Acts 4:32 And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul… I. GOD'S VOICE ASSURES US THAT "IT IS NOT GOOD THAT THE MAN SHOULD BE ALONE": and knit into the very stuff of our personality is the instinctive dread of loneliness and the craving after intercourse with our fellow-men. We know that it is only in fellowship with others that the life which belongs to us as men can find its essential exercise and development. Conscience, justice, sympathy, honour, pity, love: these are but a few of the words whose whole wealth of meaning lies in a man's dealings with his fellow-men. Every principle of morality, every safeguard of reason, every canon of taste, depends for its significance, if not for its sanction, on our position as members of a great community: and it was by a true and deep insight that the Greek declared that he who would live in solitude must be either more or less than man. The social instinct is astir in the very act of self-consciousness: and I would show something of the reality of the satisfaction which is offered to it in the Church of Christ — God's answer to the needs of man. II. THERE ARE TWO WAYS IN WHICH WE MAY MEASURE THE ADEQUACY OF ANY COMMUNION AND FELLOWSHIP INTO WHICH WE ARE INVITED. Sympathy lives, so to speak, in two dimensions: breadth and depth: and we may call it great either for the extent which it can cover, or for the inner depths which it can reach. So, too, it may be cramped and narrow, either because it moves within a scanty range, or else because its diffuse activity hardly goes below the surface of life. And in correspondence with these two measurements of sympathy, there are two distinct ways in which the desire for communion may seek and seem to find its satisfaction without reference to Christianity. 1. On the one hand we may find an almost infinite scope for sympathy and fellowship, if we share or understand the wants and hopes and aims of our generation, and so bear our part in its corporate action. Probably there never was an age which offered wider range. more varied opportunity, more hopeful schemes for such an exercise and development of the social instinct. Whatever help we have to give, we can pass at once into commerce with hundreds of our fellow-men. Whether the feelings with which we go out into the world are mainly benevolent, political, or scientific, we are at once admitted to a tract of interest and work in which the social instinct moves without the fear of limitation. 2. It is when the other measurement is forced upon us that we feel the practical defect of a purely natural communion, however wide and intelligent, with our fellow-citizens or with mankind. Every human soul has energies, mysterious and profound, which find no exercise or answer in that diffusive interest which is ever losing, in intensity what it gains in width. For while our inner life looks out to no horizon, in our social relations we are hemmed in on every side: in each wider range of fellowship, more of our personal feelings and convictions have to be repressed or misunderstood: as we pass from love to friendship, from friendship to acquaintance, from acquaintance to association, at each stage we feel that less of our true self is active and satisfied, that we are exchanging the full and blessed sympathy "where hearts are of each other sure," for the excitement and effectiveness of living in a crowd. And from the partial and superficial communion which thus beckons on and disappoints in ever-widening fields of ever more restricted feeling, most men turn to seek in friendship or in home a sympathy which has less to fear from the second measurement of which I spoke. Probably we all know the intense relief of passing from the jar or compromise of society at large into some inner sphere of love where "we mean what we say, and what we would we know." 3. And having found the refreshment and confidence of such sympathy, most men come to live a double life: passing across day by day from the diffuse and shallow fellowship of the wide world to the quiet trust and swift intercourse of the chosen few: trying to supplement the extent of one communion by the depth of the other: even as the great poet of our day cries — "God be thanked, the meanest of His creatures Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her."But must we put away for ever all thought and hope of any communion which shall be at once both wide and deep? Is there any power which can bring the souls of men together in a sympathy without either exclusion or reserve? III. "I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS." THIS IS THE ANSWER OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH: she, and she alone, still clings to the hope and promise of a fellowship and sympathy which shall be at once deeper than any depth which a man can fathom in his own soul, and wider than the world itself: a brotherhood into which the most ignorant and outcast and sinful may through penitence find entrance, a brotherhood in which the most sensitive and thoughtful and exacting soul shall never feel or fear the touch of cruelty or stupidity, but ever be led on from height to height, from strength to strength, from glory to glory, by the answer of a love which never is out of sight, and yet never can be outstripped. By what means then does the Church propose to make good her promise of a sympathy both wide and deep? Must we look back for the plainest answer to these questions to the days when "the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul"? It is, in deed and truth, a humiliating necessity. But still we cannot doubt that the Divine spirit of that communion is with us now: we know that, for all the noisy and obtrusive quarrels which are the shame and plague of Christendom, the strong love which held together the souls of martyrs and evangelists, the love which was stronger than death, is among us still: that in pure homes, in the fellowship of Christ's work among the poor and suffering, we can still see, in the perfect harmony of self-forgetful work, the inherited secret of Christian unity and the earnest of its achievement in the Church triumphant. But there is one plain ground of fellowship which lies so near to the experience of our daily life, that it is easy for all to see and measure. For at the outset, Christianity, and Christianity alone, sets before us all one Lord. Alike in earth and heaven we are to be brought into the true fellowship one with another by a service and devotion which is not mutual but common: by seeking first the same Lord and Saviour. The real secret of sympathy is to love in the first place, not one's friend, but that which he loves better than himself: and the fulfilment of the social instinct is found in the concentration of all hearts upon the one true God. We shall better understand what the communion of saints may be, in proportion as we can give our hearts, our strength, our lives, to Him who gave Himself for us — to Him who, since He was lifted up from the earth, alone can draw all to Himself, and link them in the one sufficient sympathy of one unending Love. For "if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another." (F. Paget, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. |
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