The Agony of the Church | Page 2

not go into a building dedicated to His Majesty the Invisible King of kings?
The real value of any Christian community is not to be found in its own prosperity but in its care for the prosperity of other Christian communities. So, for example, the value of the Protestants is to be found in their loving care for the Roman Catholics, and vice versa.
Taking the above standard, we find that all the Christian communities are almost quite valueless as to the spirit, i.e. as to their unusual loving care. Their actual value is more physical than spiritual, being as they are limited to the care for themselves. Exceptions are as refreshing as an oasis in the desert.
Church and State are like fire and water. How to connect them? For if connected, fire always dies down under water.
There are three ages in the history of the Church: the Golden Age, when the Church was opposed to political governments; the Iron Age, when she was politically directing Europe's kingdoms; and the Stone Age, when she has been subdued to the service of political governments. What a humiliation for the present generation to live in the Stone Age of Christianity!
Trying to unite Church and State we are trying to unite what God separated from the beginning of our era.
To separate the Church from the State does not mean, as many think, to separate soul from body; it means to separate two quite opposed spirits unakin and hostile to each other, like Cross and Capitol.
The worm of comfort and human inertia has reconciled Christianity with secular, pagan governments, and so paralysed the most divine movement in human history. Go to the bottom of all those clever advocacies for unity of Church and State, and you will meet, as their primus motor, the worm of comfort and human inertia.
All Churches and Christian institutions of the present time, however wonderful they may be, are only a dim prophecy of the coming Christian worship in truth and spirit. Through them we look now to the future as through a glass.
Christianity is neither monarchical nor republican. It does not care about institutions but about the spirit living in them. That institution is the best which is fullest of the Christian spirit. From this point of view, an autocracy may be better than a republic, and vice versa.
The true Christianity has been hidden from us as iron and coal were hidden from the men of the Stone Age. They walked over iron and coal but they used stone and wood only. So we are walking over and around Christ, still using in our daily life the pagan gods of old.
If there is to be a new geological epoch, with a new type of man, it will be the Christian epoch. All the existing types have been made by revolutions and influences of earth and water, or of air and fire. Now only the Christian revolution--I mean literally and not allegorically--can produce a higher type of the human animal.
My friend, you are dissatisfied with the existing Churches, and you are anxious to form a new church, or sect, or some kind of religious organisation! How childish of you! The existing Churches are the most wonderful vessels--some in gold, others in silver or pottery--made by thousands of years and generations. I know your dissatisfaction comes because of the emptiness of those vessels and not because of their ugliness. Well then, pour the divine wine into them and they will please you just as the vessels in Cana of Galilee pleased the thirsty people around the table. No one of those people, being thirsty, ever thought of making new vessels for the wine, but to get wine as soon as possible into the vessels. To pour wine into existing vessels, that is really the needed miracle, my dear grumbler!
People say: Read the Bible! Almost would I say: Do not touch it for five years--read other literature during this period--and then read it again, and you will see its real greatness, power and sweetness.
The Christ's wounds have wrought more blessings in the world than the health of all the Roman Caears.
The Eucharist does not mean a memory only but also a prophecy. The prophecy of it is, that the whole earth will become Christ's body, Christ's flesh and blood, so that whatever we eat or drink we eat and drink Him.
He ought to be our daily food. Regarding all our food through Christ it will not seem to be a prey from nature but rather nature's sacrifice for us, reminding us of Christ's sacrifice, and through it of our own calling to sacrifice.
You have to choose either to be proud or poor in spirit. The first will mean a noisy destruction, the second a quiet construction.
There exists no sublime and no mean thing in