"’But while maintaining that they only are commissioned to administer the Sacraments who have received that commission from those appointed in succession to bestow it, we have never denied that God may make His own sacraments efficacious even when irregularly administered; we should trust it might be so.’
"It would be of great advantage if we were to speak of non-episcopal orders and sacraments as ’irregular,’ which we know they are, not as ’invalid,’ about which we know nothing."
With these words of Dr. Headlam I am in profound agreement. But there is another quite different matter to which I would allude. If the Church is indeed to be the vehicle of the power of Christ in its plenitude, it must be Catholic not only in principle and right, but in actual fact. Deeper than all divisions of "Catholic" and "Protestant" is the division of the great human family—European, Indian, Chinese, and so forth. These great civilisations must each bring its own gift, consecrated by the Spirit of Christ, to the life of the whole Body before that Body reveals the measure of the fulness of the stature of Christ. A merely European Church cannot be fully Catholic, nor can it ever do, even for Europe, what the Catholic Church is called by God to do for the nations which become its provinces.
The most outstanding facts in the history known to us, which plainly reveal the providential guidance of its course, are the careers of Alexander the Great and Napoleon. There had developed in Greece the whole spirit of civilisation in reference to the small problems of the city-state; the whole principle of civilisation which had been thus worked out was now established; Greek civilisation was so perfectly developed that it had even a perfect theory of itself in Plato and Aristotle. Just at this moment there appears upon the scene the absolutely amazing figure—Alexander of Macedon, himself the pupil of the man in whom the Greek spirit reached its final formulation. He carries that spirit in his astounding triumphs through Asia Minor and Syria to the Western Provinces of India. As a military achievement the mere leading of his troops to the banks of the Indus is one of the supreme wonders of the world. No doubt he was conscious of a mission to spread the gifts which Greece held in trust for humanity; but also no doubt he was very much concerned with the political fabric which his conquests set up. The moment his work is finished, he himself dies. Politically his Empire was not established and it immediately fell to pieces. Spiritually it remained. It supplied the inspiration of Chandra gupta, and the career of Asoka is unintelligible apart from Alexander. The arrival of the Greeks in India is, I am assured, the beginning of all that we now understand by Indian art. Far more important to the history of the world was the bringing of Greek culture into Palestine; this culture in itself was no doubt decadent, and the Chasidim and Pharisees were right enough to resist it: yet the leaven of this humanising influence is an essential part of the preparation for the Incarnation in the soil of Judaism. It is to be noticed that Galilee was a region particularly affected by the Greek influence and the settlement of Decapolis was still mainly Greek in the Gospel period. Asoka and St. Paul are not at all the kind of successors that Alexander would have anticipated or desired, but his conscious desires were utilised by Providence to serve an end of which he never dreamed. His early death before his Empire could be consolidated in a political sense is as markedly providential as his emergence at the precise moment of history when he appears upon the scene.