THE HIDDEN STREAM by R. Knox

Author:R. Knox [Knox, R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Four Marks of the Church

When we have come to the conclusion that our Lord founded a Church, we have still to ask a further question, Which Church? That need not surprise or scandalize us; it's the good things in the world, not the bad things, that produce a crop of imitations—people imitate Keats, they don't imitate Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

This good wine that Christ has given us—it is only natural, in an imperfect world, that there should be some confusion about the labels. In order to keep our heads, when we start out to look for the true Church, we remember that in the Credo at Mass it is qualified by four distinguishing marks, "I believe in one, holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church." Those four marks must be present in the body we are looking for. And this is worth observing; we must be content if we find that they are there at all, we must not expect, necessarily, to find them in an eminent degree. That is a common experience when you are dealing with definitions. The usual definition of Man is that he is a reasoning animal; he is Homo Sapiens. And that is true, you see, even of lunatics; they reason, in fact they often reason with great acuteness, like the mad don who thought the don underneath was trying to shoot him through the floor, and consequently always sat on the table until at last he grew to believe that he was a tea-pot. At the same time, when you reflect on this definition of man, and realize that sapience is his characteristic quality, it makes you examine your conscience a bit, and wonder whether, having matriculated at a University, you ought not to be trying to become a little more sapient. And so it is, as I shall try to point out, with these four marks of the Church. They show us what it is, and at the same time they encourage us, in our small way, to try and make it rather more so.

To prove that the Church is, and is meant to be, visibly one, is pretty easy going. You've only to read St Paul's epistles to be struck by the enormous importance which he attaches to the unity of the Church. It's quite true that he will talk about the church at Corinth, say, and the church at Thessalonica, but never with the smallest suggestion that they are two separate entities. No, it's just like talking about the air at Brighton and the air at Blackpool; the Church, for St Paul, is the atmosphere in which a Christian moves and has his being; even when some half-dozen slaves in some rich person's household had been converted to Christianity, St Paul used to speak of the Church in So-and-so's household. And heavens, how he is always going on and on at those early Christians, even then, about unity; telling them to be built up into one another, to grow up into a single body, and so on.

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