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The Church Dormant

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Extract

'I'HE Church Dormant? . . . I have never heard

J. of it,’ the puzzled reader will say : ‘the Church Militant I know, the Church Triumphant and the Church Suffering I have also heard of, but what on earth is the Church Dormant? Is it by chance a new confraternity for the aged?’

Nothing of the sort. It is merely a pathological condition of the Church Militant. It is endemic, but sometimes epidemic: it is epidemic to-day. It is analogous to certain functional disorders of the human body, which result from over-indulgence in eating or in drinking, or even from neglecting to take sufficient exercise. For there is a curious parallelism between spiritual and material processes, and all experience teaches us that, as the body for its life and weli-being requires a certain amount of hardship and discomfort in its surroundings, so too does the soul,—both the individual soul of the Christian man or woman, and the aggregate soul of the Christian Church.

We are accustomed to speak of the Church upon «arth as the Church Militant, but we do not always realise how necessarily true that description is. In fact, the Church upon earth can never rightly be other than a militant body. She is never so well, and so truly herself as when things are going ill with her, and she is never so powerful as when fighting for her life against the embattled enemies of her Lord. It is significant that the Age of the Martyrs was also the Age of her most rapid extension and development. In later times, with greater general security, and in apparently improved circumstances, she seems largely to have lost her grip, and instead of the ‘general advance’ that distinguished her beginnings, she now either marks time, or else just jogs along, barely holding her own. The Age of the Martyrs is over, at any rate for the present.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1924 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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