Vigils Reading

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

From a sermon by St John Henry Newman

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When we commemorate the quickening or vivifying of the Church, the

birth of the spiritual and new creature out of an old world “as good as dead,” it

will be seasonable to consider the nature and attributes of this Church, as

manifested in the elect, as invisible, one, living and spiritual; or what is

otherwise called the Doctrine of the Communion of Saints with each other, and

in the Holy Trinity, in whom their communion with each other consists.

Viewed so far as it merely consists of persons now living in this world, it is

of course a visible company; but in its nobler and truer character it is a body

invisible, or nearly so, as being made up, not merely of the few who happen still

to be on their trial, but of the many who sleep in the Lord. At first, indeed, in the

lifetime of the Apostles, a great proportion of the whole body was in this world;

that is, not taking into account those Saints, who had lived in Jewish times, and

who Christ, on His departure, made partakers of the privileges then purchased

by His death for all believers.

St Stephen and St James the Greater were the first distinguished Saints of

the New Covenant, who were gathered in to enrich the elder company of Moses,

Elias, and their brethren. But from that time they have flowed in space; and as

years passed away, greater and greater has become the proportion which the

assembly of spirits made perfect bears to that body militant which is its

complement in God’s new creation. At present, we who live are but one

generation out of fifty, which since its formation have been new born into it, and

endowed with spiritual life and the hope of glory.

Now these thoughts are so very foreign from the world’s ordinary view of

things, which walks by sight, not by faith, and never allows any thing to exist in

what comes before it, but what it can touch and handle, that it is necessary to

insist and enlarge upon them. The world then makes itself the standard of

perfection and the center of all good; and when the souls of Christians pass from

it into the place of spirits, it fancies that this is their loss, not its own.