III. The Church, The Ark of Safety¶

The Church being by God’s appointment the sphere of grace and the home of the truth, it follows that there can be no safety outside the Church. This conclusion applies to all those to whom the Church has been sufficiently proposed, and who have had the opportunity of entering her fold. We are not called upon to give judgment as to the final state of those who remain and die outside the Church on earth. “Them that are without God judgeth.”[1] Whilst rightly anxious about their salvation, we must leave them to the mercy of God who alone knows whether they have heard and rejected his call to enter the true fold. We may hope that those who had not the chance of joining the Church on earth, or who never realized her claims, may, if they have been true to conscience, be received into the Church during the time of waiting between death and the last judgment.[2]

“All knowledge of religion is from (God), and not only that which the Bible has transmitted to us. There never was a time when God had not spoken to man, and told him to a certain extent his duty… We are expressly told in the New Testament, that at no time He left himself without witness in the world, and that in every nation He accepts those who fear and obey him. It would seem, then, that there is something true and divinely revealed, in every religion all over the earth, overloaded, as it may be, and at times even stifled by the impieties which the corrupt will and understanding of man have incorporated with it. Such are the doctrines of the power and presence of an invisible God, of his moral law and governance, of the obligation of duty, and the certainty of a just judgment, and of reward and punishment, as eventually dispensed to individuals; so that revelation, properly speaking, is an universal, not a local gift; and the distinction between the state of Israelites formerly and Christians now, and that of the heathen, is, not that we can, and they cannot attain to future blessedness, but that the Church of God ever has had, and the rest of mankind never have had, authoritative documents of truth, and appointed channels of communication with him. The Word and the Sacraments are the characteristic of the elect people of God…”[3]

When men realize that the Church is a divine institution, the body of Christ, the temple and the organ of the Holy Ghost, the covenanted sphere of grace and truth, it becomes to them a matter of the highest importance to know where the Church is, that they may belong to it, and so be within the Ark of Safety.

[2]

“They are members of the soul of the Church, who, not being members of the visible communion and society, know not, that in not becoming members of it, they are rejecting the command of Christ, to whom by faith and love and in obedience they cleave. And they, being members of the body or visible communion of the Church, are not members of the soul of the Church, who, amid outward profession of the faith, do, in heart or deeds, deny him whom in words they confess. The deliverance promised in that day, is to those who, being in the body of the Church, shall by true faith in Christ and fervent love to him belong to the soul of the Church also, or who, although not in the body of the Church shall not, through their own fault, have ceased to be in the body, and shall belong to its soul, in that through faith and love they cleave to Christ its head.” — Pusey, The Minor Prophets, on Joel ii. 32. In this passage Dr. Pusey is contrasting the condition of pious dissenters and others, with that of unworthy members of the Church, and considers that the former are more safe than the latter. He holds that dissenters of good life, though not members of the body of the Church, are nevertheless members of the soul of the Church; whilst Churchpeople of bad life, though members of the body, are not of the soul of the Church, and hence that the former are more acceptable to God than the latter.