hold of God.'
When our Lord was speaking to St. Peter about the ministry which was
being entrusted to the apostles, He said to him, 'Who then is the
faithful and wise steward whom his Lord shall set over his household to
give them their portion of food in due season[6]?' This description
opens to us part of the meaning of the divine household. A household
is a place where a family is provided for, where there is a regular and
orderly supply of ordinary needs. And the Church is the divine
household in which God has provided stewards to make {115} regular
spiritual provision for men, so that they shall feel and know
themselves members of a family, understood, sympathized with, helped,
encouraged, disciplined, fed. What in fact are the sacraments and
sacramental rites, what are baptism, confirmation and communion,
marriage and ordination, the administration of the word of God, the
dealings with the penitent, the sick, the dead, but the 'portions of
food in due season,' the orderly distribution of the bread of life in
the family or household of God?

But there is another idea which, in St. Paul's mind, attaches itself
strongly to the idea of the 'divine family.' It is that in this
household we are sons and not servants--that is intelligent
co-operators with God, and not merely submissive slaves. It is
noticeable how often he speaks with horror of Christians allowing
themselves again to be 'subject to ordinances,' or to 'the weak and
beggarly rudiments,' the alphabet of that earlier education when even
children are treated as slaves under mere obedience. 'Ye observe days,
and months, and seasons, and years, I am afraid of you[7].' 'Why do ye
subject yourselves to ordinances, handle not, taste not, touch not[8].'
It is perfectly true to say that what {116} St. Paul is deprecating is
a return to Jewish or pagan observances. But this is not all. He
demands not a change of observance only, but a change of spirit. Their
attitude towards observances as such is to be different. Not that St.
Paul does not insist on that readiness to obey reasonable authority
which is a condition of corporate life, or would hesitate to lay stress
upon corporate religious acts in the Christian body. The truth is very
far from that. 'We have no such custom, neither the churches of God,'
is an argument which ought to be sufficient to suppress eccentricity.
To 'keep the traditions' is a mark of a good Christian[9]. 'A man that
is heretica