Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

RECONSTRUCTING THE NATURAL ORDER 389moment when, coming 1 into the world, He uttered, " Abody Thou hast fitted to Me ; behold I come; in thehead of the book it is written of Me, to do Thy will,0 Lord," to the last words upon the Cross, " Father,into Thy hands I commend My spirit," is summed upall His thought and all His action. That conceptionof creatureship the Church took, and out of it formedthe whole of her ritual. Her teaching through thewhole order of the year revolves round the life ofChrist, and sets forth His example as the perfectcreature in His obedience. But no less her hierarchy,from its highest point in the Primate to the humblestdoorkeeper, was a carrying out of the ministry ofChrist. As He ministered to His Father in the wholework which He came to do upon earth, so in carryingO on that work to the end of time, ' the hierarchy "/which He instituted ministered to Him. The highestof all in the highest of his functions expresses thisministry when he terms himself Servant of the servantsof God, but most of all in the divine Sacrifice,in virtue of which Christ is for ever in the midst ofHis Church, His obedience unto death is embodied.This perhaps is the most striking of the many greatlessons which with every day it perpetually enjoins.From the teaching, the hierarchy, and the Sacrifice,one accordant voice sounds everywhere in the ears ofthe great Christian people that obedience, unreservedand absolute, is the part of the creature towards theCreator. Thus by the publication of the Christianmysteries, which is the Church's work in the supernaturalorder, she re-established the shaken basis ofthe natural order in the world, man's creatureship,and obedience as the mark of it. When the great D1 Heb. x. 5, from Psalm xxxix. 6.