CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM BX5175 .KM" ""^ ^ Clas rS i i C miR!iS3fi,ft,?,r,S.„fl,,. the English Church olin 3 1924 029 448 481 The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029448481 THE CLASSIC PREACHERS ENGLISH CHUECH LECTURES DELIVERED AT ST. JAMES'S CHURCH IN 1877. WITH AN INTRODUCTION By JOHN EDWAED KEMPE, M.A., CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN, PREBENDARY OF ST. PAUL'S, AND RECTOR OF ST. JAMES'S, WESTMINSTER. LONDON: JOHN MUEEAY, ALBEMAELE STEEET. 1877. 'The rijjht of Translation is reserved. LONDON : PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFOKD STKEET AXD OHAEIKO CBOSS. CONTENTS. TAGS INTRODUCTION v DONNEjJTip. Poet-Preachee) .. .. 1 jf&. Cightfoot, D.D., Canon of St. Paul's, and Margaret Prolessor of Divinity, Cambridge. BARROW (The Exhaustive Pbeacher) 27 H. Wage, M.A., Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn, and Professor of Ecclesiastical History, King's Coll., London. SOUTH (T™Rhetoeician) 53 ' wro/liAKE, D.D., Dean of Durham. , BEVERIDGE^he Scbiptubal Preacher) 81 ' W7 B?T!lark, M.A., Prebendary of Wells, and Vicar of TaunFon. » WILSOmfTHE Saintly Preacher) 109 F^W.^abbar, D.D., Canon of Westminster. BUTLERpraJBa^SlTHicAL Preacher) 135 ETM.' B wODlBrjEif, D.D., Dean of Norwich. a 2 INTRODUCTION, Speaking of places of Christian worship, Hooker says " Our repair thither is especially for mutual conference and, as it were, commerce to be had between God and us ; " * and whatever tends to defeat this end, or, indeed, does not forward it, can hardly fail to be prejudicial to the spiritual life of the Church. A distinguished physicist has been heard to de- scribe, almost in the same breath with the avowal of his inability to join in any religious service, as such, the great enjoyment which he derived from listening to anthems, chanting and hymns. In the province of 'devotion this was an example of what we may conceive to take place in that of religious teaching and exhortation. The attraction of able and in- teresting literary exercitations may not only gather to the pulpit an auditory which neither seeks nor is likely to derive any spiritual benefit from such hearing, but may seriously mislead many persons * ' Eocl. Pol.' V. xviii. 1. INTRODUCTION. who are not insensible of their need of that help which preaching is divinely appointed to afford. If they have but listened to the preacher with a moderate degree of attention, and still more if they have had any kind of unobjectionable pleasure in hearing him, they may go away persuaded that they have realised all the benefit of the ordinance, and fulfilled all their duty towards it ; and yet its effect upon them 'may not have been at all more spiritual or religious than was that of sacred harmonies in the instance which has just been mentioned.* The notion that a religious duty is done when its forms have been perfunctorily observed, and well done when this has been accomplished pleasantly or easily, is but a variety of the theory of the opus operatum, and a very dangerous one too, because it is not so obviously and repulsively superstitious as are some of those which an enlightened Christianity will unhesitatingly reprobate.f * " It is certain that a sermon, the conclusion whereof makes tlie auditory look pleased, and sets them all a-talking one with another, was either not right spoken or not right heard." — Burnet's ' Pastoral Care,' c. ix. t In this connection I may be allowed to quote the following : — " Many persons were found at Church for the great Christian ceremonies, and at the theatres or even at the temples, for the heathen spectacles. The ritual of the Church was viewed as a theatrical exhibition. The ser- mons were listened to as the displays of rhetoricians; and elo- quent preachers were cheered with clapping of hands, stamping of feet, waving of handkerchiefs, cries of ' Orthodox ' I ' Thirteenth Apostle ' ! and other like demon- strations., which such teachers as. Chrysostom and Augustine often tried to restrain, in order that INTRODUCTION. VII At the same time it is easy to justify, though not without some reservation, the policy of making the service of the sanctuary attractive to the culti- vated intellect as well as to a refined taste. The kind of considerations which may be allowed to prevail in recommendation of an element which is ceremonious, spectacular and sensuous in worship, may be extended with much less hesitation to efforts by which the intelligence of the community is sought to be conciliated towards the ministra- tions of the pulpit. It is surely a gain if minds which cannot otherwise be reached and feelings which cannot otherwise be moved by holy in- fluences are, in any way which is not in itself they might persuade their flocks to a more profitable manner of hearing. Some went to church for the sermon only, alleging that they could pray at home. And when the more attractive parts of the service were over, the great mass of the people departed, without remaining for the ad- ministration of the Eucharist. .... Things which would have been good either as expressions of devotion or as means of training for it, became through their mul- tiplication, and through the im- portance which was attached to them, too likely to be regarded as independent ends.'' — Robert- son, ' History of the . Christian Church,' Book II., c. vi., p. 356. Truly history, ecclesiastical as well as civil, repeats itself. Let any one go to St. Paul's Cathedral, at an ordinary Sunday morning service, if he would see, that not only, as is the case in nearly every church, "without remaining for the administration of the Eucha- rist,',' but without even remaining . to take away the text of the sermon, a great part of the con- gregation will still depart when the more attractive, i.e. the musi- cal, portion of the service is over. It is impossible, however, to be too thankful for the improvement . which has taken place of late years in the reverent and devo- tional tone and aspect as well as in the general "rendering" of the St. Paul's services. Vlll INTRODUCTION. prejudicial or unlawful, brought into a contact with sacred things from which spiritual profit may, at any rate, be fairly hoped for. Let us take the case of the Bible itself. If that Holy Volume had contained nothing but what the dullest might understand, the most unlettered interpret, and the most disputatious agree about, a large number of those who now study it diligently, and not without advantage to their souls, would, for want of intellectual stimulus, read it, if at all, with most unprofitable distaste and weariness. Given, as it is, in a form which affords occasions so numerous and of such great variety for mental activity and power to be applied to it, many are drawn and fixed to its pages by the pleasant sense of a healthful and (so to say) manly intellectual exer- cise, and are thus familiarised with objects, modes of thought, and principles of conduct which are calculated to direct and colour those higher faculties whereby the soul of man can hold converse with Heaven. And that which is true of the Word written, is also true of the Word preached. The first point is to get an attentive and respectful hearing for it. This secured, it becomes comparatively easy to turn that hearing to its proper account. But as, in the case of worship, the ceremonial will be anything but justifiable if it interposes a conceal- ing or obscuring medium between the worshipper and the object of his worship, so, in that of preaching, INTRODUCTION. IX it is not enough that its auditory is collected in a consecrated building, and that its utterances proceed from a gowned or surpliced orator, mounted in a pulpit. Call it by what name we will — a discourse, a lecture, an address, a homily, or what not — the ideal which is implied in the designation sermon, should never be lost sight of, always be distinctly aimed at. " So worthy a part of divine service," says Hooker, " we should greatly wrong if we did not esteem Preaching as the blessed ordinance of God, sermons as keys to the kingdom of heaven, as wings to the soul, as spiirs to the good affections of man, unto the sound and healthy as food, as physic unto diseased minds ; "* and directly or indirectly — more (as I venture to think) directly than indirectly — these purposes ought to be subserved whenever a Christian congregation is addressed from a Christian pulpit by a Christian minister. No opinion is here intended as to what is called the greater utilisation of our Churches and Cathe- drals by allowing semi-secular Lectures or Addresses to be delivered in them. This may or may not be defensible and expedient. The Society for Pro- moting Christian Knowledge is not denied to be within its functions in issuing books, provided they are written in a religious spirit, that fall under the designation of "General Literature," and so * ' Eccl. Pol.' V. xxii. 1. X INTEODUOTIOK. pdssibly it may be held that, at least upon week- days, and with adequate safeguards (if such could be devised), we should do well to open our Churches for purposes auxiliary to religious ends, though not directly and distinctively directed to them. This is a question which it would be out of place to discuss here. The discourses in this volume were delivered at a regular Sunday service, and what was sought was to reconcile their introduction there with those views of the proper use of the pulpit at such times, which have ever prevailed, and I devoutly trust ever will prevail, in our own and nearly every other Christian communion. The aim was that in their effect upon the congregation they should be sermons, in accordance with the- description quoted above from Hooker, and be distinctly understood and felt to be such. It was earnestly desired that they should not -cause the Church in which they were delivered to be regarded as a kind of ecclesiastical Lecture Hall — a Royal Institution for Sundays — ;as in former times certain London chapels were said to relieve the tedium of the day by furnishing persons who could not make up their minds to ' miss Church ' altogether, with the opportunity of whiling away a weary hour at a Sunday opera. This object, as I thought, would not be attained, nor the danger avoided, if certain great English divines were treated generally, so that the discourses devoted to them should form so many portraits in INTRODUCTION. XI the gallery of the National Church, so many chap- ters in its history, or so many articles in its bio- graphical dictionary. The proposal of a Series of Lectures, to be delivered in the Chapel of King's College, upon "The Masters in English Theology,"* was almost simultaneous with that of the discourses in this volume ; and when my friend Canon Barry mentioned it to me, with the expression of a hope that I might not think it would clash with mine, I at once welcomed it with cordial approval. The pulpit of an educational institution, of which the theological department forms the most prominent and the most important feature — of which, indeed, it may be said that the theological is the distinc- tive character f — is undoubtedly most legitimately employed in such teaching as those Lectures are intended to communicate; especially as there is no pastoral charge connected with the chapel, and it cannot be considered — its size alone would prevent that — to supply to the students in general the place of a parish Church. But the very title of those Lectures at once points to an auditory of a different * Now published by Mr. Murray. t This is said with the utmost respect for the great medical school connected with the Col- lege. The fact that the Principal of the Institution is required to be a Divine, who is also its head theological Teacher, is of itself sufficient to mark the pre-emi- nence of its theological over its medical character. The question of the comparative efficiency, popularity or extent of any par- ticular department of the College is not meant to be in any way raised, or even hinted at or im- plied. Xll INTRODUCTION. kind from that which was either wished or likely to be gathered in St. James's Church at the delivery of this present series. That title has, at least, an " ad clerum" look or sound, whereas, in my scheme, although a higher than the average intelligence of a parochial congregation was certainly aimed at, it was the " ad populum" character that I was supremely anxious should prevail, as being more consistent, if I should not say alone consistent, with the time, the place, and the circumstances of its designation. And it was for this reason that none of the great Anglican divines ,but such as were known and dis- tinguished as preachers were included in the series, and that those who were included were required to be treated with especial reference to their sermons. This treatment was intended to be completely secured by annexing to each of their names a designation descriptive of the peculiar characteristic of the preaching of each. The attempt was one of some little difficulty, and it is doubtful whether it can be successfully extended to as many more of our great preachers without repetition. So far as they have gone, however, the designations seem to be neither fanciful nor, in any instance, other than accurate. How the great ends of Christian preaching were considered to be promoted by such treatment of such subjects must now be explained. Our Blessed Lord bids His disciples be careful INTRODUCTION. Xlll what and how 4hey hear* It would be straining these cautions from their true meaning and purpose to apply them directly to the due estimate of what Christian preaching should be ; but they may fairly suggest the consideration whether it is not of the utmost importance that our congregations should be disabused of mistaken and false notions upon that subject, and indoctrinated with sound ones. We cannot suppose, without attributing to the pulpit a superiority to human infirmity far greater than it can lay claim to, that the taste and demand of the people will not always greatly influence, if not the substance of its teaching, at any rate the form, manner and method of it — if not the t/ clkovstm, at any rate the ttw?. No doubt it will be the pulpit itself that will, in the first instance, create the popular taste and give direction to the popular demand. An individual or a small set, the nucleus, perhaps, of what grows into a party, will strike out some kind of novelty, more or less marked, and either for the better or for the worse. If it ' takes,' the example will be followed, until nearly every pulpit in the communion will be more or less affected by the influence. Any one who has care- fully observed the preaching of the English Church during no longer a period than the last half century, must see that the changes it has gone through * j8\«r6Te rl cucoiieTe. St. Mark I &\4ireTe iras axoiere. St. Luke iv. 24. viii. 18. XIV INTEODUOTION. have been scarcely less evident than those of ' the fashions' themselves. The social habits and the costume of the present decade are not more varied from those of 1830 or 1850 than is the kind of preaching which now commands the most general approval from that which drew crowds from the West End to Bishopsgate, when Bishop Blomfield was Rector; or made St. Mary's at Oxford such a centre of power,* when John Henry Newman de- livered his Parochial Sermons there. The com- parative desertion which is occasionally witnessed of good preachers who were once attractive, and who continue to preach as well as ever they did, though partly attributable to the popular craving for novelty, is not always wholly due to that cause. When it is said of such an one that " his day is gone by," it often means, not that everybody has heard all he has to say, and that to continue " sitting under " him is to be served only with crambe repetita ; but that his style or method is no longer in vogue. He does not hit the taste and fall in with the tone of the times. In short, he is out of fashion.t To say, therefore, that preaching will be greatly influenced in respect to its style, and somewhat even in respect to its matter, by the consideration of popular taste and demand, is not * See Prof. Shairp's 'Studies in Poetry and Philosophy,' p. 275. t A similar phenomenon is ob- sorved by Burnet in regard to the preaohing of the period from the Preformation to his own time. 1 Pastoral Care,' o. ix. INTRODUCTION. XV necessarily to attribute to preachers any feeling that is blameworthy. St. Paul asks, " How shall they hear without a preacher ?"* and the converse ques- tion may also be put, "How shall one preach without hearers ?" It is hardly enough for him to be satis- fied that he is delivering, Sunday after Sunday, sermons that will stand every test, literary, ortho- doxal, and even spiritual, if Sunday after Sunday his auditory dwindles away, and what remains of it grows more and more listless and drowsy, turns more and more glances at the gallery clock, or more and more openly and discourteously draws out and consults the tardy-moving watch. In fact, the preacher will and must accommodate himself to some extent to the liking/ of his hearers, and therefore it is a matter of importance, as affecting the quality of his sermons, that his hearers should bring to the hearing a just estimate of what sermons ought to be, and the faculty of distinguishing what is good and wholesome in them from what is unprofitable, not to say deleterious, even though it may be agreeable. As a help towards forming such tastes and culti- vating such faculties, a better acquaintance with " the Classic Preachers of the English Church " seemed likely to be of service. The idea was not at all that those preachers should be held up as models for imitation in the present day, but simply that the * Romans x. 14. XVI INTRODUCTION. study of them should be recommended and their ex- cellences understood and appreciated. To produce in the pulpit of the nineteenth century sermons which Andrewes or Donne, Sanderson or Butler, South or Barrow, might themselves be supposed to have written, or rather which might pass for theirs with persons who have some little acquaintance with their writings, would be a feat of considerable literary cleverness, but worse than useless for any purpose of nineteenth-century preaching. Classic models are studied, not for the purpose of enabling the artist or the writer to produce works which shall resemble, or even be of the same character with, those models, but in order to imbue him with feelings, furnish him with principles, and elicit, animate, and strengthen for him perceptions which he may apply to the em- bodiment of his own original ideas. By this means he is trained to observe in the best way, that is, un- consciously, those laws of art, every violation of which detracts from the value of his work, and all con- formity to which is an enhancement of its excellence. When Burnet recommends the clergy to fit them- selves for their pulpit ministrations by "reading Quintilian, and Tully's book of Oratory, and by observing the spirit and method of Tully's Orations : or if they can enter into Demosthenes," to use him "as a much better pattern,"* no one supposes that he ' Pastoral Care,' c. ix. INTRODUCTION. XV11 would have them attempt in their sermons a kind of Christianised classicality of structure and language. Similarly it must not be imagined that in seeking to extend a knowledge of our greatest preachers, and to awaken an interest in them, with a view to the more complete efficiency of the pulpit of our own day, any such foolish and futile notion was entertained as that those preachers might be what we should call copied with advantage. I should question the de- sirableness of even modernising and adapting them for present use ; not so much, however, for the reason against using other men's sermons, which Burnet gives, viz. lest it should " too evidently appear that he " who does this " cannot be the author of his own sermons," which would " make both him and them lose much of their weight,"* as because every age and almost every generation has its own peculiar modes of thought as much as, or even more than, of expression. Though the Gospel itself can never be " another," t it admits of endless variety in the manner in which it is presented and commended to ac- ceptance, a variety which may be legitimately turned to account, and ought to be turned to account, by accommodating its preaching, of course within proper limits, to the peculiar wants, tempers, tastes, and other circumstances of each particular period, as well as each particular country, church and congregation. * ' Pastoral Care,' c. ix. t (Wat. i. 7. [st. james's.] J XV111 INTRODUCTION. And as it was never contemplated that the preachers treated of in this series should be held up as patterns for direct imitation, so neither was it that their faults and defects should be overlooked or extenuated. On the contrary, it was quite expected that nearly all of them would afford occasions for pointing out blots, blemishes, and imperfections, which might be scarcely less useful as warnings than their excellences and beauties might be as guides. The series is not meant as a contribution to English hagiology ; and if it were, the Advocatus Didboli would have a perfect right to insist that virtues should not be attempted to be magnified by the suppression of truth with regard to anything that deserved censure or that ought to qualify praise. The Saints of the Universal Church are men about whose errors, indeed whose sins, their inspired histories make no secret; and it certainly was neither ne- cessary nor advisable to proceed upon a different principle in depicting these lesser lights, particularly when the purpose for which they were to be depicted is borne in mind. To indicate, and even somewhat to exaggerate, what is faulty in their preaching, could scarcely weaken — it might even strengthen — the effect of a fair statement of their title to the rank they hold. That they should have achieved, in spite of such drawbacks, the eminence accorded to them by universal consent, might reasonably be argued to be evidence of an extraordinary balance of INTRODUCTION. XIX the highest merit, and might well challenge all the attention and study which their greatest admirers could desire to see devoted to them. The saintliness of Wilson infusing itself into his homely common- place, and lending a holy charm even to his poverty of thought; the tenderness, the fervour and the poetry of Donne reconciling us to his fancies, ex- travagances and affectations ; the deep thought and adamantine reasoning of Butler compelling us to find ^mple excuse for his severe and unevangelical dryness ; Barrow by his conscientious thoroughness, his robust strength, and his solid weight, overcoming our impatience of lengthiness and elaborate detail ; Beveridge by his "simplicity and godly sincerity," his intimacy with the Word of God and his admir- able use of it, his Apostolical Ohurchmanship and his deep piety, winning us to find in his prosaic plainness, his diffuseness and his prolixity, little or no hindrance to our assent to his warmest eulogists ; and South, by his masterful command of well-nigh every art and resource of the consummate orator, his energy, his boldness, his wit, his lucidity and bril- liancy of language, overcoming the repugnance which his fierce combativeness and deficient spirituality might well excite — these all are examples of tran- scendent excellence, establishing its claims by the help of the very things which might well prove incompatible with aught that could be acknowledged as great excellence at all. XX INTRODUCTION. It must not be supposed that the attempt to encourage the study of sermons which have taken their place as classical in the literature of the Church, is in any way influenced by a wish, either that a more artificial and (as it were) literary style of preaching should prevail, or that extempore preaching should be discouraged. With regard to the latter, it may be worth consideration whether there is not some reason to apprehend that it threatens to become too common; but its practice is not only not incom- patible with diligent study of homiletic literature, but requires it even more than 'preaching from book.' Coleridge would seem to have been singularly unfortunate in his experience of extempore preachers, for, so far, at least, as the Church of England is concerned, the case was hardly so bad about forty years ago as he describes it to have been.* It is certainly a good deal better now. At the same time, his description must be acknowledged to represent very truly the state of things which extempore * " No doubt preaching, in the proper sense of the word, is more effective than reading : and there- book, who did not forget his argument in three minutes' time, and fall into vague and unprofit- fore I would not prohibit it, but t able declamation, and generally leave a liberty to the clergyman who feels himself able to accom- plish it. But as things now are, I am quite sure I prefer going to church to a pastor who reads his discourse : for I never yet heard more than one preacher without very coarse declamation too. These preachers never progress ; they eddy round and round. Sterility of mind follows their ministry."—' Table Talk,' vol. ii. p. 103. INTRODUCTION. XXI preaching has a tendency to produce ; and hence the greater the disposition to adopt that method, and the greater the probability of its adoption becoming general, the greater will be the need of such studies as may control and regulate it, so that it may be for edification and not for destruction.* These are days of a teeming press, of cheap books, of education becoming almost universal and con- sequently of oral instruction becoming less and less generally necessary. Nevertheless, that kind of in- struction will always have a place in every depart- ment of knowledge, and in that of sacred knowledge it can never lose the rank assigned to it in the form of preaching by the Divine appointment. It may, indeed, fail to have its position duly recognised, its proper function rightly understood, and adequate use made of it as a means of grace. As in an early age, so now, it may be driven or lowered from its proper estate by an undue exaltation of ritual t on the one hand, or on the other by the spread of a critical and contemptuous intellectualism. But ap- preciated or n6t, well and sufficiently used or not, it .will always be an office committed to the Church, and a power intrusted to her, which lay her under a vast and most solemn responsibility as. to the account which she is able to give of it. " It was the pulpit beyond anything else that carried the * 2 Cor. x. 8. I the Christian Church,' Book vi., t See Robertson's ' History of | c. i. § ix. XX11 INTKODUCTION. Keformation through" . . . and thus "achieved a more extensive and a more lasting conquest than all the armies of England ever did. The effect of a victory by the vulgar force of war passes and is for- gotten, whereas that of the pulpit at the Eeforma- tion endures to this day — will endure throughout all time and in all eternity. Such capacity for good has the pulpit. Again, it was the pulpit that awoke the nation to the civil wars in the reign of Charles beyond every other instrument. . . . The main alarum — the primary spring — of all the movements of the powerful party that eventually subverted both throne and altar, was the London pulpit — the London pulpit which received the watchword from the stirring spirits of the rising government and communicated the shock to all the pulpits within the four seas. Such power had the pulpit for evil — the latter instance answering my purpose as well as the former ; for it seems to demonstrate the energy there is in the pulpit, at least, however applied; and the consequent obligation there is upon us, who have it in our own hands to make the most of such an engine, and not allow it to go to sleep"* — to which I will add, or deteriorate or fail to keep pace with an advancing intelligence. A few words must be added to justify the con- sistency with the main design of these Lectures of Prof. J. J. Bluut, ' DutioB of tho Parish Priest,' Lcot. V. p. 142. INTRODUCTION. XX111 those biographical and personal sketches and refer- ences which are contained in all of them. These were indispensable not only to the completeness and truth of the delineations, but also to the production of their intended effects. There is no branch of oratory, scarcely any of literary composition, into which the individual man ought to enter so much as into preaching. The advocate may and often must identify himself so completely with his cause or his client as to make him put his own personality aside altogether, and even seem to believe and feel otherwise than he really does. The senator deals with a class of questions which are generally out of the sphere of his inner life — that life which constitutes the true self. But this is the sphere into which it is the first object of the true preacher to make his way, and within which his preaching, to be really effective, must live and move and have its being. Unreal words — that is to say, words which represent motives, beliefs, affections and thoughts which are not truly those of him who utters them — can never hold their ground and exercise any strong and enduring influence in that sphere. It is only the true self of one man that can ever bring itself into that close contact and communion with the true self of another, by which it becomes to that other as the channel or instrument of God's renovating grace. This consideration, as it will explain much of the power, will also account for XXIV INTRODUCTION. much of the weakness of the preachers here recom- mended for study, and of a multitude of others who have exercised and do exercise the like office with theirs. Ahove all, it will serve as an admonition to us who have been called to that office, that we make it our supreme endeavour and most earnest prayer that we may ourselves be what we tell others that God, theirs and ours, would have us be. J. E. K. St. James's Rectory, lih Sept. 1877. %* It is hoped that this series may be followed next year by a second, comprising most of the following : Andrewes, Taylor, Sanderson, Hall, Horsley, Tillotson, Seeker, Bull, Sharp, Home, Paley and Leighton, if the last can be properly included amongst Preachers of the English Church. DONNE, THE POBT-PEEACHEE. " Tell me~which of them will lore him most." — 81. Luke vii. 42. " There are last which shall be first." — St. Luke xiii. 30. Donne's monurnent in St. Paul's — Its character and history an emblem of the man — His early life — His friendships — Donne as a poet— The double dislocation in his life — His conversion from Eomanism — His earlier immorality and later penitence — Com- parison with St. Augustine — Effects on. his preaching — The secret of his power as a preacher — His reluctance to enter Holy Orders and ultimate ordination — His energy and reputation as a preacher — His extant sermons — Dean Milman's opinion — Animation of his preaching — Examples of his style — Appearance and manner of the preacher — Walton's description of him — His faults — Affecta- tion overcome by the theme — His practical sense — His pointed sayings — His irony — The last sermon — His death — Lesson of his life and teaching. Against the wall of the south choir aisle in the Cathedral of St. Paul is a monument which very few of the thousands who visit the church daily observe or have an opportunity of observing, but which, once seen, is not easily forgotten. It is the long, gaunt, upright figure of a man, wrapped close in a shroud, which is knotted at the head and feet, and leaves only the face exposed — a face wan, worn, [ST. JAMES'S.] B CLASSIC PREACHERS: almost ghastly, with the eyes closed as in death. This figure is executed in white marble, and stands on an urn of the same, as if it had just risen therefrom. The whole is placed in a black niche, which, by its contrast, enhances the death-like pale- ness of the shrouded figure. Above the canopy is an inscription recording that the man whose effigy stands beneath, though his ashes are mingled with western dust, looks towards Him whose name is the Orient.* This monumental figure is not less remarkable in its history than in its aspect. It is the sole me- morial which has survived from the ancient church of St. Paul destroyed by the great fire. For many generations it lay neglected in the crypt, amidst mutilated fragments of other less fortunate monuments of the past, till, three or four years ago, it was rescued from its gloomy abode under- ground and erected in its present position, cor- responding, as nearly as circumstances allowed, to the place which it occupied in the old Cathedral before the fire.f The canopy and inscription were * An allusion to the Vulgate rendering of Zeeh. vi. 12, " Ecee vir Oriens nomen ejus " (oomp. iii. 8), translated "The man whose name is the Branch" in the Authorised Version. This text is quoted several times in Donne's Sermons, and appears to have been a favourite with him.' t In old St. Paul's it stood against a pier so as to face East- ward, the aspeot being adapted to the words; but this position was impossible in the present Cathedral, unless the monument had been plaoed in some other part of the building. DONNE. 3 restored from an ancient engraving. In its history and in its character alike this monument is a fit emblem of him whom it figures ; for it speaks of a death, a resurrection, a saving as by fire. It is the effigy of John Donne, who was Dean of St. Paul's shortly before the outbreak of the Great Eebellion. Moreover, it has a peculiar interest arising from the circumstances under which it was erected in the first instance. It was not such a memorial as Donne's surviving friends might think suitable to commemo- rate the deceased, but it was the very monument which Donne himself designed as a true emblem of his past life and his future hopes. His friend and biographer relates* that, being urged to give di- rections for his monument, he caused an urn to be carved ; that he wrapped himself in a winding-sheet, and stood thereupon " with his eyes shut and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face, which was purposely turned towards the East, from whence he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour Jesus ;" that, in this posture, he had a picture of himself taken, which " he caused to be set by his bedside, where it continued, and became his hourly object till his death ;" and that from this picture the sculpture was executed after .his decease, the inscription having * Walton's ' Life of Donne,' p. I published by Causton," with some 141. The edition quoted is that | original notes by an Antiquary." B 2 CLASSIC PKEACHEES been written by Donne himself. In its quaint affec- tation and in its appalling earnestness this monu- ment recalls the very mind of the man himself. John Donne was born in 1573, the year after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. He was the child of Roman Catholic parents, and in their faith he was brought up. At the age of eleven he went to Hart Hall, Oxford ; at the age of fourteen, or thereabouts, he was "transplanted" to Trinity College, Cambridge. At neither * University did he proceed to a degree, for his friends had a conscientious objection to his taking the required oath. He was still only in his seventeenth year, when he commenced the study of the law, and soon after he entered Lincoln's Inn. Of his subsequent life for some years we catch only glimpses here and there. He was a courtier and an associate of nobles and statesmen. He numbered among his friends and acquaintances nearly all the most famous literary men of the day — Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Wotton, Selden, Bishop Hall, Bishop Montague, Bishop Andrewes, George Herbert, Izaak Walton. He was a great traveller and a great linguist, a diligent student, a man of wide and varied accomplishments. His versatility is a constant theme of admiration with those who knew him.* At the age of twenty he wrote poems which * See Grosart's preface to Bonne's ' Poems,' ii. pp. xvi. sq. Coleridge also, comparing him with. Shakespeare, speaks of his " lordliness of opulence," *&., p. xxxviii. DONNE. 5 his contemporaries regarded as masterpieces. His fame as a poet was greater in his own age than it has ever been since. During the last century, which had no toleration for subtle conceits and rugged rhythms, it was unduly depreciated ; but now again it has emerged from its eclipse. No quaintness of conception and no recklessness of style and no harshness of metre can hide the true poetic genius which flashes out from his nobler pieces. It has been said that God's heroes are made out of broken lives. There is indeed vouchsafed to the steady progressive growth of a career which has known no abrupt transition, and in which the days are " bound each to each by natural piety," a calm wisdom, a clear insight, an impressive influence, unattainable on any other terms ; but for the fire, the passion, the impulsive energy which bears down all opposition, we must not uncommonly look to a dislocated life. This dislocation may be either of two kinds. It may be a dislocation of theological belief, like Luther's; or it may be a dislocation of moral character, like Ignatius Loyola's and John Bunyan's ; the dislocation of the convert or the dis- location of the penitent. Donne's, like Augustine's, was both the one and the other. He grew up to maturity, as we saw, a Eoman Catholic ; but while still a young man, be began to study the Eoman controversy, as he himself says, 6 CLASSIC PUEACHERS : " with no inordinate haste nor precipitation in bind- ing myself to any local religion." " I had a larger work to do," he writes, " than many other men." He tells us that in this investigation he " surveyed and digested the whole body of divinity " relating to the controversy ; and he calls God to witness, that he " proceeded therein with humility and diffidence in himself," and with " frequent prayer and equal and indifferent affections." * As the result of this search after truth, he joined the Anglican communion. It seems to me that the influence of this change has impressed itself, as it could hardly fail to do, on his preaching. In saying this, I do not refer to the purely controversial parts, where the fact mast be obvious. The remark applies to the general scope and character of his sermons. They owe their chief force to the intense earnestness with which he dwells on the atoning power of Christ's passion; and I cannot doubt that, from the intellectual side, his vividness and grasp of conception on this point owed much to his study of the Eoman controversy. Of the other dislocation, the discontinuity of his moral life, it is more painful to speak ; but no study of Donne as a preacher would be at all adequate which failed to take account of this fact. His friend Izaak Walton, in an elegy written a few days after Iiis death, has incidentally compared him to the chief * Preface to his ' Pseudo-Martyr,' p. 3. DONNE. 7 penitent in the Gospel. Contrasting with the light effusions of his earlier years the religious poems, which he assigns to a later period, he asks : — "Did his rich soul conceive And in harmonious holy numbers weave A crown of sacred sonnets, fit to adorn A dying martyr's brow, or to be worn On that blest head of Mary Magdalen After she wiped Christ's feet, but not till then. Did he — fit for such penitents as she And he to use — leave us a Litany Which all devout men love ? " * Of the fact I fear there can be little doubt that at one time he had led an immoral life. It is indeed most unjust to measure the self-accusations of the devout servant of God by the common standard of human language. The holiest men are the most exacting with themselves. Bitter cries of anguish — almost of despair — will be wrung from the saint for sins which would cost the worldling not one moment of sleeplessness and not one prick of remorse. There- fore, if they had stood alone, we ought not to have laid too great stress on those " tones of pain, thrills of contrition, stingings of accusation, wails over abiding stains and wounds, and passionate weeping," which, in the language of a recent writer.t are discernible in Donne's letters and sermons. But unhappily his shame is written across his extant poems in letters of fire. In some of these there are » 'Life,' p. 154. t Urosart, Preface to Donne's ' Poems,' vol. ii. p. xvii. 8 CLASSIC PREACHERS: profligacies which it were vain to excuse as purely- imaginative efforts of the poet, or unworthy con- descensions to the base tastes of the age. We are driven to the conclusion that they reflect — at least to some extent — the sensuality of the man himself. Of such an offence I can offer no palliation. I know no crime more unpardonable in itself, or more fatal in its consequences, than this of prostituting the highest gifts of genius to a propaganda of vice and shame, this of poisoning the wells of a nation's literature and spreading moral death through generations yet unborn.* Donne's penitence was intense; he did all he could to retrieve the consequences of his sin. But he could not undo his work, could not blot out the printed page. " In his penitential years," says his biographer, " viewing some of those pieces that had been loosely — God knows, too loosely — scattered in his youth, he wished they had been abortive, or so short-lived that his own eyes had witnessed their funerals." f But whatever may have been the sins of his youth and early manhood, his married life shows him a changed man. His clandestine union brought him only sorrows and trials from a worldly point of view ; * It must be remembered however, that Donne was not in many cases responsible for the publication of his poems. They were published for the most part after his death. t P. 106 eq. The sentence is somewhat differently worded in different editions. DONNE. 9 but he was an affectionate and true husband, faith- ful to his wife during her lifetime, and loyal to her memory in a solitary widowhood of many years after her death. The comparison of Donne with the great African father was too obvious to escape notice. It is touched upon by his earliest critic, his contemporary and biographer ; * and it is drawn out by one of his latest. Of one of his religious poems the pre- sent Archbishop of Dublin writes : " It is the genuine cry of one engaged in that most terrible of all struggles, wherein, as we are winners or losers, we have won all or lost all." Then, adverting to this parallel, he adds ; " There was in Donne the same tumultuous youth, the same entanglement in youth- ful lusts, the same conflict with these, and the same final deliverance from them; and then the same passionate and personal grasp of the central truths of Christianity, linking itself, as this did, with all that he had suffered and all that he had sinned, and all through which, by God's grace, he had victoriously struggled." f It is no marvel then to find Donne himself quoting St. Augustine more frequently than any of the fathers — this "sensible and blessed father," this " tender blessed , father," as he affectionately calls him. The bearing of these facts on his preaching will * P. 65 sq. I Poetry,' p. 404, quoted by Grosart, t ' Household Book of English I Donne's ' Poems,' vol. ii. p. xviii. 10 CLASSIC PEEACHEES: be evident. This moral experience was the comple- ment of his intellectual experience. It taught him to feel and to absorb into himself, as the other taught him to understand and to reason about, the doctrine of Christ's atoning grace. What penitence, what tears, what merits of his own could wash out the stains with which such a life as his was imbrued ? It was therefore no pious platitude, no barren truism, no phrase of conventional orthodoxy, but the profound conviction of a sinful, sorrowing, for- given, thanksgiving man, when he speaks of "the sovereign balm of our souls, the blood of Christ Jesus."* Hear now these lines, which he wrote in his later years on a sick-bed, and which often after, when "sung to the organ by the choristers of St. Paul's," as he himself told a friend, "raised the affections of his heart and quickened his graces of zeal and gratitude."! " Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run, And do run still, though still I do deplore ? When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done ; For I have more. " Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won Others to sin, and made my sin their door 1 Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun A year or two, but wullow'd in a score ? When Thou liast done, Thou hast not done ; For I have more. * Donne's 'Works,' vol. i. p. 53, ed. Alford. The references to the sormons below are taken from this edition, but I have collated the quotations, where I had the opportunity, with the original editions, t Walton's ' Life.' p. 111. DONNE. 11 " I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ; , But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son Shall shine, as He shines now and heretofore ; And having done that, Thou hast done ; I fear no more." * " Simon, I have somewhat to say unto thee. ... Tell me which of them will love him most ? Simon answered and said, I suppose that he to whom he forgave most. And He said unto him, Thou hast rightly judged." .... " Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins which are many are forgiven ; for she loved much : but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little."t Of Donne's romantic career it has been said, that his life is more poetical than his poetry 4 We might without exaggeration adapt this epigram to his preaching, and say that his life was a sermon more eloquent than all his sermons. If, then, I were asked to describe in few words the secret of his power as a preacher, I should say that it was the contrition and the thanksgiving of the penitent acting upon the sensibility of the poet.§ * Donne's ' Poems,' vol. ii. p. 341 sq. (ed. Grosart). t St. Luke vii. 40-47. % Campbell, as represented by Milman, ' Annals of St. Paul's Outhedral,' p. 324 ; but Camp- bell himself, if I have found the right reference, makes the very commonplace remark that "the life of Donne is more interest- ing than hi3 poetry " (' British Poets,' vol. iii. p. 73). § Donne seems to have the best right to the title of the poet- preacher — a designation which has sometimes been given to an- other. 12 CLASSIC PEEACHEKS: Donne remained a layman till his forty-second year. He was pressed again and again, by friends who knew his gifts, to enter Holy Orders, but for some years he hesitated. His hesitation was due partly to an unwillingness to incur the suspicion with his own conscience of being influenced by motives of self-interest, but still more by the recol- lection of his past life. He himgfelf had long repented of the sins of his youth, and " banished them his affections : " but though forgiven by God, they were not forgotten by men ; and he feared that they might bring some censure on himself, or (worse) some dishonour on his sacred calling, if he com- plied* At length he yielded, after much delay, to the repeated solicitations of the King himself. In the year 1614 he was ordained ; and seven years after- wards he was promoted to the Deanery of St. Paul's, which he held till his death. He died in the 59th year of his age, having been sixteen yearsin orders. As a layman he had been notably a poet; as a clergyman he was before all things a preacher. He had remarkable gifts as an orator, and he used them well. Henceforward preaching was the main business of his life. After he had preached a sermon " he never gave his eyes rest," we are told, " till he had chosen out a new text, and that night cast his * Walton's ' Life,' p. 41. DONNE. 13 sermon into a form and his text into divisions, and the next day he took himself to consult the fathers, and so commit his meditations to his memory, which was excellent."* On the Saturday he gave himself an entire holiday, so as to refresh body and mind, "that he might be enabled to do the work of the day following not faintly, but with courage and cheerfulness." When first ordained, he shunned preaching before town congregations. He would retire to some country church with a single friend, and so try his wings. His first sermon was preached in the quiet village of Paddington. But his fame grew rapidly ; and he soon took his rank as the most powerful preacher of his day in the English Church. Others envied him and murmured, says an admirer, that, having been called to the vineyard late in the day, he received his penny with the fii-st.t More than a hundred and fifty of his sermons are published. Some of them were preached at Lincoln's Inn, where he held the Lectureship ; others at St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, of which church he was vicar; others at Whitehall, in his turn as Royal Chaplain, or before the Court on special occasions ; others, and these the most numerous, at St. Paul's. Of this last class a few were delivered at the Cross, by special appointment, but the majority within * Walton's ' Life,' p. 119. I tached to 'Poems,' by John t Elegy by Mr. K. B., at- I Donne (1669), p. 393. 14 CLASSIC PEEACHERS : the Cathedral, when year after year, according to the rule whi'ch is still in force at St. Paul's, he preached as Dean at the great festivals of the Church, Christmas and Easter and Whitsunday, or when he expounded the Psalms assigned to his pre- bendal stall, or on various incidental occasions. An eminent successor of Donne, the late Dean Milman, finds it difficult to "imagine, when he surveys the massy folios of Donne's sermons — each sermon spreads out over many pages — a vast con- gregation in the Cathedral or at Paul's Cross, listening not only with patience, but with absorbed interest, with unflagging attention, even with delight and rapture, to those interminable disquisitions." ... "It is astonishing to us," he adds, "that he should hold a London congregation enthralled, unwearied, unsatiated." * And yet I do not think that the secret of his domination is far to seek. " Fervet immensusque ruit." There is throughout an energy, a glow, an im- petuosity, a force as of a torrent, which must have swept his hearers onward despite themselves. This rapidity of movement is his characteristic feature. There are faults in abundance, but there is no flag- ging from beginning to end. Even the least manage- able subjects yield to his untiring energy. Thus he ' Annals uf St. Paul's Cathedral,' p. 328. DONNE. 15 occupies himself largely with the minute interpre- tation of Scriptural passages. This exegesis is very difficult of treatment before a large and miscellaneous congregation. But with Donne it is always interest- ing. It may be subtle, wire-drawn, fanciful, at times ; but it is keen, eager, lively, never pedantic or dull. So again, his sermons abound in quota- tions from the fathers ; and this burden of patristic reference would have crushed any common man. But here the quotations are epigrammatic in them- selves; they are tersely rendered, they are vigor- ously applied, and the reader is never wearied by them. Donne is, I think, the most animated of the great Anglican preachers. I select two or three examples out of hundreds which might be chosen, as exhibiting this eagerness of style, lit up by the genius of a poet and heated by the zeal of an evangelist. Hear this, for instance : " God's house is the house of prayer. It is His court of requests. There He receives petitions ; there He gives orders upon them. And you come to God in His house, as though you came to keep Him company, to sit down and talk with Him half an hour ; or you come as ambassadors, covered in His presence, as though ye came from as great a Prince as He. You meet below, and there make your bargains for biting, for devouring usury, and then you come up hither to prayers, and so make God your broker. You rob and spoil and eat His people 16 CLASSIC PEEACHEES: as bread by extortion and bribery and deceitful weights and measures and deluding oaths in buying and selling, and then come hither, and so make God your receiver and His house a den of thieves . . . As if the Son of God were but the son of some lord that had been your schoolfellow in your youth, and so you continue a boldness to Him ever after ; so because you have been brought up with Christ from your cradle and catechized in His name, His name becomes less reverend unto you ; and Sanctum et ter- ribile, holy and reverend, holy and terrible, should His name be."* Or this : " In the earth, in the grave, there is no distinc- tion. The angel that shall call us out of that dust will not stand to survey who lies naked, who in a coffin, who in wood, who in lead, who in a fine, .who in a coarser sheet; in that one day of the resurrection there is not a forenoon for lords to rise first and an afternoon for meaner persons to rise after. Christ was not whipped to save beggars, and crowned with thorns to save kings: He died, He suffered all, for all."t Or hear this again, which was a favourite passage with Coleridge : " Death comes equally to us all and makes us all equal when it comes. The ashes of an oak in the ' Works,' vol. iii. p. 217 sq. t ' Works,' vol. vi. p. 237. DONNE. 17 chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell me how high or how large that was : it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speechless too ; it says nothing, it dis- tinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldst not, as of a prince whom thou couldst not, look upon, will trouble thine eyes, if the wind blow it thither : and when a whirlwind hath blown the dust of the churchyard into the church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the church into the churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, #nd to pronounce, * This is the patrician, this is the noble flour ; and this is the yeomanly, this the plebeian bran ? ' " * Or listen again to this most terrible passage of all. I do not quote it from any sympathy with this mode of appeal to the Christian conscience, but merely as illustrating the appalling power of the preacher when he puts out his strength. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God ; but to fall out of the hands of the living God is a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination." " That God should let my soul fall out of His hand into a bottomless pit, and roll an unremovable stone upon it, and leave it to that which it finds there (and * 'Works,' vol. i. p. 241. [st. james's.] 18 CLASSIC PEEACHEES : it shall find that there which it never imagined till it came thither), and never think more of that soul, never have more to do with it. That of that pro- vidence of God, that studies the life of every weed and worm and ant and spider and toad and viper, there should never, never any beam flow out upon me ; that that God who looked upon me when I was nothing, and called me when I was not, as though I had been, out of the womb and depth of darkness, will not look upon me now, when, though a miser- able and a banished and a damned creature, yet I am His creature still, and contribute something to His glory, even in my damnation ; that that God who hath often looked upon me in my foulest un- cleanness and when I had shut out the eye of the day, the sun, and the eye of the night, the taper, and the eyes of all the world, with curtains and windows and doors, did yet see me, and see me in mercy, by making me see that He saw me, and sometimes brought me to a present remorse and (for that time) to a forbearing of that sin, should so turn Himself from me to His glorious saints and angels, as that no saint nor angel .nor Jesus Christ Himself should ever pray Him to look towards me, never remember Him that such a soul there is ; that that God who hath so often said to my soul Qmre morieris ? ' Why wilt thou die ? ' and so often sworn to my soul Vivit Dominus, 'As the Lord liveth, I would not have thee die but live,' will neither let me die DONNE. 19 nor let me live, but die an everlasting life and live an everlasting death ; that that God who when He could not get into me by standing and knocking, by His ordinary means of entering, by His word, His mercies, hath applied His judgments, and hath shaked the house r this body, with agues and palsies, and set this house on fire with fevers and calentures, and frighted the master of the house, my soul, with horrors and heavy apprehensions, and so made an entrance into me ; that that God should frustrate all His own purposes and practices upon me, and leave me and cast me away, as though I had cost Him nothing ; that this God at last should let this soul go away as a smoke, as a vapour, as a bubble, and that then this soul cannot be a smoke, a vapour, nor a bubble, but must lie in darkness as long as the Lord of light is light itself, and never spark of that light reach to my soul. . . ." * Listen to such words as I have read ; and to com- plete the effect summon up in imagination the ap- pearance and manner of the preacher. Eecall him as he is seen in the portrait attributed to Vandyck, — the keen, importuning, " melting eye,"-f the thin, worn features, the poetic cast of expression, half pensive, half gracious. Add to this the sweet tones of his voice and the "speaking action," $ * ' Works,' vol. ii£ p. 386 sq. t Walton's ' Life,' p. 150. J Elegy by Mr. Mayne, at- tacked to ' Poems,' by John Donne (1669), p. 387. C 2 20 CLASSIC PEEACHEKS: which is described by eye-witnesses as more elo- quent than the words of others, and you will cease to wonder at the thraldom in which he held his audience. "A preacher in earnest," writes Walton, "weeping sometimes for his auditory, some- times with them : always preaching to himself ; like an angel from a cloud but in none ; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to heaven in holy raptures, and en- ticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives : here picturing a vice so as to make it ugly to those who practised it, and a virtue so as to make it beloved even by those that loved it not . . ."* Indeed we cannot doubt that he himself was alive to that feeling, which he ascribes to the " blessed fathers" when preaching, "a holy delight to be heard, and to be heard with delight." t Donne's sermons are not faultless models of pulpit oratory. From this point of view they cannot be studied as the sermons of the great French preachers may be studied. Under the circumstances, this was almost an impossibility. Preaching his hour's sermon once or twice weekly, he had not time to arrange and re-arrange, to prune, to polish, to elaborate. As it is, we marvel at the profusion of learning, the rich- ness of ideas and imagery, the abundance in all kinds, poured out by a preacher who thus lived, as it were, from hand to mouth. ' Life,' p. 69, f ' Works,' vol. i. p. 98. DONNE. 21 Moreover, the taste of the age for fantastic imagery, for subtle disquisition, for affectations of language and of thought, exercised a ; fascination^ over him. Yet even here he is elevated above himself and his time by his subject. There is still far too much of that conceit of language, of that subtlety of associa- tion, of that " sport with ideas," which has been con- demned in his verse compositions ; but, compared ■with his poems, his sermons are freedom and sim- plicity itself. And, whenever his theme rises, he rises too; and then in the giant strength of an earnest conviction he bursts these green withes which a fantastic age has bound about him, as the thread of tow snaps at the touch of fire. Nothing can be more direct or more real than his eager, impetuous eloquence, when he speaks of God, of redemption, of heaven, of the sinfulness of human sin, of the bounti- fulness of Divine Love. At such moments he is quite the most modern of our older Anglican divines. He speaks directly to our time, because he speaks to all times. If it be the special aim of the preacher to convince of sin and of righteousness and of judgment, then Donne deserves to be reckoned the first of our Classic preachers. We may find elsewhere more skilful arrangement, more careful oratory, more accurate exegesis, more profuse illustration ; but here is the light which flashes and the fire which burns. Donne's learning was enormous; and yet his 22 CLASSIC preachers: sermons probably owe more to his knowledge of men than to his knowledge of books. The penitent is too apt to shrink into the recluse. Donne never yielded to this temptation. He himself thus rebukes the mistaken extravagance of penitence: "When men have lived long from God, they never think they come near enough to Him, except they go beyond Him." * No contrition was more intense than his ; but he did "not think to prove its- reality by cutting himself off from the former interests and associations of his life. He had been a man of the world before ; and he did not cease to be a man in the world now. " Beloved," he says — this term " beloved " is his favourite mode of address — " Beloved, salvation itself being so often presented to us in the names of glory and of joy, we cannot think that the way to that glory is a sordid life affected here, an obscure, a beggarly, a negligent abandoning of all ways of pre- ferment or riches or estimation in this world, for the glory of heaven shines down in these beams hither. ... As God loves a cheerful giver, so He loves a cheerful taker that takes hold of His mercies and His comforts with a cheerful heart." t This healthy, vigorous good sense is the more admirable in Donne, because it is wedded to an intense and passionate devotion. I wish that time would allow me to multiply ' Works,' vol. ii. p. 31. t lb., vol. ii. p. 142. DONNE. 23 examples of his lively imagination flashing out in practical maxims and lighting up the common things of life ; as for instance, where he pictures the general sense of insecurity on the death of Eliza- beth : " Every one of you in the city were running up and down like ants with their eggs bigger than themselves, every man with his bags, to seek where to hide them Safely. " * Or where he enforces the necessity of watchfulness against minor tempta- tions: "As men that rob houses thrust in a child at the window, and he opens greater doors for them, so lesser sins make way for greater."! Or when he describes the little effect of preaching on the heartless listener : " He hears but the logic or the rhetoric or the ethic or the poetry of the sermon, but the sermon of the sermon he hears not." % Of such pithy sayings Donne's sermons are an inexhaustible storehouse, in which I would gladly linger ; but I must hasten on to speak of one other feature before drawing to a close. Irony is a powerful instrument in the preacher's hands, if he knows how to wield it ; otherwise it were better left alone. The irony of Donne is piercing. Hear the withering scorn which he pours on those who think to condone sinful living by a posthumous bequest : " We hide our sins in His house by hypocrisy all our lives, and we hide them at our deaths, perchance, ' Works,' vi. p. 137. t lb., vol. ii. p. 556. % lb., vol. i. p. 72. 24 CLASSIC PREACHERS: with a hospital. And truly we had need do so ; when we have impoverished God in His children hy our extortions, and wounded Him and lamed Him in them hy our oppressions, we had need to provide God an hospital."* Or hear this again, on the criticism of sermons: "Because God calls preaching foolish- ness, you take God at His word and think preaching a thing under you. Hence it is that you take so much liberty in censuring and comparing preacher and preacher."! And lastly, observe the profound pathos and awe which is veiled under the apparent recklessness of these daring words : " At how cheap a price was Christ tumbled up and down in this world ! It does almost take off our pious scorn of the low price at which Judas sold Him, to consider that His Father sold Him to the world for nothing."} For preaching Donne lived ; and in preaching he died. He rose from a sick bed and came to London to take his customary sermon at Whitehall on the first Friday in Lent. Those who saw him in the pulpit, says Walton quaintly,§ must "have asked that question in Ezekiel, 'Do these bones live?'" The sermon was felt to be the swan's dying strain. Death was written in his wan and wasted features, and spoke through his faint and hollow voice. The subject was in harmony with the circum- stances. He took as his text the passage in the * ' Works,' vol. ii. p. 555. j J lb., vol. i. p. 61. t lb., vol. ii. p. 219. I § ' Life,' p. 135 sq. DONNE. 25 Psalms, " Unto God the Lord belong the issues of death." His hearers said at the time that "Dr. Donne had preached his own funeral sermon." The sermon is published. It betrays in part a diminution of his wonted fire and animation. We seem to see the preacher struggling painfully with his malady. But yet it is remarkable. The theme and the circumstances alike invest it with a peculiar solemnity ; and there are flashes of the poet-preacher still. " This whole world/' he says, " is but a universal churchyard, but one common grave: and the life and motion that the greatest persons have in it is but as the shaking of buried bodies in their graves by an earthquake."* "The worm is spread under thee, and the worm covers thee. There is the mats and carpet that lie under, and there is the state and the canopy that hangs over the greatest of the sons of men."t " The tree lies as it falls, it is true, but yet it is not the last stroke that fells the tree, nor the last word nor the last gasp that qualifies the man."| Hear now the closing words, and you will not be at a loss to conceive the profound impression which they must have left on his hearers, as the dying utterance of a dying man. " There we leave you in that blessed dependency, * 'Works,' vol. vi. p. 283. t lb., p. 288. J lb., p. 290. 26 CLASSIC PREACHERS. to hang upon Him that hangs upon the Cross. There bathe in His tears, there suck at His wounds, and lie down in peace in His grave, till He vouchsafes you a resurrection and an ascension into that kingdom which He hath purchased for you with the ines- timable price of His incorruptible blood. Amen." Amen it was. He had prayed that he might die in the pulpit, or (if not this) that he might die of the pulpit ; and his prayer was granted. From this sickness he never recovered ; the effort hastened his dissolution ; and, after lingering on a few weeks, he died on the last day of March, 1631. This study of Donne as a preacher will be fitly closed with the last stanza from his poem entitled, ' Hymn to God, my God, in my sickness,' which sums up the broad lesson of his life and teaching. " So in Mis purple wrapped, receive me, Lord ; By these His thorns give me His other crown ; And as to others' souls I preached Thy Word, Be this my text, my sermon to mine own : Therefore, that Se may raise, the Lord throws dovm."i 1 Works,' vol. vi. p. 298. t ' Poems,' vol. ii. p. 310. BARROW, THE EXHAUSTIVE PEEACHEE. " But godliness is profitable unto all things." — 1 Tim. iv. 8. Hospital Sermons an old institution — A Spital Sermon in 1671 — Sketch of the Preacher, Dr. Barrow — His studies — His life — ■ Character of hia preaching — His combativeness — His exliaus- tiveness — Advantage of his methods — His objects — His account of his own times — His sturdy Morality — Its foundation in his Theology— Moral and Intellectual truth the natural food of the soul— His sermons chiefly devoted to practical duties — Character of his doctrinal Sermons — Deficiency of his theology — His bold appeal to reason — Its strength and its weakness — Comparison with our own times — Value of his example. One of my duties on this occasion * is to invite con- tributions to the Fund collected throughout London this day for the Hospitals of the Metropolis, and my other duty suggests an interesting historical parallel. The idea of a special appeal once a year for all the Hospitals is, in substance at all events, some cen- turies old. In some fields near Bethnal Green there existed in old times a Priory and Hospital, * Hospital Sunday, June 17, 1877. 28 CLASSIC PEEACHEES : dedicated to the honour of our Lord and the Virgin Mary, and commonly called St. Mary Spital. In the churchyard of the Priory, now Spital Square, was in old times a pulpit-cross, something like that which was once in* St. Paul's Churchyard ; and here originally were preached every year what were known as the Spital, or Hospital, S erm ons. It is said to have been * for ,a long time a custom on Good Friday, in the afternoon, for some learned man, by appointment of the Prelates, to preach a sermon at Paul's Cross, treating of Christ's passion. On the three next Easter holydays, other learned men, by a like appointment, used to preach in the after- noon at the said Spital on the Article of Christ's resurrection ; and then on the Sunday after Easter, before noon, another learned man at Paul's Cross was to make rehearsal of these four sermons, either commending or reproving, as was thought con- venient; and he was then to make a sermon hini- self, which in all were five sermons in one. At all these sermons the Lord Mayor, with his brethren the aldermen, were accustomed to be present. The pulpit was broken down in the Grand Kebellioh, but the sermons were continued, with the old name of the Spital Sermons, at St. Bride's and elsewhere, and they retained some associations connected with the old Hospital. In 1740 we have Bishop Butler * Peter Cunningham's 'Handbook of London,' 1850, p. 463; Maitland's 'London,' X756, pp. 799, 800. BAEEOW. 29 preaching one of them, and the institutions for which he preached are specified as Christ's Hospital, for children ; St. Bartholomew's and St. Thomas's Hospitals, for the wounded, maimed, sick, and dis- eased ; Bridewell, for the vagrant and other indigent and miserable people ; Bethlehem, for distracted men and women; and the London Workhouse in Bishopsgate Street. The word Hospital was used in the width of its old signification, but to all intents and purposes this was a Hospital day. It seems a. pity, if such a suggestion may be per- mitted, that the new institution of Hospital Sunday has not been affiliated on this old custom. But to pass to my other subject. On Wednesday, in Easter week, in the year 1671, a very remarkable sermon was preached, at the Spital, " On the Duty and Beward of Bounty to the Poor." There is a tra- dition that it occupied three hours and a half in de- livery ; but since the Court of Aldermen desired the Preacher to print his sermon, " with what farther he had prepared to deliver at that time;" and since the' sermon as now printed occupies not more than ninety- four octavo pages, it is thought there may be some exaggeration in this tradition. The Preacher is said to have begun to be weary with standing so long ; but it is not recorded that there was any weariness on the part of the audience. On the contrary, as we have seen, having heard a good deal, they desired to read more; and no wonder, for the sermon 30 CLASSIC PEEACHEES: is almost an exhaustive treatise on the subject. It is on the text, "He hath dispersed, he hath given to the poor, his righteousness endureth for ever, his horn shall be exalted with honour." After some observations on the comprehensiveness of the liberality thus described, the preacher goes on, as he says, to propound several considerations " whereby the plain reasonableness, the great weight, the high worth and excellency of this duty, together with its strict connection with other principal duties of piety, will appear." * First, he observes that there is no sort of duty more expressly commanded in Scripture, so much so that righteousness and mercifulness are almost inter- changeable terms ; Charity, in fact, being the main point of religion, and mercy and bounty the chief parts of Charity. He proceeds to discuss the obliga- tions to this virtue arising from our relation to God, from our relation to the poor themselves, from the cha- racter and origin of wealth, and the relative positions of the rich and the poor. It is characteristic of him that, preaching to a rich audience, himself a staunch Cavalier and a champion of established order, he does not hesitate to declare that, in the existing degree, the differences of wealth and poverty are not natural. It was sin, he exclaims, which " begot these ingrossings * Works t>f Isaac Barrow, D.D. Edited by the Rev. A. Napier, Cambridge, 1859. Vol. i. p. 1 sqq. All other references to Barrow's works are made to this edition. BAREOW. 31 and enclosures of things ; it forged those two small pestilent words, meum and tuum," and we are bound in some measure to redress the balance thus disturbed. But so far as the distinctions of rich and poor are divinely appointed, it is in order, that a charitable intercourse of mutual gratitude and obligation should be established between them. The poor, moreover, have the special distinction of representing the form assumed by our Saviour Himself. " The greatest princes and potentates in the world," exclaims the Preacher, " the most wealthy and haughty of us all, but for one poor beggar had been irrecoverably miserable;" and "if we will do poverty right, we must rather for His dear sake and memory defer an especial respect and veneration thereto." All these points are elaborated in detail, and vigorously enforced with quotations and illustrations. The Preacher pursues every excuse for uncharitableness into its hiding-place, and drags them forth one by one. A Christian, in a word, is one who has pledged himself to imitate the benign and charitable Son of G-od, and. " a Christian niggard plainly is no Christian, but a blemish, a reproach, and a scandal to that honourable name." Finally, he quotes ex- amples of liberality, not omitting that of the City of London itself, and briefly recounts the honours which the text attaches to bountifulness. Such a recital of the obligations, the reasons, and the blessings of Charity ought not to be without its 32 CLASSIC PEBACHEES: effect on our liberality this afternoon ; and, at all events, it may afford some idea of one of the chief characteristics of the Preacher in question. But before dwelling on these characteristics, let us en- deavour to realise the man himself. He was a man who, in several respects, ought to command especial interest at this time. Though this was the first sermon he ever printed, and he was but forty years of age, he had long held a very distinguished position at Cambridge and was one of the King's Chaplains. Twenty-five years before he had entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and ever since then, with the sole interval of a year or two spent in travel, Cambridge had been his home. During that time he had devoted himself with astonishing industry, vigour, and success to almost every study which the University offered. The period was the very turning-point in the history of that great University. Within the space of Dr. Barrow's career — for that was the name of the Preacher — had that bent been given to it which has since rendered it in a peculiar degree the home of the mathematical and physical sciences. It was just at this moment, in the middle of the seventeenth century, that the new experimental philosophy, to which Lord Bacon, himself a Cambridge man, had given so momentous an impulse, began decisively to assert its predominance. When Barrow entered Cam- bridge, no branch of philosophical science except BAKKOW. 6d Medicine was represented by a Professor ; there was only one lecture in Mathematics, and these were so elementary that Barrow describes it as a great achievement " that men had ceased to tremble at the name of Euclid, and had even triumphed over the mysteries of Algebra." But in 1663 the Lu- ^asian Professorship of Mathematics was founded. Barrow became the first Professor ; and one year before he preached this Spital Sermon he had resigned this Professorship, and had been succeeded by one of his own pupils, whose name was Isaac Newton. During the time he held the Professor- ship he had approached to the very verge of one of Newton's greatest mathematical discoveries; and had be given his life to the subject, the master might bave been only second to the pupil. But Barrow's energy could not be confined to one subject. Three (rears before his appointment to the Mathematical Jhair he had been elected to the Professorship of 3-reek ; and he was confessedly one of the first 3-reek and Latin scholars of the day. But this was 'ar from all. He was intensely interested in, the ;ising experimental sciences, and studied with great success anatomy, botany and chemistry. Had he jeen unbiassed, he might even have made Medicine lis profession, but he held one of those preferments, (0 obnoxious to modern ideas, now known as clerical fellowships ; and on the eve of their probable aboli- tion let it be remembered to their credit that, in [ST. JAMES'S.] D 34 CLASSIC PREACHERS : this instance at least, if they spoilt a great mathe- matician or natural philosopher, they did at least foster a great divine. Barrow felt that his oath bound him to make Divinity the end of his studies. It would seem that about the time his Spital Sermon was preached, he had finally devoted himself to this career ; and in the following year Charles II. appointed him to the Mastership of Trinity College, saying that he gave it to the best scholar in England. He held the post only five years, dying in 1677, in his forty-seventh year, after preaching the only other Sermon which he lived to prepare for publication, that delivered at the Guildhall on Good Friday, 1677, on the Passion of our Blessed Saviour. One or two more touches will complete bis portraiture sufficiently for our purpose. He was the son of a wealthy citizen, who suffered much for his adherence to the cause of the King ; and when the authority of the Church and the King was supplanted at Cambridge by Parliamentary Commissioners, Barrow distinguished himself as an undergraduate by his bold, though not obtrusive, adherence to the old cause. As a boy at the Charterhouse he was cbiefly distinguished by his pugnacity ; but as the troubles of the time began, he settled down to serious and diligent study. Lastly, as another point which should command attention for him at the present moment, during his travels he spent a year at Constantinople, and he BARROW. 35 has left an account of the Turks and their religion, in prose * and verse, f which has been recently said to afford, even now, the best short account of the subject existing.! Unfortunately both these pieces are in Latin; but could I trouble you with a quotation, § you would see that his impressions of the Turks and their religion do not differ much from those which are most current at this hour. Such, however, was the man who, in a Spital Sermon of the year 1671, poured on the heads of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London that flood of discussion, exhortation, denun- ciation, argument, encouragement, which I just now described. There is, perhaps, something in it which recalls the early character of the boy. There is a certain pugnacity about the form of the argument which suggests that the old spirit was still alive in him. Throughout the Sermon he seems to have before him the character whom he describes as " the Christian niggard ; " and he appears to take a de- light in demolishing this monster with as many and as vigorous blows as his own strength and the en- * ' Works,' vol. ix. p. 386. f Md-, P- 481. t ' Quarterly Review,' October 1869. § " Saeva Buperstitio, bellisque creata oiendis, Indulgens irse, pronseque effiisa remittens Lora voluptati, Martis simul improba fautrix Et Veneris, votis ac moribus apta feriuis, Barbara corripuit subita prsecordia flamma." De Meligione Turcica, 'Aic4eauty or art into the worship of God, and the same ibjection to those great principles of Church govern- ment which Hooker had so eloquently asserted. ?he tendency would have been, as the other leaders f the Church party, like Cosin and Sanderson, irobably saw, to form a schism within the Church astead of without ; or, as South expressed it, " By ielding or giving place to them, a pernicious and icurable schism would have been brought into he Church."* Unquestionably there were to be 3und among the Puritans men of eminent good- ess and toleration like Baxter. Nor need we esitate to admire the courageous zeal even of the ery zealots of Cromwell's army, or the evident iety of most of their greatest writers. Yet even Saxter, judging by his own account and that of his •iends, was one of the most impracticable of men ; * iv. 198. 76 CLASSIC PEEACHEES: and as he described the Boob of Common Prayer as " a dose of opium, likely to cure diseases by extin- guishing life," he may be believed when he himself says, " that the world will see that we differ in greater things than ceremonies and forms of prayer."* "We cannot, therefore, but regard the attempt to widen the Church of England in a Presbyterian direction, which was made at the Savoy Conference in 1662, as a matter of doubtful policy, which the Church party may have well been wise in resisting. But .the persecution of the Puritans which followed was a very different matter. The Act of Uniformity, the Conventicle Act, and the Five Mile Act, are quite as odious in principle as the Bevocation of the Edict of Nantes ; they were forced upon a reluctant King, who had pledged his word to the Presbyterians that he would secure for them freedom of worship ; and the last and most cruel was passed at the very time when the Nonconformists had rendered eminent service during the Plague in London by preaching in the "empty pulpits," deserted, in too many instances, by their own clergy, t The tone adopted by South was a direct instigation to measures of this kind, and was probably prompted by their authors, Archbishop Sheldon and Bishop Ward. It would * Baxter's 'Life,' 213, 320,325. t Burnet, i. 314. He adds, indeed : " They began to preaoh openly, not without reflecting on the sins of the Court, and on the ill-usage that they themselves had met with,. This was repre- sented very odiously at Oxford." SOUTH. 77 be easy to quote many passages full of his caustic wit on this subject; but I shall only .give one short extract from a Sermon preached in ^871, when the contest with the Nonconformists was still raging. Their tenderness " of conscience," says South, " is such an one as makes men scruple at the lawfulness of a set form of worship, at the use of some solemn rites and ceremonies in the worship of God, but makes them not stick at all at sacrilege, nor at rebellion, nor at the murder of their King, nor at the robbery and undoing of their fellow-subjects; villainies which not only Christianity proscribes, but the common reason of mankind rises up against, and by the very light of nature condemns. And did not those among us who plead tenderness of conscience do all these things ? Nay, did they not do them in the very strength of this plea ? " * It is painful to quote invectives which nothing can justify, yet it may be said, as a final excuse for South, that this feeling was, for a time at least, that of the whole nation, of the laity quite as much as the clergy. Clarendon and Southampton, Charles's best ministers, shared it. The Puritan party was, in fact, now suffering the penalty of ten years of tyranny, when, in the words of a historian nowise unfavourable to them, "they had forbidden, under heavy penalties, the use of the Book of Common * a 376. 78 CLASSIC TEEACHEES: Prayer; not only in churches but even in private houses ; when it had been a crime in a child to read by the bedside of a sick parent one of those beautiful Collects which had soothed the griefs of fqrty generations of Christians ; when clergymen of respectable character were not only ejected from their benefices by thousands, but were frequently exposed to the outrages of a fanatical rabble :"* when so much that was beautiful in Churches and Cathe- drals had been ruthlessly defaced, and almost every- thing which reminded men that Christ's religion had been dear to their forefathers for sixteen cen- turies was deemed on that very account unholy. If we are inclined to judge South, and even prelates like Cosin, with severity, we must remember that their language often only expresses the indignation which even religious men will feel against a tyrannous attempt to injure Christianity by limiting it to the teaching of a narrow and intolerant sect. In the above remarks on the writings of this eminent man, I may possibly appear to have dwelt too much on the defective side of his character. But the palm of sacred oratory is not to be won even by the highest intellectual gifts alone ; and while I have gladly recognised the natural genius of South as an Orator, I have felt that it is equally important to exhibit the causes of his failure to attain the Macaulay's 'History of England,' i. 161. SOUTH. . i 9 highest rank as a Preacher. I have endeavoured, in a word, to describe South's sermons justly; both as they show the power of the man and the charac- ter of his times — which influenced him, in some respects, so unfortunately. He was, perhaps, born with too keen and caustic a wit, and he indulged it too unsparingly, ever to have been either a great man or a great preacher ; for wit like his tends to make men contemptuous of their fellows, and is seldom consistent with that generous en- thusiasm which is essential to true eloquence. But his natural powers, both of thought and expression, though they were often unwisely exercised, were as great as could be found in any preacher, either ancient or modern. And if we acknowledge with regret that in the gentler, sweeter, and tenderer feelings, which are the crowning glory of the Christian preacher, South was deficient, we may still believe that writings marked by such powers of thought and expression, so rich in learning, in wit, and in illustration, and with so much of moral and religious wisdom, can never fail to be an instructive and often an elevating study. BEVERIDGE, THE SCEIPTUKAL PEEACHER. " Thy testimonies are my delight, and my counsellors." Psalm cxix. 24. The importance and significance of preaching — General character- istics of Beveridge as a theologian and preacher — Scriptural and Catholic — Opposed to Komanism and Puritanism — His history — Great Kebellion — Life at Cambridge — Restoration — First writings — Vicar of Ealing— Hector of S. Peter's, Comhill — Great work of his life — His practical piety — His strong Chureh- manship — The Revolution — Refuses Bath and Wells — Bishop of S. Asaph — His will — His position as a preacher. " We live in an age, and among a people that place a great part, if not the whole of their religion in hearing sermons." These are the words with which Bishop Beveridge commences a discourse on the " Ministers of the Gospel, Christ's Ambassadors ; " * and he goes on to complain that " we find but few that are ever the more religious for all they hear ; " a complaint which is very familiar to us in every age of the Church. It is quite possible to exaggerate the importance of sermons, and it may be conceded that the mere * Serm. XI, 'Works ' (Angl. Cath. Libr.), vol. i. p. 195. [ST. JAMES'S.] G 82 classic preachers: amount of preaching or of hearing will form a very uncertain measure of the depth and extent of religious life among a people. Yet no one can deny that a revival of religion has always been accompanied by an increased interest in the ordinance of preaching ; and it would be difficult to suggest a better means of ascertaining the prevailing religious sentiments of an age, .than a complete and careful study of the ' sermons, which, as a matter of fact, were listened to by the Christian congregations of that age. The preacher is made by his age, and he in his turn helps to make it. In proportion to his influence, he is both representative of the spirit and modes of thought of the generation to which he belongs, and a power by which that spirit and those thoughts are moulded. It is, however, a much easier task to ascertain the doctrinal position, or even the historical influence of the preachers of past times, than to estimate their oratorical powers, or the secret of their influence in the pulpit. Oratory is not a mere matter of words, of phrases, of arguments, of method ; it is, in its highest forms, the outgoing of the life — intellectual, moral, spiritual — of the preacher, upon the life and soul of his hearers. It is conveyed as much by tone, manner, gesture, as by language ; and even when we read the words which have moved multitudes to the very depth of their being, a few hours after they have been delivered, we are often unable to under- BEVERIDGE. 83 stand the secret of their power; how much more when the circumstances in which they were spoken are forgotten, or removed into a distant past, and we are no longer under the influence of the ideas and habits to which they appealed ! There is, perhaps, a peculiar difficulty in studying a preacher like Beveridge, who was but little con- nected with the more stirring events of his times ; and who presents few of those striking peculiarities by which some preachers, in no other respect superior to himself, have been distinguished. - Yet this ob- vious difficulty is undoubtedly counterbalanced by the advantage that be deals, for the most part, with subjects which are of abiding and eternal interest. In this respect, as in so many others, his sermons are like the Book which he delighted to study, speaking to us of human sinfulness and weak- ness, of Divine mercy and grace, of the life of God in the soul of man, of the means of grace and the hope of glory. Like the Psalms of David, they are full of words which, if they are hoary with age, are also fresh with the bloom of everlasting youth, which awaken an echo as true in the hearts of the servants of God in our own times, as in the days long gone by in which they were first uttered. We shall, perhaps, best understand the work of Bishop Beveridge, if we first consider his general characteristics as a preacher and a divine, and then note briefly how the man and the preacher was G 2 84 classic preachers: made, and finally endeavour to set forth some of the most prominent features of his method and manner as a teacher. We have called Beveridge the " Scriptural Preacher." The very designation is an evidence of the difficulty of affixing any special characteristic to his genius. Yet it would not be easy to find another word which would be so truly and exactly descriptive, and it would be equally difficult, I fancy, to find another preacher to whom the title could be so justly applied. It is not merely that there are few preachers of any age who make such copious use of Holy Scrip- ture in their sermons, although this is true. It would not be just to say that he strings together texts from Scripture to supply the place of thought and matter of his own. It would be still less true to say that he drags in the words of the sacred writers without relevancy to the subject which he has in hand, or the point which he is seeking to establish. There are pulpit orators who are scrip- tural preachers in this bad sense of the words. It is not so with Beveridge. You hardly ever find a text misapplied, or which is not to the point. You hardly ever find a meaning forced out of the sacred Word to suit the purpose for which he employs it. Beveridge was a scriptural preacher because his own spirit was bathed in the spirit of the Word of God. He loved the Bible : G-od's testimonies were indeed his delight BEVEBIDGE. 85 and his counsellors. He spoke in scriptural language, because he thought in it, felt in it, lived in it, worked in it, prayed in it. Nor was he one of those — and they abound in all ages — who make the claim to be a true interpreter of Holy Scripture a means of promulgating their own private opinions, and often their own departures from Catholic truth. He would put no man or church between him and the Bible ; he would hold direct converse with the Spirit of God through His appointed oracles ; but he also watched jealously over his own conclusions, and verified them by pri- mitive testimony and Catholic consent. " The Scriptures," he says, " as being indited by the Spirit of God, do contain the best and soundest words that possibly could be invented, whereby to express such truths as are necessary for mankind to believe or know." Yet, he points out that " there never was any error, heresy, or schism in the Church, but was pretended by the authors and abettors of it to be grounded upon Scripture." And this result, he says, has followed partly from their being igno- rant of the original languages in which the Scriptures were written, partly from their being unacquainted with " the rites and customs of the Jewish Church," partly from the mysterious nature of the doctrines contained in the Scriptures, and partly from the moral and spiritual dispositions of those who have studied the Bible. " Such," he says, " is the weak- 86 CLASSIC PEEACHBES: ness of men's understandings, such the corruption of their judgments, such the perverseness of their wills, the disorder of their affections, and the .praTity of their whole souls, that they extract poison from that which was intended for their food, draw error out of truth, heresy out of the Scriptures themselves, so as to learn to blaspheme God in His own words. But what, then, shall we do in this case ? How can we be ever certain that the words we use in matters of religion be sound, and, by consequence, our opinions orthodox, and our sentiments of God and those eternal truths which He hath revealed to us, such as He Himself would have them ? Why, surely for this end it is necessary that we indulge not our own fancies, nor idolise our own private opinions, but ' hold fast the form of sound words ' delivered to us in the Holy Scriptures, in that sense which the Catholic Church in all ages hath put upon them." * In these words we have the key to Beveridge's whole position, as a student of Holy Scripture, as a theologian, as a Churchman. How he was fashioned by circumstances, by the grace of God, by his own earnest labours, to be the man he was, we shall pre- sently see. It is at this point important to note that he was, in his convictions, in his teaching, in his life and work, thoroughly consistent from beginning to end. His devotion to the English Church, his * Serm. VI., " Form of Sound Words," ' Works,' vol. i, p 111 i BEVEEIDGE. 87 labours as a parish priest, his resolute antagonism to Komanistn on the one hand and to Puritanism on the other, are all explained by his views of the method of ascertaining the nature of Divine truth. Thus, speaking of the Church of England, he says : — " For our Church, as to its doctrine as well as discipline, is settled upon so firm a .basis, so truly Catholic, that none can oppose what she teacheth, without denying, not only the Scriptures, but the Scrip- tures as interpreted by the Universal Church. So that we may justly challenge all the world to show us any one point or article of faith wherein our Church differs from the Catholic in all ages, since the Apostles' days, which, I think, is more than can be said of any other national Church in the whole world, there being no other, that I know of, which keeps to the form of sound words delivered in Scripture, as interpreted by the Universal Church, so firmly and constantly as ours doth." * Hence his opinion of the Roman Communion : — " The Church of Rome hath of late degenerated so far from the doctrine and practice of the Primitive and Universal Church, that they who live in her communion, do commonly perform the same acts of religious worship to creatures which they do to the great Creator of the world, ' God blessed for ever.' This we justly condemn them for, as judging Serm. VI., " Form of Sound Words." 88 classic preachers: it one of the greatest sins that a Church or person can be guilty of. But in the midst of this our just zeal against the Papists for giving as much worship to creatures as they do to the Creator, we must have a care of falling into the other extreme, even of giving no more worship to our Creator than what may be given to a creature ; which is the great fault of too many among us. * Equally clear were his utterances against Puritan- ism. "And as for schism, they certainly hazard their salvation at a strange rate, who separate them- selves from such a Church as ours is, wherein the Apostolical succession, the root of all Christian com- munion, hath been so entirely preserved, and the Word and Sacraments are so effectively administered. . . . And therefore, to speak modestly, they must needs run a very great hazard who cut themselves off from ours,' and by consequence from the Catholic Church, and so render themselves incapable of re- ceiving any benefit from this promise, or from the means of grace which they do or may enjoy." And yet he was no formalist, for he goes on : " But when I speak of your continuing firm and faithful to our Church, I do not mean that you should only talk high for her, much less inveigh against her adver- saries, or damn all those who are not of her communion ; for this is contrary to the Divine and * Sera. "V., "On the True Notion of Religious Worship," vol. i. p. 88. BEVEBIDGE. 89 Apostolic spirit that is in her, which is a spirit of , meekness, and soberness, and charity. But my meaniDg is that you firmly believe whatsoever she, from the Word of God, propounds as an article of faith, and faithfully perform whatever she, from the same Word, requires as a necessary duty to God or man. . . . And oh ! that all we who are here present, and all that profess to be of our Church, wheresoever they are, would for the future do so ! What an holy, what a happy people we should then be ! How pious towards God, how loyal to our Sovereign, how just and charitable towards all men ! . . . Then our Lord Himself would delight to dwell amongst us, and be always present with us, not only by His spirit, but likewise by His power too. And if He be with us, we need not fear what flesh can do against us." * We have thus learned to understand the theological position of Beveridge. Before we attempt more fully to comprehend the preacher, we must try to make acquaintance with the man ; for we must remember, — and it is a solemn truth for priests and people, — it is the man who preaches, it is the inner life of the speaker that comes forth in his words, and determines their value and their power, or their unreality and their weakness. The recorded incidents of Beveridge's life are few, and they are not striking. He was born early in the * Serm. I., " Christ's Presence with His Ministers," vol. i. p. 23. 90 CLASSIC PKEACHEES: year 1636 (N.S. 1637),* in the parish of Barrow- upon-Soar, in Leicestershire, of which parish his father was vicar. The troubles which led to the Civil War and to the Commonwealth were in full progress. In the year of his birth, Laud's Liturgy was introduced into Scotland. In the following year Hampden was condemned for his refusal to pay the ship-money. He was a boy of twelve when the King's head fell on the block at Whitehall. His father had died, and another of the same name, perhaps an uncle, had been deprived by the sequestrators. In the year 1653 he entered S. John's College, Cambridge, the same year, and within a month of the time when Cromwell dissolved the Long Parliament. We can imagine the thoughts which were moving in the mind of the young Churchman when he became a member of the University. Here the influences under which he was placed were all opposed to the teachings of his childhood. Dr. Tuckney, the master of his College, was a distinguished Puritan and Calvinist ; he was one of the Presbyterian divines at the Savoy Conference, after the Restoration. Beveridge was not contented to abandon his hereditary faith, nor was he satisfied to hold it with mere unreasoning constancy. He addicted himself with devotion and * The Oxford Editor has 1638. Through the kindness of the present Vicar of Barrow, the Bev. W. Newham, I have been able to verify the date. The birthday is unknown ; Beveridge was baptized Feb. 21st. BEVERIDGE. 91 success to the study of oriental languages, of Holy Scripture, of the early records of the History of the Church. Before he was twenty he had written a grammar of the Syriac language. The fruits of his patristic and ecclesiastical studies were afterwards given to the world in his works on the Apostolical Canons and the decrees of the early Councils.* These works have indeed been in great measure superseded ; but they contributed in no slight degree to advance those deeply interesting and important studies, and they are still quoted with respect by the most recent labourers in the same field. Beveridge felt in his day, as we feel now, that if the position of the Church of England is unassailable, it is because she stands firm upon Holy Scripture, primitive testimony, Catholic consent. It is this conviction which makes his utterances so clear, decided, unwavering. He was not only convinced, but he knew well the grounds on which his convictions were based. But he was not a mere scholar and theologian ; he was a devout Christian, and all his studies were con- ducted to the end that he might more perfectly know the will of God, in order that he might acquaint himself with Him, love Him, and serve Him. His ' Private Thoughts,' written for his own use early in * The 'Fandeotoe * appealed in j informed me, Beveridge was the 1672; the ' Codex Canouum ' in j only English divine who was 1679. It is a cm-ions illustration j known to Philaret, Archbishop of the influence of these books, of Moscow, that, as the Bean of Westminster 92 classic preachers: life, although not published until after his death, are an abiding testimony to the reality, the depth, the warmth of his devotion. Thus prepared in heart and mind, he had attained to the age of twenty-three at the time of the Restoration, and was in the following year (1661) ordained deacon and priest, and insti- tuted to the Vicarage of Ealing. Eleven years afterwards, in 1672, he was ap- pointed rector of S. Peter's, Cornhill, in which office he spent the best part of his life, a period of no less than thirty years. It was here, therefore, that the great work of his life was done ; and it is in this work that we naturally look for an illustration of those principles of which he was the consistent advocate. Nor do we look in vain. At the very beginning of his ministry he set before his new parishioners that which was the con- stant theme of his teaching, " holiness the great end of the Christian dispensation;" and he showed them that, however ardent his Churchmanship, however staunch his orthodoxy, no result but this could satisfy him, that they should be a pattern to others for piety, and true holiness. " How happy should I think myself," he exclaims, " if it would please God to make me, the unworthiest of His servants, an instru- ment in His almighty hand towards the effecting of it in this place!" Beveridge had formed to himself a distinct and lofty ideal of the Christian life which he would cul- BEVERIDGE. 93 tivate in himself, and which he strove to produce in others. It was, to use his own expression, "the exemplary holiness of the primitive Christians," that he proposed to his people as their model ; and he taught them that such a character could be attained only by the use of those means which the primitive Christians employed. For this reason he always laid great stress upon regular, devout, and frequent atten- dance at the table of the Lord. On this subject his admonitions are earnest and repeated. Thus, speaking of the Holy Communion, he says: "This sacrament supplies the defect of all the Levitical sacrifices, the paschal lamb, the sin-offerings, the trespass-offerings, the peace-offerings, the thank-offerings, the whole burnt-offerings, they are all now laid aside, and this one substituted in their place, of more power and efficacy to the ends for which they were ordained than all they put together ; for they only foreshowed Christ's death until it happened, this shows it forth to the end of the world ; for, as the A.postle saith, ' As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord's death till he come.' "... " It is true," he goes on, " He hath prescribed no set times for it, as he did for the sacrifices under the law ; yet, however, seeing it eomes in their place, it ought to bear some proportion with them in this respect, at least so far, that as they, besides their daily, had their weekly sacrifices more than ordinary upon the Sabbath-day ; so we should celebrate this Holy 94 CLASSIC PEEACHEBS : Sacrament once a week upon the Lord's Day, as we find the Apostles did. . . . " Especially considering the mighty benefits and advantages that accrue to us by a due and worthy receiving of this Holy Sacrament. Hereby we are put in mind of the sinfulness of sin, and the dread- ful punishments which are due unto it, seeing nothing less than the blood of the Son of God could expiate it. Hereby our minds are set against it, and our whole souls are taught to abhor and loathe it. Hereby we exercise our faith in Christ, for the pardon of all our faults, and have them accordingly pardoned to us; hereby we wash ourselves over again, as it were, in the blood of the Lamb of God, which cleanseth us from all sin ; hereby we derive power and virtue from Christ, to withstand the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil ; and to serve God with a perfect heart and a willing mind j hereby we dwell in Christ and Christ in us."* In another Sermon,! speaking on the same subject, he exclaims : " Blessed be God for it, you have the same opportunity as they had of receiving the Holy Sacrament every Lord's Lay, and therefore be ad- vised to follow their example, in being constantly at it, or at least as often as you possibly can ; do not let every little trifling worldly business deprive you * Serm. LIV., "Universal Obedience," vol. iii. p. 46. •f Serin. LI., " Steadfastness to the Established Church," vol. ii, p. HO. BEVEEIDGE. 95 of the greatest blessing you can have on this side heaven." From one of his most remarkable sermons, that on " the exemplary holiness of the primitive Christians,"* as well as from contemporary testi- mony, we learn that these exhortations had not been in vain. " In the place," he says, " where I had the honour to serve G-od at His altar, before He called me hither, I administered it every Lord's Day for above twenty years together, and was so far from ever wanting communicants, that I had always as many as I and two curates could well administer it to them; for people found such extraordinary benefit and ghostly comfort from it, that they never thought they could receive it often enough ; and the oftener they received it the more they still desired it." The effect of his teaching, his example, his labours, among the people of his parish, soon became con- spicuous. " He applied himself," it is said, " with the utmost labour and zeal to the discharge of his ministry in its several parts and offices; and so instructive was he in his discourse, from the pulpit, so warm and affectionate in his priva^ exhortations, so regular and uniform in the public worship of the Church, and in every part of his pastoral functions, and so remarkably were his labours crowned with success, that as he himself was justly styled the ' great * Serm. CH. vol. iv. p. 448. 96 CLASSIC PEEACHEES: reviver and restorer of primitive piety,' so his parish was deservedly proposed as the best model and pattern for the rest of its neighbours to copy after." * While Eector of S. Peter's, he was made succes- sively Prebendary of S. Paul's (1674), Archdeacon of Colchester (1681), and Prebendary of Canterbury (1684). The same zeal which he showed in his parish he carried into the work of his Archdeaconry. Doubtful, and reasonably doubtful, of the accuracy of Churchwardens' reports, he visited in person every parish in his district, taking an exact account of its condition and necessities. When at Canterbury he gave a remarkable ex- ample of his somewhat severe Churchmanship. King James II. had ordered a brief to be read for the re- lief of the persecuted French Protestants. Whether because of his imperfect sympathy with the object of the appeal, or because he really doubted of the legality of such a notice, Beveridge objected that it was not sanctioned by the rubrics. It was on this occasion that Tillotson, who was then Dean of Canterbury, addressed to him the well-known taunt, " Doctor, doctqr, Charity is above rubrics ! " It is not unlikely, however, that he was beginning to see that King James's new-born zeal for toleration was used only as a means of restoring the papal * ' Biographia Britannioa,' and preface to hia (posthumously pub- lished) ' Private Thoughts.' BKVEEIDGE. 97 power in England. We know, at least, that he was about this time the member of a society which met in private for consultation on this subject, and for prayer that such an evil might be averted. At the revolution, he did not hesitate to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary, and was shortly afterwards (1690) made one of the King's chaplains. He was also a prominent member of Convocation, and took an active part in the debates on the subject of the concessions which were pro- posed to be made for the reconciliation of the Puritans. Eeveridge was not unwilling to meet the party with which he had little personal or eccle- siastical sympathy ; but he strenuously opposed any surrender of what he regarded as principle. Before the Convocation of 1689 he "preached a Latin Sermon,* in which he warmly eulogised the existing system, and yet declared himself favourable to a moderate reform. Ecclesiastical laws, he said, were of two hinds. Some laws were fundamental and eternal ; they derived their authority from God ; nor could any religious community abrogate them without ceasing to form a part of the universal Church. Other laws were local and temporary. They had been framed by human wisdom, and might be altered by human wisdom. They^ ought not, in- deed, to be altered without grave reasons. But surely, at that moment, such reasons were not wanting. * This summary is from Lord Macaulay's ' History,' chap. xiv. [ST. JAMES'S.] H 98 CLASSIC PEEACHEES : To unite a scattered flock in one fold under one shepherd, to remove stumbling-blocks from the path of the weak, to reconcile hearts long estranged, to restore spiritual discipline to its primitive vigour, to place the best and purest of Christian Societies on a base broad enough to stand against all the attacks of earth and hell, these were objects which might well justify some modification, not of Catholic insti- tutions, but of national or provincial usages." In 1691, on Ken's refusal to take the oath of alle- giance, Beveridge was offered the bishopric of Bath and Wells. His conduct on this occasion has been greatly misunderstood ; Macaulay speaks of him as ' being " though an honest, not a strong-minded man; " yet the explanation of his indecision and of his final resolution to decline the office, is very simple. On the one hand, Beveridge had no doubt of the lawful- ness of accepting the appointment from King William, as he had already taken the oaths : on the other hand, he was unwilling to sit on the throne from which the saintly Ken had been thrust out. After considerable hesitation, by the advice of Archbishop Sancroft, he refused the bishopric. His scrupulosity did not protect him from the attacks of the pam- phleteers of his day ; but there are few who will now refuse to do honour to the motives by which he was influenced. It will not at least be denied that he relinquished a post of honour and dignity, and he seems, besides, to have forfeited the favour of the BEVEEIDGE. 99 King, for he was offered no further promotion until the reign of Queen Anne. By this Queen he was in 1704, when he was already sixty-seven years of age, promoted to the See of S. Asaph, where he laboured for about four years with the same apostolic zeal and fervour which he had shown in a less elevated position. " He was no sooner exalted to the Episcopal Chair," says the editor of the ' Private Thoughts,' " but in a most pathetic and obliging letter to the clergy of his diocese, he recommended to them ' the duty of cate- chising and instructing the people committed to their charge, in the principles of the Christian religion ; to the end they might know what they were to believe and do in order to salvation ; ' and told them ' he thought it necessary to begin with that without which, whatever else he or they should do, would turn to little or no account, as to the main end of the ministry.' And to enable them to do this the more effectually, he sent them a plain and easy ' ex- . position upon the Church Catechism.' " He died at his lodging in the Cloisters of West- minster Abbey, on the 5th of March, 1707 (N.S. 1708) ; and was buried in S. Paul's Cathedral. He died as he had lived, with a heart full of love to God and man, and with an unwavering devotion to the Church in which he had ministered. After making a certain provision for his relatives, he left the bulk of his property to the recently -founded Gospel Pro- H 2 100 CLASSIC PREACHERS: pagation Society and Christian Knowledge Society; but his zeal for the Church had not made him forget- ful of the needs of the people among whom he was born. To eight of the poor housekeepers of Barrow he left forty shillings a year, to be distributed equally among them on Christmas Eye, regard being had in the selection to those who had been most constant at prayers, and at, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper the foregoing year ; and to the Curacy of Mount Sorrel and Vicarage of Barrow he bequeathed twenty pounds a year for ever, on condition that Morning and Evening Prayer should be read daily in the chapel and parish church ; and if it should so happen that this provision should not be carried out, then his bequest was to be applied for the instruction of children in the principles of the Christian religion, according to the doctrine of the Church of England. Such was Bishop Beveridge as a man, a Christian a teacher of the Christian faith. But the question may still he asked as to the rank which may fairly be conceded to him among the great preachers of past times. On this point opinions will always differ ; but an impartial judgment will not refuse him a high place among the faithful, the earnest, the eloquent witnesses for Divine truth. It is true that he was not free from some of the faults of his age. He may have committed himself to statements on the subject of human reason and its relation to Divino revelation which we could not BEVERIDGE. 101 accept. He has been accused of High Calvinism ; but a candid examination of his writings will not support the charge. On some occasions, indeed, he was carried away by his feelings to forget the solemn caution of Christ against supposing that the greatest sufferers were the greatest sinners. He compares King Charles, without any apparent misgiving, to the Proto-Martyr, S. Stephen.* He does not hesi- tate to declare that the Fire of London was sent as a punishment for the great rebellion and the murder of the King, in which the City had so great a part.f These may have been faults of taste and judgment ; but they will not be greatly regarded in a general estimate of his work. A German writer, who speaks highly of his books on the Canons, says his religious writings are of small value ; and a French author tells us that his sermons have nothing very extraordinary in point of profun- dity of ideas. This may be in a measure true, and we can hardly put him in the very highest rank of preachers. He had not the gorgeous imagination of Taylor, or the polished eloquence of Massillon, or the eagle wing of Bossuet. Those, moreover, who regard florid language, heaped-up metaphors, or flights of fancy as a necessary adjunct to true eloquence, will deny that he was eloquent. But those who judge by truer canons of criticism, will * Serm. IV. of " Sermons on particular Occasions," vol. vi. p. 432 sq. t Serm. LXXXVI., vol. iv. p. 151 sq. 102 classic preachers: acknowledge that he was not destitute of this great gift of God. If well-ordered thoughts expressed in language, pure, simple, and fervent, spoken by a tongue whose every utterance was truth and goodness, kindled by the glowing fire of love to God and to man ; if these things constitute eloquence, then Beveridge must have been eloquent. " He had a way," said the pious Bobert Nelson, in his life of Bishop Bull, " of gaining people's hearts and touching their con- sciences, which bore some resemblance to the Apostolic age ; and, when it shall appear that those bright preachers, who have been ready to throw contempt upon his Lordship's performances, can set forth as large a list of persons whom they have con- verted by their preaching, as I could produce of those who owed the change of their lives, under God, to the instructions of this pious prelate, I shall readily own that they are superior to his Lordship in the pulpit ; though, considering what learned works he published in the cause of religion, and what an eminent pattern he was of true primitive piety, I am not inclined to think that his Lordship will, upon the whole of his character, be easily equalled by any one." Even if we cannot go so far as a contemporary writer* who quotes a passage from one of his Sermons, which may, he says, "in acuteness of judgment, ; Guardian,' No. 74. June 5, 1713. BEVEKIDGE. 103 ornament of speech, and true sublime, compare with any of the choicest writings of the ancient Fathers," we shall hardly quarrel with the testimony of another,* who says : " There is something so great, primitive, and apostolical, in his writings, that it creates an awe and veneration in our mind ; the im- portance of his subjects is above the decoration of words; and what is great and majestical in itself, looketh the most like itself the less it is adorned." It would be easy, did our time permit, to give multitudes of examples of the homely directness, the serious and affectionate earnestness, the powerful incisiveness, with which he appeals to the consciences of his hearers, now warning them of the danger of impenitence, and again setting forth the fatherly love and mercy and grace of Almighty God. Take, for example, the beginning of his Sermon on " the exemplary holiness of the primitive Christians," as a specimen of his plain and direct dealing with the conscience of his hearers. " Having this opportunity of preaching the word of God to you, I heartily wish that I could do it so effectually, that by His blessing upon it, ye may all be the better for it in this life and the next; for otherwise my preaching will be in vain ; and your hearing also will be in vain ; and so it always will * Dr. H. Felton, 'Dissertation on Beading the Classics, and. forming a just Style.' 104 CLASSIC PKEA.CHERS: be, unless, when you hear the word, you receive it, as the Thessakmians did, ' not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectu- ally worketh also in you that believe.' " Towards the end of the same Sermon, he goes on : " This, therefore, is that which I would now persuade you all to do, and should think myself happy if I could do it. Play no longer with religion, as people commonly do, but set upon the practice of it in good earnest. As ye profess to believe the Gospel, live according to the rules and precepts of it, that ye may adorn your holy profession with a suitable con- versation. . . . Strive all ye can to shine as lights in the world, that ye may be the great examples of true piety and virtue to one another, and to all that are about you. This would be the most effectual means to convince the enemies of our Church and holy religion of their errors and mistakes, when they see you who profess it, so far exceeding and outdoing them in your constancy at your devotions, in your frequency at the Holy Communion ; in your temper- ance and sobriety ; in your meekness, patience, and humility; in your truth and justice in all your dealings together; in your liberality to your poor brethren ; in your zeal for God ; in your loyalty to your Sovereign ; in your kindness, love, and charity to one another ; and in all such good works as God hath prepared for you in your several places and callings to walk in ; still trusting in your blessed BEVERIDGE. 105 Saviour, both for His assistance of you in what ye do, and for God's acceptance of it when it is done. " This is the way, too, to have a place ready pre- pared for you in heaven against your departure out of this wicked world, that you may live together with the glorified saints and angels and with Christ Him- self, in all ease and plenty, in all the joy, happiness, and glory that creatures are capable of, not only for some time, but to all eternity, and all through His merits and mediation for you."* It would be easy to multiply examples of the application of his subject, which must hare been not simply what we call effective, but most deeply impressive. Let us take only one other example from his Sermon on the " wisdom of being holy." The text of the Sermon is, " The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom :" " Men and . brethren, I haye endeavoured to show and prove this day, that every sinner is a fool, and every sin a folly. I know there are many understanding persons among you who have heard what hath been said upon this subject ; some, I hope, who are wise towards God understanding the things that appertain to their everlasting peace, and such, I am sure, cannot but acknowledge' the truth of what they have heard. Others, I fear, may be wise enough for the world, understanding how to manage their trades to the * Serm. CII, vol, iv. pp. 441-452. 106 CLASSIC PREACHERS: best advantage, and how to make a good bargain as well as the best ; and such can hardly be persuaded that they are fools in anything, because they think themselves to be wise in some things. To such my humble advice is, that you would seriously weigh what ye have heard, and not suffer yourselves to be fooled into a vain conceit of your own wisdom ; for assure yourselves there is not the ignorantest person in the congregation that fears God, but is far wiser than the wisest of you that do not ; for such a one's little knowledge is true wisdom, your great cunning is your real folly ; and therefore, if you would mani- fest yourselves for the future to be wise and prudent persons indeed, lay aside your former follies, and devote yourself wholly to the fear and service of Almighty God, for till you do so, you have not at- tained to the very first degree of wisdom, ' for the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.' " * It may be that these words seem but cold and feeble when repeated in this day by other lips ; but I am persuaded that few could have heard them spoken by the lips of him who penned them, ani- mated by the spirit which dwelt within him, without being, for the moment at least, wiser and better men, without some resolve forming itself within them, however transient and evanescent, henceforth to live less to the world and self, and more to God. * Serm. XCVIII., vol. iv. p. 389. BEVEEIDGE. 107 If we do not propose Beveridge as a model for imitation, it is because we do not believe that any preacher can be, in the strict sense of the word, a model for another ; it is because he belongs to an age with which our own can, at best, have but partial sympathy. If, however, we look beyond the cir- cumstances of place and time, if we penetrate to the life and spirit of the man, then there is hardly a characteristic of his life or teaching which the Christian preacher would not do well to imitate. In his patient toil for the acquisition of sacred knowledge, in the entire devotion of his heart and soul and life to the service of God, in his deep realisation of the Divine presence and grace, in his fervent love for souls, in the manly simplicity of his language, in the subordination of all his teaching to the salvation of men and the glory of God, he is worthy of earnest study and imitation. Happy will it be for the Church of England when she has many preachers and pastors like William Beveridge ; still more happy when she has multitudes of children who thankfully receive such teaching and submit to such guidance ! WILSON, THE SAINTLY PEEACHER. " Lord who shall dwell in thy tabernacle, or who shall rest upon thy holy hill ? Even he that leadeth an uncorrupt life, and doeth the thing that is right, and speaketh the truth from his heart." — Psalm xt. 1, 2. The glory of the Saints of God — Contrast between Thomas Wilson and Jonathan Swift — Wilson as Tutor and Chaplain — His aver- sion to Pluralities— His work as a Bishop — His attempts to restore ecclesiastical discipline — His severe trials — Imprisoned in Castle Rushen — The Bishop at Court — His last days— His Works— General characteristics of his Sermons — Absence of any allusions to Nature, History, or contemporary events — His in- feriority to the great Preachers of the Seventeenth Century — Moral deadness of the Eighteenth Century — Wilson's sincerity — Behind the Sermons stood the Man — His life and example lend preciousness to his Works. As the life and death of each separate coral insect adds to the noiseless growth of the reef, which ulti- mately becomes an island or a continent, so does the life and death of each individual man add its per- manent quota to those vast accumulations of ex- perience and impulse which determine the conditions of humanity. He and his work may seem alike to perish; but just as no particle of matter can be destroyed, but only be caught up in the magic eddy 110 CLASSIC PKEACHEKS: of nature to be recombined in new forms with other elements ; — and just as no force can be finally ex- hausted, but remains impressed for ever on the material universe ; — so even the obscurest man who has ever lived has exercised a real influence, be it ever so infinitesimal, on the mighty whole of the human race. Some men have directed the great movements which alter the relations of kingdoms; some men have materially modified the physical conditions of the globe ; some men, by their inven- tions, have given new developments to the aims and labours of mankind — have, by their works of art, haunted our imagination, or by their writings en- riched our thoughts. But, among all these, none have a stronger claim to universal gratitude than those Saints of God who have kindled their names like beacon-lights upon the hills, to show to what lofty regions the foot of man can reach, what pure air the life of man can breathe. Others have im- proved the conditions of living ; these have enhanced the blessedness of life itself. Others have brightened the gloom of things seen and temporal ; these have fixed our hearts on the things unseen and eternal. And such was he of whom I am to-day bidden to speak. The transcendent merit of Thomas Wilson, Bishop of Sodor and Man, is that in an age of god- lessness he was pre-eminently a Saint of God. He was not a man of genius ; he was not a man of great * See Mr. M. Arnold's ' Last Essay on Beligion/ p. 71. WILSON. Ill attainments ; he was not a man of keen sagacity ; he was not a remarkable orator ; he was not a dis- tinguished author ; but he was something higher and better than if he had been all these at once, for he was " the last survivor," if not " of the saints," * yet certainly of the saints of the English Church — the last of those too few in number, in our Eeformed Communion, on whom that glorious title can be bestowed. Thomas Wilson was born of humble but pious parentage, at Neston in Cheshire, in the year 1663. He was educated at Chester, and entered the Uni- versity of Dublin, at the age of eighteen, with a sizarship of £20 a year. In the same term was entered a boy of fourteen, whose name was Jonathan Swift. It is a tradition that they knew each other, and that, in after years, the Bishop of Sodor and Man declined a present of some of his works from the Dean of St. Patrick's.* But what a contrast was there between the careers and characters of these two youths ! The one a man of colossal genius, destined to become an intense politician, a scathing satirist, a terrific pamphleteer, with all the fame of those who mould the policy of empires ; and yet the most miserable of men ; doomed to break the hearts of those that loved him — to be lacerated by a savage indignation, which vented itself in raging sarcasm — to pollute the sacred page of literature with mis- * ' Life,' by Keble, vol i. p. 13. 112 CLASSIC PEEACHEBS : anthropy and filth ; a man who had fought with the wild beasts of fury, and envy, and want, and hate, and who bore in every limb the bleeding marks of the horrid contest ; a man who seems ever to have heard, around his head, the scream of malignant harpies, and the convulsive flap of their obscene funereal wings, and who, " dying at the top like a blighted tree," expired at last in agony and madness, " a driveller and a show." The other, a man of very modest capacity, of small literary influence, of no political weight ; who lived, not in the blaze of fame and publicity, but in the deep valley and shadow of re- tirement ; — but whose character was one of heavenly sweetness ; whose whole labours were for the good of his fellow-men; who loved and honoured them as sincerely as Swift despised and loathed ; who broke no loving hearts, but bound up many a wounded one ; and who, not tormented as Swift was by the horrors of memory, and so " dying in a rage like a poisoned rat in a hole," * passed away amid the tears of sorrowing thousands, and carried his white hairs, like a crown of glory, to a happy and a deeply honoured grave. Could two careers of schoolfellows be more different ? — the one like a glaring meteor, plunging through storm and the wrath of the elements into the twilight, into the evening, into the black dark night ; the other a sweet and shining dawn, that brightened more and more unto the perfect day. * Swift's Letter to Bolingbroke, ' Works,' vol. xvii. p. 274. WILSON. 113 After a blameless but undistinguished college career, in the year 1686 Wilson was ordained : and the exquisite prayer which he yearly used on the anniversary of his ordination, — " Give me, Lord God, I humbly beg, a sober, a patient, an under- standing, a devout, a religious, and courageous heart. . . ." * — may serve as an epitome of the spirit of his life. In the same year he was appointed curate of New Church on £30 a year, and from that time, if not before, he always, to tbe end of bis life, set aside one-tenth of his income for -the poor. In 1692 he became chaplain to Lord Derby, and tutor to his son, Lord Strange. We know from history how low was the position of domestic chaplains, and, "indeed, of the clergy generally, in the eighteenth century, and how basely complaisant was too often their tone and conduct ; and I fear that there were very few among them who would have shown the courage which Mr. Wilson did, in venturing to drop hot sealing-wax on Lord Strange's hand when he was about to sign a document which he had not read, and even to rebuke his noble patron for ex- travagance and , neglect of his affairs. There, too, he first set to bis age the rare example of re- fusing to hold a living at which he could not reside.f So far from resenting bis manly rebuke, * See the whole of this beauti- ful prayer, 'Life,' vol. i. pp. 26, 27. t He had made a vow that he would never hold two ecclesi- astical preferments .with cure of souls. — ' Life,' vol. i. p. 65. [ST. JAMES'S.] I 114 CLASSIC PEEACHEKS: Lord Derby, the very next year, compelled him, in spite of his most sincere nolo episcopari, to become Bishop of Sodor and Man. It was so poor a bishopric * that all Wilson's predecessors had been only too glad to supplement its poverty by an Eng- lish benefice ; but Wilson, on being again offered the living of Badworth, in Yorkshire, again set to a corrupt and worldly Church the higher example of refusing it — " strange and highflown " as his scruples must then have seemed. Accordingly he was made Doctor of Laws by Archbishop Tenison, consecrated Bishop, and in 1698, after a sail which occupied four days, landed in the little diocese where he was to rule for no less than eight-and-fiftv years. The prayer which he wrote on April 11, 1698, the day of his enthronement, is well worth study, as showing alike the spirit on which he entered upon his new and sacred duties, and the spirit in which, by God's help, he was enabled to fulfil them to the last, t The scene of his future labours was a poor and lonely place, and the house, which had been for six years uninhabited, was in great decay. J But it was * When Dr. Barwick had boon moat affectionately besought by Lord Derby to accept it, Lord Clarendon had written, " I can- not blnmo you for not being desirous to accept the Bishopric t ' Lite,' vol. i. p. 96. J On the aoquittnl of the Seven Bishops, his predecessor, Bishop Levinz, had written to Archbishop Sancroft, " This good news will mate me goe of Man, which if yon shall do, with more cheerfulness into the nobody would accuse you of ' Long- Saile I am now going to in ambition." my Putrnos, as your Grace usu- WILSON. 115 with no thoughts of gloom and discontent — it was not only with no desire for preferment in England , but even with a determination not to take it, — that Bishop Wilson landed in his little Patmos. He meant to make this his home, there to live and there to die. There he married, there his children were born, and there he lived for fifty years a widower. He threw himself with love and diligence into all his duties. He preached, he visited, he practised a free) aud genial hospitality ; he indulged his benevolent heart in the largest charity ; he built ; he planted ; he restored churches ; he improved the agriculture of the island ; he promoted parochial libraries ; he made efforts to found colleges, and elevate the theo- logical standard of his clergy; he drew up the 'Principles and Duties of Christianity,' the first book in the Manx language ; he laboured in season and out of season, and won the love of all good and honest men. Even in his brief visits to England he supported charity schools at a time when they were ally stiles ir, where all the com- fort. I can procure myself is this topique only, that there I may have time enough for my prayers — since that poor desolate place will hardly afford me any other than He to converse with." He tlien begs for "a House and Prebend att Winchester," or something similar, to prevent the necessity of his wintering in the severe clime of Man, because he has " a title too bigge for his scant fortunes to maintain ;" and again he speaks of Bishopscourt as "a disconsolate residence," and describes " the terrible storms, tempests, and prodigious winds and inundations of rayne of which he has never seen the lite, and if there are these in summer what he is to expect iu winter God alone knows." — ' Life,' vol. i. p. 98-101. I -2. 11(3 classic preachers: still regarded with selfish suspicion ; and was, to his immortal honour, among the earliest founders of institutions so excellent as the Societies for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. But his main work, and his constant residence, was at Bishopscourt. Tuta et parvula — " safe and very small " — was the motto in which he described his little diocese, and to which he remained faithful to the end.* And let it not be supposed for a moment that he was influenced by so ignoble a motive as love of ease. The little island was much more of a thistle than a rose. Its bleak atmosphere, its scanty popu- lation, its ignorant clergy, its deep poverty, its entire isolation, might have been easily borne by one whose sole aim in life was faithfully to cultivate the little corner of the vineyard which God had entrusted to him. But this was far from all. Bishop Wilson was a High Churchman with a sincere belief in ecclesi- astical discipline, and this discipline he carried out to an extent and with a rigour then utterly un- * " Burning, indeed, and sinn- ing, like the Baptist, in an evil time, he seemeth as if a beacon lighted on his small island to show what his Lord and Saviour could do in spite of man." — J. H. Newman. When he preached before Queen Caroline in 1711, so greatly was she struck by his sweetness and dignity, that she offered him an English See, which he declined with the simple and noble words — so un- like the general spirit of his age — "that with the blessing of God he could do some small good in the little spot he then resided on, whereas, if he were removed into a larger sphere, he might be lost, and forget his duty to his flock and to his &od." WILSON. 117 known. The annals of his episcopate — faithful, humble, saintly as it was — are yet inexpressibly dreary. They consist mainly of the miserable details of provincial vice among both clergy and people — a tissue of small crimes, disagreeably diversified by large ones— together with the warnings, penances, and excommunications which these entailed. People are censured, admonished, and have to give security even for offences so venial as not going to church, or for sleeping in church,* and there is a quite incessant doing of penance in white sheets.f There was a bridle, of which a specimen is still preserved, to gag people guilty of abuse and slander ; and instead of being, as in England, whipped at the cart's tail, certain offenders were dragged through the water by soldiers at the stern of a boat. It is hardly to be wondered at that the energetic enforcement of a rapidly obsoleseing system — even by a man so saintly and tender that he mingled his tears with those of the offenders whom he condemned — gradually aroused an organised opposition.:]: I do not propose to detail * Also, for shaving during church-time, for playing with a dog in church, for swimming a duck and a spaniel on Sunday evening, even for fiddling on Saturday evening. — ' Life,' vol. i. p. 351 ; vol. ii. p. 642. t It shows the rude state of things then prevalent, that on one occasion a ragged communion table-cloth was used as the sheet of penance ! t See ' Life,' vol, i. pp. 188, 442 ; vol. ii. pp. 526, 564, &a. There is a certain Archdeacon Horrobin, with his miserable heresies ; a number of feminine slanders, in which a Madame Home, the wife of Lord Derby's governor, is mixed up ; the defiant contumacy 118 CLASSIC PKBACHEES: all those wretched quarrels. One has scarcely patience to read the disgraceful illegalities, the grotesque state-documents, the churlishly insulting missives of the ill-bred and insignificant people who were Lord Derby's officials in the government of Man. For years of his life the Bishop " walked with his head in a cloud of poisonous flies ;" and at last, to the amazed and indignant grief of the whole island, he, with two of his Vicars-General, was thrown into prison in Castle Rushen.* Nothing could have been more beautiful than his conduct under these trying circumstances. In a damp dark cell, punished like a felon, " with inexpressible hardship," his letters in- tercepted, his messengers " treated with all the dis- respect imaginable," he continued for nine weeks to pray for his enemies, and labour at the translation of the Manx Bible. At last he managed to lodge an appeal with the Privy Council, was released, and escorted back to his home amid the tumultuous joy of his people, with shouts and bonfires and scattered flowers. But he had after all to pay the heavy costs of his appeal, and, true to his earliest principles, of all connected with the Govern- ment, on the plea that as the Lord's retainers and family they are exempt from ecclesiastical authority ; refusal of the Govern- ment to lend soldiers to carry out the Bishop's sentences ; the pa- thetic story of the soldier Halsal, who was practically killed by the reckless insolence of Governor Home ; — all of which things oul- minate in the explosion of hate and insults whioh found vent in the bishop's imprisonment. * June 29, 1722.— ' Life,' vol. ii. p. 518. WILSON. 119 once more refused the English bishopric which was offered him in indemnification. In these struggles with the petty pelting officers of the place — hun- dredth-rate men, dressed iu a little brief authority — a lonely widower, a bereaved father, amid inces- sant annoyances and shameful calumnies, he passed long years. Amid such a paltry environment of provincial malignities there is absolutely nothing beautiful but this good man's life, who, " being con- vinced that he was no proprietor " (oh that all Eng- lish bishops of old had borne this in mind !), " but only a steward of the Church's patrimony, and find- ing by experience that God would be no man's debtor," was for years putting by forty per cent, of his income, for pious uses in his own diocese and among the poor* More peaceful days came at last, and a scene or two is illustrative both of the man and of the time. The Bishop was at Court, and when he had kissed the King's hand, — " Nobody," said the Queen to her ladies, " envies that honest man his bishopric." " Nor do I envy any one theirs," said he. " I be- lieve you," said Queen Caroline ; " you are a very honest man." "See here, my lords," said the Queen (on another occasion), when she had several prelates with her, "is a bishop who does not care for a * ' Life,' vol. ii. p. 493. 120 CLASSIC preachers: translation." " No, indeed, an 't please your Ma- jesty," said he, "I will not leave my wife in my old age because she is poor." Even the heart of George II. was won by such transparent goodness. "The Bishop came into the drawing-room in his usual simple dress, having a small black cap on the top of his head, with his hair flowing and silvery, and his shoes fastened, like those of an ancient Manxman, with leathern thongs instead of buckles. As soon as he entered the presence-chamber, the King stepped out of the circle of his courtiers, and advancing to- wards the Bishop, came to him, took him by the hand, and said, " My lord, I beg your prayers." His latter days were spent almost exclusively in the duties of his diocese ; and it was in his own house at Bishopscourt that finally, in his ninety- third year, gentle sickness came upon him, and gradual decay. In his last days all was calm and beautiful. God gave him songs in the night. From that time to the hour of his death the very wan- derings of his delirium were praise and prayer. There was a beauty and dignity about his look and manner which impressed every beholder with awe ; and he died as he had lived, with holy words upon his lips. The works of Bishop Wilson were his 'Manx Catechism ; ' his ' History of the Isle of Man \ in Bishop Gibson's edition of Camden ; his ' Instruction for the Indians;' his 'Introduction to the Lord's WILSON. 121 Supper;' his 'Maxims,' ' Sacra Privata,' and ' Ser- mons.' It is by the last four books that he is mainly known, and the mere fact that they are still used, admired, and valued, is alone a sufficient proof that they appeal to deep feelings and supply real needs.* It is, however, as a Preacher that we have now to do with him, and it is his position as a Preacher that I wish mainly to define. And I must say at once that, in a literary point of view, his Sermons can hardly be held up as a remarkable model of style, of method, or even of theologic thought. Little more can be said of them than that his style is very plain, his method exceedingly simple, and his religious opin- ions unquestioningly orthodox. They contain so little that is specially rememberable, that the Bishop preached them again and again, over a space of fifty-eight years, with scarcely a word of alteration, and even " in the same words to the same audiences at no long spaces of time."t And if this shows " how * 'Manx Catechism,' 1699. 'Plain Instructions for the Bet- ter Understanding of the Lord's Supper,' 1736. ' Instructions for the Indians,' 1740. ' Parochialia, ' 17S8. 'Maxims of Piety and Christianity,' 1789. ' Sacra Pri- vata,' 1800 ; and " now first printed entire from the original manuscripts," 1853. 'Works and Life,' ed. Cratwell, 1781. ' Works, and Life,' by Keble, in ' Library of Anglo - Catholic Theology,' 7 vols., 1847-1852. 'History of the Isle of Man,' in Bishop Gib- son's ed. of ' Camden Britanniea,' 1722. 'The Holy Bible, with Notes,' &c, edited by Bey. 0. Crutwell, 1785. t " He followed in this re- spect," says Mr. Keble, " as well as in the fact of their beinu; written, the recommendation of Bishop Sanderson, who, in both these respects, set the pattern to the generation to which Wilson belonged.' — ' Life,' vol. i. p. 278. Missing Page Missing Page 124 CLASSIC PREACHERS: observed, there is not in Wilson's Sermons, from be- ginning to end, one single allusion to the magnificence or loveliness of the outer world. Nor again, is there any reference worth speaking of to the great world of books. The Sermons of the seventeenth century- divines are rich with the spoils of their oceanic read- ing, and he who would edit their writings would need a library coextensive with the learning of that day : but the editor of Wilson needs little or nothing beyond a Bible and an Apocrypha. Nor, again, does he ever refer to that other inestimable revelation, the Book of History. Some of his mighty predecessors, using the experience of the past as a mirror to the present, had laid under contribution the annals of the world : but the reader of Wilson need hardly be aware that there has ever been any nation except the English and the Jews; And, once more, Wilson is singularly devoid of the faintest reflection on the circumstances of his day. It was the age of Hume, yet he does not contribute one iota of argument to the defence of Christianity : it was the age of Pope, yet he scarcely quotes or alludes to, one line of poetry :* it was the age of Addison and Johnson, yet he makes no reference to contemporary litera- ture : it was the age of Berkeley and Botlek, yet for him metaphysics are non-existent : it was the age *In Sermon XXVII. he quotes six lines from Samuel Woodford's ' Purapliruso of the Psalms.' WILSON. 125 of Hoadly, yet' he has nothing to contribute to the Bangorian controversy : it was the age of Law and Fen^lon, yet he lias not a word to say of mys- ticism or quietism: it was the age of the early preaching of Wesley and Whitfield, yet he never touches upon that breath of reviving influence, which — alas ! too late it may be to avert the Nemesis of her neglect and worldliness ! — was beginning to breathe over the dead Church like a stream of fire.* From his early manhood vast events had shaken the king- dom ; but though he had been twenty-two years old at the time of the Bloody Assizes, and had lived through such crises as the Great Revolution, the Massacre of O-lencoe, the victories of Marlborough, the Peace of Utrecht, the accession of the House of Bruns- wick, and the adventures of Prince Charles Edward — though he had witnessed careers so varied, so melan- choly, so instructive as those of many of his illus- trious contemporaries in a stirring and troublous epoch — yet there is nothing in his writings to indi- cate the existence of Jesuits, or Jacobites, or Me- thodists, or Whigs, or Tories. 1 fear that an ordinary man in these days preaching the Sermons of Bishop Wilson, unaided by the saintliness and unction which * "Wilson, 1663-1755 ; Hume, 1711-1776 ; Pope, 1688-1744 ; Addison, 1672-1719; Johnson, 1709-1784; Butler, 1695-1752; Hoadly, 1676-1711 ; Law, 1686- 1761 ; Fe'nelon, 1651-1715 ; Wesley, 1703-1791 ; Whitfield, 1714-1770. (Eeignsof James II., 1685-1689; William III. and Mary, 1689-1702 ; Anne, 1702- 1714; George I., 1714-1727 ; George II., 1727-1760.) 126 CLASSIC PBEACHEKS: gave to those Sermons all their power, might be voted an unoriginal retailer of familiar truths.* How is it, then, that Bishop Wilson was un- doubtedly a great preacher ; that so good and fasti- tidious a judge as Queen Caroline called him her silver-tongued Bishop ; that he was much followed and admired ; that the various London Societies were always anxious to secure his advocacy ; that he has even been called " the most perfect Gospel preacher among uninspired men " ? Why is it that, even in great English towns, crowds would flock round him, with the request, " Bless me too, my Lord " ; and that when " these divine discourses," as one of his clergy calls them, were preached in Manx after his death, crowds began to nock again to the churches which Methodism was beginning to empty ? I answer first that, though his Sermons were not great in the way of literary greatness ; though they partake of, and illustrate, that downward move- ment, which, from the splendour of Barrow and Taylor, plunged like a flake of falling fire through the chill transparency of Clarke and Tillotson, into * "It is my full conviction that in any half-dozen sermons of Donne or Taylor there are more thoughts, more facts and images, more excitement to in- quiry and intellectual effort, than are presented to the congrega- tions of the present day in as many churches or meetings dur- ing twice as many months." — Coleridge's 'Lay Sermons,' p. 227. But it should be added in fairness that the clergy of to-day have, as a rule, to produce as many sermons — or compositions which bear that namo — in a year as the 17tli century divines had to do in all their lives. WILSON. 127 the orthodox duliiess of Beveridge, aud which, when all but extinguished, sputtered feebly amid white ashes in the tawdry verbosity of Harvey and the arti- ficial rhetoric of Blair ;* yet they were superior to the ordinary, and beyond all comparison superior to some of the more pretentious, sermons of the age in which he lived.f 1. For in the first place they were absolutely sincere. The age in which they were preached was a godless age; it was "an age, whose poetry was without romance, whose philosophy was without in- sight, and whose public men were without character." It abounded in " immoral thoughtlessness." A " loose and ignorant Deism " was freely prattled in all fashionable circles, and general scorn of religion was, as always, attended by general profligacy of man- ners.! The clergy themselves were remiss in their * Tillotson, 1630-1694; Be- veridge, 1636-1707 ; Clarke, 1675-1729 ; Harvey, 1714-1758; Blair, 171S-1799. t Milton speaks of the ordi- nary sermons of his day with unspeakable scorn, as " treading the constant round of common doctrinal heads," and the book- draft " out of which, as out of an alphabet or sol-fa," a parochial minister, who had reached his Herculean pillars of a warm bene- fice, would be unspeakably fur- nished to the performance of more than a weekly charge of ser- moning — " not to reckon up the infinite helps of iuterlinearies, breviaries, synopses, and other loitering gear." — ' Areopagitica.' J See, among hundreds of other authorities, Butler's ' Ana- logy,' and ' Charges,' passim ; the Preface to Cave's ' Primitive Christianity ; ' Dr. Stanhope's 'Sermon before the House of Lords ;' many of Wilson's own Sermons ; Wesley's ' Further Appeal ; ' Hartley's ' Observa- tions on Man,' vol. ii. p. 441. " In this estimate," says Mr. Mark Pattison, " the followers 128 CLASSIC PEEACIIEES: labours, and self-indulgent in their lives. There were some even among leading statesmen who were drunken, illiterate, and coarse. There were mem- bers of the Royal Family who set a scandalous example. The odious letters of Chesterfield show with what unblushing cynicism a father could teach immorality to his son as a necessary element of a fashionable career. The uneducated and shamefully neglected masses sank into terrible depths of crime and brutality. The pictures of Hogarth, the novels of Smollett and Fielding, show that English morals had fallen to their very nadir of degradation. And how did God's ministers attempt to stem this torrent of iniquity? what was the teaching they offered, what the motives they opposed to all this crime and denial of God ? Nothing, for the most part, but the coldest and nakedest morality. They were not Pro- phets ; they were not Seers ; they were not even well- instructed Scribes ; they were but cold Essayists and dull Utilitarians. Their Gospel was a Gospel of bald respectability. There was no passionate appeal to the wavering, no fiery denunciation of the insolent wrong-doer. Cringing flattery, unblushing inconsis- tency, open worldliness, greedy hunting of prefer- ments, — Bishops and Archbishops amassing colossal fortunes, and leaving their trail across their pro- of Mill and Oarlyle agree with those of Dr. Newman." ' Essays and Reviews,' pp. 255, 322 ; Mahon's ' History of England,' chap, xi., &o. &c. WILSON. 129 vinces by the shameless nepotism, which gorged with pluralities of every desirable benefice their sons and kinsmen, — a clergy addicted to such aims as these* — a clergy painfully anxious to relieve themselves of the crying sin of enthusiasm, f — a clergy which revel- led in such pompous euphuisms and polished nullities as those of Blair, could never deeply stir, the heart of the age. For a living coal from the altar they offered to their generation a glittering icicle from the study. They applied feeble sprinklings of tepid water to an age which needed burning deluges of baptismal fire. The very conception of a sermon became to the last degree artificial and inane. " I should think a clergyman might distinguish himself," said the poet Shenstone, "by composing a set of sermons on the ordinary virtues extolled by the classic writers, in- troducing the ornamental flourishes of Horace," &c. ! Even Bishops, in their charges, referred their clergy to the satires of Juvenal,* instead of bidding them catch their moral intensity from Isaiah or St. James. * For the tone and character of the clergy after the Kestora- tion and onwards see Burnet's ' History of his own Times,' voL i. pp. 186, 258 ; ' Diary,' Feb. 16, 1668 ; Macaulay's ' History,' chap. iii. ; Stoughton's ' Church of the Restoration,' vol. i. p. 511 ; and nearly all allusions to them in the contemporary literature. t " Histories incomparably more authentic than Mr. Hume's [ST. JAMES'S.] prove by irrefragable evidence the aphorism of ancient wisdom that nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. For what is enthusiasm but the oblivion and swallowing up of self in an object dearer than self, or in an idea more vivid ?" : — Coleridge's ' Lay Sermons,' p. 25. X Bishop Burnet's ' Pastoral Letters.' K 130 CLASSIC PBEACHEES: The conception of religion had dwindled into a cal- culating selfishness, and a prudential commonplace. The current theology is typified by a sermon which explained the Fatherhood of God as an elegant met- aphor.* The chief anxiety of the preachers seemed to be that none should suppose them to be so utterly foolish as to urge any one to be righteous overmuch. Enthusiasm ? it needed men who were " boiling in spirit"! to continue the work of the Prophets and the Apostles ; it, needed a voice of thunder, and a tongue of fire, to shame into decency, and startle into repentance this corrupt and guilty age. 2. And though Wilson's was no voice of fire, yet his preaching was far above the average teaching of his age. He has this surpassing merit, that " he never penned one sentence which savoured of unreality." Among his contemporaries he shone like a light in the world. His style is exquisitely lucid, and has a certain dignity and sweetness of its own. If his sermons have no special force, they have at least an admirable directness ; and if they have no eloquence, yet they are not devoid of tenderness and unction. They assume all Christian doctrine ; they ignore all speculative theology; but they have these three marked characteristics: — a very practical aim; an * See Clarke's Sermon on "Call no man your Father on Earth ;" and see some exoellent remarks in Mr. Leslie Stephen's ' English Thought in the Eigh- teenth Century.' t Zeovres iv irvefyuiTi (Bom. xii. 11). WILSON. 131 intimate knowledge of Scripture ; and the peaceful calm of a most untroubled faith. They do not indeed glow with an inspiring passion, but they do shine with a serene and heavenly light. And if they never soar, — if they have no exordium, no peroration, no one prevailing all-absorbing motive, — if they never rise to a climax, or startle by a paradox, or arouse by an antithesis — yet, on the other hand, they never sink. They have in them no word of folly, no tinge of affectation, no shadow of bad taste. They need, it has been acutely said, to be tested by immediate translation into action. " To think on Bishop Wilson with veneration," said Dr. Johnson, " is only to agree with the whole Christian world. I hope to look into his books With other purposes than those of criticism, and after their perusal not only to write but to love better." Accept them as an authoritative guide to religious conduct, drawn from deep and lifelong ex- perience, and then, ceasing to be ordinary, they be- come sublime. * And this is why one of the acutest and most genial of modern critics ventures to rank Bishop Wilson among the four chief names of the English Church. " Hooker," he says, " is great, by having signally and above others the sense in reli- gion of history and historic development. Butler is great, by having the sense of philosophy ; Barrow, by having that of morals ; Wilson, that of practical * "Debemus legere simplioes et devotos libros, sicut altos et profundos." — ' Imit. Christi,' i. 5. K 2 132 CLASSIC PREACHERS : Christianity." * We may sum up in one word the excellence of Wilson by saying that, to a pre- eminent degree, he received the kingdom of God as a little child. 3. But another source of his power— if, indeed, it be not the same under another aspect. — lay in the ^0o? of the man, — in the deep moral impression which he made on his hearers.t " His style," said Mr. Moore, in his Funeral Sermon, " is adapted to the capacity of all degrees* of men : at the same time he delivered his sentiments with all the dignity and authority of an inspired Apostle." Even when the sermon was poorest, the speaker was a Saint of God. The lips of such a man, even if he be— as Wilson was not — of stammering tongue, will speak wisdom. There were many good men in Wilson's, as in every age, whose lives have been all the more unnoticed because they were hid with Christ in God ; but a Saiut is one who makes his religion, absolutely and * Matthew Arnold's ' Lit. and Dogma,' p. xx. Elsewhere he attributes to him a balance of the four qualities of ardour, unc- tion, downright honesty, and plain good sense, which might have resulted in a prosaic reli- gion held fanatically, but which he possessed in a fulness aud perfection whioh made this un- toward result impossible — "his unotion is so perfect, and in such happy alliance with his good sense, that it becomes tenderness and fervent charity ; his good sense is so perfect and in such happy alliance with his unc- tion that it becomes moderation and insight." — ' Culture and An- archy,' p. vii. t " Sermons, though never so good, are not always understood or minded by common people; but a good, a sober, a pious life and example, is a language that everybody understands." — Wil- son's ' Sermons,' lxxxix. WILSON. 133 inflexibly, and in ways little familiar to his genera- tion, the rule of his whole life ; and wlm, with a per- feot absence of all self-consciousness, does this in such a manner as to seize the imagination and influence the character of his own and of other generations. Berkeley and Butler were men of pre-eminent good- ness, and men of a thousand times the ability of Ken and Wilson; yet we do think of Ken and Wilson, and we do not think of Berkeley and Butler, as saints of God. Living in an age in which sensuality had eaten like a cancer into the heart of society, Wilson left on all men the impression of serene and stainless purity. Living in an age of greed and worldliness, he chose the lot of self-deny- ing poverty and voluntary retirement. And so be- hind the Sermons stood the man. We who only read those Sermons cannot fairly judge of them. Men can listen to much which they would find it tedious to peruse in print ; and he, for instance, who can only judge of Whitfield by his published remains, can form no conception of the thrilling effect produced by his impassioned oratory. " See God's ambassador in pulpit stand Where they oould take note from his look and hand, And from his speaking aotion bear away More sermon than our preachers use to say.'' And when we find in Wilson's Sermons the simplest truths of faith and morality set forth vith entire sincerity, in language plain, but reverent, and void of every tinge of Pharisaism; when we know that 134 CLASSIC PKEACHEBS. his life and his words were in perfect accord ; when we recall in imagination the forehead whereon the Lamb had set his seal ; the calm dignity of bearing — the flowing silver hair — the comely and benevolent aspect — the sweet and reverent voice — the saintly and venerable figure — we can well imagine that none could listen to exhortations such as his — so faithful, so intelligible, so practical, so scriptural — without being the better and wiser for them. " At church with meek and unaffected grace His looks adorned the venerable place ; Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools who came to scoff remained to pray." And, if many of our great divines have risen to loftier heights of ability; have left behind them more immortal utterances ; have swayed more potently the hearts of multitudes ; have shed more light upon the great problems of religion ; have fired with a more ardent enthusiasm the love of virtue ; — yet the life and example of Wilson are a heritage more precious than eloquent words. And so long as the spirit of religion has any influence upon mankind (and that surely will be so long as man is man), so long will his calm good sense, his practical wisdom, his perfect consistency, his sober-minded gentleness — in one word, the holiness of his charac- ter, as preserved for us by a warm and loving me- morial, — furnish us with a worthy object of love and imitation in this true servant of the Lord Jesus — Thomas Wilson, the Saintly Pkeachee. BUTLER, THE ETHICAL PREACHER. Sebmons by the Eight Beverend Father in Ood, Joseph Butler, D.O.L., late Lord Bishop of Durham. A New Edition. Oxford : At the Clarendon Press, mdcccxxvi. Professor Mozley, Bishop Butler's modern representative — Was Butler a preacher? — The essentials ef preaching — How\both Paley (in his ' Natural Theology ') ,and Butler are preachers — Deficiency of evangelical reference in Butler's Sermons, and the reason of it — No argument against his personal faith in Christ — His Sermons not only evidential, but also indicative of the line of human duty — His style needs to be popularised— His Sermons may be regarded as masterly expositions of certain great truths of Holy Scripture — (1) They show that human nature was made originally in God's image — The consistency of benevolence with reasonable self-love in the Divine Mind — All the moral attributes of God resolvable into love — Exhibition of benevolence and self- love in the Passion of Our Lord — Christ exemplifies the indigna- tion against moral evil, which Butler intimates to be part of a perfect character — (2) Butler illustrates the text that man is " fearfully and wonderfully, made " — The appetites and affections — Vicious affections only excesses and morbid) developements of innocent ones — Self-love and benevolence — The conscience re. garded by Butler rather as an eye than a light — How Butler's theory of human nature may assist us in self-examination and self-discipline — and show the mistake of a morbid pietism — and , give the sound and healthy view of resentment — (3) Butler's 136 CLASSIC PEEACHEBS: view of the corruption of human nature— The deceitfulness of the heart analysed and exhibited in the Sermons on the Character of Balaam, and on Self-deceit— Revelation adds to the description of the effects of the Pall, which may be gathered from reason, this further particular, that man's faith was disabled by it — Combina- tion in man of gratification of present passion with faith in a foreseen|future would have been a topic worthy of Butler — Identity of what is called Faith in the language of Revelation with what Butler would call Beason — Gen. iii. furnishes the explanation of the moral convulsion of which Butler finds such evident traces in our nature. A volume of Sermons, published in the course of last year, — probably, in knowledge of the human heart and analysis of human motives, one of the two greatest contributions to religious literature which the nineteenth Qentury has made,* — recalls to us the ethical discourse which has too much gone out ,of late, and of which Butler's Sermons are the great model and archetype. Joseph Butler, Bishop and Prince Palatine of Durham, is not dead ; or rather, " he being dead, yet speaketh " in the pages of Professor Mozley. The Professor's great dis- courses on " The peaceful temper" and on " Our duty towards equals," and his method of showing how war is bound up in that distinction of the human race into nations, which is part of the present system of things, are conceived in Butler's happiest vein, and differ from his Sermons chiefly in being much easier reading, and couched in a style far less ponderous. * The other being the Sermons of the Bev. John Henry Newman, late Vicar of St. Mary-the-Vir- gin's, Oxford. Qui cum talis Bit ulinaw, nosier adhuc esset. BUTLEE. 137 But ethical Sermons generally give rise in some minds to a question, the answer to which will throw light upon the, true character of preaching, and may be given, we think, quite; suitably from the pulpit, without any blinking of^the sacred objects which should be paramount there. That Bishop Butler was a profound religious thinker, and a great moral philosopher, will be admitted on all hands. But there are many who would demur to his claim to rank among great preachers. No doubt he wrote discourses, which he entitled Sermons, and which were delivered from the pulpit. These, however, are but the accidents and accessories of preaching ; and before any person's claims to be a preacher can be satisfactorily made out, it must be shown that his discourses are essentially sermons, sermons in something more than the name. In attempting to do this for Bishop Butler, we shall gain an insight into the distinguishing character of his preaching. Every one understands what is meant when a sermon and an expository lecture are spoken of as distinct. But it is doubtful whether the terms em- ployed represent the real and essential distinction between the things.* All preaching is, or .ought to * Probably the more correct definition would be to call the sermon an exposition of a single detached passage of Holy Scrip- ture, the lecture an exposition of an entire context with all the sequences of thought which link text to text. In the first 138 CLASSIC PEEACHERS: be, expository ; that is, it ought to be an exposition or setting forth of some part of the Word of God. If any discourse is not this, it is not preaching. And, conversely, if any part of the Word of God, whether promise or precept, warning or consolation, forms the subject of a discourse, it is properly called a sermon, and the person delivering it is a preacher. But in this definition the expression, " the word of God," must be understood in its full legitimate breadth of mean- ins;. There is a word of God, for those who have ears to hear 'it, in Nature as well as in Eevelation,^- a word not by any means so explicit as Holy Scrip- ture, but yet which serves sufficiently, as St. Paul tells us, to render those " without excuse " * who do not heed it ; the word of which the Psalmist speaks, when he says,t " The heavens declare the glory of God ; and the firmament sheweth his handy work. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor lan- guage, where their voice is not heard." Now these works of God, whereby His "eternal power and godhead "J are understood among men, are not merely — and one may say not chiefly — outside us. The noblest work of God is man himself. Man's there is more or less unity of thought ; in the second there ia no other unity than that which is given by tracing the stages of the argument, if the passago is argumentative, or the develop- ment of the narrative, if it be historical. * See Rom. i. £0. t Psalm xix. 1, 2, 3. J See Eom. i. 20. BUTLER. 139 mental and moral anatomy, and its adaptation to his circumstances and surroundings, bears a stronger testimony to the Creator's power, wisdom, and goodness, than even the architecture of the heavens or the structure of animals. The ex- pounders, therefore, of the works of God, seeing that His works are a true revelation of Himself, though dimmer and less explicit than His word, may rightfully, if only they point upwards continu- ally from the creature to the Creator, claim the title of great preachers. Paley, in his 'Natural Theology,' is a great preacher, his object being to discover and disclose the traces of an intelligent and benevolent Creator, which are scattered so thick over the whole realm of nature. And not less surely — rather much more — is Butler a magnificent preacher, ■whose Sermons discuss and expound that great sub- ject, which the Apostle lays down * as the foundation- stone of his argument on the justifying efficacy of faith, the law " written in the heart," and the " wit- ness" of conscience. Hence comes the deficiency of evangelical reference, or rather of reference to revealed religion, in these Sermons, a fact which is patent upon the surface of them,f and which to * See Rom. ii. 15. t A remarkable instance of this absence of reference to Holy Scripture is to be found in Sermon IX. (" Upon Forgiveness of Injuries "), where the moral ground of capital punishment is thus stated : " What justifies public executions is, not that the guilt or demerit of the criminal 140 CLASSIC PKEACHEES: superficial readers, possessed with trie conventional notion of what a sermon is or ought to be, forms no inconsiderable stumbling-block. Even where one would most naturally look for them, evangelical allu- sions are, if I may so say, studiously avoided. Thus the two great Sermons " Upon the Love of God," that is, on our love towards Him, do not even incident- ally and in passing refer to that love of God to- wards us, which is the great inducing motive of our love to Him, according to that word of the Evangelist,* " We love him, because he first loved us." While recognising the goodness of God generally as that which "ought and has a natural tendency to beget in us the affection of gratitude," f he is silent as to that great exhibition of Divine dispenses with, the obligation of good-will, neither would this justify any severity ; but that his life is inconsistent with the quiet and happiness of the world : that is, a general and more enlarged obligation necessarily destroys a particular and more confined one of the same kind, inconsistent with it " (p. 145). As far as any mischief goes; which the culprit himself might liereafter do, the world would be sufficiently secured against it by his per- petual imprisonment. Hence what Butler must have meant is that, unless the extreme penalty were exaoted from the criminal, there would be no sufficient de- terrent against crimes of the same order. But what we wish to draw attention to is the entire omission of any reference to the Divine authorization of capital punishment as inflicted by the magistrate, both in the Noachio precept (Gen. ix. 6), and in the New Testament, where the capi- tal punishment is not restricted to the offence of blood-shedding (Eom. xiii. 4). "The sword" placed in the hand of the civil magistrate was a symbol of his being invested with the power of life and death. * 1 John iv. 19. t Serm. XIII. p. 241. BUTLER. 141 goodness, the gift of God's Son for and to sinners, the comfortable pledge to us, as the Apostle teaches,* of His readiness to bestow all lower and lesser gifts. It is almost as if, in saying the General Thanksgiving, a man should stop short after the words, " We bless Tliee for our creation, preservation, and all the bless- ings of this life," and should drop all the subsequent mention of the " inestimable love " manifested in re- demption, of the " means of grace," and of " the hope of glory." The omission is far too strongly marked to be attributed to aught else but deliberate design. Butler intended his treatment of the love of God to be, like the rest of his Sermons, purely and exclu- sively moral. " Then why," it might be asked, " take up such a subject at all ? Why not let the Sermons ' Upon Human Nature,' ■ The Government of the Tongue,' and other purely moral subjects, stand alone, without intruding into the domain of Theology by a disquisition upon the love of God ? " The answer is, that it is assumed throughout the Sermons that the being and attributes of God are recognisable by the light of reason and conscience^ * See Rom. viii. 32. t Sec Serm. I. p. 11, where he mentions certain " instanoes of our Maker's cave and lovo both of the individual and the spe- cies ; " Serm. II. p. '.Hi, " Instincts by which they " [brutes] " are carried on to the ond the Author of their nature iutended them for; "Serm. III. p. 42, "It is evident that, exclusive of revela- tion, man oannot be considered as a creature left by his Maker to aot at random;" Serm. IV. p. 58, " The good Author of our nature designed us not only 142 CLASSIC PEEACHEES: quite apart from the more brilliant light which revealed religion sheds upon them. Butler will not avail himself, in the smallest degree, of that more brilliant light. His design is to show that the morality of the Gospel, which turns upon the two principal pivots of the love of God and the love of our neighbour, is indicated in the structure of human nature, when it is closely analysed. If the heart of. man, truly read and interpreted, is found to make a most distinct and intelligent echo to the twofold precept of the love of God and of our neighbour, that furnishes a very strong presumption that this summary of morality is from the Author of our necessaries, but also enjoyment and satisfaction;" Serm. XIV. p. 243, " Our reason convinces us that God is present -with us, and we see and feel the effects of Ms goodness ; " ibid. p. 252, " Since the supreme Mind, the Author and Cause of all things, is the highest possible object to himself, he may be an adequate supply to all the faculties of our souls ; " — and the Sermons " upon the Love of God " passim. It will be remembered that the great religious controversy of Butler's days was with the Deists (Collins, Toland, Tindal, Chubb, &c.) who admitted the being and attributes of God. Mr. Leslie Stephen, in his ' His- tory of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century' [London, 1876], seems to think the lucu- brations of the Deists one of the most important factors in the serious thought of that age. An able paper in the ' Quarterly Eeview ' for April 1877, calls in question the importance of the Deistical speculations then so rife; but of course these specu- lations must have been constantly present to the theologians of the day ; and when they wrote con- troversially or apologetically, Ihey would feel that by the greater part of the religious thinkers of the day no objection would be made to their assuming as true the first paragraph of the Apostles' Creed, however prevalent might be the scepti- cism respecting the second and third. BUTLER. 143 nature. It is an independent testimony to Gospel morality which Butler is seeking to elicit from his researches into the human heart ; and in order to do this, he is bound to refrain from advancing any truth of revealed religion, which natural religion does not of- itself* establish. Thus his argument de- manded the banishment of evangelical topics. But . let us not do this great and good divine the crying injustice of supposing that such topics did not sit very near his heart. The prelate who, in compli- ance with his own principle of the benefit accruing from public expressions of faith,* set up in that cold and rationalizing age the emblem of our redemp- tion in the chapel of his palace at Bristol, and was defamed and vilified as a Papist f in consequence, as many smaller men than he have been since his day on no better or more reasonable ground, can never have been wanting in appreciation of that re- demption, which was wrought upon the, cross, and of which the cross is the symbol. * " Your chief business, there- fore, is to endeavour to beget a practical sense of it" [religion] "upon their hearts . . . And this is to be done by keeping up, as we are able, the form and face of' religion with decency and re- verence, and insuch a degree as to bring the thoughts of religion often to their minds. . . . Ex- ternal acts of piety and devotion, and the frequent returns of them, are necessary, to keep up a sense of religion, which the affairs of the world will otherwise wear out of men's hearts." (Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of Durham, in the year mdccll, pp. 434, 430.) t See the Biographical Sketch appended to this Lecture. 144 CLASSIC PREACHERS : Following in the line of thought which has been thus opened, we will first speak of these Sermons in their more obvious character as evidential, and then regard them as expositions of certain great and fundamental truths of Holy Scripture. I. And in speaking of them as evidential, our first observation is that they are something more than evidential, that the same argument which serves the purpose of confuting selfish and sceptical theories, is made to serve equally well the moral purpose of enforcing duty upon the professed be- liever. A little above a parallel was drawn between Paley and Butler, as being both of them expositors of that, lower revelation which God has made of Himself in the works of nature — Paley dealing with the works which lie around and outside *of man, Butler with man himself, the noblest of the works. But if Paley may, in regard of his ' Natural Theo- logy,' be justly regarded as a great preacher, how much stronger a claim has Butler to the title ! The various instances of design and adaptation which Paley alleges in his work, and which in- stances might be augmented to almost any ex- tent, the design in the eye* of the cat, in the * " The eyes of animals whioh follow their prey by night, ns oats, owls, &c, possess a faculty not given to those of other spe- cies, namely, of closing the pupil entirely. The final cause of which seems to be this. It was neces- sary for such animals to be able to descry objects with very small degrees of light. This capacity BUTLER. J 45 tongue* of the woodpecker, in the footf of the wate'r- depended upon the superior sen- sibility of the retina; that is, upon its being affected by the most feeble impulses. But that tenderness of structure which rendered the membrane thus ex- quisitely sensible, rendered it also liable to be offended by the access of stronger degrees of light. The contractile range therefore of the pupil is in- creased in these animals, so as to enable them to close the aper- ture entirely, which includes the power of diminishing it in every degree; whereby at all times such portions, and only such por- tions, of light are admitted as may be received without injury to the sense." (Paley's ' Natu- ral Theology;' London, 1802; chap. xii. p. 257.) * " The tongue of the wood- pecker is one of those singulari- ties which nature presents us with, when a singular purpose is to be answered. It is a parti- cular instrument for a particular use; and what else but design ever produces such ? The wood- pecker lives chiefly upon insects, lodged in the bodies of decayed or decaying trees. For the pur- pose of boring into the wood, it is furnished with a bill, straight, hard, angular, and sharp. When, by means of this piercer, it has reached the cells of the insects, then comes the office of its [ST. JAMES'S.] tongue ; which tongue is, first, of such a, length that the bird can dart it out three or four inches from the bill, in this respect differing greatly from every other species of bird; in the second place, it is tipped with a stiff, sharp, bony thorn; and, in the third place, which appears to me the most remarkable property of all, this tip is dentated on both sides, like the beard of an arrow or the barb of a hook. The description of the part declares its use. The bird, having ex- posed the retreats of the insects by the assistance of its bill, with a motion inconceivably quick launches out at them with this long tongue ; transfixes them upon the barbed needle at the end of it ; and thus draws its prey within its mouth. If this be not mechanism, what is? Should it be said, that, by continual endeavours to shoot out the tongue to the stretch, the wood- pecker species may by degrees have lengthened the organ itself, beyond-that of other birds, what account can be given of its form, of its tip ? How, in particular, did it get its barbs, its dentation ? These barbs, in my opinion, wherever they occur, are deci- sive proofs of mechanical con- trivance." (' Natural Theology,' chap. xiii. 268-270.) t " If it were our intention to L 146 CLASSIC FKEACHEES : fowl, in the lamp* of the glow-worm, of what are they eyidences? Clearly of the intelligence and beneficence of the great Creator, and nothing more. pursue the consideration further, I should take in that generic distinction among birds, the web- foot of ■water-fowl. It is an in- stance which may be pointed out to a child. The utility of the web to water-fowl, the inu- tility to land-fowl, are so obvious, that it seems impossible to notice the difference without acknow- ledging the design. I am at a loss to know how those who deny the ageDcy of an intelligent Creator dispose of this example. There is nothing in the action of swimming, as carried on by a ' bird upon the surface of the water, that should generate a membrane between the toes. As to that membrane, it is an exer- cise of constant resistance. The only supposition I can think of is, that all birds have been origi- nally water-fowl and web-footed ; that sparrows, hawks, linnets, &c, which frequent the land, have, in process of time, and in the course of many generations, had this part worn away by treading upon hard ground. To such evasive assumptions must atheism always have recourse; and, after all, it confesses that the structure of the feet of birds, in their original form, was criti- cally adapted to their original destination." ('Natural Theo- logy,' chap. xii. pp. 255, 256.) * " If the reader, looking to our distributions of science, wish to contemplate the chemistry, as well as the mechanism of nature, the insect creation will afford him an example. I refer to the light in the tail of a glow-worm. Two points seem to be agreed upon by naturalists concerning it: first, that it is phosphoric; secondly, that its use is to attract the male insect. The only thing to be inquired after is the singu- larity, if any such there be, in the natural history of this animal, which should render a provision of this kind more necessary for it than for other insects. That singularity seems to be the dif- ference which subsists between the male and the female, which difference is greater than what we find in any other species of animal whatever. The glow- worm is a female caterpillar, the male of which is a fly, lively, comparatively small, dissimilar to the female in appearance, pro- bably also as distinguished from her in habits, pursuits, and man- ners, as he is unlike in form and external constitution. Here, then, is the adversity of the case. ■_ The caterpillar cannot meet her BUTLEK. 14? Paley's argument stands clear altogether of human duty, yields no indications of what man's character and conduct should be, unless, indeed, it be the inference that to a Being so wise, so powerful, so good, man owes adoration, praise, and gratitude. But not so Butler's argument on the internal eco- nomy of the human heart. When he Tindicates a place among the principles of our nature for bene- oompanion in the air. The winged rover disdains the ground. They might never, therefore, be brought together, did not this radiant torch direct the volatile mate to his sedentary female." ('"Works of W. Paley, D.D.' London : 1821. Vol. iv. p. 263.) Of course in thus citing Paley, whose works (like those of But- ler himself) it is now the fashion ungenerously to depreciate, I am not ignorant that it will be ob- jected that the argument from final causes has had its day, and is going out, and that to appeal to it, when it is on the wane, is just to ignore the discoveries made (or alleged to be made) by modern savants. But my firm persuasion is that no attempt (however subtle and ingenious) permanently to supplant the argument from design will suc- oeed in the long run, or take hold of the public mind. It is rooted in the common-sense of mankind; and though a few philosophers (or would-be philo- sophers) will from time to time find an agreeable diversion in criticising and picking holes in it, it will crop up again after they have left the scene, and by its vitality defy its assailants. We may safely challenge any one to succeed in persuading the great majority of men that where there is a complete and curious adaptation of any natural object to a certain end, it is not due to an intelligent design in a con- structive Mind, but only to the operation of a natural instinct in the object itself. Let savants say what they please to throw doubt upon this; their specula- tions will all go for nothing in the long run. Or rather, perhaps, men will make upon them the reflection which Butler makes upon the subject of certain fan- tastic moral theories : " Persons of superior capacity and improve- ment have often fallen into errors, which no one of mere common understanding could." (Serm. V. p. 84.) L 2 148 CLASSIC PEEACHEBS: volence or good-will towards our neighbour — a prin- ciple which rests in our neighbour's happiness as its end — and shows that because this " benevolence, though natural in man to man, yet is in a very low degree, kept down by interest and competitions) and men, for the most 'part, are so engaged in the busi- ness and pleasures of the world, as to overlook and turn away from objects of misery ;" therefore com- passion is also given us, to back up benevolence in case of the distressed, " to gain the unhappy admit- tance and access, and to make their case attended to ; " when he points out the correspondence of com- passion with our circumstances as placed in a world of sorrow, and where men have much more power of doing mischief to one another than good ; when he scatters to the winds the over-subtle theories of the selfish philosophers, that benevolence is nothing more than delight in the exercise of power, and compassion nothing more than fear for ourselves in disguise, — he not only brings evidence to the wisdom and beneficence of the Creator, but also elicits from our nature an independent testimony to the morality of the Gospel, which is said in various parts of Holy Scripture to be all summed up in love. And this indication of the path in which our nature, as well as Scripture, indicates that our duty lies, passes in Butler's hands into an admonition to walk in that path, into a plain pressing home of duty upon the conscience. So that besides finding footsteps of the BUTLER. 149 Creator in the structure of trie mind, we find also footsteps for our own conduct in daily life, and foot- steps in which the preacher exhorts us to plant our feet. And this is what Butler himself says in the following passage, which is quite in his own terse and solid manner : — " As all observations of final causes, drawn from the principles of action in the heart of man, compared with the condition he is placed in, serve all the good uses which instances of final causes in the material world about us do ; and both these are equally proofs of wisdom and design in the Author of nature: so the former serve to further good purposes ; they show us what course of life we are made for, what is our duty, and in a peculiar manner enforce upon us the practice of it."* Before taking leave of this part of the subject, it may be allowable to express the wish that Butler's Sermons, considered as a great argument, not only in favour of the wisdom and beneficence of the Creator, but also in corroboration of Christian mora- lity, should be recast by some competent person, and reproduced with amplifications and additions in a popular form. Butler's style, though it has a massive grandeur and solidity in it — the just expres- sion of the author's mind, and dear, if it were only as a memorial of him, to those who owe him an intellectual and moral debt of gratitude — is yet any- * Serm. "VI., " Upon Compassion," p. 87. 150 CLASSIC PEEACHEES : thing but attractive to the general reader. The weighty thoughts are too tersely enunciated; and though here and there an almost grim stroke of sarcastic humour * lights up the page, there is very little light beyond this. It is probable that from the fact of the mass of men being so outward, so little apt to reflect upon themselves and the processes of their own minds, Butler's ' Natural Morality ' (if we may so term it) could never be made as interesting to the many as Paley's ' Natural Theology.' But we cannot but think that something might be done towards the popularising of so important an apolo- getic work by one who had first himself obtained au insight into, and a thorough grasp of the argu- ment. The Sermons want cohesion and method; they are all rather essays towards a great moral theory than the orderly development of one. And The ' Quarterly' reviewer of Mr. Leslie Stephen's book on ' English Thought in the Eigh- teenth Century,' is " disposed to think that the chief character- istic of the century was its power of humour," a power which, he says, took a different shape in Addison and Swift, but was a feature common to the minds of both of them. Certainly every now and then humour oozes out io Butler, as, for example, where he is about to oonsider whether self-love " may not pos- sibly be so prevalent as to disappoint itself, and even con- tradict its own end," he prefaces the discussion thus : " These in- quiries, it is hoped, will be favour- ably attended to ; for there shall be all possible concessions made to the favourite passion, which hath so much allowed to it, and whose cause is so universally pleaded : it shall be treated with the utmost tenderness and concern for its interests." We think his humour was rather of Swiff's type, with a dash of melancholy and cynicism in it, only tempered and chastened in Butler by devo- tion and sobriety of mind. BUTLER. 151 this might at least be redressed. What a treatise might have been added to the apologetic literature of the Church, had such a writer as Archbishop Whately recast in his own mind the argument of these grand Sermons, and expressed it with his own luminousness and perspicuity ! II. But it is quite possible to bring these Sermons strictly under the category of Sermons by regarding them as masterly expositions of certain great truths of Holy Scripture. (1.) And first of that statement, which stands at the head of the inspired history of the human race : " And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness .... So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him." * That Butler himself regarded his studies of Human Nature in this light, although he nowhere professes a formal exposition of the text just quoted, is evident from the following observations, which are made incidentally. After a powerful discourse upon Besentment, in which he vindicates for that passion its place and functions in the moral system, shows, e.g., that it is a " balance to the weakness of pity," which, if not thus held in check, would render the execution of justice upon criminals " exceedingly difficult and uneasy," — he concludes with this re- flection : "Men may speak of the degeneracy and corruption of the world, according to the experience * Gen. i. 26, 27. 152 CLASSIC PREACHERS: they have had of it ; but human nature, considered as the Divine workmanship, should methinks be treated as sacred : for in the image of God made He man." And in a long note to his first Sermon, having exposed the unsoundness of Hobbes's theory that every appearance of good-will and benevolence which presents itself in human nature, is resolvable into the love of power, and delight in the exercise of it, he adds : " These are the absurdities which even men of capacity ruu into, when they have occasion to belie their nature, and will perversely disclaim that image of God which was originally stamped upon it, the traces of which, however faint, are plainly discernible upon the mind of man." Butler's method of treating this great subject cannot be thoroughly understood without considering the way in which he was led to it. It is to be remembered that he found a selfish theory of morals exclusively in possession of the field of thought, a theory which it was fashionable /or the sceptical fops of the reign of George II. to affect, and which gave them a con- venient plea for their own cynical Epicureanism, and for disregarding the interests and feelings of their neighbour to any extent. "Vain, luxurious, and selfish effeminacy," says a contemporary,* " was the * Brown, in his " Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times " (published in 1757), as quoted in the ' Quarterly Re- view ' for April 1877, " English Thought in the Eighteenth Cen- tury," p. 410. BTJTLEE. 153 chief character of the age," and it was built upon an erroneous philosophy which derived its whole pres- tige from having been broached by Hobbes and other writers, whose views it was accounted a mark of advanced intelligence and higher cultivation to adopt. "Vices and follies have their turns," says Butler, "and the distinctive vice and folly of the present day is to profess a contracted spirit, and greater regards to self-interest than appears to have been done formerly." And again, in his Preface : "There is a strange affectation in many people of explaining away all particular affections, and repre- senting the whole of life as nothing but one con- tinued exercise of self-love." Now Butler's enterprise was to explode the false theory under which the selfishness and cynical indifference of his age veiled itself, to vindicate human nature from the calumnies which this theory put upon it, and to show, without the aid of Kevelation, from a simple and not over subtle analysis of it, that it was made originally in the image of God. This, we conceive, he has done triumphantly, in such a way as to set the question at once and for ever at rest. And what, it may be asked, are the traces of this image of God as dis- covered in human nature ? " We have no clear conception," says Butler, " of any positive moral attribute in the Supreme Being but what resolves itself up into goodness " or benevolence. Now it is just the natural feeling of benevolence, the existence 154 CLASSIC PEEACHEBS: of which in man's heart had been called in question by the selfish philosophy of Butler's day. It is therefore this point which he labours to establish, showing the reality of the feeling, and the impossi- bility of resolving it, without coming to an absurdity, into any form of self-love, and pointing out how the gratification of it is so far from being inconsistent with self-love, that it is one of the highest and purest enjoyments known to us ; how, in order to secure it from being ousted by competition from other prin- ciples, it is subsidised and seconded by compassion ; and how conscience, in the survey of our actions, reflects with complacency upon those done from its promptings, and sets upon benevolence the seal of its approval. Now we are distinctly told — in the Scriptures — told twice over by way of emphasizing an assertion of such paramount importance, that " God is love."* And we know also (the whole Bible from beginning to end is a gradual unfolding of the great truth) that when sin made its entrance into the world, and blighted the hearts and hopes of men, this love of God took the aspect of compassion or mercy towards the sinner. The Gospel in all its provisions, whether for the acceptance of man with God, or for his renewal after the image of Him who created him, is a scheme of Divine mercy. And yet we are constantly assured that this scheme con- » 1 John iv. 8, 16. BUTLER. 155 tributes, as no other arrangement could have done, to God's own glory, and that the hallowing of His name — the universal acknowledgment of Him on the part of all His rational creatures as a most tender Father, who yet loves His children too well and wisely to suffer sin upon them — is the end of ends which is to be pursued by all His rational creatures, both in prayer and endeavour, and which therefore must be an end with Himself. And the trace of this in the moral economy of man is what Butler has so thoughtfully and carefully pointed out ; the perfect consistency of benevolence with reasonable self-love, which last he fully admits (and indeed asserts) to be one of the higher principles of our nature, and a principle by which, according to the constitution of that nature, we cannot but be, and ought to be, strongly influenced. There is this, consistency also in the Divine Mind. The Heavenly Father finds His greatest delight and blessedness, His glory and His joy, in re-admitting sinners to full communion with Himself, through that Mediator whose precious work of atonement proclaims His holi- ness, and justice, and truth, with no less emphasis than His long-suffering, His mercy, and His love. I say His holiness, and justice, and truth ; for when Butler says that " we have no clear conception of any positive moral attribute in the Supreme Being, but what may be resolved up into goodness," we must take him as meaning exactly what he says; 156 CLASSIC PEEACHEE8: not that there are no other features in the Divine character but goodness, but that all its other features are resolvable into this. " God is love ;" but He is light, and truth, and holiness, and justice, yea, and moral indignation also : only none of these attributes is so fundamental as love — each of them is ultimately resolvable into love. Sunlight is found, when ana- lysed, to comprise sombre as well as bright rays — indigo, blue, and violet, as well as red, yellow, orange and green ; the indigo ray is an element in the light no less than the yellow. The remissness of a government in punishing obstinate and hardened criminals, the letting such characters loose upon society, and putting the lives and properties of the innocent at their disposal, would not be benevolence or love to the public, — would not be care for the general good, but the reverse. And on the other hand, the making an example of offenders, and visiting them with condign punishment, though it does not bear the aspect of love to them, yet does not imply the least ill-will to them, and is clearly enough resolvable into benevolence to the public and care for the general good. Butler shows that " whf n benevolence is said," in the Scriptures, " to be the sum of virtue, it is not spoken of as a blind propen- sion, but as a principle in reasonable creatures, and so to be directed by their reason," in order that it may attain its end, which end he points out as being not always the avoiding of inconvenience to indivi- BUT LEE. 157 duals, or even classes, but " the greatest public good." — It may be added that truth also, — though, like any one of the seven prismatic rays in light, it may be looked at separately and distinctly, and must be so by creatures like ourselves, whose minds must take a subject to pieces in order to comprehend it, — is yet resolvable into love or goodness. Suppose a man, either by words or his method of action, to raise expectations in the minds of others which his conduct towards them entirely disappoints, is that goodness or the reverse ?* The Scribes and Pharisees were men whose whole life was a lie, who cloaked a worldly heart under the appearance of piety — they " for a pretence made long prayers." And side by side with this feature of character, this want of truth, was .a want of love which was the radical or fundamental vice in them ; " they devoured widows' houses." The sum of what has been said above is, that as love embraces all the perfections of the Divine na- ture, so also benevolenqe, or the love of our neigh- bour, embraces the whole compass of human duty, according to that saying of the Apostle's, which forms the text of Butler's two sermons upon the love * Professor Mozley, in his recent volume of * Lectures on the Old Testament' ("Belation of Jael's aot to the morality of her age"), brings out most forcibly the connexion of truth with love, iu commenting upon the Apostle's words (Eph. iv. 25), "Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another." Truth is a part of our duty to our neighbour. Our whole duty to him is love. 158 CLASSIC PREACHERS : of our neighbour: "And if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." * Before passing on, we may pause to make an obvious suggestion, which opens a wide field for use- ful and edifying thought. What the various attri- butes of the Divine Being are in themselves is a problem which, as being high above out of our reach, we should, from a feeling of reverence, and under a consciousness of our own utter ignorance, decline all attempt to solve. The Holy Scriptures, accommo- dating themselves to our understanding and condi- tion, speak of the Almighty as moved by compassion, anger, sorrow, joy, repentance, and other emotions in our nature ; and our wisdom is to take these expres- sions with all the simplicity of children, and act in conformity with the representations thus given to us of the character of Him with whom we have to do. That such representations are not mere figures of speech, that there is something underlying them, of which the terms expressive of human passions are the correct exponents to our minds, is clear from the circumstance that, when God took flesh " and was made man," He assumed all human affections, and through the medium of those affections exhibited to us the image of the invisible God. Highly interest- * Eom. xiii. 9. BUTLER. 15y ing and profitable it will be then to take Butler's original draught of human nature, and to mark how it corresponds in every particular with this image of God exhibited to us under four different points of view in the evangelical narrative. It would detain us far too long to go into particulars ; but two points I may briefly throw out for further development in meditation : first, the natural shrinking of our blessed Lord from mental and bodily suffering, even to the deprecation of it, " my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me ; " * and yet the entire and cheerful resignation with which He at length accepted the cup, " my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done."t What is the first of these but the action of fear, seconded by self-love, in the sinless humanity of our Blessed Lord, — a self-love which naturally declines pain, both bodily and mental, and all the more sensitively on account of the purity of the nature in which it exists, — a self-love ' which is the nega- tion of stoicism, no less than of weak succumbing to calamity? And what is the second, but an exercise by Christ of that resignation to the will of God, in which Butler finds the three elements of fear, hope, and love, and of which he says that it " is the whole of piety," and " includes in it all that is good ; " and also an exercise of that * St. Matt. xxvi. 39. f .St. Matt. xxvi. 42. 160 CLASSIC PREACHERS : benevolence and compassion, the claims of which to govern our nature he has so grandly advocated, and which redounded to the gratification, of the Saviour's own heart, when he saw of the travail of His soul, and was satisfied. It was the love of God and the love of His neighbour, which urged Him not to be influenced by sensibility to present suffering (how- ever keen), but to endure the cross for the joy that was set before Him. This joy was a satisfaction to reasonable self-love, which He must perforce have fallen short of, had He declined the cup. And again, as to resentment, the real object of which, Butler tells us, is " not natural but moral evil," not suffering but injury, and the indulgence of which in a measure, and as moral indignation against wrong- doing, he so conclusively justifies, and points out the use of, — who does not see that the inspired accounts of our blessed Lord's character bear out entirely all that he says on the subject ; for while Christ is not only the gift, but the impersonation, of Divine love and mercy, are we not told of " the wrath of the Lamb," and did not His wrath breakout with special warmth — never, indeed, against personal outrage, however insulting and cruel, but against hypocrisy and empty shows of piety, in which the heart had no part — and did it not culminate in that tremendous denunciation, which yet consisted with strong and compassionate yearning over the souls both of the blind guides and those who were led by them : "Ye BUTLER. 161 serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell ? "* (2). Another passage of Holy Scripture, which Butler in his Sermons works out, though he does not use it formally as a text, is the 14th verse of the 139th Psalm: "I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made : marvellous are thy works ; and that my soul knoweth right well." It is clear from the context that the uppermost thought in the mind of the Psalmist was the curious structure of the human body, and the gradual building up of the members into one organism. A passage in the Epistle to the Bromans,t in which the Apostle bor- rows an illustration of his subject from the bodily organism of man, stands at the head of Butler's first Sermon, and this is the way in which he accommo- dates it to the purpose of his argument : " Since the Apostle speaks of the several members as having distinct offices, which implies the mind, it cannot be thought an allowable liberty, instead of the body and its members, to substitute the whole nature of man, . and all the variety of internal principles which belong to it." The truth is that the outward is but a symbol and type of the inward ; and when the Holy Spirit, who spake by the Psalmist, moved him to say that he was " fearfully and wonderfully made," He doubt- less had in view no less the intellectual and moral * St. Matt, xxiii. 33. t Rom. xii. 4, 5. [st. james's.] M 162 classic preachers: economy of man than his outward bodily structure. And it is this intellectual and moral oeconomy which Butler in his Sermons so skilfully lays open and in- terprets ; he takes the dissecting knife in hand, and shows us by a study of our moral structure both what we are intended by our Creator to be, and what, alas ! we are. A brief and rapid resume of his results may here be in place. Human nature is a complex of various prin- ciples, which, like the various orders of men in a body politic, not only have different functions to discharge, but are of different ranks, high and low, legislators and artisans, governors and go- verned. The lowest of the people in this common- wealth are those appetites and instincts, not worthy of being called affections, which man shares in com- mon with the beasts that perish. Of a superior rank to these, as owning the sway of reason, and capable of being controlled by it, are the passions and affections, fear, hope, compassion, resentment, and the rest. Of these there is not one which, apart from its excesses, abuses, and perversions, is not good — not one which is without its proper function, and which does not contribute, by fulfilling that function, to the health and vigour of the general system. Are there not then affections, it may be asked, which are in themselves vicious, and which a good man must set himself altogether to eradicate ? "Undoubtedly," Butler would answer (if we may BUTLER. 163 venture to put words in his mouth), " there are many wrong and criminal feelings in our hearts, which we are bound to suppress, and to which no quarter must be given ; but if you will philosophi- cally analyse these, you will find that each of them is the morbid excess, the undue and exaggerated de- velopment, sometimes the monstrous caricature, of an affection which, as it stood in our nature originally when it came fresh from the hands of the Creator, was perfectly innocent, holy, and good, and adapted to the condition and circumstances of man." What can be more criminal, or more mischievous, than lust, as it is ordinarily exhibited in human life ? what can be more essentially cruel than it is, or, as Burns says, more hardening to all within, and petrifying to the feeling ? * Yet the instinct, of which the crime is a perversion, is, of course, de- signed for, and essential to, the continuance of the species, and, in the ordinance of holy matri- mony, receives the authorization and consecration of the most High. Is it possible to conceive that this could be the case if it were in itself, apart from its misdirection, perversion, and excesses, wrong? But resentment is the great instance by * " I wave the quantum o' the sin, The hazard of concealing ; But och ! it hardens a' within, And petrifies the feeling." Mpistle to a Young Friend. M 2 164 CLASSIC PEEACHEES : which Butler illustrates his principle that " no passion which God hath endued us with can be of itself evil ; and yet " that " men frequently in- dulge a passion in such ways and degrees that at length it becomes quite another thing from what it was originally in our nature."* He shows that what raises deliberate resentment, the object upon which it fastens, is injury and wrong, whether to ourselves or others; that "to prevent and remedy such injury, and the miseries arising from it, is the end for which " it " was implanted in man ; " that "fear of' their fellow-creatures' resentment does, as a fact, often restrain men from 'injuring others, when they would not be restrained by a principle of virtue ; " and that passionateness in strong tempers, peevishness in weak ones, exaggeration of injuries done to us, dogged refusals to be set right as to erroneous impressions connected with offences, are all "peculiarities of perverseness and wayward humour," to be traced up to anger, indeed, but yet not to be confounded with it in its original and pure state — unwholesome fermentations of the ori- ginal passion, produced by the leaven which has wrought in man's heart since the fall, and which has turned what was originally a generous wine into acrid vinegar. The same leaven has wrought similar mischievous results upon the passion of » P. 121. BUTLER. 165 emulation. Emulation is " the desire and hope of equality with, or superiority over, others, to whom we compare " ourselves," and the end which it aims at bringing about is this equality or supe- riority. We ought to be emulous of others in respect of their virtues and graces, so that emula- tion has a real place and function even in the spiritual mind. For to what principle but emu- lation did St. Paul appeal, when he boasted to his Macedonian converts of the promptitude and libe- rality of the Church of Corinth in giving alms, an appeal to which the passion of emulation in the Macedonians had responded; for "your zeal," says he to the Corinthians, describing the effect of his quoting their example, "hath provoked very many." * But when emulation seeks not simply our own equality with others, but the achievement of this equality by the particular means of bringing them down to our level, it then becomes envy, and is corrupted into an unlawful passion, not to be allowed harbour within the precincts of our nature. Of the various passions and affections, of which we are now speaking, there are some whose primary intention is the security and good of the indi- vidual (such, for example, as fear of danger, and resentment, both which act as protections to the individual) ; others, whose primary intention is * 2 Cor. ix. 2. 166 CLASSIC PEEACHEES: rather the security and good of society (such, for example, as desire of esteem, compassion, indig- nation against successful vice, and so forth). — Above the other affections in rank, as being calmer, more free from turbid sediment, more purely reasonable, more removed from mere in- stincts and blind propensions, are those two ten- dencies of our nature, self-love and benevolence, the one lending its complexion to one class of the lower affections, the other to the other. Each of the subordinate passions rests in its own end, fear- in the security which it seeks, compassion in the relief of misery, emulation in the winning of the coveted superiority, resentment in the redress (whether legal or otherwise) of an injury. But these two higher tendencies, self-love and bene- volence, have for their ends, the one our own happiness and good, the other the happiness and good of others. Butler calls attention to the fact that men, in the pursuit of their passions, nearly as often contradict self-love — act, i.e., in defiance of their own good and happiness — as they do bene- volence ; and that one who does so, who consults present and immediate gratification, in preference to what a reasonable self-love tells him is his real interest, if called selfish, should be distinguished from the man who, from undue self-love, subordi- nates in his own mind the 'interests of others to his own, and uniformly seeks the latter at the expense BUTLER. 167 of the former. The one, he suggests, should be styled sensually selfish; the other, to whom alone the term selfish is strictly appropriate, must be called, by way of distinction, deliberately selfish. — But now comes the highest of all faculties in the reasonable soul of man, the conscience, which Butler defines as " the principle of reflection in men, by which they distinguish between, approve and disapprove their own actions." This faculty, if it were only that it implies an exercise of the judgment or deliberating faculty, is evidently supe- rior in rank to the affections and appetites, which are mere propensities to certain external objects. However weak the conscience may be in point of fact, God has stamped authority upon its brow; " to preside and govern, from the very economy and constitution of man, belongs to it. Had it strength, as it had right ; had it power, as it had manifest authority, it would absolutely govern the world." Lord Shaftesbury, in his "Inquiry con- cerning Virtue," had implied that, putting aside our obligations to God, which the atheist does not admit, a man who should seriously doubt or deny that virtue is conducive to haziness, woidd be under no obligation to follow it. Butler maintains that such an obligation would still arise, from the indisputable authority with which conscience is in- vested, from the claim which it evidi ntlv makes to absolute control over all the lower iaculties ; so that 168 classic preachers: one who eschews virtue, and chooses vice, stands condemned by the constitution of his own nature, without bringing in a reference to any judgment passed upon his conduct by an external authority. We must not omit to observe that, at the beginning of liia second Sermon, Butler distinctly recognises "some diversity among mankind with respect to" this faculty of conscience, and intimates that the same standard of right and wrong does not uni- formly prevail throughout the world or throughout its different ages, thus showing that he regards conscience not as a light, hut rather as an eye. An eye may be partly closed or fully opened ; it may have a film over it; its mechanism may be de- ranged, and the derangement may trouble its pos- sessor with optical illusions; but light cannot mis- lead, though the eye may ; illusions can only be dissipated, not engendered, by light. Conscience is a judge, who deliberates upon evidence submitted to him ; the evidence proves, or fails to prove, what it was brought to prove; but the judge may be under a bias. Such is (in outline) Butler's theory of the eco- nomy of man's moral nature. And, abstruse and difficult as, by his own confession, the subject is, and ponderous and wanting in vivacity as most readers will think his treatment of it to be, yet, when we have once thoroughly mastered it, to what immense practical account may it not be turned in the con- BUTLEK. 169 duct of the spiritual life, as an aid to self-exami- nation and self-discipline! In the great work of our sanctification our own will must co-operate with God's grace, if the mental and moral disorder into which the fall has plunged us is to be set right. But how can mental and moral disorder be satis- factorily set right ; how can we see to do our part in the work of setting it right, unless we under- stand something of the original structure which was disorganized by sin? Could a physician hope to prescribe successfully without some such know- ledge of the human frame as is derived from study in the anatomy school? What chance would a watchmaker have of mending a watch, who knew nothing of the various wheels and springs which constitute the machinery, who had never seen the various parts of the interior taken to pieces and put together? Nor is it only in self-government and knowledge of our own hearts that Butler's studies of human nature might greatly assist us. They might act as preservatives against that pietism in which even the most fervid piety is apt some- times to run to seed, and might correct mistakes in well-disposed and earnest minds, which, if uncor- rected, might fret, discompose, and spiritually retard them. Many an ascetic devotee among heathen worshippers (and the morbid, tendency has not unfrequently crept into and corrupted Christian devotion) has professed that the end of all moral 170 CLASSIC PUEACHERS: endeavour should be to get rid of self utterly ; to suppress, by force and rigour, its earliest and most innocent movements, and, if possible, to extinguish it altogether as a motive. The attempt has never succeeded. If you try to crush self by the most painful discipline of the animal nature, he en- trenches himself all the more strongly in the for- tress of spiritual pride. Butler would have taught you that "reasonable self-love," no less than con- science, is ,a "chief or superior principle in the nature of man;" that "conscience and self-love, if we understand our true happiness, always lead us the same way ; " that " duty and interest are per- fectly coincident ; for the most part in this world, but entirely and in every instance, if we take in the future and the whole ; " and that therefore neither self-love nor our natural susceptibility to pleasure and pain are to be, or, indeed, can be, suppressed, but only controlled and guided.* * As an instance of the loose- ness with -which even devout and able writers express them- selves on the subject of self-love, take the following, written by- one of the saintliest men and most truly apostolio pastors who have graced the Church of Eng- land in recent times. It is clear that in reproving Belf-love he intended to reprove selfishness (its morbid perversion and ex- cess) ; for the letters, from which the passage is an extract, are headed, " On Selfishness." Thus he writes to his children, under date October 21, 1841 : " Learn, in the next place, to consider self-love as that which separates us from, and Divine love as thut which unites us to, God and our neighbour. In other words, learn to regard self- love as the source of all disorder, BUTLEK. 171 Again; it would not be difficult to imagine a devout person taking up, from those passages of Scripture, in which anger is spoken of in the bad sense as a passion depraved by the fall, the notion that this affection should be wholly eradicated from our nature ; that it is to be cut away, root and branch ; and that its every working in the heart is to be regarded as a working of sin. Possessed by this idea, he prays and strives against every rising of the feeling, but with no success; he is striving, if he could see the truth, after that which is not within the designs of G-od's sanctifying grace for man ; striving to eliminate certain original affections from our nature, rather than to direct and control them. It is a weary and disheartening thing to strive for the unattainable ; and if a person, under the false view I have described, were to take up Butler's "Sermon upon Eesentment,'' and to be taught by him that, apart from its perversions and excesses, this passion has excellent and necessary ends to answer; that its proper objects are injury, injustice, and cruelty, by fastening upon which it strife, and confusion ; and Divine love, as, at once, the parent and the nurse of all good order, harmony and peace, whether in families, or neighbourhoods, or states ; leading us to see God in everything, and ' to do our duty in that state of life, to which it may please God to call us.' " (' Practical Religion exemplified by Letters and Passages from the Life of the late Rev. Robert Anderson, Perpetual Curate of Trinity Chapel, Brighton.' Sixth edition. Rivingtons, 1855. Page 133.) 172 CLASSIC PEEACHEBS: does a public benefit, and becomes a security to society; and that the Scripture, when laying re- straint upon anger, does so guardedly, bidding us to " be angry, and sin not " * (that is, not to allow anger to pass into sin, by indulging it to excess), and again denouncing punishment against every one who is angry with his brother without a caused it is very possible that such a new light as this upon the subject might seem to strike off shackles, which had before galled and hindered him in his spiritual course, and that he would thence- forth go on his way rejoicing with lightened heart and disencumbered conscience. (3.) The last point with which we propose to occupy the attention of our readers is the descrip- tion which Butler gives, or, I should rather say, which may be elicited from his Sermons, of the corruption of our nature and the effects of the fall of man. Judging from the Sermons upon Human Nature, this corruption consists mainly in the dis- organization of the moral system, in the fact of conscience being dethroned, and of some unruly passion or appetite usurping its place and governing the soul. But we should wrong our bishop very much if we represented this as being his entire account of the disorder into which the fall has * Eph. iv. 26. I rashly, at random, on pure im- t See St. Matt. v. 22. Elxrj= I pulse, and without deliberation. BUTLER. 173 plunged our nature, or if we implied that the dis- order itself was only incidentally noticed by him, and not made the subject of separate consideration. Again we are reminded of a passage of Scripture which Butler has most grandly illustrated, without, however, making it a formal text, or even expressly referring to it : " The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"* As to the exceeding deceitf'ulness of the natural heart of man (one of the chief features of its wickedness, and closely associated — as want of truth always will be — with another feature, want of love), was it ever more subtly analysed, more wonderfully exposed, than in Butler's two Sermons upon the character of Balaam, and upon Self- , Deceit? These discourses are, indeed, great mas- terpieces of spiritual anatomy, showing how adroitly men, in the exercise of self-deceit, will frame a false conscience, by whose dictates they will abide with the utmost punctiliousness, while the true conscience is suppressed and held in abey- ance, this being one of the tricks by which the man will pass with himself for being a strict adherent to the inner rule of right ; and when to these is added the Sermon before the House of Lords on the' day of the Martyrdom of King Charles L, in whicb he draws out the Scriptural definition of the term * Jer. xvii. 9. 174 CLASSIC PEEACHEES: hypocrisy (" In Scripture, which treats chiefly of our behaviour towards God and our own con- sciences, hypocrisy signifies, not only the endeavour to delude our fellow-creatures, but likewise insin- cerity towards Him and towards ourselves") we must admit that, if we desire to be practically im- pressed with the lesson that " the heart is deceitful above all things," we can learn it nowhere so con- vincingly as from Butler, and that the penetration which his Sermons display into the secrets of the human conscience, entitles him to a foremost place among our English preachers. It should be added that the Sermon upon Self- Deceit not only urges the necessity of self-examina- tion as a preservative from it, but also gives advice for this exercise, which will be found of great service in the conduct of it. How helpful for detecting the blindness induced by self-partiality would those rules of Butler's be, that we should consider what parts of our own character and conduct would offer most handle to an enemy bent upon disparaging and defaming us, and watch ourselves specially in that quarter, and that, in judging ourselves for any part of our behaviour, we should imagine that our neighbour had behaved in exactly the same way, and consider what judgment we should give upon him. And is this all the account then that can be given of the corruption of our nature, that it stands in the BUTLER. 175 rebellion of the passions against the authority of conscience, which is their lawful sovereign, and in the self-partiality and self-flattery which are perver- sions of self-love, — which are self-love in its excessive and morbid actings ? All the account which un- assisted reason can give, not all the account which may be gathered by the help of Revelation. Holy Scripture teaches that the great principle of our recovery from the ruins of the fall is faith — "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Now there must be a correspondence, one would think, between the fall and the recovery, as between a disease and the remedy which cures it. The remedy cures in virtue of some natural adapta- tion which it has to the complaint. The inference therefore is forced upon us that the great spiritual result of the fall was to bring man under the empire of things which are seen, to make him a slave to the visible, to loosen his grasp upon all such truths as he cannot reach either by the senses or by ex- perience, upon the being and presence of G-od and upon his own immortality. He has noble aspirations still ; but time and sense lie like a collar round his shoulder, and pin him down to the earth. His faith was disabled on the moment of his fall. Though still able tcr foresee, and ready to provide against, a future, — yet it must be a future in time, of which the race to which he belongs has had experience. In his left hand he retains the sense of touch ; but 176 CLASSIC PEEACEEES: the right hand,* wherewith he might grasp and feel the solidity of the things which are not seen and are eternal, is withered. This is the reason of the phenomenon to which Butler frequently calls atten- tion, that men for the present gratification of some passion, so often act in direct violation of what they know to be for their own interest. The reason is the grasp which their senses, and all that is called in Scrip- ture " the world," has upon them in virtue of their fall, — the urgency with them of the present and the visible. Connected with this urgency, there is one point which we venture to think that Butler might have drawn out more explicitly, without in the least departing from his line of excluding Revelation from his view, in order to find evidences strongly cor- roborative of its testimony in the structure of the human mind. It has been reserved for a divine of this century, the late Archdeacon Hare, to bring out this point forcibly and fully in his Sermons on the Victory of Faith. The point is the extraordinary combination in man of present gratification of passion, though known to be adverse to his best interests, with deliberate provision for a foreseen future in time, which future the individual may not live to see. The same man, who shows himself utterly unable to resist a temptation to some excess of intemperance, which he knows will tend to undermine his bodily * See St. Luke vi. 6. BUTLER. 177 health, will sow in anticipation of a harvest, which he may never reap, will labour hard, year after year, for a competence which he may never enjoy, will even submit to toil and self-denial for the attainment of some distinction which he may never win. Butler would say that this is a case of passion in certain points prevailing oyer reasonable self-love, while in other points self-love prevails over the lower instincts, such as love of ease, natural indolence, and averseness to trouble. But there is something else in the matter besides and beyond a mere compliance or non-compliance with self-love. Hare shows most conclusively that every success which man has reached in his natural life, every realised result of civilization, has been reached in the strength of faith. Man has projected himself into the unseen future, not by a blind or unintelligent instinct, like the ant or the bee, but by deliberate and thoughtful fore- sight. And this projection of himself into the future is faith ; it is the operation of a faculty on things which come within human experience, and which, as applied to things transcending human experience, is the renovating faculty of our nature. Had Butler seized this point, he might have made in his massive solid style, a grand disquisition upon it, which would have enriched our English literature with one more great Sermon. Tersely and with sententious gravity he would have prosecuted the great argument, which Hare has dilated on so copiously, so expansively, and [ST. JAMES'S.] N 178 CLASSIC PEEACHEES: with such warmth and glow of devout emotion. The New Testament suspends the salvation of man on the genuineness of his faith. Now, putting aside Eevelation altogether, we find in our study of man a principle of faith (if by faith be meant realization of the unseen), which works, and works powerfully, in his natural life. More than this ; we find that this faculty of realizing the unseen has been the principle by which man has won every success which he has achieved, and by which every deed in human history, which is good and great, has been done. It is, in short, the one faculty, which raises man above the beasts that perish, the faculty by which, in its higher actings, he does or may take cognizance of a God above him and an eternity before him. Butler, faithful to his principle of borrowing nothing, not even his terms, from Eevelation, calls this faculty reason. And reason it is in the language of the moral philosopher, and under one aspect of it, which yet in the language of the Scriptures, and under another aspect of it, is faith. Considered as a light kindled by the Author of our nature in man's heart, it is reason ; considered as a principle, which lifts us above our immediate surroundings into a state of things concealed from us at present, it is faith. But to view it as faith has this advantage, that we thus gain a strong evidence in favour of Revelation, when we come to perceive that the faculty which it selects as our moral and spiritual restorative, is the BUTLEB. 179 very faculty to which all past improvements and successes in man's natural life have been due. But let us be thankful to Butler for the large amount of independent evidence to Eevelation which his Sermons furnish, without venturing to complain that he has not done in this line quite all that he might have done. His manner is to be reticent ; to withhold much that he might advance ; to drop few words, but weighty, into the ears of the wise. We feel instinctively in reading his writings, that there is a great power in reserve which he does not care to display. Suffice it that in the independent study of our nature he has arrived at evident and unques- tionable traces of some great moral convulsion, which somehow (it is not his business to say how), it underwent. It is all disorganized, — a body politic in a state of mutiny. Affections, perfectly whole- some in themselves, have become morbid by some perversion or degradation, which in reason there is no accounting for. Self-partiality, the excess (or rather caricature) of self-love, has brought in its train all sorts of blindness and delusion, so that we are unable to see ourselves as others see us. The third chapter of Genesis gives the key to this otherwise unaccountable moral phenomenon. Man is a fallen creature, by virtue of an act which his ancestors did, in unhallowed ambition, and in gratification of their senses. Ever since their descendants have groaned under the bondage of the visible world, that lower K 2 180 CLASSIC PKEACHEKS. system of things " in which the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life," are the domi- nant principles. Deliverance is to be had only by faith in that Redeemer, whose miraculous birth, and passion, and triumph, were dimly and enigmatically predicted in the course of the sentence upon the arch-offender. But we cannot appreciate the remedy without both study and personal experience of the disease. And for the analysis of the disease, the care- ful moral anatomy which brings it to light, and shows us how poorly we realize the ideal of human nature, as it existed in the mind and design of the Creator, there is no work in English Theology like Bishop Butler's Sermons, — none which shows so clearly how accordant are the teachings of Revelation with the indications of our own nature, as regards the end for which we were made, the height from which we have fallen, and the path which it behoves us to pursue. ( 181 ) BIOGBAPHICAL NOTICE OF BISHOP BUTLEB. Joseph Butler was born at Wantage in Berkshire, the birthplace of Alfred the Great, May 18, 1692. His father was a retired linen and woollen draper, who, wishing to educate his son for the ministry of the sect , to which he himself belonged, that of the Presbyterians, placed him at a very excellent academy at Gloucester (afterwards removed to Tewkesbury), which turned out several men of mark besides himself; among them Archbishop Seeker, a constant friend to Butler during his life, and the vindicator of his memory after his death. It was here that, at the age of twenty-one,, he first showed his marvellous metaphysical power in a correspondence with Dr. Samuel Clarke on certain diffi- culties which had occurred to him in Clarke's famous work, ' A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God.' The correspondence was conducted with a modesty which reflected as much credit upon Butler's heart as the argument did upon his head, his name being carefully concealed, and Seeker conveying the letters to the Gloucester Post Office for him, lest his incognito should be discovered. Was it the constitu- tionally orthodox mind both of Butler and Seeker, or the law, whose operation is not unfrequently seen, that the children of parents with strong religious views repudiate those views for themselves, or a certain narrowness which all sects exhibit, and which is ru- 182 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF pulsive to great and cultivated minds, which made these two young men renounce the communion in which they had been educated, and, after mature consideration, declare for the Church of England ? Butler's father, finding that no arguments of the Pres- byterian divines were strong enough to shake his son's resolution to desert the ranks of the Noncon- formists, sent him, at the age of two-and-twenty, to Oriel College, Oxford; a nursing mother then, as in later days, of intellectual celebrities. Here he formed the acquaintance of Mr. Edward Talbot, son of the then Bishop of Durham, and through their interest and kindness reached his first steps of preferment, the Preachership of the Bolls (1718), and the living of Haughton near Darlington (1722), which he was allowed shortly after to exchange for the richer benefice of Stanhope. His year was divided now between his duties as a parish priest at Stanhope, and those attach- ing to his preachership at the Bolls. It was his power- ful execution of these last duties which has given us the famous ' Fifteen Sermons,' upon which, as well as upon the occasional Discourses annexed to them, must be formed our estimate of his character as a preacher. At Stanhope, Henry Philpotts, late Bishop of Exeter, on suc- ceeding to the living,.made every inquiry in his power respecting " Bector Butler," his principal informant being an old parishioner of ninety-three, who remem- bered having frequently seen Butler some eighty years ago. Beyond a tradition of the rector's " riding a black pony, and riding always very fast" (the latter, perhaps, not utterly insignificant as a trait of character ; for does not " he driveth furiously " enter as an element into the delineation of a character in Holy Scripture ?), and the more moral trait of his having a peculiar BISHOP BUTLEE. 183 sensibility to the distresses of beggars, which led him, not indeed always to relieve them (one of his Sermons shows that he held that practice to be injudicious and unjustifiable), but to run away from their importunities, and seclude himself in his house, — scarcely any memo- ries survived of the great philosopher and divine. His friends thought that his talent was at Stanhope bound up in a napkin and hidden in the earth; and when Seeker, in his capacity as royal chaplain, preached before Queen Caroline in 1732, he took the opportunity of a conversation, with which Her Majesty honoured him after the sermon, to mention his friend. The Queen had thought that Butler was dead ; but, on making inquiry afterwards on this point, received from Archbishop Blackburn the humorous reply ; " No, madam, not dead, but buried." With the aid of such friends as Seeker and Talbot, Butler was speedily exhumed. The Queen, a great patroness of literary men, at whose request Newton drew up his treatise on "Ancient Chronology," and to whose influence Berkeley and Seeker, as well as Butler, owed their advancement, appointed him Clerk of her Closet in 1736, and in the same year procured for him a stall at Rochester. Every evening, we are told, from seven till nine, she commanded his attendance upon her, in order to enjoy his conversa- tion on philosophical and theological subjects — Berkeley, Clarke, Huadly, c and Sherlock, frequently taking part in the discussions. It was in 1736 that the great work which has immortalised the name of Butler, ' The Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion,' appeared. The Queen is said to have greatly admired it; but she can hardly have studied it deeply,, for it is not a book which can be mastered in a short time, and Queen Caroline's days were numbered. At the close of 184 BIOGBAPHICAL NOTICE OF 1737 she died, some weeks after receiving privately at Butler's hands the Sacrament of the Holy Communion. George II., however, showed himself mindful of the interest which his consort had shown in Butler; and Lord Chancellor Talbot, the brother of his early friend, also warmly recommending him, he was consecrated to the see of Bristol, December 3, 1738, by Archbishop Potter, who in the previous year had been translated from Oxford to Canterbury. His friend Seeker had occupied the see of Bristol before him, from 1735 to 1737, and had been succeeded by Dr. Grooch, who held it only for a single year. Butler's tenure of this very poorly endowed see was to last twelve years. The King's eye, however, was still upon him ; and, by way of compensating him for the great poverty of his see, he was installed Dean of St. Paul's in the spring of 1740, a dignity the revenues of which enabled him, as he used to say, to make extensive improvements and additions to his palace at Bristol. On receiving this preferment, he resigned Stanhope and his stall at Eochester, and divided his year equally between the duties of his deanery and those of his diocese. As to the former of these duties, we are told that he never, while in residence, failed to attend both the daily services in the Cathedral. Building seems to have been somewhat of a passion with him ; and an architectural decoration which he made in repairing and enlarging his •palace at Bristol, aroused a senseless outcry, and was thought injudicious even by his friend Seeker, warmly as he challenged the absurd inference drawn from it. Over the holy Table in the palace chapel he placed a white marble cross, about three feet high, which was thrown up in relief by a slab of black marble, into which it, was sunk, and was surrounded by a frame of BISHOP BUTLEK. IS.") "beautifully carved cedar-wood, the gift of the Bristol merchants. Some fifteen years after his death (in the year 1767), an anonymous pamphleteer put forth the calumny that he " died in the communion of a church that makes use of saints, saints' days, and all the trumpery of saint worship," alleging, as one of the grounds of this accusation, that he had '• put up the popish insignia of the cross in his chapel " at Bristol. His attached friend Seeker (who had heoome Arch- bishop of Canterbury in 175S) vindicated him from these aspersions by letters, signed " Misopseudes," which appeared in the ' St, James's Chronicle." Seeker died in tbe August of the following year (1768); so that his vindication of Butler may be said to have been one of the latest acts of his life. As an act of constant friendship, therefore, it raises our estimation of the Archbishop; while at the same time a charge so ob- viously false and spiteful, brought against a prelate so eminent and of suoh established character as Butler, might probably have been better left to expire by its own inanity. Men might be apt to think there is some- thing in a charge, when the Primate of all England condescends to enter the lists against it. But, be this as it may, it may soothe the wounded sensibilities of the Protestant mind to reflect that this sad proof of Butler's deflection from the pure faith of the Reformed Church no longer exists. Bristol, which has nobly maintained to the present day its character for ico- noclasm, could not tolerate such an abomination ; and the white cross on the black ground perished in the ruins of the episcopal palace, when the mob in ISol set fire to it. Even in a memoir so cursory as the present, it is quite impossible to pass over the reminiscence of Butler 186 BIOGEAPHICAL NOTICE OF ■which has been preserved to us by Dean Tucker of Gloucester. When Tucker was a minor Canon of Bristol Cathedral, and curate of St. Stephen's Church in that city, his abilities and energy attracted Bishop Butler's notice, so that he made him his domestic chaplain, and used his interest to obtain for him further preferment. The story must be told in the Dean's own words ; we are inclined to think it the most characteristic of all the anecdotes of the Bishop which have come down to us : — " The late Dr. Butler, Bishop of Bristol, had a singular notion respecting large communities and public bodies ; a notion which is not, perhaps, alto- gether inapplicable to the present case. His custom was, when at Bristol, to walk for hours in his garden in the darkest night which the time of the year could afford, and I had frequently the honour to attend him. After walking some time, he would stop suddenly and ask the question, ' What security is there against the insanity of individuals ? The physicians know of none ; and as to divines, we have no data, either from Scrip- ture, or from reason, to go upon relative to this affair.' ' True, my lord, no man has a lease of his understand- ing, any more than of his life ; they are both in the hands of the Sovereign Disposer of all things.' He would then take another turn, and again stop short: ' Why might not whole communities and public bodies be seized with fits of insanity, as well as individuals ?' ' My lord, I have never considered the case, and can give no opinion concerning it.' 'Nothing but this principle, that they are liable to insanity, equally, at least, with private persons, can account for the major part of those transactions of which we read in history.' 1 thought little," adds the Dean, " of that odd conceit BISHOP BUTLER. 187 Df the Bishop at that juncture ; but I own I could not avoid thinking of it a great deal since, and applying it to many cases." But we must hasten on to the few remaining events of Butler's life. The King's favour, probably in con- sequence of the late Queen's partiality for him, still accompanied him. In 1746, when he had been eight years at Bristol, he was appointed Clerk of the Closet. And he might have stood, had it so pleased him, on the highest pinnacle to which in this country eccle- siastical ambition can aspire. For on the death of Archbishop Potter, in 1747, the Primacy of all England was offered to, and declined by him, with the observa- tion that, " it was too late for him to try to support a falling Church ;" words which, while they attest his modesty, and the true greatness of a soul weaned from earthly ambitions, at the same time have a dash of con- stitutional melancholy in them. The Church of Eng- land in his day may have seemed to be, and may really have been on the surface, torpid and unenergetic ; and still more depressing times were in store for her after his death ; but " as a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when they cast their leaves," there was in her during all that dreary age a "holy seed," which was " the substance thereof ;" and the energy and activity, which of late years has manifested itself in our communion, are but the result of prin- ciples which even then were working in the hearts of English Churchmen, deep in the soil, but not yet ap- parent above the surface. Three years after the offer of the Primacy had been made to Butler (in 1750) the see of Durham fell vacant, and was offered to Butler, with a private intimation that the lord-lieutenancy would be no longer attached to it, but conferred upon a 188 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF secular peer. He declined it, in the first instance, on the ground that " it was a matter of indifference to him whether he died Bishop of Bristol, or of Durham ; but not a matter of indifference to him whether the honours of the see were invaded during his incumbency." It must be well if in these days, when it is the fashion to strip bare every eminent position not only of its emolu- ments, but of every scrap of ancient prestige which has clung to it from the earliest period, a similar spirited reply were made by all those to whom the denuded position is offered. In Butler's case the resistance which he thought it right to make to the minister's proposal was not allowed to outweigh his claims to the high position. The see was again offered to him, and the removal . of its ancient honours not further insisted upon. He did homage for the see on the 9th of Novem- ber, 1750, and was enthroned at Durham the same day by proxy. Horace Walpole's sneer at this translation, vented in the course of the next year (1751), when the bishops had offended him by offering no opposition to the Begency Bill, was as follows : " The Bishop of Durham has been wafted to that see in a cloud of meta- physics, and remains absorbed in it." The income of the bishopric df Durham was large ; and Butler spent it, as a bishop should, in acts of large munificence and hospitality. On one occasion, when applied to for aid towards a newly-projected benevolent institution, he called for his steward, and asked how much money he had in his possession. On being told five hundred pounds, he exclaimed, " Five hundred pounds ! What a shame for a bishop to have so much! Give it away; give it all to this gentleman for his new institution." Three days in every week the Bishop entertained publicly, with all suitable circumstance, the gentry of, BISHOP BUTLEE. 189 the county and neighbourhood; while in private his habits were simple and frugal even to plainness, and on the other days, even when he was not quite alone, the provision made for the table consisted of only two dishes. But the way of life thus indicated was not to continue long. Our prelate, having given a glimpse to the world of the way in which it behoved a Prince- Bishop to live, was soon to be withdrawn from it. In 1752 his constitution seemed to break up. Clifton was resorted to, and then the waters of Bath, but with no good effect. On Tuesday, the 16th of June, 1752, the great Christian philosopher entered into the state where all those mysteries which hang over religion, both natural and revealed, and which not the subtlest or profoundest understanding can enable man to resolve, are made plain in the light of God's countenance. One or two edifying anecdotes are told of his latest senti- ments, for which probably (even if they have been added to and touched up) there is some foundation in truth. " In his dying moments the Bishop expressed it as an awful thing to appear before the moral Governor of the world " (a sentiment so coincident with the whole strain of Butler's theology, that we can entirely understand its recurring to him with peculiar force in the solemn hour when flesh and heart were failing). " On this his chaplain " (Dr. Foster) " expounded the efficacy of the blood which cleanseth from all sin, and in terms so adjusted to the felt and expressed apprehen- sions of the dying prelate, that his last utterance was, ' 0, this is comfortable !' with which words on his lips he expired." Butler must have been perfectly familiar with the text 1 John i. 7 ; may have often studied it and preached upon it ; but now at length had come to him the moment of spiritual susceptibility, when the testi- 190 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF mony of " the cleansing blood " winged its way through his soul with all the power of a spiritual cordial. And as to the preliminary sense of awe, in the prospect of appearing before God, this was a condition of the comfort reaching him, and doubtless in such a character as his was unusually deep. The wise man after the flesh, if truly instructed in the knowledge of God and of himself, has no other hope than that which supports the rudest peasant's soul; nay, in proportion to the amount of that knowledge is the depth of his humilia- tion ; and " he fears as he enters into the cloud," even though it be the bright cloud of God's presence and smile. And so Bishop Butler entered into rest in the comfortable faith of Christ's atonement : — " Just as I am, -without one plea, Save that Thy blood was shed for me, And that Thou bidd'st me trust in Thee, O Lamb of God, I come." A piece of information given us by the poet Cole- ridge in his ' Table-talk ' summarizes in three or four lines the moral character of the man. Butler's was a strong soul, liable to strong and stormy temptations ; the howling winds swept across it ; the waves of passion surged over it and rose mountain-high ; but the reason of the Christian Philosopher (which, as I have endea- voured to stiow at the end of my Lecture on his .charac- ter as a preacher, is only faith in another aspect of it) held the helm, and kept the vessel true to her course. "The great Bishop Butler," says Coleridge, "was all his life struggling against the devilish suggestions of his senses, which would have maddened him if he had relaxed the stern watchfulness of his reason for a single moment." BISHOP BUTLER. 191 He was buried in his first Cathedral at Bristol, near he episcopal throne, on June 20, 1752, with as little state as might he, Mr. Chapman, the Sub-dean of Bristol, reading the Office for the Burial of the Dead. The facts and anecdotes in the above ' Biographical Notice' are almost all drawn from the Bev. Thomas Bartlett's ' Memoirs of Joseph Butler, late Lord Bishop of Durham' [London: John W. Parker, 1839]. The world is much indebted to Mr. Bartlett for having col- lected with great industry, and recorded with accuracy and fidelity, every reminiscence which survived of his illustrious kinsman by marriage ; one who has been justly described as " not only pre-eminent in his own day, but in the foremost rank of the immortalized sages of the world." Chronology of Bishop Butler's Life. Joseph Butler, bora May 18, 1692 Commences correspondence with Dr. Clarke . . . . Nov. 4, 1713 Entered as a Commoner at Oriel Mar. 17, 1714 Appointed Preacher at the Rolls 1718 Took the degree of B.C.L 1721 Presented by Bishop Talbot to the living of Haughton . . 1722 Exchanges Haughton for Stanhope 1725 Publishes his ' Fifteen Sermons ' 1726 Resigns Preachership at the Bolls Autumn, 1726 Geo. II. and Queen Caroline of Brandenburg- \ j ^ 172 7 Anspach come to the Throne / D.C.L., and Chaplain to Lord Chancellor Talbot .. .. 1733 Clerk of the Closet to the Queen .. 1736 Prebendary of Rochester Aug. 7, 1736 192 BIOGKAPIJICAL NOTICE OF BISHOP BUTLER. ' The Analogy ' published .. May, 1736 Queen Caroline died Nov. 20, 1737 Butler consecrated Bishop of Bristol Dec. 3, 1738 Installed Dean of St. Paul's May 24, 1740 Refused the Archbishropic of Canterbury 1747 Translated frorrj Bristol to Durham Nov. 9, 1750 The Regency Bill 1751 Dies at Eath, aged 60 Tues. June 16, 1752 Buried in Bristol Cathedral Sat. June 20, 1752 LOSDON: PIUNTED I1Y WILLIAM OI.OWBS AND SONS, STANFORD STREET AND CIIAKINO CROSS. 50a, Albemarle Street, London, January, 1878. MR. MURRAY'S GENERAL LIST OF WORKS. ABINGER'S (Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer) Life. By the Hon. P. Campbell Scarlett. Portrait. 8vo. 15s. ALBERT MEMORIAL. 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