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BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 FROM THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 liciirg W. Sage 
 1891 
 
 ({At^Mi i.sM't 
 
 3777 
 
9 
 
 ■>-* 
 
SERMONS 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 
 
 HENRY EDWARD MANNING, M.A., 
 
 ARCHDEACON OF CHICHESTER, 
 AND LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE. 
 
 OXFORD, 
 
 JOHN HENRY PARKER; 
 
 G. F. AND J. RIVINGTON, LONDON. 
 
 MDCCCXLIV. 
 
OXFORD : 
 PRINTED BY I. SHRIMPTON. 
 
TO 
 
 ROBERT BULLOCK MARSHAM, D.C.L., 
 
 WARDEN OF MEETON COLLEGE, 
 
 THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED 
 
 A SLIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 THE KINDNESSES OF MANY TEARS. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 THE DANGER OF SINNING IN THE MIDST OF 
 PRIVILEGES. 
 
 Feast of St. Matthias, 1842. 
 Acts i. 24, 25. 
 
 Page 
 
 Thou, Lord, which fcnowest the hearts of all men, shew whether 
 of these two thou hast chosen, that he may take part of this 
 ministry and Apostieship, from which Judas hy transgression 
 fell, that he might go to his own place. . 1 
 
 SERMON II. 
 
 THE PROBATION OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 November 20, 1842. 
 
 St. Matthew xviii. 7. 
 
 Woe unto the world because of offences ! for it must needs 
 he that offences come ; hut woe to that man hy whom the 
 offence cometh ! 23 
 
VI CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON III. 
 
 THE WORK APPOINTED US. 
 March 12, 1843. 
 
 St. John xviii. 37. 
 
 To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the 
 world 43 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 CHRIST'S KINGDOM NOT OF THIS WORLD. 
 Nov. 5, 1843. 
 
 Sx. John xviii. 36. 
 
 My kingdom is not of this world : if my kingdom were of this 
 world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be de- 
 livered to the Jews : but now is my kingdom not from hence. 67 
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 LOVE THE PREPARATION FOR CHRIST'S COMING. 
 Third Sunday in Advent, 1843. 
 
 2 Tim. iv. 6—8. 
 
 I am now ready to be offered : and the time of my departure is 
 at hand. 
 
 I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course ; I have 
 kept the faith : 
 
 Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, 
 which the Lord the righteous Judge shall give me at that 
 day : and not to me only, but unto all them also that love 
 his appearing 07 
 
CONTENTS. VII 
 
 SERMON VI. 
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION. 
 
 St. Philip and St. James, 1844. 
 
 St. Matthew v. 8. 
 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God . . . .117 
 
 SERMON VII. 
 
 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 
 
 Trinity Sunday, 1844. 
 
 St. James i. 17. 
 
 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh 
 down from the Father of lights 147 
 
SERMON I. 
 
 THE DANGER OF SINNING IN THE MIDST OF 
 PRIVILEGES. 
 
 Feast of St. Matthias, 1842. 
 
 Acts i. 24, 25. 
 
 " Thou Lord, which knowest the hearts of all men, shew 
 whether of these two thou hast chosen, that he may take 
 part of this ministry arid Apostleship, from which Judas by 
 transgression fell that he might go to his own place." 
 
 The Church commemorates by this festival, 
 not more the election of St, Matthias than 
 the fall of Judas. These two facts in the open- 
 ing of the Gospel dispensation are so united, 
 and so exhibit the two sides of one and the 
 same great law, that they can hardly be dis- 
 connected without losing a part of the lesson de- 
 signed for our learning. In Judas we see the fall, 
 in St. Matthias the consecration, of an Apostle; 
 the latter expressing the mind of the Spirit in the 
 perpetuity of the Apostolical commission; the 
 former the peril of ministering in holy things 
 
2 THE DANGER OF SINNING [Serm. 
 
 without personal holiness. It is not more certain 
 that by this act of the Apostles the Church of all 
 ages is both instructed and bound to transmit, 
 with the solemn action of prayer and imposition 
 of hands, the divine authority, than that by the 
 judgment which fell upon the traitor Judas a 
 great law of God's spiritual kingdom is revealed : 
 I mean the awful reckoning He will take with 
 those who are familiar with the sanctities of His 
 Church, without being thereby sanctified. And 
 to this we may confine our present thoughts. 
 
 We are wont to treat the example of Judas as 
 an exhibition of incredible guilt, far beyond even 
 our own worst condition of heart. At last we come 
 to believe it to be so remote from our common 
 probation, as to lose the warning for which it has 
 been recorded. In this we greatly deceive our- 
 selves. There is less difference than we may 
 imagine, between the probation of Judas and our 
 own. Like the other Apostles, he was called to 
 follow our Lord with an especial nearness. Like 
 them he left all that he had. Like them he con- 
 versed and companied with the Lord Jesus Christ, 
 was witness of His fasts and prayers, hungered 
 and thirsted with Him, suffered weariness by the 
 way-side, was buffeted on the sea ; like them he 
 shared the ghostly office of the apostleship, he 
 partook of their mission, their preaching, their 
 
I.] IN THE MIDST OF PRIVILEGES. 3 
 
 miraculous powers ; it may be also, of their shame, 
 and of the contradiction of sinners. So far as we 
 know from Holy Writ, throughout the ministry 
 of our Lord, he was like the rest. But his inte- 
 rior state was not like theirs. He had in his heart 
 a master-sin still unsubdued. He was covetous : 
 and yet, it may be, not more covetous than many 
 both before and since his day, whose covetousness 
 has been followed by a renouncing of all things. 
 He was covetous : and yet Scripture is awfully si- 
 lent on the mysterious question whether or no his 
 leading sin had gained the ascendant in his heart 
 before, or after, his call to be an Apostle : whether 
 or no he were chosen, being from the first such 
 as he was seen to be at last, or whether he became 
 what he was through ordinary temptations and 
 the insensible degrees of spiritual declension, 
 after his call to follow Christ. That his apostacy 
 was foreseen, St. Peter teaches us by quotation 
 from the book of Psalms : and our Lord also when 
 He asked, " Have I not chosen you twelve, and 
 one of you is a devil a ?" and again when He 
 said, " I know whom I have chosen : but that 
 the Scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth 
 bread with me hath lifted up his heel against 
 meV But there is nothing here requiring us 
 to believe that the inward state of Judas before 
 and at his call was a developed state of the sin 
 
 a St. John vi. 70. b St. John xiii. 18. 
 
 b2 
 
4 THE DANGER OF SINNING [Seem. 
 
 which in the end wrought his destruction. It may 
 be that he followed the call of Christ, as Simon 
 Magus received holy Baptism, of whom it is ex- 
 pressly said, that he "believed." I say it is more in 
 harmony with the dealings of God to suppose that 
 his was a probation like our own ; that the sin of 
 his heart though for a season held in check, still 
 kept its hold on him, baffled the healing virtues 
 which went out from the fellowship of Christ, and 
 converted the daily context of his life into temp- 
 tations, and the circumstances of his office into 
 stimulants of his besetting passion. For we read 
 of him that " he was a thief and had the bag"." 
 And in this we see a wonderful coincidence, as it 
 were, of the strong current of a man's sinful habit 
 with the outward facilities which minister occa- 
 sions of falling. How he became the bearer of 
 the bag, whether by. his own importunity and the 
 predisposing turn of his character, or because his 
 honesty was, as far as men saw, unsuspected, we 
 know not : so it was ; and in the midst of his pe- 
 culiar blessings he was entrusted with an office 
 Out of which he drew excitements to his ruling 
 though hidden fault. 
 
 And this view is borne out by what we read of 
 his last and greatest sin: "Then Judas, which 
 had betrayed him, when he saw that he was con- 
 demned, repented himself, and brought again the 
 
 ••■ St. John xii. 6. 
 
L] IN THE MIDST OF PRIVILEGES. 5 
 
 thirty "pieces of silver to the chief priests and 
 elders, saying, I have sinned in that I have be- 
 trayed the innocent blood. And they said, What 
 is that to us? see thou to that. And he cast 
 down the' pieces of silver in the temple, and, de- 
 parted, and went and hanged himself d ." From, 
 this it seems plain he had no thought of his 
 Master's condemnation. He looked, it may be, 
 at the worst for some light chastisement. He 
 had again and again seen Him pass unharmed 
 through the midst of His enemies, putting 
 them aside by the majesty of His presence. 
 He had seen the sea and the winds .obey Him, 
 and all the malice and craft of man abashed by 
 His calm wisdom. Perhaps he thought that He 
 who walked the water should have freed Himself 
 from the moment of peril by the power of a 
 miracle. At all events, he did not look for what 
 issued from his unhallowed covenant. When he 
 saw that He was condemned, he was all horror 
 and amazement; and in one breath he bore wit- 
 ness to his Master's innocence, and to his own 
 guilt. He dared to thwart his Lord's enemies 
 in the moment of their first success, though he 
 might peril his own life by that unwelcome testi- 
 mony. He cast from, him the bait by which he 
 had been taken, as an accursed thing. All his 
 greediness was subdued by the anguish of his 
 
 d St. Matt, xxvii. 3 — 5. 
 
6 THE DANGER OF SINNING [Serm. 
 
 spirit, "and he departed, and went and hanged 
 himself." 
 
 In all this we have very evident tokens of a 
 mind not half conscious until then of its own 
 evil. Day hy day he had grown familiar with 
 the presence and the voice of Christ, and it had 
 lost its awfulness ; day by day his own love of 
 unlawful gains had grown more importunate, and 
 he had lost the perception of its guilt. He had 
 reached by slow degrees a point of hardihood, at 
 which he did not fear to make even the person of 
 his Master the subject of an abhorred and traitor- 
 ous barter. And yet, doubtless, had he fully 
 known what would come, he would have shrunk 
 in terror from the thought. 
 
 Now the lesson I would draw from this ex- 
 ample, is the extreme danger of permitting the 
 power of any sinful affection to go unresisted : 
 and that, first of all, because no one can foresee 
 to what such a disposition of heart may grow. 
 Whensoever the mind is under the sway of 
 any fault, such as ambition, love of money, 
 worldliness, jealousy, self-love, all the outward 
 circumstances of a man's life are converted 
 into aliments of his sin. It is remarkable by 
 what unlikely things, and by what far-fetched 
 and unnatural ways, an ambitious or a selfish man 
 will feed and excite his ruling passion. And by 
 
I.] IN THE MIDST OF PRIVILEGES. 7 
 
 these stimulants it perpetually gains upon the 
 mind, and winds itself into all its movements ; 
 all things become full of it, and minister to it, 
 and are measured by their affinity to it, and by 
 their tendency to promote it. Little by little, and 
 day by day, it grows, until it seems to take up 
 all the whole character — all thoughts, reflections, 
 forecastings, desires, in a word, the whole man — 
 into itself. It often subdues and stifles even 
 other faults: as ambition will overcome love of 
 money ; or rivalry a love of ease and self-indul- 
 gence. And yet it is not that a man becomes 
 thereby less faulty ; but that some one tyrannous 
 passion grows too strong to suffer even other 
 faults to thwart its cravings. And, nevertheless, 
 such is the versatility of spiritual evil, that there 
 is no fault or sin into which his master-passion 
 may not shape itself: even as the covetousness 
 of Judas passed into the unearthly guilt of be- 
 traying the Lord of glory. This was no more 
 than a venture on which the spirit of greediness 
 embarked for its own separate end. It was not 
 an object of desire in itself; far from it : doubtless 
 it was a thought of fear, long shrunk from, it 
 may be, striven against, done by self-constraint at 
 last ; only less feared than the wages of betrayal 
 were coveted. So with any predominant fault ; it 
 contains radically in itself every form of evil : for 
 
8 THE DANGER OF "SINNING [Sekm. 
 
 manifold as are the kinds of sin, there is an unity 
 in the nature of evil. The several forms are only 
 several expressions of one principle, and it seems 
 to matter little what may he the particular shape 
 in which sin maintains its contact with the mind 
 and its secret dominion over it ; for any other 
 forms of evil may be unfolded, when they ap-r 
 pear at any time to serve the predominant de- 
 sires of the heart ; as for instance, selfishness 
 often becomes cowardly, vindictive, and un-, 
 grateful ; worldliness deceitful and licentious ; 
 softness effeminate and impure. Men often 
 break out into sins altogether removed from the 
 line of their characteristic faults ; and we wonder 
 at them, forgetting that the forms of sin are acci- 
 dental, and ever changing ; that they may veer 
 about, and return into themselves, and yet always 
 express one and the same principle of spiritual 
 wickedness. It is therefore not only by its 
 growth in strength and stubbornness, but by its 
 comprehensiveness and versatility, that a ruling 
 fault is full of peril. We are in danger of any 
 issue, how awful soever it be, so long as we yield 
 assent to any habitual solicitation of an unresisted 
 sin. 
 
 Again, a sinful affection harboured in the heart 
 casts a man out of the grace of redemption, 
 although he be in the inner court of Christ's 
 
I.] IN THE MIDST OF PRIVILEGES. $ 
 
 Church, and in outward appearance as nigh as 
 Judas to his Master's daily fellowship ; joining 
 perpetually in the visible order of divine worship, 
 in fasts, festivals, and Holy Sacraments : even as 
 Judas looked on when the water was changed to 
 wine, and bore in his hands the bread which his 
 Master multiplied ; yet is there a bar absolute and 
 impenetrable to the healing virtues of God's 
 Spirit, He takes into his hands things conse- 
 crated for the life of the world ; he visibly presses 
 with his teeth the holy elements ; all the harmo^ 
 nies of the everlasting Gospel fall upon his outer 
 ear, and the lights of salvation enter into his 
 speculative reason : but the heart is darkened by 
 its own shadow. He bears within a mystery of 
 spiritual evil, which baffles the ministries of mercy, 
 and closes up the avenues of his will. His moral 
 nature is in array, and in energy, against the will 
 of God, Under the abundant grace of God he 
 lies barren and unfruitful; and in the commu- 
 nion and fellowship of the Church he is cold, 
 .clouded, and alone. This, I say, is the effect of 
 any sin harboured in the heart, such as im- 
 purity, pride, falsehood, uncharitableness, and 
 the like ; they so repel the pleadings and draw- 
 ings of grace, as to make a man hold out un- 
 changed against the transforming influences of 
 the Spirit of God. 
 
10 THE DANGER OF SINNING [Seem. 
 
 And well if this were all. Perilous as is a 
 state of spiritual barrenness, and hopeless the 
 end of cold unfruitful Christians, there is yet a 
 greater condemnation. For mercies which are re- 
 pelled turn to the savour of death unto death. To 
 handle holy things without holiness is sacrilege. 
 We cannot tell what wasting plague of spiritual 
 deterioration it may work in our regenerate 
 nature; every such approach to God is a pre- 
 sumption ; for a sullied heart is the direct antago- 
 nist of the Divine purity. Proud and unclean 
 thoughts are challenges of the eternal Spirit : they 
 are energies of our being in that part of it which 
 is akin to the divine, and are therefore in the 
 highest order of rebellion. The will which con- 
 sents to them, must be awfully estranged from 
 God ; and when with such hearts we handle His 
 holy Sacraments, or offer up prayers and praises, 
 professing to speak with God; unconscious of 
 what we are, or if conscious, so much the guilt- 
 ier ; what do we but sin after a fearful sort ? 
 That which is ordained to life turns unto death : 
 His gifts of grace are the very matter of our sin : 
 His mercies are our greater condemnation. 
 
 And, besides the guilt which is thus incurred, 
 every such contact with the outward symbols of 
 -God's presence leaves behind it a deadness upon 
 the spiritual being. None are so hard to move as 
 
I.] IN THE MIDST OF PRIVILEGES. 11 
 
 they who have become familiar with religion, hold- 
 ing fast all the while some cherished sin. It may- 
 be that, for some time the consciousness of direct 
 sins of the spirit, or of secret reserves in the 
 heart, and of faults harboured within, will mate 
 us fear and shrink at the return of holy seasons, 
 or sacred actions, or public solemnities, or even in 
 our private approaches to God in secret. It is in 
 these that the struggle is decided. Every time we 
 call God's eye upon, us by prayer, we are made 
 to thrill at the consciousness of what we conceal 
 within us ; and either our prayers cast out the 
 unclean spirit, or, if it go not forth, it turns and 
 overwhelms the conscience. We are between two 
 fears : we fear to leave off praying, and yet we fear 
 to pray. And we go on hoping without striving, 
 and praying without amendment ; and our fears 
 grow less, and pass into a slumber of feeling ; and 
 soon we go through the round of religious acts, 
 without a separate consciousness of each; and 
 they return in a cycle year by year, and day by 
 day; and we learn to kneel without shrinking 
 in the very presence of God : and then we grow 
 to be unconscious of it, and self-possessed ; and 
 a dulness comes over the eye of the soul, and 
 its ear grows heavy, and the heart waxes fat ; 
 and when most in peril we are least afraid. 
 It may be, that of all his covetous deeds the 
 
12 THE DANGER OF SINNING [Sebm. 
 
 last act of Judas was done with comparatively 
 less of shrinking and irresolution., The pas- 
 sive feelings of awe at his Lord's presence had 
 been worn off by daily familiarity ; and the love 
 of gain had so gathered strength as to close at 
 once with a high and tempting bait. So must it 
 be with us : boldness in sin, and deadness of con- 
 science come on together, and both are deepened 
 by the daily presence and baffled influence of 
 slighted mercies. It often happens that the ex- 
 ternal habits of religion are maintained with as 
 much of order as before : it is not a decline like 
 that of coarser or more careless offenders, who, 
 retaining a vivid sense of the awfulness of religion, 
 even from a hatred of hypocrisy, when they con- 
 sent to evil, throw off the semblance of better 
 thoughts. Of such as these there is often more 
 to be hoped. Profligate as they are, there is 
 underneath a living consciousness which may be 
 some day roused into energy by the powers of 
 truth from which they shrink. There is some- 
 thing still to work on ; something to appeal to : 
 theirs is the disobedience of a heart dragged 
 away by an evil lust, not the deadness of a drug- 
 ged and hardened conscience. 
 
 And, once more, the danger of cherishing any 
 ruling passion while we maintain the habits of 
 religion, may be seen in this : that it is a great 
 
I.] IN THE MIDST OF PRIVILEGES. 13 
 
 provocation of the righteous severity of God. 
 What but this has brought down on Churches 
 and on men the awful sentence of judgment and 
 rejection? What but this moved the righteousness 
 of God to scatter the apostate seed of Abraham ? 
 It was no other than the guilt of permitted evil, 
 in the midst of a consecrated order, which drew 
 from the Lord Jesus Christ His awful threatenings 
 to the seven Churches, and called for the sword 
 and desolation upon the Churches of Egypt and 
 Africa. The very same law, of which Judas is 
 an appalling personal type, Ordains the rejection 
 of all who familiarly mingle with religion without 
 holiness of life. We know not how God may 
 even in this world avenge the sin of profane-- 
 ness. He gave awful tokens of His consuming 
 jealousy in the Corinthian Church, where " many 
 were sickly and many slept." It may be, in these 
 latter times, by His inscrutable working, He no 
 less vindicates His unseen presence from the 
 profanation of the presumptuous and impure. It 
 is no disproof that we cannot assure ourselves in 
 the particular case, as in Pharaoh, Ananias, and 
 Herod; the same laws still reign in His kingdom, 
 although the administration of them be more 
 secret and unseen. We must believe it as a 
 principle; but We shall be safer in not seeking 
 particular examples of its infliction. Be this as it 
 
14 THE DANGER OF SINNING [Serm. 
 
 may; it is most certain that we do see visible 
 marks of a righteous law appearing through the 
 after state of those who have grown callous in the 
 midst of God's mercies. We see them entangled 
 in perplexities, amazed by fears, confounded by 
 exposure, baffled in their nearest hopes, cast 
 off even by the world. Sometimes we see men 
 of great intellectual powers committing acts 
 of such incredible fatuity, that we recognise 
 the phenomena from which even a heathen 
 could deduce a law of God's hidden govern- 
 ment. Sometimes we see men who have long 
 seemed fair without, and have moved along a full 
 tide of prosperity, all at once a wreck. The evil 
 has long tracked them unseen, and their sin has 
 found them out at last. Sometimes we see men 
 so seared in feeling, so abandoned to the bondage 
 of a governing lust, and to the credulity of an 
 unbelieving heart, that all can perceive their de- 
 gradation but themselves. It is a part of their 
 fall not to recognise their own debasement. 
 
 And how must we interpret these tokens of a 
 righteous Judge, but as expressions of His most 
 just award ? We read in Holy Scripture how 
 God gives over some "to a reprobate mind;" 
 how He " sends strong delusion that they believe 
 a he ;" how He answers men " after their own 
 heart," leaving their own fostered and multiplied 
 
I.] IN THE MIDST OF PRIVILEGES. 15 
 
 sins to develope themselves freely into the tyranny 
 of a governing habit, so that the inner state of a 
 man is not more his sin than his scourge. 
 
 I have now shortly touched on the peculiar 
 danger of thus permitting the secret indulgence 
 of any sinful affection. It is most perilous in every 
 way : not only does it bring a man in danger of 
 an infinite growth and multiplication of faults, but 
 it thrusts itself in between him and the grace 
 of life ; it converts his approaches to God into 
 profaneness ; and by irreverent slighting of the 
 very ministries of renewal, it hardens and blinds 
 the heart. And withal it highly provokes the 
 just severity of God, and draws down manifold 
 visitations, and chastisements of perplexity and 
 shame. 
 
 Fearful indeed is such a state : wherefore it is 
 most needful to surrender ourselves to Him with- 
 out reserve ; to renounce sin with an entire rejec- 
 tion of heart ; to curb ourselves with an universal 
 strictness, giving no dispensations to any favoured 
 fault, or to any characteristic failing; counting 
 ourselves never safe so long as any one temper or 
 imagination of heart exalts itself above the law of 
 uniform obedience. 
 
 Most necessary as this admonition is to all 
 members of Christ, to some among us it is of 
 especial moment. 
 
16 THE DANGER OF SINNING [Seem. 
 
 As, first, to those that share the holy office from 
 which Judas by transgression fell. To us, above 
 all men, does this awful warning come home with 
 a direct and searching point : for we are favoured 
 beyond our brethren ; we are brought nearest to 
 the throne of our Lord. The sanctities of His 
 Church are entrusted to our keeping. We are 
 under a twofold vow ; both by our Baptism and 
 by our Ordination. We have gone forth after 
 Christ, choosing His service and fellowship for 
 our portion. Larger measures of knowledge are 
 a grave stewardship. But we have more. Our 
 charge is to speak in His name, and in His name 
 to do many mighty works ; by Sacraments, and 
 benedictions ; by warnings, and rebukes ; by bind- 
 ing and loosing ; by censures and absolutions. It 
 is but little wonder that of old men fled into the 
 wilderness, or made as if they were of weak un- 
 derstanding, hiding the gifts for which others did 
 them homage, that they might free their soul from 
 the bond and the burden of this awful charge. 
 They knew better, alas ! than we, what it is to 
 minister to the Lord Jesus ; of how pure a heart, 
 of an eye how single,- of how clear and unreserved 
 a will they must needs be, that would feed the 
 flock of God. Well did they know that from the 
 highest dignity hi Christ's spiritual kingdom to 
 the lowest depth in hell, there needs but one 
 
I.] IN THE MIDST OF PRIVILEGES. 17 
 
 headlong fall ; that as Satan like lightning fell 
 from Heaven, even so may we fall from the 
 unction of our Priesthood to the worm that 
 dieth not. Therefore they fled, and hid them- 
 selves from that which some men now seek and 
 court with a ready and fearful eagerness. And 
 hence it follows that we, even when pure and 
 without greater blame, are so often full of re- 
 served affections, so distracted by other aims, so 
 dazzled by the pride of life, so willing to take 
 our fill of the high and smooth things of the 
 world. The sacerdotal character too often seems 
 rather the accident, than the fife of our office. 
 Happy are they who do not find themselves, even 
 in the holiest paths, following their own personal 
 bias, serving themselves ; and even in the most 
 sacred actions, beset by a world of thoughts, 
 which, because indulged at other times, thrust 
 themselves even then unbidden on their hearts. 
 Not only at their nearer and more formal ap- 
 proaches to God, but at all times are the Pastors 
 of Christ's flock in a close relation to His un- 
 seen presence. The larger measures of spiritual 
 knowledge entrusted to them, gives an exceeding 
 greatness even to ordinary faults. The indulgence 
 of such evils as vanity, bitterness, personal re- 
 sentment, softness, a slanderous spirit, in the fuller 
 light of a more instructed conscience, may make 
 
 c 
 
18 THE DANGER OF SINNING [Serm. 
 
 unknown havoc in the spiritual nature. They 
 may greatly repel the grace of sanctification, and 
 bring on most insidious forms of declension. To 
 take a single instance. Who can say in how 
 great danger we may be, who live in these con- 
 troversial ages of the Church; how much of 
 unsubdued self may sullenly maintain its hold 
 of our hearts at the very time we are making 
 the greatest profession of His service : how we 
 may seem to minister to Him while we indulge 
 our own besetting faults ? 
 
 Again, there are others to whom the same warn- 
 ing is also of great importance. I mean, to such 
 as are favoured in a peculiar measure, and beyond 
 their fellows, with the order and offices of the 
 Church ; to those, for example, who have leisure, 
 and discharge from the care and turmoil of life ; 
 from its dull round of necessary business, its ambi- 
 tious schemes, and vain-glorious ostentation ; who 
 live under the shadow of the Church in some shel- 
 tered dwelling, where the homage daily offered to 
 Almighty God brings them into a perpetual near- 
 ness to the presence of the world unseen : and 
 such are we who enjoy the untold blessings 
 which are our inheritance in this place. By that 
 strange and admonitory law which appears to 
 govern all our life, we seem never to know in full 
 the blessedness of our academic course until it is 
 
I.] IN THE MIDST OF PRIVILEGES. 19 
 
 past and over. It is after we have ventured out 
 from its sheltering precincts, filled with a blind 
 joy, as if released from a restraint and thral- 
 dom, we begin to know that we have forfeited a 
 blessing. When the rough unconsecfated world 
 throngs upon us, and wearies us by an unrelieved 
 return of toil without sympathy, and of labour 
 Without repose ; when we find ourselves carried 
 against our will into the mid-stream of an angry 
 and buffeting strife ; then it is our hearts yearn 
 backward for the peace of other days. In weari- 
 ness and drought of soul there arises upon us the 
 remembrance of our too short tarrying here. In 
 the midst of a wearied and restless fife, we re- 
 member the calm still thoughts of God, the daily 
 sacrifice, the ever-renewing chant of mattins and 
 even-song, and the quiet chimes, which here told 
 all day long of things unseen and eternal. And 
 it is in such moments of deep and fruitless long- 
 ings for the past, that we most keenly feel the 
 consciousness of what we were ; and that Our own 
 inner state was our only hindrance. We come at 
 last to see clearly why we reaped so little blessing 
 from so rich a soil : because we carried our own 
 obstructions in ourselves ; our hearts were turned 
 aside by their own permitted faults. We were still 
 harbouring the evils of an untutored spirit. Wil- 
 fulness, vanity, softness, or self-indulgence, (for I 
 
 c2 
 
20 THE DANGER OF SINNING [Serm. 
 
 will not speak of the deadlier forms of profligacy,) 
 alienated our hearts from the consecrated order 
 of our academic life. We bore our part in it 
 with an averted will, and a mind out of sympathy 
 with its moral design ; and we have become con- 
 scious, all too late, that we then dwelt in the 
 neighbourhood of blessings — and that now they 
 are hid from our eyes. We perceive at last that 
 we were put upon a searching probation, and 
 that we lacked faith to read the intention of our 
 trial. Perhaps we can now discern what was the 
 particular moral bar which we set up against its 
 chastening discipline. 
 
 Truly much preparation of heart, much watch- 
 fulness, much government of the will, much sub- 
 jugation of ourselves, much singleness of eye, is 
 needful that we should dwell even with safety in 
 such a place as this. Here, if any where, are the 
 lingering admonitions of faithful days, and visible 
 shrines which shadow the Unseen, and purities 
 which are breathed from heaven. We cannot 
 abide here with impunity. Better or worse we 
 must perforce become ; nearer to the mind of 
 Christ, or further from the fellowship of God. 
 It is an awful mercy to be greatly exalted ; to be 
 highly favoured above other men. They that fol- 
 lowed Christ afar off, had need to walk warily ; 
 how then must they bear themselves who are 
 
I.] IN THE MIDST OF PRIVILEGES. 21 
 
 called to converse with Him in a familiar nearness ? 
 " To whom much is given, of him shall much be 
 required." And if with our dim insight into our- 
 selves we can detect so much of our fallen nature, 
 what must He behold, whose eyes are as a flame 
 of fire ! What sins of act, of brooding imagination, 
 of unrepenting memory, of unholy thoughts con- 
 sented in, of withheld affections, of a weak or dis- 
 loyal will! What does not His piercing gaze 
 read in the depth of our inmost spirit ! " Who can 
 tell how oft he offendeth ? Cleanse thou me from 
 my secret faults : keep thy servant also from pre- 
 sumptuous sins, lest they get the dominion over 
 me ; so shall I be undefiled, and innocent from 
 the great offence." 
 
SERMON II. 
 
 THE PROBATION OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 November 20, 1842. 
 
 St. Matthew xviii. 7. 
 
 " Woe unto the world because of offences ! for it must needs 
 be that offences come ; but woe to that man by whom the 
 offence cometh !" 
 
 In these words our Lord both prophesied of 
 the trials of His Church, and declared the inevit- 
 able law of its probation. Before the sight of the 
 Son of Man all the destinies of the Church were 
 unveiled. He foresaw the shadows and lights 
 which should chequer its mysterious path ; — the 
 warfare of the world ; the ever-returning persecu- 
 tions ; the winnowing of His floor ; the sins of 
 His own servants ; the doctrines of devils, and 
 apostacies of heart ; the multitudes untold which 
 in this entangled maze of trial should fall from 
 the promises of life ; — all this was full before His 
 sight; and He said "it must needs be that 
 offences come." 
 
 There is something very awful in this saying. 
 There is a severity in its abruptness: "it must 
 needs be." We seem to be brought into the pre- 
 
24 THE PROBATION [Serm 
 
 sence of one of the great laws of the spiritual 
 world, and to see as it were one of the mysteries 
 of sin laid open. It means plainly this : To the 
 end of time men will go on sinning, and causing 
 others to sin ; falling, and making others to fall ; 
 perishing, and destroying those " for whom Christ 
 died." 
 
 And so it must be : First, because this world is 
 fallen, and evil is still mingled with the creatures 
 of God ; it is still a living and energetic principle 
 in the nature of man ; the bias is yet upon him : 
 and next, because it is the moral character, so to 
 speak, of God's providential government over the 
 world, not to coerce the actings of man's will. The 
 restoration of the regenerate to the image of God, 
 is not wrought out by a mechanical expulsion of 
 evil from the world ; nor by reducing the moral 
 nature of man, created in the likeness of God, to 
 a passive and involuntary being ; but by sustaining 
 the powers of man against the strength and solici- 
 tations of the evil one : by imposing such checks 
 and limitations on the workings of sin, as shall 
 bring it under the powers of a regenerate will. In 
 all the complex agencies which make up the pro- 
 bation of men, there is an ultimate point, where 
 each living responsible being stands or falls, in 
 and by his own personal act. 
 
 Therefore it must needs be that many should fail 
 
II.] OF THE CHURCH. 25 
 
 in this great probation : that all along the course 
 of the Church through this ensnaring world, mul- 
 titudes should fall away before the powers of evil, 
 and strive against the pleadings and the guidance 
 of the Spirit of God ; becoming thereby each one a 
 several principle of evil; a temptation, and a stum- 
 bling-block to other men. And of these offences 
 there are many forms. Sometimes they have come 
 in shapes of unmasked evil; by persecution for 
 Christ's sake ; or by blasphemy, infidelity, unclean- 
 ness, hatred, pride, schisms, heresies, and the like : 
 sometimes under a veil, and in concealment, in the 
 indirect effects of the lives of selfish and uncharit- 
 able Christians, who follow without check the cur- 
 rent of a headstrong will, pleasing themselves, and 
 careless of other men. Both ways such men become 
 propagators of evil ; their living powers are either 
 openly arrayed on the side of the kingdom of dark- 
 ness, or they hold treacherous commerce with it ; 
 from age to age they repeat portions of the original 
 Fall, by involving in the consequence of acts, charg- 
 ed with evil, generations as yet unborn. Such, for 
 instance, was Simon Magus ; and the author of the 
 Nicolaitan heresy; the Judaizing teachers; Mon- 
 tanus, Arius, Donatus, and the like, whose names 
 are remembered in the Church of God as Jero- 
 boam of old, " who made Israel to sin." These men 
 sinned and died, but not alone. Their work in the 
 
26 THE PROBATION [Serm. 
 
 world was in direct contravention of the work of 
 Christ. He knit the world together in unity; they 
 divided His mystical Body. He lifted up the light 
 of truth upon the earth ; they set up a cheat and 
 a counterfeit. He impressed on man a law of 
 purity; they tainted the sanctities of life, and 
 taught men so. He made plain the one path to life 
 eternal ; they bewildered it with a maze of windings 
 and perplexity. He reared in the world a visible 
 Church, which by its unity and sanctity should 
 guide men to heaven ; they bequeathed to Chris- 
 tendom a family of sects and doctrines, which 
 should run down from age to age, shifting, it may 
 be, in outward shape, but inwardly ever the same, 
 ensnaring and offending His followers : so that as 
 He is by an incommunicable title the Saviour, 
 they are the destroyers, of mankind. 
 
 I. There are some inferences naturally flowing 
 from what has been said : as, for instance, it is 
 plain that what seem to us to be obstructions of 
 the Divine purpose in His Church, are neverthe- 
 less foreseen and subservient to His design. How 
 it may be, we shall never know till all be fulfilled, 
 till we look back upon the course of this world, 
 and see its secret unravelled by after events, and 
 the great mystery resolved by the perfection of 
 God's elect. 
 
 We are apt to speak of the Church as if the ori- 
 
II.] OF THE CHURCH. 27 
 
 ginal scheme of the Divine mind were to realize, 
 at this present time, something very different from 
 what we now see ; as if it were designed to exhibit, 
 in this present world, a state of holiness and of 
 unity, far beyond what we anywhere find to exist : 
 as if God, in the beginning, had laid the ground- 
 plan of a perfect work, and men had marred it in 
 the superstructure. But is it not nearer to the 
 truth to believe that it was designed to be what 
 indeed it is ; that the Divine monarchy over the 
 world is really expressed in all things, even as 
 they are ; that there is some deeper reason in the 
 fact that they are not otherwise ; that all the of- 
 fences, scandals, and falls of Christian men and 
 of Churches were all foreseen, and, so to speak, 
 reckoned into and allowed for in the great 
 scheme ; so that the purpose of God is fulfilling, 
 not only in spite but by means of the most 
 adverse powers ? 
 
 We perhaps should have expected in the Church 
 an unbroken unity, an uncontaminated faith, and 
 an increasing sanctity of life. And yet we find 
 the phenomena of its history to be in direct vari- 
 ance with such anticipations. It was no sooner 
 founded, than there were some who were not of 
 it, who went out from it. The Catholic faith is 
 hardly older than the Gnostic heresy. It may be, 
 on the hypothesis of good and evil co-existing 
 
28 THE PROBATION [Serm. 
 
 in the Church, and of a moral, not a mechanical 
 restoration of our nature to God, that schism 
 and heresy are the foils and conditions of the 
 manifestation of unity and truth; as St. Paul 
 has said, " there must be heresies among you, 
 (Set yap nai aipecrei? iv vfiiv eivai) that they 
 which are approved may be made manifest among 
 you a ." 
 
 So far from seeing the world conformed to a 
 perfect moral rule, by the powers of regenera- 
 tion which are in the Church, we find rather the 
 Church itself, in many ways, as it were succumb- 
 ing to the temper of the world. The standard 
 of Christian life, which was set up in the lives 
 of Apostles, Martyrs, and Saints, seems visibly 
 fallen, partly through decay of discipline, and 
 partly through the declension of these latter 
 days. It would almost tempt us to imagine that 
 the momentum of the Gospel were a measured 
 force, exhausting itself as it advances. And yet 
 this declension was foretold from the first : "When 
 the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the 
 earth" ?" " Because iniquity shall abound, the love 
 of many shall wax cold ." At the time of the 
 Church's history when we might perhaps be look- 
 ing (as some do look) for a mature and universal 
 kingdom of the Gospel, " the Spirit speaketh ex- 
 pressly, that some shall depart from the faith, 
 
 • 1 Cor. xi. 19. b St. Luke xviii. 8. c St. Matt. xxiv. 12. 
 
II.] OF THE CHURCH. 29 
 
 giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of 
 devils ; speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their 
 conscience seared with a hot iron d ." Though this 
 may have its incipient fulfilment in early days, it 
 still characterizes these, which are called " perilous 
 times 6 :" and we know that the forerunner of 
 Christ's coming shall be a falling away, such as 
 never was from the beginning, and, it maybe, as the 
 first ages believed, some personal revelation of the 
 wicked one, " the son of perdition." From all this it 
 seems plain that it is no more a part of the Divine 
 purpose to exhibit the Church perfect in its quali- 
 ties, than fulfilled in its number, before "the mani- 
 festation of the sons of God;" so that, as the faithful 
 are gathered out one by one, and the Church is 
 imperfect till the number is accomplished, in like 
 manner the Church on earth must needs be, as its 
 members are, subject to the conditions of mortality, 
 abased by the imperfections of the Fall. And this 
 seems to be the form under which the purpose of 
 the Divine mind is fulfilling itself. In a world 
 wherein sin and death have gained an entrance, 
 scandals and offences, it may be, are related to the 
 perfecting of the Church, as the entering of sin 
 into the world is related to the Divine mercy and 
 glory. It is the condition under which God has 
 been pleased to reveal Himself to the world in our 
 redemption. And out of this disordered and 
 d 1 Tim. iv. 1,2. e 2 Tim. iii. 1 . 
 
30 THE PROBATION [Serm. 
 
 conflicting state, there is ever being gathered a 
 perfect fruit, there is ever passing off a perfect 
 result; out of the offending multitude, an ap- 
 proved handful, — out of many called, few chosen. 
 It is a wonderful and inscrutable secret of the 
 Divine government, to which the waste of 
 nature, and the extinction of animal life, as soon 
 as given, are but faint analogies. We can 
 measure, after some sort, the direct tendency 
 of truth and goodness to certain proximate 
 ends; but the complex result of the compo- 
 sition of the great moral forces of truth and 
 falsehood, good and ill, is beyond all finite un- 
 derstanding. Some wonderful function in God's 
 spiritual kingdom has been fulfilled by the very 
 antagonism of sin and falsehood. Schismatics, 
 heresiarchs, apostates, and every offender of 
 Christ's little ones, has somehow obeyed the will 
 he has resisted : as prominent angles reflecting 
 the light they intercept. It may be, that the saints 
 must needs be winnowed by evil ; and that the 
 seemingly self-obstructing, contradicting, turbu- 
 lent phenomenon which we call Christendom, is 
 the necessary means, under the conditions of the 
 Fall, to prepare for that day when ' ' the Son of Man 
 shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather 
 out of his kingdom all things that offend, and 
 them which do iniquity:" and "the righteous shall 
 
IJ.] OF THE CHURCH. 31 
 
 shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their 
 Father." 
 
 2. Another inference we may draw is this : that 
 whatsoever, as a general law, is subservient to the 
 purpose of the Divine mind towards the Church, 
 must be, at all times, most expedient for it. This 
 may seem harder to believe in particular in- 
 stances. It is a paradox to say, that the divi- 
 sions of the Church, the East against the West, 
 the North against the South ; and the multitude 
 of open heresies, and the infinite multiplication 
 of unbridled and insidious errors ; the fastidious 
 laxity of these later days ; the excited intellectual 
 state of modern civilization ; the worship of 
 expediency ; the pride of political freedom ; the 
 refinements of self-indulgence ; the stagnation 
 of spiritual powers; the over-developement of 
 private theories, and of individual peculiarities of 
 opinion and practice ; it seems incredible, I say, at 
 first sight to affirm that all these are conspiring 
 together for the furtherance of the Divine purpose 
 in the Church. And for this reason : because the 
 purpose we are wont to assume to be the design 
 of God, is not His purpose, but our own. "We are 
 looking for an absolute manifestation of perfec- 
 tion ; He for a perfection which shall be accom- 
 plished through the laws of our probation. And 
 yet "it must needs be that offences come," is 
 
32 THE PROBATION [Serm. 
 
 riot a more unerring and absolute law, than " all 
 things work together for good to them that 
 love God." We can acknowledge them seve- 
 rally and apart, but we cannot combine them in 
 one view. 
 
 To take a particular case : I mean the state 
 of the Church of Christ among us. The land 
 seems full of offences ; they lie within the precinct 
 of the Church ; offences seem to multiply day by 
 day ; old stumbling-blocks are not taken out of the 
 way, new are cast down : there must needs be 
 heresies among us, and heresies there are : through- 
 out the land there is the voice as of a great multi- 
 tude but speaking diverse things : discipline is re- 
 laxed; the Church year by year deplores it; her na- 
 tional character seems fading away : rival Churches, 
 Priesthoods, Doctrines, and Sacraments, challenge- 
 her legitimacy. Of her own some forsake her : the 
 habit of faith in realities external to the mind is 
 weak and languid : the moral character of division 
 is fully out upon our people : it is sustained in its 
 intensity among the sects which beset the Church ; 
 it finds too ready a sympathy even within its pale. 
 They that bear us no good-will would say more : 
 and they that dwell over-much on the visible face 
 rather than the hidden purpose of our trials, are 
 tempted to believe them. But so " it must needs 
 be " : from the beginning it hath been so ; it is, 
 
II.] OF THE CHURCH. 33 
 
 and ever shall be. " There hath no temptation 
 taken" us, "but such as is common to" the 
 Church. They who complain, or are cast down at 
 these things, do they not unconsciously repine at 
 the discipline by which the Church is to be per- 
 fected, and impeach the wisdom of Christ's pro- 
 vidential rule ? Even though it be all that I have 
 said; though it be manifold worse, as indeed 
 it may be ; and perhaps it will : let all the of- 
 fences, which are even now so many, be both more 
 and greater, — " it must needs be." There is some 
 greater destiny before us for which we are not yet 
 ripe. It may be that there is in store for this 
 Church some rougher work than to dress her own 
 vineyard ; some higher lot than to open and shut 
 the fold of one people. It is doubtless expedient 
 that we should be tempted, humbled, and 
 chastised; that we should learn deeper lessons 
 in warfare with the gates of hell ; that we may 
 realize, and identify with our very life, our mysti- 
 cal union with Christ through this branch of His 
 Church Catholic, and become conscious of the 
 great gift of His presence among us ; and offer 
 ourselves up to Him through it, to be trained and 
 strengthened in obedience to the mother of our 
 regeneration. It may be, that these offences are 
 permitted, in order to work out our steadfastness, 
 to turn our passive abiding in the Church into a 
 
 D 
 
34 THE PROBATION [Serm. 
 
 conscious and energetic principle of loyalty. It 
 is just in this point that we are tried, and it is 
 there we most need a trial. 
 
 The bearing of what has been said upon our 
 own probation is very obvious. First, in teaching 
 us to realize the greatness of our personal respon- 
 sibility ; " Woe to that man by whom the offence 
 cometh. It were better for him that a millstone 
 were hanged about his neck, and that he were 
 drowned in the depth of the sea f ." Be we what 
 and where we may, there is a great context of 
 God's providence all round about us, which we 
 dare not rend. That we are both where we are, and 
 what we are, is a revelation of His purpose to us, 
 and in that lot we must stand : our probation is 
 here. "Who can say whether He will accept us on 
 probation in any other path ? We may not lay the 
 scene of it elsewhere ; we cannot merge our re- 
 sponsibility in the probation of others, nor of the 
 Church ; we must die and be judged alone ; "we 
 must all stand before the judgment-seat of Christ, 
 that every one may receive the things done in the 
 body*." 
 
 Let us therefore remember how pregnant with 
 unknown consequences is every single act and 
 word ; — there is something in each that passes 
 into eternity, and has a power greater and more 
 penetrating than we can .ever know till all shall be 
 
 f St. Matt, xviii. 6. ?2 Cor. v. 10. 
 
II.] OF THE CHURCH. 35 
 
 fulfilled. In our lifetime we can see only the least 
 portion of their effects ; " some men's sins are open 
 beforehand , going before to judgment, and some men 
 they follow after b ." It is after men are dead that 
 their works begin to be known. For instance, how 
 little did the authors of heresy and schism foresee, 
 that it would one day come to pass, that all truth 
 should, by their act, be overcast with distorting 
 shadows, and even the unity and visibleness of 
 the Church be plausibly denied ! How little did 
 the age in which they lived know of what we see ! 
 They saw only the casting of the evil seed ; we the 
 bitter and accumulated harvest. Or again : Take 
 impure or infidel writers, such as have blighted 
 the literature of England and France in the last 
 hundred and fifty years : what unknown worlds of 
 lust and of unbelief, ever multiplying, generation 
 after generation, what rendings of the body of 
 Christ, what revilement of holy things, have 
 teemed from the span of their miserable life ! what 
 multitudes for whom Christ died have perished 
 by the offence of one long since gone to his ac- 
 count ! While he suffers in the world unseen, he 
 sins still on earth. He is a partaker of other 
 men's sins, and has a twofold being; ever suf- 
 fering, and ever sinning : age by age burdening 
 him with a heavier condemnation, multiplying 
 the woe in which he is tormented. " It had been 
 
 h 1 Tim. v. 24. 
 D 2 
 
36 THE PROBATION [Serm. 
 
 better for that man if he had never been born." 
 Alas for us, then, if we through ignorance -which 
 is not guiltless, in our short day on earth, shall put 
 " light for darkness, and darkness for light ;" if we 
 teach false things for true, or reject true as false; 
 or make doubtful things necessary, or treat neces- 
 sary things as doubtful ; or destroy men's fears of 
 heresy, or teach them to make light of schism, or 
 give occasion to either; yea, if we "break one of 
 the least of" God's " commandments, and teach 
 men so." 
 
 "Who can foretell what shall be said of us, when 
 this our busy day is over ? "We are always affect- 
 ing other men with a power which, could we fully 
 know it, would make us tremble. Our thought- 
 less actions, random words, unguarded hints, our 
 very tones, even our gestures, in our most relaxed 
 hours, leave impressions on other men, such as we 
 neither design nor imagine. We may learn it in 
 ourselves. Who is there but can trace back 
 thoughts, wishes, imaginations, habits, or even the 
 bias of a whole life, to some act or word of another? 
 It may be, they were unconscious at the time, and 
 to this hour have never known the powerful im- 
 pulse they gave to our destinies. Perhaps some 
 of our strongest inclinations are derived from a 
 word we heard in childhood, or an event that met 
 us on the threshold of life in a season of trial ; or 
 
II.] OF THE CHUKCH. 37 
 
 of secret excitement, when the vividness of the 
 mind makes it take deep impressions from trivial 
 causes ; or at a moment when our character was 
 balancing in suspense, and doubtfully inclining to- 
 wards its after determination. And how slight a 
 cause is sufficient for the worst result. The in- 
 jection of a solitary doubt has issued in settled 
 infidelity ; an impure tale has wrought itself out 
 into the defilements of an unchaste life ; an irreve- 
 rent quotation of Holy Writ has possessed a man's 
 mind with haunting thoughts nearly akin to blas- 
 phemy ; a light mention of sin has made men bold 
 to do, what before they hardly dared to think ; a 
 slighting comment on devoted men, or on high 
 purposes of self-denial, has slackened energies and 
 checked aspirations, which might have won a great 
 reward. These, and the like offences, are ever 
 passing off, so to speak, from the life and the lips 
 of sinful and inconsiderate men. Lapides sunt 
 in via — stones of stumbling; tempters of the 
 brethren ; destroyers of " those for whom Christ 
 died." It will be a fearful retrospect for the man 
 that must look back on some companion of his boy- 
 hood, some early friend, some brother in Christ, 
 over whom he has wielded an evil influence. He 
 will remember, it may be, when his friend was pure, 
 and himself over-familiar with sin : he remembers, 
 perhaps, the place, and the day, and the hour of the 
 
38 THE PROBATION [Serm. 
 
 day, and who was by, and what he did, and that he 
 was neither ignorant nor taken unawares, but sin- 
 ned in the clear light and with a resolved heart ; 
 and that through him another fell, and has never 
 arisen again : though he, the tempter, be now 
 penitent, the tempted is still unchanged. A single 
 word was enough to corrupt, but whole years of 
 entreaty and of tears have not prevailed to reclaim 
 the fallen. Awful retrospect in this life ! and 
 what shall it be in that state where is only the 
 " fearful looking for of fiery indignation ?" and 
 what in the abode " where the worm dieth not, 
 and the fire is not quenched ?" 
 
 2. In the next place, this view of the subject, 
 may teach us the danger of suffering to exist in us 
 the inward habits which lead to offences ; such, I 
 mean, as self-dependance, irreverence, disobedience 
 to the authority immediately set over us ; discon- 
 tent at the lot, and impatience at the probation, 
 which God has appointed for us. And also others 
 iess noted and watched against ; such as a private 
 spirit in judging and acting, which, in matters of 
 defined obligation, is, ethically, disobedience to 
 the Church and to Christ ; self-contemplation, in 
 which we forget others ; self-pleasing, by which we 
 endanger others ; a false conscience, which makes 
 what we wish appear to be our duty ; a tongue 
 which utters crude opinions, and precipitate objec- 
 
II.] OF THE CHURCH. 39 
 
 tions ; prejudices, which alienate men by habitual 
 misunderstandings ; a skilfulness in making worse 
 constructions of other men's acts seem like truth ; 
 hard censures of states of character in which we 
 do not sympathize ; unfeeling disregard of trials 
 from which we happily are free ; a fancied zeal for 
 truth, which marks a censorious or a controversial, 
 spirit. We are both so unwary and, even when 
 most guarded, so transparent, that we cannot har- 
 bour these spots in our hearts without betraying 
 them to the hurt of others. However careful we 
 may be, the faults of our minds will breathe out, so 
 long as they go unchastened. There is no safety 
 for us, but in correcting them at the very core. 
 
 3. And lastly, we may learn that there is no 
 way of correcting them but by the expulsive 
 power of habits with which they cannot co-exist. 
 There is nothing that will perfectly discharge us 
 of the self-will by which offences come, except a 
 habit of Uniform obedience. Nothing will so re- 
 frain us from words or acts out of harmony with 
 the Divine will, and misleading to other men, as 
 obedience to a superior ; to us, this superior is the 
 Church, in which we were born again. We shall 
 never be disinfected of the spirit of self-pleasing 
 and inconsiderateness, except we be endowed with 
 larger gifts of charity. " Fratres, inter heec scan- 
 dala unum est remedium. Ne male sentias defra- 
 
40 THE PROBATION [Sebm. 
 
 tre tuo. Humiliter esto quod vis eum esse, et ngn 
 putabis eum esse quod non es l ." There is a 
 blessed simplicity in charity, which covereth all 
 things, and hopeth all things. Its very blindness 
 to a brother's faults gives to its touch so delicate 
 a keenness, as to detect the faintest traces of ex- 
 cuse, and the lightest shadow of a good intention. 
 It has a happy credulity in believing men better 
 than they are, and by believing to make them so. 
 It has a manifold cunning in combining favourable 
 improbabilities, and devising for erring brethren 
 fairer interpretations than they could imagine for 
 themselves. Obedience and charity ; these two 
 are our safeguard in an age of scandal : they are 
 the divine antagonist to that spirit by which of- 
 fences come, for they are the Spirit of Christ. 
 " Let us not judge one another any more : but 
 judge this rather, that no man put a stumbling- 
 block, or an occasion to fall, in his brother's way." 
 Yea, let us love unity, and desire each other's 
 steadfastness ; and we shall " follow after the 
 things which make for peace, and things whereby 
 one may edify another." 
 
 The probation of every one of us is drawn to so 
 fine a texture, that we may well be fearful over 
 ourselves. So perhaps every age has said before ; 
 each one thinking its own trials greater than were 
 ever known since the beginning. We may be 
 
 ' St. Augustin. 
 
II.] OF THE. CHURCH. 41 
 
 only as our forefathers : nay, in the instant pres- 
 sure of hard choices and great perplexities, it may 
 be, they were far more tried than we. And yet 
 we seem to be at a point which is full of long- 
 drawn consequences for the hereafter. Offences 
 abound, yea, and are multiplied, and tokens of of- 
 fences yet to come hang upon the horizon, and 
 we know not what may be ascending below it. 
 Day by day new shadows rise out of quarters 
 which before were fair : new agencies and powers 
 which were for a time held back, seem like the 
 stayed winds of heaven, to be coming down upon 
 the Church. Past ages have bequeathed their 
 offences to us ; we have added our own. It may 
 be, that these latter times shall grow more and 
 more perilous till the end come, when, " except 
 those days be shortened, there should no flesh be 
 saved." The refiner's fire seems to be fanned to a 
 piercing heat ; and He is setting us nearer and 
 nearer within its range. It may be that the 
 Prophet's words must needs be fulfilled, in our 
 days. " Some of them of understanding shall 
 fall, to try them, and to purge them, and to make 
 them white, even to the time of the end k ;" and 
 " Many shall be purified, and made white, and 
 tried ; but the wicked shall do wickedly : and 
 none of the wicked shall understand ; but the 
 wise shall understand 1 ." 
 
 k Dan. xi. 35. Ibid. xii. 10. 
 
SERMON III. 
 
 THE WORK APPOINTED US. 
 March 12, 1843. 
 
 St. John xviii. 37. 
 
 " To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the 
 world." 
 
 In these words of our Lord to Pilate there is 
 something peculiarly awful. There was surely 
 never any one who bore less the outward semblance 
 of a king, than the Son of Man at that hour. He 
 stood in the judgment-hall, in the midst of the 
 powers of this world, forsaken and desolate, bro- 
 ken with sorrows, watching, and agony, a very 
 spectacle of weakness and humiliation. Yet never 
 did the assertion of a kingly title carry its own 
 attestation with a more commanding majesty. 
 When to our eyes He might seem most baffled 
 and powerless, He was fulfilling, with the most 
 perfect accomplishment, the mysterious design of 
 His Kingdom. "My kingdom is not of this world : 
 if my kingdom were of this world, then would 
 my servants fight, that I should not be delivered 
 to the Jews : but now is my kingdom not from 
 
44 THE WORK APPOINTED US. [Serm. 
 
 hence. Pilate therefore said unto him : Art thou 
 a King then ? Jesus answered, thou sayest that I 
 am a King. To this end was I born, and for this 
 cause came I into the world, that I should bear 
 witness unto the truth." 
 
 Our Lord here declares that there was one great 
 design for the fulfilment of which He assumed 
 our nature, and became a sojourner and an out- 
 cast in His own world: for that one end and pur- 
 pose He took our manhood, was born, was subject 
 to His parents, was baptized of John's baptism, 
 taught, suffered, and died. It is this, if we may 
 reverently speak it, which gives such a perfect 
 unity to the history of His life. A consciousness 
 of this one end and cause of His coming, was 
 always upon Him ; it wrought upon Him as the 
 perfect law which controlled His whole being. 
 Even in childhood it began to manifest itself. 
 " How is it that ye sought me : wist ye not that 
 I must be about my Father's business a ?" And 
 afterwards, " My meat is to do the will of him 
 that sent me, and to finish his workV So alto- 
 gether, we are told, did it carry Him out of the 
 common life of men, that His friends " went out 
 to lay hands on him, for they said, He is beside 
 himself c ." 
 
 This declaration of our Lord naturally suggests 
 the question, Whether are we severally born into 
 
 a St. Luke ii. 49. b St. John vi. 34. c St. Mark iii. 21. 
 
III.] THE WORK APPOINTED US. 45 
 
 the world, in any sense or measure for the fulfil- 
 ment of an end foreseen and fore-determined, in 
 the providential order of God's kingdom ; or was 
 this a part of the supernatural dispensation, of 
 which He was the object and centre ? Does this 
 belong to Him in that aspect, so to speak, of His 
 life, which is so remote as hardly to afford example 
 to us ? I mean as a divine Person, the subject of 
 prophecy — the only Mediator and Propitiation for 
 the sins of the world. Or may we believe that, in 
 thus declaring that there was a certain and fore- 
 determined end which He came to fulfil, He did 
 but declare, in the highest and most perfect form, 
 the law which orders and disposes of us all ; that 
 in this, though His work on earth was inseparable 
 from His Divine nature, He is an example to us ? 
 Although it is manifest that in one sense we cannot 
 be " pure as He is pure," nevertheless in that very 
 point He is set before us as an example : so it 
 may be, that in the truth of His humanity He is 
 proposed to us as an example of the particular 
 appointments of God, and of the entire self-dedi- 
 cation with which we ought to obey them. Is 
 there, then, reason to believe that we are sent into 
 the world for any designed end, and can we arrive 
 at such a knowledge of the particular will of God 
 towards us in this point, as to admit of our saying 
 in a lowered and secondary, but true sense, " To 
 
46 THE WORK APPOINTED US. [Serm. 
 
 this end was I born, and for this cause came I into 
 the world?" 
 
 It would appear that we may : it would seem also 
 to be of the highest practical influence that we 
 should take this view of our lot and probation in 
 life. 
 
 1 . A particular appointment, ordering the life 
 of individual men, appears to be inseparable from 
 the idea of God's providential government over the 
 world. As that government is carried on upon a 
 perfect general scheme, so it must necessarily in- 
 volve an ordering and disposal of particular agents. 
 Of this, the history of the Old Testament is a 
 direct proof throughout. For what is it but the 
 key to the providence of God in the world, and 
 an account of the Divine government, written 
 under the guidance of the Divine Governor ? In 
 that history we see how God not only disposes of 
 nations, but orders the path of every several 
 man ; not only in institutions, such as the 
 Church and Polity of Israel ; not only in the suc- 
 cession of priests and kings, and in the extraor- 
 dinary calling of prophets ; but in the selection of 
 individual agents, as Joseph, Saul, David, Jero- 
 boam, Cyrus, Zacharius, Simeon, and others. 
 
 This, taken alone, would be enough to interpret 
 to us the dispensation under which we are living. 
 But we have a still clearer light. Our Lord Him- 
 
III.] THE "WORK APPOINTED US. 47 
 
 self has declared to us that "the kingdom of 
 heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, 
 who called his own servants, and delivered unto 
 them his goods : and unto one he gave five 
 talents, to another two, and to another one ; to 
 every man according to his several ability*." " For 
 the Son of Man is as a man taking a far jour- 
 ney, who left his house and gave authority to his 
 servants, and to every man his work"." And as the 
 kingdom of heaven, like a net let down into the 
 sea and taking of all kinds, incloses nations and 
 families within its folds; it follows, that every 
 member of that kingdom, whether called to spi- 
 ritual or secular offices, or to the retired duties 
 of a domestic life, is truly charged with a trust 
 and a work, which is to him the end for which he 
 lives ; or — as we are wont to say, unconsciously 
 recognising the great law of God's kingdom — his 
 vocation and his calling. 
 
 2. It seems also necessarily to follow, that, if 
 this be so, and if our probation lies, as our Lord's 
 parables teach us, in the particular trust or calling 
 we have received, we must needs be able to dis- 
 cern what is our particular vocation ; to what end 
 in life the will of God is disposing us. If our 
 duty he in that direction, and if our probation be 
 in following the guidance of God by the particu- 
 lar path of our duty, it must be so ; there must be 
 
 d St. Matt. xxv. 14, 15. e St. Mark xiii. 34. 
 
48 THE WORK APPOINTED US. [Serm. 
 
 some sufficient indications to those who diligently 
 seek them, whereby they may assure themselves 
 that they are fulfilling, in God's kingdom, the work 
 which He designs them to accomplish. Although 
 we shall perhaps never fully know, until all things 
 are revealed, what is the end to which our whole 
 being on earth has been subordinated and over- 
 ruled, yet it is most certain that such a design 
 exists in the manifold wisdom of God ; that there 
 is an end and cause for which we are what we are. 
 In a subject of so great extent, and descending, 
 as it necessarily must, into details so minute, and 
 of a kind so personal and various, it is obviously 
 impossible to lay down any rules which shall be 
 sufficient to guide all men in weighing and deci- 
 ding on, these indications of God's particular pro- 
 vidence to them. All I can attempt to do is to 
 suggest some particular instances in explanation 
 of what has been said. 
 
 We may be sure then that we are ordained by 
 the Divine will to that calling in the world, which 
 shall most certainly promote our sanctification, 
 and the attainment of everlasting life ; and more- 
 over to that which shall most directly lead to the 
 enlargement and edification of His Church, and to 
 the salvation of those for whom Christ died. So 
 much is true generally, and of all men. 
 
 But, in particular, we may most strongly pre- 
 
III.] THE WORK APPOINTED US. 49 
 
 sume the state in which we actually find ourselves 
 to be the calling wherewith we are called ; or that 
 to which our state naturally leads ; or that which 
 is nearest to it ; which needs least effort, or transi- 
 tion to attain it. Sometimes a man is so visibly 
 sought out by persons or events, which, as it were, 
 embody and represent the providence of God to 
 him, that he cannot doubt that it is God who is 
 calling him. The initiative is visibly in God's 
 hands : and he does but follow. Sometimes the 
 choice is made for us by the act of others ; and 
 - our will is forestalled, and moulded by early cir- 
 cumstances ; sometimes a man's own natural 
 powers mark out his work for him ; sometimes 
 his attainments ; sometimes the strange facilities 
 which open, and invite him into one path rather 
 than any other ; sometimes the difficulties which 
 spring up on every side, as a man turns himself, 
 till he has set his face in one direction ; sometimes 
 predominant and unaccountable longings of the 
 mind ; or strong convictions of duty overruling 
 wishes for some path more flattering and grati- 
 fying to a man's hopes and aspirations ; or again, 
 the exigencies of the days in which he lives, or 
 unexpected junctures of events, and the like ; all 
 these, and many more tokens which are hid in 
 the secret economy of God's particular providence, 
 do wonderfully reveal to us at times the will of 
 
THE WORK APPOINTED US. [Sbrm. 
 
 God, — as if He were guiding us with His eye : 
 and we seem to understand by a sort of intuition 
 clearer than all reasoning, or rather by faith, 
 which is stronger and more persuasive even than 
 such intuitions, tbat this or that particular calling 
 is the line that God wills us to follow, and there- 
 fore the end for which we are henceforth to live. 
 
 In this sense, then, it seems we may conclude 
 that in the life of our Lord we have an example 
 of the most perfect human obedience, guided and 
 quickened by an unintermitted consciousness that 
 He was fulfilling the work for which He came into 
 the world ; and that such is the law of His King- 
 dom, beginning from its Divine head, and running 
 down through every member to the lowest ; that 
 the most perfect obedience of regenerate men, is 
 to follow with entire faith and obedience the lead- 
 ing of God, as it is revealed to them in their 
 particular calling; and that this probation lies 
 in faithfully seeking for the tokens of God's 
 guidance, especially in the choice of their pro- 
 fession or vocation in life. 
 
 I would now set aside the higher aspect of this 
 question; I mean, the religious obligation of 
 studying and following the leadings of God's pro- 
 vidence, and of the rewards which are promised 
 to such as faithfully obey the intimations of His 
 will, and rather consider it in its relation to our 
 
III.] THE WORK APPOINTED US. 51 
 
 practice, and in its bearings upon our choice of 
 a particular course in life. 
 
 It may be said almost in one word, that the cri- 
 sis and turning point of our probation lies in de- 
 liberately choosing, and following out, some one 
 aim, as the end to which God has called us. About 
 men who have so chosen their path, there is an 
 unity of purpose, a singleness of heart, a concen- 
 tration of all moral and intellectual powers, an in- 
 tensity of decision, an energy in counsel and action, 
 a superiority both to opposition and to allure- 
 ments, which at once bespeaks a strength greater 
 than their own. Sometimes, and in some mea- 
 sure, this may be traced to the native powers of the 
 character : but almost always it will be found to 
 result from the steadiness, and determination, and 
 consequent enlargement of the natural powers, re- 
 sulting from the fixedness and distinctness of their 
 aim and purpose. Even men of the commonest 
 natural powers, by the force of a choice well made, 
 often accomplish the greatest works. What they 
 have not in intellectual gifts, is compensated for 
 in the moral habit. It is wonderful to see for how 
 many high mental endowments, mere decision and 
 calm perseverance will make up. Whatsoever 
 powers such men possess, are united, and there- 
 fore concentrated and multiplied. It sometimes 
 seems as if the human will alone, (when in har- 
 
 e 2 
 
52 THE WORK APPOINTED US. [Serm. 
 
 mony with God's will,) could do any thing ; as if it 
 could put forth out of its own depths all manner 
 of endowments. Even those which are not, either 
 by nature or by acquirement, in the character, seem 
 to wait upon a man who lives not to do his own 
 will, but the will of Him that sent him. And it is 
 not for us to say how such men may be gifted for 
 the work to which they are called. We have the 
 Apostles for an example, and multitudes in after- 
 times of the Church, unlettered men, and weak 
 women, for continual proofs that with those who 
 are in their lot in God's kingdom, there is One who 
 worketh in them to " will and to do of His good 
 pleasure." It seems the very law of God's dealings 
 to choose " the weak things of the world to con- 
 found the mighty; " to make " perfect His strength 
 in weakness ;" and it is remarkable how many who 
 have done the greatest work in edifying and in- 
 structing the Church, and have left upon it the 
 deepest and most lasting impression of their cha- 
 racters, have been noted in early as in private life 
 for slowness of understanding, smallness of natu- 
 ral gifts, or positive imperfections. Oftentimes 
 they have been, as we say, the last men we should 
 have chosen : but David was chosen last of all. 
 Their greatness lay hid in their moral powers, 
 which, when fully ripe, asserted a supremacy over 
 the mere endowments of the mind, and exerted 
 
III.] THE WORK APPOINTED US. 53 
 
 an irresistible force. When once they had found 
 their line, so to speak, in God's kingdom in that 
 direction, they carried all before them : nothing 
 seemed able to withstand their advance. As 
 occasions arose, they put forth new faculties to 
 meet them : as difficulties multiplied, so did their 
 powers. They seemed able to cope with any thing, 
 and to subdue every thing to themselves. 
 
 If there be any intelligible cause to be assigned 
 for such facts, any, I mean, subject to our under- 
 standing and to our control ; it is simply this : 
 such men had chosen one aim in life, believing 
 that it was God who called them to it ; they set 
 up that one object before them, and, in one word, 
 they lived for it. They loved life as the condition 
 of that which they loved better than life itself; to 
 them "to live" was "Christ." They did not doubt 
 or fear to say, " To this end was I born, and for 
 this cause came I into the world." 
 
 The importance of this subject will be brought 
 out still more strongly by a contrast. We shall 
 find almost universally that they who neglect or 
 violate this great law of obedience to the provi- 
 dential government of God, either live at random, 
 wasting their powers and life without point or 
 aim, or take some self-willed and dangerous 
 course. 
 
 We often see men of high intellectual gifts, 
 
54 THE WORK APPOINTED US. [Serm. 
 
 with much cultivation of mind, and many attain- 
 ments, pass through life, and do absolutely nothing. 
 Men of whom the greatest expectations have been 
 formed, often seem to grow less and less mature 
 as they grow older. Again, there are some who 
 can do all things, but do nothing well ; who know 
 something of all subjects, but know none tho- 
 roughly; have a multitude of aims, but reach 
 none ; and a multitude of undertakings, but 
 fulfil nothing. This is true of all they touch ; 
 their studies, devotions, rules of self-discipline, 
 schemes of benevolence, and the like. They 
 propose to themselves to live for so many objects, 
 that they end in living for none at all. There is 
 no one aim to which all other things are made to 
 bend, and therefore their whole life is without 
 point or meaning. 
 
 The cause of this is either a want of faith 
 simply to obey God with earnestness in the lot 
 where they are originally placed, or a want of 
 moral force to strengthen the will against the 
 solicitations of vanity, ambition, self-indulg- 
 ence, and the like. They cannot withstand pre- 
 sent popularity, and they squander themselves to 
 purchase a momentary reputation ; or they cannot 
 resist the temptation to be thought liberal, or 
 accomplished, or refined, or versatile and com- 
 prehensive in their powers and attainments; or 
 
HI.] THE WORK APPOINTED US. 55 
 
 they cannot brace themselves steadily to pursue 
 some one aim at the cost of self-denial, worldly 
 discouragement, loss of ease, and the brighter 
 scenes of life; or to forego excitement, and 
 visions of remote enterprizes, and to settle them- 
 selves patiently to some laborious and common- 
 place line of duty. And therefore it follows that 
 their whole life passes away as if they had come 
 into this world for no end or purpose. They die 
 and leave behind them nothing. 
 
 Or, what is worse, they deliberately, though un- 
 consciously, choose a wrong line. Through some 
 warp or fault of the mind, they commit them- 
 selves to callings and professions out of which, 
 after the loss of years beyond all price, disap- 
 pointment and failure drive them at last to re- 
 trace their steps. A false choice often costs a 
 man half his life. No greatness of intellectual 
 powers, no scholastic attainments, no worldly 
 advantages, will compensate for a rash step at the 
 outset. Even those that best recover themselves, 
 are not what they would have been. Many never 
 recover themselves at all ; one false choice leads 
 to another: when they attempt to begin over 
 again, they cannot find the place from which 
 they set out ; they have lost the point of sight. 
 They pass from one wrong path to another, and 
 a succession of changes is generally a succession 
 of mistakes. 
 
56 THE WORK APPOINTED US. [Serm. 
 
 But the worst case of all is where a man, under 
 the dominion of some characteristic fault, such as 
 ambition, or love of power, pleasure, or gain, either 
 deliberately enters upon paths to which God not 
 only does not invite him, but even forbids him to 
 approach ; or having entered them, through error 
 at -first, afterwards wilfully perseveres. History 
 is full of such instances. Our everyday life pre- 
 sents many an example ; and what sight can be 
 more pitiable than that of a man striving to gain 
 or to keep a position in God's world, to which 
 God has not invited him? What repulses and 
 disappointments, what falls and humiliations, do 
 men earn for themselves by struggling for places 
 and functions in God's kingdom which He has 
 not allotted to them. " Woe unto him that 
 striveth with his Maker ! Let the potsherd strive 
 with the potsherds of the earthV What can a 
 man gain by refusing the place which the Lord 
 of the kingdom assigns him, and by thrusting 
 himself upon unbidden services ? What but 
 failure, and bitterness, and overthrow? "They 
 shall build, but I will throw down." All their 
 excitement, and toil, and busy fretfulness, and all 
 their great and high sounding schemes come, in the 
 end, to nothing : nay, sometimes to worse : they 
 end in the decline of personal integrity; in the 
 deterioration of the man ; they form in him the 
 
 £ Isaiah xlv. 9. 
 
III.] THE WORK APPOINTED US. 57 
 
 habits of restlessness, repining; and disobedience, 
 and train him to crave after things denied to him, 
 to murmur at the providence of God, and to put 
 himself in opposition to the government of the 
 Divine will. 
 
 And this is not only true of men who go wrong 
 on a large scale, such as the prominent characters 
 in the history of nations, whose parts are laid in 
 the turbulent times of the world : it may be our 
 own case : for every state of life is ordered by 
 the same divine Governor. Even our unmarked 
 and homely life may be the scene of as direct a 
 variance of our will with the will of God, as the 
 life of Pharaoh or of Saul. 
 
 We see tokens of this conflict running through 
 a man's whole career. It is the reason of every 
 failure, and the secret of every disappointment. 
 Sometimes even apparent success will prove all 
 the more visibly that a man is at variance with 
 the order of Providence. Sometimes men prosper 
 as they grow worse, and grow worse as they grow 
 more prosperous. And the place of their ambi- 
 tion, the post they have longed for, is reserved 
 for the more conspicuous chastisement of their 
 original perversity. Their very success turns to 
 an exposure, and a retribution. 
 
 Let what has been said suffice to shew the 
 great practical importance of this subject. Our 
 
58 THE "WOEK APPOINTED US. [Serm. 
 
 lives are chiefly determined for good or ill by the 
 first choice we make upon the very threshold: 
 and our choice will be wise, and safe, just in the 
 measure in which we repress the importunate 
 solicitations of our own minds, and follow in 
 faith what seems to us to be the leading of God's 
 providential hand. 
 
 With many of us this act of choice is past. For 
 good or ill it is over : to some of us it is irrevo- 
 cable — I mean, to us who have received Holy 
 Orders. We cannot choose again ; but we may 
 learn much from what I have endeavoured to ex- 
 press. We may learn to look more fixedly, year 
 by year, on the one aim of our life ; to cast off 
 unnecessary burdens ; to draw ourselves within 
 straiter lines, and to five more singly, and with 
 fuller dedication of all we have and all we are, to 
 the service of the Church. 
 
 But I had rather speak to those who have this 
 one great choice still to make. 
 
 Brethren, you are come to the point where 
 your life must soon take its determination for 
 ever. Hitherto you have been walking in a vain 
 show ; a little while, and your life will be turned 
 to a reality. A change will soon have passed on 
 you, which you have not imagination now to con- 
 ceive. Your present life will seem to you to be 
 a very dream, a playing at life rather than living. 
 
III.] THE WORK APPOINTED US. 59 
 
 For some of you the choice of your future path 
 (though not actually made) is already predisposed. 
 Hereditary place, the burdensome stewardship of 
 this world's wealth, bonds and ties of blood, the 
 wise authority of parents, have already determined 
 for you the position and career in which you 
 shall glorify God. Be that position, be that 
 career what it may be, there is one governing law, 
 which must alike control you and the most con- 
 secrated servant of God. No rank, or wealth, or 
 secular dignities ; no high office, or great employ- 
 ments of state ; no successful administration of 
 civil functions; will set you free from the law 
 which binds you to live absolutely and supremely 
 for the glory of God. The civil state (though 
 not the highest in God's kingdom) may never- 
 theless be so related to the mystical body of 
 Christ, as they that ministered to Him on earth 
 were related to His Divine person. Personal 
 holiness, therefore, and the devotion of our best 
 and chiefest powers to the service of God, is not 
 the duty of the Priesthood only, but of the whole 
 Church. In this the layman is bound no less 
 than we. Nonne et Laid Sacerdotes ? Scriptum 
 est, Regnum quoque nos et sacerdotes Deo et Patri 
 suo fecit s . " Ye are bought with a price, there- 
 fore glorify God in your bodies, and in your spirits, 
 which are God's\" In this there is but one 
 
 b Tertullian. De exhort. Castit. vii. h 1 Cor. vi. 20. 
 
60 THE WORK APPOINTED US. [Serm. 
 
 law for all members of His kingdom. The ex- 
 ample and the blood-shedding of Christ bind all 
 alike. 
 
 Of those among you that are still free to 
 decide, I would fain ask, On what principle, on 
 what view of life, have you been preparing to 
 choose your future profession ? 
 
 The example of our Lord Jesus Christ not only 
 lays down for us a rule of self-devotion ; it reveals 
 to us, further, what is the highest work to -which 
 the powers and life of man can be devoted. The 
 most perfect office in this world of sin, is that to 
 which He was consecrated — the Priesthood of the 
 atonement, the ministry of reconciliation, which 
 He has entrusted to His Church. So far as the 
 redeemed could partake in the work of their 
 Redeemer, He associated His Apostles with Him- 
 self. They partook of the Divine commission 
 which He had received of the Father : and in 
 them He associated with Himself all who should 
 succeed Him to the end of the world. There is 
 no other office so nearly related to His Cross, 
 His Sacrifice, and His Throne ; none which so 
 takes up into itself the whole being of him that 
 bears it ; none so near to the work of minister- 
 ing angels ; none so real, changeless, or blissful, 
 nor in so full a harmony with the will of God in 
 Christ Jesus. 
 
III.] THE WORK APPOINTED US. 61 
 
 But if this be so — and none can deny it — then 
 you must needs have some well weighed and 
 sufficient reason for declining so high a calling. 
 Let no man, indeed, seek it for hire, or take 
 it by constraint. It is true all men are not 
 invited to it : "No man taketh this honour 
 unto himself." But consider well why you turn 
 away from the highest end to which a man can 
 dedicate himself. Ask yourselves, " Is it safe for 
 me to know this, and still to go on feeling no 
 desire for it ? Who can tell but it may be with 
 me, in this matter, as it was with them, in whose 
 sight He had no form nor comeliness that they 
 should desire Him ? May there not be scales 
 upon my eyes ?" Is it that secular dignities and 
 callings seem fair, and bright ; full of promise to 
 you ; and the priesthood of Christ cheerless, and 
 straitened by self-denial ? Are you feeding your- 
 selves with hopes of elevation, or enrichment, or 
 the pure happiness of a blameless and well-fur- 
 nished life ; and does the thought of forsaking all 
 these to follow Christ make you turn from Him, 
 and go away sorrowful ? 
 
 Truly I can advise no one to choose the 
 pastoral office as one among many professions. 
 It will be found a false cast for the man that 
 loves quiet, or the world, or himself. They who 
 take it must look for little rest, and a small hire ; 
 
62 THE WORK APPOINTED US. [Sehm. 
 
 for anxiety, and contradiction, and the Cross. 
 No one knows the secret toils and anxieties 
 which wait on Holy Orders, but they who have 
 tasted of them. You will forsake not only the 
 world and its gifts, but also many alluring and 
 innocent pleasures. You will choose hardness, 
 a narrow income, perhaps a solitary home, many 
 slights from a wealthy and prosperous age, with 
 vexation and disappointments; much conflict with 
 perverse and unreasonable men; peradventure 
 loss of friends, false constructions, suspicions, re- 
 proaches. But these, too, are light dissuasives 
 compared with the unremitting sense of responsi- 
 bility, with the perpetual consciousness that souls 
 are entrusted to your hands ; for " if it happen 
 that any take hurt or hindrance by reason of 
 your negligence, ye know the greatness of the 
 fault, and the horrible punishment that will 
 ensue 1 ." 
 
 Let a man therefore count well the cost, lest he 
 venture upon it in precipitation and by excite- 
 ment. But let him also take heed lest God be really 
 calling him, and he unwilling to obey. There is 
 an unwillingness which forbids Holy Orders on 
 pain of sin ; but there is an unwillingness which 
 does not discharge us from the work of the 
 Priesthood. There was one who arose and fled 
 
 1 Office for Ordering of Priests. 
 
III.] THE WORK APPOINTED US. 63 
 
 to Tarshish, but he was overtaken in his flight. 
 So will it be with you if the Lord of that prophet 
 have cast His eye on you for His service. It 
 takes some time to bring our will under the yoke. 
 It is a hard thing to die to ourselves, even though 
 we be convinced that a pastor's life is the work 
 to which He is drawing us ; there are abundant 
 unchastened longings, and lingering regrets, that 
 make men hang back, and hope that they may 
 still be spared. Life and the world look brighter 
 and fairer as we seem drawn away from them : 
 they are never so longed for as when the lot is 
 cast that we must forsake them. But let us take 
 care lest this be a criminal slackness of heart. 
 Do we not owe ourselves to Him? Has He 
 not kept some of you pure from childhood ; 
 and does He not seem thereby to claim you 
 for His own? Has He not brought some of 
 you to a repentance which is as a second 
 -regeneration ; do you not owe yourselves in 
 restitution for the past ? It may be some have 
 spoken undutiful things of His Church, and 
 great things of themselves; or they have in- 
 dulged themselves in assuming a higher tone 
 than others in practice and opinion; and have 
 they not thereby, as it were, pledged themselves 
 to greater self-denials, and to an austerer dis- 
 cipline ? 
 
64 THE WORK APPOINTED US. [Serm. 
 
 Here then is a test to prove the reality of their 
 professions. Nothing so tries a man whether he 
 be in earnest, or no : nothing so searches and un- 
 masks us, as to watch for souls among those who 
 must give account. We may profess great things 
 cheaply, but it costs dear to do and to suffer 
 them. This is a wholesome correction for an age 
 of controversial theology. One might almost 
 say that no man has a right to assume a free- 
 dom of giving opinions, until he has obtained 
 it with a great sum in doing the work of the 
 Church. 
 
 But besides these particular reasons, there is 
 one which, at this moment, appeals to us with a 
 most constraining force. The Church calls to 
 you with a voice not to be denied. The work of 
 regaining a wayward, luxurious, disunited people; 
 of recovering alienated millions to her fold ; of re- 
 converting to God, and to His Christ, whole towns 
 and cities, corrupt beyond words, and defiled be- 
 yond imagination — oppresses her utmost strength. 
 She asks not for civil privileges, nor for 
 learned works, nor for gifts of money, nor for any 
 external and material aids (though all these in 
 their place are good and useful); but for men who 
 will give up the world for the love of God ; who 
 will live no more unto themselves, but unto Him 
 that died for them and rose again. She demands 
 
III.] THE WORK APPOINTED US. 65- 
 
 the living strength of her children, guided and 
 quickened by charity and self-denial. It is the 
 wages of your spiritual nurture that she asks 
 of you in recompense. She seeks " not yours, 
 but you ;" your whole life and being, with all 
 its thoughts, affections, and energies, that they 
 may be weaned from the softness, glitter, and 
 allurements of the world, and wholly joined to 
 the powers of redemption, which through her are 
 working out the perfection of God's elect. In 
 the solemn Ember season now past, some who 
 have been with you from boyhood, companions 
 of your every day, and of all your studies and 
 pursuits, have been preparing themselves to re- 
 ceive the light yoke of His service. At this very 
 hour they are recording their vows at the Altar 
 of God. Their example is a bidding and an in- 
 vitation to you. Choose as they have chosen. 
 It is a choice you never shall repent. You will 
 find it full of recompense ; full of calm joy in life, 
 and, if you be faithful, full of peace at the last. 
 Happy are ye if ye can make it. Listen, therefore, 
 with a watchful ear for the promptings of the 
 Holy Ghost, by whom alone all true pastors are 
 moved to take upon them that office and ministry. 
 If He call you, arise with a ready heart ; and 
 humble yourselves before Him that . bears the 
 everlasting Priesthood ; and through Him offer 
 
66 THE WORK APPOINTED US. [Serm. III. 
 
 up yourselves to be consecrated, so far as we 
 may be, to that same end for which He was bom, 
 and to the very work for which He came into the 
 world. 
 
SERMON IV. 
 
 CHEIST'S KINGDOM NOT OF THIS WOELD. 
 Nov. 5, 1843. 
 
 St. John xviii. 36. 
 " My kingdom is not of this world : if my kingdom were of 
 this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not 
 be delivered to the Jews : but now is my kingdom not from 
 hence." 
 
 By these words our Lord declared that He was 
 indeed a king : but that His kingdom was neither 
 such as should challenge the authority of Pilate's 
 master, nor defend His own person from the 
 malice of the Jews. "My kingdom is not of 
 this world." It has no legions nor armaments 
 of earthly warfare. If it were of this world, My 
 servants by might and mastery would set Me 
 free. I am a king, but My kingdom is " not 
 from hence:" that is to say, the seat of My 
 kingdom is not earth but heaven : My throne is 
 not in the provinces of the world, but " in the 
 light which no man can approach unto," in the 
 heavenly court, at the right hand of God, where 
 are seraphim and cherubim, thrones and domi- 
 nions, principalities and powers. 
 
 And from this we may understand that, as its 
 seat is in the heavenly state, so is its end or 
 
 f2 
 
68 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Seem. 
 
 design transcendent and above this world. The 
 kingdom of Christ does not aim at gathering to 
 itself earthly and secular powers : it does not 
 seek to consolidate a temporal system, nor to 
 govern mankind in their natural or national con- 
 ditions. For these provision is made in the 
 paternal and political offices with which indivi- 
 duals and states are invested in the course of 
 nature, and by the general providence of God. 
 The kingdom of Christ is not related to man 
 only as he is an inhabitant of this transitory 
 world, neither does it terminate within this 
 narrow sphere. Its aim and purpose is some 
 destiny above the conditions of nature, the course 
 of time, and the changes of mortality. Its end, 
 so far as it is revealed to us, is the reconstituting 
 of a new order in the creation of God a , by gather- 
 ing from the ages of the world the fellowship of 
 His elect ; and bringing them, through probation, 
 to perfection of holiness, and to eternal life. 
 Neither is it related to this state of trial only. 
 Though, with the winding up of the mystery of 
 their mortal life, that part of the mediatorial 
 office of Christ shall be fulfilled,: yet "of his 
 kingdom there shall be no end".." Its perfect 
 manifestation is to come hereafter, when the 
 mystical number of God's elect, '" the hundred 
 and forty and four thousand redeemed from the 
 
 " mroKarda-Tacns iravrav, Acts iii. .21.. b St. Luke i. 33. 
 
IV.] NOT OP THIS WORLD. 69 
 
 earth," shall be accomplished at the Marriage 
 Supper of the Lamb. 
 
 Once more, the prerogatives and powers of 
 His kingdom, which issue from its heavenly seat, 
 and are directed to their transcendent and eternal 
 end, must needs be transcendent and eternal too. 
 They consist in gifts of grace, by which men 
 redeemed from sin are restored to holiness ; and 
 in laws of government, whereby the regenerate 
 are ruled as subjects of the kingdom of heaven. 
 The laws of His dominion run out into the 
 eternal world, and have their awards beyond the 
 grave. Their sanctions are life and death ever- 
 lasting : the changeless destinies of man. It 
 deals with us as we are related to eternity, and 
 all its administration, prerogatives, and powers, 
 are unearthly and divine. 
 
 Such, then, as included in what has been said, 
 is the visible Church of Christ, which is His 
 kingdom partially revealed on earth. It is the 
 embodying and expression of a heavenly order ; 
 ovpavos eiriyeios : the lower, imperfect, and pro- 
 bationary part of that spiritual kingdom which 
 dwells on high in its proper realm : the outskirts 
 of its glory. Moreover, it is the ordained means 
 of effectuating and fulfilling the ultimate design 
 and aim of His kingdom in the gathering and 
 salvation of the elect. As the Incarnation, and 
 
7o CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Serm. 
 
 the Atonement, the Birth, Death, Resurrection, 
 and Ascension of the Son of God are the merito- 
 rious and productive causes of this mystery of 
 grace, so the illumination of truth, and the gifts 
 of the Spirit, through the ministry and Sacra- 
 ments of the visible Church on earth, are the 
 effective and proximate means. Therefore when 
 He ascended up on high to sit down in His 
 Father's throne, and to open His mediatorial 
 kingdom in the order of angelic and perfect 
 spirits, He ordained, commissioned, and em- 
 powered a visible ministry on earth. They 
 became His representatives and witnesses, the 
 highest officers of His kingdom, second in it to 
 Himself alone ; invested with a spiritual power 
 limited only by the will and expressed commis- 
 sion of their unseen Lord. In all things of the 
 soul and of the world to come ; in all things 
 relating, by direct spiritual order, to the aim and 
 design of the Incarnation and Atonement of the 
 Son of God, and to the perfecting and salvation 
 of the elect, the; visible Church is sole and 
 absolute, having no superior but Christ alone. 
 From Him, the only source of spiritual jurisdic- 
 tion, all rules and laws of the inner life of man 
 must be derived : all commissions to bind and 
 loose ; to gather and to rule His elect ; to admit 
 to holy Sacraments, and mysteries of grace ; to 
 
IV.] NOT OF THIS WOULD. 71 
 
 define and to teach doctrines of truth ; to use 
 correction for the health of souls ; to legislate 
 and to judge, in matters purely spiritual, and of 
 the kingdom of God. 
 
 1 . The first general inference to be drawn 
 from what has been said is, that separation from 
 the policy of the world is the first law of the 
 Church. Its very charter is to be a kingdom 
 "not of this world." And by this heavenly 
 origin it bears perpetual witness to the advent 
 of the Word made flesh ; and forces upon the 
 consciousness of mankind the reality of the 
 world unseen. The broad contrast of the Church 
 with empires and kingdoms of the world in its 
 ends and means, its power and policy, is a part 
 of its divine office and design. To grasp at 
 powers, other than the suasions of truth and the 
 pleadings of the Spirit, is a direct contradiction 
 of its own nature, and a defeat of its highest 
 aim. "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray 
 to my Father, and he shall presently give me 
 more than twelve legions of > angels ? But how 
 then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled that thus it 
 must be c ?" "If my kingdom were of this world, 
 then would my servants fight, that I should not 
 be delivered to the Jews." 
 
 By what was it. that the Apostles of our Lord 
 prevailed to found His kingdom in all lands, but 
 
 c St. Matt. xxvi. 53, 54. 
 
72 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Serh. 
 
 by their perfect separateness from the power and 
 policy of the world, their perfect abstinence from 
 all secular means ? Absolute in their own spi- 
 ritual commission, they were, in all things tem- 
 poral, obedient to the powers ordained of God d . 
 By preaching and suffering, by prayer and 
 patience, by holiness and martyrdom, by the 
 virtues and attractions of the cross, they planted 
 in all states and kingdoms of the earth a domi- 
 nion which was separate from and superior to 
 them all : and, binding them together in one 
 body by the bonds and sympathies of the Spirit, 
 they subjected all alike to the one Head over all, 
 which is Jesus Christ. In this the world lent 
 .them no aid : the kingdoms of the earth fought 
 
 d Rom. xiii. 1. "Let every soul be subject unto the higher 
 powers." St. Paul says this " to shew that it was not for the 
 subversion of the commonwealth that Christ introduced His 
 laws ; but for the better ordering of it, and to teach men not 
 to be taking up unnecessary and unprofitable wars. For the 
 plots formed against us for the truth's sate are sufficient ; and 
 we have no need to be adding temptations superfluous and 
 unprofitable .... these regulations are for all, even for priests 
 and monks, and not for those of secular occupations only . . . 
 if thou be an Apostle even, or an Evangelist, or a Prophet, or 
 any thing whatsoever, inasmuch as this subjection is not sub- 
 versive of religion." S. Chrys. in Rom. Horn, xxiii. So also 
 S. Augustine, Theodoret, and Theophylact. in Joe. Notwith- 
 standing this, Bellarmine says, "Ex hoc non sequitur S. Petrum 
 et Apostolos cseteros subjectos fuisse de jure temporalibus 
 potestatibus." Qpuscula. De Excusat. Barclaii, c. iii. 6, 
 
IV.] NOT OF THIS WORLD. 73 
 
 not for them but against them : and yet by their 
 very opposition wrought with them in their work ; 
 perfecting the patience of the saints, and exalting 
 saints to martyrs : so that, while they used spi- 
 ritual weapons alone, all things worked together 
 for the kingdom of Christ ; His own servants by 
 living and dying in witness against the world ; the 
 world itself by the help of ten bitter persecutions : 
 and, while it perfected the servants of the Cross, 
 it fell before the imperishable Church ; while it 
 beat the air in vain, it subdued itself; when it 
 seemed to have the mastery, it was itself taken 
 in the snare. A mightier than the world had 
 risen up in all its provinces, and penetrated into 
 its very life. The emblems of its secular great- 
 ness gave place to the tokens of Christ's humilia- 
 tion : and the majesty of the Caesars yielded 
 itself to the kingdom of the cross. 
 
 Thus far in the history of the Gospel it is 
 abundantly clear, that the Church preserved its 
 purely spiritual character from intermixture with 
 the kingdoms of the world. It is, however, a 
 favourite argument with a certain school of 
 objectors, to allege that this spiritual and sepa- 
 rate character was forfeited at the conversion of 
 the empire to the faith. But this is false in fact. 
 There was, as there could be, no change in the 
 commission and institutions of Christ. The 
 
74 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Serm. 
 
 Church was still the same. On the empire, in- 
 deed, a mighty change had passed. It was thence- 
 forward endowed with a new capacity ; with a 
 perception of its own relation to the heavenly 
 world; and of its subjection to the laws of Christ. 
 It was invested with new responsibilities, and 
 learned to use its powers for new and higher aims. 
 But though the Church pervaded its whole frame 
 with an universal presence, there was no com- 
 mutation nor collision of powers. They moved 
 from different centres, and traversed different 
 spheres". The Church lost none of its distinct 
 and heavenly character when it became imperial : 
 it admitted no principles of secularity when its 
 canons were embodied with the public laws : it 
 forfeited none of its absolute spiritual commis- 
 sion from its unseen Head, when its chiefs were 
 cited to the councils of princes f . Its organiza- 
 
 e " Colimus ergo et imperatorem sic, quomodo et nobis licet 
 et ipsi expedit, ut hominem a Deo secundum ; et quicquid est, a 
 Deo consecutum, et solo Deo minorem. Hoc et ipse volet : sic 
 enim omnibus major est dum solo vero Deo minor est." Ter- 
 tull. ad Scapulam, § 2. See also S. Athan., torn. i. p. 371, 
 and S. Optat., lib. iii. c. 3. 
 
 1 " Si autem de fide loquamur Christian^, et legibus ad 
 Ecclesiasticam spectantibus disciplinam, ipsi etiam Imperatores 
 Christiani ingenue multoties professi sunt, nihil sibi juris in 
 istiusmodi sanciendis rebus tributum esse. Sic Constantinus 
 Magnus, Valentinianus, Marcianus, Theodosius, aliique quorum 
 verba alibi retulimus. Quin ipse etiam omnium peritissimus 
 
IV.] NOT OF THIS WORLD. 75 
 
 tion was incorporated with the civil state : it was 
 made capable of holding and transmitting pos- 
 sessions 8 consecrated to the service of God, that 
 is, it became national, established, endowed, by 
 the super-adding of new accidents, without change 
 or forfeiture in its original and essential character. 
 
 2. Another inference as obvious as the last is, 
 that it is an act of the highest unfaithfulness, 
 and a direct contradiction of the first laws of its 
 own existence, for the Church, as such, to admit 
 into itself the principles, or to assume the tem- 
 poral powers, of the world. In proportion as it 
 becomes conformed to the kingdoms of the earth, 
 it loses the stamp of its heavenly origin : it ceases 
 to testify for Christ, and to rule in His name : it 
 thereby abdicates its commission, and denies in 
 act that Christ has upon earth any kingdom at all. 
 
 From the time that the powers of the world 
 became Christian, and spiritual rulers were 
 united in a concurrent jurisdiction with secular 
 princes, a new class of questions forced them- 
 
 legum Imperator Justinianus, in ea fuit sententia, leges nempe 
 civiles non prsecedere debere sed sequi Ecclesiasticas ... Hinc 
 est, quod etiamsi Imperatores multa de Ecclesiasticis personis, 
 et rebus in constitutionibus suis ediderint, nihil tamen de novo 
 constituerunt, sed ea tantum quae ab Ecclesiasticis synodis prius 
 constituta fuerant, ipsi sua etiam auctoritate confirmarunt." 
 Bevereg. Synodicon. Prolegom., p. 2. See also Thorndike's 
 Right of the Church in a Christian State, pp. 231, 232. ed. 1649. 
 s Sarpi on Ecclesiastical Revenues, p. 1 1 . 
 
76 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Sbrm. 
 
 selves upon the Church.- It became her duty 
 to teach the princes of the world how to con- 
 secrate to God the powers they had received at 
 His hand ; to counsel them in their deliberations 
 for the people entrusted to their civil care, and 
 to guide them in using their earthly prerogatives 
 for the peace and welfare of the Church. It is 
 not to be wondered at, if, as the pure theocracy 
 of Israel sunk in the secular debasement of its 
 after history, so the visible kingdom of Christ, 
 spiritual and separate as it was in the beginning, 
 should become entangled and obscured, in the 
 course of this turbid and tumultuous world : for 
 the same law of probation is ordained for both. 
 It is impossible to do more than refer to the 
 outline of this extensive subject. Indeed, we 
 shall perhaps maintain a clearer view of the 
 principles involved in it, if, as much as possible, 
 we avoid all details. 
 
 It is undeniable that the spirit of the world 
 did in later ages diffuse itself in the visible 
 body of the Church, drawing after it principles 
 and a wisdom which are earthly and alien from 
 Christ; and diverting its prominent and active 
 powers from the purely spiritual end for which 
 it was ordained 11 . But it would be a false account 
 
 h "Status insuper Ecclesiac nonne factus est totus quasi 
 brutalis et monstruosus ? ubi caelum deorsum, hoc est scilicet 
 
IV.] NOT OF THIS WORLD. 77 
 
 of this unquestionable fact, if we were to suppose 
 that the first or chief agents in these departures 
 from the spirit of Christ's kingdom were uni- 
 formly evil, or conscious of their deflections. 
 The errors which entered into Christendom were 
 not theories projected at once and in full com- 
 pleteness from any individual mind, but the 
 accumulated deviations of ages and multitudes 
 of men. So, doubtless, in results the most dis- 
 astrous to mankind, unnumbered agents, and 
 some themselves guileless and pure, will be found 
 to have contributed ; men, themselves dead to 
 the world, to have impelled others with a direct 
 force in the career of secularity. 
 
 It is remarkable how both in the East and in 
 the West this tendency, though under different 
 aspects, developed itself in the same direction. 
 In both the spiritual element became more or 
 less subservient to the secular. In the East, for 
 instance, we find the later Greek emperors, not 
 
 id quod spirituale est, et terra sursum, spiritus serviens et caro 
 dominans. Principale accessorium, et accessorium principale, 
 usque ad hoc ut quidam delirare non dubitent quod per inven- 
 tiones humanas etiam melius quam per legem divinam Evan- 
 gelicam regeretur, quasi minus sit anima quam corpus, et 
 spiritualis quam carnalis fructus." Gerson. Serm. ' coram 
 Papa. See Browne's Fasciculus Rerum Expetend., torn, 
 ji. p. 891. Petrus de Alliaco, de necessitate Reformationis 
 Ecclesiae in capite et in membris. Appendix to torn. ii. of 
 Gerson's Works. 
 
78 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Serm. 
 
 content with the Christian prerogatives wielded 
 by the earlier, gradually proceeding to extrava- 
 gant assumptions. We find also the later councils 
 and canonists of the Greek Church favouring and 
 enlarging their claims'. In like manner also in 
 the West, we find the holy boldness of earlier days 
 settling down into the worldly policy of later 
 Pontiffs k ; and saints that withstood the world by 
 patience and the arms of the Spirit, drawn into 
 precedent by the advocates of the Roman court 
 for assumptions of universal sovereignty. As if 
 it were a small thing to claim an universal juris- 
 diction in things spiritual over the whole Church 
 of God, and that by Divine right, the Bishop of 
 Rome took to himself a power of disposing also 
 of all things temporal on the plea of promoting 
 spiritual ends 1 . It matters little whether that 
 
 5 " Ita posteriorum Grsecorum adulatio, suffragantibus ipsis 
 eorum conciliis, eo evaserat, ut Imperatoribus facultatcm largi- 
 retur dispensandi de Canonibus CEcumenicarum etiam Synodo- 
 rum quo illi jam ecclesiasticis legibus omnibus solvebantur." 
 Thomassin de Vetere et Nova Eccles. Discipline, pars i. 
 lib. i. xxi. 9. 
 
 k See the account of the Pontificate of Martin IV., Boniface 
 VIII., in Dollinger's History of the Church, vol. iv. p. 76, 77, 
 80—84. Dolman, 1841. 
 
 1 "Asserimus, Pontificem ut Pontificem, etsi non habeat 
 ullam mere temporalem potestatem, tamen habere in ordine ad 
 bonum spirituale, summam potestatem disponent! i de temporali- 
 bus rebus omnium Christianorum." Bellarm. Disput. de Sum- 
 mo Pontifice, lib. v. c. 6. 
 
IV.] NOT OF THIS WORLD. 79 
 
 power be claimed, in scholastic distinctions, as 
 direct or indirect. In its consequences, and in 
 the confusions resulting from it, there is no 
 difference™. It assumes what our Lord in the 
 text denies, that is to say, a power, whether tem- 
 poral or spiritual matters little, to dispose of the 
 things of this world : and that too upon a prin- 
 ciple which overthrows the true aim of Christ's 
 
 m " Restat postrema pars disputationis de Pontifice, quae est 
 de potestate ipsius temporali, de qua quidem qusestione tres 
 inveniuntur auctorum sententi».~ 
 
 " Prima est, Summum Pontificem jure divino habere plenis- 
 simam potestatem in universum [orbem terrarum, turn in rebus 
 ecclesiasticis, turn in politicis 
 
 " Altera non tarn sententia quam hseresis in altero extremo 
 posita, duo docet. Primo Pontificem ut Pontificem et ex jure 
 divino, nullam habere temporalem potestatem, nee posse ullo 
 modo imperareprincipibus secularibu3, nedum eos regnis et prin- 
 cipatu privare, etiamsi illi privari alioqui mereantur. Secundo 
 docet non licuisse Pontifici aliisque Episcopis accipere temporale 
 dominium, &C. 
 
 " Tertia sententia media et Catholicorum theologorum com- 
 munis est, Pontificem ut Pontificem, non habere directs et 
 immediate ullam temporalem potestatem, sed solum spiritu- 
 alem ; tamen ratione spiritualis habere saltern indirect^ potes- 
 tatem quandam, eamque summam, in temporalibus." Bel- 
 larm. Disput. de Summo Pontifice, lib. v. c. i. 1 — 3. 
 
 Barclay ascribes the first opinion to the Canonists, the third 
 to the theologians of the Roman Church : and says truly, " ita 
 qnicquid illi recto ordine, id isti oblique et per consequentias 
 Papae tribuunt, ut ratio tantum diversa, res eadem sit." De 
 Potestate Papa? in Principes, &c. p. 5. 
 
80 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [SeRm. 
 
 supermundane kingdom ; for it was alleged that, 
 without such a power, " the ecclesiastical com- 
 monwealth" would not be " perfect and sufficient 
 of herself in order to her own end n ." What was 
 the end of the ecclesiastical commonwealth through 
 the ages when this theory was in the ascendent, 
 the archives of every kingdom in the West of 
 Europe , the history of ecclesiastical benefices 1 *, 
 and the records of the Roman chancery 9 , will shew. 
 
 " Overall's Convocation Book, p. 229, and Bellarm. Disp., 
 lib. v. c. vii. 3, and De Excusat. Barclaii, c. iii. 4. 
 
 See Gravamina Nationis Germanicse, in Browne's Fasci- 
 culus, Rerum Expetendarum, &c. torn. i. p. 334, &c. Grava- 
 mina Ecclesise Gallicanae, ibid. torn. ii. p. 238, &c. Antiqua 
 Regni et Ecclesise Angliae Gravamina, ibid. 415, &c. For 
 Spain see Bramhall's account of the Council of Castile, Just 
 Vindication of the Church of England, Works, pp. 114 — 117. 
 ed. fol. 1676. Also Excerpta from S. Bernard., Gerson, John 
 of Salisbury, Matthew Paris, &c. Browne's Fascia, torn, ii, 
 pp. 887—902. 
 
 p Thomassin De Benefices, pars ii. lib. i. xliv. 1 — 3 ; Sarpi's 
 Benefices and Revenues, pp. 118. 125. 145. 174. 
 
 i Nicolai de Clemangis de Corrupto Ecclesiae Statu, c. 5. 
 Aureum Speculum Papa?, P. iii. i. in Browne's Fasciculus, torn. 
 ii. p. 94. " Luce enim clarius constat, quod pro majori parte 
 facta et ordinata in quatuor generalibus conciliis principalibus, 
 et aliis conciliis per temporum successiones statuta, crescente 
 avaritia Pontificum, Cardinahum, et Prselatorum, tarn per Papae 
 reservationes, quam per iniquas Camera? Apostolica? Constitu- 
 tiones, et Cancellariae regulas, et formulas Audientia? causarum 
 Rotse, et ambitiosas Dispensationes, Absolutiones, Indulgentias, 
 Confessionalia, Officium Poenitentiarise, sint fere imminuta, anni- 
 
IV.] NOT OF THIS WORLD. 81 
 
 From this principle a manifold secularity 
 spread itself in the Western Church. Spiritual 
 powers were turned to worldly ends. The ec- 
 clesiastical system, which had been the source 
 and guide of civilization, the inventor and per- 
 fecter of science, the true legislator, the fountain 
 of political and judicial wisdom, the centre of 
 organization, the guardian of domestic and inter- 
 national peace — forasmuch as its end, being the 
 highest and most perfect, included in itself all 
 lower and less perfect ends of human and 
 secular wisdom — this principle of unity and 
 order became at times itself, so far as a divine 
 work can be swayed aside by human obliquity, 
 the source of tumult and intrigue. The power 
 of spiritual censure, excommunication, and inter- 
 dict, were wielded by hands that measured their 
 strength with the princes of the world in 
 fleets and armies 1 . From the same prin- 
 ciple of disorder came also an evil which is 
 the converse of the last, namely that of using 
 worldly policy for spiritual ends. For instance ; 
 the use of persecution to promote unity of 
 faith ; the deposition of princes for heresy ; the 
 absolving their subjects from oaths of obedi- 
 
 hilata, et quasi in derisum, et oblivionem posita." Gerson de 
 Modis uniendi ac reform. Eccles., torn, ii.pp. 182, 183, et p. 194. 
 r See Dollinger's History of the Church, vol. iv. p. 76. 
 
 G 
 
82 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Seem. 
 
 ence s ; the instigating their destruction'. These 
 fundamental laws of spiritual and civil anarchy, 
 howsoever repudiated now by individuals and 
 even by Churches of the Roman obedience, were 
 nevertheless the potent and active principles of 
 that court and see for ages : they were formally 
 elaborated by Schoolmen, defended by Doctors, 
 recognised in councils' 1 ; and, what is more than 
 all polemical arguments, openly put in act. Five 
 
 9 " Ex hoc principio satis apertfe colligitur, esse in Romano 
 Pontifice potestatem temporalia disponendi, usque ad ipsorum 
 Regum et Imperatorum depositionem : nam per ipsam spiri- 
 tualem potestatem potest summus Pontifex ligare Principes se- 
 culares vinculo excommunicationis, potest per eandem solvere 
 populos a juramento fidelitatis et obedientiee : potest obligare 
 eosdem populos sub excommunicationis poma, ut regi excom- 
 municato non pareant, atque ut alium sibi eligant Regem." — 
 Bellann. de Excusat. Barclaii, c. iii. 4. 
 
 ' See Jeremy Taylor's Sermon on Nov. 5, pp. 141, 142, 143. 
 151, 152. folio. 1678. 
 
 n Bellarmine cites ten Councils, in which the temporal power 
 of the Pope was recognised, i. e. one held by Gregory II., a 
 second by Gregory VII. " His addi debent," he proceeds, 
 " alia quinque Concilia habita a successoribus Gregorii VII., 
 videlicet .Beneventanum a Victore III., Placentinum ab Urbano 
 II., Romanum a Paschale II., Coloniense a Gelasio II., Remense 
 a Calisto II., in quibus confirmata est sententia Gregorii VII." 
 To these he adds the council of Clement under Urban II., 
 Lateran under Innocent III., Lyons under Innocent IV. " Si 
 haec," he says, " non est Ecclesiae Catholica? vox, ubi, obsecro, 
 earn inveniemus ? " — Bellarm. de Potestate Papae, Opuscula, 
 pp. 845, 846. 
 
IV.] NOT OF THIS WOULD. 83 
 
 times the Roman Pontiff has assumed to depose 
 emperors and kings; and to absolve their sub- 
 jects from their allegiance x . And these acts were 
 justified by his most cherished and honoured ad- 
 vocates 7 . The inveterate and unnatural schism 
 by which this our Church is afflicted, is the per- 
 petual memorial, and ever present witness of the 
 attempt of Pius the Fifth to depose the Queen of 
 England for heresy and usurpation 2 . Obsolete 
 as these evil doctrines may have become by the 
 silent and irresistible control of Divine Provi- 
 -dence, yet their miserable consequences are still 
 active to the distraction of Christendom. More- 
 over, they have never been retracted with the 
 solemnities of their publication. Until they be 
 effaced by an authentic and recorded disavowal, 
 
 x Henry IV. Emperor, Philip I. of France, Frederick II. 
 Emperor ; Bellarm. ibid. To which, may be added Henry VIII. 
 and Elizabeth. Bellarmine says Leo Isauricus was excommuni- 
 cated by Gregory II. for heresy, and " vectigalibus Italiae 
 mulctatum." There is no mention of deposition. 
 
 y Bellarmine quotes writers of all ranks and dignities, i. e. 
 twenty-one Italian, sixteen French, twenty Spanish, twelve 
 German, seven English or Scotch, who have maintained the 
 temporal power of the Pope. De Potestate Papa;, Opuscula, 
 pp. 831, 842. At the head of the list is Gregory VII., with 
 whom all the rest, including Bellarmine, coincide. 
 
 z Collier's Eccles. History, vol. ii. p. 521. " It is plain that 
 recusancy and disobedience came hand in hand." — Jeremy 
 Taylor's Sermon, p. 147. 
 
 G2 
 
84 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Serm. 
 
 they must Istand, without restitution or confes- 
 sion, as a heavy score of unrepented sins a . And 
 
 ■ To all whose " heart's desire and prayer to God" is that the 
 Catholic Church may, in His own time, and by His wise and 
 healing providence, be once more knit together in the grace of 
 charity, it must be a matter of devout thankfulness, first, that 
 the causes of our miserable divisions have been, in so great 
 a measure, of a secular kind ; and next, that these have been 
 already, by the grace and working of God, wonderfully weakened 
 if not altogether withdrawn. On the former point, it is im- 
 portant to examine carefully the line taken by our foremost 
 divines, for instance by Archbishop Bramhall, who even heads 
 one of his controversial Treatises as follows : " Schism guarded 
 and beaten back upon the right owner, shewing that our great 
 controversy about Papal Power is not a question of faith, but 
 of interest and profit ; not with the Church of Rome, but with 
 the Court of Rome &c." Bramhall, Works, p. 286. folio, 1675 : 
 see also Sect. I.e. 9. p. 337. On the latter point, the late 
 Charles Butler, after stating the opposition between the Trans- 
 alpine and Cisalpine doctrines on the temporal and spiritual 
 power of the Pope, says, " This difference of opinion exists now 
 no longer, the Transalpine divines having insensibly adopted, 
 on this subject, the Cisalpine opinions." Works, vol. v. p. 
 36. The Cisalpine opinion cannot be better stated than in 
 the following words ; " Nor do Catholics, as Catholics, believe 
 that the Pope has any direct or indirect authority over the 
 temporal concerns of states or the jurisdiction of princes. 
 Hence, should the Pope pretend to absolve or to dispense with 
 his Majesty's subjects from their allegiance, on account of 
 heresy or schism, such dispensation they would view as frivo- 
 lous and null." ..." as to temporal power, none could be exer- 
 cised when as yet (i. e. in the early ages) which was its origin, 
 no territory was possessed: and the positive declaration of 
 Jesus Christ 'that his kingdom was not of this world,' re- 
 mained strongly impressed on the mind of them who professed 
 
IV;] NOT OF THIS WORLD. 85 
 
 history must still rehearse the train of com- 
 plicated evils, by rebellion, treason, and mas- 
 sacre, which this single dogma directly, or by 
 its ethical consequences, has produced: and 
 we must look upon those who permitted the 
 attempt to justify such things, who reaped the 
 illusory benefits of transgression, and commen- 
 ded the doers of these evil deeds b , as a spec- 
 tacle of awe and sorrow". These are grievous 
 
 themselves and were believed to be his vicars." Faith of 
 Catholics, Propos. xv. pp. 165-6. Such is the received doc- 
 trine, and declared Ecclesiastical law in all Roman Catholic 
 states at this day. By this, one inexhaustible cause of conflict 
 and discord has been in the last three centuries removed from 
 Western Christendom. 
 
 b Dr. Pusey's Sermon, Nov. 5. 1838, pp. 29, 30. and 
 note. 
 
 " Causa dispositiva Schism atis Grsecorum, inter alias una 
 fuerit ; propter gravamina Romanae. Ecclesise in exactionibus, 
 excommunicationibus et statutis." P. de Alliaco de Reform. 
 Eccles. c. ii. " Reformatio totius corporis Ecclesiae, et parti- 
 cularis Ecclesia? Romanae, est de arduis pertinentibus ad Fidem. 
 Nam ejus generalis deformatio non mediocriter Fidem tangit, 
 et per consequens ejus reformatio." Ibid. c. i. Gerson, Op. 
 torn. ii. p. 905. What was the great western schism, by which 
 the Church was divided and torn into two, and sometimes 
 three, conflicting sections for a space of fifty years and more, 
 but the natural result of the secularity of which the Pontifical 
 palace was the focus ? There is no period of the Church, as 
 cotemporaneous writers testify, so frightfully conspicuous for 
 flagrant scandals, contempt of discipline, corruption of manners, 
 rejection of truth, encroachment of the civil power. See Gerson, 
 de Morbis et Calamitatibus Ecclesiae, torn. ii. p. 309. It is im- 
 
86 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Serm. 
 
 words to speak of any Christian body: espe- 
 cially of that Church once so full of charity to 
 mankind. But truth forces them. False charity 
 is falsehood after all : and truth soon or late will 
 avenge itself on those who violate or slight it. I do 
 not recount these things to re-awaken in us any 
 feelings but sorrow and humiliation for the sins of 
 Christendom. They are historical data on which to 
 ascertain the conformity of the mediaeval policy 
 of the Koman court with the Kingdom which is 
 "not of this world;" to indicate the height to 
 which it had attained, and the greatness of its 
 fall 4 . And lastly, I do so because it is the 
 legitimate moral result of this daring and clan- 
 destine policy, together with its twofold pro- 
 vidential defeat, that we this day commemorate. 
 
 possible to say how deeply the contests of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury may have been aggravated by the schism of the fifteenth : 
 and how much of our trials and perils of this day may be ulti- 
 mately traced to the shock which both faith and unity suffered 
 at that time. 
 
 d " Clement died in April, 1314. His Pontificate proves to 
 us that which might have been foreseen under Martin IV. and 
 Boniface IX. [qu. VIII. ?] that the Papal power had fallen 
 from that height to which the circumstances of Christendom 
 had with a sure hand conducted it, and that it had surrendered 
 itself to a worldly, calculating, and sometimes avaricious policy, 
 in consequence of which the common father of the faithful 
 became the willing instrument of one prince, and the imperious 
 master of another." Dollinger's History of the Church, vol. 
 iv. p. 104. Dolman, 1841. 
 
IV.] NOT OF THIS WORLD. 87 
 
 The two events which are united in the acts of 
 this day, different as they are in their circum- 
 stantials, have this at least in common. They 
 exhibit the mercy of God in preserving the Eng- 
 lish Church and people from the secular domi- 
 nation of the Roman Pontiff. 
 
 The conspiracy against the king and the three 
 estates of England was conceived, planned, and 
 brought to the eve of perpetration, by members 
 of the Roman Communion 6 : it was designed to 
 advance the interests of the Roman Church f . It 
 was not indistinctly known that some such at- 
 tempt was in preparation 8 . The intent was en- 
 couraged by the subtilties of casuistry, being 
 directly defensible on principles prevalent and 
 commended among the writers 11 of that Church. 
 
 In the other event, "the Most High" that 
 " ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to 
 whomsoever he will," confounded our adversaries 
 in the very point wherein they had usurped upon 
 His sole prerogative. They who had claimed 
 
 e Lingard's History of England, vol. ix. p. 33, &c. 
 
 f Apologia pro Garnetto, p. 4. Sir Everard Digby's Letter 
 to his wife, Biographia Britannica, note E. Collier, Eccl. 
 History, vol. ii. p. 690. 
 
 e Dr. Pusey's Sermon, Nov. 5. 1838. Hallam's Constitu- 
 tional History, vol. i. p. 554, note. 
 
 h See collection of authorities given by Jeremy Taylor, 
 already referred to in note r. p. 82. 
 
88 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Sbem. 
 
 " the power to bestow the empire on whom they 
 listed'," who also said of themselves "We are 
 to this end placed over the nations and king- 
 doms that we may destroy and pull up and build 
 and plant k ," — saw, in one hour, the secret labours 
 and confident expectations of many years, scat- 
 tered "as a dream when one awaketh 1 ." A special 
 providence appears to have shielded this Church 
 and realm from falling again under the secular 
 dominion of Rome. Every time it has re-entered, 
 it has been cast out again with a more signal ex- 
 pulsion; every time it has seemed to gather 
 strength, it has been more utterly confounded. 
 The reign of princes alien from the English 
 Church has been twice brought to an end with a 
 speed truly significant : foreign armaments igno- 
 miniOusly baffled : conspiracies at home laid bare : 
 the insinuation of secret emissaries detected and 
 exposed : the whole fine of the House of Stuart 
 repelled by steady and uniform defeats. If a 
 
 ' Hadrian IV. Overall's Convocation Book, p. 310. 
 
 k Innocent III. Ibid, p. 311. 
 
 1 It is enough for the purpose of this Sermon to treat the 
 Revolution of 1688 as an event in providence, without regard 
 to the agents or principles involved in it. No one can deny 
 that it was an event in providence, nor that by that event the 
 re-entrance of the Roman influence was prevented, and no 
 member of the English Church can but look upon this as a 
 mercy. 
 
IV.] NOT OF THIS WORLD. 89 
 
 series of providential acts may be read in combi- 
 nation, and thereby taken to express the purpose 
 of the Divine Ruler of the world m , it would 
 seem to be the will of Heaven, that the dominion 
 of the Roman Pontificate may never be again set 
 up in this Church and realm. 
 
 There are many duties to which this day of 
 commemoration yearly recalls us : but it is impos- 
 sible to do more than refer shortly to one or two. 
 
 1 . And, first, we are specially warned to humble 
 ourselves in thankfulness for all God's undeserved 
 mercy to this Church and nation. In the midst 
 of our great worldly exaltation, there is exceeding 
 
 m " Surely there are in every man's life certain rubs, 
 doublings, and wrenches, which pass awhile under the effects 
 of chance ; but at the last, well examined, prove the mere hand 
 of God. It was not dumb chance that, to discover the fougade 
 or powder plot, contrived a miscarriage in the letter. I like 
 the victory of 1588 the better for that one occurrence which our 
 enemies imputed to our dishonour, and the partiality of fortune, 
 to wit, the tempests, and contrariety of winds. King Philip 
 did not detract from the nation when he said, he sent his 
 armada to fight with men, and not to combat with the winds. 
 Where there is a manifest disproportion between the persons 
 and forces of two several agents, upon a maxim of reason we 
 may promise the victory to the superior : but when unexpected 
 accidents slip in, and unthought of occurrences intervene, these 
 must proceed from a power that owes no obedience to those 
 axioms : where, as in the hand- writing upon the wall, we may 
 behold the hand, but see not the spring that moves it." 
 Browne's Religio Medici, Works, vol. ii. p. 24. 
 
90 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Serm. 
 
 danger lest we be lifted up and inflated with a 
 spirit of secular, and still more of spiritual; pride. 
 It is for our very safety ever to remember that, as 
 we owe our elevation, so also we owe our con- 
 tinuance, to the movements of His will ; that 
 there are abroad in the earth antagonist powers, 
 before whom we should utterly melt away if He 
 were to withdraw the restraints He has laid upon 
 them. He has taught us by a series of marvel- 
 lous interpositions at the crisis of action, and in 
 the moment of accomplishment, how the very 
 being of Churches and kingdoms hangs upon 
 His breath. A spirit of national vain glory 
 would be our perdition : our safety lies in self- 
 humiliation, in great charity to all mankind, 
 especially to the members of His Church now 
 miserably torn asunder; and in absolute obedi- 
 ence to the kingdom and will of Christ. 
 
 2. Another plain duty of which this day 
 admonishes us, is that we realize to ourselves, by 
 a clear and vivid perception, the greatness of the 
 blessings which God has mercifully preserved to 
 us ; and, before all, the integrity of His spiritual 
 kingdom in this land. I say integrity, not in 
 relation to our own spiritual condition in His 
 sight ; God forbid : the best fall infinitely below 
 the spiritual order in which they stand before 
 God. I speak not of us, but of the Church our 
 
IV.] NOT OF THIS WORLD. 91 
 
 mother, which He has so watchfully fostered and 
 preserved". 
 
 If we would rightly understand both the acts by 
 which, for just causes, and by a rightful authority, 
 the Roman jurisdiction was finally removed, and 
 the true nature of the ecclesiastical prerogative 
 claimed by our princes, we must follow the Statutes 
 of Provisors along the course of our history. The 
 act of the sixteenth century was the last and the 
 successful effort in a long series of ineffectual 
 struggles against the secular encroachment of 
 the Roman court . It was counselled, com- 
 
 D This is to be confined strictly within the terms of the 
 subject. We have too much cause to humble ourselves for 
 personal secularity, as well as for the wide-spread Erastianism 
 of feeling and practice by which we are deeply suffering. 
 
 ° " "What was threatened and effected in part in the days of 
 Henry III. and Edward III., was perfected in the reign of 
 Henry VIII." ..." These former kings, who reigned in 
 England about the years 1200 and 1300, might properly be 
 called the first Reformers : and their laws of Proviso's and 
 Prsemunire's, or more properly Praemoneres, the beginning of 
 the Reformation. They laid the foundation, and Henry the 
 Eighth builded upon it." Bramhall, Just Vindication of the 
 Church of England, Disc. II. c. vi. p. 99. fol. 1676. See also 
 ibid., p. 73. In fact, the Regale is the counteraction produced 
 by the Pontificate : and the dangerous tendency to set up 
 'nationality' and 'liberties' even to the breach of Catholic 
 unity, was a defensive recoil from the excesses of a spiritual juris- 
 diction which had become secular and encroaching. The true 
 solution of the relation of independent nations to the Catholic 
 
92 CHRIST'S KINGDOM {Serm. 
 
 pleted, and justified by men whom the advocates 
 of the Pontiff could, in no other point, attaint 
 of error p . And the principle on which they 
 rested their act, and on which our relation to 
 the Roman Church is still amply to be defended, 
 is this — that there is no one supreme prince or 
 power in things temporal from whom the civil 
 rulers of this realm derive their sovereign au- 
 thority 11 : neither by Divine right any one 
 supreme spiritual head on earth from whom the 
 pastors of this Church derive their apostolical 
 commission : that both the Spiritualty and Tem- 
 poralty of this Church and Realm severally possess 
 full authority and jurisdiction derived to them 
 by succession and devolution ; and that both, 
 under Christ alone, are within their respective 
 spheres perfect and complete. There does not 
 exist any fountain of jurisdiction below Christ 
 the Head of all, on whose will and authority the 
 acts of either for right or for validity depend. 
 
 Church is to be found in the independent action of the " Epi- 
 scopates unus concordi numerositate diffusus." 
 
 p Archbishop Warham and his suffragans. See Bramhall's 
 Just Vindication of the Church of England, Disc. II. .ch. iii. 
 pp. 62 — 65. Gardiner's book, De Vera Obedientia, and TunstaU's 
 Letter to Cardinal Pole. Collier, vol. ii. 
 
 « 24 Henry VIII. c. 12. Palgrave's History of the English 
 Commonwealth, vol. i. p. 647. "Ego Constantini, vos Petri 
 gladium habetis in manibus." King Edgar's Oration to the 
 Clergy, ibid., and Wilkins' Concil., torn. i. p. 246 ; also p. 249. 
 
iv.] ;not of this world. 93 
 
 This full and perfect integrity of the Church of 
 England to do all spiritual acts for her own flock 
 and people, no more crosses or contravenes the 
 obligations of ecclesiastical unity, or canonical 
 order, or the authority of councils truly general, 
 or any other laws of the universal Church, or 
 the duty of intercourse with all Churches of 
 Christendom, on the basis of Catholic commu- 
 nion, and on the conditions of Catholic truth, 
 than does the independence of this realm and 
 kingdom clash with the laws of nature and of 
 nations, by which the states of the world are 
 mutually related for the preservation of inter- 
 national justice and universal peace. 
 
 3. And, lastly, it is our duty to give ourselves 
 in entire faith to the work of carrying out the 
 principles which the Providence of God has thus 
 preserved to us. Surely they are a trust for 
 others yet to come. We have been made the 
 depository of no light gifts : the stewards, rather, 
 of an exceeding treasure. 
 
 If there were ever days in which the true and 
 living principles of Christ's kingdom were more 
 needed than before for the peace and govern- 
 ment of mankind, they are these which are now 
 upon the earth. All the phenomena of the world 
 warn us that the latter days have set in. We 
 have seen the frames of ancient states heaved 
 
94 CHRIST'S KINGDOM [Serm. 
 
 upward from their very base ; and their fastest 
 bonds of order parted asunder. The active and 
 executive powers of government seem every where 
 to wax feeble ; and the office of the civil ruler to 
 become rather the index of the popular will than 
 the source of a steady control. So prominent 
 and universal are the tokens of this unnatural 
 and inverted law, that political speculators deduce 
 for themselves the conclusion that such is the 
 purpose and will of God. We see at this day 
 the internal unity of the firmest states yielding to 
 new elements of confusion. Even they that seem 
 most still and peaceful, carry within them forces 
 that at any hour might burst forth and rend 
 them piecemeal. And as with the civil, so is 
 it with the spiritual rule. From two of the. 
 mightiest kingdoms of western Europe this 
 generation has seen the Church all but blotted 
 out. At its very centre, it rests upon the deceit- 
 ful calmness of a flood which at any hour may 
 lift up its lowest depths and scatter it to the 
 winds. They who once claimed to plant, and 
 to pluck up the thrones of kings, now hold their 
 own unsteady seat by the tutelage of princes. 
 Throughout all Christendom spiritual discipline is 
 feeble, and the traces of Christ's kingdom weak. 
 The sway of reason and righteousness over mate- 
 rial force seems fast passing away. If " that which 
 
IV.] NOT OF THIS WOR.LD. 95 
 
 letteth" the revelation of the son of perdition be 
 the kingly and priestly power of Christ mani- 
 fested to the world in the spiritual and civil rule, 
 then there are tokens not a few that the time of 
 his being " taken out of the way" is not far off. 
 The whole aspect of the world seems to be look- 
 ing out towards some new movement of the 
 Providential hand. It is towards evening, and 
 the day of its restless life seems well-nigh spent. 
 The old institutions of the Christian world cast 
 long shadows on the earth. Strange energies, 
 spiritual and political, issue from their relaxing 
 frames, forming themselves into new combina- 
 tions, and moving rapidly towards some unknown 
 consummation. If there be truth in the universal 
 foreboding of Christendom, days of trial for the 
 Church must soon come : and who can foretell 
 what we, unworthy, may be raised up to fulfil — 
 for what the energetic acts of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury may have been the stern but necessary pre- 
 paration ? It may be, that our highly-favoured 
 Church, amid much chastisement and rebukes of 
 heavenly discipline, shall be fashioned and per- 
 fected until it become a principle of reconcilia- 
 tion between east and west, and a law of unity 
 and peace to mankind. It may be, that our task 
 shall be to cast up the camp of the saints against 
 the day when the nations of Antichrist shall, for 
 
96 CHRIST'S KINGDOM NOT OF THIS "WORLD. [Serm. IY. 
 
 the last time, go up and compass it about. We 
 may be called to bear and to break the last assault 
 of the kingdom of evil. God grant that we may- 
 be kept unspotted from the world : steadfastly 
 cleaving to the unseen hand, which has thus far 
 preserved us : ready to serve Him in the Church 
 where He has blessed us with our spiritual birth, 
 by all the powers of life, and through His strength 
 even unto death ! 
 
SERMON V. 
 
 LOVE THE PREPARATION- FOR CHRIST'S COMING. 
 Third Sunday in Advent, 1843. 
 
 2 Tim. iv. 6, 7, 8. 
 
 " I am now ready to be offered : and the time of my depar- 
 ture is at hand. 
 
 " I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course ; I 
 have kept the faith : 
 
 " Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteous- 
 ness, which the Lord the righteous Judge shall give me at that 
 day : and not to me only, but unto all them also that love His 
 appearing.'' 
 
 These are the words of the great Apostle, when, 
 broken in body by years and by sufferings, he 
 was looking out for the coming of his Lord. 
 His work was done. His fight and his course 
 was over. Earth had nothing more for him to 
 suffer or to do.. There lacked nothing but his 
 Master's coming, and for this he yearned with all 
 his soul and with all his strength. The world 
 has no longing that may be compared with it. 
 His life was already " hid with Christ in God," 
 
98 LOVE THE PREPARATION [Serm. 
 
 and there remained nothing now but to see 
 Him face to face, and to enter into the unclouded 
 meaning of the mystery for which he had laboured 
 unto death. Through all his life of toil, the 
 coming of the Lord had been his stay. " The day 
 of Christ," " the day of our Lord Jesus Christ," 
 " the coming of the Lord," " his coming and 
 his kingdom," " that blessed hope and the 
 glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour 
 Jesus Christ," this had been the bright spot in 
 which his whole life had centred. 
 
 And the day was now come at last when the" 
 world should do for him the one only deed of 
 kindliness it could bestow. It could speed him, 
 with the tokens of the Cross, into the presence of 
 His Lord. It could unite him in the brotherhood 
 of martyrdom with that same Stephen in whose 
 blood he had been consenting. Therefore he 
 stood unbent before the judgment-seat at which 
 nations trembled, in that day when " no man 
 stood with him, but all men forsook him." He 
 closed with that last dread passage of his career in 
 exceeding joy. "I am ready to be offered, and the 
 time of my departure is at hand." The " strait 
 betwixt two" in which he had so long been holden 
 was at last dissolved, and his desire was all but 
 accomplished. " Henceforth there is laid up for 
 me a crown of righteousness which the Lord the 
 
V.] FOR CHRIST'S COMING. 99 
 
 righteous Judge," — reversing this world's in- 
 justice,^ — " shall give me at that day, and not to 
 me only, but to all them also which love his 
 appearing." 
 
 It is to these last words that we are chiefly con- 
 cerned to refer. They are most seasonable. The 
 manifold admonitions of this time warn us to turn 
 from the truths and topics of our ordinary duties, 
 to look more intently upon ourselves. Advent is 
 as a shadow thrown forward on us by the day of 
 our visitation. The crown of this great Apostle, 
 though of surpassing brightness, will not be the 
 only one that shall then be given. All Christ's 
 true servants shall be crowned likewise ; " every 
 man in his own order ;" "all those that love his 
 appearing," that look to it not with cold expec- 
 tation, but with awful hope, and strong desire. 
 
 There is something almost too great for us to 
 utter, too high for us to conceive, in the words, 
 " who love his appearing." How shall sin and 
 dust look on to that day of fear without tremb- 
 ling and amazement? Prophets and saints have 
 not been able to endure His presence in vision, 
 and in ecstacy : how then shall we abide the day 
 of His coming, or who shall stand when He 
 appeareth ? The "man greatly beloved," when the 
 vision stood before him, " retained no strength," 
 and his " comeliness was turned into corruption :" 
 
 h 2 
 
100 LOVE THE PREPARATION [Serm. 
 
 the beloved disciple " fell at his feet as dead." 
 Who then shall " love the appearing" of our Lord 
 and Judge? Far as this is beyond all that we 
 have attained, it is yet a state of no false imagi- 
 nation, no excited emotion, but a reality, — calm, 
 deep, and mature. It is a state of high and 
 exceeding peace, the fruit of ripe obedience : 
 having its origin and strength in the most real 
 and necessary affections of our spiritual nature. 
 It may be attained by each one of us. Ought we 
 not rather to say, it must be, if we would rise 
 above the dubious and uncertain level of an im- 
 perfect faith ? Let us endeavour, then, to ascer- 
 tain what are the conditions of such a temper of 
 mind : and the grounds on which it rests. 
 
 And first, if any one would love that day, he 
 must have a clear and deep perception of the 
 hatefulness of sin. To all who have learned this 
 great lesson, the appearing of Christ is the day of 
 perfect release from the burden and affliction of 
 a fallen nature. The grace of regeneration has 
 given to them a sense and a sympathy with 
 which spiritual evil is discord and warfare. They 
 see the creation of God marred by the power of 
 sin : they struggle with it in perpetual outward 
 temptations : they feel it in themselves clinging 
 fast to them, penetrating their inmost thoughts, 
 sullying their purest affections. And they have 
 
V.] FOR CHRIST'S COMiNG. 101 
 
 been taught, to hate it with a hatred which is of 
 God : to abhor themselves for what they are ; to 
 pray, and to strive to be delivered " from, the 
 body of this death." Such, for instance, are those 
 that are true and disciplined penitents ; who after 
 boyhood, or youth spent of permitted sins, have 
 turned with indignant abhorrence from the 
 haunts, deeds, familiars, visions and memories of. 
 their past impurity. While they have chastened 
 themselves with a discipline of humiliation, the 
 keenness of their spiritual perception has revived. 
 And after they are delivered from the active habit 
 of disobedience, they enter into a depth and a 
 mystery of darkness which they never felt before. 
 They begin for the first time truly to know them- 
 selves, and what they have done. Their past 
 commerce with the Evil One, now seen in a clear 
 retrospect, makes their very life to savour of the 
 second death. It seems as if in their narrow 
 soul there were a capacity to hold the un- 
 divided kingdom of darkness ; and they gaze, 
 in exceeding fear, at the depth of evil which 
 stands open in their spiritual nature. Impure 
 imaginations still sear them, evil thoughts still 
 haunt their hearts : even in the purest actions, 
 the most retired employments, the holiest seasons, 
 a consciousness of what they have been ; of the 
 death in which they walked blindfold ; of the soils 
 
1 2 LOVE THE PREPARATION [Serm. 
 
 and characters which are still branded on them, 
 make them to break away from themselves, and 
 to cast themselves upon Him who at His coming 
 " shall change our vile body that it may be like 
 unto his glorious body," Awful as that day 
 must be, it will bring deliverance from a torment 
 which has no other alleviation. Much as they 
 fear the eye of the Holy One, they fear more the 
 defilement of the soul. One fear makes the 
 other to pass into longing : and they learn to 
 love that, from which, as they love it, they per- 
 petually shrink with dread. 
 
 This is also true of the holiest, and the more 
 so in the measure in which they are holier. As 
 they learn by chastened experience the dreadful 
 secrets of the fall in others and in themselves, the 
 presence of the original taint in all the sphere of 
 their spiritual nature, the subtle stimulants of the 
 fallen world around them ; so they learn that the 
 misery of man is in himself ; in the mystery of 
 his own fearful and wonderful being, once in har- 
 mony with itself and with God, now darkened, 
 soiled and biassed. The consciousness of sin 
 dwelling in them, and its vivid response to out- 
 ward provocations and allurements ; and the 
 humbling sense that they are susceptible of all 
 temptations, these things make them long for the 
 day of perfect redemption. In all their nearest 
 
V.] FOR CHRIST'S COMING. 103 
 
 approaches to God, in works of charity, in alms- 
 deeds, in acts of consolation, in prayer and secret 
 abasement, in the worship of the Church, even at 
 the foot of the altar, they bear about with them 
 the burden and the consciousness of that which 
 afflicts them while they abhor it. Though crucified 
 and kept under by the Spirit of grace, yet it is 
 still there reminding them that they are fallen and 
 imperfect : that so long as they are in the body, 
 they must bear the yoke of their humiliation. 
 And though they are willing to bear it still as a 
 salutary affliction, to chasten and to purify them 
 for the day of His coming : nevertheless, in this 
 body they " groan being burdened, .earnestly de- 
 siring to be clothed upon with the house which is 
 from Heaven." There is nothing they desire with 
 so intense a longing as to be made whole in the 
 kingdom of the regeneration, to be without sin in 
 that day " when the Son of Man shall sit upon 
 the throne of His glory :" and in awe and 
 trembling they learn to love the day which shall 
 purge them of all stains, and make them as the 
 angels of God. 
 
 Again, we cannot love the day of Christ, ex- 
 cept we be dead to this world. Until we have 
 learned its dangers and deceits, its falsehood and 
 emptiness, we have got but a little way in prepar- 
 ing for Christ's coming. To love it is impossible, 
 
104, LOVE THE PREPARATION [Serm. 
 
 There is nothing in Holy Scripture more em- 
 phatic than warnings against the world ; and 
 that not only against the positive ' evils, and de- 
 filements of it, but against the snares and dangers 
 which beset even things lawful in themselves. 
 Our Lord said of His elect, " They are not of 
 the world, even as I am not of the world*." It 
 is plain that this meant more than a freedom 
 from its impurities. It expresses that peculiar 
 habit and state of mind in which His true ser- 
 vants hold themselves aloof from the fears and 
 hopes, cares and anxieties, burdens and gifts of 
 this secular state. " No man that warreth en- 
 tangleth himself with the affairs of this life, 
 that he may please him who hath chosen him to 
 be a soldier;" i. e. they who are followers of the 
 cross have a free and clear discharge from all 
 other service ; they are willing to be full or to 
 suffer want, to have and to hold all things just so 
 far as shall most accord with the hope of attain- 
 ing to the resurrection of the dead. 
 
 And with this detachment from all secular' 
 things, there arises a profound desire to be finally 
 delivered from them all ; an unutterable weari- 
 ness of the falsehood and turmoil of the world, a 
 weariness — not the sickly fancy of impatient 
 minds, nor the repining of a disobedient, selfish, 
 discontented spirit, that morbid egotism which 
 
 a St. John xvii. 14. 
 
V.] FOR CHRIST'S COMING. 105. 
 
 besets the most secular of worldly men — but a 
 higb grace which none possess but those that 
 have given themselves to " spend and be spent" 
 for His sake. A true and pure desire to be 
 free from the conditions of this mortal life, is 
 always combined with the highest and most 
 active devotion to God's service, with a large and 
 fervent charity, and with self-denial for the sake 
 of the elect. Without these we may well fear 
 lest we deceive ourselves. No man can be truly 
 dead to this world until his affections are quick- 
 ened and concentrated in the world beyond the 
 grave. It is this perception of the realities of 
 God's kingdom, that teaches him to withdraw 
 his affections from this dazzling and changeful 
 vision with its vanities and pomps. He sees that, 
 under all its bright array, it is full of perturba- 
 tions : that its conflicts, changes, contradictions, 
 are heavy to bear: its fairest things frail and 
 fleeting. He shrinks from its cumbrous favours, 
 its uncertain blessings, its doubtful tenures. 
 He sees things that promised brightly end in 
 clouds, and things that looked most lasting 
 " crushed before the moth." He finds little 
 rest : no full quiescence of heart. It is this deep 
 sense of the nothingness of the world that has 
 taught not only to Apostles and Martyrs, but to 
 all. the elect of God, the lesson of entire deadness ; 
 
106 LOVE THE PREPARATION [Serm. 
 
 in whatsoever path or state of life ; in courts and 
 camps; in busy marts, or learned schools; princes, 
 soldiers, wise men, the highborn and the hon- 
 oured, merchants, and traffickers of the earth, the 
 unlettered, and the lowly, they have caught the 
 strains of another world, and all the charming 
 of this world are to them grating and powerless. 
 They refuse to hear, charm it never so wisely. 
 Their longing is for " the restitution of all 
 things ;" when all things shall be reduced to har- 
 mony, and ordered in their original perfection: 
 when there shall no more be either death or sin, 
 and all the creatures of God shall once more be 
 faultless and everlasting. Their portion is in the 
 world beyond the grave ; and they choose rather 
 to wait for the bliss which fadeth not away, than 
 to make trial of a state whose best things must 
 " perish in the using." What they are seeking 
 is a reality, which every year may grow more real, 
 and pass onward into the world which is eternal. 
 It is this that makes them choose to wait 
 wholly upon God, whether in the sacred or 
 secular state, with perfect devotion, because that 
 alone is a reality which shall outlast the shadows 
 and changes of time. When all else is passed 
 away, their great choice shall still advance to its 
 perfection ; the service of God, the worship of the 
 Eternal, here under a veil, and through symbols 
 
V.] FOB,. CHRIST'S COMING. 107 
 
 and sacraments, and in imperfect acts of homage, 
 in chants, and prayers, in works of mercy and of 
 repentance in the fellowship of penitents and 
 mourners, shall there pass into the adoration 
 which goes up before the throne, out of the 
 midst of which came lightnings and thunderings 
 and voices, by direct intuition, beatific vision, 
 unwearied homage day and night with the com- 
 panies of the blessed, saints, angels, archangels, 
 spirits of knowledge and of love, in the glory of 
 His everlasting kingdom. 
 
 And once more, this love of His appearing is 
 the direct and natural effect of love to Christ 
 Himself. Otherwise it is hard to say how any 
 man should love His coming. And this love is 
 not a distant awe, or scrupulous reverence, or a 
 cold keeping of His literal commandments ; but 
 the same vivid affection of our nature, purified 
 and raised to embrace Him who loved us and 
 gave Himself for us. They who have attained to 
 this high grace wait for Him as we wait for one 
 in whom all our happiness is centred; as we 
 look out for the coming of some friend whom we 
 love greatly. We know how in times of expecta- 
 tion their image is always in our thoughts : what- 
 soever we are saying or doing, it is ever in our 
 mind : it passes before our eyes, and mingles 
 in the work that lies before us: their tones 
 
108 LOVE THE PREPARATION [Serm. 
 
 and words, almost their very footfall, are in our 
 ear. It is a second consciousness, so that we feel 
 the more alone till they come back ; though there 
 be many with us, yet the friend we wish for is not 
 there, and it is as if there were no one : as the 
 days pass we reckon them up, at last the hours ; 
 and our eager hope imagines to itself the signs 
 and sounds of their arrival ; and we look out in- 
 cessantly, and hasten forth again and again to 
 meet them before they are come indeed; this is 
 but a faint expression of their earnest, and impor- 
 tunate longing, who wait for Christ's appearing. 
 Through long years of repentance and disci- 
 pline, it may be from earliest childhood, they 
 have heard and spoken, read and pondered of 
 Him with an awe which drew their affections to 
 Himself. They have tasted of His goodness 
 in blessings and chastisements, in guidance and 
 in safety; in manifold temptations, in solace, 
 in reproofs. They have realized His continual 
 presence and control in all the passages and 
 windings of their past life. They are glad when" 
 they receive fresh tokens of His nearness to them, 
 albeit in visitations of rebuke : year by year they 
 have grown familiar with Him, and have learned 
 to know His voice, and to love its accents even 
 though they sometimes fall sharply on the ear. 
 It is their peace to believe that all things are dis- 
 
V.] FOR CHRIST'S COMING. 109 
 
 posed by Him ; that all the earth is full of the 
 signs of His coming, that the fig-tree is putting 
 forth its leaves : and the more emphatic these be- 
 come the more do they tremble yet rejoice. They 
 can without fear speak one to another of the 
 visitation in the time of the end : the strife 
 of nations : " famines and pestilence, and fearful 
 sights, and great signs from Heaven :" " distress 
 of nations with perplexity : the sea and the waves 
 roaring: men's hearts failing them for fear, and 
 for looking after those things which are coming 
 on the earth." They are looking out for the last 
 tokens, false Chris ts and false prophets deceiv- 
 ing almost the elect; iniquity abounding, love 
 waxing cold, faith all but extinct : the hiding of 
 the Church's light : the sharp sword issuing from 
 His mouth : and in all the earth the profound 
 non-expectation of His coming, whereby we know 
 that the day of the Son of Man is at hand. All 
 these signs of fear to them carry no personal 
 alarm : they know in "Whose hand are all these 
 conflicting powers, and Whose coming they be- 
 speak. They know too that they are on His 
 side : and that their " redemption draweth 
 nigh." 
 
 But there are, perhaps, few of us who can 
 think of that day without alarm. The warnings 
 of our Lord fill us with a sense of fear. For 
 
HO LOVE THE PREPARATION [Serm. 
 
 instance, what are our true feelings when we 
 read such words as "Of that day and hour 
 knoweth no man : no, not the angels of heaven, 
 but my Father only. But as the days of Noe 
 were, so shall also the coming of the Son of Man 
 be. For as in the days that were before the flood 
 they were eating and drinking, marrying and 
 giving in marriage, until . the day that Noe 
 entered into the ark, and knew not until the 
 flood came and took them all away ; so shall also 
 the coming of the Son of Man be. Then shall 
 two be in the field, the one shall be taken and 
 the other left. Two women shall be grinding at 
 the mill, the one shall be taken and the other 
 left. Watch, therefore, for ye know not what hour 
 our Lord doth come 1 "." Do we not feel a thrill as 
 we read "Ye shall look on me whom ye have 
 pierced." "Which prevails in us, love or fear, desire 
 or shrinking? If it be fear, need we go far for 
 the reason ? Is it only because the day of His 
 coming is awful in itself ? Is it not rather that 
 in ourselves there is something with which we 
 fear to meet His eye ? Is it not that there is in 
 us some sin still unmortified, or still unrepented? 
 that though we be seemingly changed we are not 
 truly penitent ? that we are conscious of some 
 cherished evil either of the flesh or of the spirit — 
 pride, or lust, wrath, envy, or sloth, something that 
 b St. Matt. xxiv. 36—41. 
 
V.] FOR CHRIST'S COMING. Ill 
 
 makes us fear when we read " If any man defile 
 the temple of God, him shall God destroy" ?" For 
 at that day we shall each one for ever be what 
 we shall then be found : our actual state will 
 be fixed by His word and be made eternal. 
 We shall then hear Him say, " He that is un- 
 just let him be unjust still, and he that is 
 filthy let him be filthy still." Wherefore : 
 "take heed to yourselves, lest at any time 
 your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and 
 drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that 
 day come upon you unawares. For as a snare 
 shall it come on all them that dwell on the face 
 of the whole earth :" even on the most prepared : 
 though they shall be always ready in habitual 
 purity. But on those who are morally unpre- 
 pared all the forerunning signs will fall in vain. 
 The same permitted sin, be it one only, which 
 makes men shrink at the thought of Christ's 
 coming, will hinder them also from perceiving 
 the warnings of His approach. They will class 
 them with the ordinary phenomena of the natural 
 world, or of political states, or of religious pro- 
 bation, and will explain- away, as common and 
 unmeaning events, the tokens which shew that He 
 is at the very doors. 
 
 Or again, if we fear, it is because there are in 
 us some inordinate desires, some still unchastened 
 
 c 1 Cor. iii. 17. 
 
112 LOVE THE PREPARATION [Serm. 
 
 longings, something at variance with the self- 
 denial of the cross, something not dead to the 
 world. It may be that it is in itself a lawful 
 matter .- some schemes we desire to accomplish : 
 some position to be won. We are hankering, 
 perhaps, after questionable happiness ; or we have 
 some lofty aims, some self-exalting imaginations. 
 The kingdoms of the world and the glory of them 
 are somehow still a lure to us. We have not 
 fulfilled the renunciation of our baptism. We 
 are perhaps of too buoyant a heart : or too full 
 of life. We do not penetrate deep enough into 
 the realities of the Spirit. The lawful callings, 
 or the happiness of this earthly state, have too 
 much hold upon us. We cannot attain to 
 St. Paul's precept, " Brethren, the time is short : 
 it remaineth that both they that have wives be 
 as though they had none ; and they that weep, 
 as though they wept not ; and they that rejoice, 
 as though they rejoiced not ; and they that buy, 
 as though they possessed not ; and they that use 
 this world, as not abusing it d ." This is the cause 
 of most of our shrinking. Perhaps after all we 
 do in secret love the world : its purer forms are 
 too attractive : it is still too fair, and soft, and 
 pleasant to us : and that day would cut short 
 our joys, and spoil us of our innocent pleasures. 
 It would be a great wrench to give them up ; to 
 
 d 1 Cor. vii. 29—31. 
 
V.] FOR CHRIST'S COMING. U3 
 
 leave behind what we cling so fast to. Our con- 
 victions urge us onward, but' our affections hang 
 continually back. The bliss of the eternal world, 
 and of those that wait for it, is too severe and 
 high for us. Still we go on thinking that, when 
 some cherished purpose is fulfilled, we shall then, 
 after that, forsake all and make ourselves clear 
 and disentangled of the world to wait for His 
 coming. And yet, after all, what is this but only 
 a subtler insinuation of " the lust of the flesh, the 
 lust of the eyes, and the pride of life," of that love 
 with which the love of the Father will not dwell ? 
 something that- ought to be dead within us still 
 living? If he that said "suffer me first to go 
 and bury my father," received of the Lord an 
 answer of so stern a sound, what shall we hear 
 when He comes to judge the world ? 
 
 And lastly, it is perfect love alone that " casteth 
 out fear." The love of His unseen presence now, 
 is the true and all-comprehending discipline to 
 prepare us for the coming of our Lord. This is the 
 cause why we have more fear than love of that day, 
 because our love to Him is but a faint affection, a 
 love rather of the reason than of the heart, of the 
 conscience than of the soul. We picture to our- 
 selves His presence by the imagination rather 
 than apprehend it by faith. Our thoughts of 
 Him are as thoughts of a pure heavenly intel- 
 
314 LOVE THE PREPARATION [Serm. 
 
 ligence, rather than of a Divine Person encom- 
 passed with our nature, perfect in sympathy, 
 overflowing with love. 
 
 For the most part ours is a loveless faith. Is 
 it not already come to pass according as it is 
 written, " Because iniquity shall abound, the love 
 of many shall wax cold?" Surely of this our 
 infrequent prayers, our constrained communions, 
 our poor works of mercy, our slender and cheap 
 self-denials, our spiritual sloth, bear too sure a 
 witness. How is it that these things are at 
 all times irksome to some, sometimes to 
 all? "Which of us can say, "I have fought a 
 good fight?" How then can we say "there is 
 laid up for me a crown of righteousness ?" Nay, 
 rather, how many among us shall hardly clear 
 ourselves from the Apostle's sentence, "If any 
 man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be 
 anathema maranatha." 
 
 Wherefore let us make ready while there is 
 yet time : while the night yet wears on, and the 
 day still tarries. Let us so live as we would 
 desire to be found by Him at His appearing. 
 Let us forsake all things of this world so far as 
 the liberty which God gives to each of us allows : 
 counting them happy that are freest from its tram- 
 mels, most dead to its allurements, — attending on 
 the Lord without distraction. A few short years, 
 
V.] FOR CHRIST'S COMING. 1 15 
 
 and where shall be all those things we are now 
 so eager about ? Where shall be all our anxious 
 studies and busy schemes, our toils and theories, 
 our forecastings, designs, and strong contentions : 
 our waking and watching, our sorrows and joys, 
 our losses and successes ? What shall popularity, 
 or learning, or rank, or elevation, or worldly 
 power then profit us ? Where will be all our 
 future aims when the white cloud shall be seen 
 in heaven, and we shall be cited before the 
 righteous Judge ? Better, far better, to bear 
 now " in the body the marks of the Lord Jesus," 
 that we may be arrayed then in white raiment, 
 than to be full of the gifts of this life, to be 
 served and worshipped by the world, and at that 
 day to stand before His piercing eyes, naked and 
 defiled, and all men see our shame. 
 
 i2 
 
SERMON VI. 
 
 THE BEATIFIC VISION. 
 Feast of St. Philip and St. James, 1844. 
 
 St. Matthew v. 8. 
 " Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
 
 In joining the two Apostles, St. Philip and 
 St. James, in one act of commemoration, the 
 Church seems to suggest to bur thoughts the 
 deep and living unity by which all the servants 
 and saints of Christ are knit together. Howso- 
 ever different they were in character and life, 
 in the acts and events of it, in the powers and 
 gifts bestowed upon them, they .were still one 
 in Him to whom they are now united ; St. Philip, 
 the Apostle and Missionary, the converter of 
 nations, the founder of Gentile Churches ; St. 
 James, the Apostle and Bishop, sitting in his 
 spiritual throne, fixed, and stedfast, in the Holy 
 City, ruling the Israel of God. The fruit of 
 St. Philip's preaching has its record only in the 
 
118 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Serm. 
 
 living traditions of Christendom : the episcopate 
 of St. James has also its memorial in the written 
 canon of Holy Scripture. God deals in a mani- 
 fold and wonderful way with His elect servants, 
 and yet in all their diversities makes them vitally 
 one ; in the same divine commission, the same 
 devoted toil for His elect, the same thirsting 
 after God, the same crown of martyrdom, the 
 same vision of God in glory. 
 
 In the few and scattered notices of St. Philip, 
 whom we to-day commemorate, there is a saying 
 which leads us especially to connect his name 
 with the hope of the beatific vision. Our blessed 
 Lord, in that last night of His humiliation, said 
 to His disciples, "I am the way, the truth, and 
 the life : no man cometh unto the Father but by 
 me. If ye had known me ye should have known 
 my Father also : and from henceforth ye both 
 know him, and have seen him." And these 
 words did but kindle the very yearnings and 
 perplexed desires which they should have allayed. 
 " Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, 
 and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have 
 I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou 
 not known me, Philip ? He that hath seen me, 
 hath seen the Father ; and how sayest thou, then, 
 Shew us the Father ? Believest thou not that I 
 am in the Father, and the Father in me*?" 
 
 a St. John xiv. 6—10. 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 119 
 
 Now in these words St. Philip gave utterance 
 to the craving which has burned in the heart of 
 patriarchs, prophets, and saints in all ages of the 
 world. He is almost a type of the Church of 
 old in its dim desires after the vision of God, 
 and of the thirst which has been felt above all 
 by the Church of the regeneration. There has 
 been in all God's true servants a consciousness 
 that nothing but God alone could give rest to 
 their souls : that they were made for Him, and 
 that without Him their being was but a frag- 
 ment, a painful mutilated life : that their capa- 
 cities of knowledge, love, and bliss, were too 
 large to be filled by creatures, that the hiding of 
 the only sufficing uncreated One is the source 
 of all sorrow, and the cause of all restless want. 
 It is this that has kindled their whole inner life 
 into a passionate longing after God. To see 
 Him was the insatiate desire of Moses in the 
 mount, when he said, " I beseech thee shew me 
 thy glory. And he said, thou canst not see my 
 face : for there shall no man see me and live. 
 And the Lord said, Behold there is a place by 
 me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock : and it 
 shall come to pass while my glory passeth by, 
 that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and 
 will cover thee with mine hand, while I pass by : 
 and I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt 
 
120 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Seem. 
 
 see my back parts; but my face shall not be 
 seen b ." It was the very breathing of David's 
 life ; " like as the hart panteth after the water- 
 brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God: 
 my soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the 
 living God : when shall I come and appear before 
 God ?" It was the ecstatic vision of Isaiah ; " In 
 the year that King Uzziah died I saw also the 
 Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, 
 and his train filled the temple. Above it stood 
 the seraphims : each one had six wings ; with 
 twain he covered his face, and with twain he 
 covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And 
 one cried unto another, and said, Holy, Holy, 
 Holy, is the Lord of Hosts : the whole earth is 
 full of His glory. And the posts of the door 
 moved at the voice of him that cried, and the 
 house was filled with smoke. Then said I, Woe 
 is me ! for I am undone ; because I am a man of 
 unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people 
 of unclean lips : for mine eyes have seen the 
 King, the Lord of Hosts ." It was the glory of 
 Ezekiel's rapture ; "above the firmament . . . was 
 the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a 
 sapphire stone : and upon the likeness of the 
 throne was the likeness as the appearance of a 
 man above upon it. And I saw as the colour 
 of amber, as the appearance of fire round about 
 
 b Exod. xxxiii. 18—23; xxiv. 9, 10. c Isa. vi. 1—5. 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 
 
 within it, from the appearance of his loins even 
 upward; and from the appearance of his loins 
 even downward, I saw as it were the appearance 
 of fire, and it had brightness round about. As 
 the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud 
 in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the 
 brightness round about. This was the appear- 
 ance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord d ." 
 Again, "Then the Spirit took me up, and I heard 
 behind me a voice of a great rushing, saying, 
 Blessed be the glory of the Lord from his place. 
 I heard also the noise of the wings of the living 
 creatures that touched one another, and the noise 
 of the wheels over against them, and a noise of a 
 great rushing. So the Spirit lifted me up, and 
 took me away, and I went in bitterness, in the 
 heat of my spirit ; but the hand of the Lord was 
 strong upon me'." It was the promised bliss of 
 Simeon that he should see the Lord's Christ : " God 
 manifest in the flesh." It was the gift bestowed 
 upon the Apostles that they should see and con- 
 verse with God, eat and drink, journey, and toil to- 
 gether with God in the mystery of His holy Incar- 
 nation. It was the peculiar favour bestowed upon 
 St. Paul. " I knew a man in Christ about fourteen 
 years ago (whether in the body, I cannot tell, or 
 whether out of the body, I cannot tell : God know- 
 eth !), such an one caught up to the third heaven. 
 d Ezek. i. 26—28. e Ezek. iii. 12—14. 
 
122 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Sbkm. 
 
 And I knew such a man (whether in the body or 
 out of the body, I cannot tell : God knoweth) 
 how that he was caught up into Paradise, and 
 heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful 
 for a man to utter f ." In all these, by ecstacy and 
 vision, by rapture and prophecy, by visible 
 advent, by divine personality, by revelations of 
 Paradise, the pure in heart did truly " see God." 
 Peter and John, Andrew and Thomas, Philip and 
 James, and Paul, though the last yet above all, did 
 as truly see God as they beheld each other. For 
 the "Word had been made flesh and they had seen 
 Him, and beheld His glory — " the glory as of 
 the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and 
 truth." " God was manifest in the flesh," and in 
 His indivisible personality of both natures, by 
 virtue of the Eternal Godhead, there was the pre- 
 sence both of the Father and of the Holy Ghost. 
 "He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father." "I 
 and my Father are one." He was "the brightness 
 of his Father's glory, the express image of his 
 person," "the image of the invisible God." 
 "In him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead 
 bodily*." 
 
 Now what were all these but pledges and earn- 
 ests of a bliss which is to come hereafter ? Real 
 
 f 1 Cor. xii. 1 — 4. S. Thorn. Aquin. ; Summa Theol. 2 da 
 2 dM Qusest. 175. 6. 
 
 b St. John x. 30; Heh. i. 1 ; Col. i. 15. and ii. 9. 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 123 
 
 and high as was this fellowship with God, it was 
 but the first manifestation of that glory which 
 shall be revealed. It was the foretaste of this 
 Beatitude ; the inheritance of the pure in heart : 
 a faint anticipation of that vision in bliss, which 
 makes blessed all who behold it. 
 
 Let us then go on to consider, so far as we 
 may, what is the nature of the beatific vision. 
 It is plainly something that is yet to come. " The 
 pure in heart shall see God." This was not finally 
 fulfilled in the visions of seers, nor in the presence 
 of Christ in the flesh, nor in any manifestation 
 that has yet been made of God to His servants. 
 Such beginnings, and first intuitions, as they may 
 have had here in this fife, did but lead on to 
 the perfect sight of the Divine Presence. They 
 were of old both fulfilments and prophecies, 
 earnests and actual gifts, in part realities, and in 
 part adumbrations, of that vision of God which 
 shall be hereafter. 
 
 First, then, in the kingdom of heaven, the pure 
 in heart of all ages, both before and since the 
 Incarnation, shall see God in the person of Jesus 
 Christ. They shall all be admitted to the same 
 vision of " the Word made flesh," as His first 
 followers beheld after the Resurrection. The 
 promise to His servants is to "be with him 
 where he isV " to be ever with the Lord 1 :" " to 
 
 i St. John xvii. 24. ! 1 Thess. iv. 17. 
 
124 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Sbrm. 
 
 be received unto himself, that where he is they 
 may be also V "to see him as he is 1 ." Even in 
 His Kingdom the Divine manhood of Jesus Christ 
 will still be a direct and immediate revelation of 
 God's presence. 
 
 "When He appeared after His resurrection, and 
 the laws which govern our humanity had no longer 
 power over Him, He was already clothed in an 
 incorruptible and spiritual body. The veil which 
 was upon His Divine nature seemed to be drawn 
 so fine as to reveal some clearer and more piercing 
 rays of the eternal Godhead. His most favoured 
 Apostles met His presence with an awe too great 
 for words. Their eyes were in part holden, and yet 
 they saw more than they could utter. At the sea 
 of Tiberias " none dared ask him, Who art thou ? 
 knowing that it was the Lord." Again, in the 
 mountain, when they saW Him, " they worshipped 
 him, but some doubted :" as if from the excess 
 of majesty, from some ineffable awe, some per- 
 plexed consciousness overwhelmed by the presence 
 of their risen Lord. Doubtless in this there was 
 somewhat of that loving worship and prostrate 
 adoration, with which the pure in heart shall see 
 Him in His kingdom. For at that day He will 
 be seen, not in the subdued and attempered 
 majesty in which He shewed Himself on earth 
 even after His resurrection, but once more glori- 
 
 * St. John xiv. 3. ' St. John iii. 2. 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 125 
 
 fied "with the glory which he had with the 
 Father before the world was." His very man- 
 hood arrayed with the uncreated light. The 
 momentary unveiling of His glory in the mount 
 of the transfiguration is a token of the splen- 
 dour of that glorious body wherewith He is 
 now exalted to the throne of God. And if in the 
 days of His humiliation the passing emissions of 
 His glory were so keen and bright, that " his 
 face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was 
 white as the light™," what shall be the glory of 
 His exaltation? When He appeared to Saul, it 
 was in a light " above the brightness of the 
 sun n :" when He came in vision to the beloved 
 disciple, it was in a form of insupportable majesty, 
 " clothed with a garment down to the foot, and 
 girt about the paps with a golden girdle. His 
 head and his hairs were white like wool, as white 
 as snow, and his eyes were as a flame of fire ; and 
 his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in 
 a furnace : and his voice as the sound of many 
 waters. And he had in his right hand seven 
 stars : and out of his mouth went a sharp two- 
 edged sword : and his countenance was as the sun 
 shineth in his strength ." And again, "I saw a 
 great white throne, and him that sat on it, from 
 whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, 
 
 m St. Matt. xvii. 2. n Acts xxvi. 13. 
 
 Rev. i. 13—16. 
 
126 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Sbrm. 
 
 and there was found no place for them p." And 
 yet what are all these to the unimaginable glory 
 which shall be revealed ? We do but lower our 
 own thoughts of it by subjecting them to any 
 symbols or descriptions but those of the Spirit. 
 Let thus much then suffice. They who attain to 
 that life and the kingdom of the resurrection, 
 shall see the Divine presence in the glorified 
 manhood of Jesus Christ; the one eternal, in- 
 visible Godhead, unfolding the Divine glory, 
 through the person of the Incarnate Word. In 
 seeing Him, the pure in heart shall in very truth 
 see God in the glory of His kingdom. 
 
 And yet it would appear that even this is 
 rather the access to the Beatific Vision than the 
 Beatific Vision itself. There is in Holy Scripture 
 a revelation of the Divine presence besides the 
 personal manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 As when St. Stephen saw the heavens opened, 
 " and the Son of Man standing at the right hand 
 of God : " and as where St. Paul ascribes the mani- 
 festation of Christ at His second coming to God, 
 saying, "which in his times he shall shew, who is 
 the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings 
 and Lord of lords ; who only hath immortality, 
 dwelling in the light which no man can approach 
 unto : whom no man hath seen nor can seei ." 
 And again, in the book of Revelation, St. John 
 
 p Rev. xx. 11. i 1 Tim. vi. 15. 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 127 
 
 so describes the Divine presence as to include 
 somewhat more than the vision of the person of 
 the Word made flesh ; and uses symbols which 
 lead us back again to the visions of Ezekiel. 
 " I was in the Spirit," he writes, " and behold 
 a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the 
 throne. And he that sat was to look upon as 
 a jasper and a sardine stone. And there was 
 a rainbow round about the throne in sight like 
 unto an emerald : . . . . and out of the throne 
 proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices : 
 and there were seven lamps of fire burning 
 before the throne, which are the seven Spirits 
 of God." ..." And they rest not day and 
 night, saying, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God 
 Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come." 
 And again, " I saw no temple there, for the Lord 
 God Almighty, and the Lamb, are the temple of 
 it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither 
 of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of 
 God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light 
 thereof." " And he shewed me a pure river of 
 water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of 
 the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the 
 midst of the street of it, and on either side of the 
 river, was the tree of life, which bare twelve 
 manner of fruits, and yielded his fruit every 
 month, and the leaves of the tree were for the 
 
 r Rev. iv. 2—8; xxi. 22, 23. 
 
128 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Serm. 
 
 healing of the nations. And there shall be no 
 more curse, but the throne of God and of the 
 Lamb shall be in it : and his servants shall 
 serve him ; and they shall see his face, and his 
 name shall be in their foreheads, and there shall 
 be no night there : and they need no candle, nei- 
 ther light of the sun, for the Lord God giveth 
 them light, and they shall reign for ever and 
 ever'." Now whatsoever this sublime language 
 of symbols may intend, and whatsoever glances 
 there may be in it at the work of grace now in 
 its progressive state, it cannot be denied, first, 
 that it does ultimately shadow forth the bliss that 
 is reserved for the saints ; and next, such an un- 
 veiling of the Divine presence, as no man in this 
 unpurged flesh and blood could see and live : 
 such as we by virtue of our mystical unity and 
 living incorporation with the second Adam, the 
 Man Jesus Christ, shall, through Him, behold. 
 And it is to this St. Paul seems to lead us when 
 he says of Christ, that " he must reign till he 
 hath put all enemies under his feet . . . And 
 when all things shall be subdued unto him, then 
 shall the Son also himself be subject unto him 
 that put all things under him, that God may be 
 all in all' :" that is to say, when sin and death 
 are expelled from all the members of His mystical 
 body ; when the number of His elect is full, and 
 
 8 Rev, xxii. 1—5. * 1 Cor. xv. 25, 28. 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 129 
 
 the Church and Christ are united in one perfect 
 body ; then shall the mediatorial office of the king- 
 dom of grace be at an end, and He shall receive 
 His Saints into the kingdom of glory, and the new 
 Creation be subject to the One, uncreated, undi- 
 vided, God the Fatber, God the Son, and God 
 the Holy Ghost". This is the true Temple where 
 they minister day and night before Him. This 
 is the throne where " they shall see his face." 
 And this seems to be the vision of bliss, in the 
 rest of God, in the infinite intensity of the Divine 
 presence, when the Word made flesh shall gather 
 His mystical body, the elect, who, through the 
 mystery of the incarnation, and by union with His 
 person, shall receive power to behold the Divine 
 Presence, as angels, archangels, thrones, domi- 
 nions, principalities, and powers, cherubin and 
 seraphim behold it now. 
 
 Thus far we have considered the visible mani- 
 festations of the Divine presence as they have 
 been exhibited 1 , or are promised to the sense of 
 
 " S. Greg. Nyss. Orat. in " Tunc ipse Filius subjicietur" &c. 
 torn. ii. pp. 12 — 15. " Et ipsa visio est facie ad faciem, quae 
 summum praemium promittitur justis ; et ipsa fiet, cum tradet 
 regnum Deo et Patri ; in quo et suae form* visionem vult in^ 
 telligi, subjecta Deo universa creatura, et ipsa in qua Filius Dei 
 filius hominis factus est." S. Aug. De Trinitate, lib. i. 18. 
 torn. viii. p. 768. 
 
 * S. Chrysostom, after quoting Isaiah vi. 1, &c, Dan. vii. 9, 
 
 K 
 
130 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Serm. 
 
 outward sight; but there would seem to be in 
 this beatitude something deeper and still more 
 intense. Throughout the words of Prophets and 
 Apostles there are ever to be heard such warnings 
 and checks as these, " The Lord spake unto you 
 out of the midst of the fire : ye heard the voice 
 of the words, but saw no similitude, only ye heard 
 a voice 7 ." Again, " There shall no man see me 
 and live." Again, " We shall surely die because 
 we have seen God." Again, " No man hath 
 seen God at any time." Again, "whom no man 
 hath seen nor can seeV 
 
 There seems to be no truth more broadly 
 written in Holy Scripture than the invisibleness 
 of the uncreated God. It seems to be the highest 
 contradiction of His infinity of Being to use any 
 such terms as imply circumscription, figure, 
 locality, or to subject the Divine presence to the 
 conditions of manifestation which appear to be 
 necessary for the corporeal vision of His crea- 
 tures. 
 
 Exod. xxxiii. 13, adds, ical crcpoi avrbv £a>paKao~i. Has ovv 6 
 'ladvvrjs eiire, &tov oibels e&pcutc irimore; SrjXiov Sn Travra cKetvd 
 ovyKara/3ao-EG)s rjv ovk (tvrijs rrfs ovcnas yvp,vrjs Jtyir' el yap aunji' 
 eapav tt\v (pva-iv ovk av bia<p6pa>s camp/ idedaravro' carkrj yap ns 
 Kai ao-)(r)paTi<rros avrtj, icai atrivBeros, Kal aweplypairros. In Joan- 
 nem, Horn. xv. torn. viii. p. 85. 
 
 y Deut. iv. 12. 
 
 * Exod. xxxiii. 20-; Judges xiii. 22; St.Johniv.12; 1 Tim. vi. 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISIOty 131 
 
 Nevertheless, we read also in St. Paul's writings, 
 "now we see through a glass darkly, but then 
 face to face." And in the book of Revelations, 
 " and they shall see his face." 
 
 Now these words of the One Spirit must have 
 some true and deep agreement, howsoever in 
 letter and in sound they may seem opposed. 
 And into this it is not unlawful for us to enter, 
 so that we speak of such inscrutable mys- 
 teries without rash words, or vain and prying 
 thoughts : using " rather efficacious affections 
 of the will, than curious discourses of the un- 
 derstanding." 
 
 It seems evident, then, that the words of Moses, 
 St. John, and St. Paul, are to be understood first 
 of the impossibility of our seeing God so long 
 as we are in this mortal and sinful state ; and 
 next of the vision of bodily sight. 
 
 But it would also appear from all the revela- 
 tions of truth that, as the final bliss of man con- 
 sists in the highest exercise of his nature upon 
 the highest object of its knowledge and love, 
 they who are made perfect will in some way 
 " see him as he is." For otherwise how should 
 the saints be in perfect blessedness ? It would 
 then seem either that they should never attain 
 to that perfection, or that their vision must fall 
 short of God, and terminate in some other below 
 
 k2 
 
132 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Serm. 
 
 Him ; both which suppositions are alike contrary 
 to the Divine Word of promise*. 
 
 But it does not therefore follow, that such a 
 vision of God should in any way imply the 
 impossible notion of a circumscribed or limited 
 figure, nor that He should, in His pure essence, 
 be the object of our bodily sight even in the 
 state of glory. In His very and true being, if 
 we may reverently speak of things so high and 
 awful, without doubt God is unseen by any direct 
 gaze except His own b : for what other gaze is 
 infinite ? Not even angels nor seraphim, we 
 may believe, behold, under any finite, or com- 
 prehensible figure, form, or idea, the very and 
 uncreated Godhead . Those purer intelligences 
 behold Him now less by gazing than by living 
 in Him. Their vision is by union of their pure 
 spirits with His kindred nature. And so, it would 
 seem, it will be with His saints. For what inferior 
 
 * "Cum enim ultima hominis beatitudo in altissima ejus 
 operatione consistat, quae est operatio inteUectus, si nunquam 
 essentiam Dei videre potest inteUectus creatus, vel nunquam 
 beatitudinem obtinebit, vel in alio ejus beatitudo consistet, quam 
 in Deo, quod est alienum a fide." S. Thom. Aquin., Summa 
 Theolog., P. I. Qusest. xii. art. i. 
 
 b S. Chrys. in Joan. Horn. xv. torn. viii. p. 85. " Mdvoj ovv 
 
 uvtov opa 6 vl6s xai t6 Trveu/ia t6 aywv. 17 yhp Kriirri) (pvirtg awacra 
 was Kal l§€iv 8vvrj<T€Tat rov aKTitnov ; 
 
 c S. Chrysost. ibid : S. Dionys. Areop. de Divinis Nom. c. 
 i, § 5. 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 133 
 
 similitude could body forth the supreme d : or what 
 created form could express the infinite Creator ? 
 To the eyes of the spiritual body, indeed, the 
 presence and energy of the ever-blessed Trinity e 
 may be exhibited by heavenly tokens, and by a 
 circumstantial glory : by a sublime array of in- 
 effable symbols, as in the Apocalyptic visions, 
 by the harmony of splendours and lights, by the 
 outlines of perfect forms, and by the unity of 
 the celestial world f ; but into the brightness 
 which is dark from excess of glory, it would 
 still appear that no eye of sense e , outward or 
 inward, neither that which beholds outwardly, 
 nor that which pictures its vision inwardly upon 
 itself, may ever penetrate. 
 
 It remains, then, that we look for some other 
 power of vision higher than sight or imagination, 
 
 d S. Thorn. Aquin., Summa Theol., Qusest. xii. art. ii. 
 
 e S. Greg. Nyssen, de Vita S. Ephrsem, torn. iii. 616. 
 
 S. Greg. Naz., Orat. xliii. tom. i. 833. " avveiroirrevovres Tt)v 
 ayiav Ka\ paKapiav Tpidda KadaparepSvre Kal TeXedyrepoVf 179 pvv /*€- 
 Tplas 8(Seyp.eda ras €p,(pd<Teis : 
 
 f S. Thorn. Aquin., S. T., Quaest. xii. art. iii. 
 
 s " Impossibile est Deum videri sensu visus, vel quocunque 
 alio sensu aut potentia sensitive partis. Omnis enim potentia 
 hujusmodi est actus corporalis organi. . . Actus autem propor- 
 tionatur ei, cujus est actus. Unde nulla hujusmodi potentia 
 potest se extendere ultra corporalia. Deus autem inco'rporeus 
 est. . . . Unde nee sensu, nee imaginatione videri potest, sed solo 
 intellectu." S. Thorn. Aquin., ibid. 
 
134 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Serm. 
 
 somewhat more sublime and heavenly, subject 
 to none of the laws and limits of corporeal 
 organization 11 . And this our Lord seems here 
 to teach us when He says, " the pure in heart 
 shall see God : " it would seem that the true 
 vision of Him is spiritual, by a more direct and 
 interior power of intuition fixed upon the pre- 
 sence of God revealed in the very persons of the 
 blessed ; that His image shall be seen not by 
 
 h *' Quod autem non imaginaliter, sed proprie videtur, et non 
 per corpus videtur, hoc ea visione videtur quae omnes cseteras 
 superat. . . . 
 
 " Hsec sunt tria genera visionum Primum ergo appel- 
 
 lemus corporale, quia per corpus percipitur, et corporis sensibus 
 exhibetur. Secundum spiritale, quidquid enim corpus non est, et 
 tamen aliquid est, jam recte spiritus dicitur ; et utique non est 
 corpus, quamvis corpori similis sit, imago absentis corporis, nee 
 ille ipse obtutus quo cernitur. Tertium vero intellectuale, ab 
 intellectu .... 
 
 " Quapropter si hoc tertium visionis genus, quod superius 
 est, non solum omni corporali, quo per corporis sensus corpora 
 sentiuntur, verum etiam omni illo spiritali, quo similitudines 
 corporum spiritu et non mente cernuntur, tertium caelum appel- 
 lavit Apostolus ; in hoc videtur claritas Dei, cui videndse corda 
 mundantur, unde dictum est, ' Bead mundo corde, quia ipsi 
 Deum videbunt : non per aliquam corporaliter vel spiritaliter 
 figuratam significationem tanquam per speculum in aenigmate, 
 sed facie ad faciem, quod de Moyse dictum est, ' os ad os ;' per 
 speciem scilicet, qua est Deus quidquid est, quantulumcunque 
 eum mens, quae non est quod ipse, etiam ab omni terrena labe 
 mundata, et ab omni corpore et similitudine corporis alienata 
 et abrepta capere potest." S. Aug. De Genesi, lib. xii. §§ 6, 
 7 and 28. torn. iii. pars i. p. 302. 
 
VI-] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 
 
 135 
 
 outward vision, fixed on the similitude of any 
 form, but by reflection, by participation of His 
 likeness in knowledge, will, love, holiness in 
 themselves ; : by a divine consciousness which 
 is the bliss of those who are made partakers of 
 the divine nature : Oelas noivwvoi 0ua-ea>? k . And 
 this is the most true and perfect sight : for, mani- 
 fold as are the objects and the modes of percep- 
 tion, the power of vision is one and indivisible. 
 It does not originate in the body, but in the living 
 spirit: it does not terminate in the bodily organi- 
 zation, but in the spiritual percipient : it is hardly 
 more an act than a consciousness : so that the 
 beholding of created and sensible things is but a 
 mediate and outward consciousness, and the con- 
 templation of the image of the uncreated God in 
 
 1 " Manifestum est autem, quod Deus et est auctor intellee- 
 tivae virtutis, et ab intellectu videri potest. Et cum ipsa intel- 
 lectiva virtus creaturse non sit Dei essentia, relinquitur quod sit 
 aliqua participativa similitudo ipsius, qui est primus intellectus. 
 . . . Requiritur ergo ad videndum Deum aliqua Dei similitudo, 
 . . . Dicendum ergo, quod ad videndum Dei essentiam requi- 
 ritur aliqua similitudo ex parte visivse potentise, scilicet lumen 
 Divinre gloria? confortans intellectum ad videndum Deum, de 
 quo dicitur in Psal. 35, 'In lumine tuo videbimus lumen.' 
 Non autem per aliquam similitudinem creatam Dei essentia 
 videri potest, qua? ipsam divinam essentiam representet ut in se 
 est." S. Thom. Aquin., Summa Theol., P. I. Qua?st. xii. art. ii. 
 S. Greg. Nyssen, De Beatitud., Orat. vi. torn. iii. p. 816. 
 
 k 2 St. Pet. i. 4. 
 
136 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Serm- 
 
 purity of heart, an immediate and inward sight — 
 a sight more perfect, direct, and true, than any 
 external vision by instruments and organs. It 
 would therefore seem that the sight which the 
 perfect shall enjoy in heaven, various as it is, 
 will be all one perception ; the heavenly court, 
 the celestial hierarchy, the holiness of saints, the 
 glorified manhood of the second Adam, the 
 image of God, all one complex of brightness and 
 of bliss, seen and tasted by one consciousness of 
 the perfect Spirit : that our whole nature shall 
 see God, by all its faculties and powers, which 
 shall have all their proper objects, each accord- 
 ing to its capacity, not in succession as in this 
 imperfect state, but by one everlasting act of the 
 pure in heart. 
 
 Now if this be the end and reward of the 
 saints hereafter, it would seem to follow that 
 they are truly made partakers of it, in kind and 
 in earnest, now. For without this there can be 
 no true rest or bliss : and the perception of these 
 is through purity of heart, which is to be sought 
 and attained in this imperfect state. The presence 
 of God is the fountain of beatitude to all His 
 servants, in all conditions and approximations to 
 His kingdom. 
 
 The rest and bliss of the Church unseen, of 
 patriarchs, prophets, and saints now departed, is 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION: 137 
 
 a participation in measure of that which they 
 shall hereafter receive in fulness. What partial 
 veiling of the final glory there may now be, while 
 the bodies of the saints are yet asleep ; what 
 higher and deeper measures and capacities to 
 receive the bliss of heaven may be given with 
 the spiritual and glorious body; what fuller 
 emissions of the Divine light shall be seen in 
 the nearer access which they shall obtain after 
 the resurrection ; we must wait to learn through 
 His grace at His coming and His kingdom. 
 
 But this one truth seems clear and necessary, 
 that there can be but one source of bliss, which 
 is God alone, and but one perception of that bliss, 
 which is by purity of heart. It would seem to 
 be one and the same in all orders of created 
 spirits, from the highest seraphim to the lowest 
 saint beneath the feet of His elect. 
 
 And from this it follows again, that the spiritual 
 vision of God, which the pure in heart enjoy in 
 this mortal and humbled state, must be the very 
 same act related to the same object, wanting only 
 the circumstantials of its perfect manifestation in 
 heaven, and the conditions of perfect purity in 
 our hearts to behold it. The object of vision and 
 love there, is the object of faith and love here. 
 It is one, changeless and eternal, being God Him- 
 self. And therefore we even now speak of seeing 
 
138 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Serm. 
 
 God by faith, by the light of knowledge, and by 
 the exercise of the contemplative and intellectual 
 powers ; but there is, even in this life, that same 
 and still higher perception of His presence which 
 is spiritual, including all other ways of perceiving, 
 and that is by the sustained and habitual con- 
 sciousness which holy minds possess of His 
 nearness, and the inward impressions they have 
 of His truth and love. This is the communion 
 with God which the devout and contemplative 
 enjoy. It is something to be tasted rather than 
 to be talked of; to be learned by experience 
 rather than defined by terms. But that it is no 
 mere imagination, but a true and divine reality, 
 is manifest from the words of our Lord Himself. 
 When He went away into heaven, He pledged 
 His continual presence to His faithful. " I will 
 not leave you comfortless, I will come to you 1 ." 
 "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end 
 of the world." And that by a true and per- 
 sonal presence of the Word incarnate. " Behold 
 I stand at the door and knock ; if any man will 
 hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in 
 to him, and sup with him, and he with me m ." 
 Again, He promised not His own personal pre- 
 sence alone, but also that of the Father, and of the 
 Holy Ghost, of the ever-blessed Trinity, three Per- 
 sons in one God. " If a man love me, he will 
 
 1 St. John xiv. 18. m Rev. iii. 20. 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 139 
 
 keep my words, and my Father will love him, and 
 we will come unto him, and make our abode 
 with him." Again, "He that loveth me shall 
 be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and 
 will manifest myself to him." And again He said, 
 of " the Comforter which is the Holy Ghost"," 
 " He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you." 
 In these promises we see a further presence of 
 God with His elect, a presence of three Divine 
 Persons, a manifestation of Himself through the 
 Spirit to the inward sight of the pure in heart, a 
 true vision of God from which the light of truth 
 and peace, and we know not what communica- 
 tion of the things of Christ, is shed abroad in 
 the heart. In prophets, apostles, and seers, this 
 is the source of fore-knowledge and inspiration ; 
 in us, of that spiritual light which is common to 
 all saints. As there is but one principle of visible 
 light, one source, one radiance, one perception; so 
 it is in the vision of God in heaven and in earth, 
 in angels and saints, in those that are at rest, 
 and in us that are still in the body of this death. 
 From all this it follows, that there is even in 
 this life an illumination of those that are pure 
 in heart, which is not to be explained by the 
 common processes of sight and knowledge. I 
 say, is not to be explained by them ; for I do not 
 mean which is independent of the conditions to 
 
 n St. John xiv. 18. 
 
140 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Serm. 
 
 which our nature subjects us, or of the means 
 ■which God has ordained for us to use in search- 
 ing after truth. This in theory would be mere 
 fanaticism : and, in fact, none in the history of the 
 Church have ever exhibited such laborious fidelity 
 in all discipline of the heart and reason, as those 
 who have received and again reflected the greatest 
 supernatural lights. Great as the knowledge is that 
 some men, void of God's presence, have attained 
 in natural, and human, and even revealed truths, 
 yet there is something perceptibly wanting in 
 them. They amaze us with the bight of their 
 speculations, and then astonish us with a pur- 
 blind ignorance of some self-evident, and vital 
 axiom of truth. There is evidently some stupen- 
 dous breach in their intellectual system, some 
 want of continuity in its perceptions, or some 
 faculty related to particular kinds of truth wholly 
 wanting. And that is in fact the true solution. 
 But in those who have attained to this spiritual 
 knowledge, there is a perception of first truths, of 
 universal principles, axioms of the life that is in 
 us, discernment of moral qualities, of fine dis- 
 tinctions, intuitions into character, anticipations 
 of events yet to come, with a clearness, a depth of 
 insight, a light and illumination of the conscience, 
 reason, and soul, which none have ever attained 
 but the pure in heart. And what is all this but 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 141 
 
 an endowment nearly related to the perception of 
 the Divine Presence in themselves ? 
 
 The same may be seen also in looking at the 
 contrary fact, namely, that the most powerful men, 
 by forfeiting their higher illumination, often re- 
 lapse into most melancholy and sometimes total 
 obscuration of intellectual light. An impure, 
 that is, a double heart, or a heart that is unclean 
 and sensual, or heavy with sloth and surfeit, so 
 deadens the perception of the Divine Presence in 
 the world, in Providence, in the Church, in Holy 
 Sacraments, in all consecrated actions, that the 
 soul becomes overcast and dark. The powers of 
 the reason lose their precision, the judgment 
 warps and distracts the whole process of thinking 
 and believing. A profligate life will imbrute even 
 the highest intellectual gifts. The source of 
 heresy is an impure heart. The unclean at first 
 will not, and at last cannot, see God in His word 
 or in His works. There grows up a fearful un- 
 consciousness of moral probation, and of the rela- 
 tion between sanctity and truth. The whole con- 
 flict of truth and falsehood in the world has had 
 side by side with it a like conflict of purity and 
 impurity ; of those that see God and those that 
 see Him not. What else is the warfare of the 
 Church against the world ; of faith against here- 
 sies ; of the schools of the prophets against the 
 
142 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Serm. 
 
 schools of the disputers of this world ? It will 
 all be found traceable at last to one great prin- 
 ciple, the relation of sanctity and truth. The 
 science of the saints begins in the spiritual 
 powers, and is learned of God. It is a science 
 " which none of the princes of this world knew ; 
 for had they known it they would not have' cruci- 
 fied the Lord of glory," which the world, since His 
 passion, never has known nor ever will know: 
 for it is the gift of that Divine Presence " which 
 the world cannot receive, because it seeth him 
 not, neither knoweth him." And hence come all 
 jangling and contentious theologies, divisions of 
 doctrine, and crucifixion of the Truth. Chris- 
 tendom itself has, at times, become a mystical 
 Calvary, because the impure in heart have for 
 a while possessed the earth. 
 
 This spiritual knowledge, then, is the avenue to 
 the vision of God, or rather the first radiance of 
 it, meeting us in our approaches to Him — the first 
 light of His countenance upon the inward sight 
 of His saints. And it is impossible to limit the 
 intuitions of those who so behold Him. They 
 have an insight into the foundations of truth 
 which definitions cannot express : ideas of the 
 spirit broader than the articulations of speech. 
 And yet none have so inflexibly witnessed and 
 suffered for the doctrines of faith, and for the 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 143 
 
 traditions of the Church, as they whose illumi- 
 nation seemed to overflow the boundaries of 
 doctrinal forms, and the limitations of creeds and 
 dogmas. What does the light talking of super- 
 ficial men against the dogmatic teaching of the 
 Church prove, but the absence of that higher and 
 larger light in which the nature of language, and 
 its relation to the perfection of truth, and the 
 imperfections of the human mind, are perceived 
 and measured ? 
 
 Another principle we may learn from what has 
 been said is, that the way to all knowledge or 
 vision of truth is by seeking first the purities of 
 God's presence. All processes of the intellect, all 
 the laws of dialectics and of philosophy, are sub- 
 ject to that first philosophy which is the science 
 of God. This is the foundation of the schools 
 which the Church has reared. The Faith is their 
 charter and their very life ; and the Faith is the 
 virtue of purification. In nothing does the Church 
 more directly front and contradict the wisdom of 
 the world, than in the whole principle and order 
 of her divine and true philosophy. In the eyes of 
 the world, to seek knowledge by humiliations, fast- 
 ings, alms-deeds, charity, daily prayers, devout 
 communion, is a folly and a provocation. They see 
 no relation between such premises and the con- 
 clusions of truth. It is a logic the conditions of 
 
144; THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Serm. 
 
 which they have not hearts to understand. And yet 
 there is no fact in science proved by observation 
 and experiment so ample and precise as this, 
 that the greatest teachers of mankind have learned 
 more truth upon their bended knees, and at the 
 foot of the altar, than in the books and schools of 
 science; that the gifts of piercing intellectual 
 force, of irresistible subtilty, elevated contempla- 
 tion, discernment beyond the keenness of common 
 understanding, direct insight, analytical penetra- 
 tion, energy, comprehension, unity of powers, 
 have been the peculiar and characteristic marks 
 of those who sought all truth in sanctity, and be- 
 held all things in the light of God. And those 
 most full of light have been also the chastest, 
 meekest, lowliest of men. This is the witness of 
 the whole Church of God, not in Apostles and 
 seers, Bishops and pastors only, but in all the 
 regenerate servants of Christ — princes, statesmen, 
 schoolmen, doctors ; men of science, speculation, 
 action, enterprise : neither is it in the attainment 
 of direct religious truth only, but of all truth: for 
 all truth is in Him, and by Him all is bestowed 
 upon mankind. There is but one and the same 
 path to all secular knowledge, to all sciences of 
 the world, of nature, of humanity. With equal, 
 or even inferior powers, it is true in all, that the 
 purest heart shall have most light. For such 
 
VI.] " THE BEATIFIC VISION. 145 
 
 minds are planted, as it were, at the point of sight 
 from which all things, the most confused and 
 entangled to other eyes, seem to marshal them- 
 selves, and to fall under their own principles. 
 The ethical science of the ancient world, the moral 
 condition of classical ages, the theologies of the 
 East, the whole tradition of worship among man- 
 kind, the entire science of law, that is, of right and 
 wrong, as it lies at the root of all civil society and 
 the compacts of human life, all those truths which 
 form the subject-matter of the study and proba- 
 tion of most men in the secular state, are to men 
 of impure, or unilluminated hearts, full of doubt, 
 probability, imperfection, — of abruptness, and 
 seeming contradiction : and that simply because 
 they have never ascended to the first idea of truth, 
 which is to be seen in God alone. Let us then 
 never think the subject-matter of our studies, 
 or employments, to be so secular and remote 
 from Him, as that we can enter upon it in our 
 own light and strength. It is " the entrance of his 
 word that giveth light," and all light is from Him 
 who " lighteth every man that cometh into the 
 world." This is emphatically true of men at the 
 outset of life, when they are learning not the par- 
 ticular formulas and technicalities of a profession, 
 but the ideas, and laws, which govern both the 
 intellect of mankind and the matter which is 
 
146 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Serm. 
 
 Subject to his knowledge. The studies of an 
 University, from their peculiar character as a 
 broad primary discipline of the heart and reason, 
 are of all studies most closely related to this first 
 science of the Divine Spirit. The very faculties 
 of the mind which are called into act and energy, 
 are those which he nearest to the spiritual life ; I 
 mean, the discernment of moral distinctions, of 
 the qualities of evidence, and the force of obliga- 
 tion. It is peculiarly the discipline of man as 
 man, not of men as they are limited and cramped 
 by the forms and usages of particular callings. 
 It is a discipline, the design of which is to en- 
 large the capacity of men for the reception and 
 love of truth, as such. And what is that but the 
 purification of the heart by truth that it may see 
 God ? O Se toiovtos av evrj /8/oy KpeiTreov r) Kara. 
 avOpamov' ov yap y avOpamos 4(ttcu ovtcos |8«b- 
 a-erat, aW' y deiov ti iv avrtp virapxei . 
 
 If the lusts of the flesh and of the spirit, if 
 vanity, pride, sloth, sensuality, unbelief, are deadly 
 sins any where, certainly they are most deadly 
 at the Altar, and in the schools of the Church. 
 God's holy Name be praised, that in this place, 
 the teacher's chair is still set within the pre- 
 cinct of the sanctuary, and the school of the 
 learner is likewise the oratory of saints. While 
 the universities of almost every other Chris- 
 Arist. Eth. Nicom. x. 7. 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 147 
 
 tian land, the celebrated schools of western 
 Europe, the lights of the middle ages, the homes 
 of saints and doctors, have wasted away or sunk 
 under the false philosophies of these latter days, 
 we are still spared in possession of our inherit- 
 ance ; and, if we be true to ourselves, shall^preserve 
 inviolate our charter still. From the Church we 
 received it, and of the Church we must hold it as 
 a trust : " The Lord is our light." And He alone 
 knoweth what service He will yet take at our 
 hands. Next to the Catholic Church sojourning 
 in this land, there is no work of the Divine hand 
 so majestic, and fruitful of saints, as our colle- 
 giate system. "What a work of light and sanctity 
 has been advancing here these thousand years : 
 from what small beginnings, to how bold a 
 stature, and with what hardy strength it has con- 
 tinued to witness with the witness of the Church 
 its mother. Here the pure in heart have seen 
 God, and bequeathed to us the heirloom of their 
 rest and knowledge. What companies of saints 
 of every state, lay and sacred, bishops, pastors, 
 doctors, rulers, nobles, men. holy and humble, 
 wise and pure, have issued from these religious 
 homes. Through what ages of rough eventful 
 history it has held its light steadfast and even, 
 forsaken only when it forsook itself. 
 
 Surely if there be any admonition to be read, 
 l2 
 
148 THE BEATIFIC VISION. [Sbrw: 
 
 clear as the writing of a man's hand, upon these 
 walls, it is a warning how we, who are blessed 
 with the inheritance of this favoured place, suffer 
 to dwell in our hearts the impurity or insincerity 
 which hides the vision of God. The very condition 
 of our continuance is that we seek truth in purity, 
 and thirst for the light which is the gift of God. 
 Let us then, with all our strength, seek after 
 " holiness, without which no man shall see the 
 Lord." Let us strive to be saints, that we may 
 become students, scholars of the One Teacher. 
 Let us not so spend ourselves in poring upon the 
 letters of truth, that we come short of the vision 
 of God. Let prayer, habitual contemplation, 
 self-chastisement, patience, charity, self-denial, 
 the subjugation of those tumultuous and worldly 
 passions which trouble the clearness of the heart, 
 be our first studies and our last. Lay deep the 
 foundations of a holy life in purity and humility, 
 while as yet the world and its rude trials are 
 stayed back from buffeting you. The time will 
 come when, in the turmoil and contamination of 
 a busy life, you will desire to see one of these 
 days of devout and sheltered communing with 
 God, and shall not see it. If any live im- 
 purely here, what shall their life be, when the 
 world has breathed its searching and noisome 
 plagues upon them? "If they do these things 
 
VI.] THE BEATIFIC VISION. 149 
 
 in a green tree, what shall be done in the 
 dry?" 
 
 Be this, then, our one end in life, to cleanse 
 our hearts, that we may behold more and more 
 of the beauty and the splendour of the Divine 
 Presence : that we may see God in all His crea- 
 tures ; in all His providence, in all the events and 
 changes, the calls and chastisements of life ; in the 
 light which shines out from His holy Word, in 
 the " fire infolding itself" whereby He manifests 
 to His elect His presence in His holy Sacra- 
 ments, and above all in His image reflected in 
 our own regenerate being ; that by purity of 
 heart we may receive more of His presence, and 
 by the revelation of truth within us, our souls 
 may be more intimately cleansed, until the day 
 come when faith shall pass into sight, and love 
 be made perfect before the throne, where He 
 liveth and reigneth, God the Father, God the 
 Son, and God the Holy Ghost, in glory equal, 
 in majesty coeternal, the blessed Three, the Holy 
 One, over all, blessed for ever. Amen. 
 
SERMON VII. 
 
 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 
 Tbimtjt Sunday, 1844. 
 
 St. James i. 17. 
 " Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and 
 cometh down from the Father of lights." 
 
 The Feast of the Holy Trinity brings before us 
 not only the mystery of the Divine nature, but 
 also the economy or manner of the revelation by 
 which God has been pleased to make Himself 
 known to the world. It seems hardly more the 
 design of the Church to bring before us, this day, 
 the ineffable mystery of Three Divine Persons in 
 One God, than to impress upon us the relation 
 in which we stand to Him, and the laws which 
 He has imposed upon our reason and our will. 
 This is emphatically the Feast of awe, wonder, 
 worship, and abasement — a day in which to adore 
 God, not so much as He is manifested in the 
 particular acts of His economy of grace, but 
 throned " in the light which no man can approach 
 unto," in the glory of His eternal rest. 
 
152 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Serm. 
 
 St. James here reminds us of one of the 
 simplest and highest laws of God's kingdom ; one 
 so plain and familiar, that we are wont to turn 
 our thoughts from it with a readiness nearly akin 
 to impatience. But it involves in itself great and 
 far-reaching consequences ; truths the highest and 
 most subtile for the conduct of our reason, and 
 precepts the most direct for the guidance of our 
 life. He says there is no giver of good gifts but 
 God alone, — all is from above ; all truth, grace, 
 light, and life, are from Him "the Father of lights," 
 of angels, spirits, intelligences in earth and heaven ; 
 there is from Him a perpetual effluence of being, 
 goodness, benediction. Heaven, and the Heaven 
 of Heavens, cannot contain His fulness ; earth is 
 replenished with the overflow of the Divine love ; 
 ever descending, without measure, still, deep, ex- 
 haustless. There is but One without beginning, 
 the beginning of all ; unoriginate, uncreate, 
 eternal, infinite, having no measure but His own 
 will"; the Maker, Quickener, Preserver of all 
 things visible and invisible ; very light, goodness, 
 life, essence ; above all being, but the Cause of all 
 that are ; the Ordainer of all powers ; but, above 
 all; the fountain of life to all living, and of reason 
 to all intelligence, — one Wisdom, Power, and Will. 
 
 And this leads back our thoughts naturally to 
 the subject of this Festival. Of all the good and 
 
 a S. Joan. Damascen. De Fide orthodoxa, viii. 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 153 
 
 perfect gifts of God, the chiefest, without contro- 
 versy, is the knowledge of Himself. And this 
 hath come down from the Father of lights with 
 a most expressive order and unity of revelation. 
 Four thousand years this great gift was in de- 
 scending ; as if the capacity of the world were all 
 too narrow to receive it at one effusion. The 
 heavenly light steadily advanced upon mankind, 
 flowing from one changeless point, without 
 variableness or " shadow of turning." From 
 the creation of the world to the descent of the 
 Holy Ghost, there has been one measured, ever 
 expanding revelation of Himself. 
 
 " In the beginning God created the heavens 
 and the earth." "And the Spirit of God moved 
 upon the face of the waters." " And God said, 
 Let there be light"." The very act of creating was 
 a revelation of God. The world became a record 
 of " His Eternal Power and Godhead"." " The 
 heavens declare the glory of God, and the firma- 
 ment sheweth his handiwork. One day telleth 
 another, and one night certifieth another. There 
 is neither speech nor language, but their voices 
 are heard among them d ." The laws and instincts 
 of all creatures, both with and without life, be- 
 came an universal witness, and perpetual tradi- 
 tion of God, coming down directly from Himself. 
 
 b Gen. i. 1, 2, 3. c Rom. i. 20. 
 
 <> Ps. xix. 1, 2. 
 
154 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Serm. 
 
 And again: the economy of the Incarnation, 
 or the new creation of the world, was a carry- 
 ing out and perfecting of the revelation which 
 was given in the first. It was a retouching of 
 the same outline, and an unfolding of hidden 
 mysteries into open light. " In the beginning 
 was the Word, and the Word was with God, 
 and the Word was God." "All things were 
 made by him : and without him was not any 
 thing made that was made. In him was life, 
 and the life was the light of men. And the 
 light shineth in darkness, and the darkness com- 
 prehendeth it not." " That was the true light 
 that lighteth every man that cometh into the 
 world. He was in the world, and the world was 
 made by him, and the world knew him not." 
 But for this end, " the Word was made flesh, 
 and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, 
 the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father 6 ." 
 The mystery of God's nature was revealed not so 
 much by the words of the Son as by His Person ; 
 not so much by His teaching as by His coming 
 into the world ; by the act of His manifestation 
 in the flesh. That for which the bight of nature, 
 and the visions of Prophets had been preparing, 
 was come. The fulness of time was ripe : and 
 the period had set in, after four thousand years 
 of waiting, for another good and perfect gift, 
 
 ' St. Johni. 1—1 4. 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 155 
 
 another flood of illumination from the Father of 
 lights. The fact of Christ's coming was a reve- 
 lation in very deed that in the unseen Godhead 
 there was a mystery of two coequal, coeternal 
 Persons, the Father and the Son, related by an 
 ineffable and everlasting generation, so that the 
 Father was always, and the Son always ; the Son 
 never without the Father, nor the Father without 
 the Son. And to fill up the measure of this perfect 
 gift, the Holy Ghost, by His personal descent, re- 
 vealed in visible act another and the third Divine 
 coequal Person ; the Son testified of the Father ; 
 the Spirit, of the Father and the Son ; the Son 
 sent of the Father, the Spirit proceeding from 
 both, and sent by both. Such were the acts and 
 witness of the new creation perfecting the old; 
 and this good gift, the knowledge of God the 
 Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, by the ministry of 
 the same Spirit, has been again recorded through- 
 out the world. The whole Creation is written 
 both within and without. By the gift of Inspira- 
 tion to the Apostles, the voice of the regeneration 
 was heard in all the earth. "The morning stars" of 
 the new creation " sang together." "Their sound 
 went out into all the earth, and their words 
 into the ends of the world f ." By the universal 
 witness of the Apostles, by the grace of the 
 new birth, by the simultaneous planting of the 
 
 s Rom. x. 18; Ps. xix. 4. 
 
156 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Serm. 
 
 Catholic Church, by the world-wide tradition of 
 the one Faith 8 , by the Holy Name in Baptism, 
 by Confession, and Holy Scriptures, by doxologies 
 and hymns learned from the worship of Angels 
 and of Seraphim, the visions of Prophets came to 
 pass — " the earth shall be full of the knowledge 
 of the Lord, as the waters cover the seaV 
 " From the rising of the sun even unto the going 
 down of the same, my Name shall be great among 
 the Gentiles, and in every place incense shall be 
 offered to my Name, and a pure offering 1 ." 
 " Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of Hosts, the 
 whole earth is full of his gloryV The light of 
 creation passed into the light of the Divine 
 Word and Spirit : and in all the world there is 
 the imperishable revelation of God the Father, 
 Son, and Holy Ghost ; the Creator, Redeemer, 
 Sanctifier; the unity of love, wisdom, power : the 
 Father made of none, neither created nor begot- 
 ten : the Son, of the Father alone, neither made 
 nor created, but begotten : the Holy Ghost, of 
 the Father and of the Son, neither made nor 
 created nor begotten, but proceeding: and this 
 in one Godhead, simple, undivided, eternal. 
 
 This is the gift of truth which, by one continu- 
 ous revelation, He has recorded for our learning. 
 
 s S. Iren. Adv. Hser. lib. i. c. x. h Isaiah xi. 9. 
 
 1 Malachi i. 11. k Isaiah vi. 3. 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 157 
 
 It ceased not till all was given. By acts of His 
 own He has written it in what may be called the 
 universal ordinances, deposits, traditions of. na- 
 ture, and in the universal laws, instincts, energies 
 of the Church : the manifold unity of creation, 
 and the manifold unity of the Church, being a 
 witness full and perfect, given from above, exter- 
 nal to the reason of mankind, self-evident and 
 steadfast, unto the end of the world. 
 
 From this then we see that all the knowledge 
 we possess of the Divine Nature is the direct gift 
 of God Himself. And let us duly weigh the con- 
 sequence of this great fact, in its bearing upon 
 all our knowledge of Divine truth. It is a 
 type of the whole of our perceptions. We have 
 all knowledge by a gift of God, by a succession 
 of Divine acts, by reception, not by discovery. 
 For although the knowledge of God be discover- 
 able by the light of nature, yet that light was of 
 God's giving ; and though in Scripture the mys- 
 tery of the Holy Trinity be fully contained, yet, 
 as a fact, that doctrine was not deduced from it 
 by proof and reasoning ; but simply received to- 
 gether with Holy Scripture, and before it was 
 written, from the preaching of Evangelists and 
 Apostles. 
 
 From this we may learn : 
 
 First — That the most perfect knowledge of 
 
158 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Serm. 
 
 Divine truth is that which we receive by the pas- 
 sive perceptions of the reason. By the reason, I 
 mean that power of intellectual sight whereby we 
 see or perceive the ideas and relations of truth. 
 By passive perception, is not intended a lifeless 
 and inert condition of the mind, which is contra- 
 dictory to the plain meaning of the word : for to 
 perceive presupposes life, and the activity of liv- 
 ing powers in the subject. The words passive 
 perception may be used to express the act of per- 
 ceiving such truths as discover themselves to us 
 by their own light, as opposed to those percep- 
 tions which are the consequence and conclusions 
 of reasoning and investigation. It is not neces- 
 sary to raise any question as to the kind or de- 
 gree of light which may be in us by nature, in 
 respect to particular truths. "Whatsoever it be, 
 it is still a gift passively received, to which we 
 bring nothing but the simple capacity and con- 
 sciousness of perceiving. 
 
 Men are so fond and ambitious of originating 
 and discovering, that they will not easily believe 
 the highest offices of the reason to be those that 
 are most nearly passive ; and the activity of in- 
 quiry and proof to be a plain evidence of imper- 
 fection either in the certainty of the object, or in 
 the clearness of our own understanding. And 
 yet what are the conditions of perfect knowledge 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 159 
 
 but certainty in the matter external to our minds, 
 and clearness in the faculties by which we perceive 
 it. In Divine things this certainty is the revela- 
 tion of God. The only condition of perfect 
 knowledge that remains to be secured is in our- 
 selves, that is to say, the clearness of our own 
 perceptions. And of these it will be found that 
 those are the most perfect which are so simple 
 as to be truly called passive. 
 
 This must be evident if we remember that the 
 surest, clearest, and most steadfast of our percep- 
 tions are those which we call axioms, or primary 
 laws, of truth, and right ; of number, and quantity, 
 and the like ; which are not conclusions but in- 
 tuitions, certainties without premises, issuing out 
 of a consciousness which is as certain as life 
 itself. For instance ; personal identity, the voice 
 of conscience, the being of a God, the force of 
 right and truth, the existence of the external 
 world, what higher certainties have we than 
 these ? and these did hot follow but precede the 
 process of investigation. It is needless to in- 
 quire what radical or seminal principles of these 
 were in us at our birth. It is enough that 
 they are universal in mankind ; that they go 
 before all reasoning, before all inquiry, judg- 
 ment, inference : and that they are our highest 
 forms of knowledge. And yet what perceptions 
 
160 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [SerK. 
 
 have less of volition, or are more passive than 
 these ? 
 
 Again, what is the result of reasoning the most 
 elaborate and exact, but to arrive at conclusions 
 which may be referred at last to their first order of 
 more perfect truths ? The utmost certainty which 
 results from reasoning is, after all, less absolute 
 than the certainty of intuition and consciousness. 
 
 And, further, what may we suppose to have been 
 the perfect reason of man before he fell ? Must 
 we not believe that both the objects of knowledge 
 were certain, and the powers of intellectual sight 
 were clear ; that what we laboriously attain by 
 argument, was seen by intuition ; that cause and 
 consequence, principle and effect, were both 
 alike directly perceived ? And what, then, is. the 
 source of uncertainty and doubt, of contingency 
 and false conclusions, but the entrance of sin 
 into the world, which has troubled the reason of 
 mankind by passions, and darkened our hearts 
 with impetuous emotions ? The source of false- 
 hood is in our moral nature. Clear and un- 
 changeable as the revelations of truth have stood 
 from the beginning, it is our sin, — the medium 
 through which they must needs force their way, — 
 that has made even the most steadfast lights to 
 seem tremulous and doubtful. What do investi- 
 gation, hypothesis, argument, evidences prove, 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 161 
 
 but this, that truth is hidden ; that we are walk- 
 ing by half-truths, conjectures, and probability ? 
 an inevitable lot to fallen man, and full of whole- 
 some discipline, permitted for our trial and for 
 the proving of our hearts ; yet nothing surely to 
 be proud of, nothing to glory in. The preroga- 
 tive of being doubtful has nothing in it either 
 high or noble. The privilege of looking uncer- 
 tainly from truth to falsehood, and from falsehood 
 to truth, is nothing to boast of. The necessity of 
 taking the least improbability as the surest attain- 
 able conclusion, is no property of a perfect intelli- 
 gence. Our highest logic is but a struggle with 
 the imperfections of our own faculties. And that 
 this must be so, we may learn not only from what 
 the reason of man once was, but from what it 
 still shall be when we shall be icrdyyeXoi, "as the 
 angels of God." What shall be then our know- 
 ledge when the conditions of this imperfect state 
 are no more? Now we " know in part, and we 
 prophesy in part," — that is, we reason, doubt, 
 discourse, — " but when that which is perfect is 
 come, then that which is in part shall be done 
 away." We shall know by insight, intuition, 
 and consciousness of the very presence of truth 
 itself. And what is this passive reception of the 
 reason but Divine faith ; the surest knowledge in 
 a fallen state ; the most perfect way of knowing 
 even in a perfect world ? 
 
 M 
 
162 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Seiim. 
 
 2. And this leads to another conclusion,, 
 namely, that the deepest insights into Divine 
 truth are obtained not by controversy, but by 
 contemplation. 
 
 By contemplation I mean the act of the rea- 
 son, consciously and of our own will, with faith 
 and love, dwelling upon truth received by the gift 
 of God ; and by controversy, the activity of the 
 intellect, either seeking truth by collision and 
 counter-reasonings, or proving and evincing what 
 it has already received. Controversies, in which 
 both sides are seeking for their conclusions, and 
 both alike are uncertain and conflicting, may 
 enlighten the disputants, but can confer no boon 
 on those who have already received the doctrines 
 of faith. Such, in fact, have been the contro- 
 versies of the Gentile schools, external to the 
 precinct of the Church, before Christ's coming 
 and since. 
 
 But it is no less true of the controversies 
 which have been forced upon the Church itself. 
 For what are they but defences of the truth as 
 it is already apprehended in the mind of the 
 Church ? The Councils of the fourth and fifth 
 ages did but affirm and illustrate the faith of the 
 first. The Catholic Creeds, precious as they are as 
 expositions of truth, added nothing to the " good 
 and perfect gift." They did but express it. All 
 that they contain is derived from it. Whatever 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 163. 
 
 may have been gained by the early defences of 
 truth, in logical and verbal exactness, was rather 
 a gain to the expression than to the conception of 
 the faith. They did not bring out things which 
 lay dormant and unperceived, as some strangely 
 argue, into the inward view of the Church; but 
 only express outwardly what had been held from 
 the beginning. 
 
 Again, controversies can but inadequately ex- 
 hibit those inward perceptions ; for all contro- 
 versy must be limited to the conditions of logic 
 and speech, of thoughts and terms ; and these 
 have no sufficient capacity to receive the fulness 
 of truth as it is seen by contemplation. And it 
 is this that stamps with such inestimable worth 
 the creeds and definitions, the very words and 
 forms, which the Church has approved and used 
 in propounding the faith. The right use of 
 language in Divine things is a high gift, and pre- 
 supposes much spiritual discernment of truth; 
 for language can but approximate and shadow 
 forth, as it were, by symbols and characters, (the 
 most perfect indeed that we possess, yet still in- 
 adequate,) the ideas and relations of Divine truth; 
 as, for instance, the unity of the uncreated God, 
 the eternal generation of the Son, the procession 
 of the Holy Ghost. These, when expressed in con- 
 troversy, do not give back any clearer insight to 
 
 m 2 
 
164 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Sbrm. 
 
 the enlightened intellect. Are they not among the 
 tilings "which it is not lawful for a man to utter?" 
 What can words or propositions reflect back upon 
 the regenerate reason which devoutly adores the 
 mystery of the Holy Trinity ? In truth, it is not 
 controversy that has aided contemplation, but 
 contemplation that has sustained and perfected 
 all true controversy. It is out of the contempla- 
 tive life of the Church that the verbal and logical 
 expression of truth has been derived. Controver- 
 sies are but the efforts of her lower and less perfect 
 faculties; exercises of those gifts which are ad- 
 dressed not to the apprehension of truth, but to 
 the instruction of mankind. And they are those 
 chiefly of the intellect alone, separable and distinct 
 from the grace of sanctity. Though the greatest 
 contemplatists and saints have been the first and 
 greatest defenders of the faith — witness St.Athana- 
 sius, St. Austin, St.Anselm, among a multitude — 
 yet the mental gifts employed in controversy may 
 be possessed by unholy men ; and the knowledge 
 which results from controversy is no more than 
 may be apprehended by the intellect. It may 
 become a sort of intellectual or literary tradition, 
 as regards the spiritual life, superficial and inac- 
 tive. And this explains how men of a low tone 
 of personal religion have been able controversial 
 writers ; partly because the faculties of contro- 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 165 
 
 versy lie within their reach, and partly because 
 the terms and definitions of truth have been sup- 
 plied to them by men who have inwardly par- 
 taken the contemplative life, i. e. the faith and 
 love, of the Church : so that in reality, through 
 the conflicts of eighteen hundred years, they 
 have most effectively maintained the truth who 
 have intensely apprehended it in devotion of 
 heart. 
 
 The true account of the matter then would 
 seem to be, that the controversies of the Church 
 are not by way of investigation but of exposition, 
 and therefore, so far from bringing accesses of light, 
 are themselves the results and not the cause of 
 knowledge. And for want of a clear acknowledg- 
 ment of this great fact, the endeavour to reduce 
 objects of faith to. definitions and proofs has be- 
 come, to many, a source of infinite danger. We 
 may see this in the schools and sects constituted 
 upon the principle of inquiry and reasoning. They 
 have perpetually entangled themselves in verbal 
 arguments, and produced heresies by subjecting 
 to the imperfection of language, and the rules of 
 logical inference, mysteries which can only be re- 
 ceived by the passive apprehension of the reason; 
 as, for instance, the heretical use of the words 
 " Son of God :" and of the terms TrpofioXrj and : 
 arroppoia, as describing the eternal generation of 
 
166 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Serm. 
 
 the Son; or again, the Sacramentarian errors ; and 
 the like. These perplexities are the natural re- 
 sult of their first principle, and the perpetual ten- 
 dency of it is to exhaust and forfeit what truth is 
 still possessed. When language and dialectics, 
 which are vehicles of a mechanical kind, are abused 
 as sources of proof, truth escapes by a perpetual 
 waste ; witness the Arian, Eutychian, and Socinian 
 heresies, and the modern Christian sects which 
 have developed themselves into rationalism, rejec- 
 tion of the Canon of Holy Scripture, and in the 
 end, of Christianity itself. Controversy, then, in 
 the hands of the Church has relation not so much 
 to herself as to her antagonists. The very weapons 
 by which she overcomes, she uses sparingly and 
 almost against her will. Though both necessary 
 and good, they are, yet, all too earthly and limited 
 to give full utterance to the life and perception 
 of faith. The contemplation of truth is so nearly 
 allied to worship, that they continually blend. 
 In meditating upon it, the Church adores the pre- 
 sence of her Lord ; and from it she gains insights 
 into the Divine will, mind, wisdom, and love, which 
 issue not in definition and speech, but in affec- 
 tions and emotions ; they can find no vent in 
 figures and arguments, but in silence and sanc- 
 tity, in love, obedience, adoration. This is the 
 scientific and true use of reason, the enlightened 
 
VII.] THfi GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 167 
 
 rationalism, which later days have inverted and 
 profaned, by which things first believed are after- 
 wards apprehended, first loved are afterwards un- 
 derstood. It is by this devout reflection of the 
 mind on the objects of faith, that the reason 
 pierces into the causes and relation of truth, and 
 finds the perfect harmony of its own light with 
 the lights of nature and of faith 1 . 
 
 3. And from this it follows again, that the most 
 direct and effective discipline of the reason is a 
 holy life. That there is some real and close con- 
 nection between the intellectual and the spiritual 
 powers we all acknowledge. Holy Scripture ex- 
 pressly declares it ; and the evidence of fact 
 plainly confirms the same. The illumination 
 possessed by those who five purely, and the dark- 
 ness of sensual and inflated minds, alike convince 
 us that there is, and must be, some law by which 
 the intellectual powers of those that live in 
 humility and prayer are elevated above their 
 natural range. And yet, with all this general 
 certainty, we are often perplexed by apparent 
 anomalies and contradictions. We see men of 
 unholy lives exhibiting great intellectual powers, 
 and doing service even in the defence of Divine 
 truth ; and again, men of the holiest lives slow 
 and weak in their reasoning faculties. Moreover, 
 we are unable exactly to say how it is, that a 
 
 1 S. Thom. Aguin., contra Gentes. lib. i. c. vii. 
 
168 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Sbhm. 
 
 noly life acts upon the intellectual nature ; and 
 what are the gifts which are thereby conferred 
 upon it, that is, whether they are superadded 
 lights, or only its latent or virtual powers de- 
 veloped and extended. Perhaps every one has 
 been tempted, after using the strongest expressions 
 of belief in this law of grace, to explain away 
 what he has said, until it is reduced almost to 
 nothing ; and no alternative seems left to us but 
 to choose between admitting that all we mean 
 may be explained by the natural conditions of 
 our intellectual faculties, or continuing to use 
 high professions of belief in a supernatural en- 
 lightenment which we cannot verify by facts. 
 
 It must be said, then, first of all, that even 
 though we were unable to attain to any clear 
 view of the mysterious conditions on which it 
 pleases God to distribute the measures of intellec- 
 tual light, it would be no argument against the 
 reality of that distribution, nor against the 
 belief that such gifts are conferred by a law of 
 spiritual discipline and probation. For we are 
 equally unable to say how the operations of the 
 Spirit unfold and strengthen the other affections 
 and powers of our nature ; and yet no one there- 
 fore doubts the reality of our sanctification. 
 There are, however, certain manifest facts which 
 give us some further insight into the matter. 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 169 
 
 It is evident that the most powerful intellects 
 of those who live either in sin or spiritual sloth, 
 are mysteriously limited in their perceptions of 
 truth. After all their toil and labour spent upon 
 the matter of Divine Revelation, they appear to 
 get no further than the external tradition of lan- 
 guage and definitions. They seem to dwell in the 
 outer court of Divine knowledge : in the logical 
 and controversial region : in the restless exercise 
 of the active intellect : the superficial and ver- 
 bal exposition of the mysteries which shroud 
 from them the realities of the Divine Presence. 
 Even in the study of Holy Scripture, with the 
 acutest critical knowledge of the text, they seem 
 to have little or no realization of the sense. The 
 characters which are traced upon the veil they 
 read with a perfect skill, but the ideas which are 
 behind it they seem not so much as to appre- 
 hend. It appears as if the faculties which are 
 related to the objects of contemplation were 
 wanting ; or, if we may so say, as if, with a per- 
 fect state of the organs of sight, the original 
 power of perception were limited. On the other 
 hand, the slowest and most unapt among devout 
 and pure minds, although they be wanting in the 
 logical and communicative powers, shew by their 
 moral energies, by the realities of patience, reve- 
 rence, obedience, love, inflexibility, wisdom of 
 
170 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Sebm. 
 
 life, such an inward realization and intuition of 
 truth, as would probably be beyond the power 
 of speech fully to express. They seem to pos- 
 sess that which St. Paul, even after three years of 
 unwearied teaching, had it not in his power to 
 confer upon the Church of Ephesus, which he 
 still sought for them by the direct gift of the 
 Father of lights, that they might " be able to 
 comprehend, with all saints, what is the breadth, 
 and length, and depth, and height, and to know 
 the love of Christ which passeth knowledge™." 
 
 It is impossible to look at the history of the 
 Christian Church and to doubt of this. What 
 enlightenment of the inward sight, what intense 
 perception of the Divine power, what ineffable 
 knowledge of the mystery of the Father, Son, 
 and Holy Ghost, what infinite fellowship and 
 communion with the Holy Trinity of love, wis- 
 dom, and power, have there been in all ages 
 since the Word was made flesh : even in the 
 darkest days, when for a time the impure pos- 
 sessed the earth, and heresy usurped the altars of 
 the Church. What things which it is not given 
 to us to utter, have been realized and tasted by 
 the poor and unlettered of Christ's members. 
 The Baptismal Confession, devoutly pondered on, 
 has been to the great multitude of all ages a 
 fountain of all truth ; and the grace of regenera- 
 m Eph. iii. 18, 19. 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 171 
 
 tion a source of perpetual light. Meditation on 
 the Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, has 
 been a discipline of reason above that of scholas- 
 tic studies ; and devout Communion an entrance 
 into the very realities of truth. And is it not so at 
 this hour ? Are not the millions of Christendom 
 in the same condition still? Do we not see 
 every day, among our brethren in Christ, that 
 those in whom the intellectual powers lie dor- 
 mant, and their activity suspended, possess such 
 gifts of wisdom and knowledge, such ripe and 
 fruitful apprehensions of Divine truth, as the 
 most cultivated intellect can obtain by no pro- 
 perties of its own ? Nobody can watch over the 
 minds of unlearned Christians without perceiving, 
 in " holy and humble men of heart" a proverbial 
 wisdom, a sort of axiomatic knowledge of truth, 
 an originality of thought, a refinement and deli- 
 cacy of discrimination, a creativeness nearly akin 
 to the highest acts of imagination and reason, 
 which can be sufficiently accounted for by no ex- 
 ternal teaching, no acquisition from the oral sug- 
 gestions of other men. Even those that cannot 
 read the letters of Holy Scripture are found to 
 overflow with an inward light ; as if, with organs 
 of sight the most defective, or even dark, their 
 inward powers of spiritual perception, like the 
 gifted vision of the sightless, had no horizon ; — as 
 
172 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Serm. 
 
 if they were released from the conditions of im- 
 perfect vision. And what is this after all but the 
 power of regeneration, the light which is poten- 
 tially in the grace of the new birth, drawn forth 
 by the obedience of a devout and docile heart, 
 shining inwardly upon a reverent and humble 
 spirit ? 
 
 Now, what is thus true of the most unculti- 
 vated minds must be equally true of all. That 
 which is able to make them wise, despite of every 
 intellectual hindrance, will doubtless work, with a 
 greater and more searching virtue, for the illumi- 
 nation of those that are gifted both with intel- 
 lectual powers and with the discipline of instruc- 
 tion. If depth, penetration, discernment, be con- 
 ferred by a holy life upon untutored minds, how 
 much more upon those, who with equal devotion 
 have greater intellectual gifts. 
 
 From all this then it would seem to follow, 
 that by the ordinary condition of our sanctifica- 
 tion, the Spirit of God helps, as our other affec- 
 tions and powers, so also our intellectual facul- 
 ties ; that the cleansing of our moral habits is a 
 direct means of increasing our inward light, by 
 perfecting the clearness of the powers by which 
 the objects of truth are to be seen ; that through 
 the same discipline, by which our moral habits 
 are chastened into repentance, self-control, and 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 173 
 
 obedience to. the law of righteousness, our in- 
 tellectual faculties are also concentrated and 
 strengthened in the contemplation of truth; 
 and, lastly, that we cannot say what further 
 intellectual powers may be developed out of the 
 reason thus enlightened ; what gifts of quick and 
 keen discrimination, of direct and intuitive in- 
 sight, may be conferred, through grace, upon the 
 holy heart. This we know from the words of 
 Inspiration ; " the natural man receiveth not the 
 things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolish- 
 ness unto him, neither can he know them because 
 they are spiritually discerned. But he that is 
 spiritual judgeth all things: yet he himself is 
 judged of no man. For who hath known the 
 mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? 
 But we have the mind of Christ*." 
 
 Surely, brethren, it concerns us of all men to 
 ponder these things. We are called to serve 
 God in the paths of an intellectual life ; and to 
 glorify Him by the sanctification of our reason- 
 able powers. We walk in an awful nearness to 
 the light of truth, and on the very verge of heights 
 which make the unsanctified intellect to turn. 
 We need a discipline of personal holiness, lest 
 our very gifts of light should cast us down. 
 
 1. Let us then remember that habits of study, 
 without habits of devotion, will at best develope 
 
 n 1 Cor. ii. 14—16. 
 
174 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Sbrm. 
 
 only the lower faculties of our intellectual nature : 
 and that such a life will lay us open to great 
 danger of false opinions, as well as of serious 
 moral declension. The powers of the mind that 
 are chiefly called into play by a life of study, are 
 apprehension of terms and definitions, judgment, 
 memory, and the like. Now no enlargement of 
 the capacity or retentiveness of the memory, no 
 sharpening of the critical sense of agreement 
 or disagreement between logical terms, no per- 
 ception of the functions and relations of numbers, 
 and of mathematical truths, will supply the place 
 of those higher powers and capacities which are 
 related to the objects of worship and contempla- 
 tion. These may be almost extinct in the acutest 
 reasoner, in the most apt and ready scholar. 
 There is nothing so dry and feeble as a mere 
 literary mind, nothing more out of sympathy 
 with all that is high, deep, living, energetic in 
 truth. Intellectual activity is in itself a great 
 distraction from prayer, meditation, and the 
 silence of the inward life. The most devout 
 are the most emphatic in saying so. Many 
 books need many devotions, for much reading 
 with the outward eye blinds the conscience and 
 the heart. To be early and late at studies, un- 
 sanctified by prayer and frequent communion 
 with Christ in the Holy Eucharist, dries the 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 175 
 
 springs of deeper emotions, and keeps up a 
 feverish pulse, a perpetual excitement which 
 must be allayed and put down before the higher 
 and calmer movements of the spiritual nature can 
 find range and a season to begin their course. 
 This seems to be the reason why, even in those 
 that are blameless and pure in their moral 
 habits, and of a sensitive regularity in the re- 
 moter duties of a Christian life, there are often 
 great and obstinate spiritual faults. A religion 
 which is speculative rather than contemplative is 
 seldom fervent. For the most part, there is 
 something strangely frigid and unreal about it. 
 And a familiarity with theological terms, learned 
 by study rather than realized by devotion, has a 
 perilous tendency to two things that most of all 
 stifle the very life of faith, I mean, to irreverence 
 and to disputation. When the mind is partially 
 and unequally excited, so that the intellectual 
 habits are strengthened, while the passive habits 
 by which devotion is nourished and sustained 
 become stagnant and. senseless, there is exceeding 
 danger of that most subtle form of practical 
 atheism, which consists in a clear acknowledg- 
 ment of Divine mysteries in combination with a 
 cold, and loveless temper of heart. It is not with- 
 out a Divine counsel and deep intimation of 
 truth, that they who in the heavenly presence 
 
176 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Sebm. 
 
 stand nearest to the Father of lights, are the 
 Spirits of knowledge and of love ; that cheruhim 
 are united as counter-parts with seraphim in the 
 ministries of heaven. Surely it is to teach us 
 that there is no true light hut that which is com- 
 hined with love; and to warn us how we put 
 them asunder even so much as in thought. 
 Truth held without love is hut a weak helief, and 
 will give way not only before the subtilties of 
 disputants, but under the perplexities of our own 
 secret doubts. 
 
 But error of opinion is not the chief danger of 
 a life of mere study. The propositions of the 
 intellect are a shifting foundation for our obedi- 
 ence to rest on. The will that has no better 
 supports than the conclusions of reasoning, will 
 not stand long against the assaults of passion and of 
 the world. A faith which dwells only in the logical 
 understanding, is soon beaten down when temp- 
 tations set upon it, " when the blast of the terri- 
 ble ones is as a storm against the wall." And a life 
 which stimulates the imagination, and introduces 
 the mind to the knowledge of things which can 
 be safely read only with pure eyes, and under- 
 stood by clean hearts, has dangers peculiar to 
 itself. It is not uncommon to find men of high 
 intellects enslaved to habits of secret vice. And 
 fearful is the wreck they make of themselves at 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OP ILLUMINATION. 177 
 
 last. Perhaps the most awful sight is that of a 
 man gifted with powerful intellect, but defiled by 
 pride or lust. The higher the powers of the 
 intelligence, the more nearly he is akin to an 
 unclean spirit. And fearful is the judgment for 
 which he prepares himself. The sin that is in him 
 bribes his intellect against the conclusions of 
 truth, warps his judgment, and teaches it subtil- 
 ties and shifts to escape the inevitable" condemna- 
 tion of its own clear voice. It is impossible to 
 say what incursions of temptation are permitted 
 to invade such a mind ; what doubts and contra- 
 dictions may be sedulously ministered to it by the 
 spirit of falsehood; what delusions such a man 
 may palm upon himself; and, as the Spirit of 
 grace is withdrawn, how even the highest prin- 
 ciples of righteousness and truth may become 
 clouded and uncertain ; in the end, what corrup- 
 tion may spread over the particular affections, 
 what settled perversion through the will itself. 
 To such men the light of nature is darkness, 
 the traditions of the Christian world a delusion, 
 the doctrines of Christianity provocations to im- 
 pious thoughts. We do not know what capaci- 
 ties of spiritual wickedness may . he within us. 
 Who can say that the very gift of regeneration 
 may not confer on us a susceptibility of such 
 forms of intense evil as our unregenerate nature 
 
 N 
 
178 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Serm. 
 
 could never exhibit ? Who can say what a height 
 of impiety there may be not only in the atheism 
 and infidelity of regenerate men, but also in their 
 sceptical and irreverent disputations; and how 
 infinitely near they may come to that last judg- 
 ment on the perverse and incredulous heart, 
 " because they received not the love of the truth, 
 that they might be saved," " for this cause God 
 shall send them strong delusions that they should 
 believe a lie ." 
 
 Let us, therefore, with all our strength, endea- 
 vour to draw forth the powers and gifts which 
 are in our regeneration. This is the great 
 practical truth enforced upon us by the Church 
 to-day. God has revealed Himself to us in 
 mystery that we may approach Him with awe. 
 He has bidden us to know Him by self-abase- 
 ment, worship, holiness. Let these be our chief 
 aim ; and all gifts of wisdom and knowledge, all 
 faculties of the reason needful here in this world 
 shall be added unto us. 
 
 2. And, lastly, let us remember that it is 
 through the higher powers of our spiritual and 
 reasonable nature, that we are related to the state 
 of bliss hereafter. What employment there shall 
 be in that everlasting rest, it is not for us too curi- 
 ously to inquire. But it would seem, that there 
 where the Truth itself shall be unveiled, and the 
 
 2Thess. ii. 10, 11. 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 179 
 
 spiritual nature shall be perfect in the clearness 
 of its vision, there will be no more exercise for 
 those faculties which are now employed upon 
 uncertainties and doubtful investigation. In 
 that kingdom of light, where there is no more 
 toil and weariness ; where the fever and the stir 
 of this restless state shall all be over; there shall 
 be no more clouds of doubt or probability, of 
 chance or contingent future. There we " shall 
 know even as we are known ;" not by reflected 
 lights, but by direct intuition. And where 
 shall then be that world of systems and deduc- 
 tions, of opinions and theories, which our inferior 
 powers have here created for themselves ? Are 
 they not all of time and of this world ; born of 
 the confusion and turbulence of our earthly life, 
 and by the imperfect acts of our imperfect reason ? 
 When all these are passed away, what shall sur- 
 vive but the energies of soul which have here 
 been unfolded by holiness unto love, worship, 
 adoration ; those powers which are universal in 
 man, the matter of our common probation. "And 
 I heard as it wejre the voice of a great multitude, 
 and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice 
 of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia, for the 
 Lord God omnipotent reignethV This shall be 
 the work of saints, in the power of the Divine 
 Majesty to worship the Eternal. Our highest 
 
 p Rev. xix. 6. 
 
180 THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. [Serm. 
 
 employment here shall be our only employment 
 there; that work which is the work of all the 
 regenerate servants of God ; not only of the wise, 
 learned, intellectual and refined, but of the whole 
 mystical body, of every redeemed spirit of man. 
 All our artificial inequalities shall then be past. 
 There shall be no more the rude and the en- 
 lightened, the teacher and the learner, where all 
 " shall see God." Here we are differenced from 
 our fellow-heirs of the kingdom by superficial 
 accidents ; there we shall be united in that 
 which in common we possess as men, and have 
 together inherited as saints. Our reward shall 
 then be measured by the law of our probation 
 and the unfolded capacity of those spiritual gifts 
 which are alike in all. The poorest and the least 
 of Christ's saints shall then pierce into the very 
 life of truth with an intuition keener than the 
 sharpness of the intellect ; for there we shall see 
 by love. Doubtless, of all who attain that bliss, 
 they will, with the fullest measure, enjoy the 
 fruition of the Heavenly presence, who have here 
 sought it with the most fervent devotion, and 
 embraced it with the largest heart. It will be a 
 day of reversing many an unequal lot, when Christ 
 shall distribute the rewards of His kingdom, uot 
 according to our thoughts and judgments, but 
 according to the spiritual and universal condition 
 
VII.] THE GIFT OF ILLUMINATION. 181 
 
 by which He has proved His own elect. " Many 
 that are first shall be last, and the last first." 
 Wherefore He hath said: — "I thank thee, O 
 Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou 
 hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, 
 and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, 
 Father : for so it seemed good in thy sight 9 ." 
 
 <J St. Matt. xi. 25, 26. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 OXFORD : 
 PRINTED BY I. SHRIMPTON.