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THE YOUNG LIFE EQUIPPING 
 ITSELF FOR GOD'S SERVICE. 
 
 Jour 8erm0tt0 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, 
 OCTOBER AND NOVEMBER, 1872. 
 
 By C. J.S/AUGHAN, D.D, 
 
 MASTER Op- THE TEMPLE, 
 
 AND CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN ; 
 
 FORMERLY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 ^Sixtk ^iitiott. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1877. 
 
CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANSy 
 CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 \^ls_\-''-"-e, 
 
 PACK 
 
 I. Preparation i 
 
 II. Prayer 34 
 
 III. Illumination 69 
 
 IV. The Perpetual Presence . . . . to8 
 
PREPARATION. 
 
 And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel 
 of peace. — Ephesians vi. 15. 
 
 O T PAUL from his Roman prison is looking 
 
 forth upon all time and two eternities. 
 
 Nowhere is his view so entirely free as in this 
 
 queen of Epistles. Whatever the reason, he is 
 
 free even from personal memories. He stays 
 
 not to recall what must have been a more than 
 
 commonly populous retrospect. That three 
 
 years' stay at Ephesus, longer probably than 
 
 any other (save perhaps at Tarsus and Antioch) 
 
 since he became a Christian, is treated here as 
 
 B 
 
PREPARATION. 
 
 if it were forgotten. Like the Twelve, like the 
 Seventy, in the trial-missions of the days of 
 Christ's flesh, he is so full of his message that he 
 can ' salute no man by the way.' The absence 
 of personal reminiscences has led some critics in 
 all times to conclude that the Epistle could 
 not be for Ephesus. It was a doubt hasty in 
 many ways. The salutations in St PauFs letters 
 are by no means proportioned to his intimacy 
 w^ith his correspondents. The Epistles to the 
 Corinthians, amongst whom he had spent a year 
 and six months, are destitute of them. The 
 Epistle to the Romans, a Church which he had 
 not then visited, is full of them. It is evidently 
 a fallacious test for this kind of criticism. The 
 Epistle to the Colossians, accompanying this, 
 and containing one passage which seems to say 
 
PREPARATION. 
 
 (though it does not really say) that he has 
 never seen them, has half a chapter of greetings. 
 It is certainly noticeable, but only this, that the 
 sister Epistle, that before us, is perfectly general, 
 with one single exception, from the first line to 
 the latest. It may be, according to one plau- 
 sible hypothesis, that it was a circular letter, 
 intended for several Churches, and therefore de- 
 signedly left impersonal. There may have been 
 a blank in the first verse, to be variously filled 
 up or left blank. Yet in the parallel Epistle, 
 expressly directed to be read in other Churches 
 besides that to which it is addressed,- no such 
 scruple operates. The salutation of Archippus, 
 the commendation of Onesimus, is no bar to the 
 transmission of the letter to Laodicea, or to its 
 
 public reading in the house of Nymphas. We 
 
 B 2 
 
PREPARATION. 
 
 must look somewhat deeper for the cause of 
 the phenomenon. We have here an Epistle (if 
 I might use the expression) charged and satur- 
 ated with Inspiration. In this one instance 
 *the sword of the Lord' is not 'the sword of 
 Gideon.' The human element is here almost 
 lost in the Divine. I know scarcely one Book 
 of Holy Scripture which in this respect rivals it. 
 If all Scripture had been like this, there would 
 have been room for a theory of Inspiration 
 which (as it is) needs modification. Not only is 
 a man full of the Holy Ghost writing — that is 
 true everywhere — but he is writing as such and 
 such alone. He scarcely touches the earth 
 which he illuminates. He is lost in the mys- 
 teries of the Unseen, and testifies, by that 
 absorption, to the supremacy of things Divine. 
 
PREPARATION. 
 
 His eye explores the eternity in which the 
 Creator dwelt alone, and gathers strength for 
 conflict and martyrdom from those inscrut- 
 able counsels which took note of things and 
 beings that were not, wrote indelible names in 
 a Book of Life, and drew the boundary lines of 
 future existences of which every moment and 
 every circumstance was as clearly foreseen and 
 as minutely predestined as though ages and 
 generations had not to run their round before 
 the first foundation of the first of them should 
 be laid in time. 
 
 You can estimate, from this faintest sketch 
 of the opening verses of the Epistle, the 
 improbability (if I might so speak) of there 
 being one local allusion or one personal greet- 
 ing in the latest. When St Paul descends at 
 
PREPARATION. 
 
 last from ' the holy mount ' of his more than 
 Apocalyptic intuition, it is but to tell how 
 these Divine determinations were realised and 
 wrought out in time ; how the election became 
 a calling, and the calling a sealing, and the 
 sealing a possession, and the possession a glory ; 
 how the Christ of predestination became the 
 Christ of incarnation, and the Christ of humili- 
 ation, and the Christ of resurrection, and the 
 Christ of ascension, and the Christ of dominion, 
 and the Christ of ' headship over all things to 
 the Church ; ' how the dead in sins are quick- 
 ened and raised and exalted already in Him 
 — lifted into a new life, re-made for a Paradise 
 not of manual but of spiritual culture, brought 
 back from an exile of estrangement and god- 
 lessness into a home of reconciliation and com- 
 
PREPARATION, 
 
 munion — yea, forming, themselves, a holy and 
 magnificent temple, of which Jesus Christ is the 
 chief corner-stone, and God, through eternal 
 ages, God in the Spirit, the Light and the 
 Presence. 
 
 What room in such an Epistle for remi- 
 niscences and associations of earth ? What 
 place, we almost feel, for images and meta- 
 phors, temples of Diana, wonders of the world, 
 amidst unearthly scenes and bodies celestial ? 
 We seem to be conscious, as we read this one 
 letter, of a sort of reluctance to descend even 
 to Avhat is commonly called the practical. The 
 word, I know, is inaccurate. Nothing is so 
 practical as the spiritual. Nothing touches the 
 spring of conduct like doctrine— if by ' doctrine ' 
 we understand God revealing Himself to what 
 
PREPARATION. 
 
 this Epistle calls ' the eyes of the heart' But, 
 adopting the distinction, we say that St Paul 
 finds here an unusual difficulty in turning to the 
 practical. In the third chapter he tries to do so, 
 and fails. ' For this cause I Paul, the prisoner 
 of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles ' — he is going 
 to say, * beseech you that ye walk worthy of 
 the vocation wherewith ye are called.' A whole 
 chapter intervenes. Again he loses himself in 
 matters deeper and higher ; rises once more into 
 a region divine ; extricates himself through 
 prayer and praise, and resumes at last in the 
 fourth chapter the interrupted and suspended 
 application. Even now it is but to enunciate 
 principles, themselves running up again into 
 mystery. This is what makes the Epistle 
 before us so dear, so precious to the Christian. 
 
PREPARATION. 
 
 This is what makes it the model of the evan- 
 gelist and the directory of the pastor. It is a 
 standing protest in the Churches against that 
 dull, dry, dismal detail of duties, against that 
 morality falsely so called, under which the 
 Church of England, for example, through the 
 eighteenth century languished, slumbered, and 
 sinned. St Paul knew that out of the heart are 
 the issues of the life ; and if he discoursed upon 
 duty, if he discoursed upon the relation of 
 wives and husbands, of masters and slaves, he 
 so spake as to make each a wellspring of reve- 
 lation, bringing Christ into all, and kindling into 
 a sacrifice of living devotion each act and each 
 circumstance of the mortal being. 
 
 All this he has done. With the handcuff on 
 his arm — with the rude rough Praetorian, some 
 
lO PREPARATION. 
 
 Thracian perhaps or Illyrian, the companion, 
 perforce, of his prayers and his exhortations — 
 he has dictated thus far to his amanuensis 
 these words of hfe and godHness : and now the 
 'Finally^ is come. From his prison at Rome 
 he will equip the soldier of all time. How far 
 he is influenced in the choice of his figures by 
 the neighbourhood of the camp or the presence 
 of the soldier, we presume not to say ; remember- 
 ing that in earlier days and other scenes he had 
 (more lightly and briefly) sketched the same 
 parallel in writing to Thessalonica. The passage 
 has been read to-day throughout Christendom 
 as the Epistle for the one-and-twentieth Sunday 
 after Trinity ; and I have chosen from it one 
 clause for your meditation on this opening 
 Sunday, full of hopes and responsibilities, of 
 
PREPARATION. II 
 
 the Academical Year, earnestly praying that 
 God may write it upon many of these hearts, 
 and make it the motto from this day forth of 
 many a young life, here taking its decisive 
 colour and impress for a manhood of action 
 and an immortality of consequence. 
 
 'And your feet shod with the preparation 
 of the Gospel of peace,' 
 
 The girdle of truth, the breastplate of 
 righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of 
 salvation, the sword of the Spirit, all would be 
 incomplete without the sandal of preparation. 
 We read in vScripture of ' rough places ; ' we read 
 in Scripture of ' slippery places : ^ there are both 
 of these on the great battle-field, which is the 
 world. If we would ' withstand in the evil day,^ 
 if we would ' stand, having done all,' we must 
 
12 PREPARATION. 
 
 complete the equipment with the sandal of 
 preparation. 
 
 The word ' preparation ' is ambiguous : the 
 eroijuLacria of the Greek is not so. It occurs only 
 here in the New Testament, and has some slight 
 varieties of sense in the Old. But there is ample 
 authority for the interpretation which I would 
 give to it to-day. ' Preparation ' is ' readiness.' 
 The charge is, that we have the feet shod with 
 the ' preparedness,^ the ' readiness,^ of the Gospel 
 of peace. 
 
 ' Ethelred the Unready ' is the well-remem- 
 bered title of one chapter of English story. It 
 might be the title of many lives as God and 
 man read them. It was not that there was a 
 conscious deliberate purpose to betray the cause 
 of patriotism or religion, of truth or right, of the 
 
PREPARATION. 13 
 
 Church or the Gospel. The Ethelreds are of 
 course against the Dane. In one sense, it is the 
 worse. A thirty-five years' reign was just the 
 mischievousness of the Unready. When he dies, 
 there will be a better man. He stops the way. 
 And yet he is there. He has a right to his life, 
 and he has a right to his throne. It is scarcely 
 a parable, brethren — it is the very case itself still. 
 The illustrations would be endless, if we were 
 not helped by the context to narrow them. The 
 scene is laid, not in still life, but in a battle. 
 We have but to think, then, of our own lives 
 in their aspect of conflict. And we speak, 
 of course, of spiritual conflict ; of that sort 
 of struggle which we only incur by being 
 Christians. What is this but the very life to 
 which we were pledged at our Baptism — ' man- 
 
14 PREPARATION, 
 
 fully to fight under Christ's banner ' — ' to con- 
 tinue Christ's faithful soldier unto the life's end?' 
 I know how easy it is to evade this warfare. I 
 know how far smoother it seems to render a 
 man's life, to forget altogether this pledge, this 
 ' sacramentum,' and believe himself only, always, 
 everywhere, among friends. I know how 
 courtesy, and complaisance, and charity, and 
 even humility, may be turned to account in this 
 direction ; how it may be made almost a duty 
 to gloss over differences, and round off angu- 
 larities, and presuppose agreement, and make 
 allowance for imperfections, and hope the good 
 and refuse to see the evil — till at last the very 
 idea of conflict is exterminated and eradicated 
 from the life. And God forbid that we should 
 be quick-sighted to a brother's failings, and blind 
 
PREPARATION. 15 
 
 to Christ^s ' image and superscription ' stamped 
 indelibly, however faintly discernible, upon each 
 precious spiritual coin once minted in His 
 treasury ! It is the very keenness of this 
 consciousness of the ownership which makes us 
 strong and earnest in combating that which 
 would deface it. It is because we see Christ's 
 purchase^ it is because we see one of God's 
 spirits inside each body ; encased and enshrined 
 in each most frail, most imperfect, most sinful 
 life, wdiich meets us on earth^s common trivial 
 highway — It is therefore that we v/ould wrestle 
 with the spirit-hosts of evil which have occupied 
 and desolated it. We know that what God 
 speaks of is always the reality. No kingcraft or 
 priestcraft, no Gregory or Constantine, can stay 
 by change of name or form the internecine 
 
l6 PREPARATION. 
 
 strife, earth-wide and age-long, between good 
 and evil. It lies deeper than national conver- 
 sions or European reformations. It rages still, 
 in hearts and lives. And though the blessing of 
 even a nominal Christendom is above gold and 
 precious stone, it does but leave where it was 
 the spiritual strife and the individual responsi- 
 bility : it does but render more obscure, more 
 perplexed, more difficult, the personal warfare 
 because it gives added force to the burning 
 words of St Paul, ' We wrestle, not against flesh 
 and blood.' 
 
 You see then the double risk, in this compli- 
 cation of the struggle, of that unreadiness which 
 is our subject. The separate encounters, of 
 which the life's sum is the defeat or victory of 
 the Christian, are generally unexpected, sudden. 
 
PREPARATION. 17 
 
 and impalpable. They come to us, not so much 
 
 in the form of open sinners, bitter scoffers, or 
 
 avowed infidels, warning us off by their look, 
 
 or sounding the alarm by their utterance. They 
 
 come to us, not like the profligates in the 
 
 Proverbs, saying, ' Let us lay wait for blood, 
 
 let us lurk privily for the innocent. . . . Cast 
 
 in thy lot among us, let us all have one purse : ' 
 
 on the contrary, so far as the persons of our 
 
 warfare are concerned, they are men like us, 
 
 or better than we ; full of kindly sentiment, 
 
 full of knowledge and ability, men whom it 
 
 is pleasant to meet, honourable to know. And 
 
 to stand aloof, as though either our faith or our 
 
 conduct gave us the advantage over them, to 
 
 treat them with suspicion, to read them moral 
 
 lectures, to reprove them for carelessness or 
 
 C 
 
l8 PREPARATION. 
 
 heterodoxy, to wear armour in their presence 
 as though they were our enemies, would be 
 not only a misery but a folly and a presump- 
 tion, destroying the hope of profiting them, 
 and dishonouring by the very spirit and temper 
 the cause and Gospel of the Saviour. And 
 yet, my brethren, from this very converse we 
 return home, again and again, conscious that 
 we have practically betrayed or denied Him. 
 In our hearing, soldiers of Christ as we call 
 ourselves, words were spoken, principles were 
 avowed, judgments were passed, acts were 
 estimated, not in accordance with Christ^s rules, 
 nay, on suppositions, tacit yet evident, which 
 would have made His Cross and His Crown 
 alike superfluous and nugatory. We sate by, 
 not with the excuse (itself insufficient) of 
 
PREPARATION. I9 
 
 mortal terror, of imminent martyrdom, if we 
 should say the word for Christ ; no, in security, 
 in calm, in indifterence ; or, if not that, then 
 in awkward irresolution, in the surprise of 
 unpreparedness ; because we expected no such 
 trial, because we never thought that that sort 
 of thing was the Christian conflict, because 
 we took it for granted that society was recrea- 
 tion, because we would not spoil an enjoyment, 
 our own or another's, by what we called to 
 ourselves ' dragging in religion/ Yes, but to go 
 a little deeper, for this other and truer reason, 
 because we had omitted to prepare ourselves 
 for all risks by a habit and temper of watchful- 
 ness ; because we had refused to listen betimes 
 to St Paul's counsel before us, * Stand there- 
 fore — having your feet shod with the pre- 
 
 C 2 
 
PREPARATION. 
 
 paratlon of the gospel of peace.' Therefore 
 we lost our opportunity. The word of quiet, 
 firm, self-controlled correction was not in time 
 to be spoken. In conversation there are *no 
 footsteps backward.' The stream hastens by, 
 and in vain do we watch on the brink for 
 the ' sacred waters ' to * flow upward.' Meet 
 emblem of the fugitiveness of all opportunity ! 
 Solemn memento of the responsibility of cir- 
 cumstance ! Awful warning, too, of that which 
 shall be the retrospect of a life's unreadiness ; 
 the harvest past, the summer ended^ and we 
 ourselves unsaved ! 
 
 There is another aspect of the precept, 
 which suggests itself forcibly before this audi- 
 ence. 
 
 We would not exaggerate — it is foolish as 
 
PREPARATION. 21 
 
 well as wrong to do so — the special perils of our 
 generation. We cannot compare. We see but 
 the present. Past and future are alike and 
 equally out of our ken. But we must be blind 
 and deaf and stupid, if we do not take account 
 of the positive. We hear, we read, we know, 
 that there is a shaking of faiths, an unsettlement 
 of foundations, existing and extending itself, in 
 reference to matters lying yet deeper than our 
 very Christianity ; such elements and rudi- 
 ments, for example, of religion, as the possibility 
 of prayer, the immateriality of the soul, and 
 the personality of God Himself And we know 
 also that on the side of this advanced scepticism 
 men appeal confidently to what they call 
 science ; loudly proclaiming the incompatibility 
 of proved and incontrovertible fact and law 
 
PREPARATION. 
 
 with the most fundamental principles of (at all 
 events) revealed religion. 
 
 You will not imagine that I am proposing to 
 enter into such questions to-day. We are 
 assembled in this house of prayer on the basis 
 and presupposition not of religion only but of 
 revelation. As a Christian I speak to you : as 
 Christians you listen. Evidences, whether of 
 miracle or prophecy, whether of Christian 
 morals or Christian character, whether of the 
 suitableness of the Gospel to man's want, or of 
 the perfection, in life and mind, of Him who is 
 the Gospel, appear to me to be more properly 
 unfolded in books or lectures, where there is no 
 risk of disturbing or distressing worshippers 
 whose faith is stedfast. 
 
 My purpose is different. I would seize 
 
PREPARATION. 
 
 23 
 
 the moment which is given me to urge upon 
 you the risk of unreadiness in reference to these 
 gigantic battles of our generation. You are 
 here with one single object : to make prepara- 
 tion. Before you lies an unexplored, an in- 
 scrutable future. You may succeed or fail in 
 your ambitions. You may be famous or ob- 
 scure in your generation ; you may be happy or 
 sorrowful in your home ; you may die late or 
 early : these things none can forecast. But, as 
 your day will most surely have in God's sight 
 its twelve hours in full tale ; as every life is in 
 God's sight complete ; as character and influ- 
 ence and destiny will unquestionably shape 
 themselves, and He, the Judge of all, will be 
 able to write infallibly on your gravestone, ' He 
 did good,' or, ' He did evil ; ' so, amongst other 
 
24 PREPARATION. 
 
 things, nay, as the root of all, you will have a 
 mind, one way or the other, concerning truth 
 and faith and the Gospel. If not for Christ on 
 the whole, on the whole you will be against 
 Him. This is what each man can contribute — 
 his own conviction, his own influence, his own 
 life to the sum of the Christian evidences. It 
 is a serious thought, a great responsibility. 
 Now there is no doubt that the whole weight of 
 some men is lost by their unreadiness. They 
 are so ill educated that they simply go for 
 nothing in the great battle. Their arguments 
 for revelation are the mere sputterings of rage 
 and fear. They tell against, not for the truth ; 
 men smile at them, pity them, and pass them 
 by. How different with those who have indeed 
 'shod' themselves for the fight! How noble 
 
PKlEPARATION. 25 
 
 the ambition, here proposed to you in the name 
 of Christ — older men envy you as they exhort 
 — to make yourselves wise in all this world's 
 learning- ; to enter with all earnestness of self- 
 devotion into the mysteries of nature and of 
 existence ; to be quite sure, and therefore 
 absolutely fearless in your search, that truth 
 and the truth must be at one ; that nature, 
 which is God's common working, cannot really 
 contradict miracle, which is God's exceptional 
 yet not less orderly working ; that science can 
 be perilous (in a religious sense) only to the 
 irreligious ; that to the man who will take God 
 with him in his search, God will reveal Himself, 
 for the satisfaction of his own soul, and for the 
 reassurance and reconciliation (it may be) of 
 other seekers who but for him mi^ht have 
 
26 PREPARATION. 
 
 floundered into Atheism. O for a few earnest 
 hearts — and such there are, I doubt not, I know, 
 in this congregation — who shall take this for 
 their province ! so to trust, and doubt not, the 
 fidelity of their God, as to give themselves to 
 track His footsteps in earth and sea and sky, 
 in plan and law and system and providence, on 
 purpose that they may be ready to grapple with 
 the arrogances of a 'science falsely so called,' 
 and both to reanimate the doubting and to 
 convict and confute the gainsayers ! 
 
 This University has. been fertile in such 
 intellects ; men who have brought Science her- 
 self to God's footstool and made her bend a 
 willing knee to Him who gave her at once her 
 implements and her subjects. They pass to the 
 grave, one by one ; scarce one or two of the 
 
PREPARATION. 27 
 
 giants of Cambridge, philosophy Hngering still 
 in the loved precincts where first they fearlessly 
 studied, and afterwards as fearlessly illustrated, 
 the wonderful works of God. They pass to 
 their rest, clamoured down already by new 
 strifes of tongues, yet safe themselves in God's 
 tabernacle, and bequeathing the reality of their 
 work to others. Happy they on whom the 
 mantle shall fall — the mantle of their 'readi- 
 ness ' and of their devotion ! 
 
 We know well enough that such men must 
 be rare. * Every man hath his proper gift of 
 God — one after this manner, another after that.' 
 There is no honest toil which is not a part of 
 God's preparation. Literature, as well as 
 science, can equip for God's conflict. It is 
 ignorance, it is undiscipline, it is uneducation, 
 
28 
 
 PREPARATION. 
 
 which makes us flee when none pursueth. A 
 mind practised in study, whatever be its depart- 
 ment, is not awed into doubting by the self- 
 assertion of the infidel. It can weigh, and wait, 
 and judge. And not only that. For one man 
 who could be made with any culture an ef- 
 fective champion, in speech or writing, of revela- 
 tion, a thousand are capable of being shod with 
 that Gospel readiness of which the text makes 
 mention. Brethren, it might make Angels weep 
 to see the waste here too often made of priceless 
 gifts ; gifts such as God gives, in these Univer- 
 sities, to England, and to no other nation on the 
 face of His earth. You have before you, every 
 one, a lifetime short at the longest, and then an 
 eternity unmeasured by millenniums. As you 
 prepare, so will you live ; as you live, so will 
 
PREPARATION. 29 
 
 you die. Fearful the spectacle of young lives 
 risking-, chancing, gambling away themselves ! 
 daring to undertake the charge of other lives, 
 whether as masters, landowners, legislators, or 
 ministers ; daring to face trouble, doubt, dif- 
 ficulty, temptation ; daring to settle their faith 
 and to shape their destiny, without prepara- 
 tion long and anxious for responsibilities so 
 tremendous ! Listen, brethren, listen to-day to St 
 Paul's counsel. Put on the sandal of readiness 
 — not in the form (for of that there is too much) 
 of presumption and positiveness, of prejudice 
 and self-conceit, of swiftness to speak and in- 
 capability of doubting — but of that prepared- 
 ness, for life and for death, which is only, 
 which is surely, to be found in what the 
 text calls ' the Gospel of peace ; ' that Gospel 
 
30 PREPARATION. 
 
 which Christ brought from heaven, stamped 
 Avith God's fourfold seal, of holiness, wisdom, 
 power, and love, and then committed to the safe 
 keeping of a Church for which He shed His 
 blood ; that Gospel which is the peace of God 
 knitting all the scattered fragments of mind and 
 will and soul into one, and bringing all into 
 harmony with that mind and will and spirit 
 above which is the Love and the Life and the 
 Light of men ! Let not one day pass without 
 trying the truth of that Gospel in earnest, re- 
 solute, importunate prayer. Ask God to lift up 
 His light upon you, and convince you of the 
 being and the power, of the atoning death and 
 the risen life, of Jesus. Ask Him so to reveal 
 His Son in you, that it shall be no guess and no 
 peradventure that he is your Lord and your 
 
PREPARATION. 31 
 
 God. Pray Him to keep you stedfast in this 
 faith, and every day to frame and fashion your 
 whole Hfe, in thought and speech and act, after 
 it. Ask of Him grace to try the strength of the 
 Gospel, here and now, by facing your besetting 
 sin in the name and by the Spirit of Jesus Christ. 
 Fight it out with the devil in some definite 
 decisive battle within, after which you shall be 
 able to say, * I know in whom I have believed ; ' 
 ' He is faithful that promiseth ; ' ' I can do all 
 things through Christ which strengtheneth me ! ' 
 One such experience — is it not to this that St 
 Paul here challenges us .^ — one such experience 
 is more to the soul that has it than all the 
 books of all the theologians. The habit of such 
 experiences grows at last into an evidence sure 
 and stedfast, strong enough to form a practical 
 
32 PREPARATION. 
 
 ansAver to all who would say to you, The 
 Gospel is a fable, Christ is not risen, prayer is a 
 mockery, and God is an abstraction and a 
 name. You answer, Whether He be a name or 
 no, I know not ; one thing I know, that, whereas 
 I was tied and bound by the chain of my sins, 
 now I am free and at large and victorious, so 
 long, and only so long, as I live in communion 
 with a Father and Saviour and Comforter, 
 whom I treat as living and hearing and answer- 
 ing, as tender to compassionate, and as strong 
 to save. If it be so — if it be indeed so — that 
 good and evil, falsehood and holiness, are in 
 league for my ruin ; that through a faith which 
 is a delusion I reach a strength which is virtue ; 
 that by means of prayer which is idle as the 
 wind I find myself able to become pure and 
 
PREPARATION. ^^ 
 
 peaceable and diligent and self-forgetting — if all 
 this be so, then out of this wreck and discord of 
 my being I can but choose the less of two evils, 
 live the better life even in error, and bow my- 
 self to the inevitable conditions of a creature 
 the accident of an accident. But if this cannot 
 be — if good and evil cannot thus conspire — if 
 the lie cannot be holy, if the wicked thing 
 cannot be true, then is my evidence sure and 
 my hope stedfast. If the Gospel of peace gives 
 me the victory, then by that sign I know the 
 Author — God is with it and in it of a truth. 
 
 Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity, 
 October 20, 1872. 
 
 D 
 
II. 
 
 PRAYER. 
 
 Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went 
 into his house ; and his windows being open in his 
 chamber toward Jerasalem, he kneeled upon his knees 
 three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his 
 God, as he did aforetime. — Daniel vi. lo. 
 
 A ND was this superstition ? Was this the 
 lingering bigotry of an obsolete Judaism, 
 surviving the transplantation into a land of 
 larger culture and higher civilization ? This 
 man of kings' courts and great employments, 
 chief minister of successive dynasties, in whom 
 Eastern astrologers recognized a ' light and 
 understanding and wisdom, like the wisdom of 
 the gods,' was he showing himself a silly 
 
PRAYER. 35 
 
 fanatic when he thus braved the wrath of his 
 
 royal master by disobeying the edict which 
 
 prohibited worship ? Shall one who admires 
 
 the courage ridicule the enthusiasm ? Shall 
 
 we praise the conscientiousness which faced 
 
 martyrdom at the call of fancied duty, and 
 
 condemn the Infatuation which saw a duty in 
 
 devotion ? 
 
 Brethren ! these are questions asked openly 
 
 in the world, in the Church, of this day ; and 
 
 they are questions which unsettle, where they 
 
 overthrow not, the faith of many ; and they are 
 
 questions which cannot, like most questions, 
 
 wait for their answer, inasmuch as they are 
 
 fundamental, crucial, vital, touching the very 
 
 spring of being, and coming (so to say) between 
 
 the man and his God. 
 
 D 2 
 
36 PRAYER. 
 
 We shrink, and perhaps ought to shrink, 
 from a topic so momentous ; feehng how much 
 the comfort and well-being of souls may be 
 jeoparded by its wrong or unskilful handling. 
 We have thought to turn aside from it into 
 provinces less perilous and less responsible. 
 But everything seems to beckon us this way, 
 and to make every other subject insignificant by 
 comparison. Pray then, w^e and you, that we 
 may touch it, however feebly, however partially, 
 at least with reverence and with sympathy ; 
 guided by the God ' who heareth prayer ' to 
 that which shall quicken and not hinder the 
 prayers of His people. 
 
 There might seem indeed to be an impro- 
 priety, almost an indelicacy, in dealing in any 
 manner with this most intimate, most secret in 
 
PRAYER. 37 
 
 tercourse between God and the soul. Praying is 
 the object of preaching: but can it be its subject? 
 Most of all, in the form of an inquiry into the 
 reality, the lawfulness, the possibility, of pray- 
 ing ? A deep awe should indeed rest in all such 
 questionings, upon the ear that hears and the 
 tongue that speaks. Far, far from this medita- 
 tion be the lightness and the smartness and the 
 asperity of Vv^orldly controversialists, of the strife 
 of wrangling tongues ! Put off the shoe from 
 the foot, thou who wouldest discuss the mystery 
 of mysteries, man's access to and converse with 
 his Maker ! ' Is it nothing to you, O ye that 
 pass by,' if all the generations of God^s Church, 
 from the Creation to the Advent, shall have 
 lived and died on a faith which was delusion ? 
 Here at least inside the Church, with memories 
 
38 PRAYER. 
 
 dear and sacred of lives and deaths, near and 
 far off, of which prayer was the soul ; with an 
 ancestry, more than of family, knitting us to 
 saints and heroes of whom the world was not 
 worthy ; we need not fear levity or coldness or 
 indifference in the listening. That which we 
 could not bear to discuss with persons uninter- 
 ested, we will ponder together here on the knees 
 of the soul. 
 
 It is wonderful how full Scripture is, when 
 we read it in this aspect, of the word and of the 
 fact of Prayer. This one day, how full is every- 
 thing of it ! And what wonder 1 The very 
 life of religion is prayer. Unlike in all else, all 
 God's saints have been men of prayer. It has 
 been their life. Explain it as you may, here is 
 a fact of which philosophy, of which candour. 
 
PRAYER. 39 
 
 of which common sense, of which common 
 justice must take notice. Here is a phenomenon 
 as plain, as certain, as striking, as sunrising or 
 sunset. The antiquity of prayer — its existence, 
 as a habit, as a custom, in the remotest age 
 of which we have one record ; the universality 
 of prayer, as a primary duty of every man who 
 has imagined himself to have so much as one 
 spark or one echo of a revelation ; the import- 
 ance attached to prayer, in the mind and in the 
 life of all religious men ; the prevalence of prayer, 
 in proportion to the emergency of circumstance 
 and the vehemence of feeling, in the best and 
 noblest and truest of men ; the power of prayer, 
 judged but by its results in moulding character 
 and affecting action and even transforming life ; 
 the benefit of prayer, its enemies themselves 
 
4° PRAYER. 
 
 being judges, in calming, softening, sobering, 
 sweetening, strengthening, elevating the spirits 
 and souls of the righteous ; these are all so 
 many facts, which the unbeliever himself cannot 
 gainsay, though he may profess to account for 
 them on principles most unsatisfactory to the 
 Christian. 
 
 Remember also that this antiquity and 
 universality of prayer in God's Church has 
 been realized in the midst of many conflicting 
 influences which might have been expected to 
 overcome it. Prayer, if in one sense an instinct, 
 is in another aspect a mystery. That I should 
 be able, kneeling on this paltry insignificant 
 earth, to hold communication with ' the high and 
 holy One that inhabiteth eternity ; ' to think my 
 thought, to confess my sin, to wish my wish 
 
PRAYER. 41 
 
 into the ear of an Almighty hstening God ; to 
 bring my Httle, fleeting, dying Hfe into the 
 presence, into the regard, into tlie loving 
 fostering supervision of Him who made earth 
 and sea and sky, and in whom, moment by 
 moment, ' all things consist ; ' this surely is a 
 conception so little obvious or a thing of course 
 that it must have needed more than argument, 
 more than persuasion, much, very much more 
 than accident, to recommend it so convincingly 
 to the judgment and heart of mankind. And 
 when to this mysteriousness we add the dif- 
 ficulty, felt and acknowledged by all who have 
 tried it, of the work of praying ; the reluctance 
 of the natural fallen being to seek the face of 
 God ; the resistance of flesh and blood, much 
 more of sin and conscious unworthiness, to the 
 
42 PRAYER. 
 
 effort of arising in the far country to return 
 home to One justly displeased ; the exertion 
 required, alike of intellect and affection and will, 
 on each particular occasion of earnest impor- 
 tunate supplication ; we may well marvel more 
 and more at the moral force which has 
 vanquished this difficulty, and made prayer 
 not only the rule of every religion, but the 
 practice of all the religious. One thing more 
 we must add, if we would be true to human 
 experience : and that is, the many discourage- 
 ments and disappointments of praying ; the 
 oft-repeated long-frustrated endeavour after a 
 grace seen but in the distance ; the patient 
 importunate seeking, the late, the tardy, the 
 partial, the imperfect attainment. When the 
 sum of these impediments is taken, and we see 
 
PRAYER. 43 
 
 nevertheless that prayer is, and is mighty, and 
 is in all the earth ; that we can appreciate, in 
 some measure, the cogency of the evidence 
 and feel that it needs more than assertion, 
 and more than conjecture, and more than 
 theory, to destroy it. 
 
 And yet, my brethren, prayer would be 
 undermined in one moment, if that which some 
 have dared to say of it were substantiated. If 
 it were a sufficient account of this phenomenon, 
 to say with the unbeliever, that the power of 
 prayer begins and ends with faith in itself ; that 
 all its beneficial effects, which the infidel does 
 not gainsay, are reducible to the influence of 
 the act of praying upon the mind of the 
 worshipper ; that it is not that any answer 
 comes, but that the asking reacts usefully upon 
 
44 PRAYER. 
 
 the spirit of the asker ; that it tends to promote 
 calmness and patience and fortitude and bene- 
 volence, to suppose oneself communicating with 
 the Inyisible God and Lord of life ; that a man 
 who imagines himself heard is solemnized and 
 tranquillized and comforted, enabled to go 
 about his work and to meet his trials with a 
 gentler, braver, kindlier disposition ; and that 
 thus prayer is its own answer, and the common 
 idea of an Auditor above as good as the 
 impossible reality — this would be indeed to 
 cut up by the roots the whole habit and the 
 whole conception. No true man will any 
 longer pray, if you once convince him that 
 prayer is an imposture however beneficial, 
 a fraud however pious. We shall say, ^A 
 corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit,' 
 
PRAYER. 45 
 
 nor can the lie be tolerated because it is 
 convenient. 
 
 Therefore it becomes a matter of life and 
 death to us to know the truth in this matter. 
 'Give light, and let us die.^ If God has not 
 given us the right to pray ; if God has not made 
 prayer the soul's breath, nor access to Himself 
 the prerogative of a spirit which He has created; 
 tell us not that, though a fancy, though an 
 illusion, it is productive of good, and that, if it 
 does us good, if it refreshes us, if it amuses us, 
 we are at liberty to practise it while we can. 
 As in the affairs of earth, so surely, not least 
 in the concerns of the soul, our maxim must be^ 
 first, midst, and last. Be true, be true, be true ! 
 
 We can suppose that few of these hearts 
 have been always free from all misgiving as 
 
46 PRAYER. 
 
 to the use, the right, and the efficacy of Prayer. 
 Times of depression, ' cloudy and dark days ' 
 Ezekiel calls them, come to all of us, when 
 truths most surely believed seem to crack 
 and give way under us. We have hinted at 
 some of the causes which may thus operate 
 upon our faith in Prayer. When the weight 
 of earth and flesh and time lies heavy upon 
 us ; when all around conspires to say to us, 
 the things alike and the persons which make 
 up our life. Nothing is real but the visible, 
 and nothing is important but the material ; 
 when each separate limb of the soul is so 
 clogged and weighted, that it cannot drag 
 itself, save by a compulsion which makes the 
 act nugatory, to the arduous task of commun- 
 ing with One whom eye hath not seen, dwelling 
 
PRAYER. 47 
 
 in the light unapproachable ; when some par- 
 ticular chain of sin is tying and binding us, 
 and we know, in the heart and in the soul, 
 that that sin must be laid down at the very 
 porch of heaven's temple, if ^vc would not 
 preclude our own entrance and affront the 
 majesty which is our hope ; at such times a 
 thousand voices clamour within us, each elo- 
 quent with some new argument against the 
 good of praying, each bidding us turn some 
 other way in quest of that benefit, in mind, 
 or body, or estate, for which Scripture and 
 the Church and pious custom had encouraged 
 us to make application at the throne of 
 grace. 
 
 At these moments, my brethren — and I 
 think we must have known them — there is 
 
4^ PRAYER. 
 
 scarce one cavil or taunt of the unbeliever which 
 has not awakened an echo in the most earnest 
 and faithful heart. 
 
 Sometimes it is the presumption — the im- 
 pertinence, I had almost said — of praying, which 
 forces itself upon the attention. Can I really 
 suppose that the great First Cause, the Uni- 
 versal Fountain of being, can have leisure to 
 attend to this want or pain or unrest, which I 
 myself, who would have it relieved, yet feel in 
 my own consciousness to be less than nothing to 
 any one out of myself ? Is it not great ignor- 
 ance of my place and my desert, as a very 
 insignificant inmate, for a very short life-time, 
 of a very insignificant planet, to suppose, or to 
 act as if I thought, that my happiness or my 
 misery could be of any consequence at all to 
 
PRAYER. 49 
 
 the Almighty One who inhabiteth eternity, and 
 whose name is Holy ? It is not always self- 
 evident, though it is a deep and substantial 
 principle, that all such hesitation is in' fact the 
 irnputation to God Himself of an estimate of 
 importance and insignificance which belongs 
 altogether to finite intelligences. When we thus 
 speak, however humbly and reverentl}', of things 
 great and small in God's regard ; of things too 
 trifling, and of other things not too trifling, for 
 His notice — even if the one class of subjects be 
 the management of universes, and the other 
 class of subjects be the aches and tears of a 
 child — we are forgetting that it is the attribute 
 of the Infinite and Self-Existent One to 
 measure not with man's measure the relative 
 
 or the positive ; that to God nothing can be 
 
 E 
 
50 PRAYER. 
 
 great but Himself; and that, so far from its 
 being beneath His dignity to take account of 
 created interests and sufferings, it is, in reaHty, 
 the highest glory of Him before whom suns 
 and stars, Angels and Archangels, are in them- 
 selves ' less than nothing, and vanity,' that He 
 visits with His consolation the prisoner in his 
 dungeon, the widow and fatherless in their afflic- 
 tion ; that he marks the first rising to return 
 of the prodigal exile, and thrills joy through the 
 very heaven of His holiness over one sinner that 
 repenteth. 
 
 Sometimes it is from another quiver that the 
 dart of doubt is suggested. You are asking 
 God, so the cavil shapes itself, to ' make a new 
 thing in the earth ; ' to interrupt, in your behalf, 
 the orderly laws of His working ; to do that 
 
PRAYER. 
 
 51 
 
 which, if often done, would introduce uncertainty 
 and confusion into everything, and replace the 
 ' Fiat lux ' of creation by an opposite mandate, 
 Met there be darkness.' How can God grant 
 this prayer of yours, for the health (say) or the 
 life of your friend, in disregard of that general 
 connection of cause and effect which exists be- 
 tween a poison and a fever, between exhaustion 
 and death ? How can God, in this other case, 
 hearken to the entreaty that it will please Him to 
 counteract the regular operation of His winds 
 and His waves, of His storms and His calms, on 
 purpose that a particular person in whom you 
 happen to feel an interest may be restored in 
 safety to your home and to your embrace? How 
 can God, in this other case, consistently with 
 His moral laws, which are at least as real as the 
 
 E 2 
 
52 
 
 PRAYER. 
 
 natural, prevent, at your intercession, some care- 
 less boyhood running on into a sensual youth, 
 some sensual youth into a corrupt manhood and 
 a ruined old age, until, as * lust conceiving 
 brought forth sin,' so ' sin finished shall bring 
 forth death ? ' Nay, how can God — the thing 
 which even they who doubt about prayers con- 
 cerning weather and sickness regard as the 
 proper subject for supplication — how can God, 
 for your mere asking, interpose between your 
 own sin of the past, and its just, its natural con- 
 sequence in the weakness and misery of the 
 present ? When you beg of God a pure heart, 
 you yourself having made that heart by your 
 own self-indulgences a very cage of unclean 
 birds ; when you beg of God a heavenward 
 spirit, you yourself having cribbed and cabined 
 
PRAYER. 
 
 53 
 
 that spirit, by your own obstinate indifference, 
 within the four narrow walls of earth and time ; 
 you are, in fact, asking Him to break His 
 mighty self-enforcing law of moral and spiritual 
 consequence, and to encourage, both in yourself 
 and in others, that fatal habit of venture and 
 speculation in the things of the soul, which it 
 must be the first object of religion — of revelation 
 first and foremost, if a revelation there be — to 
 discountenance and to preclude. 
 
 These are terrible thoughts so much as to 
 shape into utterance. But they cannot be en- 
 tirely new to any of us. And although they 
 wear an air of reason, and with many pass for 
 unanswerable, I venture to think that they are 
 as shallow as they are shocking. If by ' law ' 
 we mean what (in this connection) we ought to 
 
54 PRAYER. 
 
 mean, God's habit of acting, God's way of 
 going on, as observed by us where we can trace 
 it, as made known to us by whatsoever means ; 
 it is impossible to speak of any particular sup- 
 posed act of God as breaking this law, until we 
 know for certain every chapter and every clause 
 of it ; know for certain (in other words) that this 
 very act in question was not conceivably a part 
 of it. How if, for example, the prevalence of 
 prayer was one ingredient in that irresistible 
 will ? How if God, unto whom ' all His works 
 are known (we read) from the beginning,' was 
 pleased to link together in the eternal counsels 
 the prayer which should ask, and the result 
 which should be realized ? How if prayer itself 
 be a part of the predestination — that predestina- 
 tion which (we grant) none can withstand and 
 
PRAYER. 55 
 
 none can modify ? Something of this kind 
 seems to hirk in those memorable words of God 
 by Ezekiel, ' I the Lord have spoken it, and I 
 will do it. ... I will yet for this be enquired 
 of by the house of Israel, to do it for them.' 
 The promise is ready, but the prayer must 
 fetch it. 
 
 And is there indeed any immorality, any 
 breach of God^s law spiritual, in the granting of 
 those other prayers spoken of ? prayers for the 
 reformation of a life, mine own or another's ; 
 prayers for the cleansing of a sin-stained heart, 
 for the elevation of an earth-bound spirit ? Oh, 
 if there be anything immoral in Prayer, in the 
 name of God abandon it ! But if the highest 
 of all morality be that which gives back a 
 soul to its God ; which uncoils the binding rope 
 
56 PRAYER. 
 
 of habit, and makes a whole man free with the 
 Hberty which is in Christ Jesus ; tell us not 
 that we are risking God's law by bidding you 
 to believe in a superhuman work of healing, 
 or that we are encouraging in others a gambling 
 with the spiritual life by relying with all our 
 trust upon a God mighty to bring us sinners to 
 repentance. Who ever in the history of this 
 race was made profligate by the hope of a late, 
 a bitter repentance ? Who ever found the 
 efficacy of prayer so sudden or so luxurious, as 
 to embolden him to relax, in the confidence of 
 it, one struggle, or one battle, or one agony, of 
 the self-mastering and the self-amendment ? 
 
 There remain behind, unnoticed, for lack of 
 space and time, a thousand possible misgivings 
 as to the availableness of Prayer. We cannot 
 
PRAYER. 57 
 
 count that old doctrine a conceit which tells us 
 of an enemy trembling for his dominion often as 
 he sees one of us kneeling, like Daniel, to make 
 supplication. Sometimes the mere panic is 
 enough — Prayer is an enthusiasm. What if it 
 be.'' And what if 'enthusiasm' itself means the 
 having God in us .'' Sometimes prayer is a 
 nullity. Thou kneelest here, in thy study or in 
 thy chamber — thou kneelest and utterest words 
 thin as air, pleasing if they be Avishes, amiable, 
 pious, hopeful, if they be aspirations — but the 
 great God is not here — He is in a far-off heaven 
 — the blue vault of sky, the white-washed ceiling 
 of thy room, bounds, confines, and flings back 
 thy supplication ! Sometimes prayer is a super- 
 fluity. God has decided this or that concerning 
 thee ; perhaps kindly, perhaps in anger : it is 
 
58 PRAYER. 
 
 settled : why meddle with thy destiny ? Some- 
 times prayer is a mistrust. God has charge 
 of thee : dost thou doubt Him ? Will He not 
 do better for thee than thou canst direct Him ? 
 Hath He not said, 'Stand still, and see my 
 salvation ? ' Sometimes, sometimes — said I not 
 always ? — prayer is a trouble. It is so long ere 
 I can set in motion the wheels of this chariot 
 — so many wandering thoughts first, so many 
 plans intervening of business and recreation, so 
 many fears and doubts assailing. Who am I } 
 and what and where is my God ? — so many 
 ' bitter thoughts, of conscience born.' telling of 
 prayers defeated by sin, telling of prayers 
 paralyzed by sin, telling of prayers vitiated by 
 sin — O weary, weary, weary round of words, 
 trodden each day, no day advancing me to- 
 
PRAYER. 59 
 
 wards my goal, nay, not even if that goal be but 
 the faciHty, the deHght of praying ! ' Ye said 
 also. What a weariness is it ! and ye have 
 snuffed at it, saith the Lord of Hosts.' 
 
 Brethren ! we would draw you back, God 
 helping us, towards this thing which is indeed 
 your life. We tremble lest there be in any 
 of us an evil heart of unbelief, as concerning 
 this duty — yes, let us use the old word till we 
 can feel it, this privilege, this blessing— of 
 Prayer. There can be no life toward God 
 without it. Brethren, there can, we believe, 
 be no death toward God with it. Very various 
 are the workings of life : death has none. 
 Expressions, experiences, ideas, doctrines, esti- 
 mates of good and true and important, these 
 differ, unspeakably differ, in good men, Chris- 
 
6o PRAYER, 
 
 tian men, ^ saints of the Most High ' (to use 
 this Prophet's word for them), who nevertheless 
 all, in their measure, ' shall possess,' do possess, 
 *the kingdom.' We do not think that they 
 differ much in one thing : all pray. If w^e 
 would be of them, if we would live good lives, 
 lives above chance and change, above accident 
 and circumstance, above disappointment and 
 defeat and bereavement, above temper and 
 temperament and temptation, we must pray. 
 And, shall I dare to confess it ? I care little 
 how you pray, or for what you pray. ' Whereto 
 ye have attained, by it walk,' by it pray, 
 according to your light and according to your 
 conscience. 'If in anything ye be otherwise 
 minded, God shall reveal even this unto you.' 
 If you have too much limited the field of 
 
PRAYER. 6l 
 
 prayer, if you have not yet felt the compass 
 of God's permission to enquire of Him, if 
 either scoffing words or misgiving thoughts 
 have kept you from the comfort and strength 
 of consulting God and invoking God and im- 
 portuning God about everything ; be not dis- 
 mayed — pray as you can, pray as you feel and 
 know and are minded, and God, in His bound- 
 less love and pity, will tell you more and more, 
 little by little, of the fathomless depths of His 
 sympathy and of his strength. 
 
 It is sometimes the art of the sceptic to 
 dwarf down Prayer to Petition. . Prayer, he 
 assumes, is asking certain definite gifts from 
 One whose favour is valued because His power 
 is infinite. It is further assumed that the gifts 
 asked are of this life — health and prosperity. 
 
62 PRAYER. 
 
 recovery and restoration, length of days and 
 abundance of possessions ; these are the sub- 
 jects, the only appreciable subjects, of that 
 Petition which is Prayer. Prove then, he says, 
 in the most precise, literal, business-like manner, 
 whether Prayer is of use. Ask the life of one of 
 a room-full of fever-stricken people, and ask not 
 the lives of the rest. If you decline the ordeal, 
 you are self-condemned. If you believed in 
 the power of Prayer, you would ' give the sign.' 
 Even thus was it in the days of Jesus Christ. 
 Very hard it might seem to those Pharisees, 
 very unsympathizing, or else very suspicious, 
 that he would not display in the sky the token 
 which would have wrought conviction. 'The 
 kingdom of God,' He said^ 'cometh not with 
 observation.' 'The kingdom of God is within 
 
PRAYER. 6;^ 
 
 you : ' if you will not see it there, you can see it 
 nowhere. Even so, we all feel the impropriety, 
 the inconclusiveness, whether meant or not the 
 irreverence, of the proposed test of Prayer. 
 Prayer is not the synonym of Petition. Peti- 
 tion itself is not chiefly of earth. Prayer is 
 speaking- to God — whatsoever be the voice, the 
 language, the subject of discourse : it may be 
 confession, it may be adoration, it may be 
 thanksgiving, it may be petition. If it be 
 petition, it may be entreaty, it may be 
 deprecation, it may be intercession, it may 
 be for the life, it may be for the soul. Who 
 pretended that a sudden, disjointed, isolated 
 request, uttered once in a way, apart from 
 the spirit, apart from the life's tone and tenor 
 and habit, had any promise, any faintest hint 
 
64 PRAYER 
 
 of an answer ? Prayer is the soul's language 
 in the ear of a God known to be present. A 
 man may pray, Avho asks nothing, who but 
 dwells in the secret place of the Most High, 
 silent from petition, counting it enough to abide 
 under the shadow of the Almighty, the All- 
 loving. Enlarge your conception of this thing. 
 Know that you can pray, even if you have 
 a scruple about prayer for temporal blessings ; 
 even if you see not your way to prayer for 
 wind and rain, for staying the course of a 
 fever, or diverting the incidence of a thunder- 
 bolt. Call no man an unbeliever who does 
 not expect and dare not implore special in- 
 terpositions of a Hand which he knows to be 
 working and can trust to work well. He 
 misses something perhaps of the consolation 
 
PRAYER. 65 
 
 of the ' Christian altogether ; ' and yet his 
 soul may be resting on the impregnable rock, 
 and his life guarded, half unawares, by minister- 
 ing spirits from God's presence. The reality 
 of prayer is the meeting of the two spirits 
 — the ' I ' and the ' I AM ' — unto communi- 
 cation, unto converse, unto interchange (with 
 reverence be it spoken) of thought and speech, 
 of life and love. Where this is, prayer is ; 
 though nothing be asked and nothing be given, 
 save that ineffable grace of the Divine Presence, 
 from which the earthly countenance shines, and 
 men take knowledge of the man that he has 
 been with Jesus. Then, in due season, then, 
 in God's time, the transference will be easy 
 and natural from the vv-alkino- with God here 
 
 to the seeing His face hereafter. 
 
66 PRAYER. 
 
 Brethren, it cannot be wicked to pray. It is 
 no intruding into things forbidden. It is the 
 visiting a home which was ours in our infancy, 
 which shall be ours for ever when the childhood 
 of our perfection shall at last be attained. 
 Prayer is going home. Prayer is coming to 
 Him who is our Rest. Prayer is awakening out 
 of earth's sleep, letting in the light of day upon 
 night's dark dank chamber, and beginning to 
 live. Use it evermore as your refreshment and 
 your recreation. ' Bodily exercise,' this day^s 
 Lesson tells us, ' profiteth little : ' the life toward 
 God, of which Prayer is the intensest, most vital 
 moment, * is profitable for all things.' See that 
 you make it so. Make it tell upon the life that 
 now is. Prove it now herewith — not by its 
 power to work wonders, to make sick men 
 
PRAYER, 67 
 
 suddenly whole, or ' a plague of rain and waters,' 
 a firmament swept and sparkling — but by its 
 effect upon your life's life ; by its chasing, the 
 demon of lust and the demon of cruelty and the 
 demon of a diabolical selfishness, and ,making 
 you the helper of the weak, and the comforter of 
 the downcast, and the example of the wavering, 
 and the delight of your friends, and the joy of 
 your home. When you find that Prayer does 
 something of this kind for you ; that it will not 
 dwell Avith sin, that it makes you strong for the 
 soul's battle, that it is in you a reality and a 
 power and a love ; then you, and others with you, 
 will have a proof not to be gainsaid, a proof 
 worth ten thousand portents, whose gift is 
 Prayer ; you will know that such a boon, so 
 pure, so peaceable, so beneficent, can have but 
 
 F 2 
 
68 PRAYER. 
 
 one source, one origin ; is indeed from above ; 
 Cometh down, like wisdom, like hope, like 
 charity, from the Father of lights, with whom 
 is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. 
 
 Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity, 
 October 2^, 1872. 
 
III. 
 
 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 The eyes of your understanding being enlightened. 
 Ephesians i. i8. 
 
 T T is the prayer of St Paul for his beloved 
 Church of Ephesus. For persons, of whose 
 Churchmanship, of whose Christ-membership, 
 he has no doubt. Already called, believing, 
 sealed with the Spirit. St Paul hears of their 
 faith, hears of their love, ceases not to give 
 thanks for them as he mentions them in his 
 prayers — those wonderful, heaven - searching,, 
 earth-compassing prayers, which neither dis- 
 tance, nor isolation, nor imprisonment, nor 
 (hardest to bear) compulsory inactivity, nor 
 
70 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 presence, by day and night, of a rude heathen 
 soldier chained to him, could interrupt or em- 
 bitter : and yet, when he tells us what those 
 prayers were for these Ephesians, we might 
 almost think in our haste and in our formal 
 rigid theology, that they were such as implied, 
 not their immaturity only, but their shallowness 
 and hollowness, in the life of Christ : for he 
 prays that God may give them, as a blessing 
 still needed, * a spirit of wisdom and revelation 
 in the knowledge of Himself, the eyes of their 
 understanding being enlightened.' 
 
 There lies thus on the service of the text a 
 lesson of humility and a lesson of wisdom. Let 
 us never count ourselves to have attained. Let 
 us never think it too late to pray for illumina- 
 tion. Let us never resent, never repudiate the 
 
ILLUMINATION. 7I 
 
 word which speaks to us as unto babes (still) in 
 Christ. And for others — so many of us as are 
 or shall be ministers of Christ — let us learn, in 
 our preaching, in our counselling, in the tone of 
 our address, in the manner of our shepherding 
 that spirit of hope and of brotherhood, that 
 sense of the universal propitiation and of the 
 individual incorporation, which shall make the 
 very sound of our Gospel an encouragement and 
 an attraction, saying this to the most backward 
 and the most earth-bound in the congregation, 
 Because ye are Christ's therefore be Christians : 
 because ye are chosen and called and sealed, 
 therefore pray, therefore struggle, therefore 
 hope : because ye are children of light, there- 
 fore walk in it, the eyes of your understanding 
 being enlightened. 
 
72 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 There can, I believe, be no question that 
 the proper reading of the text will give us 
 ' heart ' for ' understanding.' ' The eyes of your 
 heart being enlightened.^ The peculiarity of 
 the expression seems to have occasioned the 
 alteration. And yet what a word is it, when 
 it is restored to us ! How beautiful, how sug- 
 gestive, how bright in thought ! ' The eyes of 
 your heart illuminated,' to know two things : 
 the first, ' the hope of God's calling ; ' in other 
 words — for the 'and' which makes three 
 co-ordinate clauses, ought, I believe, to be 
 cancelled — ' the riches of the glory of God's in- 
 heritance in the saints ; ' the second, the exceed- 
 ing greatness of the power put forth upon us 
 who believe, a power measured only by that 
 which raised Christ Himself from death, and 
 
ILLUMINATION. 73 
 
 exalted Him both to universal dominion and to 
 the headship over all things to the Church. 
 ' The eyes of your heart being enlightened.' 
 It would be a mistake to carry into the Bible 
 that nicety of mental distribution which is some- 
 times deceptive even in human metaphysics. 
 We are aware that ' heart ' in the language of 
 the Bible is larger and more inclusive than in 
 our modern acceptation. It means sometimes 
 in Scripture all that is in man. ' From within, 
 out of the heart of man, proceed evil thoughts,' 
 as well of blasphemy and foolishness, as of 
 passion and lasciviousness. Still that there is 
 a difference, usually recognized in the Bible, 
 between ' heart ' and * understanding,' will be 
 evident in a moment if you try in some par- 
 ticular instance to interchange the two. 'With 
 
74 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 my whole heart have I sought Thee.' * I cried 
 with my whole heart.' ' In the integrity of my 
 heart have I done this.' * Give unto Solomon 
 my son a perfect heart.' ' See that ye love one 
 another with a pure heart fervently.' ' Who 
 shall ascend into the hill of the Lord } He 
 that hath clean hands and a pure heart.' 
 * Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall 
 see God.' 
 
 * The eyes of your heart being enlightened/ 
 The heart, brethren, no less than the under- 
 standing, has its thoughts, has its voice, has its 
 hands, has its eyes. What is this but to say 
 that the one indivisible being, the * myself ' of 
 the man, has a real, an active, an energetic exist- 
 ence — and that in all manner of ways — in the 
 province of the affections } The point before us 
 
ILLUMINATION. 75 
 
 — and we will keep to it — is, the discernment, 
 the insight, the intuition, of the affections. The 
 heart has eyes. The eyes of the heart are as 
 keen, are as piercing, are as quick and as far- 
 sighted, in their sphere — and that sphere is a 
 universe — as the eyes of the body or the eyes of 
 the intellect. Who has not found them so .'* I 
 dare almost to say that without the heart the 
 intellect itself is torpid ; that without loving 
 there is no knowing anywhere. 
 
 Certainly it is so in study. What can be so 
 dull, so lethargic, so stupid, as mere quickness, 
 sharpness, cleverness, hating its subject ? I need 
 not carry back your thoughts to those first days of 
 lessons, in nursery or school-room, when all was 
 blank despairing darkness because the love of 
 knowledge was not yet awakened, either in its 
 
76 ILLUMINATION, 
 
 pure disinterestedness, which is the promise of 
 wisdom, or in that ambition of reward, which 
 sometimes helps and sometimes counterfeits it. 
 The experience is yours still. There are subjects 
 of lecture and of examination, which you dislike 
 and therefore fail in : there are others which the 
 same mind readily grasps and rapidly appropri- 
 ates, because it finds in them a congeniality and 
 an attractiveness, so that the eyes of the under- 
 standing are for them the eyes also of the heart. 
 If you would know a science, you must love it. 
 If you would know a book, you must read it 
 with the eyes of the heart. Dislike it all the 
 time, and you will never know it. Love is 
 knowledge. 
 
 And who has not had experience, in life, of 
 this phenomenon — a head entirely educated by 
 
ILLUMINATION. 77 
 
 the heart ? There was one who, in boyhood, in 
 youth, through school days and academical, was 
 looked upon as a laggard and a dullard in 
 everything intellectual ; below and behind his 
 equals in age, in all that distinguishes youth or 
 gives promise for the manhood. But there came 
 to that man under the good hand of God, the 
 impulse of a new, a mighty affection — perhaps 
 in the form of a human love, perhaps of a 
 Divine — and soon the whole being seemed to be 
 lifted to a higher level, into a livelier and more 
 buoyant atmosphere. Activity, success, useful- 
 ness, distinction, the respect of the world, the 
 devotion of his own, the blessing of the needy, 
 the visible approval of One above, began to 
 mark his onward Avay, and a life, not of meri- 
 torious toil only, but (which is our present 
 
78 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 point) of real intellectual elevation, of opinion 
 wise and large, of judgment profound and per- 
 suasive, was the result here below, the direct, 
 the undoubted result, not of the expulsive, but 
 father of the impulsive power of a new affection. 
 If this be true of the knowledge of things 
 what shall we say. of that of persons? There 
 certainly the eye of knowledge must be the eye 
 of love. Tell us not of people quick-sighted 
 to the faults of their brother ; of men said to be 
 discerning because they are suspicious, good 
 judges of character because with them every 
 character is bad. That is a devil's knowledge, 
 from which God keep us all ! Doubtless every 
 character has its bad side. The amiable are 
 sometimes weak, and the strong are some- 
 times — thank God, not always — unamiable. 
 
ILLUMINATION. 
 
 79 
 
 The religious are sometimes censorious, and 
 charity is sometimes seen — thank God, not 
 always — in divorce from orthodoxy. I doubt 
 not that evil spirits see these inconsistencies — 
 see perhaps little else in us — and make sport of 
 them. But he who would see another truly, 
 see him through and through, must see him, in 
 his measure, as God sees him — with the eyes of 
 the heart, which are the eyes of love. How 
 often has it happened to you to judge a man 
 unfavourably. You could see nothing but his 
 awkwardness, or his roughness, or his ugliness, 
 or his unmannerliness. Yet a friend of yours 
 loved that man — wished that you judged him 
 favourably — told you that he w^as to be loved. 
 Could you but have got over your prejudice, 
 could you but have willed to like him, you 
 
8o ILLUMINATION. 
 
 would have valued him, because then first you 
 would have known him, too. The eyes of the 
 understanding are nothing without the eyes of 
 the heart. 
 
 Judge ye therefore, brethren, how little the 
 intellect can furnish towards the knowledge of 
 God. We would not undervalue — God forbid — 
 Theology, the key and the crown and the queen 
 of sciences. We cannot echo that senseless 
 nineteenth-century cry, which would make light 
 of Theology, pretending to exalt piety ; which 
 would say, We all know : any one can preach : 
 why study the Fathers } why institute a Theolo- 
 gical School or a Theological Tripos ? theology, 
 if it means anything, means religion, and 
 religion, if it is not an imposture, means piety, 
 and piety means feeling, and feeling means 
 
ILLUMINATION. 
 
 sentiment, and sentiment is a mere incense, a 
 fragrant dust, aromatic and fugitive and evan- 
 escent ! Nevertheless we do know that a man 
 might be a theologian and not a Christian. 
 Why ? Because the eyes of the intellect are 
 diverse and separate from the eyes of the 
 heart, and he who would know God can know 
 Him only with these. God, as the Hope of 
 our calling ; God, as the Inheritance of the 
 saints ; God, as the Resurrection Power, first 
 to Christ, then to the Christian — of course no 
 Theology taught in Lecture-rooms or tested by 
 Examinations will bring us to Him, will make 
 us know Him ! One moment of prayer is 
 worth them all — because Prayer is the voice of 
 the heart, and the heart alone can become 
 acquainted with a person. That knowledge 
 
 G 
 
82 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 begins and grows and is perfected in converse, 
 in contact, in intercourse and interchange, in 
 sympathy and fellowship and communion ; not 
 least when Hope and Power are the two subjects 
 of the study — the hope of an everlasting coexist- 
 ence, the power of an assimilating Presence. 
 '' If any man love God, the same^ knoweth — let 
 me rather say with St Paul — it is more reverent, 
 it is more true — ' the same is known of Him.' 
 ' The eyes of your heart being enlightened.' 
 
 There is a second condition of seeing. The 
 organ of sight is created, and yet there is not 
 vision. Light is wanting. St Paul prays that 
 the eyes of the heart may be enlightened. 
 
 There must be, first, a revelation of the 
 Invisible. The light unapproachable must 
 itself approach. 
 
ILLUMINATION. 83 
 
 Who amongst us believes in Revelation ? 
 I know we reverence the name and the idea. 
 The ancient Book which enshrines it is dear 
 still to the heart of England. Yet suffer, 
 brethren, and put not from you, the word of 
 enquiry. Do you believe that God, over and 
 above the book of Nature, in which he that 
 runs may read what St Paul calls ' His eternal 
 power and Godlikeness ' — over and above the 
 gifts of reason and conscience, by which dis- 
 coveries may be made, true discoveries, of the 
 wonder-working Hand, and the right-loving 
 Will, of a Power, a Person, who evidently 
 lets us not alone — has interposed to communi- 
 cate, directly, thoughts, and facts, and ' con- 
 cerning ' directions, as to Himself, and as to 
 His creatures ? Do you believe in a Revela- 
 
 G 2 
 
84 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 tion, real, direct, and original, of which God, 
 God in Christ, is at once the Subject and the 
 Author ? 
 
 This is an enquiry lying deeper and reach- 
 ing further than the genuineness or the authen- 
 ticity of any number, or of the whole volume, 
 of the Books of Scripture. Revelation and 
 Inspiration are two things, not one. It is great 
 confusion, and it is a great wrong, to interchange 
 them. It is quite conceivable that there might 
 have been one of the two, and not the other ; 
 that God might have revealed Himself in Pro- 
 phets and in His Son, and yet not have inspired 
 one word of the record. ' The Light that lighteth 
 every man, coming into the world,' might have 
 shone in all its lustre — and yet the other and 
 separate light, of a Word written and legible, 
 
ILLUMINATION. 85 
 
 never have been kindled. We do a cruel wrong 
 to others, we lay a needless and wanton burden 
 upon ourselves, when we make faith in Revela- 
 tion, and faith in Inspiration, convertible and 
 interchangeable terms. A man might be a 
 devout believer in the Gospel of grace and 
 salvation, and yet not an implicit receiver of 
 each verse or each chapter or each book of 
 Scripture as equally, and as a matter of course, 
 directly inspired by God. Let the two questions 
 be kept distinct, and God will answer each, in 
 His time and in His way, to the devout and 
 earnest and honest enquirer. 
 
 But the former of the two questions is vital. 
 Hath God revealed Himself to us in His Son ^ 
 I do not ask, Was the character of Christ 
 beautiful, and the doctrine of Christ sublime. 
 
86 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 and the life of Christ exemplary, and the death 
 of Christ noble and martyr-like and self-sacri- 
 ficing ? None of these things would prove a 
 difference in kind, however great in degree, be- 
 tween Him and some few of those master-spirits 
 which have appeared at intervals of a few gener- 
 ations or a few centuries to astonish and to 
 abash and to elevate mankind. What we ask 
 is, ' Was God in Christ, reconciling the world to 
 Himself.?' Had Christ words of eternal life, 
 brought with Him from heaven, for fallen, sinful, 
 dying, immortal men ? This is a question 
 which will not wait. It is your life. Theories 
 of Inspiration, particular things in the Bible, 
 Authorship of its books. Old Testament mi- 
 racles, I dare to call each and all of these 
 secondary to that of the commission and the 
 
ILLUMINATION. 87 
 
 authority and the Divinity of Jesus Christ. 
 When you are a Christian, then you will have 
 a thousand questions to ask — interesting, im- 
 portant, momentous questions, for which a life- 
 time is not long enough : but you will ask them 
 of a God known in a Saviour — you will ask 
 them on your knees before a Person in whose 
 light alone you hope to see light. 
 
 But there is not in all of us this first know- 
 ledge. St Paul's prayer in the text is wanted 
 here, in a sense in which it was not wanted at 
 Ephesus. Brethren, vv^e must not assume even 
 our Christianity. We must not take for granted 
 the first illumination. The eyes of the heart 
 still need to be enlightened in thousands and 
 tens of thousands inside the Church. We still — 
 in Isaiah's strong figure — grope at noonday in 
 
88 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 darkness, like men that have no eyes. The 
 experience of one — taken almost at hazard from 
 a beautiful biography of yesterday — is the ex- 
 perience of multitudes of listeners in these 
 galleries. 
 
 ' I have always felt that there was a some- 
 thing between me and God ; that there was 
 a barrier I had no power over, which seemed 
 to stop as it were my communication with 
 Him, to hide Him from me. When I at- 
 tempted to pray, it was often with a feeling, 
 Where shall I find Him ? a sort of vagueness 
 about the whole thought of Him. I am aware 
 now that I did not believe in the reality of 
 any deeper feeling. . . . Now, it is but faint, 
 yet I have a feeling within — it is not a thought, 
 a belief, but a feeling. ... I look to myself 
 
ILLUMINATION. 89 
 
 SO Ugly in the past, that I wonder any one 
 could love me. . . . When I read in my Bible, 
 every word seems as if it applied to me 
 personally ; words that were before an empty 
 sound, seem to pierce through me. All my 
 previous religious impressions seem to have 
 left the root of the matter untouched ; now I 
 am sure that I am being drawn to God, and 
 that He will lift me up to rest wholly on His 
 promises and to taste His peace. ... I feel 
 quite fearful lest the delicacy of the new 
 feeling should be hurt or damped. It is cer- 
 tainly very mysterious. I feel a constant wonder 
 at myself at what I am sure is no delusion, and 
 yet is so distinct from any previous impression. 
 It is not a difference in degree — it is an awaken- 
 ing to life ; a removing of what before seemed 
 
90 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 to be between me and God, as if He was hid 
 from my eyes/ 
 
 * The eyes of your heart being enHghtened.' 
 My brethren ! every man hath his proper gift 
 of God, and even His spiritual dealing is 
 infinitely various. It is idle, it is worse than 
 idle, to try to force all men through a round 
 of successive experiences, each having its de- 
 fined form, its assigned chapter in the manual 
 of the soul's pilgrimage. It may be the will 
 of God that some of His spirits should dwell 
 in a lower heaven of faith ; should never in 
 this life see Him with this clear, this distinct 
 intuition ; should have all their joy, if not all 
 their peace, reserved for the year and the day 
 and the hour of the beatific vision. These 
 things may be — may be as a trial of faith, may 
 
ILLUMINATION. 9I 
 
 be for other reasons, or may be as a discipline 
 of loving correction for long foregoing years 
 of indifference, frivolity, or sin. They who 
 dwell much in the secret place of the Most 
 High, serving with veiled face and feet, ' long- 
 ing, yea, even fainting ' for a brighter light 
 and a more open vision, may well accept it as 
 a cross to be borne if they must still cry, 
 with the patriarch, ' Oh that I knew where 
 I might find Him ! that I might come even 
 to His seat ! Behold I go forward, but He 
 is not there ; and backward, but I cannot 
 perceive Him : on the left hand, • where He 
 doth work, but I cannot behold Him : He 
 hideth Himself on the right hand, that I cannot 
 see Him : but He knoweth the way that I take ; 
 when He hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.' 
 
ILLUMINATION. 
 
 Only, only, brethren — we would charge it 
 upon you in the name alike of truth and hope — 
 suffer not any sophistry, not even if it call itself 
 by a theological name, to persuade you that you 
 are in the light when you know that you are 
 in darkness. Some of God^s saints have walked 
 all their days in the dimness of a twilight 
 hope and a flickering peradventure. But they 
 felt it at the heart's core, and they made it 
 a discipline of humility unto godliness. How 
 different had it been with them, if they had 
 declared that they were in the light, that they 
 had all, that all which they had not was either 
 a fancy or an impossibility, because they had 
 been baptized, and because Church usage made 
 (j)coTtcr/jio^ a synonym for baptism ! Yet even 
 Church fathers, when they wrote guardedly, 
 
ILLUMINATION. 
 
 could distinguish between the two ; could show 
 that they knew the difference between the type 
 and the antitype ; could say, ' Mark, the illumin- 
 ation is before the baptism ; ' and, * Without 
 the illumination of the Spirit no man can attain 
 to the knowledge of the truth.' Phrases and 
 figures, half devotional, half rhetorical, harmless 
 in days when Christianity was suffering, may 
 become dangerous to truth, because dangerous 
 to spirituality, when they are stereotyped, in an 
 age or a world of promiscuous profession, into 
 formulas of doctrine or definitions of Theology. 
 Let us accept with devout thanksgiving the 
 place within God's Church, within Christ's body, 
 to which baptism has admitted us. Let us 
 acknowledge the greatness of that mercy which 
 has ' prevented ' us with benediction ; which has 
 
94 ILLUMINATION, 
 
 sealed upon the individual the world-wide re- 
 demption, and given us to draw the first breath 
 of consciousness in an atmosphere of Evan- 
 gelic grace. * Thy congregation shall dwell 
 therein ;' in the dew and the rain and the sunshine 
 of a love perfectly free and a hope guaranteed 
 by promise. It is everything to know that not 
 one day nor one hour need intervene before we 
 begin to live the life which is hidden with Christ 
 in God. That we need not wait for one sign 
 inward or outward, that God has taken us for 
 His own and sealed us with His seal. That 
 we are already His people and the sheep of 
 His pasture ; entitled to say to Him, ' Our 
 Father ; ' entitled to plead the will which is our 
 sanctification. These things are ours : let us 
 not * curse our blessings ' by ' dreaming that we 
 
ILLUMINATION. 95 
 
 eat' to 'awake with appetite.* Let us read 
 aright the signs within. . If we find no pleasure 
 in the Word of God and Prayer ; if we know 
 not what it is to speak inside the soul to a 
 living, a present, a listening God ; if in the 
 Services of God's house, if in the Sacrament of 
 Holy Communion, we can but galvanize our- 
 selves into a so-called devotion by gestures and 
 postures which never get beyond a violent self- 
 determination to believe that there is some One 
 before us to whom obeisance is due, while yet 
 with that Person, if Person he be, we never 
 enter, spirit to spirit, into real comniunication, 
 into conscious converse — it is idle to say that 
 the eyes of the heart are enlightened because in 
 sleeping infancy we were sprinkled with the 
 baptismal water, made partakers of Christ, and 
 
96 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 inserted into that holy Church which is His 
 body. The blessing of that initiation is great ; 
 but it lies not in making it supplant the very 
 grace itself which it testifies. 
 
 Brethren ! if any heart feels itself this day 
 unilluminated, not yet lit up and kindled by 
 that living grace which is the one satisfaction 
 of the true, let it pray for itself St Paul's 
 prayer, let it resolve, let it determine — Re- 
 demption, Church-membership, the Book which 
 is God's legible Word, the Sacraments which 
 are God's visible hand, all justify this — the 
 resolution, the determination, to end this un- 
 realized state at once. Not one year, not one 
 month, not one week, not one day, not one 
 hour from this present, shall find or leave me 
 as I am ! I have the right of illumination given 
 
ILLUMINATION. 97 
 
 me — I will use it. I will ask, I will seek, I will 
 knock, on the ground of the promise. Lord, 
 lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon 
 this heart ! Lord, if Thou art — and I know that 
 Thou art ; if Thou hearest prayer — and I know 
 that Thou hearest ; I will come to Thee as such, 
 as that which Thou art, and I will not leave Thee, 
 I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me ! 
 O, long, long before this opening Term has 
 closed again — long before these dark, cloudy, 
 watery days of November have changed them- 
 selves into the healthier frosts of Christmas — • 
 you shall have been heard, and you shall have 
 been answered ; the eyes of your heart enlight- 
 ened with the spiritual Presence, and you 
 yourself made anew into the resolute, the 
 humble, the often rejoicing, always hoping 
 
 H 
 
ILLUMINATION. 
 
 Christian ! Yes, we exaggerate to ourselves 
 the length of time and the outlay of toil — yet 
 could either be too great with such an object ? 
 required to gain a hearing at the Throne of 
 Grace. An answer there will be, I dare to say 
 it, instantly. An answer, a light, a peace, a 
 hope, yes, a joy, so soon as there is what God 
 calls an asking. We limit, God limits not. 
 God never says, ' Go, and come again, and 
 to-morrow I will give.' If any of you lack 
 wisdom, if any of you lack light, let him ask of 
 God, that giveth to all men liberally and 
 upbraideth not. Only let him ask in faith, 
 nothing wavering. 
 
 ' The eyes of your heart being enlightened.' 
 
 The duty is again this year laid upon me. 
 
ILLUMINATION. 99 
 
 and I accept it with thankfulness, of urging 
 upon this great Congregation the claims of a 
 Charity, one than which none can lie nearer to 
 your doors — a few moments, I trust, will suffice 
 to recommend it also to your hearts. This Uni- 
 versity, itself in so many senses a focus of 
 light — light intellectual, light, I know, also — light 
 increasingly — moral, religious, spiritual — dwells 
 like the Church in the world, in the mJdst of 
 darkness. It is needless to assign causes ; but 
 I suppose that no darkness is much denser than 
 that which hangs, or did hang, upon the suburbs 
 of Cambridge. I say not whether any portion 
 of this cloud of sin and sorrow is drawn from 
 the very midst of us : the fact is not gainsaid — 
 there is a cloud dank and pestilential, receding 
 a little, driven backward by pastoral effort, yet 
 
 H 2 
 
ILLUMINATION, 
 
 existing still — and your aid is asked to trans- 
 figure it. Something, much, has been done 
 during these past ten years, since first I was en- 
 trusted with this office — something, much, by the 
 devoted work of men of your own body, who 
 had before them the choice of all work, and chose 
 this, the least attractive and the most disheart- 
 ening; something, much, has been done, visible to 
 man, how much more to God, to carry a Gospel 
 of light and love into the homes of poverty, 
 into the very nurseries and seedplots of vice, 
 and so to prove once again that that Gospel 
 has in it — might it be heard, might it be 
 heeded — the secret of all light and of all love, 
 between man and man, because first between 
 man and his God. 
 
 Yes, brethren, think not that you are urged 
 
ILLUMINATION. lOI 
 
 to an impossible or a chimerical effort, when you 
 are asked to give for the evangelization of these 
 suburbs. A work is in progress there, due in large 
 part to this Association, which for the GospeFs 
 sake, which for Christ's sake, ought to be spoken 
 of. In a district, once (I had almost said) infamous, 
 numbering now ii,ooo inhabitants, there are 
 already three Churches, containing more than 
 2000 worshippers on the evening of each Sun- 
 day, there are more than 400 communicants, 
 1600 children in Church Sunday Schools, more 
 than 100 Candidates for the annual Confirma- 
 tion — will you say that the money here gathered 
 is wasted or thrown away when such are its 
 fruits } Is it not worth something — some self- 
 denial, some foregoing of superfluities, some 
 sacrifice of luxury whether in amusement or 
 
I02 . ILLUMINATION. 
 
 entertainment — to be able to touch but with one 
 finger a work so pure, so merciful, so 'twice 
 blessed ' ? 
 
 This work depends still in large part upon 
 your annual offerings on this one occasion. 
 Brethren, it would move your serious regret, did 
 you know, could you know, how great a dis- 
 couragement you have sometimes dealt to this 
 holy, this Divine mission, by your indifference, I 
 am sure your mere inattention, to the appeal 
 thus made to you. Most of all, by the uncer- 
 tainty, the precariousness, the almost capricious- 
 ness, of your response. One year this occasion 
 gave a collection of ^98 : another year of £'j^ : 
 another year of £48. Fifty pounds cut off at 
 one stroke, by a multitude of young, unthinking, 
 unreflecting, not unkind hearts, disregarding, 
 
ILLUMINATION. I03 
 
 just ' passing by on the other side/ this urgent 
 case of most real because most secret distress ! 
 No doubt we preachers lack the skill oftentimes 
 to touch you. Oh but you should supply, you 
 should not punish, our unadroitness ! How can 
 any organization adapt itself to such ebbs and 
 flows of charity .^ One year you give, and 
 another year you cut off, quite without notice, 
 half the year's stipend — surely not a redundant 
 recompense — of one minister amongst these 
 heathen Christian brothers ! I pray you, let this 
 be one of the good days — one of the bountiful 
 givings ! I ask of you a hundred pounds to-day. 
 Oh if each one of you would give his least pos- 
 sible offering, such a Congregation could scarcely 
 fall short of the sum of a couple of thousand 
 shillings ! I do rely upon your sympathy to- 
 
I04 ILLUMINATION, 
 
 day. None of you will pass those plates. And 
 think, ere you give, who it is that asks of you. 
 Not man, but Jesus Christ — Christ, in His poor 
 — Christ, in His little ones — Christ, who told 
 you the Parable, the scarce Parable, of the 
 division, and the principle of the division, at the 
 last great day, when the King shall come in His 
 glory, and before Him shall be gathered all the 
 nations. Take that day, that scene, that revela- 
 tion, into account, and then give what you will — 
 I fear not for the reckoning. 
 
 Yet one thing more I would ask of you 
 while the heart is yet full, and while this 
 remarkable spectacle is still stirring it to its 
 depths. There is one particular suburb of 
 Cambridge, filled with poor, growing daily, cut 
 off from mother Churches on the right hand 
 
ILLUMINATION. I05 
 
 and on the left, and destitute absolutely of 
 any permanent house for its worship. It has 
 nothing but a frail temporary tenement ; open 
 to every blast of heaven's wind ; incapable of 
 holding, itself, one-tenth part of the people. 
 The time has come when that Church must 
 be built : and I am strong in the hope that this 
 day shall lay the first stone of it in the hearts 
 of this audience. I venture to ask a special, a 
 separate effort in this behalf. Take it not from 
 what a larger, a more comprehensive enterprise 
 requires in this day's almsgiving. You are 
 giving here for all the suburbs of this University 
 Town. I ask of you, beyond and besides this, 
 that some five-and-twenty of the best and 
 youngest of my hearers this day will offer 
 themselves as special collectors for a Church 
 
I06 ILLUMINATION. 
 
 in New Chesterton. I ask of you that in this 
 coming week such a beginning may be made of 
 this work, as shall cheer the hearts of those 
 devoted Christian men who are giving life and all 
 its powers — no common powers of understanding 
 and heart and soul — to the ministry of Christ in 
 that district. Think not they are idle — or 
 that their poor destitute people are idle — in this 
 behalf, that you may be burdened ! More than 
 ^80 are gathered in that poor room in one year 
 by the offerings of the people themselves. But 
 they cannot — no, not if they gave their all — they 
 cannot do this one thing — they cannot build. 
 O ye whose hearts are ' enlightened ' to the 
 beauty and the glory of Jesus Christ, who for 
 our sakes became poor — for our sakes left 
 heaven, and bore shame and spitting and scourg- 
 
ILLUMINATION. I07 
 
 ing and crucifixion, that we might Hve with 
 Him here, and afterwards reign with Him in 
 glory — count it not a great thing, as though 
 some strange or some hard thing were asked 
 of you, to build Him one House, for His 
 Name and for His Kingdom, for His worship 
 and for His Sacraments ! Rather praise and 
 magnify Him for setting you on His work, for 
 vouchsafing to employ you here, and for promis- 
 ing you His everlasting rest, v/hen, after serving 
 Him in serving your generation, you shall one 
 by one safely and peacefully fall on sleep ! 
 
 Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity, 
 November 3, 1872. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 And, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
 world. — ^Matthew xxviii. 20. 
 
 '' I "^HIS is the Church's charter. By this 
 instrument we hold our all. If this be 
 
 true, the gates of hell cannot prevail against us. 
 
 If Christ, the Crucified and the Risen, is in 
 
 deed and in truth present still, present for ever, 
 with us who believe, then to be a Christian, a 
 Christian all through and altogether, must be 
 strength and safety and happiness, must be 
 life and glory and immortality, assured by 
 the word of One who cannot lie, of One who 
 raised from death, dieth no more. 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. I09 
 
 The words themselves are strong, beyond 
 the strength of this Version ; beyond the 
 strength indeed, taxed to the uttermost, of our 
 vigorous Saxon tongue. Each word is em- 
 phatic. ' Lo.' The * eyes of the heart ' may 
 behold and see the Speaker. ' I ' — the pronoun 
 is not (as it might be) implied, but uttered 
 and emphasized, in the Greek. * I,' whom 
 you once saw daily and companied with in the 
 flesh — ' I,' whom you have seen, these last 
 days, come back to you, in identity of person 
 and character, from the grave and gate of death — 
 'am' — not, 'will be,' as though by some new 
 beginning of relationship, transferring into a 
 vague dim future the whole thing spoken of : 
 the present Person, in His present being, He 
 it is that promises. There shall be no breach of 
 
no THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 continuity, no disruption or dislocation of the 
 connection that is : ' I am ' that which I shall 
 be, and that existence, which is thus without 
 seam or suture, is, for you, a coexistence and 
 a companionship. * I am — with you.' And 
 that ' alway.' The Greek says, ' all the days ; ' 
 as though to prepare us for their being many, 
 and to assure us that they are numbered, 
 and to bid us take them one by one, making 
 each a little lifetime, and seeing in this sum of 
 little lifetimes the aggregate of the Church's 
 opportunity and the Church's trial. ' I am 
 with you — all the days — even unto the end of 
 the world ' — ' the consummation of the age ' — 
 the accomplishment of that period which is 
 Time, and so the introduction of that other 
 period which is Eternity. 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 The words are weighty with thought, and 
 the occasion of their utterance was unique in 
 history. It was a meeting between two worlds ; 
 between flesh and spirit ; between Hfe and resur- 
 rection ; between men in the prison-house of 
 sense, and a Man in the emancipation of immor- 
 tahty. It was a meeting by appointment. The 
 province, the district, the spot itself, had been 
 marked out. Galilee, the scene of so many 
 journeyings and so many ministrations — ' a 
 mountain,^ ' the m.ountain,^ as though perhaps 
 the very mount of the Beatitudes or the Trans- 
 figuration — had been 'appointed' by Jesus Him- 
 self for this momentous meeting. And now the 
 Eleven, as St Matthew says — with (possibly) a 
 larger company around or behind them, those 
 * five hundred brethren ' of whom St Paul speaks 
 
112 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 to the Corinthians as having witnessed one of the 
 Appearances — are gathered together, in prepara- 
 tion for that solemn conference of which they 
 know not as yet the subject or the object. He 
 appears. At first perhaps in the distance, on 
 the mountain top, in sudden starthng manifesta- 
 tion — as when he entered the chamber at Jeru- 
 salem, the doors still shut, and made His first 
 greeting ere they knew Him present. He 
 appears. They see Him : they worship : all 
 worship : and yet — memorable, blessed words — 
 * some doubted.' Some — is it not so written ? — 
 even of the worshippers ! More merciful than 
 our human systems, the Bible recognises the 
 possibility. A man, a true man, may believe, 
 may behold, may even worship — and yet doubt. 
 What is this but the anxious agonized cry, 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. II3 
 
 ' Lord, I believe : help Thou mine unbelief ? ' 
 Yes, if we would be God's theologians, we must 
 be natural as well as spiritual ! We must thread 
 the mazes of that intricate labyrinth, the heart 
 of man, * yea, even of the regenerate man,^ and 
 record that which we find — though it contradict 
 rule — for our reproof, for our correction, for our 
 education in righteousness. 
 
 They doubt, yet they worship. Doubt, 
 because the sight is wonderful, and the eye 
 is dazzled as it beholds. Doubt, because their 
 all is at stake, and they would not lose it by 
 precipitancy. Doubt, because the joy is over- 
 whelming, and the heart misgives itself. Can 
 it be real ? 
 
 He then, the merciful Lord, draws near and 
 speaks to them. Such doubting, my brethren, 
 
 I 
 
114 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 waits but for converse. Such doubting may 
 survive sight — it will not survive speech. * The 
 words that I speak unto you, they are spirit 
 and they are life.' More especially is the voice 
 of Christ reassuring, when it sets a man upon 
 work. Fear not, ye who know something of 
 this kind of doubting, which is the mere flutter 
 and trembling of the soul before a truth felt 
 to be vital — fear not to accept Christ^s commis- 
 sion, setting you your life's work, and authorizing 
 you to do it as for Him. 'All power is given 
 unto me in heaven and on earth : Go ye,' in 
 the strength of it, and ye shall make the world 
 mine ! 
 
 It is not with the details of the Churches 
 commission that I would occupy your time 
 to-day. And yet every clause is laden with 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. II5 
 
 instruction. There is the basis — the Resurrec- 
 tion Empire of Jesus Christ. He speaks not of 
 the original rights of His Deity, but of the 
 acquired powers of His risen Manhood. ' We 
 see Jesus ... for the suffering of death crowned 
 with glory and honour.' ' Wherefore,' as the 
 reward of humiliation, ' God also hath highly 
 exalted him.' Unto me, not as God, but as the 
 Crucified and the Risen, is given all power in 
 heaven and on earth. 
 
 On this rock rises the Church. It is to be a 
 Church of movement. Its journeyings are to be 
 coextensive with earth. Missionary, ar nothing 
 — such is the alternative. ' Go ye and make all 
 the nations disciples.' He who said aforetime 
 ' The field is the world,' here interprets. Sweep 
 all mankind into the Gospel net. Stay not — for 
 
 I 2 
 
Il6 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 that time is not yet, and that office is not yours 
 — stay not to discriminate or to judge. ' Make 
 all the nations disciples.' The very form of 
 initiation is prescribed. Baptism is the portal. 
 Baptism into the Triune Name. The Name one 
 yet threefold. ' Neither confounding the Persons, 
 nor dividing the Substance.' ' Into the Name' — 
 which is the Revelation of God — so that the 
 life, the soul, the man, shall be concentrated, 
 contained, and enveloped in it. This initiation 
 is not an end, but a beginning. It subjects to 
 teaching. A teaching continuous, thorough, 
 minute, distinctively Christian. A teaching 
 which recognizes Christ as supreme and the 
 doctrine of Christ as authoritative. If ye call 
 me ' Lord, Lord,' ye must ' do the things which 
 I say.' ' Teaching them to observe all things, 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. II7 
 
 whatsoever I have commanded you ; and, lo, I 
 am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
 world/ 
 
 * I — am with you — ahvay/ 
 
 Try, brethren, struggle, pray, to reahze this 
 promise, this pledge, this fact — 
 
 The Perpetual Presence. 
 
 Surely, surely, we have here more than a 
 farewell — more than the last adieu, however 
 tender or solemn, of a departing friend to his 
 household or his family. Such a parting may 
 have in it many things — reminiscences, antici- 
 pations, even promises of an undying remem- 
 brance, even promises (it has been so) of a 
 return, in vision or apparition, from the world of 
 the unseen. But this particular expression, ' I 
 am ' — or even ' I will be ' — * with you alway,' 
 
Il8 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 was never used, I will dare to assert it, in the 
 last conversation between a departing friend and 
 his best-beloved. There is a distinct claim of 
 Divinity, of Deity, in the words. Nothing short 
 of Omnipresence could make this true : and 
 need I say that, where one attribute of God is 
 there are all attributes ^ Christ bids them go 
 everywhere, evangelize all nations, busy them- 
 selves in all lands, preaching, baptizing, teach- 
 ing, and this not for a month or a year, but till 
 the end come, till the consummation of time — 
 and in the foreview of this extension and this 
 expansion of the work. He adds, ' And, lo, I am 
 with you alway.' 
 
 We have here, in one clause — and it is never 
 superfluous, least of all in these days, to mark 
 such coincidences — the whole of St John — 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. II9 
 
 Gospel, Epistles, Apocalypse, in one. Men will tell 
 you that St John's Christology (as they call it) 
 was an afterthought; a later and a morbid growth 
 of Christianity ; the idolatry of a beloved Master, 
 invested, by distance of time and by confusion 
 of idea, with a character which He never 
 assumed, and with a nature which He would 
 have disclaimed as blasphemy. Brethren, we 
 cannot thus dispose of the proper Deity of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. When you have discarded 
 St John, you find yourself confronted by St 
 Matthew. St Matthew will tell you that, where- 
 ever two or three are gathered in Christ's name, 
 there is He in the midst of them. St Matthew 
 will tell you that the Son of Man hath power to 
 forgive sins, and that He gave His life a ransom 
 for many. St Matthew will tell you that among 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 His latest words, if not the latest, was that 
 promise which takes to Himself Deity — ' Go ye 
 into all the world . . and lo, I am with you 
 everywhere and alway!' St John himself can 
 say nothing stronger, however he may aid us in 
 developing and in deciphering. 
 
 But we should lose a great part of the 
 comfort, and all the distinctiveness, of this> 
 saying, if we read it, with some interpreters, 
 as discriminating between the Humanity and the 
 Divinity of Jesus, and promising the presence 
 of the latter in the necessary loss and disappear- 
 ance of the former. It is by such artifices 
 of dogma that the Church is robbed of her 
 bread. When Christ says 'I,' He means 
 Himself and the whole of it. The presence 
 promised is the Emmanuel presence, Divine 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 and (I had almost said, Divine because) Human. 
 It is quite true that the phrase * I am with 
 you ' impHes naturally a Divine presence. It 
 was thus that God spake of old time to Patri- 
 archs and Prophets, summing up all that is 
 sustaining, all that is comforting, all that is 
 elevating, in the one phrase, * Certainly I will 
 be with thee.^ It is thus that the Church 
 concentrates all her best and purest and loftiest 
 wishes for her children gathered under her wing 
 for worship, in the briefest, the most touching 
 of benedictions, ' The Lord be with you.' And 
 the response is like unto it, 'And- with thy 
 spirit.' 
 
 ' I am with you alway.' 
 
 Let us ponder together some of the features 
 of this Perpetual Presence. It has evidently 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 a collective and an individual realization. And 
 the Church has ever been in danger, more 
 than in danger, of losing the one of these 
 or the other. An excessive collectivity has 
 pampered her into superstition. An excessive 
 individuality has starved her into infidelity. 
 The one forgets the ' one spirit : ' the other loses 
 sight of the ' one body.^ And the Wisdom 
 of God has tempered these two together ; 
 making the separate life the condition of the 
 corporate, yet in such sense that the healthiest 
 working of the separate life is found, not in 
 the keenness of its unit self-consciousness, but 
 in the completeness of its self-forgetfulness in 
 the corporate. 
 
 When Christ says, * I am with you alway,' 
 He addresses Himself to a community. It 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 matters little, to the truth of this remark, 
 whether those present were the eleven or the 
 five hundred. In either case, it was not a 
 word spoken in the separate ear of St John 
 or St Peter ; not the ' Lovest thou me more 
 than these?' and not the 'If I will that he 
 tarry ... what is that to thee.?' These indi- 
 vidual utterances have their place and their 
 time, their lesson also for all time, as to the 
 Divine dealing with souls. But when He says 
 ' with you,' He speaks to a community. The 
 promise of the Presence is made primarily to 
 a body. 
 
 To the Apostles, you will say. Blessed be 
 God, yes ! To those * holy and humble men 
 of heart,' by whose labour and ministry the 
 light of the Gospel was made to shine through- 
 
124 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 out the world. To those preachers and writers 
 of truth, all truth, and nothing but truth, to 
 whom, the longer we live, the more profoundly 
 we think, the more diligently we study, the 
 more every day shall we feel our obligation. 
 We see what the Presence was to the Church, 
 if it had even stopped with the Apostles. We 
 see what inspiration was, little as we can define 
 it, when we set it over against the very first, 
 the very best, of those fathers of the Church 
 who had it not. But we cannot thus limit the 
 compass of the 'with you.' We cannot read 
 ' the end of the world,' * the consummation of 
 the age,' as meaning any event or any moment 
 which has yet been. Certainly the fall of Jeru- 
 salem did not satisfy it. The fall of Jerusalem 
 gives no sense to the same phrase as it occurs 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 125 
 
 in the Parables of the Tares and the Net, where 
 it is distinctly declared to represent the time 
 of the Advent and the Judgment, of the sever- 
 ance of the wicked from among the just, and 
 the shining forth of the righteous as the sun 
 in the kingdom of their Father. If that is 
 not yet, then neither was the Perpetual Presence 
 only for the Apostles. 
 
 Brethren ! I would not willingly utter one 
 word in this place that could jar upon any ear 
 or revive one slumbering controversy. It shall 
 be enough to say that ' you ' here is the Church. 
 One man shall understand by the Church an 
 Apostolical Succession ; shall think that the 
 promise, spoken here to the Eleven, had in its 
 direct view a perpetuity of guiding and ruling 
 Ministers, tracing their Orders in clear unbroken 
 
126 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE, 
 
 line to the Apostles, and representing such of 
 their functions as were not plainly miraculous, 
 to the faithful of all lands and times. Another 
 man shall understand by the Church her gather- 
 ings in General Councils, where, in imitation at 
 least of that first assembly at Jerusalem to 
 which we owe it (under God) that Christianity 
 was not made for all timic a development or a 
 sect of Judaism, it may be no presumption to 
 adopt the imposing phraseology, ' It seemed 
 good to the Holy Ghost and to us.' We do 
 not dispute such interpretations, because we see 
 in each and in all a truth, if it be but a partial 
 one ; an example, if it be but a single one, of 
 fulfilment by Christ Himself of the promise of 
 the Presence. We know the importance at- 
 tached by Inspiration itself to the orderly 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 12/ 
 
 ministrations, to the regular offices, of Christ's 
 holy Church. The Pentecostal gift itself is 
 made by St Paul, in the 4th chapter of his 
 Epistle to the Ephesians, to consist in the grant, 
 by the Ascended Lord, of ' Apostles, Prophets, 
 Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers, for the 
 perfecting of the saints, for the work of the 
 ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.' 
 He that despiseth such ministries, despiseth 
 not man but God. 
 
 Only, my brethren, we cannot consent to 
 any such interpretation of this august promise, 
 as should formalize, nominaiize, or localize it. 
 We cannot allow it to be so read as to make it 
 a promise to one Church out of the many 
 Churches of Christendom. It must not be 
 made to depend, for its application, upon par- 
 
128 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 ticular designations, whether Greek, Latin, or 
 Enghsh, of Church Officers or Church Govern- 
 ments. Even upon earth Christ was ever met 
 by the questions, 'Where, Lord.?' and 'When, 
 Lord.?' and ' Speakest Thou unto us, or even 
 to all.?' And now that He is not here in the 
 body to answer such limiting", cramping en- 
 quiries with His own strong 'Verily' — 'Where- 
 soever the carcase is' — 'The kingdom cometh 
 not with observation ' — ' Say not, Lo^ here, or, 
 Lo, there ' — of course such narrownesses breed 
 and multiply, till they cause the Gospel itself 
 to be evil spoken of. W'e must say, reverence 
 and truth alike demanding it, When Christ 
 said 'with you,' and meant 'with the Church,' 
 He spoke, as that beautiful prayer expresses it, 
 of 'the whole congregation of Christian people 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. I29 
 
 dispersed throughout the world ; ' and when He 
 promised infallibihty — if that promise be a part, 
 and we think that it is, of this mighty world- 
 wide and age-long engagement — He spake of 
 that indeed, that real, 'semper, ubique, ab 
 omnibus,' which is the ' consensus ' of * all who 
 in every place call upon the name of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, both theirs and ours ' — that 
 indeed * Catholic Faith,' which a man has who 
 believes in Christ as His Saviour, though he 
 may enunciate it with lisping, stammering, 
 babbling tongue, or mean by it little more 
 than the grand old baptismal confession, ' I 
 believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of 
 God.' This is that 'public opinion,' that 
 ' common sense,' of all Christendom, which 
 is the blessed unity amidst ten thousand 
 
 K 
 
130 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 diversities — a unity of which the home is 
 God's heaven, and its tongue the harmony of 
 God's universe. 
 
 We speak not to disparage Creeds or Ar- 
 ticles, nor to make hght of accuracy in the things 
 of God. It is not by washing out all colour, 
 and it is not by chiselling away all feature, from 
 our Christianity, for the sake of precipitating a 
 complimentary fraternity, that we shall promote 
 the real interests of either truth or charity. It 
 is well that each man should enquire and search 
 diligently for himself into God's Revelations, 
 and that he should grasp tenaciously and feel 
 strongly and maintain earnestly the thing, the 
 exact thing, which he has learned and has been 
 assured of. Only we ask that, as no man but 
 a fool imagines himself to be the only wise, so 
 
THE PERPETUAI- PRESENCE. 131 
 
 each man should be wilhng to beUeve that 
 another, expressing himself differently, may- 
 have, in his heart and in his soul, the same 
 truth with him, or another truth equally vital. 
 Then, instead of unchurching or unchristianizing 
 one another, we shall have this far higher, far 
 nobler, far more Christ-like satisfaction — we 
 shall believe, where we see not, that the very 
 Gospel lies deeper, spreads wider, rises higher 
 than one little section of the vast human 
 brotherhood ; that Christ is in more places than 
 one, has a voice for more hearts than one, yea, 
 a voice of m.ore sounds than one, like that ' voice 
 of many waters ' which St John heard in 
 Patmos ; that His promise, * I am with you 
 alway,' is neither to Greek nor Roman nor 
 Briton, still less to Anglican or Evangelical or 
 
 K 2 
 
132 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 Non-Conformist, but to the common human 
 being veiled under each ; and that hereafter, in 
 that which Scripture calls (were it but for this 
 cause) the day of our * refreshing,' God will 
 indeed 'gather together all things in Christ, 
 both that are in heaven and that are in 
 earth; 
 
 ' Lo, I am with you alway.' 
 
 What then, we must ask briefly, are some of 
 the characteristics of this Perpetual Presence — in 
 the Church — and in the soul ? The words must 
 be few : may they be suggestive. 
 
 First, it is a special Presence. There is a 
 Presence in the universe. ' In Christ all things 
 consist ' — withdraw Him, and there is chaos. It 
 is not of this Presence that He speaks. I know 
 not that we all believe in any other. I know 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. I33 
 
 not that we have taken into our thoughts this 
 fact — Christ is with His Church as He is not 
 with the world. There is a mind and a will, 
 there is a power and a work, inside this com- 
 munity which a man enters by believing, dis- 
 tinct from that which orders sky and sea, 
 replenishes earth with life, and keeps the stars 
 in their courses. This special Presence is that 
 which accounts for the very start and progress 
 and success of Christianity. What could be so 
 improbable, before the experience, as that a 
 religion born in rude, rough, remote Galilee 
 should ever cross a sea or make one proselyte ? 
 What could be so improbable beforehand as a 
 Christendom — a portion of the globe charac- 
 terized, as to its civilization, as to its moral and 
 social and political life, by the influence of Jesus 
 
134 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 Christ ? What could be so improbable as that 
 this religion, not patronized by royalty, and not 
 propagated by the sword, could even survive its 
 first exposure to the scorn of established philo- 
 sophies and the persecution of powerful des- 
 potisms ? Wc say. It was an enterprise, not 
 audacious only, but inconceivable, save to Om- 
 nipotence. Wc ascribe its success to the word 
 of its Author, ' Lo, I am with you alway.' 
 
 Secondly, it is a spiritual Presence. The 
 Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, once dwelt 
 with, now He dwells in, the Church. The 
 corporeal Presence is gone, that the spiritual 
 may come. * The flesh profiteth nothing ' — 
 not if it be the very flesh of Jesus ; that flesh 
 which Judas and Herod and Pontius Pilate, 
 scoffing scribe and Roman executioner, looked 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. I35 
 
 upon and handled and were profited nothing — 
 * it is the Spirit that quickeneth.' Strange 
 that any should wish back the carnal Presence 
 when they have the spiritual ! This is that 
 Presence of which Christ said, ' I will not leave 
 you comfortless : I will come to you. Because 
 I live, ye shall live also.' This presence has 
 influences direct and constant, which are the 
 life of the body. What would the Word be, 
 the Book or the voice, without the Presence ? 
 What would the Sacraments be, the Water 
 or the Supper, without the Presence ? What 
 would prayer be, public prayer, or private, 
 without the Presence — the Presence of the 
 assisting Spirit, and the presence of the inter- 
 ceding Lord ? It is the Presence which changes 
 idle sounds, bare materials, fleeting wishes, 
 
136 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 nto realities, into instrumentalities, into very 
 ' powers of a world to come.' 
 
 Thirdly, it is a manifold Presence. Every 
 gift and every grace is due to it. Every 
 office and every function of the Universal 
 Church is due to it. Not action only, but 
 counteraction ; not institution only, but adapt- 
 ation ; not formation only, but reparation — 
 these, too, are parts of it. The orderly work- 
 ings of grace are mighty and wonderful ; what 
 shall we say of the Hand which ministers to 
 the Church's exceptional wants, as they arise 
 out of the manifold changes and chances of 
 worldly circumstance, of human thought ? How 
 often has the Christian of one land or one age 
 imagined that the last hour had struck of his 
 Faith or of his Church ! He has seen one for- 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 137 
 
 tress after another stormed by the foe ; one 
 doctrine after another impugned, betrayed, 
 trampled upon, by men commissioned to teach ; 
 a growing indifference to all religion, not 
 amongst the profane or the profligate, but in 
 minds cultivated and disciplined, loving truth 
 and abhorring evil. His heart has misgiven him 
 for his country's future ; and he has sometimes 
 asked himself, in the language, if not in the 
 tone, of the scoffer, 'Where is the promise.^' 
 And yet, my brethren, the power of the 
 Presence has not been w^ithdrawn : the medi- 
 cinal, the remedial, the reparative hand has inter- 
 23osed in its season, making doubt itself minister 
 to humility, and bringing out of the refiner's 
 fiercest fire but a brighter and a more precious 
 Cfold. 
 
138 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 Fourthly, and above all else, it is a sanctifying 
 Presence. Men may cavil at revelation, fight over 
 doctrine, ask all their days, ' What is truth ? ' 
 There is one thing they dare not malign — and 
 that is holiness. If the Presence were protective 
 only — keeping alive in the earth 'a. sign spoken 
 against,' a spiritual religion, offering happiness, 
 offering heaven, on the condition of faith in a 
 Saviour — it might attract the weary and sor- 
 rowful, it would not appeal, as now, to the con- 
 science and heart of mankind. Truly has it 
 been said, Over and above the four written 
 Gospels, there is a fifth — w^ritten not with ink and 
 pen — the Gospel already eighteen chapters long, 
 and each chapter is a century, of Christian lives 
 and Christian deaths. I believe that this is prac- 
 tically the evidence which weighs most with this 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. I39 
 
 age. You can explain a^vay, by the help of 
 a strong will and a powerful motive, the evi- 
 dences of miracle and prophecy and Gospel 
 success : but there lies still, at the bottom of 
 the heart, the sight of some life, the memory of 
 some death, which was either a mere delusion — 
 calm as it was, and grave, and strong, and con- 
 sistent — or else caused, made what it was, changed 
 perhaps into what it was, by the help, by the 
 power, b}- the presence, of Him who lived and 
 died and revived, of Him who said, and who 
 has fulfilled it, 'I am with you alway.^ The 
 Presence is proved by its effect. It is a light, it 
 is a power, it is a life, it is a love ; men do know 
 for themselves what is the secret of their life, 
 and other men take knowledge of it whether it 
 is powerful and whether it is pure. If Christ 
 
140 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 can transform a life, if Christ can comfort a 
 death, then I may doubt about many things, I 
 may postpone many decisions, I may leave some 
 matters for the light of ' that world,' I may 
 submit to the pain and the misery of some 
 harassing suspenses — but one thing I can see, 
 that this is indeed the Saviour I need : one 
 thing I can resolve, that, through life's am- 
 biguous windings, through the valley of death's 
 dark shadow. He shall be with me — His rod 
 and His staff shall comfort me. 
 
 * I am with you all the days till the end of 
 the world.' 
 
 And is this ' day ' not one of them ? Is 
 the Presence lost ? is the promise forfeited ? Is 
 it lost, ask yourselves, to the Church ? is it 
 forfeited by the Church ? to the Church, by 
 
THE TERPETUAL PRESENCE. 141 
 
 the Church, ask yourselves, of this land ? Oh ! 
 we know, we know too well, her many mistakes, 
 her many shortcomings, her many negligences, 
 her many sins. If it were a pleasure to us, or 
 if it could be a duty, we could count her faults 
 by hundreds and by thousands. We could tell 
 of schisms and heresies, we could tell of sects 
 and separations, we could tell of neglected 
 parishes and mission -fields unoccupied, we 
 could tell of wasted gifts and lost opportunities 
 and ruined lives, we could tell of unfaithful 
 ministers and retrograde movements and reviv- 
 ing superstitions. But have these faults, these 
 unfaithfulnesses, any or all of them defeated 
 and vitiated the promise ^ Has there not been, 
 side by side with all these, a mighty counteract- 
 ing and counterbalancing force of good ? Shall 
 
142 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 any man presume to say that this or that 
 measure, this or that enactment, if it be carried 
 through, will have lost Christ to His Church ? 
 Is it indeed so, that the perpetual Presence is 
 tied to a particular form of words, to the 
 public utterance of a particular form of words, 
 so that, if that be altered or silenced, then 
 Christ will be gone ? Shameful, arrogant, 
 presumptuous thought ! The Presence is a 
 life, not a word : nothing but habitual wilful 
 sin loses it for the man, and nothing short 
 of utter spiritual death forfeits it for the 
 Church. 
 
 Christ is with us still, in this Church of 
 England— never more vividly or more vitally. 
 Never was there a deeper love for Him, for His 
 Word, for His Sacraments, for His little ones. 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 143 
 
 Never, since He ascended, had he a more 
 devout or a more devoted people. Can you 
 point to any generation, to any century, in 
 which It would have been better for you, 
 spiritually better, to have been born ? Can 
 you conceive a greater freedom to know, to 
 worship, and to confess ? Can you conceive a 
 larger, a grander sphere for Christian action and 
 for Christian communion ? If the Word is now 
 tried to the uttermost, is not that very trial 
 winning for it a more attentive hearing, a pro- 
 founder study, and a deeper because more 
 intelligent veneration ? Is not division itself 
 (haply for this purpose permitted) not only 
 stimulating each section of the Church to an 
 earnest and not necessarily ungenerous rivalry 
 of good, but also practising us in the twin 
 
144 'I'HE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 graces of hope and charity — bidding us to 
 look beyond uniformity for the reaHty of 
 unity, and to recognize in other modes ahke to 
 government and of worship efforts at least, 
 however imperfect, after a more primitive rule 
 and a more spiritual devotion ? 
 
 ' I am with you,' Christ says, ' all the days' — 
 and this is one of them. 
 
 Brethren, if the promise endures for the 
 Church, how is it with this its famous School 
 and training-place ? Has any change here 
 effected, within or from without, robbed this 
 University of a Divine Presence ? 
 
 I know that here also, as in the Church, 
 there are symptoms which a hasty diagnosis 
 might interpret unfavourably. We have not 
 escaped here the infection of free thinking, of 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 145 
 
 sceptical opinion, of ' oppositluns of science 
 falsely so called.' This University would not be 
 national if it were otherwise. A colle^c^e is not 
 a monastery — it is a little world. It is a speci- 
 men of English life, for good and evil. It could 
 not, it would not, bar its doors against the 
 entrance of any thought or any enquiry. There- 
 fore those unsettlements of human opinion, 
 which are rife everywhere, have their representa- 
 tion and their reflection here. But their pre- 
 sence does not shut out Christ's. Rather does 
 it stir into livelier action the faith which is 
 His, and which finds itself in urgent need of all 
 its aids and of all its weapons, if so be it may 
 both keep its own integrity and assimilate the 
 still floating elements which surround it. Here 
 assuredly, if anywhere, enquiry should be free, 
 
 L 
 
146 THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 because here, if anywhere, the means of its 
 satisfaction are at hand. 
 
 And you know, brethren, and we know, that 
 never in the history of this University were the 
 influences of Christian zeal and Christian ex- 
 ample larger, stronger, or more persuasive, than 
 now. The means of religious instruction, the en- 
 couragements to religious study, instead of being 
 curtailed, are greatly multiplied here since the 
 days of my youth. Christ's Presence is here 
 manifested in ways of which no tests and no 
 subscriptions — fetters, always, only to the scru- 
 pulous — can take knowledge. Delightful, most 
 delightful, to those w4io love the highest welfare 
 of their University, are the tidings of a large 
 and growing Association of Students, formed on 
 the broad and strong basis of Christian Com- 
 
THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. I47 
 
 munion, for the express purposes of strength- 
 ening the spiritual hfe here, and of sending 
 forth hence, into the various fields of the 
 Church's home and foreign activity, men qua- 
 lified_, both in knowledge and devotion, to 
 serve Christ faithfully in the service of their 
 generation. 
 
 O, with such omens, such tokens of good, we 
 will not fear — though the waters roar and be 
 troubled — though the mountains shake with the 
 swelling thereof! Great are the responsibilities, 
 great the perils — greater, for all true men, the 
 encouragements. Work, hope, prayer, these 
 three — and the victory is ours. ' There is 
 a river, the streams whereof shall make 
 glad the city of God.' 'Jesus came and 
 said unto them, All power is given unto 
 
I4S THE PERPETUAL PRESENCE. 
 
 me in heaven and in earth. . . And, lo, I 
 am with you ahvay, even unto the end of the 
 world.' 
 
 Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity, 
 N'ovember 10, 1872. 
 
 CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANSj CKVSTAl, PALACE PRESS. 
 
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