r* < w o w C P O I* ^ 2 (ft 3 w (D o W Hi O < . LO J— 1 »-h • ^ (D 0) 00 00 b H> -3 p. CT> O I I 00 -J LESSONS OF LIFE AXD GODLINESS. LESSONS OF LIFE AND GODLINESS : A SELECTION OF SERMONS PREACHED IN BY C. J. VAUGHAN, D.D. MASTER OF THE TEMPLE. FOURTH EDITIOX. Hcmton : MAC MILL AN AND CO. 1870. [All Rights resn-ued.] Camftrttigc: PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M. AT THE UNIVERSITY I'RESS. CONTENTS. PACE SERMON L Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity, wth November, i860. THE TALEBEARER. Proverbs XL 13. — A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter . . 1 SERMON IL The Innocents' Day, Friday, ■zZth December, i860. THE INNOCENTS' DAY. Tsalm VIII. 2. — Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained strength because of Thine enemies, that Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger . . 13 SERMON III. Sexagesbna Sunday, -^rd February, 1861. THE DISREGARDED AND THE ACCEPTED OFFERING. Genesis IV. 4, 5. — And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering : but unto Cain and to his offering He had not respect 26 SERMON IV. Quinquagesitna Sunday, 10th February, 1861. FEATURES OF CHARITY. i Corinthians xiii. 5. — Charity doth not behave itself un- seemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil ........ 37 CONTENTS. SERMON V. Second Sunday in Lent, 24th February, 1861. THE CAKE NOT TURNED. PAGE Hose A VII. 8. — Ephraim is a cake not turned ... 49 SERMON VI. Third Wednesday in Lent, ■z-jth February, 1861. THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. Hebrews x. 38 — If any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him .60 SERMON VII. Fourth Sunday in Lent, 10th March, 1861. THE SECRET LIFE AND THE OUTWARD. Genesis xliii. 30, 31. — And he entered into his chamber, and wept there : and he washed his face, and went out, and refrained himself 74 SERMON VIII. Fifth Sunday in Lent, iyth March, 1861. REVERENCE. Exodus hi. 5. — Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground ... 85 SERMON IX. Third Sttnday after Trinity, z6th June, 1861. FAMILY PRAYER. i Samuel h. 30. — Them that honour me I will honour . 98 SERMON X. Fourth Sunday after Trittity, -zyd June, 1861. WAYWARDNESS AND WISDOM. St Luke vh. 35. — But wisdom is justified of all her children 1 1 1 CONTENTS. vii SERMON XI. Sixth Sunday after Trinity, -jth July, 1861. FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. PAGE ST Luke v. 5. — Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing : nevertheless at Thy word I will let down the net 124 SERMON XII. Tenth Sunday after Trinity, \th Augtist, 1861. FRIENDS AND FOES. 1 Kings xxi. 20. — Hast thou found me, O mine enemy? . 140 SERMON XIII. Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, iztk August, 1861. GREAT THINGS AND SMALL. 2 Kings v. 13. — My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it ? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean? 154 SERMON XIV. Twelfth Sunday after Trinity, 18th August, 1861. ZEAL WITHOUT CONSISTENCY. 2 Kings x. 16, 31. — And he said, Come with me, and see my zeal for the Lord... But Jehu took no heed to walk in the law of the Lord God of Israel with all his heart . . 167 SERMON XV. Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, 25th August, 1861. THE COMMANDMENT EXCEEDING BROAD. Psalm cxix. 96. — I have seen an end of all perfection : but Thy commandment is exceeding broad. Or (Prayer-Book Version), I see that all things come to an end : but Thy commandment is exceeding broad . . 1 80 viii CONTENTS. SERMON XVI. Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, \st September, i86r. THE GOSPEL AN INCENTIVE TO INDUSTRY IN BUSINESS. PAGE Psalm l. 4. — His leaf also shall not wither : and look, what- soever he doeth, it shall prosper 193 SERMON XVII. Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, 1st September, 1861. THE KING UPON THE HILL OF ZION. PSALM II. 6. — Yet have I set my King upon my holy hill of Zion . . . 207 SERMON XVIII. Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, z$th September, 1861. THE FALL AND THE RISING. St Luke xxii. 61, 62. — And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how He had said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And Peter went out, and wept bitterly 219 SERMON XIX. Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, 22nd September, 1861. USE AND ABUSE OF THE WORLD. i Corinthians vii. 31.— And they that use this world, as not abusing it 233 LESSONS OF LIFE AND GODLINESS. SERMON L THE TALEBEARER. Proverbs xi. 13. A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter. By thy words, our Lord said, thou shall be justified, and by thy words thou shall be condemned. Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. I need not add anything more to ex- cuse my calling your attention this morning to the verse just read to you, taken as it is from one of the Lessons selected for the Service for this day. There is a prejudice in men's minds against what are called moral Sermons. And no doubt there may be a moral Sermon which is unchristian, Christless, and there- fore miserable food for a Christian congregation. But it need not be so. I have heard Sermons on single points of duty, which I could never afterwards forget; Sermons for which I shall be grateful to my dying day. v. s. 1 2 THE TALEBEARER. [Serm. I. And I would desire, my brethren, as one very high ob- ject of my own ministry among you, to speak to you now and then upon special particulars of Christian con- duct ; praying God to make such Sermons not the least but the most stirring of all that are delivered to you; fruitful in humility, fruitful in vigilance, fruitful in self- knowledge, and fruitful in charity. The Book of Proverbs, which is just now furnishing us with our Sunday Lessons, is a portion of Holy Scrip- ture abundant in wise precepts. It is a miscellaneous collection of sagacious remarks, by one who knew the human heart well, and had had much experience of human life in its brighter and in its darker phases, and who unhappily had had in his own history but too many warnings as to the power of temptation and the miserable consequences of sin. The knowledge which we possess of the personal life of king Solomon, of his early piety, his singular endowments, his magnificent beginning and his melancholy ending, adds greatly to the interest of his writings. And yet, if we had known nothing what- ever of him but his writings, we could scarcely have failed to regard him as one of the wisest and one of the most remarkable of men. What lessons does this Book contain for young men and young women; for persons whose course lies fresh and open before them, and who have still to form their principles and to point their aim in life ! What solemn, what touching appeals to them as to refusing the evil and choosing the good! What earnest exhortations to think of the end from the begin- ning, and so to take heed to their ways at the first, that they may have peace and hope at the last ! And then Serm, I.] THE TALEBEARER. 3 what lessons for men of mature life ! What a storehouse of wisdom and prudence for the man of business ! What grave admonitions as to the necessity of uprightness; that one chief virtue of the tradesman, and the merchant, and the agent or manager for others! Those oft-repeat- ed, and in their sound almost obsolete, maxims about the false weight and measure — alas ! is there no room for that precept in the world of this day? The bag of deceit- ful weights which we heard of, a few Sundays ago, in the prophet Micah, does that need much translating, or much adaptation, in order to make it suitable to the circum- stances of some of those who hear me? Is the trickery of trade, its short measure and its light weight, a thing altogether of a past century? But now let me come closely to my chosen subject. The talebearer revealing secrets, and the faithful man concealing matters. I dare say we have all heard this verse read many times, and thought but little of it. May God give us an ear to hear it to-day inwardly ! A talebearer. One celebrated nation of antiquity used to express this man's character by a very significant figure. They called a tale-bearer a " seed-picker. " They gave him the same name which they used for a bird which goes about everywhere picking up seeds. The poor bird does it for its own support and for that of its young. I wish we could say as much for the talebearer. And yet it is no exaggeration to say that there are men in the world who live by their seed-collecting; by going about here and there, from house to house, from street to street, through a town large or small, and gathering together all the little stories which can be told or made I 2 4 THE TALEBEARER. [Serm. t. about the neighbours who are (as last Sunday's Lesson expressed it) dwelling all the time securely by them, and ignorant of the calumnies by which they are assailed. Yes, the " seed-collector," the man who goes about gathering anecdotes, great and small, about his neigh- bours, and retailing them again as he goes, is a common character everywhere. I wish that I could hold up the mirror to him for his own conviction. I am sure he would be ashamed, I believe he would be sorry, if he saw himself faithfully pourtrayed. If we endeavour to do so, it is for his good, with a view to making him a better man, with a view to showing him a more excellent way, with a view to bringing him to the cross for forgive- ness, and to the Spirit of Christ for cleansing. It may be that the giving up of one fault will be in God's hand the very saving of his soul. A talebearer revealeih secrets. Things which have been confided to him, too often: things which a mis- placed trust has put into his possession: things which a conscience ill at ease has deposited with him for its own relief : these things are sometimes betrayed by those who should have known better. Or else things which ought to be secrets: things which, even if true, are better not repeated : things the repetition of which can do no good either to religion or morality: things which it is a shame even to speak of, and which are only done, if done at all, in secret. Or else things which really are secrets; secrets even to the person who repeats them, inasmuch as they are mere guesses, chance shots, arrows winged at a venture, assertions founded on a mere suspicion, suspicions founded on a mere imagination. Yes, all Serm. I.] THE TALEBEARER. 5 these are examples of what we may understand by " se- crets" here. These are the things which are every day in every place being revealed : if true, a veil which was but decent is being rudely stripped off from them : if half true, if based only on truth, if mixed with but a grain of truth, if a mere fabrication, still worse is it then: the "revealing" is then, in part or in whole, an inventing: and heavy is the responsibility, great the criminality, of him who so reveals secrets as to create what he discloses. Hence strifes and divisions among you: hence bitter heartburnings : hence deep resentments : hence misery in families: hence discords and separations between chief friends: hence blasted characters and blighted lives. Yet the talebearer sees not the ruin : he has borne but a small part in it ostensibly: he only picked up his seed, and dropped it again; it found its congenial soil; it sprang and grew up he knew not how ! What a mischievous habit ! you all exclaim. And yet, my brethren, the tendency is in all of us. Many motives go to make up a talebearer. His character is not so odious, apparently, in its beginnings. Perhaps he is a witty man. He has what is called a turn for satire. His insinuations have much point in them. He can intimate, rather than express, a scandal. His repre- sentations of character are pungent. His imitations, his caricatures, of manner and of speech, are irresistibly comic. In society he is the life of his company. You scarcely think, and he scarcely thinks, of the effect he is producing upon the good name of others. It is not till he is silent and departed — perhaps not even then — that you begin to feel that there has been virtually a 6 THE TALEBEARER. [Serm. I. talebearer among you, and that he has been revealing unkind secrets. Or, again, he may be a man in whose own conscience there is a sore place. He knows something against him- self. He is conscious of some lurking, some secret, some bosom sin. And it is a relief to him to hope that others are not so much better than himself. He finds a solace in his wretchedness in making company for his sin. None are so bitter in their taunts, none are so credulous in their suspicions, as those unhappy people who are on the look-out for society in their degradation. To believe that others are even as they, to throw out the hint that they have reason to think evil, is a momentary palliation of the sting of an accusing conscience. And there are others who cannot bear superiors. They do not like superiors in station: but superiors in character they cannot brook. To hear another praised is to hear themselves blamed. Everything which is ascribed to another is felt as though taken from them- selves. Up to their own level, they can bear to see another lifted: but, above that, it is pain and grief to them. Their only comfort is in a general disbelief of virtue. A ridiculous story to tell of the eminently good is to them as a draught of water to the thirsty. If no one else is quite so good, we ourselves may perhaps not be quite so bad. Sometimes it goes yet beyond this. A story is told — and I have seen it applied in this very sense — of a tribe of savages who believe that the strength of a slain enemy passes into his conqueror. Every man who kills his foe is not only ridding himself of a danger, but also Serm. I.] THE TALEBEARER. 7 possessing himself of a virtue. The speed, or the saga- city, or the courage, or the unerring aim of the dead man, all becomes instantly the property and the endow- ment of the victor. Is it not sometimes thus with our depreciations one of another? Is it not with us, some- times, not only the taking down of that which towers above us, but also the elevation of ourselves upon its ruins? A man is often seen to be as eager in running down the merit of another, his goodness or ability, his uprightness, or his wisdom, or his ^kindness, or his devo- tion, as if he thought, like the wild Indian of whom we have spoken, that the denial of this or that virtue to ano- ther would be its ascription to himself. Thus it is that the talebearer is formed. These, and many more, are among the motives which impel him to his mission. He goes on his way revealing secrets. He calls it himself by a very different name. Agreeable conversation, a quick sense of the ridiculous, a ready humour, a good-natured pleasantry, innocent and cer- tainly not uncharitable mirth — it is thus that he deno- minates that which Solomon calls by the far less honour- able name of talebearing, that which one greater than Solomon terms a tissue of idle words to be given account of in the day of judgment. My brethren, do not imagine that he who is address- ing you is able to look down from a high eminence upon the follies or the sins of others. He is seeking rather to impress his own mind as well as yours with the im- portance of the warning on which we meditate together. And as we have been compelled to dwell for a time on the dark side of the picture, so now let us turn it in our 8 THE TALEBEARER. [Serm I. hand and view that which is brighter and more attrac- tive : as we have sought to express to ourselves the cha- racter of the talebearer who revealeth secrets, so now let us think for a few moments of his opposite : he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter. TJie matter. He does not say what matter. But we may understand it to include two things : that which has been entrusted to him in the secrecy of confidence, and that which has become known to him to another's dis- paragement. We all think ill, or at least slightingly, of one who cannot keep a secret. There are such persons. There are those whom the possession of a secret frets and irri- tates beyond endurance. They can only relieve them- selves by telling it. Such persons do much mischief. They do mischief sometimes by what they actually di- vulge. It is hard upon those who have trusted them, that they should be betrayed. Perhaps it is their fault for making a bad choice of their confidant. But the mischief goes further. It shakes men's confidence in confidence. People are afraid to trust any one. It has become so much a matter of experience that confidences are betrayed, that we are obliged to keep to ourselves secrets which it would be not only a great relief but a great blessing to us to be able to confide to another. There are ways, Ave all know, of violating confidence without actual treachery. Sometimes we hint a secret which we do not tell out. Sometimes we take just one other person into our confidence; tell him our friend's secret; and can we wonder if he in his turn tells it to just one other? We ought, for the sake of the general Serm. I.] THE TALEBEARER. 9 good, as well as for the sake of guarding against indivi- dual injury, to practise ourselves in keeping secrets. He that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter. We may dislike, we may discourage, as a general rule we may refuse, confidences: happy is he who is the depository of none: but, if a confidence is accepted, if it is even forced upon us, then let it be sacred. Nothing can excuse its violation. Difficult as it may sometimes be to reconcile it with speaking truth, to guard our brother's secret with- out sullying our own conscience with falsehood, this is just one of the many difficulties of life — this adjustment of apparently conflicting duties to our neighbour and to God — and we must pray for His help in surmounting it. He that is of a faithful spirit concealeth certainly the matter which has been entrusted to him. This may sometimes be, as we have seen, a difficult thing to do: difficult, in the only sense in which a Chris- tian may use that word; namely, when the demands of conscience are ambiguous; when two things, each by itself, are right, and when to combine the two is a matter of perplexity. But to fulfil the charge in its second sense ought not to be very difficult; namely, to conceal the matter which has come to our knowledge in dispa- ragement of another. It sometimes happens to a man to be unable to resist the conviction that another person has done wrong, has committed a particular sin or been guilty of some flagrant inconsistency of life. We all know what the talebearer does on such an occasion ; an occasion which ought to be felt so painfully. He has picked up his seed, and he cannot rest till he has drop- ped it into some new soil. Whatever he may profess, or IO THE TALEBEARER. [Serm. I. however he may flatter himself, the possession of this knowledge is to him not altogether painful. Whereas charity rejoiceth ?iot in iniquity, but reioiceth with the truth; is glad, not when another has sinned, but when another has either risen or stood upright; he, on the con- trary, finds in every fall of another a rising of his own, and cannot rest till he has made his own knowledge the common property of his neighbourhood. I am not speaking here of those who, being set in places of public trust, make themselves partakers of other men's sins by the very fact of hiding them: there are cases in which discovery and even punishment are duties, and in which he who screens the sinner sins himself. But I am speak- ing of private life ; of disclosures of fault or sin made, not reluctantly, for the purpose of cleansing away sin, but voluntarily, for the sake of divulging it to those whom it does not officially or practically concern. Of such disclosures, I say that they belong to the talebearer and not to the man of a faithful spirit. In such cases, he that is of a faithful spirit will conceal the matter. He will purpose, he will resolve, he will watch and pray, to do so. If he finds himself on the point of telling that which would be to another's injury, he will check himself by a strong effort of will and of duty ere the sentence has crossed the door of his lips. He will gather strength, in doing so, to do so again. He will form the habit of keeping his tongue as it were with a bridle while they are present to whom his words would do injury by encourag- ing the present to despise or to condemn the absent. My brethren, I cannot close my Sermon without ex- pressing to you with all my power my sense of the im- Serm. I.] THE TALEBEARER. portance of the subject. If we could only part for ever with the disposition of the talebearer, we should have parted with that which, more than anything else, con- fuses and perplexes and embitters human life. How peaceable should we be, if there were no talebearers amongst us; but, let me rather say — for it is the more profitable and the more Christian way of expressing it — if there were not within each of our hearts so much of the spirit of the talebearer! It is the crying sin of social life. We cannot meet for half an hour's friendly con- verse without taking away one or two characters. Of us, in reference to speech at least, the words of the wise man are too true, They sleep not, except they have done mischief; and their steep is taken away, unless they cause some to fall. God give us all a better wisdom! Let us store our minds with things valuable, and meet one another to give out what we have first taken in. Let us talk less of persons. Constituted as fallen nature is, if we speak of persons, we shall be sure to speak ill of persons. If we must talk so much of persons, let us practise ourselves in speaking well of them. Let us see their good side when we can: and, when we cannot but see the evil, then let us go on our way and be silent about it. Above all — for here lies the root of almost every Christian grace — let us know ourselves a little better. Let us enter into judgment with our own hearts, and compare our own lives, out- ward and inward, with the standard of God's will and of Christ's example. I believe that, if we did this more, we should have little heart for scandal or for slander. We should be stopped, as by an audible voice within, when we were opening our lips to censure or to malign. It is 12 THE TALEBEARER. [Serm. I. the want of self-knowledge which makes us so keensight- ed. It is the want of acquaintance with Christ, as our Propitiation first, and then as our Example, which makes it possible for us to sit in the tribunal of judgment. O let us think what we are; let us call to remembrance our own sins, our own foolish, perverse, wilful, presumptuous sins, our own ingratitude to Christ, our own rebellion against God, our own hairbreadth escapes and our own shameful falls — O let us think what Christ is to us and has been; how gentle, how patient, how longsuffering, how forgiving, how slow to punish, how swift to bless — and well do I know that we shall have no heart left for triumphing over another, no pleasure in hearing of an- other's defeat, no sense of self-satisfaction in looking upon another's sin. Twenty-Third Sunday after Trinity, November ri, 1S60. SERMON II. THE INNOCENTS' DAY. Psalm viil 2. Out of the mouth of babes cuid sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of Thine enemies, that Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. The special observance of the Innocents' Day in our Parish Church dates from the year 1675, when a small bequest was left, by the will of a resident in this Town, to secure its perpetual remembrance by an annual Ser- mon. I know not what particular circumstance may have led to the selection of this day from among so many preceding or following it, which might have seemed to possess a stronger claim to notice. It may have been — though I know not that it was the case — that some family event, the early loss of a child or grandchild, awakening a peculiar interest in the thought of the death of infants, guided the pious founder to the choice of the day on which we are assembled. At all events, for a period of almost two whole centuries, that will has been in force, and it has been the duty of those who have pre- ceded me in this sacred office, as it has now become my THE INNOCENTS* DAY. [Serm. II. duty, to use the festival commemorative of the massacre of the young children of Bethlehem as an opportunity of instruction and exhortation to so many of the people of this place as the call of local custom shall have suc- ceeded in drawing together to hear and to worship. I have hoped that the selection for the first time of an evening instead of a morning hour, may enable a some- what larger body of worshippers to avail themselves of this opportunity of edification. All must have been struck, some perhaps perplexed, by the choice and arrangement of those Church festivals which follow immediately upon Christmas Day. There is no very obvious connexion between Christmas day and the martyrdom of St Stephen; between the martyrdom of St Stephen and the life (protracted to extreme old age and to a peaceful end) of the great Apostle and Evange- list St John; between the commemoration of St John the Evangelist and the record of the cruel and untimely fate of the young children slain for Christ's sake at Beth- lehem by the bloodthirsty king Herod. Various reasons have been discovered for this arrangement. Some have seen in the three days of which this is the last, the com- memoration of three kinds of martyrdom; St Stephen's, a martyrdom both in will and deed; St John's, a mar- tyrdom in will but not in deed; that of the Innocents, a martyrdom in deed not in will. They have seen in close attendance upon the feast of the Nativity the names of those who in different senses gave their very lives for Him who was then manifested in the flesh; those who may be conceived of as standing very near His throne in heaven, one for his martyrdom, another Serm. II.] THE INNOCENTS' DAY. 15 for his love, the third for their innocence ; constituting in a manner the very first fruits of that work of redemption which the festival of Christmas presents to us in its mar- vellous origin and in its most comprehensive aspect. There is perhaps something of fancy in all this. Per- haps we need not search very deeply for reasons why these three festivals, and not three others, or four or five others, should follow so closely in the wake of Christ- mas. Accident may have had its share in it, as well as design; more especially as, I believe, there was a differ- ence of date in the institution of the three festivals; St John's Day having been consecrated at a later time than St Stephen's, and the Innocents' Day having been originally associated, not with Christmas, but with the Epiphany. Reasons may be found for many things afterwards, which had no share in causing them. Our business now is with one only of these three days; that which commemorates the fact recorded in the second Chapter of St Matthew's Gospel; namely, that, when king Herod found that the wise men who had come from the East, under the guidance of the Star, to enquire for the birthplace of the infant King of the Jews, had departed into their own country another way, instead of exposing themselves, and the young child also, to the risks of his rage and malice, he sent forth and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, that he might be quite sure to include amongst them Him whose rising power he ignorantly feared. A cruel and shameful, as well as impotent, endeavour: but what was there here, we might ask, which could either entitle these little chil- i6 THE INNOCENTS' DAY. [Serm. II. clren to a place in a Calendar of Christian saints, or furnish us with any spiritual lesson, beyond, indeed, that new proof which is here afforded of the folly as well as wickedness of presuming to fight against God? Jesus was already by God's providence withdrawn into Egypt, when the terrible decree went forth for that indiscrimi- nate and barbarous slaughter. We must look for our answer to these questions to the Services appointed for the day. In particular, we shall turn to the Collect for the day; in which we shall find (as the name itself perhaps implies) the doc- trine and principal instruction of the occasion collected into a brief and comprehensive form, and made 'the subject of direct prayer to God through His Son Jesus Christ. The older form of the Collect for the Innocents' Day- was to this effect : O God, whose praise this day the young innocents Thy witnesses have confessed and sho7ued forth, not in speaking, but in dying: mortify and kill all vices in ?;s, that in our conversation {conduct) our life may express Thy faith, which with our tongues we do confess; through Jesus Christ our Lord. At the last Revision of our Liturgy, in the year 1661, the Collect assumed its present form : O Almighty God, who out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast ordained strength — quoting from the 8th Psalm the verse read as the text — and madest infants to glorify Thee by their deaths ; didst by Thy permitting and overruling Providence bring it to pass that even little children should give their lives unconsciously in Serm. IT.] THE INNOCENTS' DAY. 17 behalf of Thy Son, satisfying that fury of the oppressor which would else have sought far and wide for its in- tended victim, and giving him to imagine that in that slaughter of the innocent he had actually cut off Him whose life he sought ; mortify and kill all vices i?i us, and so strengthen us by Thy grace, that by the innocency of our lives, and constancy of our faith even unto death, we may glorify Thy holy name, that is, may show forth what Thou art, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. My brethren, the Innocents' Day is practically the commemoration of departed children. It is the festival which we keep in remembrance of all who have died in infancy ; taking as their sample and nrstfruits the martyred children of Bethlehem. It is the festival on which we recount God's teaching by children ; showing forth what we know, from Scripture and from expe- rience, of their possible effects, by word and act and suffering, upon the hearts of men; treasuring up the memory of all those who have safely died in the arms of Christ's redeeming love even before they knew or could understand it; asserting the same hope which the Church entertains and expresses concerning them, that children who are baptized, dying before they con unit actual sin, are tmdoubtedly saved; and, for ourselves, deeply pondering the lessons which the thought of them ought to teach us, that we, following their example in the points in which it is so distinctly instructive, may inherit the blessing of Him who said, Except ye be con- verted, and become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of God. The young children of Bethlehem were a type of redeemed children in every age of the v. s. 2 i8 THE INNOCENTS' DAY. [Serm. II. Church ; and of the whole body and Church of redeem- ed children as it now is, or hereafter shall be, safely housed in heaven. This then is a festival which recommends itself very strongly to what I may almost call our Christian in- stincts, and which ought to be especially dear to all those Christian parents who are either now fostering the infancy of their little ones, or have already laid it to rest in Jesus in the sure and certain hope of a future glorious resurrection. Out of the mouth of babes and suckli?igs hast Thou ordai?ied strength because of Thine e?iemies, that Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. Thus wrote the inspired Psalmist in days before the Gospel ; and One greater than he quoted the passage, on an occasion towards the close of His earthly life, described by St Matthew in these words : And when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderficl things that He did, and the children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosanna to the Son of David ! they were sore displeased, and said tmto Him, Hearest thou what these say ? And Jesus saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise ? The love of Jesus for little children was indeed, as we all know, strongly marked during His ministry. It is not without reason that the stress of Scripture proof with reference to the Baptism of Infants is thrown by our Prayer Book upon that most elementary yet most significant of all intimations, His receiving the little children that were brought to Him, taking them up in His arms, putting His hands upon them, and blessing Serm. II.] THE INNOCENTS' DA Y. 19 them. He who once did this, and who also took a little child as the one specimen of those who shall be greatest in His kingdom, may well be trusted, now that He is gone away from us, with the spiritual and eternal charge of those little ones who are dedicated to Him in His own ordinance of Baptism; yes, and with the charge also of those little ones who have early passed from a world of sin and sorrow into the dwelling-place of peace and love. In proportion as we more learn of little children, we rise higher, our Lord Himself teaches us, in the scale of His heavenly kingdom. What then are some of the ways in which we should learn of them? In what re- spects do they teach a lesson of Christian wisdom to older men? 1. The Collect for this day shall be heard first, in answer to this question. It says that little children teach us a lesson of innocence. Mortify and kill all vices in us, and so strengtJien us by 1 hy grace, that by the innoce?icy of our lives, &*c. And so the Baptismal Service, com- menting upon the passage already referred to, reminds us how Christ exhorteth all men to follow their innocency. We need not shrink from the expression. Innocence, free- dom from hurting, from harming, from wrong-doing, is the blessed attribute, even since the Fall, of little chil- dren. They inherit a fallen and corrupt nature; but Christ has taken away the guilt of it by His redemption, and they cannot yet choose the evil, or act the evil, for themselves. They are in a happy pause, a blessed inter- val, could it but continue; washed from original sin, and not yet involved in actual sin; cleansed once, and not 2 — 2 2 3 THE INNOCENTS' DAY. [Serm. II. yet defiled; safe from the old Adam in the new, and not yet, of their own freewill, going back from the freedom of the latter into the bondage of the former. Who that has grown up even to boyhood, much more to middle or advanced age, may not well envy, may not earnestly pray to recover, the innocence of the little child? True, there is a higher state than innocence; that of a tried and disciplined godliness : innocence regained is a more glorious attainment than innocence not lost ; the position of the young man in Christ, who has overcome the wicked one, than the position of the babe in years, who has never yet been called to encounter him. But inno- cence not yet lost is a better state than sin, than com- mitted transgression, than forfeited integrity, than stained and sullied purity. If you would shame a young man walking in the way of his own heart in the indulgence of vanity and lust, bring him face to face with a little child : let him look on that clear eye, on that open brow; let him listen to that simple prattling tongue; and, depend upon it, if he be not utterly hardened, there will stir within him, unavowed but not unfelt, the breathing of regret and sorrow, if not of godly repentance, as he looks on this picture and on that; here on the spectacle of what he is, and there on the spectacle of what he was. It is something to be taught, however late, the lesson of innocence ; the desire to regain if it were but the vestige of that state in which no wrong has yet been done to the soul or the body of another, no affront consciously of- fered to the holiness of God, to the blood of Christ, to the grace of the Spirit. 2. There is another lesson never so taught as by a Serm. II.] THE INNOCENTS* DA Y. 21 child; the lesson of simplicity. In a very little child there is no guile, no artifice, no affectation, no self-con- sciousness. What he is, he seems : what he seems, he is. His real wishes are those which he expresses. He does not say one thing and mean another. He does not seek to gain unavowed ends by crooked and circuitous means. His wants are few, and what he wants he cries out for. Simplicity is in many cases the first thing lost by a child ; before purity, before innocence. Self-consciousness soon comes in, in some natures, and spoils the whole beauty of the first creation. But this only marks simplicity yet more strongly as the peculiar possession of the little child. Some retain it long, others lose it early; some regain it afterwards, some part with it for ever: but, none the less, in every case, simplicity is the virtue of the very young child. Simplicity! What a grace! How beautiful, how at- tractive — yet ceasing to attract the very moment that it desires it ! O how far are most of us gone from it ! The poor sometimes, to our eye, show it wonderfully: but it is not so with all even of them: they too have their guile, though it is not the same precisely, in its workings, with our own: they too have oftentimes things which they feign, and things which they dissemble: they too have oftentimes unavowed objects to gain, and they seek those objects by crooked means. But in other stations of life how rare, how extremely rare, is a perfect can- dour, a true simplicity; not degenerating, as we some- times see it, into rudeness, into harshness, into fault- finding, into disregard of feelings, but kind and gentle 22 THE INNOCENTS' DAY. [Serm. II. as its Author, sincere in every profession, and straight- forward in every act and purpose ! 3. There is yet another lesson taught us by the little child; and that is a lesson of trust. Our Lord tells us that God has hidden His truth from the wise and prudent, and has revealed it unto babes j to those, that is, who are like little children in this respect, that they receive with affiance and faith that which one older and wiser than themselves communicates. A little child is no arguer, no caviller : it has an instinctive reliance upon the truth and love of its parents, and never suspects that they would mislead, deceive, or betray. It is a cruel mockery to tell a young child that which is deceptive. It is painful and shocking to see the faith, the credulity if you will, of a child, trifled with. That first dawning suspicion in a child's mind of the truthfulness of an in- formant, who has gravely asserted something which he does not intend to be accepted as a fact, is no pleasing spectacle to a right-minded observer, though it is but the commencement of an experience which that child must afterwards complete painfully amidst the thousand lies and deceits of the world into which, if he lives, he must enter. It was said of simplicity that it is that virtue which a child oftentimes first loses: we may say of trust, of credulity, that it is generally the longest kept, the last forfeited. It is not indeed till a little later than the age of infancy that it can be said, in this form, to be brought into exercise. The little child — like those of Bethlehem — of two years old and under ; has little receptive faith to SERM.IL ] THE INNOCENTS' DAY. -3 practise. Still it is in him a quality, if not exercised, only dormant : it is there — in him above all — only wait- ing for the touch which is to awaken it. And is not this a quality which we all greatly need to learn from him? this simple trust in One wiser and better than ourselves? Is not this the history of all error in Christian doctrine, that we have parted with the cha- racter of little children; have set up for ourselves as wise and prudent, and therefore must see to ourselves alto- gether, apart from Him who is our Wisdom as well as our Righteousness? 4. I will add one other quality of the little child; and it is closely connected with the last-named: the quality of submission. The last was submission of the mind ; this is submission of the will. The Collect prays, that, by the constancy of our faith even unto death, we may glorify Thy Holy Name. It regards the little children of Bethlehem as examples, though involuntary and uncon- scious examples, of this sort of submission. God's Pro- vidence, overruling a cruel decree, accepted, as it were, the sacrifice of those young lives as glorifying Him in His Son Jesus Christ. And is not this sort of submission one of the special characteristics of the little child? He is in the hands of one who was the instrument of his very being. He lies passive in those hands. Food or medi- cine, rest or exercise — nay, God's own ordinances of day and night, cold and heat, summer and winter — are all ministered to him through another, and to resist the appointments of that other would be for him not unreasonable only but impossible. The little children 24 THE INNOCENTS' DA Y. [Serm. II. of Bethlehem were obliged to give their young lives to the executioner : the power of resistance is the en- dowment of a later age : they are at another's mercy, and whithersoever he will he may carry them. My brethren, our prayer is, that, what a little child is in the hands of its parents — what those little children were in the hands of an absolute king — that we may learn to be in the hands of God. Even unto death: that is the limit of our submission. He who gives his life gives all. In God's hands : yes, that is our proper place : and, let me add, that is our place of safety, and that is our place of happiness, and that is our place of dignity. To be in God's hands absolutely, is the glory of God's creatures. Christ came to bring us back into those hands ; no longer as the hands of a ruler only, but as the hands of a parent too; of One who gave us being, and who desires only our good. What He gives, we will receive : what He denies, we will forego : what He takes away, we will part with. While He bids, we will stay here : when He bids, we will go hence. Ours shall be the mind, ours the life, of the little child, who subjects himself in all things to another and a wiser will, and out of whose mouth, in the language of a perfectly resigned and submissive heart, God evermore ordains strength and perfects praise. Thus it is that He stills the enemy and the avenger. By the faith of his little children, He puts to silence the ignorance and the hostility of foolish men.. Men marvel at them, and, in spite of them- selves, sometimes enquire the secret of their constancy. Then they hear that it is because Christ lives that they Serm.IL] THE INNOCENTS' DAY. 25 live also. Then they understand the meaning of the inspired words, Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed : always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. His strength is made perfect in their weakness : insomuch that the words are daily verified, When I am weak, then am I strong. The Innocents' Day, Friday, December 28, i860. SERMON III. THE DISREGARDED AND THE ACCEPTED OFFERING. Genesis iv. 4, 5. And the Lord had respect imto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offeri?ig He had not respect. There are two things which distinguish the Bible from every other book; even from some of those books which profess to derive their teaching from the Bible. Two things, which, when all the arguments which infidelity can bring against the Bible have been exhausted, will still stand their ground, vindicating for it everything which is really included in the term Inspiration, and making it in its completeness — the Old Testament and the New Testament together — the great storehouse for ever of human wisdom and of human hope. These two things are — if only two must be spoken of — the view given us in the Bible of man, and the view given us in the Bible of God. The one so human, the other so Divine. The one so exactly consistent with what we ourselves see of man, the other so exactly consistent with what we ourselves should expect in God; in other words, with what our own conscience, which is God's Serm. III.] THE DISREGARDED OFFERING. 27 voice within, recognizes as worthy of God, and ratines where it could not have originated. The explanation and enforcement of this general re- mark might of itself fill my Sermon. But for to-day it must suffice to ask you to apply the remark itself to the brief and familiar narrative from which the text is taken. With what rapid strides does the history of the world advance through these first chapters of the Book of Genesis ! What a wisdom shines in the brevity ! What an indication of the purpose with which God sends His Word; not to gratify curiosity; not to anticipate and not to stifle science; not to supersede human labour and not to indulge human speculation ; but simply to instruct man in the things which he could not find out for certain without God ; just to give the great leading strokes which it needs a master hand to put in, and then to leave him to fill them up, for himself, yet under their sure direction, with the lesser lines of reflection, of infer- ence, of application, and of experience ! The Creation, and then the Fall, and then the reign of sin unto death — these are the real primeval records, and they have their confirmation in everything that we see around us and in everything that we feel within. We might have thought that, if sin did enter, it would enter by slow degrees. We might have expected that, for some few generations at least, there might have been a lurking alienation of heart from God, a growing reluc- tance or indifference to worship, and a diminution of natural kindness on the part of men one towards ano- ther, without any violent or fatal outbreak of the very 28 THE DISREGARDED AND [Serm. III. worst passions of a tainted and corrupted nature. But no : the first paragraph which follows the history of the Fall is the history of a murder, the murder of a brother by his own mother's son. Surely this is instructive : it tells us how man's only safeguard — literally his only safeguard — is in God : it tells us how near we are to the very worst crimes : it tells us how acts, of which, on their first hear- ing, we should exclaim, Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thifigl may yet, under altered circum- stances, be not only possible to us but easy ; meditated and done and even slept upon ; thought of afterwards, not only without true repentance, but even without re- morse and horror. I repeat it, there is no safety for any one of us but in God; in His constant upholding, sought of Him by constant prayer. There may be some young man, or some child, in this congregation, little aware of the career opening before him, little aware how soon the relaxation of Christian habits may be followed in his case by sin and shame, by crime and punishment; little aware how short is the step from quitting God's presence into openly defying Him, from losing the light of love within to trampling upon it in some fearful deed without. Let us run back into our one refuge, if we have quitted it; the refuge of God's fatherly hand, of Christ's patient love, of the Holy Spirit's quickening and protecting grace. And now we will approach somewhat more closely to the historical fact before us, and seek by God's bless- ing to draw from the text one or two thoughts suitable and profitable to ourselves. The Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering: Serm. III.] THE ACCEPTED OFFERING. -9 but unto Cain and to his offering He had not respect. Whence this distinction? Each of these worshippers brought an offering suitable to his occupation. Cain was a tiller of the ground : it was of the fruit of the ground that he brought his oblation. Abel was a keeper of sheep : and he brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. Was there anything in the material of the two offerings, which made the one acceptable and the other offensive? Have we any right to say this, apart from the express language of Scripture? any right to say, as some have said, that by bringing an animal in sacrifice Abel showed a clear perception of the true way of atonement, and that by bringing of the fruits of the earth Cain proved himself a self-justifier, a despiser of propitiation — proved himself, as some one has strongly expressed it, the first Deist? I think that in all this we are somewhat in danger of adding presumptuously to the record of Scripture. We are nowhere told that worship by sa- crifice was a primeval ordinance of God. If God en- joined it upon our first parents; if He even intimated to them (as some have imagined) by the coats of skins with which He clothed them, that the sacrifice of animal victims was the acceptable mode of approaching Him ; then indeed the offering of Abel was in itself an act of obedience, and the offering of Cain, in its very form, a proof of presumption. W T e must be contented to leave this part of the enquiry where the Word of God has left it. In the absence of express guidance there, we dare not assert with confidence that it was in the material of the two offerings that God saw the presence 30 THE DISREGARDED AND [Serm. III. or the absence of an acceptable principle. In pro- portion as we lay the stress of the difference more upon the spirit and less upon the form of the sacrifice, we shall be more certainly warranted by the inspired Word, and more immediately within the reach of its application to ourselves. We read in the Epistle to the Hebrews the follow- ing description of the offering of Abel. By faith Abel offered unto God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts : and by it he being dead yet speaketh ; not only at the time of his death, when the accusing voice of his blood cried unto God from the ground on which it had fallen, but still — still after many centu- ries — testifying to the one distinguishing principle and the one supporting hope in which God's people from the very beginning have all been one. It was by faith that Abel offered a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain. It was because of the presence of faith in Abel that God had respect unto him and to his offering. It was because of the absence of faith in Cain that to him and to his offering God had not respect. Here we are upon sure ground. Here we are speaking only where God, and so far as God, has spoken first. God saw in Abel a spirit of faith : and in Cain God did not see a spirit of faith. Therefore Cain and Abel were our examples, not by a forced or a remote application, but by a direct and immediate likeness. The test to which they were brought, all those ages ago, is the very test to which we are all subjected. We too bring offerings. Every age and every land has tried to do Serm. III.] THE ACCEPTED OFFERING. 3' so. The heart of man in its furthest estrangement is conscious that God has a claim upon His creatures; and, if it were only to pacify conscience, something must be brought and something must be done to sa- tisfy this claim. We cannot live without worship. At least, it takes a long time, and many struggles — yes, struggles — as many struggles, almost, as, if properly directed, would make a man a Christian — to enable any one of us to live without God and not be fearful of the consequences. Therefore most of us offer some- thing. A daily form of prayer, however brief and hurried; a weekly attendance here, however spiritless and perfunctory ; all of us give this : it is our offering. Cain brought his offering as well as Abel : Judas brought his offering as well as John : we bring ours. And there is no fault, perhaps, to be found with the nature, with the material, of the offering. We are not sure that there was any fault of this kind in Cain's offering. We dare not say for certain that, when Cain brought his basket of fruit or his sheaf of corn to present it before the Lord, it was a sin in him not to have begged or bought one of Abel's sheep, that so the sacrifice might be one of a typical life's blood, and not of mere gratitude or mere self-denial. Certainly in our offering there is nothing wrong externally. God is a Spirit : and they who worship God now must worship Him as a Spirit; worship Him with spiritual offerings, not with gifts either of natural produce or of sacrificial blood. The human tongue, with its divers utterances of praise and supplication, is the instrument by which we must worship ; and we have brought no 3^ THE DISREGARDED AND [Serm. III. other. Or, if another, if in one single instance, as on this day, we do bring, besides, a little offering of a visible oblation ; if, kneeling at that table, we do, in that one service, ask God to accept, not our alms only for His poor, but also our oblations — His creatures, as it is afterwards said, of bread and wine, to be eaten and drunk in His presence ; yet is this in obedience to an express command of our Saviour Christ, who in- stituted this as a perpetual commemoration of His pre- cious death for sin, to be continued until His coming again. Here too, here above all, none can find fault with the material of our offering : here therefore again we have to look at the instructive example proposed for us in the text, to see whether in any sense it can be hoped or feared, with respect to different members of this congregation, that God has respect to one of us and to his offering, but to another and to his offering He has not respect. It was by faith that Abel offered to God, and it was by want of faith that Cain failed to offer to God, an acceptable sacrifice. And so it is now. The bodies of us all are here : and the right sounds issue from our lips ; right sounds, and the same from all : what then can be wanting? Why is the worship of one ac- cepted, and the worship of another disregarded ? Why ? Because one has faith, and another has no faith. And what is faith? Faith is, as the Chapter just referred to tells us, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith is, the looking not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. Faith is a spiritual sight of things spiritual; let Serm. III.] THE ACCEPTED OFFERING, 33 us rather say, of Him who is invisible and eternal. In daily life, faith is the setting God always before us ; the walking before God ; the doing and saying and thinking all things as in His presence ; the having Him more powerfully present to us than the attractions or the temptations or the provocations of things below ; the being able to say, and to act upon the resolution, This will I do, for I fear God, and again, How can I do this wickedness and sin against God ? More espe- cially is it, the consciousness of Christ; the being as- sured, the remembering, and loving to remember, Him who died for us, and rose again ; and the actual en- deavour to set our affections on things above, where He sitteth at the right hand of God. This, carried into its consequences, is the daily life of faith. And now what is it in worship ? How does faith enable, or the want of faith forbid, a man to offer an acceptable offering? How was it that Abel offered? how was it that Cain did not offer? Surely, the worship of faith is the concentrated energy of the life of faith. In worship a man who has faith is not only remem- bering God as a check upon sin, or as a motive to diligence, or as an encouragement to hope, or as a stimulus to watchfulness; not only thinking of Christ as One who is, and is all-powerful to help, and all- sufficient to make reconciliation, and long-suffering to our infirmities and our backslidings ; but also, making application to Him as such; entering into His pre- sence as such ; communing and interceding with Him as such; making use of His sonship and of His re- demption ; gaining new supplies of grace and strength, v.s. 3 34 THE DISREGARDED AND [Serm. III. from Him whom he knows as his Father, through Him whom he knows as his Redeemer and as his High- Priest in heaven. This is faith as exercised in worship. Where God sees this, there He has respect to our offer- ing : where God sees not this, to that person and to his offering He has not respect. My brethren, this suggests a very serious question. It is right that we should come hither, as on this day, to praise and to ask of God : but it is not certain that in so doing we are doing more than Cain did : he brought of the produce of his ground, and stood before God with it as a worshipper and as an offerer. Yet to him and to his offering God had not respect, because he offered not in faith. He did not realize God's presence as his Crea- tor, his Benefactor, his Owner, and his God. He did not feel towards God, as a creature, owing everything to Him, ought to have felt. His worship was a mere hom- age, empty and ceremonial : and God, who looks on the heart, saw in it nothing. He had no respect to the offer- ing : He could not regard it as having any value or any meaning. And Cain was angry at this : not penitent, not ashamed, not sorry: he did not pray and struggle for a better mind : he was very wroth, and his countenance fell. O what a picture of the natural man in all times ! The disregarded, the refused, the unrespected worship- per, goes away angry: he never sees the cause of the refusal in himself: he never admits that the reason of his rejection lay in the worldliness, or the sinfulness, or the unbelief, of his own spirit: no, he thinks it hard that he should have humbled himself to worship, and not been noticed ; that he should have taken the trouble to kneel Serm. III.] THE ACCEPTED OFFERING. 35 and to respond, and God did not regard him. He was very wroth, and his countenance fell. 0, my brethren, let us learn a better lesson from the truth before us ! Let us acknowledge that without faith it is impossible to please God, unreasonable to expect to please Him. He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and must approach Him in the one way which He has marked out. And how shall we know whether God has respect to us and to our ottering? How shall we know, each one of us, as we kneel this morning at Christ's holy Table, whether we, we personally, are among the regarded or the unregarded worshippers? Cain knew it, we may suppose, by the absence of the heavenly fire which con- sumed his brother's sacrifice. When Abel offered, the flame of God fell, and consumed the offering; attested the faith of the suppliant, and crowned it with a visible acceptance. When Cain ottered, all was still: the fruit or the grain lay there upon the earth-built altar; lay, and was disregarded: the worshipper himself might fetch it away: He to whom it was nominally presented did not want, did not notice, did not care for it. These signals are of the past. The fire of God is now, like His sacri- fice, spiritual : it is only in the heart within that the one is presented or that the other is vouchsafed. Yet is there such a thing as a sense of acceptance; such a thing as the Spirit of God witnessing with our spirit that we are His sons; a comfort of love, and a confidence of communion, to testify that we are heard, and to send us on our way rejoicing. These things may still be looked for, and expected, and prayed for, in our worship : if we have no consciousness of being heard, none ever, we 3—2 36 THE DISREGARDED OFFERING. [Serm. III. have reason to enter into judgment with ourselves as to the cause of this want: may there not be some secret thing kept back from the Lord, or some attempt to mix together heaven and the world, or some culpable remiss- ness and carelessness in worship, interfering with the brightness and with the directness of the spiritual vision? These things we may fear: these things should be looked into : lest perhaps our worship itself should be nugatory, lest our very prayers should be turned into sin. But, after all, the proof of acceptance lies yet more decisively in the after than in the present results : do we, when we go hence, find ourselves, if not comforted, yet at least strengthened? do we find that we have received some- thing of real help against sin; something which has made us more successful in realizing to ourselves God and Christ, more earnest to fight the good fight of faith, or more loving in our spirit towards those who thwart us, or try us, or provoke? If we have this, we can almost dispense with the other: strength is better than comfort: at all events we can wait God's time for His comfort, if He only gives us His strength: he who finds himself a little more earnest, a little more serious, a little more consistent, in consequence of worship, can afford to en- dure patiently the delay of a bright hope or a positive assurance. And yet, why not both these things? Why not both comfort and strength? Surely the Lord's hand is not shortc7ied, that it ca?inot save; ?ior His ear heavy, that it cannot hear. Ash, and ye shall have: knock, and it shall be opened. Sexagesima Sunday, February 3, 1861. SERMON IV. FEATURES OF CHARITY. i Corinthians xiii. 5. Charity doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her ow?i } is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil. We enter this week upon a season of humiliation. Our thoughts are to be turned to the special subject of sin and repentance. Is it quite by chance that the Epistle for the preceding Sunday is the 13th Chapter of St Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians? Or is there not some- thing, in this choice, of preparation, designed prepara- tion, for the special work of Lent? I do not suppose that there is one of us who can listen unmoved to the description of charity, or Christian love, as it is here set before us by St Paul. And when we see the importance which he, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, attached to this particular grace; when we hear him say that all spiritual gifts are valueless with- out it; when we hear him say that prophecy is nothing, and knowledge is nothing, and faith itself is nothing, with- out charity; when we hear him say that even self-denial, self-devotion, and self-sacrifice for the good of others, is FEATURES OF CHARITY. [Serm. IV. nothing, unless there be also in the heart, as the motive of all, the spirit of a living charity; then surely the thought must press upon us very heavily, what is charity? and, have I charity? have I that particular grace or fruit of the Spirit, which is something distinct from faith, dis- tinct from piety, distinct even from almsgiving and from the service of the poor? have I, in my heart and in my life, that most excellent gift of charity, without which who- soever liveth is counted dead before God? Thus we are led, first to the searching of the Scriptures, and then to the examination of ourselves: and I am much mistaken if the result of this process will not be to awaken anxiety and even alarm, lest perhaps, after a long profession of faith, after doing many things and hearing gladly, we be found destitute of the one Christian characteristic, in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ. I have selected for consideration this morning just one verse of the Chapter, containing four brief clauses. Each of these clauses adds one feature to the portraiture of charity. We shall look at each separately. i. First, charity doth not behave itself unseemly. The expression in the original is still shorter. Its first mean- ing is this : is ?iot shapeless, is not misshapen, is not indeco- rous, rude, or unmannerly. A strange element, we might think, in the composition of charity! Not indecorous, not rude, or unmannerly — what has that to do with charity? Reflect a little, and you will perceive that this also is no small thing to mention, and that it bears very directly upon the grace spoken of. In this, as in other cases, we see a thing best by its opposite. Have we ever noticed such a thing as inde- SERM. IV.] FEATURES OF CHARITY. 39 corum, unmannerliness, rudeness, in persons claiming to be Chistians? Yes, it is sometimes made a part of re- ligion so to be. There are those who make what they call faithfulness the one virtue. They are so fearful of disguising their own convictions, and so fearful of en- couraging carelessness or false security in others, that they run into an opposite extreme, and would obtrude upon the notice of every passer-by those truths or those feelings of which the whole value is in their depth and in their humility. It may be that there are some to whom God has given a peculiar power of startling others into conviction by a mode of presenting His truths which on other lips would be simply offensive and repulsive. There may be such persons, and He who has peculiarly en- dowed may peculiarly bless. But for others, for Chris- tian persons generally, it is not safe to forget the special warning which Christ has given (in His own emphatic figure) against casting pearls before swine, or the remark- able feature here presented to us by this Apostle in the delineation of the grace of charity, that it is never un- mannerly. To ask a stranger, casually and suddenly, whether he is a converted man, whether he has the love of Christ in his heart, whether he is on his way to hea- ven or hell, &c, is the language of impertinence rather than of duty, with regard to which the words of the text may warn us that true charity doeth not so; knowing that, for one person driven by these rough means into the path of peace, many will rather be diverted and de- terred from a religion so indifferent to the rules of pro- priety and of good taste. True Christian charity is deeply concerned about the 40 FEATURES OF CHARITY. [Serm. IV. souls of men, and would count no labour and no sacri- fice too great if she might but save one. But charity is not rudeness, not impertinence, not self-sufficiency, and not arrogance. One part of charity is courtesy. And, depend upon it, courtesy, which is consideration for the feelings of others, will in the long run win more souls to Christ than rudeness. Where we are sure that courtesy is genuine; not timidity, not time-serving, not a mere wish to please, but a delicacy of perception and a ten- derness of feeling; there nothing is so attractive; attract- ive, not only in the sense of conciliating personal regard, but even in the sense of recommending godliness and drawing minds and hearts to Christ. I am not counselling silence at all times upon the concerns of the soul. There are persons charged with a ministry, who must be instant in season and out of sea- son. There are affronts offered to Christ in the world, which require of those who love Him that they speak out, even to protest, even to reprove. There is such a thing as compromise. There is such a thing as coward- ice. There is such a thing as being ashamed of Christ before men. And we know who has said that of such persons He will Himself be ashamed when He returns in glory. If charity is not rude, neither is she cowardly. And, if charity has to guard against rudeness in the things of God, much more will she abhor it in the things of self. For one person who is unmannerly in Christ's behalf, a thousand and ten thousand are unmannerly, obtrusive, pushing, and impertinent, in their own behalf. Let these see in the words before us a grave reproof and a serious warning for themselves. If it is wrong to be Serm. IV.] FEATURES OF CHARITY. 41 indecorous for a heavenly Master, much more must in- considerateness and coarseness of feeling be repugnant to charity when destitute of any such excusing or atoning motive. Charity doth not behave itself unseemly. 2. Secondly, charity seeketh not her own. We have already seen something of a reason why this clause should follow closely upon the former. The courtesy of charity must not be selfishness. A man might seem to be mindful of the charge not to be unmannerly, and yet be wholly regardless of the next caution, that he be not selfish. All seek their own, St Paul complains, not the things which are Jesus Christ's. How true a saying! How prevalent, how almost universal, is the spirit of self-seek- ing ! When man, in the Fall, broke loose from God, he broke loose also from his brother. The natural man is not ungodly only; he is selfish too. In fact, it is only in God that hearts can really meet. It is only so far as it succeeds in turning both alike to God, that any ministry can be effectual (to use the language of the last verse of the Old Testament) in turning the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers: they meet in Him as their common centre. My brethren, when we speak of selfishness, we can only lay ourselves in the dust, and mourn together. Who is not selfish? selfish in common things, in little things, in the things of everyday life? Who does not grudge trouble? or, if not all trouble, yet trouble of any kind which is not self-chosen and self-imposed? Who does not dislike being put out of his own way; having his plans for the day broken in upon; having his few mo- 42 FEATURES OF CHARITY. [Serm. IV. merits of relaxation and refreshment curtailed yet further by some unexpected and unwelcome call? But we might go further, and say, Whose religion, whose charity, is not somewhat selfish? Is there any one who really desires, in doing good to others, their good more than his own? How many of us, in visiting the poor, are really aiming at gratitude ! really seeking, if not the ap- plause of lookers on — and do not be absolutely sure that there is not a little even of this feeling lurking within — yet at least the thanks and the love of those to whom we are ministering, instead of the result itself; the good, in soul or in body, of the person benefited or served ! In this case, charity herself is seeking her own. And in another sense too. In serving others, we may be thinking of ourselves, even without aiming at gratitude. We may do it as a duty, as a means of gaining good for ourselves, of promoting our own salvation, or even with some lingering relics of an idea of merit. Do not think that I would strain too far the demand of a disinterested motive. It is well for the world that charity should work in it anyhow, from any motive. And it is far bet- ter, even for ourselves, that we should be diligent in the service of others, whatever the imperfection of our mo- tive, than not diligent. And we may pass through lower motives to higher; gradually purifying our work from the dross of selfishness as we go on and get forward. Still I think that it is good for us, both as an exercise of salu- tary humiliation, and still more as a means of casting out evil from our hearts and lives, to contemplate the diviner form of a real Christian charity as it is set before us in the pages of Holy Scripture: to remind ourselves, for Serm. IV.] FEATURES OF CHARITY. 43 example, that then only is charity perfect, even as its Source and its Inspirer is perfect, when in no sense it seeks its own; when neither the desire of human applause or human gratitude, nor even the desire of self-improve- ment, much less of self-approval or self-justifying, has any place in it, but the heart has learnt something of that most sublime of all exercises of self-forgetfulness and self-sacrifice to which St Paul had risen when he wrote the memorable though sometimes misunderstood sentence, / could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren. Charity seeketh not her own. Charity is altogether unselfish. Just so far as self enters even into our best deeds, in that same degree we are without charity. And if the best of men have deplored to the end of life how wanting they were in the grace of an entire self-forgetful- ness, may we not, here also, apply the subject to some persons, in this as in every congregation, who never know what it is even for a moment to seek any one's good or any one's pleasure but their own, and urge them, by the love of Christ and by the hope of heaven, to prac- tise themselves, ere it be too late, at least in little self- denials, if perhaps a better spirit may by degrees be formed in them, and they may rise at last to something of that mind which was in Christ Jesus? 3. In the third place, the text tells us that charity is not easily provoked. I fear we must confess that the word easily is no part of the verse as St Paul wrote it. Whence it crept in, I know not. Whether it was really felt that the rule was beyond human reach without it; or whether some mere accident occasioned its insertion; 44 FEATURES OF CHARITY. [Serm. IV. these questions are comparatively unimportant: but I fear that we must read the words without modification, Charity is not provoked. It is not said that charity is never angry. On the contrary, we read of our Lord Himself that on one occasion He looked round upon an audience with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts. And the same holy Apostle, whose words are now before us, writes elsewhere, Be ye angry, and sin not: imply- ing that all anger is not sinful. It is right to be in- dignant at some things : we may well wish that there were more amongst us than there is of righteous indig- nation at things mean and shameful, acts of revenge and lust and cruelty. St Paul says of himself, Who is offended, that is, caused to offend, hindered and injured in his Christian course, and I burn not, that is, with holy anger on his behalf? Charity is not provoked refers to different matters. It follows closely upon, and indeed springs directly out of the foregoing particular, seekcth not her own. Selfishness, self-pleasing, and self-seeking, is the com- mon cause of provocation. If we had no self in us, we should not be provoked, no, not once in a thou- sand times, as we now are. How seldom does pro- vocation really arise out of a disinterested care for the good of others ! How seldom are we, like our Lord, simply grieved because of the hardness of another's heart; simply concerned to think of the dishonour done to God, and the risk brought upon a brother's soul by unbelief, ungodliness, and sin ! Or, even if there be something of this motive for anger, yet how mixed is SERM.IV.] features of charity. 45 it with lower regards ; with vexation, perhaps, because we can make no impression ; with irritation at the per- verseness which will not see aright : or with weariness in the disappointment of efforts to correct and to im- prove ! And how true is it, that when once charity is provoked, it ceases to be of any avail ; ceases to in- fluence, because it ceases indeed to be charity ! O, if we would be of any use one to another ; if we would move in the world as Christ's witnesses, whether among equals or among inferiors ; we must pray without ceas- ing for a gentle and a loving soul ; even for tJiat orna- ment of a meek and quid spirit, which is in the sight of God of great priee. 4. In the fourth and last place, it is said, Charity thinkdh no toil. This is a different thing from Charity believe th all things, or hopcth all things, of which we read below. Thinkdh no evil is, properly, reckoncth ?iot that which is evil. In other words, Christian charity is shown in not keeping an account of injuries or of unkindnesses ; in not registering and recording acts or words of neglect, contempt, or wrong ; in not entering such things in the tablets of memory, as if for a future day of human reckoning or of divine retribution. Some minds, my brethren, are strangely tenacious of such things. It is in vain to remind them — in vain they do remind themselves — of shortcomings and offences of their own : in vain do we say, O bring not upon yourselves the judgment of the unmerciful sen-ant ! O provoke not God, by your harsh, uncharitable, unfor- giving spirit towards men, to remember your far greater debt of sin towards Him ! O be willing, when you 46 FEATURES OF CHARITY. [Serm. IV. remember how wrongly, how ungenerously, how sus- piciously, and how contemptuously, you have yourself often spoken or acted towards others, to forgive and to forget a few such acts and words when they have injured or wounded you / In vain, I say : for charity is the gift of God only : Send Thy Holy Ghost, we pray, and pour into our heai-ts that most excellent gift of cha- rity : charity is the gift of God, given by His Spirit, given in answer to earnest prayer, given as the fruit of many watchings and strivings, of many struggles with ourselves and many conflicts with Satan : no wonder therefore if they who ask not and believe not, are not charitable, do not love ! Charity recko?ieth not evil; preserves no record of it, keeps no account against it. There was an expres- sion in ancient times, denoting one of the great boons promised to the populace in a revolutionary crisis. That boon was called new tablets ; new account- books : in other words, the cancelling of the old ; the abolition of all outstanding debts. In that application, however attractive in its sound, however expedient at certain times in order to prevent worse consequences, it was not an act of justice, and it was a dangerous prece- dent. But, in the sense in which I now use it, it involves no danger, and, on the whole, taking one side with another, no injustice. If we have all something to forgive, have we not all something also to be for- given ? Let us have new tablets this Lent ! Let us agree to cancel all outstanding debts ! Let us turn our thoughts from earthly dues to heavenly; from things owing to us to things owing by us; yes, owing by us Serm. IV.] FEATURES OF CHARITY. 47 both to man and God ! Let us start afresh ! Let charity reckon no evil : let charity destroy her old account-books, and forget the past ! We cannot deal with our own sins, till we have done with those of others. If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there remcmba'csi that thy brother hath ought against thee, or thou thyself (might we not venture to add?) against thy brother, leave there thy gift before the altar, ana 1 go thy way : first be reco?iciled to thy brother, and thai come and offer thy gift. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. More than that we do not even pray for : can we look for more ? Charity is not rude. Charity is not selfish. Charity is not provoked. Charity reckons not the evil. Such are a few of the features of that divine grace. There are others, and we should study all. But even these few have humbled us. Even these few enter into judgment with us, and condemn us. Let us not be satisfied with recording the sentence, and thus nattering self-love with a dream of great humility. Let us rather see how arousing, how stimulating, ves, how invigorating, if rightly used, is the word which humbles. We must pray, and we must struggle, for the grace of Christian courtesy, that we may be wise to win souls j not insolent, not arrogant, not awkward, not repulsive. We must pray, and we must struggle, for the grace of Christian unselfishness ; beginning to practise it in little things, and passing on by degrees 48 FEATURES OF CHARITY. [Serm IV. to greater. We must pray, and we must struggle, for the grace of an unprovokable spirit ; remembering how we have provoked God, and yet He has been patient. We must pray, and we must struggle, for a short memory in evil ; for the power, not to forgive only, as men too often count forgiveness, but to forget also ; the power to sponge well every night the heart's tablets, that they may preserve no mark of bad impression until the morrow. This if we do, seriously, daily, and in God's presence — on our knees, with the windows well open towards the heavenly temple — He will help us. God is nearer to us than we think : and in His presence is strength. QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY, February 10, 1861. SERMON V. THE CAKE NOT TURNED. Hosea VII. 8. Ephraim is a cake not turned. The language of Scripture is largely borrowed from common life. Most often, from natural objects; fields and trees, sea and sky, the means and processes of vegetation and agriculture. But sometimes in-door life is laid under contribution for spiritual illustration. Sometimes it is a feast, with its bright lights, its good cheer, and its merry guests within, in contrast with an outer darkness and a sad exclusion. Sometimes it is a humbler matter still ; a lost piece of money, and a woman sweeping the house till she finds it. Some- times it is one of the processes by which food is pre- pared for strengthening man's heart, and the poorest man or woman is taught how to find profit for the soul out of an occupation which seems to be wholly con- fined to things sensible and earthly. You would be surprised, if you looked into a Concordance of Holy Scripture, to see how large a space is occupied by the word bread. We might almost say that bread has been v. s. 4 50 THE CAKE NOT TURNED. [Serm. V. consecrated by the Bible, the Old Testament and still more the New, to such an excellent mystery that by it is typified and represented the work of grace in the heart of man. Now of this character is the figure employed in the text. Ephraim is a cake not turned. Ephraim, in its original meaning here, denotes the kingdom of Israel or of the Ten Tribes. But I am sure I need not say that that which is written of a rebellious and per- verse nation has its exact counterpart in the individual ; nay, that it was only because true of individuals that it was ever true of a nation; and that human nature, fallen human nature, is of one stock and of one blood in all times, so that, if we get below the surface (God's Word guiding us) with reference to one man in one age, we are quite sure to find the same thing true of the depth of some other heart in some other age — yes, in germ at least, true of every other heart in every other age. Ephraim, being interpreted, is man. At least, he is many a man, under circumstances at all similar to those of the Israelites at the time spoken of. In other words, the character ascribed in God's Word to Israel of old is the character of very many persons to whom God has spoken, whom He has brought within the pale of His covenant and of His Church, and striven with through long years by the inward pleadings and remonstrances of His Spirit. Ephraim, so understood, is compared in this passage to a cake not turned. English history has treasured among its anecdotes of a favourite royal hero, one which tells us of a cake not turned. The disguised sovereign, occupied with Serm. V.] THE CAKE NOT TURNED. 5 1 graver cares, forgot the duties of the task which he had assumed, and left the countrywoman's bread to spoil for lack of turning. Such is the very emblem here em- ployed by God's Prophet. There is something in the character of some men which resembles a burnt loaf ; a cake left too long with one side exposed to the fire, till it has caught and been scorched, while the other side is still mere dough. So condescending is the lan- guage of Divine Revelation, when it seeks to show us to ourselves as we are ! A little accident, familiar to every cottage and to every kitchen, is seized by the wisdom of God, and made the vehicle of correction and instruction in righteousness. May He help us so to use it ! The character described is easily legible. It is that in which there is a too much and a too little. One side is overdone, the other is underdone. There is nothing even and equable in the compound. It is in pieces and patches : here a lump of dough, and there a cinder : here that which must be cut off because it is too dry and too black for mastication, and there that which must be left upon the plate because it is too moist and too sticky for digestion. I am sure, my brethren, if we think of it, we all know such characters. Some of us, who look closely within, may perhaps be constrained to confess, Certainly I know one such ! It is intended, you know, that the grace of God, or by whatever other term we designate the thing spoken of, should go through and through the whole of us. The comparison slightly varied gives us the leaven which is hid in the meal till the whole is 4—2 52 THE CAKE NOT TURNED. [Serm. V. leavened. Just so is it in the baking. That which has been first thoroughly mixed, and then thoroughly- leavened, must last of all be thoroughly baked. Every part of the mind and life — the principles and the affec- tions, the temper and the spirit, the motives and the conduct, the feelings towards God and the feelings towards man — ought to be alike and equally influenced by the presence of the Holy Spirit within. The cake is imperfectly mixed, imperfectly leavened, or imper- fectly baked, if it be not so. The whole man ought to move together in God's love and in God's service. It is the want of this unity, this coherence and con- sistency of parts, this combination and harmony of all elements in one whole, which makes the words true of any human character, Ephraim is a cake not turned. And this might be exemplified in many ways. i. There is, first, the case which the context seems to point to ; an inconsistency arising from too much of voluntary intermixture with the world. Ephraim, he hath mixed himself among the people: he hath mingled himself among the surrounding heathen, and learned their ways : Ephraim is a cake not turned. Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not : yea, gray hairs are here a?id there upon him, testifying to a loss of strength, to a decay of vigour, yet he knoweth not. A very graphic picture of the life of many ! Cer- tainly some are very arbitrary in their definitions of the world. They do not understand the difference between the heathenism which surrounded Israel of old or the Christian Church in its first beginnings, and the nominal Christianity which is about us on every side Serm. V.] THE CAKE NOT TURNED. 53 now. We have no right to ignore Baptism and Com- munion, profession of faith and attendance on ordi- nances. These things are not unimportant. For good or else for evil, they make a distinction between him who has them and him who has them not. Still for practical purposes, as a matter of Christian prudence and of Christian consistency, we must put a difference now between some and others even of our fellow- worshippers. A brother who walks among us disorderly, who is either notoriously sinful in his life, or whose influence, at all events, is entirely adverse to religion, cannot be regarded by us, nor ought he to be, as a fitting friend or companion for one who desires above all things to save his soul alive. And there is such a thing in these days as a man mixing himself 'among such persons, and becoming by that intermixture like a cake unturned. His religion may become in that way rather an incongruous adjunct than a pervading leaven. He may still have a religion : he may still think himself religious : he may continue a worshipper, he may con- tinue a communicant : he may have prayers in his family, and prayers in his chamber : but his life is not religion j his day is spent away from God ; his prayers are isolated from his occupations and isolated from his interests; his heart is in the world, whatever his pro- fessions or even his occasional wishes be. 2. Or, again, there is the still sadder case, if it be possible, of one who is tied and bound by the chain of some evil habit. How much that is beautiful and apparently hopeful in a character may coexist, for a time at least, with a sin ! In the end, no doubt, the 54 THE CAKE NOT TURNED. [Serm. V. forcible words of this Prophet are made good in every instance of a life of sensuality, Whoredom, and wine, and new wine, take away the heart. Fearful are the ex- emplifications of this saying — of the heartlessness of the sensualist — in human life. They meet us everywhere : patent among the poor; discernible, doubtless, to a closer inspection, in the homes of the wealthy. But this, in its full developement, belongs to a late stage of sin. In its beginnings there may be a great mixture of good. Sometimes there is a considerable amount of piety, of religious feeling I mean, in a character which has its dark spot all the time. Often there is in it what I may call a pathos and a plaintiveness very touching and even attractive. If the strong man despises, the humble Christian cannot but pity, may almost love. That profound sense of sinfulness, that exceeding bitter cry which rises in the hearing of God or man from a self- condemning heart, that deep humility, that tenderness in judging, that consideration for the feelings and faults of others — all which are sometimes characteristic of a man vainly struggling rather under than against a pre- vailing evil temper or victorious evil lust — are things not to be witnessed without compassion even by one who cannot, for his Master's sake, be indifferent to the guilt, or blind to the danger, of the sin which thus reigns. The words of the text may well recur to us as we contemplate such a case. O that the whole man were what a part of him is ! O that that inconsistency could be reconciled ! O that that tenderness and that humility could but have been combined with purity, or that generous warmth of feeling with some command Serm. V.] THE CAKE NOT TURNED. 55 of speech and of temper ! How beautiful then might have been the compound, where at present we can but admire a few separate ingredients ! Would that God's grace might even yet bring unity into that confusion, casting out that which is evil, and claiming for His own that which is good ! He has done so, for a few at least, even in this most perilous and fatal case of all : He has, here and there, given a man the victory even over a sin which had long led him captive : often enough to forbid despair, though not often enough to preclude deep anxiety. 3. But the subject is still far from being exhausted : I feel rather that we have as yet scarcely sounded its depths. The peculiar point in it is the imperfect dif- fusion of good through the whole man; the exaggera- tion of some parts to the disparagement of others; the one side overdone, and the other scarcely touched, by the fire of truth and grace. How applicable is this description to some characters to which we can scarcely deny the title of religious; some which perhaps most confidently arrogate that title to themselves ! How often have we seen in such persons zeal without tenderness ; energy without repose ; eagerness for what they deem truths, without charity towards those whom they count in error ; a distortion, for themselves and others, of the whole proportion and balance of the Gospel, by pressing one truth as if it were all the truth, and casting into the shade of practical disregard other things which a more impartial reader of God's Word would see to occupy a primary place ! And great dishonour is done to Christ oftentimes by such distortions and by such !>6 THE CAKE NOT TURNED. [Serm. V. onesidedness. Great injustice is often done to personal merits of a different and less obtrusive order. Men are regarded as far behind in the Christian race, who in all save the loudness of their profession or the narrow- ness of their view may be far forwarder than their judges. And, what is worse, many honest struggling men are so discouraged in their estimate of themselves, and so deterred by the representation thus made to them of Christ's Gospel, that they are really thrown back in the race, or diverted into some erratic course the end of which can scarcely be recognized as the Christian's heaven. Such are some of the evil results of that imperfect blending of Christian graces, that dis- proportionate developement in one character of the various elements of true perfection, which we have so often to deplore even in religious persons, and to which no figure of comparison could be more appropriate than that drawn for us in the words of the Prophet, Ephraim is a cake ?iot turned. 4. And, if applicable thus far to Christian men, what shall we say of the bearing of the subject upon persons who have not yet taken a decisive step towards Christ's service? Is there no inequality, no jar, no disorder, in their being also ? What if in many of them conscience is at variance with practice, conviction with conduct ? If you are not inwardly convinced that there is something in Christ which is not to be dispensed with and not elsewhere to be found, why are you here? I would fain believe that that which is indicated by your presence among Christ's worshippers is in reality the very deepest and truest part of your being. It is not Serm. V.] THE CAKE NOT TURNED, 57 that I would teach you that you are guilty of hypocrisy or false profession in coming hither. That is dangerous language, and not more dangerous, I believe, than false. Rather would I urge you to cherish that habit, of coming to hear Christ's Word read and preached, and of joining in His public worship, as one of the links which still connect you with the realities which lie above, and which lie within, and which lie before you. But then, my brethren, if you are not to discontinue worship, let it mean something ! It will not do to have two parts of you entirely severed and at variance. Your faith in Christ, which you express by worship, must not be confined to worship. If you call Him Lord, Lord, you must also try to do the things which he says. O, if there be in you but one thing which He disapproves, be assured that it will be for your happi- ness to part with it — certainly it will be for your hap- piness to have parted with it : make the effort in His name and strength, and He will enable you. And, not less, endeavour to carry the thought of Him into your daily life in all its parts. Try to understand, and try to exemplify, what is meant by even eating and drinking to God's glory — by temperance and by thankfulness — by using moderately what He gives, and by praising and remembering Him in your hearts over it. You will never be really happy until your life is at one. The cake not turned is a spoilt and damaged thing; good neither for food nor show : men cast it out. Pray and strive that it be not a figure descriptive of you. Let your prayer, and the prayer of all of us, be that of the 58 THE CAKE NOT TURNED. [Serm. V. inspired Psalmist, Unite my heart to fear thy Name. Yes, bring all its scattered parts into one whole. Rea- son and conscience and will, judgment and affection, energy and enjoyment, thought and speech, soul and spirit, mind and life, let each in its office serve Thee, and let the whole be Thine. Then are they glad, because they are at rest : and so he bringcth them unto the haven where they would be. In God alone is the rest of man : he that findeth Christ findeth peace. Unity is happiness, and unity is strength. If you see that the Lord is God, follow Him; follow Him whithersoever He goeth. If you hear the voice within, saying, This is the way, walk thou in it ; if conscience tells you that a particular thing is right, because Christ commands it, or a particular thing wrong, because it might lead you or another into sin, into some occupa- tion or some indulgence which Christ in His Gospel has forbidden ; let that be decisive : an hour later you will be glad of it. No man can serve two masters ; God and the world, Christ and self, Christ and sin. It is misery to attempt it. They are the wretched men of this world, not who live entirely for the world, not who live entirely for God, but, who have just light enough to prevent their forgetting Him, and not de- cision enough to be His wholly. They are the wretched men : others have the world to enjoy, and there is some enjoyment in it so long as men can forget the last end : and others, again, have God to enjoy, and His service is perfect freedom, and in it is nothing to be forgotten : but they have neither ; they miss both worlds : and a Serm. V.] THE CAKE NOT TURNED* 59 weary bondage they suffer. Well may the text say to each of us, Be one man, not two : make up your mind, and let mind and life move together. God is one: let him who is God's be one also. Second Sunday in Lent, February 24, 1861. SERMON VI. THE DANGER OE RELAPSE. Hebrews x. 38. If any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. Those of us who have ever had to do with sickness know the serious import of the word " relapse." " What we have to guard against is a relapse " is the expression of a most pressing anxiety : the tidings, " He has had a relapse," must sound in every ear with much of the awfulness of a death-warrant. It is my purpose to-night to speak to you of that which is analogous to this in the soul. "The danger of relapse " is our subject. I would address myself to it, not so much as the physician, but rather as the friend or the relative of the patient ; nay, as one compassed him- self with every danger which can beset or befall the weakest and the most sinful. It is not obvious to every one, on first hearing the word, that " relapse " is synonymous with " backsliding." It is the Latin form of that English word. And yet it seems to convey to us a more real and tangible Serm. VI.] THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. 61 sense. Backsliding is a term appropriated to religious subjects : relapse is a term of wider use, applicable to bodily as well as spiritual matters, and, in the same proportion, as it appears to me, more natural and more significant In either case, you will notice that the force of the word lies in its indication of a gradual process. A relapse is a gliding or slipping back. There is nothing in it of suddenness or of violence. Whatever the result may be, however unexpected or however fatal, the word denotes that the process and progress towards it has been easy and perhaps imperceptible. And we shall readily understand that in that particular point lies the main risk and peril. To give something of clearness and definiteness to the remarks now to be made upon it, we may separate the two cases, of act, and of spirit ; of particular habits and tendencies, and of the general mind and life. In each of these there may be either a progress towards recovery, or else a relapse : and the danger of relapse will be sufficiently evident when we draw out into a few serious thoughts the thing which that word in- dicates. i. And first in its reference to particular acts and habits. All of us have known, either for ourselves, or in those near to us, what it is to fall into a bad habit. Habits are of all kinds: it is a word which we use indiscriminately with reference to small things and great; to bodily, mental, and spiritual acts; to mat- ters which are mere tricks of manner or gesture, as 62 THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. [Serm. VI. well as to grave moral concerns on which the life or death of the soul may hang. A great part of early education, in the nursery and the school-room, is taken up with the prevention or correction of bad habits. Little faults of deportment, mere awkwardnesses and rudenesses of tone or posture, give early teachers much trouble, and we are deeply indebted to those who will take that trouble with us. Again, in our childish or youthful lessons, certain ten- dencies early show themselves towards particular mis- takes : special defects, of natural talent, or of attention and industry, lead to a perpetual repetition of the same error; only to be overcome, if at all, by an equally incessant struggle, on the part alike of the teacher and of the taught. And, once more, how obstinate, how wearisome to ourselves and others, are those faults of temper which form the first battle-field of the child with indwelling sin; faults of pride or of passion, of irritability or of sullenness, as the case may be ; which, if left uncorrected, will be the torment of a lifetime, and which, with all the care and pains that can be bestowed upon them, are seldom perhaps so entirely eradicated as to give no trouble at all even to the grown man, even to the established Christian ! Now, taking these very simple and elementary ex- periences as illustrations of three kinds of bad habit; the first concerned mainly with the body, the second with the mind or understanding, and the third with the spirit or soul; we can all see in them, though on a very humble scale, what is meant by the danger of a relapse. Serm. VI.] THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. 63 It sometimes happens that this early home-training is temporarily interrupted. Perhaps a mother, whose whole time is given to the care of her children, is laid aside for a time by sickness, or called from home by some demand of duty. A few weeks pass, during which she has been compelled to leave her children in the hands of servants, or of some person less wise or less keenly interested than herself in the true discipline of those concerned. How often, under these circum- stances, do we hear of what in reference to graver or later faults we should have to call a relapse ! Tricks of manner, once corrected, are again as bad as ever. In- attentions and carelessnesses and slovenlinesses over lessons, are all come back, and the combat must begin afresh. Bad tempers of whatever kind, irritable, mo- rose, passionate, have resumed their hold, and the work of faithful and judicious discipline is felt to be thrown back by weeks or months, and to require to be abso- lutely begun again. There has been, in all senses, a relapse : and in the judgment of a true educator and a true Christian a relapse is always and at every age a matter of great anxiety and of great danger. But there comes a time when this danger is terribly aggravated, and the everlasting state of a soul comes to be bound up in it. The life of home, we will suppose, is for the present ended, and the boy or young man goes forth to a place of far less constant, less tender, and less anxious watch- ing. He is left to form for himself — and it is needful that sooner or later he should do so — his own habits of good or evil. And even if he still remains under his 64 THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. [Serm. VI. parent's roof, he will yet have to do this. An age comes, at which self-management and individual re- sponsibility become, in the order of God's Providence, the burden of each one of us, and to attempt to bear it for one another can end in nothing but disappoint- ment and injury. It is a very serious time, and it sets vividly before us the anxieties of that probation which is our lot below. I need not and cannot trace in detail the thousand influences which begin to affect life, inward and outward, at this stage. It is enough to say, as one speaking to those who know it, that multitudes — I dare not institute any comparison of numbers, so as to say what proportion, or anything like what proportion, of human characters may thus be described — but multi- tudes, at all events, do fall under most injurious in- fluences, in conduct and habit, at the entrance upon mature life. Sinful and vicious habits, learned from without or springing from within, do lead captive many a young life. In many instances, the sin and its con- sequences are incurred almost or quite unawares. There is no positive consciousness of either, until the poison has been drunk in. The life of many a young man is thenceforth a life of disquiet, of unrest — happier if of conflict. Many fight not at all, but yield to their sin day by day. Many repent of it every morning, and before night as regularly, are again fallen. Some — many, we are sure, these also — are awakened, under some one of those many providential influences for good which are always counterworking the snares and mines of evil, to a deep sense of the sinfulness of sin, and to an earnest and effectual repentance, shown, as true re- Serm. VI.] THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. 65 pentance is sure to be, by a recovery, under God's grace daily sought and cherished, from the dominion and bondage of their sin. Though life can no longer be ignorant of evil, or (in one sense) innocent of evil, it may yet be cleansed and purged from evil ; graver, sadder, than once it was, but not therefore disconsolate, and not therefore unblessed, and not therefore inopera- tive for the highest and noblest good. If a young man cleanse his way, by taking heed thereto according to God's Word, he may still do a good life's work, and be owned by Christ at His coming. But, alas ! how great, in every such instance, will be the danger of relapse ! When sin seems to have been entirely put away, how quickly, how suddenly, does it reappear ! nay, how close by us it seems to have been standing all the time ! Who ca?i say, I have made my heart clean, lam pure from my sin % Sin once admitted seems to have a sort of claim upon us : it returns ever and anon as to its own house, and rather demands than asks admittance. It has been said, and too truly, that a man's besetting sin will be such to the end of his life : it is one of the strongest arguments, could its strength but be felt beforehand as it is felt in the retrospect, against harbouring sin at all, against suffering any in- ducement to make us part with the integrity of an unstained life. He who has once admitted into his life or heart a definite form of sin, may cleanse himself perhaps from it for a time, may remain for three years or five years free almost from its solicitations, and yet again it shall come back upon him, in the thoughts of his heart if not in the very act itself, and he shall mid v. s. 5 66 THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. [Serm. VI. himself, if he ever relax his watchfulness, as much its slave as ever, and the house from which it went out shall have been as it were but swept and garnished for the hour of its return. It is needless to carry the matter one step further, and speak of the dangers of a relapse in the case of the formed and matured habits of later life. There are two sins, more particularly, which have exemplified again and again the fearful risk of a return to evil. Of one of these I will not speak. From the other, the sin to which we commonly restrict the term intemperance^ it is painful but not impossible to draw the illustration. Alas ! how dreadful is our experience of it in the dwell- ings of the poor ! What a raging monster is drunk- enness ! how utterly hardhearted ! how dead to the call even of natural affection, even of humanity, even of self-love ! And what a tyrant is it ! how resolute its rule over the soul once enthralled ! Neither entreaties nor resolutions, neither shame nor remorse, neither fear of God nor regard for man, avail anything against its iron grasp. How it exemplifies too the saying of the Book of Proverbs, Wine is a mocker I Now and then it seems as though it would relax its hold : the voice of conscience has been heard within, awakened by some dispensation of God's Providence, or quickened into energy by some conviction or persuasion of God's Word : for a time we hear the glad tidings that he whom Satan has so long bound has struggled into freedom : the home of poverty smiles again, and cheerfulness, if not plenty, is seen where all was gloom and wretchedness: alas ! again and again even this fair hope has been Serm. VI.] THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. 67 disappointed : there has been a relapse : the later dark- ness is more absolute than the earlier; the evil spirit has come back, as though with seven others more wicked than himself, and the last end of that man is even worse than the first. 2. We turn now to the latter part of the subject, and would speak of the danger of relapse in reference to the spiritual state generally, rather than to particular habits of life. I need not say to any one here present that there is an inward life for each one of us ; real and definite, though not visible ; a life which we live towards God, and by which God judges each of us from day to day. If we are not conscious of any relation to God ; if we can live without Him in the world ; if, for us, the words faith and hope and love, as towards God, are unreal and unmeaning; all this does not prove us to have no inward state, no spiritual condition, but only to be in a state of the greatest possible risk and danger, a condition of living death, carrying about with us everywhere not only a deeply diseased but an actually dead soul. We who are here this evening are not, we may hope, quite in this state, any of us. We have a spiritual existence, and a spiritual history, every one. As we look back upon the years that are past, we can see that there has been a thread running through them, connecting each with each, and all with God : we can probably, if we examine them, say with regard to one period, / was then making some effort to be religious, and of another, / was then walking carelessly, and of another, / was then under a particular influence operating 5—2 68 THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. [Serm. VI. strongly upon my character in this direction or that: it is perhaps on the whole, for many of us, a painful retrospect, but not the less necessary on that account : there can be no repentance without a retrospect, and I think there is no retrospect which does not testify quite as strongly to God's patient love as to our per- verseness and sinfulness. But every glance cast backward upon the things behind, must have one effect at least amongst others ; that of showing us the precariousness (humanly speak- ing) of the Christian life; its slow and intermittent growth ; its liability to reverses and relapses ; its ex- posure to innumerable influences and accidents; its wonderful fluctuations and its too frequent vacillations. If on the whole its course were progress ; if, viewing it at intervals, we could see distinctly that we were in advance now of the position which we had attained then; the result would be less saddening and less dis- couraging. But I fear that many of us have to confess that our spiritual history has not been so much a pro- gress with drawbacks, as a mere oscillation ; a swaying to and fro ; a pendulum limited in its range by two ex- tremes which it cannot pass, rather than the hand of the clock advancing by a steady though almost impercep- tible progress to the completion of its hour. This it is that makes our hearts misgive us when we look forward. Is it to be so always ? Is every apparent advance to be made up for, as it has so often been, by an equal or greater decline ? Is our Christian life to be always lived within barriers which at its best it cannot surmount? Am I never to get into a higher region of experience, Serm. VI.] THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. 69 a purer air, a brighter light, and a more expansive free- dom ? We all know how to reply to these questions : we can all say, Ye are not straitened in God, ye are strait- ened only in yourselves ; straitened in your own expecta- tions almost as much as in your own endeavours. It is true, and we do well to remember it, and to rebuke ourselves even sharply for our weakness of faith and our faintness of hope. But we need also some serious counsel : we need at some times a very bracing, if at other times a soothing treatment : and I am persuaded that both for ourselves and for others we are all too apt to shrink from it. I wish that for this night we might be enabled by God's grace to lay well to heart the few words given as the subject of meditation, the danger of relapse. If we felt this as we ought, it would lead us to take the proper precautions against it. And in the soul, however it may be in the body, there is properly no such thing as acci- dent : our spiritual state is the result of influences the effect of which we can to a certain extent calculate, and which conscience, the Word of God, and the Spirit of God, will, if duly listened to, teach us how to direct. Ye are idle, ye are idle — well might it be said to us — and then lay upon human infirmity, or else almost upon Divine appointment, the blame of a result which you could have foreseen and with which you are charge- able. O, my brethren, we do not take the pains with our souls which we ought. It would be a daily miracle if our bodies were kept in health without food : why should we expect a like thing in the soul? Which of us is not more or less guilty of starving his soul? 7 o THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. [Serm. VI. Which of us gives his own soul either proper food or proper exercise or proper rest? These things are all alike found in communing with God : and which of us knows as he ought what that is ? O let us say to ourselves each morning, so many of us as have any fear or love of God at all, / am at a certain point now, whatever it be, i?i my soicVs life: twenty years, or thirty years, or fifty years, of my probatiofi are ended, and soon, soon at the latest, my destiny will be determined: at prese?it, though wider the care of God, I am in an enemy s country : many things will this day arise which will try my faith : temptations will come, offences will come, and it is my business to meet and to surmount them : but, most of all, and at all events, I know that I shall be influenced by things seen a?id tc7nporal to relax my hold upo?i things unseen and eternal : and it may be that from within also, out of the sins of the past, some defi?iite root of bitterness will this day spring up to trouble me: it is of the utmost consequence that I should not fall, that I should not go backward: I am behindhand enough now ; let me not, by my carelessness or by my wilfulness, or by my pre- sumption, make my case yet worse: O let me remember, while it may yet avail something, the importance of over- coming, of standing fast, of not drawing back, of not re- lap 'sing: and let me now come with all my heart to Him who is able to keep me from falling, that He may help and protect me all the day: may, as it is written, hold up my goings in His way, that my footsteps slip not. Such thoughts, carried out into their natural conse- quences, first of earnest prayer, and then of watchful living, will be our safeguard in the time of trial : God Serm. VI.] THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. 7i will be in our daily life, and He will not suffer us to be greatly moved. The subject which has engaged us is one of melan- choly tone and sound : but every word of God has its bright side also. The danger of relapse is great and formidable : no one in this life is exempt from it. Rich and poor, high and low, learned and unlearned, old and young, all are in danger of sliding back, of becoming backwarder than now in the Christian race, of actually drawing back unto perdition. We hear of it from time to time as a danger realized in sad experience. We receive sometimes from dying lips the confession, / was once what I am not now : in my youth I was converted: I began to serve God : I came to the Lord's Table, I attended religious and devotional meetings: I thought all was well with me. But I fell away : the cares of life, or the unkind/iess of others, or the discovery of hypocrisy in some whom I had thought Christians, or — it may be — perhaps, if we knew all, yet more often — some subtle bosom sin, insinuated itself and ate the heart out of my religion: by degrees I gave up my profession; I ceased to communicate; I ceased to pray ; I went with the mul- titude : and I lie here a backslider ; afraid and ashamed to lift up my eyes unto heaven ; the source of prayer dried within, and the ear of God closed. Such is the reality of the danger in its last and most fearful developement. But the sense of danger, realized betimes, is not a terror but a caution : it is given to us that we may be both warned and armed against it : and the same Scripture which tells us of the danger tells us also how to counteract it. 72 THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. [Serm. VI. When our Lord had been delivering to His dis- ciples the discourse which we still read in the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St John, on His relation to them as the bread of life ; and when, in answer to the cavils of those who would not understand, He had gone on into language still more difficult, and had spoken of eating His flesh and drinking His blood as the one condition of spiritual life ; it is recorded that from that time many of His disciples went back, and walked no more with Him. In their case, it seems to have been the depth and spirituality of His teaching which was the cause of stumbling; just as in other cases, it has been the holiness of His teaching, and the necessity of choosing between our sins and Christ ; the impossibility of keeping sin and yet being saved from it; of being cleansed from guilt without being washed from sin. The effect is the same : a relapse from Christ's service into some other, whatever the precise form of that other service be. They went back, and walked no more with Hi?n. Then He turned to the twelve disciples, those whom He had specially chosen to be with Him and to be His friends, and He said to them, Will ye also go away ? Are even ye not to be relied upon? must I see you also one by one turn away, and leave me alone ? Then Simon Peter answered Him, Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life. The danger of relapse was only a reason, with him, for flying more earnestly to the source and spring of life. To take shelter in Christ with redoubled faith and love was his remedy and his com- fort. May it be ours ! If we are in danger of relapse, Serm. VI.] THE DANGER OF RELAPSE. 73 yet, remember, that clanger is not an accident, and it is not a fatality : it is not a danger which need take us by surprise, and it is not a danger which must pre- vail against us. Say to Him whose we are, to Him who came to die for us, and who now lives again for us, Lord, I see the danger : I fed myself powerless : O keep me ! To whom can I go 7 If I turn away from Thee, I turn only to restlessness, to darkness, a?id to despair. Thou hast the words of life: O grant that neither the world, the flesh, nor the devil, neither tempta- tion nor infirmity, neither neglect of duty ?ior tamper- ing with evil, may draw me aside from Thee. Any one of these things is stronger than I; but in Thee is almighty strength! O keep me near Thee; keep me with Thee; when I faint, revive me ; when I stray, recall me; when my faith fails, strengthen it out of Thy fulness ; and, when some earthly idol would usurp Thy place within, give me grace to dethrone it, cost what it may I So pray- ing and so trusting we shall not be confounded. Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompence of reward. For ye have need of pa- tience, that, after ye have do?ie the will of God, ye might receive the promise. For yet a little while, and He that shall come will come, and will not tarry. Now the just shall live by faith ; but, if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him. But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition, but of them that believe to the savi?ig of the soul. Third Wednesday in Lent, February 27, 1 861. SERMON VII. THE SECRET LIFE AND THE OUTWARD. Genesis xliii. 30, 31. And he entered into his chamber, and wept there: and he washed his face, and went out, and refrai?ied himself. The whole of that history from which the text is taken is a picture of human life. Not indeed in its details of circumstance : for the life of Joseph was one marked by- stranger vicissitudes than fall to the common lot of man. But in its truth to nature; to the feelings of nature, good and bad; to the jealousies of nature, and to the selfish- nesses of nature, and to the cruelties of nature; and again, on the other side, to the sensibilities of nature, and to the humanities of nature, and to the tendernesses of nature ; the history of Joseph is a living picture still of man and of human life, and it will be read to the very end of time as one of the thousand indications of the naturalness of the Bible, as well as of the deep insight of God who made us into the wills and ways and woes of man. I have selected for this morning's meditation one single point in this delineation of human life; the contrast exhibited by the text between the secret life and the out- Serm. VII.] THE SECRET LIFE, <5rv. 75 ward life of each one of us; between the chamber and the banqueting room; between the man whom God sees and the man whom the world sees in each one of us. I have not done so for the sake of a beautiful sentiment, or a poetical dream ; but for a practical purpose, which I trust will be evident to all of us as the course of remark un- folds itself. Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn tipon his brother: and he sought where to weep, and he entered into his chamber, and wept there. And then he washed his face, and went out, and refrained himself, and said, Set on bread. Is it not a true account of many a life? Have not many of us, perhaps all of us at some time or other, had this double part to play; this weeping in the chamber, and this refraining of ourselves below; these heart's griefs known to God only, and this necessity of taking part, notwithstanding all, in the busy world of duty and of society? The heart knoweth Us own bitterness: and a stranger doth not intermeddle with its joy. There is a grief which can talk; but we never think of that grief as the sorest or the deepest. Most of us, perhaps, have or have had a grief of this kind; a grief patent and avowed, for which others could pity us, and for which we let them pity us. Of such a kind are the commoner disappointments of life, its obvious privations, most of its losses, most of its be- reavements. With these things others can sympathize: they have known something like them : at least they can appreciate the things in question; they can imagine what it would be to undergo, if they have not yet themselves undergone them. In these things, if there be a weeping 76 THE SECRET LIFE [Serm. VII. in the chamber, there is no need to disguise it below: it is expected of us that we should feel them : not to feel them would be a sign of insensibility rather than of fortitude. But these things, except in cases rarely fortunate, do not make the whole or the worst part of life's real sorrows. For all these things there is a remedy, if in all there is a smart: the assurance of a loving purpose in chastisement, of the benefit of a mixed or even bitter cup below, the prospect of a future compensation for life's troubles, of a future reunion with life's lost relations, is of itself not a nominal but a real solace under such calamities; and many, we trust, are they who find it. It is rather to the thought of secret sorrows that the text directs us ; sorrows of which the world, perhaps our nearest friends, know little or nothing in us; sorrows which however keenly felt in secret, must be disguised and suppressed in the company of others. It is not necessary or desirable, even in the way of general description, to strip off the veil from such dis- tresses. A very few words will characterize and classify them : and then we may turn intelligently to those aspects of the subject which are entirely useful and practical. i. The trouble of Joseph on the occasion spoken of in the text was one of the heart or affections. There was a beloved brother before him, whom he had not seen for many years, and to whom he could not yet unbosom himself with the full warmth of natural feeling. The pent- up love was overwhelming: it could only be relieved by a burst of tears: he sought where to weep; he entered into his chamber and wept there. How many of those who hear me can feel with him ! Where is the house in Serm. VII.] AND THE OUTWARD. 77 which affection is not the source of some secret trouble? How many a sister has had her youthful years entirely clouded by the coldness of a brother! What anguish does God witness in a thousand secret chambers from this one cause — love, natural love, unreturned, unacknowledged, unaccepted ! What pangs may be inflicted by a very little selfishness, a very little inconsiderateness, on the part of one fondly loved ! It is easy for those who go out from home into the varied interests of a busy life, to forget or even to be ignorant of sorrows which have no such chance of dissipation. It is easy (to adhere to the same illustra- tion) for a brother to think that he gives all he ought, discharges every Christian obligation, if he is tolerably obliging and good-tempered to the inmates of home when chance brings him there, and occasionally recognizes the tie of nature by a letter in his absence. And perhaps long experience, long patience, and long self-discipline, may at last make those acquiesce in this amount of affec- tion, who find that they must expect no more. But to all young people in this congregation I would take this opportunity of saying very seriously, Be well aware of the possible existence in others of a tenderness of feeling which is not your own : be well aware of the risk of over- looking or trampling upon such affection: be quick to notice the effect of your conduct and manner upon those with whom God in nature has allied you; and count it a great inhumanity, and therefore a great sin, to allow either temper or indifference or preoccupation of mind to make you add one jot or one tittle either to the dulness of an uneventful home-life, or to the burden of an over- charged spirit. This on the one side; to those who have 78 THE SECRET LIFE [Serm. VII. it in their power to wound. On the other side, to the weaker and perhaps younger, to the sister disappointed in her brother's affection, and even to the wife wounded sometimes by a husband, I would say in all tenderness, and simply with the view to the promotion of happiness, Be not (for your own sake) too expecting or too exact- ing : school yourself to patience : be prepared to find less than a home here: learn to look higher for your rest; even to One who always loves more than we love Him, One who loved first and will love last too. Your trouble is a real one: loneliness of heart, unrequited love, is a calamity : God sees it, God pities it : but be brave, in His strength, to face and to endure it, and do not put aside, in perverseness or in self-will, that offer of divine love which in the long run will be worth all else to you. 2. I have taken one example of a secret sorrow, as the text seemed to suggest, from the natural affections. And it is but a step from this to the next example, that of anxiety about the souls of others. Here again, we have only to look round, even if it were in a compa- ratively small congregation, and be quite sure that some heart echoes the words, and that some chambers, even of our own, could bear witness to the severity of the grief thus described. Are there not, for example, some Christian parents whose whole life is embittered by a secret misgiving as to the spiritual or even the moral well-being of a favourite son? Do we not know such cases ; cases in which perhaps a singularly engaging and endearing nature was alloyed by faults of temper, faults of feeling, faults of conduct, growing with the growth and strengthening with the strength, until at last they Serm. VII.] AND THE OUTWARD. 79 are developed in mature life into some definite habits of immorality and of ungodliness? Or cases in which a wilful childhood and a disobedient youth has ended in a total severance of all possibility of intercourse; in which the only chance of recovering a lost position has been the removal into a distant land, where nothing from home could follow the exile, save a mother's daily yearnings and nightly prayers, and tears? Or, to take another example with which the slightest acquaintance with humble life must make us too familiar, are there not amongst us, even between wives and husbands, instances of a constant, wearing, never ending, ever fresh anxiety, which can neither be avowed nor yet calmed? What is it to see signs of incipient intemperance, or of intempe- rance returned "to? signs of an evil spirit holding pos- session, or else of an evil spirit temporarily dispossessed only to return back with seven others? What must it be, not to stand by and watch (as a disinterested spectator might do) such a case, but to have to live with it, to have to be involved in it for good or evil, or, far worse — for love is not thus selfish — to see it creeping or hurrying to its own destruction, and feel oneself powerless to help or mitigate? What words could more aptly designate such a life of anxious watching, than those which speak of a weeping in the chamber and a refraining oneself below ; a couch watered with tears, yet a face which must smile by day that it may not tell its tale? Yes, well is it writ- ten of such a sufferer, that he went out and refrained himself; held himself in (for such is the figure) as with bit and bridle, that he might not reveal, that he might not betray. So THE SECRET LIFE [Serm. VII. 3. Unrequited love, undivulged anxiety, have fur- nished two examples of secret sorrow: the third and last illustration must be taken not from the heart but from the soul: and we must think of those distresses which come to us from the inward strivings of sin; from those restless workings of inward corruption, which make the life of so many one long toil and conflict. These too, these above all, are secret things. I speak not of sin yielded to and indulged: in this there may be little weeping in the chamber, and little refraining of oneself below. But O how little do they know of the heart of man, who are at a loss to understand the meaning of a weeping and mourning for inward sin! There must be indeed, in such a case, something of better desire, some longing after God's favour, some aspiration after the freedom of holiness. It is not the careless, the worldly-minded, the simply decent and moral, who can be expected to enter into these sorrows. But between the total slavery of sin and the perfect freedom of holiness there lie many long and dubious stages; between the dead sleep of natural indifference and the entire wakefulness of Christian maturity. All through that intermediate region the saying of the text may be realized in a thousand ways and degrees. More and more in proportion to the advance once made in the life of God, and to the extent of a subsequent de- clension from it. More and more in proportion to the keenness of the spiritual insight, and to the feebleness of the obeying will. More and more in proportion as conscience is strong and resolution weak; the sense of duty accurate, and the habit of self-government loose Serm. VII.] AXD THE OUTWARD. 8l and intermittent. In such cases, the chamber may well be a scene of weeping, though the life below and the life abroad may bear few traces of it. The sad con- demning retrospect of sinful indulgence, even if that indulgence has been but in heart, and has not actually stained the life afresh with sin; those bitter thoughts of co?iscience bom which with sinners wake at mom; the plain direction of duty, yet the experience alike and foresight of departure from it; these things recurring every day are enough to make life very wretched; most of all — the point now before us — do they account for much discomfort and much agony in that secret com- munion with God, which (strange though it may appear, yet with a truth beyond gainsaying) may still be main- tained in some sense even by the unstruggling or scarcely .struggling combatant. Xor is it he only who weeps, and has cause to weep, in his chamber. Where is he amongst us who does not in many things offend? Where is he who has not every night to repent of short- comings, and ever} r morning to dread his own unfaith- fulness? All probably, of those here present — and certainly of the best Christians amongst us it will be the most true — have had occasion to go softly and even to walk mournfully before their God on account of the repeated inconsistency between their profession and their life, between the thing which they prayed for, and the thing which they attained. These are among the secret sorrows of life. We tell them not, in detail, to our dearest friend. We trust to his taking them for granted: we dread the certain inaccuracies of human confession, and we dread the possible flatteries of its v. s. 6 82 THE SECRET LIFE [Serm. VII. reception by man. These things are our secrets: but they exist. They make a large part of our own existence, and we have to refrain ourselves not to show them. Let us hear the brief conclusion of the subject. It will have two parts. i. To some — to those who need the caution — I would say, Do not nurse your secret sorrows. They are not fancies in themselves, but they may be made fanciful. Sorrows of affection grow by pondering. They are loud calls to work. If this world cannot be what you would have it in enjoyment, take care at all events not to miss its object. It was never given to you to rest in: that belongs to a different life; a life, moreover, which you will miss altogether if you do not apprehend the object of this life. Your griefs will not be allayed, they will be fostered, by hugging them to your bosom. Make up your mind, by stern resolution, that this is evidently not to be a world of rest to you, whatever it may be to others. Then carry your sorrows out : take them with you to the house of God; perhaps you will leave them there : take them with you to the abodes of poverty, of sickness, of misery; there you will be asham- ed of them; there you will be half inclined to call them fancies, when you look upon those palpable hideous forms which are buffeting and torturing the mortal life of others. These people who are in the hands of want, of disease, of vice, of cruelty, have no time to think of sorrows of sentiment or of the heart: learn a lesson from them : it will alleviate if it cannot cure your griefs. And even as to those sorrows which are in no part fanciful; sorrows springing out of an unselfish and a Serm. VII. ] AND THE OUTWARD. 83 just anxiety; still even these, so far as they are mere anxieties, can do no good: turn them from cares into prayers, and then they will be altogether salutary; salu- tary to yourself, salutary (may we not believe, however hopeless in man's judgment?) to him for whom you are in anguish. Nay, even your struggles with indwelling corruption may be helped by the charge to forget (in some sense) the things behind, and to reach forth to the things before. To lash yourself for your offences, to prognos- ticate their repetition, if it stop there, is idle and unman- ly. Call upon God, and there is meaning in it, and hope. Say to yourself, / am not the creature of chance, 1 am not the sport of destiny: I am a man: I have a God: let me for this day fight like a man and trust in that God I Am I weak? yes, far more weak even than I know: but have I not heard that there is strength in God? Let me try. One day of hard fighting, of real struggling, will at least be bracing, if it be not decisive: God help me, for His Son's sake, by His Holy Spirit, and I will not yield without a struggle. While I lie here on the ground, mourning for the past, I am losing precious time: confess thyself, my soul, to the Lord: invoke His help as a real living thing, and get thee back to thy con- flict: soon the night cometh, whe?i no man can work, when no man can fight! ii. Finally, to stronger men, who have no such experiences of secret sorrow, whatever its cause and source, I would say, Beware of disregarding and des- pising those who have. Make room for others — make room even for the weak, the fanciful, or the morbid — in 6—2 8 4 THE SECRET LIFE, &e. [Serm. VII. this capacious world of ours. Live, and let live. Be tolerant, for Christ's sake, of moral feebleness. Be gentle, for Christ's sake, to the erring and the sinful. This in general. But, in particular, the subject on which we have dwelt says to you, and to all, Recognize the existence of secret sorrows as an explanation of many phenomena of character. Is the temper of one with whom you live less than perfect? Is there an inequality of spirits, is there an absence of mind, is there a heaviness and a silence, which displeases and irritates you? Be merciful to it. Perhaps, if you knew all, you would perceive in that bosom a lurking care, disappointment, or self-reproach, enough, and more than enough, to account for what you witness. The cheerfulness which there is may be all a self-refraining : the chamber may have a sadder tale to tell; of tears and watchings, of tormenting doubt or distracting fear. Respect what you see not. Jesus Christ bore our griefs and carried our sorrows: bear ye one another's, and so fulfil the law of Christ. In a spirit of consider- ation, of deference, of silent yet intelligible sympathy, of tenderness towards another's untold trials, of pity for another's undivulged temptations, in these things is the love of Christ well-nigh perfected: they who practise these things have learned of Him. And they who learn of Him partake also of His power: in His school you will yourself become a son of consolation: and sorrowful wounded hearts will take knowledge of you that you have been with Jesus. Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 10, 1861. SERMON VIII. REVERENCE. Exodus nr. 5. Put off thy shoes fro?n off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. The text is a call to reverence. I need hardly say how much that duty is dwelt upon in Scripture, both in the way of precept and of example. Let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: for our God is a consuming fire... Serve the Lord in fear: and rejoice tmto him with rrverence... The Lord reigneth; let the people tremble: He sitteih between the cherubims; let the earth be moved... God is very greatly to be feared in the council of His saints, and to be had in reverence of all them that are round about Him... Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob; who turned the hard rock into a standing water, and the flint-stone into a springing well... The Lord is in His holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before Him. We must all have been struck with the feeling 86 REVERENCE. [Serm. VIII. expressed towards God in the Old Testament. What a profound awe ! what a prostrate yet loving adoration ! what an admiring sense of His goodness! what a long- ing, what a hungering and thirsting, after the knowledge, after the sight, of Him ! Take only the example of him of whom the First Lessons for to-day and for some following Sundays contain the history. I know nothing more wonderful, nothing more touching, than the mind of that great and holy mediator of the first Dispensa- tion towards the God whom he served. What profound humility! what entire and absolute self-devotion! what a sense of the necessity of God's presence! what deep submission to the stroke of chastisement for sin! what a single desire that God's work should be done, what- ever might be man's portion ! I can scarcely conceive of the mind which is not affected by the record of his character as it is incidentally disclosed in the Books which bear his name. And how noble a supplement to those records is that 90th Psalm, which is headed, as you remember, A prayer of Moses the man of God; that well-remembered Psalm which many of us have heard read over the bodies of friends and relatives, Lord, Thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another: before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, Thou art God from everlasting, and world without end...O satisfy us with Thy mercy, and that soon: so shall we rejoice and be glad all the days of our life... Show Thy servants Thy work, and their children Thy glory. And the glorious majesty of the Lord our God be upon us: prosper Thou the work of our hands upon us, O prosper Thou our handy work 1 Serm. VIII.] REVERENCE. §7 My brethren, I must appeal to you whether there is amongst us at this day anything of this spirit of reverence. Where do we see it? Is it shown in our conduct? Is it shown in our language? Is it shown in our use of God's Word? Is it shown in our meetings for God's worship? Order there is: decency there is: God forbid it should be otherwise: but is there amongst us, even in this house of God, that deep awe, that heart-felt reverence which the text prescribes? Put off thy sJwcs from off thy feet, for the place whereon thoic standest is holy ground. Translate this charge from its oriental form into its spiritual sense, and what does it say to us ? Some have laboured, and, as I think, foolishly, to reintroduce under the Gospel a sort of exaggeration of that local reverence which belonged rather to the Law. They attract attention by their gestures and postures, their bendings of the head and knee, in Church, and more particularly at the Lord's Table, and imagine themselves in so doing to be either exercising or else learning a spirit of reverence. If they think so, we would not grudge them the help which they deem use- ful: but we would rather point out to them a more excellent way; one in which they may walk unosten- tatiously and simply, and perhaps attain that substance of which the other is at best the shadow. What is reverence? what are its ingredients, its component parts? What hinders and what helps it in us? And what are some of its blessings ? God Himself aid us in the endeavour to speak in His name upon some of these points ! 88 REVERENCE. [Serm. VIII. i. I need not say — for all agree in it — that Gospel reverence must be a thing of the heart. It seems to be compounded of two things; the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of ourselves. It is the contact between the sinful and the sinless. It is the access of a conscious transgressor to One who is altogether holy. It is the mind of a created being, who has also fallen, towards One whom he desires above all things still to belong to, still to return to, still to be with, and still to serve. I do not think it necessary to say more in the way of definition. O, my brethren, would that I could impress upon you my own deep conviction of the desirableness of this mind! How dreadful it seems that we should not all possess it ! When the thought of God forces itself or breathes itself upon our hearts, how dreadful does it seem — I might almost say, how impos- sible — that we should trifle before Him, and trifle with Him, as we do! I am sure the remembrance of our Sunday worship — though it is perhaps the best thing we have to show in the way of reverence — will be a very bitter thing to many of us some day! O these wanderings — O these vanities — O these murmurings — O these idolatries — which seem not only to hang about us here, but really to be more at home with us and more tyrannical to us here than anywhere — what shall we think of these things when we look back upon them with eternity open? Do you suppose that Moses the man of God worshipped in this way? Do you suppose that he who said, / beseech Thee, shew me Thy glory, and meant what he said — he who prayed, Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us, and meant as well as Serm. VIII.] REVERENCE. 89 uttered the prayer — knelt before God as we do, with the world all about him, with the flesh and even the devil busy in him while he prayed? And yet it ought to have been said, Among all that were born of women there was not a greater prophet nor a 7tiore holy man: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he I I know that it is a matter of great regret and great sorrow to many of you that this should be true. And be assured that we can all feel for one another, and feel with another, about it. How happy should we be, if a few plain words spoken by a fellow-sufferer and fellow-sinner might assist any one (for is not that the use of preaching?) in seeking and cultivating that good spirit of which we must all lament the rareness! 2. The hindrances to a spirit of reverence lie on the very surface of our life. Things that are seen obscure the things that are not seen. We cannot help feeling earthly things to be very real. What can be so real, we all say to ourselves, as this work, this person, this house and garden, this bright sun, this fair world, which is here before my eyes? Compared with these things, all other knowledge, we think, can be but guess- ing. The reality even of the Maker is put out of sight by the thing made. This is general. Then there is an early habit of inattention or of half-attention even in religious wor- ship. I do not see how it is to be altogether avoided, but there is no doubt that children's prayers, and still more children's attendance at Church, must be, in part, of this character. The outward habit has to be acquired CjO REVERENCE. [Serm. VIII. before the inward, the formal, before the spiritual. Then there is no marked moment at which the child's prayers turn into the man's prayers; at which the inattention which was once a want of understanding has become an inattention consciously culpable: and thus, unlike St Paul, we do not, in this respect, when we become men, altogether put away childish things: we keep the two together: and the same man will often exemplify the sad combination, of an intellect mature and vigor- ous, and a devotion absolutely puerile and childish. Irreverence is fostered also by everything approach- ing to unreality of expression in prayer. It is one of the many advantages of our Church Prayers that they are for the most part extremely simple, and (what is not less important for a mixed congregation) perfectly level to humble spiritual attainments. There is little or no- thing in them which it is hypocrisy for a very humble Christian to use. An advanced and devoted Christian finds them enough for him, but a backward and very failing Christian can use them without feeling them unreal. There is something perhaps in the mere fact of their being prescribed to us which gives us confi- dence in using them. It is not so always with other prayers. It is not so always even with our own private prayers: we are apt, some of us, to use expressions which, if we examine them, we shall find to be beyond our mark; beyond the mark of our desire, I mean, and not only of our experience. All such prayers are irreverent. They do not express the mind of a poor sinner kneeling before his holy God. They are more or less the prayers of one who thinks wickedly that Serm. VIII.] REVERENCE. 9* God is such an one as himself, and can be misled by- words, when the heart is not in them. Amongst other causes of a want of reverence, I must not omit the mention of an excessive indulgence of what is commonly called a sense of the ridiculous. In mode- ration, that is no fault: it has many advantages: it keeps a person from many follies: it is often the com- panion of a very sound judgment, and of a great capacity for good counsel. But where it is allowed full scope, without a restraining hand of piety and of charity, a sense of the ridiculous may become a very serious fault and risk. There are some people who can see only the ludicrous side of things. Human life itself has for them no grave aspect. They can turn everything into ridicule ; until, at least, one of the great tempests beats upon them themselves. Then they feeL But that feeling is then selfish. And the predominance of the other, the opposite feeling, has perhaps by that time eaten out the very heart of reverence within. A man may lie on the ground, and lash himself for his sins, and sigh and cry for his sorrows, and yet not possess one spark of reverence for God, or even of real consciousness of His being and presence. Reverence, to be learned at all, must be learned by effort and by patience. And I may add one special caution with reference to the intrusion of levity into sacred subjects. A man's heart ought to have one sanctuary. Even if he is not yet a devoted man, he ought to keep just one spot in his heart as it were clear for God: he ought to allow nothing else to possess it, even if God has not yet 9 2 REVERENCE. [Serm. VIIT. taken up His abode there. Whatever else he jests about, he ought to keep the name of God, and the Pro- vidence of God, and the Word of God, and the servants of God, safe from profanation. The letting in of com- mon light upon this province; the admission of profane words or thoughts into that which ought to be a holy subject; is not only a decisive mark of present irrever- ence, but it is also a bar to future reverence: he will not find it easy, even if God should give him repentance, to recover the strength of his religious instincts or the purity of his religious regards. This is one of those ways in which a prudent man makes provision for future contingencies: he will not fling away the chance of wanting God hereafter, even if he can dispense with Him in the time that is. 3. I have said that we, all of us, more or less, mourn over a want of reverence. There are times when we terribly miss it. I am sure we some of us feel that, if we could only know what a holy awe of God is, we would submit patiently to a want of comfort and to a want of confidence. There is nothing so real as godly fear. It introduces us into that which is within the veil. A sense of God's reality, a sense of God's nearness — of His power, of His holiness, of His right over us, of His concern for us, of His future judgment — is the foundation of all piety and therefore also of all peace. How miserable, how consciously condemning, is the want of this! To kneel down, knowing that we are in need, in weakness, in darkness, in sin, and yet not to be able to feel that we are before any one; not to be able to find the throne of power, much less the Serm. VIII ] REVERENCE. 93 throne of grace; to lie there prostrate and grovelling, yet by ourselves — no light above or within to mark the presence, much less to indicate the will to hear — this is very wretched: and I know that it is no fiction, no fancy: it is the case with many : not only have they no Saviour, they can find no God: they have let themselves alone, they have let themselves drift and go, too long, and now they are being filled with their own ways and eating as it were of their own perverseness. But God would not have even these left here, left thus. Reverence may, by His gracious help through Christ by the Holy Spirit, be gained — yes, regained. We bless Him for that hope. We do believe that He desires not our death but our life : O let us come to Him ! We must practise reverence, as well as pray for it. We must always recollect ourselves thoroughly before we begin to worship. In private, we must, if I might so express it, meditate and study God's pre- sence. We must not begin our prayers without trying to set God clearly before us as a living Person to whom we are coming, to whom we are about to speak. When I pray, said a poor person well instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, / tell God what He is, and what I am, and what I want, and what He has proniised, and what He has done. No account of prayer was ever more thorough. And for the present, think of those first words, I tell God what He is: I count over, as it were, the particulars and items of His character: I set Him before me as what He is : I make quite sure of my ground by a preliminary recollection of the almighty power, the boundless mercy — but, yet before 94 REVERENCE. [Serm. VIII. these, the living presence — of Him to whom I am about to address myself. And then, everything which we know or can learn of God may be made a help to reverence before Him. We ought to reflect and meditate upon His qualities as they are set before us in Scripture; not only in a summary and combined form, but in items and particu- lars: we ought to make these things, in their full and ample expanse, a subject of meditation, so that they may impress us as they ought, and dwell with us, even as we treasure up in our inmost hearts the features of the face, and the beauties of the character, of some loved friend, never weary of recounting them to our- selves, and gathering from the repeated survey of the whole a sense of the reality of the living man, over which even absence, even separation, even death itself, has at last no power. And thus we pass from that help to reverence which is found in setting God fully before us, on each parti- cular occasion, as the object of prayer; and from that help to reverence which is found in the occasional study of His character and attributes in detail as they are revealed to us; to a third and last consideration; the help which a spirit of reverence will derive, above all, from repeated personal acquaintance and intercourse with God Himself. The man who is most reverent will be the man who knows God best and has seen most of Him. Where there is anything of unsound- ness in a character, anything concealed and glossed over, anything of mere manner and profession and false appearance to recommend it, there, of course, increased Serm. VIII.] REVERENCE. 95 knowledge is fatal to respect. There the only hope for a person is distance, and familiarity does but breed contempt. But it is not so with true characters, even amongst men. There are those, and many, we thank God, are they, "whom the more we know the more we honour: persons, sometimes, of less attractive form or manner, but who are true to the backbone, and whom the most intimate knowledge only serves to exalt immea- surably in our esteem. If this can be ever so with men, what must it be with God! The only thing that can ever make God less than reverenced by His crea- tures, is ignorance of Him; ignorance involuntary or wilful; that ignorance which is the want of knowledge, or that still commoner ignorance which is the rejection and contempt of knowledge. In proportion as you see more of God; in proportion as you extend and multiply your opportunities of deep and hearty con- verse with Him ; in proportion as you add a little (with a loving and earnest heart) to the length or the frequency of your daily times of prayer; in the same degree will you find that you are growing in reverence for Him, appreciating more justly each feature of His character, and learning more happily to harmonize each with each. 4. I end with two brief remarks. Reverence is the pervading tone of heaven. It predominates over every other characteristic, save love alone. And even love itself needs reverence to solemn- ize without chilling it. / saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple. Above it stood the scrap hi ms: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered 9 6 REVERENCE. [Serm. VIII- his feet, and with twain he did fly. Four wings for reverence, but two for flight! It is a true parable. Reverence for unworthy objects is the curse of earth: reverence for Him who deserves it all is the very per- fection of heaven. Lastly, reverence was characteristic on earth of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. What an awe of God filled and sometimes overwhelmed His soul ! Trust, obedience, submission, love, unwearied zeal, unwearied prayer — yet, amongst and above all these, what a paramount and pervading reverence! Father — my Father — my Father which is in heaven — your heavenly Father — my Father and your Father, my God and your God — what a tone of reverence breathes in the very sounds ! In His record- ed words addressed to the Father; in His sense of the necessity of repeated and prolonged intercourse with His Father; in those long nights of prayer in the desert or on the mountain, after long days of toil in the city or by the way ; what a token do we see, what an infallible sign, of reverence and godly awe! Well might it be written of Him, that in the days of His flesh He offered up supplications a?id prayers with strong cry- ing and tears, and was heard in that He feared — heard (as it might be given) for His reverence. Now He has gone back into the invisible, the inaccessible glory: and it is ours to approach Him with the same reverence with which He on earth approached God. That all men should honour the Son even as they honour the Father ...He that honour eth not the Son honour eth ?iot the Father, which hath sent Him. Now the earlier adoration, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which Serm. VIII.] REVERENCE. 97 was, and is, and is to come, is supplemented and com- pleted by the ampler doxology of the Gospel, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be u?ito Him that sitteth tipon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever. Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 17, 1861. SERMON IX. FAMIL Y PR A YER. i Samuel ii. 30. Them that honour me I will ho?iour. This is God's rule. Them that honour Him He will honour. Let a man make it his object in life, to bring to God all the honour that he can; to show that he remembers Him and regards Him and reverences Him, even when it is not likely to be noticed, even when it is inconvenient to himself, even when there might be many excuses found for postponing, omitting, or forgetting it; let a man live thus, and God who is thus honoured by him will in turn, as it is here written, honour him. He will cause men to see that a life of remembering God is, on the whole, in the long run, a happy life and a successful life and an honoured life. In early years such a man may have gone through much: he may have been overlooked, he may have been passed by, he may have been despised; or again, he may have been pointed at, he may have been opposed, he may have been ridiculed : but, let him have held on his way quietly and stedfastly, let him Serm. IX.] FAMILY PR A YER. 99 have held his principles firmly, spoken the truth in love, and above all things kept manfully to his great object, that of bringing to God Himself all the honour that he can; and you will find that the path of that man has been ever a smoothing and brightening path; whatever his youth may have been, his mature age has been respected, his hoar hairs honoured, and his dying day bewailed. Them that honour me I will honour. And we all know how the opposite half of the truth has been made good in every generation. Tliey that despise me shall be lightly esteemed. There are those whose whole life has been one continued despis- ing of God. They have gone on as though it were quite certain that no one of God's words was true. They have lived as if this world were all. And not only so, but as if, even with regard to this world, even with regard to such happiness as can be found below, God knew nothing, and might be entirely disregarded without fear of consequences. To what particular acts of folly or disobedience they may have surrendered themselves, is of less moment: that has depended upon a thousand things; inclination, influence, rank, wealth, companions, circumstances: but one thing has not varied: they have disregarded God, they have practi- cally despised God: they have said in their hearts, either that He cared not, or that He knew not, or that He was not, and have lived from day to day on that supposition, on that principle. Has not the advancing life, has not the old age, has not the death-bed, has not the memory, of those men, proved, over and over 7—2 IOO FA MIL Y PR A YER. [Serm. IX. again, the truth of the saying, They that despise me shall be lightly esteemed? Has not the respect of men been found to a remarkable degree to come and to go along with the approval of God? Not uniformly, not perfectly; or the judgment of human actions would be present, not future; exercised by the world that is, instead of waiting for the world that shall be. But still, when we read in Scripture of sinners awakening from the dust of the earth to shame and everlasting contempt, do we not feel that there is a foretaste for them of that contempt below? that, even in this life, there is an instalment of despite for them that have despised God, and an anticipation at least of that shame which is hereafter to be the portion of those who have here been ashamed of Christ. These remarks are perhaps too general to have found their way into the conscience. I proceed to a special application of the subject, for the sake of which I have chosen it from one of the Lessons for the day. The topic of my Sermon this morning is Family Prayer. I have reason to fear that it is one which will come home to some hearts in this congregation with reproof and conviction. Let them not therefore cast it from them. Let them listen seriously to the few words now to be spoken, and, according as they shall judge, so let them act. God grant us all grace to listen in this practical, honest, and earnest spirit ! I need not spend a moment in explaining what is meant by the words, Family Prayer. They mean that prayer which is offered to God by an assembled family or household. Such devotion occupies an intermediate Serm. IX.] FA MIL Y PR A YER. 101 place between private and public worship. It partakes in some degree of the character of either. It is carried on at home, but not in the chamber: it is carried on with others, yet not in the congregation. It has about it much of seclusion, but it aims not at secrecy. The worshippers are not all of one age, or capacity, or station, or descent: but they have all something in common: they form together one household, one society, one community, combined together partly by ties of nature, and partly by those of service required and service rendered. It is a great mistake to suppose that the union of a family, even with reference to those members of it who are not made so by birth, is a slight or feeble bond. It is a connection, not only of mutual advantage, but also, where it is rightly understood, of great kindliness and of strong attachment When a united family kneels down to pray to God — parents and children, master and apprentices, mistress and servants, together — it is not a mere collection of iso- lated units: there is a reality in the connection, there is a unity in the aggregation, and therefore also there is a meaning in the worship incommunicable to any other. I may take it for granted, further, that family wor- ship has its well understood and (in all main features) uniform course. The reading of some portion of God's Word, with or without comment; and then a prayer read or uttered aloud, either from the heart of the master of the family, or from our Church Prayer-Book, or some other manual of devotion such as is every- where to be met with; this is the common order of 102 FA MIL Y PR A YER. [Serm. IX. such worship, and, however it may differ or vary in its details, its general tenor may be assumed to be the same for all. Now let me suggest a few plain reasons for esta- blishing and maintaining this sort of worship in every family. x. And let me place first, as the text teaches us to do, this paramount consideration: family worship honours God. We are far too apt, all of us, to leave out of sight this object of worship. We ask, and we do well to ask, What can I get by prayer? How can I make it most profitable to my own soul? What shall I have therefore? And prayer is meant to do us good; to bring back an answer; an answer direct, personal, and substantial. But this is not all: and perhaps I might say, this is not the highest office of prayer. The Lord's Prayer itself begins with three petitions con- cerning God, His name, His kingdom, His will, before it says one word of our wants; of daily bread, of forgiveness, of deliverance from evil. It is a very great and a very high object to keep up the remembrance of God upon earth : to see that each member of every family, however much he may neglect private prayer, shall yet be reminded of God's reality and of God's truth every day: to provide that in every home (if it might be so) in a particular parish or town there should be, as it were, an altar built to no unknown God, and the fire of a periodical sacrifice kindled upon it in the sight of all who dwell therein. Family worship is an honour due to God from those who are living together Serm. IX.] FAMIL Y PR A YER. 103 upon His bounties, and who, collectively as well as individually, have a state and a life before Him. When the bell rings for worship at the appointed time, break- ing off other occupations, and silencing other sounds, we recognize in it a voice which says to us, God is, and is your God: Christ is, and is your Lord and your Saviour: the Holy Spirit is, and is your Sanctifier and your Comforter. Thus, if not otherwise, twice in each day, is the call of conscience made audible to the care- less, and the reality of things unseen proclaimed to men tied and bound by the material and the temporal. 2. Again, fami/y worship elruates and consecrates and (in one word) Christianizes fa?nily life. What a poor thing, taken in itself, is the work which fills our day ! I will put aside now the thought of a statesman's life, which may seem to be really engaged in great matters, and the thought of a clergy- man's life, which has to do directly and constantly, so far as its great object is concerned, with the souls of men. I will speak rather of the occupations of business (commonly so called) for men, and of house- hold affairs for women. What an expenditure of time and thought, of capacities and abilities, upon subjects trivial, transitory, perishable! Which of these things will be of importance, which of these things will be in existence, ten years, or perhaps ten days, hence? And yet they must be done. Much depends, for present comfort and for present well-being, upon a punctual discharge of worldly business, and upon the conveniences and decencies of a nicely ordered home. Let no man despise the occupations of a man of business or of a io4 FA MIL Y PR A YER. [Serm. IX. domestic woman. In these things we live: only a fool despises them. But yet, my brethren, but yet, how poor, if this were all ! if there were no God for the soul to serve in these things, or no future world for which this is but the porch and the vestibule ! Now in family prayer this background of faith is made for the time the foreground. When those who have been toiling through their little, carnal, domestic duties, sit together to hear a portion of God's Holy Word read, and then kneel together to ask for His forgiveness, His help, His blessing, and His Holy Spirit, how are they reminded of the elevating and consecrating prin- ciple which pervades, or ought to pervade, human life in all its parts! how are they reconciled to common duties, when they see above, behind, or within each, that thing which makes the mean great, the common sacred, and the earthly heavenly! how cheerfully do they go forth again to the appointed tasks of time, in the sure and certain hope of an immortality of rest, of blessedness, and of glory! And there is another point also. Who that has lived, as all have lived at some time, in a family, can be unaware of the various little jars and collisions which the coexistence in one household of various tastes, tempers, aad characters must necessarily, con- stituted as we are, involve? Every day brings with it some experience, expected or unexpected, because old or new, of contrarieties of wish and will between different inmates of one home, which must either be endured by an effort of principle, or combated with discomfort, dissension, at last perhaps with dislike and Sf.rm. IX.] FA MIL Y FRA YER. enmity. It is only amongst persons very imaginative and very unreal in their notions of life, that family coexistence is treated as if it were all peace or all sunshine. It is not so: and, to speak of one important portion, more particularly, of every large household, its inferior members, its dependents, its servants, could it be expected to be so? Gathered together, in that case at least, from various quarters, to perform together a stated hired service, what is there to make it probable that all their likings and dislikings will be harmonious, or that, if not so, they will feel pleasure in sacrificing their own to another's? We expect too much in look- ing for these things to come naturally. We ought to recognize the difficulty, and in a Christian spirit to meet it. And again I would ask, What expedient is so likely by God's blessing to operate powerfully towards the Christianizing of a family — for that is what w r e mean when we speak of diffusing a spirit of kindness and mutual forbearance throughout it — as that gather- ing together, night and morning, before the throne of a common Father, in the name of a common Saviour, and with prayer for the inward grace of a common Spirit? Often, as they there kneel, will those who have a little forgotten themselves (as we speak) towards one another feel themselves to be silently reconciled, and some early opportunity will be seized of performing one of those little acts of mutual kindness which are often the pledge, better than words, of a restored harmony and a forgiving spirit. 3. I will add a third reason. Family worship has God's promise, and will draw down God's blessing. io6 FA MIL Y PR A YER. [Serm. IX. It is not only an honouring of God, and it is not only beneficial in what may be called its indirect effects upon the social life of a household, but it is itself an act of real communication with God, commanded by Him, and sure of His blessing. Wherever two or three are gathered together in the name of Christ, there is He in the midst of them. That which is taken for granted with regard to private prayer is expressly promised and asserted of social prayer; as though it needed a stronger encouragement, or as though (might we not almost say it?) it were in itself a yet higher act of faith. Let us never lose sight of the direct effects of prayer in the indirect. Prayer has a thousand minor and collateral uses: but it has one primary meaning, and one definite object. It asks for something ; and it expects an answer. Even thus it is with the particular mode of prayer which is now before us. If family prayer is worth anything, either as an honour to God, or in its influence upon a household, it must be because it is prayer; not only a thing bearing that name; not the repetition of a few lifeless sounds, as a propriety and a decency, at certain stated hours, by a family calling itself Christian; but the confession of real sins, the avowal of real wants, the outpouring of real desires, to a God believed in and reverenced, through a Saviour known by those who are present, and trusted in. It is not altogether unnecessary, I well know, to enforce strongly this obvious consideration. The direct object of family prayer is, God's blessing. O who shall measure the full compass of that brief phrase — God's blessing? Who- Serm. IX.] FAMILY PRAYER. 107 does not know the difference between wealth and God's blessing? between prosperity and God's blessing? between domestic love and God's blessing? To feel, within the limits of one's own home, that God's blessing dwells there; that He in whom, whether as friend or foe, we must live and move and have our being, is not an enemy but a Friend; that whatever we have, His smile rests upon it; whatever we do, He precedes and fol- lows it, He approves and He prospers it; that the life which is lived within the sacred precincts of home is a life crowned with His favour, and therefore sweet, therefore happy; this indeed is a comfort worth praying for, and this is that which family prayer daily invokes, and which (I fear we must add) without family prayer can scarcely be. The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich: and He addeth no sorrow with it. I am firm in the hope, my brethren, that the mention of this subject to-day, as I know that it is not unseason- able, so will be followed by some marked results in the week which shall follow. Let it not be for nothing that your family will have heard this charge to-day laid upon you, that you institute for them an opportu- nity of united worship. Let it be a help to you to be aware that they will themselves expect it of you. You know that your conscience has not been altogether easy in the neglect of this duty. A little shyness — very intelligible, very natural, but still not to be yielded to — is all that has, for some time past, stood between you and the establishment of family worship. That shyness has only been waiting, I trust, for some outward appeal to demolish it. To-day you have heard it. Now there- lo8 FAMILY PRAYER. [Serm. IX. fore I will ask you to lose no time in acting upon the call. Life is short: sudden death is too common amongst us, to be called a shock or a surprise: set your house in order, for, very soon, soon at the latest, soon whatever be the notice, soon you shall die and not live. Do not have on your conscience any neglect- ed or (which is much the same thing) any postponed duty. It will lie very heavy on you then. Do not have to feel then, that, in addition to any personal sins you may have to answer for — slackness in private devo- tion, acts of injury to your own soul secret or open — you have also to excuse yourself for an habitual neglect of the souls of your family, for having starved them by a denial of the means of grace, whether as ministered in the congregation, or as provided by yourself at home. These are thorns in dying pillows: take heed lest yours be strewn with them. I anticipate many blessings from an increase of this family religion amongst us. I do not indeed con- fuse the terms family prayer and fa?nily religion. There may be punctuality in the one, and no life in the other. But, without the one, the other can scarcely be. If the family are not gathered for worship; if there is no recognition, in any particular house, of God as the God of the family; then consider how greatly you are aggravat- ing the risk of the separate members of the family not worshipping God, not serving God, for themselves. Personal religion is a distinct thing, in some senses, from family religion : we can imagine a family in which its separate members served God in secret, but which nevertheless had no public recognition pf Him: and, Serm. IX.] FA MIL Y PR A YER. 109 even on that least formidable of all suppositions, -we should feel that there was a want, a defect, a fault, in the community, though it was well covered and to a certain extent redeemed by the individual spirit of devotion. But how improbable is that supposition! It is very easy for a careless master to say, / have no family worship, but I hope we all serve God equally well in private: has that master ever seriously reflected upon the opportunities which his household enjoy of serving God in secret? Has each child, has each apprentice, has each servant, his place for private worship, and his time for private worship? Are you ignorant that in many cases there may be interruptions offered, by other inmates of the same chamber, to the exercise of individual worship? that in all cases there are tempta- tions, strong temptations, to neglect it; work beginning at an early hour, and hours of rest too short already* to leave much margin for secret prayer night and morning: and, when the day has once begun, and the tasks of the day have set in, and each one is hurrying to and fro to discharge household duties, or is a close prisoner in the shop or in the counting-house, with scarcely leisure so much as to eat, it is a mockery to talk of moments being spared for devotion, unless the piety, unless the charily, unless the humanity, of the employer secures them for all by making it a rule of the house that at certain times all shall assemble for worship? Then, while all other sounds are hushed in the one office of reading the Word of God and of prayer, there will be secured at least one brief interval, two brief intervals, in each day, for self-recollection and no FA MIL Y PR A YER. [Serm. IX. for communing with God: and, if the hearts of any should wander away to vain things, you, at least, will be blameless: or if, on the other hand, the hearts of any should seize that period of quietness for a deeper and more personal self-recollection than the words which are in his ears, and which are designed generally for all, could furnish, still He who seeth in secret will accept the offering which gives what it has and does what it can : and yours, in any case, will be the happi- ness of feeling that you, by word and by example, have made that prayer possible which else would have been impracticable; you have smoothed the path of life for one who might else have missed it; you have drawn down upon your house and upon your heart that promised blessing, He that watereth shall be watered also himself ...Them that honour me I will honour. Third Sunday after Trinity, June 16, 1861. SERMON X. WA YWARDNESS AND WISDOM, St Luke vii. 35. But wisdom is justified of all her children. The preaching of our Lord was extremely simple. Always grave, always reverent, always, in the best of senses, dignified, it was yet, at the same time, always level to human capacities, just because it disdained not to address human nature and to draw its illustra- tions from human life. Processes of husbandry or of domestic economy, occupations of poor people and of working men, operations of nature and of Providence, incidents of fortune and instincts of the heart, all were used by Him as illustrations of divine truth, and no- thing regarded as too mean or too common to be elevated and consecrated into a vehicle of holy doctrine. The context affords a singular example of this sort of adaptation. There the very games of children are laid under contribution for a sacred purpose. The pastimes of childish leisure, and the whims and caprices which are sometimes to be noticed in them, are used as an illustration of the temper and conduct of the 112 WA YWARDNESS AND WISDOM. [Serm. X. men of that age towards God and His dispensations. I beg your attention for a moment to the passage itself; one not entirely easy of explanation, nor always rightly understood. Whereicnto shall I liken the men of this generation, and to what are they like? It is as though the all-wise Teacher were Himself for the moment at a loss how to characterize the disposition of His generation. It is like the question which He sometimes put to His dis- ciples before working a miracle. From whence shall we satisfy these men with bread here in the wilderness? ... And this He said to prove him ; to test the faith of a disciple ; for He Himself knew what He would do. And thus in the passage before us : though He asked for a comparison, yet He Himself knew what He would say. They are like children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept. We have tried all ways of pleasing you, gay and grave, and you would accept none. We played you a lively air, and you would not dance; a pathetic dirge, and not a tear fell. We offered to play at marrying, or to play at burying; we would imitate a wedding festivity, or else a funeral solemnity ; you would have neither: so unsociable, so unaccom- modating, so wilful, so crossgrained ! Even thus is it with you grown-up men. You are towards God just what these little perverse wayward' children are to their companions. God has tried with you all methods. He sent you one messenger, who was all austerity, all gloom: John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor Serm. X.] WAYWARDNESS AND WISDOM* 1*3 drinking wine: he was a man of the wilderness, express- ing by his own garb and deportment the severity of the message with which he was sent to a self-righteous and a self-pleasing age : and you, instead of recognizing the fitness of that character, instead of being awed by it into attention, reverence, and obedience, instead of saying, God hath done all things well, teaching as much by the demeanour as by the doctri?ie of His messen- ger — instead of this, ye say, He hath a devil; you ascribe the isolation of the prophet to moroseness, and morose- ness to possession. Again God speaks to you, and, this time, speaks in His Son. He adopts now a different channel for His utterance, 'and invests with a different character the person of His representative. TJie Son of man is come eating and drinking: He who comes with tidings of salvation, He who not only calls to repentance but offers forgiveness, He whose mission is to human life as a whole, that He may raise, that He may transform, that He may consecrate it all to God, must mix in that life : He must not summon men out of the world to speak with Him in the wilderness, but rather visit them in their world, and show them by His own example how they may be in the world yet not of it: He therefore came eating and drinking, mingling with men in those hours of relaxation in which yet more than in business or in devotion they speak as they feel and show themselves as they are. But with what result? Did those who cavilled at the austerity of the Baptist hail the more genial freedom of the Saviour? No, the caviller cavils still, and says, as he sees the Divine Teacher seated at the marriage-feast v. s. 8 ii4 WA YWARDNESS AND WISDOM. [Serm. X. in Cana, or eating bread in the Pharisee's house, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a f riend of publicans and sinners/ Thus it is, and thus it will ever be, with the unregenerate heart of sinful man. He has his excuse always ready for putting aside the call of God. If he cannot quarrel with the message, he will find fault with the messenger: if the words are undeniably sound and wholesome, he will find something to impeach in the dress or the deportment. Meanwhile there are those who judge a more righteous judgment. Wisdom is justified of all her children. The wisdom of God in each and all of His dispensations is justified, that is, recognized, felt, and owned, on the part of all those who are truly children of wisdom. The wise justify God's wisdom. They see that in all that He does He does well and He does wisely. They quarrel not with the roughness of the Baptist: they suspect not the gentleness of Christ. They see that each in its place suited the work of each. The presence of an Elijah would have been incongruous at a banquet: the home of the Redeemer could not have been in the desert. God placed each where each was fitting: and they who had gone forth with tears of repentance to be baptized of John in Jordan confessing their sins, returned to listen, seated at the feet of Jesus in the temple-courts or in the home of Capernaum or of Bethany, to the gracious words which told of life for sinners and of a God well pleased for His sake with man. My brethren, I have thought that the passage thus brought before us in one of the Lessons for the day Serm. X.] WAYWARDNESS AND WISDOM. 1 15 contained some good and seasonable instruction for us who are here assembled before God. May He by His Holy Spirit bring it home to our hearts ! We have here a contrast presented. There is on the one side the perverseness, the waywardness, of man; his disposition to cavil at all God's appointments, especially at those which concern religion, revelation, and the soul; his readiness to complain of each as inappropriate, inadequate, inconclusive, or unreason- able ; his proneness to say of each, If it had been thus, and not thus, it would have been more satisfactory, more impressive, or more convincing; I should have felt it so, and God, if He had sought my good, would have thus arranged it. On the other side, there is the sympathy of wisdom with wisdom; the kindred and affinity which exists between the voice of God in His Word and the voice of God in the heart and conscience of His creatures; the certainty that what God speaks, and the way in which He speaks — the persons by whom and the circumstances amidst which He speaks — will commend itself to those who are wise indeed, wise in the humility of a true self-knowledge, wise in the genuine insight of an illumination from above. The waywardness of which our Lord here speaks is more or less in all of us. In some it is a prevailing and predominant habit of mind. We have seen it in its working towards men. There are those — and they are the torment of families — who are possessed by that unhappy temper which takes everything wrong. They are always imagining slights and suspecting insults. They can receive nothing in a simple, straightforward, 8-2 Il6 WAYWARDNESS AND WISDOM. [Serm. X. natural sense. They are always annoyed that this has not been done, rather than that. If they have not arranged a thing themselves, they can perceive nothing but faults in it. They give it to be understood that, if they had had the doing of it, it would have been differently and far better done. Without speaking their thoughts plainly, they wear a look of offence, which is far more trying to others than any anger or any censure. These are the wilful, the wayward, the per- verse characters, as shown in human life towards human persons. But that which we all dislike, and feel the discomfort of, in human intercourse, we are all, more or less, guilty of towards God. We show it in reference to all God's appointments. We have long thought, If I had but this, I should be happy. If I could but gain this one object, this one step in life, this one position or emolument or affection, I should be fully satisfied, I should want nothing more. It comes — it is given — the wish is gratified : do we want nothing more? O, behind the first reach of that moun- tain summit, there stretches yet another and another and another: to have gained the height which we saw from below, is only to come in sight of a second, and then of a higher still, and yet a higher: he who begins to climb must climb on, or he can but despise the earlier ascent which once seemed so important. Nay, do we not hear of something worse than new desires growing out of old attainments? Who has not known what it is to find the character of an object changed as we grasp it, and to pass from charging God foolishly for not giving, into a yet more sinful murmuring against Serm. X.] WA Y WARD NESS AND WISDOM. 117 Him for having listened to our desire? The wayward mind is never satisfied : great need have we, even with regard to earthly matters, to say, Not my will, 0 Lord, but Thine be done! There are those who, in reference to outward things, justify God's wisdom instead of setting up their own. There are those who say, He has judged better for me than I could have judged for myself: this which He has denied would never have made me happy: this which He has given is the very best thing: it must be so : for has not He, my Father, ordered it? But it is far more distressing, and scarcely less com- mon, to see the wayward spirit running on into the affairs of the soul. It is impossible to conceive any- thing more painful than the feeling which some persons cherish as to God's treatment of them morally and spiritually. How often have we heard a young person complain of the strength of particular evil tendencies felt within, as though it were a proof of God's want of love, almost of God's injustice! We have heard that person refer in no submissive tone to the more favourable religious circumstances of another. Not only in refer- ence to the superior character of parents, friends, or companions; to the better example daily witnessed, or the more abundant advantages of Christian instruction. No, the natural constitution of the character has been made a ground of complaint. An irritable or morose temper has been laid, almost in terms, at God's door. An excitability of temperament which makes certain temptations more powerful, or a languor and indolence of habit which makes all manner of exertion more toil- some, than is the case with others, has been expressly n8 WAYWARDNESS AND WISDOM. [Serm. X. charged upon Nature: and what do we know of Nature, save that it is God's order? Men have excused them- selves for their faults by their faults. They have found an apology for sins in tendencies to sin. They have said, If I had had the amiable disposition of this person, or the cold temperament of that person, I should have had no trouble in being good. And perhaps that other person may be saying — you, if that regret or that wish of yours had been listened to, would probably have been saying now — If I had the energy of this nature or the fire of that, this indomitable spirit or that impatience of repose, I should not suffer as I do from the difficulty of being an earnest and a zealous Christian. There is no end to these things; these fruitless wishes for a different moral constitution, or these recriminations upon Nature for our faults and sins. It is not only that they are vain: it is, that they are perverse, and it is, that they are ungrateful. Each one of them can be inverted; and instantly would be so, if the opposite were our condition. These com- plaints from human hearts are ever rising into the ear of the Lord of Sabaoth, and they sound there like the caprices and irritabilities of little children, whose companions say of them that nothing will satisfy; the grave and the gay are alike distasteful; We have piped unto you, and ye have not da?iced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented. The wise in heart view all these things in a different spirit. They know- that no one is free from tendencies to evil, and no one free from hindrances to good. They know that in these tendencies and in these hindrances lies man's Serm. X.] IVA YWARDNESS AND WISDOM. 119 earthly struggle: through these things resisted he must serve God; through these things vanquished he must enter heaven. They see also — or, if they see not, they can trust — that God has ordered the spiritual affairs of His creatures with all justice and judgment; that a principle of compensation runs throughout them, as through their physical and mental circumstances; that what is denied here is given there, and what seems in this point to be an unfairness of disadvantage is made up in that point by some countervailing pre- ponderance of good. And if in some cases they can neither see this, nor see how it can be so, still they trust God's justice through all, and not only si- lence but satisfy the involuntary risings of doubt within, by the great elementary question, Shall ?wt the Judge of all the earth do right 1 For themselves, they are quite sure that it is so; and they acquiesce in that all-wise appointment which has commanded that their parti- cular battlefield should be situated here and not there; in a character tending (as the case may be) to an excess of warmth or an excess of languor, to irritability or else to torpor, to sensitiveness and its accompanying unreasonablenesses, or else to coldness and its probable shortcomings and deficiencies. They know that their business lies with that which is, not with that which might have been : they set themselves in God's strength to do the work which He has made theirs, and not to imagine how, under altered circumstances, they might have done better that work which He has made another's. Thus is the wisdom of God justified by its children. 120 WAYWARDNESS AND WISDOM. [Serm. X. We approach yet more nearly to the original use of the context, when we add a few concluding remarks upon the perverseness of man in reference to God's revelations of Himself. The waywardness which is here expressly rebuked was exhibited in the manner in which the Jews of that time received the mission of the Baptist and the mission of the Saviour. They settled with themselves how God ought to speak, and judged accordingly with regard to that which He did speak. When He sent them a reprover, in the befitting garb of austerity and of isolation, they attributed to a diaboli- cal agency those manifestations of the character of the message which he conveyed. When He sent them One who was to bring God's love into everything; to raise what was low, and to sanctify what was common, in human life, by coming Himself into the midst of it to show, not by precept only but by example, what it might be made; then they said that it was self-indulgence which prompted the intermixture, and that one who really came from God would never associate on equal terms with the earthly and the sinful. Thus, whatever God did, was just wrong. If He spoke severely, it was unloving and morose: if He spoke gently, it was a compromise with evil. My brethren, there are those who judge in much the same manner now of God and His revelations. If He says what we know, or think we know, already, it is superfluous: we do not want a revelation to teach us that. If He says one word beyond what nature or reason might have taught us, it is irrational: the word must be brought to the bar of a pre-existing faculty with- Serm. X.] WA YWARDNESS AND WISDOM. 121 in, and whatever that faculty does not instantly ratify, must be condemned as a fancy or an imposture. One of the plain declarations of the Bible is pronounced to be inconsistent with probability, another with some human authority, another with the Divine justice, another with Christian charity: one is harsh, one is sweeping, one would lead to mischief, one is extravagant, one is un- attainable: all these things must be cast aside as not suiting our preconceptions of God's character or of God's truth. And, as it is with the contents of God's Revela- tion, so is it also with the proofs and evidences of its Divine origin. One person does not like miracles, an- other cannot accept prophecy : one says, it is unworthy of God to suspend His own laws j another, it is unworthy of God to dignify human persons by the prediction of their names and deeds j a third finds nothing so convincing to himself as what he calls the internal evidence of truth, the testimony of his own conscience telling him of the goodness of the word spoken, or the comfort of his own heart in the exhibition there made of the holiness and the love of God. And what each one does not like in the way of evidence, he directly casts aside as valueless, and perhaps goes on to demonstrate to be hollow and delusive. Such is man's treatment of God's revelation. And if there be something, in all this, which is presump- tuous and shocking ; something which offends a sound judgment as irreverent towards God and unthankful for means of conviction largely and variously vouchsafed ; might we not apply also to this subject the language now before us, and say that there is also in such reasonings something unworthy and puerile ; something which may 122 WA YWARDNESS AND WISDOM. [Serm. X. remind us of the little children sitting in the marketplace, whom nothing can please, who are dissatisfied with every endeavour to charm them from their waywardness and ill-temper? What would they have? What can God say to them which they will not find some excuse for quar- relling with ? How can He support His disclosures by such proofs as they will accept as satisfactory? W T e shall find, I fear, in too many cases, that the real dislike is to Revelation ; that the real repugnance is to the idea of being taught anything from above ; that the ground of the refusal of this and that as an item of truth or as a mode of demonstration is in fact an overweening estimate of the power and sufficiency of man; insomuch that, whether the heavenly music be gay or grave, it will alike in either case be unresponded to ; whether the messenger be the Baptist, he will be said to have a devil — or the Saviour, He will be accused of companionship with the sinful. Meanwhile, here also, wisdom is justified by her children. They whose hearts are softened by a true self- knowledge, and enlightened by a real communion with God ; they who are wise in that wisdom of which the condition is humility, and the beginning the fear of the Lord ; will see wisdom in that which to the caviller is folly, will recognize a Divine harmony where all is discord to the self-confident, and own an abundance of resource worthy of the All-wise and the All-merciful, in that variety of evidence which affords to different minds, and perhaps to different ages of the world, their appropriate as well as conclusive reason for believing. The very things which others calumniate are to them indications of wisdom. They see how the message of the Baptist and the habits SERM. X.] WA YWARDNESS AND WISDOM. 123 of the Baptist — the office of the Saviour and the life of the Saviour — are severally harmonious and of a piece. They see how exactly God adapts His means to His end, and His messenger to His message. Where they do not see this, they yet trust. Not blindly, nor in the dark : for they know Him whom they have believed, and judge of that which they discern not by that which they have already known. Thus they live : thus would they die. They cannot part with what they have, till they have found something better. They cannot cavil at God's Word, till they have discovered something more wise, more durable, and more supporting. When the question is put to them, Will ye also go away ? their answer is, Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life. Fourth Sunday after Trinity, Jiuie 23, 1 86 1. SERMON XI. 1 FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. St Luke v. 5. Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at Thy word I will let down the net. The Miracles of our Lord are Parables too. Not that we are to lose the fact in the doctrine. Not that we are to say, as some have presumed to say, that the allegorical is either the whole or the primary sense of a Gospel miracle : each miracle is a fact first, and out of the fact flows the doctrine. It is because the record is literally true, that it is also spiritually instructive. It is because the narrative is true to fact, that it is true to life, true to nature, and true to the heart. It is not by deceptions and it is not through illusions that the God of truth leads His creatures into the light of life. The history from which the text is taken is the ac- count of something which actually occurred. The two little boats lying empty on the shore ; the fishermen washing their nets ; the request of our Lord for the loan 1 This Sermon was preached also in Westminster Abbey, at the last Special Evening Service of the year, June 30, 1861. S erm. XI. ] FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAIL URE. 1 2 5 of one of the boats j the discourse held from it with the people on the beach j then the command to let out the nets, the answer given in the text, and the miraculous draught which followed j these things are all true, they all happened : they are as much matters of fact as is this evening's concourse, as real as that the sound of a human voice is now in your ears. Equally true, as a matter of fact, is that memorable incident which followed ; when Simon, suddenly convinced of the superhuman presence in which he stood, threw himself at the feet of Jesus, a man before the Son of Man, and said, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord. Equally true is it, as a matter of fact, that he received on that occasion a reply which changed the whole course and current of his life, a reply uttered by human lips, but conveying a promise which it was beyond mere human power to fulfil, Fear not: from henceforth thou shalt catch men. The after life of Simon and his companions was the acting upon that command, and the performance to them of that promise. Fishers of men, throwers of the Gospel net upon the world's waters, with results real and palpable; results which have changed the face of history — have made a large part of the earth a totally different scene from that which it else would have been — have altered, have re- versed, have inverted human lives, and stamped men with characters the very opposite of those which other- wise they would have borne ; results which have either endured, or else been constantly renewed and repeated, through long ages ; this is what the disciples here spoken of became and did : this is what Christ's word made them, and He has glorified Himself in them. 12 6 FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAIL URF. [Serm. XI. Very wonderful and very instructive are the lessons contained in this latter part of the narrative. But I would speak to you this evening on the one verse read as the text ; on the answer of Simon to the command to launch out and let down his nets : Master, we have toiled all the flight, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at Thy word I will let down the net. Which was the more probable time for catching? Which of the two would the fisherman choose for the exercise of his calling — night, or day? the shaded or the glaring light? the stillness which precedes or the stir which follows the dawn ? We need not to be told this : and therefore we can enter into the force of the words, All the night we were toiling and caught nothing ; yet now, at Thy word — though it be against experience, against custom, against calculation and expectation — at Thy word I will again let down the net. Thou speakest as with authority: Thy tone is not that of a mocker: if Thou commandest, I cannot think it vain : I have already seen something of the power that is in Thee, when at Thy bidding one of my household rose from a bed of sickness : yes, though all things be against it, yet at Thy word I will let down the net. My brethren, Sermons have been preached, solemn, earnest, touching Sermons — touching in themselves, and touching in the time and circumstances of their delivery — on the two topics, Faith triumphant in doubt, and Faith triumphant in death. I would ask you to-night to ponder with me a topic, full of interest, I am persuaded, to many souls here present and open before God, Faith triumphant in failure: All the night we have toiled in vain ; we have Serm. XL] FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. 127 spread the net, and it has enclosed nothing; we have looked in the morning, and, behold, our time, our pains, our patience, had been thrown away; yet, for all this — notwithstanding past discouragement, disappointment, and failure — nevertheless, at Thy word we will once again let down the net. The terms success and failure have a large range in human life. Some men are born, we say, to succeed. There are certain qualities which we feel to have a direct bearing upon the realization of objects. A clear concep- tion of the thing aimed at, and a resolute look towards it ; a just calculation of distances, and a wise allowance for impediments; a concentration of thought upon means, and a perpetual recollection of ends ; amidst and above all, an immovable purpose, and an indefatigable per- severance ; these are qualities, or powers, call them which we will, from the possession of which, in any particular instance, we confidently prognosticate success, and the absence of which we deem a certain prophecy of failure, in the race of life viewed only with reference to the interests of this world. And yet even in this matter we are bat imperfect judges, fallible prophets. There are failures, even with all these gifts. Perhaps there are successes — it is just possible — without any of them. Nothing that man possesses can guarantee results. After all, promotion cometh neither fro?n the east nor fro?n the west: God putteth down one, and setteth up another. Cir- cumstances which man controls not, changes which he cannot foresee, and chances which he cannot regulate, have a wide operation, wider perhaps than ought else, and under their influence it is seen again and again that the 128 FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. [Serm. XI. race is ?wt to the swift, ?wr the battle to the strong; failure comes where success was certain, success where every- one foresaw failure. And no one can be insensible to the importance, for a human being, of the alternative thus described. It is a very grievous thing for a man to feel at the end of life that life itself has been for him a failure. No one can know, without experience, what the sense of mercantile or professional failure is to a man; what it is to have to confess to oneself that time and strength, the years of education and the years of activity, have been devoted to one work, and that that work has failed ; that we have toiled all day and all night, and have taken nothing ; nothing that was at all equivalent to the exertion used, the sacrifices made, and the hopes perhaps once fostered. Happy are they, my brethren — and they are some- times to be found — who are able to comfort themselves under the consciousness of earthly failure by the sense of a higher and a better success. If a man has found heaven, he may bear to have lost earth. But is it not true that failure has place also in this higher work ? Are there no spiritual senses in which the words of the text are true ? Is there no such thing as a toiling all the night and taking nothing, in the matters of that world which is of the soul and of eternity? The history of the Church of Christ is full of answers to that question. What long dark nights has it had to toil through as a body! Have there not been whole periods in which its real work seemed to be going back rather than forward? periods at the end of which the condition and prospects of the Gospel must have appeared Serm. XI.] FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. 129 even worse than at the beginning ? And, on the whole, has not this been the true account of the cause of Christ on earth during the eighteen centuries of its warfare, that it has been, more often than not, apparently stationary; making no visible progress ; taking no strides, certainly, towards universal empire; just holding its own by the patient labours of its faithful few, but scarcely seeing one new indication of the approach of the promised day when the kingdoms of the world shall have really become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ ? And have not the great advances of the Gospel, when they have come, been irregularly and fitfully bestowed ? now and then a whole country opened at once to the inroad of the truth, and then again a generation or two passing without one event which could possibly be called a victory won for Christ ? These things have been : and we scarcely know how much of them we ought to ascribe to the order of God's Providence, and how much to the indolence and faithlessness of man. But of this we are sure, that the long toil of the night, however little rewarded, was essential to the marvellous success of the morning ; as essential (we cannot say more so) as the faithful letting out of the nets, when morning came, in obedience to the special call of Christ. The attitude of the true Church on earth has ever been characterized by the brief words selected as the topic of this sermon, Faith triumphant i?i failure. And how shall we say, my brethren, that the case stands now — stands for us ? Are we living in a night, or in a morning? Are we of this generation toiling through long hours and taking nothing, or are we rather living in 13° FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. [Serm. XI. one of those glad and encouraging moments, at which the risen Lord stands at daybreak on the shore of our sea, and says, Children, have ye any meat? and when we answer, No, goes on to direct us by His own authoritative and loving voice, Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find? It is not easy to answer that question. It is not for us to seek to answer it while we are yet among the toiling. But it is very important for us not to be deceived ; deceived with that sort of deception which mistakes seeming for reality, and counts means instead of weighing results. Nothing is so opposite to faith as vanity. It is far better to be labouring in the blackest night, than to fancy ourselves gathering with Christ when we are indeed scattering without Him. I hope that it is not thus with us. I hope that there is much, in the Church of this day, of that quiet, steady, faithful plodding, to which the promise is sure, I?i due season ye shall reap, if ye faint not. This, in every age, is the real strength of the Church. It is given to few persons, and at rare intervals, to have magnificent triumphs. St Paul himself, who wrote, Thanks be unto God who always causeth us to triumph in Christ, wrote in the very same Epistle of affliction, of anguish, of many tears, of a sentence of death felt in himself, of a restless- ness of spirit in anxiety for others which forced him even to turn aside from a door opened to him of the Lord. The real work of the Church, I would say it once again, is done, in every age, by those who are as willing, if so it be, to toil all the night and take nothing, as they are, at their Master's call, to let out the net for an abundant draught. We think it a great thing — and no one ought Serm. XL] FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. 131 to despise it — to have originated some great enterprise of good, some new way of winning souls, some mission, perhaps, to a land hitherto uncared for, or some novel mode of proclaiming the Word of God at home. And it is right to try every way : we are far too fainthearted, and far too unenterprising, and far too uninventive, in this one field alone : the children of this world arc in their generation wiser than the children of light, and it is dis- honourable to our faith and zeal that in the highest and grandest of all works we should be contented to go on in that drowsy and torpid spirit which in matters of business, of science, or of research, would be regarded by all as ruinous and disgraceful. But yet, my brethren, be we well assured that the condition of success in heavenly things is still, as it ever has been, not ingenuity, but devotion ; not hurry, but patience; not self-confidence or presumption, but quiet toil, earnest prayer, and invincible faith. All can, by God's grace, labour through the night and watch for the morning : all cannot, upon earth, see that morning break, or hear the joyful summons to let out their nets for one last, one crowning success. Such thoughts can never be long absent from the hearts of those whose office it is, whether in our own or distant lands, to be fishers of men, watchers for souls as they that must give account. It is theirs to spread the net upon the waters, ignorant whom in particular that net may enclose ; ignorant indeed whether in the day of that final drawing ashore, in which the ministers shall be not they but God's Angels, there shall be found within its folds so much as one soul tracing back its eternal life to their instrumentality. It is theirs to spread the net 132 FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. [Serm. XI. widely; and in prayer, in faith, in patience, to await its gathering. They look not at the agency employed : they desire never to be suffered (in the Prophet's words) to sacrifice to their net: they would rather toil through their night, and look solely to His blessing who alone can give the increase. God grant that that increase may be largely, may be abundantly, bestowed ! Yet, even if it come not, faith shall still triumph amidst failure, still, at Christ's word, shall continue to let down the net. We wonder oftentimes, and who can help it? that, if the Gospel be indeed God's, more success is not vouchsafed to it. And, though the reasons for its failure are not few nor far to seek, reasons wholly of man's neglect and indifference and inconsistency, still we wonder on, and in moments of darkness could almost suffer wonder to pass into murmuring. But this I think we can say — and, if it is no answer to the general question, at least it may speak to us as individuals — that it is but little of success which any of us can safely bear. Where is the man whose highest life is not something injured by success — whose soul does not prosper most in failure ? Yes, my brethren, the remark has a wide compass : I know not whether we may not almost carry it into the inward as well as the outward work of man. But of the latter, at all events, we may say it ; that then is a man's soul safest and most healthy, when he is not borne along on the highest wave of a triumphant success. Look at the life of one who has devoted himself to the ministry of Christ's Gospel. Do you suppose that there is no danger to that man's soul from seeing himself followed; listened to, admired, Serm. XL] FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. 133 by a crowd of persons assembled rather to hear than to worship? That, you will say, and most truly, deserves not to be called success: the object of the ministry is to win souls not to man but to God; and it is not until man is forgotten that God is found. But go further: there are men, and in these days women too, who have an evident power granted to them over the souls of others; when they appear, there is respect; when they speak, there is attention; when they reason, there is conviction; when they remonstrate, there is shame; when they persuade, there is change, there is obedience, there is reformation. Well may they thank God, and take courage for further conflicts. But do we not feel also that out of this power over others arises a risk for them? Is there not to be seen a tinge of self- complacency, self-gratulation, at last almost of self-confi- dence, in the very language of humility and self-abnega- tion in which they publish their successes to the world? Yes, indeed it is true not least in spiritual things, that man being in honour hath no understanding: we can all bear comparative failure better than marked success: and I doubt not that that faith which triumphs over failure is oftentimes a purer and a brighter quality than the faith which gives thanks, or forgets to give thanks, over success. No one can overestimate the qualities which are demanded for a steady triumph over failure. Mark the man to whom that grace has been given. I have seen such a man in a country parish, remote in place, unattractive in scenery, uninteresting in every character- istic of its population. He came there in early years, 134 FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. [Serm. XI. endowed with gifts of intellect, fresh from academical honours, and he established himself there deliberately for life. He was the friend of his people in health, their physician in sickness, their counsellor in life, their comforter in death. The Word of God was his study and his meditation: week by week, and day by day, he was unfolding its stores to such as would listen. For nine and forty years he lived thus : he carried his plan of life to its completion, and died where he had laboured. And yet that man never knew what success was. He had no striking, no marked, triumphs. He spent and was spent; he offered himself day by day upon the sacrifice and service of his people's faith; and yet he felt, all the time, that, the more abundantly he loved, the less he was loved. This never shook him from his purpose. If he toiled all the night and caught nothing, still his faith was proof even against that failure. At last he rests from his labours: and now, no doubt, his works follow him. No doubt, others are entering into his labours, and reaping what he had sown. So would he have it. He served a faithful Master, and he will be quite satisfied, when he awakes, with His likeness. Which of us, in the retrospect, cannot see that that life was a safe life and a blessed one? Dull and uneventful, monotonous and unremunerative, when weighed in an earthly balance, was it not a noble one when weighed in the balance of God's sanctuary? Noble, just because it was far-reaching and deep-sighted; noble, because it showed a wonderful superiority to the in- fluences of things seen and temporal; noble, because he who so lived was able to say, and to act upon the Serm. XL] FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. 135 declaration, Master, I have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing; nevertMess at Thy word, I will again and yet again let down the ?iet. And is it not even so, though it be in humbler measure, with all those who have cared deeply for the souls of others? Has not the parent whose heart has been deeply exercised with anxiety for the salvation of her children, found in that long watching, that fervent intercession, that occasional agony of apprehension, a seriousness, a sobriety, a devotion, a nearness of access to God, which might else have been distracted by meaner cares, or drawn downwards by lower attrac- tions? There is perhaps no greater triumph of faith than that which has been won over and over again amidst the apparent failures of this anxious conflict. When the very child in whom earthly hope centres can be truly resigned into the hands of God; when the disappointment of prayer itself only makes prayer the more earnest; when a career of indifference, folly, or sin, while it wrings the heart with anguish, can yet be watched through and prayed through in the strength of an invincible trust in the mercy and faithfulness of an Almighty Saviour; then, even more than in self- denying works of charity, is the victory of faith won : and may we not believe that in the most unpromising case there is a virtue in that fervent prayer which shall at last make it effectual? that Christ sees in that toiling through the long night a trust which is altogether acceptable, and will crown it, even after death, with the very boon for which it waited? But, my brethren, it is not only in reference to I3 6 FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. [Serm. XI. others that faith in Christ has to combat and to conquer failure. And I believe that it is when we come to our own case that we shall feel, not least but most deeply, the truth on which we have dwelt. Where is he amongst us who, looking back upon the years that are past, can count his spiritual history altogether a success? I should almost doubt him if he declares it so. The Christian life is often called a warfare: is that warfare always a victory? I know that it ought to be so. St John writes that a Christian ca?i- not sin, because he is born of God; that he keepeth himself, so that the wicked one toucheth him not. Those are words which have caused misgiving to many a serious heart: how could it be otherwise? For indeed we feel, my brethren, that the Christian of whom such words could be spoken is scarcely one of us. We know that it ought to be so: we know that, if a Christian sins, it is because he is, so far, not a Christian; because he has forgotten his Saviour, and looked off from his God. But, for ourselves, what can we say? O, if the hearts of this congregation were laid open, where would be he amongst us who could come forward to claim the victor's wreath? I know better than to suppose that there is one here present to whom the sense of failure is not more familiar than the experience of triumph. What is our day made up of, but a succession of failures? What is the ti?ne past of our life but a long retrospect of defeats? Duties left undone; relations unfaithfully ful- filled; Bibles left unread, prayers often left unsaid and oftener left unprayed; a testimony for God rarely borne with the lips and often contradicted in the life; affections Serm. XL] FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. 137 set not on things above but on things of the earth; that is one part of the record: I do not suppose that any- one will gainsay that charge. How is it with another? Sins, not of omission only; definite bad habits; unkind, envious, resentful thoughts; unkind, mischievous, irre- parable words; yes, and worse things still than these — whose history is entirely free from darker stains? I know there are those who are so: let them thank God far more than themselves if it be the case: let them thank Him for a natural disposition, perhaps, which pointed not towards some iniquities: let them thank Him for controlling circumstances which have stood between them and some transgressions: let them thank Him for that diffusion of general light which in a Christian land makes some crimes all but impossible in some stations : but let them not fail to acknowledge that in them, that is, in the natural heart, dwells no good thing: let them not deny that in all of us there is the germ at least of, every sin: and, if they have little of outward open sin to answer for, then let them carry the question further, and see how it has been with sins to which they were prone; let them ask whether, on the whole, success or failure in the great spiritual warfare of life has been for them the more frequent: and I shall expect to hear that these too find themselves condemned; that these too must look back upon a long night, if of toiling, yet of taking nothing; of incessant defeat in whatever was for them the spiritual conflict; of countless disappointments in whatever they did prescribe to themselves as their bounden duty and service. My brethren, nevertheless let faith triumph over 138 FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. [Serm. XI. failure. I know that every failure is a proof of the want of faith. I know that, if faith were present, failure could not be. But there is such a thing as faith, after defeat, returning to the charge: and it is in that returning to the charge that the test of our Christianity lies. A man who can come back to Christ, and say, Lord, I have slept at my post — Lord, L have let my oars drop — Lord, I have often left my net unmended until it could enclose nothing — Lord, L have suffered weariness to make me indolent, and long disappointmejit to make me hopeless — / have done all this — but yet — even now — even thus late — / will, once again, at Thy word let i?iy net down, and wait Thy blessing — that man may have many faults, he may be much behindhand, he may be full of infirmity and of sin, but he has the root of the matter in him; he has a little faith, and according to that faith shall it be to him. That man knows something, however little, of a faith triumphant in failure. He, if he tries it, shall triumph too. Christ watches not for our halting but for our rising. It is not in Him that we are straitened. O suffer not yourself to fall finally — it has been the case, alas ! with many — just because you would have it that you were not a Christian ! Arise, call upon Christ, and be assured that He will give you light. May His blessing, which is life and strength, be upon us all! He stands, as He stood of old, upon the shore, and asks us of our welfare. He enters, as He entered of old, into the little vessel which contains our fortunes: He feels for 'its frailness, He will guide its flittings, He will steer it for us into the haven where we would be. Hitherto we may have toiled and taken Serm. XL] FAITH TRIUMPHANT IN FAILURE. T39 nothing: but if, at His word, we will now let down the net, He will bring into it that which shall be sufficient for us, and man's failure shall be Christ's success. Sixth Sunday after Trinity, July 7, 1S61. SERMON XII. FRIENDS AND FOES. i Kings xxi. 20. Hast thou fou?id ;;/. 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New Edition, revised, and a Prefatory Memoir by the Rev. Francis Procter, M.A. New Edition. Crown 8vo. ios. 6d. A HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. Middle Age. From Gregory the Great to the Excommunication of Luther. Edited by William Stubbs, M.A., Regius Professor of Modem History in the University of Oxford. With Four Maps constructed for this work by A. Keith Johnston. New Edition. Crown 8vo. ios. 6d. "As a Manual for the student of ecclesiastical history in the Middle Ages, we knozv no English work which can be compared to Mr. Hardwick' } s book. " — Guardian. A HISTORY of the CHRISTIAN CHURCH DURING THE REFORMATION. New Edition, revised by Professor Stubbs. Crown 8vo. ios. 6d. This volume is intended as a seauel and companion to the ''History of the Christian Church during the Middle Age. ' Hare. — Works by the late Archdeacon Hare : THE VICTORY OF FAITH. By Julius Charles Hare, M. A., Archdeacon of Lewes. Edited by Prof. Plumptre. With Introductory Notices by the late Prof. Maurice and Dean Stanley. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. THE MISSION OF THE COMFORTER. With Notes. New Edition, edited by Prof. E. H. Plumptre. Crn.8vo. 7s. 6d. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 3 Harper.— THE METAPHYSICS OF THE SCHOOL. By Thomas Harper, S.J. In 5 vols. Vols. L and II., 8vo. i8j. each. "If the Clergy of either communion in this country could be brought to study Father Harper 's booh, we should augur well for a sounder the- ology even in the next generation." — Church Quarterly Review. Harris.— SERMONS. By the late George Collyer Harris, Prebendary of Exeter, and Vicar of St. Luke's, Torquay. With Memoir by Charlotte M. Yonge, and Portrait. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. Hervey.— THE GENEALOGIES OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST, as contained in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, reconciled with each other, and shown to be in harmony with the true Chronology of the Times. By Lord Arthur Hervey, Bishop of Bath and Wells. 8vo. 10s. 6d. Hort. — TWO DISSERTATIONS. I. On mongtenhs ©eo2 in Scripture and Tradition. II. On the " Constantinopolitan" Creed and other Eastern Creeds of the Fourth Century. By F. J. A. Hort, D.D., Fellow and Divinity Lecturer of Emmanuel Col- lege, Cambridge. 8vo. Js. 6d. Howson (Dean) — W/orks by : BEFORE THE TABLE. An Inquiry, Historical and Theo- logical, into the True Meaning of the Consecration Rubric in the Communion Service of the Church of England. By the Very Rev. J. S. Howson, D.D., Dean of Chester. With an Appendix and Supplement containing Papers by the Right Rev. the Bishop of St. Andrew's and the Rev. R. W. Kennion, M.A. 8vo. Js. 6d. THE POSITION OF THE PRIEST DURING CON- SECRATION in the English Communion Service. A Supplement and a Reply. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. Hughes. — THE MANLINESS of CHRIST. By Thomas Hughes, Author of 'Tom Brown's School Days.' Cr. 8vo. 4s. 6d. "He has given to the world a volume, which so truly, and in some places so picturesquely and strikingly, represents the life of our Lord, that we can only express the hope that it may find its way into the hands of thousands of English working men." — Spectator. Hutton.— ESSAYS : THEOLOGICAL and LITERARY. By Richard Hutton, M.A. New and cheaper issue. 2 vols. 8vo. 18s. Hymni Ecclesise. — Fcap. 8vo. 7s. 6d. This collection was edited by Dr. Newman while he lived at Oxford. 14 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. Hyacinthe.— CATHOLIC REFORM. By Father Hyacinthe. Letters, Fragments, Discourses. Translated by Madame Hyacinthe-Loyson. With a Preface by the Very Rev. A. P. Stanley, D.D., Dean of Westminster. Cr. 8vo. fs. 6d. " A valuable contribution to the religious literature of the day — Daily Telegraph. Illingworth. — SERMONS preached in a College Chapel. With an Appendix. By J. R. Illingworth, M.A., Fellow of Jesus College, and Tutor of Keble College, Oxford. Crown 8vo. $s. " These sermons have a rare intensity and reality of tone. . . . It is full of strength, and we should be glad to induce any one to read it." — Spectator. Imitation of Christ.— Four Books. Translated from the Latin, with Preface by the Rev. W. Benham, B.D., Vicar of Margate. Printed with Borders in the Ancient Style after Holbein, Diirer, and other Old Masters. Containing Dances of Death, Acts of Mercy, Emblems, and a variety of curious ornamentation. Cr. 8vo, gilt edges. Js. 6d. Also in Latin, uniform with the above. New Edition, js. 6d. Jacob.— BUILDING IN SILENCE, and other Ser- mons. By J. A. Jacob, M.A., Minister of St. Thomas's, Pad- dington. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. Jellett— THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER: being the Don- nellan Lectures for 1877. By J. H. Jellett, B.D., Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, formerly President of the Royal Irish Academy. Second Edition. 8vo. $s. Jennings and Lowe. — THE PSALMS, with Introduc- tions and Critical Notes. By A. C. Jennings, B.A., Jesus Col- lege, Cambridge, Tyrwhitt Scholar, Crosse Scholar, Hebrew University Scholar, and Fry Scholar of St. John's College ; helped in parts by W. H. Lowe, M.A., Hebrew Lecturer and late Scholar of Christ's College, Cambridge, and Tyrwhitt Scholar. Complete in two vols, crown 8vo. 10s. 6d. each. Vol. I, Psalms i. — lxxii., with Prolegomena ; Vol. 2, Psalms lxxiii. — cl. Killen.— THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF IRE- LAND from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. By W. D. Killen, D.D., President of Assembly's College, Belfast, and Professor of Ecclesiastical History. Two vols. 8vo. 25^. " Those who have the leisure will do well to read these two volumes. They are full of interest, and are the result of great research."— Spev- tator. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. *5 Kingsley. — Works by the late Rev. Charles Kingsley, M.A., Rector of Eversley, and Canon of Westminster : THE WATER OF LIFE, and Other Sermons. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. THE GOSPEL OF THE PENTATEUCH ; and David. New Edition. Crown. 8vo. 6s. GOOD NEWS OF GOD. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. SERMONS FOR THE TIMES. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. VILLAGE AND TOWN AND COUNTRY SERMONS. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6.r. SERMONS on NATIONAL SUBJECTS, THE KING OF THE EARTH, and other Sermons. New Edition. Cm. 8vo. 6s. DISCIPLINE, and other Sermons. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. WESTMINSTER SERMONS. With Preface. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. OUT OF THE DEEP. Words for the Sorrowful. From the Writings of Charles Kingsley. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3^. 6d. Kynaston.— SERMONS PREACHED IN THE COL- LEGE CHAPEL, CHELTENHAM, during the First Year of his Office. By the Rev. Herbert Kynaston, M.A., Princi- pal of Cheltenham College. Crown 8vo. 6s. Lightfoot. — Works by J. B. LlGHTFOOT, D.D., Bishop of Durham : ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE GALATIANS. A Re- vised Text, with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations. Seventh Edition, revised. 8vo, cloth, lis. While the Author's object has been to make this coi7i7nentary generally complete, he has paid special attention to everything relating to St. Patit's personal history and his intercourse with the Apostles and Church of the Circumcision, as it is this featui'e in the -Epistle to the Galatians which has given it an overwhelmmg interest in recent theological controversy . The Spectator says — " There is no comme?itator at once of sounder judg- ment and more liberal than Dr. Lightfoot. " ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS. A Revised Text, with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations. Sixth Edition, revised. 8vo. 12s. i6 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. LIGHTFOOT {"Dr.)— continued. "No commentary in the English language can be compared with it in regard to fulness of information, exact scholarship, and laboured attempts to settle everything about the epistle on a solid foundation. " — Athenaeum. ST. PAUL'S EPISTLES TO THE COLOSSIANS AND TO PHILEMON. A Revised Text with Introduction, Notes, etc. Fifth Edition, revised. 8vo. lis. n It bears marks of continued and extended reading and research, and of ampler materials at command. Indeed, it leaves nothing to be desired by those who seek to study thoroughly the epistles contained in it, and to do so with all known advantages presented in sufficient detail and in conve- nient form." — Guardian. ST. CLEMENT OF ROME. An Appendix containing the newly discovered portions of the two Epistles to the Corinthians, with Introductions and Notes, and a Translation of the whole. 8vo. Ss. 6d. ON A FRESH REVISION OF THE ENGLISH NEW TESTAMENT. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. The Author shews hi detail the necessity for a fresh revision of the authorized version on the following grounds: — I. False Readings. 2. A rtificial distinctions created. 3. Real distinctions obliterated. 4. Faults of Grammar. 5. Faults of Lexicography. 6. Treatment of Froper A T ames, official titles, etc. 7. Archaisms, defects in the English, errors of the press, etc. " The book is marked by careful scholarship, familiarity with the subject, sobriety, and circumspection." — Athenaeum. Maclaren.— SERMONS PREACHED at MANCHESTER. By Alexander Maclaren. Sixth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. These Sermons represent no special school, but deal with the broad prin- ciples of Christian truth, especially in their bearing on practical, every-day life. A few of the titles are: — u The Stone of Stumbling," "Love and Forgiveness," "The Living Dead," "Memory in Another World" " Faith in Christ," "Love and Fear" " The Choice of Wisdom," " The Food of the World." A SECOND SERIES OF SERMONS. Fourth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. The Spectator characterises them as "vigorous in style, full of thought, rich in illustration, and in an unusual degree interesting. " A THIRD SERIES OF SERMONS. Fifth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 17 MACLAREN (A.) — continued. " Sermons more sober and yet more forcible, and with a certain wise and practical spirituality about them it would not be easy to find.'''' — Spectator. WEEK-DAY EVENING ADDRESSES. Delivered in Manchester. Extra Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. Maclear.— Works by the Rev. G. F. Maclear, D.D., Warden of St. Augustine's, Canterbury, late Head Master of King's College School : A CLASS-BOOK OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. With Four Maps. New Edition. 181110. 4s. 6d. "T/ie present volume," says the Preface, " forms a Class- Book of Old Testament History from the Earliest Times to those of Ezra and Nehe- miah. In its preparation the most recent authorities have been consulted, and wherever it has appeared useful, Notes have been subjoined illustra- tive of the Text, and, for the sake of more advanced students, references added to larger works. The Index has been so arranged as to form a concise Dictionary of the Persons and Places mentioned in the course of the A r arrative." The Maps, prepared by Stanford, materially add to the value and usefulness of the booh. The British Quarterly Review calls it " A careful and elaborate, though brief co??ipendium of all that modern research has done for the illustration of the Old Testament. We know of no woi'k which contains so much i??iportant information in so small a compass.'" A CLASS-BOOK OF NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY. Including the Connexion of the Old and New Testament. New Edition. i8mo. 5-r. 6d. The present volume forms a sequel to the Author's Class-Book of Old Testament History, and continues the narrative to the close of St. Paul's second imprisonment at Rome. The xvork is divided into three Books — I. The Connexion between the Old and Nezu Testament. II The Gospel History. III. The Apostolic History. In the Appendix are given Chronological Tables. The Clerical Journal says, "It is not often that such an amount of useful and interesting matter on biblical subjects is found in so convenient and small a compass as in this well-arranged volume. " A CLASS-BOOK OF THE CATECHISM OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. New and Cheaper Edition. iSmo. is. 6d. The present work is intended as a sequel to the two precedbtg books. 1 1 Like them, it is furnished with notes and references to larger works, and it is hoped that it may be found, especially in the higher forms of our i8 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. MACLEAR (Dr. G. F.) — continued. Public Schools, to supply a suitable manual of instruction in the chief doctrines of our Church, and a useful help in the preparation of Can- didates for Confirmation." The Literary Churchman says, "It is indeed the work of a scholar and divine, and as such, though extremely simple, it is also extremely instructive. There are few clergy who would not find it useful in preparing Candidates for Confirmation ; and there are not a few who would find it useful to themselves as well. " A FIRST CLASS-BOOK OF THE CATECHISM OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, with Scripture Proofs for Junior Classes and Schools. New Edition. i8mo. 6d. This is an epitome of the larger Class-book, meant for junior students and ele?nentary classes. The book has been carefully condensed, so as to contain clearly and fully the most important part of the contents of the larger book. A SHILLING-BOOK of OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. New Edition. i8mo. This Manual bears the same relation to the larger Old Testament His- tory, that the book just mentioned does to the larger work on the Catechism. It consists of Ten Books, divided into short chapters, and subdivided into sections, each section treating of a single episode in the history, the title of which is given in bold type. A SHILLING-BOOK of NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY. New Edition. i8mo. A MANUAL OF INSTRUCTION FOR CONFIRMA- TION AND FIRST COMMUNION, with Prayers and Devo- tions. 32mo. 2s. This is an enlarged and improved edition of ' The Order of Confirma- tion.'' To it have been added the Communion Office, with A r otes and Explanations, together with a bruf form of Self- Examination and De- votions selected from the works of Cosin, Ken, Wilson, and others. THE ORDER OF CONFIRMATION,, with Prayers and Devotions. 321110. 6d. THE FIRST COMMUNION, with Prayers and Devotions for the Newly Confirmed. 32mo. 6d. THE HOUR OF SORROW ; or, The Order for the Burial of the Dead. With Prayers and Hymns. 32mo. 2s. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 19 MAC LEAR (Dr. G. F.) — continued. APOSTLES OF MEDLEYAL EUROPE. Cr. Svo. 4s. 6d. "Mr. Maclear will have done a great work if his admirable little volume shall help to break up the dense ignorance which is still prevailing among people at large.'' — Literary Churchman. Macmillan. — Works by the Rev. Hugh Macmillan. LL.D., F. R. S. E. (For other Works by the same Author, see Catalogue of Travels and Scientific Catalogue). TWO WORLDS ARE OURS. Globe Svo. 6s. THE TRUE VINE ; or. the Analogies of our Lord's Allegory. Fourth Edition. Globe Svo. 6s. The Nonconformist says — "// abounds in exquisite bits of description, and in striking facts clearly stated. " The British Quarterly .ntpi — "Readers and preachers who are unscientific will find many of his illustrations as valuable as they are beautiful. n BIBLE TEACHINGS IN NATURE. Twelfth Edition. Globe Svo. 6j. In this volume the author has endeavoured to shew that the teaching of Xatitre and the teaching of the Bible are directed to the same great end; that the Bible contains the spiritual truths which are necessary to make us wise unto salvation, and the objects and scenes of Nature are the pictures by which these truths are illustrated. "He has made the world more beautiful to us, and unsealed our ears to voices of praise and messages of love that might other-wise have been unheard. — British Quarterly Review. "Dr. Macmillan has produced a book which may be fitly described as one of the happiest efforts for enlisting physical science in the direct sendee of religion. " — Guardian. THE SABBATH OF THE FIELDS. A Sequel to ' Bible Teachings in Nature. 1 Third Edition. Globe Svo. 6s. " This volume, like all Dr. Macmillan 's productions, is very delight- ful reading, and of a special kind. Imagination, natural science, and religious instruction are blended together in a very charming way.'' — British Quarterly Review. THE MINISTRY OF NATURE. Fourth Edition. Globe 8vo. 6s. " Whether the reader agree or not with his conclusions, he will ac- knowledge he is in the presence of an original and thoughtful writer." — Pall Mall Gazette. " There is no class of educated men and women that will not profit by these essays.'' — Standard. OUR LORD"S THREE RAISINGS FROM THE DEAD. Globe Svo. 60. 20 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. Materialism : Ancient and Modern. By a late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Crown 8vo. is. Maurice. — Works by the late Rev. F. Denison Maurice, M.A., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cam- bridge : The Spectator says — "Few of those of our own generation whose names will live in English history or literature have exerted so profound and so permanent an influence as Mr. Maurice. " THE PATRIARCHS AND LAWGIVERS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. Third and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. %s. The Nineteen Discourses contained in this volu?ne were preached in the chapel of Lincoln: 's Inn during the year 185 1. THE PROPHETS AND KINGS OF THE OLD TES- TAMENT. New Edition. Crown 8vo. ioj. 6d. Mr. Maurice, in the spirit which animated the compilers of the Church lessons, has in these Ser??ions regarded the Prophets more as preachers of righteousness than as mere predictors — ait aspect of their lives which, he thinks, has been greatly overlooked in our day, and than which there is none we have more need to contemplate. He has found that the Old Testament Prophets, taken in their simple natural sense, clear up many of the difficulties which beset us in the daily work oj life ; make the past intelligible, the present endurable, and the future real and hopeful. THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. A Series of Lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 9^. Mr. Maurice, in his Preface to these Twenty-eight Lectures, says — '■''In these Lectures I have endeavoured to ascei'tain zvhat is told us respect- ing the life of Jesus by one of those Evangelists who proclaim Him to be the Christ, who says that He did come from a Father, that He did baptize with the Holy Spirit, that He did rise from the dead. I have chosen the one who is most directly connected with the latei' history oj the Church, who was not an Apostle, who professedly wrote for the use of a man already instructed in the faith of the Apostles. I have followed the course of the writer's narrative, not changing it under any pretext. I have adhered to his phraseology, striving to avoid the substitution of any other for his." THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. A Series of Discourses. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 21 MAURICE (Rev. F. D.) — continued. The Literary Churchman thus speaks of this volume: '■'•Thorough honesty, reverence, and deep thought pervade the -work, -which is roery way solid and philosophical, as well as theological, and abounding with suggestions which the patient student may draw out more at length for himself. " THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN. A Series of Lectures on Christian Ethics. Second and Cheaper Edition. Cr. 8vo. 6s. These Lectures on Christian Ethics were delivered to the students of the Working Men's College, Great Ormond Street, London, on a series of Sunday mornings. Mr. Maurice believes that the question in which we are ?nost interested, the question which most affects our studies and our daily lives, is the question, whether there is a foundation for human morality, or whether it is dependent upon the opinions and fashions of different ages and countries. This important question will be found amply and fairly discussed in this volume, which the National Review calls 11 Mr. Maurice's most effective and instructive work. He is peculiarly fitted by the constitution of his mind, to throw light on St. John 's writings." Appended is a note on 1 Positivism and its Teacher. ' EXPOSITORY SERMONS ON THE PRAYER-BOOK. The Prayer-book considered especially in reference to the Romish System ; and the Lord's Prayer. Crown 8vo. gs. After an Introductory Sermon, Mr. Maurice goes over the various parts of the Church Service, expounds in eighteen Sermons their intention and significance, and shews how appropriate they are as expressions of the deepest longings and wants of all classes of men. WHAT IS REVELATION? A Series of Sermons on the Epiphany ; to which are added, Letters to a Theological Student on the Bampton Lectures of Mr. Mansel. Crown 8vo. ios. 6d. Both Sermons and Letters were called forth by the doctrine maintained by Mr. Mansel in his Bampton Lectures, that Revelation cannot be a direct Manifestation of the Infinite Nature of God. Mr. Maurice maintains the opposite doctrine, and in his Sermons explains why, in spite of the high authorities on the other side, he must still assert the principle which he discovers in the Services of the Church and throughout the Bible. SEQUEL TO THE INQUIRY. 'WHAT IS REVELA- TION?' Letters in Reply to Mr. Mansel's Examination of ' Strictures on the Bampton Lectures.' Crown 8vo. 6s. This, as the title indicates, was called forth by Mr. ManseVs examina- tion of Mr. Maurice's Strictures on his doctrine of the Infinite. 22 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. MAURICE (Rev. F. D.)— continued. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. ios. 6d. " The book,'''' says Mr. Maurice, "expresses thoughts which have ieen tvorking in my mind for years ; the method of it has not been adopted carelessly; even the co?nposition has undergone frequent revision.'" THE DOCTRINE OF SACRIFICE DEDUCED FROM THE SCRIPTURES. New Edition. Crown 8vo. Js. 6d. THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD, AND THEIR RELATIONS TO CHRISTIANITY. Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo. $s. ON THE SABBATH DAY ; the Character of the Warrior, and on the Interpretation of History. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. THE LORD'S PRAYER, THE CREED, AND THE COMMANDMENTS. A Manual for Parents and Schoolmasters. To which is added the Order of the Scriptures. i8mo, cloth limp. Is, DIALOGUES ON FAMILY WORSHIP. Crown 8vo. 6s. SOCIAL MORALITY. Twenty-one Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge. New and Cheaper Edition. Cr. 8vo. ios. 6d. "Whilst reading it we are charmed by the freedom from exclusiveness and prejudice, the large charity, the loftiness of thought, the eagerness to recognise and appreciate whatever there is of real worth extant in the world, which animates it from one end to the other. We gain new thoughts and nezv ways ofviezving things, even more, perhaps, from being brought for a time under the influence of so noble and spiritual a mind." — Athenaeum. THE CONSCIENCE: Lectures on Casuistry, delivered in the University of Cambridge. Second and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 5^. The Saturday Review says — " We rise fro?n the pei'usal of these lec- tures with a detestation of all that is selfish and mean, and with a living impression that there is such a thing as goodness after all." LECTURES ON THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF THE FIRST AND SECOND CENTURIES. 8vo. iar. 6d. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. MAURICE .Rev. F. D.t — LEARNING AND WORKING. Six Lectures delivered in Willis's Rooms, London, in Tune and Julv, 1S54. — THE RELIGION OF ROME, and its* Influence on Modern Civilisa- tion. Four Lectures delivered in the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, in December, 1S54. Crown Svo. 5$ SERMONS PREACHED IN COUNTRY CHURCHES. New Edition. Crown Svo. io.^. 6 J. '* Earnest ', practical, and extremely simple." — Literary Churchman. " Good specimens of his simple and earnest eloquence. The Gospel inci- dents are realized with a fh-idness which we can well believe made the common people hear him gladly. Moreover, they are sermons which must haz'e done the hearers good." — John Bull. Milligan. — THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD. The Croall Lecture for 1S79 — So. By the Rev. Professor Milli- GAN, D.D., Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism in the University of Aberdeen. Svo. 9j. Moorhouse. — Works by James Moorhouse, M.A., Bishop of Melbourne : SOME MODERN DIFFICULTIES RESPECTING the FACTS OF NATURE AND REVELATION. Fcap. Svo. 2s. 6d. JACOB. Three Sermons preached before the U niversity of Cambridge in Lent, 1870. Extra fcap. Svo. 3I 1 . 6d. O'Brien.— PRAYER. Five Sermons preached in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin. By James Thomas O'Brien, D.D., Bishop of Ossory and Ferns. Svo. 6s. Onesimus.— MEMOIRS OF A DISCIPLE OF ST. PAUL. By the Author of " Philochristus. " Demy Svo. 10s. 6d. Palgrave.— HYMNS. By Francis Turner Palgrave. Third Edition, enlarged. iSmo. is. 6d. T7iis is a collection of twenty original Hymns, which the Literary Churchman speaks of as " so choice, so perfect, and so refned, — so tender in feeling, and so scholarly in expression." Paul of Tarsus. An Inquiry into the Times and the Gospel of the Apostle of the Gentiles. By a Graduate. Svo. 10s. 6d. *' Np thoughtful reader will rise from its perusal without a real and lasting profit to himself, and a sense of permanent addition to the cause of truth. "—Standard 24 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. Philochristus. — MEMOIRS OF A DISCIPLE OF THE LORD. Second Edition. 8vo. I2j. " The winning beauty of this book and the fascinating power with which the subject of it appeals to all English minds will secure for it many readers" — Contemporary Review. Philpott. — A POCKET OF PEBBLES WITH A FEW SHELLS. Being Fragments of Reflection, now and then with Cadence, made up mostly by the Sea Shore. By the Rev. William B. Philpott. Second Edition. Picked, Sorted, Polished anew. With Two Illustrations by George Smith. Fcap. 8vo. $s. Picton.— THE MYSTERY OF MATTER; and other Essays. By J. Allanson Picton, Author of 'New Theories and the Old Faith.' Cheaper Edition. With New Preface. Crown 8vo. 6s. Plumptre — MOVEMENTS in RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge, Lent Term, 1879. By E. H. Plumptre, D.D., Professor of Divinity, King's College, London, Prebendary of St. Paul's, etc. Fcap. 8vo. 3J. 6d. Prescott — THE THREEFOLD CORD. Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge. By J. E. Prescott, B.D. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. Procter.— A HISTORY OF THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER : With a Rationale of its Offices. By Francis Procter, M.A. Sixteenth Edition, revised and enlarged. Cr. 8vo. 10s. 6d. The Athenaeum says — " The origin of every part of the Prayer-book has been diligently investigated, — and there are few questions or facts con- nected with it which are not either sufficiently explained, or so referred to that persons interested may work out the truth for themselves. " Procter and Maclear. — AN ELEMENTARY INTRO- DUCTION TO THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. Re-arranged and Supplemented by an Explanation of the Morning and Evening Prayer and the Litany. By F. Procter, M.A., and G. F. Maclear, D.D. New Edition. Enlarged by the addition of the Communion Service and the Baptismal and Confirmation Offices. i8mo. 2s. 6d. The Literary Churchman characterises it as "by far the completest and most satisfactory book of its kind we know. We wish it were in the hands of every schoolboy and every schoolmaster in the kingdom. " Psalms of David CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. An Amended Version, with Historical Introductions and Ex- planatory Notes. By Four Friends. Second and Cheaper Edition, much enlarged. Crown 8vo. &r. 6d. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. ^5 One of the chief designs of the Editors, in preparing this volume, "was to restore the Psalter as far as possible to the order in which the Psalms were written. They give the division of each Psalm into strophes, and of each strophe into the lines which composed it, and amend the errors of translation. The Spectator calls it " one of the most instructive and valuable books that have been published for many years." Psalter (Golden Treasury).— The Students Edition. Being an Edition of the above with briefer Notes. iSmo. $s. 6d. The aim of this edition is simply to put the reader as far as possible in possession of the plain meaning of the writer. " is a gem," the Non- conformist says. Pulsford.— SERMONS PREACHED IN TRINITY CHURCH, GLASGOW. By William Pulsford, D.D. Cheaper Edition. Crown Svo. 4s. 6d. Ramsay.— THE CATECHISER'S MANUAL; or. the Church Catechism Illustrated and Explained, for the Use of Clergymen, Schoolmasters, and Teachers. By ARTHUR Ramsay, M.A. Second Edition. iSmo. is. 6d. Rays of Sunlight for Dark Days. A Book of Selec- tions for the Suffering. With a Preface by C. J. Vaughan, D.D. iSmo Ninth Edition. t> s - &d. Also in morocco, old style. Dr. Vaughan says in the Preface, after speaking of the general run oj Books of Comfort for Mourners — "It is because I think that the little volume now offered to the Christian sufferer is one of greater wisdom and of deeper experience, that I have readily consented to the request that I would introduce it by a few words of Preface." The book consists of a series of very brief extracts from a great variety of authors, i?i prose and poetry, suited to the many moods of a mourning or suffering minJ. "Mostly gems of the first water.™ — Clerical Journal. Reynolds.— NOTES OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. A Selection of Sermons by Henry Robert Reynolds, B.A., President of Cheshunt College, and Fellow of University College, London. Crown Svo. "js. 6d. Roberts.— DISCUSSIONS ON THE GOSPELS. By the Rev. Alexander Roberts, D.D. Second Edition, revised and enlarged. Svo. 16s. Robinson.— MAN IN THE IMAGE OF GOD ; and other Sermons preached in the Chapel of the Magdalen, Streatham, 1874—76. By H. G. Robinson, M.A., Prebendary of York. Crown Svo. 7*. 6d. 26 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. Romanes.— CHRISTIAN PRAYER AND GENERAL LAWS, being the Burney Prize Essay for 1873. With an Ap- pendix, examining the views of Messrs. Knight, Robertson, Brooke, Tyndall, and Galton. By George J. Romanes, M.A. Crown 8vo. p. Rushbrooke.— SYN OPT ICON : An Exposition of the Common Matter of the Synoptic Gospels. By W. G. Rushbrooke, M.L., Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. Printed in colours. In Six Parts and Appendices. 4to. Part I. 3s. 6d. Parts II. and III. 7-r. Parts IV. V. and VI. With Indices, 10s. 6d. Ap- pendices, 10s. 6d., or the complete work, in one vol. cloth, 355-. Salmon.— NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY, and other Sermons, preached in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin. By George Salmon, D.D., Chancellor of St. Patrick's Cathe- dral, and Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Dublin. Crown 8vo. 6s. Scotch Sermons, 1880.— By Principal Caird ; Rev. J. Cunningham, D.D. ; Rev. D. J. Ferguson, B.D. ; Professor Wm. Knight, LL.D. ; Rev. W. Mackintosh, D.D. ; Rev. W. L. M'Farlan; Rev. Allan Menzies, B.D. ; Rev. T. Nicoll; Rev. T. Rain, M.A. ; Rev. A. Semple, B.D. ; Rev. J. Stevenson ; Rev. Patrick Stevenson ; Rev. R. H. Story, D.D. 8vo. Third Edition. 10s. 6d. The Pall Mall Gazette says — " The publication of a volume of Scotch Sermons, contributed by members of the Established Church, seems likely to cause as much commotion in that body as ' Essays and Reviews ' did in the Church of England.'''' Selborne. — THE BOOK OF PRAISE : From the Best English Hymn Writers. Selected and arranged by Lord Selborne. With Vignette by T. Woolner, R.A. ilmo. 4^. 6d. It has been the Editor's desire and aim to adhere strictly, in all cases in 7vhich it could be ascertained, to the genuine uncorrupted text of the authors themselves. The names of the authors and date of composition of the hymns, when known, are affixed, while notes are added to the volume, giving further details. The Hymns are arranged according to subjects. ' 1 There is not room for two opinions as to the value of the 'Book of Praise. ' " — Guardian. "Approaches as nearly as one can conceive to perfection." — Nonconformist. BOOK OF PRAISE HYMNAL. See end of this Catalogue. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 27 Sermons out of Church. By the Author of "John Halifax, Gentleman." New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. Speaking of this volume the Reviewers remark: " We have read this book with no small pleasure. The author is well entitled to speak on many of the questions she has raised here. In many ways her book is timely." — British Quarterly Review. " We may fairly advise young housekeepers especially diligently to study the pages devoted to the Servant question — but called ' My Brother's Keeper' — a simple, practical, wise treatise on a difficult subject." — Spectator. Service. — SALVATION HERE AND HEREAFTER. Sermons and Essays. By the Rev. John Service, D.D., Minister of Inch. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. " We have enjoyed to-day a rare pleasure, having just closed a volume of sermons which rings true metal from title page to finis, and proves that another and very powerful recruit has been added to that small band of ministers of the Gospel who are not only abreast of the religious thought of their ti?ne, fact have faith enough and courage enough to handle the questions which are the most critical, and stir men's minds most deeply, with frankness and thoroughness." — Spectator. Shipley. — A THEORY ABOUT SIN, in relation to some Facts of Daily Life. Lent Lectures on the Seven Deadly Sins. By the Rev. Orby Shipley, M.A. Crown 8vo. p. 6d. Smith.— PROPHECY A PREPARATION FOR CHRIST. Eight Lectures preached before the University of Oxford, being the Bampton Lectures for 1869. By R. Payne Smith, D.D., Dean of Canterbury. Second and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. The author's object in these Lectures is to shew that there exists in the Old Testament an element, "Which no criticism on naturalistic principles can either account for or explain away: that element is Prophecy. The author endeavours to proz>e that its force does not consist merely in its predictions. " These Lectures overflow with solid learning." — Record. Smith.— CHRISTIAN FAITH. Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge. By W. Saumarez Smith, M.A., Principal of St. Aidan's College, Birkenhead. Fcap. 8vo. 3J. 6d. Stanley. — Works by the late Very Rev. A. P. Stanley, D.D., Dean of Westminster : THE ATHANASIAN CREED, with a Preface on the General Recommendations of the Ritual Commission. Cr. 8vo. 2S. 28 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. STANLEY (Dean)— continued. "Dr. Stanley puts with admirable force the objections which may be made to the Creed ; equally admirable, we think, is his statement of its advantages. " — Spectator. THE NATIONAL THANKSGIVING. Sermons preached in Westminster Abbey. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. ADDRESSES AND SERMONS AT ST. ANDREW'S in 1872, 1875 and 1876. Crown 8vo. $s. Stewart and Tait.— THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE ; or, Physical Speculations on a Future State. By Professors Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait. Tenth Edition, Revised and Enlarged. Crown 8vo. 6s. "A most remarkable and most interesting volume, which, probably more than any that has appeared itt ?nodern times, will affect religious thought on many momentous questions — insensibly it ??iay be, but very largely and very beneficially." — Church Quarterly. " This book is one which zvell deserves the attention of thoughtful and religious readers // is a perfectly safe enquiry, on scientific grounds, into the possibilities of a future existence.''' — Guardian. Stubbs. — Works by Rev. CHARLES WILLIAM STUBBS, M.A., Vicar of Granborough, Bucks. : VILLAGE POLITICS. Addresses and Sermons on the Labour Question. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. " The sermons in this book are all worth reading. .... They are full of warm syfnpathy for the labourers and sound practical advice to all classes concerned in the struggle. " — Guardian. ' 1 is a most encouraging sign of the times, that a clergyman of the Church of England can be found to deliver such discourses as these." — Westminster Review. , THE MYTHE OF LIFE, and other Sermons, with an Introduction on the Social Mission of the Church. Extra fcap. 8vo. $s. 6d. Taylor.— THE RESTORATION OF BELIEF. New and Revised Edition. By Isaac Taylor, Esq. Crown 8vo. Ss. 6d. Temple.— SERMONS PREACHED IN THE CHAPEL of RUGBY SCHOOL. By F. Temple, D.D., Bishop of Exeter. New and Cheaper Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4^. 6d. This volume contains Thirty-five Sermons on topics more or less inti- mately connected with every -day life. The following are a few of the subjects discoursed upon: — "Love and Duty;" "Coming to Christ;" THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 29 TEMPLE (Dr.)— continued. "Great Men ;" ' 'Faith ;" * ' Doubts ;" ' ' Scruples ;" ' ' Origin i Sin "Friends/iip;" "Helping Others;'''' "The Discipline of Temptation;" "Strength a Duty;" " Worldliness ;" "/// Temper;" "The Burial of the Past." A SECOND SERIES OF SERMONS PREACHED IN THE CHAPEL OF RUGBY SCHOOL. Second Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. This Second Series of Forty-hoo brief pointed, practical Sermons, on topics intimately connected with the every-day life of young and old, will be acceptable to all who are acquainted with the First Series. The following are a fezu of the subjects treated of: — "Disobedience," " Almsgiving," "The Un know n Guidance of God," "Apathy one of our Trials" "High Aims in Leaders," " Doing our Best," " The Use of 'Knowledge" "Use of Obserz'ances," "Martha and Alary," "John the Baptist," "Severity before Mercy," "Even Mistakes Punished," "Morality and Religion," "Children," "Action the Test of Spiritual Life," "Self- Respect," "Toe Late" " The Tercentenary." A THIRD SERIES OF SERMONS PREACHED IN RUGBY SCHOOL CHAPEL IN 1867— 1869. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. This Third Series of Bishop Temple's Rugby Sermons, contains thirty-six brief discourses, including the " Good-bye 1 '' sermon preached on his leaving Rugby to enter on the office he now holds. Thornely. — THE ETHICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECT OF HABITUAL CONFESSION TO A PRIEST. By Thomas Thornely, B.A., LL.M., Lightfoot and Whewell Scholar in the University of Cambridge, Law Student at Trinity Hall and Inns of Court, Student in Jurisprudence and Roman Law. Crown 8vo. 4$-. 6d. " The calm a?id judicial spirit in which the inquiry is conducted is in keeping with the aim of the writer, and we are heartily in sympathy with him in his conclusions as far as he goes. "— London Quarterly, "ft is marked by an evident desire to avoid over-statement, and to be strictly impartial. " — Cambridge Review. Thring.— THOUGHTS ON LIFE-SCIENCE. By Rev. Edward Thring, M.A. New Edition, enlarged and revised. Crown 8vo. Js. 6d. Thrupp.— AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY AND USE OF THE PSALMS. By the Rev. J. F. Thrupp, M.A., late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. New Edition. 2 vols. 8vo. 25-r. 3<> THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. Trench.— Works by R. Chenevix Trench, D.D., Arch- bishop of Dublin : NOTES OX THE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. Fourteenth Edition. 8vo. 12s. This 7uork has taken its place as a standard exposition and interpreta- tion of Chrisfs Parables. The book is prefaced by an Introductory Essay in four chapters : — /. On the definition of the Parable. II. On Teach- ing by Parables. III. On the Interpretation of the Parables. IV. On other Parables besides those in the Scriptures. The author then proceeds to take up the Parables one by one, and by the aid of philology, history, antiquities, and the researches of travellers, shews forth the significance, beauty, and applicability of each, concluding -with what he deems its true moral interpretation. In the numerous A T otes are many valuable references, illustrative quotations, critical and philological annotations, etc., and ap- pended to the volume is a classified list of fifty -six works on the Parables. NOTES ON THE MIRACLES OF OUR LORD. Eleventh Edition, revised. 8vo. \2s. In the ' Preliminary Essay 1 to this work, all the momentous and in- teresting questions that have been raised in connection with Miracles, are discussed with considerable fulness. The Essay consists of six chapters : — /. On the Homes of Miracles, i. e. the Greek words by which they are designated in the New Testament. II. The Miracles and Nature — What is the difference between a Miracle and any event in the ordinary course of Nature ? III. The AuthoHty of Miracles — Is the Miracle to command absolute obedience ? IV. The Evangelical, compared with the other cycles of Miracles. V. The Assaults on the Miracles — I. Thejezvish. 2. The Heathen (Celsus, etc.). 3. The Pantheistic (Spinosa, etc.). 4. The Sceptical ( Hume). 5. The Miracles only relatively miraculous ( Schleicr- mac her). 6. The Rationalistic (Paulus). 7. The Historico- Critical ( Woolston, Strauss). VI. The Apologetic Worth of the Miracles. The author then treats the separate Miracles as he does the Parables. SYNONYMS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Ninth Edition, enlarged. 8vo. \2s. This Edition has been carefully revised, and a considerable number oj new Synonyms added. Appended is an Index to the Synonyms, and an Index to many other words alluded to or explained throughout the work. "He is," the Athenaeum says, " a guide in this department of knowledge to whom his readers 7?iay intrust themselves with confidence. His sober judgrnent and sound sense are barriers against the misleading influence of arbitrary hypotheses. " ON THE AUTHORIZED VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Second Edition. 8vo. 7s. After some Introductory Remarks, in which the pro/rriety of a revision is briefly discussed, the whole question of the merits of the present version THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 3i TRENCH (Archbishop)— continued. is gone into in detail, in eleven chapters. Appended is a chronological list of works bearing on the subject, an Index of the principal Texts con- sidered, an Index of Greek Words, and an Index of other Words re- ferred to throughout the book. STUDIES IN THE GOSPELS. Fourth Edition, revised. 8vo. \os. 6d. This book is published under the conviction that the assertion often made is untrue, — viz. that the Gospels are in the main plain and easy, and that all the chief difficulties of the New Testament are to be found in the Epistles. These ' Studies, ' sixteen in number, are the fruit of a much larger scheme, and each Study deals with some important episode mentioned in the Gospels, in a critical, philosophical, and practical man- ner. Many references and quotations are added to the Notes. Among the subjects treated are: — The Temptation ; Christ and the Samaritan Woman; The Three Aspirants ; The Transfiguration ; Zaccha^us ; The True Vine; The Penitent Malefactor ; Christ and the Two Disciples on the way to Emmaus. COMMENTARY ON THE EPISTLES to the SEVEN CHURCHES IN ASIA. Third Edition, revised. 8vo. Si-. 6d. The present work consists of an Introduction, being a commentary on Rev. i. 4 — 20, a detailed examination oj each of the Seven Epistles, in all its bearings, and an Excursus on the Historico- Prophetical Interpreta- tion of the Epistles. THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. An Exposition drawn from the writings of St. Augustine, with an Essay on his merits as an Interpreter of Holy Scripture. Fourth Edition, en- larged. 8vo. 1 or. 6d. The first half of the present work consists of a dissertation in eight chapters on ''Augustine as an Interpi'eter of Scripture,'' the titles of the several chapters being as follow : — /. Augustine's General Views of Scrip- ture and its Interpretation. II. The External Helps for the Interpreta- tion of Scripture possessed by Augustine. III. Augustine's Principles and Canons of Interpretation. IV. Augustine 1 s Allegorical Interpretation of Scripture. V. Illustrations of Augustine's Skill as an Interpreter oj Scripture. VI Augustine on John the Baptist and on St. Stephen. VII. Augustine on the Epistle to the Romans. VIII. Miscellaneous Examples of Augustine' s Interpretation of Scripture. The latter half of the work consists of Augustine's Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, not haivever a mere series of quotations from Augustine, but a connected account of his sentiments on the various passages of that Sermon, inter- spersed with criticisms by Archbishop Trench. SHIPWRECKS OF FAITH. Three Sermon 9 preached before the University of Cambridge in May, 1867. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 3^ THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. TRENCH (Archbishop)— continued. These Sermons are especially addressed to young men. The subjects are "Balaam," "Saul," and "Judas Iscariot," These lives are set forth as beacon-lights, "to warn us off from pei'ilous reefs and quick- sands, which have been the destruction of many, and which might only too easily be ours.'" The John Bull says — "they are, like all he writes, af- fectionate and earnest discourses." SERMONS Preached for the most part in Ireland. 8vo. \os. 6d. This volume consists of Thirty-two Sermons, the greater part of which were preached in Ireland; the subjects are as follow : — Jacob, a Prince with God and with Men — Agrippa — The Woman that was a Sinner — Secret Faults — The Seven Worse Spirits — Freedom in the Truth — Joseph and his Brethren — Bearing o?te another's Burdens — Christ 's Challenge to the World — The Love of Money — The Salt of the Earth — The Armour of God — light in the Lord — The Jailer of Philippi — The Thorn in the Flesh — Isaiah's Vision — Selfishness — Abraha77i interceding for Sodom — Vain Thoughts — Pontius Pilate — The Brazen Solent — The Death and Burial of Moses — A Word from the Cross — The Church's Worship in the Beauty of Holiness — Every Good Gift from Above — On the Healing of Prayer — The Kingdom which cometh not with Observation — Pressing towards the Mark — Saul — The Good Shepherd — The Valley of Dry Bones — All Saints. LECTURES ON MEDIEVAL CHURCH HISTORY. Being the Substance of Lectures delivered in Queen's College, London. Second Edition, revised. 8vo. \2s. Contents : — The Middle Ages Beginning — The Conversion of Eng- land — Islam — The Conversion of Germany — The Iconoclasts — The Crusades — The Papacy at its Height — The Sects of the Middle Ages — The Mendicant Orders — The Waldenses — The Revival of Learning — Christian Art in the Middle Ages, &>c. drv. THE HULSEAN LECTURES, 1845-1846. Fifth Edition, revised. 8vo. Js. 6d. This volume consists of Sixteen Sermons, eight being on ' The Fitness of Holy Scripture for unfolding the Spiritual Life of Men,' the others on 1 Christ, the Desire of all Nations ; or, the unconscious Prophecies of Heathendom.'' Tulloch.— THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS AND THE CHRIST OF MODERN CRITICISM. Lectures on M. Renan's 'Vie de Jesus.' By John Tulloch, D.D., Principal of the College of St. Mary, in the University of St. Andrew's. Extra fcap. 8vo. $s. 6d. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. S3 Vaughan — Works by the very Rev. CHARLES JOHN Vaughan, D.D., Dean of Llandaff and Master of the Temple : CHRIST SATISFYING THE INSTINCTS OF HU- MANITY. Eight Lectures delivered in the Temple Church. Second Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3j\ 6d. "We are convinced that there are congregations, hi number unmistakably increasing, to whom such Essays as these, full of thought and learning, are infinitely nwre beneficial, for they are more acceptable, than the recog- nised type of sermons.''' — John Bull. THE BOOK AND THE LIFE, and other Sermons, preached before the University of Cambridge. Third Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 4-r. 6d. TWELVE DISCOURSES on SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH THE LITURGY and WORSHIP of the CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Fourth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 6s. LESSONS OF LIFE AND GODLINESS. A Selection of Sermons preached in the Parish Church of Doncaster. Fourth and Cheaper Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. This volume consists of Nhieteen Sernwns, mostly on subjects connected with the every-day walk and conversation of Christians. The Spectator styles them "earnest and human. They are adapted to every class and order in the social system, and will be read with wakeful interest by all who seek to amend whatever may be amiss in their natural disposition or in their acquired habits. " WORDS FROM THE GOSPELS. A Second Selection of Sermons preached in the Parish Church of Doncaster. Third Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. The Nonconformist characterises these Sermons as ' ' of practical earnest- ness, of a thoughtful ness that peneti-ates the common conditions and ex- periences of life, and brings the t? uths and examples of Scripture to bear on them with singular force, and of a style that owes its real elegance to the simplicity arid directness which have fine culture for their roots." LIFE'S WORK AND GOD'S DISCIPLINE. Three Sermons. Third Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. THE WHOLESOME WORDS OF JESUS CHRIST. Four Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge in November, 1866. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 35. 6d. Dr. Vaughan uses the word "Wholesome" here in its literal and original sense, the sense in which St. Paul uses it, as meaning healthy, sound, conducing to right living ; and in these Sermons he points out and illustrates several of the 11 wholesome" characteristics of the Gospel, — the Words of Christ. The John Bull says this volume is " replete with all the author's well-known vigour of thought and richness of expression." 34 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. VAUGHAN (Dr. C. J.)— continued. FOES OF FAITH. Sermons preached before the Uni- versity of Cambridge in November, 1868. Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 3^. 6d. The " Toes of Taith" preached against in these Tour Sermons are: — I. "Unreality." II. ti Indolence." III. " Irreverence." IV. "Incon- sistency." LECTURES ON THE EPISTLE to the PHILIPPIANS. Fourth and Cheaper Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. $s. Each Lecture is prefaced by a literal translation from the Greek of the paragraph which forms its subject, contains first a minute explanation of the passage on which it is based, and then a practical application of the verse or clause selected as its text. LECTURES ON THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN. Fourth Edition. Two Vols. Extra fcap. 8vo. 9.?. In this Edition of these Lectures, the literal translations of the passages expounded will be found interwoven in the body of the Lectures themselves. "Dr. Vaughan's Sermons," the Spectator says, "are the most prac- tical discourses on the A pocalypse with tvhich we are acquainted. " Pre- fixed is a Synopsis of the Book of Revelation, and appended is an Index of passages illustrating the language of the Book. EPIPHANY, LENT, AND EASTER. A Selection of Expository Sermons. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 10s. 6d. THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL. For English Readers. Part I., containing the First Epistle to the Thessalonians. Second Edition. 8vo. U. 6d. It is the object of this work to enable English readers, unacquainted with Greek, to enter with intelligence into the meaning, connexion, and phraseology of the writings of the great Apostle. ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. The Greek Text, with English Notes. Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo. Js. 6d. The Guardian says of the work — "Tor educated young men his com- mentary seems to fill a gap hitherto unfilled. . . . As a whole, Dr. Vaughan appears to us to have given to the world a valuable book of original and careful and earnest thought bestowed on the accomplishment of a work which will beof?nuch service and which is much needed." THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST DAYS. Series I. The Church of Jerusalem. Third Edition. II. The Church of the Gentiles. Third Edition. „ III. The Church of the World. Third Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 4-r. 6d. each. The British Quarterly says — " These Sermons are worthy of all praise, and are models of pilpit teaching." THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 35 VAUGHAN (Dr. C. J.)— continued. COUNSELS for YOUNG STUDENTS. Three Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge at the Opening of the Academical Year 1 870-7 1. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. NOTES FOR LECTURES ON CONFIRMATION, with suitable Prayers. Eleventh Edition. Fcap. 8vo. is. 6d. THE TWO GREAT TEMPTATIONS. The Tempta- tion of Man, and the Temptation of Christ. Lectures delivered in the Temple Church, Lent 1872. Second Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3-r. 6d. WORDS FROM THE CROSS: Lent Lectures, 1875; and Thoughts for these Times : University Sermons, 1874. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. ADDRESSES TO YOUNG CLERGYMEN, delivered at Salisbury in September and October, 1875. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4s. 6d. HEROES OF FAITH : Lectures on Hebrews xi. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. THE YOUNG LIFE EQUIPPING ITSELF FOR GOD'S SERVICE : Sermons before the University of Cambridge. Sixth Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. THE SOLIDITY OF TRUE RELIGION ; and other Sermons. Second Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. MEMORIALS OF HARROW SUNDAYS. A Selection of Sermons preached in the Chapel of Harrow School. Fifth Edition. Crown 8vo. iar. 6d. SERMONS IN HARROW SCHOOL CHAPEL (1847). 8vo. iar. 6d. NINE SERMONS IN HARROW SCHOOL CHAPEL (1849). Fcap. 8vo. S s - «MY SON, GIVE ME THINE HEART;" Sermons preached before the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 1876 —78. Fcap. 8vo. $s. THE LORD'S PRAYER. Second Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3 j. 6d. REST AWHILE : Addresses to Toilers in the Ministry. Extra fcap. 8vo. 5^. TEMPLE SERMONS. Crown 8vp. iar. 6d. This volume contains a selection of the Sermons preached by Dr. Vaughan in the Temple Church during the twelve years thai he has lield the dignity of Master. 36 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. Vaughan (E. T.)— SOME REASONS OF OUR CHRIST- IAN HOPE. Hulsean Lectures for 1875. By E. T. Vaughan, M.A., Rector of Harpenden. Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. Vaughan (D.J.) — Works by Canon Vaughan, of Leicester: SERMONS PREACHED IN ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, LEICESTER, during the Years 1855 and 1856. Cr. 8vo. $s. 6d. CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES AND THE BIBLE. New Edition, revised and enlarged. Fcap. 8vo. $s. 6d. THE PRESENT TRIAL OF FAITH. Sermons preached in St. Martin's Church, Leicester. Crown 8vo. gs. Venn.— ON SOME OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF BELIEF, Scientific and Religious. Being the Hulsean Lectures for 1869. By the Rev. J. Venn, M. A. 8vo. 6s. 6d. These discourses are intended to illustrate, explain, and work out into some of their consequences, certain characteristics by which the attainment oj religious belief is prominently distinguished from the attainment of belief upon most other subjects. Vita.— LINKS AND CLUES. By Vita. Crown 8vo. " It is a long time since we have read a book so full of the life of a true spiritual mind. . . . Indeed, it is not so much a book to read through, as to read and return to as you do to the Bible itself, from which its whole significance is derived, in passages suited to the chief interest and dififictdlies of the moment We cannot too cordially recommend a book which awakens the spirit, as hardly any book of the last few years has awakened it, to the real meaning of the Christian life."— The Spectator. Warington.— THE WEEK OF CREATION ; or, The Cosmogony of Genesis considered in its Relation to Modern Sci- ence. By George Warington, Author of 'The Historic Character of the Pentateuch vindicated.' Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. Westcott. — Works by Brooke Foss Westcott, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge ; Canon of Peterborough : The London Quarterly, speaking of Dr. Westcott, says — " To a learn- ing and accuracy which command respect and confidence, he unites what are not always to be found in union with these qualities, the no less valuable faculties of lucid arrangement and graceful and facile expression." AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE GOSPELS. Sixth Edition. Crown 8vo. \os. 6d. The author's chief object in this work has been to shew that there is a true mean between the idea of a formal harmonization of the Gospels and the abandonment of their absolute truth. After an Introduction on THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 37 WESTCOTT (Dr.)— continued. the General Effects of the course of Modern Philosophy on the popular views of Christianity, he proceeds to determine in what way the principles therein indicated may be applied to the study of the Gospels. A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE HISTORY OF THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT during the First Four Centuries. Fifth Edition, revised, with a Preface on ' Super- natural Religion.' Crown Svo. iar. 6d. The object of this treatise is to deal with the New Testament as a whole, and that on purely historical grounds. The separate books of which it is composed are considered not individually, but as claiming to be parts of the apostolic heritage of Christians. ' ' The treatise," says the British Quarterly, tf is a scholarly performance, learned, dispassionate, discriminating, worthy of his subject and of tlie present state of Christian literature in relation to it." THE BIBLE IN THE CHURCH. A Popular Account of the Collection and Reception of the Holy Scriptures in the Christian Churches. Seventh Edition. i8mo. 4_y. 6d. A GENERAL VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. ioj. 6d. The Pall Mall Gazette calls the work t€ A brief, scholarly, and, to a. great extent, an original contribution to theological literature." THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, MANIFOLD AND ONE. SLx Sermons preached in Peterborough Cathedral. Crown Svo. is. 6d. THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION. Thoughts on its Relation to Reason and History. Fourth Edition, revised. Crown Svo. 6j. The present Essay is an endeavour to consider some of the elementary truths of Christianity, as a miraculous Revelation, from the side of History and Reason. The author endeavours to sheiu that a devout belief in the Lije of Christ is quite compatible with a broad view of the course of human progress and a frank trust in the laws of our own minds. In the third edition the author has carefully reconsidered the whole argument, and by the help of several kind critics has been enabled to correct some faults and to remove some ambiguities, which had been overlooked before. ON THE RELIGIOUS OFFICE OF THE UNIVER- SITIES. Crown Svo. \s. 6d. " There is wisdom, and truth, and thought enough, and a harmony and mutual connection running through them all, which makes the collection of more real value than many an ambitious treatise."— Literary Churchman. 38 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. WESTCOTT (Dr.)— continued. THE REVELATION OF THE RISEN LORD. Crown 8vo. 6s. Westcott— Hort— THE NEW TESTAMENT IN THE ORIGINAL GREEK. The Text Revised by B. F. Westcott, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity, Canon of Peterborough, and F. J. A. Hort, D.D., Hulsean Professor of Divinity, Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge : late Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. ioj\ 6d. each. Vol. I. Text. Vol. II. Introduction and Appendix. " The Greek Testament as printed by the two Professors must in future rank as one of the highest critical authorities amongst English scholars. " — Guardian. ' ' It is pi'obably the most important contribution to Biblical learning in our generation. " — Saturday Review. " The object in view is to present the original words of the New Testa- ment as nearly as they can be determined at the present time, to arrive at the texts of the autographs themselves so far as it is possible to obtain it by the help of existing materials We attach much excellence to this manual edition of the Greek Testament, because it is the best contribution which England has made in modern times towards the production of a pure text. . . . It bears on its face evidences of calm judgment and com- mendable candour. The student may avail himself of its aid with much confidence. The Introduction and Appendix specially deserve minute attention."— Athenaeum. Wilkins.— THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. An Essay, by A, S. Wilkins, M.A., Professor of Latin in Owens College, Manchester. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. *' It would be difficult to praise too highly the spirit, the burden, the conclusions, or the scholarly finish of this beautiful Essay." — British Quar- terly Review. Wilson.— THE BIBLE STUDENT'S GUIDE TO THE MORE CORRECT UNDERSTANDING of the ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, by Reference to the Original Hebrew. By William Wilson, D.D., Canon of Winchester. Second Edition, carefully revised. 4to. 25^. The author believes that the present work is the nearest approach to a complete Concordance of every word in the original that has yet been made; and as a Concordance it may be found of great use to the Bible student, while at the same time it serves the important object of furnishing the means of comparing synonymous words and of eliciting their precise and distinctive meaning. The knoivledge of the Hebrew language is not absolutely necessary to the profitable use of the work. THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 39 Worship (The) of God and Fellowship among Men. Sermons on Public Worship. By Professor Maurice, and others. Fcap. 8vo. 3-r. 6d. Yonge (Charlotte M.) — Works by Charlotte M. Yonge, Author of ' The Heir of Redclyffe ': SCRIPTURE READINGS FOR SCHOOLS AND FA- MILIES. 5 vols. Globe 8vo. is. 6d. With Comments, $s. 6d. each. First Series. Genesis to Deuteronomy. Second Series. From Joshua to Solomon. Third Series. The Kings and Prophets. Fourth Series. The Gospel Times. Fifth Series. Apostolic Times. Actual need has led the author to endeavour to prepare a reading book convenient for study with children, containing the very words of the Bible, with only a few expedient omissions, and arranged in Lessons of such length as by experience she has found to suit with children's ordinary power of accurate attentive interest. The verse form has been retained be- cause of its convenience for children reading in class, and as more re- sembling their Bibles ; but the poetical portions have been given in their lines. Professor Huxley at a meeting of the London School-board, par- ticularly mentioned the Selection made by Miss Yonge, as an example of how selections might be made for School reading. " Her Comments are models of their kind." — Literary Churchman. THE PUPILS OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 1 ' Young and old will be equally refreshed and taught by these pages, in which nothing is dull, and nothing is far-fetched." — Churchman. PIONEERS AND FOUNDERS; or, Recent Workers in the Mission Field. With Frontispiece and Vignette Portrait of Bishop Heber. Crown 8vo. 6s. The missionaries whose biographies are here given, are — John Eliot, the Apostle of the Red Indians; David Brainerd, the Enthusiast ; Christ- tan F. Schwartz, the Councillor of Tanjore; Henry Martyn, the Scholar- Missionary ; William Carey and Joshua Marshman, the Serampore Mis- sionaries ; the Judson Family; the Bishops of Calcutta — Thomas Middleton, Reginald Heber, Daniel Wilson; Samuel Mar sd en, the Aus- tralian Chaplain and Friend of the Maori; John Williams, the Martyr of Erromango ; Allen Gardener, the Sailor Martyr; Charles Frederick Mackenzie, the Martyr of Zambesi. THE "BOOK OF PRAISE" HYMNAL, COMPILED AND ARRANGED BY LORD SELBORNE. In the following four forms : — A. Beautifully printed in Royal 32mo., limp cloth, price 6d. B. „ Small 18mo., larg-ertype, cloth limp, Is. C. Same edition on fine paper, cloth, Is. 6d. Also an edition with Music, selected, harmonized, and composed by JOHN HTJLLAH, in square 18mo., cloth, 3s. 6d. The large acceptance which has been given to " The Book of Praise" by all classes of Christia?t people encourages the Publishers in entertaining the hope that this Hymnal, which is mainly selected from it, may be ex- tensively used in Congregations, and in some degree at least meet the desires of those who seek uniformity in common worship as a means towards that unity which pious souls yearn after, and which our Lord prayed for in behalf of his Church. ''''The office of a hymn is not to teach controversial Theology, but to give the voice of song to practical religion. No doubt, to do this, it must embody sound doctrine ; but it ought to do so, not after the manner of the schools, but with the breadth, freedom, and simplicity of the Fountain-head." On this principle has Sir R. Palmer p7'oceeded in the preparation of this book. The arrangement adopted is the following : — Part I. consists of Hymns arranged according to the subjects of the Creed — "God the Creator," "Christ Incarnate," "Christ Crucified" " Christ Risen," "Christ Ascended," "Christ's Kingdom and Judg- ment," etc. Part II. comprises Hymns arranged according to the subjects of the Lords Prayer. Part III. Hymns for natural and sacred seasons. There are 320 Hymns in all. CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. PALMBR. » Date Due