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 ,S356 1896 
 , E. F. 
 Christ church sermons with 
 an introductory essay 
 
 BV 4253 
 Sampson 
 
CHRIST CHURCH SERMONS 
 
(-^/v, 
 
 CHRIST CHURCH SERMDNS 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY 
 
 BY THE REV. 
 
 E. F. SAMPSON, M.A. 
 
 STUDENT TUTOR AND FORMERLY CENSOR OF CHRIST CHURCH, OXI-OI. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. 
 
 LONDON, NEW YORK, AND BOMBAY 
 1896 
 
 All rights rcserr'cd 
 
PATRI REVERENDISSIMO IN DEO 
 
 EDWARDO 
 
 EPISCOPO LINCOLNIENSI 
 
 /EDIS CHRISTI PER DUODECIM ANNOS CANONICO 
 
 SUORUM SI QUIS ALIUS 
 
 AMICO PASTORI MAGISTRO 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The sermons printed here were preached at con- 
 siderable intervals in the course of the last twenty - 
 one years ; during seventeen of these years the author 
 held the office of Censor of Christ Church. They 
 were written without any idea of publication, and it 
 has consequently been necessary to correct them in 
 details; they are, however, substantially unchanged. 
 Care has been taken to give, as far as possible, 
 references to any books of which use was made ; l)ut 
 as, with very few exceptions, the manuscripts were 
 never looked at from the dates at which they were 
 preached, until they were re-read for the purpose of 
 this book, it is possible that some of the references 
 have been lost sight of and forgotten: for any such 
 accidental omission the author wishes to apologize. 
 In one or two cases it is obvious that the sermons 
 are considerably indebted to particular writers. The 
 first sermon would never have been written as it 
 stands, if it had not been suggested by a book 
 on " Mental Physiology," by Dr. W. B. Carpenter.' 
 
 ^ " Principles of Mental Physiology," by W. B. Carpenter, M.D., 
 F.R.S. London : Kesran Paul & Co. 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 On re-reading it, there appeared to be difficulty in 
 marking tlie particular references tliat should be 
 made; the author, however, wishes to acknowledge 
 fully his general indebtedness to this very interesting 
 book. Two other Sermons (VIII. and XVIII.) draw 
 very largely upon the standard work on " The Doctrine 
 of the Incarnation," by Archdeacon Wilberiorce.^ 
 Their publication here seems to need no apology; 
 any one well acquainted with the book will recognize 
 at once how large the author's debt to it is ; any one 
 who does not know the book, and has his attention 
 directed to it by one of these sermons, will be 
 grateful for the introduction to so instructive and 
 suggestive a treatise. 
 
 There is difficulty — perhaps generally, certainly 
 under the conditions in Avhich sermons have to be 
 written — in distinguishing between what may and 
 what may not be held to be original. Ideas are 
 suggested in conversation as well as in magazines and 
 books ; they take their place in the mind, germinate 
 there and reappear, sometimes without any recollection 
 on the part of the writer of the origin from which 
 they spring. The author is perfectly conscious how 
 much he owes to such indirect sources for guidance 
 and stimulus, in all sorts of ways. It is, of course, 
 
 * " The Doctrine of the Incarnation," by Archdeacon R. I. Wilbcr- 
 force. London, IMurray, 18-11). 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 only possible to acknowledge this debt in general 
 terms; but the debt is none the less real, and the 
 acknowledgment of it none the less sincere. As these 
 words are being penned, there rise up before the 
 writer memories of friends and colleagues — among 
 them some who have now passed " from out our bourne 
 of Time and Place " — who have given, and still give, 
 to life in Oxford its peculiar happiness. This is the 
 special reward that Christ Church has been able to 
 bestow so lavishly upon those who have worked for 
 the House ; and it is in the help given by this friend- 
 ship, that the author finds the source of all that there 
 may be of any value in what he has written, while 
 he accepts as his own the full responsibility for any 
 failure or shortcoming. 
 
 Christ Church, 
 Sejpt&mber, 1896. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction xvii 
 
 I. 
 ^otjjinfl antf E tapping. 
 
 " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." — Gal. vi. 7 1 
 (The First Sunday after Trinity, May 30, 1875.) 
 
 IL 
 
 EIjc Eljuts^ t^Kt arc mn^ttiu 
 
 " For now we see through a glass, darkly ; but then face to face : 
 now I know in part ; but then shall I know even as also I 
 am known." — 1 Cor. xiii. 12 11 
 
 (^Quinquagesima Sunday, February 8, 1880.) 
 III. 
 
 €l)e laiiTfltTflm at Cljrtst. 
 
 " My kingdom is not of this world." — St. John xviii. 36 . . 23 
 {Twenty-sixth Sunday after Trinity, November 21, 1880.) 
 
 IV. 
 ^^t dTiitite SntcHcrt. 
 
 '' We know in part." — 1 Cor. xiii. 9 33 
 
 {Sunday after Ascension-day, May 2L), 1S81.) 
 
 V. 
 
 '• This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate 
 
 of Heaven." — Gen. xxviii. 17 44 
 
 (Ttventy-fifth Sunday after Trinity, November 20, 1S82.) 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 VI. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 " Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good 
 
 things." — St. Luke xvi. 25 55 
 
 {First Sunday after Trinity, May 27, 1883.) 
 VII. 
 
 " Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of 
 
 God."— St. John iii. 3 67 
 
 (Quinquagesima Sunday, February 24, 1884.) 
 
 VIII. 
 K'^t Cl^tirc]^ r^t 23otfe of €l)xi^t 
 
 " The Church which is His Body."— Eph. i. 23 78 
 
 {Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, October 26, 1884.) 
 
 IX. 
 
 '' My sin is ever before me." — Psalm li. 3 87 
 
 (Sezagesima Sunday^ February 8, 1885.) 
 
 X. 
 
 ^f^t ?i?0lp €ximtv, 
 
 " Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall see God." — St. 
 
 Matt. v. 8 95 
 
 {Trinity Sunday, May 31, 1885.) 
 
 XI. 
 CTjri^ttan ^If--as^rrti0u. 
 
 " I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." 
 
 —Phil. iv. 13 105 
 
 {Ttoenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity, November 22, 1885.) 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 XII. 
 ^clf--}3urift'ratt0n. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 We know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him ; for 
 we shall see Him as He is. Aud every man that hath this 
 hope in him purifieth liimself, even as He is pure." — 1 St. 
 JoHNiii. 2, 3 114 
 
 (Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, February 14, 1886.) 
 
 XIII. 
 
 €^t miaVk of Etfc. 
 
 Their eyes were holden that they should not know Him." — 
 St. Luke xxiv, 16 121 
 
 (Fifth Sunday after Easter, May 30, 1886.) 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Speak every man truth with his neighbour : for we are members 
 one of another." — Eph. iv. 25 . • 131 
 
 (Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, October 31, 1886.) 
 
 XV. 
 
 Hofte totuartf^ (Sotf. 
 
 " Charity never faileth."— 1 Cor. xiii. 8 140 
 
 (Quinquagesima Sunday, February 20, 1887.) 
 
 XVI. 
 
 E^t ^nyictie^ of iCifc na dSytuit for dfailure of Coiiratjc. 
 
 " He that observeth the wind shall not sow ; and he that 
 
 regardeth the clouds shall not reap." — Eccles. xi. 4 . , 150 
 
 (Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity, October 30, 1887.) 
 
 h 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 XVII. 
 ^\^t 3Lifc 0f tljc Simorltf t0 rnmc. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I saw a new heaven and a new earth." — Key. xxi. 1 ... 159 
 (Septuagesima Sunday, January 29, 1888.) 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Tlien opened He their understanding, that they might under- 
 stand the scriptures." — St. Luke xxiv. 45 170 
 
 {Sunday after Ascension Day, May 13, 1888.) 
 
 XIX. 
 
 ' Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, 
 which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the Bride- 
 groom. And five of them were wise, and five were foolish." 
 —St. Matt. xxv. 1, 2 180 
 
 (Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, February 10, 1889.) 
 XX. 
 
 ' Then went in also that other disciple . . . and he saw, and 
 
 believed." — St. John xx. 8 188 
 
 {Fourth Sunday after Easter, May 19, 1889.) 
 
 XXI. 
 
 VL\it mm%tx& €f (iFvtrrnalij^m. 
 
 These have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a 
 time." — St. Mark iv. 17 198 
 
 (First Sunday in Lent, February 23, 1890.) 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 XXII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 They all with one consent began to make excuse,"— St. Luke 
 xiv. 18 207 
 
 {Second Sunday after Trinity, June 15, 1890.) 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 (QiKxx antf B^coB. 
 
 " Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated."— Rom. ix. 13 . 218 
 
 (Second Sunday in Lent, February 22, 1891.) 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 (Salf'^ Waitt mu^t fie l^eartf in ^t ClaintJEf ai 3^u^mi Bvditi, 
 
 " And he said. Nay, father Abraham : but if one went unto 
 them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto 
 liim, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will 
 they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead." — St. 
 Luke xvi. 30, 31 227 
 
 (First Sunday after Trinity, May 31, 1891.) 
 XXV. 
 
 " Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and for 
 
 ever."— Heb. xiii. 8 (R.V.) * .... 236 
 
 (Second Sunday in Lent, March 1 3, 1892.) 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 €f^t Unijc of (Solr. 
 
 " As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you." — St. 
 
 John xv. 9 247 
 
 (Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, October 30, 1892.) 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 XXVII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 " O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord : praise Him and 
 exalt Him above all for ever." — Song of the Three Holy 
 Children, 35 257 
 
 (Twenty -seco7id Sunday after Trinity, October 29, 1893.) 
 
 XXVIII. 
 CIjc 3Startn(j ai ti)t €xa^^. 
 
 " If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take 
 
 up his cross, and follow Me." — St, Matt. xvi. 24 . . . 265 
 
 (Second Sunday in Lent, February 18, 1894.) 
 XXIX. 
 
 " Take heed, and beware of covetousness : for a man's life 
 consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he 
 possesseth." — St. Luke xii. 15 274 
 
 (Quinquagesima Sunday, February 16, 1896.) 
 XXX. 
 
 "Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life 
 consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he 
 possesseth." — St. Luke xii, 15 283 
 
 (First Sunday in Lent, February 23, 1896.) 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The following sermons, with the exception of the last 
 two, have no immediate link of connection with each 
 other ; yet, from the fact that they were all preached 
 to a College audience, there are naturally special points 
 that recur more than once. On two of these it may be 
 well to make a few preliminary remarks. 
 
 In the sensitive atmosphere of Oxford, where during 
 the last half century everything that is generally in- 
 cluded under the term faith has had almost of necessity 
 a very hard struggle for existence, it is natural that in 
 speaking to younger men a preacher should be anxious 
 in every way he can to lay stress upon the reality of 
 the things that belong to the unseen world. And, if 
 he ventures to touch on such questions as this, he must 
 deal with them, as best he can, from the purely intel- 
 lectual side. A University is a place of books, of 
 people who are reading widely, and whose chief duty is 
 either learning or teaching — one or both of these. 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION, 
 
 Men are outside the stream of general life ; they are 
 theorists, some would perhaps say dreamers, rather 
 than practical men dealing with everyday life in all 
 its many-sidedness. The " academic mind " is a well 
 understood phrase; and it is under conditions domi- 
 nated by it that the maintenance or defence of so 
 intensely practical a thing as the Christian Creed has 
 to be undertaken. Hence comes the tendency to insist 
 on the fact, that the ultimate intellectual difficulties 
 of the reason, when it acknowledges its allegiance to 
 the Creed, are not in reality seriously greater than 
 those it has to meet if it refuses this allegiance ; that 
 in the end, if a man persistently examines and probes 
 and cross-examines his first principles, he must find 
 questions put to him to which he can give no complete 
 and satisfactory answer ; and this quite as certainly on 
 non-Christian as on Christian lines of thought. 
 
 The writer matriculated in 1865 ; the Conservatism 
 of the older Oxford had by that time done its best — 
 or its worst — in the way of restraining or stifling the 
 growth of new ideas, and in compelling thought to 
 move, if it moved at all, only along lines traced out 
 and fixed unchangeably by prevalent ideas and 
 opinions. The Tractarian Party was supposed to be 
 crushed, or if not quite crushed, yet to be reduced to so 
 completely a quiescent condition, that those who had 
 been living in terror at the idea of the possible re- 
 establishment of Papal authority in these kingdoms 
 
INTRODUCTION, 
 
 were able to sleep in peace. Really they had won 
 their imaginary peace only by the proverbial method 
 of creating a solitude. By the suspension of Dr. Pusey 
 some twenty years earlier, the leaders of the old 
 Oxfctrd party had struck a fatal blow at Church life ; 
 followed as this suspension was within a few years by 
 the Gorham judgment and by renewed secessions to 
 Rome, all possibility of steady influence was for the time 
 taken away from the group of men, who, whatever their 
 faults might have been supposed to be, were the leading 
 thinkers within the Church. From the beginning of 
 the movement they had steadily maintained a very 
 high ideal of what life in Oxford should be, in its 
 simplicity of manners as well as in its intellectual 
 eagerness and industry. It is easy to understand how 
 entirely distasteful such enthusiasms must have been 
 to the old-fashioned academic mind. It, indeed, would 
 have none of these innovations, and in the end it 
 practically carried its point. Dr. Pusey himself was 
 undismayed ; he held his ground, set like a great rock 
 in the corner of " Tom Quad," unmoved and unmov- 
 able ; years hence men will, perhaps, be able to 
 estimate what the Church of England owes to his 
 courage and tenacity. Here and there were one or two 
 — notably the late Dr. Liddon, then one of the younger 
 Students of Christ Church — who kept the flame that 
 had been kindled in the earlier days from entirely 
 dying out ; but in the main, at that date, the victory 
 
INTRODUCTION, 
 
 rested with those who desired to keep down the New 
 Movement. Enthusiasm was checked, and Church life 
 was left to be represented by the traditional ideals of 
 conformity, by College services which were compulsory, 
 with little attempt to infuse life or reality or glow into 
 them, and by monthly celebrations of the Holy Com- 
 munion, which, strange as it seems to us, were also 
 practically compulsory. It is scarcely necessary to 
 criticize principles which could produce such results as 
 these. At a time when the ferment of a newly 
 awakened life was spreading through the nation, when, 
 after the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, new ideas 
 were making themselves felt and were beginning to 
 tell in every direction — Tractarianism, after all, was no 
 isolated phenomenon ; it had its place in and its relation 
 to the general movement of the day — the University, 
 under the guidance of the then dominant i)arty, made 
 its attempt to stand aside and to remain uninfluenced 
 by the forces that were working in the world ; it tried 
 to do this, and it failed as it was bound to fail. The 
 author is entirely convinced that the reforms which 
 have been carried out during the last fifty years were 
 reforms that ought in any case to have been made, and 
 that it was right, as well as inevitable, to deprive the 
 Church of England of the exclusive position it held in 
 Oxford. It is, however, certainly worthy of remark, 
 that the first serious blows at the Church were struck, 
 not in the House of Commons or by a political party? 
 
INTRODUCTION, xxi 
 
 but within the University itself, and by the hands of 
 some who claimed to be among its most faithful sons. 
 
 The success which attended the old Hebdomadal 
 Board in dealing with the religious movement within 
 the University, did not follow them in other and, from 
 their point of view, quite as important struggles. 
 While they were doing what they could to suppress 
 the Tractarians, new and, so far as they were concerned, 
 entirely unforeseen forces were beginning to assert 
 themselves and to complicate the problems that 
 pressed for solution. In the sixties the question of 
 the religious tests on the M.A. and superior degrees 
 (tests on the undergraduates and on the bachelors' 
 degrees, except Theology, had been removed by 
 Parliament in 1854) had become a burning question ; 
 and this question, troublesome enough in itself, was 
 further complicated by the fact, that almost all the 
 Headships and a considerable majority of the Fellow- 
 ships were confined to only a minority of those who 
 were members of the Church of England — that is, to 
 those who either were already in Holy Orders, or who 
 were prepared to promise to be ordained within a few 
 years of the date of their election or appointment. 
 Further, as this minority was a steadily diminishing 
 one, owing to the growing reluctance of the younger 
 men to become clergymen, it became difficult to keep 
 up a sufficiently high standard of attainments for the 
 clerical Fellowships. No doubt there were many 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 causes at work tending to produce this result. The 
 political and social developments of the preceding 
 half century had been marvellously rapid, and it was 
 consequently impossible to remain within the old lines 
 of thought and to look at life in the old way. The 
 regular Oxford career — a fellowship, then a tutorship, 
 then a College Living — could no longer be regarded 
 as the normal one. New interests and ideas had made 
 their way into life ; the growth of the natural sciences 
 and the opening out of new fields of knowledge made 
 it impossible that ordination should continue to be 
 a necessary condition of holding positions of learning 
 and education. Men wished to be students and 
 teachers without becoming clergymen; we nowadays, 
 perhaps, find it difficult to understand how it was 
 possible seriously to oppose wishes that appear to us 
 so entirely rational. This appears to be the plain 
 matter-of-fact truth of things that underlay much 
 passionate rhetoric that was used on both sides in the 
 years during which the struggle lasted. Common 
 sense said this change must be made; experience 
 proved that the clerical restrictions did much to make 
 the idea of ordination repugnant to men, and in this 
 way increased the hesitation some felt in making up 
 their minds whether to beeome clergymen or not ; in 
 a word, the restrictions were positively harmful to 
 those who were bent on retaining them. 
 
 It will be readily understood that this did not make 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 it easier to discuss the general imposition of tests on 
 the full degree — that is, on all degrees that admitted 
 men to a share in the government of the University. 
 The question, however, dragged on, and meanwhile the 
 work of the University had to be done. The natural 
 outcome was the growth of opinions which were 
 directed towards the minimizing of the tests in 
 every possible way; and modes of explanation and 
 interpretation began to be current that made them an 
 almost unmixed evil. It is not intended to criticize 
 these opinions in themselves, or to find fault with 
 those who advocated them; they were an almost 
 necessary consequence of the point at which matters 
 stood at the time ; but, in this at least all must agree, 
 when perfectly conscientious people were found to 
 argue seriously that in signing the Articles a man did 
 no more than promise not to controvert them publicly 
 in his position as a University graduate or teacher — 
 that the subscription in no way committed him to 
 any positive belief in them, the position of those 
 who adhered to the tests became very difficult. For 
 it is clear that the tests, so interpreted, excluded 
 mainly Koman Catholics and Nonconformists, who, 
 conscientiously and on religious grounds, dissented 
 from the Church of England: other men, on the 
 theory largely advocated that Englishmen as such 
 were members of the State Church, and in presence 
 of a very liberal interpretation of the tests, were able 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 without any great strain on their consciences to affix 
 their signatures to the Thirty-nine Articles. It is 
 quite obvious that under such conditions as these 
 subscription could not be long retained. 
 
 The controversies that arose from these circum- 
 stances would, if long continued, have been little less 
 than disastrous to Oxford. On the one hand they 
 certainly were full of danger for all that was best 
 in the religious life of the University, while on the 
 other hand they checked and impeded the intellectual 
 development of the place. They divided men into 
 tAvo hostile bodies, sharply opposed to each other, 
 either section inclined to judge their opponents' 
 ability and power of usefulness solely by the attitude 
 they took on the one question of the tests. Fortunately 
 the passing of the Act of 1871 by the Government 
 of Mr. Gladstone, followed as it was a few years later 
 by the work of the last University Commission — a 
 necessary consequence of the Bill of 1871 — settled 
 effectively what may be spoken of as the political side 
 of the question. There are, it is true, some clerical 
 offices still in existence; but as they are now con- 
 stituted they exist with a definite object, namely, 
 the instruction of members of the Church of England, 
 and the maintenance of the College services. They 
 thus have special duties attached to them : incidentally 
 also they are very useful as a connecting link between 
 the present and the past life of the University ; and 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Oxford thus escapes that sudden and entire break with 
 its past which is always to be deprecated in the case 
 of a great historic society. None, it is imagined, will 
 object to this statement except those, if there are any, 
 who consider revolution preferable to evolution. 
 
 Hitherto the points referred to have been mainly 
 what may be called political points. They could not 
 be wholly omitted ; but there are other considerations 
 that touch religious life and thought much more 
 closely than they do. As a matter of fact intellectual 
 difficulties in regard to the Christian Creed had a 
 very large influence in determining men's attitude 
 to ordination and to clerical restrictions. These 
 difficulties were made much more acute by the modes 
 of thought which at that time dominated the Oxford 
 Schools. The teaching of Mr. J. S. Mill was at the 
 zenith of its popularity ; the positions which he main- 
 tained, and the methods that underlay all Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer's work, were regarded as in a very real sense 
 final and conclusive ; they were supposed to contain 
 within themselves the last word that could be said on 
 all subjects. ■■■ In the methods of these teachers there 
 was but small place to be found for any of the ideas 
 usually associated with the Creeds. The truths of 
 
 ^ It is only intended here to enter a protest against the absohite 
 autocracy that Oxford allowed these teachers thirty years ago. The 
 author always feels that he himself owes Mr. Herbert Spencer a debt 
 of real gratitude for the " First Principles." 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Cliristianity were not denied ; they were rather left on 
 one side ; partly perhaps because they were not under- 
 stood, partly because, so far as they were thought about 
 at all, they were not regarded as worth attacking : they 
 were no doubt welcome to survive, if they were able to 
 do so, on the condition that they accepted the principles 
 that underlay the prevailing school of thought. This 
 was of course impossible ; and consequently men began 
 to discover that there was gradually forming round 
 them a mental atmosphere in which, on intellectual 
 grounds, it ceased to be possible to remain Christians 
 in belief. The conceptions of the Creeds could only 
 drag on a precarious existence for imaginative minds 
 as a kind of vague and mystic poetry ; as facts, in any 
 usual sense of the word, they had ceased to be intel- 
 ligible ; they could no longer be made subjects of 
 serious study. 
 
 For some years this school was absolutely dominant 
 in Oxford, and then a great change began to make 
 itself felt. A writer would require very special qualifi- 
 cations to be able to justly estimate the work done 
 in the University by Professor T. H. Green ; it was, 
 however, impossible to live there, while he was teach- 
 ing, without having some idea how deep and wide was 
 the influence exercised by him over his pupils and his 
 contemporaries. Among the former were a number of 
 able men who seized on his teaching with avidity, and 
 made it the basis of their own work, and became 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 afterwards the pioneers of the younger High Church 
 party. It has happened to them, as it often does in such 
 cases, to be denounced most strongly by some of those 
 whose lineal successors they undoubtedly were. This 
 was perhaps unavoidable ; for the work of the earlier 
 Tractarians had lain in the past ; they were compelled 
 by circumstances, first to prove, — and they certainly 
 proved it, — that the line of teaching they maintained 
 had existed continuously within the Church of England 
 since the Keformation ; and next, to restore the study 
 of the fathers and early Church literature, with a view 
 to showing the practical identity of this teaching with 
 that prevailing in the Church before quarrels and 
 schisms had broken it up and disunited it. This work 
 done, it was done once for all, and the problems that 
 then demanded solution were entirely different. The 
 relations of Christianity to modern modes of thought 
 had to be considered ; in view of the changed concep- 
 tions which were becoming part of the ordinary mental 
 furniture of every thinking man, some re-statement of 
 Christian doctrine was absolutely unavoidable. This 
 duty the younger High Church party undertook, and 
 they did their work under the inspiration of Professor 
 Green's teaching. 
 
 It is not, of course, for one moment implied — 
 the mere suggestion of such an idea is grotesque to 
 any one who knows anything of the Professor and his 
 work — that in doing this they were simply putting 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 into a different shape what they learned from him. 
 The point is, not that he taught them exactly what 
 to say, but that he opened the way into methods of 
 thought that made their line of teaching a possibility. 
 He broke the chains by which, during the immediately 
 preceding years, men's minds had been held in bond- 
 age, and kept shut up within the limits of principles 
 that were ultimately — however little some perhaps of 
 those who accepted them would allow it — naturalistic, 
 materialistic, or agnostic. The late Rector of Lincoln 
 College — who was a brilliant representative of the 
 thought of the Oxford of thirty years ago — saw clearly 
 what was going on, and spoke with cynical bitterness 
 of the way in which High Churchmen were carrying 
 off to their own hives the honey created by the new 
 school of thought.^ The great work of Professor 
 Green from an outsider's point of view — and it is 
 superfluous to say that the writer speaks only as an 
 outsider — was that he brought us freedom, cleared the 
 air and made it more breatheable. His influence was 
 fortunately greatest in the University in the seventies, 
 the years immediately following the passing of the 
 Tests Act, by which — strange as some may think the 
 admission to be — Parliament had removed one of 
 the greatest obstacles tha^ stood in the way of the 
 restoration of religious life in Oxford. How far the 
 successors of the Tractarians have done their work it is 
 ' Cf. " Mark Pattison's Memoirs," p. 167. 
 
INTRODUCTION. xxix 
 
 too soon to estimate ; but it is certain that Oxford has 
 passed out of the phase of thought in which it had 
 become practically impossible for many men to accept 
 the Creeds. It is not now an axiomatic truth that to 
 be frankly Christian is incompatible with the pos- 
 session of any intellectual power ; this change the 
 author believes to be due in a very real sense to the 
 teaching of Professor Green. 
 
 It is not suggested for one moment that under 
 these new conditions a complete and final system has 
 been, or is being evolved, which will supply a sufficient 
 vade mecum to all the mysteries that lie about our 
 lives. But, and it is this that is important, it is now 
 possible to think that there are some things which are 
 true and which must be reckoned with, that are not 
 discoverable in the laboratories of the physiologist and 
 the chemist ; that there are facts of the soul and spirit 
 as certain and as urgent as those of the body ; and that 
 any attempt to analyze or explain humanity, which 
 ignores or denies the former, dooms itself to failure. 
 In a word, it is possible once more to say with Pascal, 
 " Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait ^ointT ^ 
 This is not, as is sometimes suggested, equivalent to 
 denying or dethroning reason. The attempt to give 
 reason — reason, that is, as the term is understood in its 
 relation to positive knowledge — a supreme and com- 
 manding position in regard to every side of life and 
 » "Pascal's Pensees," Ed. Faugere, ii. 172. 
 
 e 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 tlionglit, appears to the writer equivalent to the 
 attempt, if such an attempt can be imagined, to drag 
 the skeleton out of the human body, and then^ because 
 life cannot get on without it, to assume that it is 
 the principle of life, and that the rest of the body may 
 be ignored. It is a sheer impossibility, except as an 
 intellectual tour de force, to separate the reason from 
 the moral and spiritual sides of man — from all that 
 belongs to the heart and the affections. To deny the 
 latter their due place is to confuse and perplex the 
 former, and so to make the reason quite unable to 
 fulfil its function in guiding and directing life as a 
 whole. 
 
 There is, then, no intention to argue that the change 
 that has taken place in the way in which all such 
 questions as these are regarded, makes it possible to 
 offer a mathematical demonstration of the truth of the 
 Creed. Most certainly it does nothing of the sort ; but 
 it does grant conditions in which it is no longer little 
 less than an intellectual impossibility to accept the 
 Creed. This is the important point. In many cases, 
 and especially with younger men, much of the difficulty 
 felt in remaining true to the Creed of the Church is 
 taken out of the way, when they begin to understand 
 that the ultimate intellectual difficulties, which have to 
 be met on all lines of thought, present problems that 
 are practically insoluble ; that the pre-suppositions of 
 materialistic systems are pre-suppositions just as surely 
 
INTRODUCTION. xxxi 
 
 as those of Christianity; less objectionable, perhaps, and 
 less difficult of acceptance to particular minds, but none 
 the less for all that pre- suppositions ; that all systems 
 ultimately ask questions to which it is quite impos- 
 sible for men, constituted as they are, to give final 
 answers. When this is admitted, and it is seen that 
 the way is open to listen to the appeal of the heart, to 
 pay attention to the claims of the moral and spiritual 
 sides of man's complex nature, the Creed can command 
 a hearing ; it is no longer as a matter of course set 
 aside and rejected. Certainly there is no steady 
 pressure of continuous and unassailable argument, as 
 in the case of the Propositions of Euclid, compelling 
 men to accept its conclusions ; certainty of this order 
 is only possible in the most exact of the exact sciences. 
 But the road along which the lines of thought de- 
 manded by Christian dogmatic teaching invite men to 
 travel, is no longer hidden from sight, or blocked up 
 and rendered wholly impassable ; the path is open and 
 clear, and those who will may follow its track. This 
 is all that can be wished or expected. Anything more 
 than this would annihilate all conception of the present 
 life as a time of trial and probation, in which it is 
 possible for men to choose and accept, but in which 
 also it is possible to refuse and to deny. 
 
 Any system that aims at completeness and self- 
 sufficiency appears to the present writer unintelligible 
 in this relation. That the whole must remain too vast 
 
xxxii TNTR OD UCTION. 
 
 for human grasp, that it must at times seem hopelessly 
 tangled, that there must be apparent contradictions, 
 apparent impossibilities, is to him certain. All com- 
 pletely reasoned out theories, all complete pocket charts, 
 whose authors claim to have sounded every depth and 
 climbed to every height of the mysteries that lie 
 about us, ap23ear to him to be of less than no value. 
 " Whatever may be true, it is quite certain that cannot 
 be, it is far too simple," is a remark made to him one 
 day by a friend, which practically puts in a single 
 sentence the position here maintained. The paradox 
 " credo quia impossibile " contains a profound truth, 
 since all that is the subject matter of faith cannot by 
 its peculiar conditions be verified by immediate ex- 
 periment ; as soon as it can be so verified, it passes into 
 the domain of positive knowledge, and must be judged 
 by its methods. That which is not possible under the 
 conditions we can experimentally measure and verify 
 may become the object of faith; nothing else can. 
 There seems no reason why we should hold ourselves 
 permanently committed to the dualism involved in 
 this way of speaking ; things no doubt will be made 
 clearer as more is known of the world of phenomena ; 
 something probably of the same mystery that sur- 
 rounds life everywhere else will be found, as men go 
 back more steadily to first principles, to underlie, in 
 the sphere of positive knowledge, a great deal that 
 is now regarded as perfectly known and understood. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Meanwhile it is convenient to accept common phrase- 
 ology, not as dividing knowledge into two sections 
 that are wholly different, and therefore stand quite 
 apart from each other, but as representing two widely 
 contrasted aspects of it, under one or other of which 
 our ideas are compelled to range themselves. 
 
 It may seem that the end aimed at here is of small 
 advantage, even if it is attained ; that the purpose is, 
 as indeed it is, simply to prepare the way for the 
 teaching of the Creed, and to do something, if it may 
 be so, to remove or lessen difficulties which go so far 
 in many cases to make the acceptance of Christian 
 doctrine a simple impossibility. If, however, this end 
 could be gained, a position of great importance would 
 have been won. We cannot live with our intellect 
 and our heart permanently divided against each other ; 
 and among thinking men, with whatever sorrowful 
 reluctance and even pain, the intellect is sure sooner 
 or later to assert itself, and become the master. There- 
 fore, to win the concession of the full right to appeal 
 to the moral facts of life and to the claims of the affec- 
 tions, to secure attention to the logic of the heart, is 
 to win what may be, in some cases, the one thing neces- 
 sary to ensure a hearing for the truths, which the 
 Church of Christ is commissioned to proclaim and 
 teach ; and thus some, at all events, may be delivered 
 from the painful necessity of choosing between the 
 dreary alternatives, of either gradually giving up the 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Creed, in which they have found full satisfaction for all 
 the needs of their hearts and consciences, or of living 
 in a state of continual warfare with the growing 
 strength of their intellectual life. 
 
 11. 
 
 Wealth, its dangers and its responsibilities, is, all 
 must allow, one of the most serious questions that could 
 be spoken about to an Oxford undergraduate audience. 
 The existence among the younger members of the 
 University of a considerable number of men ^^ho have 
 command of large sums of money, and who live and 
 are used to living, to use the regular phrase, up to 
 their means, forces on those who know anything of 
 the manner of life of multitudes of men and women 
 in this country, the anxious problems connected with 
 the rich and the poor, and makes it impossible for them 
 to remain altogether silent. 
 
 It is an astonishing fact that, after so many centuries 
 of Christian teaching. Christian conceptions of wealth 
 and poverty sliould seem so very strange to us. Chris- 
 tianity is the gospel of poverty ; it continually blesses 
 the poor as poor ; it always treats riches as a danger 
 and a responsibility ; it never speaks of them as a 
 blessing. Men still choose steadily to shut their eyes 
 to this fact, although it forces itself upon their attention 
 in almost every page of the Gospels. " There seems to 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 me," the late master of Balliol once said/ " to be much 
 more in the New Testament in praise of poverty than 
 we like to acknowledge." These words exactly hit the 
 point ; men do not like to admit the fact, and therefore 
 pm-posely ignore it. It would, perhaps, be well if they 
 were contented only not to think of it ; unfortunately 
 they sometimes deliberately set themselves to teach the 
 exact contrary of the New Testament lessons. Our 
 Lord taught that men should seek first the kingdom 
 of God and His righteousness, and that all other things 
 should then be added to them. This precept is now 
 generally reversed ; men seek everything else first and 
 His righteousness last of all ; if indeed they do seek it 
 even last. Look well ahead, a young man is told ; make 
 sure of a due share of wealth and comfort — each one 
 interpreting the phrase by the standard of his 
 immediate surroundings — win for yourself a decent 
 income and an assured position ; and then, as to the rest 
 — since the doctrine of " good works " has a somewhat 
 " Komish " flavour about it, and is therefore to be 
 abhorred by all sound Protestants, — it is quite easy to 
 be religious and moral if you have money ; religious 
 and moral, that is, in the estimation of a world that 
 does not trouble itself to look below the surface ; that 
 is always prepared to stamp with its approval all who 
 conform to its customs and accept its conventions, 
 
 ^ "Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol," by Hon. L, A. Tolle- 
 mache, p. 4. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 while it regards with a certain suspicion ideal standards 
 of life and conduct. In such a world as this it 
 certainly is not good to be poor ; the " Northern 
 Farmer " does not stand quite alone in his decision 
 that " the poor in a loomp is bad." ^ It is not indeed 
 generally said quite so bluntly as this ; yet wealth is 
 practically looked upon as a guarantee of moral worth, 
 and although the complementary proposition regarding 
 poverty is not openly stated, there is an undercurrent 
 of belief in something very like it. xind so it comes 
 about that, in one form or another, wealth is the great 
 object that men are taught to set before themselves 
 in life. 
 
 Money, without doubt, can buy social conside- 
 ration; and to appear as a supporter of charitable 
 institutions or as a liberal subscriber to works con- 
 nected with churches and church organization, is one 
 very well recognized way of spending it with a view 
 to the purchase of this most desirable possession. 
 This is sometimes euphemistically sj)oken of as 
 " giving away " money. It is really nothing of the sort ; 
 money so spent is not " given away " at all ; it is laid 
 out in the purchase of a much-sought-after article of 
 merchandize. And, besides this, it buys also power, a 
 far more valuable commodity, and one that has great 
 attractions for many who do not think about social 
 consideration. In truth, none of us ever " give," who 
 ^ Tennyson's "Northern Farmer, New Style." 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 dispose of our surplus pounds here and there in charity, 
 under conditions which involve no self-denial and 
 cost us absolutely nothing. To know what " giving " 
 means, it is necessary to be poor. The man who, out 
 of hundreds or thousands, subscribes a five-pound note 
 to feed hungry children " gives " nothing ; the woman 
 who shares her loaf with a starving neighbour, not 
 knowing where to-morrow's meal is to come from for 
 herself, " gives." This is the real thing ; she is the 
 representative of the widow with her two mites who 
 won our Lord's emphatic approval. Political economy 
 of course objects. One overhears cautious people 
 murmuring to themselves something about reckless- 
 ness and improvidence. Had these cautious people 
 been at Jerusalem, no doubt they would have con- 
 demned the woman our Lord blessed. At the same 
 time — there is no reason to deny it — it is probable 
 enough that the poor are often both reckless and 
 improvident; nothing is more saddening than to 
 hear them lauded, as they sometimes are by people 
 who want their votes, as if because they were 
 poor they had no vices. Of course they have their 
 vices, those to which, as poor, they are more liable 
 than the rich are ; but the fact remains eternally 
 true that the vices that belong to the rich as such, 
 shut and bar for them the gates of the kingdom of 
 heaven, in a way that the vices of the poor never 
 bar them against the poor. We cannot say this too 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 decidedly; we have our Lord's own warrant for the 
 statement.^ 
 
 Covetousness, greed — the desire of amassing wealth 
 and the comforts that belong to wealth — is a sin that 
 attaches itself to societies no less than to individuals ; 
 it is spoken of in the last but one of these sermons 
 as a national sin. No doubt it may be objected that 
 Englishmen are not more covetous than other nations. 
 This is possibly true ; there are, it is certain, what may 
 
 * There is nothing new in this way of looking at things. A very 
 quaint old book was printed in 1862 by J. B. Nichols and Sons, 
 London, for the Roxburghe Club, called " Roberd of Brunne's Handlyng 
 Synne; " it was written in 1303. In it the claims, almost the rights, 
 of poverty are set out in no baiting phrases {e.Q. pp. 210, 215) ; the 
 slothfulncss and self-indulgence of the rich are denounced (p. 135) ; 
 it is said they even grudge the poor man the little he gets (p. 187). 
 It is impossible not to feel that some of these old mediaeval people had 
 a firm grip of sides of truth that we have forgotten. We need not be 
 astonished at this ; the human race does not move forwards and 
 upwards in a perfectly straight line ; the course is at best zigzag and 
 irregular ; there is always loss as well as gain ; it must be enough for 
 us that the total result is advance. Since the sixteenth century 
 English Christianity has been tainted with what has been well called 
 '• practical pelagianism : " this lias re-acted on and increased our 
 national selt-suflSciency, and so made us blind to the beauty of the 
 moie humble virtues. It is curious to note (p. 131) that in these old 
 days the characteristic sin of England was " envy" — the feelingof regret 
 or grudge at a neighbour's success or prosperity. This is not unknown 
 in the present day ; witness the assumption which underlies many 
 questions asked and many answers given in Parliament, that any 
 change in international relations "or agreements must of necessity be 
 wrong, unless it results in some practical gain to ourselves. The envy 
 of a neighbour's prosperity is only another aspect of covetousness. 
 The author is indebted for his knowledge of this book to his friend 
 and colleague the Rev. T. B. Strong. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 be called " world " sins as well as national sins, and, 
 constituted as men are, it is only too likely that greed 
 is such a sin. But this does not help matters much. 
 As nations can only be made better by mending the 
 morals of individuals among them, so the world can 
 only be made better by raising the moral tone of the 
 different nationalities; and, therefore, the call to 
 national repentance and national amendment becomes 
 only more pressing and more urgent, in the case of 
 each separate people, as the area of the sin is widened. 
 The world is a very sorry sight; every nation of 
 Europe is armed to the teeth. Japan, on entering 
 into relations with the western nations, finds itself 
 compelled to tread the same fatal path. Our own 
 country can no longer keep out of European compli- 
 cations ; and consequently our war burdens, or, as one 
 would fain regard them, our defence burdens, must 
 become heavier and heavier year by year. The root 
 of all this misery entailed upon the silent, suffering 
 populations is to be found in international envy, 
 suspicion, and greed. Certainly he must be a bold 
 man who is prepared to claim that we as a nation 
 are guiltless of these sins ; almost as bold as if he 
 were to say that the " patriotic " songs of our theatres 
 and music-halls were Christian hymns. 
 
 It is sometimes said that democracies will be found 
 to be as warlike as the most autocratic governments. 
 It is to be feared that there may be truth' in this 
 
xl INTRODUCTION, 
 
 statement ; if so, it is not because the masses of the 
 people are eager for war, but because men are as sheep, 
 and readily follow any leader who presents himself: 
 the consequence is that noisy self-assertive militant 
 factions, whose advantage is found in fishing in 
 troubled waters, readily pose as the representatives of 
 the whole nation, and before the great majority know 
 what is happening some irrevocable step is taken, some 
 reckless challenge given and accepted. It is open 
 to question whether a true democratic government has 
 yet been seen ; men as men seem to ask to be 
 governed, and up to the present time democracies 
 have shown no special capacity for developing really 
 national leaders, or indeed leaders at all in any noble 
 sense of the word. If this be indeed so, and if de- 
 mocracies cannot rise to the level of the duties which 
 political evolution has assigned them, then they must 
 continue to pay the penalty of their failure, until by 
 suffering they have learned how to govern themselves, 
 how to do justly and to live unselfishly. 
 
 It is not intended to suggest for one moment — it 
 is scarcely necessary to say it — that the defence of 
 our own homes, our own country, our own kith and 
 kin in our colonies, is not a primary duty, and one 
 that must be fulfilled under any difficulties and at 
 any cost. But the entire acknowledgment of this 
 duty is perfectly compatible with a decided refusal 
 to accept theories of national growth and national 
 
INTRODUCTION. xli 
 
 expansion, which constitute a declared policy of national 
 greed. The civilized nations of the world appear to be 
 engaged just now in what can only be called a " game 
 of grab " on a gigantic scale ; and men assume that 
 all must to the extent of their power and opportunity 
 follow out this policy of greed ; that any nation which 
 attempted to adapt international relations to the 
 principles of the Gospels would be at once blotted out 
 of existence. Is this quite so certain ? If the present 
 intolerable strain of militarism is ever to be relaxed, 
 such release can only come about by the adoption of 
 a code of international ethics that is in accord with, 
 or, to put it quite modestly, is not wholly incompatible 
 with the ethics of Christianity. As it is, the nations 
 of the world have denied Grod ; they have consecrated 
 greed and set up the great golden image as the object 
 of popular worship, and men are consequently begin- 
 ning to groan under the weight of burdens they find 
 too heavy to be borne. National sins, no less than 
 individual sins, involve suffering ; and sooner or later 
 the crash must come, the penalty of the sin must 
 inevitably be paid. One war, however, will not see 
 the end of it, neither will two, nor three ; the end can 
 only come when the idols men have hitherto been 
 taught to worship are ground to powder and cast 
 to the four winds of heaven. But this can never be ; 
 perhaps so, as we men look at things : that, however, 
 which is impossible with men is possible with God ; 
 
xlii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 tlie work Christianity has to do in the world is not 
 yet finished ; on some sides, indeed, it is true to say 
 it has never even been begun. 
 
 There are two principles which, if clearly and 
 steadily held, may guide men through present anxieties, 
 and also bring hope to any who are beginning to 
 despair, as they think of what may be in store for 
 their children. They are these : — 
 
 1. A firm belief in God revealed in the Bible as 
 a God of Love ; with a steady conviction that the 
 Movement of the Ages, in spite of human perversity, 
 is the expression of His will for man. 
 
 2. A clear recognition that the present distribution 
 of property is not of divine ordinance, and may be 
 amended or entirely changed without mortal sin. 
 
 The second proposition does not involve the corol- 
 lary that, although the present arrangement of 
 property is not ordained of God, some new one that 
 will hereafter be set up as a consequence of franchises, 
 palavers, and parliaments, will be of divine ordinance. 
 No system is or ever will be divine ; the New Testa- 
 ment cares nothing about these things ; " Who made 
 Me a divider over you ? " ^ is the expression of its 
 inmost thought. It does, indeed, care infinitely what 
 manner of beings the men are, who have to bear the 
 
 1 St. Luke xii. 14. 
 
INTRODUCTION, xliii 
 
 grave responsibility that attaches to earthly posses- 
 sions. When men are governed by the Christian law 
 of Charity the conditions of the distribution of wealth 
 are not of primary importance. Where the law of 
 Charity is unknown, and so far as it is denied in 
 practice, no system can be devised that will not, sooner 
 or later, become a grinding tyranny. 
 
 The great difficulty for any preacher lies in this, 
 that he has to make statements and to enunciate 
 truths, which must appear to his audience to put 
 forward a claim on the part of the speaker to a stead- 
 fastness of belief, and to a lofty standard of life and 
 action which, as he only too sadly knows, lie far away 
 from anything that he has reached. This difficulty is 
 not made less when the words are put out as printed 
 words. But the message must be spoken, however 
 weak or faulty he may be who has to deliver it ; it 
 cannot be dragged down to the level of his own life. 
 In saying this there is no intention, either to suggest 
 that the preacher may say what he does not believe, or 
 to make any excuse for insincerity, exaggeration, or 
 untruthfulness on his part. So far as the author is 
 able to judge himself, all that is said here represents 
 his sincerest convictions, which, through many years of 
 work, under conditions always of the fullest interest, 
 often of true happiness, at times too of real and press- 
 ing anxiety, have steadily grown and strengthened. 
 The problem that such convictions can grow without at 
 
xliv INTRODUCTION, 
 
 once over-mastering all other interests, and so putting 
 an end once for all to the moral and spiritual struggles 
 of our life, is, perhaps, one of those open contradictions 
 by which we may, in some degree, measure how, in our 
 probation here on earth, we live confused and tangled 
 lives ; so that, even when we see the better things and 
 might lay hold upon the substance, we are nevertheless 
 quite ready to pursue the shadow, and seek after the 
 things that are worse. Arthur Hugh Clough felt, it 
 may be, something of the truth that lies hidden 
 here when he wrote the lines that have been so often 
 quoted : — 
 
 " It fortifies my soul to know 
 That, though I perish, Truth is so : 
 That, howsoe'cr I stray and range, 
 Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. 
 I steadier step when I recall 
 That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall." 
 
 Respice in servos Tugs et in opera Tua. Et sit splendor 
 Domini Dei nostri super nos : et opus manuum nostrarum dirige. 
 
Solomg anlr ^leaping. 
 
 " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." — Gal. vi. 7. 
 (The Fikst Sunday after Trinity, May 30, 1875.) 
 
 OuK actions, we are sometimes told, are merely the 
 resultants of the forces which act upon us; we take 
 up, it is said, a particular line of conduct simply 
 because we cannot help it ; and as we exercise no sort 
 of control over the forces, it is impossible to hold us 
 to be morally responsible for their resultant. On 
 the other hand, we hear some speak as if we were 
 altogether free, as if everything that we did were 
 the outcome of our own independent decision, as if 
 nothing external to ourselves had any part at all 
 in the direction or control of our actions ; and hence 
 the conclusion is naturally drawn that we are, in the 
 widest sense of the term, responsible agents. Does 
 not the real truth of the matter in this, as in many 
 another question, lie between these extreme positions ? 
 On one side it is true we are free, on the other side 
 it is also true that we are influenced by determining 
 
 B 
 
SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
 forces which are wholly beyond our control. We 
 assume at once, as a question about which it is 
 impossible to dispute, that the children of consump- 
 tive parents are very likely to be consumptive, that 
 their bodily organism will probably show the same 
 weaknesses as their parents' from whom it is inherited; 
 but we apparently shrink from making the analogous 
 assumption, for which there seems to be quite as 
 good evidence, that the children of vicious parents 
 are likely to inherit a tendency to vice, that moral 
 tendencies as well as physical qualities pass down 
 from father to son. We cannot, however, hesitate 
 any longer to make this assumption, and consequently 
 we find ourselves compelled to admit that we inherit 
 with our physical organism inclinations towards good 
 and evil which necessarily affect us when we come 
 to make our choice between right and wrong, and 
 therefore so far interfere with our freedom of action. 
 
 Again, consider the circumstances which have 
 surrounded us since our birth. Over the majority 
 of these we have had no control whatever; and yet 
 can we venture to say that they have had no influence 
 upon us ? that we are in no way different from what 
 we should have been had all our early years been 
 passed, to take a very exfi-eme instance, in the homes 
 of vice and misery that are to be found in our great 
 cities ? What should we, who were shielded during 
 our childhood from every breath of evil, have become 
 
SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
 had our lot been that of many who are born into 
 this world ? If ever we feel ourselves the least in- 
 clined to thank God with the Pharisee that we are 
 not as other men, we might remember this. And 
 if, as we think of it, the burden of sin seems to grow 
 too heavy to bear — the burden, I mean, of human 
 sin — the sense of the utter weakness of the vast 
 brotherhood to which we belong, the feeling of man's 
 wonderful capacity for good, and yet of his appalling 
 failure ; if we see one or another around us going 
 farther and farther away from what is true and good, 
 we shall fall on our knees to offer up our prayers 
 to the great Father of all with no touch of the com- 
 placent self-satisfied feelings of those who, secure in 
 the contemplation of their own rectitude, beg forgive- 
 ness for a brother who has fallen into sin ; our prayer 
 Avill not be "forgive him," but "forgive us." We 
 do not know what his temptations were ; we can only 
 feel that perhaps had we been so severely tried, our 
 failure would have been more completely disastrous 
 than his. It is certain that the more we think of it, 
 the more and more shall we be compelled to admit 
 the very large influence which our lot in life, the 
 various conditions of our environment, exercise upon 
 us both for good and for evil. Thus, in a second 
 direction, our freedom is curtailed, since it is true 
 up to a certain point that we are what circumstances 
 make us. 
 
SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
 Is man, then, the slave of circumstance? Em- 
 phatically no. We have souls as well as bodies. 
 No doubt the soul is in this life irrevocably tied to 
 the body, and consequently it must be conditioned 
 and even hampered by it. To each one is given a 
 body, acted upon within and without by many 
 influences, some for good, but only too many for 
 evil ; and out of this weary and tuneless discord the 
 soul is bidden to beat out the music of a holy life. 
 Men have done this in the past by the grace of God, 
 and in the same strength we in our turn may do 
 it if we will. If we will; for the will of man is in 
 itself free. It matters little what hard logic may 
 sometimes seem to demand from us ; we need only 
 appeal to experience. We know that we are free. 
 We may make the experiment at any moment. We 
 know that we can and do make our choice between 
 two courses of action, that we reject the first and 
 choose the second, when it was just as much in our 
 power to have rejected the second and chosen the 
 first. We may indeed rest content with this one 
 fact, that those who on intellectual grounds reject 
 the freedom of the will, are compelled in practical 
 life to act as if they believed in it. We find, there- 
 fore, that there is within us one force which is the 
 expression of our inmost selves, which may beat 
 down all opposition, may make all the opposing 
 forces that we have to meet its subjects and its 
 
SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
 slaves ; or which may, on the other hand — we must 
 never forget it — be itself overpowered and crushed, 
 until the man ceases to be, in any sense of the words, 
 a responsible being, and is tossed like a rudderless 
 boat on every wave of passion. 
 
 Here, then, is a third direction in which we may 
 lose our freedom. In this case, however, there is the 
 great difference that now the loss comes upon us 
 through our own fault. We constantly speak of the 
 formation of habits; what do we mean? We mean 
 that any action we continually repeat, after every 
 repetition we are more likely to do again, when the 
 opportunity occurs ; that is, we more and more lose 
 our freedom of choice as to whether we will or will not 
 do that particular thing. Thus, as life goes on, those 
 influences over which in the first case we had no 
 control and our will are continually modifying each 
 other ; each time we sin we are giving our inherited 
 tendencies to evil, and all other opposing forces that 
 surround us greater power, and at last we may give 
 them such an advantage that we can no longer be 
 considered to be responsible for what we do; not 
 responsible for our actions, but responsible for the loss 
 of our responsibility ; we are guilty of having allowed 
 and encouraged some sin while it was yet in our 
 power to have resisted it, and we have continued this 
 encouragement until we have lost our chance of 
 escaping from it. 
 
SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
 Physiology tells us the same story. Every time 
 we do anything we modify our brain; we strengthen 
 the nervous forces which continually impel us to the 
 reproduction of that particular action whether it be 
 good or bad. It cannot, of course, be allowed for one 
 moment that the little bit of brain tissue is the habit, 
 is the force that holds us in its grasp ; but still we are 
 told that the soul, as it were, stamps on the brain the 
 evidence of all that has been done, and consequently 
 we bear about with us, graven on our living selves, the 
 records of our past. The particles of matter which 
 make up the body are continually changing, yet a 
 scar will retain its old shape throughout life, the new 
 material taking exactly the same shape as the old ; 
 in the same way, the modifications we have introduced 
 into the brain tend to perpetuate themselves, in other 
 words, habits are formed. Thus it is no idle metaphor 
 to say that " we are tied and bound with the chain of 
 our sins." And then there is the possibility of the 
 complete paralysis of our will, the absolute loss of our 
 responsibility ; in the words of the Bible, it is possible 
 to quench the Spirit of God, to drive Him altogether 
 from our hearts; it is possible to create within our- 
 selves such strong forces for evil that the soul, numbed 
 and deadened, can no longer hear the voice of God. 
 We dare not set limits to the power of God; but 
 we have no right to expect Him to work miracles 
 for us, and nothing short of a miracle can help 
 
SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
 one whose will, whose power over himself, is entirely 
 destroyed. 
 
 " As a man soweth so also shall he reap." Even 
 now, if you think a little, you know you are reaping 
 in a very real sense as you sowed in the years of 
 school life. But for you the seed time of life has not 
 yet passed away ; life is not yet a dreary contemplation 
 of what might have been ; it is full of hope, full of the 
 boundless " may he's " that lie in an unknown future. 
 What that future shall be depends, far more than you 
 can understand now, on the way you spend the next 
 few years. In the quiver and throb and excitement 
 of your life in these Oxford years, your inner selves, 
 like metal molten in a furnace, are imperceptibly but 
 surely running away into the mould that will fix them 
 fast for life. It is therefore of the very last importance 
 that you should make some effort to train your wills 
 now, when the task is comparatively easy : a few years 
 hence it will have become almost impossible. 
 
 But there is no need to rest the question on what 
 may after all seem to be only selfish grounds. St. 
 Paul's words strike far deeper than we at first sight 
 imagine them to do. If what we have been thinking 
 about is at all true, then we are ourselves gathering in 
 the harvest that has grown up from what our fathers 
 have sown, and the next generation will reap as we, 
 in our turn, sow for them. We may even go a step 
 further still ; we very often forget how many and how 
 
SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
 subtle are the actions and reactions which are con- 
 tinually going on in the social world; and yet it is 
 certain that we are all day by day making each other 
 better or worse. We cannot help it ; it is one of the 
 laws of our life. Our past actions have created around 
 us a moral atmosphere which we must perforce carry 
 with us wherever we go, which must, therefore, have its 
 influence on all with whom we come in contact. If 
 we have any " enthusiasm of humanity " — to borrow a 
 well-known expression — any desire to do what we can 
 to make men better, or to avoid doing our share 
 towards making them worse, the only road is through 
 patient self-discipline, not undertaken for merely 
 selfish ends, not springing, as indeed it never could, 
 from what has been called "other worldliness," but 
 undertaken rather for the sake of those we love, or, 
 as we should better say, from love to the good, to God, 
 and through this, as the only sure basis for it, of love 
 to men. It is only by being brave and pure and 
 generous and true ourselves that we can do anything 
 whatever to help to make others so. If we are impure, 
 mean, and cowardly, then we must, we cannot help it, 
 do our share in making those with whom we constantly 
 live cowardly, mean, and impure too. 
 
 And this task of self-ediTcation laid ujDon each one 
 of us as our life's work would be heavier than the 
 bravest of us dare attempt, were it not that all the 
 help we need for its fulfilment is within our reach. 
 
SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
 Do not hesitate or draw back at the thought of prayer 
 and of the things that belong to the religious life, 
 because so much that is said and done in the name 
 of religion is the reverse of manly, is weak and feeble 
 and effeminate; because duty is sometimes insisted 
 on till it seems as if men were called only to be slaves, 
 slavishly doing a master's bidding, and not called to 
 learn, it may be very slowly and very painfully, to 
 become free men, masters and rulers of their own 
 hearts and wills. Kemember we are not bidden to 
 destroy our wills, we are called on to assimilate these 
 wills to the will of Almighty God. If, then, we 
 realize the task set before us, if we believe, as we say 
 we do, that — to quote words known to some of us — 
 *'' the upper zones of human affection above the clouds 
 of self and passion take us into the sphere of a Divine 
 Communion," ^ if we know, as we must, our deep need 
 in our hour of weakness of that strength which only 
 Divine sympathy and compassion can supply, then 
 prayer becomes the natural outpouring of the heart, 
 the constant means of intercourse of the soul with 
 God, the speaking to Him face to face as to a friend ; 
 it is not, what it is often misrejDresented as being, a 
 succession of petitions for earthly comforts and selfish 
 gratifications. In the light of such thoughts as these 
 College services and College prayers will surely take 
 
 * Address at Manchester New College, London, on October G, 
 1874, by Dr. James Martineau, PrincqDal. 
 
SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
 a new character ; they can no longer be regarded as 
 formal perfunctory or unwelcome duties ; they become 
 most essential factors in our life ; the extent of their 
 influence upon all that is best in us is, we may be 
 sure of it, beyond our power to estimate. 
 
 Let me leave this with you. Here in these under- 
 graduate days you have a unique opportunity of 
 training yourselves that you may in after years do 
 something to help on all that is true and of good 
 report ; if through indolence and self-indulgence you 
 lose rather than gain in self-control and self-discipline 
 now, you can only recover the lost ground in later life 
 after many a weary struggle with yourselves, and it 
 may be you will never win your way back again 
 at all. 
 
 " Be not deceived ; God is not mocked : for what- 
 soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he 
 that soweth to his flesh, shall of the flesh reap corrup- 
 tion : but he that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the 
 Spirit reap life everlasting." 
 
11. 
 ^fie ^6mgs ti)at are Unseen. 
 
 " For now wc see through a glass, darkly ; but then face to face : now 
 I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." 
 — 1 Cor. xiii. 12. 
 
 (QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY, FeB. 8, 1880.) 
 
 WoEDS are sometimes put into the mouth of God by 
 the Bible, which are at first sight somewhat startling ; 
 He loves and hates, He is angry and jealous; no 
 apology is made, no explanation is offered, it is all said 
 in a matter-of-fact sort of way. If we begin to con- 
 sider what these sentences really mean we are conscious 
 at first of a feeling that they border on irreverence, 
 since they appear to represent Almighty God as if He 
 were a man of like passions with ourselves. And in 
 support of this feeling comes the taunt that is at times 
 levelled against Christian men, that the God they 
 worship is only the creature of their own imagination, 
 that He is, to quote well-known words, only " a magni- 
 fied, non-natural man." 
 
 We need not be very careful to find an answer to 
 this objection. It is impossible to doubt that if the 
 
12 THE THINGS THAT ARE UNSEEN. 
 
 brute creation had reason and were trying to picture to 
 themselves God, unless they had accurate knowledge of 
 some higher form of existence, they would picture Him 
 under the symbolism of their own creature life — they 
 could not do otherwise ; nor is it possible for men to 
 act differently. In those simpler days, now long gone 
 from us, men saw God everywhere near them; "He 
 made the clouds His chariots and walked upon the 
 wings of the wind ; " ^ it was " the Lord that thundered 
 out of Heaven, the Highest gave His thunder: hail- 
 stones, and coals of fire ; " ^ it was " the voice of the 
 Lord that shook the wilderness." ^ But these days 
 have passed away, it was God's will they should, 
 and we have grown, as we think, wiser. We have 
 measured the various activities of nature, and have to 
 some extent learned to hold them in control ; we have 
 compelled the world around us to disclose her most 
 secret workings ; we have tabulated and labelled her 
 forces, and have fallen into the error of supposing that 
 because we have given a thing a name we know all 
 about it ; and sometimes the conclusion has been 
 drawn that natural forces and natural development 
 supply the key to all the problems of the universe. 
 
 But good and real as all this work is in relation 
 to those questions that rightly belong to it, it cannot 
 give us the complete interpretation of our lives. It 
 leaves out of consideration facts as real, as irresistibly 
 
 1 Ps. civ. 3. - Pa. xviii. 13. ^ pg_ ^xix. 7. 
 
THE THINGS THAT ARE UNSEEN. 
 
 cogent, as any that it includes. What can it say to 
 all those vague wants we feel, to that wild unrest 
 that nothing this world can give us is able to satisfy? 
 What can it say to the sense of right and wrong, the 
 certainty that, say what men may, there is a right 
 and there is a wrong ? Very little it seems, except to 
 suggest that they are delusions, useful enough perhaps, 
 and therefore to be maintained, if possible, as a sort of 
 social police force. But whatever molecular theories 
 may be possible it is hard to believe that morality 
 can ever be securely founded on a molecular basis. 
 
 The truth is that we have not really moved so far 
 away from that older life as the external conditions 
 of existence in the nineteenth century suggest; the 
 problems of life are as pressing now as in the 
 Psalmist's days. Each one of us knows that there 
 is some unknown power within him and around him 
 in the world; if he ascends up to Heaven it is 
 there, if he goes down into the depths it is there 
 also; he cannot, do what he will, escape from its 
 presence. What it may be he cannot understand ; 
 he gropes blindly after it if haply he may find it, 
 and yet he can lay no hand upon it. He cannot keep 
 silence, he must speak to one and another about him 
 to ask them if they can help him to penetrate the 
 mystery of life and thought — to ask them, as we 
 Christians should put it, to help him to find out 
 God. But how can he speak ? In what words ? How 
 
14 THE THINGS THAT ARE UNSEEN. 
 
 shall the finite grasp the infinite? How can he, 
 but by comparing the infinite to what he can under- 
 stand, by lowering it down to the highest and best that 
 he knows, and what is that but man ? He speaks of 
 God under figure of a man ; in no other way could he 
 speak of Him at all, for the eye has not seen Him 
 nor the ear listened to His voice. 
 
 But surely, it may be said, we have our Bibles, and 
 in them we are given a direct revelation from God 
 Himself. This is, indeed, true enough, and we may 
 well thank God for the great gift so given to us. But 
 if we think for a moment, what is it that the Bible 
 teaches us? At once everything and nothing. It 
 tells us that God is, that He is our Creator, our 
 Kedeemer, our Sanctifier ; it brings us the story of a 
 perfect life, and it bids us make that life our example ; 
 it tells us that "we see now through a glass, darkly," 
 but that we shall " hereafter see face to face " ; and it 
 points us to that future, when we are crushed down by 
 doubt or despair in the twilight and uncertainty of 
 this present life, and declares that then all things shall 
 be made clear, and that " we shall know even as we 
 are known." But it does not answer all the questions 
 we would so gladly put to it if we could. It does not, it 
 could not, map out for us", as in a chart, a clear and 
 definite plan of the mind and purpose of God; it 
 could have no scheme of salvation reasoned out for us 
 with all the accuracy of a mathematical proposition. 
 
THE THINGS THAT ARE UNSEEN. 
 
 It speaks of Grod as man ; it uses figures drawn from 
 humanity, and in doing so it sanctions our use of them ; 
 it could not do more than this. If it showed us God 
 as He is, it would at once make us more than men ; a 
 God scientifically understood would no longer be God 
 at all. Thus the Bible can only use, as we can only 
 use, language that stretches out as it were towards 
 God, borrowed from the best and highest ideas which 
 we can conceive, borroAved, that is, from the idea of a 
 perfect man. And we cannot go wrong in following its 
 guidance ; unless, indeed, we forget that our formula' 
 are not scientifically accurate, unless we imagine that 
 they give us the sum of the whole matter, that they 
 represent to us in themselves the beginning and the 
 ending, the first and the last of Him, of whom we can 
 only say, in language that satisfies us simply because 
 it goes beyond anything that we can completely 
 know, and stretches far away from our tiny selves into 
 the infinity around us, " 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." ^ 
 
 Thus, when with all the skill of the practised 
 dialectician, with all the accuracy of the scientific 
 laboratory, with all the cogency of a pitiless logic, men 
 proceed to take to pieces the Christian Creed, and show 
 
 ' Ps. xc. 1, 2. 
 
i6 THE THINGS THAT ARE UNSEEN. 
 
 us a contradiction here, an impossibility there, and tell 
 us that on this side and on that what we profess to 
 believe passes beyond the limits of their understand- 
 ing, and then go on to draw the conclusion that, as our 
 language cannot be technically accurate, the God 
 whom we worship is a fiction, and our hopes and beliefs, 
 at best the idle fancies of a dreamy mysticism — 
 when they say all this, they are missing their mark 
 completely. We never thought that we could hold 
 the infinite in the hollow of our hand ; we never 
 thought that we could be given a clear picture, 
 accurate in every detail, of all that it has never entered 
 into the heart of man to understand; but God is, 
 although we cannot see Him; if we will only listen 
 to His voice, He speaks to our inmost souls, and no 
 science and no logic need ever, if we will, take Him 
 away from us. 
 
 " Scarcely I catch the words of His revealing, 
 Hardly I hear Him, dimly understand, 
 Only the Power that is within me pealing 
 Lives on my lips and beckons to my hand. 
 
 "Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest, 
 Cannot confound, nor doubt him, nor deny : 
 Yea, with one voice, O world, though thou deniest, 
 Stand thou on that side, for on this am L" ' 
 
 It is useless, worse than useless, to tell men that 
 there are no difficulties before them. Faith would be a 
 word of absolutely no meaning at all, if all the present 
 
 » St. Paul. F. W. H. Myers. 
 
THE THINGS THAT ARE UNSEEN. 17 
 
 and all the future were wholly within our ken. We 
 only know, experience has proved it for us, that apart 
 from God our lives cannot be complete. When we once 
 clearly understand what is the alternative that is offered 
 to us, the dreary wastes of endless criticism, the cold 
 austerity of pure intellect, the hopeless attempts to 
 build up man — body, soul, and spirit — out of the dry 
 bones of the natural sciences, then we shall be satisfied 
 with something short of mathematical certainty ; we 
 shall be content to see now through a glass darkly, 
 and by God's grace we shall look on with a faith that, 
 come what may, will not allow itself to be crushed, 
 to that unseen life, " when we shall see face to face, 
 and shall know even as also we are known." 
 
 It is hard enough, let us frankly admit it, to hold 
 our ground, for the faith of many is growing cold. 
 The fact is forced on our attention in endless ways; 
 we see it, perhaps, most plainly in the great change 
 that has come over men's minds in regard to ordina- 
 tion; for I fear there can be no doubt that Oxford 
 is not giving, as she used to do, of her best-trained 
 and most cultivated intellects to clerical work. The 
 current opinions of the thinking world have created 
 around us an atmosphere which appears to seriously 
 influence even those who have the courage to hold fast 
 to their own personal beliefs ; they shrink back from 
 undertaking to definitely maintain positions which 
 they hear so often, and sometimes, as it may seem, 
 
 c 
 
1 8 THE THINGS THAT ARE UNSEEN. 
 
 SO successfully assailed; and thus, although, even 
 when the destructive criticism has appeared most 
 complete, their whole soul refuses to accept the 
 negative conclusion, yet they determine that just now 
 the risk of ordination is too great — they will wait 
 until things are more settled ; and by this they mean, 
 until some of the problems that perplex us have 
 received a definite solution. If men must wait till 
 this day comes, if they have not faith and courage 
 to work on, seeing only "through a glass, darkly," 
 the day will never come when they can work for 
 the Church of Christ. No; certainty will never be 
 given us in this life; but we are given sujBficient 
 satisfaction to make us really responsible for our 
 failure in duty, if we elect to stand idly by, and let 
 the days, when we might do some true work, pass 
 from us without an effort to employ them in the 
 service of Almighty God. 
 
 Meanwhile, the cry for men at home, in the 
 colonies, and in the wide missionary field, is most 
 urgent ; the work that is put before us is noble work, 
 it rises to the level of the heroic; it has in it 
 enough to satisfy the most chivalrous spirits. There 
 is a want of men of education, and of the breadth 
 of sympathy that education gives, a want of men 
 of physical and intellectilal vigour, to work in the 
 East End of London and among the teeming popu- 
 lations of our great manufacturing towns. Why 
 
THE THINGS THAT ARE UNSEEN. 19 
 
 should these wants remain unsatisfied? One often 
 hears the complaint that men who have taken their 
 degrees at Oxford have no idea what to do with 
 themselves. Sometimes they have — it may be un- 
 fortunately for themselves — what is called an in- 
 dependent position; this is often supposed to mean 
 that they have a right, if they please, to live merely 
 for amusement. If they work at anything, it is 
 really very much to their credit ; such self-denial 
 could scarcely have been expected from them. There 
 is no opinion which is so entirely false as this : the 
 man who does not work for his daily bread, it matters 
 not whether he be rich or poor, has practically stolen 
 it. Those men and women who live only to amuse 
 themselves, who have never done any real honest 
 work for God or for man, who at last have but 
 one object in life left to them, the discovery of 
 a new means of excitement — these are the authors 
 of that social revolution which some tell us we shall 
 see even before the end of this present century. 
 If the wealthy classes of this country become as 
 a body indolent and self-indulgent, then assuredly 
 the crash will come, and the upper and not the lower 
 strata of society will be mainly responsible for it. 
 It is impossible to lay all the crimes of the French 
 Revolution on the unhappy people who worked it 
 out. We shall find its true source in the selfishness 
 and the vices of the upper classes of France in the 
 
20 THE THINGS THAT ARE UNSEEN. 
 
 preceding century. History, it is said, repeats itself. 
 We at least have what the French had not, a warning 
 of what may be the consequences of cynical and 
 careless self-indulgence. 
 
 Here, then, we have on the one hand a crying 
 want, the want of educated men for the work of the 
 Church, and on the other hand many in this University 
 who have no idea what duties to look forward to in 
 after life. Is there not in this one fact a direct call, 
 at all events to some amongst us, to come forward 
 and help? It is a great work to which men are 
 called, and one that can only be done by accepting 
 the responsibilities of the clerical office. It is indeed 
 sorrowfully true that at times the clergy of the 
 Church of England have woefully failed in their 
 duty to the nation as a whole; but it is excusable 
 to think that there is in some quarters a greater 
 anxiety to note these failures, than to recognize the 
 widespread influence for good that has been exercised 
 by her ministers. It seems clear that, while they 
 are drawn from very different classes of the community, 
 the clergy must be specially qualified to bridge the 
 gulf that some think to be daily widening between 
 the upper and the lower classes, or rather, as it has 
 now become, between the rich and the poor. They 
 may, it is quite certain, do much to ensure that the 
 social and political changes that must be brought 
 about in the next century, shall not come in England 
 
THE THINGS THAT ARE UNSEEN 
 
 in the wild gusts of revolutionary passion, but in the 
 gradual evolution and development that has marked 
 the growth of our present surroundings. If, however, 
 for the future, members of the better-educated and of 
 the wealthier classes are to hold aloof, the clergy as a 
 body would no longer be fitted for this work. The 
 loss will be our own. God's work for the salvation 
 of souls will be done without help from any one of us ; 
 but we who might have shared in the work and have 
 refused to do so, what of us ? 
 
 We are now on the eve of Lent, a season when 
 we all give some thought, not only to the past, but 
 also to the future — to the work in life which we are 
 doing, or are preparing ourselves to do. Let me 
 suggest to any one before whose mind ordination floats 
 as a vague possibility some few years hence, not to 
 allow himself to drift either one way or the other, but 
 rather to face the question at once, and to give thought 
 and earnest prayer to it during the coming weeks. 
 He may, indeed, ultimately refuse so great a responsi- 
 bility; he cannot be wrong in doing so if he refuses 
 it, with as deep a sense of the issues involved in his 
 decision, as he would have felt had he accepted it. 
 
 It is no doubt excusable to hesitate ; no thinking 
 man could undertake the responsibilities of the ordi- 
 nation vows unless he knew that he did not stand 
 alone : but never forget that, if you are truly called 
 to this office and work. He who lays the burden upon 
 
22 THE THINGS THAT ARE UNSEEN. 
 
 you will, while you are true to Him, also give you 
 strength to fulfil its duties. "Holy, holy, holy, is 
 the Lord of Hosts: the whole earth is full of His 
 glory. Then said I, Woe is me ! for I am undone ; 
 because I am a man of unclean lips : for mine eyes 
 have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts. Then flew 
 one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in 
 his hand : and he laid it on my mouth and said, Lo, 
 this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is 
 taken away and thy sin purged." Then, and then 
 only, when fire from God's altar has touched our lips, 
 as the ever-recurring question sounds in our ears, 
 " Whom shall I send, and who will go for us ? " can 
 we dare to answer, " Here am I ; send me." ^ 
 
 1 Tsa. vi. 3-9. 
 
III. 
 
 ^jbc BingUom of ODfirist. 
 
 •' My kingdom is not of this world." — St. John xviii. 36. 
 (Twenty-sixth Sunday after Trinity, November 21, 1880.) 
 
 When John the Baptist came preaching in the 
 wilderness of Jucla3a, the burden of his teaching was 
 contained in the words, " Kepent ye, for the kingdom 
 of Heaven is at hand," and the same summons was 
 repeated by our Lord when He began His public 
 ministry. This kingdom of God is an image that 
 continually recurs in the New Testament ; in parable 
 after parable our Lord unfolds its laws, its constitution. 
 He proclaims its universality, its spirituality ; " Many 
 shall come from the east and west, and shall sit 
 down in the kingdom of Heaven ; " ^ " Behold, the 
 kingdom of God is within you." ^ Such teaching as 
 this was quite unintelligible to Jews, and, therefore, 
 the disciples and even the apostles themselves did not 
 understand what the words implied. They could 
 explain them in only one way ; the kingdom of God, 
 1 St. Matt. viii. 11. ^ ^t Luke xvii. 21. 
 
24 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST, 
 
 what would that be but the house of Israel? What 
 could their teacher be foreshadowing to them but the 
 restoration of the Davidic kingdom in more than its 
 ancient splendour, as a rival to the victorious and, as 
 it seemed to men of that day, the indestructible 
 greatness of the Eoman Empire ? 
 
 A kingdom that was not of this world was an idea 
 even apostles could not entertain ; they could only 
 look for a magnificent temporal dynasty : and full of 
 this thought, they began to dispute among themselves 
 who among them should, when the day of triumph 
 came, take rank after the new sovereign, and sit on his 
 right hand and on his left. Our Lord made no imme- 
 diate attempt to correct these mistaken fancies. He 
 left it rather to the teaching of events, and contented 
 Himself with enigmatical answers, and veiled reproofs 
 of which, at the time, they could not see the meaning ; 
 these reproofs, however, were remembered and trans- 
 lated in the light of all that happened in later years. 
 " Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of ; " ^ and 
 again, "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? 
 and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized 
 with? "2 
 
 If we understand this, we see at once why the 
 disciples forsook our Lord at the crucifixion. There in 
 a moment, and as it seemed to them for ever, all their 
 hopes were shattered ; the idol that they had set up 
 
 1 St. Luke ix. 55. - St. Mark x. 38. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 25 
 
 in their heart was crushed to pieces, and they fell 
 away in complete despair. When, a few days later, 
 they began to realize that the news brought to them 
 from the sepulchre on the first Easter morning might 
 be true, they could only regard the resurrection from 
 one point of view ; with the thought that Christ was 
 again alive their old hopes revived ; it was possible 
 that even now the dream of their life was to have its 
 fulfilment ; "Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore again 
 the kingdom to Israel?" ^ is the question they at once 
 ask : and the answer given them is, " It is not for you 
 to know the times or the seasons which the Father 
 hath put in His own power. But ye shall receive 
 power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you." 
 
 The day of Pentecost came, and at once the whole 
 meaning of what Christ had taught them broke in 
 upon their minds. David is indeed dead and buried, 
 but God has raised up Jesus to sit on David's throne, 
 and made Him, whom the house of Israel had crucified, 
 both Lord and Christ ; ^ and the promise is not to the 
 Jew only, but also to the Gentile, even to all that are 
 afar off. They understood now the meaning of the 
 prayer they had often prayed, " Thy kingdom come : " 
 this kingdom was no earthly empire ; it belonged to 
 the unseen world within the veil, through which their 
 Master and King had passed out of their sight ; it 
 knew no difference of race or of language, but all 
 
 ' Acts i. 6-8. 2 Acts i. 29-35. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 
 
 nations of every tongue and people should be gathered 
 into it. 
 
 Christ's kingdom, therefore, could not be founded 
 as human kingdoms are; it owed nothing to human 
 intrigue or violence ; nor did armed enthusiasts raise 
 up the standard of the cross and compel men to 
 baptism by fear of death. A small company of men, 
 some of them ignorant and unlettered, went from 
 village to village, and from city to city proclaiming 
 the gospel of the kingdom of God ; they had indeed 
 little in common with the conquerors of men; de- 
 spised and rejected as their Master before them, treated 
 with scorn and contempt by Jew and by Eoman alike, 
 imprisoned, beaten, stoned, they were as St. Paul says, 
 " made a spectacle unto the world ; " ^ but still they 
 worked steadily on ; no discouragement could quench 
 their zeal, no pain or suffering could dim their faith ; 
 rather it grew stronger and clearer as they rejoiced 
 that they were counted worthy to suffer for His sake ; 
 for they were inspired by the one enkindling enthu- 
 siasm to spread abroad among men the knowledge of 
 the love of God in Christ. At first not many great or 
 noble or wise were called ; but the poor, the weak, the 
 outcast, — the things, as St. Paul says, that were not — 
 were the subjects of the Church's earliest triumphs ; 
 and beginning with these, ijt made its way, step by 
 step, through all strata of society, until it claimed 
 1 1 Cor. iv. 9. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 27 
 
 among its converts the occupant of the imperial throne. 
 " Not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit " ^ 
 of the Lord Himself, was this great work done. All 
 the powers of the world, all the energies of religions 
 dying, and therefore desperate, were banded together 
 to resist the growth of the kingdom of Christ; but, 
 in spite of all, it grew into a mighty tree, and at last 
 overshadowed the world. 
 
 Since the days of Constantine the civilized world, 
 at least in its outward aspect, has been nominally 
 Christian ; and consequently the power of the govern- 
 ment, which before that time had been used to resist the 
 Faith of Christ, has since been used, only too often, to 
 persecute in its behalf. Christianity had become an 
 important factor in the world, and so of necessity was 
 brought into relation with the ruling powers. This 
 could not be avoided, and we can see how essential 
 it was that, at the break-up of the Koman Empire, 
 Christian influences should control those in authority. 
 Still Christianity lost as well as gained by the alliance ; 
 in its new relation to society, it could not but be affected 
 by State intrigues ; it was bound to be used by political 
 parties or by unscrupulous rulers or ministers for their 
 own ends. And then the days came when the sword 
 was drawn in its behalf, Avhen armies were employed 
 to extend its influence. In all this it suffered loss ; its 
 strength was not, and never could be, in the sword. 
 ' Zech. iv. 6. 
 
28 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 
 
 Again and again tlie old spirit revives ; and men like 
 Savonarola, and many of those who lived in the Kefor- 
 mation period, and to come nearer our own day, the 
 last martyr Bishop of the English Church, Bishop 
 Patteson, have restored, each in their own time, its old 
 ideal of love and self-sacrifice, and have counted all 
 things but loss, given up every earthly good, everything 
 that we men hold dear, only that they may proclaim 
 the faith of Jesus Christ, and help to establish His 
 kingdom in the earth. 
 
 Here, where it has been since the day that the 
 Holy Spirit was given to the infant Church, is still 
 the one and only source of the Church's strength and 
 life. Some would have us believe that this simple 
 faith is a thing altogether of the past, and that men 
 hold fast to the externals of Christianity, some from 
 conservatism and because they cannot face the conse- 
 quences involved in its rejection, others from the 
 meaner motive of the present advantages which they 
 get by their Christian profession ; but we, living in 
 this place, as we recall the lives and examples of those 
 who have served Christ here, know that faith in a 
 risen Saviour is a living force among us at this day 
 as certainly as in the past ages of the Church ; a force, 
 too — our parish clergy know it — which can now, as in 
 those days long ago, lift simple ordinary lives up to 
 the level of real heroism. 
 
 Many of those who are listening to me this morning 
 
THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 29 
 
 will, I hope, some day be clergymen ; let me venture 
 to say a word on one aspect of this question in regard 
 to which it seems to me to be our bounden duty to 
 exercise the strictest self-control, although it may not 
 be, and in the immediate future probably will not be, 
 easy for us to do so. It is a really serious question for 
 us how far we allow our political opinions to afiect our 
 relations to the people committed to our charge ; how 
 far we are inclined to act and speak as if our political 
 cause, which is often enough only the expression of 
 our own private or class interest, were really the cause 
 of God Himself, and so to endeavour to gain additional 
 weight for our opinions by identifying them with the 
 name of Him who is the Truth Itself. We pay a 
 heavy price for such a daring mistake : there can be 
 little doubt that the alienation of the poorer classes 
 from the Church of England is due in no small 
 measure to the action of her clergy in the past : for 
 example, the doctrine of the divine right of kings was 
 sometimes taught by them as equally binding on the 
 conscience of Churchmen with the doctrine of the 
 Incarnation, and Englishmen, being somewhat matter- 
 of-fact, took these teachers at their word and left a 
 Church that appeared to impose upon them a political 
 creed which they could not accept. 
 
 The Church as such has no knowledge of political 
 parties, or even of forms of government. In the not 
 very distant future we shall stand face to face with 
 
30 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 
 
 the Democracy; among them are, no doubt, many 
 who are professedly Eepublicans ; while we must not 
 on the one hand abate one iota of our personal 
 loyalty to our Sovereign, on the other hand we have 
 no right to erect constitutional monarchy into an 
 article of the Christian Faith; if we do, depend 
 upon it we shall not convert men to our political 
 ideals, but we may certainly do a great deal to make 
 Christianity seem impossible to them. They will 
 regard the Church as a state engine, which exists 
 in the interests of the classes to which they do not 
 belong, and for the propagation of social theories to 
 which they are entirely opposed. If this country 
 became a Kepublic to-morrow our duties as Christ's 
 ministers would be unchanged ; the message we are 
 bidden to deliver to the world would be what it has 
 always been, and we should not think of telling people 
 that until they were prepared to support a Eestoration 
 they could not be loyal members of the Church of 
 Christ. This is no doubt an extreme instance, and one 
 in regard to which we may earnestly hope that none 
 of us in our lifetime will be called upon to act. But 
 there are other questions which come nearer to the 
 sphere of practical politics, and through which the 
 personal feelings of many amongst us may before long 
 be very keenly tried. One such question is the political 
 position of the Church of England. 
 
 It may help us, in what must at best be a most 
 
THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 31 
 
 difficult question, if we never forget that we are not 
 primarily members of a department of the State, or 
 officers in a wealthy corporation endowed with peerages 
 and dignities and tithes and rent-rolls, but servants of 
 Christ's spiritual kingdom, bound before all things 
 to Him who is our Saviour and our King; sent by 
 Him that we may hold up before men that Christlike 
 life of self-sacrifice and gentleness and goodness to 
 which He calls all the members of His great human 
 family, to enable them to attain which He lived and 
 died. 
 
 If we, unmindful of this duty laid on us, let our 
 personal interests interfere with our teaching, if we 
 tie up the message of repentance and forgiveness, 
 which is committed to our charge, with particular 
 phases of political thought, and thus render it practi- 
 cally impossible for those who do not accept our 
 theories to do otherwise than suspect our motives 
 when we speak to them of God and the soul, then 
 we have betrayed our trust and shall hereafter be 
 called to a terrible reckoning. The future of the 
 visible Church we must leave in His hands ; she has 
 lived through ages of poverty and oppression, she 
 has been, and here in England she is still, rich and 
 powerful ; but he must read her history thoughtlessly 
 who thinks her days of greatest spiritual weakness 
 have always coincided with her days of temporal 
 depression. " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the 
 
32 THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST. 
 
 end of the world," are the last words she heard from 
 her Master's lips. Nation shall rise against nation 
 and kingdom against kingdom, empires shall be over- 
 thrown, forms of government shall change, but under 
 all the ever-shifting scenes of the visible world, He 
 continues to give His Presence, unchanged and un- 
 changing, to the Church which is His Body. Christ's 
 kingdom is not of this world; the Church does not 
 draw her life from Establishment ; she knows nothing 
 of political conditions; in a world where pain and 
 death are the common inheritance of all, she repeats 
 and will repeat as long as time shall last, her one 
 unvarying message — Eepent, believe, and live. 
 
 The truest defence of the Church is to be found 
 in the lives of her members — her surest bulwarks are 
 unselfishness, purity, gentleness, goodness ; if in the 
 past she had always used her proud position to help 
 the needy, to succour the oppressed, to protect those 
 who could not protect themselves, the political out- 
 look might be other than it is; but we are not 
 responsible for the past; the present is ours, and we 
 have a share in moulding the future; we shall fail 
 miserably if our one or our main object is to support 
 a great secular position ; come what may, we cannot 
 fail if we are loyal to our heavenly King. 
 
IV. 
 
 ^6e JFmite ]Intdkct. 
 
 " We know in part." — 1 Cor. xiii. 9 
 (Sunday after Ascension-day, May 29, 1881.) 
 
 The leading principle which in our day dominates the 
 world in matters of business or commerce as well as in 
 the higher region of intellectual activity, is the 
 principle of specialization or division of labour — in 
 other words, the area of work whether in practical 
 or intellectual matters is too wide and too varied 
 for one man to cover the whole, or anything like 
 the whole of it ; and consequently we each have 
 assigned to us one little corner in which we busy 
 ourselves, in which we make, or try to make, our- 
 selves complete masters of our subject, in relation to 
 which our opinion may be asked and we may speak 
 with some authority : but beyond and outside this 
 narrow circle, our knowledge and attainments, how- 
 ever varied they may be, are at best uncertain and 
 imtrustworthy. This is the rule of modern life, we 
 may almost take it as our definition of civilization. 
 
 D 
 
34 THE FINITE INTELLECT, 
 
 As years go by the principle becomes more and more 
 clearly marked ; each of us becomes dependent on 
 larger numbers of his felloAvmen ; more and more we are 
 separated from our old isolation, our old self-centred 
 life. We learn nowadays to do one thing, we work at 
 one trade, or we get up one subject of study, and we do 
 what we do marvellously well ; but outside this small 
 section we are practically helpless. It is almost 
 miraculous what this special training can do ; call to 
 mind the marvellous readiness of the specially trained 
 eye or ear ; think for one moment of the delicate com- 
 binations of hand and eye to be found in our chemical 
 and physical laboratories, or in our astronomical obser- 
 vatories ; consider the wonderful sensitiveness of the 
 musician's ear, who, as he stands before a great 
 orchestra and chorus, can unravel its practically 
 infinite intricacies, can follow each instrument, each 
 voice, and knows at once, if there is any flaw in the 
 harmony of the whole, where the fault is to be found. 
 It is wonderful what this special training can do, what 
 capacities it develops, what powers it confers. But 
 we should do well to notice one point ; the trained ear 
 does not imply the trained eye — indeed to a great 
 extent, since human life is short and human capacities 
 limited, it would seem almost to exclude it. We, on 
 the contrary, too often assume that eminence in one 
 direction implies eminence in all, and that any one 
 prominent in some art or science, or skilled in some 
 
THE FINITE INTELLECT, 35 
 
 delicate or artistic manipulation, is at once qualified 
 to pronounce a sort of ex cathedra judgment on every 
 conceivable question that may be brought before him. 
 It is really amusing to notice sometimes how our 
 daily newspapers chronicle, as of the last importance, 
 an opinion which a man eminent in some one particular 
 line of work, has been unfortunate enough to deliver on 
 a subject that lies entirely outside his own special 
 study. 
 
 This is a matter of far greater importance than we 
 are likely at first sight to think it. On the intellectual 
 side it has most important bearings on our whole 
 attitude to knowledge. Take for a moment the student 
 of the exact sciences, the mathematician, and to a 
 certain extent the student of nature. He asks for 
 positive evidence, all else is worthless; he does not 
 deal with probabilities, he asks for an exactly accurate 
 explanation of each different point, a clear unbroken 
 sequence in each argument. It almost raises a smile 
 to talk about a probable demonstration of a proposition 
 of Euclid ; if it is true it can be fully demonstrated to 
 be so, and until a complete and accurate proof has 
 been given no mathematician could possibly accept 
 the result. 
 
 But, on the other side, take the case of the scholar ; 
 one of the questions he has to settle is the text of his 
 books, the reading in a manuscript ; and in this case he 
 has to deal with probable evidence. He has to array 
 
36 THE FINITE INTELLECT. 
 
 side by side the arguments for and against a particular 
 reading, to carefully balance all that can be said on this 
 side and on that, and then to draw his conclusion; 
 probable evidence is to him the breath of life, certainty 
 in the mathematical sense he cannot have. 
 
 Now, if we consider for a moment two men specialized 
 in these two lines, we must at once admit that either of 
 them would be quite unfit to enter into the work of the 
 other; that the scholar could hardly be trusted to 
 judge correctly as to what was an adequate proof of a 
 mathematical proposition, or the mathematician to 
 estimate correctly the arguments for and against a 
 particular reading in a manuscript. I do not suggest 
 any invidious comparisons between different branches 
 of study, or imagine that the critical acumen of the 
 scholar gives evidence of more or less brain power than 
 the results obtained by the mathematician. My point 
 is this ; one man has mental gifts and endowments in 
 one direction, another in an entirely different direction ; 
 they naturally, therefore, pursue different lines of 
 study ; ^nowadays the area to be covered in each 
 subject is so large that they must devote themselves 
 entirely to their particular branch of study and become, 
 as we say, specialists. The consequence is they move 
 farther and farther apart, and may at last even lose the 
 capacity of appreciating each other's work. This may 
 seem to be a very fanciful statement ; but it is not so. 
 Ko one but a man who has been specially trained in 
 
THE FINITE INTELLECT. 37 
 
 exact reasoning and is then brought face to face with 
 the necessity of balancing probable evidence can fully 
 appreciate how great the difficulty is : at first, do 
 what he will, he cannot watch the turn of the scale ; if 
 he thinks he sees it, he cannot lose sight of the 
 evidence on the other side, it hangs about his thoughts 
 like a dead weight ; he cannot be contented with his 
 conclusion, he can find no satisfaction, no rest in it ; he 
 finds it hard to treat it as a conclusion at all. But on 
 the other hand, I have heard men say that they could 
 not understand or appreciate the mathematician's 
 satisfaction with his certain results; they appeared 
 almost to assert that they did not understand what 
 certain evidence meant. 
 
 The aim of what has been said is this : each one 
 of us, however great his attainments may be, has 
 made himself complete master of only a small section 
 of human knowledge. There lie, and must lie, outside 
 his work lines of thought, accumulations of facts, 
 methods of reasoning, into which he is not trained 
 to enter. He can look at them from the outside, he 
 may object to them and think he refutes them, or 
 he may contemptuously put them aside ; but they 
 lie, as we may say, in a plane parallel to that in 
 which he moves, and, as a matter of fact, he cannot 
 get into contact with them at all. Thus there is a 
 truth in the statement which has been made, that no 
 system of philosophy as a system can be true; for 
 
38 THE FINITE INTELLECT. 
 
 a system of philosophy is, after all, only a view more 
 or less complete of one side of truth. On that side, 
 no doubt, it has much to say for itself; but it is 
 impossible to admit its claim to be the whole of truth. 
 To be such would demand, on the part of its author, 
 complete encyclopaedic knowledge both of facts and 
 methods, besides the necessary corollary that all 
 additions to knowledge should at once find their 
 natural place in the teacher's system. Thus when 
 any new theory or system is put before us, we know 
 at once that it cannot be the whole truth. We shall 
 therefore be anxious on the one hand not to lose 
 the truth that is in it, while on the other hand, we 
 cannot, at the imperious demand of this new theory, 
 surrender without a murmur all that up till now we 
 have accepted as truth. 
 
 The gospel of evolution is now somewhat loudly 
 clamouring for the complete recognition of its supreme 
 claims on the allegiance of mankind. The facts which 
 are being given us with such marvellous rapidity 
 by the students of nature we accept at once ; the 
 relations and inter-dependence between animate and 
 inanimate nature, between plants and animals, between 
 animals and mankind, which they have studied and 
 tabulated, we have no wisji to throw doubt upon. 
 We do not reject the laws and sequences in nature 
 which they have verified and formulated. All this 
 is the work of specially trained men, devoted to their 
 
THE FINITE INTELLECT. 39 
 
 own line of study, and the world in general has no 
 claim to review these conclusions. But when the 
 theory, that is the complete generalization of all this 
 work, is set forward as a dogma to be taught to 
 children, as the answer to all our questionings, whence 
 we have come and whither we are going, as con- 
 taining in itself the sufficient and only explanation 
 of all the complexities of conscious existence, then 
 we are not called upon to give our assent to it. This 
 claim, that is made with so much urgency and insist- 
 ence, comes from the students of one special side of 
 knowledge. It is the claim that their own special 
 aspect of truth should be acknowledged to be the 
 whole of truth ; that its methods should be accepted 
 as of universal application, as giving the solution of all 
 the mysteries of thought and consciousness. If the 
 demand were granted on these terms one thing at 
 least is certain — religious life, as we Christians under- 
 stand the words, would cease to be ; its hopes and 
 fears alike must be remembered only as the dreams 
 and hallucinations of childhood. God, we are told, 
 is no longer a necessary hypothesis in this world of 
 ours, and being unnecessary, we shall take leave to 
 dispense with Him. The history of life is one long- 
 chain of cause and effect, each event involving its 
 successor, and involved itself in its predecessor. 
 Throughout all time the magnificent panorama has 
 been unfolding itself; the evolution of life, from its 
 
40 THE FINITE INTELLECT. 
 
 lowest to its higliest forms, has rolled on through 
 ages which we cannot count or conceive. The earth, 
 indeed, groans and travails in pain; the cries of 
 anguish come to our ears from the dying, the wail 
 of distress and pain from the living ; there is the wild 
 fury of human passion, the deep blackness of human 
 ingratitude and crime and sin. But all these are 
 of no account ; there is no voice nor any that answers. 
 The dumb universe moves on its resistless course, and 
 man is bound in chains more tightly than ever in the 
 ages past, since he has bowed down his whole moral 
 and intellectual self to the bondage, and closed round 
 himself the iron grip of a remorseless necessity. 
 
 In the midst of so much certainty we hesitatingly 
 ask for some explanation, since the old difficulties still 
 occur to some of us. Where is the first link of this great 
 chain of cause and effect suspended? How did animal 
 life or human thought first appear? But we are 
 told the answer is very simple. Myriads of years ago 
 some inorganic carbon compounds met by chance in 
 a favourable environment beneath the water of the 
 ocean, and their chemical affinities acting under these 
 circumstances produced spontaneously the lowest 
 form of animal life, and from that hour the develop- 
 ment has gone forward. It may indeed be that life 
 can be traced back to this primeval form, and thence 
 followed upwards to its infinite varieties in the 
 nineteenth century. We can only bow to the decision 
 
THE FINITE INTELLECT. 41 
 
 of men more qualified to answer such questions than we 
 are. It is indeed very wonderful, and it may be very 
 true ; but where did these inorganic carbon compounds 
 come from ? How is it they were endowed with these 
 singular capacities of development ? Is it possible to 
 attach much meaning to tlie word chance in this con- 
 nection? unless, indeed, it is under a different form 
 some recognition of an unknown power, which, as 
 it were, set in motion this mighty machine, and 
 which sustains it from moment to moment. These 
 old questions still live on, as urgent, as relentless 
 as ever, at the bottom of theories which cannot 
 make any attempt to explain them; and every fair 
 mind must acknowledge that materialism has its 
 ultimately insoluble problems as certainly as the 
 creed of the Church of Christ ; and that the man 
 who believes in a Divine Kuler of the world at least 
 does no greater outrage to his reason, than one who 
 believes that all this wonderful world of life is the 
 outcome of nothing more than the chance meeting 
 of atoms of carbon and nitrogen " in the infinite azure 
 of the past." 
 
 If they could bear this in mind, men would not be 
 so easily persuaded on intellectual grounds to loosen 
 their hold upon their religious beliefs, and so finally 
 altogether to drift beyond the reach of the Christian 
 Creed. Men are too ready to become the slaves of a 
 theory ; they feel themselves compelled to accept any 
 
42 THE FINITE INTELLECT. 
 
 and every consequence which appears to be deduced 
 from their premisses ; their very virtues, their honesty 
 and thoroughness of purpose are arrayed against 
 them ; they feel, and rightly so, they must follow 
 truth wherever it may take them ; but they forget that 
 this is, as a thoughtful writer tells us,^ a very different 
 thing from following an argument whithersoever it 
 may take them, seeing that the course of an argument 
 is always steadier and more incisive when it does not 
 embarrass itself with the consideration of all that 
 opposes it, or lies beyond its own immediate purpose. 
 As the critical instinct develops, which it must do 
 here in Oxford, men understand what demands are made 
 upon them by the Christian Creed ; and the fact of 
 the Eesurrection, or the fact of the Ascension seems to 
 pass at once beyond the region of those things which 
 they can acknowledge or believe ; and so, some 
 eagerly enough, some with pain and misgiving, they 
 take refuge in theories which appear at first sight to 
 offer an escape from such serious claims on their reason. 
 But they have given up all that makes life hopeful, 
 all that can help them to work on steadily through 
 disappointment and failure and weakness, all that can 
 enable them to show a firm front to the misunder- 
 standings and troubles, that sooner or later life must 
 bring to us all; and instead they have accepted a 
 
 ^ Of. " Human Life and its Conditions," by the Very Eev. R. W. 
 Church, D.C.L., late Dean of St. Paul's, p. 84. 
 
THE FINITE INTELLECT. 43 
 
 cold and barren theory of existence which, as they 
 must at last find out, makes really the same demand 
 on their faith, and puts an equal strain on their reason ; 
 ^^ hich is ultimately on purely intellectual and logical 
 grounds as incomplete as the faith they have so 
 lightly cast aside ; which they discover, often too late, 
 does not only not satisfy their intellect, but has no 
 gleam of hope for their heart in the midst of the 
 anxieties of the present, or in presence of the darkness 
 and uncertainty of the future. 
 
 This has been the fate of more than one. It need 
 never be ours if we do not carelessly let slip the 
 faith and the hope which have been given us almost 
 as our birthright ; let us try to make the collect 
 for Ascension Day fully our own, and pray with all 
 earnestness that we may in heart and mind thither 
 ascend whither our Eisen Saviour has gone before, and 
 that we may continually dwell in His presence. The 
 aim of what has been said this morning is to assert 
 that we may do this without losing one iota of our 
 intellectual freedom ; indeed it would be truer to say 
 we can only find perfect freedom when we learn to 
 bow down before Him who is Himself the Truth. 
 Here and now we know and can know only in part ; 
 the time is coming, God grant it to each of us, when 
 we shall see Him face to face, and shall know even 
 as we are known. 
 
V. 
 
 " Tliis is none other bnt the house of God, and this is the gate of 
 Heaven." — Genesis xxviii. 17. 
 
 (Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity, November 2G, 1882.) 
 
 Although we all acknowledge the duty of worship, 
 few, it is to be feared, could give an intelligent ansAver 
 to the question what its relation to our life really is, 
 what its true function is in the midst of all the A'aried 
 duties and pleasures, anxieties and amusements, in 
 which the days and months and years go hurrying 
 from us. The reason of this is ready to our hand. 
 We have lost our hold on any clear idea of what 
 worship should be, because we have altogether neg- 
 lected so much that should have helped to make the 
 unseen world a reality to us. The unseen world — we 
 talk about it — " The things that are not seen and 
 eternal ; " ^ yes, we acknowledge their existence ; we 
 allow ourselves to say that they are the only reality, 
 the one supreme end of our present life. We say this, 
 » 2 Cor. iv. 18. 
 
WORSHIP, 45 
 
 but our words seem sometimes only words ; they are, 
 indeed, for too many of us what we call a survival — a 
 way of talking about things that has lived on in out- 
 ward form, when it has lost its inner meaning. And 
 yet this unseen world is close around us, and we are 
 living in it ; round about us are the angels of God, 
 those guardian angels who, as they turn from us, look 
 up and " behold the face of the Father which is in 
 heaven." ^ There, too, are the dead, those whom we 
 have lost, and of whom, if we are driven to speak, \^'e 
 say in somewhat uncertain tones that they still live 
 awaiting the day of the Eesurrection : but we venture 
 no further than this ; we put aside at once as super- 
 stitious any thought of real union with them ; we 
 forget, or we exjDlain away, the article of the Christian 
 Creed which acknowledges our belief in the Com- 
 munion of Saints. The mother may pray for her 
 child with her last breath, but when she has passed 
 into the unseen world, we may not think of her as 
 praying still. We stand beside an open grave and 
 say the words which are put into our mouths, for the 
 dead as for ourselves, that we and they alike may, by 
 the mercy of God, attain in His own time the peace of 
 heaven ; but as the thought flashes on us, and suggests 
 something of the reality of our union and communion 
 with the Church that have passed within the veil, love 
 is chilled and disappointed, and the hope that made the 
 
 » St. Matt, xviii. 10. 
 
46 WORSHIP. 
 
 unseen world for one moment a reality is thrust aside 
 by current phases of thought that seem unable to 
 endure the touch of the supernatural. 
 
 We say that we believe in the doctrine of the Incar- 
 nation ; we acknowledge that at the appointed moment 
 in time, God, in His great love and compassion for His 
 fallen creatures, was born into the world, that the 
 Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, that He 
 lived that wonderful life in Galilee and Judsea, that 
 He died upon the cross, that He rose again the third 
 day from the dead and ascended into Heaven ; when 
 ever we say the Creed we assert our steadfast belief in 
 these facts as historical. But even those who heartily 
 accept these articles of the Creed, accept them as 
 belonging rather to the past than to the present. The 
 historical fact of the Incarnation is indeed acknow- 
 ledged; but it, and all its miraculous surroundings, 
 began with the birth of Jesus Christ, and as far as 
 mankind were concerned, came to an end at His 
 Ascension. It never seems to occur to many people 
 that such events as these, if true at all, must have 
 some immediate and direct relation to men now at 
 this present moment. We indeed recall His own 
 words, " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end 
 of the world ; " ^ " Yet a little while and the world 
 seeth me no more ; but ye see me : because I live, 
 ye shall live also." ^ They come upon our ears, the 
 » St. Matt, xxviii. 20. " St. John xiv. 19. 
 
WORSHIP, 47 
 
 far-off echoes of a promise that at least is clear and 
 simple and direct : but if we question ourselves closely 
 we find we attach only a vague meaning to them; we 
 seek their fulfilment apart from Him, rather than in 
 the certainty of His own promise ; for we make their 
 living power depend on the shifting phases of passing- 
 emotions, on the rise and fall of religious enthusiasm 
 and excitement. 
 
 But we are surely falling short of the faith of the 
 Bible, we are deaf to the teaching of the Christian 
 Church. We do not worship a dead Christ ; One, who 
 more than eighteen hundred years ago had something 
 to do with the human race ; a Christ who once lived, 
 once suffered, once long ago cared for men ; but who, 
 after a few short years, passed away beyond the limits 
 of space and time. The Incarnation is a living present 
 fact now at this hour, as surely as it was during those 
 three years when the disciples looked upon the human 
 form of the Son of Man. He is near us, with us now, 
 closer than our own thoughts, near us in every tempta- 
 tion, near us too — may His great mercy help and 
 pardon us — when we sin wilfully, when in thought or 
 word or deed we clasp the evil close about us ; when 
 we trample under foot His cross, and do despite to the 
 Spirit of His grace. For, on each one of us the sacred 
 water has been poured ; on our forehead has been set 
 the Sign of the Cross ; over each one of us the solemn 
 declaration has been made that we are regenerate and 
 
48 WORSHIP. 
 
 grafted into the Body of Christ, and for this His great 
 mercy to us thanks have been rendered to Almighty 
 God on our behalf. These are not empty formulae or 
 charitable assumptions; they are simple, straight- 
 forward statements of fact. By Christ's own ordinance 
 we have each of us been grafted into the Body of 
 Christ ; we have been made children of God and heirs 
 of the kingdom of Heaven. What we have done with 
 the gift He gave us, whether through indolence or wilful 
 sin we have stifled and done much to destroy that new 
 life then planted in us, are questions we may well ask 
 ourselves ; but the fact remains that He gave the gift, 
 and so brought us very near His own Incarnate Life. 
 
 And in that other Sacrament, to which Sunday by 
 Sunday we are all bidden to come — to which a few, 
 a very few, habitually do come — we are brought close 
 up to the foot of the Cross. Here throughout all the 
 Christian ages is the visible pledge of the living 
 Presence of the Saviour with His Church. A small 
 piece of bread, a few drops of wine — there is little 
 enough in these as far as man can see; and we cannot 
 explain how in this way God visits and sustains the 
 souls that He has redeemed. But neither can we 
 say how God who made the world could become man, 
 could take upon Him our finite nature. We know, how- 
 ever, that we are called to take our part in no empty 
 commemoration, where all the strength and glow and 
 power springs not from Him, but must be looked for 
 
WORSHIP. 49 
 
 in ourselves. " Except ye eat the Flesh of the Son of 
 Man, and drink His Blood, ye have no life in yon ; " ^ 
 it was a hard saying ; " How can this Man give us His 
 flesh to eat ? " ^ and so, in confusion and dismay, 
 many went away and left Him. But when at the Last 
 Supper He said to His apostles, "Take, eat, this is 
 My Body," "Drink ye all of this, this is My Blood," 
 they knew that, so far as was necessary for them, they 
 had the key to His hard saying ; and so they taught 
 the Church which Christ committed to their care. 
 
 "This is none other but the house of God, this 
 is the gate of Heaven ; " and we have not known it. 
 We have used the old words and phrases ; they are in 
 our Bibles and Prayer-books, and are often on our 
 lips. There is a glow and warmth about them still ; but 
 for only too many it is the glow of a sun that is set, 
 of a faith that is dying and almost dead. For even as 
 men feel its power they make haste to explain that 
 they do not really mean what they seem to say ; that 
 they have passed quite beyond the thought of any 
 immanent presence of the supernatural, any super- 
 stitious conception that could bring them into imme- 
 diate contact with the unseen world. There remain 
 indeed some few shreds of the old faith ; there, in the 
 long past centuries, is the miraculous life and work of 
 Jesus Christ; far away, too, in the dim background 
 of the long past we get some glimpses of a Father in 
 
 1 St. John vi. 53. » St. John vi. 52. 
 
 B 
 
5o WORSHIP. 
 
 Heaven, as One who set in motion this wonderful 
 universe around us, which throughout all the ages of 
 time has been moving on through its ceaseless evolution. 
 But when we have read and thought a little more we 
 find that there is one thing more demanded of us, that 
 we are asked to give up even these remaining fragments 
 of the Creed; we are startled at first, but it is not 
 long before some at least are ready to do even this. 
 The life of Christ still remains full of all possible 
 grace and tenderness, raised indeed far and away above 
 any ordinary human standard, still only a human life, 
 and only a human death. It was, however, so remote, 
 so unreal before, that to accept this conclusion does 
 not make any very serious change in thought. And 
 then, last of all, men are told of "a power not our- 
 selves that makes for righteousness ; " or where they 
 have until now been accustomed to think of God, they 
 are bidden to think of a vaguely personified nature : 
 and they soon discover that, as they have travelled so 
 far away from the Creed of the Church of Christ, even 
 in admitting this, no great shock is given to their 
 mental conceptions. Whether such hypotheses are 
 better verifiable than the articles of the Creed, or 
 whether they give a more stable resting-place for 
 thought, are questions we cannot consider now; we 
 must be content with tracing a movement with which 
 many of us must be more or less familiar. 
 
 Kemember, we pray you, what it means to be 
 
WORSHIP. SI 
 
 members of the Church of Christ ; if you allow your- 
 selves to sink clown to the level of the meagre con- 
 ceptions of the Christian Creed which are current in 
 some places — conceptions which are, let it be frankly 
 admitted, sufficient to sustain real faith in very simple 
 lives — you will find, as thinking men, if ever your 
 minds are fully turned upon the questions, that you 
 have no halting place left you within any limits that 
 can be recognized as distinctively Christian. Make 
 then some effort to understand in its fulness the Creed 
 you profess. We may forget or ignore or deny it, 
 but still the word of God stands sure and steadfast ; 
 we " are come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the 
 Living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innu- 
 merable company of angels, to the general assembly 
 and church of the firstborn, which are written in 
 heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the 
 spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the 
 Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of 
 sprinkling."^ This world of God, in all its wonder 
 and glory, is close around us whether we know it or 
 not, and we have our place in it ; here is the sphere of 
 our worship, the true home of our prayers. We are 
 citizens of this heavenly kingdom ; a kingdom which 
 we cannot see now, but which we shall see hereafter. 
 We kneel and pray at our bedside or here in church, 
 and we kneel in the presence of all the hosts of heaven; 
 ' Hebrews xii. 22-21, 
 
52 WORSHIP. 
 
 we worship with all the faithful dead, who with us 
 are " knit together in one communion and fellowship 
 in the mystical Body of Christ our Lord." ^ We come 
 here to church and kneel and bow down before the 
 Lord at the Holy Table, and we are close to One 
 whom indeed we cannot see, but who is now our 
 all-merciful Saviour, who will one day be our Judge — 
 whom our eyes shall behold — the King in His beauty 
 — and this sight shall be our unspeakable happiness, 
 or a consuming fire. 
 
 Must life, then, be one ceaseless round of commu- 
 nions and of prayers ? No ; we are set here in the world 
 to work as well as to pray ; we all of us have our duties, 
 and it is of the last importance to us that we should 
 fulfil them. We are here in the world as workers; be sure 
 of this. But work becomes worship ; for prayer takes 
 our work and lifts it to its true level, and presents it, 
 through the merits of Christ, a living sacrifice to the 
 Father in heaven. This is the only true sense in which 
 we can say work is prayer. Men who have lost all hold 
 on the reality of prayer are apt to say to themselves, 
 " I really cannot pray, but at least I can work," and 
 then to act as if the well-known motto, " laborare est 
 orare," justified the conclusion that work was a sub- 
 stitute for prayer. This we know it can never be. 
 And yet it is wholly trueHhat it is good to be a 
 worker in the world, even though we cannot pray. 
 » Collect for All Saiuts' Day. 
 
WORSHIP. 53 
 
 One cannot doubt that there are many such lives 
 amongst us, going bravely on, wistfully conscious of 
 a need for which they can find no satisfaction ; to them 
 sooner or later the answer will come, and work will 
 be seen for them to have been prayer. But in these 
 busy, restless, faithless days, we have need to remember 
 the other aspect of the question, and to insist that 
 prayer is work. Certainly prayer, as we have been 
 reminded, does not conduct engineering operations on 
 a gigantic scale ; it does not level mountains or literally 
 cast them into the sea ; but, in virtue of our Saviour's 
 promise and command, we know it has a place and 
 function in the lives of men. We believe that they 
 who can only stand and wait do serve the King of 
 Heaven: w^e have no gospel of Euthanasia for in- 
 curables; we do not look on them as merely unpro- 
 ductive consumers ; in their patient endurance of 
 suffering, in their many fervent prayers, they may 
 teach us and they may work for us in ways we cannot 
 know or conceive. 
 
 It is indeed difficult, let us at once admit it, to 
 hold firmly and steadily to the assurance of " the life 
 of the world to come." But for this very reason we 
 must never neglect any means through which God 
 gives us help and guidance. AVe have had before us 
 this morning the ennobling thought of companionship 
 and association, the gifts that are so freely bestowed 
 upon us in our common worship. We are members of 
 
54 WORSHIP. 
 
 the Church of Christ ; as such we are united to the 
 countless multitude of the saints who have lived before 
 us ; we are also closely linked to all who are now on 
 earth fighting as soldiers of the Cross. Here indeed 
 is a wonderful source of strength. We, too, in this 
 place are members of this ancient House which bears 
 our Saviour's name ; here also none of us stands alone ; 
 others share with us the contest, and give us all the 
 help that example and patient and faithful leadership 
 can give. We surely must be indeed dull and slow of 
 heart if we cannot respond to such calls as these. Our 
 feet have been set within the house of God, our faces 
 have been turned towards the gate of Heaven ; the 
 power of God is round us on every side ; may He of 
 His infinite mercy grant that when its open glory 
 shall appear, the sight may not draw from us what 
 must then be a cry of despair, this was indeed the 
 gate of Heaven, but we would not know it. 
 
VI. 
 
 " Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good 
 things."— St. Luke xvi. 25. 
 
 (FiEST Sunday after Trinity, May 27, 1883.) 
 
 It i>s curious to mark how gregarious men are, not only 
 in their habits, but in their opinions. An idea is 
 started in some society or community, among a body 
 of men, larger or smaller as the case may be, who are 
 linked together on some ground, whether political, or 
 religious, or social ; it is repeated from mouth to mouth ; 
 it takes its place in the current literature, newspaper 
 or other, of the party; and at last it reaches the 
 dignity of an axiom or truism. Henceforward a man 
 will need some audacity if he ventures within the 
 limits of that society to question its truth, or to 
 inquire into the foundation of fact on which so 
 generally received a proposition rests. 
 
 In some such way as this the theory has grown up 
 among certain sections of society, that Christianity is 
 a religion that exists in the interests of the rich. 
 
56 THE CHURCH AND WEALTH. 
 
 There can, I fear, be no doubt that some of the 
 difficulties that the Church of England has to meet 
 lie in the fact, that many of the poor are persuaded that 
 its teachings and its ultimate purposes are bound up 
 with the well-to-do ; that is to say, with those who up 
 to the present time have formed the governing classes 
 of the community. There is an idea that Christianity 
 exists to support the established order of things ; that 
 its precepts and catechisms are primarily directed 
 to the maintenance of the present distribution of 
 wealth and social comforts; that its one supreme 
 object is to keep in order what are called " the lower 
 classes," and to teach them, at the peril of their happi- 
 ness in a future life, " to order themselves lowly and 
 reverently to all their betters," and " to do their duty in 
 that state of life " in which they find themselves placed. 
 These two precepts of the Church catechism^ 
 are apt to be quoted as if they formed the special 
 message which the Church of England had to deliver. 
 They contain, it need not be denied, a truth which 
 none of us are the better for having forgotten. The 
 world would certainly be no worse if there were in it, 
 in the upper as well as in the lower classes, a truer per- 
 ception of the value of order, and of the social happi- 
 ness that can only be found in the submission to due 
 and reasonable authority. If the Christian ideal of a 
 quiet and contented life were to wholly disappear, the 
 world would be in great danger of becoming the scene 
 
THE CHURCH AND WEALTH. 57 
 
 of a fierce and wolfish struggle for existence, without 
 pity and without remorse. We may, however, readily 
 admit that the wording of these clauses of the catechism 
 is old-fashioned, and that they belong to a time when 
 social ideas were very different from those current 
 amongst us in the present day. We may admit, too, 
 that these particular words have been at times unduly 
 and unfairly emphasised ; and consequently a good deal 
 of excuse may be found for the distrust with which the 
 Church of England is now and then confronted when 
 it comes into contact with the masses of the working 
 people. 
 
 Since the fourth century Christianity has been 
 the acknowledged creed of the nations of Europe. 
 Bishops have taken their seats in legislatures on a level 
 with, or even superior to any who sat there ; and con- 
 sequently the Church has been closely linked with the 
 governing classes and has had a very large share in 
 moulding for good and for evil the political develop- 
 ment of the world — for good and for evil ; its enemies 
 forget the former and lay stress on the latter. It is a 
 mixed history ; dark blots are to be found upon it. It 
 is impossible at times to bring the lives of those who 
 were the successors of the Apostles into any relation 
 to the ideals of the New Testament, — ideals which 
 have their roots in self-abnegation and self-surrender ; 
 or to recognize in the earthly Prince the fitting re- 
 presentative of the Faith of Him " who had not where 
 
58 THE CHURCH AND WEALTH, 
 
 to lay His head." In our own day, the wealth and 
 temporal dignity that siuToiind the Church of England 
 are not wholly without their disadvantages ; they lend 
 colour at all events to these suggestions of partizanship, 
 which we should do well to keep in mind ; for it is our 
 bounden duty, in all we say or do, to be on our guard 
 against any line of action which could give real justifi- 
 cation for these thoughts about us. 
 
 Historically, then, the connection between the 
 Church and the governing classes is a fact; it has 
 brought, as all things do, both good and evil to 
 men. The Church in our day is paying the penalty 
 for the mistakes of those of her rulers in the past, 
 who, forgetful of their high responsibilities and 
 wonderful opportunities, gave to the few that which 
 was entrusted to them by Almighty God in the 
 interest of the many. The Gospels in no way sanction 
 — it ought to be perfectly unnecessary to say it — this 
 tying up of Christianity with wealth and temporal 
 power. Indeed, the whole drift of the teaching of the 
 New Testament is quite in the opposite direction. 
 Nothing but our long familiarity with the Bible shuts 
 our ears to the perfectly startling character of what we 
 read there. There is sentence after sentence whicli 
 declares in the most emphatic manner that the 
 possession of riches, in itself and aj^art from the con- 
 sideration of the use that is made of them, is a 
 dangerous, almost fatal hindrance to the spiritual life ; 
 
THE CHURCH AND WEALTH. 59 
 
 that wealth is a positive evil ; that to be a wealthy 
 man makes it additionally difficult to reach the 
 kingdom of God. " Woe unto you that are rich ! for 
 you have received your consolation." ^ " How hardly 
 shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of 
 God! "2 
 
 It is true, we persuade ourselves, that our Lord 
 explained away this, as we think, too severe sentence, 
 when He added the words, " How hard it is for them 
 that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of 
 God ! " ^ But there is really no qualification here ; our 
 Saviour merely explains the grounds on which He had 
 made His previous declaration ; how hardly shall they 
 enter in ! hardly, because, surrounded as they are by 
 wealth and all that wealth gives, they are soon 
 entangled in its meshes and learn to put their trust in 
 their riches. Everything around them calls them to 
 present enjoyment and present gratification ; bids them 
 to eat, drink, and be merry, and let their soul rejoice in 
 all the abundance of satisfaction which is immediately 
 within their reach. All this is close at hand, and the 
 thought of God is very far off; death, judgment, 
 eternity, of the haunting shadows of which even 
 thoughtless persons are never quite able to rid them- 
 selves, are so doubtful, so uncertain, that we can- 
 not get any hold upon them. The present world we 
 
 » St. Luke vi. 24. 2 g^ j^j^rk x. 23. 
 
 " St. Mark x. 24. 
 
6o THE CHURCH AND WEALTH. 
 
 understand; here, at least, there is something fairly- 
 solid ; on every side it calls us to what we know to be 
 pleasant and attractive ; and in the end the warning is 
 found to be true in our case, " Where your treasure is, 
 there will your heart be also." ^ 
 
 All this of which we have been thinking, is brought 
 before us to-day with wonderful vividness by the 
 Grospel from which the text is taken. In this story 
 the veil that hangs between this world and the next, 
 is for one moment drawn; aside, and we are given the 
 history of one who had lived and died ; w^ho in this life 
 had enjoyed all the luxuries that great wealth could 
 put within his reach, and who, in consequence, suffered 
 utter ruin and loss when he passed into the unseen 
 world. I say " in consequence " deliberately ; for if 
 we attend to the conversation given in the parable, 
 and try to gather from it what it was that brought 
 him to this end, we shall find w^e are not told of any 
 things that we usually regard as sin; the only sug- 
 gested ground of his failure is the utterly selfish use 
 he made of his wealth. He " fared sumptuously," and 
 was ";clothed in purple and fine linen ; " he lived well, 
 and he dressed well ; he was a person of great social 
 consideration, and he filled a great position with 
 magnificence. And then the contrast is set before us 
 in the life of the poor. One man is singled out, who, 
 hungry and diseased, is brought and laid at the gate 
 » St. Luke xii. 34. 
 
THE CHURCH AND WEALTH. 6i 
 
 of the great liouse, desiring to be fed with the crumbs 
 which fell from that sumptuous table. Dives, however, 
 could feel no sympathy with the sufferings of the 
 beggar who lay at his gate ; he showed no compassion, 
 and he gave no help to a sufferer on whom the very 
 dogs took pity. 
 
 " And the rich man died and was buried." He was 
 given a magnificent funeral ; men recounted his great- 
 ness and his high dignities ; funeral orations were 
 delivered ; his virtues were extolled ; his munificence 
 here, his magnanimity there, duly commemorated. 
 But in the parable, the veil is lifted, and we are told 
 what happened to his real self, which his fellow-men 
 had never known. "And in hell he lifted up his 
 eyes being in torment," to hear the words that told 
 the one ground of his condemnation ; " Son, remember 
 thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things ; " the 
 good things that belonged to thee, that were to thee 
 the whole of good, the one only good for which thou 
 hadst any thought or care. His one purpose in life 
 had been to protect himself from all that was disagree- 
 able or unpleasant ; he had lived, in a word, the ideally 
 selfish life of the cultured, educated, and wealthy man. 
 He had forgotten his responsibility to God for the 
 wealth he had received ; he had refused to recognize 
 that he was but a steward, that he had duties towards 
 others which he dared not neglect ; everything that 
 had in it a touch of self-discipline he had pushed away 
 
62 THE CHURCH AND WEALTH. 
 
 from him; he had lived simply for himself, and 
 consequently he had already received to the full the 
 rewaixl that he had desired. There is no hint whatever 
 that he was, what we call, an irreligious man ; Moses 
 and the prophets were not unknown to him ; and 
 there is nothing to suggest that he did not believe 
 what they taught; or again, that he did not attend 
 with regularity on his religious duties. His con- 
 versation with Abraham shows us that he had little to 
 learn ; the picture of his home is what we should 
 recognize as an outwardly religious home. The fact that 
 the ordinary calls of religion had failed to reach him 
 is indeed the special ground of his plea on behalf of 
 his brothers, that one might be sent from the dead, 
 who should rouse them from their lethargy and compel 
 them to that real repentance without which, as he now 
 knows, they too must come to this place of torment. 
 
 " This scripture," says Bishop Andrewes, " hath 
 the name given it in the words * recordare fili ' — son, 
 remember ; it is a remembrance, and such a remem- 
 brance that it toucheth our estate in everlasting life ; 
 that is, the well or evil hearing of this ' recordare ' is 
 as much as our eternal life is worth. For we find both 
 in it. Our comfort or torment eternal — comfort in 
 Abraham's bosom, torment in the fire of hell — depend 
 upon it ; and, therefore, as mlich as we regard them, 
 we are to regard it." ^ 
 
 1 " The Works of Bishop Andrewes," vol. ii. p. 78. 
 
THE CHURCH AND WEALTH. 63 
 
 Our Lord does not teach us that no rich man can 
 enter heaven ; for Abraham himself was a man of 
 great wealth, and thus it is through the lips of a rich 
 man that the warning comes to rich men. The warning 
 is the old one ; life must bring us discipline ; it is 
 true that none of us can escape the heavy troubles 
 which at times come upon us all ; but apart altogether 
 from these there is the daily discipline of life. In the 
 case of the poor this is unavoidable ; we, however, can 
 escape it if we choose to do so, although it lies near 
 enough to us. The trivial round, the common task, 
 furnish for all the opportunity of self-denial, point 
 out the road by which we may, if we will, day by day 
 draw nearer to God. The terrible peril of wealthy men 
 is that it is open to them to refuse this daily trial, to 
 avoid the discipline of life, to think only of present 
 pleasure and present gratification. Here is a real 
 danger for all of us in this place ; in our better moments 
 we desire sincerely to attain that nobler ideal of life 
 which is set before us in our Bibles ; but it can never 
 be ours without effort, without definite and determined 
 push and struggle. It is so hard to nerve ourselves 
 to the contest ; it is so natural to avoid it, and to take 
 the immediate pleasures that temptingly invite us. If 
 now, in indolent self-indulgence, we choose the easier 
 road, as years go by the higher ideal will fade away 
 and be lost, and there will remain only the good we 
 have consistently chosen and have made our own, 
 
64 THE CHURCH AND WEALTH. 
 
 and in receiving which, for a few years, we have 
 received our payment in full for all eternity. 
 
 This seems, perhaps, a somewhat sombre view of 
 life to set before young men. No doubt it is pleasant 
 to retain as long as we may the happy carelessness of 
 boyhood ; but, after all, we are men and not boys, and 
 we must, therefore, put away childish things. We 
 must let this " recordare " of the gospel come home 
 to us — Son, remember. We must look at life seriously, 
 we must let the shadow of work and duty and earnest 
 strenuous purpose fall across our path ; it is positively 
 wrong that we should now be as lighthearted and as 
 thoughtless as we were when we first went to school. 
 
 Some of us may, I think, be pardoned if at times we 
 mark with anxiety and regret failures in the University 
 examinations which, too often, are wholly gratuitous 
 and unnecessary; the consequence of careless in- 
 difference to the mental training and discipline which 
 are, after all, among the main purposes of the exist- 
 ence of a University. This is, it is true, only a single 
 point, and I do not wish to speak of it as if it were 
 the only thing we had to think about ; but tested in 
 this one matter, only too many of us fail to respond. 
 Why should we work ? What is the use of it ? For 
 us there is much goods laid up for many years, we can 
 surely take our ease. Hunting, rowing, cricketing — • 
 these are what we care for, and there is nothing wrong 
 in them. This may be true enough, but still we must 
 
THE CHURCH AND WEALTH. 65 
 
 not live to hunt or to row. In merciful warning to 
 us against so ruinous a mistake our Saviour lias given 
 us this " recordare " in the gospel : beware lest you 
 are receiving now in this life all the good you know 
 and care for ; for the time cannot be very far off when 
 your life must be given back to the God who gave 
 it, and what then will be your place in that future 
 world ? How can you receive a good you have never 
 learned to desire ? How can you find your eternal 
 happiness in the presence of God if, in this life, you 
 have had no thought of loving or of serving Him ? 
 
 Our Saviour is ready and waiting to help us tread 
 the path He bids us follow ; but we must, each for him- 
 self, accept the help He offers. There is the deep 
 mystery of our freewill ; our freewill to reject, if we 
 choose to do so, the love which created and redeemed 
 us. If, however, we will hear His voice and accept 
 the discipline to which he calls us. He will give us, 
 through that discipline and that service, a freedom 
 and a happiness that a selfish life can never know. 
 When wealth, and all the gratifications that belong to 
 wealth, when power and influence are given to us, 
 whether they come to us by birth or inheritance, or 
 are won directly by our own personal work and effort, 
 we should do well, as we receive them, to kneel down 
 and pray with our whole hearts and souls that we may 
 not receive our reward in full now in this present 
 time ; that God would give us here whatever He will, 
 
 F 
 
66 THE CHURCH AND WEALTH. 
 
 but that we may so receive all which He sends us in 
 this life, that we may be received ourselves hereafter 
 into the kingdom of His Son. 
 
 And as our Blessed Lord's merciful "recordare" 
 sounds in our ears, let us plead with Him our own 
 "recordare," that He would remember us in all the 
 work of life, in the hour of death, and in the day of 
 judgment : — 
 
 Kecordare, Jesu pie, 
 Quod sum causa tuse viae 
 Ne me perdas ilia die ! 
 
VII. 
 
 " Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God," — 
 St. John iii. 3. 
 
 (QUINQUAGESIMA SuNDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1884.) 
 
 Faith and knowledge — how great the contrast is 
 between the ideas called up before us by these two 
 words as we generally understand them. Knowledge 
 seems to be something substantial, solid, positive ; it 
 deals with the things we can taste and smell and 
 handle and see and hear; it feeds and clothes and 
 sustains us ; it annihilates, at all events on the earth, 
 time and space; it brings the fruits of distant lands 
 into the small island in which we live; it has put 
 close at hand, and within the reach of the vast 
 majority of living men, luxuries that have now become 
 almost necessaries of life, of which even our wealthiest 
 ancestors scarcely dreamed. It is no doubt true that 
 if we penetrate ever so little beneath the surface 
 of things, and ask questions as to first principles, 
 various more or less difficult problems present them- 
 selves for solution. But we English are before all 
 
68 FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 things practical men, and even the better educated 
 of us push aside with a certain impatience such 
 discussions as these, regarding them as matters that 
 it is well enough for thinkers and dreamers to spend 
 their time upon ; for us it is sufficient, as our everyday 
 experience teaches us, that knowledge practically 
 applied is the means of attaining wealth and comfort 
 and prosperity. 
 
 But the conception of faith is so very different 
 to this. Faith deals with things that are shadowy, 
 vague, impalpable; we can bring its subject matter 
 to no such tests as those we have applied with brilliant 
 success to what is called positive knowledge. Faith 
 will not correspond with our favourite methods of 
 investigation, it declines to submit to our verifications. 
 The ages of faith appear to us, as we look back on 
 them, the ages of gross superstition ; and, consequently, 
 to men overwhelmed with the urgent work of this 
 hurrying life, faith seems to be little different from 
 credulity, to be the child and the offspring of ignorance. 
 
 But there are others who, although they accept 
 absolutely the principle that the subject-matter of 
 knowledge can be only that which appeals to the 
 senses and to the experience of the senses, yet 
 recognize that it is not possible to leave things exactly 
 at the point they reach in op.r laboratories or our 
 workshops. There open out before them the questions 
 suggested by mental and physical pain, the problems 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. 69 
 
 of decay and death— I say nothing of sin, as this 
 is a specially theological conception — the tragedy 
 of human life pleads with them, and they cannot 
 escape its importunity. They must make some effort 
 to find out how men may be made better and happier ; 
 how pain, distress, and sorrow may at least be lessened, 
 if they cannot be destroyed ; and how death, although 
 it is the inevitable lot of all men, may yet, perchance, 
 be robbed of its agony and its terror, and become 
 the peaceful sleep, in which a life that has known 
 happiness and steady growth and progress may at last 
 lose itself without regret and without apprehension ; 
 and in this attempt really to look before and after, 
 really to answer those questions whence and whither, 
 men necessarily rise to some higher level of serious 
 purpose than those who live only for the passing 
 moment. In the effort to learn from the past, or 
 to provide for the future, men are lifted into those 
 wider spheres of thought and emotion, where they can 
 form great purposes, and shape for themselves great 
 ideals; and then, braced and steadied, they return 
 to everyday life to do and sometimes to suffer, and 
 if they can, to persuade others to do and suffer too, 
 not for anything they can see with their eyes, or 
 handle with their hands, but for something they hope 
 for — they work, in a word, in faith. 
 
 This is the faith that has nerved all great human 
 teachers as such — the statesman, the politician, the 
 
70 FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 poet, the thinker — and faith looked at in this way 
 has, no doubt, much in common with poetic instinct 
 and poetic enthusiasm. Eeason — using the word, as 
 Christians would say, in a somewhat restricted sense — 
 can, it is certain, teach us that life is wrapped round 
 on every side in mystery; reason vainly seeks to 
 fathom or to understand it; it can only reach such 
 satisfaction as is to be found in calling the mystery 
 unknowable. Behind the veil we cannot penetrate, 
 there may be or there may not be a God; but this 
 much at least is certain, that if there is a God we can 
 know nothing about Him. This, indeed, is no new 
 discovery. " Canst thou by searching find out God ? 
 Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection ? It 
 is as high as heaven ; what canst thou do ? deeper 
 than hell ; what canst thou know ? " ^ So we read in 
 the Book of Job. And St. Paul, speaking at Athens, 
 tells his hearers how vainly the heathen world 
 groped after God; and again in the First Epistle 
 to the Corinthians he writes, "The natural man 
 receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for 
 they are foolishness unto him : neither can he know 
 them, because they are spiritually discerned." ^ And 
 then, in the words of the text, our Blessed Lord 
 declares the impossibility that a man can reach any 
 true conception of the kingdom of God unless he be 
 born again — unless, that is, new powers are given 
 
 1 Job xi. 7, 8. 2 1 Cor. ii. 14. 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. 71 
 
 him ; unless cliannels of communication are opened up 
 between him and the life that is unseen and eternal, 
 as real as those physical powers which became his 
 at his physical birth, and connected him with the 
 material universe. 
 
 The blindness of the blind is no argument to 
 any one who can see against the truth of his sight. 
 Imagine the most ingenious and powerful arguments 
 supported by the subtlest intellectual ingenuity of 
 a number of blind men, which tried to prove that 
 all we had to tell of the glories of the visible world, 
 revealed to us through our eyesight, was but the 
 product of a fervid and poetical imagination play- 
 ing round the sensations which reach us through 
 touch or taste or hearing, and that it was clearly 
 impossible, for this, that, and the other reason, all 
 of quite irresistible cogency to the blind, that an 
 independent faculty such as sight could belong to 
 men. Would this move us for one moment? Why, 
 then, should we allow ourselves to be made anxious 
 because men who have no idea of what is meant by 
 faith, prove to us with elaborate care and completeness 
 that we have no right, if we are honest and sincere 
 men, to have any faith ourselves ? 
 
 Faith, no doubt, has, in one sense, kinship with 
 poetic enthusiasm, and the noble ideals of unselfish 
 men; but it is infinitely more, infinitely greater than 
 this. To the Christian Church faith is not a dream 
 
72 FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 or an illusion, however beautiful, however graceful, 
 but " the substance of things hoped for, the evidence 
 of things not seen." It is, in short, the sum of all those 
 powers of the soul in which, and by which, God is 
 known and understood, as surely as the eye takes in 
 the light, or the ear hears the voice of the friend. If 
 we have once really known, however dimly, that God 
 is ; if He has once spoken to our hearts and consciences ; 
 if the veil that hangs between us and the unseen world 
 has been withdrawn for us but for a moment; then 
 we know that there is a region of true knowledge open 
 to us which is not reached directly through the bodily 
 senses, which is not included under what we generally 
 mean by the knowable, but which belongs to the 
 mystery that is round about our life : human philo- 
 sophy can recognize but cannot fathom it : it is re- 
 vealed by the Spirit of God to those v/ho in humility 
 and patience wait and Avork and pray. 
 
 And we Christians believe that this knowledge is 
 the gift of God, in and through the Incarnation of our 
 Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. We believe that the 
 germ of this spiritual life was given each one of us in 
 our infancy when we were baptized into the Name of 
 the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost ; 
 and since that moment we have been gaining an ever- 
 deepening knowledge of God, or have been doing what 
 in us lies to quench His Spirit which then was given 
 us. In our early days Christian influences were round 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. 73 
 
 us ; we were taught to read our Bibles and to say our 
 prayers : but how slight the impression is that many 
 of us now have of that early teaching. We do not, it 
 is true, feel the day has begun quite rightly if we have 
 not said our prayers ; but a few hurried sentences, one 
 or two collects not very carefully or thoughtfully 
 repeated, easily satisfy the demand our consciences 
 make on us ; and if this is so, a few more months or 
 years, and it will cease to trouble us at all that we 
 regularly enter on the duties of each new day, and go 
 out to meet its temptations without one thought of 
 God. 
 
 Men often speak of a judgment to come, and they 
 speak lightly and truly ; but even now the judgment 
 has begun. We should do well to lay to heart the 
 lesson God teaches us, by His working in the visible 
 world, as to the laws by which He governs the spiritual 
 and unseen world. Take one instance : the mole has 
 chosen to burrow and live beneath the surface of the 
 ground out of the reach of the light of day, and Nature 
 has done what she always does in such cases, and has 
 taken away a gift of which no use is ever made ; the 
 mole, living continually in darkness, clearly has no 
 need of the power of sight, and so it has been taken 
 away. Just so, if we forsake the Light of God's 
 Presence, the spiritual sense through which alone He 
 can be seen will lose its power ; and if we choose to 
 burrow down among the things of this lower world, we 
 
74 FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 must lose the sight of the soul as certainly as the 
 mole has lost its physical sight. And in the realm of 
 external nature nothing is done in a hurry, or by leaps 
 and bounds ; slowly and step by step the disused 
 organ decays and loses its capacity for usefulness : for 
 a long time recovery is still possible if only the right 
 means be used ; but at last the sense is completely 
 lost, and only a miracle can restore that which has 
 been wholly destroyed. 
 
 The same law rules in the spiritual world : and 
 equilibrium is an impossibility; backwards or for- 
 wards, evolution or degradation, gaining a deeper 
 knowledge, or losing the feeble light we still have, — 
 one or other of these is happening to us all. Day 
 by day, hour by hour, the judgment is going on ; 
 to-day is judged by yesterday, to-morrow by to-day, 
 this Term by last Term, the next by this. Of what 
 infinite importance is all this to us here in Oxford, 
 when life is just opening out before us ; when all the 
 wealth of associations and memories that belong to 
 this place, all the varied influences of its intellectual 
 activities are moulding and shaping our lives ; when, 
 perhaps for the first time in our experience, we are 
 reading books, and are brought into contact with 
 brilliant intellects in whose scheme of things in general 
 no place can be found for all that we have been taught 
 to believe ; when at times we find ourselves travelling 
 along lines of thought and speculation which are 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. 75 
 
 insensibly undermining much that is essential in the 
 foundations of our faith. We are no longer children ; 
 we are fairly afloat on the sea of life, and we need all 
 our spiritual strength and all our readiness. If in the 
 past we have done little or nothing to utilize the gifts 
 and powers that belong to our spiritual nature, we shall 
 find ourselves in serious jeopardy of shipwreck : we 
 have need to work hard and watch and pray lest the 
 last and most terrible judgment of all be passed upon 
 us, — that the light that is in us has become darkness. 
 
 Lent is once more close upon us with its over- 
 mastering sense of sin — of sin not as a figment of 
 theologians, but as a real power and potency, crushing 
 the life of the soul, separating us from God our 
 Father, and hiding His mercy from us. None can 
 venture to say he has not sinned — sinned in thought 
 and word and deed ; sinned, too, in omission, in 
 neglecting to fulfil the duties which God had given 
 him to do ; sinned, too, with his intellect, those sins 
 which we so rarely recognize or acknowledge, but 
 which, perhaps, set the most impassable barrier between 
 the soul and God. " If we say that we have no sin, we 
 deceive ourselves ; " Lent bids us remember this, and 
 bids us come to prayer. If we could once say, " Our 
 Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, 
 forgive us as we forgive ; " if we could once say these 
 words as our Saviour would have us say them ; if we 
 could once know what communion with God really 
 
76 FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 is, — then God, the soul, eternal life, would no longer 
 be only words; we should understand what spiritual 
 communion means ; and the knowledge of God would 
 be so sure and certain that no one could ever take it 
 away from us. 
 
 How differently we live from all that is implied 
 in this. We can find our complete satisfaction for our 
 spiritual needs in a single service on Sunday, in 
 coming to listen to the anthem on Sunday afternoon ; 
 instead of coming to this church as often as we may 
 with all our powers of body, soul, and spirit, with all 
 our intellectual enthusiasms and mental activities, 
 with our sorrow and our penitence, and kneeling 
 down in His presence, and being still and learning 
 to know that He is God. Out of some two hundred 
 baptized and confirmed members of the Church of 
 Christ, only ten or twelve come here Sunday by Sunday 
 to fulfil His last command and to show forth His death. 
 How can our spiritual life be vigorous and strong, if 
 we take no thought or care for it? if we use none of 
 the help God has put into our hands ? if we neglect 
 prayer, communion, almsgiving, self-discipline, and so 
 leave it to grow as it may, or to perish if it must? 
 AVe implore you, by the mercies of God, that you 
 would not neglect the grace of God that is in you ; 
 that you would present yourselves with all your powers 
 of body and of intellect a living sacrifice to Him who 
 has done so great things for you. Come with us this 
 
FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. 77 
 
 Lent, we beg you, and kneel down liere and think and 
 pray; we must all seek forgiveness, that we have 
 misused and neglected the grace and mercy that have 
 been round ns since first we were gathered into the 
 fold of Christ : and may He in His great mercy hear 
 us and bring us at the last to His eternal kingdom, 
 where Faith will be lost in sight; where knowledge 
 as we now understand it will vanish away ; but where 
 a new and an enduring knowledge of all the infinite 
 depths of the wisdom and the love of God will, through 
 all the ages of eternity, for ever grow from more to 
 more. 
 
VIII. 
 -^fie ai^ftutc^ t]&0 23otfg of QLW%1 
 
 " The Church which is His Body."— Eph. i. 23. 
 (Twentieth Sunday after Teinity, Oct. 26, 1884.) 
 
 We may well wonder how it comes to pass that some 
 parts of the teaching of the Bible are so readily 
 accepted by many Christian people, while other parts 
 of its teaching, equally clear and definite as they appear 
 to us to be, and after all little more than necessary 
 complements of that which is generally believed, are 
 often ignored and sometimes denied ; while those who 
 press home upon men the duty of the acceptance of the 
 complete Creed are declared to be enemies of the Cross 
 of Jesus Christ. 
 
 All Christians who are worthy of the Name they bear 
 teach the doctrine of the Incarnation, and the truth 
 of the redemption of mankind by the one sacrifice 
 once offered upon the cross ; but many pass by, with- 
 out any serious consideration,' the truth of our Blessed 
 Lord's perpetual intercession and the fact of His present 
 mediation on behalf of His Church. "Lo, I am 
 
THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 79 
 
 witli you alway, even unto the end of the world ; " ^ 
 these were among the last words our Lord spoke to 
 His Apostles before the ascension. He then, the 
 God-Man, perfect God and perfect Man, though hence- 
 forward no longer seen with the outward eye, would 
 yet be with them till the end of time ; with them, that 
 is, in the reality of His Human Nature. But since 
 His Human Nature is a fact, it is against the truth of 
 that nature, that It should be anywhere else than where 
 we are told It is since the ascension, that is, at the 
 right hand of God. His Humanity can therefore only 
 be present with us after a spiritual manner, in the 
 power, that is, of His Divine Nature; and it is the 
 special office of the Third Person in the Blessed 
 Trinity, God the Holy Spirit, to be the agent through 
 whom this spiritual Presence of the One Mediator is 
 given to the Church. " I will not leave you comfort- 
 less : I will come to you." ^ " If I go not away, the 
 Comforter will not come to you ; but if I depart, I 
 will send Him unto you." ^ " He shall glorify Me : for 
 He shall receive of Mine, and shall show it unto you." * 
 Therefore it was on the day of Pentecost that our 
 Lord's words, "I will come again, and receive you unto 
 Myself," ^ had their fulfilment ; for it was to His 
 Church only that this Presence was to be given. " A 
 little while, and the world seeth Me no more ; but ye 
 
 1 St. Matt, xxviii. 20. 2 gt. John xiv. 18. 
 
 3 St. John xvi. 7, * St. John xvi. 14. ^ St. John xiv. 3, 
 
8o THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 
 
 see Me : because I live, ye shall live also." ^ These 
 words cannot be taken as if they were fulfilled at His 
 second coming to judge the world; for then every 
 eye shall see Him : they can only refer to the Pre- 
 sence with His people, and to the divine life given 
 them with that Presence, which was bestowed upon the 
 Church on the day of Pentecost. Obviously the words 
 are not explained by the supposition that our Lord 
 uses them of Himself as God, since as God He must be 
 present everywhere. Moreover, this Presence with us 
 as God is not that which we sinners ask may be given 
 us ; from that Presence we seek to hide ourselves as our 
 first parents did in the garden of Eden; it is the 
 Presence with us of our Mediator we so sorely need ; 
 that Presence through which alone we can dare approach 
 God as God, through which alone our sins can be 
 blotted out, through which alone we can receive 
 strength to live the divine life which was implanted 
 in us at our Baptism. " We will come unto him and 
 make Our abode with him," ^ are our Lord's words. 
 "Where two or three are gathered together in My 
 Name, there am I — I, that is, in the power of My 
 glorified Humanity — in the midst of them." ^ As God 
 we cannot escape from Him ; if we climb up into 
 heaven, He is there: if we go down to hell. He is 
 there also.^ From the Presence of God we cannot 
 
 ' St. John xiv. 19. * St. John xiv. 23. 
 
 ^ St. Matt, xviii. 20. * Ps. cxxxix. 8. 
 
THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 8i 
 
 escape ; from the Presence of the Saviour — the Medi- 
 ator — we can, and may God help us, we do again and 
 again cut ourselves off by wilful sin. 
 
 This spiritual Presence is then a reality. How is 
 it given us ? Clearly a moment's thought will tell us 
 there are two sides to this question ; since we are free- 
 agents, and God wills that we should be so, there is 
 something required on the one hand from us ; and on 
 the other hand, since our Blessed Lord's Intercession 
 and the fact of the Presence of His man's nature 
 in the world are truths entirely independent of any 
 one of us, there is, if we may put it so, something 
 to be done on behalf of Almighty God. For the 
 moment we will think only of the latter aspect of the 
 question. On this side when we are asked how this 
 spiritual Presence of our Lord is given to us, we can only 
 reply, that it is given us through the Church which 
 is, as St. Paul teaches us, the Body of Christ. We are 
 bound to the Church through the Sacraments, and they 
 derive all their power and efficacy from the truth of 
 the Incarnation ; and hence, to quote the words of 
 Archdeacon Wilberforce, " It is impossible to answer 
 the question whether men are joined to Christ by being- 
 joined to His Church, or joined to His Church by being 
 joined to Him. It would be a parallel question to ask, 
 whether we were sharers in Adam's nature because we 
 were men, or men because we were sharers in Adam's 
 nature. The two relations hang inseparably together. 
 
 a 
 
82 THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 
 
 By the mystical Body of Christ is meant the whole 
 family of those who by the Holy Ghost are imited in 
 Church ordinances to His man's nature. Our real 
 union with each is what gives us a part in the other." ^ 
 But it may be said, you are really taking as a 
 serious statement what is intended only for a metaphor. 
 Yet, after all, a metaphor must mean something. When 
 our Lord speaks of Himself as the Good Shepherd, as 
 the Door of the Sheepfold ; when He compares the 
 relation between Himself and His followers to the 
 union between the Vine and its Branches, we under- 
 stand at once what He means. You may speak of the 
 members of a society as a body, or you may speak of 
 the citizens of a country as a body, but would there be 
 much meaning in calling the inhabitants of a country 
 the body of their king or their president ? ^ Now 
 St. Paul over and over again speaks of the Church as 
 the Body of Christ ; words could not be stronger or 
 more definite than those he uses, " We are members of 
 His Body, of His Flesh, and of His Bones ; " ^ and thus 
 (I again quote Archdeacon Wilberforce) " It seems un- 
 questionable that some real relation must bind together 
 the natural body which He took at the Incarnation, and 
 His Mystical Body the Church, so that our union with 
 the one must be a ground of union with the other." ^ 
 
 ^ "The Doctrine of the Incarnation,", by Archdeacon Wilberforce, 
 2nd Edition, 1849, p. 312. 
 
 2 Cf. Wilberforce, p. 313. ^ Ephes. v. 30. '- Wilberforce, p. 315. 
 
THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST, 83 
 
 But it will be said, this is to limit the grace of 
 God ; the way is open and clear, and " spirit with 
 spirit can meet;"^ we can go to God freely and simply ; 
 you are setting purely imaginary obstacles before us — 
 human inventions they are often called. There might 
 have been something to be said for such a position as 
 this if we had not been fallen creatures. If sin had 
 never come between God and man and destroyed the 
 right of access which man, as he came from his 
 Creator's hands, undoubtedly had to his Creator, then, 
 no doubt, to have been a child of Adam would have 
 given the right to have come into the Presence of God. 
 But the very ground of the necessity of the Incarnation 
 lay in the fact that we men could no longer approach 
 the Presence of God ; that a new way must be opened 
 for us ; and this new and living way is " through the 
 A' eil, that is to say, His Flesh." ^ How many there are 
 who stand up with all their sins upon them, and in 
 proud contempt ask with Naaman, "Are not Abana 
 and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the 
 waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be 
 clean? "^ Think, they say, of the greatness of the 
 human intellect ; remember the heights of inspiration 
 to which the poet can rise ; call to mind that spiritual 
 insight and glow which we find in page after page 
 of writers who do not admit for one moment the truth 
 
 ^ Tennyson's " Higher Pantheism." 
 
 2 Heb. X. 20. =" 2 Kings v. 12. 
 
84 THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 
 
 of the Christian Creed. Such writers and thinkers lift 
 us above the present ; in their enthusiasm we find our 
 freedom; we lose sight of misery and death; we are 
 lifted into a new world, we breathe a new air. Are not 
 these better than the narrow path of Christian doctrine ? 
 than the weary round of penitence, self-discipline, and 
 prayer, which may only make men morbid, self- 
 analytical, and nerveless ? We rise above all that is 
 base, above much that you call sin ; you would have 
 us remember past sin, you preach contrition and 
 amendment ; we move in the free atmosphere of great 
 thoughts and ideals, you tell us we must travel along 
 a steep and difficult road of doctrine and discipline, 
 and would forbid us to turn from it to the right hand 
 or the left. The picture is an exaggerated one; still it 
 has its side of truth. All we need say is, the way of 
 penitence is Cod's way, and is the only way of salva- 
 tion. We are sure of this ; and men who have travelled 
 along it only a little distance know that it is a path 
 that leads to the only possible freedom, the freedom 
 that is of a perfect and willing service. Such men 
 know that penitence lifts them into a serener air than 
 this world can know ; that through it Cod grants them 
 a peace that passes the understanding of men, a hope 
 that cannot fade away, a light that will shine brighter 
 and brighter till the day of CErist. We say nothing 
 of those to whom the gospel of the grace of Cod has 
 never come, to God alone they stand or fall ; but for 
 
THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 85 
 
 US " who were once enlightened, and have tasted of 
 the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the 
 Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good Word of God, and 
 the powers of the world to come," ^ to cut ourselves off 
 from His Church is to cut ourselves off from Him ; to 
 refuse or to slight the spiritual food which He gives 
 us in the Holy Sacrament for the nourishment and 
 sustenance of the life He has bestowed upon us, is, 
 in one word, to reject Jesus Christ. To go back is 
 to reject the revealed mediation of our Lord and to 
 assert, directly or indirectly, that man has in himself 
 and of himself the right to approach Almighty God ; 
 that is, to deny that we are sinners and have fallen 
 away from Him, and thus tacitly to deny altogether 
 the doctrine of the Atonement. 
 
 All of you have at your Baptism been made 
 members of Christ, sharers in the divine humanity, 
 members of His Mystical Body. You have the right 
 of access to the throne of God by the one and only 
 mediation of Christ our Lord. You share in the con- 
 tinual cry of the Church, " Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata 
 mundi, dona nobis pacem, miserere nobis ; " " Thou 
 that takest away ; " now as we kneel before God, the 
 sins which otherwise would shut us out from His 
 presence are taken away from us through the power of 
 our Lord's ever present intercession and mediation. 
 Thus only are we able to pray at all ; and God becomes, 
 » Heb. vi. 4, 5. 
 
86 THE CHURCH THE BODY OF CHRIST. 
 
 not one against whom we have most grievously sinned, 
 a just and awful Judge, but " Our Father, which is in 
 Heaven." And this right and gift is ours as members 
 of the Mystical Body of Christ, and therefore united 
 to His human nature. 
 
 And further, it is only in virtue of the same union 
 that we have the right to come before Almighty God 
 with our private prayers ; it is this that makes each 
 one of us in his own order and degree a " priest unto 
 God." ^ Do not be afraid of the truths that belong to 
 the Faith ; understand what it teaches you, and when 
 you understand it believe it fearlessly, confess it boldly, 
 and pray God to bless your endeavours to act it out 
 in your life. The faith of Christ, fully grasped and 
 heartily accepted, places beneath your feet a firm 
 solid rock which no waves of human passion or human 
 ingenuity can undermine or wear away. Instead of 
 groping your way uncertainly, hesitating as to how 
 this or that thought you meet with will affect your 
 beliefs and hopes, doubtful as to what place you must 
 give to this or that theory, to this or that new bit of 
 knowledge, you will go through life with courage and 
 confidence, since you serve the Lord of Truth. 
 
 ' Rev. i. 6. 
 
IX. 
 
 penitence. 
 
 " My sin is ever before me," — Psalm li. 3. 
 
 (Sexagesima Sunday, Februaey 8, 1885.) 
 
 The mystery of the Fall of man is set before us with 
 wonderful vividness in the first lesson for this morn- 
 ing's service. Last Sunday we read of the Creation ; 
 the marvellous work moved on through its ceaseless 
 evolution under the sustaining life-giving hand of the 
 Lord God, and when each period reached its close, 
 when the evening and the morning had come and 
 gone, He beheld all the work that He had made, and 
 saw it was very good. And as the scene unfolded 
 itself at last the crown and climax of visible created 
 life was reached, and man came from his Maker's 
 hands, marred by no defect, stained by no sin ; and 
 Grod saw that he, too, was very good. 
 
 To-day all this is changed. Almighty God, in His 
 wisdom, had given His creature a perilous gift ; in 
 the mystery of his free will he was at liberty to choose 
 whether he would serve God or no ; he had the power, 
 
PENITENCE, 
 
 if lie chose, to take the gifts God had given him, and 
 turn them against the Giver : and the time came 
 when he did this : he asserted his freedom, his inde- 
 pendence, and in the very act of the assertion of his 
 freedom he lost it, and became, save for the mercy of 
 God, for evermore a slave. In this disaster all his 
 descendants were overwhelmed : it could not be other- 
 wise ; his nature crushed, maimed, torn, and tangled 
 Avas not as it had been before he fell ; he could not 
 transmit to others what he himself had lost ; and so 
 sin passed upon all, and in Adam all died. 
 
 It is sometimes said, and we are conscious of an 
 inclination to assent to the doctrine, that it is incon- 
 sistent with the idea of the justice of God to allow the 
 innocent to suffer with the guilty. When men stand, 
 as all must hereafter, before the judgment seat of our 
 Lord and Saviour, to answer for all that they have 
 done and all that they have left undone in life, we at 
 all events shall not be able to make this defence for 
 ourselves. It is true that we inherit the consequences 
 of the Fall, but we have also received a gift greater 
 than any Adam had ; God's presence and His very 
 self, given to us in the Incarnation of our Blessed 
 Lord ; in our Baptism we were made partakers of His 
 Divine humanity, and received, graces and gifts in the 
 strength of which we could beat down and hold in 
 check the power of evil. No one of us is sinless ; this 
 is true, but can we stop there ? Can any of us venture 
 
PENITENCE. 89 
 
 to say that he has not knowingly and even wilfully 
 sinned against the grace of God ? fallen, too, not into 
 slight or venial sin, if we can venture to speak of 
 any sin as venial, but into sin which has opened a 
 great gulf between the soul and God ? There have 
 been those who have thought so seriously of sin com- 
 mitted against the grace of God, that they have 
 taught that post-baptismal sin cannot be forgiven. 
 The Christian Church has always held such teaching 
 to be erroneous ; but it is the exaggeration of a truth 
 which we should do well never to forget : it is, indeed, 
 a far truer estimate of the disastrous results of sin 
 wilfully committed against the grace of God, than the 
 easy-going theories which only too many who have 
 been baptized into the name of Christ, hold concern- 
 ing sin committed by Christian men and women. But 
 we know that even here there is a way of restoration 
 open to us ; it is not an easy or smooth path, but 
 rather rugged, and steep, and toilsome ; the way, the 
 one and only way open to us, is the way of penitence. 
 
 Penitence ; — it is a word we often use ; how many 
 of us, I wonder, have any conception of all that it con- 
 notes ? There are two things which are often mistaken 
 for it, but which most emphatically it is not. In the 
 first place it is not that ready glib admission that we are 
 sinners which is sometimes made without any serious 
 thought or recollection, a sort of formula repeated 
 as a matter of course. Sinners ? Yes, no doubt we are 
 
90 PENITENCE. 
 
 sinners. Do wrong ? Yes, certainly we do wrong ; we 
 quite see we are not what we should be ; we know we 
 are not all we would be. But all the time men say 
 this, there is in the background of their thoughts a 
 kind of reserve, that really they are not so very bad — 
 that they are much better than the ordinary run of 
 people. So far as they think thus, they can have no real 
 conception of what sin is ; and those who do not know 
 what sin is, cannot know much about penitence. 
 
 And, secondly, penitence is not merely emotionalism, 
 or a facility for passionate regrets. We vary very 
 much on our emotional side, just as we do on other 
 sides of our wonderfully mysterious nature ; some are 
 easily moved, others are constitutionally phlegmatic. 
 We should do well to remember that easily roused 
 feelings are not in themselves certain evidence of the 
 work of the Spirit of God : there is a luxury in excited 
 emotions which is a most serious danger to the spiritual 
 life ; a kind of spiritual intoxication which is only too 
 easily mistaken for deep earnestness and true devo- 
 tion. The power of evil is never so dangerous as 
 when it comes to us dressed in all the glory of an 
 angel of light, and nowhere and at no time does this 
 happen more effectively than when undisciplined 
 emotions are being played upon in a way that suggests 
 the presence of the grace of God in the soul. 
 
 What, then, is penitence ? It is indeed no vague, 
 indefinite regret, no general feeling of dissatisfaction 
 
PENITENCE. 91 
 
 with self, such as depends to a very large extent on 
 the state of our bodily health ; it knows nothing of, 
 and is altogether untouched by any of the external 
 or social discomfort and disquietude which are at times 
 the accompaniments of the sins of men. Penitence is 
 rather in the profound emotion which once for all 
 takes possession of a man who has stood face to face 
 with his own sin ; who has learnt to know its hideous 
 deformity ; to measure in some degree its base ingrati- 
 tude, its overwhelming shame. Once awakened in this 
 way, he cannot be content with uncertainty or indefinite- 
 ness, he cannot rest in vague generalized acknowledg- 
 ment of sin; the whole past life must be taken and 
 looked at through and through. With prayer that 
 cannot shape itself in definite words, he looks up to the 
 God he fain would reach, that he may be able to do 
 the work effectively, that nothing may be forgotten or 
 lost sight of. Sin indeed haunts the soul as a night- 
 mare : look where the man will he sees, he can see, only 
 the one picture. Hitherto, it may be for years past, he 
 has been able to avoid this ; but escape is now, by 
 God's mercy, no longer a possibility, and he is com- 
 pelled to realize to the full that he has sinned against 
 the grace of his baptism, that he has trampled under 
 foot the Cross of the Lord, and by his faithlessness put 
 Him to shame before an unbelieving world. 
 
 Very morbid and very unwise all this, some 
 people will say ; but sin wilfully forgotten and wilfully 
 
92 PENITENCE. 
 
 ignored is unforgiven sin; we may be sure of this. 
 There is nothing the enemy of your souls would like 
 better than that you should forget your sins. There 
 is something very specious about this kind of advice, 
 and very much that is wise and influential in the 
 world combines to oifer it to us, and we are easily 
 enough persuaded to follow it. Surely, men say, the 
 best thing that you can do with the past is to 
 forget it, and put it out of the way. It is the future 
 you have to think about, and all your endeavours 
 should be directed to doing better in the remaining 
 years of life. Certainly this has to be done; but 
 you may not on that account leave the other undone. 
 You may no doubt ignore the past if you like, but 
 you will not get quit of it in that way. Your life 
 is one complete whole. You cannot disintegrate it 
 or snap it asunder by any effort you can make. 
 Your past for evil as well as for good makes and 
 shapes your present; so be quite sure of this, that 
 the right course is not to ignore it, but to learn 
 from it. The true line of action is, after all, the 
 brave and manly one ; if, therefore, you know you 
 have never been really clear and straightforward with 
 yourself, face boldly the disheartening task that you 
 have before you, and then bring your past life — ac- 
 knowledging everything, all that you recall, and all, too, 
 that you cannot now recall — and lay it down at the foot 
 of your Saviour's Cross, plead His death and passion, and 
 
PENITENCE. 93 
 
 hear, as you may, His voice absolving you from all your 
 sin, since He has left in His Chui'ch power to forgive 
 the sins of those who truly repent and believe in Him. 
 
 But penitence is the work of a lifetime, and not 
 of an hour or a week. The soul never knows the 
 full horror of sin till it sees it in the light of the 
 Cross of the Lord and Saviour. Forgiveness does 
 not lessen, but, on the contrary, increases the pain 
 which is the consequence of sin — the pain which every 
 soul must go through, when it really knows what sin 
 is, and who He is against whom the sin has been 
 committed. "The Lord turned, and looked upon 
 Peter," ^ and that look St. Peter never forgot. God in 
 His mercy grant to us, that we may know something 
 of what it is to feel that same glance bent upon 
 ourselves ; if so, it will pierce us through as nothing 
 we have ever felt before. Pain, mental or physical, 
 most of us know what this may mean; but pain, 
 sorrow for sin burning into us, a consuming, cleans- 
 ing, purifying fire — this is what God will give us. 
 And it brings with it a happiness all its own, for 
 it is the pledge of the grace of God, cleansing and 
 renewing all that has been defiled and broken and 
 ruined by the wilful misdeeds of life. 
 
 And this contrition shall by God's blessing remain 
 with us until the battle of life is over, never losing 
 anything of its power, but rather growing in vividness 
 ^ St. Luke xxii, 61. 
 
94 PENITENCE. 
 
 as the spiritual life deepens and strengthens. It may 
 be, as the years go on, that He will grant days of the 
 peace and rest and quiet which they only can know 
 who strive to live in the presence of their Saviour. 
 Such days, however, cannot last ; life under its normal 
 aspect must be stern conflict and persistent discipline 
 up to the end. It is true we are not called upon 
 to use physical violence to ourselves; but it is also 
 true that we are bidden to put ourselves under the 
 discipline the Christian year brings to us. We may 
 at least restrain the unnecessary luxuriousness of 
 our food ; we may use it to sustain life, and not to 
 minister to mere sensual enjoyment ; we can deny our- 
 selves, that we may be able to give more liberally to 
 God's poor. We may well be reminded of this now 
 when Lent is close upon us, bidding us once more 
 remember all that our Blessed Lord endured for us 
 men and for our salvation. And as we, mindful of 
 that life and death, look back upon our past lives, 
 Avith all their ingratitude and carelessness and sin, 
 we can only ask that God would give us true con- 
 trition for wrong done, for duties so often sadly 
 neglected, and try in solemn earnestness to make our 
 own Bishop Andrewes' penitential prayer, — 
 
 Domine, poenitet, pognitet, Domine, 
 
 Adjuva impcenitentiam meam, 
 Et magis adhuc magisque 
 
 Compuuge, scinde, contere 
 
 Cor nieiiii). 
 
Wbt i^olg '^Trinity. 
 
 " Blessed are the pure in heart : for they shall see God." — 
 St. Matt. v. 8. 
 
 (Trinity Sunday, May 31, 1885.) 
 
 There are, if I may put it so, two aspects under which, 
 the thought of Almighty God may present itself to us. 
 We can, on the one hand, think of Him as the God 
 who created, and redeemed, and sanctified us, as uphold- 
 ing and sustaining us and the world around us by His 
 presence and His power ; we can think of Him, that is, 
 in His relation to ourselves, in what He has done, and 
 is doing at the present moment for us. Again, we 
 may, on the other hand, think of Him as He is in Him- 
 self, apart from and without any created thing, as He 
 was before the worlds were made, in the boundless 
 changeless glory of His Eternal Being; and it is 
 this latter conception that belongs especially to the 
 festival of Trinity Sunday. 
 
 As we try to give some outline and form to our 
 thoughts, we are of necessity brought face to face with 
 
96 THE HOLY TRINITY. 
 
 dogmatic definitions and formulae, that is, with the 
 Creeds of the Church of Christ; and we draw back 
 puzzled, with a sense of difficulty about us ; difficulty, 
 too, rather needlessly created, we are inclined to say ; 
 and perhaps we are even seriously offended. If we 
 think for a moment, we shall discover that these diffi- 
 culties, at all events for Christian people, spring up 
 from two very different sources. They may arise from 
 our recognition of the truth of God's greatness and our 
 own absolute nothingness ; from our knowledge of what 
 God must be, and our knowledge of what we ourselves 
 are ; so far, even if mistaken, they are the expression 
 of true reverence. But, if we are only perfectly honest 
 and sincere with ourselves, we are compelled to 
 acknowledge that they may also have their origin in 
 the secret power and strength of sin within us. 
 
 We may, it is true, shrink from definition because 
 we feel how utterly impossible it is for us, with our 
 finite words and thoughts, to attempt, as it were, 
 to set limits to the truth of Almighty God. xind, 
 so far, we are not very wrong. Yet we are mis- 
 taking the purpose and object of such definitions 
 as those of the Creeds. Faith alone can enable us 
 to know God ; faith alone can give us the capacity 
 to understand Him, to see Him, to love Him ; but, 
 given the belief that is the -outcome of this faith, 
 from the very constitution of our complex nature, 
 our reason must take cognizance of, and bring itself 
 
THE HOLY TRINITY. 97 
 
 into relation with onr beliefs ; and it is at this point 
 that the Creeds become necessary. As a matter of 
 fact, definition has invariably been forced on the 
 Church from the outside, and consequently her defini- 
 tions are, in the first instance, warnings — warnings that, 
 if we accept particular presuppositions or surrender 
 ourselves to particular lines of thought, Ave do so with 
 the certainty of arriving, sooner or later, at conclusions 
 for which no place can be found within the four 
 corners of the Creed we still profess to hold. Once 
 started on these lines, we must surely reach at last the 
 dilemma, that we must either follow boldly along the 
 line in which our reason, following out the particular 
 presuppositions we have accepted, is leading us, and, 
 as a consequence of this, surrender our hold upon 
 the truth of the Creed; or that we must have the 
 courage to retrace our steps, and modify or set aside 
 altogether the intellectual conceptions from which we 
 started, and which are the actual cause of our present 
 anxiety. It is, no doubt, a fact that there are many 
 men who are true and sincere Christians, but who have 
 accepted intellectual premisses which, if they were 
 worked out to their logical conclusions, would render 
 it impossible for those who held them to acknowledge 
 the truth of even the most elementary doctrines of the 
 Creed, — of those simple truths, as they are often called, 
 which are still accepted by the great majority, at least 
 in this country, of those who call themselves by the 
 
98 THE HOLY rRlNITY. 
 
 name of Christ. Individual men, it is certain — perhaps 
 it is especially true of us slower Northern nations — can 
 and do rest with complete satisfaction to themselves 
 on the middle of what one must speak of as a logical 
 slide. Men can do this for themselves — you or I may 
 do it ; but be sure of this, the Church cannot do it, 
 and generations of men cannot do it. 
 
 Surely and certainly, although it may be very slowly 
 these things work themselves out ; and, if men of one 
 generation are not logical, their children or their 
 grandchildren will be so ; they will carry to its natiu-al 
 conclusion their fathers' teaching, unhampered, it is to 
 be feared, by their fathers' faith. I can imagine no 
 more painful reflection that could occur to any one 
 when he comes to die, or when with fuller knowledge 
 he sees things more nearly as they really are, than to 
 have to say to himself, — yes, I thought I was living as 
 a Christian should ; but I forgot that the intellectual, 
 not less than the moral side of my nature needed 
 discipline ; and so, neglecting the gifts which God had 
 put within my reach, I allowed myself to think and to 
 speak as though my intellect had been untouched by 
 sin ; I never watched myself or hesitated to accept or 
 teach any theory that at the moment commended itself 
 to me. I never accepted any responsibility for con- 
 sequences, I was quick and ^iperficial. I made no 
 attempt to work things out or to see what they really 
 involved ; but those, whom I have influenced — and, after 
 
THE HOLY TRINITY. 99 
 
 all, few of us have no influence — will do this. And, 
 therefore, in my day I have done what I could to add 
 to the difficulties of those who are striving to be true 
 servants of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Now the Creeds will save us from this danger, if 
 we will let them do so. The Church is not the 
 witness for her Master only to us; we are but one 
 tiny link in the vast chain of immortal beings for 
 whom she has to care. She has the care of all the 
 ages ; and so she warns men with no uncertain or 
 hesitating voice, that this and that thought about God 
 is false ; that to hold it, to give ourselves up to it, is 
 implicitly to deny the fact of the Incarnation, the 
 truth of the Atonement, the life in the world to come ; 
 that, however it may at first sight catch our fancy, or 
 appear to meet our wants, it is, in its essence, entirely 
 contrary to the highest truth, and must surely, if 
 accepted and made the groundwork of our thoughts 
 about the unseen world, undermine our faith, and 
 leave us without God and without hope. Thus the 
 Church warns us of pitfalls and morasses in the 
 sphere of intellectual activity in which faith has been 
 swallowed up in the past, in which ours, too, will be 
 lost if we venture lightly upon them. The Creeds are 
 in one sense summarized experience ; they do not set 
 bounds to Almighty God, or shut up His Glory within 
 the limits of verbal definitions: they tell us how 
 Christian men and Christian thinkers have learned to 
 
THE HOLY TRINITY. 
 
 think and speak of Him, " Quern nosse est vivere, Cui 
 servire regnare est." Quern nosse est vivere, — yes, 
 little as we think it, we only live, live in the full sense 
 of all that the word means, for intellect no less than 
 heart and will, when we surrender ourselves to the 
 willing service of Almighty God, when our one desire 
 is that we may know His will, and our one purpose that 
 we may, by His grace, fulfil it. 
 
 But there is a second and more serious reason why 
 we are distressed at the definitions of the Creeds. 
 Assertions such as these — so direct, so immediate — are 
 not made about a God who is far off, who may be, but 
 of One who is a present and most solemn reality ; not 
 indistinct, remote, uncertain, but close to us and with 
 us in all we think and do. The hazy Christianity, or 
 rather Christian sentiment, which satisfies very many 
 people, is so different from this ; it is content with the 
 vague recognition of a God, for whose existence there is 
 some slight probability. Under such a conception men 
 find themselves able to admit, in a sense, the existence 
 of sin. They are educated persons, and so can 
 appreciate the beauty of Christian ethics and Christian 
 ideals. Their natural refinement revolts against sin, at 
 all events in its grosser forms, — revolts even as they 
 yield to those temptations to which their position in 
 life and their natural tendencies especially expose 
 them. But all this is changed when men intelligently 
 recite the Creed. It is just the definiteness of it which 
 
THE HOLY TRINITY. loi 
 
 produces the sense of irritation and dismay ; for in 
 presence of these clear assertions sin and evil, however 
 lightly we may have regarded them before, appear in 
 darker and more serious colours. After all — as far as 
 verbal statement can do it for us — we are brought face 
 to face with the reality of the existence of Almighty 
 God; and the question we have to ask ourselves is, 
 how we can dare to stand before His presence. And 
 so, perhaps, in our desire to get rid of a serious diffi- 
 culty in the easiest way, we take refuge in some such 
 objection as that of which I have already spoken, — 
 the objection that to attempt to define the nature of 
 Almighty Grod is to introduce an unworthy conception 
 of Him ; when, if we were quite honest with ourselves, 
 we should see that our real motive was not zeal for 
 God's glory, but rather a desire to silence an incon- 
 venient thought that pressed very urgently upon us, 
 one that demanded from us a sincerer purpose and a 
 clearer recognition of the heavy responsibilities in 
 which the gift of life has of necessity involved us. 
 
 We do, all of us I hope, at times call to mind what 
 we are, and what we know, from His revelation of Him- 
 self, God intended that we should be. What we are — 
 nothing and less than nothing, we are apt to say ; and 
 yet how untrue this is. The doctrine of the Incarna- 
 tion is the measure of the dignity and greatness of 
 human life. The love of God manifested then, was not 
 manifested on behalf of some vast stupendous creation, 
 
I02 THE HOLY TRINITY, 
 
 but for men, women, and children; for the human 
 race, indeed, as a whole, but still for the race as 
 made up of separate personalities, and therefore for 
 each one in his separate existence. Yes, never forget 
 that for each one of us, as if we alone had sinned, 
 our Saviour died; for each the rest and peace of 
 heaven is prepared, that mansion in the Father's 
 house which shall be one day ours, unless, which 
 God forbid ! we forfeit it now by sin and selfishness. 
 We cannot think little of human life who believe 
 these truths. We cannot contemn even our own 
 selves, sin-stained as we know ourselves to be. He 
 made us, He redeemed us. He wills that we should 
 be His children. But only the pure in heart shall 
 see God ; and never forget that, if we do not learn to 
 see Him now in this present life, we shall never see 
 Him in that which is to come. Thus it comes about 
 that the cry of the heart for purity, the sense of 
 the deadly power of sin, is even more urgent on 
 Trinity Sunday than in the penitential season of the 
 Church's year. Those who have made the effort, 
 with whatever of weakness and hesitation, to live 
 only to God, to have no thought, no purpose, save 
 only His Glory, no desire but what He commands, no 
 will but what He wills, — they know how past sin parts 
 the soul from Him whom they long, with the whole 
 purpose of their heart, to know and to obey. 
 
 My brothers, I pray you in God's name not to 
 
THE HOLY TRINITY, 103 
 
 imagine for one moment that a little more carelessness, 
 a little more self-indulgence, a little more sowing of 
 wild oats, as people euphemistically speak of things 
 which otherwise they would not venture to talk about, 
 will make no difference in the end — no difference 
 because we mean to repent before we die ; and God, 
 in His mercy, will pardon even the greatest sinner. If 
 we can think such thoughts as these, the light that is 
 in us has already become utter darkness. Believe me, 
 it is most terribly true, even forgiven sin stands between 
 the soul and God. The vain, the frivolous, the self- 
 indulgent, the impure, will not — simply because they 
 have found out the sinfulness of sin, and have by God's 
 grace begun to forsake the evil — at once and easily 
 learn to see the face of God. Their upward path must 
 be steeper, their discipline severer, before their eyes 
 can look upon the King in His beauty, than it would 
 have been had they never lost their baptismal purity. 
 For those who are really honest with themselves, who 
 under whatever difficulties in the present, out of what- 
 ever slough of sin in the past, are steadily set to live 
 to God, this knowledge will have no terror ; rather 
 the certainty of the trial will only nerve them to be 
 patient and faithful, and to "bear the dimness for 
 His sake ; " for they know that in the end, through 
 the discipline and training of life, He will give them 
 the purity of heart they long for, and show them His 
 glory ; and that hereafter they will learn to know 
 
I04 THE HOLY TRINITY. 
 
 Him more and more fully, when the work of purifica- 
 tion is accomplished and they take their part in the 
 ceaseless worship of the courts of heaven, where angels 
 and archangels, and all the hosts of God, and all the 
 multitude of redeemed rest not day and night, saying, 
 " Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God xilmighty, which was, 
 and which is, and which is to come." 
 
XL 
 
 d)tistian ^cIf--nsscrtion. 
 
 "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." — 
 Phil. iv. 13. 
 
 (Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity. — November 22, 1885.) 
 
 Life is of necessity self-assertion; every action and 
 almost every word and movement is the intrusion of 
 ourselves upon others. Welcome or unwelcome we are 
 there, making ourselves felt, and the lift and enthu- 
 siasm we are conscious of come to us through this 
 activity. 
 
 Watch a child at play. It rides its mimic horses ; 
 it fights its mimic battles ; it creates round itself a 
 fancy world in which it moves with unfettered freedom. 
 There is no sense of opposition, no check, or restraint, 
 or doubt; it reigns the unchallenged monarch of all 
 the worlds, and in this freedom it finds full enjoyment 
 and complete happiness. If we can only learn, ever 
 so little, to know the radiant gladness that fills the 
 world of God's love around us, we may receive for 
 ourselves something of the same sense of power and 
 
io6 CHRISTIAN SELF-ASSERTION. 
 
 freedom wMcli the cliild has; we may become, with 
 deeper truth than we usually find in the Avords, "as 
 little children." For self-assertion is our true life, if 
 we only use the word in a right sense. Christianity 
 must necessarily, as a consequence of all its teaching, 
 lay stress on this ; the doctrine of the Incarnation, 
 rightly understood, is the measure of the A^alue we are 
 to set on the lives God Himself became man to 
 redeem. This truth dignifies and raises every con- 
 ception of work and duty ; it lifts men up, as they 
 learn its meaning, into the unseen world of God, 
 where they see His glory, and know that they are the 
 children of an infinite hope. To the child everything 
 is possible ; the imagination moves easily from point 
 to point; it knows nothing of any let or hindrance. 
 Existence seems to be summed up in one boundless 
 " I can " ; — " I can," the cry of life and of hope, as 
 " I cannot," is the wail of despair and death. 
 
 When we grow to manhood, when the hours of 
 inspiration of childhood and youth have passed from 
 us, and all the glory that filled the horizon has faded 
 down into the light of common day, the thing of all 
 others that most chills and disappoints us is the dis- 
 covery of the effort which every task demands from us. 
 Life, instead of being free, ^s we fancied, appears to 
 be restrained and fettered in countless ways. The 
 chains irk and irritate us ; and the result is, men only 
 too often develop into what we ordinarily mean by 
 
CHRISTIAN SELF-ASSERTION. 107 
 
 selfish and self-asserting persons. These may be classed 
 for all practical purposes in two main divisions, who 
 may be said to take for their mottoes the words "I 
 can " and " I cannot." 
 
 The former, by sheer force of character, as we so 
 often say, defy the difficulties they meet with ; they 
 steadily and persistently assert their power to rise 
 above and to conquer the untoward circumstances of 
 their lives ; they are men who are by nature persons 
 of determined character, over whose headstrong wills 
 the teaching of Jesus Christ has had little or no 
 restraining influence. Standing alone, consciously or 
 unconsciously without any knowledge of God, un- 
 influenced by any thought of a future life, without 
 any intelligent conception of the responsibility we 
 all have for those among whom we live, such a man 
 becomes to himself the centre of thought, almost of 
 worship ; his wishes, his wants, his success, — these are 
 the sole motive forces within him; and in the full 
 strong belief in his own capacity to push his way — 
 not sensitive enough, or finely strung enough to con- 
 template the possibility of mistake or failure in him- 
 self — he goes forward, regardless of what may happen 
 to any with whom he comes in contact, utterly in- 
 different as to who may fall or who may sufter, pro- 
 vided only he may succeed. And so, step by step, the 
 strong pushing man grows into the hard selfish man 
 of the world, who, making great boast of his own 
 
io8 CHRISTIAN SELF-ASSERTION. 
 
 capacities and powers, forces his way right on to the 
 prize he means to grasp. Of course, the refinements 
 of cultured life do something to conceal such a 
 character under a decent varnish of consideration for 
 others; good taste and the laws of society require 
 certain courtesies from us in dealing with each other, 
 and he is too shrewd and too alive to his own interests 
 not to comply with these demands. 
 
 But selfish as all this is, it is very doubtful whether 
 such a character is really worse than the man who is 
 always depreciating himself. The latter broods over 
 and exaggerates the anxieties of life as they come upon 
 him. He, too, has no sustaining belief in God's good- 
 ness, no sense that His Hand is guiding and upholding 
 the course of the world's movements ; he takes for his 
 motto the gloomy "I cannot," and refuses even to 
 attempt to make any real effort, but just exists in 
 hopeless listlessness ; at times, perhaps, he rouses 
 himself enough to point an epigram or give vent to 
 a sneer at others who are not quite faithless, and are 
 brave enough to be in earnest. This man is just as 
 selfish as the other, quite as intolerable and wicked, 
 and utterly weak, too, into the bargain. Only a miracle 
 could change a character that has developed into any 
 of the worst forms of this indolent selfishness ; for here 
 even the feeblest elements of faith are wanting. He 
 that comes to God must at least have some belief that 
 He exists, and that He can in some way give an answer 
 
CHRISTIAN SELF-ASSERTION. 109 
 
 to those who seek Him. The former class had at all 
 events the merit of being alive ; this man is dead while 
 he lives. There are, it is to be feared, only too many 
 who have hidden sympathies with such a character; 
 all moody, ill-tempered, grumbling people really 
 belong to this category; they are as selfish as the most 
 pushing self-asserting man could be, and, moreover, 
 they glory in it ; they commend themselves for their 
 far-sightedness and good sense in seeing that this 
 world is really very badly put together, and in refusing 
 to show the least contentment amid so very ill-arranged 
 surroundings. 
 
 Now both these attitudes of mind are wholly 
 wrong and wicked. They both imply an entire 
 refusal to submit to or to acknowledge the will of 
 God as revealed in the course of the world. They 
 are, in their extreme forms, in reality deadly sin. 
 None of us, we may trust, are as yet entirely given 
 over to such evils as these ; and yet we may, many of 
 us, be only too sadly conscious that we are by nature 
 liable to the temptations either of arrogance on the 
 one hand, or of indolent despair on the other; and 
 therefore we need to be carefully on our guard. We 
 must never forget that the bright enthusiasm and 
 eager hope, untouched by personal self-assertion and 
 personal pride, of the simple child-life, the sense of 
 power to do and to be, which is really our birth- 
 right, can only be given to men, through the grace 
 
CHRISTIAN SELF-ASSERTION. 
 
 of God, as they kneel at the Cross of Jesus Christ. 
 But, it may be said, surely submission to the faith 
 of Christ is the very reverse of self-assertion. True ; 
 and yet not the whole truth. You lose your life 
 indeed, but only that you may find it; you lay it 
 down, but only that you may receive it back again; 
 you put yourself under discipline, you struggle 
 against sin and selfishness, and, by God's blessing, 
 gain some mastery over them, but it is only that 
 you may obtain your freedom. You cannot, however 
 much you resent it, get away from the restraints that 
 hedge your life about. It is useless to say, I will be 
 free, I will be independent ; after all, try as you may, 
 you cannot be so : servant, ay, slave, you are and you 
 must be ; God or the world must be your master. 
 You have, it is true, a power of choice, but however 
 you choose, you remain a servant. People often talk 
 as if the Christian's life must be harder than other 
 men's, because he has to deny himself this and that 
 which otherwise he would allow himself. But, after 
 all, there is no servitude more galling than the hope- 
 less servitude which is the result of the want of all 
 restraint. Ask any one who has, in popular phrase, 
 been living as his own master, recognizing no check 
 on thought or on action, and who then has by God's 
 blessing pulled himself together, and controlled the 
 evil habits and wayward passions, in the full liberty 
 of which he had hitherto been living, he will tell you 
 
CHRISTIAN SELF-ASSERTION, iii 
 
 how hardly he has won his freedom from what, even in 
 those days of boasted liberty, was a detested slavery. 
 
 But pass under the yoke of Jesus Christ, accept 
 the teaching of His Church, surrender yourself fully 
 and for ever to His service, and at once all the 
 fetters and chains begin to fall away from your life. 
 Anxiety and worry and pain and sorrow and death — 
 the servant of Christ can go out to meet all these in 
 quietness and confidence. The hope that dominates 
 his life is far away out of their reach ; " none of these 
 things move " ^ him. He has but to seek to know 
 the will of God, and then to bend all his energies, 
 come what may, at any and every cost, to fulfil it. 
 He will make mistakes, ay, and what are for the 
 moment even bitter mistakes; but in the mercy of 
 God he knows he can through these mistakes reach 
 the goal towards which his face is steadily set. He 
 knows, too, that, however he may fail, the truth stands 
 for ever unchangeable, and knowing this, he can work 
 and hope under conditions that otherwise would seem 
 the completest failure. For life has been given back 
 to him by his Lord and Master, endowed with the 
 strength of an unfading hope. His trials are the 
 pledges of his redemption ; the chains that bind him 
 are the means whereby he works out his freedom. 
 The sense of capacity and power, always stunted and 
 distorted when it turned only to himself, now knows 
 
 ^ Acts XX. 24. 
 
112 CHRISTIAN SELF-ASSERTION. 
 
 neither limit nor restraint. As his faith grows clearer, 
 he moves onward till he reaches the magnificent self- 
 assertion of St. Panl, " I can do all things ; " but he 
 adds, " through Christ which strengtheneth me." 
 
 Let no one, however, imagine that because he 
 can rise for a time to the height of a true sympathy 
 A\ith these enkindling Christian ideals, he has there- 
 fore a right to call this hope his own. All this 
 which has been spoken about is the end, not the 
 beginning, the goal and not the starting-point, of 
 the Christian life. If we desire to have a real share 
 in this hope, then we must endure the hardness of 
 the contest through which it can be won — a contest 
 not so much of words as of acts — a moral as well as 
 an intellectual struggle. If we will not do the will of 
 God manifested to us in our consciences, which says 
 to us imperatively " Do this " or " Avoid that," then 
 it is to little purpose that we spend our days or our 
 nights in discussion as to the being of God, or of our 
 relation to Him, in words and word-fencing, in which 
 the dominant thought is only too often our own 
 cleverness, the last thought the wonders of the good- 
 ness and the love of Him whose Name is so readily 
 upon our lips. "If any man willeth to do the will 
 of God" — lav Tig O^Xri TO Qi\r]iia avTOv ttoihv — "he 
 shall know of the doctrine." ^ The question is. Do we, 
 with all the energy of a determined purpose, will to 
 1 St. John Tii. 17. 
 
CHRISTIAN SELF-ASSERTION, 113 
 
 do the will of God as He has revealed it to us ? If 
 so, then in the present knowledge of conquered sin, 
 in the growing self-confidence which has its root in 
 self-discipline and self-dedication, we do, even in the 
 earliest years of our life with God, receive some fore- 
 taste of that sense of freedom and strength and 
 power which shall be ours when at the last, through 
 whatever of pain and effort He, in His mercy, may 
 appoint for us, we attain to the glad and willing 
 service of perfect love. When that day comes we 
 shall be able to take as our own these wonderful 
 words of St. Paul, "I can do all things through 
 Christ which strengtheneth me " — Yiavra layvit}^ Iv rw 
 \vhvva\xQvvri fxe Xptarou 
 
XII. 
 
 g:£lf=puriKcatton. 
 
 " We know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him ; for we 
 shall see Him as He is. And every man that hath this hope in 
 him purifieth himself, even as He is pure."— 1 St. John iii. 2, 3. 
 
 (Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, February 14, 1886.) 
 
 The Collect, Epistle, and Gospel for the Sixth Sunday 
 after Epiphany seem at first sight to belong to the 
 season of Advent; a little reflection, however, soon 
 tells us that there is a very great difference between 
 the attitude of the Church to-day and that which she 
 takes on the Sundays that precede the Christmas 
 Festival. There are two great motive powers that 
 draw men to God — love and fear ; in Advent the Church 
 appeals, with all the incisiveness she can command, 
 to the second of these motives — fear; and in her 
 Master's name endeavours to rouse souls that are 
 numbed and dead, held in the bondage of sloth and 
 sin, by the vivid announcement of the judgment to 
 come, of the account men must one day give of all that 
 they have done and all that they have left undone in 
 
SELF'PURIFICA TION. 
 
 115 
 
 their life here on earth. This morning the second 
 coming of our Lord is put before us as the climax of 
 the great series of manifestations of Himself for us 
 men and for our salvation ; we are not bidden to think 
 of a fallen world in the presence of its Judge, but we 
 are pointed onwards to the fulfilment, in the return 
 to her of her Lord, of the supreme hope, in the strength 
 of which the Christian Church has done its work in 
 the world from the first day till now. This hope, 
 " that He will come again, and receive us unto Him- 
 self," ^ is set clear before us, as that, in which we 
 should find the stimulus and the quickening energy 
 necessary for the work of self-purification, which is 
 laid upon each one of us by Almighty Cod. " We 
 know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like 
 Him ; " and he " that hath this hope purifieth him- 
 self." 
 
 What have we to say to this claim upon us? 
 What is our personal share in this hope ? If we are 
 seriously anxious to prove ourselves in this respect, 
 there is, I think, one simple and direct test which we 
 may apply to our lives. What would be the effect 
 upon us, if — to make an assumption, which merely as 
 an assumption seems to be little short of impious — 
 it could be proved to us, by an irresistible demonstra- 
 tion, that the faith of the Church of Christ was an 
 utter and complete illusion ? Would this make any 
 
 ' St. John xiv. 3. 
 
1 16 SELF-PURIFICA TION. 
 
 serious difference in our mode of life? Should we 
 then do things which now we do not do, or leave 
 undone what now we do? It is not enough to say, 
 that we should think a great loss had been inflicted 
 upon us; that great and wonderful possibilities that 
 up till now we had vaguely felt to be behind our lives, 
 would be there no longer ; this no doubt, in the province 
 of thought and imagination, may be very generally 
 true ; but beyond and above this, should we otherwise 
 continue to live very much as we do at this moment ? 
 or should we know that life had lost its meaning and 
 its purpose? that the very gladness had gone out of 
 the sunshine? that strength and dignity had passed 
 away from human friendship ? that grace and tender- 
 ness had perished for ever out of human love ? In a 
 word, is the centre of gravity of our lives here in the 
 things we see and touch and know through the bodily 
 senses, or there where Jesus our Lord sits at the right 
 hand of God ? 
 
 But let me assume, as I fain would this morning, 
 that all of us would accept this test for ourselves, that 
 we all claim our part in this hope ; feeble, perhaps, our 
 share in it may be, far, very far, short of the vivid 
 realization of its truth that belongs to the strong 
 Christian life ; but in the mercy of God it is true that 
 the hope is ours, and, in faith in Him, it is a sure hope, 
 and we know that we can trust it ; and so, having this 
 hope, we purify ourselves. 
 
SELF-P URIFICA TION. 1 1 7 
 
 Purify ourselves— is this possible ? Surely not ; 
 surely we cannot of ourselves do any good thing. We 
 have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. This is 
 the answer that rises at once to our lips. But we 
 must distinguish two parts in the work of purification — 
 the first regeneration or conversion, which is wholly 
 God's work, and the second sanctification, which is 
 partly our own. In the first we are purely passive, 
 and God in His great goodness gives us of His gifts ; 
 but in the second we are called to make use of the 
 grace which He has bestowed upon us. He has given 
 us a talent, and we are bidden to use it. This is the 
 simple truth ; although it is no doubt also true that 
 we could not of ourselves do even this, were it not that 
 His grace, to uphold and to sustain us, is continually 
 given us in answer to our prayers. Thus it is true to 
 say that God made us without ourselves ; that He 
 renewed and redeemed us without ourselves ; but that 
 in the mystery of His love He will not save us without 
 ourselves, and against our will ; and therefore it is right 
 to say that they that have this hope purify themselves. 
 
 When we first understand that God has really 
 called us to newness of life, when we first of set purpose 
 try to be good, there is, only too often, definite and 
 positive sin in our lives, which we have to meet and 
 to conquer. While our attention is thus of necessity 
 taken up with what I may call external aspects of sin, 
 we are apt to neglect the source and spring of sin in 
 
1 1 8 SEL F-P URIFICA TION. 
 
 the heart, in the affections and the secret impulses of 
 the will. But we soon learn that it is the little sins, 
 more even than the great sins, that determine the life — 
 or, rather, that great sins are only the outcome, the 
 almost certain outcome, of these sins which we call 
 little. " Nemo repent e fuit turpissimus ; " even the 
 heathen moralist could teach us this. How many- 
 there are who, in earlier days of life, have turned away 
 from words of warning or of counsel with the angry 
 exclamation, " Is thy servant a dog that he should do 
 this great thing ? " ^ And then, a few years later, these 
 same men, grown accustomed gradually and secretly 
 to the atmosphere of evil, have set themselves, without 
 shame or remorse, to do the very thing against which 
 they had cried out so vehemently ; yes, and perhaps 
 even worse things than this. 
 
 In money matters Ave know that the man who takes 
 care of small expenses is the person least likely to run 
 into debt. AVho is there who in social or business con- 
 cerns would entrust with great responsibilities one who 
 in small things had uniformly failed ? It is just the 
 same in the spiritual life ; these little sins, as we think 
 them, each small and, in one sense, insignificant as it 
 stands alone — the thoughtless jest at goodness, the words 
 that wound and embitter others, the ill-temper that jars 
 on those about us, the unwillingness to put ourselves 
 even a little out of the way for another's convenience, 
 
 ' 2 Kino-s viii. 13. 
 
SELF-P URIFICA TION. 1 19 
 
 the idle story we told, the innuendo of evil in what we 
 said that poisoned our own thoughts, and sent its 
 destroying venom into another's soul, one younger than 
 ourselves, one, perhaps, whom God had committed to our 
 charge — these little sins, as we think them, choke and 
 poison the springs of life, and so make possible those 
 more terrible outbursts of evil at which sometimes the 
 whole world seems to stand appalled. Each snowflake is 
 as nothing, yet the piled-up flakes soon bury the earth 
 out of our sight ; each grain of sand is unregarded, but 
 the heaped-up grains may form the graves of cities. 
 80 in the spiritual life, the passing touches of impurity 
 and passion, the hasty words of unkindness, the single 
 acts of ill-temper and self-indulgence, the idle words 
 and tales, — these, and such as these, each but little in 
 themselves, are gathering one by one around the souls 
 of men, and burying them beneath a load of sin; of 
 sin, the end of which may sometimes be — God only 
 knows how often — spiritual death. We who have 
 lived but to middle life, know something of broken 
 and wasted lives, that lie, as it were, cast aside along 
 the highway of the world by which we ourselves have 
 come ; not always hopeless, thank God for that, despite 
 the outward failure and ruin and disaster ; but we have 
 seen the pain and the loss and the suffering, even 
 where there is not the utter darkness of spiritual 
 death, and, knowing this, we would plead with men, 
 and, if God wills, persuade them. 
 
1 20 SELF-P URIFICA TION. 
 
 I allowed myself just now to say that there were 
 such things as little sins ; I spoke as a man ; bring 
 the slightest breath of evil, the least word of unkind- 
 ness, the least touch of wrong, and set it in thought 
 in the sight of the eternal purity, the boundless love, 
 the infinite holiness of Almighty God, and try to see 
 it but once as He sees it, and you will never speak of 
 a little sin again. 
 
 If we would keep this hope, which Grod has given 
 us, bright and strong, if we would have it grow with 
 our growth and strengthen with our strength, then 
 we must do all we can, to bring every thought and 
 intent of our hearts into obedience to His Divine will. 
 God asks of us a hard thing ; yes, that is true, as men 
 think and speak. But He asks no more than we — 
 through faith and hope and love — can learn to do, and 
 in doing win our only true happiness. Let us, then, 
 thank Him with our whole heart and soul for the 
 mercy which has given us this task of self-purification 
 through which we may prove and test the reality of 
 the hope that is in us. 
 
XIII. 
 
 mt mioxk of iLif£. 
 
 "Their eyes were holden that they should not know Him." — 
 St. Luke xxiv. IG. 
 
 (Fifth Sunday after Easter, May 30, 1886.) 
 
 In the course of the first Easter Day two men left 
 Jerusalem to go to the village of Emmaus, some seven 
 or eight miles distant, where one and possibly both of 
 them lived. The name of one, Cleopas, is given us — 
 he must not be confused, however, with the better 
 known Clopas or Alphseus of the gospel history — the 
 name of the second is unknown, except in a late and 
 entirely untrustworthy tradition. They did not belong 
 to the inner circle of the apostles; they were only 
 ordinary members of that small body of followers 
 of Jesus Christ, who had built their hopes high on 
 the temporal deliverance He would work for Israel; 
 and now that they had witnessed what they thought 
 to be the complete wrecking of these hopes, they 
 were going back to their village life, taking with 
 them the memory of a great enthusiasm which had 
 
122 THE WORK OF LIFE. 
 
 once possessed tliem, but wMcli now had entirely 
 vanished away. They walked along oppressed with 
 that sense of desolation, of utter dulness and deadness, 
 that comes over men when all that filled up the 
 expectations of the future, all that gave body and 
 shape to the coming years, has crumbled away into 
 nothingness. At such crises of their lives men must 
 endeavour, if they have character and courage, to 
 construct some new plan of life, something that shall 
 supply anew the motive power to action; if they 
 cannot do this, if they are weak men, they live on 
 as best they can, cheating their fancies with dreams 
 of what might have been, with the memory of what 
 they have lost ; they live, as we say, " in the past," the 
 dreariest A^erdict surely that can be given on any life. 
 But for the moment, however stable the strength 
 and purpose may be that are in the man, he can 
 only wander in thought along the road he has just 
 travelled; he can only discuss and re-discuss all 
 that he has passed through, if perchance he may 
 discover in what he made his mistake. And so these 
 two disciples were talking together of the things 
 that had happened to them, and trying to see how 
 it was they had altogether misinterpreted the character 
 of their master. And as they talked they were joined 
 by a third Person. How He came we are not told; 
 but He came, St. Mark tells us, " in another form " — 
 with a figure and an appearance different from that 
 
THE WORK OF LIFE, 
 
 they had known — which is but the physical explana- 
 tion of St. Luke's words, that "their eyes were 
 holden." After a time He joins in their conversation, 
 and asks the reason of their sadness, and the subject 
 of their earnest debate. They, naturally enough, 
 take Him to be one of the many strangers who 
 came to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, and 
 are astonished that He could have been there during 
 the preceding week without knowing something of 
 what had happened. " Knowest Thou not the things 
 that have come to pass ? " His reply, without answering 
 their question, leads them to make a fuller explana- 
 tion. He said to them, "What things?" And they 
 answered, " Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, whom the 
 chief priests and our rulers delivered to be condemned 
 to death and to be crucified. But we trusted that 
 it had been He that should have redeemed Israel. 
 Yea, and certain women of our company who were 
 early at the sepulchre found not His Body, and came, 
 saying that they had seen a vision of angels, who 
 said that He was alive; and certain of them that 
 were with us went to the sepulchre, and found it 
 even so as the women had said ; but Him they saw 
 not." " We trusted it had been He that should have 
 redeemed Israel ; " " but Him they saw not : " these 
 two sentences sum up the matter. The first tells us 
 of the complete loss of any hope they had : the 
 women's story they put down to mere excitement; 
 
124 THE WORK OF LIFE. 
 
 the men of their company went to the sepulchre, 
 and it turned out as they knew it must — " Him they 
 saw not." And then, in answer to their words, our 
 Blessed Lord takes them back through all the history 
 of the Jewish Scriptures, and passing from point to 
 point, explains how there was a divine necessity for 
 this, that Christ should suffer these things, and so 
 should enter into His glory. It is hard for us now 
 to understand how it was they did not know Him ; 
 but, blind as they were, they at least perceived that 
 He was no ordinary person. When they reached their 
 journey's end, and He would have gone further, they 
 entreated Him to stay with them. Already He had 
 given them new thoughts and new hopes; He could 
 surely teach them much more, and, it may be, in the 
 end answer those questions they had so earnestly 
 debated when they started from Jerusalem. And 
 then, in the house at Emmaus, He, with no questioning 
 on their part, appears naturally to take the head of 
 the table at their evening meal, and He blesses the 
 bread and the wine, and gives them the Eucharistic 
 Food, and in that act they know Him and He passes 
 out of their sight. 
 
 Here we read, as in a parable, the secret of our 
 own life's history : for we all are travellers, journeying 
 forward on our way through the world, sometimes 
 glad and lighthearted, sometimes earnestly questioning 
 and debating, perplexed and confused by the difficulties 
 
THE WORK OF LIFE. 125 
 
 about us ; and with us, close beside us, is One whom 
 we do not know, for our eyes are holden. 
 
 "Our eyes are holden." We all admit that we 
 are here to serve God, and to do the work which 
 He has given us to do ; but very few of us realize all 
 that is involved in this admission. It means, in truth, 
 a great deal more, and also a great deal less than 
 Ave commonly suppose. God, indeed, gives us a 
 place and a share in His work; but, if I may put 
 it so without being misunderstood, it is for our own 
 sake, rather than for His. Still it remains true that 
 Almighty God does stoop down to us and consent 
 to need us. His creatures though we are. We each 
 have something to do for Him; perhaps no great 
 thing — here indeed may be the point of our trial — but 
 yet something which He asks of us, and which we 
 can do. We may not understand it, or see clearly 
 what it is — for "our eyes are holden." Think for 
 one moment what it would have meant to have been 
 the author of the thirty-first Psalm, and so to have 
 written the words that would come from the lips 
 of our Blessed Lord at the moment of His death. 
 Is it a great exaggeration to think that the author 
 of this psalm might, in writing it, have done, though 
 quite unwittingly, his special work? But, however 
 we may think of this, depend upon it we have each 
 our task to fulfil : and although we may not know 
 where or when it comes to us, all our life and 
 
126 THE WORK OF LIFE, 
 
 education is a preparation for it; and the op- 
 portunity — it may be but a moment, the supreme 
 moment of all our lives — comes and goes, and we 
 do not know what we have done or what we have 
 left undone. In the clear light of the future, when 
 we stand face to face with our Lord, then we shall 
 hear His gracious "Well done," or shall know that 
 Ave have failed. " Our eyes are holden " now. The 
 things we think so important, and of which we are 
 inclined to say, "Well, in this or in that I think I 
 have a right to feel I can do something," these are 
 again and again really so unimportant ; but some 
 little duty, some effort, some task that now appears 
 beneath our notice, just a cup of cold water given 
 in the Lord's name, we shall, perhaps, one day know 
 to have been the turning-point of life. 
 
 But if we think too little of our work in one way, 
 in another we are given to think too much of it. We 
 look round upon the movements and activities of the 
 world ; at best we see but the surface of things, and 
 even what we see we misunderstand and misinterpret. 
 When, for example, we think of the many difficulties 
 that beset the Church of Christ within and without, 
 we are apt to attach an undue importance to those 
 who are, as we think, taking the right side; we are 
 apt sometimes to take an exaggerated view of our 
 own personal importance, of our own necessity to 
 God's work. We are by no means so necessary as 
 
THE WORK OF LIFE. 127 
 
 we sometimes think we are; our exertions, our 
 influence, our undertakings on God's . behalf are not, 
 after all, the main life and strength of the Faith. 
 " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." ^ Here 
 is the true key to the problem: hidden from the 
 gaze of men, beyond their ken and their prying, 
 God works His work in the world; and men shall 
 do to His Church, that which He allows them to do. 
 There will be days of seeming growth and success, 
 of what men regard as prosperity ; there will be times 
 of flagging and disappointment, of what men regard 
 as failure and decay ; parties will rise and fall ; faction 
 and heresy, misbelief and unbelief shall do their 
 utmost even within His sacred fold ; but under all 
 and through all He alone works. He alone sustains 
 and guides, and His work cannot fail, the gates of 
 hell shall not prevail against His Church. 
 
 Let no one imagine that to think thus robs life 
 of its fulness and intensity ; after all it is only saying 
 in other words that we live by faith alone. This 
 knowledge sobers and steadies us; but it does not 
 impoverish, on the contrary it enriches our life. 
 Nothing can be unimportant when such great issues 
 are at stake; not the smallest duty, not the most 
 insignificant act or thought. We do not know where 
 God will meet us, where He will need us; whether 
 in what the world regards as our more important 
 
 » St. John V. 17. 
 
128 THE WORK OF LIFE. 
 
 duties and responsibilities, or in the unnoticed and 
 unrecognized byways of our lives. And so all our 
 work, in the least matters as well as in the greatest, 
 must be done for Him alone. Thus life takes a 
 steadier, stronger tone : " our eyes are holden " it 
 is true, but still we cannot, if we are really faithful, 
 fail in the end. Whatever our weakness, the truth 
 is what it is, and we are servants of the Lord of Truth. 
 We work and are glad ; now we are full of excitement 
 and hope, now we are crushed beneath a load of 
 despair; we go eagerly forward on our way, or life 
 drags on with dull and weary effort ; but through 
 all our varying moods, under all the changing circum- 
 stances of the hurrying days, God our Father works 
 out His merciful purpose for the world, and we are 
 called on to do our part in His service, undazzled by 
 success, unmoved by failure, undismayed by weakness. 
 Life moves quickly by us : to say so to the young 
 and vigorous is to speak to deaf ears. Some of us, 
 however, look back on many years that have passed 
 away, since first we came to Oxford : twenty or thirty 
 years sounds a long time, and a great deal may happen 
 in them ; but they are as nothing to look back 
 upon ; and yet they account for all the difference that 
 there is between a schoolboy and a man in middle life. 
 When we remember this and think of the eternal 
 issues for good and for ill that hang upon the use 
 we make of the years that pass so swiftly from us, 
 
THE WORK OF LIFE. 129 
 
 we may well feel that we would give all we have 
 if only we could bring right home to the hearts and 
 consciences of one single generation of men in this 
 place all that it means to call ourselves Christians ; 
 all that the Creed has to teach us as to the end for 
 which we were born, as to the goal towards which 
 oiu' days are hastening on. 
 
 All through the journey of your life, though your 
 eyes are holden and you see Him not, Christ is 
 there beside you. He is calling you, teaching you, 
 now drawing you to Himself by love, now compelling 
 you by discipline ; He pleads with you in every hour 
 of your happiness. He constrains you by every claim 
 of your work and duty. And you, how often do you 
 think of Him, remember His Presence, or try to 
 understand His words and to learn His lessons ? 
 
 And in the end, when the evening of life is at 
 hand, there will await you very little of the rest or 
 hope that belong to the peaceful close of a laborious 
 day, unless your heart has burned within you as, 
 unknown it may be and unrecognized. He has taught 
 you in the past His lessons of patience and endurance, 
 of faith and hope — unless now, in the full vigour of 
 your life and powers, you are day by day learning 
 to hear His voice, and to obey His teaching, and 
 to understand something of your pressing need of His 
 abiding Presence. But if you only begin to learn 
 this, you will have the secret, that shall teach you 
 
 K 
 
130 THE WORK OF LIFE. 
 
 to put on Hini then that constraint to which He 
 will so gladly yield, and to plead with Him with an 
 earnestness that will not be denied, " Abide with me, 
 for it is toward evening and the day is far spent." 
 And so, when the work of life is done, when the light 
 of this world is fading from our sight, we shall learn 
 at last there, within the veil. Who it is who has been 
 with us through all these years on earth, and know 
 Him to be — may His mercy grant it to us all — our 
 Saviour and our God. 
 
XIV. 
 
 " Speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one 
 of another." — Eph. iv. 25. 
 
 (Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, October 31, 1886.) 
 
 It would, I think, scarcely have occurred to any of us, 
 if we had been explaining the ground of moral action, 
 to have laid down that given in the text by St. Paul 
 as the basis of the virtue of truthfulness ; speak the 
 truth, he says, for we are members one of another. 
 The apostle lifts the question right away from those 
 passing motives, which belong to the particular time 
 of life, or to the age in which we live, or to the 
 peculiar circumstances in which we are placed, up to 
 the height of a great ruling principle, given to the 
 world directly by Christ Himself through His Church. 
 He tells us that the principle which should govern 
 men's actions in this, as in all their dealings with each 
 other, lies in the fact of the union of each member of 
 the Church with its head, our Lord and Saviour, and so 
 through Him with all for whom He died. We, members 
 
132 TRUTHFULNESS. 
 
 of His Churcli, are one body in Him — linked each to 
 each by bonds which transcend the limits of space and 
 time — and the firm and sure basis for all our duty to 
 God or to man is found in the complete acceptance 
 of this fundamental truth, " we are members one of 
 another." 
 
 We are one body in Christ our Lord. The hand 
 is instinctively true to the eye, and wards off the blow 
 which otherwise might maim or destroy the sight ; the 
 eye guides the foot away from the pitfalls that lie 
 about its path ; if the eye be darkened or the hand 
 paralyzed the whole body suffers loss — the safety and 
 well-being of the whole man is dependent on the 
 entire trustworthiness, the perfect truthfulness of the 
 communications made by every sense to the brain. 
 And, St. Paul says, the same is true of the Christian 
 body ; one Christian should no more deal untruly or 
 insincerely with another — to say nothing of direct 
 falsehood and lying — than the hand should fail the 
 eye in warding off a blow, or the eye allow the feet to 
 stray into a trap or a snare. 
 
 We Englishmen are apt to pride ourselves on being 
 a truth-speaking and truth-loving nation. It is only 
 too much open to doubt whether our character in this 
 respect will bear a very serious or very thorough 
 investigation ; but truth-speaking is, it is fair to say, a 
 public-school virtue. The old theory that the masters 
 and boys were natural enemies, that the relation 
 
TRUTHFULNESS. 133 
 
 between them was at best a sort of veiled warfare, and 
 that consequently many things which would other- 
 wise have been wrong — and among them a considerable 
 laxity in the matter of truthfulness — were quite 
 pardonable, and almost commendable, is now a thing 
 of the past ; its day was nearly done some fifty years 
 ago, when the boys at Eugby began to say to each 
 other that it was a shame to tell Arnold a lie, because 
 he always believed what was said. The appeal has 
 been made in our schools to all that was chivalrous 
 and generous in the young, and we can say that the 
 appeal has not been made altogether in vain. 
 
 But when we pass on into middle and later life, 
 it is much to be doubted whether we find the same 
 high tone of feeling in regard to this question of 
 truth. No doubt the difficulty and the complexity 
 of the questions we have to answer is then more 
 obvious to us ; and this in itself somewhat confuses 
 and perplexes us. But, making all allowance we need 
 for this, it would, I fear, require a great deal of courage 
 to maintain that English life in its social, political, 
 and commercial aspects, was wholly sincere or honest 
 or true. 
 
 The early dawn of a summer's day is wonderful. 
 Words fail us if we try to tell of its beauty or speak of 
 the newly-awaking life, as the world, fresh and bright 
 and glad, comes, as it were, recreated from its Maker's 
 hands, without a shadow of weariness or pain or 
 
134 TRUTHFULNESS. 
 
 disappointment. The hours pass on, the day wearies 
 and grows old, and then, under the burning heat of 
 the midday sun, the world seems tired and worn ; the 
 glory of its early promise has been taken from it ; in 
 the glare of the noonday all the graces and mysteries 
 of its shadows and lights and shades are wholly lost. 
 In this we see a symbol of our own lives ; they open 
 before us full of the boundless possibilities of an 
 unknown and untried future ; but the years gather 
 upon us, and the buoyancy and the eagerness of our 
 younger days are very quickly lost, as the stress and 
 strain of our work begin to tell upon us, as we pass 
 under the burden and the heat of the day of life. 
 
 It is this that makes the infinite pathos of work 
 here in Christ Church ; to look round us each October 
 on the new group of faces, each year younger and 
 more boylike as they seem to us, who are growing- 
 older, and so, in point of age, moving farther away 
 from them ; to look round and wonder what may be 
 gathering here for the coming years — these faces 
 often so frank, so generously self-confident, so un- 
 conscious that to live can ever seriously mean to be 
 unhappy. Again and again the very faults and weak- 
 nesses of a character do much to make it only more 
 winning and more attractive : and unconsciously, 
 beneath all the quick and subtle movements and 
 changes that pass hither and thither like flashes of 
 light, there is in each case a future working itself out 
 
TRUTHFULNESS. 135 
 
 — a future of real usefulness, real goodness, real solid 
 work, so that those who know the man shall be glad 
 because he has lived ; or a future, dark with self-seeking 
 and perhaps vice and sin, that his friends shall hereafter 
 wish he had died in his schooldays. Yes, this is the 
 point, is there in us that which will last ? Have we 
 any real staying power ? Anything, for example — to 
 return to my special subject — that will hold us closely 
 and steadily to that high standard of truthfulness 
 which has hitherto been ours ? Or will the generous 
 straightforwardness of youth pass into the sordid 
 selfishness of age? Will truthfulness give place to 
 expediency, till, by tampering with sincerity, life has 
 become hollow and false and untrue to its very core ? 
 
 The morning of life must pass; the burden and 
 the heat of the day must come upon each one of us ; 
 the readiness, the ease of movement, the lift we are 
 conscious of, and imagine will always be at our com- 
 mand — these will one day be lost; we shall become 
 conscious of effort, we shall learn the meaning of 
 failure. All that moved about so lightly and so 
 easily, " in worlds as yet not realized," must gather 
 shape and outline and substance, and in doing so 
 harden and stiffen. We must form definite opinions ; 
 the questions put by life must be answered ; the mists 
 and clouds of the morning that veil the hilltops, or 
 wrap from our sight the depths of the valley or the 
 level sweep of the meadow, must be dispersed by the 
 
136 TRUTHFULNESS. 
 
 growing heat of the sun ; till at last everything 
 stands before us clear and distinct in the fierce blaze 
 of midday light. Life is not easier for us as it takes 
 this clearer form ; on the contrary, it is harder, it 
 makes greater demands upon us, it takes more out 
 of us. We must still make our ventures of faith 
 which we once made without question, almost without 
 thought. Now we have the measure of things, we 
 make our ventures knowingly — knowing that they 
 are ventures; we have passed under the burden and 
 heat of the work of life ; have we staying power ? 
 Can we set our teeth, face the stress and strain of 
 things, endure the disappointment of finding that much 
 we hoped for can never be ours, that much we thought 
 we could do is beyond our power ? We used to think, 
 perhaps, that we could move mountains; now we 
 know we would thank Almighty God to be allowed 
 to place one single tiny stone in His eternal temple ; 
 our one doubt, it may be, was only how we could find 
 time to do all that we had it in us to do ; now we work 
 in the faith and the hope, that although we can do so 
 little, so very little, yet no true effort, however weak 
 and halting in itself, ever has been or ever shall be 
 wholly lost. We have a truer measure of our powers ; 
 we no longer look for or expect results; we only 
 pray for strength that we may hot fail or falter in our 
 duty, or hesitate to do with our might what God has 
 put into our hands to do. We have learned that all 
 
TRUTHFULNESS. I37 
 
 things come to an end ; but we are, it may be, also 
 beginning to know that His commandment is exceeding- 
 broad.^ 
 
 Do not misunderstand me. To throw a slur on the 
 ardour and enthusiasm of the young would be little 
 short of sin : thank God for such gifts as these, and 
 count them as the greatest He could give you ; but 
 while you rejoice in your youth, remember that for all 
 these things God will bring you to judgment. This 
 judgment, too, is no thing of the future, but is passed 
 each day, each hour as the years of life go by, as the 
 clouds and the mists of the morning roll aside, and 
 the character stands declared and definite in the sight 
 of men. The quick throb of life, the quiver of 
 excitement that is about you now, the bounding health, 
 the generous rivalries and ambitions, these must pass, 
 and then what will be left ? That high tone of 
 feeling that makes schoolboys truthful will not last 
 on, just as it is, to make them truthful in middle and 
 later life ; in itself it will pass, and then the question 
 is, what will be left ? If you could come safely 
 through the ordeal of life, if you would stand firm 
 and unmoved in the day of your difficulty, then be 
 true as steel now to all you have learnt to know of 
 the will of God ; let nothing ever tempt you in the 
 least matter to swerve from that high standard of 
 truthfulness and sincerity which is yours, given you 
 » Ps. cxix. 96. 
 
138 TRUTHFULNESS. 
 
 in your homes and in your school life. Never parley 
 for one moment with impurity, in thought or word or 
 deed ; and help others when you may, by making your 
 protest as Christian gentlemen, against loose and idle 
 talk ; you cannot listen to this, much less applaud it, 
 without sullying and staining your own souls. Practise 
 that true temperance which is the crown of a manly 
 life in every detail of your bodily wants, and, above 
 all, in the more dangerous question of the use of 
 wine ; and if it is in your power, do what you can to 
 save others, who may be weaker than yourselves, from 
 temptation to self-indulgence in any and every form. 
 
 And that you may do these things rightly, that 
 your own spiritual growth may be a right and noble 
 development, that you may win the kindliness and 
 courtesy and sympathy which cannot offend, even 
 when it has to show disapproval, remember, I entreat 
 you, in God's name, the duty of prayer. It is not a 
 great deal of time that is asked for ; only begin each 
 day by receiving it as God's gift from His Hands, 
 praying Him to guide and keep you that you may 
 not fall into sin; and then end it with confession of 
 the failure, where the failure has been, and with 
 prayer that you may, in the days yet to come, " live 
 more nearly as you pray." And then, as the years pass 
 by, and the hopes and enthusiasms that have ruled you 
 are somewhat spent and dulled, there will have grown 
 and shaped a clear understanding of that which alone 
 
TRUTHFULNESS. 139 
 
 can keep men steady under the pressure of tlie serious 
 work of life — a knowledge of what we mean when we 
 speak of the Incarnation, of what it is to be members 
 of the Body of Christ, and in Him members one of 
 another. This knowledge is the gift of God, given by 
 Him to all who, in prayer and quiet devotion to work 
 and duty, have striven to know the will of God and to 
 do it. And if, through the sin into which we have 
 fallen, its fulness must be at present hidden from us, 
 yet we shall, at least, know whom we have believed 
 and be content to wait, if it be His will, till at last 
 the full knowledge of the love of God in Christ is 
 given us in the life of the world to come. 
 
XY. 
 
 ILobe totoartfs Gob. 
 
 " Charity never faileth." — 1 Cor. xiii. 8. 
 
 (QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1887.) 
 
 Among the indications that point towards the doctrine 
 of the fall of man, one may perhaps be found in 
 what we may briefly call the "corruptio optimi." I 
 mean this, that our good is so near evil ; that our 
 best lies so very close to our worst ; that the higher 
 we rise in our moral life the deeper and more 
 disastrous may be our fall; that the very gifts and 
 graces of our character may become, if we are not 
 careful, the cause of our failure. Our highest virtues 
 are virtues, not as the consequence of their external 
 visible forms, but in consequence of the motives which 
 form the unseen principles of their life ; and in subtle 
 unperceived hidden ways these motives may wholly 
 change their character, and our "good things become 
 shams and falsehoods, and as such more destructive 
 of true spiritual life than things which men count 
 
LOVE TOWARDS GOD. 141 
 
 positive sin. We need not travel far to find examples. 
 There is an unselfishness, as it would be reckoned, 
 which is only the outcome of the addition of a cul- 
 tured hypocrisy to a subtle self-seeking. Eefinement, 
 good manners, good taste, make it obvious enough 
 that selfishness is unlovely, or rather positively revolt- 
 ing ; and so, for very self's sake, people find it well 
 to assume the outward semblance of unselfishness. 
 Consequently, as soon as we insist on some duty, or 
 press home the practice of some virtue, we find our- 
 selves at once compelled to guard against the special 
 danger which lies very close to the good which God 
 has made possible for us. As He gives it, it is wholly 
 good ; we in our wilfulness are able to corrupt it into 
 what is almost wholly bad. 
 
 If we had not been all our lives accustomed to 
 the words, to-day's Epistle would startle us by the 
 emphasis it lays on such thoughts as these. We 
 acknowledge the duty of almsgiving : we have no 
 quiver of doubt as to the directness of the claim upon 
 us ; and yet we are told we may give all our goods 
 to feed the poor, and it may profit us nothing. Our 
 almsgiving may be ostentatious and self-centred, and 
 so erect an impassable barrier between our souls and 
 God. We urge the duty of self-devotion : we know 
 that we ought to be ready, if the will of God were 
 so, to give up even life itself for His sake : we call 
 to mind the long roll of Christian martyrs : it may 
 
142 LOVE TOWARDS GOD. 
 
 be we can look back upon some one whom we have 
 known, who has given his life in the cause of Christ : 
 and we do well to pray that, if the same call came 
 to us, we in our turn may be ready to obey it. And 
 yet St. Paul tells us we may give our body to be 
 burned, and it may profit nothing. Martyrdom itself 
 may be self-willed; in itself and by itself it is no 
 passport into the kingdom of heaven. We speak of 
 faith in God ; we call it the sight of the soul, that by 
 which God may be seen and known and understood ; 
 and we urge men to win this faith, and to grow in this 
 knowledge. And yet we may have all faith, we may 
 understand all knowledge and all mysteries, we may 
 speak with the tongues even of angels, and yet be 
 only as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. 
 
 The corruption of our best; the light that is 
 in us darkness; the knowledge of God, the power 
 and strength and insight of the intellect, that has 
 never touched and purified the heart; outward self- 
 surrender, devotedness, care for others — all these 
 may be only the very subtlest form of self-seeking. 
 How many a large subscription is given to this or 
 that charity and the reward received in the full 
 when popular applause acclaims the giver? How 
 much is done for others from the mere pleasure in 
 activity, or in consequence of the gratification we 
 enjoy in the sense of superiority which is ours, when 
 we are able to help or, as we almost unconsciously 
 
LOVE TOWARDS GOD, 143 
 
 regard it, patronize others ? How much, too, is done, 
 which looks outwardly like the purest unselfishness, 
 from that eagerness for popularity which is so great 
 a snare to sensitive natures ? Indeed, men who are 
 thought to be, and who are, in the best sense of the 
 words, good men, have need to remember the warning 
 of our Lord, " Woe unto you, when all men shall 
 speak well of you ! " ^ Would men do many things 
 they now do if the consequence was that they made 
 themselves unpopular? Would they go on giving 
 time, money, thought, if they gained by their actions 
 no consideration ? or if by what they did they positively 
 lost caste in the eyes of others ? 
 
 The Epistle for to-day, however, points us to one 
 grace which, alone of all God's spiritual gifts to us, 
 rises clear above every danger of degradation or 
 misuse, and that gift is Charity, or Love. The 
 Love of God Himself above all created things, and 
 the Love of man in God and for God, — this, St. 
 Paul says, never fails. All other gifts, even the 
 greatest, as faith and hope, may be said, in a 
 sense, to begin from ourselves, and to move out from 
 ourselves towards God ; but Love is the fire the 
 Saviour came to kindle upon the earth. " Love is God 
 Himself," I quote the words of one well remembered 
 by some of us in this place,^ "His very substance 
 
 1 St. Luke vi. 26. 
 
 - The Rev. E. B. Puscy, D.D. Cf. Sermon xxxviii. of " Cathedral 
 and Parochial Sermons." |> 
 
144 LOVE TOWARDS GOD. 
 
 the very bond of union of the Co-equal Trinity." 
 Thus the Holy Spirit, who is God, and therefore is 
 Love, sheds abroad in the hearts of men that Love 
 which is Himself ; and we learn to love God because 
 He first loved us ; and so from the hearts of men there 
 flows back to Almighty God that Love which comes 
 from Him; it is from Him, and it moves back to 
 Him. 
 
 And therefore Love cannot fail. Faith will vanish 
 for ever in the unveiled presence of God ; it will 
 be lost and swallowed up in sight: hope can have 
 no place at all when the soul has received the 
 full revelation of Him whom now it dimly longs for, 
 yearns after, and moves towards: but it is not so 
 with Love. Now it may be but poor and feeble 
 at its best, but then it will grow ever richer and 
 fuller and stronger. Love will then be all that the 
 soul can ask or need. It will be, it is in itself, 
 heaven. It is that fulness of joy which is in God's 
 presence, those pleasures at His right hand which 
 endure for evermore.^ Therefore, Love is the touch- 
 stone of the spiritual life ; so far as we have it, faith, 
 hope, self-denial, self-discipline, knowledge of God, 
 devotedness, if it may be even to death, these and 
 all other Christian gifts and graces are placed 
 beyond the reach of corruption or degradation or 
 misuse. Without Love we may have every other 
 ' Ps. svi. 12. 
 
LOVE TOWARDS GOD. 145 
 
 virtue and grace, and yet, as St. Paul tells us, be 
 nothing. 
 
 When Jesus our Lord — He who is God, and there- 
 fore is Love itself — was here among men in bodily 
 presence. He tried them by this test ; and it often 
 happened that the learned, the intellectually brilliant, 
 the outwardly strict, the careful keeper of the law, 
 the Pharisee, failed to respond to it. Such men had 
 knowledge, they gave alms, they were the distin- 
 guished for the external correctness and propriety 
 of their conduct, they were — stress is often laid upon 
 this point — quite free from gross outward sin : but 
 in spite of all this they were nothing, while of the 
 woman who was a sinner Jesus said, " Her sins, which 
 are many, are forgiven ; for she loved much." ^ In 
 saying this no apology is suggested for a lax or 
 careless life. We, at all events, in this place, are 
 without excuse; shielded and protected during our 
 childhood in Christian homes, guarded and fenced 
 round in countless ways, so that we have almost 
 of set purpose to seek out opportunities of open 
 sin, — in us, if in any, the ordinary virtues of the 
 Christian life must be found ; uprightness, truthful- 
 ness, purity, unselfishness, sincerity, these and all 
 such Christian graces should be simply matters 
 of course with us. The point is this, and we 
 should do well never to forget it, that we may 
 » St. Luke vii. 47. 
 
 L 
 
146 LOVE TOWARDS GOD. 
 
 possess all these graces, — we may be strictly honest, 
 sober, temperate, chaste, — and yet be none of His. 
 We, who perhaps think ourselves good men, and 
 whom men about us think to be good, may be shut 
 out of heaven, and others, who have been looked 
 down upon as lost and outcasts in this world, the 
 publican and the harlot, may be found among the 
 number of the redeemed. " They shall come from the 
 east, and from the west, and from the north, and from 
 the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of 
 God," ^ and we, the children of the kingdom, church- 
 men, baptized, communicants, may be for ever shut 
 out. If Jesus Christ were to come among us to-day 
 in visible form, is there no chance St. John's words 
 would once more be fulfilled to the letter, " He 
 came unto His own, and His own received Him 
 not ? " ^ Would it not probably be one series of 
 surprises, as He rejected and upbraided some whom 
 the world calls good and great; while He had com- 
 passion on and was welcomed and recognized by some 
 poor and, as we think, degraded people who live sur- 
 rounded by all the temptations of our crowded cities ? 
 How, then, are we to win this Love towards God ? 
 The only answer is, as has been well said, learn to love 
 by loving. We learn to run by running, and to row 
 by rowing, so learn to love by loving. Teach yourself, 
 therefore, to see God everywhere. This should not be 
 
 1 St. Luke xiii. 29. " St. John i. 11. 
 
LOVE TOWARDS GOD. 147 
 
 diflScult for us ; for about our favoured lives there is an 
 untold abundance of goodness ; goodness which surely 
 must command our thankfulness, and through our 
 thankfulness should lead us on to Love. All the 
 wealth of knowledge, all the possibilities of happiness 
 that come with good health, with those capacities and 
 opportunities for pure enjoyment which God has given 
 to so many of us, all the beauty of this world in which 
 we live, — there is none of us in the place who has not 
 a real share in some or all of these. Do they not call 
 on us to be glad and thankful ? All of us, I suppose, 
 have stamped indelibly upon our memories pictures 
 of nature's loveliness, which, if we lived for centuries, 
 would be as vivid at the end of them as they are 
 now, or were when we looked upon them, it may be, 
 years ago ; as we gazed then upon the radiant glory 
 of the face of nature, we seemed for a time to stand 
 within the very presence-chamber of Almighty God. 
 The dullest of us cannot remain wholly unmoved at 
 such moments as these ; yet if we were only more 
 thoughtful, we should realize that the meanest flower 
 that grows upon the ground could teach us some- 
 thing of the eternal beauty. And God created all 
 this wonder and glory, and has given us power and 
 capacity to see them and to understand them and to 
 rejoice in their beauty. Thank Him, then, with 
 unfeigned hearts, for His priceless gifts. Acknowledge 
 Him in everything; accept everything as coming 
 
148 LOVE TOWARDS GOD. 
 
 from Him ; and compel yourself, even when you 
 feel most dull and hard, to say the "Gloria Patri," 
 and as you say the words to remember what they 
 mean. And if Love can grow up strong and clear 
 from the recognition of God's gifts in nature, what 
 should it become when men have learned the meaning 
 of sin, and the mercy and the grace of forgiveness ? 
 when they have heard ever so faintly the voice that 
 says, "Son, be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven 
 thee ? " when they have begun to understand some- 
 thing of the hope given to mankind in the resurrection 
 of Christ our Lord from the grave ? 
 
 Train yourselves, then, to love God. Begin by 
 loving Him because you need Him ; He will accept 
 even such selfish love as this. But do not rest here ; 
 it is indeed an impossible halting place. Press on and 
 learn to love God because He is God ; and to love all 
 men, yes, and even yourself too — if it may be put so — 
 for His sake. We indeed are often tired and out of 
 heart ; and sometimes we are sullen and ill-tempered, 
 and then we feel we cannot continue to make the effort 
 demanded of us ; we begin to doubt whether we have 
 in us any capacity of loving God at all. And yet we 
 know that this Love is the goal of our life's journey, 
 the end for which we were born, the purpose for which 
 we came into the world ; and, knowing this, we must 
 utterly refuse to be turned aside from our purpose 
 because we cannot always command our unstable 
 
LOVE TOWARDS GOD. 149 
 
 feelings and emotions. In the dark days, whether they 
 are many or few, as well as in the bright, in cloud as 
 well as in sunshine, have one fixed purpose before you 
 to learn something of this Love for God. The un- 
 swerving purpose is the proof of your sincerity, and 
 the pledge of your success. And this Love, however 
 feeble it may seem at times, will never wholly leave 
 you ; it lights up with its own brightness the face of 
 the visible world, and shows us created things as a veil 
 through which there shines out upon us something 
 of the Infinite glory; it fills up with an untold 
 wealth of meaning all the mysteries of music ; it 
 reveals itself through all true and pure and noble 
 work in literature and in art ; and then, when we 
 reach the rough and difficult places of life's journey 
 along which we must all of us sooner or later travel, 
 this Love can make the rough places smooth, and 
 reveal to us sorrow and pain and even death itself 
 as the messengers of a peace of God which passes 
 the understanding of men. 
 
XVI. 
 
 -^fie Anxieties of Hffe no (Excuse for jFailun of 
 OTomagt. 
 
 " He that observeth the wind shall not sow ; and he that regardeth the 
 clouds shall not reap." — Eccles. xi. 4. 
 
 (TWENTY-FIEST SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY, OCTOBER 30, 1887.) 
 
 We may well feel a little astonislied that a book like 
 tMs from which the text is taken has ever been 
 admitted into the sacred canon. The writer is one 
 who has enjoyed a position of absolute power, such as 
 is only possible to an Eastern despot. Every wish, 
 every imagination of his heart, that it was in human 
 power to gratify had received its gratification ; he had 
 been endowed with great gifts of intellect; the treasures 
 of wisdom had been set within his reach, and he had 
 made no bad use of his opportunities ; wealth, power, 
 knowledge — these, with all their varying interests, he 
 had been allowed to make his own; and yet, as he 
 looks back upon them all, he repeats over each in turn 
 his one hopeless refrain, "vanity of vanities, all is 
 vanity " : and therefore he praises the dead, which are 
 
THE ANXIETIES OF LIFE. 151 
 
 already dead, more than the living which are yet 
 alive; and better than both, he declares, is he that 
 hath not been, who hath not seen the evil work that 
 is done under the sun. 
 
 There are, it is certain, some amongst us now who 
 may learn very useful and very necessary lessons from 
 this book ; and who, therefore, may well be thankful 
 that this phase of human experience is represented so 
 fully in the Bible. 
 
 The century in which we live has been a time of 
 unprecedented and marvellous growth in many diffe- 
 rent directions ; perhaps the most marvellous of all the 
 wonders we have seen is the extraordinary success 
 which has attended men in their endeavour to develop 
 the resources of the earth, with its consequent enormous 
 increase of material wealth. Certainly we in these 
 islands have not been slow to avail ourselves of the 
 opportunities thus offered to us. For the time men 
 seem to have forgotten everything else in their haste 
 to take possession of the kingdom of wealth so opened 
 out before them. In the first rush of these years of 
 prosperity it was declared in words that have been often 
 quoted, and which — so one said who heard them spoken 
 — seemed in their jubilant exultation as the heralds of 
 the handwriting on the wall against our nation, that 
 " our prosperity was advancing by leaps and bounds." 
 Now, at all events, we appear to have run through 
 our fortune, and, under the influence of widespread 
 
152 THE ANXIETIES OF LIFE. 
 
 commercial depression, other consequences of the vast 
 movement of the present century are steadily and 
 persistently forcing themselves to the front ; and social 
 and jiolitical problems, the extent and reach of which 
 not the wisest man can foresee or estimate, are looming 
 in the near future before us : — problems, too, which are 
 certain and unavoidable, and for which some solution 
 must be found; for we cannot turn back the stream 
 of time, or rewrite the history of the world. There is 
 enough going forward in this present year to give us 
 food for serious thought ; and the coming years must 
 be years of anxious conflict between varying opinions 
 and interests and necessities, as the old order changes, 
 giving place to the new. 
 
 But the experience through which we have imme- 
 diately come has been in many ways a bad preparation 
 for the work before us ; for our supreme need is faith. 
 And yet in an age of material growth and material 
 prosperity men's minds have been entirely diverted to 
 the things that belong to the world of sense. All the 
 modes of thought that have become habitual to them, 
 all the principles that guide their decisions, and 
 determine them to action or inaction, — all these turn 
 on immediate and material consequences or experiences, 
 on what they touch, and taste, and handle, and see. 
 And more than this, our intellectual advance can be 
 turned against us : it has been said that thought is fatal 
 to action ; that education deprives men of the ability 
 
THE ANXIETIES OF LIFE. i53 
 
 to decide important issues, to form judgments at a 
 great crisis ; since, as a result of tlieir education, they 
 learn to look, or try to look, too far ahead. Their 
 imaginations are quickened ; they fear consequences, 
 they foresee possible disaster, and therefore become 
 nerveless and hesitating, and grow incapable of making 
 the great ventures of faith that come naturally and 
 easily to simpler minds. Without attempting to 
 ascertain the value that should be attached to decisions 
 that confessedly are what they are through the 
 ignorance of those who make them, we need not 
 hesitate to allow that the call made upon a man's 
 faith is greater, in proportion to his capacity to under- 
 stand how vital are the issues that depend upon his 
 decisions or his actions. And herein lies the supreme 
 necessity of faith at this moment. It is, indeed, 
 a hard task to regain this virtue, to win it back 
 in days when all that we have been taught about 
 the unseen world, about God and the soul, as to the 
 meaning and consequence of sin, as to the certainty 
 of the judgment, all that belongs to the supernatural 
 or preternatural is not so much denied, but seems rather 
 in many cases simply to have vanished out of the sphere 
 of human consciousness. Even when these things are 
 recognized by the acceptance of outward practices or by 
 the repetition of verbal formulae, they are unconsciously 
 denied and entirely set at nought by the manner of 
 men's lives. All must know something of what this 
 
154 THE ANXIETIES OF LIFE. 
 
 means, since the intellectual atmosphere in which we 
 live cannot but influence our own life and conduct. 
 The spirit that dominates the world has found its 
 way within the Church, and has taken a far deeper hold 
 than we like to acknowledge on those who in name and 
 profession are servants of Jesus our Lord and our God. 
 There are only too many who prefer not to put the 
 matter too seriously to the test. The external diffi- 
 culties of the Church, its political relations, party 
 questions, party zeal— these provide outlets for activity 
 — they recognize, in a way, the acknowledged claim of 
 the Lord of the Church for personal devotion and 
 23ersonal love. Social problems, practical questions as 
 they are called, are sometimes welcomed with an 
 almost feverish eagerness ; they do something to bring 
 satisfaction to the deeper needs of the heart ; in the ex- 
 citement of their prosecution, and in the rush of action 
 men lose and forget themselves, and no longer need to 
 consider whether they can give an account of the faith 
 that is in them, or whether there is in them any faith 
 at all. And yet when the tide of enthusiasm slackens, 
 in presence of mistake and failure, when face to face with 
 hard questions that urgently demand an immediate 
 answer, when looking forward to the many anxieties 
 that surround the coming years, men find that they 
 need something more than enthusiasm for hard work. 
 Faith in the righteousness and love of God alone can 
 stand us in good stead at the critical moments of life ; 
 
THE ANXIETIES OF LIFE. I55 
 
 this alone can teach us to take no thought for the 
 morrow, to say, not merely as a formula with the lips, 
 but with the whole energy of the heart and will, 
 " Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him ; "^ this 
 alone can rise to the sublime confidence of the Three 
 Holy Children, and in whatever danger of the present 
 or anxiety for the future, simply say, " Our God whom 
 we serve is able to deliver us : but, if not, we will not 
 serve thy gods nor worship the golden image." ^ 
 
 The writer of Ecclesiastes presses home this lesson. 
 Live, he seems to say to us, for wealth or pleasure 
 or knowledge as ends in themselves, and do so under 
 the happiest and most favourable conditions, and the 
 soul, at last satiated and weary, will find all to be but 
 vanity and vexation of spirit. Man cannot live by bread 
 alone : life means more than simply living ; it is a trial, a 
 discipline, by means of which character grows and shapes 
 itself ; and, when it is done, the soul passes on to the 
 judgment. Whatever your present condition may be, 
 whether you are rich or poor, glad or sorry, know 
 assuredly that for all these things Grod will bring you 
 to judgment. Therefore, whatever thy hand findeth to 
 do, do it with thy might ; therefore fear God and keep 
 His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. 
 Never forget that if you dream and brood and murmur, 
 if you give yourself up to the evil spirit of pessimism, 
 the end can only be utter ruin and loss. The man 
 
 > Job xiii. 15. * Daniel iii. 17, 18. 
 
156 THE ANXIETIES OF LIFE. 
 
 who does nothing but watch the wind and the 
 clouds will never even sow his seed, much less reap his 
 harvest. 
 
 Here, then, is our lesson : amid whatever perplexities, 
 anxieties, or hesitations, we must keep a firm hold on 
 our belief in the love and the goodness of Almighty 
 God; we must trust Him, believe in Him, hope in 
 Him ; even if it seems quite impossible, yet we must 
 still trust, still believe, still hope ; we must look away 
 from our little despondencies up to Him ; He, " Deus 
 rerum tenax vigor," alone guides and sustains the 
 world through all its changes. To the Christian one 
 thing, and only one thing, is certain, and that is the 
 Will of God. He has set us here, in all this eager 
 active life; He wills for us all this strain and stress 
 of outward circumstances ; we have received no promise 
 of temporal success or temporal reward, no promise 
 even that truth shall prevail, and error be destroyed ; 
 the very gifts He gives men may be turned against 
 Him ; men may win freedom, or knowledge, or power 
 only through them to deny and reject Him who gave 
 them all. But these are not reasons for one moment's 
 hesitation. Admit, if it be so, that the forecasts of the 
 most hopeless men amongst us are to be justified : even 
 then the trial that is to try the Church is the will of 
 God for her. In this -trial is our discipline; under 
 these conditions, and no other, our characters are to be 
 formed and developed ; here we are to be witnesses 
 
THE ANXIETIES OF LIFE. 157 
 
 for Him ; in this way to prove, or, perhaps I might 
 say, to win our love for Him. 
 
 So far as we are true to the Creed of the Church of 
 Christ, hopelessness, faithlessness, is an impossibility. 
 No doubt it is hard to be so entirely true ; but we may 
 and must cling firmly to the faith we have, however 
 poor and weak and halting it may be. " Lord, increase 
 our faith," will be our daily, hourly, almost momentary 
 prayer. Under all the pressing anxieties of this age 
 in which we live, we, servants of our Incarnate Lord, 
 dare not stand moodily aside, refusing to do our part, 
 until we can see our way right on to an assured and 
 certain end. While we are criticizing — and every- 
 thing can be criticized — while we are hesitating, 
 doubl^ing, shuddering, the years of life are slipping 
 past us, our opportunities are missed, and the days in 
 which we might have worked for God are lost for ever. 
 Come what may, the movement of the ages is, after all, 
 the will of Almighty God, working out its one great 
 purpose to one assured and perfect end. We must 
 work in this living present. We dare not wrap the one 
 talent He has given us in a napkin, and bury it away 
 out of sight ; we must set ourselves steadily to the duty 
 which lies before us ; we must be ready to risk some- 
 thing, to venture something, and then to leave the result 
 in His hands. It is treachery to His goodness to allow 
 His gifts to us of increased knowledge and increased 
 insight to unnerve our hearts, or to paralyze our wills. 
 
158 THE ANXIETIES OF LIFE. 
 
 Faith, prayer, and hard work^ — here lies the bounden 
 duty of each member of the Body of Christ. We may 
 make mistakes: as we get older we shall learn the 
 truth of this by sad and sorrowful experience ; but it is 
 better, far better, so than, for fear of mistakes, to dream 
 away the years of life. We are under no illusions ; we 
 are not the victims of a shallow optimism ; we are fully 
 aware of the dark side of life's picture ; we cannot 
 under-estimate the strength of sin, who see in it the 
 power that nailed the Lord Jesus to His cross ; ^^ e 
 know the disasters it has worked in the past ; we have 
 no reason to think it will be less powerful in the 
 future ; we have seen the ruin it has made of many and 
 many a life ; we know it yet more clearly in the hand 
 to hand struggle with the evil of our own hearts. But 
 we believe and are sure that we have been set to take 
 our part in this conflict by Perfect Love ; and in this 
 certainty we may learn, if we will, the lesson of patient 
 endurance, of quiet steadfastness in duty ; we may dis- 
 cover the secret of a power that will give us courage 
 and cheerfulness through the difficulties and anxieties, 
 whatever they may be, in which we are called upon to 
 work ; and so we may at last, by God's blessing, learn 
 to make our own those words of St. Paul's, " We know 
 whom we have believed, and are persuaded that He is 
 able to keep that which we have committed unto Him 
 against the day of Christ." ^ 
 
 1 Cf. Gal. V. 6. 2 2 Tim. i. 12. 
 
XYII. 
 SSe %ik of tfte OTorlU to come. 
 
 " I saw a new heaven and a new earth." — Rev. xxi. 1. 
 (Septuagesima Sunday, January 29, 1888.) 
 
 In the Church of England since the sixteenth century 
 (in this continuing a custom that dates from the days of 
 St. Chrysostom), 1 part of our preparation for the 
 
 ^ Cf. Bingham, vol. v. p. 57 (Oxford University Press, 1855). 
 The sermon on Genesis i. 1, mentioned here, was preached (see 
 " Tillemont Memoirs," vol. xi. 42) on February 16, 386, being the first 
 day of Lent, the Monday after the seventh Sunday before Easter. 
 This is the day on which Lent is still reckoned as beginning in the 
 Eastern Church. 
 
 The author has not ascertained when Genesis i. was first read on 
 Septuagesima Sunday, It is appointed for this day in the Benedictine 
 Breviary and in all breviaries of the Roman type. No date can be 
 assigned for its introduction ; but as St. Chrysostom tells us that 
 Genesis was always read during Lent, it is possible that, as the 
 preparation for Lent in the West was pushed further back, the read- 
 ing of Genesis was begun earlier ; if so the question resolves itself 
 into the fixing of the date when Septuagesima Sunday was first 
 observed in its present form. The above suggestion is supported by 
 the fact that the Ambrosian Breviary, which includes Septuagesima, 
 begins Genesis the Monday after Septuagesima, while the Mozarabic, 
 which has no Septuagesima, begins Genesis on the Monday after the 
 first Sunday in Lent. 
 
 Duchesne (Origines du culte Chretien, pp. 234, seq.) gives reason 
 
i6o THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 season of Lent has been to read in public the earlier 
 chapters of the Book of Genesis. And so this morning 
 we have once more read how, in the beginning, God 
 created the heavens and the earth — and created them 
 pure and perfect and good, without any dark shadow 
 of pain or sorrow ; ^' God saw everything that He had 
 made, and behold it was very good." But this is not 
 
 to suppose that Septuagesima and the two following Sundays were 
 fixed, i.e. had proper Masses attached to them, at about the same time 
 as the four odd days from Ash Wednesday to the following Saturday 
 were added to make up the forty days of the Quadragesima. The 
 latter were not observed in Gregory the Great's time, but they are 
 found in the " Gelasian Sacramentary" of the Eighth Century, iu 
 which Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quadragesima are also found. 
 
 In " Edward VI. and the Book of Common Prayer," published by 
 F. A. Gasquet, O.S.B., and E. Bishop, it is stated, on p. 384, that 
 " the interest of the comparison (of the Lectionaries drawn up at the 
 Eeformation period) really lies in the proof afforded of the gradual 
 tendency to substitute the civil for the ecclesiastical year ; and for 
 an arrangement which in some measure corresponded with the eccle- 
 siastical seasons, a mechanical 'lectio continua ' of tlie Scriptures" ; 
 and lower down the transference of Genesis (of course in the week-day 
 lessons) to January is noted as an illustration of what is objected to. 
 The Church of England has, however, practical justification from 
 ancient sources for reading Genesis in January as well as in Lent. 
 In the " Comes," which is sometimes, but erroneously, referred to 
 Jerome (probably the date is two or three centuries later), Genesis ii. 
 vers. 7-14 inclusive is ordered to be read on January 1, if a week-day, 
 and allowing for holy- days, what may be called the history of man 
 from the Book of Genesis is ordered to be continuously read in the 
 week-day lesson (see " Comes," Editio Vallarsi, vol. xi., column 609). 
 As March, which used to be the first month of the year, coincides 
 practically with Lent, it is possible that* one of the reasons for reading 
 Genesis in Lent was that it coincided with the beginning of the year. 
 The author is indebted to the Rev. Dr. Bright, Canon of Christ Church, 
 and to the Eev. F. E. Brightman, for most of the above references. 
 
THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME. .161 
 
 the world we know ; our thoughts run on at once to 
 all that so quickly follows — the disorganization and 
 dislocation of this fair and perfect work of God through 
 the disobedience and rebellion of man. We see the 
 entry into the sphere of human life of other and 
 malignant forces which, but for the deliverance worked 
 out by God himself, must in the end have destroyed 
 those germs of goodness and righteousness that sur- 
 vived the first catastrophe, and so must have made this 
 world, without protest and without opposition, the 
 kingdom and the home of evil. This is the other law 
 that St. Paul tells us he found warring against the 
 law of God, in which after the inward man he delighted ; 
 so that, he exclaims, " the good that I would I do 
 not : but the evil which I would not, that I do." ^ 
 
 This unending conflict with sin — with all its con- 
 sequences, direct and indirect — this struggle that seems 
 always to be beginning, and never to get one step 
 nearer its end, — this is what is forced home upon our 
 thoughts as we come once more within sight of Lent. 
 There is a dreariness and hopelessness about it all, 
 against which some of us have to put forth our whole 
 strength ; and therefore it was a bit of real inspiration 
 that led those who revised our Lectionary some twenty 
 years ago to set beside the first chapter of Genesis 
 the last chapter of the Book of Kevelation, that, as 
 we read of the completeness of the disaster, we may 
 
 1 Rom. vii. 19. 
 
 M 
 
i62 THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME, 
 
 also be reminded of the sure and certain hope of 
 perfect restoration. 
 
 What is the motive power that gives steadiness 
 and resolution to men in their life's work ? That 
 enables them to persevere in disagreeable or wearisome 
 duties, to shun delights and live laborious days ? No 
 doubt, in God's goodness, there is a real happiness in 
 activity for its own sake ; but this Avill scarcely stand 
 the test of the monotony and the tediousness that are 
 apparently more or less necessary attendants upon all 
 continuous work. Some, perhaps, will point to 
 ambition ; here certainly is a powerful force, especially 
 with the young; one, too, that is able at times to 
 dominate men even in extreme old age. But some 
 of us never become the slaves of ambition ; few, I hope, 
 remain under its thrall in middle or later life. There 
 is, it is certain, one influence that can carry men 
 who are wholly under its guidance through fire and 
 water, and that is greed : we need not, however, wait 
 to speak of that now ; we know its strength and we 
 know its author ; none would willingly acknowledge 
 himself to be living his life under its inspiration. The 
 question still remains, what is it that can give staying 
 power to honest and unselfish work ? There is, and we 
 may well be thankful for the fact, a great deal of such 
 work being done ; there is a truer spirit of unselfishness, 
 a more ready willingness to help others at the cost 
 of personal comfort, than has, perhaps, ever before been 
 
THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME. 163 
 
 seen in the world. It would be well if we allowed our- 
 selves to recognize this fact more unhesitatingly ; we 
 should then be saved from the harsh and ungenerous 
 judgments that men are only too apt to pass on those 
 who are working on lines they do not understand or 
 approve. Temperance, purity, education, social and 
 political reform — these and similar subjects are occu- 
 pying the attention and claiming the time and trouble 
 of hundreds and thousands, clergy and laity alike, 
 many of whom are working willingly and gladly with 
 no thought of reward, no desire for public recognition, 
 no expectation of personal gain. Why do they do it ? 
 What hope have they ? For — 
 
 " Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, 
 And hope without an object cannot live." * 
 
 When the collar begins to gall, when the wear and 
 tear of life begin to tell, men are at last compelled to 
 put to themselves the question which John Stuart 
 Mill tells us was at one time forced upon his own 
 thoughts : " Suppose that all your objects in life were 
 realized ; and all the changes in institutions and 
 opinions which you are looking forward to could be 
 effected at this very instant : would this be a great joy 
 and happiness to you ? " ^ And if they have no thought 
 of anything beyond the present life, they will find, if 
 they are honest, they must answer the question as lie 
 
 1 " Coleridge's Poems," p. 330. Moxon's edition, 1870. 
 
 2 "Autobiography of J. S. Mill," ch. v. 
 
1 64 THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 did, with an unhesitating " No." The truth is that men 
 are immortal beings, and that therefore they cannot 
 make this world their one supreme object ; if they do 
 they only court certain failure. They see, for example, 
 after long years of work and waiting, some change 
 made or some reform carried which they have ardently 
 desired, and the result is only disappointment : the 
 world is little bettered by what has been done ; indeed 
 men almost seem to refuse the deliverance they have 
 helped to win for them. Thus their gain becomes their 
 loss; success has robbed them of the real source of 
 their happiness, the enthusiasm for action, the excite- 
 ment of the chase. But Christ's followers can answer 
 this question with a decided " Yes ; " " yes," because 
 every position gained can only mean at best a starting 
 point for renewed and even greater effort ; " yes," 
 because they are not careful to measure or appraise re- 
 sults, because in themselves success and failure are of 
 no account at all. Come what may, Christian men and 
 women must work for Him to Whose service they are 
 pledged ; the cause is His, not theirs ; they must do 
 the little they are able to do, to take temptation 
 out of men's way, to open out before them, as far as 
 may be, the possibility of clean and wholesome lives. 
 They must do their part, but the result is in the hands 
 of Almighty God; and, therefore, however complete 
 may seem to be the failure of this or that which they 
 once thought gave promise of solid achievement, they 
 
THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME. 165 
 
 cannot be disheartened, tliey will not allow themselves 
 to despair ; for the end is not now, but far on in that 
 day which their eyes shall at last behold — they look 
 " for the new heaven and the new earth." 
 
 And if the best workers of the world know what 
 it is to feel the necessity for the hope the Christian 
 Creed can give, what shall we say of others ? Of those, 
 for example, whose life must be one long endurance of 
 pain ? We know there are such ; many of us can 
 say this from our own personal knowledge. Month 
 after month, year after year, boyhood, youth, manhood, 
 all passing away without any prospect of what we as 
 men could speak of as happiness ; with no deliverance 
 possible for them, but that which death will bring. 
 There is scarcely any possibility of exaggeration here. 
 There can be few clergymen, at all events, who have 
 not come in contact with suffering and disease, often 
 intensified by the pressure of poverty, where, if they 
 could not have said from the very bottom of their 
 hearts, — yes, here is the weariness, the pain, the 
 discipline of life, but under it all is love, and beyond 
 it there is the sure and certain hope — it would have 
 been impossible to refrain from a fierce and bitter 
 outcry against the cruelty of the power, or fate, or 
 chance which had thrust men into the world only that 
 they may suffer. How people face these things whose 
 outlook is bounded by the present day of suffering it 
 is hard to understand ; I can only suppose that they 
 
i66 THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 do their best to forget it, and to put it out of sight. 
 No doubt it is true that the promise of happiness in 
 a future life does not, in our ways of measuring things, 
 set right the sorrow of the present world : but there 
 is yet a further question to be answered. Can this 
 trial be a preparation for the future life ? Can this be 
 the road by which, as perhaps by no other, men and 
 women may reach the perfection of saintliness ? We 
 must indeed have kept our eyes very tightly closed 
 if we have failed to learn that this discipline of pain 
 creates, in God's Providence, characters among the most 
 beautiful that we ever meet with. In some poor room, 
 which the occupant, it may be, will only leave to be 
 carried to rest in the churchyard, we may meet a 
 quiet contentment, a trustfulness and thankfulness, 
 yes, and even a radiant happiness, at which we can 
 only look with wonder and amazement, if shame for the 
 ino:ratitude and thanklessness of our own lives leaves 
 room for any other thought at all. And this beautiful 
 creation, this pure and true love to God our Father, 
 this gentle, patient, faithful character, grown to be 
 what it is through the very pain that seemed to be 
 so wanton and so unintelligible, are we to think of it 
 as a lovely and beautiful work, the offspring of chance 
 or necessity, which a few nionths, or at most a few 
 years hence will be crushed into nothingness? No 
 indeed : Christian people are certain that all this pain 
 has not been suffered without purpose. They know 
 
THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME. 167 
 
 that souls are fitted by the discipline of pain for 
 the work they have to do in the life of the world 
 to come; that they are prepared through much 
 tribulation for their place in the new heaven and 
 the new earth in which even now by faith they live, 
 and for whose advent they continually pray, "Thy 
 kingdom come." 
 
 And then there are others, whom men of robuster 
 mould are apt to treat somewhat scornfully, into 
 whose wounds they have no oil that they can pour ; 
 those, I mean, who from conditions of birth or 
 education, from faults of character, from mistakes 
 and want of judgment, have travelled down the 
 pathway to despair; those who are the failures of 
 the world, dragging out a weary existence in some 
 distasteful or monotonous work ; shut in by narrow 
 and sordid aims ; visited with the consequences of 
 their fathers' sin, tied and bound in the chains of 
 their own ; weary, incapable, without one glimmer of 
 any real hope before them in life. You may organize 
 and reform, and re-organize and re-reform the world 
 till the end of time, such as these will never vanish 
 from the earth. It is certain that the one thing that 
 can by any possibility put strength into such stag- 
 nant lives is the hope that the Church of Christ 
 proclaims ; the hope that can speak to them with 
 unfaltering accents, and tell them, in spite of every- 
 thing that seems so dark, to be of good cheer, since 
 
1 68 THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME. 
 
 they may, even in the failure and the disaster of the 
 present, find the discipline of their character, the 
 sanctification of their life. God's best and truest gifts 
 are not reserved for the successful, for those whom 
 we men account happy and prosperous. Saintliness, 
 goodness, holiness, patience, gentleness, purity, love — 
 these are out of the reach of none ; and when this 
 world and all the fashion of it are passed away, when 
 so much that is now made great account of will have 
 perished for ever, those who have won these graces shall 
 have their place in the new heaven and the new earth. 
 And, if we may pass from characters which are, 
 as we measure things, least attractive to us, to others 
 which of all that we meet in life command our readiest 
 sympathy, think for one moment of men who are richly 
 endo^^■ed with various mental gifts, and who yet are 
 hampered and held back by external circumstances, by 
 failure of health and strength, and so are compelled 
 to live apart from the full stream of life, their powers, 
 as it seems to them, useless and unused. How can 
 we help these ? How can ayc sound the depths of their 
 distress? Unless, indeed, we are able to say, — the 
 cause is God's, not yours ; the end is in His keeping ; 
 He made you, He needs you ; He is, even here, training 
 you, if you will but leave yourself in His hands ; some 
 Jay — though it may be not noAv — some day, in that 
 far-off future, as we men in our limitation speak of 
 time, every capacity and gift and power you possess 
 
THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME. 169 
 
 sliall have their full play in the perfect service of 
 Him who is a God of perfect love. We can only read 
 the riddle of life as we fall 
 
 " with our weight of cares 
 Upon the great world's altar stairs 
 That slope thro' darkness up to God," ^ 
 
 and look on by faith to the day when the new heaven 
 and the new earth shall be revealed. 
 
 We must learn that it is our duty and our happiness 
 to bring our wills with no shadow of hesitation or 
 reserve into accordance with the will of God : and as 
 we do this we are taught the secret of the one principle 
 that can give steady purpose to our work in life, 
 whatever that work may be, whether it be found in 
 active service or in patient endurance. Here we can 
 find the courage which will enable us to wage the 
 ceaseless conflict with sin ; here, through all the irk- 
 some duties of our daily tasks, we can find the source 
 of a patience which will endure when all lower 
 motives have entirely spent themselves. We cannot 
 flinch in the moral struggle, or consent to lead idle 
 and frivolous and hopeless lives, if we "look for the 
 resurrection of the dead and the life of the world 
 to come." 
 
 * Tennyson's " In Blemoriam ," p. 78. 
 
XVIII. 
 
 " Then opened He their understanding, that they might understand 
 the scriptures." — St. Luke xxiv. 45. ^ 
 
 (Sunday after Ascension Day, May 13, 1888.) 
 
 We not unfrequently hear men speak with great satis- 
 faction of what they call a " rational faith ; " the words 
 are used with perfect honesty, but the speakers seem 
 to be altogether imconscious of the fact that this 
 phrase, unless carefully guarded and explained, is 
 little less than a complete contradiction in terms. If 
 and so far as any subject matter is within the compass 
 of our natural reason or can be understood and 
 measured and formulated by its unaided guidance, 
 it makes and can make no call on faith properly so 
 called. If on the other hand it comes into the sphere 
 of our consciousness through faith, which is " the as- 
 surance of things hoped for, the proving of things not 
 seen,"^ then reason must ^o far be content to stand 
 aside ; for questions are at issue with regard to which 
 
 ' Heb. xi. 1. 
 
FAITH, 171 
 
 it cannot claim to hold any final court of appeal. 
 These two principles of faith and reason stand over 
 against each other. The principle of faith loyally 
 acknowledged, loyally followed, leading men steadily 
 on through whatever dimness or uncertainty that may 
 from time to time surround them to a fuller knowledge 
 of the truths about God, the soul, and eternity; the 
 principle of reason leading men, whatever may be the 
 religious beliefs of particular persons or particular 
 societies who from time to time submit themselves 
 unreservedly to its guidance, farther and farther away 
 from any hope that looks beyond the horizon of the 
 present life. 
 
 The Church is pledged to the principle of faith. 
 The kernel and heart of the Creed is that man was 
 created with the endowment of powers and faculties 
 which brought him into direct and conscious commu- 
 nication with Almighty God ; that in the Fall he lost 
 these capacities which had been his ; that henceforward 
 between himself and his Creator a great gulf was set, 
 which he had no power to bridge; that only by 
 God's revelation of Himself could he re-enter this vast 
 world of thought and knowledge from which by sin he 
 had been excluded. This revelation has been going 
 on through all the ages of the world's history, until at 
 last in the fulness of time God became Man ; and in 
 the Incarnation of our Blessed Lord, there was found on 
 the one side the complete revelation of the Being and 
 
172 FAITH, 
 
 Nature of God ; and on the other side the means 
 were provided by which man, though fallen, could 
 be re-admitted into communion with his Father in 
 heaven. This fact and all that it involves is known 
 to us by the gift of God Himself; no principle of 
 human reason could have worked it out, or proved or 
 explained or guaranteed its truth to us. This media- 
 torial work of our Eedeemer is the basis of the whole 
 of the teaching of the Church ; to Him she traces 
 every gift she holds ; her teaching is, as it were, only 
 the continual repetition of His Name. "The Word 
 was made flesh and dwelt among us full of grace 
 and truth." ^ Full of grace, — every capacity of the 
 soul, every thought of holiness, every gift of sanctifica- 
 tion, all that makes for our highest moral and spiritual 
 selves, comes from Him : and also full of truth, — the 
 gifts of knowledge, the powers of the intellect are 
 bestowed by Him ; He opens the understanding of 
 men that they may know. 
 
 Distinctly opposed to this idea stands out the con- 
 ception of the sufficiency of natural reason. This 
 principle is in our day accepted by many, in full 
 consciousness of all the consequences that are in- 
 volved in its acceptance ; they are satisfied with it, and 
 find their rest in it, although they know that it bars 
 the gate of heaven, and leaves mankind to live their 
 life in the world with no God in the present and with 
 
 1 St. John i. 14. 
 
FAITH, 173 
 
 no hope in the future. To these we have and can 
 have at this point little to say ; we can only sorrow- 
 fully acknowledge the completeness and consistency 
 of the intellectual position they have assumed. But 
 since the great upheaval of the sixteenth century, 
 this principle of the sufficiency of human reason to 
 deal with and to compass the things of the unseen 
 life, has been only too largely adopted by Christian 
 people and Christian societies, it would seem without 
 any idea of its ultimate and necessary consequences. 
 It is difficult to doubt that the Agnosticism of the 
 nineteenth century is the lineal descendant of prin- 
 ciples which came into prominence three centuries 
 ago. It is not to the point to say that those who then 
 adopted these principles held this, that, or the other 
 larger or smaller portion of the Christian Creed ; the 
 question is not where they were able to stop, but 
 whither the principles they adopted necessarily led 
 them. Extreme Puritans, who objected that the 
 Church obscured the Person and Work of Christ, are 
 the ancestors of those who have adopted Socinian 
 theories, and say that the Church leans far too much 
 upon Him, and now deny His Godhead. One of the 
 most popular outcries against the Church was that she 
 ignored and neglected the Bible, and did not give 
 God's revealed word the place and position to which it 
 was entitled ; the successors of these men in Germany 
 and elsewhere are those who would have us regard the 
 
174 FAITH. 
 
 Bible as an extremely interesting collection of Jewish 
 literary productions, but as a Book which is in no 
 intelligible sense an inspired book. 
 
 In this question of inspiration the lesson is written 
 clearly enough for any one to understand. Men who 
 ignored or denied the Church as a living witness to the 
 truth of God, fell back in the sixteenth century, as a 
 matter of necessity, on the written word : they were 
 then compelled to construct theories of the infallibility 
 of that written word, from which they could by logical 
 process build up those schemes of Christian doctrine 
 and belief which they, acting on their private judgment, 
 deemed it well to retain. The present century has 
 been watching the destruction of those theories, and 
 the consequent tottering of the edifices constructed 
 upon them. Now the historical Church as a whole is 
 committed to no theory of inspiration ; she declares 
 the Bible to be the word of God, to contain the revela- 
 tion of God's will for man, but she has never made the 
 attempt to separate this divine element from the 
 human, or to settle exactly and definitely when, where, 
 and how the divine guidance was given. The Church 
 draws her life from her Incarnate Lord; she is the 
 extension into the sphere of the present of His Person 
 and work; she is linked with her Lord through the 
 power of the Holy Spirit, and, under the guidance of 
 the same Spirit, she has enshrined in her creeds that 
 body of revealed truth to which the Bible witnesses, 
 
FAITH. 175 
 
 and whicli, " whether men will hear, or whether they 
 will forbear," ^ she calls on all to accept, believe, and 
 teach. 
 
 But, besides and beyond this body of external 
 objective revealed truth, there is what has been 
 called an infused gift of truth : since truth, in 
 the same way as holiness, requires to be brought 
 home to the inner life, there is the gift to all 
 faithful members of the Body of Christ of right 
 judgment, of insight into and recognition of re- 
 vealed truth, which our Lord promised to all who 
 would do His will. This knowledge, however, is not, 
 any more than the Creeds themselves, the product of 
 the natural reason ; it is the gift of God through the 
 mediation of Jesus Christ. " The gift of faith," says 
 Archdeacon Wilberforce, " the power of understanding, 
 the inward light of a higher reason, these are among 
 the blessings which mediation obtains, and which flow 
 in perfection from Incarnate Godhead into the members 
 of His mystical body." ^ " The things of God knoweth 
 no man, but the Spirit of God. Now," St. Paul adds, 
 " we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the 
 Spirit which is of God; that we might know the 
 things that are freely given to us of God." ^ And 
 
 1 Ezck. ii. 5. 
 
 2 "Archdeacon Wilberforce on the Incarnation," 2nd edit., 1849, 
 p. 500. 
 
 ' 1 Cor. ii. 11, 12. 
 
176 FAITH. 
 
 therefore our Lord " opened the Apostles' under- 
 standings, that they might understand the Scriptures." 
 
 In these two gifts of revelation, in the imparted 
 treasure of truth, and in the engrafted principle 
 through which that truth is apprehended, we find at 
 once the limitation and the guide of reason as it can be 
 exercised in relation to things divine. Faith, it is true, 
 limits under one aspect the authority of reason ; but 
 faith, it is also true, extends infinitely the range of 
 vision. The revealed truth of God in the Creeds sets 
 the limits within which individual thought may be 
 exercised in relation to subject matter which, but for 
 the gift of God, would never have come within the 
 sphere of human consciousness : and, further, in its 
 action with regard to that truth, reason must act in 
 subordination to the engrafted gift of heavenly 
 guidance which the Mediator bestows on the body of 
 His disciples. 
 
 A great deal of perfectly needless misunderstand- 
 ing would disappear, and a great waste of power would 
 be saved, if we once recognized the fact that people 
 cannot be made Christians by argument. Men may 
 expound with all conceivable brilliancy, and ingenuity, 
 and eloquence, and incisiveness, the body of truth con- 
 tained in the Creeds and the Bible, but only the Spirit 
 of God can bring it home to the heart and conscience 
 and will, and so to the intellect and the reason. He, 
 not we, can open the understanding : so long as we 
 
FAITH. 177 
 
 act as though the strength of the Church lay in 
 argument alone we must fail; for the Spirit of Grod 
 works in the hearts of men in ways we cannot know, 
 and by methods that lie beyond the reach of our 
 subtlest analysis. I do not for one moment mean to 
 say that we should not do our best to understand what 
 the assumptions made by the Creed are ; what relation 
 they bear to general questions; what are the really 
 essential and critical points in the Christian and the 
 non-Christian positions ; all this is, in its true place, 
 of very great importance ; but it is work that demands 
 special training and special qualifications in those 
 who are called on to undertake it. And even so, when 
 all has been said and done in this regard, we can only 
 look up to Him " who alone can order the unruly wills 
 and affections of sinful men," ^ and say from our heart 
 of hearts Elisha's prayer, "Lord, I pray thee, open 
 their eyes, that they may see." ^ Quietly, persistently, 
 and steadily the Church is called on to proclaim the 
 revealed truth which has been committed to her 
 keeping by Almighty God ; but He, and He alone, can 
 be His own Interpreter. Of one thing we are sure, 
 while sin and sorrow, and pain and death, remain 
 amongst us, this teaching cannot be without its hold 
 on human consciences and wills, and almost in spite 
 of itself on human reason too. 
 
 ^ Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Easter. 
 2 2 Kings vi. 17. 
 
 N 
 
178 FAITH. 
 
 I have spoken of the external gift of revelation, 
 and also of the imparted illumination granted to the 
 body of faithful people. But those of us who have 
 accepted the principles of the Christian Creed as the 
 basis of our thoughts in regard to the world in which 
 we live now, and of the unseen future to which we are 
 day by day hastening on, must never forget that it is 
 possible to accept the Creed with the intellect, and to 
 be uninfluenced by it in the heart and life. "The 
 mere intellectual perception of truth," says a well- 
 known member of this House, " is like the perception of 
 form by those who are colour-blind. Without the 
 spirit of love, the higher meaning and relationship of 
 things is lost." ^ In such a case, the body of revealed 
 truth stands, as it were, outside ourselves. We are 
 able, perhaps, to exercise ourselves with infinite skill 
 and cleverness in stating its various positions, in un- 
 ravelling its manifold intricacies, we may defend it 
 from attack with subtlety and ingenuity, but all the 
 while its truths may be nothing more to us in our 
 inner lives than mere propositions of the schools. Only 
 when the light from the Eternal Source of all light 
 breaks in upon our hearts and consciences can the 
 Creed become to us what it really is, a vivifying, 
 energizing force ; only then can it give us the strength 
 to fight our battle with the* sin and selfishness that 
 
 1 " The Life beyond the Grave," by the Eev. R. M. BeDSon, Student 
 of Christ Church, p. 464. 
 
FAITH. 179 
 
 SO sorely beset us in our own hearts and in the world 
 around us ; only then can it give us a sure hope that 
 is able to take away the sting of death, and to rob 
 the grave of its victory. If we steadily keep this in 
 mind, we shall pray with all earnestness that God 
 would send us the light of His Holy Spirit through 
 whom alone it can be given us, " to have a right judg- 
 ment in all things," ^ whose special office and work it 
 is " to guide into all truth," ^ " to take of the things 
 of Christ, and to show them unto us." ^ If we think 
 a little of these things this week, we shall perhaps 
 next Sunday morning be able to say our Pentecostal 
 prayer, "Veni Creator Spiritus," with some clearer 
 insight into the meaning of what we ask, and some 
 truer measure of the fulness of the gift which we may, 
 if we are faithful, receive. 
 
 1 Collect for Whit-Sunday. 2 gt. John xvi. 13. 
 
 « St. John xvi. 15. 
 
XIX. 
 
 '^Tiie OTisc anb tfjc Jpoolisj^ Ffrains. 
 
 " Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which 
 took their lamps, and went forth to meet tlie Bridegroom. And 
 five of them were wise, and five were foolish." — St. Matt xxv. 
 1,2. 
 
 (Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, February 10, 1889.) 
 
 Among all our Blessed Lord's parables there is none 
 of more solemn warning tlian this from which I have 
 taken my text. For it is not a parable that tells ns 
 about the bad and the good, as we call them, — about 
 those who are openly and sincerely the servants of 
 their Lord, and those who, in outward act and life, 
 show that they have chosen the service of the evil 
 one. No ; it is a parable of the visible Church, and 
 of those within that Church between whom in outward 
 appearance no difference can be made by men. The 
 foolish virgins as well as the wise were looking forward 
 to the coming of the bridegroom ; the foolish as well as 
 the wise understood the duty of making preparation 
 for it ; the foolish as well as the wise thought they were 
 prepared. All alike had their lamps, and the vessels 
 for the oil ; all alike had their lamps burning ; all 
 
THE WISE AND THE FOOLISH VIRGINS. i8i 
 
 alike fell into slumber ; all alike were roused by the 
 midnight cry, that told of the immediate coming of 
 Him for whom they had all prepared and waited and 
 watched. And, when they heard the cry, all alike knew 
 what it meant, and what must forthwith be done ; " then 
 all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps ; " all 
 alike set themselves to make at once the last hasty 
 preparations, that they may be ready for the coming 
 Lord. And at this supreme and fateful moment a 
 difference never before seen or noted was found between 
 them ; five of them discovered that their lamps were 
 flickering and dying out, and that they had no oil in 
 their vessels with which to replenish them. Hastily 
 they turn to the other five, with the request, " Give us 
 of your oil, for our lamps are going out." But this 
 is quite impossible; their defect cannot be remedied 
 so ; they therefore hurry away — if yet there may be 
 time before He comes — to buy from those who have oil 
 to sell ; they make a supreme effort to supply their 
 fatal want. But while they are gone the Bridegroom 
 comes; the five who are prepared, and stand with their 
 lamps trimmed and burning, take their place in the train 
 of their Lord; the palace doors are flung open, and the 
 great procession passes within its gates ; and then the 
 doors are shut. Later on the other five come back ; 
 they knock at the closed and barred doors, and from 
 within, in reply to their summons, there is heard only 
 those terrible words, *' I know you not." 
 
1 82 THE WISE AND THE FOOLISH VIRGINS. 
 
 A day is coming when a great and final separation 
 will be made between men who in the present life 
 appear to be absolutely alike. They have all shared 
 the same privileges ; all alike are baptized members 
 of the Church of Jesus Christ; all alike profess 
 themselves His servants ; all alike look forward to the 
 same end, and prepare themselves for the same day of 
 account. They worship in the same churches, they 
 kneel at the same altars, Avhere all alike receive the 
 bread and the wine, which are the pledges of the 
 Saviour's love for men : we see no difference between 
 them, outwardly there is no distinction that can be 
 marked ; all, so far as we men are able to judge, are 
 united in one purpose and animated by one hope ; and 
 yet hereafter a deep and impassable gulf will open 
 between them ; for " five of them are wise, and five of 
 them are foolish." 
 
 This is a lesson which our Blessed Lord again and 
 again enforces. "Two women shall be grinding 
 together ; the one shall be taken, and the other left. 
 Two men shall be in the field ; the one shall be taken, 
 and the other left."^ Outward conditions, outward 
 professions, outward actions are all, without exception, 
 the same ; and yet one enters into the joy of his 
 Lord, while the other hears only the fatal words, " I 
 never knew you." Thou hastr not known us ! why, " we 
 have eaten and drunk in Thy Presence, and Thou hast 
 
 ^ St. Luke xvii. 35, 36. 
 
THE WISE AND THE FOOLISH VIRGINS. 183 
 
 taught in our streets ; " and again the only answer, 
 " I know you not whence ye are ; depart from me, all 
 ye workers of iniquity." ^ 
 
 What is it, then, that Christ our Lord saw in the 
 wise virgins that ensure for them a glad welcome in 
 the day of His coming ? What is it that He missed 
 in those other five which shuts them out from hope ? 
 In one brief word, the former had, while the latter 
 had not, learned the meaning of the love of God. The 
 whole Bible, from first to last, is the gradual un- 
 veiling of this love ; the birth of Jesus Christ is its 
 perfect manifestation; the apostle and evangelist of 
 the Incarnation sums up all that this doctrine means 
 for us in the single phrase, " God is Love." This love 
 we must have, if we would reach our rest in the world 
 to come ; he that loves is " born of God," ^ he that loves 
 not " does not know God." ^ Without love we are 
 nothing ; we can do nothing that is pleasing in the 
 sight of God, or that is in any true sense helpful to 
 ourselves. I am not exaggerating; it is indeed im- 
 possible to go beyond St. Paul's words, " though I be- 
 stow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give 
 my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth 
 me nothing." ^ Church privileges, sacramental grace, 
 abstinence even from evil — all nothing, all able to 
 avail nothing where love is not found. Therefore, O 
 
 * St. Luke xiii. 27. ^ 1 St. John iv, 7. 
 
 ' 1 St. John iv. 8. " 1 Cor. xiii. 3. 
 
1 84 THE WISE AND THE FOOLISH VIRGINS. 
 
 God, in Thy mercy give us love. Yes ; but what can we 
 do ? In these self-analytical days, when old moorings 
 are lost, when thought is quickened and anxious and 
 nervous, when we can no longer tread the quiet paths 
 of less self-conscious times, it is most perilous to many 
 minds even to suggest the question. Do I in truth 
 love God ? — since the question, merely by being asked, 
 seems to call for the answer, No. 
 
 A man need not have lived very long to have 
 found out that, for only too many, life runs a steady 
 course of complete and, it may seem to us, unmerited 
 failure; and to have learnt besides something of the 
 ruin that sin can work, it may be has worked, in 
 lives that are very near his own ; and if it were not 
 that at the moment of his sternest and most rebellious 
 outcry against the hardness of it all, there lay in the 
 background of his thoughts, fixed and rooted immova- 
 bly, the firm belief — or assumption or presupposition, 
 if you will — that unintelligible and confused as every- 
 thing may seem to be, yet, under all there is the 
 unchanging love of the Eternal Father, life must sink 
 down into the abyss of a hopeless despair. But if God 
 is indeed love, then so far as we are shut out from that 
 love it must be by our own perverseness or our own 
 sin. So we do not ask ourselves the question. Do I 
 love God? but having learned the entire necessity 
 of this supreme gift, we set ourselves, by His grace, 
 to win it ; strive for it as we would for any earthly 
 
THE WISE AND THE FOOLISH VIRGINS. 185 
 
 prize; fight on, even thougli we do not seem to 
 make much way, only anxious that we may not falter 
 through the strenuousness of the conflict, that nothing 
 should rob us of the eagerness of our quest ; convinced 
 that, if we are faithful, we shall find the gift to be 
 ours in the great day of His coming. 
 
 Yes; but again, How are we to strive? Let me 
 speak of two things. First there is the sin of thank- 
 lessness. Fight against this, and compel yourself to 
 be thankful : keep under stern control the tendency 
 to look with envious eyes on what may seem to 
 you the greater happiness or good fortune of other 
 men, their superior position and opportunities, their 
 greater abilities, their greater power of endurance or 
 of work, their sounder, stronger health. Put all such 
 thoughts resolutely aside, and thank God for the gifts 
 you have : the least fortunate of us in this place have 
 very many and very real gifts. Check firmly that 
 sense of weariness, because talents you may be, perhaps 
 quite rightly, conscious of have to lie by unused ; 
 because the opportunities that appear to come so 
 readily to others are denied to you, because while they 
 are active you must be idle, because while they are 
 called to work, you are called to wait. Believe me, 
 as long as any man indulges himself in wilful despond- 
 ency, and is as a necessary consequence stained with 
 the sin of rebellious ingratitude, he is cutting himself 
 off from all knowledge of God's goodness ; and unless 
 
1 86 THE WISE AND THE FOOLISH VIRGINS. 
 
 lie makes a real effort, and deterraines by prayer and 
 self-discipline to crush and conquer this sin, he will 
 never know the meaning of the love of God. 
 
 And then, my brothers, there is another enemy of 
 love of which, if you will bear with me, I will dare to 
 speak — and that enemy is impurity. I do not mean 
 those outrageous and flagrant sins, in which if men 
 indulge themselves, they cannot, with any truth, be 
 reckoned as Christian even in name ; but those more 
 secret sins in thought and word and deed, which may 
 lie, as we must sometimes learn, very near lives that 
 outwardly seem to be even exceptionally devoted to 
 the service of our Blessed Lord. If men habitually 
 and wilfully hang round the galleries of their imagina- 
 tions pictures of evil and of shameful sin, then they 
 may be sure that, however outwardly devout they 
 may be, or however regular in their religious duties, 
 the love of God is a grace of which they cannot know 
 anything at all : no, nor, indeed, can they understand 
 in any true sense the beauty and dignity and tender- 
 ness of human love. It is not, as excuses are so often 
 made, that our spiritual self is hampered by our lower 
 nature, in which all the forces of sin are to be found. 
 The sin is not to be looked for in what we call our 
 animal nature ; no, indeed ; but as has been most truly 
 said,i it finds its strength in' our higher nature, in 
 
 ' Cf. " On behalf of Belief," p. 278 seg., by Rev. H. S. Holland, 
 Canon of St. Paul's. 
 
THE WISE AND THE FOOLISH VIRGINS. 187 
 
 the endowments of the intellect, and in God's great 
 gifts of reason and memory and imagination; these 
 step down from their high throne in the heights 
 that are the very presence-chamber of the All Holy, 
 and revel in the thoughts and words and deeds of sin ; 
 and the sin is what it is by this wanton degradation. 
 To the heart that is the home of such sin as this, in 
 secret no less than in open form, the love of God can 
 never be revealed : the least whisper of that love is 
 checked and silenced in such an atmosphere as this ; 
 the blessing of the sight and the knowledge of God — 
 and sight and knowledge is love — is promised and can 
 be given only to the pure in heart. Yes ; it was, believe 
 me, a wonderfully true insight that taught those who 
 drew up our Communion Office in its present form, to 
 appoint among its opening prayers one of the most 
 beautiful of all our collects : when, therefore, we come 
 into the presence of our Lord in our solemn Eucharistic 
 Service, we pray God, " so to cleanse the thoughts of 
 our hearts by the inspiration of His Holy Spirit that 
 we may perfectly love Him," ^ since perfect love can 
 only be found where there is perfect purity. 
 
 1 This collect formed part of the Introductory Pjayers of the 
 Celebrant in the Sarum Mistal. 
 
XX. 
 
 ^Se Hesumction. 
 
 " Then went in also that other disciple . . . and he saw, and believed." 
 — St. John xx. 8. 
 
 (Fourth Sunday after Easter, May 19, 1889.) 
 
 Dk. Mozley, in the first of his Bampton Lectures,^ 
 points out how very really the difficulty of the belief 
 in what we speak of as the miraculous is increased 
 for us by the rapid growth of knowledge, more espe- 
 cially by the growth of the physical sciences, and by 
 the development of the historical imagination. Past 
 events now range themselves visibly before us; we 
 have learned to project ourselves backwards into the 
 surroundings of the scene that the historian describes ; 
 we are there in bodily presence ; we see, we touch, we 
 handle, and we find it correspondingly difficult to 
 accept anything that does not fit in with the expe- 
 rience of our senses. We stand beside the empty 
 tomb on Easter Day, and all that it connotes in the 
 physical world is so foreign to that of which we have 
 
 ^ " Lectures on Miracles," Bampton Lectures for 1865, by Kev. 
 J. B. Mozley, D.D. 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 personal knowledge, that, however real our faith — or, 
 rather, it is almost true to say in proportion to 
 our faith — we are conscious of the shock of a sur- 
 prise, of the press of a difficulty, of the presentation 
 to our thoughts of the serious demands made upon us 
 by the Creed ; and so, for the moment, there is pause 
 or hesitation, or even doubt. The truth is that we 
 carry with us in our historical retrospect, unconsciously 
 but almost necessarily, an idea that our personal expe- 
 rience is the one test of what is possible ; and, conse- 
 quently, any event that does not find its verification 
 in that experience appears strange and incredible, and 
 is instinctively felt to be exaggerated, if not false. 
 There are some who have founded their theory of 
 history on the axiom that the past must be verified by 
 the present; to whom, therefore, historical evidence 
 for a miracle is an impossibility, unless and until 
 miraculous events shall once more take place openly 
 before our eyes, and, by their occurrence in the present, 
 verify the possible truth of the accounts which have 
 been given of their occurrence in the past. To minds 
 set in such a mould as this, records of miraculous 
 events are only interesting in that they offer problems 
 for ingenious speculation, to ascertain what, if any, 
 is the real substratum of historical fact that underlies 
 the stories ; and next to find some explanation of the 
 particular form which the account of the miraculous 
 takes in particular cases. It is true, no substratum of 
 
190 THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 any such verifiable history has ever been suggested as 
 underlying the statement of the fact of our Lord's 
 resurrection. But a great deal has been said on the 
 second question; and a very general method is to 
 explain it in one way or another as a perfectly natural 
 outgrowth from the account of His life on earth ; and 
 thus to find its parallel in the various legends and 
 stories that surround the great national heroes who 
 lived in the early days of the world's history. But, as 
 has been ably insisted on in a book lately published/ 
 the whole gist of these legends is that the life was so 
 imposing, so masterful, so heroic, that men could not 
 believe that it had ceased to be, and, therefore, bit 
 by bit, dressed it up with legends of renewed activity 
 after death. All the stories are built upon the events, 
 or supposed events, of the life. There in the life is 
 found the true centre of the story ; everything that is 
 told as to what happens after death is explained by it. 
 The legends would never have taken the form they 
 did were it not for the splendid deeds and actions 
 of the years of life. 
 
 We need not have read the New Testament very 
 carefully to know that when we come to deal with 
 the history of our Lord we meet with exactly 
 the reverse of all this. His Life was not, in the 
 sense in which we ordinarily, use the words, and as 
 we men judge such things, a specially striking, or 
 
 1 * *0n behalf of Belief," p. 17 se(Z., by the Rev. H.; S. Holland, 
 Canon of St. Paul's. 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 191 
 
 specially heroic life. It was gentle, winning, patient, 
 gracious, tender : there was sympathy with sorrow and 
 pain and distress, sympathy such as men had never 
 dreamed of before. There, combined with a purity 
 that awed and silenced opponents, was found com- 
 passion for those entangled in the meshes of sin, such 
 compassion as drew the penitents to His feet. There 
 were, indeed, miracles : but it is true, as we are often 
 told — and we Christians can use the fact as well as 
 others — that they were worked in an age when 
 miracles were as generally thought possible as they 
 are generally thought impossible now, and conse- 
 quently they were not in any sense as startling or 
 impressive as they would be if they were worked in 
 our own day. 
 
 The story of the life as given in the Gospels 
 emphasizes this point; as we read the narrative we 
 find that, in the estimation of the disciples, our Lord 
 fails just at the point where they expect He will 
 assert Himself, and put Himself forward. Step by 
 step the apostles are disillusionized : they looked for 
 a conqueror who would found a great earthly kingdom, 
 but He disappoints their expectations ; He does nothing 
 that even suggests its advent. After thirty years, 
 passed so far as we know in silence, there came 
 possibly only three years of active work. In these 
 years no doubt many deep and mysterious things 
 were spoken about; but in them, it is true to say. 
 
192 THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 under the conditions and circumstances of the time, 
 very little was done that could impress the imagi- 
 nation with the prospect of a brilliant future. On the 
 contrary, there continually emerged dark sayings that 
 suggested only failure ; and that, not only for Himself, 
 but for all who were ranked among His followers. To 
 the apostles who were closest to Him, the best He 
 promised was that they should drink of His cup and be 
 baptized with His baptism; and that cup and that 
 baptism were clearly not the symbols of any immediate 
 earthly triumph. There were, it is true, two occasions 
 of a different significance : the first when the chosen 
 three saw Him in His glory in the mystery of the Trans- 
 figuration ; and the second, which alone really met the 
 disciples' hopes and expectations, when the triumphant 
 procession passed over the Mount of Olives on Palm 
 Sunday, moving forward amid the exulting cries of 
 the multitude, "Blessed be the king that cometh in 
 the Name of the Lord." ^ This was what they had 
 looked for, hoped for, longed for, and at last it seemed 
 as if their hopes were to be fulfilled. But the excite- 
 ment of that day only served to make the gloom and 
 desolation, the failure and defeat, more utterly crushing 
 on the following Friday morning. 
 
 Then came the Kesurrection. The fact was met 
 by doubt and unbelief ; it was accepted after pause and 
 hesitation : but, once accepted, it was seen to be the 
 * St. Luke xix. 38. 
 
THE RESURRECTION. i93 
 
 key to the life ; this one fact revealed to the apostles 
 for the first time all that the life had meant. The 
 last period of confusion is to be found in the great 
 forty days, when they asked our Lord, "Wilt Thou 
 at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel ? " 
 The answer given them was the promise of Whit 
 Sunday, "It is not for you to know the times or 
 the seasons. But ye shall receive power after that 
 the Holy Ghost has come upon you : and ye shall be 
 witnesses unto Me." ^ After the day of Pentecost the 
 outlook is entirely changed : the men are the same 
 still, — the same and yet not the same : the St. Peter 
 of the Acts is the St. Peter of the Gospels, there 
 is no mistaking his identity ; but where before un- 
 certainty and hesitation were found, there is now a 
 clear strong conviction, that never wavers and never 
 flinches; and the heart of that conviction is that 
 Jesus Christ who was crucified on Good Friday rose 
 on the first Easter Day from the dead. The whole 
 conception of our Lord's office and person and work, 
 the explanation of all that up to this point had 
 been so unintelligible in His actions, starts from 
 this central fact. In view of this fact the Life 
 becomes coherent and intelligible; without the Eesur- 
 rection it would have been a miserable and disastrous 
 failure. Yes, if Christ be not raised, we Christians, 
 so St. Paul unhesitatingly affirms, "are of all men 
 
 1 Acts i. 6, 7, 8. 
 
 O 
 
5194 THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 most miserable : " ^ our faith is vain, we are yet in 
 our sins. 
 
 We shall never reach the full conviction that 
 should be ours of the fact of our Lord's Kesur- 
 rection, if we go back in thought to stand beside 
 His empty tomb with our intellectual conceptions 
 shut closely up within the four walls of a physical 
 laboratory, or with our moral ideas set only on making 
 the best out of this best possible of all worlds ; prac- 
 tising virtue, if it can be called so, on utilitarian 
 grounds ; our first and best thoughts given to obtaining 
 for ourselves the largest share we can command of 
 present comfort and luxury ; our spiritual selves choked 
 with the cares and business and pleasures of this life. 
 In such an intellectual or moral atmosphere as this 
 there is nothing that corresponds with eternal truth : 
 and, after all, if we understand what we say, it is true 
 that the Eesurrection must be verifiable in our own 
 experience. The question for us is, and it is a far- 
 reaching one, what that experience is and has been. 
 
 The mere physical fact of the Eesurrection in 
 relation to life as we have known it, the returning 
 to the world of one who had died, is embarrassing, 
 unintelligible, and therefore so far inexplicable; but 
 we are not asked to stop here. When St. John went 
 into the empty tomb he had the evidence of his senses 
 for the fact of the Eesurrection; but the acceptance 
 ' 1 Cor. XV. 19. 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 195 
 
 of this fact by itself is a small part of what is meant 
 by the words, "he saw and believed." The fact had 
 a significance beyond any limit of space or of time; 
 St. John "saw and believed," and was the author of 
 the fourth gospel, and of the Book of the Kevelation. 
 Life and everything connected with it had passed 
 through a great and momentous change; a new and 
 marvellous factor had entered into it, and the kingdom 
 of heaven was open to all believers. He believed and 
 saw the first glimpses of the new heaven and new earth 
 of which he wrote in later years ; he heard the first 
 notes of his later message, " Behold, the tabernacle of 
 God is with men, and He will dwell with them. And 
 there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor 
 crying, neither shall there be any more pain : for the 
 former things are passed away." ^ He believed and 
 caught the first echoes of the promise, "Behold, I 
 make all things new." ^ 
 
 If our spiritual instincts are numbed and 
 atrophied, then there is nothing in us that can 
 correspond to, or leap out to welcome the truth of 
 our Lord's Eesurrection. Yes, to know its truth, the 
 Eesurrection must be to our own lives what it was 
 seen by the apostles to be in a unique and supreme 
 sense to the life of our Lord. "We have to ask 
 ourselves," as we have been well reminded, "whether 
 we are living a life which demands our resurrection in 
 » Rev. xxi. 3, 4. « Rev. xxi. 5. 
 
196 THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 Christ as its only adequate solution. Would your 
 ways and mine be incomprehensible if there were 
 no Kesurrection ? Have we any motives, real and 
 animating, on which we act, which would be meaning- 
 less if we were not to rise again ? Have we made any 
 moral venture on the strength of this assurance?"^ 
 In a word, do we bring our creed to the test of practise ? 
 We find here both the littleness and the greatness 
 of our life on earth : its greatness, in that it stretches 
 away into an infinite and unknown future which we 
 cannot understand, but of which we can only say that 
 it shall never end; its littleness, in that we are set 
 here for our brief moment to do our work and duty ; 
 to hold, in our turn, the lamp of truth, that others may 
 kindle their torches at ours, and take our place, and 
 do, God grant it ! better far than ever we have done. 
 And the Eesurrection supplies the key to the problem ; 
 we know assuredly that there are men and women 
 living amongst us to-day with as clear and firm a 
 hold on this conviction as, we may venture to say it, 
 was given to the apostles themselves. One such life 
 has but lately ended in a distant island, where a 
 Christian priest, with a devotion worthy of the great 
 communion to which he belonged, — a communion so 
 rich in the memories of saints and confessors and 
 martyrs,— has just sealed with his death his living 
 martyrdom among the lepers to whom he had given 
 » •' On behalf of Belief," p. 21. 
 
THE RESURRECTION. 197 
 
 everything a man has to give. We, it may be, 
 know others, some perhaps whom we have been 
 privileged to call our friends. The're are, too, many 
 more, known only to Crod Himself, and perhaps also 
 to one here and there to whom they have ministered ; 
 and looking at such lives when our faith falters, we 
 do well to ask ourselves what we have ever done 
 that we should be worthy to know God's truth as 
 they have known it, fully and clearly, with no cloud 
 or shadow of doubt to darken it. Such lives and 
 examples give, however, strength and form and sub- 
 stance to our wavering faith, and beckon us on, by 
 God's grace, to make our own venture on the truth 
 of what we profess to believe, and to live a little more 
 as men should live who are one day to rise again to 
 a new and endless life. 
 
XXL 
 
 ^6e Bangers of ISxtcrnalism. 
 
 " These have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time."— 
 St. Mark iv. 17. 
 
 (First Sunday in Lent, February 23, 1890.) 
 
 How little we know ourselves — this is an axiom that 
 is universally accepted, a mere truism. A well-known 
 writer^ has pointed out that when one man is con- 
 versing with another, either represents three distinct 
 persons — there is the man as his friend thinks him 
 to be, there is the man as he conceives himself to be, 
 and, thirdly, there is the man as he really is. There 
 need be no intentional hypocrisy in this; it is the 
 natural consequence of the conditions under which 
 we are called to live. But, ultimately, each lives his 
 life apart and alone. 
 
 " Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe, 
 Our hermit spirits dwell and range apart, 
 Our eyes see all around in gloom or glow, 
 Hues of their own fresh borrowed from the heart." - 
 
 ^ " The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table." 
 
 - " Christian Year," Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity. 
 
THE DANGERS OF EXTERNALISM. 199 
 
 "We touch," Bishop Samuel Wilberforce once said, 
 "like spheres at a single point; strive as we may 
 we can never touch at more." The two great realities 
 for each of us, Cardinal Newman has taught us, are 
 ourself and God; solu^ cum Solo, — each alone with 
 God alone, we live our lives as if there were no 
 other created thing. Few, I suppose, who accept 
 the Christian Creed would deny that there is truth 
 in such statements as these. 
 
 And yet it is only through the activities of the 
 visible world that it is possible for us to give ex- 
 pression to the thoughts, the hopes, the purposes that 
 are in us. We project ourselves out upon the scene, 
 we throw ourselves eagerly into the work that lies 
 before us: often we seem like children surrendering 
 ourselves now to this and now to that enthusiasm, 
 each for its turn occupying all our thoughts. And 
 we find our happiness in this activity ; in the dullest 
 of us some pulse of life throbs and beats. We find 
 ourselves, we scarcely know how, bound up with this 
 or that party, pledged to this or that reform, anxious 
 to oppose this or that change ; we find our work 
 in this place or in that; and the duties which con- 
 sequently fall upon us call into play all our reserves 
 of strength and will and steadiness of purpose. There 
 are, indeed, some men who are unhappy enough to 
 have no duties, or, as it would be more true to sav, 
 to think that they have none ; they consequently 
 
200 THE DANGERS OF EXTERNALISM. 
 
 live for pleasure, sometimes of a higher sometimes of a 
 lower lund ; and tluis they, too, arc lost, perhaps even 
 more completely than others, in the rush of external 
 interests. There is, therefore, a real spiritual danger 
 that besets ns all — tliose who set before themselves 
 a liigh standard of active dnty as their ideal, no less 
 than tliose wlu) think only of living pleasantly and 
 comfortably — and it is this : we soon begin to live 
 for the things we care for and think about ; in the 
 bustle and confusion and noise the external world 
 becomes the one all-sufiicing reality. "Earth, these 
 solid stars, this w^eight of body and limb," ^ become 
 in sober earnest the sign and symbol of our division 
 from Almighty God. We have but little time, in 
 the midst of our busy work or our eager pursuit of 
 jdeasure, to remember that true life within us, which 
 once begun can never cease to be ; which, under all 
 this external excitement, is being shaped and moulded 
 and fashioned for an end of wliich we rarely tliink : 
 we remember it, perhaps, in a way when we kneel 
 dow'n in tlie morning or evening to say our prayers ; 
 but otherwise it has small place in our thoughts, and 
 very little influence over our actions. 
 
 Eecall for one moment what tlie motives and aims 
 are tluit generally influence and guide us in our work 
 in the world : pleasure, self-gratification, ambition, 
 tlie desire to get on, or to staiul well among men, 
 
 * Touiiyson's "Higlicr Pantheism." 
 
THE DANGERS OF EXTERNALISM. 201 
 
 loyalty to our party, to those with whom we are more 
 immediately associated, respect for some leader to 
 whom we have given our allegiance, admiration for 
 some one with whom we have been l)rought into 
 close contact, and i'or whom we have, it may be, a 
 sincere and true affection. Some of these — ambition, 
 for example — are abnost wholly bad ; some, like 
 loyalty, a curious compound of good and evil ; none 
 is wholly and unreservedly good. Think how mixed 
 the motives are which influence men in tlieir religious 
 life. They attach themselves — they could scarcely 
 tell you why — to parties or to sects : if they do this, 
 as it is to be feared they too often do, without a 
 sincere devotion to the service of Almiglity God, 
 they bring with them a purely political element, 
 with all its fuss and noiso and ])assion ; and the 
 consequence is tliat ()ut\\'ard acts of devotion or 
 reverence or ceremonial, which should be the natural 
 expression of a true religions life, are made the badges 
 of a party and the flags of a facticm fight ; and men, 
 as they quarrel about these poor shadows of the 
 visil)le world, lose sight of the growth in holiness, and 
 the realization of tlie nearness of (lod's presence 
 and of the infinite depths of His love ; and yet without 
 these all external acts of devotion and service are 
 entirely worthless. Ileal religious life will, we allow, 
 of necessity find its expression in oiit\\ard c(,'remony 
 and outward act ; but these exiermxl a(;ts are not the 
 
202 THE DANGERS OF EXTERNALISM. 
 
 life. Where the life is, there they will be found : but, 
 unfortunately, it by no means follows that where they 
 are to be found there is of necessity the life also. 
 
 Again, men sometimes pay to a leader or teacher 
 the devotion and homage which are due to God alone. 
 All their abilities, capacities, and endowments are 
 placed unreservedly at their hero's disposal : and, now 
 and then, the most wonderful gift that life can give 
 us, the grace of friendship, is misused in this way. 
 Men take up opinions and accustom themselves to 
 use phrases, without thinking that they only mimic, 
 it is well if they do not caricature, the teaching, and 
 sometimes the very tone of voice of their leader. 
 Admit that he may be most worthy of admiration; 
 allow that all his words and acts are the natural 
 and almost necessary expression of a true life with 
 God; unfortunately, this does not ensure reality in 
 the imitation ; the customs, observances, and acts 
 which are in the one case the spontaneous expression 
 of true faith and devoted love, are only too likely 
 to become in the other the empty mockery of mere 
 ceremonial. 
 
 We live, I repeat, our true lives hidden from the 
 observation or the criticism of our fellowmen; if we 
 are not honest with ourselves, we live them masked 
 and screened even from ourselves. To all of us, 
 no doubt, opportunities are given when we may, 
 if we will, understand this more clearly. We find 
 
THE DANGERS OF EXTERNALISM. 203 
 
 ourselves at times carried aside out of the stream 
 of life's business, caught in some back eddy of its 
 restless current; and there alone, it may be even 
 without the help that external religious rites could 
 afford us, we are able to learn, if we will, what are 
 the things that are of eternal worth. Then all that 
 finds its strength and stay in the confusion and 
 bustle and excitement of our everyday life vanishes 
 like " a dream when one awaketh." ^ At such 
 times we can, in some sense, answer the question 
 whether there is any root in ourselves, — anything 
 that, given to us by God, is dependent solely upon 
 Him, and is therefore able to endure though the 
 heavens should be destroyed, and the world and all 
 that is in it should pass away for ever ; or whether, 
 on the other hand, the religious ideal in which we 
 have put our trust represents nothing but political 
 or social enthusiasm, or is only the expression of 
 personal friendship or of unreal sentiment. If we 
 find only too real reason to fear that much that 
 we thought of sterling worth is mere straw and 
 stubble, it is for the moment sad enough for us ; but 
 it is also good for us to get an insight into the 
 possibilities of unsuspected and unconscious hollowness 
 and unreality that have been concealed under our 
 external professions and actions. We are thus com- 
 pelled to fix our thoughts steadily on that which is 
 1 Ps. Ixxiii. 19. 
 
204 THE DANGERS OF EXTERNALISM. 
 
 the beginning and the end of all true religion, the 
 increase of the knowledge of God, the growing sense 
 of His Presence, the certainty of His goodness and 
 His love, the reality of our life in Him. 
 
 Such opportunities of careful thought are suggested 
 to us by the course of the Christian year; certainly 
 something like this is the call that is made upon us 
 by Lent ; we are bidden to put aside, at least for a 
 few hours now and then in the next six weeks, the 
 amusements and pleasures, the cares and anxieties 
 of our eager, hurrying life ; to go apart even from 
 friendship ; to leave everything, and look steadily at 
 life as we should see it, if we were called on here and 
 now to die. To do this quietly and humbly is to 
 bring our everyday life to the test of an unfailing 
 standard ; here we can find, and especially we who 
 are clergy and those who in future years intend, 
 God willing, to take on themselves the great re- 
 sponsibility of the priesthood, some protection against 
 those serious dangers of externalism which only become 
 greater and more pressing as our responsibilities increase 
 and multiply. 
 
 We do well to draw aside when we hear glib 
 discussions of the minutiae of outward observances; 
 we are right instinctively to turn away when we hear 
 clergy counting up their communicants, or number- 
 ing their confirmation candidates, when they are, to 
 use a commercial phrase, taking stock of their success ; 
 
THE DANGERS OF EXTERNALISM. 205 
 
 for we know that success cannot be measured by these 
 things ; — " The wind bloweth where it listeth, and 
 thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell 
 whence it cometh, and whither it goeth : so is every one 
 that is born of the Spirit." ^ The work of God's grace 
 within the soul of man is known only to God Himself ; 
 when the end of this age has come we shall learn 
 something of the great things He has done for men. 
 It must be allowed, however, that these considerations 
 have a value if they are regarded as negative, and 
 not as positive tests. Those who come to the Holy 
 Communion do not merely by their coming prove 
 themselves to be true and loyal servants of Jesug 
 Christ : but when out of a large congregation only a 
 scanty remnant come to the altar of God ; when many 
 come rarely, and many more not at all ; then we 
 may rightly fear — as sometimes is sadly felt in this 
 place as the little band of communicants gathers here 
 on Sunday mornings at eight o'clock — that religious 
 life is not very clear or deep or strong; then we 
 may well begin to ask ourselves what our responsibility 
 in the matter is ; for we who come to the Holy Table 
 may be living so inconsistently with our outward 
 professions as actually to repel others from their 
 religious duties. 
 
 The gifts of the Church are, thank God, real and 
 true gifts; they are the channels and the means of 
 
 ' St. John iii. 8. 
 
2o6 THE DANGERS OF EXTERNALISM. 
 
 grace. We are sent to bless ; we are sent to absolve ; 
 we are sent to give into the bands of men the bread 
 and the wine, the Sacrament of the Body and Blood 
 of the Lord ; but the sphere within which the grace 
 so given is effectual and availing is beyond the reach 
 of our penetration, far away out of our ken. We, 
 laity and clergy alike, can judge only superficially. 
 Eight belief, right actions, almsgiving, prayers, fast- 
 ing, — these all will be found where true love is ; but 
 they give us no sure key by means of which we may 
 enter into the secrets of the inner life, where alone 
 the root of true religion can grow and strengthen, 
 and bring forth fruit for the eternal world. There 
 in the silence of our own separate life, we do not 
 appear as we fondly imagine ourselves to be, or as 
 friends in their kindliness or good nature estimate 
 us, or as strangers or cynics caricature or depreciate 
 us, but as we really are, as we shall know ourselves 
 to be when we come to die, as we shall be known to 
 be when we stand before the Judge. 
 
XXII. 
 
 " They all with oue consent began to make excuse." — St. Luke xiv. 18. 
 (Second Sunday after Trinity, June 15, 1890.) 
 
 To make excuses for ourselves comes quite naturally to 
 all of us ; indeed we may almost make this habit our 
 definition of man. In the great allegory with which 
 the Book of Genesis opens, in which is summed up the 
 story of the Fall, this characteristic comes out with 
 perfect directness and simplicity. The tragedy is 
 completed, and sin has entered into the world ; and at 
 once the man excuses himself by throwing the blame 
 on the woman, while the woman in her turn throws the 
 blame on the tempter. The silence in which these 
 excuses are passed by is more impressive than any 
 condemnation could be ; the original source of the 
 evil is indeed acknowledged, but no attention is paid 
 to the defence put forward by the offenders against 
 God's law : they have themselves sinned and therefore 
 they must suffer ; so the man receives his sentence of 
 painful and weary effort in the sustaining of life, in 
 
2o8 EXCUSES. 
 
 the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread; while 
 to the woman the pains of childbirth are assigned, as 
 at once the penalty of her sin, and also the pledge of 
 future deliverance, since in the time to come the seed 
 of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head. The 
 story has all the simplicity of childhood about it ; 
 but the world has long outgrown its childhood. 
 Excuses, however, by no means come to an end on 
 this account ; they only run into some other channel ; 
 the circumstances of their education and the peculi- 
 arities of their temperament, and even the whole 
 realm of nature itself provide men a wide area in 
 which they can always find broad and deep courses 
 for the floods of apology and excuse. 
 
 It is, indeed, a large question to attempt to follow 
 out in all its details. We may, however, dismiss at 
 once all excuses that indirectly as well as directly 
 take the form of falsehood or untruth. We all 
 agree about this : none of us would tolerate any touch 
 of falsity here. But in passing it is worth while to 
 mark how, in spite of this, the anxiety to escape 
 trouble or discomfort, the lazy slipping along the 
 line of least resistance, creates a practice of excusing 
 or apologizing for conduct without sufficient regard 
 for accuracy or sincerity : when this happens the sense 
 of the stern necessity for, truthfulness grows dull, 
 and sometimes there grows up a habit of mind which 
 feels no shock or distress at a direct lie. Strange as 
 
EXCUSES, 209 
 
 it seems, there are people who have reached such a 
 mental and moral condition that they simply cannot 
 be straightforward ; an indolent, easy-going nature 
 that never wilfully intended to deceive or mislead has, 
 through the constant practice of making unreal excuses 
 to others, and worse still to itself, become radically 
 unreal, insincere, untruthful. 
 
 Let us pass on to consider two characters which on 
 very different grounds find it necessary to offer ex- 
 planations or apologies for themselves. First, there 
 are men of a somewhat sensitive, mobile nature, who 
 spend a great deal of their time in the disastrous 
 amusement of what is called castle-building. They are 
 conscious — and it may be quite rightly — that they 
 have gifts in this direction or in that ; but then, instead 
 of doing with heart and soul the duties, insignificant 
 and trivial as they may seem, which lie before them to 
 be done, they live in a world of their own creation ; in 
 all the scenes they picture they naturally hold a 
 prominent place, for success and not failure is the 
 subject of their dreams — success and the applause won 
 by success forms the background of all their thoughts. 
 The chance they look for may never come to them, 
 and then their life slips from them with nothing done : 
 or it may be the opportunity is given them — they get 
 their desire, and as the Psalmist says, it brings " lean- 
 ness withal into their soul."^ The good that is in 
 » Ps. cvi. 15. 
 
 P 
 
2IO EXCUSES. 
 
 them — and there is good — rebels against the conditions 
 of success now it is won ; the men of whose applause 
 they had dreamed are, they discover now, just those 
 who have no plummet with which to sound the depth 
 of serious purpose, which, in spite of their self-absorp- 
 tion, had a place in all their dreams. After all, they 
 had some true measure of the real needs of the human 
 soul, and this keener, truer insight soon tells them 
 what a hollow mockery their success is ; it shows them 
 that, in past neglect of the work that they ought to 
 have done and in dreaming their life away, they have 
 lost irrevocably their one opportunity of preparation 
 for the duties now before them. They have reached 
 a prominent position, and they might have had some- 
 thing to say to these people who look up to them ; 
 they might have been ready to help on the work 
 they now see has to be done ; they might have 
 been and they are not, and never can be. Well 
 indeed for them if indolent self-appreciation gives 
 way at this point. Unfortunately men are too apt to 
 accept the present conditions, and to make the best of 
 their hollow success. It is true, they quite allow it, that 
 they might have been ready for the opportunity which 
 has come to them : but, after all, the fault is not so much 
 in themselves, as in the conditions and surroundings 
 of their past lives ; they never really had a fair chance 
 of preparation ; for they were so completely misunder- 
 stood by all the people who had to deal with them. 
 
EXCUSES. 
 
 But there is a clanger in the opposite direction ; 
 there is the possibility summed up for us in the well- 
 known phrase about those who make the great refusal. 
 Indolence urges the refusal, and suggests that humility 
 absolutely consecrates inactivity. An opportunity is 
 given that demands sincere effort, and it may be real 
 self-sacrifice ; it comes in different ways to different 
 people ; it calls one to a position of prominence, another 
 to a post of danger, another to duties and responsi- 
 bilities in some obscure corner of the world. However 
 it may come the man is called by the Lord and Master 
 of us all to do the best he may in this particular sphere 
 of duty; to go out and meet his work in faith and 
 trust in God, who alone can enable the strong to be 
 really strong, and in whom the weak may be made 
 strong. The call has come : how it is so, or why it is so, 
 he may not be able to say ; but it has come, and he has 
 not courage to meet its responsibilities. He finds a ready 
 ground of excuse in the ordinary cares that come in 
 some shape to all ; he has bought a field, he has bought 
 some oxen, or he has married a wife ; excuses enough 
 are close at hand, and in the end if they do not serve 
 him, plainly he will not obey the call. No one can 
 refuse a real opportunity of useful work without moral 
 strain, even if the refusal be — as it sometimes is — a 
 right refusal ; but if it is based on indolence or 
 faithlessness, the man will henceforward live his life not 
 merely with the sense of what he might have been, but 
 
212 EXCUSES. 
 
 through misdirected effort failed to become, but of 
 what he might have been and would not even try to be. 
 
 Translate these suggestions into practice. A man 
 has intellectual gifts of a fair order ; he is, and in no 
 way wrongly, conscious of them. He has an interest in 
 metaphysics or theology, in mathematics or scholarship, 
 in the problems of the world of nature, or in those of 
 social and political science. But he is bent on running 
 before he can walk ; he refuses to face what a great 
 teacher, ^ whom some of us remember here, used to 
 speak of as the underground work, the drudgery which 
 all must go through if they would prepare themselves 
 to use rightly and effectively any gifts whatever of 
 mind as well as of body. This man, versatile enough, 
 with only too ready an aptitude for catching up phrases 
 and theories, dreams away his days reading things he 
 cannot j)roperly master, ignoring the accurate training 
 of grammar or logic or mathematics, secure in the 
 ready excuse when he fails in them that the men who 
 have to deal with him are narrow and unsympathetic, 
 and in their curious insistence on the petty details of 
 moods and tenses, and the simple duty of accuracy of 
 thought, are quite unable to appreciate the flights 
 of genius. Do men never make shipwreck of fair 
 abilities by the refusal to submit to this discipline of 
 preliminary and necessary drudgery? Do they, or 
 their friends for them, never make the flattering 
 
 * The Eev. J. B. Mozley, D.D., Kegius Professor of Divinity. 
 
EXCUSES. 213 
 
 excuse that their failure is not so much due to them- 
 selves as to the incapacity of others to understand 
 originality ? 
 
 Again, all admit the responsibility attaching to the 
 choice of a profession. Think for one moment of the 
 clerical office. The due supply of persons qualified to 
 serve in God's Church is an anxious question for all of 
 us, and, it is to be hoped, is one we at times make the 
 subject of our prayers. It is true enough all are not 
 intended to be clergymen, and there are many to whom 
 such a future has never suggested itself as a possibility 
 in their o^vn case. But suppose that the possibility has 
 presented itself ; that as the question of Trinity Sunday 
 morning is asked, " Whom shall I send, who will go 
 for us ? " the answer, " Here am I, send me," has risen 
 to our lips. We are so apt to think that in determining 
 such a question all the responsibility is on the side of 
 saying " Yes," while no responsibility attaches to the 
 answer, " No." Clerical life involves in any case some 
 self-denial and self-restraint : but beyond this there are 
 those to whom it presents itself as a call, accom- 
 panied by special claims for endurance and self-forget- 
 fulness ; work in the mission field, or work at home in 
 places and under conditions where the hope of worldly 
 advancement is small, where the work itself is not 
 likely to attract much attention or to make much stir. 
 It may be right, this is admitted, on consideration to 
 turn aside, but it is a grave responsibility to do so. 
 
214 EXCUSES. 
 
 To leave such a high purpose and to set one's self in 
 one of the ordinary grooves is manifestly to accept a 
 lower ideal of life. It is useless to say, — after all, 1 
 am but as other men, and they do not make this 
 sacrifice ; this is to miss the whole point. These 
 others must meet their own responsibilities at their 
 own time. No one of us can be as any other ; each 
 is in a sense a law to himself; no man can put 
 his hand to the plough and look back without moral 
 loss. I do not mean that all who in some moment 
 of enthusiasm think of becoming clergymen are truly 
 called to the priesthood. Some rightly say " No " ; 
 but others also, to their own untold loss, make what 
 is in their case " the great refusal." There is always, 
 when a decision has to be made, a responsibility in 
 the refusal to undertake a serious duty only less grave 
 than that which attaches to its acceptance. 
 
 Other illustrations of the refusal of the higher ideal 
 and the acceptance of the lower one of ease and, as it 
 seems, success, might be taken. The artist who neglects 
 his art and paints to sell ; the musician who leaves his 
 great themes and truckles to popular fancies ; the 
 statesman who barters righteousness for popular ap- 
 plause ; the preacher who speaks, not what he believes, 
 but what he fancies others would like to hear ; all who 
 sell themselves and their J)owers, whether great or 
 small, for popularity or success, for gold or the 
 equivalent of gold — all these are, in their measure and 
 
EXCUSES. 21 s 
 
 degree, refusing the good and choosing the evil. For 
 all the excuse is ready, you must not ask too much of 
 people : it is made until it becomes a matter of course ; 
 and men sum it all up in what they regard as a sort 
 of moral truism, that no one can be expected to be so 
 quixotic as to give up his chance of success in life, 
 in obedience to simple faithfulness to a high ideal 
 of duty. 
 
 Life, we are sometimes told, is meant to be happy 
 and prosperous. Seriously this cannot be true. There 
 are lives in which the great temptations, the main 
 springs of disaster, are to be found in their uniform 
 success. Difficulty, failure, struggle — these, even in 
 severe forms, may be the greatest blessings that can 
 be given to men. No doubt passionate rebellion 
 against God's will is sometimes only too possible under 
 these conditions; but it is also true that character is 
 moulded by adversity as it can be in no other school - 
 we never know what is in us, for good as well as for 
 evil, till the waves and storms of life have gone over 
 Tis. But through this discipline we are trained for 
 tlie things which are unseen and eternal; hereafter 
 we shall learn that lives reckoned by us to be great 
 successes have been disastrous failures, and some that 
 we have reckoned failures to have been the truest 
 successes : the small man aiming at small things and 
 scoring his hundreds; the great soul filled with a 
 great purpose and breaking down, and, as we say, 
 
2i6 EXCUSES. 
 
 failing ; but there is no need to speak of this, we all 
 know Browning's Grammarian's Funeral. 
 
 The failures as we think them : as we watch a 
 young life that has achieved nothing, broken and 
 wasted with disease ; or as we call to mind him ^ who 
 spent one brief term as an undergraduate in this House, 
 and then last January was struck down with the fatal 
 illness from which in God's mercy his release came some 
 three weeks ago ; are these and such as these failures ? 
 When we look at the Cross of our Lord, and realize 
 who He is, and why He hung there, we know that these 
 seemingly complete failures are not always the lives 
 that ask for defence or apology or explanation. The 
 indolent, dreaming, self-centred life, that sometimes 
 attains success in virtue of inherited gifts of intellect 
 or of social position — a success, however, for which no 
 preparation has been made, no foundation laid that 
 enables the man to do his duty as a leader or teacher 
 or guide ; and the selfish, faithless, cowardly life that 
 refuses to accept the sterner duties and responsibilities 
 that are offered to it; the hollow prosperity of the 
 former, the lazy self-indulgence of the latter — these 
 even now are seen to demand apology and justification. 
 In the day when the secrets of all hearts are laid bare, 
 both will be found to be without possibility of defence 
 or excuse ; while truthfulness', sincerity, courage, and 
 
 ^ A. G. Haselfoot, scholar of Christ Church, matriculated 
 October, 1889, and died in the course of the following spring. 
 
EXCUSES. 217 
 
 their correlatives purity, unselfisliness, faith, though 
 in this world they may be found in lives that have 
 never known what we men think of as success, will 
 alone stand men in good stead when they are face to 
 face with their Lord and Judge. 
 
XXIII. 
 iEsau anil ^jacob. 
 
 " Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated." — Kom. ix. 13. 
 (Second Sunday in Lent, February 22, 1891.) 
 
 Most of us, I suppose, are somewhat surprised at this 
 emphatic sentence : indeed, for ourselves, we are almost 
 prepared to reverse its terms. We do not, it is true, 
 regard Esau as an exactly lovable character ; but his 
 distress commands our sympathy, while his brother's 
 cunning and deceit and duplicity go far in our estima- 
 tion to justify our hatred of so mean a character. No 
 doubt our idea of the two men is largely based on the 
 well-known chapter of Genesis,^ which has been read once 
 more to us in this morning's first lesson ; and it may be at 
 once allowed that our judgment, so formed, is a perfectly 
 right judgment. It is, however, formed on incomplete 
 evidence. If we study the characters more carefully, 
 and follow them throughout the whole course of their 
 lives, we shall, I think, find reason to modify our 
 opinion, and to acknowledge the justice of the words 
 
 * Gen. xxvii. 
 
ESAU AND JACOB. 219 
 
 of tlie text in tlieir approval of Jacob, and their con- 
 demnation of Esau. 
 
 Pliysically, as in every other way, the two brothers 
 are complete contrasts. Esau, on the one hand, is 
 vigorous and athletic, a cunning huntsman, disdaining 
 the more peaceful occupations of the pastoral life, and 
 choosing rather to live by his spear and his bow. 
 Jacob, on the other hand, is physically weaker, sensitive, 
 with keener intellect, seeing more what things mean, 
 better able to look before and after in the struggle for 
 existence, finding in his brain a source of strength 
 which is denied him by his physical organization. 
 In primitive, less ordered conditions of life, skill soon 
 degenerates into cunning ; and duplicity, emphatically 
 the besetting sin of Jacob's character, becomes, in early 
 days, an important factor in his life. Esau returns one 
 evening from his hunting, fagged and worn out and 
 hungry ; he desires some food that Jacob has prepared, 
 and recklessly careless about everything but the 
 immediate gratification of his appetite, sells to his 
 astuter brother his place as the senior in his father's 
 house ; surrenders his birthright to the younger for a 
 mess of pottage. " Thus," in the words of the book of 
 Genesis, " Esau despised his birthright." ^ 
 
 In this morning's lesson we have the second act in 
 the drama, when Jacob, his falsehood aided and abetted 
 by his mother, secures the formal declaration of the 
 
 * Gen. XX.V. 31. 
 
220 ESAU AND JACOB. 
 
 blessing from his father Isaac, now old and blind. It 
 is a shameful story of lying, deceit, and fraud, and there 
 would be something wrong about us if we had no 
 sympathy with Esau's bitter cry. But, that which 
 Jacob had gained by such crooked means, Esau had 
 thrown away through contempt and self-indulgence; 
 and now, stung to passionate fury by his disappoint- 
 ment, he gives free rein to his vindictive nature, and 
 lays his plans, so soon as his father dies, to take his 
 brother's life, and in this way to recover the position 
 he had lost. Sin brings suffering to all but the hope- 
 lessly bad : none are so surely deserted by God as those 
 who sin and never pay the penalty. Jacob and 
 Rebecca have to learn this. The mother sees what is 
 in store for her favourite son, and avoids it in the only 
 possible way by sending him into a distant country to 
 her brother Laban. So far as the story tells us, she 
 never saw him again. 
 
 On the journey he rests at Bethel, and there we 
 learn something of another side of Jacob's character, 
 his belief in the unseen world, and in a God to whom 
 his service is due. We all know, since our child days, 
 the story of the ladder he saw in his dream, set up 
 between earth and heaven, with the angels of God 
 ascending and descending upon it, while God revealed 
 Himself as the God of Abraharfi, and the God of Isaac 
 his father. His faith, indeed, is not very clear : when 
 he wakes he knows that he has been at the very gate 
 
ESAU AND JACOB. 
 
 of heaven. But in spite of this he must make a sort of 
 bargain with God ; if God will bring him safely back 
 to his father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be 
 his God : and he sets up a pillar or cairn of stones as a 
 token of his vow. Not very high, or pure, or strong, 
 this faith ; but faith is there, and that is something 
 now, and may be everything in future days. 
 
 Arrived at his uncle Laban's house, he enters into 
 his service ; there he finds that he has no monopoly of 
 deceit. The devices he used against his brother Esau, 
 are now, in some sort, turned against himself. In the 
 end, however, Jacob appears to get the better of Laban ; 
 in one way or another, by hard work, and certainly 
 not without a good deal of his natural craftiness, he 
 becomes a very wealthy man at Laban's expense. At 
 last the inevitable quarrel between them came about, 
 and Jacob, with his family and all his large possessions, 
 sets out on his return to his father's country. 
 
 On the return journey, the strong and the weak 
 sides of Jacob's character are equally well illustrated. 
 There is first the wonderful vision of God, in which he 
 gained the victory in the mysterious struggle with the 
 angel, and by tenacious importunity, " I will not let 
 Thee go, except Thou bless me," won the signal blessing 
 and the title Israel, Prince of God ; " for as a Prince," 
 it was said to him, " hast thou power with God and with 
 men, and hast prevailed." ^ And then in contrast 
 
 * Gen. xxxii. 28, 
 
ESAU AND JACOB. 
 
 with this there is his pusillanimous fear of Esau, his 
 care to propitiate him by magnificent presents, and by 
 abject submissiveness : as we think of Esau's rough 
 good-natured reception of a brother, whom he naturally 
 considered to have defrauded him of what should have 
 been his own, it is difficult to give Jacob credit for 
 any special nobility of character in comparison with 
 his brother Esau. 
 
 Years pass on, and in Jacob's family the wild 
 tempers of the Eastern nomad tribes, and the guile 
 and cunning which were part of their natural inherit- 
 ance, do their work in Jacob's home. On one 
 memorable occasion a gross wrong done to the family 
 by a prince of the Shechemites was avenged by two 
 of Jacob's sons with savage brutality and treachery 
 that could hardly be surpassed. Jacob, indeed, con- 
 demns their act, but he has no word of condemnation 
 for its deceit or its falsehood. As he querulously puts 
 it, " Ye have troubled me to make me to stink among 
 the inhabitants of the land : and I, being few in number, 
 they shall gather themselves together against me, and 
 slay me." ^ The safety of himself, his property, and his 
 belongings — his mind runs on these, and not on out- 
 raged truth and good faith. It is, indeed, but a poor 
 figure he makes ; it is, however, the last story of his 
 weakness. 
 
 In later years we see him with all kinds of home 
 * Gen. sxxiv. 30. 
 
ESAU AND JACOB. 223 
 
 troubles thick upon him ; mourning for his loved wife 
 Kachel, heartbroken at the loss of his favourite son 
 Joseph : and then towards the end of his days we meet 
 him a stranger in the land of Egypt, where the son 
 he supposed dead is a leading and prominent official. 
 In all the pages of the Old Testament there is no more 
 dignified or gracious figure than Jacob, as he stands, in 
 his old age, in the presence of Pharaoh and gives his 
 blessing to the Egyptian king. He was an old man 
 then, trained and disciplined and chastened by the 
 storms and vicissitudes of life : his sins have found him 
 out ; they have all borne their bitter and appointed 
 fruit ; but he has come through the fiery furnace, and 
 has reached a strong and beautiful old age. There is 
 little in his speech or bearing that recalls the weakness 
 of the past. He finds himself a stranger in a strange 
 land, among a people to whom he and his are an 
 " abomination " ; and, as he looks back over the long 
 past, he sums it all up, in answer to Pharaoh's question, 
 in the words, " Few and evil have the days of the years 
 of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of 
 the years of the life of my fathers." ^ But, whatever 
 the evil days had been, they had done their work for 
 him; and the treacherous youth had grown into the 
 steadfast and brave old man, who looked in faith to the 
 Eternal Lord, " for whose salvation he had waited," ^ 
 who peered dimly into those far distant days when 
 
 » Gen. xlvii. 9. = Gen. xlix. 18. 
 
224 ESAU AND JACOB. 
 
 Shiloh ^ should come ; and whose name is, therefore, 
 rightly added to the great roll of the heroes of faith 
 drawn up for us by the author of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews, the long roll of those who "out of weak- 
 ness were made strong," ^ and who died in faith of 
 promises which they did not themselves receive, but 
 only beheld afar off. 
 
 Of Esau, we know but little, except as the victim of 
 his brother's misdeeds ; otherwise there would not be 
 much about him that would attract our sympathies. 
 He stands before us wild, headstrong, impetuous, with- 
 out stability, without reverence, — witness his carefully 
 laying himself out to vex and annoy his father's old 
 age — a character summed up in the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews by the single epithet " profane." ^ His life 
 is, from a worldly point of view, successful ; he, no less 
 than Jacob, attains to wealth and power : but there 
 is in his case no sense of failure or incompleteness, no 
 hint that it ever occurred to him that he might do 
 wrong, or that he could sin as well as be sinned against. 
 He remains the type of a character that is sometimes 
 mistakenly thought generous, because the man, if at 
 the moment his own interests are untouched, is reckless 
 and indifferent, and so outwardly good-natured ; a 
 character with no respect for duty and no thought of 
 
 1 Gen. xlix. 10. ,2 Heb. xi. 34. 
 
 ^ Heb. xii. 16. jSe/STjAos. Bishop Westcott says the word describes 
 a character which recognizes nothing as higher than earth : for whom 
 nothing is sacred ; no divine reverence for the unseen. 
 
ESAU AND JACOB. 225 
 
 responsibility, seeking only at each moment to get 
 its own way, and to gratify its own selfish desires. 
 
 My brethren, we dare not play with onr respon- 
 sibilities ; although to do so may win for us ease, or 
 secure for us popular applause and temporary good- 
 will. When life is too full, too complete, too satisfy- 
 ing, we may well be made very thoughtful : never to 
 know ourselves in the wrong, never to have any suspicion 
 of failure, never to feel the potter's hand ^ or to be con- 
 scious of the whirling of the wheel, never to surrender 
 ourselves to that unseen Power which, through the 
 press and push of outward circumstance, is fashioning 
 and moulding us ; this, however pleasant it may seem 
 at the time to avoid the discipline of life, is to miss 
 the purpose for which we are here in the world. 
 
 But, to most of us, I trust, in these weeks of 
 Lent, the lesson of Jacob's life comes home. If we 
 know only little of ourselves, we know too well, I 
 fear, much that degrades and stains our lives as fatally 
 and as persistently as Jacob's falsehood stained and de- 
 graded his. The fact that, in spite of his weakness, he 
 is set before us in our Bibles as one whom God could 
 commend and love, should be of real help to us when 
 we feel, as we so often do, how wearisome, how utterly 
 hopeless our struggle seems to be with the sins 
 that so easily beset us. Only remember this : Jacob 
 did not win his pre-eminence because he was deceitful, 
 
 ^ CI". Browning's "Rohlii boii Y//.\\\.r 
 
 Q 
 
226 ESAU AND JACOB. 
 
 but because lie fought against the evil, and after long 
 years conquered it. His story illustrates, in those 
 long-past days, all our Blessed Lord taught His 
 Apostles as to endurance being the first condition of 
 safety, " He that shall endure unto the end, the same 
 shall be saved." ^ The lesson is the old lesson, old 
 and well worn, but yet always to be steadily insisted 
 on ; the lesson of the duty of perseverance in spite 
 of all failure and all weakness, and, if I may say 
 it without danger of being misunderstood, even in 
 spite of all lapses into sin. 
 
 ' St. Matt. xxiv. 13. 
 
XXIV. 
 
 CSob^s Fofce must hz l^eartr in i\\t QLMn\% of 
 present iButies. 
 
 " And he said, Nay, father Abraham : but if one went unto them from 
 the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear 
 not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, 
 though one rose from the dead." — St. Luke xvi. 30, 31. 
 
 (First Sunday after Trinity, May 31, 1891.) 
 
 One of the special characteristics of the days in which 
 we are living is the vast increase of knowledge. When 
 we say this we do not mean merely that men have 
 learned more facts or accumulated large additional 
 stores of information : the change goes much deeper 
 than this ; it is a change of method quite as much as of 
 material : the last fifty years have seen what amounts 
 to a practical revolution in our ways of thinking. The 
 consequences of this affect us all, unlearned as well 
 as learned ; all at least who live in a University must 
 perforce breathe this quickened keener atmosphere ; 
 we are the children of our age, and we share all that it 
 has to give us, whether we; turn its gifts to our gain or 
 to our loss. 
 
228 THE CLAIMS OF PRESENT DUTIES, 
 
 Think only of two points : first, the great develop- 
 ment of historical research. The past that seemed so 
 far away has been brought very close to us. Whole 
 nations, as we have been well reminded, have been 
 called out of their graves; and as we have been 
 brought into closer contact with them we have found 
 the men and women of those long-past times to be, 
 after all, of the same flesh and blood, the same 
 capacities, the same weaknesses as ourselves — to be, 
 indeed, in all things men of like passions with our- 
 selves. No doubt we can point to many and great 
 differences between ourselves and them ; but these lie 
 often on the surface of things and lose something of 
 their prominence as we better understand the conditions 
 of that older life. One thing, however, we have learned 
 with perfect certainty ; and that is that all national and 
 social growth and development that have in themselves 
 real elements of stability or permanence are univer- 
 sally very gradual and very slow, and can only be 
 measured and understood when they are followed 
 through many years, and even ages, of silent and 
 progressive change. And then, secondly, side by side 
 with this development of historical insight, there has 
 been given us a clearer idea of the evolution of the 
 world in which we live ; and while the past we can 
 reach in written record has J^een bridged over and 
 brought so much nearer to us, the past written in rocks 
 and stones, in the hills and valleys around us has 
 
THE CLAIMS OF PRESENT DUTIES, 229 
 
 revealed itself as far more complex than men used 
 to suppose : so that while historical time has appeared 
 to contract, geological time has stretched itself ont 
 into ages that are often difficult for us to grasp or even 
 conceive.^ But here again, as we have learned the 
 story of our planet, we have found one note dominant 
 through all its changes, and that is their slowness and 
 gradualness : noAvhere is there any hurry or confusion 
 or suddenness ; all moves onward in quiet orderliness, 
 here a little and there a little ; the result, unseen and 
 imperceptible at the time, discernible only after long 
 waiting — the unnoticed, unmeasurable, and yet cease- 
 less movement bringing, in the lapse of time, its 
 certain growth, modification, and development. 
 
 There are two classes of minds who, in different 
 ways but with the same practical result, are always 
 ready to throw the blame of their failure, whether in- 
 tellectual, or moral, or spiritual, on the particular cir- 
 cumstances of the special time in which they live, and 
 to find in these the complete excuse for their break- 
 down. The fault is not in themselves: with their 
 temperament the conditions of their lives gave them 
 no real chance. Men of one cast of mind decorate 
 
 ^ At present geological speculation on the, physical side suggests 
 that we cannot draw upon a past of quite indefinite duration, and that 
 probably some reduction must be made in the very long periods of time 
 that have hitherto been suggested as necessary to explain the develop- 
 ment of the world. But, however this may be, geological time must 
 remain enormously great compared with historical time. 
 
230 THE CLAIMS OF PRESENT DUTIES, 
 
 the past with every kind of ideal virtue ; and as they 
 dream of the ages of faith in which they would have 
 lived, find excuses for their unbelief and faithlessness 
 in the difficulties that belong specially to their days, 
 and press with such severity on men of their peculiar 
 characteristics : while others, as they look on to a future, 
 entirely visionary and ideal, imagine that there are in 
 themselves possibilities of moral and spiritual develop- 
 ment, which would be realized if only this or that 
 or the other obstacle which is just now in their way 
 could be removed ; if the world, or the church, or 
 society, could be at once re-organized according to 
 their ideas of what each should be. The latter are 
 impressed with the idea that they are born too soon, 
 the former are sure that they have lived too late in 
 the world's history. 
 
 If nothing else were to be said, the utter futility of 
 all such hypothetical positions should be their complete 
 condemnation for healthy minds. And all that we 
 have learned as to the conditions of growth around us, 
 all that we have learned in our fuller knowledge of the 
 days that have gone before us, as we have been brought 
 into closer contact with them, teaches us, and that with 
 no uncertain voice, the same lesson our Lord teaches 
 in the w^ords of the text — a lesson which should silence 
 for ever all such vain imag'lnings. Men are them- 
 selves and themselves only : in the historical and 
 spiritual spheres no less than in the physical, the old 
 
THE CLAIMS OF PRESENT DUTIES, 231 
 
 saying liolcis good, "Coelum, non animum, mutant, 
 qui trans mare currunt." Dives pleads for his brothers 
 that something startling should be done in their 
 behalf, lest they, too, should wreck their lives as com- 
 pletely as he had wrecked his own ; and the answer 
 is not as to what they would have, or should have, 
 or might have, but as to what they have — " They 
 have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them." 
 Dives objects that this is not enough, and implores that 
 more might be done for them ; for, he says, " If one 
 went unto them from the dead they will repent." And 
 once again the same reply is given him, " If they hear 
 not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be 
 persuaded though one rose from the dead." 
 
 When we speak of the difficulties that belong to 
 particular times and circumstances, we forget that even 
 in the darkest days God has never left Himself without 
 a witness ; that each age has its peculiar graces and 
 gifts as well as its peculiar dangers ; that God in sundry 
 places and in divers manners has spoken in times past 
 to men, and that the same God who spoke in the past 
 reveals Himself now in our own day to us ; and if we 
 cannot hear His voice now we may be sure that, even 
 if one came to us from the dead, we should still refuse 
 to hear it. 
 
 When our Lord lived in bodily form on earth, men 
 felt considerable wonder as they saw who they were 
 who received and acknowledged Him, and who they 
 
232 THE CLAIMS OF PRESENT DUTIES. 
 
 were who rejected Him. In fact, under the surface of 
 visible things a new and mysterious force began to 
 act, a nev/ line of cleavage began to show itself in 
 human society ; ^ it knew nothing of social or ecclesi- 
 astical distinctions, it ignored the test of external 
 respectability ; the law of its action men could not 
 trace then, nor have they been able in the centuries 
 that have since elapsed to determine its course ; on 
 the one side were those who, in the words of the Gospel, 
 had faith, on the other side were those who had it not. 
 Now, as then, there are the faithful and the faithless ; 
 now, as then, if we could see below the surface, we 
 should be astonished to knoAV who belonged to the 
 former, and who to the latter. These are matters into 
 which we cannot penetrate : but to those who will hear, 
 God's voice speaks to-day as clearly as it has spoken in 
 the past. If we cannot hear it now, then neither the 
 thunders of Sinai nor the miracle of the first Easter 
 Day could teach us anything. 
 
 The living power of God in this living, breathing 
 present, as surely as in the hour of creation or the 
 day of redemption — this is the truth the Church of 
 Christ has to insist upon. To-day, as surely as when 
 St. Paul preached at Athens, God is not far from any 
 one of us ; now, as then, in Him we live and move 
 and have our being. If we cannot read the pages set 
 wide open around us and within us, if the heavens do not 
 
 ^ Cf. Ecce Homo, Christ's winnowing fan. 
 
THE CLAIMS OF PRESENT DUTIES. 233 
 
 declare His glory, if His voice has no message to our 
 hearts and consciences, then, even though one rose 
 from the dead we should not repent. The fault is not 
 in our circumstances, it is in ourselves ; carry us 
 whithersoever you may, mere change in space or time 
 will never give us that gift of sight without which we 
 cannot recognize the kingdom of God. 
 
 The lessons of the past are given us to guide and 
 strengthen us for our work in the present; they are not 
 given us to make us discontented, or that we may cast 
 Avistful eyes back to a condition of things that appear 
 to us so much more to our taste than the days in which 
 we live. The impulse and enthusiasm of hope are ours 
 that we may be ready to work for a future we shall 
 never see ; they are not given us that we may build 
 magnificent castles in the air, and then grow listless and 
 dissatisfied because we may not live in them. We may 
 be certain it is indolence or pride that whispers to us 
 that we are so greatly superior to the days in which 
 we are called on to live and work ; that excuses our 
 inaction on the groimd that everything is wrong and 
 that we can do little or nothing to right it ; that bids 
 us stand aside in lazy despair while we soothe our dis- 
 content with cynical epigrams. 
 
 We are, many of us, almost of necessity bound to 
 the past by the closest ties; changes are distressing 
 to us and sometimes bring a pain that must be felt to 
 be understood. This is our peculiar tone and cast of 
 
234 THE CLAIMS OF PRESENT DUTIES, 
 
 mind ; we can no more help it tlian we can help the 
 length of our arms or the colour of our hair. Still 
 these very circumstances assign us our work and our 
 duty, for the conservative forces have a true place in 
 the evolution of life. But, because changes come about 
 that we do not like, to lose faith and hope and to 
 find excuse for bitterness and despondency, is to deny 
 in act the words we Sunday by Sunday repeat with 
 our lips, "I believe in Grod the Father Almighty, 
 Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible 
 and invisible." 
 
 To see one's own cherished fancies set aside ; 
 to feel the set of some strong current of thought and 
 action against one; to be generous and fair, and at 
 the same time true to the side of truth which God has 
 taught us ; to be sympathetic without being flabby ; 
 to be considerate and open-hearted and yet true to 
 principle ; to work heartily for the many — as was once 
 finely said from this place — while we think with the 
 few ; ^ to be true to the last word of what we believe, 
 and yet to understand that God does not work as we 
 men work ; to know that much we build, much, it may 
 be, on which we spend years of thought and energy, may 
 yet be unable to stand the trial by fire that shall try 
 each man's work of what sort it is — that there is much 
 of wood, hay, straw, and stubble, that will and ought 
 
 ^ In a sermon preached at a college service by the Bishop of 
 Lincoln when he was Canon of Christ Church. 
 
THE CLAIMS OF PRESENT DUTIES. 235 
 
 to perish, although, in God's mercy, through the fire 
 and the loss the man shall reach his own purification ; 
 to understand something of all this, and then with 
 sincere and steady purpose to do the work which God 
 has given us to do ; this surely is the duty laid upon 
 us as the servants of Jesus Christ. It is, no doubt, a 
 high ideal, and we may well ask, who can be sufficient for 
 these things ? But we are not left to work in our own 
 strength ; we have the witness of God our Heavenly 
 Father with us, if only we will receive it ; His witness 
 in the long story of His dealings with past ages of 
 our race ; His witness in the book of Nature spread 
 open round us ; and, far more than these, His witness 
 in our hearts and consciences. He has given us all 
 we need ; and we may rest assured of this, that if we 
 cannot hear His voice that speaks to us now, then no 
 miracle, no catastrophe, however it may thrill or 
 horrify or appal us, could bring us to a true repentance 
 or rouse us to a clear knowledge of what are the real 
 issues of life and of death. 
 
XXY. 
 
 " Josiis Christ is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and for ever." 
 — Heb. xiii. 8 (R.V.). 
 
 (Second Sunday in Lent, March 13, 1892.) 
 
 Our creed lias come to each of us in some special 
 outward dress, and under definite external conditions 
 and circumstances; and we, not unnaturally, attach 
 great importance to these surroundings. The more 
 sincere and true our faith, the more keenly shall we 
 reverence all that is linked with our religious life 
 in the past ; especially all that belongs to child-days, 
 and brings, it may be, before the thoughts the memory 
 of some one, now lost to us, who first taught us to 
 think of God as our Father in Heaven. And yet — 
 and we do well to remember it — much that we value 
 so highly may be, after all, of no vital moment ; we 
 may be making the mistake of setting things that are 
 accidental in the place of things that are essential; 
 we may, in our blindness, be substituting for God's 
 truth human inventions and human ideals ; in our 
 
THE ONE LORD. ?.yj 
 
 care and zeal for the casket we may be in danger of 
 forgetting the jewel for the protection and safety of 
 which it was ordained. 
 
 Does not this explain why some people are so 
 easily persuaded that the faith of Christ is in jeopardy 
 and that the foundations of the Church are being- 
 undermined ? They are alarmed because a movement is 
 going forward which threatens their cherished fancies ; 
 because a change is impending which interferes with 
 their prejudices. Perhaps, in the course of time, that 
 which they dreaded so much comes about, and when 
 the storm of controversy has passed by, they find that, 
 after all, the Church of Christ stands as secure as it ever 
 did. It may be the march of events has shown them, 
 that this which they thought so great an aid to faith 
 was rather a stumblingblock in its way, while that 
 which was supposed to supply motive power was only 
 a drag and a hindrance. Others, again, sanguine 
 men, born reformers, have their peculiar moods and 
 fancies. They are apt to think that the world would 
 be a very good place if they could have the ordering 
 of it : in the re-constituted Christian society of their 
 imagination all problems and difficulties solve them- 
 selves. Perhaps they live to see reforms they wished 
 for carried out ; but, after all is done, things are much 
 the same as they were before. Certainly the offence 
 of the Cross has not ceased, as it certainly never will 
 cease, while time shall last. Tlie conservative and 
 
238 THE ONE LORD, 
 
 tlie reformer alike have misunderstood tlie conditions 
 of the problem : each, no doubt, has his part and 
 place in the movement of the world, each can give his 
 mite to the common stock; but both have to learn 
 that they must look for the realities that are the life 
 of the Faith in other things than those which, in 
 their hope or their despair, they had thought of such 
 paramount importance. We need not be disheartened 
 by our mistakes; we have this treasure, St. Paul 
 teaches us, in earthen vessels : — 
 
 " Our little systems have their day ; 
 
 They have their day and cease to be ; 
 
 They are but broken lights of Thee, 
 
 And Thou, O Lord, art more than they." * 
 
 But we make a mistake if, on this account, we 
 think lightly of the systems : through them each 
 one of us, if he is in earnest, has learned something 
 of the truth that God has been teaching us; the 
 vessels are earthen, but they bear the revelation of 
 God Himself to the human soul. Sir Walter Scott, 
 in one of his most powerful books, has painted with 
 a master's hand the blind fanaticism of the covenanters' 
 army that fought at Bothwell Bridge. Not many 
 pages later in the story we are given an account of 
 the trial, the torturing, and the condemnation to 
 death of one of the leaders, 'Macbriar, who accepts his 
 
 ' Tennyson's " In Memoriam," 
 
THE ONE LORD. 239 
 
 sentence with these noble words ; " I forgive you, my 
 lords, for what you have appointed and I have sus- 
 tained — and why should I not? Ye send me to a 
 happy exchange — to the company of angels and the 
 spirits of the just for that of frail dust and ashes ; 
 ye send me from darkness into day, from mortality 
 to immortality, and, in a word, from earth to heaven ! 
 If the thanks, therefore, and pardon of a dying man 
 can do you good, take them at my hand, and may your 
 last moments be as happy as mine." ^ The contrast 
 between this scene and the fanatical excesses that 
 precede it is so marked, that it is not easy at first 
 sight to connect them with the same people : but pain 
 and death are two great touchstones of human character 
 and test men to the quick ; under all that may seem 
 so wild and grotesque, there can grow, by the grace 
 of God, as the result of the discipline of life, a faith 
 that can make men heroes and martyrs, and prepare 
 them to meet even death itself. 
 
 To a large extent, it is true, we are not responsible 
 for the external circumstances which go so far to 
 mould and determine our lives; whether they are 
 hopeful or the reverse, whether they are bright 
 or cheerless, they are so far quite independent of 
 us. But if we are inclined to be despondent about 
 our own peculiar anxieties arising out of these con- 
 ditions, we may well remember we are not the first 
 
 ' " Old Mortality," chap. xxxv. 
 
240 THE ONE LORD. 
 
 who have felt thus, as we certainly shall not be the 
 last. In Bishop Butler's days, men supposed Chris- 
 tipouity to be now at last dead, and thought and spoke 
 as if nothing remained but to give it a decent and 
 respectful burial. Those who held to their faith at 
 that time can have had no easy task : they never 
 dreamed then that, before many years were over, the 
 faith of Christ would once more assert, as successfully 
 as ever, its unique and supreme claim on the lives and 
 consciences of men. The Wesleys, and all the great 
 movement associated with their name, first within the 
 Church, and afterwards, alas ! without it ; lEr. Simeon 
 and the evangelical school which set so clear a mark 
 on our sister university; and then, here in Oxford, 
 the Tractarian movement, the energy and impetus of 
 which is, in God's mercy, still unspent amongst us : 
 these things men, in Bishop Butler's day, could not 
 foresee. As we look back on them and think of those 
 who, under God, were the leaders in these revivals, so 
 different, so widely different as they have been, and 
 yet all alike such powerful instruments in moulding 
 the religious life of this century, we may well ask what 
 is the connecting link that binds them into one ? 
 What is the peculiar secret of their influence ? What 
 is it that unites together Wesley and Keble, Simeon 
 and Newman ? What is it ,that gives a place beside 
 them to the great Nonconformist preacher we have 
 but just now lost, Charles Spurgeon ? What is this 
 
THE ONE LORD. 241 
 
 gift which, while it adorns and sanctifies intellectual 
 eminence, can exist in fullest vigour where learning 
 is not ? The answer is, I believe, not far to seek : 
 these men all alike have a firm unwavering faith in 
 the Living Christ ; they are His servants, they spend 
 themselves and are spent in His service. He is 
 near them and with them in all they think or 
 do. He speaks through them and in them ; their 
 gifts and endowments, whatever they may be, great 
 or small, are as nothing and less than nothing, since 
 self is lost and swallowed up in devotion to Jesus, 
 their Master and their Lord. It is no uncommon thinir 
 to hear Churchmen and Catholics contrasted with 
 Puritans and Protestants, by saying that the religion 
 of the former is that of a Church, while the religion 
 of the latter is that of a book. Both these estimates 
 are incomplete and unfair. So far as the Puritan or 
 the Catholic is true to his creed, the religion of either 
 is the religion of a Person, of the Incarnate Son of 
 God. To so convinced a Protestant as Mr. Spurgeon 
 the book is nothing, save only for the sake of Him 
 who speaks by it to men ; who in its pages is brought 
 near to hearts and consciences that are weighed down 
 with the load of sin, or broken and bowed under the 
 crushing weight of pain or bereavement. The living- 
 Christ revealed in the pages of the gospels ; this 
 was the core of tlie message he had to deliver. Christ 
 our Lord spoke through him ; of this he never doubted ; 
 
 B 
 
242 THE ONE LORD. 
 
 and therefore week after week he was able to draw 
 together the thousands who depended on him for their 
 spiritual instruction, for the external support and 
 guidance of their spiritual life. 
 
 And the Church, and Church organization and ritual, 
 even the very Sacraments themselves — take away the 
 thought of Jesus Christ, and what remains ? Nothing 
 but empty and meaningless forms and ceremonies. 
 The Church and the Sacraments are what they are to 
 us because, and only because, they are the channels 
 to our souls of the grace of God; because in them 
 and through them He, the living Lord, comes near to 
 us to heal and to save : He comes to us in all our 
 weakness and foulness and sin with His gift of pardon 
 and cleansing ; He comes to sanctify all our joys, and to 
 sustain us in the day of pain and sorrow. Dr. Pusey's 
 sermons and teaching and Mr. Keble's " Christian Year " 
 do not set before men a barren ritual system, a Church 
 organization that is merely external : they speak of 
 the needs of the soul of man, of sin, and of sufiering 
 the necessary consequence of sin, of purity that has 
 been lost but which may be regained, and of holiness, of 
 peace, of joy, of love in the communion of the Holy 
 Spirit ; and then of the way open to all to attain 
 these graces through the Cross of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ. The Church is ^vbat she is because she 
 represents her Lord : the Church is His Body ; the 
 Sacraments are the channels of His grace, the means 
 
THE ONE LORD. 243 
 
 by which men are united to His death and share His 
 risen life ; in which He comes to men and dwells with 
 them and they with Him ; in which He makes them 
 members of Himself, of His Body, of His Flesh, and 
 of His Bones. And the same is true of the teaching 
 of our great Oxford Cardinal : when he passed within 
 the Roman communion, he no doubt accepted doctrines 
 and practices that seem to us to obscure the essential 
 truths of the Creed which he and we alike are 
 anxious to defend. But let us at least be just; 
 although doctrines and practices are accepted by the 
 Roman communion, which we hold to be doubtful 
 and dangerous, and likely to do positive harm to 
 men and women who make use of them, still the 
 prominent place in every church is given to the 
 Crucifix, and to Him Who died upon the cross for 
 men; we find, it is true, litanies and special devo- 
 tions to saints and angels which we think it quite 
 impossible to use, but the great service of all is 
 the daily and continual pleading of the Memorial 
 of the one Sacrifice once offered for the sins of the 
 whole world. 
 
 I do not mean to say that all such things can be 
 treated as matters of indifference by serious people. 
 We must be honest in dealing with these questions; 
 we must not palter with the truth as we have learned 
 to know it; but we may do all this and yet live 
 in charity with others. It is not, I allow, easy for us 
 
244 THE ONE LORD, 
 
 to understand how vast and many sided truth must 
 be, and yet to be absolutely faithful to those aspects 
 of it which we have learned ; to hold this truth with- 
 out any reserve, while we realize that God's word is 
 wider than we can grasp or comprehend : the task is 
 a hard one, but we may by God's grace fulfil it. We 
 know the gifts of the living Christ are bestowed on men 
 who are outside the borders of the historical church ; 
 we can only deny this if we resolutely shut our eyes 
 and refuse to look upon what God has done in the 
 world. But this does not lessen our responsibilities : 
 vve are linked, as we believe, in unbroken historical 
 descent with the Church of Apostolic days, and 
 therefore have a great trust committed to our charge 
 to guard and to use : if we would use it rightly we 
 must never forget that in all we teach and in all we 
 do we are powerless, except we, steadily forgetful of 
 everything else, proclaim to men Jesus Christ and Him 
 crucified ; since only in His name and in His living 
 present power can we fulfil the duty that has been so 
 solemnly laid upon us to advance His kingdom in 
 the souls of men. 
 
 We are living in an age when numbness and dead- 
 ness seem again to have stolen over the spiritual world : 
 here in Oxford, where the atmosphere quivers with 
 the least breath of hostile m^ovement, it needs some 
 tenacity of purpose to hold firm to Christian truth. 
 In the conversation of some of those ^vith uliom Ave 
 
THE ONE LORD. 245 
 
 associate, in reviews and general literature, there has 
 again grown up a way of speaking about Chris- 
 tianity as if it were a thing of the past. No doubt, 
 as a rule, it is spoken of respectfully and given a 
 very prominent place in the story of the world's 
 development ; but its claim, at least, as a revelation of 
 the supernatural, is supposed to be entirely set aside ; 
 its interest lies in the leading part it has played in 
 the evolution of Western civilization. We are not 
 careful to answer this : we read the Church's history 
 differently, and we know that, however carefully men 
 may seal the stone and set the watch, the Lord of 
 Life cannot be held in the bonds of death. " Jesus 
 Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, yea, and for ever;" 
 the storms of to-day will pass away, as the storms 
 of years long gone from us have spent themselves 
 before, and Christ our Lord will be again acknow- 
 ledged the Lord of the intellect, as He is the Saviour 
 of the souls of men. For us, it remains only that we 
 be found faithful — faithful to what we have learned, 
 faithful to what we may yet, if we will, learn of His 
 way and of His purpose for us. And if it be so, if we 
 seem to see nothing, to learn nothing, to understand 
 nothing, if no ray of certain light breaks through the 
 shadows that have gathered about our path, we can 
 still, " in our patience possess our souls ; " we can wait 
 and to the best of our power do the work that lies 
 before us waitino: to be done. God knows the task is 
 
246 THE ONE LORD. 
 
 at times a heavy one for some amongst us — God forgive 
 us that we are so often ready to despair, that so often 
 we will not and cannot trust Him ; God pardon those 
 of us who are so prone to think hard thoughts of 
 Him. 
 
XXVI. 
 
 "^"bt Hobe of C5otr, 
 
 '" As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved you." — St. John xv. 0. 
 (Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, October 30, 1892.) 
 
 The love of God ; none of us, believe me, know God 
 at all except so far as we know Him to be Love. God 
 is Love. This is the supreme revelation given us by 
 Jesus Christ. In this one sentence we find the sum 
 of the teaching of the New Testament as well as the 
 key to the Old. There is much in the Bible — we need 
 not hesitate to admit it — ^just as there is much in the 
 world we see about us, that is confusing and perplex- 
 ing, and very hard to understand ; much that at times 
 overwhelms us with almost unbearable doubt, that 
 hides away God's face from us, that seems to turn 
 His word into a threat and His world into a dungeon ; 
 but still He is Love. And yet how utterly impossible, 
 unthinkable, unprovable many \vill say ; look round 
 you at the men, women, and children that may be 
 found any day within but a small radius of our own 
 homes; how many a life is crushed under a load of 
 
248 THE LOVE OF GOD, 
 
 intolerable distress. Here is one halting through 
 the world with a broken and maimed body; here is 
 another stretched on a bed of sickness — sickness that 
 shall only end in death ; here is a third in the midst 
 of all his busy, eager work, pushing his way on as 
 best he may, bravely doing what he can, though 
 stricken with mortal disease. There is everywhere 
 pain and want ; there is weakness pitiful — oh, so 
 pitiful ! — there is sin so grim and so ghastly — sin 
 that far more often than we care to remember wraps 
 the child about from the hour of its birth, welcomes 
 it into the world, and then never leaves it, but steadily 
 stunts, pollutes, and at last destroys its life, without, 
 as far as man can see, giving it one smallest, slenderest 
 chance of any escape — and still, Grod is Love. 
 
 It is no wonder men find it hard to believe it ; 
 that at times they turn round in almost fierce rebellion 
 against any who would bid them receive such a doctrine 
 as this. In one sense, our strength becomes our weak- 
 ness, and our gain our loss. In the days in which we 
 live now, we have passed away from those old con- 
 ditions in which it was possible for men to be satisfied 
 to enjoy their own happiness and their own comfort ; 
 and, secure themselves, to give no heed to the 
 voice that bade them think how their brothers and 
 sisters in this great human family were living their 
 lives. We have passed, and we may be thankful for 
 it, far away from that smug Pharisaic ccsntentment 
 
THE LOVE OF GOD, 249 
 
 that could actually dare to thank Almighty Grod 
 that some had what others had not. The reason of 
 this is obvious : the world is smaller than it was ; 
 it is closer to us. I do not mean that the people who 
 live in the same village or street or town are closer 
 to us ; nor even our own countrymen, the inhabitants 
 of the densely crowded quarters of our over-populated 
 cities ; we have leaped over the narrow barriers of 
 seas and of oceans, and the sorrows of all who suffer 
 on the face of the whole earth are present to men's 
 minds with a force and a vividness that make them 
 only too oppressive realities. We understand and 
 feel for the mass of human suffering and sorrow and 
 sin as men have never felt before ; we know, as St. Paul 
 scarcely knew, the meaning of the words he spoke 
 when he declared that "the whole creation groans 
 and travails in pain." ^ It is not that we are so much 
 better than our fathers were ; it is the necessary con- 
 sequence of the increase of possibilities of intercourse, 
 through which mankind has been presented to our 
 thoughts as one great family huddled together on 
 this tiny planet, as it careers with inconceivable 
 velocity through the abysses of never-ending space. 
 
 The old question, "What is man, that Thou art 
 mindful of him ? " ^ is asked now with an emphasis 
 impossible in simpler days. Human life is present to 
 our thoughts in all its pathetic weakness; we know 
 
 ^ Rom. viii. 22. - Pb. viii. 4. 
 
250 THE LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 liow infinitesimally small we are ; we know the earth, 
 our present home, to be but a tiny speck among the 
 stupendous order of created things; and then, with 
 every fibre of our thoughts quivering with the sense 
 of man's utter insignificance, and so often, too, of his 
 hopeless and miserable failure, we are still bidden 
 to say that God is Love, and to believe Him to be in 
 deed and truth our Father in Heaven, full of most 
 tender pity for all His children. 
 
 When such questionings threaten to overwhelm 
 us, how can we find an answer that shall give us, I do 
 not say their solution — that may be impossible — but 
 that shall give answer enough to enable us to pause, 
 and be quiet and stand firm until the storm has passed 
 away. There is no answer that can be given, I firmly 
 believe, but that which is found in the clear assurance 
 of the reality of the life of the world to come. In the 
 assertion of a future life we reach — it is a mere truism — 
 the core of the Christian creed : in all ages of the 
 Church, apostles, martyrs, saints, confessors have borne 
 witness to their steadfast belief in this by dying, and, 
 which is sometimes far harder, by living for the things 
 that are unseen. How often and how sadly Christian 
 people at large have lost sight of this truth is only too 
 painfully evident. Men and women come to church and 
 make the solemn declaration,''' I look for the resurrec- 
 tion of the dead, and the life of the world to come," 
 and then go away and prove up to the hilt by the 
 
THE LOVE OF GOD. 251 
 
 way they live that what they have said with their lips 
 is a formula and nothing more. When illness comes 
 upon them, or in the hour of danger or difficulty, they 
 perhaps turn to their Creed ; but they do so mainly 
 with the thought that they may, if possible, escape 
 the danger, or that they may regain their health ; and, 
 to put it quite bluntly, the Church seems to be 
 regarded rather as a means of obtaining comfort or 
 well-being in this life than, as it is in fact, the 
 extension into the sphere of visible things of the 
 unseen world in which Christ gives His spiritual gifts 
 to men. 
 
 During the past summer most of us have been read- 
 ing something about the pilgrimage-trains which have 
 been carrying their sad burden of sick and dying to the 
 shrine at Lourdes. The unspeakable pathos of the sight 
 lay, it seems to me, in two things : firstly, that they 
 seemed to be in a sense sad and sorrowful representa- 
 tives of humanity in its pain, distress, and suffering ; 
 and, secondly, that the appeal made to the Mother 
 of our Lord was not so much that she would aid them 
 with spiritual gifts and graces, in order that they may 
 reach their home in the eternal world, but rather 
 that she would give them healing for their bodies, and 
 so enable them to enjoy their present life on earth. 
 
 I repeat, Ave need at this moment, perhaps as never 
 before, to hold fast to the belief in the world to come. 
 There are, it is true, those who do not think this : 
 
252 THE LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 they lool?: for^Aard to a millennium of perfect sanitation, 
 of widespread education, and of undisturbed social 
 equality, when life in the present shall be so full 
 and so satisfying that men will need to give no 
 thought to anything beyond it. It may be said that 
 such complete felicity is perhaps more problematical 
 than enthusiasts imagine : but, however this may be, 
 it is at least certain that no one alive now will live 
 long enough to see it. Reckless or desperate people 
 may try and hasten its advent ; but revolutions hinder 
 as much as they advance the progress of the world. 
 They destroy obnoxious rulers, they break up what 
 are called the governing classes ; they give the rein, 
 too, to the fiercest passions of envy and greed and 
 hate ; they have been sometimes the agents of a terrible 
 vengeance — a vengeance that seems to be almost 
 justified as men recall the provocation that led up to 
 it. ^Nevertheless, whether they are with or without 
 possibility of excuse, when the din and confusion and 
 tumult have cleared away, things are found to be but 
 little different from what they were before. Some who 
 were rich have become poor ; and some who were poor 
 have become rich ; that is all, or nearly all. Yiolence 
 such as this does little, often less than nothing, to 
 hasten forward the slow and silent movement through 
 which the will of God for man is being done. 
 
 And time which brings its social changes very slowly 
 brings with it also mental and moral development; 
 
THE LOVE OF GOD. 253 
 
 tliey are equally slow, but they have to be reckoned 
 with : so far there has come with our progress an 
 increase of sensitiveness ; our eyes are opened and 
 our ears unstopped, and we see and hear as men could 
 not in older days ; and it may well be that hereafter, 
 as man advances, the earthly millennium, with the 
 hope of which he cheats himself, will appear to recede 
 as he goes forward ; and if so, then the creed of the 
 Church of Christ will be more than ever his only 
 escape from the wretchlessness of a more complete 
 despair than we have ever known as yet. 
 
 Certainly, without the belief in the reality of the 
 world to come, the problem life puts before us is for the 
 men and women now living round us, so far, at all 
 events, as their own lives are concerned, simply inso- 
 luble ; with such a belief I do not say that it is solved, 
 only that its solution ceases to be practically unthink- 
 able. No doubt two wrongs do not make a right ; no 
 doubt cruelty and injustice suffered in this life cannot 
 be, as we say, made up in another : but we Christians 
 are, in one sense of the word, " Agnostics : " we frankly 
 admit that the problem is too complex for us to grasp 
 or to understand, and that the threads are tangled 
 beyond hope of our unravelling them ; only, since He 
 in whom we believe is Love, we are able to commit 
 ourselves, all our despairing thoughts, all the pain, 
 sorrow, distress Ave I'eel and kno\\ , all the far greatei*, 
 far lieavier burden which we du not knoA\', to the 
 
254 THE LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 Love of God, who we are convinced lias cared and will 
 care for all the creatures He has made. 
 
 Kecall once more the words of my text, and re- 
 member who they were to whom they were spoken. 
 "As the Father hath loved Me, so have I loved 
 you." Jesus Christ spoke these words to His dearest, 
 truest friends. How did He fulfil them ? He did not 
 call the Apostles to honour, but to dishonour ; not to 
 wealth, but to poverty ; not to success, but to disaster ; 
 some, at least, among them to the death of martyrdom. 
 Listen to the words of one who was not numbered Avith 
 them at the time, but who in suffering for Christ came 
 not one whit behind any among them : " Thrice was 
 I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered 
 shipwreck ; in journey ings often, in perils of waters, 
 in perils of robbers, in perils in the city, in perils 
 in the wilderness, in perils among false brethren ; in 
 weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger 
 and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." ^ 
 And in the end, St. Paul gave his life for the cause 
 of Christ, and, if the tradition may be trusted, died 
 with St. Peter a martyr's death at Kome. Through 
 all they suffered these men never doubted the love 
 of God, never doubted that Christ had given tliem 
 all, and more than all. He promised. " The love 
 of Christ constraineth us,"^ St. Paul cries; that 
 they may "know the love of Christ, which passeth 
 
 1 2 Cor. xi. 25. = 2 Cor. v. 14. 
 
THE LOVE OF GOD. 255 
 
 knowledge,"^ is his dearest hope for the Ephesian 
 Christians. Can we ask more for ourselves than they 
 received ? " O Lord, in Thee have I trusted ; let me 
 never be confounded " — this must be our prayer ; for, 
 as has been well said,^ to remain quite steady and un- 
 moved, a man must be either very brave or very 
 insensible : not all of us are very brave ; none, I hope, 
 are quite insensible. The confusions are before us, 
 and we may not wholly escape them; and so we 
 have the difficult task of holding fast to beliefs and 
 hopes under conditions of anxiety and strain that may 
 at times seem almost more than we can bear; but 
 if we, even in our greatest weakness, will dare to trust 
 in God, we shall not be altogether confounded. 
 
 Let me end as I began : God is Love ; we know 
 Him only so far as we know Him to be Love. This, 
 if we think a moment, will be the measure to us of 
 how little we know Him, perhaps it will teach us 
 that we do not know Him at all. The preacher's lips 
 may well falter as he speaks of such things as these ; 
 but in the faithful discharge of his commission he 
 is called to speak of much which he can but dimly 
 understand, which is again and again the measure 
 to him of his own completest failure. But, it may be, 
 his words may kindle others, and aid them in their 
 struggle up to heights he sees afar off, but may never 
 
 ' Eph. iii. 19. 
 
 "^ "Village Sermons," by Dean Church, p. 163. 
 
256 THE LOVE OF GOD. 
 
 reach himself: should this be so for one single life, 
 his prayer is more than answered ; if only in the end, 
 when the work of life is done, he who speaks and 
 they who hear may one and all reach the eternal 
 fruition of the Love of God, himself in the last and 
 lowest place, as God wills and when God wills, but 
 only without shame and without sin.^ 
 
 ^ Bishop Andrcwcs' " Devotions." 
 
XXYII. 
 
 * O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord : praise Him and exalt 
 Him above all for ever."— Song of the Three Holy Children, 35. 
 
 (Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity, October 29, 1893.) 
 
 " Let us sing the song of the Three Children which 
 they sang as they blessed the Lord in the furnace 
 of fire."^ These are very familiar words to many 
 of us : they are the opening words of the thanksgiving 
 which we are accustomed to use when we have been 
 present at the service of the Holy Communion ; with 
 this thought set prominently before us we are wont to 
 summon all the energies of our souls to render thanks 
 to Almighty God for His great mercies vouchsafed to 
 us in the Sacrament of our Lord's Body and Blood. 
 " They blessed the Lord in the furnace of fire ; " here in 
 one single sentence is summed up a whole philosophy 
 of the Christian life. Trial, temptation, distress, 
 affliction, pain, suffering — these or some of these are 
 always present with us, and we must bow our heads 
 
 * " Treasury of Devotion," Thanksgiving after Communion. 
 
 S 
 
258 THANKSGIVING. 
 
 and thankfully accept them. Through them all, if 
 we are called on to endure them, we must be patient ; 
 and for the trial and the discipline, whatever it may- 
 be, however it may meet us, we must be ready to 
 thank and bless God. 
 
 This certainly is no very easy or obvious view 
 of life. To many in this place, in full health and 
 strength, and under the favoured conditions they 
 enjoy, it may well seem an impossible one. Of the 
 ordinary anxieties and troubles of many of our fellow - 
 men we know practically nothing. All the necessaries, 
 and many even of the luxuries of life, come to us 
 we scarcely know how or think how. AVe have never 
 known the stern experience of hundreds — or rather 
 thousands — of men, women, and children around us, 
 who cannot tell from day to day where their next 
 meal is to come from. The simple primary meaning 
 of the petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," 
 is one that does not occur to us as we use it : we have 
 never been starving; we have never been in distress 
 for want of necessary clothing, or in actual suffering 
 because we could not afford a fire in the biting cold 
 of winter. Again, like all other men, we have 
 capacities for pleasure and amusement, and the days 
 as they come bring to us, with the minimum of 
 forethought and anxiety on our part, our full share in 
 these. We are fond of sport, or we are fond of games, 
 and opportunities abound to us which we may rightly 
 
THANKSGIVING. 259 
 
 use in satisfying our desires. And then, once more, 
 to rise to higher things, there are all the gifts that 
 belong to a place of culture ; those great intellectual 
 interests which all of us who are members of this 
 House, by our presence here, at least profess to set 
 some store by. These the wonderful wealth of oppor- 
 tunity that Oxford sets within our reach gives us 
 ample means to enjoy to the full. 
 
 No doubt in all such things there is a share of 
 real and true discipline. We can do nothing with- 
 out some effort. If we would play a game well, we 
 must give time and thought to practise it. Cer- 
 tainly, in intellectual matters, if we will not face 
 the drudgery of hard work we shall never win the 
 gift of wide and sound learning. Besides this there 
 is also the real discipline of failure, the sometimes 
 almost severer discipline of success. But making 
 as fall allowance as we can on grounds such as 
 these, it must of necessity remain true that we have 
 as yet done little more than touch the fringe of the 
 stern ordeal which life will surely mean for us. All 
 our activities seem to realize themselves without let 
 or hindrance; the happiness of success is only not 
 less than the happiness of failure. We are trying 
 our powers in a new and unknown world ; its possibilities 
 seem unlimited, nor can its hopes just now be clouded 
 by disappointment. Kejoice, young man, in thy youth ; 
 but do not entirely forget the added warning, for all 
 
26o THANKSGIVING. 
 
 this God will bring thee into judgment. Remember, 
 therefore, now thy Creator before the evil days come.-^ 
 
 Yes ; hitherto we have learned very little of what 
 our probation here means ; we have sunk no plummet 
 into the hidden and secret depths of life; we have 
 little idea of its possibilities, little conception of the 
 demands it will sooner or later make upon us. So far, 
 for most of us, life has been steadily prosperous, and 
 Christianity has no message but one of serious and 
 solemn warning to the successful and prosperous man. 
 " Woe to you rich ! for ye have received your consola- 
 tion."^ "Woe unto you, when all men shall speak 
 well of you ! " ^ " When thou shalt have eaten and 
 be full ; then beware lest thou forget the Lord." ^ 
 "Man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the 
 things which he possesseth." ^ " This night shall thy 
 soul be required of thee : then whose shall those 
 things be?"^ Be glad, then, and rejoice in all the 
 happiness life brings you. Yes ; but take care some- 
 times, if only for an hour now and then, to be still, 
 and to think and to remember whose you are and 
 whom you serve. Use the gifts that are poured out 
 upon you in such unstinted measure; but each 
 morning pray for grace to use them unselfishly. The 
 sorrows of life, if they do not actually touch you, 
 
 ^ Eccles. xi. 9 and xii. 1. ^ g^ L^j-g yj 24. 
 
 3 St. Luke;vi. 26. * Deut. vi. 11, 12. 
 
 5 St. Luke xii. 15. « St. Luke xii. 20. 
 
THANKSGIVING. l(i\ 
 
 are near enough round about you, close by the 
 homes in which you live so happily and lie so softly. 
 In many ways, direct and indirect, you may if you will 
 share them, and in sharing them win discipline for 
 yourselves and lighten the burden for those who are 
 called upon to suffer. 
 
 The successful, smooth, prosperous life is not the 
 normal life : here and there — more seldom probably 
 than is generally imagined — it is found; but sooner 
 or later the years must bring the trials that will test us 
 to the quick. There is the discipline of pain. As we 
 grow older there is rarely a single day in our lives 
 when we have not present to our thoughts one or 
 another known to us, perhaps very close to us, cast 
 down bound into the midst of the fiery furnace of 
 physical pain, and called upon, — impossible, incon- 
 ceivable as it may seem, — to thank God for what they 
 have to bear. And there are men and women who 
 can thank God, and do thank Him, in their pain. The 
 parish priest who knows his people has seen them ; 
 not often, perhaps, but one here and another there ; and 
 they are his evidences of Christianity; he needs no 
 other ; and as he watches the patience and the faith that 
 grace can bestow, he thanks God and takes courage. 
 
 But we may, at all events for some years, escape 
 the discipline of pain; from the moment we become 
 responsible agents we cannot escape the discipline 
 of temptation. If it seemed an impossible demand 
 
262 THANKSGIVING. 
 
 on us when we are told to thank God for physical 
 suffering, it will seem a far more impossible demand 
 that we should be called upon to thank Him for 
 temptation. "My brethren, count it all joy," St. 
 James writes, " when ye fall into divers temptations ; 
 knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh 
 patience. But let patience have her perfect work, 
 that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing." ^ 
 " Think it not strange," writes St. Peter, " concerning 
 the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some 
 strange thing happened unto you."^ "We glory 
 in tribulations also : " says St. Paul, " knowing that 
 tribulation worketh patience." ^ Temptation, probation, 
 is the will of God for us, and we must bow our heads 
 and thankfully accept it. 
 
 This is no doubt a hard saying; but there are 
 two considerations that may help us to receive it. 
 First, the innocence of cliildhood is very pretty, very 
 winning, and very graceful ; but it is fragile, and has 
 no strength or vitality in it. The innocence of the 
 man who knowing evil has conquered it — or, as it 
 is truer to say, is with steady determination fighting 
 the battle of holiness, and striving all he knows, under 
 every difficulty, by God's grace to bring every thought 
 into captivity to the obedience of Christ — this has 
 strength and substance and reality in it ; it is innocence, 
 not ignorance ; and it is ours, and can only be ours, 
 
 ' St. James i. 2-4. = 1 St. Peter iv. 12. ^ ^^^^ ^ 3 
 
THANKSGIVING. , 263 
 
 when we have passed through the fiery ordeal of the 
 temptations of life. 
 
 And next, as we read the story of the life of Jesus 
 Christ, and remember who He was, and what He did 
 for us, as we place ourselves in thought once again 
 at the foot of His Cross, we surely take close home 
 to ourselves that old reproach, "All this I have 
 done for thee, what hast thou done for Me ? " If 
 any earthly friend is very dear to us, our first thought 
 is, how can we most simply, most unobtrusively and, 
 therefore, most sincerely, prove our love. Christ our 
 Lord bids us prove our love for Him ; and the one way 
 to do so is to give Him ourselves; the one answer 
 to His question is something like this :— For Thy 
 sake, and for love of Thee, I have striven after good- 
 ness ; I have held steadily on my way in my struggle 
 with the assaults of the flesh, and with the many 
 temptations that beset me and goad me on to sin; 
 I have striven to forgive, as I pray to be forgiven; 
 I have done what I could to follow among men the 
 things that make for peace, that lead to holiness. 
 Kot many of us, perhaps, can dare to say such things 
 as these ; rather we must say, — we have tried to live 
 the life which by God's grace we should, but we 
 have failed, often sadly, sometimes ruinously; still 
 at least we have tried, and in the strength of His 
 unchanging love Ave will try again and again as 
 long as our probation lasts. 
 
264 THANKSGIVING. 
 
 "They sang as they blessed the Lord in the 
 furnace of fire." The triumphant cry of the Benedicite, 
 " all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord, praise 
 Him and exalt Him above all for ever," can only be 
 ours when our thoughts take a wider range than our 
 eyes can see or our senses understand, when the seen 
 is lost in the unseen and the temporal in the eternal ; 
 in a word, when we can make our own the bright hope 
 of immortality set before us in our Bibles. Then 
 the trials of the present hour vanish away from our 
 thoughts as we look on, with longing but patient 
 hope, to the day when St. John's words shall at last 
 have their complete fulfilment, " Behold, the tabernacle 
 of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, 
 and they shall be His people, and God Himself 
 shall be with them, and be their God. kxA God shall 
 wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall 
 be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither 
 shall there be any more pain : for the former things 
 are passed away. And He that sat upon the throne 
 said, Behold, I make all things new. It is done. I 
 am Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. 
 I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain 
 of the Avater of life freely. He that overcometh shall 
 inherit all things ; and I will be his God, and he shall 
 be My son." ^ 
 
 ' Eev. xxi. 3-7. 
 
XXVIII. 
 '©jbe 23earin9 of tit ODtoss. 
 
 " [f any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up 
 his cross, and follow Me." — St. Matt. xvi. 24. 
 
 (Second Sunday in Lent, February 18, 1894,) 
 
 " The idea of these words," says Mr. Kuskin, " has 
 been exactly reversed by modern Protestantism, which 
 sees in the Cross, not a furca to which it is to be nailed ; 
 bnt a raft on which it, and all its valuable properties, 
 are to be floated into Paradise." ^ We need but super- 
 ficial knowledge of current ways of speaking and writing 
 among some religious people to know that there is 
 much that goes a good way to excuse or to justify this 
 very severe criticism. It may, perhaps, be worth while 
 to consider for a moment how this comes to be so. 
 
 St. Paul is emphatically the preacher of the Cross ; 
 and, as we think of him, there are, it seems to me, two 
 characteristics which stand out most obviously, and at 
 once challenge our attention. The first of them is his 
 sense of sin. St. Paul's idea of sin cannot be expressed 
 
 » "Bible of Amiens," J. Kuskin, p. 124. 
 
266 THE BEARING OF THE CROSS. 
 
 in negative terms. To him it is no abstract idea, no 
 negation of good, no mere absence of qualities that are 
 useful or meritorious, no mere contradiction of pru- 
 dential considerations, no mere disobedience to natural 
 laws. Sin is something real, positive, I had almost 
 said tangible ; it clings about men, tainting, defiling, 
 degrading them. It is an enemy close to them, personal, 
 overmastering, holding them fast bound in fetters and 
 chains, a power to which they are by nature sold to be 
 bondslaves. Kecall his description of moral evil in 
 the Gentile world in the first chapter of the Epistle to 
 the Komans ; it gives one of the most appalling 
 pictures of human degradation that we can imagine. 
 But the Jew is found to be no better than the Gentile ; 
 St. Paul passes on at once to show that the former, 
 with all his privileges, was the bondslave of the same 
 master : Jews and Gentiles, both alike, are found to be 
 fast bound in the chains of sin. No one escapes the 
 slavery ; " I," he cries, " am carnal, sold under sin " : ^ 
 and, in one of his latest Epistles, he says, Christ Jesus 
 came to save sinners, of whom I am chief; — wy wpwrog 
 eijuLL iyoj ^ — in his mouth this is no conventional phrase ; 
 it is the natural and necessary expression of a j)erfectly 
 candid and sincere soul. 
 
 And next, over against his conception of sin there is 
 set the possibility of delivefance from sin through the 
 Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Here was the heart of 
 
 * Rom. vii. 14. 2 j rp-^^^ • ^^ 
 
THE BEARING OF THE CROSS. 267 
 
 his Grospel ; the glad tidings, to carry Avhich through- 
 out the world, he willingly gave all that he had — and 
 that was much — of energy, enthusiasm, and intellectual 
 and moral gifts. " Being justified," he writes, " freely 
 by His grace through the redemption that is in 
 Christ Jesus : whom God set forth to be a propitiation, 
 through faith, by His Blood ; " ^ and, again, " In 
 Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in 
 the Blood of Christ " ; ^ and, again, " Having blotted 
 out the bond written in ordinances that was against 
 us, which was contrary to us : and He hath taken it out 
 of the way, nailing it to the Cross." ^ kSin and the 
 redemption from sin — they stand over against each 
 other. " The good which I would I do not : but the evil 
 which I would not, that I practise. But if what I would 
 not, that I do, it is no more I that do it, but sin which 
 dwelleth in me. Oh, wretched man that I am ! who 
 shall deliver me out of the body of this death ? I thank 
 Grod through Jesus Christ our Lord." ^ Man as man 
 could not help himself ; he was tied and bound in the 
 chains of his sins. The deliverance came, as it only 
 could come, of the free gift of Almighty God in the 
 mercy of the Incarnation, in the life and death of Jesus 
 Christ. The sense of wonder and astonishment at this 
 gift never leaves the Apostle ; it thrills and penetrates 
 his whole being ; and again and again he turns aside in 
 
 » Rom. iii. 24. - Epli. ii. 13. 
 
 3 Col. ii. 14. ■> Rom. vii. 19, 20, 24, 25. 
 
268 THE BEARING OF THE CROSS. 
 
 the midst of his argument to pour out, in one doxology 
 or another, his thanks to God, the Giver of all good ; 
 " Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and 
 the knowledge of God ! how unsearchable are His judg- 
 ments, and His ways past tracing out ! " ^ 
 
 AVhen men think of sin as St. Paul thought of it, 
 when the death on the Cross means to them all it 
 meant to him, then, no doubt, you have in these two 
 doctrines the essence of the Christian Creed. But, if 
 the glow and warmth of life have gone out of them, if 
 men accept them with the intellect alone as complete 
 and formal summaries of the Christian Creed, they may 
 only too quickly degenerate into the lifeless formulae 
 of a narrow and meagre presentation of St. Paul's 
 teaching. The time was when they moved men's 
 hearts and moulded their lives, but they can do so 
 no longer. The fineness of religious touch has been 
 dulled, and the fervour of self-devotion has been lost, 
 as the world through selfishness and indolence has re- 
 gained its old mastery over thought ; and, consequently, 
 propositions which were at one time the expressions 
 of vital truths, are so manipulated and interpreted as 
 to suggest some such wild travesty of the Creed as 
 that which called forth Mr. Kuskin's unsparing but 
 perfectly just criticism. 
 
 " Believe on the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be 
 saved." ^ This, rightly understood, is the heart of 
 1 Kom. xi. 33. ' Acts xvi. 31. 
 
THE BEARING OF THE CROSS. 269 
 
 the xipostle's message. But what did lie mean by 
 "believe?" No doubt he meant intellectual assent 
 to definite historical and theological propositions ; but 
 he meant a great deal besides this. " Thou believest, 
 thou doest well : the devils also believe, and shudder," ^ 
 St. James writes. We must turn to St. Paul's Epistles 
 for the full answer to the question. Listen to what he 
 says about himself: "I buffet — or bruise — my body, and 
 bring it into bondage : lest by any means, after that I 
 have preached to others, I myself should be rejected ; " ^ 
 " I have been crucified with Christ ; " ^ " I die daily ; " ^ 
 " the sufferings of Christ abound unto us ; " ^ " that 
 I may know Him and the fellowship of His suffer- 
 ings " ; ^ " not that I have already obtained or am 
 already made perfect " ; "^ " they that are of Christ 
 Jesus have crucified the flesh " ; ^ " the Cross of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been 
 crucified unto me, and I unto the world " ; ^ " now I 
 rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and fill up on my 
 part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in 
 my flesh." ^^ No ; be sure of this, redemption is not in 
 the Cross of Christ without you as an external objective 
 fact, but in the power of that Cross brought home to 
 you, penetrating and pervading the whole moral and 
 spiritual life, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, 
 
 1 James ii. 19. "^ \ Cor. ix. 27. » Gal. ii. 20. 
 
 * 1 Cur. XY. 31. » 2 Cor. i. 5. « Phil. iii. 10. 
 
 Phil. iii. 12. « Gal. v. 24. " Gal. vi. 14. 
 
 '" Col. i. 24. 
 
270 THE BEARING OF THE CROSS. 
 
 perfected in you during the whole of life on earth in 
 the constant struggle with sin and temptation. 
 
 " Let no man think that, sudden, in a minute, 
 All is accomplished and the work is done ; 
 Though with thine earliest dawn thou shouldst begin it, 
 Scarce were it ended in thy setting sun. 
 
 " How have I knelt with arms of my aspiring 
 Lifted all night in irresponsive air, 
 Dazed and amazed with overmuch desiring, 
 Blank with the utter agony of prayer ! 
 
 " Ay, and for me, there shot from the beginning 
 Pulses of passion broken with my breath ; 
 O thou poor soul, enwrapped in such a sinning, 
 Bound in the shameful body of thy death ! 
 
 '- Well, let me sin, but not with my consenting, 
 Well, let me die, but willing to be whole ; 
 Never, O Christ, — so stay me from relenting, — 
 Shall there be truce betwixt my flesh and soul," ' 
 
 But, more than this : it was impossible for St. Paul 
 to imagine that he would travel through life here by 
 some easier path than that which his Master had trodden. 
 Christ Himself was made perfect through the things 
 that He suffered ; surely the servant cannot be greater 
 than his Lord ; surely the sorrows of the Master shall 
 be and must be shared by all His followers. Each 
 who will take up this service must be ready, by the 
 terms of the service, to travel along the way of the Cross, 
 to drink of the cup his Master drank of, and to be 
 baptized with the baptism that He was baptized with. 
 
 ^ " St. Paul," by F. W. H. Myers. 
 
THE BEARING OF THE CROSS. 271 
 
 St. Paul's teaching is a consistent whole ; you cannot 
 take it to pieces and rearrange it to suit your fancy. 
 Accept his teaching, as indeed you must, about sin and 
 redemption from sin by the Cross of Christ ; but you 
 must also accept all he tells you as to the means 
 whereby, through the power of the Holy Spirit, that 
 redemption is worked out in each individual soul. 
 True, no doubt, had Christ never died, there would be 
 no Cross to which we could be nailed ; true, no doubt, 
 the redemption is all His ; but, if we would have it for 
 ourselves and make it our own, we can only do so in 
 the one way which St. Paul points out, that is, by 
 taking our share, as God shall show us, in the Cross. 
 
 For, after all, St. Paul is only teaching what our 
 Lord had taught in the words of the text, "If any 
 man will come after me, let him deny himself and take 
 up his Cross, and follow Me " ; deny himself, take up 
 his cross, follow Me. Deny himself as Christ did; 
 Love, Divine pity and compassion, was the motive of 
 that self-emptying, that humiliation — and our self- 
 denial is of no value save as it honestly seeks to find 
 itself in love, love to God shown and testified to by 
 love to man. 
 
 And let him take up his cross ; again take it up as 
 Christ took His ; carry it as He carried His ; and in the 
 end be nailed to it as He was nailed to His. 
 
 To bring these things home to our dull hearts is no 
 easy task, for, as Dr. Hort has said, " we are slow to 
 
372 THE BEARING OF THE CROSS. 
 
 believe that the Cross of anguish can be a Tree of 
 Life." ^ When the hand of Gocl is heavy upon our- 
 selves, when the discipline and anxieties of life are 
 heavier than we know how to bear, when the cross laid 
 on us is weighing us down, seeming to crush us 
 beneath its weight, we find out how very far we have 
 come short of the life of faith that should be ours. 
 Shall we, therefore, give up the struggle in despair ? 
 God forbid ! All we need then ask is patience to be 
 quiet and still, to bear and to endure ; and strength and 
 courage to do the work that has been put into our hands 
 to do. For round us on every side are the sheltering 
 arms of the Christian Church ; before thousands upon 
 thousands of Christian altars the Eucharistic pleading 
 is continually made, the pleading of the one Sacrifice 
 once offered, the holding up before heaven and earth of 
 the one true Cross. It may be that for the moment 
 we have lost sight of everything ; that faith seems a 
 delusion, and hope a far-off echo of some bygone dream 
 or fancy. But we can still throw ourselves, as we may 
 and must, upon the faith of the whole Church of God, 
 and, in the strength of that companionship, live and 
 work, endure the hardness, and when the time comes, 
 if need be, die. It is easy — God pardon us who preach ! 
 — to say such things as these, but hard— God only knows 
 how hard ! — to live them through in our lives. Still, 
 there lies our path, and we must do our best steadily to 
 1 " Hulsean Lectures," by the Eev. Dr. Hort, p. 218. 
 
THE BEARING OF THE CROSS. 273 
 
 make our way along it. It will help us if we remember 
 that, perhaps in the very stress of the confusion, in 
 the crushing and, as it seems, the fatal maiming of our 
 present life, unkno^vn to us, in ways we cannot now 
 conceive or understand, the life that never has an 
 ending may be gathering strength and fulness and 
 power within us, and so for us too, as we pray in God's 
 mercy we may one day know, the Cross is indeed the 
 Tree of Life. 
 
XXIX. 
 
 Cobetousness. 
 
 " Take heed, and beware of covetousness : for a man's life consisteth 
 not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." — St. 
 Luke xii. 15. 
 
 (QUINQUAGESIMA SuNDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1896.) 
 
 We are, I fear, only too ready to imagine that the 
 command to beware of covetousness is one that is not 
 of any special importance for people placed as we are : 
 it applies, we think, rather to those whom we often 
 call, in not very happy phrase, the lower classes ; to 
 those who are poor and in want, and are therefore 
 naturally tempted to cast covetous eyes on the things 
 they see in the possession of others. Perhaps the 
 words of the Church catechism, in which we were 
 taught as children that we must not covet or desire 
 other men's goods, have some share in emphasizing this 
 very restricted view. No doubt it is a sin to covet 
 that which belongs to another ; let us admit this as 
 fully as we can — and let us admit, too, that those 
 who are in very impoverished circumstances of life are 
 peculiarly liable to this particular temptation : but we 
 
CO VE TO USNESS. 275 
 
 must also admit, if we are capable of dispassionate 
 thought, that under these conditions we meet the sin 
 in its least heinous form ; that again and again there 
 is in the surrounding circumstances, when we come to 
 know them, only too much that goes far to palliate if 
 not even to condone the wrong desire. When we hear 
 well-to-do people solve all the problems presented by 
 the struggles of political and social life by the simple 
 dictum that it is only a question between " the haves " 
 and "the have nots," implying, as they usually do 
 by the words, that most of the greed and most of the 
 selfishness is on the side of the latter, we may well 
 pause a moment, and think; and the result of our 
 thought will be, I feel perfectly clear, to convict " the 
 haves " of the greater guilt of covetousness. 
 
 Most people, however, get one step beyond this 
 very elementary view of the question : they recognize 
 that covetousness in the abstract, the burning desire 
 to add to one's possessions, is ignoble and debasing, is 
 in a word sin ; that, as Christian men and women, we 
 are bound to be contented with the conditions in which 
 we find ourselves placed, and to do our duty thankfully 
 in that state of life to which Almighty God has called 
 us ; that the undisciplined desire to double or treble our 
 incomes, or to add to what is ours of wealth or power, 
 denotes a sordid mind; that the man who indulges 
 these thoughts lives in continual sin. Here we reach a 
 point that is, it may well be feared, only a too serious 
 
276 COVETOUSNESS. 
 
 one for Englishmen. We speak of national sins, and 
 we do so rightly, for societies, no less than individuals, 
 have a moral conscience ; it is, therefore, a fair question 
 to ask, whether covetousness is not a national sin 
 amongst us. I would I felt I could answer this question 
 unhesitatingly in the negative. He that makes haste 
 to be rich, the Bible tells us, shall not be innocent.^ 
 There is an old saying, quoted in a sermon some two 
 centuries ago by one who held office as a Canon in 
 this Church; 2 "there is no man," it runs, "very 
 rich, but is either an unjust person himself, or the 
 heir of one or other who was so." " I dare not," the 
 preacher adds, " pronounce so severe a sentence univers- 
 ally : but the general business and corruption of men's 
 practices has verified this harsh saying of too many ; 
 and it is every day seen how many serve the god of 
 this world to receive the riches of it." 
 
 If Dr. South could say this in his day, what would 
 he think if he saw things as they are now ? What 
 are hundreds and hundreds of Englishmen, yes and 
 Englishwomen too, doing to-day but wildly, passion- 
 ately, hasting to be rich ? And what are the means 
 they are using to attain their end ? Stock Exchange 
 operations no doubt attract a great many; but the 
 excitement of these is equalled, possibly surpassed, 
 by the methods that obtain 4iowadays in commercial 
 
 ' Prov. xxviii. 20. 
 
 * SoTith's Sermons, vol. iv. p. 473. Edition, 1715. 
 
COVETOUSNESS. 277 
 
 transactions. One sometimes hears it questioned 
 whether there is any sound, legitimate business 
 left; so much of it has become wild speculation, or, 
 to put it in quite plain words, betting and gambling. 
 And the game, disastrous as it is, I believe, in itself, 
 is too often made infinitely worse because it is not 
 played fairly. Men form rings, companies, syndi- 
 cates, and seem at times to recoil from nothing that 
 can compass their one end — gain : false news, bogus 
 telegrams, political complications, even national 
 troubles, — any method may be used, and any risk run 
 that will bring about the desired object, a rise or a fall 
 in the market ; and then those who are behind the 
 scenes sell or buy at the critical moment, that moment 
 being the time when, to put it quite bluntly, the 
 opportunity occurs to steal as much as possible from 
 other people. We have seen the closing of the 
 gambling tables at many of the places of popular 
 resort ; we hope before long to see the end of the tables 
 at Monte Carlo ; and we are inclined to congratulate 
 ourselves on the moral advance we have made. Are 
 we not a little too hasty ? With the growth of inter- 
 communication, linked together as the human race now 
 is by the telegraph, the world has become one vast 
 gambling house ; the counters lie about at every large 
 Stock Exchange and at every great commercial centre, 
 and the wildly exciting maddening game is played 
 almost without cessation. 
 
278 COVETOUSNESS. 
 
 One man's gain is another man's loss. This 
 system does not create wealth ; it does not beneficially 
 distribute it ; it forcibly wrenches it from one and 
 flings it to another. The thousands a successful 
 speculator sweeps into his coffers come of necessity 
 out of the pockets of others : it would be well if they 
 came only from those who gambled as he does : un- 
 fortunately at times, and only too often, innocent 
 people suifer, and the old man's savings, the widow's 
 income, and the money that should educate and feed 
 the children pay their tax to these unscrupulous 
 operators. God's law for man is the merciful bene- 
 ficent law of labour — " in the sweat of thy face shalt 
 thou eat bread." ^ All the earth has to give us is the 
 reward of toil, and only by toil can any of its wealth 
 be honestly gained or honestly held. Those who work 
 immediately and directly in the production of the 
 fruits of the earth, those who work indirectly in the 
 duties of government, or healing, or teaching, or any 
 of the manifold tasks which may be allotted men, — not 
 primarily for their own profit, but that the world may 
 be the better because they have lived in it, — all these 
 earn their living honestly as the Bible bids them do. 
 Those who amass wealth by preying upon their fellow- 
 men, whether on a large and magnificent scale, where 
 success wins admiration and applause, or in those 
 less splendid ways which never win popular approval, 
 ^ Gen. iii. 19, 
 
COVETOUSNESS. 279 
 
 and very often end in jail, earn their livelihood dis- 
 honestly — in one word, they steal it. 
 
 It will, perhaps, be thought that all this is very 
 remote from our lives here ; it may be so, I trust it is 
 so ; but there are other ways in which the same sin, 
 the same deadening unholy worship of the god of this 
 world, may be brought much nearer home to the life 
 of a University. No doubt the sin appears in less 
 obvious ways ; it does not flaunt itself so openly and 
 so unblushingly ; but its consequences are none the 
 less fatal, perhaps they are even more disastrous. It 
 shows itself under decent outward pretences, it puts on 
 the guise of moral purpose, it assumes at times the 
 cloke of religion. Think only of one aspect of it ; how 
 industriously, and sincerely too, during these many 
 years past, well-meaning people have preached the 
 great gospel of " getting on " ; do this and avoid that, 
 choose the one and refuse the other and you will " get 
 on " ; not meaning that you will be better men, truer, 
 braver, more generous ; that you will have learned more 
 kindness and consideration for others, more control over 
 yourself ; that you will have won some clearer hold on 
 all that is meant by goodness ; that you will know more 
 of the love of God ; not this at all, or anything like 
 this ; but that you will have some chance of a decent 
 balance at your bankers. " Get on " means get 
 wealth, get power, get honour, get position, get 
 money ; here is the ideal ; liere is the golden image 
 
28o CO VE TO US NESS. 
 
 set up for the worship and adoration of Christian 
 people. Surely the god of the world has blinded 
 their eyes ; surely they are being taught to spend 
 their strength for nought, and their labour for that 
 which shall never profit them. It would have seemed 
 possible that the things with which this place is 
 chiefly concerned, the things that belong to the mind 
 and intellect might escape the contamination, and yet 
 they have not done so. Many are working steadily and 
 unselfishly in the cause of education, and it is one of 
 the most hopeful signs of our times that this should be 
 the case : but it will save some from bitter disappoint- 
 ment if they remember, that education may be made a 
 mere engine for profit and social advancement; that it is 
 only too often sought and desired, not for its own sake, 
 but for the price it will fetch in the world's market. 
 It, too, is compelled to bow the knee to Mammon, and 
 as it jDays its worship it loses utterly and for ever all 
 that gives it its worth ; it loses its soul. 
 
 Compare with these low standards the aims set 
 before us in the pages of the Gospels, and you 
 will see how practically fathomless the gulf is that 
 opens out between the ideals, moralities, and re- 
 spectabilities of modern society and the teaching of 
 Jesus Christ. Try and think of Him on earth in 
 bodily form again ; and ask yourself how He would 
 bear Himself in Throgmorton Street ? What would He 
 do or say among the hurrying crowds of speculators ? 
 
COVETOUSNESS. 281 
 
 among the men who are busy bartering their gifts of 
 intellect for money, or power, or place ? or among 
 those who, having the key of knowledge, neither enter 
 in themselves nor suffer others who would do so to 
 enter in? We know, indeed, where He would be 
 found. He would be with the ploughman as he drove 
 his furrow through the field; He would bless the 
 husbandman as he sowed his seed; the reaper as he 
 gathered his sheaves; He would acknowledge His 
 true merchants,^ as they fulfilled their beneficent 
 mission in providing for the wants of men, by dis- 
 tributing the fruits of the earth or the products of 
 labour. No honest work sincerely done for others' 
 good would be beyond the reach of His benediction. 
 He would be found where sickness and pain were, in the 
 wards of our hospitals and by the bedside of the dying ; 
 He would be found, too, let us never forget it, among 
 the poor. We think of Him as tender, compassionate, 
 gracious; but we forget, willingly, perhaps wilfully 
 forget, that He said some very stern things ; sternest of 
 all of the rich and the well to do, the Pharisees and the 
 rulers. Would He, think you, in this our day, be less 
 severe than He was of old in Palestine ? Would He 
 call to Himself now the rich, the Church people, the 
 well to do? Would He bless those that sit in the 
 seats of the teachers now? Are they all no longer 
 blind guides? Are the dangers of wealth less now 
 
 ^ Cf. Ruskin's '-Unto t' is Last," Gtli edition, p. 33. 
 
282 COVETOUSNESS. 
 
 than they were then ? Have the sins and selfishness 
 that shamed it then in His presence become impos- 
 sible now ? Would His temple need no cleansing 
 now? Are there no longer usurers and money- 
 changers to be cast out? Would He readily find a home 
 in churches frequented by rich and fashionable people ? 
 In our great cathedrals, with their stately magnificence 
 and dignified services, would He now be at once 
 welcomed and recognized ? or would He be again re- 
 jected, again scorned, again crucified? It may help 
 us, as we enter once more into Lent, if we each 
 try to answer these questions so far as they concern 
 ourselves personally. 
 
XXX. 
 
 " Take heed, and beware of covetousness : for a man's life eonsistetli 
 not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." — St. 
 Luke xii. 15. 
 
 (First Sunday in Lent, Febeuary 23, 1896.) 
 
 Last Sunday I spoke of covetousness under some of 
 its very obvious aspects ; to-day I pass on to consider 
 it in its more subtle and indirect forms. 
 
 It will perhaps sound somewhat oddly, and yet 
 it is entirely true, to assert that we may covet that 
 which is, as children say, our very own, that which we 
 have won by our own honest labour, which is morally 
 as well as legally our own. We may use it selfishly ; 
 we may wrap ourselves up in comfort and self- 
 indulgence ; we may say to our souls that we have 
 worked hard and now it is quite right that we should 
 take our ease and enjoy the fruits of our toil; not 
 necessarily at all in coarse or vulgarly selfish ways ; 
 selfishness may be, and very often is, quite refined, out- 
 wardly decorous and even graceful, and none the less 
 
284 COVETOUSNESS. 
 
 it is wholly base. The selfish, self-regarding use of 
 the wealth that is in our keeping is at bottom the 
 same deadly sin with the sin of covetousness. 
 
 And we cannot stop even here : as we go on to think 
 it all out, this sin of which we are speaking is found 
 to extend over all the circumstances and conditions of 
 life; it covers the whole of our relations with the 
 visible world. Yes ; covetousness in veiled forms may 
 stain and taint the noblest gifts we possess — gifts of 
 intellect, gifts of art, the magic power and wonder of 
 music, and, lastly, the greatest gift of all, friendship, 
 love, the ties of home, the source and spring of so 
 much that is best in us. 
 
 I often recall a story, I believe a well-known one, 
 told some years ago from this pulpit by one of our 
 greatest preachers, who has since then passed to his 
 rest. Cardinal Mazarin was lying on his deatli-bed ; 
 his attendants thought him asleep. For some reason or 
 other they went out of the room, and left the old man 
 alone. A minute or two later, as they were passing out 
 of the picture gallery into which the bedroom opened, 
 they heard a shuffling movement behind them, and, 
 turning round, they saw the Cardinal, with a loose gown 
 thrown round him, standing in front of his favourite 
 pictures, and kissing his hand to them, and saying, 
 " Good-bye, dear pictures ! " ^ 
 
 ^ " Passiontide Sermons," by the late Kev. H. P. Liddon, Canon of 
 St. Paul's, Sermon xvii. \). 2G6. The story as told here is somewhat 
 
COVETOUSNESS. 285 
 
 In a brief account of the career of one of our 
 greatest Oxford scholars, it is told how, in his last 
 illness, when he could no longer read or write or 
 attempt any intellectual work at all, he had his beloved 
 books gathered round him on his bed ; and as he laid 
 his feeble hands on them, he said fondly and sadly, 
 " Ah, I am to leave my books ! " ^ 
 
 It may, perhaps, be said. Are we not to admire beau- 
 tiful pictures ? Are we to close our ears to the subtle 
 charm of music, to distrust and despise our intellectual 
 gifts ? Are we even, for it seems to be so implied, to 
 put a restraint upon our affection for our friends ? 
 
 Follow me for one moment in another line of 
 thought ; it will seem as if we were passing right away 
 from all of which we are speaking, but we shall, I 
 believe, be brought round to the answer we must make 
 to all such questions as these. What do we mean by 
 beauty ? We shall best find an answer in brief compass 
 by asking, what do we mean by beauty in nature ? We 
 have all watched an autumn sunset, — many of us have 
 seen it in the clear warm air of Southern Europe, — the 
 sky brilliant with colours of purple and crimson and 
 gold that no tongue can describe and no pencil can 
 paint. As the vision of the glory rises upon our wist- 
 ful gaze, as it gathers strength and majesty and fulness, 
 
 altered. It was told from memory, and is left in the form in which it 
 was given at the time. 
 
 » "Stones of Stumbling," by Hon. L. A. Tollemache, p. 124. 
 
286 COVETOUSNESS. 
 
 and then by slow degrees grows dim and at last fades 
 altogether from our sight, can we say whether the 
 feeling of which we are conscious is one of pleasure or 
 of pain ? There is the sense of stretching out far away 
 from our ordinary selves to some great good only very 
 dimly seen and very dimly understood, which yet we 
 would fain, if we could, gather in and make our own. 
 But we cannot do so ; the light and the glory pass away 
 and are gone, and there remains with us the sense of in- 
 completeness and loss. We seem to have been close up 
 to some vision of those things which eye has never seen 
 nor ear ever heard ; it was near us, and now it is gone, 
 and we have lost it. Something of this I always 
 imagine Wordsworth, with that intuitive sense he had 
 of the Infinite veiled under nature everywhere, meant, 
 when he said — 
 
 " To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 
 
 This that we have tried to say of natural beauty is 
 true of all beauty. All beauty is the reaching towards 
 an ideal, the endeavour to realize to the outward senses 
 something which is of necessity in its perfection wholly 
 unattainable. What is it that makes a picture great ? 
 Certainly not the skill, wonderful as it may be, of the 
 worker. We have all learned that the moment art 
 becomes self-conscious, andns proud of what it can do 
 and of its skill in doing it, it is smitten with sure and 
 certain decay and death. That which makes the artist 
 
COVETOUSNESS. 287 
 
 what he is, so we have been taught, is to be found in 
 his gifts of sympathy and imagination — imagination, 
 that is, in the highest, noblest sense of the word ; 
 imagination in the strength of which he may climb the 
 height of heaven and reach thoughts words will not 
 express. And having heard and seen and pondered, he 
 needs must try to speak, and with the finite means at 
 his command suggest something of that which lies 
 beyond the bounds of time and sense. Impossible ! 
 Yes, of course it is impossible ; and he is always telling 
 us how impossible it is. But — and this is my point — his 
 work is noble in so far as it lets us into his secret, and 
 shows us that he has seen things which pass beyond his 
 power of description. His true greatness lies just where 
 he cannot but in one sense fail ; that is, in his attempt 
 to present to men truths that are beyond representation, 
 to reveal that which never can be plainly said by any 
 human tongue or distinctly limned by any human hand. 
 The same is true of music. Much of it is intricate 
 and puzzling, and the satisfaction found in it at times 
 appears to be chiefly akin to the arithmetician's interest 
 in his clever puzzles. But the secret of the mighty 
 power of music cannot be found in these ; music in its 
 turn must be the interpreter of all that is noblest in its 
 age, and to be such an interpreter it must be able to 
 rise infinitely above it and to reveal something of the 
 divine ideals which lie hidden beneath the seeminoly 
 chaotic movement of the whole ; it must have caught 
 
288 COVETOUSNESS. 
 
 some echoes of the choirs of heaven, some thoughts 
 that in their fulness lie far beyond our reach ; in its 
 attempt to present these it fulfils the conditions of its 
 greatness in the certainty of its failure. 
 
 Intellectual gifts, intellectual genius, whether de- 
 voted to the world of outward nature or the world of 
 thought, pass under the same law. The wisest men 
 know how little they really know ; how at their very 
 best they are but as children picking up the shells and 
 stones on the shore of an infinite sea. The things 
 they find tell them wonderful stories, open out mar- 
 vellous depths, seemingly boundless spaces for the 
 imagination to penetrate : but with the increase of 
 knowledge comes always a keener juster appreciation 
 of the stupendous unknown : however complete some 
 momentary advance may seem to be, the infinite 
 beyond them always beckons men on ; in the moment 
 of greatest achievement they realize most acutely how 
 infinitesimally small they are ; how they also triumph 
 only to measure their failure. 
 
 There remains the greatest gift of God to man, one 
 which, however remote some of the things of which we 
 have been thinking may seem from many of us, is 
 close up to and within the reach of all, the gift of com- 
 panionship, of friendship, of love. Life ^ we have been 
 
 ^ "For life, with all it yielcls of joy and woe, 
 Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love, 
 How love might be, hath been indeed, and is." 
 
 Browning, A Death in the Desert 
 
CO VE TO US NESS. 289 
 
 taught to think of as just the opportunity of learning 
 this priceless lesson of love. Those who have failed to 
 learn it have never really lived. Love, the purest and 
 the most unselfish, has been given, God grant it ! to each 
 of us in the homes of our childhood, in the mother's 
 tender patient care, and in the father's strong affection. 
 There are, it is true enough, people to whom the words 
 father and mother, one or both of them, never call up 
 any gracious memories or any wondering gratitude ; on 
 them in God's inscrutable purpose for them has been 
 allowed to fall one of the greatest of human sorrow s ; 
 only those who have passed through it can know what 
 that sorrow is. Love, however, comes to men and women 
 in other ways ; and the life must have been indeed a hard 
 one to which it has never revealed itself in something of 
 the strength and grace that have been given to it by 
 God. Through it men learn what are the depths of 
 human tenderness, the possibilities of human self- 
 sacrifice, the miracles of entire and whole-hearted 
 friendship. All these are wonderful gifts, wonderful 
 beyond power of words to speak of ; and yet they are, 
 even while we hold them, ready to perish : misunder- 
 standing may mar them ; death will surely sever them ; 
 they pass from us, and we are left alone ; they were, 
 and now they are not, and we — what can \\q do to save 
 ourselves in the day of our despair ? 
 
 ]\ry brothers, what does it all mean ? This con- 
 stant stretching out of ourselves to seize upon the 
 
 u 
 
290 COVETOUSNESS. 
 
 marvels revealed in art and in the mystic wonder of 
 music? this leaping up of intellectual enthusiasm as 
 the visions of the past and the hopes of the future, the 
 mysteries of life and thought and consciousness, seem 
 ready to unfold themselves ? this amazing strength of 
 friendship, these miracles of love ? and then over them 
 all, ringing out clear and strong, this sad pathetic note 
 that tells of incompleteness, inadequacy, and failure? 
 We Christians have our answer ; " My soul is athirst 
 for God, yea, even for the living God : when shall I 
 come to appear before the presence of God ? Why 
 art thou so vexed, O my soul : and why art thou so 
 disquieted within me ? put thy trust in God : for I 
 will yet thank Him which is the help of my counte- 
 nance, and my God." ^ Yes, it is all true. The day 
 will come when you must leave your books, when 
 you must say good-bye to your pictures, when love and 
 friendship will pass from you, and you, stripped bare 
 of all that now seems to hold your life together, must 
 pass away alone into the mysterious, unseen, and 
 unknown world that lies behind the veil of the things 
 that are seen. Alone, and yet, God grant it to each 
 of us ! not alone : for when that day comes you do not 
 leave Him Who is the Strength and Stay of all things 
 made by Him ; Who is Himself the supreme, un- 
 changing beauty ; Who has revealed Himself as perfect 
 Love ; Who is Himself the Giver of all human friend- 
 1 Ps. xlii. 2, 14, 15. 
 
CO VE TO US NESS. 291 
 
 ship, and the Source of all human love. In Him all 
 things consist and are ; they speak to us of His glory, 
 and they tell us of His praise. 
 
 Here is the sum of the whole matter ; only learn 
 to see God's Presence revealed, dimly indeed but 
 still most really, in all the world of nature round you, 
 and you must of necessity learn to use His gifts 
 rightly. So far as you live consciously in His sight, 
 covetousness, the selfish desire for or the abuse of any 
 one of His gifts, will become utterly impossible. So 
 living you can thank Him with full hearts for all the 
 gladness He has poured out upon your lives ; you can 
 praise Him for all His gifts of health and strength and 
 intellect, and for all the dear ties of love and affection ; 
 you can never then forget the Giver, or as you receive 
 His gifts use them selfishly. See His Hand everywhere ; 
 see Him revealed in every glory of earth and sky and 
 sea, in every noble work of human skill, in every pure 
 gift of human imagination. See Him, too. He knows 
 how almost impossible it is, in the great mysteries of 
 pain and sorrow and death : it may be a day will come 
 for some of us when we shall be able to make our own 
 the Psalmist's words, " It is good for me that I have 
 been in trouble : that I may learn Thy statutes." ^ 
 
 At many different times, but twice on very solemn 
 occasions, our Lord declared Himself to be the Life of 
 men ; " I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life ; " ^ " I 
 
 * Ps. cxix. 71. - St. Jolm xiv. G. 
 
292 CO VE TO US NESS. 
 
 am the Eesurrection, and the Life." ^ Here in contrast 
 with the words of the text which tell us that " a man's 
 life consisteth not in the abundance of the things 
 which he possesseth," is that in which our life in deed 
 and in truth consists. " I am the Life ; " this is the 
 theme of St. John's Gospel, the sum of the Kevelation 
 he has to unfold ; " In Him was Life ; and the Life was 
 the Light of men ; " ^ the whole of the fourth gospel 
 is a comment on, and an explanation of, these words. 
 And in those wonderful chapters with which the New 
 Testament closes he once again repeats and enforces 
 the same truth ; " And he shewed me a pure river of 
 water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the 
 Throne of God and of the Lamb." ^ " And the Spirit 
 and the Bride say. Come. And let him that heareth 
 say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And 
 whosoever will, let him take of the water of life 
 freely."^ If we could once learn this lesson, if Ave 
 could once realize that our true life is *'hid with 
 Christ in God," ^ we should no longer need the con- 
 tinually reiterated warning of the New Testament, 
 " take heed and beware of covetousness." 
 
 ^ St. John xi. 25. - St. John i. 4. ^ Rev. xxii. 1. 
 
 * Rev. xxii. 17. ^ Col. iii. 3. 
 
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 A LENT WITH JESUS. A Plain Guide for Churchmen. Containing 
 Readings for Lent and Easter Week, and on the Holy Eucharist. 
 32OT<?, IJ-. ; or in paper cover, 6d. 
 
 AN ADVENT WITH JESUS. 32^^, i^.; or i?i paper cover, ed. 
 
 WHAT I SHOULD BELIEVE. A Simple Manual of Self-Instruction 
 for Church People. Small 8vo, limp, \s. ; cloth gilt, is. 
 
 Bathe and Buckham.— THE CHRISTIAN'S ROAD BOOK. 
 
 2 Parts. By the Rev. Anthony Bathe and Rev. F. H. Buckham. 
 Part I. Devotions. Sewed, 6d. ; lifnp cloth, is. ; cloth extra, is. 6d. 
 Part II. Readings. Sewed, is. ; limp cloth, 2s. / cloth extra, 3J. / 
 or complete in one vohtme, sewed, is. 6d. ; //;;;/ cloth, 2s. 6d. ; r/oth 
 extra, y. 6d, 
 
A SELECT/ON OF WORKS 
 
 Benson— THE FINAL PASSOVER : A Series of Meditations 
 upon the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. By the Rev. R. M. 
 Benson, M.A., Student of Christ Church, Oxford. Small 8vo. 
 
 Vol. I.— The Rejection. 5s. 
 Vol. IL— The Upper Chamber. 
 
 Part I. 55. 
 
 Part II. 55. 
 
 Vol. IIL— The Divine Exodus. 
 
 Parts I. and ii. 5J. each. 
 Vol. IV.— The Life Beyond the 
 
 Grave. 5^. 
 
 Bickersteth.— YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER: 
 
 a Pjoem in Twelve Books. By Edward Henry Bickersteth, D.D., 
 Bishop of Exeter. One Shilling Edition, xZmo. With red borders, 
 i6fno, 2S. 6d. 
 
 The Crown Zvo Edition {ss.) may still be had. 
 
 Blunt.— Works by the Rev. John Henry Blunt, D.D. 
 
 THE ANNOTATED BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER: Being an 
 Historical, Ritual, and Theological Commentary on the Devotional 
 System of the Church of England. 4^^?. 21s. 
 
 THE COMPENDIOUS EDITION OF THE ANNOTATED BOOK 
 OF COMMON PRAYER : Forming a concise Commentary on the 
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 DICTIONARY OF DOCTRINAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. 
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 DICTIONARY OF SECTS, HERESIES. ECCLESIASTICAL PAR- 
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 Writers. Imperial 8vo. 21s. 
 
 THE BOOK OF CHURCH LAW, Being an Exposition of the Legal 
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 ys. 6d. 
 
 A COMPANION TO THE BIBLE : Being a Plain Commentary on 
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 8vo. Sold separately. 
 The Old Testament. 3^. dd. The New Testament. 3^. dd, 
 
 HOUSEHOLD THEOLOGY : a Handbook of Religious Information 
 respecting the Holy Bible, the Prayer Book, the Church, etc., etc. 
 Paper cover, i6mo. xs. Also the Larger Edition, 3J. 6d. 
 
 Body.— Works by the Rev. George Body, D.D., Canon of 
 Durham. 
 THE LIFE OF LOVE. A Course of Lent Lectures. x6mo. 2s. 6d. 
 THE SCHOOL OF CALVARY; or, Laws of Christian Life revealed 
 
 from the Cross. i6mo. 2s. 6d. 
 THE LIFE OF JUSTIFICATION. i6mo. zs. 6d. 
 THE LIFE OF TEMPTATION. xSmo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 Boultbee.— A COMMENTARY ON THE THIRTY-NINE 
 
 ARTICLES OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. By the Rev. 
 T. P. Boultbee, formerly Principal of the London College of Divinity, 
 St. John's Hall, Highbury. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 
 
 Bright.— Works by William Bright, D.D., Regius Professor 
 of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford, 
 Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. 
 
 THE ROMAN SEE IN THE EARLY CHURCH : And other Studies 
 in Church History. Crown 8vo. yj. 6d. 
 
 WAYMARKS IN CHURCH HISTORY. Crow?i 8vo. 7s. 6d, 
 
 MORALITY IN DOCTRINE. Crown Zvo. -js. 6d. 
 
 LESSONS FROM THE LIVES OF THREE GREAT FATHERS: 
 
 St. Athanasius, St. Chrysostom, and St. Augustine. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 THE INCARNATION AS A MOTIVE POWER. Crown Bvo. 6s. 
 
 Bright and Medd.— LIBER PRECUM PUBLICARUM EC- 
 
 CLESI^ ANGLICANS. A Gulielmo Bright, S.T.P., et Petro 
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 Browne.— AN EXPOSITION OF THE THIRTY-NINE 
 
 ARTICLES, Historical and Doctrinal. By E. H. Browne, D.D. 
 formerly Bishop of Winchester. Zvo. i6j. ' * ' ' 
 
 Campion and Beamont.— THE PRAYER BOOK INTER- 
 LEAVED. With Historical Illustrations and Explanatory Notes 
 arranged parallel to the Text. By W. M. Campion, D.D., and W J 
 Beamont, M. A. Small Zvo. js. 6d. 
 
 Carter.— Works edited by the Rev. T. T. Carter, M.A., Hon. 
 Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. 
 
 THE TREASURY OF DEVOTION : a Manual of Prayer for General 
 and Daily Use. Compiled by a Priest. 
 
 iZmo. 2s. 6d. ; cloth limp, 2s. 
 
 Bound with the Book of Common Prayer, 35. 6d. 
 
 Red-Line Edition. Clot/t extra, gilt top. iZmo, 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 Large-Type Edition. Crowjt Zvo. 35. 6d. 
 
 THE WAY OF LIFE : A Book of Prayers and Instruction for the Young 
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 xZmo. IS. 6d. ' 
 
 THE PATH OF HOLINESS : a First Book of Prayers, with the Service 
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 THE GUIDE TO HEAVEN : a Book of Prayers for every Want. (For 
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 limp, \s. Large-Type Edition. Crown Zvo. xs. 6d. ; cloth limp, xs. 
 
 THE STAR OF CHILDHOOD : a First Book of Prayers and Instruc- 
 tion for Children. Compiled by a Priest. With Illustrations. x6mo 
 2S. 6d. 
 
 [continued. 
 
A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Carter.— Works edited by the Rev. T. T. Carter, M.A., Hon. 
 Canon of Christ Church, QySordi— continued. 
 NICHOLAS FERRAR : his Household and his Friends. With Portrait 
 engraved after a Picture by Cornelius Janssen at Magdalene 
 College, Cambridge. Crown Zvo. 6s. 
 THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JOHN KETTLEWELL. With Details 
 of the History of the Non- Jurors. With Portrait. Crowtt Zvo. 6s. 
 
 Conybeare and Howson.— THE LIFE AND EPISTLES OF 
 
 ST. PAUL. By the Rev, W. J. Conybeare, M.A., and the Very 
 Rev, J. S. HowsON, D.D. With numerous Maps and Illustrations. 
 Library Edition. Two Vols. 8vo. 21s. Students' Edition. One Vol. 
 Crown 8vo. 6s. Popular Edition. One Vol. Crown 8vo. 3J. 6d. 
 
 Devotional Series, 16mo, Red Borders. EacA 2s. 6d. 
 
 BICKERSTETH'S YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER. 
 
 CHILCOT'S TREATISE ON EVIL THOUGHTS. 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN YEAR. 
 
 FRANCIS DE SALES" (ST.) THE DEVOUT LIFE. 
 
 HERBERT'S POEMS AND PROVERBS. 
 
 KEMPIS' (A) OF THE IMITATION OF CHRIST. 
 
 WILSON'S THE LORD'S SUPPER. Large type. 
 
 *TAYLOR'S (JEREMY) HOLY LIVING. 
 
 * HOLY DYING. 
 
 * These two in one Vohune. 55. 
 
 Devotional Series, 18mo, without Red Borders. Each is. 
 
 BICKERSTETH'S YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER. 
 THE CHRISTIAN YEAR. 
 
 FRANCIS DE SALES' (ST.) THE DEVOUT LIFE. 
 HERBERT'S POEMS AND PROVERBS. 
 KEMPIS (X) OF THE IMITATION OF CHRIST. 
 WILSON'S THE LORD'S SUPPER, Large type. 
 *TAYLOR'S (JEREMY) HOLY LIVING. 
 * HOLY DYING. 
 
 * These two in one Volume. 2s. 6d. 
 
 Edersheim.— Works by Alfred Edersheim, M.A., D.D., Ph.D., 
 sometime Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint, Oxford. 
 THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JESUS THE MESSIAH. Two Vols. 
 
 8vo. 245. 
 JESUS THE MESSIAH : being an Abridged Edition of The Life and 
 Times of Jesus the Messiah.' Crown 8vo. js. 6d. 
 
 HISTORY OF THE JEWISH NATION AFTER THE DESTRUC- 
 TION OF JERUSALEM UNDER TITUS. New Edition (The 
 Third). Revised by the Rev. Henry A. White, M.A., Fellow of New 
 College, Oxford. With a Preface-*by the Rev, William Sanday, 
 D.D., LL.D., Margaret Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ 
 Church, Oxford. 8vo. i8s. 
 
tN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 
 
 Eland.— THE LAYMAN'S INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK 
 OF COMMON PRAYER : being a Short History of its Development. 
 By the Rev. Edwin H. Eland. M. A., Balliol College, Oxford. With 
 Facsimile. Crown Zvo. 5J. 
 
 EUicott.— Works by C. J. Ellicott, D.D., Bishop of Gloucester 
 and Bristol. 
 A CRITICAL AND GRAMMATICAL COMMENTARY ON ST. 
 PAUL'S EPISTLES. Greek Text, with a Critical and Grammatical 
 Commentary, and a Revised English Translation. 8w. 
 
 I Corinthians. x6s. 
 Galatians. Zs. 6d. 
 Ephesians. 8j. 6d. 
 
 Philippians, Colossians, and 
 
 Philemon, ioj. 6d. 
 Thessalonians. js. 6d. 
 
 Pastoral Epistles. 10s. 6d. 
 HISTORICAL LECTURES ON THE LIFE OF OUR LORD 
 JESUS CHRIST. Zvo. 12s. 
 
 Epoclis of Church History.— Edited by Mandell Creighton, 
 D.D.,LL.D.,Bishopof Peterborough. Fcap.Zvo. 2s.6d.each. 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE 
 EASTERN EMPIRE. By the Rev. 
 H. F. TozKR, M.A. 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE ROMAN 
 EMPIRE. By the Rev. A. Carr, M.A. 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE PURI- 
 TANS, 1570-1660. By Henry Offley 
 Wakeman, M.A. 
 
 HILDEBRAND AND HIS TIMES. 
 By the Rev. W. R. W. Stephens, M.A. 
 
 THE POPES AND THE HOHEN- 
 STAUFEN. By Ugo Balzani. 
 
 THE COUNTER REFORMATION. 
 By Adolphus William Ward, Litt. D. 
 
 WYCLIFFE AND MOVEMENTS 
 FOR REFORM. By Reginald L. 
 Poole, M.A. 
 
 THE ARIAN CONTROVERSY. By 
 H. M. GwATKiN, M.A. 
 
 THE ENGLISH CHURCH IN 
 OTHER LANDS. By the Rev. H. W. 
 Tucker, M.A. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF THE REFOR- 
 MATION IN ENGLAND. By the 
 Rev. Geo. G. Perry, M.A. 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE EARLY 
 FATHERS. By the Rev. Alfred 
 Plummer, D.D. 
 
 THE EVANGELICAL REVIVAL IN 
 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 
 By the Rev. J. H. Overton, D.D. 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. 
 By the Hon. G. C, Brodrick, D.C.L. 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CAM- 
 BRIDGE. By J. Bass Mullinger, 
 M.A. 
 
 THE ENGLISH CHURCH IN THE 
 MIDDLE AGES. By the Rev. W. 
 Hunt, M.A. 
 
 Fosbery.— Works edited by the Rev. Thomas Vincent Fosbery, 
 M.A., sometime Vicar of St. Giles's, Reading. 
 
 VOICES OF COMFORT. Cheap Edition. Small Zvo. zs. 6d. 
 
 The Larger Edition (js. 6d.) may still be had. 
 HYMNS AND POEMS FOR THE SICK AND SUFFERING. In 
 
 connection with the Service for the Visitation of the Sick. Selected 
 
 from Various Authors. Small Zvo, 35. ^d. 
 
A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Gore.— Works by the Rev. Charles Gore, M.A., Canon of 
 Westminster. 
 THE MINISTRY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 8m loj. td. 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CLAIMS. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 
 
 Geikie.— Works by J. Cunningham Geikie, D.D., LL.D., late 
 
 Vicar of St. Martin-at-Palace, Norwich. 
 
 HOURS WITH THE BIBLE : the Scriptures in the Light of Modern 
 Discovery and Knowledge. New Edition, largely rewritten. Com- 
 plete in Twelve Volumes. Crown 8vo. 6s. each. 
 
 OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 In Six Volumes. Sold separately. 6s. each. 
 
 Creation to the Patriarchs. 
 With a Map and Illustrations. 
 
 MosES TO Judges. 
 and Illustrations. 
 
 With a Map 
 
 Samson to Solomon. 
 Map and Illustrations. 
 
 With a 
 
 Rehoboam to Hezekiah. With 
 
 Illustrations. 
 Manasseh to Zedekiah. With 
 
 the Contemporary Prophets, With 
 
 a Map and Illustrations. 
 Exile to Malachi. With the 
 
 Contemporary Prophets. With 
 
 Illustrations. 
 
 NEW TESTAMENT. 
 In Six Volumes. Sold separately. 6s. each. 
 
 The Gospels. With a Map and 
 
 Illustrations. 2 vols. 
 Life and Words of Christ. 
 
 With Map. 2 vols. 
 
 Life and Epistles of St. Paul. 
 With Maps and Illustrations. 
 
 St. Peter to Revelation. Com- 
 pleting the New Testament Series. 
 \In the Autzimn. 
 
 LIFE AND WORDS OF CHRIST. 
 
 and Illustrations. 2 vols. 
 
 Presentation Edition. With j 
 Imperial 8vo. 24J. 
 
 Cabinet Edition. With Map. 2 vols. Post Zvo. X2S. 
 
 Cheap Edition, without the Notes, i vol. 8vo. js. 6d. 
 A SHORT LIFE OF CHRIST. With mimerous Illustrations. 
 
 Crowfi Zvo. 2>^. 6d. 
 OLD TESTAMENT CHARACTERS. With many Illustratiotis. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 3^. 6d. 
 LANDMARKS OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. Crown 8vo. 
 
 Ss. 6d. 
 THE ENGLISH REFORMATION. Crown 8vo. ss. 6d. 
 ENTERING ON LIFE. A Book for Young Men. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 THE PRECIOUS PROMISES. Crown 8vo. 2s. 
 BEN AMMI : being the Story of the Life of Lazarus of Bethany, told, 
 
 reputedly, by Himself, [Preparing for publication. 
 
IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 
 
 Hall.— THE VIRGIN MOTHER: Retreat Addresses on the 
 Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary as told in the Gospels. With an 
 appended Essay on the Virgin Birth of our Lord. By the Right Rev. 
 A. C. A. Hall, D.D., Bishop of Vermont. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. 
 
 Harrison.— Works by the Rev. Alexander J. Harrison, B.D., 
 Lecturer of the Christian Evidence Society. 
 PROBLEMS OF CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM. Cr.Svo. 7s. 6d. 
 THE CHURCH IN RELATION TO SCEPTICS : a Conversational 
 Guide to Evidential Work. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 
 3s. 6d. 
 THE REPOSE OF FAITH, IN VIEW OF PRESENT DAY DIFFI- 
 CULTIES. Crown Bvo. 7s. 6d. 
 
 Holland.— Works by the Rev. Henry Scott Holland, M.A., 
 Canon and Precentor of St. Paul's. 
 
 GOD'S CITY AND THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM : Crown 
 
 8vo. 7s. 6d. 
 PLEAS AND CLAIMS FOR CHRIST. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 
 CREED AND CHARACTER : Sermons. Crown Bvo. 35. 6d. 
 ON BEHALF OF BELIEF. Sermons. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 
 CHRIST OR ECCLESIASTES. Sermons. Crown Bvo. 2J. 6d. 
 LOGIC AND LIFE, with other Sermons. Crown Bvo. 3s. 6d. 
 
 Hutchings.— SERMON SKETCHES from some of the Sunday 
 Lessons throughout the Church's Year. By the Rev. W. H. Hutch- 
 ings, M.A., Canon of York. Vols. I and II. Crown Bvo. 5^. each. 
 
 INHERITANCE OF THE SAINTS ; or, Thoughts on the 
 Communion of Saints and the Life of the World to come. Col- 
 lected chiefly from English Writers by L. P. With a Preface by the 
 Rev. Henry Scott Holland, M.A. Crown Bvo. 7s. 6d. 
 
 Jameson. — Works by Mrs. Jameson. 
 
 SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART, containing Legends of the Angels 
 
 and Archangels, the Evangelists, the Apostles. With 19 Etchings and 
 
 187 Woodcuts. 2 vols. Bvo. 20s. net. 
 LEGENDS OF THE MONASTIC ORDERb, as represented in the 
 
 Fine Arts. With 11 Etchings and 88 Woodcuts. Bvo. xos. ?tet. 
 LEGENDS OF THE MADONNA, OR BLESSED VIRGIN MARY. 
 
 With 27 Etchings and 165 Woodcuts. Bvo. 10s. net. 
 THE HISTORY OF OUR LORD, as exemplified in Works of Art. 
 
 Commenced by the late Mrs. Jameson ; continued and completed by 
 
 Lady Eastlake. With 31 Etchings and 281 Woodcuts. 2 Vols. 
 
 Bvo. 20J. net. 
 
8 A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Jennings.— ECCLESIA ANGLICANA. A History of the 
 
 Church of Christ in England from the Earliest to the Present Times. 
 By the Rev. Arthur Charles Jennings, M.A. Crow7i 8vo. 7s. 6d. 
 
 Jukes.— Works by Andrew Jukes. 
 
 THE NEW MAN AND THE ETERNAL LIFE. Notes on the 
 Reiterated Amens of the Son of God. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 THE NAMES OF GOD IN HOLY SCRIPTURE : a Revelation of 
 His Nature and Relationships. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. 
 
 THE TYPES OF GENESIS. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 
 
 THE SECOND DEATH AND THE RESTITUTION OF ALL 
 THINGS, Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF THE KINGDOM. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 THE ORDER AND CONNEXION OF THE CHURCH'S TEACH- 
 ING, as set forth in the arrangement of the Epistles and Gospels 
 throughout the Year. Crown 8vo. zs. 6d. 
 
 Knox Little.— Works by W. J. Knox Little, M.A., Canon 
 Residentiary of Worcester, and Vicar of Hoar Cross. 
 SACERDOTALISM, WHEN RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD, THE 
 TEACHING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Crown 8vo. 6s, 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN HOME. Crown 8vo. 35. 6d. 
 
 THE HOPES AND DECISIONS OF THE PASSION OP OUR 
 MOST HOLY REDEEMER. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS AND MOTIVES OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 LIFE. Ten Sermons preached in Manchester Cathedral, in Lent and 
 Advent. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 SERMONS PREACHED FOR THE MOST PART IN MANCHES- 
 TER. Crown 8vo. 3 J. 6d. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF THE PASSION OF OUR MOST HOLY 
 REDEEMER. Crown 8vo. zs. 6d. 
 
 THE WITNESS OF THE PASSION OF OUR MOST HOLY 
 
 REDEEMER. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 THE LIGHT OF LIFE. Sermons preached on Various Occasions. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 3^. 6d. 
 
 SUNLIGHT AND SHADOW fN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 Sermons preached for the most part in America. Crown 8vo. y. 6d, 
 
IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 
 
 Lear.— Works by, and Edited by, H. L. Sidney Lear. 
 
 FOR DAYS AND YEARS. A book containing a Text, Short Reading, 
 
 and Hymn for Every Day in the Church's Year. iSmo. 2S. 6d. Also a 
 
 Cheap Editiott, ^'zmo. is. ; or cloth gilt, is. 6d. ; or with red borders, 2s. 6d. 
 FIVE MINUTES. Daily Readings of Poetry. i6mo. 3s. 6d. Also a 
 
 Cheap Edition, ^zmo. is. ; or cloth gilt, is. 6d. 
 WEARINESS. A Book for the Languid and Lonely. Large Type. 
 
 Small 8vo. ^s. 
 
 CHRISTIAN BIOGRAPHIES. 
 
 Madame Louise de France, 
 Daughter of Louis XV., known 
 also as the Mother Terese de 
 St. Augustin. 
 
 A Dominican Artist : a Sketch of 
 the Life of the Rev. P^re Besson, 
 of the Order of St. Dominic. 
 
 Henri Perreyve. By P^re 
 Gratry. 
 
 St. Francis de Sales, Bishop and 
 Prince of Geneva. 
 
 Nine Vols. Crown Zvo. y. 6d. each. 
 
 The Revival of Priestly Life 
 IN THE Seventeenth Century 
 in France. 
 
 A Christian Painter of the 
 Nineteenth Century. 
 
 bossuet and his contempora- 
 RIES. 
 
 F^nelon, Archbishop of Cam- 
 
 BRAI. 
 
 Henri Dominique Lacordaire. 
 
 DEVOTIONAL WORKS. Edited 
 
 Uniform Editions. Nine Vols. 
 F^nelon's Spiritual Letters to 
 
 Men. 
 
 F^nelon's Spiritual Letters to 
 Women. 
 
 A Selection from the Spiritual 
 Letters of St. Francis de 
 Sales. Also Cheap Edition, ^T.nio, 
 6d. cloth limp ; is. cloth boards. 
 
 The Spirit of St. Francis de 
 Sales. 
 
 by H. L. Sidney Lear. New and 
 itmo. 2S. 6d. each. 
 
 The Hidden Life of the Soul. 
 
 The Light of the Conscience. 
 Also Cheap Edition, ^o.^no, 6d. 
 cloth limp ; and is. cloth boards. 
 
 Self-Renunciation. From the 
 French. 
 
 St. Francis de Sales* Of the 
 Love of God. 
 
 Selections from 
 ' Thoughts.' 
 
 Pascal's 
 
 Liddon.— Works by Henry Parry Liddon, D.D., D.C.L.,LL.D., 
 late Canon Residentiary and Chancellor of St. Paul's. 
 LIFE OF EDWARD BOUVERIE PUSEY, D.D. By Henry Parry 
 Liddon, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D. Edited and prepared for publication 
 by the Rev. J. O. Johnston, M.A., Principal of the Theological 
 College, and Vicar of Cuddesdon, Oxford ; and the Rev. Robert 
 J. Wilson, D.D., Warden of Keble College. With Portraits and 
 Illustrations. Four Vols. 8vo. Vols. I. and II., 36J. Vol. III., i8j. 
 
 \continued 
 
A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Liddon.— Works by Henry Parry Liddon, D.D., D.C.L., 
 LL.D., late Canon Residentiary and Chancellor of St 
 Paul's. — contmued. 
 CLERICAL LIFE AND WORK : Sermons. Crown Zvo. ss. 
 
 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES : Lectures on Buddhism— Lectures on the 
 Life of St. Paul — Papers on Dante. Crown 8vo. 55. 
 
 EXPLANATORY ANALYSIS OF PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE 
 
 ROMANS. Bvo. 145. 
 SERMONS ON OLD TESTAMENT SUBJECTS. Crown 8vo. 5s. 
 SERMONS ON SOME WORDS OF CHRIST. Crown 8vo. 55. 
 THE DIVINITY OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST. 
 
 Being the Bampton Lectures for 1866. Crown Zvo. 55. 
 ADVENT IN ST. PAUL'S. Sermons bearing chiefly on the Two 
 
 Comings of our Lord. Two Vols. Crown 8vo. 35. td. each. Cheap 
 
 Edition in one Volume. Crown 8vo. ^s. 
 
 CHRISTMASTIDE IN ST. PAUL'S. Sermons bearing chiefly on the 
 Birth of our Lord and the End of the Year. Crown 8vo. 5s. 
 
 PASSIONTIDE SERMONS. Crown 8vo. Sj. 
 
 EASTER IN ST. PAUL'S. Sermons bearing chiefly on the Resurrec- 
 tion of our Lord. Two Vols. Crown Bvo. 3s. 6d. each. Cheap 
 Editiofi in one Volume. Crown Bvo. 55. 
 
 SERMONS PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 OXFORD. Two Vols. Crown Bvo. 3^. dd. each. Cheap Edition in 
 
 one Volume. Crown Bvo. 55. 
 THE MAGNIFICAT. Sermons in St. Paul's. Crown Bvo. 2s. 6d. 
 SOME ELEMENTS OF RELIGION. Lent Lectures. Small Bvo. 
 
 2S. 6d. ; or in paper cover, xs. 6d. 
 
 The Crown Zvo Edition (5^.) may still be had. 
 SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS OF H. P. LIDDON, D.D. 
 
 Crown Bvo. ^s. 6d. 
 MAXIMS AND GLEANINGS FROM THE WRITINGS OF H. P. 
 
 LIDDON, D.D, Selected and arranged by C. M. S. Crown x6mo. is. 
 
 Luckock.— Works by Herbert Mortimer Luckock, D.D., 
 Dean of Lichfield. 
 THE HISTORY OF MARRIAGE, JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN, IN 
 RELATION TO DIVORCE AND CERTAIN FORBIDDEN 
 DEGREES. Crown Bvo. 6s. 
 AFTER DEATH. An Examination of the Testimony of Primitive 
 Times respecting the State of the Faithful Dead, and their Relationship 
 to the Living. Crown Bvo. 3.?. 6d. 
 THE INTERMEDIATE STATE BETWEEN DEATH AND 
 JUDGMENT. Being a Sequel to After Death. Crown Bvo. 3J. 6d. 
 
 {continued. 
 
IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE, ii 
 
 Luckock.— Works by Herbert Mortimer Luckock, D.D., 
 Dean of Lichfield. — continued. 
 FOOTPRINTS OF THE SON OF MAN, as traced by St. Mark. Being 
 
 Eighty Portions for Private Study, Family Reading, and Instructions 
 
 in Church. Crown Zvo. y. 6d. 
 THE DIVINE LITURGY. Being the Order for Holy Communion. 
 
 Historically, Doctrinally, and devotionally set forth, in Fifty Portions. 
 
 Crown ^vo. 3J. 6d. 
 STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK OF COMMON 
 
 PRAYER. The Anglican Reform— The Puritan Innovations— The 
 
 Elizabethan Reaction — The Caroline Settlement. With Appendices, 
 
 Crown 8vo. 35. 6d. 
 THE BISHOPS IN THE TOWER. A Record of Stirring Events 
 
 affecting the Church and Nonconformists from the Restoration to the 
 
 Revolution. Crown 8vo. 3^. 6d. 
 
 LYRA GERMANIC A. Hymns translated from the German by 
 
 Catherine Winkworth. Small 8vo. 55. 
 
 MacColL— Works by the Rev. Malcolm MacColl, M.A., Canon 
 Residentiary of Ripon. 
 CHRISTIANITY IN RELATION TO SCIENCE AND MORALS. 
 Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 LIFE HERE AND HEREAFTER : Sermons. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 
 
 Mason.— Works by A. J. Mason, D.D., Lady Margaret Professor 
 of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. 
 THE FAITH OF THE GOSPEL. A Manual of Christian Doctrine, 
 
 Crown 8vo. js. 6d. Cheap Edition. Crown 8vo. y. 6d. 
 THE RELATION OF CONFIRMATION TO BAPTISM. As taught 
 in Holy Scripture and the Fathers. Crown 8vo. js, 6d. 
 
 Maturin.— SOME PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES OF 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. By the Rev. B. W. Maturin, Mission 
 Priest of the Society of S. John the Evangelist, Cowley, Oxford. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 45. 6d. 
 
 Mercier.— OUR MOTHER CHURCH : Being Simple Talk 
 on High Topics. By Mrs. Jerome Mercier. Stnall 8vo. 3^. 6d. 
 
 Milne.— THE DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF THE 
 
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12 
 
 A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
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IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 13 
 
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 [^continued. 
 
14 A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
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IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 15 
 
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