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 BV 4011.6 .N43 1898 
 Newbolt, W. C. E. 1844-1930. 
 Priestly ideals 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF EXPERIENCE; or, the Wit- 
 ness of Human Life to the Truth of Revelation. Being the 
 Boyle Lectures for 1895. Crown 8vo. s^r. 
 
 COUNSELS OF FAITH AND PRACTICE. 
 
 Crown Bvo. s^. 
 
 SPECULUM SACERDOTUM ; or, the Divine 
 
 Model of the Priestly Life. Crown Bvo. 7^. dd. 
 
 PENITENCE AND PEACE. Being Addresses on 
 
 the 51st and 23rd Psalms. Crown Bvo. "zs. 6d. 
 
 THE FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT. Being Ten 
 
 Addresses bearing on the Spiritual Life. Crown Bvo. -zs. 6d. 
 
 THE MAN OF GOD. Being Six Addresses delivered 
 
 during Lent, 1886. Small 8vo. is. 6d. 
 
 THE PRAYER-BOOK : its Voice and Teaching. 
 
 Being Spiritual Addresses bearing on the Book of Common Prayer. 
 Crown Bvo. -zs. 6d. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 LONDON, NEW YORK, AND BOMBAY 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS 
 
 BEING 
 
 A COURSE OF PRACTICAL LECTURES 
 
 DELIVERED IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL TO ''OUR 
 
 SOCIETY'' AND OTHER CLERGY, IN 
 
 LENT, 1898 
 
 BY THE REV. 
 
 W. C. e/nEWBOLT, M.A. 
 
 CANON AND CHANCELLOR OF ST. PAUL's CATHEDRAL 
 
 " Qui ergo alium doces, te ipsum non doces ' 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 
 
 1898 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
TO 
 MY DEAR FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE 
 
 AETHUE FOLEY 
 
 LORD BISHOP OF STEPNEY 
 
 WHO 
 
 IN THE MIDST OF ALMOST UNCEASING LABOURS 
 
 HAS LEARNED TO FIND 
 
 HIS STRENGTH 
 
 IN THE JOY OF THE LORD 
 
" Opus grande ego facio et non possum descendere." 
 
PREFACE 
 
 These Lectures are published in answer to a strong 
 request on the part of those to whom they were 
 addressed, which I did not feel at liberty to refuse. 
 They were undertaken at a very short notice, in 
 consequence of the serious illness of the Rev. W. B. 
 Trevelyan, Vicar of St. Matthew's, Westminster, who 
 was to have delivered the Lenten course of " Our 
 Society " Lectures. They will be found to contain 
 only simple thoughts on familiar topics, of which 
 every Priest is bound to remind himself, more espe- 
 cially at a season of solemn self-examination such 
 as Lent. They are essentially ad clernm, and they 
 are designedly on subjects of practical importance, 
 rather than of theological or doctrinal significance. 
 There has been no attempt, except in a very few 
 instances, to modify or adapt the plain-speaking 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 which such an occasion seemed to demand. It 
 would be well, however, if the reader were to bear 
 in mind that the person on whom the onerous 
 duty of lecturing his brethren falls, can only do 
 so, with any proper regard to modesty and self- 
 respect, if he makes it clearly to be understood 
 that he includes himself in all the shortcomings 
 which have to be lamented, the perils to be 
 avoided, and the temptations to be overcome ; and 
 that he, if any, keeps constantly before him the 
 motto prefixed to these lectures, " Qui ergo alium 
 doces, te ipsum non doces ? " 
 
 With this reservation, they are committed to the 
 forbearance and kindness of my brethren, whose 
 attendance and sympathy, in the midst of their 
 heavy Lenten labours, were no slight encourage- 
 ment and assistance to the lecturer. 
 
 W. C. E. N. 
 
 3, Amen Coukt, 
 
 Feast of the Ascension, 
 
 MDOCOXCVIII. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE FAGK 
 
 I. The Pkiest in his Private Devotions 1 
 
 II. The Priest in his Church 31 
 
 III. The Priest in his Dealings with Penitents ... 59 
 
 IV. The Priest in his Parish 85 
 
 V. The Priest in his Life and Conversation . . . Ill 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 LECTUEE I. 
 
 THE PEIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 
 
 Introduction. 
 
 Nature of the present Course of Lectures. 
 The Priest needs his own Lent. 
 I. Private devotions : their intense importance in our life. 
 The Priest " the Spiritual Man in the parish." 
 The encroachment of " Offices." 
 Prayerlessness. 
 II, The power of Prayer. 
 
 The difficulty of real Prayer, i.e. of Prayer which is powerful. 
 
 Prayer, a real part of our work. 
 
 The three faculties employed in Prayer— the understanding, 
 
 the affections, the will. 
 The preparation for Prayer. 
 III. Times of Prayer. 
 
 " Pray without ceasing." 
 The fixed hours of Prayer. 
 Ejaculatory Prayer. 
 Meditation 
 
 Its system and practice. 
 Spiritual power stands before everything else. 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 
 
 Introduction. 
 
 The Parish Church. 
 Its custodian. 
 
 Rights of the parishioners. 
 
 Certain uses of the Church selected. 
 I. The Priest at the Altar. 
 
 The transcendent importance of the Eucharistic Service. 
 The daily Celebration. 
 The Eucharistic Vestments. 
 The witness of symbolism to the inner life. 
 II. The Divine Office. 
 
 Its dignity and importance. 
 
 Its obligation. 
 
 Must not be perfunctory. 
 
 All part of the day's work. 
 
 The association in it of the people. 
 
 Its beauty. 
 
 Its use of Scripture lections. 
 The Psalter. 
 III. Instruction. 
 Sermons. 
 
 Their importance. 
 
 Their neglect. 
 
 Their dignity to be maintained. 
 Pour qualifications for a good preacher. 
 
 *+* The Lecture on this occasion was given in the Chapter 
 Home, 68, St. Paul's Churchyard. 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THE PEIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 
 
 Introduction. 
 Dealing with sin, a great occupation of the Priest. 
 The fool's paradise. 
 I. The Priest must make penitents — 
 By speaking plainly about sin, and 
 By speaking about penitence. 
 II. He must find out penitents — 
 By being sympathetic. 
 By being accessible. 
 By being discriminating. 
 
 III. He must help penitents. 
 
 Absolution. 
 
 The need of Confession. 
 
 Confession of sins not sinfulness. 
 
 The voice of the Church on this subject. 
 
 Objections. 
 
 " Direction." 
 
 The " dangers " of Confession. 
 
 IV. The Priest himself the chief penitent. 
 
 " Amplius lava me." 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE PRIEST IN HIS PAEISH. 
 
 I. The parish : its importance and significance. 
 Divide et impera. 
 
 The parish : our responsibilities towards it. 
 
 To be scientifically studied. 
 
 " Quifacit per alium,facit per se." 
 
 II. The parish, the post assigned by God, 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 Two kinds of work in the parish. 
 
 1. The edification of the faithful. 
 
 The clergy. 
 Lay helpers and teachers. 
 The choir. 
 Guilds and classes. 
 The communicants. 
 
 2, Mission work to those outside Christian influences. 
 
 This to be systematized. 
 " Hopelessness " a crimQ. 
 " Hurry " a mistake. 
 in. This requires labour. 
 The doctrine of " Gifts." 
 Perseverance. 
 
 "Visiting" with a view to knowing the people. 
 Its use. 
 
 Its importance. 
 Its joys. 
 Its lessons. 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 
 
 I. " What we are, comes before what we teach." 
 The haunting personality. 
 Article XXVI. and its limitations. 
 The power for good or evil of " what we are." 
 The Tractarians. 
 II. The Characteristics of the inner life. 
 
 1. Bearing the Cross. 
 
 2. Making full proof of our ministry. 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 
 
 3. Holiness. 
 
 (a) Cleanliness of life. 
 
 (&) Spiritual freshness. 
 
 (c) Spiritual fulness. 
 The secret of happiness is within. 
 The great future before the Church of England. 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 
 
 " Type of tlie wise wlio soar, but never roam, 
 True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home." 
 
 I SHALL best meet your wishes, if I mistake not, 
 during this holy season of Lent, in trying to see 
 with you whether the simple spiritual mechanism 
 of our life is working as it ought to do. We 
 shall be speaking again and again to our people, 
 in public and in private, about Penitence and 
 Prayer. It does not look well for a doctor to 
 be himself afflicted with the disease for which 
 he professes to hold the cure. It does not look 
 well for the artist, who is teaching others the 
 principles of beauty, himself to be unable to draw 
 a straight line. Am I not right, dear brothers, 
 in saying that sometimes it is a sharp pain — it 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 almost stops our mouths from a sense of hypocrisy 
 and incongruity — to have to tell others how we 
 know they may succeed, while we are only too con- 
 scious of never having, at least for some time, taken 
 the trouble to practise ourselves the advice which 
 we give ? It is a sad thing to tell others how 
 to pray, when our spiritual bow is all unstrung; 
 how to be pure, out of a sadly soiled life; how 
 to control the tongue, when we ourselves allow 
 that unruly member to be so unrestrained; how 
 to be active, hopeful, faithful — ah ! we do not 
 say it, but it lingers like a metallic ring round 
 our formal sermons and our cold advice, " Do as 
 I say, not as I do." 
 
 And may I just say in self-defence, that if I 
 try to enter into our difficulties fully, it is only 
 on the always understood condition that the 
 difficulties of which I shall speak belong to us 
 all in common ? That it is not one Priest lecturing 
 his brethren, but one priest, if you will, lecturing 
 on his own shrivelled arm and misshaped spiritual 
 life ; that from the needs of one, and the difficulties 
 of one, we Priests may all of us discover how to 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 3 
 
 get our share of good out of this season of Lent, 
 from which we hope for so much for our people. 
 
 To-day I am asking you to consider with me 
 the simplest, the commonest thing, such as we 
 might talk about to our school children or at 
 a communicants' guild, and yet so important, 
 so powerful, that we feel if we were straight 
 and rightly furnished here, we should be a match 
 for most of the difficulties which the hardest day 
 puts before us. I mean our private Devotions, 
 our hidden life of Prayer. 
 
 When Giotto was asked to give a specimen 
 of his skill as a draughtsman, he took up his 
 crayon and drew a faultless circle — a poor ornament 
 for a palace, but a marvellous exhibition of potential 
 art. We ask clergy who work with us whether 
 they can sing, and teach, and preach, and visit, and 
 manage clubs. Do we ever ask them if they can 
 pray ? Have we ever made this an ambition — more 
 than to be a great preacher, to be a great pray-er ? 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 A very great deal is bound up in it. It depends 
 on that tube swaying in the current, as to how 
 long the diver can stay in the heavy tide of sin 
 and squalor with its dead weight of depression 
 all round him. So long as the air comes down 
 from Heaven in an unbroken course, he can stay 
 some time, and work without fainting ; but apart 
 from it, he dies. So long as the air-tight globe 
 shuts in the servant of God from the atmosphere 
 of this world, his light can shine before men, clear 
 and steady. It would be something if our people 
 felt they could count on this, that in their midst 
 was one who, having more leisure, and having 
 been more richly endowed with the Holy Spirit, 
 was more constantly in communion with Heaven. 
 The parish Priest is the spiritual man ex hypothesi, 
 in the place where he dwells. Just as the doctor 
 is the representative of medical skill, the lawyer 
 of legal knowledge, the different professional men, 
 of different professional excellences, so we are 
 the professional men of spiritual things. Are we 
 in danger of throwing this splendid distinction 
 away, while we go as far as we can to meet laymen, 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. S 
 
 just to show them that we don't belong to a 
 sacerdotal caste ; while we go half-way to meet the 
 infidel, just to show that we are not afraid to treat 
 the Bible like any other book ; while we wish to 
 show that we are not narrow ; while above all 
 things we wish to show what splendid power of 
 organization we possess ? 
 
 Ah ! I know the rush and tear — " What time 
 have we ? The ten minutes extra I meant to 
 have had in the early morning — why, I am 
 worn out, I cannot get up! The time in the 
 middle of the day — why, I have an unceasing 
 string of interruptions all the morning through ; 
 and in the evening, after the clubs, the guilds, 
 the meetings — what time have I ? Too tired even 
 to go to bed ! " 
 
 Yes — I say nothing about myself — but is it 
 kindness to my people ? Ought they, when they 
 come to one whom they hope to find spiritually 
 fresh, find instead, one who gives them spiritual 
 things and spiritual advice, but only flattened, 
 dead, dull, with all the spiritual bloom brushed 
 off by the continual wear and tear of a too busy 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS, 
 
 life ? If time is to be economized anywhere, 
 beware of economizing it in times of devotion. 
 Just as the extravagant man will retrench in the 
 money spent by him in charity, so the spend- 
 thrift in time is too often tempted to economize 
 in his times of devotion ; but it is a bad economy. 
 It is a great thing to do plenty of work, but it 
 is a greater thing to do that work in all the 
 freshness of a spiritual vitality. Ah ! we know — 
 if ever we have succeeded in opening that window 
 which looks out towards the distant mountains 
 of Heaven, there where the breezes blow fresh 
 across the sea, there where the sweet odours of 
 Paradise come wafted in from the islands of the 
 Blessed — we know the strength and refreshment 
 of those moments spent with God. If Daniel is 
 to brave the wrath of the king, and play the 
 man, he feels that the window towards Jerusalem 
 must be kept open to nerve his resolution and 
 brace his courage. 
 
 People lecture from time to time on some of 
 the simplest things which concern life; we are 
 thinking this morning of that which, simple as 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 7 
 
 it is, is yet the very necessity of the Priestly life. 
 Before I go further niay I earnestly beg that we 
 all use every effort to get those windows open, 
 and open regularly ? That we sedulously set 
 our faces against those tall imposing buildings — 
 splendid, artistic, almost necessary some would 
 tell us — if they shut out "the ancient lights;" 
 those ancient lights which were opened when we 
 were children (perhaps we use almost the same 
 words still in our prayers), where the sun has 
 come in before, and will come in again, without 
 which our spiritual life will become pale and 
 thin ? Do not misunderstand me. Are we in 
 danger here, as in so many other quarters, of a 
 Pseudo-ecclesiasticism ? Are we getting to be 
 slaves to Offices, beautiful and ancient, it may 
 be, but difficult, exacting, and just wanting in 
 that personal fervour and simple directness, which 
 our private Devotions were meant to supply ? If 
 the Church of England puts upon us, as of obli- 
 gation,^ Matins and Evensong, are we wise to 
 
 ^ It is difficult to take seriously a letter recently sent to a 
 Church newspaper, in which the writer says, " We are under a 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 add to our ohligatioois a perfect network of Offices 
 which are more than our spirit can bear? Do 
 
 canonical obligation to say the ipsissima verba of Missal and 
 Breviary. Nor is there to be found anywhere in the Prayer- 
 book or other formulary a single word to release us from this 
 obligation, or to lead us to suppose that anything else has been 
 substituted for them. The Prayer-book is distinctly called the 
 Book of Common Prayer," etc. We are reminded of a dis- 
 tinguished traveller, who interpreted the fact that he was pro- 
 vided with clean linen to mean that he was to put on one shirt 
 over another, simply because he had never been told when he 
 put on clean linen first to divest himself of that which had been 
 soiled. We imagine that the compilers of our Prayer-book, 
 whether they were right or wrong, at least credited their descen- 
 dants with some share of common sense. And when they made 
 provision for the obligatory recital of Matins and Evensong by 
 the clergy, privately as well as opeul}^ did not anticipate that 
 it was necessary first of all formally to stop the recitation of 
 the old offices, as a matter of obligation, when they had ipso 
 facto provided a substitute. It may interest some readers, who 
 are not merely dea-iv Sia(pvAarT6vTe5, to recall the words of Dr. 
 Liddon on the subject. "A complemental, yet most useful 
 practice of the clergyman's life (if time allows) is the obser- 
 vance of the lesser canonical hours, and particularly the use of 
 the service for Sext, by way of noonday prayer. Of course such 
 a practice as this rests on very different grounds from that of the 
 daily office^ and even from meditation, of which the former is 
 positively and the latter implicitly enjoined in the English 
 formularies. It is simply an act of the individual judgment, 
 undertaken with a view to edification. Matins, indeed, and 
 Lauds are very fairly, and Vespers very fully, represented in 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 9 
 
 not we want to be alone with God sometimes — 
 to talk to Him without the formal etiquette of 
 an Office ? 
 
 Surely it is not all a protest against self- 
 righteous display, when Our Blessed Lord bids 
 us, before we pray, enter into our closet! We 
 have read before now of the strange coldness 
 which has sprung up in courts between princes 
 and their parents, if they only see them in the 
 stiff formalities of court ceremonials : a life built 
 upon Offices leaves something to be desired, and 
 is at the best like the trim Dutch garden, where 
 one longs for the freely-blooming freshness of 
 the flowers, and the fragrance of their unstinted 
 growth. I do plead earnestly for the Priests' 
 private Prayers, lest they should be crushed out 
 by multiplied work, or planted out by Offices, 
 or talked out by committees. Depend upon it, 
 dear brethren, that in many a physical break - 
 
 the English Prayer-book; so much so that the repetition of 
 these offices in their original shape might appear to some minds 
 to involve an act of disloyalty towards the actual services of the 
 English Church."—" Clerical Life and Work," by Dr. Liddon, 
 p. 39 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 down if the doctor came to see us, he would say, 
 "Above all things, if you are to keep in health, 
 you must have your meals regularly, and take 
 sufficient time over them." In like manner, any 
 physician of the soul would say to you this Lent, 
 "You must say your private Prayers with regu- 
 larity and devotion, and give plenty of time to 
 them. Without this your spiritual life will faint 
 and fail; your face will not shine; your people 
 will not be fed with their proper food; you will 
 be restless, irritable, discontented, wearied, with 
 that worst form of spiritual malady, known as 
 prayerlessness, which is the very insomnia of 
 the soul." 
 
 11. 
 
 As Priests have we measured sufficiently the 
 intense power of Prayer ? There are other forms 
 of organization, other forms of work, but Church 
 work ought to be thus differentiated — that it is 
 saturated with Prayer. The congregation to 
 whom the parish Priest preaches ought first 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. Ii 
 
 to have been made ready for the good seed of 
 the Word by the earnest preparation of inter- 
 cessory Prayer. The sermon itself should be not 
 the rambling incoherency of a barren unprepared- 
 ness, but carefully built up with Prayer. Words 
 in their Sunday^ dress, not only the best words, 
 but sanctified words. The parish difficulties, such 
 as we encounter in visiting, in schools, in individual 
 cases, must first be crumbled down with Prayer. 
 Before the hand-to-hand assault, let there be the 
 steady bombardment of Prayer. And then how 
 often the difficulty vanishes ! The way into that 
 impregnable citadel, as we thought it, has been 
 prepared, and the victory of persuasion has been 
 made easy by Prayer. If only we resolved to be 
 men of Prayer, so many of our difficulties, personal 
 and otherwise, would vanish. Secularity, which is 
 never far absent, officialism, an irreverent easiness, 
 indolence, — all these things would become impossible 
 in our own lives. The parish Priest would shed 
 around him an atmosphere of spiritual health, and 
 like the eucalyptus tree in a deadly, fever-stricken 
 
 * " La Poesie, c'est la verite endimanchee." 
 
12 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 swamp, would sweeten the air by his very 
 presence. 
 
 But Lent is just the time to ask ourselves even 
 closer-home questions than these. Lent is a time 
 when our souls are on their examination, and 
 when, like wise examiners, we take nothing for 
 granted. 
 
 " Have I, with all my Eucharists, my OflSces, my 
 Prayers, as a matter of fact, learned to pray ? " As 
 the train of life, in all its manifold activities, rests 
 for a moment thus in Lent, does this wheel, this 
 master- wheel, give a true sound when we tap it ? 
 Have I, as a matter of fact, learned to pray ? I 
 suppose there is no trouble so common, especially 
 among spiritual men, as the inability to pray ; and 
 there are few things of their kind which so revenge 
 themselves upon us as Prayer, if we do not use it 
 aright. For as there are few joys to compare with 
 real Prayer, if just for a few moments we have 
 attained to it, so there are few drudgeries to com- 
 pare in weariness and distastefulness, to Prayers 
 said because we must say them : when we want 
 to be doing something else, and simply try to drag 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 13 
 
 the mind after us, an unwilling and impassive 
 victim to an irksome sense of duty. 
 
 Here may I put in a plea at once, that Prayer 
 may be reckoned more as a part, and a very real 
 part, of our work ? We can see the popular estimate 
 of Prayer in the old conception of a Cathedral body 
 like this. Few officials, at all events, in old days 
 would come to church unless they were paid for it. 
 *' The Canon in Residence " only came in at the last 
 moment, and went away at the first opportunity, 
 when his month of residence was over, just putting 
 in an official minionuvi of service. Every one thus, 
 as it were, giving his pound of flesh and no more. 
 We still feel the efiects of this system. People 
 think, if they don't always express it, as they see 
 the large body of Cathedral clergy, " How can you 
 find time for your long services ? I should like to 
 go to church and say prayers myself, but business 
 must be done." Well, that Priest at all events will 
 not do much good who does not recognize Prayer 
 as his business, and his first business. The church 
 is his office, his seat in church is his clerk's-desk. 
 Prayer and spiritual duties are the very first 
 
14 PRIESTLY IDEALS, 
 
 charge upon his time. And however much a lay- 
 man may be forced to regard such things as a 
 irapepyovj to the Priest certainly they are the very 
 essential ipyov, which he is set to fulfil. Think 
 of our Divine Master spending whole nights in 
 Prayer! Think of the exhortation of the great 
 St. Paul: "Pray without ceasing!" Unless we 
 realize this, unless we recover this sense of the 
 dignity, the absolute essential necessity of Prayer, 
 we shall lapse into a slough of committees, and the 
 Church will become what the old Empire used to 
 conceive it to be, an eccentric form of a burial 
 guild, an inconsequent '^raipua, always trouble- 
 some, probably also dangerous to the State. It 
 is sad to see the large municipal buildings rising 
 in our large towns, from which all signs of 
 Christianity are excluded, and mythical shapes 
 raised in their place, where the architecture 
 requires some form of ornamentation. Take care, 
 lest we be organizing the Church and leaving out 
 Prayer, its chiefest ornament ! 
 
 But this brings us to the very heart of the 
 question. Without doubt, a great deal of that 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 15 
 
 which passes for Prayer is sheer waste of time, 
 simply because it is not Prayer at all. "We cannot 
 wonder if some people refuse to recognize Prayer as 
 work, when they only know it as the feeble patter- 
 ing of unreal words. It would do us all good to 
 read, during this Lent, the chapter which deals 
 with "Prayer" in Dr. Liddon's "Some Elements 
 of Religion."^ "Let us examine," he says, "the 
 idea of Prayer, which is taken for granted in such 
 language as the foregoing. Is it true that Prayer is, 
 as is assumed, little else than the half-passive play 
 of sentiment which flows languidly on through the 
 minutes or hours of easy reverie ? Let those who 
 have really prayed give the answer. They some- 
 times, with the patriarch Jacob, describe Prayer 
 as a wrestling together with an Unseen Power, 
 which may last, not unfrequently, in an earnest 
 life, late into the night hours, or even to the break 
 of day. Sometimes, with St. Paul, they refer to 
 common intercession as a concerted struggle. 
 They have, when praying, their eyes fixed on the 
 Great Intercessor in Gethsemane; upon the drops 
 
 1 "Some Elements of Eeligion," Lect. V. p. 171, by Dr. Liddon. 
 
i6 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 of blood which fall to the ground in that agony 
 of resignation and sacrifice. Importunity is of 
 the essence of successful Prayer. Our Lord's 
 references to the subject especially imply this. 
 The Friend who is at rest with his family will 
 rise at last to give a loaf to the hungry applicant. 
 The Unjust Judge yields in the end to the resist- 
 less eagerness to the widow's cry. Our Lord's 
 blessing on the Syro-Phoenician woman is the 
 consecration of importunity with God. And 
 importunity means, not dreaminess, but sustained 
 work. It is through Prayer especially that "the 
 kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the 
 violent take it by force." It was a saying of 
 the late Bishop Hamilton, of Salisbury, that "no 
 man was likely to do much good at Prayer who 
 did not begin by looking upon it in the light 
 of a work, to be prepared for and persevered in 
 with all the earnestness which we bring to bear 
 upon subjects which are, in our opinion, at once 
 most interesting and most necessary." He shows 
 to us, in fact, that Prayer is, and must always 
 be, a very serious task; something which will 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 17 
 
 make us tired; something which must have an 
 honourable place, and not merely be taken up 
 when we have nothing better to do. "Prayer," 
 says Coleridge, " earnest Prayer is the most severe 
 of all mental exercises." 
 
 If we recognized this, it would help us to feel 
 more its dignity, it would give us a greater sense 
 of its importance; but also it would lead us to 
 take more trouble about it. Why are we so 
 tormented and distracted in Prayer ? Why does 
 it effect so little? Why do we feel so lifeless 
 about it ? Is it that we have not put our strength 
 into it ? Think of those three powers — the intel- 
 lect, the affections, and the will ! Surely it would 
 be one very real help to earnest Prayer if we 
 prepared for it more than we do. It is a saying, 
 attributed to a well-known master of the spiritual 
 life, that if he had only three minutes in which 
 to pray, he would devote two of them to prepara- 
 tion. The Bishop of Truro speaks of " the introit " 
 to Matins and Evensong, as well as the introit 
 to the altar.i In our public worship, at all events, 
 
 ' " The Parish Priest of the Town," p. 179, by Dr. Gott. 
 
 C 
 
i8 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 we have the form of this preparation for devotion, 
 in the pause and silent kneeling which is made 
 by every one when he comes into the church. 
 Shall we not find that here, as in so many things, 
 liKkov y]/xiav iravTog, and that if we commenced 
 with an earnest preparation in our private Prayers, 
 it would carry us through all the difficulties of 
 weakness and distraction ? 
 
 Surely one great help would be to put ourselves 
 at once in the presence of God ; to try and realize 
 the court of God, what it is and what it means. 
 To put before us God the Father in all His great- 
 ness, God the Son at His right hand, and God 
 the Holy Ghost; to try and realize, if it may 
 be, the awful solemnity of that Presence before 
 Whose glory angels veil their faces and the 
 Prophet Isaiah could only feel his own unclean- 
 ness. To remember the transcendent business 
 which is being transacted at that court ; that even 
 while we speak one of the souls that are ceaselessly 
 leaving the body is coming before Him ; that He 
 is receiving, even then, the last prayer for pardon, 
 the last cry of despairj the agonies of the tempted, 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS, 19 
 
 the strong intercession of the saints, and the pure 
 prayers of little children. If Prayer is not to be 
 an empty speaking into an empty desolation, we 
 should realize the awful meaning of that phrase, 
 *' The provocation of their offering." ^ 
 
 I have not ventured to touch on the question as 
 to how far religious pictures and religious emblems 
 are useful as a help to Prayer. I should imagine 
 that this is a question which would be answered 
 differently by different individuals. But I do 
 think that we want to fill out, to people, to make 
 definite, the Unseen world around us. Some people 
 are best helped in their private Prayers in this way, 
 by an absolute blank before them ; to some people, 
 again, nothing is so helpful as the open sky and 
 the green grass (I am speaking now of helps only, 
 — helps to private devotion), and I suppose we 
 ought to watch jealously any tendency even in the 
 use of the Blessed Sacrament itself, for this purpose, 
 which would make it hard to realize God without 
 some outward form to help us. We want more 
 and more to make the spiritual the more real, the 
 
 1 Ezek. XX. 28. 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 inward stronger than the outward ; to feel that 
 this whole world around us is a great sacrament, 
 whose inner presence is God. 
 
 III. 
 
 If we can rescue Prayer from its degradation 
 and elevate it to its proper dignity, we have again 
 further to ask ourselves, '* Do I assign to it sufficient 
 time in my active life, in my busy day ? " The 
 times of Prayer may well form a distinct subject 
 of inquiry in our Lenten self-examination. I sup- 
 pose, generally, we should wish that our day 
 should be more or less pervaded with Prayer ; and 
 to this end we might well set up certain great 
 fortresses, as it were, of stated times and acts of 
 Prayer, and for the rest let ejaculatory Prayers be 
 a vigilant patrol to drive back the spies of the 
 enemy ; and so draw a cordon of Prayer round the 
 day. Of these fortresses of Prayer, I suppose it is 
 impossible to over-estimate the quiet strength of 
 the early morning devotions. It is the Nazareth 
 before the ministry. There is a great strength in 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 21 
 
 that time spent before Divine Service, before 
 meeting our friends, before reading letters, before 
 the world has been able to penetrate within. This 
 is no slight part in the evil of late rising, that it 
 curtails the preparation and the calm strength of 
 the morning devotions, and sends us out hurried 
 and unequipped, with a sense also of having been 
 already worsted in an encounter, to the unknown 
 battles of the untried day. 
 
 The other great fortress will be set up in the 
 quiet Prayer at night, with its own sense of sad- 
 ness and failure, with its own sense of rest and 
 forgiveness, when the disciple comes to Jesus to tell 
 Him what he has done, and what he has taught. 
 Here, again, there is a practical strength which no 
 one would lightly forego. It is the death-bed of a 
 day with its own confession of sin, its special com- 
 mendation of the soul to God. 
 
 " Abide with me when night is nigh. 
 For without Thee I dare not die." 
 
 Between these stated times, there will at least 
 be the halting-place of an earnest midday devo- 
 tion, and it is possible (as St. Ignatius advises, in 
 
22 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 overcoming some sin), the special midday examina- 
 tion. And might we not make more use of ejacula- 
 tory Prayer than we do ? Would it not be possible 
 to utilize the hour of dressing with its obvious sym- 
 bolism, to remind us of Baptism and self-dedication ? 
 Would it not be possible to utilize the last moments 
 of the day in Psalms and verses of hymns ; just as 
 He, our Redeemer, when He hung upon the Cross, 
 used those verses of the Psalms which served to 
 give expression to the mysteries of that awful 
 hour? Would it not be possible to let the clock 
 each time that it strikes call us to Prayer ; as in 
 the beautiful example we have in the horology of 
 Bishop Andrewes? Thus to fall back upon God 
 will help us in many a trial, and when temptation 
 is upon us. Our Lord and Saviour used the texts of 
 His boyhood to repel Satan ; so the very familiarity 
 of the hymns which come to our lips will bring to 
 hand readily the weapon which we need. 
 
 I have left to the last one form of private 
 devotion, about which I would gladly be allowed 
 to say a word; I mean systematic devotional 
 Meditation. There are few religious exercises so 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 23 
 
 helpful, few so neglected, even by the Priest. And 
 yet, those who use it know how extraordinarily 
 valuable and blessed an aid it is. More than other 
 devotions, it helps us to speak to God in our own 
 language, and tells us " the manner of the God of 
 the land." It opens up to us the heart of Scrip- 
 ture, and shows us what God's Holy Word really 
 is, and what it was meant to say to our soul. And 
 further, for those who have to preach, it supplies a 
 persuasiveness which nothing else gives. When we 
 have learned to meditate, then we can make Holy 
 Scripture our own, and bring out new things from 
 our treasury, not well-worn platitudes which we 
 have adopted without thinking, and repeat without 
 meaning. If any say that Meditation is difficult, 
 that is the very measure of its importance; per- 
 haps if it were not so valuable, it would not be 
 so difficult. If any say he has no time, surely it 
 is his duty to make time to wait upon God. If 
 any say he has no natural aptitude thereto, he 
 has no audience to please except himself. In 
 one sense. Meditation is preaching a sermon to 
 one's self; in another sense, it is talking with 
 
24 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 God, without the restraint and formalities of 
 a stated book of devotions. I would earnestly 
 plead that Meditation should be a part of our daily 
 routine, with perhaps stated exceptions when, on 
 certain days, its place may be otherwise occupied. 
 I would plead that the subject of Meditation should 
 generally be the Holy Scriptures. I would suggest 
 that we should take one book of the Bible at a 
 time, and work through it, taking one verse or one 
 passage a day. So we should be saved from the 
 daily difficulty of having to select ; so we should 
 be saved from the snare of favourite texts ; so we 
 should find that all Holy Scripture is auriferous, 
 and that every text will give up its gold, if we 
 labour long enough and hard enough. So our text 
 will come to us each day like a message from God. 
 This is my lesson to-day ; this is what God has to 
 say to me to-day: these are my day's orders; in 
 this I shall find the day's watchword. And so, 
 having fixed our time and resolutely shut our door, 
 we kneel down and pray to the Holy Spirit; we 
 read our text, and think it out, and pray over it, 
 and resolve over it, and perhaps formally pick the 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 25 
 
 spiritual bouquet, which is to last us through the 
 day. The following may perhaps serve as ex- 
 amples of Meditation on verses of Holy Scripture. 
 The first on a difficult, the second on a more 
 obvious text taken out of the Gospels. 
 
 Meditation for Holy Saturday. 
 
 " Now in the place where He was crucified there was a garden." 
 —St. John xix. 41. 
 
 I. Contrast the wild turmoil of Calvary with the 
 peace of " a garden." And consider the first Adam 
 bringing in sin into the world, in a garden. 
 
 And now the Second Adam, Himself sinless, sub- 
 mitting to the penalty of sin, in a garden. 
 
 "Wherewithal a man sinneth, by the same also 
 shall he be jDunished " (Wisd. xi. 16). 
 
 II. " In the place where He was crucified." By 
 my sins wast Thou crucified, Lord. 
 
 Still in that place of sin there is a garden, planted 
 with good seed. Education, Grace, Good Kesolutions 
 of Lent. 
 
 This garden must be weeded, cleansed, made soft 
 and open, ready for the Easter Sun. 
 
26 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 " Break up your fallow ground " (Hos. x. 12). 
 
 III. " In the place where He was crucified." In 
 the hearts of my people, which seem so hard, there 
 is a soft place, prepared by Grace, sown in the past 
 by good influence. 
 
 " I have planted, ApoUos watered " (1 Cor. iii. 6), 
 and God will give the increase. 
 
 Calvary shall not produce despair. I will still 
 look for the garden. 
 
 IV. " In the place where He was crucified." 
 Close to the scene of my own death, with all its 
 terrors, there is the Paradise of God. 
 
 " Our Master hath a garden which fair flowers adorn, 
 There will I go and gather both at eve and morn ; 
 Nought's heard therein but Angel hymns with harp and lute, 
 Loud trumpets and bright clarions, and the gentle, soothing 
 flute. 
 
 " The lily white that bloometh there is Purity, 
 The fragrant violet is surnamed Humility : 
 Nought's heard therein, etc. 
 
 " But still of all the flowers, the fairest and the best 
 Is Jesus Christ the Lord Himself, His Name be blest. 
 Nought's heard therein, etc. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 27 
 
 " O Jesu, my chief good and sole felicity, 
 Thy little garden make my ready heart to be ; 
 So may I once hear Angel hymns with harp and lute, 
 Loud trumpets and bright clarions, and the gentle, soothing 
 flute." 
 
 "God Almighty first planted a garden. And 
 indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. It is 
 the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man ; 
 without which buildings and palaces are but gross 
 handiworks." ^ 
 
 Meditation for the Beginning of Lent. 
 
 " Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness, to be 
 tempted of the devil." — St. Matt. iv. 1. 
 
 I. "Then" — i.e. after His Baptism, after the 
 glorious manifestation from Heaven. In the full 
 glow of God's glory. 
 
 Times of spiritual blessing may be followed by 
 times of distress and temptation. 
 
 Look back, my soul, to Confirmation, past Com- 
 munions, past Retreats, past Lents. 
 
 " Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed 
 lest he faU " (1 Cor. x. 12). 
 
 ' Bacon's " Essays," xlvi. 
 
28 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 II. " Jesus." The sinless God is tempted, there- 
 fore no one is exempt. 
 
 " My son, if thou come to serve the Lord, prepare 
 thy soul for temptation " (Ecclus. ii. 1). 
 
 The Saviour is tempted ; all who work for God 
 must expect the fiercer trials. 
 
 "Mighty men shall be mightily tormented" 
 (Wisd. vi. 6). 
 
 Distinguish, however, temptation and sin. 
 
 And remember, " God is faithful. Who will not 
 suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able ; 
 but will with the temptation also make a way to 
 escape, that ye may be able to bear it " (1 Cor. 
 X. 13). 
 
 III. "Led up of the Spirit." Examine com- 
 mentaries, and see whether He was led by His 
 Spirit, or by the Holy Spirit. 
 
 Deciding for the latter, notice " Lead us not into 
 temptation," and, " My brethren, count it all joy 
 when ye fall into divers temptations " (St. James 
 i. 2). "Ottou ^' aywvic ^^a Kai (TTi(j)avot. 
 
 IV. " Into the wilderness." The best place in 
 which to meet temptation. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PRIVATE DEVOTIONS. 29 
 
 Consider the wilderness of Lent, and of self- 
 denial. 
 
 " O Lord, Who for our sake didst fast forty days 
 and forty nights," etc. Collect for first Sunday in 
 Lent. 
 
 V. « Of the Devil." Consider his titles—" Devil/' 
 ''Satan/' "The Serpent/' "The Father of Lies/ 
 " The Roaring Lion " — and from the titles of the 
 enemy, learn the nature of the conflict. 
 
 Resolution : " Whensoever I call upon Thee, then 
 shall mine enemies be put to flight : this I know ; 
 for God is on my side " (Ps. Ivi. 9). 
 
 Do let us remember that spiritual power and 
 spiritual excellence stand before everything else. 
 That our greatest glory and joy must be to be 
 ecclesiastics, vigorous, active, spiritual men. If 
 people took as much pains in making themselves 
 spiritually proficient as they do in making them- 
 selves intellectually so, the Church and the world 
 would be very different. Men ought to be able to 
 feel that in the vicarages and clergy houses of the 
 land there lives a race of men in very close contact 
 
30 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 with God, ready to watch the questions of this 
 world, its social and political difficulties on the side 
 of God, ready to administer and skilfully apply 
 the spiritual remedies so carefully placed in their 
 hands — men who speak what they know, and 
 testify what they have seen. 
 
 Prayer may have seemed to be only a homely 
 and simple subject; we share its power with the 
 devout layman, with the pure child. But never- 
 theless, if we had only learned to pray, it would 
 mean an incalculable difference in our own lives 
 and the lives of others. Surely Prayer seems to 
 string together the different periods of our life 
 with a continuous thread as nothing else can do. 
 It may be, as with the cottage built into the 
 walls of the palace, we still preserve our boyhood's 
 prayers in the selection which we have each made 
 for ourselves. They are the sword of Goliath to us, 
 wrapped up behind the ephod. We slew with it 
 our boyish giant, and there is none like it now. 
 And when we come to die, we lean upon the 
 familiar words with which we have so often gone 
 to rest, and say for the last time, ''Father, into 
 Thy hands I commend my spirit." 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 
 
 Lo, on the top of each aerial spire 
 
 "What seems a star by day, so high and bright 
 
 It quivers from afar, in golden light. 
 
 But 'tis a form of earth, though tinged with fire 
 
 Celestial, raised in other days to tell 
 
 How, when they tired of prayer, Apostles fell." 
 
 There are few possessions which we so much 
 cherish as our parish churches. Wherever we go 
 about the country, we know that it is the rarest 
 thing in the world to find a church in which there 
 is no object of interest. 
 
 More often we find buried away, in quiet nooks, 
 bits of beauty, records of self-denial, touching 
 memorials of former piety ; and we feel what our 
 parish churches have been in the past, and what, 
 please God, they will continue to be to our people. 
 And here in London we know what a power the 
 
32 PRIESTLY IDEALS, 
 
 actual church — the material church of bricks and 
 mortar — is in a parish. It is a centre of unity in 
 the dread selfishness which is so characteristic of a 
 great city. It is a bit of beauty in a land of 
 squalor, a centre of patriotism, something to be 
 proud of, something to work for. It is a sympa- 
 thetic voice to remind men of the universal love of 
 God. It weeps when they weep, it smiles when 
 they rejoice, it weaves itself into their joys and 
 sorrows until it becomes a part of their lives. The 
 parish Priest must feel this to be no mean privilege, 
 no unimportant detail, that he is the custodian of 
 the parish church ; to keep it in repair, to enlarge 
 it, if need be ; yes, to keep it clean — emphatically ; 
 to beautify it — most certainly. The parish church 
 should represent in this the heavenly city, the 
 new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven, as a 
 bride adorned for her husband. We need to feel 
 more than we do the educational power, the ele- 
 vating power of simple beauty, where sin is every- 
 where so ugly and God is everywhere so beautiful, 
 in the spirit of that great hymn which, after ex- 
 hausting all themes of adoration and praise, simply 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 33 
 
 expends itself in this : " We give thanks to Thee 
 for Thy great glory ; " " Gratias agimus Tibi propter 
 magnam gloriam Tuam." 
 
 Only let us remember that it is of the greatest 
 importance ever to bear in our mind that we are 
 the custodians, the trustees of the house of God, 
 which belongs to the parish. We ought to do all 
 we can to respect the reasonable sentiments of the 
 people, and readily repress our own individual likes 
 and dislikes. 
 
 It is a pitiful thing to see a man driving away 
 his people, or alienating their affection from the 
 parish church, because he dislikes this or that 
 arrangement, harmless in itself ; or because he likes 
 a particular form of ornament, or insists on having 
 a Litany-desk, or a particular chant, or a particular 
 kind of music. 
 
 I think music has a great deal to answer for in 
 the present day. Our organs get larger and larger, 
 more noisy and obtrusive, filling up space better 
 employed in other ways, mutilating chapels and 
 architectural features, and, in the end, sacrificing 
 everything to artistic display, until, in the enforced 
 
34 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 silence of the congregation, we have only a musical 
 version of the old duet between the clergyman and 
 the clerk, which, in the early days of the Oxford 
 Movement, we made such a point of destroying. 
 Most certainly congregational worship is being more 
 and more invaded by the musical tyranny. How 
 few churches now give the congregation the oppor- 
 tunity of joining in the singing of the Magnificat 
 and Nunc Dimittis ! The dull, interminable, and 
 noisy anthems are listened to in mute patience, 
 or accepted as a musical performance. And the 
 worship of the Altar is so overlaid with noisy and 
 elaborate settings that there are too evident tokens 
 of weariness and distraction. No ! As the parish 
 Priest learns sternly to repress his own aesthetic 
 tastes, or, at least, govern them by the needs of his 
 congregation, so let him not hesitate to keep his 
 choir in due subservience to edification. 
 
 There is, of course, this side to musical worship, 
 in which we rejoice to recognize it as the offering 
 of the most perfect vocal and musical production 
 that can be realized, to the King of Beauty. That 
 has been the function of our cathedrals and great 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 35 
 
 centres of musical art ; but it is disastrous, if we 
 are going to allow the people to be driven out of 
 their share of Divine worship by a musical 
 performance which is neither beautiful in itself 
 nor devotional and helpful to the worshippers. It 
 takes us a long time, all of us, to realize how selfish 
 we are. It takes a long discipline and some 
 experience to be sympathetic with those who are 
 repelled by what we think to be beautiful ; who 
 are hindered by what we find helpful ; who regard 
 as a wicked waste of money what we think to be 
 an edifying symbolism; who are perplexed and 
 puzzled by our fine words and theological terms, 
 which we thought to be so helpful and precise. 
 
 More than we think, more than we care to 
 think, the people and their devotions are the real 
 ornament of the church. Nothing will make up 
 for it ; we can be nothing else than miserable if we 
 find more candles than communicants in our 
 church, a big choir and an empty nave, our own 
 shibboleth echoed by a few and the rest puzzled 
 and unedified. The church is the church of the 
 people, the only bit of beauty which some of them 
 
36 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 possess, the only property in which some of them 
 have a share. They do not like to be hustled and 
 puzzled by our ever-changing eclecticism, or by the 
 last fashion which catches the restless fancy of the 
 parish Priest. Think only of the tender memories 
 which lie buried in those walls, of the many broken 
 hearts, and earnest longings and heartfelt resolu- 
 tions which have wound themselves round the 
 fabric, the services, the hymn-book, the very aspect 
 of the building ! " A tiresome conservatism," do 
 you say? Perhaps; only be tender. There are 
 roots which are struck down into the earth there, 
 in soil which you deem miserably thin, perhaps 
 poisonous. You put them into a richer soil, you 
 put them into a hot-house, they wither and die. 
 They were growing among cinders and rubbish, 
 but there was a soil there, and a grip of it which 
 in our folly we have got rid of, and do not know 
 what to put in its place. Old customs, old beliefs, 
 old prejudices, any soil in which roots have struck 
 down, — they may have to be cleaned, to be re- 
 plenished, reformed, but, depend upon it, it is a 
 bad policy to cast them away altogether. In this 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH 37 
 
 connection the following statement of Cardinal 
 Newman's may not be out of place : ^ " It is not 
 difficult to determine the line of conduct which is 
 to be observed by the Christian apologist and 
 missionary. Believing God's hand to be in every 
 system, so far forth as it is true (though Scripture 
 alone is the depository of His unadulterated and 
 complete revelation), he will, after St. Paul's 
 manner, seek some points in the existing super- 
 stitions as the basis of his own instructions, instead 
 of indiscriminately condemning and discarding the 
 whole assemblage of heathen opinions and practices; 
 and he will address his hearers, not as men in a 
 state of actual perdition, but as being in imminent 
 danger of ' the wrath to come ' because they are in 
 bondage and ignorance, and probably under God's 
 displeasure, that is, the vast majority of them are 
 so in fact, but not necessarily so, from the very 
 circumstance of their being heathen. And while 
 he strenuously opposes all that is idolatrous, 
 immoral, and profane in their creed, he will profess 
 to be leading them on to perfection, and to be 
 1 Newman, " The Arians of the Fourth Century," sect. iii. p. 85. 
 
38 PRIESTLY IDEALS, 
 
 recovering and purifying, rather than reversing the 
 essential principles of their belief. 
 
 " A number of corollaries may be drawn from this 
 view of the relation of Christianity to Paganism 
 by way of solving difficulties which often perplex 
 the mind. For example, we thus perceive the 
 utter impropriety of ridicule and satire as a means 
 of preparing a heathen population for the reception 
 of the truth. Of course it is right, soberly and 
 temperately, to expose the absurdities of idol- 
 worship ; but sometimes it is maintained that a 
 writer, such as the infamous Lucian, who scoffs at 
 an established religion altogether, is the suitable 
 preparation for the Christian preacher, — as if 
 infidelity were a middle state between superstition 
 and truth. This view derives its plausibility from 
 the circumstance that in drawing out systems in 
 writing, to erase a false doctrine is the first step 
 towards inserting the true. Accordingly the mind 
 is often compared to a tablet or paper : a state of it 
 is contemplated of absolute freedom from all pre- 
 possessions and likings for one system or another, 
 as a first step towards arriving at the truth ; and 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 39 
 
 infidelity represented as that candid and dis- 
 passionate frame of mind, which is the desideratum. 
 For instance, at the present day, men are to be 
 found of high religious profession, who, to the 
 surprise and grief of sober minds, exult in the over- 
 throw just now of religion in France, as if an 
 unbeliever were in a more hopeful state than a 
 bigot for advancement in real spiritual knowledge. 
 But, in truth, the mind never can resemble a blank 
 paper, in its freedom from impressions and pre- 
 judices. Infidelity is a positive, not a negative 
 state, it is a state of profaneness, pride, and selfish- 
 ness ; and he who believes a little, but encompasses 
 that little with the inventions of men, is undeniably 
 in a better condition than he who blots out from 
 his mind both the human inventions and that 
 portion of truth which was concealed in them." 
 
 The parish church is like a rock in the wilder- 
 ness, out of which gushes the fountain of life. 
 There it streams forth in sacramental rivers of 
 grace, and where it flows over, there is the green 
 oasis of vicarage, school, institute, penitentiary, 
 houses of god-fearing men and women, whose lives 
 
40 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 are soothed by the murmur of this refreshing 
 stream, where the parish Priest follows the guid- 
 ance of the Good Shepherd and leads them forth 
 in the green pastures beside the waters of comfort. 
 
 I. 
 
 Of the many functions which the Priest has to 
 discharge in his parish church, I would take now 
 only just a few, asking you to remember that I 
 do not put these forward as an exhaustive 
 enumeration, but certainly as leading and most 
 important offices of spiritual duty, which he has 
 to discharge in his spiritual house of business. 
 
 And first of all, of course, I must put his 
 ministry at the Altar. This is his most character- 
 istic function. The worship of the church is no 
 mere independent arrangement which might have 
 been otherwise ; ^ it is ordained by Christ Himself, 
 to make, as it were, the worship one which links 
 Heaven and earth together. A Sunday without 
 
 ^ See " The Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of our Lord," 
 Milligan, p. 309. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 41 
 
 an Eucharist is an anomaly which ought to be 
 impossible. A Priest who neglects this most 
 important part of his ministry must surely feel 
 that his church is like a patch of darkness, where 
 the long line of Altars flashes up the great memorial 
 to God. As one looks down from a height over 
 the far-stretching plain, or over the city from the 
 dome above us, and see the towers and spires of 
 the churches reaching away into the haze, one 
 realizes what a mighty intercession it might be, 
 when, at every Altar, at least on Sunday, the Priest 
 proclaims the Lord's death till He come. The 
 guides at the top of this cathedral are accustomed 
 to say (I know not with what truth) that wher- 
 ever the cupola or spire is painted black, that is 
 a sign that the pre-existing church on that spot 
 was destroyed in the Great Fire. What does the 
 recording angel think of those dead churches 
 which neglect to plead the Lord's death and break 
 this linked intercession ? On the other hand, now, 
 it is not unusual to find, and for this we must 
 thank God, even many churches in which the 
 Holy Eucharist is offered daily. Only, ought we 
 
42 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 not to look to it as a subject of self-examination 
 in Lent, that we never enterprise sucli a tre- 
 mendous thing in mere obedience to a fashion, or 
 because it is " the right thing to do " ? One does 
 so dread anything like playing with the Blessed 
 Sacrament, or thinking that one can put on, as the 
 saying is, a Daily Celebration as lightly and easily 
 as one can put on a coloured stole. There are 
 difficulties, yes, and there are profanations con- 
 nected with it, which people do not always think 
 of. It must be — it is — a tremendous strain for a 
 Priest to be obliged, from want of assistance, to 
 celebrate every day. I know there are some who 
 think it only the right and the duty of every 
 Priest, even when they are in retreat, so to cele- 
 brate. It is a tremendous claim, and implies a 
 life of sustained sanctity, which I know we are 
 all bound to aim at, but which we feel it is un- 
 speakably difficult to attain to. 
 
 It is idle to affect to ignore that a mechanical 
 devotion has before now crept in over the Priest- 
 hood. It survives in the popular idea of " Sacerdo- 
 talism." There is nothing in that term itself 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 43 
 
 which should or would frighten people, but it 
 represents a scar, the memory of a past burn on 
 the public conscience, which keeps men away even 
 from warmth and light. It has been admirably 
 put before us in a recent book on the " Ministerial 
 Priesthood," that " a Christian priesthood misappre- 
 hends itself which can be content to find the 
 beginning and end of its definition or meaning in 
 terms only of what is outward and ceremonial, or 
 in any sacramental service, however intelligent 
 it may be, or reverent in itself, which does not 
 sweep in the whole heart, and action, and life. 
 Leadership in Eucharist worship, truly understood, 
 involves many corollaries of spirit and life : the 
 bearing of the people on the heart before God ; the 
 earnest efibrt of intercessory entreaty ; the practi- 
 cal translation of intercession into pastoral life, and 
 anxiety, and pain."^ The Daily Celebration and 
 ministerial easiness, or levity, go ill together. He 
 who celebrates daily has mastered the difficulty 
 which puzzles us, of wearing aright the Eucharistic 
 Vestments. He has the Helmet of salvation on 
 
 ' "Ministerial Priesthood," by Dr. Moberly, p. 261. 
 
44 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 his head, the Amice which shields him from the 
 dazzling and distracting blows of the world, from 
 intellectual perplexity and spiritual temptations. 
 He is covered from head to foot with the Alb of 
 perfect purity ; he has learned to bring into 
 captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. 
 He is girt with the Girdle of absolute temperance ; 
 he is not the slave of any habit, however innocent 
 in itself, but is girded in tight from the enjoyment 
 of any creature, which is used for its own sake 
 apart from the necessities of life. He bears on his 
 neck the Stole of humility ; he is the servant of 
 God and the servant of his people ; his whole life 
 is dedicated to the service of humanity. He is 
 covered before and behind with the Chasuble 
 marked with the cross. He is wrapped up in Christ. 
 His intercessions are joined with His. His active 
 hands are pierced with His. His busy feet are 
 pierced with His. His side is pierced in compas- 
 sion with His. While on his arm hangs the 
 Maniple of sympathy, to weep with them that 
 weep, to know something of the Beatitude of the 
 mourners, and to minister to the distressed. Wher- 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 45 
 
 ever we go in the ministry we are surrounded 
 with the symbolism of utter surrender ; but 
 directly we brush past these mute reminders 
 directly we become official, cold, or perfunctory, 
 we run tremendous risks. Fashion, "the correct 
 thing," orthodoxy, a stiff rule, ecclesiasticism, have 
 a great deal to answer for; our rough, illogical, 
 haphazard methods, which seem to be so irregular 
 as compared with the firm correctness of other 
 standards, at least witness to an intense abhor- 
 rence of unreality, of a national shrinking from 
 going one inch further outwardly than we are 
 prepared to go inwardly, and an intense desire to 
 know what the man is inside the Vestments. And 
 if he be a golden Priest, let him offer in a vessel 
 of wood ; if he be a wooden Priest, let him forbear 
 to offer even in vessels of gold. Surely it would 
 be a region in which we should meet with no 
 opposition, except from the devil, if we tried to 
 provide ourselves, this Lent, with the Eucharistic 
 Vestments of a Spiritual Life. 
 
46 PRIESTLY IDEALS, 
 
 II. 
 
 Another function connected with the church 
 is the recitation of the Divine Office, known 
 as Matins and Evensong, to which recitation we 
 are bound by a special obligation. Of course 
 the revival of this recitation was one of the main 
 features of the Tractarian Movement, and it is 
 probable that more people attended these Offices 
 thirty years ago than do now. Possibly this has 
 been due to that feminine form of admiration 
 which imagines that love for a particular thing 
 can best be shown by depreciating something else. 
 People have thought it a good way of elevating 
 the Holy Eucharist to depreciate Matins and Even- 
 song. Partly, again, other popular Devotions have 
 taken their place. Partly the Shortened Service 
 Act has so robbed them of their structure and 
 their beauty, that where everything has been 
 sacrificed to brevity, people have ceased to feel 
 their attraction. Partly, no doubt, also people 
 have grown indifferent in a general wave of care- 
 lessness about church-going. But, as Priests, do 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH, 47 
 
 let US recall a few simj)le considerations which 
 merit our attention. First, that a very special 
 blessing attaches to our recitation of an Office 
 which is laid upon us under the obligation of 
 a duty. Secondly, that it would be desirable 
 that we should get out of the way of a per- 
 functory parochial recitation of these Offices, which 
 is symbolized by the fact that none of the clergy 
 ever attend unless they are obliged to do so, 
 in the person of the one who is responsible 
 for the Office. Surely, just as in well- worked 
 cathedrals every effort is made to minimize the 
 idea of " the Canon in Residence," so it would be 
 a good thing to minimize the idea of the Priest 
 who is responsible for the Office, and to use these 
 times as far as possible as the expression of the 
 united voice of those who minister to God in that 
 parish. Thirdly, let us realize that this is part of 
 our work, as real and as true as the performing 
 of some definite parochial activity. We, in our 
 Cathedrals, have an immense obligation laid upon 
 us, to show people that we are not wasting time 
 when we take part in our daily elaborate services, 
 
48 PRIESTLY IDEALS, 
 
 and to let those whose duty brings them there feel 
 that the clergy go to church not only when they 
 are obliged, and that their main duty after all is 
 not merely to preach, write letters, and attend 
 committees. Fourthly, let us realize that by the 
 custom of the Church of England the laity are 
 invited and expected to assist the clergy in the 
 recitation of the Divine Office — nothing unprimi- 
 tive or unusual, as a study of Duchesne will 
 show.^ And this being so, it is loyal, it is well 
 to emphasize and elaborate it. What is more 
 miserable in life than a man who is unnatural; 
 who, being born, for instance, to the honest and 
 dignified position of tradesman, affects to despise 
 trade, and to imitate the fashions and indolence 
 of a social stage above him ? Or, what is more 
 provoking than for a man who is born an English- 
 man to pose as a Frenchman ? Or, in the region 
 of art, what greater mistake has been made by an 
 architect than treating Classical Architecture as if 
 it were Gothic, and Gothic as if it were Classical ? 
 Depend upon it, it is an immense thing, as 
 ^ Duchesne, " Origines du Culte Chretien," chap. xvi. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 49 
 
 Churchmen also, to be natural; to be fond of 
 the peculiarities of Anglicanism, and to make the 
 best of them, and not for ever to be trying to 
 make them something else, or despise them because 
 they are not foreign. 
 
 It would be difficult to find anywhere a form of 
 Divine Office more dignified and more serviceable 
 than Evensong. Its intense dignity and beauty 
 must strike any one, as well as its great popularity 
 in the best sense. And, indeed, largely intellectual 
 in their appeal as the Divine Offices are, and full of 
 Holy Scripture, they have brought up, and do bring 
 up, a sturdier generation of Churchmen than those 
 who are nourished on hymns and popular devo- 
 tions, sometimes almost puerile, generally very light. 
 
 And this being so, is it not our wisdom to recog- 
 nize it and adorn it ? If Holy Scripture enters so 
 largely into our Offices, they were meant to be in- 
 structive. If they are in the vernacular, they were 
 meant to be heard. What is the mystical value of 
 mumbling ? What is the precise value of reading 
 so fast, so unintelligibly, so badly, that laymen 
 shrink away ashamed and pained ? This surely is 
 
50 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 an affectation of what we are not, and about as 
 dignified as the assuming of a limping gait, or a 
 lisping tongue, when God has made us healthy and 
 whole. No! the recitation of the Divine Office 
 should be performed with as much care as the 
 celebration of the Holy Mysteries themselves. We 
 cannot run in and out before God, and say, " It is 
 only Matins, it does not matter. We must get 
 through it somehow, we must do it quickly." No ! 
 God is there, and when we have done our best we 
 shall have done it very badly. While to have done 
 our best in the Divine Office is a reason for being 
 able to do our best in the service of the Holy Altar. 
 Might we not this Lent take the Divine Office 
 in hand, and try to offer it more worthily to God ? 
 What a grand thing is the recitation of the 
 Psalter alone ! Think of that great choir before 
 whom we say it; the saints who have enriched 
 every cadence, and fulfilled every turn of those 
 Psalms with the melody of their lives! What a 
 companion we have in the Daily Office ; how it has 
 wound itself round our life, and has spoken to us 
 at every turn ; childhood, school, college-life, our 
 daily vicissitudes, are all in it ! It is like the sea, 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 
 
 it is like the mountains, always changing, yet 
 always the same. We do not need proper lessons, 
 they are always appropriate. King Charles is 
 comforted before his martyrdom by the lesson chosen 
 as if for his especial comfort. The Bishops on their 
 release from the Tower are cheered by the Lesson 
 which told of St. Peter's deliverance from prison. It 
 is a sturdy, vigorous life, after all, which has grown 
 up, fed with the Daily Office full of Scripture — and 
 of Scripture shaded and painted and framed in the 
 exquisite devotional setting which gives it its true 
 value. Here at least we shall make use of our 
 church, and ask our people to use it with us, 
 and thank God for a national use which has 
 taught our people to love their Bible, and has 
 given them withal a masculine spiritual sense. 
 
 III. 
 
 In the few moments I have left, I would speak 
 of the church as a place of instruction, and that 
 only in one department, the instruction as given in 
 sermons. It is a question whether we are giving 
 sermons anything like their proper position in our 
 
52 PRIESTLY IDEALS, 
 
 work and thoughts. In the great reaction from 
 the time when preaching obscured Sacraments, 
 there seemed to be a deliberate attempt to belittle 
 sermons. It was another example of what I spoke 
 of just now : people showed their appreciation of 
 Sacraments by offering indignity to sermons. We 
 remember the absolute fear of preaching without a 
 book, pulpits cut down, or even abolished, the 
 restrained, unimpassioned reading of a doctrinal 
 treatise, generally on the subject of Baptismal 
 Regeneration. But English people certainly be- 
 lieved in sermons, and surely it was the height of 
 folly to drive away a class which was ready to be 
 taught, and to break down what was in reality a 
 great opportunity. Now, of course, there are signs 
 that this belief, imperfect and out of proportion as 
 it was, is dying out. The rising generation as a 
 rule dislikes sermons. And it is not a matter which 
 we can view with unmixed satisfaction, if our 
 class-room is empty, and an uninstructed youth is 
 growing up, more especially as they come to us from 
 schools where dogmatic truth is wholly ignored, 
 and even a proper use of the Bible is neglected. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH 53 
 
 Is there not a growing carelessness and even 
 flippancy about sermons ? Their numbers, alas ! 
 do not decrease, but our people are being fed on 
 terribly thin stuff, and they resent it. And then 
 comes the terrible temptation to do something to 
 make them stop and listen, which is unworthy, — the 
 comic sermon, the attractive sermon, the sermon on 
 subjects of the day. I myself have seen churches 
 placarded as if a variety entertainment were to 
 take place inside. " Courtship," " Wives," "■ Musings 
 by the side of a glacier," " The biggest banquet on 
 record," and titles of this kind, are advertised as 
 subjects of sermons. Is it not degrading ? Is it 
 not pandering to the lowest tastes ? Is it not an 
 offence against beauty ? Is it not dangerous to 
 the preacher himself? The new calendar, again, 
 landing us in Sanitation Sunday, with the general 
 subject of drainage — is it not lowering the Chris- 
 tian pulpit ? Does it not say, " The Gospel is worn 
 out, and I must do something to attract and keep 
 a congregation together somehow " ? Or, take once 
 more the prevailing fashion of inviting to church, 
 men by themselves, women by themselves, children 
 
54 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 by themselves, to a special service. Of course there 
 are occasions when this may be desirable, but very 
 often it is only a kind of flattery designed to make 
 people believe that we have got a message of 
 peculiar importance to deliver to them, which turns 
 out after all to be something which might have 
 been said with equal propriety to the occupants of 
 the old family pew. It was said in a recent 
 sermon ^ that there are four qualifications for a good 
 preacher: (1) Reverence; (2) Study; (3) Dogma; 
 (4) Comprehensiveness. And these are heads of 
 examination under which we might well bring our 
 sermons. I£ we think of reverence, it would be 
 something if we always knelt down before we 
 prepared, and always before we delivered our 
 sermons, and said, " Veni Creator r We should 
 hardly then invite the Holy Spirit to help us to 
 make jokes, or talk about glaciers, or say smart 
 and profane things about the Saints, just to show 
 we are not afraid. We should speak then as in a 
 Presence, and feel that a sermon is a speech with 
 
 1 " Four Qualifications for a Good Preacher," a Sermon by Dr. 
 Luckock, Deau of Lichfield, 1887. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 55 
 
 a nimhv^ round it, just as the Bible is a book with 
 a nimbus round it, and the church is a building 
 with a nimbus round it, and the Priest, if you like, 
 a man with a nimbus round him. These flippant 
 attractive sermons not only, in some instances, do 
 harm to the preacher, but they do harm to the 
 congregation also. Accustomed to strong stimu- 
 lants like this, they will have nothing without 
 them, and the old Gospel sounds flat to those who 
 want more jokes, more pictures described, more 
 politics, more questions of the day. Smartness, 
 profanity, irreverence — so it gets piled on and on, 
 as the old stimulants fail, and something stronger 
 is demanded, under threat of an empty church. 
 We see the great Preacher of righteousness reduced 
 to a congregation of twelve on one occasion, and 
 they wavering ; but there was no attempt to 
 minimize truth in consequence. 
 
 And then I suppose, in just the opposite direction, 
 a preacher who has driven people away by his 
 dullness and emptiness, ought to be severely 
 grieved with himself. It is not a mark of per- 
 fection to have an empty church. Study of books, 
 
56 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 of men, of history, of self, should always give him 
 something to say. And if a man has something to 
 say, people will stop to listen to it. We want to 
 get out of that hopeless way of droning out a few 
 platitudes which have been said hundreds of times 
 before, something to take up time, or suggesting 
 the obvious impression that a duty has been forced 
 upon us which we dislike, despise, and refuse. 
 Every Priest who is in earnest can preach ; if we 
 have something to say we shall be able to say it. 
 We ought surely to take more pains, not to write 
 an essay, but to give our people, whom we know 
 as individuals, a message. Indolence, neglected 
 prayer, vanity, self-indulgence, contented ignorance, 
 neglected visiting, neglected schools, all leave their 
 marks upon our sermons. It is the greatest com- 
 pliment which a preacher can receive, not that he 
 has preached an eloquent sermon, but that he has 
 preached a helpful one. My old Vicar, the late 
 Dean Butler, used to say we ought to ask 
 ourselves, "Has my sermon led anybody to do 
 anything ? " — to think worse of himself than when 
 he came to church ? Has it taught anybody 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS CHURCH. 57 
 
 anything ? These are the sort of things to aim at 
 in a sermon : not, " How am I to write a good essay- 
 to satisfy myself?" but "What will that trades- 
 man whom I know get out of this ? What will 
 this teach that difficult Churchman? Will this 
 solve that young man's perplexities ? Is this the 
 sort of thing which will help my people to face 
 the infamy of the streets, and the temptations of 
 life ? " It is better to speak from the heart, and 
 what we feel, even if artistically or to a scholarly 
 mind we are out of proportion, than to say, " There 
 is this to be said on this side, and this on that ; the 
 truth lies somewhere between, and is of very little 
 value when you find it." We want study. Study 
 in the two books, the book of experience and the 
 book of revelation. And we want dogma. I 
 cannot sum up this better than in these words, 
 which I once read in a review, "The Gospel is 
 good news, not good advice." We have news, 
 unspeakably good news, to deliver; we have to 
 preach to men the way of salvation ; and the way 
 of salvation, however unpopular it may be to say 
 so, is very clearly marked, and sharply separated 
 
S8 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 off from many tracts of very pleasing error. And 
 we shall want comprehensiveness, " the proportion 
 of faith." Surely this does need insisting on. At 
 one time Baptismal Regeneration, as we have seen, 
 used to be preached ad nauseam. At another 
 time, the Atonement. Now we so often hear the 
 Holy Sacrament of the Altar dragged in, in season 
 and out of season, that we find ourselves looking 
 out for it as a milestone on the way. It is terribly 
 easy to make truth stale, to press it out of pro- 
 portion, and to build superstructures without 
 foundations, and to spend strength on ornamenta- 
 tion which was needed for the foundations. The 
 whole history of schism is the history of ill-pro- 
 portioned truth, which has broken off at the point 
 of deformity. 
 
 If our churches are of such value, viewed in only 
 three departments of their manifold uses, let us 
 labour more and more to make them centres of 
 life ; houses of God in very truth ; sanctuaries to 
 which the sinner can flee and escape ; schools of 
 sound doctrine, the grave Gospel preached by 
 grave clergy to meet the grave mysteries of life. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 
 
 " Despondency is but another form of self-conceit. Despondency 
 is self-confidence whicli has failed." 
 
 No one can have been long in the ministry, if at 
 all events he has made full proof of it, without 
 finding out how largely he is occupied in dealing 
 with sin. So much so, that if a man finds, or 
 begins to think, that his time and work are devoted 
 only or chiefly to presiding at committees, organiz- 
 ing entertainments, improving sanitary conditions, 
 and in political agitation, one is almost inclined 
 to think there must be something wrong. 
 
 The sheep are safely curled up in the fold, he re- 
 gards their number with pride, their general fleecy 
 whiteness with satisfaction ; and he knows nothing 
 of the thief which comes not but for to steal and to 
 kill and to destroy. If a doctor in the parish were 
 
6o PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 to spend all his time in organizing missionary 
 meetings, or getting up concerts, his patients would 
 soon seek some one else, or, failing that, die. And 
 so if we Priests are out of touch with individual 
 work, if we know nothing of the soul's needs among 
 our people; perhaps unconsciously to us they are 
 seeking other remedies, other doctors, strange 
 unhealthy sentimental quackeries, while we keep 
 the Church medicine-chest shut up, and do not 
 know how to use the Church's instruments. And 
 our sheep are getting their remedies elsewhere 
 while we are sending up our parochial statistics to 
 "The Church's Year-book," or they are dying of 
 some hidden disease, while we complacently say, 
 " What a beautiful flock we have under our hand 1 " 
 We are bound to assume the existence of sin and 
 the need of definite penitence in our flock ; not, 
 alas ! in those open and notorious cases which we 
 fence round with a wall of propriety, and leave as 
 altogether beyond us and impossible; but also 
 among our own most cherished sheep, our choir, 
 our communicants, our respectable Churchpeople, 
 our schools. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 6i 
 
 Always remember — never let us forget it — 
 that congregation of respectable people whose 
 religious sympathies were so outraged, and their 
 sense of the intense obligation of the moral 
 law so accentuated ; who wished to make it a 
 test of our blessed Lord's conduct, whether or not 
 He sympathized with them in suppressing so great 
 an outrage. There they stand round the poor 
 woman taken in adultery, indignant, triumphant, 
 with a case with a definite issue, from which He 
 could not escape. " Moses in the Law commanded 
 us, that such should be stoned : but what sayest 
 Thou ? " ^ And in a few moments the whole con- 
 gregation has melted awa}^, stung by a shaft from 
 the quiver of truth : " He that is without sin 
 among you " (he that is free in this matter), " let 
 him first cast a stone at her." ^ 
 
 L 
 
 And this brings me to the first thing I wished 
 to say. We must make penitents. Every man is 
 
 ^ St, John viii. 5. " St. John viii. 7. 
 
62 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 a sinner, but not every man is a penitent. Some 
 are leading two lives, quite distinct the one from 
 the other ; it is " Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde " over 
 again. And when the first man is in church, or 
 talking to his Rector, he does not think anything 
 about his second self, which is lustful, intemperate, 
 angry, dishonest, on other days and in other com- 
 pany. And he has persuaded himself that every- 
 body has something amiss with him ; that virtue is 
 like a highly refined spirit, which needs a little 
 adulteration with sin if it is to stand the climate of 
 the world. He poses in society as a man who is 
 not too strict, as a man who knows something of 
 the world, as one, in short, who makes no profes- 
 sions. There they sit before you on Sunday as 
 morally dense as any King David when Nathan is 
 speaking his parable in the pulpit. We must make 
 penitents ; that is, we must speak plainly from time 
 to time about sin and the need of repentance. We 
 must tell people what sin really is, and what peni- 
 tence really is, and that a great deal more is re- 
 quired from the followers of the Crucified than was 
 required from the better heathen and from the Jews, 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 63 
 
 Do we have plain speaking enough from the 
 pulpit ? The only plain speaking that many of 
 our parishioners get is on the side of Satan, in 
 novels and publications which they read without 
 a blush ; while they are shocked at anything which 
 is outside the limits of commonplace in our utter- 
 ances. It is the shallowest criticism which com- 
 plains of what some people are pleased to call the 
 indelicacy of the Bible. There, certain sins and 
 the permanent attitude of God towards those sins, 
 together with certain mysteries of life, are treated 
 of in a solemn and serious way, and the knowledge 
 of what is wrong and the knowledge of those 
 mysteries of life which so many are now saying- 
 ought to be imparted to the young, are there set 
 forth in a natural, solemn, and yet veiled manner. 
 
 Still, I return to what I said at first. Do we 
 speak seriously enough to our people about sin and 
 sinfulness ? It is difficult and it is dangerous ; and 
 surely great care must be exercised; but still it 
 should be done. Why should there not be more 
 consultations among the Priests of a parish as to 
 sermons ? And if something has to be said, let it 
 
64 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 not be said by the youngest and most inexperienced 
 and the least responsible member of the staff, but 
 by him who is best qualified by experience and 
 capabilities to speak, and who will do so as the 
 representative of all. How often it happens that 
 things are rushed, and harm is done because a 
 young man, straight from his Ordination, without 
 consultation, and without knowing the people, in- 
 sists on blurting out some difficult piece of advice 
 on some delicate doctrinal point, and thinks that he 
 is thereby declaring " the whole counsel of God." ^ 
 
 Most certainly refined ladies and children have 
 to be respected ; and therefore I would venture to 
 suggest that when we preach about impurity, e.g. as 
 we ought to do from time to time, it should be in 
 Lent or at other times when special notice can be 
 given, so that those who do not want to come may 
 be able to withdraw themselves. Lust, drunken- 
 ness, untruthfulness, dishonesty, and other common 
 sins, should be preached about earnestly and 
 strongly, at least once a year, by that member of 
 the staff who is best able to do it. It was the old 
 
 1 Acts XX. 27. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 65 
 
 Tractarian rule to preach penitence in the con- 
 fident belief that repentance and confession of sins 
 would naturally follow. In our sestheticism, our 
 sermons on subjects of the day, our love of change, 
 there is a terrible danger of forgetting %in ; and it 
 is one of the first duties of the parish Priest to 
 put this before his people. 
 
 11. 
 
 If it is his duty to make penitents, to rouse this 
 feeling in the hearts of a too self-satisfied genera- 
 tion, it is his duty also to find out penitents. I 
 mean, he will not content himself with firing into 
 the air ; he wiU follow it up ; he must get at close 
 quarters with his people. And how very much 
 depends on this 1 Is there not a danger in that 
 diocesan official spirit that people will begin to 
 think you have no heart and no human sym- 
 pathies ? The man who looks from the height 
 of an inefiable superiority on a poor struggling 
 schoolboy will not encourage him to ask how 
 he can get rid of that evil which has not yet 
 
 F 
 
66 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 become chronic, which has fastened on him 
 from evil surroundings. There are some people 
 we could not confide in ; they seem to repel us. 
 That man who magnificently reaches the poor 
 tempted artisan through a network of organiza- 
 tion, and touches him with the finger-tips of a 
 district visitor, perhaps not over wise, perhaps 
 gossiping and fussy, must not expect to get at 
 the depth of a man's heart. The man who only 
 speaks to his people in herds in a parish-room or 
 schoolroom must not expect Nicodemus to come 
 and talk to him about his soul, or Onesimus 
 to tell him that he is a runaway slave, who 
 wants to get back to his Master and atone for his 
 fault as a Christian to a Christian. Penitents 
 hide away in the garrets in the shape of men who 
 have long shunned the very sight of a Priest. 
 There is a reason for it. Penitents lurk away in 
 that class of difficult people whom we have lumped 
 together in a broad generalization of uniform 
 hopelessness as " publicans and sinners." Penitents 
 are to be found in the Confirmation candidates, 
 who are not a class to be drilled to pass an 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 67 
 
 examination, but individual souls to be saved. The 
 young man who tells you he does not believe in 
 a God does not really need a series of " Bampton 
 Lectures," but probably only wants to make his 
 Confession. The man whom you press and worry 
 to fall in with the ordinary routine of penitence 
 shrinks back ; you have frightened him. His soul 
 is tender ; sin to him is a delicate and awful 
 subject ; he does not know you are the sort of 
 doctor he cares to trust. It is one thing to preach 
 penitence ; it is another thing to have that subtle 
 diagnosis of character, that wisdom and practical 
 prudence, which knows where to look for the sin- 
 laden sufferer, and how best to cure the acuteness 
 of his sufferings. 
 
 And this, I truly believe, is a long process. 
 You can get it mechanically. You can tell your 
 young people you expect a certain routine of 
 penitence, and that they must conform to it. But 
 I doubt whether the good doctor, quite apart from 
 anything else, ever treats people mechanically. 
 Sympathy, experience, tenderness, seeking people 
 in season and out of season, great refinement and 
 
68 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 delicacy of touch, practical knowledge born of 
 constant work among them, and supernatural 
 grace, which is the outcome of prayer, — this will 
 be the welcome to the penitent, which will attract 
 him and draw him on to Christ. 
 
 III. 
 
 But, having preached penitence, and having 
 found those who feel deeply their need of forgive- 
 ness, having gained the confidence of your people, 
 how are you going to help them ? Most certainly 
 God has provided in His Church the very anodyne 
 of their pain, and has given it to you to administer. 
 I mean Absolution. Now, you know this is a 
 subject on which a good deal is said which is 
 foolish, and a great deal that is wrong. Let us 
 try and clear it up, as far as we may. 
 
 Most certainly, if we believe Holy Scripture at 
 all, everybody is bound to confess his sins — " If we 
 confess our sins. He is faithful and just to forgive 
 us our sins ; " and, mark you, not merely our sin- 
 fulness, but our sins. Do our people realize this ? 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 69 
 
 It is SO picturesque and easy just to kneel down 
 and say, "We have erred like a lost sheep. We 
 all know that we are sinners. I know I am not 
 so good as I ought to be." It adds sometimes a 
 gentle softening, as of humility, to a character 
 whose respectability is almost too obtrusive in its 
 brilliant colours. Aristides deprecates ostracism 
 by saying that, after all, his justice is defective, 
 and he makes no professions. But it is quite 
 another thing to kneel down and say, "O God, 
 I did a vile action. I said this or that cruel thing- 
 to-day. I did not tell the truth. To-day I have 
 given way to bitter anger." This is the sort of 
 confession our Prayer-book orders for her com- 
 municants, accompanied with a searching self- 
 examination by the rule of God's Commandments. 
 But she does more than this ; she is bound to do 
 more than this. There is an ordinance of the 
 Church known as Absolution, which (of course, it 
 could not have been otherwise ; we cannot cut 
 away God's ordinances as indifferent matters) was 
 retained at the Reformation as a well-known, 
 definite thing. Everybody knew what Absolution 
 
70 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 meant then ; everybody knows what it means now 
 To retain the term, if something else was meant 
 by that term, would be about as reasonable as if 
 an inhabitant of Leicester were to leave behind in 
 his will, as his advice, that, in face of the opposi- 
 tion to that medical process called vaccination, all 
 his children should be periodically vaccinated at 
 stated times, as a preventive against small-pox, 
 when he only meant by this that they were to 
 take cooKng medicine when they required it. 
 Surely it is playing with the meaning of terms 
 if we suppose Absolution to mean reading "the 
 Comfortable Words," or reading out texts of Holy 
 Scripture, or declaring that God forgives sins on 
 repentance, which a child could say with as much 
 truth and power as a Priest. No ; the Church 
 has put into our hands the power which has been 
 lodged in the Church from the very beginning 
 and was committed to us at our ordination — 
 " Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted 
 unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, 
 they are retained." ^ And it is this great, this 
 
 » St. John XX. 23. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS, 7 1 
 
 unspeakable gift that we can bestow upon the 
 penitent in his dealings with his sins ; which we, 
 and only we, can give him. And to obtain this 
 he must make Confession as the contribution on 
 his part, which we always find in the case of any 
 recipient of Divine grace. 
 
 But here we are confronted with several objec- 
 tions. In the first place, people say all this blessing 
 which you hint at can be obtained in the Public 
 Confessions and Absolutions of the Divine Ofiice, 
 and more especially of the Holy Communion. 
 Surely it is quite sufficient if I examine myself, 
 and remember my sins, and read them with true 
 contrition into the Public Confession, and obtain 
 the Public Absolution. Well, in the first place, 
 " sufficient " is hardly the term we like to use in 
 dealing with repentance for our sins. Our blessed 
 Lord did not ask what was " sufficient " when for 
 us men and for our salvation He came down from 
 heaven, but He emptied Himself of His glory. He 
 did not ask what was " sufficient " when, to make 
 Atonement, He shed His Blood in the bitterness of 
 His Cross and Passion. In view of our sins, do we 
 
72 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 not need rather to ask, " Is there anything more 
 that I could do ? Is there anything to make me 
 feel my sins more, to deepen my contrition ? " 
 Awjplius lava me .• " Wash me more and more 
 from my wickedness." Surely thus to run in, as it 
 were, under the public Absolutions would be to 
 endeavour to snatch a Sacramental blessing with 
 the smallest possible expenditure of personal shame 
 and trouble. God forbid that we should say it 
 is impossible ! It is possible to wash in a 
 tiny basin, but it is easier and better to use 
 the cleansing bath. For although almost certainly 
 the Absolutions in the public services are real 
 sprinklings of Absolution pronounced by the 
 Priest alone, yet surely they are final Absolutions 
 pronounced over people already believed to be 
 pardoned, for the purposes of the immediate 
 service in hand. They are a kind of ceremonial 
 cleansing of the wedding guest before he enters 
 the Presence ; a spiritual laver standing before 
 the door of the sanctuary — "that those things 
 may please Him, which we do at this present." 
 That moment when we assemble and meet 
 
7 HE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 73 
 
 together^ to worship God is a time for very 
 special confession of sins over and above our usual 
 private penitence. And note these public Absolu- 
 tions are no new thing introduced when private 
 Absolution fell into abeyance, or, rather, ceased to 
 be compulsory at the Eeformation. They are to 
 be found in the old Choir Offices of Prime and 
 Compline. In the Roman Mass, every one who 
 receives the Blessed Sacrament, and as a prelimi- 
 nary has received private Absolution, has said over 
 him before his Communion a second Absolution in 
 public: "Misereatur vestri Omnipotens Deus, et 
 dimissis peccatis vestris perducat vos ad vitam 
 
 ' That this is possible we see in the Kiibric in •' The Form of 
 Prayer to be used at Sea " : — 
 
 "When there shall be imminent clanger, as many as can be 
 spared from necessary service in the Ship shall be called together, 
 and make an humble Confession of their sin to God: in which 
 every one ought seriously to reflect upon those particular sins of 
 which his conscience shall accuse him, saying as followeth : — 
 
 " Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," etc. 
 
 Just as in a similar manner a sick man can be assured that in 
 great extremity a spiritual communion will secure to him all the 
 benefits of an actual communion. 
 
 But surely we do not need to act in our daily life as if we were 
 in imminent danger in a storm at sea. 
 
74 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 seternam. Amen. Indulgentiam, absolutionem et 
 remissionem peccatorum nostrorum tribuat nobis 
 Omnipotens et misericors Dominus. Amen." 
 
 Neither does the often-quoted exhortation in the 
 First Prayer-book of Edward VI. countenance this 
 idea. It runs as follows : " Requiring such as shall 
 be satisfied with a general Confession not to be 
 offended with them that do use to their further 
 satisfying the auricular and secret Confession to the 
 Priest ; nor those also which think needful or con- 
 venient for the quietness of their own conscience 
 particularly to open their sins to the Priest to be 
 offended with them that are satisfied with their 
 humble Confession to God and the general Confes- 
 sion to the Church, but in all things to follow and 
 keep the rule of charity, and every man to be 
 satisfied with his own conscience, not judging other 
 men's minds or consciences; whereas he hath no 
 warrant of God's word to the same." ^ 
 
 Note here, as in our present Prayer-book, it is 
 assumed that the penitent's preparation shall be 
 conducted at some length and with great earnest- 
 
 ^ Exhortation, First Prayer-book of Edward VI., a.d. 1549. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 75 
 
 ness in private before coming to the service of 
 Holy Communion. And in doing this the penitent 
 can do one of two things : he can either confess his 
 sins to God with earnest contrition, which is here 
 described as " his humble Confession to God," and 
 obtain from God the pardon which He always 
 vouchsafes to true penitents ; or else he can confess 
 his sins to God before His Priest, and obtain Sacra- 
 mental Absolution, a definite assurance of pardon, 
 accompanied with a special grace. Then, which- 
 ever course he chooses to take, he goes to church, 
 and makes what is here called a " general Con- 
 fession to the Church" of sinfulness, and obtains, 
 although in any case a forgiven man, Absolution 
 again, for the purpose of the service; just as a 
 man, however clean, washes his hands afresh 
 before going to the banquet of the King. 
 
 No, if we reject Absolution and private Confes- 
 sion, we must insist all the more on the greater 
 earnestness of private Confession to God, and find 
 some mode, if we can, of deepening our contrition. 
 The contrast is not between private and public 
 Absolution, but between private forgiveness of 
 
76 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 sins, which God gives to an earnest penitent, and 
 private Absolution, which God gives as a Sacra- 
 mental gift to all who have done their part by- 
 private Confession ; both of these being the 
 Church's method by which we may prepare our- 
 selves for public worship. 
 
 Perhaps it is hardly necessary to allude to the 
 objections which are advanced from time to time 
 against this salutary ordinance. They are, for 
 the most part, the objections of people who have 
 no practical experience of the matter at all. Take, 
 for instance, the assertion that Confession weakens 
 the will. It weakens the will just so far, and no 
 further, as the Priest allows a person to repose in 
 his direction and advice, instead of following the 
 dictates and orders of his own conscience and 
 Divinely illuminated sense. This weakening of 
 the will has nothing to do with Confession. The 
 Priest who is always allowing his parishioners to 
 consult him on all matters, so that they never stir 
 a step without asking his advice, which they seek 
 in the private interview and the godly converse, is 
 in this way impairing the wills of his people just 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 77 
 
 as much as by the supposed weakening which goes 
 on in Confession. Are we not in danger of looking 
 too much at the humiliation of the Confession, or 
 the help given by direction, and not enough at the 
 pure and surpassing grace given in Absolution ? 
 This is the grace which is quite unlike any other 
 grace in the world for overcoming sin. It is 
 useless to describe it oh extra. "Come and see" 
 is the only advice which is of real and salutary 
 avail. No — that which weakens the will is sin — 
 the deadly warp of sin. But Confession of sin, that 
 never weakens the will, and never can. The 
 perpetual seeking for advice and for some pleasant 
 remedy which is powerless against the deep- 
 seated evil — these may be dangerous. Only, may 
 I venture to say here a word of caution ? I do 
 think we make a great mistake if, for lack of time 
 or pressure of penitents or by reason of our own 
 dryness and lack of spiritual power, we send 
 penitents away without a word of advice. It is 
 good for their humility ; it is good for their soul's 
 health. They need it; it impresses on them the 
 sinfulness of their sin ; it gives them the advantage 
 
78 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 of the opinion of an outside person. Do not let us 
 fall into mechanical officialism. If other Priests 
 do not do it, that is no reason why we should not. 
 If Absolution and direction are two distinct things, 
 this may be granted. But there are other ways of 
 marking the distinction. We are getting rabbled 
 out of our prayers, our meditations, our Offices, by 
 the exigencies of work. Do not let us be rabbled 
 out of the best and most potent opportunity for 
 advice which touches a man's inmost soul. Do not 
 let us be like the perfunctory doctor who hurries 
 over a crowd of official patients ; but let us imitate 
 the physician who carefully and earnestly examines 
 every case and prescribes with minute attention, 
 as if his ante-room were empty, and his paper 
 of engagements a blank. 
 
 This is what the Times obituary notice says 
 of the late Sir Kichard Quain : — 
 
 "Always cheerful, always hopeful, he had the 
 gift of adapting his discourse to the mental and 
 bodily condition of the hearer; and he had the 
 still greater gift of never being in a hurry and 
 of never seeming to be impatient. How his leisure 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 79 
 
 was obtained, and how he crowded into the avail- 
 able hours the work of his ordinary day, were 
 mysteries which few could fathom; but when he 
 was in a sick-room, it is certain that he did not 
 appear to have a thought beyond its boundaries, 
 or that was not devoted to the welfare of the 
 sufferer whom he was called upon to aid." 
 
 It is hardly necessary to condescend to answer 
 the people who talk about "the filthy Confes- 
 sional." I do not know what it means. From a 
 long experience of more than thirty years I can 
 only say that if there are people who make 
 Confession filthy, they are the same people who 
 make the Bible filthy, and Church-going filthy, 
 and the ordinary social dealings of life filthy. We 
 cannot legislate for the filthy: "De minimis non 
 curat lex." But, at the same time, I know that it 
 does require absolute delicacy, refinement of touch, 
 prayer, and great carefulness. The surgeon may 
 be poisoned while cutting out a sore. The surgeon 
 may bungle, and start a sore which was not 
 there before. But all these dangers exist in far 
 greater acuteness in the spiritual diagnosis or 
 
8o PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 consultation which is suggested in its place when 
 the clergyman plunges about with his knife, test- 
 ing an unwilling patient, instead of painfully and 
 carefully listening to what he believes to be a 
 faithful enumeration of the exact diseases which 
 are laying siege to life. 
 
 There is no doubt that Absolution is an immense 
 help to our people. I do not say that we are 
 to go about preaching it in season and out of 
 season; that would only defeat our object. But 
 we ought to let it be known that there is such 
 a power, more especially in preparing candidates 
 for Confirmation and for Holy Communion, by 
 reading the Exhortation in the Prayer-book, by 
 giving them individual advice, by preaching 
 penitence. I can only say, from my own experience, 
 that there are certain sins which Confession alone 
 will touch : sins of long standing, sins of great 
 malignity; sins when a man falls below his own 
 standard and wants outside help, when he wants 
 a voice to answer, and say to him that he is 
 forgiven, and grace to make him stronger. I 
 think we ought to make a firm resolution that, 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS DEALINGS WITH PENITENTS. 8l 
 
 if we have no experience of Confession, we will 
 never say anything against it. I hold that so to do 
 is wicked ; and, in view of the ordinary experience 
 which any Priest could give, is — unintentionally, 
 of course — to play into the hands of the devil. 
 You know how Mr. Keble longed for its revival; 
 how he described our methods without it to be like 
 a man stumbling along his way in the dark, who 
 treads into puddles and makes false steps because 
 he does not know his path. Certainly a phy- 
 sician who treats his patient generally as being 
 ill, without knowing what is the matter with him, 
 must either give him coloured water, or else run 
 a risk sometimes of giving him poison instead of 
 the medicine suitable for his disease. 
 
 One thing we must remember when we talk of 
 Absolution as an occasional remedy. How do we 
 know the occasion, or who wants it ? The startling 
 thing is to find how it is the good people who 
 so often need it — the best boy at school, the 
 regular communicant ; yes, the Priest who is 
 eating his heart out because he cannot shake off 
 the yoke of some galling sin. And here we sit 
 
 G 
 
82 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 with the remedy in our hands, and say it is a bad 
 thing always to be taking medicine. Perhaps so ; 
 but not when you live in a morass, and drink in 
 the malaria of the world, and are actually being 
 wounded by a malignant serpent, or when you 
 are afflicted with a dangerous illness. Many 
 people, on the other hand, are killed by doctoring 
 themselves. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Just one word in conclusion. My old Vicar and 
 dear friend. Dean Butler, to whom I owe so much, 
 a man the memory of whom makes one smile 
 when people talk of Confession as weakening the 
 will; a strong, vigorous, trenchant, resolute man, 
 as hard as flint and as downright as a lion — he 
 has said : " Of one thing I seem certain, that it 
 cannot properly be urged but by a confessing 
 clergy."^ And what he preached we knew he 
 systematically practised. Is it not so ? I cannot 
 quite see the spiritual force of the argument : " I 
 
 ' '* Life and Letters of Dean Butler," p. QQ. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS BE A LINGS WITH PENITENTS. 83 
 
 cannot hear the Confessions of others if I do not 
 make Confession myself." I do not recognize the 
 force of the word " cannot ; " I would rather say 
 "I will not." I suppose it would be almost 
 incredible that we should go on dispensing this 
 wonderful grace, while all the time we left our 
 own sores untended and unhealed by a help 
 whose power and whose efficacy were so abundantly 
 displayed. I would say, further, that we clergy 
 need it more than other people, our work is so 
 delicate ; we come very near to God. Just as a 
 person who has very fine work to do needs constant 
 washing, so we seem to need it more than others ; 
 we who approach the Altar so frequently ; we who 
 are so beset with the dangers of formalism ; we 
 who are always preaching, and so seldom get an 
 opinion on our own lives ; we who have to venture 
 into dangerous positions, and labour amidst the 
 dust and filth and contamination of the world ; 
 yes, we need it more than others. Sometimes it 
 will come across us as Israel comes back routed 
 from the battle, and parish things go wrong, and 
 the Church makes no progress : " Am I, after all, 
 
84 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 that Achan ? Are these the wedges of forbidden 
 gold, the secret sins of my youth, still buried 
 beneath the tent, the Babylonish garment of past 
 carelessness ? " " Brother, reform thyself." It is 
 the first call to Church reform. 
 
 When things go wrong, when we say we ought 
 to go somewhere else, when everything seems to 
 fail, — is it all right within ? 
 
 Most certainly sin, and how to deal with it, is 
 the most pressing question which besets a Priest ; 
 if he does not beat it down with the power of the 
 Cross, it will beat him. Penitence is wanted more 
 than culture ; personal dealing more than platform 
 oratory ; the Priest more than the district visitor. 
 Take nothing for granted; sin is everywhere. If 
 we raise up the sacerdotal garment, the leprosy is 
 beneath ; and we kneel at the head of our congrega- 
 tion, a sinner among sinners, and say, " Lord, if 
 Thou wilt. Thou canst make me clean." 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE PRIEST IK HIS PARISH. 
 
 " O guide us when our faithless hearts 
 
 From Thee would start aloof, 
 Where Patience her sweet skill imparts 
 
 Beneath some cottage roof ; 
 Revive our dying fires, to burn 
 
 High as her anthems soar, 
 And of our scholars let us leam 
 
 Our own forgotten lore," 
 
 It is a solemn moment when we first enter the 
 parish where we have to minister. You remember 
 your first curacy ; the buildings — how interesting 
 the church was! — whether it were beautiful or 
 ugly, this was where you had to minister — full 
 of traditions to the people, of which you yourself 
 as yet knew nothing. The names on tombs, on 
 the walls ; the hideous windows — beautiful to 
 them ; the altar — not correct, you thought it — it 
 was the daily delight of some of them ; the walls, 
 
86 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 the floor, the roof, the seats, the pulpit, were all 
 written over with inscriptions, in a cypher which 
 long intercourse with your people and knowledge 
 of their secret would alone enable you to read. 
 Then the church officials, how they stared at you ! 
 — the old sexton, the bell-ringer, the organist, all 
 wondering how you would affect them; whether 
 their privileges were safe; whether you had any 
 strange notions; whether they were to treat you 
 as a sort of new boy come to school. And then 
 the schools ! Ah, the misery, when you find all 
 the children locked up from you under the jealous 
 eye of a Board ! But if not, as you go in, all those 
 little faces, so quick, eager, inquisitive, the future 
 men and women of the parish, which you will 
 either form or deform. The people in the streets, 
 the shops, they are all so strangely interesting 
 — my parish ! 
 
 I. 
 
 And surely this is a legitimate sentiment. We 
 are casting into the great crucible of the present 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PARISH. 87 
 
 ferment all manner of time-honoured institutions. 
 Parochialism, more especially here in London, is, 
 from the nature of things, only loosely and lightly 
 maintained ; but still there is immense good in it. 
 If our people like to destroy and break down the 
 limits of the parochial organization, we Priests 
 shall, nevertheless, find the parochial delimitation 
 practically a great help to us in our work. 
 
 Divide et impera. Here is a definite, to a 
 certain extent manageable, division of the great 
 seething mass of humanity. Within certain limits 
 marked off" on the map, I am responsible for the 
 well-being of every man, woman, and child who 
 passes his time in it, and calls it his parish and his 
 home. 
 
 Where this is literally possible, it is a great 
 blessing and a great power ; and therefore a man 
 is foolish who despises a small parish. It is an 
 opportunity of doing a small piece of work in an 
 exquisite and finished way, which reacts on the 
 whole neighbourhood, and far out into the Church. 
 Where this is not possible — and do not let us 
 assume it too hurriedly — where one man is 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS, 
 
 confronted by thousands, or by birds of passage, or 
 is planted down among infidels or aliens, or those 
 of another Obedience who reject him and his 
 ministration, still they are all his people, all his 
 charge ; he is not the parish Priest of a part, but of 
 all. He cannot accept the Dissenting Minister as 
 anything else but one of his parishioners who has 
 no real charge and no real right to deal with his 
 people, but whom he will regard in the ordinary 
 parochial friendly relationship. And in cases like 
 this (I suppose the most ordinary case in a London 
 parish), at least, he will make a study of his 
 district. He will not merely open his church, like 
 a van in the market-place, and just welcome all 
 who come ; he will make a study of the streets, 
 the occupations, the religious professions of his 
 people. Is it too much to ask that at least the 
 names of all the people should be known to the 
 Clergy, that they may bring them before God, and 
 scientifically deal with them ? And then he will 
 have his organizations, his reservoirs of good, in 
 guilds and classes; his outposts; his missionaries; 
 his district visitors ; — only I do feel that the parish 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PARISH. 89 
 
 Priest should be in touch with all this. " Visit ? 
 Oh no; I have no time for visiting. My dis- 
 trict visitors do thafc, however, instead of me." 
 "Schools? Oh no; I have no time for schools. 
 One of the curates looks in sometimes to say 
 Prayers; besides, I have got a first-rate master." 
 ''That alley? Oh, it is of no use for me to go 
 there ; I have a first-rate colonel, who comes down 
 from the West End, who manages all that for me. 
 He has got a class of ragged boys who will do 
 anything for him." 
 
 This may be all very well; but there is a 
 difierence in the man who, while "facit 'per aliuni,'' 
 yet " facit 'per se " (it is still always /ac^^^, "he does 
 it "), and the man who practically deparochializes 
 himself — sublets his parish rights to various 
 tenants, and just retains the vicarage and the 
 church, and occasionally receives in rent the 
 chorus of praise which belongs to a man who is 
 a splendid organizer. No, depend upon it, for 
 practical purposes a parish is an invaluable insti- 
 tution; and I would say now, make the most of 
 it, hope for it (that is all-important; we shall 
 
90 PRIESTLY IDEALS, 
 
 never get on without hope), and, almost above all, 
 be proud of it. There are bright examples all 
 up and down the country of men who, like the 
 monks of old, have settled down on the fever- 
 stricken morass, with its stubborn growth of weeds 
 and its unyielding soil, and have prayed and 
 laboured until the desert has blossomed like a 
 rose, and their parish has become a glory and a 
 pride. I can think of three cases which will 
 illustrate what I mean. One is a village on a 
 bleak stretch of down, where jockeys and trainers 
 form almost the entire population. Among these 
 laboured devotedly an earnest Priest. Jockeys 
 sung in his choir, trainers supported him in his 
 work ; and when he died, at his funeral there 
 was a sight not often seen in England, men kneel- 
 ing on the ground in the churchyard outside, who 
 were unable to get into the church, packed with 
 a devout and sorrowing congregation. Another 
 instance is in a large town where Church prin- 
 ciples, even now, have to contend fitfully and 
 with difficulty against the results of years of neg- 
 lect, and the outcome of triumphant Secularism. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PARISH. 91 
 
 Here are two Priests, hunted, pelted, mobbed, 
 yet sticking to it in their little iron church, 
 and, before they died, living to see two large 
 churches built, if not three, filled with devout 
 worshippers from among their own people — large 
 Church schools, and a devout and intense paro- 
 chial patriotism. And the third is an example 
 of a place where men, with their own hands, 
 in their off-work time, actually built their own 
 church, and so exhibited the power of this paro- 
 chial sentiment. 
 
 Do not let us despise our parish, or work 
 always with one foot out of it, one eye looking 
 elsewhere, and our heart wholly somewhere else. 
 Do not let us say, "I shall be better among 
 educated people." It is a pity to be a failure 
 anywhere; and most often to have failed among 
 the poor is a sure indication that a ministry 
 among the more educated will be a failure also. 
 The more unpromising the materials, the greater 
 the glory and the joy of having rescued a bit 
 of waste land and made it blossom for the Lord. 
 
92 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 11. 
 
 Having accepted, then, your post as part of your 
 vocation ; having recognized that " vocation as a 
 call to God, and not a call to work," and that God 
 has placed you there; having studied, and 
 organized, and made your survey ; — you will pro- 
 bably find, at least in most parishes, that your 
 work is of two main kinds : one, the edification 
 of the faithful ; and the other, the more ordinary 
 mission work to those who are practically outside 
 Christian influence. 
 
 (a) As regards the first, there is no doubt that it is 
 the most serious and important work. We cannot 
 advance without it. The body of the faithful is a 
 sort of hollow square, inside which are included all 
 the weak and timid, with which in close formation 
 the Church marches across the desert, flanked, 
 harassed in the rear, by the incessant assaults of 
 the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. In the 
 formation of this hollow square four constituent 
 elements are employed. First of all, there are the 
 clergy ; and how difficult it is to keep up to 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PARISH. 93 
 
 the mark ! " No time, no time ; so tired, so 
 tired; my uniform is rent and soiled, my face 
 blackened with gunpowder, my shoes worn out 
 with marching ! " And yet we must keep up, we 
 must keep dressed ; a button missing on the coat is 
 a serious breach of military discipline. We must 
 keep up, prayers must be said, meditation must be 
 made; we must observe and compare, and never 
 sink down to the level of our surroundings — that 
 is vital — nor get careless and flippant, and lose 
 (jEfjLvorr^g, or get lax and slipshod, and lose refine- 
 ment and brightness of spirit. " What we are 
 comes before what we teach." And there is a 
 perpetual struggle going on, did we but know it, as 
 to which is to teach which, refinement, degradation ; 
 or degradation, refinement. Always come dressed 
 on to parade, always keep bright and smart ; you 
 will not be obeyed as you ought to be, you will not 
 get your army across the desert, if you become out 
 at elbows, and just one of the people. Remember 
 you are an officer ! 
 
 And then there comes the band of Church- 
 workers, teachers, visitors, helpers of all sorts. We 
 
94 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 must tell them again and again that they must be 
 teachers " come from God ; " that they never must 
 lose sight of the fact that they have got to get 
 Israel out of Egypt; that Pharaoh is as crafty 
 now as ever he was. Either he wants Israel only 
 to go just a little way into the wilderness — that is, 
 not to be too extreme; not to push religion too 
 far, to keep it for Sundays — and then come back 
 to him ; or, when he finds this will not do, he says, 
 " Leave the children behind ; go ye that are men. 
 Do not worry me about religious education, let me 
 have one who will go ahead, and not bother the 
 children about theological distinctions. Go now ye 
 that are men, and serve the Lord ; for that ye did 
 desire." And when that will not serve, Pharaoh 
 then expresses a desire to have the cattle, the 
 endowments and money of the churches, and tells 
 us that all we want is to stand out in a bare and 
 simple spirituality. But no; he has to be told 
 plainly and directly that we are going right 
 out of Egypt ; that we are going with our young 
 and with our old, and with our flocks and with 
 our herds ; that the Church of God is a great 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PARISH. 95 
 
 organization moving across the plain; and that 
 we come to the people, not as sanitary im- 
 provers, or political agents, but in the Name of 
 God. 
 
 Then there is the choir. I wonder if we think 
 enough of the extreme importance of insisting that 
 a great many things are of more value in a 
 chorister than a good voice; that it is a very 
 serious thing to stand up and conduct the service 
 of God's people ? I think it was the old Emperor 
 William of Germany who said that he always 
 used to judge of the discipline of a regiment, as it 
 marched past, by the band. Difficult, disappointing, 
 distracting folk are choirs ; and they need a great 
 deal of watching. And how they live comes before 
 how they sing. Do let us avoid all mawkish 
 sentiment and petting, and ''angel voices," and 
 " dying young," and all that sentimental nonsense ; 
 and remember that it is a matter for very stem 
 discipline, and that he who has charge of the choir 
 has the charge of the most difficult thing in the 
 parish, which requires a great deal of prayer, 
 watchfulness, and inflexible severity. 
 
96 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 And then there comes the general body of com- 
 municants. I suppose in most parishes now there 
 is an arranged system of classes or guilds for the 
 communicants. This system was carried to great 
 perfection by Dean Butler at Wantage. It is thus 
 described in his " Life and Letters," pp. 107, 108 : — 
 " I have found it necessary in a country town to 
 form' no less than twelve classes, which are [held] 
 invariably in the week which precedes the first 
 Sunday of every month, and before the greater 
 festivals. These classes vary greatly in size. The 
 smallest has eight names only, the largest forty-five. 
 On the wliole the numbers, which at first were 
 under thirty, have now passed three hundred. A 
 careful list is kept of absentees, who are always 
 specially visited and invited not to pass over the 
 next time. A few, as might be expected, slip 
 through as years flow on, sometimes from old age, 
 or other reasonable causes, sometimes from idleness, 
 but the leakage is more than made up for by those 
 whom each Confirmation and close and continuous 
 parish sifting adds." 
 
 He continues with "a few words of caution," 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PARISH. 97 
 
 which describe, in fact, his own practice for thirty 
 years. 
 
 ''' (1) On no account should these classes be 
 held in schoolrooms, parish-rooms, or aisles o£ the 
 church, but in the parsonage itself. It is of all 
 importance to give them a friendly aspect. . . . 
 (2) The members of the classes should be re- visited 
 and r6-invited. General notices given in church are 
 of less than no value. ... (3) The classes must on 
 no account be omitted. . . . 
 
 " In my opinion, all the success of communicant 
 classes depends simply on real hard work. . . . 
 Much prayer, much patience, much tact, and much 
 perseverance are here absolutely necessary. . . . 
 If, however, the parish Priest is not afraid of 
 ' spending and being spent,' he will . . . find after 
 a time that he has established, without show or 
 fuss, in this bit of parochial machinery, a most 
 potent auxiliary in his campaign against evil." 
 
 An organization of this kind is of the very greatest 
 importance. Something into which to draft the 
 newly pledged Confirmation candidates ; something 
 in which to place those who need the support of 
 
 H 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 numbers and the sense of companionship ; — an 
 organization, in fine, through which Christ and 
 systematic teaching may be regularly given. And 
 in this division I would include those who, with- 
 out being in a guild or class, yet belong to the 
 inner line of our parish life, the very earnest 
 and the very devout. What are we doing for 
 these — the sixth form, as it were, in our schools ? 
 Are we guiding their reading ? Are we giving 
 them any spiritual instruction ? Or are we shrink- 
 ing back in a cowardly way from helping them ? 
 St. John Baptist says to Christ, " I have need to be 
 baptized of Thee, and comest Thou to me ? " ^ Still, 
 he baptized Him. Do we shrink from spiritual 
 sermons, spiritual advice, the spiritual training 
 of our best people? "I have no time to read." 
 Ah, there it is again ! Dry, withered, unfreshened 
 sermons ! but the safety of our hollow square 
 largely depends on these good people, whom we 
 are bound to help and keep up to the mark. 
 
 (6) Then if we turn to the mission side of our 
 work, surely our first aim is to bring into this square 
 
 » St. Matt. iii. 14, 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PARISH 99 
 
 as many outsiders as we can ; first to put them in- 
 side, and then to get them to fall into line as they 
 get strong. To this end, therefore, there is hanging 
 up in our study a list of the unbaptized; every 
 baby that is born in the parish is put down on it. 
 There is in our note-book a list of all the uncon- 
 firmed, whether they wish to be confirmed or not. 
 That is what we have to work at for them. Then 
 there is a list of all who, being confirmed, are not 
 yet communicants. That is the next stage which 
 we have to work for in theiin. Then there are those, 
 too many to classify, who we know never come to 
 church. That is the next thing we have to work 
 at for them ; the first overt act which we shall look 
 for in their return to religion. 
 
 And here, perhaps, we go on to classify. We 
 have to ehminate the Romans, the Dissenters, the 
 Jews, the Infidels. All these need special treatment 
 of their own. We have to eliminate houses where 
 we are not received, and make them a subject of 
 earnest prayer. But with the others there is this 
 special aim always going on : to make the careless 
 come to church ; to make all who come to church 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 become confirmed ; to make all who are con- 
 firmed, communicants, and pass them into the 
 hollow square. 
 
 Then there comes the definite mission work, 
 rough and exacting, to deal with men and women 
 who seem to be outside all religious influences. I 
 suppose we run several dangers here : first, that 
 terrible danger of hopelessness. It does seem so 
 absolutely hopeless to attempt to touch the sordid 
 mass of sin and indifference. And yet, I suppose, 
 nothing ever seemed so hopeless as the conversion 
 of the Koman Empire. To be hopeless is to fail ; it 
 means that we have lost faith in God, in ourselves, 
 in human nature. All the strongest powers are on 
 the side of success, after all. " They that be with 
 us are more than they that be with them." ^ Think 
 of the work that is going on about those souls ! 
 The Good Shepherd Himself is there. He has 
 come to seek that lamb which He once carried in 
 His arms, now flaunting her shame in the streets, 
 lost, degraded, and unhappy ; but He has not given 
 her up. There is a grave angel bent on the same 
 
 » 2 Kings vi. 16, 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PARISH. 
 
 errand, the angrel who has watched over her ever 
 since her Baptism. He has not given her up. 
 Think of the great pleading in heaven, the mighty 
 power of intercession, the innate good which lies 
 at the bottom of every heart. Do not despair, do 
 not listen to the inverted gospel of failure. Saul is 
 always ready to stop David going out to meet the 
 giant. " I have tried it often and often," he says : 
 " it is of no good ; at least, you will want my sword 
 and helmet. You must first secure the people their 
 rights, and set them to return a good member to 
 Parliament, or a proper representative on the 
 County Council; you must first civilize them." 
 And David, who has not got much beyond a Bible, 
 a few earnest prayers, and a sense that God must 
 help, is half inclined to turn back. No ; do not let 
 us be hopeless, and do not let us be in a hurry. 
 That is where we fail ; we want to see it all in a 
 day. We may have to reform the parish through 
 the children, which takes a long time ; or by our 
 martyrdom, when we shall not see its reformation 
 at all ourselves ; or by methods which take a very 
 long time. It is one of the saddest things to see 
 
102 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 all the hasty remedies that are employed one after 
 another, with little patience or sustained effort. 
 And, what is worse, the confident proclamation of 
 the old much-abused precept, which seems to be 
 engrained in human nature : " Let us do evil that 
 good may come." How often we have scorned 
 with indignation the sophism that "It does not 
 matter what a man believes as long as he is in 
 earnest." And yet, what is more common now 
 than to hear, "Yes, it is difficult to justify; it 
 sails perilously near Nestorianism ; it is just the 
 thing the best people on the Continent are trying 
 to get rid of, but it does attract the people somehow, 
 and that Priest is so good, and does so much hard 
 work, and is so devoted"? Of course, on these 
 principles every form of religious empiricism may 
 be justified. Even Arius himself was very popular. 
 "My people love to have it so." "The house of 
 Baal was full from one end to another." The 
 gospel of attraction is largely answerable for 
 popular cults; and popular cults are allowed to 
 prey as parasites on dogmatic religion. And because 
 the people love to have it so, the gardens of the 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PARISH. 103 
 
 Church are planted with forced flowers — large 
 congregations of ill- taught people, who look like 
 success. There are no roots, growing slowly and 
 steadily ; roots are ugly things, and will not flower 
 in our time. The attraction dies away, and the 
 flowers wither, and the next generation is further 
 than ever from the Faith. They have never been 
 planted in the house of the Lord, and they cannot 
 flourish in the courts of the house of our God. 
 
 III. 
 
 All this means hard work. When St. Paul is 
 enunciating his doctrine of gifts, he says, " Having 
 then gifts difiering according to the grace that is 
 given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy 
 according to the proportion of faith; or ministry, 
 let us wait on our ministering : \v ty^ diaKovia." ^ Be 
 in it ! — that is it. Stick to it ! It is only too easy 
 to sail off on the doctrine of gifts and say, "Well, 
 every one has his proper gift. Preaching is a 
 
 * Komans xii. 6, 7. 
 
104 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 gift. I wish I could preach, but it is not my gift ; 
 I cannot." Or another will say, " I would gladly 
 teach in the schools, but teaching is a gift which I 
 have not got. I should only do harm ; the school- 
 master will do it much better." Or another will 
 say, "Pastoral ministration is a gift. I do not 
 know what to say. If people come to me, and ask 
 for something, well and good, but I cannot go 
 beating about the bush to find what they do 
 want; it is not my gift." Of course, it is well, 
 it is only right, that we should always and 
 everywhere recognize that all good things are 
 gifts of God, and that some have them more 
 than others, and special gifts fall to special men. 
 But it was never meant that we should say, 
 "Because I am not a Saint Chrysostom, I will 
 not try to preach at all; because I am not 
 a first-class teacher, I am going to take no 
 pains at all to develop an important part of my 
 Office; because I am not naturally gifted with 
 the power of making my way, I am therefore 
 going to be stolid, stupid, and ungenial, while I 
 yield to a selfish sloth." No ; if we have a gift, and 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS PARISH 105 
 
 if we have no gift, we have undertaken to be 0£o{) 
 Sm/coyof, and our virtue must be to stick to this 
 vocation, Iv t^ diaKovia. 
 
 Now, we often hear people say, " A change is 
 good for every one after a time ; three years, seven, 
 ten (whatever be the time when the precise speaker 
 wishes to make a move), is long enough for a man 
 to be in any parish." I wonder if this is so ? 
 Certainly, if we are always to attract, and still to 
 attract with novelties, people may get tired of us ; 
 but if it is the same gospel, which we dare not 
 alter, the same truths, the same dilBficulties, the 
 same grace, the same sin about which we are 
 busied, then surely it does not hold good, Dis- 
 senters feel this strongly, and many of theni move 
 their ministers on, as a matter of course, after a 
 term of years. But to us, who do not view our 
 people chiefly from the pulpit, I doubt whether it is 
 so. Certainly there is a great deal to be said on 
 the other side. The Church methods are slow, and 
 take long to develop. It ought to take many 
 years before our plants begin to show fruit ; and 
 it is a great blessing where he who plants is 
 
io6 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 allowed to stay long enough to see some of the 
 fruit of his labour. 
 
 And there is also an immense power in gaining 
 a knowledge of our people and letting them know 
 us. This would seem to me to be one great virtue 
 in a system of ZiaKovia which seems to be strangely 
 unpopular, without any definite reason, or at least 
 any valid reason. The fact that parochial visiting 
 is not practised in other portions of the Church 
 seems no reason at all, and certainly the com- 
 parative neglect of it by Dissenting Ministers is 
 a never-ending source of weakness to them. It 
 does seem so foolish, when we are trusted and 
 welcomed as no other clergy are in the world, in 
 the same way, that we should push our oppor- 
 tunity aside on any doctrinaire grounds. Of 
 course, I am aware that parochial work in London 
 and in the country are two very different things ; 
 that the poor man's house in the country and in 
 town may be two very different things. But this 
 neglect is not confined to London. I know there 
 is no sacramental value in visiting; I know it 
 may degenerate into gossip, or become a system 
 
THE PRIEST IN BIS PARISH. 107 
 
 of dole-distributing ; that no good results may 
 seem to come of it. But there are other and more 
 serious charges brought against other branches of 
 our Ministry, of which we take no notice because 
 we know better ; and so with this, when we have 
 recognized these dangers, forewarned is fore- 
 armed; but they are not sufficient to stop us in 
 a very obvious duty. The merit of parochial 
 visitation is this, that it helps us to know our 
 people, and all our people, in a way that we 
 cannot know them otherwise, and it helps them 
 to know us. I could give you examples, again 
 and again, of what it effects, and how people 
 miss it. I could give you examples of Priests 
 and people becoming estranged and strained in 
 their relations simply because they did not know 
 each other. I am speaking in the interest of 
 that large floating neutrality, who will not, as 
 yet, come out into our hollow square, and yet 
 have not joined the ranks of the avowed enemy. 
 I am speaking in the interest of those who can 
 be approached through their hearts, and can be 
 drawn by sympathy. I am speaking in the 
 
io8 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 interest of the parish Priest himself. Why does 
 that man get up in the pulpit on Sunday and 
 preach a sermon full of terms which his people do 
 not understand any more than if they were Greek ? 
 It is because he does not know the languag-e of the 
 country, and how these terms need to be translated. 
 Why does another get up and preach about some 
 absorbing topic in the Church newspapers ? His 
 parishioners are wrapped up in the sad news of 
 " Tom's " death in America, who was known in the 
 neighbourhood, or are entirely absorbed in some 
 local difficulties which appeal to them much more, 
 and in which they crave for sympathy. We 
 should not have such dry and pointless sermons 
 if our Priests knew their people better. The 
 knowledge of our people and the knowledge of 
 God are the two factors which make up a good 
 sermon, however halting be the delivery and 
 feeble the words. I am speaking, once more, in 
 the interest of the clergy. What interest can there 
 be so keen, so absorbing, as the study of the lives 
 of our people ? Yes, I know the struggle with 
 sin, our Church work in penance, — I know all 
 
THE PRIEST IN FITS PARISH. 109 
 
 that. But this is absorbing too : their tragic 
 sorrows, their strange joys, their awful needs, 
 their family interests ! Surely it is an immense 
 privilege to be allowed to enter into — as you are 
 allowed to enter into^ where you are trusted — 
 the family life of your people, with all its strong 
 interests; to trace the little ship of life which 
 put to sea from your school, and to see it cross 
 the river-bar, and go out into the deep, and come 
 back again buffeted and broken, and perhaps 
 almost a wreck, but still with a warm place in 
 the heart for you, next to the old father and 
 mother. No ; he would not come to church — 
 there you sat with your biretta on — not he. 
 But you went round to see him, you talked to 
 him at the street corners ; he half responded — 
 perhaps he turned away. But it has come up at 
 last, just that little seed between the stones of a 
 very hard heart; and he comes to church now, 
 he is confirmed, he is a communicant; he is an 
 experience to you, so that you do not despair. 
 
 And I ask you again, as you feel cold and life- 
 less, and out of heart, have you ever looked to your 
 
no PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 people for comfort ? On that dark day when you 
 sat at home and wished your brother-curates would 
 come in and talk, when you said you were worn 
 out, and that you must seek other work. And then 
 you went into the parish ; you went to the sick-bed 
 where a man was lying, the bread-winner of the 
 family, with no wages, only a small club allowance, 
 with no comforts, the children hungry and squalid 
 around him, and you heard him say so quietly 
 and so earnestly, "It is all what pleases God." 
 And you felt what a simple faith there is here, 
 when I, with so much to be thankful for, can only 
 grumble and complain ! There are lessons of refine- 
 ment, lessons of charity, courtesy, self-denial, which 
 the poor have to teach us, which we would not 
 miss for the world ; quite diff'erent from the ordi- 
 nary lessons of penitence which we get in church. 
 A reaction, thank God, is setting in, and when we 
 have done imitating the faults of other people, we 
 shall wake up to the solid virtues which make our 
 ministry in the English Church such a treasure and 
 such a force. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 
 
 " The memory like a cloudless air, 
 The conscience like a sea at rest." 
 
 I. 
 
 It has been well said, " What we are comes before 
 what we teach." " Conduct and character are the 
 keys of Creed." It is the man, after all, who comes 
 out in everything — the ministrations, the sermons, 
 the direction, the parish visiting. We may wish 
 that it were otherwise. We may decry — and 
 rightly decry — a personal ministry ; it is dangerous 
 and artificial. We may have to say again and 
 again, "Don't cling to me; act for yourselves." 
 But still people cling to the person. They grudge 
 Moses the time, even, which he spends in the mount, 
 and will make a golden calf if he is not there. 
 
PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 They will grudge the Divine Teacher His time of 
 retirement in the mountain, and will not give Him 
 leisure so much as to eat. We know the truth of 
 the XXVIth Article, that "the un worthiness of 
 the Minister " does not hinder the grace of Christ 
 in the Sacraments. But it is next to impossible to 
 get our people practically to believe it. If there is 
 a Hophni or a Phineas in the ranks of the Priest- 
 hood, men, for their sakes, abhor the offering of the 
 Lord. If there is an Eli on the seat of government, 
 things slide from bad to worse, and he cannot pull 
 them up. There is an old belief that flowers flourish 
 best under the hands of those that love them. 
 However this may be about flowers, it is true as 
 regards the souls of men — they flourish best where 
 there is a loving personal touch, which is furthest 
 removed from ofiicialism. 
 
 It is this that is at the bottom of a great deal 
 of the outcry about Sacerdotalism. People resent 
 anything which is merely official, or domineering, 
 or removed from personal sympathy. And, alas ! on 
 looking back over our career, it is this that perhaps 
 we have more than anything else to deplore — the 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION 1 13 
 
 obtrusive personality which has just ruined the 
 roundness and finish of our work ; the hot temper 
 which lost us the cause which we had at heart at 
 the public meeting, or gained us our desire, and 
 sent leanness withal into our soul, as, like spoiled 
 children, we experienced the disappointment which 
 resulted from merely getting our own way. The 
 self which cropped up in sermons, in advice, in 
 visiting ; the old breakage which suddenly began 
 to twinge and wrench, dating back to a youthful 
 fall. It is this self which, for good or for evil, 
 clings to us like a shadow. We cannot shake it 
 off. We shall never succeed in being pure officials ; 
 at least, if we do, it is only to minister to the dead 
 and dreary ghosts of men and women — formalists 
 ministered to by officialism. The great teachers of 
 the Tractarian Movement knew this, and they bent 
 all the force which they could command to turn a 
 worldly, self-pleasing clergy into spiritual, self- 
 denying, careful Priests. No one can read the life 
 of Dr. Pusey or Mr. Keble without being struck by 
 the stern self-discipline which they practised, the re- 
 solute attempt to combat worldliness in themselves, 
 
 I 
 
114 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 the firm endeavour to develop clericalism of the 
 best kind, and to recognize that many things 
 which are quite permissible to a layman are often 
 undesirable — nay, more, unbecoming — in a Priest. 
 And who can say how much the movement, which 
 has transformed the Church of England, owed to the 
 inner life and devotion of those who were its prime 
 movers ? " What do they say at Hursley ? " It is 
 no light tribute to the great personality of that 
 humble, retiring man that, " when all else had been 
 said and done, people would wait and see what 
 came from there before they made up their minds 
 as to the path of duty." ^ And people who remem- 
 ber the giants of those days are somewhat like the 
 Jews who wept when the foundations of the New 
 Temple were laid, having remembered the Temple 
 which preceded it. " Yes," they said, " it is all very 
 beautiful ; but where is the Shechinah ? where is the 
 Sacred Fire, the Urim and Thummim, the Spirit of 
 Prophecy, the Ark ? " And so they say now, 
 " Yes, it is all very beautiful — your services, your 
 choir, your ritual — but there is something wanting. 
 
 ^ Dr. Liddon, «' Clerical Life and Work," p. 350. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSA TION. 115 
 
 What you express now with ceremonial and magni- 
 ficent service, they were able to express by the 
 sheer force of their lives — the sense of the great 
 visit which our Blessed Lord makes to His Church 
 in the Sacrament of Holy Communion ! " Look at 
 Dr. Pusey handling Holy Scripture ! See him 
 dealing, as has been described, with the twenty- 
 second Psalm, as if he almost shrunk back from 
 entering into the discussion of that great Psalm of 
 the Passion ; as if the awful mysteries of the Cruci- 
 fied Messiah which lurked in it came out like the 
 devouring cloud of glory, and made it impossible to 
 minister there before the Lord. A modern com- 
 mentator would have no such difficulty. This con- 
 trast must strike us with wonder and fear, lest it 
 be true that we have lost something. Certainly it 
 is beautiful and edifying to contemplate even the 
 pages of their biographies — their intense humility, 
 their sublime reverence. How strangely it comes 
 out in that anecdote told us of Mr. Keble, when he 
 was waiting to see Froude ofi" by the coach, and 
 felt that he ought to say that his own sense of 
 reverence had been pained in conversation ; too 
 
Ii6 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 tender to rebuke, too brave to neglect his duty, 
 you remember how, just as his friend was leaving 
 him, he said, " Froude, you thought Law's ' Serious 
 Call ' was a clever book ; it seemed to me as if you 
 said the Day of Judgment will be a pretty sight." 
 And Froude said this speech had a great effect on 
 his after-life ! ^ 
 
 And in addition to their reverence there was 
 their great regard for authority. They had to 
 rouse in the members of the Episcopate the sense 
 that they were the successors of the Apostles, and 
 they always treated them as such, and in their 
 conflict with individual Bishops this was never 
 lost sight of. The whole movement was based on 
 authority, and they never dreamed that the idea 
 of the Church which they recovered could ever 
 live for one moment without it. 
 
 II. 
 
 What, then, should be the characteristics of that 
 inner life which is beating so strongly beneath our 
 
 ' " The Oxford Movement," by Dean Church, p. 25. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 117 
 
 outward ministration, as to make or mar in the 
 eyes of our people the holy profession which God 
 has called us to undertake ? Remember that re- 
 ligion is hard to the natural man; the road is 
 narrow which leads unto life, and the gate is 
 strait, and there are few people who traverse 
 that way. 
 
 (1) Surely we ought first of all to set our people 
 the example of how to bear the Cross. We are 
 in danger of forgetting, in days of great material 
 progress, that this is set before us again and again 
 by our Blessed Lord as the elementary condition 
 of discipleship — bearing the Cross. And, re- 
 member, the Cross is no plaything, but a heavy 
 burden of rough wood whose pain is constant, on 
 which we are crucified, that thereby we may be 
 elevated towards God as a victim ; that we may 
 expiate our sins, and be a comfort to others, who 
 without us would suffer only like the impenitent 
 thief, and be unworthy communicants in the 
 Sacrament of pain. 
 
 I suppose it would lead us to bear with gentle- 
 ness, with resignation, with joy, those things which 
 
ii8 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 God has to put upon us all for our perfecting. It 
 is rather a sad thing that we have had to talk and 
 think so much lately about clerical incomes and 
 clerical preferment. Do you think there are some 
 of our people looking on and saying, "Ah, I 
 thought so ; now he has got to feel some of the 
 things I have to put up with — working without 
 a rise, full time and bad wages — he calls out 
 loudly enough : why should not I " ? Thank God, 
 they have also been able to witness really splendid 
 examples of clerical devotion. They have seen in 
 many cases the parish Priest on the sharp cross of 
 actual destitution and want, suffering without a 
 murmur, cheerfully and patiently, and doing his 
 work at a tremendous sacrifice. We must never 
 forget what beautiful instances of this there have 
 been in recent years, and how powerful for good 
 these examples have been. And when God's Cross 
 comes to us in sickness, or loss of money, or some 
 acute disappointment ; when we seem to be left 
 behind, forgotten, unnoticed, do let our people see 
 an example of bearing the Cross ! Let them see 
 that these things elevate and not sour, that they 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 119 
 
 are accepted — " We indeed justly ; for we receive 
 the due reward of our deeds''^ — and that they 
 soften and make us sympathetic, so that we can 
 bring to others the comfort wherewith we our- 
 selves are comforted of God. And then, further, 
 ought not our people to see in us less shrinking 
 than they sometimes see from the fasting and dis- 
 cipline of the Church ? It may be we have 
 systematized fasting more than we did. God grant 
 that we may continue to do so. But ought we to 
 be more courageous about this than we are ? ought 
 we to try and observe — at least in some way, so 
 that others may see — the Fridays, the Ember 
 Days, the Vigils, the Eogation Days, the Forty 
 Days of Lent ? It is disagreeable thus to make 
 ourselves conspicuous; so it is to say our Grace 
 when others do not. It is setting ourselves up as 
 more particular than other people. But there are 
 times when we must let our light shine before 
 men. How else are we to get the proper position 
 of fasting recognized ? A simple rule, that we do 
 not dine out on fast days, and that we wiU try to 
 * St. Luke xxiii. 41. 
 
120 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 observe, as far as health will allow, the rule of the 
 Church, is surely a very plain and obvious duty. 
 And if we are obliged to curtail this, or seek dis- 
 pensation, surely we should act in the spirit of 
 this prayer : " Blessed Lord, Who for our sakes 
 didst fast forty days and forty nights, give to us 
 whose faith is imperfect and bodies less subdued, 
 grace to follow Thee more distantly in a contrite 
 and humbled spirit, and grant that the sense of 
 this our weakness, which we meekly confess before 
 Thee, may in the end add strength to our faith and 
 seriousness to our repentance. Who liveth and 
 reignest with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever 
 one God, world without end. Amen." 
 
 But I suppose we ought to go further, and look 
 out, each for himself, for opportunities of self- 
 denial. The following passage in a well-known 
 volume of sermons is worthy of our considera- 
 tion : ^ " But, besides this, there are other modes of 
 self-denial to try your faith and sincerity, which 
 it may be right just to mention. It may so 
 happen that the sin you are most liable to is not 
 1 Newman, " Parochial and Plain Sermons," vol. i. p. 69. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 121 
 
 called forth every day. For instance, anger and 
 passion are irresistible, perhaps, when provoked, 
 and when you are off your guard; so that the 
 occasion is over, and you have failed before you 
 were well aware of its coming. It is right, then, 
 almost to find out for yourselves daily self-denials ; 
 and this because our Lord bids you take up your 
 cross daily, and because it proves your earnestness, 
 and because by doing so you strengthen your 
 general power of self-mastery, and come to have 
 such an habitual command of yourself as will be a 
 defence ready prepared when the season of temp- 
 tation comes. Rise up, then, in the morning with 
 the purpose that, please God, the day shall not 
 pass without its self-denial — a self-denial in inno- 
 cent pleasures and tastes, if none occurs to mortify 
 sin. Let your very rising from your bed be a 
 self-denial ; let your meals be self-denials. Deter- 
 mine to yield to others in things indifferent, to go 
 out of your way in small matters, to inconvenience 
 yourself (so that no direct duty suffers by it), 
 rather than you should not meet with your daily 
 discipline. This was the Psalmist's method, who 
 
122 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 was, as it were, 'punished all day long, and 
 chastened every morning.'^ It was St. Paul's 
 method, who 'kept under,' or bruised 'his body, 
 and brought it into subjection.'^ This is one 
 great end of fasting. A man says to himself, 
 ' How am I to know I am in earnest ? ' I would 
 suggest to him — make some sacrifice; do some 
 distasteful thing, which you are not actually 
 obliged to do (so that it be lawful), to bring home 
 to your mind that, in fact, you do love your 
 Saviour, that you do hate sin, that you do hate 
 your sinful nature, and that you have put aside 
 the present world." 
 
 I suppose most of us have had to give up some- 
 thing, some a great deal in the way of worldly 
 amusement and comfort, when we were ordained. 
 Have we given up enough? Not because the 
 things are wrong in themselves, but because they 
 are unclerical. We frequently use the sign of the 
 Cross. Is it really traced over our use of food, of 
 sleep, of time, of recreation? Surely we Clergy 
 ought to show our people the way, in reducing 
 ^^Ps. Ixxiii. 13. 2 1 Cor. ix. 27. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 123 
 
 that large common ground which so many seem 
 to think may be allowed to exist in their lives, 
 which belongs neither to themselves, nor to God, 
 nor to their people, but is a sort of unclaimed waste 
 space, where we meet the World, and sometimes 
 the Flesh and the Devil — a large strip of neutral 
 ground. How many difficulties we meet here; 
 when we just spend an hour in smoking with the 
 young fellows, merely to show that we are one of 
 them ! When Peter stands by the fire and warms 
 himself without any idea of breaking with his 
 adorable Master; and yet not exactly wishing to 
 declare himself then. That tiresome maid; that 
 awkward turn in the conversation; "surely thou 
 art one of them ? " " Let us hear what the Clergy- 
 man has to say ! " And yet how much we want 
 that common land for building purposes. If we 
 could only succeed in taking in some of it, we 
 should hear less of the persistent cry, "No time 
 to read — no time to build up by solid learning the 
 foundations of the faith ! " They put up an 
 advertisement in the railway stations, stating how 
 many thousand miles of one form of cigarette are 
 
124 PRIESTLY IDEALS, 
 
 smoked daily. How many five minutes in the 
 day do I spend on my own enjoyment, or allow to 
 lie quite unused ? All that neutral ground — that 
 ground where we meet people, and do, as we 
 profess, so much indirect good—it may be well 
 filled ; but we have gone very much in the opposite 
 direction to old methods. We are so afraid of cant, 
 that we seem to be as afraid of talking to a man 
 about his soul as we should think it indelicate to 
 ask him about his income; while there almost 
 seems a danger of thinking that smoking over a 
 subject is equivalent to praying over it. 
 
 I venture to think we make a terrible mistake 
 in being so shy in these matters, that there are 
 hundreds and hundreds of people who are not 
 really so shy as the Clergyman is, and who some- 
 times wonder why he does not come to the 
 business of his life just as readily as any other 
 professional man. No; I wish we tried more to 
 feel that we are consecrated men, and that we, if 
 any, have no common land to waste ; that whether 
 we eat or drink, or whatever we do, we wish to 
 do all to the glory of God ; and that we wish to 
 
THE PRIEST IN HJS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 125 
 
 bring into captivity every thought to the obedience 
 of Christ. 
 
 (2) In the second place, we ought to be not only 
 marked with the Cross very definitely, but we 
 ought to be making a constant study of our 
 profession ; there is the study of books, the study 
 of God, and the study of human nature, and the 
 study of our own professional methods. Now, I 
 have already touched on the importance of read- 
 ing ; I suppose we should nearly all agree on that 
 point ; what we should like to know is, rather, 
 how to find time for it. What can one say, in 
 the whirl and the utterly overwhelming tide of 
 work which carries you along, dear brethren? 
 Still, I am now speaking of the very busiest life. 
 I hold it more or less a duty, if we are to deal 
 with men and women, that we should read, each 
 day, some of the Newspaper. It is terribly 
 irritating to keen active minds to hear us peace- 
 fully discoursing about events which happened 
 thousands of years ago, when we have not tried to 
 connect them with passing incidents of absorbing- 
 interest, which afiect the welfare of our people — 
 
126 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 like the country squire, who is said to have gone 
 out with his harriers between the positions of the 
 contending armies on the morning of the battle of 
 Edgehill. Without preaching sermons on subjects 
 of the day — which I, for one, abhor — we ought to 
 have these same subjects of the day clearly before 
 our minds in our presentation of the gospel. 
 Contemporary history, as it is there unrolled 
 before us, is a sacred and a serious thing. And 
 yet how easy it is to waste time over the Paper ; 
 to let it engross the precious morning hours ! 
 Here is something which can be read, for the most 
 part, in recreation time. 
 
 Then there are the odd five minutes — ten 
 minutes — between appointments, when we are 
 kept waiting, which is not unusual. Are there 
 not books which we can keep on our table, which 
 we can take up at these odd moments, adapted to 
 this fragmentary style of acquiring knowledge ? 
 And then, is it not possible to get one solid hour 
 somewhere, at least, on most days ? Archbishop 
 Benson's day was, if any, a full one; yet one 
 cannot read without personal shame how a man. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 127 
 
 pressed as he was, contrived to secure on the 
 busiest days that serious food which his soul 
 needed by a vigorous exercise of self-discipline. 
 The author of " An Appreciation of Archbishop 
 Benson," in the Times, has told us : " His life of 
 incessant labour did not stop him from reading — 
 and reading stiff books — though the reading was 
 generally done when he ought long to have gone 
 to bed,^ He kept up with modern literature of 
 many sorts. Whenever he got an opportunity he 
 worked diligently at St. Cyprian; but the Bible 
 was his chief study, as became a Priest. No 
 morning came without his making time for long 
 and solid work upon it before joining his family. 
 All that minute and exact scholarship, of which 
 the foundation was laid at Birmingham, was 
 brought to bear upon it. Nor was he minute only 
 in his analysis ; he loved to read large pieces 
 together, so as to enter into the general tenor and 
 catch the drift of what he was reading. Religion 
 
 ^ This is not to be imitated by every one. There is, with many 
 people, as much self-denial to be exercised in going to bed at 
 night as there is in getting up in the morning. 
 
128 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 was a profound reality for him ; he was resolved 
 to sound the deeps of it." This is, I fancy, very 
 often a mere matter of arrangement. It is the 
 fashion of the present day, not only to have time 
 for nothing, but to be proud of having time for 
 nothing. And, I suppose, in this, as in other 
 things, we ought not to undertake more than our 
 strength can stand, while, I suppose, that the 
 ideal man, as he reserves time for meals and for 
 bed, would also reserve time for reading. 
 
 I would only dwell now on one other region 
 of reading — I mean reading in the book of 
 experience. Here is a book which again and again 
 God tells us that He has given us to use. " Hear 
 My law, O My people : incline your ears unto the 
 words of My mouth. I will open My mouth in a 
 parable : I will declare hard sentences of old ; 
 which we have heard and known: and such as 
 our fathers have told us ; that we should not hide 
 them from the children of the generations to come : 
 but to show the honour of the Lord, His mighty 
 and wonderful works that He hath done. He 
 made a covenant with Jacob, and gave Israel a 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 129 
 
 law: which He commanded our forefathers to 
 teach their children; that their posterity might 
 know it: and the children which were yet 
 unborn ; to the intent that when they came up : 
 they might show their children the same." ' Why 
 are we so dull in reading our communicants the 
 lessons of experience? Are there no lessons of 
 your school life which you can impart to those 
 young boys, who have very much the same trials 
 and temptations as you had ? Are there no 
 lessons out of the hard experience of your life 
 for these young men whom you are so shy in 
 helping ? Do you not say, " If only I had been 
 helped ; if only I had known ; if only a word had 
 been said to me " ? Are we practically so shy and 
 dull that we are acting in the same way towards those 
 under our care ? Do not let us fall into the snare 
 of seeking to be popular, or saying pleasant things, 
 or speaking what we know will easily go down. 
 This is akin in our personal ministrations to that 
 dismal mistake of " pleasant afternoons in church." 
 Not but that it is extremely important to keep 
 
 » Ps. Ixxviii. 1-7. 
 
130 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 alive our sense o£ humour. It might save us from 
 a Polychrome Bible and strange theories. It 
 would save us certainly from some of those curious 
 notices which we hear and read in churches; 
 while it would help us not to take too seriously 
 the follies of the fool, who says there is no God. 
 Our Blessed Lord saw the rich young ruler whom 
 He loved go away. He once was left almost alone 
 with His disciples. There are times when we 
 must be very stern and very uncompromising, 
 just as there are times when we must be very 
 tender, and this is only to be learnt by long and 
 patient studies in character drawn from experi- 
 ence. Ah, yes ! Here is a use to which we can 
 put our own sad past. It is not all loss, after all ; 
 it stays me from being Pharisaical; it stays me 
 from casting the hasty stone ; it stays me from 
 trifling; it makes me intensely in earnest; it 
 makes me long with all my heart to rescue and 
 relieve. As the poor penitent kneels before me, 
 I see myself once more. There are my old 
 troubles, my old difiiculties. I know what helped 
 me. Poor fellow 1 I must make him feel, I must 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION 131 
 
 make him smart ; but I can help him. I know 
 now why God has given such power unto men 
 in the wondrous strength of sympathy. Practically, 
 in our ministerial life, we have a wonderful oppor- 
 tunity of witnessing the best evidence for the 
 confirmation of the Faith. We can see the Faith 
 at work; we can see the fearful struggle with 
 evil, such as is described in the pages of Holy 
 Scripture : the awful power of sin, and the 
 incidence of temptation, while, at the same time, 
 we can trace the effect of Atonement, of Sancti- 
 fi cation, and of Sacramental grace. 
 
 Are we making full proof of what we have ? 
 Do we know the strength of those stores which 
 have been deposited with us, which we are keeping 
 from our people, while we let them put up with 
 the panaceas of the world? Do we know the 
 edge of the sharp instrument which God has 
 given us to use ? Can we trace out the spiritual 
 anatomy of a soul ? We should be seeking to be 
 spiritual experts. There are many seeking to be 
 experts in all branches of science, to be critics, 
 improvers, reformers; but how few are trying to 
 
132 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 be spiritually excellent, and to be, before all things, 
 profound and accomplished ecclesiastics ! 
 
 (3) And then there comes, lastly, at the end of this 
 course of lectures, the old sign, which we long that 
 our people should see in us — the sign of holiness. 
 We long that our people should see our faces shine, 
 as a token that we have been talking with God. 
 But the glory dies away ; we put a veil over our 
 faces; we shrink within ourselves at the thought 
 of the startling and ironical discrepancy between 
 our words and the person who utters them; 
 and we do feel that if only we could be holy, we 
 should be the happiest people in the world, and 
 our parishes would be like flowers bathed in the 
 sunlight; we should be a centre of brightness 
 and heat and joy wherever we went. Holiness ! 
 We have been reading this last year, in the news- 
 papers, the account of a town, not so far from here, 
 desolated with an epidemic, which has only just 
 left it. There were the springs which fed the 
 town reservoir gushing up bright and clear, but 
 very near the surface, and very unprotected. And 
 we have read how encampments of rough people. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 133 
 
 squatting in the neighbourhood, caused defilements 
 to percolate into the stream, and the water was 
 poisoned and the town was stricken. Do we look 
 back on our life and see its little springs bursting 
 up in the fresh green surroundings of home ? And 
 then came school, with all its opening opportuni- 
 ties, and with its work and its treasures there 
 oozed in the subtle defilements which poisoned our 
 unprotected life. Larger and coarser were the 
 occupants who settled on it as life went on. Its 
 very activities seemed to take away its sweetness 
 and its freshness. Perhaps, as we look back — 
 God grant that it may not be so ! — our conversa- 
 tion brought sickness, and our presence was not 
 a presence of health to those whom we reached 
 with the stream of our life. It is one of the 
 saddest things that a man can brood over, if he 
 has to think of some soul whom he has injured, 
 whom his own penitence cannot affect, perhaps 
 his heartfelt prayers hardly reach — perhaps some 
 one, unknown to him even, who just tasted of that 
 poisoned stream, or who languished under an 
 unhealthy influence. And, in addition to this, 
 
 K 3 
 
134 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 how difficult it is to work it out ! What a terrible 
 thing is a Priest's fall, a clerical scandal ! So often 
 the recrudescence of an old defilement, which 
 trickled in many years ago, and has never been 
 cleansed away. As we aim after holiness, as we 
 long for its mark on our characters, certainly we 
 must ask ourselves, "Is the stream of my life 
 clean ? Has it been purified in the precious blood 
 of Jesus ? Or am I trusting to the lapse of years 
 or the general purifying effect of time, and then 
 wonder that my people are so little refreshed by 
 the brackish water of only a half-cleansed life ? " 
 
 And i£ my life is clean, is it fresh? Consider 
 what we have tried to think over together — 
 the life of Sacrament, Prayer, and Meditation! 
 All round our life there are springs — openings 
 through which comes down the fresh inrush of 
 heavenly grace. Nothing will make up for it if 
 they are closed. A bad Sunday will make all the 
 week stale and lifeless. A prayerless morning will 
 make all our spiritual efforts vain and unprofitable. 
 They will be like delicate work done by one only 
 half awake or in a fit of irritation, so that he 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 135 
 
 cannot work with patience. A day without 
 meditation will be like a day without our regular 
 exercise. Our work will be done formally and 
 mechanically, to the ultimate injury of our spiritual 
 health. 
 
 And then, is our life full? If only we could 
 realize the intense interest of all that is around 
 us, and the correspondences whereby we can reach 
 out to all the riches of the spiritual world, what 
 a different life this would be ! It may be, like 
 Jacob, we lie down tired and disappointed upon 
 the hard pillow of a monotonous life. We are 
 tempted to think we are failures. At school we 
 were told we were going to be the supplanters, 
 we won our boyish prizes ; at the university 
 we gained our distinctions, we were known, and 
 we were popular ; — and now here we are, failures ! 
 '•' The supplanter " and its promise is a delusion. 
 We have tried and failed. When, lo ! at our very 
 head, out of the dreary streets, with their depress- 
 ing squalor and their exacting toil, rises the golden 
 ladder which joins earth and heaven, and grave 
 angels are ascending and descending on it. There 
 
136 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 is something greater than being a supplanter; 
 something greater than prizes and benefices and 
 " monstroT digito prcetereuntiumJ' The supplanter 
 Jacob may become Israel the prince. The Altar 
 is open to him, with its wondrous stair opening 
 out into the ever- vanishing distance of increasing 
 glory. To be so very near to Christ, to bring Him 
 to the people, to be linked on to the great sacrifice 
 in heaven! — The Church becomes dearer than it 
 was before, as I am able to say, " This is none 
 other but the house of God, and this is the gate 
 of heaven." ^ 
 
 And the golden ladder starts up from the 
 schools which I thought so dull and uninteresting. 
 How strangely those young lives wind themselves 
 round me; I wonder that I ever despised those 
 whose angels see God in heaven ; their little 
 sorrows, their easily produced joys, their losses, 
 their sins, their sicknesses, their early deaths — 
 how impossible it is to despise them ; how anxious 
 I am to help them up the golden stair ! 
 
 And the ladder reaches up from the squalid, 
 
 ' Gen. xxviii. 17. 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 137 
 
 festering courts and the dirty houses around me. 
 And I find Jesus Himself in His poor ; I minister 
 to Jesus in the sick and afiiicted; I clothe Him; 
 I visit Him. I bear my people on my heart, 
 and their sorrows drive out mine, and their joys 
 enter into my cold heart and make it warm with 
 sympathy. 
 
 Happiness does not come from our surround- 
 ings; we bring it with us. Success is not the 
 lucky chance of a man who has got on, but comes 
 from doing the work which God has given us 
 to do with all our might. 
 
 We are sons of a glorious Church; we have 
 inherited a splendid birthright. Let us see to it 
 that we adorn it. " The lot is fallen unto me in 
 a fair ground ; yea, I have a goodly heritage." ^ 
 A sure secret of failure is to disparage what we 
 have got, and to try to be one thing while we 
 really are another; to mourn over our meagre 
 Liturgy in comparison with others, ancient and 
 modern, when perhaps we have never tested or 
 made full proof of the excellences of the one we 
 ' Ps. xvi. 7. 
 
138 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 have. Should we find devotion any easier, or the 
 difficulties of concentration any less hard, with 
 another Liturgy ? It is not the Liturgy which is 
 to blame. We mourn over the Babel voices of 
 the Church of England, when perhaps we have 
 not as yet submitted ourselves to the supreme 
 virtue of obedience. It has been pointed out that 
 there was a period in the incident of Babel when 
 the builders all spoke indeed the same language, 
 but were all fatally in the wrong. 
 
 There is no doubt that we are rapidly approach- 
 ing a crisis, when much of what we have gained 
 will be lost if we do not fall into line and stop 
 the petty larceny of private judgment. It is 
 ironical that those who have laboured to uphold 
 the Catholic ideal instead of the Protestant substi- 
 tute which seemed to have usurped its place, should 
 be actively promulgating the essential doctrine 
 of the barest Protestantism, viz. private judgment, 
 as opposed to authority. It is wonderful, as we 
 look back, to see what has been achieved. There 
 is no limit to what we may achieve yet, if we go 
 forward in order, in submission to the principles 
 
THE PRIEST IN HIS LIFE AND CONVERSATION. 139 
 
 which are absolutely bound up in the Catholic 
 Faith. Here is a contribution which we may add 
 to the great cause of Church progress, we who 
 have entered into the labours and martyrdom 
 of other and greater men, to consolidate what 
 they have won for us; to have a firm hopeful- 
 ness in the immense future which lies before the 
 Church of England ; to pray and to work for the 
 reunion of Christendom, not by belittling our own 
 Church, or minimizing the good we have, but by 
 showing that we are proud of her, and that if we 
 are ready to make any concessions which may be 
 right, we are by no means prepared to say that 
 they must all be made on our side ; while before 
 all things we shall make it clear that we can 
 never play with truth, but that rather we shall 
 be seeking to strengthen with dogmatic fulness 
 the more ornate worship which an aesthetic age 
 seems to tolerate and even desire, but not always 
 with a zeal according to knowledge. 
 
 Above all, we will aim at the fuller develop- 
 ment in our own souls of that holiness which 
 ever must be the distinguishing badge and glory 
 
140 PRIESTLY IDEALS. 
 
 of the Priesthood ; in a life marked with the 
 Cross; in a life which exhibits a knowledge of 
 God's law, and a delight in all that He has 
 revealed ; and in a personal life, clean, fresh, full, 
 alive unto God, watchful, eager for His work, 
 devoted to the Church of England, of which we 
 are proud to be the sons. 
 
 " Spernere mundum, spernere nullum, speruere sese, 
 Spernere sperni se; quatuor hsec bona sunt." 
 
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