THE 
 
 MAGNIFICAT 
 

THE 
 
 jW a 0 n t f t r a t 
 
 SERMONS IN ST. PAUL’S 
 
 AUGUST, 1889 
 
 By H. P. LIDDON, D.D., D.C.L, LL.D. 
 
 LATH CANON RESIDENTIARY AND CHANCELLOR OF ST. PAUL'S 
 
 Misericordias Domini in ceternum cantabo. Alleluia 
 
 FOURTH EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 
 i8 95 
 

 TO 
 
 MY DEAR SISTER. 
 
 <k 
 
 ANNIE POOLE KING, 
 
 IN THE JOYFUL CONVICTION 
 THAT AS OUR DAYS ON EARTH ARE 
 
 DRAWING TOWARDS THEIR CLOSE 
 
 WE ARE MORE AND MORE UNITED 
 
 IN HEART AND MIND 
 
 WITH RESPECT TO THOSE THINGS THAT ARE 
 OF LASTING VALUE. 
 
 <k 
 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION 
 
 mHIS edition has no advantage over its predecessor, 
 beyond the improvement of a few phrases of 
 doubtful meaning. But a friend, to whose criticisms 
 the writer attaches particular value, remarks that in 
 these sermons too much is made of the historical import 
 of the Magnificat to leave room for doing justice to 
 its practical aspects. To this, perhaps, it may be replied 
 that the historical occasion of the Magnificat is of greater 
 relative importance than is the case with any other 
 Psalm or Hymn that ever was uttered. a If so much be 
 granted, — and what Christian can hesitate to grant it ? 
 — the question is reduced to one of time and space. It 
 might have been better to devote eight sermons to such 
 a subject than four; but, in days like ours, it would 
 have been more difficult to secure attention. For the 
 rest, the bearing of the Hymn of Mary on our daily 
 
 a A sentence to this effect might well have been introduced at p. 8. 
 
Preface to the Second Edition . 
 
 viii 
 
 lives lies more on the surface of the language than does 
 its relation to the Incarnation. And its practical value 
 for us is likely to be enriched and intensified if we bear 
 in mind as much as may be, when the words that are 
 so often on our lips were first uttered, and by whom. 
 
 3, Amen Court, St. Paul’s, E.C., 
 
 Whitsuntide , 1890. 
 
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 
 
 T HESE sermons ai'e published for the reason which has 
 compelled the recent publication of some earlier 
 volumes. If a man’s words are in any case to remain 
 behind him, he would rather give them to the world 
 himself, and correctly. The author cannot be responsible 
 for any version of these discourses which does not bear 
 the name of his present publishers. 
 
 It has not been an object with him to discuss the grave 
 controversies which at once present themselves when the 
 name and office of our Lord’s Blessed Mother come into 
 question. If her true place in the hearts of Christians 
 has been often exaggerated, it has been as often un- 
 recognized or denied. If the language and practice of 
 some Christians with respect to her may seem to encroach 
 on what is due to the incommunicable and awful pre- 
 rogatives of God, the terms in which she is referred to 
 by others would appear to show that they have forgotten 
 Whose Mother she is, and what He may be thinking of 
 
X 
 
 Preface . 
 
 a lack of love and reverence for her on the part of those 
 who own His Name. In these sermons it has seemed 
 better to dwell on the inspired language which she her- 
 self has left us ; and for the rest to bear in mind the wise 
 words of Bishop Pearson : a “If Elisabeth cried out with 
 so loud a voice, 1 Blessed art thou among women/ when 
 Christ was but newly conceived in Mary's womb, what 
 expressions of honour and admiration can we think 
 sufficient now that Christ is in heaven and that Mother 
 with Him ! Far be it from any Christian to derogate 
 from that special privilege granted her which is incom- 
 municable to any other. We cannot bear too reverent a 
 regard unto the Mother of our Lord, so long as we give 
 her not that worship which is due unto the Lord Himself. 
 Let us keep the language of the Primitive Church : ‘ Let 
 her be honoured and esteemed, let Him be worshipped 
 and adored.' " 
 
 3, Amen Court, E.C., 
 
 Advent Sunday , 1889. 
 
 fl Pearson, On the Creed Art. Ill . p. 218. Oxford : 1847. 
 
I. 
 
 MARY OUR MODEL IN PRAISING 
 
 GOD. 
 
 St. Luke i. 46-48. 
 
 And Mary said , 
 
 My soul doth magnify the Lord , 
 
 And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour . 
 
 For He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden . 
 
 No fact is more attested by wide experience, and 
 few facts are more pregnant with significance and 
 warning, than the tendency of the human mind to 
 lose its hold of the sense and power of language, 
 especially of religious language, after constantly 
 repeating it. Words, although sacred, and designed 
 for universal use by the Highest of all authorities, 
 and richly endowed with spiritual power, do yet 
 become to us, through the process of constant 
 usage, barren and unfruitful, unless an effort be 
 made from time to time to recover and reassert 
 in the human mind their original sense and import. 
 So it is even with that most sacred Prayer which 
 our Lord Himself prescribed for the use of His 
 disciples. Neither the associations of ages, nor 
 
 B 
 
2 
 
 General danger of formalism. [Seem. 
 
 the varied experiences of our own souls, which 
 have gathered round the several petitions of the 
 Lords Prayer, will avail to save us from saying 
 it in a thoughtless and formal way, unless we 
 constantly remind ourselves of what it means ; of 
 what it has meant to millions, of what it might 
 mean to ourselves. And as this is true of words 
 which our Lord Himself bids us use, so it is no less 
 true of other inspired words, which His Church has 
 selected from the Sacred Records, as being especially 
 suited for constant employment in public worship. 
 It holds good of those psalms which, like the ninety- 
 fifth or the hundredth, or the seven psalms of Peni- 
 tence, have been chosen for frequent use on account 
 of their spiritual intensity ; and even of those three 
 hymns in which the earliest saints of the New 
 Testament heralded the Birth of the Divine Re- 
 deemer — the song of Zacharias,“ or the Benedictus ; 
 the song of Simeon , b or the Nunc Dimittis ; and 
 the song of Mary,® or the Magnificat. In view of 
 this tendency to lose our hold on the sense of 
 language which on account of its excellence we 
 repeat most frequently, it may be well to devote the 
 Sunday afternoons of the present month, to such 
 consideration as time will permit, of the familiar, but 
 8 St. Luke i. 68-79. b 29 -32. c lb. i. 46-55. 
 
I] The Magnificat in the Prayer-book. 
 
 3 
 
 not always well-understood words of the first in 
 order and the greatest of Christian hymns — the 
 Magnificat. 
 
 I. 
 
 There is no mistaking the prominence assigned 
 in the English Prayer-book, as in many older 
 Prayer-books of the Christian Church, to the Hymn 
 of Mary. It is the centre and heart of our Evening 
 Service. All else leads up to it, or expands it, or 
 radiates from it. We mount upwards to it by 
 successive steps; by confession of the sins which 
 disqualify the soul of man for true communion with 
 God; by the great prayer which makes all com- 
 munion with God easy and natural ; by psalms which 
 express the longings of the human heart for some 
 nearer contact with God, or which sadly deplore 
 whatever may hinder it, or which joyfully anticipate 
 its realization. We mount yet a step higher as we 
 listen to some Lesson from the Old Testament, 
 which, whether it be history or prophecy, narrative 
 or moral teaching, poetry or prose, everywhere and 
 always speaks of Jesus Christ, to those who have 
 ears to hear ; suggesting Him as the contrast to the 
 human failures, or as the crown of the human ex- 
 cellences which it describes ; or announcing Him as 
 
4 
 
 Prominence of the Magnificat 
 
 the Heavenly Visitant Who, by-and-by, will still 
 man’s fears and warrant his hopes. Now, as of old, 
 unless there be a vail over the heart a in the 
 reading of the Old Testament, the Great Teacher 
 accompanies us through its pages, and, beginning 
 at Moses and all the Prophets, expounds to 
 us in all the Scriptures the things concerning 
 Himself. 6 And thus we approach the Hymn 
 which proclaims that all for which Psalmists and 
 Prophets have yearned has in very truth and 
 deed come to be. Mary might seem evening 
 by evening to stand in the church of her Divine 
 Son, while in strains which we shall consider, she 
 celebrates an event compared with which all else in 
 human history is insignificant indeed. As from her 
 thankful heart the incense of praise ascends to 
 the Eternal Throne, first in one and then another 
 incense-wreath, each having its own beauty of 
 tint and form, we reflect that the hardest questions 
 of man’s mind have been answered, and that the 
 deepest yearnings of his heart have been satisfied. 
 The Only Begotten Son has come down from 
 heaven to be born of a human Mother, to die at 
 the hands of His creatures, and to rise again. 
 After this all else might seem, in some sense must 
 seem, pale and poor ; but it is this great truth, set 
 * 2 Cor. iii. 14. b St. Luke xxiv. 27. 
 
I] in the Evening Service of the Church. 5 
 
 forth or latent in every line of the Magnificat which 
 carries us on to the end of the Evening Service; 
 through the Second Lesson, in which the Incarnate 
 God speaks to us Himself or by the lips of His 
 Apostles ; to the Nunc Dimittis, in which we take 
 leave of His message with thankful joy ; to the 
 Creed, in which we brace ourselves for the toils and 
 pains of life by a new profession of our faith in Him ; 
 to the concluding prayers, in which His omnipotent 
 Intercession is at once the warrant of our praying 
 at all, and of the confidence that we shall be heard, 
 not for our merits, but for His. 
 
 It may seem strange that, from time to time, 
 persons who have felt no difficulty about the use 
 of the old Hebrew psalms in Christian worship, have 
 been disposed to take offence at the public use of 
 the Magnificat, or, indeed, of all the Christian hymns 
 which are preserved for us in St. Luke’s Gospel. 
 Such a feeling, however, found expression shortly 
 after the Book of Common Prayer had come into 
 use. a It was maintained that unless we could all be 
 in the exact circumstances of Zacharias at the birth 
 
 a The permission to sing the psalms Cantate Domino and 
 Dens Misereatur, instead of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, 
 dates from 1552. But even this serious concession did not 
 appease the Judaizing temper which was offended by any use 
 of the Evangelical Canticles. 
 
6 
 
 Sacred hymns independent 
 
 of the Baptist, or of Simeon after seeing our Lord 
 in the Temple, or of Mary at the Visitation, we had 
 no adequate reason for singing their hymns. 4 This 
 amounts to saying that no hymn or psalm is to be 
 used by any other person than its composer, unless 
 the circumstances of the composer can be exactly 
 reproduced in the case of the man or the Church 
 which sings his hymn. Not to enquire how this 
 rule would apply to modern and uninspired com- 
 positions which are largely in use among us, we 
 may observe that it would forbid any use whatever 
 of the Psalter itself in public or private devotion — 
 a use to which, however, oddly enough, those old 
 objectors who have been referred to, do not seem to 
 have objected. For every psalm was composed in 
 a special set of circumstances, some of which can, 
 while some cannot, be ascertained ; and yet it does 
 not seem to have been argued that, because we 
 cannot make these circumstances our own, we 
 are precluded from using the psalms. We are 
 none of us in the position of David persecuted by 
 a jealous sovereign, b or insulted and rebelled against 
 
 a Cf. Hooker, Peel. Pol., v. 40. See 1 Adm. apud Whitg. 
 Def. 494, quoted by Keble. Some Puritans objected to the 
 frequent use of the Venite ; cf. A •parte of a register, contayninge 
 sundrie memorable matters , Edinburgh, 1593, p. 73. 
 
 b Ps. viii., lii., lvii., lviii., lix. 
 
of the circumstances of their origin. 
 
 7 
 
 by a favourite son,* or bringing the ark to the 
 sanctuary of Zion, b or ordering a royal household 
 according to the Divine Law.® The glories of 
 Solomon/ the conquest and humiliation of Reho- 
 boam/ the repulse of Sennacherib/ the ruin and 
 desolation of Jerusalem by the Babylonian con- 
 queror/ the sadness of the captives weeping by the 
 waters of Babylon/ the laying the corner-stone of 
 the new temple after the exile/ — these, and many 
 other like subjects or events, are the occasions of 
 psalms, which yet we use at this day to express the 
 fears, or hopes, or resolves, or aspirations of our own 
 souls. Clearly, if such a difference of circumstances 
 does not forbid the recitation of Hebrew psalms, it 
 cannot preclude us from usingNewTestament hymns; 
 which, as Richard Hooker has said, “ concern us so 
 much more than the songs of David, as the Gospel 
 toucheth us more than the Law, the New Testament 
 than the 01d. j ” But in truth, whether it be Jewish 
 psalm or Christian hymn, we Christians use them 
 because their inspiration lifts them above the limits 
 of the time, the place, the events which witnessed 
 their composition. As a work of natural genius, 
 
 s Ps. iii.-vii., lv., lxi. b lb. xxiv. c lb. oi. 
 d lb. Ixxii. e lb. lxxxviii. 1 lb. xlvi., lxxiii., lxxv., lxxvi. 
 
 15 lb. cii. h lb. cxxxvii. 1 lb. cxviii. 1 Eccl. Pol., v. 40, 42. 
 
8 
 
 The Magnificat is 
 
 ■ [Sekm. 
 
 whether it be poem, or speech, or painting, or statue, 
 has that in it which detaches it from the study of 
 the poet, the audience of the speaker, the workroom 
 of the artist, and makes it belong to all times and 
 countries ; so much more do words that are super- 
 naturally inspired carry with them the certificate of 
 an universal applicability, which is independent of 
 places, and events, and epochs, and authorship, and, 
 indeed, of everything save His Mind from Whom 
 they proceed, and that heart and understanding of 
 His creatures which needs and welcomes them. 
 
 The Magnificat, then, is the Hymn of the Incar- 
 nation. It was uttered in circumstances the like of 
 which had never before, and have never since, 
 surrounded any human being whatever. Mary had 
 been told at Nazareth by a heavenly messenger 
 that she was to be the Mother of Him in Whom all 
 God’s best promises to Israel and to the human 
 race were to be fulfilled. 8. And she was to be His 
 Mother, not in the ordinary way of nature, but, as 
 became His pre-existing glory, and as was needed 
 ifi order to cut off the entail of evil which came 
 down from the first father of our race, in a new 
 and supernatural way. “ The Holy Ghost ” — so 
 ran the prediction — “ shall come upon thee, and 
 
 a St. Luke i. 30-33. 
 
I] 
 
 the Hymn of the Incarnation. 
 
 9 
 
 the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee : 
 therefore also that Holy Thing Which shall be born 
 of thee shall be called the Son of God.” a Mary 
 knew that she was to be the Mother of the Divine 
 Messiah, when she traversed the land from Nazareth 
 to a country house some few miles from Jerusalem, 
 on a visit to her cousin Elisabeth, the future 
 mother of the Baptist. It was their meeting which 
 was the immediate occasion of the Magnificat. 
 Elisabeth had no sooner heard from the lips of 
 Mary the wonted salutation, of “ Peace be to thee ! ” 
 with which religious Jews greeted each other after 
 a long absence, than, under the influence of the 
 holy spirit of prophecy which filled her soul, she 
 broke out into words which mark the high signifi- 
 cance of Mary’s destiny scarcely less clearly than 
 does Mary’s own Magnificat. “ She spake with a 
 loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among 
 women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And 
 whence is this to me, that the Mother of my Lord 
 should come to me ? ” b The Mother of my Lord ! 
 Elisabeth was the elder woman, and, as the wife 
 of Zacharias, she was in a higher social position 
 than Mary ; but few things in religious history are 
 more beautiful than her ready and unstinted recog- 
 * St. Luke i. 35. b lb. 42, 43. 
 
IO 
 
 Successive strophes 
 
 [Seem. 
 
 nition of the loftier vocation of her younger 
 relative. Her next sentence was at once a blessing 
 and a prophecy ; but they touched a secret spring 
 in the illuminated soul of Mary, and she forthwith 
 uttered her hymn of praise. 
 
 She uttered it, as might seem, in a single jet; 
 but as it passed from her lips, as is usual with 
 eastern poetry, it fell, not of set design, but by an 
 instinct of intrinsic fitness, into divisions of unequal 
 length, which we moderns should call strophes. 
 
 Mary begins by offering up to God, with the 
 whole strength and resource of her spiritual being, 
 that praise which she knows to be His due at all 
 times, and especially in view of the signal privilege 
 and honour that has been vouchsafed to her — 
 
 “ My soul doth magnify the Lord, 
 
 And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. 
 
 For He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden.” 
 
 Then, in a second strophe, she dwells for a 
 moment on the singular and gracious distinction 
 whereby she has been chosen to be the Mother of 
 the Incarnate Son — 
 
 “ For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me 
 blessed. 
 
 For He That is mighty hath done to me great things ; 
 
 And holy is His Name. 
 
 And His mercy is on them that fear Him throughout all 
 generations.” 
 
I] 
 
 of the Magnificat. 
 
 1 1 
 
 But during these moments of thankful exulta- 
 tion her vision has widened to embrace new 
 horizons, and, in a third strophe, she sets forth 
 some relations of the Birth of her Son to the action 
 of God’s Providence in the history of human nations 
 and human lives — 
 
 “ He hath showed strength with His Arm ; 
 
 He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their 
 hearts. 
 
 Ho hath put down princes from their thrones, 
 
 And hath exalted men of low degree. 
 
 He hath filled the hungry with good things ; 
 
 And the rich He hath sent empty away.” 
 
 Once more, in a concluding strophe, she traces the 
 great gift which, through her, has been bestowed 
 on the race of man, up to its sources in the Com- 
 passion and the Faithfulness of God. 
 
 “ He remembering His Mercy 
 Hath holpen His servant Israel ; 
 
 As He promised to our forefathers, 
 
 Abraham and his seed, for ever.” 
 
 It has more than once been suggested that such 
 a Hymn as this is not the kind of response which it 
 would be natural for us to make in reply to such 
 a congratulation as Elisabeth’s ; a and it is hin ted 
 
 a Strauss, Leben Jesu , i, 3, § 31, cannot understand how 
 two friends, visiting one another, should “ even in the midst 
 of the most extraordinary occurrences, break out into long 
 hymns.” 
 
12 
 
 Was the Magnificat a 
 
 [Serm. 
 
 that the composition may be really due to some 
 later writer, whether the Evangelist or another. 
 
 Upon this we may remark that “natural” is a 
 term of varying import ; and that what is natural 
 to one person, or people, or age, is far from being 
 natural to another. We have only to look around 
 us in order to discover that persons of different 
 temperaments meet similar occasions very dif- 
 ferently. One man is reserved and sparing of his 
 words, another is effusive ; this man checks his 
 feelings, that man indulges them ; one is as literal 
 and prosaic as may be, another almost inevitably 
 expresses himself in the language of poetry. Then 
 the Eastern and Western nations differ now in these 
 respects as they have always differed. To many 
 an Arab at this hour it is perfectly natural to 
 discuss an everyday occurrence in words which 
 have the form and rhythm of a poetical compo- 
 sition. That which an European would put into a 
 sentence, the Arab will expand into what is virtu- 
 ally a poem, with rhythmic rise and fall, and 
 refrains and repetitions, and appeals to all kinds 
 of higher considerations, not perhaps foreign to the 
 subject, but not necessary to its due discussion. 
 No Englishman who had just lost his king and 
 his friend would forthwith break out into an 
 
IJ “ natural ” reply to St. Elisabeth f 13 
 
 effusion such as that in which David laments the 
 death of Saul and Jonathan on Mount Gilboa ; a 
 but in David, as in many another Eastern, ancient 
 or modern — apart from any question of inspiration 
 — it was almost a matter of course to do so. And 
 Mary, instinct with the spirit of prophecy, answers 
 Elisabeth’s congratulations in a burst of inspired 
 poetry, based on older words which she has known 
 from infancy, and which she so transfigures as 
 to make them express the fact which fills her 
 grateful soul with wonder and joy. To measure 
 her utterance by the prosaic rules of our Western 
 temperament, is to forget the most obvious laws 
 of equitable criticism. 
 
 Nor, we may confidently add, is there any real 
 ground for the assertion that Mary’s Magnificat 
 was the work of any other than Mary. Like the 
 songs of Zacharias and Simeon, it is something 
 more than a psalm, and something less than 
 a complete Christian hymn. A Christian poet, 
 living after the Resurrection of Christ, would 
 surely have said more ; a Hebrew psalmist would 
 have said less than Mary. In this Hymn of hers 
 we observe a consciousness of nearness to the 
 fulfilment of the great promises, to which there is 
 2 Sam. i. 19-27 ; cf. Acts iv. 24-30. 
 
14 The Magnificat and [Seem. 
 
 no parallel even in the latest of the psalms ; and 
 yet even Mary does not speak of the Promised One 
 as an Evangelist or an Apostle would have spoken 
 of Him, by His Human Name, and with distinct 
 reference to the mysteries of His Life and Death 
 and Resurrection . 3 Her Hymn was a native product 
 of one particular moment of transition in sacred re- 
 ligious history, and of no other ; when the twilight 
 of the ancient dispensation was melting, but had 
 not yet melted, into the full daylight of the new. 
 
 Certainly the Magnificat is an inspired Psalm ; 
 it belongs to the highest degree of inspiration, and 
 yet it does not claim an absolute originality. It 
 is, in truth, modelled very largely, although not 
 altogether, on an older Psalm, b which Hannah had 
 sung many a century before at the door of the 
 tabernacle in Shiloh, when she brought to it 
 her infant son Samuel, as she said, to “ lend 
 him to the Lord as long as he liveth .” 0 Hannah’s 
 history had an especial place in the heart and 
 thoughts of every Jewish woman. Not only 
 because she was the mother of the great and 
 austere prophet, who may claim in some respects 
 
 a Cf. Mill, Observations on the Attempted Application of Pan- 
 theistic Principles to the Theory and Historic Criticism of the 
 Gospels , p. 1 19. 
 
 b 1 Sam. ii. 1-10. 
 
 c lb. i. 28. 
 
I] 
 
 the Song of Hannah. 
 
 15 
 
 an unrivalled importance in the history of the 
 people of Revelation, but also and because her 
 deferred hopes, her bitter disappointments, the 
 rough misunderstanding to which she was exposed 
 even at the hands of the gentle and weak old man 
 who then held the office of high priest in Israel, 
 have a human pathos that is all their own. At last 
 her longings were fulfilled, and when, in accord- 
 ance with the terms of her vow, she consecrated 
 her son as a Nazarite to the lifelong service of God, 
 her thankful heart found vent in a Hymn of Praise, 
 in repeating which many a Jewish mother and 
 maiden from that time forth associated herself with 
 the sorrows and the joys of Hannah. Listen to 
 Hannah first and then to Mary, and you will 
 perceive how closely their hymns are related to 
 each other. Each of these inspired women finds 
 her joy in God; a each traces God’s Hand in the 
 exaltation of the humble and in the humiliation 
 of the proud ; b each closes her song by dwelling 
 on God’s fulfilment of His promises . 0 Mary, we 
 see plainly, has reproduced the very ideas, the 
 order of ideas, nay, sometimes the very phrases, 
 of the older hymn ; but she has made them sub- 
 servient to a truth which was seen, if at all, very 
 * 1 Sam. ii. 1. b lb. 6 - 8 . c lb. 10. 
 
1 6 The Magnificat, how far “original." [Serm. 
 
 dimly, across the ages, by the older songstress, 
 and which is close and clear to herself. When 
 Strauss observes that if the Virgin’s Hymn had 
 been inspired from on high we might expect in it 
 more of originality,® it is not out of place to reflect 
 that God the Holy Ghost is not bound to adopt 
 the exact standard of originality which may approve 
 itself to a modern literary man of a sceptical turn 
 of mind. Originality does not consist always and 
 only in the production of new material, new 
 thoughts, new phrases ; the truest originality may 
 display itself when old ideas and old phrases are 
 enlisted in the service of some newly proclaimed 
 truth. When, in her inspired Magnificat, Mary 
 draws so largely upon the ancient Hymn of Hannah, 
 she is only doing what inspired souls had done 
 again and again before her. We cannot read the 
 Bible carefully, without noting how Psalmist bor- 
 rows from Psalmist, Prophet from Prophet, nay, it 
 even might seem, one Evangelist from another ; 
 the first object with all the sacred writers being 
 not the creation or the vindication of a poor repu- 
 
 a Leben Jesu, u.s. Strauss thinks it “ surprising that a dis- 
 course emanating immediately from the Divine Source of 
 inspiration should not be more striking for its originality, 
 but should be interlarded with reminiscences from the Old 
 Testament.” 
 
I] 
 
 Mary s first thought. 
 
 *7 
 
 tation for one species of originality, but the clear 
 exhibition of truth through the employment of 
 those precise words and thoughts which are best 
 able to do it justice. 
 
 II. 
 
 The first strophe of Mary’s Hymn is a burst of 
 praise. And we may note here three matters for 
 consideration. 
 
 1. There is, to begin with, the fact that in the 
 order of Mary’s thoughts the praise of God comes 
 first. To give God His due is not, with Mary, an 
 afterthought ; it is not appended to something 
 relating to her friends or to herself. In Mary’s 
 soul God takes precedence of all besides. And 
 therefore, in her Hymn, the praise of God takes 
 the lead of all other topics. This, be it observed, 
 is the case, although her Hymn is also an answer 
 to the congratulations of a near relative. She is 
 replying to Elizabeth, but she instinctively, inevi- 
 tably, turns the eye of her soul upwards. She 
 addresses her first words to God. 
 
 Now let us consider what would, in all prob- 
 ability, have been our own course of procedure. 
 
 You have achieved, let us suppose, some consi- 
 
 c 
 
i8 
 
 How modern congratulations are [Serm. 
 
 derable success, or you have escaped some disaster, 
 or some position or distinction has been conferred 
 on you. Friends surround you with congratula- 
 tions ; some of them conventional and perfunctory ; 
 many of them, let us be assured, sincere. Your 
 friends paraphrase, after an earthly fashion, the 
 words of Elisabeth to Mary. They tell you that 
 your success, your escape, your distinction, is a 
 gain and a joy to them. They associate themselves, 
 by the expression of a warm and intimate sympathy, 
 with your satisfaction and delight ; they are 
 honoured, they are decorated, they have succeeded 
 and been distinguished, because you, their friend, 
 have won distinction and success. 
 
 How do you reply? You begin by thanking 
 them for their kindness. To succeed in a world 
 where no friends are left to express their joy, 
 would be success robbed of two-thirds of its 
 value. The old sometimes observe, pathetically, 
 that success and honours have come to them too 
 late. And so you tell your friends with perfect 
 sincerity that their congratulations are more pre- 
 cious to you than anything that has been done 
 by or done to yourself, and that your first thought 
 on this auspicious occasion is the satisfaction which 
 you have given them. The first verse of your 
 
I] 
 
 commonly acknowledged. 
 
 19 
 
 real Magnificat, if it were written out, might per- 
 haps run thus : “ My soul doth magnify the kind- 
 ness and sympathy of my friends, and my spirit 
 hath rejoiced in the pleasure which they have 
 enjoyed on my account.” 
 
 Or, it may be, you give your first thoughts to 
 yourself. You do not wish to say too much about 
 yourself, but at the same time you will not affect 
 a false modesty. You cannot deny — that is the 
 form which a sense of personal merit takes when 
 tempered with some misgivings as to the wisdom 
 of expressing it — y ou cannot deny that it is a great 
 satisfaction to you that efforts, long persevered 
 in without success, have at last succeeded ; that 
 merits, which it might have seemed were entirely 
 overlooked, have at last been recognized. You do 
 not wish to dwell too much on the subject; but, 
 on the other hand, your conviction of what is the 
 fact, and what you call a “ proper pride,” compels 
 you to say thus much. With this view you would 
 make the first verse of your Magnificat something of 
 this sort : “ My soul doth magnify myself, and my 
 spirit hath rejoiced in the efforts or merits which 
 have at length been rewarded as they deserve.” 
 
 But you are a Christian, or at least a Theist. 
 You remember that, after all, there is such a Beinff 
 
 D 
 
20 
 
 Contrast between conventional [Serm. 
 
 as God. If the truth is to be told, you do not feel 
 Him to be very near to you, but you do not wish 
 to forget Him altogether. If He exists, — and you 
 believe that He does exist, — He must have some- 
 thing to do with everything that goes on. It is 
 only right that you should recognize this. You 
 recognize it somewhat tardily, and as a matter to 
 be touched on lightly ; because, in fact, God is less 
 real to you than you are to yourself, or than your 
 friends are. You would not ignore God ; still less 
 would you deny His existence. But you think of 
 Him, in many of your moods of mind, as an idea 
 or conception rather than as a living Being ; a 
 conception from which man’s mind can really sub- 
 tract something, or to which it can add something, 
 as the ages pass. You do not think of Him as 
 of One Who is entirely independent of you, but 
 Who is also as near to you as are the influences 
 which you can measure and the creatures which 
 you can touch, about which you talk to other 
 men, or of which you read in the newspapers. 
 He is there ; but on a somewhat distant and 
 dim horizon of your thought. He is there, and 
 something must be said about Him ; but that 
 something must befit your very thin and precarious 
 idea of what He is. And so at last, you say your 
 
I] 
 
 and religious thankfulness. 
 
 21 
 
 Magnificat after a third fashion : “A sense of 
 intellectual fitness leads me to magnify the Lord ; 
 and I experience a satisfaction in admitting that 
 now, as at other times, something may be due to 
 a higher Power than myself.” 
 
 How pathetically is all this in contrast with 
 Mary! No doubt, to Mary, the joy of Elizabeth was 
 a real joy ; and she cannot but have known that by 
 lineage and training she herself had been prepared 
 for her own high destiny. But her first thought is 
 of Him from Whose goodness all else proceeds ; 
 both the warm hearts, and kindness of friends, and 
 the gifts, whether of nature or of grace, which she 
 had herself received. God must claim her first 
 acknowledgments. Before Him she is as nothing ; 
 and yet He, in His condescending Mercy, had 
 deigned to visit her, as none of His creatures had 
 been visited before. She can only think of the 
 contrast between her nothingness and His Magni- 
 ficence. If she glances for a moment at herself, it 
 is to wonder that she should have been noticed at 
 all by her Creator. “He hath regarded” — not the 
 humility, not the lowly temper ; these graces were 
 undoubtedly hers in a very eminent degree, but 
 she is not thinking of them ; the original word will 
 not lend itself to such a sense. — “ He hath regarded 
 
22 
 
 Mary praises God with [Serm. 
 
 the low condition a of His handmaiden.” Because 
 the contrast between Him and herself is thus 
 present to her ; because she is convinced that she 
 has exerted no claim on Him, and that whatever 
 she has received has come from Him ; she must 
 begin with praise — 
 
 “ My soul doth magnify the Lord, 
 
 And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.” 
 
 2. Then Mary praises God with all the faculties 
 and resources of her spiritual being. “My soul 
 doth magnify,” “ my spirit hath rejoiced.” “ Soul ” 
 and “ spirit ” are not two different names for the 
 same thing. When St. Paul prays that the “ whole 
 spirit and soul and body of the Thessalonian 
 Christians may be preserved blameless unto the 
 coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” b he does not use 
 two words where one would have sufficed. No 
 doubt, alike in Biblical and popular language, both 
 soul and spirit are sometimes used alone for the 
 whole immaterial part of man ; as when our Lord 
 asks, “ What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain 
 
 a Ta 7 reLvu(rLv. The word may have been chosen to express 
 among other things the reduced circumstances of the House of 
 ' David. Meyer, in Zoc., takes it more generally : “ Maria meint 
 die Niedrigkeit ihrer Person.” b i Thess. v. 23. 
 
I] 
 
 her whole spiritual being. 
 
 2X 
 
 the whole world, and lose his own soul 1 ” a or when 
 the Preacher says “that the spirit shall return to 
 God Who gave it.” b But when, as here, the words 
 occur together, in more or less obvious contrast 
 with each other, they stand for the lower and 
 higher parts of that invisible half of man which 
 accompanies his body, yet is distinct from it. c Soul 
 is nearer to the bodily nature ; spirit nearer to the 
 nature of God. Soul in man is analogous to the 
 higher life of the animals ; the animals ■ have in 
 them nothing that corresponds to spirit. Soul 
 receives impressions both from the external world 
 and from spirit : and so, as here, it utters through 
 the bodily organs that thought or emotion which 
 has previously 11 been present to spirit. Soul is 
 the seat of passion, of imagination, of impulse ; 
 spirit, while, as we see in this Hymn, it is, like 
 pure thought, capable of sublime joys all its own, is 
 specially the seat of the self-measuring and reflective 
 reason, of memory, of deliberate and imperative 
 will. Soul, it is plain, lives not far from the 
 frontier of the things of time and sense ; spirit 
 
 & 
 
 a St. Mark viii. 36. b Eccles. xii. 7. 
 
 c Delitzsch, Bibl. Psychol ., p. 179. 
 
 d Observe the present pey aXvvet to express the action of 
 ij/vxri , in contrast with the aorist, rjyaWcacrev, which describes 
 that of 7 rvtviJLOL, Cf. Meyer, in loc. 
 
24 
 
 Half-hearted praise. 
 
 [Serm. 
 
 belongs to a sphere on which the things of time 
 and sense need not, and often do not, intrude. 
 Between them soul and spirit include the whole 
 incorporeal nature of man, with all its powers ; and 
 Mary summons them all, the highest and the lowest, 
 the faculties which traverse the world of sense, and 
 the faculties which live among the highest and most 
 abstract truths, to the solemn work of praise. Her 
 “soul” must magnify the Lord, because, as she 
 sings, her “spirit” has rejoiced in God her Saviour. 
 
 Is there not here also a lesson to be learnt from 
 Mary ? Some men appear to think that a single 
 power of the soul may be told off, like a domestic 
 servant or a soldier, when sent on a particular 
 errand, to discharge the duty of praise. One 
 man bids his fancy engage in the work ; and 
 another his affections ; and another his reasoned 
 sense of the fitness of things; and another his 
 instinct of beauty, turned towards the higher 
 horizons. Nay ! it might sometimes seem as 
 though no mental or spiritual faculty was bidden 
 to engage in praise at all ; and Christians who 
 make a serious effort to pray, and would be 
 shocked at the neglect to do so, leave the duty of 
 praising the great Creator to their neighbours, to 
 the choir, to the choristers, or, it might almost 
 
25 
 
 I] Effort needed to say Gloria Patri. 
 
 seem, to the organ. And yet what a demand on all 
 the faculties of our being is made by one simple 
 and oft-repeated act of praise, such as, for instance, 
 the Gloria Patri ! We say it before we begin the 
 Psalms ; we repeat it at the end of each Psalm 
 and each Canticle, excepting the Te Deum. It 
 consists only of two verses, and yet what infinite 
 spheres does it bid us traverse ! Our souls rise 
 first to the Three Almighty Incomprehensible Sub- 
 sistences within the Being of the Godhead — “ Glory 
 be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy 
 Ghost.” And then, remembering that the Eternal 
 Three have ever been and ever will be what They 
 are, our thought reaches backwards into an unbegun, 
 and forwards into an unending eternity, while 
 seeking for an instant to touch the present, which, 
 as we touch it, has already mingled with the past — 
 “ As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall 
 be, world without end.” If any of us should have 
 cause to think that we have paid but scant atten- 
 tion and embarked little or no spiritual effort in 
 this oft-repeated act of praise, let us bethink our- 
 selves of the import of Mary’s words. She would 
 summon the whole mental and moral nature to the 
 work of praise ; ^ . wf^^n^^pch, as in a vast 
 orchestra, each, mental faculty h^a- its place, and 
 
 '! No.-.va.'i.as. 
 
 \ 
 
26 
 
 Mary rejoices in her Saviour. [Serm. 
 
 may bring its due and needed contribution to 
 swell the harmony of the mighty whole. No variety 
 of emotion is so poor and lowly that it cannot 
 utter something in honour of the Creator ; no 
 power or resource of thought is so great that it is 
 humbled by joining in the tribute which is due 
 from all finite minds to the Infinite. The old 
 exhortation to the Temple choir may be paraphrased 
 as addressed to the faculties of the Christian soul — 
 
 “ Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet, 
 
 Praise Him upon the lute and harp. 
 
 Praise Him in the cymbals and dances : 
 
 Praise Him upon the strings and pipe. 
 
 Praise Him upon the well-tuned cymbals : 
 
 Praise Him upon the loud cymbals. 
 
 Let everything that hath breath 
 Praise the Lord.” a 
 
 3. Lastly, observe the title under which Mary 
 praises God. “ My Saviour.” “ My spirit hath re- 
 joiced in God my Saviour.” 
 
 This designation, as you would know, although 
 associated by Christian faith, in an especial manner, 
 with our Lord Jesus Christ, is much older than the 
 New Testament. It grew naturally out of Israel’s 
 faith in God’s especial and protecting Providence. 
 “ It is Thou that savest us from our enemies,” b was 
 the voice of the chosen people from age to age. 
 a Ps. cl. 3-6. b Ps. xliv. 8. 
 
I] 
 
 Senses of the word “ Saviour 
 
 2 7 
 
 But the enemies were generally political foes, and 
 the salvation was victory in the field or deliverance 
 from bondage. This outward and temporal salva- 
 tion was, indeed, also a religious salvation. Israel 
 was the people of God ; the defeat of Israel was the 
 defeat of the cause of God ; the victory or salvation 
 of Israel was the victory or the triumph of that 
 cause. But it is probable that a new impulse was 
 given to this more spiritual meaning by what would 
 have seemed to pious Jews the profane assumption 
 of the title of Saviour by the pagan kings, who, 
 after the death of Alexander the Great, founded 
 dynasties in Syria and in Egypt.® If henceforth 
 the God of Israel was to be addressed as Saviour, it 
 must be in a lofty and spiritual sense ; and thus 
 Mary praises God as the Saviour, not of her country 
 from temporal ruin, but of her own soul from 
 eternal death. The expression cannot be explained 
 by the clause, “ He hath regarded the low estate of 
 His handmaiden ; ” which, while it assigns the 
 motive for Mary’s praise, does not explain the title 
 she gives to God. The honour put on her by the 
 Incarnation might be described by many other 
 names. But high office is one thing, personal 
 
 a Antiochus I., of Syria, the son of Seleucns Nicanor, took 
 the title of aw-i'/p, after his victory over the Gauls. It was 
 also assumed in Egypt, by Ptolemy I., the son of Lagus. 
 
28 Mary praising her Saviour 
 
 salvation another ; and if Mary calls God her 
 Saviour, it is for reasons independent of the rank 
 and duties which He has assigned to her. 
 
 Let us reflect on the meaning of this expression 
 on Mary’s lips. Unique as was her office, magnifi- 
 cent as was the endowmeut of grace bestowed on 
 her, singular as were her humility, her purity, her 
 likeness to the Most Holy, she has and she needs a 
 Saviour. She does not stand outside that universal 
 law, that “ all have sinned, and come short of the 
 glory of God.” a Hers is not a soul which finds its 
 way to the courts of heaven without recourse to 
 that One “ Name under heaven given among men, 
 whereby we must be saved.” b There is, in fact, no 
 intermediate position in the kingdom of grace 
 between the Saviour and the saved ; no neutral 
 post, in which nothing is received and from which 
 nothing is bestowed. There is one Saviour, and all 
 others are simply saved, be their place in the spheres 
 of glory what it may, and whatever the graces that 
 may have been here bestowed on them. Mary 
 owed, and owes what she was on earth, what she 
 is in heaven, no less entirely to the merits and the 
 Precious Blood of her Divine Son, than does the 
 humblest Christian among us at this hour ; and she 
 “ Kom. iii. 23. b Acts iv. 12. 
 
I] 
 
 a model for Christians. 
 
 29 
 
 offers the best praises that her soul can offer to God, 
 not as manifested first or only in the awful attributes 
 of Knowledge or Power, but as her Saviour. 
 
 And in this, too, most assuredly she is a model 
 for us. It is well indeed that we should think 
 deeply and often on other aspects of the Divine 
 Nature, each one of which is a fitting object of 
 adoring praise. It is meet and right that we 
 should give thanks to God for the great glory of 
 His Power, His Intelligence, His Love. But the 
 sense of natural gratitude which He has put in our 
 hearts bids us remember that “ God commendeth 
 His love to us, in that, while we were yet sinners, 
 Christ died for us.” a There is much else for which 
 we may praise God ; we must bless Him “ for our 
 creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this 
 life.” But if we know what indeed we are, and 
 what has been done and may yet be done for us, 
 we shall do more than thank Him for these fruits 
 of His bounty. We shall bless Him, above all, for 
 His “inestimable love in the Redemption of the 
 world through our Lord Jesus Christ; for the 
 means of grace, and for the hope of glory,” which, 
 through that Redemption, He has bestowed on us. 
 
 a Rom. v. 8. 
 
II. 
 
 PRIVILEGES OF THE VIRGIN 
 
 MOTHER. 
 
 St. Luke i. 48-50, 
 
 For behold , from henceforth 
 
 All generations shall call me blessed. 
 
 For He That is mighty 
 Hath done to me great things . 
 
 And holy is His Name : 
 
 And His mercy is on them that fear Him 
 Unto all generations. 
 
 Last Sunday we left Mary, at the end of the first 
 strophe of her Hymn, beginning to disclose the 
 motive that had inspired the burst of praise with 
 which she had replied to the salutation of Elisabeth. 
 All the powers of her spiritual nature, ranging from 
 the heights of pure thought to the depths of pas- 
 sionate emotion, were engaged, like the variously 
 accomplished members of a great choir, in chanting 
 the glory of the Eternal Being ; especially in His 
 character of the Saviour of herself and of the whole 
 race of mankind. But the fact which immediately 
 prompts her song is that He, in Whose sight every 
 
The “ low estate ’ of Mary. 
 
 3i 
 
 creature is manifest,® and Whose eyes are in every 
 place, beholding the evil and the good, b has deigned 
 to cast on her a look of profound significance. 
 “He hath regarded the low estate of His hand- 
 maiden.” The blood of David flows in her veins. 
 But for some generations the royal race has lived 
 in seclusion, among the poor ; cherishing the 
 secret of its high descent, but resigning itself 
 to the destiny which God, in His Justice and 
 His Love, had for the time assigned to it. The 
 low social estate of Mary was, in her eyes, associated 
 with a low spiritual estate ; a condition which 
 could pretend to no excellence or merit in the 
 eyes of God. Nevertheless, He had “looked upon 
 her,” after such a fashion, that she must needs 
 break out into thankfulness and praise. It may be 
 that her memory was haunted by some words of a 
 later Psalmist, describing an event which, like the 
 Annunciation, though in an immeasurably lower 
 sense, was the reversal of a great humiliation. 
 
 “ He taketh the simple out of the dust, 
 
 And lifteth the poor out of the mire ; 
 
 That He may set him with the princes, 
 
 Even with the princes of His people.” c 
 
 She thinks of herself as of the handmaiden, or, 
 
 a Heb. iv. 13. b Prov. xv. 3. c Ps. cxiii. 6, 7. 
 
 / 
 
32 
 
 Prediction of Mary that [Serm. 
 
 more exactly, the bondwoman a of God ; a slave 
 who was simply His property, who could plead 
 no personal rights in arrest of His Will. And yet 
 what had He not done for her ? Before she goes 
 further she must, out of sheer gratitude, own His 
 bounty ; and this she does in the second strophe 
 of her Hymn, in which one remarkable result of 
 the high honour conferred on her, the Source to 
 which it is due, and the sense in which a kindred 
 distinction may be shared by all the true servants 
 of God, are successively touched on. 
 
 “ For behold, from henceforth 
 All generations shall call me blessed. 
 
 For He That is mighty 
 Hath done to me great things ; 
 
 And holy is His Name. 
 
 And His mercy is on them that fear Him 
 Throughout all generations.” 
 
 I. 
 
 Mary places her finger first of all on one very 
 startling consequence of the honour assigned to 
 her as Mother of the Divine .Redeemer. b She would 
 
 a SovXrjs. 
 
 b It is not easy with Meyer to paraphrase a.7 ro tov vvv by 
 “nach den begeisterten Worten der Elisabeth.” The fact 
 which Elisabeth recognized by the words rj fxyjrrjp tov Kvpiov 
 fiov gave her address its real importance. 
 
II] all generations would call her blessed. 33 
 
 live for ever in the memory of mankind. Elisa- 
 beth had said, “ Blessed art thou among women ; ” 
 and Mary, so far from deprecating this high esti- 
 mate of her privilege, goes considerably beyond it. 
 “ Behold,” she exclaims, “ from henceforth all gene- 
 rations shall call me blessed.” 
 
 Undoubtedly there are in the Hebrew Scriptures 
 sentences which Mary, when thus speaking, may 
 have had in her mind. Thus, at the birth of Asher, 
 his mother Leah exclaimed, “ Happy am I, for the 
 daughters will call me blessed ; ” a and the child’s 
 name Asher, “ the happy,” expresses the feeling of 
 his mother. And in the Book of Proverbs the 
 children of the virtuous woman arise up and call 
 her blessed ; b and Malachi predicts a day when all 
 nations would recognize the blessedness of Israel as 
 having been the people of God. 0 But there is 
 nothing in these sayings which is really comparable 
 to Mary’s unique prophecy about herself ; in which 
 she anticipates the judgment, not of some, but of 
 all the generations of living men. “ All generations 
 shall call me blessed.” 
 
 That which, at first sight, must strike us in 
 this language is its boldness. Mary is sure of that 
 
 * Gen. xxx. 13. b Prov. xxxi. 28. 
 
 c Mai. iii. 12. See Dr. Pusey, in loc. : Minor Prophets, 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 Boldness of Mary s prediction. [Seem. 
 
 which, in ordinary experience, seems to lie beyond 
 the range of probable conjecture. She is sure of 
 the future. Average human common sense, looking 
 out upon the future, declares that nothing is prob- 
 able except the unforeseen. But Mary, too, 
 surveys the future, and she has no hesitation in 
 foretelling the terms in which distant ages will 
 speak of herself. “ Behold,” she cries, “ from 
 henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.” 
 
 She is sure, first of all, that she will be remem- 
 bered. Let us reflect what this means. In every 
 generation of men, only a small minority of the 
 dead is remembered at all. A name commonly 
 lives in a family for two or three generations at 
 most. If a man is known to a wider circle, it 
 may cherish his memory for a few years. But 
 the circle dies, and the man is forgotten. There 
 are, of course, some few memories that survive : 
 rulers of peoples, leaders of political parties, dis- 
 coverers in art or science, masters in literature. 
 But you can almost count them on your fingers ; 
 and their names, too, when a century has gone by, 
 are often enough on their way to pass into general 
 oblivion, even though they should linger in the 
 notebooks of students and on the shelves of 
 libraries. As a rule, all quickly disappear. A 
 
II] The dead generally are soon forgotten. 35 
 
 human life drops like a pebble into the ocean of 
 Eternity ; for a few moments there are ripples on 
 the surface, growing fainter as the circles widen, 
 and then, so far as this world is concerned, the life 
 which has passed from sight is as forgotten as 
 though it had never been lived. 
 
 “ ‘ Men fade like leaves, they drop away 
 Beneath the forest shade : 
 
 Others again succeed ; but they 
 Are in oblivion laid/ 
 
 So spake the sire of Grecian song ; 
 
 Through each succeeding age, 
 
 The words are caught and borne along 
 By poet, saint, and sage.” a . 
 
 This, I say, is the rule ; but Mary is confident 
 that she will be an exception to it. She is, to all 
 seeming, but a poor Syrian peasant-girl. And yet 
 she dares to predict that this ordinary law of forget- 
 fulness of the dead will be suspended in her favour. 
 Remember that, as yet, nothing has happened out- 
 wardly to warrant her confidence. No Apostle has 
 yet been called to the service of her Son ; no miracle 
 has been worked by Him ; no one has yet heard of 
 His Resurrection or of His Sermon on the Mount ; 
 nay, He is still invisible ; He has scarcely laid aside 
 the glory which He had b with the Father before the 
 
 a Williams, Christian Scholar , p. 23. St. John xvii. 3. 
 
36 
 
 Perishableness of reputations. 
 
 world was ; He has not yet entered by birth into 
 the world of sense. Mary has only the angel’s 
 promise to fall back upon. Yet she sees in it a 
 warrant that she will live in the memories of men 
 to the furthest limits of time. 
 
 But Mary not only knows that she will be 
 always remembered ; she declares that she will be 
 congratulated on her blessedness as long as her 
 memory shall endure among men. 
 
 Let us reflect here, that when a memory does 
 survive, it often survives only to be associated with 
 a very different judgment from that which was once 
 accorded to it. A time comes when all who 
 knew a living man or woman have passed away ; 
 when the dead can only be studied in documents, in 
 such documents as may be still procurable. And 
 then a reputation is forthwith cast into the crucible 
 of criticism, which constantly, under the guise of 
 historical impartiality, ministers to the passions or 
 to the prejudices of the age. Criticism, indeed, is 
 sometimes just ; it destroys unworthy idols, and 
 it redresses the injustice of contemporaries. But it 
 is a very uncertain guide to absolute truth ; and it 
 often illustrates by its capricious activity the point on 
 which I am insisting ; it shows how transient may 
 be an earthly reputation. Scarcely any two writers 
 
37 
 
 II] Marys words are verified now. 
 
 who have discussed him, during the seventy years 
 that have passed since his death, have agreed as to 
 the merits or demerits of the first Napoleon. And if, 
 to come nearer to our present subject, we recall the 
 names of women who have figured on the scene of 
 human history — Hatapsu, Semiramis, Zenobia, the 
 Countess Matilda, Catharine of Medici, Elizabeth of 
 England, Mary Stuart, Maria Theresa, Catharine 
 II. — how various have been the world’s judgments 
 about them ! But of such a vacillation respecting 
 herself Mary has no apprehension whatever. Filled 
 with the spirit of prophecy, she looks down the long 
 procession of the coming ages, with their incessant 
 vicissitudes of races and opinions, and she knows 
 that her name will ever carry with it associations 
 which must secure for it a universal welcome. ‘ ‘ From 
 henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.” 
 
 And is she not right ? Nearly nineteen cen- 
 turies have passed since she spoke ; and what 
 man of average information, interested only in the 
 concerns which affect our race, has not heard of 
 the Virgin Mary ? A man cannot help hearing 
 of her ; so conspicuously does she loom in the 
 pages of human history. True enough it is that 
 around the solid records in the Gospels respecting 
 her, religious imagination has been especially busy. 
 
38 Even legends imply Mary s blessedness. [Serm. 
 
 Early in the history of Christendom there were 
 documents,* which the early Church rejected as 
 apocryphal, 1 * and in which Mary’s birth and infancy, 
 and the exceptional distinctions supposed to have 
 been accorded to her after her death, are described 
 with a freedom which might have passed as poetry if 
 only it had not been treated as sacred prose. Into 
 this subject it is not consistent with our present 
 purpose to enter. Suffice it to say, that whatever 
 the exaggerations and fables which have thus 
 gathered around the name of Mary, they cannot 
 obscure the greatness which is assigned to her in 
 the pages of the Gospel, while in their wildest 
 forms they should remind us of the place which 
 she herself claimed to occupy, and has occupied ever 
 since her death, in the minds of men. 
 
 Compare Mary, from this point of view, with 
 some of the great ladies who were nearly or exactly 
 her contemporaries. While Mary was fetching water 
 day by day from the well of Nazareth, or gathering 
 
 a For the Psuedo-Mattheei Evangelium, and the Evangelium 
 de Nativitate Marioe, cf. Tischendorf, Evangelia Apocrypha, 
 pp. 50— X14. For the Koi/.u/cris rrj s ayias OeoroKov, and the two 
 versions of the Transitus Maries, cf. Tischendorf, Apocalypses 
 Apocryphce, pp. 95-136. 
 
 b Cf. S. Hieron., Contr. Helvid. cxii., ad Matt. xxv. 35-sqq. ; 
 Credner, Gesch. d. Canons, 2 15-2 17 ; Tiscli., Ev. Ap., Prol. 
 xxv.-xxvii. ; and Apocalyps., Apocryph., Prol. xxxiv.-xlvi. 
 
II] Mary compared with great ladies of her day. 39 
 
 wood and wild fruits on the hill above the village, 
 these stately dames, surrounded by a crowd of 
 slaves, swept proudly through the halls of the 
 Caesars. But, if we except a professed student of 
 history here or there, what do men know about them 
 now ? What do you know of Livia, who parted 
 from an honourable husband that she might be the 
 wife of Augustus ; or of Julia, the ill-used daughter 
 of Augustus and wife of Tiberius ; or of Octavia, 
 the sister of Augustus, whom Antony divorced 
 that he might wed Cleopatra ; or of Antonia, the 
 high-minded daughter of Octavia, who lived, they 
 say, to be poisoned by her grandson Caligula ; or 
 — somewhat later — of such empresses as Messalina, 
 Agrippina, Poppcea, — better perhaps unmentioned in 
 a Christian church — who are associated with the 
 courts of Claudius and Nero ? The names of these 
 ladies were once as familiar to the vast population 
 of the Empire as are those of the members of our 
 own royal family to ourselves. For a few years 
 they filled the thoughts, and — by their crimes or 
 their misfortunes — they supplied materials for the 
 gossip, of the world. Now they are, for all prac- 
 tical purposes, forgotten ; while the lowly maiden 
 who was living unknown in a remote province of 
 the vast Empire that was ruled by their nearest 
 
40 Significance of the Annunciation. [Serm. 
 
 relatives, is at this hour more borne in mind by 
 civilized men than any other member of her sex 
 who ever lived. 
 
 II. 
 
 But what is the justification of this astonishing 
 confidence on the part of Mary that she will be 
 remembered as blessed to the utmost limits of time ? 
 It is not anything that she has personally achieved. 
 It is not any grace or excellence peculiar to her 
 mind or character. That she was personally en- 
 dowed with graces of the highest excellence and 
 beauty we may be well assured : in coming among 
 us, the Eternal Son would, by His Spirit, make 
 ready a fitting temple prepared for Himself. But 
 Mary dwells on nothing of this kind ; on nothing 
 personal to herself. She only knows that she has 
 been the recipient of an astonishing privilege, con- 
 ferred on her by the free bounty of her Creator. 
 
 “ He That is mighty hath done to me great things ; 
 
 And holy is His Name.” 
 
 She refers, of course, to what was implied in the 
 message of the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation : 
 “ Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is 
 with thee: blessed art thou among women. . . . 
 
 
II j Words of St. Gabriel the Archangel. 41 
 
 Fear not, Mary : for thou hast found favour with 
 God. . . . Thou shalt bring forth a Son, and shalt 
 call His Name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be 
 called the Son of the Highest : and the Lord God 
 shall give unto Him the throne of His father David : 
 and He shall reign over the house of Jacob for 
 ever ; and of His kingdom there shall be no end.” a 
 And in answer to Mary’s expression of wonder the 
 Angel added, “ The Holy Ghost shall come upon 
 thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow 
 thee : therefore also that Holy Thing Which shall be 
 born of thee shall be called the Son of God.” b Mary 
 had received these assurances in submissive faith. 
 “ Behold the handmaid of the Lord ; be it unto me 
 according to thy word.” c And they were the warrant 
 of the confidence which she expresses, that “ all 
 generations shall call me blessed.” How, indeed, 
 could it be otherwise, if she was to be the Mother 
 of the superhuman Heir of David’s throne and 
 promises ? if He Who was to be born of her was, in 
 virtue of the supernatural conditions of His Birth, 
 to be recognized as the Son of God ? Nothing that 
 she had done or could have done, nothing that she 
 was or could have been, could have merited this 
 extraordinary distinction ; and Mary is bent upon 
 a St. Luke i. 28-33. b W h 35- c lb. i. 38. 
 
4 2 
 
 Mary dwells, not on herself, [Seem. 
 
 ascribing it unreservedly to God. “ He That is 
 Mighty hath done great things to me.” 
 
 Be careful to observe that Mary dwells here, 
 not on her person, but on her office in the economy 
 of the Incarnation. Not once in the Magnificat 
 does she let fall a single word which points to a 
 sense of personal desert or excellence ; her joy is 
 that “He That is Mighty hath done great things to 
 me.” And she adds, “Holy is His Name.” She does 
 not understand why she should have been singled 
 out for such high honour ; but she is sure that, 
 since He wills it, all is well. For His Name, which 
 is to her apprehension inseparable from, since it 
 unveils His Nature, is Holy. Holiness is the rule 
 and measure of that which He ordains. Elisabeth 
 had wondered, “ Whence is this to me, that the 
 Mother of my Lord should come to me % ” Mary 
 does not repudiate the honour; to have done so 
 would have been to make little of God’s bounty. But 
 she insists that she is whatever she is by the grace 
 and favour of God, and in this respect is on a level 
 with all His creatures. 
 
 In all this is she not an example to an age like 
 ours, which has no very robust faith in the Presence 
 and the gifts of God, but does pay exceptional 
 homage to the merits or accomplishments of indi- 
 
n] 
 
 but on her office. 
 
 43 
 
 vidual men? Even the modern Church of Christ 
 has not wholly escaped the disposition to think less 
 of a sacred office than of the man who holds it ; to 
 dwell lightly on the gift or the commission which 
 is common to the holder with all his brethren, and 
 to devote exceptional attention to anything that 
 is strictly peculiar to the man, and that may be 
 supposed to be the product of his own industry or 
 character. It may well be that we of the clergy have 
 not always been sufficiently on our guard against 
 a tendency to disparage the ministerial character 
 which Christ has given us in comparison with some 
 fancied or real endowments which we dream of as 
 our own. Any such mistake is tacitly rebuked by 
 Mary in her Magnificat. She never leads us to 
 think of what she personally is ; but we do not for 
 a moment forget that she is by office the Mother of 
 the Divine Redeemer. 
 
 Indeed, when we review the terms in which she 
 refers to her surpassing privilege, it is impossible 
 not to be struck with their guarded and reserved 
 tone. “He hath regarded the low estate of His 
 handmaiden ; ” “ He That is mighty hath done 
 to me great things.” We wonder, perhaps, that 
 she is not more explicit ; that, knowing what she 
 knows of her extraordinary place in the order of 
 
44 
 
 Reserve of Mary 
 
 [Serm. < 
 
 Divine Providence, she does not say more about 
 it ; does not, at least in outline, describe what it is. 
 “ He That is mighty hath done to me great things.” 
 An ordinary Christian might say as much, we think, 
 after recovering from a dangerous illness, or after a 
 spiritual change, which had altered profoundly all 
 his views and purposes in life. Mary is designated as 
 
 ( Mother of the Eternal Son ; she is, as the poet says 
 with literal truth, “favoured beyond archangel’s 
 dream ; ” a and yet she might seem to desire to 
 draw a veil over her prerogatives, by phrases which, 
 while implying, in her mouth, something extra- 
 ordinary, convey no definite idea of what it is. 
 Can we venture in any way to account for this ? 
 
 It would seem, then, that here Mary is teaching 
 us a lesson which has never been unneeded since 
 religion — the commerce between the human soul and 
 God — has had a place in the life of man. She is 
 teaching us the duty of speaking very sparingly, 
 if we speak at all, of any blessings which we may 
 have reason to believe that God has conferred on us 
 and on no others. It cannot be wrong to insist on 
 the common facts of Christian experience. We 
 cannot be mistaken, when a good opportunity 
 
 a Christian Year, Hymn for the Annunciation of the 
 Blessed Virgin Mary. 
 
with respect to her prerogatives. 
 
 45 
 
 offers, in pointing out the power of prayer, the 
 value of Christian example, the instruction and 
 encouragement to be gained from Holy Scripture, 
 the grace and efficacy of the Christian Sacraments. 
 We cannot err in bearing our witness to truths 
 which are the common inheritance of Christians ; 
 the reality of His love for us, Who died for us on 
 the Cross, and intercedes for us on His throne in 
 heaven ; the incalculable issues of life ; the certainty 
 and nearness of the eternal world. To say what 
 we may with sincerity and reverence on these 
 high subjects is indeed to 
 
 “ Praise God in His holiness, 
 
 Praise Him in the firmament of His power, 
 
 Praise Him in His noble acts, 
 
 Praise Him according to His excellent greatness.” a 
 
 But when we come to matters which touch us, and 
 us alone; to blessings which we only have received ; 
 to experiences which, so far as we know, have been 
 shared by no others ; — the case is different. As to 
 these, the best rule is to say nothing at all about 
 them, if we can help it ; or, if we must say some- 
 thing, to say as little as possible. 
 
 That God does at times visit one particular soul 
 as He visits no other, can hardly be doubted. The 
 
 * Ps. Cl. I, 2. 
 
4 6 
 
 Risks of talking publicly about [Serm. 
 
 Bible teaches us that He does so in a variety of 
 ways ; and here Christian experience has ever been 
 in accord with the mind of Holy Scripture. Such 
 favours or gifts to individuals are suited to the 
 needs or the temperament of those who receive 
 them ; they cannot be catalogued or reduced to a 
 system. Sometimes God gives to a soul a peculiar 
 satisfaction and joy in prayer; sometimes a vivid 
 sense of His Presence in times of anxiety or trouble ; 
 sometimes a clear presentiment of the blessedness 
 of the world to come. There is no question here 
 of communications made, whether in prayer or 
 otherwise, to a single soul for the sake of others ; 
 as when, during that stormy night in the Mediter- 
 ranean, the angel of the Lord stood by Paul, and 
 assured him of the safety of himself and his fellow- 
 voyagers. a But much may pass between God and 
 a soul which has no reference to others; as when our 
 Lord encouraged and guided the Apostle in the vision 
 at Corinth, b or strengthened him during the second 
 imprisonment at Borne.® Such things may take place 
 in any Christian life. There is no reason for doubt- 
 ing the reality of these special favours, but there is 
 great reason why those who have received, or 
 who think that they have received them should 
 a Acts xxvii. 24. b lb. xviii. 9, 10. c 2 Tim. iv. 17. 
 
personal endowments or graces. 
 
 47 
 
 say as little about them as they may. For, 
 first, there is always the possibility that what 
 looks like a spiritual visit, endowment, or grace, 
 especially if it be of an unusual character, may 
 be in truth an illusion of natural emotion. That 
 such illusions exist is no less certain than the ex- 
 istence of the spiritual graces or gifts which they 
 counterfeit. And, next, supposing there to be no 
 element of illusion at all, a soul cannot but suffer 
 loss if, like Hezekiah, when entertaining the mes- 
 sengers of Merodach-Baladan, it displays its trea- 
 sures in an ostentatious temper ; 4 and the danger 
 of such ostentation is very subtle, and may 
 exist where it is least suspected. Then, thirdly, 
 there is the ever-present risk of exaggeration ; not 
 in the coarse form of representing something to have 
 occurred which never did occur at all, but in the more 
 common forms of giving distinctness and outline 
 to that which was indefinite, or colour when every- 
 thing was colourless, or vividness and point where 
 such elements of interest were really wanting. 
 
 Probably we have all heard of meetings of 
 earnest people, in which first one and then another 
 member of the company has retailed his experiences. 
 If these experiences were strictly confined to sins, 
 a 2 Kings xx. 12-18; Isa. xxxix. 1-7. 
 
48 Reasons for St. Paul's allusion [Serm. 
 
 such meetings might be very improving. In the 
 early Church of Christ, Christians confessed their 
 sins in public ; and such confession, it need hardly 
 be said, was a very good lesson in the difficult 
 work of learning to be really sincere and humble. 
 But to talk in public about any tokens of God’s 
 especial favour towards us, or still more about our 
 good points, even if our estimate of them is an 
 accurate one, is surely very dangerous ; dangerous 
 to those graces of truthfulness and self-forgetfulness 
 which are, in the Christian life, of almost more 
 account than anything else. I do not say that no 
 occasion can ever arise to justify departure from 
 this rule ; one such occasion, we know, did present 
 itself in the lifetime of St. Paul. He had been 
 traduced by his opponents at Corinth, as an 
 ambitious, scheming, and, above all, unspiritual 
 man ; who was really working against Christ’s older 
 Apostles, Peter and James, and who acted as he did 
 because, unlike Peter, he had never witnessed such 
 a sight as the Transfiguration — the vision of Christ 
 in glory. Had his own reputation or comfort only 
 been at stake, the Apostle would have been 
 silent. But, if his opponents were unanswered, his 
 whole work for Jesus Christ at Corinth would have 
 been imperilled. And therefore very reluctantly he 
 
to his Rap Hire into heaven . 
 
 49 
 
 H] 
 
 partially, only partially, withdraws the veil from 
 an occurrence of which, but for the ill-natured 
 gossip of the Corinthian sectaries, we should never 
 have heard. In doing this he only half admits 
 that he is the subject of his own narrative ; he 
 refers to the receiver of the singular distinction 
 which he records as if he were or might be some 
 one other than himself. 
 
 “I knew a man in Christ fourteen years ago, 
 (whether in the body, I cannot tell ; or whether out 
 of the body, I cannot tell : God knoweth ;) such an 
 one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew 
 such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the 
 body, I cannot tell : God knoweth ;) how that he was 
 caught up into Paradise, and heard unspeakable 
 words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter. 
 Of such an one will I glory : yet of myself I will 
 not glory, but in mine infirmities.” 4 
 
 We see how a reference to this striking- passage 
 in his life was wrung out the soul of the unwilling 
 Apostle by the sheer pressure of spiritual necessity ; 
 and something of the same kind must have been 
 the case with the Blessed Virgin, when for the 
 honour of her Son, and to promote the true and 
 full knowledge of the Gospel, she communicated 
 * z Cor. xii. 2-5. 
 
50 
 
 The Mercy of God rests 
 
 to the Evangelist St. Luke the details of all that 
 passed at the Annunciation between herself and the 
 angel. When she is acknowledging Elisabeth’s 
 congratulations, she is under no such necessity ; 
 and therefore she veils what has happened beneath 
 the more general phrases of the Magnificat. It is a 
 point of spiritual prudence to know how to say 
 enough to give God His due, and yet not enough 
 to feed that subtle self-approbation which is one of 
 the worst foes of our true well-being. 
 
 III. 
 
 Mary concludes the second strophe of her Hymn 
 by lines- which lead our thoughts away from God’s 
 dealings with herself, to a general law of His 
 Providence — 
 
 “ His mercy is on them that fear Him 
 Unto all generations.” 
 
 And yet in these words she may well be classing 
 herself among those who fear God, and whom God, 
 in consequence, visits with His mercy, whatever 
 form the visitation may take. By “ fear ” she means 
 that sincere and awe-struck apprehension of the 
 Presence and Majesty of God which is the be- 
 ginning of all spiritual wisdom, since without it 
 
on all who fear Him. 
 
 5i 
 
 n] 
 
 the soul can take no true measure either of itself, 
 or of what is due to the Author and End of 
 its existence. Such fear may coexist with love ; 
 although love in such degree as it becomes “per- 
 fect ” a expels from fear the element of terror, while 
 preserving that of reverent and watchful apprehen- 
 sion. It is in this sense that “ perfect love caste th 
 out fear.” Fear and love are the twin guardians of 
 the higher life of the soul ; and God never fails to 
 help and govern those whom He brings up in His 
 steadfast fear and love. b 
 
 Mary, then, shows, by what took place at the 
 Annunciation, that she had this fear, or reverent 
 apprehension of God, in her heart ; that she was 
 looking out for intimations of His Will. And, 
 accordingly, His mercy lighted upon her ; He made 
 her the Mother of His Son. But the same law of 
 His action would hold good for all coming time. 
 Not by natural works of righteousness which man 
 had done, but according to His mercy, 0 would Jesus 
 Christ save men from their sins ; and this mercy 
 would be accorded to those who had in their hearts 
 that sensitiveness to what was amiss in them which 
 some apprehension of what God is alone can give. 
 
 8 1 St. John iv. 18. 
 
 b Collect for Second Sunday after Trinity. c Tit. iii. 5. 
 
52 
 
 Religious privileges unavailing [Serm. 
 
 So it was with those earliest believers who waited 
 for the Consolation of Israel ; a so it has been with 
 every soul which has come, in adult life, out of the 
 darkness of heathenism or unbelief to the knowledge 
 and love of Jesus Christ. To the end of time Jesus 
 is the channel and dispenser to the human race of 
 the infinite Mercy of God, and He dispenses it to 
 those seekers who begin with fear. 
 
 But Mary’s words have another and a deeper 
 meaning. It is that for the endless well-being of 
 the soul those earliest stirrings of life which are 
 due to a Divine influence, and which we call fear 
 and love, are more important even than religious 
 privileges. They are more important, not in them- 
 selves, but to us. Without fear and love the greatest 
 religious privileges are but as seed dropped into the 
 sand of the desert, — they cannot bear fruit, or indeed 
 do anything for us. We may dare to say that even 
 to Mary it was more necessary that she should have 
 the fear of God in her heart than that she should 
 be the Mother of the Incarnate Son ; since our 
 Lord Himself has told us so. You remember that 
 striking scene in after-years, when one in a crowd 
 of eager listeners around Him, in a transport of 
 enthusiasm, essayed to win His heart by reference 
 a St. Luke ii. 25. 
 
II] without proper dispositions of the soul. 53 
 
 to the blessedness of His Mother : “ Blessed is the 
 womb that bare Thee, and the paps that Thou hast 
 sucked.” a What was His answer ? He does not 
 disparage, much less deny, the high standing and 
 privilege of His Mother Mary ; but He insists that 
 both for her and for all others the more important 
 thing is that temper of obedient fear, which alone 
 makes great religious privileges other than dangerous. 
 “ Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the Word 
 of God and keep it.” He does not here imply that 
 His Mother did not satisfy this condition of true 
 blessedness ; we are told, indeed, that she kept in 
 view all God’s providential dealings towards her, 
 and pondered them in her heart. b But He would 
 draw attention away from religious privilege, how- 
 ever eminent, to those vital conditions without 
 which no spiritual advantages can be turned to 
 good account. 
 
 We can never afford to lose sight of this truth. 
 The human mind is constantly tempted to think 
 that the possession, of high religious office, or of 
 special religious opportunities, is of itself a warrant 
 of religious security in time and for eternity. 
 Nothing is less true. A man may be an Apostle, 
 and yet a Judas. He may be a companion of 
 
 b lb. ii. 19. 
 
 a St. Luke xi. 28. 
 
54 
 
 Religion equalizes men 
 
 [Serm. 
 
 apostles, and yet a Demas. He may be a receiver 
 of that greatest of all the gifts of God — that gift 
 by receiving which we are most nearly likened to 
 Mary — the Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood 
 — and yet he may eat and drink his own con- 
 demnation, not discerning the Lord’s Body.® Warm 
 or excited feelings are often full of illusion, but 
 the important matter is that sensitiveness of 
 conscience to the Will and the Presence of God 
 which the Bible calls “fear.” “ Blessed is the man 
 that feareth the Lord ; he hath great delight in His 
 commandments ; ” b “ Blessed are all they that fear 
 the Lord, and walk in His ways. For thou shalt 
 eat the labours of thine hands : 0 well is thee, and 
 happy shalt thou be.” c 
 
 And thus we are led to reflect — even in presence 
 of the highest religious distinction that ever was 
 conferred on a human being — that, after all, religion 
 places all men on a level more truly than any other 
 force or agency in this world. The great inequali- 
 ties between human lives are due to causes which 
 are rooted in the nature of things and always opera- 
 tive ; if these inequalities could be suppressed by 
 legal enactment to-morrow, they would reappear in 
 a week’s time. The rich and poor, the powerful and 
 
 * i Cor. xi. 29. b Ps. cxii. 1. c lb. cxxviii. 1, 2. 
 
more truly than literature or nature. 55 
 
 the defenceless, the honoured and the neglected, 
 will ever be found in human society, for the simple 
 reason that men enter life with different equipments 
 of natural power, and this difference will certainly 
 express itself in consequences beyond. Some men, 
 who have dwelt constantly and even bitterly on 
 the social and other inequalities of life, have 
 endeavoured to console themselves by reflecting 
 that nature and books redress the balance. What- 
 ever be our position in life, they say, we are all 
 equally free to enjoy a writer like Shakespeare ; 
 monarchs and working men are, for the moment, 
 on a level before the genius and insight which 
 instructs and delights us all. Again, whatever be 
 our position in life, we are all equally free to enjoy 
 nature. The outline of the great mountain, the first 
 burst of spring, the glories of the autumnal sunset, 
 the mystery of the heavens on a clear night, the sea 
 with its ever-changing moods of storm and calm ; 
 — these are common property. Undoubtedly to a 
 certain extent this is true. But in order to relish the 
 masterpieces of literature, at least some education 
 is needed ; and men who would enjoy nature most 
 thoroughly are not always free enough or wealthy 
 enough to visit her where she may be seen to the 
 best advantage. It is otherwise with those elemen- 
 
56 Presence of God in the Christian soul. 
 
 \aM 
 
 tary movements of the soul, upon which God sheds 
 His mercy, and which are the first steps, as they are 
 the crowning accomplishments, of a religious life. 
 Every human heart may fear and love the Being 
 Who made it. Religious instruction and religious 
 opportunities are indeed precious ; and when they 
 are within reach, fear and love will conspire to 
 make the most of them, since assuredly they cannot 
 be neglected without peril. But when they are not 
 to be had, if there be the fear of God in the heart, 
 there, most surely, is His mercy too. And where 
 there is the love of the Perfect Moral Being, there 
 also is within reach a Presence in the soul which 
 may even compare with that vouchsafed to Mary. 
 “ If any man love Me, he will keep My words : and 
 My Father will love him, and We will come unto 
 him, and make Our abode with him.” a Only one 
 woman could be the Mother of the Most Holy 
 when He vouchsafed to enter our human world ; 
 but there is no reason why each and all of us 
 should not know by experience what the Apostle 
 means by that astonishing yet most blessed saying, 
 “ Christ in you, the Hope of glory.” b 
 
 ft St. John xir. 23. b Col. i. 27. 
 
III. 
 
 VICISSITUDES OF MEN AND 
 NA TIONS. 
 
 S r r. Luke i. 51-53. 
 lie hath showed strength with His Arm ; 
 
 He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. 
 He hath put down princes from their thrones, 
 
 And hath exalted them of low degree. 
 
 He hath filled the hungry with good things ; 
 
 And the rich He hath sent empty away. 
 
 Between the second strophe of the Magnificat 
 and the third, there is a contrast which makes the 
 transition from one to the other appear somewhat 
 abrupt. In the second strophe, so far as her 
 humility would permit, Mary was speaking of her- 
 self ; she foretold her place throughout all time in 
 the memories and hearts of men ; she touched upon 
 the great things which God had done to her ; she 
 was not excluding a personal reference when she 
 sang of that Mercy of God which unto all genera- 
 tions is on them that fear Him. But in the 
 strophe which is before us to-day, she is surveying 
 the wide field of human history ; she sees God’s 
 
58 Wide visions of truth vouchsafed [Serm. 
 
 Arm of power displayed in it conspicuously; she 
 notes the changes which God makes in the fortunes 
 of dynasties and nations ; and His rule of action 
 in the kingdom of grace. 
 
 “ He hath showed strength with His Arm ; 
 
 He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their 
 hearts. 
 
 He hath put down princes from their thrones, 
 
 And hath exalted them of low degree. 
 
 He hath filled the hungry with good things ; 
 
 And the rich He hath sent empty away.” 
 
 What is the connection between that more 
 personal history and this larger survey of the 
 action of God in the civil and religious affairs of 
 man ? How does Mary come to have passed so 
 rapidly from one to the other ? 
 
 Here let us take note of a common experience 
 of the human mind in all ages, whether within the 
 sphere of inspiration or outside it. At times of 
 deeply moved feeling, whether of joy or sorrow, the 
 soul of man is raised above the level of its average 
 existence, and enjoys the command of a larger 
 outlook. The petty cares of life are lost sight 
 of in these moments of unwonted elevation ; and 
 wide and extended horizons, which are ordinarily 
 beyond the range of sight, come into view. From 
 the crest of the wave that is bearing him towards 
 
in moments of spiritual elevation. 
 
 59 
 
 an unknown shore, the mariner looks out for an 
 instant on a distant prospect, it may be of pre- 
 cipitous cliffs, it may be of hills and valleys and 
 peaceful homesteads, and all that recalls the secu- 
 rity of a landsman’s life ; — hut he has no sooner 
 descried it than he sinks forthwith into the trough 
 of the sea. And the human soul is able, when 
 borne upwards by a wave of feeling, to perceive 
 larger fields of truth than usual, even though the 
 vision fades almost at the moment of its being 
 enjoyed. Something of this kind has often been 
 observed at the approach of death. Men who are 
 not generally given to hazard predictions, or even 
 to enunciate general principles, will sometimes 
 speak on their death-beds as though they were 
 invested with a kind of prophetic character ; so 
 large would seem to be their range of view, so clear 
 and confident their opinion as to what will or will 
 not happen after they are gone. A great joy will 
 sometimes have a like result ; and we may have 
 observed how recovery from the extremity of ill 
 ness, or the birth of a son, or unlooked-for deliver- 
 ance from impending ruin, will lead even taciturn 
 people to speculate aloud on the influences which 
 govern human life, and with which they feel them- 
 selves for the moment to be in vivid contact. 
 
6o 
 
 Import of Mary s own experience. [Serm. 
 
 Mary’s inspiration would not have withdrawn her 
 from the operation of this law of the special 
 illumination which is attendant on certain states 
 of elevated feeling. Her own experience would 
 lead her to reflect on God’s general principles 
 of government. For the principles on which He 
 deals with single souls are the same principles as 
 those which control His dealings with nations and 
 races and Churches ; the difference lies in the scale 
 of their application. When Newton saw an apple 
 fall from the tree, and had asked himself why 
 it did not go upwards instead of downwards, he 
 had discovered the law which governs the move- 
 ments of the heavenly bodies ; and when Mary 
 surveyed her own history closely, she recognized 
 the principles of God’s general government of the 
 world. She was a descendant of David’s line ; and 
 she knew how in the past her ancestors had been 
 put down from their thrones, while she, in her low 
 estate, had been exalted to a far higher honour than 
 is conferred by any earthly crown. Like every 
 true Israelite, she had longed to see God’s promised 
 salvation ; and lo ! she was to be the Mother of 
 the Promised One. Such experiences could not 
 but lead her to consider the general truths which 
 they so strikingly illustrated ; but, before she 
 
Reality of God's Providence. 
 
 61 
 
 announces them, she pauses to do homage to a fact 
 which takes precedence of them, and which throws 
 them out into full relief. 
 
 I. 
 
 That fact is the active and never-failing Provi 
 dence of Him Who ordereth all things both in 
 heaven and earth. No fact, perhaps, is so widely 
 confessed and so practically forgotten as God’s 
 action in the affairs of the world and of men’s 
 separate lives. Yet those who believe in God may 
 always verify it, since it explains, and it alone 
 explains, much which takes place ; while if much 
 also takes place which it does not explain to our 
 apprehensions, we may reflect that, alike in what 
 He does and in what He permits, God, as the In- 
 finite Being, naturally does and allows much which 
 we could not understand. But Mary sings that 
 “He hath showed strength with His Arm.” The 
 human arm represents man’s working power. The 
 arm executes the orders of the will : and it is in 
 the vigorous, quickly moving arm that we recognize 
 a will of energy and decision. Thus, in the language 
 of the Hebrews, the word “ arm ” was generally used 
 in the sense of power; as when the man of God 
 
62 
 
 The Arm of God. 
 
 [Serm. 
 
 prophesied to Eli the downfall of his family: 
 “ Behold, the days come, that I will cut olf thine 
 arm, and the arm of thy father’s house ; ” a or when 
 Jeremiah exclaims that the “arm of Moab is 
 broken ; ” b or Ezekiel, speaking in the Name of 
 God, “ I have broken the arm of Pharaoh King of 
 Egypt .” 0 A word thus employed to denote human 
 power was naturally used of the Power of God, 
 without, of course, implying that the Divine Being, 
 in ages before the Incarnation, had taken on Him 
 any likeness to the human form. Thus God is 
 often said to deliver His people from Egypt, and 
 from later oppressions, “ with an outstretched 
 Arm,” d that is, by a special exertion of His power. 
 And a Psalmist sings how God “ with His own 
 right Hand and His holy Arm hath gotten Him- 
 self the victory ; ” e and another, that “ He had 
 scattered His enemies abroad with His mighty 
 Arm.” f And Isaiah speaks of God’s showing 
 “ the lighting down of His Arm ; ” s and he pre- 
 dicts that the Arm of the Lord shall be on the 
 Chaldeans ; b and he invokes the Divine attribute of 
 power in favour of captive Israel : “ Awake, awake, 
 
 a i Sam. ii. 31. b Jer. xlviii. 25. c Ezek. xxx. 21. 
 
 d Deut. v. 15; vii. 19; xi. 2 ; xxvi. 8 ; Ps. cxxxvi. 12. 
 e 16 . xcviii. 1. f 16 . lxxxix. 10. 
 
 8 Isa. xxx. 30. h 16 * xcviii. 14. 
 
God’s action on human affairs. 
 
 6 3 
 
 put on thy strength, 0 Arm of the Lord ; ” a and he 
 asks, with reference to the future Redeemer, con- 
 sidered as embodying and exhibiting to men the 
 Power of God, “ To whom is the Arm of the Lord 
 revealed % ” b These, as all readers of their Bibles 
 would know, are only a few of the passages which 
 might be quoted; so that Mary was using old 
 and consecrated language when she described God’s 
 power by the metaphor of an “arm.” But what 
 does she mean by saying that God had “ showed 
 strength with His Arm ” ? Clearly that His incessant 
 energy had brought about particular results which 
 were calculated to impress human minds with the 
 sense of His power, as vividly as though they had 
 seen the heavens open, and an arm of irresistible 
 might stretched out to shape the course of men 
 and events according to the good pleasure of their 
 Invisible Ruler. One of the principal uses of the 
 historical books of the Old Testament is to accus- 
 tom us to look at all history in this way ; to see 
 God’s Hand and Arm in it ; to trace in circum- 
 stances which might seem trivial or a matter of 
 course, the strong action of His Holy Will. God 
 is not less present in English than in Jewish 
 affairs ; nor has He less concern with our separate 
 
 a Isa. li. 9. b lb. liii. 1. 
 
6 4 
 
 The scattering of the proud. [Serm. 
 
 lives than with those of the forefathers and heroes 
 and saints of Israel ; the great difference is that, as 
 a rule, we do not see Him, whereas they did. Mary, 
 at any rate, before she goes further, will not leave 
 the matter in doubt ; God, she says, “ hath showed 
 strength with His Arm.” 
 
 II. 
 
 She passes on to note one particular series of 
 events, running through long periods of history in 
 which this action of the Arm of God is especially 
 manifested — 
 
 “He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their 
 hearts. 
 
 He hath put down princes from their thrones, 
 
 And hath exalted them of low degree.” 
 
 Mary here, it seems, looks backward and forward ; 
 she is at once historian and prophetess; she is 
 proclaiming principles of the Divine Government 
 which will be as true in the remote future as they 
 have been true in the distant past. She looks 
 backward over the ages of history, and she beholds 
 kingdoms which have fallen from great prosperity 
 into utter ruin ; and princes whose names were once 
 the terror of the world, while their thrones have 
 long since been vacant, or humbled with the dust. 
 
Ill] Moral dangers of wealth and power. 65 
 
 “ He hath scattered the proud,” or literally, “ the 
 insolently proud.” a The word which she uses ac- 
 curately describes the prevailing temper of the 
 average occupant of an Eastern throne. It is the 
 temper which is naturally produced by long-con- 
 tinued success, by the accumulation of much wealth 
 and power. It is to be found on a small scale in men 
 among ourselves in private life, who have had every- 
 thing their own way, made money rapidly, achieved 
 social and perhaps some political importance, and 
 above all have had many years of unbroken health. 
 To prosper after this fashion, and to remain humble, 
 self-distrustful, unselfish, mindful of the real con- 
 ditions of life, of the nearness of death, of the 
 weakness of the strongest man, and of the awful 
 Presence and Power Which is around and above 
 us, — this is the exception rather than the rule. 
 The rule is, that when very prosperous men are 
 not under the influences of religion, they become 
 haughty and self-asserting, even although they 
 should have sufficient good taste, as distinct from 
 religious principle, to check the exuberant exhibition 
 of these tendencies in what they do and say. But if 
 such a temper exists in Christendom and in private 
 life, think what may happen when a man is in 
 
 a V7T€pr](jidvOVS» 
 
 F 
 
66 Blinding effects of wealth and power, [Serm. 
 
 the position of one of the ancient kings of Egypt 
 or Assyria ; with unchecked power over the lives 
 and fortunes of his subjects ; with vast wealth, large 
 armies, and a great company of accomplished slaves 
 altogether at his disposal. Wonderful indeed it 
 would be if, without the control of the true religion, 
 the heart of a man in such a position did not swell 
 with an intolerable pride ; wonderful if he did not 
 altogether lose sight of the real measure of things, 
 of the place of every dying man in the universe 
 of God, of his true relations with God and with 
 his brother-men. Mary knows this, and thus she 
 sings of God’s scattering the insolently proud in, or 
 rather by, the imaginations of their hearts.® The 
 false estimate of self, of men and things, which is 
 engendered by the temper in question, is constantly 
 fatal to the position which has appeared to warrant 
 it. It overrates its own resources ; it underrates 
 the resources of others ; it overrates material wealth 
 or power ; it underrates the strength of those moral 
 convictions which lie deep in the hearts of millions 
 of men ; it is so inflated by the successes of the 
 
 a Meyer’s theory that Siavota is here a dative of more pre* 
 cise definition, would make the phrase too nearly tautolo- 
 gous. Pride cannot exist outside the Siavoia ryg Kapdias of 
 the proud. 
 
Ill] 
 
 in public and in private life. 
 
 67 
 
 past, that it cannot coolly take account of the con- 
 tingencies of the future ; it is so full of its Auster- 
 litz and its Jena, that it cannot anticipate what 
 may happen amid the snows of Russia, or during 
 a retreat from Moscow. It is not a peculiarity of 
 the ancient, as also it is not of the modern, world ; 
 it is not less true in private than in public life, that 
 God in His own time and way scatters to the 
 winds highhanded insolence as being too full of self 
 to recognize the conditions on which any position 
 is held in this world, by any man or any people 
 whatever. 
 
 Mary, no doubt, would often have heard her 
 parents discuss the fall of those ancestors of hers 
 and theirs who had last sat in Jerusalem on the 
 throne of David ; and consider how far their temper 
 and conduct or that of some of their predecessors 
 had helped to bring it all about ; and repeat the 
 solemn truths contained in those warnings of Jere- 
 miah, which to the last kings of Judah and their 
 courtiers appeared to be so unpatriotic and dis- 
 loyal. But if these monarchs of what was only an 
 inconsiderable state had to learn that they would 
 not therefore reign because they closed themselves in 
 cedars,® their fall was, in the outward scale of events, 
 • Jer. xxii. 15. 
 
68 
 
 Self-assertion of ancient kings. [Serm. 
 
 of trifling importance when compared with that of 
 the occupants of the mighty thrones around them. 
 The Egyptian hieroglyphics and the cuneiform 
 characters have yielded up their secrets to the 
 industry of modern scholars ; and we have before 
 our eyes the proud inscriptions in which the 
 old kings of Egypt and Assyria announced their 
 will or proclaimed their triumphs to their subjects 
 and to the world. Nothing is more remarkable in 
 these inscriptions than the astonishing self-assertion 
 which from first to last inspires them : they are the 
 language of men who sincerely believe that no 
 bounds to their power exist, and that to traverse 
 their will is an unpardonable crime. The Egyptian 
 kings believed that they were deities in human form,® 
 and they spoke and acted accordingly. More than 
 one Syrian monarch after Alexander described him- 
 self as “ God.” b And the Bible bears a like witness 
 to the temper of the ancient monarchies. Ezekiel 
 records a saying of the contemporary Pharaoh about 
 the Nile : “ My river is mine own, and I have 
 made it for myself.” c Daniel tells us that Nebu- 
 
 * Cf. quotations from the inscriptions in Kenouf s Hibbert 
 Lecture for 1879, p. 162 sq. 
 
 b Antiochus II., Antiochus IV., the great oppressor of the 
 Jews, and Antiochus VI., describe themselves on their coins 
 as ©E 02 . c Ezek. xxix. 3. 
 
Ill] Fall of empires in ages before Mary. 69 
 
 chadnezzar “ walked in the palace of the kingdom of 
 Babylon ; and the king spake, and said. Is not this 
 great Babylon, that I have built for the house of 
 the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the 
 honour of my majesty?”* And how does Ezekiel 
 address a much less considerable potentate, the 
 Prince of Tyre? “ Thine heart is lifted up; thou 
 hast said, I am a god, I sit in the seat of God, in 
 the midst of the seas.” b In a later age there was 
 a scene at Caesarea w r hich illustrates the point 
 before us, when “ Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, 
 sat upon his throne, and made an oration” to the 
 embassies from Tyre and Sidon ; “ and the people 
 gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god, and 
 not of a man.” c 
 
 Mary knew what had happened to Egypt; she 
 knew what had been the fate of Tyre and of 
 Babylon. Before her eyes there passed a long 
 procession of vacant and ruined thrones. As syria 
 had gone down before Babylon ; Babylon and 
 Egypt before the Persians ; the Persians before the 
 great Alexander. Alexander’s generals in Egypt 
 and in Syria had set up monarchies which by 
 turns oppressed Israel in the later stages of its 
 history ; never did a nation sustain a more 
 a Dan. iv. 29, 30. b Ezek. xxviii. 2. c Actsxii. 21, 22. 
 
7o 
 
 Mary a prophetess. 
 
 [Serm. 
 
 exhausting struggle for its very life than did the 
 Jews under the Maccabees. But these oppressors 
 too had recently gone their way ; in Egypt and Syria 
 they had alike been humbled before the Roman 
 power. It might be said that when Mary sang, the 
 East was still echoing to the crash of falling thrones ; 
 and one power remained supreme on earth — at least 
 to the apprehension of populations that had never 
 heard of what was even then going on in India and 
 China — the Imperial power of Rome. 
 
 But Mary is a prophetess no less than an his- 
 torian ; and as she could foretell her own place in 
 the memory of the grateful Church, so she could 
 divine what would happen to the great world- 
 Empire. She speaks of what God has done. “ He 
 hath scattered ; ” “ He hath put down ; ” “ He hath 
 exalted ; ” “He hath filled ; ” “ He hath sent away.” 
 But this is sometimes the style of a prophet, who is 
 by no means obliged to use a future tense when 
 foretelling a future time. The vision of the future 
 passes before the prophet’s soul ; and he describes 
 what he sees as actually occurring, or as already 
 accomplished. Thus it is that Isaiah, in the latter 
 part of his book, foretells the captivity in Babylon 
 as though it had already produced a state of things 
 in the midst of which he was actually living ; and 
 
Ill] Coming Fall of the Roman Empire. 7 1 
 
 the prophets sometimes use a past tense advisedly, 
 as expressing as vividly as possible their conviction 
 that the predicted future is as certain as the past. 
 If, then, Mary speaks of God as having put down 
 princes from their thrones, she may mean Roman 
 emperors to come no less than the dynasties which 
 had long since ruled on the Nile or on the Euphrates. 
 
 When Mary sang, Rome was at the height of 
 her power ; the greatest part of the known world 
 obeyed her laws. Her legions had planted their 
 eagles on the Rhine, on the Danube, on the Eu- 
 phrates, on the Nile, in the deserts of Africa. Her 
 civilization, with its blessings and its vices; her 
 institutions, her manners and motives, even her 
 language, had followed. The world was already 
 Roman, not only in name, but to a large extent in 
 sympathy and purpose ; and no social and political 
 fabric that had ever bound civilized men together 
 seemed so strong or so durable as that which stood 
 around the throne of the Caesars. And yet the 
 causes which had brought about the downfall of 
 earlier powers were at work within the great Em- 
 pire. Material splendour had blinded men’s eyes to 
 the secret symptoms of decay, and to the truths and 
 virtues which could alone avert it ; and at last the 
 crash came. It nearly came in the third century, 
 
72 
 
 The exaltation of the humble . 
 
 after Christ, two hundred years before its time. It 
 did come with overwhelming terrors in the fifth, 
 when everything that had been venerated for cen- 
 turies, save only the Church of God, was involved 
 in one vast catastrophe, and when Goths and Huns, 
 and Yandals and Lombards, swept like waves of 
 angry men over the wreck of the old civilization. 
 Thus at last the words were fulfilled which St. John 
 had heard in ecstasy, “ Babylon the great is fallen, 
 is fallen !” 0 
 
 But the work of the Arm of God, as Mary watches 
 it from afar, is not merely or chiefly destructive ; it 
 scatters and -destroys only that it may gather and 
 rebuild. As the Church says with such truth and 
 beauty, “ God declareth His Almighty Power most 
 chiefly in showing mercy and pity.” b When Mary 
 sings that God hath exalted the humble and meek, or 
 rather, them of “ low estate,” she may well be think- 
 ing of the position of Israel among the nations of 
 the world ; surrounded by mighty monarchies, while 
 itself occupying a territory not much larger than 
 an English county, yet chosen to be the people of 
 Bevelation, and to exercise an altogether unrivalled 
 influence on the future of the human race. Or she 
 may have in her mind such careers as those of 
 * Rev. xiv. 8. b Collect for Eleventh Sunday after Trinity. 
 
Ill] Triumph of the Church of Christ. 73 
 
 Joseph at the court of Egypt in one age, and of 
 Daniel and Esther at the courts of Babylon and 
 Persia in another. Nor can she but have borne in 
 her grateful soul an ever-present and overwhelming 
 sense of the exceptional honour put upon herself. 
 What royal distinctions were in reality ever com- 
 parable to hers who was the chosen Mother of 
 Emmanuel ; to hers, of whom — as St. Paul said of 
 her race — as concerning the flesh, Christ came. Who 
 is over all, God blessed for ever ? a 
 
 And may we not here also observe that Mary’s 
 words have a reference to the future as well as to 
 the past? Does she not already descry a far-off 
 time, when the disciples of the Crucified would suc- 
 ceed to the empire of the world ; when “ the meek 
 would inherit the earth, and be refreshed in the 
 multitude of peace ”? 6 The triumph of Christianity, 
 notwithstanding the faults of individual Christians, 
 was on the whole a victory of purity and patience, 
 of humility and conscientiousness, over the corrup- 
 tion, violence, pride, lack of serious moral principle, 
 which so largely characterized the social fabric of 
 the old empire. And Mary beheld the coming 
 victory ; she saw that it was involved in the angel’s 
 promise respecting her Son. “ He shall reign over 
 * Rom. ix. 5. b Ps. xxxvii. n. 
 
74 Temper more important than position. [Serm. 
 
 the house of Jacob for ever ; and of His kingdom 
 there shall be no end.” a 
 
 How far happier would men be, if they could 
 only be sure that their future place in another 
 world, if not here, will be the reverse — I do not 
 say of their place, but — of their temper, whether of 
 self-effacement or of self-assertion, in this ! Doubt- 
 less there have been paupers who have cherished in 
 their rags the pride of discontent in a measure not 
 unworthy to be compared with Sennacherib’s pride 
 of success ; b and there have been kings whom crown 
 and sceptre, and the fascinations of power, and the 
 adulations of a court, have not rendered incapable 
 of cultivating the humble and patient temper of a 
 Christian saint. The position counts for little ; 
 the important point is the temper. As it is the 
 self-asserting temper which God deposes from its 
 throne of pride, so it is the self-renouncing temper 
 which He exalts to His realm of glory. How could 
 it be otherwise, when the Most Holy, being in the 
 form of God, did not deem His equality with God a 
 prize to be eagerly grasped, but emptied Himself of 
 His glory, and took on Him the form of a servant, 
 and was made in the likeness of man, in order that 
 this same mind might be in us which was also in 
 a St. Luke i. 33. b 2 Kings xviii. 33-35. 
 
Hunger for truth and grace. 
 
 75 
 
 Himself, Christ Jesus ? a And what more natural 
 and fitting than that the Mother of the Incarnate 
 God should proclaim a moral truth which is the 
 first lesson of the Incarnation of her Son ? 
 
 III. 
 
 Corresponding with this law of the depression 
 of the insolent and the exaltation of the unpre- 
 tending, is God’s rule of administration in the 
 purely spiritual world. They who are sensible of 
 their needs and deficiencies, who are seeking truth 
 and longing for grace, are, sooner or later, satisfied. 
 They who deem themselves to have need of nothing 
 from on high, who are sure that they see at once to 
 the bottom of every question, who hold that they 
 can do right without any aid from the Author of 
 all goodness — the self-reliant and the self-compla- 
 cent, — these men are excluded from a share in the 
 Divine bounty. 
 
 “ He hath filled the hungry with good things ; 
 
 But the rich He hath sent empty away.” 
 
 This principle, that a sense and confession of 
 want must precede in intelligent men any com- 
 munication of God’s best blessings, is in keeping, as 
 * Phil. ii. 6, 7. 
 
76 Spiritual blessings must be desired. [Serm. 
 
 Mary’s metaphor suggests, with the law of nature. 
 If food is to invigorate the body, if it is not to be 
 an incumbrance, and a cause of discomfort and 
 disease, it must be welcomed by appetite. Appetite 
 is nature’s certificate that food will not be injurious. 
 And if a soul is to be benefited by truth or grace, 
 that soul must desire the blessing. No fact is 
 more constantly insisted on in Holy Scripture than 
 this ; unless it be another fact which follows as a 
 consequence, namely, that God withholds His best 
 blessings when men do not seek them. 
 
 This is the constant teaching of the Old Testa- 
 ment. “ Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.” a 
 “Call upon Me,” says God, by the mouth of Jere- 
 miah, to Israel — “ call upon Me, and I will answer 
 thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which 
 thou knowest not.” b “ If,” says Solomon, “ thou 
 criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for 
 understanding ; if thou seekest her as silver, and 
 searchest for her as for hid treasures ; then shalt 
 thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the 
 knowledge of God.” c And so a Psalmist during the 
 exile sings : “ Blessed are they that keep God’s testi- 
 monies, and seek Him with their whole heart. . . . 
 I have had as great delight in the way of Thy testi- 
 a Ps. lxxxi. io. b Jer. xxxiii. 3. c Prov. ii. 3-5. 
 
The self-satisfied receive nothing. 
 
 77 
 
 monies as in all manner of riches. . . . Open Thou 
 mine eyes, that I may see the wondrous things out 
 of Thy Law. . . . My soul hath longed for Thy 
 salvation, and I have a good hope because of Thy 
 Word. Mine eyes long sore for Thy Word, saying, 
 0 when wilt Thou comfort me ? . . . I have longed 
 for Thy saving health, 0 Lord ; and in Thy Law is 
 my delight. 0 let my soul live, and it shall praise 
 Thee.” a 
 
 This teaching and these prayers would have been 
 familiar to Mary ; and her Son and Lord confirmed 
 their import in after-years. “ Ask, and ye shall 
 have ; seek, and ye shall find ; knock, and it shall 
 be opened unto you. For every one that asketh 
 receiveth ; and he that seeketh findeth ; and to him 
 that knocketh it shall be opened.” b 
 
 On the other hand, Mary proclaims that “ the rich 
 He hath sent empty away.” God does not force 
 Himself on those who think that they can do with- 
 out Him. He offers them His good things ; and if 
 He meets with the indifference of an imaginary 
 sufficiency, He passes on. They who deem them- 
 selves too well off to need Him, are taken at their 
 word ; and they cannot complain if it be so. So it 
 was in the days of our Lord and His Apostles. 
 
 “ Ps. cxix. 2, 14, 18, 8i, 82, 174, 175. b St. Matt. vii. 7, 8. 
 
78 “Greeks" and “Jews” sent empty away. [Serm. 
 
 Herod, Pilate, Felix, all came close to truth, and 
 were sent empty away ; while Simeon and Anna, 
 and first one, and then another Apostle — the fisher- 
 men, the tax-gatherer, the tent-maker — and later 
 on, Cornelius the centurion, were filled with the good 
 things of faith in the Unseen, and hope in an endless 
 inheritance, and love towards God and man. And 
 as with individuals, so with classes of men. The 
 average Greek, satisfied with his shallow pride 
 of culture, had no eye for the realities of the moral 
 world, or for his own deep need of pardon and grace. 
 He toyed with some one of the current philosophies ; 
 and if it told him nothing certainly about those 
 things which it most concerns a thinking man to 
 know, it at least produced in him a sense of tran- 
 quil satisfaction with life and with his own powers. 
 And the average Jew was either a hard-headed 
 sceptic like the Sadducees, or a man of phrases and 
 proprieties like that Pharisee who is apostrophized 
 by St. Paul : “Behold, thou art called a Jew, and 
 restest in the Law, and makest thy boast of God, and 
 knowest His Will, and appro vest the things that 
 are more excellent, being instructed out of the Law ; 
 and art confident that thou thyself art a guide ot 
 the blind, a light of them which are in darkness, an 
 instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which 
 
Ill] Why are many so ignorant of religious truth ? 79 
 
 hast the form of knowledge and of the truth in the 
 Law.”* This is a picture of the temper of a great 
 number of Jews in the Apostolic age ; and we can 
 understand how, in such a state of mind, “they 
 being ignorant of God’s righteousness, went about 
 to establish their own righteousness, not submitting 
 themselves to the righteousness of God.” b The 
 earlier chapters of the Epistle to the Romans are 
 devoted to breaking down, in Gentile® and Jew d 
 alike, this fatal temper of satisfaction with self, and 
 to proving that, since all the world is guilty before 
 God, all need that gift of pardon and peace which 
 is offered by His Blessed Son, Incarnate and 
 Crucified for men. 
 
 This consideration may enable us to answer two 
 questions which are often asked nowadays, and 
 which are sufficiently practical in their bearings. 
 
 And first, Why do so many people, who have 
 opportunities of knowing Christian truth, and have 
 good natural abilities, often know so little about its 
 real character ? 
 
 The answer, at least in a great many cases, is, 
 that they do not make a serious effort to find out 
 what it is. They take it for granted that while 
 
 a Rom. ii. 17-20. b Korn. x. 3. 
 
 c lb. i. 18-32. d lb . ii. 17-iii. 31. 
 
8o 
 
 What natural ability can do. [Serm. 
 
 you cannot naaster a science or learn a new language 
 without some serious trouble, religious knowledge 
 will somehow come to them as a matter of course. 
 They have learnt something about it many years 
 ago, and that, they think, will do. They give the 
 real energy and vigour of their minds to the things 
 of this world ; they reserve a few spare moments 
 for religion. Religion, they say to themselves, being 
 meant for all, can be thoroughly understood, with 
 a very little effort, by any person of average 
 ability ; and to spend too much labour on it would 
 be a waste of time. 
 
 Now, natural ability has nothing necessarily to 
 do with the real apprehension of religious truth. 
 It can master the surroundings of religion ; the evi- 
 dences on which the Creed depends ; the historical 
 circumstances which accompanied the appearance 
 of our Lord among men ; the outline of Church 
 history ; the controversies which have arisen on 
 religious matters from century to century. But the 
 essential point, the appeal which our Lord makes 
 to the moral and spiritual faculty in a man, has no 
 more to do with his intellectual capacity than it has 
 with his accomplishments as an athlete or as an 
 artist. And unless the spiritual faculty be on the 
 alert, hungering to be satisfied with the good things 
 
Ill] The Christian soul always “hungry!' 81 
 
 of God, religious truth falls dead upon the soul, 
 whatever a man’s natural ability may be. It is one 
 thing to read about religion, and to use religious 
 language ; and a very good thing too, as far as it 
 goes. But it is another to perceive the reality of 
 religion from its perfect adaptation to the wants 
 and aspirations of a man’s own soul. And this 
 perception is impossible if we allow ourselves to 
 think that, as we already know all about religion, 
 there is no need for further trouble. However much 
 he may have learnt about God, a true Christian 
 is always learning ; and he ever bears in mind, 
 that, since he, a finite being, is face to face with the 
 Infinite, there must always be something, or rather 
 much, to learn. He is always forgetting those 
 things that are behind, and pressing forward to 
 those things that are before. 11 The moment he 
 ceases to do this ; ceases to desire to know more of 
 God and of our Lord Jesus Christ ; the pores of his 
 soul close up, and a process of spiritual atrophy 
 begins to develop itself. To him, not less than to 
 souls that are choked with the cares and riches and 
 pleasures of this life, is addressed the solemn warn- 
 ing : “ Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased 
 with goods, and have need of nothing ; and knowest 
 * Phil, iii, 13. 
 
 Or 
 
8 2 Why do not Christians gain more strength [Serm. 
 
 not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, 
 and blind, and naked : I counsel thee to buy of Me 
 gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and 
 white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that 
 the shame of thy nakedness do not appear ; and anoint 
 thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.” a 
 
 And the other question is, Why do many of us 
 apparently get so little moral and spiritual strength 
 from the Holy Communion ? Considering what 
 that Sacrament really is, and Who it is That we 
 meet in it, and the purpose with which He comes, 
 we may wonder that it is, in so many cases, to all 
 appearance, so unfruitful in spiritual results. 
 
 Well, my brethren, there may be some other 
 answers to that very important question ; but one 
 answer, doubtless, is that we do not sufficiently long 
 for it. Our Lord Himself said of the last Passover 
 at which He met His disciples, “ With desire have 
 I desired to eat this Passover with you before I 
 suffer ; ” b and every communicant ought to be able 
 to say to our Lord, before each Communion, “ With 
 desire have I desired once more to receive this Thy 
 Sacrament before I die.” Such desire must grow 
 out of and be prompted by an unaffected sense of 
 our weakness, nay, of our impotence, without the 
 • Rev. iii. 17, 18. b St. Luke xxii. 15. 
 
from the Holy Communion ? 
 
 83 
 
 strengthening Presence and aid of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ; but to a soul that has any relish for spiritual 
 things, this desire is not less spontaneous than is the 
 craving for food in a hungry man. Such a desire 
 prompts and guides preparation for Communion ; 
 review of conscience, confession of sins, prayers for 
 the dispositions of repentance, faith, hope and love, 
 which befit the approach to this great means of grace. 
 The spirit of this desire is that of the Psalmist in 
 exile on the hills of Bashan, who, as his thoughts wan- 
 dered to the services in the distant temple, beheld at 
 his feet the wild gazelles tracking the water-courses 
 that furrowed the mountain-sides in search of some 
 spring which might slake their thirst : “ Like as the 
 hart desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul 
 after Thee, 0 God. My soul is athirst for God, 
 yea, even for the living God : when shall I come to 
 appear before the Presence of God ? ” a 
 
 May our Lord Jesus Christ, of His great Mercy, 
 empty us of all which so satisfies the soul as to 
 make it insensible to His supreme attractions; 
 and then may He fill us with such true love of 
 Himself, that we, loving Him above all things, may 
 obtain His promises, which exceed all that we can 
 desire ! 
 
 Ps. xlii. 1, 2. 
 
IV. 
 
 GOD'S MERCY AND FAITHFULNESS 
 IN THE DIVINE INCARNATION 
 
 St. Luke i. 54, 55. 
 
 He hath holpen His servant Israel, 
 
 In remembrance of His mercy 
 (4s He promised to our forefathers') 
 
 Towards Abraham and his seed for ever. 
 
 To-day we reach the closing strophe of Mary’s 
 Hymn ; and it is obvious to remark how naturally, 
 as the utterance of a religious mind, this strophe 
 follows on all that have gone before it. Mary has 
 told us how all the powers of her soul and spirit 
 were engaged in praising God for the great and 
 distinguishing honour which had been vouchsafed 
 to her ; she has described this distinction, so far as 
 she might, in itself and in some of its consequences ; 
 she has dwelt upon the connection between it and 
 the great rules by which God governs the world at 
 large, and the kingdom of souls. And now she 
 would follow the gracious mystery confided to her 
 
Israel's gain by the Incarnation. 
 
 85 
 
 up to its source in the Life of God ; and she finds 
 it in His attributes of Mercy and Faithfulness. 
 
 “ He hath holpen His servant Israel, 
 
 In remembrance of His mercy 
 (As He promised to our forefathers) 
 
 Towards Abraham and his seed for ever.” 
 
 “He hath holpen His servant Israel.” Mary, 
 of course, is referring, under cover of this general 
 statement, to the Incarnation of the Son of God, 
 Whose Mother, as the Angel had announced, she 
 was to be. The terms she uses are vague and 
 distant, as in earlier verses of her Hymn: “He 
 hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. 
 . . . He That is mighty hath done great things 
 unto me.” When we consider what the coming of 
 the Eternal Son of God, clothed in our human 
 nature, into this our world, really meant, for all 
 races and for all times, it might be deemed little 
 enough to say that by such an event God had 
 brought help to Israel. But, in fact, Mary’s 
 vagueness and reserve is not without a reason. 
 In the earlier lines of her Hymn, as we have seen, 
 it may be explained by the instincts of a sanctified 
 character, when touching upon subjects that inti- 
 mately affect personal standing before God. a In 
 
 • See pp. 44-50. 
 
86 
 
 The choice and destiny of Israel [Serm. 
 
 the last strophe it is dictated by her immediate pur- 
 pose, which is to find the source of the Incarnation 
 in God’s attributes of Lovingkindness and Truth. 
 This could but be done by pointing to His past 
 relations with Israel ; since the Birth of His Only 
 begotten Son of a Jewish Mother was the fitting 
 complement and crown of those relations. “ He 
 remembering His mercy towards Abraham and his 
 seed for ever, hath holpen His servant Israel.” 
 
 I. 
 
 The Incarnation of our Lord, then, is ascribed 
 by Mary, first of all, to God’s remembrance of His 
 mercy towards Abraham and his descendants. The 
 words, “ Towards Abraham and his seed for ever,” 
 are certainly connected in the original with the 
 words, “ For a remembrance of His mercy,” although 
 the line, “ As He spake to our forefathers,” is 
 parenthetically inserted between the two halves of 
 the clause. It was not, as in other places, God’s 
 mercy over all His works, or over all the race of 
 mankind, but His mercy towards Abraham and 
 certain of His descendants, that God is here said to 
 have remembered. Why He should have selected 
 this particular family to be the object of His 
 
IV] in harmony with God' s general Providence. 87 
 
 especial favour ; to be constantly visited by His 
 envoys ; to be the guardian of His Revelation and 
 His Will ; to be thus chosen out of all nations for 
 a post of spiritual and exceptional distinction;- — is a 
 subject on which we may speculate, but can arrive 
 at no certain knowledge. We can only say with 
 the Apostle that He has mercy on whom He will 
 have mercy.® The unequal distribution of gifts and 
 privileges among His creatures by the Creator is 
 unintelligible to that passion for equality which is 
 a conspicuous ingredient of the social or political 
 temper of our day. But, whatever we may think 
 about it, there it is ; it is written on the face of God’s 
 works. If, without detriment to His attributes 
 of Justice and Love, God could create the various 
 orders of living beings which we see around us, and 
 which differ so surprisingly in the qualities which 
 enable them to maintain and protect life ; if, as 
 human beings come into the world, they find them- 
 selves equipped by the Creator, some with the 
 highest gifts of genius, and others with so low an 
 order of intelligence as scarcely to deserve the 
 name ; if even the moral as well as the mental 
 and physical advantages of men are so various ; 
 then God’s choice of Israel is at least in harmony 
 a Rom. ix. 15. 
 
88 God' s gif ts and calling without repentance. [Seem. 
 
 with the general rule of His administration, and is 
 governed by considerations and motives which, as 
 lying behind creation itself, are out of the reach of 
 human criticism. He hath mercy on whom He 
 will have mercy ; and, if we are satisfied that His 
 decisions are those of a perfectly holy Will, we bow 
 our heads and are silent. 
 
 The family of Abraham was God’s choice ; and 
 in this choice there lay the earnest of blessings yet 
 to come. For the calling as well as the gifts of 
 God are without repentance.® They are, as befits 
 the majesty and generosity of the Giver, irrevo- 
 cable. They may take different forms from age to 
 age, as the temper and dispositions of men may 
 require ; but God’s “ mercy towards Abraham and 
 his seed for ever ” was as much a part of His Will 
 as the existence of any separate order of rational or 
 irrational life ; and Mary sees a signal proof of it 
 in the fact that the Son of God was to be born of 
 a Jewish Mother. “He remembering His mercy 
 towards Abraham and his seed for ever, hath holpen 
 His servant Israel.” 
 
 But, further, it is plain from the terms of the 
 promises to the patriarchs, that, in the Divine 
 Mind, Israel included others than the race of men 
 
Abraham s spiritual progeny 
 
 89 
 
 who were lineally descended from the patriarchs, 
 and whom the Apostle calls Israel “after the flesh.” 
 Mary had already sung of God’s mercy as being on 
 them that fear Him throughout all generations ; a 
 and this earlier phrase of hers, probably, does not 
 mean anything very different from God’s Mercy 
 towards Abraham and his seed in its wider sense. 
 For who are the real “seed” or descendants of 
 Abraham ? Not only they, St. Paul has told us, 
 who could claim descent from Abraham by blood, b 
 although such were so far from being excluded from 
 a higher relationship with Abraham than the 
 merely physical one, that they had a first claim to 
 it. 0 But the Apostle insists that Abraham’s seed 
 includes millions w T ho had no blood-relationship 
 with the patriarch whatever ; that the promise that 
 in Abraham’s seed all nations of the earth should 
 be blessed, imposed upon the idea of descent, in 
 Abraham’s case, a much wider and more spiritual 
 meaning ; that the children of this promise, those 
 who by faith in and union with Jesus Christ made 
 it their own, were counted for a seed, — were 
 reckoned among Abraham s descendants, — though 
 they belonged to races utterly distinct from the 
 stock of Abraham. 
 
 St. Luke i. 50. b Kom. ix. 8, cf. iv. 16. c lb. xi. 17. 
 
go 
 
 Is physical or spiritual [Serm. 
 
 This is not so strange an idea as it may appear 
 at first sight, if we will reflect that there are two 
 ways in which a man may be said to live on in this 
 world after he has left it. He may live on by the 
 transmission of his blood, and by the transmission of 
 his convictions, ideas, type of character. They are 
 by no means incompatible forms of survival — God 
 forbid ; but they are at least very distinct from each 
 other. Jonadab the son of Eechab, who was as- 
 sociated with King Jehu at a critical period in his 
 career,® is an instance of a man who combines the 
 two fatherhoods in a remarkable degree ; he was 
 the spiritual as well as the natural ancestor of his 
 descendants, the Rechabites. He lived on from 
 age to age, not only in their strong Bedouin 
 frames, but in their method of life. They were 
 wandering men, dwelling in tents, and were 
 bound by him to certain ascetic observances ; and 
 long after he was gone, as we know from Jeremiah, 
 when they were forced by the Chaldean invasion 
 to take refuge within the walls of Jerusalem, they 
 could not be induced to transgress the rule of their 
 progenitor. 1 * A man may be the parent of an enor- 
 mous family without transmitting to them anything 
 whatever except the gift of physical life. Or he 
 * 2 Kings x. 15, seq. b Jer. xxxv. 19. 
 
parentage the more illustrious? 
 
 9i 
 
 may be childless, and yet may live after his death 
 in the convictions of thousands whom he has formed 
 by his precepts and his example. And, if the ques- 
 tion be raised which is the nobler sort of ancestry 
 — the purely zoological, or the spiritual, the 
 parentage of mere animal life, or the communication 
 of principles and ideas which govern life — surely 
 there can be no doubt about the answer. There can 
 be no doubt which of these kinds of ancestry is 
 common to man with the animals below him ; and 
 which is his prerogative distinction as a being in 
 whom an immortal and spiritual nature is linked 
 to a bodily form, but without waiving its claim to 
 superiority and leadership. St. Paul resists the 
 Jewish boast that descent from Abraham is limited 
 to those in whose veins the blood of Abraham still 
 flows ; he claims for Abraham the immeasurably 
 larger family of those who have inherited Abraham’s 
 firm hold of and trust in the Unseen, as shown in 
 his practical obedience. 3 And this loftier and vaster 
 spiritual ancestry underlies Mary’s language, too : 
 the objects of God’s mercy are not only or chiefly 
 the natural descendants of the patriarch, but the 
 millions whose faith in the Unseen is counted to 
 them for righteousness. 
 
 a Rom. iv. 12, 18-22. 
 
92 Israel a special object of God's Mercy. [Seem. 
 
 Why, let it once more be asked, should either 
 Israel — the Israel by blood or the Israel through faith 
 — be objects of the Divine Mercy ? Why, but because 
 Mercy radiates from God as do light and heat from 
 the natural sun ? When we Christians name God, 
 we do not mean only a resistless force, which has 
 brought about and maintains all that is ; we do not 
 mean only a boundless intelligence, which has 
 left marks of design and contrivance in all that 
 is ; we mean also and especially that moral quality 
 which is revealed in the gift of self ; we mean love. 
 Only by His desire to surround Himself with 
 creatures who might be the objects of His love, can 
 we account for the mystery of creation ; — that first 
 and greatest innovation on the Eternal Life of God. 
 And when love looks out upon a world, or a race, 
 or a single being, in whom sin, need, pain, dissatis- 
 faction with life as it is, are manifest, love takes 
 the form of mercy. Mercy is love in its attitude 
 towards the suffering, the sinful, and the fallen ; 
 and God’s Mercy was ever presiding over the des- 
 tinies of Israel. You remember that later Psalm, 
 which so often attracts the attention of young 
 children by the peculiarity of its structure, and 
 in which this truth is brought out more vividly 
 than anywhere else in the Psalter.® Act after act 
 a Ps. cxxxvi. 
 
IY] God pledged to the aid of Israel. 
 
 93 
 
 of God, from the making of the heavens, and 
 laying out the earth above the waters, down to 
 the deliverance from the prison in Babylon, is 
 followed by the line, “ For His mercy endureth 
 for ever.” It was this enduring Mercy which 
 accounted for the wonders in Egypt ; for the over- 
 throw of Pharaoh ; for the passage through the 
 wilderness ; for the conquest of Sihon and Og ; for 
 the inheritance of Canaan ; for the escape from the 
 exile. “ His mercy endureth for ever.” And Mary 
 would place the Divine Incarnation, too, in the 
 light of this luminous and gracious Attribute, of 
 which it was indeed in human history the crowning 
 and supreme expression. “ He remembering His 
 mercy hath holpen His servant Israel,” by the 
 Incarnation of His Son. 
 
 II. 
 
 But a second account of the help thus vouch- 
 safed to Israel follows. God was pledged. “ He 
 hath holpen His servant Israel, as He promised,” or 
 spake, “ to our forefathers.” 
 
 The question has been asked how God could 
 ever have pledged His word to man ; and a sort of 
 antecedent impossibility of His doing so has in 
 
94 God, if He wills , can reveal His Mind. [Serm. 
 
 some quarters been taken for granted, to the dis- 
 credit of the Bible narrative. This is only a 
 variety of the general presumption supposed to 
 lie against Revelation which has been made to do 
 duty for serious argument. Why should not God, 
 if He so wills, do that which any of His reasonable 
 creatures can do at their pleasure ? Why should 
 He not, if He so wills, unveil His Mind ? Why 
 should He not, if so He wills, pledge His word of 
 promise ? The assumption that, for some undefined 
 reason, He cannot do these things, breaks down as 
 soon as we look it steadily in the face. The Author 
 of all intercourse between one of His creatures and 
 another, can Himself, surely, hold intercourse with 
 any as seems best to Him. Doubtless, His methods of 
 revealing His Will vary in different ages of human 
 history. An angel, an inspired soul, even a dream, 
 may be the channel of a promise or a revelation. 
 
 Among the promises to the patriarchs which 
 Mary glances at, those may be presumed to be 
 especially in her view which stated, whether dis- 
 tinctly or by implication, that the Promised One 
 would be born of their descendants. Thus the pro- 
 mise ran to Abraham, in Haran : “ In thee shall all 
 families of the earth be blessed ; ” * at Hebron : “ I 
 a Gen. xii. 3. 
 
Promises to the Patriarchs . 
 
 95 
 
 IVJ 
 
 will establish My covenant with Isaac for an ever- 
 lasting covenant, and with his seed after him ; ” “ 
 in the plain of Mamre : “ Abraham shall surely 
 become a great and mighty nation, and all the 
 nations of the earth shall be blessed in him ; ” b 
 after the offering of Isaac : “ In thy seed shall 
 
 all the nations of the earth be blessed; because 
 thou hast obeyed My voice.” c To Isaac, in 
 Gerar : “I will perform the oath which I sware 
 unto Abraham thy father ; and I will make thy 
 seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, . . . and 
 in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be 
 blessed .” d To Jacob, in Bethel : “ Thy seed shall 
 be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt 
 
 spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and 
 
 to the north, and to the south ; and in thee and 
 
 in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be 
 
 blessed.” 8 
 
 These promises, besides connecting the antici- 
 pated blessing with the descendants of Abraham, 
 make two other assertions about it. It was to 
 extend to the whole human race : so each of the 
 three patriarchs was in turn assured, as if to rebuke 
 by anticipation the narrow national prejudice of 
 
 0 Gen. xvii. 19. b lb. xviii. 18. c lb. xxii. 18. 
 d lb . xxvi. 3, 4. e lb. xxviii. 14. 
 
g6 Increased definiteness of The Promise. [Serm. 
 
 the later Jews. And it was to last. Unlike other 
 promises to nations or dynasties, it was not con- 
 ditioned ; it would not be transitory in its effects ; 
 it would not depend upon the fortunes of a people 
 or a form of government ; it would outlive the 
 vicissitudes of human affairs ; it was embodied in 
 “ an everlasting covenant ; ” it would hold good for 
 ever. The promise to the patriarchs was made 
 more definite to their descendants. Its realization 
 was limited first to the tribe of Judah, then to the 
 family of David. Then the Person of the Promised 
 One comes more clearly into view. Isaiah foretells 
 His miraculous Birth, a His atoning Sufferings, b His 
 eventual triumph ; 0 and, with a nearly contempo- 
 rary Prophet, Micah, d though in different terms, pro- 
 claims His Divinity.® Lastly, Daniel fixes the date 
 of His appearance ; f and Malachi announces His 
 coming to His Temple, 6 and the triumph of His 
 Name and His worship in the heathen world. 11 
 
 Reflect how such a promise as this would have 
 been talked over again and again from generation 
 to generation, from century to century, in every 
 Jewish household ; how the old people would pass 
 
 a Isa. vii. 14. b lb. liii. 4-10. c lb. 12. 
 
 d Micah. y. 2. e Isa, ix. 6. f Dan. ix. 24-26. 
 
 g Mai. iii. 1. h lb. i. 11. 
 
Political insignificance of Israel. 
 
 97 
 
 it on to the younger ; and how these, at first, 
 perhaps, thinking little of it, as young people do, 
 as of a tradition mainly interesting to a past genera- 
 tion, came in time, as they grew older, to perceive 
 its importance. Great indeed was its importance. 
 For two reigns only, and for a period far short of 
 a century, did Israel attain to anything like political 
 splendour or even consideration. When Solomon 
 had been laid with his fathers, and the division 
 of the ten tribes and the two had taken place, 
 the nation’s place in the world was, to all outward 
 appearance, insignificant indeed as compared with 
 that of the great surrounding monarchies. There 
 was little, or nothing, of this world’s splendour to 
 stir the imagination or feed the national pride of the 
 descendants of the patriarchs ; there were no walls or 
 palaces like those of Babylon ; there was no navigable 
 stream teeming with industry and life, like the Nile; 
 nay, the Temple of Jerusalem itself was of diminu- 
 tive proportions when contrasted with the mighty 
 structures that had existed in Egypt from a date 
 long before the days of Moses. Not only had the 
 divided people little to show in the way of distant 
 conquests ; they gradually lost the territories that 
 had been won by David and Solomon : and as years 
 went on, there was less and less reason for thinking 
 
 H 
 
9 8 
 
 National humiliation of Israel. [Serm. 
 
 that Israel could ever again be a great power 
 in the East. Thus, in the absence of grounds 
 for satisfaction with their present public circum- 
 stances, religious men were led to think more of 
 the promise which had been handed down to them. 
 If they had no great share in the present, they had 
 good hope for the future ; if man was not likely to 
 do much for them, they had a confidence that one 
 day God would do much, both for them, and through 
 them, for others. But years passed ; first came one 
 disaster, then another; the captivity of Israel by the 
 Assyrians ; the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebu- 
 chadnezzar ; the bondage of Judah in Babylon ; 
 with its profound distress and humiliation ; the 
 many vicissitudes which followed the return ; and 
 notably, the hard struggle against Antiochus Epi- 
 phanes, who desired to substitute Greek paganism in 
 thought and life for the religion revealed to Moses 
 and the Prophets. Often, in days when all seemed 
 going to ruin, and men’s hearts were faint, the 
 question must have been asked in many a humble 
 home up and down the land, whether God had 
 forgotten to be gracious, and whether He would shut 
 up His lovingkindness in displeasure. 8. So Isaiah 
 anticipates the complaints of Israel in exile : — 
 a Ps. lxxvii. 9. 
 
IV] The promise repeated, but unfulfilled. 99 
 
 “ But Zion saith, The Lord hath forsaken me, 
 
 And my Lord hath forgotten me. 
 
 Can a woman forget her sucking child, 
 
 That she should not have compassion on the son of he 
 womb ? 
 
 Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. 
 
 Behold, I have graven thee on the palms of My hands ; 
 Thy walls are continually before Me.” a 
 
 And when the prospect of impending ruin was 
 darker than ever before, Jeremiah reminds his 
 despairing countrymen — 
 
 “ Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, 
 
 That I will perform that good thing which I have 
 promised 
 
 Unto the house of Israel and to the house of Judah. 
 
 In those days, and at that time, 
 
 "Will I cause the Branch of Kighteousness 
 
 To grow up unto David. . . . Thus saith the Lord ; 
 
 If ye can break My covenant of the day, and My covenant 
 of the night, 
 
 That there should not be day and night in their season ; 
 Then may also My covenant be broken with David My 
 servant, 
 
 That he should not have a son to reign upon his throne.” b 
 
 And so the years passed on. It was a long night 
 of expectation, and generation after generation died, 
 as it had lived, in hope ; but at last the first streaks 
 of dawn were seen in the East : it was understood 
 
 Isa. xlix. 14-16. 
 
 b Jer. xxxiii. 14, 15, 20, 21. 
 
IOO 
 
 The Dawn of the fulfilment. [Seem. 
 
 that the Sun of Righteousness a was rising on the 
 world. Says Zacharias — 
 
 “ He hath raised up a mighty salvation for us, 
 
 In the house of His servant David ; 
 
 As He spake by the mouth of His holy Prophets, 
 
 Which have been since the world began ; 
 
 That we should be saved from our enemies, 
 
 And from the hands of all that hate us ; 
 
 To perform the mercy promised to our forefathers, 
 
 And to remember His holy covenant ; 
 
 To perform the oath which he sware to our forefather Abra- 
 ham 
 
 That He would give us.” b 
 
 Or, as Mary sings — 
 
 “ He hath holpen His servant Israel, 
 
 For a remembrance of His mercy, 
 
 As He spake unto our forefathers.” 
 
 III. 
 
 Now, the Gospel which was preached by Mary’s 
 Divine Son, and which has Him for its central 
 Subject as well as its Author, contains, as St. 
 Peter reminds us, “ great and precious promises ; 
 that by these we might be partakers of the Divine 
 Nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the 
 world through lust .” 0 But the fulfilment of these 
 
 * Mai. iv. 2. b St. Luke i. 69-74. 0 2 St. Pet. i. 4. 
 
God's promises to Christians. 
 
 101 
 
 promises is, in large measure, yet to come. Many 
 men find it easy to believe in God’s past faithfulness, 
 simply because the past witnesses to His faithful- 
 ness. But they hesitate about the future. They 
 assume, without saying it, that He is less present 
 to us than He was to our forefathers, and that, in 
 accordance with modern ways of talking and think- 
 ing, His “ Hand is shortened that it cannot save.” a 
 
 At any rate, we cannot doubt that God may be 
 trusted to keep His word in the world of nature. 
 We lay out our lives upon that presumption. We 
 go to bed night after night without any misgivings 
 as to whether the sun will rise the next morning. 
 We make plans for the autumn, feeling sure that 
 it will be followed by winter ; and for the winter, 
 knowing that it will be succeeded by spring, and, 
 in due time, again by summer and autumn. All 
 the proceedings of our farmers and our sailors, 
 nay, of our chemists and physicians, are based 
 on the calculation that God will be true to His 
 general rules of working ; that He has given to 
 the world of nature a law which shall not be 
 broken. b So too our men of science cross the 
 Atlantic to take observations of an eclipse, which 
 they are sure will begin to be visible in a ceitain 
 * Isa. lix. h Ps. cxlviii. 6. 
 
102 
 
 God keeps His Word in nature [Serm. 
 
 place at a given hour and minute, because long 
 observation has taught them that the Almighty 
 Worker never fails to keep His appointments 
 exactly. Indeed, so exact is He, that they them- 
 selves will often fail to remember that He works 
 or lives at all ; the mechanism of nature by its fault- 
 less regularity shuts out from their view the Great 
 Engineer. Sometimes too His constant observance 
 of His rules is pleaded as a reason for foregoing the 
 duties of prayer and thanksgiving, since all, it is 
 presumed, will go on without failure, whether we 
 address our prayers to Him or not. And this, in- 
 deed, is why now and then He stays His beneficent 
 Hand, and shows us, in what we call, through our 
 ignorance, the caprices of nature, — in the drought, 
 the storm, the deluge of waters, the destroying 
 plague, — that He is ever at work behind the veil, 
 and that wo cannot with impunity trifle with Him ; 
 as though He were only an unintelligent force 
 strangely engaged in the complex and subtle ma- 
 nipulation of matter. 
 
 But if God keeps His appointments in the world 
 of nature, much more does He keep them in the 
 moral sphere. For while nature might have been, 
 in countless ways, otherwise ordered than as it is, 
 the moral law could not have been other than it 
 
IV] 
 
 and in the moral world. 
 
 103 
 
 is, since it expresses in human speech the Nature of 
 God, in relation to the circumstances of human life. 
 God might have made us men with differently 
 shaped bodies, with differently furnished minds. 
 But, without being untrue to Himself, He never 
 could have said to us, “ Thou mayest do murder ; 
 thou mayest commit adultery; thou mayest steal.” 
 If the laws of nature, as we call them, fail not, 
 much more impossible is it that the laws of the 
 moral world should fail. If seedtime is followed by 
 harvest, and day by night, much more certain is it 
 that “ God is not mocked ; ” and that “ whatsoever a 
 man soweth, that shall he also reap;” a that “ he that 
 soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corrup- 
 tion, but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the 
 Spirit reap life everlasting.” b God’s own essential 
 Nature is concerned in maintaining the unfailing 
 regularity of His rules for governing the moral 
 world. “ Wherefore should the wicked blaspheme 
 God, while he doth say in his heart, Tush, Thou 
 God carest not for it ? Surely Thou hast seen it ; 
 for Thou beholdest ungodliness and wrong .” 0 And 
 on the other hand, “ God is not unrighteous, that 
 He will forget your works and labour that pro- 
 ceeded of love.” d Even a heathen like Sophocles, 
 
 a Gal. vi. 7. b Jb. 8. c Ps x. 14, 15. d Heb. vi. 10. 
 
[04 Promises to the Church of Chtist [Seem. 
 
 contemplating the moral order of human life, could 
 recognize 
 
 “ The steadfast laws that walk the sky — 
 
 Laws horn and reared in the ethereal heaven, 
 
 Of which Olympus is alone the sire ; 
 
 To which no race of mortal man gave birth, 
 
 Nor ever shall oblivion lay to sleep.” “ 
 
 And we Christians know that God’s righteousness 
 standeth like the strong mountains ; that His 
 judgments are as the great deep. b 
 
 The Gospel contains Divine promises to the 
 Christian Society or Church, and to the Christian 
 soul. Why should we think that they are less 
 likely to be observed than God’s rules for the 
 movements of the stars, or for the enforcement of 
 virtue and the repression of vice ? 
 
 To the Church, for instance, there has been made 
 the great promise that “ the gates of hell shall not 
 prevail against it.” c This promise enables a 
 believing Christian to survey, not, indeed, without 
 distress, but certainly without misgiving, much 
 that he sees around him in the Eealm of Christ. 
 Our Lord prayed d for unity, and everywhere we 
 behold division. Our Lord made holiness a note of 
 
 a (Ed. Tyr 863, sqq. 
 c St. Matt, xv i. 18* 
 
 b Ps. xxxvi. 6. 
 
 4 St. John xvii. 20 , 21 . 
 
IV] not forfeited by divisions and sins. 105 
 
 His kingdom,* and holiness among Christians is the 
 exception rather than the rule. Our Lord promised 
 His Spirit to guide into all truth, b and we see men 
 adding to or taking away from that truth into which 
 the Apostles were guided. Nor is the difficulty to 
 be removed by saying that one fragment of the 
 Church is the whole of it, or that the true 
 Church of Christ is an invisible society. These 
 are the rude expedients of a supposed controversial 
 necessity ; they will not bear the wear and tear of 
 reflection. No ! we must admit that an enemy has 
 sown tares among the wheat. Of the Gospel Vine, 
 too, it must be said that whereas 
 
 “ The hills were covered with the shadow of it, 
 
 And the houghs thereof were like the goodly cedars,” 
 
 it has come to pass that she lies, with “ her hedge 
 broken down,” so that “ all they that go by pluck 
 off her grapes ” — 
 
 “ The wild hoar out of the wood doth root it up, 
 
 And the wild heasts of the field devour it.” c 
 
 Certainly the Church’s weakness is the opportu- 
 nity if not the triumph of unbelief, which, since the 
 earliest age of the Christian Faith, never was so 
 
 “ Isa. lx. 21 ; Jer. xxxi. 33, 34; St. John xiii. 35. 
 b St. John xvi. 13. c Ps. lxxx. 10-13. 
 
106 Promises to the Christian soul [Serm. 
 
 threatening, never had enlisted so many fine in- 
 tellects in its service, as to-day. But there lies our 
 charter — “the gates of hell shall not prevail.” 
 There may be temporary discouragement and de- 
 feat ; a falling away of prominent men, of large 
 classes ; the withering of entire branches of the 
 Sacred Yine. We do not know, but all this and 
 more is possible. What is not possible is that the 
 Divine kingdom should perish from off the face of 
 the earth before the day of our Lord’s coming. 
 
 So also will the Christian soul recall many and 
 precious promises, on which it may lean during 
 the days of its earthly pilgrimage, and of the 
 eventual fulfilment of which there can be no room 
 for doubt. Promises of deliverance from spiritual 
 foes ; promises of victory over insurgent passions ; 
 promises of an inward Presence Which can make 
 man a true temple of God ; promises of joy and 
 peace in believing ; promises which transcend this 
 world and pierce the veil of the next, and embrace 
 in their mighty scope not only time but eternity. 
 “ Come unto Me, . . . and I will give you rest. 
 Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me ; . . . and 
 ye shall find rest for your souls.” a “ If any man love 
 Me, he will keep My words : and My Father will 
 * St, Matt. xi. 28, 2 q. 
 
IV] not forgotten , because as yet unfulfilled. 107 
 
 love him, and We will come unto Him, and make 
 Our abode with him.” a “ In My Father’s house are 
 many mansions : if it were not so, I would have told 
 you. I go to prepare a place for you. ... I will 
 come again, and receive you unto Myself ; that 
 where I am, there ye may be also.” b “ To him that 
 overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, 
 which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.”® “He 
 that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white 
 raiment ; and ... I will confess his name before 
 My Father, and before His angels.” d “ To him that 
 overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, 
 even as I also overcame, and am set down with My 
 Father in His throne.”® 
 
 There are times when even good Christians 
 are tempted to ask whether such bright and 
 gracious words will be realized. Let them re- 
 member how long Israel waited before the promises 
 spoken to the patriarchs were fulfilled in the Son of 
 Mary. Be sure that no word of God returns to 
 Him empty, or without accomplishing that purpose 
 for which He sent it. f It is so with God’s laws in 
 nature ; it is so with His moral law ; it cannot be 
 otherwise with His promises to His servants. If 
 
 “ St. John xiv. 23. b lb. 2, 3. c Rev. ii. 7, 
 
 d lb. iii. 5. e lb. 21. f Isa. lv. n. 
 
io8 
 
 God’s faithfulness our support [Serm. 
 
 He was true to His word in dealing with the old 
 Israel, He will not fail those who belong to the 
 Israel of God. 
 
 The conviction that God will keep His pledges 
 to help us carries us, as nothing else can, through 
 the trying changes of our outward circumstances. 
 These changes will sometimes go far to break down 
 the faith of men who have believed for years. 
 Narrow means, weak health, the death of those for 
 whom we care most on earth, — why, men ask, if He 
 is alive, and if He loves us, should God permit it ? 
 
 Christians sometimes forget that they are to be 
 tried as other men are not ; that they are not to 
 count such trials strange ; a that “ whom the Lord 
 loveth He chasteneth ; ” b that “ our light affliction, 
 which is but for a moment, worketh for us an 
 exceeding and eternal weight of glory .” 0 That 
 which seems so accidental or purposeless, is de- 
 signed to train us gradually for a higher life ; those 
 great sorrows which are sometimes pointed to as 
 showing that we are the sport of some heartless 
 chance, are in truth but so many blows of the 
 chisel of the Eternal Artist, Who is fashioning each 
 character for its high destiny out of the rude 
 material which passes under His Hand and Eye. 
 
 » i St. Pet. iv. 12 . b Heb. xii. 6. c 2 Cor. iv, 17. 
 
IV] under outward and inward trials. 109 
 
 No one trial, be sure of it, is aimless or unneeded ; 
 poverty, sickness, loss of friends, each has its 
 appointed work to do. And, beyond all, is the 
 certainty that He will be true to His promises ; 
 true to those who overcome the temptation to 
 doubt His word. The bright Morning may not be 
 far distant from thee when thou shalt praise Him 
 
 “ Who saveth thy life from destruction, 
 
 And crowneth thee with mercy and lovingkindness ; 
 Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things, 
 
 Making thee young and lusty as an eagle.” a 
 
 And this same conviction braces us to encounter 
 those trials of the mind and heart which sometimes 
 bear more hardly on a man than anything outward. 
 You have done your best, you say, and you have 
 met with nothing but disappointment ; you have 
 done your best for a noble cause, and you are 
 credited with devotion to purely selfish ends * your 
 love and energy has met with ingratitude or con- 
 tempt. You have spent prayer, time, money, upon 
 the bringing up your children in the nurture and 
 admonition of the Lord, and they only attain to 
 manhood to wound you by their neglect, or to 
 shame you by their frivolity or their misconduct. 
 What, you are tempted to ask, is the good of 
 efforts which lead to nothing, at least, so far as 
 a Ps. ciii. 4, 5. 
 
I IO 
 
 Instability of the human heart [Serm. 
 
 you see, in those for whose sake they are made ? 
 And then you are out of heart about yourself. You 
 have meant sincerely to consecrate your life to God, 
 and lo ! you find that which should be a temple of 
 His perpetual Presence degraded by a hundred 
 little sins which are utterly alien to Him ; by some 
 vulgar social pride, by some ill-natured and spiteful 
 grudge, by unchristian acts, by words that breathe 
 only covetousness or envy. You had hoped that you 
 had gone far enough on the road to the heavenly 
 Jerusalem to be out of the reach of these igno- 
 minious sins; but there are days when they seem 
 to have been so numerous, and to represent so much 
 of unsubdued passion and of decomposing faith, 
 that your spirit fairly sinks within you, and you 
 doubt whether you will ever reach the heavenly 
 goal. Certainly you cannot fall back for comfort 
 on your own heart, which is not in the same mood 
 for two days running. You know it to be per- 
 petually changing, or, as the Bible says, “ deceitful 
 above all things.” a In the morning you are happy 
 and hopeful, and before night you are in misery 
 and despair. To-day you are in ecstasies as if with 
 Paradise in full view ; to-morrow you are a victim 
 of the most gloomy depression. One week the 
 heaven of your inner life is as the clear blue sky, 
 a Jer. xvii. 9. 
 
IV] 
 
 1 1 1 
 
 and our unchanging God. 
 
 with the brilliant rays of the Eternal Sun playing 
 upon you ; the next, all is overclouded, and you 
 are apparently in the darkest shadow. Certainly 
 this poor, changeful, vacillating heart of ours yields 
 but a sorry resource in the troubles of life. Our 
 only real deliverance lies in rising out of ourselves, 
 and taking firm hold of the promises and the 
 Person of Him Who sitteth above the waterflood a 
 of human feeling, and Who does not change. b In 
 His own time He will be as good as His word ; the 
 disappointments will be seen to have been steps in 
 our probation ; the temptations to humiliating 
 faults, after teaching us self-distrust, will have 
 vanished ; the varying moods of joy and depression 
 will have been exchanged for a tranquil and assured 
 happiness. 
 
 This is the closing lesson of the Magnificat. 
 Mary leaves us with the conviction that God’s 
 promises may for long remain unfulfilled, but that 
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 servant Israel, as He promised to our forefathers.” 
 For us too of to-day “the vision is yet for an 
 appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and 
 not lie : though it tarry, wait for it ; because it will 
 surely come, it will not tarry.” c 
 
 * Ps. xxix. 9. b Mai. iii. 6. c Hab. ii. 3. 
 
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12 
 
 A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Merrier.— OUR MOTHER CHURCH : Being Simple Talk 
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IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE . 
 
 *3 
 
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 THE HISTORY OF MY LIFE : An Autobiography. Crown Svo. 5^. 
 
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 THE EARNEST COMMUNICANT. New Red Rubric Edition . 
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 OUR CHURCH AND HER SERVICES. Reap. Svo. 2 s, 6d, 
 
 f [ continued . 
 
14 
 
 A SELECTION OF WORKS 
 
 Oxenden. — Works by the Right Rev. Ashton Oxenden 
 formerly Bishop of Montreal — continued. 
 
 FAMILY PRAYERS FOR FOUR WEEKS. First Series. Fcap. 8 vo. 
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 Pusey. — LIFE OF EDWARD BOUVERIE PUSEY, D.D. 
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IN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE . 
 
 15 
 
 Sanday. — Works by W. Sanday, D.D., Dean Ireland’s Professor 
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 {continued. 
 
16 A SELECTION OF THEOLOGICAL WORKS. 
 
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SEorfeg bg trg 19arrg Ht&ifon, 
 
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WORKS BY THE LATE CANON LID DON— Continued. 
 
 Edward Bouverie Pusey. A Sermon preached in St. 
 
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 The Recovery of St. Thomas. A Sermon preached in 
 
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 Love and Knowledge. A Sermon preached in King’s Col- 
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 The One Salvation. A Sermon preached in St. Paul’s Cathe- 
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 The Moral Groundwork of Clerical Training. 
 
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 The Inspiration of Selection. A Sermon preached before 
 
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 Devotion to the Church of Christ. A Sermon preached 
 
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 Religion and Arms. A Sermon preached in St. Paul’s 
 
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 The Name of Names. A short Sermon preached in St. 
 
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 The Worth of the Old Testament. A Sermon preached in 
 
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 LONDON AND NEW YORK: 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. 
 
BV 
 
 ^69 Liddon, Henry Parry 
 The Magnificat 
 
 1895 
 
 15493 
 
 Semin-* 
 
 Library