^H^ 
 
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 L I B RARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 U N 1 VERS ITY 
 
 Of 1 LLl NOIS
 
 THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION: 
 
 ITS INNER GRACE. 
 
 A SER/AON 
 
 I'RF.Arillil) Ar THE 
 
 DEDICATION of the FOWLER MEMORIAL CHAPEL 
 
 Ol' TIIF, 
 
 LEEDS CLERGY SCHOOL, 
 
 ON July 28th, 1896. 
 
 The Right Reverend JOHN GOTT, D.D. 
 
 LORD BISHOP OF TRL'RO. 
 
 LEEDS : 
 RICHARD JACKSON, COMMKRCIAE STREI
 
 S. Mark i. 38 : 
 ''Let us go \into the next tozvns] that I may preach T 
 
 Y^i HEN the spirit which stirs within us whenever, 
 ^^ however, we rise to a priestly act, is the Spirit 
 of Jesus ; the will to preach, to teach in school, to 
 visit the sick, to comfort the weary and sad, to awake 
 some sleeping conscience, to prepare a soul for life, 
 or to prepare a soul for death — the will to do this 
 is the Voice of my Lord, saying within me, " Let us 
 go." He and I doing the thing together ; He in 
 me, and I in Him ; the Divine and human forces 
 working together in the Christian priest — thinking, 
 speaking, ministering — two in one. 
 
 " Let 2ts go, that / may preach." He puts His 
 words. His tones. His aim within us, till He can 
 truly say that He preaches through us. Unless you 
 rob Him of the credit, unless you seek something 
 other than His glory, unless you trust in yourselves. 
 He and you go together; and He preaches, ministers, 
 and celebrates. He is the Jonathan, and you are 
 His armour-bearer. 
 
 This is the Apostolic Succession at work in spirit 
 and in truth — out of Him, descending into you, 
 through a long succession, the pastoral heart, the
 
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 soul on fire, the concentrated will, the presence of 
 ministering angels, the vision of God, the daily 
 sacrifice. This is the Apostolic Succession of which 
 v/e hear so much this year. And some ask if it is 
 worth all the reiterated argument ; is it a practical 
 thing ? does any success or failure depend upon it ? 
 "This birthright, what profit shall it do to me?" 
 
 My sons — for some of you perhaps will let me 
 call you by this name of love and hope— my sons, 
 it is a birthright indeed, a link living and life-giving 
 that joins us to Jesus Christ. Every Christian has a 
 birthright. Christ the King has many children, and 
 each is born in the purple, each has a royal inheri- 
 tance. But Christ the Prophet, who speaks words 
 for God — Christ the Priest, who offers the sacrifice — 
 has His own lineage and family in the clergy of His 
 Church. We are the heirs of His ordination ; we 
 are His priestly sons. Every Christian is member 
 and limb of His Body, we are His ininistering 
 members ; the whole body is priestly, we are its 
 priestly organs. As a man is a seeing and speaking 
 being, yet he sees only through the eyes, and speaks 
 only through his mouth. So the Church is a pastoral, 
 a baptizing, a celebrating nation, and we are the 
 hands and lips by which it fulfils its vital functions. 
 
 Every confirmed Christian is a priest, responsible 
 for others, with a cure of souls — in his family, in 
 society — with his sacrifice to offer, his Lord to serve, 
 and his witness to bear. But the clergy have 
 nothing else than this to do ; this is our calling, 
 
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 our living, our gift, and our judgment. He calls us 
 as He calls no others: His "Ambassadors," His 
 " Stewards," and His " Glory." By us He absolves, 
 blesses, celebrates. This is Apostolic Succession. 
 
 I am not careful to prove a thing that no one 
 here doubts. It is not the history of the Succession 
 or its dogma that specially interests us ; it is the 
 spirit of the Apostolic Succession that I wish to 
 realize, and use more and more ; it is the grace, the 
 power, and the blessing of it all that I aspire to 
 employ among my people. It is the gain of it to 
 England, and the virtue of it to our parish, that 
 seems to me the most practical thing I can put 
 before you. 
 
 This, then, is the Succession which makes us what 
 we are, the priestly heart of our Lord beating in us, 
 not for our own sake so much as for our parishioners ; 
 with His singleness of eye, all to the Father's glory, 
 concentrating our look around; with His instinct for 
 the new life of others instinct in ourselves ; with 
 His sense of His Father's presence, "Yet I am not 
 alone, for the Father is with Me;" with His self-aban- 
 donment reproduced in us ; with His late evenings 
 and dawns of prayer renewed in you and me ; with 
 His love of the world and alienation from its world- 
 liness moving us to-day ; with His vision of heaven 
 and sight of the unseen filling our eyes now. 
 
 But where should I stop ? Three heirlooms at 
 least I must take out of our Ordination treasure- 
 house and realize.
 
 1. — His Spirit of Prayei^, which S. Luke inspires 
 into us. 
 
 (a) The introit of all work, early in the morning, 
 in the freshness and peace of the dawn, preventing 
 the day ; before His Sermon on the Mount, and before 
 His call of our Fathers, the first links of the Apos- 
 tolic Succession ; a whole night in prayer, as S. Carlo 
 Borromeo and a thousand others have done, each in 
 their place of the chain, and as I know that one 
 of you who are present has sometimes done ; before 
 His feeding of the five thousand ; before He went 
 to minister in the towns and villages of Galilee. 
 The Alpha of every holy act. 
 
 (/3) /;/ His Baptism, in His Transfiguration, in 
 the Agony, on the Cross. The soul of all, of every 
 priestly act. 
 
 (7) After the long pastoral day of Capernaum, 
 after He had fed the multitude, after he had given 
 the Last Supper. The Omega of every act. 
 
 And you have built this succession of His 
 devotional life into the walls of your new Chapel. 
 This is the outward and visible sign of your in- 
 ward and spiritual grace. Twenty years ago some 
 said that Leeds might teach better than other places 
 the practical side of a parish priest's life, but they 
 feared that the spiritual side would be starved in 
 this crowd. This Oratory says that we have cared 
 mainly for the inside of life, for this is the costliest 
 and most conspicuous part of our buildings ; and it 
 has always seemed to me that the touch of a great
 
 7 
 
 town, with its sorrows, its sins, its battles, and all its 
 pathetic necessities, bends one's knees, and gives fire 
 to one's altar of incense as nothing else has ever 
 done to me. 
 
 2. — " Himself took our infirmities and bare our 
 sicknesses.'' Here was a sympathy of a new rank. 
 The infirmities of a Nicodemus, or a Joseph of 
 Arimathea, aye of a S. Peter or a S. Thomas, He 
 took into His heart till they absorbed some of His 
 own strength ; and so out of weakness these men 
 became strong. The ghost of a will in the man of 
 the Pool of Bethesda, to which our Lord gave a 
 life and a body as He touched it with His ''Wilt 
 thou be made whole } " till the man's exhausted and 
 nerveless will stirred within him again as the will 
 of a boy. The infirmity of faith in His Apostles, as 
 they feebly looked on the paralytic child, which He 
 kindled with His own Almighty faith, and slowly 
 changed into that confidence in God which removes 
 mountains. His daily consideration for the failures 
 and self-disappointment of men, and His understand- 
 ing of their difficulties, as He never quenched the 
 smoking flax of the lamp He had lit, or broke the 
 bruised reed out of which He would breathe sweet 
 music. His bearing of hunger because so many 
 were hungry ; His bending under the misunder- 
 standing of friends, and the opposition of religious 
 people ; bending, but never slacking His purpose. 
 The home He made in His Body for thorns and 
 scourges and spitting ; the home He made in His
 
 soul for scorn and shame ; the home He made in 
 His heart for slighted love and broken promises of 
 constancy — " Though all men should forsake Thee, 
 yet will not I." 
 
 So that one of our callinof who never even saw Him 
 upon earth could say, as part of his Apostolic Suc- 
 cession, "Who is weak, and I am not weak?" Aye, 
 "Himself took our infirmities;" and so, only so. He 
 gave strength to all who cast their burden on Him ; 
 so, only so, " His strength made perfect in weakness ;" 
 so, only so. He gathered the lambs in His arms, bare 
 the sick and wounded sheep in His bosom, gently 
 led those that were with young, and laid the lost upon 
 His shoulders, homewards rejoicing. 
 
 And all this tenderness, this Divine sympathy, 
 this appropriation of every kind of weakness and all 
 sickness of body and soul. He handed on to a^U His 
 Church ; and He has treasured it for greater safety 
 and use in the lives of His faithful clergy. "Who 
 is offended, and I burn not?" said a clergyman of 
 old. 
 
 3. — " He put azvay sin by the sacrifice of Himsel/y 
 I have no need to remind you that there has been 
 only one sacrifice for sin. This you knew before you 
 first came to Leeds, this you understood more deeply 
 in those rooms and at that altar across the road. 
 This only offering and satisfaction it is our glory to 
 celebrate, our salvation to receive, and our medicine 
 to minister. But in union with the sacrifice of our 
 Lord each Christian must sacrifice himself, and each 
 
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 . 9 
 
 priest must lead the way. It is nothing that he who 
 loves his life shall lose it, but we shall lose a hundred 
 lives around us ; it is not only that he who loseth 
 his life for My sake shall find it, but we find the lost 
 souls of our parish and win them home, not by the 
 beauty of our preaching, nor the skill of our parochial 
 technique, but by the secret of our Lord, the life laid 
 down in self-denial, in overwork, in realizing the end 
 of sin and the subtlety of temptation, as one of our 
 Holy Orders said who never saw his Lord's example 
 that he might follow it, but inherited His spirit, till 
 the noblest life and the strongest pastorate seemed to 
 him to "spend and be spent," "to pour out his life as 
 an offering," " in labours more abundant, in weariness 
 and painfulness, in watchings often, and in daily care 
 for his Church." 
 
 If we are the heirs of Christ the Priest, we must 
 have something to offer. All our parish is an altar, 
 and our life is our victim. All the things you hold 
 dear, all that the world covets, — praise of men, and 
 sense of success, pleasant ease and innocent tastes, 
 and the allurements of friends, and the whisperings 
 of promotion, one by one lay them on the altar, offer 
 them in union with the offering of our Lord, and then, 
 even in this world, you shall gain an hundredfold, — 
 praise of God and the love of many, and the gratitude 
 of those saintly souls whom you have led through 
 the valley of death, the prayers of children and their 
 parents ; or, sometimes wanting these, your soul shall 
 content itself with loving submission to the perfect
 
 ro 
 
 will of God. To bear the burdens of others, this is 
 the service of God, to be a deacon indeed in that 
 diaconate which grows more devoted and more bur- 
 densome in the priest, most lovingly devoted and 
 burdensome in the true Bishop : for we read that our 
 Lord was a deacon, as well as priest and bishop. 
 
 To lay one's life on the cross of one's parish, to 
 say each morning " Offero Tibi, Domine, in unione 
 Verborum, Cogitationum, Operum Christi, omnia mea 
 verba, cogitationes et opera," — this is the priestly 
 life, this is the seal of Christ the Priest in us. 
 
 "Even as the Son of Man came not to be served, 
 but to serve — SiaKovija-ai — and to give His life a ran- 
 som for many," as we read in Saturday's Gospel on 
 S. James' Day, the day when this Clergy School was 
 originally opened with its six students twenty years 
 ago. 
 
 It is, you remember, only o?ir lips that tell to God, 
 " Here we offer and present unto Thee ourselves, our 
 souls and bodies." Our people say the "Amen," but 
 our to7igiie alone utters the self-oblation. So it is in 
 our parish life : it is in us openly and visibly to give 
 ourselves to God, and our people add each their own 
 living " Amen." 
 
 A fortnight ago a son of Leeds died in London. 
 He was a curate in a poor district. With a body 
 worn out by ceaseless toil, with a constitution sapped 
 by pastoral zeal, he watched the deathbed of a boy 
 in his district. The lad refused all food and medicine, 
 except under the influence of his young curate. Two
 
 1 1 
 
 nights this Leeds man sat up by that bedside, and 
 at last the self-sacrifice was complete : the boy lives, 
 and the priest dies. And when his father answered 
 my letter of sympathy he said : — " There is nothing 
 to regret in my son's death ; he died as a man should, 
 and the love of the men and boys of his parish to 
 him has been wonderful." .... Yes, he that 
 loseth his life shall find it indeed, both his own life 
 and others. So lost and so found young Wilfrid 
 Henderson. 
 
 This true kneeling by the side of our Lord, in 
 thus bearing the burden of others in our own hearts, 
 this pouring out of ourselves on the altar of Christ, 
 and all else that makes a man a priest, is drawn from 
 the single Priesthood of Jesus, the Bishop of our 
 souls, by His conscious touch, by meditation on Him 
 as the introit of every day, by walking in the blessed 
 steps of His most holy life, by the renewing use of 
 the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. 
 
 Our priesthood is Apostolic, not because we derive 
 it from Apostles, not even from a S. Peter, a S. John, 
 or a S. Paul, but through them yrc*/// Christ the Priest, 
 in whose loins we were born, in whom all were when 
 He preached the Sermon on the Mount, supped 
 with Levi and Zacchceus, raised Lazarus and Jairus' 
 daughter, absolved the penitent thief, gave the Last 
 Supper, and ascended Calvary. 
 
 Non comprehenditur Deus per investigationem, sed 
 per imitationem. So said S. Bernard.
 
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 And yet the truth is deeper than this. Christ is 
 not received by imitation, though this is the way to 
 understand Him. He is only received through inheri- 
 tance, and this shall be no barren pedigree, no living 
 on the prestige of the ancestor, no boast of an heroic 
 founder, but the prayerful effort to live up to so great 
 a Father, to increase by use the property He has 
 left us, and to make full proof of our lineage, not by 
 sacerdotal claims, but by sacerdotal lives, by priestly 
 duties fulfilled in all faith, and hope, and charity ; by 
 pastoral cares — the only care we allow ourselves — by 
 loyalty to God and to every child of His. This is 
 the virtue of the Apostolic Succession, 
 
 And never fear that the long line of clergy which 
 separates, I should say unites, us to our Lord, has 
 worn the cord thin, or weakened its truth or its force. 
 The electric wire gives its message, its strength and 
 its light, as truly at the distance of i,ooo miles as it 
 does to its next door neighbour. 
 
 And that is only a senseless wire that neither 
 understands the message it bears, nor rejoices in the 
 strength that it gives. But the line that leads down 
 from our Lord to you and me is a living chain, 
 whose links are the hearts of men who lifted the 
 weary into their soul, and loved not their lives to the 
 death. Was it not said of the pedigree that led up 
 to Christ, that they "through faith subdued kingdoms, 
 wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the 
 mouths of lions, out of weakness were made strong, 
 waxed valiant in the fight, turned to flight the armies
 
 of the aliens ; and others were tortured, not accepting 
 deHverance, that they might obtain a better resurrec- 
 tion, of whom the world was not worthy." And if 
 such thinos were told of men who descended from 
 the first Adam and the first Aaron, — men who were 
 types indeed but not sons, fo7'ecasts and not heirs, — 
 what shall not the Spirit say of the beautiful and 
 sacrificial lives of S. Peter, S. John, and S. Paul : the 
 first, the priest of emotion ; the second, the priest 
 of love ; and the third, the priest of power — who 
 handed on these gifts to a S. Luke, who reveals to 
 us, as no other does, the prayers of Christ ; to a 
 S. Stephen, who hands on the intercession for his 
 enemies, and the committal of his soul ; or in due 
 time to an Augustine, with his science of God and 
 his tender confessions ; a Jerome, using his great 
 learning to give to the people the Bible in their 
 mother tongue ; an Ambrose, with his moral indigna- 
 tion at the doors of his Church ; a Gregory, with his 
 love of boys, aye, of our Yorkshire boys ; or again, 
 through the conscientious pastorate of an Aidan ; the 
 beginnings of Church history in a Bede ; the refusal 
 to save himself at the cost of the Church of an 
 Alphege ; the missionary enthusiasm of a Boniface ; 
 the admirable common sense and practical episcopate 
 of Wulfstan of Worcester, who alone of Saxon bishops 
 kept his see through the harrowing of the Norman 
 Conquest ; the masterly education which a William of 
 Wickham gave to England as founder of our public 
 schools ; the wisdom of a Wolsey, who aimed to reform
 
 the Church without a schism ; the loving heroism of 
 a Bernard Gilpin, apostle of the north ; the home- 
 missionary awakening of a John Wesley, to whose 
 indirect influence we owe the purification of political 
 and commercial life ; the saintliness of a Simeon ; the 
 manifold life of a Samuel Wilberforce, who gave a 
 new ideal to the Episcopate of to-day ; the daring 
 truthfulness of an Arnold of Rugby, who gave a new- 
 ideal to our school life ; the martyrdom of a Patteson 
 and a Hannlngton, who gave a new ideal to our 
 missionary life ; the vicariate of Walter Hook, the first 
 parish priest of his age, who gave a new ideal to our 
 pastoral lite. 
 
 And here let me give you a name yet nearer to 
 us here, in this Chapel built in living memory of 
 George Foivler, whose large view of life, whose gen- 
 erous sympathy with souls that are often out of touch 
 with the saints of God, and the strength he gave to 
 those who were agonizing in spiritual difficulties, made 
 him a life-giving link in the Apostolic Succession. 
 
 Is there any sign of exhaustion in ten thousand 
 times ten thousand links like these, the living rings 
 of our Apostolic Succession ? " Hath God forgotten 
 to be gracious?" or "Is the Lord's arm shortened?" 
 
 No, indeed, the grace of Holy Orders has 
 increased by use ; each true man in the great lineage 
 has added his personal gains of pastoral grace to the 
 first bequest ; each holy priest has daily drunk at 
 the fountain of Christ, and so become a living 
 channel to those who followed Him, Did He not
 
 15 
 
 promise us this growth of ministerial power when 
 He said, " The works that I do shall ye do also, 
 and greater works than these shall ye do ; because 
 I oro to the Father." 
 
 So now, it has come to you and me. We are 
 responsible for inheriting the yearly deepening and 
 ascension of life, all the bearing of others' burdens, and 
 the self-sacrifice of clergy, in whose souls the spirit 
 of Jesus has lived and grown from the first day 
 until now. On you and me have descended in 
 accumulated virtue the devotional and pastoral gifts 
 which Christ has added in every generation to those 
 who carry on His work. Can you think that 
 Theology and criticism — or discernment, as I would 
 call it — have grown till we have seen them grow 
 before our eyes, while the consequent adoration of 
 God and the teaching of men have remained stag- 
 nant ? To know Him better is to love Him more ; 
 and surely we know Him better, even Natural Science 
 has revealed Him, and Art has illustrated His nearness. 
 
 A regret arose in my heart as this morning I 
 missed the old altar, consecrated by the vows of you 
 and me, the altar Cross which I remember you giving, 
 and the old Oratory in our first house, the old Chapel 
 above the stable, in a rude simplicity that reminded 
 one of the stable of Bethlehem, where our Lord 
 came to us, and S. Jerome translated the Bible ; but 
 the second thought told me it was only a type of 
 our own Succession. The old die, and the new take 
 their place and are better.
 
 i6 
 
 Therefore, with the ApostoHc Succession always 
 behind us, as a long chain by which we draw the 
 water of life daily from the well of Christ, and 
 with the approach of the returning Christ before us, 
 perhaps only a little before us, " Let us go, that He 
 may preach." 
 
 As one of our British links of the Succession 
 used to pray : — * 
 
 " May the Power of God guide us, 
 
 "And the Might of God uphold us; 
 
 " May the Wisdom of God teach us, 
 
 " And the Word of God give us speech. 
 
 " Christ be with us, and within us ; 
 
 " Christ before and after us ; 
 
 " Christ on our right hand, and on our left ; 
 
 " Christ above and beneath us ; 
 
 " Christ in each heart that thinks of us ; 
 
 " Christ in each eye that sees us ; 
 
 *' Christ in each ear that hears us," 
 
 "From the " Lorica " of S. Patrick. 
 
 Richard Jackson, i6 & 17, Commekciai. Street, Leeds,
 
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