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 Brands plucked out of the Fire, 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PltEACHED BY 
 
 THE DEAN OF WESTMINSTER 
 
 RILFORK THE 
 
 CHURCH PENITENTIARY ASSOCIATION 
 
 AT ST. JAMES'S CHUliCH, PICCADILLY 
 
 THURSDAY, APRIL 22, 1858. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 PKINTED FOR THE ASSOCIATION BY 
 SPOTTISWOODE & CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE. 
 
 1858.
 
 8 ER M J^. 
 
 Zechakiah, iii. 2. 
 " Is not this a brand plucked out of the fire V 
 
 In nothing does the Church of Christ so plainly vindicate 
 her true character and mission, in nothing does she affirm so 
 clearly that she is a divine institution, and not a merely 
 human, as in bold assaults upon the kingdom of Satan ; 
 challenging the adversary on his own ground — not timidly 
 content if only she can shield and shelter from his malice and 
 his wiles those who have always continued with her, but 
 winning back from his dominion tliose whom for a while she 
 has lost, and he had won ; daring the strong man in his own 
 stronghold, and, in the strength of a Stronger yet, taking 
 from him his armour in which he trusted, and dividing his 
 goods. To the question, " Is the Lord among us or no? " the 
 true answer must be ever, not in word, but in deed. He is 
 among us, if we are doing mighty acts, which only can be 
 done through Him, through His ])resence, and in His power. 
 A character of daring will ever mark a Church in which the 
 Spirit of Christ effectually dwells. To go upon forlorn hopes, 
 to believe everything possible, — that mountains can become 
 plains, that lost can be found, and lame can walk, and lepers 
 be cleansed, that di*y bones can live, and brands half consumed 
 be plucked from the fire, that clods of earth may be trans- 
 muted into stars of heaven, that Sauls may be transformed 
 
 A2
 
 into Pauls, persecutors of the faith into preachers of the faith, 
 beggars taken out of the mire and set among princes, women 
 that 7oc're sinners be changed into women that shall be saints; 
 to believe all this, and to embody this belief in acts, in acts 
 of faith and love, " believing all things, hoping all things, 
 enduring all things," this is the true glory of the Church. 
 Thus, in such acts of holy daring, she avouches her conviction 
 that she indeed wields powers of the world to come, dispenses 
 sacraments of heaven, that His name whom she preaches, 
 through faith in His name, is able to make the weak strong, 
 and the sick whole, and the dead alive ; that as nothing is 
 impossible to Him, so nothing ought to be impossible to that 
 Church which represents Him, and carries on His work in the 
 world. 
 
 It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that out of every 
 revival of faith and love in the Church, there has risen up a 
 stronger and more earnest sympathy, a more inward bleeding 
 compassion than before, for those who, among the lost, seem 
 the mosi lost, the furthest removed of all from the healing- 
 powers of that Gospel, the most inextricably entangled of all 
 in the net of hell; I mean that unhappy class whose sins and 
 whose sorrows, whose guilt and whose misery, have brought 
 us together to-day. The Church has, indeed, always recog- 
 nised in some sort her duty to these; she can never forget 
 what her mission and commission is — even to seek and save 
 that which is lost. But she has recognised this duty faintly 
 and feebly in times past ; and even after all thnt has 
 been done during these last few years, for which we thank 
 God, it must be owned that she recognises it faintly and 
 feebly still. At the same time your presence here, the work 
 which many among you, with so many others absent from us 
 in body but not in spii'it to-day, are carrying forward through 
 the land, is a testimony that our duty in this matter is more 
 fully admitted than it has been ; and I shall not, therefore, 
 occupy your time in pressing upon you a task which you 
 have already undertaken, but suggest a few thoughts whereby 
 we may, if God shall bless the word, quicken, strengthen, 
 deepen in oui'selves, and it may be in others, a sense of the 
 obligation which lies upon us. Christian men and Christian 
 women, to do more than yet we have done for seeking those 
 strayed, and saving those lost. Nor shall I emit to suggest 
 some of the encouragements which we may find in this work. 
 
 First, then, let me observe, that to my mind nothing can 
 strike more strongly one who thoughtfully meditates on the 
 moral phenomena which society presents, than the \eyy dif- 

 
 ferent, the very unequal distribution of the penalties which 
 wait upon unchastity in one sex and the other — so far, at 
 least, as this present life is concerned. How lightly they 
 descend upon one sex ; how heavily, with what a crushing 
 weight, upon the other. He forgets the promise of his bap- 
 tism, namely, that he would flee from youthful lusts, that he 
 would yield his members instruments of righteousness unto 
 God. He forgets this; he yields them instruments of un- 
 righteousness unto sin ; and what is the penalty which he 
 pays? There may be, there surely Avill be, deep scars upon 
 his conscience ; wounds which, after long seeming closed, will 
 open afresh ; haunting memories of evil ; but I am not speaking 
 of these, nor yet of that day when all things done in the 
 body, all unrepented and therefore unforgivcn sins, shall 
 have to be answered in the body ; nor am I even speaking of 
 his position as it would be in the Church, supposing any 
 discipline were there exercised at all ; but, as matters now 
 stand, it is free to him at any moment, if only he will break 
 off these evil coui'ses, to have all which has been done for- 
 gotten by the world, a general act of oblivion past in regard 
 of it ; and his profligacy must have been very extreme and 
 very unusual indeed, if more is said about him than that he 
 was a little wild in time past, or if in any way his prospects 
 or permanent position in the esteem and good opinion of men 
 is affected by the sins which he has committed. 
 
 Thus is it with Itirn ; but how with her ? She too falls ; 
 but is the rising again so easy for her ? Alas ! no. The weak- 
 ness or guilt, and ah ! sometimes the ignorance, of a moment, 
 is the misery of a life. For her one might almost say, " ves- 
 tigia nulla retrorsum." What is condoned in him so easily, is 
 not condoned in her at all. There seems but one way hence- 
 forth before her, and that is the downward way, leading ever 
 further and further from God, nearer and nearer to the pit. 
 
 Now, my brethren, when I speak thus, I would not for an 
 instant imply that it is not most just that this sin of un- 
 cliastity should be visited with heavier penalties in the woman 
 than in the man, — with heavier penalties so far as this present 
 world is concerned. I believe that it is most just ; and when 
 some would account for this fact on the ground that it is man 
 who mainly forms the public opinion, and that he has unfairly 
 formed it in his own favour, this explanation, I am persuaded, 
 is as shallow as it is untrue. This heavier penalty is of God's 
 and not of man's ordaining. 
 
 It was He who gave to the woman the guardianship of the 
 
 A 3
 
 sanctities of the home, of the family life, of the inviolate 
 hearth. The mart, the forum, the altar, the unconquered 
 forest, the wild ocean, the stormy battle-field, these are man's. 
 But the homo, and the special guardianship of that virtue which 
 alone makes the home possible, this is the woman's. This 
 trust was committed to her charge ; the sceptre of this august 
 dominion was placed in her hands — a trust most glorious when 
 fulfilled ; most fearful, most terrible, when betrayed ; and as 
 the glory, the dignity, the blessedness of the fulfilment, so 
 the shame, the dishonour, the misery of the betrayal. We 
 express all this, when we call a woman's chastity her virtue. 
 It is a deep and true instinct which leads us to give it this 
 name. It is her virtue ; it is the centre, the moral citadel of 
 her whole life and being. And not man, but God, has said 
 that the sin of this virtue lost, should draw after it a direr 
 penalty for her than for him. 
 
 But with all this, the enormous disproportion between the 
 penalties of this sin of unchastity inthe one sex and in the other, 
 the very difierent balances in which these are weighed out, 
 cannot but strike us deeply ; it cannot but lay heavy bonds, 
 and impose strong obligations on that sex, whicli, so far as 
 this Avorld is concerned, has by so much the lighter portion 
 of the burden, though it has often the heavier portion of the 
 guilt. And these obligations, what are they ? They are 
 obligations to mitigate, so far as this is possible, the terrible 
 severity of the woman's punishment — that it may not reach 
 body and soul alike — that if fame and name and almost 
 everything which is the ornament of this present life are 
 gone, and so gone that only a few shattered fragments of 
 them can ever be recovered again, still that with these the 
 hope of heaven, of peace with God, of a place among his par- 
 doned ones, should not likewise disappear. 
 
 And these obligations to diminish, so far as this may be 
 done, the overwhelming severity of this doom, lie, as it seems 
 to me, upon all men, ought to be acknowledged and admitted 
 by all. Thus, there are those wlio, it may be under the 
 sheltering influences of a religious home, in the strength of 
 their baptismal grace, and of the daily increments of that grace 
 received thi-ough prayer ; those who, by the fear of God, and 
 by the love of God, have been kept in their youth from the 
 pollutions which are in the world through lust ; have passed 
 unscathed through those fires in which so msmy are scorched, 
 even though they be not quite consumed. Whatever blots 
 their youth may have had, it had not this, which for so many 
 is the darkest blot amono- all. Is there not here matter
 
 for them of everlasting thanksgiving ? May not this, that 
 they were thus kept (lor surely they will not say they kept 
 themselves), claim a thank-offering at their hands ? And 
 what shape should such a thank-offering more suitably assume 
 than that of some labour of love, some offering of gratitude 
 for the setting forward such purposes as those which this 
 Association has at heart? 
 
 Some again (it may be that such is here present to-day) 
 have helped in time past to swell the great tide of this iniquity 
 which is now rising like a flood around us ; alas ! it may be, 
 have helped to increase the ghastly company of those unhappy 
 and lost ones, who now people our streets, at once our danger, 
 our scandal, and our shame. Is there such among us this day ? 
 What amends, what reparation, can you make? None pro- 
 bably to her whom you have injured and wronged the most. She 
 has passed out of your sight, lost amid a miserable multitude, 
 having probably long since gone down to the chambers of 
 death by those steep stairs of infamy, and scorn, and shame, 
 which lead, for these wretched ones, so swiftly and inevitably 
 there; and you two shall never meet again till that day 
 when all shall meet, and among them the seducer and the 
 seduced, the tempter and the tempted, the deceiver and 
 the deceived, before the judgment seat of Christ. Does not 
 this, if this it be, call for something from you, something 
 very different from the ordinary contribution which good men 
 make to a good and desirable work ? Grant that you have 
 found the atonement through the blood of the Lamb — but 
 will you stop there? Have you found the atonement, if 
 you stop tiiere ? Surely if the other rendered his thank- 
 offering, will not you render your sin-offering, and seek, in the 
 largeness of this, to express the largeness and depth of your 
 repentance ? 
 
 Such are the motives of justice, which may fitly move us 
 to take an earnest share in this work of sustaining, enlarging, 
 and multiplying penitentiaries for fallen women. And yet 
 not motives for justice only may constrain us here, but of 
 love, of pity, of every motive which may fitly operate on a 
 Christian heart. Thus love to Christ may well constrain us. 
 Now love to Christ will show itself in imitating the mind 
 that was in Christ, in following the steps wherein Christ 
 walked. But the whole ministry of our blessed Lord and 
 Master was signalised by a peculiar tenderness for the lost in 
 tills kind. He who hated the sin as onl/the spotless and the 
 stainless one, as only the King of saints, the immaculate 
 Lamb of God, could ^o, showed everywhere his infinite pity
 
 8 
 
 and compassion for tlie sinner. Wherever there were the faintest 
 sjiarks of grace that might again be fanned into a flame. He 
 cherished and fostered them — quenched no smoking flax, 
 bruised no broken reed, bade the adulteress, uncondemned 
 for the present, and with time and space for repentance, to 
 go sin no more, cast the shield of his protection over another, 
 whom the cruel Pharisee would have spurned from his feet, 
 threw wide the gates of his kingdom, so that publicans and 
 harlots entered in, while proud pi'iests and self-righteous 
 Pharisees were excluded. Assuredly, then, the love of Christ, 
 if that love is at all constraining, will prompt us to take our 
 share in this toil. 
 
 And as this love of Christ, so also pity and compassion 
 may well prove motive powers. Surely if the measure of the 
 miseryof others ought to be the measureof our pity, those whom 
 we here desire to aid may claim an infinite pity at our hands. 
 There are some, indeed, who would fain persuade us that this 
 miserable life from which we would seek to deliver them, 
 saving them in fear, snatching them as brands from the fire, 
 is no such miserable life after all ; and we must most of us 
 have seen, and having seen, can scarcely forget, that evil letter 
 which, by some strange oversight and inconsistency, found its 
 way into our principal journal ; and which, professing to be 
 written by a prosperous member of this guilty company, but 
 betraying in every line the hand of a man, set forth at large, 
 and in attractive colours, the advantages which the occupation 
 offered, tlie opportunities for self-culture which it afforded, 
 the many virtues which it gave its votaries the room for dis- 
 playing. 
 
 Believe nothing of the kind; when you have believed the 
 worst which your imagination can devise of the wretchedness 
 and degradation which such a life must draw after it, be sure 
 that the picture which you have drawn, falls infinitely short 
 of the terrible reality. Oh ! if it were possible to look into 
 the heart of one of those unhappy ones whom w^e hurry past 
 in the streets with a momentary shudder, and then perhaps 
 think of no more, as we hasten to that sheltered liome, where 
 wife and daughter, and the happy innocent children, are 
 gathered round the holy hearth ; oh ! if we could look into 
 that bosom, what a revelation would be there ! What unut- 
 terable loathing of self ! what fierce indignation against others ! 
 what a dark empty heaven above ! what a dreary desolate 
 earth around ! what depths of despair within, deeper than 
 any plummet-line of our anguish has ever sounded ! what 
 gnawings that have already commenced of the undying worm !
 
 the present loathsome and hideous — the past more Jreadful 
 yet, for it shows like a Paradise forever lost, wherein she too 
 once walked in paths of innocence and peace, which she can 
 never walk in again — a Paradise lost and haunted, it may 
 be, by the memories of a mother's anguished love, of a father's 
 broken heart. Such the present and the past ; and for the 
 future, blackness of darkness in this life, — and beyond this life, 
 — but what need of another place of torment ? " Myself am 
 hell; " these awful words, which our great poet put into the 
 mouth of the chief among the fallen Spirits, and which 
 never could be perfectly/ true of any other, how very nearly 
 may they find their fulfilment in one and another of those lost 
 sisters whom we, sometimes without one pitying thought, 
 hurry past in our streets ! 
 
 And the outer of their lives, in its want and woe, its deso- 
 lation and wretchedness, is only too sure a reflex and counter- 
 part of the inner. Sooner or later the world turns round upon 
 all its votaries, upon all who have yielded themselves to its 
 service and the service of sin, rather than to the service of 
 God: sooner or later it rejects them with loathing, as the sea 
 rejects after a while the corpses which itself has swallowed 
 up. All servants of evil are sooner or later cast off by that 
 master whom they have served, but none so soon as these ; 
 in none is the degradation so rapid ; for none is the paint 
 and gilding upon the surface of a sinful life stripped off 
 so completely and so soon ; for none is the little honey at 
 the brim exchanged so quickly for the much gall in the cup ; 
 by none are the swine's husks so quickly reached ; for none is 
 the downward path so strangely swift, so terrible, or to such a 
 bottomless abyss of woe. It is calculated, by those who have 
 studied the matter, that the career of one of these unhappy 
 ones seldom is prolonged beyond three or four years at the 
 most ; that by this time, disease and exposure, and the canker 
 of a corroding misery within, with the vain attempt to dull 
 and deaden the anguish of this by stimulants from without, 
 will have done their work, and that in this brief period a 
 whole generation of these, the most unfitted of all to die, have 
 died, and another sinful generation succeeded in their room. 
 
 Seeing, then, that he, the murderer from the beginning, 
 is gathering in so fast his harvests of death, of death 
 natural and death eternal, it behoves those to be up and 
 doing, who could by any means save some, and gather 
 some into the garners of heaven. Nor is this endeavour 
 at all such a forlorn hope as I spoke of just now. Many 
 have been saved ; pulled out of the fire. Many more
 
 10 
 
 might have been saved, if there had been the love and faith 
 to make the attempt. Indeed, 1 know no sadder page in the 
 whole history of the Church's work in this direction, than 
 the fact that one of our chief Penitentiaries, during about 40 
 years of its existence, admitting 2747 applicants, was obliged 
 to reject, in other words, to bid return to their sinful courses, 
 nearly twice as many more. Oh ! let us not now by our 
 niggard charity shut the door of hope upon any. There is 
 much to be done. Experience has taught us that we need 
 two different kinds of foundations effectually to carry on this 
 work ; we need the Penitentiary, and the House of Kefuge : 
 the House of Refuge as near as possible to the very haunts 
 of sin, with its door always open, so that the happy moment 
 may be seized at once ; the blessed thought, " I will arise 
 and go to my Father," may at once embody itself in act; 
 and then behind this the Penitentiary, whither those that 
 have found temporary shelter in the Refuge, may be pre- 
 sently drafted off"; and where all that restorative discipline of 
 grace and healing which exists in Christ's Church may be 
 brought to bear upon their souls ; where too they may find 
 that which is above all price, even tlie free service of love, in 
 the devotion of Christian women, who count it their noblest 
 task to help in raising up the fallen, in restoring the true 
 womanhood in those their sisters, from whom it might have 
 seemed utterly, and for ever, trampled out and effaced. A 
 difficult task no doubt ; and yet, as all who have tried know, 
 neither a hopeless nor a thankless toil. Wondei-ful are tliose 
 restorative powers of which I reminded you but now. Who 
 is there that has had anything to do with these poor outcasts 
 but has marked how soon, when they have returned even but 
 a little to the ways of penitence and prayer, the very fashion 
 of their countenance has altered ; the signs of effrontery and 
 debauch, stamped so visibly there, which they brought with 
 them, have disappeared, and the true lineaments of the " human 
 face divine" have come forth again? And this outward change 
 is but the utterance and expression of an inward. For not in 
 old times only, but in our own as well, where sin has abounded, 
 grace has abounded much more. We do not merely read of the 
 Mary Magdalens, the Maries of Egypt, the Lavallieres, monu- 
 ments of the grace of God ; but we too see our tokens ; brands 
 plucked out of the fire ; wanderers brought home, given back 
 to themselves, to their friends, to their God ; yea, sometimes, 
 so wonderful are God's dealings in His Church, so free His 
 grace, those that had lain among the pots, to whom are given
 
 11 
 
 the wings of a dove, that is covered with silver wings, and 
 her feathers like gold. 
 
 To strengthen and encourage ourselves, and one another, 
 in this blessed work by common prayer ; by a word of ex- 
 hortation ; by oblations of a free heart ; above all, by fellow- 
 ship in the blessed Body and Blood of the Crucified for our 
 sins and the Risen again for our justification; it is for this that 
 we are assembled to-day. May He prosper the work of our 
 hands ! May His grace and spirit be with us now and for 
 evermore J 
 
 THE END.
 
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