PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 BX 5037 .H361 
 
 Hatch, Edwin, 1835-1889. 
 
 Memorials of Edwin Hatch 
 
 S/ie//. 
 
 Number 
 
Digitized by 
 
 tine Internet Arcliive 
 
 
 
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 https://arcliive.org/details/memorialsofedwinOOIiatc 
 
MEMORIALS OF EDWIN HATCH, 
 
MEMORIALS 
 
 OF 
 
 EDWIN HATCH, D.D., 
 
 SOMETIME READER IN ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN 
 UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, AND RECTOR OF PURLEIGH. 
 
 EDITED BY HIS BROTHER. 
 
 For me — to have made one soul 
 
 The better for my birth ; 
 To have added but one Jtower 
 
 To the garden of the earth ; 
 
 To have struck one blow for truth 
 
 In the daily fight with lies ; 
 To have done one deed of right 
 
 In the face of calumnies ; 
 
 To have sown in the souls oj men 
 
 One thought that wilt not die— 
 To have been a link in the chain of life : 
 
 Shall be immortality. 
 
 Edwin Hatch. 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 
 27, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 
Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 OT for the first time does the sad duty devolve 
 
 upon me of sending forth to the world some 
 memorials of a beloved brother suddenly called 
 away in the midst of ever-increasing work in the 
 Lord's vineyard. The circumstances under which my 
 younger brother's distinguished career was abruptly 
 closed are referred to at length in one of the Sermons 
 (XI.) in the present volume. And now, with touch- 
 ing coincidence, he who, twelve years ago, spoke so 
 pathetically of " a glorious light that had shone and 
 passed away," has himself, with hardly less sudden- 
 ness, been ushered into the eternal presence of the Sun 
 of Righteousness. Of such devoted fellow-workers, 
 "lovely and pleasant in their lives," and in their death 
 not long divided, it may assuredly be said, " Blessed 
 are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth : 
 yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their 
 labours ; for their works follow them." 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The Sermons are placed in chronological order, 
 extending over the whole period of my brother's 
 thirty years' ministry. They were delivered, as will 
 be seen, upon very varied occasions, and to widely 
 different classes of people. For if the preacher 
 seemed to breathe his native air most freely in the 
 University pulpit or in Westminster Abbey, it may 
 be said also of him, as was once said of his Master, 
 " The common people heard him gladly." Not the 
 least impressive Sermon is that, for example, which 
 was addressed, in simple language, to an agricul- 
 tural congregation on the Yorkshire moors {vide 
 Sermon VIII.) ; or another (XVI.) delivered to an 
 overflowing multitude of artizans in a manufac- 
 turing district. Indeed, his wonderful power of 
 adaptation may be accounted as one of my brother's 
 most remarkable gifts. Some of the Sermons have 
 already been printed in separate form ; but with 
 regard to the remainder it is scarcely necessary for 
 me to say that they were not written with the least 
 view to publication, and thus lack the keen revision 
 of the author's critical pen. 
 
 Although it is the intention of my lamented 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 brother's widow to publish his Life, for the compila- 
 tion of which there is happily abundant material, I 
 have felt constrained to include in this volume some 
 of the spontaneous tributes of affection and venera- 
 tion which have already appeared. 
 
 SAMUEL C. HATCH. 
 
 Clyde House, Blackheath, S.E. 
 Christmas Day, 1889. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES : 
 
 PAGE 
 
 "the times " . . . . . . . .XV 
 
 BISHOP OF ST. ALBANS ...... xvii 
 
 REV. W. W. JACKSON, M.A. (UNIVERSITY SERMON) . . Xviii 
 
 REV. PROFESSOR SANDAY, D.D. ..... xix 
 
 REV. PROFESSOR CHEYNE, D.D. . . . ' . . XXV 
 
 "CHRISTIAN world" . ..... xxxiii 
 
 REV. CANON DRIVER, D.D. ...... XXXV 
 
 REV. PRINCIPAL FAIRBAIRN, D.D. (MEMORIAL SERMON) . XXXvii 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 {Preached at Lciuisham, 1859.) 
 
 OVERCOMING THE WORLD ...... 3 
 
 "Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world.'' — 
 I John v. 4. 
 
 .SERMON II. 
 
 {Preached at Quebec Cathedral, 1864.) 
 
 THE STRENGTH OF CHRIST . . . . . -13 
 
 "My brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His 
 might." — Eph. vi. 10. 
 
X 
 
 CONTE.\TS. 
 
 SERMON III. 
 {Preached at Quebec Cathedral, 1865,) 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE RISEN SAVIOUR ....... 23 
 
 "Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, 
 but is risen."— Luke xxiv. 5. 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 {Preached at St. Mary's, Oxford, 1867.) 
 
 THE HEAVENLY AND THE EARTHLY CONFLICT 
 
 "There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought 
 against the dragon ; and the dragon fought and his angels, 
 and prevailed not ; neither was their place found any more 
 in heaven." — Rev. xii. 7, 8. 
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 {Preached before the University of Oxford, 1869.) 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR ...... 
 
 Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, 
 he sent two of his disciples, and said unto Him, Art Thou 
 He that should come, or do we look for another? Jesus 
 answered and said unto them, Go and show John again 
 those things which ye do hear and see : the blind receive 
 their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, 
 and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor 
 have the gospel preached to them." — Matt. .\i. 2-5. 
 
 SERMON VI. 
 {Preached at St. Chad s, Headiiigley, 1873.) 
 THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT . . . . 
 
 ' The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the 
 flesh : and these are contrary the one to the other, so that 
 ye cannot do the things that ye would."— Gal. v. 17. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON VII. 
 
 {Preached at Mertoii Chapel, Oxford, 1874.) 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ASCENSION . . . .69 
 
 " Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing 
 on the right hand of God."— Acts vii. 56. 
 
 SERMON VIII. 
 
 [Preached at Kirkby Overblow, 1875.) 
 SOWING AND REAPING ....... 79 
 
 " Verily I say unto you. They have their reward." — Matt. vi. 2. 
 
 SERMON IX. 
 
 {Preached at St. Mary's, Oxford, 1S76.) 
 
 THE PLACE OF CONTROVERSY IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE . 89 
 
 " In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor 
 uncircumcision, but a new creature." — Gal. vi. 15. 
 
 SERMON X. 
 
 (Preached at St. Mary's, Oxford, 1876.) 
 WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD . . . . -99 
 
 " Without God in the world." — Eph. ii. 12. 
 
 SERMON XI. 
 
 {Preached at Birchanger, 1877.) 
 THE GOD OF HOPE ....... I09 
 
 " The God of hope." — Rom. xv. 13. 
 
xii 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON XII. 
 {Preached at St. Mary's, Oxford, 1878.) 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE SUFFERINGS OF TH^: PRESENT TIME . . • I23 
 
 " I reckon that the sufferings of the present time are not worthy 
 to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in 
 us." — Rom. viii. 18. 
 
 SERMON XIII. 
 
 {Preached before the University of Oxford, 1879.) 
 
 HUMILITY 137 
 
 " Be not wise in your own conceits."— ROM. xii. 16. 
 
 SERMON XIV. 
 
 {Preached before the University of Oxford, 1881.) 
 
 DIVERSITY IN UNITY THE LAW OF SPIRITUAL LIFE . 1 63 
 
 "Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And 
 there are differences of administration, but the same Lord. 
 And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same 
 God which worketh all in all." — i Cor. .xii. 4-6. 
 
 SERMON XV. 
 {Preached at Westminster Abbey, 1882.) 
 THE MYSTERY OF LIFE . . . . . 181 
 
 "This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only 
 true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent." — 
 John .wii. 3. 
 
 SERMON XVI. 
 
 {Preached at Burley, Leeds, 1882.) 
 
 life's trading ........ 
 
 "Occupy till I come" [R.V., "Trade ye herewith till I come"]. 
 —Luke xi.x. 13. 
 
CONTENTS. xiii 
 
 SERMON XVII. 
 
 {Preached before the University of Oxford, 1883.) 
 HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY . . . . . • 213 
 
 " Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on 
 the things of others."— Phil. ii. 4. 
 
 SERMON XVIII. 
 
 (Preached before the University of Oxford, 1884.) 
 
 THE AIM OF CRIMINAL LAW 23 1 
 
 " Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth." — 
 I Cor. X. 24. 
 
 SERMON XIX. 
 {Preached at Barley, Leeds, 1884.) 
 THE EPIPHANY ...... 
 
 "The life was the light of men."— John i. 4. 
 
 SERMON XX. 
 
 {Preached at Westminster Abbey, 1 885.) 
 
 THE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY . . .253 
 
 ' ' O God, Thou art my God ; early will I seek Thee : my soul 
 thirsteth for Thee, my flesh longeth for Thee in a dry 
 and thirsty land, where no water is." — Psalm l.xiii. i. 
 
 SERMON XXI. 
 
 (Preached before the University of Oxford, 1885.) 
 
 INDIVIDUALISM AND ECCLESIASTICISM : THEIR COMMON 
 
 PLACE IN THE CHURCH OF CHRIST . . . 265 
 
 "Forasmuch as ye are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek that ye 
 may excel [R.V., abound] to the edifying of the Church." 
 — I Cor. xiv. 12. 
 
 243 
 
xiv 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON XXII. 
 {Preached before the University of Edinburgh, 1886.) 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHRISTIANITY IN ITS RELATIONS TO MODERN KNOWLEDGE 
 
 283 
 
 "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our 
 faith." — I John v. 4. 
 
 SERMON XXIII. 
 {Preached at St. Margaret's, Westminster, 1887.) 
 THE TRUTH OF TRUTHS ...... 299 
 
 ' ' God is love." — i John iv. 8. 
 
 SERMON XXIV. 
 
 {Preached before the University of Oxford, 1888.) 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME . . • 
 
 " Remember the days of old, consider the years of many gene- 
 rations : ask thy father, and he will shew thee ; thy elders 
 and they will tell thee, "— Deut. xxxii. 7. 
 
 SERMON XXV. 
 
 {Preached at Westminster Abbey, 1888.) 
 
 THE THREEFOLD BENEDICTION 327 
 
 " The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and 
 the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all.'' — 
 2 Cor. xiii, 14. 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES. 
 
 THE following obituary notice is from The Times, 
 the writer quoted in the concluding paragraphs 
 being, it is understood, the Master of Balliol : — 
 
 " We regret to announce the unexpected death of 
 Edwin Hatch, D.D., Rector of Purleigh, in Essex, and 
 during the last five years Reader in Ecclesiastical 
 History at Oxford. The sad event took place at 
 his residence in Oxford on the evening of Sunday, 
 November lOth, from a combined attack of pleurisy 
 and heart disease. Dr. Hatch was in the fifty-fifth year 
 of his age. He had been educated at King Edward's 
 School, Birmingham, and was afterwards a scholar of 
 Pembroke College, Oxford. He took a second class 
 in Classics in 1857, and obtained the EUerton Prize in 
 1858. After a residence in Canada as professor and 
 head of a College, he returned to Oxford in 1867 and 
 became the Vice-Principal of St. Mary Hall, a post 
 which he held until four years ago. At the time of 
 his death he was engaged on two unfinished works — 
 (1) the Hibbert Lectures for the Year 1888, of which the 
 subject was the connexion of Greek philosophy with 
 early Christianity ; (2) A Concordance to the Septuagint 
 — a work of stupendous labour, to which he devoted 
 the best years of his life. Of the first of these two 
 
THE TIMES." 
 
 works the greater part, and of the second several 
 sheets, are already in print. His other writings are 
 the Bampton Lectures, delivered in 1880, which have 
 received the singular honour of being translated into 
 German by his friend Professor Harnack ; and a volume 
 of essays on Biblical Greek, published at the beginning 
 of this year. He was also the author of innumerable 
 articles in reviews, magazines, and dictionaries. A few 
 months ago he gave an address by request to the 
 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. A dis- 
 tinguished resident member of the University writes : — 
 " ' Dr. Hatch was a man of great force of mind and 
 of great learning. In the days of his youth he had 
 had to make a brave struggle for education and in- 
 dependence. The effect of this never altogether left 
 him, and strengthened his character. It was wonderful 
 how he found time to accumulate his stores of know- 
 ledge ; for during the greater part of the day he was 
 engaged in teaching, and his literary work was done 
 between whiles in a life which was never free from 
 interruptions. No one ever carried on original re- 
 searches under more discouraging circumstances. Yet 
 he was a thinker as well as a reader, and was very 
 accurate. He was also a most pleasant companion, 
 being very ready to talk on his own subjects as well 
 as on the interests of the day. The power of his 
 memory was very striking in conversation. He brought 
 into the University many new topics, on which he threw 
 a light by the clearness of his mind. There was, too, 
 a great kindness and humanity about him, especially 
 shown towards persons who had met with misfortune 
 partly through their own fault. 
 
BISHOP OF ST. ALBANS. 
 
 xvii 
 
 " ' For many years his talents were, perhaps, not 
 appreciated by the University so much as they deserved 
 to be, but he never complained of this, or attributed his 
 want of success to anyone but himself. He never gave 
 a thought to the question how his writings might affect 
 his chances of preferment in the Church. Upon that 
 subject he had no illusions, nor did he feel any soreness 
 about it. He recognized gratefully the kindness and 
 consideration with which he had been received by the 
 Bishop of his diocese. He was a lover of the truth, 
 and would have thought it a rich reward of his studies 
 and of his life if he could have dissipated some of the 
 clouds which darkened ecclesiastical history. 
 
 " ' To his friends, to the University, to theology, his 
 death is a loss which cannot be easily replaced. No 
 Englishman of the present generation has given greater 
 promise of becoming a distinguished theologian. There 
 is always something pathetic in an eminent man being 
 taken away at the time when he is beginning to gather 
 the fruits of his labours. His library, his unfinished 
 manuscripts, his various collections remain ; but the 
 spirit which animated them is fled. His place is vacant, 
 and the work which he commenced has to be completed 
 by another. He who would take it up and continue 
 it in the same spirit must read ecclesiastical history 
 anew, without any prejudice or colour of opinion, in 
 the " dry light " of the most ancient documents.' " 
 
 The venerable Bishop of St. Albans, Dr. Hatch's 
 diocesan, writes : — 
 
 " His great abilities and his singular modesty always 
 struck me very forcibly. And there was a great charm 
 
xvlii 
 
 REV. W. IV. JACKSON, M.A. 
 
 in his n-.anner and in his smile. It grieves me now 
 that I saw so httle of him when he was so near a 
 neighbour ; but we were both of us, in our different 
 ways, constantly occupied. We lived apart, but there 
 was a link between us — a link which death cannot 
 sever." 
 
 At the close of his sermon before the University of 
 Oxford, the Rev. W. W. Jackson, M.A., Rector of 
 Exeter College, said : — 
 
 " Here this sermon should have ended ; but since it 
 was written a calamity has befallen us to which I 
 cannot but refer. Dr. Edwin Hatch has been removed 
 by death after a brief illness, when it seemed that the 
 brightest and most fruitful period of his career still lay 
 before him. The indefatigable worker is at rest. The 
 pen has dropped from the busy hand ; the active brain 
 is still. It is hard even now to realise that his life's 
 work has all come to an end. I will not speak as a 
 friend might be allowed to speak of a friend. Nor is 
 this the time, if I had the power, to estimate the value 
 of his contributions to theology. But every one here 
 can have only one feeling of sorrow for the loss which 
 his death has inflicted on theological learning in Oxford 
 and in England. His example has done much to 
 stimulate and to recommend the dispassionate study of 
 facts, without which theology, like all other sciences, is 
 but a sickly plant. His conclusions would not have been 
 considered even by himself as more than stepping- 
 stones. Many persons dissented from them ; but every 
 one must admire the pains and candour he showed in 
 arriving at them. His unquestioned mastery of the 
 
REV. PROFESSOR SAND AY, D.D. xix 
 
 field which he had made his own, and his wide and 
 accurate acquaintance with other branches of theology, 
 enforced attention. He deserved a hearing because he 
 never acquiesced in anything less than the best and 
 most exact knowledge attainable. His was the same 
 spirit as that of our great living divine, and commen- 
 tator on S. Paul, the acknowledged leader of theological 
 learning in England. Surely this spirit must ultimately 
 prevail. Everything short of the truth must vanish 
 away. Systems in which facts are suppressed and 
 distorted have their day. But they are in their nature 
 transient. Truth alone can ultimately endure, and only 
 in the truth is final agreement possible. May there 
 never be wanting a succession of English theologians 
 who, with no blinding prepossessions, shall set them- 
 selves to learn the will of God as it is revealed in the 
 facts of history, of literature, of human nature, and the 
 constitution of the world ! If the unwearied industry 
 and devotion of the friend whom we lament shall help 
 others to realise the high ideal of a student's duty after 
 which he strove himself, then he will not have lived in 
 vain." 
 
 The following In Memoriam article, from the pen of 
 the Rev. Professor Sanday, D.D., is contributed to 
 the Guardian : — 
 
 " Few names could drop out of the roll of Oxford 
 scholars and leave so wide a gap as that of Dr. Hatch. 
 I doubt if any Enghsh theologian, not even excepting 
 the great Cambridge group, was so well known or so 
 highly thought of abroad. Yet the strong attraction 
 which his work possessed for Continental scholars was 
 
REV. PROFESSOR SAND AY, D.D. 
 
 not due to any foreign proclivities in its author. He 
 knew and appreciated what was done on the Continent, 
 but he was himself essentially English both in the 
 character of his mind and in method. I have never 
 known any one who went through life with such large 
 ideas cherished without wavering through evil report 
 and good report. For years he worked on almost in 
 solitude. He was independent— some might think, to 
 a fault. Whatever subject he took in hand he must 
 needs build up from the very foundations for himself. 
 There were few conclusions which he was content to 
 take at second hand. He worked on strictly inductive 
 lines. His first step was to collect an immense 
 quantity of data. Those who knew him chiefly by the 
 Bampton Lectures, with all their compactness and self- 
 restraint, would have but an imperfect idea of what 
 those masses of data were. A better impression of 
 them might be obtained from some of the remarkable 
 articles, ' Holy Orders,' ' Ordination,' ' Parish,' ' Priest,' 
 in the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities. The 
 subject of the Bamptons was only one of many on 
 which he was engaged. Gradually his stores were 
 being completed, and he was beginning to draw to- 
 gether the threads of a number of intricate and widely 
 separated enquiries. Rarely has any one possessed 
 the power of doing this in equal degree. Dr. Hatch 
 was not one of those learned men who are overweighted 
 with their learning. His was emphatically an archi- 
 tectonic mind, which could sketch in broad bold lines the 
 salient features of his subject. And the filling in was 
 a model of lucidity and precision. With him neither 
 was the whole sacrificed to the parts nor the parts to 
 
J^EV. PROFESSOR SAND AY, D.D. xxi 
 
 the whole. It is long since we have had a writer so 
 nervous and masculine. The more quiet it was, the 
 less occasion there was for rhetoric, the more did the 
 massive proportions of his style appear. I doubt if it 
 was ever seen to better advantage than in the little 
 volume on Mediceval Institutions, and in the Essays on 
 Biblical Greek. 
 
 " The subjects to which Dr. Hatch had paid special 
 attention fall into five or six groups: — (l) The history 
 of Christian institutions ; (2) in connection with this 
 the rise of canon law ; (3) the history of Christian 
 worship as expressed in the early Liturgies ; (4) the 
 philology and lexicography of Biblical Greek ; (5) as a 
 side inquiry springing out of this the history of philo- 
 sophical terms, especially in the Stoics and Philo ; (6) 
 on a larger scale the history of ideas and practice at 
 certain marked epochs, such as the first three Christian 
 centuries and the Carlovingian Reformation. 
 
 "The first of these groups is perhaps that with 
 which Dr. Hatch's fame is most commonly associated ; 
 it is represented by the articles m the Dictionary 0/ 
 Christian Antiquities, by the Bampton Lectures, and by 
 the volume on the Growth of Church Institutions, which 
 was intended to be the precursor of a much larger and 
 fuller treatment. Both these latter works received the 
 somewhat unusual honour of translation into German 
 — an honour which acquired additional significance 
 from the fact that the translator, Dr. Harnack, was 
 himself an ardent student of the same periods and 
 subjects. Another eminent scholar, the veteran Dr. 
 Weizsacker, wrote in terms of warm praise of the 
 Bampton Lectures ; and, indeed, both books met with 
 
xxii REV. PROFESSOR SANDAY, D.D. 
 
 general recognition in Germany. Dr. Hatch had hoped 
 to return to the subject of the Bamptons, but did not 
 wish to do so until he could deal with it in a compre- 
 hensive way. 
 
 " Much of his material was derived from a close 
 study of the ecclesiastical canons. He had worked 
 elaborate^ at the canons of the early councils, not 
 only in their Greek texts, but in the various Latin 
 versions. He often utilised his too brief and hurried 
 excursions to the Continent to examine MSS. of these. 
 
 " Another study which he had prosecuted with equal 
 diligence was that of the early Liturgies. These, again, 
 were approached by the same comparative method, and 
 the eye of the critical historian was quick to note changes 
 and phases of growth and development. Whether 
 the materials left on these heads are in a state that 
 might possibly admit of publication is more than I can 
 say. I fear that the hand and the knowledge of the 
 author would be too greatly missed. 
 
 " In regard to Biblical Greek happily much has been 
 saved. The great Concordance to the LXX. is so nearly 
 launched, and its plan must be by this time so fully 
 matured, that there is every reason to hope for its 
 successful completion, and the Essays published this 
 year contain at least a gleaning of general results. It 
 would be a mistake to look upon these essaj's as pro- 
 fessing to be in any way exhaustive. They were rather 
 a contribution to the study of materials gathered at first 
 hand. For many years I know that Dr. Hatch had 
 contemplated a philological commentary on the Gospels, 
 which would have been full of original matter. This too, 
 I rather think, was to have been taken up in the near 
 
REV. PROFESSOR SAND AY, D.D. xxii. 
 
 future ; but I do not know whether anything had been 
 completed. 
 
 " In his search for illustrative matter Dr. Hatch had 
 turned with special interest to the Stoic and Philonian 
 philosophies. These attracted him also for their own 
 sakes. There was a strong philosophic bent in his 
 mind, and he had all a philosopher's grasp and pre- 
 cision in the handling of ideas. 
 
 " It is probable that the collections made in this 
 direction will have been largely used in the recent 
 Hibbert Lectures. I was, unfortunately, myself dis- 
 abled when these were being delivered, and heard only 
 one of the latest of them. The subject was extremely 
 large and difficult, and weakened health had, I fear, 
 interfered rather seriously with the final revision which 
 the lectures were undergoing. 
 
 " These lectures will show what Dr. Hatch under- 
 stood by history. With him it was no mere surface- 
 study. He was always penetrating to causes, and to 
 the larger movements which lay behind the ebb and 
 flow of events. His range of historical knowledge was 
 extraordinary. There was no period with which he 
 had not a very considerable familiarity — a familiarity 
 always marked by the same philosophic breadth of 
 view. These gifts naturally made him an excellent 
 examiner — always clear, always definite, always going to 
 the heart of his subject, and covering well its different 
 aspects. In this respect, as in all others, he will be 
 very greatly missed. He took a deep interest in the 
 working of the Theological School, and his colleagues 
 know how much he did to raise and improve it. In 
 the recent revision, and to some extent reconstruction. 
 
xxiv REV. PROFESSOR SAN DAY, D.D. 
 
 of the subjects for examination his was the moving 
 spirit. 
 
 " When it is remembered that in addition to all this 
 he bore on his shoulders the work of a large and dis- 
 tant parish, that his duties as secretary to the Boards 
 of Faculties and as editor of the University Gazelle took 
 up nearly the whole of his afternoons, that there was 
 hardly a subject of public importance, whether political, 
 economical, social, or moral, that did not interest him, 
 we shall not wonder, however much we may lament, 
 that a constitution not naturally strong broke down 
 beneath the strain. 
 
 " Dr. Hatch was what would be called self-reliant by 
 nature. He could not divest himself of the conscious- 
 ness of strength. A!l he did bore the impress of a 
 powerful individuality. And he had thought so much 
 and so long upon the subjects on which he expressed 
 himself that he did not pay much regard to criticisms 
 which he knew had no such weight behind them. But 
 he was perfectly ready to admit well-founded correc- 
 tions ; and he had too firm a faith in the advance of 
 science to expect things to remain just where he had 
 left them. We, too, may recognise this without under- 
 valuing his own contributions to the advance. Few 
 men whose period of production was cut short so 
 abruptly have made greater. 
 
 "Although the occasion of controversy, Dr. Hatch 
 was not himself a controversialist. The Bampton 
 Lectures were sharply criticised, but to the best of my 
 recollection he made but one rather indirect reply. 
 Neither in public nor in private did he show any 
 impatience. He seemed to be prepared to find himself 
 
REV. PROFESSOR CHEYNE, D.D. 
 
 XXV 
 
 misunderstood, and content to let the injustice right 
 itself. He was singularly free from pettiness of every 
 kind. No personal considerations ever interfered with 
 his desire for truth. Of late the isolation in which he 
 had at one time worked seemed passing away. He 
 was encouraged by the marks of high regard which 
 reached him both from far and near. And I know how 
 much he was touched by little signs of friendliness and 
 consideration in those who did not see eye to eye with 
 him. The gathering round his grave on Friday last 
 showed how deep and real this sympathy was, and 
 how widely it was shared by men of every shade of 
 opinion. Dr. Hatch was not one of those who can 
 work only in the sunshine ; but the sunshine came or 
 was coming. Slowly, but surely, he was winning his 
 way to the place which was his due ; and it is a 
 pathetic consolation to think that his last days were 
 spent in hopeful looking forward to the years which 
 have been denied him." 
 
 The Rev. T. K. Cheyne, D.D., Oriel Professor of the 
 Interpretation of Holy Scripture, writes in the Oxford 
 Magazine : — 
 
 "There was a special sadness in the regret which 
 brought so many together in Holywell Cemetery last 
 Friday afternoon. The blow fell so suddenly that, till 
 we were summoned to pay the last tribute of respect, 
 we could hardly believe that Edwin Hatch was no 
 longer working among us. We had ventured to hope 
 that the high-minded patience which had forborne to 
 pluck the fruits of study before they were ripe was to 
 issue in other and still nobler monuments of learning 
 
xxvi REV. PROFESSOR CHEYNE, D.D. 
 
 than those of which we were so justly proud. That 
 the restless worker ' might cease to be before his pen 
 had glean'd his teeming brain ' none of us ever thought. 
 Ranke's fair lot was no doubt exceptional, but Hatch 
 was only just fifty-four, and we knew how much there 
 was maturing in that ample intellect. It was only six 
 years ago that he was appointed a University Reader, 
 and we saw him beginning to found a school of students, 
 trained in critical methods, of whom yet greater things 
 might be hoped. Those who have attended Hatch's 
 Lectures on Church History testify with one voice to 
 their stimulating character, and to the singular intel- 
 lectual power which they displayed. What a grasp of 
 history ! What a unique power of connecting and 
 comparing ill-understood phenomena ! What an eye for 
 the gradual growth of institutions, and for the Church- 
 historical significance of inscriptions, of the canons in 
 all their changing forms, of codes of laws and capitu- 
 laries, of the minutest contemporary records ! Hatch's 
 introductory lecture, printed in 1885, called forth from 
 Professor Harnack the expression of the earnest wish 
 that the succeeding lectures might in time be given to 
 the public. One may hope that even now the wish 
 may, to some extent, be gratified. The lectures on the 
 Canons and on the Carlovingian Period have produced 
 such an impression on the hearers that if there be any 
 corrected notes of them they can scarcely be withheld. 
 Hatch certainly meant to publish something more 
 elaborate on the growth of Church institutions than 
 the lectures (popular, bat bristling with facts and 
 inferences) published on this subject in 1887. 
 
 " The story of Hatch's fife is simple but pathetic. 
 
REV. PROFESSOR CHEYNE, D.D. xxvii 
 
 He was born at Derby, September 4th, 1835, and was 
 educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, which 
 has also produced our two leading exegetes (Bishop 
 Lightfoot and Canon Westcott), and the present scho- 
 larly Archbishop of Canterbury. He graduated in 1857 
 (second class, Lit. Hum.), gained the Ellerton, and 
 was ordained in 1858 ; was from 1859 to 1866 Pro- 
 fessor of Classics in Trinity College, Toronto, and 
 Rector of the High School, Quebec, and from 1867 to 
 1885 Vice-Principal of St. Mary Hall. In 1883, from 
 a genuine love of pastoral work, shown long since 
 when he preached as a young man in the open air in 
 East London, he accepted the not very lucrative living 
 of Purleigh in Essex, where he chiefly spent his 
 vacations. In 1880 he became Bampton and also 
 Grinfield Lecturer, and in 1888 delivered the Hibbert 
 Lectures in London and in Oxford. How much be- 
 sides he did officially, all Oxford knows. And what 
 follows from these facts ? That Hatch had no easy life, 
 and that his stores of learning were acquired in the 
 intervals of hard tutorial and other official work. One 
 feels his removal the more acutely because of the 
 unusual though to us quite intelligible slowness of his 
 development. With so much routine work he could 
 not step forward with the rapidity of some scholars, 
 whose peer he may well be accounted. But in some 
 ways Hatch doubtless gained by his long waiting time. 
 He acquired a wide practical experience, a clearness 
 of vision, and (if the phrase may be allowed) a certain 
 cautious boldness which the recluse scholar does not 
 often possess. When he was ready, and not before, 
 he seized the great opportunity presented by the 
 
xxviii 
 
 Bampton Lectureship. The lectures of 1880 revealed 
 a new scholar to the theological world in general, 
 though students of the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities 
 (1876- 1 880) must have appreciated the vast knowledge 
 and critical judgment of the series of articles signed 
 with the initials ' E. W! It was the results of these 
 articles which formed the basis of the Lectures, the 
 subject of which was ' The Organisation of the Early 
 Christian Churches.' We all remember the storm that 
 greeted this remarkable work, which has done so much 
 to stimulate Church-historical studies, but for a time 
 seemed to be more appreciated in Germany than in 
 England. 
 
 "How far was the Lecturer himself responsible for 
 the opposition which he encountered ? Was he too 
 dogmatic — too self-confident — too regardless of the 
 labours of other Church historians? It has been some- 
 times thought so. And yet, one may now ask. Could 
 Hatch have spoken otherwise than he did ? It was his 
 fortune to approach his subject from an entirely new 
 side, and apply a method which had till then only 
 been applied to secular history. He was an eager and 
 enthusiastic researcher, and was almost as much fas- 
 cinated by the inscriptions of the Roman Empire as 
 that eminent explorer of Asia Minor who was for a 
 time lent to Oxford ; and if even one so free from 
 theological colour as Professor Ramsay, after expound- 
 ing the bearings of the inscriptions on early Church 
 History to the excellent Cambridge Church Society, 
 could not escape the charge of being ' unsympathetic ' 
 (see the Guardian), who can be surprised that a 
 theologian in the robes of an archaeological professor 
 
xxix 
 
 was overwhelmed with even worse accusations ? Hatch 
 might of course have paused on every page to limit and 
 qualify his assertions by some remark adapted to minds 
 slower and less many-sided than his own. But could 
 this great master of style have so injured the effect- 
 iveness of his work ? Could this pioneer be expected 
 to realise the difficulties of those who followed him ? 
 Naturally Hatch felt the sting of some of the charges 
 brought against him, and, naturally too perhaps, did not 
 always avoid sharp words. But the bitterness on both 
 sides was, one may think, only temporary. Generosity 
 is not extinct among theologians, and a recent work on 
 the Christian Ministry proves that Hatch's contributions 
 (for which he never claimed finality) are not only 
 highly valued, but drawn upon by one of the most 
 competent on the side opposed to his own. 
 
 " The opinion entertained of Hatch not only by the 
 northern theologians who conferred upon him a D.D. 
 degree, but by German scholars such as Harnack and 
 Weizsacker, is by this time well known. But a pas- 
 sage from a private letter written by the former to the 
 writer of this sketch may be quoted, without his 
 permission indeed, but with a full sense that its publi- 
 cation will meet with his approval. 
 
 " ' I loved and respected Hatch. I saw in his activity 
 the future of Church historical studies in England ; and 
 in his learning that of England's great old theologians 
 Ussher and Pearson lived to me again. I have never 
 found a Church historian whose judgment 1 so much 
 trusted as his, and never have I met with a fellow- 
 worker whose ways of looking at things harmonised so 
 much with my own. Although our course of develop- 
 
XXX REV. PROFESSOR CHEYNE, D.D. 
 
 ment was as different as the lands in which we dwelt, 
 the circle of our interests, our method, and our goal 
 were the same. When we spoke together of early 
 Church History, our thoughts met with wonderful 
 regularity in all the chief points. It seldom happened 
 that we were of a different opinion ; and when this did 
 occur, we were soon at one again. In conversation I 
 saw myself helped forward in the best manner, without 
 being compelled to give up my independently won 
 conviction. He was a great writer. Few books have 
 been written so masterly as his Lectures. But above 
 all, he was a glorious man, whose loss I shall never 
 cease to mourn.' 
 
 " We might well stop here. But Hatch did the 
 work of several men, and who will chide the writer 
 for claiming a little further space? These Church- 
 historical writings are not the only monuments of this 
 great scholar. 
 
 " It would be wrong to pass over the remarkable 
 exposition of the Pauline theology in the new edition 
 of the Encyclopedia Britannica (art. " Paul "). Many 
 may differ from the author's apparent critical pre- 
 suppositions, or be disappointed at the brevity with 
 which very important ideas are necessarily treated, 
 but the candid and exact style of the work cannot fail 
 greatly to impress the reader. Perhaps indeed it was 
 rash to enter on a field which he could not hope at 
 present thoroughly to break up. But no such criticism 
 can be passed on his next literary engagement. His 
 appointment as Grinfield Lecturer in 1880 enabled him 
 to utilise a mass of researches which he had made in 
 later Greek in general, and that of the Bible in parti- 
 
REV. PROFESSOR CHEYNE, D.D. xxxi 
 
 cular. The substance of his lectures was pubhshed in 
 the present year under the title Essays in Biblical Greek. 
 Future students of the Septuagint, whose interest may 
 lie in the revision of the text, and especially in the cha- 
 racter of the language, have now a specimen of the work 
 they have to do. The book is almost all equally original, 
 though at one point his way lies parallel to that of the 
 brilliant Gustav Bickell. Simultaneously with these 
 lectures. Hatch was deeply engaged on a Concordance 
 to the Septuagint, undertaken by the Clarendon Press, 
 and delighted in this opportunity of drawing out the 
 scholarly gifts of his juniors. Of this great work but 
 few sheets are unhappily yet in type, but it may be 
 expected that those who worked under him will be 
 able to complete the task in his own thorough manner 
 and upon his own well-thought-out principles. 
 
 "Dr. Hatch's practical services to the University 
 were, however, ungrudgingly rendered and most 
 efficient. Nor can one say less of his labours as a 
 college tutor; he was undeniably a first-rate teacher, 
 and as kind as he was able. And surely no praise 
 can be too high of his work in connexion with the 
 Theological School. As an examiner he spared no 
 pains to find out exactly what each candidate knew, 
 and he was ever ready to judge a man upon the best 
 side. His remarkable width of knowledge made him 
 a tower of strength to his fellow-examiners. He be- 
 lieved moreover in theological study, when rightly 
 pursued, as a liberal training for the mind. His efforts 
 to make Oxford theology more thorough and critical 
 were unceasing, and yet his willingness to co-operate 
 with not less zealous but perhaps more cautious 
 
xxxii REV. PROFESSOR CHEYNE, D.D. 
 
 colleagues was equally conspicuous. In fact, it was 
 clear that his character mellowed as time went on, 
 and his native gentleness and generosity took an ever 
 greater range. He felt most kindly towards those 
 who differed from him. He knew too that behind all 
 intellectual differences there were precious truths 
 common to him and to them. He was no cold 
 anatomist of ecclesiastical organisms, but underneath 
 the critic there was the Christian and the Churchman. 
 He saw with distress ' the growing and inevitable 
 sadness of our time' (see Essay on Religions Progress 
 in a well-known Jubilee volume), but he trusted in 
 the future with a chastened Christian optimism. In 
 his own way he was indeed a strong Churchman. No 
 one can doubt this who reads the concluding pages of 
 his sermon on ' Individualism and Ecclesiasticism,' * 
 one sentence of which (see p. 280, on ' Ephraim and 
 Judah') is strangely parallel to the striking close of 
 his speech at the opening of Mansfield ; t or who has 
 noticed his warm sympathy with all organised Christian 
 efforts for the elevation of the poor. And even judging 
 him as a critic, ought one to overlook the passages of 
 restrained but fervent Christian eloquence in his famous 
 Lectures, or the beautiful concluding paragraph in his 
 inaugural lecture as a Reader, where he says that 
 though criticism of Church history cannot be barred, 
 yet ' we must tread our path with reverence and 
 sympathy,' for ' the facts which we have to learn are 
 facts about that which is in a special sense Divine 
 within us.' Yes ; he was not only a critic but a 
 
 * Sermon XXI. in the present volume. f ^'de p. xxxiv. 
 
"THE CHRISTIAN WORLD." 
 
 xxxiii 
 
 Churchman ; not only a Churchman but one who had 
 a deep inner life of his own. He was no ' light half- 
 believer of our casual creeds.' A sad event in his 
 family history had brought very near to him the un- 
 certainty of life, and the Christian view of God was a' 
 necessity of his existence." 
 
 The Christian World alludes especially to Dr. Hatch's 
 association with the opening of Mansfield College — his 
 last public appearance : — 
 
 " Oxford is beneath the shadow of a great and 
 irreparable loss. On Sunday evening there passed 
 away to ' where beyond these voices there is peace ' 
 the University Reader in Ecclesiastical History, Dr. 
 Edwin Hatch. Free Churchmen, both in England and 
 in the larger world without, have long regarded Dr. 
 Hatch as one of their best and most sympathetic friends. 
 His wide experience of life, his marvellously profound 
 insight into the past history of religion, and his life- 
 long struggle for a wider freedom of thought and of 
 faith within this ancient University which he loved so 
 well, and thereby within the Anglican Church, to which 
 his allegiance was always most dutiful, had taught him 
 to recognise how much good there was without the 
 pale of his own Church, and how absolutely essential 
 to the true well-being of rehgion was the existence of 
 the Free Churches. His position was indeed unique, 
 and was never acceptable to a large proportion of his 
 fellow-Churchmen. As a leading Broad Churchman in 
 Oxford, and also as a leader among academic Liberals, 
 he fought a hard and strenuous battle during the days 
 of change and reform. Few men suffered more for the 
 
xxxiv 
 
 "THE CHRISTIAN WORLD." 
 
 cause of progress and freedom. And now death has 
 taken him just as the day was dawning and the fair 
 fruits of victory were beginning to ripen. No one 
 rejoiced more in the advent of Mansfield College than 
 Dr. Hatch. It meant to him, perhaps, far more than 
 to any other old Oxford resident. At length he saw 
 a chance of a true and scientific school of Theology 
 springing up in the University. At the last lecture 
 which he ever gave he probably had a larger audience 
 than he had ever before seen at one of his ordinary 
 classes. Almost twenty Mansfield men were present. 
 Those who were privileged to hear his last public 
 speech at the breakfast to representative guests in 
 Mansfield Mall (October 1 6th) will not soon forget his 
 wise and kindly words. 
 
 " ' You are rendering,' lie said at the end of his brief 
 speech, 'a service to the Church of England, and I 
 believe to the University, by helping it to fulfil its 
 ideal. The ideal of the Christian Church in its largest 
 sense is the ideal which I find, not only in the New 
 Testament, but also in the Old. It is the ideal of a 
 vast community in which Judah shall not swallow 
 Ephraim nor Ephraim Judah, but Judah and Ephraim 
 shall live side by side, each working out its common 
 purpose, but in which Judah no longer vexes Ephraim 
 nor Ephraim Judah. In coming here you are helping 
 the Church of England to do its work by doing yours, 
 showing how it is possible in actual practice and in 
 close local contiguity to realise by working together 
 in a conmion spirit that which is the New Testament 
 ideal — one Lord, one faith, one baptism.' 
 
 " These words were most truly characteristic of the 
 
XXXV 
 
 man. Born in the year 1835, Dr. Hatch led a Hfe full of 
 activity and hard labour. He was originally a member 
 of Pembroke College, and his first labours after gradu- 
 ating and taking orders were among the poor of the 
 East-end of London. Although duty called him into 
 a very different sphere before long, yet his old affection 
 for work among the poor of large cities never died out. 
 He took great interest in all modern movements for 
 the help of the poor, and frequently in later years 
 showed the utmost personal interest in the West 
 London Mission and its leader, Mr. Hugh Price Hughes, 
 several times appearing on the platform of St. James's 
 Hall on Sunday afternoons." 
 
 The Rev. Canon Driver, D.D., Regius Professor of 
 Hebrew, contributes an elaborate article to the Classical 
 Review, the concluding paragraphs of which are as 
 follow : — 
 
 " Dr. Hatch's Bampton Lectures have shared, with 
 those of Dr. Liddon, the singular honour of having 
 been deemed worthy of translation into Germaii. It is 
 an additional testimony to the high qualities which 
 they exhibit that the translation was the work of one 
 of the most distinguished of German Professors of 
 Ecclesiastical History, Professor Harnack, who in an 
 introduction prefixed to his translation has explained 
 the grounds which induced him to undertake it, viz. 
 (stated briefly) their comprehensive and lucid exposi- 
 tion of the subject with which they deal. There may 
 be aspects of the subject which Dr. Hatch has not 
 made sufficiently prominent, as there may also be ele- 
 ments of the evidence which he has under-estimated 
 
xxxvi REV. CANON DRIVER, D D. 
 
 but his principal opponent — a thoroughly courteous 
 and honourable opponent — the Rev. C. Gore, while 
 criticising his work on these grounds, cheerfully recog- 
 nizes {vide The Church and the Ministry, 1889, p. vii.) 
 the great value of the historical materials collected by 
 Dr. Hatch, both in this and in his other writings. In 
 Church History he was intimately acquainted with the 
 mediaeval not less than with the ancient period ; and in 
 his capacity of Reader in Ecclesiastical History lectured 
 frequently on the Canon Law. 
 
 " Dr. Hatch took a warm and active interest in 
 University matters. That practical ends were not 
 undervalued by him may be judged from the Students' 
 Handbook to the University and Colleges of Oxford, a 
 manual of information for the guidance of students, 
 which was compiled by him originally in 1873, and has 
 since passed through several editions. As a colleague, 
 whether on a Board of Studies or a Committee, or as 
 an Examiner, his knowledge of the subject in hand, 
 and his clear sense of the issue involved, rendered his 
 criticism and advice very valuable. The high ideal 
 which he set to himself, he sought to impress upon the 
 studies of the Unversity : while he was lenient and 
 considerate towards those men — always the majority 
 in a University — whose talents were few, he held that 
 a high standard of excellence should be exacted of 
 those who had the ability requisite to attain it. He 
 strove especially to raise the level and improve the 
 quality of theological study in the University. Quite 
 recently some substantial improvements in the course 
 of study prescribed for the Theological School, sug- 
 gested by his recent experience as an examiner, had 
 
J^EV. PRINCIPAL FAIRBAIRN, D.D. xxxvii 
 
 been introduced through his instrumentaHty ; and upon 
 the last occasion on which the Board appointed to 
 regulate these studies had the benefit of his counsel 
 he was still anxiously at work promoting the same end. 
 
 " In character Dr. Hatch was amiable, patient, dis- 
 interested, and scrupulously just ; no disappointment 
 or academical defeat ever left its mark upon his temper. 
 His life was dedicated to the cause of learning — to its 
 advancement by himself, to its encouragement in others ; 
 and these ends he pursued with unremitting energy and 
 perseverance. English scholarship could not have lost 
 a brighter example, nor English theology a worthier, a 
 more earnest, or an abler representative." 
 
 At a memorial service held in the Chapel of Mansfield 
 College, the Principal, the Rev. Dr. Fairbairn, founding 
 his discourse on Gen. iv. 9, Psalm xxiii. 4, and 2 Tim. 
 iv. 7, thus feelingly alluded to the loss of his colleague 
 and friend : — 
 
 "This College has lost a steadfast friend, the Uni- 
 versity an illustrious son and teacher, the Church of 
 England a faithful minister, the cause of learning and 
 historical research an eminent master, while the im- 
 palpable, yet all too real, things we name truth, freedom, 
 progress, brotherhood, have to mourn the fall of a 
 foremost man and trusted leader. This is not the 
 place where men ought easily to be praised ; yet we 
 owe him too much to leave our obligations unacknow- 
 ledged. When God bestows a great gift on His Church 
 we do well to be gratified; when His Church loses a 
 gifted son, will He chide us if we mourn ? 
 
 " There was something to our human weakness 
 
xxxviii KEV. PRINCIPAL FAIRBAIRN, D.D. 
 
 Strangely pathetic in the death of our friend. Here was 
 a man of strong capabilities, possessed of immense 
 resources, of treasures accumulated through years of 
 strenuous yet silent toil, as eager as he was competent 
 for work, taken away just as what seemed to him his 
 hour and his opportunity had come. Life had not been 
 to him an easy or a gentle thing : what men call prefer- 
 ment or patronage did not seek him out or smile upon 
 him, or do anything to make his way agreeable. He 
 had to endure hardness, and he endured it as became 
 a Christian man. With the true scholar's enthusiasm, 
 which many waters cannot quench, he laboured at his 
 great subject in moments saved from between the hours 
 of tutorial drudgery, at once earning the means of 
 living and accumulating stores of learning that he 
 might the better serve the truth he loved. After the 
 years of patient acquisitive toil and slow ripening came 
 the all too brief harvest, the season when his pen 
 moved swiftly and scholars gathered round him to 
 learn his method, examine his results, at once test and 
 trace the process by which they were reached. When 
 his Bampton lecture appeared it was hailed by Con- 
 tinental scholars as a work of sober and serious science, 
 and as a sign that Oxford was losing its provincial 
 temper and insular mind, and becoming in its religious 
 studies Catholic in spirit and historical in method. 
 Indeed, I would say that his method was his great 
 contribution to modern knowledge. Nothing could 
 have been more rigorous or exact : it was throughout 
 comparative and historical. He studied all the con- 
 temporary factors of progress and change, and measured 
 at once the rate of progress and the degree of change 
 
REV. PRINCIPAL FAIRBAIRN, D.D. xxxix 
 
 by bringing at each successive point the later face to 
 face with the earlier forms of doctrine, polity, and 
 worship. His method was based on the law of develop- 
 ment, was indeed but the scientific study of this law 
 in its working and in its results. To him the churches 
 were so many stupendous organisms living and grow- 
 ing within their respective environments, and his 
 problem was to discover the conditions under which, 
 and the forces through which, the largest and the most 
 complex of these organisms had come to life. Develop- 
 ment was not to him what it was to Newman, the 
 multiplication of dogmata, in order to the preservation 
 of a dogma or a process of aggregation justified as a 
 thing logically necessary to a given result, but it was 
 a living growth, a process of life, that could be known 
 only by observation, by watching the interplay of 
 organism and environment, the action of the Church 
 upon its historical conditions, the reaction of the condi- 
 tions upon the Church ; as a consequence it became pos- 
 sible to show how the immense and highly-articulated 
 system men call Catholicism had been built up, and 
 at once to explain and appraise it by the exhibition 
 of the forces that made it and the process through 
 which it had become. It could be granted to no man 
 to do the whole work, but abiding gratitude is due to 
 the master who showed how best the method could be 
 used and what things it could achieve. 
 
 " Yet the method and what it enabled him to accom- 
 plish was not the most remarkable feature of his work ; 
 more remarkable was the large idea of history that 
 underlay it, the large conception of the Church and 
 kingdom of Jesus Christ that gave it purpose and 
 
xl 
 
 REV. PRINCIPAL FAIRBAIRN, D.D. 
 
 meaning. He never fell into what would have been 
 a tremendous mistake, identifying the Church whose 
 organisation he traced with the kingdom of God. 
 Catholicism and the Catholic Church were to him not 
 likes but opposites. But he was so intent in using his 
 method to work out his results that he often failed to 
 make explicit the qualifying ideas present to his own 
 mind, and it .is the function of the critic to assume that 
 ideas not made explicit are ideas absent or denied. He 
 strongly believed that the Church of Christ was as 
 broad as Christian men, pious and godly men, con- 
 sciously saved and visibly blest of God were of the 
 society of the redeemed members of Christ's body, 
 citizens of the City of God ; and the polity that denied 
 this of any could be no true polity, or in any sense or 
 respect essential to the Church. To him there was no 
 heresy so great as to say that a man whose very being 
 was a living witness to a present and indwelling Christ 
 was, because his conscience bade him stand outside 
 a given ecclesiastical organisation, therefore outside 
 Christ's visible Church, or even without the fullest 
 communion of the saints and fellowship of the Spirit. 
 The man who says there is no Church speaks falsely, 
 but not so falsely as the man who says. There is no 
 Church but mine. And our late friend patiently 
 worked to show how many forces that were of the 
 earth, how many influences from the ancient world, its 
 customs, thought, usages, institutions, ideas, and ideals 
 had contributed to form the constitution, system, order, 
 and orders of the society that called itself the Catholic 
 Church. But he did not labour to show this for its 
 own sake, or as a curious point in the national history 
 
REV. PRINCIPAL FAIRBAIRN, D.D. xli 
 
 of ecclesiastical institutions ; it was to set free the 
 larger, the more gracious and catholic idea of a Church 
 that included all the holy, and was rigorous in exclud- 
 ing only the evil and the bad. 
 
 " But enough of the work ; it does not become me to 
 speak here in Oxford of the services he rendered to the 
 University. Other and more competent men will do 
 that ; but of one thing I may speak — the great desire, 
 nay the ambition he had to make the Theological 
 School a school worthy of theology. He loved theology, 
 thought it more than any other academic study needed 
 trained faculty, believed that it should be the last of 
 all schools to become a refuge for the intellectually 
 necessitous, or a mere gateway to profession and place. 
 And so he wished to see it raised to where it ought to 
 stand, at the head of all our academic culture, the 
 school for which the humanities and history only could 
 prepare. The day is not yet come when this ideal can 
 be realised, but realised it must be if theology is to live. 
 Permit only a word or two as to the man. It is not 
 easy to speak here with just frankness, yet becoming 
 reserve, of a man we have learned to love. Yet if I 
 had not loved him I could not have dared to speak of 
 him here. With what he seemed on the pubUc arena 
 we are not concerned ; with what he was as a man and 
 a friend we are. He could be, and often was, swift 
 and sharp in speech, but nothing more marked him 
 than the gentle and even generous way he judged the 
 men to whom he was opposed. He was a devout and 
 reverent man ; indeed, I have known few things more 
 touching than the simple devoutness of some of his 
 spontaneous family prayers. He did not love an 
 
xlii REV. PRINCIPAL FAIRBAIRN, D.D. 
 
 academic or cloistered religion ; he was anxious that 
 men who were being trained in religious knowledge 
 should be exercised in religious service. He followed 
 with keenest sympathy and approval the efforts to 
 reach the lapsed, to rescue the fallen, to apply the 
 healing touch and ameliorative spirit of religion to our 
 social diseases and depravities. Nor are these judg- 
 ments simply mine ; a friend, a learned and capable 
 teacher of men, who had heard him described as hard, 
 unspiritual, negative, a mere comparative anatomist of 
 bodies ecclesiastical, came to know him, to stay in the 
 same house with him, and to see him under the most 
 searching hghts that can fall upon the spirit and 
 character of a man, now writes to me : 'I cannot tell 
 you what a gratification it is to me that 1 thus knew 
 and had learned to value him. I had previously no 
 right conception of his honesty and truth and earnest- 
 ness, or of that kind gentleness which softened all. I 
 shall now treasure his memory as a sacred trust, and 
 hope that it may help me to try to be more like him.' 
 So he became to men that saw him face to face ; to 
 men who looked from a distance he was the scholar, 
 the historical student, the teacher, the man whose 
 methods and conclusions men of large repute had 
 disapproved ; but to men who knew him from within 
 he was a veracious, high-minded, tender-hearted friend, 
 wise in counsel, candid in speech, helping the man that 
 trusted him to bear his burden and do his work in the 
 world. His loss has impoverished our present, but 
 has enriched our past with happy memories and our 
 future with sacred hopes. Our dead is buried from 
 our sight, but he lives to our faith, and we see him as 
 
xliii 
 
 he dwells in the bosom of his God, looking a loving 
 benediction to the friends of his earthly home. Fare- 
 well, loved brother ; we can speak of thee in words 
 that are thine own, wrung from the heart of thy 
 sorrows when thou hadst to mourn a loved lost brother 
 of thy flesh, but also of thy spirit : — 
 
 " 'We lived the earthly life as one, 
 The happy years were spent 
 In perfectness of sympathy 
 And mutual content. 
 
 " ' We thought one thought, we prayed one prayer, 
 We dreamed one dream of life. 
 And struggled upwards on one road 
 Of spiritual strife. 
 
 " ' Then came the sudden sundering. 
 Body from spirit torn ; 
 I lived awhile but half my life, 
 Maimed, widowed, and forlorn. 
 
 " ' 'Twas only that my soul's dim sense 
 Was all too blind to see 
 That Death is Life — and did but bring 
 His spirit nearer me. 
 
 " ' For when within God's House I stand 
 Too sad for worshipping. 
 My angel-brother sings for me 
 The songs I cannot sing. 
 
 " ' And when in lone untravelled ways 
 My heart is cold with care. 
 He frames the words I cannot frame 
 In utterance of prayer. 
 
 " ' And God, Who knows our fellowship, 
 Hears in the House of Love 
 A single voice from separate souls. 
 One here, and one above.'" 
 
SERMON I. 
 OVERCOMING THE WORLD. 
 
SERMON I. 
 
 OVERCOMING THE WORLD. 
 \_Lewishai)i, 1859.] 
 "Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world." — I John v. 4. 
 
 IT would be impossible to sum up in nobler words 
 the lesson of this Easter season. 
 On Good Friday, we seemed to be, with the Apostles 
 and with the Master of the Apostles, in the extreme of 
 anguish and desolation. The very darkest hour of his- 
 tory had come. The struggle of a Divine Life seemed 
 to have ended in defeat. The dream of a regenerated 
 society seemed to have vanished away. 
 
 And on Easter Day there came the sudden cry : 
 " The Lord is risen ! " What had seemed the crisis 
 of defeat was changed into the crisis of victory. The 
 darkest hour of the world's night was the hour before 
 dawn. 
 
 Good Friday and Easter Day are the parable of 
 history. Their story has been repeated again and 
 again. The lesson which they teach is universally 
 true. Not only the First Begotten of the Father, who 
 struggled and overcame at Jerusalem, but at all times 
 and in all places, in the wide sphere of human society 
 
4 OVERCOMING THE WORLD. 
 
 and in the narrower sphere of the individual soul, 
 " Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world." 
 
 What is the world ? In the Apostle's time it meant, 
 no doubt, the whole mass of human society, with the 
 exception of the handfuls here and there of those who 
 had embraced the Christian faith. The line of separ- 
 ation between the Christian and the non-Christian 
 elements of society could be readily and sharply drawn. 
 But it is not so now. The Church has leavened the 
 world ; the world has leavened the Church. The non- 
 Christian element of society is no longer a distinct and 
 definable aggregation of men. The world exists, but 
 it is, so to speak, no longer visible and separable. Its 
 existence is as real, but its form is vaguer. It is the 
 sum of the many forces, principles, and tendencies 
 which oppose and counteract the progress of the spirit 
 and the spiritual. It exists not only among us, but in 
 us. It is all that part of each one of us which gives a 
 more or less active resistance to growth in goodness, 
 in knowledge, and in sympathy ; the sum of the 
 influences of fashion, and prejudice, and selfishness : 
 " the lust of the flesh, the lust of the ej'es, and the 
 pride of life." 
 
 In antithesis and antagonism to this, now as then, 
 in both society and the individual, is that which " is 
 born of God." And this, too, is hardly definable. For 
 wherever good works, God works: and that which is 
 born of Him gathers up into itself all the spiritual 
 forces which lead towards holiness, all the mental forces 
 which lead towards truth, all the gathered mass of 
 
5 
 
 organisations and woricings, of symbols and practices, 
 of liopes and foreshadowings, which came forth from 
 God and go back to Him. For all this the Apostle has 
 one comprehensive expression, " our faith." For him, 
 as for us, Christianity was the latest born of God's 
 children; it summed up all that is divine in man. 
 Between this and the world, between Christianity and 
 the society which surrounded it, he implies a continual 
 conflict, and he prophesies a certain victory. 
 
 The prophecy seemed a hazardous one. The con- 
 flict was apparently the most unequal that could be 
 imagined. On the one side were the few Christians* 
 broken up even in those early days by internal dissen- 
 sions ; on the other side was not only the very people 
 in the midst of whom Christianity had arisen, but 
 the vast organisation of the Roman Empire. Nation 
 after nation had been crushed ; and who were these 
 few religious devotees that they should venture the 
 prophecy of their victory ? 
 
 And yet the prophecy was true. The faith which 
 the Apostles preached, and which we profess, is the 
 greatest power in human society. It has not annihilated 
 its enemies. It has not made a wilderness, and called 
 it peace. It has not rid its hosts of traitors and idlers 
 and the crowd of camp-followers. It is still doing 
 battle. But for all that, it has overcome, and is still 
 overcoming. 
 
 There are two elements of it which seem to be espe- 
 cially victorious, and they are the same two elements 
 which seem more than any others to approach to the 
 
6 
 
 OVERCOMING THE WORLD. 
 
 conception "whatsoever is born of God." Ttie one is 
 the spirit of love, which is the Christian law of the 
 social life ; the other is the spirit of truth, which is 
 the Christian law of the intellectual life. 
 
 1. The ideal of society which the New Testament 
 sets before us, is a society in which men shall do from 
 mutual respect what they have hitherto done upon 
 compulsion. It is a republic of unselfishness. It is 
 a community in which the love of one's neighbour 
 takes the place of, and supersedes the necessity of, 
 the positive enactments, "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou 
 shalt not covet." 
 
 From this ideal we are still far removed, and yet we 
 seem to be nearer, to it than our fathers were a thousand 
 years ago. There is a greater desire to relieve the 
 burdens of the afflicted and the poor, an increasing 
 effort to reform the criminal, a growing admission of 
 the possible variety of human beliefs, a lessening 
 disposition to settle all international disputes by the 
 terrible decision of war, a growth of the mutual respect 
 which is the parent of liberty — for the mutual respect of 
 each for each means the common liberty of all. 
 
 The growth of this is a growth of Christian influence, 
 and of the Christian temper : it is a victory of " our 
 faith," for it is the victory of Christian love. 
 
 2. In the intellectual life Christianity is the spirit of 
 truth. Nothing that is true is alien to it. Hypocrisy, 
 falsehood, insincerity, are its extreme opposites. It is 
 the spirit which not merely acquiesces in what is true, 
 but finds it out. It is the spirit of investigation. It 
 
OVERCOMING THE WORLD. 
 
 7 
 
 wages a constant war against ignorance and prejudice, 
 and unproved assertion — against the tenacious clinging 
 to the old as old, the unreasoning dislike to the new as 
 new. And in this war it is succeeding. There is a 
 lessening tendency to acquiesce in what is false, a 
 growing tendency to find out what is true. Men are 
 beginning to regard facts rather than opinions, the 
 things that are rather than the things that are imagined. 
 New tracks are being opened up, and every step of the 
 old tracks is being re-surveyed. This spirit of investi- 
 gation is the spirit of Christianity. There are, no 
 doubt, unbelievers in the manifoldness of the works 
 and ways of God, who take every discovery as a fresh 
 rebuff, who would put chains upon the feet of every 
 traveller into the domain of science or of history, lest 
 his report of what is to be found there should be 
 different from their own or other men's dreams. But 
 the number of such timorous doubters is lessening : 
 the number of behevers in truth is increasing. 
 
 It may be that the particular opinions which we 
 prize will not be the doctrines that will prevail. It 
 may be that what is born of God excludes much that 
 we hold sacred, and includes much that we think pro- 
 fane. It may be, that in the wreck and overthrow of 
 the false, many things will be swept away which we 
 would gladly keep, and many things be kept which 
 we would gladly sweep away. 
 
 But the truth will overcome : and every fresh truth 
 that is established is a fresh vindication of the spirit 
 of Christianity, which is the spirit of truth. And is 
 
8 
 
 OVERCOMING THE WORLD. 
 
 there one among us so enamoured of himself as to 
 prefer that the phantoms of his own brain should live, . 
 and that truth itself should die ? 
 
 But for you and me, brethren, in our own secret souls 
 these words of to-day's Epistle have a more particular 
 comfort and consolation. For there is not one world 
 only, but many. The larger world of which I have 
 been speaking has its separate and special reflection in 
 each individual soul. To some of us the world is the 
 vast -complex of insoluble riddles which force their way 
 into our souls, and demand an answer which we cannot 
 give, and keep us in a perpetual unrest. To some of 
 us the world is an accumulation of vexation upon vexa- 
 tion, of thwarted desires, and unsatisfied aspirations, 
 and the cutting off of cherished hopes, and the failure 
 to realise the ideal which we set before us. To some 
 of us the world is the dead weight of apathy, of disin- 
 clination to exertion, of morbid feelings, of the influence 
 of custom and fashion and popular prejudice, which 
 retards spiritual movement and stunts spiritual growth. 
 Every one of us has his own special world within him 
 and about him : but every one of us, so long as there is 
 in him the faintest whisper of conscience, the faintest 
 aspiration after better things, has both within him and 
 about him that which " is born of God." Between 
 these two there is a perpetual and irrepressible conflict. 
 It is natural for us sometimes to despair. It is natural 
 for us sometimes even to doubt the presence, or the 
 power, or the providence of God. For the world 
 
OVERCOMING THE WORLD. 
 
 9 
 
 must have its victories. But unless we voluntarily 
 submit to defeat, it cannot be victorious at the last. 
 Our faces may be bruised and bleeding, our shields 
 battered and dinted in the fight ; for we are not told 
 that " whatsoever is born of God " will escape conflict ; 
 but we are told, and it is the crown of all consolations, 
 that " whatsoever is born of God " shall overcome. 
 
SERMON II. 
 
 THE STRENGTH OF CHRIST. 
 
SERMON II. 
 
 THE STRENGTH OF CHRIST. 
 
 [Quebec Cathedra/, 1864.] 
 
 "My brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His 
 might." — Eph. vi. 10. 
 
 THE religious doubts which are so strongly marked 
 on modern literature, and which I know, brethren, 
 are shared by some of you, may be grouped in two 
 classes, intellectual and moral, each of which has two 
 degrees, according as the doubt affects religion in 
 general or the Christian religion in particular. 
 
 1. There is, firstly, tiie deepest of all doubts, the 
 doubt whether God and the soul exist, whether the 
 visible world upon which our eyes look may not be the 
 sum total of reality, and whether the material organism 
 which the anatomist dissects may not comprehend in 
 itself all that we are and can be. 
 
 2. There is, secondly, the doubt not as to religion in 
 general but as to Christianity in particular. There are 
 men who, believing in God and the soul, in the order 
 of Providence and the life to come, are not convinced 
 that Christianity stands on any other footing than 
 natural religion. Admitting the moral government of 
 
14 
 
 THE STRENGTH OF CHRIST. 
 
 the world, they doubt the doctrine of God's special 
 intervention and the consequent possibility of a reve- 
 lation ; admitting human imperfection, they doubt the 
 doctrine of the Fall and the consequent necessity of 
 the Atonement ; admitting our Lord's historical reality, 
 they doubt the miraculous clement in His life and 
 consequently His divinity. 
 
 These are the two stages of intellectual doubt : the 
 other kind is moral, and it likewise has two degrees. 
 
 1. There are some who doubt not the facts of religion 
 but its utihty. Admitting that if religion increased the 
 sum of human happiness it would, whether true or not, 
 be useful, they doubt whether the world has been or is 
 likely to be on the whole the better for it. They hold 
 that the belief in a future life supplies a false motive 
 for conduct, and that the result of the belief in even 
 the moral government of God has been a terrorism 
 which has retarded human progress. 
 
 2. There are others who doubt not the general 
 utility of religion but the special utility of Christianity. 
 They doubt whether it has supplied any motive to 
 right conduct which the promptings of human nature 
 could not of themselves have afforded, or whether it 
 contains any valid moral precept which had not been 
 previously stated by, or could not be legitimately 
 inferred from, either Greek philosophy or Jewish 
 mysticism. 
 
 I do not include in this analysis of the forms of 
 doubt those workings of a diseased mental or moral 
 nature which show themselves in scoffing ridicule of 
 
THE STRENGTH OF CHRIST. 15 
 
 truth, and seek in doubt a refuge from conscience : I 
 speak only of the honest doubts of thoughtful men, 
 because it is these only that we have to face. Nor do 
 I propose this morning to give all the answers that 
 might be given to any one of these forms of doubt. 
 But I propose to draw your attention to the practical 
 answer which the Epistle for to-day suggests to doubters 
 of every degree, and particularly to those who question 
 the special utility of the faith which we profess, and 
 which this is the proper place to vindicate. 
 
 The Apostle bids us " be strong in the Lord and in 
 the power of His might." 
 
 This reminds us that in the Gospel we have at any 
 rate a new poivcr. Whether we can or cannot demon- 
 strate metaphysically the antecedent possibility of 
 miracles, whether we can or cannot prove historically 
 the fact of the resurrection, whether it be true or not 
 that Christianity contains no new moral precept, this 
 one fact remains — incontrovertible, and on any other 
 hypothesis inexplicable, — that Christianity has been 
 and is a moral power, that it has changed and is 
 changing the moral tone of the human race, and that, 
 in spite of the apathy and inconsistency of many of 
 those who bear the Christian name, it gives a new 
 motive to the doing of our duty, and supplies the lack- 
 ing energy to our weak and struggling souls. 
 
 In answer to intellectual doubt I would say,' Analyse 
 as you will the historical facts connected with the life 
 of Christ and the first propagation of the Gospel ; 
 reduce them, if you will, to so much fact and so much 
 
THE STRENGTH OF CHRIST. 
 
 fiction, so much objective reality and so much sub- 
 jective impression ; still there remains, above and 
 beyond all this, the fact that Christianity has succeeded 
 where philosophy failed, that it has done the very 
 thing which no other creed ever could do, — that it 
 has given a new impetus to moral progress, a new 
 life to every believing soul. 
 
 In answer to moral doubt I would say, Dissect as 
 you will the ethical system of the New Testament ; 
 refer, if you will, this precept to the Alexandrian 
 school and that to the Rabbis ; show the analogy, if 
 you will, between this or that truth of Christianity 
 and tiiis or that truth of Stoicism ; still you must 
 allow that there is in the Christian faith the missing 
 link of the chain which binds man to dut}', that it 
 gives a power not only to the few but to the many, 
 where all other systems had at their utmost height 
 only strengthened the moral resolutions of individual 
 philosophers. 
 
 This is the fact to be accounted for. The most 
 searching analysis only proves that, whereas God 
 taught men in many ways what they ought to do, it 
 was the special mission of His Blessed Son to give 
 them the power to do it. 
 
 But let us not think of this as a mere general pro- 
 position : the exhortation of the Apostle is a personal 
 one, and as such we should take it to ourselves. For 
 strength is the common want of every one of us : we 
 want not the knowledge of our duty but the power to 
 do it. We all know more or less the bitter struggle 
 
s 
 
 THE STRENGTH OF CHRIST. 
 
 17 
 
 between impulse and conviction ; we have all been 
 tempted — we are tempted every day — to give up what 
 we know to be right for what we feel to be pleasant ; 
 we struggle, some of us, to resist, and we find our 
 struggles in vain ; we set out in the morning with the 
 full intention to do what is right, and we find before 
 the day is half over that we have preferred the interest 
 of the moment to known and undoubted duty ; we 
 would fain fear God and keep His commandments, but 
 we find it so hard as to be virtually impossible to dis- 
 entangle ourselves from the intricate ties which bind 
 us to common modes of action, or to resist the accu- 
 mulating influences which lead us to accept current 
 maxims of morality. But the remedy lies within our 
 reach. The Apostle, writing as one who had felt all 
 this as strongly as we can feel it, bids us "be strong 
 in the Lord." It would have been a mockery to have 
 said simply, "Be strong." It is the expression of the 
 deepest thought and the most varied experience to say, 
 " Be strong in the Lord." The strength by which we 
 are to live must be not ours but Christ's : it will come 
 to us not from the human nature which we inherit at 
 our birth, but from the Divine nature which His Spirit 
 breathes upon us. 
 
 And what do I mean by strength ? I mean the 
 power to do right when we know it : to give up what 
 will be of most immediate advantage for the sake of 
 the inner voice which speaks to us of duty ; to avoid 
 tampering with evil suggestions ; to be able to resist 
 the ever-recurring tendency of the old Adam to angry, 
 
 2 
 
i8 
 
 THE STRENGTH OF CHRIST. 
 
 selfish, cowardly, indolent, uncharitable actions. It is 
 to do all this in the faith and by the promised power 
 of Him who lived and died and is present with us still 
 — perfect God and perfect man — the highest type of 
 human excellence and the highest source of moral 
 power. 
 
 Nor let us think merely of strength on the grand 
 scale for some great act of moral heroism. That which 
 we want, and that which our Master gives us, is 
 strength for our common life — strength to do our 
 ordinary duties — strength not only for the pitched 
 battles which some of us have, now and again, to fight, 
 but strength also, and most especially, foi the daily 
 conflicts with evil, the skirmishes, so to speak, 
 between the advanced outposts of evil and good, where 
 they meet so closely as to seem not so much enemies 
 as friends. It is the strength of a new motive ; it is 
 given to us by One who is not only a perfect Example, 
 but an ever-present Guide. For He who in those far- 
 off ages trod the Judaean hills is with us still. He is 
 with us not only as a memory of the past, but as a 
 living influence. He who helped men in their common 
 life long ago helps us still. The mere memory of 
 Him would have done much for us. The bare record 
 of His Ufe, the story of His unflinching devotion to 
 duty, of His boundless charity, of His unsullied purity, 
 would of itself have suggested high and new motives. 
 The fact that the idea of humanity had once been 
 realized would of itself have been an encouragement 
 and a support to us in our efforts to do better. But 
 
THE STRENGTH OF CHRIST. 19 
 
 the Strength which we may have is something far 
 higher. It is the strength of One who is ever present 
 by His Spirit — who being very God is not far from 
 every one of us, who being very Man can penetrate the 
 deep recesses of our hearts and know at once their 
 aspirations and their needs. It is the strength not 
 of an imaginary picture of perfection, but of a Divine 
 Redeemer. It is a strength which, if once we make 
 it our own, will grow with our growth, be sufficient for 
 every need of life, and be a rod which will turn into 
 dry land for us the dark river of death. 
 
 If any one of you, brethren, has been hitherto tempted 
 to throw the blame of his wrong-doings and short- 
 comings upon his weakness, let him remember that the 
 fault is his own : the weakest among us may become 
 strong if only he will put on the promised armour of 
 God. And if any one of you has been hitherto a 
 sceptic as to the moral power of the Gospel to overcome 
 his individual difficulties and to support him in his 
 peculiar dangers, let him remember that this simple 
 exhortation contains all that he can need — that for 
 every difficulty and every doubt, every suggestion of a 
 selfish heart, every prompting of evil passion, every 
 hesitation about duty, every tampering with sin, there 
 is one remedy, and that Divine, — he may, if he will, be 
 strong " in the Lord and in the power of His might." 
 
SERMON III. 
 THE RISEN SA VIOUR. 
 
SERMON III. 
 
 THE RISEN SAVIOUR. 
 \_Qitebec Cathedral, Easter Day, 1865.] 
 
 " Why seek ye the living among the dead ? He is not here, but is 
 risen." — St. Luke xxiv. 5. 
 
 THE Sabbath of the great Festival was over: the 
 solemnities of the Temple had not abated their 
 magnificence : the paschal lamb had been slain and 
 eaten in ten thousand Jewish homes : the gathered 
 multitudes from every country under heaven had shared 
 in the festivity as they had done in years gone by, and 
 as they hoped to do in years to come. The day before 
 three men had been crucified. It was no uncommon 
 incident. Two of them were notorious bandits, the 
 third a Teacher, who had claimed a special mission from 
 heaven, but who had at last been condemned by the 
 Sanhedrim for blasphemy, and executed by the Roman 
 governor on a vague charge of treason. His followers, 
 of whom but few had survived His apparent fall, were 
 mourning over His death. They had " trusted that it 
 had been He which should have redeemed Israel," — 
 that the power which had recalled the dead to life, and 
 sent the unclean spirits back to their abyss, would have 
 
24 
 
 THE RISEN SA VIOUR. 
 
 brought legions of angels with swords of flame to drive 
 away the Roman eagles from the chosen land. But 
 the grave which had closed over Abraham and David 
 and the Prophets had received Jesus of Nazareth. 
 The hopes of Israel were buried with Him in the tomb. 
 Nothing now was left but to remember His precious 
 words, and to pay to what remained of Him the last 
 sad tribute of affection. 
 
 " Very early in the morning," while the darkness 
 still lingered in the ravines around, and the top of 
 Olivet alone reflected the rising of the Easter sun, 
 came the women who had followed Him from Galilee 
 to embalm the Sacred Body, wliich the tender care of 
 Joseph had wrapped in the winding-sheet and laid 
 in the new-made tomb. But they "knew not the 
 Scriptures, nor the power of God." They had come 
 to seek what was far away. "And as they were much 
 perplexed thereabout, behold two men stood by them 
 in shining garments, and as they were afraid, and 
 bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto 
 them, Why seek j'e the living among the dead ? 
 He is not here, but is risen." 
 
 "Which things are" — not a fact only but — "an 
 allegory." Not in that grey dawn alone, but through 
 all the many days and 3'ears of Christian history, has 
 the same story been repeated. Crowd after crowd of 
 theologians and saints and common men has followed 
 the Marys to the sepulchre. The history of the Church 
 has been in no small degree the history of a search for 
 a dead rather than a living Christ. Men have bowed 
 
25 
 
 their heads and looked into the tomb, when they should 
 have Hfted up their eyes to heaven, and seen the Son 
 of Man standing at the right hand of God. Some have 
 sought Him in the tomb where the facts of history He 
 like dead men's bones, unbreathed upon and unrevived ; 
 they can tell with more or less accuracy of detail what 
 He did and said and suffered, but the Name which 
 once healed the sick and raised the dead — that tender 
 humanity, which is still touched with sympathy for our 
 weakness, that awful majesty, in whose hands are still 
 held the keys of hell and death — is to them a name and 
 nothing more. Others have sought an ideal Christ, the 
 creation of poets and painters, enshrined in harmonies 
 of perfect colouring, or imagery of splendid words — a 
 shrine beautiful indeed, but still a tomb, — in which that 
 gathering together of all that it is possible to conceive 
 of tenderness, and sorrow, and patient suffering, is 
 not incarnate, but crystallized, with no present living 
 power. Others have sought Him in the labyrinth of 
 philosophy : they have wrapped Him anew in the 
 grave-clothes of doctrines and formularies : they have 
 made Him the pivot round which metaphysical theories 
 of sin and punishment have revolved : but they have 
 failed to realize the awful presence, though unseen, 
 among us, of the risen Master of our souls. 
 
 Brethren, on this Easter morning, as the light breaks 
 once more over that empty tomb, we preach to you 
 not a dead but a living Saviour, not a name which 
 represents only a bygone historical personage, not 
 an ideal Man of Sorrows devised by monks in their 
 
26 
 
 cloisters, or dreamed of by poets in their reveries, but 
 One who lives still, passing to and fro among human 
 life, as once He passed visibly through the streets of 
 Jerusalem, never w^eary now, never homeless now, but 
 ever strong to help our feebleness, and to rescue us 
 from the curse of sin. 
 
 For it is not only that He lives : He lives as a Man. 
 His manhood is as perfect now as it was long ago 
 in Palestine. There have been men, it is true, in all 
 periods of the Church's history who have derogated 
 from that perfect humanity. Some have held that His 
 human body was united to a Divine soul ; others have 
 held that, though there was a human reason, there 
 were not human feelings or a human will. But against 
 every form of this opinion the Church of every age 
 has protested. The last and most metaphysical of the 
 creeds is in this respect the most explicit, and the most 
 human. He not only was but is " perfect Man," as 
 well as " perfect God." When He rose from the dead 
 He did not leave His humanity in the grave. He rose 
 a Conqueror, but still a Man — a High Priest strong to 
 succour, because He is touched with pity. 
 
 And as such, think of Him : think of the tenderness 
 which was moved to tears by His friend's sorrow; 
 think of the courage which could brave opposition and 
 rejection and death itself in the consciousness of duty ; 
 think of the faith against which the Tempter drew in 
 vain the keenest shafts from his long-practised bow ; 
 think of the resolute will which could find its meat and 
 drink in doing the appointed task ; think of the patient 
 
THE RISEN SA VIOUR. 
 
 forbearance which the bitterest hostility could not rouse 
 into anger ; think of the self-control which could hold 
 the consciousness of a Divine mission in check for 
 thirty years — until His " hour " was come. Think of 
 all this as endowed now with power to help as well as 
 to sympathize ; think of it as not far off, but very near 
 — near enough to hear the murmur of an unuttered 
 prayer — near enough to trace the subtlest windings of 
 temptation through the labyrinth of the soul— telling 
 our weak spirits, as they bow beneath the burden of 
 their weakness, and look upward for help in their 
 struggles to be holier — " I am He that liveth and was 
 dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore." 
 
 Is not this what we want ? Is not this strong arm 
 of a Helper, who is at once human and Divine, the 
 satisfaction of our deepest needs ? For what is it that 
 we are seeking all through life ? Is it not to be better 
 men ? Is it not that our sins and sinfulness may be 
 forgiven, and a holier life made possible ? Is it not 
 that we may do our work with a better heart and a 
 stronger will ? Is it not that we may throw off the old 
 cravings after selfish and earthly ends, and make each 
 passing incident a means of moral growth ? And 
 what is it that we look for when this life is ended ? 
 Is it that we may sleep a sleep from which there will 
 be no waking ? Is it that these faculties which here 
 we are cultivating a.id strengthening may cease to 
 have an exercise ? Is it that we are tired of being, 
 and would fain sink back again into the nothingness 
 from which we came ? Nay, it is not so. We want 
 
28 
 
 THE RISEN SAVIOUR. 
 
 not death but life — not the mechanical life of a brute 
 organism, but the ever-aspiring, ever-developing life 
 of a man. And what we want that first Easter morning 
 has made possible. In Him who rose all fulness 
 dwells, and by communion with Him, by sharing His 
 spirit and following in His steps, we may be partakers 
 of His holiness. 
 
 Let this, then, be your Easter lesson. Seek no 
 longer the living among the dead, but realize the risen 
 Saviour as an ever-present power, one who not only 
 gives you help in solemn moments of lonely struggle, 
 but whose manhood takes Him now, as it took Him long 
 ago, wherever men are to be found and wherever human 
 liearts are sighing for strength and sympathy. Let 
 your struggle be from this day forward to make your 
 communion with Him constant as well as deep. Rise 
 with Him from the death of sin — from the tomb in 
 which your best instincts are buried, while your lower 
 impulses keep up the masquerade of life. Fix one by 
 one upon those points of His character in which the 
 majority of us are most unlike Him, and strive, by the 
 help which He gives, to become, from day to day, more 
 pure, more brave, more resolute in duty, more ready to 
 meet minor trials, more tender-hearted towards those 
 who fail, more charitable towards those who differ 
 from you. Mortify one by one "your members which 
 are upon the earth " — uncleanness, untruthfulness, 
 covetousness, anger, malice. Struggle, whatever the 
 struggle cost, to wean your affections from these 
 shadows that pass— earthly riches, earthly honours, 
 
THE RISEN SA VIOUR. 
 
 earthly position, and set them on "things above" — 
 things that abide. 
 
 And thus seeking you will find ; — you will find your 
 characters growing day by day, through the strength 
 v/hich He gives, more like the pattern which He left ; 
 you will find the chains of sin which now bind you 
 down one by one snapping asunder, and that you are 
 rising to the full height of your true selves — not casting 
 aside your manhood, but evolving its perfect form. 
 Nor will the finding cease when this life is ended. He 
 in whose communion you live will not forsake you 
 when you die. The Resurrection is at once the type 
 and the cause of an endless progress. All life is a 
 resurrection — a passing from the old into the new. 
 And life in Christ is an eternal resurrection, an eternal 
 ascent to God. In the very heaven of heavens there 
 will still be new depths of love to be sounded, new 
 heights of knowledge to be scaled. But let the sphere 
 of our souls' being widen as it may, it will still be the 
 power of Him who, through His resurrection, became 
 a quickening spirit, that shall shape them to new forms 
 of holiness and glory, until the last shadow of our 
 darkness fades into His Hght, and the last struggling 
 aspiration floats up into His perfect peace. 
 
SERMON IV. 
 
 THE HEAVENLY AND THE EARTHLY 
 CONFLICT. 
 
SERMON IV. 
 
 THE HE A VENLY AND THE EARTHLY 
 
 \^St. Mary's, Oxford, Michaelmas Day, 1867.] 
 
 " There was war in heaven : Michael and his angels fought against 
 the dragon ; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed 
 not; neither was their place found any more in heaven." — Rev. xii. 7, 8. 
 
 NDER the form of a combat between St. Michael 
 
 ^ and the dragon the Church brings before us 
 to-day the wider bearings of that struggle which has 
 gone on through all recorded history, and which is 
 going on still in our own souls, between the powers 
 of evil and the powers of good. 
 
 The subject is one which affords a wide scope to the 
 imagination. It is one which has given birth to great 
 paintings and to still greater poems ; but it is one also, 
 and as such I propose to deal with it now, which has 
 a direct relation to our every-day difficulties and to the 
 most prosaic forms of life. 
 
 Two points seem to be especially impressed upon us 
 by the form in which it comes before us to-day. 
 
 I. In the first place it seems to be indicated that we 
 are members of a larger community than that which is 
 
 3 
 
 CONFLICT. 
 
54 THE HEAVENLY AND THE EARTHLY CONFLICT. 
 
 apparent to our senses. Our senses tell us of a world 
 beneath us and around us. They tell us of the brute 
 creation with which we are linked by the strong tie 
 of a common, or almost common, organism, of common 
 wants and common desires, of a common birth and 
 a common death. They tell us also of the world of 
 our fcllow-men, of the action and reaction of men 
 upon one another, of wealth and poverty, of success 
 and failure, of comfort and distress. Nor do they 
 ever cease their story. What they tell us is constantly 
 present, and assumes for us an absorbing interest. 
 They are so near, so urgent, so importunate, that their 
 din is ever in our ears. We not only listen to them, 
 but are carried away by them. We tend to live for 
 them and for what they suggest to us. We fill our 
 little space in the society of our fellows. We have our 
 friends and relatives, those above us whose acquaint- 
 ance we covet, those below us in whose concerns we 
 take a kindly interest. If we talk, it is for the most 
 part about this and that person to whom this or that 
 has happened. If we act, it is for the most part that we 
 may satisfy our bodily desires or our social ambitions. 
 The morning occupations of our business or our house- 
 holds, the evening cares of entertainment or of rest, 
 absorb almost all our energies, and sum up almost all 
 our purposes ; and the parenthesis of religion which 
 we insert into our routine becomes only an expression 
 of social interest in a hardly less personal form. 
 
 And all the while you and I are members of a 
 community which begins with men and ends with 
 
THE HE A VENL Y AND THE EARTHLY CONFLICT. 35 
 
 God ; a community which gathers into itself all intelli- 
 gent souls, all spirits whom God has made, all who at 
 whatever distance can approach Him in adoration or 
 in prayer. You and I, busy as we are with our occu- 
 pations, our human interests, our sympathies more or 
 less wide with politics and society, blind as we are to 
 the Eternity in which even now we move, are one in 
 life and one in hope with sons and servants and 
 ministers of God, whose number cannot be counted 
 for multitude. Where they are and what they are, 
 whether they be in our midst as we sit here, or whether 
 they tenant yonder far-off stars ; whether their shape 
 be what Hebrew poets imagined and Italian painters 
 painted, or whether it be some new and to us unknown 
 clothing of the spirit, are questions about which we 
 may dream, but to which we can give no answer. It 
 is sufficient for us to know that between us and God 
 is not the deep void of an appalling nothingness, but 
 beings who, like us, are conscious of His presence : 
 and some at least of whom if, unlike us, they need not 
 pray, can at least, like us, bow down their faces and 
 adore. 
 
 2. In the second place, the text implies not only that 
 we are members of a larger community than that which 
 is apparent to the senses, but also that in that larger 
 community there is the same great conflict going on 
 which is for ever raging here — the conflict for mastery 
 between evil and good. This present world of human 
 souls is not the only scene of strife. Far back in the 
 remote and incalculable past we read of angels who 
 
36 THE HEA VENL V AND THE EARTHL Y CONFLICT. 
 
 "kept not their first estate; " and far on in the perhaps 
 still distant future we read of "war in heaven." 
 Stretched between the two is human history, and all 
 the acted problems of which history is the sum. Read 
 that long chronicle of struggles and defeats and victories, 
 of disappointed ambitions and successful sins, of fierce 
 contests between justice and injustice, between right 
 and might, between truth and error. Look upon your 
 own lives, and think of all their chequered incidents, 
 of temptations and failures, of sins which sting you 
 still as you think of them, of blighted hopes and 
 unforeseen successes and sudden reverses, of joys and 
 sorrows, great and small, rising and falling in a cease- 
 less alternation, as the waves of the sea rise up moment 
 by moment into the light, and moment by moment sink 
 back again into the darkness. And as you think of all 
 this, remember that it is but the visible part of a 
 conflict in which all intelligent creatures of God are 
 taking part, and that there may be moments at which, 
 if we had but eyes to see, we should behold other 
 struggles and other victories, at which, Hke the only 
 One of our race who knew the secrets of the invisible, 
 we might even see " Satan fall from heaven." 
 
 I am calling your attention to this to-day, not to 
 supply a barren food for the imagination, but that the 
 thought of it may have a direct effect upon our daily 
 lives. 
 
 It is not given to us to fight the great battle which 
 St. Michael is represented as fighting with the dragon 
 " who deceiveth the whole world ; " but it is given to 
 
THE HEA VENL V AND THE EARTHL Y CONFLICT. 37 
 
 US to fight a battle apparently smaller, but in fact as 
 great, which involves the same principles, and which 
 is ony another form of the same universal struggle. 
 
 What is it, for example, to tell a lie ? It seems but 
 a little thing : the yielding to a sudden impulse — the 
 movement of a muscle or two — a faint vibration of the 
 air — and the lie is told. We forget it, and all seems 
 over. And what is it to tell the truth instead of a lie ? 
 Only a momentary resolution — the perhaps reluctant 
 passing of a sentence in the judgment-hall of the 
 conscience — a breath, and nothing more. 
 
 And yet on these two courses depend issues which 
 stretch out into illimitable space and into endless time. 
 As the balance of motives sways to truth or to falsehood 
 the soul ranges itself in one of two great armies : it is 
 one more victory or one more defeat for the cause of 
 goodness and of God : it is one more stone added to 
 the fabric of eternal truth, or one more blow which 
 wants not will but strength to shake it to its deep 
 foundations. 
 
 It is in these daily actions, which seem so trivial, 
 which we perform so thoughtlessly, which we look 
 back upon with such an indifferent regard, that the 
 deepest and holiest of all principles are involved. As 
 we do what is just or not just, as we say what is true 
 or not true, we are giving or withholding the assent ot 
 a perhaps free will to an eternal principle. The lie 
 which we tell in our business, the trick by which 
 we take advantage of another's ignorance, the slander 
 which we complacently repeat from half-sympathising 
 
38 THE HEA VENLY AND THE EARTHLY CONFLICT. 
 
 lips, the indolent neglect of a duty which stares us in 
 the face, are acts which do not end here ; they not only 
 leave a lasting mark upon our character, but touch 
 upon an infinite sphere and widen out like the widening 
 of a ripple upon a shoreless sea. Here and now, as 
 truly as when " Satan fell from heaven ; " here and now, 
 as truly as in the great crises of human history, is being 
 fought out, not in metaphor but in stern earnest, that 
 fight between good and evil, between the powers of 
 light and the powers of darkness, of which all that we 
 know of the history of intelligent souls is but the varied 
 expression. And yet I must recall you to the con- 
 sideration that the actions in which all this is involved 
 are but the common ordinary actions of your every-day 
 life. The battlefield is not some vast interstellar space 
 in which all the gathered spiritual hosts are massed in 
 dense array, but the prosaic ground of our studies, and 
 our shops, and our dining-rooms. The battle is not 
 waged so much at some supreme moments of mentaj 
 struggle, when all the forces of our nature come into 
 conscious play, but in the subtler form of the setting 
 aside of plausible motives, and the struggling with 
 apparently trivial sins. The two greatest of all recorded 
 temptations turned upon actions which might at the 
 moment have seemed insignificant : " Eat this apple," 
 said the serpent, " it is pleasant to the taste : it will do 
 you no harm." " Turn these stones into loaves," said 
 the devil ; " you are very hungry, and you have but to 
 say the word." And yet upon these insignificant actions, 
 upon the doing of the one and the not doing of the 
 
THE HE A VENL Y AND THE EARTH I. Y CONFLICT. 30 
 
 Other, what awful issues hung ! And to you and me, it 
 may be to others besides you and me, the temptation 
 comes in no less subtle a form. " Do this — it is very 
 pleasant, and will do no real harm." " Do this — it is 
 almost necessary, and the little wrong of it can soon 
 be undone." Sometimes we listen and sometimes we 
 refuse : and all our lives long, day by day and hour 
 by hour, we alternate between victory and defeat, in a 
 struggle which sometimes becomes a despair. For the 
 path of holiness is not the calm ascent of a marble 
 stairway : it is for all of us, for some no doubt more 
 than for others, a life-long journey over a rugged and 
 sometimes uncertain road, a stumbling over many 
 stones, a wandering into many a by-path, a fall into 
 many a snare : and when heaven's gates open to us at 
 last, they open to a tattered traveller with a worn and 
 weary soul. 
 
 But, for all that, there need be no despair. In the 
 great allegory of the text there is at once the picture 
 and the assurance of victory. "The dragon prevailed 
 not, neither was his place found any more in heaven." 
 The victory is slow to come, but it comes at last ; and 
 its coming, for this world at least, depends, in God's 
 providence, not on angels and archangels, but upon you 
 and me and men like ourselves. It depends on our 
 doing the best we individually can, with the help which 
 is given to us from above, to crush in our own souls, 
 and in the sphere in which we move, the daily and 
 hourly temptations to selfishness, to injustice, to untruth, 
 to uncharitableness, to indolence, and to irritability. 
 
40 THE HEA VENLY AND THE EARTHLY CONFLICT. 
 
 Every dishonest act which we decline to perform, every 
 falsehood which we refuse to utter, every uncharitable 
 word which we leave unsaid, every sensual impulse 
 which we crush, is for ourselves, for the world of men, 
 for the world of spirits of which we are members, one 
 more thwarting of the power of evil, one more victory 
 of the power of good, one more step towards that 
 consummation when the great choir of intelligent souls 
 shall circle round the Father of spirits from whom 
 both they and we derive our life, and to whom both 
 we and they alike return. 
 
SERMON V. 
 THE GOSrEL OF THE POOR. 
 
SERMON V. 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 \_Umversify of Oxford, 1869.] 
 
 "Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he 
 sent two of liis disciples, and said unto Him, Art thou He that should 
 come, or do we look for another? Jesus answered and said unto 
 them, Go and show John again those things which ye do hear and 
 see : the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers arc 
 cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead arc raised up, and the poor 
 have the gospel preached to them.'' — St. Matthew xi. 2-5. 
 
 A T the time these words were spoken the orbit 
 
 of the Jewish, and perhaps also of the European, 
 mind was traversed by one of those semi-luminous 
 belts of more or less undefined anticipations out of 
 which great thoughts and great deeds periodically 
 spring. The belief in a regime had passed into the 
 belief in a man. Year by year the belief had gathered 
 form. Hope had mingled with the sense of want, and 
 become an anxious waiting. At last a voice was heard 
 on the slopes of the Galilean hills which seemed like 
 the voice of the Expected One. It was the voice of 
 One who had come to satisfy, not the imagined need 
 of a King, but the unexpressed need of a Comforter. 
 He began not with the doing of some great work or 
 
44 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 the utterance of some profound thought, but with the 
 proclamation of a Jubilee. In that lay the sign of His 
 Messiahship. " The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, 
 because He hath anointed Me to preach the Gospel to 
 the poor." And when the question was directly asked 
 — the only question of the kind which the Synoptic 
 Gospels record — " Art thou He that should come, or 
 do we look for another ? " He pointed, both for answer 
 and for proof, to nothing else than what He had at 
 first proclaimed ; not to the width or depth of what 
 He taught, but to its compassion, its sympathy, its 
 charity — " the blind receive their sight . . . and the 
 poor have the Gospel preached to them." 
 
 I think it not unfitting to call your attention to 
 the profound insight which these words of last Sun- 
 days gospel give into the work which the Christian 
 faith has done, and has to do, in human society. It 
 has been, and it is, the Gospel of the troubled and 
 the poor. 
 
 I will speak first of the past, and secondly of the 
 present. 
 
 I. At the time when it appeared, as at almost all 
 times in civilized communities, three distinct religions, 
 or groups of religions, divided the Roman empire — 
 the religion of the comfortable classes, the religion 
 of the reflecting classes, and the religion of the 
 proletariat. 
 
 The religion of the comfortable classes was, then 
 as now, a worship of luxury, tempered by a belief in 
 the marvellous and the fear of death. The religion of 
 
45 
 
 the reflecting classes was chiefly a literary philosophy 
 coloured, on its theological side, by a "rationalized" 
 polytheism. The religion of the proletariat was, for the 
 most part, an aggregate of superstitions scarcely one 
 stage ajjove fetichism. 
 
 Upon these three religions, or groups of religions, 
 two new influences were beginning to work — the 
 influence of thaumaturgy and the influence of revived 
 Stoicism. I shall not now speak of the former of these 
 influences, but it will be strictly relevant to the subject 
 in hand to examine at least the more prominent 
 features of the latter, and to show what there was in 
 it which made it fail in the same field in which Chris- 
 tianity succeeded. 
 
 Between it and Christianity are many points of re- 
 semblance. It is the most Christian of non-Christian 
 religions. It, like Christianity, believes in an ever- 
 present God and Father of all, who watches every 
 movement, and listens to every prayer. It, like Chris- 
 tianity, calls men the sons of God, and would have 
 them make it the rule of their life to follow Him. It, 
 like Christianity, would have men be true, and pure, 
 and faithful, and considerate, and self-respectful, and 
 compassionate. And incidental expressions of Stoic 
 writers have so much the ring of the New Testament 
 about them, that uncritical minds have at various times 
 discussed the question whether Seneca may not have 
 heard St. Paul, or Epictetus have been a Christian. 
 But between the two systems are deep chasms of 
 difference. It is impossible either to subtract the 
 
46 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 Personality of Christ from Ciiristianity, and call the 
 residuum Stoicism, or to add It to Stoicism and call 
 the result Christianity. It is impossible for Stoicism to 
 exist with, or for Christianity to exist without, the idea 
 of sin. Christianity postulates a broken harmony 
 which it is beyond the unaided power of man to restore : 
 Stoicism postulates a perfect order which it is the aim 
 and business of the philosopher to preserve. Chris- 
 tianity is built upon the common emotions, Stoicism 
 upon the common reason of mankind. The one appeals 
 to the heart, the other to the intellect ; the one to the 
 unreflecting many, the other to the unimpassioned few. 
 Stoicism, in short, is a strong man's analysis of his 
 strength. It is the attempt to eliminate the factor of 
 passion from the complex of human motives. "Pain is 
 no evil, pleasure is no good " : and, as almost all the 
 pains and pleasures of life are pains and pleasures of 
 the imagination — anticipated evils or remembered joys 
 — the right discipline of the imagination may reduce 
 them to a minimum, and enable a man to live his life 
 in peace, in harmony with natural law. At the same 
 time, we must guard against crediting Stoicism with 
 what, by an abuse of its own word, is now called 
 "apathy." It was far from shutting a man out from 
 the love of wife and child, of country and of home. 
 It had not only sympathy for other men, but en- 
 thusiasm. It could not help but preach to convert 
 them. The perfect Stoic was not so much a disciple 
 as an apostle. 
 
 And for several centuries this revived Stoicism had 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 47 
 
 a more vigorous life in the rhetorical schools — the 
 infant Universities of Europe — than is at first sight 
 apparent The majority of the non-Christian writings 
 of that period have perished in the " struggle for life " 
 with the writings of the Christian fathers; but side 
 by side with the hterature with which most of us are 
 to some extent familiar was another literature, now 
 almost wholly gone, which shows how deep the minds 
 of the reflecting classes were filled with the spirit of 
 Stoicism. 
 
 And yet it failed — even with these reflecting classes. 
 It failed because it lost its power as a rule of conduct, 
 and became a literature. It failed because its preachers 
 ceased to preach, but only wrangled or declaimed. It 
 failed because it was no longer itself the life and 
 the reward of those who felt its power, but became 
 an endowed profession. It failed because its joints 
 stiffened, and its blood chilled, and it no longer spoke 
 with a hving tongue the thoughts of a living brain, 
 but repeated its supposed dogmatic verities with the 
 mechanical accuracy of an automaton. 
 
 And with the proletariat it had never succeeded. It 
 had not the first conditions of success. It appealed not 
 to the emotions but to the intellect; and to the mass 
 of men the emotions rather than the intellect are the 
 springs of moral action. It had not one of the 
 elements of a popular religion. It aimed not, as a 
 popular religion must aim, at something superhuman, 
 but only at the preser\ation of a balance of power 
 between the various elements of human nature. In the 
 
48 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 crouching misery of the lower classes of the Roman 
 Empire something less rational was needed. It helped 
 men to be at peace ; but what peace was there for the 
 slave or the pauper ? It helped them to be free from 
 emotion ; but what freedom from emotion could there 
 be when hunger was gnawing the flesh from men's 
 bones ? It had no moral lever. It had neither an ideal, 
 nor a terror, nor a hope. It had no ideal— for Zeus 
 was too far off, Socrates and Diogenes too near. It had 
 no terror — for it recognised no punishment for vice 
 except that which is inherent in being vicious. It had 
 no hope — for it had no life to come. A strong man 
 might live without any of these : but the mass of men 
 required all three. As far as the wretched and the 
 lonely were concerned, Stoicism did but show them how 
 to live an unliveable life, and to attain an unattainable 
 end. 
 
 But it was otherwise with Christianity. It was from 
 the first the Gospel of the poor. It laid but little stress 
 on intellectual power : — " Not many wise men after the 
 flesh . . . are called." It grew but slowly among 
 the reflecting classes. Not until the end of the fourth 
 century did the rhetoricians, who had hitherto professed 
 Stoicism, come in any great numbers to profess Chris- 
 tianity. But, in the meantime, the great masses of the 
 Empire had been won. They had been won, not by 
 the thaumaturgic element in early Christianity, not by 
 its denunciation of their vices, not by the contagion of 
 its martyrdoms, but rather by its satisfaction of their 
 great needs. 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR 49 
 
 For look at the Empire : through its vast length and 
 breadth it was pauperized and decaying. In Rome 
 itself, and in one or two of the larger provincial cities, 
 was no doubt an accumulation of capital, but it was in 
 comparatively few hands. In Italy and the majority ot 
 the provinces all were paupers together. The proofs 
 of it abound. The economical conditions of the pro- 
 duction of wealth did not exist : the economical results 
 of the absence of wealth were everywhere apparent. 
 Even so early in the history of the Empire as the time 
 of Plutarch, the whole of Greece could only furnish a 
 contingent of 3,000 men. The system of deletion and 
 confiscation had broken up the large estates without 
 encouraging small proprietors. There were vast dis- 
 tricts once teeming with inhabitants, which had neither 
 owners nor slaves. The land was impoverished ; the 
 crops failed ; the population decreased. The thinned 
 yeomanry of Italy could not find bread to feed their 
 children ; eleemosynary aids began to be necessary ; 
 and some of the Emperors, conspicuously Trajan, made 
 the granting of subventions for the aliment of children 
 an important part of their domestic administration. 
 Famines, wars, the uncertainty of property, thinned 
 the empire more and more, until, when Diocletian 
 replaced the purple toga by the flowing robe of an 
 eastern sovereign, the flowing robe was almost neces- 
 sary to hide from its own view the bloodless limbs and 
 the protruding bones of the once vigorous Roman 
 state. 
 
 And where there is pauperism there is wretchedness ; 
 
 4 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 and where there is wretchedness there is a craving for 
 sympathy — or despair. 
 
 Such was the field in which Christianity struck root. 
 Into the rugged ground of wretched hearts it sent the 
 deep-reaching fibres of love and hope. It gave men an 
 ideal, for each succeeding century threw an intenser 
 light upon the image of the Perfect Man, who was also 
 Perfect God. It gave them a hope : for its doctrine of 
 the immortality of the soul at once interpreted and 
 formulated the still wider doctrine — which is for all but 
 the most wise or the most comfortable a moral necessity 
 —that there are, sooner or later, compensations in the 
 life of the individual and in the history of the race. 
 And, above all, it had an organization : there was 
 the contagion of brotherhood about it. Stoicism had 
 encouraged— perhaps invented — philanthropy, but it 
 knew nothing of brotherly love. In the stronger feel- 
 ing of a common work for a common Lord, the dis- 
 tinctions of classes began to break down. Rich and 
 poor had a common faith, and met together for common 
 worship. In the eyes of the Church there was 
 neither bond nor free. And thus there grew up, not 
 by antagonism to society, but by intense sympathy 
 with it, a vast complex unity which, rising upwards 
 from beneath, absorbed the reflecting classes one by 
 one, and threw at length the seeming guise of at 
 least a new form and an unwonted impulse over 
 the most impenetrable and immutable of all reliigons 
 — the religion of the unthinking well-to-do and 
 respectable. 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 SI 
 
 II. This was what Christianity did once : this is 
 what it has the power to do again. 
 
 And there is still the same need for its being done. 
 
 The moral conditions of modern society are singularly 
 akin to the moral conditions of the society of the 
 Empire. There is among us, as there was in the vast 
 tracts of the Empire — only huddled together with still 
 more haggard faces and in still more filthy rags — a 
 seething mass of poverty which boils over perpetually 
 into crime. Now, as then, the miserable are in excess 
 of the happy. It would seem as though civilization 
 exuded misery. Every year that comes brings with 
 it new complications of pauperism, and adds to the 
 number of the struggling and the sad. 
 
 And while it is so, the work of Christianity, so far 
 from being, as we sometimes hear, almost ended, is 
 hardly yet begun. 
 
 Fo- it is the religion of the sad. It appeals to what 
 has almost become a permanent factor of human nature. 
 It appeals to the sense of wretchedness, to the con- 
 sciousness of unachieved purposes, to the bitterness 
 of unmerited failure and disappointed dreams. It must 
 last at least as long as sadness lasts — as long as 
 struggle is the law of life and effort is outiun by 
 aspiration. 
 
 But why should I say all this to you who know it 
 well ? 
 
 I. Because, in the first place, this great and special 
 function of Christianity — this to which the Master of 
 us all pointed when the question was raised who He 
 
52 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 was and what He came to do — is so continually over- 
 looked and forgotten in the strife of tongues, in the 
 effort to make Christianity what it never professed to 
 be, an elaborate system of philosophy. 
 
 2. And because, in the second place, there is a 
 growing tendency among many of the reflecting class 
 in our own society to break down with rude hands the 
 image which Christianity has set up. "They know not 
 what they do." It may be comparatively easy for us, 
 as we sit or teach in our quiet rooms, to preach and 
 practise a calm philosophy in which hope and fear are 
 replaced by the conviction that all is cause and effect 
 and natural law — though even to us there is at times a 
 Nemesis of Faith. But go into the streets of a great 
 city, and watch the haggard forms of the passers-b}', 
 and tell them that their misery and hopeless struggles 
 are but the result of social laws which it may take ages 
 to remedy ; or go into some wretched hovel, and tell 
 the little ones, as they crouch in their hunger and 
 loneliness round their dead father's corpse, that pain 
 is no evil, and self-perfection the end of life ; — and the 
 gaunt weird faces will look up at you with a quiet 
 beseeching which is more eloquent than any speech, 
 and — if they believe you — will but echo back your own 
 Stoic's words, " The door is open — let us die." But go 
 to them with the news that there is a Father of the 
 fatherless, a Comforter of the sad, a better life hereafter, 
 and there will be a new motive for exertion, a new 
 light in life. 
 
 For their sakes, if not for our own, let us hesitate 
 
THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR. 
 
 S3 
 
 before — either by the emasculation of its doctrines or 
 the discrediting of its credentials — we attempt to cripple 
 Christianity as a moral power : let us hesitate before 
 we condemn the oppressed and the lonely and the sad 
 of generations yet to come, to sit round the flickering 
 embers of a dying faith, drinking cups of unmingled 
 gall. 
 
I 
 
SERMON VI. 
 THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 
 
1 
 
SERMON VI. 
 
 THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 
 
 ySt. Chad's, Headingley, 1873.] 
 
 "The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the 
 flesh : and these are contrary the one to the other, so that ye cannot 
 do the things that ye would." — Gal. v. 17. 
 
 E are all conscious of it : the struggle began in 
 
 'V us at our birth, and will only end with death. 
 And yet I can understand some of you thinking that 
 there is a certain exaggeration in these words of the 
 Apostle. For the Spirit and the flesh are not always 
 coming, so to speak, visibly upon the scene and fighting 
 a pitched battle for the mastery ; we are not at every 
 moment conscious of the tug and strain of spiritual 
 contention : on the contrary, so silent is the shock of 
 these mighty unseen forces, that often in the very 
 crisis of the battle we are saying to ourselves that all 
 is still. 
 
 But whether we be conscious of it or no, the conflict 
 is going on. Every motive that urges us is a move- 
 ment of either the one force or the other ; every action 
 that we perform is a conquest of the flesh over the 
 Spirit or of the Spirit over the flesh. 
 
58 
 
 THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 
 
 For these two elements are permanent in our nature. 
 On the one hand is the body, the animal part of us, 
 that which we share in common with the brutes, and 
 which, like them, is born and grows, and becomes 
 old and dies ; on the other hand is the soul, the divine 
 part of us, that by which we are linked to God, and 
 which, like God Himself, is incorruptible and immortal. 
 
 And in every action that we perform this double 
 nature of ours necessarily comes into play. There 
 is, consciously or unconsciously, a clash and collision 
 between them. It is impossible for us to escape from 
 it. We may shut ourselves up in a cloister, or retire 
 like hermits to the wilderness ; we may lead the quietest 
 or the busiest of lives ; we may have the coldest or 
 the most sensitive of temperaments, but we take the 
 flesh with us wherever we go, and wherever the flesh 
 is present the Spirit is present also to combat it. 
 
 The combat takes infinitely various forms. 
 
 Sometimes, for example, the flesh assumes the form 
 of a vehement desire to satisfy an inordinate appetite ; 
 and the Spirit is the effort to be temperate. Some- 
 times the flesh comes in the form of a quick resent- 
 ment, the sudden reaction of the emotions which impel 
 us to anger ; and the Spirit is the effort to be calm- 
 Sometimes the flesh is in the form of a tendency to 
 indolence ; and the Spirit is the prompting to activity. 
 Sometimes the flesh is the inclination to stand aloof 
 from duty because of its troublesomeness ; and the 
 Spirit is the conscience which utters its unresting com- 
 mand, " Do it, do it, do it." Sometimes the Spirit is 
 
THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 59 
 
 the gentle monitor who whispers in our ears, " Say 
 what you were thinking of : it is kind — it is manly — 
 it is Christian ; " and the flesh is the other voice that 
 says, " It will be more comfortable to leave things 
 alone." 
 
 It is this very perpetuity of the combat, and this 
 infinite variety of its forms, that in a large proportion 
 of cases makes us insensible to its issues and its 
 importance. We are conscious of a play of diverse 
 motives ; we yield to the stronger impulse or to the 
 more persuasive argument without any sense — or at 
 least any vivid sense — of victory or defeat. 
 
 This is the common rule — the law of most of our 
 lives. But it is not so always. There are occasions 
 on which we rise to a sense of the struggle and its 
 issues. Our whole nature comes into play. We be- 
 come conscious that the promptings to duty are the 
 promptings of our better selves, of our diviner element; 
 and that the promptings to take pleasure instead of 
 duty are the promptings of the law of sin that is in 
 our members. We feel racked and torn by the fierce 
 vehemence of the struggle. We long to be better, 
 purer, more generous-hearted men ; and in the very 
 effort to rise we fall — we do some deed of anger, or 
 feel some thought of pride, or say some word of un- 
 generous bitterness. And when we have done it, the 
 Spirit comes back again to us in the shape of remorse. 
 We loathe our own selves. We strain every nerve of 
 our better nature to shake off the heavy grasp of 
 worldly, fleshly, animal desires ; and still that heavy 
 
6o 
 
 THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 
 
 grasp relaxes not its hold. Again and again we know 
 that we are doing what we do not want to do, and 
 leaving undone that which we would do. " I will not 
 be angry," we say, and still we are angry ; " I will 
 not indulge my appetite," and still we do indulge it ; 
 " I will not be idle to-day," and still we are idle. And 
 then the Spirit comes back to us in the shape of a 
 sense of defeat ; and we are ready to cry out in our 
 agony, " O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver 
 me from the body of this death ? " 
 
 And sometimes the conflict ranges over a still wider 
 field. It brings into play not only our whole nature, 
 but our whole history. It was this form which was 
 exceptionally prominent when the Gospel was first 
 preached, and which finds an especial example in St. 
 Paul's own history. There was a sudden halt and a 
 sudden change. There was a turning round of the 
 whole nature, a " conversion," as it was called, in 
 which the struggle was of the keenest. It is so with 
 some of us still. There are some of us who, up to a 
 certain point in life, have trodden our path with heed- 
 less feet, taking things as they came, yielding always 
 to the impulse which promised the keenest or the 
 longest pleasure, without much reflection as to its being 
 good or bad. And suddenly the Spirit within us has 
 awaked from sleep, and made us halt on our course, 
 and turned us round to face the mournful company of 
 accumulated negligences and misdoings which come 
 trooping after us from years far off and near. Each 
 individual misdeed takes shape before our eyes, and 
 
THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 6l 
 
 tells the story of its consequences, and points to our 
 nature as we find it now, and says, " It was because 
 you did me and me and me that you are what you 
 are now — selfish, irritable, indolent, uncontrolled, with 
 Desire your only guide, and Comfort your only God. 
 
 And when we feel all this — when we look back upon 
 the chequered panorama of our lives ; so many struggles, 
 so few successes ; a character so battered and dinted 
 — we are tempted almost to despair of final victory, 
 and to cry out in the bitter consciousness of our scanty 
 progress, " Would God the conflict were at an end." 
 We would fain be rid of disquiet and anxiety and 
 unrest ; we would fain have no struggles, or at least 
 fewer ; we would fain be rid of this ever-recurring 
 responsibility of having to decide between good and 
 evil. 
 
 " If only we were not thwarted," we say to our- 
 selves ; " if we could but crush once and for ever the 
 cravings of the flesh ; if things went more smootlily in 
 our souls — ^we might have a fair chance of progress." 
 
 This is our ideal : the ideal of a life from which 
 struggle and storm will be far away. But it is not 
 the ideal of St. Paul. The text is probably not quite 
 accurately rendered in our English version. St. Paul 
 does not say, "So that yc cannot do the things that 
 ye would," as though the things that we would were 
 desirable to be done. He does not say, the flesh 
 lusteth against the Spirit, so that your strivings after 
 better things are liable to fail ; but, "The flesh lusteth 
 against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh, 
 
62 
 
 THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 
 
 in order that ye may not do the things that ye would." 
 In other words, this contrariety between the two parts 
 of our nature is not merely a fact, but a divinely 
 ordered fact. It is intended to prevent the very state 
 of things which in our narrow-sightedness we desire 
 and pray for. The struggle is ordered by God that 
 we may not rest and be satisfied, but move onwards 
 and progress. 
 
 There are, it is true, some who tell us that the 
 world is out of joint ; that its strife and struggle and 
 want of harmony show only the presence and power 
 of evil. 
 
 But so far from struggle being an anomaly, it is a 
 universal law. It is the law of all that is known to 
 us of the Divine administration, both physical and 
 moral. It is by contrariety and struggle that all things 
 grow — not by a perennial summer heat ; not by 
 perennial winter cold ; not by an eternal day of cloud- 
 less sunshine ; not by the dropping of an unceasing 
 rain — but by the alternation and antagonism of all 
 these is the earth clothed, spring by spring, with fresh 
 verdure, and brings forth fruit, summer by summer, 
 for the use of man. It is the law also of the moral 
 world. The history of mankind has been the history 
 of a struggle. Nation has been ranged against nation, 
 class against class, one man's thoughts against another 
 man's thoughts, and the result of it all has been 
 progress. Wherever there has been strife there has 
 been progress, and wherever there has been progress 
 there has been strife. Political progress has come 
 
THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 63 
 
 from the strife of nations ; social progress has been 
 evolved from the strife of classes ; theological progress 
 from the strife of creeds ; intellectual progress from the 
 strife of opinions. 
 
 And it is so closer home. Look both around you 
 and within. 
 
 At this very day the conflict is going on around us. 
 Every generation has its great question ; and on every 
 great question there are two conflicting opinions. 
 There are grave political controversies, grave social 
 controversies, grave theological controversies, round 
 us on every side. We sometimes are tempted, as we 
 think of them, to despair of our country, and to 
 despair of society, and to despair of the Church. We 
 see evil dominant, and good repressed ; we see dis- 
 cord, and misunderstanding, and hot contention. We 
 would fain exchange all this for peace. We would 
 have questions settled ; we would have controversies 
 ended. 
 
 But, in the first place, they never will end ; and, in 
 the second place, all analogy tells us that it would be 
 a misfortune if they did. 
 
 And last of all, to come back to our own secret 
 selves. So it is within. The soul lives not by quies- 
 cence, but by unrest. This struggle which we feel 
 is a sign that we are not stagnating. It may be that 
 we are making but tardy progress ; but at any rate 
 the Spirit has not ceased to strive. It is still possible 
 for us to bring forth, not the fruits of the flesh, but 
 the fruits of the Spirit ; to be not selfish, uncharitable, 
 
64 
 
 THE FLESH AND THE SPIRIT. 
 
 proud, indolent, and impure, but large-iiearted, humble, 
 generous, pure-minded, Christ-like men. 
 
 Instead, therefore, of moaning all day long a barren 
 prayer for peace, let us pray the nobler prayer for 
 strength to fight. Let it be our ambition not to lie 
 down contented with ourselves and with the world 
 as we see it, but to combat every form of fleshly and 
 earthly desire, and to rise day by day more and more 
 into the likeness of the Perfect Man. 
 
 There are, it may be even here, men and women 
 who are satisfied — who live from day to day in quiet 
 contentment with themselves ; who find hard names for 
 those who are struggling to make the world socially, 
 morally, politically, better than it is ; and to whom the 
 fierce contest between good and evil — the perpetual 
 oscillation of success between the lower and higher 
 parts of us which some of us know — is an evil to be 
 shunned. 
 
 For such men we may well despair. 
 
 But let our effort be not to be at rest, but to be ever 
 moving. To us rest is paralysis. The very Prince of 
 Peace Himself came not to send peace on earth, but 
 a sword. In our time at least that sword will not 
 pass away ; in our time at least this dispensation of 
 God, this contrariety between the flesh and the Spirit, 
 will not cease. In each of us it has its own special 
 form. If the flesh does not fight within us in the form 
 of impurity, it may do so in the form of pride ; if not 
 in the form of pride, it may do so in the form of selfish- 
 ness ; if not in the form of selfishness, it may in the 
 
65 
 
 form of indolence ; if not in the form of indolence, it 
 may do so under the form of contentiousness or 
 uncharitableness or greediness. Whatever be the 
 form that the flesh takes, whatever form the Spirit 
 takes, let us pray earnestly that strength may be given 
 to us to fight on and not to yield ; that so when this 
 present economy of God is at an end, when at last the 
 victory is won, and the din of this earthly battle is 
 hushed in the stillness of the eternal calm, we may 
 know the meaning and the power of that which is 
 incomprehensible to us now, the " peace of God which 
 passeth all understanding." 
 
 5 
 
SERMON VII. 
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ASCENSION. 
 
SERMON VII. 
 
 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ASCENSION. 
 
 [Merton Chapel, Oxford, 1874.] 
 
 "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing 
 in the right hand of God." — Acts vii. 56. 
 
 '' I ^HE conception of heaven has widened with the 
 
 -» widening of human knowledge and with the in- 
 creasing fulness of the revelation of God. It was at 
 one time no more than the conception of the court 
 of a semi-patriarchal chieftain, whose tent in the fixed 
 flat roof above our heads was surrounded by His 
 soldiers and messengers, and to whom the smoke of 
 the sacrifices visibly ascended from the altars of the 
 world below. At another time it was the conception 
 of a realm of light beyond the firmament, in which the 
 Lord of the armies of the sky was seated upon His 
 throne, " high and lifted up," and in which also an 
 innumerable company of heavenly warriors were doing 
 battle with a vast counter-array of the powers of dark- 
 ness. At another time there was given to men a still 
 grander vision — a vision which Tintoretto painted and 
 of which Dante sang — the vision of another world than 
 ours, in which, through all the happy fields of light, 
 
70 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ASCENSION. 
 
 angels and archangels and the spirits of the just were 
 for ever circling in their graded companies round the 
 embodied shape of the Father Eternal, canopied by 
 the mystic Dove, and with the Son at His right hand. 
 And to us in these later days has been given, if not a 
 grander conception, a fuller knowledge — the knowledge 
 which, though still imperfect, tells us that the sky is 
 not a roof above our heads, that the depths of space 
 are infinite, that the Master and Maker of all, who 
 dwelleth not in temples made with hands, dwelleth 
 not either in one particular star, that He whom we 
 worship is a Spirit and the Father of spirits, and that 
 the throne and the white-robed angels and the happy 
 paradisal fields are an impossible dream. 
 
 The pictures pass like the pageant of a gorgeous 
 cloud-land. One by one we mark them as they go, 
 and feel a pang of sorrow as they slowly melt awa}', 
 leaving only the pure blue heaven — infinite, eternal, and 
 serene. 
 
 What is that heaven for you and me ? What is 
 it for you and me who know, or think we know, so 
 much that our fathers did not know, to be told of an 
 ascended Saviour, of " the Son of Man standing on the 
 right hand of God " Is that, too, a dream ? Nay, 
 is it not rather one of the most abiding of truths, the 
 type of all that is great even in this great universe, of 
 all that is most worth hving for even in the stupendous 
 worth of life itself. For what does all our religion 
 mean but this — that we too are striving to ascend to 
 God ? What is the outcome of all our deep emotions, 
 
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ASCENSION. 71 
 
 our sorrows and our joys, our growth into higher know- 
 ledge and wider charity, our acts of human beneficence 
 and our moments of rapt devotion, but that thereby we 
 ascend one step more in that infinite ascent, and feel 
 one more pulsation in our souls of the life of Him who 
 veiled His Godhead under human personality, and who 
 in His human personality has passed from earth to 
 heaven ? For that which ascended was the Man, Christ 
 Jesus, one whose human nature was as perfect in its 
 humanity as yours or mine, whose human body was 
 born and grew, felt hunger and weariness, pain and 
 death ; whose human soul felt affection and sympathy, 
 hope and humiliation, sadness and delight. Wherever 
 heaven may be, it is He who is in heaven now. And 
 again and again we are told that His ascension is the 
 type and the earnest of our own ; He is " the first-born 
 among many brethren ; " He is the " forerunner who 
 has entered within the veil ; " He has gone " to prepare 
 a place for " us. 
 
 Think for one moment of the infinite significance of 
 the lesson. 
 
 To you and me is it given, in like manner but in 
 lesser degree, to become what He is, to make life on 
 earth an ascent of the stairway which leads from earth 
 to heaven, to transform these souls of ours, with all 
 their weaknesses and all their sins, into the likeness 
 of the Son of God. 
 
 It seems almost a paradox and an impossibility. 
 
 The lives of most of us move in so narrow a sphere 
 as to make it seem almost a waste of empty words to 
 
72 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ASCENSION. 
 
 speak of their ascent to heaven. There seems to some 
 of us but little room and scope in the sphere of our 
 daily duties to shadow forth a Divine hkeness, the like- 
 ness of the Manhood of Him who has ascended into 
 heaven. For day after day we grope with eyes upon 
 the ground, our brains racked with petty cares, or filled 
 with a still more petty contentment ; day after day we 
 bind ourselves with a still firmer cord of sordid em- 
 barrassments and mean perplexities ; day after day we 
 repeat a creed which to many of us has lost its meaning, 
 and bring the God whom we have created for ourselves 
 more and more within the compass of our narrow lives ; 
 and day after day we pour our miserable wants into 
 His ear, and tell Him the story of the sins which we 
 mention only to justify. 
 
 And yet it was out of a narrow life like ours that He 
 rose. We think that our sphere is humble ; but His 
 was the sphere of a village carpenter. We think that 
 our opportunities are few ; but His were those of 
 a Syrian peasant. We think that our temptations are 
 strong ; but the attacks which He withstood were those 
 of the very Tempter himself. It was out of the 
 commonest of. common lives that He sprang. There 
 was no halo of Divine glory round His head as He 
 walked to and fro. He did not live within the conse- 
 crated walls over which once the sacred cloud had 
 rested. It was from a life like yours and mine — a life 
 of daily routine, a life of apparently trivial work, a 
 life of weary nights and disappointed days — that He 
 ascended into the very heaven of heavens. He did so 
 
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ASCENSION. 73 
 
 because He saw and recognised that to which we too 
 often shut our eyes — the infinite possibilities of good 
 which surround every one of us, the infinite significance 
 of the fact that God is our Father, the divinity of 
 unselfishness. 
 
 And far beneath Him as we are, the field which lay 
 before Him lies also before us. 
 
 To make His ascension the type of our own, we 
 must live the life that He lived. That life was not 
 a life of rapturous ecstasy, but of constant work. 
 Through all the thirty years of waiting, until the 
 "hour " was come for the consummation of His sacrifice, 
 it was what would sometimes be called a prosaic life. 
 But it is in the prose of life rather than in its poetry 
 that the work of religion lies. The ascent to God has 
 to be achieved in the sphere of daily duty and common 
 life. Nor is it a new thing to learn that it is so. The 
 truth is at least as old as David. For him God was 
 a local God ; for him the House of God was a visible 
 building ; for him the ascent was the physical climbing 
 of the Judsean hills. But for us, no less than for him 
 — though for us with a deeper meaning than for him — 
 is the burden of his poem true : " Who shall ascend 
 into the hill of the Lord, or who shall dwell in His 
 holy place ? " Not the poet dreamer with his mystic 
 song ; not the weird ascetic with his mortified flesh ; 
 not the hallowed priest with his garments of glory and 
 beauty — but " he that hath clean hands and a pure 
 heart, who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor 
 sworn deceitfully; he that walketh uprightly and worketh 
 
74 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE Ai,CENSION. 
 
 righteousness and speaketh the truth from his heart ; 
 he that bacicbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil 
 to his neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his 
 neighbour." 
 
 Purity and truth, uprightness and kindliness, fair 
 dealing and guilelessness— these in our human sphere, 
 these with our present circumstances, these and not 
 ecstasy, these and not poetry, are the steps by which 
 it is possible for us to ascend to God. 
 
 And shall we not struggle to ascend ? Shall Ascen- 
 siontide pass away once more without one effort to 
 rise ? Shall to-morrow find us what to-day has found 
 us — nay, it cannot do that— shall it find us worse 
 instead of better, baptized in just one more day's 
 baptism of selfishness and earthliness and pettiness ? 
 or shall it find us better and not worse, better by just 
 one breath of firmer resolve to care more for goodness 
 and less for form, more for charity and less for pique, 
 more for truth and less for prejudice, more for others 
 and less for ourselves? The struggle no doubt is 
 keen, but the ascent is possible, for "our Forerunner" 
 has gone before. 
 
 Ascend, then, with Him : let each day as it closes 
 see you leaving farther behind the unholy thoughts 
 which have hovered round your soul until now, and 
 approaching nearer to His Divine purity. Ascend with 
 Him : let each day see you leaving farther behind the 
 uncharitableness which interprets all motives by the 
 standard of a narrow experience, and rising to a sense 
 of the many-sidedness of human character, and the 
 
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ASCENSION. 75 
 
 7Tianifoldness of the ways of God. Ascend with Him : 
 let each day see you leaving farther behind the cow- 
 ardice which is afraid of saying what it thini<s to be 
 true, and of doing what it believes to be right, and 
 facing with Him, if need be, the scorn of men and the 
 reproaches of your brethren. Ascend with Him : let 
 each day see you living less within the straitened 
 bounds of household cares and social ambitions and 
 weary amusements, — nay, living less even within the 
 shadow of solemn sorrows and spiritual distress, and 
 rising with Him to the contemplation of the vastness 
 of this great world, and the infinite significance of 
 moral growth, and the awful nearness of God. Ascend 
 with Him : and so at last pass by the path which He 
 has made possible from all this dulness and seeming 
 pettiness, from all this hopelessness of baffled effort, 
 and this despair of doing good, to that life which He 
 lives now — a life in which we shall not sleep the 
 death-like sleep of an everlasting quiescence, but 
 rather with fuller powers and undimmed eyes have 
 ampler sphere to " work the works of God." 
 
I 
 
SERMON VIII. 
 SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
! 
 
 I 
 
SERMON VIII. 
 
 SOWING AND REAPING. 
 \_Kirkby Overblow, 1875.] 
 •'Verily I say unto you, they have their reward." — Matt. vi. 2. 
 
 THE life of men is a life of effort. It is the condition 
 of all God's gifts to us that we must contribute 
 something ourselves before they are really our own. It 
 is so in our outer life : the lilies of the field " toil not, 
 neither do they spin " for their raiment, the birds of 
 the air "sow not, neither do they reap " for their food : 
 but to us is given at once the need and the power — the 
 will and the responsibility of effort. It is so also in our 
 inner life : in spiritual as in teniporal things, we must 
 ask before it is given to us — we must seek before we 
 can find, we must sow before we can reap. 
 
 And not only is our life a life of effort, but upon the 
 nature of the effort depends the nature of the result. 
 Although the sunshine and the rain come from God 
 alike upon one field and upon another, yet it is upon 
 the kind of seed that is sown that the nature of the 
 crop depends. And so upon a man's actions depends 
 his character. In the life moral, as in the life physical. 
 
8o 
 
 SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
 whatsoever we seek we shall find, whatsoever we sow 
 we shall reap. 
 
 The law of cause and effect thus runs through the 
 whole cycle of human life ; and it is this universality o; 
 its operation which makes it so fearful to contemplate : 
 for the wrong things, and the foolish things, and the 
 careless things we do, as well as the strivings after 
 right, bear their fruit. The wicked, no less than the 
 good, reap the fruit of their doings ; that which they 
 seek they find : their actions are not lost or fruitless — 
 (as the words of the text should be accurately ren- 
 dered) aire-xovai tov fJLiaOov avTwv — " they have their /u/l 
 reward." 
 
 If we look for a few moments at the various kinds of 
 lives which men lead, and the various objects which they 
 set before themselves, we shall see how this law holds. 
 
 The object which some men have is reputation — not 
 always in the form of a world-wide fame which shall 
 live from age to age on the lips of men, but in some one 
 of its innumerable minor forms : e.g. the love of being 
 respected, and of being well spoken of among their 
 companions and neighbours. For this they work and 
 toil day and night, for this they are ready to sacrifice 
 not only pleasure but interest — and in the attainment 
 of it they have their fu/i reward. 
 
 There are others, again, who seek for pleasure in 
 some one of the endless forms of enjoyment in which 
 our many-sided human nature takes delight. I do not 
 refer to the grosser forms of pleasure which a man's 
 physical nature as well as his conscience condemns. 
 
SOWING AND /'IE APING. 
 
 but to those which the world sanctions, and even good 
 men covet. They seek for these, and they do not seelc 
 in vain — but in finding them they have their full 
 reward. 
 
 There are others who seek for power ; not always 
 in the higher form of political power, but it may be only 
 in the minor phase of influence — of having their opinion 
 followed and their actions imitated. This is what they 
 seek, and this therefore is what they have ; but this is 
 all they seek, and therefore is all they have — and in 
 it they have their full reward. 
 
 There are others who seek for knowledge ; whose 
 aim in life is to know, and so to teach ; who devote to 
 it noble energies and great abilities, and pursue it with 
 a zeal which is in itself almost a moral virtue. They 
 seek, and they obtain ; they do good, it may be, to 
 other men, and make a permanent contribution to the 
 world's store of knowledge ; but it stops here — and 
 herein is their full reward. 
 
 And there are others, again, whose object in life is 
 merely the acquisition of wealth ; who rise up early and 
 take rest late — planning and scheming hour by hour, 
 in order that no day may be without its gain ; no effort 
 is too great, no toil too severe provided only that it 
 will add to their store. This is their passion, and its 
 gratification is their full reward. 
 
 And there are others, lastly, who have no definite 
 aim beyond life itself; they go on from day to day, 
 living from hand to mouth, quite content with their 
 life if no great exertion is required of them, and no 
 
 6 
 
SOWING AND REAPING. 
 
 great trouble crosses their path ; their desire is simply 
 to live out in peace the ordinary span of human 
 existence, and to die at last in comfort in their beds. 
 This is all they seek, and in this is their ///// reward. 
 
 In thus glancing over some of the many phases of 
 human life you will see how thoroughly this law of our 
 life holds good — the work is followed by its reward, 
 the kind of reward corresponds to the kind of work. 
 For it is a mistake to suppose that our Lord in the 
 text is using the language of irony. The reward of 
 which He speaks is not permanent, but it is not illusory. 
 It is not true that wicked men always fail and are 
 imlucky — that there is no enjoyment in the possession 
 of godless wealth, no delight in the pursuit of godless 
 pleasure. The very point of our Lord's remark lies in 
 the assertion of the contrary. These Pharisees of His 
 days had for their aim in life the attainment of a 
 reputation for religion ; all that they coveted was to 
 be vvell spoken of for their " long prayers ; " and they 
 wevii well spoken of, they had that praise of men which 
 they sought for ; and, in having it, they had, our Lord 
 says, their fitll reward. 
 
 So it is with men now. The reward which they 
 seek they have in full. But what is it ? It is money 
 which they cannot take with them into the grave ; it 
 is knowledge which passes away ; it is reputation which 
 an idle slander may blast ; it is pleasure which is 
 consumed in the attainment : this is all they seek and 
 this is all they have. 
 And whcit then ? 
 
83 
 
 The story which we read in the Gospels tells us the 
 rest. " There was a certain rich man who was clothed 
 in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every 
 day." He was not absolutely wrong in thus using 
 his wealth as wealthy men do — in having a large 
 house and keeping a good table. He is not described 
 as having been a bad man in the eyes of the world. 
 He may not even have been so uncharitable as we 
 sometimes imagine — for there is nothing to imply that 
 the broken meat was not sent out to the beggar who 
 lay at his gate. He was simply a man who lived for 
 this world and cared for nothing beyond : this was all 
 he sought for — and when he had found this there was 
 no more for him to receive. His greatness ended v;ith 
 his funeral. And after that, we read — he lifted up 
 his eyes, being in torments." 
 
 What is it, brethren, let us ask, as we think of this 
 sad story — what is it for which we are seeking ? For 
 we, too, come beneath this universal law : we, too, are 
 seeking : though we may never put it definitely and 
 consciously before ourselves, there is something which 
 lies at the end of all our exertions — something the 
 attainment of which will give us more or less satis- 
 faction. We too are sowing — and as we sow we shall 
 reap : Is it to the flesh, or is it to the Spirit ? Is it 
 to self, or is it to God ? 
 
 And let none of you, brethren, yield to the temptation 
 that you are too young to be sowing yet : for the law 
 holds not only with all classes of men but with all 
 periods of life. As soon as we are conscious of acting 
 
84 
 
 at all we are beginning to sow for the future. These 
 years of youth which pass so pleasantly and seem so 
 harmless — which you hurry through with a quick step 
 and a light heart — are the spring and early summer of 
 the soul : the crop may not be so apparent nor the 
 power of the influences which act upon it so marked, 
 and yet on them as much as, or more than, on the 
 ripening sun of later summer the character of the 
 harvest depends. Let me urge you then — if you have 
 not done so as yet — now at last by God's help to set 
 before yourselves the attainment of an end which will 
 gather up your best energies on earth, and which will 
 not fail you when your life on earth is ended. The 
 choice must be your own : choose this world with its 
 lower life, its passing joys, its uncertain success ; or 
 choose the Kingdom of God, with its pleasures that 
 cannot fail — and its sure hope of immortality. And 
 when you have chosen, do not deceive yourselves as to 
 what you have to do ; the work of living the Christian 
 life is' a real one ; it is no casual or occasional thing ; 
 it calls for untiring energies and unceasing care. You 
 would ivork to obtain earthly things, and work is the 
 condition of God's gift of heavenly things. The life of 
 holiness does not come upon us like a sudden gust 
 of wind : it must be sought diligently if we would find 
 it, it must be worked out " with fear and trembling," 
 even by those who have most hope of salvation. 
 
 But though the work be great the reward is great 
 also : seek to live the Christian life, seek to show to 
 those among whom you are thrown that faith in Christ 
 
SOWING AND REAPING. S5 
 
 can make you strong and pure and noble ; that it can 
 uphold you in difficulty, support you in temptation, and 
 carry you safe through the bitterest trial, and the reward 
 even in this life shall be a peace which the world 
 cannot give — a happiness which none but the Christian 
 can know. 
 
 Let this, then, be your choice : if you seek for 
 earthly things, you may find what you seek — -but they 
 will perish wilh you, perhaps before you. But if by 
 God's grace you set your affection on heavenly things, 
 and live the higher life which is possible to you : if you 
 will — you will not indeed escape trouble or temptation 
 or sorrow, but you will have with you the ever-abiding 
 presence of your Lord, the never-failing comfort of 
 His Spirit, strengthening your human weakness, and 
 lightening your earthly darkness, until you receive at 
 last that which is not the reward, but the " gift of 
 God " — the gift of eternal life. 
 
SERMON IX. 
 
 THE PLACE OF CONTROVERSY IN THE 
 CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
SERMON IX. 
 
 THE PLACE OF CONTROVERSY IN THE 
 CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 ISt. Mary's, Oxford, 1876.] 
 
 " In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availcth anything, nor uncir- 
 cumcision, but a new creaturc/'—GAL. vi. 15. 
 
 IT is remarkable to notice how large a space in the 
 history of mankind is occupied by controversies 
 about reHgion. Other kinds of controversy are local 
 and partial. There have been in past times, and there 
 are now, many controversies about politics. But 
 controversies about politics are not always possible. 
 They imply not only an amount of interest in public 
 affairs which is not always felt, but also an amount 
 of political freedom which is not always enjoyed. In 
 the times and in the countries in which St. Paul lived, 
 for example, there might be, and there was, a question 
 among his fellow-countrymen whether they should or 
 should not revolt against the Roman rule ; but con- 
 troversy, the discussion of public questions, writing, 
 speaking, arguing about the best mode of government, 
 was impossible. There have been, and there are now, 
 controversies upon literary questions. A large pro- 
 
90 PLACE OF CONTROVERSY IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 portion of the literature which exists in the world is 
 occupied with discussions as to the authorship of 
 particular books or the merits of particular authors. 
 But literary controversies, from their very nature, 
 appeal only to a limited class of the community. It 
 is impossible for the great mass of mankind, even in 
 the most cultivated age, to care much about the date of 
 Homer or the genuineness of a work of Aristotle. 
 
 It is otherwise with religious controversies ; they 
 have existed at almost all times, and in almost all 
 countries ; and sometimes, as, for example, in the 
 early days of Christianity, and at the period of the 
 Reformation in Europe, they have absorbed all other 
 controversies into themselves, and have gathered, 'as 
 it were, into a single focus all the scattered energies of 
 men. 
 
 But although religious controversies have almost 
 always existed, and although the great issues of re- 
 ligious controversies — the fundamental questions of all 
 creeds — are few in number, and necessarily the same 
 in kind, the particular forms which they have assumed, 
 the particular points to which they have narrowed 
 themselves, are almost infinitely various. 
 
 At one time the Christian Church was torn by a 
 dispute as to the day on which the Resurrection should 
 be commemorated. It was contended by one party 
 that it ought to be always a Sunday ; by the other 
 party that it ought always to be the same day of the 
 month, whether a Sunday or no. It was contended 
 later on, by one half of Christendom, that the cycle for 
 
PLACE OF CONTROVERSY IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 91 
 
 the computation of the Paschal moon should be one 
 of ninety-five years ; by the other half of Christendom, 
 that it ought to be one of eighty-four years ; and in 
 the early history of Christianity iri England there is 
 perhaps no religious question which fills a larger place. 
 
 Again, the Christian Church was divided by the 
 subtle question — reaching deep into the essence of the 
 Godhead, and straining after an exactness of knowledge 
 which it seems hardly possible for a creature to attain 
 — whether, when our Lord said that the Spirit of Truth 
 proceeded " from the Father," He ought not also to 
 have added explicitly the words we added in our creed 
 just now, "and the Son." For asserting the affirma- 
 tive, the whole of Eastern Christendom separated itself, 
 and to this day remains separated, from the whole of 
 the West. For asserting the negative, the head of 
 Western Christendom placed the head of Eastern 
 Christendom under the ban of perpetual excommuni- 
 cation. 
 
 Again, there was no small division between those 
 who had joined in fighting a great religious battle, and 
 winning a great moral victory, as to whether children 
 could or could not be made members of the Christian 
 Church, and as to the precise quantity of water which 
 was necessary to constitute an efficient baptism. There 
 were earnest men who faced contumely and imprison- 
 ment, and even death itself, for the belief that to be 
 baptized at all a man must have come to years of 
 discretion, and that to be baptized efficiently the water 
 must cover his body. 
 
92 PLACE OF CONTROVERSY IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 And again, there was a controversy, which in this 
 very country of Great Britain has split up the Estab- 
 lished Church into two divisions, whether the regulation 
 of the Church and the exercise of discipline was com- 
 mitted by our Lord to single officers, or to committees 
 and meetings of elders. And I need not remind any 
 of you who are familiar with the history of our country 
 how bitterly the controversy was fought out, and how 
 pitilessly the advocates of episcopacy on the one side, 
 and of the presbytery on the other, robbed, pillaged, 
 imprisoned, and murdered each other. 
 
 Now the particular controversy which was most 
 keenly contested in St. Paul's time, and which is spoken 
 of in this Epistle to the Galatians, was whether it 
 was necessary for a Christian to be circumcised or no. 
 Even in those first, and, as some think, purest days of 
 the Christian Church, and even between the Apostles 
 themselves, the question was hotly debated, and bitter 
 words passed to and fro. 
 
 It was contended on the one side that Christianity 
 was but a phase or form of the earlier religion which 
 God had sanctioned, and that the ceremonial which had 
 been enacted with so much minuteness of detail was not 
 intended to pass away, but to be good for all nations 
 and for all times. It was contended on the other side 
 that the revelation which God had made in early times 
 was partial and incomplete, and that the regulations 
 which He had sanctioned for the Jews were in their very 
 nature temporary, and were from the first intended to 
 pass away. 
 
PLACE OF CONTROVERSY IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 93 
 
 "Circumcision or uncircumcision ? " was the question. 
 " Circumcision ! " shou ted the Jew, zealous to bring 
 the Gentile world within the pale of the Mosaic legisla- 
 tion. " Uncircumcision ! " shouted the Gentile, seeing 
 that the family of God was wider than the family of 
 Jacob. " Circumcision ! " cried the Jew, looking back, as 
 he did, upon the splendid ritual of the Mosaic Church, 
 upon the splendid achievements of Hebrew history. 
 " Uncircumcision ! " cried the Gentle, looking back, as 
 he did, upon the long array of great names and famous 
 deeds, upon the width and length of the new world 
 which had to be won, upon Christ who had made them 
 free. " Nritlwr circumcision nor uncircumcision ! " 
 cried St. Paul, " but a new creature." 
 
 These words of St. Paul are the master-key to all 
 the controversies which have raged or are raging still 
 within the Christian Church, or within the still wider 
 sphere of the religious life of mankind. 
 
 They mean this : — 
 
 The one absolutely necessary thing to us as Christian 
 men — to us as children of God into whom the Spirit of 
 God is breathed^is not that we should be technically 
 right in this or that practice, not that we should be 
 theoretically right n this or that doctrine, but that we 
 should be " new creatures " ; that we should have risen 
 above the lower, earthly, brutish part of us, the sensual, 
 degrading, animal impulses, into a better and higher 
 life, to a nobler and holier creed, to a diviner and more 
 spiritual temper. The one paramount precept of the 
 Christian religion and of all religion, is — Be better 
 
94 PLACE OF CONTROVERSY IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 than you have been : be purer, be braver, be sincerer, 
 be truer, be kinder, be less of the animal and more of 
 the man, have less of the old Adam and more of the 
 new — be, in short, "new creatures." 
 
 And to us whose lines are fallen upon days of much 
 talk and many disputes ; to us who, with all our 
 interest in political, social, and even literary questions, 
 feel a still keener interest in some questions of religion ; 
 to us, with our wranglings of divided churches and 
 opposing sects, of fiery pamphlets and impassioned 
 speeches, of lawsuits and inhibitions, of Acts of Parlia- 
 ment and Judicial Committees, this great maxim comes 
 home with especial force, — " neither circumcision nor 
 uncircumcision," neither Protestantism nor Catholicism, 
 neither Evangelicism nor Ritualism, neither Episcopacy 
 nor Presbyterianism, neither Church nor Dissent, — but 
 a new creation, a new fashioning of our nature, a 
 reconstruction of our motives, a substitution of truth- 
 fulness for insincerity, of trust for despondency, of 
 charity for selfishness, of courage for cowardice, of 
 the sense of brotherhood for the lifting of every man's 
 hand against his neighbour. 
 
 And yet St. Paul, who lays down this maxim, was 
 himself a great controversialist. This very Epistle of 
 his from which the text is taken is a controversial 
 Epistle. There seems, at the first glance, almost a 
 contradiction between his precept and his practice. 
 
 But you would carry away a very erroneous impres- 
 sion if you thought, either that the Apostle meant, or 
 that I have been trying to persuade you, that contro- 
 
PLACE OF CONTROVERSY IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 95 
 
 versy is absolutely useless, that any man may believe 
 what he likes, and that the search for truth is an idle 
 quest. 
 
 It />• of consequence that we should have well- 
 grounded beliefs ; it is of consequence that we should 
 not let the marvellous powers which God has given us 
 for finding out the truth grow rusty from disuse ; it is 
 of consequence that we should ascertain for ourselves 
 what God has said and what He has not said ; it is of 
 consequence that we should not pick up our opinions 
 haphazard, and let them lie like loose stones upon 
 the surface of our minds, ready to be kicked away by 
 any passer-by. But it is of vastly greater consequence 
 that all through our search for truth, or our controversy 
 with supposed errors, we should remember that belief 
 is subordinate to practice, and that the highest know- 
 ledge which it is possible for us to hold fades into 
 obscurity when compared with the love of God and 
 the love of men, with the endeavour after a holy life, 
 and the active effort to do good in our generation. 
 
 For that which " availeth " is the "new creature" 
 —the getting rid of prejudice, and selfishness, and 
 impurity, and greediness, and intemperance ; that 
 which "availeth" is the re-formation, the regeneration, 
 the transmutation of our lower nature, the earnest 
 search for truth, the spirit of kindliness towards those 
 whose results are different from our own, the spirit of 
 humility in the acknowledgment that we know only 
 in part, the spirit of industry in the determination to 
 find out as much as we can. The attainment of 
 
96 PLACE OF CONTROVERSY IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. 
 
 knowledge may be, and is, in itself a part of that new 
 creation to which we should aspire, a sign and proof 
 that the old Adam of idleness and arrogance and in- 
 tolerance has not an undisputed sway. But that which 
 " availeth " is the spirit of search rather than the fact 
 of attainment, the spirit of charity rather than the 
 having just one grain more of truth on one side than 
 on the other. 
 
 Some day truth may dawn on us in its fulness, rising 
 like the sun upon the unflecked sky of new-born and 
 sinless souls ; some day, in another world than ours, it 
 may be given to us to stand upon the sublime height 
 of perfect knowledge above the cloudland and the 
 storm ; but here and now — where at best we know so 
 little, and while all our lives long we can but see dim 
 outlines of reality — here and now, while life is so 
 awfully short, and the realm of the unknown so awfully 
 vast, it will not restrict our knowledge, it will certainly 
 widen our charity, to know that controversy means so 
 little, to know that goodness means so much, to know 
 that "neither circumcision availeth anything nor un- 
 circumcision," but the daily growth in calmness, and 
 love, and self-control which St. Paul calls a " new 
 creation." 
 
SERMON X. 
 WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD 
 
 7 
 
SERMON X. 
 
 WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD. 
 
 ISt. Alary' s, Oxford, 1876.] 
 "Without God in the work]."— Ephesians ii. 12. 
 
 NE of the first, and one of the strangest, objections 
 
 ^^-^ that was ever urged against Christianity was 
 that it was a godless religion. The technical charge 
 upon which several of the first martyrs were condemned 
 to death was that of Atheism. A great satirist in the 
 middle of the second century treats Atheist and Christian 
 as synonymous terms. When the Emperor Constantine 
 embraced the Christian faith, he was said to have 
 embraced an atheistical opinion ; and the same term 
 of reproach summed up the calumnies which Julian 
 flung at the faith of his baptism when Paganism was 
 flickering to extinction. 
 
 It is not difficult to account for the charge. The 
 current religions of the Roman world were not only 
 religions in which there were many gods ; they were 
 also religions in which the gods, with many varieties 
 of attribute, were but exaggerated men. They were 
 conceived as having more than human power, and 
 sometimes more than human wisdom. They exhibited 
 
100 WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD. 
 
 upon a grander scale the ideal virtues, and sometimes 
 also the actual vices, of contemporary society. They 
 loved and hated ; they had banquets and dances ; they 
 made merry and were sad. They were men and 
 women through and through. They could be, and 
 they were, exhibited in human form. The ideal of 
 perfect manhood and perfect womanhood was not 
 merely a symbol of, but a close approximation to, the 
 Divine reality. The temples and the very streets were 
 full of statues of deities and deified men. 
 
 But of the God whom the Christians preached no 
 statue was possible. He that " made the world and 
 all things therein, seeing that He is Lord of heaven 
 and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands : 
 neither is worshipped with men's hands as though 
 he needeth anything, seeing He giveth to all life and 
 breath and all things." There was no visible temple. 
 There was no visible sacrifice. There seemed to be 
 no link to connect Him with humanity. He in whom 
 the Christian preacher lived and moved — breath of His 
 breath, thought of His thought, soul of His soul — was 
 inconceivable to the average Polytheist, whose deities 
 were definite and almost tangible realities. A God 
 who was everywhere seemed to be nowhere, and those 
 who believed in Him were condemned as Atheists — as 
 being " without God in the world." 
 
 St. Paul takes up the current word and flings it back 
 upon those who had used it. You Gentiles, he says, 
 were Atheists ; you who were " dead in sin," you who 
 were " aliens from the commonwealth of Israel," you 
 
WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD. loi 
 
 who were " without Christ," were also " without God. 
 And the early Christian writers who followed St. Paul 
 were at great pains to show that the retort was not 
 only telling but true. With much elaboration of argu- 
 ment they showed that the current conceptions were 
 degrading and base ; that the idea of God was altogether 
 inconsistent with the narrow attributes which were 
 popularly attributed to Him ; and that the sublimer 
 picture which the Gospel drew was no evanescent 
 shadow. 
 
 So far the words of the text have an historical, but 
 not a personal interest for us. From another point of 
 view they come home to almost every one of us. There 
 is a tendency in modern times which very much re- 
 sembles the tendency of the opponents of the early 
 Christians. It is not infrequent to find men framing 
 a narrow conception of God, and giving hard names 
 to those whose idea cannot be expressed in precisely 
 the same form of words, or fills a wider circumference. 
 The discoveries of modern times have made almost as 
 great a chasm between the conception of God which 
 was entertained by the average Christian three centuries 
 ago, and the conception at which we can arrive now ; 
 as existed between the gocls of the Greeks and Romans 
 and the God whom Paul preached and in whose faith 
 the early Christians died. 
 
 When the earth was conceived as the centre of 
 existing things round which all other spheres revolved ; 
 when the sky above us was conceived as a solid surface, 
 far off, indeed, but still at an appreciable distance, in 
 
102 
 
 WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD. 
 
 which the stars were mere openings through which the 
 Hght of the empyrean shone ; and when, to take the 
 other pole of creation, the realm of existence was almost 
 bounded by human sight ; when it was not and could 
 not be known that hundreds of thousands of atoms go 
 to the making of a single seed, and that a tiny drop 
 of water may contain a world of living things, — it was 
 altogether inevitable that a narrower conception of the 
 Divine nature should prevail than that which tends to 
 prevail now. We men were altogether more important 
 persons in the universe. The " nothingness of man " 
 was not so completely branded into him. The power, 
 the wisdom, the goodness of God, even then seemed 
 vast, and were spoken of as infinite ; but it was im- 
 possible to realize that vastness ; it was impossible to 
 bring it home to the imagination in the way in which 
 it is possible now — not merely to anyone who studies 
 nature profoundly, but to anyone who will look out just 
 for an hour on a starlight night upon the suns and worlds 
 and systems of worlds which shine out upon his view. 
 
 The result of this widening of the known sphere of 
 God's operation is that many persons who have made 
 nature their especial study are so penetrated with the 
 idea of the vastness of the world which God has made, 
 and have their imaginations so expanded with the 
 habitual conception of its boundlessness, that some 
 of the ways in wiiich God has been described, and 
 some of the modes in which God was once conceived 
 to manifest His especial presence, no longer correspond 
 to their conception. The words seem too narrow, the 
 
WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD. 
 
 103 
 
 theory seems too imperfect, to account for the mag- 
 nitude of the facts which lie before their view. 
 
 But it has happened that just as the early Christians 
 were called Atheists for opposing the popular concep- 
 tion and trying to bring the world to a wider and truer 
 conception of God, so also many of those who have 
 conferred on Christianity itself a great and lasting 
 service, by unfolding to us the unimagined vastness of 
 " our Father," have earned for their reward the epithet 
 of Atheist, — the accusation flung without mercy and 
 without stint that their God is no God at all. 
 
 And just as St. Paul was able to retort the charge 
 upon the Gentiles of his day, so some of those who 
 have gained a larger conception of God can retort it 
 upon many of those who think that they have hit off to 
 a letter the exact way in which they should define Him. 
 
 There are some persons who come to church, and 
 are quite orfhodox in their beliefs, who are yet as much 
 as ever these Gentiles were " without God in the world." 
 Their religion is so mean a thing, and the part which 
 God plays in it is so insignificant, that it might almost 
 be omitted altogether. There is no feature more 
 marked on the face of contemporary religion than its 
 pettiness. It is a religion of commonplace — of the 
 matter-of-fact respectability which is the ideal life of 
 the average Englishman ; or if it be not that, if even 
 there be a spark of enthusiasm in it, it becomes a 
 religion of paltriness and trifles, of saying exactly the 
 right shibboleth in exactly the right tone, or of burning 
 exactly the right number of candles with precisely the 
 
104 WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD. 
 
 right amount of incense. I am very far indeed from 
 asserting that all of you to whom it is my privilege to 
 speak have no other and no better religion. But yet 
 the number of those to whom God is anything more 
 than a mere name in the background is terribly small. 
 It is so perhaps from habit rather than from intention ; 
 but it is so beyond question. One of the results of the 
 education through which all of us, in greater or less 
 degree, have passed, is that we deal with words rather 
 than with things, i.e., we hear the spoken sounds, or 
 we see the written characters, without picturing or 
 attempting to picture to ourselves the realities which 
 those sounds or characters represent. It is especially 
 so with this most sacred and most solemn of all words. 
 It has become to many of us a name and nothing more. 
 It does not bring before us any vivid picture. It sug- 
 gests to us a crowd of collateral and subordinate 
 questions ; and the tendency of the mind is to dwell 
 upon the last and minutest of these questions rather 
 than upon the great permanent fact, the great unchang- 
 ing reality, in comparison with which the questions 
 upon which our attention rests are but as the moss 
 that grows on the mountain side. 
 
 This is being " without God," because the idea of 
 God is so far shut out from our thoughts as not to 
 enter into the sphere of our motives, or to have any 
 direct effect upon our conduct. The proof lies in the 
 practical result. 
 
 Is it possible that, if once you realised the idea of 
 God — the perfectly Holy, the perfectly Just, the perfectly 
 
WITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD. 
 
 105 
 
 True, standing as it were by your side, watching you 
 as you speak, and knowing what you think — you would 
 dare, as some Christians do dare, to tell a lie ? 
 
 Is it possible that, if once you realised the idea of 
 God — the Almighty Creator of yourselves and all you 
 see, the Eternal Upholder of all life that is and has 
 been, waiting, so to speak, for your recognition, and 
 listening to your prayer — you would wrangle, as some 
 Christians do wrangle, as to which way they shall turn 
 their faces when they worship Him ? 
 
 Is it possible that, if once you realised the idea of 
 God — the Almighty Father whose arms are round you 
 even when you stray farthest from His presence, whose 
 breath is within you in every lofty thought you breathe 
 — you would make a form of approaching Him, as some 
 Christians do approach Him, with a babble of words 
 which, so far from meaning, they do not even under- 
 stand ? 
 
 Is it possible that, if you and I realised to ourselves 
 only an infinitesimal part of the grandeur, the majesty, 
 the awful subUmity, which even at this very moment 
 is not far from every one of us, we should be the mean, 
 despicable, selfish creatures that we sometimes are in 
 our daily lives ? 
 
 " Without God in the world : " it may be a picture 
 of you and me, — you and me, with all our talk about 
 religion, and all the fine names we give ourselves for 
 our orthodoxy. 
 
 " Without God in the world : " in one sense it is 
 impossible, for neither in the heights above nor in the 
 
io6 IVITHOUT GOD IN THE WORLD. 
 
 depths beneath is it possible for His creatures to escape 
 Him : but it is altogether true, as far as we are. con- 
 cerned, when we live in habitual unconsciousness 
 of Him. 
 
 And yet there is not any one of us who may not, 
 like the Patriarch of old, " walk with God." Sit down 
 calmly for once and try to fill your imagination with 
 the thought of the Infinite Fatherhood which embraces 
 in its love, not only you and me and men like ourselves, 
 but every living thing ; not only this world and all that 
 is in it, but all worlds that have been and that are. 
 Think of that Infinite Fatherhood as not far off but 
 very near, near enough to watch the faintest aspiration 
 and to hear the unspoken prayer. Realise to yourself 
 that all you do — the small things as well as the great, 
 the mean things as well as the noble — are done in His 
 presence ; and if you do this, if only once the fact of 
 that presence seizes hold of your consciousness and is 
 pictured to your soul, it will be a new and purer and 
 controlling element in every motive, moulding your 
 conduct as well as your beliefs, and influencing your 
 lives from hour to hour. Then, but not till then, will 
 your lives be like the life of Him who even in His 
 humanity was able to say, " I and my Father are one." 
 A meaner ideal is the ideal of many Christians. A 
 meaner ideal was the ideal of these Ephesian Gentiles 
 to whom Paul preached : " the times of that ignorance 
 God winked at." But you and I are not Ephesian 
 Gentiles, and if we are " without God," we are "with- 
 out excuse." 
 
SERMON XI. 
 
 THE GOD OF HOPE. 
 
SERMON XI. 
 
 THE GOD OF HOPE.* 
 " The God of hope." — Rom. xv. 13. 
 
 THE voice that spoke from this place last Sunday 
 afternoon is hushed and silent ; the face that you 
 saw here then is a face that you will see no more. 
 Yonder churchyard holds all that was visible and 
 audible of a soul that is now with God. 
 
 And while the memory of him is as fresh as the 
 pain is keen, I, who knew him best, must tell you, who 
 had scarcely time to know him yet, what kind of man 
 he was. 
 
 Across the horizon of our lives there has passed one 
 of those characters which are so rare as to be remark- 
 able. The characters of most men fall under one of 
 two classes : they are either characters to be admired 
 or characters to be loved. There are some characters 
 to which, though we admire them, we cannot cling : 
 there are others to which we cling, but which we feel 
 to be weak. But the special feature of the character 
 
 * Preached at Birchanger Church, on the second Sunday in Advent, 
 1877, upon the occasion of the sudden death of the Rector, the Rev. 
 W. M. Hatch, M.A., Fellow of New College, Oxford. 
 
no 
 
 THE GOD OF HOPE. 
 
 which has passed away from us was its combination of 
 gentleness and power. It had each of these quaHties in 
 an intense degree : it was as lovable as it was strong. 
 The feature of it which perhaps struck men most was 
 its exquisite and subtle tenderness. He won the hearts 
 of all who knew him. There was fascination in the 
 delicate sensitiveness of his manner and in the soft 
 music of his voice. Children drew close to him while 
 he lived, and old men wept when he died. In every 
 word and every look there was a sympathy as pene- 
 trating as it was profound — a sympathy " that could 
 be felt." But even of sympathy there are two forms : 
 there is a selfish sympathy which makes the imagination 
 of the feelings of other men merely an intensification of 
 its own ; and there is an unselfish sympathy which is 
 of all features of human character the highest and the 
 most divine. It sympathises not for the sake of a 
 reaction upon self, but out of pure and passionate 
 generosity. It is not passive but active. It cannot 
 rest content with feeling, it must be doing. It becomes 
 self-sacrifice. It utterly forgets self in order to make 
 others happier, wiser, better men. This gift God had 
 given to my brother, and this gift he used. Sympathy 
 was ever passing into self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice 
 was ever showing itself in energy. Unsparing of him- 
 self, unresting, and unwearied, he gave himself up to do 
 good to others — to win their hearts and to mould their 
 convictions, and to lift them to a higher level of know- 
 ledge and of character. At the cost of thought and 
 labour, at the cost of anxiety and sorrow, at the cost of 
 
THE GOD OF HOPE. 
 
 HI 
 
 weary days and sleepless nights, at the cost of health 
 and the cost of money, and the cost sometimes of 
 reputation, and the cost at last — as we all sadly know 
 — of life itself, he was obeying the Divine impulse which 
 filled him to try to make men better than they were 
 before. There is a saying that " Genius does what it 
 must, but talent does what it can." There was this 
 attribute of genius about my brother. Necessity was 
 laid upon him ; there was no possibility of evasion ; 
 he must preach his Gospel, though in preaching it he 
 were to die. It was no question with him, Will another 
 service hurt me ? Will another effort weary me ? 
 The passionate determination of his will thrust pru- 
 dence roughly from its path ; it was at once impelled 
 and inspired by the overmastering consideration, " There 
 is work to be done for men and for God ; do it I must, 
 and do it I will ! " 
 
 For you and me such a life' and such a character are 
 impossible. For you and me the rule of life is prudence. 
 For you and me, who have children looking to us for 
 bread, the first of all duties, and the highest of all 
 religions, is not merely to use the gifts of God, but to 
 use them with judgment and with economy. And yet 
 if life were all prudence it would be intolerable. If 
 passionate generosity ceased to exist, if the realisation 
 of impracticable ideals were never attempted, if nothing 
 were done but what sober men thought likely to succeed, 
 if there were no glory of golden sunsets at the end of 
 our gloomy days, if there were no seeming waste of 
 fragrance and blossom on the hedgerows of our weary 
 
112 
 
 THE GOD OF HOPE. 
 
 roads, — this dull, sad life of ours would be a burden that 
 we could hardly bear. And what the sunset is to a grey 
 and leaden sky, what the summer flowers are to the 
 common prose of a country-side, — all that, and more, 
 more perfect in its poetry and more profound in its 
 meaning, is such a life as that which has passed away 
 to your lives and mine. Imitate it exactly we cannot — 
 and if we could, we should not ; and yet, out of its 
 sublime unselfishness, out of its Divine devotion to the 
 sense of a great duty, may come to you — there will 
 live in me to my life's end — the sense of a better motive, 
 and the stimulus to more unselfish action. 
 What is the story of his life ? 
 
 He began with no great advantages of birth or station, 
 and in this keen competition of life — in which there 
 are few to help you when you struggle, and fewer still 
 to pity when you fall — it is no slight victory for a 
 youth to fight his way almost single-handed to the 
 position which he won. Nearly sixteen years ago he 
 entered the University of Oxford. His career there 
 was a distinguished one. He was in the front rank of 
 his contemporaries. He might have stayed there to 
 this day, living the quiet life of a college tutor ; and 
 there was great promise that, if he had done so, he 
 would have gained for himself a name among those 
 who influence mankind in the higher paths of thought. 
 His intellect was essentially philosophical. He had a 
 keen insight into the subtler issues of great questions. 
 He had just enough dreaminess to be speculative, and 
 although his bent was rather critical than constructive. 
 
THE GOD OF HOPE. 
 
 he could not only analyse a theory but frame one. But 
 he had a passion for education of another kind. He 
 loved boys, and he found that boys loved him. He 
 resolved to devote himself to educating them. He was 
 possessed with the idea that much of the education of 
 boys in England is based on a mischievous separation 
 of moral and intellectual from religious culture. He 
 thought that the two might be blended into a perfect 
 harmony, and that the chapel rather than the hall or 
 class-room should be the centre of school life. In the 
 important institution to the headship of which he was 
 soon appointed, the noble theory which he conceived 
 is still being carried into practice. The splendid chapel 
 with its living services is a visible record of what he 
 did. He left it to others to carry on, while he himself 
 endeavoured to form a still nobler institution in another 
 part of the country. But there the ways of the world 
 baffled him ; legal difficulties and other obstacles came 
 in the way, and he left the scheme incomplete to do 
 what good he could here among you. How he worked 
 here you know better than I can tell you. These walls 
 which by his efforts were made more like the walls of 
 a House of God ; these services which by his efforts 
 and your co-operation have received a new spirit, bear 
 witness to what even in a few months a man of his type 
 may do. For you to the last he spent himself If he 
 had economised his energies, he might, humanly speak- 
 ing, have been preaching to you now. But his spirit 
 was as eager as his flesh was weak. Last Sunday 
 afternoon — just a week ago to the very hour — he 
 
 8 
 
THE GOD OF HOPE 
 
 preached his last sermon ; he sang his last hyvan ; there 
 was just time enough for him to lay aside the robe in 
 which he had ministered : he sank down exhausted in 
 his chair ; the " Angel of Mercy " was waiting for him ; 
 the Advent which he had preached was come. 
 It was the ver\- poetrj- of death. 
 
 Is this all ? You will perhaps wonder that I even 
 ask. The very meaning and purpose of our being here 
 is to say that it is not all. What is this but " the 
 Lord's Day " — the Day of the Resurrection ? What is 
 this but Advent — the commemoration of the Lord's first 
 coming, the anticipation of His coming again ? 
 
 And yet for all that I ask, " Is this all ? " For this 
 is one of those times when we have to probe to the 
 very deepest depths of things. One after one our 
 kinsmen and our friends join the awful procession 
 which is always in mo\-ement and always gathering 
 strength. One after one the actors disappear from 
 the great stage of hfe in which we too are placing our 
 parts, and frx)m which we too must follow them. There 
 comes or seems to come to us, as a faint and unsubstan- 
 tial vision against a background of gloom — a faint cuid 
 solemn whispering in the stillness of the night But 
 where they are and what they are we carmot tell, and 
 we are not told. There are, no doubt, some who think 
 that we are definitely told in the Gospels. They think 
 that, for example, the storj- of the rich man and Lazarus 
 is not an adaptation of the current behefs of the time 
 to a striking lesson, but an intentional revelation of the 
 actual world to come. It may be so : but since the 
 
THE GOD OP HOPE. 
 
 question whether it is so depends on the correctness or 
 incorrectness of a particular method of interpretation, 
 it may also not be so. We must go deeper than that. 
 Surmise and poetry and questions as to methods of 
 interpretation are not enough for us. We are here 
 face to face with realities so awful that we must at 
 least pause to look at them. Once only can we be 
 bom: once only can we die. These two facts, the 
 one at the beginning of our life, the other at its end, 
 are the most momentous personal facts that we can 
 ever know. They are so momentous that all 'other 
 knowledge in the world fades into insignificance in 
 comparison with them. With the one fact we are 
 familiar every day. We are indeed so familiar with 
 it that it escapes our notice. Like the shkiing of the 
 sun, like the growth of plants, like the alternation of 
 waking and sleeping, this e\er-present fact of our 
 ha\-ing come into life and our living now surrounds 
 us and penetrates us. It has ceased to be a wonder. 
 We live, and we accept the fact of our li\Tiig ; and life, 
 moreover, is so full of work which must be done, that 
 it would be a frustration of its ob\-ious purposes if we - 
 stopped still, as we might well stop still, to contemplate 
 the wonder of it But just for a moment — now that 
 the sudden passing away of our friend compels us, 
 whether we will or no, to pause— think what it is to 
 live. Out of nothing, or next to nothing, we have 
 come to be ; out of the vast and shapeless mass — vast 
 eddies, as we are told, of impalpable and invisible gases 
 — which preceded the days of creation, has come the 
 
Ii6 
 
 THE GOD OF HOPE. 
 
 world of which we are part, with all its marvellous 
 variety of phase and form — sunlight and starlight, 
 trees and flowers. Out of an atom is developed a man. 
 How the atom itself comes into being none can tell. 
 How it should result in you and me — in the eyes which 
 see, and the brain which thinks, and the busy hands 
 which move — is a mystery to which, with all our 
 knowledge, we have scarcely a clue. Think of all this, 
 I ask you, if but for a moment : and then turn to the 
 twin mystery of death. It is the lesser of the two. 
 The marvel is not that we should cease to live, but 
 that we should live at all. 
 
 It is because of this — because, that is to say, we 
 have among us, as the most certain of all facts, this 
 inexplicable mystery of life — that we have hope of life 
 in death. Look at a dead man's face — at its still and 
 awful powerlessness — and you will be tempted to think 
 it impossible that he should live again. But listen to 
 a living man's voice, as it chmbs the heights of thought, 
 or sweeps through the chords of passion, and reflect 
 whence all this has sprung, and you cannot help but 
 imagine that the bridge between life and death is 
 subtler than we know. The Power that evolved all 
 this from an atom can keep it, though it seem to cease 
 to be. This is the last word of modern thought, it is 
 the last word also of the ancient faith. It was breathed 
 from the mouth of the Hebrew prophet when the 
 inspiration passed through him, " Behold, all souls are 
 Mine" (Ezek. xviii. 4). It was expressed in that still 
 diviner saying of our Master, " All live unto Him " 
 
THE GOD OF HOPE. 
 
 117 
 
 (Luke XX. 38). It may seem a meagre Gospel to 
 preach, and yet it sums up all that we need know. 
 Upon the manner of the life " beyond the veil " both 
 the Bible and the Church are awfull}' and significantly 
 silent. There are magnificent pictures which Christian 
 painters have painted of it. There are magnificent 
 poems which Christian poets have sung. But just as 
 the "Old Fathers " had no fuller and )'et no profounder 
 teaching than that of the great unknown philosopher, 
 " The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, 
 and there shall no torment touch them : " so also the 
 teaching of our Lord, the teaching of the Apostles, the 
 teaching of the Church Universal, has no fuller and yet 
 no sublimer utterance than the triumphant ending of 
 its most triumphant hymn — " I look for the resur- 
 rection OF THE DEAD, AND THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO 
 COME." 
 
 I have only two other things to say — one about my 
 brother, the other about ourselves. 
 
 Common talk speaks of a "premature" death. 
 Common talk speaks of a career cut short and of 
 promise unfulfilled. At first sight it seems as if 
 common talk were correct. Think of what my brother 
 was as you saw him last Sunday afternoon, and con- 
 trast it with the still and silent form which lies in 
 yonder grave. It would seem at first sight as though 
 learning, energy, and enthusiasm had all been thrown 
 away. It would seem as though something had been 
 lost — a flame quenched for ever in the dark ; and in 
 sorrowing for ourselves, for the loss of the living love 
 
il8 THE GOD OF HOPE. 
 
 that he gave us, and of the living words that he spoke, 
 we are tempted to sorrow also for him. But " in that 
 he liveth, he liveth unto God." If God be, as we 
 believe Him to be, a " God of hope ; " if the life to 
 come be, as we believe it to be, not a dream but a 
 reality, — then not a power is wasted, not a fibre of the 
 life of his soul is thrown away. That which was 
 earthly in him has gone back whence it came ; the sin 
 has been washed away ; the faults — and there were 
 many — have perished like the dross in the furnace; 
 the pure gold of his character is left behind. For him, 
 disburdened, cleansed, and purified, there is some other 
 " garden of the Lord " in which there is work to do. 
 
 For him, therefore, we may not mourn ; but we may 
 mourn for ourselves. For us remains the struggle and 
 the strife ; for us remains many an anxiety, many a 
 temptation, and, it may be, many a sin ; for us remains 
 the constant weariness of baffled effort and disappointed 
 hope. But for us, also, there remains the influence 
 of his example. The memory of his character may 
 live among us ; and of all influences that act upon 
 human life the influence of character is the strongest 
 and the subtlest. It is an influence which, for good 
 or for evil, every one of us exercises ; but sometimes 
 when men are dead their characters influence us more 
 than when they were living. When they were living 
 we saw their faults as well as their merits, and we 
 steeled ourselves against the influence of their merits 
 because of their faults. But, when they are dead, 
 their merits rather than their faults come into pro- 
 
THE GOD OF HOPE. 
 
 119 
 
 minence. It is the light, and not the shadow, that 
 strikes our notice and impresses itself upon our souls. 
 So it was and so it is with him of whom we are think- 
 ing now. His loss will be a gain if we think of what 
 was best in him, and let it work its subtle work upon 
 our souls. There are some in whom that work is 
 already marked and visible. There are some of the 
 boys whom he trained from whose minds his image 
 will never fade, and through whom the gentle power of 
 his unselfishness, the light of the noble ideal which he 
 tried to carry out, will be reflected upon children's 
 children. So let it be also with ourselves — both with 
 those who have known him lately and with those who 
 have loved him long. A glorious light has shone and 
 passed away ; let us rather thank God for having given 
 it than lament over its loss ; let us treasure the memory 
 of it and keep it clear ; and so shall our lives — sad, 
 struggling, disappointed, and weary, as some of them 
 are — be brought nearer God by the hallowing, refining, 
 stimulating power of a pure and gentle soul. 
 
( 
 
SERMON XII. 
 
 "THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT TIME: 
 
I 
 
SERMON XII. 
 
 ^^THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT TIME." 
 
 ISt. Mary's, Oxford, 1878.] 
 
 " I reckon that the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to 
 be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us." — Rom, 
 viii. 18. 
 
 THESE words, like all other words of Scripture, 
 must be taken in relation to the person who 
 uttered them, and to the time at which they were 
 uttered. 
 
 The Christians of that time were with few excep- 
 tions Jews. And the Jews were a hated race. They 
 stood apart from the rest of mankind, and the rest 
 of mankind shunned them. The common bond which 
 binds man to man hardly existed between the Gentile 
 and the Jew. They were scorned where they were 
 not hated ; they were loathed where they were not 
 scorned. But the 'Christians were worse off than the 
 Jews. Between the Jews there existed at any rate 
 the bond of a great fellowship. In every important 
 city of the East they formed a community. They 
 clung together though the rest of men hated them. 
 In the streets, in the market-places, in the public 
 
124 "THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT TIME:' 
 
 gatherings, they were isolated and scorned. In their 
 own synagogues, in their own society, this very fact 
 of their isolation held them together in the bonds of 
 brotherhood. There was a kind of freemasonry among 
 them. The password of a common tongue, and even 
 of a common physiognomy, secured for each individual 
 Jew recognition and fellowship and hospitality. They 
 were hated by the world, but they were loved by 
 their kindred ; and that love of their kindred was a 
 compensation for rebuff and rebuke and ridicule. It 
 overbore the physical hardships of persecution ; it was 
 stronger than the fear of death. But all this, though 
 it came in time, had hardly come yet to the Christian. 
 He was a Jew outside the pale of Jews. He was a 
 pariah among pariahs. The very Jews would not 
 associate with him. He was " hated of all men for 
 Christ's name's sake." 
 
 And if in all the ranks of this hated subdivision of 
 a sect there was one man who could be sensible of 
 the scorn which was poured upon him, that man was 
 the writer of these words. Born of the very bluest 
 blood of Judaism — a Jew among Jews — educated as a 
 conservative and a high churchman, with that bitter 
 scorn of dissenters from his faith which then as now 
 was the special mark of orthodox high breeding, he 
 had come to be a dissenter among dissenters; not 
 only a Christian, but an advocate of opinions which 
 among Christians themselves were unpopular and 
 proscribed. " I think that God hath set forth us the 
 Apostles last, as it were appointed unto death, for we 
 
"THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT TIME." 125 
 
 are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels 
 and to men. . . . We are made as the filth of the 
 world, and are the offscouring of all things unto this 
 day." 
 
 Nor was it all a merely moral torture. The con- 
 tempt of the mass of men, the hatred of one's kin, 
 the sense of being a heretic among heretics, a pariah 
 among pariahs, are all capable of consolation. The 
 inner sense of satisfaction, the conviction of duty, the 
 " conscience void of offence," can outweigh even in 
 less noble natures the opposition of the world outside. 
 There was not only moral but physical torture. 
 Wherever the ecclesiastical courts of his countrymen 
 had jurisdiction, he received the "stripes" of a heretic. 
 Wherever the civil courts of the Roman government 
 took cognisance of him, he was " beaten " with the 
 lictor's " rods " as a disturber of the peace. There 
 was death in front ; there was ignominy and torture on 
 either hand ; there was that terrible mingling of moral 
 humiliation with physical pain which to a sensitive 
 nature like St. Paul's is a thousand times worse than 
 the agony of dying. 
 
 These were some of the " sufferings of this present 
 time." They were almost more than man could bear ; 
 and yet, when put into the scale, they weighed but 
 the weight of a feather. " I reckon that the sufferings 
 of this present time are not worthy to be compared 
 with the glory which shall be revealed in us." 
 
 For on the other side was an overpowering hope. 
 The vision came before him of a sublime and splendid 
 
126 " THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT TIME." 
 
 future in which the redemption of the sons of God 
 would be visible and complete. It was not the common 
 Jewish hope that the time was coming in which 
 Jerusalem would no longer be trodden under Gentile 
 feet, and in which they would no longer serve but 
 reign. It was not the great panorama which seemed 
 to rise from the western sea to the prisoner in the 
 solitary island, the cloudland of a great sunset shaping 
 itself into a city of God. It was more vague in its 
 external outline, but more distinct in its inner character. 
 It was the vision of a time in which the flesh would 
 no longer lust against the spirit, and in which the law 
 of sin would no longer prevail over the law of God. 
 It was glorious, because it was godlike. The new life 
 was to be a Divine life. The lower self, with its lusts 
 and hates, with its passions and its strifes, would be 
 wholly put away. The transitoriness of life, as well 
 as its pain, would cease, for " the things which are 
 seen are temporal, the things which are not seen are 
 eternal." 
 
 For this it was worth while to struggle and to wait. 
 " If in this life only we have hope, then are we of all 
 men most miserable." But it is not so. It will not 
 only be that the balance will be restored, but that the 
 compensation will be an " exceeding weight of glory." 
 The dim reflection of Christ, which is visible in men's 
 characters now, will become a glorious " image." The 
 faint flickering of the Spirit's flame will become a 
 burning and a shining light. The temptation will be 
 gone ; the struggle ended ; the sadness changed to joy 
 
''THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT TIME." 127 
 
 unspeakable. " I reckon that tlie sufiferings of this 
 present time are not worthy to be compared with the 
 glory which shall be revealed in us." 
 
 I began by saying that these words of Scripture 
 must be taken in close relation to the man who uttered 
 them, and to the time at which they were uttered. I 
 have tried to give you an outline of what they meant 
 in St. Paul's mouth and in St. Paul's days. And if I 
 stopped here, there would still have been something 
 gained. It is something to throw ourselves into a past 
 time, and to realise a past character. It is a widening 
 of human sympathy, and a brightening of human 
 intelligence to do so, even if nothing more be done. 
 
 But you would hardly be listening to me to-day 
 if that were all that I had to say. You would hardly 
 be at the trouble of coming, week after week, to hear 
 a fragment of history told over and over again. You 
 expect to hear about dead men's lives and the lessons 
 of their lives elsewhere ; and there are probably some 
 among you who do not care much about them when 
 you do hear of them. 
 
 But history is a parable : and when it is told as a 
 parable it is no longer dead, but living. What " was 
 written aforetime was written for our learning." It 
 has a present value. The circumstances are different, 
 but the moral comes home to you and me. 
 
 The circumstances are different : there are few greater 
 contrasts than the contrast between St. Paul's position 
 and our own. There has been a complete revolution. 
 To be a Christian is no longer a mark of ignominy 
 
128 " THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT TIME:' 
 
 and a punishable crime. The outcasts of society are 
 not those who profess Christianity, but those who 
 blaspheme it. There is no longer any sense in which 
 it can be said that our profession of religion brings us 
 into obloquy, and still less into physical pain. 
 
 But although the circumstances are different, the 
 Apostle himself helps us to see that his words have a 
 meaning even for the Christian world of the nineteenth 
 century. He speaks primarily of his sufferings for 
 Christ's sake. But he goes on to speak of the travail 
 of the whole creation, and the bondage of corruption in 
 which the whole human race is bound. It is not of sin 
 but of suffering that he speaks. Suffering is no doubt 
 conceived as the result of sin, but it is of suffering 
 rather than of sin that he is thinking now. Whether 
 he thought of the one or of the other, the lesson, 
 though not the same lesson, comes home to us. For 
 we too know of suffering, though not of suffering for 
 Christ's sake ; and in transferring his thoughts to our 
 own times, what we have to note is the sharp contrast 
 between the misery of the present time and the per- 
 fection of the time to come. 
 
 In all times men have been born to sorrow. The 
 history of our race is a history of pain. Nor is it cer- 
 tain that, as history has gone on, the pain has lessened. 
 We hear from time to time of the alleviations of suffer- 
 ing which have marked the advance of civilisation. 
 We live in an age in which the effort to alleviate 
 suffering forms a distinct feature in the organisation 
 of society. We cannot look at the photograph of con- 
 
THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT TIME:' 129 
 
 temporary life which is contained in a daily newspaper 
 without seeing that benevolent institutions and social 
 improvements occupy a large place in the thoughts and 
 efforts of civilised mankind. 
 
 But for all that, the doubt remains whether the sum 
 total of human misery has not vastly increased. It 
 would almost seem as though the onward march of 
 civilisation slays its thousands and maims its ten 
 thousands. It is almost inevitable that it should be 
 so. The whole machinery of society is so constructed 
 as to make the difference between rich and poor wider 
 as civilisation increases. Wealth tends to accumulate 
 itself in fewer hands. There is consequently not only 
 a multiplication of the number of the poor, but a 
 deepening of their poverty. The fact is so serious, 
 and is becoming so prominent, that many of those who 
 contemplate social phenomena from a scientific point 
 of view regard it with undisguised alarm. Nor is its 
 significance lessened by the fact that the newest of all 
 philosophies is a philosophy of pessimism, a philosophy 
 which is based on the conviction that we are going 
 from bad to worse. 
 
 But whether the misery of men be more or less than 
 it has been, it is at any rate enormous. Most of us 
 who are here now, living as we do fives of quiet routine, 
 belonging, as most of us do, to the respectable classes, 
 scarcely touch the frmge of it. We have sorrows and 
 afflictions of our own ; we have social struggles and 
 social hardships ; but what are these compared with 
 the intense and awful misery of some other classes of 
 
 9 
 
ISO "THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT TIME." 
 
 the community ? If I could draw but an outline of the 
 picture, I would ask you to come with me in imagina- 
 tion for a moment into the by-paths of a great city, and 
 to look at their squalor, their disease, and their almost 
 hopeless degradation. I would ask you to look at all 
 this, not with the eye of a theologian as so much sin, 
 nor even with the eye of a politician as so much crime, 
 but with the eye of a Christian as so much wretched- 
 ness ; and to contrast your own quiet homes and well- 
 nurtured frames with the puny bodies which have 
 borne from their birth the evidence of hunger, and 
 with the wretched dens in which they huddle together 
 for warmth, or with the street-corners, which are worse 
 than dens, where they shudder in the cold. Though 
 I cannot paint it, though it is hard to imagine it, yet 
 think for a moment, I beseech you, of this mighty 
 seething cauldron of misery, the fire beneath which is 
 for ever kept alive by the burning passions of lust, and 
 avarice, and hate. 
 
 What are we to say as we think of it ? What are 
 we to tell those who are passing through it ? What, 
 indeed, are we to say, if we cannot say these words of 
 St. Paul, and say them with St. Paul's own enthusiasm, 
 " 1 reckon that the sufferings of this present time are 
 not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall 
 be revealed " ? 
 
 On the wings of that strong hope the wretchedest 
 of men may rise ; and without it life can only be to 
 you and me, as well as to the wretchedest of men, an 
 enigma, a struggle, and a despair. 
 
"THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT T/ \/E." 131 
 
 This power of a great hope may become the power 
 of a great temptation. This dream of a glory to be 
 revealed has played a baneful as well as a beneficial 
 part in the history of Christianity. As long as we 
 ourselves are not feeling the misery of life, but only 
 contemplate it from outside, there is nothing easier 
 than to sit with placid countenances and folded hands, 
 looking away from the wretchedness at our feet to the 
 sunlit cloudland of the future. It has been the tempta- 
 tion of many men, and even of many good men, in 
 all ages. It is this which underlies the tendency to 
 monasticism which fills so large a place in Christian 
 history, and which is not wholly absent from us now. 
 There were monks who felt as keenly as you or I could 
 feel the misery and wickedness which surrounded them, 
 and who painted, in more glowing colours than any one 
 before or since has painted, the glory of the Jerusalem 
 that is to come ; and yet who made no single effort to 
 make the misery less or to bring the glory nearer. 
 There are men among us still who, though not monks, 
 but entangled in the net-work of common life, take the 
 misery that they find there as an inevitable element 
 of it, and wait in unmoving acquiescence, if not in 
 placid self-satisfaction, until God sends some change. 
 But this, so far from being hope, is rather its paralysis ; 
 for hope that does nothing is not hope, -but an idle 
 dream. 
 
 On the other hand, the power of a great hope may 
 become the power of a great motive. 
 
 I will not now stay to show in any detail how it may 
 
132 "THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT TIME." 
 
 affect our relation to the " sufferings of this present 
 time," of which I have been chiefly speaking. I will 
 rather deal with it, and that only for a moment, in its 
 bearings upon our own lives. There are few among us 
 whose lives have not an element of sadness. For you 
 and for me, as well as for the wretchedest of men, the 
 consolations of the future are still needed. But if they 
 come to us at all, they should come as a motive power ; 
 they should help to shape our character. It was so 
 with St. Paul. His conception of the glory which 
 should be revealed was not, as we have seen, so much 
 a complete change in external circumstances as a 
 change of the spirit and the inner life. It was a 
 change of character and a change of power. It was 
 the final victory of the spirit over the flesh. It in- 
 volved the obligation to work towards it by new efforts 
 after spiritual life. This is never lost sight of : " We 
 are debtors not to the flesh to live after the flesh, for 
 if ye live after the flesh ye shall die, but if ye through 
 the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body ye shall 
 live." And again, after speaking of the earthly 
 and the heavenly tabernacle, and of mortality being 
 swallowed up in life, his inference is, " wherefore 
 we labour whether present or absent, that we may 
 be accepted of Him." And again, St. John, after 
 speaking of the same hope of immortality, adds, " He 
 that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as 
 He is pure." 
 
 That is a lesson which we may all take home. The 
 life after the Spirit, the communion with God, the 
 
"THE SUFFERINGS OF THE PRESENT TIME.- 133 
 
 realisation in our own characters of the character of 
 Christ, which are the elements of the glory of the life 
 to come, must have their beginnings in this present 
 life below. In the struggle which this involves we 
 may be content to live, for in the hope which it brings 
 we may be glad to die. 
 
SERMON XIII. 
 HUMILIl Y. 
 
SERMON XIII. 
 
 HUMILITY. 
 [ Uiriversity of Oxfo7-d, 1 879.] 
 " Be not wise in your own conceits." — Rom. xii. 16. 
 
 IT is my duty this morning to speak of the virtue 
 of humility. The earliest references to that virtue 
 in sacred literature show it to have been in the first 
 instance a political virtue. It was the virtue of Syrian 
 peasantry. The primitive distinction of classes into 
 the weak and the strong has always been marked 
 among the Semitic races. It was especially marked 
 among the Syrian population of the centuries which 
 immediately preceded the Christian era. There were 
 but two classes, the oppressors and the oppressed. 
 The particular governments varied, but the system 
 was permanent. On the one hand were those who 
 had political power, and could command military force. 
 On the other were the peasants and peasant farmers, 
 extracting a scanty subsistence from a gradually im- 
 poverished soil, and robbed like the fellahin of the 
 present day by the tax-gatherers and the soldiery. 
 The contrast expresses itself strongly in the post- 
 
138 HUMILITY. 
 
 exilian Psalms, which form in many respects the most 
 interesting part of the Old Testament Canon; it is even 
 more strongly marked in that touching collection of 
 extra-Canonical Psalms which is known as the Psalms 
 of Solomon. When the LXX. translation of the Old 
 Testament was made the two small groups of Hebrew 
 words which were used to designate the two classes 
 respectively were regarded as interchangeable. One 
 group was rendered indifferently by "the proud," "the 
 rich," "the mighty"; the other was rendered indiffer- 
 ently by " the poor," " the meek," " the humble." It 
 was by the latter class, rather than by the former, 
 that the Psalms were written, and it is to the latter 
 rather than to the former that they appeal. Their 
 sense is almost uniform. They are not the war songs 
 of an era of revolution, but the lyrics of a religion of 
 acquiescence. They accept the present supremacy 
 of " the proud " ; they look on to the future exaltation 
 of " the humble." For that future they are sometimes 
 impatient, but in the meantime they preach the gospel 
 of submission. Their tone is that of a modified 
 fatalism : " God is the Judge ; He setteth up one, and 
 putteth down another." This was humility as it was 
 first taught. Where it is spoken of in the Old Testa- 
 ment it is usually to be understood in this sense. It 
 was the moral opiate of the oppressed. It lulled the 
 Syrian peasants into peace. 
 
 In later times there has not merely been a rebellion 
 against this kind of humility, but a question whether 
 it should be retained on the list of virtues at all. The 
 
HUMILITY. 
 
 139 
 
 whole drift of the political teaching, which found its 
 first great expressions in the United States of America 
 and in the French Revolution, is apparently in direct 
 antagonism to it. That teaching proclaims the natural 
 equality of man to man. It asserts that political sub- 
 ordination has no proper place in human society. It is 
 a doctrine which is taking new forms in our own times, 
 and which promises to effect even greater changes in 
 the future than it has effected in the past. I am not 
 advocating, but only stating it ; but I venture to think 
 that it is impossible to look at the inner life of European 
 society, at the movement of thought which is going 
 on — perhaps more in Continental Europe than in our 
 own country, and yet in our own country as well as 
 in Continental Europe — without seeing that the day of 
 political subordination is past, and that the forces of 
 the future are operating in the direction of political 
 equality. 
 
 Is it therefore true that, in this sphere in which its 
 existence was first asserted, the day of humility is 
 past, and that it is likely to have no place in the virtues 
 of the future ? 
 
 I venture to remark that however much the form of the 
 virtue has necessarily changed under the changed and 
 changing circumstances of widely separated centuries, 
 that although neither the Psalms of David nor the Psalms 
 of Solomon can be taken in their first literal sense as 
 the political gospel of the future, still the essence of 
 the virtue remains, that it may be both preached and 
 exercised by those who hold most strongly the natural 
 
140 HUMILITY. 
 
 equality of man to man, and that so far from being 
 obsolete it represents still one of the cardinal virtues 
 of a peaceful, and prosperous, and orderly society. 
 For the essence of it even in its earliest sphere was 
 that the rights of the individual are limited by the 
 rights of the dominant power, and that so long as that 
 power is dominant it is the duty of the individual to 
 submit. And although the dominant power which is 
 recognised under the modern conditions of society, and 
 which will be necessarily also recognised under the 
 new conditions of society which may conceivably take 
 the place of those present conditions, is no longer a 
 special group or class, but the mass of society itself, it 
 is clear that without such a recognition society could 
 not hang together. We could not live in a state of 
 perpetual antagonism. We must agree upon a modus 
 Vivendi. But the virtue of humility not only accepts 
 such a modus vivendi, but accepts it willingly. It 
 is the willing recognition by the individual of the fact 
 that he is but one of a mass : that his rights as an 
 individual are limited by, and subordinate to, the rights 
 of the mass ; and that when his rights as an individual 
 come into conflict with those of the mass they must 
 inevitably yield. It is the virtue of political acquies- 
 cence. What facts declare to be inevitable, and what 
 many men rebel against in spirit or in act although 
 it is inevitable, the virtue of humility accepts in peace, 
 and the virtue of Christian humility accepts as the 
 ordinance of God. 
 
 But before the Canon of Scripture was closed the 
 
HUMILITY. 
 
 virtue of humility had claimed for itself a second sphere 
 of operation. It became not so much political as social. 
 The conditions of the great cities in which St. Paul 
 preached, and to which he addressed his letters, were 
 very different from the conditions of the Syrian peasan- 
 try. There was probably no sense, or at least no vivid 
 sense, of oppression. There were occasional instances 
 of venal or exacting magistrates. There were probably 
 some memories of their pre-imperial freedom. But to 
 have preached humility as it had been preached before 
 — the submission of peasants to their masters, of an 
 oppressed nation to its conquerors, would have been 
 almost as meaningless as it would be to preach it here 
 in Oxford. It was preached to Christian communities, 
 and, as preached to Christian communities, it was 
 necessarily preached under a new form. The members 
 of those communities met upon an equality which was 
 tempered only by the existence in all organized societies 
 of presidents and office-bearers. But those members 
 did not all come from the same classes of society. 
 Their equality as members of the Church was consistent 
 with inequalities of social condition, of moral character, 
 of intellectual culture. The philosopher found himself 
 side by side with the fool or the madman (6 fiawo\j,evo'i 
 is a common term in Stoical writers for all who were 
 not Stoics), against whom he had pointed the arrows 
 of his scorn. The patrician found himself standing 
 side by side with the slave whom he had bought and 
 scourged. The Jew with his pride of Divine tuition, 
 the Greek with his pride of aesthetic culture, the 
 
142 
 
 Roman with his pride of imperial sway, met together 
 upon the church floor, and sat together at the sacred 
 meal, as equals and as brethren. 
 
 It is impossible not to believe that there was at first 
 some degree of friction. Bound together as they were 
 by the tie of a common hope, a common enthusiasm, 
 and even a common hability to imprisonment and 
 death, it is still clear that there was not even in those 
 primitive Christian communities the perfect peace of 
 an ideal home. There were jealousies, heartburnings, 
 assertions of superiority, refusals to submit, and 
 strivings for the mastery. There was need of a 
 strong inner principle of concord, and this principle 
 St. Paul found in humility, or the sense of lowliness. 
 In the four chief passages in which he speaks of it, he 
 speaks of it in this relation. " Be of the same mind 
 one towards another ; mind not high things, but con- 
 descend to men of low estate " (or " be led captive with 
 lowly things") (Rom. xii. i6). "I beseech you that ye 
 walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, 
 with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, 
 forbearing one another in love, endeavouring to keep 
 the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace " (Ephes. 
 iv. i). " Fulfil ye my joy that ye be likeminded, having 
 the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let 
 nothing be done through strife or vain-glory, but in 
 lowliness of mind, let each esteem other better than 
 himself" (Phil. ii. 3). "Put on therefore as the elect 
 of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, 
 humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering, forbearing 
 
HUMILITY. 
 
 143 
 
 one another, and forgiving one another if any man 
 have a quarrel against any" (Col. iii. 12). 
 
 And in the earliest of the extra canonical writings 
 of the Nevi^ Testament, the first epistle of Clement of 
 Rome, humility is spoken of almost uniformly in a 
 similar connection : it is ranked with moderation and 
 concord, in contrast to backbiting and detraction 
 (c. 30) ; it is the special virtue of the members of the 
 one body in which all are members one of another, 
 the strong bearing with the weak, the weak respecting 
 the strong (c. 38) ; and again, the greater a man's 
 power, the greater also should be his humility, seeking 
 mt his own good, but the common good of all (c. 48). 
 This is humility in its social sphere, as the Apostles 
 and the great Apostolical Father preached it, and as 
 we may conceive that some at least of the early Chris- 
 tians practised it ; it is the voluntary surrender of the 
 individual will to the common good — the forbearance, 
 the conciliation, the submission of each to each, which 
 gives play to the energies of all. 
 
 But it would be idle to conceal the fact that humility 
 as a social virtue has fallen into disrepute. Like all 
 the virtues which are mainly passive in their nature, it 
 admits of being easily counterfeited. It is consequently 
 at a discount. The parody is so common that the 
 original has been almost forgotten. If anyone in 
 modern times says that he is humble, even the more 
 charitably disposed regard the expression only as a 
 kind of /netwcri?, implying that the opinion which the 
 speaker entertains of his value is at least not below the 
 
144 
 
 HUMILITY. 
 
 average. And not only has it fallen into disrepute, but 
 even its place on the list of virtues has been questioned. 
 As with humility in its political phase, so also with it 
 in its social phase, men have asked themselves — Why 
 should I be humble ? Why should I even temporarily 
 and ex-hypothesi put myself in an attitude of subordi- 
 nation to another ? Why should not my wishes, my 
 will, my purposes assert for themselves whatever place 
 they can gain ? 
 
 The answer, which is equally true whether it be 
 society in general or Christian society which is in the 
 view of the interrogator, is practically this — that the 
 assertion of the will, the wishes, and the purpose of 
 the individual is made more possible by the recognition 
 of the fact that all others whom we meet have also their 
 will, their wishes, and their purposes. A state of 
 continual striving for social predominance is a state of 
 social Ishmaelism. Civilized society would be impos- 
 sible, or if possible would be intolerable, if it were only 
 an arena from which conciliation was absent, and in 
 which equality was at every moment asserted. And 
 civilized society has come by the necessities of its own 
 existence, and through the agency of those unwritten 
 laws which are among the strongest forces that act 
 upon human conduct, to put upon its members the 
 restraint of mutual respect and mutual subordination. 
 And out of the forces of civilization working with the 
 forces of Christianity, there has come down to us that 
 form of social humility in which all earlier forms are 
 blended, which like all other forms of humility is easily 
 
HUMILITY. 
 
 145 
 
 parodied, and yet is in itself a genuine product of a 
 manly temper, and which by its name " courtesy " 
 reminds us that it is, with its twin sister chivalry, the 
 noblest bequest that was ever made by an age of dark- 
 ness to an age of light. 
 
 There is yet a third sphere in which the virtue of 
 humility has been both preached and denied ; in which, 
 though its form has changed, it has still a conspicuous 
 place among the virtues, and a great work to do. 
 
 The Jewish teaching, not only upon matters of fact 
 and practice but also upon matters of science and 
 literature, was a teaching upon authority. It referred 
 men to great names. It upheld one doctrine as against 
 another by the preponderance of learned opinion. And 
 in course of time the teaching of the Christian world 
 became what the teaching of the Jewish world had 
 been, a teaching upon authority. The interpretation of 
 the Bible was to be settled not by reason and philology, 
 but by a Catena Patrum. The teaching of philosophy 
 was a handing down of great traditions. From this 
 point of view, in the Christian as in the Jewish world, 
 humility meant submission to authority. That which 
 was required was sometimes submission to great names, 
 and sometimes submission to a great organization. At 
 one moment the authority was Aristotle, at another the 
 Master of the Sentences. For one class of doctrines it 
 was St. Augustine, for another the Decretals. If a 
 theory, however slender its basis in fact or inherent 
 probability, had the support of the current authority, it 
 was not to be questioned ; if a theory, however great 
 
 lO 
 
146 
 
 its plausibility, ran clearly counter to the current 
 authority, it must either not be asserted at all, or if 
 asserted the assertion must be so veiled as to look like 
 its contradictory. 
 
 Against this the tendency of by far the larger part 
 of modern thought has been an almost complete 
 l ebellion. The claims of authority have been absolutely 
 denied ; it is alleged that the function of the thinker is 
 not to listen to others, but to find out for himself, and 
 that the virtue of intellectual humility which consists 
 in listening is the virtue only of pupilage and child- 
 hood. The result of this abandonment of authority 
 and humility has been in some branches of knowledge 
 an almost incalculable increase of its domain. The age 
 in which we live has been an age of splendid exploits. 
 In the knowledge of the constitution of the world in 
 which we live, in the knowledge of the moral and 
 political history of our race, in the knowledge of so 
 much of its intellectual development as can be gathered 
 from the study of the language in which thought has 
 expressed itself, so much has been achieved already, 
 and so much is being achieved every day, that the 
 knowledge which our fathers had is becoming almost 
 obsolete to us ; and the knowledge which we ourselves 
 have promises to be itself almost obsolete by the time 
 that our children are men. 
 
 In face of these patent facts, and this patent tendenc}', 
 and especially in a place in which the old learning and 
 the new both find a home, it will be appropriate to 
 consider, with somewhat more detail than I have con- 
 
HUMILITY. 
 
 '47 
 
 sidered either the political humility of the Old Testament 
 or the social humility of the New, the question which, 
 if not equally interesting to all of us, can hardly be 
 devoid of interest to any — What place, if any, is there 
 for humility in the active intellectual life of modern 
 times, and of modern Oxford ? How can you and I, 
 living as we do here, assuming as we may possibly 
 without great presumption assume that we possess, 
 and are conscious that we possess, an average amount 
 of knowledge, and an average degree of mental power, 
 say that we are humble without feeling in foro con- 
 scientice that we are hypocrites as we say it ? 
 
 The general answer which I propose to give is that 
 humility in its intellectual phase, so far from being 
 opposed to knowledge, is a necessary condition of it ; 
 that so far from being an obsolete virtue, it is one 
 which should be fostered in the interests alike of 
 science and of faith ; that the attitude which it pre- 
 scribes alike towards the facts which are cognizable 
 without revelation, and to the truths which are only 
 known by revelation, is the attitude ahke of the 
 scholar and of the Christian. For the essence .of 
 intellectual humility is not the acceptance without proof 
 of that which is stated only upon authority, but the 
 adequate sense of the relation of what we individually 
 know to the sum of what is known or knowable, and 
 also the adequate sense of the relation of the whole 
 sum of what is known or knowable to the sum of the 
 unknown and possibly unknowable. 
 
 Let us consider it for a moment or two in relation 
 
148 
 
 to the facts of physical nature. We find ourselves 
 surrounded by that of which we ourselves are part, a 
 mass of phenomena, infinite in their vastness, infinite 
 in their minuteness, and infinite also in their complexity. 
 We find ourselves borne on by an irresistible impulse 
 to observe and to classify them, to investigate the 
 modes in wliicli they are produced, and to note the 
 sequences in which they occur. There is no need to 
 take them on authority. They are an open book known 
 and read of all men. It may be assumed that within 
 certain limits, though there may be a dispute as to the 
 exact limits, that book can be read. And if this be 
 assumed, it is almost obvious that there can be no 
 moral virtue in questioning the veracity of our senses 
 as we read it. Humility cannot lie in the depreciation 
 of the sight of our eyes or the hearing of our ears. If 
 a man knows or finds out a verifiable fact, or a verifi- 
 able law, it is not the wisdom of conceit if he says that 
 he has found it ; nor is it humility, but the aping of 
 humility, if he hedges round the assertion that he has 
 found it with " perhaps," and " probably," and " I 
 humbly venture to think so." But when he adds, 
 " Because I have seen this another person cannot have 
 seen anything else or, " Because I have proved this. 
 So-and-so in this matter cannot have proved any- 
 thing else," then the wisdom of conceit may be said 
 to enter, and the virtue of humility to be absent. But 
 at the same time that he does this he is at variance not 
 with moral virtue only, but with the conditions of science 
 itself. The spirit of humility and the spirit of science 
 
HUMILITY. 
 
 149 
 
 agree in confining assertion to that which is known and 
 verifiable. Both of them are limiting and conditioning. 
 The moment that a man says, "I can show nerve force 
 to be a mode of physical motion," and adds, " therefore 
 mind is a function of the body " ; or " I can show that 
 the body can be resolved into this, that, and the other 
 element," and adds " therefore there is no immortality," 
 the addition which he makes to the facts which he 
 observes, not being warranted by those facts and not 
 being verifiable, is logically defective. If you express 
 his defect in terms of intellectual science he is wanting 
 in scientific precision ; if you express it in terms of 
 moral or theological science he is wanting in humility. 
 
 But there is the less reason for speaking at length 
 upon the relation of humility to knowledge in the 
 sphere of natural phenomena, because, on the one hand, 
 scientific methods tend of themselves to be rigid, and 
 because, on the other hand, the tendency towards excess 
 of assertion on the part of scientific men has not 
 unfrequently been spoken of before in this place. I 
 propose to pass to a sphere of knowledge which for 
 most of us has an even deeper interest, in which the 
 virtue of humility finds a not less appropriate sphere, 
 and in which the absence of that virtue effects an even 
 greater mischief. 
 
 What is the attitude of humility towards theology ? 
 
 I. In the first place what is its attitude towards the 
 Bible ? 
 
 The majority of us believe that God has given us a 
 Revelation of His will, and that the Bible is or contains 
 
HUMILITY. 
 
 such revelation. Before I ask what is the attitude of 
 huniiHty towards such a revelation, I will ask what is 
 the attitude of the scholar ? 
 
 We have to bear in mind that that revelation was 
 not communicated like the fancied revelation of heathen 
 divinities in inarticulate sounds or vague signs, but 
 that it came through the channel of human language. 
 It was intended to convey a clear meaning to those to 
 whom it was addressed. If St. Paul or St. John had 
 lived in England in this nineteenth century, and had 
 written in the language which we habitually use, the 
 problem of the right method of interpreting that lan- 
 guage would scarcely have arisen, and the difficulty 
 of so interpreting it would have presumably been no 
 more than the difficulty which we experience, which is 
 no doubt occasionally, though not ordinarily, great, in 
 interpreting a poem or an Act of Parliament. Now, 
 as we all know, St. Paul and St. John lived many 
 centuries ago, and spoke a different language from our 
 own. But that fact, although it gives us a different 
 subject matter with which to deal, does not affect the 
 conditions of the problem itself If the words had 
 been written here and now, we should have considered 
 what meaning here and now attaches to them ; and 
 since as a matter of fact they were uttered in Syria and 
 Greece eighteen hundred years ago, we have similarly 
 to consider what meaning they probably conveyed to 
 those who first read them. This is the attitude of 
 the scholar. It is the attitude also of humihty. It is 
 an attitude of enquiry. In the presence of a document, 
 
HUMILITY. 151 
 
 whether sacred or otherwise, which is written in an 
 unfamiliar language, the science of scholarship and the 
 virtue of humility alike forbid us to guess at the mean- 
 ing. The science of scholarship and the virtue of 
 humility alike forbid us to say, " I do not know Greek, 
 but I do know English, and if you will give me a fair 
 translation I will tell you what St. Paul or St. John 
 means." The science of scholarship and the virtue ot 
 humility ahke forbid us to say, " I do not know the 
 language which was current in Syria in the first 
 century of our era, but I do know the language which 
 was current in Athens four centuries before, and I can 
 guess at the one from the other." Neither the science 
 of scholarship, nor the virtue of humility, can be 
 content with less than the most thorough investigation 
 which the resources at our command enable us to make 
 into the precise value of the words under the precise 
 circumstances under which they were uttered. 
 
 But what the science of scholarship and Christian 
 humility alike forbid is done every day, and has been 
 done for generations, partly in the interests of faith, 
 partly in the interests of unbelief, and partly in the 
 interests of those attempted compromises between faith 
 and unbelief which have few of the benefits of the one 
 and all the disadvantages of the other. And the 
 general result is that the state of knowledge of the 
 language in which the New Testament was written 
 is such as would hardly be tolerated for a day in 
 regard to Sophocles or Plato. If anyone habitually, 
 and as a matter of course, ignored the monuments of 
 
152 . HUMILITY. 
 
 the post-Periclean age, and used only Homer and 
 Hesiod to interpret the Greek of Plato ; or if anyone 
 wrote a commentary upon Sophocles and, ignoring all 
 contemporary dramatists, based his interpretation of 
 Sophoclean phrases upon analogies which he detected 
 in Isocrates and Polybius ; and if in either case he put 
 forth his conclusions not as tentative, but as a final 
 account of all that could be said, and as being based 
 upon a true and exhaustive method : if on the strength 
 of this he gave himself the airs of a great Platonist, 
 or a great expositor of Sophocles; the verdict of 
 scholars, and the verdict also of laymen as far as they 
 understood the premises, would be that he was as 
 wanting in true philological science as he was wanting 
 in humility. It would, no doubt, be foolish to assume 
 and idle to hope that every man who handles a Greek 
 Testament should go tlirougli dc novo and for himself 
 the large mass of literature whicii has to be examined 
 before the language of the New Testament can be 
 understood. What I deprecate is not the fact that 
 nine readers out of ten have to be content with their 
 dictionary, but that with few exceptions, in spite of 
 the great importance of the subject in itself, and in 
 spite of the great interest which is shown in it through- 
 out the Christian world, the knowledge of the language 
 of the several writers of the New Testament is only 
 now in its infancy. 
 
 But it is impossible for anyone who speaks in this 
 place to forget that he is speaking in the presence of 
 those who may hold widely different views from those 
 
53 
 
 which he himself holds, as to the relation which both 
 the science of scholarship and the virtue of humihty 
 hold towards theology in general, and the New Testa- 
 ment in particular. 
 
 It is competent for anyone to say, " I believe that 
 we are not left for our knowledge of the meaning of 
 the sacred words to the results of scholarship and 
 enquiry. 1 believe that concurrently with, or ante- 
 cedent to, that revelation which is contained in the 
 Bible is the living revelation of which the Bible is 
 the earliest expression, but which has never ceased to 
 exist, and which, by way either of origination or of 
 interpretation, exists still in the voice of the Church." 
 If any one adds to this statement of his beliefs the 
 further statement : " I believe that that voice has 
 spoken from time to time and it speaks still. When I 
 want to hear it, I know where to go, and when 1 ask 
 it a question, I obtain an answer," his position is at 
 least logical, and it is not inconsistent with humility 
 in the highest phase of its development for such a 
 man to say, " I bow my reason unreservedly before 
 that living voice of God." 
 
 But supposing that anyone says, " When I want to 
 know the meaning of Scripture I listen to the voice 
 of the Church rather than to human scholarship ; but 
 I do not recognise any one existing organization as 
 corresponding exactly to what I mean by the Church :" 
 or supposing that he says, " I listen to the voice of 
 the Church rather than to human scholarship, but by 
 the Church I mean the Church as it ought to be, and 
 
154 HUMILITY. 
 
 not the Church as it is ; or supposing that he says, 
 I listen to the voice of the Church rather than to 
 human scholarship, but the Church has spoken by many 
 voices — some of them are the real voices of the Church, 
 and some of them are the voices of hirelings ; I claim 
 for myself the power to discriminate the one from the 
 other, and to recognise the voice of my true Shepherd." 
 In any of these cases I venture to maintain there is 
 a want of logical basis which renders the position 
 untenable on grounds of reason, and a more or less 
 conscious arrogance which renders it antecedently 
 improbable from the point of view of religion. 
 
 For in all of them the person who makes the asser- 
 tion claims to himself the possession of a power of 
 discriminating between a true and a false Church, or 
 between the Church as he thinks it should be and the 
 Church as fettered by the State, or between those 
 whom he imagines to represent the mind of the Church, 
 and those whom he rejects, lie assumes, and there 
 is more or less arrogance in the assumption, that one 
 Church is a true Church, in spite of its errors, because 
 it has maintained a particular organization ; and that 
 another so-called Church is not a true Church because 
 it has omitted some words in the ceremony of ad- 
 mitting its presbyters to office ; or he lays down for 
 himself the rule that certain divines represent the real 
 tradition of ancient interpretation, and that certain 
 others do not — -that a catena of interpretations picked 
 from one set of divines should be accepted as true, 
 whereas if a catena of interpretations were picked from 
 
HUMILITY. 
 
 another set of divines the presumption would be to the 
 contrary. 
 
 Now these propositions, which I must be pardoned 
 for bringing forward here, because they are not only 
 maintained, but at the present time influence the 
 opinions and the lives of many among us, appear to 
 me to fail, if for no other reason, at least from the 
 conspicuous absence of the virtue of humility. For it 
 is one thing for a man to say, " I believe, by an act 
 of the faith which is the gift of God, that an interpreter 
 of God's will exists, here and now, visibly and audibly, 
 and to that interpreter 1 unreservedly bow." It is 
 another thing for a man to say, " I can so pick and 
 choose among this mass of opinions and assertions, 
 as to be able to tell to whom I ought to listen and to 
 whom I ought not ; when a writer is uttering the mind 
 of the Church, and when he is giving a private opinion." 
 
 In other words, the conclusion to which the science 
 of scholarship and the virtue of humility agree in 
 leading us is that, between the theory that the inter- 
 pretation of the Bible has been committed by God to 
 a hving authority whose voice is audible, intelligible, 
 and indisputable, and the theory that it is the object 
 of the most careful examination which our faculties 
 enable us to make, there is no logical mean. What 
 grounds there are for adopting the one view rather 
 than the other it is not my present purpose to discuss. 
 It is not part of my argument, though I mention the 
 fact to prevent misconception, that there appear to me 
 to be overwhelming reasons in favour of the latter : but 
 
HUMILITY. 
 
 for the vague eclecticism which sometimes calls itself 
 the via media — for that wisdom of conceit, as I cannot 
 hesitate to call it, which claims for itself the power, as 
 it wanders through the many corridors of the great 
 library in which the works of biblical interpreters are 
 gathered together, to sniff the scents of true interpre- 
 tation, and to detect from afar the odours of erroneous 
 interpretation, there seems to me to be no sound basis 
 either of probability or of fact, and it is to be hoped, 
 in the interests of Christian truth and^Christian unity, 
 that it will not have in the theology of the future the 
 place which, as I believe unhappily, it has had in the past. 
 
 II. But Christian theology does not consist wholly 
 of biblical exegesis, and the questions which agitate 
 men's minds in relation to that theology are not all 
 immediately derivable from the discussion of interpre- 
 tations ; and I must plead the great importance of the 
 subject, and the great mischief which, as I conceive, is 
 caused by the want of humility in relation to it, if for 
 a few moments I ask you to consider another branch 
 of Christian theology in which the virtue of humihty 
 has an analogous exercise. 
 
 We find ourselves face to face, not only with a book 
 which we believe to be Divine, but also with a mass of 
 institutions, usages, and doctrines which, even if Divine 
 in tlieir origin, are not only human in their form, but 
 also bear strong and indisputable marks of historical 
 growth. If we Hved under other circumstances; if 
 these institutions, usages, and doctrines were all un- 
 questioned, the attitude of humihty towards them 
 
HUMILITY. 157 
 
 might be simply one of submission, and the function 
 of intelligence simply one of interpretation. And even 
 as it is, it is no doubt competent for a man to do in 
 regard to them what he does also in regard to the 
 Bible, to select some one existing organization and to 
 say, " I ask no questions ; I investigate no antecedents ; 
 I take the organization as it stands ; I believe this 
 organization to be Divine, and to it I bow." The 
 position of such a man, however untenable we may 
 think it, is at least logically consistent, and the attitude 
 of humility in the case of such a man lies not in the 
 right application of reason, but in what is possibly still 
 more difficult, the renunciation of it. 
 
 But supposing that, as is the case with a great 
 majority of us, we do not see our way to such a 
 supreme act of faith, supposing that we look full in 
 the face the actual mass of phenomena which surrounds 
 us, what are we to do when we find, as we do find, 
 that these phenomena have not only varied in the past 
 but are controverted now ? The answer which the 
 virtue of humility seems indisputably to give is that 
 we cannot assume to ourselves individually the pos- 
 session of a power, which the very fact of the variety 
 of opinion shows that God has not given equally to all 
 men, of so moving among this complex mass of institu- 
 tions, usages, and beliefs as to be able to detect by 
 instinct, and without examination, the true from the 
 false, the Divine from the human, the orthodox from the 
 heterodox. On the contrary, it commands us to enquire. 
 The more searching the enquiry, the greater, that is to 
 
HUMILITY. 
 
 say, the distrust of our power of guessing, the greater 
 also is our humihty. 
 
 On this fundamental proposition there is, I apprehend, 
 no great divergence of opinion among the majority of 
 us. We are ready to admit that the phenomena which 
 present themselves in the domain of Christian theology 
 are proper subjects of enquiry. We are ready to admit 
 an appeal to antiquity. We are ready to admit that it 
 is legitimate to ask, what was early belief, and how 
 did early belief come afterwards to express itself in 
 this or that form ? What was early practice, and how 
 did early practice come afterwards to be embodied in 
 this or that usage ? Where most of us differ is in the 
 greater or less degree of hximility with which we 
 approach the examination of these questions in their 
 actual detail. I hope that I may not be accused of 
 exhibiting the arrogance which I deprecate, if I venture 
 to assert that, of all the sciences which deal with literary 
 as distinguished from physical phenomena, that which 
 deals with the history of Christian institutions, Christian 
 usages, and Christian beliefs is the least intelligently 
 known. It is hardly possible to take up a book on any 
 controverted point without seeing that the writings of 
 one age are made to interpret those of another, that the 
 meaning which technical words had in a particular 
 period is assumed to be true of all periods, and that the 
 vast intervals of time which separate institution from 
 institution, and fact from fact, are ignored in a way 
 which, if it were exhibited in any other science, would 
 call forth beyond question one of those storms of 
 
HUMILITY. 
 
 159 
 
 scornful criticism which, in these days of accurate 
 research, sweep bad books into obHvion. And as an 
 almost necessary result of this, when controversy comes 
 down from the higher region of learned or quasi-learned 
 books to the lower levels of common talk, of periodical 
 literature, and even of young men's sermons, there is 
 an amount of confused and at the same time confident 
 assertion, of ignorance of technical terms, of unintelli- 
 gent misapprehensions of the points at issue, which 
 would almost justify an outside observer in alleging 
 that theology shared with philosophy the singular 
 distinction of being a controversy in which those who 
 assert an affirmative misunderstand what they affirm, 
 and those who assert a negative do not know the 
 meaning of what they deny. And if I had to point to 
 a typical example of arrogance I should find it not in 
 the pioneer of physical science who, standing on some 
 newly-ascended mountain peak — some Matterhorn or 
 Jungfrau of the Alps of knowledge — asserted that he 
 saw there something which was really beyond his view, 
 but in the young dogmatist who by the simple instincts 
 of an untutored mind, or it may be only because he 
 had read it in a newspaper, is able to tell at a moment's 
 notice what is catholic and what is not catholic, what 
 is orthodox and what is heterodox, what was the belief 
 of the first century and what was never heard of until 
 the Reformation. All forms of conceit are no doubt 
 reprehensible, but at the same time a distinction must 
 be drawn between the conceit of over-estimated know- 
 ledge and the conceit of sheer ignorance. 
 
i6o 
 
 HUMILITY. 
 
 And if I deprecate, as I cannot help but deprecate, 
 the fact that concurrently with the growth of theological 
 controversy there has not been a commensurate growth 
 in theological study, and a commensurate increase of 
 the sense of humility, I do so, not in the interests of 
 any theory of my own, still less in deprecation of 
 theology in general, but because the loss has been a 
 loss not only to individuals, but to the common faith 
 of us all, and because the presence of that of which I 
 deplore the absence would favour the sacred interests 
 of Christian unity, and what is still higher than 
 Christian unity, the interests of Christian truth. 
 
 There are other aspects of humility upon which, lest 
 I should overtax your patience, I do not now propose 
 to dwell. I have selected those aspects of it upon 
 which I have spoken because of their immediate im- 
 portance. Just as the cultivation of humility in its 
 political bearings is the cultivation of political peace, 
 and just as the cultivation of it in its social relations 
 is the cultivation of social conciliation and courtesy, 
 so the cultivation of it in its intellectual phase is the 
 cultivation of charity and the cultivation of truth — 
 which are the twin Angels of the Church of God. 
 
SERMON XIV. 
 
 DIVERSITY IN UNITY THE LA W OF 
 SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 tt 
 
SERMON XIV. 
 
 DIVERSITY IN UNITY THE LA W OF 
 SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 {^University of Oxford, Whitsunday, 1881.] 
 
 "Now there are diversities of gifts, but tlie same Spirit. And 
 there are differences of administration, but the same Lord. And there 
 are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worlveth 
 all in all." — I Cor. xii. 4-6. 
 
 THE analogy between the material and the spiritual 
 world is a commonplace of preachers. It is one 
 which in this early summer-time almost forces itself 
 on our attention ; for though the sense of the marvel 
 of it is blunted by the constancy of its succession, we 
 are once more face to face with the mystery of a new 
 creation. Year after year, through untold centuries 
 of years, has the summer died into the winter and 
 been born again into spring ; year after year when we 
 are lying, as our fathers lie, among the unremembered 
 dead, will the green grass of the cornfields, and the 
 bright blossoming of the flowers, be the acted parable 
 of the resurrection. 
 
 And year after year, as we look upon this new-born 
 world, we are confronted with the wonder, not only 
 
i64 
 
 DIVERSITY IN UNITY 
 
 of its existence, but of its variety. There are infinite 
 differences of individuals ; no two plants are absolutely 
 the same ; every tree is unique ; " the meanest flower 
 that blows " has its own personality of beauty. There 
 are infinite varieties of kind ; every continent, every 
 country, and even every locality, has its own special 
 kinds. The limit to their number seems to be only 
 the limit of our opportunities of observation. New 
 kinds are constantly being found, and new kinds are 
 also constantly coming into existence. For there is not 
 only variety, but the power of variation. The type of 
 each kind varies its expression from age to age. It 
 is not now what it was in earlier periods of the history 
 of our globe. It is constantly re-adapting itself to 
 changed conditions. Life, and variety, and the power 
 of variation go everywhere hand in hand. There is 
 fixity and absolute uniformity only in death. 
 
 All this is the parable of human society. In the 
 vast fields of human life natures are as various as 
 the summer flowers. Every one of us has his own 
 character {xapaKTi'jp), his own special stamp of God. 
 Every one of us has his own temperament {tempera- 
 tnentum), his own special mingling of the elements 
 of which our nature is compounded. There clings to 
 every one of us the inalienable sense of personality. 
 We are ourselves, and no other ; and we are so because 
 there is none like us in the whole vast range of the 
 universe which God has made. Nor is the diflference 
 one of individuality only ; there are, even in the same 
 community, types of character so distinct from one 
 
THE LAW OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 165 
 
 another that the aims, the motives, the pursuits of 
 one class of men are almost unintelligible to the other. 
 Their whole mental attitude is different. They live 
 in different worlds. The same fact has for the several 
 classes an entirely different significance. They look 
 upon the same landscape from an entirely different 
 point of view, so that that which is prominent in the 
 foreground of the one is lost in the dim distance of the 
 other. And if we look outside any one community, 
 there are found between different communities differ- 
 ences not only of mental attitude, but almost of mental 
 structure. There are languages, for example, whose 
 syntax is so different from our own that it is almost 
 impossible to find for an idea which has been expressed 
 in the one an equivalent form in the other. There are 
 religions so different from our own that we cannot 
 bring ourselves to see how for one hour they could 
 be conceived as either pleasing their own grim gods or 
 satisfying the first needs of men. And if we take a 
 still wider view, and look not merely at contemporary 
 life, but at the successive strata of life which make up 
 history, we find that, just as in the physical world the 
 types of animals or plants have assumed in successive 
 ages widely differing forms, so in human society the 
 same types have not been constantly reproduced. The 
 prevailing temper of one age has not been the pre- 
 vailing temper of the next. Ideas which in one age 
 have seemed to be fundamental have seemed to an- 
 other age to be illusory. Institutions which in one age 
 have seemed to be necessary parts of the framework 
 
1 66 DIVERSITY IN UNITY 
 
 of society have been discarded in another age as 
 cumbrous scaffolding. It is hardly possible to point 
 to a single idea, or to a single institution, which has 
 been constant in all ages and in all societies. If we 
 take, for example, the idea of personal liberty, to us 
 it is almost axiomatic. We do not discuss its desir- 
 ability, but assume it. We lay it down as a principle 
 of all legislation and all intercourse. We allow it to 
 be interfered with only in cases of strong necessity, 
 for the safety of society as a whole. But there have 
 been times at which it was equally axiomatic that there 
 should be slaves. Or if we take the institution of 
 private property. It is the largest stone in the present 
 basis of society. It is fenced round with every barrier 
 which society can devise. It is regarded as an inde- 
 feasible right. And yet the researches of scientific 
 jurists enable us not only to go back to a time when 
 it did not exist, but also to see in some existing 
 communities institutions which exclude it. 
 
 And this movement of ideas and institutions is 
 continually going on. We never " abide in one stay." 
 The history of our race not only has been, but is at 
 this moment, the history of a constant re-adaptation 
 to changed and changing circumstances. Whether we 
 look at morals or at politics, at ideas or at institutions, 
 we come back to the analogy with which we began. In 
 human society, as in the material world, variety and the 
 power of variation are the law and symbol of life, the 
 mode of its manifestation, and the proof of its existence. 
 
 Now if we turn from human society as a whole to 
 
THE LAW OF SPIRTTUAL LIFE. 167 
 
 that part of it which, at various times and in various 
 places, has accepted the Christian faith, we may ante- 
 cedently expect that what is essential and necessary 
 in the one will be also, with whatever modifications 
 of detail, essential and necessary in the other. 
 
 If the Church were a merely artificial institution, 
 superinduced upon human society by an external force, 
 such a proposition, doubtless, would not hold ; but 
 if it be, as we believe it to be, human society itself — • 
 ultimately the whole, at present a part of it — redeemed, 
 purified, and brought nearer to God, then there is no 
 ground for supposing any change in the Divine economy 
 in relation to it except such as arises from the fact that 
 what was once unclean now is holy, and what was once 
 alienated is now reconciled to God. "The multitude 
 of them that believed," in becoming Christians did not 
 cease to be men. The same God who made men 
 redeemed them ; the same Spirit who once " dove-like 
 sat brooding o'er the vast abyss " informs and quickens 
 the regenerate soul. The creation and the re-creation 
 are part of the same Divine action ; they are the work 
 of the same co-operating Trinity ; they result in 
 analogous forms of life. 
 
 This is what we might antecedently expect, and this 
 is what we find to have been in fact the case. 
 
 If we look back upon the history of the Church we 
 find that its main features are, in fact, the main features 
 of the general history of mankind. The thoughts, the 
 tendencies, the institutions, of one age have not always 
 been the thoughts, the institutions, the tendencies, of 
 
i68 DIVERSITY IN UNITY 
 
 the next. The basis is, no doubt, in all cases the same. 
 "The Church's one Foundation is Jesus Christ her 
 Lord." His life and words, as they are presented in 
 the Gospels, form a limit which Christian men cannot 
 overpass or alter without ceasing to be Christian. So 
 far as Christian doctrine consists in repeating those 
 sacred words, and so far as Christian institutions have 
 the direct appointment of the Master, variety of doctrine 
 or variety of form is impossible. But that life and 
 those words have suggested at various times various 
 inferences ; they have presented themselves under 
 various aspects, according to the varying temper of an 
 epoch or a race ; just as travellers who approach a 
 mountain on one side, and in the brightness of a morn- 
 ing sun, have an entirely different view from those 
 who approach it on another side, and under a dull or 
 stormy sky. 
 
 There have been times, for example, at which the 
 dominant temper of the Christian world has been 
 metaphysical. The subtle distinctions between sub- 
 stance, matter, and essence, which no modern student 
 of Greek philosophy has yet succeeded in precisely 
 formulating, were at one time the common property 
 of educated men in the Roman world. 
 
 There have been times again in which the prevail- 
 ing temper has been mystical, in which the seen and 
 the unseen, the present and the future, seemed to be 
 linked together by such subtle bonds that whatever 
 could be discovered about the one was an infallible 
 clue to the other. 
 
THE LAW OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 169 
 
 When either of these tempers has prevailed, the 
 aspect under which the hfe and words of Christ have 
 presented themselves to men's minds, and the infer- 
 ences which they have drawn from them, have been 
 so different from those which we should draw in our 
 own times that, though we may accept them as true, 
 we are at the same time compelled to look at many of 
 them as being only dimly intelligible. 
 
 For we in our day are passing through a different 
 phase. Our tendency is to seek not for substance, but 
 for sequences, and to look not at the possible, but at 
 the actual. When we try to interpret nature or history, 
 our tendency is to thread facts upon ideal strings, 
 finding a theory for all that we can read of, and a law 
 for ail that we can see. When we try to interpret 
 Scripture our aim is to find out, not what it may mean 
 if interpreted mystically, but what it does mean if 
 interpreted grammatically. This, too, may be only a 
 passing phase, but for the time it is the dominant 
 phase ; and we move so completely within it that former 
 phases have ceased not only to have an interest for us, 
 but also to be understood. What ovcrla meant in the 
 later Greek philosophy, what it meant in the meta- 
 physics of one school as compared with another, what 
 " real " means in the phrase " real presence," what 
 " substance " means in the term " transubstantiation," 
 are questions which belong to so different a horizon 
 from our own that few living persons are competent to 
 express an opinion upon them. The answers to them 
 lie, for us at least, on the other side of the great sphere 
 
170 
 
 DIVERSITY IN UNITY 
 
 of truth, of which no mortal eye can see more than one 
 side at a time. 
 
 And as it has been with the aspects under which 
 the Ufe and words of our Lord have at various times 
 presented themselves to men's minds, and with the 
 inferences which have been at various times drawn 
 from them, so it has been with the forms in which, at 
 various times, men have tried to realize the Christian 
 society. Those forms of organization do not in any 
 case rest upon an explicit Divine command. If our 
 Lord had explicitly said that every church should have 
 its bishop and its presbyters, and that all churches 
 should be linked together in a visible and world-wide 
 confederation, it would have been for us Christian 
 men not to argue, but to obey. But there is no such 
 command. Whatever is gathered from the New Testa- 
 ment in regard to Christian organization is gathered 
 by way of inference, and in most cases of remote 
 inference. And, as a matter of history, the organiz- 
 ations have varied widely, not only in any given 
 age, but in one age as compared with another. The 
 reflection of the Roman empire, which is visible in 
 the post-Nicean effort at confederation, and that of 
 the Roman municipal system, which is visible in the 
 western provinces after the Roman empire fell, are 
 different, not only in detail, but in conception, from 
 that kind of organization which the Carlovingian 
 emperors fostered, or that which became a necessity 
 in the Reformed churches of Germany. 
 
 In other words. Church history tends to establish 
 
THE LAW OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. \^\ 
 
 the presumption which is raised by antecedent con- 
 siderations, that in the Church, as in the world, in 
 society in its new relation to God, as in society in its 
 old relation to God, variety is the law of life, and that 
 ideas and institutions not only differ, but are meant to 
 be different. It does not follow that the Holy Spirit 
 is not leading the Church into all truth because, in 
 the vast area of human society. He shows this and 
 that group of men only one side at a time : it does 
 not follow that He is not shaping the form of ecclesias- 
 tical organization, because those forms are as varied 
 as the types of trees and flowers. On the contrary, 
 all this variety tends to show that the Lord and Giver 
 of the life natural is the Lord and Giver also of the 
 life spiritual ; that the infinite variety of the one is the 
 type and symbol of the infinite variety of the other ; 
 that beneath the one, as beneath the other, varying 
 His operation to the varying needs of men, shaping 
 His utterances to their varied comprehension, is the 
 one Father and the one Spirit from whom we come 
 and to whom we go. 
 
 The difficulty which some persons find in realising 
 this variety of the operation of the Holy Spirit seems 
 to arise from the vastness of its scale. Within certain 
 limits we are all ready to admit it. We frame or 
 accept an institution or a formula, and are ready, 
 within the limits of that institution or that formula, 
 to allow certain variations of detail. But we Hmit 
 the variations to that which we ourselves would have 
 been able or willing to do under similar circumstances. 
 
172 
 
 DIVERSITY IN UNITY 
 
 We work in grooves ; we cast thoughts and institu- 
 tions into moulds ; the possibihty of giving to the 
 same fact a multitude of expressions, and of deve- 
 loping the same law in an infinity of forms, passes 
 beyond alike our comprehension and our powers. But 
 though we cannot comprehend the ways of God, we 
 may for all that recognize that they are not as our 
 ways, and that the limits of our comprehension are 
 not the limits of His action. But this is precisely 
 what a large proportion of Christian men decline to 
 do in regard to the history of the Church. They are 
 almost clamorous in asserting that its builder and 
 maker is God ; and yet they commit the paradox of 
 trying to limit the Divine operation to that which 
 would have been probable if men had been not only 
 the agents, but the authors of the plan. If Christi- 
 anity had been an artificially devised religion, there 
 would have been, in all probability, a single life of the 
 Founder, and a single systematic exposition of His 
 teaching ; instead of that, there are four different lives, 
 written apparently for different classes of minds and 
 from different points of view. If the Church had been 
 an artificially-devised institution, there would pro- 
 bably have been a single definite code of rules, and 
 a single prescribed form of government ; instead of 
 that, there are no authoritative rules, and there is an 
 almost absolute elasticity of form. In the one case the 
 diversity of record, in the other the variability of form, 
 and in both cases the contradiction of human analogies, 
 are indications of a deeper than human unity. 
 
THE LAW OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 173 
 
 This paradoxical tendency to insist upon the Divine 
 origin of the Christian Church, and, in the same 
 breath, to throw that Church into an inelastic human 
 mould, is in reality the result of a confusion between 
 two wholly different things — the eternal and Divine 
 law of variety, and the temporary and human need of 
 uniformity. 
 
 For purposes of association there must be, at any 
 one time, and for any one group of men, rules and 
 formularies. To that particular group, and for the 
 mental horizon of that particular time, those rules 
 and that mode of formulating Christian doctrine may 
 be the best that can be devised. But the fact that 
 in a particular country, or to a particular group of 
 men, that rule and that formula are not only appro- 
 priate, but necessary, and being appropriate and 
 necessary are part of the Divine plan, is not incon- 
 sistent with the belief that under other circumstances, 
 or for other groups of men, other modes of statement 
 and other rules of order are not less appropriate and 
 not less necessary. In other words, it is competent 
 for a Christian man to say : — 
 
 " To me, individually, there are some modes of 
 conceiving Christian doctrine which, so far from seem- 
 ing to be true, are so remote from my own conception 
 that I cannot even place myself in that attitude of 
 mind in which they become intelligible. 
 
 " But, on the other hand, I cannot assume either 
 my own infalHbility, or my own universality of know- 
 ledge. I am conscious that the judgments which 1 
 
»74 
 
 DIVERSITY IN UNITY 
 
 form, and which to me seem incontrovertible, are the 
 result of the complex conditions of my birth, my 
 associations, and my training. I find that there are 
 other men who accept, as I accept, the facts upon 
 which Christianity is founded, whose sincerity, whose 
 mental powers, whose love of God, are at least equal 
 to my own, and yet who express their beliefs in forms 
 which to me seem erroneous, and who frame their 
 church order in a manner which seems to me to be 
 injurious to the Christian life. 
 
 " I have no right to deny to them what I claim 
 for myself. I have no right to attempt to limit the 
 operation of the Holy Spirit to that particular mode 
 which has been best for me and for men with my own 
 mental constitution. ' For the wind bloweth where it 
 listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst 
 not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth : so is 
 every one that is born of the Spirit' " 
 
 Such a recognition of diversity in unity, of the in- 
 finite varieties of mode under which the action of the 
 Holy Spirit has manifested itself in the past, and is 
 manifesting itself in the present, is the modern form 
 of the ancient conception of Catholicity. The ancient 
 form of that conception was unity of organization. 
 There loomed before the eyes of men the vision of 
 a visible order, a single type of government, a single 
 form of worship, a single earthly head. It seemed at 
 one time to be almost reahzed ; but the inelastic frame- 
 work broke beneath the pressure of the life which it 
 
THE LA IV OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 
 
 75 
 
 sought to confine. The visible unity broke up, as the 
 Roman Empire broke up ; and the attempt to restore 
 the one is as impossible an anachronism as would be 
 the attempt to restore the other ; for the " congregation 
 of Christian people dispersed throughout the world," 
 the congregation of all races, tongues, and climes, of all 
 types of character and of all varieties of mental power, 
 is held together by a deeper than human unity. That 
 unity is neither the unity of compromise nor the unity 
 of indifference. It is not the unity of an artificial form, 
 but the unity of a Divine life. It is the unity of that 
 Spirit whose symbol, now as ever, is seven lamps of 
 fire. In the Church of our own time as in the Church 
 of apostolic days, in the Church of all time as in the 
 Church of our own time, " there are diversities of gifts, 
 but the same Spirit. And there are differences of 
 administrations, but the same Lord. And there are 
 diversities of operation, but it is the same God which 
 worketh all in all." 
 
 This truth has many applications and many corol- 
 laries. I shall speak to-day only of one, and that one 
 which St. Paul has drawn for us. 
 
 When he regards the Church as a whole, he sees in 
 it, as it were, a garden of God with many kinds of 
 flowers — diversities of gifts and differences of operations. 
 When he looks at the individual members of the 
 Church the truth assumes the converse form, " Every 
 man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, 
 and another after that." It is this personal aspect of 
 the truth of the text which has to be insisted upon 
 
176 
 
 DIVERSITY IN UNITY 
 
 again and again ; and insisted upon not less now than 
 ever before, because now as much as ever before there 
 is a tendency to merge the individual in the mass and 
 to conceive of the Church as an abstraction, a vague 
 and impalpable thing, apart from the individuals who 
 compose it. But this converse statement of the great 
 fact of the diversity of God's operations recalls us to 
 the fact of our personality. One by one are we born 
 into the world, one by one we die ; and in all the 
 solemn passage from birth to death, it is one by one 
 that God holds communion with men and men witli 
 God. And one by one we have our work to do — that 
 special and inalienable work, which, in the economy of 
 God, none but ourselves can do. No doubt association 
 with our fellows in the Church helps us to do it ; for it 
 gives us special means of Divine comfort ; it surrounds 
 us with the sense of brotherhood ; and in all this sad- 
 ness of baffled effort, this monotony of daily care, this 
 mystery of the Spirit striving with the flesh, it gives us 
 the help and hope which come of sympathy. But asso- 
 ciation is a means, and not an end ; and for all that it 
 can give, our work is still our own. And if our work 
 be our own, and if the work of each one of us be 
 different, then, side by side with the doing of our own 
 work, must be the recognition of our brother's work. 
 The task is hard, and it is one which few of us accom- 
 plish ; for, seeing as we do with our purblind eyes some 
 little portion of the vast whole of truth, we are not 
 satisfied until other men see exactly what we see ; and, 
 finding some special benefit for ourselves in some parti- 
 
THE LAW OF SPIRITUAL LIFE. 177 
 
 cular rules of association, we try to impose them upon 
 the rest of all mankind. But in that sublime Catholicity, 
 which is the correlative of the infinite diversity of the 
 manifestation of Divine life in human souls, there is no 
 place for antagonism ; and for you especially, whose 
 powers are fresh, and who will soon have left your tutel- 
 age here to confront your life's work face to face ; for you 
 who are feehng in your souls the first stirring of spiritual 
 energy ; for you who are fired with the first and holiest 
 enthusiasm to do something before you die, for Christ 
 and for the world — the echo of a Divine message seems 
 to stand forth clear and strong, telling you one by one, 
 " Do thine own work— the work of learning, the work 
 of self-reformation, or the work of helping to govern 
 this Church and realm ; fulfil thine own ministry — the 
 ministry of teaching, the ministry of healing, or the 
 ministry of peacemaking ; use thine own gift — thy gift 
 of enthusiasm, thy gift of sympathy, or thy gift of the 
 sense of beauty. What place that work and ministry 
 of thine will have in the mighty whole, it is not for 
 thee to know ; it is not for thy dim eyes to see the vast 
 proportions of the temple of living stones which the 
 Master-builder has planned ; it is not for thy dull ears 
 to hear the; innumerable chords of that vast harmony 
 which is for ever rising from the manifold creation. 
 Let thy care be only lest the manifestation of the Spirit 
 which is given to thee be profitless, lest the place which 
 thou wast destined to fill be a blank, and lest the 
 eternal harmony be — for all that thou hast done — a 
 silence or a discord." 
 
 12 
 
SERMON XV. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
SERMON XV. 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 \_Westminster Abbey (Special Sunday Evening Service) 
 1882.] 
 
 " This is life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, 
 and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." — John xvii. 3. 
 
 THE most certain of all facts and the most solemn 
 of all mysteries is the fact and the mystery of 
 life. We all know that we are living, but we none of 
 us know what life is. We all know that we were 
 born, and we all know that we shall die ; and between 
 these two limits of birth and death we move from day 
 to day and from hour to hour — some of us with the 
 slow steps of sadness, some of us with the light hearts 
 of untroubled youth — some of us on rugged steeps, and 
 some of us on the dusty plain, and some of us on 
 velvet lawns. And from day to day and from hour 
 to hour — through all the varied panorama of passing 
 circumstances, through all its changing moods and 
 passions, through all its quick succession of fears and 
 hopes, of perceptions and thoughts and dreams — the 
 soul is to itself its own most solemn mystery. It sees 
 the body die — one after another its companions drop 
 
l82 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 off from the solemn procession — and all that was 
 visible of them is given back to the earth whence it 
 came. But it cannot believe that they are utterly no 
 more ; it knows that in the same way the body which 
 itself inhabits will one day be seen no more likewise. 
 It sees not only the barred gate of death, but it 
 believes that behind it there is life and God. 
 
 Age after age it has striven to pierce the darkness : 
 age after age has seen dream after dream, and specula- 
 tion after speculation, on these three forms of the same 
 great problem, — What are we? whence came we? and 
 whither are we going ? Age after age there has 
 been the same God-given belief that this visible world 
 is not all existence, and that the death of the body 
 is not the end of life. Age after age there has been 
 the same profound conviction that the you and I who 
 are living now will be in essence, though not in form, 
 the same you and I who will be living on when the 
 gate of death is passed. Age after age there has been 
 the same baffled questioning. Here and now is that 
 soul within us which will live for ever ; and that which 
 will constitute the life of the soul then is that which 
 in its essence and reahty constitutes the soul-life 
 now. And what is it ? When we seek for an answer 
 we find it not in scenes, not in speculation, but in the 
 Divine word which reveals to us : "This is life eternal, 
 that they might know Thee the only true God, and 
 Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." 
 
 It may seem strange to be told that life is know- 
 ledge. I can understand some of you asking your- 
 
THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 183 
 
 selves as you think of it, Is the soul's life then the 
 study of theology ? Is eternity a divinity school ? 
 And will the undimmed eyes of the ransomed ones be 
 for ever poring over the books that tell them about 
 God ? This may be the scholar's paradise, you may 
 say, but it is not mine, only one shade less satisfying 
 to my soul's needs than the Indian's happy hunting- 
 ground or the Norseman's Valhalla. 
 
 But it is not so. Knowledge is a word of more than 
 one meaning, and that knowledge of God which is eternal 
 life has very little in common with that knowledge of 
 Him which is called theology. 
 
 For there is a difference, and that a fundamental 
 difference, between knowing a thing and knowing about 
 it : there is a difference, and that a fundamental differ- 
 ence, between the knowledge which we gain from books 
 and that which comes through feeling. 
 
 There is, for example, a kind of knowledge called 
 astronomy. It tells us, and no doubt tells us truly, that 
 the sun is so many miles distant from the earth, that 
 it has such and such gases at its surface, that it moves 
 in a certain way. All this and all else that astronomy 
 tells us is very interesting and very useful; and the 
 finding out of such knowledge is a fascinating pursuit. 
 
 But I know that there is a sun, not because astro- 
 nomers tell me so, but because I see it ; and I know 
 that the sun is warm because I feel it. 
 
 It is just so with the knowledge of spiritual things. 
 There is one kind of knowledge which is found in 
 books, which consists in reasonings or meditations upon 
 
1 84 THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 what God has revealed to us, which is very interesting, 
 very important, and which I should be the very last 
 to disparage. There is another kind of knowledge 
 which comes straight into the soul as the sunlight 
 comes — which manifests not only its existence, but its 
 nature — which tells us not only that God is there, but 
 that God is good. The one kind of knowledge is 
 formed by adding fact to fact, and inference to infer- 
 ence, in a long and laborious study. The other is an 
 immediate, irresistible, and penetrating force. 
 
 And again, the knowledge which comes through 
 feeling, not only forces itself upon us and tells us 
 about itself whether we will or no, but it does all this 
 by changing our bodies or part of them from one state 
 into another. The sun not only tells us that it is 
 warm, but makes us warm too. 
 
 So it is with the knowledge of God. It is not only 
 a power, but a transforming power. "We all, with open 
 face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are 
 changed into the same image from glory to glory." 
 
 It is in this way that the knowledge of God is our 
 life : it is a penetrating and transforming power ; it 
 is His Spirit acting upon our spirits, until they are 
 fashioned again in a new and holier birth ; it is the 
 communion of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 And this knowledge is possible to us now. It is 
 not in heaven that thou shouldest say, Who shall go 
 up for us to heaven and bring it to us ? neither is it 
 beyond the sea that thou shouldest say. Who shall go 
 over the sea for us and bring it unto us ? 
 
THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 185 
 
 Here and now is this essence of the hfe eternal pos- 
 sible to us. It is the present life of the Christian soul. 
 We know that we have passed from death unto life. 
 It surrounds us as the sunlight surrounds us. It may 
 be hidden from us as the sunlight may be hidden from 
 us, when we turn away our faces and retire into the 
 caverns of selfishness and sin. 
 
 But here and now — if you will, but only if you will 
 — here and now in these human lives of ours, ransomed 
 as they have been by Christ from sin, quickened as 
 they may be by the breath of the Divine Spirit, here 
 in these human lives, with all their mean surroundings, 
 and with all their endless shortcomings, is this know- 
 ledge of God possible to us — this mysterious trans- 
 formation of our souls into a Divine likeness, of which 
 the life to come is but the sublimer form. 
 
 But how is such a knowledge possible to us ? What 
 is meant by opening our souls to the light of God, 
 and feeling its transforming power ? 
 
 I can understand that there may be some here who 
 are ready to say, It is a mockery to tell me of knowing 
 God and of growing like Him. It is like taking a man 
 into the open sky when the bright shining of the stars 
 makes us more vividly conscious than at other times 
 of its infinity, and saying to him, " Be infinite like 
 yonder heaven ; be bright like yonder stars." 
 
 I can almost hear some of you saying. This ideal 
 of a Divine and perfect life may be all very well for 
 you preachers, and for those who have nothing else 
 to do but to think of it. Come with me to-morrow to 
 
186 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 my daily life, and see what I have to do ; come with 
 me to my shop, and see how I am filled with anxiety 
 from morning until night, whether I shall take enough 
 over the counter to pay my debts and feed my children 
 and stave off bankruptcy ; or come with me to my 
 counting house, and see the keen tension of commercial 
 life — the rivalry, the animosity, the chicanery, of those 
 with whom I have to deal. 
 
 Or come with me to my daily toil, and see the dull 
 mechanic pacing to and fro, and the physical exhaus- 
 tion with which night after night I sink into my bed 
 for a sleep which is too brief ; and then, when you have 
 spent just one day in the kind of life which I am 
 compelled to live, tell me how I am to know God 
 there. 
 
 And I can understand others again saying. You may 
 explain it as you like, but it is still a mockery. Give 
 me infinite power and infinite time, and I too might be 
 good and godlike. But what would God be like, what 
 would God do, if, instead of being infinitely powerful. 
 He were bounded as I am bounded by the sordid cir- 
 cumstances and the bodily weaknesses of this mortal 
 sphere, by the thwarting of His aims, by the failure 
 of His efforts, by the constant temptation to sin ? 
 
 There is no irreverence in the question, because it 
 is one which God Himself has answered for us. It is 
 like the petition of Philip, " Lord, show us the Father, 
 and it sufficeth us." And the answer which comes is 
 the answer which Philip received : " He that hath seen 
 Me, hath seen the Father. If ye had known Me, ye 
 
THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 187 
 
 should have known My Father also." For there is 
 another half to my text — a half upon which I have not 
 yet touched : " This is life eternal, that they might 
 know Thee, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." 
 Here is the key to the difficulty which we all must feel 
 more or less when we speak of knowing God. For us 
 men in this human life the knowledge of the Father 
 is the knowledge of the Son, the knowledge of God is 
 the knowledge of Jesus Christ. We have before us in 
 the life of our Lord Jesus Christ the satisfaction of 
 this need of a divinity which is, if not nearer at least 
 more apparent to our human life, and more possible 
 for mortal men to approach. 
 
 We have before us in the Gospels the picture of 
 God clothed with humanity — treading the streets of 
 an earthly city, living that very life of struggle which 
 seems at first sight to be at the very opposite pole of 
 existence from God. Again and again, through the 
 prison bars of that humanity, there flashed forth the 
 light of the divinity that was in Him ; but His Hfe was 
 a human life — a life like yours and mine ; a life which 
 felt pain and disappointment and temptation, and a 
 life consequently which, though at far distance, it is 
 possible for us to know and to imitate. 
 
 To know God is to know Him as manifested in 
 the sphere of our humanity. To feel the power of 
 that knowledge as a stimulating, no less than a trans- 
 forming, force is to feel it as it shines through the 
 pages of the Gospels, — Christ as He lived and Christ 
 as He died ; Christ living, Christ crucified, and Christ 
 
188 THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 risen is the power which draws all men unto Him. 
 We can see and feel the infinite patience of Almighty 
 God both in the world outside us and in human 
 history. And as we see and feel this we are drawn 
 towards it and transformed by it. 
 
 But in this human life — surrounded as we are by 
 the irritating crowd of our fellow-men, harassed by the 
 inevitable failure of our human efforts— that which 
 stimulates us, that to which we can most immediately 
 grow like, that which we can consciously imitate, 
 is the patience, the longsuffering, the forbearance of 
 Jesus Christ. We can see and feel the infinite mercy 
 which is spread over all the world of God — the infinite 
 goodness which in spite of all our sadnesses lies 
 beneath our lives. And as we feel it we are drawn 
 towards it, and the goodness of God is reflected as in 
 a mirror in the glowing gratitude of our souls. 
 
 But nearer even than that abounding goodness is 
 the tenderness, the sympathy, the forgiveness of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 This then is eternal life. It is the knowledge of 
 God through Christ. It is that knowledge of God 
 which is a transforming power. It is, on the other 
 hand, that knowledge of Christ which is a stimulating 
 as well as a transforming power. It is the growth 
 within us, by virtue of that transformation, of a new 
 man, a new self. It is the change from selfishness to 
 unselfishness, from impatience to patieAce, from moral 
 cowardice to moral courage, from distrustfulness to 
 faith, from despondency to hope, from unreality to 
 
THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 truth, from uncharitableness to love of the brethren, 
 from selfish inactivity to helpfulness for good. This 
 is eternal life as we know it here, the life which the 
 soul lives when it is close to God. 
 
 The effort after it is religion. There are many other 
 things which might be said about a religion, and 
 there are some other sides from which it may be 
 viewed ; but this is the essence and kernel of it : it is 
 the conscious effort to know God by realizing in our 
 lives the life of Christ. 
 
 And I lay stress upon this aspect of religion for two 
 chief reasons : 
 
 I. Religion is sometimes preached as though it 
 meant only the being saved from everlasting misery 
 and the gaining of everlasting happiness. It is all 
 that, but it is infinitely more than that. We must 
 have come out of darkness before we can stand in 
 the light. We must have been reconciled to God 
 before we can begin to know the peace of God. 
 
 But religion means, eternal life means, not so much 
 the having come out of darkness as standing in the 
 light and feeling its power. It is not so much the 
 ceasing to do evil as learning to do well. It is not 
 so much the dying unto sin as the living unto 
 righteousness. There are times at which the sense 
 of sin must come upon all of us ; but a religion which 
 preaches only salvation is only half a religion, be- 
 cause it preaches only half the truth. It is not only 
 half a religion, but it becomes a selfish religion ; what 
 it leads men to think of and to care for is neither God 
 
THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 nor Christ nor their fellow-men, but only that lowest 
 of all motives for being good — the wish to go to 
 heaven. 
 
 II. In the second place, the knowledge of God has 
 sometimes been preached as though it were only a kind 
 of dream. 
 
 There have been men in all ages of the Church's 
 history, and there are men now, who think that the 
 knowledge of God is best attained by contemplation. 
 They fold their hands and gaze, as it were, upon an 
 infinite sky, and are lost to the world in ecstasy. 
 
 There is at first sight a fascination in this shutting 
 the eyes to all human sights and the ears to all human 
 voices, and kneeling in the darkness and the silence 
 alone with God. Even those who do not adopt the 
 theory in its extreme form think highly of a devotional 
 life. And there are moments when all of us do well 
 to obey our Master's injunction — to go into the closet 
 and shut the door and commune with Him who is 
 invisible. 
 
 But the world in which our Lord ordinarily moved 
 was the world in which you and I have to move — the 
 world of business and of work ; the world of common 
 daily duty, of common household cares; the world 
 of affection: and it is in this world that we must be like 
 Him, and the struggle to be like Him is religion. Not 
 once only, but again and again, is the knowledge of 
 God and the knowledge of Christ spoken of as a 
 practical thing and in a practical connection. 
 
 It is St. Paul who prays for his disciples that they 
 
THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 191 
 
 may bear fruit in every good work, and so increase in 
 the knowledge of God. 
 
 It is St. Peter who couples grace and knowledge, 
 bidding us " grow in grace and in the knowledge of our 
 Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." 
 
 It is St. John who tells us, " Hereby do we know that 
 we know Him, if we keep His commandments ; " " He 
 that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also to walk 
 even as He walked." 
 
 The one way to know God in this .human life is to 
 struggle to live in our homes, in our businesses, in our 
 daily work, a Christlike Hfe. 
 
 It is neither, on the one hand, to be always crying 
 out to God to save and make us happy; nor, on the 
 other hand, to be always straining our eyes in gazing 
 at an infinite sky ; but it is that harder and sterner 
 and nearer task of following the blessed steps of 
 Christ's most holy life. 
 
 And again the question comes, How are we to do 
 this ? 
 
 Again I can understand your asking me to go with 
 you — one, as it were, to his farm, and another to his 
 merchandise — and saying " Tell me how I am to be like 
 Christ, there." 
 
 The answer is brief, for it can only be general : there 
 are as many ways of knowing God and following Christ 
 as there are individual souls. To each individual soul 
 among us God stands in an immediate and personal 
 relation. Each individual soul has not only a separate 
 and incommunicable character, but also a separate and 
 
192 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 inalienable way of knowing and acting. It would be 
 as futile, as it would be interminable, a task to lay 
 down rules for all this vast gathering,— for all these 
 separate souls with their separate histories, their sepa- 
 rate sadnesses, their separate capabilities, their separate 
 temptations, and their separate sins. Nor is this what 
 the Gospel does. It recognises and allows for this fact 
 of our individuality. Other religions — ^and not only 
 other religions, but narrow forms of Christianity — have 
 had their elaborate rules for regulating almost every 
 kind of action in almost every form of life ; but what 
 the Gospel gives us, and all that a preacher can rightly 
 offer to Christian men, is not detailed rules, but general 
 principles. 
 
 Instead of the minute regulations of the Mosaic law 
 we have only, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as 
 thyself." "He that loveth another hath fulfilled the 
 law." 
 
 Instead of elaborate counsels of perfection we have 
 only, " Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father 
 which is in heaven is perfect." 
 
 And instead of two hundred pages on the imitation of 
 Christ it repeats with emphasis the stern and solemn 
 rule, " If any man will come after Me, let him deny 
 himself, and take up his cross and follow Me." 
 
 There is the secret of the Christian life ; there is the 
 beginning of the knowledge of God ; there is the 
 earthly form of life eternal : " Let him deny himself ; " 
 and that is all the exhortation I can give you. 
 
 Out of self with its mean ambitions and its sordid 
 
THE MYSTERY OF LIFE. 
 
 >93 
 
 aims. Out of self with tlie sins that come of self- 
 indulgence and self-contentedness and self-absorption. 
 
 Out of self with its jealousies and malices, its hatreds 
 and mistrusts. 
 
 Out of self into the world of our fellow-men with 
 their innumerable wants that cry for help, for those 
 infinite sorrows that cry for compassionate love. 
 
 Out of self into the Divine world of sympathy, where, 
 if anywhere in this life of sorrow, we have fellowship 
 with the Father and with the Son. 
 
 Out of self until the old Adam has passed utterly 
 away and the new man is fashioned in its place. The 
 knowledge of Christ is so intimate, and the union with 
 Christ so complete, that you say. It is no more I, but 
 Christ who liveth in me. 
 
 This is for us the earthly form of the eternal life ; this 
 is for us the highest form of the knowledge which 
 draws us to itself and changes and stimulates us. 
 
 It is not all that is possible to us. For here we know 
 only in part ; here we bear the image of the earthly ; 
 here we are living, as it were, under a vast tent roof 
 and only see the sky through the rifts in the canvas ; 
 but the day is coming when the tent shall be struck and 
 the eternity which is even now around us shall be 
 manifest to our souls — the infinite sky of endless life, 
 lit up even as the world is lit up now, to those who 
 have eyes to see, by the sunshine of the love of God. 
 
 13 
 
SERMON XVI. 
 LIFE'S TRADING. 
 
i 
 
SERMON XVI. 
 
 LIFE'S TRADING. 
 
 [Bur ley, Leeds, 1882.] 
 
 "Occupy til! I come" [K.V. " Trade ye herewith till I come"]. — 
 Luke xix, 13. 
 
 'O-NIGHT is the last night of the year. To- 
 
 i morrow will be New Year's Day, and it will 
 seem as if a change had come. Somehow or other the 
 world around us will look different, and we shall feel 
 ourselves starting afresh. 
 
 And yet there will be no real change in the world 
 around us. The difference between to-morrow and 
 to-day will be only that inevitable difference which 
 marks off one day from another. It will be only that 
 same difference which made yesterday different from 
 Friday, or last Monday from last Sunday, the slow and 
 solemn movement of time itself with all the incidents 
 and circumstances that time brings forth. 
 
 I remember that when I was a boy this was a great 
 puzzle to me. I remember one New Year's night on 
 which I went out into the fields, to watch what would 
 happen. I thought that at least there would be a 
 
LIFE'S TRADING. 
 
 lightning-flash, or some sudden turning of the moon, 
 or just a moment's pause, as it were, in the movement 
 of the stars. But though I watched and waited in a 
 sort of dimly-felt awe — shuddering sometimes at the 
 thought of what might happen — of the possible mani- 
 festation, as it were, of the very finger of God, touching 
 the vast machinery of the world, and bidding it stop 
 for an instant, and then begin afresh, though it seemed 
 almost as if the Almighty Father might choose that 
 very moment for bidding the Archangel sound his 
 trumpet, and for opening the awful heavens for the 
 cloud-chariot of the Son of Man, there was nothing 
 in the sky that there had not been before — no flash, 
 no pause — no sound ; until the music of the distant 
 church-bells floated through the air to tell me that, 
 all unawares and unperceived, the moment of change 
 had passed, and that the new year had begun. 
 
 What then is a new year ? Why should there be 
 any more significance in to-morrow than there will be 
 in to-morrow week ? or in the first of January than 
 there will be in the first of February ? why should we 
 single out one particular day and call it New Year's 
 Day? 
 
 Now 1 think that I can perhaps answer this ques- 
 tion best if I take for granted, as I have no doubt 
 I may, that some of those who are listening to me are 
 engaged in business, or at any rate know what business 
 means. 
 
 You know, even better than I do, two facts about 
 business : on the one hand, that if you spend your 
 
LIFE'S TRADING. 199 
 
 whole day looking into your accounts, your business 
 will not thrive ; and, on the other hand, that if you 
 never look into your accounts your business will pro- 
 bably get into confusion. And, consequently, I have no 
 doubt that most of you who have to do with business, 
 adopt the very simple and prudent plan of having 
 regular times for taking stock and balancing your 
 accounts. And when you have done so, you turn over 
 a new leaf in your books, and, so to speak, begin afresh. 
 There is nothing in the nature of things to compel you 
 to fix on one day more than another for the purpose ; 
 but when you have fixed upon it, it becomes a sort 
 of marked day, and you reckon up towards it and 
 downwards from it. 
 
 Now in the parable from which my text is taken, 
 the spiritual life is represented as a sort of business. 
 The master gives his servants so many pounds — so 
 much capital as we should say — and as he goes away 
 into a far country, he tells them to trade with it. 
 " Occupy " — trade with it ; for that is the proper mean- 
 ing of the word — " till I come " back. We are traders 
 with the gifts that Christ has given us, and which He 
 gives us afresh from day to day. 
 
 Now what is good for your worldly business is in 
 this respect good also for this spiritual business in 
 which we are traders for God. 
 
 It would be a great waste of time and a hindrance 
 to your soul's growth, if you were always looking into 
 your spiritual state, to see what progress you were 
 making. There are some people, indeed, who do this. 
 
200 
 
 LIFE S TRADING. 
 
 At every moment, so to speak, on the road of life they 
 turn round and apply the measuring-tape, and say with 
 an inward satisfaction : " I am ten yards farther than I 
 was a minute ago." You will see that progress under 
 those conditions is not likely to be very rapid. 
 
 And on the other hand it would be dangerous in 
 the extreme to go on from day to day, and from year 
 to year, through all the days and years of life, without 
 ever stopping for a moment to cast up accounts, as it 
 were ; to ask yourselves: "Am I doing what I ought to 
 be doing ? " " Am I as good a servant of Christ ? " 
 "Am I as useful to my family and to my fellow-men 
 as I might be ? " 
 
 There is, for all of us, whether we will or no, one 
 such great day of account coming. 
 
 Some day, we cannot tell how soon, the Master who 
 has given us the pound with which to trade will call 
 His servants to Him one by one, that they may give 
 an account. But " lest that day should come upon us 
 unawares," unprepared to render any good account of 
 what we have been doing, it is well for us — I do not 
 say that it is our bounden duty, but it is well for us — 
 to reckon with ourselves, to cast up our own accounts, 
 and to see what we are doing with the talents which 
 the Master has entrusted to us. 
 
 This is the meaning, and this is the use, of New- 
 Year's Day. It is a sort of spiritual account-day. Now 
 before I ask you to go into the account, let me remind 
 you what it is of which you have to give an account. 
 
 In a parable which is very much like that from 
 
LIFE'S TRADING. 201 
 
 which my text is taken what are entrusted to us are 
 called talents, and the parable has made such an im- 
 pression upon the world, that the word has come into 
 our common language — the language even of men who 
 are not Christians. They speak of a man's talents, or 
 of a talented man. 
 
 But this ordinary use of the word of the parable has 
 led to a very common mistake about its meaning. 
 It is sometimes thought that the parable refers only 
 to those who have exceptional gifts of God — gifts alto- 
 gether above the common ; or only to some special 
 power, which each one of us has in distinction from 
 his fellows. And there are some persons who assume 
 that the parable does not apply to them, because they 
 think " I am not talented ; " "I have no talents." 
 
 My friends, the parable applies to every living soul. 
 The pound which God has given us is the sum total 
 of His gifts to us. Whatever we have, whatever we 
 are, whatever we have the power to do, whatever 
 opportunities we have of doing it — these are God's gifts, 
 the Master's pound, with which we have to trade, and 
 for which we have to give an account. 
 
 There are powers and opportunities which are given 
 to but few. There are two sets of gifts which we all 
 have — will and influence. There are many people who 
 are content to say that they are what God made them, 
 that they have neither the wish nor the power to 
 become different. Now it is only one half of the truth 
 to say that we are what God made us, the other half 
 is that we are what wc have made ourselves. 
 
202 LIFE'S TRADING. 
 
 We are all born into the world with a certain nature, 
 with so many quaHties of body and heart and mind, 
 with so many tendencies to good and so many to evil ; 
 with a certain amount of strength, and a certain degree 
 of weakness. If you take children quite early in life you 
 will find one child for example to be impulsive, another 
 affectionate, another quarrelsome ; one will be indus- 
 trious, another indolent. And you will find that many 
 people grow up from childhood to manhood or woman- 
 hood, and from manhood to old age, taking these 
 various tendencies and powers just as they found 
 them, drifting helplessly along the current of their lives 
 without ever attempting to turn or influence their 
 course. 
 
 The very first lesson which every one of us ought 
 to learn in the school of life is, that these natures which 
 God has given us, and with which we were born, are 
 simply the material upon which we have to work. 
 They are so much wood and stone with which we 
 have to build , they are so much raw yarn which we 
 have to weave into cloth ; they are so many talents with 
 which we have to trade. For above all these tendencies 
 and powers and qualities God has given to every one 
 of us the supreme gift of will. He has given us the 
 power to shape and mould the qualities with which we 
 were born. He gives us every moment that we live 
 some new circumstances, some new incident, some 
 new opportunities, all of which are intended to be 
 tools in the hands of our wills for shaping our char- 
 acters. And above and beyond all this — stronger than 
 
203 
 
 our wills, though working with them ; infinitely stronger 
 than our natures, although not crushing them, but 
 acting upon them, as the gentle force of the sunlight 
 acts upon the leaves of a flower — is His own Spirit, 
 God Himself, working with our spirits, guiding, comfort- 
 ing, strengthening : guiding us when in the tangled 
 maze of good and evil, we hardly know which way to 
 turn ; comforting us when in sorrow for our inevitable 
 falls we are tempted to despair ; strengthening us when 
 with resolute effort and earnest prayer we determine 
 to be better men. 
 
 Now, brethren, at the year's end, at this settling-day 
 after fifty-two weeks of powers and opportunities for 
 trading with this talent of will which God has given 
 you for making your characters better than they were 
 a year ago, let me ask you to go into the account. 
 
 Compare yourselves with what you were a year 
 ago, and ask yourselves : " Is it loss or gain ? Am I 
 better or worse — more like Christ, or more unlike 
 Him — nearer to God or fartiier away from Him?" 
 
 You must go into that account yourselves. We 
 cannot in spiritual things, any more than in temporal 
 things, keep one another's books. The gifts which 
 God has given to us are infinitely varied. And a 
 preacher can do very little towards helping his hearers 
 to cast up the account. 
 
 I will take only one item : Every one of us has 
 the gift of the power of self-control, the power to 
 check ourselves. We all have in the nature with 
 which we were born, passions and impulses and 
 
204 
 
 LIFE'S TRADING. 
 
 desires which, when allowed to run an unhindered 
 course, become aggravated and mischievous sins. But 
 the Master puts into our hands the reins to check 
 these fiery steeds of passion, and these reckless 
 wheels of impulse and desire. You can if you will, 
 you can if you pray, be master of them. You can 
 stop anger, you can stop immoderate appetite and 
 unlawful desires. You may have the kind of struggle 
 with all these that you have with a restive horse, but 
 you can stop them if you will, and if you pray. 
 
 Now, brethren, in reckoning up the account at the 
 end of the year see how you have used this power 
 of self-control. Look back on the last twelve months 
 — think as well as you can of their varied and incessant 
 incidents, and then ask yourselves, " Have I been trading 
 with this gift of God to the best advantage ? Have 
 I been trying to keep down the old tendency to be 
 angry, in season and out of season — the tendency to 
 desire what I ought not to desire — to hate what 1 ought 
 not to hate and love what I ought not to love ? " 
 
 Then again, God has given to every one of us 
 the gift or talent of influence. There is not one 
 single person here — not the youngest child, not the 
 poorest and humblest workwoman — who has not an 
 influence upon others. That is a pound which God 
 has given to every human soul with which to trade. 
 Trade with that pound, says our Lord, to every one 
 of us — " till I come," Use it to make other men and 
 women and children better and happier. 
 
 My friends, look back upon the last fifty-two weeks. 
 
LIFE'S TRADING. 
 
 205 
 
 and ask yourselves how this great amount of influence 
 stands. What kind of influence have you, each one 
 of you — not your neighbours, but you to whom I am 
 speaking — been shedding around you this last year ? 
 And when you look into the account remember what 
 a mysterious and subtle thing influence is. It does 
 not consist in talking to people, in preaching sermons 
 to them, or arguing with them. 
 
 Influence is not spoken but felt. It is like the 
 sunlight — it acts without making any noise. Silently, 
 and with unseen step, it draws out the bud into the 
 blossom and the blossom into the fruit. It acts, so to 
 speak, in spite of itself — doing the work which God 
 has assigned it, whether it will or no. 
 
 Thus it is with this gift of influence : we cannot 
 help influencing other people — we do it in spite of 
 ourselves. The very love of our voices, the very 
 manner of our setting about our work, must influence 
 those with whom we are thrown. The sister will 
 influence the brother, the brother the sister ; the father 
 influences the child and the child the father ; friend 
 influences friend, workman influences workman — and 
 all by virtue of this silent power which passes like an 
 invisible electric current from soul to soul. 
 
 So that when you reckon up your account of 
 influence for the past year it will not be enough to 
 say, for instance, that you tried to convert a drunkard, 
 or to reform a liar. You must go a great deal deeper 
 than that — you must ask how far your unselfishness 
 helped to make others unselfish, your courage helped 
 
206 
 
 I.IFES TKADING. 
 
 to make others brave, your kindliness helped to make 
 others warm-hearted. Or it may be — alas ! too often 
 it is : " How far has my selfishness helped to make 
 others selfish — my moral cowardice to make others 
 hang back from duty — my uncharitableness helped to 
 make others hard and unpitying and censorious ?" 
 
 Ah ! my friends, when once we begin to reckon in 
 this way the account swells to terrible dimensions. 
 There is an awful balance on the wrong side when we 
 add up just one single year — nay, one single week — 
 of lost opportunities and misused power. 
 
 And the first thought of all of us as we look back 
 must be a thought of sorrow, and a prayer that God 
 will forgive us. 
 
 O call me not to strict account 
 
 How I have lived here ; 
 For then I know right well, O Lord, 
 
 Most vile shall I appear. 
 
 But although, just for a moment, in this halt, as it 
 were, on the road of life, we may both feel our sorrow 
 and express it, I do not ask you to prolong that feel- 
 ing. When you have taken a wrong turn in a country 
 walk it is folly to stand still for an hour or two, and 
 reproach yourself with your mistake ; the wisest plan 
 is to turn round as quickly as you can and get into the 
 right road. And when in business you find that you 
 have run into debt, it is folly to wring your hands and 
 sit down and deplore your mistakes. The wisest plan is 
 to set to work to make up as far as you can for the loss, 
 and to try to be more cautious in the future. It is 
 
LIFE'S TRADING. 
 
 207 
 
 exactly so with this pound— these talents — with which 
 our Master has bidden us trade. If we find on reckon- 
 ing up the account at the year's end that we have, so to 
 speak, run into debt ; if we have misused our talents or 
 not used them at all, what God would have us do is, not 
 spend our time in sorrowing over the past, but endeavour 
 with His help to make better use of them in the future. 
 It is possible to say, " God be merciful to me a sinner," 
 a great deal too often. Mercy and pardon are sure to 
 those who believe, to those whom Christ has redeemed. 
 The prayer which should never be absent from a 
 Christian's lips is : " Lord, help me ! " 
 
 And what I chiefly want to urge upon you to-night 
 is, to reckon not so much with the past as with the 
 future. Just for once look back upon all that you have 
 done and left undone — upon the use you have made in 
 this last year of the powers and opportunities which 
 have been given to you. But when you have done 
 that remember that, with to-morrow morning a new 
 year begins — fifty-two more weeks of opportunities of 
 trading with the Master's money. And all through 
 those weeks, and days, and hours the Master's pound 
 will be in your hands ; and all the while, like a deep 
 undertone beneath all the varied music of the incidents 
 of life, there will be, if you are wise, these solemn 
 words ringing out clear and loud : " Occupy till I 
 come." 
 
 "Occupy till I come." Occupy — trade with use to 
 the best advantage — the Lord's money. You have, 
 every one of you, many gifts of God : you have industry. 
 
208 
 
 I IFE'S TRADING. 
 
 or patience, or perseverance, or faith, or kindness of 
 manner, or power of sympathy, or courage, or hope- 
 fulness, or moderation, or several of these gifts com- 
 bined. These are your Lord's coins ; trade with them, 
 put them out to the best advantage among your families, 
 or your friends, or the world which sees you but does 
 not know you. Make them double this time next year 
 what they are now in their strength and force in your 
 own souls, make them more than double this time next 
 year what they are now in their prevalence among 
 your neighbours. 
 
 "Occupy till I come" — till I come. The words give 
 an awful responsibility to our trading. For He will 
 come ; and none of us know how soon. And although 
 it is not good for our soul's health to be constantly 
 thinking of the end, to make life with all its infinite 
 possibilities of doing positive work for God, a mere 
 anticipation of death : yet, at these solemn milestones 
 of life — at the casting-up of our accounts — at the old 
 year's ending and the new year's beginning, it is not 
 only good for us, but almost a duty, to reflect before 
 tiie awful significance of these simple words : " Till I 
 foine." 
 
 It is not necessary for us to believe that before next 
 year's December ends the " trump of God " will have 
 audibly sounded, the riven skies parted, the sea have 
 given up her dead. For you and me the account will 
 be closed whenever the hour comes which calls us away 
 from the body. 
 
 My friends, who among us would have the awful 
 
LIFE'S TRADING. 
 
 209 
 
 hardihood to say that that hour will not come for us 
 this year ? Who among us would venture so to 
 challenge God, as to say : " I shall be in this church 
 at next year's end ? " 
 
 Think of those of this very congregation who pnce 
 spent their Christmas as you have just spent it, and 
 who doubtless thought as much of spending New Year's 
 Day as you think of spending to-morrow, to whom one 
 morning, as they sat in their accustomed place of work, 
 the sudden summons came — and in a moment the 
 account was closed, and life had become eternity. 
 Yours and mine may be less sudden deaths, to you and 
 me a longer working time may be given. But while we 
 live there is upon us this awful responsibility of duty. 
 In our hands, in the hands of the very humblest among 
 us, are untold powers and innumerable opportunities 
 of using those powers, coins with which our Master 
 has entrusted us, with this solemn command : " Occupy 
 till I come ! " 
 
 To the very best and strongest among us, this night 
 of reckoning must be a night of sadness when we think 
 of all we have not done in the year that is past. To 
 the very weakest and worst among us to-morrow morn- 
 ing may be a morning of hope, if, as we go forth to 
 the New Year's work, with our Master's money in our 
 hand, we go forth in the strength of the Lord God. 
 
 14 
 
1 
 
SERMON XVII. 
 HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
SERMON XVII. 
 
 HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 [^University of Oxford, 1883.] 
 
 " Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the 
 things of others." —Phil. ii. 4. 
 
 IN the scheme for realizing the ideal Christian 
 hfe which was framed by St. Benedict of Monte 
 Cassino, and which became a rule for his followers in 
 the monasteries of the West, the virtue of humility was 
 made the basis upon which the Christian character 
 should be built. It had twelve forms or grades, some 
 of them touching the holiest relations of the soul to 
 God, and others forming mere rules of Christian eti- 
 quette for the cloister, but all of them falling within 
 the sphere of conduct. 
 
 But the " last of the Western Fathers," St. Bernard 
 of Clairvaux, in commenting six centuries afterwards 
 upon this part of the Bcndictine rule, sets aside almost 
 altogether the forms which humility assumes within the 
 sphere of conduct, and deals with it as a virtue of the 
 intellect. Its end, he says, is the ascertainment of 
 truth, and, viewed in the light of that end, St. Bene- 
 dict's grades of it are like the steps by which the 
 
214 
 
 HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 pilgrims of ancient Israel ascended the hill of Sion, 
 which he seems to have pictured to himself as the 
 early painters represented it, — as a mediaeval fortress, 
 from whose lofty towers, overlooking the whole land- 
 scape of existence, all truth might be seen. 
 
 I shall not, therefore, be wanting in a precedent 
 if, on the present occasion, on which humility is the 
 appointed subject of discourse, I speak of it in its 
 relation to knowledge. 
 
 But St. Be'-nard's treatment of it affords not only a 
 precedent, but an analogy. For he lived in the first 
 half of thetwelft'i century. A new life had then begun 
 for feudal Europe. The schools of Paris were drawing 
 thousands of students from far-off countries. The 
 world of speculative knowledge was opening out afresh 
 with infinite prorr'se. The great Breton, Roscelin, and 
 the great Lombard, St. Anselm, had fought the combat 
 which had stirred the chivalry of thought to an appa- 
 rently perpetunl tournament. The most brilliant and 
 the most hopeless of philosophical compromises, the 
 conceptualism of Abelard, was fascinating the world 
 which it failed to convert. Learning, like speculation, 
 was passing through the throes of a new birth. The 
 knowledge of classical literature was being revived. 
 There was floating into Western Christendom., in the 
 tales of travellers, the news that the "great master of 
 all who know " hr.d written other books besides the 
 Organon. From the Jews and Moors of Moslem 
 Spain, from the schools of Cordova and Seville, 
 medicine and na'^ural history, mathematics and astro- 
 
HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 21 
 
 nomy, were travelling slowly to the north. And for 
 some, as for St. Bernard himself, the poetry of life had 
 a greater charm than either logic or learning ; and in 
 him and his friends, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, 
 the Eastern mystics lived again. 
 
 We, in our time, are in the midst, or it may be only 
 at the beginning, of a still greater revival of learning, 
 and a still greater movement of thought. The fields 
 which but a century ago were mere tracts of barren 
 moorland are now ripe with the harvest of knowledge. 
 The history of our race, the history of the earth on 
 which our race has lived, the history of the vast system 
 in which this earth is but an insignificant unit, are 
 beginning to stand out in clear outline from the mists 
 which have hitherto hung around them. The study of 
 language has taken us back to the times when there 
 were no records. The study of mythology has enabled 
 us to reconstruct that which is obscure even when 
 records are abundant — the history of beliefs. The 
 great methods of experiment and comparison have 
 unfolded to our certain gaze more than our forefathers 
 dreamed of as possible to be known. The sea has 
 yielded up her secrets. The heavens themselves have 
 told us of the nature of the fires which burn in their 
 incalculably distant suns. The tree of knowledge is 
 covered everj'vvhere with new blossom. Encyclopaedias 
 have to be written afresh ; and we feel the pride of 
 conquerors who have brought a new empire beneath 
 their sway. 
 
 But to anyone who looks as it were from an adjacent 
 
2l6 
 
 HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 cliff upon this great moving sea of contemporary 
 thought, there are at least two facts which will suggest 
 themselves. 
 
 I. In the first place, it will be apparent that this 
 enormous growth in knowledge has opened up more 
 questions than it has solved, and that, coincident with 
 the unveiling of that which we now know, there has 
 been a revelation of the vastness of the unknown. 
 There was a time when the sum of the knowable 
 appeared to be a limited quantity. The Mum scibile 
 was a country which could be mapped out and 
 described. But the higher we ascend the hill of know- 
 ledge, the wider is the horizon. In the physical world, 
 the knowable appears to be limited only by our means 
 of observation. Around us is that which seems to be 
 infinitely vast ; beneath us is that which seems to be 
 infinitesimally small. There are worlds beyond worlds, 
 and worlds within worlds, still to be discovered, as our 
 senses develop a finer quality and science finds for 
 itself new apparatus of research. Even within the 
 fields which have been most thoroughly explored, there 
 are wide gaps in the record of facts, and negative 
 instances to the generalizations which claim for them- 
 selves the most universal validity. And so far from the 
 exacter knowledge of the physical world having helped 
 us to a knowledge of the deeper problems which under- 
 lie and transcend it, it has rendered them more difficult, 
 because it has rendered them more complex. From 
 the search for the reality which is hidden behind 
 phenomena, the enquirer returns more baffled and 
 
HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 217 
 
 unsatisfied than before ; and, for all its splendid con- 
 quests, the best knowledge of our time confesses its 
 incompleteness no less in the pathos of its triumphs 
 than in the sublimity of its despair. 
 
 II. The second consideration which impresses an 
 outside observer of our time is the existence of wide 
 differences of mental attitude towards the world, alike 
 of matter and of thought. Now, no less than at any 
 previous time, and in some respects more than at any 
 previous time, men are divided between pessimistic and 
 optimistic theories of society, between nominalism and 
 realism in metaphysics, between selfish and unselfish 
 theories of morals. Now, no less than at any previous 
 time, is the constructive type of character at work, 
 drawing generalizations and framing systems. Now, 
 no less than at anj' previous time, is the analytical type 
 of character busy with its mental disintegration of 
 phenomena, noting differences and marking discords. 
 Now, not less than ever, does the spirit of dogmatism 
 claim for its theories not only truth but exclusive truth, 
 and set itself, as it were, in battle array to combat 
 its gainsayers. Now, not less than ever, is there that 
 natural rebound from dogmatism which showed itself in 
 the academics and sceptics of later Greek philosophy, 
 and which would have us believe that nothing can ever 
 be certainly known. Now, not less than ever, are there 
 between these poles of dogmatism and denial eclectics of 
 infinitely varying degrees. And now, not less than ever, 
 is it seen that the differences between these various 
 types of character are permanent and irreconcilable ; 
 
2l8 
 
 HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 as though the Spirit of God, which breathes through 
 the human soul, as through the pipes of a great organ, 
 gave to each soul his distinct and separate note, which 
 it is not given to us to change or blend. 
 
 It is the combination of these facts, the fact that we 
 are in the eddies of a great movement — that what we 
 do not know seems to be vastly greater than what we 
 do know — and that our differences of mental attitude 
 even in regard to what we do know are deep and ap- 
 parently irreconcilable, which makes a place, and that 
 a large place, in our modern life for the Christian virtue 
 of humility. For humility points us at once to the vast- 
 ness of the unknown, and to the necessary partiality of 
 each individual's point of view. It recognizes at once 
 the " idols of the tribe," and the " idols of the cave." 
 It bids us moderate our claims. It tells us that our 
 generalizations are too wide. It looks forward to the 
 innumerable years that are yet to come — to the infinite 
 future which is to crown a possibly infinite past, and it 
 will not assert that, either individually or collectively, 
 we in this present year have attained to finality in 
 any one branch of knowledge. It looks out upon the 
 diverse characters of men, and will not believe that the 
 conceptions of any one man or any one group of men 
 are complete, and that their statements exhaust all 
 possible assertions upon any one field of knowledge. 
 It is an attitude of mind, which is what courtesy is as 
 an attitude of conduct. It asserts the place of the indi- 
 vidual, but it recognizes also the place, and the equal 
 place, of others. It does not hold that because each 
 
HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 219 
 
 man's view is partial, conditioned and supplemented 
 by the views of other men, there is no such thing as 
 absolute truth. It looks upon truth — the sum of know- 
 ledge about the realities of things — as a diamond with 
 many facets. Each man sees but one or a few of them ; 
 but those which he does see are there. They do not 
 exist any the less truly because there are other facets 
 invisible to him which are seen by other men. And, 
 consequently, it is not the part of humility to be 
 diffident about the truth which it sees. It is confident 
 in assertion and diffident only in denial. It conse- 
 quently becomes a stimulus and a spur. For acqui- 
 escence in what we at present see, knowing that what 
 we see is partial and incomplete, is not humility, but 
 a low form of pride — the pride of conscious ignorance. 
 
 And if humility be a becoming attitude of mind in 
 relation to knowledge in general, it is especially so 
 in relation to that knowledge which has for almost all 
 of us an interest, and for some of us a fascination — the 
 knowledge which is summed up in the word theology. 
 
 For theology, in some degree — though to a less degree 
 than might have been supposed — shares in the general 
 movement which marks the knowledge of our time. 
 But the two points which are noteworthy, in regard 
 to knowledge in general, are especially noteworthy in 
 regard to theology. 
 
 I. In the first place, we cannot help being struck 
 with the incompleteness of our knowledge of the sources 
 of information. 
 
 If we take that which is incalculably the most 
 
220 
 
 HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 important of all such sources — the New Testament — 
 we are not at the end, but only at the beginning of our 
 knowledge of its text., because although the manuscripts 
 have been collected they have not yet been sifted ; and 
 the very principles upon which they should be sifted 
 have not yet been determined. 
 
 We are not at the end, but only at the beginning, of 
 our knowledge of the meaning of that text, because the 
 facts of contemporary language have not yet even been 
 gathered together. 
 
 We are not at the end, but only at the beginning, of 
 our knowledge of the ideas to which the Divine words 
 were relative, and by which their textual meaning 
 must necessarily be explained. And we are not at the 
 end, but only at the beginning, of our knowledge of those 
 facts of the history of Christianity, during the first 
 centuries of its existence, which have determined the 
 history both of its doctrines and its organization ever 
 since. And if we cast our eyes upon a wider field, 
 we are not at the end, but only, as it were, at the 
 beginning, of our knowledge of the facts of other 
 forms of religious belief, which existed before God re- 
 vealed Himself to men in the person of Jesus Christ, 
 and which have existed since, and which brings us 
 face to face with that larger and momentous question : 
 Who are the " other sheep " of the Good Shepherd 
 " which are not of this fold " ? 
 
 II. And not only in theology, as in other fields of 
 knowledge, do we find ourselves face to face with unex- 
 plored facts, and unsolved questions, but in theology. 
 
HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 221 
 
 as in other fields of knowledge, the inferences from the 
 facts we know are as various as are the various types 
 of human character. Ever since our Lord's earthly 
 lifetime, the facts of His life, and the words of His 
 teaching, have roused the activity of many types of 
 mind, and given birth to many kinds of knowledge. 
 Without pressing, as some have pressed, the differences 
 in apostolic days between St. Paul, St. Peter, St. 
 James, and St. John, or without saying there is not a 
 substantial agreement between them on certain funda- 
 mental propositions, it is impossible to deny that those 
 several Apostles represent distinct attitudes of mind. 
 And through all the centuries of Christian history, 
 those distinct attitudes of mind have continued and 
 multiplied. There has been the theology of the logician 
 — drawing the pure gold out into fine threads, and 
 weaving them into such exquisite filigree-woi k, that 
 the sense of the purity of the material has become lost 
 in the sense of the ingenuity of the workmanship. 
 There has been the theology of the critic, scanning the 
 evidence for each fact with cautious eye, and examining, 
 as it were, with a microscope, the letters of the Book 
 of Life. There has been the theology of the mystic, 
 with his eyes aflame, as the awful glory of the spiritual 
 world has blazed and burned before his sight. There 
 has been the theology of the syncretist, claiming to be 
 free from the narrowness of a single view, and to be 
 able to make Divine truth into a mosaic — the tesselated 
 pavement of his judgment hall. There is the theology 
 of those, who, believing that the Church is in some 
 
222 
 
 HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 mysterious sense the continuation of the Incarnation, 
 — the very Body of Christ incorporate in living men, — 
 beheve also that through the ministers of the Church, 
 and through them only, as through the bodily organs, 
 the sustenance of the Divine life is given. There is 
 the theology of those who believe that faith, and faith 
 alone, binds the individual soul to its risen Lord, and 
 makes the body of the believer the temple of the Holy 
 Ghost. There is the theology of those who believe 
 that the order of nature, and the order of grace, are 
 one and the same. There are inside all these several 
 schools those who claim for their doctrines, not only 
 truth, but exclusive truth ; and there are outside all 
 these schools, those who maintain that all truth about 
 God is a mere "will-o'-the-wisp" — the phosphorescence 
 on the stagnant marshes of old beliefs. 
 
 And that which is even more noteworthy than the 
 fact of differences of opinion on all these points, is the 
 fact that the differences are apparently irreconcilable. 
 They are not like differences as to some matter of fact, 
 which can be settled at once by reference to a common 
 standard. They lie deep in the very constitution of 
 men's natures. The whole bent and texture of some 
 men's minds is to be critical, of others to be sympathetic, 
 of others to be doubtful. Men can no more change 
 their natures in this respect than they can change the 
 cast of their features. Nor can any one man say with- 
 out arrogance. Mine, and mine alone, is the true 
 attitude. The character, the tendencies, the attitudes, 
 of men's minds are as far apart, and as little likely to 
 
HUM/I.ITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 223 
 
 be brought together upon the inferences which may be 
 drawn from the facts of Christian theology, as are the 
 separate snow-peaks which rise up in a great Alpine 
 chain ; between them are chasms which cannot be 
 bridged : and above them all is the infinite blue heaven, 
 with its faint white mists of unsolved questions, which 
 no controversies touch, — the mystery of birth, and the 
 mystery of death, and the mystery of pain. 
 
 It is in face of this combination of the facts of 
 theology, the fact of a great present movement of re- 
 ligious thought, the fact of the largeness of the field 
 which has yet to be explored, and the fact of the deep 
 and apparently irreconcilable differences of mental 
 attitude towards them, that, as in face of a similar com- 
 bination in the sphere of general knowledge, there 
 seems to be an especial room in the domain of theology 
 for this Christian virtue of humility. For humility is 
 an attitude of mind which, looking at something vaster 
 than ourselves, recognizes our personal littleness. It 
 acknowledges at once our imperfection and our differ- 
 ences. It points, on the one hand, to the smallness of 
 what we know, and quotes to us the ancient words : 
 " Lo, these are parts of his ways ; but how little a 
 portion is heard of Him." It points us, on the other 
 hand, to the inevitable imperfection of each individual 
 soul, and tells us that no one man's mind is a perfect 
 mirror of the mind of God. It is not dogmatism, for 
 dogmatism maintains, not only, as humility maintains, 
 the truth of its own assertions, but the falsehood of 
 all others. It is not scepticism, for it sees in scepticism 
 
224 HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 only another form of dogmatism — the dogmatism of 
 assumed ignorance. It is not compromise, for while it 
 acknowledges that there may be truths which it does 
 not itself see, it gives up no iota of its own conviction. 
 Nor is it indifferentism ; for it believes that God has 
 revealed Himself to men, and that His revelation may 
 be known ; but it believes also that that revelation has 
 been made TroXy/Aepw? as well as iroKyrpoirw; — in many 
 parts as well as in many ways — and it only abstains 
 from passing judgment on those parts which other men 
 see rather than ourselves, or which have possibly not 
 been yet revealed to any of us. It recognizes the dis- 
 tinction between fact and inference ; between the facts 
 of our Lord's life, and the recorded words of His 
 teaching, and. the inferences which may be derived 
 from them. But though it makes this distinction, its 
 creed is not in solution. It has its own strong con- 
 victions ; but the very strength of its convictions 
 makes it admit the co-existence, and the possible co- 
 ordination as truth, of similar convictions in the minds 
 of other men. It consequently dechnes to claim for 
 itself infallibility. It asserts no monopoly of truth. 
 Believing as it does that we are all sons of one Father, 
 it cannot believe that to one son exclusively has the 
 Father revealed His nature. And believing this, it is 
 urged on by that irresistible impulse, which to most 
 men becomes an inexorable duty, to endeavour to 
 supplement its own imperfection. It becomes the law, 
 not of standing still, but of progress. It treads a slow 
 and cautious path, but, in treading it, it ascends. It is 
 
HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 225 
 
 sometimes enveloped in mist, and over the landscape 
 on which it gazes there often broods the inexplicable 
 darkness of the thundercloud ; but out of the cloud 
 there comes to it the echo of a Divine voice which 
 becomes at once a consolation and a stimulus, " What 
 I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt understand 
 hereafter." 
 
 , This is the path of humility. This it is to look, as 
 St. Paul bids us, not every man on his own things, but 
 every man also on the things of others. This is that 
 via media, in whicii it is the especial duty of us to 
 walk who claim to be loyal sons of the Church of 
 England. For the Church of England, content with 
 requiring from her members an adherence to that 
 ancient baptismal formula which is known as the 
 Apostles' Creed, does not claim for herself, and especi- 
 ally denies even to general councils, an immunity from 
 error, even in things pertaining unto God. In her 
 view, the function of a Church is not that of an in- 
 terpreter of Holy Writ, but that of its witness and 
 guardian. Her position is thus unique among the 
 great churches of Christendom ; and it is one which 
 is especially incumbent upon us at the present time to 
 maintain and to defend. For, in face of the diversities 
 of opinion within our own borders, in face of the 
 common differences of all of us from those who are 
 outside our own organization, but to whom not even an 
 Ultramontane would refuse the name of Christian ; in 
 face of the vast heathen world, with its religions which 
 are not yet dead, and whose elements of truth the most 
 
 IS 
 
226 
 
 HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 enthusiastic missionary cannot ignore ; in face of the 
 deeper questions to which the widening knowledge of 
 our time is giving a new force and a new significance, 
 it is well for us to consider how much of our failure 
 of union and of evangelisation is due to the over- 
 confidence with which we have mingled inference with 
 fact in our statements of belief, and whether the path 
 of humanity may not be destined to become the path 
 at once of conquest and of peace. It is neither latitudi- 
 narianism nor compromise to say, that we Christian 
 men do not claim to understand all mysteries and all 
 knowledge ; or to say that though truth is one it has 
 different aspects, and finds various forms of expression. 
 Nay, rather, as some of the schoolmen urged, this 
 spirit of humanity is the foundation of all Christian 
 virtues, and transmutes itself into them. It is the 
 spirit of charity, because it is the spirit of catholicity, 
 — the recognition in the sphere of the intellect of the 
 brotherhood of the sons of God. It is the spirit of 
 faith, because it believes that the key of the unknown 
 is in the hand of God. It is the spirit of hope, because 
 it believes in the dawning light. It is the path which 
 you especially should tread, who stand as it were at 
 the gateway of theological knowledge and desire to 
 enter in. You will find it a path of difficulty and a 
 path of courage. You will find ambitious sj'stems, 
 both of dogmatism and of doubt, ready to your hand. 
 You will find eager partisans ready to give you hard 
 names because you will not join their company. But 
 you will find also that in treading this path of humility, 
 
HUMILITY IN THEOLOGY. 
 
 227 
 
 in limiting your statements to what you know, in 
 sifting other men's statements before you adopt them, 
 in continually going on with the search rather than in 
 continually asserting that you have found, in looking 
 also at " the things of others," in forbearance, and con- 
 sideration, and the practical belief that the Divine 
 Spirit breathes through other lips than your own, you 
 will not only be doing your part as Christian men to 
 win the world for Christ, and to bring about that 
 spiritual unity for which He prayed, but you will learn 
 also in your own secret souls that now, as in ancient 
 days, and in the sphere of knowledge no less than in 
 the sphere of conduct, the abode of God is with the 
 humble. 
 
SERMON XVIII. 
 THE AIM OF CRIMINAL LAW. 
 
SERMON XVIII. 
 
 THE AIM OF CRIMINAL LA W. 
 
 [University of Oxford, 1884. An Assize SertJion.] 
 
 " Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth." 
 — I Cor. X. 24. 
 
 THERE was an ancient rivalry in this University 
 between the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of 
 Medicine. The rivalry has ceased, but the analogy 
 which it suggests remains : it is based upon so real a 
 correspondence between the arts which the two faculties 
 are designed to foster, as to have continued true in spite 
 of many variations in both the circumstances of the 
 times and the aims of the arts themselves. 
 
 The earliest aim of the art of medicine was to cure 
 disease ; and so long as disease exists the aim is 
 legitimate and permanent. For a long time it was 
 the only aim. Medicine meant therapeutics : it culti- 
 vated only the arts and sciences which are ancillary 
 to therapeutics. 
 
 But as time went on there arose a second aim. It 
 was discovered that diseases were not all scourges of 
 God, but had their origin in ascertainable causes. The 
 efforts of physicians were directed to find out these 
 
232 
 
 THE AIM OF CRIMINAL LAW. 
 
 causes, and as far as possible to remove them". They 
 endeavoured not only to cure but to anticipate. Thera- 
 peutics gave way to preventive medicine; that is to 
 say, the art of medicine came to have for its object, 
 not so much to restore a sound state of body as to 
 prevent a sound state of body from being impaired, 
 and it dealt with the causes of disease, not only in the 
 individual, but in the circumstances which chiefly arise 
 when men are aggregated into societies. 
 
 The aim of criminal law, and it is of criminal law 
 alone that I propose to speak to-day, has passed 
 through a corresponding change. It was at first 
 vindictive : it was the effort of society to control the 
 instinct of revenge. As civilization progressed, it 
 became remedial ; it endeavoured not to punish but 
 to cure. There were many variations in the methods 
 which were employed : but they were all based on the 
 hypothesis that crime was a social disease, and that 
 as such it admits of remedies. The remedies employed 
 in the first instance, like the remedies of the older 
 therapeutics, dealt almost exclusively with the effects 
 of crime in the individual, and provided for them. But 
 in course of time the fact forced itself upon the atten- 
 tion of legislators that, in a large proportion of cases, 
 crime, like disease, is the result not only of ascertainable 
 causes, but of causes which affect not so much indivi- 
 duals detached from the mass as large groups of society 
 at once. The aim of those who engaged themselves 
 with criminal law began to be directed rather to the 
 removal of these causes than to the obliteration of their 
 
THE AIM OF CRIMINAL LAW. 233 
 
 effects. The consideration of the best deterrents from 
 crime came to give way to the consideration of the 
 means by which the social conditions which foster 
 crime may be best removed. 
 
 Now there are conceivable circumstances under 
 which preventive medicine and preventive jurispru- 
 dence would be capable of being so cultivated and so 
 applied as to be no less exact in their methods, and no 
 less certain in their results, than the art of engineering 
 or of building. If human bodies came into the world 
 fresh from the hand of their Maker, unscarrtd by their 
 fathers' sins, unbiassed by their fathers' tendencies, 
 the city of Hygieia would be situated not, as now, in 
 the far interior of the country of Utopia, but possibly 
 here in England. And similarly, if human society were 
 now first to be organized, if we were to begin step by 
 step from the simple elements which philosophers have 
 described as the conceivable beginnings of political 
 organization, the office of the criminal judge might 
 find no separate place, but be merged in the office of 
 the educator and the moral guide. 
 
 But just as, on the one hand, the art of medicine, as 
 it exists now, is complicated by the fact that human 
 bodies are not what God made them, but what they 
 have become through generation after geiiL-ration of 
 want and disease, of unhealthy homes and vitiated 
 ways of hving ; so, on the other hand, criminal law is 
 complicated by the fact that human society, whatever 
 its origin, and whether its present state be an improve- 
 ment or a degeneration, is not what it conceivably 
 
234 THE AUl OF CRIMINAL LAIV. 
 
 might be, but what it has become through the combined 
 and accumulating influence, from generation to genera- 
 tion, of lust and avarice, of passion and contention, of 
 misery and war. 
 
 Hence, in law as in medicine, prophylactics cannot 
 yet — nor within the limits of our present horizon — 
 wholly take the place of therapeutics ; cure and pre- 
 vention must go hand in hand ; we must be content 
 to begin with reformation. 
 
 Criminal law has thus come to have a double aim, 
 the one palliative, the other preventive. As far as the 
 present is concerned it proposes to reclaim the criminal 
 classes, as far as the future is concerned it proposes to 
 prevent criminal classes from being formed. And this 
 double aim has, though only after many struggles, so 
 far asserted itself as to be recognized by the State and 
 to underlie legislation. Even the earlier stages of that 
 legislation are within the memory of many who are 
 now living, and of some who may be present here. It 
 was based upon the hypothesis that the forced seclusion 
 of an offender might be made the means, not only of 
 deterring him from crime, but also of accustoming him 
 to habits of industry, and so enabling him to acquire 
 for the future an honest livelihood. The State assumed 
 to itself the especial charge of young offenders against 
 social order, and endeavoured by weaning them in 
 early life from mischievous associates, and by teaching 
 them useful trades, to give them the opportunity of 
 being for the rest of their lives respectable members of 
 society. It was reserved for our generation to take 
 
THE AIM OF CRIMINAL LAW. 
 
 235 
 
 a farther step, by insisting on the education of every 
 child who is born into it, with the explicit intention of 
 thereby diminishing the number of the criminal classes. 
 And it is even more recently that the State has 
 recognized the fact that crime often goes hand in 
 hand with squalor, and that it has afforded facilities 
 for replacing the foul nests in which the night-birds of 
 human society make their home by clean and healthy 
 habitations. 
 
 It is the grateful task of this generation, and of that 
 which is coming on, partly to carry out and partly to 
 develop these measures of remedial and preventive 
 legislation which our fathers and our contemporaries 
 have devised. It is our task, for example, on the one 
 hand, to see that prison administration be effective to 
 secure its end ; and, on the other hand, to develop the 
 principle on which that administration is based by 
 contriving better means than exist at present for en- 
 abling those who have passed through prison discipline 
 to recover their lost places in the ranks of honest men, 
 and to cease to be a leaven of vice in the society to 
 which they are restored. It is our task, on the one 
 hand, to see that children are sent to school ; and, 
 on the other hand, to take care that the education 
 which they receive be not, as it has too often been, 
 a mere gathering of dry faggots, but an eating of 
 the genuine fruit of the tree of knowledge. It is our 
 task, on the one hand, to see that sanitary legislation 
 secures its immediate end ; and, on the other hand, 
 to take measures for obtaining that co-operation of 
 
236 THE AIM OF CRIMINAL LAW. 
 
 individuals without which the healthiest homes may 
 become as useless as the worst. It is our task, on the 
 one hand, to see that the facilities for intemperance are 
 not multiplied, and that existing facilities are controlled; 
 and, on the other hand, to see that means are provided 
 for supplying the social want which has hitherto been 
 met mainly by the tap-room and the gin palace, by 
 providing other places of entertainment in which the 
 passions of men will not be stimulated by noxious 
 drinks. 
 
 But the task which lies before us and before our 
 children does not end with the application, or even with 
 the wider development, of those principles of remedial 
 and preventive legislation which have already been 
 accepted. When all is done that can be done in the 
 way of reforming the criminal and educating the young, 
 of making homes healthier, and removing some of the 
 inducements to wrong-doing, there will still remain those 
 factors which have been so long a part of human 
 history as to seem permanent and ineradicable. The 
 causes of crime do not lie wholly on the surface of 
 society. They do not wholly consist in drunkenness 
 and squalor and ignorance. They reach deeper down 
 into the constitution of the body politic, and into the 
 inner springs of action. And if crime is altogether to 
 be prevented, if that millennium is to come in which 
 the criminal judge will be known only from books of 
 history, criminal law must be subserved not only by 
 those acts which deal with the outward appearances 
 of evil, but also by those sciences which are concerned 
 
THE AIM OF CRIMINAL LAW. 
 
 237 
 
 with the general conditions of human society, and with 
 the ultimate motives of human conduct. The criminal 
 jurisprudence of the future promises to widen out into 
 what is now sometimes called social science — the con- 
 sideration of all the laws which promote or retard the 
 well-being of society. Just as a hundred years ago 
 many of those principles which now underlie practical 
 legislation were only hopes or theories which floated 
 in the minds of thinkers, so there are many problems 
 connected with the general improvement of social con- 
 ditions, and thereby with the diminution of crime, 
 which in generations not far removed from our own 
 may pass from the region in which one man calls to 
 another in a fog, into the clear light of practical legis- 
 lation and administration. 
 
 In the meantime there are at least two things to be 
 done. 
 
 In the first place, there is a special duty devolving 
 upon some of us, particularly in this place, to grapple 
 with the problems which preventive jurisprudence in 
 its wider acceptation suggests, and to work out a 
 practical solution of them. It is the duty of some of 
 us to give the best thought and the ripest experience 
 to the study of the great, and as yet unsettled questions 
 of political economy, to the further elaboration of the 
 theory of punishment, to the consideration of the best 
 methods of education and of the relation of education 
 to crime, to the reduction of the overwhelming numbers 
 of the pauper class, and even to the examination of the 
 political conditions under which there is the maximum 
 
23S THE AIM OF CRIMINAL LAW. 
 
 of happiness and the minimum of crime. For some 
 of these are the questions of the future, and the 
 success of the future in dealing with them will depend 
 to no slight extent upon the degree to which we on 
 our part have helped to clear the ground. 
 
 In the second place, there is a common duty devolv- 
 ing upon all of us to help forward the great work of 
 preventive jurisprudence, by endeavouring to frame our 
 own conduct after the ideal which it holds before us. 
 If you and I, brethren, wish the world to be better, 
 we must first be better ourselves. If you and I wish 
 criminals to be fewer, and look, in either our day-dreams 
 or our prayers, towards a state of things in which they 
 will have ceased to be, we must make it the effort of 
 our lives to be in our own persons men from whom 
 the deep-reaching roots of crime have been plucked 
 out, and who show in their demeanour towards their 
 fellow-men what they would have their fellow-men to 
 become. And hence it is that the consideration of 
 preventive jurisprudence, of the means whereby the 
 world may become better than it has been and than 
 it is, so far from being foreign to this place in which 
 we stand, claims especial recognition in it. For its aim 
 is one with the aim of practical religion. It is identical 
 with the ideal and the precept of St. Paul, " Let no 
 man seek his own, but every one another's well-being." 
 The duty which it involves rests upon the deepest 
 foundations on which any obligation can be based. 
 For the effort to be better in ourselves, and thereby to 
 help in our own persons and by our own example 
 
THE AIM OF CRIMINAL LAW. 
 
 239 
 
 towards the regeneration of society and the coming of 
 tlio kingdom of heaven for which we pi^ay, is a duty 
 which is incumbent upon us, not only as members of 
 this great human community from which we have 
 ourselves received so vast a legacy of civihzed habits 
 and transmitted knowledge, not only as members of 
 this great country which, by whatever name it may be 
 called, empire or kingdom or confederation of kingdoms, 
 gives to each of us so vast a sphere of usefulness, and 
 throws upon each of us so heavy a responsibility ; not 
 only as members of a great religious society in which 
 more than even as men or as citizens we are members 
 one of another, — -but also in the depth of our own 
 secret souls, in our individual relations to the Unseen 
 and to the Future, as followers of Christ and as 
 servants of God. 
 
SERMON XIX. 
 THE EPIPHANY. 
 
SERMON XIX. 
 THE EPIPHANY. 
 \_Burley, Leeds, 1884.] 
 "The life was the light of men." — John i. 4. 
 
 'HE Epiphany is the commemoration of the shining 
 
 A ofahght. The word is not only poetical and meta- 
 phorical in itself, but it also comes to us from an age 
 and a country in which poetry and metaphor played a 
 more important part in life than now; it was conse- 
 quently applied to many things to which it seems to us 
 to bear only a remote and fanciful resemblance. 
 
 When the sunshine drove away the frosts of winter, 
 and brought back the luxuriant verdure and the ripe 
 fruits of summer, making the still glens resonant with 
 the songs of birds and the wilderness blossom as the 
 rose, light seemed to them the source and symbol of 
 the life which it made possible. 
 
 When the sUn rose above the eastern hills and the 
 towers of the city walls, and the rocks of the deep 
 ravines no longer stood indistinguishable in the dark- 
 ness — when as man met man in the awakening streets 
 he could discern not a mere moving shadow but the 
 face of his brother or his friend — the light which came 
 
THE EPPIHANY. 
 
 upon them, and made all this possible, seemed the 
 source and symbol of knowledge. 
 
 When the fresh glow of the morning absorbed the 
 mists on the horizon, and chased the gathering clouds 
 beyond the farthest verge of sight, and not a single 
 snowflake of cloud flecked the intense clearness of the 
 summer sky, and the sight almost dazed itself to 
 blindness before the steady blaze of the perfect opal of 
 the firmament, — the light of which all this was the 
 visible shining was, to those who thought, the source 
 and symbol of purity. 
 
 When in the fulness of the noonday the pinnacles of 
 the House of God flashed back upon the face of heaven 
 a brightness almost its own ; when the hills stood 
 radiant with their verdure, and the great white sea 
 beyond them blazed hke a jasper floor, — the light which 
 caused all this, and which made the heart beat with an 
 irrepressible exultation against the barred walls of its 
 chamber, was the type and symbol of gladness. 
 
 When St. John, therefore, speaks of life being ligJit, 
 possibly both terms, and certainly one of them, conveyed 
 to the minds of those whom he addressed many other 
 meanings than those which are obvious to ourselves ; 
 and it has been the happy fate of many men to have 
 had leisure to weave many webs of speculation by way 
 of commentary upon these famous words. Some of 
 them thought of the life of Christ as a living influence ; 
 some of them thought of it rather as a historical fact. 
 To some of them the life of Christ was the light of 
 men, because it quickened their dead souls with a new 
 
THE EPIPHANY. 
 
 245 
 
 power, and made them live again with the Hfe of sons of 
 God. To others it was the h'ght of men, because it drove 
 away the miasma of impurity and unholiness, and 
 made the foul soul clean. To others it was the light 
 of men, because it brought into their sad lives a new 
 hope and a new possibility of joy. 
 
 1 do not propose to-night to draw out all these and 
 other meanings which are latent in the text, but to ask 
 you to consider in detail only one ; and that, perhaps, 
 at once the most obvious of them all and the most full 
 of practical power. 
 
 By the life of Christ I propose to consider the actual 
 life which He lived, and of which we have the record in 
 the Gospels. That life was the light of men, because 
 it was itself a living revelation. The character which 
 He exhibited, the words which He said, the actions 
 which He performed, the spirit in which He did them — 
 all this shone out ages ago ; all this shines out clearer 
 and brighter as the years roll on and the mists fade 
 away, as the true light which lighteth every man ; the 
 true light which is to melt our benumbed and frozen 
 souls ; the true light which is to drive away the dark- 
 ness of ignorance and dishonesty and impurity and 
 selfishness, and to guide our feet into the kingdom of 
 God. 
 
 The life of Christ was the revelation of God to men. 
 The character wiiich was manifested in the whole 
 tenour of His actions was a withdrawing of the veil 
 from what had been before only dimly seen, an exhibi- 
 tion of what God is, and of what it is to be Godlike. It 
 
2^6 
 
 was through the medium of a man's nature that the 
 Divine nature showed itself. It was in a man's life 
 that God was pleased to show us what He Himself is, 
 and what our lives may be. Our weakness was not 
 mocked by the spectacle of a human body moved like 
 a machine by the Divinity which tenanted it. The 
 reasonable soul as well as the fleshly organism was 
 human. Nor were our strivings after better things 
 mocked by the spectacle of a life moving on a loftier 
 stage than that which is possible to us. The life which 
 He lived, as well as the character which He bore, was 
 human — none the less human for its being also Divine. 
 The spliere of its action was ordinary life — the ordinary 
 life of men who, like you and me, have bread to earn 
 and families to support ; who have joys and sorrows, 
 anxieties and cares, affections and responsibilities ; and 
 who believe that it would be a falling short of the 
 purpose of our creation if Vv-e left all these things 
 unheeded and undone. 
 
 This was the light of men. It was by a life spent 
 in this sphere that He revealed to us the nature of 
 God. And it is in this very point that the differ- 
 ence between "Christ and other masters" is most 
 prominent. Both before and since philosophers have 
 spun curious cobwebs of speculation as to the nature 
 of the Most High. They have chiefly told us — and I 
 do not say that they have told us wrongly — what He 
 is 7tot, that He cannot be seen, that He cannot be 
 limited, that He cannot change. All this is true, but 
 when all these attributes are put together there is still 
 
THE EPIPHANY. 247 
 
 only a formless and colourless picture. It is impossible 
 to represent to ourselves a cluster of negations. Still 
 less is it possible for us to take a cluster of negations 
 as the type to which we are to shape our lives. But 
 Christ showed us not so much what He is not as what 
 He is. He showed it by exhibiting it in His own 
 character. His life was the light of men. 
 
 Look for a moment or two at that life. It is impos- 
 sible to say all that might be said about it in one 
 sermon or in twenty sermons, but one or two features 
 shine out even above the rest. St. John sums it up 
 when he says that grace and truth came by Jesus 
 Christ. These two features, grace and truth — charity 
 and sincerity — ^kindliness and honesty— are marked 
 upon it in a marvellous degree. It was full of grace. 
 It was a life of self-sacrifice. It was a completely 
 unselfish life. It was wholly given up to doing the will 
 of God and achieving the good of man. That which, 
 under innumerable and sometimes hardly discernible 
 forms, is the prime motion of action with other men 
 was altogether absent from- His nature. He identified 
 Himself with the mass of men in such a way that their 
 hopes, their aims, their joys, were His. He went out 
 of His way to help them ; He did good not merely 
 when it required little effort. He weiit about to do it. 
 His love embraced not only those with whom He 
 might be supposed to have some common tie of kinship 
 or of sympathy : it took in the outcast and the 
 stranger, the Samaritan heretic and the woman who 
 was a sinner. And yet with all this there was no 
 
THE EPIPHANY. 
 
 weak-hearted complacency with wrong-doing. He 
 had no sympathy for a hypocrite, and His words 
 assume an unwonted vehemence when He denounces 
 those who cause the little ones to stumble in their 
 path. It was full, not only of grace but of truth. He 
 had nothing to conceal, and He concealed nothing. 
 The intense reality of His character blazes out, so to 
 speak, in every action that is recorded of Him. It 
 struck even His enemies. " Master, we know that Thou 
 art true," they said, when they came to entrap Him into 
 an admission from which they knew that He would not 
 shrink and by which they hoped to ruin Him. And 
 being true it was fearless. He was utterly unafraid. 
 He flinched from nothing. Wherever duty called He 
 went. He was not, as so many of us are, continually on 
 the watch for what people might say of Him. He 
 preached the purest morality, and yet mingled with 
 those who had the reputation of being the basest and 
 the vilest of mankind. He was taunted with the angr}' 
 scoff : " Behold a gluttonous man and a winebibber;" and 
 yet He went on His course undeterred. He had the 
 perfect strength which comes from perfect purity. He 
 was tempted in all points like as we are, and yet He 
 knew no sin. The tempter thrust again and again, 
 and even tried to smite Him with the sharp edge of the 
 Word of God. Sometimes His faith was tried, some- 
 times His patience, sometimes His love ; but His faith. 
 His patience, and His love never once gave way. He 
 was under self-control, He had the power to check 
 desire. For thirty years He lived unknown in the 
 
249 
 
 obscurity of a provincial village. He was master of 
 Himself because He was completely dependent upon 
 God. He could bide His Father's time. He could 
 wait until His hour was come — until the opportunity 
 for action was afforded Him. 
 
 This is the true Epiphany — the manifestation of 
 God in human life, which now, as then, is the light of 
 men. It bids us be pure, for God manifest in the flesli 
 was pure ; it bids us be true, for God is true ; it bids 
 us be patient, for God is patient ; it bids us be kind, for 
 God is kind ; it bids us be just, for God is just ; it bids 
 us be holy, for God is holy. 
 
 And yet St. John tells us in the same breath that 
 " tlie light shineth in darkness, and the darkness com- 
 prehendeth it not." There are deep caverns on the 
 earth's surface which the sunshine has never penetrated : 
 and ever since the world began ignorance and supersti- 
 tion and hypocrisy have been busy at work, digging 
 still deeper caverns for the souls of men. There are 
 some men, and it may be some men here, to whom 
 God and Christ are simply names and shadows ; there 
 are some to whom they are simply idols dimly seen 
 through the stifling smoke of the incense of their 
 worshippers ; there are some to whom they are only 
 puzzles and problems, the text of many commentaries, 
 the centre of innumerable speculations. And all the 
 time above and beyond the darkness which we are 
 creating for ourselves there is shining out clear and 
 glorious as a summer sun the true light which lighteth 
 every man, the light of the life which was lived for 
 
250 
 
 THE EPIPHANY. 
 
 our example — the light of the true Divinity in man, 
 the light of the life of Christ. 
 
 My friends, you will not have been to church in 
 vain to-day if only you carry home with you this great 
 truth, which most of you doubtless know already, but 
 which you can never know too well — that for us men 
 in our human lives and with our finite human under- 
 standings, God is what Christ by His life, as well 
 as by His words, declared it to be ; and that if you 
 would understand the Father you must first understand 
 the Son. To be like God we must be like Christ. 
 The highest humanity is the highest Christianity. 
 There are parts of the Divine nature which are alto- 
 gether beyond our reach. It is impossible to be like 
 God in His infinity, His omniscience, His eternity, but 
 it is possible for us to be like Christ in His sincerit}'. 
 His courage, His faith, His purity, and His love. And 
 if only we will — if only we make the struggle which we 
 may, to crush and keep down the lower and earthly 
 part of us, the tendency to selfishness, to harshness, to 
 unreality, to indolence, to distrust, the Christian life may 
 be to us one long Epiphany, a continually brighten- 
 ing manifestation of God in our souls. If such an 
 Epiphany have not begun for us already let it begin 
 now ; and let this year of grace be marked in the annals 
 of our lives by the fact that in it we began to fix our 
 eyes more and more upon the perfect life which our 
 Master lived, and to shape our actions more and more 
 after the perfect pattern which He revealed to men. 
 
SERMON XX. 
 
 THE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
SERMON XX. 
 
 THE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 " O God, Thou art my God ; early will I seek Thee : my soul 
 Ihirsteth for Thee, my flesh longeth for Thee in a dry and thirsty land, 
 where no water is." — Psalm l.xiii. i. 
 
 *- of the far south of Palestine. I can only speak 
 of it at second hand ; but 1 have seen, as you, no 
 doubt, have seen, from time to time, pictures of its 
 mountain ranges and its deep ravines which almost 
 startle us by the strange intensity of their colouring, 
 and which yet, travellers tell us, are even less wonder- 
 ful than the reality. There seems to be no beauty of 
 hill and dale ; no colouring of moorland or of glen 
 in our northern lands, like the awful glory of those 
 granite peaks, which glow in the sunlight until the eye 
 is dazed by the splendour of their burning, and the blue 
 heavens above seem to grow warm in sympathy. For 
 a time the traveller journeys on, fascinated by the 
 beauty of the scene. He finds here and there a well of 
 water, and he replenishes his store ; but then, again 
 and again, there comes a long stretch of waterless 
 waste, " a dry and weary land where no water is," and 
 
 \_lVcstminster Abbey, 1885]. 
 
 Psalms is the scenery 
 
254 THE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 he begins to feel the iron grasp of a want which he can 
 neither repress nor satisfy. What thirst means in a 
 tropical wilderness none but those who have passed 
 through it can tell. It is an overpowering and a 
 paralysing need. 
 
 All this the Psalmist had felt. He had wandered 
 through those vast and gorgeous wildernesses ; he had 
 felt what thirst was ; and when, in later days, he lay 
 upon his bed, and meditated in the night watches, the 
 memory of that weary wilderness and of the agony of 
 his unconquerable thirst became to him a parable of 
 life. As in the long marches through the desert sands, 
 in the awful blaze of an Eastern noon, he had sighed 
 for the pasture lands and the springs, so life seemed 
 but a dry and weary waste until his soul was satisfied 
 with the sight of God. 
 
 It is a parable of the life, not of the Psalmist only, 
 but of tiie world ; it is a picture of God's education of 
 our race. Just as He did not teach our forefathers the 
 arts of hfe — the use of iron and of fire — by an immedi- 
 ate inspiration, but let them find them out by slow and 
 gradual processes, as the need of them was felt; just 
 as He has not put intellectual truths into our minds at 
 our birth, but lets us work them out as the satisfaction 
 of a felt desire, so it is with religion. He does not all 
 at once satisfy our mouth with good things. He teaches 
 us through the discipline of thirst and want. He lets 
 each age tread its own path, work out its own problems, 
 cope with its own difficulties, and be brought to Him at 
 last by the constraining force of an unsatisfied desire. 
 
THE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 255 
 
 I might show that the parable is true of many ages, 
 but I will take only two — the first ages of Christianity 
 and our own. If we look at the first ages of our faith 
 we see that it did not all at once convince men of its 
 truth, as the sun that rises in the morning tells all who 
 have eyes to see that a light is shining. Men came to 
 it by many paths. The greatest of all those paths led 
 them through the splendid scenery of Greek literature 
 and Greek philosophy ; for it was an age of culture : 
 education was general in almost all the cities of the 
 Roman Empire, and the basis of education for the mass 
 of men was literature supplemented by the elements of 
 philosophy. Men were as familiar with some of the 
 technical terms of logic as they are now with some of 
 the technical terms of chemistry or of physiology. To 
 the better sort of men at the time philosophy was a 
 passion ; it absorbed all the other interests of life. 
 They not only lived for their beliefs, but were some- 
 times ready to die for them. And they were beliefs 
 for which a man might be content to die. From an 
 intellectual point of view there is hardly anything 
 grander, even in Christian theology, than the sermons 
 of some of those philosophical divines who knew not 
 Christ. The conceptions of an Architect of the universe 
 who framed part to part with an exquisite symmetry ; 
 of a Providence who watches over all His creatures 
 with an unresting care ; of a supreme Dispenser of 
 good and ill, of rewards and punishments, have never 
 been more splendidly set forth or applied with greater 
 force to human conduct. It was splendid scenery. I 
 
256 THE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 should be the last to attempt to disparage the work 
 which either literature or philosophy then actually 
 accomplished, but neither literature nor philosophy was 
 a substitute for religion. It failed, and that on so large a 
 scale, and among so many types of character, that the 
 experiment need never be tried again; there was the 
 demonstration for all time that the soul had a thirst 
 which philosophy could not satisfy ; that thirst was the 
 need of God, of a God whom men could love, of a God 
 on whom they could lean, of a God to whom they could 
 cry out in their despair, and their failure, and their sin : 
 " My soul longeth for Thee." This need showed itself 
 in a thousand forms, and some forms were very 
 strange ; but the stranger they were the more strongly 
 did they express the need of the soul. The need was 
 irrepressible, and it took whatever outlet it could find. 
 Side by side with philosophy was superstition. There 
 were fantastic forms of worship — new divinities, and 
 new modes of approaching them. But all these were 
 various expressions of one overpowering thirst ; and in 
 the discipline of God the thirst was for a long time 
 unsatisfied. It was not until other waters had been 
 found to be bitter that the masses of educated men 
 came to drink of that living water which the Christian 
 faith supplied — the water of the knowledge of God in 
 Christ, which is, in the believer's soul, " a well of 
 water springing up unto everlasting life." 
 
 That was one fulfilment of the parable. It is being 
 fulfilled again before our eyes in our own time ; we, 
 too, are passing through another kind of scenery, a 
 
TflE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 257 
 
 scenery so new and vast that we can hardly be sur- 
 prised that many men, in their wonder at the newness 
 and vastness of it all, have come to think that this at 
 last is a satisfaction for the soul, and that in this crown 
 of all the ages we have found in Nature a substitute 
 for God. Alike from the far-off stars and from the 
 depths of the deep seas, there shine out splendours 
 upon splendours of new knowledge, and new possi- 
 bilities of knowledge, which seem to lift us into a 
 higher sphere of living than that which to our fore- 
 fathers was possible. There are men in our own time 
 to whom this new knowledge is all in all. The ac- 
 quisition of it is the end, and I will not say that it is 
 an unworthy end, for which they live. I should be 
 the very last to disparage it. The opposition between 
 it and religion seems to me to be a mere battle of 
 phantom hosts in a phantom world ; but I say that 
 it is not enough. It is splendid scenery, — the world 
 has never seen its like, — but, splendid as it is, there 
 are needs, the deepest needs, of the soul which it does 
 not, which it cannot, satisfy. I seem to see in the 
 writings even of some of those for whom science has 
 taken the throne of faith a profound sense of dissatis- 
 faction, a restlessness, that comes of a sense of want ; 
 and I see, side by side with the enthusiasm of science, 
 the enthusiasm of a hundred forms of religion. The 
 sense of thirst is overpowering in our time ; it cannot 
 help but show itself. And now, as in old days, it some- 
 times takes strange forms. We may read with com- 
 placency — though the old phrases seem strange in their 
 
 17 
 
25S THE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 new setting — the sermons which are preached in the 
 church of humanity ; we may listen with complacency — 
 though the music may sound harsh to our ears — to the 
 bands of the Salvation Army ; we may hear — I will not 
 say with complacency^, but with delighted surprise — of 
 the successes of Evangelical movements in France, in 
 Italy, and in Spain, because to the interpretation of all 
 these phenomena there seems but a single key : they all 
 with their different voices tell the same story — the want 
 of our time, the thirst of our time, is religion. Con- 
 sciously or unconsciously in a thousand different ways, 
 by a thousand different efforts, men in our time are 
 thirsting for God. It is true that the want does not 
 all at once leap forth into the articulate cry of the 
 Psalmist, " My soul thirsteth for God," but there is 
 no other explanation of the phenomena. The parable 
 has one more fulfilment — the soul of this Nineteenth 
 Century is athirst for God, " in a dry and weary land 
 where no water is." It is athirst for God. There is 
 no other satisfaction for its ambitions, its enthusiasms, 
 its passionate strivings ; there is no other cure for its 
 sorrows and its sins; there is no other solution of its 
 problems. But I lay stress upon this — that what it 
 feels, consciously or unconsciously, is a thirst for God ; 
 what it needs is religion — religion, not knowledge ; 
 religion, not philanthropy ; religion, which thirsts for 
 God, which is satisfied with nothing less than Him, 
 and which finds in Him at once a supreme satisfaction 
 and a constraining motive. 
 
 And I lay stress upon this because there are some 
 
THE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 259 
 
 substitutes for religion — some forms of religion, if you 
 like to call them so, which seem to me to leave out that 
 which is its most essential element. On the one hand, 
 in the rebound from the extravagances which have 
 sometimes marked religious teaching, there are those 
 who substitute for the whole of religion those elements 
 of it which consist in the higher moral virtues — -the 
 love of truth, the love of righteousness, the love of 
 self-control. For these elements I have no word but 
 one of praise. The stress which is laid upon them is 
 supremely necessary ; without them religion cannot 
 exist : but yet they do not constitute religion ; they 
 want just that which is characteristic of religion, just 
 that which supplies the motive, just that which com- 
 pensates for failure — consciousness of the presence of 
 God. For in time there comes to all men the sense 
 of thirst for God. There are few who rise at all times, 
 there are none who rise uniformly at all times, to the 
 heroic height of doing good for goodness' sake, and 
 of furthering justice for justice' sake. The baffled 
 efforts of the struggle for righteousness, the defeats of 
 truth, the relapse from self-control, make men weary 
 before the day is spent ; and across the evening of life, 
 if not across its morning, there rises the sharp and 
 sudden cry of thirst, a thirst which God alone can 
 satisfy. And, on the other hand, in the rebound from 
 the superabundant talk about religion which character- 
 ises our age, from the battles of the churches and the 
 unsubstantial theories which claim the place of Divine 
 verities, there are those who substitute for the whole 
 
26o THE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 of religion that part of it which consists in active 
 philanthropy. For this, again, I have no word but 
 that of praise. Without this religion can hardly be 
 said to exist, but it is not religion ; for though religion 
 must move about the world with the busy feet of an 
 angel of benevolence, benevolence does not of itself 
 satisfy the soul's thirst for God. The soul comes back 
 hungry from its errands of mercy — it needs a diviner 
 motive and a diviner satisfaction. The beginning of 
 religion is neither the love of righteousness nor the 
 practice of benevolence, but the thirst for God. Where 
 that thirst exists there is religion ; where that thirst is 
 absent, there, in spite of all that a man may profess, 
 religion is absent also. 
 
 I am speaking to those who believe that that thirst 
 may be satisfied. I am not now speaking to those who 
 have not yet come to believe in God, or who believe 
 Him to be other than He is. I cannot think that there 
 is anyone here who holds the darkest of all forms of 
 atheism — the theory that tiie belief in God is a mere 
 artificial anodyne to lull the otherwise intolerable pain 
 of living. I cannot believe that there is anyone here 
 who thinks that the Maker and Father of us all has 
 condemned us to journey through the scenery of life 
 with only Dead Sea waters for our thirst, and Dead Sea 
 apples for our food. The thirst for God finds its satis- 
 faction. The satisfaction is as real as the need, and 
 He has placed it within our own power. To the 
 simple-minded Psalmist, living as he did before the age 
 of philosophy, — I had almost said before the age of 
 
THE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 261 
 
 theology, — the satisfaction was to appear before the 
 visible symbol of God's presence at Jerusalem. That, 
 too, is part of the parable. It is true for all time. The 
 soul's satisfaction is to realize the presence of God. 
 The other name for it is faith. It is the seeing of Him 
 who is invisible. But though I am speaking to those 
 who believe that the thirst may be satisfied, I am 
 speaking also perhaps to some who are thirsty never- 
 theless. My aim is to urge, is to make faith a reality, 
 by turning it from the mere acquiescence, in proposi- 
 tions which you hold to be true to the realisation of 
 that most stupendous fact of all existence, the fact of the 
 presence of God. What a transformation would there 
 be of the lives of many of us if we did but realise that 
 every single scene of their varied drama is acted out 
 from first to last in the actual presence of God, of a 
 God who made the world, and upholds it ! — of a God 
 who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, and who, having 
 been incarnate, knows our sorrows, our aspirations, 
 our failures, and our thirst for Him ! We cannot 
 actually realize this presence until it comes to us, not 
 as a picture on which we look, not as the gratification 
 of an intellectual desire, but with the force of an over- 
 powering motive. If we did but once realize that God 
 is here, knowing the unuttered thoughts of our heart, 
 the unuttered whispers of our desire ; if we did but 
 once realize that God is here in the world of natural 
 phenomena (of which day by day we are learning more), 
 behind the shining of the sun, and behind the blowing 
 of the breeze ; if we did but once realize that God is here 
 
262 THE NEED OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 in the world of human society, knowing its needs, its 
 faihires, its ambitions, controHing its movement on a 
 vaster scale than our mind can grasp ; that God is 
 here, that He has been here since the world began, 
 that He will be here when this world and the fashion of 
 it has passed away ; that God is not only here in this 
 world, visible and invisible, in which we live, but that 
 in spheres of life unknown to us, in the life beyond 
 the grave, He, the same God for whom we thirst. He, 
 the same God who reveals Himself as he satisfaction 
 of our need. He, the same God who reveals Himself 
 in His Son, is eternally present; if we do but once 
 realize this — the reahzation of it — the one, single, vivid 
 realization of it — will be a permanent force of our lives ; 
 it will satisfy our thirst ; it will be to us a perpetual 
 inspiration ; it will give us the strongest of all motives ; 
 it will give us the sublimest of all consolations ; it will 
 smooth the rough places of life, and light up its dark- 
 ness, and soothe us until the time comes when He bids 
 us lie down to rest, and we sleep with the quiet sleep 
 of a little child, knowing that the waking hour will 
 come, and that when we awake after His likeness, 
 we shall be satisfied. 
 
SERMON XXI. 
 
 INDIVIDUALISM AND ECCLESIASTICISM : 
 THEIR COMMON PLACE IN THE CHURCH 
 OF CHRIST. 
 
SERMON XXI 
 
 INDIVID UA L ISM A ND ECCLESIA STICISM : 
 THEIR COMMON PLACE IN THE CHURCH 
 OF CHRIST. 
 
 ^University of Oxford, 1885.] 
 
 " Forasmuch as ye are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek that ye may 
 excel [R.V. abound] to the edifying of the Church." — I Cor. xiv. 12. 
 
 I HAVE chosen these words from the Hst of texts 
 which are specially provided for this morning's 
 sermon, because the exhortation which they convey 
 seems to be singularly applicable to the times in which 
 we hve. The newly-formed community at Corinth, to 
 which they were addressed, was distinguished from 
 the other Christian communities of which a record has 
 come down to us by an extraordinary exaltation of the 
 spiritual life, and, at the same time, by the existence 
 within it of sharply-defined religious parties. 
 
 There had come over it a great wave of spiritual 
 force, surging in different currents through the souls 
 of the new believers, and finding its expression some- 
 times in the power to heal the sick, sometimes in the 
 power to preach, sometimes in that strange utterance 
 of impassioned emotion which is called "speaking in a 
 
266 INDIVIDUALISM AND ECCLESIASTICISM : THEIR 
 
 tongue." A physiologist may explain it as an epidemic 
 of frenzy ; but St. Paul saw in it, and we also may see, 
 a special energy of that Spirit who, like the wind that 
 is His earthly image, does not breathe through all the 
 ages and upon all souls alike with the steady force of 
 a uniform current, but breathes upon some ages and 
 upon some souls with the rush of a mighty tempest. 
 
 The community in which there was this singular 
 manifestation of spiritual energy was broken up into 
 parties : " Each one of you saith, I am of Paul ; and I 
 of Apollos ; and I of Cephas ; and I of Christ." I do 
 not propose to ask you to follow me — though the path 
 is not without interest — through the forest of theories 
 which has grown up round this last phrase : it is enough 
 for our present purpose to point out that the overflow 
 of spiritual life was not inconsistent with large diver- 
 sities of opinion ; that some of those opinions diverged 
 so far as to question even the fundamental doctrine of 
 the resurrection of the dead (i Cor. xv. 12) ; but that 
 the exhortation is addressed to all alike, whether they 
 were of Paul, or of Apollos, or of Cephas, or of Christ, 
 — " Seek that ye may abound to the edifying of the 
 Church." 
 
 These incidents of the community of Corinth are a 
 parable of our own time. Behind these early Christian 
 communities there burns a light which casts their 
 shadow onward on to the vast screen of history, so 
 that their incidents are constantly repeating themselves 
 on a larger scale. Upon us, too, in our time, there has 
 come the wave of a great spiritual force. In all com- 
 
COMMON PLACE IN THE CHURCH OF CHRIST. 267 
 
 munities of those who bear the Christian name men 
 are aglow with the fires of a new activity. There is 
 a new growth of rehgious thought and rehgious Htera- 
 tiire, of spiritual fervour and devotional expression, of 
 charitable activity and missionary zeal, which, if it 
 be taken in the mass, finds no parallel in any bygone 
 Christian century. 
 
 And with all this new outpouring of spiritual life, 
 stimulated into new energy by the new forces which 
 act upon them, strengthened for contest by the new 
 materials which are- furnished by wider knowledge 
 and keener insight, there are " divisions " among us, 
 as there were " divisions " at Corinth — divisions so 
 manifold as to seem at first sight incapable of classifi- 
 cation, but which yet, if we overlook minor differences, 
 conventional and accidental arrangements, may be 
 ultimately merged in two great groups, according as 
 they are dominated by the tendency to individualism, 
 or by the tendency to which we may give the name of 
 " ecclesiasticism." 
 
 The former of these has received an exceptional 
 impetus from the forces of modern life. There has 
 come a sense of power, and with the sense of power 
 has come the instinct to use it. The spirit of our time 
 moves as a giant moves who feels his strength and 
 must needs give his muscles play. There has come 
 thereby a quickened sense of personality ; and with 
 the quickened sense of personaHty has come an un- 
 pruned luxuriance of new theories, an almost wilful 
 shaking off of old authorities, a construction of new 
 
268 INDIVIDUALISM AND ECCLESIASTICISM : THEIR 
 
 associations, an extravagant rebellion against customary 
 rules. The spirits of men are stirred not by the 
 memory of a splendid past, but by a sense of exultation 
 in the moving present ; and the traditions of a saintly 
 ancestry are of less force than the sense of oneness 
 with the general movement of our time. 
 
 And over against all this, stimulated on its part also 
 into a new activity by the action upon it of influences 
 which are alien to it, are the new forms of that which 
 is at once one of the noblest growths of history and 
 one of its strongest forces — the spirit of ecclesiasticism. 
 It is at every point the antithesis of the other. It 
 differs in its conceptions, for it conceives not of the 
 society as an aggregation of individuals, but of in- 
 dividuals as members of the society. It differs in its 
 methods, for it does not discover, but defines ; it does 
 not learn, but teaches. It differs in its aims, for it 
 aims less at the perfection of the individual than at 
 the realization of the society. The society is for it a 
 Divine and organic unity, a perpetuated incarnation of 
 the Son of God. Through it and through it alone, do 
 the covenanted gifts and graces of God come to the 
 individual soul. To be a member of it is the highest 
 earthly privilege ; to listen to the voice of it is to 
 listen to a continuous revelation ; to carry out the laws 
 of it is to be free with a Divine freedom. 
 
 I need not speak at greater length of these two 
 tendencies in themselves, because we all drift with the 
 one or the other of them. I wish rather to ask you to 
 look at two facts in relation to each of them, the 
 
COMMON PLACE IN THE CHURCH OF CHRIST. 269 
 
 existence of which cannot be denied or the importance 
 over-estimated. 
 
 The one is the fact that each of these tendencies 
 carries with it the whole nature of those whom it 
 affects. It is not a partial and passing phase of mind. 
 It sways the whole being of a man in such a way that 
 no other attitude of mind is conceivable to him. It is 
 all but impossible for one who feels himself moving 
 with the movement of his time ; to whom it is an 
 axiom that truth is discoverable by research ; to whose 
 spiritual nature the fact which dwarfs and overwhelms 
 every other fact is the fact that God is close to him, in 
 an immediate relation to him, speaking to him with an 
 almost articulate voice ; to throw himself, even in 
 imagination, into the frame of mind of one who feels 
 himself to be an integral part of a great society, to 
 whom the grace of God comes through the society, to 
 whom the traditions and forms of the society are the 
 most sacred of possessions. And conversely : If you 
 listen to the average adherent of individualism, you 
 will be told that ecclesiasticism is so clearly wrong 
 as to be only explicable on the hypothesis either of 
 deliberate fraud or of judicial blindness ; if you listen 
 to the average adherent of ecclesiasticism, you will be 
 told that freedom of research and freedom of association 
 are patent absurdities, so clearly contrary to the mind 
 of Christ as to be hardly worth discussion. This fact, 
 that each is inconceivable to the other, seems to me to 
 be of importance as establishing the inference that the 
 difference is not a difference which can be composed 
 
270 INDIVIDUALISM AND ECCLESIASTICISM: THEIR 
 
 by argument or concession, but is a difference of 
 mental type. 
 
 The other fact which has to be noted in regard to 
 these two tendencies is, that they not only possess the 
 whole nature, but also affect large masses of men. 
 They are not the eccentricities of isolated individuals 
 or of small groups. They cannot be accounted for 
 by local and temporary causes. They form notable 
 features of society. Nor can they be classed among 
 those transient forms of opinion which sometimes, like 
 a great snowdrift, hide for a time all the other features 
 of a landscape, and then suddenly disappear. They 
 are not only large, but constant elements in our present 
 human life. 
 
 The existence of these two facts in relation to these 
 two great co-existing tendencies may indeed be said to 
 underlie and to account for no small part of the history 
 of Europe for the last four centuries. 
 
 It has been an inevitable result of the fact of the 
 completeness with which these tendencies lay hold of a 
 man, that the one of them should have been constantly 
 endeavouring to repress the other. Religion — and 
 that not religion in general, but religion in the particular 
 form in which man held it — has seemed not only so 
 overwhelmingly true, but also so overwhelmingly im- 
 portant that it became a man's supreme duty to impress 
 it upon his fellows, and to impress it, if persuasion 
 failed, by physical force. It seemed as much a man's 
 duty to save his fellow from spiritual perdition as it 
 was to hold back a would-be suicide from drowning. It 
 
COMMON PLACE IN THE CHURCH OF CHRIi^T. 271 
 
 followed as a necessary consequence that it was the 
 duty of the State to help to keep its members from 
 the contagion of pernicious beliefs. It is in this way 
 that persecution has arisen. In one sense, no doubt, 
 persecution is the worst outcome of spiritual pride. I 
 am not offering an apology for it. I yield to none in 
 my abhorrence of even the present attenuated forms of 
 it. But, on the other hand, I cannot believe that all 
 persecutors are monsters of iniquity. There have been 
 among them men of refinement, of intelligence, and 
 even of humanity. The fact that persecution and 
 persecutors have existed, and have, indeed, not yet 
 entirely passed into the world of shadows, seems to 
 me to be simply a result of the fact that religion is not 
 only a dominant, but also an all-absorbing, force. 
 
 But this fact, and all to which it leads, has been 
 neutralized by the other fact that each of these 
 tendencies is shared by large masses of men. Neither 
 the one tendency nor the other has been able to assert 
 for itself an unchallenged supremacy. Each has existed 
 on so large a scale that the one has held tlie other in 
 check, and there has resulted that equilibrium of forces 
 for which toleration is an inadequate name — inadequate 
 because it assumes a dominance of the one tendency 
 over the other which may be true as expressing a 
 political fact, but cannot, without begging the question, 
 be held to indicate a normal relation. 
 
 We are thus brought face to face with two great 
 tendencies which co-exist within the vast area of 
 Christianity, each of which absorbs the whole nature ; 
 
272 INDIVIDUALISM AND ECCLESIASTICISM : THEIR 
 
 each of which is shared by large masses of men ; each 
 of which would, if it could, drive the other from the 
 field ; each of which is held in check by the scale on 
 which the other co-exists with it. 
 
 What is the relation of these facts to Christianitj' ? 
 
 The question is easy to ask, but the answer is 
 difficult to find, partly because of the preliminary 
 difficulty of determining the principle on which we 
 should base it ; and partly because none of us, sharing 
 as we all do in the one tendency or the other, can be 
 held to be impartial judges. We cannot narrow the 
 question to the form, Which of the two tendencies is 
 true ? partly because that involves the assumption that 
 only one of them is true, and partly because the 
 difference of opinion as to the nature of the evidence 
 which should be employed is part of the general differ- 
 ence between them. For example, Is it Scripture ? or 
 is it tradition ? or is it both together ? If it be 
 Scripture, what are the canons of interpretation ? If 
 it be tradition, what are the exclusive channels ? If it 
 be both, is it to be tradition modified by Scripture, or 
 Scripture by tradition ? 
 
 Nor can we narrow the question to the form, Which 
 of them is morally best ? because, even if the tests of 
 moral excellence be agreed upon, there are upon the 
 one side, no less than upon the other, men who are 
 above the average and men who are below it. Neither 
 tendency has a monopoly of either the genius or the 
 folly of mankind. Whatever virtues of earnestness, 
 of self-devotion, of spiritual-mindedness, are recorded 
 
COMMON PLACE IN THE CHURCH OF CHRIST. 273 
 
 in the annals of the one tendency, are recorded also 
 in the annals of the other. It is not possible to 
 institute a comparison between them to the plain 
 disadvantage of either. Each group has qualities which 
 the other lacks, each lacks quahties which the other 
 has, and, whether you take the individual or the mass, 
 the scales of judgment seem to be evenly balanced. 
 
 If, therefore, we apply to the determination of the 
 problem the criterion either of truth or of moral 
 excellence, we shall simply leave off where we began, 
 since each of the two tendencies will claim the victory 
 for itself We must, therefore, seek for another kind 
 of solution, and it seems to me that such a solution is 
 suggested by the very conditions of the problem itself. 
 For, on the one hand, we have two co-existing ten- 
 dencies, each of which, so far from merely lying on 
 the surface of human nature, or being merely found 
 in certain localities, is deep-seated, firmly planted, and 
 widely spread. On the other hand, we have a religion 
 which, not accidentally, but essentially, not in certain 
 of its phases only, but in all of them, claims to be 
 universal. The universality of Christianity seems to 
 me to afford the key to the determination of its proper 
 relations to the tendencies which exist within it. For 
 it must be antecedently expected that Christianity, 
 claiming as it does, and rightly claiming, to be the 
 universal religion, cannot leave outside itself any large 
 fact of human nature, or any great mass of men who 
 are disposed to accept, and who do accept, the main 
 truths which it proclaims. The universality which it 
 
 18 
 
274 INDIVIDUALISM AND ECCLESIASTICISM : THEIR 
 
 claims must fit the facts of the case : it must rest upon 
 its power of comprehending various elements, upon 
 its recognition of large diversities of type in human 
 character, and upon its giving to each type its appro- 
 priate exercise. A religion which does less than this 
 may indeed be, as Judaism was, Divine ; but it cannot 
 be, as Christianity claims to be, the final revelation of 
 the Father, who made all men of one blood, but mixed 
 their elements in widely different proportions. But 
 this which we must antecedently expect is what we 
 find that Christianity actually does. Whether we take 
 the earliest records of its history, or the earliest monu- 
 ments of its teaching, we find that diversities of type 
 and diversities of conception exist side by side. Its 
 reasoning, as expressed in the logic of facts, is that 
 diversities may co-exist. It does not come to us with 
 a policy of toleration, telling the party which is from 
 time to time dominant that it may condone this or that 
 deviation. Still less does it come to us with a policy 
 of compromise, bidding us gather fragments from this 
 system and from that, and piece them together as well 
 as we can into the mosaic of a creed. Its recognition 
 of diversity is shown in the very form in which its first 
 teaching has come down to us — St. Paul by the side of 
 St. Peter, and St. John by the side of St. James. It 
 not merely recognized diversities, but gave each type 
 free play. Each type, obtaining its recognition and 
 obtaining also its free exercise, was co-ordinated by one 
 Spirit to one common end. And so it has been ever 
 since. There has been room in it for different elements 
 
COMMON PLACE IN THE CHURCH OF CHRIST. 275 
 
 and for different types of character, for emotion no less 
 than for reason, for individualism no less than for 
 ecclesiasticism. In the vast economy of God each 
 element and each type has had some special function 
 to perform. There is pride enough, no doubt, in each 
 element and each type to make it think that it, and 
 it only, represents the mind of Christ. But even the 
 narrowest of creeds builds some bridge across the 
 abyss of hell for all but the hardened impenitent. And 
 if heaven be open to the one type no less than to the 
 other there must be a common place for both of them 
 in the Church on earth. 
 
 And so we come back to the words with which we 
 started — to the exhortation of St. Paul to the Corin- 
 thians, who, though some were of Paul and some of 
 Apollos, were all filled with various spiritual energies, 
 and were all zealous of spiritual gifts : " Forasmuch as 
 ye are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek tliat ye may abound 
 to the edifying of the Church." 
 
 The words suit the needs of the vast Christian 
 aggregate of modern times no less than those of the 
 community to which they were first addressed. To 
 those of us, on the one hand, who, though our lives 
 be but "a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million 
 million suns," yet feel in personality an element of life 
 which is at once hke God and brings us close to Ilim ; 
 who believe that His grace comes to all who seek 
 it, whether within or without the organized society, 
 whether through or apart from the customary channel ; 
 who believe in the existence of a vast undiscovered 
 
276 INDIVIDUALISM AND ECCLESIASTICISM : THEIR 
 
 world of truth, spiritual no less than intellectual ; and 
 who believe, also, that any one of us may set sail 
 upon the open sea in quest of it, — to such as these 
 the exhortation, " Seek that ye may abound," sets the 
 whole forces of our nature to seek whatever we can 
 find. 
 
 To those of us, again, who conceive of the grace of 
 God as coming only through the Christian society ; 
 who find in the food with which the society supplies 
 them an adequate nutriment, intellectual no less than 
 spiritual ; who lean upon the vast fellowship of the 
 present and the past, and seem to feel that without 
 it Christianity would resi, as other rehgions rest, upon 
 an unstable and shifting sand, — to such as these the 
 exhortation, "Seek that ye may abound," comes, with 
 no less a force than to others, to tell us that whatever 
 be the mission which that society has to fulfil, we must 
 do our best towards its fulfilment. Whether the 
 inspiration comes to us from the sense that we are 
 moving with the general swing and movement of our 
 time, or from the sense that we are an integral part of 
 a Divine and organic unity ; whether we are stirred, in 
 other words, by the forces of individualism or by the 
 forces of ecclesiasticism, — the exhortation is to abound. 
 And in the exhortation is an implied warning : it is a 
 warning which appeals especially to you younger men, 
 who sec in all this constant confiict of religious opinion 
 and religious systems a reason for standing apart, or 
 for fighting at best a languid battle. The warning is, 
 "Do nothing half-heartedly." It is of far less import- 
 
COMMON PLACE IN THE CHURCH OF CHRIST. 277 
 
 ance which of the two great forces should move you, 
 than that, if they move you at all, they should stimulate 
 all your energies, and inspire your whole soul with the 
 inspiration of a supreme necessity. You may think, 
 and it is well that you should think, that there are 
 other eyes than those with which you see, and other 
 landscapes besides that upon which it is given to you 
 to look ; but it does not follow that your own eyes see 
 with a distorted vision, or that the landscape upon 
 which you seem to look is but the mirage in the desert. . 
 You cannot be half-hearted in religion. A half-hearted 
 religion is but a ragged surplice huddled round the 
 skeleton of unbelief. It is not merely that God will 
 not take from you less than the love with which He 
 bids you love Him — the love with all the heart, and 
 with all the soul, and with all the strength — but that 
 He has so framed the fabric of your nature that a 
 half-hearted love of Him is impossible. 
 
 " Seek," then, " to abound " in whatever gift you 
 have, on whichever side you stand. To some of you 
 is given, as in ancient days, the spirit of knowledge — 
 seek to abound in it, whether the knowledge be the 
 interpretation of the past or the discoveries of the 
 present ; to some of you is given the spirit of wisdom 
 — seek to abound in it, whether the wisdom be that 
 which makes the utmost use of existing forms, or that 
 which frames new forms for what seem to be new 
 needs; to some of you is given, in larger measure 
 than to others, the spirit of faith, the sense of the 
 nearness to us of unseen verities ; to some of you is 
 
THEIR 
 
 given, though perhaps in another sense than that of 
 ancient days, the spirit of healing, the power to bind 
 up the broken-hearted, and to touch those who walk 
 lame along the paths of life with the magic wand of 
 sympathy, — in all these, whatever they be, and on 
 whichever side you stand, seek to abound — to leave the 
 languid, easy-going ways of modern luxury, the cynical 
 indifference which comes of doubt, and to be whatever 
 you are with all the powers of your being. 
 
 But there is yet another element in the exhortation, 
 and of it I must briefly speak. The words are not 
 simply, "Seek that ye may abound," but "Seek that ye 
 may abound to the edifying of the Church " — Trpo? r-qv 
 OLKoSofirjv rrj'i iKKXr](rla<; ; keeping in view, that is, the 
 building up of the Christian community, the building 
 up of the Holy Catholic Church, the building up of the 
 regenerated and transformed society of the redeemed 
 sons of God. It is at once a limitation and an aim. It 
 is a limitation, because it suggests to us that our 
 individual work is but part of a larger whole, and that 
 men who are working at other kinds of work and by 
 other methods than our own maj' yet be carrying out 
 the Master-builder's plan. It is an aim, because it 
 reminds us that all this overflow of spiritual energ)' is * 
 not a mere running to waste of waters, and that before 
 us lies, with the certainty of Christianity itself, the 
 realization of the sublime ideal which Christianity 
 proposes to us. We too have a share in the last and 
 greatest movement of our race. For the three elements 
 of the social ideal which the philosophy of a century ago 
 
COMMON PLACE IN THE CHURCH OF CHRIST. 279 
 
 evolved from a survey of natural relations, "Liberty, 
 Equality, Fraternity," do indeed represent three stages 
 in the onward progress of mankind. They each of 
 them represent vast secular movements, which we can- 
 not even detect until we survey history on the largest 
 scale. The first of them is almost finished ; the last is 
 scarcely begun. The achievement of the political ideal, 
 the ideal of liberty, belongs to the past. We read 
 of the heroic struggles of our fathers to be free, of 
 the lights and shadows of their varying successes, of 
 imprisonment, of torture, of death, and of victory ; and 
 it sometimes seems as though there would have been an 
 unwonted halo round our lives if we could have been 
 fighting, as they fought, for the freedom which they 
 ultimately won. What the political ideal was to them, 
 the Christian ideal is to us. Before them was the ideal 
 of liberty ; before us is the ideal of fraternity. The 
 one seemed for ages, as the other seems to many of 
 us now to be but a fantastic mist in the Utopia which 
 is peopled only with the ghosts of madmen's dreams. 
 But for all that it was so far off then, liberty was 
 realized at length ; and for all that it is so far off now, 
 fraternity will also be realized. But the one no less 
 than the other has to be realized by ten thousand 
 individual struggles, by sacrifices, by failures, by 
 mistakes, by the long lapse of patient years. Its 
 realization depends on the degree to which each of us 
 in his appointed place does his appointed work, and 
 does it, moreover, with the zeal, the energy, and the 
 enthusiasm which St. Paul expresses by the word 
 
28o INDIVIDUALISM AND ECCLESIASTICISM. 
 
 "abound." And the nature of the ideal itself suggests 
 to us another feature in the work which must achieve it. 
 It is an ideal not of uniformity, but of brotherhood. It 
 is a combination of different types into a single whole. 
 We each of us in our pride act as though our own 
 type, and our own type only, was destined ultimately 
 to prevail. But the picture which the prophet of the 
 future presents to us is the picture not of a world in 
 which Ephraim and Judah will either of them have 
 ceased to exist, but of a world in which Ephraim will 
 no longer "vex" Judah, nor Judah Ephraim. It sup- 
 poses not the extinction of the varieties of type which 
 exist among Christian men, but their co-operation. 
 It tells us not only that our "abounding" is not in 
 vain, but also that, by our abounding in a common 
 work in view of a common end, it is given to us, amid 
 all the storms of the present, and in face of a doubting 
 world, to realize in act, as well as in thought, that the 
 earthly manifestation of the Fatherhood of God is the 
 brotherhood of men. 
 
SERMON XXII. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY IN ITS RELATIONS 
 MODERN KNOWLEDGE AND LIFE. 
 
i 
 
SERMON XXII. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY IN ITS RELATIONS TO 
 MODERN KNOWLEDGE AND LIFE. 
 
 {Preached befo7-e the University of EdinbiirgJi, at its 
 Anmtal Commemoration Sei-uice, 1886.] 
 
 "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." 
 — 1 John v. 4. 
 
 THE circumstances under which we have met to- 
 day preach of themselves an impressive sermon. 
 The more I have thought of them the more ready have 
 I been to be silent : and if for a few minutes I use the 
 privilege of speech, I feel that I cannot better use it 
 than in giving articulate expression to the hopes which 
 those circumstances inspire. 
 
 I. The first circumstance is that a religious service 
 has been newly instituted by a University which has 
 added to the fame of its past the special fame of its 
 present, that it is in sympathy with modern knowledge. 
 I cannot but regard this as an indication, and a ground 
 of hope, that the relations of religion to modern know- 
 ledge are beginning to be different from what they 
 have been. It is impossible to look upon those re- 
 lations without regret ; for it is impossible to disguise 
 
284 CHRISTIANITY IN ITS RELATIONS 
 
 from ourselves that, for the most part, religion has not 
 yet adequately appreciated the strength of the new 
 forces which have sprung up around it. That which 
 distinguishes our age is not simply that we know more 
 than our fathers knew. Nor is it simply that we have 
 passed from one phase of opinion into another. It is 
 rather that we are face to face with a new world. We 
 are passing through one of those crises which come 
 only once and again in the long history of our race. 
 We are on the threshold of a new era. We are 
 entering into a new sphere of thought. We are no 
 longer dominated by the same fundamental ideas as 
 our fathers. We are assimilating wholly new concep- 
 tions. The gradual acquiescence of the mass of think- 
 ing men in the universality of law and of development 
 marks a revolution. 
 
 The attitude of religion in face of this new world has 
 been to a great extent an attitude of timidity. It has 
 given at best a reluctant welcome to the new truths 
 which have established themselves. It has been some- 
 times incredulous and sometimes hostile. It has ques- 
 tioned palpable facts ; it has denied certain inferences. 
 Almost any scientific paradox which linked itself to a 
 text of Scripture has been applauded as though it were 
 a truth ; almost all scientific truths, the bearing of which 
 upon religion was not immediately seen, have been 
 denounced as heresies. 
 
 The attitude of men of science in face of this attitude 
 of religion has been one not of timidity, but of confident 
 triumph. For the new knowledge of our time has 
 
TO MODERN KNOWLEDGE AND LIFE. 2S5 
 
 impressed men's minds as nothing has ever impressed 
 them before with a conviction of its certainty. They 
 have absolutely no doubt whatever of its power to hold 
 its ground. And being on the one hand profoundly 
 convinced of the truth of their conclusions, and on the 
 other hand assured, by the voices of a thousand zealous 
 preachers, that Christianity is incompatible with those 
 conclusions — compelled, as it were, to choose between 
 the one and the other — it can hardly be wondered at 
 that some of them have chosen knowledge as their 
 master, rather than Christ. Nor can it be wondered 
 at, that from this attitude of confident triumph they 
 have sometimes passed, sensibly or insensibly, into an 
 attitude which has varied between pity and scorn. They 
 have regarded faith as a kind of intellectual purblind- 
 ness. They have pictured religion as a cave of Adullam 
 in which the collective weaknesses of mankind have 
 taken refuge. They have taken for granted that we 
 Christians live in the fool's paradise of a phantom 
 heaven. Within the last few weeks one of the chief 
 living "masters of those who know" has told us that 
 He whom we worship, and to whom a moment ago we 
 prayed, is but an idol of the intellect, differing in respect 
 of refinement of conception, but not in respect of 
 reality of being, from a block of wood or stone. 
 
 In our meeting to-day, I cannot help seeing an 
 indication that these relations of unfriendliness between 
 religion and modern knowledge are beginning to under- 
 go a change. I am far from thinking that the time has 
 come, or even that it is near at hand, in which it can be 
 
286 
 
 CHRTSriANITY IN ITS RELATIONS 
 
 shown that all results of modern knowledge are in 
 harmony with all that Christians hold as matters of 
 faith. The attempted reconciliations seem to me to be 
 unconvincing, because they seem to me to be premature. 
 But believing as I do that both are true, and both 
 Divine, I believe with a profound conviction that there 
 is a harmony which has yet to come. 
 
 What grounds are there for such a belief, apart from 
 the vague hope that it may be so ? 
 
 There are other grounds which appeal strongly to 
 otlier minds ; to my own mind the strongest ground is 
 that which is afforded by historical analogy. This is 
 not the first time in its history that Christianity has 
 found itself in presence of a mass of ideas which at 
 first sight seemed alien to it. Its modern contact with 
 the conclusions of physical science and historical 
 criticism is analogous to its earher contact with Greek 
 philosophy. The first relations which that earlier 
 contact caused were, like those of its modern counter- 
 part, relations of unfriendliness. Neither philosophy 
 understood Christianity nor Christianity philosophy. 
 Mankind being divided into "philosophers" and "fools," 
 Christianity was "to the Greeks foolishness." There 
 were at least two centuries of misunderstanding and 
 misrepresentation. There were attempted compromises 
 which satisfied no one but their authors. There were 
 slanders and recriminations and caricatures. Philo- 
 sophical Christians were denounced by their fellow- 
 Christians as heretics. Christianizing philosophers 
 were denounced by their fellow-philosophers as rene- 
 
TO MODERN KNOWLEDGE AND LIFE. 287 
 
 gades. But the two great forces gradually drew nearer 
 to each other. Christianity entered the schools ; 
 philosophers spoke the language of Christians, Chris- 
 tians spoke the language of philosophers ; and the 
 " foolishness " of the days of Paul was the dominant 
 " wisdom " of the days of Athanasius. Christianity so 
 thoroughly absorbed metaphysics, and metaphysics 
 effected so firm a lodgment in Christianity, that the 
 mass of men— at least out of Scotland — only know 
 metaphysics in their Christian form. 
 
 This historical analogy affords not indeed a proof 
 but yet a presumption that the relations of Christianity 
 to modern knowledge will undergo a similar change. 
 If in this place I may be bold enough to venture upon 
 a scientific illustration, I will say that Christianity 
 presents itself to me as a vast living organism, and 
 roimd it, floating in the same medium, I see a mass of 
 matter which it has not yet assimilated. The experience 
 of the past leads me to believe that the organism has 
 the capacity to absorb and assimilate that matter in the 
 future. The process of absorption and assimilation has 
 in fact begun. Our presence here to-day is an indica- 
 tion of it. And just as Christianity after its union 
 with Greek philosophy was richer in the variety of its 
 elements, and had a stronger hold upon humanity, so will 
 it be the richer and the stronger for assimilating modern 
 knowledge. It will be the more so because the meta- 
 physical ideas which it incorporated fifteen centuries 
 ago have had almost too exclusive a sway within it ; 
 and it will reach vast areas of human life which it has 
 
288 
 
 yet hardly begun to conquer, when it has added to the 
 elements which it has gathered to itself in the past the 
 new elements of this present time. 
 
 That is our hope, and the ground of it. Christianity 
 has already shown its capacity to absorb and assimilate 
 ideas which have grown up outside it. It can absorb 
 and assimilate them still. For it is not a crystal in a 
 sealed casket, but a seed, a regenerating force, a prin- 
 ciple of life planted in the fruitful ground of human 
 souls. It grows because it comes from God. It 
 changes because it grows. It is continually re-adapting 
 itself to its environment, and it has thereby within it the 
 elements of perpetuity. It underlies all progress, being 
 itself the spirit of progress. It embraces all truth, 
 being itself the spirit of truth. It lives with the world's 
 life. It expands with the world's expansion. The 
 widening thoughts of men reach no sphere into which 
 it does not follow them. Its capacity is as infinite as 
 the universe. It is as undying as the souls which it 
 redeems. 
 
 II. The second memorable circumstance in our 
 service to-day is that we are gathered together within 
 these ancient walls, and that we have joined in forms 
 and words of worship which link us by direct historical 
 continuity with the Christians of bygone centuries. 
 The circumstance has not merely a sentimental interest. 
 It is a recognition of the truth that though Christianity 
 grows, it grows from the ancient roots. It is an acted 
 expression of the belief that the complex needs of our 
 time are needs which historical Christianity can satisfy. 
 
TO MODERN KNOWLEDGE AND LIFE. 289 
 
 This belief needs the more emphatic expression, because 
 there is a not unnatural tendency on the part of those 
 who feel that Christianity is out of touch with some 
 other elements of our time to dissociate themselves to 
 an undue extent from the doctrines and usages which 
 we have received. The tendency comes from the habit 
 of regarding Christianity too exclusively on its intel- 
 Lectual side. The result of it is a philosophy which is 
 not a religion, a morality from which the spiritual elements 
 have been evaporated. The preaching of such a Chris- 
 tianity is a predestined failure. There is not one of us 
 in whom a purely intellectual religion does not sooner 
 or later cause an irrepressible sense of want. We need 
 what our fathers needed. We are linked to them not 
 only by the tie of physical descent, but also by the ties 
 of a common life, and a common death, and a common 
 heritage of pain, of common aspirations, and common 
 temptations, and common sins. Our world is a larger 
 world than theirs, but it is peopled with the same 
 human natures. The stars are farther distant, but 
 their innumerable cold ej'es look still upon the same 
 conflict of reason and desire, the same play of mean 
 ambitions and baffled purposes, the same stormy sea of 
 unstilled passions. There is not one of us for whom, as 
 for our fathers, a purely intellectual Christianity would 
 not be inadequate. And to the mass of men such a 
 Christianity would have but little meaning. For to 
 the mass of men life is simply a struggle with 
 circumstances. It means not the pursuit of knowledge, 
 but the pursuit of a livelihood. The struggle varies in 
 
 19 
 
290 
 
 CUKISTIAXITY IN ITS RELATIONS 
 
 intensity, but it is in its essence the same. It is full 
 of misery. Generation hands on to generation its 
 inheritance of sorrow and of failure. Each generation 
 seems to have its special problems, its special forms 
 of social pressure and of moral perversity. But the 
 underlying needs are constant, and the same. And 
 for these underlying needs Christianity is a permanent 
 satisfaction ; but it is the old Christianity and not a 
 new substitute for it. For that old Christianity was 
 not the product of a single age, destined to die with it. 
 The message which it brought from God was for all 
 the ages that were to come. It was not the rehgion of 
 a single race, stamped with the physiognomy of that 
 race, and fitted only for a single type of men. One of 
 the most remarkable phenomena of its history is that, 
 being the religion of one race, it became the religion of 
 another ; and that, being the religion of a primitive state 
 of civilisation, it became the religion of a civilisation as 
 complex as our own. It began by being the religion 
 of a Semitic people, it has become the religion of 
 Aryan peoples. It began by being the religion of 
 men who lived the simple lives of Syrian peasantry ; 
 it won its chief triumphs among the proletariat of the 
 great cities of the Roman Empire. The more complex 
 the civilisation, the more intense the struggle for life, 
 the wider was the area of its success. 
 
 This experience of its capacity to meet the needs of 
 a varied past is the proof of its capacity to meet the 
 needs of a complex present. And there is one special 
 point of analogy between the times of the first victory 
 
TO MODERN KNOWLEDGE AND LIFE. 291 
 
 of Christianity and our own, which is to my mind an 
 especial ground of confidence, and an especial reason 
 for treading the ancient paths. It is that there was 
 then as now an endeavour to construct a purely 
 intellectual religion. The place which is now occupied 
 by science was then occupied by Stoicism. It was not 
 an unworthy rival to Christianity. It offered men a 
 conception of God, and an ideal of life, which were 
 hardly less sublime than those of the Gospel. But 
 Stoicism failed. It absorbed the better energies of the 
 few, but it never touched the many. It failed, not 
 because it was an illusion, but because it was insuf- 
 ficient. It appealed only to the intellect. It dealt 
 with men only as thinkers. It assumed a supremacy 
 of reason over impulse. It offered knowledge without 
 emotion, an ethical ideal without an ethical impulse. 
 It wanted a moral lever. It wanted a consolation for 
 suffering. It wanted spiritual power. The secret of 
 that subtle alchemy which transformed a pagan into a 
 Christian world was the simple secret of the Cross of 
 Christ. It satisfied at once the moral needs of the 
 individual and the social needs of the masses. It gave 
 men at once an ideal, and the power to reach it. Its 
 strength lay in its spiritual force. In an age of misery 
 it gave them hope, in an age which stood aghast at 
 its own viciousness it gave them purity, in an age of 
 conflict it gave them brotherhood. 
 
 And this is what we want now. In an age in which 
 competition is destroying the finer elements of human 
 association, we want now, as of old, the gospel of 
 
292 
 
 CHRIST/AN/TY IN ITS RELATIONS 
 
 Christian brotherhood. In an age in which luxury, 
 and the selfishness that comes of luxury, are weaken- 
 ing the bonds of self-restraint, we want now, as of old, 
 the gospel of self-sacrifice. In an age in which misery 
 seems to have in this life no alleviation, in which the 
 tired feet pace the dusty roads in vain, and the wan 
 hands are stretched out for bread which is not given, 
 we want now, as of old, the gospel of a Divine com- 
 munion and an eternal hope. We want the old Gospel 
 and not a new one. In such an age as this, possibly 
 in all ages of the world, knowledge without love and 
 hope, and spiritual strength — nay, even Christianity 
 itself, robbed of its heart — is like what you see some- 
 times on winter nights, in these northern lands, when 
 on a sudden the dark firmament is aglow with flame, 
 and the lances, as it were, of myriads of angels flash 
 and dart across the sky, and not heaven only, but the 
 very heaven of heavens itself seems to open before 
 your eyes, and to draw you upwards into the infinite 
 depths of splendour which it reveals, — and all the 
 while, on the lone moorland where you stand, the poor 
 body whose eyes are dazed with the glory of it shivers 
 and dies with cold. So it is with our souls. For all 
 our knowledge and all our civilisation we want some- 
 thing which neither knowledge nor civilisation can give. 
 We want the warmth of the Sun of Righteousness to 
 shine upon us with heaUng in His wings ; we want the 
 Gospel of love and hope ; we want that of which these 
 ancient walls and these ancient forms of worship are 
 the eloquent and perpetual witnesses, that undying 
 
TO MODERN KNOWLEDGE AND LIFE. 293 
 
 trinity of benediction — " the grace of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the 
 Holy Ghost." 
 
 III. There is yet a third circumstance of our meeting 
 to-day which is as full of hope as it is of interest. It 
 is one of which I should not speak if it were merelj 
 personal to myself ; but of which I cannot refrain from 
 speaking, because it has a more than personal im- 
 portance. For I gather that, in asking a minister of 
 another society than your own to preach, you have 
 wished to indicate an opinion that the barriers which 
 separate the several societies of Christian men are 
 human and not Divine. I do not know of any more 
 important contribution than this that the Christianity 
 of our time can make to the Christianity of the future. 
 For the return of its ancient instinct of brotherhood will 
 be the return of its ancient power. The conquests of 
 the future will be like the conquests of the past. That 
 which won the world for Christ was a simple creed. 
 That which linked men together was the simple love 
 of the brethren. That which has been permanent in 
 doctrine has been not subtle theories but elementary 
 truths ; that which has been permanent in organisation 
 has been not the form but the fact of it. Doctrine and 
 organisation have both been essential to Christianity ; 
 but it has held its sway not by the elaborateness of its 
 doctrines but by their simphcity, not by the fixity of its 
 organisation but by its elasticity. But just as there has 
 been a singular and most mischievous confusion of idea 
 between the necessity of believing in Christ and the 
 
294 
 
 CHRISTIANITY IN ITS RELATIONS 
 
 necessity of believing this or that theory about Him, so 
 has there been a singular and most mischievous con- 
 fusion of idea between the necessity of having some 
 organisation and the necessity of having this or that 
 particular organisation. It is part of the special task, 
 and I believe that it will be also part of the special 
 glory, of this age to disentangle these separate elements. 
 The task is easier in respect of Christian organisation, 
 because the theory that a particular organisation is of 
 the essence of Christianity has broken down by the 
 silent acquiescence of its defenders in the truth of the 
 facts which subvert it. It was an intelligible and a 
 necessary corollary of that theory that, outside the pale 
 of the particular organisation, there should be not 
 only a defect of the means of grace but also no certain 
 hope of everlasting life. But when it is admitted, as it 
 is admitted, that outside the pale there may be Christian 
 men, with whatever loss of present privilege, in full 
 hope of salvation, it is admitted thereby that no one 
 organisation has a monopoly of either Christian truth 
 or spiritual life. 
 
 The logical consequence is clear enough ; I look 
 forward to a more express recognition of it; I look 
 forward with the more confidence on account of this 
 service of to-day, because I seem to see in such a 
 service the real solution of the question which must 
 inevitably come : — If the particular form of organisa- 
 tion be of less importance than has been sometimes 
 supposed, what are to be the relations of Christian com- 
 munities to one another ? The solution seems to lie in 
 
TO MODERN KNOWLEDGE AND LIFE. 295 
 
 the existence of such communities side by side, each 
 recognizing the other's work. It is an idle dream to 
 suppose that all the Christian communities throughout 
 the world will ever be merged into a single visible 
 organisation. The sense of individuality which leads 
 each community to shape its own forms is no less 
 powerful a force in human life than the instinct of 
 association. But the sense of individuality is not in- 
 compatible with the recognition of brotherhood. It is 
 no idle dream to conceive of the Christian communities 
 each holding what it prizes as its own, and yet co- 
 operating for the common good ; and I look forward with 
 hope to the time when they will no longer turn their 
 swords against each other in an internecine conflict, but 
 each with its own officers, each with its own weapons, 
 and each in its own part of the battle-field, fight under 
 a common banner as one great army of God against the 
 common foes of selfishness, and ignorance, and sin. 
 
 It is because of these three circumstances of our 
 service to-day — the fact that religion and modern know- 
 ledge seem herein to approach each other, the fact that 
 we are meeting upon the ancient lines of the ancient 
 faith, and the fact that members of different Christian 
 societies arc listening to each other's speech — that I 
 gather from it an inspiration and a hope, which comes 
 to me, as I trust it will come also to you, with the 
 power of a new motive, enabling us to go forth to our 
 several ministries in the world, each one of us with a 
 new vigour and a new vitality as a servant of Christ 
 and a son of God. 
 
SERMON XXIII. 
 
 THE TRUTH OF TRUTHS. 
 
SERMON XXIII. 
 
 THE TRUTH OF TRUTHS. 
 ^St. Margaret's, IVestininstcr, 1887.] 
 "God is love."— I John iv. 8. 
 
 IT is said, and it is probably true, that no two persons 
 ever see the same picture. In every act of sight the 
 image that is actually seen is modified by the person- 
 ality of him who sees it. It is also said, and it is 
 probably true, that no two persons have the same idea 
 of God. He reveals Himself with a separate revelation 
 to each individual soul. The history of that revelation 
 since consciousness first dawned upon the human spirit 
 is too large to be even touched upon here. The history 
 of it in Christian times may be grouped under two great 
 heads : the revelation of God as a moral being, and the 
 conception of Him as a metaphysical being. There 
 have been, in other words, two great and dominant 
 ideas of God — the one moral and the other metaphysical. 
 Each of them includes innumerable varieties of form, 
 each of them marks a great development, each of them 
 is written large in human history, and each of them fills 
 a large place in the present. 
 
 The first great revelation of God was the revelation 
 
300 THE TRUTH OF TRUTHS. 
 
 of Him as a Moral Governor. There had been earlier 
 conceptions which had pictured Him as a local God, the 
 Protector of the house or the city, of the country or of 
 the race. It was the splendid mission of the Hebrew 
 prophets to lift men into a larger sphere ; they preached 
 of Him as the God of the whole earth and as the God 
 of Righteousness. The other conception of God came 
 not from the Jews but from the Greeks. It is the 
 abiding result in modern life of Greek philosophy. 
 The God of the Greek philosophers was not like the 
 God of the Hebrew prophets ; He was not the Moral 
 Governor of the Universe ; He was the underlying 
 ground and cause of all things ; He was pure being ; 
 He was infinite and eternal, without passion and with- 
 out change. It was a marvellous conception ; it was a 
 marvellous revelation ; it was a revelation of Himself 
 by which God raised men out of that thought of Him in 
 which He was only a magnified man, and led them to 
 recognize Him as being in the realm of the unseen, the 
 spiritual and the eternal. 
 
 Now each of these conceptions of God, each of these 
 revelations, is profoundly true ; and each of them must 
 have its place in our thought. We must think of Him 
 as the Governor of the Universe, controlling this vast 
 sphere of moral action as He controls this vast sphere 
 of physical action, by laws which cannot be broken, 
 and which are perfectly good. We must think of Him 
 as a Spirit — the eternal ground of all being, of whom 
 are all things, and in whom are all things. It is as 
 necessary to think of God thus as it is that we should 
 
THE TRUTH OF TRUTHS. 301 
 
 sometimes go out into the night, and at least for a 
 moment or two look upon the infinite heaven, and the 
 innumerable stars, and the unfathomable depths where 
 there are neither suns nor stars, nor mists of light that 
 are gathering into stars. 
 
 It is necessary thus to bring ourselves face to face 
 sometimes with the awful vastness of the world, with 
 the infinity above us and beneath us. But it would 
 be as unprofitable as it would be impossible to be 
 always star-gazing, or to make all our knowledge 
 consist in the knowledge of infinity. So it is with 
 this spiritual infinity in whom we move. It is necessary 
 for us sometimes to fix our thoughts upon it ; it is 
 necessary for us even to accept the ideas about it which 
 a more metaphysical age than our own has bequeathed 
 to us ; for every age in which thought is active forms 
 its own special conceptions, which penetrate its life and 
 thought, and which it transmits by inheritance to its 
 successors ; but it is not for us so to press these great 
 ideas of the nature of God (and there has been a 
 tendency so to press them) as, on the one hand, to 
 forget that we see only one aspect of reality at a time ; 
 and on the other so to obscure Divine truth by the 
 multitude of human influences that it becomes dark 
 and almost invisible to us. 
 
 The conception of God as a moral Governor has, on 
 the one hand, been pressed as though it exhausted all 
 that we know about Him ; on the other hand, it has 
 been darkened by analogies from human laws, until the 
 supreme conception of a God of righteousness has been 
 
302 THE TRUTH OF TRUTHS. 
 
 transmuted into a conception of one who curses where 
 even men would bless, and who punishes where even 
 men would pardon. And the conception of Him as 
 infinite and eternal and unchangeable has been robbed 
 of almost all positive meaning, so that with all the 
 straining of a man's thought he does but pass, as he 
 thinks of God, from the sense of infinite darkness to 
 the sense of infinite silence, and from the sense of 
 infinite silence to the sense of infinite cold. 
 
 I recall you, my brethren, to the simpler, the loftier, 
 the more Christian idea of God which is revealed to us 
 in to-day's Epistle. It is an instance of the truth that 
 the simplest conceptions are always the deepest. It 
 is no elaborate creed, it requires no hard thinking ; it 
 involves no training in philosophy before you can under- 
 stand it. Its three short words are hke a lightning 
 flash, that open up to us an infinite heaven of heavens 
 through the intense darkness of the clouds that hang 
 over human life. It speaks straight to our human 
 nature. It tells us, that in the awful Maker of all 
 things seen and unseen, in the Infinite, the Absolute, 
 the Eternal, there is something like this heart that 
 beats, there is something like that which draws the 
 mother to the son and the sister to the brother, that 
 the most human part of us is also the most Divine — 
 that it is that which " moves the sun and all the stars," 
 for " God is love." And I recall you this simple truth 
 about God, because it is at once one of the most practi- 
 cal of truths and one of the most necessary for our time. 
 
 It has been said, and it is often true, that no dis- 
 
303 
 
 courses are more barren than discourses on the being 
 and attributes of God— that they are the very type of dry 
 divinity. They need not be so. They may be among 
 the most fruitful : they are among the most necessary. 
 They are not needed to prove to us that there is a God, 
 or that He is a true and holy God, but they are needed 
 to impress His nature upon us. His presence, and His 
 work. We all in some sense believe in God ; we 
 should not be here if we did not ; but there lingers 
 in the souls of many of us some echo of the ancient 
 phrases which lead us to picture Him as enthroned in 
 some far-off heaven. We need to be reminded that 
 " He is not far from every one of us," and we need not 
 only the sense that God is here, but also that He is 
 here with all the fulness of His being. It is not a 
 formless and impassive spirit that is near to us, not 
 a blank void ; but the infinitely holy, the infinitely true, 
 the infinitely kind. It is this that gives the thought of 
 God a place in practical life. There is no single form 
 or phase of His being which does not come to us, when 
 we realise it, and in proportion to the vividness with 
 which we realise it, with the force of a supreme motive. 
 
 We think of God, for example, as infinitely true. If 
 we did but realise this as we might, if we were pene- 
 trated tlirough and through with the thought of it ; if, 
 just as false words were shaping themselves into speech, 
 we felt that " God is near ; God, who is infinitely true, 
 knows what I think and what I am about to say," 
 would you dare to tell a lie ? If we thought of God as 
 infinitely holy, if we did but realise this as we might, 
 
304 
 
 THE TRUTH OF TRUTHS. 
 
 if the sense of it penetrated us as the sunhght pene- 
 trates us, if we realised it as vividly as we realise that 
 fire will burn or water drown, should we dare to think 
 an unholy thought or to do an unholy deed ? 
 
 So it is with this element of His nature which we 
 call love. I speak of it this afternoon, not only because 
 to-day's service suggests it, but because it is at once 
 the most practical of truths and the most necessary 
 now. It is a special truth for our time. It contains 
 the Gospel that we need ; it comes to our sadness as 
 a Gospel of consolation ; it comes to our restlessness 
 as a Gospel of repose. It is in this latter aspect that I 
 wish for a moment or two to speak of it, for the rest- 
 lessness of our time is an even more significant feature 
 of it than its misery. It is also more difficult to deal 
 with. For material want there is material alleviation ; 
 we can feed the hungry, we can clothe the naked, we 
 can nurse the sick, but there is that about our time, 
 and foremost among the features of our time, which 
 is beyond material relief. I will not now speak of the 
 awful strain that comes of its complex civilisation, of 
 its growing numbers, of its quickened competition, and 
 of its aroused ambition ; nor will I now speak of the 
 fermenting of new thoughts that come of new know- 
 ledge : I will speak only of its social unrest. There 
 are many here who are not in want : there are many 
 here who come from well-furnished houses with a well- 
 provided table, who, when compared with the mass of 
 men, are rich, and comfortable, and secure, and yet 
 whose life, is a fever of unrest. You find, some of you, 
 
THE TRUTH OF TRUTHS. 
 
 30s 
 
 brethren, but little comfort in the thought of God, 
 because He seems to you to be too far off, because you 
 think of Him in only one aspect of His nature, as the 
 infinite justice or the infinite power : there are moments 
 of your lives at which the rush and strain of them seem 
 to be intolerable ; you kill excitement by excitement, 
 and you stauneh the wound of one baffled ambition by 
 another. 
 
 To you, brethren, you who feel most of all the strain 
 and stir of life, this revelation of God as love comes 
 with a singular power, for it is the Gospel of repose. 
 Can you not remember when you were children, tired 
 with the fatigue of play, you threw yourselves into 
 your mother's arms supremely conscious of your mother's 
 love, and felt, as you sank to happy sleep, the exquisite 
 delight of secure and perfect rest ? Can you not, now 
 that you are men and women, be children, once again 
 in the arms of the Eternal Father, and feel close to you 
 the infinite love of Him who knows your sadness, your 
 weariness, and your unrest, and in whose love you may 
 find a perfect repose ? It was a true instinct, though 
 an exaggerated one, which led men ages ago to leave 
 the common life of the world, the common life of 
 ambition and struggle and despair, and spend their 
 lives in some solitary spot, and think only, for days and 
 years, until death brought them the perfect vision of 
 the love of God. 
 
 There was a deep human need underlying this. It 
 is the same need that you feel. You, too, are tired, as 
 they were, with the noise and stir and strife ; tired as 
 
 20 
 
3o6 THE TRUTH OF TRUTHS. 
 
 they were with the factiousness of pohtical party feel- 
 ing, with the meanness of social ambition, with the 
 chicanery of commerce, where each man is an Ishmael, 
 his hand against every man, and every man's hand 
 against him. And to you the same satisfaction is 
 possible. It can be but for a moment or two, not for 
 a lifetime, not for the solitude of years and years, but 
 just for a moment or two now and again I would ask 
 the wise man to forget his wisdom, and the strong man 
 to forget his strength. Just for a moment or two where 
 the fight is thickest I would have you be lost to the 
 world of sense and of common life ; I would ask you to 
 rise, as the spirit can, clear of the awful torrent and 
 swirl of life, to have your spirit resting in the eternal 
 Father who loves you, close to your soul of souls. I 
 would have you feel the awful sense of spiritual rest 
 and spiritual strength as you know that God is near, 
 that God is yours, and that, like the Father who went 
 forth to meet the prodigal, so He comes to welcome you 
 back even from sin, until you feel the warmth of the 
 Father's breast and rest in His passionless peace. 
 
 For the soul that is close to God, 
 
 In the folded wings of prayer, 
 Passion no more can vex, 
 
 Infinite peace is there. 
 
 I should be glad if it had been possible for me to go 
 on, as the Apostle goes on in the following verse, to 
 speak of the supreme manifestation of the love of God 
 in sending His only begotten Son into the world that 
 we might live through Him ; but I must be content 
 
THE TRUTH OF TRUTHS. 
 
 307 
 
 to-day with the truth which hes behind the incarnation 
 and explains it, and I am the more content because it 
 is not uncommon for the force of that great truth of the 
 love of God to be weakened by dispersion. We let our 
 thoughts rest on some one of the innumerable ways in 
 which that love has shown itself : it is well that we 
 should do so ; but it is well also that we should some- 
 times simply think : " The Father Himself loveth you." 
 It is as though we stood in front of some sublime 
 panorama of Alpine scenery, some vast amphitheatre 
 in which the splendour of the dazzling snow, and the 
 rose-red granite, and the purple shadows, made us 
 forget that all the glory and the beauty of it were but 
 forms and manifestations of the pure and colourless 
 sunlight. So it is that all Christian truths are forms 
 and manifestations of this supreme truth of the love of 
 God. To that truth of truths I recall you, my brethren, 
 to-day. In the sublime and awful splendour of it I 
 would bid you rest. About some other truths we may 
 differ; in this, at least, we agree. Into some other 
 truths there may enter elements of doubt which weaken 
 their force as motives of conduct, but to-day let the 
 sublime revelation of St. John's Epistle link us together 
 in a perfect concord, and let it be for us the sublime 
 inspiration of a constraining motive and a supreme 
 repose to know that the Father Himself loveth us, for 
 " God is love." 
 
SERMON XXIV. 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 
 
SERMON XXIV. 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 
 
 \_University of Oxford, 1888.] 
 
 " Remember the days of old, consider the years of many genera- 
 tions : ask thy father, and he will show thee ; thy elders and they 
 will tell thee/' — Deut. xxxii. 7. 
 
 IT might appear a rather barren truism to say that 
 reHgions are relative to states of mind. But the 
 truism ceases to be barren when it is seen to involve 
 the truth that the religion of an individual is the 
 outcome and expression of the whole nature of that 
 individual ; and that the religion of an age is, in a 
 similar way, the outcome and expression of the whole 
 human phenomena of that age. And since the natures 
 of men who co-exist at any given time differ widely, the 
 forms of religion which are relative to them differ also ; 
 and since the general features of one age differ from 
 those of another in respect of their social, their moral, 
 and their intellectual phenomena, so do they differ also 
 in respect of their religion. 
 
 It is, therefore, natural to expect that our own age, 
 which has a not less strongly-marked individuality 
 than any age which has preceded it in respect of its 
 
312 THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 
 
 social and its intellectual life, should have strongly- 
 marked characteristics also in respect of its religion. 
 
 I spoke on a previous occasion of one of these 
 characteristics of its religion, its love of fact, its revolt 
 against theological speculation. That characteristic is 
 mainly negative : our time stands in a position of 
 antithesis and opposition to previous times. But a 
 negative attitude in religion is partial and temporary. 
 It affects not all men, but only some. It affects an age 
 which it affects at all only as a passing phenomenon. 
 The view, therefore, of our age, as standing in an 
 attitude of antithesis to a previous age, is necessarily 
 inadequate. It is also only temporary : it represents 
 a feature of our time which must inevitably pass 
 away. 
 
 It is, therefore, necessary to examine the other side 
 of the picture, and to find out in what positive ways 
 the religion of our time tends to express itself It is 
 also desirable, in a great centre of thought and of 
 education, not only to see what the tendencies are, but 
 also to give them, in whatever degree may be possible, 
 a right direction. 
 
 In what positive ways, then, I will ask, are the 
 religious phenomena of our time shaping themselves, 
 and in what ways can we in Oxford take our appropriate 
 part in helping their development ? 
 
 Its most obvious characteristic is that it is an age of 
 stir and movement. The pulses of men seem to beat 
 with a preternatural quickness. Their feet move busily 
 along the crowded ways. Its type is a London street ; 
 
THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 313 
 
 the loiterers are few ; there is a constantly moving 
 stream ; almost everyone is in earnest and in haste. 
 It is inevitable that this activity should seek to find a 
 field for its exercise within the sphere of religion ; and 
 it is doing so in more ways than one. 
 
 I. The activity of our time is finding an adequate 
 and appropriate field for its exercise within the religious 
 sphere in works of philanthropy and social improve- 
 ment. It was here that the first signs of religious 
 awakening showed themselves nearly a century ago. 
 It went hand in hand with the spirit of travel and 
 trade and colonisation in sending missionaries to the 
 ends of the earth, raising the level not only of religious 
 but of social and moral and individual life among the 
 undeveloped races of mankind. It went hand in hand 
 with the new impulse towards education, founding 
 schools, training teachers, and circulating books. It 
 has in more recent times gone hand in hand with the 
 effort to deal with the whole fabric of our complex 
 civilisation. It has excited and stimulated and directed 
 the effort to cure, or at least to palliate, the evils which 
 that civilisation has either caused or intensified ; efforts 
 which are not the less religious or the less Christian, 
 because they do not always use Christian phraseology, 
 or bear a religious name. There are few more hopeful 
 signs, either for Christianity or for society, than that 
 the two should thus come again into close contact, that 
 religion should no longer fix its eyes upon the clouds, 
 or walk in sombre garments through the busy haunts 
 of men crying out, " Memento inori." There are few 
 
314 THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 
 
 more hopeful signs than that Christianity in this form 
 should have taken so strong a hold upon this Univer- 
 sity, that colleges should have missions attached to 
 them, and that some of the ablest of the younger 
 generation should be actually living among those whom 
 they desire to elevate, and preaching, not a gospel of 
 sermons, but a gospel of active sympathy and of 
 personal service. 
 
 In all this the religious activity of our time has 
 followed the path of primitive ages. The practical ac- 
 tivity of Christianity preceded its intellectual activity. 
 It tried to save the world before it began to instruct 
 the world. It saved the world by sympathy and help, 
 not less than by the splendid vision which it revealed 
 of an ever-present Father, and of a life in the world 
 to come. 
 
 2. But social efforts are not possible to all men, nor 
 do they absorb all the energies even of those who take 
 part in them. There is a non-practical element in every 
 man's soul. There is always a non-practical element 
 in society. The intellectual activity of our time is 
 an even more marked characteristic than its practical 
 activity. It is expressing itself in a thousand new 
 forms, it is inspired by a new spirit, it is working 
 by new methods. And the question which I propose 
 briefly to answer is this : What appropriate and ade- 
 quate field exists for that activity within the religious 
 sphere? What positive work does religion offer for 
 the intellect of our age ? 
 
 The fields which lie before it are many in number. 
 
THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 315 
 
 The choice of the field must depend, no doubt, to some 
 extent, on the personal temperament of the worker. 
 There are some men who would still occupy themselves 
 with the metaphysics of religion, discussing the a priori 
 possibility of miracles, of revelation, of evolution. 
 There are some men, again, who would occupy them- 
 selves with the psychology of the religious emotions, 
 analysing, by the aid of physiology and anthropology, 
 their origin, their nature, and their form. But the field 
 to which I desire to direct attention as being more 
 appropriate to our time than any other, and more 
 adequate, suits the case which will, I believe, be found 
 more typical and more distinctive than any other, and 
 which will, therefore, be applicable to by far the largest 
 number of individuals. It is that of a man who, with- 
 out waiting to solve the problem of miracles, or to 
 master, if indeed it be possible to master, the psychology 
 of the religious emotions, simply asks, and wishes to 
 know, not. What is Christianity ? — for a man need not 
 have advanced far along the path of life to have found 
 out already that to that question there will be as many 
 answers as there will be speakers — but, How am I to 
 find out what Christianity is ? 
 
 The answer which I venture to give is one which 
 I venture to give with a special confidence, because it 
 has been frequently given before from this place by 
 men whose names will always be held in honour in 
 this University. 
 
 It is, in short, that the best field for the intellectual 
 activity of our time is to be found in Christian history, 
 
31 6 THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 
 
 and that a generation which would find out what 
 Christianity is must first find out what it has been. 
 
 It is the answer which was given fifty years ago by 
 the earhest of those who were afterwards known as 
 Tractarians. The school which then arose was a 
 reaction against a school of speculation, which con- 
 structed an elaborate and scholastic theology on the 
 basis of an arbitrary exegesis. They reasserted the 
 principle that Christianity has had a past, and that it 
 is not given to each succeeding generation to start 
 afresh with new interpretations and a new super- 
 structure. They appealed to Christian antiquity, and 
 they applied themselves to its study. They produced 
 in the Library of the Fathers an important and memo- 
 rable contribution to historical knowledge ; and it is 
 probable that if they had gone on as they began, we 
 should not see before us, as we see now, the vast fields 
 of Christian history ripe for an ungathered harvest. 
 But their aim was, from the first, rather polemical 
 than purely historical. They assumed that the doctrines 
 and usages of Christian antiquity were intended to 
 be permanent ; and they believed that those doctrines 
 and usages would be found to be, in all essential points, 
 preserved in the doctrines and usages of the Reformed 
 Church of England. They studied history, in other 
 words, with a purpose ; and this purpose, which would 
 have been secondary to a purel}' historical student, 
 became primary to them. They were entangled in 
 controversies on the right hand and on the left ; and 
 before the first generation of them had lived half their 
 
THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 317 
 
 life, the historical inquiry into the eariier strata of 
 Christian beliefs was merged in an effort to show the 
 continuity of corporate existence and of ritual usage 
 with the Christendom of the middle ages. 
 
 The result is that historical Christianity comes to 
 most men now robed in the splendid vestments of the 
 Mediaeval Church. It fascinates some men by the 
 beauty of its external form. It is in harmony with, 
 and gives an expression to, the revived sestheticism of 
 our time. But the vast hold which it has upon men 
 comes less from the charm of its adornments, than 
 from its claiming to satisfy that which is a true instinct 
 of our time — the clinging to a religion which is not 
 only of our time, but the expression in our time of the 
 Christianity of the past. And it is to no slight degree 
 because the success of what I may term mediaevalism 
 shows this instinct to exist, that I believe the answer 
 which I have ventured to give to the main inquiry to 
 be not only true in general, but also the satisfaction 
 of a present need. 
 
 It is to the study of Christian history, then, that I 
 invite attention, as the most fruitful and promising 
 field within the sphere of religion for the intellectual 
 activity of our time. It is almost wholly virgin soil. 
 It seems a paradox to say so. There are thousands 
 upon thousands of histories. There have been hun- 
 dreds upon hundreds of historians. But for all that 
 the fields of Christian history are new, as, until 
 recently, all fields of history were new, because they 
 need new research and the application of new methods. 
 
3i8 THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 
 
 It is this which gives to it its present charm. It 
 would be neither appropriate nor adequate as a field 
 for the intellectual activity of our time if it simply 
 promised a revised edition, with new notes, of a history 
 which had been written before. It promises not only 
 new results, but also a new meaning. The past of 
 Christianity has been studied for the most part, so 
 far, as a collection of antiquities, or a collection of 
 biographies. Ecclesiastical histories are, for the most 
 part, either museums or biographical dictionaries. They 
 have, as such, whatever interest antiquities and bio- 
 graphies have, as such. I am far from denying that 
 such an interest exists, and that it is legitimate. But 
 it is not everyone who cares to walk, as it were, in 
 the streets of a disinterred city, or to estimate the 
 characters of even the greatest heroes of the past. 
 Ecclesiastical history, so far as it gives men this, is 
 only on a level with other history. The interest which 
 it creates is confined to a limited class, and it affects 
 that class only in a limited degree. 
 
 But that which lies before us in Christian history, 
 and which lies before us, moreover, as an object not 
 merely of legitimate interest, but of supreme and ab- 
 sorbing importance, is the revelation which it affords of 
 the nature of Christianity, by being itself the revelation 
 of God. 
 
 I cannot now do more than indicate the bare outlines 
 of the field. 
 
 We have to study (i) the recorded facts, and espe- 
 cially those of original Christianity. They are simple 
 
THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 319 
 
 and yet complex. They seem to lie on the surface, and 
 yet they are hard to find. This first and most neces- 
 sary step of ascertaining them requires the aid of the 
 highest developments of the sciences of philology, and 
 the logic of history ; and the developments of these 
 sciences " in our day has been a necessary preliminary 
 to the study of Christianity. 
 
 (2) We have to find out the relation of those facts, 
 when we have ascertained them, to the whole mass of 
 contemporary facts. We have to bear in mind the pro- 
 position with which we started, that religion is the 
 outcome and expression of the old nature of a man, 
 and of the whole human phenomena of religion, not 
 in isolation, but as parts of a whole 
 
 (3) We have to find out the attitudes of mind in 
 which sucessive generations have stood to the original 
 facts ; and we have, further, to consider the causes of 
 those attitudes. We find in successive generations 
 changes in both belief and practice. We cannot 
 assume that all such changes are wrong. We cannot 
 believe in an arrested development. We cannot believe 
 that the Spirit of God ceased at some one moment of 
 history to speak to men. We cannot believe that the 
 supreme Christian duty of one age is to attempt the 
 impossible task of reproducing the whole intellectual 
 scenery of another age. We are impelled to see in the 
 new attitudes of successive ages, new forms and phases 
 of truth, and to study them as parts of the revelation of 
 God. 
 
 It is a study as vast as it is interesting. The final 
 
320 THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 
 
 results are not for us or for our time. But there are 
 general results which may come to us in our time apart 
 from the special results of our inquiry into particular 
 beliefs, or the final results which are yet on an unseen 
 horizon. 
 
 In the first place we shall learn that there is a 
 Christianity which is not of time or place. We shall 
 find that the Christianity of all good men through all 
 the Christian ages has been in its essence one. We 
 shall be able, if we will, to appropriate that simple essence 
 to ourselves. We shall find that deep down in the 
 souls of men the primitive faith has lived. We shall 
 find that primitive faith comprehended and expressed 
 in all the ages, in that which was first given to us as a 
 trinity of benedictions, and which has become the most 
 spiritual as well as the most abiding of creeds : " The 
 grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, 
 and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost." 
 
 In the second place we shall not only learn the 
 permanence of Christianity, but its variety. We shall 
 distrust the finality of our own judgment or the judg- 
 ment of our own contemporaries, because we shall see 
 that almost every writer, in almost every age, has felt 
 the same confidence, and we shall also see that each 
 generation, as it passes a judgment of incompleteness 
 upon its predecessors, anticipates the inevitable judg- 
 ment which must one day be passed upon itself. We 
 shall infer that speculations and practices which were 
 freely allowed in the far-off past, cannot be incompatible 
 with admission into the Kingdom of Heaven. We 
 
THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 321 
 
 shall infer also that speculations and practices which 
 were not unknown in that far-off past, however natural 
 an outcome of succeeding times, cannot be in them- 
 selves vital. And as we watch the changes, and trace 
 the causes of them, the conviction will become the 
 more certain that the world of grace is no less diverse 
 in its forms than the world of nature, and that all the 
 vast and varied panorama, as it moves slowly before our 
 view, is a vision of God, revealing Himself at sundry 
 times, and in divers manners, to the souls of men. 
 
 Two, other results will follow these in that part of us 
 which, if so incongruous a word as " part " be allowed 
 in regard to human nature at all, may be specially 
 called religious. 
 
 The one is an increased spirituality. A religion lives 
 and grows in proportion as it satisfies spiritual needs. 
 It must show itself in active life in benevolence, in the 
 effort to do good. It must show itself in the intellectual 
 life as the effort to find out what is true. It must show 
 itself in the moral life as the effort to kill the baser part 
 of us, to crush the tyranny of passion and desire. But 
 underneath these several modes and expressions of it, 
 there must be, if there be religion at all, the life of 
 the Spirit. There must be, if not always, yet in 
 moments of supreme need, that sublime transcending 
 of the earthly life, that awful touching of the finite 
 by the infinite, which we call communion with God. 
 The degree to which a form of religion can satisfy 
 this need is the measure alike of its reality, and of its 
 power. 
 
 2 I 
 
322 THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 
 
 And Christian history is the knowledge of God 
 revealing Himself in the generations of men, which 
 intensifies our spiritual life and satisfies this spiritual 
 need, because it gives us not a dead inheritance of 
 past beliefs, but a close and continual contact with 
 the living Father. 
 
 The other result is the sense of repose. Theology 
 thrives in the stir and tumult of the battlefield. Reli- 
 gion seeks for calm. The progress of theology, like 
 all intellectual progress, is " progress by antagonism." 
 Its formula is thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But a 
 religion that is purely or mainly critical, purel}' or 
 mainly antithetical, is no religion at all. Religion 
 must have repose. 
 
 There have been no doubt at many periods in the 
 history of religion a tendency to exaggerate this ele- 
 ment of repose. In the ideal of the perfect life of 
 which men dreamt, while it was still possible for 
 dreamers to dream their dreams, the very heaven of 
 heavens itself was pictured as an unstirred calm. It 
 was a fancy of an old Greek interpreter that in the 
 " Sea of glass like unto crystal," which St. John saw 
 before the throne of God, each separate drop was a 
 separate soul, which found its supreme and eternal 
 felicity in lying for ever and for ever in the infinite 
 stillness of that glassy sea, and being for ever and for 
 ever the mirror of the eternal and perfect light. The 
 heaven to which some of us aspire would be not that 
 glassy sea, but a world made bright with the quick 
 movement of the white-winged messengers moving 
 
THE RELIGIOUS TEND EMC I ES OF OUR TIME. 323 
 
 without rest in the service of God. It may be that in 
 that unwearied world there will be no need of rest : 
 it may be that the true picture of the souls in glory is 
 the picture of those who are — 
 
 Still becoming, more than being, 
 Apprehending, more than seeing, 
 Feeling as from orb to orb, 
 • On their awful course they run, 
 How their souls new light absorb 
 From the self-existent One. 
 
 But at least, here upon earth we seek for rest, and 
 we cling to a religion that gives us rest. It is because 
 we are storm-tossed on the " waves of this troublesome 
 world;" it is because the strongest of us faint and are 
 weary, and some of us utterly fail ; it is because we 
 are bowed down by its weariness, and worn by its 
 sadness, and perplexed by its doubts, — that we seek, and 
 do not seek in vain, the infinite peace of God. Before 
 a religion can give this, it must have certainty. To 
 some men, it may be the loftiest and happiest of God's 
 children, the certainty of an internal conviction is 
 sufficient and supreme. But the mass of men crave 
 for an external guarantee. They hear the dissonant 
 voices of preachers, each one proclaiming the certainty 
 of his own belief. They have no time to examine the 
 credentials for themselves. Some of them are led by 
 a true instinct, though I believe it to be wholly mistaken 
 in its direction, to the Church of Rome. They see the 
 patent fact that in these, or not unlike, faiths and 
 forms generation after generation has worshipped God. 
 
324 THE RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES OF OUR TIME. 
 
 They feel, inside the gates of the vast and ancient 
 temple which receives them, an infinite security and 
 an infinite repose. Their instinct is true, though it 
 leads them to an illusion. But what Rome offers, 
 history gives. What Rome offers, every investigation 
 weakens. What history gives, every new investigation 
 makes more certain. Behind us are nineteen centuries 
 of continuous revelation. In all these nineteen cen- 
 turies we are in contact with the Spirit of God, who 
 reveals Himself in them. The result is a certainty and 
 a repose which nothing can disturb : for as the supreme 
 outcome of our search we come upon those truths, 
 which, being in all ages deep-seated in the minds of 
 holy men, are also eternal in the heavens. 
 
 It is to this great study, to which I believe the 
 intellectual activity to be drifting, and which offers 
 to that activity a worthy and an appropriate field, that 
 I invite, especially, you younger men, who have your 
 lives before you, who are stirred by the sense of reli- 
 gion, and who pray to live a life worthy of yourselves, 
 and of your inheritance. " Remember the days of old ; 
 consider the years of many generations ; ask thy father 
 and he will show thee ; thy elders, and they will tell 
 thee." 
 
SERMON XXV. 
 
 THE THREEFOLD BENEDICTION. 
 
SERMON XXV. 
 
 THE THREEFOLD BENEDICTION. 
 
 \_Westminstcr Abbey, Trinity Sunday, 1888.] 
 
 "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the 
 communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all."'— 2 Cor. xiii. 14. 
 
 IT is remarkable that one of the two most expHcit 
 recognitions of the three Persons of the Holy 
 Trinity in the New Testament should be in the form of 
 a benediction. The fact is itself a sermon. It is full 
 of instructive lessons. It tells us, above all, that the 
 revelation of the Trinity is a revelation not of an object 
 of speculation, but of a living truth. It recalls us from 
 metaphysics to life. It reminds us that in our world 
 of effort and failure we need the varied help of God. 
 It reveals to us that God, who in His trinity of Persons 
 is very near to us, is near to us with a trinity of 
 blessings. 
 
 He reveals Himself to us as a trinity of Persons : 
 the Eternal Fathtr, of whom we are tlie children ; the 
 Eternal Son, who brings back to us our lost sonship ; 
 the Eternal Spirit, by whom we and all things live, are 
 severally close to us. And yet they are not three 
 Gods, but one God. 
 
328 THE THREEFOLD BENEDICTION. 
 
 It is a trinity of benedictions. The love of the 
 Father, the grace of the Son, the fellowship of the 
 Spirit, come each of them round us, and enfold us in 
 the wings of blessing. And yet they are not three 
 benedictions, but one. The love, and the grace, and 
 the fellowship are not different and apart ; but one 
 and the same. 
 
 The Apostle begins with the grace of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, because that seems to be nearer to us ; it is, as 
 it were, the doorway through which we pass to the 
 sense of the love of God. Grace means "gift." It 
 was a word which seemed best to sum up that which 
 Jesus Christ did for us. It was a short technical 
 expression which included at once redemption and 
 atonement, the knowledge of God, and the hope of 
 eternal life. The world had been seeking for redemp- 
 tion from the power of the body which held the spirit 
 as its slave, for some visible sign and manifestation 
 that conquest was possible. It had been seeking for 
 certain knowledge, for some sure stairway into the 
 far-off heaven which pure souls saw in the infinite 
 heights above them and which they could not reach ; 
 it had been seeking for light and for hope ; for it had 
 struggled with its pain, it had struggled with its sorrow, 
 with the problem of its disappointment and its failure 
 — it could not always beat the air in a fruitless battle : 
 and there was coming over them, as the slow mist 
 creeps over the fair landscape in an autumn afternoon, 
 the sense of a supreme despair. 
 
 And to men came the grace, the gift which Jesus 
 
THE THREEFOLD BENEDICTION. 329 
 
 Christ brought of a Divine knowledge, of a Divine 
 manifestation of conquest over the flesh, of a Divine 
 hope, which was not to vanish — not a dim, but a sure 
 and certain, faith that God was in the world, and had 
 not left us to be the struggling but inevitable prey of 
 passion, and darkness, and death. It was the sense of 
 a Divine sonship. 
 
 "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ" was also, and 
 thereby, " the love of God." There are many Christian 
 men who have been so long the slaves of the ideas 
 which Roman law brought into Western Christianity, 
 that the old truth seems so unfamiliar as to be almost 
 new: "The Father Himself loveth you." The very 
 significance of the word Father is lost to us. We 
 speak of the Almighty, of Providence, as though He 
 were not a person, but an abstraction. Many think of 
 Him as the Supreme Judge and Supreme Ruler, and 
 forget the infinite depths of love. He reveals Himself 
 to us as a father ; as a father He loves us. We 
 measure His love by the love that those of us who are 
 fathers feel, that all of us who are sons have felt. He 
 loved us in infinitely greater degree, but in some way 
 like the way in which we love our children. He for- 
 gives us when we go back to Him and throw our arms 
 round about Him, as it were, and tell Him that we 
 know we were wrong. He helps us on our way when 
 we tend to stumble ; He gives us, as it were, a Father's 
 arm upon which to lean, and a Father's hand to guide 
 us through the darkness. He not only loves us but 
 He loves us all as children. The benediction is the 
 
330 THE THREEFOLD BENEDICTION. 
 
 sense of it. The love of the Father is Hke the sun 
 which shines in the heaven, it shines ahke upon one 
 field and another ; but upon one field is a crop of grain, 
 upon another is a crop of useless and baleful weeds : 
 the difference lies not in the sunshine but in the pre- 
 paration of the ground. So it is with human souls. 
 The love of the Father comes to us all, but the blessing 
 of that love comes to us in proportion as we till the 
 soil of our souls. It is dependent so far upon our 
 effort ; it comes not to supersede our labour but to call 
 it forth and to bless it. He blesses us in proportion 
 as we are ready for His blessing — in proportion as 
 we prepare our souls to receive it. And He helps us 
 to prepare them. 
 
 And so " the love of God " becomes " the fellowship 
 of the Holy Spirit." The eternal Father has not placed 
 His love in some infinitely distant space, to blaze and 
 burn like Sirius in some field of the universe which we 
 can only see in the distance, which touches us with no 
 warmth, which enlightens us with no knowledge, and 
 which only reveals to us the unimaginable vastness of 
 His power. He has not mocked us with a panorama 
 of sunlight, and the luxuriant growths that come of 
 sunlight, passing as it were like a vast moving spec- 
 tacle before our eyes. He comes close to us ; He holds 
 communion with us; He touches us with warmth. It 
 is the fellowship of the Holy Ghost ; He enlightens us 
 with His light ; He comes close to us with the awful 
 revelation of His infinity. And then, in close com- 
 munion with us. He whispers to us with tenderness, 
 
THE THREEFOLD BENEDICTION. 331 
 
 as of a mother to her son, " I, God, am yours ; I, your 
 God, am your Father and love you ; I, your God, am 
 your Saviour and have redeemed you ; I, your God, 
 am your Helper and can sustain you." 
 
 Thus it is that " the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy 
 Ghost " are not three benedictions, but only three 
 forms of one. The sense of the gift of a Divine 
 Sonship, the sense of the love of a Divine Father, the 
 sense of a Divine conmumion, are but the prismatic 
 colours of one perfect light. 
 
 But I feel almost a sense of paralysis as I draw this 
 feeble sketch of what these words mean. They are the 
 whole Gospel ; they are all that Paul preached. They 
 are all that Paul's Master and ours revealed. They 
 burn within me ; and they burn within me because I 
 want you also to feel their supreme, their awful bene- 
 diction. What do I want, what do you want for this 
 world and for the worlds beyond the world, but the 
 "grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, 
 and the communion of the Holy Ghost " ? If you ask 
 me to translate all that into the language of philosophy ; 
 if you tell me that no ray of that Divine light can reach 
 my soul until I have told you of what chemical elements 
 it is composed, I answer, Nay. The sun was shining 
 in the heavens, revealing to the world the infinite 
 beauty of form and colour, for untold ages before its 
 rays were analyzed by the prism. It was bringing 
 forth verdure by its warmth for untold ages before it 
 was found out that oceans of hydrogen surge upon its 
 
332 THE THREEFOLD BENEDICTION. 
 
 surface, and that its heat like its hght is a mode of 
 motion. What you and I want, what you and I have, 
 is not the bare truth that there is a sun, but the sense 
 of his warmth. What you and I want, and what you 
 and I have, is not an analysis of what the idea of God 
 means, but the sense that there is a Father who loves 
 us, the sense that there is a God who holds communion 
 with us. 
 
 I will ask you thus to think of the Trinity to-day. 
 I will ask you to let the thought of God, as He is 
 revealed to us, be with you, not as a dogma, but as 
 an ever-present benediction. I will ask you to pray 
 each for himself the prayer which the Apostle prayed 
 for himself and for all the world. It is not a selfish 
 prayer. The benediction of God is like the sunlight 
 which must radiate back again from all those upon 
 whom it shines. The love of the Father cannot be in 
 our hearts without shining, it must needs shine upon 
 our fellow-men. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 cannot be hid. The fellowship of the Divine Spirit is 
 a sharing in His Divine activity, in an unresting and 
 untiring life, always moving, because motion and not 
 rest is the essence of His nature — always moving 
 with a blessing. There are some men who seem to 
 think that the love of God is so personal, so private a 
 possession, that it can be, as it were, locked up in 
 a casket, upon which they may gaze with a selfish 
 and exclusive adoration, but which none can see but 
 themselves. 
 
 It was a dream of many men in old times — it is a 
 
THE THREEFOLD BENEDICTION. 333 
 
 dream of some men now — that the highest revelation of 
 God to man was not only made to the individual soul, 
 but also made so personally and individually that no 
 one else could know that it had been made ; and they 
 went into the desert, or they lived in their solitary 
 cells, that they might spend their lives in adoration, in 
 private communion with God. Can you conceive their 
 theory to be true, can you conceive that if this prayer 
 of the Apostle were fully answered for every one of us 
 it would turn us all into silent mystics ; that the stir 
 of life would be checked by the presence of the Divine 
 benediction ; that men would cease to move and would 
 stand still for ever gazing upon the infinite Son ? It 
 cannot be : the blessing of God, if it be within us, must 
 shine forth from us. No one can see God face to face 
 without his own face shining. No one can have within 
 him this supreme benediction of the love of God with- 
 out moving, as the love of God is always moving, in an 
 unresting activity. 
 
 The activity takes innumerable forms. It sometimes 
 takes the form of the activity of knowledge. In some 
 men the communion of the Holy Ghost is a communion 
 of insight. They cannot rest until they know ; they 
 cannot rest when they know until they have told their 
 fellows ; and they cannot rest when they have told their 
 fellows until they have plunged again and again into the 
 deep seas of the unknown, and have brought up new 
 pearls of knowledge that men may again and again be 
 thankful. It sometimes shows itself within us in the 
 activity of benevolence. The fellowship of the Holy 
 
334 THE THREEFOLD BENEDICTION. 
 
 Ghost is a fellowship of beneficence. It stirs men to a 
 sense of the wants of others, and to effort to help them. 
 The love of God shines out with the warmth of a Divine 
 fire upon those who are sick, and those who are weak, 
 and those who are needy, and those who are in distress. 
 It sends men into far-off lands, burning with enthu- 
 siasm, to bring the degraded populations of our race to a 
 higher level. It sends men into the homes of the poor 
 that they may be helped to rise to a higher life, to 
 a higher status, that their lives may be brightened 
 and blest. It stirs men to move about the common 
 society which is around them, and touch every soul 
 that comes in contact with them with love and sym- 
 pathy. It sometimes shows itself within us as the 
 activity of moral growth. 
 
 The fellowship of the Holy Ghost is a fellowship of 
 goodness. It never rests with being what it is : it is 
 always striving to be better. And if it were given to 
 me to pray for one benediction more than another, for 
 one form of Divine fellowship more than another, I 
 should pray for this benediction and the fellowship of 
 spiritual growth. I should pray, if I had but one thing 
 to pray for, not for the activity of knowledge (though 
 I value knowledge), not for the activity of doing good, 
 but for the activity of spiritual growth. I should pray 
 that my light might, by the help of God, so shine 
 before men that they might glorify our Father who is 
 in heaven. I should pray for this because it gathers 
 up all else into itself. 
 
 To be good is to do good. To attempt to do good 
 
335 
 
 without being good is to beat the air. Do you suppose 
 that your missionaries will convert the heathen world 
 while the Christian men and women who live sur- 
 rounded by heathen society live the lives not of the 
 Christian ideal but of heathen practice ? Do you 
 suppose that you who are fathers and mothers, for all 
 your precepts and your kindness, your children will 
 grow up to be what you want them if, day by day, in 
 your common intercourse with them, with one another, 
 with the society in which you move, you show your- 
 selves irritable and uncharitable and censorious ; if you 
 show that your life has no loftier aim than commercial, 
 or Hterary, or social success ; if in ten thousand little 
 ways there shines out from you upon them, not the 
 pure light of the Divine benediction of chanty and truth 
 and self-control, but the baneful fires of selfishness 
 and unreality, of an unrestrained appetite and an 
 ungoverned tongue ? 
 
 If God's benediction be upon us, if the communion 
 of the Holy Ghost be really ours, it must shine out in 
 ten thousand ways in our daily lives. 
 
 When we pray, therefore, this prayer for the trinity 
 of benedictions, we are praying not a selfish prayer, but 
 a prayer for others as well as for ourselves. It is not 
 given to us to determine the form in which the bless- 
 ing of God shall be manifested in us. He has given 
 to everyone of us his own separate capacity, his 
 own separate powers, and He worketh in each of us 
 severally as He will. 
 
 But it is given to us as we think of God to think of 
 
336 THE THREEFOLD BENEDICTION. 
 
 Him as blessing us. It is given to us to pray for one 
 another this prayer of the Apostle, that His grace, His 
 love, His communion, may be always with us. And 
 the special purpose of to-day's festival is not that we 
 may once more lose ourselves in the mazes of specula- 
 tion in which the Greeks of old time loved to wander, 
 but that just for a moment or two we may pause upon 
 our journey to drink a new draught of the well of life ; 
 that just for a moment or two we may, like Moses, 
 gaze upon some part of the infinite glory and bow our 
 heads in adoration of the infinite and ineffable majesty, 
 and then come down, as it were, from the height into 
 our common life, move among our fellow-men, baptized 
 with the baptism of this threefold benediction : " The 
 grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, 
 and the communion of the Holy Ghost." 
 
 Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesburj-. 
 
Date Due 
 
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