LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 Theological Seminary, 
 
 PRINCETON. N. J. 
 
 BX 5133 .V3 F63 1868 
 c, Vaughan, C. J. 1816-1897 
 Foes of faith 
 
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Digitized by 
 
 the Internet Archive 
 
 
 
 in 2015 
 
 
 
 https://archive.org/details/foesoffaithfoursOOvaug 
 
RECENT WORKS BY DR C. J. VA UGH AN. 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST DAYS. Lectures 
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 TWELVE DISCOURSES on Subjects connected with 
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 MEMORIALS OF HARROW SUNDAYS. A Selec- 
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 ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. The 
 
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 LESSONS OF LIFE AND GODLINESS. A Selection- 
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 THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL FOR ENGLISH 
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 LIFE'S WORK AND GOD'S DISCIPLINE. Three 
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 THE WHOLESOME WORDS OF JESUS CHRIST. 
 
 Four Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge in 
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 EPIPHANY, LENT, AND EASTER. A Selection 
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Works by the same Author — Continued. 
 
 SINGLE SERMONS, 4c. 
 THE JOY OF SUCCESS CORRECTED BY THE 
 
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 THE MOURNING OF THE LAND AND THE 
 
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 Prince Consort. 1861. Tliird Edition, id. 
 THE THREE TABERNACLES. On the Opening of 
 St. Peter's School Chapel, York. 1862. is. 
 
 QUIETNESS AND CONFIDENCE THE STRENGTH 
 
 OF THE CHURCH. On the Consecration of Trinity Church, 
 Handsworth. 1864. is. 
 SON, THOU ART EVER WITH ME. In the Chapel 
 of the Magdalen Hospital. 1864. is. 
 
 FREE AND OPEN WORSHIP IN THE PARISH 
 
 CHURCHES OF ENGLAND. Second Ed. Fcap. Svo, id. 
 MUSIC IN CHURCHES. At a Festival of a 
 
 Church Choral Association. Fcap. Svo, 6d. 
 THE HAND AND THE SCROLL. On the Sudden 
 
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 THE REVISED CODE OF THE COMMITTEE OF 
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 SIDERED. 1862. Third Edition, is. 
 
 RUBRICAL MODIFICATION NOT LITURGICAL 
 
 CHANGE. A Few Words on the Burial Service. 1864. 
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 RAYS OF SUNLIGHT FOR DARK DAYS. A 
 
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 PLAIN WORDS ON CHRISTIAN LIVING. 
 
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 CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. Small 
 
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 CHARACTERISTICS OF CHRIST'S TEACHING. 
 
 Small Svo, 4s. 6d. 
 
 VOICES OF THE PROPHETS ON FAITH, 
 PRAYER, AND HUMAN LIFE. Small Svo, ^. 6d. 
 Alexander Strahan, 56 Ludgate Hill, London. 
 
FOES OF FAITH. 
 
Catntirtlrge: 
 
 PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M. 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRES 
 
FOES OF FAITH: 
 
 FOUR SERMONS 
 ^«acbEti before tj^e SUnibErsitg of GCambribge 
 
 IN NOVEMBER, 1868. 
 
 /. UNREALITY. II. INDOLENCE. 
 IIL IRREVERENCE. IV. INCONSISTENCY. 
 
 C. J. VAUGHAN, D.D. 
 
 VICAR OF DONCASTER, 
 
 UBLISHED AT THE REQUEST OF THE VICE-CHANCELLOR. 
 
 Honiion anij eTambnligE: 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 1868. 
 
 [All I^ighls reserved.] 
 
OiiK luTiv -qiuv -q vdXv T/)os al/J-a Kal aapKa. 
 
 Eph. vi. I z. 
 
DEDICATED 
 TO THE RIGHT REVEREND 
 EDWARD HAROLD, 
 
 LORD BISHOP OF ELY, 
 
 WITH GRATEFUL AND RESPECTFUL AFFECTION. 
 
I. 
 
 UNREALITY. 
 
 I 
 
Isaiah xlyi. 7. 
 
 TJiey bear him upon the shoulder, they carry 
 him, and set him in his plaee ; from his 
 place shall he not remove: yea, one shall 
 cry icnto him, yet can lie not ansiver, nor 
 save lam out of his trouble. 
 
 I WILL not regard it as a mere accident, 
 tliat this brief ministry begins amongst you 
 on a festival known throughout the Churches 
 as All Saints' Day. Rather would I make 
 this the starting-point and the goal of our 
 course — bidding you to place yourselves in 
 thought in that arena of which an Apostle has 
 written that it is compassed about with a 
 great cloud of witnesses'^ ; witnesses once, in 
 life, to the reality of Jesus Christ ; witnesses 
 now, in another sense, from the world unseen, 
 of the struggle and the warfare and (God 
 
 1 Heb. xii. I. 
 
 I — 2 
 
4 Uiirealiiy. 
 
 grant it) the final victory too, of a generation 
 which has entered into their labours, and 
 without which it has pleased God that they 
 themselves should not be made perfect^. 
 
 Who is there amongst us, older or younger, 
 who has not some friend, known to him by 
 feature and lineament, in that blessed com- 
 pany ? This very place, this very University, 
 has furnished its full contingent to the ranks 
 of that army of the justified and glorified: 
 and doubtless, on the recurrence of this 
 annual commemoration, other recollections, 
 nearer, tenderer, and more personal, rise to 
 the surface of memory, and make one harmo- 
 nious though secret throb of sympathy vibrate 
 along the benches and galleries of the Congre- 
 gation. 
 
 There is one difference, indeed, between 
 All Saints' Day and that which immediately 
 follows it in another Communion, the festival 
 of All Souls. In the latter the dead only are 
 included ; in the former both the dead and 
 the living. In the same degree is the former, 
 
 1 Heb. xi. 40. 
 
Unreality. 5 
 
 this day's commemoration, the more instruc- 
 tive and the more animating. It reminds us 
 that we, we ourselves, have already, as an 
 Apostle writes, come to the spirits of just 
 me7i made perfect^: we ourselves, if we be 
 Christians indeed, are already one part of that 
 communion and fellowship in which God has 
 knit together His elect in the mystical body 
 of His Son Christ our Lord". It is not as a 
 remote or even distinct community that we 
 look upon those who have crossed that stream 
 which bounds the dead from the living. It is 
 not with the hope, dim or bright, that we may 
 one day, our earthly course run, join that 
 resting, rejoicing, thanksgiving throng, and 
 find there, what we find not here, a peace and 
 a repose and a conscious union too, reviving 
 and reassuring and comforting, in the presence 
 of God and the Lamb, where shall be no more 
 sorrow, nor sin, nor pain : rather it is as 
 those who are already there, in privilege as 
 well as anticipation, already one with them 
 
 1 Heb. xii. 22, 23. 
 
 =2 Collect for All Saints' Day. 
 
6 U nrcality. 
 
 in comfort and communion, inasmuch as 
 already our life, like theirs, is Jiiddeti with 
 Christ in God^, waiting only for the arrival of 
 that day when He, who is not more their life 
 than ours, shall be just revealed, unveiled, 
 manifested in His glory. 
 
 Now when we ask who these are of whom 
 such glorious things are spoken in the Word 
 and in the Church — and when we turn to 
 Holy Scripture, and to its utterances in this 
 day's Services, for the answer — we are struck, 
 first of all, with this most general and ele- 
 mentary characteristic, that they are holy 
 persons : they are those who have, on the 
 whole, not without many spots and stains 
 from the world's contact, not without many 
 infections of a fallen nature within, and many 
 assaults, but too successful, of a wary and 
 crafty spiritual foe beside them — yet, on the 
 whole, lived a good life, set a good example, 
 done a good work in and upon their gene- 
 ration, exhibited, however unostentatiously, 
 those particular virtues and graces which the 
 
 1 Col. iii. 3. 
 
Unrcaliiy. 
 
 7 
 
 Gospel first made such, meekness, gentleness, 
 humility, an unprovokablc spirit, a ready for- 
 giveness, an unwearied unbounded charity; 
 insomuch that it was perfectly plain that, 
 though in the world they were not of it, and, 
 though fallen in Adam, they were raised and 
 renewed and transformed in Christ. This 
 was one part, the broadest and the most 
 legible, of that seal of the Divine authentica- 
 tion, of which this day's Epistle tells, as their 
 badge, and token, and safeguard also, amidst 
 the woes and the curses of a renegade, rebel- 
 lious, reprobate earth \ 
 
 But already, in this first and most cursory 
 glance at the condition and character of the 
 Saints, we have noticed one feature which 
 must now be brought more prominently into 
 view. 
 
 It is not mere respectability — even if that 
 word be raised out of its lower into its truer 
 and more honourable acceptation — it is no 
 mere respectability of life, and it is no mere 
 cultivation of virtues such as the natural 
 ' Rev. vii. i, &c. 
 
8 Unreality. 
 
 man honours — which marks the men and the 
 women and the little children whose birthday 
 through death into immortality the Church is 
 this day keeping. These persons were knit 
 together on earth, are bound together in 
 heaven, in part certainly, but not only nor 
 chiefly, by that moral resemblance which 
 made them patterns of all good to their home, 
 their place, their age : this was not the seal, 
 though it was one of the impresses of the seal, 
 which marked them as God's ; and this was 
 not the relationship, though it was one of the 
 results and workings of the relationship, in 
 virtue of which they are not only fellow- 
 citizens to each other, but individually mem- 
 bers of God's household. It is not moral 
 resemblance which makes them one com- 
 munion : it is a single allegiance, a separate 
 devotion, an individual dedication, to one Per- 
 son, who has taken them severally for His 
 own, and in whom they all meet and centre 
 and are at one. 
 
 There is a name given in Scripture to 
 this characteristic feature, this family tie, this 
 
Unreality. 9 
 
 one blood'^, which determines the membership 
 of the mystic communion, and that name 
 is Faith. It is Faith which makes Enoch 
 brother to Paul, and David to John, and 
 Daniel to Cephas : it is Faith, which overleaps 
 the chasm of time, and brings together those 
 who could only yearn after Christ in anxious 
 longings, with those who sat at His feet or 
 walked in His steps or saw Him risen : it is 
 Faith, which knits into one races and dispo- 
 sitions and circumstances and cultures the 
 most diverse and dissimilar, and gives already, 
 in no doubtful vision, a glimpse of that mag- 
 nificent future of which it is written in the 
 Word that cannot lie — 
 
 // shall be in tliat day, that ike Lord sJiall 
 be King over all the earth : in that day shall 
 there be o?ie Lord, and His name one^. 
 
 You will observe also that, as faith is the 
 characteristic feature of all the saints, so there 
 has been in all time something given, com- 
 municated by God Himself, for faith to fasten 
 upon. Faith is not guessing. Faith is the 
 1 Acts xvii. 26. - Zech. xiv. 8, 9. 
 
10 Unreality. 
 
 apprehension by the whole man of something 
 which God has told concerning Himself\ 
 Faith is the sight of the unseen : but that un- 
 seen thing is unveiled first by the All-seeing. 
 Faith is not the discovery by man of mys- 
 teries lying hid from the race^: it is the grasp- 
 ing, by the firm hand of the soul, of something 
 which God stretches out to it from behind 
 the veil of the Incomprehensible and the 
 Infinite. 
 
 Now that something is called in Scrip- 
 ture by a name which connects it, even in 
 sound, with the act which is to apprehend 
 it. St Paul speaks of denying the faith; of 
 erring from the faith; of departing front t/te 
 faith; of making sliipivreck concerning (or oti) 
 the faith; of holding the mystery of the faith 
 in a pure conscience^. He speaks of himself 
 as 7101V preaching the faith which once he de- 
 stroyed^. He speaks of the faith coming'" — 
 and of mankind as shut np unto it — kept as 
 
 1 Heb. xi. 3, 7, 11, &c. " i Cor. i. 21. 
 
 3 I Tim. i. 19. iii. 9. iv. I. V. 8. vi. 10. 
 * Gal. i. 23. ^ Gal. iii. 23, 25. 
 
Unreality. 1 1 
 
 it were under the lock and key of earlier and 
 darker Dispensations, until the fulness of the 
 time should come^, and the infancy of al- 
 phabet and law should be ripe for the manlier, 
 the more confidential dealing of the Gospel 
 and the Spirit ^ Faith is the sight of the 
 unseen : the faith is the revelation of the un- 
 seen. Faith is the eye which sees : the faith 
 is the light which makes visible. Faith is the 
 apprehension by the man of that which the 
 faith communicates to the race. 
 
 Leaving then these necessary but unat- 
 tractive preliminaries of distinction and de- 
 finition, I would plunge without delay into 
 the subject proposed to us; which must be — I 
 had almost said in these times, but certainly on 
 this day and before this audience — in some 
 form or other, the warfare of faith ; and which 
 I will endeavour, by the help of God, to make 
 as practical as possible, by selecting for con- 
 sideration, from time to time, some one of 
 those real foes of faith, in manful battling 
 
 1 Gal. iv. 4. 
 
 - Gal. iii. 24. iv. I — 3. 2 Cor. iii. 6, &c. 
 
12 
 
 Unreality. 
 
 with which must lie, for each one of us, the 
 assured hope of being finally admitted into 
 that holy communion and fellowship which 
 is, for time and eternity, tJie blessed company 
 of all faitlifiil people \ 
 
 For this day, then, I take as one of the 
 most formidable enemies of our faith, what I 
 will venture to designate as a spirit of C/.v- 
 
 REALITY. 
 
 I know that the word is not accurate. 
 For it is not of the quality of the thing, 
 whether opinion or doctrine, but of the mind 
 that deals with it, that I purpose to speak. 
 Unrealizing rather than unreality is what I 
 seek to denote by it. Nevertheless, if the 
 thing meant is plain, I care not for the ex- 
 pression. 
 
 Unreality is in one sense the exact oppo- 
 site of faith. If faitli is the substance (or 
 confidence) of things hoped for, the evidence {that 
 which convinces) of things not seen"^, unreality 
 is the exact opposite of this. It is the not 
 being assured, the not being convinced, in 
 
 ' Order of Holy Communion. ^ Heb. xi. i. 
 
Unreality. 1 3 
 
 the secret of the heart, of things spiritual, 
 of things unseen. But that which is in one 
 aspect the opposite, is in another aspect an 
 opponent, one among many, of Christian, of 
 saving faith. And it is thus that I use it. 
 
 Let me try, first, to express what is meant 
 by it. I could scarcely do this more graphi- 
 cally than in the words of the text. 
 
 Isaiah is giving one of his contemptuous, 
 consuming pictures of the folly of idolatry. 
 It is a favourite topic with him. Bel bowcth 
 down, Nebo stoopcth : the images which could 
 not save Babylon, loaden upon the weary 
 cattle, are themselves going into captivity \ 
 Such is idolatry. Gold lavished out of the 
 bag — silver weighed in the balance — a gold- 
 smith hired — a god made — made, and then 
 worshipped ; carried to his pedestal, set there 
 — just able to stand, impotent to stir one 
 step in aid of his worshipper — with no voice 
 to answer, and no hand to savc^; such 
 is the thing which one greater even than 
 Isaiah, the Apostle Paul, briefly calls a non- 
 ^ Isai. xlvi. I, 2. ^ Verses 6, 7. 
 
14 Unreality. 
 
 entity, a non-existence*: an existence, indeed, 
 as God made it ; a block of wood or stone ; 
 so far, a part, though a humble part, of the 
 universe which God called good^; but no ex- 
 istence in its new, its man-made character, 
 as a person, a being, still less a deity : — even 
 such is that thing which I wish to describe 
 to you ; an essence, a truth, a reality there- 
 fore, in itself, but no being, no existence, no 
 entity for you, because you have not seen it 
 with the eye of the soul, nor grasped and 
 handled it with the manipulation of the spirit. 
 
 I. We see this unreality — to mention but 
 two points — first in relation to doctrine. 
 
 Some of the most elementary, most bless- 
 ed, most sustaining revelations of the Gospel, 
 are as yet unrealities to many who now hear 
 me. I can scarcely go wrong in mentioning 
 them. 
 
 We have heard, from infancy — for many 
 years the youngest of us have uttered with 
 their lips — the Creeds of the Church. Where 
 is he to whom the Articles of one, the briefest 
 
 ' I Cor. viii. 4. - Gen. i. 31. 
 
U nrcality. 1 5 
 
 and simplest, of those Creeds, the Articles of 
 the Apostles' Creed, are, each and all, reali- 
 ties to-day ? You have carried them, and set 
 them in their place — you would be shocked, 
 you would be indignant, if any one doubted 
 them : you yourself would be alarmed, would 
 be displeased with yourself, if you thought it 
 possible that you could deny or expunge one 
 of them. Yet when, in your hour of distress — 
 when, in your moments of just self-reproach — 
 when, in the agony of a temptation or a sin 
 — when, in sickness or by the open grave, you 
 call in one of these first elements of Re- 
 velation to your succour or your consolation, 
 do you find — ask yourself — do you find that 
 you have hold of it ? Does it help, does it 
 comfort, does it answer you ? 
 
 I will select just two of these. 
 
 / believe in the Holy Ghost. 
 
 I believe that there is in the blessed Deity, 
 the Object of my worship, one Person — in- 
 exact as the phrase confessedly is — who has 
 specially charged Himself with the indivi- 
 dual spiritual well-being; One who has under- 
 
1 6 Unreality. 
 
 taken, in behalf of all who believe, the office 
 of the Comforter, the Sanctifier, the inward 
 Intercessor, the Guide, the Strength, the Life. 
 I believe that He is as near to me as I my- 
 self ; that He knows my every thought, feels 
 my every want, foresees my every danger, 
 cares for my peace, wills my holiness ; and 
 that He has, for all these purposes, that 
 Omnipotent strength which is an attribute of 
 God Himself I believe too that this Blessed 
 Person has but to be sought in order to be 
 found ; that He comes to those who ask Him ; 
 and that, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there 
 is liberty'^. Then how is it, that one, believing 
 this, should yet walk in darkness and have no 
 light ^? should find himself day by day too 
 indolent for duty, too weak for resistance, too 
 dull to worship, too cold to love ? Is it not 
 plain that these things come from that spirit 
 of Unreality, which holds for doctrines a 
 thousand things which it never grasps and 
 never lives by ; believes in a Divine Helper 
 and Advocate and Comforter whom it never 
 
 1 2 Cor. iii. 17. ^ Isai. 1. 10. 
 
Uiircality. 
 
 17 
 
 calls in, and idly talks of a grace which it 
 has neither will nor faith to stir up ^ ? 
 
 I believe in the forgiveness of sins. 
 
 I believe that God has made provision, in 
 the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, for the 
 cancelling of guilt incurred by sins committed. 
 I believe that a sinner humbly seeking par- 
 don as the free gift of God, through the Atone- 
 ment which was made once for all in the 
 death of Christ, may find that pardon, real 
 and conscious, for real sins done by him in 
 this body. I believe that this forgiveness is 
 no theory or figment of theologians; no re- 
 mote distant peradventure to be looked for- 
 ward to as a possibility in the world be- 
 yond death; but a plain, express, positive 
 promise of God Himself, to be laid hold upon 
 in the present, relied upon and used and 
 rested in, for immediate comfort and for 
 actual reconciliation. How is it then, we ask 
 again, that so few of us are living in the en- 
 joyment of this greatest of gifts ; exercising 
 that right of the pardoned, which is the tran- 
 1 1 Tim. i. 6. 
 
 2 
 
1 8 Unreality. 
 
 quillity of the conscience, and living that life 
 of the forgiven, which is the activity of all the 
 powers in a Father's service ? Surely this too 
 is by reason of that unreality of which we are 
 speaking. We hold this truth as a theory, 
 we do not grasp it as a fact : we do not, when 
 we have sinned — and there is no man that 
 sinncth not'^ — instantly come, with sorrow yet 
 with frankness, to the throne of grace, plead- 
 ing the blood of Christ for present pardon, 
 and going forth humbled and solemnized, yet 
 with a full assurance of forgiveness, to the 
 duties and trials of a life still before us. 
 
 These are examples of that loss and that 
 defeat which hangs about all of us, from the 
 working of a spirit of unreality in the whole 
 region of our faith. We cannot live the 
 Christian life, because we do not realize the 
 Christian revelation. We do not, as a matter 
 of fact, apprehend the forgiveness of sins as a 
 possession guaranteed to us: therefore we 
 never rise to the joyful alacrity of a man free 
 to run with confidence the race set before him. 
 
 1 I Kings viii. 46. 
 
Unreality. 19 
 
 We do not, as a matter of fact, expect and 
 claim the presence of the Holy Spirit to en- 
 lighten the eyes of the heart for truth, and to 
 gird the loins of the life for duty : therefore 
 we never know what it is, for one single day, 
 to live with God and in God and for God ; we 
 speak and we act, we work and we enjoy, 
 only as men in the flesh, not at all as those 
 who have been lifted out of the atmosphere of 
 sense into the pure air and blessed light of 
 spirit and immortality. 
 
 Would to God, my brethren, that it were 
 as easy to correct as it is to account for the 
 state thus described ! 
 
 Sometimes it arises from a false teaching 
 as to the demand which this faith makes upon 
 us. A dry dogmatical presentation of truth 
 to the young disciple, often suggests the idea 
 — if it be not put into words — that acqui- 
 escence is the virtue in reference to God's 
 revelations ; that to receive the mighty dis- 
 closures of Atonement and Grace, to receive 
 them, I mean, as disclosures, and to count it 
 a sinful exercise of the reason to discuss or 
 2 — 2 
 
20 Unreality. 
 
 dispute them, is man's part, is certainly the 
 Churchman's part, in regard to the several 
 items of the faith once delivered. Much 
 stress is laid upon the mysteriousness, the 
 unfathomable depth, of each particular doc- 
 trine ; and the mind is brought back, again 
 and again, to this supposed contrast between 
 acceptance and understanding : it is made 
 almost a higher attainment to bend the knee 
 of the soul to an incomprehensible and unex- 
 plored formula of doctrine, than to enter, with 
 however much of humility and reverence, 
 into the examination, into the sifting and 
 handling, of the thing itself veiled under it. 
 Thus a spirit of unreality is made by some 
 almost a synonym for a habit of submission 
 and humility. 
 
 Or it may be that there has been, from 
 quite an opposite cause, a timidity in appre- 
 hending. It is no uncommon temper of mind, 
 in these days, to feel a general misgiving as 
 to the certainty of Divine truth. Men say to 
 us. It is all doubtful — nothing can be proved — 
 t/ie supernatural must be indemonstrable — once 
 
Unreality. 21 
 
 admit miracle — and what else is revelation ? — 
 and yon arc in that land of dreams, in zvliich 
 the closed eye is the first condition of being: 
 Thus even the Christian, even the man of 
 serious convictions and earnest aspirations, 
 finds himself insensibly acquiring a habit 
 of timidity, almost of cowardly skulking, 
 in reference to his own most anxiously che- 
 rished doctrine : he becomes afraid to look 
 anything in the face : he clings to his faith, as 
 a drowning man to a frail worn rope, without 
 daring to try its strength, and with but a faint 
 expectation of its ever really lifting him into 
 the vessel of an everlasting salvation. 
 
 Or it may be, once again — in this Congre- 
 gation it may well be — that there has not yet 
 begun to stir, in some hearts, that deep, deepest 
 questioning as to things unseen and eternal, 
 through which and out of which is generally 
 accomplished the new birth of the soul. This 
 kind of questioning comes not, commonly, 
 but with an experience of want, of distress 
 and poverty felt and groaned under, such as 
 is rare in the young. Not least is it rare in 
 
22 Uiireality. 
 
 the case of those who have been kept, by the 
 good hand of God over them, from falling 
 into open transgression. They who have 
 never known what it is to find themselves 
 powerless against the assault of a sin, or to 
 find themselves remorseful and anguished by 
 the recollection of a sin, may not yet have 
 felt the necessity of looking thoroughly into 
 that word grace or that other word forgive- 
 ness, so as to make sure their ground before 
 God in the prospect of life and in the pro- 
 spect of judgment. 
 
 These three possibilities may contain in 
 them, for one or for another, the explanation 
 of that condition of unreality in relation to 
 the things of God, which is under notice to- 
 day as one of the foes of faith. 
 
 And it is my desire to render you discon- 
 tented with this condition. I would remind 
 you of a coming day — coming surely even in 
 this life — when such a faith as this must break 
 down under you. It cannot resist temptation 
 — it cannot reconcile to disappointment — it 
 cannot comfort sorrow — it cannot face death. 
 
Um'eality. 23 
 
 I would not indeed counsel, as some possibly 
 might dare to do, the absolute discarding, 
 from your list of things believed, of every- 
 thing which you have not personally realized. 
 I would not venture to advise a deliberate 
 surrender of every belief which is not yet a 
 faith. I would not have a man say, Because 
 I do not yet feel that I have a firm grasp of the 
 A tonement for sin, or the Deity of Jesus Christ, 
 therefore I mtist for the present call and treat 
 myself as a Unitarian, and say nothing in my 
 prayers or in my xvorship which presupposes a 
 confidence, not yet mine, in the deeper and more 
 mysterious doctrines of a Catholic and Apo- 
 stolical Church. This would be a wilful, a 
 desperate abandonment of that position which 
 the Providence of God (to say the least) 
 has given you within the pale of that com- 
 munity which worships Him through Christ 
 Jesus, and accepts the Volume of Scripture as 
 His true and inspired Word. 
 
 But this I do counsel : first, the utmost 
 possible humility, both of thought and pro- 
 fession, as concerning all doctrine which is 
 
24 Unreality. 
 
 yet to you but a name; the most sincere 
 confession, to yourself and to God, of the 
 backwardness and sluggishness of your heart 
 in receiving those truths which you are taught 
 in the Bible and by the Creeds of your Church 
 as portions of His mind and will ; the con- 
 fession of this unreality as an ingratitude and 
 as a sin, and the prostration of your soul 
 before God for a truer and a more profound 
 discipline of His grace. And then, secondly, 
 and above all, an earnest resolution to bring 
 to a decision this state of unrealizing belief 
 Say to yourself, If this doctrine be of God, 
 it must be meant for use: it cannot be in- 
 tended to be jjist set in its place, like the idol 
 that Isaiah tells of, dumb to my cry and im- 
 potent for my help. Therefore the test of its 
 truth will be its availableness. Let me test it 
 by trial. Let me, in the morning, ask, as a 
 real tiling, the presence of the Holy Ghost 
 zvithin me, to strengthen me for work, to 
 keep me froin sin of act and sin of speech a7id 
 sin of thought. Let me expect an answer. Let 
 me wait and watch, let me make room for, let 
 
Unreality. 
 
 25 
 
 inc foster and cherish, that blessed iuflttencc. 
 Let me too at ecoening — let me after caeh 
 several instance of inconsistency, levity, or sin — 
 make application to God for actual, for im- 
 mediate forgiveness, on the ground of what 
 Christ has done and suffered. Let me expect 
 that forgiveness. Let me go fortli, as if for- 
 given, to be God's child and God's servant still, 
 though sinful, yet not doubting, for that, the 
 trutli and reality of His promise. So let me 
 live — and tlien, in the same degree, the condition 
 of unreality will have ended : mine will be a 
 life, not of tmrealized doctrine, but of revelation 
 grasped and apprehended and lived by. So 
 shall / have proof, day by day, of the truth of 
 things believed, and I shall be able to say, like 
 the Samaritans in the Gospel, Now I believe, 
 not because of another's saying, but because I 
 have heard Him myself, and know that He is 
 indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the World ''^ 
 — or with the PatriarcJi of an older antiquity, 
 I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear 
 —now mine eye seeth Thee ^ 
 
 John iv. 42. ^ Job xlii. 5. 
 
26 Unreality. 
 
 2. That spirit of unreality which thus eats 
 into the heart of faith in reference to doctrine, 
 is no less ruinous in relation to worsliip. 
 
 Has it ever occurred to one of you to 
 place himself, in thought, on any occasion, in 
 the position of a spectator of his own worship? 
 It is a dreadful thing, I think, when we reflect 
 upon it, to notice how small a part of any one 
 Service in which we have ever taken part 
 has been the absorbing, engrossing, self-for- 
 getting employment of the mind, the heart, 
 the soul. If we must interpret the worship of 
 others by our own, we should almost begin 
 to fear that in some Services God who sees 
 in secret sees notldng; not one moment of 
 that direct, undistracted, self-surrendered ado- 
 ration, not one act of that entire, absolute 
 concentration of thought and feeling, which 
 alone passes for worship when He looks on. 
 If at the close of any public Service, if on 
 rising from private prayer, the question were 
 seriously put to us, in the heart. What have 
 you done ? what has been asked, what has 
 been sought, what has been desired, wished. 
 
Unreality. 27 
 
 or felt, in this act of devotion ? what, there- 
 fore, oJi the supposition that God answers 
 prayer, may you now expect as the result? 
 how often must the confession be, Nothing — 
 Nothing: my heart made 710 response, when 
 the cry was, Awake and praise: my heart 
 uttered no soimd, zvlien the lips seemed to be 
 saying. Holy, holy, holy, Loi'd God of Sa- 
 baoth : Heaven and earth are full of the ma- 
 jesty of Thy glory! The very object of our 
 worship, God Himself, was to us an un- 
 reahty : our conception of Him, our shaping 
 and framing of the thought of Him, was even 
 hke that dumb thing of which Isaiah tells — 
 a thing lifted into its place, and helplessly set 
 there, dumb to its suppliant, and powerless to 
 save. 
 
 We know too well how many causes have 
 been working to this end. 
 
 Worship began for us in form, ere it could 
 begin in spirit. Never did the exact moment 
 come, at which we felt the responsibility de- 
 fining itself of being worshippers indeed. We 
 had grown accustomed to the being present. 
 
28 Unreality. 
 
 where we could not be engaged. By degrees 
 thought awakened, mind opened, feehng de- 
 veloped itself — everywhere but in worship. 
 Now and then, even in worship, we felt our- 
 selves addressed, summoned, compelled. But 
 never did we feel, as we ought, the profane- 
 ness, the wickedness, of indevotion. 
 
 Do I outrun your experience, my brethren, 
 in this description Or do I describe just 
 what you have known And, if this, how 
 shall I counsel you 
 
 Shall I say, Multiply forms until at last 
 you shall be constrained into devotion ? Shall 
 I say, Wliat you zuant is a ritual more 
 perfeet, more perstiasive to the sense, more 
 attractive to the idea ? Alas ! I fear that 
 in such multiplications of the external, the 
 spirit may be overborne, may be smothered 
 altogether. Rather would I recommend, 
 as the present medicine for a state such 
 as I have described, a ritual so bare and 
 hungry that the soul may be put un- 
 der compulsion to say whether or no it 
 is engaged in God's worship. Far better 
 
Unreality. 
 
 29 
 
 were it, I think, in such a case, for the 
 reahty of devotion, that the very mind itself 
 should be stripped bare till there could be no 
 mistake. For if indeed the form is nothing 
 — nothing in the sight of Him who is Spirit, 
 and whom they who worship must worship 
 in spirit and in triith'^ — surely nothing can be 
 more fatal to the reality of worship, than 
 such a cumbering of service with form that 
 the question is never forced upon the soul, 
 Art thou present? such an overlaying of the, 
 spiritual with the sensible, that a man can 
 scarcely say whether the spirit is asleep or 
 waking — as though it were possible for the 
 eye and the ear to capture the soul, and 
 carry it by a sort of physical violence into 
 the Divine Presence. 
 
 Then shall I say. Discard forms — cease to 
 zvoi'ship at all, until the soul shall constrain 
 you to seek Gods throne, and then let it be 
 tlie soul alo7ie, pure and unclothed, tvJiich goes 
 to the pursuit of the spiritual and eternal? 
 Not so. For indeed the soul in this life, 
 
 ^ John iv. 14. 
 
30 Unreality. 
 
 cumbered with the body, does need an 
 external assistance, does want the help of 
 sympathy and of communion, to encourage 
 and to arouse it in drawing nigh to its God. 
 Neither in forms, nor without forms, can 
 the worship of the Church militant be made 
 effectual in spirit. 
 
 Rather I would say this. The experience 
 of unreality should urge us to a more earnest 
 effort after a spiritual worship. We must 
 carefully dress and equip ourselves for de- 
 votion. We must anxiously seek God before 
 we worship. We must severely judge and 
 try ourselves in worship. We must guard 
 and fence ourselves with God's complete 
 armour when we would bow ourselves before 
 Him. And when we leave the place of His 
 worship, we must diligently question our- 
 selves as to the thing we have done. Have 
 we asked anything? Wliat then have we 
 asked? What shall we go forth to expect 
 and to wait for? Wherein shall we know 
 whether God has answered us? Thus let us 
 give reality to form, and spirit to substance. 
 
Unreality. 31 
 
 Thus let us practise ourselves here below for 
 a worship which shall be perpetual above. 
 Thus let us make trial of the efficacy of wor- 
 ship, by seeing whether aught, in deed and in 
 truth, comes of it. 
 
 And one thing more let me say, most 
 suitable to this occasion. Connect worship 
 with practice. Try the effect of your prayers 
 upon the life. If nothing comes of Services, 
 be sure that all is wrong with you. For this 
 reason— if there were none else — I do not 
 join in the common disparagement of Charity 
 Sermons \ They bring home to us the con- 
 nection, the inseparable connection, between 
 prayer and work, between preaching and 
 practice. This day I have again, as on more 
 than one former occasion^, to ask your alms 
 for the poor and needy ; not indeed for the 
 wants of the body, but for that other and 
 worse famine of which a Prophet tells — not 
 of bread nor of water, bnt of hearing the 
 
 1 A Collection was made after this Sermon in aid of the 
 Fund for providing Additional Curates in Cambridge and 
 its suburbs. 
 
 - In 1862 and 1866. 
 
32 Unreality. 
 
 words of the LortP. Two years ago, you 
 responded to the appeal addressed to you by 
 a noble contribution ; enough, or almost 
 enough, for the support of one Minister for a 
 whole year. Let it not be otherwise to-day ! 
 Let your thoughts go forth from this honour- 
 ed, this time-honoured and God-honoured 
 place of hearing, to the population, dense I 
 may truly call it, and deeply, shamefully in- 
 digent, lying around this city of God's light, 
 the light of education and the light of the 
 Word, which ought to be, and which in some 
 senses is, a centre of illumination to towns 
 and countries into which it sends forth year 
 by year, godly. God-fearing, God-taught 
 men, carrying the torch of truth, the lamp of 
 grace, the light of life. Let not the near 
 neighbourhood starve, while the far-off are 
 fed by you to the full ! Let the offerings of 
 a free heart this day be plenteous as in days 
 of old, to the glory of the one Lord and to 
 the salvation of many souls. 
 
 I would dare to urge my plea by one last 
 1 Amos viii. 1 1. 
 
Unreality. 33 
 
 argument. It comes to you from the dead. 
 The Church of England is mourning this day 
 the loss of her chief Pastor': a man of many 
 gifts and more graces : a man of dihgent, 
 simple, godly life: a man tried in many 
 things and in many places, and carrying into 
 all the same kindly, genial, generous spirit — 
 too kindly perhaps for some offices; too good, 
 I would almost dare to say, for some of the 
 persons and for some of the occasions with 
 which the Providence of God called him to 
 deal. But he did ivhat he could"'.... \y\ himself, 
 he was, in many respects, a specimen of 
 Christian men and Christian bishops. I know 
 of definite instances — one instance specially 
 rises before me — in which he applied himself 
 to the reformation of an individual life; 
 rescuing a poor neighbour from the prison- 
 house of inveterate intemperance, and con- 
 tinuing to watch his recovery, and still to 
 animate him to the struggle by letter, when 
 
 ^ This Sermon was preached on the Sunday after the 
 deatli of the Lite Archbibhop of Canterbury. 
 ^ Mark xiv. 8. 
 
 3 
 
34 Unreality. 
 
 he had been himself removed to a distant 
 Diocese, and to a burden of new toils and 
 cares amidst which forgetfulness might have 
 been pardoned. One such recollection shines 
 more brightly below — one such grace certainly 
 is more illustrious in heaven — than many 
 an eloquent Sermon, or many a trium- 
 phant progress through admiring Churches. 
 Well were it for us all if more were like 
 him ! 
 
 And now he rests from his labours : rests, 
 they say, with a smile on his face — rather 
 anticipative of the future than retrospective 
 of the past. He rests — and we remain. We 
 leave out the honoured name in our Bidding 
 Prayer : but that is because we have inserted 
 it, in thought at least, in the thanksgiving 
 for All the Saints. Let us follow him in 
 his gentleness, in his meekness, in his 
 charity. Let us follow him, first of all, in 
 that reality of faith and devotion, which 
 breathed on his deathbed in words which 
 will long be remembered and treasured in 
 the Churches — 
 
Unreality. 35 
 
 A poor and guilty sinner I know myself 
 to be ...I commit my soul into the hands of 
 my God and dear Saviour. I have had 
 proofs enough of His love in the past, and I 
 am well assured that whatever sufferings or 
 trials are permitted to befall me are visita- 
 tions of love. Though He slay me, yet zvill 
 I trust in Him. 
 
 All Saints' Day, 
 November i, 1868. 
 
 3—2 
 
II. 
 
 INDOLENCE. 
 
Hebrews vi. 12. 
 
 That yc be not slot/if iil, but folloivcrs of thcvi 
 zsjJio through faith and patience inherit the 
 promises. 
 
 St Jude bids us to contend earnestly for the 
 faith once delivered to the saints'^. He speaks 
 of Christian people as an army of holy [con- 
 secrated) men, to whose keeping there has 
 been entrusted a sort of sacred banner, a 
 standard of Divine loyalty and allegiance, for 
 the safety of which they are made responsible 
 to their King. This banner is tJie faith; 
 that revelation of truth (spoken of last Sun- 
 day) which is presented to the individual 
 faith as its object of apprehension. This 
 faith, once (that is, ojice for all) delivered, is 
 in jeopardy. It has to be contended for; nay, 
 St Jude's word is, contended over — as though 
 
 1 Jude 
 
40 Indoleiicc. 
 
 it were already struck down, laid low, even 
 to the ground'^, and the business of the faithful 
 few were to cover, to protect, to fight over it. 
 It is a strong figure ; certainly as true and as 
 forcible in our days as in his. And it could 
 not have been inappropriate to make this the 
 text of these Sermons ; to bid the occupants 
 of this Church, older and younger alike, to 
 fight the battle of the imperilled faith of the 
 Church in this their day. Where, if not in 
 an English University, can we look for cham- 
 pions of God's truth — for the fighting men of 
 His Church in reference to doctrine } Never- 
 theless we have not chosen this particular 
 topic. Not because we disparage its import- 
 ance ; not because we think that anywhere it 
 could be more suitable : but for these two 
 other reasons. First, because it could not, 
 even here, come home to all men : there must 
 be, even in this Congregation, many who feel 
 that they have no aptitude, and therefore no 
 call, to come forth as the disputants and 
 controversialists of their day, even on God's 
 
 ^ Isai. xxvi. 5. 
 
Indolence. 4 1 
 
 bchalp. And secondly, because there is always 
 a risk in this service, a spiritual risk : there is 
 so much in it which is unwholesome ; such a 
 tendency to personality ; such a temptation 
 to wrath and wrangling ; such a liability to 
 seek triumphs rather than to win souls ; such 
 a fatal readiness to put doctrine in the place 
 of practice, and opinion in the place of life ; 
 above all, so terrible a likelihood of overlook- 
 ing oneself, and, in the zeal of a supposed 
 anxiety for the faith, forgetting that one 
 wcigJiticr inattcf^, which is Faith itself 
 
 Therefore, instead of bidding each man, 
 and each young man, in this Congregation, to 
 become a disputant for the faith, however 
 seriously and sorely imperilled in this late 
 (perhaps latest) period of the Church's trial, 
 we have said this rather, Look to yo7ir oivn 
 faith: guard it, watch over it, your choicest, 
 your most precarious possession: and in so 
 doiiig yoti will best be accomplishing that wJiich 
 St Jude, and the Spirit who spake in him, 
 meant, for us, when he charged the men of 
 
 ^ Job xxxvi. 2. ^ Matt, xxiii. 23. 
 
42 Indolence. 
 
 his day to contend and to struggle over the faith 
 itself. We wrestle not against flesh and blood ' : 
 we wrestle against spiritual foes, and it is 
 the first stratagem of their subtle, their most 
 experienced warfare, to turn off the attention 
 of the soul from the true key of the position, 
 from the actual point of attack. 
 
 We have proposed, then, in the plainest 
 and most practical way to do what an old 
 king of Judah proposed to his enemy the king 
 of Israel, namely, to look our foe in the face" ; 
 to think with ourselves what are some of 
 those adversaries to our faith — in other words, 
 \J to our own personal insight into, and interest 
 in, the things of God — with which we must 
 enter into conflict day by day if we would be 
 believing men — if we would ourselves fight the 
 good fight of faith, and lay hold on eternal 
 life\ 
 
 We have placed first in this list the spirit 
 of Unreality ; that habit of holding for truths 
 many doctrines which we have never grasped 
 and never handled, of going out to battle in 
 ' Eph. vi. 12. • 1 Kings xiv. 8. ' i Tim. vi. 12. 
 
Indolence. 43 
 
 armour which we have not proved'^, of wor- 
 shipping God in words and forms which, for 
 us, at the time, mean nothing — which, if in 
 one sense the opposite, is in another sense 
 an opponent, one amongst m.any, of that 
 spiritual vision, that sight of the unseen, that 
 soul's intuition, which is the essence of Faith. 
 
 To-day we will change the subject, and 
 speak, under the guidance of the text, of 
 another enemy of the personal faith, which is 
 the spirit of Ixdolence. That yc be not 
 slotJifiil, blU folloivers {imitators) of tliein who 
 throiLgJi faith and patience now inherit the 
 promises. The words themselves give the 
 contrast. Not slothful, but men of faith. 
 Indolence, sluggishness, is a foe of faith. 
 
 And where, my brethren, shall we begin, 
 and where end, in grappling with this foe t 
 What department of the being is his strong- 
 hold ? or from what region — of body, soul, or 
 spirit — is he fenced out t 
 
 I. It can never be unnecessary — not even 
 here — to dwell, though it must be summarily 
 
 ' I Sam. xvii. 39. 
 
44 
 
 Indolence. 
 
 and in enigma, upon the warfare of sloth in 
 the body. 
 
 We do not wish to estimate over-highly 
 that bodily exercise of which St Paul says in 
 all senses — though chiefly in a very different 
 sense from this — that it profitcth little^. We 
 do not join in that flattery of flesh and 
 bone, that worship of muscle and sinew, that 
 idolatry of strength and agility, which has 
 been carried, we think, much too far in our 
 Schools and Universities. We must be bold 
 to speak of it, if we are Christians — nay, if 
 we are rational beings — in terms more mea- 
 sured and less exalted. The highest height 
 of bodily prowess is essentially lower than 
 the humblest developement of intellectual 
 strength. And the loftiest flight of intel- 
 lectual ambition never rises into the very 
 lowest heaven of spiritual grace. These are 
 gradations, not of man's making, but of God's 
 ordaining. Soul first, then mind, last body. 
 Do not expect— for it is impossible — to re- 
 arrange for yourself the primeval law, to in- 
 1 1 Tim. iv. 8. 
 
Indolence. 
 
 45 
 
 vert the everlasting order, of the material, 
 the mental, and the spiritual. Do not allow 
 yourself to live as if you could do so. God 
 has settled these things : we must judge, and 
 we must act, accordingly. We cannot admit 
 that either Universities or Schools exist for the 
 sake of games ; and still less that that later 
 age, that maturer manhood, in which (if any- 
 where) man must be served and God hon- 
 oured below, can devote to sports of the field 
 — and be blameless — its life and breath and 
 all things^. 
 
 But, though this is true, and the remem- 
 brance of it urgent, it is to a different peril 
 that I would turn your thoughts now. Better 
 any diligence than any sloth. Better the stre- 
 nuous idleness of bodily exercise, than the 
 sluggish, purposeless lounging which is the 
 alternative for many. Not even that absorp- 
 tion of the faculties in corporeal energy — 
 not even that devotion of precious hours to 
 interests which perish ivith the iising"^ — is so 
 fatal to faith as the stagnation of all the 
 
 ^ Acts xvii. 25. " Col. ii. 11. 
 
46 
 
 Indolence. 
 
 powers in a dull monotonous idling. The 
 one may be excessive, may be irrational, 
 may be the jjostponing of higher objects to 
 lower, may be, so far, a dereliction of duty, 
 a forgetfulness of the future, a blindness to 
 the invisible and the everlasting : but it does 
 not so unstring the mind, it does not so drug 
 and paralyze the whole being, as that other 
 habit, of doing nothing, thinking nothing, 
 and caring for nothing, which is as hopeless in 
 prospect as it is fruitless and objectless in the 
 present. The man of activity may find his 
 scope, and even his mission, hereafter, in the 
 great world-wide work-field. Ill would it have 
 been for us, in the Crimean war, in the Indian 
 mutiny, if we had had no soldiers, and no 
 civilians, whose youth had been disciplined in 
 games, whose courage and whose endurance 
 had been practised in the hunting-field. Soul 
 ranks above mind, and mind above the body : 
 but lowest of all in the scale of human exist- 
 ence — in brute animal life there is no such 
 specimen — is that man who does notliing in 
 acknowledgment of the creation gift ; whose 
 
Indolence. 47 
 
 eye is not only bounded by the horizon of 
 time, but closed, absolutely closed, to every 
 interest of his being. 
 
 Do you ask why this meanest of all sloths 
 should be called a foe particularly of faith ? 
 I will answer, without hesitation, First, because 
 it is expectant of nothing. I might say of 
 it, as of Unreality before, that it is not only 
 one opponent, it is the very opposite, of 
 faith — for faith is active expectation, and 
 sloth is indolent contentment. And secondly, 
 because this kind of sloth is peculiarly friend- 
 ly to vices which are murderers of faith. 
 These men are the plague-spots of society : 
 in low life, they fill its gaols — in higher life 
 they secretly stain our very feasts of charity. 
 
 2. But I will go a step onward, and urge 
 the charge, that yc be not slothful, upon viinds 
 also. 
 
 It is undeniable that there are even in our 
 homes of learning — even amongst those who 
 must be described, by courtesy at least, as 
 scholars and students — a vast number of un- 
 
 ^ Jude T2. 
 
48 Indolence. 
 
 occupied minds. There are men who take no 
 interest (to use the conventional, though far 
 too respectful phrase) in the studies of the 
 place. It is difficult to see how this excuse, 
 if such it ever was, can be admissible now. 
 Surely it is a tradition of the past, rather than 
 a suggestion of the present. It comes down 
 to us from a time when there was in this 
 University but one recognized line of study, 
 but one system of instruction and one 
 possibility of reward, and when it might 
 happen that there was such a natural in- 
 aptitude, so absolute an incapacity, for the 
 cultivation of that one, as drove a man alto- 
 gether out of the only course marked out 
 for intellectual effort. Who can say this 
 now .'' Who, that is not born incapable of 
 thought, can be at a loss, in these days, to find, 
 in this place, a career and a goal.' I would 
 most earnestly charge it upon my younger 
 and my youngest hearers to-day, that they 
 allow themselves in no such plea for sloth. 
 The man who can find no interest in the 
 studies of this place, has himself only to 
 
Indolence. 49 
 
 blame for it. Let each one, whose line of 
 study is not yet definitely chosen, choose his 
 line instantly. Let him take counsel upon 
 it — with himself at least, always the best of 
 counsellors if there be first but an honest 
 mind — and let this very week witness the 
 desired obedience, in him, to the Apostolical 
 charge, that, in mind at least, we be not 
 slothful. 
 
 But there is a sluggishness of mind, often- 
 times, even in those who are not absolutely 
 standing idle. 
 
 For example, there is, in almost all of us, 
 a proncness to inattention. The eye passes 
 over the line, reaches the foot of the page, 
 arrives, in due course, at the end of chapter 
 and volume — and nothing remains of it. Of 
 all the reproaches which arise against a man 
 in his chamber of study, there is none more 
 bitter than these two — the sight of his own 
 books unread, and the sight of his own books 
 read. The one accuses him of waste — the 
 other accuses him of inattention. We are 
 slothful in not reading — we are slothful also 
 
 4 
 
50 
 
 Indolence 
 
 in reading. I would beg you to grapple 
 with the demon of indolence betimes, in this 
 form of inattention. Examine yourself in 
 )'our reading. Make each book, each page, 
 each sentence, give account of itself to you. 
 This which your University does for you in 
 her place, do also — you can better do it — for 
 yourself. 
 
 Again, there is in most men a habit too 
 of desultoriness. We see it in the day, and 
 we see it in the life. Some have spent one 
 year, or two years, in this place, and they 
 have not yet resolved upon their line of study. 
 They know not in which, or whether in any, 
 of the recognized branches, they will seek 
 honours. Thus they miss all, in asking which. 
 And so in details. From book to book, from 
 subject to subject, from one study and from 
 one accomplishment to another, Ave are still 
 passing and re-passing, and there is nothing 
 done, and nothing gained, in any. Unstable 
 as ivatcr, thon. shalt not excel 
 
 Once more, still speaking of mind, there 
 
 * Gen. xlix. 4. 
 
Indolence. 5 1 
 
 is a general dreaminess and listlessness and 
 vagueness, yet more common perhaps than 
 cither of the former. Sometimes health has 
 to do with it : — and yet even health is more 
 under a man's control than we like to be- 
 lieve it : a little wilfulness in habits and 
 hours, in such small things as diet, sleep, 
 and exercise, will make a man an invalid 
 whom God never made so, and whom God 
 must reprove and visit and judge for being 
 so. And even excess in study will account 
 for this : a man cannot fix his thought, can- 
 not concentrate his effort, from mere extra- 
 vagance of labour, or from mere superfluity 
 of anxiety — in other words, from want of wis- 
 dom or want of faith — and so he is slothful in 
 business ]v\9,'i from over-business— just because 
 he has not been (in the Christian sense) fer- 
 vent also in spirit, serving the Lord'^. 
 
 3. Let us turn then — as these last words 
 counsel us — to that kind of indolence of which 
 the Apostle actually wrote the warning, That 
 yc be not slothful. 
 
 ^ Rom. xii. i r. 
 
5 2 Indolence. 
 
 It is true, each man is one, not many. V/e 
 may divide, for the sake of distinctness, this 
 total which is the man — we have Scriptural 
 authority for doing so' — into two, or into three, 
 parts : but we must not forget that the living, 
 thinking, moving person is one and the same 
 through all these, and if sloth acts in one part 
 it acts in all, and acts in the unit being of 
 which each part is an aspect. If the body is 
 slothful, the man is slothful ; and if the mind 
 is slothful, the man is slothful : — and that will 
 be our answer to any one who should object 
 that neither body nor mind have to do with 
 faith. But let us come now to that of which 
 there can be no question — the action of sloth 
 in the soul — that is, in the unit being in its 
 direct aspect towards God. 
 
 (i) And here we shall observe it first in 
 its dealing with Divine truth. 
 
 There ought to be no doubt that Revelation 
 is not given to save a man trouble. If it be 
 true that in matters of life man's extremity 
 is God's cpportnnity, so in matters of know- 
 
 1 I Cor. vii. 3^. l Thess. v. 23. 
 
Indolence. 5 3 
 
 ledge it is true likewise that, where man ends, 
 God begins. Man can think, and God would 
 have liim think : man can reason and ponder 
 and reflect and exercise judgment, and God 
 would have him do each one of these things 
 in regard to truth spiritual, eternal, and 
 Divine. If Revelation came to supersede 
 effort — to make it needless, wrong, presump- 
 tuous, to use God's natural gift of thought 
 upon God's supernatural gift of enlightenment 
 from above — Revelation itself would lose one 
 sure mark of its origin and one chief object of 
 its coming. Canst tliou by searching find out 
 God"- ? No— but, if God declares Himself, it 
 is to show me how to search so that I may 
 find. The knowledge of God is not a science, 
 but an acquaintanceship : it is not the know- 
 ledge of a book, it is the knowledge of a Per- 
 son. And that knowledge presupposes toil 
 and patience and progress, a setting out and 
 an arrival, all the more, not the less, because 
 God has vouchsafed it for our direction. 
 Thus, of all impediments to spiritual know- 
 ' Job xi. 7. 
 
54 Indolence, 
 
 ledge, none is greater than sloth. The en- 
 trance of sloth into religion is fatal even to 
 the reception of truth. 
 
 Watch it in its influence. 
 
 It makes one man a bigot. If it is not 
 necessary, if it is not safe, to think — if Revela- 
 tion vi^as given as a solid lump of doctrine, to 
 be laid up in the napkin of an indolent assent, 
 or used as a missile against infidels, or brought 
 out at set times, on Sundays and holy days, 
 for parade or ornament — let me take it on 
 trust from the family in which I was born, or 
 the sect or the party into which disposition or 
 accident has thrown me, and let me count it a 
 mark rather of attainment than of irreligion to 
 be confident in my interpretation of its mean- 
 ing, and vehement in my denunciation of all 
 who differently read it. This is the very historj- 
 of religious partizanship. One man, taught of 
 God or untaught, ponders and meditates, at 
 last speaks and writes : his thought, his con- 
 clusion, is taken on trust by thousands, who 
 just call themselves by his name, and follow, 
 or think they follow, where he leads or led. 
 
Indolence. 5 5 
 
 It is sloth which really marshals the ranks, 
 and turns the thoughtful utterance of one into 
 the senseless violent gabble of the many. 
 
 It makes another man a sceptic. We do 
 far too much honour to doubt when we dig- 
 nify it by the title of free-thinking. Certainly 
 there are those who have reasoned themselves 
 into unbelief; as there are those who have 
 through much learning, truly or falsely so 
 called, confused and hopelessly entangled an 
 intellect never perhaps the clearest. But of 
 this I am assured — that, for one man who 
 disbelieves the Gospel through overmuch 
 thinking, thousands and tens of thousands 
 doubt about it through the precipitancy of 
 indolence. Sloth loves suspense. Not to reject 
 the Gospel — for this might alarm ; not to call 
 myself an infidel — for this still requires some 
 courage ; but to leave all doubtful — to recog- 
 nize the certainty of nothing — to lay no result 
 by in the storehouse of conviction, and to 
 treat no principle as established beyond the 
 reach of assault — this is the counsel of sloth 
 in reference to all truth ; and when you point 
 
56 
 
 Indolence. 
 
 to this man and that man, of taste, of elo- 
 quence, of intellect, who has never given in 
 his adhesion to the Gospel of Christ, I shall 
 still think that, in matters of the soul, indo- 
 lence may have been his counsellor, and that 
 he who was diligent in business, and sagacious 
 in politics, may yet have been sluggish in 
 answering the greater question, What must I 
 do to be saved ? 
 
 And certainly, if these are the effects of 
 indolence in its more marked and definable 
 workings, there is an influence which it ex- 
 erts day by day, in reference to the reception 
 of Divine truth, in the hearts of all Avho are 
 compassed with human infirmity. We read 
 in this Epistle of a dulncss of hearing — but 
 it is the same word (in the original) as that 
 on which the text turns — a slothfniness, or 
 iliiggishness, of car^ — which makes men unfit 
 to enter into the deeper mysteries of Scrip- 
 ture and the Gospel. Which of us knows not 
 something of that deadening, by sloth, of the 
 spiritual ear.' Where in us is that quickness, 
 
 ' Heb. V. II, vu-OpuL '/eyivnTf raU a.voais. 
 
Indolence. 5 7 
 
 that alertness, that alacrity in catching the 
 sound of God's voice in the Bible, which was 
 never so touchingly expressed as in that answer 
 put by the old man into the child's mouth at 
 Shiloh, Speak, Lord: for thy servant IiearetJt^ ? 
 What record, what disclosure, what command, 
 what expostulation of Scripture, does not come 
 to us clouded and dimmed and muffled and 
 stifled, rather as the muttering echo of a far- 
 off thunder, than as the articulate speech of a 
 Person dealing with us and conversing with 
 us from an opened heaven'''? This too is of 
 sloth. We do not arise and bestir ourselves — 
 we do not go forth, like Patriarchs and Pro- 
 phets of old, to stand under the open sky* and 
 Jieaj-ken what God the Lord shall say con- 
 cerning ns* — we sit still at home, and expect 
 the Word to come to us, ready labelled for 
 use, legibly directed for application — we treat 
 it as a dead letter, and expect it to turn itself 
 for us by sleight or magic into a living voice 
 • — when, in reality, the change which must 
 
 ' I Sam. iii. 9. - Heb. xii. 
 
 ^ Gen. XV. 5. Fsr^m viil. 3. * P.-.alm Ix.xxv. 8. 
 
5 8 Indolence. 
 
 pass upon it is a change in ourselves, and he 
 who would find God in his Bible must begin 
 by seeking Him in his soul. 
 
 (2) And thus we have passed, by a na- 
 tural, an almost imperceptible transition, from 
 the province of thought to the province of 
 devotion ; from the reception of Divine truth 
 to the exercise of Divine communion. And 
 need we spend words or moments in showing 
 to any one how indolence acts day by day in 
 this truest and deepest part of the life — that 
 which has a direct relation to God Himself? 
 What is it which, as a simple literal fact, 
 keeps many young men, and many active 
 and vigorous and (in other respects) not self- 
 indulgent men, from beginning each day with 
 an earnest, thoughtful, deliberate act of self- 
 dedication and devotion } Shall we be afraid 
 to name it by its name in this house of 
 God's worship.' Shall we not say plainly. It 
 is sloth — dull sloth — sloth in its meanest, 
 poorest, most corporeal aspect — we sufier our- 
 selves to sleep on when we should be waking, 
 and leave no room for God between the in- 
 
Indolence. 59 
 
 firmity of the flesh and the importunity of 
 the world ? 
 
 But the spirit of indolence, in this form 
 of indevotion, is not expelled even by wor- 
 ship. Who does not vex himself with the 
 miserable experience, not now of that sloth 
 which prevents, but of that sloth which spoils 
 prayer ? What other occupation of life is 
 gone through with the languor, with the 
 drowsiness, with the half-attention, with the 
 divided distracted thought, which besets the 
 act of praying ? / will arise, one said, a)id 
 go to viy Father ' ; we arise not — we go not : 
 we say rather, / zvill sit still, and see ivhcihcr 
 God will come to me: it matters not — / luill 
 pay my paltry due of worship, and, if nothing 
 comes of it, I shall be blameless! And no- 
 thing does come of it. The prayer so prayed 
 asked nothing — and God, who is a Spirit, saw 
 nothing, heard nothing, recognized nothing, 
 in it. There is none, the Prophet says, that 
 callcth npon Thy name — why Because there 
 
 Luke XV. 18. 
 
6o 
 
 I-.idolcncc. 
 
 is none, he adds, that stirrctJi itp hiiiisc/f to 
 take hold of Thcc^. Prayer, true prayer, re- 
 quires more of effort, more of exertion, than 
 any other act of the life : every other has 
 something to assist it ; the mere presence, 
 the mere scene, the mere object, helps the 
 doing : in prayer, there is nothing to aid ; 
 everything is against it : the pressure of 
 things seen, the atmosphere of earth and 
 sense surrounding, all fights against that 
 speaking to the Invisible : unbelief prompts 
 the thought, Tlicrc is no One listening: sloth 
 weighs down the arm that should be lifted, 
 and says. It is in vain — let alone — see zuhc- 
 tJicr some ar.swcr may not come wit/iout the 
 asking: therefore the expression is not one 
 whit too strong, tJiat stirreth up himself, as 
 you would rouse a smouldering fire, or waken 
 a man from that sleep which is death's bro- 
 ther, not merely to approach, not merely to 
 ;iddress, but actually, with the strong hand of 
 the soul, to take hold of Tltcc ! This is that 
 
Indolence. 
 
 6r 
 
 soul's effort of which the Old Testament tells, 
 in mysterious type and shadow, when the 
 way-worn Patriarch, left alone by the brook, 
 wrestled all the night long with an unknown 
 Person, to Avhom he said, after all those lin- 
 gering hours, / zvill not let thee go, except tho7i 
 bless mc^. This is that agony of mental strug- 
 gle, of which the garden of Gethsemane, on 
 the night of the Passion, witnessed the Divine 
 example ; and of which that Master's latest- 
 born Apostle^ wrote to one of his Churches, 
 / ivonld that yc knciv — it would give you an 
 idea of my love, not otherwise to be gained — 
 what great conflict I have for you, and for 
 them at Laodicea—d.\\d not for these alone, 
 but even for all those zvho have not seen my 
 face in the flesh^. Over such prayers as these 
 the demon of indolence had no power. God 
 give us all grace, my brethren, ourselves to 
 go and do likezvise* ! Let us, in this sense, 
 become followers of those zuho through faith 
 and patience fought the good fight before us, 
 
 1 Oen. xxxii. 24—26. 2 j c^,., ^v. 8. 
 
 2 Col. ii. I. 4 Luk^ X. 37. 
 
62 
 
 Indolence. 
 
 and conquered. Depend upon it, there is 
 one sign which has ever marked the true 
 heir of salvation ; and that is, earnestness in 
 praying. All else may have varied: one 
 man has shown one grace, or one kind and 
 class of Christian graces, and another an- 
 other ; one has fallen short in this perfection, 
 and another in that ; one has been burdened 
 with this infirmity, and another with that ; 
 but I do not believe that there is one occu- 
 pant, at this moment, of the Paradise of God 
 unseen, of whom this could not be said, He 
 was a man of prayer. Sloth assailed him, 
 and sin assailed him, and Satan assailed him, 
 not least, but most of all, when he prayed : 
 he knew what it was to shrink from the 
 effort, he knew what it was to feel that 
 wrestling which alone prevails difficult, severe, 
 daunting to flesh and blood : but he knew 
 also that to such wrestling alone heaven 
 at last opens, that through such wrestling 
 alone heaven is at last won ; and therefore he 
 persevered day by day, and God gave him 
 the victory : of him it was true, on the whole 
 
hidolcnce. 63 
 
 — or he had not been where he is — that he 
 always prayed, and never fainted'^. 
 
 (3) Finally, as in the regions of thought 
 and of worship, so also in that region which 
 the context specially contemplates, the re- 
 gion of Christian action, there is a special 
 warfare to be waged with the spirit of sloth. 
 
 God is not unrighteous, so runs the pass- 
 age, to forget your work and labour of love. 
 And we desire that every one of yon do show 
 the same diligence unto the end : that ye be 
 not slotJfuP. It is thus, by a diligent earnest 
 continuance in well-doing — in other words, 
 in a life of active charity — that the departed 
 saints are to be imitated. 
 
 It might seem as though I were forgetting 
 the peculiar circumstances of the Congrega- 
 tion, when I seek to give prominence to this 
 particular topic to-day. Last Sunday you 
 were invited to an act of almsgiving : to-day 
 it is not so. And, apart from some direct 
 object of that kind, it may not be evident at 
 first sight what can be the practical bearing 
 ^ Luke xviii. i. ^ Heb. vi. lo — 12, 
 
G4 Indolence. 
 
 of a call, from this Pulpit, to a life of charit}-. 
 Shall I be thought to exaggerate if I venture 
 to say that I know of no audience to which 
 such a call could be more appropriate ? It is 
 not only that you run some special risks of 
 forgetting it : it is not only that your life in 
 this place is proverbially prone to selfishness : 
 it is not only that a double strength of 
 Christian resolution is needed to make you, 
 at this age, and in these circumstances, that 
 which yet you must be if you would ever 
 hear the glad summons. Conic, yc blessed of 
 viy Father . . . for I was in distress, and ye 
 ministered to vie^. It is not only the difficulty 
 of the duty which proves its urgency ; nor 
 yet the certainty that in some future stage of 
 your life, the very next stage to this, you 
 iintst enter upon a work of unselfish well- 
 doing, if you would be Christians : — far, far 
 more than this. I am going to assert that 
 here, if anywhere, a life of charity is possible, 
 and that here, if anywhere, the evil spirit of 
 sloth is busy to preclude it. 
 
 ^ Matt. XXV. 34—36. 
 
Indolence. 65 
 
 I speak not only, though I would ever 
 speak with respect and sympathy, of those 
 direct efforts in behalf of Christ and Christ's 
 Gospel, of Christ and Christ's poor, of Christ 
 and Christ's little ones, which are ever coun- 
 teracting — never more than now — the more 
 selfish and antichristian influences of a life 
 and a society like ours. I speak not of these 
 only or chiefly. And yet I would, in passing, 
 bear my testimony to the blessed rebound 
 and reaction of good upon characters thus 
 disciplined in the University for serving God 
 afterwards in their generation. I would recall, 
 with grateful affection, names once known 
 here in connection with these youthful enter- 
 prises of charity, and made illustrious after- 
 wards in the Church by a maturer devotion, 
 at home and abroad, to the cause of truth and 
 the service of mankind : and I would venture 
 to ask some of those who now, in their stead, 
 fill these galleries, whether they might not, 
 more of them, bethink themselves of some 
 Parish School or Parish District in this Town, 
 to which they might off"er a spare hour, on 
 
66 
 
 Indolence. 
 
 Sunday or week-day, for the benefit of others 
 and for their own ; learning practically betimes 
 what is the condition, physical, intellectual, 
 moral, spiritual, of that world into which God 
 has brought them — in which will lie, for a life- 
 time, their work and their duty and their 
 suffering — and drawing down, upon their own 
 studies, and upon their own brighter and 
 more joyous existence, a blessing not of earth 
 but of heaven. 
 
 But even this exhausts not the capabilities 
 for good, the special capabilities, of a life in 
 this place of education. If the spirit of cha- 
 rity be in you, it will never want a work. 
 Glorious things have been done here in 
 secret, without once stepping forth, even in 
 the cause of charity, into the outer world 
 which surrounds us. Sicknesses of mind, and 
 sicknesses of body — sharp, sudden, trj-ing 
 emergencies of suffering — come here, as they 
 come everywhere on this earth of sin and the 
 fall ; and often there is none to minister on 
 the instant but a friend. Happy he, whose 
 heart is so attuned and so disciplined by faith 
 
Indolence. 67 
 
 and love, by constant self-control and habi- 
 tual self-denial, that he may be ready at once 
 with the word of wisdom and the act of kind- 
 ness — ready to sacrifice rest, exercise, study, 
 health itself, to minister, through long nights 
 and days, to the sin-stricken conscience or 
 beside the bed of sickness and death ! 
 
 These special calls are of necessity rare 
 and exceptional : but not by these alone are 
 the offices of charity bounded. Where is he, 
 for example, who has not some one amongst 
 his own friends, of whose spiritual or moral 
 well-being he cannot as a Christian feel him- 
 self assured ? some one perhaps whom he 
 knew in other days, at school, or at home ; 
 some one whom friends or relations have re- 
 quested him to notice, ignorant, it may be, 
 of the dispositions of either, or of the mutual 
 fitness of the two ; some one whom he sees 
 (as the expressive phrase is) to be going on 
 ill, living wastefully, idly, or worse yet, and 
 whom it is both easy to shake off and not 
 easy to attract or help. Surely such expe- 
 riences are common, as of old time : and I 
 
68 
 
 Indolence. 
 
 bid you to apply to them the counsels of the 
 text. Enter with serious thought into the 
 character, into the disposition, into the faults 
 and trials, of the person thus brought nigh 
 to you. Despise him not — for God made 
 him. Despair not of him — for for him Christ 
 died. Set before you, as a definite object, his 
 improvement, his progress, his soul's health. 
 Pray for him, watch over him, influence him 
 as God enables. Where is the world so full 
 of such opportunities as this Where else, 
 where in later life, will you find yourself so 
 placed, as here, within reach of other lives 
 and other souls, still tender with youth, still 
 ductile and pliable to the touch of friendship, 
 brought nigh to you not by official duty but 
 by community of circumstances t Seize, I 
 pray you, while it is yours, the flying mo- 
 ment ! buy np, as St Paul expresses it, the 
 one, the momentous opportunity — remember- 
 ing always that time is short and that the 
 days are eviP ! 
 
 And if ever, in this as in all else, the evil 
 1 Eph. V. 1 6. 
 
Indolence. 
 
 69 
 
 spirit of indolence should whisper to you, 
 Am I my brothers keeper^? if sloth should 
 bid you think of yourself, your own ease, 
 your own amusement, your own interest, 
 your own profiting, and not another's — then 
 think of all those who before you have thus 
 been tempted, and yet by God's grace have 
 conquered — those who, in the successive 
 generations of this University, have here 
 exercised themselves unto godliness"^, and gone 
 forth, one by one, into the struggles of an 
 ampler yet scarcely more trying arena, the 
 stronger and the better and the wiser for 
 having here proved the strength and prac- 
 tised the wielding of the weapons of God's 
 armour — think of these, and pray for grace to 
 keep the Apostle's charge ever before you — 
 
 That ye be not slotJifiil, but followers of 
 them zvho throngh faith and patience inherit 
 the promises. 
 
 1 Gen. iv. 9. 2 i Tim. iv. 7. 
 
 Twenty-Second Sunday after Trinity, 
 November 8, 1868. 
 
III. 
 
 IRREVERENCE. 
 
Hebrews v. 7. 
 
 And was heard in that He feared. 
 
 Was heard, the Greek text says, from His 
 reverence'^. The word expresses that spirit 
 of caution or scrupulosity with which a man 
 takes into his hand an object of peculiar 
 value or sacredness — fearing to spoil, fear- 
 ing to desecrate. As a substantive, it occurs 
 once only besides in the New Testament, 
 and is there rendered by our Translators godly 
 fear. Let 7is have grace, whereby we may 
 serve God acceptably with reverence and godly 
 fear". But the adjective and the verb are 
 of less rare occurrence. Simeon is described 
 as just and devout^: the word is the same 
 
 * KaJ tlaaKovaBeU dirh t^s evXa^elas. 
 
 ' Heb. xii. 18. The received text has fiera alSoCs Kal 
 evXa^clas, and the Authorized Version wns no doubt made 
 from this reading. The revised text has fiera dXa^elas Kal 
 Siovs. 
 
 ^ Luke ii. 25, SiVaios Kal ei)Xo/3)}s. 
 
74 
 
 Irreverence. 
 
 — reverent. Devout [reverent) men carried 
 Stephen to his burial, and made great lametita- 
 tion over him'^. In the catalogue of the men 
 of Faith, in this Epistle, Noah is described as 
 moved with fear^, with a feeling of devout re- 
 verence, to prepare his Ark, whereby he 
 became heir of the righteousness which is by 
 faith. In the Septuagint the same word is 
 used, in some signal passages, as the render- 
 ing, I believe, of two Hebrew verbs con- 
 veying the several ideas of trembling and 
 of silence. Moses hid his face, for he was 
 afraid to look upon God^ — trembled, St 
 Stephen says, with a more exact regard 
 perhaps to the original, and durst not beliold*. 
 And thus God Himself expostulates with 
 His rebellious people in the Book of Jere- 
 miah. Fear ye not vie? saith the Lord: 
 will j'c not tremble at my presence^? And 
 
 ^ Acts viii. 2, dv5p(s eiXa^eis. 
 2 Heb. xi. 7, evXa^-qeeis. 
 
 ' Exod. iii. 6, LXX. evXa^eTro yap KaT(H^\e\f/ai hwirioy 
 Tov Qeov. 
 
 ^ Acts vii. 32, lirrponos yevofievos k.t.\. 
 
 ^ Jerem. v. 22, LXX. ^ airb npoauirov p.ov ovk ev\a- 
 
Irrevereitce. 75 
 
 the Prophets Habakkuk and Zechariah are 
 interpreted by the same word in the Septua- 
 gint Version, when they say, the one, But the 
 Lord is in His holy temple : let all the earth 
 keep silence before Him^ — and the other, Be 
 silent, O all flesh, befoj^e the Lord: for He is 
 raised up out of His holy habitation'^. 
 
 These examples give some additional 
 force and fulness to the thought here pre- 
 sented, And zvas heard from His reverence; 
 heard by reason of that spirit of awe, which 
 trembles, and which keeps silence, where God 
 is; which made the Eastern exile put off his 
 shoes when God spake with him'; which made 
 the Psalmist himself write, as though in ex- 
 press contradiction to his own act in handing 
 over his inspired song to the Chief Musician, 
 Praise is silent for Thee, O God, in Sion'^. The 
 deepest praise of all is a silence too : even as 
 the profoundest prayer is that which breathes 
 
 ^ Hab. ii. 10, LXX. evXa^eiaOoi otto Trpoaunrov avTov 
 Tracra ij yrj. 
 
 ^ Zech. ii. 13, LXX. evKaPeicrffu iraaa aapl dird Trpocrwirov 
 Kvpiov. 
 
 ^ Exod. iii. 5. Acts vii. 33. 
 ■* Psalm Ixv. I (margin). 
 
76 Irreverence. 
 
 itself in iinuttercd groanings^, the very voice of 
 God's Spirit, heard in that it feared. 
 
 We have not touched yet the most 
 memorable thing in this brief text; that the 
 Person spoken of is the Lord Jesus Christ 
 Himself. It is He who in the days of His 
 flesh offered up prayers and supplications with 
 strong crying and tears unto Him that was able 
 to save Him from death, and it is He who 
 was heard by reason of His raierenee. 
 
 We can scarcely fail to see in this verse 
 an allusion to the Agony in the garden of 
 Gethsemane. At all events, that was an 
 instance — a chief, a crowning instance — of 
 the thing spoken of. Does any dull prosaic 
 mind raise the objection, Christ was not saved 
 from death — Christ, on that occasion, was 7iot 
 Jieard? It is a striking example of our manner 
 of reading God's Word, and of our manner of 
 interpreting God's dealing. Is there no answer 
 to prayer but the literal.'' Is there no hearing 
 of prayer but that which just tamely puts 
 into the hand the very thing asked } Is there 
 1 Rom. viii. id. 
 
Irreverence. 77 
 
 no answering by contraries, and yet an- 
 swering the more completely ? Is there no 
 saving out of death, which was not a sav- 
 ing from death^ ? no strengtJieiiing with 
 strcngtJi in the soid'^, far more blessed, and far 
 more glorious, than the mere excusing from 
 suffering? All these questions — and yet one 
 more — must be pondered before we presume 
 to say that the text was not written of Geth- 
 semane. 
 
 I say, and yet one more. For indeed it 
 may be doubted whether the prayer of Christ 
 our Lord in the Garden was a prayer for 
 deliverance from the Cross; was, in other 
 words, an outburst of human shrinking from 
 pain and shame and mortal extremity, of which 
 at least we should have to say that it was at 
 variance with all else that we read concerning 
 Him — for calmly and uncomplainingly, and 
 with solemn longings also', He had set before 
 His disciples, as before Himself, the necessity 
 
 ^ The Greek is, irpot rov hvv6.ii.tvov (xu^eiv avrov (k 
 ffavdrov. 
 
 " Psalm cxxxviii. 3. 
 
 ' See Mark x. 32. Luke xii. 50. 
 
78 Irreverence. 
 
 of that end, and the glory thus only to be at- 
 tained both by Him and them ; whether it 
 was not rather against the blackness of a 
 spiritual darkness, against the crushing weight 
 upon the soul of the burden of a world's sins, 
 separating Him then, as afterwards upon the 
 Cross, from that blessedness of conscious com- 
 munion with the Father which had been His 
 stay and solace heretofore — whether, I say, 
 this was not the cup, this the hour, for the 
 passing of which Christ prayed \ and whether 
 it did not pass, for the time at least, when 
 there came that conscious, that visible, answer, 
 of which St Luke tells. There appeared an 
 Angel jaito Hint from heaven, strengtliening 
 Hini"^. He tvas heard in that He feared. 
 
 These are mysteries too deep for us, 
 straggling, tottering, sin-laden souls, to ex- 
 pect to penetrate. We will leave them in 
 their solemn recesses, and turn to one other, 
 the last remaining, preliminary to our de- 
 signed application of the text to-day — which 
 
 1 Matt. xxvi. 39. Mark xiv. 35. 
 - Luke xxii. 43. 
 
Irreverence. 
 
 79 
 
 is, the enquiry, How are such words as these 
 to be understood of the Divine Lord ? how 
 can we reconcile them with that revelation 
 upon which the availableness of the Cross 
 itself is suspended, the oneness of the Son 
 with the Father, the true Divinity — let us use 
 the plain word, the proper Deity — of Him 
 who died for us and rose again ? He was 
 heard for His reverence. He learned obedience, 
 the next verse says, by tlie tilings wliich He 
 siijfered. 
 
 We can grasp each half of the Christian 
 verity; we can apprehend the Godhead, we 
 can comprehend the Manhood: but we can- 
 not put them together; we cannot frame into 
 one whole the parts of which our faith is 
 made up. Be it so. We could almost say 
 that it was thus with inspired men. We read 
 in this same Epistle, of a Person by whom God 
 made the worlds'^ — what is that but an act of 
 Deity We read of a Person who upJiolds all 
 things by the word of His power"^ — what is He 
 
 1 Heb. i. 2. 
 
 » Heb. i. 3. 
 
8o 
 
 Irreverence. 
 
 by whose agency Creation itself — including 
 time and space, extension and duration, sun, 
 moon, and stars, worlds seen and unseen, 
 systems, our own and other, of orderly move- 
 ment and inconceivable vastness — was called 
 into existence, and is hourly, daily, annually, 
 everlastingly, maintained in existence — what 
 is He, let us know, but God, very God ? We 
 have no third term by which to designate 
 Him. Omnipotence, Omnipresence, Omni- 
 science, existence before time, universal a- 
 gency, the keystone and condition of all 
 being — what is this but God ? We know- 
 not of degrees of Deity : that which has 
 these properties, that which exercises these 
 powers, is Deity : it is our idea, it is almost 
 our definition — were it reverent to define 
 — of God Himself Therefore I say there 
 is no doubt who and Avhat this Person is 
 of whom it is written, in words now before 
 us, that He was heard for His reverence. 
 God give us all grace to hold fast this 
 faith — these two parts of the faith, if we can- 
 not as yet piece them into each other — the 
 
Irreverence. 
 
 8i 
 
 Humanity and the Deity, the Ecce Homo 
 and the Ecce Dais, out of which, in their 
 combination, springs the faith of saints, when 
 they say, in the adorations of time and 
 eternity, My Lord and my God^ ! Of this 
 Person it is here written, that He was heard 
 in tJiat He feared. For He too, for the 
 sake of us men and of our salvation, con- 
 descended to give, in human flesh, an ex- 
 act pattern of the perfect man ; so that we, 
 we wlio hve in times nearer or more distant, 
 even to the end of all time, might know Iiow 
 to walk so as to please God^ ; even by be- 
 coming like Him, in spirit and life, who did 
 truly divest Himself, by a miracle of self- 
 sacrifice, of the exercise of the attributes of 
 an inalienable Deity ^ and did consent to live 
 upon earth, through childhood, youth and 
 manhood, as a Prophet and a Minister and a 
 Sufferer too, as though He were only a Man 
 perfectly inspired and indwelt of the Holy 
 Ghost\ Of Him it is written that His prayer 
 
 ' John XX. 28. 2 I Thess. iv. r. 
 
 ^ Phil, ii.6, 7,fV/io/)</))7 9eoi" \nrapx<^v . . iavrbv e/ieVuo-ej/ k. t. \. 
 
 * Luke iv. 1, 18. John iii. 34. Acts x. 38. 
 
 6 
 
82 
 
 Irreverence. 
 
 below — most of all, His latest prayer, His 
 prayer of anguish and agony — was heard 
 because of His reverence. 
 
 We are speaking, in these Sermons, of the 
 Foes of Faith ; of those tendencies and incli- 
 nations of the fallen nature — we might even 
 go further, and call them — St Paul, certainly, 
 would have called them'^ — those workings and 
 influences of a personal spirit of evil — which 
 are directly antagonistic in us to the life of 
 faith. We have spoken of a spirit of Unrea- 
 lity, making profession unmeaning, and carry- 
 ing a practical falsehood into truth itself: 
 we have spoken of a spirit of Indolence, re- 
 laxing the very sinews of the spiritual being, 
 and making thought and worship and con- 
 duct alike vague and desultory and purpose- 
 less : to-day we have another foe in view — 
 it is the spirit of Irrevere.xce. 
 
 And nothing seemed so likely to shame 
 us into self-reproach and self-abasement con- 
 cerning it, as the contrast presented in the 
 text by the example of Christ Himself He, 
 
 1 E;ih. ii. i. vi. 12. 
 
In-cvcrcnce. 83 
 
 equal to the Father as touching His God- 
 head'^ — He who, even on earth, was still, as to 
 His Divine Nature, in hcavcji, in the bosom of 
 the Father" — yet, when He prayed, was heard 
 in that He feared. What are we, that we 
 should stand upright, when our Divine Lord 
 Himself not only kneeled dozvn^, but even fell 
 on the ground", before that God with whom 
 He was one— His soul sorrozvfnl unto death"" 
 beneath that load of a world's sin which 
 the world itself carries so lightly and fears 
 not? 
 
 The spirit of Irreverence. What is it ? 
 Whence comes it? And how, under God, 
 shall we cast it out? 
 
 I. We have seen what reverence is : we 
 have seen it in Christ. We know then its 
 opposite. Irreverence is the not fearing, the 
 not being awed into silence, the 7iot bending 
 tlie knee of the soul before Him in -whom lue 
 live and move and have our being''. And we 
 
 ' Creed of St Athaiiasius. 
 •* Luke xxii. 41. 
 « Mark xiv. 34. 
 
 - Jolui i. 18, iii. 13. 
 * Matt. .wvi. 39. 
 « Acts xvii. 28. 
 
84 
 
 Irreverence. 
 
 see this evil spirit everywhere. We have seen it 
 in the open profaneness of the scoffer at holy- 
 things. We have seen it in the insolent de- 
 fiance of the busy mocker^ who asks, Wlio is 
 the Lord''? and where is the promise of His 
 coming^? We have heard it in the light jest- 
 ing quotation, of words, either sacred, or no- 
 thing. We have heard it in the wicked, hor- 
 rible oath ; in the appeal, on occasions trivial 
 and trifling, to One who, if He is, must judge. 
 We have seen it, alas ! in the actual profana- 
 tion of our Churches, of our College Chapels, 
 to purposes of shameless levity — or worse 
 things yet — in the very hearing of words of 
 revelation, in the very performance of acts of 
 worship. This is irreverence, let loose, and 
 running riot. 
 
 If this were all, I would not speak of it 
 here. This audience shudders at the very 
 mention of atrocities like these in the Churches 
 and in the Universities of Christian England. 
 And yet this Congregation itself feels, if it 
 
 ^ Psalm XXXV. i6 (Prayer Book Version). 
 = Exod. V. 2. 3 2 Pet. iii. 4. 
 
Irreverence. 85 
 
 listens, if it reflects, that it too knows some- 
 thing of this foe of faith ; knows it in the 
 secret of the soul, if not — as we trust not — in 
 the utterance of the lips. 
 
 Where, indeed, is the spirit of irreverence 
 not working ? in which of all us ? in what 
 part, in what act, of any one of us ? 
 
 We can trace it, God helping us, in the 
 lurking-dens of the heart, in the clianibcrs of 
 the imagery^. Every movement of the mind, 
 concerning Providence, concerning duty, con- 
 cerning Revelation, is an irreverence if God is 
 not remembered in it. 
 
 Who has not cherished thoughts of dis- 
 content and murmuring, in regard to his place 
 in life, and his adaptation to it O, I know 
 well what are the thoughts of many young 
 men as to their rank and circumstances, as to 
 their talents and prospects, as to their gifts of 
 look and manner, as to their acceptance with 
 friends and strangers — as to deeper things 
 than these, their disposition and temperament 
 — their proncness to this jsarticular vice, their 
 
 ^ Ezek. viii. 12. 
 
86 
 
 Irrcveratce. 
 
 sluggishness towards this special virtue. In 
 all these things there is in all hearts a tend- 
 ency to say to the Creator Himself, Why 
 hast Thoii made me, or why hast Thou placed 
 me, tJius^? 
 
 And if Ave pass from irreverence concern- 
 ing the original moulding and ordering of 
 this being, to irreverence as to that which 
 befalls it ; when we see how those who are 
 dependent upon God for everything presume 
 to call in question His dealings and His pro- 
 vidences — to find fault with this event and 
 that condition, with disappointments, and de- 
 feats, and losses, and sicknesses, and deaths, 
 which they must feel, if they reflect at all, to 
 come straight and direct from the hand of 
 God ; when we not only see these things, 
 but feel them ourselves at the heart's core — 
 find ourselves, when we are tried, just as un- 
 believing, as undutiful, as refractory, as the 
 worst — ever questioning, complaining, repin- 
 ing, all but blaspheming, so soon as the will is 
 thwarted in the smallest matter ; I know we 
 
 ^ Rom. ix. 20. 
 
Irreverence. 87 
 
 must say that it is impossible for us to cast 
 the first stone : we can but lay the hand 
 upon the mouth, and confess ourselves irre- 
 verent with the vilest ! 
 
 Or if, yet once more, we track our own 
 footsteps into the Divine presence-chamber, 
 and notice how we — for I speak now of us all 
 — deal with God Himself in what He says to 
 us and in what we say to Him — in other 
 words, in the two matters of faith and wor- 
 ship ; I am persuaded that here too we shall 
 have to confess the power over us of this 
 same wicked spirit: we shall find that the very 
 idea oi sitting at Jcsiis feet to hear His ivord^, 
 of receiving information as true because He 
 gives it, of bending the mind and the heart 
 to the receptivity of the little child — and are 
 not these things due, if God vouchsafes to 
 teach ? — is lost, is exploded, is almost ridi- 
 culed, in the mind within us : other notions 
 have cast it out, so that now we neither have, 
 nor yet miss, this primary condition of Divine 
 instruction — this reverent, devout answer of 
 1 Luke X. 39. 
 
88 
 
 Irreverence. 
 
 the thrice-summoned understanding, Speak, 
 Lord: for iky servant hearetJi^. 
 
 And if we speak to God, as avc pro- 
 fess to do when we pray, what is the posture, 
 what is the attitude, of the heart nominally- 
 drawing nigh? Where is that sense of an 
 Auditor, that consciousness of a Presence, 
 without which the whole thing is nugatory, 
 or worse? Where is that coming as to a 
 throne of grace', \vhere is that drawing near 
 with a true heart^, where is that heart-service, 
 as contrasted with the service of the lips^ 
 of which, not Scripture only, but conscience 
 tells, as the first preliminary to an act 
 of real devotion? And where is that self- 
 recollection as to the subjects and topics 
 of the particular address, that summing up 
 of the wants, and that carrying of them, as 
 real things, to a real Person actually present 
 and certainly listening, without which, if there 
 may possibly be adoration, there cannot be 
 petition ; and for lack of which we are silenced 
 
 1 I Sam. iii. 9. - Ileb. iv. 16. 
 
 3 Heb. X. 22. ^ Kai. xxi. 13. Matt. xv. S. 
 
Irreverence. 89 
 
 instantly when Christ comes to us with His 
 grave, calm, searching question, What zvilt 
 thou that I shall do 7into thce'^? 
 
 We will not hunt down the same question 
 in its application to the perseverance or the 
 persistency of our worship. We will not ask 
 how much of any one public Service is gone 
 through at the full stretch of devotion, or how 
 many thousands and tens of thousands of 
 wandering thoughts cross the mind, in the 
 course of it, to confuse and spoil and ruin the 
 act of professed communion with Him in 
 whose sight earthly things are only so far 
 significant as they may help or hinder the 
 safe arrival of the imperilled man in the home 
 and sanctuary which is to be his rest for ever. 
 All these are of the same spirit of irreverence 
 which is our subject to-day: all are proofs of 
 the manner in which we have departed, in this 
 latter day of the Church, from the primitive 
 modeP; from the example, above all, of Him, 
 our Divine Master, of whom it is written that 
 
 1 Matt. .\x. 2r, 32. 
 
 - Acts i. 14. ii. 42. iv. 24 — 31. Eph. vi. 18. 
 
90 Irreverence. 
 
 He offered 7ip His supplications luitJi strong 
 crying atid tears, and was heard for His rever- 
 eiice — xuas heard in that He feared. 
 
 The first step towards recovery is the 
 knowledge of disease. And I think that we 
 may assume, on the part of all who hear to- 
 day, their sympathy in the misery, in the 
 shamefulness, of the condition described. 
 Many even of our younger hearers feel them- 
 selves already lonely and desolate by reason 
 of this unconsciousness of God's presence, 
 which may be taken as the definition of ir- 
 reverence. There are times, doubtless — hours 
 of each day, longer periods too of a life as 
 yet untroubled and prosperous — during which 
 the unconsciousness of God, as a Person living 
 and present, may be borne without uneasiness ; 
 nay, may even be a relief from immediate 
 fear and pain. But I am equally certain that, 
 to have no one, when you do suffer, to whom 
 you can instantly have recourse for sympathy 
 — to have no one, when you do want comfort, 
 to go to on the instant for solace — is a great 
 misery, a wretchedness above words. And 
 
Irrci'crcncc. ■ 91 
 
 I venture to think that no one's day, even 
 now, can be quite happy if it cannot be 
 begun with the express benediction of a 
 heavenly Father; and that no one's night, 
 even now, can seem quite restful, if it cannot 
 be committed, consciously and expressly, to 
 the charge and safe-keeping of a Friend who 
 neither sleeps nor slumbers' ; and that no one, 
 feeling it, as most men feel it, right and need- 
 ful to worship, can really like to kneel down 
 beside his bed, and not feel that he speaks to 
 any one, or to come forth to a Church Service 
 and not know by any sign within that he has 
 reached God's House, or that his prayers and 
 praises go anywhere, or can by possibility 
 draw down upon a thirsty spirit and a barren 
 life the dew and the sunshine of a personal, 
 a Divine love. I say that irreverence is a 
 misery even now. And what will it be .'' What, 
 when old age comes, when sorrow, when loss, 
 when sickness, when death } What ivill yc do 
 in the end tJicrcof^f Who would not then 
 give all that earth has, of possession or pro- 
 1 Psalm cxxi. 4. ^ Jereni. v. 31. 
 
92 Irreverence. 
 
 mise, if it might but be said of him, as of the 
 Divine Master before him, He was heard in 
 that He feared? 
 
 2. Deeply impressed with this experience 
 of the workings of irreverence in every part 
 and particular of our being, we shall all ask 
 ourselves, Whence comes it ? How is it that 
 a creature, owing everything to the Creator, 
 can by possibility come into this state of for- 
 getfulness, of unconsciousness of Him, which 
 is so full of misery and wretchedness ? And 
 some answers might be given, true but insuf- 
 ficient. 
 
 One might say, It is because I was com- 
 pelled to worship. Before mind or thought 
 could be exercised upon it, I was made to bend 
 the knee and lo say the xvords of an utterly 
 unrealized, an absolutely unintelligible devotion. 
 I was not asked what I knew or what I be- 
 lieved : I luas taken to ChnreJi — / was made 
 to pray. WJiat could such prayer amount to ? 
 
 And notv, zvlien I am a man, I am still, 
 by the rules of this place, constrained, not on 
 Sundrys only but on week-days also, to take 
 
Irreverence. 93 
 
 part, by no choice of mine, in a form of luor- 
 sJiip presupposing faith, and making no small 
 demand upon individual devotion. It is tins 
 wJdcJi fosters, if it did not create in me, a 
 spirit of irreverence. Leave me free, let me 
 worship ivlicn I zvill, force not utterances which 
 to me are conva/tional : this is onlj to preclude, 
 by forestalling, that which, to be worth any- 
 thing, must be from the heart ; leave me free, 
 and I shall be more likely to attain to that 
 which certainly I shall not attain thus. 
 
 This is the language, possibly, of some 
 hearts to-day. We understand, though we 
 admit not, the plea. It is a difficult ques- 
 tion, this, of (what is disagreeably called) 
 compulsory worship. Several points have to 
 be considered. How many, we might ask, 
 would worship at all if all were free How 
 many, we might ask still more reasonably, 
 have cause to be thankful that their worship is 
 encouraged, is fostered, is rendered unostenta- 
 tious and unhypocritical, by being thus made a 
 law and a rule Are there not some, who, be- 
 ginning by obedience, end by love .'' Are there 
 
94 Irreverence. 
 
 not some who would not come, yet, coming, 
 learn to pray ? Can we forget, in this place, one, 
 afterwards a master in our Israel, who owed 
 conversion itself, under God, not to compul- 
 sory worship alone, but even — such were the 
 times — to compulsory communion He who 
 was brought to his first convictions of sin and 
 salvation through an Academical rule which 
 (in that form) few would justify, may at least 
 be quoted as an example of what honesty 
 and resolution can do in bringing good out 
 of disadvantageous circumstances, and may 
 encourage some, who are now struggling, with 
 unequal steps, after him, to grapple, like him, 
 with their difficulties, in the name and strength 
 of One \\\\o is tlic same yesterday and to-day 
 and for ever'''. 
 
 But indeed, my brethren, none of you 
 supposes that these things are, or make, the 
 real obstacle to that spirit of reverence of 
 which the text speaks. These things are the 
 mere shell and husk of an evil which lies 
 deeper, and is of the soul. 
 
 1 See Life of the Rev. C. Simeon, M.A. ^ Heb. xiii. 8. 
 
Irreverence. 95 
 
 It is easy to tell of some particular influ- 
 ences which assist, if they do not create, this 
 irreverence of which we are speaking. 
 
 The first of these is levity. They made 
 light of it \ says the Gospel. Made light of 
 the King's invitation, of the Gospel call. Made 
 light, we will venture to read the saying, of 
 everything. There was nothing which they 
 could not twist into a subject for jesting. Not 
 the purest, most sacred affection ; not the 
 deepest, the most sincere conviction ; not the 
 noblest, the most self-forgetting devotion. It 
 is the fashion of the times, far beyond any 
 other of which history or literature keeps the 
 record, to seek amusement in human infirm- 
 ity. That, perhaps, is not new, strictly in- 
 terpreted : that, perhaps, has always afforded 
 laughter to the playful and sarcasm to the 
 cynic : the new thing is, to find something 
 ridiculous in human suffering, human feeling, 
 human piety, human life. Nothing is left, 
 even to the young, for admiration pure and 
 simple : all good is either ridiculous, or hypo- 
 
 ' Matt. xxii. 5. 
 
96 Irreverence. 
 
 critical, equally and alike. How can a man 
 go from such reading, from such conversation, 
 from such views of life, and fall on his face 
 instantly before the purity and before the 
 wisdom and before the love of Almighty 
 God ? The heart of reverence has died out 
 in him — he is no believer in verities, he is 
 a scoffer at the good, at the beautiful, at 
 the true. 
 
 And a second ingredient in irreverence is 
 vanity. A man must be humble who would 
 be devout. The ancient Prophet, the ancient 
 Lawgiver, the ancient Psalmist, lay low before 
 his God, because he first felt himself poor 
 and vile and naked. Nothing is more mar- 
 vellous than the humility of those saints. 
 Men whose shoes' latchet modern thought and 
 modern genius is not worthy to loose — men 
 whose prayers and whose hymns are the heir- 
 loom of the ages, and whose names are held in 
 honour where intermediate existences are ob- 
 literated — they could revere, because they were 
 destitute of self-conceit : they could humble 
 themselves before God, because they first knew 
 
Irreverence. 97 
 
 and felt themselves to be nothing. How is it 
 now ? Thousands and tens of thousands of 
 puniest intellects, of men not worthy to be 
 named, I do not say among inspired writers, 
 whether of history or psalmody or prophecy, 
 but not even amongst the third-rate or the 
 tenth-rate thinkers of this age or of any, are 
 yet presuming to sit in judgment upon God 
 and God's Word, as to what He ought to do 
 and it to be, and refusing to take one step 
 towards a firm faith or a manful confession 
 until they can explain to their own satisfac- 
 tion every mystery, and put a rational gloss 
 upon every revelation, of the Gospel. The 
 first condition of reverence is humility ; where 
 this is not, vainly shall we look for the prayer, 
 vainly for the acceptance, of Him who was 
 heard in that He feared. 
 
 And is it indeed too much to ask of man 
 that he should be humble .'' to bid him, who 
 knows that he neither made himself, nor can 
 sustain himself in being, nor can shield him- 
 self from one fracture or one paralysis or one 
 fever, nor can answer one single question 
 
 7 
 
98 Irreverence. 
 
 fully as to the mechanism of his own frame 
 or the causation of his own perceptions, nor 
 can tell you one single thing, out of his own 
 philosophy, concerning that which was in the 
 beginning, or shall be in the eternity which is 
 to come — to humble himself, alike in thought 
 and in worship, before One who holds him /;/ 
 the holloiv of His ka7id\ and certainly must 
 have arranged with absolute authority the 
 time and the place and each circumstance of 
 his being ? 
 
 A third of these counteractions of rever- 
 ence is excitement. Excitement is of all 
 kinds and all degrees ; from that lowest and 
 most brutal which touches mind through body, 
 and rouses into unnatural activity powers 
 which eventually it is to drug into idiotcy, 
 up to that which has for its subject the po- 
 litical interests of a nation, and too often, at a 
 season like the present, makes men estimate 
 characters, and state facts, and judge of mo- 
 tives, not according to truth, not by rules of 
 justice and judgment, but by the bearing of 
 
 ' Isai. xl. 12. 
 
Irreverence. 99 
 
 each upon certain ends which they have pro- 
 posed to themselves as either important to 
 society, or alas ! (too often) conducive to a 
 party triumph, in which they are to have a 
 share. Hence many results upon which a 
 thoughtful observer looks with concern : not 
 least an idolatry, a deification, of objects 
 which a Christian knows to be, at the best, 
 earth-bounded and temporal : not least, a 
 shutting out, for the time, of those higher and 
 highest contemplations without which there 
 can be no place, in any, for Divine reverence, 
 for godly fear. 
 
 My brethren, I have not yet touched that 
 one higher spring out of which all these turbid 
 waters flow, and without the mention of 
 which the briefest analysis of irreverence 
 would be utterly incomplete and deceptive. 
 We must speak of it plainly, as the Word of 
 God bids us : it is the alienation of the fallen 
 from the God of their life and the God of 
 their satisfaction : it is the repugnance which 
 is in all of us by nature to a close dealing 
 with Him from whom we have broken loose : 
 7—2 
 
lOO 
 
 Irreverence. 
 
 it is that mingled fear and shame and enmity 
 which settles down upon the heart of the 
 sinner, and of which the record of the first 
 sinner's experience gives us the token and 
 the parable, when it describes him, after he 
 has broken the commandment, as hiding him- 
 self from the presence of the Lord God amongst 
 the trees of the garden^. That hiding was the 
 devil's counterfeit (so to say) of reverence ; 
 all that the sinner, impenitent and unfor- 
 given, can know of it ; just a shrinking away, 
 timorous and blindfold, from a face and a 
 voice which is still, could he but know it, the 
 sinner's only rest and only healing. 
 
 3. Such is one of those foes with which 
 Faith, the sight of the Invisible, the con- 
 sciousness of God, the soul's Divine vision, 
 must daily and hourly battle in such as 
 would be saved. Hozl' it militates against 
 Faith must be obvious to every one. It would 
 be idle repetition to show it. Rather let us 
 spend a few latest moments to-day, in sug- 
 gesting one or two practical counsels as to 
 
Irreverence. 
 
 lOI 
 
 the manner in which Faith must combat Irre- 
 verence. Let us speak them with all plain- 
 ness. The battle is one of detail: it is only 
 by attention to particulars that it can be 
 won. 
 
 Be reverent, then, first, in worship. How 
 difficult this is, we have seen, we have felt. 
 But he who would not be a profane man must 
 be reverent at least in worship. When, if not 
 then .'' then, when we are gone actually to 
 meet God — then, when we are actually speak- 
 ing to Him, asking for things, declaring this 
 and that as our knowledge of Him, our feel- 
 ing towards Him, our desire concerning Him — 
 when, if not then.' Surely that irreverence 
 which can trifle with God in worship, is an 
 irreverence inexcusable and double-dyed : 
 alas ! is it not also, God being the witness, 
 the commonest of all, and the least con- 
 scious ? 
 
 Be reverent, secondly, in speech. It is bad 
 to have bad thoughts : it is worse to utter 
 them. Worse, because then they infect others. 
 Worse, because then they use speech, which 
 
102 
 
 Irreverence. 
 
 is man's ^/i9rj/\ for the very purpose of doing 
 God dishonour. Worse, because then they 
 fix and stereotype themselves (so to say) upon 
 the man — no longer darts and brands injected 
 by the great foe, only lying for a moment 
 within before we seize and eject them, but 
 rather weapons of our own, taken by us and 
 used and wielded for our own purposes, as 
 parts of ourselves. Not for nothing, be we well 
 assured, did our Lord utter the memorable, 
 the half-paradoxical saying. It is tJie things 
 which come out that defile the man I The things 
 which come out must be his own. There can 
 be no doubt as to the ownership and proprie- 
 torship of these. Therefore we say, with all 
 earnestness, Guard your speech from irrever- 
 ence. If a witty thought occurs to you, and 
 you long to utter it — if the freedom of de- 
 lightful conversation stimulates within you 
 the power of mirth and the power of jesting, 
 and you complain of the stiffness and dulness 
 of being evermore fenced and guarded when 
 
 ' P^alm xvi. o. xxx. 1 1. Ivii. 8. cviii. i . 
 - Mark vii. 15 — 23. 
 
Irreverence. 103 
 
 you are amongst friends — still, if there be in 
 the repartee one fragment of a parodied text, 
 or in the story that you would tell one pro- 
 fane expression, refrain ! as you love rever- 
 ence, refrain ! This is that abstinence which 
 is better than fasting ; that self-control which 
 sobers and which disciplines : such self-de- 
 nials, small as they may be in themselves, by 
 degrees make men, Christian men — able to 
 go forth to mightier exploits in the strength 
 of an armour, a Divine panoply, which in 
 these little things, in these youthful days, 
 they have already proved and found suffi- 
 cient! By thy zvords t/iou sJialt be justified, 
 and by thy words thou shalt be condemned 
 
 Be reverent, finally, in tlionglit. There is 
 a grace which, we sometimes fear, is dying 
 out — could any grace quite die out — in the 
 Church of this latter day ; and that is the 
 grace of meditation. Saints of old kept 
 things and pondered them in their heart'': 
 saints now, if saints there be, talk of things 
 
 ' Matt. xii. 37. 
 
 ' Luke ii. 19, 51. 
 
1 04 Iri-evere7ice. 
 
 and dissipate them with their lips. Where is 
 he amongst us who knows what it is to medi- 
 tate — to commune with his own heart con- 
 cerning God and Christ, concerning life and 
 death, concerning truth and eternity — to com- 
 mune with his oivn heart in his chamber', and 
 bestilP? But it is out of such communing 
 that reverence springs ; the worship of rever- 
 ence, and the speech of reverence, and the 
 soul of reverence too. Without it there is no 
 root in our religion: the growth is all outward : 
 the world scorches it : in the time of temptation 
 it falls away^. Without it there may be forms, 
 there may be ceremonies, there may even be 
 throes and paroxysms of devotion : but there 
 will be no steady, even, wholesome develope- 
 vci&nt— first the blade, then the ear, after that 
 the fill corn in the car^ — such as marked the 
 lives of Christian people in generations now 
 passed or passing away. There is no exercise 
 of mind and heart so difficult, none so re- 
 warding. That counting over in the soul the 
 
 ' Psalm iv. 4. ^ Luke viii. 13. 
 
 - Mark iv. 18. 
 
Irreverence. 105 
 
 treasures of grace — that profound research 
 into the mind and will and work of God as 
 He has revealed it to us in the Word ivrittcn 
 for our Icaniiiig^ — that secret sacred inter- 
 course, as of a man with his friend ^ with the 
 Unseen and Invisible One, whom to know, 
 whom to love, whom at last to dwell with, is 
 eternal life' — this, this is devotion. He who 
 goes forth from this exercise into the world 
 of business, into the world of society, into 
 the world of literary, scientific, political, eccle- 
 siastical activity, goes forth to remember God 
 — goes forth (it is the other half of duty) 
 to remind of God. Of that Divine converse, 
 as it is written of the Lawgiver of old, he 
 carries forth upon the very countenance an 
 impress and a memorial ; tJic skin of his face 
 shone because God had talked zvith him*! 
 Such be our ambition, such our effort — such, 
 in God's measure, our attainment also ! Thus, 
 in one and in another, as the record of a life 
 
 ' Rom. XV. 4. 
 ^ John xvii. 3. 
 
 - Exod. xxxiii. 11. 
 
 ■' Exod. xxxiv. 29 — 35. 
 
io6 
 
 Irreverence. 
 
 is written in eternity, shall the blessed words 
 come at last to be verified, in faint reflection 
 of an unapproachable glory — 
 He zvas heard in that He feared. 
 
 Twenty-Third Sunday after TRiNrrv, 
 Nm'cmbcr 15, 1868. 
 
IV. 
 
 INCOA^SIS TENC} 
 
Hebrews xin. 8. 
 
 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to-day, 
 and for ever. 
 
 A HASTY reader, finding no verb in this sen- 
 tence, concludes that it is to be read with 
 the verse before it, and that Jesus Christ is 
 the end of the conversation there spoken of. 
 It is only of late that it has been possible 
 for an English reader to interpret otherwise. 
 I mark a gradual progress towards the truth, 
 in that change from semi-colon to colon, and 
 at last from colon to full stop, which is ob- 
 servable in a long succession, at various dates, 
 of editions of the Bible. 
 
 Everything has been against us. The 
 word end, with its two meanings, of object 
 and termination — the word conversation, with 
 its invariable but not always understood 
 sense, in our Version, not of speech, but of 
 
1 10 Inconsistency. 
 
 conduct — the unfortunate use of the present 
 tense in the clause wliich have the rule- over 
 you — and then, last but not least, the omission 
 of the word is in the text itself, are four 
 separate obstacles to the right reading of 
 the passage, which I will venture thus to 
 remodel : — 
 
 Rcmcvibcr your guides, zvho spake to you, 
 in their lifetime, the word of God ; and re- 
 viewing the close of their life, in other words, 
 the manner of their death, imitate their faith. 
 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day 
 and for evcr^. 
 
 Have always printed in your remembrance, 
 the Apostle says, the words and deeds of de- 
 parted pastors. Remember their preaching — 
 remember their life — remember their death. 
 Review the holy courage, the stedfast devo- 
 tion, with which they laid down life itself at 
 the call of truth and duty. It may be that 
 
 ^ nKTy^ioveiJeTe tiSv riyov/ihwii vfiwv, oiTives i\a\r)<Ta>i ifuv 
 Tov X0701' Tov Qeov' S:v avaBeoipovvres ti)v iK^aaiv t^s iva- 
 <rTpo<j>^t nifi-eiffOe tt]v iricTW. 'iTjaom X/Jicrris exQh KoX armepoy 
 6 airbs (cai eh tovs aiuvas. 
 
Inconsistency. 1 1 1 
 
 those Hebrew Christians whom he is directly 
 addressing had but two or three years before 
 witnessed the cruel martyrdom of their own 
 chief pastor, St James the Just, tJic Lord's 
 hrotJicr^. They may have seen him thrown 
 from the gable of the Temple ; they may have 
 heard his dying cry, Father, forgive t/iem ; 
 they may have seen the stoning, and the club- 
 stroke, and the burial on the spot in the holy 
 precincts : and thus tJic end of the convcr- 
 satioji, the exit of the life, would have a 
 meaning for them far more than general ; it 
 would appeal to their tenderest recollections, 
 and enforce by a personal persuasion the call 
 coupled with it, to imitate the faith. 
 
 And then, lest any of them should de- 
 spond in the comparison of that heroism with 
 their own weakness ; should say within them- 
 selves, Hoiv shall zvc, common men, look for 
 an Apostle's faith or a Martyrs boldness? 
 the Apostle adds this one last word, pregnant 
 with inspiriting thought and brightening pro- 
 mise — 
 
 ' Gal. i. 19. 
 
112 / nconsistency. 
 
 jfcstis Christ, remember, is the same yester- 
 day and to-day and for ever. 
 
 He, raised from the dead, dietli no inore^ : 
 He, God and Man, one Person, fainteth 
 not, neither is weary^: the grace which He 
 gave, He gives : the strength which He died 
 to breathe into the dead, He hves to com- 
 municate to the Hving : look to Him, and 
 you too shall be strong — trust in Him, and 
 you too shall be courageous, ^esns Christ is 
 the same yesterday and to-day — the same for 
 them and for you : yea, however long, how- 
 ever protracted the struggle, the same unto 
 the ages, even for ever and ever. 
 
 We have two words in our language ex- 
 pressive of the same general idea — constancy, 
 and consistency. If there be, as I think there 
 is, a difference between the two, it may per- 
 haps lie in the two definitions, tenacity of 
 purpose, and tenacity of plan. I think that 
 we call a person constant, who keeps the 
 same end in view ; the same object of effort, 
 
 ' Rom. vi. 9. 
 
 ' Isai. xl. 28. 
 
Inconsistency. 1 1 3 
 
 the same object of affection, the same object 
 of life. And I think that we call a person 
 consistent, who seeks the one end by one and 
 the same means ; who, having proposed to 
 himself a certain goal, runs the same exact 
 course towards it, turning neither to the right 
 hand nor to the left, allowing from others no 
 diversion, and in himself no deviation. 
 
 Now either of these terms would be ap- 
 plicable, would be appropriate, to the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, and to the use here made of His 
 name. 
 
 Our Lord Jesus Christ was constant, in 
 that, having proposed to Himself one end and 
 aim, the rescue of our race from its self-made 
 ruin\ He never allowed in Himself one back- 
 ward look, but fixed the eye of His life 
 steadily and persistently upon it. The devil 
 offered Him a ready, an immediate posses- 
 sion of that kingdom upon which He would 
 enter"^ — the kingdom of the human life, and 
 the kingdom of the human happiness. But 
 
 1 Thou tookest upoti Thee to deliver man. Te Deum. 
 ' Matt. iv. 8, 9. 
 
 8 
 
114 Inconsistency. 
 
 He would not. He saw that in that ofifer 
 there lurked the abandonment of the very 
 end which He had proposed to Himself: 
 there would have been a recognition of the 
 Atheist usurper in the very act of claiming 
 the conceded crown. And therefore He would 
 not. His aim was not the nominal but the 
 real emancipation, not the apparent but the 
 actual ransom, of a world lying in the wicked 
 one^. And a deliverance thus gained would 
 but have riveted the fetters in the guise of 
 striking them off. Therefore the constancy 
 of Jesus Christ prevailed against this wile of 
 the devil. Although the refusal cost Him ob- 
 loquy and contempt, toil and suffering, delay 
 and disappointment, Gethsemane and Cal- 
 vary, yet, inasmuch as He had an end in 
 view ; one end — a joy set before Hini^, one 
 joy — therefore He was firm to endure the 
 cross, even to despise the shame, and the 
 constancy of Jesus Christ triumphed, amidst 
 seeming discomfiture, over the world, and 
 
 ^ I John V. 19 : 6 koj/xos oKos ei> jroyrjp^ Kurai. 
 ^ Heb. xii. 2. 
 
Inconsistency. 1 1 5 
 
 the flesh, and the devil, in one. This was the 
 constancy. 
 
 But the thought specially before us in the 
 text is slightly different even from this. It 
 was not so much the constancy — it was rather 
 the consistency — of Jesus Christ, which the 
 Apostle felt to have in it the strength and 
 the courage of those to whom he writes. It 
 is not enough that Christ has one end. He 
 has also one means. Tenacity of purpose is 
 fulfilled in tenacity of plan. It is true that 
 He set before Himself the human rescue : it 
 is true that, cost Him what it might. He ad- 
 hered to it, and never looked back. But a 
 man might say, / donbt not the redemption 
 of the race: I doubt not t/ie eventual estab- 
 lishment of the kingdom. But I am a poor, 
 feeble, insignificant unit: I am not the race: 
 I may be one of those fragments, as of dust 
 or dross, zvhich seem, everyzvlierc and in all 
 things, to be the ivaste and refuse of Nature's 
 dealing, and of the God of Nature's dealing, 
 with the bodies and the lives and the souls 
 which He has made: therefore the constancy 
 
1 1 6 Inconsistency. 
 
 of Christ, by which I understand tlie tenacity 
 of His grand world-wide time-embracing pur- 
 pose, is small comfort to me: I want sovie- 
 tliing on which the poor, feeble, straggling, 
 struggling, suffering life may fasten; some- 
 thing at once small enough to attend to me, 
 and large enough to hold me, and strong 
 enough to support me: tell me of that, and 
 I will hope on — tell me of that, and I will 
 toil and combat and sujfer still ! 
 
 Now this other thing, for which human 
 infirmity yearns and groans and pants, and 
 will not be satisfied without it, is the thing 
 proposed to us in the text. The consiste7icy 
 of Jesus Christ. He who is tenacious of His 
 purpose is tenacious also of His plan. 
 
 What was His plan .'' It was the seeking 
 of the race through the individual. It was 
 the delivering of man through the man. It 
 was the dealing with human want, human 
 sorrow, human suffering, not in some grand 
 philanthropic manner, as by philosophies, 
 institutions, or societies, but in detail. It 
 was the going after the one lost, until He 
 
Inconsistency. 1 1 7 
 
 found hun.\ It was the sitting by a single 
 couch, on which lay the actually diseased, 
 the separately distressed, the singly and 
 severally disarranged and disordered being, 
 and ministering to it ; and through it, by 
 the universal magnet of an individual sym- 
 pathy, to all who, in any land and in any 
 time, might want the same help — want, and 
 cry out for it. This was the plan, as the 
 other was the purpose. 
 
 Read the Gospels in the light of this 
 thought, and see how bright they become, 
 how strong, how attractive. You will under- 
 stand then how it was no waste of time for 
 Jesus Christ upon earth to make a journey of 
 many miles to heal one sufferer^; to utter 
 words, full of divinest wisdom, to one simple 
 or sinful woman'; to confine His personal 
 ministry to one remote, prejudiced, stiffnecked, 
 stubborn-hearted people^; to die without once 
 appealing on a large scale to what might be 
 called the intellect or the conscience or the 
 
 * Luke XV. 4. 
 - Joiui iv. 7—26. 
 
 - Mark vii. 24 — 3r. 
 .Matt. XV. 24. 
 
Il8 Inconsiste7icy. 
 
 heart of mankind \ All this was part of the 
 plan. In order to be the Saviour of the 
 world, He must begin by being the Saviour 
 of one or two : He must begin by making 
 Himself part and parcel of one or two lives ; 
 by touching, here and there, just the inner- 
 most part of a single human being : and then 
 afterwards — for was He not God also ? had 
 He not the residue of tlie Spirif — the power 
 therefore to provide also for this ? — causing 
 the record of this sort of individual dealing 
 to be written for all time ; to be so written, 
 that, if any one should ever be in distress, 
 should ever be in want, should ever be draw- 
 ing nigh unto death and terrified at it, there 
 would He be, beside that bed, inside that 
 soul, in the universality of His Word, in the 
 ubiquity of His Deity! Nothing less than 
 this could make the reflection appropriate 
 here, Jesus Christ is t/ie same yesterday, and 
 to-day, and for ever. He died not with the 
 dying martyr ; He ceased not to feel because 
 He had once felt, nor to be willing to help 
 
 1 Luke xii. 50. - Mai. ii. 15. 
 
Inconsistency. 1 1 9 
 
 because He had willed and because He had 
 helped before. Rather was each foregoing act 
 an earnest and an argument of that which 
 should follow ; an example and a proof also 
 of that consistency of Jesus Christ, which 
 makes His constancy practical, and realizes 
 the tenacity of the purpose in the tenacity 
 of the plan. 
 
 Much has been written, in these days, of 
 the character of Christ. Not always in that 
 tone of devout, reverent, profound adoration, 
 which befits a man writing of his Judge ; not 
 always without some touch of that cold, that ^ 
 familiar, that almost patronizing treatment, 
 which is characteristic of the age in its deal- 
 ing with things sacred ; still with a feeling, 
 not more confident than true, that here, if 
 anywhere, is to be found an evidence com- 
 mending itself to man's conscience, and re- 
 proving the world's unbelief and ungodliness 
 of sin and of riglitconsncss and of judgment^. 
 
 Let us bespeak a page in this record for 
 
 1 John xvi. 8. 
 
1 20 Inconsistency. 
 
 the special point before us — the consistency 
 of Jesus Christ. He asked, Himself, of His 
 generation, Which of you convinceth me ofsiii^f 
 as though He would challenge those who best 
 could judge to a decisive sentence upon the 
 consistency of His life. And, indeed, if we 
 read the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, the 
 Revelation, for the special purpose of answer- 
 ing the question, for ourselves. What think ye 
 of Christ"^? I know not that anything im- 
 presses itself more decisively upon us than 
 the consistency, which is in other words the 
 unity, of that mind and that will and that 
 work which is pourtrayed for us by so many 
 writers, in so many particulars, with ev^ery 
 possible opening (so to say) for diversity and 
 discrepancy, and which yet, in every light 
 and in every aspect, shines forth unvarying, 
 changeless, one and the same. It is no mere 
 concentration, no mere blending and com- 
 bining — as in common hero-worship — of all 
 manner of recognized virtues in one great 
 ^ John viii. 46. - ISIatt. xxii. 42. 
 
Inconsistency. 1 2 1 
 
 founder of a school or in one illustrious an- 
 cestor of a family : many of the qualities 
 and graces which shine in our Lord were 
 scarcely known as virtues till He made them 
 so ; till He threw upon them the sunbeam of 
 His own manifestation, and gathered them all 
 into the unity of His own example. 
 
 But the prosecution of this thought would 
 lead us too far from the special purpose of 
 this closing discourse ; which is, to set be- 
 fore you, as one of the enemies of our 
 faith — amongst which we have already 
 enumerated the spirit of Unreality, and the 
 spirit of Indolence, and the spirit of Ir- 
 reverence — now, in the last place, the spirit 
 of Inconsistency. 
 
 Jcsiis Christ, the text says, is tJie same 
 yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. In child- 
 hood, in boyhood, in youth, in manhood ; 
 in the home of His parents, in the temple- 
 school of the doctors, in the synagogue 
 of Nazareth, in the malignant presence of 
 the Sanhedrin ; walking by the way, sitting 
 by the well, eating bread with the Pharisee, 
 
122 Inconsistency. 
 
 keeping His last Passover with the disciples ; 
 teaching, healing, praying, suffering ; living, 
 dying, rising, ascending ; on earth, in heaven — 
 there is in Him, as there is in God Himself, 
 vo variableness, neither shadow of turning'^. 
 Departure from earth has not altered Him. 
 He has been seen since : and though His 
 countenance was as the sun shining in his 
 strength"^, still He was one and the same in 
 that love stronger than death, in that sym- 
 pathy uniting Him with the suffering, which 
 brought Him from heaven, which gave Him 
 to die. 
 
 With us it is not so. Scripture, history, 
 observation, experience, teem with proofs of 
 the inconsistency of the fallen. Saints them- 
 selves were not free from it. Men whose 
 names are on the record-rolls of the Churches 
 stand there, in part, as monuments of repent- 
 ance and reparation. Abraham, and Moses, 
 and David, and Hezekiah — again and again 
 and yet again, the Apostle Peter, the verj- 
 Cephas and rock of the Church — kept not 
 ^ James i. 17. - Rev. i. 16. 
 
Inconsistency. 123 
 
 their stedfastness ; forgot, and fell, and yet 
 rose and returned to strcnglhcn their b ret/urn^. 
 Prophets are full of this warning. Ephraini, 
 one says — and it is the specimen of many — 
 is a cake not tiirned"^ : into one side of him 
 the penetrating leaven, the transforming fire, 
 has not carried the force of grace. Christ 
 Himself tells of the patched garment, partly 
 old and partly new, tattered the more and the 
 worse for the attempt to mendl It is the 
 Parable of Inconsistency. Christ Himself tells 
 of the cJiildren of light outdone in wisdom by 
 the children of this world*. Why ? Because 
 the children of this world not only propose to 
 themselves an end, but also make for it; and 
 the children of light set before themselves 
 a blessedness which they do not make for ; 
 which they even plitck down zuith their hands 
 in the very act of building ^ 
 
 We try to turn the parable to account in 
 ourselves, and what see we there 
 
 ^ Luke xxii. 32. - Hosea vii. 8. 
 
 2 Matt. ix. 16. ^ Luke xvi. 8. 
 
 ^ Piov. xiv. I. 
 
1 24 Inconsistency. 
 
 I. Which of all us, my brethren, is a con- 
 sistent man all through ? 
 
 I know we set before ourselves an object. 
 God grant there be none here present, destitute 
 of a hope beyond death ; not one who does 
 not hope, when he shall have put off this 
 body, to be clothed upon tvith a house front 
 heaven \ 
 
 But how do we pursue this object ? If 
 there be a constancy in the purpose, where is 
 the consistency in the plan ? 
 
 Examine your thoughts. You profess to 
 believe in an immortality beyond death. You 
 profess to coiait all things but loss' that you 
 may gain that. Yet who does not find himself 
 attaching an unchristian, an antichristian im- 
 portance to the things zuhich are seen^? Who 
 does not estimate success and failure by the 
 world's standard, after all Wlio does not 
 count himself disappointed, if he has not the 
 wealth, or the office, or the honour, which 
 must perish when earth goes by.? Who is 
 
 > 2 Cor. V. 2. ' Phil. iii. 8. 
 
 3 1 Cor. iv. 18. 
 
Inconsistency. 125 
 
 able quite to measure with the Angel's mea- 
 suring-wand \ and to weigh the world of time 
 by the shekel of the satictiiary"^ ? 
 
 This in the present. And I ask you to 
 ponder your estimate also of death. Are you 
 able indeed to think of death as Christ teaches 
 us to think of it, as the door of life, as the 
 gate of immortality ? Which of you has not 
 sometimes sorrowed, even as otJici-s wJiich have 
 no Jiope^, beside the open grave, in the desolate 
 dwelling } Which of you has not counted it 
 all gain, when a dangerous sickness passed by, 
 and you were sent back into the abodes of 
 the living, still to sorrow, still to suffer — still, 
 alas ! to sin } 
 
 These are the workings of inconsistency in 
 the thought and in the heart. You see how 
 opposite they are, how antagonistic, to Faith ; 
 to that spirit which sees the Invisible One*, 
 and suffers the loss of all things that it may 
 win Christ^. 
 
 ^ Ezek. xl. 3. 
 ' Exod. XXX. 13. 
 4 Heb. xi. 27. 
 
 Rev. xxi. 15. 
 
 ' I Thess. iv. 13. 
 5 riiil. iii. 8. 
 
126 Inconsistency. 
 
 What shall I say of the speech f Yes, 
 it is there not least that inconsistency vaunts 
 itself. O these worldly estimates of things 
 desirable and evil ! O these uncharitable 
 judgments of persons better perhaps than 
 we are ! O these evil surmisings upon truth 
 and duty, these lowering damaging influences 
 — such is the power of that little member^ — 
 upon the faith and upon the holiness one 
 of another ! 
 
 Can we think that these things are of 
 Him who calleth us ? Can we make these 
 things, these voices of the tongue, consistent 
 with His service, who never, even in word, 
 departed, by one hair's breadth, from the 
 purity and from the perfection which is in 
 God only ? 
 
 And how shall I dare to speak of incon- 
 sistencies of the life ? Alas ! the heart know- 
 ctJi Ids oivn bitterness'^ : but is there not — veiled 
 in the secrecy (I know) of conscience — yet is 
 there not, in this audience, many a memory^, 
 and many an affection, and many an intention 
 ' James iii. 5. - Prov. xiv. 10. 
 
Inconsistency. 127 
 
 too, by no means consistent with the profes- 
 sion of a Christian law and a Christian hope ? 
 God only looks within : the voice of the 
 Preacher cries in the wilderness^ , and the bow 
 of Gospel conviction is drawn utterly at a 
 venture'': yet I will be bold to ask whether 
 even this day some heart does not misgive 
 itself, and some will almost change itself, as you 
 listen, concerning some act (perhaps) which 
 it meant to have done this evening, and some 
 life inwardly resolve to be henceforth not in 
 name only but in deed and in truth Christian, 
 because it feels that the consistency of Christ 
 towards us demands a consistency on our part 
 towards Him, and makes it shameful as well 
 as wicked to do nothing, nothing ever, for 
 Him who so loved us as to die for us and rise 
 again' ? 
 
 2. The workings of inconsistency are 
 countless, but they lie open (at least in- 
 wardly) to all consciences. Now what are 
 its motives ? 
 
 1 Isai. xl. 3. - I Kings xxii. 34. 
 
 3 2 Cor. V. 15. 
 
1 28 Inconsistency. 
 
 These too are various. Some of them are 
 poor and mean enough. 
 
 There is the fear of the world. A man 
 that must die and be judged, is afrai4 of 
 o the frown of other men who must die like 
 himself and be judged with him' ! And 
 thus he will rather sin against his Judge 
 than offend a few fellow-mortals and fellow- 
 criminals. 
 
 And there is the love of the world. When 
 Christ was on earth, there were those who 
 actually believed on Him and yet would not 
 confess Him, because, as St John says, t/u:y 
 loved tJie praise of men more than the praise 
 of God^. That is inconsistency. To have 
 convictions which you will not avow — to live 
 a lie — to carry in your soul a belief which 
 your self-interest forbids you to utter — these 
 are among the motives, the meaner and baser 
 motives, for which we are searching. 
 
 Others are slightly less obvious. 
 
 For example, there is a self-conceit in 
 
 I Isai. li. 12. 
 
 " John xii. 42, 43. 
 
Inconsistency. 129 
 
 many of us, which is gratified by the exhi- 
 bition of versatihty. It is a mark of power, 
 with some, to be able to be this in reality, 
 and that in appearance ; to cherish inwardly 
 the Christian hope, and yet outwardly to 
 be all the time — in a sense most opposite 
 to St Paul's use of the words* — all tilings to all 
 men. This feat of reconciling two opposites— 
 this dancing on the tight rope — this travers- 
 ing of the sword-edge bridge, between Christ 
 and the world, between a Christian conviction 
 and a worldly seeming — has its attraction for 
 some natures : souls have been lost, as lives 
 have perished in the analogous outward thing, 
 in this halting between two opinions'^ — rather, 
 in this endeavour to represent in one person 
 the two opinions — the value of things pre- 
 sent, and the all-sufficiency of Christ. We 
 have known such men : and we have mourned 
 over the misapplied ingenuity, which would 
 have, and which sacrificed, two worlds in 
 one. 
 
 There is another motive too. Men have 
 ' I Cor. ix. 24. " I Kings xviii. 11. 
 
 9 
 
1 30 Inconsistency. 
 
 felt, or persuaded themselves that they felt, 
 the responsibility of attracting. They have 
 seen some unstable souls repelled by the 
 rigidity, by the rigour, by the rude and rough 
 severity, of a Christian profession. They 
 have themselves suffered from the assertion, 
 made and not proved, that this or that was 
 forbidden, this or that commanded, by the 
 Gospel ; that such or such an amusement, in 
 which there was no evident harm, was incon- 
 sistent with religion, and that such or such 
 an observance, in which there was some ap- 
 parent unreality, was one of the conditions, 
 was one of the terms, of salvation. And they 
 have gone forth to show, in their turn, that 
 the way of life was not thus narrow ; that 
 a man might be a believer and yet not an 
 ascetic ; that a man might enjoy this or that 
 with his fellows, and yet be a Christian. 
 They have even said to themselves that it 
 was their mission — word lightly spoken, and 
 much misapplied ! — to attract towards Christ 
 these repelled and distanced ones — not by 
 bringing into consciences the light of His 
 
Inconsistency. 1 3 1 
 
 love, but by keeping off from lives the seve- 
 rity of His judgment. The end of it has 
 been, again and again— whatever the motive 
 — they have not gained others, it may be 
 that they have rather lost themselves. 
 
 The motives of inconsistency are many, 
 but its cause is one and the same. It is 
 owing to the lamp of grace burning low 
 within : it is owing to the feeble intermittent 
 seeking of God's Holy Spirit in the shrine 
 and sanctuary of the heart : it is owing, in 
 large measure, to the unbelief which it also, 
 in its turn, fosters — the unbelief of things 
 unseen, the unbelief of God's power to subdue 
 all things to Himself The inconsistent man 
 is not walki?ig Jmnibly, certainly not walking 
 closely, witJi Jiis God^; and he is not exercising 
 himself, day by day, to have always a con- 
 science void of offence toivard God and toivard 
 
 3. We have spoken of the workings of 
 inconsistency: we have spoken of its motives. 
 Let us say a word upon its consequences. 
 
 ' Micah vi. 8. ^ Acts xxiv. i6. 
 
 9—2 
 
1 32 Inconsistency. 
 
 Inconsistency is impotence. In so far as it is 
 perceived, it is ruinous to influence, it is fatal 
 to strength. An inconsistent man is never 
 respected. You see how it is even in political 
 life. It is felt as a taunt — it is resented as an 
 insult — to be called an inconsistent states- 
 man. A man will make any effort to repel, to 
 disprove the charge. And yet in politics there 
 must sometimes be an inconsistency, if there 
 is not to be a worse thing — inconstancy. To 
 be tenacious of his purpose, a man must 
 sometimes be willing to sit loose to his plan. 
 Circumstances change, and with them the pos- 
 sibility (sometimes) of adhering to the exact 
 line once marked out. A brave man will risk 
 the imputation, and follow judgment, and fol- 
 low conscience, at the expence of change. 
 Still the inconsistency, even when it is consci- 
 entious, is a loss, so far as it goes, of strength. 
 It is a wrench which leaves a man the weaker, 
 in so far as others have to do with him. It 
 shakes confidence. It may even break up a 
 party. If this be so in a region in which out- 
 ward inconsistency is sometimes a duty and a 
 
hiconsistcncy. 133 
 
 conscience, how shall it be in that one pro- 
 vince in which it always must be a sin? If the 
 politician who varies his course in order that he 
 may reach his goal, is yet punished, and must 
 be punished, for a change sanctioned by con- 
 science; how shall it be with him who can 
 only vary his course to endanger his crown, 
 inasmuch as he is breaking a sure law which 
 changes not — a law over which circumstances 
 have no right of control, because the law is 
 the law of Revelation, the will of God, the 
 example of Christ ? For such inconsisten- 
 cies there is no comfort within, and there is 
 nothing but harm and loss without. Who are 
 the men who in this place have influenced 
 their generation ? Who are they who have 
 left their mark behind them when they were 
 gone, and are remembered in the honest gra- 
 titude of minds quickened, lives moulded, and 
 souls saved ? Whatever else they may have 
 been — and they have been infinitely various 
 in all else, tastes, attainments, manners, gifts, 
 graces — in this they have been one; they 
 have been consistent men : what they set be- 
 
1 34 hiconsistcncy. 
 
 fore themselves as right, they did ; what they 
 sought, they lived for ; what they professed, 
 they were. If they said a thing, you knew 
 that they meant it : if they urged a thing 
 upon another, that other person knew, without 
 their saying it, that they first did it them- 
 selves. This was their strength. To have 
 discovered that it was all false ; that they 
 called Christ Lord, but did not the things 
 which He said^ ; that they judged others se- 
 verely, but never entered into judgment with 
 themselves — this would have been fatal : their 
 influence, had this been suspected, would have 
 crumbled instantly into dust : their consist- 
 ency was their strength — inconsistency would 
 have been impotence, would have been no- 
 thingness for them at once. 
 
 Inconsistency is misery. Just in so far as it 
 has place in the life, it is ruinous to peace. If 
 it be no more than the inconsistency of human 
 infirmity — not allowed, not indulged, most 
 involuntary, most exceptional — still, so far as 
 it is there, it is fatal to happiness. To believe 
 I Luke vi. 46. 
 
Inconsistency. 1 3 5 
 
 in Christ as the Saviour to whom all gratitude 
 and all devotion is due, and to feel that you 
 have displeased, dishonoured, grieved Him, in 
 some particular of speech or thought or action 
 — that is painful : if the faith be real, that is 
 painful. If we loalkcd in tlie liglit'^, the light 
 of conscience and revelation, of the Word and 
 the Spirit, we should feel each sin thus. Sin 
 is an inconsistency, if it be but a thought — 
 and, as such, it is a pain too. Nothing but 
 confession, confession to the forgotten injured 
 Lord — nothing but an express act of absolu- 
 tion, communicated by Him to the penitent 
 soul within — can restore peace after an incon- 
 sistency such as this. What then must be the 
 wretchedness of having the whole life, the 
 whole being, one habitual inconsistency— one 
 heap of ruins, one sea of wrecks, one huge 
 lie .'' To have in the poor dry intellect an 
 opinion or two as to the truth of Christianity — 
 to be uttering with the lips both creeds and 
 prayers, alike unexamined, unrealized, un- 
 meaning, but still a profession — and to be 
 
1 36 Inconsistency. 
 
 daily, hourly contradicting these in every 
 action and movement and principle of the 
 life — what but long use can make a man easy 
 thus ? And can long use, can life-long use, 
 really make such a state tolerable, except by 
 utterly Spoiling and desolating every noble 
 faculty of the moral being, and sinking the 
 whole man to a level lower than of the beasts 
 that perish ? 
 
 Inconsistency — I Avill add but this one con- 
 sequence more — is hypocrisy. I know that I 
 could employ no term more repugnant, more 
 abhorrent, to the hearts that listen. If there 
 be a vice of which men, of which English- 
 men more than most, count themselves in- 
 capable, it is hypocrisy. And in its coarsest, 
 foulest, most odious form — that of intention- 
 ally pretending oneself to be good when one 
 is utterly bad, that of professing faith for 
 the sake of gain, or virtue as a mask for 
 villainy — I quite believe it to be an all 
 but impossible depravity for educated, civi- 
 lized. Christianized man. But is this indeed 
 the only hypocrisy against which Scripture, 
 
Inconsistency. 137 
 
 against which experience, warns us ? Was 
 any one ever quite this ? Was even Judas 
 quite this ? Hypocrisy, our Lord Himself by 
 implication tells us, may consist in even dis- 
 guising the good'; in locking up within our- 
 selves that knowledge of truth, that sense of 
 duty, which ought to come forth into faithful 
 speech and into Christian action. The es- 
 sence of hypocrisy, if you trace it far enough, 
 is duplicity : it is the trying to be two men 
 in one : the having principles which are not 
 practised, beliefs which are not acted, con- 
 victions disguised by silence, or professions 
 contradicted by conduct. This is hypocrisy. 
 This is the opposite of that singleness which 
 is man's glory ; the being one all through 
 and through all ; that unity of the whole 
 man, which was grievously broken in upon in 
 Adam, and which can be absolutely recovered 
 only in Christ. He who would shun hypo- 
 crisy must fight it out with his inconsistency. 
 When once it has come to this with us, that 
 to know a thing to be true is an insufficient 
 ^ See Luke xii. i — 9, 
 
138 Inconsistency. 
 
 motive for avowing it, and to know a thing to 
 be right is no sure guarantee for doing it ; 
 when they who know us well and observe us 
 closely, perceive that we have many points in 
 our creed which we do not personally realize, 
 and many duties in our religion which we 
 never set ourselves to fulfil ; when they see 
 this, or (which is more true to say) when we 
 ourselves, stirred perhaps by some unwonted 
 influence, look in upon our own inner state 
 and see this to be so ; then indeed we have 
 cause to fear that inconsistency, in our case, 
 is beginning to bear its natural fruit in hypo- 
 crisy, and that our hope too may be at last 
 like that hope of llic Jiypocrite of which it is 
 written, that it sJiall perish when God takcth 
 away his sonl^. 
 
 4. But the Word of God never leaves 
 us with gloomy forebodings. It has always 
 something to say to us, will we but hear it, 
 in the tone of practical direction and whole- 
 some encouragement. This foe of faith, like 
 the rest, must be encountered, encountered in 
 
 ^ Job viii. 13. xxvii. 8. 
 
Inconsistency. 1 39 
 
 detail, by the Christian soldier : happiest he 
 who earliest faces it, and seeks to bring the 
 whole of his life, not a few last days of it, into 
 that unity of faith and practice which is per- 
 fected freedom. How shall we counsel him ? 
 We will say, first — 
 
 Determine to be consistent. There is 
 much, very much, in the power of the will. 
 A man may still say to himself, without pre- 
 sumption, WJiatcvcr else I am, I will be con- 
 sistent. I zvill not be that poor, disjointed, 
 hypocritical thing zuhich has been described. 
 I need not be — and I will not. I will not 
 hold a thing for trtce and yet not believe it. 
 I will not hold a tiling for right and yet not 
 do it. If I do not as yet see all truth nor 
 know all duty, still zuhat I do see I zvill 
 maintain, and what I do knozv I zvill practise. 
 I say that there is no presumption in this 
 resolution — for well do I know that he who 
 sets himself to live it will soon be upon his 
 knees ! 
 
 Then other thoughts follow. 
 
 Never outrun your convictions in your 
 
140 Inconsistency. 
 
 professions. Much of the inconsistency which 
 is in us springs out of unreality. We have 
 a multitude of religious notions which we 
 ourselves have never brought into judgment. 
 Some of these are traditions, received (true or 
 false) from an ancestry of the past Some 
 are current maxims of a world calling itself 
 religious. They may be arbitrary rules. They 
 may be truths wrapped in follies. For us, at 
 all events, they are as yet unproven. To 
 adopt all these as our own in theory, before 
 we have established them for ourselves in 
 reality, is to multiply beyond calculation the 
 probabilities of inconsistency; for to break 
 these rules scarcely touches the conscience, 
 and yet they are lying for the present among 
 our stock of duties. It is important then that 
 these matters should be looked into, and 
 those only retained as principles, which will 
 bear the scrutiny of thought. Hence one part 
 of the value of thoughtfulness in religion. 
 
 Guard especially against censorious judg- 
 ments. By finding fault with others for what 
 they do and for what they do not, we, more 
 
Inconsistency. 141 
 
 than in any other way, lay down laws for 
 ourselves. TIicsc matters, at all events, it will 
 be said, and said justly, aj^e points on which 
 his mind is made up. He could not thus 
 seat himself in the tribunal if lie zvere not 
 sure of his laiv. None therefore can make 
 allowance for your own transgression of these 
 rules. If you walk not by them, you are in- 
 consistent at once. And yet it may be, that 
 the thing itself was not so wrong ! Out of 
 thine own moutJi will I judge tJice'^. 
 
 See that ye walk circumspectly. Accu- 
 rately"^ is St Paul's word — that is, with a close 
 regard to details of duty. Inconsistencies 
 creep in by unguarded doors : generally in 
 small points first : little omissions, little neg- 
 ligences, little frailties, then little sins — this 
 is the way of them^. The consistent man 
 must look zvell to his going*. No one will 
 fall headlong, at once, over the precipice of 
 frightful temptation : the first danger will be 
 that of tripping and stumbling: — let that 
 
 1 Luke xix. 12. " Eph. v. 15: aKpi^w. 
 
 » Psalm xlix. 12 (Prayer Book). ^ Prov. xiv. 15. 
 
142 Inconsistency. 
 
 experience caution us. He who guards against 
 small inconsistencies, of word and spirit, will 
 be forearmed yet more against what the 
 Psalmist expressively calls tlie great offence — 
 t/ce great transgression^. 
 
 Lastly, take a serious view of life. The 
 subject enforces it. The season enforces it. 
 We have reached once again the very thres- 
 hold of Advent. We are rapidly nearing the 
 end of another year. A Christian year has 
 gone, soon will a natural year be going, to 
 give in its account. Who has not prayed 
 from the heart, this morning, that quicken- 
 ing prayer of the Church, Stir np, we be- 
 seech Thee, O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful 
 people"^ — these sluggish, earth-bound wills, so 
 prone to evil, so dull to good .'' Who has not 
 listened, with some compunctions visitings, 
 to the well-known call of this Sunday's 
 Gospel, that we gather ttp the fragments that 
 rcvmin^ — fragments of instruction, fragments 
 
 ' Psalm .\ix. 13. 
 
 ° Collect for the Sunday next before Advent. 
 ^ John vi. 12. 
 
Inconsistency. 143 
 
 of opportunity, fragments of grace — relics of 
 a table largely furnished for us in this zuil- 
 derncss^, but of which we have so reluctantly, 
 so thanklessly taken ? Let us set ourselves 
 at least to collect the fragments ! Soon will 
 fragments alone be left for any of us to 
 gather — fragments of strength and health, 
 fragments of will and resolution, fragments 
 of memory and feeling and life! Let us 
 prepare for that day by using this ! Let no 
 evil habit now indulged torture us then ! 
 Let no ungrateful waste of God's present 
 bounties — physical, intellectual, spiritual — be 
 the lash of conscience then ! God give us all 
 grace so to love and serve Him in this time 
 present, that it may be the strength and stay 
 of our hearts in the hour of death ajid in the 
 day of judgincnt'\ to know that there is no 
 exhausting of His will and of His power to 
 save, forasmuch as Jesus Christ is the same 
 yesterday, and to-day, and for ever! 
 
 ^ Psalm Lxxviii. rg. ^ Liia„y. 
 
 Sunday next before Advent, 
 November 72, 1868. 
 
CambrtSgE : 
 
 PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 
Date Due 
 
 
 
 
 
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