SERMONS ON THE SABBATH-DAY 
 
 CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR, 
 
 AND ON THE 
 
 INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. 
 
 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, M.A. 
 
 CHAPLAIN OF LINCOLN'S INN, 
 AND PIIOFESSOB OF DIVINITY IN KING*3 COLLEGE, LONDON. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 JOHN W. PARKER AND SON, WEST STRAND. 
 
 MDCCCLIII. 
 
LONDON : 
 ILL AND EDWARDS, PRINTERS, 
 CHANDOS-STBEET. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 CLERGYMAN, I conceive, has no right to 
 avail himself of any temporary excitement, 
 except for the purpose of enforcing or elucidating 
 some permanent principle; he has no right to 
 pass by any which he believes may minister to 
 that end. To preach upon the ' Crystal Palace 
 question' for the sake of adding one voice more to 
 those who defend or who attack the measure which 
 the directors of the Company have proposed, would 
 have seemed to me a grievous abuse of my office 
 and of the Sabbath-day. To use the controversy 
 which that question has awakened as a means of 
 urging my hearers to a more serious examination 
 of the nature of the institution which they and 
 their fathers have observed — to make the charges 
 which are brought against others a reason for 
 
iv PREFACE. 
 
 asking ourselves how far our customary notions 
 and practice are in accordance with its character 
 and its object — seemed to me a duty which I could 
 not safely neglect. It is a very painful thing 
 to find ourselves at variance with those whose 
 judgment and sincerity we wish to revere; but if 
 we find from Scripture that the opinions which 
 the religious public, in different periods, have 
 formed on this subject, involve very serious moral 
 and theological errors, the fear of differing with 
 the good men around us is over-balanced by the 
 greater fear of being at issue with the authority of 
 the Lord of the Sabbath-day, — of Him by whose 
 sentence they and Ave must be judged. If one 
 person is led by the Sermons I am putting forth 
 ou this subject, to reverence a day which he 
 has been used to dislike or to scorn, and to 
 receive it and the book which testifies of it as the 
 pledge of God's love for him and for the world, I 
 shall have abundant compensation for any hard 
 words which I may hear from those whose favour- 
 able opinion I should rejoice to win, if it could be 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 V 
 
 obtained by some smaller sacrifice than that of 
 truth and honesty. 
 
 The more serious excitement produced by the 
 funeral of the Duke of Wellington should not, I 
 think, be suffered to evaporate in a vague feeling 
 about the vanity or fragility of human greatness. 
 I have endeavoured to show, in the sermon 
 preached the Sunday after that event, that the 
 greatness we deplore was not vain bat substantial, 
 and that the national unity which for that one 
 day was realized, ought not to be fragile, since all 
 morality and faith will perish when it perishes. 
 
 The fifth sermon in the volume was one of a 
 course of weekly lectures delivered at the Church of 
 St. Martin-in-the-Fields during the Great Exhi- 
 bition of 1851. The subjects were selected, with 
 much judgment, by the Vicar, for the purpose of 
 connecting the thoughts respecting human skill 
 and the fellowship of different nations which 
 the Exhibition awakened, with the laws of God's 
 universe, and with those which bind races and 
 men together. The one upon which I preached 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 was destined for a gentleman whose accurate and 
 comprehensive knowledge of history would have 
 enabled him to do it signal justice. \Yhen I was 
 invited to be his substitute, I despaired of giving 
 students the kind of help which they might 
 have expected from him. I contented myself 
 with pointing out a few difficulties which, judging 
 from my own experience, I thought were likely to 
 distress them, and with explaining how I believed 
 tbe Divine book had anticipated and resolved 
 them. 
 
 London, December, 1852. 
 
CONT 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. 
 
 Exodus, xx. 9—11. 
 
 Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days thou 
 shalt labour, and do all thy work, but the seventh day 
 is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God ; in it thou shalt 
 not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, 
 nor thy man servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy 
 cattle, that is within thy gates : For in six days the 
 Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in 
 them is, and rested the Sabbath day ! wherefore the 
 Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it 
 
 ,R£C. NOV 
 
 SERMON- II. 
 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATn. 
 
 Hebrews iv. 11. 
 Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any 
 fall after the same example of unbelief .... 
 
 SERMON III. 
 
 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 
 
 Matt. xii. 7. 
 
 But if ye had known what this meaneth, 'I will have mercy 
 and not sacrifice,' ye would not have condemned the 
 guiltless 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 THE CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR A LEGITIMATE 
 OBJECT OF ADMIRATION TO CHRISTIANS. 
 
 Isaiah ii. 4. 
 
 r 
 
 And He shall judge among the nations and shall rehuke 
 many people : and they shall beat their swords into 
 plough-shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks : 
 nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither 
 shall they learn war any more 
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 THE DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. 
 
 Revelations v. 1 — ". 
 
 And I saw in the right hand of Him that sat on the throne 
 a book written within and on the backside, sealed 
 with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel proclaiming 
 with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and 
 to loose the seals thereof? And no man in heaven, nor 
 in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the 
 book, neither to look thereon . And I wept much, because 
 no man was found worthy to open and to read the 
 book, neither to look thereon. And one of the elders 
 saith unto me, Weep not : behold the Lion of the tribe 
 of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the 
 book, and to loose the seven seals thereof. And I 
 beheld, and, lo I in the midst of the throne and of the 
 four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, a Lamb as it 
 had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, 
 which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the 
 earth. And He came and took the book out of the right 
 hand of Him that sat upon the throne 
 
SERMON I,3Hnrafg5* 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. 
 
 Preached at Lincoln's Inn, Oct, 31, 1852. 
 
 Exodus XX. 9 — 11: Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 
 Six days thou shah labour, and do all thy work, but the seventh 
 day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God : in it thou shah not 
 do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy 
 man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, that is 
 within thy gates : For in six days the Lord made heaven and 
 earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the Sabbath 
 day : wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and 
 hallowed it. 
 
 OU cannot be ignorant that the minds of many 
 
 people in this city, I suppose in the country 
 generally, are much excited by the opinion, that a 
 company, apparently formed for a useful and benevo- 
 lent purpose, is projecting an outrage on the sacred- 
 ness of the Sabbath-day. Meetings are summoned 
 to protest against the anticipated crime ; resolutions 
 are passed, declaring the very existence of the 
 nation to be in danger; above all, we, the clergy, 
 are conjured, in documents privately and publicly 
 B 
 
2 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [SERM. 
 
 circulated, if we value our own souls, and the souls 
 of those who hear us, to testify that the law of 
 God must not he set aside upon any pleas of tem- 
 porary expediency. If I thought that the design 
 which has called forth these fears and denuncia- 
 tions were as mischievous and evil as it is repre- 
 sented to be, I might not, perhaps, have felt myself 
 bound to tell you so ; for there are many immea- 
 surably more powerful voices raised to enforce that 
 conviction, and I fancy that a cause suffers, in the 
 judgment of an educated congregation at least, 
 from the perpetual repetition of arguments and 
 declamations in support of it. They suspect that 
 there must be some reasonable cry on the other 
 side which we wish to drown ; they ask whether 
 the habit of agitating our own minds and the minds 
 of our hearers, upon particular topics, is favourable 
 to moral health and tends to promote a Sabbatical 
 temper; they are apt to think that we magnify 
 enormously those errors to which we are not prone, 
 and proportionably diminish others which he close 
 to ourselves, and in which we have a grievous 
 share. After telling you very recently, that our 
 first duty is to set right our own tasks and occu- 
 pations, to see that we are pursuing them in a way 
 to glorify God and benefit our brethren, I should 
 
Iv] REASONS FOR PREACHING. 3 
 
 have hesitated before I turned aside, to pronounce 
 a censure — however I might have thought it to be 
 deserved — upon persons with whom we are not 
 directly connected, and whom a great part of the 
 religious world have already condemned. But 
 ministers of the Gospel who, like myself, after re- 
 flecting earnestly upon the subject, cannot persuade 
 themselves that the course which has been taken by 
 those who have commenced and are carrying for- 
 ward this agitation is a wise or a just one, ought, 
 I think, to obey the call which has been made 
 to them, without demurring to the authority from 
 which it proceeds, and frankly to declare, why they 
 look upon the Sabbath day as the most precious, 
 blessed, and divine of all institutions, and why, 
 because they hold that faith, they dare not take 
 this popular method of enforcing its claims. 
 
 That I may not deceive you, or obtain any credit 
 which I do not deserve, from those who hold what 
 are called latitudinarian notions upon the subject, 
 I will say at once, that I regard Scripture as the 
 right and safe guide of our judgments on every 
 moral question ; that I believe its help will not fail 
 us in any case if we seek for it ; that I would never 
 at any time (certainly not on this subject) set up 
 the New Testament against the Old, which it 
 b 2 
 
4 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [SERM. 
 
 illustrates, vindicates, fulfils; that I reverence the 
 Christian Sabbath, not for its unlikeness to the 
 Jewish, but as the interpretation and consumma- 
 tion of it ; that I desire no substitution of foreign 
 habits, Protestant or Romish, for those which have 
 prevailed in England, but believe that we should 
 suffer an incalculable loss by the exchange ; that I 
 participate in the fear that such a calamity may be 
 in store for us ; and that I dislike the present violent 
 excitement, among other reasons, because it seems 
 likely to produce the evil which it seeks to avert. 
 
 I see in this tumult, plentiful causes for imme- 
 diate sorrow, because I am sure it will lead a number 
 to fancy that they can make amends for habitual in- 
 difference to the weightier matters of the Law, by 
 their zeal in this; and will produce a bitter dislike of 
 the Sabbath, and great scorn of all religious profes- 
 sion among our feUow-countrymen of the working- 
 class, who will fancy that all religious institutions 
 and religious men are in conspiracy against them. 
 But I see in it ultimate reasons for hope, — because I 
 trust it will compel a more thorough examination of 
 the whole subject. If that examination is faithfully 
 undertaken, it will clear all our minds of many 
 loose notions ; it will, I am convinced, issue in the 
 discovery, that a gift which some would make an 
 
THE WORD ' REMEMBER.' 
 
 5 
 
 excuse for harshness and self-exaltation — which 
 some would throw aside, as worthless and worn- 
 out — is, in truth, one of those which most attests 
 the love of God to all His creatines, and one 
 which they will prize most, when they are taught 
 most to love Him, and to love each other. I have 
 taken the fourth commandment for my text to-day, 
 because I mean to speak exclusively of the Jewish 
 Sabbath, though not exclusively of that which the 
 Old Testament tells us respecting it. Next Sun- 
 day, if God permit, I will try to investigate the 
 origin and history of the Christian Sabbath ; I 
 would wish to employ a third discourse in con- 
 sidering the application of the principles brought 
 out in the two former, to the circumstances of 
 our own country and our own time. May God 
 grant that His Holy Spirit — the Spirit of Peace 
 — who can alone enable us to enter into His rest, 
 or can keep us from distracting His Church, and 
 wounding the consciences of our brethren, may 
 dwell both with the speaker and the hearers, — 
 teaching them to perceive what things they ought 
 to do, and giving them grace and power faithfully 
 to fulfil the same. 
 
 I. The first word of the fourth commandment 
 reminds us that the Sabbath-day was already 
 
6 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sERM. 
 
 established among the Israelites when the Law 
 was delivered on Sinai. That Law created nothing. 
 It preserved and enforced that, which God had 
 already taught His people by another method than 
 that of formal decrees to observe. All divines 
 have insisted — would to God they would not only 
 insist in words, but recollect habitually — that the 
 Sabbath-day does not stand upon an enactment, 
 any more than marriage does, any more than the 
 reverence of fathers does, — but that it is a primary 
 institution of humanity, a part of God's divine and 
 original order, having its foundation in His own 
 nature, and therefore, in the nature of the creature 
 whom He has formed in His image. I do not 
 stop to prove this point now. I have often tried 
 to show you, that the whole Scripture is a discovery 
 and revelation to us, of the laws according to which 
 God has made the universe and made man. I am 
 merely affirming that this is the doctrine which is 
 asserted and implied in the word ' remember f 
 a doctrine which those who differ from me most 
 in some of my conclusions, will not, I should 
 suppose, be inclined to dispute. For it is thus 
 we understand, how the words of the command- 
 ment are connected with the words in the Book 
 of Genesis, respecting the Creation. It is thus 
 
I.] THE OFFICE OF THE JEWS. 7 
 
 we see why the Israelites were taught, before they 
 came near the burning mountain, that they were 
 to gather manna on the six days, and to expect 
 none on the seventh. It is thus that the Sabbath- 
 day is brought into connexion with all that are 
 sometimes called the moral precepts of the Law, 
 and receives a part of their sacredness, not being 
 separated from them as a mere formal and positive 
 ordinance for a peculiar people. It is thus, also, 
 that the office of a peculiar people is clearly under- 
 stood and set forth. The Jews, as I have so often 
 pointed out to you, while lecturing on the Old Testa- 
 ment, were called out of all nations, to be a witness 
 of that which is true for all nations — were made 
 exclusive, that they might protest against the ex- 
 clusiveness into which those necessarily fell who 
 had a separate God over each district and each oc- 
 cupation, — were formed into a society fenced round 
 with rigid rules and ordinances, that they might 
 testify of Him who is at the foundation of all 
 society, who alone prevents it from being torn into 
 fragments. If there was a great, primary, eternal 
 distinction grounded in the Being of God Himself, 
 to be expressed in the order of man's life, to 
 regulate his thoughts, acts, purposes, it must be 
 the especial function of a people whom He had 
 
8 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sERM. 
 
 chosen as His witnesses, to preserve this distinction 
 — to preserve it as the most precious part of then- 
 own national economy. It would be one of the 
 signs that would mark them out as different from 
 all other people ; it would be one of the signs that 
 would mark them out as the guides and teachers 
 of all people. 
 
 If I have spoken of that which existed before 
 this commandment, I have done so not to escape 
 from the letter of it, but because the letter drove 
 us beyond itself; because we could not interpret it 
 without reference to other parts of the record 
 which contains it. Most willingly do I go back 
 to it, assured that every part of it deserves our 
 fullest and deepest consideration. The word 
 ' holy,' which people in our day repeat as if 
 they were quite sure that they knew what it 
 means, and could assume that every one else 
 knew what it means, must, it seems to me, be 
 interpreted by the Scripture itself, and not by 
 any notions or practices of ours. The people of 
 Israel were told that they were holy to the Lord, 
 — that they were, as a body, consecrated to Him 
 — that they existed to bear witness of Him 
 to all the families of the earth. They could 
 not separate the holiness of the Sabbath from the 
 
I.J THE COMMAND TO WORK. 9 
 
 holiness of the Nation. In recollecting that it 
 •was set apart, they were to recollect that they were 
 set apart. If ever one belief was to perish, the 
 other must perish too. If one was revived, the 
 other must revive with it. Should they be led, 
 by any false teaching or indulgence in evil courses, 
 to doubt their own holiness as a nation, the attempt 
 to enforce a holy Sabbath upon them would be 
 impossible. A Sabbath might be enforced, but it 
 would not be God's. The reason -which He gave 
 for the institution would be inapplicable. A com- 
 mandment of man's, not His, would be the found- 
 ation of it. 
 
 II. But the precept goes on : ' Six days shalt 
 thou labour, and do all that thou hast to do/ 
 This is not a preliminary to the commandment, 
 but an integral part of it. Work is enjoined, 
 just as much as rest is enjoined. The Israelite 
 was to feel that he was working because God 
 bade him work, that that was a divine call- 
 ing, that that was made holy by the Lord, and 
 was holy to him. It is the most utter per- 
 version of this law — a perversion from which 
 all others have, perhaps, begun — to separate 
 those tilings which God has so wonderfully joined 
 together, which He has so wonderfully distin- 
 
10 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [SERM. 
 
 guished, in the course of nature and in the Kingdom 
 of Grace ; to treat the day of rest as if it were 
 His, and the days of work as if they were man's. 
 All worldliness, all ungodliness, is involved in that 
 doctrine. Six-sevenths of man's time are delivered 
 over to Mammon; one-seventh is graciously be- 
 stowed upon God. So people believe that they 
 are keeping His ordinances. And how much of our 
 religious teaching countenances the delusion ! 
 
 III. This commandment does not countenance 
 it in the slightest degree, but strikes at the root of 
 it. ' The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord 
 thy God ; in it thou shalt do no manner of work, 
 thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy man- 
 servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor the stranger that 
 is within thy gates.' Man's sin has made work 
 into a curse. God has redeemed and restored 
 work into a blessing, by uniting it again .to the 
 rest, with which, in His divine original order, it 
 was associated. He asserts this rest for all classes 
 together, for the man-servant and the maid-servant, 
 as well as the master. He declares, that by His 
 holy ordinance all shall have rest who have work; 
 that one implies the other. It is sin to refuse the 
 one to any on whom you enforce the other. What 
 an unspeakably gracious ordinance was this to 
 
I.] REASON OF THE COMMANDMENT. 11 
 
 come forth amid thunders and lightnings, and a 
 burning fire ! One which brought all Israelites 
 to the same level, which showed forth the Lord 
 and God of all, caring for all, vindicating the same 
 blessing for all, regarding the commonest life of 
 every one as dear to Him, and a worthy subject 
 of His government. And yet, there was need of 
 the thunder and the lightning and the fire to 
 enforce this decree, as much as that against idols, 
 or that against murder ; for the same root of bit- 
 terness in each man, the same hard selfishness, 
 would lead to the continual violation of all three. 
 
 IV. The Divine reason upon which this is 
 grounded still lies behind. We are told often 
 that the Sabbath is to be observed, simply because 
 it is written in the 20th chapter of Exodus that it 
 should be observed. Will those who say so read 
 what is .written in the 20th chapter of Exodus? 
 Do they find there a mere arbitrary decree, with- 
 out a reason given for it ? If they do, let them 
 by all means adhere to that decree, and obey it as 
 well as they can. But if they find God giving a 
 reason for what He appoints, is it reverent to say, 
 ' we will take the precept without the reason ; 
 we will not apply ourselves to the consideration of 
 that; we will not use it in determining any 
 
12 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sBRM. 
 
 cases which may come before ourselves ?' What, 
 are we wiser than He? Do we know better 
 what is good for us than He does ? Everything, 
 I believe, will be found to turn upon this reason 
 of the commandment, everything in its relation 
 to the old world, everything in its relation to the 
 new. God rests j therefore He would have man 
 rest. God works ; therefore He would have man 
 work. Man cannot rest truly unless he remem- 
 bers his relation to God who rests. Man cannot 
 work truly, unless he remembers his relation to 
 God who works. God created the world ; it is 
 a finished work ; the order of it is established and 
 abideth, and is very good. God is every day, and 
 hour, and moment, carrying on a new and fresh 
 creation, causing new grass to spring up, and trees 
 to bud and blossom and bring forth fruit, and 
 fishes to multiply in the sea, and buds in.the air, 
 and beasts upon the ground, and new generations 
 of men to appear, that they may replenish the 
 earth and subdue it. Except you believe in the 
 permanence of the order, you will be distracted 
 and overwhelmed by the endless, exhaustless fecun- 
 dity of the things around you, as well as by their 
 continual decay. You will be lost in the infinite 
 vicissitude, and trying to escape from it, you will 
 
I.] PENAL LEGISLATION. 13 
 
 seize some of the fleeting and perishing ohjects 
 before you, and try to refer all to them, or at 
 least try to refer yourself to them, and so you 
 will fall down and worship them. If you fix your 
 mind upon the permanence of the order, and 
 turn away your thoughts from the facts of change 
 and growth winch present themselves on every 
 side, you will sink into the acknowledgment of a 
 hard, fixed, decreeing fate which you may invest 
 with what name you please, but which will not be 
 the living God. The week, consisting of the day 
 of rest and the days of work, wrought into the 
 tissue of human life, brings a harmony out of 
 that which would be else a mere discord, a weari- 
 some, hopeless contradiction. In proportion as 
 the ordinance is really kept, as we adhere to 
 God's method of linking together work and rest, 
 the harmony becomes a practical one. It does 
 not stay as a dogma or theory outside of us, but 
 penetrates our existence through and through, 
 adjusting and uniting a man's highest contempla- 
 tions with his most trifling daily acts. 
 
 V. This is the law to which Christians appeal, 
 when they say that they regard the Sabbath as a 
 perpetual obbgation. Of course they do not refer 
 to the penal legislation of the Jewish people ; of 
 
14 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sERM. 
 
 course they believe that that belonged to con- 
 ditions and circumstances Avhich have passed away. 
 No one, so far as I know, (I cannot answer for the 
 early Puritan legislators in the North American 
 States,) has supposed that a man is to be put to 
 death for working or gathering sticks on the Sab- 
 bath, or even that a fire is not to be lighted on it. 
 He who does not distinguish between Divine and 
 eternal laws, and the peculiar statutes which are 
 ordained for men in a certain stage of society, and 
 as dwelling in a certain locality, has read the books 
 of Moses to very little profit, for no books bring out 
 that distinction so strongly and vividly as they do ; 
 none more carefully surround the particular enact- 
 ment with minute accidents, which prove that it is 
 not intended to be used where these accidents do not 
 exist. It is quite possible that these penal decrees 
 were only designed for the people while passing 
 through the wilderness ; that they were adapted to 
 the condition of a mixed and disorderly multitude on 
 its march. At all events there is no allusion in the 
 Prophets to them, though there is very frequent 
 allusion to the moral and national blessings which 
 would follow, if the Sabbath were kept according to 
 its meaning and principle, and the degeneracy which 
 had accompanied, or would accompany the abuse of it. 
 
ISAIAH CHAP. LVIII. 
 
 15 
 
 VI. Thus Isaiah says, in a passage of his 
 fifty-eighth chapter, which is continually quoted, 
 but the sense and context of which I fear are 
 often forgotten, ' If thou turn away thy foot 
 from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on 
 my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, 
 holy of the Lord and honourable, and shalt honour 
 Him, not doing thine own ways, not finding thine 
 own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words; then 
 shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord, and feed 
 thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father ; for the 
 mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.' If you refer 
 to the opening of this discourse, you will see that 
 it is addressed to a people in a particularly self- 
 righteous state, who fancied that they were keep- 
 ing strictly the ordinances of God, who complained 
 that when they fasted, He did not hear them, who 
 afflicted their souls, bowed down their heads as bul- 
 rushes, and spread sackcloth under them. They 
 are told that such services as these would never 
 be acceptable to the Lord, for that in the day of 
 their fast they found pleasure, and exacted all their 
 labours ; that their duty was to loose the bands of 
 wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the 
 oppressed go free, and to break every yoke. Then, 
 it is said, will their light break forth as the morn- 
 
16 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [SERM. 
 
 ing, and their health will spring forth speedily, 
 and their righteousness shall go before them, and 
 the glory of the Lord shall be their reward. 
 
 How naturally does the allusion to the Sabbath 
 come in here ! They had never understood its 
 holiness, its honourableness; what a witness it was 
 bearing on behalf of the man-servant and the maid- 
 servant, the poor and the needy. It had been to 
 them a day of exacting labours, a day of self- 
 seeking and self-indulgence; yes, even when they 
 were turning it into a fast — into a hard service. It 
 had been a day of strife and debate, of bitter rail- 
 ing and fault-finding. All its glorious meaning had 
 been lost, and therefore the people were none the 
 better for it ; the moral tone of the nation was not 
 raised by it. Oh ! if they did keep it in spirit 
 and in truth, how different the case would be ! 
 What new knowledge would there be of the mind 
 and will of God ! What a new light in every 
 palace and every hovel ! 
 
 VII. So again, there are the well-known words 
 of Jeremiah, in the 1 7th chapter of his prophecy : 
 ' Hear ye the word of the Lord, ye kings of Judah. 
 If ye diligently hearken to me, saith the Lord, to 
 bring in no burdens through the gates of this city on 
 the Sabbath-day, but hallow the Sabbath-day to do 
 
T.J CARRYING BURDENS. 17 
 
 no work therein; then shall this city remain for ever. 
 But if ye will not hearken unto me to hallow the Sab- 
 bath-day, and not to bear a burden, even entering 
 into the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath-day, 
 then will I kindle a fire in the gates thereof, and it 
 shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall 
 not be quenched.' A most terrible denunciation 
 surely! And as it was spoken, so it came to pass. Do 
 you think the punishment was for this simple act of 
 carrying a burden on the Sabbath-day ? Those who 
 do, can never have read the prophecy of Jeremiah ; 
 they must not talk of following the Bible, for 
 they do not know what the Bible contains. The 
 prophecy points out a multitude of moral evils of 
 which the princes and priests and prophets of 
 Jerusalem were guilty. They were idolatrous, 
 they were self-righteous, they were adulterous. 
 These were the sins that were eating up the 
 land, because they were eating up the hearts of 
 those who dwelt in it. But here was an index 
 of the temper which exhibited itself in so many 
 ways. When the great men insisted upon bur- 
 dens being carried through the gates on the 
 Sabbath-day, they were robbing the poor man of 
 rights which God had claimed for him : they 
 showed that they did not believe that He who 
 c 
 
18 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [SERM. 
 
 was the common judge of prince and peasant, was 
 in the midst of them. This want of brotherly 
 feeling, this unbelief and godlessness, would as- 
 suredly bring destruction upon that land, for in 
 them he the seeds of destruction for all lands. 
 
 VIII. Once more. In the 20th chapter of Ezekiel, 
 when He answers an inquiry of the captive elders 
 of Israel, by reviewing the whole history of the 
 nation, we have the memorable words, ' I said I 
 am the Lord your God. Walk in my statutes, 
 and keep my judgment's ; and do them, and hallow 
 my Sabbaths, and fbey shall be a sign between 
 me and you that I am the Lord your God.' And 
 then the complaint is made : ' They have not 
 executed my judgments, they have despised my 
 statutes; they have polluted my Sabbaths, and 
 their eyes Avere after their fathers' idols.' Here 
 the Sabbath is represented precisely as the fourth 
 commandment represents it. It is the sign or 
 sacrament of the union of the unseen Lord to the 
 nation. The Israelites polluted the Sabbath, be- 
 cause they did not receive it as such a sign or 
 sacrament. They did not believe that they were 
 in God's covenant. They did not like to retain 
 Him in their knowledge. Their hearts went after 
 their idols. They were seeking Gods of their 
 
I.] YOUR SABBATH MY SOUL HATETH. 19 
 
 own. They were a divided, self-seeking people ; 
 therefore the Sabbaths, like any other witness of a 
 loving and gracious presence, had become worthless 
 in their eyes. 
 
 IX. There are other passages, very awful pas- 
 sages, to be found in these Prophets, which I 
 must not pass over, though I have not time to 
 dwell upon them. They, too, are connected with 
 prognostics of coming overthrow. Their force is 
 not exhausted by the events which attested their 
 truth. They are such as these : ' Your Sabbaths 
 and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. I am 
 weary to bear them. When ye make many 
 prayers, I will not hear you. Your hands are 
 full of blood. Wash you. Make you clean. Put 
 away the evil of your doings from among you. 
 Cease to do evil. Learn to do well. Judge 
 the fatherless, plead for the widow, relieve the 
 oppressed.' I wish you to remember that these 
 words were uttered by the men who loved the 
 Sabbath most, who were most eager for the true 
 observance of it ; who were uttering, as we believe, 
 God's own judgment respecting it. They at least 
 show us, if we had no other and higher guide, 
 that there are evils to be guarded against as 
 fearful as those which we are told in tracts and 
 c 2 
 
20 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [SERM. 
 
 handbills will draw down the Divine vengeance 
 upon cities and kingdoms. 
 
 X. It is not wonderful that the Jews, after 
 the captivity, as they had been schooled by a long 
 discipline into an understanding of the meaning of 
 the second commandment, so had learnt also to 
 appreciate in some degree the worth of the fourth. 
 Nehemiah, the brave and noble-hearted reformer 
 of the fallen city, speaks frequently and with great 
 emphasis of the Sabbath, as a gift of God which 
 their fathers had lightly esteemed, and which the 
 new generation was bound most fondly to cherish. 
 The self-same holy and godly inspiration which 
 led him to put down the oppressions of the nobles, 
 who had sold their brethren for their debts, led 
 him to assert the sanctity of the law, which was 
 the common protector of all classes, the sign that 
 his people was indeed the people of God. There 
 is nothing sadder or more instructive than to 
 observe the way in which the words and acts of 
 him and of his fellow -labourers were abused 
 by the Jews who hved between their age and 
 our Lord's nativity. There was a brilliant period, 
 indeed, in that interval, when reverence for the 
 law and the covenant of their fathers and the 
 blessed signs of the nation's calling, produced 
 
I.] THE SABBATH OF THE RABBIS. 21 
 
 deeds worthy of patriarchs and judges and kings. 
 When the little band of Maccabsean patriots rose 
 against the Syrian oppressor who denied their 
 temple, corrupted their sacred books, and wished 
 to force upon thcni the abominations of idol 
 worship, — when, undismayed by his power and by 
 the apostasy of their own priests, they bade him 
 defiance in the name of the Lord of Hosts, and 
 showed how paltry his strength was by the 
 side of their weakness, — proof was given that 
 the living God was not less ruling His land, 
 and fighting for it, than in the days when the 
 voice of prophets was heard and acknowleged as 
 His voice. But, after that glorious outburst, there 
 came an age of seeming godliness, of real unbelief ; 
 an age when there was talking and debating 
 without end about the meaning and character of 
 the law, the relative worth of its different precepts, 
 the modes in which it was to be observed ; but 
 w r hen it was regarded merely as a law coutained 
 in a book, not as one coming forth from the 
 mouth of the Lord of Hosts; when those who 
 copied it out most carefully, and took most pains 
 in inscribing its letters upon their garments, did 
 not love it, did not carry it in their hearts, but 
 felt its commands as a burden, a slight portion of 
 
22 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [SERM. 
 
 which, with many alleviations, they were to carry 
 themselves, but which they were to lay with all 
 its weight on the shoulders of others. In that 
 most dark and heartless period, the open crimes 
 of which are recorded in the narrative of the 
 Jewish liistorian, the secret radical disease of which 
 was to be laid bare when the Lord Himself came 
 suddenly to His temple, — in this time practices, 
 and rules, and maxims, and penalties respecting 
 the observance of the Sabbath, were accumulating 
 every day; the ingenuity of each Rabbi was 
 tasked to discover new ones. In that time the 
 Sabbath itself, all its human graciousness, all its 
 divine reasonableness, were becoming each day 
 more utterly obscured. 
 
 XI. You know that these statements do not rest 
 upon any inferences of mine. You know that 
 they all rest upon His words, who spake as never 
 man spake. He said that He came not to destroy 
 the law, but to fulfil. And in order that He 
 might fulfil it, in order that He might bring 
 out its meaning and righteousness, all those 
 cobwebs which the spiders of the Rabbinical 
 schools had spun, must be cut through. I Have 
 you ever considered how very large a portion of 
 the acts and words of our Lord, recorded in all 
 
I.] CH111ST FULFILLING THE LAW. 23 
 
 the four Gospels, bear upon this subject of the 
 Sabbath-day? Have you ever considered that 
 these words and acts were those which most drew 
 down upon Him the wrath of His greatest enemies ? 
 Have you ever observed that His sternest denun- 
 ciations against the Pharisees refer to the objec- 
 tions which they raised against this part of his 
 conduct ? Do you remember that the one time 
 when He is said to have looked round upon them 
 with anger, was when they objected to His healing 
 the man with the withered hand upon the Sabbath- 
 day? Do you think that all this time He was 
 merely relaxing the severity of Rabbinical pre- 
 cepts, merely establishing one case in which the 
 fourth commandment might be construed less 
 strictly than the Jews of that day supposed that it 
 could ? Do you not think that in this, as in every 
 case, He was doing what He said He came to do, J 
 fulfilling the law, exhibiting the inmost intent 01 
 the divine day? 
 
 XII. On one occasion the ruler of the syna- 
 gogue answered with indignation, because Jesus had 
 healed on the Sabbath-day : ' There are six days 
 on which men ought to work ; in them, therefore, 
 come and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day.' 
 Was it not a reasonable suggestion? Supposing 
 
24 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sERM. 
 
 it was a justifiable thing, a thing not absolutely to 
 be prohibited, that men should be cured upon that 
 day, was it not better to abstain — better to set an 
 example of adherence to a customary rule, than to 
 risk the probability of diminishing the popular 
 reverence, by breaking through it? Certainly, 
 most of us would have said so; certainly, this 
 would be the opinion of the religious world in our 
 day, as it was of the religious world in that day. 
 He who was the object of the hatred of 
 that world, He who knew what was in man, 
 He who knew the mind of the Father, thought 
 otherwise. According to His judgment, He was 
 carrying out the very purpose of the Sabbath 
 when He healed on that day. He was proclaim- 
 ing it to be a day of healing and of blessing to the 
 weary, heavy-laden children of earth; He was 
 declaring that they were not children merely of 
 earth, but children of His Father in heaven, 
 those whom He was inviting to do His work and 
 to share His rest. He was claiming those as heirs 
 of the covenant with Abraham whom the Phari- 
 sees were casting out as vile, — treating as unfit 
 for contact with them. He was showing that the 
 relief of bodily sufferings and calamities, of suffer- 
 ings which the Pharisees, in their affected regard 
 
I.] THE LORDSHIP OF THE SON OF MAN. 25 
 
 for the soul, treated as lying beyond the sphere of 
 religion, was the most effectual witness which 
 could be borne of a spiritual deliverer. You will 
 see, I am sure, when I quote our Lord's words, 
 that I am not putting into them a meaning of mine, 
 that they express all I have said with Divine might 
 and clearness : — ( The Lord then answered him 
 and said, Thou hypocrite; doth not each one of 
 you on the Sabbath loose his ox or his ass from 
 his stall, and lead him away to watering ? And 
 ought not this woman, being a daughter of 
 Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo these 
 eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the 
 Sabbath-day ?' 
 
 XIII. This is one of those great practical argu- 
 ments, so simple in its foi-m, so profound and so vari- 
 ous in its application to the deceits of the human 
 heart, by which He showed that the exceptions 
 which they made, and were obliged to make, from 
 the formal rule of not working, were made in favour 
 of themselves ; and that the rigour which they were 
 trying to enforce upon others, destroyed the very 
 principle and object of the divine ordinance. 
 There is another dispute of His with the Pharisees, 
 recorded especially by St. Mark, which connects 
 their thoughts on this subject with the feelings 
 
26 THE OLD TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sERM. 
 
 which led them to reject Him. The Sabbath was 
 made for man, He says, not man for the Sabbath ; 
 < therefore, the Son of man is Lord also of the Sab- 
 bath-day.' The religious teachers of the Jews did 
 not believe that God had made the Sabbath for man. 
 They looked upon Him as a distant Being, who 
 had made statutes and decrees for His creatures, 
 not as one who had formed them in His own 
 image, and established between them and Him an 
 eternal bond, which the sin of man was concealing 
 — which He was seeking to make manifest. The 
 claim of Jesus to be the Son of man and 
 the Son of God, was therefore, in their judgment, 
 horrible blasphemy. The Sabbath, which they 
 used to create a separation between the children 
 and their Father in heaven, Jesus asserted to be 
 a pledge of their union, of his desire to be recon- 
 ciled with them. He, as the Mediator, declared 
 Himself to be the Lord of it, and proved Himself 
 to be so by turning what they made a curse into a 
 blessing. 
 
 XIV. St. John carries us a step further in the 
 history of these discourses. "When the Jews ac- 
 cused J esus of healing the sick man at the pool of 
 Bethesda on the Sabbath-day, He said, ' My Father 
 worketh hitherto, and I work.' They were start- 
 
I.] MY FATHER WORKETH, AND I WORK. 27 
 
 ling words, and the Jews were startled by them. 
 ' He has not only broken the Sabbath/ they said, 
 'but has called God His Father, making Himself 
 equal with God.' Nor did he evade the charge. 
 His language was only justifiable on the supposi- 
 tion that He was, and ever had been, the Son of 
 God; that He had taken flesh to show forth His 
 Father's mind, to exhibit the true idea of His rest 
 and His work; to enable His adopted children to 
 rest and work as He does. 
 
 Here is the fulfilment of the fourth command- 
 ment. Christ, the minister of the circumcision, to 
 accomplish the promises made to the fathers, asserts 
 the true glory of the Sabbath-day, in asserting 
 the mystery of His own relation to God and to 
 His creatures. Christ, the author of the New 
 Testament, prepares the way for the New Sabbath, 
 which is the expression of God's accomplished 
 work in man's redemption, of His divine rest in the 
 well-beloved Son. 
 
SERMON II. 
 
 THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATH. 
 
 Preached at Lincoln's Inn, Nov. 7, 1852. 
 
 Hebeews iv. 11 : Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, 
 lut any man fall after the same example of unbelief. 
 
 rPHE phrase 'Labour to enter into rest/ sounds 
 strangely. Yet we caunot say that our trans- 
 lators have perverted or exaggerated the contrast 
 which was in the mind of the writer. No word can 
 express more energy and effort than the one he 
 has used. And it is quite in harmony with the 
 argument of the whole chapter, even of the whole 
 epistle. He attributes to his countrymen, in former 
 days and in his own, a moral and spiritual torpor. 
 That, he treats as the cause of their not entering 
 into rest. They have a sluggish unbehef in that 
 which God has revealed to them respecting himself 
 and them; therefore they are unfixed, fluctuating, 
 restless. Belief and Rest he treats as kindred and 
 inseparable ideas. But as Belief is, according to 
 
THEY WILL NOT ENTER INTO REST. 29 
 
 Him, the living state of a moral and spiritual being, 
 he connects Rest also with the life of all thoughts 
 and affections, not with their death. 
 
 The allusions in this chapter, as well as in the 
 last, to the Jewish Sabbath, are very marked and 
 obvious. " One speaks in a certain place of the 
 seventh day on this wise : ' And God did rest the 
 seventh day from all his works.' 3 This the writer 
 represents as the ground of a call to man to rest from 
 his own works. Then he quotes the 95th Psalm, 
 as evidence that the call was not obeyed by a 
 number of those to whom it was addressed. It 
 was in vain that nature beckoned them to rest, in 
 vain that an express decree interpreted and con- 
 firmed its voice. There was that in them which 
 refused rest, which made rest impossible. There 
 could be no Sabbath keeping for them, though the 
 Sabbath-day might be the most fundamental of all 
 their institutions, nay, the one of which they 
 boasted most. 
 
 The Jews might indeed say, ' God gave us the 
 blessing of this institution, when He brought us 
 into Canaan. That was always held forth to our 
 fathers as a place of rest for which the weariness 
 and sore travail of the wilderness were to prepare 
 them.' No doubt there was warrant for this view 
 
30 THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sERM. 
 
 of the case. The fourth commandment, when 
 the law was repeated, referred directly to their 
 redemption from Egypt, as one principal part of 
 its meaning. No doubt the unbelief-of the people 
 in the redemption that had been wrought out for 
 them, their distrust of the promise that they 
 should be able, in the strength of God, to conquer 
 the sons of Anak, and to possess the cities that 
 were high and walled up to heaven — was the cause 
 of their murmuring, their cowardice, their restless- 
 ness, their punishment. No doubt the actual 
 triumphs of Joshua were a confutation of their 
 unbelief, a proof that Moses and the Sabbath- 
 day had declai-ed a truth, and not a lie. But the 
 writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews reminds 
 them that the Israelites had already entered into 
 the land which Joshua won for them, when David 
 spoke of their hardening their hearts and not 
 entering into rest. There must, therefore, he 
 says, be a different rest than this for the people of 
 God. Rest in Canaan, does not fulfil the idea 
 of the fourth commandment; that points to a 
 resting of man in God. 
 
 There are those who discover in the frequent 
 allusions to another day, which occur in this 
 chapter, the announcement or prognostic of a new 
 
II.] 
 
 ANOTHER DAY. 
 
 31 
 
 Christian Sabbath, of the first clay as intended 
 to displace the seventh. I cannot say that 
 this thought was not present to the mind of 
 the writer. Very possibly it may have been. 
 But I dare not build any conclusion upon so 
 uncertain an hypothesis. An institution which 
 has lasted for eighteen centuries in the most 
 civilized parts of the universe, which has been 
 preserved amidst all differences of customs, lan- 
 guages, opinions, among races and churches which 
 have been slaying and anathematizing each other, 
 cannot rest upon the doubtful construction of one 
 passage, or of twenty. And I believe the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews explains to us the origin and 
 history of that new Sabbath much more effec- 
 tually and satisfactorily by the great general 
 principles which it brings to light and enforces, 
 than it could possibly do by any special language 
 of this kind, the force of which critics and not 
 wayfarers must detect. 
 
 The great object of the epistle, I conceive, as I 
 had occasion to point out several years ago in this 
 place, is to bring forth the reason and ground of 
 those institutions which the Jews had accepted as 
 mere formal ordinances belonging to their race, with 
 the view of preparing them for events, now close at 
 
32 THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATH. [SERM. 
 
 hand, which would shake their national polity to 
 its centre, and would utterly destroy it unless there 
 were in it a divine and universal substance. Setting 
 this object before him, he devotes himself to the 
 task of showing that a Son of God and a Son of 
 man, a Mediator between God and man, was 
 implied in all the history and institutions of his 
 country; that such a person had now been mani- 
 fested; that His character and work would be 
 attested by the dissolution of the framework of the 
 Jewish commonwealth ; but that a divine and 
 universal commonwealth, which had been implied 
 in that, and for which it had been the prepara- 
 tion, would be presented to the world when it 
 disappeared. As part of this doctrine, the most 
 essential part of it, he dwells upon the fact that 
 Christ had actually presented the full and perfect 
 sacrifice which alone could satisfy the mind of 
 God or the mind of man ; that God, in raising 
 Him from the dead, and so affirming Him to be 
 His well-beloved Son, had witnessed that the 
 conflict was accomplished ; that peace was esta- 
 blished between earth and heaven ; that God could 
 rest in the perfect image of His creature, which 
 was shown forth in the crucified Man ; that men 
 could rest in the perfect image of God, which He 
 
It.] 
 
 JEWS AND CHRISTIANS. 
 
 33 
 
 had shown forth in the same Pei-son. Here was 
 that rest of God which He affirmed to be more 
 perfect than that with which He looked upon the 
 universe on the seventh day. Here was that rest 
 into which he invited Hebrews, because they were 
 men, to enter. 
 
 I conceive, brethren, that the Jew has the best 
 possible right to say, ' If you stand upon edicts, 
 you must adhere to the fourth commandment, 
 according to what we know, and you know, to be 
 the intention of it. You must keep the seventh 
 day, or no day at all.' I could not answer this 
 argument ; I do not think anybody could. For 
 what are hints and passages to a law given amongst 
 thunders and lightnings, proceeding from the 
 mouth of G od himself ? But if, as I tried to show 
 you last Sunday, that law, instead of being an 
 arbitrary enactment, contains its own reason, draws 
 our attention to it, will not allow us to forget it; 
 if it was to this reason of the commandment that all 
 prophets appealed, as explaining wherein the breach 
 of it consisted, and what perils lay in the breach of 
 it ; just as it was to this reason that our Lord ap- 
 pealed when He was vindicating the true ob- 
 sex-vauce of it from those who had utterly misun- 
 derstood and perverted it; then I say that the 
 
 D 
 
34 THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sERM. 
 
 institution is not divine unless it carries out this 
 reason, embodies it, exhibits it, converts it from 
 a mere idea into a fact, abandons its own acci- 
 dents, so far as is necessary for the preservation 
 of its eternal substance. The question at issue 
 between us and the Jew respecting the Sab- 
 bath, cannot be separated from the whole ques- 
 tion which is at issue between us and them. 
 If there has not come one into the world who has 
 a right to the name of the Son of God and the 
 Son of man, if God in Him has not reconciled the 
 world unto Himself, if a complete sacrifice has not 
 been offered for the sins of all mankind, if He who 
 died on the cross has not gone into the holiest 
 place, into the presence of God for us, and is not 
 the perpetual high-priest between us and God, 
 then assuredly our Sabbath-day is a delusion be- 
 cause our faith altogether is a delusion. 
 
 But if all this is as we affirm it to be, then we 
 are not evading the verbal force of the fourth 
 commandment, when we make the day of our 
 Lord's resurrection the Sabbath-day. That must, 
 according to the Christendom hypothesis, explain 
 the mighty secret how it was possible for man to 
 rest because God rests, for man to be holy because 
 God is holy. That must show what the nature of 
 
It.] THE AGE OF THE FATHERS. 35 
 
 God's rest is, that it is the rest of complacency in 
 an object worthy to be loved ; what man's rest is, 
 that it is the rest of complacency in an object 
 worthy to be loved. That must show that all 
 work is holy so far as it begins and ends in this 
 rest ; unholy, so far as it is separated from this 
 rest. 
 
 The division of time then into the one day and 
 the six days wanted no sentences of evangelists or 
 apostles, no decrees of councils wliile the rulers 
 of the world were still pagan, no decrees of 
 monarchs after they became christianized, to call 
 it into existence, or to stamp it with authority. It 
 descended upon the Church like every other part of 
 the history and economy of the chosen people. It 
 was altered and transfigured like every other part 
 of that old economy and history, by the revelation 
 of Him who was its centre and corner-stone. If 
 you would know any other causes which led to 
 the adoption of it, you will not find them. On 
 the contrary, you will find a great many motives 
 and influences which might have led to the rejec- 
 tion of it, which were frequently threatening that 
 result. The Christian Churches at the commence- 
 ment of the second century could no longer call 
 Jerusalem their capital or mother city. The 
 d 2 
 
3G THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATH. [SERM. 
 
 apostles, who had been a link to connect the old 
 world with the new, had passed away. A con- 
 siderable section of those who formed the Jewish 
 element in the Church, disclaimed fellowship with 
 their Gentile brethren, clung more tenaciously to 
 the exclusive forms which had no longer any 
 external hierarchy to support them ; consequently 
 drove those who did not acknowledge themselves 
 merely as part of the synagogue into an almost 
 necessary reaction against it. A terrible insurrec- 
 tion of the Jews in the reigns of Trajan and 
 Hadrian, made the separation still more sharp and 
 decisive, for the followers of the new leader, the 
 new Christ as they considered him, treated the 
 followers of Jesus as their worst enemies. The 
 effects of the conflict are visible in the writings of 
 the Apologists of that age. Justin, who was born 
 in a village of Samaria, aud brought into close 
 contact with the Jews, shows how much he and his 
 brother christians dreaded what he calls Sabbatizing, 
 that is, falling into the customs of the old nation, 
 and so losing the acknowledgment of their having 
 been fulfilled in Christ. If such were the ten- 
 dencies aud fears of the most conspicuous members 
 of the Christian Church at the time when it was 
 coming forth as a united and spiritual kingdom in 
 
IT.] THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 37 
 
 the midst of the Roman world, you will see how 
 wonderful a thing it was that the ancient ordinance 
 which the Jews had made such a continual excuse 
 for denouncing our Lord, nay, for conspiring 
 against His life, should nevertheless have established 
 itself among His devoted followers, and been 
 received as one of the institutes of His kingdom. 
 And yet so it was. No feelings, impressions, 
 natural prejudices, reasonable suspicions, anxiety 
 to avoid past dangers, inferences apparently follow- 
 ing from the teaching of Christ and His apostles, 
 could prevent an ordinance which might have 
 seemed to be cast away among the ruins of the 
 fallen city, or mixed with the ashes of the temple, 
 from starting into new life, and moulding the 
 whole time and order of modern society. It was 
 not the edict of Milan, which Constantine pub- 
 lished immediately after the victory that made 
 him master of Eome, which determined the 
 future character of his empire. That was only an 
 edict of toleration, one which relieved the Christians 
 from the persecutions which they had undergone 
 under Diocletian, Maximian, and their colleagues. 
 It was the decree which sanctioned the observance 
 of Sunday, enrolling it among the festal days of 
 the capital city, which really revolutionized the 
 
38 THE NEW TESTAME.VT SABBATH. [sERM. 
 
 state, and compelled the pagans to feel that then- 
 faith was fallen. For the emperor, probably 
 almost without intending it — nay, whde speaking 
 of the day as Dies Solis — had adopted the resurrec- 
 tion into the circle of men's habitual thoughts and 
 acts. He had allowed the old Jewish distinction 
 of work and rest, interpreted by the Gospel, to 
 penetrate beneath all the days, unlucky or pro- 
 pitious, which the augur or the pontifex had 
 consecrated. 
 
 When this same institution was proclaimed 
 amongst our Gothic ancestors, it found, so at least 
 we have been taught to believe, some forms which 
 seemed to have anticipated it, and with which it 
 could blend. But there is nothing more remark- 
 able or worthy of being reflected upon, than the 
 change which those primitive elements must have 
 undergone when this new formative principle came 
 in to disturb and re-organize them. The God whom 
 the eye could not see or the ear hear, the 
 Father of our Lord J esus Christ, claiming the day 
 of the sun, the day of light, as His day, and in 
 virtue of that, claiming to rule each other day 
 which had been devoted to the service of some 
 separate divinity ; — the Father of the Man, and in 
 Hi in of all men, surmounting and reducing under 
 
II.] 
 
 THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 39 
 
 Himself all those gods of nature to whom men had 
 been bowing down ; a God who cared for the serf 
 and the bondsman, acknowledged as the highest 
 of all and yet the nearest of all, presiding over the 
 daily tasks, appointing the needful and the gracious 
 rest ; — consider how this must have translated the 
 words of the preacher into reality — how it must 
 have undermined idolatry, not by defacing idols, 
 but by introducing another law and order in place 
 of its incoherent medley of services and propitia- 
 tions — how it must have helped to shape out a 
 new Christendom society out of what seemed the 
 rudest materials, out of what yet were the stones 
 wherewith God designed to build His own Temple. 
 
 These influences must not be attributed to any 
 design or deliberate calculation in those who dif- 
 fused the Gospel amongst the barbarous nations, 
 and brought them within the fold of the Church. 
 The Sunday was enjoined as other festivals were 
 enjoined. The birth-days or dying-days of 
 apostles and martyrs were fit subjects for the 
 recollection and gratitude of those whom tliey had 
 benefited by their words and lives. Holy men 
 and women who had done services, or were 
 thought to have done services, for particular' places, 
 soon obtained the like honour. There were days 
 
40 THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sERM. 
 
 that celebrated the foundation of churches, the 
 opening and blessing of wells, the discovery of 
 relics. They mingled -with traditional customs 
 which could boast of a long heathen prescription. 
 It was not to be expected that days which appealed 
 to direct palpable associations, to cures wrought in 
 the very neighbourhood, to gifts which every 
 worshipper might hope to obtain, should not be 
 cherished with especial fondness. The Sunday 
 made no appeal to this kiud of sympathy. It 
 was comprehensive ; it pointed to the invisible ; 
 it was a witness not for, but against, superstition 
 and idolatry. That it should have maintained its 
 ground through the middle ages, that its sanctity 
 should have been acknowledged as high and 
 transcendant, that it should have kept up the idea 
 of the balance of work and re?t when so many in- 
 fluences were disturbing that balance, is not a fact 
 which can be accounted for by Church legislation 
 or priestly influence, far less by the terror of state 
 enactments. All these did homage, sometimes will- 
 ing, sometimes reluctant — occasionally judicious — 
 often very awkward and undesirable — homage to a 
 principle which they did not create and which 
 they could help little to strengthen. 
 
 The proof of this appears at the time of the 
 
II.] THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS. 41 
 
 Reformation. The reformers appealed to the 
 Bible as an authority which surmounted all eccle- 
 siastical maxims and decrees. The Bible, they 
 said, contained a direct message from God to man, 
 and proclaimed emancipation from those fetters 
 which his own evil nature as well as the inven- 
 tions of other men had bound him with. Fes- 
 tivals and fasts seemed to them a part of these 
 fetters, checking the spirit of man in its ascent 
 to God, substituting outward observances for 
 inward faith. The question arose, ' Is not the 
 Sunday one of these festivals V They could not 
 answer ' No they could not find any precept for 
 observing it in the New Testament. The old law 
 which fixed another day had, they thought, clearly 
 been abrogated. Therefore, for the most part, the 
 foreign reformers saw no principle upon which they 
 could enjoin the observance of the Lord's day. It 
 must be left to every man's conscience ; or the 
 legislators of each nation must do what they found 
 most convenient for the well-being of the state. 
 These were the considerations which most directly 
 and consciously influenced them. There was 
 another, of which, I believe, they were not equally 
 aware, but which, I cannot doubt, operated upon 
 them powerfully. Strongly as they believed and 
 
42 THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sERM. 
 
 asserted that Christ's sacrifice on the cross was 
 made once for all, and that no human sacrifices 
 could render it more complete, they did not hold, 
 practically at least, that it was a sacrifice for 
 mankind, that the world was reconciled to God. 
 A festival which proclaimed this, which bade all 
 men everywhere to enter into God's rest, which 
 spoke of nations as holy, like the Jewish nation, 
 had not its full significance for them. Individuals 
 might enter into this rest on one clay, or any day ; 
 but why should there be a great levelling day 
 which seemed to speak to the faithful and unfaith- 
 ful, which seemed to declare that God was send- 
 ing His spiritual grace like His rain, upon the 
 just and upon the unjust, upon the good and 
 upon the evil? With all their desire to preach 
 a gospel in words to the most sinful and outcast, 
 this was a kind of gospel which clashed with many 
 of their strongest and most deeply-rooted feelings. 
 And they were too honest and earnest to adhere 
 to a mere shadow. They were sure that if the Sun- 
 day were not a Sabbath according to the divine 
 sense of the word, it ought not to be put forth 
 as a Sabbath in some earthly and artificial sense. 
 
 There was one country, however, which adopted 
 the doctrinal exclusiveness of the continental re- 
 
II.] SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND. 43 
 
 formers, nay, exaggerated it; and yet which en- 
 forced the observation of the Sunday with a strict- 
 ness previously unknown. I can never speak 
 without reverence of a people so manftd and 
 energetic as the Scotch Presbyterians have proved 
 themselves to be in many periods of their history; 
 or of the man from whom they derived so many 
 of their best qualities j or of the habits which he 
 cultivated among them. It is impossible not to 
 see that those habits grew out of the conviction 
 that the laws and principles of Jewish life were 
 to be severely and cautiously cherished as pledges 
 of its divine covenant and calling by each Chris- 
 tian people. Much of the old sanctity of the 
 household, much of the solidity of that people's cha- 
 racter may be traced, I conceive, to this cause. But 
 it cannot be denied that the method by which the 
 Scotch Calvinists avoided the difficulty which the 
 Genevan Calvinists had not been able to avoid, 
 was a singular one. If the latter could not ex- 
 plain to themselves the existence of a festival 
 which appeared to be meant for all, when ac- 
 cording to their theory it could only be realized 
 and enjoyed by a few, the former cut the knot by 
 making it a fast. There was no harm in enforcing 
 a penalty on the unregenerate. It was not incon- 
 
44 THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sERM. 
 
 sistent that, while putting themselves in all respects 
 at the farthest distance from Romish practices, they 
 should have simply inverted the Romish view of this 
 institution. They gained probably more than they 
 lost. They secured a day which had a divine 
 ground for its observance, though they made that 
 day very different from what we should suppose 
 it to be from the fourth commandment, from the 
 prophets, from Christ. 
 
 There was the same resemblance and the same 
 difference between the Scotch and English prac- 
 tice upon this subject as upon most others. 
 Throughout our history we may trace a strong 
 Jewish feeling, a Jewish belief in the position of 
 the sovereign as called by God and responsible 
 to Him, a J ewish sense of the dignity and holiness 
 of the nation, a Jewish reverence for all institu- 
 tions which could be referred to a divine authority. 
 But our Reformation, conducted by our sovereigns, 
 had been one which more asserted than any 
 other the nation's independence of papal autho- 
 rity, which less disturbed than any other the order 
 of society, civil or ecclesiastical, previously existing 
 within the land. The effect of it was to vindicate 
 for the Sunday its divine ground, its entire dis- 
 tinctness from all days, however they might be 
 
II.] SABBATH LEGISLATION IN ENGLAND. 45 
 
 recommended for honour and celebration, which 
 rested on a mere ecclesiastical appointment j while 
 at the same time it retained something of its 
 original character. It was looked on as a day on 
 which God was inviting his creatures to rest, a day 
 which His ministers were to seize for the purpose 
 of teaching them the grounds on which they 
 might rest in Him, and worship Him ; not in 
 any respect as one of penance. This was the 
 habit of the nation generally. There was a 
 considerable minority of it, which inclined in 
 this, as in most other respects, to the Scotch 
 doctrine and practice. As the re-actionary and 
 despotical tendencies of the two first Stuarts, 
 their intense loathing of the habits which had 
 grown up and established themselves in the 
 country from which they sprung, their desire 
 to fashion it anew after English models, and in 
 many cases to interpret these models by French 
 or Italian maxims and precedents, alarmed this 
 portion of their subjects, and gave them a 
 power which they had not previously possessed 
 with the most thoughtful part of the nation ; so 
 nothing supplied them with more righteous 
 grounds of complaint than the wanton and 
 arbitrary outrage which Charles, probably at the 
 
46 THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATH. [sERJI. 
 
 instigation of Henrietta, though not without the 
 concurrence of Laud, perpetrated on the Sabbath- 
 day. The frantic notion of publishing a book of 
 sports, and enjoining it to be read by royal 
 authority, could only have the effect of driving 
 the mind of the country into the most opposite 
 direction, a direction not natural to it, and in 
 which it was not likely to more evenly or con- 
 sistently. 
 
 The effects of that madness were more visible 
 after the Restoration than even during the Com- 
 monwealth. The court of Charles II., instead of 
 adhering to the precedent of the previous reign, 
 allowed, as you know, the most stringent act for 
 enforcing the observance of the Sunday which 
 exists in our statute-book, to pass into a law. 
 That was the age which set the great example of 
 this kind of legislation ! Dissenters who desire 
 the repetition of it in our day, must try to revive 
 the spirit of the reign which passed the Conventicle 
 and Five Mile Acts. Those who believe it is pos- 
 sible to enforce morality and Christianity by 
 penalties, may encourage themselves by reflecting 
 what morality and Christianity produced these 
 experiments, and were produced by them. But 
 those who love the day of rest, which God has 
 
II.] IMITATION, INSINCERE. 47 
 
 provided for the man-servant and maid-servant, 
 and who look upon the day of rest as emphatically 
 the day which testifies of Him, will not wonder 
 that, in an age when humanity and godliness were 
 equally forgotten, the rich of the earth should have 
 thought they might make amends to God for the 
 blasphemies and falsehoods which they were daily 
 committing by enforcing a parody of His decrees 
 upon watermen and mechanics. 
 
 Corruptio optimi pesshna is a maxim of never- 
 failing truth. I believe, brethren, we may claim 
 for our country the best idea of the Sabbath-day 
 which is to be found anywhere. Whether you 
 agree with me or not, you should at least consider 
 that we cannot abandon this idea without aban- 
 doning much more. We cannot merely take the 
 Sabbath-day of the Romanists. With it we must 
 take the whole scheme and principle of Romish 
 society ; the order of our life must be based upon 
 an ecclesiastical arrangement. We cannot merely 
 take the Sabbath-day of the German Protestants. 
 With it we must take their conception of the 
 entire separation between the faith of the Chris- 
 tian and the ordinary economy of the world. We 
 cannot merely take the Sabbath-day of the Scotch 
 Presbyterian. With it we must take all that we 
 
48 THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATH. [SERM. 
 
 took from him in the days when our Parliament 
 accepted the Covenant, and the Westminster As- 
 sembly re-organized our ecclesiastical government 
 and our civil life. I would have you well weigh 
 the sacrifices we should have to make of that 
 which is most closely involved with our national 
 and moral existence for generations, by any one of 
 these experiments. But the greatest evil of all is, 
 that not one of them can be sincere. We may 
 counterfeit the habits of other men ; but they will 
 never be ours. Our gaiety and our gravity will 
 be both alike affected. The one will not be inno- 
 cent; the other will be merely pharisaical. And 
 this, I conceive, is our great danger. If we do 
 not realize the true idea of the Sabbath, we shall 
 have a compound of all the worst notions of it 
 that can be gathered from all the ends of the 
 earth, and those notions will be faithfully em- 
 bodied in a most incoherent practice. A portion 
 of our society will be just as lax as any people 
 abroad ; but they will carefully insist upon un- 
 mitigated strictness from their inferiors. Among 
 them there will be brutal amusements, mixed 
 with a kind of notion that they ought to be using 
 the day to conciliate the favour of a Being who 
 has no sympathy with them. And — saddest 
 
II.] RELIGIOUS RESTLESSNESS. 49 
 
 spectacle of all — our religious people themselves 
 make it a day of excitement", uot of rest; of 
 listening to popular preachers, not of worshipping 
 God; a day painful to their domestics, painful to 
 their cliildren ; not one which seems to leave any 
 blessing upon themselves, or to make the work of 
 the week more holy and pure. 
 
 Dear brethren, these are our dangers. But, if 
 we are aware of them, we may avoid them. We may 
 say deliberately, with a fixed and solemn purpose, 
 * It is not a day that is speaking to me, and bidding 
 me rest. God is speaking to me through that 
 day, and bidding me rest. He who can overcome 
 the restlessness of my mind, as well as the dull- 
 ness of it, is assuring me that He will. He who 
 desires that I should have an inward and not 
 merely an external peace, is Himself vouchsafing 
 to bestow it upon me. I will therefore stretch 
 out my heart to receive it. I will resist the im- 
 pulses on the right hand and on the left, the 
 bustle that disturbs the world, the bustle that 
 more shamefully and profanely intrudes itself into 
 the sanctuary : not because I want an ungodly 
 and inhuman quietism, not because I think the 
 business of the world dishonourable, not because I 
 would shrink from any controversies in which my 
 
 E 
 
50 THE NEW TESTAMENT SABBATH. [SERM. 
 
 brethren are interested, — but because I want a 
 standing ground from which I may contemplate 
 the things which are passing, truly, that I may act 
 in them faithfully/ 
 
 In this way, we shall begin by degrees to enter 
 into God's rest, and so we shall begin also to do 
 God's work. But since that which is a rest for 
 us, is a rest for all our brethren, — since Christ's 
 resurrection testifies of God's reconciliation, not to 
 us but to mankind, — since every one of our poor 
 brethren is a fellow-heir with us of earth and of 
 Heaven, — we shall feel that it is our business, in 
 every way that we can, to make him a partaker of 
 the blessings of the Sabbath, of its highest bless- 
 ings as well as its lowest. How we may do this, 
 is an inquiry upon which we should enter thought- 
 fully and devoutly ; not taking for granted current 
 maxims on the subject ; not wilfully or scornfully 
 setting ourselves in opposition to them j not per- 
 mitting ourselves or any one else to thrust in cer- 
 tain inferences from Scripture in place of its own 
 direct statements : not appealing even to those 
 statements, as if they at once decided questions in 
 favour of our schemes, and against some course 
 which may have been recommended by persons as 
 good as ourselves, — but calmly, quietly, as in the 
 
II.] 
 
 HOW TO DEAL WITH CASES. 
 
 51 
 
 sight of God, testing the application of each 
 principle to each particular case, knowing that no 
 case can be out of the range of a principle, but 
 always reasonably diffident of our own power of 
 showing how the one governs the other. Above 
 all, if we have this spirit, we shall not doubt 
 that God must desire that His creatures, one and 
 all, shoidd enter into His rest, and we shall 
 confess that it is our own unbelief and hardness 
 of heart which have excluded ourselves, and our 
 fellow-men from the enjoyment of it. 
 
 b 2 
 
SERMON III. 
 
 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 
 
 Preached at Lincoln's Inn, Nov. 14th, 1SS2. 
 
 Matt, xn, 7 ■ But if ye had known what lids meancth, ' I will 
 hare mercy and not sacrifice,' ye would not have cohdemncd 
 the guiltless. 
 
 "HEN I was speaking, two Sundays ago, of 
 
 * " our Lord's acts on the Sabbath-day, and of 
 His discourses respecting it, I did not allude to 
 the incident which called forth these words. I 
 wished you to see how He himself interpreted His 
 healing on that day, to be not the relaxation of 
 the Jewish law, but the fulfilment of it ; how He 
 proved that the Pharisees were violating the letter 
 of the ride, and justifiably violating it, for their 
 own ends; how He claimed a right as the Son of 
 man, to use it for the blessing of the sons of 
 men; how He declared that the works which the 
 Father did on that day, He as the Son might do 
 likewise. But I passed over the story of the 
 
THE CORN FIELDS. 
 
 53 
 
 disciples ' walking through the corn-fields, plucking 
 the ears and rubbing them in their hands/ and the 
 complaint of the Pharisees, ' They do that which 
 is not lawful to do on the Sabbath-day/ For this 
 story refers not to the Lord, but to the servants. 
 He is not asserting his own right to do good 
 on the day which had been consecrated as a 
 witness for God's goodness and against man's 
 selfishness. He is justifying an ordinary unneces- 
 sary act, which had no show of benevolence in it, 
 yet which shocked rabbinical prejudices as much 
 as any greater one could have done. You might 
 have expected Him to dismiss such a charge, 
 either by acknowledging that his disciples were 
 wrong, or by treatiDg it as frivolous. He takes 
 neither of these courses. He treats the objection 
 most seriously, as if it involved, like the other 
 reasonings of the Pharisees on this subject, a mis- 
 chievous and ungodly principle. He answers it 
 first by appealing to the case of David, who went 
 into the house of God, and took the shew -bread to 
 satisfy the hunger of himself and his followers- 
 next to the case of the priests, whose very services 
 in the Temple on the Sabbath-day violate the letter 
 of the law so far as it prohibits work. Thirdly, 
 he refers to a passage in Hosea, in which God 
 
54 THE CRYSTAL FALACE. [.SERM. 
 
 declares ' He will have mercy and not sacrifice.' 
 Finally, He proclaims the great law which He 
 applied in other cases, ' The Son of man is Lord 
 of the Sabbath-day.' 
 
 The allusions to the Jewish king and priest are 
 full of instruction, and should be considered in 
 the light of the great truth, that He, the king and 
 high priest of humanity, came to claim all God's 
 institutions, as witnesses of man's redemption. 
 The quotation from the old prophet expounds 
 these allusions, and brings them home to the con- 
 science of the Jews. The words were familiar to 
 them. They had them ready to cast at a mo- 
 ment's notice against any Heathen or any Jew, 
 whom they supposed to be adopting heathen 
 practices. But they had never known what they 
 meant. Hosea and the prophets generally, warned 
 their countrymen that they were forgetting the 
 God who had made a covenant with their fathers, 
 and had revealed Himself as the God of mercy 
 and truth, and were making gods like those of 
 the nations, whom they must propitiate with sacri- 
 fices of their own. The Jews, in the days of our 
 Lord's incarnation, while they pretended to worship 
 the God of Abraham, had fallen into the same sin. 
 They did not see that the ordinances of God were 
 
III.] MERCY NOT SACRIFICE. 55 
 
 revelations of His goodness and mercy to the 
 children of men. They did not proclaim them to 
 their own countrymen or to the world in that 
 character, but merely as inj mictions by which the 
 Jew was to be distinguished from other men, and 
 the respectable religious Jew from the publican 
 and sinner. They were thus unfitting themselves 
 to receive Christ in that character of a Son of 
 man, which He claimed for Himself so continually 
 in express words ; which He more gloriously vin- 
 dicated to Himself by His death and resurrection. 
 
 I take the sentence which He adopted from the 
 Old Testament as my guide in the task which I 
 undertook to perform this afternoon. I have tried 
 to set before you the principle of the Jewish and 
 of the Christian Sabbath. I have wished you to 
 feel, that one ordinance is the expansion and ful- 
 filment of the other. It remains for me to show 
 that the principle is not a dead one ; but one 
 which we may apply to our own conduct and our 
 present emergencies. But since the words 'con- 
 duct' and ' emergencies' may convey only a vague 
 impression to your minds, I will address myself 
 directly to the topic which is occupying the 
 thoughts of so many at this time. I would 
 rather avoid one which is so exciting ; but if I did, 
 
56 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. [SERM. 
 
 I should miss the very end which I proposed to 
 myself in these sermons, and should lead you to 
 suppose, that Scriptur?is not the faithful director 
 in practice I have maintained it to be. I shall, 
 therefore, notice other subjects as they rise out of 
 this, and naturally connect themselves with it. 
 And since the arguments of the many able and 
 excellent persons who have pronounced a judgment 
 on this point in which I cannot concur, are en- 
 titled to the most grave and respectful attention, 
 T will consider them one by one, not intentionally 
 passing by any, nor admitting any rule in the 
 examination of them, but that which they recognise 
 and to which they appeal. 
 
 The question before us is this. It having been 
 proposed by certain persons to open gardens in 
 the neighbourhood of London, in which various 
 objects, allowed to be suitable for contemplation on 
 week-days, may be seen — not only on these days, 
 but during part of the Sunday — are we bound, as 
 Christians and Englishmen, to protest against that 
 design, and to do what in us lies that it may 
 not be carried into effect ? 
 
 A very considerable, and a very estimable, por- 
 tion of the English public, says that we are bound 
 to take this course — first, because the whole Sun- 
 
III.] 
 
 THE CASE STATED. 
 
 57 
 
 day, according to the laws of God laid down in 
 holy Scripture, being consecrated to religious 
 duties, the scheme proposed will break its unity, 
 assigning part of it to its proper objects, another 
 to mere intellectual gratification : secondly, because 
 the Sabbath is already desecrated to a fearful 
 extent, and it is the duty of all men, but especially 
 of the clergy, to see that it is not desecrated 
 further : thirdly, because numbers will certainly be 
 withdrawn from their regular congregations if so 
 strong a temptation is placed within their reach : 
 fourthly, because the act which is proposed to be 
 done will require a national confirmation, and will 
 therefore be a national act, and will involve a 
 national sin : fifthly, because in all cases of doubt 
 respecting the Sabbath day, it is safer and more 
 religious to incline to the side of strictness, than 
 to the side of laxity. 
 
 There are various questions relating to the 
 details of this measure, which I think are entitled 
 to the most serious consideration, but upon which 
 it is impossible to enter, so long as we are told 
 that it is, in principle, impious and unscriptural. 
 Every one has a right to suggest that such or 
 such an improvement in the working of the scheme 
 will remove possible evils from it, or diminish 
 
,38 
 
 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 
 
 [SERM. 
 
 the amount of labour which it may cause to 
 those who have as much right to the day of 
 rest as their neighbours — if he has first satisfied 
 himself that there is not a horrible enormity in- 
 volved in the scheme, however it may be carried out. 
 As the case is commonly stated, it would be sinful 
 even to think of any corrections or improvements. 
 To touch such a proposition is to be defiled. 
 Whether this conclusion is true or not, I wish to 
 inquire, and I believe I have enumerated all the 
 arguments by which any persons have been led to 
 adopt it. 
 
 I. The proposition concerning our religious 
 duties naturally occupies the first place ; all the 
 others depend upon it. Let me remind you then 
 that this phrase is not a scriptural one. I do not 
 say that it has not great value. I am sure that it 
 has. But we must learn what its value is from 
 scripture ; we must not adapt its statements to our 
 nomenclature. 
 
 If by religious duties is meant obedience to 
 God's commandments, all duties whatsoever arc 
 religious duties. The fourth commandment, as 
 I pointed out when I was preaching upon it, obliges 
 us to work on the six days, as well as to rest on 
 the seventh. We are as much serving God in 
 
III.] RELIGIOUS DUTIES. 59 
 
 doing the one as in doing the other, as much 
 resisting His will, if we arc intentionally not doing 
 the one as the other. It will be a sad day for 
 England — I need hardly tell you this, while the 
 venerable relics are still among us, which this 
 week will be committed to their kindred earth — 
 when every act that a man does, in the field or the 
 council-chamber, shall not be felt to be a part of 
 his duty, of his religious duty. It will be, and 
 has been, a sad day for the Gospel and the Church 
 whenever it has been supposed that a certain class 
 of services may be called secular, and are subject 
 to the cognizance of a human tribunal merely, not 
 of Him who judgeth the reins and the heart. I 
 make this remark, because I would have you see 
 how great an error we may commit, if we trans- 
 late the injunction 1 on the seventh, or on the 
 first day, thou shalt rest/ into the phrase, 'on 
 the seventh, or on the first day thou shalt perform 
 thy religious duties.' We must understand what 
 those duties are, what the distinction in them is, 
 from the commandment. My religious duty, I 
 grant you, is to rest on one day. But if I want to 
 know what that rest is, I must find it out by some 
 other means. I cannot travel in a circle, and affirm 
 that my rest consists in doing my religious duty. 
 
GO 
 
 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. [sERM. 
 
 Supposing, however, this phrase be trans- 
 lated worship, and it is said that the rest of the 
 Sabbath-day consists in the worship of God, I 
 admit this to be very true. Though nothing 
 could be more contrary to the spirit of the Old 
 and New Testament than the notion of restricting 
 worship to one day in seven, yet that day in a 
 remarkable manner explains and defines its nature; 
 to that day it has a most special appropriateness. 
 For all worship, if we follow the teaching of 
 apostles and prophets, is grounded upon God = s 
 revelation of Himself to man as the God who is 
 seeking after his creature ; and is completed when 
 the creature acknowledges that revelation, and 
 turns to the God who is seeking it. God resting 
 in the beloved Son, and meeting those who had 
 wandered from Him, in that Son — the children 
 looking up to then - reconciled Father in Him — is 
 not this the explanation of prayers, thanksgivings, 
 sacraments ? If preaching is to be joined with 
 those prayers, and thanksgivings, and sacraments, 
 is not this to be the theme of it ? Is not the 
 preacher the herald of a Gospel of God's love to 
 man, of the completed sacrifice and atonement ? 
 Is he not to show how all acts and duties flow 
 from the relation in which we stand to God in 
 
III.] 
 
 SABBATH WORSHIP. 
 
 61 
 
 Christ — how all evil and misery flow from the 
 denial of it ? But if this be the case, it must be 
 the greatest of all possible duties, emphatically 
 our religious duty, emphatically our Sunday duty, 
 to set worship before our countrymen in this light. 
 To make them think of a church as their Father's 
 house, as the home for His children, as the refuge 
 for the poor, as the place where they are to realise 
 their union with each other as well as with Him, 
 this must be the obligation which is laid upon us 
 all, upon the clergy above all others. And any- 
 thing which tends to hinder the growth of this 
 conviction ; any mode of stating the nature and 
 character of worship, which causes it, to be re- 
 garded as a hard compulsory service; anything 
 which leads the poor to look upon the church as a 
 place to which they must go because a human 
 law forces them, not one to which they may come 
 because a divine law of love invites them, — is 
 perilous to their souls, subversive of the meaning 
 of Christian theology, at variance with all the 
 doctrine of Scripture concerning the Sabbath-day. 
 
 Brethren, I know that this will sound very 
 ridiculous and impractical in the ears of some 
 people. ' Tempt our people into churches, in- 
 deed ! Look at them, and see how far it is likely 
 
62 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. [sERM. 
 
 that such influences will prevail !' I do look at 
 them, and I see that other motives have not 
 prevailed. I do look at them, and I see that the 
 argument from fear, whether enforced by the 
 threatening of God's judgment hereafter, or of the 
 magistrate's judgment here, has not succeeded in 
 making our churches frequented, or our people more 
 eager to know what goes on in them. I do look 
 at them, and I find everywhere symptoms that 
 we need violent excitements to draw the rich to 
 slumber in their pews, and that these excitements 
 are not sufficient to attract the poor to their 
 benches. I do look at them, and I see very 
 decisive evidence that we have not learnt what that 
 meaneth, ' I will have mercy, and not sacrifice f 
 that we are not using God's mighty methods, but 
 our own feeble and paltry ones, to recommend 
 His service. 
 
 But the Sabbath-day should be a whole day, 
 not a divided day. Certainly ; its intention and 
 effect is to give wholeness and unity to our lives, 
 to prevent them from being discordant and frag- 
 mentary ; it must have a right to claim a unity for 
 itself. TATiat kind of unity ? I imagine a unity 
 of purpose, unity of sphit. If we really labour 
 that it may have this, we shall enter into God's 
 
III.] SABBATH UNITY. 63 
 
 rest j we shall show that His worship has clone 
 us some good. If we try to do more, if we insist 
 upon a uniformity of occupation, we demand that 
 from others which we know that we do not prac- 
 tise — which we feel that we ought not to practise — 
 ourselves. We are not engaged all day in the 
 public worship of God j Ave feel that the repetition 
 of prayers and praises would soon become a 
 mockery, if there were not pauses for reflection ; 
 that there would be no rest, outward or inward, 
 if there were not an alternation of exercises. We 
 do not, I hope, consider the time devoted to the 
 service of the body, a mere ignominious and 
 shameful necessity, but an occasion for giving of 
 thanks. At least, if we lived like those whom we 
 are taught to regard as our models, it would be so. 
 They ate their bread with joy and singleness of 
 heart, because they had learned the secret of God's 
 love and redemption. ' Oh ! but such high 
 standards are not applicable to the low condition 
 of our people !' What consistency ! You call 
 upon the people in this low condition to keep a 
 united Sabbath — a whole Sabbath. You say that 
 there must be no departure from the strictness of 
 God's rule, and when we try to ascertain what 
 that rule is, how it ought to be carried out in 
 
64 
 
 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 
 
 [SERM. 
 
 practice, that we may be in accordance with the pre- 
 cepts and example of Scripture, you immediately 
 invent another rule, a unity of your own, and in- 
 sist that all people, high and low, subjects and 
 rulers, shall conform to that. Is not this making 
 a Sabbatb, not accepting God's Sabbath ? 
 
 ' But intellectual occupations on such a day must 
 needs be distracting/ Here, again, a maxim is gene- 
 ralized to meet a particular case, which maxim we do 
 not act upon and cannot act upon in other cases. In 
 that country where the Sabbath is supposed to be 
 observed most strictly, is there no seeking for intel- 
 lectual gratification in the frequenting of preachers, 
 no exercise of intellectual skill — must I not add, 
 no mischievous and proud exercise of it — in the 
 criticism of them ? You may wish to prevent 
 any evils which accompany tbis tendency, but 
 will you silence the teacher that you may take 
 away tbe temptation to it? Or will you lay down 
 the maxim once for all, that only words can be 
 sanctified to God ; that when you contemplate His 
 works, or any forms of beauty, that is not to be a 
 holy or religious exercise — merely, (according to 
 a distinction which you have borrowed from the 
 schools of philosophy — not from tbe Bible) an in- 
 tellectual one? Such a doctrine, fully and fairly 
 
III.] SABBATH DESECRATION. 65 
 
 stated, involves the most frightful Manicheisrn, 
 sets aside the very meaning of worship, which is 
 meant to shed its radiance over all the acts and 
 the whole life of man, directly contradicts the 
 practice of our Lord, who sat at marriage feasts 
 and walked with His disciples through the corn 
 fields, drawing the divinest parables from them. 
 
 II. I have endeavoured to show you into what 
 dangerous and unscriptural dogmas those have 
 been led who have professed to apply high standards 
 to this subject. I follow them, — not willingly, for 
 how can any one speak willingly of such wretched 
 facts? — into their statements respecting the actual 
 condition of our London people. 
 
 I admit, at once, all that they say respecting 
 the present desecration of the Sabbath. If they 
 like to begin where it would be most honest and 
 courageous to begin — with the highest classes — 
 I cannot combat the assertion that there is an 
 employment of men-servants and maid-servants 
 and of cattle on that day which is justified by no 
 necessity, which does rob numbers of the rest 
 God has intended for them. Or if you affirm 
 that these are beyond your reach, and that 
 all you can do is to take care that the poor shall 
 not throw away their souls because the rich do; I 
 
 F 
 
66 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. [sERM. 
 
 am equally ready to concede that as yet very little 
 progress has been made towards the accomplish- 
 ment of this end. That uniformity of occupation 
 on the Sabbath-day, which some hold to be the 
 great essential of it, has been attained very 
 completely by great masses in this metropolis. 
 Nothing breaks its low and grovelling monotony. 
 No better or purer pursuit interferes with the 
 rest which is supplied by the gin-palace. Others 
 do go forth from those wretched courts and 
 alleys which have been called, in mockery, their 
 quiet homes and peaceful firesides, into the 
 suburbs. They breathe, once in the week, some- 
 thing like fresh air; they see trees and the sky. 
 But amusements of a very coarse and sensual 
 kind are offered to them there also. The heavy 
 work of the week, the weariness and helpless- 
 ness of that work, the loss of interest in higher 
 things which our neglect has caused, the destruc- 
 tion of family life and sympathy which has sprung 
 up from husbands and wives and children being 
 rivals of each other in their labours, and from 
 the abominable state of those dwellings in which 
 different families are crowded together, — have made 
 entertainments such as the conductors of the 
 lowest tea-gardens and taverns supply, those which 
 
III.] MORAL CONTRADICTIONS. 67 
 
 they feel most congenial. These are facts attested 
 by the most accumulated evidence, not denied but 
 insisted upon by those who are loudest in their de- 
 nunciations of the new Crystal Palace. Upon the 
 strength of these facts, they adjure us, the clergy 
 of the land, — who know that we cannot prohibit 
 those who have chariots and horses from making 
 any use of the Sabbath that they like, though they 
 have the other six days at their command, — who 
 have looked on quietly at the most low and 
 degraded use of it by those who have that day only 
 for any repose — to fill the air with our cries because 
 certain persons have offered to the humbler classes 
 entertainments which we allow are not dishonour- 
 able, not degrading — which may awaken in them 
 some higher instincts, some better aspirations — 
 which do recognise them as human beings, as 
 beings having capacities and sympathies in common 
 with ourselves. It is your duty, brethren — it is 
 more strongly our duty — to watch over the pre- 
 servation of the Sabbath-day, to do what in us 
 lies that it may be kept more holily than it is now j 
 and therefore I maintain that this is not, this 
 cannot be our duty. It is true, that God does 
 send His punishments upon those who neglect His 
 commands j those commands being for the blessing 
 f 2 
 
68 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. [SERM. 
 
 of His creatures, the violation of them being for 
 their injury ; and "therefore I do tremble lest He 
 should call not others, but us, to account for that 
 which He sees among us — lest He should say, 
 ' Ought I not to judge you who are breakiug my 
 express command by looking for motes in other 
 men's eyes while there are beams in your own? 
 Shall I not send my sword against an hypocritical 
 people? Shall not my soul be avenged of such a 
 nation as this ?' 
 
 III. But it is said that not merely the outcasts 
 of our land — those who have never thought of a 
 church as their home, who have never believed 
 that the Church had anything to do with them — 
 but that those who frequent her ordinances, our 
 regular congregations, perhaps our communicants, 
 will be drawn from us by these gardens and works 
 of art. Brethren, the fear may be a well-grounded 
 one. But if it be so, must there not be a fault 
 somewhere else than in the gardens and the works 
 of art ? The Gospel came into the midst of an 
 age not better than ours; it found a set of men 
 who were familiar with all the spectacles of the 
 amphitheatre, who had facdities for gratifying 
 every intellectual and every brutal taste. It 
 found men pressed down with burdens from 
 
III.] OVR CONFESSION OF WEAKNESS. 69 
 
 which such spectacles could give no deliverance — 
 toiling hearts for which such objects could not 
 procure rest. It came among them with no civil 
 support; it could not even prohibit the most 
 shameful of such entertainments till it had already- 
 achieved its victory. And we, in the eighteenth 
 century of the Christian era, in the midst of a 
 Christian land, openly proclaim that we dare not 
 encounter the rivalship of a few statues and trees, 
 that our Gospel has no power when compared 
 with them. How has this happened ? Is it that 
 there are no spirits now crying out for help, for 
 teaching, for emancipation? There never were 
 more in any age or country of the world. Is it 
 that mere sights to the eye and sounds to the ear 
 give them the satisfaction which they could not 
 give to those who lived under the Roman Empire? 
 They confess in a thousand ways that they feel 
 the inadequacy of such comforters. There must 
 be another cause — may God endue us with courage 
 to confess it to ourselves and to Him ! It must 
 be that our words do not contain the food or the 
 medicine which meets the great necessities of those 
 to whom we offer them. It must be that as the 
 dogs licked the sores of Lazarus, which the man 
 clothed in purple and fine linen did not heal or 
 
70 
 
 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. 
 
 [SERM. 
 
 bind up, or mollify "with ointment, inanimated 
 nature or forms of human beauty have a gracious 
 and soothing influence, which the divine message 
 spoken by our cold, insincere lips, does not carry 
 with it. But oh ! if it be so, what help can 
 prohibitions or restrictions afford us ? Every 
 Crystal Palace may be closed, but there will not 
 be one human spirit more quickened or purified. 
 If God does not teach us to show forth the power 
 and meaning of His day of rest — if He does not 
 enable us to receive it and declare it as the witness 
 of His love to all, of the redemption He has 
 wrought for all — if He does not stir us up to pro- 
 claim the holiness of work as well as the holiness 
 of rest, and to do what in us lies that it may be a 
 blessing, not a curse, to those who are engaged in 
 it — we may agitate the land against one tempter 
 after another, but our flocks will not abide with 
 us, and their blood will be required, not of those 
 whom we have denounced, but of us. 
 
 IY. I know, however, how strongly tbe feeling 
 prevails that the scheme complained of is a national 
 one, and that therefore it cannot be brought into 
 parallel with any wrong-doings of which individual 
 laymen or clergymen are guilty. Most heartily 
 do I rejoice that we should be led by any arguments 
 
III.] HOLINESS OF THE NATION. 71 
 
 or declamations to recollect what we are all so 
 prone to forget — that we form a nation, and are 
 not a collection of loose atoms. We ought to be 
 thankful for all events, however sad in themselves — 
 for the deaths of great men, for the fears of foreign 
 invasion — which awaken us to a sense of that 
 unity. None should strive so diligently to arouse 
 it as the ministers of the Gospel : they will never 
 be more successful than when they meditate on 
 the origin and purpose of the Sabbath-day, a_id 
 make their people aware of its holiness. For its 
 holiness, as I said two Sundays ago, was the great 
 witness to the Jewish nation of its own holiness. The 
 seventh day said to the stiff-necked race — to those 
 who were continually setting up idols — to those 
 who were sinking into all low vices, ' Ye are 
 holy, for God is holy. He has chosen you to be 
 a people of inheritance to himself. You become 
 individually and collectively base and grovelling 
 when you forget that He has done so.' 
 
 Does the first day bear this witness less strongly 
 than the seventh did ? I believe not. I believe 
 that we have as much right to call England a holy 
 nation as the prophets had to call Judaea a holy 
 nation. I believe that it is holy in virtue of God's 
 calling ; that the members of it are unholy when 
 
72 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. [sERM. 
 
 they deny their calling and their unity — when they 
 say that they have no common life, no common 
 interests, when they think each man has an in- 
 terest of his own which is unlike his neighbour's 
 or contrary to it. Would to God that we could all 
 preach this doctrine, that we could claim every 
 Englishman, whatever his caste or occupation may 
 be, as a sharer in the covenant, in the holiness, in 
 the blessedness of the Nation ! It would give us 
 a heart, a courage, a fellowship of which now we 
 know very little, but which soon we may want for 
 the direst emergencies. 
 
 And I believe, brethren, it is because we have 
 not done this, that the day of rest has lost its sig- 
 nificance and its power for us. Because we have 
 divided ourselves into sect3 and factions, because 
 we have said to this man and that, ' Stand by, we 
 are holier than thou art;' because we have not 
 addressed all as citizens of God's kingdom, heirs of 
 God's covenant, — the Sabbath day is no longer 
 recognised as more than a human institution, to be 
 upheld by enactments and penalties. 
 
 And thence we have come to suppose that a 
 nation can only express itself in such enactments 
 and restrictions, that the only national acts are 
 those which proceed from parliament or some 
 
hi.] 
 
 NATIONAL SINS. 
 
 73 
 
 public office, that the only national sins are those 
 which are committed by cabinet ministers. 
 While we maintain such doctrines, the Bible must 
 remain a sealed book to us, or one which we only 
 open to seek missiles that we may cast at our 
 neighbours. It is surely the duty of statesmen, 
 as it is the duty of us all, to labour for the sanctity 
 of the Sabbath-day. But they must consider, as 
 we must, in each particular case, how this sanctity 
 may be preserved, how it may be endangered. 
 If they are honest men, fearing God, hating cove- 
 tousness, they will not allow their judgment ever 
 to be swayed by a loud shout, however they may 
 respect particular voices which have helped to swell 
 it. They will remember who said, on this very 
 subject, ' Judge not according to the appearance, 
 but judge righteous judgment;' who said to rulers 
 of the synagogue, ' If ye had known what that 
 jneaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, ye 
 would not have condemned the guiltless.' The 
 Queen's ministers are told, and rightly told, that 
 they are responsible to God for their acts, that 
 they must not violate that responsibility for a tem- 
 porary expediency. By all means let them keep 
 that thought in mind, and let no fear of displeas- 
 ing the religious world induce them to swerve by 
 
74 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. [SERM. 
 
 a hair-breadth from their conviction ; to do any- 
 thing which they are persuaded it is wrong, to 
 leave undone anything which they are persuaded it 
 is right, to do. In proportion as they give proof 
 that they act upon this principle, they wdl avoid a 
 number of national sins which arise, like so many 
 individual sins, from cowardice and the dread of 
 public opiniou. 
 
 V. But all the arguments which I have con- 
 sidered are clenched, and their weakness ex- 
 cused, by one grand canon, 'that in all cases, 
 when a doubt exists in our mind, we shall be 
 acting more reverently and safely if we give the 
 benefit of it to the side of strictness, not of laxity/ 
 Answering not the words of this proposition, but 
 the sense of it, (for I do not defend any laxity — I 
 am endeavouring to discover what is the most 
 exact and scriptural way of keeping the holy day,) 
 I say at once, I reject this canon, for one simple 
 and conclusive reason. Our Lord Jesus Christ 
 did not act upon it, but upon that which is 
 apparently most opposed to it. I qualify the words 
 carefully, since I have shown you that, instead of 
 weakening the force and obligation of the Sabbath- 
 day, no one ever sanctified it as He did. But in 
 the judgment of the men around him, He was, not 
 
Hi.] Christ's acts not exceptional. 75 
 
 once or twice, but continually, breaking tbrough 
 rules which custom had established, and for which 
 it pretended scriptural authority. Will it be said 
 that our circumstances are different from those of 
 the Jews when He was upon earth — that he was 
 surrounded by self-righteous Rabbis — that we dwell 
 among persons who systematically set aside the 
 obligation of the day, among multitudes who 
 habitually transgress it? I deny the difference 
 altogether. There were Sadducees then, who 
 made light of mere institutions ; Herodians, who 
 looked at them merely from a state point of view ; 
 Roman soldiers, who mocked at all Jewish forms ; 
 crowds of people — sheep without a sbepherd — 
 utterly estranged from their country and their 
 country's law, ready to become outcasts and 
 brigands. It is historically false — it is theologi- 
 cally dangerous — to draw a line about our Lord's 
 life on earth which hinders it from being an 
 example to His followers in other ages and lands. 
 Each age, when it has been awakened to a know- 
 ledge of its own state, has perceived how the one 
 which was chosen for His appearing illustrated its 
 own dangers and duties. There is none that should 
 be more awake to that fact than the one into 
 which we are bora. There is none which has 
 
76 THE CRYSTAL PALACE. [sERM. 
 
 more need to ponder that which was doing in 
 the green tree from which the life and sap had 
 not yet departed ; that which He said should be 
 done in the dry after it had separated itself from 
 Him, its divine root. "While He was with them, 
 they used all the institutions which God had 
 given them to be witnesses of their common King 
 and Deliverer, as arguments for rejecting Him. 
 When they had cast Him out, saying ' this is the 
 heir, let us kill him that the inheritance may be 
 ours/ they clung to the Sabbath-days, to every 
 thing which reminded them that they had formed a 
 divine commonwealth. But they had lost the 
 centre of it. It was not a commonwealth. They 
 had no bond to each other, for they had no bond 
 to God. And then was the long-delayed sen- 
 tence upon that ancient tree fulfilled — ' Cut it 
 down. Why cumbereth it the ground V 
 
 Brethren, it is not by raising clamours about 
 the Sabbath-day, or about the authority of the 
 Bible, that we can avert this sentence. It is by 
 an earnest repentance for the sins individual and 
 national, for the sins of the people and the sins of 
 the priest, which have kept us from feeling for 
 one another and caring for one another, which 
 have made our rest godless, and our works god- 
 
in.] 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 77 
 
 less ; which have made all the blessed testimonies 
 of Scripture concerning the Son of man and the 
 Son of God strange and incomprehensible to us. 
 May He who is raised up on high to give re- 
 pentance and remission of sins, deliver us from the 
 great sin of having used His name as a name of 
 strife and division ! May He Himself teach us 
 what that meaneth, 'I will have mercy and not 
 sacrifice.' 
 
SERMON IV. 
 
 THE CHAEACTEE OF THE WAEEIOE A LEGI- 
 TIMATE OBJECT OF ADMIRATION TO 
 CHBISTIANS. 
 
 Preached at Lincoln's Inn, Nov. 21, 1852. 
 
 Isaiah ii. 4 : And He shall judge among the nations and shall 
 rebuke many people : and they shall beat their swords into 
 plough-shares, and their spears into prunhvj-hooks : nation 
 shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they 
 learn war any more. 
 
 I SHALL not inquire on what particular occa- 
 sion these words were spoken. I observed some 
 time ago, when I was preaching upon Isaiah, that 
 they were probably quoted from an older prophet, 
 and that the purpose of the discourse which follows 
 them in this and the third and fourth chapters, 
 was to remove some false impressions which the 
 Jewish people in the days of Jotham had taken 
 up respecting the time and the mode of their ful- 
 filment. I have chosen them for my text this 
 afternoon, because they have given rise to some 
 questions which I think ought to be answered at 
 
THE CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR. 79 
 
 this time. We are asked how, with such passages 
 written in sunbeams in the Book which we hold 
 to be divine, we can regard with any complacency 
 the acts and characters of a warrior. It may be 
 natural, we are sometimes told, that worldly men 
 should admire those who have become great through 
 the sword; that the pagan type of excellence 
 should still be the type of excellence for those 
 who adopt Christianity only in name. Eut can 
 clergymen, can those who urge others to make 
 the Gospel their rule, and the character of Jesus 
 Christ their model, openly join in the same 
 homage ? Are they not surrendering a principle ; 
 thoughtlessly or consciously following a multitude ; 
 impairing the rectitude of their own minds, and 
 the testimony which they bear to all who hear 
 them, by admitting two standards of morality, one 
 derived from the Bible, one from the maxims of 
 the age ? Such doubts, by whomsoever propounded 
 to us, ought not to be evaded. If we dismiss 
 them, they will come to us again; if we silence 
 them with mere general phrases, our minds will 
 become bewildered, and our acts insincere. There 
 is so much danger, we all know, of merely catch- 
 ing an infection, of merely obeying a popular 
 impulse, that each man is bound seriously to ask 
 
80 THE CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR. [sERM. 
 
 himself before he moves in a crowd, and allows 
 himself to partake of its sympathies : — Am I 
 complying with a fashion — bowing to an idol 
 which men have set up; or am I acknow- 
 ledging a divine inspiration which is raising my 
 countrymen above the ordinary level of their 
 feelings ; which it is good for them to obey ; 
 which it would be shameful and ungodly for me 
 not to obey also ? 
 
 Of course one may deceive oneself in such self- 
 examination. We may any of us have yielded to 
 a false motive, or to mixed motives, or may have 
 acted without any reflection at all. But I am 
 convinced that the Bible, and this text especially, 
 which is supposed to warrant so different a conclu- 
 sion, might have helped to clear our consciences j 
 to teach us that our own instincts and those of 
 our countrymen were not wrong but true instincts ; 
 to prove that the kind of character for which we 
 have testified reverence and affection, is one for 
 which we ought to feel respect and affection, not 
 because we acknowledge some other law than that 
 which God has given us, but because we wish to 
 be governed by that law. 
 
 I. The old prophet, it is often said, was antici- 
 pating the Gospel or Christian age of the world, 
 
IV.] CHRIST THE RIGHTEOUS KING. 81 
 
 and was pointing out what ought to be its con- 
 dition always, what some day will be actually its 
 condition. I do not object to this statement, ex- 
 cept for being too vague. The words, ' He shall 
 judge among the nations and rebuke many people,' 
 cannot be diluted into the phrase ' the pure and 
 beuign doctrines of the Gospel, or of Christianity, 
 shall be diffused over the world/ They speak 
 not of Christianity, but of Christ ; not of a doctrine, 
 but of a King. They speak of One whose do- 
 minion had been from everlasting, or ever the 
 worlds were ; who had declared Himself, though 
 unseen, to be the King of His people Israel, who 
 would be afterwards manifested as the King of 
 men, who would reign till all His enemies were 
 put under His feet. That this King is merciful 
 and gracious was proclaimed by the law and the 
 prophets, was proved when He took flesh and 
 dwelt among men. But His primary character- 
 istic is that He reigns in righteousness, that His 
 sceptre is a sceptre of justice. The language 
 which describes Him here does not suggest, first 
 of all, an image of tranquillity and peace. ' He 
 shall judge among the nations and rebuke many 
 people thus is He represented to us who, we be- 
 lieve, took upon Him the form of a servant, and 
 
82 CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR. [sERM. 
 
 was meek and lowly of heart. If then, we make 
 Christ our standard, and allow the Bible, and not 
 our own fancy, to tell us what He is, we must 
 honour any man who acknowledged right, who, 
 we are confident, was a just man. I am quite 
 sure it was the conviction that they were honour- 
 ing a just man, which gave those crowds we saw 
 last week their dignity and their seriousness. 
 Every person among them might have his own 
 vulgar notions, his own imperfect maxims about 
 good and evil, his own irregular practice. But 
 the common, united, human heart which rose above 
 their individual basenesses and pettinesses, paid 
 reverence, not to outside trappings, not to reputa- 
 tion, not to success, but to that law of right which 
 the man whose earthly glories had all crumbled 
 into dust had confessed, and which could not 
 perish. And so doing, they gave honour directly 
 or implicitly to Christ the utterer of that law, the 
 Christ in whom it was fulfilled. They felt, more 
 truly and piously than some of us feel who should 
 know better, that whatever is good must come 
 from the source of good, and that we deny Him 
 whenever we deny it. 
 
 It has been said that this sense of right and 
 order, though it may have been conspicuous in one 
 
IV.] THE DISCIPLINE OF ARMIES. 83 
 
 man, is emphatically the quality of a soldier : that 
 it belonged to him because, more than any one 
 else, he had entered into the meaning of a soldier's 
 life, into that which the discipline of camps, strictly 
 understood, exacts of those who lead and of those 
 who follow. I cannot contradict this assertion. 
 But then the consequence from it seems to be that 
 this discipline, and the character which is moulded 
 by it, deserve not our reprobation, but our admira- 
 tion and imitation, because we are Christian men. 
 People do render it. It is their conscience which 
 leads them to render it. I am sadly afraid that 
 if we tell them the Gospel forbids them to render 
 it, they Mill say that their conscience and the 
 Gospel are drawing them in two different ways. 
 But we have no right to say so. The Gospel gives 
 us no authority to say so. That armies may be- 
 come mere machines, frightful machines, directed 
 by some will which is merely bent upon destruc- 
 tion, this we all know. That after they have be- 
 come such machines, particular leaders may put 
 forth their own' individual energy, may prove that 
 mind and spirit are meant to have sway over mere 
 physical force, and may use that force to produce 
 a wide anarchy, we know also. None, I believe, 
 are doing more to hasten on one or both of these 
 g 2 
 
84 CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR. [SERM. 
 
 dire calamities, than those who represent injustice 
 and violence as the inevitable attributes of the 
 military man, or the military chief. Aud none, I 
 believe, have done so much to arrest the danger, 
 as those who have shown, through a long and 
 steadfast life, that obedience — not simply to law 
 palpable and expressed in letters, but to that right 
 and equity which the conscience recognises, which 
 is called for on sudden emergencies where no rule 
 can be appealed to, which must be enforced upon 
 others in spite of obloquy, and upon oneself in 
 spite of temptation, which must be tested by its 
 application to minute and laborious details — is the 
 quality which, above all others, the calling of a 
 soldier demands. We paid honour, on Thursday, 
 to the man in whom we believed this quality, this 
 specially humble quality, dwelt largely. Accord- 
 ing to any standard of ethics, we were bound to 
 revere it for its manifest utility, for its intrinsic 
 nobleness. But the Christian ethics, more than 
 all others, enforced it from us, because such obe- 
 dience is the recognition of an invisible authority 
 to which the heart and will must bow down when 
 they are most inclined, and when circumstances 
 most enable them, to exalt themselves. Call it 
 military if you will, it is a quality which civi- 
 
IV.] ALL OFFICES UNDER CHRIST. 85 
 
 Hans must cultivate if they would do any good to 
 society, nay, would not be its plagues and pests. 
 Call it mundane, but divines must have it if they 
 would not utterly set aside the words and the ex- 
 ample of their Master. 
 
 But I may be told that, however desirable and 
 Christian-like such a quality may be, when it is 
 transferred from its proper region to another, in 
 that region it is only an instrument for the ac- 
 complishment of an evil end. As long as I have 
 these words written in the Divine Book, and in a 
 passage of it which some who omit large portions of 
 it as obsolete and dangerous delight to quote, ' He 
 shall judge among the nations, and rebuke many 
 people,' so long I cannot accept that statement. I 
 can only look upon all our offices as appointed by 
 Him to carry out certain portions of His own 
 divine work for men. The physician heals bodies 
 under His eye and teaching, and shoidd confess 
 Him as the chief healer. The lawyer should con- 
 fess Him as the first lawgiver and judge. The 
 priest should own Him as the great high-priest. 
 And if He has still that function of rebuking the 
 nations, then there are wars which are not the 
 work of the evil spirit, but are for the putting 
 down of his works, and the warrior is Christ's 
 
86 CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR. [SERM. 
 
 minister in these. And so far as he fulfils his 
 calling faithfully, with a sense of its awfulness and 
 responsibility, with an earnest desire that it may 
 not be necessary, and that blood may be shed 
 only to save that which is more precious than all 
 individual life, the severity of the methods which 
 he must resort to should affect him just as much as 
 those which the lawyer or physician or divine 
 resort to affect them, and no more. The excessive 
 approbation which men sometimes bestow upon 
 his deeds, may, no doubt, mislead him. But if 
 he has borne it meekly, if it has not overthrown 
 his reason or confused his conscience, it may have 
 been granted to sustain him against that loss of 
 self-respect which the ignominious aud loathsome 
 parts of his occupation might cause him ; to re- 
 mind him how much more precious the sympathy 
 of one's fellow -creatures is than all exercises of 
 destructive power; even to make him aware by 
 the abundance and surfeit of human applause, 
 how utterly unsatisfactory it is, how little it would 
 be worth while for such an end to risk death one- 
 self, how much less to inflict it upon others. And 
 so he is thrown back, as the member of every 
 other profession must be thrown back, upon the 
 sense of a calling. It is worth while to do that 
 
IV.] A LESSON TO THE PRIEST. 87 
 
 which one is appointed to do. Be the work great 
 or little, respectable or contemptible, apparently 
 gracious, or apparently terrible, it is to be done as 
 ever in the great Task-master's eye ; our concern 
 being scarcely at all with the judgment which 
 men may form of it, or the results to which it may 
 lead ; the rewards will be what are best for us : 
 God will see to the issue, if each moment's task is 
 not forgotten. 
 
 When we are asked, then, whether we can, as 
 heralds and priests of the Prince of Peace, join in 
 the reverence which is paid to a fallen chief, and 
 encourage our countrymen to pay it, I reply, ' Yes, 
 verily. For we priests ought to feel, and I trust 
 do feel, that the warrior puts us to shame in that 
 very character which we profess to bear, of wit- 
 nesses for righteousness and for the righteous 
 King. With infinitely greater temptations to go 
 wrong than we have, with probably much fewer 
 opportunities of knowing the right, he was yet 
 taught and enabled by Him who alone teaches and 
 enables any one, to eschew the great sin of self- 
 seeking as we have not eschewed it, to pursue a 
 law and standard of justice as we have not pur- 
 sued it. What his deflections may have been, we 
 know not. But God knows, and we know, what 
 
$8 CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR. [sERM. 
 
 our own have been. And we should be dishonour- 
 ing Him and deceiving our own selves, if we tried 
 to escape from the confession of them by pretend- 
 ing that there was one rule for us to follow, and 
 another for him. If we have been yielding to 
 faction, disobedience, and self-will, his faithful 
 resistance to these evils must assuredly rise up to 
 condemn us when Christ owns those who have 
 done His will, not those who have eaten and drunk 
 in His presence, or taught in His name.' 
 
 II. It is the next clause of the text, however, 
 which is most frequently in people's mouths ; that 
 one of which I have spoken being forgotten. 
 ' They shall beat their swords into plough-shares, 
 and their spears into pruning-hooks.' ' Observe/ 
 it is said, ' how strong the words are. It is not 
 that swords shall be thrown aside for plough-shares, 
 or spears for pruning-hooks ; the first are to be 
 changed into the last, there being no use for 
 them in their original shape/ We accept the 
 criticism, making no complaint of its over-refine- 
 ment. Then it would seem to follow that the 
 material of which the peaceful instruments are 
 made, is the very same of which the warlike 
 instruments were made, not the first of iron, and 
 the other of some feeble and more flexible sub- 
 
IV.] SWORDS TURNED INTO PLOUGHSHARES. 89 
 
 stance. Till, then, all the energies of war are 
 faithfully represented in the acts and services of 
 peace, the prophecy is not fulfilled. It cannot be 
 fulfilled unless the settled purpose of an army, 
 its unity and concentration, the self-devotion of 
 its individual members, the consciousness of a 
 common interest in the leader and in the humblest 
 soldier, are transferred to civil life. It is not in 
 the way to be fulfilled, its principle is directly 
 contradicted, its promised blessings are utterly 
 slighted, in a society where men feel that they are 
 rivals one of another, that each one has a sepa- 
 rate object, and is to pursue it at the cost of his 
 neighbour. It cannot be fulfilled in an age 
 which makes gold, in the most material and gross 
 sense, its prize and aim ; when mere acquisition 
 is esteemed as the great good j when self-restraint 
 is only valued just so far as it ministers to that 
 good; when all thought, study, enterprise, are 
 supposed to be of worth exactly in proportion as 
 they contribute to it. Such a state of things may 
 accomplish all the dreams of some statesmen and 
 sages; they may desire nothing but a security 
 for its continuance ; nothing but a more entire 
 extinction of those instincts and aspirations which 
 disturb it. But it corresponds to no visions of 
 
90 CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR. [sERM. 
 
 prophets. The 'thousand years of peace' which 
 they looked for to follow the ' thousand years of 
 war/ were not of this character. In such a society 
 they saw all the elements of wars and fightings, 
 because wars and fightings were already going 
 on in the hearts of its members, because it was, 
 in fact, only a condition in which each class was 
 providing, and ineffectually providing, against the 
 dangers with which some other was threatening it. 
 When the false prophets in such states of society 
 sang ' Peace, peace/ the true men foretold that 
 invaders were coming to destroy the land, and lay 
 it waste. They called upon countries which had 
 fallen into this sleep to awake out of it ; they 
 said God's thunders would scatter then- dreams, if 
 they did not awake. And though they spoke with 
 trembling of such days of the Lord as they saw 
 approaching, they did not conceal the blessings 
 which might flow from them — in that they w ould 
 destroy much of the material prosperity to which 
 the nation's soul was sacrificed, in that they would 
 arouse many to feel that they were members of a 
 nation, and that this is a blessing for the sake of 
 which all lesser ones may be cast away. 
 
 A military chief, then, who brought into the 
 transactions of civil life the manly sense which 
 
IV.] REVERENCE FOR ORDER. 91 
 
 had governed him in the camp, who would suffer 
 no pettinesses of party or of individual feeling to 
 stand in the way of that which was to be carried 
 out, who looked facts in the face, making his own 
 opinions bow to them, who taught with few words 
 that there is an order among men which they 
 must obey, or suffer, may well be thought to have 
 worked more in the spirit of this text — to have 
 done more that the sword should be turned into the 
 ploughshare — than those who set one against the 
 other, and who would make the state of peace 
 unhke that of war only in being more heartless, 
 contentious, inhuman. On this ground it was, I 
 conceive, a righteous and wise thing in one of our 
 Universities to set before her sons the example of 
 a man who knew next to nothing of her peculiar 
 studies, because that which they want, in this 
 day especially, is purpose, concentration, a resolute 
 indifference to trifles ; in short, the habits which 
 may be learnt far better from soldiers than from 
 schoolmen. And for a reason not altogether dif- 
 ferent, the crowds who were gathered together 
 last week, knowing bitterly that the rivalry which 
 is proclaimed by the professed admirers of peace 
 as the great principle of society, had destroyed 
 society among them, were following no unwise or 
 
92 CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR. [SERM. 
 
 unholy instinct when they mourned for a man 
 who had given pledges and proofs that the habits 
 and organization of hosts may be most serviceably 
 applied, without violence or the invasion of personal 
 liberty, to the ordinary occupations of peace. 
 
 III. But it is written farther, 'Nation shall 
 not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they 
 learn war any more.' 
 
 If this is to be the blessed issue of the world's 
 history one day, ought we not, we are asked, to be 
 keeping it in sight ; to be longing for it ; as far as 
 we can, to be taking all steps which may lead to 
 it; certainly not to be moving in the opposite 
 direction j certainly not to be cultivating in the 
 minds of others, or admitting into our own, any 
 tempers or principles which are at variance with 
 it? I do not doubt that all this is demanded of 
 us, that we are wrong whenever we deviate from 
 these rules. The question we should consider 
 must be, what the blessed residt is, what will 
 lead to it, what will hinder it. 
 
 Observe, then, that when the prophet says 
 ' Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,' 
 he clearly assumes that there shall be distinct 
 nations in the most perfect condition of society 
 which can be conceived of. Any other faith would 
 
IV.] 
 
 NATIONALITY. 
 
 93 
 
 have been absolutely intolerable and impossible to 
 a Jewish prophet. The distinctness of his own 
 nation had been the assurance to him that God had 
 chosen him and his fathers, that He Himself was 
 in the midst of them. He longed for a time when 
 each nation should have the same stable ground 
 for its existence, when each should feel that the 
 God of the whole earth was its God. He looked 
 with horror and trembling at those great empires 
 which swallowed up the particular nations, though 
 he regarded them as the divinely-appointed 
 punishers of their idolatries and sins. Nor can 
 this truth of theirs, brethren, ever be changed. 
 There may be abundance of religion where there 
 is no national life; but there is no godliness. 
 Destroy national characteristics, reduce us merely 
 into one great society, and whether the bond of 
 that society is a pope, or an emperor, or a customs- 
 union, the result is the same. A living God is 
 not feared or beheved in ; He is not the centre of 
 that combination; His name or the name of a 
 number of Gods may be invoked in it, but His 
 presence is not that which holds its different 
 elements together. Therefore let us be sure that 
 if we would ever see a real family of nations, such 
 as the prophets believed would one day emerge 
 
94 CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR. [sERM. 
 
 out of the chaos they saw around them, a family 
 of nations which shall own God as their Father 
 and Christ as their elder Brother, this must come 
 from each nation maintaining its own integrity and 
 unity; this must come from the members of it 
 feeling that they are really fellow-citizens; this 
 must come from their understanding that it is 
 their solemn duty, their duty to God and to each 
 other, not to cast away their swords, not to beat 
 them into ploughshares, while there is any power 
 which would take that from them which has been 
 committed to their trust, and which they can only 
 part with when they part also with their morality 
 and their faith. I trust and believe that if ever 
 our countrymen are called upon to defend their 
 own hearths and homes, they will not be taught by 
 the preachers of the land that they may do so 
 because self-preservation is an instinct which justi- 
 fies almost any acts. So poor and miserable a 
 doctrine, such a mere apology for resistance, never 
 yet inspired any hearts or nerved any arms. 
 
 I trust God will enable us to speak a truer 
 language, more in accordance with His word ; to 
 say boldly that this is a duty to which God Him- 
 self is calling them, which His Spirit will enable 
 them to perform, which it is a sin against Him to 
 
IV.] THE DUTY OF FIGHTING 95 
 
 neglect; that not self-preservation, but self-sacrifice, 
 is their work and privilege. For that work let 
 them be animated and prepared by prayers, bene- 
 dictions, sacraments. And though we are not 
 permitted to hold out the hopes to men with 
 which priests in the middle ages encouraged those 
 who were going to the holy wars, that then: sins 
 shall be remitted, and that they shall obtain 
 crowns of glory ; though all such arguments would 
 be weak, because they would be dishonest ; we may 
 say confidently, that if any men who have been 
 leading a grovelling, self-seeking life, caring nothing 
 for their fellow-men or for God, are moved to 
 become brave and devoted citizens, that is the 
 beginning of a conversion, that is a better and 
 more healthful obedience to the voice of the Divine 
 Spirit, than any self-inflicted penances or tortures 
 could possibly be. 
 
 Because, then, it is promised that nation shall 
 not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they 
 learn war any more, and because the only straight, 
 appointed, divine road to the accomplishment of 
 that prediction, so far as we know, is that each 
 nation should seek to be united in itself, and to 
 maintain its own position and freedom, it was 
 
96 CHARACTER OF THE WARRIOR. [sERM. 
 
 fitting that we should all of us enter heart and 
 soul into the services by which England testified 
 her love for the man who had done perhaps more 
 than any other to keep her a nation, and in which 
 she realized that she is one still. It was fitting that 
 each one should for himself swear upon those 
 relics, invoking a strength which they could not 
 give, that he would in his own calling, according 
 to the light God should give him, strive to 
 strengthen this unity, and to fight in himself and 
 his fellow-citizens against the powers which 
 threaten its dissolution. No man is bound by that 
 oath to adhere to any special opinions of the Duke 
 of Wellington. He is rather bound to acknow- 
 ledge that there is more power in the life of a man 
 than in all lus opinions, and in the opinions of all the 
 parties that divide us. He is bound at the same 
 time to feel that the salvation of a nation does not 
 stand in the life of any man, but in the life of 
 Him who judges among the nations, and rebukes 
 many people. 
 
 It may be, brethren — the most evident indica- 
 tions I think prove it must be — that men of this 
 day will need a more direct and explicit faith in 
 His government than our fathers needed, that we 
 
VI.] OUR HOPE AND SHAME. 97 
 
 cannot bring forth the same fruits as they brought 
 forth, not even much more unripe fruits, unless we 
 perceive more clearly than they did whence it is that 
 the power of fulfilling every duty comes, who it is 
 that binds the members of a nation to each other, and 
 can only bind together the different nations in that 
 universal body of which He is the Head. If con- 
 victs more serious than those in which the last age 
 took part, serious as they were, are reserved for us, 
 our weakness will require, and God will not deny 
 it, a help which was not vouchsafed to them. But 
 that consideration should increase, not lessen, the 
 affectionate reverence with which we think of them, 
 as well as our own humiliation. If we fall shame- 
 fully, it will be amidst examples of the past, trea- 
 sures of experience, divine encouragements, such as 
 no men ever possessed before. We can only fall 
 through our own pride and littleness, because we 
 think much of the things that are perishable, and 
 are indifferent to those that endure; highly of those 
 which separate classes, poorly of those which be- 
 long to all citizens in common j because we are 
 charmed with the list of titles which the herald 
 pronounced over the tomb of the departed warrior, 
 and do not feel the power and mystery that lay in 
 the words, 'this our brother/ winch connected 
 
 H 
 
C8 
 
 CHARACTER, ETC. 
 
 him with the poorest creatures upon earth, and 
 with the whole family for which Christ died, for 
 which He lives to make intercession at the right 
 hand of the Father. 
 
SERMON V. 
 
 THE DIVINE INTEEPEETATTON OF HISTOEY. 
 
 Preached at St. Martin's Church, May 1851. 
 
 Revelations v. 1 — 7. — And I saw in the rigid hand of Him 
 that sat on the throne a book written within and on the lack- 
 side, sealed with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel 
 proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open, the 
 book, and to loose the seals thereof? And no man in heaven, 
 nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the 
 book, neither to look thereon. And I wept much, because no 
 man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to 
 look thereon. And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep 
 not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, 
 hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals 
 thereof. And I beheld, and, lol in the midst of the throne 
 and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders, a 
 Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven, eyes, 
 which are the seven Spirits of God sent forth into all the earth. 
 And He came and took the book out of the right hand of Him 
 that sat upon the throne. 
 
 TT is commonly said that this book was a book 
 of prophecy, that St. J ohn wept because none 
 was worthy to understand the future destinies of 
 the Church and of mankind. I cannot doubt 
 h 2 
 
100 DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. [SERM. 
 
 that this interpretation is a true one; but I venture 
 to question whether it expresses the whole truth. 
 "We are taught in Scripture to look upon past and 
 future as most intimately connected. The pro- 
 phets of the Old Testament were not more oc- 
 cupied with one than with the other; they seem 
 to have thought that as much Divine light was 
 needed for the explanation of one as of the other. 
 Things which had happened did not he more open 
 to the ordinary gazer, than things which were to 
 happen. The facts might be known; the mean- 
 ing and significance of the facts were hid in the 
 mind of God. He might reveal a portion of His 
 mind to this or that seer; an event, or series of 
 events might be brought out in clearness before 
 one who had long waited and prayed for illumina- 
 tion ; when he was finishing his course he might 
 hand on the torch to a successor, who must kindle 
 it afresh for himself at the source of light. Still 
 a deep mystery would hang over the ages past 
 and the ages to come; those who believed God's 
 word would hope for a complete revelation of the 
 meaning and harmony of both. 
 
 I cannot help thinking, then, that if the book 
 in the hand of Him who sat upon the throne con- 
 cerned the future, it must also have concerned the 
 
V.] THE BOOK OF MYSTERIES. 101 
 
 past — that it must have been the book of God's 
 dealings with His creatures from the beginning of 
 the world to the end. It might refer to a par- 
 ticular tract of time; that tract might extend over 
 a few years, or a great many centuries ; but in 
 those years or centuries would be gathered up the 
 difficulties which beset earnest thinkers in one 
 generation or another, with the great practical 
 solution of them. I propose to consider the text 
 to-night from this point of view; I shall not in- 
 terfere with any theories respecting the construc- 
 tion of the Apocalypse, or respecting the special 
 application of its different portions to times near 
 or distant. It suggests certain great hints for our 
 guidance in tracing the course of God's dispensa- 
 tions, which are equally profitable and even neces- 
 sary, whatever opinions we hold respecting the 
 accomplishment or non-accomplishment of its pre- 
 dictions. We must take them with us into the 
 study of that which has been, as well as of that 
 which is to be, if we would not, in either, lose 
 sight of Him who is the same yesterday, to-day, 
 and for ever. 
 
 I. Readers do not, in general, dwell much upon 
 the opening of the vision — ' I saw a book in the 
 right hand of Him that sat on the throne.' They 
 
102 DIVINE INTERPRETATION" OF HISTORY. [sERM. 
 
 recollect the Avords — 'These things the Father 
 has put in his own power/ they conclude that the 
 book must be one concerning times and seasons 
 which God had not yet been pleased to discover 
 to his ci'eatures; and they hasten to passages 
 which require more skill and dexterity for their 
 elucidation. 
 
 But if we think we understand the words ever 
 so well, they are worthy of the most earnest re- 
 flection that we can give them. We have need 
 to remember that a vision of history or prophecy 
 must begin with a vision of God ; that the ground 
 of all events, of their law, of their knowledge, lies 
 in Himself. We must not be content with the 
 loose phrase that they are ordained by Him, or 
 with the notion that they might have been other- 
 wise if He had so decreed it. "We are to recollect 
 that we are speaking of the God of order, of 
 righteousness, and of truth, not of a capricious, 
 self-willed being, who asserts His power by chang- 
 ing the principles of His government. Any one 
 who is weighing the hopes and fears of the uni- 
 verse must start from the belief that there is an 
 absolute Will to all good — an eternal Truth, a liv- 
 ing Person — at the foundation of it. When we 
 have fully settled that conviction in our minds, we 
 
V.] GOD HOLDS THE BOOK. 103 
 
 have the quietness which is indispensable to the 
 student of history and prophecy ; a quietness for 
 which the greatest quickness and subtlety in de- 
 tecting and following out analogies, and the most 
 extensive and minute learning, are no substitute. A 
 clear eye for observing facts and distinguishing 
 false statements from true, is very precious ; but 
 a faith that, whether we can see into the meaning 
 of facts or not, there is a divine meaning in them ; 
 — that whether we can sever the right from the 
 wrong, or no, right is fixed, substantial, everlasting; 
 wrong — disturbance, intrusion, distortion ; — this 
 faith is the only one which can really give us 
 any encouragement to persevere in seeking for the 
 causes or issues of events. God holds the book 
 in His hands. Instead of making us satisfied to 
 be ignorant of its contents, He inspires us with 
 a passionate desire to understand them. He 
 Himself sets before us the things which He has 
 concealed, that we may search them out. 
 
 II. St. John teaches us this in the next 
 passage of his vision : ' I saw a strong angel pro- 
 claiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open 
 the book and loose the seals of it.' No words 
 can declare more emphatically by M'hom the desire 
 to investigate the problems of our own lives and 
 
104 DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. [sERM. 
 
 of the world's history is awakened. The tempta- 
 tion to shrink from even the most complicated of 
 these problems comes from an atheistical fear that 
 if we could penetrate to the root of things we 
 should find falsehood, and not truth. The devil 
 prompts that fear ; God's angel urges us to seek, 
 even if the search shall only lead to a discovery of 
 our ignorance and impotency. 
 
 III. And assuredly this must be the first result 
 of our inquiries. TTe do not know what dark- 
 ness covers the course of the world's history, till 
 we begin to seek for light. The farther we ad- 
 vance the thicker and heavier the mists become. 
 St. John, in his hour of wonderful inspiration and 
 revelation, heard the full and terrible truth which 
 has come, in some form or other, at some time of 
 his life, to every student in his solitary chamber : 
 ' No one was able to open the book, neither 
 to look thereon.' At each turn in the laby- 
 rinth the searcher finds some new obstruction ; pro- 
 mising theories failing when they are brought to the 
 test, new complications making conclusions which 
 had seemed certain, untenable. "When natural 
 resources have been tried, he flies, perhaps, to 
 supernatural. He seeks to cut the knot which he 
 coidd not untie, by resorting to the supposition of a 
 
V.] REFUGES FROM DOUBT. 105 
 
 naked Omnipotencewhich can dispense with all laws. 
 But out of that thought comes utter anarchy or a 
 reign of chance. Above, around, beneath, all 
 looks hopeless. ' None can loose the seals or 
 open the book.' 
 
 IV. There are some who feel little at these dis- 
 comfitures, or who are scarcely conscious of them. 
 They can obtain a certain knowledge of facts; 
 they can arrive at some general conclusions; 
 phrases about laws of nature, the perplexity of 
 human motives, the progress of the species, stand 
 them iu stead of actual discoveries. But one who 
 really cares for his fellow-creatures and longs to 
 find an order in their proceedings, and is haunted 
 by an inward witness that there must be an order 
 in them, is utterly overwhelmed when he finds 
 nothing but irregularity and disorder. Can a 
 righteous God be the author of a universe in which 
 there are such contradictions ? But does the 
 student dare, for the sake of keeping his faith, to 
 shut his eyes to facts ? Dares he exchange realities 
 for fancies, by taking refuge iu hopes of the future 
 from the confusions of the past and the present ? 
 Does he seek for some epicurean self-content, in- 
 different to the storms by which other men are 
 tossed, so long as he can keep himself at peace ? 
 
106 DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. [SERM. 
 
 Dares he even fall back upon his confidence in the 
 divine goodness ? Does not that goodness become 
 an impalpable abstraction, if God has left the 
 world to be as it is ? 
 
 Such thoughts have tormented and are tor- 
 menting thousands. Often when they utter their 
 doubts, religious men turn away from them with 
 indignation and horror. I believe the apostle's 
 religion would have led him to treat them very dif- 
 ferently. He 'wept much because no one was 
 found worthy to open the book.' He entered into 
 the very depths of this despondency, though he 
 had been dwelling in the light of God's presence, 
 and was beholding the spirits about the throne. And 
 because he felt for and with his brethren, the com- 
 fort which he and they needed was brought to him. 
 
 V. ' And one of the elders said unto me, 
 Weep not; behold the Lion of the tribe of 
 Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open 
 the book and to loose the seals of it.' 
 
 He wept, no doubt, for the vorld over which so 
 dark a mystery hung. But as he never lost — as 
 no true-hearted man ever does lose — his patriotism 
 in his concern for mankind at large, the cloud 
 which was over his own land must have been the 
 heaviest of all upon his heart. He had believed 
 
V.] THE LION OF JUDAH. 107 
 
 that in it all the families of the earth were to be 
 blessed ; how could he separate its destinies from 
 theirs? The announcement then comes to him in the 
 only way in which it could have brought him con- 
 solation. ' The Lion of the tribe of Judah ' had 
 prevailed to open and interpret the book. Through 
 his nation, light was to come upon tlie history of 
 all nations. 
 
 I cannot doubt, brethren, that the message to 
 him is one to us. We may try hard to decipher 
 the world's records without reverting to the records 
 of the chosen nation. They, we think, are narrow, 
 local, obsolete. We may even hold it a part of 
 religion to say, they are the records of a peculiar 
 people, and therefore not applicable to the con- 
 dition of other people. But I believe that when 
 we have wept much over the confusions of his- 
 tory, we shall be driven from these arguments. 
 We shall feel how needful it is that the key to 
 the history of all nations should be furnished in 
 the history of one. We shall feel how untrue 
 that history would be, how useless, if it was not 
 local and definite, instead of vague and general.' We 
 shall not feel that we are honouring God's purpose 
 in choosing out one race to be a blessing to all 
 others, if we do not believe that He meant its life 
 
108 DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. [SERM. 
 
 to be an illustration of the life of all others — his 
 methods with it a specimen of his methods with 
 all others. Finally, we shall not really acknow- 
 ledge a Deliverer and Redeemer of mankind, if we 
 do not see the fulness of His love and power un- 
 folding itself through the struggles, experiences, 
 and sorrows of one race, and of the particular men 
 who struggled and sorrowed with it. If we are 
 content to gaze for a while on the Lion of the tribe 
 of Judah, another vision will soon rise out of that 
 — of a Lamb that was slain for all people and 
 nations and languages. Out of that form of strength 
 comes the form of suffering and meekness j out of 
 the national conqueror comes the universal brother. 
 In Him are the horns of strength; in Him are 
 the eyes which draw light from the sun, and carry 
 light into all corners of the earth ; from Him go 
 forth the spirits which unite all creatures together, 
 and enable each to put forth its proper strength. 
 It is this Lion of Judah, this Lamb tbat was slain, 
 who takes the book out of the hand of Him who 
 sits upon the throne. In Him, combining these 
 qualities of power and sacrifice, of nationality and 
 universality, in Him the Lord of Israel, in Him 
 the bond of all society, the ground of each man's 
 distinct personal responsible being, — the apostle 
 
THE CONQUEROR. 
 
 109 
 
 finds the Person who can break the seals which 
 had hidden the course of God's dealings from 
 human beings, who can change the life of the 
 world from a collection of unintelligible fragments 
 into a living whole. Let us endeavour to follow 
 him — for we need a prophet to tell us both the 
 dream and its interpretation, both to arrange the 
 puzzles which present themselves to us in history, 
 and to show us how they may be cleared up — let 
 us try to follow liim while He brings before us 
 different distinct visions of forms which have haunted 
 every student, have often made him think that 
 history was a weary maze without a plan, have 
 often tempted him to believe that an evil spirit 
 was directing the course of it. 
 
 VI. — 1. First we have the vision of a Conqueror. 
 ' And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, 
 and I heard as it were the noise of thunder, one of 
 the four beasts sayiug, Come and see. And I saw, 
 and behold a white horse, and he that sat on him 
 had a bow, and a crown was given unto him, and 
 he went forth conquering and to conquer.' I do 
 not deny for a moment that some particular 
 person is intended who answers to this description, 
 or that it is a legitimate subject of inquiry who 
 that person is. But whoever he is, the same 
 
110 DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. [sERM. 
 
 general qualities must meet in him which we find 
 in a multitude of others who pass before us in the 
 great pageant of history. The seer represents with 
 great accuracy a whole class of phenomena, though 
 he may have had some one fact or image present 
 to his mind. He recalls to us the feelings which 
 we have all had in reading the lives of the con- 
 querors of the world, feelings which no theories 
 can force us to suppress, and which he does not 
 tell us that we need be ashamed of. The sight of 
 power and of triumph is a goodly sight. What- 
 ever be the use to which it is turned, or the results 
 which finally proceed from it, we are compelled to 
 have a certain sympathy with it. Yet surely it is 
 one of the puzzles in the book of history, that war 
 and conquest should form so conspicuous and 
 capital a part of it, that they should force them- 
 selves upon our notice whether we hke them or 
 not, though the motives of those who engaged 
 in them seem to be ever so doubtful, and they 
 themselves ever so transitory. It is a seal; we 
 have all felt and owned it to be so; one which we 
 have tried to break, and have not been able. St. 
 John declares that the Lion of the tribe of Judah 
 has broken this seal. One of those four beasts, 
 who represent different aspects of the mind and 
 
THE CIVIL WAR. 
 
 Ill 
 
 character of God, call upon him to come and see 
 it broken. The conqueror with his bow passes 
 rapidly over the stage, as he does in the actual 
 drama of the world. But we have a witness that the 
 power which was given him was from above, how- 
 ever he may have perverted it. Conquest is God's 
 minister, let the instruments of it be what they 
 may; it has its commissioned work and its per- 
 manent effects, though the glory which men have 
 sought by it may be only as the dream of a 
 night. 
 
 2. Next comes a more appalling spectacle. ' And 
 there went out another horse that was red, and 
 power was given unto him that sat thereon, to 
 take peace from the earth, and that they should 
 kill one another. And there was given unto him 
 a great sword.' We have here evidently, I think, 
 the picture of civil war, such as might have been 
 raging in the Roman Empire very near the time 
 in which the prophet was writing, such as had 
 convulsed every part of it and ended in the de- 
 struction of the Capitol, in the period between the 
 death of Nero and the accession of Vespasian. I 
 merely take that case as an example, not the least 
 assuming it to be the one of which St. John is 
 speaking. I need not remind you that it is but 
 
112 DIVINE INTERPRETATION' OF HISTOR/. [SERM. 
 
 one out of multitudes of such cases, which ancient 
 and modern history supply. And surely it is 
 one of the seals upon the meaning of both. All 
 the brilliancy of the first vision is wanting to 
 this. The white horse has been changed into the 
 red. There is no crown, but only a sword. You 
 can trace no one purpose, no concentrated am- 
 bition, only the strife of factions, with all their 
 infinite meannesses and pettinesses, their hollow 
 alliances, their deliberate cruelty; such scenes as 
 present themselves to us in the war of the sixteenth 
 century in France, or in the war of the seventeenth 
 in Germany. 
 
 Historians generally entertain themselves with 
 moralizing about the evils of party-spirit, and the 
 great advantages which would follow if men would 
 cease to indulge it. That is very well. But it does 
 not help to break the seal. The strife continues 
 after we have made our comments. St. John says 
 that the Lion of the tribe of Judah has broken 
 the seal. There is something lying beneath this 
 struggle of factions, as there was beneath 
 those conquests. There is a central peace at 
 the heart of this endless agitation. Through all 
 this war, men are to be taught what the ground 
 of union is. It is not right to wish that they 
 
THE AGE OF MONEY. 
 
 113 
 
 should be at peace till they find out what that is ; 
 peace is only another name for feebleness and 
 falsehood. 
 
 3. The next vision is of such a peace. ' And 
 when he had opened the third seal, I heard the 
 third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and 
 lo ! a black horse, and he that sat on him had a 
 pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice 
 in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of 
 wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley 
 for a penny, and see that thou hurt not the oil and 
 the wine/ This is that stage in the history of 
 peoples, which the poet speaks of, when they 
 ' change swords for ledgers the time when money 
 claims to be king of the world, and when men 
 bow to it and confess it to be the king; a time 
 which many of the wise and great hail as the 
 return of golden days, or as the commencement of 
 a millennium out of which they suppose there must 
 needs come uninterrupted tranquillity to the people 
 of every tongue and clime. But those who see 
 how the oil and the wine become precious above 
 every other good to those who receive the impress 
 of such an age, how unfair the balances are in 
 which the wheat and the barley are weighed, what 
 a time of rivalry and bitter strife it is for very 
 
114 DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. [sEH3f. 
 
 grovelling prizes, what myriads of bodies and souls 
 perisli in that strife ; how periods of apparent pro- 
 sperity may be periods of utter destitution to the 
 multitudes who are the instruments of producing 
 it; how it may be a time which awakens all Tan- 
 talus cravings for drops that are never really 
 taste 1; how out of it come the greedy lust of the 
 gambler and the poverty which is the fruit of it; 
 those who think seriously of these things, regard 
 this as one of the seals upon the book of history 
 which it is most difficult to break. A mammon 
 tyranny is to them more portentous, more incom- 
 patible with any righteous order in the world, than 
 the victories of the most insatiable conqueror, or 
 the most reckless violence of parties. And yet 
 this seal also is declared to have been broken by 
 the Lion of the tribe of Judah. This money 
 power, like every other power in the world, is of 
 God, however it may have been turned to uses 
 which are not His. There is nothing in it which 
 in itself deserves to be hated ; it may become an 
 instrument of all the blessings which those who 
 worship it talk of and which they can never 
 feabze. The commerce of the earth was surely 
 meant to be a real and effectual bond between 
 the nations. All the works which men would 
 
V.] TUE AGE OF DEATH. 115 
 
 dedicate to the spirit of selfish rivalry did not pro- 
 ceed from it, but from the true Head of society, 
 against whom it is rebelling, and by whom it shall 
 at last be utterly destroyed. 
 
 4. And now comes the spectacle which was pre- 
 paring for us in that time of seeming quietness 
 and felicity. 'And when he had opened the 
 fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast 
 say, Come and see. And I looked and behold a 
 pale horse ; and his name that sat on him was 
 Death, and Hell followed with liim. And power 
 was given unto them over the fourth part of the 
 earth, to kill with 'sword, and with hunger, and 
 with death, and with the beasts of the earth/ 
 There are various calamities brought together in 
 this vision : pestilence, famine, invasion, the beasts 
 of the earth, all indicating, it would seem, an age 
 following one of luxury and effeminacy, when the 
 energies of thought and action have equally de- 
 cayed j when a people have lost all courage, union, 
 enterprise; when the material enjoyments which 
 have been the reward of their industry and me- 
 chanical skill, have eaten up their parents ; when 
 the powers of nature come in to avenge the 
 idolatry which has been paid to them ; when the 
 oil and the wine that were the great objects of 
 i 2 
 
116 DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. [sERM. 
 
 search and hope fail altogether ; when Death claims 
 spirits and bodies both as his prize. An abyss of 
 utter, hopeless darkness lies beyond. Such 
 seasons there have been in the lives of nations and 
 empires ; the student of history wonders, as he 
 reads, how they should have lived through them. 
 He is less surprised that races which seem worn 
 and exhausted should sink under the power of 
 some healthier and more vigorous one, than that 
 they should last on, as the lower empire did, for so 
 many centuries, when all life seemed to have for- 
 saken it. This is one of the seals on the book of 
 history which no man can break. St. John says 
 that the Lion of the tribe of Judah has broken 
 it ; that in Him, even these conditions of utter 
 prostration and death find their explanation; that 
 He is still bearing up the pillars of the universe 
 when they are most feeble and tottering ; nay, 
 that in the most decayed and fallen societies, there 
 are still witnesses of His truth and power, still 
 thousands who have not .bowed the knee to Baal. 
 
 5. That truth is brought out in the next passage. 
 ' And when He had opened the fifth seal, I saw 
 under the altar the souls of them that were slain 
 for the Word of God and for the testimony which 
 they held. And they cried with a loud voice, 
 
V.] THE CRY UNDER THE ALTAR. 117 
 
 saying, How long, O Lord holy and true, dost 
 thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that 
 dwell on the earth? And white robes were 
 given unto every one of them. And it was said 
 unto them that they should rest yet for a little 
 season, until their fellow-servants and their 
 brethren, which should be killed as they were, 
 should be fulfilled.' When we first begin to 
 meditate upon history, this perhaps is the most 
 difficult problem of all : that the best men should 
 be the greatest sufferers, that they should speak 
 and should not be heard, or heard only by a few, 
 who afterwards, perhaps, abuse their names for 
 the support of some faction or the diffusion of 
 some heresy ; that if they ever become famous, it 
 is when they become misunderstood; that pos- 
 terity, even when it seems to approve their 
 sayings, often does them as little justice as their 
 cotemporaries who stoned them and cast out their 
 names as evil. This, I say, seems a seal harder 
 to break than any other ; because we might have 
 reconciled ourselves to the punishment of the rest 
 of the world, if we could see these triumphant, if 
 even we could be sure that their memories were 
 so. But when they seem to be mixed up in all 
 the confusion of the world, to partake of it, to be 
 
118 DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. [sERM. 
 
 mastered by it, there is a shadow over the future 
 as well as over the past ; it is hard to gather 
 comfort for the one out of the other. Yet no 
 seal has been so thoroughly broken as this. Out 
 of this seeming darkness, there comes a flood of 
 light upon every page of history and upon the 
 whole series of its events. For Christ has broken 
 this, not as the Lion of the tribe of Judah, but as 
 the Lamb that was slain. His own life and 
 death — all the confusions of disciples — the contra- 
 dictions of sinners against Him — when they are 
 rightly meditated upon, become the keys to this 
 mystery. If He had come to bear witness of 
 Himself, or to seek His own glory, He would 
 not have been reviled or crucified. Because He 
 came to seek his Father's glory, and to redeem 
 the earth for Him, therefore he poured out his 
 soul as a sacrifice. If these saints were seeking 
 their own glory, it would be fitting that they 
 should be uuderstood, appreciated, enthroned. 
 But because they are bearing witness of Him who 
 is faithful and true, because their care is not for 
 their own fame or glory here or hereafter, but that 
 the earth may be redeemed from its oppressors, and 
 made a fit place for Him who is the King of it, 
 therefore it becomes a part of the right order of 
 
V.] THE REVOLUTION. 119 
 
 things that they should wait, and be content that 
 others should feel the fruit of their labours, which 
 neither they nor others see ; and should be guides 
 and helpers, as much by their calamities and errors 
 as by their faithful words and acts, to those that 
 come after them ; and should link Heaven and 
 earth together by the cries which proceed from 
 both against the powers of darkness and evil; and 
 shoidd be formed by suffering into a holy fellow- 
 ship of men who understand, as well as confess, 
 that self-sacrifice is and must be the only ground 
 upon which human society can stand. 
 
 6. Which divine and eternal principle is not less 
 manifested, though very differently, in the next 
 vision which St. John saw. ' I beheld when He 
 had opened the sixth seal, and lo ! there was a 
 great earthquake, and the sun became black as 
 sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood, 
 and the stars of heaven fell upon the earth, even 
 as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs when she 
 is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven 
 departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, and 
 everv mountain and island were moved out of 
 their places. And the kings of the earth, and 
 the great men, and the rich men, and the chief 
 caDtains, and the mighty men, and every bond- 
 
120 DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. [sERM. 
 
 man, and every freeman, hid themselves in the 
 dens and in the rocks of the mountains, and said 
 to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us and hide 
 us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, 
 and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great 
 day of his wrath is come ; and who shall be able 
 to stand ? ' 
 
 No one, I believe, has doubted that this is the 
 description of a political earthquake — of what we 
 call, in modern language, a revolution. And surely 
 it is not for us to say that the language of St. John, 
 however rich and gorgeous, is too grand for such an 
 event. Those who have lived within the region of 
 such catastrophes, and have seen all faces gathering 
 blackness, the strong becoming weak, the brave 
 timid, will feel as if even these images, the most 
 perfect wliich nature or human language could 
 supply, are yet only too weak to represent the 
 confusion of all orders ; the upheaving of the sur- 
 face of things j the opening of the abyss below. 
 Now, though the student of history may have 
 learnt to think of such events as the necessary 
 consequences of diseases long pent up in the 
 body politic; though when they first occur they 
 may seem to him as even blessed disturbances in 
 the monotony of the world, and witnesses that there 
 
V.] THE WRATH OF THE LAMB. 121 
 
 is some government over it j yet, when he thinks 
 of all the hateful passions which such periods bring 
 to light, and then of the little compensation which 
 there seems to be for all the crimes they engender, — 
 kings, captives, freemen, bondmen, relapsing into 
 then- old conditions, only feeling more jealous and 
 suspicious of each other, more busy in devising 
 securities against each other, — he may well regard 
 these also as some of the puzzling facts in human 
 history, as a seal which he cannot break. How 
 does the apostle tell us it is broken? He speaks 
 of all the terrors which the rulers and great men 
 of the earth experience at such seasons, as testi- 
 monies of their conscience that God and the Lamb 
 are come forth to judge them, as cries of deliver- 
 ance from their wrath. That is to say, those who 
 are living to themselves and to their own glory, 
 who are making self their God, are made to feel 
 and know that self is not the God, that there is no 
 help, or protection, or power, in such a divinity; 
 that all power is really gathered up in a Being 
 whose nature is truth and love, and in Him who 
 gave up Himself for men ; that He is really the 
 King of the earth, and always has been; that all 
 the events which occur and have occurred on this 
 earth, are manifestations of His kingdom ; that it 
 
122 DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. [sER>I. 
 
 must finally triumph over whatever opposes it. 
 This, then, is the real preparation for the complete 
 opening of the book of history and prophecy, the 
 authentic declaration and evidence that all its 
 enigmas have found their solution, and that a truth 
 which is clear and satisfactory for our faith now, 
 will be one day made clear to those who have most 
 interest in disbelieving and denying it. 
 
 My object to-night has not been to give you a 
 commentary on the Revelations, but only to 
 inquire what is the Christian method of consi- 
 dering the events of history. I shall not, there- 
 fore, pursue the subject any further, though it 
 might receive, I believe, very striking illustration 
 from the record of those trumpets which announce 
 that the city of confusion, the great Babel, which 
 had been set up in mockery of the kingdom of 
 God is fallen down; as well as from the descrip- 
 tions of the conflicts between the different forms 
 of the evil power and the Word of God, who goes 
 forth with His hosts to overthrow them; and from 
 the vision of the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, 
 which cometh forth out of Heaven as a bride 
 adorned for her husband. My main purpose has 
 been to convince you, that if we follow the guid- 
 ance of the beloved disciple, or rather of Him who 
 
V.] THE TRUE FIFTH MONARCHY. 123 
 
 spoke to him and by him, we need not wish to 
 pervert any of the world's records, or to force 
 them to give out some opinions or moral of ours. 
 Read simply, faithfully, without the omission of 
 one dark or troublesome passage, they bear wit- 
 ness to that order which man has been continually 
 violating ; they show that no transgressions of his 
 can subvert it or mar it; that the efforts to inter- 
 rupt it have been the greatest testimonies to its 
 perfection and its might. The facts of ordi- 
 nary history will confuse us, the interpreta- 
 tions which the Old and New Testaments give 
 us of those facts will confuse us still more, 
 if we look for the great result of God's deal-, 
 ings as the mere triumph of a certain set of 
 persons whom we call saints, and the discomfiture 
 of those who oppose them. For all the facts of 
 history show that the best men have been those 
 who sought their own triumph and glory least, and 
 who felt and cared most for those who disliked 
 and resisted them; and on the other hand, that 
 those who have set themselves up to be the 
 chosen ones of God, and on that account claimed a 
 right to govern the eartb, have continually denied 
 and blasphemed His name, have shown that none 
 were less fit than they were to be the chief of 
 all, because none understood so little how to be 
 
124 DIVINE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. [sERM. 
 
 the servants of all. And all Scripture teaches us 
 that it must be so, unless Christ's kingdom be alto- 
 gether different from that which He said it was, 
 or unless He has ceased to be the head of it. ' The 
 facts of history will confuse us, and the interpre- 
 tations of Scripture still more, if we maintain 
 that Christ did not claim to be a King when 
 He entered Jerusalem meek and sitting upon an 
 ass ; that He did not maintain His kingly rights 
 when He trod the wine-press alone, when He 
 rose from the dead, and when He ascended on 
 high ; when He sent down His spirit upon the 
 apostles; when He overthrew the ungodly nation 
 which had refused to be the herald of His mercies 
 to mankind; but that He only is to become a king 
 hereafter in some unknown day. For if the esta- 
 blishment of his universal Church, the overthrow 
 of the Roman Empire, the building up the nations 
 in modern Europe, all the blessings and judgments 
 which have come upon them, all the events which 
 have befallen our own land from the time when 
 we became a nation to this time, be not tokens 
 that He is reigning amongst us, our faith is vain, 
 the Bible has deceived us; neither as the Lion 
 of the tribe of Judah, nor as the Lamb that 
 was slain, has Christ broken the seals and opened 
 the book. 
 
THE FINAL ISSU1 
 
 125 
 
 But if we confess Him, as our fathers did, to 
 be in deed and in truth, and not in name, our Lord 
 and King, the Lord and King of our nation, the 
 Lord and King of all nations, then all events 
 ■which seem most to set at nought His authority 
 or to substitute some other in its place, all con- 
 vulsions in nations and in churches — the fainting 
 and feebleness of His servants, the falling of 
 standard-bearers, the loss of human helpers and 
 counsellers, the disappearing of the cunning arti- 
 ficer and the eloquent orator, all signs and tokens 
 of adversity — as well as those which are cheering 
 and hopeful — such as the desire of nations to be one, 
 the craving for some common bond of fellowship, 
 the seeking for a centre of unity, when that which 
 pretends to be the centre is proving itself to be 
 the cause of division and strife — will all be heard 
 as different utterances of the same voice, ( Lo ! 
 I come quickly.' Oh! that the sorrow and the 
 joy, the mercy and the discipline, may so subdue 
 and soften all our hearts, that we may be ready to 
 join in the answer to that voice, 'Even so come, 
 Lord Jesus.' 
 
NOTE TO SERMON III. 
 
 Since these Sermons were preached, it lias been 
 announced in the newspapers that an Act of the 21st 
 George III., in the opinion of the law oificei-s of the 
 Crown, makes the opening of any places of entertain- 
 ment on Sunday penal, and therefore forbids the 
 Government to grant the Charter which the directors 
 of the Crystal Palace Company desired. Any one 
 who will be at the pains to read the Act in epiestion, 
 will see that it was passed for the purpose of pre- 
 venting certain seditious meetings alleged to be held 
 on Sunday evenings for the discussion of texts of 
 Scripture J which texts, it is said, were often debated 
 by 'persons unlearned and incompetent to explain 
 the same.' It is precisely one of those Acts of which 
 religious people among the Methodists and Dissenters 
 might feel reasonably jealous as likely to be twisted — 
 if that were not its original intention — to condemn 
 all meetings which the Government or the Church 
 should choose to represent as having a mischievous 
 tendency. It is one of those Acts which a supporter 
 of the City Missionaries would gladly expunge from 
 the Statute Book, as capable of being strained, in 
 
NOTE TO SERMON III. 127 
 
 some evil day, to the hindrance of their benevo- 
 lent efforts. And it is upon this Statute, so juvenile, 
 yet so mouldy, that the reverence for the divine 
 day — the godliness of the English nation — henceforth 
 must be understood to depend ! Surely such a 
 reductio ad absurdum of the principle for which 
 worthy and devout men are contending will startle 
 them, and make them think. And it must greatly 
 strengthen the conviction of those who had believed 
 previously that the Fourth Commandment will never 
 be truly regarded, or the blessed institution wliich it 
 bids us remember, loved, while penalties, enforced by 
 Acts of Charles II. and of George III., — Acts passed 
 with no moral or Christian purpose at all, to excuse 
 the consciences of the rich, or to provide for some 
 temporary emergency, — are used to help out its diviue 
 sanctions. 
 
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