SOCIAL AND PRESENT-DAY 
 QUESTIONS
 
 SOCIAL AND PRESENT-DAY 
 QUESTIONS. 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERIC W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S., 
 
 A rchdeacon of Westminster ; late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 
 atid Chaplain to the Queen and House of Commons. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 
 27, PATERNOSTER ROW.
 
 Printed by Hazell, Watson, 6^ V,ney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 SOCIAL AMELIORATION 7 
 
 NATIONAL PERILS 26 
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF PUBLIC DUTIES 40 
 
 NATIONAL DUTIES 54 
 
 FAITH IN HUMANITY 69 
 
 TRIALS OF THE POOR 82 
 
 DUTY OF GIVING 95 
 
 MAMMON WORSHIP I08 
 
 RELIGIONISM Il8 
 
 ATHEISM -. , 131 
 
 HISTORY 148 
 
 ART l6l 
 
 BIOGRAPHY: THE TEACHERS OF MANKIND 180 
 
 THE PULPIT 190 
 
 BOOKS, THEIR POWER AND BLESSEDNESS 204 
 
 THE IDEAL CITIZEN . . . 2r6 
 
 2000261
 
 6 CONTENTS. 
 
 PACK 
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND AMERICA 22 g 
 
 GENERAL GRANT 2 44 
 
 GENERAL GARFIELD 2 
 
 DEAN STANLEY . 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 . 269 
 
 . 282 
 
 CHARLES DARWIN ........ 
 
 JOHN BRIGHT ......... 
 
 GARIBALDI ............ ^ 
 
 COUNT LEO TOLSTOI . 
 
 NEED OF PROGRESS 
 
 343 
 
 355
 
 SOCIAL AMELIORATION. 
 
 "Which now of these three proved himself a neighbor to him who fell 
 among the thieves ? And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said 
 Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise." LUKE x. 36, 37. 
 
 Nearly nineteen centuries have elapsed since the 
 angels sang their carol at the birth of Christ. What have 
 been the issues of that first Christmas-tide? Let no sor- 
 row, no discouragement, make us fail to see that the results 
 have been immense in their beneficence. The French 
 statesman cried in despair: "Christ has come; but when 
 cometh salvation?" An English poet sings, 
 
 " We have preached Christ for centuries, 
 Until, at last, men learn to scoff, 
 So few seem any better off." 
 
 Let not such notes of distress blind us to what is still a 
 splendid reality. The abolition of slavery among Chris- 
 tian nations; the extinction of gladiatorial games and the 
 cruel shows of the amphitheatre; war rendered more merci- 
 ful; womanhood honored and elevated; childhood sur- 
 rounded with an aureole of tenderness and embraced in 
 the arms of mercy; education extended; marriage sancti- 
 fied; the bonds of serfdom broken; hospitals built; the 
 eternal and inalienable rights of man everywhere asserted; 
 pity for the prisoners; compassion even to the animal
 
 8 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 world; the gospel preached to the poor, these are some 
 of the Gesta Christi, some of the triumphs of Christianity. 
 These belong not only to its ideal, but also in large meas- 
 ure to its achievements. This is one side of the picture, 
 the blessed and the hopeful side. 
 
 s There is another. Do not make the common mistake of 
 saying, when you hear it, that it is a proof that the gospel 
 has failed. Never and nowhere has the gospel failed. 
 Never and nowhere has Christianity, where it has been a 
 reality, been other than a consummate blessing, and the 
 greatest of all blessings, to mankind. You might just as 
 well say that Duty has failed, because, though it be a 
 thing sublime as heaven, yet men have not given obedi- 
 ence to its mighty law. But, although Christianity has not 
 and cannot fail, yet, alike in heathen and Christian lands, 
 Christians have failed, terribly, egregiously, again and 
 again, have failed to rise to the standard of their own 
 profession or to realize the efforts and self-denials which 
 their Lord required. 
 
 Whole ages and generations, alas! have failed to carry 
 forward His banner; and multitudes in every age and gen- 
 eration have even betrayed His cause. And different as 
 are our degrees of guilt, in our measure we are all guilty. 
 Darkly and terribly guilty are all they who are living in 
 wilful and constant violation of the law of God; all they 
 everyone of them who sell themselves to do evil; who 
 work all uncleanness with greediness; who call evil good 
 and good evil; who are gaining their livelihoods in ways 
 which demoralize or degrade or defraud their neighbor; 
 and who thus fundamentally deny the Lord that bought 
 them, and count the blood of the Covenant whereby they 
 were redeemed a common thing.
 
 SOCIAL AMELIORATION. O 
 
 Guilty also are all those and they are many who, 
 without active and flagrant immorality, live only to the 
 world or to the flesh; selfish, egotistical, indifferent; 
 caring only for their own comfort or interest; shut up amid 
 their own refinements and indulgences, heedless of the 
 howling winds which wrestle on the great deep without, 
 and of the multitudes who are being helplessly swallowed 
 up in those wild waves. 
 
 Less guilty, yet still needing to be aroused to nobler 
 aims, are the multitudes who, though not useless, not im- 
 moral, yet too blind to the solemn responsibilities which 
 God lays upon us all, raise no finger outside the circle of 
 their own narrow domesticities to make the world happier 
 or better. 
 
 Least guilty, yet not wholly to be acquitted, are those 
 who do love and pity their suffering fellow-men, but, fold- 
 ing their hands in mute despair before the perplexities of 
 life's awful problems, need to be fired with fresh energies 
 and brighter hopes. 
 
 It is to the latter classes that I would mainly speak, yet 
 not I, but the Voice of God in the events of this our day. 
 And the message of that voice to all of us alike is, Do not 
 be apathetic, do not be selfish, do not despair! "And the 
 Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto Me? 
 Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward." 
 
 One of the many ways in which the world, and the 
 merely nominal Church, try to check every effort for good, 
 to discourage every reformer, and choke in anguish the 
 voice of every prophet, is, when the tale of misery and sin 
 is brought under their notice, to say that it is "sensa- 
 tional," or "exaggerated." It is a very contemptible form 
 of obstruction. But I suppose that the most callous and
 
 IO QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 the most selfishly optimistic person will hardly take upon 
 him to deny that here in England, here in London, 
 here, under the very shadow of our Abbey, there is a 
 vast area of want and vice, of crime and misery, the exist- 
 ence of which it is shameful to ignore, since the facts of 
 it are daily before our eyes and the proofs of it daily thrust 
 upon our notice. Within a bow-shot even of this place are 
 streets where drink and harlotry are rampant ; where men, 
 women, and children live in chronic misery; where every 
 now and then some terrible crime is perpetrated. And, if 
 the ordinary comfortable citizen does not know all that we 
 know, yet the daily journals and the commonest records of 
 justice will tell him of the ravages of sin in London, of 
 betting and gambling, drunkenness and impurity, beggary 
 and ruin, starvation and despair; of wife-beating, wife- 
 desertion, child-murder, outrage; of the slum and the rook- 
 ery; of rotting tenements, where generation after generation 
 pass away in filth and vice, steeped in dulness, sodden 
 into brutality by drink; of the training-house of the thief, 
 the den of the sweater, the cell of the felon, and the grave 
 of the suicide. 
 
 According to various careful estimates, those who may 
 be called "the submerged classes," or "the army of the 
 destitute" in England, are some three millions, one in 
 ten of our people, a population equal to that of Scotland. 
 
 However much we may try to escape from the burden of 
 our common Christian duties by talk about exaggeration, 
 the fact remains that here, at our very doors, is an awful 
 waste of splendid human material, an awful shipwreck of 
 redeemed humanity, of which the responsibility falls on 
 the Church, that is, on every one of us; on the nation, 
 that is, on every one of us. We talk of slums, but the
 
 SOCIAL AMELIORATION. IJ 
 
 voice which is now calling to England says, "To many the 
 world is all slum, with the workhouse as an intermediate 
 purgatory before the grave. And what a slough it is," he 
 adds, "no man can gauge who has not waded therein, as 
 some of us have done, up to the very neck, for long years." 
 
 "A volume of dull, squalid horror a horror of great 
 darkness, gradually obscuring all the light of day from the 
 heart of the sufferer might be written from the simple, 
 prosaic experiences of the ragged fellows you meet every 
 day in the street." 
 
 And is all this nothing? One of our Bishops, not given 
 to exaggeration, says that "the zones of enormous wealth 
 and degrading poverty, unless carefully considered, will 
 presently generate a tornado, which, when the storm clears, 
 may leave a good deal of wreckage behind."* 
 
 Such is the state of the present; and, if we do not 
 grapple with its evils, must not the future be far more 
 terrible? Consider these four facts: 
 
 First, the country is being more and more depleted; the 
 great cities are becoming more and more densely over- 
 crowded; and in great cities there is always a tendency to 
 the deterioration of manhood morally, physically, and spir- 
 itually. 
 
 Secondly, our population is increasing at the rate of 
 nearly one thousand a day, and the most rapid increase is 
 among the most destitute and unfit. 
 
 Thirdly, in spite of all that temperance reformers have 
 said and done, drink still continues to be the chief curse 
 of our country, the awful waste of its resources, the utter 
 ruin of tens of thousands of its sons; and even the prog- 
 ress of last year was disgraced by an ugly rush to alcohol 
 and rum. 
 
 * The Bishop of Winchester.
 
 I2 QUESTIONS O'F THE DAY. 
 
 Fourthly, the struggle between capital and labor, the 
 moneyed classes and the destitute, the employer and the 
 employed, the union-man and the non-unionist, is con- 
 stantly assuming proportions more menacing and more 
 colossal, so that in this last year it has daily filled the 
 hearts of all thinking men with anxiety, and may end in a 
 crisis such as shall shake to its very foundations the struct- 
 ure of our national prosperity. 
 
 To face these perils, to grapple with these difficulties, 
 will need all our courage, all our wisdom, all our manhood, 
 all our faith. But, if we meet them with nearly one out of 
 every ten of our population helplessly sunk in pauperism 
 or sodden with drink, or, at the best, steeped in grinding 
 poverty, what will happen to us? We are truly warned 
 that then "the vicious habits and destitute circumstances 
 of multitudes make it certain that, without some kind of 
 extraordinary help, they must hunger and sin, and sin and 
 hunger, until, having multiplied their kind and filled up 
 the measure of their miseries, the gaunt fingers of death 
 will close upon them and terminate their wretchedness.'* 
 While we are waiting, men are perishing on every side! 
 
 And, all this being so, what is the attitude of the 
 nation towards this state of things? 
 
 The attitude of some let us hope the very few 
 is simply not to care at all; to live in pleasure on the 
 earth, and be wanton ; to have hearts as fat as brawn, and 
 cold as ice, and hard as the nether millstone; to heap up 
 superfluous and often ill-gotten wealth, to be hoarded in 
 acquisition, squandered in luxury, or reserved for the build- 
 ing up of idle families. But to men whose immense 
 riches are squandered, in all but an insignificant fraction, 
 on their own lusts and their own aggrandizement, comes
 
 SOCIAL AMELIORATION. j, 
 
 the stern, strong message of St. James: "Your riches are 
 corrupted, your . garments are moth-eaten. Ye have lived 
 delicately on the earth, and taken your pleasure. Ye have 
 nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter." 
 
 The attitude of others is that of a scornful pity, half 
 cynical, half despairing. Such is the spirit expressed in 
 these lines of an English poet respecting the wretched and 
 the lost : 
 
 In dirt and sin ye all were born ; 
 
 In sin and dirt ye all were bred; 
 
 Not yours in truth, not yours to scorn 
 
 The offal which is food and bed. 
 
 Take gold ; disperse the rich man's store ; 
 
 Take it, and satisfy your need. 
 Then misbeget some millions more 
 
 For our posterity to feed. 
 Wallow until your lives be through, 
 Satan's godchildren, take your due ! 
 
 That spirit, surely, is the most absolute antithesis to the 
 humility, the hope, the yearning pity, which should actuate 
 the Christian's life. 
 
 The attitude of others, again, is stolid acquiescence. 
 They are weary of the whole thing; sick of hearing any- 
 thing about it. It annoys them. Tell them of it, and 
 they shrug their shoulders with an impatient "What can 
 we do?" Ask them for help, and they have "so many 
 claims" that they practically give to none. Press the 
 claim, and they resent it as a personal insult. Suggest 
 apian, and they will call it "Utopian." Describe a case 
 of anguish, and they will call you "sensational." Take 
 part in a public effort, and they will sneer at you as "self- 
 advertising." The one thing they believe in is selfish
 
 I4 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 laissez faire. Things will last their time, and that is all 
 they care about. They grow too indolent and too selfish 
 to care about anything but their own indulgences and their 
 own ease. 
 
 The attitude of others is at least a tender, if a some- 
 what despairing, pity. They would fain stretch out a help- 
 ing hand if they knew how. They say, with the good 
 Bishop of Wakefield: 
 
 O brother, treading ever-darkening ways, 
 
 O sister, whelmed in ever-deepening care, 
 Would God we might unfold before your gaze 
 
 Some vision of the pure and true and fair ! 
 Better to know, though sadder things be known; 
 
 Better to see, though tears half blind the sight, 
 Than thraldom to the sense, and heart of stone, 
 
 And horrible contentment with the night. 
 
 And how can we be blamed if, indeed, our individual pity 
 does take a tinge of despair? Almost every week there 
 come to my door men perfect strangers asking for 
 money or asking me to find them work. What can I, what 
 can any man do, for such cases ? To find work is of course 
 impossible: to give money to all such chance mendicants 
 is not only impossible, but would merely feed the sources 
 of misery and do positive harm. The case lies wholly 
 beyond the reach of such isolated and often pernicious 
 almsgiving. It needs the brave effort of a whole nation. 
 It needs the courageous self-denial of the whole Church. 
 It needs the hearty co-operation of all true Christian men. 
 What, then, is England doing in this direction? 
 Legislatively, I fear, very little; and scarcely anything 
 effectual, unless it be effectual to produce Blue-books full 
 of damning evidence, and then leave them to moulder on
 
 SOCIAL AMELIORATION. l ^ 
 
 dusty shelves. When a deputation of the destitute went to 
 a great statesman, all he could answer was that he knew 
 their sorrows, and pitied them, but did not know what to 
 do. Our fathers paid ^20,000,000 to emancipate black 
 slaves; but our own countrymen we leave to perish, by 
 myriads, in a lower and more helpless wretchedness. 
 
 And what is the Church of England doing? Pastorally, 
 she is doing a great and a very blessed work, a work most 
 noble, most self-denying, of wholly inestimable value; but 
 I only echo the universal experience, and the most impar- 
 tial testimony, when I say that for aggressive, for mission 
 purposes, to recover lost ground, to keep pace with the 
 running tide of population, to plunge into the very depths 
 of misery and pluck the perishing from their destruction, 
 to dig down to the roots of vice and destitution and stub 
 them up, she needs a more burning enthusiasm, a more 
 powerful and unencumbered organization. 
 
 It is with that conviction that I have tried for some time 
 to urge upon the Church the establishment of new agencies 
 call them Brotherhoods or what you will, bind them by 
 temporary vows, or leave them unbound, as you will to 
 live in the midst of the people, to come face to face with 
 them in their lowest slums, to grapple hand to hand, to 
 wrestle shoulder to shoulder, with the evil conditions by 
 which they are surrounded. 
 
 Even to Him whose eyes are as a flame of fire, it would 
 not, I trust, be true to say that we have been like the 
 Priest and the Levite, only glancing at the wounded man, 
 and then, absorbed in our formal functions, passing by on 
 the other side, while we leave the Samaritan to pour oil 
 and wine into his wounds. But, whatever be the cause, 
 and whosesoever be the blame, two things are fatally true,
 
 j5 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 I fear, alike of the Church of England and of almost every 
 other religious body. 
 
 The one is that, in multitudes of cities and parishes, 
 alike in the town and in the country, we have practically 
 lost all effectual hold on the mass of the working classes, 
 so that not one-tenth of them frequent our Churches, not 
 three per cent, are partakers of our Communions. 
 
 The other is that, while to our honor there are mul- 
 titudes of good societies and benevolent agencies, they 
 affect, for the most part, but a fraction of the population. 
 Many, perhaps most of them, are struggling for funds; a 
 large part of their work is hampered and swallowed up in 
 their expenses; they are working in a sporadic and discon- 
 tinuous manner; they achieve a partial improvement, but 
 accomplish no general deliverance. They do but touch a 
 spot here and there on the outermost circumference of the 
 ever-widening circle; they do not clear away the dense and 
 poisonous forest, but, as it has been expressed, "only peck 
 at the outside of the endless tangle of monotonous under- 
 growth." What they do is a thing for which to thank God; 
 they do alleviate sorrow, and prevent the still wider spread 
 of its fretting lichen. I for one have rejoiced to do what 
 I could, in many ways and in many places, to give labor, 
 and time, and effort, to plead their cause and to swell 
 their funds. If to use St. Paul's expression I may 
 speak as a fool, I do not think that many of the clergy 
 have been more desirous than I have to promote the bless- 
 ing of the poor. We have, too, our own Church Army. It 
 has had, from the first, my most cordial sympathy, and such 
 help as it was in my power to lend. 
 
 But the movement with which the thoughts of many are 
 now filled, though religious in its origin, is predominantly
 
 SOCIAL AMELIORATION. l j 
 
 and fundamentally social in its aims. So far from hinder- 
 ing the work of all the other workers for good, such as 
 the brave and patient clergy in East, South, and North 
 London, Dr. Barnardo, Mr. Mearns, Mr. Charrington, Mr. 
 Benjamin Waugh, the Oxford House, Toynbee Hall, the 
 various school and college Missions, and others, so far 
 from extinguishing or injuring these, my hope and belief 
 is that the scheme now proposed will, in every way, render 
 their special efforts more effectual. 
 
 But there are multitudes who feel convinced that some- 
 thing more resolute, more thorough, more centralized, more 
 systematic, more fundamental than any existing effort is 
 required, if we are to obey the voice which is ever sound- 
 ing to us across the centuries, "Undo the heavy burden; 
 let the oppressed go free; break every yoke; deal thy 
 bread to the hungry; cover the naked with a garment; 
 hide not thyself from thy own flesh; bind up the broken- 
 hearted; set at liberty them that are bruised. Then shall 
 thou be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of 
 paths to dwell in." 
 
 You are all aware that the great scheme for grappling 
 with the want and misery of which I have spoken has been 
 put before the world by the head of the Salvation Army. 
 I have examined this scheme. I have been deeply stirred 
 by it. In my best judgment, however feeble that judgment 
 may be, I believe it to be full of promise if the funds are 
 provided; and, therefore, I have regarded, and still regard 
 it to be, my plain Christian duty to lend to it the best aid 
 in my power. Had any scheme so large been proposed 
 by any member of the Church of England, who possessed 
 either the power or the means, or the agencies by which it 
 could be carried out, I should have done my very utmost 
 
 2
 
 jg QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 to further it. But although our Church has mighty wit- 
 nesses, and has originated many noble efforts, I regard 
 this effort as supplementing, not as interfering with, her 
 labors; as preparing for, not hindering, her work. It has 
 not pleased God as yet to call obviously to the front from 
 her communion any one gifted with the large hopefulness, 
 the genius for organization, and the holy confidence and 
 courage which can alone make a deep inroad into the bor- 
 ders of the Kingdom of Darkness. 
 
 This scheme, as I have said, though no Christian 
 scheme can be wholly dislinked from religion, is yet 
 primarily social. It is not intended, as such, to promote 
 the work of the Salvation Army, but the work of the 
 whole Church of God. It has been felt that Christianity 
 has a duty here, now, on earth, in this life, to men's 
 bodies as well as to their souls. It has even been felt 
 that, if we disregard the hunger and misery of their 
 bodies, we cannot effectually touch or reach their souls. Is 
 the scheme, then, to be thrown aside out of sectarian jeal- 
 ousies and ecclesiastical prejudice, because it emanates 
 from the Salvation Army, though not pertaining directly 
 to their religious crusade? If any think so, I blame them 
 not; but I for one stand here, in the presence of Christ my 
 Saviour, and say that I cannot share their views. Would 
 such aloofness be in accordance with the parable of the Good 
 Samaritan? or with the tests of pity and mercy on which, 
 and not on ecclesiastical differences, Christ said the Great 
 Assize would turn? or with that definition of pure religion 
 and undefiled before God and the Father, which says that 
 it is "to visit the fatherless and the widow in their afflic- 
 tion, and to keep himself unspotted from the world " ? 
 
 Some years ago I uttered a note of warning respecting
 
 SOCIAL AMELIORATION. !n 
 
 some of the views and methods of the Salvation Army, 
 and the perils to which it was liable. On those points 
 my views have not changed. Except in the great funda- 
 mental truths of Christianity, on which all Christians 
 are agreed, I differ perhaps even more widely from the 
 Salvationists than many of my brethren. Nevertheless two 
 things I plainly see. The one, that God has not left them 
 unblessed. Another, that there is much which we might 
 profitably learn from the methods which have enabled them 
 to accomplish, in so short time, so great a work. A few 
 years ago there was no Salvation Army; and its present 
 leader was an unknown Dissenting Minister, without name, 
 or fame, or rank, or wealth, or influence. To-day the 
 Salvation Army, growing like a grain of mustard seed, has 
 9,000 officers and 13,000 voluntary workers, many of them 
 in the flower of their youth and youthful energy, who have 
 tested in many ways their sincerity, and given their hearts 
 to God. It has, all over the world, nearly 3,000 centres of 
 work; and it raises, in large measure from the contribu- 
 tions of the poor, an income of nearly ^800,000 a year. 
 Apart from its directly religious work, it has thirty Rescue 
 Homes for fallen women, five nightly Shelters, three Food 
 Depots, and eighty officers working in deep poverty in the 
 poorest of the slums. 
 
 These, surely, are credentials which even malice must 
 blush to deny. I believe that God has raised up these 
 humble workers to effect now an immense social ameliora- 
 tion. Are we, then, to stand coldly, finically, critically 
 aside, because we are too refined and nice to touch this 
 work with one of our fingers? 
 
 For myself, I should have thought that I failed griev- 
 ously in my duty if insult or love of ease or self-interest
 
 2Q QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 made me hold aloof from any effort which Christ, the Lord 
 of our lives, were He here in visible presence among us, 
 would, I believe from my inmost heart, approve. But, if 
 you desire weightier evidence than mine, let me quote to 
 you the testimony of two of the great dead, whose praise is 
 in all the churches. 
 
 "The Salvation Army," said Bishop Lightfoot, the wis- 
 est and most learned of our Prelates, "has at least recalled 
 us to the lost ideal of the work of the Church, the uni- 
 versal compulsion of the souls of men." "It fills me with 
 shame," said Canon Liddon, the most eloquent of our 
 preachers, after attending a Salvation Army meeting, " I 
 feel guilty when I think of myself, to think of these poor 
 people, with their imperfect grasp of truth! And yet 
 what a contrast between what they do and we are doing! 
 How little effect do we produce compared with that which 
 was palpable at that meeting! I take shame to myself 
 when I think of it." 
 
 God knows, I have no desire whatever but to fulfil the 
 tasks He lays upon me; and I may assume that I am 
 speaking at least to some serious men and women, who 
 will not think themselves injured if their attention is 
 asked to a matter of national significance, which concerns 
 every one of us, not as Christians only, but even as citi- 
 zens and lovers of our country. 
 
 Here, then, a proposal of which you have probably 
 all learnt the general outlines, is laid before us. How 
 shall we receive it? 
 
 There are various ways of receiving any and every pro- 
 posal for good. It is well for us to consider them, and to 
 question our own hearts faithfully respecting them, that 
 we may be sincere with ourselves and before God.
 
 SOCIAL AMELIORATION. 21 
 
 One way the simplest and commonest, when any 
 effort to do good is brought to our notice is (as I said) to 
 ignore it, and let it disturb neither our dinners nor our 
 sleep. To those who thus deal with it, I have nothing to 
 say. 
 
 Another way is to talk about it, then let it drop, and 
 do absolutely nothing. To those who adopt this line, I 
 have nothing to say. 
 
 Another way is to examine it, and, if convinced that 
 it will do no good, deliberately to reject it. That is per- 
 fectly manly. It is a course which every one may take 
 without blame. Let each man conscientiously form his 
 own opinion; let each be fully persuaded in his own mind. 
 Only let our decision be conscientious; let it not be 
 biassed by petty or by secret motives. To those who, hav- 
 ing examined the proposals made in "Darkest England," 
 regard them if they can regard them as either nugatory 
 or pernicious, I have, of course, nothing to say. They 
 may be quite as good, and better judges, than I am. They 
 are responsible for their opinions as I am for mine, but it 
 is to God and not to man. 
 
 But another way, alas ! is one far too common when 
 any good work whatever is suggested, even if* it be cast- 
 ing out devils, especially if it be by one who followeth 
 not after us. It is a way to which all of us are often 
 tempted. It is to sneer, to object, to misrepresent, to find 
 fault, to pick holes; to say, "Your plan has nothing new 
 in it"; to say, "Who are you?"; to riot in offensive per- 
 sonalities; to call the scheme visionary or a dodge of 
 vanity; to damn with faint praise; to throw cold water 
 upon it; to smother it in the wet blanket of cynicism; 
 "to just hint a fault and hesitate dislike"; to snatch up
 
 22 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 any one of the millionfold varieties of excuse, opposition, 
 and half-hearted selfishness which the world, the flesh, 
 and the devil readily supply to every one of us who, on 
 any occasion, desires to veneer the slothfulness of his 
 own callous conscience. This is the way of those 
 and they may be counted by tens of thousands who do 
 not mean to help in this or in any scheme, but to keep 
 their money and their ease to themselves, and to let the 
 sins of the world go on unheeded till the pit swallow them, 
 and until upon their own sensual selfishness crashes the 
 awful message, "Thou fool! this night!" 
 
 Yet another way, not quite so base and vulgar as 
 this, but yet sufficiently ignoble, is to leave others to bear 
 the brunt; to stand aside till the forlorn hope has been 
 killed, and then walk triumphantly through the open 
 breach; to wait till there is no more opposition; to be 
 timid, safe, cautious, hesitating, eminently respectable, 
 immensely careful of our own personal interests, infinitely 
 on our guard against facing insult and opposition. 
 "Fools," the poet says, "rush in, where angels fear to 
 tread." Yes, but it has been answered, the safe and timid 
 angels are sometimes glad enough to follow when the poor 
 fools, with sweat of brow and anguish of heart, have forced 
 the way. 
 
 But the last way and I trust that this is the way 
 which we shall adopt, if, on examination, we can approve 
 this scheme of trying to uplift the unemployed from their 
 misery is to support it by our influence; to give to it of 
 our means. You will see that it is a scheme immense and 
 far-reaching, a scheme which, if it please God to bless it 
 with success, may bring help and hope to thousands of 
 the helpless and the hopeless, who have been made
 
 SOCIAL AMELIORATION. 23 
 
 helpless and hopeless by the terrible conditions of society 
 but for every one of whom Christ died. To begin the 
 scheme in desperate earnest, ,100,000 are wanted. What 
 is that to the wealth of England? The annual expenditure 
 of London alone is estimated at ^200, 000,000. What 
 is a 2,oooth fraction of this ? A mere drop in the 
 ocean! Not one tenth of what is wasted every year, to 
 the destruction of men's souls and bodies, in beer, and 
 rum, and gin. In 1889 the income tax assessments were 
 ^681,000,000. In 1884 it was found that the net wealth 
 had increased by 1 30 per cent. There are a hundred men 
 in England who might immortalize themselves by such a 
 gift, and bring showers of blessing on their own souls, and 
 yet not have one gorgeous luxury or one boundless super- 
 fluity the less. There are tens of thousands of men and 
 women in England who could each give ^100 this very 
 day, and never miss it at the year's end. I leave the ques- 
 tion to your consciences. Will it not be a desperate shame 
 to England, and an awfully lost opportunity, if, for lack 
 of an infinitely small self-denial on our part, any scheme 
 which gives so hopeful a promise of social amelioration, 
 should be, like a broken purpose, lost in air? 
 
 But, in conclusion, you say, "The scheme may fail." 
 Alas! do I not know it? Is not the world full of worn-out 
 enthusiasms, and defeated efforts, and broken hearts, even 
 as the desert is full of the bleaching bones of them that 
 have traversed it? Has not many a full rejoicing river of 
 human sympathy been lost in the muddy ooze, and hardly 
 seemed to fertilize the barren sands? Have not many 
 thousands of the weak waves of human effort been dashed 
 into mist upon the wind, into scum upon the shore, by the 
 hard and jagged rocks of selfishness, and greed, and sin?
 
 2^ QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Yes, the effort may fail; for very fallible are the judg- 
 ments, and "toilsome and incomplete" is the best work of 
 man. "Toilsome and incomplete," says the late Dean of 
 St. Paul's, "full of pangs, and disgust, and disappoint- 
 ment, has often been the work of genius. Toilsome and 
 incomplete, the effort of the leader of a great movement for 
 the overthrow of a wrong, for the welfare of his brethren, 
 for the deliverance and happiness of a people, amid un- 
 popularity and suspicion, the delays and contradictions and 
 provocations of petty and unrelenting adversaries, or un- 
 worthy friends. Toilsome and incomplete the labor of 
 him who, in daily contact with all that is horrible and 
 desperate, spends a life to bring the mercies and peace of 
 Christ down to the coarse misery which festers around all 
 our brilliant capitals." Yes, the scheme may fail. Well, 
 but, if to die amid disloyalty and hatred be failure, St. 
 Paul failed. If to perish at the stake be failure, all the 
 martyrs failed; if to die amid the howl of the world's dis- 
 approval be failure, Savonarola, and Luther, and Whitefield 
 failed. If to die on the Cross, with all the priests and all 
 the mob jibing at Him and insulting Him, be failure, 
 then the Lord Jesus failed. Yes, the effort may fail; but 
 fear, and timidity, and jealousy, and suspicion, and indo- 
 lence, and impatience, and despair are counsellors who will 
 find multitudes to listen to them; and as for me I will 
 listen to the counsellings the wiser, the better, the 
 nobler counsellings of hope. And failure, what is 
 failure? Cannot we get behind the word? Are none of us 
 brave enough or noble enough, in trying to do God's work, 
 to prefer such failure to the most gorgeous success in 
 pleasing the world, and making truce with the devil? 
 Failure?
 
 SOCIAL AMELIORATION. 2 $ 
 
 Speak, history ! who are life's victors ? 
 
 Unfold thy long annals, and say, 
 Are they those whom the world called the victors, 
 
 Who won the success of a day? 
 The martyrs or Nero ? The Spartans, 
 
 Who fell at Thermopylae's tryst, 
 
 Or the Persians and Xerxes? His Judges or Socrates? Pilate or 
 Christ? 
 
 Yes! the plan may fail, but I for one mean to pray, and 
 to hope, that it will succeed; and the question for each of 
 us is, about every good effort which is made, Shall it fail 
 through my cowardice, my greed, my supineness, my pru- 
 dential cautiousness, my petty prejudices, my selfish con- 
 ventionality? If, on examining this plan in the light of 
 conscience, we see in it any element and augury of effi- 
 ciency in the removal of the deadly evils which lie at the 
 heart of our civilization, we are in duty bound to do our 
 utmost to help it forward. But how, if we conscientiously 
 disapprove of it? Are we then free from obligations? 
 Nay: then we are in duty bound to propose, or to for- 
 ward, something better. One way only is contemptible 
 and accursed; that is, to make it our excuse for envy, 
 malice, depreciation. He that heareth, let him hear; and 
 he that forbeareth, let him forbear. But God shall be 
 the Judge between us; and His Voice says in Scripture, 
 "If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, 
 and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, 
 Behold, we knew it not; doth not He that pondereth the 
 heart consider it? And He that keepeth thy soul, doth 
 not He know it? And shall not He render to every man 
 according to his work?"
 
 NATIONAL PERILS. 
 
 " And in the morning ye say, It will be foul weather to-day : for the sky is 
 red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky ; but can 
 ye not discern the signs of the times ?" MATT. xvi. 3. 
 
 PROBLEMS of the gravest import await our solution, 
 problems which need all our nerve, all our determination, 
 all our courage, all our hope, and which affect the life 
 and duty of us all. It is possible to paint the condition 
 of the present age in two very different ways; and this 
 has recently been done by the master hands of two of the 
 greatest sons of this century. The Poet Laureate in his 
 new "Locksley Hall" has drawn it in dark colors, as it 
 might appear to the mind of an aged and disenchanted man : 
 the late Prime Minister has, in reply, drawn it in its most 
 glowing lights of hope and gladness. I have tried to show 
 elsewhere that there is nothing antagonistic in these views. 
 There is one series of facts which, if we contemplated them 
 exclusively, would make us hopeless pessimists. There is 
 another series of facts which, taken by themselves, would 
 fill us with rose-colored optimism. But apart from either 
 picture new conditions are arising round us of endless sig- 
 nificance, conditions which need immediate and strenuous 
 action, and which, unless the nation rises to the true mean- 
 ing of the situation, may be pregnant with individual and 
 national disaster, such as it is hardly possible for the 
 imagination to conceive. And these evils cannot be reme- 
 died, these perils cannot be averted, except by a nation 
 which is thoroughly in earnest; by a nation prepared for
 
 NATIONAL PERILS. 2 J 
 
 higher thinking and plainer living than England is at 
 present; by a nation which will rise, with heroic self- 
 denial, to face the extremity of its own enormous needs. 
 It is on the way in which the problems of the present 
 touch every one of us individually that I must speak 
 to-day. The man must be indeed callous and selfish who 
 can think of the menace of the sky without a heavy heart. 
 To the lounger, the idler, the frivolous waster of time; to 
 the drunkard, the glutton, the dissolute; to the hypocrite, 
 the money-maker, the Mammon-worshipper; to all who 
 basely sit at the feast of life, and "try to slink away without 
 paying the reckoning," the facts should be full of signifi- 
 cance; and would that these my words could have all the 
 solemnity of that voice which he who heard the Apocalypse 
 heard cry in heaven, "Woe to the inhabiters of the earth! " 
 I will say nothing of that red glare flung on the lowering 
 horizon by the menace of European war. I know not 
 whether these rumors of war are only like the waves that 
 "roll shoreward, and roar and strike and are dissipated," 
 or whether they mean a tide which shall redden a hundred 
 fields with blood. When we see mighty nations armed to 
 the teeth against each other, exhausting their resources, 
 squandering their strength, swelling their national debts, 
 in these costly and gigantic follies; when we read of these 
 frightful inventions, explosives of unknown force, guns of 
 infinite destructiveness, torpedoes which go far under the 
 sea to blowup navies; when we see man's ingenuity ex- 
 hausted in the elaboration of devilish enginery, and inter- 
 national jealousy adding its dread quota to the miseries 
 caused by commercial rivalries; when we see in Europe 
 at this moment at least twelve and a half millions of 
 armed men doomed to lives of unproductive menace, amid
 
 2 3 QUESTION'S OF THE DAY. 
 
 groaning and tax-burdened populations, I ask you which 
 seems most likely to happen in our days, the dawn of 
 that millennium, 
 
 When the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle flags are furled, 
 In the parliament of man, the federation of the world, 
 
 or, rather, that dim, awful Armageddon-battle of the last 
 days, when the hosts of evil shall concentrate all their 
 wrath for one last and deadly struggle against the hosts of 
 light. 
 
 But, passing over this question, there are two dan- 
 gers which here in England are already upon us, and 
 which, if we care at all for the prosperity and for the 
 future interests of this nation, need all our consideration. 
 One is the unstable equilibrium of our whole commercial 
 system, the fact that the so-called national prosperity 
 enriches not the many, but the few; the fact that our in- 
 dustrial organization shows signs of perishing by its own 
 inherent vices. We are constantly told of the wealth of 
 England; of our national income of one thousand millions 
 a year; of the fact that out of this income, according to the 
 most eminent statisticians, we are yearly saving and invest- 
 ing two hundred and thirty-five millions; the fact that 
 while every philanthropic society is struggling and many 
 efforts for good are bankrupt, yet, when some huge brewing 
 business is to be sold, hundreds rush forward ignobly emu- 
 lous, and a hundred million pounds is at once, and with 
 passionate eagerness, imploringly put forward to buy a share 
 in so blessed a concern and to participate in the huge gains 
 which it brings in amid the general decay! Who enjoys 
 the luxury of this enormous mass of wealth? The few, and 
 not the people. We have a population of over 36,000,000,
 
 NATIONAL PERILS. 2 g 
 
 but out of this population 30^ millions belong to the lower- 
 middle and poorer classes, and their quota of the national 
 income, as calculated by the most competent authority, 
 shows a miserably small average for the total weekly ex- 
 penditure. Clearly, the existence of fabulous wealth in the 
 country no more proves general prosperity than the hectic 
 flush upon the cheek of consumption is a sign of health. 
 It was only for a brief space that steam and machinery 
 added to the general well-being. Latterly it has heaped 
 riches into a small number of hands, and done nothing tc 
 popularize the use of them; and, now that it has glutted the 
 markets, and diminished the profits of the capitalists, whole 
 classes of Englishmen are at this moment engaged in a 
 terrible struggle to hold back by the ears the wolf of pov- 
 erty. The retail tradesmen are in a state of depression; 
 the tenant farmers are in many parts of England on the 
 verge of bankruptcy; many of the clergy are in the anguish 
 of destitution; innumerable clerks, sempstresses, and shop- 
 men are working many hours a day on the merest pittances, 
 and, if even for a month they fall out of the race, it is harder 
 and harder for them to find employment. Work grows more 
 and more uncertain and irregular; crowds of dock laborers 
 madly struggle at the dock gates for the poor labor 
 which only a few of them can obtain. The number of 
 unemployed in England is increasing, and in all probability 
 will increase. It is now numbered by thousands. What will 
 you do when it is numbered by hundreds of thousands, and 
 when with the pauperism deepens also the fierce and sullen 
 discontent? We are complacently told that, while our pop- 
 ulation has increased fivefold, our wealth has increased 
 sevenfold: the fact remains that while there is more wealth 
 there is more general misery. There are in London at this
 
 3 o QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 moment 80,000 paupers, and half a million are at hand- 
 grips with destitution and are helped by charity. In this 
 dreadful city alone there are as many fallen women, mis- 
 erablest and most fallen of the human race except the 
 wretches who have made them what they are, as many, 
 we are told, in this city alone "as the whole population of 
 Norwich; as many known criminals as the whole population 
 of Huntingdon; as many homeless nomads who live on the 
 verge of famine as twice over the population of the town of 
 Nottingham." Is not this a warning against the selfishness 
 of luxury and of comfort-worship? Is it not possible that 
 under such conditions all they that are fat upon earth and 
 have eaten and drunken may, in the warning of Scripture, 
 have only been heaping up treasure for the last days, and 
 nourishing their hearts as in a day of slaughter?* 
 
 And, besides this congestion of wealth in the hands 
 of a few, the other grave peril to which the thoughts of 
 many Englishmen are now being awakened, and that on 
 every side, is the growth of population. It has increased 
 more since the year 1800 than it did for fully six hundred 
 years after the Conquest. The Saxon races of Europe now 
 double their number in every seventy years. In India 
 myriads are scarcely ever free from the pangs of hunger. 
 In twenty-five years more the United States of America, 
 that great outlet for emigration, will be fully occupied by 
 its hundred millions of inhabitants Long before another 
 century has run its course the economical conditions of the 
 whole world will be fundamentally altered, and on this 
 ground alone there must be some immense change or crisis 
 in the history of our race. The catastrophe dreaded by 
 
 Many of the facts set fonh in this chapter have been powerfully stated in recent works, 
 such as Mr. J. Cotter Morrison's "Service of War" and Mr. Arnold Morley's " Problems of 
 Great Cilies."
 
 NATIONAL PERILS. 31 
 
 some writers in the last century has only been staved off 
 for a time by the unforeseen importation of food; but this 
 resource is far from inexhaustible, nor has science discov- 
 ered a means of increasing the supply of food in the same 
 geometrical ratio as the increase of population. As one 
 writer expressed it, "the human race in old countries is 
 being jammed into an impasse, from which there is no 
 escape until Nature take the matter in hand." But how? 
 Will she send forth God's four sore judgments? Will the 
 red horse of war, and the livid horse of famine, and the 
 black horse of pestilence be let loose among mankind? Or 
 is the shadow, indeed, reaching that line on the dial-plate 
 of eternity when the earth shall thrill with the trumpet of 
 the Archangel and with the voice of God? 
 
 I do not make the faintest pretence to forecast the future. 
 I do not pretend to know what the end of these things will 
 be. I am touching on this point solely to emphasize our 
 sense of individual duty. But this is plain, that this stu- 
 pendous increase of population is complicated by two other 
 elements in England of a great and silent revolution which 
 is going on in the midst of us. One is the growth of great 
 cities, and the other is the multiplication of the unfit. 
 
 No one who has a grain of thoughtfulness in his composi- 
 tion can dispute the facts or can question their significance. 
 The population of England, on the one hand, was rural, 
 and is become urban ; on the other hand, the strong are in 
 danger of being crowded out by the weak. Of the first of 
 these facts, I will only say a word. Every year the country 
 is more depleted, the cities, and, above all, this monstrous 
 imposthume of London, are more overcrowded. London 
 alone adds a new Exeter, a new city of seventy thousand, 
 to her inhabitants every year. If things go on like this
 
 22 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 unchecked, before two centuries are over England will be 
 mainly one huge, intolerable town, "a furious centre of 
 prolific vitality," the curse alike of the physique and 
 morale of the race. 
 
 Take the other serious fact, that the increase is prepon- 
 derantly among the unfit. The tendency of civilization is 
 to multiply from the lower and not from the higher speci- 
 mens of the race. The idle, the squalid, the unthrifty, the 
 undersized, those who practise no forethought and exercise 
 no self-control, those who live on degraded and adulterated 
 food, and whose one joy is drugged and poisonous drink; 
 those who have no vista but the workhouse and no para- 
 dise but the gin-shop, are at this moment multiplying ten 
 per cent, more rapidly than the prudent and self-controlled. 
 I will quote, not from an aristocrat, but from a Socialist 
 leader, who describes the ever-waxing crowds of the East 
 End as people of stunted frames and dwarfed intelligence, 
 and who speaks of the dwarfed sympathy of children in the 
 slums, suckled on gin, poisoned by foul air, corrupted by 
 filth and bad food, crippled by too early toil. Premature 
 marriages intensify the curse. In the year 1884 in the 
 East End of London 59 per cent, of men that is to say, 
 14,818 men and 75 per cent, of women were married, if 
 the name of marriage can be given to such wretched unions, 
 were married before twenty-one years of age; whereas in 
 St. George's, Hanover, only I per cent, of men were so 
 married. Fresh complications arise from the ceaseless 
 influx into London of starving laborers, helpless Jews, 
 pauper Irish, and indigent foreigners, and by the domi- 
 nance in this afflicted land of the horrible curse of drink. 
 Blighted and shiftless youths without health, without hope, 
 without resources, without God, with nothing to bring to
 
 NATIONAL PERILS. 33 
 
 the work of life but their nunger and their lust, swarm 
 penniless from the feverish slums in which they scarcely 
 ever wash or change their clothes, and swamp the labor 
 market with the crudest forms of unskilled and superfluous 
 labor. And what do these things mean? The Socialists 
 know if you do not. They mean that, unless remedies be 
 found in our earnestness and in our self-denial, and in our 
 promotion by every possible means of the common good of 
 all, then the Huns and Vandals who shall shipwreck our 
 civilization are being bred, as Mr. Henry George has 
 warned us, not in the steppes of Asia, but in the slums of 
 great cities. They mean that they who put down their 
 ears, and listen to the ground-swell murmuring restlessly 
 in the great ocean of humanity, hear in that dull hoarse 
 roar a prelude of the tidal wave; and that, as Prince 
 Krapotkin tells us, a multitude whom no man can number, 
 are as the ocean, and shall rise and swallow up all else. 
 They mean that, if there be no remedy, sooner or later 
 and sooner, I fear, rather than later there will, and must 
 be, a social revolution which will deepen unspeakably the 
 general catastrophe. They mean that if the upper classes 
 the comfortable classes, the upper and middle classes 
 do not rouse themselves from what has been called their 
 "awful selfishness and bovine contentment," they will be 
 shaken out of it by the impatient earthquake. They mean 
 that our drink, and our vice, and our Mammon-worship are 
 bringing about by natural laws their own inevitable retri- 
 bution, and that the vultures which scent decay from afar, 
 and may be seen already like black specks on the horizon, 
 -will soon be filling the whole sky with "the rushing of 
 their congregated wings." 
 
 Fools and selfish men, and those who do not care what 
 
 3
 
 34 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 happens to the world when they cease to consume its fruits, 
 will be deaf and blind to all such facts as these; but every 
 earnest, and every honorable, and every Christian man and 
 woman will ask, Is there any help and is there any remedy? 
 And thus much I will answer at once, that there is no 
 help and that there is no remedy except in lives of increas-, 
 ingly earnest effort and more self-denying duty, and that 
 to all who are not enclosed in their own fat such considera- 
 tions should sound as a clarion call to be up and doing. 
 
 For Socialism is no remedy. Socialism, strong only in 
 the existence of neglected evils and wrongs unredressed, 
 may conceivably triumph for a time in England, as it did 
 in France; but, if so, it will not be a remedy, it will be 
 an aggravation. It may preach to hungry and ignorant men 
 as it openly does abroad, though not in England its 
 devil's gospel of plunder and confiscation; it may cripple 
 the State and overthrow the Church and trample on the 
 Crown, and, so doing, it may plunge the realm into some 
 irretrievable calamity. But, if it does, its own helpless 
 children will be the very first whom it will ruthlessly 
 devour, and it will be in its turn blown into ruins by 
 the indignation of mankind. 
 
 Legislation, again, is no remedy. Legislation might, 
 indeed, furnish some alleviations, though at the best but 
 partial ones. This century has seen many noble enact- 
 ments, the outcome of all that was best and wisest, most 
 just and merciful, in the national heart. Had it been 
 otherwise, our case would long ago have been des- 
 perate. But there can be no more legislation ade- 
 quately noble and adequately strenuous, unless legislators, 
 after all these years of warning and struggle, have 
 the courage at last to make a ruthless sacrifice of sterile
 
 NATIONAL PERILS. 
 
 35 
 
 party chatter; to grapple with the destroying curse of drink; 
 to economize, if they cannot extirpate, the tempting facil- 
 ities to vice; to make short work with the owners of rot- 
 ting houses, and the vested interests of all those who- 
 batten on the degradation of mankind; to give brief shrift 
 to the so-called liberty which means free license and temp- 
 tation to do wrong, a liberty to the weakest to make 
 themselves the beasts and slaves of their lowest appetites! 
 
 But if Socialism be but an aggravation, and adequate 
 legislation be at present hopeless, individual effort is a 
 remedy. Instead of sitting still in aimless acquiescence 
 and selfish stupefaction, let us each see how God calls upon 
 us to act. Are we helplessly to wait for miraculous inter- 
 positions? If so, we shall perish in our supineness. 
 
 There is no way whatever to help the struggling masses 
 of our population which does not elevate the poor. The 
 condition of things which I have described never can be 
 remedied nay, will grow worse and worse, until the pit 
 swallow it unless the poor can be roused to make a 
 resolute effort to uplift themselves. Without moral and 
 religious remedies all others will be in vain. 
 
 Alas! the classes whom I would fain address are not 
 here : they have, for the most part, been lost long ago to 
 the Church of England and to every other religious de- 
 nomination. On us, as members of the National Church, 
 rests in this matter an immense responsibility. Our pres- 
 ent methods will not reach them; to our elaborate theol- 
 ogies, and our routine ceremonies, and our professional 
 fineries they have nothing to say; for rubrics and millinery 
 and stereotyped services, they care no more than they do 
 for the idle wind; they want a broader, simpler, larger, 
 truer, manlier, less conventional, less corrupt, less fourth-
 
 jg QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 century gospel ; they want the essential gospel ; they want 
 Christ. And, oh! if He were here now, how would He 
 be moved with compassion for them; how would He go 
 amongst them- how little would He care for our petty 
 ecclesiastical jealousies; how unmixed with isms, ologies, 
 and rites, and forms would be His pure, heart-searching 
 gospel! But this certainly He would tell to these masses 
 of the poor whom the Church has lost, these sheep having 
 no shepherd, that nothing which can be done to help them 
 will be of any avail until they have learned to help them- 
 selves. They and their demagogues point often with scorn- 
 ful finger to the scandals in the lives of the aristocracy: 
 their own lives are often ten times more scandalous. They 
 talk of the selfish rich: the poor, too, often in their 
 way, are ten times more selfish. The pauper youth who 
 marries within half a crown of starvation; the labourer 
 who drinks five shillings' worth a week of gin and ale, 
 while his children are starving and his wife is in rags; the 
 loafer who will scarcely do an honest day's work, each of 
 these is a far worse enemy of society, far more selfish, and 
 far more of a voluptuary in his vile way than any of the 
 rich. They talk of being slaves: they are only too free, 
 free to destroy themselves body and soul, and through 
 drink and lust to kindle the fires of hell in their hearts 
 and on their hearths. 
 
 But is it nothing to us? Are we each, like so many 
 Cains, to say, "Am I my brother's keeper?" I say that 
 on every one of us is incumbent the plain duty of consider- 
 ing these signs of the times, of considering the poor, of 
 doing our utmost in whatever way God makes clear to us 
 and, if we seek the way, He will make it clear to us to 
 avert the lurid menace of these lowering skies. If Social-
 
 NATIONAL PERILS. 
 
 37 
 
 ism be a ruin and not a remedy, if the action of legislation 
 be at the best but tardy and partial, can the Church of 
 God do nothing? To me it seems that what I mean by the 
 Church of God is the only power which can do anything. 
 God's arm is not shortened; the outpouring of God's Spirit 
 was not confined to Pentecost. The Divine enthusiasm 
 which grappled with the abominations of paganism, refuted 
 its philosophies, routed its legions, regenerated its corrupt 
 society, reinspired and reconstructed its shattered institu- 
 tions, the Spirit of God which of old brooded upon the 
 face of the waters and said, "Let there be light," and there 
 was light, that Spirit is omnipotent to deliver us from 
 dangers far more threatening than these, only it waits for 
 hearts strong enough and pure enough to receive its mighty 
 inspirations ; "hearts pure and transparent as crystal, strong 
 and active as fire, patient and enduring as the hearts of 
 martyrs.'' Even now that Spirit is calling, "Whom shall 
 I send and who will go for us? " And when men are noble 
 enough to say, with all their hearts, "Here am I: send 
 me ! " and to go forth, if need be, without bread, or scrip, 
 or money in their purse, then the apostolic succession of 
 inspired men will be renewed, and we shall see once more 
 such miracles as were wrought of old by Paul and John, 
 by Benedict and Francis, by Luther and Whitefield. The 
 Church of God, I say, is the only power on earth which can 
 face the enormous and complicated problems of the future. 
 And by the Church of God I mean you, every one of you, I 
 mean all true Christians, whether they worship in Abbeys or 
 in Ebenezers. The clergy alone are as nothing in this work : 
 they are but 20,000, and you are more than 30,000,000. 
 Until each one of you does his own duty, the work of God's 
 Universal Church will be miserably paralyzed; until each
 
 38 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 sweeps before his own door, the streets of the New Jerusa- 
 lem will not be clean. We are treated to loud jubilation 
 in these days on the work of the Church, and, if we hear a 
 string of notices given out about endless services and Holy 
 Communions, we think that a great deal must be doing. 
 I attach very little importance indeed to services and com- 
 munions at which, out of parishes of many thousands, per- 
 haps not half a dozen persons are present ; and, in general, 
 much which passes in our ecclesiastical circles for extreme 
 clerical activity is little better than outward function and 
 strenuous idleness. All that kind of activity was in its 
 very fullest bloom in the Temple at Jerusalem, and Priests 
 and Pharisees thronged its courts at the very time that 
 Jesus was saying on the Mount of Olives, "Not one stone 
 of it shall be left upon another." 
 
 I cannot share, I grieve to say, in these jubilations about 
 our progress. When in one city of four millions, three 
 millions and more on one Sunday are in no place of wor- 
 ship, I think the Church should rather be sitting and weep- 
 ing in dust and ashes than glorifying herself about her own 
 activity. New times want new methods and new men; and 
 if we do not adopt new methods, and find new men who 
 really are men, we shall die of our impotent respectability. 
 It is not enough for us only to edify, or strive to edify, the 
 faithful few, when so little is being done to reach the lost 
 many. We need a new order of clergy altogether, side by 
 side with and nobler than ourselves, an order that will 
 live poor and unmarried in the very midst of the poor, as 
 poorly as they live, giving up, as the apostles did, every- 
 thing for Christ; men who shall take the simple gospel in 
 their hands, and nothing else; men conspicuous for their 
 manliness, their humility, their self-sacrifice, and who by
 
 NATIONAL PERILS. 39 
 
 their whole lives will pour silent contempt on gold. And 
 we need among all classes of Englishmen a deeper sincer- 
 ity, a more willing self-denial, a larger liberality, a truer 
 estimate of the real ends of life, an awakening conception 
 of the truth that "heaven means principle," and that life 
 means service, and that there are times when he who would 
 really find his life must lose it. There is not one person in 
 this congregation, young or old, who ought not to ask him- 
 self to-day whether he has been really enrolled in God's army, 
 or whether his life is useless for any purpose but his own 
 self-indulgence; whether he has been individually told off 
 into active service in the contest between the powers of life 
 and the powers of death, or whether he is living to any 
 better purpose than to eat and drink and sleep, and turn 
 the whole world into a feeding-trough for his own special 
 use. 
 
 If so, woe unto him! And woe unto that society and 
 woe unto that nation that has many such sons! Oh, I 
 entreat you, let us all take to heart this warning, and let 
 us feel sure that in God's battles slackness is infamy! On 
 every side around us there are calls for the most fearless 
 love of truth, and scorn for illusions and for hypocrisies; 
 calls for the most strenuous action, and scorn for greedy 
 and selfish ease. For it was on the eve of one of the most 
 terrible destructions which the world has ever seen that 
 Christ said to the full-fed Sadducees and Pharisees of a 
 self-satisfied generation: "In the morning ye say, Foul 
 weather to-day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye 
 hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye 
 not discern the signs of the times? "
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF PUBLIC DUTIES. 
 
 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! " LUKE xi. 44. 
 
 THERE are two causes to which a good man may devote 
 himself as the fit occupation for a noble life, the cause of 
 the individual and the cause of the race. There is but 
 one cause to which no truly good or noble man may or can 
 devote himself : it is the cause which the vast majority of 
 mankind serve with intense devotion all their lives, the 
 cause of self. It is quite true that men who are deemed 
 great do devote themselves to this cause of self, and that 
 exclusively; and, in doing so, succeed beyond the wildest 
 dreams of avarice and of ambition. They succeed, and they 
 are miserable; and they deserve to be so. Such a wor- 
 shipper of self, ready for self's sake to deluge the world in 
 blood and steep his conscience in crime, was Bonaparte. 
 His life was a colossal effort to succeed without a con- 
 science. You know what came of it, its retributive an- 
 guish, its miserable collapse. 
 
 " Behold the grand result in yon lone isle, 
 And, as thy nature urges, weep or smile ; 
 Behold the scales in which his fortune hangs, 
 A surgeon's statements and an earl's harangues." 
 
 Yes! such a life is one of the numberless comments 
 written by history, with endless variations of detail, but 
 perfect unity of teaching, comments on our Lord's oft- 
 repeated words, "He that saveth his life shall lose it; and
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF PUBLIC DUTIES. 4I 
 
 he that loseth his life for my sake and the gospel s, the 
 same shall save it." 
 
 Now I shall dwell a good deal on the life of a man 
 who, whatever were his faults, and they were very grave 
 and even deadly faults, and who, however serious was 
 the injury which he inflicted on religious belief, yet 
 did, in his measure, and in some directions, fulfil the 
 high duty of man to his race. He was one who has 
 been often and most bitterly denounced as a sceptic, as 
 a blasphemer. He has been often, and not unjustly, de- 
 scribed as vain, impure, theatrical, unscrupulous, untruth- 
 ful. He dealt many a wicked blow, not only at things 
 falsely deemed sacred, but at things which are sacred; and 
 he stood pre-eminent among a band of men who are re- 
 garded as enemies of religion. There have been, thank 
 God, hundreds of saints in the world; and there have been 
 hundreds of saints who perhaps were all the more saintly 
 that they have never been sainted. But the man of whom 
 I speak was no saint, no hero. He set in many respects 
 a bad and low example. He cannot, I fear, be called, in 
 any high sense, a good man. But, on the other hand, there 
 has often been a fibre of goodness and nobleness, whether 
 you call it saintliness or not, in many of the utterly un- 
 saintly, just as there is, alas! many a root of bitterness 
 in the characters of those who pride themselves on being 
 religious men. Judge for yourselves whether it was so or 
 not in the character of the man of whom I shall speak. 
 But before I mention his name, or say a word about him, 
 you will perhaps ask me why, in any case, I hold up the 
 virtues of such a man for example and admiration. Well, 
 among other reasons, because I choose for once to follow 
 the example of Scripture. The Scriptures, again and
 
 42 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 again, hold up to us imitable examples in men who were 
 in other respects far from good, in Saul, in Gideon, in 
 Jephthah, in Samson, in David, in Solomon, in Jonah, in 
 many men intensely faulty, in whom, nevertheless, there 
 was a salt of righteousness, and of whom there is much 
 that was good to tell. I will cut short further cavils with 
 the plain practice of our Lord. He found more that was 
 estimable, more that was redeemable, in publicans and sin- 
 ners than in scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. His type of 
 Christian love to our neighbor was not sleek priest or scru- 
 pulous Levite, but a hated and heretical Samaritan. And, 
 when in His teaching he wished to emphasize some special 
 point of justice or prudence, sometimes, as in the parables 
 of the dishonest steward and of the unjust judge, He set it 
 in relief by throwing it on the dark background of a char- 
 acter otherwise evil, or of conduct otherwise to be con- 
 demned. We must not be afraid of Christ's own methods: 
 and I shall try to show you the grandeur and the beauty of 
 certain forms of duty and service as illustrated by the char- 
 acter and as prominent in the conduct of one at whom, 
 when I have finished, he who is without sin among us may, 
 if he will, fling a stone, as at a wicked man. For my part, 
 I will try to learn a lesson from the good that was in this 
 man, while I leave all that was evil in him to the Judge of 
 all the earth. 
 
 Now there were vast principles for which the man 
 of whom I speak struggled all his life, vast and splendid 
 principles; principles often terribly lacking in Chris- 
 tians, lacking most of all in many of those who call 
 themselves ecclesiastics and churchmen. They are the 
 principles of justice, of tolerance, of humanity. Many 
 churchmen breathe of deliberate choice the verv atmos-
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF PUBLIC DUTIES. 
 
 43 
 
 phere of intolerance. They turn religion itself into a 
 chaos of violent hatreds and petty spites. They see injus- 
 tice and inhumanity around them, and look at it with an 
 immoral acquiescence. "The worst of the worthy sort of 
 people is," said this man, "that they are such cowards. 
 A man groans over wrong; he shuts his lips; he takes his 
 supper; he forgets." And again, "People talk about a 
 wrong for a moment, and the next they are hastening to 
 the comic opera; and barbarity, becoming the more inso- 
 lent for our silence, will cut throats at pleasure." Their 
 attitude towards the great mass of mankind resembles the 
 terrible ballad of the French poet. A young and lovely 
 girl named Constance was burned to death as she was array- 
 ing herself for a ball at the ambassador's. The news 
 arrived during the ball. What happened? They said, 
 "Poor Constance! " and they waltzed till daybreak at the 
 house of the ambassador of France! 
 
 This man could not take so lightly the existence of these 
 wrongs and crimes. They filled him "with a blaze of anger 
 and pity." "With an unrelenting perseverance, inexorable 
 as doom, he got wrong definitely stamped and transfixed." 
 It was by fighting against oppression and cruelty with all 
 the keenness of his radiant genius that, whether you call 
 him a bad character or not, he, amid all the evil which he 
 did, still rendered immortal service to the cause of civili- 
 zation, to the cause of man. 
 
 I will tell you his name, but not at once. At present 
 we will call him Arouet. It was his real name, the name 
 of his birth, but not the name by which he is usually 
 known, or the name by which he will be recognized by 
 most of you. And, if many of you do by this time recog- 
 nize who he was, remember that, so far as he was an enemy
 
 44 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 to religion, while yet he was a friend to so much that was 
 noble and good, it was because, in his day, religion was 
 mixed up with much that was false, corrupt, and hypocriti- 
 cal. In its pride and ignorance, the thing which called 
 itself religion which was not true religion, but its fatal 
 counterfeit often proved itself, as it now so often proves 
 itself, an enemy to all that he loved most passionately, an 
 enemy to tolerance, an enemy to humanity, an enemy to- 
 truth. 
 
 You have all heard in English history of the name 
 of the unfortunate Admiral Byng. In the year 1756 he was 
 sent to seize Port Mahon in Minorca. His opponent was 
 Marshal Richelieu. By some accident, probably through 
 no fault of his own, Byng failed to relieve Minorca. For 
 this he was tried. Chatham, the great Prime Minister, 
 was for mercy: the House of Commons inclined to mercy; 
 but the king was inexorable, and the English people, in 
 one of their periodical paroxysms of mad injustice and 
 ignorant fury, were, in their disappointment, clamoring for 
 blood. By a sentence disgracefully iniquitous, Admiral 
 Byng was shot on his own quarter-deck. But the man of 
 whom I speak Arouet did his utmost to save him, and 
 for this purpose forwarded to him a letter in which his 
 opponent, Richelieu himself, had spoken of his bravery 
 and good judgment. The effort was in vain. Had it suc- 
 ceeded, the page of English history would not have been 
 encrimsoned with that ineffaceable stain of innocent blood. 
 Again, in 1702 there was an infirm old man at 
 Toulouse, a Protestant bookseller named Galas. His elder 
 son had become a Romanist. His second son was found 
 hung in his father's shop. Calas was accused of having 
 murdered this son, in order to prevent him from abjuring
 
 THE SAC REDNESS OF PUBLIC DUTIES. 
 
 45 
 
 Protestantism. There was not a particle of real evidence 
 against him; but, under the influence of a bigoted judge, 
 his youngest son was banished, his widow and children 
 were put to the torture, and he himself, brutally broken on 
 the wheel, died protesting his innocence with his last 
 breath. His wife and family fled to Arouet, who sup- 
 ported and protected them. Devoting his genius to their 
 cause, though the brutal sentence was sustained by the 
 whole power of the Church, he got the judgment against 
 Galas unanimously reversed by the Council of State, 
 and the ruin of the family restored out of the public 
 purse. The work occupied the soul of Arouet for three 
 years; and during all that time, he said, "if a single smile 
 escaped me, I reproached myself with it as a crime." 
 
 Again, a young girl named Sirven, torn from her 
 parents who were Protestants, and shut up in a convent, 
 weary with cruel treatment, escaped from the convent, and 
 flung herself into a well. The priest who had shut her up, 
 the nuns who had ill-used her, they doubtless deserved 
 punishment; but instead of this the miserable father was 
 falsely accused of having murdered her, and was con- 
 demned, like Calas, in the same year, to be broken on the 
 wheel. He fled in time; but his wife, who accompanied 
 him, perished of misery among the snows of the Cevennes, 
 and Sirven joined the wretched family of Calas under the 
 protection of Arouet at Geneva, who there supported them. 
 Arouet once more flung himself into the poor man's cause, 
 and by his influence and his eloquence, and by agitating 
 the whole world with pity and indignation, secured his 
 acquittal. 
 
 Once more, in the same year, 1766, it was found 
 that a wooden crucifix on the Bridge of Abbeville had been
 
 46 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 mutilated during the night. Suspicion fell on two lads of 
 eighteen and sixteen, a young soldier, the Chevalier de la 
 Barre, and his friend, D'Etallonde. There was not an 
 atom of proof against them; according even to their sen- 
 tence, they were only "vehemently suspected." But pri- 
 vate grudge and vile fanaticism were set to work. Priests 
 and Jesuits with dark lies maddened the blind multitude. 
 D'Etallonde fled, and Arouet procured him a commission 
 in the army of the King of Prussia. He thus escaped the 
 abominable sentence pronounced upon these poor boys by 
 the Bishop of Amiens. The sentence pronounced by this 
 bishop was that the two boys should have their tongues cut 
 out, their right hands struck off, and be burned at a slow 
 fire. The Parliament of Paris commuted the punishment 
 to decapitation; and young De la Barre was first horribly 
 tortured, and then beheaded. For twelve years Arouet 
 held up to deserved execration the hideous and criminal 
 punishment by which the official ministers of the gospel of 
 mercy and forgiveness had immolated a boy's life on the 
 Moloch-altar of religious bigotry. 
 
 Again, in 1766 Count Lally was condemned to 
 death in Paris, after a trial tainted with every kind of 
 illegality, for asserted misconduct in India. It was a case 
 analogous to that of Admiral Byng. The French were infu- 
 riated by the loss of their Indian possessions, and thirsted 
 vindictively for blood. A victim, like Byng, to the blind 
 and brutal passion of the populace, Count Lally was con- 
 demned, and, with a gag between his teeth, was dragged 
 off to execution. For twelve years Arouet pleaded for a 
 reversal of the attainder, and the news that he was at last 
 successful cheered his dying-bed. " I die happy," he wrote : 
 "I see that the king loves justice." Those were the last
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF PUBLIC DUTIES. 47 
 
 words that word "justice" was the last word that he 
 ever wrote. 
 
 I might tell you more of the same kind: how this 
 man, indignant to see some 12,000 peasants treated as serfs 
 by twenty lazy monks, lived to hasten the abolition of serf- 
 dom throughout France; how he lent to a poor family the 
 means of supporting their rights to an estate against the 
 encroachments of the Jesuits; how he relieved the poverty 
 of the grand-niece of Corneille; how he once burst into 
 anger because two white doves which had been given him 
 had been killed for food; how his heart was ever open to 
 the cry of the persecuted, and his purse to the miseries of 
 the needy. And I do not hesitate to say that, in deeds 
 like these, I see in this man who was no Christian, who 
 may well be regarded as an enemy of Christianity, better 
 Christian qualities than have been shown even by many 
 Christian priests. In an age of gross injustice, in an age 
 when the eyes of justice were bandaged and blinded by the 
 fury of sacerdotal superstition, I see in him a splendid love 
 of justice. "My cause," he wrote, " is only that of an ob- 
 scure family, but the meanest citizen murdered unjustly 
 by the sword of the law is precious to the nation." "Pun- 
 ish," he wrote, "but do not punish blindly. Reason must 
 be the guide of justice, though she be painted with a band- 
 age over her eyes." I see in him faith in human nature. 
 "The love of honor," he wrote, "and the fear of shame, 
 are better moralists than the executioners." I see a 
 hatred of cruelty. Torture, he pleaded, should be utterly 
 abolished. I see a hatred of fanaticism, which he justly 
 characterized as the rage, the madness, of souls. I see the 
 courage of insight. A crime was always to him a crime, 
 whether a king committed it in the madness of anger or a
 
 4 g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 law court with the formalities of statutes. And for these 
 principles in which our whole race is concerned Arouet 
 maintained for sixty years an incomparable struggle. 
 Wherever he saw a right oppressed, he strove to vindicate 
 it; wherever he heard of a victim of injustice, he strove to 
 redress or avenge his cause. When he was an old man, 
 the wise and good Franklin brought his grandson to him, 
 for his blessing. "God, liberty, tolerance, that," he said, 
 "is the best blessing for Franklin's grandson." 
 
 I began by saying that there are two mighty and 
 noble feelings which may sway the human heart : one, the 
 pity for individual suffering, the pity which, like the little 
 new-born babe, sits in the heart of a John Howard or a 
 Vincent de Paul ; the other, the passionate indignation for 
 human wrongs. There are souls which feel wounded when 
 reason is wounded; which, moved by a lofty and masculine 
 sensibility, are keenly alive to the mighty interests of 
 order, justice, and human dignity. The spirit of man 
 plunged in ignorance and error, liberty of person fettered, 
 liberty of conscience strangled, justice perverted, inno- 
 cence oppressed^ reason hurled down by violence, multi- 
 tudes crushed by a selfish despotism, these are the wrongs 
 which fill their souls with flame. And what are these but 
 violations of the Christian law, "Do unto others as ye 
 would they should do unto you " : violations of that holy 
 law on a vaster scale, and transferred from the individual 
 to the social sphere? 
 
 But now who was this man, this Arouet, of whom I 
 have spoken to you? None other than he who is known to 
 the world by the detested name of Voltaire. You have 
 never heard of him but as an enemy to religion, as he who, 
 in the poet's words,
 
 THE SACRED NESS OF PUBLIC DUTIES. 
 
 " For the bane of thousands born, 
 Built God a church, and laughed His word to scorn." 
 
 49 
 
 Yes! but herein lies my lesson. If an enemy to re- 
 ligion can do such deeds, what ought we to do who call 
 ourselves its friends? Alas! it might be well for many a 
 Christian if, when he stands before the awful bar, the 
 recording angel can plead for him against the accuser of 
 his sins such good deeds as were done for Byng, for Galas, 
 for Sirven, for Lally, for De la Barre, for many more, by 
 this Voltaire, whose body, when he died, the Church of 
 France, implacable even to the dead, would fain have flung 
 forth unburied upon the dunghill. 
 
 The enemy of religion? Yes! but what kind of 
 religion, calling itself religion, did Voltaire see? In his 
 very infancy, he had been trained by that monstrous but 
 in those days not uncommon thing, an atheist priest. On 
 all sides, he saw among the professors of religion a fierce and 
 infatuated intolerance, a scheming and licentious hypoc- 
 risy, a petty and wrangling party spirit, a mean and frivo- 
 lous superstition. In the State he saw prisons filled with 
 brave and innocent citizens. He saw luxurious splendour 
 supported by oppressive taxes at the expense of general 
 starvation. In alliance with this State he saw a Church in 
 which Jesuits were dominant. Under their dominance, in 
 his youth he saw Louis XIV. unreproved by the Church 
 when he was a profligate and flattered by the Church when 
 he was a prosecutor, suppressing Protestants by dragon- 
 nades, and driving from his kingdom 50,000 of his best 
 subjects. In his manhood he saw Louis XV. suffering 
 harlot after harlot to toy with the contaminated crown of 
 St. Louis in the palaces of France. He saw the clergy 
 solicitous about the gay plumage of the court and careless 
 
 4
 
 ijO QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 of the dying bird of the nation. He saw them cruel, arro- 
 gant, idle, among a lower class sunk in ignorance, and an 
 upper class steeped in immorality. He saw contending 
 sects animated by bitter mutual hatred. He saw a tyran- 
 nical inquisition, which tortured the consciences of the 
 dying and wreaked vengeance even on the dead. If relig- 
 ion was attacked in France, if religion has, alas! fallen, 
 dragging down with it morality and glory, that is due, 
 not to the shining arrows launched against it by Vol- 
 taire, but, on the one hand, to the faithlessness by which 
 it was degraded and the insincerity with which it was 
 corrupted through and through; on the other, to its own 
 absence of wisdom and candour, of tolerance and justice, to 
 its own cruelty and its own godlessness, to its alliance 
 with arrogant stupidity and intolerant superstition. 
 
 Do not think that I have been relating history. I 
 never allude to the past except to point a lesson to the 
 present. And I call attention to these great principles 
 of a very imperfect if you will, of a bad man, because 
 I think that they are eminently needed among Christians 
 still. 
 
 For instance, you profess and call yourselves Chris- 
 tians. Are you tolerant? Doubtless you can be sweet as 
 summer to those of your own sect or clique or school of 
 thought ; you can praise and honor those who flatter you, 
 those who answer you according to your idols. But have 
 you the least tolerance, forbearance, kindness, candour, for 
 those who disdain to speak to you anything but the truth? 
 Have you any charity for those whose views are entirely 
 different from your own? Have you long made up your 
 mind that those who oppose your views must be very stupid 
 or very wicked people ? I hope better things of you ; but
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF PlrBLIC DUTIES. e l 
 
 such, I see, is the tone commonly adopted by religious par- 
 tisans. 
 
 Are you just ? If you are, I can only say that I 
 can testify, from large experience and constant observation, 
 that many persons who call themselves religious do not 
 seem to have of justice even the most elementary concep- 
 tion. Judging by their newspapers, judging by their 
 anonymous letters, judging by their ways of carrying on a 
 controversy, judging by the line which they take towards 
 opponents, I see on all sides in the religious world men 
 who are habitually and conspicuously unjust. 
 
 Are you humane? Do you really care for the 
 struggles and the sufferings of the drunkard, of the sick, 
 of the wretched? Which do you think of most, the 
 duties of property or of its rights? the riches of the few 
 or the misery of the many? the protection of the multi- 
 tude or the privileges of the millionaire? Is there one 
 of the world's heavy burdens which you are helping to lift, 
 were it so much as with one of your fingers ? 
 
 Well, of this be sure. These virtues of conduct, 
 these principles of life, tolerance, justice, humanity, 
 which are but Christian charity exercised in the sphere 
 of the world, are essential to the very existence of relig- 
 ion. And if the Church does not develop these virtues 
 among her sons if she develop none of these large and 
 masculine virtues, but only thin, effeminate, ecclesiastical 
 virtues then, in the days of coming struggle, she cannot 
 and she will not hold her own. And if religion does fall 
 because Christians are uncharitable and priests are parti- 
 sans, or because churchmen, forgetting the weightier mat- 
 ters of the law, care only for the mint and cumin of the 
 infinitely little, then Voltaire shall rise up against this
 
 5 2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 generation and shall condemn it. And, as it will be 
 better for Nineveh and for Sodom in the day of judgment 
 than for Chorazin and for Bethsaida, so, too, it may be bet- 
 ter for the robust virtues of men who had been disgusted 
 by a narrow and corrupt ecclesiasticism than for the 
 smooth conventionalities of men who, absorbed in their 
 petty sectarianisms of system and of ceremony, look on at 
 the wounds of humanity as indifferently as the cold Levite 
 and the sanctimonious Priest. 
 
 One last word. You are all, doubtless, better than 
 Voltaire; you can all afford to speak of him with the hiss 
 of contempt, and fling at him the stone of condemnation. 
 Be it so: then do better than he did; or do what you will, 
 but do in these directions one-tenth part as well as he! 
 We want large, manly virtues, not miserable squabbles and 
 heresy-huntings. All the formalism and all the profession 
 in the world will not elevate you even to his standard; but, 
 if you have faith, if you have love, as a grain of mustard- 
 seed, you may be, in all that affects man's deepest inter- 
 ests, incomparably more happy and incomparably more 
 wise. For in failing to know the blessing of Christ and 
 the power of his resurrection, Voltaire lost the purest hap- 
 piness, the most sustaining consolation, of our sad life 
 here. 
 
 " The Frenchman first in literary fame, 
 Mention him, if you please. Voltaire? The same, 
 With spirit, genius, eloquence supplied, 
 Lived long, wrote much, laughed heartily, and died. 
 Yon cottager, who weaves at her own door, 
 Pillow and bobbins all her little store, 
 Receives no praise ; but, though her lot be such, 
 Toilsome and indigent, she renders much; 
 Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true, 
 A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew,
 
 THE SAC REDNESS OF PUBLIC DUTIES. 
 
 And in that charter reads with sparkling eyes 
 Her title to a treasure in the skies. 
 O happy peasant, O unhappy bard, 
 His the mere tinsel, hers the rich reward; 
 He praised perhaps for ages yet to corje, 
 She never heard of half a mile from home ; 
 He lost in errors his vain heart pref?rs ; 
 She safe in the simplicity of hers ! " 
 
 53
 
 NATIONAL DUTIES. 
 
 "Cast cut devils."- -MATT. x. 8. 
 
 " Lord, even the devils are subject to us in Thy name." LUKE x. 17. 
 
 "In My name shall they cast out devils." MARK xiv. 17. 
 
 THE first of these three quotations is the command which 
 Christ gave to His seventy disciples when He sent them 
 two and two before His face to preach His kingdom and 
 prepare the way for His coming. The second is the report 
 brought back to Him by the disciples who had believed 
 His word and obeyed His bidding. The third is the 
 prophecy which He spake to His twelve apostles when 
 He had risen from the dead and was leaving them His last 
 commands. Do not, I entreat you, my brethren, escape 
 the cogency of these words of Christ by taking refuge in 
 those conventional glosses which make nine-tenths even of 
 the Gospels so utterly unreal to us. Do not, I entreat 
 you, say in your hearts, "Oh! this is only a command to 
 work miracles, and miracles have long since ceased "; or, 
 "Oh! this is only a command of Christ to His apostles, and 
 our circumstances are very different, and at the best the in- 
 junction has only some sort of significance for the clergy " ; 
 or, again, do not say: "We don't know anything about de- 
 moniac possession. The Jews seem to have assigned to the 
 direct agency of evil spirits what in these days we call 
 epilepsy and lunacy, and so on!" Ah! my brethren, thus 
 it is that, by mere literary and exegetical controversies, 
 which have in reality only the most distant bearing on 
 religion, thus it is that we empty the significance of
 
 NATIONAL DUTIES. 
 
 55 
 
 Christ's most precious words. These questions about 
 demoniacal possession, and so forth, have no bearing what- 
 ever on the tremendous practical reality of the question 
 whether we are, or are not, obedient to Christ's law, 
 whether we are, or are not, living in accordance with His 
 righteousness. Never limit His commands. What He 
 spake to His apostles He spake to His church, He spake 
 to all. Beyond the sacred functions of worship, and 
 religious guidance, and the due administration of the 
 sacraments, whatever is the duty of the clergy is the duty 
 of the laity as well. Never let the Christian laity su- 
 pinely betray their privileges or lazily abnegate their 
 sacred duties. Ye are all, if you will, children of the 
 Most High; God, if ye will, hath made you all kings 
 and priests. Would to God that, like Eldad and Medad, 
 ye all prophesied! Would to God that you were not sat- 
 isfied to leave so much as you do the serving of tables, 
 the administration of charity, the work of mercy in the 
 hands of the clergy! Would to God that so many of you, 
 Christian men and Christian women, were not content to 
 do nothing at all and give nothing at all ; and so many more 
 were not content to be charitable only by proxy, charitable 
 only by organizations, only by machinery, only by drop- 
 ping here and there, or not even dropping, a promiscuous 
 shilling or penny, the absence of which will not cost you 
 one ribbon or one cigar the less! Oh that you, the laity, 
 even the church-going laity, of the great Church of Eng- 
 land, felt that the elevation of the tone of society, the puri- 
 fying of literature, the evangelization of heathendom, the 
 education of the people, the sympathy with suffering, the 
 struggle against iniquity, were every whit as much your 
 work individually as they are ours; more your work collec-
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 tively, inasmuch as you are a thousand times more numer- 
 ous. Into these points I have no time to enter now. But 
 this I say, to this I would earnestly call your attention, 
 that to you, to every one of you, no less than to the 
 clergy, comes the command, "Cast out devils"; to you, 
 to every one of you, no less than to the clergy, the 
 prophecy, "In My name shall they cast out devils"; for 
 you, for every one of you, if only you be not faithless but 
 believing, shall come the rapturous and astonished acknow- 
 ledgement, "Lord, even the devils are subject unto us 
 through Thy name." And, therefore, I repeat to you, in 
 our Master's name, as our Master's message, I repeat to 
 you, all the more solemnly the command, "Cast out 
 devils." 
 
 But, beginning with one consent to make excuse, you 
 will perhaps say, "To cast out devils was a miracle, and 
 miracles have ceased." Yes: that is one of the ways in 
 which we paralyze Christianity into a dead religion, hav- 
 ing first frozen it into a hard and abstract orthodoxy, 
 utterly remote from our daily life. It is true that to cast 
 out devils was a miracle; but, except for those who, like 
 ourselves, are "fools and slow of heart to believe," miracles 
 have not ceased. Miracles have not ceased: it is faith that 
 has ceased. Well might the timid, wavering disciples ask 
 Christ, when they had failed in the case of the demoniac 
 boy, " Why could not we cast him out ? " and clearly the 
 explanation came: "Because of your unbelief. For verily 
 
 1 say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard-seed, 
 ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder 
 place, and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossi- 
 ble unto you." I have somewhere read that two centuries 
 and a half ago, in Geneva, its good bishop, St. Francis de
 
 NATIONAL DUTIES. 57 
 
 Sales, was walking in the streets, when he saw confined, 
 in a sort of iron cage, a priest who had become a raving 
 maniac, the Evangelists might have said, and perhaps 
 quite as accurately, a raving demoniac. For a few mo- 
 ments, in tears and with deep emotion, the good bishop 
 watched the frightful spectacle, and then, with one intense 
 victorious prayer, strong in faith and love, he boldly en- 
 tered the cage, took the dangerous maniac by the hand, and 
 saying, "Come home with me, my poor brother," instantly 
 calmed his paroxysms, and led him away in his right mind, 
 gentle and quiet as a lamb. Whether you call this a mira- 
 cle or not I care not, but I think that the Evangelists, 
 knowing all that Christ had promised, would have called 
 it so ; and rightly called it, for it was a miracle, and one 
 which you and I would probably have been too faithless to 
 work. It was a miracle of perfect faith, a miracle of 
 spiritual ascendency, a miracle of irresistible gentleness. 
 And we, if we had the same strong faith, the same burning 
 love, we, too, by the aid of Him who said, "Lo, I am with 
 you alway, even to the end of the world," we, too, might 
 work these and the like miracles. Not in our own name, 
 not of our own power. If we attempt that, we shall be as 
 deservedly battered and beaten back as were the seven sons 
 of one Sceva, a Jew; and the devils, and those possessed 
 with them, will say to us with just contempt, "Jesus I 
 know, and Paul I recognize; but ye, religious squabblers, 
 easy livers, selfish money-getters, ye, of the earth earthy, 
 of the world worldly, who are ye? " But, if we set to the 
 task in Christ's name, in Christ's power, in the strength 
 of Christ's life, we, too, weak and worthless as we are, 
 shall feel the outpouring of the Spirit from on high, and 
 may yet live to say, "Lord, even the devils are subject 
 unto us."
 
 5 g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Alas! the devils which I would urge you to help in 
 casting out to-day are far, far harder to deal with than 
 those which seize possession of individual souls. They 
 are the devils of national temptation, the devils of na- 
 tional apostasy, evil spirits which ride abroad in legions 
 upon the darkened air, the rulers of spiritual wickedness 
 in many places, alike high and low, whose work is the 
 overthrow of men.* Call them devils or not, they are, 
 at any rate, pestilent vapours which diffuse themselves 
 through the age, and insinuate their venom into the heart, 
 corrupting, subtly and imperceptibly, the soul of nations. 
 Men are too often unaware of them, because they avail 
 themselves of the current of human inclinations. They hurl 
 their victims over the precipice on the side towards which 
 they naturally lean. With deep and inventive hatred they 
 change harmless customs into deadly temptations, they 
 stimulate natural desires into reckless passions, until by 
 clever epigrams, by popular sophisms, by specious hypoc- 
 risies, by gilded bribes they have moulded to their own 
 purposes the very spirit of the time. They come in the 
 guise of indignant virtues, of Scripture precedents, of pru- 
 dential respectabilities. That is why it is so difficult to 
 cast them out. That is why so many a possessed nation, 
 pleading in vain for its demoniac sons, seeing them flung 
 oft-times into the fire and into the water, has been forced 
 to moan aloud to its Lord in heaven, "I spake unto Thy 
 disciples that they should cast out this demon, and they 
 could not." That is why those who, in any degree, try to 
 cast them out, are sneered down as fanatics and Pharisees; 
 and, because the many will not stir so much as a finger 
 to do herein their duty, the few, weary and sick at heart, 
 
 * Operatic eorum est hoitinis eversio. Tert. Apol. 22.
 
 NATIONAL DUTIES. 
 
 59 
 
 hurl themselves against national sins in vain. Yet, at 
 least, you shall be once more reminded of your Lord's 
 express command, "In My name cast out devils." 
 
 And of these evil spirits I would name, first, the devil 
 of Intemperance. My brethren, it is perfectly easy for 
 you, if you like, to pooh-pooh the whole subject; to quote 
 Scripture to prove the blessing of drink, though there is 
 ten times as much Scripture to warn against its curse. 
 All this is perfectly natural. It rises in part from the 
 selfishness which hates to be disturbed in its own indul- 
 gences ; in part from profound ignorance of the entire sub- 
 ject; in part from laziness; in part from conceit. In 
 taking such a line, you are only doing exactly what your 
 fathers did when they upheld the blessedness of the slave- 
 trade; or denounced the spread of education; or defended 
 the burning of all who did not agree with them; or 
 upheld the "manly pastimes" of prize-fighting and bear- 
 baiting; or proved from the Bible that the world was flat. 
 But things, for all that, are as they are; and no amount of 
 ignorance or of indifference, will alter the plain, glaring, 
 patent fact that the present conditions of our drink traffic, 
 and the drink it sells and the drunkenness which results 
 from it, are the direct source of untold disease; of wide- 
 spread lunacy; of immense and premature mortality; of 
 nearly all that there is of pauperism; of domestic misery 
 so deep and bitter that it is fully known to God only; of 
 a stunted population cursed with a diseased appetite and 
 an hereditary crave; of nearly every act of brutal atrocity 
 committed in England; of nine-tenths of all our existing 
 crime. It is drunkenness and the love of drink which 
 sours the temper, which inflames the passions, which brutal- 
 izes the hearts, which obliterates the affections of myriads.
 
 5o QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 There is no enormity of blasphemy in language, or of cruelty 
 in action, to which it may not goad even the naturally 
 gentle. At this moment, in this city, there are not hun- 
 dreds merely, but thousands ay, and I fear tens of thou- 
 sands of houses in which, because of drink and of drunk- 
 enness, and to gratify the artificially created crave for 
 drink, children are being left ragged and starving, or 
 wives are being beaten, or daughters are being driven 
 into shame. And this curse, against which well-nigh 
 every Judge upon the bench has uttered his stern indict- 
 ment, is now strong in possession, intrenched in social 
 customs, defended by all the force of the incomes it 
 creates and the interest which it commands. Well, if 
 England perishes of this her besetting sin of drunken- 
 ness, she must not, she will not perish, unwarned. 
 
 The devil of Excess may hide behind the wings of the 
 angel of Moderation, or shoot his fiery arrows from under 
 the stainless shield of Liberty, "hung up as the signboard 
 of the gin-palace"; but England must cast out this devil. 
 She must cease to recruit her ghastly procession of 600, 
 ooo drunkards; must cease to spend ^"150,000,000 a year 
 on alcohol ; must cease to multiply her maddening tempta- 
 tions precisely where the power of resistance is at the 
 minimum; must train her working classes not to soak away 
 a degraded leisure, squandering honest earnings in the 
 smoke of tobacco and investing them on the ruin of 
 disease; must cease to "girdle the groaning globe with a 
 zone of drunkenness " ; must cease to be the most intem- 
 perate of nations. Else, as her pleasant vices are now 
 the instruments to scourge, so shall they be the engine to 
 destroy her; and, as it was in the days of Noah, so she may 
 be eating and drinking when the deluge of her calamity
 
 NATIONAL DUTIES, gj 
 
 shall come. For the day comes, sooner or later, when 
 devils are driven into the abyss, and the pit swallows them 
 and those whom they possess. And you, whether you will 
 hear or whether you will forbear, He who said to His 
 disciples, "In My name cast out devils," says to-day, says 
 to England, says to you, "Do your duty, do your part, in 
 casting out the devil of intemperance." 
 
 And there is another devil, not yet universal, not 
 yet so apparently irresistible, not yet intrenched in the 
 citadel of selfish interests, but which has of late years 
 reared his head among us, and is daily gaining ground, 
 the devil of Lying. Strange, you will say! Are we not 
 a nation of truth-tellers? Is not an Englishman's word 
 as good as his bond? "Truth-teller was our own English 
 Alfred named; Truth-lover was our English Duke." Ay, 
 and long may it be so; or let us die, or, like the Pilgrim 
 Fathers, shake from off our feet the dust of our shores, 
 rather than see the day of England's shame! And yet a 
 great statesman said the other day that there was "a 
 lying spirit abroad." And I will tell you, my brethren, 
 what is very nearly akin to lies, and what seems every day 
 to be growing more popular in the midst of us, if we may 
 judge by what we daily read and by what we daily see; 
 and that is gossip, scandal, spite, libel, eavesdropping, 
 tattle, slander, calumny, envy, hatred, malice, and all un- 
 charitableness. It is what one has called a spreading 
 leprosy. "Truly," as Edmund Burke exclaimed, "the age 
 of chivalry is gone. The unbought grace of life is gone. 
 ... It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity 
 of honor." Let us only hope that what a living prophet 
 calls "the age of bronze and lacquer, the age of animal- 
 isms and mendacities," has not begun. Alien from all mag-
 
 6 2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 nanimity, alien from all that is great and noble, alien, one 
 used to think, from the very conception of a gentleman, 
 how alien slander is from anything remotely resembling 
 the spirit of a Christian, I need not tell you. '"They 
 say' is half a liar"; and "they say" is becoming more 
 and more the staple of I know not how many purveyors 
 to the diseased appetite of a prurient curiosity. Nor is 
 it a valid excuse when the lie happens to contain any grain 
 or shadow of the truth : 
 
 " For a lie which is half the truth is ever the greatest of lies, 
 Since a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright, 
 But a lie which is half the truth is a harder matter to fight" 
 
 And, indeed, I hardly know which is the baser and more 
 devilish, to probe, out of sheer malice, the half -healed 
 wounds (it may be) of the guilty, or to fling mud on the fair 
 name of the innocent. It is not only that this cruel spirit 
 is now assuming a definite head and front as a new phenom- 
 enon, in literature, but it even reflects itself in more honor- 
 able quarters, in the mutual recriminations and virulent 
 animosities of party politics; in the reckless imputation of 
 the meanest motives, bandied unblushingly as an element 
 in the maintenance of differing opinions; even in the gross 
 injustice and reckless misrepresentations of so-called "re- 
 ligious" newspapers. Let every honorable man and every 
 honorable writer help in casting out this devil from 
 amongst us, if England would not see her brave, true sons 
 
 not merely gray-headed routs and worn-out men of the 
 world, with hearts as callous as the nether millstone, after 
 worthless lives, but even young men who should know bet- 
 ter, and should not yet have lost all the generosity of youth, 
 
 if England would not see men who, a little time ago,
 
 NATIONAL DUTIES. 63 
 
 would have blushed to repeat a slander or disseminate a 
 gossip, beginning to be eager 
 
 " To catch a loathly plume fall'n from the wing 
 Of that foul bird of rapine, whose whole prey 
 Is man's good name," 
 
 then it is time, ere a new year dawns, to bid England cast 
 out the lying spirit from the midst of her, if she would not 
 have even her king's chambers invaded by legions of Styx 
 and Acheron, the abhorred children of hatred and of spite. 
 "In My name cast out devils." There is yet a third 
 evil spirit, whose dark wings have brooded of late over our 
 national life. There is another sin which disputes with 
 drunkenness the claim to be the besetting sin of this great 
 people: it is Avarice. No wonder that St. James calls it 
 a root of all kinds of evil; for covetousness is idolatry, 
 and idolatry of gold is indifference to God. If God gives 
 us riches, let us at least strive rightly to use this unright- 
 eous Mammon. But it is at best a doubtful blessing, and 
 many make it a deadly curse. When you hear the "Woe 
 unto them that lay house to house" of Isaiah, or the "Woe 
 unto you, rich men," of St. James, perhaps you set it down 
 as prophetic fanaticism; but dare you so make light of the 
 words of Christ when he says, "Blessed are the poor," or, 
 "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon," or, "How hardly 
 shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God"? 
 Which of us all believes enough to say with Luther, "O 
 my most dear God, I thank Thee that Thou hast made me 
 poor, and a beggar upon earth " ? Is there not folly, and 
 worse than folly, is there not guilt, in this greedy pursuit 
 of gold? When Napoleon called us contemptuously "a 
 nation of shopkeepers," we scorned the taunt, because we
 
 6 4 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 knew that honorable commerce is a blessing to mankind. 
 But woe to the nation that takes to dishonorable commerce ! 
 Woe to any nation which, having won the markets of the 
 world by honest industry, loses them by that hasting to be 
 rich which never is, and never can be, innocent, by infe- 
 rior goods, by dishonest contrivances, by scamped work, by 
 diminished industry, by fraudulent imitations, by adul- 
 terated products, by the false weights and the unjust bal- 
 ance which are an abomination to the Lord! Woe to any 
 nation which, in the fever of competition and the greed of 
 gain, will defraud a myriad consumers to enrich one pro- 
 ducer; which prefers undue returns to fair profits; which 
 will pinch the miserable earnings of the workmen to swell 
 the bursting coffers of the millionaire; which will destroy 
 tons of good food which God has given rather than lower 
 an artificial price. Every eleven years we are told we must 
 expect a commercial crisis; a sort of broken imposthume, 
 to relieve the diseased system; a thunder-storm of ruin, to 
 purge the air of the pestilence of greed. Is there nothing 
 to learn from this present distress, of which all newspapers 
 are full? When God's judgments are abroad, shall not the 
 people of England learn wisdom? Shall we do nothing to 
 avert a crash which, if the same causes work on unchecked, 
 may some day drag down the whole country with it, in 
 some great ring of dishonest combination, some intricate 
 network of interminable fraud? When, amid rotten busi- 
 nesses and reckless speculations, the very wind "like a 
 broken worldling wails, and the flying gold of the ruined 
 woodlands drives through the air " ; when, on Manchester 
 Exchange, a gentleman can show a roll of paper, yards 
 long, of the year's bankruptcies and liquidations; when 
 we are told that 4,079 such failures have occurred in the
 
 NATIONAL DUTIES. fy 
 
 last thirteen weeks alone; when men who have grown gray 
 amid the world's esteem elders in churches, Sunday- 
 school teachers, rigid Sabbatarians, attenders of prayer- 
 meetings can invest in gambling securities, produce cooked 
 balance sheets, publish falsified accounts, enter bad debts 
 as good assets, issue splendid dividends to conceal hopeless 
 and ruinous bankruptcy, who shall dare to say that he, too, 
 may not be tempted to descend from carelessness to culpa- 
 bility, from culpability to fraud? In such an age do we 
 not all need the warnings of Christ, lest we drift from 
 greed into peril, and from peril into crime? And, oh, the 
 misery of the many caused by this mean and guilty money- 
 hunting of the few! Oh, this stealing of the bread of the 
 orphan, and embezzlement of the pittance of the widow! 
 Oh, this snatching of a wicked luxury from the hard-won 
 earnings of the honest through long years! Oh, this frus- 
 tration of the weary work which has only been sweetened 
 by the love of wife or child! But, you will say, the guilty 
 are punished. Not always here, by any means; for 
 
 " In the corrupted currents of the world 
 Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice ; 
 And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself 
 Buys out the law. But 'tis not so above. 
 There is no shuffling : there the action lies 
 In his true nature ; and we ourselves compelled 
 Ev'n to the teeth and forehead of our faults, 
 To give in evidence." 
 
 Ay! but for the nation punishment is not sufficient: there 
 must be reform as well. If we are to listen to Christ's 
 commands, this devil of Avarice must be cast out. 
 
 Do not think, my brethren, that you and I are private 
 persons, and so cannot help to cast out these devils. States- 
 
 5
 
 66 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 men have, indeed, a vaster power. Chatham was never 
 nobler than when he thundered and lightened in defence of 
 civil liberty or in denunciation of savage war; nor Wilber- 
 force than when, for twenty years, amid taunts and lies, he 
 fought in the House of Commons the battle of the slave. 
 Our fathers have cast out devils: why cannot we? The 
 devil of Intolerance, the devil of Cruelty, the devil of 
 Tyranny, have been cast out; but why and how? Because 
 statesmen spoke in the voice of nations. The destinies of 
 people are in the people's hands. Think rightly, speak 
 bravely, act vigorously in these matters; and, even amid 
 signs of peril, though the fingers of a man's hand have 
 written "Mene, Mene, Tekel," they may yet be stayed 
 before they write " Upharsin " on the wall. First of all, 
 let us have clean hands ourselves. "Thou shalt do no 
 murder." "Thou shalt not commit adultery." "Thou 
 shalt not steal." "Thou shalt not bear false witness 
 against thy neighbor." The law of kindness, the law of 
 purity, the law of honesty, the law of truth, let us write 
 those commandments of the Most High God on the fleshy 
 tables of our hearts. 
 
 If a lying spirit is abroad, let us, as the high rule of the 
 life, if not of the Christian, yet, at the lowest, of the gentle- 
 man, "Speak no slander, no, nor listen to it"; no, nor 
 so much as even read it ; nor in any way, directly or indir- 
 ectly, encourage it, nor inwardly rejoice when others suffer 
 from it; but let us rather study on our knees St. Paul's 
 grand hymn to that Christian charity which thinketh no 
 evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth at the 
 truth. If we do this, our souls shall be ready to sicken 
 within us at the thought of our being so base as to en- 
 courage, in any way, the innuendoes of malice and the lies 
 of hate.
 
 NATIONAL DUTIES. g- 
 
 If the devil of Drunkenness is abroad, let us not lead 
 others to perish by permitted things; let us not abuse our 
 personal safety to perpetuate the causes whence others 
 perish, let us not, for the sake of drink and its interests, 
 cause souls to stumble for whom Christ died. 
 
 If the devil of Greed and Avarice is abroad, luring 
 thousands to shame and ruin by the gleam of gold, let us 
 cultivate the spirit of simplicity, which is content with 
 little; let us show that godliness with contentment is great 
 gain; let us prove that we do not wish to be of those who 
 heap up treasures for the last days, and fatten their hearts 
 for the day of slaughter; let us not, to save our pounds or 
 our pennies, rob the poor of their offering and the Church of 
 her due ; let us count ourselves too high and our redeemed 
 souls too godlike for the dismal, illiberal lives of base 
 gettings and mean spendings, for the "petty but conscious 
 dishonesty which looks God full in the face, and every 
 hour of its day charges a half-penny too much for a pound 
 of sugar or a yard of tape." Oh my brethren, if at this 
 close of yet another year we will but utterly cast the devils 
 out of our own hearts, by the aid of His grace who died to 
 save us from ourselves, how much God might bless us in 
 the noble endeavor to cast out devils from our national and 
 social life! What constituted, in fact, the mighty force of 
 Luther? Did not Pope Leo X. hit it rightly when he 
 said, "This German beast cares nothing for gold"? When 
 men are true, when they are really in earnest, when there 
 is no speck of hypocrisy in them, they become, as has been 
 well said, magnetic; they create about them an "epidemic 
 of nobleness " ; they flash in upon the consciences of others 
 their own heroic convictions, and the courage and con- 
 stancy which are necessary to carry them out. Oh that
 
 63 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 some, oh that many, for the strengthening of their own 
 souls, for the good of England, for the amelioration of the 
 world, for the love of God, in the cause of Christ, would 
 catch that sacred flame to-day! Oh, if all of you here 
 assembled could see these truths, how vast might be your 
 aggregate influence! How far different might be the end 
 of this year from that year which closes in unrest and 
 gloom! Oh that we were all more true to the com- 
 mand, "Cast out devils," and heartier believers of the 
 prophecy that to do so is in our power. Then should we 
 also say to Christ, in humble exultation, " Lord, the very 
 devils are subject to us through thy name"; and He 
 should answer us: "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from 
 heaven. Behold, I give you power to tread over all the 
 power of the enemy, and nothing shall by any means hurt 
 you. Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits 
 are subject unto you, but rather rejoice because your names 
 are written in heaven."
 
 FAITH IN HUMANITY. 
 
 " Thou turnest man to destruction ; and sayest, Return again, ye children of 
 men." PSALM xc. 3. 
 
 IF I were asked to sum up in the most comprehensive 
 manner two of the greatest lessons which Christ came to 
 teach us, I think that they might be expressed in these 
 words, the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. 
 There is a vast difference between Christ's way and the 
 world's way of treating the individual. Christ's way is 
 help, encouragement, cheering and inspiring kindliness: 
 the world's way is, too often, spite, envy, injustice, ingrati- 
 tude, depreciation. The duties which the imitation of Christ 
 entails upon us are to be kind and unselfish in our family 
 circles, to strive habitually to look on all men at their 
 best, to write all our own wrongs in water and in ashes, 
 and let them be to us as though they had never been. But 
 our estimate and our treatment of the individual are closely 
 connected with our estimate and treatment of the whole 
 race of man. I would earnestly endeavour to point out our 
 duty to the great world of humanity, to the communities 
 to which we belong, to the generation in which we live, 
 to the great family of mankind of which God has made us 
 members. 
 
 What have been, -what are, men's thoughts respecting 
 the race of man ? We know not for how many thousands 
 of years our race may have lived on this little planet, roll- 
 ing and spinning (as it has been described) like an angry 
 midge amid the immensities of space; but over a space
 
 ^O QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 of forty centuries at least, in the pages of many litera- 
 tures, in the accents of many tongues, we find the opinions 
 of men respecting man. They have been uttered as freely 
 as to-day by the bards and prophets of races long since 
 vanished, in languages long since dead. Man has ever 
 been a mystery to himself. "Who are you?" asked an 
 irascible person who had been delayed by running against 
 Schopenhauer in the street. "Ah!" replied the philoso- 
 pher: "if you would tell me that, if you would tell me who 
 lam, I would give you all I possess in the world." To-day, 
 however, we do not want to enter into transcendental mys- 
 teries. We only want to learn what men have thought of 
 man in his moral, his spiritual, his religious aspect. 
 
 We want no misereres on the sorrows of his experience: 
 we want no elegies on the briefness of his span. If we 
 did, we might go back to Job, " Man is born to sorrow as 
 the sparks fly upward ", or to Homer: 
 
 Like leaves on trees the race of man is found, 
 Now green in youth, now withering on the ground. 
 Another race the following spring supplies, 
 They fall successive, and successive rise : 
 So generations in their course decay, 
 So perish these when those have passed away ; 
 
 or we might come down to Addison, "Alas! man was 
 made in vain! how is he given away to misery and mor- 
 tality! tortured in life, and swallowed up in death!" or, 
 again, to Sir Walter Scott: "And this, I said, is the 
 progress and the issue of human wishes! Nursed by the 
 merest trifles, they are fed upon hope till they consume the 
 substance which they inflame, and man, his hopes, pas- 
 sions, and desires, sink into a worthless heap of ashes and 
 embers ! "
 
 FAITH IN HUMANITY. ^ 
 
 Nor, again, do we want any eulogy upon the splendour of 
 man's powers. If we did, we might go back to Sophocles, 
 "Wondrous are many things, and naught is more wondrous 
 than man "; or we might come down to Tennyson, 
 
 " Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new. 
 That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do." 
 
 But what we rather would seek to-day is men's opinion 
 of the moral worth, the moral character, the moral capabil- 
 ities of man. And here, strange to say, we are confronted 
 at once with a chaos of conflicting judgments. According 
 to some, man is a being so small, so intolerably contempt- 
 ible, so radically unjust, mean, and selfish, that he is not 
 worth working for: he is not only "a shadow less than 
 shade, a nothing less than nothing," but he is a creature 
 essentially allied to the animal, a blot on God's fair crea- 
 tion, a jar in the untroubled silence, a discord amid the 
 infinite harmony, "a flutter in the eternal calm." It is 
 remarkable how cynics in all ages have coincided in this 
 view. Think of Diogenes searching in daylight with a 
 lantern to find a man in the streets of Athens; think of 
 Phocion, when a passage in his speech was applauded, 
 turning round and asking, " Have I said anything wrong, 
 then?" think of Pyrrho the atheist, describing men as a 
 herd of swine, rioting on board a rudderless vessel, in a 
 storm; think of La Rochefoucauld reducing even man's 
 poor seeming virtues into selfish vices in thin disguise; 
 think of Voltaire describing the multitude as a compound 
 of bears and monkeys ; think of Schopenhauer condemning 
 this as the worst of all possible worlds, and arguing that 
 man is a radical mistake; think of the more serious voice 
 which says,
 
 72 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 " Let the heavens burst and drown with deluging rain 
 The feeble vassals of lust and anger and wine, 
 The little hearts that know not how to forgive." 
 
 "However we brazen it out, we men are a little breed." 
 But, then, turn to the other side, the grand and exalted 
 opinions which men have entertained of man. Think of 
 Shakspeare: "What a piece of work is man! How noble in 
 reason! how infinite in faculties! inform and manner, how 
 express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in 
 apprehension, how like a god!" Think of Henry Smith: 
 "All those discourses which have been written for the soul's 
 heraldry will not blazon it so well to us as itself will do. 
 When we turn our eyes upon the soul, it will soon tell us 
 its own royal pedigree and noble extraction, by those 
 sacred hieroglyphics which it bears upon itself." Recall 
 the saying of Novalis: "Man is the true Shechinah, or 
 glory light of God. We touch heaven when we lay our 
 hands on that high form." 
 
 And, strange to say, we find these contrasted judg- 
 ments not only in different writers, but even in the 
 same writer, expressing himself in different moods. 
 "What is man?" asks David in one place; and the 
 exulting answer is, "Thou madest him a little lower than 
 the angels; Thou crownest him with glory and honour. 
 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy 
 hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet." Yet, 
 in another place, the answer to the same question comes 
 like the wail of a sufferer, as though it were some voice of 
 shipwreck on a shoreless sea. "Man is like a thing of 
 naught; his time passeth away like a shadow." That was 
 three thousand years ago. But we find contrasts no less 
 striking in a writer of genius to-day. "Truly, it seems to
 
 FAITH IN HUMANITY. ~-> 
 
 me," says Mr. Ruskin, in one place, "as I gather in my 
 mind the evidences of insane religion, degraded art, merci- 
 less war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure, and vain or vile 
 hope in which the nations of the world have lived since 
 first they could bear record of themselves, it seems 
 to me, I say, as if the race itself were still half-serpent, 
 not yet extricated from its clay, a lacertine brood of bit- 
 terness, the glory of it emaciate with cruel hunger, and 
 blotted with venomous stain, and the track of it on the leaf 
 a glittering slime and in the sand a useless furrow." And 
 yet this same writer has said, " One thing we know, or may 
 know if we will, that the heart and conscience of man are 
 divine; that, in his perception of evil, in his recognition 
 of good, he is himself a God manifest in the flesh." And 
 in another place: "I trust in the nobleness of human 
 nature; in the majesty of its faculties, in the fulness of 
 its mercy; in the joy of its love." 
 
 Which, then, my friends, are we to follow of these 
 diverse judgments? By which are we to be guided in our 
 own dealings with our fellow-men? I answer with all my 
 heart, Take the nobler and better view of mankind, which 
 is the Christian view. Think that Christ loved man so 
 much that, even while we were yet sinners, He died for the 
 ungodly. Adopt this view not as a voluntary illusion, but 
 as a living faith. Good and evil without end may be said 
 of man ; and both be amply borne out by history and by 
 experience. That is due to the fact that man is a com- 
 posite being; that he partakes of two natures, the animal 
 and the spiritual; that he is swayed by two impulses, the 
 evil and the good; that he has in him two beings, the 
 Adam and the Christ ; that the angel has him by the hand 
 or the serpent by the heart ; that
 
 74 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 " Our little lives are kept in equipoise 
 
 By balance of two opposite desires, 
 The struggle of the impulse that enjoys 
 And the more noble impulse that aspires." 
 
 Hence we may say of man in the same breath, - 
 
 " How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, 
 How complicate, how wonderful, is man ! " 
 
 "Glory and scandal of the universe," says Pascal, "the 
 judge of angels, a worm of earth : if he exalts himself, I 
 smite him down; if he humbles himself, I lift him up." 
 But is there no practical reconciliation of these antithe- 
 ses? Yes, my brethren, there is. Not in the world, not 
 in nature, not in philosophy, but there is in religion, 
 there is in Christ. Look at man in himself, look at him 
 as he makes himself by yielding to and aiding the fraud 
 and malice of the devil, and hardly any language is too 
 bitter to describe his baseness and degradation; but look at 
 him in the light of revelation, look at him under the triple 
 overarching rainbow of faith and hope and love, look at 
 him ransomed and ennobled into a filial relationship with 
 God, and you will see at once where men have learned their 
 high faith in themselves, and who has taught them to 
 speak of man in such noble accents. They have learned 
 them from St. Paul: "And such were some of you; but 
 ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified, 
 in the name of the Lord Jesus, and in the Spirit of our 
 God." They learned them from St. Peter: "But ye are a 
 chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a 
 peculiar people, that ye may shew forth the excellencies of 
 Him who called you out of darkness into His marvellous 
 light." They learned them from St. John: "Beloved, now
 
 FAITH IN HUMANITY. ^ 
 
 are we children of God, and it doth not yet appear what we 
 shall be; but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall 
 be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." They learned 
 them most of all from Christ Himself: "I say not unto 
 you that I will pray the Father for you; for the Father him- 
 self loveth you, because ye have loved Me, and have be- 
 lieved that I came forth from God." 
 
 I would urge you then, my brethren, even amid life's 
 most bitter disillusionments, even when you experience the 
 worst proofs of the world's malice, falsity, and meanness, 
 still not to abandon your faith in man, or in God's des- 
 tinies for man, nor sweetness, nor charity, nor invincible 
 hopefulness. To lose faith in man is to lose faith in God 
 who made him. To lose faith in man's nature is to lose 
 faith in your own. Surely, we have seen, and not in 
 dreams, the glory of the Divine on human countenances. 
 All men are not liars. All friendship is not feigning. All 
 virtue is not prudential egotism. The man who has no- 
 thing but bitter condemnation for human nature is no longer 
 to be trusted: he is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. 
 To be in a condition in which no man pleases us is a fatal 
 sign of our own degradation. It is recorded of two men in 
 ancient history that they were firmly convinced that no 
 human being was pure; but who were those two men? 
 They were the very vilest men whom a decaying civilization 
 ever produced : one was the Emperor Nero, and the other 
 was the Emperor Heliogabalus. Men who fall into such 
 abysses of vile judgment have become the enemies and the 
 corrupters of their race. And in this fact you have one 
 of the mightiest inducements to personal effort after good- 
 ness. For how could men ever become so utterly vile as 
 to hold that all men are vile? Whence comes the infernal
 
 76 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 possibility of this debasing pessimism, this utter inca- 
 pacity to believe in human nature? It is never instantane- 
 ous, we are never worst at once; but neither again is it 
 abnormal : it is a fearful sequence of natural retributions. 
 Look at some splendid tree with its crown of foliage and 
 flower and fruit, a thousand girths of spring in its giant 
 bole, and a song on its every spray; look at another tree, 
 shrivelled and hateful, when the canker-worms have crawled 
 to its topmost boughs, and swing down from its every leaf; 
 look at yet another tree, blighted, dead, rotten, phos- 
 phorescent, covered with chill and clammy funguses, deathy 
 and like a corpse's cheek. Each of those is a tree; but 
 the one is a tree in the glory and majesty of its true being, 
 because it has followed the laws of strength and health 
 and vigor, feeding on the pure earth and the pure air and 
 the pure dew; while the others are trees whose very roots 
 have been as rottenness, and their blossoms have gone up 
 as dust. So it is with human beings. But, just as you 
 would not go into a dead forest to judge of the glory of a 
 tree, so neither ought you to judge of the true majesty and 
 beneficence of human nature from that nature when, having 
 rotted inwardly, it bourgeons perversely into all sorts of 
 poisonous growths. It makes all the difference in the 
 world whether you judge mankind from Thersites or from 
 Achilles; from a Nero or from a Marcus Aurelius; from 
 a Marat or from a St. Louis; from living men, like one or 
 two who could be named, or from the evil men and se- 
 ducers, who ever wax worse and worse, deceiving and being 
 deceived; from living women full of grace and meekness 
 or from those unmotherly mothers and unwomanly women 
 who nigh turn motherhood to shame and womanliness to 
 loathing. Oh, judge mankind from the best and highest!
 
 FAITH IN HUMANITY. 
 
 77 
 
 You want to know what a glow-worm is like. Which is 
 the true glow-worm, the black insect which you see crawl- 
 ing in the day or the lustrous emerald of the starlit bank? 
 And which is the true man, the man who is yielding to foul 
 distempers, and whose soul is dimmed with rage and envy 
 and lust, or the man who, be it for a moment, shakes him- 
 self free from the cerecloths of his own contaminating base- 
 ness to unfold the wings wrapped within him and rise re- 
 deemed from earth? 
 
 Look at man in his eternal aspect. Look not at the feet 
 of clay, but at the golden head crowned with spiritual 
 stars, and you will learn to say, as even the pagan moralist 
 said, "Man should be a sacred thing to man," and with 
 the Christian apostle, "Honour all men." 
 
 But remember at the same time that in each of us is the 
 potentiality of either development. The great and polished 
 Goethe said that there was no crime which he did not feel 
 that he might have committed. The martyr, Bradford, 
 when he saw the criminal being led to the gallows, said, 
 "There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford." It 
 lies in our own power whether we will be thus or thus. 
 If we have not already made up our minds to do the right 
 and eschew the wrong, it can only be because already we 
 are, in our secret heart, traitors to God and to our best 
 selves. Some men lose all faith, because they have deserved 
 to lose all faith in their own nature; and they who lose 
 that lose also their faith in man. 
 
 Let us, then, try to believe that there is a good 
 side in every man. Often in the most hardened criminals 
 the thought of home, the thought of a mother, the thought 
 of innocent childhood, a flower which recalls the memory 
 of a better past, a proof of confidence, an unlocked for
 
 prg QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 kindness, will open the fountains of the great deep of puri- 
 fying emotion and restore the true attributes of a man. 
 We sometimes read with amazement how some one, who 
 seemed to be past all remedy in abandoned vileness, sud- 
 denly, touched by the glory of heroism, will rise to a great 
 act of self-sacrifice. We read of some poor soldier, whom 
 his general has rated for backwardness, who, bidden to 
 charge, one against a thousand, 
 
 " Hurls his soiled life against the pikes and dies." 
 
 Look at the battle of Waterloo, look at the trenches of 
 Sebastopol, look at the charge at Balaklava, look at the 
 burning of the "Goliath," look at the wreck of the "Birken- 
 head," to see how the commonest and coarsest of men can 
 recognize the invincible claim and sovereignty of duty, 
 even at the cost of life. The world is not wholly bad. 
 Amid its sin, amid its want, amid its misery, there move 
 everywhere the white-winged messengers of mercy. If you 
 will believe in the natural goodness of men and throw 
 yourself upon it; if you will appeal always to that spirit- 
 ual faculty which a man may waste and desecrate, but never 
 quite destroy, you will find that man's nature has never 
 lost all touch of its original brightness, nor seems less 
 than archangel ruined. That nature may often look like 
 the dull waste of the Alpine mountain side, darkened only 
 by the shadows of its black and stubborn pines; but let the 
 dawn blush in the vernal sky, and the south wind breathe, 
 and the sun fire the high tops of those mountain pines, and 
 the chilled snow will melt and vanish under their soft and 
 golden touches, till its accumulated mass at last rushes 
 down in avalanche, and where yesterday was snow to-day 
 shall be green grass and purple flower.
 
 FAITH IN HUMANITY. ^n 
 
 And, as another way to help us in retaining our 
 faith in human nature, let us turn away from the thought 
 of bad men altogether to that galaxy of heaven wherein 
 shine the clustered constellations of saintly lives. The 
 saints, in the long ages, have not been few. And to these 
 have been due the progress, to these the ennoblement, to 
 these the preservation of the world. Among all the bad 
 passions, among all the disordered lives of men, amid all 
 their meanness, and littleness, and emptiness, and egotism, 
 it is as water in the desert to come, in life, and more often 
 among the records of the dead, on natures such as these. 
 Look on these, think of these : do not think of the heartless 
 and aimless crowds that vegetate without living, but read the 
 lives and actions of these few children of the light. When 
 you would escape a sense of suffocation in the secular or 
 ecclesiastical atmosphere around you; when, after the cramp 
 and torpedo-touch of the world, numbing every generous 
 impulse, chilling to death every ardent aspiration, you 
 would cause your spirits once more to dilate as it were, and 
 " conspire with the morning wind, " turn from the dreary 
 and abhorrent proofs of human wickedness; turn from the 
 spectacle of good men made the mock of fools, disliked by 
 the envious, abandoned by the weak ; turn to the spectacle of 
 what men have been and may be; turn to these our nobler 
 brothers, but one in blood, who have been better and lived 
 nearer to God than we, not hollow, grasping, ungenerous, 
 but sincerely and eminently good. 
 
 But above all, as the best of all rules, think con- 
 stantly of Christ, and fix your eyes on Him. "Of what 
 account, after all, are the saints compared to Christ? They 
 are," said Luther, "no more than sparkling dewdrops of 
 the night-dew upon the head of the bridegroom, scattered
 
 gO QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 among his hair." The only measure of a perfect man is 
 the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. Con- 
 sider what has been the history of many minds respecting 
 their faith in their fellow-men. Many, in their childhood 
 and early youth, have believed in the beauty, the sacred- 
 ness, the tenderness, of humanity. They have seen it in 
 the transfiguring light of a mother's love. Faith in all 
 high things has beaten in their blood. The old English 
 poet says of the pet white fawn which died: 
 
 " Had it lived long, it would have been 
 Lilies without, roses within." 
 
 The same exquisite words might be applied at first to 
 many a delicate human soul. Had it continued as it was 
 in childhood, it would have "glowed like the roses of morn- 
 ing with enthusiasm, and been white as the lilies in its 
 purity." No human soul can retain this ideal beauty and 
 freshness; but, if a man will still keep firm hold on Christ, 
 though he may never recover the gracious illusions of child- 
 hood, he may still look on his fellow-men as redeemed and 
 glorified in the light of the Lord he loves. 
 
 And, oh! lastly, the most sure way to justify our 
 faith and hope in human nature is to justify it in ourselves. 
 Our nature is human nature. If we feel how much our 
 own nature is capable of all nobleness and self-sacrifice; if 
 we feel that we cannot breathe the stifling air of sin and 
 shame, then we shall soon learn to feel that God has cre- 
 ated man for holiness, as the trees of the forest for light. 
 There could be no such compound misery, no such disease 
 and deformity physical, moral, and intellectual as 
 exists around us, without violation on violation of eternal 
 laws. Ah! but let not us become "stockholders in this
 
 FAITH IN HUMANITY. 3 X 
 
 sin," and so add to the necessary expiation! Has not your 
 contempt for human nature, your despair of human nature, 
 a terrible secret ally in your own heart? Turn out the idols 
 thence, cleanse the precincts, expel the creeping things, in- 
 troduce the light of heaven into its darkest corners, make 
 it a temple of the living God, and then you will see that 
 the sanctuary in your own heart can be built no less in 
 every other. If you would raise others, live yourself as on 
 a mountain, live yourself as on a promontory. Say "What- 
 ever happens, I must be good, " even as though the emerald 
 or the purple should say, " Whatever happens, I must be 
 emerald and keep my colour." 
 
 If we believe in good, not in evil, if we look to the good 
 men and not to bad, if we make our own moral being our 
 prime care, we, too, can make one man a Christian, and all 
 that a man and all that a Christian ought to be, one man; 
 and that is ourselves. We can do this: we can do all 
 things, through Christ who strengtheneth us. And when 
 we have attained to this pious and just reverence for our 
 own souls, we shall learn no less to honour all men, because 
 the Lord Christ despaired neither of man, nor of human- 
 ity; but for all no less than for ourselves Christ died.
 
 TRIALS OF THE POOR. 
 
 "Blessed is he that considereth the poor and the needy." PSALM xli. i. 
 
 THERE never has been an age, since the world was, in 
 which there has not been a contrast between the lots of the 
 poor and the rich. But in southern and eastern lands, 
 where life is easily maintained, poverty is never so press- 
 ing as in lands like ours. The life of England is unfortu- 
 nately becoming a city life; and it is in cities above all, 
 in great cities that the contrast becomes most glaring, 
 and the distress at times so ghastly as to madden the mul- 
 titude with a sense, however blind, of intolerable wrong. 
 And, when this is the case, it has often been the sign of 
 social decay, the omen of impending ruin. What was one 
 cause of the downfall of ancient Rome ? " Latifundia," says 
 Pliny, "perdidere Italiam." What was the cause of the 
 French Revolution? The hard reality of inexpressible mis- 
 ery "brushed by the rustling masquerade" of careless lux- 
 ury. One day, as Louis XV. was hunting in the wood of 
 Senart, away from his gorgeous and guilty Palace of Ver- 
 sailles, he met a ragged peasant with a coffin. "What did 
 the man die of?" asked the king. "Of hunger," answered 
 the serf; and the king gave his steed the spur. When 
 Foulon was asked how the overtaxed people were to live, 
 he brutally answered, "Let them eat grass." Afterwards 
 the mob, maddened into wild beasts, caught him in the 
 streets of Paris, and hung him, and stuck his head on a 
 pike, the mouth filled with grass, "amid sounds as of 
 Tophet from a grass-eating people."
 
 TRIALS OF THE POOR. 83 
 
 W 7 hat is history but a reflection of the experiences of 
 the past for the warning of the future? In these days 
 it is the duty not only of every Christian, but of every 
 patriot, of every lover of his fellow-men, to think often and 
 seriously of his duties to the poor. Whether distress is 
 more or less universal than in past days is a question 
 which we need not consider. Suffice it for our duty and 
 our sympathy that distress there is; and for Christians the 
 sight of the suffering is an appeal from Christ himself. 
 
 In a society so complicated as ours the change of a 
 fashion, the shifting of a tax, the accident of a discovery, 
 the alteration of a line of commerce, may affect the liveli- 
 hood of thousands. The numbers of the unemployed may 
 be exaggerated, and the fact of being unemployed may, in 
 many cases, result from untrustworthiness and miscon- 
 duct. Still there are in this city thousands who are out of 
 work, and I will quote to you from the pamphlet of a 
 Socialist what this means. It means "to gradually sell or 
 pawn the few sticks of furniture which convert the single 
 room into a home; to blister the feet in walking in search 
 of work, while hope deferred makes the heart sick and 
 want of nourishment enfeebles the frame; to see your wife 
 sinking for lack of food, and send your children to school 
 without breakfast ; to know that, as you grow each day more 
 gaunt in face, more shabby in appearance, more emaciated 
 in physique, there is less and less chance of obtaining 
 employment; to return, faint and footsore, after a long 
 day's tramp, and hear those you love best on earth crying 
 for food; to ponder, in cold and hunger, whether the theft 
 which would save your family from starvation is a crime 
 or a duty; to be restrained from suicide only by the cer- 
 tainty that your death must drive your helpless daughters
 
 84 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 to swell the ghastly army of degraded womanhood; to feel 
 drawing ever nearer the day when you will be driven alone 
 into the living tomb of the workhouse; to feel through all 
 this that you have done nothing to deserve it." That is 
 what it means to be out of work, and the picture is not 
 exaggerated. I claim your attention, I claim the atten- 
 tion of the nation to it. And the question at once arises, 
 If there be this deep distress, how is it to be remedied? 
 
 Let us see how nations and classes sometimes deal 
 with it. 
 
 Sometimes and this is the very worst and basest 
 way of all they treat it with neglect and indifference, 
 shut their eyes hard to it, ignore it altogether. 
 
 This most fatal course is possible, but not for long. It 
 is possible, for a time, for men to make colossal fortunes 
 by grinding the faces of the poor; to surround themselves 
 with every form of luxury; to make the calendar of the year 
 one round of careless, heartless, selfish dissipation; to be 
 indifferent to the fermenting mass of unhappy human 
 beings around them; to encourage the traffickers in drink, 
 and poison, and lust, and death, and spurious excitement, 
 until the society beneath them is as "an accumulation of 
 Dead Sea wreckage." So it was in the France of 1750, 
 the population growing daily more and more wretched, 
 more and more vicious, more and more ferociously sullen, 
 more and more madly discontented, till the low moan and 
 mutter of miserable humanity burst forth into the roar of 
 the flood and the typhoon. Of all courses which a nation, 
 and its rich, and its rulers can take, the indifference to 
 social problems, the neglect of social problems, the mere 
 laissez-faire as to social problems, is the most insensate 
 and the most base.
 
 TRIALS OF THE POOR. 85 
 
 Another way of dealing with distress is the sudden 
 adoption of spasmodic, ill-considered, panic-stricken reme- 
 dies, which only intensify the virulence of the disease. It 
 is like the policy of Ethelred the Unready in buying off 
 the incursions of the Danes. 
 
 One of the worst and commonest of remedies, a remedy 
 altogether temporary and contemptible, is that of indis-' 
 criminate dole-giving. It is the perpetual feeding of a 
 foul disease. It neglects the sufferers to support the 
 rogues. The person who, without inquiry, gives his 
 money to the hypocritic whine and lying tale of profes- 
 sional beggars, is flinging it away in the encouragement of 
 lazy imposture. Such mercy is not mercy: it is pure self- 
 ishness. It is twice cursed: it curses him who gives and 
 him who takes. There are classes of the community whom 
 it is a simple wrong to the community, and to themselves, 
 to encourage in their worth lessness. The roughs, the crimi- 
 nals, the professional pickpockets and burglars, who make 
 life a terror to myriads of unprotected households; the 
 blear, blaspheming groups who loaf about the thievish 
 corners of the streets, blighted by depravity and gin; the 
 wretches who haunt the parks to levy blackmail by trump- 
 ing up lying charges against the innocent; the brutal 
 bullies who assault helpless girls and snatch purses from 
 helpless women, these are the obscene birds of prey to 
 whom every true society should mete out a pitiless justice; 
 and the sturdy vagabonds, the begging letter-writers, and 
 the rogues who go about begging, with sham deformities and 
 borrowed children, are hardly less noxious and depraved. 
 When you give to these, you are not giving indiscriminate 
 charity, but doing indiscriminate mischief. To consider 
 the poor is a high and blessed thing: to fling chance doles.
 
 36 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 which you do not miss, to the drunken and the worthless, 
 is a mere baseness and folly. Funds administered at hap- 
 hazard may only do the same harm on a larger scale'. The 
 East End of London, according to some who know it best, 
 has been irretrievably demoralized by the careless scatter- 
 ing of ill-considered doles. It is only when we give wisely 
 and generously that God will approve our gifts; and the 
 wise giving of money becomes a most stringent duty in 
 exact proportion as we take no personal part in those forms 
 of kindness which are more blest. 
 
 Again, distress is not to be remedied by hasty 
 interferences with well-understood economic laws, inter- 
 ferences, perhaps, rashly conceded on the one side because 
 they are menacingly demanded on the other. By all means, 
 let everything be done which the legislature can do; but 
 it ought not to do what only tends to pauperize the work- 
 ing classes on the one hand, while, on the other, it lays 
 heavier burdens on others whose sufferings are more silent, 
 but not less real. I am, for instance, wholly opposed to 
 what is called free education. The pence paid by the poor 
 are in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred easily paid. Is 
 it much that a man who has incurred the responsibility of a 
 family should pay for the week's education of his own child 
 as much as the cost of one pint of ale? Is it just that two 
 millions should be added to the crushing burden of our 
 taxes, to save men from paying the merest fraction of what 
 they weekly spend on tobacco and beer? Where the in- 
 ability is real, there let the pence be freely excused; but, 
 where the inability merely means sloth and drink, let them 
 be required. Nor, again, do I think that all the children 
 should be fed at the public expense. Let this be done for 
 all who need it, as it is done in many of our parishes by
 
 TRIALS OF THE POOR. 37 
 
 private generosity; but, if the State does it, it will only 
 come back on the poor in rates and rent. Nor could the 
 State do a deadlier disservice than to teach parents that 
 they are not responsible for the support of the children 
 that they have brought into the world. 
 
 Nor, again, do I think that works not otherwise neces- 
 sary ought always to be opened directly they are de- 
 manded. It cannot be done wholesale except as a very 
 temporary remedy, nor without increasing the influx of 
 crowds into cities already overcrowded, nor without ulti- 
 mately deepening the evils it is meant to cure. All that is 
 necessary, and just, and wise, and kind in these remedies 
 in free education, in free dinners, in supplying work 
 can be done, ought to be done, and is being done in detail 
 in each parish by those who are working, not speechifying. 
 Each parish of the Church of England, when clergy and 
 laity alike do their duty, is an agency for dealing with 
 distress, whether continuous or exceptional, which has alike 
 the power and the will to do merciful, discriminating, per- 
 manent, and useful work. 
 
 Least of all can distress be remedied by wild dreams 
 of revolution or communism, the destruction of capital, the 
 robbing of property, the disturbing the peace of cities, or 
 anything of the kind. These things merely mean pil- 
 lage, anarchy, bloodshed, national madness, unfathomed 
 misery, irretrievable ruin, which would not fall mainly on 
 the rich, but on England as a nation, on its whole great 
 middle classes, and most of all, and most irretrievably, 
 upon the poor. To set class against class; to teach the 
 ignorant, the criminal, and the lazy to turn hungry eyes of 
 hatred on property; to teach them the falsehood that prop- 
 erty is plundered from them, or that they would be any-
 
 38 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 thing but infinitely the worse by the vain attempt to seize 
 it, is the most speedy and the most certain way of turn- 
 ing partial distress into universal catastrophe, and present 
 discomfort into final ruin. The communists talk of the 
 "contemptuous" charity of the rich. I venture to say that 
 the charity of those rich who are charitable is as much the 
 reverse of contemptuous as it possibly can be. What is 
 needed is to abolish, not to exacerbate, the existence of 
 needless and unchristian bitterness between those who 
 have been called "the masses " and "the classes." What 
 we desire to promote is the feeling that the interests of oft- 
 contrasted classes are not antagonistic, but identical; that 
 the rich and the poor are alike brethren in the great family 
 of God; that each may be equally happy in their own lot; 
 that they cannot do without each other ; and that by every 
 law, human and divine, they are bound to work with and to 
 help each other. 
 
 But I turn from the negative to the positive side. If 
 nothing but evil can come from the remedies or no reme- 
 dies on which I have touched, from neglectful indiffer- 
 ence, from indiscriminate almsgiving, from panic-stricken 
 legislation, from socialistic revolution, are we to sit still 
 and do nothing? God forbid! There is a world of room 
 for Christian effort; there is ample work to be done by 
 every human being who has a brain to think, a heart to 
 pity, an arm to aid. 
 
 So far as the Socialists are moved by a deep compassion 
 for human misery; so far as their action may serve to 
 startle a selfish apathy; so far as they succeed in opening 
 the eyes of the nation to a state of things which it will 
 tax all the wisdom of the wise and all the mercy of the 
 kind to remedy, so far they may well have the sympathy
 
 TRIALS OF THE POOR. 
 
 8 9 
 
 of all, even when we are compelled to consider many 
 of their words inflammatory, and some of their methods 
 as a certain cause of deeper misery and worse compli- 
 cations. 
 
 But there is one remedy which goes to the very heart 
 of the matter; and, if the Socialist leaders wish to bene- 
 fit not to madden, to uplift and not basely to flatter, 
 it is their special duty to make their genuine adherents 
 see that, if distress is to be relieved and pauperism 
 abolished, the most prolific and permanent causes of 
 distress and pauperism must be removed. He is a better 
 patriot and a truer philanthropist who cuts off the causes 
 than he who potters with the effects ; he who prevents the 
 disease than he who alleviates the symptoms. Now, it is 
 a very sad fact, which we must face, that, besides the dis- 
 tress which is innocent and undeserved, and which needs 
 all our sympathy and all our effort, there is a great deal of 
 distress which is absolutely self-caused, which is the nec- 
 essary consequence of laziness and vice. It is a duty to 
 say this. If it be a duty which requires courage to speak 
 of the sins and vices of the rich, it is no less necessary, 
 and requires more courage, in days when the working 
 classes are practically our masters, to point out, not 
 harshly, not unsympathetically, yet with perfect faithful- 
 ness, the sins and vices of the poor. Now, among the 
 poor there are three wide-spread and prolific causes of 
 distress, thriftlessness, disgracefully early marriages, 
 and, above all, drink. 
 
 First there is thriftlessness. The poor clergyman, 
 the poor clerk, the poor tradesman, is, as a rule, thrifty. 
 He denies himself; he lives within his narrow income; 
 he lays by some of his scanty earnings. In the sum-
 
 go QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 mer he does not forget the winter, nor in sunshine the 
 rainy days. It is not so with multitudes of the poor. 
 When in good wages, many of them waste what would 
 have kept up their self-respect when work is slack. They 
 have not realized that extravagance and luxury are quite 
 as possible and quite as culpable in the poor as in the 
 rich. 
 
 A second cause of distress is the prevalence of dis- 
 gracefully early marriages. In the upper and middle 
 classes it is the exception, and is regarded as discreditable, 
 if a young man thinks of marrying much before the age of 
 twenty-nine or thirty, or unless he has sufficient means 
 to keep a wife and family. But, unhappily, in the poor- 
 est classes marriages between mere boys and girls of eigh- 
 teen are disgracefully prevalent, and they marry often 
 when they have no more in hand than to pay a month's 
 rent for some filthy and squalid room. Hence, as statistics 
 painfully prove, the rate of increase of the population is 
 very much more rapid in squalid centres than in the 
 wealthier suburbs; and the result is an offspring stunted, 
 rickety, diseased, unhappy children of the gutter and the 
 slum, who, on the border lands of destitution, are, in the 
 terrible language of South, not so much born into the 
 world as damned into the world. 
 
 Beyond all question, and beyond all remedy, pauperism 
 will be multiplied and misery deepened till the poor learn, 
 as well as the rich, that marriage is not to be enterprised 
 nor taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, wantonly, but 
 discreetly, advisedly, reverently, soberly, and in the fear 
 of God. 
 
 But the third and master curse, the Aaron's rod 
 among the serpent curses of distress, is drink. A phi Ian-
 
 TRIALS OF THE POOR. gj 
 
 thropist bore witness that last year he relieved 2,900 cases 
 of distress, and had ascertained that of those 2,850 were 
 directly due to drink. A statistician, minimizing rather 
 than exaggerating, found that the working classes spend 
 annually ^36,000,000 in drink; and of this very many 
 millions are not merely spent in drink, but wasted in drink. 
 A sum sufficient to redeem the whole kingdom from pau- 
 perism is squandered in excess. I do not wonder at it so 
 long as we are, by law, sowing our streets broadcast with 
 gins and traps of glaring temptation, and while legislators 
 listen with* cynical indifference to the long-continued ap- 
 peals of those who know that this is the one master fiend 
 of national degradation. While we leave this curse un- 
 checked, let us leave the beasts of prey upon our shield, 
 but tear the lilies out. Nor can any one effectually help 
 the working classes till in these respects they make a 
 strenuous effort to help themselves. Where there is sloth, 
 incontinence, bad work, recklessness, there is no power 
 on earth which can prevent distress. The working classes 
 loudly complain that our ships are being filled with foreign 
 sailors and our trades crowded with foreign competitors; 
 and so it will be if foreign sailors are the less drunken and 
 the more trustworthy, and if foreign workmen be the more 
 industrious and the less incompetent. That which con- 
 trols, for men's good, the laws of life, is not the shout of 
 the noisiest, the wish of the idlest, the decree of the 
 vilest, but the hand of the diligent and the knowledge of 
 the wise. The man who helps to put down the curse of 
 drink will not earn millions by it, nor will he be made a 
 peer for it. He will be furiously attacked by the selfishness 
 of monopolists, and by all who have a vested interest in 
 the causes of human ruin; but he will have done more good
 
 Q 2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 by diminishing misery than by building cathedrals, by pre- 
 venting sickness than by endowing hospitals, by promoting 
 virtue than by rearing prisons. 
 
 It is, then, of supreme importance to encourage thrift, 
 to discourage reckless marriage, to put down the curse of 
 drink. Further, we can help all wise institutions. Thank 
 God, there are many of them. Every effort to make men 
 good, steady, diligent workmen; every effort to raise the 
 swarming myriads of our youth into health and purity, into 
 self-reliance and self-respect; every effort to cleanse our 
 nightly thoroughfares from their shameless impurity; every 
 help given to well-conducted hospitals; every help cheer- 
 fully and self-denyingly extended to all who are thor- 
 oughly willing to help themselves, is a remedy in the 
 power of each of us; and it is a remedy which blesses 
 and is blest. 
 
 Every one of us belongs to some parish ; and I am more 
 and more convinced that each faithful parish, if properly 
 assisted, can best cope with the distress in its own limits. 
 Every well-worked parish abounds in thoughtfully planned 
 agencies to raise and comfort the suffering poor. The clergy 
 often provide that in some, at least, of their densely crowded 
 streets, not one person shall suffer cruel and intolerable 
 hardships unless those hardships be self-induced by drink 
 and crime. The deserving poor are helped with clothes, 
 with coal, with work, and that with no grudging hand, 
 wherever the innocent are suffering need. If each of us 
 will do our individual duty in the parish wherein our lot is 
 cast, we shall be doing in the aggregate an immeasurable 
 amount of good. 
 
 There, then, are three ways in which you all can help, 
 by fighting against the causes of distress, by assisting
 
 TRIALS OF THE POOR. 03 
 
 every good and careful institution of relief, by generously 
 and strenuously doing your individual duty. 
 
 It is ridiculous, and it is faithless, to take pessimistic 
 views and to despair of the whole state of society. If only 
 every man and woman among us recognized the plain truth 
 that we are the Church; that all these duties are not the 
 duties of the clergy, but our duties; that we can no longer 
 shift on to other shoulders the sacred responsibilities which 
 God, and no other, lays upon ourselves; if, in other 
 words, Christians could only be aroused to be Christians, 
 to feel as Christians, to live as Christians, to labor as 
 Christians, we should soon sweep away the subterranean 
 horrors of 
 
 " This deep, dark underworld of woe 
 That underlies life's shining surfaces, 
 Dim, populous pain and multitudinous toil, 
 Unheeded of the heedless." 
 
 There is wealth enough to relieve, ten times over, all 
 real distress, and not feel it. Oh, terribly heavy in these 
 days are the responsibilities of the wealthy! Some few 
 of them are liberal. Many of them are the reverse of lib- 
 eral; and to all such St. James says: "Go to, now, ye rich 
 men, weep and howl for the miseries that shall come upon 
 you. Your riches are rotted, and your garments moth- 
 eaten." Such was the apostle's terrible denunciation of 
 selfish ease and arrogant rapacity. It is valid forever 
 against the tarnish and corruption of riches greedily 
 amassed, ungenerously withheld. Wealth may be honora- 
 ble, and may be used blessedly when men regard them- 
 selves as being, what indeed they are, the stewards of it, 
 not the owners; when they know how to acquire without 
 avarice, and to communicate without grudging. But the
 
 g4 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 wealth of the callous, the selfish, the greedy, the luxurious, 
 the selfish, their gold and silver is rusted, and its rust 
 shall be a witness against them, and shall eat their flesh 
 as it were fire! God has said, the voice of the Saviour 
 Himself, has said to you, "Whosoever hath this world's 
 good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his 
 bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love 
 of God in him?"
 
 DUTY OF GIVING. 
 
 "And they came, every one whose heart stirred him up, and every one whom 
 his spirit made willing, and brought the Lord's offering." Ex. xxxv. 21. 
 
 THE duty of almsgiving, of self-sacrificing generosity, 
 of systematic and proportional charity, of the responsi- 
 bility for and the right stewardship of what God has 
 given us. It is a subject of grave importance, of seri- 
 ous difficulty, of great distastefulness to most people. For 
 that very reason it is one which we ought to face, and 
 to face seriously as in the sight of God, since it is un- 
 doubtedly one of the duties, and one of the too much 
 neglected duties, of life. I am speaking to the poor as 
 well as to the rich, and I beg my poorer readers to bear in 
 mind that the spirit and principle of every word that I say 
 apply quite as strongly to them as to their wealthier 
 brethren. In point of fact, the highest eulogy which our 
 blessed Lord pronounced on any act of charity was given 
 to that poor widow who did but cast in two mites, which 
 make one farthing. It was, He said, a greater gift than 
 that of the rich donors; for it was all that she had. Her 
 gift left her no margin: their gifts still leave them a 
 boundless superfluity. To all, then, rich and poor alike*
 
 96 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 the rule is "to do good, and to communicate, forget not " ; to 
 all the exhortation, " Be merciful after thy power : if thou 
 hast much, give plenteously; if thou hast little, give gladly 
 of that little " ; to all the assurance, " He that giveth to 
 the poor lendeth unto the Lord, and, look, that which he 
 layeth out He will pay him again " ; to all the promise, " He 
 that soweth plentifully shall reap plentifully"; to all the 
 warning, "There is that withholdeth more than is meet, 
 but it tendeth only to poverty." We profess to reverence 
 the Bible as our rule of life, but the Bible is full from end 
 to end of the duty of giving back to God of that which is 
 His, though for a brief space He has lent it to us. We 
 profess to take Christ as our example; but Christ not only 
 insisted again and again on this duty, but it lay at the very 
 centre of His whole earthly sacrifice. The poor man 
 Christ Jesus gave warning after warning to the rich, and 
 condemns the selfishness of poverty as distinctly as the 
 luxury of wealth. 
 
 That there is a special need just now for every true 
 Christian, and indeed for every patriotic citizen, to con- 
 sider this subject, is apparent from the attention which it 
 excites. When it has become a common topic in maga- 
 zines, it may well demand the consideration of the pulpit; 
 and, when the duty of less greed and larger generosity is 
 insisted on by agnostics and infidels, it is surely time for 
 it to be considered by Christians. 
 
 May I, then, ask every one of us to take seriously to 
 heart the duty of facing this question for himself, of 
 asking himself, not perfunctorily or self-deceivingly, but 
 with simplicity and sincerity, Am I, on any reasonable es- 
 timate, am I, even with every allowance for family cares 
 and duties, really free from that love of money which is a
 
 DUTY OF GIVING.. gy 
 
 root of all kinds of evil? Am I too selfishly squandering 
 on personal comforts, or am I too eagerly hoarding for 
 family ends? Am I in God's sight, who sees truly, among 
 the mean, the greedy, the niggardly, like churlish Nabal, 
 who refused to recognize even just claims; like luxurious 
 Dives, too self-absorbed even to notice the misery which 
 lay unpitied at his gate? Or am I, by God's grace, of the 
 nobler few who are not unconscious of the neighborhood of 
 misery, not swathed and surfeited in gross indulgence of 
 self? Am I one of the liberal souls who devise liberal 
 things, one of those who shall experience the beatitude of 
 him that considereth the poor, of those who have a bountiful 
 eye, of those who remember the words of the Lord Jesus, 
 "It is more blessed to give than to receive"? When 
 we look at the conditions of society, at cheating conven- 
 tionalities of profession; at wealth gotten by fraud ; at some 
 into whose bursting coffers runs the gold which is wet with 
 the tears of women and red with the blood of men ; at gains 
 swollen by tempting the perverted passions and diseased 
 appetite of mankind; at gains swollen by pandering to the 
 spurious excitement of betting and gambling; at low gin- 
 shops where the poor woman spends the last penny on that 
 which shall poison the blood of her children, who die like 
 flies; at false weights, at scamped work, at forged trade- 
 marks, at adulterated goods, at scant hires, at starvation 
 wages, at sweaters' dens, we have nothing to say to crimi- 
 nals who live by such pandering to the worst instincts of 
 their own nature, whether they be gorgeous criminals who 
 loll in carriages or squalid criminals who booze in beer- 
 shops, except that, by God's eternal law, wealth gotten 
 by wickedness shall perish. But, if these be the crimes 
 of the comparatively few, are not vast multitudes of us 
 
 7
 
 98 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 guilty of possessing means stricken with sterility and stag- 
 nation, of earnings needless, disproportionate, untithed, 
 unutilized for good, laid up in secret, prolific of deteri- 
 oration to ourselves, barren of all blessing to others, 
 earnings which contribute nothing, or nothing adequate, 
 nothing in God's estimate, to the honor of God and to 
 the service of mankind? 
 
 My friends, the special gravity of such questions at 
 the present moment lies in the consideration (let me ask 
 your solemn attention to it, as patriots, as citizens, as 
 Christians, even as men) of England's poverty and of 
 England's wealth. 
 
 Of England's poverty I shall say but very little now. 
 Suffice it that the paupers in receipt of parish relief repre- 
 sent but a fraction of our national poverty, and neither the 
 sorest nor the most pitiable part of it; yet, in the first 
 week of January, 1891, there were 761,312 paupers, va- 
 grants, and pauper lunatics in England. Suffice it that the 
 committee of the London School Board report no, 759 chil- 
 dren whose fees are remitted because of poverty, and 63,888 
 children habitually attending school in want of food. Suf- 
 fice it that poverty honest poverty, or poverty dirty, 
 drunken and vicious lies at our doors, confronts us every 
 day in our daily walks. We see daily the ragged, squalid, 
 blighted, emaciated groups of its drink-ruined victims. The 
 social wreckage is always and everywhere before our eyes, 
 in all its sin and agony and shame. Blind must be the 
 eyes and callous the hearts which do not see and will not 
 grieve for it. 
 
 But what shall I say of England's wealth? What I 
 say shall be based on the calculations, and sometimes stated 
 in the very words, of men who have spoken on the subject
 
 DUTY OF GIVING. ^ 
 
 with authority. In 1886, according to Mr. Giffen, the total 
 yearly income of the United Kingdom had reached the 
 enormous amount of ^1,207,000,000 sterling. The amount 
 assessed for income tax has much more than doubled in 
 thirty years. In forty-nine years it has been nearly 
 trebled. Will you try to take in these facts, stated by 
 Mr. Gladstone? In 1862 the income of the nation not 
 derivable from land was ^99,000,000. In 1889 it was 
 ^336,000,000, showing an increment of ^154,000,000, or 
 85 per cent. It is estimated that at the present time the 
 entire capital of the country amounts to the altogether stu- 
 pendous and appalling sum of ; 12, 000,000,000, and this 
 increase by leaps and bounds is mainly in "irresponsible 
 wealth," as it has been called, "little watched and checked 
 by opinion, little brought into immediate contact with 
 duty." Irresponsible wealth! My friends, do not be de- 
 ceived: there is no such thing. The owner of wealth is 
 responsible absolutely and always. He may bury his 
 talent in the earth, or in the consols, but he will have to 
 give an account to the uttermost farthing. How shall we 
 give an account of this awful stewardship? The very word 
 "steward " is absolutely meaningless, if it does not mean that 
 we have to render an account. To whom? Ask yourselves 
 whether the thought that we are accountable to God, who 
 cannot be deceived, with whom excuses become speechless, 
 to whom no shams can be palmed off, ought not, if indeed 
 we have grace to be faithful, to be "a prevalent motive of 
 almost incalculable power, entering into the secrets and 
 recesses of our lives." 
 
 What ought we to give? You know that Jacob, in his 
 vow to God, said, "Of all that Thou givest me, I will surely 
 give back the tenth unto Thee." That was the rule of
 
 IOO QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Moses in the Jewish legislation. It is still kept by all 
 faithful Jews, and kept so strictly that they do not regard 
 this tenth as belonging to themselves at all. Their chari- 
 ties begin where the tenth ends. Now, the gospel lays 
 down no hard-and-fast rule. It only bids each man give "as 
 God hath prospered him," "according as he is disposed in 
 his heart," cheerfully, with a willing mind. But is Chris- 
 tianity meant to make us more free at the cost of making 
 us more selfish? If the lower law has been annulled, it has 
 been so only by "a more searching, constraining, peremptory 
 law, a law which has its roots in nature, a law older than 
 the Decalogue," the law of Christian charity and Christian 
 generosity. And yet do we give as much as the ancient 
 Jews? or is most of the wealth of England coagulated in 
 the slimy and stagnant pools of selfishness, from which no 
 rill dribbles to fertilize the barren and miserable plains? 
 Nothing is more certain than that as a nation which means 
 that in countless individual cases we do not give ade- 
 quately, and that the rich, and the very rich who would 
 feel it least, give, as a rule, least adequately. "The clutch 
 and gripe of most possessors over their money," says Mr. 
 Gladstone, "is scarcely ever relaxed. And this gross 
 defect of duty which prevails is not due to the odious vice 
 of conscious and hardened avarice, but to ignorance, care- 
 lessness, and the love of indulgence. It is due to the 
 existence in all classes, but perhaps most in the wealthiest, 
 of those of all men the most miserable who, however 
 imperative their obligations, however vast their wealth, 
 have comprehended from youth upwards no idea but that of 
 enjoyment, and all whose incomes are swallowed up with- 
 out compunction in the insatiable maw of their desires." 
 Why, if English Christians dreamed of giving anything
 
 DUTY OF GIVING. 
 
 101 
 
 like a tenth part of their incomes to the service of God and 
 their neighbour, how much, do you think, would annually go 
 to purposes of charity? No less than ^130,000,000 a year, 
 and would still leave ^70,000,000 at the close of the year 
 in the prospering stores of the wealth-making classes. 
 The sad fact is that the wealth of this richest country in 
 the world "has increased with a profuseness and rapidity 
 unequalled in history; and, as it has increased, the propor- 
 tion given to the service of God and our neighbour has 
 become less and less. We are dazzled by ;i,ooo given 
 to a hospital or a cathedral. We forget that the vast, glori- 
 ous cathedrals themselves, which so incomparably surpass 
 the powers of any attempted munificence of ours worthily 
 to maintain, were built by a population not one-fifteenth so 
 numerous and not one-hundredth part so wealthy as ours." 
 We forget that the wealthy men who give worthily of their 
 dangerous accumulations, are not one in a hundred. We 
 forget that the vaunted charities of England, when esti- 
 mated by the certain wealth of England, are not the glory 
 of our national generosity, but the most damning proof of 
 the national meanness and national indifference. Why, 
 if we had the courage to break the accursed tyranny of 
 drink, and if men gave but a tithe of the millions which 
 are but the annual increase of our wealth, England might 
 bloom once more like a garden; the horrors of slum life, 
 the festering misery of East, and North, and South Lon- 
 don, the starvation of many of the clergy, the debt on our 
 struggling hospitals, the destitution and squalor of hun- 
 dreds of thousands of miserable men and women and chil- 
 dren all of which we ought to mourn as the cruel misery 
 of such vast multitudes for whom Christ died would live 
 but
 
 1 O2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 " In the memory of Time, 
 Which, like a penitent libertine, should start, 
 Look back and shudder at his former years." 
 
 Is it not time, then, that our moral sense should be 
 aroused, that we should think about "opening a private 
 bank account with our own consciences " ? For let us not 
 be deceived. All the wisest and most serious voices are 
 telling us that the present condition of things, the present 
 startling and glaring contrast of colossal wealth and osten- 
 tatious luxury amid masses of human beings who live all 
 their lives on the grim borderland of starvation, constitutes 
 a grave danger both to individuals and to the State. In the 
 wicked, luxurious empires of ancient history the co-exist- 
 ence of utmost luxury and urgent need was not uncommon ; 
 and amid gold and perfumes and precious stones there were 
 counted also, in the destroying apparatus of luxury, the 
 slaves and souls of men. But never did this occur without 
 peril, never but as a menace of the sky. An English pre- 
 late, the Bishop of Winchester, says to us, "The zones of 
 enormous wealth and degrading poverty, unless carefully 
 considered, will presently generate a tornado, which, when 
 the storm clears, may leave a good deal of wreckage be- 
 hind." An English cardinal, Cardinal Manning, says to 
 us: "The present condition of our laboring people is one of 
 wide-spread unrest. The world of capital is combining in 
 alarm against the world of labor." An American cardinal, 
 Cardinal Gibbons, warns of a struggle, how imminent none 
 can tell, "the signs of which fill us with disquiet, because 
 the* thirst for wealth becomes daily more insatiable, and 
 the cries of the distressed more poignant and violent." An 
 English Positivist, Mr. Frederic Harrison, writes that "a 
 society in which generation after generation passes away,
 
 DUTY OF GIVING. \ o 
 
 consolidating vast and ever increasing hoards of wealth, 
 a society in which capital has created for itself a gos- 
 pel of its own, and claimed, for the good of society, the 
 divine right of selfishness, such a society the workmen 
 will not forever tolerate." A French sceptic, M. Renan, 
 testifies that, "when modern individualism has borne its 
 last fruits, when a dwarfed, paltry, shop-keeping society shall 
 have been driven out with scourges, by the heroic and ideal- 
 istic portions of humanity, then life in common will be 
 valued again." "There is," says an American poet, Mr. 
 Lowell, "there is a poison in the sores of Lazarus against 
 which Dives has no antidote." "Lazarus," says a Wes- 
 leyan minister, Mr. Hughes, "is no longer lying on the 
 doorsteps of Dives, in the quiescence of sullen despair, but 
 vehemently gesticulating to hungry men at the corners of 
 the street." "The working classes," says Bishop Barry, 
 "are now demanding that Christianity should be tried by 
 the test of its social effectiveness, its power to serve the 
 welfare, physical, intellectual, moral, of the great mass of 
 men." "The generation which is about to take our place," 
 says the Bishop of Derry, "will certainly judge the Church 
 by her works. I see them rising to their feet, the great- 
 est host that time has ever known, and hear the murmur 
 of millions speaking to millions across the sea in many 
 languages. What there is in the gospel to rectify the 
 relations of human life, to elevate the selfishness of capital 
 and chasten the selfishness of labour, to carry to the homes 
 of the poor improvement in the present and hope in the 
 future, that will find eager listeners. But to the men of 
 the near future religion will appear a barren and worthless 
 stem unless it be taught to clothe itself with the blossoms 
 of worship and bear the fruits of human love."
 
 IO4 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Can you neglect the weighty admonitions of so many 
 Voices? And do they not all point to one and the same 
 lesson? I will explain it in the words of two great prime 
 ministers of England. Said Lord Beaconsfield as far back 
 as 1832, "I will withhold my support from every ministry 
 which will not originate some great measure to ameliorate 
 the condition of the lower orders." Said Mr. Gladstone 
 last year, "We ought, in this life, to foster all that makes 
 goodness easier, and sets barriers of whatever kind across 
 the flowery ways of sin." 
 
 My friends, I have touched on the public danger of 
 wealth that falsely regards itself as irresponsible: I have 
 left the private peril to our own characters almost un- 
 touched. Yet the accumulation of stagnant wealth breeds 
 in the wealthy "a supercilious cynicism, an impenetrable 
 obduracy, which cannot understand the miseries of the 
 people." That there is a danger to our own personal 
 character and well-being from the love of money, from 
 being too eager to get it, and too close in grasping it 
 when gotten, all Scripture warns us, and all experience 
 shows, and Christ, our Lord and Master, emphatically 
 teaches. A selfish life, an egotistical life, is, whether 
 in millionaire or in pauper, a life conspicuously con- 
 temptible; and "a heart at leisure from itself," a hand 
 generous in blessings, is the heart and hand of a Christian 
 whom God loves. 
 
 I will not dwell further on the subject. But I have 
 touched upon it now, because at this season of the year 
 appeals are made to you for some of the most needful and 
 Christ-like of the Church's efforts. The mean and the 
 selfish will hate those appeals: the noble and the gener- 
 ous will hail and welcome them. Oh that the considera-
 
 DUTY OF GIVING. IO5 
 
 tions which I have urged upon you might tell in the 
 habitual generosity of our gifts to the cause of Christ, to 
 schools, to hospitals, to missions, to temperance, to all 
 the great work of social amelioration, to the indispensable 
 maintenance of your Church and its worship, to the x imme- 
 diate care of the poor who are at your doors. In the weekly 
 offertory we have what we should all regard as a happy 
 reminder of our obligations, as a precious opportunity for 
 the fulfilment of duties which otherwise too many of us 
 would callously and habitually ignore. It is ancient, it is 
 Scriptural, it is free. Man does not know, man will not 
 inquire, whether our gifts have been mean or ample, ade- 
 quate or wholly disproportionate; but God knows, and God 
 will reward, and God will judge. Public spirit, magna- 
 nimity towards man and in God's service, is in itself a form 
 of charity as noble as it is rare. Even of the poor wan- 
 derers of the desert, Aaron said, " The people bring much 
 more than enough for the service of the work." "Much 
 more than enough!" O happy Aaron! O vanished days! 
 " Much more than enough," what a glorious river of muni- 
 ficence, compared with our agonizing dribblets! much more 
 than enough given by exiled wanderers in the barren wil- 
 derness, while here, in a city of which the annual income 
 is counted by so many millions, nearly every charity is 
 struggling, and people perish for lack of bread! It is sad, 
 it is humiliating, to think how much more fascinating to 
 most of us is the love of gold than the love of God! how 
 very few of us are capable of the effort of honouring our- 
 selves by honouring God, how few of us will trust Him 
 with a loan, as though He were a creditor who, we fear, will 
 not repay! how few of us really believe in the promises 
 which He has pronounced upon those sacrifices of the cheer-
 
 106 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 ful giver with which He is well pleased! Read in the 
 thirty-fifth chapter of Exodus how the desert Israelites 
 poured forth their gifts for the tabernacle; how the women 
 took off and gave their brooches and earrings and armlets ; 
 how every man that offered offered gold, a free-will offering 
 unto the Lord. Will ye see that ye abound in this grace 
 also? will you, like them, thank God that you have (as indeed 
 you have) the means, and, what is better than the means, the 
 will to offer willingly? Test your own superiority to lower 
 considerations, show that you can endure the to some of 
 you agonizing martyrdom of an infinitesimal self-denial. 
 About a hundred and fifty years ago the French Protestant 
 preacher, Saurin, preached a sermon on charity, in which he 
 mentioned, as I have done, the example of the Jews, and the 
 beatitudes of wealth enriched by liberality, and at the end 
 of his sermon men placed all the money they had in the col- 
 lection plate, women heaped upon it their jewels and their 
 gold. Do you think that they missed what they gave ? Were 
 they the losers for being for once carried out of themselves 
 out of their meaner, narrower, more worldly selves by a 
 wave of sacrifice? May we not feel sure that they looked 
 back on that impulse of generosity as having caused them 
 greater happiness in the gold they gave than in all the 
 gold they kept? I, alas! am no Saurin; but is there any 
 reason why you should not be as generous as the French 
 eighteenth century audience which Saurin addressed? Life 
 is fleeting; opportunity is short; the needs are great; the 
 Master presses. Then, while you have life, and health, 
 and means, give to God that which is His. Give for the 
 sake of the poor, that they may live; for the sake of so- 
 ciety, that it may endure; for your own sake, that the work 
 of your hands may be blessed; for the dignity, and beauty,
 
 DUTY OF GIVING. IO7 
 
 the worship, and usefulness of the House of God ; for the 
 sake of duty, honesty, and honour; to-day and always, as 
 habitual and generous and cheerful givers, give, and it 
 shall be given unto you. There is that scattereth, and 
 yet increaseth; there is that maketh himself rich, yet hath 
 nothing, there is that withholdeth more than is meei, and 
 it tendeth only to poverty.
 
 MAMMON WORSHIP. 
 
 "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." i TIM. vi. 10. 
 
 IN the fifth of the chasms which form the abyss of Fraud, 
 Dante, in his Vision of Hell, sees a cleft marvellously dark. 
 It reminds him of the lake of clammy pitch which he had 
 seen in the arsenal of Venice, where in winter-time the 
 sailors caulked their damaged ships. "So," he says, "not 
 by fire, but by divine art, boiled down there a dense pitch 
 which beplastered its banks on every side. It I saw, but 
 I saw nothing else there, except the bubbles which the 
 boiling raised, and the heaving and compressed subsiding 
 of the whole. And, while I was gazing down fixedly upon 
 it, my guide cried out, 'Take care, take care! ' A demon 
 came running by, bearing a sinner on his shoulders, and 
 shouted to his fellow-demons: 'See, here is one of Santa 
 Zita's elders (from Lucca). Thrust him under the pitch 
 while I return for more. There at Lucca they turn "Yes" 
 into "No" for money.' Then, as the other fiends rush at 
 the hapless wretch, and push him under the pitch, they 
 tauntingly cry to him, 'Here the Sacred Face avails not; 
 here thou must lie underneath the pitch, so that, if thou 
 canst, thou mayst pilfer privately.'" 
 
 Let me explain. Dante's vision of Hell is a vision 
 not only of the future punishment of men, but also of their 
 present sins; not only of what shall be the case with the 
 soul hereafter, but also of what is the case with the soul 
 now. That lake of pitch is the dark, evil, slimy sea of 
 usury, malfeasance, commercial fraud, feverish speculation,
 
 MAMMON WORSHIP. JQQ 
 
 sordid avarice. The Italian city of Lucca was infamous 
 for this greed of gain. Like many a modern city, it was 
 wholly given over to the idolatry of gold. The sinner 
 whom the fiend has brought from thence is scornfully called 
 "one of Santa Zita's elders" by way of contrast. For 
 seventy years before this time there had lived and died in 
 Lucca a holy servant-girl, a maid of all work, named Zita, 
 who, living and dying in uttermost lowliness and poverty, 
 had yet been sainted for her good deeds,' and was much 
 nominally honored in that city of usurers and cheats. 
 Lucca prided itself on a very ancient and holy crucifix 
 known as "the Sacred Face," and the demon tells the greedy 
 pilferer that no hypocritic adoration of Christ or His cru- 
 cifix will avail him here. But how forcible is the emblem! 
 how awful the scene! A lake of pitch, at a little distance, 
 looks quite resplendent in the sun: it looks, in fact, 
 exactly like a lake of gold. But go near, and it is pitch, 
 not gold. Touch it rashly, and it defiles you. It even 
 overglues its banks, so wide is its polluting influence. So 
 the love of money looks respectable and even resplendent, 
 yet it is full of peril. Basely gained, ostentatiously squan- 
 dered, meanly hoarded, it sticks to the fingers, defiles the 
 mind; and, while its outer wave overflows with filth and 
 baseness, its inner depths heave and bubble as with excite- 
 ment and depression, and the sighing of souls which will 
 not be satisfied. And the dark dealings of fraud are pun- 
 ished in kind. He who has secretly wallowed in them here 
 shall wallow there in an agonized obscurity, as undiscerni- 
 ble as his nefarious life on earth. 
 
 How disproportionate, how vast a place has money 
 ever occupied, as now it does, in the thoughts and desires 
 of man! How vainly emphatic are the warnings of Script-
 
 IIO QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 ure respecting it! How many, how varied the crimes 
 which attend its servitude! For money, men, alike rich 
 and poor, have been ready to make all their lives a lie to 
 themselves and a fraud upon their neighbours. For gold 
 men have betrayed their country, their friends, their God, 
 their immortal souls. For gold they steal, and rob, and 
 break open houses, and commit assaults and murders, and 
 become the terrors and scourges of society. For gold men 
 forge and cheat and start bubble companies, and tamper 
 with securities, and snatch the support of the widow, and 
 steal the bread of the fatherless. For gold they live by 
 trades and manufactures which are the curse and destruc- 
 tion of mankind. For gold they involve whole countries 
 in the horrors and crimes of war. For gold they soil the 
 honour of their sons, and sell their daughters into gilded 
 misery, and poison the world with stagnant gossip, and 
 stab noble reputations in the dark. For gold they defraud 
 the hireling of his wages, and grind the faces of the poor, 
 and wring the means of personal luxury from rotting houses 
 or infamous pursuits. Gold corrupts trades and professions 
 into that commercial standard which is often little better 
 than systematized dishonesty. Gold can condemn the inno- 
 cent and shield the guilty. 
 
 " Plate sin with gold, 
 
 And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks ; 
 Clothe it with rags, a tiny straw will pierce it." 
 
 "Look into the history of any civilized nation, analyze 
 with reference to this one cause of crime and misery the 
 lives and thoughts of their nobles, priests, merchants, and 
 men of luxurious life. The sin of the whole world is 
 essentially the sin of Judas. Men do not disbelieve in 
 Christ, but they sell Him." O my friends, let every one
 
 MAMMON' IVORS HI P. 
 
 Ill 
 
 of us poor as well as rich take heed and beware of 
 covetousness. For Mammon is a jealous God. When 
 once a man has accepted his shabby gospel, he will not be 
 content to leave one single spark of nobleness in that man's 
 soul. He lives in the pitchy slime of base hopes and 
 temptations. For Mammon, the churl Nabal threw away 
 his life. For Mammon, Achan sold his whole house. For 
 Mammon, Balaam profaned the vestal fires of prophecy. 
 For Mammon, Simon Magus wished to tamper with holy 
 things. I 7 or Mammon, Ananias lied to the Holy Ghost. 
 For Mammon, yea, for thirty paltry pieces of silver, 
 Judas sold his Lord and bartered the wretched thing which 
 had once been a human soul. Oh that our eyes were open, 
 and that we could see as he is that thrice despicable spirit, 
 that yellow, withered, mean, accursed devil, with luxury 
 attending him at his right, and felony on his left; with 
 care grim and gaunt stalking at his heels with his votaries 
 grovelling in the mud around him, feeding on dust; the 
 serpent's meat, bowed down under crushing weights, while 
 
 " Over them triumphant death his dart 
 Shakes, but delays to strike." 
 
 When we speak of the dangers of covetousness, the great 
 mass of persons, who are not rich, are apt to think that the 
 warning applies only to the wealthy. It is an immense 
 mistake. The old woman who hoards her few shillings 
 and tells lies about them in a back street, the needy clerk 
 secretly longing for the death of some one who may leave 
 him ^20, the mechanic fraudfully trying to make bad work 
 pass for good, the begging-letter impostor, the hulking 
 idler, the Anarchist indulging in senseless ravings to per- 
 suade men that luck will come to them by the ruins of tens
 
 H2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 of thousands more worthy than themselves, all these have 
 quite as much or even more need than the rich to take 
 heed and beware of covetousness. 
 
 This is a message to all, rich and poor alike. Gold is of 
 so little value that its possession or non-possession makes, 
 in God's sight, simply no difference in human life. The 
 rich may despise Mammon, though they are rich; and the 
 poor may be worshippers of Mammon, though they are poor. 
 The rich by his use of wealth, no less than the poor by 
 his indifference to it, may pour silent contempt on gold. 
 There is a very shallow proverb which says "that it is easy 
 to be virtuous on ten thousand a year." It may be easy to 
 be virtuous as the world counts virtue, but it is quite as 
 hard to be holy as God counts holiness on ten thousand a 
 year as on a labourer's pay. Riches may increase, and yet 
 not harm a man, if he sets not his heart upon them. Nev- 
 ertheless, if there be any truth in Scripture, there is in 
 wealth a peril and a snare which requires constant watch- 
 fulness. You know who it was who said, " How hardly 
 shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of 
 heaven! " George Peabody was a millionaire, but how few 
 can say as he does, in that sentence of his diary carved 
 upon his temporary grave, that it was his daily prayer to 
 his heavenly Father that he might be enabled to use his 
 wealth for the good of his fellow-men! Many men, alas! 
 become only the harder, the less generous, the less useful, 
 and much the less happy, because of their riches. On the 
 whole, the absorbing ambition to get wealth, which is the 
 master desire of so many minds, is about as poor ambition 
 as there can be. On the whole, no more vulgar advice 
 could be given to the mass of a nation than Guizot gave, 
 when, to make the French bourgeoisie content with the.
 
 MAMMON WORSHIP. !I 3 
 
 Orleans government, he said to them, Enrichissez-vous, 
 "Enrich yourselves! " We want more examples of simplio, 
 ity in life. We want public examples of men 
 
 " Who find contentment's very core 
 
 In the light store 
 
 And daisied path 
 
 Of poverty, 
 
 And know how more 
 A small thing that the righteous hath 
 Availeth than the ungodly's riches great." 
 
 Oh that we all desired rather to live richly than to die 
 rich, to do rich deeds than to leave rich properties. When 
 a man dies, his fellow Mammon-worshippers ask, "What 
 did he die worth?" but God asks, "Wherein was he 
 worthy?" "He died worth a million! " says the admiring 
 world. Ah me! in reality he may not have died worth 
 one halfpenny, as God counts worth, and a beggar might 
 have refused to have that man's character as an alms. A 
 great living physician told me how once he was attending 
 the death-bed of a rich man who seemed as if he could not 
 die; for, with aimless and nervous restlessness, his hands 
 kept moving and opening and shutting over the counterpane. 
 "What is the matter?" asked the physician. "I know," 
 answered the son for his speechless father. "Every night, 
 before he went to sleep, my father liked to feel and handle 
 some of his bank-notes." The son slipped a ;io note into 
 the old man's hand, and, feeling, handling, and clutching it, 
 he died. Ah me! that ;io note grasped in his trembling 
 hand, how much would it avail him before the awful bar 
 of God ? Yet how many men die, and have nothing better 
 to show to God than that ! 
 
 Men sometimes excuse themselves in their passionate 
 
 8
 
 j ^ QUESTIONS OF THE DA Y. 
 
 love for gold by saying, "Oh, if I were but rich, I could 
 do so much good, so much more good." Such a remark may 
 be intensely hypocritical ; but even when it is sincere, or 
 half sincere, it is an absolute mistake. In the first place, 
 we are only called upon to do good with that which we 
 have, not with that which we have not. We may all say 
 with St. Peter and St. John, "gold I have none, but what I 
 have give I thee." If we have nothing else to give, Christ 
 will only ask us whether we gave in His name that cup of 
 cold water which every one alike can give. In His sight, 
 the widow's two farthings may be a real gift, and the 
 ;i,ooo of the rich be no gift at all. The question is non 
 quantum, sed ex quanta, not what we give, but the pro- 
 portion which it bears to what we could give. The best 
 good in the world has always been done by personal ser- 
 vice, and beyond all proportion poor men have been greater 
 benefactors of the world than the wealthy. Run over the 
 names of all who have made nations great and kept them so, 
 the names of all the world's greatest benefactors, reformers, 
 poets, artists, writers, philanthropists scarcely one among 
 them all has been rich. Were the apostles rich? What 
 was the monetary value of St. Paul's cloak and parchments, 
 which were all he had to leave? How much would any 
 one have given for the sheepskin coat of St. Anthony, or 
 for the brown serge of St. Francis, or the poor rosary of 
 St. Vincent de Paul? Was not that saintly poverty one 
 secret of Luther's power? Wesley only possessed two sil- 
 ver spoons. Would he have done more, or as much, if he 
 had had ten thousand a year? St. Edmund of Canterbury 
 used to leave his money on the window-sill for those to 
 take it who would; and often, strewing it over with dust, 
 he would exclaim, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." "Satis
 
 MAMMON WORSHIP. jjc 
 
 viatici ad cahim" "Enough money to get to heaven 
 with," said the dying Archbishop Warham, when his stew- 
 ard told him that he had but ^30. Would the world have 
 thought as much of him if he, like so many worldly and 
 vulgar-minded prelates, had enriched his family out of the 
 revenues of the Church? "I have no time to get rich," 
 said, with disdain, both Faraday and Agassiz. The Char- 
 ity of Giotto's picture gives corn and flowers, and receives 
 from heaven a human heart ; but she tramples on bags of 
 gold. Most of the great heroes of antiquity also were 
 poor. More to mankind is one page of the Bedford tinker 
 than all the banks of the Rothschilds. More to God is 
 one self-sacrificing Christian than whole generations of 
 gilded and self-indulgent youths. More is one poor true 
 woman than legions of the frivolous who have toiled 
 through the pleasureless dissipations and glittering emp- 
 tiness of a dozen seasons. "The blessing of the Lord 
 that maketh rich; and he addeth no sorrow with it." 
 
 Let us, then, get rid of the idle fancy that, if we were 
 rich, we could do more good, and of the yet idler fancy 
 that, if we were rich, we should be more happy than now 
 we may be. "No more desire riches," said the wise Eras- 
 mus, "than a feeble beast desires a heavy burden." "I 
 live like a galley-slave, and am worn out with care," wrote 
 one of the most successful of modern millionaires. Yes, 
 for God's best gifts are His commonest, the gifts which 
 He gives to all, the things which we can all see and 
 all enjoy. "George," said a very rich man to his elder 
 brother, "you are a struggling man, you can only just 
 support yourself, you have made no money, and I have got 
 money enough to buy up your whole town, bank and all ; 
 and yet your life has been a success, and mine a dead
 
 TI 6 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 failure." "Having food and raiment," says Scripture, 
 "let us be therewith content." 
 
 My friends, all that I have said applies to all of us 
 alike. Some few are rich, the great majority of us are 
 poor: there is no intrinsic evil in riches, no inherent bless- 
 ing in poverty. Rich or poor, high or low, our chances of 
 happiness here and of heaven hereafter are exactly equal. 
 For alike and equally we may be innocent and generous, 
 and pure and kind; and it is on those things, not on wealth 
 or poverty, that happiness and hope depend. If we are 
 poor, let us be content ; for our treasure may be with our 
 heart in heaven. If we be rich, let us also be rich in good 
 works. If our riches have come honourably; if, when they 
 have come, we do not set our heart upon them; if we ac- 
 count ourselves the stewards of them, not the owners; if we 
 learn the luxury of doing good with them, then, indeed, we 
 shall have made friends of the Mammon of unrighteous- 
 ness. A man's wealth may turn into pride and splendour, 
 and little else; and then, assuredly, he will neither be the 
 better for it nor the happier. Or, as one has said, "it 
 may put on the snow-white robes of an angel, and pass 
 out into the streets, and gather up little children in its 
 arms, and do the Saviour's work. It is this last trans- 
 formation of wealth that brings the most blessedness to 
 the place where it goes and the bosom from which it 
 comes. Strange law of our earth, rich and poor may 
 alike do good or do harm: the rich man may touch the 
 world, and it shall sink lower in misery and common- 
 place, or he can touch it, and it will rise up into nobler 
 and happier manhood." The poor man may waste his 
 life in squalid idleness or besot it with stupefying drink, 
 or, on the other hand, he may make his home like the
 
 MAMMON WORSHIP. j j 7 
 
 home of Nazareth, and his life wealthy with the great 
 gain of contentment with godliness, and his poverty 
 blessed, accepted, patient, innocent. Rich or poor, we 
 may alike be free from that love of money which is a root 
 of all kinds of evils. God cares less than nothing for what 
 we have. He cares solely for what we are. Read once 
 more the life of our blessed Lord in the Gospels, the birth 
 in the manger, the thirty years in the shop of the humble 
 carpenter, the three years of homeless and wandering min- 
 istry, shall not these teach us not to envy the rich, not 
 to desire riches? Would not all our lives be more rich 
 to God, more peaceful, more upright, more contented, if 
 only we were wholly convinced that "a man's life consist- 
 eth not in the multitude of things that he possesseth," 
 that "man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word 
 that proceedeth out of the mouth of God " ?
 
 RELIGIONISM. 
 
 " He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth the Lord re- 
 quire of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 
 God?" MICAH vi. 8. 
 
 IT would be impossible to pass over these deeply inter- 
 esting words of the prophet Micah. They express the true 
 object of all revelation, which is to make men good; they 
 express the inmost meaning of all life, which is the attain- 
 ment of holiness. Two passages of Scripture propound the 
 most momentous question which the mind of man can for- 
 mulate, and give the very clearest and plainest answer which 
 the language of man can express. One is this verse: the 
 other is the passage in which the young ruler asks, "What 
 shall I do to inherit eternal life?" There the answer is, 
 "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments": 
 here the answer is, " He hath shewed thee, O man, what is 
 good; and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do 
 justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 
 God?" Unmistakable in their plainness, these words 
 sweep away the cobwebs and confusions of ages. Frankly 
 accepted, they would be an eternal cure for all the mala- 
 dies which in age after age have afflicted religion. They 
 show that the aim of religion is to elevate character, to 
 purify conduct, to promote goodness; they sum up the 
 mighty spiritual teaching of the prophets; they herald the 
 essential moral revelation of the Son of God. There are 
 two streams which flow side by side through the Old 
 Testament and through the history of the Christian
 
 RELIGIONISM. IIC; 
 
 Church, and frequently do not commingle their waters, 
 the stream of religion and the stream of righteousness. 
 The word "religion" is used in a loose, inaccurate way 
 for various things; but in its proper English mean- 
 ing as when our Bible speaks of "the Jew's religion," 
 and as when Milton speaks of "gay religions full of 
 pomp and gold" the word implies certain opinions and 
 certain ordinances; it means a set of doctrines; it means a 
 mode of worship. Now, outward ordinances, when their 
 importance is exaggerated, tend to become burdensome and 
 superstitious, and religious opinions, when maintained by 
 ambition and self-interest, have deluged the world with 
 crime; and that is why the great poet Lucretius represents 
 religion as a lurid and menacing spectre, and writes the 
 famous words " Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum." 
 "So many curses could religion cause! " To avoid confu- 
 sion, however, I will call this not religion, but religionism. 
 Now, a stream of religionism flows through the Old Tes- 
 tament. It centred in the Temple, the Levitical ordi- 
 nances, the whole ceremonial law; and the same sort of 
 externalism belongs as much to idolatry as to Judaism. 
 All this code has neither value nor significance in itself, 
 but solely in so far as it may be a help or adjunct to higher 
 things. Religionism, when it ends in opinions or observ- 
 ances, is worthless. Any impure and ignorant youth, any 
 empty-headed and sour-hearted girl, any worldly or greedy 
 Dives, can in this sense be religious. Persons of all classes 
 are delighted to believe that with such cheap and easy 
 superficiality God is pleased. Hence all that was poorest 
 and most pagan in Judaism eagerly seized on this element 
 in their sacred books. They would please God by ortho- 
 doxy, ritual, gifts, fastings, genuflections, holy days, sac-
 
 12Q QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 rifices, the right way of burning the two kidneys and the 
 fat. This would give them a delightful sense of being very 
 religious, while they let their slanderous tongues run riot, 
 and sated with worldliness their greedy hearts. The relig- 
 ious reform of Hezekiah and others, being mainly outward, 
 easily slid into the pagan frippery and superstition of 
 Manasseh; and it ended in the worship of the dead letter, 
 the substitution of tradition for truth, and of religiosity for 
 godliness. It reached the splendour of its zenith in Phari- 
 saism, which paid scrupulous tithes of mint, anise, and 
 cumin, but forgot justice, righteousness, and faith. It 
 tried to establish itself forever by committing the deadliest 
 crime which even religionism ever has achieved; it said, 
 "This is the Heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheri- 
 tance shall be ours." In the same endeavour the en- 
 deavour to make opinions and to make observances stand in 
 the place of sincerity and righteousness it scourged St. 
 John, it imprisoned St. Peter, it cursed St. Paul, it beheaded 
 St. James, it stoned St. Stephen. Yet they who committed 
 all these deadly crimes were very religious. They would 
 have held up their hands in horror and amazement, had you 
 called them irreligious; they would have said, "Our whole 
 life is religion, and we think of nothing else." Ay, when 
 religion is put in the place of righteousness, when, instead 
 of being regarded as a mere adjunct to godliness, it is sub- 
 stituted for godliness, then it becomes a deadly thing. 
 And, therefore, side by side with this stream of religious 
 ordinances flows through most of the Old Testament, and 
 through all the New, the richer, purer, deeper stream of 
 righteousness. And righteousness expresses, and alone 
 expresses, the essence of true religion; for true religion 
 is "a good mind and a good life." It is not an affair of
 
 \ 
 RELIGIONISM. I2I 
 
 copes and candles and such childish things; but it is some- 
 thing which restores man to God. It enables us not 
 merely to wear phylacteries and to make long prayers, but 
 to deny our wills, to rule our tongues, to soften our 
 tempers, to mortify our evil passions, to learn patience, 
 humility, meekness, forgiveness, continuance in well-do- 
 ing; it is "the will in the reason, and love in the will." 
 
 Ask a dogmatist the question, "What must I do to be 
 saved?" and he will perhaps give you some elaborate meta- 
 physical definition, and will tell you that he who would be 
 saved must thus think of the Trinity. Ask a party relig- 
 ionist what you must do to be saved, and he perhaps will 
 say to you that you must hear the Church, and believe in 
 the Real Presence. Ask Samuel, David, Isaiah, Amos, 
 Micah, Jeremiah, the four evangelists, the twelve apostles 
 ask your Lord and Master Himself, and their answer will 
 be different not only in the letter, but in the entire spirit. 
 It will not be "You must believe in this or that particular 
 doctrine"; it will not be "You must practise this or that 
 special ordinance": it will be simply, "If thou wouldst 
 enter into life, keep the Commandments." Whatever may 
 have been the original intent of Levitical rules and Temple 
 proprieties, they had become so terribly perverted, so 
 fatally meaningless, that the greatest prophets speak of 
 them again and again with sweeping and exceptionless 
 depreciation. "Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt- 
 offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the 
 Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to 
 hearken than the fat of rams." So spake Samuel. "Thou 
 requirest not sacrifice, else I would give it Thee; but Thou 
 delightest not in burnt-offerings." So sang the Psalmist. 
 "And now, Israel, what doth the Lord require of thee,"
 
 122 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 asks the Book of Deuteronomy, "but to walk in all His 
 ways and to love Him?" "To what purpose is the multi- 
 tude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord. Bring no 
 more vain oblations ; incense is an abomination unto Me ; 
 your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; 
 put away the evil of your doings from before Mine eyes; 
 cease to do evil; learn to do well." So wrote Isaiah. "I 
 hate, I despise your feast days," says Amos; "but let judg- 
 ment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty 
 stream." And, on the positive side, to the question, 
 "Who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord, and who shall 
 stand in His holy place?" the answer is nothing else than, 
 "He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, and hath not 
 lifted up his mind unto vanity, nor sworn to deceive his 
 neighbour." And what does the Preacher tell you is the end 
 of the whole matter? Is it to believe in a vast mass of tra- 
 ditional propositions? No. Is it to go through a numer- 
 ous huddle of fantastical pomps and cumbersome ceremo- 
 nies? No. But the whole of the matter is, "Fear God, 
 and keep His commandments; for that is the whole duty of 
 man." 
 
 That was how, one after another, the greatest of the 
 prophets spoke; and the New Testament so completely 
 endorses their spiritual ideal that, while every page and 
 verse of it breathe of righteousness, you scarcely find any 
 religionism in it at all, scarcely any organization even the 
 most rudimentary, scarcely any ritual even the simplest, 
 scarcely any dogmatic creed even the most brief. What 
 was the sum total of the preaching of the glorious Eremite, 
 John the Baptist ? Just two words, Repent, Obey. What 
 is the sum total of the moral revelation of Christ? Just 
 two words, the two words carved on the statue of that
 
 RELIGIONISM. 
 
 123 
 
 noble philanthropist* which has just been added to our 
 Abbey, the two words, "Love, Serve." Not one syllable 
 did Christ say for the traditionalism which in His day 
 passed for the only orthodoxy; not one syllable did He say 
 in favor of all the elaborate ablutions, vestments, fringes, 
 phylacteries, genuflections, feasts, fasts, long prayers, which 
 then passed for indispensable ceremonial; but while He 
 was the Friend of sinners, and forgave the penitent harlot 
 and approved of the prayer of the publican, He struck the 
 mere professing religionist with flash after flash of His 
 terrible denunciation. And the teaching of every one of 
 His apostles was the very antithesis of the spirit of exter- 
 nalism. They seemed to treat that with sovereign disdain, 
 as though it belonged to the infinitely little. Their lan- 
 guage is identical with that of the great prophets. "Cir- 
 cumcision," then regarded as the very first of necessary 
 ordinances, "circumcision," said St. Paul, "is nothing, 
 and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the com- 
 mandments of God." "I am afraid of you," he says to the 
 Galatians: "having begun in the spirit, do ye now end in 
 the flesh ? " What was the sum total of the preaching of 
 St. Paul? Two words, "in Christ "; and again two words, 
 Faith, Works. What was the sum total of the teaching 
 of St. James? Two words, Compassion, Unworldliness. 
 What was the sum total of the teaching of St. John? One 
 word, Love. He explains his apparent truism, "He that 
 doeth righteousness is righteous," by that deep account of 
 what true holiness means: "He that doeth righteousness 
 is born of God." You know that popes and cardinals and 
 priests burned John Huss; and when they sent him to the 
 stake, as they sent many another saint of Christ who hated 
 mummeries and lies and bondage, they clothed him in a 
 
 The Earl of Shaftesbury.
 
 I2 4 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. . 
 
 sanbenito, a robe painted all over with flames and devils, 
 and they told him that from the earthly fire he should pass 
 to the endless torments of the fire which is never quenched. 
 But the angels, meanwhile, were clothing in the san- 
 benito not the victims, but the priestly inquisitors; for it 
 was they who were the murderers, it was they, and not he, 
 who did not righteousness; and "he that committeth sin 
 is of the devil." When Christ was asked what was the one 
 test by which you could know true teachers from false, was 
 it, "By their doctrines ye shall know them," as men have 
 most fatally taught? Nothing of the kind. It was, "By 
 their fruits ye shall know them." To preach these princi- 
 ples is to preach the very essential heart of the Scriptural 
 morality; but yet it is a preaching that invariably makes 
 religionists very angry. For its importance lies in this, 
 that it is the very touchstone which discriminates between 
 true and false religion. It sweeps away, at any rate, the 
 exaggerated importance attached to the adjuncts, the scaf- 
 foldings, the traditions and ordinances of men, which to so 
 many make up the whole of their religious life. 
 
 Nothing is more important than that you should know 
 whether your religion is a sincerity or whether it is a sham. 
 The Bible teaches you as I have shown, and as I could 
 show you over and over and over again that righteousness 
 and holiness are the inmost essence and the only outcome of 
 true religion ; that they are the very end and object of your 
 life; that, if you have attained to them, you may stand free 
 in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free, free 
 from all morbid scrupulosities, free from all priestly domi- 
 nation, free from all carnal ordinances, free from all weak 
 and beggarly elements, free from all petty rules about 
 things which perish in the using. If you do not possess
 
 RELIGIONISM. 
 
 \ 
 
 125 
 
 this purity of heart and righteousness of life, the most 
 orthodox opinions and the most elaborate ritual in the 
 world are not one whit more pleasing to God than sounding 
 brass or tinkling cymbal, and they will weigh no more in 
 your favour than the small dust in the scales of the 
 balance. Are you, as I have asked before, in God's 
 sight, not deceiving yourself, but going up into the tri- 
 bunal of your own conscience, and there setting yourself 
 before yourself? Are you in truth a good man or a good 
 woman ? If you are, then, though every Pharisee who ever 
 lived should hate you, and though every Church in the 
 world should excommunicate you, and though every priest 
 that ever lived should hurl at you his separate anathema, 
 as they once did at the King of Saints,' yet to you the 
 golden gates of heaven shall open, harmonious on their 
 golden hinges, and you shall be folded forever under the 
 wings of Eternal Love. But if you are not in God's sight 
 simply a good man or a good woman, then you may, like 
 an ascetic of old, torture yourself, for long years together, 
 with fasts and miseries; or, like St. Simeon Stylites, you 
 may bow yourself twelve hundred times a day; or, like 
 another saint, you may make your boast that you daily offer 
 seven hundred prayers; and, after all this, you may say to 
 Christ your Lord, "Have we not prophesied in Thy name, 
 and in Thy name wrought miracles, and in Thy name done 
 many wonderful works?" but if, in spite of this external- 
 ism and profession, you have not truly loved God, and have 
 not been true to your neighbour, true by God's standard, 
 and not by the conventional standard of the world on the 
 one hand, or of churches and party on the other if, I 
 say, you have not been thus essentially true to God and 
 man, then shall He say unto you, "I never knew you.'*
 
 I2 6 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 I know well that this is an old lesson. I know that I 
 have tried to insist on it before; yes, and I may have to 
 do so again, for it is the one lesson which insincere pro- 
 fession tries to escape, and the one lesson to which it must 
 be pinned down by the sword-point of the Word of God. 
 What God wants is not so-called orthodoxy, but "truth in 
 the inward parts." What will avail you is not any amount 
 of religiosity, but righteousness. There are thousands of 
 religious persons who would attach immense importance to 
 such small matters as whether a clergyman does this or that 
 little thing, which is supposed to be the badge of party; 
 or whether we define Christ's presence in the elements 
 materially or spiritually; or whether we hold the Bible to 
 be or to contain the revelation of God; or whether we think 
 that every poor, wretched, feeble sinner goes, the instant he 
 dies, to writhe for endless trillions of years in sulphurous 
 flames, or whether we may believe something larger of the 
 mercy of God. Well, all this may or may not be important 
 as opinion, and may or may not be important as ritual ; but 
 our opinions the one way or the other, and our ritual the 
 one way or the other, are of quite infinitesimal value as re- 
 gards the saving of our souls. God does not care for our 
 opinions at all, if only they be honest; He does not care 
 about our ritual; but He does require our goodness. With- 
 out that goodness, without that kindness, without purity, 
 without honesty, without truthfulness, without unselfish 
 humility, and that rarest of all virtues, the love of truth, 
 without these all our opinions or rituals may only mean that 
 our leprosy is white as snow. 
 
 The reason why it is necessary to insist on this is the 
 eternal Pharisaism of the human heart, which prefers formal- 
 ism to spirituality, and which causes a constant recrudes-
 
 RELIGIONISM. 1 2 j 
 
 cence of Judaism in the heart of Christianity. Very early, 
 from entire ignorance of the real relation of the Old Testa- 
 ment to the New, there arose, in spite of the whole Epistle 
 to the Hebrews, a disastrous confusion between the Chris- 
 tian ministry and the Jewish priesthood. And there fol- 
 lowed a rapid glorification of shibboleths and glorification 
 of ordinances. The sacraments were soon regarded as magic 
 amulets, and Christ's presence was thought to be nearer if it 
 was localized in the sacred bread. The grace of the Spirit 
 was confined to mechanical transmissions; none were "relig- 
 ious " unless they went to deserts or monasteries, or tortured 
 themselves with fasting and scourging; but, if all this 
 teaching in Scripture which I have quoted be true, such 
 things are not what God requires, and for whatever else they 
 may be valuable are, at any rate, valueless for salvation. 
 And religion became more and more corrupted. The con- 
 ceit of infallible opinion became a horrible curse to man- 
 kind; the blood of ten thousand martyrs is on its head, and 
 the bitterness of millions of broken hearts lies at its door. 
 What was called orthodoxy, what was called Catholicity, 
 was often hideous error, despicable for its ignorance and 
 execrable for its cruelties. Men were massacred wholesale 
 for supposed mistaken tenets, while vice and villany 
 flaunted in high places unrebuked. A pope steeped to the 
 lips in infamy founded the Inquisition. Murderers and 
 adulterers died in the odour of sanctity, if they professed 
 zeal for orthodoxy and subservience to the priests. Charles 
 V. and Philip II., men grossly immoral in personal charac- 
 ter, doomed eighteen hundred innocent victims to the scaf- 
 fold or the stake, in the Netherlands alone, for such crimes 
 as eating flesh in Lent, or reading the Psalms in their 
 native language. When, after the Renaissance, "Greece
 
 128 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 arose from the dead with the New Testament in her hand," 
 when "the bright and blissful Reformation, by divine 
 power, strook through the black and settled night of igno- 
 rance and anti-Christian tyranny, and the sweet odour of the 
 returning gospel embalmed men's souls with the brilliancy 
 of heaven," there was a brief bursting of this iron network 
 of false traditions. But the yoke was soon reimposed in 
 other forms, because men who love moral license love also 
 spiritual serfdom. And at this very day there are many 
 whom I do not wrong in saying, for they make it their 
 open boast, there are many who are trying to undo as far 
 as they dare the work of the Reformation. But the Refor- 
 mation was nothing but the sweeping away of accumulated 
 falsities and mountainous corruptions. And if may God 
 avert the omen ! but if the Church of England should 
 grow gradually false to the principle that she is a Re- 
 formed Church, one thing then I see with the absolute cer- 
 tainty of prophecy, that there will be from her a vast- 
 secession, "Every knee that hath not bowed to Baal, and 
 every mouth that has not kissed him." If, and I say again 
 may God avert the omen ! but if the Church of England 
 should indeed dwindle and degenerate into a feeble imita- 
 tion of the Church of Rome, with a pale reflexion of her 
 doctrines and a poor copy of her practices, then sooner or 
 later, if truth be truth, she will collapse into irremediable 
 ruin, and upon those ruins shall be built once more a truer 
 and a purer fold. 
 
 But meanwhile the lesson for us is clear, and it is this : 
 Our religious opinions may be false; our party shibboleths 
 may be but- the blurred echoes of our ignorance and our in- 
 competence; our private interpretations of Scripture may 
 be no better than grotesque nonsense in their presumptuous
 
 RELIGIONISM. I2 g 
 
 falsity; and all this may not be at all fatal to us, if by some 
 divine deliverance from our opinionated follies we still do 
 justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. 
 But if, on the other hand, any one of you here present, 
 while he prides himself on his orthodoxy or on his Church- 
 manship, is mean in his conduct, false in his judgments, 
 dishonest in trade, a slanderer in society, impure in life: 
 if he be a liar, and many a man who calls himself relig- 
 ious, and many a man who tries to stand on good terms 
 with the world, is a liar in God's sight, if in his heart, in 
 spite of his profession, he be a false witness, or a covetous 
 man who is an idolater, he may present himself at the wed- 
 ding feast, but he has not on the wedding garment. But 
 if, on the other hand, any one of you be indeed pure, and 
 kind, and true ; if you always admire that which is admira- 
 ble and follow that which is noble; if in humility and love 
 you be a follower of Christ's example, you may die hated 
 by all the world and hated by all the nominal Church, yet 
 your Saviour, in whose footsteps you humbly desire to 
 walk, shall decide your destinies for ever, when He shall 
 whisper to your weary spirit, "Well done, good and faithful 
 servant ! " 
 
 And ? if you would have the moral of this chapter, it is 
 this : " O ye that love the Lord, see ye hate the thing which 
 is evil." Do not talk about your views, or your party, or 
 your observances ; do not deceive yourselves with your re- 
 ligion, which may be but vain, but search yourselves with 
 candles as to your real character. What you think, how 
 you worship, to what sect or party you belong all of you 
 in a moment could tell us that; but God is not the leader 
 of a sect or the champion of a party. God trieth the reins, 
 He searcheth the heart. He will not ask you what you were 
 
 9
 
 I3 o QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 called, but what you were. Try yourself, judge yourself. 
 You may be zealous for parties or views ; but are your 
 hearts set upon righteousness, O ye people? If not, then 
 cleanse your hands, ye sinners; purify your hearts, ye 
 double-minded! That, through Christ's mercy, shall avail 
 you; that shall avail you by the merits of His infinite sac- 
 rifice, that, and nothing else.
 
 ATHEISM. 
 
 "Thou believest in one God; thou doest well." JAMES ii. 19. 
 
 Is EVEN this much true in any deep sense? He who pro- 
 fesses openly that he believes in no God is an atheist. Is 
 the man much better than an atheist who, acknowledging 
 God, acts as though there were none? Theoretical atheism 
 says with its lips, "There is no God " : practical atheism 
 says the same thing by its life. Is it less atheism than the 
 other? The bold rebel who, bidden to go work in his 
 father's vineyard, said, "I will not," was he so much 
 worse than the smooth hypocrite who said, "I go, Sir," 
 and went not? Alas! it might be possible to look round 
 us to-day and to be driven to the conviction that even this 
 most elementary of all religious beliefs this belief which 
 is as the primitive granite on which all other strata of 
 belief must rest, has been loosened and corroded. Many 
 of our literary and scientific men avow their disbelief: 
 others are ostentatious in their reticence. Scoffing allu- 
 sions to truths the most sacred abound in our popular 
 literature. Young men think it a sign of emancipation, 
 and of intellectual superiority, to throw off the trammels 
 of the creed of their fathers. Thousands who still call 
 themselves Christians seem to have so relegated their 
 Christianity to the remoter regions of their being that it 
 exercises no visible influence on their lives and motives. 
 Large English constituencies, with their eyes open, fully 
 aware of all the facts, of the case, return as their represen-
 
 132 
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 tatives to Parliament, deliberately intrust with a share in 
 framing the laws of a Christian nation, men who deny the 
 existence of a God. We pause, and ask ourselves : What is 
 coming? Where have we got to ? Does the English nation 
 believe, or not believe, that there is one God? In the face 
 of facts so startling, and so significant, can we say to any 
 large promiscuous audience of a nation in which a chance 
 constituency attaches so little importance to the most rudi- 
 mentary fraction of religious faith, can one say any longer, 
 Thou believest in one God? The Psalms say, "The fool 
 hath said in his heart, There is no God." Have the days 
 come when one cannot repeat words, which we treat as 
 sacred, without an apology? Have the days come in which 
 one cannot point out the awful peril of national apostasy 
 without being charged with political meddling? In past 
 times, when the Creed was repeated, the nobles of Hungary- 
 used to rise, and draw their swords, and wave them in the 
 air in sign that for that faith they would, if need be, fight 
 and die. Far, far are we removed from the days when the 
 northern nations laid down their fury at the feet of the 
 white Christ, when the young knights swore on their cross- 
 hilted swords to take Christ for their captain, and to do 
 their duty to all the world! I will not believe that Eng- 
 land will range herself with those who proclaim that God is 
 but an invention, and religion a fable, and immortality a 
 dream. Now that the stone, hewn without hands, has grown 
 into a mountain, and filled the whole earth; now that Chris- 
 tianity and Christendom exist as the mighty witness of his- 
 tory to the truth of the evangelists, I will not believe that 
 we mean to roll back the divine progress of nineteen hun- 
 dred years. But, if we do, I know that it is not religion 
 which is in danger, but we that are in danger. No jot or
 
 ATHEISM. j-, 
 
 tittle shall pass away from the words of Him who said, 
 "Whosoever shall fall upon this stone, he shall be broken; 
 but upon whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him to 
 powder." 
 
 For the vast majority of mankind two phenomena have 
 been in all ages, and I believe will be to the end, the all- 
 sufficient proof that there is a God. One is the Universe, 
 the other is the Conscience. One is the starry heaven 
 above, the other is the moral law within. You may make 
 men defiant, you may make them indifferent, you may 
 drug and stupefy their intellects by the fumes of their own 
 corrupt pride, you may bewitch them by the fatal sorcery 
 of their own depraved passions, you may bribe them by the 
 hope of unlawful gratifications, you may drown the still, 
 small voice of religion in the yelling tumult of anarchy 
 and license; but, until you can destroy the Universe, and 
 calcine these tablets of the heart, which cannot be shat- 
 tered like the tablets of Sinai, and whereon God's own 
 finger has inscribed His own law, till you can do this, 
 which will never be until the sun itself has burst into 
 destroying conflagration, I take it that you will not make 
 atheists of mankind. "It is all very well; but who 
 made all these? " so asked the young Napoleon, raising 
 his hand to the stars of midnight, when, on the deck of the 
 vessel which was bearing him to Egypt, the French savans 
 had proved to their own satisfaction that there was no God. 
 We take up a book, the poems of Homer, or the Vedas 
 of Hindostan, they were written many centuries ago. 
 The hands have long been unmortised from the wrists of 
 them that wrote them, and they themselves have become but 
 a legend or a name or not even a name. Yet you might 
 as well try to persuade us that the material constituents of
 
 j 74 QUESTIONS OF THE DA Y. 
 
 those books vellum, and ink, and glue, and paper had 
 sprung into existence by the accidental conflux of chance 
 atoms, and that the letters had danced into accidental 
 agglomeration and shaped themselves into philosophy and 
 song, as to teach us, with the atheist, that the sun, and the 
 moon, and the stars, and the wide seas, and the everlasting 
 hills, the air we breathe, the liquid crystal that we drink, 
 the blue sky over our heads, and the white clouds which 
 rest upon it, the trees in the illimitable forests and the 
 birds and beasts that live in their shadow, and man with 
 his wide thoughts and holy prayers, all these things with 
 all their beauty and beneficence, with all the pomp and 
 prodigality of their wonder and their power, that all these 
 things made themselves, or, which is the same thing in 
 other words, that they were the work of eddying atoms, dead 
 forces, impersonal laws. Why, from the great sun in the 
 heavens to the little wayside flower, freaked with crimson 
 and purple or adorned with the delicate network of tender 
 lines; from the star Sirius, rushing from us into unknown 
 spaces, down to the tiny, roseate shell upon the sands; from 
 the galaxy to the feather of a bird, the stalk of a wheat-ear, 
 the smallest of the thirty-four thousand eyes of the dragon- 
 fly, the whole Universe in its dread magnificence is telling 
 us, in language voiceless, but never ceasing, of 
 
 " The unambiguous footsteps of a God, 
 Who gives its lustre to the insect's wing, 
 And wheels His chariot on the rolling worlds." 
 
 And if we be blind to these sights, deaf to these voices, 
 dull and dead to these infinite appeals, if our every out- 
 ward sense is locked up, we have if we drown it not a 
 voice within us, still and small, yet louder than the thun-
 
 ATHEISM. J^P 
 
 der. To every good and true man Conscience not only tells 
 of the God above him, but of the God within him. It is 
 the categoric imperative, which says to him direct from 
 heaven, "I ought" and "I must." "It is," as Newman 
 said, "the aboriginal vicar of Christ, a prophet in its in- 
 formations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its 
 blessings and anathemas." "It is," as Kant called it, 
 "the wondrous power which works neither by insinuation, 
 flattery, nor threat, but merely by holding up the naked law 
 in the soul extorts for itself reverence, if not always obe- 
 dience, and before which, however secretly they may rebel, 
 all appetites are dumb." And with this starry heaven 
 above us, and this moral law this glow of the eternal 
 light, this mirror of the divine majesty within us, I say that 
 I will not believe that England, as a nation, will proclaim 
 herself blind as the fool's heart to the light of heaven, and 
 deaf as the adder's ear to the voice of God. I will not 
 believe that she will belie in degrading apostasy the expe- 
 riences of the world's six thousand years, or abandon the 
 one truth which has been the blessing and safeguard of man- 
 kind since the world's gray fathers first gazed upon the 
 rainbow, or Abraham, the friend of God, went forth from 
 Ur of the Chaldees, to establish forever among idolatrous 
 generations the truth that " it is the Lord that ruleth the 
 heavens." 
 
 "Thou believest in God; thou doest well: the de- 
 mons also believe, and shudder." So, with tremendous 
 and crushing irony, exclaimed St. James. He meant us 
 to see that there are beliefs, and beliefs, and that the exter- 
 nal belief of rebellious antipathy and shuddering abhor- 
 rence is a very different thing from the loving, trembling 
 adoration of holy and faithful souls. There can be nothing
 
 !36 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY, 
 
 subordinate, nothing secondary, in this belief. It is, it 
 must be, it must ultimately become, everything or nothing; 
 for the belief in a God if only it be a belief, a real belief 
 is a faith so awful in its sanctions, so illimitable in its 
 application, that, if we can treat it as a secondary matter, 
 c.s a thing of no great importance, as a thing which a man 
 can wear or not wear like an article of dress, as a thing 
 which can evaporate at the church door, our hypocrisy in 
 this matter must be nothing short of monstrous. God is 
 not "a metaphysical hypothesis," but a Living God; and, 
 in the sense that He cannot accept a lukewarm and 
 divided allegiance, a jealous God, "the Lord, the Lord 
 God, merciful and gracious, keeping mercy for thousands, 
 forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will 
 by no means clear the guilty." 
 
 In Him, whether we will it or no, we live and move, and 
 have our being. This transcendent mystery is always 
 about us, this Eternal Voice ever sounding in our ears. 
 He is a besetting God; He is a pervading God. If we go 
 into heaven, He is there; if we go down into hell, He is 
 there also: if we take the wings of the morning, and fly 
 into the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall His 
 hand lead us, and His right hand shall guide us. And the 
 belief in such a God who made us, and not we ourselves, who 
 hideth His face, and we are troubled; who taketh away our 
 breath, and we die; to whom darkness is as the light; who 
 searcheth the very thoughts of the heart; who will require 
 something more of us than our sleep and our selfishness; 
 whom to deny is as though a sand-grain would set itself up 
 against the Universe, allegiance to such a God must be 
 something more than a tepid assent or a patronizing ac- 
 knowledgment, something more than a lip service or a
 
 ATHEISM. I37 
 
 Sunday fashion. We must live in it, and die in it. It 
 must be a sovereign passion, a supreme devotion. Com- 
 mon duties must be transfused by it; common men trans- 
 figured; the significance of common deeds expanded to 
 infinitude. It is a thing about which there cannot be in- 
 difference. It is not a matter that we can play with or 
 patronize. If it be not everything, it is nothing. There 
 either is a God or there is not a God; and you must decide 
 which you believe. It is not a question, to-day, between 
 God and Baal. I do not say to you, as Elijah said to apos- 
 tate Israel: "How long halt ye between two opinions? If 
 the Lord be God, follow Him; but if Baal, then follow 
 him." But I must say to you, On which side are you, 
 the side of the atheist or the side of those who say, " I fear 
 God "? Every nation, every tribe on the whole face of the 
 earth, that has had the least germ of civilization, or even 
 of decency, has owned some sort of God; no nation above 
 the most bestial and the most abject has been found with- 
 out some object of worship. Will you deface the records 
 of all history? Will you say that Judea, and Greece, and 
 Rome, and Europe, and Asia, the bright, the civilized, the 
 noble races of the world, were all deceived, and that the 
 wisdom which ignored the Almighty was with black An- 
 damanese and brutish cannibals? But you might as well 
 quench the sun, and suppose that the world could get on 
 without light, as think that men or that nations can do 
 without God. Why, from this belief has sprung all that is 
 greatest, best, most glorious, in the world's history. The 
 divine ideals of righteousness and of holiness have had no 
 existence apart from it. It has been as the dew of heaven, 
 refreshing every withered hope. It has been as the fire of 
 God, rekindling every divine enthusiasm. It has been to
 
 138 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 all humanity the one inalienable element of life. This it 
 was which sent forth the Apostles and Evangelists to con- 
 vert the world. This it was which made the Church of our 
 fathers the defender of the poor. This it was which tamed 
 the wild flood of northern barbarians into the Christendom 
 of Europe. This it was which made childhood sacred, and 
 ennobled womanhood, and turned poverty into a beatitude. 
 This it was which founded the greatness of England, and 
 led the Pilgrim Fathers to America, and proclaimed the 
 brotherhood of man, and broke the tyrant, and emanci- 
 pated the slave. Mercy, and equal justice, and tenderness, 
 and inflexible truth, and noble purity, all that makes life 
 sacred, and uplifts it into holy self-control; all that saves 
 men from sinking into natural brute beasts, speaking evil 
 of things which they know not, and corrupting themselves 
 in the things which they naturally know, has sprung, and 
 sprung solely, from their belief in God. You might as 
 well tell me that the Indian rivers would still flow in their 
 majestic volume, to fertilize the plain, if no snows fell on 
 the Himalayan heights, as tell me that morality, every form 
 of morality, purity, truth, honor, soberness, would not 
 suffer if atheism prevailed. Do you mean to tell me that 
 if England gave up her faith for no faith, gave up her God 
 for no God, overthrew her altars, tore up her Bible, denied 
 her Christ, turned her churches into infidel lecture halls, 
 do you mean to tell me that if England comes to believe 
 that men are bodies without souls, that we only are what 
 we eat, that God is a fiction, that the commandments are 
 a result of disputable experience, that the death of the body 
 ends our being, that if you thus remove from morals all 
 their divine sanctions, and rob them of all their inspiring 
 hopes, if you thus rob the future of its immortality and
 
 A THEISM. j 32 
 
 empty heaven of its God, do you mean to tell me that with- 
 out God, and without hope, men will still be gentle, and 
 humble, and pure, and good? I tell you oh the evidence of 
 all history that the stream of morals would dry up; that men 
 would become sensual egotists, that man's vile motto would 
 be, Each for himself; that interest would become lord 
 of all; and that the mass of bad and of average men, who 
 now are only restrained at all by the general faith of 
 Christendom, and that which lingers like an echo and a 
 reminiscence, in their own hearts, would become what 
 the apostle prophesied they would become, scoffers walking 
 after their own hearts' lusts, covetous, boasters, proud, blas- 
 phemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, with- 
 out natural affection, perjurers, false accusers, incontinent, 
 fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high- 
 minded, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God : that 
 is what they would become. Those words were used by the 
 apostle concerning men who had a form of godliness, but 
 denied the power thereof. What, then, would become of 
 those who had not even the form? Read the first chapter 
 of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and you will see. You 
 will see there the moral picture of an age which had not been 
 guilty of the crime, the last, worst crime, of apostatizing 
 from Christianity into atheism: that is, of turning from 
 the best to the worst, of deliberately loving darkness rather 
 than light because their deeds are evil, of counting the 
 blood of the covenant wherewith they were redeemed an 
 unholy thing, of crucifying to themselves the Son of God 
 afresh, and putting Him to an open shame. No; but of the 
 far less heinous crime of turning only from Paganism, and 
 from natural religion; of denying the testimony of their 
 conscience only, and not seeing the Invisible in the visi-
 
 I40 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 ble. And what was the issue of even that lesser apostasy? 
 It was an issue as historically certain as it was logically 
 inevitable. It Was a universal degradation. It is not only 
 St. Paul who will tell you; but Tacitus will tell you, Sue- 
 tonius will tell you, Martial and Juvenal will tell you, 
 their own poets, their own historians, that theirs was the 
 vain imagination, the darkened heart, the debasing, degrad- 
 ing, unnatural filthiness of vile affections. Their professed 
 wisdom became glaring folly. Because they refused God, 
 God gave them up to a refuse mind, which revelled in the 
 uncleannesses which they loved. They called right wrong, 
 and good evil. It is not St. Paul only who seizes that god- 
 less age by the hair, and brands upon its leprous forehead 
 the stigma of its shame. Carved on its own gems, painted 
 on its own walls, stamped upon its own coins, written in 
 putrid stains on its own abhorrent literature, you may 
 read the confession that they were filled with unrighteous- 
 ness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, full of envy, 
 debate, deceit, malignity, whisperers, backbiters, haters of 
 God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, 
 who, knowing the judgment of God that they who do such 
 things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have 
 pleasure in them that do them. For nations there can be 
 no morality if they own no God. "In a brief, tormented 
 existence ungoverned by any law save sensation and the 
 appetites," the answer of a world deprived of a holy ideal 
 will always be summed up in two words, heartless cru- 
 elty, unfathomable corruption. 
 
 I say that any nation which denies God becomes by 
 an invariable law an infamous nation, and any age which 
 denies God an abominable age. History, alas! does not 
 lack examples to emphasize the warning. We have seen
 
 ATHEISM. ! 4I 
 
 what the last Pagan century was : let us see what the fif- 
 teenth Christian century was. That, too, was an atheistic 
 century. It seems to be the characteristic of such ages 
 that they should be glittering and corrupt, clothed like the 
 blaspheming Herod in tissue of silver, but within eaten of 
 worms. Christianity had ceased to be Christian. Priests, 
 turned atheists, made an open scoff at the religion they 
 professed. The world was filled with pride, greed, and pol- 
 lution. There is not a single historian of that period who 
 does not admit that a fearful moral retrogression followed 
 on the overthrow of faith. As the Emperors of the first 
 century were a Nero and a Caligula, and its writers a Pe- 
 tronius and a Martial, so the Pope of the fifteenth century 
 was a Borgia, and its writers an Aretino and a Berni. 
 Take another century in which unbelief was predominant, 
 the eighteenth century. In the chambers of St. Louis a 
 king debased the very ideal of manhood in the Pare aux 
 Cerfs. In Russia reigned Catherine II., 
 
 " That foul woman of the north, 
 The lustful murderess of her wedded lord." 
 
 In Saxony an Augustus the Strong filled with his shame- 
 lessness the trumpet of infamy. In Prussia a Frederic II. 
 made his court the propaganda of infidelity. In England 
 alas! even in England we had a grossly tainted litera- 
 ture; a corrupt society; gambling, drinking, all but univer- 
 sal profligacy, and the election to Parliament of a man John 
 Wilkes who had written an infamous book, and taken part 
 in the blasphemous orgies of Medmenham Abbey. Eng- 
 land was saved by the religious revival; but for Europe that 
 epoch ended in the thunder-clap of the French Revolution. 
 Among those frivolous and atheistic kings, "a people, which
 
 142 
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 had followed in the wake of their corruption to feed upon 
 its offal, flung the head of a king shorn off by the ignoble 
 axe of a machine." The boast of liberty ended in the 
 Reign of Terror; the boast of humanity in a Paris drunk 
 with blood; the boast of virtue in the desecration of 
 churches by blasphemous obscenity, and the worship of a 
 harlot on the polluted altars of Notre Dame ! 
 
 Nor are our warnings a century old. The Scripture 
 says that, when God's judgments are in the world, then will 
 the inhabitants of the earth learn wisdom. Were they not 
 abroad in France ten years ago, when her glory melted 
 away like a vision of the Apocalypse, and like the corpse 
 of some exhumed king her strength slipped into ashes at a 
 touch? Whom shall I summon as witnesses of this? Not 
 bishops, not clergymen. I will summon a sceptic, M. 
 Renan. He says that the cause of that awful collapse lay 
 in a press filled with mean buffooneries, in puerile vanity, 
 in a vulgar cynicism which sneers at all faith and all virtue, 
 in a total lack of the chastity which makes nations strong. 
 I will summon another Frenchman, an opera writer, M. 
 Alexandre Dumas, the younger. "Tainted," he says, "all 
 of us in the depths of our hearts, we must disengage our- 
 selves from our habits and conventions of yesterday to rj- 
 ascend to the primitive sources of humanity, and ask our- 
 selves simply and resolutely : Is it right, Yes or No, that 
 there should be a God, a morality, a society, a family? 
 Ought woman to be respected? Ought man to toil? Is the 
 good absolute? Yes! Yes! a thousand-fold Yes! And 
 societies, governments, families, individuals, can they, if 
 they would be noble, durable, fruitful, do without these con- 
 ditions? No! No! a thousand times No! " I will summon 
 another French novelist, M. Alphonse Karr. He describes
 
 ATHEISM. I4 3 
 
 the youth of unbelieving France as having lost their youth 
 in a precocity of vice and presumption, and as employing 
 the first decades of life in longing for the second, and the 
 second decades of life in regretting the first. He adds, "If 
 we shake down the blossom of the tree when it is in flower, 
 if we pluck prematurely the fragrant snow which crowns 
 it in the spring as with a bridal garland, who can expect 
 the summer fruit ? " * 
 
 Will these results encourage England, too, to enter on 
 the path of Atheism? If she does, let her not be deceived 
 by the notion that culture will save her, or civilization 
 will save her, from the flood of vices which will grow 
 darker and darker till the pit swallows them. They did 
 not save the first century, or the fifteenth, or the eigh- 
 teenth. What should save her if she professes the neu- 
 trality of ignorance between the faith which produced a 
 Howard and a Wilberforce and the atheism which produced 
 the Renaissance murderers and the French dynamitards? 
 Does England want her journalists to become like Marat? 
 her statesmen to become like Collot d'Herbois? her poli- 
 tics to become an anarchy of socialism like the Commune 
 which burned and murdered in 1872, or the lustful and 
 sanguinary orgies which made its toy of the guillotine 
 in 1793? Does she want her youth to have no dignity of 
 manhood, no reverence for womanhood, to be strong only 
 in blasphemies against God and basenesses towards men? 
 If she choose infidelity for her portion, what is to save 
 
 *The following appeared in the Times March 20: 
 
 " Yesterday being the anniversary of the Commune, twenty-two banquets were held in 
 Paris and its suburbs, with an aggregate of four thousand attendants. Louise Michel harangued 
 at three of them on the glory of the martyrs of 1871, the impending collapse of a rotten society, 
 the terror of the middle classes, and the approach of vengeance : 
 
 "'We shall be merciless; we shall not limit the number of victims; we shall cleave 
 abysses. We have been styled petroleurs, we shall again be incendiaries, and we shall think 
 nothing of burning down a city ! ' "
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 her? "Culture, without religious consciousness, is noth- 
 ing but civilized barbarity, and disguised animalism." So 
 said Bunsen; and, if you do not care for the testimony of a 
 Christian statesman, will you accept that of the republican 
 Mazzini, of the philosopher Goethe? "All epochs," says 
 Goethe, "in which faith has prevailed, have been brilliant, 
 heart-elevating, and fruitful both to contemporaries and to 
 prosperity. All epochs, on the contrary, in which unbelief, 
 under whatever form, has maintained a sad supremacy, even 
 if they glitter for a moment with a false splendour, vanish 
 from the memory because they have been barren." "Times 
 which have ceased," says Mazzini, "to believe in God and 
 in immortality may continue illogically to utter the holy 
 words 'progress' and 'duty'; but they have deprived the 
 first of its basis, and the second of its source." 
 
 Let me conclude this large and perilously important sub- 
 ject by one or two remarks. I am not speaking, I am not 
 thinking, of individuals. To them I would show all cour- 
 tesy, all consideration, all justice. I speak in warning to 
 the nation. I am speaking of atheist ages, not of atheist 
 individuals. The number of avowed atheists who have 
 risen to any notoriety in this world has been but small, and 
 there is scarcely one of them who is inscribed on the roll 
 of the world's benefactors. Not a few of them have lived 
 lives which, if imitated, would in one generation be fatal 
 to the world. But God forbid that every individual atheist 
 should be immoral ! It is not so. There are some who have 
 served God, though they have not known Him; some who, 
 though speculative infidels, have been practical Christians. 
 I cannot now pause to explain how or why this has been so 
 in the case of a few. But it never has been so, and never 
 can be so with an atheist nation or an atheist age. Such.
 
 ATHEISM. I4 - 
 
 a nation, such an age, may continue for a time to kindle its 
 dim torches at that fount of light which it has denied, but 
 they soon die out in smouldering fume. It may walk for 
 a year or two in the dubious twilight left upon the western 
 hill-tops when the sun has set, but the twilight soon rushes 
 into the deep, dark night. When God is denied, when 
 faith is quenched, when prayer has ceased, it is never long 
 before the holy warfare of ideas is abandoned for the base 
 conflict of interests; never long before hatred and envy 
 usurp the place of charity, and lust the place of love. For 
 a time an atheist populace may uphold "the tattered banner 
 of corpse-like traditions which it has stolen from the rifled 
 grave of Christianity," but it will never be long before it 
 declares itself the enemy of the Church, the enemy of the 
 family, the enemy of the throne; never long before it tears 
 down the flag of decency and order, and uphoists in its 
 place, if not the red flag of socialism, the black flag of spoli- 
 ation, yet certainly the foul standard of material appetites 
 and sensual desires. Let the mass of the English working 
 classes once adopt atheistic principles, and I would not 
 give five years' purchase for England's happiness or Eng- 
 land's fame. She would become an astonishment and a 
 hissing, a land of terror and of shame. 
 
 Shall it ever be so? France has deliberately erased the 
 name of God from the curriculum of her public education. 
 Shall we ever follow in that bad path? May God forbid! 
 Here, at any rate, at this centre of England's national his- 
 tory, we may dare to hope, in spite of all signs and omens, 
 that her sons will not pass out of the noonday into the mid- 
 night; will not abandon the cathedral for the charnel-house; 
 will not thus apostatize from all that has made her greatest, 
 from all for which her fathers have lavished their treasures 
 
 10
 
 J4 g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 and shed their blood. For what has England loved and 
 honored hitherto? Has she not loved her God and Saviour? 
 Answer me, shade of Edward the Confessor ! Answer me, 
 hero of Agincourt, whose last words were a humble prayer! 
 Answer me, all noble men, all saintly women, who have 
 gone to rest! Has she not loved her throne? Answer me, 
 soldiers, and patriots, and statesmen! Answer me from 
 your graves, Chatham, and Pitt, and Fox, and Canning, 
 and Mansfield, and Palmerston! Has she not loved her 
 Bible? Answer me, ye who broke the fetters of the slave, 
 Wilberforce, and Macaulay, and Buxton, and Gran vi lie 
 Sharp; and Livingstone, who spent his life in duty; and 
 Lawrence, who feared man so little because he feared God 
 so much! Not in Westminster Abbey, not with the tombs 
 and memorials of the sainted dead, who based all the 
 grandeur and all the glory of England on the awful holiness 
 of the altar and the inviolable sanctity of the domestic 
 hearth, will I doubt that, in spite of torpid indifference, 
 in spite of our unworthiness, in spite of the seducing tones 
 in which atheism appeals to the pride and to the passions 
 of mankind, England will remain true to her God, faithful 
 to her Scriptures, loyal to her throne. Surely, to doubt it 
 were well-nigh to make the crusaders start from their marble 
 tombs. But I will tell you how to avert the possibility of 
 that day, how to keep England true to her Church, and to 
 her faith. It is this : Live as Christians, as true Christians. 
 Live as men who do verily believe that Christianity is not 
 only a doctrine, but a life. The sword of England's power 
 may be blunted, but, if 'she be innocent, the silver shield of 
 her innocence can never be pierced. Her one unconquera- 
 ble source of strength has ever been the faithfulness of her 
 sons. Live as her faithful sons, and the floods of advanc-
 
 ATHEISM. , 47 
 
 ing atheism shall ebb away like a broken wave, dashed on 
 the rock of Christ into spray upon the mist, driven into 
 foul scum and empty bubbles upon the shore. Live the 
 Christian life, believe in God not as demons which shudder 
 but as sons who love, and then you may smile when French 
 savans and German scientists tell you that Christianity is 
 dead. Christianity dead! When once Christianity is dead, 
 the world will be twice dead, a wandering star to which is 
 reserved the blackness of darkness forever. But lift your 
 eyes, lift holy hands to the God who made you, and Chris- 
 tianity shall never die. It shall grow younger with years. 
 It shall deepen in faith and wisdom, in dominion and power, 
 in purity and peace. The dew of her birth shall be of the 
 womb of the morning; and they who believe and live in 
 her, shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and as 
 the stars for ever and ever.
 
 HISTORY. 
 
 "The God that made the world . . . made of one every nation of men, having 
 determined their appointed seasons; that they should seek God, if haply they 
 might feel after Him, and find Him." ACTS xviL 24, 26, 27. 
 
 IT seems to me of special importance in days of increasing 
 doubt to point out the many voices in which God speaks to 
 us. The great lessons in His sacred Book do not stand 
 alone. They are illustrated and re-enforced by His lessons 
 in other and widely different books. There is another 
 teacher of mankind, History. History means God as 
 manifested in His dealings with the race of man. But let 
 me from the first entreat you to believe that now and always 
 it will be my desire to teach God's grace, that it may help 
 us to be better men, and, therefore, also better citizens, 
 "profitable members of the Church and Commonwealth, and 
 hereafter partakers of the immortal glory of the Resurrec- 
 tion." 
 
 And where, let me ask, could History be more fitly 
 spoken of as a source of divine teaching than at Westmin- 
 ster Abbey, which is the most historic church in all the 
 world? There, at the very centre of the history of the Eng- 
 lish people, a history as sacred and as instructive as any 
 which Scripture tells, for eleven centuries at least have our 
 annals been more or less closely connected with the sacred- 
 ness of this spot. No building in the world not St. 
 Peter's at Rome, not the cathedrals of Florence, or Milan, 
 or Rheims, not the Kremlin at Moscow, not the Escorial 
 of Spain, not the Kaaba at Mecca ,can show us such a sue-
 
 HISTORY. J.Q 
 
 cession of historic scenes, so rich in interest and pathos. 
 Nowhere " has human sympathy been poured forth in such 
 torrents, in ways so great and various, and over so vast an 
 epoch of time." In yonder chapel lie the bones of the 
 saintly Confessor; there is 
 
 " The base, foul stone, made precious by the foil 
 Of England's chair " ; 
 
 there, too, are the tombs of kings and queens which were 
 venerable when Shakspere wrote. Let us enter this hal- 
 lowed place. Yonder is the helmet that gleamed at Agin- 
 court, and the sword that conquered France. There is 
 the first contemporary portrait of any English sovereign, 
 of Richard II., baptized, crowned, wedded, buried, in this 
 Abbey, and in part its builder. On the walls of yonder 
 aisle are the sculptured shields of Barbarossa, of St. Louis, 
 of Simon de Montfort. On yonder spot has every English 
 sovereign of England been crowned. There Plantagenets 
 and Tudors were anointed; there sat, clothed in white satin, 
 the king whose head fell on the scaffold; there the weight 
 of the crown left a red scar on the forehead of Queen Anne; 
 there, fifty years ago, sat the young girl who since then has 
 reigned longer than any king except Henry III. and George 
 III., and, by God's blessing, far more happily than 
 they. Your feet are on an empire's dust. On all sides 
 are the memorials of the statesmen, the soldiers, the 
 sailors, the musicians, the poets, the orators, who have 
 made this nation great, and kept it so. All this magnifi- 
 cent pageant, starting, as it were, into life from the con- 
 secrated dust around us, does it mean nothing? Is it 
 only a confused phantasmagoria of meaningless shadows? 
 God forbid!
 
 I50 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 You might say, perhaps, that History is a phenomenon 
 so vast, so complicated, that we can make nothing of 
 it; that our knowledge of it is, at the best, quite fragmen- 
 tary; and that even of that very partial knowledge much is 
 imperfect and much uncertain. There are whole nations, 
 whole races, whole dynasties of kings, over whom "the 
 iniquity of oblivion has blindly scattered her poppy." 
 "What is History," asked Napoleon I., "but a fiction 
 agreed upon?" "Don't read me History," said Sir 
 Robert Walpole, for twenty-one years Prime Minister of 
 England, "for I know that that can't be true." The an- 
 swer to such remarks is that History may be uncertain in 
 thousands of minor details, but it is not uncertain in its 
 wider issues. History is like a battle. It sways to and 
 fro, and is full of shocks and flank movements, retreats and 
 advances, rout and resistance, utterly confusing to those 
 who take part in it. Nevertheless, we know in the evening 
 which side has lost or won. It is like the sea upon the 
 shore. You can scarcely tell at first what each wave is 
 doing; but wait for a few moments, and you will not fail to 
 recognize whether the tide be in ebb or flow. So is it with 
 the annals of mankind. We are each of us units in an 
 immense procession passing for a brief moment between 
 the darkness of birth and the darkness of the grave. We 
 do but emerge for one gleaming instant between the two 
 eternities, on our way from God to God; but as surely as 
 the changes of this planet are chronicled upon its tablets 
 of rock, so surely does each generation leave behind it the 
 traces of its thoughts, and words, and deeds. And these, 
 too, are "written for our learning." Much of the Bible is 
 a History, and all History is a Bible. 
 
 Of many attempts to read aright the meaning of His-
 
 HISTORY. j- r 
 
 tory, some have naturally been partial or erroneous; and of 
 these I may notice two. 
 
 Fifteen hundred years ago, when the flood of barbarian 
 nations was surging round the empire, and had burst even 
 upon the gates of Rome, there lived a great Father of the 
 Church, who was bishop of the African town of Hippo. 
 The Vandals had been introduced into Africa by Count 
 Boniface. They had sacked Carthage, and were besieging 
 the town of which Augustine was bishop. To a despond- 
 ent mind it might well have seemed as though Christianity 
 itself had failed, as though the cross would be overborne 
 by floods of heresy or heathenism; nay, even as if, in the 
 wreck of civilization and all social institutions, the end of 
 the world had come. But the faith of Augustine was not 
 shaken. He wrote his famous "City of God," to prove, 
 even in those gloomy times, that "the world and man are 
 governed by a divine Providence." But he looked upon 
 mankind as falling into two irreconcilably hostile camps, 
 the City of God, the City of Satan, the one destined to end- 
 less glory and victory, the other mere fuel for the flame. 
 The view is but one-sided. With far larger insight and 
 loftier philosophy had St. Paul taught the philosophers of 
 Athens that God hath made of one all nations, and ap- 
 pointed to each their times, and made them all His com- 
 mon care. The lines drawn by Augustine were too hard 
 and fast. He held the narrow, unscriptural maxim that 
 "outside the Church there is no salvation." He saw that 
 in mankind there is a solidarity of guilt: he failed to see 
 that there is^also a solidarity of redemption. The history 
 of the nations is not the mere story of a handful saved from 
 universal deluge, any more than it is the chaos of madness, 
 the tissue of absurdities, which Goethe saw in it. God is
 
 I52 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 not the Father of the elect only, but the Father of whom 
 all fatherhood is named. The Saviour of mankind said to 
 his apostles, " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto 
 me." Our prayer is "that it may please Thee to have mercy 
 upon all men," and "God willeth all men to be saved." 
 
 Again, if Augustine, perhaps still unconsciously in- 
 fluenced by the deep-seated Manichaeism of his earlier days, 
 saw in mankind only an elect few and a ruined multitude, 
 a cynical and stormy gospel of modern days looks on man- 
 kind as only noticeable for the sake of its great men. This 
 was the teaching of Carlyle. "Two hundred thousand 
 men," said Napoleon to Prince Metternich, "what are two 
 hundred thousand men to me? " This view is not only 
 false: it is also ignoble and fatal. Great men are but the 
 children of their time, influenced by the spirit of millions 
 of their unknown contemporaries. The multitude are not 
 mere ciphers, the counters of the tyrant, the despot's slaves. 
 The work of God in History is not to elevate this or that 
 man like a colossus, and leave all the rest to peep about for 
 dishonorable graves : it is to bless and ennoble the whole 
 family of man. "Mankind has but one single object, 
 mankind itself; and that object has but one single instru- 
 ment, mankind again." Alone of all religions the Gospel, 
 which has given to mankind a nobler destiny than to be 
 the footstool of a few, is infinitely tender to the individual 
 also. He who has made "all nations" is not far from 
 "every one of us." God does not care, Christ did not die, 
 for great men only. Their greatness may be no greatness 
 at all to God. We weigh men by the dust-grains of rank, 
 or measure by the molehill altitudes of human distinction. 
 He, weighing in the balances of the sanctuary the eternal 
 differences of holiness and vice, calls not many rich, not
 
 HISTORY. j- 3 
 
 many mighty, not many noble. "He putteth down the 
 mighty from their seat, and exalteth the humble and meek." 
 God cares, then, for all mankind. He cares for each 
 individual man. What lessons may all nations, what les- 
 sons may England, what lessons may each man, learn from 
 God's dealings with them, as recorded in the history of 
 mankind? We may learn, first, the refutation of the fool 
 when he hath said .in his heart, "There is no God." The 
 blind man might as well assert that there is no sun. All 
 History, all Scripture, all Nature, all experience, refute 
 him. How can any man of ordinary intelligence study 
 History, and not see and hear God in it, whether in the 
 hurricane, in the fire, in the earthquake, or in the still, small 
 voice? When Frederic William of Prussia ordered his 
 chaplain to prove in one sentence the truth of religion, he 
 answered, and the answer is full of meaning, " The Jews, 
 your Majesty"; but God was not more in the history of 
 ancient Palestine than in that of modern Europe. Take 
 but a single proof, which was alone sufficient to convince 
 the great German historian, Julius Muller. Nearly nine- 
 teen centuries ago, in the most despised village, of the 
 most despised province, of a most despised and conquered 
 nation, lived One who said to His few disciples, "I am the 
 Son of God." For thirty years, for nearly His whole life, 
 He was the carpenter of Nazareth. For three years only 
 He lived and taught, mostly in poor and narrow Galilee; 
 and for one of those years at least He was a hunted fugitive 
 in half-heathen places, with a price upon His head. Priests 
 and Pharisees, the nobles and the masses, Jews and Gen- 
 tiles, combined to slander, to scourge, to buffet, at last to 
 put Him to a death of shame. He left but an obscure 
 handful of frightened Galilean followers. Is any man so
 
 I54 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 senseless as to believe that, without the manifest aid of 
 God, those few, poor, ignorant, provincial peasants could 
 have imposed on the scornful and majestic world the endless 
 adoration of one who had been crucified by a Roman official 
 as a Jewish malefactor? A paltry band of fishermen and 
 publicans, all the intellect, all the culture, all the religion 
 of the world, against them! Rank spat on them. Intellect 
 disdained them. The mob roared to fling them to the 
 lions. The swords of thirty legions were bared to smite 
 them to the dust. Without art, without science, without 
 force or wealth, their faith grovelled and smouldered for 
 two centuries among slaves and artisans, and more than 
 one emperor thought that he had trampled them out for 
 ever. And yet, before three centuries were over, emperors 
 had assumed their hated cross, armies had laid their weap- 
 ons at their feet, and "the most majestic of empires, arrayed 
 in the plenitude of worldly power," had bowed down to wor- 
 ship Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Well might the 
 baffled and dying Julian have exclaimed, "O Galilean, 
 thou hast conquered ! " Could there be two more stu- 
 pendous proofs of the presence of God in History than 
 Christianity and Christendom? What can account for so 
 superb a triumph of the merest human weakness? One fact 
 only, the power of Christ's Resurrection. "Not by 
 might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of 
 hosts." 
 
 And History, which is thus a teacher of God, is also 
 a preacher of judgment. I know not whether the tale be 
 true that, when, after the bloody orgies of the Revolution, 
 the spell of terror was broken which had paralyzed the 
 energies of France, and Robespierre was being dragged on 
 the tumbril to the guillotine, his jaw shattered by a pistol-
 
 HISTORY. I55 
 
 shot, I know not whether it be true that an old man, ap- 
 proaching the tumbril, said sadly to the miserable tyrant, 
 "Yes! Robespierre, there is a God"; but certainly all 
 History reverberates, as in thunders of Sinai, the truth, 
 "Verily, there is a God that judgeth the earth." How 
 often has God confounded the Babels, and dashed in pieces 
 the invincible despotisms of the world! Read the insolent 
 words of Sennacherib, when he threatened Judah with his 
 immense array, and how Isaiah defied him, and how the 
 Lord withered his army in a single night with one blast of 
 the simoom. Read the terror of the youth when the hosts 
 of Syria encompassed Dothan, and Elisha, opening his eyes, 
 showed him the hills round about the city, full of horses 
 and chariots of fire. Read how on the medal which com- 
 memorated the destruction of the Spanish Armada was 
 written, "Flavit et dissipati sunt," "He sent forth His 
 wind and scattered them." "You trust," said Oliver Crom- 
 well, "to the ditch which guards your coasts. I tell you 
 that, if you break God's laws, it is not your ditch that will 
 save you." It was a wiser saying than the insolent sneer 
 of Napoleon, who said, "I observe that God is usually on 
 the side of the strongest battalions." And how did God 
 answer the taunt? In the year 1812, with bursts of cheer- 
 ing, the glittering files of France and her tributary kings, 
 to the number of six hundred thousand men, crossed the 
 Niemen to invade Russia. They took Smolensko, they won 
 the bloody battle of Borodino, they took Moscow. Then 
 God sent down upon them the soft, feathery flakes of feeble, 
 innocent snow. The snows of God, the soft snows which a 
 breath can melt, were too much for the strongest battalions. 
 The French armies perished by myriads; and the Cossacks, 
 with their lances, thrust out the miserable, frozen, famine-
 
 r -g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 stricken remnant whom the northern winter had not slain. 
 God was not, that time, on the side of the strongest battal- 
 ions. Alexander of Russia understood the truth, if Napo- 
 leon did not; and on his commemorative medal were the 
 words, "Not to me, not to us, but to Thy name." 
 
 Once more, History, the revealer of God, the revealer 
 of judgment, is also the preacher of great moral verities. 
 Apply the test to any nation you like, in any age you like, 
 and you will find that the strength of nations .depends 
 neither on their gold, nor their iron, nor their trade, nor 
 their armies, but on the faithfulness of their sons to justice 
 and the moral law. A nation morally corrupt is always a 
 nation physically weak. The change may come in a few 
 years. When, for instance, was England at the very nadir 
 of her degradation? It was when she was also at the nadir 
 of her morals. It was in the days of the Stuart Restora- 
 tion. Harlots toyed with her crown in the gilded chambers 
 of Whitehall. The dissolute king was the perjured pen- 
 sioner of France. A few years earlier it seemed as if, under 
 the stern and righteous rule of Puritanism, the unclean 
 spirit had been cast out ; but now that unclean spirit re- 
 turned, and with him seven other spirits more wicked than 
 himself. Under the Puritans the name of England was 
 feared and honored in every land. Under Charles II. it 
 became a by word and a hissing. 
 
 In 1652 Blake, the great admiral of the Commonwealth, 
 began to found our naval supremacy. In 1653 he won 
 against the Dutch the great battle of Dortland. In 1655 he 
 crushed the pirates of Tunis and Algiers. In 1656 he 
 destroyed the silver-fleets of Spain. He was buried in 
 Westminster Abbey by Cromwell; and in 1661 his body, 
 with impotent contumely, was dug up by Charles II. A
 
 HISTORY. I57 
 
 few years later, under such a king, and in that foul orgy 
 of national reaction from Puritan morality, the Dutch, 
 whom Blake had swept into darkness, burned our English 
 shipping in the very mouth of the Thames. Yes! national 
 crime is a thing which God will deal with. Did not God 
 tell the Jews five thousand years ago that, if they committed 
 iniquity, ten thousand of them should flee at the rebuke of 
 ten, at the rebuke of one should they flee? Take another 
 instance. Why did a handful of English traders, fugitives 
 from the cruelty of kings and priests, face and overthrow in 
 America the mighty feudalism of France, the brutal bigotry 
 of Spain? Because God had reserved for the New World a 
 better destiny than the tender mercies of the tyrant and the 
 Inquisitor. History, then, is, as a living historian has told 
 us, "a voice ever sounding across the centuries the eternal 
 distinctions of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners 
 change, creeds rise and fall; but the moral law is written 
 on the tablets of eternity. For every false word and un- 
 righteous deed, for cruelty or oppression, for lust or vanity, 
 the price has to be paid at last. Justice and truth alone 
 endure and live. Injustice and falsehood may be long- 
 lived, but doomsday conies to them at last." 
 
 History is an unbroken continuity of causes and effects, 
 and to those causes and effects every one of us contributes. 
 Good and bad results are not accidental : they are the nec- 
 essary consequences of obeying or of breaking the great 
 laws of life. Social wrongs end in social revolutions. 
 National iniquity means national decay. Nudity and rags 
 mean indolence. Disease is, in thousands of cases, intem- 
 perance and impurity taken at a later stage. Man is born 
 for holiness,' as the trees of the forest for light. The his- 
 tory of the world is, as Schiller sang, the judgment of the
 
 I5 g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 world. It is God's constant decision between our will and 
 His will. It is His continuous condemnation of human 
 egotism, of drunkenness, and theft, and hatred, and lust, 
 and crime. 
 
 And if all this be so, if History be indeed, as Fichte 
 said, "a constant inflowing of God into human affairs " ; if it 
 be, as Vico said, "a civil theology of divine Providence," 
 we have much to fear and much to do. There is an awful 
 accumulation of poverty and pauperism, an ever growing 
 mass of dark, subterranean, impenetrable blackguardism, 
 the ever-deepening misery of multitudes, crushed into filthy 
 streets, under a foul air, "in a condition as cruel as that of 
 a Roman slave, and more squalid than that of a South Sea 
 Islander." In the upper classes there is far too much of lax 
 morals, gilded frivolity, voluptuous self-indulgence, callous 
 selfishness ; and in the other extreme, there are slums where 
 men never use the name of God but to give emphasis to a 
 curse or gain credence for a lie. In those slums thrives 
 and breeds the triple-headed Gorgon-monster of infidelity, 
 impurity, and drink. It is little that any one of us may 
 seem able to do amidst these growing perils; yet not one 
 of us can evade the responsibilities which God has laid 
 upon us. Every one of you, just as much as any minister 
 of religion, every one of you is a priest of God; every 
 one of you is in his measure accountable to God for his 
 neighbour and his brother; every one of you the boy at 
 school, the clerk in his office, the youth in the shop, the 
 employer of labour, the father of a family is helping 
 either to wreck others on the reef or to steer them to the 
 port. Which is each of you, a priest of God or a priest 
 of devils? The cruel man, who lives in the spirit of hatred 
 and malice, is a priest, not of God, but of Moloch. The
 
 HISTORY. , 59 
 
 base, greedy, dishonest man, who only lives to get money, 
 is a priest not of God, but of Belial. The corrupt, unclean, 
 dissolute man is a priest, not of God, but of Beelzebub, the 
 god of filth. Every one among you who is a better and 
 gambler, or a cheat, or a drunkard, or a liar, or a slanderer, 
 or a fornicator and corrupter of others, is hastening the 
 ruin of the nation while he consummates his own : he is a 
 curse to the world as well as to himself. It is a devil's 
 proverb which says of any one that "he is no man's enemy 
 but his own." If he be his own enemy he is the enemy of 
 others. His bad example is a spiritual impoisonment : it 
 is the teaching of a sacrilege; it is the worship of a demon. 
 Vice is not only an evil to the transgressor, but also a crime 
 against the feeble whom he helps to corrupt. We live in 
 a dangerous time, and it may be too late to avert some of 
 our dangers. Blinded by passion, steeped in ignorance, 
 having lost or rendered flaccid the moral fibre of old days, 
 we may with a light heart ruin kingdoms and barter away 
 the inheritance of ages. England may become the worst 
 bane of England's greatness, and may, 
 
 " Like a forlorn and desperate castaway, 
 Do shameful execution on herself." 
 
 But whatever may be coming upon us, whatever be right, 
 whatever wrong, we may take this comfort. If we continue 
 a righteous, God-fearing nation, we can never wholly be 
 cast down. The best Christian is also the best citizen. He 
 who does his duty from day to day to the best of his power 
 as he sees it; he who has "a strong will, the servant of a 
 tender conscience " ; he who loves and fears God with all his 
 heart, and loves his neighbour as himself; he who, in a pure 
 and manly life of such services as he has it in his power to
 
 j5o QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 render to his fellow-men, strives always, and with all his 
 might, "to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk hum- 
 bly with his God," that man, as he is a true Christian, so 
 also is he a true patriot, a true supporter and defender of 
 his country. Such a man need fear nothing. God will 
 guard him from all evil in this life or overrule it to his 
 deeper blessedness; and, when the last wave of death's river 
 has closed over him, he shall hear the voice of his Saviour 
 saying to him: "Well done, good and faithful servant. 
 Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."
 
 ART. 
 
 " Then wrought Bezaleel and Aholiab, and every wise-hearted man, in whom 
 the Lord put wisdom and understanding." Ex. xxxvL I. 
 
 ART is no mere amusement for the idle or ostentation 
 for the luxurious, but in past ages has been, and still is, 
 a consummate teacher of mankind. And let me say at 
 the outset that I look on all true and worthy Art as a thing 
 essentially sacred. There is no error more vulgar and 
 more benumbing than that which cleaves a chasm between 
 the sacred and the secular, and thus prevents religion 
 from suffusing and interpenetrating the whole realm of 
 daily life. True Art comes from the Spirit of God. It is 
 the outcome of an exquisite faculty, which, like "every good 
 gift, and every perfect gift, cometh clown from above, from 
 that Father of lights with whom is no variableness or 
 shadow of turning." Art, as a faculty, is as sacred as any 
 of the highest impulses of humanity. Whether, as the 
 Greek legend says, it sprang from love, or from some other 
 noble passion, it has its roots in the depths of man's being, 
 and is well-nigh as ancient as his race. 
 
 And, as the technical skill of Art is here attributed 
 to the Spirit of the Lord, and is therefore sacred, so, too, 
 is the right aim of Art. We fatally degrade the conception 
 of Art if we take of it the ignorant view that the essence 
 of Art is imitation. He has abdicated the office of an 
 artist who simply repeats for the mass of men what they 
 see for themselves. It is true that no less a thinker than 
 
 if
 
 jg 2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Plato fell into this error. He expels artists from his 
 model Republic, on the ground that truth (i.e., essential 
 reality) is the one object of man's search, and that the only 
 abstract and ultimate truth is to be found in the divine 
 Ideas, which alone represent absolute Being. Regarding 
 all outward phenomena as mere material copies of tran- 
 scendent facts which exist in the mind of God, he regarded 
 the artistic representations of outward things as being but 
 copies of copies, and therefore twice removed from truth. 
 But a Pheidias or an Apelles might have answered him, 
 " So far from being the copyists of copies, we aim both to 
 interpret and to get nearer the divine Ideal. We, no less 
 than the poets, xrtpoietai (makers): we do not imitate, but 
 in our measure we create." Art is indeed the representa- 
 tion of the ideal under the forms of the actual. "It con- 
 ceives of unity beneath variety; of the general within the 
 particular; of the moral within the physical; of the spirit- 
 ual in the material ; of the infinite beyond the finite. We 
 witness to, we prophesy of, the restoration of the eternal 
 beauty and harmony which sin has marred." " How beauti- 
 ful," says St. Gregory of Nyssa, "are the imitations of 
 beautiful things, when they preserve visibly the impress of 
 the beauty of the prototype ! " When Flaxman walked 
 through the lowest slums of London, he perpetually stopped 
 to point out to his companion the ideal beauty which 
 gleamed out of the rags and dirt of the poor squalid chil- 
 dren in the streets. It is the function of the artist to rec- 
 ognize and reproduce this hidden and underlying loveli- 
 ness; to shadow forth the perfect in the marred; to make 
 the trivial rise to the expression of the sublime. 
 
 "And thus 'mid mire and dirt e'en here 
 The lilies of God's love appear."
 
 ART. I63 
 
 Great artists have always felt this sacredness of their 
 function. When the Greek sculptor was asked why he 
 took such pains with the hair of a statue of which the face 
 alone would be visible to the spectator, and that high up on 
 the temple-front, where few would see it, he nobly replied, 
 "The gods will see it." "Since" so ran the statutes 
 of the guild of Sienese painters in 1355 "since we are 
 teachers to unlearned men, and since no undertaking, how- 
 ever small, can be begun or ended without the power to do, 
 without knowledge, and without true love of the work, and 
 since in God every perfection is eminently united, we will 
 earnestly ask aid of the divine grace, and begin by a dedi- 
 cation to the honor of the name of the most Holy Trinity." 
 
 And Art, thus sacred as an exquisite, God-given fac- 
 ulty, and as the striving after the ideal, is sacred also as 
 the expression of human feeling. It has been denned as 
 revealing "the consciousness of emotion in the presence 
 of the phenomena of life and nature." It springs from the 
 depths of personality, and expresses its infinite variations. 
 It is not only a transcript of the facts of nature, but of 
 those facts bathed in the darkening or illuminating atmos- 
 phere of the artist's thoughts. In the man's works we see 
 the man himself. In the sunny tenderness and vernal in- 
 nocence of Fra Angelico; in the pure religious aim and 
 perfect artistic power of Giovanni Bellini; in the sweet 
 symbolism of Carpaccio; in the chastened severity of Ber- 
 nardino Luini; in the stern, sad spirit of Michael Angelo, 
 the Dante of Sculpture; in the radiant and love-compel- 
 ling serenity of Raphael; in the gorgeous pomp and luxuri- 
 ous prodigality of Rubens; in the gloom and pathos of 
 Rembrandt; in the stormy splendour and final ruin of 
 Turner, we see the reflexion of the characters and desti-
 
 j^, QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 nies of men who, in setting forth for us the gloom and 
 glory of life or nature, set forth also the gloom or the glory 
 of their own souls ; and that is one reason why the interest 
 of pictures must ever be deep as the interests of life. It is 
 a solemn thought to the artist himself that his ethos, his 
 moral tendency, unconsciously, yet inevitably, repeats itself 
 in the work of his hands. If he be swayed by greed of 
 gain, by condescension to a vulgar desire for popularity, 
 by bitter envy or by unhallowed passion, these faults and 
 vices, no less than his pulses of nobleness and gleams of 
 holy aspiration, will in silence, yet with all the certainty 
 of fate, tinge every canvas which he paints. Yes: the 
 character, the religion, of a painter tell upon his works. 
 "Believe me," says Sir Frederick Leighton, "whatever of 
 dignity, whatever of strength, we have within us, will dig- 
 nify and make strong the labours of our hands : whatever 
 littleness degrades our spirit will lessen them and drag 
 them down. Whatever noble fire is in our hearts will burn 
 also in our work; whatever purity is ours will chasten and 
 exalt it; for as we are, so our work is; and what we sow 
 in our lives, that beyond a doubt we shall reap, for good 
 or for ill, in the strengthening or defacing of whatever 
 gifts have fallen to our lot." And this is why the poet 
 Wordsworth wrote to Sir George Beaumont : 
 
 " High is our calling, friend ! Poetic art, 
 Whether the instrument of words she use 
 Or pencil, pregnant with ethereal hues, 
 Hath need of mind and soul in every part 
 Heroically fashioned, to infuse 
 Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse." 
 
 And do not think that these are only Academic theses. 
 You may see them illustrated with fatal force on the walls
 
 ART. I6s 
 
 of our picture galleries. Contrast, for instance, two painters, 
 both eminent, but oh! how different, Salvator Rosa and 
 Fra Angelico di Fiesole. "Salvator," says our great art 
 critic, "saw early what was gross and terrible. His temper 
 confirmed itself in evil, and became more and more fierce 
 and morose. The gloom gained upon him, and grasped him. 
 Of all men whose work I have ever studied, he gives me 
 most distinctly the idea of a lost spirit, 'ce damne Salva- 
 tor,' as Michelet pitilessly calls him. The religion of the 
 earth is a horror to him. He gnashes his teeth at it, rages 
 at it, mocks and gibes at it." But now contrast this reveller 
 in the horrible, this painter of ghastliness and desolation, 
 of the vulture's beak and the bandit's prey, with that other 
 painter, the angel faces of whose pure dreams delight us 
 still; who painted "beings so fervent that they are beau- 
 tiful, so nobly beautiful that they are good." Angelico 
 painted heavenly pictures because he lived a heavenly life, 
 a life uncankered by envy, unruffled by contention, unde- 
 filed by lust. Earth for him was heaven, because he had 
 reflected some of heaven's azure in his own peaceful soul. 
 He could paint angels, because he saw them, and lived 
 with them, and heard their warbling melodies. Under 
 every cypress avenue they walked. "He had seen their 
 white robes, whiter than the dawn, at his bedside, as he 
 awoke in early summer. They had sung with him, one at 
 each side, when his voice failed for joy at sweet matin and 
 vesper time; and his eyes were blinded by their wings 
 when the sun set behind the hills of Luino." On Salva- 
 tor' s pictures are the traces of the horror and malignity 
 which had defiled his soul; on Angelico's, the sign of a 
 calm and heavenly frame. Salvator sought a home among 
 the brigands of the Abruzzi, Angelico in the peaceful clois-
 
 j65 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 ters of San Marco. "He who would practise the art of 
 painting," he said, "has need of quiet; he who would do 
 the work of Christ must dwell continually with Him." 
 In this contrast, do you not see another element of the per- 
 manence with which Art appeals to our sympathies, because 
 it is an eternal manifestation of that which has for us all 
 undying interest, the human soul? 
 
 Thus far, then, we have seen in the abstract the ele- 
 ments of the intrinsic sacredness of Art in its God-granted 
 faculty; in its striving after the ideal; in its expression of 
 the artist's soul. Let us proceed to illustrate some of its 
 various functions. 
 
 You know to how great an extent in all ages paint- 
 ing and sculpture have been occupied with portraiture; the 
 simple reproduction, as it might seem to careless observers, 
 of the human face divine. Now, has portraiture a mere 
 historic interest? Does it merely gratify our curiosity to 
 see how this or that man looked whose name we have 
 heard? Even if that were all, the manner and surround- 
 ings in which men have desired that they and their fami- 
 lies should be painted are not without significance. Stand 
 before the Madonna of the younger Holbein in the Dres- 
 den Gallery and see how the burgomaster Meyer desired 
 that he and his should be painted, all in deepest reverence 
 and devotion, alike the strong youth and the aged grand- 
 mother kneeling humbly before the Heavenly Child. Or, 
 in the same gallery, see how Paul Cagliari, of Verona, 
 could imagine no happier or sweeter way of painting those 
 noble Venetian boys and girls of his, with all their varying 
 shades of character, than by having them presented by 
 Faith, Hope, and Charity to the Virgin and her Babe, and 
 welcomed into her gentle presence by saints and angels.
 
 ART. l6? 
 
 Might not modern portraiture and modern society learn 
 something from this simple faithfulness? Might we not 
 profitably observe that the painters of Venice represent, her 
 doges, not with all the splendour of fashion and upholstery, 
 but "kneeling crownless, returning thanks to God for His 
 help, or as priests interceding for the nation in its afflic- 
 tion "? Is it to our credit that to represent us in religious 
 attitudes would appear almost shocking to a society desti- 
 tute of faith? Does it show our superiority that we so 
 often choose portraits which show us men and women not 
 of God's making, but of the tailor's or milliner's, mere lay 
 figures for the display of embroideries and satins, of rings 
 and fans? But, quite apart from these surroundings, every 
 true portrait is the manifestation of a human soul in its 
 prophecy or its history, its sorrow or triumph, its benefi- 
 cenca or baseness, 
 
 "Each face obedient to its passion's law, 
 Each passion clear proclaimed without a tongue." 
 
 It is the object of the great painter, not to present the 
 mere mask of the features, whether noble or vapid, sincere 
 or sly, ploughed by passion or smoothed by hypocrisy, but 
 rather to add the very flash of life, to look through the 
 eyes into the very soul, to get divinely behind the veil of 
 flesh, and to present for all time the inmost and immortal 
 being of the man. It was so that Raphael painted Pope 
 Julius II., and Carpaccio the doge Mocenigo, and Giovanni 
 Bellini the doge Loredano, The faces may not be in the 
 least beautiful, and yet the portraits will live in the ad- 
 miration of all time. They give the character, not only 
 the features, because they express not the vapidity of fash- 
 ion, or the insolence of self-assertion, not an exhibition of
 
 jgg QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 smirking vanity, dull pomposity, or presumptuous ostenta- 
 tion, but the human being in the image of God, and at his 
 best. 
 
 Again, Art is the reflection of History: it is an il- 
 lustrative chapter in the autobiography of nations. For 
 Art has in it an element of the inevitable. " By a neces- 
 sity deep as the world," says Emerson, "the artist's pen or 
 chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic 
 hand to describe a line on the history of the human race." 
 An artist must be in some respects the child of the society 
 to which he belongs, yet he may rise immeasurably above 
 its vulgar average, and, concentrating all that is noblest in 
 its impulses, he may help to elevate its entire standard. 
 And, besides this general influence, an artist, if he will not 
 sink into the mere pet or favorite of his age, may become 
 a mighty prophet and preacher against its vices. In Mr. 
 Ruskin's house I once sat gazing on Turner's picture of 
 the slave ship. It is the picture of a black slaver chased 
 by a frigate, under a lurid sky, and flinging the slaves 
 overboard into the lurid sea. The horrors of the picture 
 reveal, interpret, emphasize, the horrors of the fact. The 
 sky and the multitudinous sea are bathed, are incarnadined, 
 with blood, the blood of vengeance, the blood of wrong. 
 That lurid, blood-red picture, overwhelming in its solem- 
 nity and shuddering intuition of wrong, is Turner's way of 
 saying to his fellow-citizens, "Verily, there is a God that 
 judgeth the earth." It is his way of helping to educate the 
 national conscience. "Yes," said Mr. Ruskin, "that is 
 Turner's sermon against the slave-trade " ; and, limited as 
 are the means with which Art works, no sermon more 
 awfully effective was ever preached. 
 
 Again, Art may be in a very high sense an inter-
 
 ART. 
 
 I6 9 
 
 preter of Life, of life in all its phases, various as the 
 bosom of the sea, its storm and calm, its splendour and its 
 squalor, its gladness and desolations. The great French 
 painter, Millet, who died twelve years ago, says that, when 
 he saw Michael Angelo's drawing of a man in a swoon, he 
 seemed to touch the heart and hear the speech of that 
 great sculptor, and see how, with a single figure, he could 
 personify the great and the good of all Humanity. And it 
 was Millet's own work, amid the insult and neglect of a 
 generation which now flings its useless roses upon his 
 tomb, to preach to France two lessons which she most 
 sorely needs, the lesson of the intrinsic grandeur of man- 
 hood, of the infinite sanctity of toil. At this moment a 
 writer who has prostituted the gift of genius to the service 
 of corruption has deluged Europe with romances which 
 represent the life of the French peasantry as a nightmare 
 and leprosy of foulness. "His women are mostly maenads, 
 his men satyrs," and, "according to his perverted gospel, 
 human nature is simply bestial when it is not infernal." 
 The eye only sees what it brings with it the power of see- 
 ing. That is what M. Zola has seen; but, happily, two 
 true artists have seen that men and women, peasants though 
 they be, are not all akin to the tiger and the ape, but that 
 humble life still abounds in purity and faithfulness. Look 
 at the little pictures of Edouard Frere in their beauty, dig- 
 nity, and tender lowliness. They are pictures in which he 
 breathes the everlasting peace of heaven round the village 
 children, by whom, if she can save them from the taint of 
 animal degradation, France may yet be redeemed from her 
 decadence. Take his little pictures of prayer, in which the 
 dear, bowed, patient face and folded hands show us that to 
 the humble peasant mother her little ones are as surely in
 
 I7Q QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 God's presence as if the poor cottage floor were the rock 
 of Sinai. "He will do more for his country," it has been 
 said, u if he can lead her to look where he looks, and to 
 love where he loves, than all the proud painters who ever 
 gave lustre to her state or endurance to her glory." And 
 the same high message was told by Francois Millet, with 
 yet greater originality and power. He had seen from in- 
 fancy the beauty of holiness in the Breton hovel, and he 
 deliberately faced starvation rather than pander to the 
 voluptuous baseness of his day. His pictures now sell for 
 hundreds of pounds, but in his own day he had once to sell 
 six drawings for a pair of shoes. "Fra^ois," said his old 
 peasant grandmother to him, "follow the example of that 
 man who said, 'I paint for eternity.' " Sad his pictures are, 
 very sad: the toiler in the vineyard, the hoer of the clod, 
 the labour of women in field or farm; bread eaten according 
 to the primal curse or shall I call it rather the primal 
 blessing? in the sweat of the brow; hardship, monotony, 
 patient endurance, all that had been hitherto despised as 
 subject of Art. But in it all he saw true humanity and 
 great poetry, the essential dignity of man as man, the age- 
 long struggle of man's will with Nature and destiny, 
 which, without any false sentiment, without any prettifying 
 of types, may give action as heroic and beauty as rare to a 
 sower or a gleaner as to the Faun of Praxiteles or the 
 Apollo of the Belvedere. And withal, over the cry of the 
 ground, over the sadness of field and wood, over the toil 
 and suffering of man, as part of the great order of the 
 universe, he breathed, as it were, something of the eternal 
 azure, the sense of God's love shadowed in the love of wife 
 and child and home; the sense of God's Eternity burning 
 like some sure though unrisen morrow beyond his twilight 
 scenes.
 
 ART. in 
 
 And the painter is an interpreter of Nature, as well 
 as of human life. "Ah!" said Millet, "I should like 
 those who look at what I do to feel the terrors and splendours 
 of the night. One ought to be able to hear the melodies, 
 the silences, the murmurs of the air. The infinite must be 
 perceived. They tell me I see no charms in the country: 
 I see much more than charms, I see infinite glories. I see 
 the little flowers of which Christ said 'that even Solomon 
 in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' I see 
 the aureoles of the dandelions, and the sun which spreads 
 out beyond the world its glory in the clouds." And such 
 is the pre-eminent task of all true artists. They educate 
 us in the perception of beauty; 
 
 " For, don't you mark, we're made so that we love, 
 First when we see them painted, things we have passed 
 Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see." 
 
 And thus the artist lends us the help of his own intuition. 
 He opens our eyes to read, writ large over the universe, 
 God's autograph of love. We perhaps first learn truly and 
 fully to admire God's works when some brighter and less 
 world-clogged soul than ours has flung its sunlight upon 
 them. Nobly has our English school of landscape fulfilled 
 this function. It opens windows for us into the sunlight 
 from the gloom. It helps us to feel that "the world's no 
 blank for us, no blot"; that "it means intensely, and 
 means good." It educes in the region of the feeling a 
 mighty counterpoise to the atheism of the intellect. Those 
 landscapes may appeal from the syllogism of a godless 
 logic to the syllogism of a glowing faith. They show us 
 that, in the words of the Book of Wisdom, "from the 
 beauty of things visible, proportionally the Maker of them
 
 172 
 
 QUESTIONS, OF THE DAY. 
 
 is observed." "I never saw such colors in nature as you 
 represent," said some one to Turner. "No," answered the 
 great painter; "but don't you wish you could ? " "I assert 
 for myself," said the poet-painter, William Blake, "that I 
 do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is 
 hindrance, and not action. 'What? ' it will be questioned, 
 'when the sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire, 
 somewhat like a guinea?' Oh, no, no, I see an innumera- 
 ble company of the heavenly host, crying, 'Holy, holy, 
 holy is the Lord God Almighty.' I question not my cor- 
 poreal eye any more than I would question a window con- 
 cerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it." The 
 poet says that "there is no great or small," and the painter 
 teaches us this truth even in the case of things that seem 
 the smallest. He shows us the presence of God in every 
 stain of silver or orange lichen on the crag, just as the 
 fainting African traveller saw it in the single tuft of 
 emerald moss. And then 
 
 " No pebble at my feet but proves a sphere ; 
 No Chaffinch but implies the Cherubim; 
 No hum of lily-muffled bee but finds 
 Some coupling music with the spinning stars. 
 
 Earth's crammed with heaven, 
 And every common bush afire with God ; 
 But only those who see take off their shoes, 
 The rest sit round it and eat blackberries." 
 
 But the true artist makes us recognize in the loveliness 
 of created things, as. it were, one single rose flung down 
 from the summer opulence of God. As on the curtains 
 which shrouded the entrance to the Holiest, through 
 which the High Priest passed into the presence of God, 
 were woven lily, and palm, and cherubim, so the artist
 
 ART. , 73 
 
 shows us the embroideries of the arras folds of earth's 
 curtains, 
 
 " To prove what amplitude in store 
 Lies just beyond the entrance door." 
 
 And even now we have by no means reached the sum- 
 mits of Art's high power and endeavour/ She is, as we 
 have seen, the inspired interpreter of the Ideal; she is a 
 prophet of God, to unfold to common men the Sacramental 
 beauties of Nature; she has a spell to decipher the deep 
 mysteries of life. But, beyond all this, she contributes 
 greatly and powerfully to the elevation of the aim of 
 society, and to the deepest religious emotions which uplift 
 man into nearer unity with God. 
 
 I have spoken already of what Art may do as a wit- 
 ness against national sins; but must I not touch also on her 
 work in enforcing on us individually the grandeur of the 
 moral law? Among the domestic incidents and nursery 
 idylls which cover the walls of our Academies, and which 
 may at least deepen for us the spell of home affection and 
 show us how much there is of beauty and brightness to 
 gladden the sorrows of our common life, do we not constantly 
 come across some deep note of moral warning against.the 
 sins and perils alike of the society and the individual? 
 
 We know the greed and worldliness of society, and the 
 base motives which often predominate in marriage. Has 
 the painter nothing to tell us in such a picture as Mr. 
 Orchardson's " Le Manage de Convenance "? It represents 
 a husband and wife an aged roue and a woman of fashion 
 dining together in the splendid luxury of a loveless 
 home. In their faces the whole story is told. It is a 
 warning to society in all ranks. It tells that wealth, 
 sparkling wine, gems, delicate viands, unlimited magnifi-
 
 j-. QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 cence, cannot contribute one sand-grain to happiness, where 
 the world, the flesh, and the devil reign, and there is a flap- 
 ping of harpy wings about the roof. The following year 
 there was the sequel to it. It was called "After." The 
 same gorgeous room, the same luxurious table; but now 
 the husband sits- lonely in his deserted home, haunted by 
 nameless miseries, dogged by the shadows of a wasted life, 
 while "the fires of hell mix with his hearth." And are not 
 these two pictures two powerful sermons sermons needed 
 by a selfish and worldly society on the text, "Better is a 
 dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred 
 therewith " ? 
 
 There was yet a deeper lesson in another strange picture 
 by Mr. Burne Jones, called "The Depths of the Sea." 
 A mermaid, beautiful in face, but hideously repellent in 
 her scaly train, has flung her arms around a youth, and is 
 dragging him down through the green waters to her cave. 
 In her face is the intense malignity of cruel triumph and 
 cruel scorn; in the youth's face is the agony of frustration 
 and of death. And the motto below is, " Habes tota quod 
 mente petisti, Infelix! " "Thou hast what thou soughtest 
 with all thy soul, unhappy one." Oh that it were in my 
 power to preach to all young men a sermon of meaning so 
 intense as that picture! The mermaid, like the Siren of 
 mythology, like the strange woman of the Proverbs, is the 
 harlot Sense. She is the type of carnal temptation, end- 
 ing in disillusion, shame, anguish, death. It is the mean- 
 ing of that saying of the rabbis, "The demons come to us 
 smiling and beautiful: when they have done their work, 
 they drop their mask." It is the meaning of Solomon: 
 " But he knoweth not that the dead are there, and that her 
 guests are in the depths of hell." God has granted to
 
 ART. i;5 
 
 that youth his heart's desire, and sent leanness withal into 
 his bones. He has got what he passionately longed for, 
 and it is death! 
 
 Or, once more, if a youth needs not so much a warning 
 against the idolatries of sense as hope to secure the con- 
 quest over them, could he learn the lesson in a more inspir- 
 ing form than by going into our National Gallery and there 
 reading the meaning of Turner's great pictures of Apollo 
 and the Python? The youthful Sun-God, the emblem of 
 victorious purity, is seated in his circle of light, launching 
 arrow after arrow at that huge, loathly monster of corrup- 
 tion. Awful and terrible as that destructive monster looks, 
 it is but a colossal worm. When the arrow pierces it, it 
 bursts asunder in the midst. Any youth, I think, who had 
 in his soul one gleam of noble imagination might well, as 
 he looked at that picture, be inspired to hate the foulness 
 of that impurity which can so frightfully crush to death all 
 who put themselves in its power, but which is yet weak as 
 a worm to those who "walk in the light as Christ is in the 
 light," and who pierce the pestilent foulness with the 
 arrows of the dawn. 
 
 Thus, then, we have seen that Art, while merely fol- 
 lowing her own high instinct, may still climb with Moses 
 the burning crags of Sinai, and become a preacher and 
 a prophet to mankind. In indirect yet deeply effectual 
 ways, she can awaken the conscience of nations, reveal the 
 hollowness of worldly aims, teach us by nature's sunbeams 
 to climb to the Father of Lights, show us that the wages of 
 sin is death, and that God can give us the victory in Christ 
 our Lord. She can fulfil in the highest sense her ideal 
 function of "presenting to us, in many parts and fashions, 
 the dim yearning of the Universe for its divine restitution
 
 j-g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 into perfect unity with the will of God"; while, at the 
 same time, merely as a minister to our innocent and noble 
 happiness, she may in these dim cities open our windows 
 upon flashing waves, and golden headland, and purple moor, 
 and help us to hear the voices of the mountain and the sea. 
 But, besides this, she can, directly or by symbolism, enter 
 into the vestibule of theology, and give us a very gospel, 
 made more eloquent by form and color. I need hardly 
 remind you what glorious work has thus been done by Art 
 from the days of Bezaleel and Aholiab until now: by the 
 humble decorators of the Catacombs; by the builders of 
 those living symbols of the faith, and poems in stone, our 
 great Gothic cathedrals; by the painters of Italy, and 
 Spain, and Germany, and the Netherlands; by Giotto, and 
 Leonardo, and Carpaccio, and Luini, and Tintoret. The 
 high thunderings of Savonarola have been hushed for cen- 
 turies, but Fra Angelico still speaks to us of heaven. Who 
 that has seen Murillo's "Prodigal Son " does not enter 
 more vividly into the heart of the parable? Has the awful 
 "Crucifixion" of Velasquez never brought more deeply 
 home to us the pathos of the world's central tragedy? Was 
 it not such a picture at Dusseldorf, with the words beneath 
 
 it, 
 
 " I did all this for thee : 
 What hast thou done for Me ? :> 
 
 which first inspired Count Zinzendorf with the holy self- 
 devotion which brought forth fruit in the Moravian Broth- 
 ers? Can we estimate the effects produced on holy and 
 imaginative souls by directly religious pictures, from the 
 Madonnas of Raphael down to such great conceptions of 
 our own day as Holman Hunt's "Light of the World" or 
 "Shadow of the Cross"? Again, have not multitudes of
 
 ART. ^ 
 
 souls been taught by the unambiguous symbolism of such 
 pictures as Albrecht Durer's "Knight and Death," or 
 Raphael's "Knight's Dream," or Millet's "Angelus" or 
 the " Sower " ? 
 
 And of this high religious symbolism, even in these 
 days, we have had superb examples. Let me mention two 
 examples of this by our great painter, Mr. Watts. One 
 of them enriched the Royal Academy some years ago. It 
 was the "Death of Cain." On the rock, dying, his eyes 
 half-closed, his hair white as snow, his mighty limbs re- 
 laxed, lies the first man that was born into the world, who 
 was, also, alas ! the first murderer. He has dragged himself 
 to a neglected weed-grown altar. It is the old altar of 
 Abel, and thereon he is offering all that he can offer, 
 himself in willing, remorseful self-sacrifice. Agony and 
 despair convulse his dying features ; but his guardian angel 
 pleads for him to the lowering and stormy heavens, 
 pleads for him, and not in vain. For the lurid menace of 
 the storm has spent its fury, the lightning flickers in the 
 distance like a frustrate demon, and through the darkened 
 heavens a ray of mercy is gleaming down over the aged 
 murderer's head. Is not that picture a vivid sermon that 
 without reparation and restitution above all, without the 
 willing and total sacrifice of self we cannot please God? 
 But, since the sacrifice of self is ever a hard and painful 
 lesson, the same painter has tried in another picture to 
 teach us never to despair. It is a picture called "Hope." 
 She is seated on the world, where she is needed most. She 
 is blind, for Hope must walk by faith, and not by sight; 
 but she listens intently to the strains of her own harp. 
 Alas! string after string of her harp has snapped. But one 
 
 string is left: if that snaps, there is no music more. Will 
 
 12
 
 j-g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 that string also break? If Hope have only an earthly harp, 
 it will; but, if her harp be divine, it will never break, and 
 all the silver chords, restrung, shall ring forth, in perfect 
 diapason, the music of the spheres. It is a lesson deeply 
 needed by the sad and suffering world. The yearnings of 
 Pagan mythology might have taught us the same lesson in 
 the legend of Pandora. The prophet taught it when he 
 said, "Fly unto the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope." St. 
 Peter taught it most plainly of all when he wrote, "We' 
 are saved by hope," and prayed for his converts that the 
 God of hope might "fill them with joy and peace and hope 
 in believing." And thus, my friends, Art, too, has her 
 gospel, the gospel of hope, her interpretation of the blessed 
 gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord. She adds to the innocent 
 brightness of this world : and, if we ask her of the next, 
 she sings, 
 
 " Waft of soul's wing, 
 
 What lies above ? 
 
 Sunshine and love, 
 Sky-blue and spring ! " 
 
 And if she can thus, in this world, pour fresh glory on 
 things already glorious and "add sunlight to daylight, by 
 making the happy happier " ; and can also uplift at least one 
 little corner of that curtain which hides the things unseen, 
 and reveal one glimpse of those unimaginable glories and 
 melodies "which neither eye hath seen nor ear hath heard," 
 did I not rightly bestow on her the title of a Teacher of 
 Mankind ? 
 
 I have said, of course, but a small part of what might 
 be said of her high and beneficent activity. I have not 
 spoken of the application of Art to industrial purposes; 
 nothing of the simple decorative skill by which she can
 
 1/9 
 
 add grace and loveliness to the surroundings of common 
 life; nothing of her power to refine, to elevate, to brighten, 
 not only the palace of the noble, but the cottage of the 
 poor; nothing of the general element of pleasure and hap- 
 piness which she adds to our often troubled life. For I 
 have shown that the skill of Art is an inspiration; I have 
 shown her essential aim, and her indefeasible interest as an 
 expression of the soul ; I have spoken of her personal and 
 her historic function; and proved that Art may be a prophet 
 of God in her interpretation of Life, in her interpretation 
 of Nature, in her services to Humanity, and in her services 
 to Religion, by which she makes both Humanity and Nature 
 revelations of the Divine. In her highest reach, as a Chris- 
 tian scholar has pointed out, she reveals the unattainable; 
 she is the interpretation of beauty in life under the light 
 of the Incarnation. What the old Greek passion for Art 
 lost by sensuousness, Christian Art gives back to us bathed 
 in heaven; not only showing us 
 
 ' The beauty, and the wonder, and the power, the shapes of things, 
 Their colours, lights and shades, 
 Changes, surprises, and God made it all?" 
 
 but revealing to us something of the grandeur of our own 
 nature, and of that Eternal Home where He, for whose 
 Second Coming we yearn, whose Incarnation we soon shall 
 once more celebrate, has taken the Form of Man into the 
 very midst of the great White Throne of God.
 
 BIOGRAPHY: THE TEACHERS OF MANKIND. 
 
 " He will keep the feet of his saints, and the wicked shall be silent in dark- 
 ness; for by strength shall no man prevail." i SAM. ii. 9. 
 
 "For the Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them." 
 ST. LUKE ix. 56. 
 
 I HAVE tried at different times to set forth the truth that 
 God speaks to us in many voices; and that, though' those 
 voices differ in the clearness and fulness of their message, 
 yet their message is, in its great main features, one and 
 the same. In this way, I have spoken of the Bible, and of 
 Art, and of History as Teachers of Mankind. Biography, 
 the lives of particular men, forms another great part of 
 that divine revelation which comes to us in many parts 
 and many manners, but all to confirm and to emphasize 
 what God hath, in these last days, spoken unto us by His 
 Son. 
 
 True it is that the few only leave any personal record of 
 themselves in the annals of the world. Most of us become, 
 in an incredibly short time, as though we had never been. 
 Few, for instance, can tell you anything about their 
 own grandparents. The very gravestones of men are very 
 soon forgotten and undecipherable. In less than one life- 
 time the creeping wave of oblivion overtakes us all except 
 a few. And yet -there is no man or woman but has left at 
 least some sand-grain of bright or of bitter experience upon 
 the shores of time. Infinitesimal as our contribution may 
 seem to be, it is part of the great human heritage of good 
 or of evil. "In our momentary passage between the two
 
 BIOGRAPHY: THE TEACHERS OF MANKIND. I g, 
 
 eternities we have deserved the blessings or the curses of 
 all time." The wretched sot, who has made his life a de- 
 gradation and his home a hell, has injured all mankind as 
 well as himself. The cell of the felon and the grave of 
 the suicide poison the atmosphere of the world. And, on 
 the other hand, the old woman in a back street who has 
 lived honestly and virtuously has helped, in her own dim 
 sphere or unrecorded place, to make better the general life 
 of all the family of man. 
 
 But, for our warning or our example, the careers of 
 all are not forgotten. We may read the records of many 
 thousands of human lives. God teaches us by their exam- 
 ples. Being dead, they yet speak. The Bible is full of 
 biographies. In those lives God illustrates for us in the 
 concrete what He had enjoined upon us in the abstract. 
 He teaches us why He laid down the laws of "Thou shalt 
 not" and "Thou shalt." He shows us that those prohibi- 
 tions and commands are not the offspring of arbitrary will, 
 but of abiding love, seeing that the violation of them is 
 ruin, and the obedience to them peace. The moral wisdom 
 with which God inspired the Greeks expressed itself in 
 exquisite allegories. The Harpies are the symbols of 
 avenging cares and retributive remorse. The Sirens are 
 the symbols of seductive pleasure, ending in hideous death. 
 But God taught His chosen people more by actual events 
 than by poetic images. To them facts were God's words, 
 and contained a revelation which he who ran might read. 
 And those facts are recorded for our instruction. He 
 inspires, He elevates, He warns us by real examples. 
 Abraham, the friend of God; Isaac, the prayerful and 
 thoughtful; Joseph, the youth strong in virtue; Moses, the 
 mighty deliverer; Joshua, the brave soldier; Hezekiah and
 
 jg 2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Josiah, the faithful kings ; the dauntless Isaiah ; the perse- 
 cuted Jeremiah; John the Baptist, the torch of reformation; 
 Paul, the unwearying missionary; John, the evangelist of 
 love, are they not speaking types, living parables, of all 
 that is noble, unselfish, and wise? And the lives of Balaam, 
 who tried to serve God and Mammon ; of Esau, the profane ; 
 of Eli, the weak father; of Absalom, the bad son; of Re- 
 hoboam, the headstrong; of Ahitophel, the treacherous; of 
 Manasseh, the apostate ; of Judas, the traitor; of Ananias and 
 Sapphira, who lied to God, are they not as beacon-lights 
 to warn us from the wrecking shores? And these exam- 
 ples, these warnings, are continued age after age. Have 
 you to fight against strong temptations? Read the life of 
 Antony. Have you boldly to rebuke vice? Read the life 
 of Savonarola. Have you to "wake a greedy age to nobler 
 deeds "? Read the lives of Luther and of Wesley. Would 
 you see the picture of a faithful pastor? You will find it 
 in the lives of Oberlin or Felix Neff. On the other hand, 
 if you would assure yourself of the awful catastrophe and 
 conflagration which follow on sinful lives, read the history 
 of Tiberius, of Nero, of Alexander VI., of Francis Spiera, 
 of Carr, Earl of Somerset, of Judge Jeffreys. The impe- 
 rial purple, the success in war, the triple tiara of the pope- 
 dom, the earl's coronet, the judge's ermine, saved not any 
 Dne of them from wretchedness and infamy. "Once," 
 says a great novelist, "I had the opportunity of contem- 
 plating near at hand an example of the results produced by 
 domestic treachery. No golden halo of fiction was about 
 this example. I saw it bare and real. I saw a mind 
 degraded by perfidious deception, and a body depraved by 
 the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul. I did 
 not now regret what I had suffered from this spectacle, for
 
 BIOGRAPHY: THE TEACHERS OF MANKIND. jg? 
 
 the recollection of it acted as a most wholesome antidote 
 to temptation. It inscribed on my reason the conviction 
 that unlawful pleasure is delusive and envenomed pleasure; 
 its hollowness disappoints at the time, its- poison cruelly 
 tortures afterwards, its effects deprave for ever." Yes! 
 There is no teaching more plain than that of human lives. 
 And let us, above all, thank God for the infinite blessing of 
 one all-perfect, all-divine example, for the life of Christ 
 on earth, as a light to our feet and a lamp unto our paths! 
 If we would know that which renders all other knowledge 
 superfluous, let us study with all our hearts the one sinless 
 life of the only Perfect Man. 
 
 Of course, in these few moments, I can but touch on 
 the outermost fringe of such a subject; and your own fur- 
 ther meditations may well suggest to you other and better 
 lessons. Yet let me turn one leaf or two of God's Bible 
 of facts; let me mention one or two of the multitudinous 
 truths which Biography impresses on us, and in which 
 it confirms abundantly the lessons of the other books 
 of God. 
 
 And, first, we learn that one anchor holds, and one 
 only, trust in God. If you rely on any other anchor, the 
 storm will tear it, and hurl you in shipwreck on the shore. 
 Put not your trust in princes. Wolsey toiled for a king, 
 and Wolsey was deserted in his old age. Strafford leaned 
 on a king's faith, and Strafford was abandoned to the 
 scaffold. Huss trusted to an emperor's pledge, and Huss 
 was burned at the stake. Clarendon was the faithful minis- 
 ter and kinsman of a king, and Clarendon was driven into 
 exile. Columbus enriched kings with the wealth of a new 
 hemisphere, and Columbus came back in chains from the 
 New World he had discovered. Cortes gave them domains
 
 jg^ QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 larger than all, Europe, and Cortes died in neglect and 
 poverty. Put not your trust in any child of man. Even 
 friends, even kinsmen, may prove cold and false. Put not 
 your trust in mobs. You might as well trust the troubled 
 sea whose waters cast up mire and dirt. To-day they 
 will hoot, and to-morrow adore. To-day they will shout 
 " Hosanna " and to-morrow " Crucify." They will have hur- 
 ricanes of abuse for men who advise them aright, and shouts 
 of enthusiasm for men who counsel ruin. Trust in God 
 only. Look to God as the sole source of truth. Truth is 
 God's only orthodoxy. "God," said Wendell Phillips, "is 
 the sole final public opinion." "I am not afraid of ma- 
 jorities," said Henry Grattan. "Godwill guard His own 
 against rank majorities." 
 
 Again, Biography teaches us not only to trust in 
 God alone, but also to fear Him only. No true man who 
 can say, "The Lord is on my side," will fear what man 
 can do to him. What a supreme support and comfort is it 
 for those who have to face, as their Lord had to face, the 
 malice and the insolence of the world to know that one 
 approving whisper of conscience more than atones for the 
 roar of men! To be depreciated, sneered at, vilified, to see 
 all services lost in a Dead Sea of ingratitude, well the 
 humblest man, whose lot is such, may take courage when 
 he sees that this has been the lot of all the greatest bene- 
 factors of the world. "I have loved righteousness," said 
 a grand old pope, "and hated iniquity, and therefore I die 
 in exile." The world without God is a liar. Joseph was 
 accused of adultery. Jeremiah was imprisoned as a traitor. 
 Of John the Baptist they said that he had a devil. St. 
 Paul was charged with guile and uncleanness. St. John 
 had a Diotrephcs to prate against him with malicious words.
 
 BIOGRAPHY: THE TEACHERS OF MANKIND. ^c 
 
 St. Athanasius was accused of murder and embezzlement. 
 St. Chrysostom had to face a storm of lying calumnies. 
 Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, lived and died among the rage 
 of theologians, and tongues set on fire of hell. White- 
 field was 
 
 " The very butt of slander and the blot 
 Of every dart that slander ever shot." 
 
 So much for popular judgments! So much for the integ- 
 rity and infallibility of the masses! If they have called 
 the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more they of 
 his household! A gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a Sa- 
 maritan, a seducer, a rebel, these were the criticisms of 
 the religious and the irreligious world of Him who, when 
 He was reviled, reviled not again, when He suffered He 
 threatened not, but committed all things to Him who judg- 
 eth righteously. 
 
 But, if Biography thus teaches to face without fear 
 the unjust judgments of our fellow-worms, it teaches us also 
 to judge righteous judgment ourselves. A great writer, 
 now universally eulogized,* tells us that in the days when 
 every tongue was wagging against him, and when at the 
 same time he was absolutely assured of his own integrity 
 before God, he learned the duty of tender and sympathetic 
 judgments. "If I," he said, " who knew my own motives 
 to be, before God, so absolutely disinterested, am thus 
 hated and reviled in my own Church, may it not be that 
 some of those who have been doomed to lifelong and to 
 posthumous execration were nevertheless true children of 
 God?" Ah! my friends, in yonder world where all is 
 judged of truly, many of the last shall be first, and many 
 of the first last. If our heart condemn us not, if we can 
 " turn from the storm without to the sunshine of an approv^ 
 
 * Cardinal Newman.
 
 jgtf QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 ing conscience within," then that is all we need. It is only 
 the good and the guileless who can take this comfort. 
 
 " 'Tis not the babbling of an idle world, 
 Where praise and censure are at random hurled, 
 That can the meanest of my thoughts control 
 Or shake one settled purpose of my soul : 
 Free and at large might their wild curses roam 
 If all, if all, alas ! were well at home." 
 
 But, when all is well within, the condemnation of others 
 shows only that they know us not as we are known to God. 
 Let us, then, also learn from the recorded lives of men to 
 judge others gently and fairly, lest haply we be found fight- 
 ing against God. 
 
 Again, and this is a deeply valuable and needful 
 lesson, Biography teaches us to correct the world's fool- 
 ish and superficial notions of success and failure; it acts as 
 a counterpoise to the estimates of ambition and of Mam- 
 mon. Who has failed? Who has succeeded? That gor- 
 geous criminal who has amassed wealth by every sort of 
 fraud and meanness, by speculating in the ruin of the help- 
 less, by grinding the faces of the poor; to whom the world 
 bows and gives him its daughters in marriage, and 
 makes him a peer of the realm; who has wealth, and there- 
 with a heart as hard as the nether millstone and an ear deaf 
 as an adder's to the cry of the sorrowful, is he a specimen 
 of success? If so, from such success, Good Lord, deliver 
 us! And that other man, who has sacrificed everything 
 place, wealth, power to the call of duty and of con- 
 science; who has made himself hated by boldly rebuking 
 vice, by fearlessly denouncing political and religious error; 
 who is so poor, and so neglected in consequence, that it is 
 a hard struggle even to keep the wolf from the door, is he
 
 BIOGRAPHY: THE TEACHERS OF MANKIND. jg-r 
 
 one of your failures? If so, the very greatest and wisest 
 in all the world, the very souls which have most enriched 
 and ennobled it, the souls without whose influence it would 
 have been a mass of putrescent corruption, have failed. 
 Paul, forsaken, beheaded in nameless obscurity; William 
 Tyndale led from his damp and chilly prison to the stake; 
 Milton, dying amid darkness and solitude and evil tongues; 
 Henry Martyn in a distant land, perishing alone and uncom- 
 forted, without having made a single convert, were these 
 failures? Ah! "God's heroes are often the world's 
 Helots!" They have wandered about in sheepskins and 
 goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented, of whom 
 the world was not worthy. Oh, that every young man and 
 young woman setting out in life would learn this: that 
 any man is ten times over a ghastly failure who being 
 emperor or millionaire, and having gained the whole 
 world, has lost his own soul; and that he is a million-fold 
 success who, dying poor and hated, and in the prison or on 
 the scaffold, has given up all for Christ's sake by being 
 resolutely faithful to the best he knows. 
 
 Biography, in teaching us to reverse utterly the 
 world's judgments of success and failure, teaches us also to 
 correct and reverse altogether the world's estimate of happi- 
 ness. It is an old, old lesson, but one of those old, old 
 lessons which most men refuse constantly to learn. Every 
 bad sophist in Greece held it as an axiom that a tyrant was 
 happy ; and Socrates was sneered at for the remark that he 
 could not tell whether the King of Persia was happy or not, 
 because he knew nothing of his character. The oldest Greek 
 historian tells us how the Lydian king ordered Solon to be 
 shown over his treasuries, and then asked him who was the 
 happiest man he had ever seen. And he answered, Not
 
 .jgj QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Croesus but Tellos, the Athenian, who lived in a flourish- 
 ing country, and had good sons, and died fighting for his 
 native land; and next to him Cleobis and Bito, whom the 
 gods had rewarded for filial piety by early death. The 
 Greek at least saw from mere experience that the secrets of 
 happiness are contentment and a conscience void of offence-; 
 and these neither rank nor wealth can purchase. Content- 
 ment is an inexhaustible revenue, and peace of conscience 
 is a peace which indeed passeth understanding. Biography 
 tells us of many an unhappy emperor, of many an unhappy 
 millionaire, of many an unhappy one who has climbed to 
 the loftiest summits of human fame; and, on the other 
 hand, of many a poor monk, of many a toiling missionary, 
 of many a humble peasant, who would have echoed the 
 words of the weary king: 
 
 " I swear 'tis better to be lowly born, 
 And dwell with humble livers in content, 
 Than to be perked up in a glistering grief 
 And wear a golden sorrow." 
 
 Men fear all sorts of sorrows and calamities; and to 
 any of us, good or evil, all sorts of sorrows and calamities 
 will surely come. That, too, is a lesson which Biography 
 teaches us, the lesson that man is born to sorrow, as the 
 sparks fly upwards; but, if we have learned to obey the law 
 of our conscience, to be humble, and kind, and pure, and 
 honest, and truthful, and contented, we have learned a lesson 
 which renders life invincible in its essential (z.^., in its 
 spiritual) beatitude. If there be one lesson which is 
 emphasized more absolutely than all others by the teach- 
 ing of Biography, it is this rule : " Keep innocency, and do 
 the thing that is right, for that shall bring a man peace at the
 
 BIOGRAPHY: THE TEACHERS OF MANKIND. !8a 
 
 last " ; and this promise of the Lord Jesus to all that love 
 and fear Him: "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give 
 unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you." He 
 who has gained this peace hath life : he who has it not, 
 though he roll in wealth, though he be steeped in pleasure, 
 though his ambitions have been satiated with every form 
 of earthly success, he who hath it not is dead while he 
 liveth.
 
 THE PULPIT. 
 
 "THE True Functions of the Christian Pulpit," it is 
 not an easy subject. I can only treat it fragmentarily and ( 
 disjointedly. 
 
 Let me say at once that sermons ought not by any 
 means to be the main object which draws us to churches. 
 "Resort to sermons," says a wise and holy poet, "but to 
 prayer most: praying is the end of preaching." We meet 
 together, not chiefly to hear sermons, but, in the words of our 
 Prayer Book, "to render thanks for the great benefits received 
 at God's hands, to set forth His most worthy praise, to 
 hear His most holy word, and to ask those things which are 
 requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul." 
 If no preacher ever said a word, there are many who many 
 a time have felt those prayers of our Church falling, like 
 the dew of God, upon their souls. Yet, while I do not put 
 preaching in the first place, I would strongly deprecate the 
 vulgar fashion vulgar, though sanctioned by some fine 
 writers of sneering at the very notion of sermons. Since 
 the days when Noah was a preacher of righteousness, ser- 
 mons have been the appointed means of rebuking vice, of 
 inspiring effort, of awakening conscience, of keeping alive 
 in the heart the thoughts of God, the ideal of temperance 
 and righteousness, the memory of death, judgment, and 
 eternity. It was in sermons that Moses taught to the 
 Israelites, and to all mankind forever, the Ten Words of 
 the eternal Law. It was in sermons that the prophets of 
 Israel set their faces, like flint, against the crimes of other
 
 THE PULPIT. I9I 
 
 nations, and the manifold apostasies of their own. It was 
 in sermons, under the open sky, on the green hillside, that 
 He who spake as never man spake revealed to a surfeited 
 and guilty world the beatitudes of the humble, and the 
 peacemaker, and the pure in heart. It was in sermons to 
 little knots of slaves and artisans that the Apostle, of whom 
 they said that "his bodily presence was weak, and his 
 speech contemptible," founded the great churches of Anti- 
 och, and Ephesus, and Corinth, and Philippi. It was by 
 sermons that the great Church Fathers of the East and West 
 undid the heavy burden, and let the oppressed go free. It 
 was by sermons that an Urban, and a Peter the Hermit, 
 fired the grand, if erring, passion of crusading enthusiasm. 
 In sermons Savonarola thrilled the heart of corrupted Italy, 
 and snatched her from the decadence of a new Paganism. 
 In sermons the mighty voice of Luther's indignation shook 
 the world. By sermons the old Covenanters were fired with 
 the stubborn heroism and impetuous valour which faced and 
 routed the cavalry of Claverhouse. By sermons to colliers 
 and miners, down whose black cheeks, as they listened, the 
 streaming tears coursed in white, unwonted furrows, Wesley 
 and Whitefield, in a century of deepening atheism, kindled 
 into fresh flame the embers of a dying faith. To sneer, 
 then, at sermons, as though they were all fooling, to be 
 ended as soon as possible, seems to me to show a petulant 
 ignorance alike of the facts of history and of the needs of 
 man. No one could of course deny that from the pulpit are 
 spoken many foolish and feeble and unprofitable words. It 
 must inevitably be so. It would be so, just as inevitably, 
 if to-morrow the twenty thousand clergy were turned out, 
 and their places supplied by as many laymen. The clergy 
 possess no patent for unprofitableness. They have no
 
 I92 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 monopoly of what is tedious or commonplace. You find 
 it as plentifully in books, in newspapers, in magazines. 
 You meet with it as plentifully at every meeting, in every 
 law court, in every parliamentary debate. What wonder, 
 then, if at Church, also, you often hear 
 
 " The same proofs which not one text explain, 
 And the same lights where all things dark remain " ? 
 
 However low may be the standard of our sermons (and 
 I hardly see how it can be otherwise, when so very many are 
 required of us), they are, at least intellectually, on a level 
 with, and morally (perhaps) far higher than, nine-tenths of 
 the every-day reading in which the masses of every rank 
 delight. Very few among men can be great, or wise, or 
 clever. Most of us are made of very ordinary clay. Not to 
 one man in ten thousand, barely perhaps to one man in 
 a generation, is it granted to stand forth like a heavenly 
 archer, and hurl into the dark heart arrows of lightnings; 
 to wield, with no feeble hand, the Word of God as that 
 which indeed it is, a sword to pierce, a flame to scathe, 
 a hammer to dash in pieces the flinty heart; 
 
 ' To preach as one who ne'er should preach again, 
 And as a dying man to dying men." 
 
 To most of us God has given not ten talents, but only 
 one, and that only in an earthen vessel ; and not only may 
 our powers be very limited, but depression, sickness, end- 
 less work, never-ceasing worry, may secretly be killing us. 
 All the more bitterly, perhaps the more faithfully, we do our 
 duty; while often the laity, who bind these heavy burdens 
 so carelessly upon our shoulders, are not so much as touch- 
 ing those burdens with one of their fingers. The clergy
 
 THE PULPIT. j 
 
 are forced to do nine-tenths of that work of the Church 
 evangelistic, of the Church militant, of the Church benef- 
 icent which is not more their work than it is yours. 
 While they have to beg for all necessary charities, while 
 the burdens of the debts, and cares, and maintenance of 
 parish, and mission rooms, and all forms of work for the 
 poor, fall on them, often amid deep poverty, and with hearts 
 aching with anxiety for the future of those they love, it 
 is a little too much to expect of them a rushing fountain 
 of eloquence, an inexhaustible supply of "thoughts that 
 breathe and words that burn." And yet, with all its draw- 
 backs and all its imperfections, I venture to call the 
 Christian pulpit one of the most necessary and one of the 
 most blessed of all Christian institutions. 
 
 First, let me ask you to notice that it is an institution 
 distinctively, and almost exclusively, Christian. During 
 long centuries, over the vast domains of heathendom, any 
 regular Pagan pulpit was a thing almost unknown. Here 
 and there, once in a hundred years, rose in the empires of 
 Greece and Rome some great moralist, some true philoso- 
 pher, like 
 
 " That pure soul hid in a satyr's form, 
 
 Which shone beneath the laurels day by day, 
 And, clad with burning faith in truth and right, 
 Doubted men's doubts away " ; 
 
 some Socrates or Plato, some Cicero or Seneca, some 
 slave like Epictetus or emperor like Marcus Aurelius in 
 China a Confucius or a Meng Tseu, in Hindostan a Buddha, 
 in Persia a Zoroaster whose words often reached the few 
 alone. But amid pompous ceremonials, and bloody sacri- 
 fices, and terrified devotions there was no regular institution 
 of preaching meant to strengthen the weak, to console the
 
 I94 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 sorrowful, to enlighten the blind, to heal the broken- 
 hearted, to preach the gospel to the poor. There was 
 hardly even a Jewish pulpit. The Priests offered their daily 
 sacrifices in the temple till it became like one vast shambles, 
 and its marble pavements swam in the blood of lambs and 
 bulls; but of their regular teaching we hardly read till 
 Ezra's times, and even then it was more external than spir- 
 itual, more ceremonial than moral. The Jews had indeed 
 their Prophets, men who, in their magnificent courage, 
 fearlessly rebuked vice, and received back, in anguish and 
 martyrdom, the bitter tribute of its detestation. But the 
 days came, and often came, when either "there was no 
 prophet more," or "the prophets prophesied falsely, and the 
 priests bore rule by their means, and the people loved to 
 have it so." But in Christianity there has been from the 
 very first the regular institution of preaching; a pulpit 
 varying in external surroundings as those of Christ, who 
 made of His pulpits splendid temple, or crowded syna- 
 gogue, or green hill, or common house, or boat upon the 
 silver lake; and varying in power and substance from His 
 pathos of appeal to weeping sinners to the burning voice 
 of His prophecies and the blighting flash of His invective. 
 The pulpits of Christendom have been everywhere. Alike 
 in subterranean catacombs, on bleak mountain moors, in 
 sea-worn caves, in huts of the forest or the bush, in iron 
 mission-rooms of crowded slums, and in basilicas glowing 
 with gold and marble, have Christian ministers rebuked, 
 comforted, exhorted, Christian men, now with majestic 
 eloquence and terrible denunciation, now (and more often) 
 in gentle ministrations, and in homeliest words of instruc- 
 tion and appeal. 
 
 Look for a moment at the legacies of the Christian pul-
 
 THE PULPIT. JQ- 
 
 pits even in their mere literary aspect, and will any one 
 among you venture to say that the institution has been 
 profitless or vain? 
 
 Would not the wealth of human thought be greatly 
 impoverished if you emptied from its treasure-house what 
 Christian men have spoken from the pulpit to Christian 
 men? Think of the manliness of Ambrose, the spirituality 
 of Augustine, the fervour of Bernard! Would it be noth- 
 ing to lose from the works of the Eastern Fathers the 
 stately rhetoric of Gregory, the splendid passion of Chrys- 
 ostom? Would not the man stamp himself as a barbarian 
 who in French literature could not value the majesty of 
 Bossuet, the tenderness of Fenelon, the grace and power 
 of Massillon and Bourdaloue? Could the student of Eng- 
 lish literature forego the plainness of Latimer, the poetry 
 of Donne, the flashing wit of South, the radiant imagery 
 of Jeremy Taylor, the depth of Butler, the lucidity of 
 Tillotson, the saintliness of Wilson, the massiveness of 
 Barrow, or even, in our own memory, the strength of 
 Arnold, the thoughtfulness of Robertson, the cultured 
 grace of Henry Melvill? Could you select a greater, 
 could you even select an equal amount of noble thought 
 and matchless expression from the collected eloquence of 
 the platform, the Senate, or the bar? 
 
 And yet the least and lowest claim which any sermon 
 could put forward would be a claim to rhetorical skill or 
 literary finish. To charm the ear or the mind is but a 
 fraction of what the pulpit desires to do. Its glory is far 
 more in the modesty of fearful duty than in "the rattling 
 tongue of saucy and audacious eloquence." The desire of 
 every true preacher is, not to soar in dazzling flights of 
 eloquence, as when an eagle catches the sunlight "on
 
 jo5 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 every varying plume " ; not to aim at those burning mes- 
 sages which he alone can utter whose lips the seraph has 
 purged with the coal from off the altar; still less to revel 
 in average fluency and plausible facility. Far rather would 
 he cast in his lot with such a man as Chaucer describes, 
 
 " He waited for no pompe ne reverence, 
 He maked him no spiced conscience ; 
 But Christes lore, and his apostles twelve, 
 He taught, but first he folwed it himselve " ; 
 
 or as he of whom Goldsmith speaks, 
 
 " At church, with meek and unaffected grace, 
 His looks adorned the venerable place; 
 Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, 
 And fools who came to scoff remained to pray." 
 
 The chief work, perhaps, of the pulpit is done by the holy, 
 quiet, unambitious words of unknown men ; of pastors who 
 lived in humble homes under the shadow of their church- 
 yard elms ; of men who were known and loved in their par- 
 ish lanes, who did not strive nor cry, nor were their voices 
 heard in the streets, but who toiled on in unremembered 
 faithfulness, uttering only 
 
 " The golden mean and quiet flow 
 Of words which soften hatred, temper strife." 
 
 The best, the widest work of the pulpit is mainly their 
 work; and never, I believe, will it be fully known, until 
 the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed, on the one hand, 
 how many souls have been blessed and saved by this means 
 of grace, and, on the other, when men have either despised 
 it altogether, or tolerated it only on the condition that their
 
 THE PULPIT. , 97 
 
 prophets should say to them smooth things and prophesy de- 
 ceits, to what loss of their gentlest and noblest qualities, 
 to what total atrophy of their spiritual life, to what fatal 
 dominance of their worst passions and poorest weaknesses, 
 men have persuaded themselves to despise this aid to holi- 
 ness, and abrogate this ordinance of God. 
 
 This, then, edification, is the humble but immense 
 and primary function of the Christian pulpit. It is, as St. 
 Augustine said, "docere, flectere, movere," "to teach, to 
 bend, to stir up," to arrest the careless, to strengthen the 
 weak, to lift up the fallen, to bring wanderers home. But, 
 though it is impossible in a short time to prove how much 
 sermons have effected in broad, measurable influence, partly 
 by that spirit which we are forbidden to quench, partly in 
 those prophesyings (or quiet daily and weekly instructions) 
 which we are forbidden to despise, I may point out other 
 functions which from age to age they have worthily ful- 
 filled. I say, then, that a second function of the pulpit 
 has been the maintenance of liberty. Look how often it 
 has faced arbitrary tyranny, and made it quail. Look at 
 St. Basil pleading again and again for those oppressed by 
 the civil power, and standing undaunted in his church at 
 Caesarea before Valens, the persecuting emperor. Look at 
 Chrysostom, sheltering in his cathedral sanctuary his 
 fallen enemy Eutropius against all the legions and all the 
 rage of Arcadius and Eudoxia. I could instance many who, 
 like Elijah before Jezebel, John the Baptist before Herod, 
 Paul before Nero, have "stood before kings and not been 
 afraid." The "frown of the threatening tyrant " has never 
 daunted the true preacher of righteousness, from the days 
 when Ignatius confronted Trajan, or Huss drew the hot 
 blush to the cheek of Sigismund, or Luther faced Charles
 
 jog QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 V. at the diet of Worms, down to thos3 when the seven 
 bishops dared the fury of James II., and the London clergy 
 in a body refused to read his declaration. The one typical 
 instance of such courage is Ambrose denouncing from the 
 pulpit, and repelling from his church, the brave but chol- 
 eric Theodosius, till he should have done public penance 
 for his guilt in the massacre of Thessalonica. In thus re- 
 buking tyranny, Ambrose splendidly asserted the superiority 
 of the spiritual power over all material force. The func- 
 tion is needed to this day. To-day the multitude are 
 kings, and it requires a firmer courage to arraign their 
 follies and rebuke their sins than it ever did to beard a 
 tyrant. Woe to us if through our cowardice that function 
 be unfulfilled! 
 
 And a third function of the Christian pulpit is the 
 defence of the oppressed. At a very early period after the 
 victory of Christianity bishops became the protectors of the 
 poor. If a wrong was done, appeal was made to them ; if a 
 province was overtaxed, it was they who pleaded for remis- 
 sion. Was an innocent person attacked? they gave him 
 sanctuary. Was a city doomed to imperial vengeance? they 
 stood forth as its ambassadors. If a host of barbarians was 
 on the march, they met and obtained mercy from the brutal 
 chieftain; if a defeat had crippled the resources of the 
 empire, they melted down even the sacred vessels of gold 
 and silver to ransom the prisoners. They gathered the 
 lepers into their hospitals and tended them ; they received 
 strangers into their hospices, and washed their feet ; they 
 gave a new home to the orphan and pleaded the widow's 
 cause. Often, in the severe famines of those days, when 
 the rich, in pitiless greed, locked up their granaries, it was 
 the eloquence of a Basil, a Chrysostom, an Ambrose which
 
 THE PULPIT. j 9 
 
 forced them open. It was the same through the Middle 
 Ages, where it was in the Church alone that the peasant 
 could rise so high as to set his foot even on the necks of 
 kings, and where no arm but that of the preacher was strong 
 enough to beat down the mailed hand of the baron if it was 
 uplifted to strike his serf. Is it otherwise now? In how 
 many parishes is the parson the poor man's only protector, 
 and only friend? By whom are nine-tenths of the sums got 
 together, which, day by day, and year by year, are expended 
 on the sick, the suffering, and the poor? 
 
 A fourth great and permanent function of the Chris- 
 tian pulpit is the reformation of morals. In age after age 
 have preachers been as an incarnate conscience to guilty 
 nations. When Rome and Antioch and Constantinople 
 were sinking into a merely nominal and disputative Chris- 
 tianity when a cruel and callous luxury rioted in its own 
 selfishness while the poor were dying at its gates read with 
 what scathing sarcasm the selfish are reproved in the im- 
 passioned harangues of a Gregory and a Chrysostom. In 
 the corrupted Florence of the fifteenth century what moved 
 men's hearts like the voice of Savonarola? In the cor- 
 rupted England of the sixteenth and of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury think what moral amelioration was caused by the voices 
 of a Latimer, a Wesley, and a Whitefield. In the nine- 
 teenth century think how the sermons of Dr. Arnold tended 
 to regenerate the spirit of public schools. Never had any 
 nation more need than now for such voices. It costs some- 
 thing to utter them. He who denounces the vices of so- 
 ciety, he who tears the mask from the sly and distorted 
 features of insincere religionism, he who makes a stand 
 against prurient gossip, and callous self-indulgence, and 
 mean slander, and fashionable lies, and drunkenness and
 
 2QO QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 debauchery let him try it, and he will experience in 
 his own person how the secular world, and the so-called 
 religious world, can still slander, and lie, and persecute. 
 If we prefer to be flattered rather than abused ; if we say, 
 Peace, peace, when there is no peace ; if we leave unstirred 
 the slimy iridescence of stagnant and corrupt societies; if 
 we daub tottering walls with our untempered mortar, what 
 else are we doing than to sell Christ for human approval ? 
 If so, " like people, like priest " ! And, if that be ever so, 
 woe to us ! Woe to us, and double woe to you ! 
 
 Once more, a fifth function of the Christian pulpit is 
 the purification of corrupt religions. It is the tendency 
 of religion to go corrupt, like Israel's manna, if it be not 
 daily gathered pure from the fields of Holy Writ. Human 
 inventions, and will-worship, and ambition, and the thrust- 
 ing of all kinds of intermediaries between the soul and its 
 free, direct, immediate, unimpeded access to God, these 
 have to be averted. So did Isaiah: "The ancient and 
 honorable, he is the head ; and the prophet who speaketh 
 lies, he is the tail." "Ye serpents, ye generation of 
 vipers " so spake the rude Baptist to the religious classes. 
 "In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the 
 commandments of men " so spake Christ to the Pharisees. 
 " Stand fast in the freedom wherewith God hath freed you, 
 and be not entangled again in the yoke of bondage " so said 
 St. Paul. And Isaiah they sawed in sunder; and John 
 they beheaded ; and Paul they tried to murder; and they 
 crucified the Lord of glory. Swim with the stream, as 
 every preacher, like all other men, is tempted to do, and 
 you will glide delightfully along. Strike out manfully 
 against the current, and you will be buffeted with drowning 
 waves. Huss they burnt. Luther and the English re-
 
 THE PULPIT. 2QI 
 
 formers they cursed, and still curse, like dogs. Wesley and 
 Whitefield 
 
 " Stood pinnacled on infamy's high stage, 
 And bore the pelting scorn of half an age." 
 
 Yet what would religion now have been if no man had 
 stood up to expose the abominations which in age after 
 age have striven to conceal themselves in her most sacred 
 shrines? 
 
 I say that these functions, every one of them, still con- 
 tinue: first, edification; second, the maintenance of lib- 
 erty; third, the protection of the oppressed; fourth, the de- 
 nunciation of vice; fifth, Xhe purification of religion, 
 these, and others on which I cannot dwell. But that they 
 may be performed, and rightly performed for the ameliora- 
 tion of the world, demands much from us, but much also 
 from you. What have you a right to demand from us? Not 
 that we should be eloquent, or greatly wise, or very pro- 
 found; not that we should now kindle your enthusiasm and 
 now hold you hushed as an infant on its mother's breast; 
 not that we should make you lift to us faces now radiant with 
 laughter, now white with tears. You cannot expect this; 
 for to none has God given to do it always, and not to many 
 to do it ever. But there are some things which you may 
 demand of us. That we should preach to edify, and not to 
 please; to amend the heart, not to tickle the ears; to be 
 understood, not to be admired. "Sir," said a poor man to 
 an eminent preacher as he left St. Paul's cathedral, "I came 
 here to get good, but I have got none: I could not under- 
 stand you." "Friend," replied the preacher, with tears in 
 his eyes, " if I have not preached you a good sermon, you 
 have preached me one." The preacher should be clear and 
 plain; for
 
 2O2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 " By him t'le violated law speaks out 
 Its thunders, and by him in strains as sweet 
 As angels use the gospel whispers peace. 
 He stablishes the strong, upholds the weak, 
 Reclaims the wanderer, binds the broken heart, 
 And, armed himself, he furnishes with arms 
 The sacramental host of God's elect." 
 
 Alas! how much we fail! "When I think of him as a 
 preacher," says an English author, "I seem to see an 
 Egyptian priest, standing on the threshold of the great 
 door of Ipsamboul, blowing with all his might to keep out 
 the Libyan desert ; and the four great stone gods, sitting 
 behind the altar, far back in the gloom, laughing at him." 
 Yes! the preacher may be in no respect above you, your 
 brother in sins, in infirmities, in all sad experience, your 
 inferior in knowledge, in utterance, even in all spiritual 
 grace; he may be utterly commonplace, congenitally dull; 
 yet 
 
 " The worst speak something good : if all want sense 
 God takes the text, and preaches patience." 
 
 The weak reed, my friends, grows but in the mud of the 
 river bank; but, if the breath of heaven pass gently over 
 it, it waves into music for listening ears its thin stems, its 
 frail coronal of trembling plumes. 
 
 But remember, lastly, that the preacher will be largely 
 what you make him. If the soil be stony, or thorny, or 
 trodden hard, what boots it though the seed be good? 
 k 'The foolishness of preaching"? Ah, yes! but is there no 
 such thing as the foolishness of hearing? Was the failure 
 of the sermon the fault of Paul who preached or of Euty- 
 chus who slept? Ah! if you had been less guilty of the 
 cheap conceit of scorn, who knows whether you, too, might
 
 THE PULPIT. 2Q , 
 
 not have found, as thousands have found, a blessing ? Had 
 you been worthy, who knows whether some seraph might not 
 have brought from God the fire of inspiration, and the burn- 
 ing messages of prophecy been delivered by the unclean or 
 stammering lips? It was a text, and nothing else, which 
 made a hermit of Anthony, a saint of Augustine, a mission- 
 ary of Francis Xavier. If you have not the hearing ear or 
 the meek spirit, a Paul or a Chrysostom will speak to you 
 in vain : if you have, then many a time, in these feeble, 
 despised sermons, you might hear some word, some thought, 
 some image, which might be worth more to you than all 
 that you have learned, all that you have got in the world 
 beside. It might help you to walk as children of light; it 
 might be to you as a star leading you through the darkness ; 
 as a holy hand laid on your head with invisible consecra- 
 tion; as a voice behind you, saying, "This is the way: walk 
 ye in it, when ye turn aside to the right hand or to the 
 left." Yes! even amid all the braggart vaunt and puff 
 and push of worldly life, and all its loud noises and swag- 
 gering insolence, the voice of Christian preaching, unac- 
 knowledged, disowned, ridiculed, may yet be God's only 
 appointed way for you : perhaps the only way wherein you 
 shall be called from darkness to light, by which your 
 hearts shall be thrilled with the sense of duty, with the 
 call of Christ, with the awful power of the Unseen !
 
 BOOKS, THEIR POWER AND BLESSEDNESS. 
 
 "And God said, Let there be light." GEN. i. 3. 
 
 THERE is no more fatal error than to suppose that edu- 
 cation ends with the days of school. Our life itself is "a 
 beginning and a setting forth, not a finishing"; and it is 
 as true of our spiritual experience as of our temporal 
 knowledge that we should go on adding to it even to the 
 last day of our lives. For by knowledge the mind, the 
 wisdom, the soul, is fed. They become famine-stricken, 
 and their faculties are atrophied, if they are not supplied 
 with their due nourishment. 
 
 For nearly twenty years we have had a system of 
 national education. We spend upon it millions of pounds 
 of the national revenue; and, manifold as are its shortcom- 
 ings, we may be thankful for what it accomplishes. Yet, 
 if it be left unsupplemented, it is disastrously inadequate. 
 Year by year, at the perilous age of fourteen, our children 
 in tens of thousands leave the schools; and neither the 
 State nor the efforts of individuals have yet provided any 
 adequate continuation of their training. At an age when 
 the German boy or girl is still having the faculties trained 
 and expanded, our children are turned loose into the 
 burning, fiery furnace of the streets of our great cities, too 
 often to forget in one year very much of what they had 
 learned ; and between the perilous ages of fifteen and twenty, 
 which mostly decide our destiny in life, haply, and too 
 often, to turn their arithmetic into roguery and their lit- 
 erature to lust. Of how many of them can we say that,
 
 BOOKS, THEIR POWER AND BLESSEDNESS. 2 O" 
 
 by the grace of God, in that burning, fiery furnace of city 
 streets, even the smell of fire has not passed upon their 
 garments? The day must surely come when the nation 
 will extend to its youth some of the care which it expends 
 upon its children. 
 
 Fiat Lux. "Let there be light." It was the motto 
 of the first great English printer, William Caxton. Thou- 
 sands of years elapsed before printing was invented; but 
 how opportune was the blessed moment of its discovery! 
 A few years later Constantinople fell, and the flight of 
 learned Greeks revived classical culture in Europe, bring- 
 ing about that epoch which we call the Renascence, or new 
 birth of learning. Again, a few years later, Columbus 
 opened to the world a new hemisphere. A few years later 
 still the light of the blissful Reformation began to flood 
 the world. "Let there be light." It shines on the Caxton 
 \vindow of Westminster Abbey, where the great printer lies 
 buried. It is engraved on the base of the statue of Guten- 
 berg, the inventor of printing. Light is the only adequate 
 type of that widening knowledge, of that revealing insight, 
 which thenceforth seemed to beat and broaden over the 
 world in pulse on pulse of "splendour as the dawn pulsates 
 from the eastern sky." 
 
 " His cry was, ' Light, more light, while time shall last ! ' 
 
 He saw the glories growing on the night, 
 But not the shadows which that light shall cast 
 Till shadows vanish in the Light of Light." * 
 
 Consider first the stupendous force which books have 
 added to the victory of truth. Thanks to the printed page, 
 it is not the blood-stained conquerors, not the despotic 
 
 These lines were written by Lord Tennyson as an inscription for the Caxton window in 
 
 St. Mar-aret's Church, Westminster.
 
 2O g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 kings, not the ignorant shouters of anarchy, who rule the 
 
 world : it is the knowledge of the wise. Thanks to them, 
 
 " The pale-featured sage's trembling hand " 
 
 " Strong as a host of armed deities, 
 Such as the blind Ionian fabled erst." 
 
 More eternal than the Pyramids, they are the imperishable 
 shrines, not of dead ashes, but of living souls. It is by 
 their means that truths become irresistible. A monk at 
 Erfurt sits poring over the Epistle to the Galatians in his 
 lonely cell. While he is musing, the fire burns. At last 
 he speaks with his tongue, and, lo! the nations, laughing to 
 scorn the impotence of popes and emperors, shake a thou- 
 sand of years of cruel tyranny and superstitious priestcraft 
 to the dust. An astronomer observes through his rude tel- 
 escope the planet Venus in crescent, divines the facts of 
 the planetary system, is denounced as a heretic, thrown 
 into the dungeons of the Inquisition, and forced to recant 
 upon his knees. A few years pass, and by the help of the 
 printed page men see that this heresy was an eternal truth, 
 and that this discoverer whom priests treated as a criminal 
 had done more than any who yet had lived to reveal to 
 man's mind the plan of God. It is thus that in spite of 
 their prejudices, in spite of their aversions, in spite even 
 of their senses, men accept from Copernicus, from New- 
 ton, from Harvey, from Cuvier, from Hunter, from Jenner, 
 from Franklin, from Lyall, the new facts they taught, and 
 are compelled with a groan of foolish agony to abandon the 
 refuted ignorance of their hitherto most cherished convic- 
 tions. Truth once disseminated by books begins an irre- 
 sistible career. When a man has a forgotten duty to
 
 BOOKS, THEIR POWER AND BLESSEDNESS. 2 <D7 
 
 enforce, an unknown truth to reveal, and the printing-press 
 to help him, kings with their armies, priests with their 
 anathemas, shall as little avail to stay his victory as the 
 sea-birds can stay the hurricane with their wings. 
 
 " Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again : 
 
 The eternal years of God are hers ; 
 
 But Error, wounded, writhes with pain, 
 
 And dies among his worshippers." 
 
 Then think what books have done for liberty! In old 
 days of the struggle for freedom many a grand speech might 
 die away within the walls where it was uttered: now, by 
 the aid of the printing-press, reverberated through all the 
 nations, it may go thrilling and thrilling through the 
 world, and come rolling back to the speaker in millions of 
 echoes. The spoken word may reach two or three thou- 
 sand: the printed page may be read by three hundred mill- 
 ions of men and women. 
 
 " He uttered but a thought, 
 And it became a proverb for the State ; 
 He wrote a sentence in a studious mood, 
 It was a saying for a hemisphere ! " 
 
 "Give them," said Sheridan, "a corrupt House of Lords, 
 give them a venal House of Commons, give them a tyranni- 
 cal prince, give them a truckling court, and let me but 
 have an unfettered press, and I will defy them to encroach 
 but a hair's-breadth on the liberty of England." Only 
 think what cruelties, of which the thought curdles the 
 blood, and the memory inflames the cheek, our fathers had 
 dumbly to endure! Think of the horrible crimes and 
 ghastly secrets of monastic dungeons, of baronial castles.
 
 2Q g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 It is the printing-press which has poured daylight into 
 those dungeons, smashed those implements of torture, 
 burst the portcullis which defied the battering-ram, crushed 
 down the walls which withstood the cannonade. It has 
 made nations strong and free. It has shaken the thrones of 
 tyranny, and quenched the fires of persecution, and sent 
 the menacing spectres of ignorance and hatred to gibber 
 in their congenial night. 
 
 But notice how the printing-press has given voice to the 
 incarnate conscience of mankind. 
 
 Take but one illustration, and one from our own days, 
 the last struggle with the curse of slavery on the American 
 continent. One brave American reformer, William Lloyd 
 Garrison, a youth, little more than a boy, was inspired to 
 convince the millions of his fellow-countrymen of the sin- 
 fulness and shamefulness of treating men as chattels. He 
 stood utterly alone. "Intellect disowned him, respecta- 
 bility hated him." The Church frowned at him, mobs 
 assaulted him. "Malignity searched him with candles." 
 He was starving on bread and water. God honoured him, 
 as he honoured Luther, by making every bad man his enemy. 
 Yet in thirty-five years, from a mean garret on a third 
 story his bed on the office floor, only a negro boy to help 
 him, in daily dread of assassination he had won the gigan- 
 tic victory of right over might. And why? Solely because 
 the light which fell through the ink-bespattered window 
 upon the dingy wall fell upon a printing-press. In truth, 
 the printing-press has added more power to man's intellect 
 than the telescope to his vision or the lever to his arm. 
 
 "And Freedom reared in that august sunrise 
 
 Her beautiful bold brow ; 
 
 While rites and forms before her burning eyes 
 Melted liks snow.
 
 BOOKS, THEIR POWER AND BLESSEDNESS. 2 OQ 
 
 Her words did gather thunder, yet no sword 
 
 Of wrath her right arm whirled, 
 But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word 
 
 She shook the world." 
 
 But, having thus brought before you the power and 
 beneficence of books in the history of nations, let me ask 
 you to consider what they may be to individual lives for 
 happiness, for companionship, for glorious instruction. 
 Remember only that, to enjoy their blessedness, you must 
 prove yourselves worthy of their lessons. Without the 
 reader, the book is a dead thing. If they are to enlighten 
 and elevate you, you must be in earnest, and not of those 
 "flimsy and desultory readers who fly from foolish book to 
 foolish book, and get good of none, and mischief of all." 
 To holy and noble readers books are as "the life-blood 
 of master-spirits, embalmed for a life beyond life " : to 
 silly and indolent readers they are no better than rags 
 and ink. 
 
 Think, first, what a difference in the potentiality of 
 human happiness is made by books. Think what life 
 would be without them, that you may realize what life may 
 be with them. Do you desire wealth? They will bestow 
 on you wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, from treasures 
 more golden than gold, and which no rust can canker. With 
 them you may hold Egypt and Assyria and Greece and 
 Italy in fee-simple, and call the world your own. Learn 
 but to read, and the poorest of yon may be lords of all that 
 mankind have thought. Books may be to you an amulet 
 against vice and misery; for they can save you from long 
 days of idleness, and from that vacuity of thought which 
 is fertile of degradation. "I would not exchange the love 
 of reading," said Gibbon, "for all the treasures of India."
 
 2IQ QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 "Books," said Wordsworth, "are a substantial world, both 
 pure and good " ; and it was his great wish that his own 
 works might, for the young and the virtuous, co-operate 
 with all the benign forces of Nature, and add sunlight to 
 daylight by .making the happy happier. "My library 
 shelves," said our old Schoolman, Gilbert de la Porree, 
 "are the avenues of time. Ages have wrought, genera- 
 tions grown, and all their best blossoms are cast down here. 
 It is the garden of immortal fruits, without dog or dragon : 
 yea, it is a series of king's gardens, where you may walk 
 at will, whose flowers are flowers of amaranth, and their 
 fruits fruits of nepenthe." With them you need never be 
 quite unhappy; for in sadness they will make you less sad, 
 in loneliness not utterly lonely, and in bereavement not 
 totally bereaved. 
 
 Think, next, what books may be to you for compan- 
 ionship. What excuse is there for the poorest to seek for 
 base companions, and fellows in the dismal arts of self- 
 destruction, amid the low haunts where pleasure forages for 
 death? Who can say, "I have no companions"? Why, 
 if you will, the noblest of all societies will welcome you. 
 Kings will utter to you their best thoughts, and saints sit 
 beside you, like brothers! Is it nothing that at the turn- 
 ing of a page you may find the best and greatest of men 
 eager to talk to you, Dante to shew you his awful visions 
 of judgment and of beatitude, Milton to unroll his organ 
 music, Shakspeare to admit you into unimaginable realms 
 of faerie, orators ready to pour forth for you their most 
 splendid periods, poets with their garlands and singing 
 robes about them? These noblest companions, these mighty 
 spirits will have none of the malice or arrogance or weak- 
 ness of the living. We may realize from these that the
 
 BOOKS, THEIR POWER AND BLESSEDNESS. 2 I I 
 
 communion of saints is a communion not only with the liv- 
 ing, but with the mightier and more unnumbered dead. 
 
 " My days among the dead are passed; 
 
 Around me I behold, 
 Where'er these casual eyes are cast, 
 
 The mighty minds of old. 
 My never-failing friends are they, 
 With whom I converse night and day." 
 
 Think once more what books may be to you for in- 
 structiveness. They will throw open to you the gates of 
 Nature, and science shall be to you as a beneficent arch- 
 angel to teach you about the beauty, the wonder, and the 
 power of the works of the Lord ; about the sun and moon 
 and stars; the refreshing, glorious sea, with the ebb and 
 flow of its lustral tide; the trees of the Lord, which are full 
 of sap, even the cedars of Libanus which he hath planted; 
 the thunder and lightning, the rainbow and mirage, the rain 
 and snow, the dew and hoar frost, the pressure, buoyancy, 
 and elasticity of the bright, invisible air. There is all 
 History open to you, with its powerful and thrilling interest, 
 "a divine book of revelations, of which the inspired texts 
 are great men." There is all Biography, to reinspire your 
 failing faith in human nature, and to nourish you with the 
 viaticum of good examples, by showing you how the noblest 
 men have lived. Would you learn fortitude amid hurri- 
 canes of calamity and tornadoes of slander? Read the 
 lives of Origen and of Milton. Would you learn the might 
 and majesty of self-sacrifice? Read of Francis of Assisi 
 and Francis Xavier. Would you learn how "the high de- 
 sire that others may be blessed savours of heaven " ? Read 
 of John Howard, and Elizabeth Fry, and Father Damien. 
 And, if you would turn from these more solemn lessons,
 
 2I2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Poetry may uplift you on her wings, and scatter your path 
 with gleams of Paradise. And thus, by the aid of books, 
 you need never be alone ; for you will always be able to 
 commune with your own pure soul, and to find in your 
 own memory and imagination a glowing picture gallery of 
 all that is great in conduct and pure in thought. 
 Thus, then. 
 
 " From History's scroll the splendour streams ; 
 
 From Science leaps the living ray; 
 Flashed from the poet's glowing dreams, 
 The opal fires of fancy play." 
 
 But I must here add a warning. If these be the high 
 functions of good books, do not forget that there are also 
 bad, silly, corrupt books. Wherever there is any good 
 thing, the devil provides a bad thing to counteract it. 
 Books may be not only the employment of leisure, but the 
 corruption of leisure; not only the redeemers of time, but 
 the murderers of time. The country is inundated with a 
 vast flood of wicked, malicious, frivolous, and debasing 
 literature; and, if you are bad and foolish, you may read 
 yourself to death in a multitude of evil works. To all the 
 young I 'would say: Turn with horror, with loathing, with 
 contempt, from books which are stained through and through 
 with the passions of dishonor; turn from stories of pick- 
 pockets and footpads, daubed with tawdry attractiveness; 
 turn from the literature alike of paltry malice and of revolt- 
 ing brutality; turn from silly snippings of coarse slang and 
 vulgarest jocosity; above all, turn from the deadly and 
 plague-besprinkled garbage of demoralization and obscenity. 
 If there be wretches so deeply dyed in vileness as to furnish 
 you with these incentives to ruin and self-debasement, will
 
 BOOKS, THEIR POWER AND BLESSEDNESS. 2 \\ 
 
 you be so foolish, so mad, as to walk with open eyes into 
 their loathly and leprous snare? I know that sometimes 
 even Genius has polluted her vestal fires, and become a 
 "procuress to the Lords of Hell"; but he who refuses to 
 read these proofs of her sinfulness and frailty helps to cut 
 off the entail of that heavy curse. Alas! alas! how many 
 a soul has read itself to ruin in some unhallowed page; 
 has darkened all life by five minutes over a corrupt tale, or 
 by two sentences of a blaspheming tract! Oh, if you would 
 save yourselves from worlds of misery, if you would not 
 hopelessly sully and darken the crystal of your souls, fling 
 a guilty book into the hottest flame of the winter fire, as 
 you would fling away a rag full of pestilence. Do not in- 
 dulge the vain dream that it will not harm you. Can a 
 man touch pitch, and not be defiled? Can he handle hot 
 burning coals, and not be burned? 
 
 Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom; and 
 with all thy gettings get understanding. And how shall you 
 get it? Only by prayer to the Holy Spirit of God. It cannot 
 be gotten for gold; neither shall silver be weighed for the 
 price thereof. Where, then, shall wisdom be found, and 
 where is the place of understanding? Behold God under- 
 standeth the way thereof, and He knoweth the place thereof; 
 and unto man He said, Behold the fear of the Lord, that is 
 wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is understanding. 
 There is one book which is a book of books, "of history more 
 sacred, of biography more instructive, of warning more sol- 
 emn, of philosophy more eternal, of eloquence more impas- 
 sioned, of poetry more divinely enchanting, of a light more 
 supernatural and clear." Other books may be as gold, but in 
 this book, though you be ignorant of all others, there is a 
 wisdom above rubies. It is as the Urim, "ardent with gems
 
 2l . QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 oracular," upon the ephod of the high priest; and each pure 
 eye may see the light of God stealing over its graven stones. 
 For in that book, and only by the light which it has lent, 
 you may find Christ ; and in that book alone can you hear 
 the voice which says, " Come unto me, all ye that are weary 
 and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest." And, there- 
 fore, in that river of life you may baptize all other knowl- 
 edge, and in the atoning blood which it reveals you may 
 wash out all other stains. The earliest of printed books 
 was the Latin Bible of 1456. In old days a Bible was a 
 present for a king. A man would gladly give a load of hay 
 for a few chapters of St. John. The young St. Thomas of 
 Aquinas said that he would rather possess St. Chrysostom's 
 Homilies on St. Matthew than the whole city of Paris. 
 Luther thought that it must be the supreme of happiness to 
 possess all the Epistles of St. Paul. Eager crowds gath- 
 ered round the chained Bibles in the churches to hear but 
 a few verses read aloud. Now you may, in one sense, pos- 
 sess the whole Bible for a few pence. In one sense, but, 
 ah! how little in another! It is with the Bible as with all 
 true books. He who would learn its best blessings must 
 know how to read it aright. Like all other true and holy 
 books, to read it, you need no other lore, but you do need 
 "pure eyes and Christian hearts." And, when you have 
 thus learned to read it, from that one book shall stream a 
 hallowed light which shall illuminate all other books, and 
 the true light which shines in every other book shall add 
 fresh lustre to that one. This the grace of God will grant 
 to you if you seek it, and then, indeed, will you have 
 learned the object and the sacredness of all wise reading; 
 then will you be able to echo from the heart the burning 
 words of the psalmist: "The law of the Lord is an unde-
 
 BOOKS, THEIR POWER AND BLESSEDNESS, 2 \t> 
 
 filed law, converting the soul : the testimony of the Lord 
 is sure, and giveth wisdom unto the simple. The statutes 
 of the Lord are right, and rejoice the heart : the command- 
 ment of the Lord is pure, and giveth light unto the eyes. 
 The fear of the Lord is clean, and endureth forever: the 
 judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. 
 More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much 
 fine gold; sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. 
 Moreover by them is thy servant warned ; and in keeping 
 of them there is great reward."
 
 THE IDEAL CITIZEN. 
 
 "Fellow-citizens with the saints." EPH. ii. 19. 
 
 CITIZENS we all are. When St. Paul, writing to the 
 Philippians, who had the Roman franchise, said to them, 
 "Our citizenship is in heaven," he meant to remind them 
 that, though they could utter the boast, Civis Romanus 
 sum , " I am a citizen of Rome," a far nobler boast was, 
 "I am of the City of God." Let them bear in mind the 
 loftier, the more eternal privileges, the diviner, the more 
 searching obligations of their name as Christians. The 
 greatest politician is he to whom this truth is ever present, 
 he who looks through the transient to the permanent, 
 he who takes the Bible (by which I do not mean this or 
 that "text," or this or that evanescent and partial ele- 
 ment, but the Bible in its one and essential revelation, 
 the Bible as it is summed up in Christ, the Perfect 
 Man) as his statesman's manual. And they who hold 
 these views, they whose statesmanship is but an element, 
 and a subordinate element, in their Christianity, such 
 men are in heart united. They accept the same prin- 
 ciples, though they may differ in their application. They 
 agree as to the object, though they may differ about the 
 methods. 
 
 I will try, then, by God's help, to sketch the outline of 
 the Ideal Citizen. But before doing so I must make two 
 statements. The first is that which has to do with all of
 
 THE IDEAL CITIZEN. 217 
 
 us; not only because every one of us, even the youngest 
 and poorest, contributes a quota to the life of the nations 
 of the world, but because, as I said, our citizenship is but a 
 fraction of our heavenly citizenship. And the other state- 
 ment, which should be needless, is that no living man, no 
 earthly objects, are in my thoughts. I am not thinking 
 of the petty, passing interests of to-day. I flatter none. 
 I fear none. " I hear the roll of the ages " not the babble 
 of surrounding voices. I stand in utter indifference be- 
 fore the false and frivolous judgments of man's brief day: 
 I bow with awful reverence before the Great White Throne, 
 and Him who sits thereon. 
 
 First, then, I say that the Ideal Citizen must rise 
 superior to party spirit. He may of course belong to a 
 party; but he will not sink to a mere partisan. He who 
 coins party watchwords, who gets red-hot with party ani- 
 mosities, is living for the transient, not for the eternal. 
 Eminent he may be : an ideal citizen he cannot be. One 
 of our greatest men said that he who would be a great 
 poet must first make his life a poem. I say that he who 
 would make his life great in any sense must make it great 
 to God. In some playful verses it was said of Edmund 
 Burke, 
 
 " Who, meant for the universe, narrowed his mind, 
 And to party gave up what was meant for mankind." 
 
 Of that great and good man, except so far as human 
 weakness goes, the judgment was too severe; for it was 
 truly said of him that "he brought to politics a horror 
 of crime, a deep humanity, a keen sensibility, a singular 
 vivacity and sincerity of conscience." But it is true of 
 most of us. There is hardly one of us all who is not con-
 
 2I g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 scious of the tendency to become a mere party man. The 
 old woman in the back street, the member of the relig- 
 ious clique at a tea-table, the hot-headed young man in the 
 office, the vestry-man at the meeting, can show the spirit 
 of party no less than the legislator. Whenever we fail to 
 do justice to an opponent or to one whom we dislike; 
 whenever we snatch up a vehement opinion with wrath and 
 clamour ; whenever we adopt a tone of denunciative igno- 
 rance about things which we do not understand ; whenever 
 we join in the blind clamour against unpopular names; 
 whenever we repeat the shameful innuendo or the biting 
 jest, we may stand very high in the world, but we are not 
 ideal citizens or ideal in any way. 
 
 For the Ideal Citizen must walk in the light, must love 
 the truth. And these methods do not brighten the truth : 
 they obscure it. They do not quicken progress: they retard 
 it. They do not ennoble nations: they degrade and weaken 
 them. They do not purify life, but embitter and poison 
 it. If we would escape the average, we cannot advance one 
 step without those elementary Christian graces modesty, 
 sympathy, fairness of judgment, humility, candour which 
 amid the clash of controversy are too often trampled under 
 foot. Candour whiteness, brightness, brightness of the 
 clear sky, brightness of the crystal spring, brightness of 
 the transparent soul, ah! it is a gem rare and of the 
 purest lustre, not to be found in the sulphurous mines of 
 passion, undiscoverable by the fuming torches of strife and 
 faction. But the ideal politician will wear it on his breast, 
 and no mean heart can beat beneath it. The average man, 
 the man who is swayed by "the eternal spirit of the popu- 
 lace," sees his own opinions all white, and the other all 
 black; his own side all grandeur, the other all mischief;
 
 THE IDEAL CITIZEN. 2Ig 
 
 his own side all truth, the other all lies. No great man, 
 no ideal man, no true Christian, ever can take these views 
 of things. He can credit his opponents with intellects as 
 keen, with motives as honourable, with hearts as upright as 
 his own. Not long ago an English statesman died about 
 whose name the waves of party had been dashing all his 
 life. There were some who did not agree with him, who 
 thought that his policy was, as a whole, mistaken in its 
 tendency, and who yet, when the grave closed over him in 
 that generosity which mingles with the pathos of death 
 tried to appreciate only the greater qualities of his charac- 
 ter, the highest aims of his life. The brink of the open 
 grave is not the place for severity or for criticism. Even 
 when a great man dies who has been a bad man, we feel 
 that the day of his death is not the time to judge him. 
 
 " The crowded hall, the murmur, and the gaze, 
 The look of envy, and the voice of praise, 
 And friendship's smile, and passion's treasured vow, 
 All these are nothing. life is nothing now! 
 And 'what is writ is writ ' : the sin, the shame, 
 All eyes may read them, and all lips may blame ; 
 Let feeble hands, iniquitously just, 
 Rake up the relics of the sinful dust, 
 Let ignorance mock the pang it could not feel, 
 And malice brand what mercy would conceal, 
 It matters not ! " 
 
 This we say when even a bad man dies. But when a man 
 dies who, even by the confession of his enemies, has hon- 
 ourably served his country, was it not a shocking sign of 
 party feelings that when one who had received from him 
 nothing but kindness spoke of him in Westminster Abbey 
 in terms perhaps of generous, but certainly of honest 
 eulogy, he should, because of those words, have been pelted
 
 2 ., o QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 with insults? The statesman to whom I refer is Lord 
 Beaconsfield. On one occasion a divine who was not of 
 his party told a mere chance anecdote to his credit at a 
 meeting. Next morning he received a parcel of all his own 
 books returned to him, with the remark that a man who 
 praised that statesman could not be trusted as a religious 
 teacher! Was not this a degraded proof that candour has 
 no place in many breasts? 
 
 My friends, whether you are public men or private men, 
 whether you live in stately houses or in back streets, you 
 cannot be great, or good, or in any high sense Christians, 
 until you learn the holy lessons of that charity which, even 
 amid the hottest strife of party factions, suffereth long, and 
 is kind, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but re- 
 joiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, 
 hopeth all things, endureth all things. 
 
 And next to candour I would place among the requi- 
 sites of the ideal statesman, a stainless integrity, integ- 
 rity like his of whom his enemy said, "If you place the sun 
 at his right hand and the moon at his left, you could not 
 make him swerve from the path of duty." Few nations 
 have, I suppose, more reason to be proud of her statesmen 
 on this score than England has. Yet it has not been 
 always so. How long ago is it since even great ecclesi- 
 astics shamelessly and with both hands enriched themselves 
 and their families out of the Church's spoils, and left all over 
 their dioceses the proofs of their nepotism and their greed? 
 How long ago is it since a Prime Minister, Sir Robert 
 Walpole, declared, as the cynical result of years of political 
 experience, that "every man had his price"? How long 
 ago is it since another Prime Minister, William Pitt, 
 almost burst into tears when, for dubious dealings, the name
 
 THE IDEAL CITIZEN. 22I 
 
 of his dearest friend was erased from the list of the Privy 
 Council? How long ago is it since another so great, so 
 eloquent Charles James Fox, lured by ambition to com- 
 bine with men whom he had once bitterly denounced, com- 
 mitted the great error of his life, and provoked the stern 
 remark, "England does not love coalitions"? I will not 
 allude to any individual cases less than a hundred years 
 ago; but seeing that, two years ago, England was sickened 
 week after week by the revelations of how men, intrusted 
 with the sacred duty of the franchise, unblushingly sold 
 their votes for all sorts of personal motives, from sums of 
 money down to pots of beer, we have hardly, I think, yet 
 reached that millennium when it is needless to speak of 
 stainless integrity as an essential of ideal citizenship. But 
 here, again, my statements are applicable to all. If you 
 would be a true woman, or boy, or man, no golden apple, 
 however glittering, must ever stay or seduce you to turn 
 from the swift, straight race of life, or from the narrow 
 wicket-gate of duty. Others succeed; you fail. Be it 
 so. If you have wished only to speak the truth, and to 
 do the right, despise those laurels ; scorn altogether those 
 triumphs. 
 
 Nothing, my friends, be you statesmen or be you shop- 
 boys, will ever compensate you for that thrilling voice, that 
 innermost voice, heard by you always, even in the silence, 
 even at the midnight, which alone can say to you, "Well 
 done ! " The moment that, be it in great things or be it 
 in little things, you sell but one scruple of your integrity, 
 the crown will have fallen from your head; for you have 
 sinned. And the greater you are, the more will this be 
 true. It is thus that a poet wrote of an American states- 
 man now dead :
 
 222 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 " So fallen, so lost ! The light withdrawn 
 
 Which once he wore ! 
 The glory from the gray hairs gone 
 For evermore ! 
 
 " All else is gone : from those great eyes 
 
 . The soul has fled ; 
 When faith is lost, when honour dies, 
 The man is dead ! " 
 
 Candour, then, and stainless integrity, and, thirdly, 
 among the essentials of ideal statesmanship (mark, for 
 every one of us ! ) I place inflexible courage. Here, again, 
 we have something to learn from the old Greek and Roman 
 statesmen, Athens not quailing before Alexander, when he 
 came to her red from the ashes of Thebes ; Rome with her 
 legends of Scaevola and Manlius, of Fabricius and Regu- 
 lus. The brute physical courage, the courage that does not 
 fear death, courage as of the tiger, which will "leap with 
 bare breast and unarmed claws upon the hunter's steel "; 
 courage of the poor soldier, who, blamed for something by 
 the general whom he adores, charging, one against a thou- 
 sand, 
 
 " Hurls his soiled life against the pikes, and dies " ; 
 
 courage of Leonidas at Thermopylae, of Arnold von Winkel- 
 ried at Sempach, even that is something! It is the 
 attribute of a man! Higher still is moral courage, 
 courage of Paul on the Areopagus; of Athanasius against 
 the world; of John Huss at Constance; of Martin Luther 
 at Worms; of Wesley standing up to preach before yelling 
 mobs. And, when the two are combined in utterance of 
 the truth which defies death, there you have the martyr and 
 the saint! In public life you may have to face in private 
 life, even, you may have to face this deadly, this raging,
 
 THE IDEAL CITIZEN. ^^ 
 
 this unscrupulous opposition. You will have to be content, 
 if you be a true man, that men should hate you, and call 
 you Beelzebub. Take the case of the American abolition- 
 ists. At one of those meetings to support slavery, when it 
 seemed as if the very passions of demons were let loose, 
 one of the speakers said: "Where are the abolitionists 
 now? I should like to see an abolitionist now." And at 
 once, amid tumult and howls and personal violence, a burly 
 figure thrust itself forward, and a lion-voice exclaimed, "I 
 am Theodore Parker, and / am an abolitionist!" It is 
 something to face hostile mobs; something to look without 
 quailing, to look like a king among meaner men, into a 
 sea of angry faces. But to brave the collective mediocrity; 
 to disregard the elaborate sneers; to tell a church or a 
 nation that it is swayed by passion and misled by igno- 
 rance; to tell them, for all their anathemas, that they must 
 accept the truth which they have h..':ed, and hate the lie 
 which they have believed ; plainly to speak the truth, boldly 
 to rebuke vice, and to do this at the cost of wealth or place 
 or power or the good opinion of those who have hitherto 
 favoured us, or of everything which we have loved, yes! 
 this, if done for conscience' sake, shall not lose its reward. 
 The man who will lead, and not follow, public opinion; the 
 man who, leading it, will make it come round to him or 
 die in the effort to do so, yes, this is the patriot, this the 
 ideal politician, 
 
 "This is the Happy Warrior, this is he 
 Whom every man at arms would wish to be ! " 
 
 But he must suffer for it. Such "extreme lovers of their 
 country and of mankind are never fortunate, neither can 
 they be; for, when a man places his thoughts without him-
 
 2 ~,. QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 self, he goeth not his own way." "Your public career 
 will be checkered," said Lord Brougham to the late Sir 
 Robert Peel, when he was differing from those with whom 
 he had been so long connected; "but you can always turn 
 from the storm without to the sunshine of an approving 
 conscience within." 
 
 And besides candour, integrity, courage, the true citi- 
 zen must be content to accept a complete self-sacrifice. 
 The good man who thinks himself worthy of great things, 
 being worthy, must also magnanimously feel that if the 
 whole world be against him, the greatest thing he can do 
 is to be true to himself. He must be content not only 
 to fail now (that is a small matter), but to fail in this 
 world quite finally; to descend to the grave unthanked and 
 unhonoured, perhaps even as Christ did amid the con- 
 tempt and hatred of mankind. Unshaken, unseduced, un- 
 terrified, he must rise superior to the vulgar worship of 
 what men call success; he must be quite willing to de- 
 crease and to descend; he must count, with God's greatest, 
 that apparent success is often abject failure, and apparent 
 failure royal success. Think over the lives, think over the 
 ends, of John the Baptist, of Paul the Apostle, of Dante, 
 of Columbus, of Milton, of almost all the world's best and 
 greatest; ah! if you be indeed a Christian, think of Him 
 whose example we profess to follow, think of all that is 
 meant by the three short words, the "Cross of Christ." 
 Those who have been nearest Him have been ready to 
 sacrifice their very lives for His dear sake. 
 
 But, my friends, no man can achieve these heights 
 without a fourth requisite for ideal citizenship, which is 
 faith in human nature. It is often a struggle not to lose 
 this. There are times when the vision of human nature
 
 THE IDEAL CITIZEN. 22 - 
 
 appears to us so ugly, and life itself so hollow, that, giving 
 up all hope for mankind and even for ourselves, we say 
 with Elijah, "And now, O Lord, take away my life; for 
 I am not better than my fathers." But the ideal states- 
 man must never sink into this despair. And, to save him 
 from it, we must look at all men in Christ, and on every 
 man, however base and wretched, as one for whom Christ 
 died. He who clings to these principles will try to live for 
 mankind, not for a class; still less for individual men; 
 least of all for himself only. Never will he forget that the 
 good of the swarm must be the good also of the bee; never 
 will he pity the ruffled plumage, while he forgets the dying 
 bird. He must feel "the deep and terrible reality which 
 lies in the two words, 'national life.' " He must have 
 faith in eternal principles. He must be fearless of menac- 
 ing phantoms. He must not be daunted by stupidity; 
 must not be shaken by ingratitude. He must believe that 
 the victory of Christianity, which means the ultimate tri- 
 umph of all that is right and good, has all the certainty of 
 an inevitable law. 
 
 And, as a last requisite, all this means that the Ideal 
 Citizen must have an immense faith in God. He must 
 sweep away the notion that custom or expediency can 
 modify the sanctions of the eternal law. Listen to a few 
 words which Wesley wrote about the slave-trade, and tell 
 me whether they are not applicable to other questions 
 now: "Can human law turn darkness into light, or evil 
 into good? Notwithstanding ten thousand laws, there 
 must still remain an essential difference between justice 
 and injustice, cruelty and wrong. You say it is necessity. 
 I deny that villany is ever necessary. It is necessary to 
 my gaining ; 100,000. I deny that your gaining one thou- 
 
 15
 
 22 5 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 sand is necessary to your present or eternal happiness. It 
 is necessary for the wealth and glory of England. Wealth 
 is not necessary to the glory of any nation. Wisdom, 
 virtue, justice, mercy, generosity, public spirit, love of our 
 country, these are necessary to the glory of a nation; but 
 abundance of wealth is not." So wrote John Wesley about 
 the slave-trade. Have not all Christian statesmen said the 
 same? "You glory," said Oliver Cromwell, "in that 
 ditch which guards your shores. I tell you, your ditch will 
 be no defence to you unless you reform yourselves." "I 
 plead," said a living statesman, "only for what I believe 
 to be just. During twenty-five years I have endured meas- 
 ureless insult, and passed through hurricanes of abuse. 
 My clients have generally been the poor and lowly. They 
 cannot give me place, and dignities, and wealth, but hon- 
 ourable service in their cause yields me that which is of far 
 higher and more lasting value, the consciousness that I 
 have laboured to expound and uphold laws which, though 
 they were not given among the thunders of Sinai, are not 
 less the commandments of God, and not less intended to 
 promote and secure the happiness of men." 
 
 Well, then, in conclusion, perhaps you will say to me, 
 But in this sketch, imperfect as it is, you have sketched not 
 the statesman, not the citizen, but the Christian, the phi- 
 lanthropist, the religious man. Be it so. In some form 
 or other the ideal statesman must be the philanthropist, 
 the Christian, the religious man. There is no other ideal 
 attainable. The only true diplomacy is perfect truthful- 
 ness. The only international law is perfect honesty. The 
 only noble statesmanship is faith in God, and love to men. 
 By the religious man I do not mean the man who has sacred 
 words most often on his lips. By the religious man I mean
 
 THE IDEAL CITIZEN. ^ 
 
 the good man; by religion I mean holiness; by the gospel 
 I mean the good news of a kingdom of righteousness upon 
 earth. All high political questions, questions of pauper- 
 ism, of education, of public amusements, of commercial 
 honesty, of preventing disease, of diminishing crime, be- 
 long to it. Ay, and little daily duties belong to it. "A 
 chastened temper, a tongue that speaks no evil, cheerful- 
 ness amid petty worries, purity of heart ever eloquent in 
 its silence, thoughtfulness for others rather than for our- 
 selves," "these," it has been said, "are the precious stones 
 that build up the walls of the Holy City." If we would 
 be ideal statesmen, or ideal anything, we must help to 
 build it. Let us build it in our own hearts first. Unless 
 we build it there, unless there we see some glimpses of 
 the city which hath no need of the sun, neither of the moon, 
 to lighten it, for the glory of God doth lighten it, and the 
 Lamb is the light thereof, then all other efforts will be 
 in vain. But if we build it in our own hearts, then, 
 sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, in the world 
 around us, also, we shall lay its stones with fair colours, 
 and its foundations with sapphires; and in a society full 
 of candour, full of integrity, full of courage, happy in 
 self-sacrifice, animated with pure faith in man, and with 
 immeasurable love to God, we shall soon be able to 
 
 exclaim, 
 
 " Lo ! the clouds begin to shine 
 About the coming of the Lord !' 7
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND AMERICA. 
 
 "And the Lord commanded us ... to fear the Lord our God, for our good 
 always." DEUT. vi. 24. 
 
 THE fact that in Westminster Abbey a window was un- 
 veiled, a gift of Americans to the church, this beautiful 
 window, which they have given, being almost the sole exist- 
 ing memorial of a very great character and a transcendently 
 great event, compels the choice of my topic. I follow 
 such guidance as confidently as if it were a direction 
 spelled out by the gleaming light on Israel's Urim. Let 
 us get rid of the superstition that such topics, when thus 
 pointed out to us, are not religious, not spiritual, not the 
 gospel. Let us shake off the narrow prejudice that, because 
 the Bible is God's book, it is His only book. Our lives 
 would be better, our thoughts nobler, our hearts larger, our 
 faith more real, our words more charitable, if we would, 
 once for all, learn the lesson of the Law and the Prophets, 
 which is not to glide along the razor's edge of scholastic 
 dogmas, nor to wear formulas threadbare by conventional 
 iteration, but to love God, and to do good to our neighbour. 
 Which is -best, to diffuse the grandeur and sacredness of 
 faith over the whole of daily life, or to regard all but a 
 fraction of life as irredeemably secular? Which is best, 
 to specialize Sundays with servile rigorism, or to diffuse the 
 spirit of Sunday over days which we too often devote to 
 meanness and Mammon? Which is best, to surround 
 places, gestures, garments, with a mechanical sanctity, or 
 by holy lives to make the floor of a cottage as sacred as the
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND AMERICA. 22 g 
 
 rocks of Sinai, and the commonest events hallowed as the 
 rounds of the ladder on which angels tread? Alas for the 
 exclusiveness, which, resting on the impossible demand for 
 verbal orthodoxy, has too often made of religious teachers 
 a caste, and of religious society a clique, and of religious 
 talk a cant, and of religious mannerism a stumbling-block! 
 Oh for one hour of the breeze yea, even of the storm 
 of Galilee to sweep away these mists! Religion was meant 
 surely to be a diffusive dawn, not a narrow beam in the 
 midnight; it was meant to be a universal atmosphere for 
 the many, not an intoxicating perfume for the few. And 
 the Book of God, surely, it is not only such a book as our 
 Caxton could print and bind, but a book universal as our 
 race, individual as ourselves. The soldier may reveal God 
 as well as the priest; the life of the busy statesman may 
 teach us His lessons no less than that of the cloistered 
 saint. Let those whose spiritual life has dried up into 
 the acrid rivulet of a party say, if they will, that topics 
 suggested by daily events are not "the gospel": I say 
 that the gospel may be found by pure hearts and enlight- 
 ened eyes otherwhere than in the straight-dug ditches of 
 formalists; and that, if 
 
 " Every bird that sings, 
 And every flower that stars the elastic sod, 
 And every breath the radiant summer brings, 
 To the pure spirit is a word of Cod," 
 
 so, too, every human life is the life of a child of God, more 
 or less erring, but never unloved by its heavenly Father; 
 and that they who are noble may find elements of noble- 
 ness, they who know the gospel may find the gospel, as 
 clearly written by the finger of God in the pages of Experi- 
 ence as in that which we call specially His Book. Besides
 
 230 
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 the other memories which haunt it, Westminster Abbey 
 may claim its heritage in three great men and three great 
 events. The great men, whose names are on its registers, 
 are William Caxton, Walter Raleigh, John Milton. The 
 great events are the History of Printing, the Discovery of 
 America, the English Revolution. Caxton lies buried 
 there. The headless body of Sir Walter was carried there 
 from the scaffold in Palace Yard. Milton, with Hampden, 
 Pym, and Cromwell, must often have knelt in worship 
 there. There his banns were called. There lies his best 
 loved wife, the "late-espoused saint"; there the child into 
 whose little grave fell Milton's tears. Caxton, and the 
 Introduction of Printing into England, are now commemo- 
 rated by the gift of the Printers of London ; Raleigh, and 
 the Colonization of the New World, by the window un- 
 veiled. I had but to mention to one or two American gen- 
 tlemen that the man who named and colonized Virginia 
 lies almost unrecorded there, and they, with the ready 
 munificence which marks their nation, and which is cer- 
 tainly one of the lessons which we may learn from our "kin 
 beyond the sea," at once, without any toil and anxiety of 
 mine, gave the ;6oo which that window required. I ask 
 Americans to accept our thanks for their generous friendli- 
 ness; and I venture to believe that, long after we are in 
 our graves, generations yet to come will look with interest 
 on our great west window, and will read with interest the 
 lines written on it by one who was at once the American 
 Minister and one of the first of living American poets: 
 
 "The New World's sons, from England's breasts we drew 
 
 Such milk as bids remember whence we came ; 
 Proud of her Past, wherefrom our Present grew, 
 This window we inscribe with Raleigh's name."* 
 
 * Written by Mr. James Russell Lowell, who was present on the occasion.
 
 5YA' WAL TER RALEIGH AND AMERICA. 2 , t 
 
 Sir Walter Raleigh, in whose honour the window was 
 given, was not one of the world's simple, blameless charac- 
 ters, like William Caxton, of whom we spoke so recently. 
 Men of splendid physique and genius, children of a richly- 
 endowed and passionate age, have temptations more intense 
 and terrible than we who live our small, humdrum lives in 
 the petty routine of commonplace. Our faults may be as bad 
 as theirs, though they are meaner and smaller faults. Their 
 sins show large in the largeness of their lives, and in the 
 fierce light which beats upon them. At any rate, who are 
 we little men that we should sit in judgment upon them? 
 A life of heroic aims, exposed to gigantic temptations, may 
 be stained by great faults amid great achievements ; but is 
 such a life to be coldly slandered by men of the small 
 vices, low aims, petty endeavours, we see all around us? If 
 Walter Raleigh in some things sinned greatly, God loved 
 him so well that he also suffered greatly, and out of much 
 tribulation washed his robes white in the blood of the 
 Lamb. "Reader," says Dean Milman, "if thou recall his 
 sins, remember also that he had great virtues, and that 
 thou thyself art mortal." Yes! and remember also that he 
 must be ranked forever among the benefactors of his race, 
 and that there are very few of us who have not done worse 
 deeds than he, and have never done as good ones. It is 
 strange to me that one paltry tablet should hitherto have 
 been almost the only memorial of such a man. Great na- 
 tions should have more pride in their few great sons. I 
 think that Americans will rejoice with us that, after more 
 than two hundred and seventy years,* he should have a wor- 
 thier memorial of his immortal deeds in the church under 
 whose altar lies his headless corpse. 
 
 Many of you may have seen the striking painting of the 
 
 * Raleigh was beheaded in 1618.
 
 2 , 2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 "Boyhood of Sir Walter Raleigh," by our greatest painter.* 
 One of the noble boys who sits listening to the old sea- 
 worthy is Raleigh, the other may be taken for his half- 
 brother, also depicted on the window, Sir Humphrey 
 Gilbert. He, too, nobly did his part as soldier and sailor, 
 when Elizabeth was queen. Raleigh aided him in the 
 endeavour to discover and take possession of unknown lands; 
 and the queen sent him as a jewel a golden anchor, with a 
 pearl at the beak. In the little "Squirrel," a mere trivial 
 yacht of only ten tons' burthen, he explored the dangerous 
 coasts of Cape Breton, refusing to forsake the little com- 
 pany with whom he had passed through so many perils. 
 Sitting abaft, with a book in his hand, amid the fury of the 
 storm he called out repeatedly to the sailors in the "Golden 
 Hind," "We are as near heaven by sea as by land," "reit- 
 erating the same speech," says the captain of the "Hind," 
 "well beseeming a soldier resolute in Jesus Christ, and 
 I can testify he was. The same Monday night, about 
 twelve of the clock, suddenly the lights of the 'Squirrel' 
 disappeared, and withal our watch cried out our general 
 was cast away, which was too true; for in that moment 
 the frigate was devoured and swallowed up in the sea." 
 Dare you speak up for religion, dare you brave death, 
 dare you take Christ for your Captain, dare you deny your- 
 selves, dare you face storms, peril, wounds, bad fare, thun- 
 der and frost, and tropic heat and fever and scurvy for a 
 great cause, as they did? "Seeing," said Gilbert, "that 
 death is inevitable, and the fame of virtue immortal, where- 
 fore in this behalf mutare vcl timere sperno" How many 
 of you can speak in those high tones ? They were cut off 
 in the flower of their days: few of them laid their bones in 
 the sepulchre of their fathers. Life with them was no 
 
 DySirJ. E.Millais, R.A.
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND AMERICA. 2 ^ , 
 
 summer holiday, but a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, 
 and what their Maker sent was welcomed. ""He was one," 
 says the historian, "of a race that has ceased to be. Brave 
 we may still be, and strong, perhaps, as then, but the 
 high moral grace which made bravery and strength so 
 beautiful is departed from us." * Young men, it rests with 
 you on the lives you lead, on the faith which you em- 
 brace whether or not it shall have departed from us for 
 ever. 
 
 Among souls so pure and noble the boy Raleigh passed 
 his earlier years. After brilliant promise at school and 
 college, by the age of seventeen he was fighting for Prot- 
 estants in France, and beginning his many-sided life as 
 soldier, sailor, courtier, poet, discoverer, and author. If 
 you would understand his life, and the glorious years of 
 Queen Elizabeth, you must remember three things: that it 
 was the era of the Renascence; the era of the Reformation; 
 and the era of the colonization of America. 
 
 It was the era of the Renascence. That new boyhood 
 of life produced splendid daring. The glory of England in 
 that day was as when the aloe rushes into its crimson 
 flower. Around the queen stood men crowned with many 
 laurels, not like the pygmies of to-day, but men of strong 
 passions, of deep feelings, of large hopes, of dauntless en- 
 durance, of ardent imagination, of magnificent purposes. 
 Think of the day when Hooker was preaching at the Tem- 
 ple; and Bacon meditating the Novum Organum; and 
 Spenser writing the Faerie Queene; and Sidney fighting in 
 the Netherlands; and Galileo reading the secrets of the 
 stars; and Drake singeing the beard of the King of Spain; 
 and Shakspeare, Marlowe, Chapman, and Ben Jonson were 
 pouring forth all the passion of which man's heart is capa- 
 
 * Froude, " Short Studies on Great Subjects."
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 ^JT- 
 
 ble, and Milton was a little boy; when trade, ait, science, 
 learning, burst into new life; when England was acquiring 
 the empire of the sea, and the queen was telling Mendoza 
 
 in quite her natural voice, and as though it was the most 
 
 ordinary thing in the world, though he was ambassador of 
 a king at whom the world trembled that, if he talked to 
 her about Philip's threats again, she would fling him into 
 a dungeon. Yes! England was the England of Shakspeare 
 and Raleigh, and spoke in the true voice of England then, 
 because her sons were neither cynical unbelievers nor 
 gilded effeminates, but feared God, and were noble and 
 great and true. 
 
 And this era of the Renascence was, on its religious 
 side, the era of the Reformation. If the east window of 
 Westminster Abbey the gift of Ferdinand the Catholic 
 and Isabella to Henry VII., when Prince Arthur married 
 Katherine of Arragon recalls the days of Popery and the 
 Inquisition, the west v/indow speaks of the Reformation. 
 In these our days love of Popery shews itself in coquetting 
 with dead usages, and hatred of Popery has dwindled down 
 into the feeble spite of religious newspapers; and most 
 men, caring nothing about either tendency, walk in the cold 
 mid-region between "a boundless scepticism and an un- 
 fathomable superstition." But in those days hatred of 
 Popery was no mere intolerance about minor religious opin- 
 ions. It was, and had a right to be, a holy and mighty pas- 
 sion. It meant hatred of popes like Pius V., who sent his 
 soldiers into France with the words, "Slay immediately 
 whatever heretics fall into your hands"; and who taught 
 Englishmen to defy and plot against their queen. It meant 
 hatred of Moloch-fires which flamed through all lands; 
 hatred of queens steeped like Mary of Scots in murder and
 
 SIX WALTER RALEIGH AND AMERICA. 2 ^- 
 
 adultery; hatred of generals like Alva, reeking with the 
 blood of saints; hatred of blood which cried to Heaven from 
 an earth which would not cover her slain. Hatred of Popery 
 meant in that day hatred of the sanguinary alliance between 
 priestly usurpation and monarchic despotism, between cruel 
 tyranny and deadly superstition. It meant hatred of burn- 
 ings, tortures, butcheries; hatred of the dark, crooked 
 devil's work of a plotting, murdering Jesuitism, which 
 absolved the reckless perjuries of the conspirator and con- 
 secrated the cursed dagger of the assassin. It meant hatred 
 of hell-born leagues between murder and rebellion; hatred 
 of the spirit of the Nihilist, the Fenian, and the Inquisitor 
 wielding the sword of the tyrant and wearing the ephod of 
 the priest. But with Raleigh born when the fires of 
 Smithfield were barely extinguished, reading Fox's Mar- 
 tyrs at his mother's knee, who as a boy had fought against 
 Alva in the Netherlands, and seen Conde die at Jarnac, 
 and been involved in the retreat of the Huguenots at Mon- 
 contour whose ears had thrilled with the shrieks of St. 
 Bartholomew, and who knew how Philip of Spain had 
 laughed aloud when he heard of that awful massacre, and 
 how Pope Gregory XIII. had struck medals and sung Te 
 Deums in its honour, to Raleigh hatred of Popery was in 
 that day inevitably one with loyalty to Elizabeth and love 
 of England, and passion for the primary rights, the natural 
 liberty and free conscience of mankind. And, because he 
 was a lifelong foe to Popery, he was a lifelong foe to Spain, 
 which was then trying to blight the whole world with the 
 upas shadows of abhorrent absolutism. The great men of 
 Elizabeth knew that the triumph of Spain, the triumph of 
 Popery, would have meant the holiness of racks and the 
 beatitude of thumb-screws. It would have meant that
 
 ^-$ QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 the England of Elizabeth would have reeked, as did the 
 England of James II., with the odours of the charnel- 
 house. It was this that made Raleigh fight Papists in 
 Ireland, which he called, "not the commonweal, but the 
 common woe"; and fight Papists in France, and in the 
 Netherlands, and on the Armada, and in the New World. 
 It was this that made him burn the Spanish fleet in Cadiz 
 Bay. It was this that made him tell in immortal prose, as 
 Tennyson has told in immortal verse, that death of Sir 
 Richard Grenville, when one English ship fought for fifteen 
 mortal hours against fifty-three Spanish ships at the Azores. 
 Yes! in the era of the Reformation hatred of Popery meant 
 love of truth, love of England, love of freedom, love of 
 progress, air, and light. 
 
 But nobly as Raleigh served the cause of England and 
 the cause of the Reformation, it is with the New World 
 and its colonization that his name will be most gloriously 
 and most permanently connected. 
 
 " Westward the course of empire takes its way ; 
 
 The first four acts already past, 
 A fifth shall close the drama with the day; 
 Time's noblest offspring is the last." * 
 
 To Raleigh and the old seaworthies of England the New 
 World meant Eldorado. But Spain forsooth claimed the 
 whole of this New World by virtue of a trumpery parch- 
 ment signed by a meddling Italian priest! And how did 
 this land of promise and golden dreams fare in the hands 
 of Popery and Spain? The blood of Montezuma and Ata- 
 hualpa cried against them. The tale of their greed and 
 cruelty rang through all lands. The flames woven on the 
 banner of Cortez were the accursed emblem of the Inquisi- 
 
 * Bishop Berkeley.
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH AND AMERICA. ,37 
 
 tion. But they had not occupied a third even of the coast; 
 and was that land of boundless wonder and beauty, of 
 boundless fertility and wealth, to be abandoned to them? 
 Were millions of innocent Indians to be treated like brute 
 beasts? Were the English, whom they called "Lutheran 
 devils," to be handed over to the rack and the galleys, if 
 they ventured to trade, nay, if they were but shipwrecked 
 on those shores? Not if Raleigh could help it! His 
 genius fixed upon, and his dauntless patience and princely 
 munificence secured, regions which had almost escaped the 
 notice of Spain. On the colonization of Virginia he 
 spent ,40,000, and was ready to spend his whole fortune 
 to the last coin. Westminster at any rate has herein given 
 him his due. It was the late Dean Stanley who called him 
 "the Father of the United States." It was Canon Kings- 
 ley who said, "To this one man, under the providence 
 of God, the whole United States of America owe their 
 existence." 
 
 Let us glance at his life and end. If you would judge 
 of his zenith, see him in all the splendour of Durham 
 House, his beautiful wife beside him, his noble boy at 
 his knee; sometimes flashing about as Captain of Eliza- 
 beth's Guard, in his armour of enamelled silver; some- 
 times in his "doublet of white satin, all embroidered with 
 rich pearls, and a weighty rich chain of great pearls around 
 his neck"; the friend of Sidney, the patron of Spen- 
 ser, the companion of Ben Jonson and Shakspeare, Lord 
 of the Stannaries, Governor of Munster, Governor of Jer- 
 sey, Rear- Admiral of the Fleet against the Azores; ruffling 
 it with Leicester and Essex, their equal in manly beauty ; 
 " lording it with awful ascendency " in the fairyland of Glo- 
 riana's Court, "A man at whom men gazed as at a star."
 
 2 -g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Envy not his splendour! All the while he was struggling 
 in a network of base intrigues. Long before pride and 
 passion led him into sin he had learned as his poem 
 "The Lie" shows how hollow and disappointing it all 
 was. And then see the plunge right down to the very nadir 
 of human misery and ruin! I know few tragedies to equal 
 those last twelve years of his in the Tower of London. 
 Elizabeth had died "with the whole Book of Ecclesiastes 
 written on her mighty heart," and the very basest and 
 meanest of English kings with no fear except to offend 
 Spain, and no money except to lavish on infamous favour- 
 ites disgraced her throne. Such a man as James natu- 
 rally hates such a man as Raleigh. His fair day at once 
 drew to evening. "I am left of all men," he wails, "that 
 have done good to many. All my good turns forgotten, 
 all my errors revived and expounded to all extremity of 
 ill, all my services, hazards, and expenses for my country, 
 plantings, discoveries, fights, counsels, and whatso- 
 ever dire malice has now covered over." Ah! what a 
 shipwreck of man's ingratitude! and how common on the 
 treacherous sea of life! And then came the midnight. 
 Imprisoned, robbed, slandered, yet enriching even his 
 prison hours with the "History of the World"; in vain at- 
 tempting suicide, betrayed by his own king, suffering from 
 fever, losing his gallant boy in battle and his devoted 
 adherent by suicide; old, gray-headed, lame; worn with 
 sickness, anguish, and watching; penniless, ruined, dis- 
 honoured, finding the whole world turned for him to 
 thorns, after being belied for a while in a hubbub of lies, 
 he is, at a day's notice, infamously doomed to the scaffold. 
 In all those awful fires God had purged away all his dross. 
 He had long learned to defy Death in all his ugly and mis-
 
 SSX WALTER RALEIGH AND AMERICA. 2 ^g 
 
 shapen forms. "O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! " he 
 wrote at the end of his "History of the World," "whom 
 none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath 
 dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath nat- 
 tered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised : 
 thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all 
 the pride, cruelty, and ambition of men, and covered it all 
 over with these two narrow words, k Hie jacetS " "E'en 
 such," he wrote in his cell the evening before his execu- 
 tion, 
 
 " E'en such is time, who takes in trust 
 
 Our youth, our hope, our all we have, 
 
 And pays us but with earth and dust ; 
 
 Which, in the dark and silent grave, 
 
 When we have wandered all our ways, 
 
 Shuts up the story of our days. 
 
 But from this earth, this grave, this dust, 
 
 My God shall raise me up, I trust ! " 
 
 "Prythee, let me see the axe," he says to the executioner. 
 "Dost thou think, man, I am afraid of it?" "A sharp 
 medicine, but a sound cure for all diseases. I entreat 
 you," he says, "that you will all join with me in prayer to 
 the God of heaven, whom I have grievously offended, being 
 a man full of all vanity, who have lived a sinful life, that 
 the Almighty Goodness will forgive; that He will cast 
 away my sins from me; that He will receive me into ever- 
 lasting life. So I take leave of you all, making my peace 
 with God." He says but one more word. Asked to face 
 towards the east, he says, " If the heart be right, it mat- 
 ters not which way the head lies." So dies the most brill- 
 iant of Englishmen; so "fades all glory into darkness, and 
 all life into dust," that we may give God the splendour. 
 And I, for one, would rather take my stand with Raleigh,
 
 2 . QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 purged in the seven-times-heated furnace of affliction and 
 forgiven for his Saviour's sake, than with millions of vul- 
 gar and every-day respectabilities, who have passed their 
 life in the Pharisaism of false orthodoxies and the pettiness 
 of cheap observances. He was nearer God, I believe, by 
 a whole heaven than millions of the sleek sinners whom 
 God leaves alone to succeed and prosper, and to walk in 
 the odour of self-satisfaction and of sanctity, the sinners 
 who, in their own eyes, need no repentance, the little 
 hearts that know not how to forgive. 
 
 I rejoice that America has done him this honour. 
 Sebastian Cabot, who landed even before Columbus on the 
 mainland of North America, was born at Bristol and bred 
 in England. In the privy-purse expenses of Henry VIII. 
 we find this curious entry: "To the man who found the 
 new isle ;io." The man was Cabot; the isle, Newfound- 
 land! And what is America now? A mighty civilization, 
 destined, perhaps, to surpass ours; a land of illimitable 
 hopes, with her thirteen Colonies, her forty-four States, 
 her five Territories, spreading our race and tongue from a 
 narrow island to a boundless continent; freed from us, as 
 Washington said, by "reiterated and astonishing interposi- 
 tions of Providence." "You are the advanced guard of the 
 human race," said Madame de Stae'l to an American: "you 
 have the future of the world." If glorious has been our 
 legacy to her, glorious, too, have been her gifts to us. 
 She has given us a type of manhood supplied "neither by the 
 recusants of Maryland nor the cavaliers of Virginia, but 
 by the Puritans of New England " ; * a type of manhood "at 
 once manful and godly, practical and enthusiastic, prudent 
 and self-sacrificing," in which, because it was inspired by 
 the Reformation, righteousness, conduct, conscience, was a 
 
 *Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone.
 
 SIX WALTER RALEIGH AND AMERICA ~ Ar 
 
 241 
 
 main factor. It was God's will, it was best for the world, 
 that at Lexington "the embattled farmers" should have 
 reared the banner of freedom, and "fired the shot heard 
 round the world." * Henceforth we are brother nations, 
 brothers in amity; brothers by the tongue that Milton and 
 Shakspeare spoke ; brothers by the memories of one common 
 Bible; brothers for the progress and freedom of the world; 
 brothers "to discover and to traffic, to colonize and to civil- 
 ize, until no wind can sweep the earth which does not bear 
 the echoes of an English voice." f America has given us 
 in her history the spectacle of an army of a million and a 
 half of brave soldiers reabsorbed without a struggle into the 
 currents of a peaceful life. She has given us not only a 
 magnificent type of the grandeur of collective humanity, 
 but also noble types of individual humanity. To the 
 viaticum of good examples her contribution has not been 
 wanting. In literature she has given us Motley, and Ban- 
 croft, and Prescott; in fiction, Poe and Hawthorne; in elo- 
 quence, Channing, and Clay, and Webster, and Everett, 
 and Wendell Phillips; in poetry, Emerson, and Longfellow, 
 and Whittier, and Holmes, and Bryant, and Lowell; and, 
 in manhood, specimens of men pre-eminently righteous, 
 fearless, uncorrupt. Such were the blameless, unselfish 
 Washington; Franklin, who wrenched the lightning from 
 heaven and the sdeptre from tyrants; J the strong, homely, 
 patient Lincoln; the calm, wise, manly Garfield; the fire 
 and courage of Theodore Parker; the burning faith and 
 magnificent endurance of William Lloyd Garrison. Worthy 
 descendants these of the English Puritan and the French 
 Huguenot; of men who shook off the oppression of the 
 Stuarts and spurned the tyranny of the Grand Monarque ; 
 
 * Emerson. t Kingsley, " Westward Ho ! " 
 
 " Eripuit clo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis." Turfot. 
 
 16
 
 242 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 of men whose fathers fought at Naseby and Marston Moor, 
 at Bunker Hill and Saratoga. And she, too, has suffered 
 as we have suffered. She has washed away old stains in the 
 blood of Civil War. She has suffered as we have suffered, 
 wept as we have wept, for the cursed crime of assassination. 
 She, too, like us, like France, like Germany, like Russia, 
 has seen her leaders "thrust, for no cause, in the very 
 frenzy of wantonness and wickedness by the red hand of 
 murder"* from life to death. Like us, too, more than 
 other nations, she has, thank God, kept the faith. But 
 she has still a vast work to do. She has won Liberty. 
 Will she keep her name inviolate? Will she love her so 
 well as to show the world that without order there is no 
 liberty, without obedience no dominion? Will England 
 and America, for their own sake, and for the world's sake, 
 save Liberty from being degraded from a divine ideal into 
 a monstrous idol? Will her politicians and ours tremble 
 lest for votes they should trample on principles or palter 
 with God for gold? Will they remember the great words of 
 Chatham, "Where law ends, tyranny begins," and that 
 there is no tyranny so detestable as that of socialism? The 
 shield of liberty is broad and terrible, and it is the aegis 
 of the nations; but it is the shield of men, not of vipers, 
 not of hyenas that thirst for blood. If murder and rebel- 
 lion crouch beneath that shield, let them be dragged out 
 of its sacred shadow. It is the shield of innocence, not of 
 outrage; of obedience, not of assassins. Men have their 
 rights; nations have their rights; loyalty and faith and 
 virtue have their rights against the fiendishness of exe- 
 crable men. A brave statesman f said that never had gov- 
 ernments more need to be strong than now, strong for 
 Freedom against the anarchy which would fain assume her 
 
 Hoc. J. Elaine. tRt. Hon. W. E. Foreter, M.P.
 
 Sift WALTER RALEIGH AXD AMERICA. 243 
 
 aspect and would sharpen its brutal daggers in her name. 
 Yes, the day has come when neither in panic nor with 
 thirst for vengeance, but girding her loins for work in all 
 nations, firm yet merciful, Freedom must grasp the sword 
 of her sister Justice, not forgetting that it is a sword of 
 celestial temper and forged in the armoury of God. And 
 the day may come when, not in blind passion, but with the 
 sternness of inexorable duty, she must with that sword 
 stand ready to smite once and smite no more. The Eng- 
 land of Queen Victoria, the America of Lincoln and of 
 Garfield, must learn to hate the misshapen broods of Athe- 
 ism and Nihilism with a hatred deadlier even than that 
 of the England of their fathers against Popery and Spain. 
 Execrable was the Inquisition; but the Inquisition was 
 holy compared to that raging hatred of God and man, that 
 deification of lust and blood, which, adopting the enginery 
 of devils, preaches the hell-born gospel of petroleum and 
 of dynamite. The day has come when the nations must look 
 this devil in the face, and form against it their committees 
 of safety. 
 
 Oh, in the Armageddon shock of the imminent battle 
 against sin and antichrist; against the false prophets of 
 atheistic socialism, and the dragon of enmity to God's 
 eternal laws, and the wild beast which ever arises out of 
 the abysses of fallen and God-abandoning humanity, let 
 America range herself with us under the Banner of the 
 Cross, and then in the name of God, the Mighty and the 
 Merciful, we shall be irresistible for the blessing of the 
 world.
 
 GENERAL GRANT. 
 
 FOURTEEN years have not passed since Dean Stanley of 
 Westminster, whom Americans so much loved and honored, 
 was walking round Westminster Abbey with General Grant, 
 and explaining to him its wealth of great memorials. 
 Neither of them had attained the allotted span of human 
 life and for both we might have hoped that many years 
 would elapse before they went down to the grave, full of 
 years and honours. But this is already the tenth summer 
 since the Dean fell asleep, and the sixth since the great 
 soldier, whose sun went down while it yet was day, was 
 laid in his honoured grave amid the grief of thousands 
 assembled to mourn with his widow, family, and friends. 
 Yes : life at the best is but as a vapour that passeth away. 
 
 " The glories of our blood and state 
 Are shadows, not substantial things." 
 
 But, when death comes, what nobler epitaph can any man 
 have than this, that, having served his generation, by the 
 will of God he fell asleep? Little can the living do for 
 the dead. The pomps and ceremonies of earthly grandeur 
 have lost their significance; but Virtue shall be honoured 
 for evermore. 
 
 I would desire to say simply and directly, and, if with 
 generous appreciation, yet with no idle flattery, of him 
 whose death has made a nation mourn. His private life, 
 the faults and failings of his character, whatever they may 
 have been, belong in no sense to the world. They are for
 
 GENERAL GRANT. 
 
 245 
 
 the judgment of God, whose merciful forgiveness is neces- 
 sary for the best of what we do and are. We touch only on 
 his public actions and services, the record of his strength, 
 his magnanimity, his self-control, his generous deeds. 
 His life falls into four marked divisions, of which each 
 has its own lessons for us. He touched on them himself 
 in part, when he said, 
 
 " Bury me either at West Point, where I was trained as a 
 youth; or at Illinois, which gave me my first commission; 
 or at New York, which sympathized with me in my misfor- 
 tunes." 
 
 His wish has been respected; and on the cliff overhang- 
 ing the Hudson his monument will stand, to recall to the 
 memory of future generations those dark days of a nation's 
 history which he did so much to close. 
 
 First came the early years of growth and training, of pov- 
 erty and obscurity, of struggle and self-denial. Poor and 
 humbly born, he had to make his own way in the world. 
 God's unseen providence directed his boyhood. ^\. cadet- 
 ship was given him at the Military Academy of West 
 Point; and after a brief period of service in the Mexican 
 War, in which he was three times mentioned in de- 
 spatches, seeing no opening for a soldier in what seemed 
 likely to be days of unbroken peace, he settled down 
 to a humble trade in a provincial town. Citizens of 
 St. Louis still remember the rough backwoodsman who 
 sold old wood from door to door, and who afterwards 
 became a leather-seller in the obscure town of Galena. 
 Those who knew him in those days have said that, 
 if any one had predicted that the silent, unprosperous, 
 unambitious man, whose chief aim was to get a plank road 
 from his shop to the railway depot, would become twice
 
 24 6 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 President of the United States, and one of the foremost 
 men of his day, the prophecy would have seemed extrava- 
 gantly ridiculous. But such careers are the glory of the 
 American continent. They show that the people have a 
 sovereign insight into intrinsic force. If Rome told with 
 pride how her dictators came from the plough-tail, America, 
 too, may record the answer of the President who, on being 
 asked what would be his coat-of-arms, answered, proudly 
 mindful of his early struggles, "A pair of shirt-sleeves." 
 The answer showed a noble sense of the dignity of labor, 
 a noble superiority to the vanities of feudalism, a strong 
 conviction that men are to be honoured simply as men, and 
 not for the prizes of birth and accident, which are without 
 them. You have of late years had two martyr Presidents, 
 both of them sons of the people. One was the homely 
 man, who at the age of seven was a farm lad, at seventeen 
 a rail splitter, at twenty a boatman on the Mississippi, 
 and who in manhood proved to be one of the most honest 
 and God-fearing of modern rulers. The other grew up 
 from a shoeless child in a log hut on the prairies, round 
 which the wolves prowled in the winter snow, to be a 
 humble teacher in Hiram Institute. With these Presi- 
 dents, America need not blush to name also the leather- 
 seller of Galena. Every true man derives his patent of 
 nobleness direct from God. 
 
 Did not God choose David from the sheepfolds, from fol- 
 lowing the ewes great with young ones, to make him the 
 ruler of His people Israel? Was not the Lord of Life and 
 all the worlds for thirty years a carpenter at Nazareth? 
 Do not such things illustrate the prophecy of Solomon: 
 "Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall 
 stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men"?
 
 GENERAL GRANT. 
 
 247 
 
 When Abraham Lincoln sat, book in hand, day after day 
 under the tree, moving round it as the shadow moved, 
 absorbed in mastering his task; when James Garfield rang 
 the bell at Hiram Institute on the very stroke of the hour, 
 and swept the school-room as faithfully as he mastered his 
 Greek lesson; when Ulysses Grant, sent with his team to 
 meet some men who came to load his cart with logs, and 
 finding no men, loaded the cart with his own boy's 
 strength, they showed, in conscientious duty, qualities 
 which were to raise them to become kings of men. When 
 John Adams was told that his son, John Quincy Adams, 
 had been elected President of the United States, he said, 
 "He has always been laborious, child and man, from in- 
 fancy." 
 
 But the youth was not destined to die in the deep valley 
 of obscurity and toil in which it is the lot and perhaps 
 the happy lot of most of us to spend our little lives. 
 The hour came; the man was needed. In 1861 there broke 
 out that most terrible war of modern days. Grant received 
 a commission as Colonel of Volunteers, and in four years 
 the struggling toiler had been raised to the chief command 
 of a vaster army than has ever been handled by any mortal 
 man. Who could have imagined that four years would 
 make that enormous difference? But it is often so. The 
 great men needed for some tremendous crisis have stepped 
 often, as it were, out of a door in the wall which no man 
 has noticed; and, unannounced, unheralded, without pres- 
 tige, have made their way, silently and single-handed, to the 
 front. And there was no luck in it. It was a work of in- 
 flexible faithfulness, of indomitable resolution, of sleepless 
 energy, of iron purpose and tenacity. In the campaigns at 
 Fort Donelson; in the desperate battle at Shiloh; in the
 
 24 g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 siege of Corinth; *in the successful assaults at Vicksburg; 
 in battle after battle, in siege after siege, whatever Grant 
 had to do, he did it with his might. Other generals might 
 fail : he would not fail. He showed what a man could do 
 whose will was strong. He undertook, as General Sher- 
 man said of him, what no one else would have ventured, 
 and his very soldiers began to reflect something of his 
 inflexible determination. His sayings revealed the man. 
 "I have nothing to do with opinions," he said at the 
 outset, "and shall only deal with armed rebellion." "In 
 riding over the field," he said at Shiloh, "I saw that either 
 side was ready to give away, if the other showed a bold 
 front. I took the opportunity, and ordered an advance 
 along the whole line." "No terms," he wrote to General 
 Buckner at Fort Donelson, and it is pleasant to know that 
 General Buckner stood as a warm friend beside his dying 
 bed, "no terms other than unconditional surrender can be 
 accepted." "My headquarters," he wrote from Vicksburg, 
 "will be on the field." With a military genius which em- 
 braced the vastest plans while attending to the smallest 
 details, he defeated, one after another, every great general 
 of the Confederates except General Stonewall Jackson. 
 The Southerners felt that he held them as in the grasp of 
 a vice; that this man could neither be arrested nor avoided. 
 For all this he has been severely blamed. He ought not 
 to be blamed. He has been called a butcher, which is 
 grossly unjust. He loved peace; he hated bloodshed; his 
 heart was generous and kind. His orders were to save 
 lives, to save treasure, but at all costs to save his country, 
 and he did save his country. His army cheerfully ac- 
 cepted the sacrifice, wrote its farewells, buckled its belts, 
 and stood ready. The struggle was not for victory : it was
 
 GENERAL GRANT. ._ 
 
 249 
 
 for existence. It was not for glory: it was for life and 
 death. Grant had not only to defeat armies, but to anni- 
 hilate their forces; to leave no choice but destruction or 
 submission. He saw that the brief ravage of the hurricane 
 is infinitely less ruinous than the interminable malignity 
 of the pestilence, and that, in the colossal struggle, victory 
 swift, decisive, overwhelming would be the truest 
 mercy. In silence, in determination, in clearness of in- 
 sight, he was like your Washington and our Wellington. 
 He was like them also in this: that the word "cannot" did 
 not exist in his soldier's dictionary, and what he achieved 
 was achieved without bluster. In the hottest fury of all his 
 battles his speech was never known to be more than "yea, 
 yea," and "nay, nay." He met General Lee at Appomattox. 
 He received his surrender with faultless delicacy. He im- 
 mediately issued an order that the Confederates should be 
 supplied with rations. The moment that his enemies sur- 
 rendered he gave them terms as simple and as generous as 
 a brother could have given them, terms which healed dif- 
 ferences; terms of which they freely acknowledged the 
 magnanimity. Not even entering the capital, avoiding all 
 ostentation, unelated by triumph as unruffled by adversity, 
 he hurried back to stop recruiting and to curtail the vast 
 expenses of the country. After the surrender at Appomattox 
 Court House, the war was over. He had put his hand 
 to the plough and looked not back. He had dealt blow 
 after blow, each following where the last had struck; he 
 had wielded like a hammer the gigantic forces at his dis- 
 posal, and had smitten opposition into the dust. It was 
 a mighty work, and he had done it well. Surely, history 
 has shown that for the future destinies of a mighty nation 
 it was a necessary and blessed work! The Church utters
 
 250 
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 her most indignant anathema against an unrighteous war, 
 but she has never refused to honor the faithful soldiers 
 who fight in the cause of their country and God. The 
 gentlest and most Christian of modern poets has used the 
 tremendous expression that 
 
 " God's most dreaded instrument 
 In working out a pure intent 
 Is man arrayed for mutual slaughter. 
 Yea, Carnage is His daughter ! " 
 
 We shudder even as we quote the words; but yet the 
 cause for which General Grant fought the honor of a great 
 people, and the freedom of a whole race of mankind was 
 a great and noble cause. And the South has accepted that 
 desperate and bloody arbitrament. Two of the Southern 
 generals, we rejoice to hear, helped to bear General Grant's 
 funeral pall. The rancour and ill-feeling of the past are 
 buried for ever in oblivion; true friends have been made out 
 of brave foemen. Americans are no longer Northerners 
 and Southerners, Federals and Confederates ; but they are 
 Americans. "Do not teach your children to hate," . . . 
 said General Lee to an American lady; "teach them that 
 they are Americans. I thought that we were better off as 
 one nation than as two, and I think so now." "The war is 
 over," said Grant, "and the best sign of rejoicing after 
 victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the 
 field." "Let us have peace," were the memorable words 
 with which he ended his brief inaugural address as Pres- 
 ident. 
 
 On the rest of the great soldier's life we will only touch 
 in very few words. As Wellington became Prime Minis- 
 ter of England, and lived to be hooted in the streets of 
 London, so Grant, more than half against his will, became
 
 GENERAL GRANT. -,-j 
 
 President, and for a time lost much of his popularity. He 
 foresaw it all. But it is not for a man to choose, it is for 
 a man to accept, his destiny. What verdict history may 
 pronounce on him as a politician I know not; but here, and 
 now, the voice of censure, deserved or undeserved, is si- 
 lent. When the great Duke of Marlborough died, and one 
 began to speak of his avarice, "He was so great a man," 
 said Bolingbroke, "I had forgotten he had that fault." 
 
 It was a fine and delicate rebuke, and we do not intend 
 to rake up a man's faults and errors. Those errors, what- 
 ever they may have been, we leave to the mercy of the 
 Merciful, and the atoning blood of his Saviour. We speak 
 only in gratitude of his great achievements, beside the 
 grave. Let us record his virtues in brass, for men's ex- 
 ample; but let his faults, whatever they may have been, be 
 writ in water. Some may think that it would have been 
 well for Grant if he had died in 1865, when steeples 
 clanged and cities were illuminated and congregations rose 
 to their feet in his honour. Many and dark clouds over- 
 shadowed the last of his days, 'the blow of financial ruin; 
 the dread that men should suppose that he had a tarnished 
 reputation; the terrible agony of an incurable disease. But 
 God's ways are not as our ways. To bear that sudden ruin 
 and that speechless agony required a courage nobler and 
 greater than that of the battlefield, and human courage grows 
 magnificently to the height of human need. "I am a man," 
 said Frederick the Great, "and therefore born to suffer." 
 On the long agonizing death-bed, Grant showed himself 
 every inch a hero, bearing his agonies and trials without 
 a murmur, with rugged stoicism, in unflinching fortitude; 
 yes, and we believe in a Christian's patience and a Chris- 
 tian's prayers. Which of us can tell whether those hours
 
 2 c- QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 of torture and misery may not have been blessings in dis- 
 guise; whether God may not have been refining the gold 
 from the brass, and the strong man have been truly pu- 
 rified by the strong agony? We do not lack here in Eng- 
 land memorials to recall the history of your country. In 
 Westminster Abbey is the grave of Andre; there is the 
 monument raised by grateful Massachusetts to the gallant 
 Howe; there is the temporary resting-place of George 
 Peabody; there is the bust of Longfellow; over the Dean's 
 grave there is the faint semblance of Boston Harbor. 
 Whatever there may have been between the two nations 
 to forget and forgive, it is forgotten and forgiven. "I 
 will not speak of them as two peoples," said General 
 Grant at Newcastle in 1877, "because, in fact, we are one 
 people, with a common destiny; and that destiny will be 
 brilliant in proportion to the friendship and co-operation 
 of the brethren dwelling on each side of the Atlantic." 
 Oh! if the two peoples which are one people be true to 
 their duty and true to their God, who can doubt that in 
 their hands are the destinies of the world? Can anything 
 short of utter dementation ever thwart a destiny so mani- 
 fest ? Your founders were our sons : it was from our Past 
 that your Present grew. The monument of Sir Walter 
 Raleigh is not that nameless grave in St. Margaret's: it 
 is the State of Virginia. Yours and ours alike are the 
 memories of Captain John Smith and of the Pilgrim 
 Fathers, of General Oglethorpe's "strong benevolence of 
 soul," of the apostolic holiness of Berkeley, and the burn- 
 ing zeal of Wesley and Whitefield. Yours and ours alike 
 are the plays of Shakspere and the poems of Milton; ours 
 and yours alike are all that you have accomplished in lit- 
 erature or in history, the songs of Longfellow and Bryant,
 
 GENERAL GRANT. ' 
 
 the genius of Hawthorne and of Irving, the fame of Wash- 
 ington, Lee, and Grant. But great memories imply great 
 responsibilities. It was not for nothing that God has 
 made England what she is; not for nothing that the free 
 individualism of a busy multitude, the humble traders of a 
 fugitive people, snatched the New World from feudalism 
 and bigotry, from Philip II. and Louis XIV., from the 
 Spaniards and from Montcalm, from the Jesuit and the In- 
 quisition, from Torquemada and from Richelieu, to make 
 it the land of the Reformation and the Republic of Chris- 
 tianity and of Peace. "Let us auspicate all our proceed- 
 ings in America," said Edmund Burke, "with the old 
 church-cry, 'Sursum corda! ' ' But it is for America to 
 live up to the spirit of such words, not merely to quote 
 them with proud enthusiasm. We have heard of 
 
 "New times, new climes, new lands, new men, but still 
 The same old tears, old crimes, and oldest ill." 
 
 It is for America to falsify the cynical foreboding. Let her 
 take her place side by side with England in the very van of 
 freedom and of progress, united by a common language, by 
 common blood, by common measures, by common interests, 
 by a common history, by common hopes; united by the 
 common glory of great men, of which this great "temple of 
 silence and reconciliation" is the richest shrine. Be it the 
 steadfast purpose of the two peoples who are one people to 
 show all the world not only the magnificent spectacle of 
 human happiness, but the still more magnificent spectacle 
 of two peoples which are one people, loving righteousness 
 and hating iniquity, inflexibly faithful to the principles of 
 eternal justice which are the unchanging laws of God.
 
 GENERAL GARFIELD. 
 
 "His Lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant." MATT. 
 xxv. 21. 
 
 PRESIDENT JAMES GARFIELD has passed away. I desire 
 to add my tribute of sympathy, sincere, but humble, to that 
 of all other Englishmen. I do so partly because I have re- 
 ceived much encouragement from the American people, and 
 partly because I would not miss the opportunity of pointing 
 to the lifelong example of so great and good a man. That 
 dastard shot of a miserable assassin has sent to his grave a 
 man of princely nature; but no weapon can murder good- 
 ness, no weapon can strike down the power of a fair life 
 or its influence upon the world. 
 
 "Good deeds cannot die: 
 
 They with the sun and moon renew their light, 
 For ever blessing those who look on them." 
 
 On the day when General Garfield was inaugurated 
 President of the United States, he kissed in the public 
 assembly his venerable mother. Cynics and men who adore 
 small conventional proprieties sneered at the act; but it 
 was an act of grand and beautiful simplicity, worthy of a 
 hero and a good man. If the boy who at eighteen had to 
 earn his living by manual and even menial labour as- 
 cended, at fifty, one of the loftiest pinnacles of earthly great- 
 ness, his splendid prosperity was due in no small degree 
 to that aged mother. It is now sixty years ago that in
 
 GENERAL GARFIELD. 2 _ - 
 
 a poor log hut in the backwoods of Ohio the child was 
 born. He came of a good, strong, independent stock. His 
 father's ancestor was a Puritan; his mother's, a Huguenot. 
 The one had fled from the tyranny of Charles I. in Eng- 
 land: the other had been exiled by the tyranny of Louis 
 XIV. in France. The parents of the child were living in 
 the deepest poverty. Their log hut was only eighteen feet 
 by twenty. It had neither sash nor glass : light reached it 
 through greased paper placed over rude apertures. The 
 furniture consisted chiefly of three-legged stools. The chil- 
 dren slept upon straw in the loft. Yet many a child born 
 to the purple might have envied the pure happiness of that 
 lonely hut. But soon it was visited by terrible affliction. 
 A forest fire broke out, and the brave father died of exhaus- 
 tion from the efforts which saved his home. His last 
 words to his wife as he looked on his four children were, 
 "I have planted four saplings in these woods: I must now 
 leave them to your care." He was buried in a rough chest 
 in the corner of the wheat-field ; and the widow with her 
 little ones, of whom James was then a babe, was left to 
 face the privations of a winter in the woods. Food was 
 often very scarce. Often, as the children lay awake in the 
 long, dark nights, they heard the howling of the wolves and 
 the weird scream of the panthers in the snow around their 
 doors. But brave hearts can conquer anything. Thomas, 
 the eldest boy, was only eleven years old, yet he worked 
 the little farm. The mother, as she sat at her spinning- 
 wheel, often contented herself with a single meal a day. 
 The girl of fifteen carried her little brother James on her 
 back to school. He was nearly four before he had a pair 
 of shoes even in winter, and his first pair was bought out 
 of his brother's earnings. From earliest years the child
 
 2 5 g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 worked hard both to earn his bread and to master the rudi- 
 ments of knowledge. His school was at a distance, and 
 was only held for a part of the year. It was but seldom 
 that the family even got the chance of worship. There 
 is not a boy in our schools who up to the age of six- 
 teen has not had better chances of learning than the late 
 President of the United States. But the mother trained 
 her boys and girls in a very simple creed and in the Holy 
 Book, and taught them from the first that "where there's 
 a will there's a way," and that "the biggest coward in the 
 world is the man who does not dare to do what is right." 
 Even at six years old, the little boy had to help on the 
 farm, to milk cows, to chop wood, to dig vegetables and 
 at night, lying flat on the floor, he would read by the blaze 
 of the pine-wood fire, which was the only light they could 
 afford. Do you think that this was a hard training for the 
 little lad? Yes, hard, but hardy and bracing. It made 
 him what he became. It was God's education for him, 
 better than man's. He had his dear home, his great- 
 souled mother, his brave, bright-eyed, helpful brother and 
 sisters; he was far from base examples; he was being nur- 
 tured in the faith and fear of God; he lived amid the 
 sights and sounds of nature, he had health and strength, 
 and faith and purity, and hope. It is no disadvantage to a 
 brave true heart to tread the daisied path, and breathe the 
 fine mountain air of poverty. It is infinitely better than 
 to be rocked and dandled on the lap of luxury, petted and 
 pampered and spoiled into selfishness by effeminate indul- 
 gence. When that shoeless and ill-clad boy, whose hands 
 were hard with the axe and the mattock, grew up to win a 
 great battle, and to achieve in two weeks what trained gen- 
 erals could not do in two months, President Lincoln char-
 
 GENERAL GARFIELD. 257 
 
 acteristically remarked that it was "because, when a boy, 
 he had to work for his living." 
 
 So, working at the farm, working in the carpenter's 
 shop, working at building, lying on the boards by the light 
 of pitch-pine knots to learn arithmetic in the long, dark 
 evenings, doing heartily all that he did, he reached the age 
 of fourteen. Apprenticed at that age to a blacksalter, and 
 thrown among coarse, swearing, drunken blackguards, in a 
 repulsive trade, yet, like Joseph in the court of Pharaoh, he 
 held his own, and lost neither innocence nor faith. Re- 
 pelled from a sea life by the drunken brutality of a captain, 
 he became a barge-boy on a canal, fell fourteen times in one 
 year into the water, and was once saved in a manner so 
 strange that he regarded it as directly providential. Here, 
 too, among low, whiskey-drinking, blaspheming bullies, 
 the strong boy was pure, and firm, and temperate, and thor- 
 oughly respected, and even beloved. Stricken with ague, 
 he barely struggled home; and, arriving late at night, he 
 saw his mother kneeling before an open book, and heard 
 her pray, "Give Thy strength unto Thy servant, and save 
 the son of Thine handmaid." He had struggled back to 
 his home cabin only just in time, for next day he was 
 stricken down with a terrible illness. That sickness was the 
 turning-point of his life. "It is a great thing," he said 
 years afterward, "when a young man determines to devote 
 several years to the accomplishment of a definite work." 
 He determined to become a scholar. On his recovery, very 
 shabbily and scantily dressed, and with only a few shillings 
 of money in his pocket, awkward, bashful, ill-trained, the 
 boy went to a school, paying his own way at it by manual 
 labour, and by teaching in the holidays. Then he made 
 his way to a higher school, partly paying his way there 
 
 17
 
 2 ,g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 also by acting as bell-ringer and floor-sweeper. He was 
 now nineteen; and then he determined to go to college, 
 still earning his bread by his own efforts, and determining 
 not to cost a farthing to his widowed mother. Making 
 himself every year a riper scholar, and so becoming a 
 highly-valued teacher at the school where he had been 
 trained, he grew more widely known as a speaker, a 
 preacher, a strong and true man, until he was elected a 
 senator, first of his native State, and then of his country. 
 Then the Civil War broke out between the North and 
 South. In that war, by heroic courage and indomitable 
 perseverance, he showed himself as great a soldier as he 
 had been a senator and schoolmaster. He was appointed 
 a general, performed some acts of splendid bravery, rose 
 higher and higher in the estimation of his countrymen, 
 until in 1880, at the age of fifty, he was elected Presi- 
 dent of the United States. He had hardly entered on 
 his office, had not had time to trample on the corruption 
 which as an honest man he hated, had not enjoyed the 
 fruits of his prosperity, or given to America the full ben- 
 efit of his tried integrity and manly wisdom, when the shot 
 of a mean, needy, greedy, morbid creature, born, as it 
 were, out of the scum which fringes the vilest waves of 
 humanity, wrenched from him a glorious heritage of op- 
 portunity, and doomed him to eleven weeks of deplorable 
 agony, crowned by a simple, heroic death, and a funeral 
 at which not only his own mourning countrymen in their 
 many myriads, but even foreign kings and foreign na- 
 tions, shed unfeigned tears. 
 
 That act of assassination, of peril to mankind from the 
 existence of such wretched, unrestrained, desperate, dis- 
 appointed miscreants as his murderer; the fact that within
 
 GENERAL GARFIELD. 2 eg 
 
 so short an interval the same desperate and envious egotism 
 should have smitten down the Autocrat of an absolute em- 
 pire (the Czar Alexander) and the chosen President of 
 a free republic is infamous. General Garfield himself had 
 remarked, on the day after the murder of Abraham Lincoln, 
 that " it was not one man who killed Abe Lincoln but the 
 embodied spirit of tyranny and slavery, inspired with a 
 fearful and despairing hate." The same may be said of 
 his own murder. But let us turn from this abhorrent 
 theme, to speak of the character of the late President him- 
 self in its manhood and simplicity. These, not the suc- 
 cess of his life, render his memory precious. 
 
 " On either shore not hard to find 
 The lofty aim, the godlike speech, 
 The dauntless heart ; but who shall reach 
 Thy grand simplicity of mind ? " 
 
 From boyhood to manhood he was royally faithful to the 
 truth that 
 
 " The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
 A man's a man for a' that." 
 
 It was said of him by an eminent American, "He sought 
 not popularity: he sought to make himself a man." "He 
 made himself a man," said the president of his college. 
 u He was so human," said the American minister. It was 
 his own ideal. When asked, as a youth, what he was 
 going to be, he answered: "I have undertaken to make 
 a man of myself first. If I succeed, I may make some- 
 thing else afterwards. If I do not succeed, I shall not be 
 fit for much anyway." Learn this lesson, I entreat you, 
 you who are young men. No dignity you can ever win is 
 comparable to the dignity of being a true man, a son of
 
 26o QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 God, an heir of immortality, a faithful soldier and sen-ant 
 of Christ. It is indeed an immense pretension. And 
 it depends on what you are, not in the least on how you 
 get on. Why did all England join with America in 
 mourning for General Garfield? The answer comes in 
 
 Shakspere's lines, 
 
 " Give me that man 
 
 That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
 In my heart's core, aye, in my heart of heart." 
 
 There are many men in England and America greater than 
 he, more eminent, more eloquent, more learned : a few years 
 ago we had barely heard of him ; but there is no man in 
 England or America braver and better in simple manhood. 
 He was one of nature's nobles, one of God's own gentle- 
 men, who adorn any station of life, whether that of a 
 labourer or that of a prince; and he set an example which 
 all may follow, of which all may be proud. When the 
 fierce glare of publicity was turned upon his slightest 
 actions, when his past life was revealed to the world 
 down to its smallest particulars, there came to light no 
 record of him which was not honourable. When for eleven 
 weeks the attention of myriads was turned to the bed of 
 agony on which his magnificent health, born of purity and 
 temperance, the stuff out of which heroic natures are 
 moulded, enabled him to wrestle for so long with Death, 
 and keep him at arm's length, he well deserved the words 
 which have been applied to him, that 
 
 " He nothing common did or mean 
 Upon that memorable scene " ; 
 
 and when he whispered, "Shall I live in History?" the 
 friend who answered, "Yes! and still more in the hearts of 
 men," said nothing but the simplest truth.
 
 GENERAL GARFIELD. 26l 
 
 But now what is very important for us to learn is, 
 "How did he make himself, how train himself to be a 
 man?" 
 
 Well, in many ways. He trained himself to be a 
 man by watchfulness of opportunity. It has been said 
 that 
 
 " There is a deep nick in Time's restless wheel 
 For each man's good " ; 
 
 but we may add that the wheel revolves so fast that most 
 men miss the nick. They are unprepared for the tide 
 when it is at the flood. Now General Garfield missed no 
 opportunity which God gave him. He once pointed out to 
 a class of young men that the comb of the roof of a certain 
 court-house divided the drops of rain, sending those that 
 fell to the south side towards the Gulf of Mexico, and 
 those on the north side to the Gulf of St. Lawrence; and 
 that a mere breath of air, or the flutter of a bird's wing, 
 sufficed to determine the destiny of those raindrops. 
 
 " It is so with your lives, my young friends. A passing 
 event, perhaps of trifling importance in your view, the 
 choice of a book or companion, a right resolve, a stirring 
 purpose, the association of an hour may prove a turning- 
 point of your lives." And he made himself a man by 
 self-reliance. He saw that it was "pluck, not luck," which 
 wins the day; and that, while luck is a will-of-the-wisp 
 which leads to ruin, steady effort never fails. "There is," 
 he said, "no more foolish thought than the common one by 
 which the idle and the worthless delude themselves that 
 by and by 'something will turn up' in their favour. 
 Things don't turn up in this world, unless some one turns 
 them up." "Occasion cannot make you spurs, young men, 
 If you expect to wear spurs, you must win them. If you
 
 2 ^ 2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 wish to use them, you must buckle them to your own heels 
 before you go into the fight. Whatever you win in life 
 you must Conquer by your efforts. Poverty is uncomforta- 
 ble, as I can testify; but, nine times out of ten, the best 
 thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed over- 
 board, and compelled to sink or swim for himself. No one 
 is drowned who is worth saving." Thus it was that he 
 utilized what he called "the magnificent possibilities of 
 life." And it was by work. "If the power to do hard 
 work," he said, "is not talent, it is the best possible sub- 
 stitute for it." And he made himself a man not only by 
 work, but by thoroughness. When, as a boy of thirteen, 
 he had to plane timber, he used with the sweat of his hon- 
 est brow, to plane 100 boards of 12 feet a day. When he 
 had to chop wood, his axe rang so merrily that he chopped 
 two cords a day. When he was a canal boy, no canal boy 
 cared better for his barge and his mules. When he had to 
 ring the school-bell at five every morning, it was always 
 rung to the very stroke of the minute; and, when he had to 
 sweep rooms, they were swept as if he had a pride in mak- 
 ing them clean; and, when he studied, he studied as hard and 
 as well as he swept rooms. And so it was that he did all 
 duties, the meanest no less than the grandest, as unto God, 
 and not unto men. Such a man cannot fail. Let any one 
 of you be such a man, and you will soon find that the world 
 cannot do without you. It requires no greatness to be 
 such a man: it only requires moral qualities which are as 
 free to you as the sunshine. And I tell you the world is 
 looking everywhere for such men, and can scarcely ever 
 find them. There are plenty of gluttons, plenty of dandies, 
 plenty of drunkards, plenty of egotists, plenty of cheats, 
 plenty of young men who care nothing for their parents or
 
 GENERAL GARFIELD. ^^ 
 
 203 
 
 for God's law, but only for their own selfish frivolities and 
 their own vile lusts; but, oh! the inflexibly honest, the 
 pure, the just, the modest, the strenuous, the thoroughly 
 faithful, where are they? And it was by courage that he 
 made himself a man. His ideal was the man who dared to 
 look the devil in the face, and tell him he is a devil. 
 Garfield, even as a boy, because he was pure, because he 
 was temperate, because he was honest and fearless, could 
 face a bully and thrash a brute; and that was why he could, 
 as a man, save a regiment from starving by steering a boat 
 at night up and down a swollen and perilous river, and an 
 army from ruin by riding a horse through a storm of shot 
 and shell. And once more he made himself a man, a true, 
 right man, not a mere fever or appetite, not a mere disso- 
 lute miscreant like his murderer, by self-respect. He 
 would never sell his principles for popularity. He would 
 never deflect an inch from rectitude, in order to win suc- 
 cess. He knew that the life was more than meat, and the 
 body than raiment. "I desired," he said, "the approba- 
 tion of Congress; but I desire still more the approbation 
 of one person, and his name is Garfield. He is the only 
 man that I am compelled to sleep with, and eat with, and 
 live with, and die with; and, if I could not have his 
 approbation, I should have bad companionship." 
 
 But, grand as were all these qualities which had set 
 their seal upon his brow "to give the world assurance of a 
 man," the best of all was that he was a good man, a Chris- 
 tian man. Even as a boy, he showed something of this in 
 the mercy which would never allow so much as a dog or a 
 cat to be hurt, and would insist that the youngest should 
 have their fair share in the school games. As a man, he 
 said, "There are some who call it a defect in my character
 
 2 g. QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 that I should hate no one." But, young men, he was not 
 ashamed to be, and before all the world to own himself, a 
 Christian. He was not one of those vain, ignorant, misguided 
 youths who think manliness is exhibited by vicious indul- 
 gence, that if a man is pure in life, and will not swear, and 
 will not game, and will not drink, and will not loaf about 
 the thievish corners of the streets, and will not do just what 
 other young men do, therefore he must be a milksop. He 
 could have thrashed any five of such wretched and dissolute 
 idlers, because he had been virtuous from his very boy- 
 hood. He could have said, like Sir Galahad of old, 
 
 " My good blade carves the casques of men, 
 
 My tough lance thrusteth sure, 
 My strength is as the strength of ten, 
 Because my heart is pure." 
 
 He knew that God's laws are the most eternal thing there 
 is. He not only died fearing God, but he lived fearing 
 God. "His moral character," said one who knew him at 
 college, "is the fit crown of his physical and intellectual 
 nature. His heart is kind, his soul pure, his habits 
 simple, his generosity unbounded." An old friend said 
 of him, "I have never found anything to compare with 
 Garfield's heart." His mighty faith once stopped a move- 
 ment which might have grown into a terrible massacre. 
 The people of New York, raging with terrible excitement, 
 had assembled in an armed, tumultuous crowd to avenge 
 the murder of President Lincoln, when a man of command- 
 ing presence, bearing a small flag, stepped forward, and 
 lifting his arm towards heaven, said in a voice which rang 
 to the farthest limits of the crowd : " Fellow-citizens, clouds 
 and darkness are round about Him, His pavilion is dark
 
 GENERAL GARFIELD. 26 - 
 
 waters and thick clouds of the skies. Justice and judg- 
 ment are the habitations of His throne. Mercy and truth 
 shall go before Him. Fellow-citizens, God reigns, and 
 the government still lives." The raging crowd was hushed 
 to stillness, 
 
 " He called across the tumult, and the tumult fell." 
 
 Thank God, I say, for such a man! America may 
 well be proud of him. Humanity itself may take courage 
 when it can, by God's blessing, produce such noble sons. 
 He said that in the prairies whole companies and regiments of 
 bright-eyed, clear-browed, princely lads, were being trained 
 to be his peers. Ah! if so, a land which can rear and can 
 recognize such men men so great in simple goodness 
 must indeed have a splendid future. And who knows but 
 what God raised him to that high position that the wealth 
 and worth of a character which would otherwise have told 
 only upon the few should stand forth as an example and as an 
 encouragement to all the world, a stimulus to that emula- 
 tion which makes nations great? "What have I done, that I 
 should thus cruelly be made to suffer?" exclaimed his poor 
 wife, when she was first told that her husband had been 
 shot. Ah! how often, how many myriads of times, has 
 that despairing question been asked in the miseries, the 
 inevitable miseries, of human lives! And who can answer 
 it? Man cannot answer it; but there falls gently a voice 
 from heaven, " What I do thou knowest not now, but thou 
 shalt know hereafter." But perhaps in this instance we 
 may be able to see a little of the answer. General 
 Garfield in the American Civil War undertook a most 
 perilous ride with two orderlies to carry information to 
 General Thomas and save the Northern forces from defeat
 
 2 56 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 at the battle of Chickamauga. They rode straight into 
 an ambush of the enemy. The two soldiers and their 
 horses were instantly shot dead. Garfield, dashing the 
 spurs into his horse's flanks, leaped a fence into a cotton 
 field. Seeing his enemies loading for a volley, he dashed 
 across the field in a zigzag course up a hill to foil their 
 arms. They fired and wounded his horse. Before he could 
 reach the crest of the hill, a second volley flashed upon 
 him, and the bullets whizzed about his head; but he reached 
 the crest, and a ride of twenty miles more over broken 
 ground often amid a hurricane of death, brought him to the 
 side of General Thomas. His horse fell dead at his feet, 
 but the army was saved. His life was then spared as by a 
 miracle, just as it had been saved as by a miracle when as 
 a boy he fell into the black canal at midnight. But had 
 he died as a boy, or even as a man in the war, the world 
 would have heard little or nothing of him; nor would that 
 life of "ever strengthening tendency and fulfilment" have 
 been recorded, as it now will be recorded in history to 
 elevate mankind. It would have been well for many a 
 man's own fame and character if he had died at some 
 moment of great achievement: it was only well for General 
 Garfield, because it was well for the world's example. "It 
 was through the manliness, the patience, the religious for- 
 titude of the splendid victim, in his hour of agony that the 
 tie of human brotherhood was thrilled to a consciousness 
 of its sacred function." His death, the death of a man who 
 could turn from the pomp of war to breathe hard breath 
 over his plough, and could earn the means of intellectual 
 successes by teaching writing in remote villages; the 
 death of a man who could, as it were, be good-humoured 
 even with death, the death of such a man has cemented
 
 GENERAL GARFIELD. ,^_ 
 
 the union of nations, and by a touch of nature has made the 
 whole world kin. Greater in death a death "homely, 
 human, august in unostentatious heroism" than even in a 
 stainless life, he set the seal to a grand example; and we 
 can see why it was he died, why it was that in the very 
 prime of life he was called from an earthly burden to a 
 heavenly crown. Let his sad end the long agony of his 
 martyrdom save you from drawing only from his life the 
 vulgar lesson of the means of earthly success. Earthly 
 success is, at the best, of uncertain attainment; many a man 
 has purposely to sacrifice all hope or prospect of it to higher 
 ends. Many of earth's greatest, wisest, and noblest have 
 never enjoyed it. It never can fall to more than the very 
 few; and to most of those few it has brought as little real 
 happiness as if they, too, had been stricken low, as he was, 
 the moment that they have attained it. But the lesson of 
 his life is at once easier and harder; easier, in that the sole 
 obstacle to its attainment lies not in external circumstances, 
 but in our own hearts ; harder, because so few men are, as 
 he was, in the most secret sessions of their thoughts, true 
 to themselves, true to their God. Young men, would you 
 learn the real lesson of his life? It lies in this, that 
 you can all be honest men; and "An honest man's the 
 noblest work of God." There is a real and abiding 
 grandeur in the steady love of good and the steady 
 scorn of evil. The man who by God's grace has made 
 himself true and virtuous, the man who is pure, and 
 brave, and kind, and watchful, and self-reliant, and dili- 
 gent, and thorough, and a good soldier and servant of Jesus 
 Christ, that man is one whom God and man alike will, in 
 the long run, delight to honour. Aim at this, and you 
 cannot fail.
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Take thou no care for aught but truth and right, 
 Content, if such thy fate, to die obscure : 
 Wealth palls and honours ; fame may not endure; 
 
 And loftier souls soon weary of delight. 
 
 Keep innocence, be all a true man ought ; 
 Let neither pleasure tempt nor pain appal : 
 
 Who hath this, he hath all things, saving naught : 
 Who hath it not hath nothing, having all."
 
 DEAN STANLEY. 
 
 " Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons : but in every 
 nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to Him." 
 ACTS x. 34, 35. 
 
 I HAVE been trying in the last sad days to estimate fur- 
 ther some of the life-work of that dear departed friend, 
 Dean Stanley. His funeral was signalized by a wonderful 
 outburst of universal affection, such as has been rarely 
 exhibited for any man, never perhaps before in English 
 history for any clergyman. Princes and Princesses; the 
 Prime Minister and the leaders of the opposition; our 
 chief men of science; our chief poets; our most eminent 
 writers; ambassadors of foreign countries; archbishops 
 and bishops; clergymen of all schools of thought; working- 
 men of every shade of politics; nonconformists, French 
 Protestants, Americans, Armenians, Jews; every varied 
 element of English life and thought; all that was greatest 
 and best in English society, thronged the Abbey from end 
 to end to do honour to the memory of one man. In that 
 procession some were even eager to walk who had been in 
 his lifetime his most conspicuous and his most uncompro- 
 mising opponents; for, "when a man 'sways please the Lord, 
 he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." 
 There was no break, of any importance, amid the voices of 
 affectionate eulogy and immense esteem. Now, since such 
 great spontaneous movements of national feeling have in 
 them nothing fictitious, nothing fortuitous, it must be good
 
 2 - o QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 for us to understand their significance. Small, indeed, is 
 the ripple which any one of us makes when we disappear 
 beneath the rolling waters. We look again: the surface 
 is smooth and smiling, there is no sign that any one 
 has sunk beneath those flowing waves. But to dismiss 
 into swift oblivion the lessons of a life exceptionally 
 noble, exceptionally beautiful, is to neglect God's best 
 gifts. It is true that the good thoughts, and deeds, 
 and memories of those who have been the salt and the 
 light of the earth do not perish with them. They still 
 live on. Whatever there has been of grateful considera- 
 tion, of kindly hospitality, of far-reaching generosity, of 
 gracious charity, of high-minded justice, of unselfish sacri- 
 fice, of saintly devotion, these still feed the streams of 
 moral fertilization, which will run on when the place of the 
 dead knows them no more, when even their names have 
 perished; but we should strive to make them live by learn- 
 ing their lessons of goodness and wisdom. Do not let us 
 say that we have not the necessary gifts. Each of us has 
 his own gifts; and we might, if we desired, indefinitely 
 improve them. God giveth the Holy Spirit to them that 
 seek Him. Let no religious unreality prevent us from 
 speaking of good rn^n. "Whatever is made manifest," 
 says the apostle (for so the verse should be rendered), " is 
 light." What we see, when we see anything, is simply the 
 light which it reflects. On the sun's orb we cannot gaze 
 for its blinding splendour; but, when we gaze on the rose 
 of sunset, on the golden mirror of the sea, or on the silver 
 planets, or on the moon walking in her brightness, what we 
 see is nothing but the beams from one great fountain. 
 Even so we cannot gaze on the infinitude of God ; but we 
 see Him in Jesus, the effluence of His glory and the express
 
 DEAN STANLEY. 271 
 
 image of His person, and we see Him in all those His chil- 
 dren who, walking in His footsteps, are changed into the 
 same image from glory to glory. 
 
 Since, then, we cannot hear the voice of our dear 
 departed brother again evermore, let us not merely say, 
 with vain sigh, 
 
 " O for the touch of a vanished hand, 
 And the sound of a voice that is still!" 
 
 but let us try to emphasize some of the lessons which his 
 whole life has taught us. The man is gone: we shall enjoy 
 no more the dignified and gentle manners, the playful 
 humour, the eagerness for knowledge, the delightful con- 
 versation, the life high-minded without haughtiness, holy 
 without superstition. But we may gain from seeing that 
 the blessing of his life was that, when he might have been 
 irritated, might have been depressed and disappointed, 
 great thoughts kept him calm. Whatsoever things are pure, 
 and awful, and true, he thought on those things. There 
 was in him nothing of that pettiness, which shews itself at 
 some time or other in almost all of us. He never sided 
 with the multitude. He never howled with the wolves. 
 "Surely," said Sir John Herschel, "if the worst of men 
 were snatched into Paradise for only half an hour, he would 
 come back the better for it." But it was the chosen habit 
 of our dear friend's life to live as it were in Paradise by 
 habituating his soul to all things that are lovely and hon- 
 ourable, and by turning persistently away from all that is 
 base and mean. If St. Augustine, after reading of the 
 martyrs, exclaimed, "Shall we not follow them?" if it was 
 the benevolent face of John Wesley which inspired the zeal 
 of John Howard; if Henry Martin was drawn to India by
 
 272 QUESTION'S OF THE DAY. 
 
 the memory of David Schwartz, and Heber by the thought 
 of Martin, and Cotton by the grave of Heber, shall not 
 we try to become a little the better for this beautiful and 
 godly life? 
 
 Can we not, for instance, imitate his reverence for 
 Humanity? Shakspere says that 
 
 "Not a man, for being simply man, 
 Hath any honour, but honour for those honours 
 That are without him, as place, riches, favour, 
 Prizes of accident as oft as merit." 
 
 But to Arthur Stanley, as to all the best and truest men, 
 the trappings and surroundings of life, all that makes the 
 base cringe and kotow before the successful, were as no- 
 thing. He always reverenced a man simply as a man. He 
 ever sought to find in every man the angel, and not the 
 serpent; the Christ, and not the Adam; the good and not 
 the evil. He said that the true name of every man is not 
 Jacob, but Israel ; not the mean supplanter, but the Prince 
 with God. Even in the characters and the parties which he 
 most disliked he ever sought to see the better side. It 
 was so also in his historic judgments. He would see in 
 Milton the immortal poet, not the bitter controversialist; 
 in Bossuet the magnificent Christian orator, not the jealous 
 theologian; in Cromwell, the champion of freedom, not the 
 butcher of Wexford; in St. Carlo Borromeo the saintly 
 worker, not the furious persecutor. He carried his charity 
 even into his estimate of epochs. In judging the Middle 
 Ages he turned his thoughts to their devotion and their love 
 of art, not to their ignorant orthodoxy and horrible atroc- 
 ities; and in the eighteenth century, to its good sense and 
 truthfulness, not to its lethargy and corruption. And he
 
 DEAN STANLEY. 2 -^ 
 
 did all this because he felt the beauty, the grandeur, the 
 sacredness, of humanity. Like Howard and Wilberforce, 
 like Eliot and Channing, he was ever sustained "by the 
 thought that in the widest diversities of human nature and 
 in the lowest depth of human degradation there was still in 
 the better part of every human being a spark of the divine 
 Spirit." And this was why he was so much beloved. He 
 was loved by men of every age, for such was the simplicity 
 of his nature that he would always listen to the sugges- 
 tion of even the youngest. He was a link between men of 
 the most opposite ranks. After the great bereavement of 
 his life, it was the Queen of England who, with gentle 
 sympathy, led him back by the hand into his desolate 
 home; and he was no less dear to the poorest. When he 
 was at a little fishing village in Devon, after an illness, the 
 young clergyman who was with him has told how a fisher- 
 man, coming out of his cottage, asked, " Is that Dean Stan- 
 ley?" and, on being told that it was, ran into his cottage, 
 fetched out a fine turbot, and begged him to accept it. 
 Must there not have been some charm of sweetness and 
 goodness about a man who received such a tribute from a 
 humble fisherman, who had never so much as seen him, 
 in a village so far away? In this reverence for the low no 
 less than for the lofty he resembled his wife, of whom the 
 Westminster poor still remember how, when some sufferer 
 wanted immediate attention, she drove at once, in her court 
 dress, to do her deed of mercy in the miserable house in the 
 squalid street. How many of us are there who are equally 
 dear to princes and paupers? How many clergymen are 
 now living in whose memory would be passed by clubs of 
 workingmen, such a resolution as that which even as I was 
 
 writing these words reached my hands, that, "while the 
 
 18
 
 274 
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 loss of so good a man will be felt in all grades of society, 
 in no class will be found more grief and sorrow than among 
 Workingmen's Clubs, who have lost in their President a 
 faithful friend, a kind and sympathetic instructor, and a 
 noble Christian gentleman "? Ah! the day may come when 
 in the deepening divisions between class and class, in the 
 growth on one side of a selfish luxury and on the other of 
 a fierce and socialistic independence, the day may come 
 when men will see that such a man, more than hundreds 
 of commonplace ecclesiastics, or scores of the noisy fugle- 
 men of parties, was a tower of strength to our common 
 Christianity, to all that is most precious and sacred in 
 our English life. Even those who did their little best to 
 embitter his days by a perpetual depreciation may live to 
 see in him one of the few righteous who delay the doom 
 of endangered peoples. 
 
 Nor was this all. His reverence, his enthusiasm for 
 humanity, made him a link not only between different 
 classes, but even between different nations. When he went 
 to marry the Duke of Edinburgh in St. Petersburg to the 
 daughter of the late Czar, his one aim was to unite the 
 feelings of England and of Russia. He spoke of the "chiv- 
 alrous respect with which they have tried each other's 
 strength beside beleaguered fortress and on hard won bat- 
 tlefield; of their having listened to the inspiring accents of 
 each other's literature, of their churches having exchanged 
 many a friendly message-, and breathed many a kindly hope 
 for the great hereafter, which, if each be true to itself, 
 assuredly awaits them both." He never went to Scotland 
 without being most heartily welcomed by every branch of 
 the Scotch Church; and by his addresses and sermons 
 there he did not a little to ennoble the aims of the rising
 
 DEAN STANLEY. 2 -- 
 
 generation. But what shall I say of the services which he 
 rendered to the growth of brotherly love between England 
 and America? It is not eight years since another member 
 of our cathedral body, the lamented Canon Kingsley, was 
 received across the Atlantic with kindest welcome; but I 
 doubt whether any Englishman ever met with a welcome more 
 effusive in its glowing and spontaneous feeling than that 
 which greeted our beloved Dean, as he travelled over that 
 mighty continent, leaving everywhere the memory of words 
 full of nobleness and peace. Such words spoken by such 
 men are as the golden couplets which hold fast the strain- 
 ing amity of peoples; and America will not soon forget how, 
 if he saw in the confusion and chaos of Niagara an emblem 
 of the restless, beating whirlpool of active energy in the 
 United States, he saw also in the silver column of spray above 
 the cataract, rising twice as high as the falls themselves, 
 silent, majestic, immovable, glittering in the moonlight, 
 an emblem of the future destiny of America, and of the 
 pillar of light which shall emerge to guide the nation from 
 the turmoil of her present. He ever welcomed Americans 
 here. Again and again have their great preachers ad- 
 dressed us from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey. And, 
 when he noticed on the beautiful shores of Lake George a 
 maple and an oak growing from the same stem, he saw in that 
 twofold yet united tree an emblem of our unbroken unity, 
 the brilliant, fiery maple an emblem of America, the gnarled, 
 twisted oak the emblem of England; and he breathed the 
 prayer that so the two nations might always rise together, 
 different and representing so distinct a future, yet each 
 springing from the same ancestral root, each bound to- 
 gether by the same healthful sap and vigorous growth. 
 Ah! one good man the mere silent influence of one good
 
 2 - 6 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 man is often more precious to nations, in diverting the 
 
 perils of conflict and nullifying the germs of hostility, 
 than "mightiest fleets of iron framed," or millions spent 
 upon all-shattering guns. 
 
 Then, once more, his catholicity, his breadth, his large- 
 heartedness, in one word, his Christianity, manifested in 
 faith and love, made him also a link between those various 
 sects and religious parties, which, if left to the vulgar vio- 
 lence of their common partisans, would soon tear each other 
 to pieces, and turn the Church of God into a chaos of jarring 
 antagonisms. In America, in Scotland, in England, Pres- 
 byterians, Independents, Baptists, Methodists, Episcopa- 
 lians, all honoured, all loved him, because he regarded it as 
 the best work of his life to find, in the great primary truths 
 of Christianity, the remedy for intolerance, and the princi- 
 ples which bind all Christians into one. The Beatitudes, 
 the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, the Apos- 
 tles' Creed, the Two Great Commandments, these sup- 
 plied him with the broad basis of charity and union; and 
 he looked with a mixture of dismay and scorn on vermicu- 
 late questions of system and petty exaltations of non-essen- 
 tials, which do but sever and deracinate the peace of Chris- 
 tians. Hence in sects, parties, churches, as in individuals, 
 he looked always for the good, not for the evil. To him 
 error in the intellect was as nothing compared with ran- 
 cour in the heart. He understood the word "heresy " in the 
 New Testament sense, in which it means not divergent 
 opinion, but that party factiousness which lies crouched like 
 a wild beast for the opportunity to rend and to attack. His 
 wish was to judge all men and all institutions at their best. 
 In the Greek Church he saw the calm and gravity, in the 
 Roman the love of art and the cultivation of saintliness,
 
 DEAN STANLEY. 2 -- 
 
 in the Calvinistic the stern intensity of conviction, in the 
 Lutheran the burning love of truth. His perfect cordiality 
 to nonconformists arose from no plasticity or indiffer- 
 ence, for few men loved more passionately the Established 
 Church, but it arose from his habit of seeing each sect 
 glorified and illumined in the persons of its worthiest chil- 
 dren. He saw the Quakers in the light of William Penn 
 and Elizabeth Fry; the Baptists shone in the lives of John 
 Bunyan and Henry Havelock; the Independents, in Isaac 
 Watts; the High Churchmen, in the virtues of Andrews and 
 Keble; the Evangelicals, in the philanthropy of Wilber- 
 force and the tender muse of William Cowper. He de- 
 lighted in that painted window, the gift of an American citi- 
 zen, where the priestly Herbert and the Puritanical Cowper 
 shine side by side. He delighted in the monument which 
 shews the serious and noble faces of Charles and John 
 Wesley. He delighted in the advice of Archbishop Pot- 
 ter, for which John Wesley always blessed God, not to 
 spend strength in combating about the disputable, but in 
 opposing open vice and promoting essential holiness; and 
 he delighted in the hymn of Charles Wesley, 
 
 "Weary of all this wordy strife, 
 
 These notions, forms, and modes, and names, 
 
 To Thee, the way, the truth, the life, 
 Whose love my simple heart inflames, 
 
 Divinely taught, at last I fly, 
 
 With Thee and Thine to live and die." 
 
 That we are not the whole Church, but a part of it ; that 
 it is our duty to help and supplement, not to slander and 
 supersede each other; that the aspects of truth are various, 
 not single; "that God is no respecter of persons, but, in 
 every nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteousness
 
 2 -g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 is accepted of him," these were the convictions on which 
 rested his noble charity. He loved to repeat the answer 
 sent to the Pope by the Eastern Patriarchs in one of their 
 many controversies, " Let us love one another, in order that 
 we may be able with one accord to worship God." Like 
 Archbishop Leighton, he left to others to preach up the 
 petty, passing, insolent controversies of the time, while he 
 preached up the blessed and certain truths of eternity; nor 
 would he, for the sake of winning the paltry victories of 
 to-day, imperil or compromise the eternal interests of to- 
 morrow. He would have said, with the old Scotch Metho- 
 dist, "I have heard whisperings of the still, small voice, 
 telling me that the footfalls of faiths and their wranglings 
 will ne'er be heard in the Lord's kingdom." Like the grand 
 old patriarch he left to others the well " Esek " of contro- 
 versy, and the well " Sitnah " of recrimination, to drink in 
 peace of the well "Rehoboth," the well of breadth or 
 room: "Lord, it is done as Thou hast commanded; and 
 yet there is room." 
 
 Lastly, and in few words, he was not only a link 
 between different classes, and nationalities, and sects, and 
 churches, but also, to a larger extent than men will at once 
 recognize, between the clergy and the best culture of the 
 laity. Multitudes who have but small respect for the 
 clergy, in general, yet loved and venerated him. They 
 knew how utterly exempt he was from arrogance or bitter- 
 ness. They knew how fully he recognized that it is not 
 the clergy, but only the clergy and the laity together, that 
 constitute, or that speak the true voice of, the Church. 
 He was a power to draw to Christ even those powerful but 
 wavering intellects who turn with contempt from ignorant 
 assumptions, and illiterate anathemas, who are unspeakably
 
 DEAN STANLEY. 2 jg 
 
 repelled by stupid prejudice or professional fanaticism. 
 Such men were half won back to the Church when they 
 saw a man of wide culture and of keen intellect, at the same 
 time a sincere Christian and a faithful Churchman. They 
 looked up to one who did not shew them a Church without 
 Charity, a Calvary without Redemption, and a Crucifixion 
 without Christ, but who had the elementary graces of which 
 others talked, who had learned more than most of us do 
 that new commandment uttered not on Sinai, but in Galilee, 
 that eleventh commandment, not of Moses, but of Christ, 
 "Love one another." If ever any impression is to be 
 made on the widening scepticism and agnosticism of the 
 day, it can only be by those who have learned that what God 
 loves is mercy, and not sacrifice; that where the Spirit of 
 the Lord is, there is liberty; that "Truth is always green." 
 Ah! he is gone! It is well with him! He might have 
 said with the Spirit of Balder, in the poem, 
 
 " I am long since weary of your storm 
 Of conflict, and find, Hermod, in your life 
 Something too much of war and broils which make 
 Life one perpetual fight." 
 
 It is well for him; but, oh, it is not so well with us! 
 Among all these echoes, so dismal and so dreary, where 
 shall we once more hear a voice? Among all this noise 
 and narrowness, who shall teach us again that Christianity 
 is as a sea, majestic enough to receive into its capacious 
 bosom "the lakes of far antiquity, and the rushing torrents 
 of impetuous action, and the dissolving foam of ethereal 
 speculation " ? Amid all this rancour and wrangling and 
 bitterness, and war of the greater and lesser greeds upon the 
 waste of life, who shall shew us again, not in idle talk, but
 
 2 gO QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 in living action, the sweetness of charity, the large-hearted- 
 ness of comprehension ? The good and the great are passing 
 away from us. The mountains melt into the distance; the 
 cedars fall. We are being gradually left among the this- 
 tles and the molehills, so we are tempted to complain; and 
 perhaps we shall have to sigh often enough : 
 
 " Thou shouldst be living at this hour ! 
 
 England hath need of thee. She is a fen 
 
 Of stagnant waters. Altar, sword, and pen, 
 Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, 
 Have forfeited their ancient English dower 
 
 Of inward happiness. We are selfish men. 
 
 Oh, raise us up ! Return to us again, 
 And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power." 
 
 But, even while we thus mourn, a voice seems to come to us: 
 "Do not despair! Soldiers of the good cause, the cause 
 of the future; foes to narrowness and to intolerance; friends 
 of progress, and of humanity, and of hope; ye who believe 
 in the eternal love of God; ye who reverence the infinite 
 sacredness of man; ye who see God's love in the Cross of 
 Christ and man's sacredness in His Incarnation; ye who 
 hail the divine brotherhood of nations, and the unity of the 
 one flock amid its many folds; ye who know that in cath- 
 olicity, and comprehensiveness, and charity, and open- 
 mindedness, and the unfeigned love of man for man lies 
 the sole hope of the Church and of the world, close up 
 your thinned ranks! While, like Havelock, you are ever 
 trusting in God and doing your duty, no great harm can 
 happen to you. If you suffer, you suffer in a noble cause; 
 and when the signal comes in turn to you, the high per- 
 mission, which you shall so gladly welcome, then, how- 
 ever poor or obscure you may be, fall out of the ranks,
 
 
 DEAN STANLEY. 2 Sl 
 
 for it is permitted you, bow your head, bless God, and 
 die. For you may be certain then that, whatever man may 
 say of you, for you, as for a true soldier of your captain, 
 Christ, even if all the trumpets sound not upon the other 
 side, you cannot miss the infinitude of rapture, drowning 
 all the disappointment of earth's injustice in the diapason 
 of its mighty blissfulness, which shall lie in the few words 
 of Christ's approval, "Servant of God, well done! "
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 "Right dear in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints." PSALM 
 cxvi. 15. 
 
 HISTORY is a Book of God: its chapters are men's lives. 
 When men are intellectually greater than others, we learn 
 from their utterances; when they are morally better than 
 others, we learn from their lives. Most of us pass away, 
 and leave no footprint on the sands of time. Rather, our 
 lives are but as the infinitesimal "ripple made on an 
 immeasurable ocean by the touch of an insect's wing." 
 But, when 
 
 " Great men have been among us, hands that penned 
 And tongues that uttered wisdom." 
 
 we lose some of God's most striking lessons, if we neglect 
 to learn the truths and the examples which they bequeath to 
 us at their departure. 
 
 The last few years have been marked by the deaths of men 
 who have done great work in the Church of God. Germany 
 and England have both lost, quite recently, those who have 
 rendered the most eminent service. In Germany we have 
 lost Delitzsch, the veteran of Hebrew knowledge and Bibli- 
 cal exposition, and Dollinger, the learned and venerable 
 founder of the Old Catholic movement. In England we 
 have lost Dr. Hatch, whose researches into the language of 
 the New Testament and the origins of church history 
 promised invaluable results, and Canon Liddon, whose
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 2 g, 
 
 fine English style, whose powerful eloquence, whose mag- 
 netic fascination, whose severe and simple character, whose 
 beautiful and blameless life, have met with such boundless 
 appreciation from the Church which he adorned. Of Canon 
 Liddon much was deservedly spoken in many of the pulpits 
 of London. But let us turn our thoughts to some of those 
 great Christian virtues which this age specially needs, and 
 which the example and words of that other great ecclesiastic 
 who died so recently, John Henry Newman, a man of un- 
 deniable greatness, taken from us at the ripe age of eighty- 
 eight, have taught. 
 
 Let me say, at the outset, that the lesson does not lie 
 in those distinctive opinions which separate Christian from 
 Christian. It is not, in any sense of the word, as a 
 Romanist that I hold him up to our admiration. Roman- 
 ists hold, as we hold, the great bases of Christianity, the 
 doctrines of the Trinity, of the Incarnation, of the Atone- 
 ment, of the resurrection of the body, and the life ever- 
 lasting. The Church of Rome holds the three creeds, and 
 the sacraments, and the Holy Scriptures. She has over- 
 laid these elements of the faith with human additions and 
 perversions so false and so evil that our own Reformed 
 Church, in her Articles, does not hesitate to characterize 
 them as "blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits." 
 That Cardinal Newman held these tenets does not add one 
 iota to their truth ; for men as great as he or greater, and 
 as good as he or better, have as decisively and as passion- 
 ately rejected them. In point of fact, his own views varied 
 fundamentally from time to time. As a youth, he was an 
 Evangelical; as a young man, a Broad Churchman; in the 
 prime of life he was an Anglican; after middle life he 
 became a Romanist. At the age of thirty-three he was
 
 2 g, QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 saying that the Roman Church was " invaded by an evil 
 genius," and applying to its doctrines the epithets "anti- 
 scriptural, profane, impious, audacious, without authority, 
 gross, monstrous, and cruel." At the age of forty-four he 
 had joined the Church which he had denounced as Anti- 
 christ, and began to speak of Protestantism as "the dreari- 
 est of all religions." But at all "these periods, amid all 
 these variations, he was equally a Christian. He held the 
 great essential, fundamental truths, by which and not by 
 the points respecting which we differ we shall (if only we 
 live up to them) be saved. Men pride themselves on their 
 petty opinions, but apart from the fundamental truths on 
 which all Christians heartily agree, our religious opinions 
 (about which there is so much wrangling and dogmatism 
 and arrogant exclusiveness) are often entirely valueless. I 
 heartily agree with John Wesley, who said: "We set out 
 on two principles, (i) None go to heaven without holi- 
 ness of heart and life. (2) Whoever follows after this, 
 whatever his opinions, is my brother." "Men may die," 
 he said, "without any opinions, and yet be carried into 
 Abraham's bosom; but if we be without love, what will 
 knowledge avail? I will not quarrel with you about opin- 
 ions. Only see that your heart be right toward God. I 
 am sick of opinions. Give me good and substantial relig- 
 ion, a humble, gentle love of God and man." Thus Wesley 
 attacked both the wickedness and the bigotry of the world. 
 He "attempted a reformation not of opinions (feathers, 
 trifles, not worth naming), but of men's tempers and lives "; 
 of vice in every kind; of everything contrary to justice, 
 mercy, and truth. To Newman's special Romanist views, 
 then, I attach no importance; but we may all alike old 
 and young, rich and poor learn from the beauty of his 
 life.
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 285 
 
 His chief characteristic was singleness of heart through- 
 out life. One of our most Christian poets wrote: 
 
 " My heart leaps up when I behold 
 
 A rainbow in the sky ; 
 So it is now that I am old, 
 So it was when I was a boy ; 
 
 So let me die. 
 
 And I could wish my days to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety." 
 
 The lines exactly express the life of John Henry Newman. 
 Whether an Evangelical or a High Churchman or a Roman- 
 ist, Newman always aimed at holiness. From the days 
 when, as a little child, he used to play in Bloomsbury 
 Square with another little child, destined to a very differ- 
 ent career, the late Lord Beaconsfield, it was always his 
 desire to serve God with his body and his spirit, which were 
 God's. His aim was, above all things, the renewal of his 
 soul after God's image in righteousness and true holiness. 
 Oh, it is a great and pre-eminently blessed thing when 
 "the grace of God takes early hold upon any soul, and rea- 
 son and religion run together like warp and woof to frame 
 the web of a wise and exemplary life." In too many 
 lives there is a dreadful break, a grievous discontinuity. 
 Their first volume has too often been a jest book, and their 
 second a carnival, before the third becomes a remorse and a 
 repentance. The adulterous queen, in the great tragedy, 
 says to her son, 
 
 " O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain "; 
 
 and he replies to her, 
 
 " Oh, throw away the worser part of it, 
 And live the purer with the other half."
 
 2 g5 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 But how much happier are they who can give, as Newman 
 did, a single heart to God! Oh, you who are young, if you 
 would live happy, if you would live safe, if you would make 
 of life not the miserable thing it often is, but the glori- 
 ous thing God meant it to be, do not spend the first 
 half in making the second half difficult and miserable. 
 Blessed is repentance: more blessed is innocence. The 
 path of repentance is thorny and uphillward: it has to be 
 climbed with stern toil, on hands and knees, "with bleed- 
 ing feet and aching brow." The path of innocence is, by 
 comparison, as a primrose path, on the green grass, under 
 the woodland boughs. It is of the path of innocence alone 
 that it can be said "that the path to Heaven lies through 
 Heaven, and all the way to Heaven is Heaven." 
 
 " By cool Siloam's shady rill, 
 
 How fair the lily grows ! 
 How sweet the breath, beneath the hill, 
 Of Sharon's dewy rose. 
 
 " Lo ! such the child, whose early feet 
 
 The paths of peace have trod, 
 Whose secret heart, with influence sweet, 
 Is upward drawn to God." 
 
 Now, what was the secret of Newman's single-hearted- 
 ness? It is the secret which too many of us miss. His 
 soul was athirst for God. He tells us how he rested in the 
 thought of two, and two only, supreme and luminously 
 self-evident beings, himself and his Creator. Every- 
 where he saw in Nature the visible manifestation of God's 
 tenderness. Everywhere he saw the presence of God's 
 angels. "Every breath of air," he said, "and ray of light 
 and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the 
 skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 2 g- 
 
 whose faces see God." The simplest beauties of nature 
 sufficed him, even the daily dreary walk from Oxford to 
 Littlemore. "The heavens changed," says a friend, " if the 
 earth did not " ; and, when they changed, they made the earth 
 new. His eye quickly caught any sudden glory or radiance 
 above, every prismatic hue or silver lining, every rift, 
 "every patch of blue, every threat of ill," or promise of 
 a brighter hour. He carried his scenery with him, and 
 did not crave for lakes or mountains. Even on Salisbury 
 Plain, where there are no trees, no hedges, no water, no 
 flowers, and seldom even a village or a church in sight, 
 he would walk or run with a friend as cheerfully as the 
 prophet ran from Carmel to Jezreel, to announce the opened 
 gates of heaven. He could cry with the Psalmist, "As 
 the hert panteth after the water brooks, so longeth my soul 
 after Thee, O God." St. Augustine said, "Thou hast made 
 us for Thyself; and our heart is restless till it hath found 
 Thee." It was this realization of God, this dwelling in the 
 Unseen and the Eternal, which produced all the distinctive 
 characteristics of the life which has passed away amid the 
 admiration even of the world. It reminds us of the words 
 of the Psalmist: "He that dwelleth under the defence of 
 the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Al- 
 mighty." 
 
 It produced, for instance, his entire unworldliness. 
 In these days, when men worship money with so fierce a 
 devotion, when Mammon is so great a god among them, 
 when " how much a man is worth " means how much money 
 he has, Cardinal Newman lived (which is so rare) in self- 
 chosen poverty. During the greater part of his life he 
 never had more, and often not so much, a year as is earned 
 by many a butler or skilled artisan. Friends came to him
 
 2 38 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 unsought, unhoped for: he did not go out of his way to 
 seek them. Fame came to him almost in spite of himself. 
 "He had no ambition to make a career or to rise to rank 
 and power. Still less had pleasure any seductions for 
 him." His senses were exceptionally fine and delicate; 
 but he despised not only pleasure, but comfort. At the age 
 of sixteen he had fully made up his mind that God called 
 him to a celibate life; and to give up that which, of all 
 other things, had the extremest charm for him, the joys of 
 home. He substituted for them the joys of self-discipline. 
 Even when he was a Cardinal of Rome, he was content with 
 a single bare room at the oratory of Edgebaston, which was 
 both sitting-room and bedroom, with only a little square of 
 carpet in the middle, severely simple. He had the rare 
 desire to descend. He could offer the prayer which in 
 these days, as Bunyan says, has grown quite rusty, as it is 
 not prayed for by one in ten thousand, "Give me not 
 riches." When he was quite young and poor, he was of- 
 fered ;r,8oo a year to write in the Times. He declined 
 it. He would not have been free to say what he thought. 
 Neither for wealth nor for power would he deflect, by a 
 hair's-breadth, from a single conviction. He was one of 
 those whom the poet addresses 
 
 " Come ye, who find contentment's very core 
 In the light store 
 And daisied path 
 Of Poverty, and know how more 
 A small thing that the righteous hath 
 Availeth than the ungodly's riches great." 
 
 And, being thus whole-hearted with his God, Cardinal 
 Newman studied the spirit of detachment. "To be de- 
 tached," he said, "is to be loosened from every tie which
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 2 g g 
 
 binds the soul to the earth; to be dependent on nothing 
 sublunary; to lean on nothing temporal; to go about our 
 own work, because it is our duty, as soldiers go to battle 
 without a care for the consequences; to account credit, 
 honour, name, easy circumstances, comfort, human affec- 
 tions, just nothing at all, when any religious objection 
 involves the sacrifice of them." It was true of him which 
 he says of Callista, the heroine of his little romance: "She 
 saw that there was a higher beauty than that which the 
 order and harmony of the natural world revealed, and a 
 deeper calm and peace than that which the exercise whether 
 of the intellect or the purest human affections can supply. 
 She drank in the teaching, which, at first, seemed so para- 
 doxical to her, that even present happiness and present 
 greatness lie in relinquishing what at first sight seems to 
 promise them; and that the way to true pleasure is not 
 through self-indulgence, but through mortification." 
 
 Now this detachment, in which we are all so griev- 
 ously deficient, worked in three ways. First, it deepened in 
 him the sense of the awfulness of sin and the supreme 
 value of the human soul. I know no passage in religious 
 literature more terrible than that in which he describes the 
 agony of a respectable, well-to-do, able man, who, having 
 only deceived himself into the belief that he is religious 
 and tried to serve two masters, wakes, in the other world, 
 to find himself in the horrible grasp of a foul fiend, whose 
 touch is agony. "The Church would rather save the soul 
 of one poor whining beggar of Naples, or one poor brigand 
 of Palermo, than cover Italy with railways from one end to 
 the other." "It were better," he said, "for the sun and 
 moon to drop from heaven, for earth to fall to pieces, and 
 for millions of men and women to perish in the extreme 
 
 19
 
 29 o 
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 agonies of starvation than for one soul to commit one 
 single venial sin, to tell one single untruth or to steal one 
 poor farthing without excuse." 
 
 Secondly, this whole-heartedness with God produced 
 contempt for public opinion. How many men's lives are 
 base and poverty-stricken because they care more what their 
 neighbours say of them than what God thinks! Yet what 
 is public opinion? "It is," he said, "what the whole world 
 opines, and no one in particular." It is "every one ap- 
 pealing to every one else " for an opinion for which he 
 does not hold himself responsible. "You fear," he said, 
 "the judgment of men upon you. What will you think of 
 it on your death-bed ? The hour must come, sooner or later, 
 when your soul is to return to Him who gave it. What 
 will you then think of the esteem of this world? Will not 
 all below seem to pass away, and to be rolled up as a scroll, 
 and the extended regions of the future solemnly set them- 
 selves before you? Then how vain will appear the ap- 
 plause or blame of creatures such as we are, all sinners, 
 and blind judges, and feeble aids, and themselves destined 
 to be judged for their deeds! When, therefore, you are 
 tempted to dread the ridicule of men, throw your mind for- 
 ward to the hour of death. You know what you will then 
 think of it if you are then able to think at all." My 
 friends, the rule for us all, if we would live worthy and 
 noble lives, and lives which God approves, is to follow 
 conscience, and obey the will of God. Conscience should 
 be to us, as it was to him, " the aboriginal vicar of Christ, 
 a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptori- 
 ness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas" ; and our one 
 prayer for ourselves should be the prayer which he desired 
 for himself, "that in all things we may know God's will, 
 and at all times be ready to follow it."
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 2 ~ } 
 
 This detachment made him singularly straightforward, 
 honest, forthright, in the expression of his opinions. 
 He hated all that miserable hedging, half and half- 
 ness, facing both ways, trying to serve two masters, 
 scheming in a mean way to make the best of both worlds, 
 which is the curse of all sham religion. Insincere utter- 
 ances, which mean nothing, which can be interpreted any 
 way, which use language for the concealment of thought, 
 these are the broad, glossy leaves on the barren tree of 
 Pharisaism. Newman hated this selling of the soul for 
 self-interest, and he spoke of it with the utmost scorn. 
 "Mistiness," he said disdainfully, "is the mother of wis- 
 dom. A man who can set down half a dozen general 
 propositions which escape from destroying one another 
 only by being diluted into truisms; who can hold the 
 balance between opposites so skilfully as to do without 
 fulcrum or beam; who never enunciates a truth without 
 guarding himself from being supposed to exclude the 
 contradictory this is your safe man, and the hope of, 
 the Church; this is what the Church is said to want, 
 sensible, temperate, sober persons to guide it through the 
 channel of no meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis 
 of Ay and No." For myself, I believe that, if there 
 were only a little more of honest plain speaking, speaking 
 distinctly and speaking out, half the lies and shams which 
 are rotting in the midst of our religious and social life 
 would be dragged out of their deceitful twilight, and 
 killed by the pure light of day. 
 
 Cardinal Newman, then, has left us a noble example in 
 that he was true to the ideal of his life. One of his rea- 
 sons for going over to the Church of Rome was because he 
 saw too much in the English Church of "a comfortable
 
 2Q2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 and self-deceiving worldliness." He yearned "for some- 
 thing more high and heroical in religion than this age 
 affecteth;" for something which was nearer "the life, 
 society, and principles of action presented in the New 
 Testament " than mere phrases and outward observances and 
 conventional suppositions. "He could not," it has been 
 said, "see a trace in English society of that simple and 
 severe hold upon the unseen and the future which is the 
 colour and breath, as well as the outward form, of the New 
 Testament life." He "craved for models of life more like 
 the life of the early Church"; and, to our shame be it 
 spoken, he found, or thought that he found, those models 
 more real in the Church of Rome, which he joined, than 
 in the Church of England which he left. In the Roman 
 Church there were "strange, unscriptural doctrines, and 
 undeniable crimes, and an alliance, whenever it could, 
 with the world." But, at the least, the Roman Church 
 had not only preserved, but maintained at full strength, 
 through the centuries to our day two things of which the 
 New Testament was full, and which are characteristic of 
 it, devotion and self-sacrifice. And these had for him 
 a sacred attractiveness, more magnetic than the comfort, 
 and Mammon- worship, and self-seeking, which are the 
 magnets of the world. 
 
 Here, then, my friends, are the lesson which we may 
 learn from the life of this departed saint of God : first, a 
 single-hearted religious life, "completely all of a piece, 
 patiently carved out of one pure block of purpose"; next, 
 absolute devotedness to God, shewing itself in complete 
 unworldliness, and detachment from lower interests; and, 
 as a part and a consequence of these, a deep sense of the 
 awfulness of sin as the abominable thing which God hates;
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 2 ^ 
 
 a contempt for the fear of man, and the idle breath of pub- 
 lic opinion; an absolute forthrightness and honesty of 
 speech, and resolute faithfulness, at all costs, to the best 
 that he knew, to the highest and purest plan of life which 
 his heart and intellect could form. If we can attain any 
 of these principles, and shew the same faithfulness towards 
 them, our poor lives will become indefinitely nobler, 
 worthier, more useful, more happy, more holy, because 
 more like the life of Christ Jesus, who lived and died 
 for us men, and for our salvation, leaving us an example, 
 that we should follow His steps. That is the one object 
 of all Christianity, to make us like our Lord. 
 
 Oh, may we strive ever, more and more, to learn from 
 Christ, and from the saints who have followed Christ's 
 example! and we shall find rest unto our souls. This was 
 the great aim of Newman's life, and thereby he attained 
 the happy art (to quote his own words) 
 
 " Which they have learned who aim in everything 
 To choose the good and pass the evil by. 
 These, as they pace the tangled path of life, 
 Cleanse from this earth its earthly dross away, 
 And clothe it with a pure supernal light ! "
 
 CHARLES DARWIN. 
 
 " He spake of trees, from the cedar-tree that is in Lebanon even unto the 
 hyssop that springeth out of the wall : he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and 
 of creeping things, and of fishes." I KINGS iv. 33. 
 
 OF all the illustrious tombs which crowd Westminster 
 Abbey, none is more illustrious than that of Isaac Newton. 
 His, as Dean Stanley said, is "the only dust of unques- 
 tionably world-wide fame that the floor of Westminster 
 covers." Over his beautiful statue, Astronomy, leaning 
 on her celestial globe, has for a time closed her book. On 
 the graceful bas-relief below, his works are allegorically 
 forthshadowed. The genii coining at the furnace symbol- 
 ize his services as Master of the Mint; another genius 
 holding a prism indicates his vast and brilliant discoveries 
 respecting the laws of light; another weighs the sun 
 against the planets on a steelyard, as an emblem of the 
 laws of gravitation which he established; yet another lays 
 on his telescope an admiring hand; at the left others tend 
 an aloe whose rare blossom is the emblem of immortality. 
 And the inscription tells that he "of nature, of antiquity, 
 of Holy Scripture, a diligent, able, faithful interpreter, he 
 vindicated by science the majesty of the Almighty; while 
 in his character he shewed forth the simplicity of the gos- 
 pel." Other illustrious votaries of art and science have 
 here their memorials, or have mingled their dust with his ; 
 other astronomers, like Herschel, and the young and la- 
 mented Horrocks, who on a laborious Sunday between two
 
 CHARLES DARWIN. 2g| . 
 
 services observed the transit of Venus which he had pre- 
 dicted; geologists, like Buckland and Lyell; physicians, 
 like Mead and Hunter; discoverers, like Morland and Davy 
 and Hales and Young; engineers, like Watt and Stephen- 
 son, and Telford and Brunei. But, in all the long list 
 during the one hundred and fifty years since the body of 
 Newton was borne from the Jerusalem chamber, none was 
 nobler or greater, none exercised an influence so deep upon 
 the progress of science, none had more unquestionably a 
 world-wide fame, than that great and good man, Charles 
 Darwin. With one voice, the gratitude of Europe and of 
 England pronounces him to have been most patient in 
 his researches; most original in his methods; most brill- 
 iant in his combinations; inspired by the purest love of 
 truth; actuated by the most transparent candour; micro- 
 scopically careful in observation of detail; magnificently 
 comprehensive in width of grasp; "a high example of the 
 fidelity and humility of human thought." Death has been 
 busy of late among our best and greatest. It has taken 
 from us the great statesman whose career " extraordi- 
 nary," as his successor said, "even among the extraordi- 
 nary" illustrated the force of genius and indomitable 
 perseverance; it has taken the fine thinker, who, choos- 
 ing romance as the vehicle of her teaching, has flung so 
 rich a light on many of the problems of human charac- 
 ter; it has taken the great moralist, who, in language 
 intense and vivid as lightning, proclaimed to us the old 
 gospel of heroism and labour; it has taken that beautiful 
 and accomplished spirit, so dearly loved a friend to many 
 of us, who has left in our hearts and in this place a memory 
 which cannot be dimmed, but a blank and void which can 
 never be filled up. A few years ago it took from America
 
 29 5 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 the good-hearted and eloquent Emerson. It has taken this 
 greatest of our men of science; this keen observer, whose 
 genius enabled us to read so many hitherto undeciphered 
 lines in God's great epic of the universe; this clear-eyed 
 student of nature, so docile and so patient, so childlike 
 and full of love. 
 
 It is too early as yet to estimate his place among 
 mankind; but even now we may say that his claim to im- 
 mortal honour is securely based on the methods which he 
 discovered and the facts which he amassed during his life- 
 long toil. Kepler said that he might well wait a few years 
 for a reader, when God had waited six thousand years for 
 any one to see His works. The glory of Charles Darwin, 
 of which no change of view respecting his theories can rob 
 him, is that he passed through the world with open eyes. 
 In the voyage of the "Beagle" 1 he bore without a murmur 
 that five years' martyrdom of continuous sea-sickness which 
 permanently ruined his health. It was amazing but for 
 his most tender, and never-ceasing devotion, it would 
 have been impossible that anything, much less that such 
 noble work, should have been the outcome of such shat- 
 tered strength. How many of us would have had the 
 faith and the courage to redeem to such high services 
 what would have been to most men, and with some ex- 
 cuse, the life of a broken valetudinarian? But it was in 
 that voyage that he laid the foundations of his vast know- 
 ledge. This man on whom for years bigotry and ignorance 
 poured out their scorn has been called a materialist. I 
 do not see in all his writings one trace of materialism. 
 I read in every line the healthy, noble, well-balanced 
 wonder of a spirit profoundly reverent, kindled into deep- 
 est admiration for the works of God. In that charming
 
 CHARLES DARWIN. ^^ 
 
 record of his circumnavigation of the globe, he describes 
 the moonlight in the clear heavens; the dark, glittering 
 sea; the white sails filled with the soft air of gently blow- 
 ing trade winds ; the dead calm when the ocean gleams 
 like a polished mirror; the rising arch and sudden fury 
 of the squall, in which the albatross and petrel sport, 
 "the dark shadows, the bright lights, the rushing of the 
 torrents, which proclaim the strife of the unloosed ele- 
 ments on shore." He speaks of the sublimity of the tropi- 
 cal forests, undefaced by the hand of man, whether those of 
 Brazil, where the powers of life are predominant, or those 
 of Tierra del Fuego, where death and decay prevail ; and 
 "both," he says, "are temples filled with the varied pro- 
 ductions of the God of Nature, and no man can stand in 
 those solitudes without feeling that there is more in man 
 than the mere breath of his body." And, then, from these 
 grandeurs from oceans and forests, from the flora and 
 fauna, from electric phenomena and the motions of clouds 
 he turned, with the open eyes of equal wonder, to things 
 which vulgar minds would despise as mean arid insignifi- 
 cant, not only to beasts and cattle, or to birds and butter- 
 flies, but to slugs and cuttle-fish, to frogs and phosphores- 
 cent insects, to barnacles and sea-acorns, to confervas and 
 infusoria, conscious always that more creatures wait on 
 man than he'll take notice of. In 1842 and 1844 he first 
 explained to the world the structure of coral reefs and 
 volcanic islands, which play so important a part in the con- 
 figuration of the globe. In 1859 came his "Origin of 
 Species"; in 1871, his "Descent of Man." Those books, 
 apart altogether from their main hypothesis, abound in 
 exquisite discoveries and splendid generalizations. The 
 doctrine of heredity, as there developed, is pregnant with
 
 2 gg QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 moral warning. The chapter on the struggle for existence 
 reads like a thrilling tragedy, which must have its signifi- 
 cance ages hence. The doctrine of the survival of the 
 fittest may be so used as to act like a moral lever for 
 the elevation of all mankind. And these great colliga- 
 tions of facts are illustrated by hundreds of beautiful 
 observations on the instinct of animals, the plumage of 
 birds, the glowing eyes in the tail of the peacock, the gar- 
 dens of the bower-bird, the blue bars of the wings of the 
 wood pigeon, the nests of fishes, the colours of snakes, the 
 habits of ants, the cells of bees, 
 
 " Something of the frame, the rock, 
 The star, the bird, the fish, the shell, the flower, 
 Electric, chemic laws." 
 
 There is scarcely a region of animate or inanimate nature 
 on which his genius has not poured a flood of light. 
 Through the whole system of tnought and education from 
 the oldest university of Europe down to the humblest vil- 
 lage school in England, his inspiring impulse has been 
 felt. The allegorical bas-relief on his tomb would have 
 to be crowded with the works of God. But no man had 
 ever less need than he of "storied urn, or animated bust." 
 
 'Av8/)oiv lm<j>avS>v 7ra(ra yrj ra^os, " Of illustrious men, the 
 
 whole earth is the tomb " ; and of Charles Darwin it has 
 been finely said that "a grass plot, a plant in bloom, a 
 human gesture, the entire circuit of the doings and tenden- 
 cies of nature, builds his monument and records his ex- 
 ploits." 
 
 For, indeed, he threw no less light on the vegetable 
 than on the animal world. In 1862, and later years, he 
 published his astonishing investigations into the fertiliza-
 
 CHARLES DARWIN. ^ 
 
 tion of orchids, and the movements of climbing plants, and 
 other branches of botany. In these works, again, he made 
 us acquainted with masses of facts which none had under- 
 stood during the six thousand or, for all we know, the 
 six hundred thousand years since God had made them. 
 How unspeakably full of interest is the discovery of the 
 close and necessary interrelation between the insect and 
 the plant! When a pistachio tree in Paris, with only 
 female flowers, suddenly bore nuts, and it was found, by 
 most careful search, that there was but a single tree 
 with male flowers, miles away, which had blossomed 
 for the first time that year, it might well have been 
 deemed miraculous that the wind should have borne 
 minute and almost invisible pollen dust across miles of 
 smoky faubourgs till, out in the millions of motes they 
 swept along, it alighted by chance, yet with infinite 
 nicety, on one tiny spot of the pistils of that distant tree. 
 It was the German botanist Conrad Sprenger who proved 
 that it is mainly insects which fertilize the flowers of the 
 world; and this he proved by watching plants from sunrise 
 to sunset, sometimes for sixteen hours together in silence, 
 sometimes till he saw some buzzing insect penetrate the 
 flower for its honey, and then observed the grains of pollen 
 left by the winged, unconscious messenger of God on the 
 viscid humour of the stigma. Mr. Darwin immensely 
 developed this exquisite discovery. He revealed many a 
 fresh link in the divine chain which, with myriads of links 
 microscopic but indissoluble, connects the animal with the 
 vegetable world. There is one class of orchids with a 
 grand-looking nectary which were believed to produce no 
 honey, but only by their brilliant colours and fair promise 
 to deceive the bees and moths into visiting and so fertiliz-
 
 300 . QUESTIONS OF THE DAY, 
 
 ing them. They are called sham honey producers. Mr. 
 Darwin's innate love of truth and hatred of shams made 
 him disbelieve this. He could not believe, he said, in so 
 gigantic an imposture. Man, the guiltiest as the fore- 
 most work of his Creator, may wear the mark of the hypo- 
 crite; but he would not think so meanly of the innocent 
 lilies of the field. And soon he discovered that these 
 orchids, so far from existing by an organized system of 
 deception, do produce honey underneath the outer skin of 
 the nectary, which can be easily pierced by the moth. Nor 
 was this a superfluous trouble given by the flower to the 
 insect. The gum on the disc of these plants requires a few 
 seconds longer to get dry than that of others, and the time 
 spent by the moth in getting the nectary allows the gum, 
 and the pollen with it, to dry properly on its proboscis; 
 and thus it can fertilize its kindred flowers. And, if you 
 ask, Of what use are these exquisite discoveries? I answer, 
 first, that it must be a mean mind which cares nothing for 
 these divine adaptations of the Creator, unless they can be 
 turned into bread ; and, next, that such discoveries are often 
 indefinitely important even to the physical needs of man. 
 When white clover was first imported to New Zealand, the 
 colonists observed with amazement that it produced no 
 seed. Red clover grew there: why should not white? Be- 
 cause, as such discoveries led men to observe, red clover is 
 fertilized by the humble-bee, the weight of which resting on 
 the keel of the flower pushes the stamen in such a way that 
 the pollen reaches the stigma. But white clover is fertil- 
 ized by hive bees, and, when hive bees were introduced into 
 New Zealand, the white clover also bore seed and grew. 
 When man has faith, when he bends with the simplicity 
 of childlike admiration over the works of God, he never
 
 CHARLES DARWIN. 3OI 
 
 knows how precious may be the secrets which Nature may 
 unclench for him out of her granite hand. 
 
 It is but a short time since Mr. Darwin gave us his 
 last work, on "Earth-worms." In it he demonstrated the 
 marvellous fact that to these most despised and humble 
 creatures we owe nothing less than the formation of vegeta- 
 ble mould all over the surface of the earth; nothing less, 
 that is, than the preparation of the earth for the life of 
 man. That book was the practical outcome of forty years 
 of patient, continuous, unhasting, unresting observation. 
 The worm has long been a synonym for everything mean 
 and contemptible. Was there no lesson for us in the fact, 
 till then undiscovered, nay, even unconjectured, that on 
 the work of these humble creatures man, proud man, is in- 
 definitely dependent? Was there no rebuke to arrogance 
 in the fact that many a man does less good in life than the 
 worm, which, though it does no evil, he crushes into the 
 sod? Was there nothing admirable in the loving study of 
 these despised creatures of God? As a boy, Mr. Darwin 
 had been under the influence of deeply religious impres- 
 sions. There is evidence, I think, that he never lost them. 
 And this, at least, is clear: that in all his simple and noble 
 life he was influenced by the profoundly religious convic- 
 tion that nothing is beneath the earnest study of man 
 which has been worthy of the mighty handiwork of God. 
 
 When Pompey forced his way into the Holy of Holies 
 in Jerusalem, he found, to his amazement, that all the idle 
 stories of his countrymen about the worship of the Jews were 
 lies; and that they did not worship, as Greeks and Romans 
 had said, an animal or an ass. But he also found, to his 
 amazement, vacua omnia, that all was empty, that there 
 was nothing there; and after this the Romans thought that
 
 3Q2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Jehovah was some mere being of the clouds. Something 
 like this has happened to many men of science. They have 
 found, perhaps, that God is not the God presented to them 
 by false types of orthodoxy, no awful idol of the cavern or 
 of the school, but that the God whom the Gospels really 
 revealed is a God of light and a God of love. But, when 
 they have pressed their way into the arcana of Nature, the 
 shrine has seemed to them to be empty: they have seen 
 nothing; and so, like Pompey, they have failed to recog- 
 nize the Unseen Presence which dwelleth there. But God 
 was in His holy temple, though the heathen soldier saw 
 Him not. And though the probings of the scalpel cannot 
 manifest Him; though no microscope can reveal Him; 
 though, among the immensities, the telescope finds "no 
 manner of likeness or similitude," yet to the eye of faith, 
 to that spiritual faculty by which alone (as all Scripture 
 tells us) He can be spiritually discerned, and which, like 
 every other faculty, can be atrophized by neglect, God is 
 in nature; He is everywhere. Galileo saw Him in the far- 
 thest star; Linnaeus worshipped Him in the humblest 
 flower; the spores of the meanest moss reveal Him, and 
 the colours of the tiniest insect's wing. And there as- 
 suredly, judging by his own expressions, this great natural- 
 ist found Him. What were his views about those Chris- 
 tian doctrines which we hold to be most dear I know not ; 
 but I do know that in all his writings I cannot find that 
 he has lent himself to a single expression hostile to relig- 
 ion, to a single sentence irreconcilable with my faith in 
 Christ. There is a worship which has been described as 
 "mostly of the silent sort, at the altar of the unknown and 
 the unknowable." To us who worship a Father in heaven, 
 and a Saviour who died for our sins, it looks chilly, maimed,
 
 CHARLES DARWIN. 3Q - 
 
 and imperfect. But, if there be good men to whom no 
 other has become possible, I, for one, believe that by God 
 who is the judge, not we, by God, who seeth not as man 
 seeth, by God in Christ, it may and will be accepted as 
 a sincere and as a holy worship. Yes! to the God who 
 reveals Himself in many ways, I believe that even prayers 
 which can find no words, which are but the dim yearnings 
 of the unsatisfied spirit, the sighs heaved by the uncon- 
 vinced, may at least be as acceptable as was of old "the 
 right burning of the two kidneys with the fat." Nay, if 
 such worship be offered on the altar of a pure life, if it be 
 accompanied with faithful effort and unselfish love, I, for 
 one, believe that it will be a far sweeter incense than the 
 prayer of any who draw nigh unto God with their lips, 
 while their hearts are far from Him. Many an earnest 
 believer in the Lord Jesus Christ bent with sorrowing 
 heart over Darwin's grave. Let not our honour for him 
 be misunderstood. It does not mean that we love our 
 Saviour less : it does mean that we love more all for whom 
 He died. It does not mean that we have a fainter faith : 
 it does mean that we have a larger charity. 
 
 When the greatest living master of science in France 
 Louis Pasteur was received into the French Academy, 
 although himself an earnest and a sincere believer, he had 
 to pronounce the tloge on his predecessor, the learned Posi- 
 tivist, Emile Littre; and the earnest scientific believer spoke 
 of the Positivist in these noble words: "Littre," he said, 
 "had his God within him. The ideal which filled his soul 
 was a passion for work, a passion for humanity. He has 
 often appeared to me seated by his wife, as in a picture 
 of the early time of Christianity, he looking down full 
 of sympathy for sufferers, she a fervent Catholic, with 

 
 3Q4 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 her eyes upraised to heaven; he inspired by every 
 terrestrial virtue, she by every divine influence; the two 
 wearing but one radiance, from the two sanctities which 
 form the halo of the God-Man, that which proceeds from 
 devotion to what is human and that which emanates from 
 ardent love to the divine." I adopt to-day those noble 
 words of the scientific Christian. God is larger than the 
 Churches. His heart is wider than the heart of theolo- 
 gians. Faith lives : it is only the spirit of the Inquisition 
 which is dead. 
 
 I have referred to some of the regions in which lay the 
 great contributions to the results and methods of science of 
 this most eminent thinker and naturalist. And behind the 
 discoverer stood the man. If in his works he has left us 
 a legacy of imperishable knowledge, in his life he has left 
 us an example of imperishable attractiveness. Before the 
 simple goodness of this man the arrogant dogmatism of 
 science no less than the arrogant dogmatism of theology 
 stands rebuked. Not one man in a hundred is capable of 
 judging about his theories; but all the world can judge of 
 the beauty, the dignity, of his character. Denounced as 
 the author of a theory subversive not only of religion, but 
 of morality, he never retaliated. He suffered fools gladly. 
 
 To scientists he left the high example of one who did 
 his Heaven-appointed work, yet never lent himself to one 
 word against religion; to theologians, the rebuking specta- 
 cle of a mind too pure and too lofty to be moved by the 
 explosions of ignorant anathema. The personal goodness 
 which beamed from him, the largeness of nature in which 
 nothing petty could live, the total absence of mean jeal- 
 ousies, the scrupulous anxiety to do justice to opponents, 
 in how many professing Christians even shall we find
 
 CHARLES DARWIN. ~ o - 
 
 these? If high purity and rigid performance of duty con- 
 stitute a blessed career; if what God requires of us is to do 
 justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our 
 God ; if to " do unto men whatsoever we would that they 
 should do unto us " be "the law and the prophets," then I 
 do not hesitate to say that, rather than by the side of any 
 formalist or any Pharisee, whose daily words belie his 
 vaunted orthodoxy, and make men turn with scorn from his 
 religion of denunciation and of hate, I, for one, would rather 
 take my stand at the Great Assize with one who may have 
 borne the stigma of a heretic, but who shewed the virtues 
 of a saint. Calm in the consciousness of integrity; happy 
 in sweetness of home life; profoundly modest; utterly un- 
 selfish; exquisitely genial; manifesting, as his friend has 
 said of him, "an intense and passionate honesty, by which 
 all his thoughts and actions were irradiated as by a central 
 fire," Charles Darwin will take his place side by side 
 with Ray and Linnaeus, with Newton and Pascal, with 
 Herschel and Faraday, among those who have not only 
 served humanity by their genius, but have also brightened 
 its ideal by holy lives. 
 
 There are two phenomena with which every age has 
 been familiar, not least our own. One is the rapidity with 
 which truth wins its way, so that the heresy of yesterday 
 becomes the superstition of to-day; and the outcry, "It 
 is wicked and false," is succeeded by the self-complacent 
 murmur, "We thought so all along." The other is the way 
 in which men who have murdered the prophet crowd zeal- 
 ously forward to build his tomb, and, having embittered 
 all his life down to its last dregs by their depreciations, 
 come and shed their crocodile tears above his grave. This 
 life is a fresh illustration of these phenomena. Twenty 
 
 20
 
 3o6 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 years ago the views of Mr. Darwin were received with 
 bursts of denunciation and derision. What are the facts? 
 Those who still think them unproven, if they be incompe- 
 tent to give an opinion, have at least learned modesty. 
 The martyrdoms of science, the crimes of Inquisitors, 
 ought at least to have untaught us the folly of condemning 
 scientific conclusions on the ground of confused abstract 
 notions, ignorantly pieced together out of misinterpreted 
 texts. We go to the Bible for religion, not for science; 
 and three hundred years ago Bacon, one of the greatest and 
 one of the most religious of philosophers, warned us that 
 he who is guilty of the empty levity of trying to found 
 natural philosophy on the Book of Job or the first chapter 
 of Genesis is looking for dead things among living men. 
 Whether we accept or not the Darwinian hypothesis, this at 
 least is certain that (to quote his own words) there is no- 
 thing in it which is contrary to the laws impressed on mat- 
 ter by the Creator. Nay, more: that "there is grandeur 
 in this view of life, with its several powers, having been 
 originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into 
 one; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on ac- 
 cording to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a be- 
 ginning," yes, and even from the war of nature, from fam- 
 ine, and from death, "endless forms most beautiful and 
 most wonderful have been and are being evolved." It may 
 be abhorrent to man's vanity to be told that he is sprung 
 from a lowly origin; but, on the one hand, it ought to be 
 more abhorrent to know that man has often indulged in 
 lower vices than the brute, and, on the other, the body of 
 his humiliation is glorified when he remembers that it is 
 God's grace which has given him "sympathy, which feels 
 for the most debased; benevolence, which extends to the
 
 CHARLES DARWIN. - Q7 
 
 humblest living creature; a godlike intellect, which has 
 penetrated the heavens and weighed the stars." So far 
 from being robbed of one element of faith, if this convic- 
 tion be ever forced upon us, we may be indefinitely the 
 better for it if we will carry with it the old and sacred 
 lesson, 
 
 " Unless above himself he can 
 Erect himself, how poor a thing is man ! " 
 
 Let me point to one or two great and most needful 
 lessons which this life may emphasize to the nation and 
 to the age. 
 
 First, I hope that even the most unteachable of mankind, 
 those whose misguided zeal has forced science and religion 
 into unholy antagonism and disgraced the flag of faith by 
 trying to raise it in defiance to the flag of reason, will see 
 by one more instance that by such conduct they wrong 
 the cause of religion and wrong the majesty of God. Let 
 us have done forever with the ruinous error, caused partly 
 by want of real faith, partly by a usurping selfishness, 
 which has led the Church to regard progress as a danger, 
 and to repress by force or by anathema the emancipating 
 progress of the human mind. The names of Roger Bacon, 
 of Columbus, of Copernicus, of Vesalius, of Campanella, of 
 Galileo, of Kepler, of Descartes, rise in judgment, not 
 (God forbid! ) against religion, but against an ecclesiasti- 
 cism at once childishly timid and fiercely cruel, which con- 
 stantly attempts to usurp its name. Even Newton's law 
 of gravitation, the greatest discovery ever made by man, 
 was attacked as being " subversive of natural, and, inferen- 
 tial ly, of revealed religion." Shall we never learn that, 
 in generation after generation, divines of every school and 
 of every shade of opinion have, in matters of science been
 
 ~ c g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY, 
 
 not only egregiously, but obstructively, and even aggress- 
 ively, in the wrong? Science is not their sphere: their 
 opinion about it is not worth the breath with which it is 
 uttered. But in this matter there have been mistakes on 
 both sides. If clergymen have arrogated the name of relig- 
 ion to baseless nescience, born of false dogma and mis- 
 taken system, physicists also have often arrogated the name 
 of science to premature conclusions, based on insufficient 
 facts. Both have reared on bases of sand and on pillars of 
 smoke their pretentious temples of their subjective idols. 
 Let there be on both sides a little patience, a little humil- 
 ity, a little brotherly love. A truce to idle antagonism! 
 The fundamental doctrines of religion are eternally true: 
 the fundamental doctrines of science are eternally true. 
 In ceding to science the study of the universe, we do not 
 cede one iota of our faith. Religion is the voice of God 
 to man in history, in conscience, in experience, in the 
 gospel of Christ. Science is the voice of God to man in 
 nature. Scripture is His Bible written with paper and 
 ink: science is His Bible written on the starry leaves of 
 Heaven and the rocky tablets of the world. God cannot 
 speak in two voices. God cannot contradict Himself. Be- 
 tween physicists and theologians there have been conflicts 
 many a time. Between true science and true religion 
 there never has been, never will be, never can be, any 
 conflict whatever. The one, as Baronius so truly said, 
 is "the revelation of how the heaven goeth, the other of 
 how we must go to heaven." 
 
 And because these false antagonisms have been infi- 
 nitely dangerous to faith over Darwin's grave, let us once 
 more assure the students of science that for us the spirit 
 of mediaeval ecclesiasticism is dead. We desire the light.
 
 CHARLES DARWIN. 3Q Q 
 
 We believe in the light. We press forward into the light. 
 If need be, let us even perish in the light. But we know 
 that in the light we shall never perish. For to us God is 
 light; and Christ is, and will be to the end, "the Light 
 of the World." Ah! if we had but presented Him to 
 you more truly; had we not too often shewn you in 
 ourselves an image so awfully unlike Him; if priests had 
 cared less to clothe themselves with power and more to 
 clothe themselves with righteousness; had we fought less 
 for dead scholastic formulae and more for practical living 
 faith, it may be that between the students of science 
 and the champions of religion no severance would ever 
 have occurred. Had we cared little for phrases and much 
 for fruit, little for the minutiae of ritual and dogma, 
 much for mercy, justice, and truth; had we been more 
 jealous of that falling asunder of action from knowledge 
 which characterizes too much of our so-called religious 
 life, men could never have been alienated from a faith 
 which shone forth in the beauty of holiness. Let us try to 
 arrive at a better understanding, at a deeper sympathy. We 
 are men, sharers in the common sorrows of few and evil 
 days. We are brethren : we need each other's help; we need 
 more than all that by means of that common help, God, for 
 the alleviating of our miseries, should constantly give us 
 new refreshments out of the fountains of His goodness. We 
 recognize with deep gratitude the boons which we have 
 received from science. Ah! let none of you fall into the 
 dangerous error of scorning those which you may receive 
 from religion. Is it nothing that we can point you to a sea 
 of light, which rolls round, and overfloods, this sea of 
 darkness? Have you no need of Him of whom we tell 
 you; of Him who alone can say to the polluted heart, "I
 
 3IO QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 will, be thou clean"; to the prostrate soul, "Arise and 
 walk"; to the weary spirit, "Come unto me, and I will 
 give you rest"? We are brethren, created by the same 
 God, redeemed by the same Saviour, heirs together of the 
 common mysteries of life and death. Join with us, over 
 Darwin's grave, in the prayer that we, by the grace of God, 
 may learn more of humility, of charity, of large-hearted 
 goodness, of religion pure and undefiled; and, for your- 
 selves, that "human things may not prejudice such as are 
 divine; neither that, from the unlocking of the gates of 
 sense, and the kindling of a greater natural light, anything 
 of incredulity or intellectual night may arise in your minds 
 towards divine mysteries; but rather that by minds thor- 
 oughly cleansed and purged from fancy and vanities, and yet 
 subject and perfectly given up to the divine oracles, there 
 may be given," not only unto reason such things as be 
 reason's, but also "unto faith such things as be faith's."
 
 JOHN BRIGHT. 
 
 "Howl, O fir-tree, for the cedar is fallen." ZECH. xi. 2. 
 
 THE death of John Bright and the lessons of the great 
 life which has ebbed away must not be passed over. When 
 Edmund Burke died at Bath in 1797, Canning wrote, 
 "There is but one event, but it is an event of the world: 
 Burke is dead." And, though Mr. Bright had no preten- 
 sion to the imperial endowments of Edmund Burke, no 
 greater orator, no more disinterested statesman, no man 
 more pervaded with the principles of righteousness, no man 
 more free from the intrigues of party and the taint of per- 
 sonal ambition, has ever passed from the strife of politics, 
 
 " To where beyond these voices there is peace." 
 
 It was said by Lord Brougham of Sir Robert Peel that he 
 could ever turn from the storm without to the sunshine of 
 an approving conscience within. It has been said by 
 Mr. Gladstone of John Bright that " he was ever ready to 
 lay his popularity as a sacrifice upon the altar of his 
 duty." No man, however great, is raised above the com- 
 mon heritage of errors and imperfections; but, when we 
 stand beside his grave, it is no time to speak of these. 
 "Let us now praise famous men," says the son of Sirach. 
 Leaders of the people by their counsels, wise and elo- 
 quent in their instructions, all these were honoured in 
 their generations, and were the glory of their times. Their
 
 - I2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 bodies are buried in peace, but their name liveth for ever- 
 more. Were this the time or the place to criticise, we 
 might admit in him who has gone a certain intensity of 
 prejudice; a certain narrowness of range; a certain one- 
 sidedness of judgment; an inability to throw off, under 
 changed conditions, the aversions of his youth. Let us 
 rather thank God for his high example ; for that habitual 
 loftiness of thought which might have elevated the whole 
 tone of English politics; for that habitual integrity of life 
 which has left to all his contemporaries the heritage of a 
 stainless example. I will not speak of his oratory, though 
 in its supreme efforts it stood unrivalled. He, more than 
 any man, reminded me of the famous orators, 
 
 " Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence . . . 
 Shook the arsenal, and fulmin'd over Greece, 
 To Macedon, and Artaxerxes' throne." 
 
 I have heard him when, in English of matchless strength 
 and matchless simplicity, and in a voice which sometimes 
 seemed to breathe through silver, and rang anon with the 
 trumpet tones of scorn and indignation, he stood before 
 vast audiences, playing on their emotions as on some 
 mighty instrument. I have seen him now sweeping them 
 into stormy sympathy before the strong wind of his pas- 
 sion; now holding them hushed as an infant at its mother's 
 breast; now making them break into radiancy of laughter; 
 now whitening their upturned faces with sympathetic tears ; 
 sometimes even lifting them to their feet in a burst of 
 uncontrollable and spontaneous enthusiasm. I have heard 
 him rain down the large blows of his impassioned rhetoric, 
 as when a smith brings down his sledge-hammer on the 
 glowing anvil, forging the plastic iron into what he will.
 
 JOHN BRIGHT. ^ l - 
 
 And never have I heard him abuse for base or personal ends 
 this mighty power. Oratory is a natural gift and may be 
 fearfully perverted. England may thank God that, though 
 men can become leaders of the multitude by the coarsest 
 and vulgarest arts, though they can poison them with mean 
 motives and virulent antipathies, this great tribune of the 
 people, who possessed in such a high degree the love as 
 well as the confidence of the enfranchised multitudes, scorn- 
 ing to answer them according to their idols, guided them 
 with noble integrity to religious and moral aspirations. 
 However much he might sometimes be mistaken, no selfish 
 interest, no covert ambition, ever mingled with his pure 
 desire that not only peace and happiness, but truth and 
 justice, religion and piety, might be established among us 
 for all generations; and, since we desire that he should still 
 speak to us by his example, let me single out these five 
 qualities, all of them noble qualities, as specially charac- 
 teristic of his career, his love of the people; his disinter- 
 ested sincerity; his hatred for war; his disdain of popu- 
 larity; but, above all and more than all, his inflexible 
 homage to the majesty of the moral law. 
 
 It was his love and pity for the people which enlisted 
 him enlisted him at the awful moment when "the sole 
 inmate of his household was one motherless babe " 
 in the main work of his life, the abolition of the Corn 
 Laws, in the face of a tenacious, embittered, and mighty 
 monopoly. Those only who know what the state of the 
 country was half a century ago can adequately realize the 
 greatness of that achievement. By securing cheap bread to 
 the working classes in days when, in Leeds alone, there 
 were 20,936 persons whose average earnings were under 
 one shilling a week, he saved England from ruin and revo-
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY, 
 
 lution. Well might he rejoice in later years as there rose 
 before him the vision of the harvest fields of the world, 
 from Canada to Australia, from Chili to the Black Sea 
 shore, rolling forth billows of golden grain, and English 
 fleets traversing every sea to bring to men, and women, and 
 little children the fulness of God's earth; wherever the 
 rain falls, wherever the sun shines, gathering that of which 
 the full fruition was once denied to the people by foolish and 
 unjust laws. And who would not envy him the manly boast, 
 when he said that, " if in the centres of commerce, and in 
 this great Babylon in which we are assembled, we do not 
 find ourselves surrounded by hungry and exasperated multi- 
 tudes, if now, more than at any time in the last one 
 hundred years, 
 
 ' Content sits basking on the cheek of toil,' 
 
 he as much as any living man had some claim to partake of 
 that glory " ? 
 
 Next, I would touch on his entire disinterestedness. It 
 shone out in his lofty independence. " I am no frequenter 
 of courts," he could proudly say. "I have never sought for 
 office or the emoluments of place. I have no craving for 
 popularity. I have little of that which can be called the 
 lust for fame. I am a citizen of a free country. I love my 
 country. I love its freedom." "I am not, I do not pretend 
 to be, a statesman ; and that character is so tainted and so 
 equivocal in our day that I am not sure that a pure and hon- 
 ourable ambition would aspire to it." "My clients have not 
 been usually the rich and the great, but rather the poor and 
 the lowly. They cannot give me place, and dignities, and 
 wealth; but honourable service in their cause yields me 
 that which is of far higher and more lasting value. the
 
 JOHN BRIGHT. ._ 
 
 consciousness that I have laboured to expound and to uphold 
 laws which, though they were not given among the thunders 
 of Sinai, are not less the commandments of God, and not 
 less intended to promote and secure the happiness of men." 
 This manly independence of judgment was strikingly illus- 
 trated by his attitude toward the Northern States of America 
 in the great Civil War. When in 1862 the upper classes 
 of Englishmen, almost to a man, and the vast majority of 
 the middle classes, were in favour of the Southern slave- 
 holders, when even our leading politicians declared the 
 cause of the North to be hopeless, Mr. Bright repudi- 
 ated that belief because he was so deeply convinced 
 of the righteous government of the world. "The leaders 
 of this revolt," he said, "propose this monstrous thing, 
 that over a territory forty times as large as England 
 the blight and curse of slavery shall be for ever perpetu- 
 ated. I cannot believe, for my part, that such a fate 
 will ever befall that fair land, stricken though it now is 
 with the ravages of war. I cannot believe that civilization, 
 in its journey with the sun, will sink into endless night. 
 I have another and a far brighter vision before my gaze. It 
 may be but a vision, but I will cherish it. I see one vast 
 confederation, stretching from the frozen north in un- 
 broken line to the glowing south, and from the wild 
 billows of the Atlantic westward to the calmer waters of 
 the Pacific main; and I see one people, and one language, 
 and one law, and one faith, and over all that wide conti- 
 nent the home of freedom, and a refuge for the oppressed 
 of every race and of every clime." He reminded the House 
 of Commons, that every year in the slave States of America 
 there were one hundred and fifty thousand children born into 
 the world, born with the badge and the doom of slavery,
 
 -j^ QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 born to the liability, by law, and by custom, and by the 
 devilish cupidity of man, to the lash, and to the chain, 
 and to the branding iron, and to be taken from their families 
 and carried they knew not where; and by their love and 
 tenderness to their own children, as the purest and most 
 holy feeling of their lives, he asked how we should feel if 
 our children were brought up in a system so "infernal." 
 Strong in the intuitions of righteousness, he had no misgiv- 
 ing as to the issue of the contest, because he knew that it 
 rested with Him " in whose hands are alike the breath of man 
 and the life of States." And he was right. During four 
 years of agony the ground reeled under the American 
 nation, "until at last, after the smoke of the battlefield had 
 cleared away, the horrid shape of slavery, which had cast 
 its shadow over a whole continent, was gone forever." 
 
 Now, how came it that John Bright so often stood 
 almost alone in his convictions and his intuitions, while 
 good men wavered and far-seeing men were blind? I 
 believe that his prescience was due to his unswerving con- 
 viction that "that which is morally wrong cannot be polit- 
 ically right"; and that the triumph of God's righteousness 
 in the affairs of men may be, indeed, for a time delayed, 
 but comes at length with all the certainty of a law. " How 
 is it," he asked, "that any great thing is accomplished? 
 By love of justice, by constant devotion to a great cause, 
 and by an unfaltering faith that what is right will in the 
 end succeed." The secret of his prescience was the firm- 
 ness of his faith. 
 
 Nor was the Civil War between the Northern and South- 
 ern States of America the only occasion on which Mr. 
 Bright has held convictions opposed to those of the major- 
 ity of his countrymen. He hated war, and in opposing the
 
 JOHN BRIGHT. ^ 
 
 Crimean War he stood yet more magnificently alone. If 
 the present generation forgets, yet history will remember 
 the speeches in which he at least won the pure glory of 
 helping to make England shudder at the carnage of all 
 needless or ambitious war, the great speech in the House 
 of Commons in December, 1854, when down many a stern 
 cheek he drew unwonted tears by the homeliest pathos. 
 Speaking of those who had perished in the Crimea, he 
 said: "We all know what we have lost in this House. 
 There, very often, sitting near me, sat the member for 
 Frome. I met him a short time before he was going 
 out, and asked him whether he was going. He answered, 
 'he was afraid he was,' not afraid in the sense of per- 
 sonal fear (he knew not that), but he said, with a look 
 and tone I shall never forget, l lt is no light matter 
 for a man who has a wife and five little children.' The 
 stormy Euxine is his grave: his wife is a widow, his 
 children fatherless. [There were others, too], but the 
 place that knew them shall know them no more forever." 
 And again, in 1855, in the passage most remembered: 
 "The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the 
 land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings. 
 There is no one, as when the first-born were slain of old, to 
 sprinkle with blood the lintel and side-posts of our doors, 
 that he may spare us and pass on. He takes his victims 
 from the castles of the noble, the mansions of the wealthy, 
 and the cottages of the poor and lowly; and it is on behalf 
 of all these classes that I make my appeal." And we all 
 know how in those discussions he contemptuously repudi- 
 ated the mere doctrinaire defence of war out of Vattel. 
 He looked upon the " balance-of -power " theory as a ghastly 
 phantom which for one hundred and seventy years had
 
 3 ,g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 loaded the nation with debt and taxes, had sacrificed myriads 
 of lives, and had devastated thousands of homes. No doubt 
 he carried too far the doctrine of non-intervention. There 
 is such a thing as a righteous intervention, as when Crom- 
 well threatened such measures that, if the persecution of 
 the Vaudois did not cease, the guns of England might be 
 heard in the Castle of St. Angelo. 
 
 " Peace is no peace if it lets the ill go stronger, 
 Only cheating destiny a very little longer; 
 War, with its agonies, its horrors, and its crimes, 
 Is cheaper if discounted and taken up betimes. 
 Go home, you idle teachers, 
 The cannons are God's preachers when the time is ripe for war." 
 
 But yet Mr. Bright felt truly that military glory is of 
 little value compared to "the high example of a Christian 
 nation, free in its institutions, courteous and just in its 
 conduct to all foreign States, and resting its policy on the 
 unchangeable foundations of Christian morality." 
 
 I know nothing that I admire more in this great orator 
 than his magnificent disregard for popularity. "He feared 
 man so little because he feared God so much." For many 
 years of his life he had the honour I say quite deliberately 
 the honour of being one of the best haced men in the 
 country. For fully half his life he enjoyed the beatitude of 
 malediction. It is an honour which he shared with many 
 of God's noblest heroes and sweetest saints. It is an 
 honour which he shared with martyrs and prophets, and with 
 the great benefactors of mankind, with the apostles, with 
 Christ Himself. It is an honour which every man shall gain 
 who refuses to swim with the stream, who refuses to answer 
 the multitude according to their idols. He was called in 
 early years "a disaffected vagabond," "a peddling econo-
 
 JOHN BRIGHT. - lg 
 
 mist," "a wicked incendiary," "a dangerous fanatic." 
 "They spit in my face," he said to a friend, "in the streets 
 of Manchester." The man who has played any real part in 
 the history of his time, and has not been assailed with bit- 
 ter and brutal words ; the man who has stirred up no viru- 
 lent animosities, and heard no bitter hissing, is hardly a 
 fighter in the front rank of life's most glorious battles. A 
 man who has never been sneered at and insulted as a fool 
 and a fanatic may have his own smooth merits, but he can 
 never be a champion of forlorn hopes or a pioneer of flouted 
 truths. "For twenty-five years," said Mr. Bright in 1863, 
 "I have stood before great meetings of my countrymen, 
 pleading only for justice. During that time, as you know, 
 I have endured measureless insult and passed through hur- 
 ricanes of abuse." Often has he said that, even if his 
 voice were the sole voice raised against something which 
 he regarded as unholy or unjust, that single voice would 
 still be raised in solitary condemnation; and "amid the din 
 of arms and the clamours of a venal press, I shall have," he 
 said, "the consolation, which I trust will be mine to the 
 last moment of my existence, the priceless consolation 
 that no word of mine has tended to promote the squander- 
 ing of my country's treasure or the spilling of one drop of 
 my country's blood." 
 
 Like the great Lord Mansfield, he scorned that mushroom 
 popularity which is the echo of folly and the shadow of 
 renown. He desired only that applause which is bestowed 
 by after-ages on virtuous actions. "It is that popularity 
 which follows, not that which is run after. It is that pop- 
 ularity which, sooner or later, never fails to do justice to 
 the pursuit of noble ends by noble means. I will not do 
 that which my conscience tells me is wrong to gain the
 
 3 20 
 
 QUFSTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 huzzas of thousands or the daily praise ot all the papers 
 which come from the press. I will not avoid doing 
 what I think is right, though it should draw on me the 
 whole artillery of libels, all that malice can invent or 
 credulity swallow." 
 
 It was one of his noblest characteristics that he always 
 referred every question to the highest moral standard. 
 "There is no permanent greatness to a nation," he said, 
 "except it be based upon morality. I do not care for 
 military greatness or military renown. I care for the 
 condition of the people among whom I live. Palaces, 
 baronial castles, great halls, stately mansions, do not make 
 a nation. The nation in every country dwells in the cottage, 
 and, unless the light of your constitution can shine there, 
 rely upon it that you have yet to learn the duties of govern- 
 ment. May I ask you, then, to believe, as I do most de- 
 voutly believe, that the moral law was not written for 
 men alone in their individual character, but that it was 
 written as well for nations as great as this of which we are 
 citizens? If nations reject and deride this moral law, there 
 is a penalty which will inevitably follow. It may not come 
 at once, it may not come in our lifetime; but, rely upon it, 
 the great Italian poet is not a poet only, but a prophet, 
 when he says, 
 
 ' The sword of heaven if not in haste to smite, 
 Nor yet doth linger.' 
 
 We have experience, we have beacons, we have landmarks 
 enough. It is true that we have not, as an ancient people 
 had, Urim and Thummim, those oraculous gems on Aaron's 
 breast from which to take counsel; but we have the un- 
 changeable and eternal principles of the moral law to guide
 
 JOHN BRIGHT. - 2I 
 
 us, and only so far as we walk by that guidance can we be 
 permanently a great nation or our people a happy people." 
 And once more : "To the outward eye monarchs and parlia- 
 ments seem to rule with an absolute and unquestioned sway; 
 but and I quote the words which one of our old Puritan 
 poets has left us 
 
 ' There is on earth a yet auguster thing, 
 Veiled though it be, than parliament or king.' 
 
 That auguster thing is the tribunal which God has set up 
 in the consciences of men. It is before that tribunal that 
 I am now permitted humbly to plead; and there is some- 
 thing in my heart, a small but exultant voice, which tells 
 me I shall not plead in vain." 
 
 And, once again, for, indeed, this was the very differ- 
 entia of John Bright's teaching, he said, when he retired 
 from the government after the bombardment of Alexandria : 
 "I asked my calm judgment and my conscience what was 
 the part I ought to take. They pointed it out to me, as I 
 think, with an unerring finger; and I am endeavoring to fol- 
 low it." 
 
 May I not, then, say, now that we have considered 
 his patriotism; his disinterestedness; his disdain for popu- 
 larity; his championship of the indefeasible privileges of 
 our common humanity; his determination never to 
 
 " Sell the truth to serve the hour, 
 Or palter with eternal God for power " ; 
 
 his soul undazzled by the glamour of war and desirous 
 only to see his country "leading the grand procession of 
 the nations on the paths of civilization and of peace"; his 
 inflexible determination at all costs to be just, and fear not; 
 
 21
 
 322 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 and his unswerving homage to the majesty of the moral 
 law, may I not say, amid the dearth of men so eminent and 
 so courageous, "Howl, O fir-tree, for the cedar is fallen"? 
 Mr. Bright was a Quaker. His ancestors had been impris- 
 oned by the tyrannous bigotry of a jealous priestcraft. He 
 sometimes spoke of the Church of England words harsh, if 
 not unjust. I hope that the Church of England is infi- 
 nitely too magnanimous to remember them with anger. 
 But little cause had he to blush for his connection with a 
 body which more conspicuously than all other sects aimed 
 at spirituality, despised the finicking pettinesses of ritual, 
 and pleaded for the supremacy of the Indwelling Spirit and 
 the clearness of the Inward Light. He might well be 
 proud of a religious community so many of whose sons 
 and daughters have borne on their faces not only the Ten 
 Commandments, but the Eight Beatitudes, of a community 
 which, small as are its number, has been foremost in all 
 works of beneficence and mercy, in the opposition to war, 
 in the cleansing of the prison, in the emancipation of the 
 slave. I have always felt a deep admiration for that Puri- 
 tan ideal, stately and strong, which finds so noble a repre- 
 sentative in John Milton; and there were some points in 
 which the departed statesman resembled him. He, too, 
 like Milton, lived on a lofty level of dignity and self- 
 respect. He, too, "reflecting on the deep mysteries of relig- 
 ion, on his own doubts and frailties, on the shortness of 
 the present time, and on the awful and unknown future," 
 disdained religious animosities, and rose far above all 
 "priestly attempts to subjugate the mind." He, too, "kin- 
 dled his undazzled eyes at the noonday beam," and cared 
 little for "the noise of timorous and flocking birds, with 
 such also as love the twilight." We have lost him; and
 
 JOHN BRIGHT. 3,3 
 
 the House of Commons and all English statesmanship are 
 indefinitely the poorer for his loss. How many can it 
 number to rank with one who was so conspicuously, and 
 so continuously, the defender of the miserable and the 
 champion of the oppressed; whose unfaltering faith in right 
 never quailed amid the clamours of interest and greed; who 
 made the Bible his statesman's manual; who with mighty 
 hand smote at oppression and monopoly; and whose words 
 of moral indignation against wrong and robbery sprang like 
 arrows of flame from a bow of steel ! We have lost him ; 
 and may God make us mindful to follow all that was noble 
 and good in his example. We have lost him; and may 
 God raise others like him to our need. 
 
 " God give us men ! A time like this demands 
 Great hearts, strong minds, true faith, and willing hands, 
 Men whom the lust of office cannot buy; 
 Men who possess opinions and a will ; 
 Men who have honour, men who will not lie ; " 
 
 above all, men who are true Christians as well as eminent 
 politicians; men who can live pure lives as well as make 
 able speeches; men who, whatever their mistakes or limi- 
 tations, yet fear God and do righteousness, and therefore, 
 are acceptable with Him.
 
 GARIBALDI. 
 
 " I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people ; and 
 they shall say, Thou art my God." HOSEA ii. 23. 
 
 FOLLOWING the initiative of Holy Scripture, following 
 an example set by our blessed Lord Himself, I have al- 
 ways tried to regard not only the Bible, but history, and 
 life, and the universe, the past and the present, the events 
 going on around us, the lives and deaths of those whom we 
 have seen and known, as books and messages of God. To 
 me it seems that, were it given us to read their teaching, 
 the living and dying saints of to-day have as much to reveal 
 to us as the saints of old; and that the living and dying 
 heroes of to-day, with all their glories and all their fail- 
 ures, might be as full of meaning to us as those heroes, 
 with all their glories and all their failings, who lived 
 three thousand years ago. So far as I can see (and, if I be 
 mistaken, I will gladly be corrected), it is only to the nar- 
 rowness of our conventionalism, that there is anything 
 more intrinsically sacred in the life of Queen Esther than 
 in that of Queen Adelaide; in the life of Jephthah than 
 in that of Garibaldi ; in the Jerusalem of Hezekiah than in 
 the London of our Queen. Saints of Scripture, heroes of 
 Scripture? Are sainthood and heroism, then, mere local, 
 mere chronological phenomena? Men and women of 
 Scripture, were they then, in any sense, more than we? 
 Dust they were, and ashes, as we are dust and ashes; sinful 
 men and sinful women, whose very tears wanted washing, as
 
 GARIBALDI. . 
 
 do ours ; holy men and holy women, whose virtues were ac- 
 cepted, whose sins were forgiven, whose souls were re- 
 deemed, even as ours; all children of the same heavenly 
 Father, more or less beloved; all equally guilty, all 
 equally redeemed. That is why I have never hesitated, 
 shall never hesitate, to speak about the hand of God in 
 history, as seen now no less than of old; that is why, as 
 in the sunset, in the starlight, in the moonlight, in the 
 earthshine, in every glow and every colour from the rosy 
 light upon Alpine crests to the primrose in the grass, I see 
 but the reflections of the same material sunbeam, so in 
 every high thought, in every great utterance, in every 
 unselfish sacrifice, in every noble deed, I see a sparkle 
 from Him, the Father of lights, who is always in the 
 zenith, always in the meridian, in whom is no variableness, 
 neither shadow of turning, God in Christ, Christ in the 
 heart and life of men, even of men who know Him not, 
 men whose worship is not the worship of the sanctuary, 
 there is the gospel. That is how He who fragmentarily 
 and multifariously spake in times past to the Fathers by 
 the prophets hath in these last days spoken unto us by His 
 Son. Even when we speak of others, we speak of Him. 
 Through the statues of the saints, we approach His tem- 
 ple. Amid the cloud of radiant witnesses, we press for- 
 ward to fling ourselves lowly at His feet. We are told of 
 a great contemporary* that to him the dullest walk was not 
 dull, because his eye was quick to catch "every sudden 
 glory or radiance above; every prismatic hue or silver 
 lining; every rift, every patch of blue"; that "he carried 
 his scenery with him"; and that through hedgeless and 
 flowerless plains he would "run with a friend, as cheer- 
 fully as the prophet ran before the king from Carmel to 
 
 n, in Mozley's " Reminis
 
 . 2 5 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 Jezreel to announce the opened gate of heaven." Let us, 
 too, carry our scenery with us in the spiritual world ; and 
 in the light of Christ we shall learn to see nobleness even 
 in imperfection, and a soul of goodness even in things 
 evil. 
 
 And thus it has happened to me at different times to 
 speak of recently departed lives, and with this curious ex- 
 perience, that I have scarcely ever so spoken without 
 some one or other fancying himself aggrieved by words of 
 generosity so spoken of the dead, and without some one or 
 other making it an excuse for public criticism or private 
 severity. It was so, years ago, when I spoke of Abraham 
 Lincoln; so, when I spoke of Lord Beaconsfield ; so, when 
 I spoke of Charles Darwin. Well, such criticism will 
 never deter me. The fretfulness of the critic, the malice 
 of the party religionist, the fury of the political partisan, 
 maybe the highest eulogy. They say? What say they? 
 Let them say. Let the unknown voices mutter in the 
 shadow. With me, O God of my fathers, O Christ that 
 
 died, O 
 
 " Spirit of Love, and sweetness, too, 
 Now leading on the wars of God ; 
 Now to green isles of shade and dew, 
 Turning the waste Thy people trod," 
 
 with me may it be an inveterate disease to believe that 
 "mercy boasteth over justice"; to see in every man I can, 
 the good, and not the evil; to judge not by the appearance, 
 but to judge righteous judgments; to rejoice not in in- 
 iquity, but in the truth; to think evil, if possible, of no 
 man; to fling over the words and actions alike of the dead 
 and of the living, of those that love and of those who hate, 
 of those who are just and of those who are unjust, the
 
 GARIBALDI. - 
 
 cloak of that charity which covereth the multitude of sins ; 
 to see in diversities of operations the same spirit; to 
 believe, above all things, that, whatever else God is, God 
 is righteous, and God is light, and God is love. 
 
 Many may remember how, more than twenty years ago, 
 a man visited us on whom myriads of our people sons 
 of the soil, men browned by the fogs and by the sun 
 lavished such an outburst of ardent sympathy that, as he 
 rode through leagues of roaring streets, kings on their 
 coronation day have rarely witnessed such a sight. That 
 man was the Italian patriot, Giuseppe Garibaldi. It was 
 the same in his own country, the same in almost every 
 country that he visited. When he was wounded, de- 
 feated, discountenanced, all but a prisoner, as he passed 
 down the Lung' Arno at Pisa, the people flung them- 
 selves into the river merely to bid him farewell. Men 
 braved martyrdom for him. Women travelled hundreds of 
 miles merely to see him. Widows for his sake gave up son 
 after son to fall on the battlefield. Priests for his sake 
 defied the thunders of their Church. Boys, clad in his red 
 shirt, ragged, starving, bleeding, houseless, at Mentana, 
 at Calatafimi, at Marsala, at the Volturas, would rush on 
 the bristling bayonets of Austria or charge against the mur- 
 derous chassepots of France ; and, tortured in vain to reveal 
 his hiding-place, they would die with a smile upon their 
 lips. Was there ever such a speech as that which he issued 
 when, covered with blood, his clothes pierced with balls 
 and bayonet-thrusts, he was driven by the French from 
 Rome? "Soldiers," he said, "what I have to offer you is 
 this, hunger, thirst, cold, heat, no pay, no barracks, no 
 rations, frequent alarms, forced marches, charges at the 
 point of the bayonet. Whoever loves honour and father-
 
 - 2 3 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 land, follow me." And to such a promise, even to the 
 bitter end, to insult, to starvation, to imprisonment, to 
 agonies of which death was the slightest, four thousand 
 men did follow him. Why was this? How many would 
 get up two hours earlier in the morning, how many would 
 put their hands in the bursting and overflowing purse of 
 their boundless superfluity, how many would let their little 
 finger ache for you or me? For this man thousands were 
 ready to die. Do not be afraid. Do not set yourselves in 
 mental attitudes of fine critical scorn. Do not think about 
 the sharp things you will say when I have ended. I am 
 not going to pronounce any indiscriminate eulogy per- 
 haps no eulogy at all on the name of Giuseppe Garibaldi. 
 It was said not of him, but of another: 
 
 " I do not praise this man, the man was flawed 
 For Adam, much more Christ! his knee unbent 
 (His hand unclean), his aspiration pent 
 Within a sword-sweep pshaw! but, since he had 
 No genius to be loved, why, let him have 
 The justice to be honoured in his grave ! " 
 
 Those words would not be even decently just as applied 
 to him. His hand was clean, amid few that were. His 
 aspirations, so far from being pent within the sword-sweep, 
 were wide as the universal good. He uttered a great many 
 follies? Yes. He was guilty of many actions which can 
 only be regarded as rash and reprehensible? Yes. It was 
 his own headlong obstinacy which caused his wound and 
 his defeat and his imprisonment by the soldiers of the very 
 king to whom he had given two splendid ci-owns? Yes. 
 He was a perplexing and uncontrollable element in serious 
 politics? Yes. He shared all kinds of socialistic and 
 communistic dreams? Yes. His theology was of a most
 
 GARIBALDI. 
 
 329 
 
 curious complexion? Yes, as when he calmly assured a 
 great assembly that no such person as St. Peter ever 
 existed ; and when he penned the absurd and amazing note : 
 "Dear Friends, Man has created God, not God man. 
 Yours ever, Garibaldi." Can a priest or a presbyter of 
 any religion say a good word for such a man, a man con- 
 stantly surrounded by false friends and miserable intri- 
 guers, as a lion is surrounded by jackals; a man who, in 
 his obstinate wilfulness had so little sanity of judgment 
 as to be often all but unjust to his patriots, and often all 
 but disloyal to his king? Let us look, my friends, in our 
 own hearts. We are all pre-eminently respectable. There 
 is nothing volcanic in our natures, as there was in his. 
 We, of course, never do anything so childish as to make 
 a mistake in judgment. We are never carried away by our 
 feelings. Perhaps under the taming and tutoring influ- 
 ences of prudential self-interest, in a complex society, we 
 have no feelings, to speak of, which are at all likely to 
 sweep us away. We are all exquisitely orthodox, to that 
 hair-breadth of infallibility which makes us on every relig- 
 ious question the only persons who are always right. All 
 that goes without saying. But, oh, my friends, has it never 
 struck you that these commonplace lives of ours, with their 
 thin veneer of conventional virtues, with their all but total 
 absence of anything high and heroical, are often thickly 
 covered with the dust of vanity and of vice? When we 
 look without, and see the dark stains of self-seeking and 
 Mammon-worship, which lie, like the mire of the streets, 
 under the cold snow of our respectability; when we look 
 within, when we drop a plummet into the abysmal deeps of 
 personality, when we realize that the fairest cheek may 
 conceal a heart leprous as sin, yes, and that our own
 
 33o QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 heart maybe like the Dead Sea wave, "reflecting heaven 
 upon its surface, but hiding guilt in its depths," are we 
 the first to cast the stone of condemnation at a life which, 
 if it erred greatly, yet greatly achieved? Has it ever 
 struck you that the neutral tint of the dull life and the 
 apathetic end of the life whose chief records are its small 
 orthodoxies, and its investments in the three per cents, may 
 be less pleasing to God than the splendid sky of heroism, 
 even if thunderous rain-clouds sometimes darken it? Give 
 me the hurricane, any day, rather than the pestilence, the 
 hurricane whose sweeping ravage clears the stormy atmos- 
 phere rather than the pestilence which walks in the dark- 
 ness of organized hypocrisy and creeps under the noonday 
 of prosperous sin. Set the great virtues of Garibaldi 
 against his great faults, and I am not sure (to tell you the 
 plain truth), I am not sure that I consider our lives as 
 good as his. "I hope that God will be merciful to him," 
 said the pope, when he heard of his death. I am sure that 
 God will be merciful to every soul which he has made; 
 but, however that may be, 
 
 "See there ! for this man, too, life's toil is over; 
 
 His words are all said out, his deeds are done ; 
 For this man, too, there comes a rest, however 
 Unquiet passed his time beneath the sun. 
 
 " You say what seems you best ; your life's poor fountain 
 
 Just bubbles, while his soared and shuddered down ; 
 You chide him as a tired child chides a mountain ; 
 You frown on him, and think God, too, must frown. 
 
 " But, oh ! God shall judge the world, I take it 
 
 He will not meet this man by rule or line, 
 Who felt no common thirst, nor feared to slake it 
 From that which flowed within him, the Divine.
 
 GARIBALDI. ^ 
 
 " Or think you God loves our tame level acres 
 
 More than the proud head of some heaven-kissed hill, 
 Man's straight-dug ditch more than His own free river 
 Which wanders, He regarding, where it will?" 
 
 Assuming, then, my friends, that you can afford to look 
 down, with fine fastidiousness, on Giuseppe Garibaldi, and 
 give yourselves in the presence of his memory the airs of 
 moral superiority, still ask yourself whether you have 
 walked half so much in the steps of the Christ whom you 
 profess as he did in the steps of the Christ whom he 
 knew but most imperfectly. Say what you will, I shall 
 try to shew you that, loose and vague as was his creed, 
 irregular and wrong as were many of his actions, it is 
 only the eternal, Christ-like elements in his as in any 
 character which can constitute true greatness or deserve to 
 win the love of men. It was not success that dazzled men 
 to love him. He had indeed one splendid success, when 
 he mastered Sicily in a month, and took Naples as a pas- 
 senger by a railway train; but he had been defeated again 
 and again in Rio and Montevideo; he had been hung by 
 the wrists for two hours before a gate in the sight of the 
 multitude, till the cord eat into his flesh; he was checked 
 at Rome; discredited at Aspromonte; betrayed at Men- 
 tana; neglected at Genoa; dishonoured in the Vosges. 
 His hopes were thwarted; his utterances were laughed at. 
 "I have passed my life," he said, in what? In money- 
 getting? in small self-seeking? in an aimless round of friv- 
 olities? No, but, "in the hope of seeing populations 
 ennobled, and, to the extent of my power, have championed 
 always and everywhere their rights; but sadly I confess 
 that I have partly lived in a false hope." It was no suc- 
 cess. It was not the strange romance of a career which was
 
 332 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 heroic and poetic in a day of commonplace and prose; but 
 amid great errors, amid grievous faults, amid a strange 
 chaos of beliefs, it was a rich possession of qualities which 
 Christ Himself would have approved, which wetted with 
 unwonted tears the eyes of generous nations when this man 
 died. If you want a religious lesson, if you are not merely 
 trying to lull your soul into a comfortable sleep on a pabu- 
 lum of formulae, if you are a true man or woman, see if 
 you can find no religious lesson here, while I point out to 
 you in a few words the tenderness, the generosity, the sim- 
 plicity, the self-denial, which were in this fighter, in this 
 republican, in this friend of Victor Hugo and Alexandre 
 Dumas, in this strange, erratic, self-willed child of trouble 
 and romance, which, because they were virtues, were the 
 manifestation of the spirit of the Son of Man. 
 
 Great souls are tender. He was tender even to dumb 
 creatures. As a little child, he wept bitterly at acciden- 
 tally killing a grasshopper. As a man, in 1861, he met a 
 Sardinian shepherd lamenting the loss of a lamb. He told 
 his soldiers to help to find it. They looked in vain far 
 into the night, and he ordered them to their beds. Next 
 morning he was found asleep long after his usual early 
 hour, and, when they woke him, they found that he had 
 searched all night for the lamb, and, taking it home with 
 him, had shared with the poor dumb creature the warmth 
 of his own bed. How many of you, rich or poor, or 
 workingmen, would have done as much for twenty lambs? 
 There have been men who, like the sanguinary Couthon, 
 have combined tenderness to animals with cruelty to men. 
 Not so with him. At Palermo, when he conquered Sicily, 
 he, the old soldier of two worlds, burst into tears, not on 
 the battlefield, but at the sight of the little orphans in
 
 GARIBALDI. - 
 
 the asylum wanting food. Even the fine ladies of White- 
 hall, the maids of honour of James II. 's court, were not 
 above bargaining for the prisoners of Sedgemoor; but Gari- 
 baldi, when he was very poor in South America, and was 
 offered a chance of getting richer by buying Chinese slaves, 
 at once indignantly dashed his pen through that clause of 
 the contract, saying, " I will never be a trafficker in human 
 flesh." Which shewed themselves herein the better Chris- 
 tians, the fine ladies or the filibuster? If he loved Eng- 
 land, was it not because he saw in England the refuge of 
 the exile, the enemy of the despot, the home of the free- 
 man and the hope of the slave? We are all respectable, 
 critical, orthodox people; but have we nothing to learn 
 from such a tenderness of heart? 
 
 Look, again, at this man's simplicity. At Palermo 
 he occupied the royal palace, and was waited on by the 
 viceroy's servants; but he lived chiefly on water and vege- 
 tables, and frowned if they called him "Your Excellency." 
 At Messina, to avoid applause and grandeur, he left the 
 palace for the light-house, where the conqueror of a king- 
 dom, the idol of a people, lived in a single room, with 
 no furniture but two stools and a couch. Being that rare 
 thing, a man, not a mere plausible echo or a mere self- 
 indulgent appetite, being no sleek intriguer or selfish 
 accumulator, but a man, he despised, as we do not de- 
 spise, the shallow imbecilities of human pride. Garibaldi 
 a sailor on a coasting smack, Garibaldi a cattle-drover at 
 Rio, Garibaldi a tutor at Constantinople, Garibaldi a tal- 
 low-chandler at New York, was, by virtue of an inherent 
 nobleness, as lofty a person as Garibaldi conqueror of 
 
 Sicily: 
 
 " In himself was all his state, 
 More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits
 
 --, QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 On princes, when their rich retinue long 
 
 Of horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold, 
 
 Dazzles the crowd, and sets them all agape." 
 
 In an age of artificiality and shams was it nothing that 
 he witnessed to the imperial dignity of manhood in itself? 
 
 Then how generous he was, how rarely disinterested! 
 In the siege of Rome he was superseded by a mere nobody. 
 "Some of my friends," he wrote, "urged me not to accept 
 a secondary position under a man who, only the day before, 
 had been my inferior; but I confess these questions of self- 
 love never yet troubled me. Whoever gives me a chance of 
 fighting, if only as a common soldier, against the enemy of 
 my country, him I will thank." "I confess these questions 
 of self-love never yet troubled me." He said it: his con- 
 duct showed that he felt it. Is there a single one of us all, 
 with our feeble spites and small grudges, who can say the 
 same? In Westminster Abbey is the bas-relief on the 
 tomb of Outram, the Bayard of India, which represents 
 Outram's meeting with Havelock, when, refusing to rob 
 him of his hard earned glory by superseding him in his 
 command, he served under him as a volunteer. Was that 
 noble act of which we are so proud, was it greater than 
 Garibaldi's when he laid two kingdoms at the feet of a 
 king whom he did not love, and put away with one hand 
 the rewards which he had won with the other? The very 
 evening that Victor Emanuel entered Naples, which Gari- 
 baldi had given him, when the shouts were always loudest 
 for Garibaldi, a chair had been put for the hero beside the 
 royal chair. Just before the play began, a lackey came 
 and removed it. The king entered with a frown, Garibaldi 
 with that open, sunny, large-hearted smile which won all 
 hearts. When the amplest revenge was in his power,
 
 GARIBALDI. -35 
 
 when by lifting his finger he could have raised a revolu- 
 tion, after having done deeds which will affect human his- 
 tory for centuries, he went away quietly, asking no reward, 
 to the barren, rocky islet which was his home, with barely 
 fifteen shillings in his pocket, and having borrowed twenty 
 pounds to pay his debts. If life has made you familiar 
 with instances of generosity, even in very little things, 
 which are distantly comparable with these in great things, 
 you have been more fortunate than I. I have known many 
 personages, ecclesiastical and other, who have walked the 
 world in wealth, in success, in prudent reticence, in never- 
 sleeping look-out for the self-satisfied interests of life, in 
 all the odour of sanctity. I doubt whether I have known 
 more than one or two whose virtues raised them, even occa- 
 sionally, above essential littleness, and above bitter resent- 
 ment, or who loved others better than themselves. And, 
 when I do see such a man, even if he be a Turk and an 
 infidel, I do him homage in Christ's name. 
 
 And he shewed more than a mere occasional flash of 
 generosity: he was habitually self-denying; he was a hero 
 of self-denial. The great soul was content to dwell in a 
 little house. He disdainfully waved aside the incense of 
 fulsome applause. Being a man, he was too great for it. 
 He pushed riches aside for those who cared for the trash. 
 What were riches to him who preferred a soldier's fare? 
 When the Montevideans offered some acres of land and 
 some thousands of heads of cattle to the Italians who had 
 fought under him, he tore up the title-deeds and said that 
 they had only fought from gratitude and for liberty. He 
 never accepted rank. It can add nothing to a man who 
 possessed himself as a better possession, and an abiding. 
 At the age of thirteen he swam in a rough sea to save his
 
 ~* QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 comrades from a boat upset in a squall. He saved a boy 
 from drowning in the harbour of Marseilles. When the 
 plague raged, he nursed the sick in a cholera hospital. In 
 America he was made a general, but was so poor that the 
 family went to bed at sunset because they could not afford 
 candles. Yet even then he would take no remuneration for 
 his services except pardon for some prisoner or alms for 
 the wounded. Good among the corrupt, simple among the 
 luxurious, self-denying among the selfish; disinterested, as 
 Lord Houghton said of him in the House of Lords in 1849, 
 among those who sought their personal advantage, clearly, 
 this is not a man at whom selfish critics can safely cast 
 the stone. 
 
 But perhaps you will say to me, "This man, whom you 
 are holding up to our admiration, was a rebel to his Church; 
 a rebel to his king; he hated priests; he said most foolish 
 things about religion; he once even was blasphemous 
 enough to baptize a child." Fair and softly: you may say 
 all this, and I fear things more serious than this; but do 
 not let us trumpet all his faults and errors above his grave. 
 I have not held him up to your admiration at all. On the 
 contrary, I have been saying all along how much more 
 orthodox and respectable we are. I have only ventured to 
 ask (let your conscience give the honest answer!) whether 
 any one of our narrow virtues and domestic egotisms come 
 as near to the spirit of the beatitudes as his. We, of 
 course, are all invited guests : he was only of the streets 
 and lanes, nay, if you will, the highways and hedges. "A 
 rebel of his Church?" Well, perhaps he was not very 
 devoted to the Church of the Italian confessional, to the 
 Church of which the pope had eulogized as "model king" 
 that King of Naples who had his subjects lashed to death
 
 GARIBALDI. _ 
 
 in the public squares, and who looked on through his eye- 
 glass at the agony of political prisoners, pining for light 
 and air in his dungeons beneath the level of the sea. 
 "A rebel to his king?" Well, if he was ever technically 
 a rebel to a king in whose crown he had set its most 
 splendid jewels, remember that the first time he saw his 
 name in print was on his own death-warrant signed by 
 that king's father, and that that king was, as he considered, 
 "under the subtle arts of a fox-like policy." Remember, 
 too, the passionate words of that eminent American who, 
 in the struggle against the slave-trade, said that he only 
 wished the two words "infidel" and "traitor" to be written 
 on his tomb, infidel to a Church which could be at peace 
 in the presence of sin; traitor to a government which was 
 a magnificent conspiracy against justice. "He hated 
 priests?" Yes! he hated priests who lived such lives as 
 the Augustine monks of Palestrina in 1848. He did not 
 hate priests like the beautiful, the eloquent, the noble Ugo 
 Bassi, who, unarmed, tended the sick on the battlefield, 
 amid storms of shot and shell, with the tenderness of a 
 woman, and who died as only heroes and martyrs die; but 
 he hated priests like those of Bologna, who accompanied 
 the death of Bassi with agonies of a desecration to which 
 I dare give no utterance here. "His religious belief was 
 a chaos?" It maybe so. But "it is in vain," he said, 
 "that my enemies try to make me out an atheist and a 
 blasphemer. I believe in God. I am of the religion of 
 Christ, not of the religion of the popes. I do not admit 
 any intermediary between God and man." And at Caprera 
 he said: "The absence of priests is one of the special 
 blessings of this spot. God is worshipped here in purity 
 of spirit, without formalism, free from mockery, under the 
 
 22
 
 33 3 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 canopy of the blue heavens, with the planets for lamps, the 
 sea winds for music, and the green sward of the island for 
 altars." And, when he resigned his Dictatorship, he said: 
 "I am a Christian, as you are. Yes! I am of that religion 
 which has broken the bonds of slavery, and has proclaimed 
 the freedom of men." But, then, he baptized a child? 
 Yes: it was a foolish piece of business, done at the wish 
 of thousands who had thronged to see him at Verona; and 
 he said: "I baptize thee in the name of God and of the 
 legislator Jesus. Mayest thou become an apostle of truth ! 
 Love thy neighbour; assist the unfortunate; be strong to 
 combat the tyrants of the conscience and of the body." 
 That was what he said. Call these acts and these words 
 follies, vagaries, blasphemies, if you choose to use the 
 words; but, beneath whatever incrustations of error, I seem 
 to see all the primitive granite on which religious faith is 
 built, at least as clearly as I see it in the hollow worldli- 
 ness of the intriguing partisan and the bitter hatreds of 
 the religious newspaper. And I say of him, as was said of 
 another: "I dare not call this man an infidel, for fear of 
 bringing Christianity itself into reproach. For, if a man 
 can live such a life as he has lived, and do what he has 
 done, if he can stand up for justice in the face of a frown- 
 ing world, if he can devote himself to the redemption of 
 an outraged race, and be pelted with the vilest epithets for 
 a whole generation without flinching and faltering, and 
 yet be an infidel, men may well ask, What is the value of 
 Christianity?" 
 
 "Men may well ask, What is the value of Christianity?" 
 I do not indorse those words, though it was a clergyman 
 who spoke them. If we, who profess Christianity, were 
 but as true to its spirit as some have shown themselves
 
 GARIBALDI. 
 
 who profess it less, the whole world would fall once more, 
 with the wail of agony and the cry of forgiveness, at the 
 feet of Christ. If the world will not come to Christ, it is 
 because they see so little to admire, so little that is differ- 
 ^ent from or better than themselves, in us who make our 
 boast of His name. The sons who do somehow go and 
 work in the vineyard, while they either say, "I will not," 
 or seem to doubt the authority of Him who sent them, I 
 think that they are better Christians than we, who softly 
 murmur, "I go, sir," and sing our sweet hymns, and wear 
 the respectable garb of our gentle religionism, while our 
 hearts, full of vanity and self-seeking, full of malice and 
 worldliness, are far from Him. We are the traitors, we the 
 infidels. "Whatever enlarges the sphere of human sym- 
 pathy," they are the words of William Lloyd Garrison, 
 "whatever opposes tyranny in every form, whatever incul- 
 cates love and good will to mankind, and seeks to reconcile 
 a hostile world, must be in consonance with the Divine 
 Mind." But, if our Christianity is to consist in whispering 
 depreciations and exacerbating hatreds, what do we, we 
 Christians, we respectable, orthodox people, what do we 
 more than others? Are the gates of heaven to be flung 
 wide open to us for such sleek services? Do not even the 
 publicans so? Blame this man, if you like, and as much as 
 ever you like; but remember, too, how he suffered. Re- 
 member how, in his life of self-sacrifice for his ideal call 
 it, if you will, his blind ideal of liberty, he was tried in 
 the seven-times-heated fire of affliction, how he was impris- 
 oned; how he -was starved; how he was tortured; how he 
 was betrayed; how he was hunted, like a partridge, upon the 
 mountains; how he was shot down; how those whom he 
 loved were martyred ; how the very peasants were flung into
 
 340 
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 prison who had buried the poor wife, who, hunted like him 
 by the remorseless hatred of brutal enemies, died in a 
 corn-field, with her head upon his knee. It is not at such a 
 man that I, for one, shall shoot the little shaft of a vulgar 
 respectability. Never will I be of the vultures who darken 
 the horizon the moment a lion dies. Rather, I pray, God 
 accept him, Christ receive him. Rather, I pray that he 
 may wake in another world as one of those who did Christ's 
 work, and knew it not; of them who exclaim in surprise at 
 the words of welcome, " Lord, when saw we Thee a-hungered 
 and fed Thee, or thirsty and gave Thee drink?" "When 
 saw we Thee?" Yet they have seen Him. He has known 
 them, though they knew not Him. Does He know us? Let 
 us hot dwell on the imperfections of others : let us consider 
 our own imperfections, but, as far as we may, the virtues of 
 our brethren. 
 
 I have pointed you to some of the lessons of a very 
 imperfect life, because their very beauty, in the midst of 
 their imperfections, shows that they are but broken gleams 
 of the one perfect Life. If you would see perfectness, you 
 must look for it in one, even in one alone, even in 
 Christ. Every life is ugly, so far as it abandons the ex- 
 ample of His life. No life is beautiful, except in those 
 things wherein, consciously or unconsciously, it resem- 
 bles His. Generosity, tenderness, simplicity, chivalry, 
 dauntless courage, the true dignity of manhood, the bound- 
 less readiness for self-sacrifice as exhibited in this dead 
 soldier, the contempt which we perhaps profess, but which 
 he felt, for the tinsel of riches and the phosphorescence of 
 rank, they are great lessons, are they not ? Was he in these 
 things Christ's soldier, or was he not? Had he in these 
 things learned, consciously or unconsciously, any part of
 
 GARIBALDI. ^41 
 
 the lessons of Christ, or had he not? If you are better, 
 wiser, greater, purer Christians, surpass him, or equal him! 
 Shew the same dauntless, humane nature, so proudly 
 unselfish, so intensely manly, so conscious of its high des- 
 tiny from God, that it brooks not wealth's rivalry. By all 
 means, if you can, " shew me thy faith without thy works" ; 
 but, in Heaven's name, leave those in peace who shewed 
 their faith by their works. But if, with all our vaunted 
 correctness of faith, we cannot distantly equal the virtues of 
 this most imperfect life, then let us take home to ourselves 
 that lesson, it may be even with salutary shame; and 
 shocked at our own pride, our own littleness, our own 
 unfaithfulness, the vulgarity and selfishness of our whole 
 life and our whole ideal, let us pray to Christ that we 
 may be able to shew even one tithe of the virtues of those 
 saints of the highway and the hedge who knew Him but 
 little, or knew Him not at all. For them and for our- 
 selves how can we pray better than in humble words like 
 these? 
 
 " When on my day of life the night is falling, 
 
 And in the winds from unsunned places blown 
 I hear far voices out of darkness calling 
 My feet to paths unknown, 
 
 1 1 have but Thee, O Father. Let Thy Spirit 
 
 Be with me then, to comfort and uphold : 
 No gate of pearl, no branch of palm, I merit, 
 No street of shining gold. 
 
 ' Suffice it, if my good and ill unreckoned, 
 
 And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace, 
 I find myself by hands familiar beckoned 
 Unto my fitting place,
 
 2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 " Some humble door among Thy many mansions, 
 
 Some sheltering shade where sin and strivings cease, 
 And flows forever through heaven's green expansions, 
 The river of thy peace. 
 
 " There, from the music round about me stealing, 
 
 I fain would karn the new and holy song, 
 And find at last beneath Thy trees of healing 
 The life for which I long."
 
 COUNT LEO TOLSTOI. 
 
 " Oh, save me for Thy mercies' sake." Ps. vi. 4. 
 
 BUT few men have ventured to publish to the world the 
 full confession of their inmost lives, to lay bare to the gaze 
 of millions the naked heart as it lies open before the eyes 
 of God. It is right that there should have been this reluc- 
 tance. Reserve and the dignity of reticence are bulwarks 
 which God Himself has reared in our being, and no one 
 with impunity can break them down. The sacredness of 
 our individuality is the awful solitude into which no human 
 foot should intrude, and in that holy solitude we are alone 
 with God. Whatever good may have been done by the 
 confessions of the few who have torn away the veils woven 
 by nature, it is doubtful whether there may not have been a 
 deeper harm. There have been partial confessions, like 
 Bunyan's "Grace Abounding" and Goethe's "Truth and 
 Poetry." But two names stand out conspicuous, and almost 
 alone, as those of men who have told to the world the utter 
 truth about themselves : they are the names of St. Augus- 
 tine and Rousseau. 
 
 St. Augustine has told us of his stormy and unhallowed 
 youth; of the dreary period of his Manichean heresy; of 
 the dishonourable bonds in which he was long fettered; 
 of the turbulent passions with which he did not strug- 
 gle, or struggled only in vain. He has depicted himself 
 as he was, a boy who lied and stole; a youth who 
 plunged deep into folly and impurity. He has told it all
 
 -,^ QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 in the spirit of utter penitence. He was not afraid to look 
 on what then he was, because he had become wholly 
 changed. His confessions are the 5ist Psalm of a spirit 
 which cried to God out of the deeps. And, then, he has 
 told us how the influence of his holy mother, how a lofty 
 book of Pagan philosophy, how the story of the self-sacri- 
 fice of the hermits, thrilled his heart; and how at last, 
 when the grace of God had stirred him to the inmost 
 depths, he opened the Epistle to the Romans at the words, 
 "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and 
 wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the 
 Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to 
 fulfil the lusts thereof." From that time forward Augus- 
 tine became a devoted and holy man. 
 
 At the very opposite pole of feeling are the confessions 
 of Rousseau. He begins by saying, " I wish to shew to 
 my fellow-men a man, in all the verity of his nature; and 
 that man will be myself." He tells us his character, his 
 morals, his inclinations, his pleasures, his habits. Very 
 shameful are some of his disclosures; yet he declares, with 
 immense audacity, that, let the trumpet of the last judg- 
 ment sound when it will, he will come with that book in 
 hand to present himself before the sovereign Judge. "I 
 will say aloud," he says, "See what I have done, what I 
 have thought, what I was. I have spoken good and evil of 
 myself with equal frankness. I have added nothing good. 
 I have concealed in silence nothing that was evil. I have 
 shewn myself despicable and vile when I have been so : 
 good, generous, sublime, when I have been so. I have 
 unveiled my inmost being even as Thou, O Eternal Being, 
 Thyself hast seen it. Assemble round me the innumerable 
 crowd of my fellow-men. Let them listen to my conies-
 
 COUNT LEO TOLSTOI. 345 
 
 sions; let them groan over my unworthinesses ; let them 
 blush at my wretchedness. Let each one of them, in his 
 turn, discover his heart with the same sincerity at the foot 
 of Thy throne, and let a single one among them say, if he 
 dares, I was better than that man." We need say no 
 more of Rousseau than this, that no man could have 
 written such a book, no man could have expressed such 
 sentiments, except a man devoid of every element of Chris- 
 tian truth and life, no man save one who had become vain 
 in his imaginations, and his foolish heart was darkened. 
 It is never thus that the holy have written. The cry even 
 of God's saints has ever been: "My soul cleaveth to the 
 dust: quicken Thou me, according to Thy word." 
 
 In our own days, and indeed within the last few years, 
 another great writer has published his confessions, the 
 great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoi. He has done so but 
 partially, and not in detail, and with the sole intention of 
 setting forth that view of religious truth at which he has 
 now arrived. But there is in his story so much that is 
 full of instruction that, I think we may draw some val- 
 uable lessons from Count Tolstoi's life, from his conversion 
 from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto 
 God. 
 
 Count Tolsto? is now about fifty-nine years old. As a 
 Russian noble, he was trained a member of the Greek 
 Church, of the Church which boasts itself to be the Holy 
 and Orthodox Church of Russia. Trained among world- 
 lings, he never held a very serious belief. His early relig- 
 ion was nominal: it was only taken on trust; and it neither 
 dominated his reason nor swayed his life. Such a faith is 
 no better than a pack of cards. It topples over at a touch. 
 When he was but twelve, a boy came to spend the Sunday
 
 34 5 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 with him at his home, who announced it as the last dis- 
 covery of his school-fellows that there was no God, and that 
 all their religious teaching was a mere invention. Even 
 
 this taken in connection with the sceptical books which 
 
 he read was sufficient to make belief fade away from the 
 boy's mind. He tells us of a friend of his, whom he calls 
 S., who was out on a hunting party, and slept in the same 
 room with a brother. Before he lay down to rest, accord- 
 ing to a habit which he had kept up from childhood, he 
 knelt down to pray. When he had finished his prayer and 
 was preparing to lie down, his brother lightly said to him, 
 "Ah! you still keep that up?" Nothing more passed be- 
 tween them, but from that day his friend ceased to pray or 
 to go to church. 
 
 For thirty years S. has not said a prayer, has not taken 
 the Holy Communion, has not been in a church, not 
 because he shared the convictions of his brother, but be- 
 cause his brother's words were like the push of a finger 
 against a wall ready to tumble over with its own weight. 
 They proved to him that there was no depth, no sincerity, 
 in his own religion; that what he had taken for belief was 
 an empty form; and that every word he uttered, every sign 
 of the cross he made, every time he bowed his head in 
 prayer, the act was to him purely formal, and therefore 
 unmeaning. Ah! my friends, beware of light words! You 
 can never measure the awful harm which they may effect. 
 I have heard of a young officer who was deeply impressed 
 by a sermon which he had heard. It may have been that 
 from that sermon the grace of God might have taken effec- 
 tive hold of his heart, and wrought in him from that day 
 forward a new and blessed life; but, as he left the church, 
 a brother officer made some idle, jeering, frivolous remark
 
 COUNT LEO TOLSTOI. 347 
 
 about the sermon. That base jest was a fowl of the air, 
 
 one of those dark birds which Satan takes care to have 
 ready in flocks at the door of every church : it took away 
 the good seed from the young man's heart, and the oppor- 
 tunity was gone. Ah! my friends, I say once more, Be on 
 your guard against those fowls of the air yourselves: be 
 even more on your guard lest any light, base word of yours 
 should be a bird of Satan to snatch God's grace from the 
 heart of another. "By thy words shalt thou be justified, 
 and by thy words shalt thou be condemned." 
 
 But a second and more fatal influence which under- 
 mined the youthful faith of Count Tolstoif was the insin- 
 cerity which he saw on every side around him. When a 
 religion has dwindled into a hollow and thin-voiced ghost, 
 no wonder that it has lost its vital spell. The youth saw 
 on all sides of him men and women who professed the most 
 tremendous beliefs, and shewed an outer conformity in all 
 forms and ceremonies, in all their own words and actions. 
 They fasted, they used religious phrases, they perpetually 
 signed themselves with the sign of the cross; but, alas! 
 what could this avail, when he saw that they were not good, 
 that they were in no sense better than others ? He often 
 saw in these religionists (he says) men of dull intellects, of 
 stern pretensions, of self-important bearing. Not only 
 did he live among them for years without being once prac- 
 tically and effectually reminded of the fact that he was 
 living among Christians, and called himself a member of 
 the Orthodox Church, but he found that intelligence, hon- 
 esty, frankness, a good heart, even moral conduct, were 
 oftener met with among avowed disbelievers than among 
 insincere and nominal Christians. Ah! my friends, if we 
 indeed profess and call ourselves Christians, how infinitely
 
 ~ 4 g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 important is it (not only for ourselves, remembering that 
 hypocrisy, though it may stand the gaze of men, cannot 
 evade the glance of God, but also for all our brethren 
 who are in the world) that we should walk worthy of the 
 vocation wherewith we are called, in all lowliness and 
 meekness, in long suffering, forbearing and forgiving one 
 another in love! 
 
 But there was a third peril, worse than careless words, 
 worse than merely formal religionism : it was downright 
 wickedness and worldliness. In spite of all the orthodoxy, 
 in spite of all the fasts and sacraments and splendid cere- 
 monials of the Russian Church, Count Tolsto'f found that 
 among the upper and cultivated classes of his countrymen 
 men and women openly lived in direct violation of the laws 
 of God and of His Christ, earthly, sensual, devilish, 
 having no hope, and without God in the world. " I hon- 
 estly desired," he says, "to make myself a good and vir- 
 tuous man ; but I was young, I had passions, and I stood 
 alone in my search after virtue. Every time I expressed 
 the longings of my heart for a truly virtuous life I was met 
 with contempt and derisive laughter; but directly I gave 
 way to my lowest passions I was encouraged. I found am- 
 bition, love of power, love of gain, uncleanness, pride, 
 anger, vengeance, held in high esteem. I gave way to 
 these passions; and, becoming like most of those around 
 me, I found that my friends were not dissatisfied. That I 
 should marry a wealthy bride, that I should become an adju- 
 tant to the Czar, these were their chief wishes respecting 
 me. Work for God, life for the future, treasure in heaven, 
 did not enter into the view bounded by the narrow and 
 impure horizon of their worldly hopes." 
 
 Accordingly, Count Tolsto'f fell wholly into the godless
 
 COUNT LEO TOLSTOI. 349 
 
 life of the world, the flesh, and the devil. "I put men to 
 death in war," he says; "I fought duels; I lost at cards; 
 I wasted my substance wrung from the sweat of labourers ; I 
 treated those labourers cruelly; I deceived men; I lived 
 uncleanly. Lying, robbery, adultery, drunkenness, vio- 
 lence, murder, of all these I was guilty; yet I was con- 
 sidered by my equals as a comparatively moral man. Such 
 was my life during ten years, and I cannot now recall 
 those years without a painful feeling of horror and loath- 
 ing." 
 
 Not that they went wrong with him externally. He be- 
 came a distinguished soldier; he became a most eminent 
 writer. With fame he gained large wealth. He was re- 
 ceived everywhere with warmth and flattery. Was he 
 happy in this career of worldliness and dissipation, when 
 holiness had become to him an empty name? My friends, 
 what he was, what he felt, has been felt by millions from 
 Solomon down to Schopenhauer, who have all gone through 
 the same bitter experience described by divine lips two 
 thousand years ago, they have felt, and all who walk in 
 their steps must ever feel, "When he came to himself, he 
 was an hungered, and he would fain have filled his belly 
 with the husks that the swine do eat." He tells us that 
 he did but grow disgusted with mankind and with himself. 
 He felt himself like a man who was being carried away in 
 a boat by winds and waves, and who to the question, 
 "Where are we to steer?" received no answer except, 
 "We are being carried somewhere." He felt that all was 
 vanity; that it was a misfortune to be born; and that death 
 was better than life. Pleasure and worldliness were to 
 him what they always are, the dust and bitterness of 
 Dead Sea apples which crumble in the taste, the bite of the
 
 350 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 serpent whose fang is death, the taste of the cup whose 
 draught is poison. 
 
 A change came over his life, and a change for the better. 
 He married, and became the father of a family. Living on 
 his own ancestral estate, he devoted himself to the teach- 
 ing of the children of his peasantry and an amelioration 
 of their condition. So he lived for fifteen years. He had 
 a good, loving, and well-beloved wife, good children, a fine 
 estate, increasing wealth, and European fame. He was 
 praised and respected by all. His mind was vigorous, his 
 health perfect. He could study without fatigue for ten 
 hours at a stretch, and keep up with the strongest of his 
 peasants in mowing a field. In one sense, he was happy; 
 yet all the while the apparent futility of it all pressed so 
 heavily upon him, he felt himself so totally unable to an- 
 swer his own constant questions, "Why am I living?" and 
 "What comes after?'' that more and more a sense of per- 
 plexity and stagnation a stoppage, as it were, of life 
 grew upon him. "I hid away a cord," he says, "to avoid 
 being tempted to suicide, and ceased to carry a gun, be- 
 cause it offered too easy a way of getting rid of life. I 
 knew not what I wanted. I was afraid of life. I shrank 
 from it ; and yet there was something that I hoped for from 
 it, I knew not what." My friends, was not this like that 
 deep impression produced in the story of the minister who, to 
 a young man's hopeful projects and ever mounting schemes 
 of ambition, kept replying, And then? And then? And 
 then? till he had brought him to the thought of old age 
 and death, and shewed him how valueless was all in com- 
 parison with fitness to meet our God? Was it not like the 
 state of mind produced in the young and noble Francis' 
 Xavier by the repeated question of Ignatius Loyola, reit-
 
 COUNT LEO TOLSTOI. ~ l 
 
 crated every day and at every turn, "But what shall it 
 profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own 
 soul ? " And does not this weariness even amid outward 
 prosperity illustrate the great thought of St. Augustine, 
 " Thou, O God, hast made us for Thyself ; and our heart is 
 restless until it find rest in Thee"? 
 
 Two things seem to have brought back Count Tolstoi to 
 faith and peace. If he had been first shaken by a little 
 word, so it was a little word which helped powerfully and 
 materially to bring him back. He had long been struck 
 with the fact that among the poor and the peasantry he saw 
 the signs of a truer and deeper faith than among the noble 
 and the rich. One day he asked a peasant how it was that 
 some of the farmers were so kind and fair to their serfs, 
 and others so cruel and unjust to them. "Men are not all 
 alike, "Answered the peasant. "One man lives for his 
 belly; another for his soul, for God." "What do you call 
 living for his soul, for God?" he asked. "It's quite sim- 
 ple," answered the peasant, "living by the rule of God, 
 of the truth." He gave no answer, but turned away with- 
 the words "living by the rule of God, of the truth," 
 sounding in his ears. So you see that as on a word may 
 depend the overthrow of a man's faith, so on a word may 
 depend the salvation of his soul. If the words of a fool are 
 as a madman who scatters firebrands, arrows, and death, so, 
 on the other hand, "a word spoken in due season, how good 
 is it!" 
 
 But another deep and permanent influence on Tolstoi's 
 mind was the thought of death. There was an Eastern 
 apologue which deeply impressed him. A traveller in the 
 desert is attacked by a furious wild beast, and, to save him- 
 self, gets into a dry well ; but at the bottom of the well he
 
 -*2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY, 
 
 sees a huge serpent, with jaws wide open to devour him. 
 He dares not get out for fear of the wild beast. He dares 
 not descend for fear of the serpent. So he catches hold of 
 a branch growing out of the crevice of the well. His arras 
 grow tired, but still he holds on; and then he sees two 
 mice, one white, one black, gnawing through the branch 
 inch by inch. He knows that it must soon give way, and 
 he must perish; yet, seeing a few drops of honey on the 
 leaves, he stretches out and takes them, though he finds 
 them no longer sweet. The interpretation is not difficult. 
 The desert is the world; the wild beast is passion; the 
 serpent is death; the branch is the life to which we cling; 
 the black and white mice which gnaw through the branch 
 are the nights and the days; the honey on the leaves are 
 the few poor, transient pleasures at which men vainly 
 clutch, as they hang over the abyss. And what mre they 
 worth? 
 
 But finding that learning and science gave but a dreary 
 and unsatisfying answer to all his perplexities, and that 
 the Church, with her theologies and formalities, gave no 
 satisfaction to his soul, he was yet led to the ever-strength- 
 ening conviction that in God only is life; that to know 
 God only is to live. And then he was led to the revelation 
 of God in Christ and the deeper study of all His teachings. 
 And thereby he was converted; his life was changed; he 
 received the new heart and the right spirit; he found possi- 
 ble yea, easy, and, above all, most blessed that conquest 
 over himself and his own bad passions which once seemed 
 so impossible to St. Cyprian, and to St. Augustine, but 
 which millions of the saved have found to be not only 
 possible, but freely offered in Jesus Christ. He renounced 
 wealth, rank, fame, literature, all things, for Christ.
 
 COUNT LEO TOLSTOI. 353 
 
 He became an utterly changed man. "I ceased to care," 
 he says, "for that which I had previously desired, anr* 
 began to long for that for which I had once not cared 
 What had formerly seemed to me good seemed evil, and 
 what had once seemed evil now seemed good. It happened 
 to me as it might happen to a man who, having left his 
 home on business, should suddenly find the business to be 
 unnecessary, and go home again." All that stood to his 
 right now stands to his left: all that was to the left is now 
 to the right. His former wish to be as far from home as 
 possible has changed into the wish to be near it. "All my 
 desires changed places; and all this came from understand- 
 ing the teaching of Christ. For, indeed, I came to Christ 
 as the dying thief came. I, like the thief, knew that I 
 had lived and was living ill, and that most men round me 
 lived the same life, and were unhappy; and I saw no issue, 
 but death alone. I felt, like the thief, as if I was nailed 
 to the cross of an evil life, and the terrible darkness of 
 death awaited me after the countless agonies of life. The 
 thief could believe that there was salvation for him beyond 
 the grave; but I desired salvation in this life also. Then 
 suddenly I heard the words of Christ; I understood them; 
 and life, once so wearisome, and death, once so terrible, 
 ceased to appear evil to me. Instead of despair I felt the 
 joy and happiness of life, a joy and happiness never to be 
 destroyed by death." 
 
 It is needless to pursue further this story of a soul's con- 
 version. The essence has been told. My friends, your 
 soul and mine are in the same condition as that of this man 
 for whom, as for us, Christ died. When a man is con- 
 verted, when he has realized the unseen, and tasted that 
 the Lord is gracious, he has at last found out the meaning
 
 3 C4 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 of death, life, and the vast forever. For him the work of 
 life is done. Henceforth he 
 
 " Commands all light, all influence, all fate, 
 Nothing to him falls early or too late." 
 
 The rain may fall, the floods rush, the winds of misfortune 
 may rise and blow upon him from every quarter under 
 heaven; but they cannot injure, they cannot shake him, 
 for he is founded upon a rock. One part of Count Tol- 
 sto'f's experience, I know well, must have been yours: you 
 all have sinned; and another part of his experience, I 
 know well, has been yours: you have found that neither 
 the world, nor wealth, nor success, nor the life of the fam- 
 ily, nor anything whatever, can give you happiness: nor 
 man nor nature satisfy whom God alone created. Ah! 
 will you not strive, will you not pray, that yours, too, may 
 be the other, the blessed part of his experience, that you 
 may find Christ, that you may be at peace with God, that 
 yours may be the blessedness of him whose iniquity is for- 
 given, whose sin is covered? To find that blessedness is 
 to be ready for death and God and heaven; and it is no 
 farther from you than the sacrifice of a broken heart, the 
 cry of the penitent, the prayer of faith. The Son of Man 
 hath power even on earth to forgive sins. My friends, 
 .this Spirit of God is ever pleading with every one of us. 
 To-day, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.
 
 THE JEWS. 
 
 " He hath not dealt so with any nation ; neither have the heathen knowledge 
 of his laws." Ps. cxlvii. 20. 
 
 I PURPOSE to pass in swift review some of the thoughts 
 suggested by a subject which occupies two-thirds of the 
 Bible, the History of Israel, the ancient people of God; 
 and the subject is so large that I must enter on it at once, 
 without any preliminary. 
 
 Let me urge upon you, first, in this age of scepticism, 
 how astonishing an evidence of religion of the reality of 
 God's providence, of the truth of God's revelation is fur- 
 nished by the fortunes of this nation. It is said that, when 
 Frederic William of Prussia once imperiously bade his 
 chaplain to furnish in a single sentence a proof of Chris- 
 tianity, the chaplain replied "The Jews, your Majesty." 
 The answer was a profound one. No historical inference 
 is more obvious than this: that the God of all the earth 
 did choose out, did set apart, this people to preserve His 
 truth, to teach His law, to be an evidence of His dealings 
 with mankind. The torch of revelation which He in- 
 trusted to them often burned very low, but they did in 
 some sort hold it aloof for four thousand years and, though 
 for two thousand years since then the same torch, kindled 
 to a far intenser brightness, has been placed in the hands 
 of Christian nations, the voice of prophecy declares that 
 the Jews shall once more share in its splendour, and help 
 to spread its illumination even to the ends of the world. 
 
 I say the voice of prophecy; and, though this branch of
 
 ~-g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 religious evidences has often been abused, it is a matter of 
 overwhelming proof that God has spoken to mankind, and 
 that His words have not passed away. Let us glance at 
 one or two of the sacred utterances about the Jewish 
 nation ; and I appeal to the accumulated tests of thousands of 
 years of evidence, when I ask you to judge for yourselves 
 whether they have failed. 
 
 Here is one statement : " He suffered no man to do them 
 wrong," to do them wrong, that is, with impunity, "but 
 reproved even kings for their sakes." Let me summon a 
 wholly unprejudiced, a wholly unexpected witness that it 
 has been so; not a clergyman, but a king; not a theolo- 
 gian, but a sceptic; not a student of prophecy, but a pupil of 
 Voltaire. "To oppress the Jews," said Frederic the Great 
 of Prussia (hear it, persecutors of the Jews in Berlin, and 
 in Warsaw, and in Kieff !) " to oppress the Jews has never 
 brought prosperity to any government." Can you tell me of 
 any king who has been known as a Jewish persecutor, and 
 has not suffered? The great Rameses of Egypt oppressed 
 them : his land is darkened, his magicians smitten, his 
 first-born slain, his river turned to blood, his horses and 
 chariots overwhelmed in the Red Sea. Sennacherib at- 
 tacks them : the Angel of Death shakes pestilence from 
 his wings upon his host, and, as he is drinking in the 
 house of Nisroch, his god, Adrammelech and Sharezer, his 
 sons, smote him with the sword. Nebuchadnezzar op- 
 presses them; and, lo! smitten with lycanthropy, he is 
 driven forth to eat grass, like oxen. Belshazzar outrages 
 their holy things; and, lo! the palace wall blazes before 
 him into messages of doom, and 
 
 "That night they slew him on his father's throne, 
 The deed unnoticed, and the hand unknown.
 
 THE JEWS. 357 
 
 Crownless and sceptreless Belshazzar lay, 
 A robe of purple round a form of clay." 
 
 Antiochus Epiphanes oppresses them: in remorse, in 
 terror, in attempted sacrilege, he came to his end, and there 
 was none to help him. Crassus plunders their temple, 
 and soon after perishes miserably. Titus half exterminates 
 them; and Titus, so young, so strong, "the delight of the 
 human race," dies in the flower of his age, perhaps of 
 poison administered by a brother's hand. Spain disgraces 
 herself by the infamous cruelties of their slaughter and 
 expulsion; and Spain sinks to a fifth-rate power. They 
 call Ferdinand of Spain "the wise," said the Sultan 
 Bajazet; "yet by expelling the Jews he has made Turkey 
 rich and Spain poor." 
 
 Take another prophecy: "No weapon that is forged 
 against thee shall prosper." How many nations have, one 
 after another, drawn the sword ^on Israel, and how often has 
 the sword been shivered to the very hilt in their grasp! 
 Babylon, the hammer of the whole earth, smote at her in 
 vain; the hosts of Syria were foiled before the fiery bands 
 of her Maccabees ; the spear of Assyria was broken ; the 
 bow of Persia; the brazen phalanx of Greece; the iron 
 broadsword of Rome. All these have perished: Israel 
 remains. You go into an Egyptian tomb, with its colours 
 bright in that rainless air as though they had been laid on 
 yesterday, and you see the features of a Jewish king offer- 
 ing his tribute among the vassals of Shishak: the con- 
 queror has vanished, and his race and his gods, but you 
 may see those very Jewish features in the streets to-day, 
 and the faith of the Jew remains unchanged. The nations 
 have raged about Israel, as the waves surge around a rock 
 in the rushing march of some stormy sea. Again and
 
 --g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 again the rock is lashed by the billows, and wrapped in 
 sheets of foam, and overwhelmed beneath the mighty 
 masses of the advancing tide. But look again ! It is the 
 waves which have been torn; the waves which have been 
 shattered; the waves which have been dashed into spray 
 upon the wind and ebbed away in bubbles upon the shore : 
 the rock still stands immovable, and with the gleam of 
 sunshine on its head. 
 
 Take another prophecy: "Though I make a full end of 
 the nations whither I have driven thee, yet will I not make 
 a full end of thee." Could any prophecy seem more 
 utterly improbable ? Could any prophecy have been more 
 rigidly fulfilled? What but God's providence could have 
 preserved this grain of wheat amid the crushing and slow- 
 grinding millstones of mighty nations? Yet the millstones 
 have long burst into fragments and crumbled into dust : 
 the grain of wheat this tiny, homeless, insignificant nation, 
 this mere handful of some six millions among the one 
 hundred and twenty thousand millions of mankind is 
 still distinct and full of life. Had the prophecy been 
 uttered of any other nation under the sun, History would 
 long ago have laughed it to scorn as a futile prediction. 
 Where is the King of Hamath, and the King of Arpad, 
 and the kings of the city of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivah? 
 The traveller stands by a weird, waste, solitary mound of 
 shapeless debris in a wilderness; and that is Babylon. 
 He sees a few Arabs, under the direction of an English- 
 man, digging out cylinders of earthenware in a cornfield ; 
 and that is Nineveh. He sees the fragments of a shattered 
 sphinx, half buried in the drifted sand of the desert; and 
 that is Egypt. He sees some miserable fishermen drying 
 their nets upon a rock; and that is Tyre. He comes upon
 
 THE JEWS. 3S9 
 
 a lion prowling among some broken pillars; and that is 
 Pentapolis. Nation after nation, once the world-rulers 
 of this darkness, have ceased to exist even in dishonour; 
 have been obliterated down to their very ruins; have 
 been wiped out of human existence, as when one wipeth 
 a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down. But 
 Israel, homeless, despised, persecuted, slaughtered, still 
 lives, as unique, as separate, as distinguishable in every 
 land, as in the days of the Pharaohs and the Achcemenids. 
 Like some river half thwarted by the mountain gorges, 
 half choked in the sands, half exhausted by separate chan- 
 nels, but which no dam can check, no drought exhaust, 
 the stream of her national life has flowed on, leaving all 
 other forms of power and grandeur dead upon its banks, 
 dead generations, dead empires, dead millenniums, a uni- 
 verse of death. By Memphis and Thebes, by Gaza and 
 Askelon, by the tower of Belus and the hanging gardens of 
 Semiramis, by Sardis and Ecbatana, by Tyre and Sidon, by 
 Antioch and Alexandria, by Bagdad and Constantinople, 
 that river flowed; and all these are dead upon its banks. 
 Imperial Rome and Papal Rome have risen and have fallen; 
 the empires of the Saracen and of the Mogul have been 
 born and died; the Renaissance has ended; the Reforma- 
 tion has spent its force; dynasties have dwindled into ex- 
 tinction or died in exile. But the river of Jewish life is 
 still flowing on; and it may be that, when London and 
 Petersburg have in their turn fallen to ruins, the waters 
 of Siloa, which flow so softly, shall still refresh the world. 
 Take another prophecy, in strong contrast with the last : 
 "I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction." Israel 
 truly has been no exception to the rule that "he who is 
 near me is near the fire." The very type of her destinies
 
 3 5o QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 has been that burning bush, burning in the wilderness, burn- 
 ing with the fire of God, but unconsumed. The Jew had to 
 toil in the iron furnace; he wept by the waters of Baby- 
 lon; he quenched with his blood the ashes of Jerusalem. 
 His day of empire was very brief and very insignificant. 
 Massacred by the Romans and by the Syrians, massacred in 
 Alexandria and Cyprus and Caesarea and Damascus, mas- 
 sacred by the Inquisition, massacred by the Crusaders, mas- 
 sacred in England, and in Spain and Portugal and Russia, 
 the Jew still survives. Dash him to the earth, he seems to 
 rise, patient, but with renewed strength. Drown him in the 
 sea, he emerges with fresh vigour. The plague-stricken 
 Ghetto, the yellow garb, the scourge, the torture, the in- 
 famy, the blow of manhood, and the hiss of childhood have 
 been powerless against him. Eighteen centuries have passed 
 since the proud Roman struck on his medals the figure of 
 Judea weeping as a captive beneath her palm. Since then 
 her temple has never risen from its ashes; her religious 
 ceremonies have become impossible; her land has been 
 trampled under foot by herds of miserable conquerors. But 
 she has risen from under her palm, and wiped her tears; 
 and her voice is still heard among the nations, long after 
 the empires of her conquerors have become "mere glim- 
 merings and decays." 
 
 Yes: for take but one more prophecy, "Thy seed shall 
 inherit the Gentiles." What could seem more absurd? 
 even more contradictory of what has been said before? 
 "Thy seed," the tribe of a Chaldean emir, the family of a 
 perishing Armenian! And yet it has been fulfilled. And 
 it has been fulfilled, not only in the triumph of Christian- 
 ity, but of the literal, and not only of the ideal, seed of 
 Abraham. Wherever this people has been, their thrift,
 
 THE JEWS. 3 g, 
 
 their chastity, their soberness, their genius, have given 
 them an influence which neither scorn nor persecution can 
 overthrow. The disgraceful Judenhetze in Germany, the 
 infamous cruelties in Russia, have been caused in no small 
 measure by jealousy at the success of this people, which 
 under any tolerable conditions always comes to the front. 
 Now we are listening to the songs of some Jewish poet, 
 Heine, whose melody delights the world; now to the 
 oratorio of some Jewish composer, Mendelssohn, whose 
 music uplifts the soul as on dovelike wings; now to the 
 thoughts of some profound philosopher, Spinoza, whose 
 influence tells on our deepest thinkers; now to the tragic 
 passion of some great actress, Rachel, who holds specta- 
 tors breathless and spell-bound ; now to the harangues of 
 some great French or English or Austrian statesman of 
 Jewish origin, who holds the threads of the policy of 
 Europe. Is not that strange prophecy true when translated 
 out of Oriental style, "The sons of them that afflicted 
 thee shall come bending unto thee, and they that despised 
 thee shall bow themselves at the soles of thy feet "? 
 
 Such are some only of the prophecies; such is their ful- 
 filment. 
 
 And am I not now entitled to ask two things : Are not 
 the Jews a living evidence of the truth of God? And, if 
 these prophecies have been thus exactly fulfilled, shall not 
 those also be fulfilled which yet so unmistakably proclaim 
 for Israel a splendid future? 
 
 But now is it not worth our while to ask, What has 
 been the secret of this marvellous destiny? Here is a 
 people not perfect, but stiff-necked and rebellious; not 
 attractive with the brilliant charm of Greece, not gifted 
 with the lordly capacity of the Roman, or the artistic
 
 3 g 2 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 genius of the Italian, or the keen versatility of the French, 
 or the indomitable enterprise and stubborn integrity and 
 dauntless veracity of the English; a people constantly 
 enslaved, exiled, trampled down almost to extermination, 
 occupying for but a brief spell of imperilled independence 
 a narrow strip of hilly land, crushed in between the desert 
 and the sea, yet always rising superior to catastrophe, and 
 springing out of the ashes of conflagration. What strange 
 secret is the solution of this everlasting riddle? My 
 friends, I will answer very briefly: to the sceptic the 
 riddle is insoluble; to the believer it is no riddle at all. 
 
 The first solution is given again and again on the page 
 of Scripture. It is because "The Eternal hath chosen 
 Jacob for Himself, and Israel for His own possession." In 
 so far as this people has of all others been most faithful 
 to God, in so far has it been strong in God. The gods of 
 the nations were but idols ; but it is the Lord that ruleth 
 the heavens. 
 
 Bel bowed down; Nebo stooped; Dagon is shattered; 
 Great Pan is dead. The Syrians and Phoenicians were 
 worshipping Molochs and Asherahs, lust and hate, 
 Egypt was worshipping beetles and oxen and hooded cobras, 
 Greece and Rome were worshipping their own deified and 
 expanded passions, when Israel was adoring Jehovah, thun- 
 dering out of Zion, throned between the Cherubim. It was 
 believed that there were seventy nations of the world. 
 "The lamb must be strong," mockingly exclaimed the Em- 
 peror Hadrian to the Rabbi Joshua Ben Chananyal, "which 
 has to withstand seventy wolves." "It is the Shepherd 
 who is strong," replied the sage. "It is the Shepherd who 
 is strong, and " (hear it, anti-Semites of Berlin ! hear it, 
 rioters of Warsaw!) "He will save the lamb from the
 
 THE JEWS. 363 
 
 seventy wolves." He will has He not done so? The 
 sceptic and the atheist may triumph for a time; but again 
 and again the world has turned away with abhorrence and 
 agony from a defiance of its God. Not to such does the 
 future belong. "Yea, many people and strong nations 
 shall come to seek the Lord of Hosts in Jerusalem; and 
 in those days ten men of all languages shall take hold of 
 the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with 
 you; for we have heard that God is with you." 
 
 And the second reason of the vitality of the Jew is his 
 Old Testament. "What advantage hath the Jew?" asks 
 the objector to St. Paul; and he answers, "Much every 
 way, chiefly because to them were intrusted the oracles of 
 God." The Bible, with all its difficulties, is the only 
 literature which has ever reached, which ever can reach, 
 the universal heart of man. It is the Book with which all 
 others are well-nigh needless, and without which all others 
 are well-nigh valueless. A student may read Plato; a 
 Brahmin may pore over the Vedas; a Persian may study the 
 Zend-Avesta; a Chinese may know Confucius by heart. 
 But it is the Bible only which can be read by all the world. 
 It is the Bible only which, degraded as it has been by 
 religious hatred and usurped by religious tyranny, is still 
 the Urim and Thummim of all mankind. "He shewed His 
 word unto Jacob, His statutes and ordinances unto Israel. 
 He hath not dealt so with any nation; neither have the 
 heathen knowledge of His laws." 
 
 Their God, their Bible; and a third secret is the ideal 
 at which Israel aimed. The ideal of the Old World mon- 
 archies was cruel power; the ideal of Athens was a rhyth- 
 mic balance of the faculties; the ideal of the Latins was 
 haughty self-control. But the ideal of Israel alone among
 
 3 6 4 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 the nations was righteousness. Patriots you will find, and 
 conquerors, and brilliant thinkers, and brave men, in the 
 ancient histories; but in all the annals of antiquity how 
 many men do you find to whom you could give the epithet 
 of "holy"? In the story of Israel you find them again and 
 again : Abraham, the courageous, the humble, the unself- 
 ish, the friend of God; David, rising from his shameful 
 falls, to recover in agonies of penitence the clean heart 
 and the free spirit; Isaiah, pouring forth in the face of 
 hostile armies the language of undaunted faith; Jeremiah, 
 the meek sufferer ; Nehemiah, the generous ruler; Daniel, 
 the faithful exile; Judas Maccabeus, the heroic patriot; 
 Hillel, the gentle and noble rabbi. Yes! and was not even 
 the Christian ideal also Jewish? Was not St. Paul a 
 Hebrew of the Hebrews? Was it not of Israel after the 
 flesh that even the Lord of Glory came? Israel has lived 
 because "Israel was the bringer-in and defender of the 
 ideal of conduct, the lifter-up to the nations of the banner 
 of righteousness " ; and he earned the promise, " To him 
 that ordereth his conversation aright will I shew the sal- 
 vation of God." 
 
 I will msntion but one more secret of their life: it is 
 that God kindled in the heart of this teacher of the 
 nations an inextinguishable hope. There was the Mes- 
 sianic hope, of which I will not speak; but, besides, there 
 was the universal hope. The hope sprang from the faith. 
 The religion of every other nation was some form of dual- 
 ism. By the side of good, it adored and deified some form 
 of evil. Egypt had its Typhon no less than its Osiris; 
 Persia, its Ahriman no less than its Ormuzd; India, its 
 Sheeva side by side with its Bramah. All of them adored 
 devils and powers of darkness as well as deities. Israel
 
 THE JEWS. 36$ 
 
 alone worshipped the Almighty, the Unchangeable, the 
 Eternal Good; Israel alone had the high faith that evil was 
 not incurable, that it was "but for a moment," that it should 
 pass away. If the faith of us, the gloomy dwellers in 
 these wind-swept islands of the north, is "not still agoniz- 
 ing in the terrific folds of an evil power, which is a match 
 for all goodness, and the destined tormentor of the uni- 
 verse forever," we owe this, it has been said, in no small 
 measure to the faith that evil does not share the throne 
 of the. Eternal, to the hope revealed to Abraham and his 
 sons. 
 
 I trust that this swift survey has not proved to be with- 
 out its lessons. The sufferings of this marvellous nation, 
 still, alas! continue in this nineteenth century, still after 
 nineteen centuries of wrongs inflicted by Christian nations, 
 still hated in Christian hearts, still robbed and murdered 
 by Christian hands. We pray for the conversion of the 
 Jews. Is the Christian envy of the German Judenhetze, is 
 the Christian outrage of the Russian mobs, the way to con- 
 vert them? Merciful heavens! Is that Christianity? Is 
 it a high example? Is it the proof of a superior faith ? 
 Is it worthy of the Christ who wept over Jerusalem, 
 
 "Whose sad face from the cross sees only this 
 After the passion of a thousand years " ? 
 
 We blame the Jew for rejecting Christianity. Alas, 
 where has he seen pure Christianity and undefiled? Is it 
 in the scowling face of jealousy, or the glaring eyes of 
 rapine, that he can read the features of the Christ ? Was 
 the Inquisition Christianity? Was it Christianity which 
 made ignorant Crusaders bathe their hands in Jewish 
 blood? Was it Christianity which made popes and em-
 
 366 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 perors and angelic doctors declare that the Jews were eter- 
 nal slaves? Was it Christianity which drew their teeth in 
 the dungeons of mediaeval castles? Was it Christianity 
 which burned them in Seville and Toledo, and robbed and 
 murdered them in London, in Lincoln, and in York? Is 
 it to Pope Innocent III., or to Ferdinand the Catholic, or 
 to Torquemada the Dominican, or to Philip Augustus of 
 France, or to John of England, that they are to look for 
 Christian rulers? Ah, if we had been but Christians; 
 had they been able to learn what Christianity was, not 
 from our anathematizing creeds or religious newspapers, 
 but from that true Christian wisdom, which is from above, 
 and is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be en- 
 treated, full of mercy and good fruits, then I believe 
 that they would have repented long ago in dust, in ashes. 
 Convert them to Christianity? Ah, yes! but let us first 
 convert ourselves, convert Lutheran Germany, convert 
 holy Russia, convert backsliding England and America, 
 to Christianity as well! Depend upon it, we Christians 
 owe to Israel an immense reparation for our blasphemies 
 against the true faith. At least, we have one small oppor- 
 tunity to-day. The Jews are a gentle and charitable race. 
 I know that they have felt it bitterly that they almost 
 alone have subscribed to their suffering co-religionists, 
 and that Christians have coldly held aloof. Let us shew 
 them if we can, before it is too late, that at the very heart 
 of all true Christianity there lie a trembling pity and a 
 universal love. St. Paul was ready to wish himself ac- 
 cursed for their sakes; St. Peter said that they had but 
 sinned in ignorance; the Lord of Glory wept over them, and 
 prayed for their forgiveness. If we desire their peace, shall 
 we gain it by cruel outrages, by base jealousies, by stupid
 
 THE JEWS. 367 
 
 anathemas, by unequal laws? or shall we gain it, not by 
 merely asserting that our religion is (as indeed it is), com- 
 pared with theirs, as the sunshine is to the shadow, but by 
 shewing the deeds of that sunshine, by walking as children 
 of the light, by living in the faith of their God and ours, 
 by aiming at the ideal of their righteousness and ours, by 
 walking in the truth of their Scriptures and ours, above 
 all, and more than all, by something more than a hollow 
 allegiance of the lip alone to that Christ whom in the day 
 of ignorance their rulers rejected, but who shall yet feed 
 them and be their Shepherd, and be unto them also an 
 everlasting light?
 
 NEED OF PROGRESS. 
 
 "That which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away." HEB. viii 
 
 'IS- * 
 
 " Behold, I make all things new." REV. xxi. 5. 
 
 THE Book of Jeremiah shews us that, though the prophet 
 saw and survived a great religious movement, he was pro- 
 foundly dissatisfied with it. Our condition so far resem- 
 bles his that we, too, in this Church and nation, have been 
 the witnesses of one great religious movement, the heirs of 
 another; and truth compels me to add that we, too, have 
 but small reason to rest content with their total issues. 
 The remark goes to the root of the entire circumstances of 
 our age. To probe it to the bottom, to kindle in our hearts 
 that fervour of divine satisfaction which tends 'to amend- 
 ment, would demand fuller examination than is here desir- 
 able or possible; and yet the subject is one which touches 
 so closely the welfare of our Church and nation, and has 
 such immediate connection with our individual duties to 
 God and man, that it will, I think, be profitable to us if 
 we look at it from different points of view. Duty, not 
 criticism, holiness, not controversy, Christianity, not 
 party, must be the sole end we have in view. It is diffi- 
 cult to be fair, to be humble, to be tolerant and magnani- 
 mous and at the same time fearlessly honest. Let us seek 
 this spirit while we yet endeavour to speak the truth in 
 love. 
 
 Wherein lies the necessity for constant advance ? Why
 
 N. NEED OF PROGRESS. -^ 
 
 is the history of nations always marked by revolutions, 
 and that of churches by reformations? It is because man 
 is subject to a divine law of growth, progress, develop- 
 ment. God tells it as in the Second Lesson: Behold, I 
 make I am constantly making all things new. Man 
 must not, and he cannot stand still. "There is nothing so 
 revolutionary, because there is nothing so unnatural and 
 convulsive, as the strain to keep things fixed while all the 
 world is, by the very law of its creation, in eternal pro- 
 gress." Our political blessings, our religious institutions, 
 are like every other talent intrusted to us. They are 
 not to be buried in a napkin under the pretence of preser- 
 vation. The law respecting them is, "Occupy till I 
 come." 
 
 Look at this law of life briefly in the light of political 
 history. What led to our revolution in 1648? Was it not 
 the attempt to cling to what was waxing old and vanishing 
 away ? Was it not the attempt of the Stuarts to govern 
 on the same obsolete principles as the Tudors? What led 
 to the revolution of 1688? Was it not the preaching of 
 passive obedience by the clergy, till they were touched in 
 their own persons, and forced to swallow their own for- 
 mulae, so that by their acceptance of William III. the doc- 
 trine of the right divine of kings to govern wrong was 
 dashed to pieces forever? 
 
 Again, look at France in 1792. Were not the orgies of 
 the Reign of Terror due to the ignorant notion that feudal- 
 ism was to be permanent, and that the grinding despotism 
 of the Grand Monarque could be bequeathed to his feebler 
 successors? The blindness, the gilded hypocrisy, the cal- 
 lous luxury of Louis XV. amid a starving people hastened 
 the terrible catastrophe. The portent of a gorgeous crimi- 
 
 24.
 
 370 
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 nality and a guilty selfishness evoked the counter portents 
 of the carmagnole and the guillotine. A Toulon and a 
 Madame du Barry were the natural causes of a Marat and 
 a Robespierre. Corruption, atheism, luxury in high 
 places, let loose the impatient earthquake from below. 
 
 Once more, God's law that there shall be constant prog- 
 ress, constant amelioration, was illustrated on a vast scale 
 in the New World. The Old World spectres of civil and 
 religious tyranny made a desperate attempt to grasp the 
 mighty sceptre of America in their palsying hands. The 
 success of France would have meant the despotisms of the 
 Jesuit and the autocrat. The success of Spain would have 
 meant the triumph of an infernal ignorance animated by 
 an infernal zeal. Why were both these mighty powers 
 foiled by a handful of trading outcasts, driven out of Eng- 
 land by kings and priests? Why was it destined that 
 over the vast plains of America should wave neither the 
 golden lilies of France nor the Lion and Tower of Castile, 
 but first the glorious Semper eadem of England, and then 
 the stars and stripes of a free republic? Because God 
 would not give that country to men who learn nothing and 
 forget nothing, but to men whose hearts were ennobled by 
 the passion for freedom, and to Puritans whose awful vir- 
 tues were kindled by the spirit of the Reformation. The 
 days were gone by for the bigot and the blood-hound, for 
 effete tyrannies and sickly superstitions. The days had 
 come for the schoolmaster and the printing-press, for the 
 universal priesthood of all true Christians, for man strong 
 in his inherent and inalienable rights, for those great 
 ideas and noble sentiments of a fearless faith which shall 
 be the seed-corn of harvests yet to be. 
 
 Nor is the lesson different in the religious history of
 
 NEED OF PROGRESS. -,-j 
 
 mankind. Churches need many resurrections, many Pen- 
 tecosts. An unprogressive church is a dying church: a 
 retrogressive church is a dead church. The efforts of such 
 churches are but the spasmodic semblance of activity : the 
 ceremonies of such churches are but as spangles upon 
 their funeral pall. What would the church of the fourth 
 century have become but for Athanasius? What would 
 have become of the church of the thirteenth century 
 but for Francis and Dominic, the one reviving the lost 
 ideals of humility and poverty, the other awakening 
 the torpid voices of Christian teaching? Into what a 
 slough of corruption would the church of the sixteenth 
 century have been engulfed, had it not been for Martin 
 Luther! What deathful torpor would have succeeded 
 the shamelessness of the Restoration epoch in the eigh- 
 teenth century but for John Wesley ! Surely, the lessons 
 of these and many other revivals is that we cannot, 
 we may not, stand still, may not sink into slothful self- 
 satisfaction, must be quick-eared to the continuous teach- 
 ings of God in history. The paradoxes of yesterday be- 
 come the commonplaces of to-day. At each stage of God- 
 appointed change men apprehend newly the God who 
 changes not. 
 
 " Man is not God, but hath God's end to serve, 
 Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become. 
 Grant this, then man must pass from old to new, 
 From vain to real, from mistake to fact, 
 From what once seemed good to what now proves best. 
 How could man have progression otherwise ? " 
 
 There, then, is the first great principle, that neither in 
 the intellectual, nor in the political, nor in the moral, nor
 
 372 
 
 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 in the spiritual world can we stand still. Nature herself 
 teaches us the same law. The unruffled pool stagnates 
 into pestilence. If the air be not purified by the vernal 
 breeze, it must be rent by the rushing hurricane. De- 
 spised reforms mean shattering revolutions. 
 
 " New occasions teach new duties, 
 
 Time makes ancient good uncouth, 
 They must upwards still and onwards 
 Who would keep abreast with truth.'' 
 
 And the second lesson is but another application of the 
 same over again. It is, as the lessons of to-day have 
 taught us, that even new worlds need to be renewed. As 
 the new leaf-stem withers in its turn, and is pushed off by 
 its successor, so even new truths require to be renovated, 
 or they in their turn corrupt the world. Truth is as the 
 manna. It must be gathered fresh from day to day, or it 
 breeds worms. It is an abject assumption to suppose that 
 any human teacher has exhausted truth, or that theologians 
 can say to the rising tide of knowledge, "Thus far shalt 
 thou go, and no further." Is it for nothing that God 
 has shewn us a new hemisphere of earth, new stars in 
 heaven, new revelations on the rocky tablets of the 
 world? When the Pilgrim Fathers sailed from Delft in 
 1620, their pastor said to them, "I am convinced that the 
 Lord hath yet more truth for us yet to break forth out of 
 his Holy Word." Christ alone is the truth, He alone is 
 free from all error; nor can His authority be claimed for 
 countless imperfections of human system. Christianity is 
 not to be identified in any way with what Cyprian said, or 
 Augustine, or TJiomas Aquinas, or Calvin, or modern relig- 
 ious newspapers. Christ said, "On this rock will I build
 
 NEED OF PROGRESS. 
 
 my church " ; but that is no excuse for the monstrous usur- 
 pations of the Popedom. Christ said, "This is my body"; 
 but that is no excuse for the gross idolatry and grovelling 
 materialism of many sacramentarian theories. The heresy 
 of all heresies of which any church can be guilty is to 
 forget that Christ is a living Christ, not a dead Christ; 
 that it was (as He told us) better for us that He should go 
 away that we might enjoy the nearer presence of His Spirit. 
 Inspiration is not an isolated and exhausted spasm of the 
 past, but an ever living influence of the present in all pure 
 and noble souls. We may be as much inspired as the 
 disciples of old. If not, why do we sing, 
 
 "Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire"? 
 
 Is that as dead and empty a formula as our formalism 
 makes so many of our formulae? What do we mean do 
 we mean anything at all when we say, "I believe in the 
 Holy Ghost " ? Inspiration, as all Scripture teaches, is 
 not the same thing as infallibility; but every man is in- 
 spired in whose heart the Spirit dwells. We are not 
 greater or better than the Fathers; but we are enabled 
 to look on what was said to them of old time from 
 the sunlit heights of advancing centuries in the Christian 
 noon. 
 
 And God teaches us this lesson by the total failure of 
 even the best institutions, of even the holiest experiments, 
 if men cling to their dusty cerements instead of renewing 
 their inmost life. Anthony became a hermit to reteach the 
 world the infinite value of each human soul ; but the fol- 
 lowers of Anthony, imitating only his outward institution, 
 became a herd of brutal and ignorant fanatics. Francis and 
 Dominic retaught the lessons of unworldlin ess and zeal;
 
 374 QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 but because they took the brown serge or the outward trum- 
 pery for the secret of holiness, the Franciscans became lazy 
 mendicants, and the Dominicans rabid Inquisitors. Luther 
 emancipated the priest-ridden souls of a corrupt genera- 
 tion; but the reformed churches, because they changed to 
 his outward formulae and not to his living faith, sank into a 
 narrow and railing dogmatism. Ignatius Loyola upstayed a 
 falling church by genuine devotion; but the Jesuits, adopt- 
 ing the ambitious machinery, forgetting the true self-denial, 
 became the curse and the shame of Rome. Wesley awoke a 
 slumbering age, and Methodism soon became a sect which 
 had lost his spell. The Evangelical movement, the High 
 Church movement, each brought into prominence forgotten 
 truths: but, because those truths have deadened and stif- 
 fened into party shibboleths and party practices, each 
 reformation needs itself to be reformed. Neither to them 
 nor to any movement yet on the horizon do I look for any 
 deliverance from the perils which gather round us; for any 
 reawakenment of the people to the great ideals which have 
 faded out of their minds ; for any averting of that reaction, 
 terrible and overwhelming, which yet awaits us, if we be 
 not wise in time. The deliverance will come in God's 
 good time; but it will not come from the popular 
 phrases or the dominant machinery. It will only come 
 when among all the soft, bland tones which fill our ears, 
 God gives us once more some prophet's mighty voice. 
 Both movements have been blessed, but both alike have 
 lost their inspiring impulse, their essential power. "So, 
 when the tempest uproots a pine on our hills, it looks 
 green for months, perhaps for years. Still, it is timber, 
 not a tree" ; and, long before it falls finally, the chill 
 fungi have begun to grow upon its decaying trunk.
 
 NEED OF PROGRESS. ^ 
 
 Do not say that these things do not concern us. What- 
 ever is a lesson for nations and a lesson for churches is a 
 lesson for individuals, a lesson for every one of us. Are 
 we, as so many fear, in that feeble state of helpless in- 
 differentism and second-handedness which makes us some- 
 times doubt whether the same blood flows in our veins as 
 in the veins of our fathers? Are we mere echoes for every 
 brawling voice? mere vanes for every veering wind? If 
 so, we shall not hand down to our descendants, as it is our 
 duty to do, the ancient honours of this great and once God- 
 fearing empire. Is our religion in danger of becoming a 
 dead second-hand affair of routine and Pharisaism, power- 
 less to move the selfishness of the rich, or to leaven the 
 practice of the poor? If so, that is the reason why we are 
 so conventional, so void of burning enthusiasm, so pale in 
 virtue and faintly dyed in integrity, not crimson in the 
 grain. Progress, effort, enlightenment, and ever more en- 
 lightenment, is the law of man's true being. Every one of 
 us may be taught of God. Every one of us may know the 
 truth, and the truth will make us free. Man was made to 
 grow, not stop. When help has been granted to enable 
 him to grow, were it but an inch, that help is withdrawn, 
 and new help given for new needs. We are placed on a 
 ladder leaning against a temple wall whose summit soars 
 far beyond our ken. To that height, on rung after rung of 
 the angel-trodden steps, our feet must climb; but 
 
 " The ladder-rung our foot has left may fall." 
 
 But let us for our comfort remember this. Though the 
 dawn of the light is gradual, though we must be constantly 
 coming nearer and more near to the knowledge of the truth, 
 yet God never withholds from the meanest and humblest
 
 37 g QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 
 
 of us a circle of light sufficient to guide heavenward our 
 unstumbling feet. The planet Neptune is two thousand 
 seven hundred and eighty millions of miles from the sun, 
 and Mercury basks in his nearmost blaze: yet Neptune, 
 too, revolves round the great orb of fire, feels his influ- 
 ence, belongs to his system, reflects his light. Therefore 
 I hope, and I bid you hope. I bid the humblest, least 
 instructed Christian hope. Is he obeying the Ten Com- 
 mandments? Is he living in the spirit of the Eight Beati- 
 tudes? Then the Lord is on his side, he need not care 
 what man says unto him. If he be not grown indolent in 
 feeling, if he love his brother, if he be humble, loving, 
 candid, open-minded, I bid him hope. "Let midnight 
 end, sunrise will come next." If we believe in the soul, 
 if we are sure of God, if we seek the light, if we hate lies, 
 we need never fear. Theologies may be barren and 
 churches retrogressive, but Christ lives. Man fails, but 
 God rules. Neither is God coffined in Orthodox formulae, 
 nor is Christ unattainable except through human priests 
 and material symbols. Behold, He taketh away your sins. 
 Behold, He liveth forevermore. Behold, without any human 
 intervention, your souls may have immediate access to Him, 
 immediate communion with Him. Let us each pray for 
 ourselves, Send forth Thy light and Thy truth that they 
 may lead me, and guide me unto Thy holy hills and to 
 Thy dwelling. Christ is the truth: let us believe the 
 truth. Christ is the light: let us receive the light. 
 Christ is the way: let us follow the way. That truth and 
 that light will guide us, sufficiently here, perfectly after 
 death. 
 
 " Once reach the roof, 
 Break through, and there is all the sky above."
 
 NEED OF PROGRESS. 
 
 Here there is darkness, and hatred, and clouds, and winter, 
 and (it may be) approaching deluge; but God sitteth above 
 the water-floods, and God remaineth a King forever. 
 
 ' Waft of soul's wing 
 What lies above ? 
 Sunshine and love, 
 Sky blue and spring."
 
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