C§f Crofon of C^oms. 
 
 A LAST SERMON 
 
 PREACHED IN HAWARDEN CHURCH, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. EDWARD BICKERSTETH OTTLEY, 
 
 On the 2nd Simday after Christmas^ 1880. 
 
 Ppinted by request. 
 
 CHESTER : 
 PHILLIPSON AND GOLDER, PRINTERS, EASTGATE ROW.
 
 '' Then came Jesus forth wearing the crown of thorns'^ — 
 S. John xix., 5. 
 
 It is said by those in a position to judge of such a 
 matter that one of the special characteristics of our 
 modern society is a passion for morality, a general 
 admiration of the good life. Of course there are tendencies 
 of thought in an entirely opposite direction; but upon 
 the whole men are now-a-days fain to acknowledge the 
 loveliness of goodness, and more or less earnestly to 
 wish they might themselves attain to it. Virtue then as 
 a result, a splendid product, secures the homage of the 
 world. Men see and recognise, more or less clearly, the 
 wondrous Beauty of Holiness. It attracts and fascinates 
 them, and they unconsciously bend before it. Good 
 men wrestle with the Angel for his blessing, — they eagerly 
 strive in spirit to clasp this glorious prize of man's high 
 calling, — they seek early the kingdom of God and His 
 righteousness, — they try hard to find out the way of 
 Holiness and to walk in it faithfully unto death. Bad 
 men even mimic them — the outside of their lives, because 
 they are so beautiful ; and so there is a vast mass of 
 sham goodness — base moral coin current in the world y 
 the devil clad as an Angel of Light. For true goodness 
 has ever a sort of phantom-shadow of unreal, acted 
 goodness close behind it — of that hypocrisy which has 
 been well called the ' homage which vice pays to virtue ! ' 
 
 And surely, brethren in Christ Jesus, no one will 
 complain of this royal honour wherewith men testify their 
 sense of the dignity of goodness. It is not the fault of 
 goodness to be lovely and loveable, and to manufacture 
 hypocrisy as a kind of side result. So we rejoice and 
 are grateful for the general recognition of the glory of 
 being good and doing right, and trust by God's mercy to 
 build upon that, as a foundation, the temple of true 
 righteousness in Christ, which is man's eternal life. 
 
 Indeed, brethren, this recognition of the beauty of 
 holiness is an indispensable trait of a Christian, Christ- 
 like mind. Depend upon it, the true Christian will learn 
 to see more and more deeply the splendour, the glory,
 
 the gentle beauty, the pure and chastened "sweetness 
 and light " of the life and character wrought out (to use 
 S. Paul's famous expression) "in Christ." Yes! and 
 he will advance to a fuller understanding of how all that 
 product of such mysterious loveliness, such ineffably 
 tender delicacy of thought and of feeling, of wondrous 
 beauty, so simple, yet defying all analysis : how all this 
 amazing result, — the Christian life and character, — is to 
 be named and defined only in that far-reaching phrase — 
 "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ." That word 
 "grace" alone seems to explain so much of the mystery 
 of the Divine life of the soul with its rainbow-blending 
 of fair and noble ideas, — freedom, and beauty, and ten- 
 derness of love. 
 
 It is one thing however to love and admire goodness, 
 and another to aim at the practice of it. Let us endeavour 
 now, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to discover 
 and to contemplate the secret of holiness, as Christ, 
 the true Son of Man, has revealed it. It is well from 
 time to time to stand back — so to say — from the details 
 of our Christian life and its mechanism, and take a survey 
 of its principles and the laws which regulate it. Assu- 
 ming then, that all we who profess and call ourselves 
 Christians, yearn after the Beauty of Holiness, incarnate 
 in our Divine Master, the only perfect Man, and reflected 
 with varying degrees of clearness in the persons of His 
 most faithful followers ; assuming that we each one of us 
 in his vocation in life, would be such as Jesus would have 
 been, had he lived now and here and in our position : — 
 What is it we are really aiming at, and how may we hope 
 to attain it ? 
 
 There are many persons, brethren, with this same 
 noble aspiration to rise to the measure of the stature of 
 the fulness of Jesus Christ, who altogether fail to realise 
 their ambition, because they will not listen to His voice, 
 saying, "This- is the way, walk ye in it." They love 
 their own self-chosen paths of righteousness, and their 
 self-will entirely misleads them. They recognise the 
 supreme splendour of the CnRiST-like life and character ; 
 \.\\ty feel in the depths of heart and conscience the 7ieces- 
 sity of holiness ; they feel the profound, the absolute 
 truth of the scriptural assertions that there is no life
 
 whatever for man but one, — the life of union with the 
 All-holy God, the life of holiness, which is in its very 
 essence eternal, — the only deathless life. But while they 
 aspire to be good, they will not simply learn at the feet 
 of Christ how they may become so. They make many 
 a futile efifort to shake off the chains of sin ; they writhe 
 beneath an intolerable burden, — impatient, humiliated, 
 mortified. They long for life, but they will not come to 
 Jesus that they might have it ; they will not remember 
 that eternal life, the holy life, is the gift of God in Jesus 
 Christ our Lord. They think, or dream, they can save 
 themselves ; can wrest the crown of life from the liand of 
 God; can be like Christ in their own independent 
 strength. It is the old delusion which Christianity had 
 first to crush ; — the outcome of the overweening self- 
 confidence and pride of the human spirit ; the notion that 
 had so perverted the mass of the Jews with whom our 
 Saviour came in contact, that they could serve God 
 rightly and make themselves well-pleasing in His sight, 
 without His special aid. 
 
 But, brethren, if we, in singular unanimity with the 
 whole civilized world, are obliged to confess that there 
 has never been but one perfect Master (if we may so speak 
 in deep reverence) of Holiness ; one only who by word 
 and life revealed the full and entire will of God for man ; 
 surely it follows, that He alone can be trusted as an 
 authority in the great question of our own personal sanc- 
 tification. There He stands — the only Holy Man — the 
 only true and perfect Son of Man — the only Man who 
 was found to succeed in " doing the truth," unique and 
 alone in the ineffable glory of His holiness — in the 
 dazzling whiteness of His purity, wrapped in the love of 
 God, in the sunlight of righteousness, in the radiance of 
 Heaven. No truthful human heart but melts when it 
 beholds Him; no earnest spirit but reaches forth and 
 yearns to embrace Him, to clasp and to claim though it 
 be but one ray of His unearthly splendour. Nothing 
 upon this earth can so fascinate, so delight, so entrance the 
 soul as this vision of the Christ — the altogether lovely One, 
 chiefest among ten thousands : full, indeed, of amazing 
 peace and bliss, and ecstasy that expands, uplifts, ine- 
 briates. But as, forgetful of ourselves, we bow before
 
 Him, the Revealer of holiness divine, shall we not im- 
 plore Him to be Himself our Master, and the guide of 
 our life — Him, the Conqueror of Hell and of death, 
 living and dying once indeed some centuries ago on 
 earth, but, in a higher and deeper sense, by virtue of 
 His holiness, living ever and dying never, linked insepa- 
 rably in His Humanity to the eternity of God ! 
 " Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ. 
 Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father. 
 Thou sittest at the right hand of God, in the glory of the 
 
 Father. 
 We therefore pray Thee help Thy servants." 
 
 " Show Thou us the way that we should walk in, for 
 we lift up our hearts unto Thee." 
 
 It is thus, brethren, assuredly that the admiration (to 
 use so cold a word) and love of the Beauty of Holiness 
 in the Face of Jesus Christ, should lead us to faith in 
 Him and in His teaching as to our own sanctification. 
 But there are those in the world who profess the former 
 feelings and who revere the beauteous character of Jesus, 
 who nevertheless do not hesitate in refusing to accept 
 His doctrine, and to follow His rules of life and conduct. 
 They explain away or deliberately set aside large por- 
 tions of His teaching on one pretext or another. Of 
 course this is chiefly amongst those whom we should say 
 were not — formally at all events — Christians. But is it 
 not true that, even within the Church, there are multi- 
 tudes who seem to attach no weight whatever to very many 
 of the sayings of Jesus Christ, their Lord and God and 
 Saviour : they do not by any means consciously go right 
 against the law of Christ, but instead of accepting the 
 guidance of the Spirit of Jesus, and His Church — accept 
 the guidance of the other great interpreter of the Bible — 
 I mean the World : the World, you know, does not find it 
 answer to go clean contrary to Christianity, so it has its 
 own commentary upon the Scriptures — its own way of 
 explaining them or explaining them away. The dark, 
 austere sayings about sin and its consequences — the 
 death with which it is ' inveterately convolved ' : the 
 severity which Jesus teaches as the shield of virtue, the 
 guardian of that purity of heart which sees God : the 
 precepts respecting self-denial — the crucifixion of the
 
 flesh with its affections and lusts — the duty (under given 
 circumstances) of cauterizing our natural affections, and 
 learning to hate where we should spontaneously love : 
 Or, again, such an injunction as that to the rich young man 
 (by the bye, is it possible that there are none of the same 
 class now on earth ?), " sell all that thou hast and give to 
 the poor:" — In a word, all the hard, stern, ascetic aspects 
 of the Christian life, so prominent in the teaching of our 
 Blessed Master — all contact with the Cross, every shade 
 of holy suffering — from this the world recoils with a 
 shudder of disgust, and has to invent fiction after fiction 
 to gloze over the plain meaning of Christ. Hence 
 comes the danger — so widely fatal — of Christians accepting 
 the easy-going and wide path offered by the world, while 
 they flatter themselves they are on the hard and narrow 
 path of Jesus. It is true that precept upon precept, as 
 they read the Gospels, seems to confront them with a 
 solemn warning or condemnation. But the world tells 
 them, that one is obsolete and meaningless now-a-days ; 
 and another is local and occasional and for some reason 
 or other does not apply to them; and another is to be 
 spiritually, not literally, interpreted —and it vanishes in the 
 process ; and another is merely a rhetorical statement of 
 a moral truism \ and allowances are to be made of this 
 kind and of that ; till the plain mind of the believer is 
 dazed and bewildered, and he is tempted to think that, 
 after all, decency and respectability and the fashionable 
 modicum of religion is all that Christ expects of him. 
 
 Brethren, it is not so. Beware of the smooth-tongued, 
 easy-going, compromising world. Listen with unpreju- 
 diced and simple mind to the only teacher of Righteous- 
 ness, who tells you that He will save you, as He preserved 
 the perfect life of His Humanity, if you will but hearken 
 to His Voice, and give yourselves to His obedience. 
 He expects enthusiastic hearts, inflamed by contact with 
 His Holy Spirit. He expects absolute faith and devotion 
 — unquestioning loyalty to His command. " I am come 
 to send fire upon the earth." Awake, then, ye sleepers, 
 drowsy Christians, and be on fire for God : fire is strong, 
 and leaps Heavenwards, and offers up all that it may touch. 
 " The wind bloweth where it listeth, and ye hear the 
 sound thereof, but cannot tell whence it cometh, or whither
 
 s 
 
 it goeth." The wind too is strong and fierce, and though it 
 works unseen, scourges the ocean to stupendous rage, 
 and hurls headlong the mighty trees of the forest, and 
 mocks to scorn the structures of human strength and 
 scientific skill : gentle one moment as the breath of the 
 sleeping babe — all but omnipotent the next in the furious 
 blast and destruction of the gale — subtle, fantastic, way- 
 ward, wild and free — a mighty mystery is the wind. And 
 " so is everyone that is born of the Spirit " — so are 
 you, friends in Christ Jesus, born anew in babyhood 
 ot water and of the Spirit : you are endued with power 
 from on high. You have an independent and mysterious 
 force within you, if you will but yield yourself to the 
 Spirit, and obey His impulses of good. Are you ever 
 conscious of these stirrings of grace — these movements 
 of the Holy Ghost within your souls ? Have you — how 
 have you — responded to them ? Have you been brave and 
 independent and true to Christ your Captain, and taken 
 your own line — the line marked out by God, by the silver 
 star wherewith God offers to lead you from your home on 
 earth to your truer home with Jesus — and dared 
 to go against the world — against shallow or faint- 
 hearted or earthly-minded friends — against the mere 
 conventionality and the frozen religious practice of the 
 narrow-minded, inperturbable professors of a religion 
 whose heart they have never touched ? Then may you 
 have been indeed the faithful servants of Him who " maketh 
 the winds His Angels and the flames of fire His ministers." 
 Indeed, there must be something of this likeness to 
 " wind " and to " fire " in the Christian's spiritual life. 
 There must be something of enthusiasm — of the sense of 
 being inspired — enlightened and upheld by the creative 
 and regenerative Breath of God. It will be the mysteri- 
 ous source of that ceaseless aspiration, that constant 
 yearning and effort to rise higher — to grow in grace —to 
 be more like Christ, which characterises the true 
 Christian. It cannot inflate him, cannot fill him with pride, 
 because it is only in proportion to his self-resignation, 
 his utter lowliness of spirit, that he is conscious of it. It 
 will certainly give him strength and confidence, — but the 
 strength of conscious weakness, and the confidence of 
 utter self-distrust. Indeed it is the peculiar excellence
 
 of Christian virtue that, from first to last, there is no room 
 for self. It is God that worketh in all the faithful. " By 
 the grace of God I am what I am." " I live, yet not I, 
 but the grace of God which is in me." Faith is the 
 foundation of Christian morals; and faith implies utter 
 self-resignation, self-forgetfulness, self-distrust, and an 
 entire leaning of the soul upon an outside power. Yes, 
 and further, even this foundation, this elementary prin- 
 ciple of faith, is not of ourselves, " it is the gift of God." 
 Let us then lay firm hold on this great principle of 
 Christian ethics : that holiness after all is the work of 
 God in the soul, the revelation of the indwelling Spirit 
 of Jesus Christ. " Our sufficiency is of God." 
 
 And every virtue we possess, and every conquest won, 
 And every thought of Holiness — are His alone. 
 
 There is a wrong way of trying to attain even to virtues 
 and spiritual graces, as there is a wrong way of pursuing 
 happiness. Both are to be attained, but both must be 
 regarded as results wherewith God will crown our efforts, 
 but not as ends to be pursued independently of Him. 
 Seek for pleasure, grasp at happiness, and it crumbles 
 into dust beneath your touch : Seek first the kingdom of 
 God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be 
 added unto you. Somewhat similarly, strive in your own 
 unaided strength to develope Christian virtues in your 
 soul, to conform yourself to Christ's image, without the 
 support of His grace, and you may indeed clothe your- 
 self in the outer semblance of a Christain, but your 
 virtues are whited sepulchres, and your "graces" are 
 empty phantoms. With some kind of self-culture and 
 discipline of life you may " plant and water ;" you may 
 enricii the soil — you may supply every human condition 
 of spiritual life and growth, but you will find that after 
 all the lovely and majestic flower of Christian holiness 
 will rise only beneath the Almighty hand of Him " who 
 giveth the increase," and all its tenderness of colour, and 
 grace of form, and pervading fragrancy are the fashioning 
 of the angels whom He sends forth as ministering spirits 
 to minister to the heirs of Heaven. "Every good gift, 
 and every perfect gift (of soul, not less than body or 
 mind) is from above, and cometh down from the Father
 
 TO 
 
 of Lights." Such then is the first thing to observe about 
 Christian holiness, — that it is the creation of God in the 
 soul of man, a gift of grace ; the crown of our life be- 
 stowed by Him ; falling (as it were) from Heaven in 
 mysterious secresy, like the angels' food of old at mid- 
 night in the barren wilderness. 
 
 But there is a second point of equal importance to be 
 added : man's will must work together with the grace of 
 God. " This is the will of God, even your sanctificalion." 
 Yes ; but there must be no trespass upon the great 
 primal ordinance of man's free-will. It is our glory and 
 our privilege willingly to offer ourselves to Christ, 
 willingly to tread in His blessed footsteps, willingly to 
 obey His laws. 
 
 " Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
 
 Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, 
 By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
 Believing where we cannot prove. 
 
 " Thou seemest human and divine. 
 
 The highest, holiest manhood, Thou ; 
 Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
 Our wills are ours, to make them Thine." 
 
 It is ours to believe and trust Him who is Faithful 
 and True, and to accept the means and methods which He 
 sets before us. What if He command us to make use of 
 Sacraments — mysterious and beyond our understanding ! 
 We are bound to receive them as the very means He 
 chooses. If God alone can sanctify us, and not we our- 
 selves, we cannot question the fitness of the agencies He 
 employs. If our faith is tried, happy are we, for trial is 
 our perfection. If in loyalty to jEsua, and firm adherence 
 to His rules of life, we find ourselves engaged in a bitter 
 and distressful struggle ; if all the world seems ranged 
 against us, and temptations are strong and painfully 
 severe ; if life itself is very dreary and chill, and the 
 Mercy of God seems faint and far ; if the chastenings of 
 Providence are scarcely to be borne, and the Cross over- 
 shadows our Heaven and earth ; if our natural life quivers 
 with pain — sinks (as at times it may) to a very agony, 
 and our spiritual life the while is a strain and weary 
 effort — inwrought with desolation and anxiety, and
 
 1 1 
 
 unrefreshed by streams of grace : — O poor, and faint, and 
 trembling human hearts, bowed to the earth and wounded 
 sore ; O suffering and bleeding hearts^ you are in your 
 Master's footsteps and you tread the royal road of the 
 Holy Cross. Will you not learn the lesson of your 
 Saviour's passion ? Will you not believe that it was with 
 wound-printed Hands He blessed the world with His 
 divine Peace ? Will you not blend your sorrows with 
 His, and sanctify your wounded spirit by suffering with 
 Him? 
 
 Stand there before Pilate in his Judgment Hall and 
 see him point to the Lamb of God, and hear him say 
 '•Behold, the Man." And gaze, gaze upon that pale, 
 sorrow-stricken, blood-stained Brow. Do you not discern 
 beneath the shadow and the pain, that Glory of Human- 
 ity, that Loveliness of Grace, the amazing Beauty of 
 Holiness, which still melts your hearts with yearning love 
 and passionate desire ? Do you not see the peace asleep 
 upon the pain — as the iris rests upon the tost and 
 trembling spray of some great water-fall ? Do you not 
 verily " behold the Man," — the true and perfect and ideal 
 Son of ]\Ian, — royal, peaceful, strong, triumphant, while 
 His pallid countenance is marred even with tears and 
 blood? See the crown of His true Kingship on His 
 Head : He stands there victorious over shame and suffer- 
 ing — dying and behold ! He lives. "Thine eyes behold 
 the King in His beauty," — Yea, — assuredly, He is King 
 and wears His royal diadem. But look, gaze more 
 closely, and see how it is woven out of cruel, piercing 
 thorns. O Sinless Sufferer, O Divine Jesus, teach us so 
 to bear our sorrows that they may fashion our " crown of 
 life." Help us so to suffer with Thee that we may be 
 glorified together. Give us grace so to follow Thee 
 across the "waste howling wilderness," the desolation and 
 the pain of our trials and temptations here, that we here- 
 after may behold the land of promised rest and joy. 
 Fashion us after Thine own likeness, though it needs must 
 be on Thy bitter cross; and enable us day by day to weave 
 the sharp and piercing thorns, wherewith Thou wiliest to 
 strew our earthly path, into a coronal of glory and of 
 life, — the transfigured, golden crown, — of them whom 
 Thou shalt call to be joint heirs of Thy heavenly kingdom.
 
 12 
 
 Brethren in Christ Jesus, strive hard to the end ; 
 wrestle against sin ; bear manfully your daily cross, and 
 wilfully neglect no means of grace, and the higher Christ- 
 life will arise within you, though you know not whence it 
 cometh ; men will look on, wonder, admire, and learn to 
 love, to follow, to imitate. And as you rise Heavenward 
 in the power of divine grace, your light will shine before 
 them ; you will bless the world as best you may, by offer- 
 ing it the rare example of a faithful CnRisx-like life. The 
 hand of Jesus will clothe you in the mantle of truth and 
 love and purity ; the sunlight of righteousness will rest 
 upon you ; you will, in your measure, reflect — in all and 
 through all — the fairest and noblest vision of earth— the 
 Beauty of Holiness in Christ Jesus our Lord. 
 
 Forgive me, brethren, kind friends in Christ, one 
 word in conclusion. I have a request to make to you — 
 that if in the time to come you should remember a voice 
 that you no longer hear, but through which God may 
 perchance have spoken now and again to your minds and 
 souls — O if that voice of him, who was called for a while 
 to minister to you, should ever have struck some chord of 
 sympathy in your hearts, or awaked some kindly interest 
 in him ; and if hereafter you should recall some message 
 which God sent you through him — some light upon your own 
 thoughts or feelings, some counsel or encouragement you 
 think was useful ; if he have in any degree unveiled to 
 you the Beauty of Holiness, the dignity and glory of the 
 Divine Life in Christ : — will you of your charity remember 
 him in your earnest prayers — that God's pardoning mercy 
 may be extended to the many failings, sins and negligences 
 of the past, and His blessing and His grace may guard, 
 and guide and shelter him in the time to come. 
 
 m. ffi. 
 
 Phillipson & Colder, Printers, Chester.
 
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