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 |.p0st0lu %KhmxB an (JBttkira 0f 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PREACHED BEFORE HIS GRACE THE PRIMATE 
 IN THE CHAPEL OF LAMBETH PALACE 
 
 AT THE CONSECRATION OF 
 
 THE LORD BISHOP OF NASSAU, 
 
 ON ST. ANDREW'S DAY, 1863. 
 BY 
 
 HENRY PARRY LIDDON, M.A. 
 
 STITDENT OF CH. CH.; EXAMINING CHAI'LAIN TO THE LORD BISHOP OF SALISBURY; 
 AND ONE OF THE SELECT PREACHERS IN THE UNIYEESITY OF OXFORD. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY COMMAND. 
 
 OXFORD & LONDON, 
 
 RIVINGTONS : 
 
 OXFORD, 
 
 JOHN HENRY AND JAMES PARKER. 
 
 1863.
 
 % ^txmon, i't. 
 
 ROMANS X. 18. 
 But I SAY, Have they not heard ? Yes verily, their sound 
 
 WENT INTO ALL THE EARTH, AND THEIR WORDS UNTO THE ENDS OF 
 THE WORLD. 
 
 ON the Feast of the Apostle who was first converted 
 to Christ, and who opens the list of festivals in 
 the Christian Year, it is obvious to attempt a con- 
 sideration of the work of the Apostolate under that 
 aspect which is suggested by St. Paul in the passage 
 chosen from to-day's Epistle. The whole context 
 is in its style one of the most obscure portions of 
 the Epistle to the Romans. The structure and 
 connexion are continually disjointed or broken by 
 the introduction of quotations from the Old Testa- 
 ment : and in reading these quotations we are often 
 supposed to be in possession of secondary or even 
 of mystical senses, as well as of other underlying 
 trains of thought which connect them. These, when 
 detected and exhibited, enable us to trace the 
 sequence of the argument, and to explain in detail 
 the sense of a passage, which a too eager lite- 
 ralism might find hopelessly unintelligible. For the 
 general scope of the Apostle is sufficiently plain. 
 The Jew is taught his responsibihties in presence 
 of the advancing Gospel from the pages of his 
 Hebrew Bible. He learns to contrast the relicfion 
 of the Synagogue with that of the Church, when 
 viewed in its spirit, method, and end. And this, not 
 from the lips of Evangelists, but from the books of 
 
 B
 
 2 
 
 Leviticus and Deuteronomy*. Prophets like Isaiah 
 and Joel successively announce to him the reward 
 of faith in Christ, and the intimate and beneficent 
 nearness of the Lord of all to all His true worship- 
 pers^, and by consequence, the abolition of the 
 Judaic nationalism, and the Catholicity of the 
 religion which was succeeding it''. And when the 
 question is asked how there can be such true 
 worship without faith in its Object, or faith without a 
 religious education, or this again without a message 
 from heaven, and an authoritative commission to 
 proclaim it*^, the reply is given in the words of the 
 Evangelical Prophet % for whose entranced soul 
 the intervening centuries have neither force nor 
 meaning, and the distant and contingent future is a 
 realized and present fact. Along with the mes- 
 sengers who announce to captive Israel the speedy 
 return of peace and freedom, there mingle, in the 
 prophet's vision, other forms of Apostolic mien and 
 greatness, and their footsteps fall on all the moun- 
 tains of the world, as they carry forward the message 
 which emancipates mankind, and which proclaims 
 an alliance between Earth and Heaven. Yet more, 
 this greatest of the prophets foresees the partial 
 acceptance of the Gospel as accurately as he foretells 
 its universal promulgation': and prophecy closes 
 around the Jew, who refuses belief to the report of 
 the Apostles, by describing not merely the Truth 
 which confronts him, but his own attitude towards it. 
 That there may be no mistake as to the weight and 
 pressure of the Jew's responsibility, the Apostle asks 
 
 a ver. 5. Lev. xviii. 5. vor. 6. Deut. xxx. l!i — 14. 
 
 ^ ver. 11. Is. xxviii. 16. vcr. 13. Joel ii. 32. = ver. 12. 
 
 <» ver. 14, 15. " Is. lii. 7. ' ver. 16. Is. liii. 1. 

 
 in the text somewhat abruptly, whether the men of 
 Israel^ have not heard the Gospel-message. And he 
 answers not by pointing to the literal fact, that already 
 the messengers of Christ had penetrated far and wide 
 into either of the great branches of the Dispersion, 
 while Jerusalem itself was the home and focus of 
 Christian Doctrine : he quotes a psalmist who is 
 singing of the heavenly bodies, and who tells how 
 they speak for the glorious Creator in terms which 
 all can understand, while from day to day and age to 
 age, they hand on their mighty tradition of the Truth, 
 which all the languages of man confess, and all the 
 climes and regions of the earth have heard. 
 
 The heavens declare the glory of God, 
 
 And the firmament sheweth His handiwork. 
 
 Day unto day uttereth speech, 
 
 And night unto night sheweth knowledge. 
 
 There is no speech nor language 
 
 Where their voice is not heard : 
 
 Their line is gone out through all the earth, 
 
 And their words to the end of the worlds 
 
 In the translation " their line," the Authorized 
 Version keeps close to the etymology of the original 
 Hebrew : but unprejudiced scholars, (at least on 
 such a point we may trust Ewald and Gesenius,) 
 will tell us, that the line was probably the chord 
 of a musical instrument'; and that, by a common 
 form of speech, the chord might stand for the sound 
 
 ^ So Meyer in loc. against Origen, Calvin, Fritzsche, etc. 
 who refer the question to the Heathen, in spite of the obvious 
 connection. ^ Ps. xix. 1 — 4. 
 
 ' Gesen. Lex. s. v. lp. Compare too Thesaurus, p. 1201. 
 where however Professor Roediger seems inclined to adopt 
 Olshausen's 'conjecture' of D^P for DJi^, in which he had 
 been anticipated by Bellarmine, (de Verbo Dei, lib. ii. c. 2.) 
 Ewald, Dichter A. B. ii. 28. 
 
 b2
 
 which it produced. The sense of the LXX, which 
 St. Paul quotes, is supported by the version of 
 Symnmchus, and by the Syriac translation J : and 
 this rendering of the passage is further illustrated by 
 the well-known representation of the morning-stars 
 singing together, in the book of Job''. We might 
 be tempted to think of a literal music of the 
 spheres, — a conception familiar to the ancient world, 
 and not unknown among Christian writers': but 
 the general features, and particularly the gravity of 
 inspired Scripture, would lead us (with S. Augustine "") 
 to recognise a satisfactory account of the metaphor 
 in the order and harmony and proportion which 
 rule the movements of the heavenly bodies, and 
 from which the truths of his Creator's Being, as they 
 flash upon the outward eye, pierce the inner ear of 
 the soul of man. The Apostle in this very Epistle has 
 shown how the Revelation of God in nature is only 
 lost to man through his moral corruption". And the 
 Psalm throughout supposes a correspondence between 
 God's original unveiUng of Himself in Creation, and 
 His second revelation of Himself in the Mosaic Law". 
 Let this, the internal thought of the Psalm, have been 
 grasped, and it will be admitted that St. Paul cannot 
 be accused of an arbitrary accommodation of lan- 
 
 6 (f)6('>yyos. Symm. 6 ^x°^- ^J^*- Pescli. .OCnZjSflD 
 tio eoruiu.' Vulrj. and St. Jcr. soniis eorum. 
 
 J LXX. 
 
 ' annunciatic ^ 
 
 ^ Job xxxviii. 7. where however the paralleHsm L2^nS7S"\32 
 shows that the Holy Angels are intended, although described 
 under a metaphor which illustrates the text. 
 
 • See the authorities in Lorinus in Psalm, vol. i. p. 32'2. 
 
 " Quoted by Lorinus ub. supra. Compare too de Civ. Dei, 
 xi. 18. where he expands the idea of Ecclus. xxiii. 15. in this 
 sense. 
 
 n Rom. i. 20—23. 
 
 " Comp. Kuhn, Dogmatik Einl. vol. i. p. 6. for a clear statement 
 of the sense in which the natm-al world is a Revelation.
 
 guage when he extends an analogy, recognized 
 by the Psalm itself, as existing between the lessons 
 of God's work in nature and the teaching of His 
 Voice to Moses, to the wider comparison of the 
 teaching of the heavens that shine on all climes and 
 races of men, with the world-wide mission of the 
 Church. He is indeed speaking of nothing less than 
 the whole worlds yet there is no real ground for 
 maintaining that he is speaking hyperbolically ; as 
 though he were flourishing a quotation without 
 having ascertained its range of meaning, in other 
 words, without a due sense of the solemn respon- 
 sibilities of language. We must at least endeavour 
 to place ourselves in the position of the speaker, 
 before we decide upon the force which must be 
 attributed to words of doubtful import. Thus when 
 Obadiah speaks of all the nations and kingdoms 
 of the earth into which Ahab had sent to seek 
 Elijah, he uses the language of an uneducated 
 oriental, with the narrowest political horizon i. 
 But when our Divine Lord bids His Apostles go 
 teach All Nations, He speaks as One Who from all 
 eternity had shared the Intellectual, no less than 
 the other Glories of the Everlasting Father ^ So 
 when St. Paul tells the Romans' that their faith 
 was spoken of throughout the whole world, he 
 means throughout the world of Apostolic Christen- 
 dom : when, later he assures the Colossians that 
 
 P It would be absurd to pretend that in adopting the LXX 
 transl. to irepara r^j olKov^ievrjs, St. Paul was thinking of the 
 Roman Empire. The words els naa-av ttju yr^v would correct this. 
 St. Ambrose christianizes the idea of the word olKovyLivrj. (in Ps. 
 xlviii. vcr. 3. ii. 946. 
 
 1 I. Kings -Kviii. 10. 
 
 ■■ St. John xvii. 5. x. 30. xiv. 9. Compare Col. ii. 3. and 
 Eph. i. 8, 9. « Rom. i. 8.
 
 6 
 
 the Gospel which had come to them "is in all 
 the worldV his intrepid faith already sees the end 
 in its beginning, and like the prophets of the older 
 Covenant he describes a future which had yet to 
 unfold itself, as if it were an accomplished fact. 
 So here, the true sense of the text must be looked 
 for in the parallel which it assumes between the 
 world-embracing light, which streams as a speechless 
 utterance of self-evident Truth from the orbs of 
 Heaven, and the Illumination of the Faith, radiating 
 from the Person of Jesus, and diffused by His Apostles 
 and their representatives through the centuries and 
 countries of the world. It is obvious that St. Paul's 
 quotation is more than sufficient for his immediate 
 purpose. He might have told us much that we 
 yearn to know, about the labours of his brother 
 Apostles : he might have pointed to his own constant 
 presence in the synagogues of the Hellenic Dispersion. 
 But while his question touches merely the labours 
 of the first age of Christendom and the needs and 
 opportunities of a single race; the answer "" carries 
 us up to an ideal or rather a prophetic vision, — the 
 Jew and his responsibilities fade away into the back- 
 ground of thought, — and before us there opens a 
 panorama, comprehending the whole Missionary 
 action of the Church from the labours of the first 
 Apostle on the Day of Pentecost down to the last 
 efforts of those servants whom our Lord will find 
 working and watching when He comes to Judgment. 
 The Apostle reads the history of the Church in the 
 
 ' Kocrfioi not oiKovfjifui}. Col. i. 6. 
 
 " Some expositors seem to have inferred from the passage, 
 that when St. Paul wrote it, the Gospel was actuall)- heing 
 pi-eachcd in China and America, cf Meyer in loc.
 
 light of his Master's words : " Go, teach all nations\" 
 The intervening centuries count for nothing ; just as 
 when we gaze at the fixed star, we do not ordinarily 
 reflect upon that scintillation of the rays of its light 
 through almost measureless space which Science 
 yet reveals to us in all its wonder with minute 
 precision^. And the Apostle sees all at a single 
 glance : he ignores the alternation of ehb and flow 
 — the constant play of light and shade — which 
 meet us in the actual history of the Church ; we 
 forget, as we read his words, that struggle for life, 
 maintained for centuries, — maintained against over- 
 whelming forces, — maintained amid tears and agony 
 and blood ; we seem to be watching a process which 
 has all the beauty and ease of a natural movement ; 
 we have before us what is less the history of an 
 accomphshed and hard-won triumph than it is the 
 spectacle of a beneficent provision or law of the 
 universe, in which there is no struggle, no effort, 
 no jar, no resistance, and in which the Heavenly 
 Wisdom already reaches from one end to another 
 mightily, and smoothly and sweetly ordereth all 
 things ^ "Their sound is gone out into all lands, 
 and their words unto the ends of the world." 
 
 The continuous missionary and self-expanding 
 action of the Church is a truth which we generally 
 fall back upon or enforce for the practical purpose 
 of supporting Missions. But it has a distinct 
 speculative value ; it is in itself an evidence of the 
 divinity of Christianity ; its history, often inter- 
 
 " St. Matt, xxviii. 19. cf. Ps. Ixxii. 11. Hag. ii. 7. St. Matt, 
 xxiv. 14; XXV. 32. Acts xvii. 26. Rom. i. 6; xvi. 20. Gal. iii. 8. 
 Rev. vii. 9. 
 
 y Humboldt Cosmos, iii. p. 259 sqq. cf. p. 110, 111. 
 
 == Wisd. viii. 1.
 
 8 
 
 mittent and disappointing, is yet (taken as a whole) 
 a living and perpetual testimony to the presence in 
 Jesus of a something which was higher than the 
 highest human foresight or human genius ; it is a 
 feature of Christianity which, if Christianity were 
 not divine, would be nothing less than inexpHcable; — 
 it flows from Words of Christ, which if Christ had 
 been merely human, would have been words of 
 startling audacity or of unprecedented folly. 
 
 And here are two points that demand our 
 consideration. 
 
 1. For our Lord's command and the prophecy 
 of His Apostle imply first of all that the Gospel 
 would stand tJie test of time. Of all forms of power, 
 as of all forms of thought that are merely human, 
 time is the great enemy. No sooner has a doctrine 
 or a system taken its place in the arena of human 
 thought, than, like the ocean which imperceptibly 
 fritters away the base of a mountain cliff, time 
 forthwith begins its relentless work of progressive 
 demolition. Take the case of any human doctrine, 
 which has gained the ear of classes or of races 
 of men, and which accordingly has been formulated 
 by genius, and proclaimed with enthusiasm. A 
 doctrine, let us suppose, which not merely does not 
 rest upon revelation, but which is not exclusively 
 based upon those axioms of mathematics or morals 
 which themselves express truths of the Being and 
 Mind of God. And I say, that such a human 
 speculation will pursue a developement of which 
 the stages can be traced with certainty : it will 
 pass from the energy of its youth, to the self- 
 reliant vigour and system of its manhood, and to 
 the decrepitude and death which are beyond. For
 
 9 
 
 as time passes, rften slowly learn the lessons of 
 experience and reflection ; and the titles by 
 which a doctrine can establish permanent empire 
 are very different from those which originally re- 
 commend it. It must not merely have created 
 admiration at the first, it must bear the friction 
 of a continuous scrutiny ; it must be able to afford 
 not merely the charm of an hour's entertainment, 
 but the duties of a life-long friendship. Again, 
 time brings with it what we term in our ignorance, 
 chance ; it brings combinations of circumstances, 
 and of agencies to bear, upon which no genius 
 can calculate, and against which no prudence can 
 take its measures. Human annals are rife with the 
 history of dynasties and empires which have survived 
 the resistance of natural and mighty foes, and have 
 succumbed to indirect and accidental dangers ; and 
 herein the thought of man resembles the organisation 
 of his social life, and philosophies like empires have 
 found their doom in influences upon which their 
 framers never lavished so much as a suspicion. Once 
 more, the lapse of time involves the liability to in- 
 ternal decay : those who have reached power, betake 
 themselves to its enjoyment ; those who believe that 
 they are securely masters of the world of thought, 
 are not alive to the decomposition which awaits or 
 preys upon their stagnant system. At one end of a 
 dynasty you admire the hero who founds it by his toils 
 and his sufferings, at the other you turn away in 
 disgust from the effeminacies and luxuries and 
 weaknesses which drain its strength and its life. 
 On the birthday of a philosophy a presiding in- 
 tellect is moulding thought into new forms, and 
 imparting to it a new impetus ; in its dechne, his
 
 10 
 
 feeble representatives are defending positions which 
 an intellectual enemy has already turned, or are 
 obstinately clinging to phrases which have ceased to 
 represent any thing save the dogged determination 
 of their maintainers. For, lastly, as the years pass 
 over a doctrine or a system, they inevitably sub- 
 ject it to the decisive test of opposition. And 
 this not necessarily because it has faults and fail- 
 ings, but because it exists, and by its existence 
 invites hostile criticism, since it drains away some- 
 thing, however little, of the attention, and labour, 
 and substance, which would but for the fact of its 
 existence be bestowed elsewhere. Well has it 
 been said, that, when there is a competition for the 
 means of life, you need only live to provoke hostility : 
 and where a doctrinal system lives in earnest, and 
 demands sacrifice and submission elsewhere, it is 
 certain to be breasted by an opposition as fierce as 
 that which is provoked against political powers 
 who threaten the independence of even the most 
 misgoverned among nations, or the lives of the 
 most guilty of men. To attempt conquest in the 
 intellectual or moral world, cannot but expose the 
 system which does so to a shock of opposition, 
 which combining with such tendencies to dissolution 
 from within as are incident to all that is strictly 
 human, must make its final overthrow a matter of 
 time, and even a matter of approxinate calculation. 
 
 Need I say it, brethren, that He, Who came from 
 Heaven to redeem and save us, knew what was 
 before Him ? He foresaw the coolness which would 
 succeed to a first fervour of welcome to His Truth ; 
 He allowed for the unfavourable conjunctions of 
 circumstance, and for the intimidation and the errors
 
 11 
 
 of those who might represent Him, and for the 
 opposition which a Gospel, such as His, (making, as 
 it did, no terms with any human feeling or conviction 
 that was inconsistent with the Rights of God,) could 
 not but encounter in the passions of man. He pre- 
 dicted a time when the love of many would wax cold, 
 when His Disciples would be brought before kings 
 and rulers for His Name's sake, when false christs 
 and false prophets would arise, deceiving, if possible, 
 the very elect ^ He accepted. He embraced. He set 
 forth the idea of the intense and fervid hatred 
 which His Gospel must perforce encounter in the 
 world, so energetically, that He, the Prince of Peace, 
 described Himself as sending not peace but a sword ^. 
 Yet foreseeing these elements of destruction gathering 
 around Him, He is calmly certain of the perpetuity 
 of His Doctrine. Heaven and earth. He says, shall 
 pass away, but My Words shall not pass away*'. 
 Surely the event has not falsified the prediction. 
 Since the Incarnation, all else has changed; new 
 races, new moulds of thought, new languages, new 
 institutions, poltiical and social, supplant others which 
 once seemed destined to exist for ever, and which 
 have passed away. But, reigning amid the ruins of 
 the past, reigning amid the progress of the present 
 towards the future, Jesus Christ is here ; He reigns 
 in the heart and intellect of modern Europe ; He 
 reigns here and there, if you will, amid the sus- 
 picion, and the feebleness of His worshippers, amid 
 the upgrowth of forces which continually threaten 
 His supremacy, and in spite of the efforts of men 
 who succeed after eighteen centuries to the inherit- 
 
 » St. Matt. xxiv. 9. 11. 13. 24. ^ St. Matt. x. 34. 
 
 •^ St. Mark xiii. 31.
 
 12 
 
 ance of Pilate and to the task of Judas. And yet, 
 " Thy Throne, God, is for ever and ever ; The 
 Sceptre of Thy Kingdom is a right sceptre. Thine 
 arrows are very sharp, and the people shall be sub- 
 dued unto Thee, even in the midst among the 
 King's enemies." 
 
 You may contend that here and there His 
 work is marred or broken ; you may insist on 
 the desolating spread of the great heresies of 
 the first ages, or on the loss of the Churches of 
 the East and of the Church of Cyprian and of 
 Augustine — trampled as these are beneath the feet 
 of the infidel. You may show from history that 
 the great Roman Communion, the largest fraction 
 of existing Christendom, has subjected its polity to 
 an unprimitive jurisdiction, and has surrounded its 
 creed with an incrustation of elements wliich were 
 at least foreign to the belief of the Early Church. 
 You may follow the track of the Reformation, and 
 mark how all the Churches which took part in that 
 movement, save only the Church of England and a 
 possible fraction of Scandinavian Christendom, for- 
 feited with the Episcopate the organic conditions of 
 true Sacramental life. And then you may turn to 
 our own England, and note our spiritual deadness 
 during the last century, or the heathenism of our great 
 cities, or the ravages of a feeble rationalism among 
 a portion of our educated classes, or the attitude of 
 those more imposing, logical, and fatal forms of 
 destructive thought which rule in some of the 
 Schools of Germany and which threaten us with 
 invasion, or the divisions, and heartburnings, and 
 scandals which paralyse what else were at this hour 
 our mighty strength, as a Church, for God. You
 
 13 
 
 may urge all this and more ; and then ask, if it be 
 indeed true that our Ascendea Saviour has redeemed 
 His Promise ? Certainly, I reply. He has redeemed 
 it, and with a surplusage of honour ; He has indeed 
 rejoiced as a giant to run His course ; He has 
 trifled with foes and with dangers which a cautious 
 timidity, could such an attribute have reigned 
 in heaven, might have crushed or have avoided ; 
 His Church, like His Body Crucified, is known by the 
 Five Wounds and the opened Side, and her scars, like 
 His, have been imprinted in the house of friends ^ 
 But now, as of old. He is crucified in weakness, while 
 He reigns in power'': He is, by the very pressure 
 and fierceness of His foes, uniting friends who have 
 long been sundered : His vast Providences enlist the 
 services even of men who know but fragments of 
 His Truth : He has more loyal hearts who trust 
 and worship Him than in any previous age : He 
 has more tokens of present strength and of future 
 victory than in the days when the kings of Europe 
 were more ostentatiously the nursing fathers of His 
 Church, and its peoples more ready to own them- 
 selves her children. 
 
 For observe, that He does not merely hold His 
 ground : He is extending His Empire. He has already 
 with but scanty exceptions and by various agencies 
 made the New World his own : He is pushing His 
 advances along the steppes of Northern Tartary 
 and through the deserts of Central Africa. He is 
 agahi laying siege to those citadels of superstitious 
 yet of philosophical idolatry — the oriental religions — 
 which have so long resisted Him : He is, as we are 
 this day reminded, bidding the islands of the sea 
 '• Zech. xiii. 6. ^ 3 Cor. xiii. 4.
 
 14 
 
 wait on His advancing Footsteps. This would be 
 indeed passing strange, if it could be supposed that 
 His Gospel was really threatened with dissolution, 
 whenever some fitful gust of negative criticism 
 troubles the upper atmosphere of contemporary 
 thought. They say, that the legions of the falling 
 empire had no heart to face the barbarians on the 
 frontier, while a principle of national and political 
 ruin was throned and crowned at Rome. And the 
 feet of the Church's Missionaries might well falter, and 
 their words would surely die away on their stammering 
 lips, if they should admit the suspicion, that the Faith 
 they were bearing to the heathen could be proved 
 to be less than absolutely certain in itself, or other 
 than an imperious necessity for man. Only they 
 who believe can speak prevaihngly for God : Only 
 He Who was, and Who knew Himself to be, the 
 absolute and the highest Truth, could by proclaiming 
 it assure Himself of the possession of an unfailing 
 agency, streaming through the ages and the countries 
 of the world, with the life-giving and penetrating 
 ubiquity of the rays which speak of God as they fall 
 on us men by day and by night from the orbs of 
 heaven. 
 
 II. And thus we are led to observe a second 
 feature of the predicted missionary energy of the 
 Church, which, no less than that already mentioned, 
 would seem to possess an evidential value. 
 
 For our Lord did not merely insure His Religion 
 against the triumph of those causes which, in the 
 case of liuman institutions or opinions, must ulti- 
 mately produce decay and dissolution. The stone 
 which you throw loses force and swiftness as it obeys 
 the impulse you gave to it : it buries itself, we will
 
 15 
 
 suppose, beneath the waters of a still lake, and again 
 the ripple which radiates from the point of disturb- 
 ance, becomes, moment by moment, less clear to 
 the eye, as on this side and on that its widening 
 circles approach the shore. So it is with human 
 religions : they spend themselves while they gain the 
 prestige of antiquity : and our Lord, as we have seen, 
 reversed this law of exhaustion, in the case of His 
 Gospel. But He did more : He presumed upon. 
 He appealed to, because He knew Himself able to 
 create and to command, an ever-youthful and active 
 enthusiasm, which in the last ages of the Faith, no 
 less than in the first, would carry forward His 
 doctrine into all the regions of the earth, and, at 
 whatever risk, would press it closely in its perfect- 
 ness and its power on the consciences of men. 
 Look at the other great religions which have ruled, 
 or which still rule, the thought or the heart of the 
 human race. Some of them are of ancient growth : 
 they are the religions of highly-gifted races : they 
 are dominant throughout some of the fairest regions 
 of the globe : nay more, in some cases they cumber 
 lands which were once beautiful with the Faith and 
 Worship of the Redeemer. We Christians indeed 
 study their sacred books, their traditional polities, 
 and their unlovely rites — as for other and graver 
 reasons, so because in these we find interesting 
 records of the early mind and fortunes of great 
 divisions of the human family. But we send to 
 these heathen our own Bible and our Missions, not 
 by way of promoting literary or social intercourse, 
 but as sending to them the message and the gift of 
 Heaven. In wellnigh all the great cities of the East 
 are to be found the representatives of Christ : in
 
 16 
 
 many of them the Missionaries of our own branch of 
 the Christian Church. But who ever heard of a Budd- 
 hist Mission in London or in Paris ? Where are there 
 societies for transhiting the Vedas, or the Zendavesta, 
 or the Koran, into all the languages of the world ? 
 What effort that is felt beyond the natural limits of 
 race, or the forced limits of empire, have the millions 
 of India or of China made to propagate the thought- 
 ful or the foolish superstitions which they hold for 
 Truth ? Where have ancient priesthoods, like the 
 Egyptian, been missionary agencies ? Where have 
 philosophical speculations, like those of the Schools 
 of Greece, been more than the luxury and the pride 
 of the selfish few, — where and when have they 
 shown any capacity of becoming the inheritance 
 of the heart and thought of the struggling many ? 
 Certainly Mahomedanism has attempted, and at this 
 moment it attempts, a world-wide proselytism : but 
 Mahomet had studied the first six centuries of the 
 Kingdom of the Incarnation ; and his great genius 
 is more manifest in notliing than in the fact, that 
 while he borrowed from the Gospel the idea of 
 a mission to mankind without distinction of race 
 or language, he differed from it in entrusting the 
 propagation of his eclectic imposture, not to the 
 native power of its boasted truth, but to the sharp 
 edge of the scymetar, and to the courage of that 
 warrior race from which he sprung. The first 
 Apostles of Islam were beyond doubt great military 
 commanders : its earliest mission was one of the 
 most ruthless wars which have desolated the East. 
 And if to-day this creed may seem to address itself to 
 thought and conscience, in regions where no other 
 form of movement is possible ; it is more true to its
 
 17 
 
 traditional methods of action when it organizes a 
 mutiny against Christian rulers in India, or when 
 in the Syrian villages and- the streets of Damascus it 
 bathes its sword in Christian blood. It would not 
 be difficult to show by an exhaustive induction that 
 the idea of a Truth — so beautiful in its evident 
 symmetry as to compel the absolute homage of 
 the intellect and of the heart — so strong in this 
 compulsion, that alone and unarmed it can dare 
 to pass forth on the lips of an unlettered Apostolate, 
 to demand submission from the passions and the 
 prejudices of man, — is strictly proper to our Re- 
 deemer's Gospel, and undiscoverable elsewhere. 
 
 Surely, brethren, it were not unreasonable to 
 surmise, that if the Infinite and Eternal God has 
 spoken in very deed to us His creatures. He can 
 only so have spoken, as at the first He can only 
 have given us being, out of the free and pure 
 love which He bare towards us. And thus along 
 with the gift of truth would come the accompanying 
 gift of love ; and we should anticipate what is in 
 fact the case, that He our Incarnate Lord, Whom 
 we worship as the highest and absolute Truth, is 
 also the most tender and indeed boundless Charity. 
 It is by combining in Himself Truth and Love so 
 perfectly, that Jesus, from age to age, commands 
 the most intelligent and the most heroic devotion 
 of which man has ever been capable. For when 
 by Faith and Love, and Sacramental Union, a man 
 has not merely stood face to face with Jesus, but 
 has drawn the strength of thought and desire and 
 action from His Invigorating Life, he intuitively per- 
 ceives that there is nothing beyond for which the 
 heart or the understanding need further yearn, since
 
 18 
 
 in Jesus the understanding and the heart are satis- 
 fied. In such a man we may note this striking and 
 characteristic symptom, — that the passion for no- 
 velty, so dominant elsewhere in human life, has 
 ceased, at least to be a ruling power. Where Truth 
 and the King of Truth are as yet unknown, the love of 
 novelty is not merely pardonable, it is a virtue. 
 It is a virtue, because it expresses the fact — that 
 man's real end is an Infinite Being, as his true 
 home is Eternity, and that he cannot so forget 
 his original destiny as to find permanent satisfaction 
 in any thing that is finite and that belongs to time. 
 But those to whom our Living Lord is more than a 
 phantom or a phrase, can echo His Apostle's question 
 from century to century, " Lord, to whom shall we 
 go ? Thou hast the words of Eternal Life?' Think 
 not that true devotion to Christ our Lord is a luxury 
 of the Primitive Church, which can find no lasting 
 home in the midst of our modern civilization. It may 
 be true that mutilated creeds cannot provoke, and 
 that coward hearts cannot understand, such devotion. 
 But wherever the truth is taught in its integrity to 
 hearts that are * honest and good ;' the same phseno- 
 mena of absolute self-devotion will be found to 
 repeat themselves which illustrated so gloriously the 
 first ages and children of the Faith. For Jesus Christ 
 our Lord, in bidding His servants make disciples of 
 all the nations, knew that He had endued human 
 nature with new powers of thought and of action ; 
 He knew that He had raised the beggar from the 
 dust to take a place among the princes of the moral 
 world, and that His command, so impossible to un- 
 regenerate man, would be obeyed within the Church. 
 ' St. John vi. 68.
 
 19 
 
 He has, indeed, made men love Himself: He has 
 made Himself the Object of an intense, tender, 
 passionate devotion to millions who have never seen 
 Him with the eye of flesh : and beneath His Throne, 
 Christians have for eighteen centuries been crying with 
 His Apostle, " Who shall separate us from the Love 
 of Christ^?" For around Him and His work there 
 mantles such a robe of unfailing and ever-youthful 
 beauty, that in His Divine Person, His Human 
 Form, His Words, His world-redeeming Sacrifice, His 
 ceaseless Intercession, His Gift of the Blessed Spirit, 
 His oneness with His people through the Sacraments 
 of His Church, the soul finds that which answers 
 to its highest imaginings no less than to its deepest 
 needs. It finds in Him, as in none else, its rest. 
 And this absolute repose of the soul in the highest 
 Object of truth and of love, does not (as Rationalism 
 would pretend) destroy its intellectual or moral ac- 
 tivity ; it only changes their direction. The forces 
 which were but now employed in the search for Truth, 
 are, when Truth is found, enlisted in its service, and 
 devoted to illustrate and explain and propagate it. 
 Here is the raw material out of which out Lord 
 fashions and carves by His Providences the mission- 
 aries and the martyrs of His Church. And the 
 strong desire to proclaim Him which is inseparable 
 from a true knowledge and love of Jesus, gains a 
 new strength and motive in a contemplation of the 
 nature and destiny of the soul of man. One single 
 soul, one centre of strictly immaterial life, one abyss of 
 being, which once existing never can die, one tenant 
 (it may be) of the most decrepit and unlovely form 
 among the sons of men, yet in itself a capacity for 
 s Rom. viii. 35.
 
 20 
 
 boundless joy or boundless agony, nay more, a being 
 freely moving towards, while absolutely destined to, 
 an eternity of such agony or such joy, — who can 
 contemplate this living fact, which each of us carries 
 about within him, which to each is his inmost self, 
 and which each may measure, in wellnigh its whole 
 significance, by close and honest self-analysis, — who 
 I say can contemplate it, and not gain a new 
 power of living and of working for that Most 
 Merciful Lord, Who has made the contemplation 
 something else than what but for Him it had been — 
 a fearful, a mysterious agony ? For He who said, 
 'What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole 
 world and lose his own soul :' said also, (Blessed be 
 His name !) 'In Me ye might have peace V 
 
 Now the history of the Church is so interesting 
 beyond any annals which merely touch the material or 
 social or political life of man, because it is an 
 unfolding of the forces thus placed at His Own 
 disposal by our Divine Redeemer in their conflict 
 with the errors and selfishness of the race which 
 He came to save. It is a long response to that 
 command which He first. He last. He alone has 
 dared to give, — to give without giving arms and 
 letters and the ordinary weapons of social or political 
 sway — to give with an accent of certainty that He 
 was giving the motto of human history, and that He 
 would be obeyed — Go teach all nations. Certain of 
 of His Doctrine, and certain of His Empire over 
 hearts ; certain of the love, the courage, the patience, 
 the heroism, which would from age to age draw 
 strength from His Passion, and push its self- 
 sacrificing devotion, if need be, even to martyrdom — 
 '' St. Matt. xvi. 26. St. John xvi. 33.
 
 21 
 
 He bade His Disciples Go teach all nations. Fore- 
 seeing that mankind, like a sick but wayward child, 
 would refuse the draught of Truth, and would 
 resent its being protferred ; foreseeing that the 
 intelligence and resolution of the race would be 
 arrayed against Him ; knowing well that the 
 statesmen would resent a doctrine which respected 
 Caesar but which Caesar had not authorized, and 
 that the men of genius would be indignant at a 
 Flash of Thought which owed nothing to their 
 penetration and which condemned it as a blindness, 
 and that the people would not brook a command 
 to break with their time-honoured superstitions, and 
 with their consecrated sensuahties ; foreseeing accu- 
 rately and in all its bearings each step of that long 
 and agonizing struggle which began when Stephen 
 knelt to die beneath the walls of the Holy City, 
 and which although it ceased for a while and in a 
 sense with the world-famed Edict of Milan, yet 
 under new conditions lasts and shall last to the end 
 of time, whenever there is sin and error on the one 
 side, and love and truth on the other — He bade His 
 followers Go teach all nations. And if ever Chris- 
 tians have forgotten the spirit of their Master's Word 
 and the power of His Doctrine, and have invoked 
 the proselytism of the Sceptre or the worse pro- 
 selytism of the Sword ; this has been mainly 
 in dark times, or in diseased and enfeebled 
 Churches. As a rule, in the primitive, in the 
 mediaeval, in the modern period, the Church has 
 trusted herself to the Words of Christ, and has 
 really triumphed just so far as she has done so. 
 Among the many blessings of our modern civil- 
 ization, and the indirect advantages which God's
 
 22 
 
 goodness wins for us even from tlie hostile activity 
 of the intellectual and political influences at work 
 around us, we may reckon this ; — that they force 
 us Christians of the Church to look the terms of 
 our Great Charter more fully in the face, and to 
 entrust the interests which we prize most dearly 
 more and more to those moral and spiritual forces, 
 by which throughout the ages of Christendom the 
 sound of Christian doctrine goes forth into all lands 
 most persuasively, and its words unto the ends of 
 the world. 
 
 Some thoughts such as these will have occurred 
 to us, who are privileged to be witnesses of this 
 solemn scene to-day. There are men who see 
 in a Bishop's Consecration one of those graceful 
 but meaningless proprieties, whereby high office 
 in the Church as in the State is supposed to be 
 recommended to the imagination and respect of 
 the multitude. There are others who indeed see in 
 it a Rehgious Act, but only an act of that character 
 which is inseparable from the self-dedication of 
 any human soul to the highest service of the Truth. 
 Yet surely there is more here than a proffer of 
 service, more even than a solemn acceptance and 
 sanction of one who passes to a place of govern- 
 ment among Christian people. For us, loyal chil- 
 dren of the Church of England, such an event, 
 if the most solemn of its uttered words and trans- 
 acted forms are to be other than an unreality which 
 yet challenges the Eye and the approval of the 
 Most Holy ; for us a Bishop's Consecration is the 
 active assertion of an essential principle of organic 
 Life in the Church of Jesus ; it is an act, which 
 at a period when the Canon of the New Testa-
 
 23 
 
 ment was yet unformed, and for fifteen centuries 
 continuously, was believed by Christendom to be 
 absolutely indispensable to the transmission of 
 Grace and Truth in their entirety, from the 
 Redeemer's Person to the souls of men. And 
 therefore to-day does not merely call up historical 
 associations that tell of God's past mercies towards 
 His Church ; — such as are provoked. My Lord 
 Archbishop, almost inevitably in this place, and by 
 your Grace's presence, since they cluster in a pro- 
 fusion, unrivalled elsewhere in England, around 
 your Throne of Canterbury. Nor may we pause too 
 curiously to speculate upon the providential des- 
 tinies of a See, whose occupant on the one hand 
 might seem to have peculiar opportunities for carry- 
 ing the Knowledge and the Love of Jesus among the 
 fleets and seamen whether of the Tyre or of the Tar- 
 sish of the modern world ; and who on the other may, 
 from his geographical position, be enabled as none 
 else to bind closer the bonds of belief and affection 
 which already unite the English Church to the Church 
 of the nascent Confederacy. Blessed privilege! thus 
 even remotely by encouragement and counsel, to aid 
 in the overthrow of that miserable legacy bequeathed 
 by English rule to England's ancient colonies, and 
 to free the African race from a bondage, which 
 beneath the very shadow of Christ's Emancipating 
 Cross, outrages the rights of our common manhood. 
 But it were presumptuous to dwell on these high 
 yet precarious anticipations ; and duties of another 
 order claim our earnest attention during the solemn 
 moments which will presently follow. If our 
 hearts swell with thankfulness to our Adorable 
 Lord, for this fresh iUustration of the living mission
 
 24 
 
 of His Church, certain of her doctrine and certain 
 of her power to carry it forward ; if with St. Paul, 
 the present scene seems almost to fade from be- 
 fore us, as we lose it in the contemplation of that 
 glorious whole of which it is a real albeit a fractional 
 part — the perpetual Missionary Agency of the 
 Church, radiating like the light of heaven through 
 the countries and the centuries of the world ; — let 
 us at least not forget what is due to him, to 
 whom beyond all others this day all true and 
 Christian hearts will now turn with the homage of 
 a sincere and respectful sympathy. He needs, he 
 asks our most earnest prayers, that that elevation 
 of his to the Chief Pastorate of a Flock of Christ, in 
 which we gratefully own our share in the Church's 
 joy and gain, may not turn to his own or to his 
 Master's loss; and that he may carry forward Christ's 
 true work, by attaining in himself more and more that 
 which is indeed the spirit of predestined Apostles, 
 and the earnest of their victories, — the spirit of 
 freedom — of freedom from all fears save the fear of 
 God, and of freedom from all ambitions save the one 
 legitimate, masterful, life-absorbing desire to be 
 Christ's alone, — His perfectly, — His for ever. 
 
 HAXTEn, PRINTER, OXFORD.
 
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