•T 
 
 f^f 
 
 V 
 
 
 r-
 
 Cl^t l^xtmkrittg of ^mn. 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PKEACHED IN THE 
 
 CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF CHRIST 
 
 IN OXFORD, 
 
 On the Morning of the Second Sunday in Lent, 
 1883. 
 
 " Memento semper finis, et quia perditura 
 non redit tempus." 
 
 OXFORD : 
 
 PRINTED BY E. BAXTEB. 
 1883.
 
 This Sermon is printed only in deference to the 
 wish of some who heard it, and by the encouragement 
 of their hope concerning it. 
 
 Christ Chuech, 
 
 February 20, 1S83.
 
 Psalm xc. 12. 
 
 So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our 
 hearts unto wisdom. 
 
 For most of us, probably, the ninetieth Psalm 
 is already linked with associations which distinguish 
 it from almost every other part of the Psalter. We 
 have heard it under conditions which must make 
 most men alert and sensitive to receive impressions 
 deeply and truthfully : and perhaps its simple, stately 
 rhythm will never lose the echo of the minor chant 
 with which it first fell upon our ears in the Order for 
 the Burial of the Dead. During those few minutes 
 at least our thoughts were almost perforce recalled 
 from that indefinite anticipation of the things of this 
 life in which they are accustomed to stray so freely 
 and confidently : we were beckoned back, as it were, 
 to be reminded of something which we had practically 
 quite forgotten : and were compelled to realize, with 
 the utmost attention of which we were capable, that 
 a life like our own had come to an end ; that the 
 time of trial and choice was over; that the story 
 was written and the book closed and clasped. Beyond, 
 in the mysterious time and place of waiting for the 
 Day of Judgment, there might be, by God's mercy.
 
 a manifold course of growth, of purification, of en- 
 lightening : — but the battle was over : the time in 
 which each day was ordered by the expectation of 
 the next had stopped: this life had been taken out 
 of the dead man's power : he could not get at it 
 now to alter it or to disguise it : it had gone before 
 the Judge. The words that come to us when our 
 thoughts are thus arrested and controlled are almost 
 sure to reach a deeper level of feeling than is ever 
 stirred in the distraction and haste of ordinary life : 
 and there are phrases in the ninetieth Psalm and 
 the twenty-fifth chapter of the First Epistle to the 
 Corinthians which have, perhaps, more often touched 
 the sources of penitence and of action in men's hearts 
 than any other passages in the Bible. 
 
 The OflSce for the Burial of the Dead is very 
 often and very widely praised for the beauty of its 
 structure and for its power of consolation. And it 
 has indeed a skill like that of noble and faultless 
 music to bring order and harmony into the bewilder- 
 ment and tumult of grief: to move over the stormy 
 waters of a passionate sorrow, and allay them to a 
 great calm : to bring men to a temper in which, 
 whether sadness is really more or less, there is at 
 least a stronger element of wisdom and of peace. 
 But when we look beyond this vague and dimly- 
 conscious change, and ask what are the lines of thought 
 through which the Service tries to lead us, we find 
 that they are strangely different from those which 
 most men are apt at such times to choose as the 
 nearest topics of general comfort. They lie utterly 

 
 apart from that tone of indiscriminate optimism and 
 mutual indulgence, that wish to make everything 
 easy to ourselves and others, into w^hich our indolence 
 so often slips : they seem to avoid even the truths 
 vs^hich we should think most obvious and appropriate. 
 There is in the Service comparatively little which 
 helps us to linger upon the thought of God's Eternal 
 and Infinite Love. Nor does it ever encourage us 
 to forget the present and the actual, or liberate the 
 intense feeling of the moment into any hazy imagin- 
 ation of the joys of heaven. It is not the time for us 
 to be forgetting this world in unpractical speculations 
 about the next: the Church will not so trifle with 
 a great occasion of moral and spiritual influence, so 
 endanger the moment of attention which the presence 
 of the dead has won for her in the hearts of the 
 living. The grave cannot praise God, death cannot 
 celebrate Him : the practical eflfect of the Service must 
 be for the living, for those who stand in silent, humble 
 readiness to hear, in the controlling solemnity of that 
 farewell: this is a time for the plain speaking of 
 simple truth : and it is spoken, in the directness 
 of the ninetieth Psalm and the relentless pressure 
 of St. Paul's dilemma : — " The days of our age are 
 threescore years and ten ; and though men be so 
 strong that they come to fourscore years, yet is 
 their strength then but labour and sorrow ; so soon 
 passeth it away, and we are gone." " This I say, 
 that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of 
 God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. 
 The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin
 
 is the law. But thanks be to God Which giveth 
 us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 
 The certainty of death, and the dependence of all 
 hope upon the truth of our Saviour's Resurrection 
 and the merit of His Atonement, — these are the 
 thoughts which are chosen to be associated with the 
 lifelong memory of our sorrow and of our dead. 
 
 The plain duty and common sense of numbering 
 our days needs indeed all the emphasis which it 
 can receive from such associations. The ordinary 
 tenour of our thoughts, the proportion according to 
 which we divide our time and our interest, the 
 careful avoidance of some subjects when we are 
 talking with those much older than ourselves, — these 
 with many other signs betray our natural reluctance 
 to think of this life as coming to an end. And it 
 may be that most of us escape from the certainty 
 of the end into the uncertainty of its exact date : 
 we look at the obscurity which hangs about the 
 close of our days, until we forget that somewhere 
 within that obscurity their close is absolutely sure. 
 The anxiety and solemnity with which we should 
 think of the day or year in which we are to die, 
 could it be positively declared to us, is diffused and 
 attenuated and almost lost among all the years at 
 any point in which the end may come. Those 
 practical inferences with regard to the use of our 
 time and the value of our opportunities, which might 
 come from realizing that our days are numbered, 
 seem to lose point and force when we can say that 
 their number is wholly hidden from our knowledge.
 
 But there is another and a very real sense in which 
 the meaning of the text is from time to time borne 
 in upon us all, without the possibility of any such 
 escape into the uncertainty of the future, — a sense 
 in which we can often number our days quite 
 definitely, and feel, beyond the possibility of self- 
 deception, how the close of life bears upon its use 
 and worth. For by the Providence of God our course 
 through this world is divided into many stages ; the 
 indefinite time of our probation has its distinct and 
 definite periods, each with its allotted opportunities, 
 endowments, and responsibilities ; each coming at last 
 to its appointed close. When childhood ended, 
 when all its blessings and privileges, used or abused, 
 were done with, then boyhood opened before us ; 
 and we could number its days. We could foresee 
 the very year in which its peculiar occasions of serving 
 God Almighty, of doing good, of growing in know- 
 ledge and strength and holiness, would be irrevocably 
 gone. We knew the date by which, if ever, our 
 proper work in it must be done and our choice made. 
 And now those numbered days are ended, even as it 
 were a tale that is told : the incomparable influence 
 which belongs to the later years of school-life, that 
 vast and delicate power of affecting the thoughts and 
 lives of others, that great range of example, we have 
 done with them all : for good or evil, for God or 
 for Satan, we have finished and yielded up that 
 period of our probation : we cannot touch or mend 
 it now : it has gone from us : it is with the Judge. 
 And at its close another stage began, — the stage
 
 8 
 
 through which most of you, brethren, are passing now ; 
 the three or four years of Undergraduate life. And 
 these also have their own irrevocable opportunities 
 of good and evil, — opportunities of self-discipline, 
 of moral and intellectual preparation for an honour- 
 able and effective life : above all, opportunities of 
 raising or lowering the tone of a society most sen- 
 sitive to the force of example, most difficult to 
 touch in any other way ; opportunities in every 
 day of helping or discouraging some one in his silent 
 effort or hidden longing after purity and holiness. 
 It is easy to miss the opportunity : and every 
 time you let it pass unused, you are strangely less 
 likely to see it when it returns : you may not know 
 at all, those who watch the place year after year but 
 hardly and seldom know, God only always knows, 
 the power of each single life that is lived here 
 according to the Faith of Christ : but you can number 
 the days of your probation here : you know very 
 nearly when this stage too will be beyond your 
 reach ; when all its privileges and occasions, all that 
 was given to you to be used here, all that God 
 was willing to let you do in Christ Church, will 
 be put away, with the record of what you were 
 and what you did in childhood and at school ; when 
 you will not be able ever to get at one trust that 
 you have neglected, one gift that you have abused, 
 one life that you have misled. And so will it be, 
 so is it with us all, even to that great end which 
 is but faintly rehearsed as each period sinks from 
 us into the inaccessible past. Time after time
 
 Almighty God gives us a work to do ; and we can 
 number the days in which it must be done or spurned. 
 He brings us into contact with one group after another 
 of our fellow-men ; and we can number the days 
 during which we can uplift, neglect, or mar their 
 thoughts and lives. From stage to stage He leads 
 us on : and every stage has its irrecoverable powers 
 and opportunities of good : " pereunt et imputantur : " 
 the numbered days are gone at last, and all the 
 means of doing those days' work are dead and buried : 
 and we are one stage nearer to that end which seemed 
 so distant and uncertain, but which now, perhaps, 
 is clearer to us than it was : that end when all our 
 days are gone : that night which surely cometh, and 
 in which no man can work. 
 
 Nor is it only the end of this life which is rehearsed 
 for each one of us as its several periods pass beyond 
 recall. There is also surely at such pauses in our 
 probation a rehearsal, an anticipation of that which 
 lies beyond the day of death — a forecast of the 
 great Act of Judgment. At such times as I have 
 described, we are, whether we will or no, brought 
 to an account: we are put on our trial: we have to 
 face a verdict on our work. We can hardly help 
 indeed being arraigned by our own conscience : it is 
 almost inevitable that as the numbered days are taken 
 from us we should recall their sins and offences, 
 their waste and folly, their miserable vanities and 
 omissions. But we are not left to judge ourselves. 
 Even here we are arraigned before a truer court. 
 We are tried by the requirements of a new position.
 
 10 
 
 We are confronted with the needs, the duties, the 
 responsibilities, for which in the bygone stage and 
 by its buried privileges we should have been pre- 
 paring ourselves. The knowledge, the experience, 
 the self-control, the strength, the faith which we 
 might have won in the years that are past, are pre- 
 sumed and demanded from us in the stage on which 
 we enter next : " Of course," it is implied to us, 
 "you are ready for your work in life: you have 
 had admirable opportunities, plenty of time, advan- 
 tages denied to many : here is the field in which 
 to use all that you have gathered, all that you bring 
 with you from the past." And we must answer 
 something : the work is there before us : we are 
 men now: we cannot ask for more time, for much 
 indulgence : we cannot think of going back to try 
 to make a better use of that which is utterly gone 
 from us : whatever we are to do must be done 
 with what we have : and it may well be that, as we 
 look at our one poor unproductive talent, there may 
 begin to sound in our ears some warning of that 
 aweful sentence : " Thou wicked and slothful servant, 
 thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and 
 gather where I have not strawed. Take the talent 
 from him, and give it unto him that hath ten talents. 
 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer 
 darkness." 
 
 No, not so, O Lord ! It need not be so, brethren : 
 for it is not only the end of this life, nor only the 
 Judgment that is to come, which we can thus rehearse 
 as the numbered days of each stage in our probation
 
 11 
 
 take away with them their wasted and misused pc- 
 casions. There is another thought which we may 
 take at such a time from the merciful words of 
 Christian burial : another point of likeness between 
 the close of every period in this life and the great 
 close of all : another truth which only makes it 
 tolerable for sinful men to look back over the years 
 that are past. " The sting of death is sin, and the 
 strength of sin is the law ; but thanks be to God Which 
 giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 
 As one by one the opportunities of this life pass, like 
 the dead, beyond the touch of our hands, beyond 
 the sight of our eyes, we may, thank God, anticipate, 
 and in some measure realize, not only what it will 
 be to have done with this life altogether ; not only 
 what it will be to stand before the throne of the 
 All-seeing Judge, and to recognise all our secret sins 
 set in the Light of His Countenance ; but also what 
 it may be to see the merit of our Saviour's willing 
 Death, and the infinite strength of His Redeeming 
 Love thrust utterly away the dark record which we 
 dare not read : and, as we hardly pray, " O turn 
 Thy Face from my sins, and put out all my misdeeds : 
 cast me not away from Thy Presence, and take not 
 Thy Holy Spirit from me : " to know ourselves 
 accepted once again in the Beloved, and to hear 
 the Voice of Him that sitteth upon the throne saying, 
 " Behold, I make all things new." Yes, at every 
 change in our life, at every pause in our career, we 
 may forestall that final victory of the Love of God. 
 When we could only turn discouraged and unready
 
 12 
 
 from the things that are behind, sick at heart with 
 the experience of all our failures, and the thought 
 of all that we have missed or marred, then in the 
 moment of our weakness is His Strength made perfect ; 
 and, by that miracle which brings to Christianity at 
 once its most scornful critics, and the most unswerving 
 love that human hearts can give, by the great miracle of 
 our pardon because He has died, we can — through peni- 
 tence and faith, in utter, thankful self-distrust — begin 
 again. For "since by man came death, by Man came 
 also the resurrection from the dead." We need not 
 fear to seek from Him the gift He died to win for us, 
 if only we will strive henceforward to apply our hearts 
 unto Him, Who, being indeed the Uncreated Wisdom, 
 took upon Him our nature and was crucified for us. 
 We may never be what once we might have been — 
 means of grace, powers of work, sources of strength 
 which once lay ready to our hands, may bfe lost to us now, 
 never to be regained in this world ; but we shall still 
 find work to do, and strength and skill and grace 
 to do it, if, as we turn to the days that lie before 
 us, we feel that the failures of the past have taught us 
 to say as we never said before, " The life that I now 
 live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, 
 Who loved me and gave Himself for me : " 
 
 To Whom, with the Father and the Holy Ghost, be 
 all honour and glory, might, majesty, dominion, and 
 power, now, henceforth, and for evermore. Amen. 
 
 BAXTER, PRINTER, OXFORD.