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 OR, THE DUTY OF THE CLERGY AS TEACHERS OF THE PEOPLE, WITH 
 
 PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE RECENT JUDGMENT 
 
 IS THE CASE OF "ESSAYS AND REVIEWS." 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PREACHED IN 
 
 'J'HE ABBP]Y CHURCH OF ST. MARY, SHERBORNE, 
 
 ON THE 
 SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT, FEB. 21, 1864, 
 
 AT THE GENERAL ORDINATION OF THE 
 
 LORD BISHOP OF SALISBURY. 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY PARRY LIDDON, M.A. 
 
 STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH ; ONE OF THE SELECT PEEACHEBS AT OXTOED 
 AND EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD BISHOP OF SALISBURY. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY BEQUEST. 
 
 SECOND EDITION, REVISED. 
 
 OXFORD & LONDON, 
 RIVINGTONS : 
 
 OXFORD, 
 JOHN HENRY AND JAMES TARKER. 
 
 1864.
 
 BAXTER, PRINTBB, OXTORD.
 
 TO THE REVEEEND THE CLERGY 
 ORDAINED AT THE ABBEY CHURCH OF SHERBORNE, ON THE 
 SECOND SUNDAY IN LENT, 1864, THIS SERMON, PUBLISHED AT 
 THEIR REQUEST, IS DEDICATED WITH SINCERE AFFECTION 
 AND RESPECT BY THEIR BROTHER AND SERVANT IN JESUS 
 CHRIST.
 
 '\ 
 
 U«JC 
 
 \^J
 
 Cj)^ Wil^ok €oxxnBd d 60ir. 
 
 ACTS XX. 27. 
 
 I HAVE NOT SHUNNED TO DECLAKE UNTO YOU THE WHOLE COUNSEL 
 
 OF God. 
 
 HERE is one of those passages in the New Testa- 
 ment, which make a forcible and direct appeal 
 to the heart and conscience of every man who has 
 undertaken or is undertaking to serve God in Holy 
 Orders. The words occur in that parting charge to 
 the Presbyters of the Church of Ephesus, which on the 
 eve of his going up to Jerusalem, at the close of what 
 is termed his third Missionary journey, the great 
 Apostle delivered on the strand at Miletus. They 
 are such words as escape men at the turning points 
 of life, at entering upon or taking leave of great 
 responsibilities — compressed, fervid utterances of the 
 deepest thought and of the strongest currents of 
 feeling — of thought and feeling which for the 
 moment will not be pent up and restrained within 
 the barriers of ordinary habit, or of studied reserve. 
 Even a saint may, nay, at certain times, he must 
 speak of himself: and so the great Apostle glances 
 hastily at the labours and sufferings which had marked 
 his sojourn at Ephesus ^ Then he points anxiously 
 to the lowering future : he tells his hearers the pre- 
 cise limits of his supernatural knowledge. The exact 
 a vers. 18—21. 
 B
 
 2 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 form of each of the many trials before him he did not 
 know ; but he knew generally, that in every city 
 bonds and afflictions awaited him, and in parti- 
 cular, that he and they to whom he spake would 
 meet again in this world no more^ Under the 
 pressing urgency of this conviction, he predicts 
 the coming sorrows of the Church of Ephesus — the 
 Church indeed of St. Timothy and of St. John, but 
 also the Church of men who denied the central truth 
 of the Resurrection *" ; the Church of Hymen^eus, and 
 Philetus and Alexander ; the Church of the Nico- 
 laitans, whose morals were hateful (we are told in 
 the Apocalypse) to the Lord Jesus'' ; the Church, 
 as it might seem from St. John's first Epistle, 
 of some of the earliest heretics, who denied the real 
 Union of Godhead and Manhood in our Lord and 
 Saviour % Indeed, only a few years later, we see in 
 the two Epistles to Timothy the clear traces of an 
 organized opposition to Christian truth at Ephesus, 
 so formidable in its various intellectual activities, 
 that the stern energy of the Apostle's language in 
 the speech before us is only understood when read 
 by the light of a struggle, unlike to, and in some 
 respects more serious than, any other within the 
 limits of the Apostolical Age. 
 
 Casting his eye over this troubled future, St. Paul 
 utters a prophecy of mournful solemnity. ' 1 know 
 this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves 
 enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of 
 your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse 
 things to draw away disciples after themV He 
 
 »■ vers. 2-2. '-iy. <= 1 Tim. i. 20. 2 Tim. ii. 17, 18. 
 
 d Rev. ii. 6. ' 1 St. .Tolin iv 2, 3. ' Acts xx. 29, 30.
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 3 
 
 exhorts them to watch : he commends them tenderly 
 to God : but he also recalls to them the full mea- 
 sure of then' personal responsibility. His ministry 
 had put them in entire possession of the truth as it 
 had come from heaven : and, if they fell into the 
 snares which lay thick around their future path, they 
 could not, when facing the knowledge and the 
 justice of God, attempt to shelter themselves under 
 the plea of ignorance. ' 1 take you to record this 
 day, that I am pure from the blood of all men. For 
 I have not shunned to declare unto you, all the 
 counsel of God^.' 
 
 The whole counsel of God ! Such is the Apostle's 
 expression for that fixed body of Truth, which we of 
 this day name more commonly the Gospel, the Revela- 
 tion of Christ, the Faith of Christians. St. Paul says, 
 that he had declared the whole mind — that is, the 
 whole revealed mind — of God. Observe, of God. His 
 language excludes that conception of rehgious truth 
 which makes it merely the product of the truest, purest, 
 deepest thoughts of the highest and largest minds 
 among the sons of men. " Flesh and blood" had 
 not revealed to St. Peter the dignity and the claims 
 of Jesus \ "Flesh and blood" added nothing to that 
 Revelation of His Son which the Eternal Father had 
 made to the soul of St. Paul'. Resting on a Divine 
 Authority, and being human only so far as was 
 necessary, if it was to close with the intellect and 
 the heart of man, — human in its condescensions and 
 human in its sympathy, but in its truth and essence 
 Divine — the Gospel was for St. Paul unlike any other 
 object-matter that entered into his thought. It was 
 e vers. 26, 27. •■ S. Matt. xvi. 17. * Gal. i. 16. 
 
 b2
 
 ^ THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 sundered by a broad line of demarcation from all else 
 that seemed like it on this side or on that ; it did 
 not shade off into any either of the higher philo- 
 sophies or of the less sensual idolatries, of the time. 
 So absolutely and exclusively true did he deem this 
 Gospel-truth to be, that could an Angel from heaven 
 have been conceived as preaching any other, the 
 Apostle would unhesitatingly have held him " ac- 
 cursed''." 
 
 The whole counsel of God ! It was God's word, 
 not man's ; it was neither the result of a thoughtful 
 speculation, nor yet an approximative guess, nor yet 
 a cunningly devised fable. Being God's word, it 
 was as a zahole worthy of the best thought and 
 love that His creature could give it. That mi- 
 nistry of three months in the great Ephesian syna- 
 gogue ', and then the two years which followed 
 of laborious teaching in the School of the Rheto- 
 rician Tyrannus"', and last, but not least, the wide 
 publicity, the general attention", and the active 
 hatred of heathen foes which culminated in the 
 Riot of the Amphitheatre", had enabled the Apostle 
 to put forward the Gospel, the whole area of its 
 Doctrine, the many sides on which it attracted, and 
 awed, and subdued the soul of man — in unabridged 
 unmutilated completeness. 'All they which dwelt 
 in Asia (i. e. Asia Minor) heard the word of the 
 Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks.' 
 
 This solemn and momentous day, may be the very 
 crisis of their destiny to those of us who are waiting 
 to receive a Commision from heaven, at the Altar 
 
 ■■ Gal. i. 8. ' Acts xix. 8. "' Acts xix. 9. 
 
 " Acts xix. 10. 17. 20. <> Acts xix. 23—41.
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. if 
 
 of this noble Minster. And the words of the Apostle 
 may serve us well, as a guide to our thoughts, 
 our aspirations, our resolves. These time-honoured 
 walls cannot but recall to a stranger some of the most 
 cherished memories of the Anglo-Saxon Church p; 
 while in their renewed beauty they speak not less 
 persuasively of the renovated life of the modern 
 Church of England. Can we forget to-day that 
 wellnigh eight centuries have passed since here at 
 Sherborne the Commission of Christ was handed on 
 by a predecessor of our Chief Pastor to those who 
 in the early ages of our national history sought to 
 serve God within the precincts of the Sanctuary ? 
 How vast, we feel, is the life of a Church, when 
 contrasted with the fleeting existence of her mem- 
 bers : yet how insignificant, when we place it side by 
 side with the Being of her Everlasting Lord ! His 
 Person, His Word, the Laws of His Kingdom and 
 of His Service, the results of His doctrine upon the 
 soul of man, are at this hour what they were at the 
 first, what they will be to the end of time. And 
 if instead of losing ourselves in vague reflection, 
 we would give a practical turn to our (it may be) 
 somewhat eager tide of thought and feeling, let us 
 fix our attention on this primal, this simple duty of 
 an ordained man — the declaration of the whole 
 counsel of God. When St. Paul asserts that he has 
 not " shimned" to declare it, the English word, and 
 yet more strongly*^ the original for which it stands, 
 
 p Cf. Handbook to the Abbey Church of St. Mary Sherborne, 
 by the Rev, E. Harston, pp. 32—38. 
 
 •J vTr((rreikdfi7]v, cf. Meyer in loc. Dr. Wordsworth sees in it a 
 nautical metaphor, which might have been suggested by the 
 scene before the speaker.
 
 6 THE WllOLK COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 must remind us that there are many motives and 
 hindrances calculated to keep a man back from 
 doing that which must be done, if he fears his 
 God, if he cares for his own soul, if he has any true 
 love for the souls of those to whom of his own 
 free will he undertakes to minister. 
 
 1. Now one cause of failure in this primary duty 
 would seem to lie in a lack of religious knowledge. 
 It is much more easy to be deficient in essential 
 knowledge of religious truth than we are apt to 
 assume. 1 do not contemplate the extreme case of 
 ignorance, whether this or that doctrine does or 
 does not lie within the limits of Revealed Truth. 
 For it would be simply immoral in a Christian 
 Teacher not to have learnt the frontier and out- 
 line of that sacred deposit of the Faith which 
 our Lord and Saviour has committed to His 
 Church to hold fast and to hand on to the end 
 of time. But far short of this extreme short- 
 coming, may we not too easily acquiesce in an 
 ignorance w-hich is scarcely less fatal to souls ? 
 May we not lapse into a habit of thinking and 
 speaking of the doctrines of the Gospel, as if they 
 were Hke soldiers in a regiment, — so many units, 
 each adding something no doubt to the collective 
 bulk and area of Doctrine, while yet in no way 
 essential to its organic completeness, and therefore 
 each capable of being withdrawn, without inflicting 
 any more serious injury upon the entire truth than 
 that of diminished size ? Do we not hear persons 
 talk of the articles of the Creed in this way, — as if 
 each article was a perfectly separate and new 
 truth, — as if each was, I might almost say, a
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 7 
 
 new and gratuitous infliction upon the reluctant 
 intellect of man, — as if each was round and perfect 
 in itself, and had no relations whatever to any truth 
 beyond it ? 
 
 Yet what does such language really prove but 
 defective knowledge in those (be they who they 
 may) who use it? They '^know" the doctrines of 
 the faith only as so many separate propositions. Of 
 the Great Whole, which lies beyond the words, 
 and the several sides of which the words do at 
 best but imperfectly represent, — of the Body and 
 Substance of the Faith, they know little or nothing. 
 They fail to perceive the connexion, the inter- 
 dependence, the organic unity of all truth that 
 rests on the authority of God. Their view is too 
 superficial to enable them to do justice to that 
 marvellous adjustment of truth to truth, of faculty 
 to object, of result to cause, which is a direct and 
 obvious perception to souls who gaze prayerfully 
 and steadily at the complete Revelation of Christ. 
 These really shortsighted persons do not miss a 
 revealed doctrine which is withdrawn ; nor are they 
 offended when a human speculation is elevated to co- 
 ordinate rank with the certainties of Faith. It seems 
 to them to be merely a question between more or 
 less belief ; between a larger or a smaller creed ; 
 between, as they would speak, a greater or a less 
 number of dogmas. But in reality, each truth, 
 touches, implies, has relations to, truths right and 
 left of it ; and these relations are so intimate and so 
 vital, that no truth can be withdrawn, and leave con- 
 terminous truths intact. The Faith is, if I may say 
 so with reverence, so marvellously compacted, so in-
 
 O THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 stinct with a pervading life, as to resemble a natural 
 organism, 1 had almost said a living creature. Just 
 as St. James says of the moral law, that he who 
 offends in one point is guilty of all'', because of 
 the unity of the impaired principle ; and as St. Paul 
 teaches, that in the body of the Church, if one 
 limb or member suffer, all the members suffer with 
 it', in virtue of an internal and necessary sympathy; 
 so in the Creed, no one truth can be misrepresented, 
 strained, dislocated, much less withdrawn, without 
 a certain, and frequently an ascertainable injury 
 resulting to other truths which are supposed to be 
 still unquestioned and intact. For there are nerves 
 and arteries which link the very extremities of 
 Revealed Doctrine to its brain and heart ; and the 
 wound which a strain or an amputation may inflict, 
 must in its effects extend far beyond the particular 
 doctrine which is the immediate seat and scene 
 of the injury. 
 
 This powder of perceiving and exhibiting the deeper 
 internal relations and grounds of Christian Doctrine 
 might seem to correspond to that " word of know- 
 ledge " (Aoyoy yvwcrecos,^ which in his catalogue of 
 the gifts of the Spirit St. Paul distinguishes from 
 the " word of wisdom " (Xoyos crocpia^) — the faculty 
 of stating the truths and mysteries of the faith in 
 clear and precise language \ It is to be won 
 
 1 St. James ii. 10. ^ i Cor. xii. 26, 27. 
 
 ' cro0/a namlich ist die hohere christlicbe Weislieit (1 Cor. ii. 6.) 
 an und fiir sich, so dass Rede, welche die Lehrstiicke (Mysterien) 
 derselben ausspricht klar macht, anwendet, u. s. w., Xoyos a-ocpias 
 ist. Damit ist aber die tiefdringende erkenntniss dieser Lebr- 
 stiicke, die speculative Erfassung und Einsicht und Verarbeitung 
 ihres Zusammenhangs, ibier Griinde, ihrer tiefern Ideen, ibier
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 partly by the culture and exercise of the sanctified 
 intellect in study, partly, nay rather specially, by 
 prayer for illumination and a habit of meditation 
 on Scripture and the Creeds. There are eminent 
 exercises of this gift within the limits of inspiration. 
 St. Paul's demonstration of the fatal antagonism of 
 the practice of circumcision to true belief in our 
 Lord's redemptive work, in the Epistle to the 
 Galatians, will naturally occur to us. Of uninspired 
 instances I may refer to that masterly and well- 
 known account of the connexion between the 
 doctrine of the Sacraments and the doctrine of 
 the Incarnation, which the English Church owes 
 to the mind, and which she studies in the language 
 of the great Hooker. 
 
 When a man possesses this gift of knowledge — 
 of 'knowledge' in the technical sense of St. Paul — 
 he will teach the whole truth not by an effort or 
 mechanically, but in virtue of an instinct. He will 
 be carried forward, from principle to application, 
 fi-om centre to circumference, from the heart and 
 brain of doctrine to its utmost extremities ; because 
 he sees, he cannot but see, its evident, its organic 
 unity ; because to mutilate it would be to him 
 scarcely any thing short of a moral and intellec- 
 tual agony. A living faith, informed by study, 
 and quickened and stimulated by prayer, can 
 hardly be guilty of accidental, never of culpable 
 reticence ; it cannot but * declare the whole counsel 
 of God.' 
 
 Beweise, ihrer Zielc, u. s. w. noch nicht gesetzt; eine Rede 
 aber, welche sich damit beschaftiget, ist Adyos yvwa-ecos. Meyer in 
 1 Cor. xii. 8.
 
 10 Tin; WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 2. A second hindrance is lack of courage. To 
 speak for God to man, — for the just and holy God 
 to man sinful and wilful in his sin — requires nerve 
 and courage. To represent God as He is — as just 
 no less than merciful, as punishing sin no less 
 certainly than rewarding faith and holiness — this, 
 to be done well and honestly, requires courage. 
 Moses before Pharaoh, Samuel before Saul, Micaiah 
 before Ahab, Jeremiah before the Princes of Judah, 
 St. John the Baptist before Herod Antipas, St. 
 Stephen before the Sanhedrim, St. Paul before Felix 
 and Agrippa, and (in a sense altogether peculiar, and 
 unrivalled,) Our Divine Lord before the Jewish Priest 
 and the Roman Magistrate — these represent the 
 attitude and the fortunes of truth at the bar of 
 human nature. Human nature indeed is wretched, 
 and it craves for comfort — that, my clerical brethren, 
 that is our opportunity' ; but it is also proud, and it 
 resents humiliations, aye and it is strong, and likely, 
 in its own fashion and way, to express its roused re- 
 sentment. Of old they understood this well, who 
 went forth uplifting the cross, while yet baring their 
 breasts to death. They knew that the patient to 
 whom they were carrying the medicine that would 
 cure him would often refuse the draught, and would 
 punish the physician who dared to offer it. But 
 they loved man, and they loved and feared their 
 God too sincerely and too well, to infuse new 
 ingredients, or to withdraw any of the bitter but 
 needful elements of cure. They accepted civil and 
 social proscription ; they endured moral and physical 
 agony ; they embraced, one after another, with 
 ' 2 Cor. i. 4.
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 11 
 
 cheerful hearts, the very warrants and instruments of 
 their death, — because they had counted the cost, and 
 had measured too well the greatness of their task, and 
 the glories of their anticipated eternity, to shrink 
 sensitively back at the first symptoms of opposition, 
 or of difficulty. St. Paul might have foreseen the 
 conduct of Demetrius, and the tumult in the amphi- 
 theatre ; but this was no serious reason for considering 
 the worship of Diana as a sort of modified or im- 
 perfect revelation, or as any thing short of a hateful 
 he". He did not shrink from declaring the whole 
 counsel of God. 
 
 If I yet feared men, says the Apostle, I should 
 not be the servant of Christ \ The man who is 
 not in very deed emancipated from bondage to 
 any human fear, cannot do justice either to the 
 needs of his fellow-men or to the Rights of God. 
 He cannot be loyal to Truth. There are petty 
 oppositions, petty persecutions, indirect yet power- 
 ful influences, which will stay a man's hand, and 
 silence his tongue, even in this age and land of civil 
 freedom ; unless his conscience be quick and his 
 will strong, through a constant sight of One Who 
 is the Lord and the Subject of that Truth which 
 He proclaims. He will abridge, soften down, muti- 
 late his message, unless he have penetrated the 
 certainty that the fear of man bringeth a snare ^ — 
 
 " St. Paul's speech at Athens recognizes that element of 
 natural Religion whicli is at the bottom of all superstitions 
 however debased. What the Apostle really thought of the 
 Paganism of the Ancient World as a whole, is best understood 
 from such passages as Rom. i. 23 — 3'2. 
 
 ^ Gal. i. 10. ^ Prov. xxix. 25.
 
 12 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 to all indeed who would serve God in sincerity of 
 purpose, — to none, with such fatal and destructive 
 results, as to the man who undertakes to serve 
 Him in the Christian Priesthood. 
 
 3. The want of spirituality of heart and soul is 
 a third cause of defective representation of doctrine. 
 To speak for God to the souls of men, a man must 
 himself, in his inmost soul, have consciously stood 
 face to face with that truth of which he speaks^. 
 He nmst speak of God as one who has known at 
 once His dread awefulness and His tender love; 
 of sin, as that which he feels to be the one master- 
 evil, and with which as such he has struggled in 
 good truth within his secret self; of C/irist, His 
 Person, His propitiatory and atoning Death, His 
 life-giving Sacraments, as of the Person and Acts 
 of a dear Friend, loved with the heart's warmest 
 and best affection, which yet adored with the deepest 
 homage and by the chiefest powers of his prostrate 
 spirit; — of Eter/iitij as of that for which he is himself 
 making daily solemn preparation ; — of prai/er, and 
 the care of conscience and the culture of purity and 
 truth within, as of things of which he knows some- 
 thing by trial and exercise, perhaps even something 
 more by failure. Himself a redeemed sinner speaking 
 to sinners who need or who have found their Re- 
 deemer, he will speak in earnest. The issues of 
 endless life or endless death may hang upon his 
 words ; but his strength must lie in the profound 
 conviction that he is but the instrument and organ 
 of One Whose livery he wears before the eyes of 
 men, and without whom he can do nothing. 
 
 1 St. John i. 1 — 3.
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 13 
 
 Christian Preaching may be defined either as Speak- 
 ing for God, or as Speaking to souls: but whichever 
 definition a man keeps most prominently before him, 
 he must aim in the pulpit at making a spiritual 
 as distinct from a merely literary effort. Above 
 him is the Father of Spirits, dwelling in light which 
 no man can approach unto. Before him is the 
 human soul, strong, subtle, intricate, with untold 
 capabilities for good and evil, for joy and agony. 
 Surely he cannot but keep close to those great 
 truths which warm the heart and nerve the will, 
 and raise the whole spiritual being from sin to 
 holiness, from death to life, from the miseries and 
 degradations of mere nature to the sanctities and 
 magnificence of grace. But if the preacher should 
 himself stand outside the spiritual life ; if prayer, 
 communion with God, discipline of the will, culture 
 of the affections, — if these things should seem to 
 him but an extravagance or a fanaticism, and if the 
 Faith of the Church be only lodged in his under- 
 standing, as an important fact in the history of 
 opinion, or as the bare result of an arithmetical 
 calculation ; then it is not difficult to see how he 
 will presently fail, as a matter of course, to declare 
 the whole counsel of God. His thought will drift 
 naturally away from the central and most solemn 
 truths to the literary embellishments which surround 
 the faith ; he will toy with questions of geography, 
 or history, or custom, or scene, or dress ; he will 
 reproduce with vivid power the personages and 
 events of long-past ages, it may be with the talent 
 of a master-artist ; he will give to the human 
 side of Religion the best of his time and of his 
 toil. In doing this he may, after the world's measure.
 
 14 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 be doing good work ; but let us not deceive ourselves 
 — he will not be saving souls. Souls are saved 
 by men who themselves count all things but dung 
 that they may win Christ, and be found in Him'' ; 
 and who, even it' they be men of refined taste and 
 of cultivated intellect, know well how to subordinate 
 the embellishments of Truth to its vital and soul- 
 subduing certainties. Especially if a man should 
 take refuge in the literary aspects of Scripture, 
 because he is not sufficiently assured of its leading 
 truths to reproduce them with the accent — the 
 accent which the people understand so perfectly — 
 of simple unfaltering conviction ; then the contrast 
 between his graceful but relatively useless disqui- 
 sitions, and the glorious Creed of the Church of 
 God — which in its integrity alone responds to the 
 profound yearnings of the soul — will be painful in 
 proportion to the opportunities which he has missed, 
 and to the powers which he has abused. 
 
 4. Once more ; here, as in the whole field of 
 ministerial labour, let a man work and pray for the 
 grace of an unselfish spirit. Let him endeavour to 
 strangle the love of self by the love of God and the 
 love of man. For without charity, though a man 
 should speak with the tongues of men or of angels, 
 he will do nought for the real good of his hearers, 
 or for the glory of his Lord. Selfishness will spoil 
 everything. How often are not we, the Representa- 
 tives of Christ, constrained to rebuke ourselves, hum- 
 ble ourselves, condemn ourselves, by the words which 
 we speak from the Chair of Truth ! Some there 
 have been who have yielded to the fatal temptation 
 of being, what they call, consistent. They tone down 
 ^ Phil. iii. 8.
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 God's message to the miserable level of their own felt 
 shortcomings. They make of the Gospel a Gospel 
 of acquiescence in sin, rather than a Gospel of re- 
 demption from it ; they profess to see in it a 
 patronage of the flesh, and a recognition of the 
 world, 1 had almost said, a co-partnership with the 
 Evil One. Alas ! who can doubt, that unless 
 a man can speak, in simple sincerity, as for Christ 
 and from Christ, — careless though his words should 
 only reach his people at the manifest expense, nay, 
 through the deep humilation, the self-inflicted, self- 
 adjudged penance of their Minister — it must needs 
 go hard with him hereafter in the day of account. 
 Better it surely were never to speak at all, than 
 to make the Lord of Purity and Light a seeming 
 accomplice in the crime and darkness of His creature! 
 far better were silence than the advocacy of an im- 
 poverished — a mutilated — a false Gospel — a Gospel 
 robbed of all that is mysterious, awful, supernatural, 
 divine ; because forsooth, to preach the perfect Truth 
 which came from heaven is unbecoming for one who 
 lives, and who feels that he lives, as if it were not true! 
 Even the double-hearted prophet, who knew that he 
 had much to win by falsehood, could not but tell the 
 Pagan King, who would fain have subsidized his in- 
 spirations, ' Whatsoever the Lord telleth me, that will 
 I speak V And can we, beneath the Cross of Christ, 
 so pander to self, as to " handle the word of God 
 deceitfully ?" Dare we say less than what we know 
 to be Truth, because we know also that Truth in its 
 fulness would be our condemnation ? 
 
 Or take another illustration of the need of an 
 miselfish spirit. It is possible, nay probable, that 
 
 •1 Numb. xxii. 38; xxiii. 12. 20; xxiv. 13.
 
 16 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 we may liave what are called favorite doctrines, 
 sections or sides of Truth through which God has 
 in a special sense spoken to us, moved us, sancti- 
 fied us, (as we trust) saved us. Of these, no doubt 
 we can speak with more power, because with 
 more intimate perception of their bearing on the 
 secret springs of life and death. But we also 
 speak of such points with less of moral and 
 intellectual effort than of others ; and this greater 
 facility is likely to be the real cause of our giving 
 them an undue prominence in our cycle of teaching, 
 while we endeavour to whisper to our consciences, 
 and to persuade our friends, that these points are the 
 essentials of the Gospel, and that all the rest is com- 
 paratively unnecessary. Thus men teach the Atone- 
 ment, and ignore the Sacraments ; or they teach the 
 need of faith, and ignore the need of love and holiness ; 
 or they teach the beauty of our Lord's character, 
 and forget His Propitiatory and Sacrificial Death ; 
 or conversely, they insist upon the outward duties 
 of religion, and do scant justice to the spiritual and 
 internal forces of the soul. We must teach all that 
 God has revealed, because He has revealed it, 
 leaving it to Him to touch one soul by this, 
 and another soul by that portion of His Revela- 
 tion. Even within the limits of inspiration, St. Paul 
 preached faith, and St. John love, and St. James 
 practical energy, each giving prominence, (but no- 
 thing more) to these several sides of the Christian 
 life, while yet each preached it as a whole. No 
 man of modesty and thoughtfulness would make 
 the narrow circle of experiences that have passed 
 within his own soul, the absolute standard of the 
 truths and powers which may act on others : and
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 17 
 
 no duty is more difficult or more serious than that 
 of detaching ourselves from the influence of ''fa- 
 vorite doctrines," and, as far as may be, teaching 
 the whole truth in its integrity to all to whom we 
 owe it, as the gift of God. And the Proper Lessons 
 and Epistles and Gospels of the Church Service, 
 enable us to correct our natural tendency towards a 
 choice of texts and subjects which fall within our own 
 more contracted area of thought and feeling : so that 
 in making it a rule always to preach from the Ser- 
 vices of the Day, or at least on a subject suggested 
 by the season, we make provision against one of 
 the chief temptations to teach something less than 
 the whole counsel of God. Nothing, however, but 
 a spirit of genuine self-sacrifice, nothing but a 
 true love of the souls of men, can enable a man so 
 to forego his own predilections, so to throw himself 
 into the state of mind, and points of view, and 
 peculiar difficulties, and narrower or broader horizons 
 of his hearers, as to lose himself, and the little 
 history of his own spirit, in the mighty work of 
 proclaiming in its perfectness the Truth of God. 
 We know how the great Apostle combined this 
 perfect consideration for others, with an unflinching, 
 chivalrous loyalty to the claims of Truth. ''Though 
 I be free from all men, yet have I made myself 
 servant unto all, that I might gain the more. And 
 unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain 
 the Jews ; to them that are under the Law as under 
 the Law, that I might gain them that are under 
 the Law ; to them that are without law, as without 
 law, (being not without law to God, but under the 
 law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are 
 
 c
 
 18 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 without law ; to the weak became I as weak, that 
 I might gain the weak ; I am made all things to all 
 men, that I might by all means save some*." How 
 could self-sacrifice be more unsparing ? By whom 
 could the duty of declaring the whole counsel of 
 God be more forcibly proclaimed, than by a man 
 who gave up all else to enable him to discharge it ? 
 
 Under ordinary circumstances, my brethren, it 
 might be natural at this point to leave the principles 
 which have been insisted on to your mature re- 
 flections, and to the obvious force of their intrinsic 
 truth. The duty before us is sufficiently plain ; and 
 the risk of wearying you might well lead me to 
 pause, if it were indeed possible to do so. But I 
 yet owe something to the promptings of conscience, 
 and to the Rights of God. Nor would your judgment 
 be harsh or unreasonable, if you should interpret 
 my silence as to a matter of pressing and public 
 anxiety, as something less easily to be pardoned 
 than mere failure to satisfy the many claims of this 
 great occasion. Such silence would in fact be nothing 
 short of notorious treachery to the whole spirit and 
 drift of those kindling words, which it has been my 
 endeavour to recommend and illustrate. 
 
 At no age of the Church could the ambassadors 
 of Christ have afforded to forget the Apostle's ex- 
 ample of " not shunning to declare all the counsel 
 of God." But never was the force of that example 
 more needed than in our own day. Illustrations indeed 
 press so urgently upon the mind, as it ranges over 
 the recent history of the Church, that the preacher's 
 » 1 Cor. ix. 19— -i-^.
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 19 
 
 embarrassment lies in the very liberty of his choice : 
 but one illustration, I doubt not, will have occurred 
 to many of us Hving at this time, and hving, my Lord 
 Bishop, under your Lordship's jurisdiction, in this your 
 Diocese of Salisbury, with painful but irrepressible 
 prominence. My brethren, it would be an affect- 
 ation, if I should profess to suppose you ignorant of 
 a recent Judgment, proceeding not indeed from a 
 spiritual but from a temporal court ; which, although 
 it professes, and that eagerly ^ to avoid all attempts 
 at formal determination of doctrine, yet does un- 
 questionably determine the legal sense and value of 
 doctrinal formularies, and, as doing this, has and 
 must have, practically and morally, no little weight 
 with large classes of our countrymen. That Judg- 
 ment would seem, among other points, to have ruled, 
 that it is permissible in law for a clergyman to ex- 
 press a ''hope" for the final restoration of the lost. 
 No man can know any thing of his own sinful heart 
 who does not know how much there is within him 
 which is ready to welcome such a permission ; but 
 the question is a question not of the inclinations of 
 a sinful creature, but of the Revealed Will of a Holy 
 
 '' " With respect to the legal tests of doctrine in the Church 
 of England, by the apphcation of which we are to try the 
 soundness or unsoundness of the passages libelled, we agree 
 with the learned Judge in the Court below that the Judgment 
 in the Gorham case is conclusive : — This Court has no juris- 
 diction or authority to settle matters of faith, or to determine 
 what ought in any particular to be tlie Doctrine of the Church 
 of England. Its duty extends only to the consideration of 
 that which is by law established to be the Doctrine of the 
 Church of England, upon the true and legal construction of her 
 articles and formularies." Judgment (Guardian, Feb. 10, 1864.) 
 
 c2
 
 20 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 God. May we, consistently with That Will, indulge 
 that " hope ?" Assuredly not. For nothing is more 
 certain than that by the terms of the Christian reve- 
 lation any such hope is delusive and vain, since it 
 is opposed to the awfnl Truth, that they who die 
 out of favour with God and are lost, are lost irre- 
 vocably, lost for ever. If Holy Scripture is still to 
 be our Rule of Faith, Scripture, I submit, is decisive. 
 If Hooker's well known caution as to the interpre- 
 tation of Scripture, ^' that where a literal interpreta- 
 tion will stand, the farthest from the letter is com- 
 monly the worst" is still to be kept in mind, that 
 rule will preclude any serious doubt as to the real 
 mind of Scripture in this solemn matter. Scripture 
 is no less exphcit as to the endlessness of the woe 
 of the lost soul, than as to the endlessness of the 
 scene or instrument of its punishment. Isaiah 
 speaks of the ' everlasting burnings %' Daniel of ' ever- 
 lasting contempt V our Lord of ' the everlasting fire' 
 once and again % St. Paul of ' everlasting destruction' 
 or ruin', St. Jude of ' a blackness of darkness which 
 is reserved for ever*'.' Three times speaking of the 
 penal woe of the lost, the Apostle of Love uses an 
 expression of energetic redundancy and force : he 
 says that it lasts ' unto ages of ages\' Just as the 
 
 « abi^ npin Is. xxxiii. 14. ^ Obiy pS-13 Dan. xii. 2. 
 
 e rb TTvp TO aiuiviov. Matt, xviii. 8; XXV. 41. 
 
 f oXe6pov alaviov, 2 Thess. i. 9. 
 
 ^ Ois 6 ^6<pos Toil cTKOTovs fls Tov alcovu T(Trjf)r]Tac. Jude 13. 
 
 b The smoke of tlieir torment ascendeth up for ever and ever, 
 
 ets alavas aMvcov, Rev. .xiv. 11; els tovs alavas rwv aituj/wi/, Kev. xix. 3, 
 
 and Kev. xx. 10. The language of Isaiah from which this is 
 taken would certainly seem to refer to a more than temporal 
 judgment on Edom and other nations. Is. xxxiv. 9, 10.
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 21 
 
 elect will reign in heaven for ever and ever', as 
 holy souls desire that God may be glorified for ever 
 and ever*", as Jesus Risen from His grave is alive * for 
 evermore'/ as in His glory He shall reign for ever 
 and ever"", as the very Life of God Himself is de- 
 scribed by saying that ' He liveth for ever and ever"/ 
 so is this same measure applied to the punishment 
 of the lost souls °. Are we to say that a period of 
 limited duration is all that is meant to be ascribed 
 in Scripture to the glory of the blessed in heaven, to 
 the Glorified Life and Reign of Jesus, to the very 
 self-existent Life of God Himself, in order to enable 
 ourselves to rest in the conception of a Purgatory 
 beyond the Final Judgment, as less shocking to our 
 'consciousness' than the Behef in Hell? And if 
 not, can we certainly determine that as applied to 
 Hell, this phrase has an altogether narrower sense 
 than that which we ascribe to it in such passages as 
 apply it to Heaven or to the Reign of Christ? Modern 
 scepticism has tampered with the word " Eternal/' 
 just as it has emptied ' Salvation/ * Atonement,' 
 * Grace,' — nay the very Name of God Himself, of 
 their natural meaning. But "everlasting" means 
 neither more nor less that than which lasts for ever. 
 True indeed it is that the Hebrew expression which, 
 when apphed to future time, answers to the English 
 'for ever/ does in particular instances mean some- 
 thing less than boundless duration. But this is 
 the case only where a hmitation is forced upon the 
 word by the subject to which it is applied. Ori- 
 ginally the word does imply indefinite, — the nearest 
 
 ' Rev. xxii. 5. '' 1 Tim. i. 17. Heb: xiii. 21, &c. 
 
 ' Rev. i. 18. " Rev. xi. 15. " Rev. iv. 9, 10; 
 
 V. 14 ; X. 6. " Ubi sup.
 
 ii^ THli WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 approach, perhaps, which the human mind can 
 make to infinite, — extent of continuance. Taken 
 at its lowest range of meaning, it means an existence 
 co-extensive with that to which it is apphed^. In 
 the New Testament, there is a substantive which 
 varies with the various meanings of this Hebrew 
 word*^; but there is also an adjective derived from 
 that substantive, which at least, as used in the New 
 Testament, does not so vary^ but means what we 
 
 p Dvi^, properly that which is hidden ; as ai^phed to future 
 time, that which is lost to sight in the distance. Instances of 
 the narrow range of the word may be found in Gen. ix. 12. 
 Ex. xii. 14 — 17; xxvii. 21; xxviii. 43. Lev. x. 15, &c. Not 
 however in such passages as Ps. xlv. 7 ; Ixxii. 5. 17 ; Ixxxix. 37. 
 where Rationalists limit the woi'd in deference to their own 
 prejudices against the Messianic predictions. Nor again in 
 salutations 1 Kings i. 31 ; Neh. ii. 3; Dan. ii. 4, &c. since in 
 these cases, the true force of the expression is to be measured 
 by the belief of the Jews in the immortality of the soul. Of 
 what range of meaning the word is really capable will be best 
 understood from a consideration of the following extract from 
 Gesenius : " vera teternitatis notio in vocabulo nostro iis in locis 
 inest, qui immortalem summi Numinis naturam spectant, quod, 
 vocatur Dbil? 7M Deus ieternus Gen. xxi. 33 ; Jer. xl. 28. 
 D^i27n Tl in teternum vivens Dan. xii. 7. (cf. obil?? •"'^'7 vivere 
 in Eeternum, immortalem esse instar deorum [Dei] Gen. iii, 22. 
 Job vii. 16), Cui tribuuntur nbil? nSy"iT brachia teterna 
 Deut. xxxiii. 27. et de Quo dicitur b« r^rSt^ obil? 1^! Dbirp 
 Ps.xc. 2, ab teternitate ad ieternitatem, Tu es Deus. Ps. ciii. 17. 
 cf. Ps. ix. 8; X. 16; xxix. 10; xciii. 2." Thesaurus sub 
 
 voc. czibi?- 
 
 1 alav. Although, as Bretschneider remarks, "partim Grse- 
 corum more usurpatur." Like Db*)37 its original meaning was 
 that of unlimited duration, and the narrower senses were 
 imposed upon it subsequently. "Aristoteles alicubi scripsit 
 alav dici quasi altv wv." Vorstius Hebraism. N. T. ii. 39. 
 
 "■ That in the LXX, aiavios like aiiiv, when applied to future
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 2o 
 
 English mean by " everlasting." And it is this 
 last-named word which is used in the passages 
 principally under discussion. If it should be pre- 
 cariously contended that this word implies positive 
 endlessness of continuance, as little as it admits of 
 any defined limitation of continuance : it may at least 
 be observed, that as used in Scripture of the penal 
 misery of the lost, the expression ' eternal' is fixed 
 in the sense of endless duration by two considerations. 
 Where that word is applied to our home in Heaven, 
 
 time, varies in its meanings with the senses of CD^IS? is 
 clear from the passages given in Trommius, s. v. But, 
 when the Gospel had " brought life and immortality to light" 
 more distinctly, the use of the word atavios was limited 
 (within the precincts of the New Testament) to the idea 
 (taken at the lowest) of indefinite continuance. It is used 
 seventy-one times in the N. T. It is an attribute of fo)?) 
 forty-four times. St. John never uses it in any other con- 
 nection ; and it occurs twenty-three times in his writings. In two 
 cases only is it possible to argue fairly that the word may have 
 a limited meaning. (1) Philemon 15. alaviov avrov anexos, where 
 however Bretschneider (Lex. Man in voc.) construes the word 
 " ilium in sempiternum, scilicet, quia Christianus factus jam 
 vitse seternse particeps erat." So (to omit others) Huther in 
 loc. " Die christliche briiderliche Verbinduiig in die Ewigkeit 
 reiche." (2) St. Jude 7. irvpos alaviov 8ik7]v, where Pol. Synops. in 
 loc. observes that the natural construction of the whole passage 
 is that " Eas urbes incensas instar exhibere ignis ffiterni, qui 
 irapios expectat." The remarks of Huther apply to our 
 E. V. irvpos alcoviov construiren De Wette, Arnaud mit den 
 folgenden 8lktjv inrexovaai, weil dieses sonst zu entblosst stiinde : 
 allein das Feuer, womit sie bestraft sind, konnte von Judas 
 nicht wohl das ewige Feuer gcnannt werden ; dies ist stehende 
 Bezeichnung des Hollenfeuers, dem die im letzen Gerichte 
 Verurtheilten iiberliefert werden ; darum ist es besser imp. alav. 
 mit 8ety/xa ZU verbinden ; jene Stadte sind SIktjv inexovaai ein 
 Exempel des Ewigen Feuers. Brief des Judas, p. 217.
 
 24 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OE GOD. 
 
 the hopes and longings of men gladly do justice 
 to the natural force of human language. But 
 it is noteworthy % that no stronger expressions 
 are applied any where to the Eternal Life of the 
 Blessed in Heaven, within the New Testament, 
 tlian are also used to describe the endlessness of 
 the pains of Hell': and therefore the notion that 
 
 * alaviov in N. T. 2. dicitur omne quod est finis expers, 
 niaxime id, quod est post hujus vitte mundique decui'sum 
 eventurum. Hue pertinent omnia ilia N. T. Ipca, in quibus 
 formulae : irvp alaviov, Kpiais alavios, Kpijxa alaviov, KoKaais aiapios, 
 C<ofi (Bo^a, aaTTjpia) alcovios reperiuntur, V. c. Matt, xviii. 8. xix. 16. 
 XXV. 41. 4G. JNlarc. iii. '29. Rom. ii. 7. 2 Tim. ii, 10. Heb. v, 9. 
 Quemadmodum cnim formulis nvp alaviov et sqq. poenee perpetuaj 
 peccatorum, quas impii post banc vitam luent, sorsque eorum 
 misera J'utura non inlcrrupta iudicantur, ita opposita formula: 
 fft)i) aiiivi.05 perennis felicitatis piorum post mortem status et 
 conditio significatur, quse 2 Cor. iv. 17. aliivLov ^apos 8d|r;y, Luc. 
 xvi. 9. ax^"^^^ alcovioi, Heb. ix. 15. aldtvios KkrjpovopLa, et 2 Pet. i. 11. 
 alojvios ^aaiKeia rov GeoC appellatur. Scbleusner. Lexicon, p. 67. 
 So too Bretscbneider (Lex. Man. in v.) who after quoting 
 all the passages in which the word alavios is applied to 
 blessedness or woe, observes, ' Alwvios in foi'mulis fco)) alav. irvp 
 alatv. 86^a alav. Kokaais, oXedpos, Kpip,a, ffpiais alcov. scmpitenium 
 nunqiiam Jiniendum indicare dubio caret, quum prsemia seque ac 
 poenre post resurrectionem sempitevnse quoque baberentur a 
 Judteis. Vid. test. Aser. in Fab. Cod. Pseud. V. T. i. p. 693. 
 potissimura Psalter. Salom. Ps. 3. vers. 13. J 5, 16. ubi ^ dTrwXeta 
 
 Tov apapToikov els rov alava ; piorum for) aicoi'tos autem, ovk iKKel-^et 
 en. p. 31. 
 
 ' Commenting on the use of alavios in St. Matt. xxv. 41.46, 
 with refeience to endless life and endless death, St. Augustine 
 observes : " Si utrumque seternum, profecto aut utrumque cum 
 fine diutumum, aut utrumque sine fine perpetuum debet intel- 
 ligi. Par pari enim relata sunt, hiuc supplicium aeternum, inde 
 vita aeterna. Dicere autem in hoc uno eodemque sensu, vita 
 seterna sine fine erit, supplicium aeternum finem habebit, 
 multum absurdum est. Unde, quia vita aeterna sanctorum sine
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD, 25 
 
 of the two states Heaven only is endless, finds 
 no support from the language of Scripture, but 
 rests solely upon a human speculation external 
 to it. On the other hand, ' eternal' is not the 
 only attribute applied in the New Testament to 
 the state of punishment : the word is illustrated 
 and defined by other terms which necessarily fix its 
 true meaning. The Baptist speaks of the penal fire 
 as ' unquenchable^' Our Lord Himself adopts the 
 word; He thrice said of the "worm" of a sinful 
 conscience that "it dieth not," and that "the fire" 
 of its punishment " is not quenched''." The prophet, 
 whose language is quoted, had used ^, future tense y, 
 the Divine Speaker, before whose Eyes the unseen 
 world is spread out — on this side in all its unspeak- 
 able Beauty, on that in all its unutterable Woe — uses 
 a present, as describing the fact yet more vividly. 
 If endless punishment could be described in human 
 words, no words could exhaust the description more 
 absolutely than the recorded words of Christ. They 
 admit of no limitation ; they are patient of no toning 
 down or softening away ; in the page of the Evan- 
 gelist, they live for all time before the eyes of men, 
 in all their vivid, awful power. If Jesus Christ has 
 told us any thing certain about the other world, 
 
 fine erit, supplicium quoque seterrmm quibus erit, finem procul 
 dubio non habebit." De Civ. Dei, xxi. 23. Even Hagenbach, 
 who quotes this passage, observes : " It is superfluous to quote 
 other Fathers, inasmuch as they all more or less agree." Hist. 
 Doct. vol. i. p. 387. 
 
 " TTXip acr^ecTTOV. Matt. iii. 12. 
 
 * ety TO TTvp TO acT^ecTTOv' ottov 6 ctkcoXij^ avTa>v ov TeXevTq, Kai to nvp 
 ov cr^evpvTai. Mark ix. 43, 44. 46. 48. 
 y n550 ^^ D^HI, Is. Ixvi. 24.
 
 26 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 we can not doubt tliat the Penal fire must last 
 for ever. But may the soul be withdrawn from the 
 punishment ? or may it be annihilated ? Few 
 Christians have dared to say 'yes' to the first of 
 these questions ; to the second, fewer still. For 
 there are Words of Christ which seem expressly 
 designed to prevent any misconception. He speaks 
 of a * punishment/ no less than of a * fire,' which is 
 " everlasting ^" And we are told, that as " he that 
 believeth on the Son hath everlasting Hfe;" so *'he 
 that believeth not the Son shall not see hfe, but 
 the wrath of God abideth on him '." ** Abideth 
 
 y St. Matt. XXV. 41. 46. After noticing the classical distinction 
 between KoXaa-is and rifuopia, (Ar. Rhet. i. 15. Plat. Prot. 323, e.) 
 Archbishop Trench observes, (Synon. N. T. i. p. 28.) " It 
 would be a very serious error, however, to attempt to transfer 
 this distinction in its entireness to the words as employed in 
 the New Testament. The Kokaa-is alavios of Matt. xxv. 46, as it 
 plainly itself declares, is no corrective and therefore temporary 
 discipline; it can be no other than the dddvaros n^icopla (Josephus, 
 B. J. ii. 8. 11), the d'iSioi rtp-coplai (Plato, Ax. 372, a), with which 
 the Lord elsewhere threatens finally impenitent men (Mark ix. 
 43 — 48) ; for in proof that KoXaa-is had acquired in Hellenistic 
 Greek this severer sense, and was used simply as punishment 
 or tonnent, with no necessary underthought of the bettering 
 through it of him who endured it, we have only to refer to such 
 passages as the following : Josephus, Ant. xv. 2. 2 ; Philo, De 
 Agricul. 9 ; INIart. Polycar. 2 ; 2 Mace. iv. 38 ; Wisd. of Sol. 
 xix. 4. This much, indeed, of Aristotle's distinction still 
 remains, and may be recognised in the sacred usage of the 
 words, that in KoXaa-is the relation of the punishment to the 
 punished, in rifuopia to the punisher, is predominant." 
 
 " John iii. 30, f} opyf) rov Qeov pevd eV avrov. Compare the 
 Psalmist's, "Ti^ =1«"?? i^^ n'^r'^V (xlix. 20.) with the earlier part 
 of this text. The true force of these words can only be set 
 aside by the a priori and unwarrantable assumption that the
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 27 
 
 on him;" — then if he die in unbeHef, he still 
 exists, though in his woe — then he is not delivered 
 from it. " Abideth on him : " the piercing words 
 seem to ring on from day to day, from year to 
 year, from century to century, from cycle to cycle 
 of measureless periods ; we feel at this moment that 
 eighteen centuries have not blunted their edge, or 
 lessened their solemnity and power. If so (you 
 reply), it were better never to have lived, than 
 to live and be lost. Unquestionably. Our Lord 
 states this truth with equal clearness. He said of 
 one lost soul, of one who had been blessed with 
 the high privilege of His Companionship, but who 
 fell so deeply as to betray Him to His enemies 
 for money, ' Good it were for that man if he had 
 never been born V There are undoubtedly critics who 
 treat these words as they might treat an exclamation 
 in some heathen Dramatist ; as if the sentence had 
 been uttered in a free rhetorical spirit, and with no 
 thought of the meaning — the vast illimitable meaning 
 — which they really contain and convey. But you 
 can only thus empty the Words of Christ of their 
 native power, if you will consent to forget that they 
 are theWords of One Whose horizon was not bounded 
 by the things of time. The Lord of Life and Death, 
 fixing His Eye in deepest woe, yet with unfaltering 
 precision, upon a creature whom He willed to save, 
 yet who spurned His Salvation — thus rules in the 
 fulness of His knowledge, in the tenderness of His 
 Love, that non-existence had been better than an 
 
 endless life of the soul was a truth unknown to the Hebrew 
 Psalmists. Compare Konig. Theologie der Psalmen, p. 329 sqq. 
 ^ St. Mark xiv. 31. Compare St. Mark iv. 29, and viii. 36, 37.
 
 28 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 undying being, which in the abuse of its free-will 
 His creature had made an unending misery. It 
 cannot be maintained that the Words of Jesus are 
 true, if at any conceivable point of a distant future 
 any restoration to heaven is possible for Judas. For 
 beyond that point, however distant, there would still 
 stretch the vision of a still illimitable Eternity ; in 
 which the restored soul would find in the presence 
 of God, a "fulness of joy" which would redress the 
 balance, and would speedily reduce a purgatory that 
 had lasted even for ages to a scarcely perceptible 
 speck in a past existence. Unless the human soul 
 be not necessarily immortal, Judas lives : unless the 
 Words of Christ be untrustworthy on the question 
 of Life and Death, Judas lives in woe. There is 
 no escape : the unspeakable awfulness of our Sa- 
 viour's language is precisely tJiis, that it does leave 
 no room for any reversal of the doom of the be- 
 trayer — of the man whose epitaph was thus traced 
 by the finger of Infinite Knowledge and of Infinite 
 Love, — " Good were it for that man if he had never 
 been born." 
 
 A few gifted minds such as Origen^ have made 
 
 *• The passages which best illustrate his deliberate opinion are 
 in formal treatises, (De Prin. i. G. Contr. Celsura, v. 14, 15.) 
 In his popular teaching, he sometimes expresses opinions 
 which seem to foreshadow the later Doctrine of a purgatory 
 before the Judgment, (Horn. vi. in Exod. no. 4. Hom. iii. in Ps. 
 xxxvi. no. ]. quoted by Lumper 0. 595,) or which at least say 
 nothing inconsistent with it. He admitted however that his 
 doctrine of a final awoKaraaTacris (of men and devils) might 
 be dangerous to the unconverted. ' For most,' he says, ' it is 
 enough to know that sinners will be punished. It would be 
 inexpedient to say more: since there are persons whom the
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 29 
 
 shipwreck, from whatever causes, of this Article of 
 the Christian Faith. But amidst the rare aberrations 
 of genius, the behef of the Christian people has been 
 such as might have been expected, from the tenor 
 of the Words of Christ. And it is particularly observ- 
 able how in the early ages of the Faith, the martyrs 
 standing before their heathen judges, felt one after 
 another that their choice lay between a transient 
 pang of suffering and an endless woe^ Not that 
 the error which is connected with the name of 
 Origen has been repudiated by no process less rude 
 and irregular than the action of popular sentiment. 
 Apparently during his life-time and certainly after his 
 decease, the speculations of the great Alexandrian 
 were condemned by councils of the Church*^; and if 
 
 fear of Eternal Punishment scarcely restrains fi'om giving 
 themselves up to wickedness with all the evils that follow 
 on it!" Contr. Cels, vi. 26. He speaks of belief in eternal 
 punishment as morally useful although not true, (F^om. in 
 Jer. 19. tom. iii. p, 507, 508. ed. Migne) when commenting on 
 Jer. XX. 7, thus admitting the adaptation of the Revealed Truth 
 to the wants of the human soul. This conviction seems to have 
 coloured his popular teaching. (Hom. 7. in Exod. 0pp. ed. 
 Migne, vol. ii. p. 347, where he quotes Is. Ixvi. 24.) 
 
 « Euinart Acta Sincera. Passio Stfe Felicitatis (p. 23.) 
 circa 150. Passio S. Maximi, circa 250 (p. 133.) Maximus 
 is described as a plebeian who was engaged in trade. When 
 desired by the Proconsul to sacrifice, that he might escape 
 the torture, he replied, " Hsec non sunt tormenta quse pro 
 nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi inferuntur, sed sunt unc- 
 tiones. Si enim recessero a Domini mei prseceptis, quibus 
 sum de Evangelio Ejus eruditus, vera et perpetua mihi mane 
 bunt tormenta." Other examples might be cited from Ruinart : 
 they shew what was the simple, unhesitating faith of the 
 Early Church. 
 
 ^ Origen was silenced and deposed by two successive synods
 
 so THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 equivocal language on the subject of endless punish- 
 ment is to be discovered in a stray writer here and 
 there by the student of Patristic Literature, he will 
 almost invariably observe that its force is destroyed by 
 language of an opposite drift, which the same writer 
 has elsewhere employed. Nor is it pretended that 
 there is any serious ground for doubt as to the 
 Catholic Belief of the Church, as evidenced by the 
 consent of her Representative Fathers^ But, let us 
 note it well, they who to-day deny the truth in 
 
 held during his hfe-time. His leading tenets were condemned 
 at Constantinople in 540. " The erroneous doctrines (says 
 Archdeacon Churton) which Origen had taught, or which others 
 taught in his name, were condemned as heretical ; and among 
 them the doctrine of the future restitution of fallen spirits 
 and of evil men. See this very fully proved hy a Church 
 Historian, who has given it the fullest examination. Natal. 
 Alex. Hist. Eccl. Ssec. iii. Diss. xvi. And this is admitted 
 by the best-informed enquirers of our own Church, as by those 
 of foreign Churches. See Bishoj) Pearson, Minor Works, i. 413. 
 and the able Life of Origen in the venerable Archdeacon of 
 Westmoreland's Biogra2iliies of the Early Church, ii. 114. 133." 
 (Guardian, March 9, 1864.) To the objection that Origen 
 was not condemned by any of the First Four General Councils, 
 it has been well replied, " that each Council did the special 
 work of its osvn emergency, and not other kinds of work; 
 and that Origenism wa& not a pressing question in 325, 381, 
 431, or 451." (W. B. in Guardian, March 16, 1864.) It is at 
 least certain that the Sixth General Council declares the Fifth 
 to have assembled for the purpose of condemning Origen and 
 other persons, thereby endorsing the anathema of the Synod of 
 Constantinople in 540. (Routh. Script. Eccl. Opusc. ii. 232.) 
 
 e See Petavius de Angelis, lib. iii. c. 8. It will be observed 
 that Petavius quotes language from Gregory of Nyssa, and 
 Gregory Nazianzen, which may fairly outweigh those passages 
 of doubtful import in their writings, to which appeal has recently 
 been made.
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. ^ 31 
 
 question, or who rashly express " hopes" that the 
 Faith of Christendom may not be true, oppose 
 themselves not merely to the decrees of Councils 
 and to the consent of Fathers, nor yet merely 
 to the ' popular' belief of centuries, nor to the 
 reign of a world-wide Tradition. Nor do they 
 merely controvert a Hebrew Prophet or a Christian 
 Apostle, and take up the position of those incon- 
 sequent Rationalists, who, respecting nothing else 
 in Holy Scripture, still profess to respect as Divine 
 and Infallible the recorded Words of Christ For 
 it is face to face with Him that they stand in con- 
 troversy*^: it is His sentence, in Whose disclosures 
 concerning the world beyond the tomb, we Christians 
 place our hopes for life and for death, that they 
 arraign at the bar of what is at best a section of 
 contemporary opinion. Our Lord and Saviour, with 
 what would be generosity in a mere man, but with 
 what in Him doubtless was provision against the 
 known weakness of His creatures, has not bequeathed 
 to His Servants or Representatives the responsibility — 
 
 f Observe the force of the following admission from a writer, 
 of whose relations to the true Faith of the Church of Christ no 
 unfair estimate will be formed from the fact of his being one of 
 the live authorities referred to with approbation by M. Eenan, in 
 his recent " Vie de Jesus." (Int. p. vii.) M. Reuss has been 
 citing St. Matt, xxv, 30. 41 sqq. and some similar passages: 
 " Toutes ces peintures," he says, " sont claires et simples; elles 
 n'offrent rien d equivoque ; il n'y a pas un mot qui trahisse una 
 arriere-pensee, qui nous fasse entrevoir une signification cachee, 
 qui les reduise a une valeur purement figuree et parabolique. II 
 est evident que les narrateurs qui nous servent ici de guides, ont 
 pris tout cela au pied de la lettre et qu'il ne leur est pas reste 
 une ombre de doute a cet egard." Reuss. Theol. Chretienne, 
 tome i. p. 249, Deux"»e edit.
 
 32 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 nay the odium — of proclaiming those stern and awful 
 certainties ; He has Himself heralded, at one and 
 the same time, the penalties and the benedictions 
 of His Gospel ; He has unveiled the Eternal Pit 
 Himself, in phrases and words as urgent and positive 
 as those whereby He has opened heaven to all 
 believers ; and fifty generations of Christians have 
 believed and confessed that His Authority is final, 
 and that to tamper with His Revelations is only 
 more obviously foolish than it is perilously blas- 
 phemous. 
 
 Brethren ! I seem to interpret to myself the 
 thought of your hearts : men are won, you say, by 
 the mercies rather than by the terrors of the Lord. 
 Would it not be more accurate to say with St. Au- 
 gustine, that the terrors of the Lord drive us men 
 to take refuge in His unspeakable mercies ? Is it 
 not a fact, familiar to every clergyman, is it not a 
 matter of personal experience to some at least in 
 this vast congregation, that the undefined, haunting 
 fear of an endless woe does again and again guide 
 unquiet souls to seek peace and safety in kneeling at 
 the foot of the Cross, and in tasting of that Plente- 
 ous Redemption, which flows from the Wounds of 
 Jesus ? Are there not now resting in Paradise souls, 
 who owe their predestined crowns and thrones to that 
 first sharp pang which pierced their spirits, when, 
 many years since, on earth, in the midst of a course 
 of sin, they first realized the certain existence of an 
 endless Hell ? You urge that there are higher 
 motives than terror, for religious effort. Undoubt- 
 edly. It is better to love God for His own sake, 
 than to love Him for the sake of the blessings
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 33 
 
 which He gives, or the woes from which He saves. 
 But He who made the human heart knew more per- 
 fectly what motives are really needed to act upon it, 
 than the theorists who proclaim what they would 
 propose as the revision of His work. He knew that 
 more men are moved by fear than by love : and that 
 man may be educated to love fearlessly, if he begins 
 by cultivating that fear which is the beginning of moral 
 and spiritual wisdom. Certainly we cannot exaggerate 
 the mercies of our redeeming Lord : they are simply 
 infinite. But side by side with them lie also His 
 judgments, unexplored and infinite ; so that the 
 ^ great deep' is their symbol in the world of nature ; 
 and His judgments are equally with His mercies 
 an integral part of the Truth of His Revelation, 
 nay of His Being : they are equally a part of His 
 ' whole Counsel' as it has been made known to us 
 men ; and it is our business, as clergy, to proclaim 
 them. To do so, many of us solemnly pledge 
 ourselves this day before God and man. We owe 
 it, my brethren of the laity, to our God ; we owe it 
 to Jesus Teaching and to Jesus Crucified ; we owe 
 it to the terms of our commission, and to the claims 
 of our consciences ; but we owe it above all to your 
 undying souls to tell you the plain, unmutilated 
 truth. We dare not, like the serpent in Paradise, 
 whisper to you here within the precincts of the 
 Church of God, that you may cherish a ' hope' that 
 God's threats may after all be false. To tell you 
 that in the future world the only alternative to 
 Heaven is a Purgatory, might indeed earn for 
 us, at the present crisis of thought in England, a 
 momentary popularity. But if it were morally in 
 
 D
 
 34 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 our power to sacrifice one truth of the Creed, we 
 could not thereby insure the rest. We could not 
 stop at '* expressing a hope" that the punishment 
 of the wicked may not be final. On the one side, 
 an Eternal Heaven might easily become both to the 
 philologists, and to the metaphysicians, as problem- 
 atical a thing as an Eternal Hell. On the other, 
 that infinite Price which our Lord paid upon the 
 Cross that He might save us from a boundless 
 woe, would soon be rejected as needless ; and we 
 should reduce His propitiatory Sacrifice to the 
 level of a moral triumph. From that it were but 
 a short step to the denial of His Godhead. For, as 
 a perfect act of faith in a single truth has already, 
 before perceiving it, grasped other truths by im- 
 plication ; so a deliberate rejection of a single truth 
 entails the rejection, first in principle, and afterwards 
 avowedly of other truths beyond. Here is our danger. 
 Fear you we may not : but you may shame our weak- 
 ness by bidding us tell you the truth, or you may 
 tempt us in speaking to you, to " prophesy smooth 
 things,' or at best to substitute the ' hay, wood, and 
 stubble' of the things of time, for the unchangeable 
 realities of the other world. If we dare not be 
 honest with you ; if through want of spirituality, from 
 a selfish instinct that we should condemn ourselves 
 in your eyes, we should shrink from a higli and 
 soul-controlling doctrine — woe, woe to us ! One 
 day we know side by side with you, but with greater, 
 far greater responsibilities than yours, which we 
 have freely chosen to bear, we too, your ministers, 
 must stand at the Judgment Seat of Christ. How 
 shall we then make answer to the stern and terrible
 
 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 35 
 
 rebuke of our Master, how shall we endure to hear 
 your deserved reproaches, your wail of remorse and 
 agony, if now, through cowardly fear of man, or any 
 false refinement, or weakly acquiescence in the 
 polished unbelief of the hour, we hide from you 
 one half of our Master's message ; justifying by our 
 silence the taunt of His enemies, that in this ase 
 we fear to preach what He Himself announced 
 as certain ; or banding ourselves with them, in 
 saying that He was at least in part mistaken, and 
 that the men of to-day have improved His Gospel 
 by eliminating its severities ? 
 
 And you, my dear brethren, who now are pressing 
 forward to receive your various powers from the con- 
 secrated Hands through which to-day, as ever before 
 and to the end of time, Christ our Lord reigning 
 in His Church bestows them — bethink you, I pray, at 
 this the most solemn crisis of your lives, of that great 
 Day which cannot be distant, and which may be very 
 near. Bethink you now, as you receive your talent 
 of the account which you must then render for its 
 due improvement. Pray that you may be fearless, as 
 speaking for the Mighty God ; but pray too that you 
 may be loving, and humble, as becomes sinners, who 
 remember their own sins, while in God's name they 
 dare to counsel their brethren. If we of the Clergy 
 feel in our very hearts that we may be lost, as easily, 
 nay rather, by reason of our greater opportunities, 
 much more easily than other men ; we shall speak 
 of Hell, not as a threat which we flourish without 
 measuring its awfulness, but as a fact, present to the 
 eye of our spirits ; we shall think and speak of it 
 as of a common danger — just as of Heaven as of 
 
 D 2
 
 36 THE WHOLE COUNSEL OF GOD. 
 
 a common Hope, and a common Home. Let us by 
 God's grace resolve to be true ; let us pray God to 
 make us true — true in our inmost selves — and true 
 to that counsel of God, which it is our duty to 
 proclaim to man. God indeed is severe and stern 
 with the self-reliant ; but for the self-distrustful and 
 the prayerful He is a tender and most indulgent 
 Master, whose service is not less the highest joy, 
 than it is the highest freedom. Even on earth for 
 every earnest, simple, truthful, unselfish spirit among 
 the servants of the Church, there is a foretaste of 
 the imperishable Reward above. It may be en- 
 joyed, and that abundantly, in the cottages of 
 the poor, in the pulpits of the Sanctuary, on the 
 steps of the Altar. Stephen may still ennoble the 
 lower grade of service by a sacrifice of self which 
 opens heaven, and which Jesus owns as the first of 
 martyrdoms. And there are mercies, blessings, 
 crowns that fade not away*^ — for those who though 
 afar off, yet by word and act, faithfully witness to 
 the justice and to the grace of their God, and who 
 standing beneath the Cross of the Redeemer of the 
 world, wield, according to the measures of their 
 ministry, the consolations of the keys of Peter, 
 the powers of the sword of Paul. 
 
 ' 1 St. Peter v. 4.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 The following Lilany has already been offered to the 
 public in another shape. It is here reprinted by the per- 
 mission of its Compiler, — the revered Author of the Christian 
 Year. The fulness with which it exhibits the mind of 
 Scripture as to the solemn question of Eternal Punishment, 
 will remind the reader how much of the Scriptural argument 
 has been left altogether untouched in the pages of my 
 Sermon. The Litany is little less than the skeleton of a 
 treatise; and can hardly fail to convince fair and reasonable 
 persons that the truth recently impugned is an essential 
 feature of the Teaching of our Divine Lord. But the 
 cause of truth will be best promoted, and the Compiler's 
 intention most strictly complied with, if the Litany be 
 used, and that frequently and earnestly, in the manner 
 suggested by its name and form. 
 
 H. P. L. 
 
 Ettans ot our ^.orti's WLnminqfi. 
 I. 
 
 God the Father, King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, 
 
 O God the Son, Redeemer of the world, begotten from 
 everlasting of the Father, 
 
 O God the Holy Ghost, Eternal Spirit, proceeding 
 from the Father and the Son, 
 
 O Holy, Blessed, and Glorious Trinity, Three Persons 
 
 and One God, Which is, and Which was, and Which is 
 
 to come, 
 
 — Have mercy upon us. 
 
 Remember not. Lord, our offences, nor the offences of 
 our forefathers; neither take Thou vengeance of our sins: 
 spare us, good Lord, spare Thy people, whom Thou hast 
 redeemed with Thy most precious blood, and be not angry 
 with us for ever. 
 Spare us good Lord, and be not angry with us for ever.
 
 38 LITANY OF OUR LORd's WARNINGS. 
 
 II. 
 
 S. Jude g 1, Jesu, Who of old didst reserve the fallen angels in 
 
 Pet. ii. 4. everlasting chains nuder darkness unto the judgment of 
 
 the Great Day, — 
 Gen. iii. Jesu, Who to our fallen parents didst declare Thyself 
 the true and just Judge, and didst condemn them for 
 ver. 17. listening to him who said, " Ye shall not surely die," 
 2S. Pet. Jesu, Word of God, hy Whom the old world w^as, 
 ' ■ ' and was destroyed by water, and the world that now is 
 is reserved unto fire for perdition of ungodly men. 
 Gen. xix. Jesu, Lord, Who from the Lord didst rain brimstone 
 xxii. 29 • ^^^ ^'^ °^' ^^ heaven on Sodom and Gomorrha, and didst 
 2S.Pet.ii. set them forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of 
 5; S J"'^*^ eternal fire, 
 Heb. xii. Jesu, Who in the figuie of Esau hast taught us that 
 
 there may be a condition where is no place for repentance, 
 Isa. xxxiii. Jesu, Who by Thy Prophet hast told us of everlasting 
 
 burnings, 
 S.Luke Jesd, Who by Thy Forerunner hast threatened un- 
 
 quenchable fire, 
 
 S. Matt. § 2. Jesu, from Whose lips, full of grace, came thrice 
 
 V. 29 ; (ixe ten'ible mention of " the whole body cast into hell," 
 
 S. Matt. X. Jesu, Who didst bid us fear Him which is able to 
 
 28 ; S.Luke destroy both soul and body in hell, 
 
 S. Miitt Jesu, Who didst warn us against a relapse which should 
 
 xii. 45 ; make the last stale worse than the first, 
 
 2g ^^^"^^i- Jesu, Who didst tell us over and over of the furnace 
 
 S. Matt, of fire, and of the outer darkness, where is weeping and 
 
 xiii.4.2,50 j^- f^ggjj 
 
 ore; vm. o o ' 
 
 12, &c. Jesu, Who didst declare it possible for a man to "lose 
 
 ^•-^i'"- his own soul," 
 XVI. 26; 
 
 S.Mark Jesu, to whom the foolish virgins will come asking 
 
 viii. .36. fyj. entrance in vain, 
 
 S. Matt. 
 
 XXV. 1 12. Jesu, Who by one and the selfsame word, "everlasting," 
 
 S. Matt. jjjjg{ described the sentence both of bad and good, 
 S^MarkLx. Jesu, Who didst mention not only the worm and the 
 
 **• 46> 48; fjie ^juj their worm and their tire, — what each one sufl'ers, — 
 cf. Isa. , . 
 
 Ixvi. 24. as undying, 
 
 — Hare mercy upon us.
 
 LITANY OF OUR LORD's WARNINGS. 39 
 
 Jesu, Wlio vouchsafing to interpret Thyselt, hast declared, 
 that Everlasting Fire means the Everlasting Punishment of" 
 those who shall be on the Left Hand, 
 
 §3. Jesu, Who in tender love didst say to Judas, S. Matt. 
 " Good were it for that man if he had never been born," ^^^' ' 
 
 Jesu, Whose own word it is, " He that believeth and is s. Mark 
 baptized shall be saved, but he that believeih not shall be^^*^^- 
 damned," 
 
 Jesu, Who hast told us of the Resurrection of damnation, S. John v. 
 as well as of the Resurrection of life, 
 
 Jesd, of Whom we have learned that a man may S. John vi. 
 become as a devil, 
 
 Jesu, Whose threat it is, " Ye shall die in your sins;" S.John 
 and " Whither 1 go ye cannot come," ^'^^' ' 
 
 Jesu, Who likenest them that abide not in Thee to aS.Johnxv. 
 withered branch whose end is to be burned, -.' ^■^"•'^^' 
 
 o. 
 
 Jesu, Who by Thy Apostle hast taught that to some the2C0r.ii.l6. 
 Gospel is as a savour of death, 
 
 Jesu, Whose revealing from heaven shall be everlasting 2 Thes.i.9. 
 destruction from the Presence of the Lord to them that obey 
 not the Gospel, 
 
 Jesu, Who tellest the Hebrews of some that cannot be Heb. vi. 
 renewed unto repentance, '^ ^' 
 
 Jesu, from Whom final impenitence can look for nothing Heb. x. 27. 
 but " fiery indignation," 
 
 §.4. Jesu, Who by two of Thy loving Apostles speakest2S.Pet. ii. 
 
 of some for whom " the mist of darkness is reserved for -J'," ,' ' 
 
 Jude 13. 
 
 ever," and of " a latter end worse than the beginning," 
 
 Jesu, in Whose presence the worshippers of the Beast Rev. xix. 
 
 shall be tormented with fire and brimstone, ^^• 
 
 Jesu, Who hast ordained that the smoke of their Rev. xiv. 
 
 torment, as the smoke of Babylon, should go up for ever ^^> ^^^* "^^ 
 
 and ever, 
 
 Jesu, Who didst shew to Thy loving Disciple how those Rev. xx.l5. 
 
 not written in the Book of Life shall be cast into the lake 
 
 of fire, 
 
 — Have mercy tipon us.
 
 40 LITANY OF OUR LORd's WARNINGS. 
 
 Rev. xii.8, Jesu, Who didst cause the Father's voice to be heard, 
 saying, " The cowardly, and the unbelieving, and the 
 abominable, aiid murderers, and whoremongers, and sor- 
 cerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part 
 in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which 
 is the second death," 
 Rev. xxi. Jesu, into Whose city none shall enter that defilelh, or 
 27. worketh abomination or a lie, but they that are written in 
 
 the Lamb's Book of Life, 
 Rev. iiii. Jesu, some of Whose last words were, " He that is 
 *^- filthy, let him be filthy still;" his probation having come 
 
 to an end. 
 Rev xiii. Jesu, from Whose home the unclean, the cruel, the 
 16. profane, the false will be finally excluded. 
 
 Rev. xxii. Jesu, Who art coming quickly, and Thy reward with 
 12' Thee, to give every man according as his work shall be, 
 
 — Have mercy upon us. 
 
 in. 
 
 From everlasting damnation : 
 
 From all blindness of heart : 
 
 From contempt of Thy word : 
 
 From self-will and self-reliance ; from going after our 
 own inventions ; from following a multitude to do or 
 believe evil : 
 
 From wresting Thy Holy Scripture; from mistrusting 
 Thy holy Church ; from bigotry and indifference ; from 
 partiality and prejudice; from respect of persons; from 
 making God's Word of none effect by man's tradition : 
 
 From hastiness and sloth ; from presumption and 
 cowardice; from levity and scornfulness in judgment, and 
 from taking part with the scorners : 
 
 From the suUenness of Cain ; from the unbelief of 
 Sodom ; from the bitter and tardy cry of Esau ; from the 
 hardness of Pharaoh ; from the self-deceit of Balaam ; 
 from the relapsing of Ahab ; from the despair of Judas; 
 and from the portion of the devil and his angels: 
 
 — Good Lord, deliver us.
 
 LITANY OF OUR LORd's WARNINGS. 41 
 
 From the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone, 
 which is the second death : 
 
 In the time when iniquity aboundeth ; in the days when 
 the Son of Man shall hardly find the faith in the earth; 
 in the revelation of Antichrist ; in the horn- of our own 
 death ; in the passing away of heaven and earth ; and in 
 the eternal judgment : 
 
 — Good Lord, deliver us. 
 
 We sinners do beseech Thee to hear us, O Lord God ; 
 and that it may please Thee to restore unto thy Church 
 perfect unity both visible and invisible : 
 
 That it may please Thee to look down with pity upon 
 the Reformed Catholic Church in the British Empire, in 
 its long and sore distress by reason of unhappy divisions : 
 
 That it may please Thee to grant unto our Bishops and 
 Pastors and all congregations committed to their charge, 
 so to cherish the bond of peace, that they may not in any 
 degree forfeit the unity of the Spirit : 
 
 That it may please Thee to fill the successors of the 
 Apostles with the spirit of power and love and of a sound mind, 
 that by the Holy Ghost so dwelling in them they may 
 keep Thy good deposit both of doctrine and Sacraments: 
 
 That it may please Thee to bestow on our gracious 
 Queen Thy special grace, that she may be crowned 
 hereafter as a true Defender of the Faith : 
 
 That it may please Thee to endue those who make 
 our laws, and judge in our courts, with a true sense of 
 the mind of Thy Church, as well as with a spirit of 
 equity as between man and man : 
 
 That it may please Thee to give unto us all a right 
 judgment and a steady and courageous will, faithfully and 
 lovingly to hold fast Thy form of sound words, not in the 
 letter only but in the spirit : 
 
 That it may please Thee to make our hearts silent and 
 submissive for the unreserved receivings alike of Thy 
 promisings and Thy ihreatenings : 
 
 — Have mercy upon us.
 
 42 LITANY OF OUR LORD's WARNINGS. 
 
 That it may please Thee to convert and pardon all who 
 disbelieve Thy threateniiigs of etenial woe, and cojisciously 
 or unconsciously cause any to disregard them : 
 
 That it may please Thee to forgive us all that has been 
 light, profane, or careless, in our thoughts, words, and ways, 
 as concerning eternal things, and all that may have en- 
 couraged the same in others : 
 
 That it may please Thee to keep continually in our ears 
 the sound of Thy Fatherly warnings, that we may be both 
 ashamed and afraid to offend Thee ; and do Thou often 
 recall to our minds the thought, " What if I should be lost, 
 and lose my Saviour for ever ?" 
 
 That it may please Thee to grant unto us a deep 
 sense of Thy mysterious love, for the quieting of all 
 scruples, doubts, or misgivings, which the craft of the 
 devil or man, or the infirmity of our nature, may at any 
 time work within us : 
 
 That it may please Thee now and always, in all our 
 trials, and in the trials of our Church and country, to guide, 
 chasten, and uphold us by Thy good Spirit, and cause 
 Thy warnings of everlasting death to become unto us words 
 of eternal life : 
 
 V. 
 
 Lamb of God, 
 
 Have mercy, and spare us. 
 Have mercy, and hear us. 
 Have mere}-, and save us. 
 
 Antiph. Yet a little while is the Light with you : walk 
 while ye have the Light, lest darkness come upon you : 
 for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he 
 goeth. 
 
 V. I remembered Thine everlasting judgments, O Lord; 
 
 R. And received comfort. 
 
 1 am hoiTibly afraid 
 
 For the ungodly that forsake Thy lata. 
 While ye have the Light, believe in the Light; 
 
 That ye may be the children of Light. 
 Jesus said, Father, forgive them ; 
 
 For they know not what they do. 
 Yet a little while.
 
 LITANY OF OVR LORd's WARNINGS. 43 
 
 Collect. O Jesus, Who hast made known to Thy 
 servants another death besides that which separates the 
 soul from the body ; deliver us not, we beseech Thee, into 
 the bitter pangs of eternal death. And that we, with all 
 those for whom we are bound to pray, may escape the sad 
 sentence of final separation from Thee; grant us, we 
 beseech Thee, courageous and dutiful hearts, truly and 
 lovingly to accept Thy most true and merciful warnings : 
 keep this Church and nation from believing a lie, and 
 from denying or doubting any part of Thy Gospel; 
 and perfect in us the love of the truth, that we may 
 be saved through Thy merits and mediation, \Mio livest 
 with the Father and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without 
 end. Amen. 
 
 The Lord bless us, and keep us. The Lord make His 
 face to shine upon us, and be gracious unto us. The Lord 
 lift uj) His countenance upon us, and give us peace, both 
 now and evermore. Amen. 
 
 BAXTER, PRINTEH, OXFORD.
 
 ">v/^1 
 
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