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 "CAST IN MEAL;" OR, THE POISON 
 RENDERED HARMLESS. 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 PREACHED BY 
 
 THE EIGHT REVEREND 
 
 SAMUEL, LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD, 
 
 Xotts "©tgf) "almoner to tfic ^uccn, 
 anft ©Ijanccllor of trje JUiost TSToMc ©rUci of tfje ffiartcr, 
 
 ON THE OCCASION OF 
 
 LAYING THE FOUNDATION STONE OF THE COLLEGE 
 CHAPEL OF S. JOHN'S, HURSTPIERPOINT, 
 
 ON TUESDAY, 17th SEPTEMBER, 1861. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 JOSEPH MASTERS, ALDERSGATE STREET, 
 
 AND NEW BOND STREET. 
 
 BRIGHTON: H. & C. TREACHER. CHICHESTER: MASON * CO. 
 
 MDCCCLXI.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The following Sermon, now published by request, 
 was preached at the laying, by the Lord Bishop of 
 Chichester, of the foundation-stone of a Chapel to 
 be built at the College at Hurstpierpoint, Sussex. 
 This College is one of the institutions which mainly 
 through the indomitable zeal of the Rev. N. Wood- 
 ard, and the hearty support he has received from 
 the present Bishop of Chichester, have risen during 
 these last few years in Sussex to supply the chiefest 
 lack of the education which has of late years been 
 provided by the Church of England for her youth. 
 Since the beginning of the present century she has 
 made gigantic efforts to supply the great labouring 
 class with a sound, useful, and religious education, 
 and her great success in this work is attested alike 
 by all the statistics collected by the late Royal 
 Commission, and as the result of all other in- 
 quiries. It is not too much to say that the educa- 
 tion given to that class has been given by her. The 
 highest ranks of society in England have also been 
 trained exclusively by her. But for many years 
 past the education of the middle class of society has 
 been far less provided for by her. This has re-
 
 4 
 
 suited partly from the gradual failure of our 
 grammar schools, and partly from the increasing 
 independence of the class itself; which has parted 
 their children as effectually from their richer as 
 from their poorer brethren. 
 
 It is to the supply of this great omission in the 
 work of our Church that the efforts of Mr. Wood- 
 ard have been directed, by founding colleges in 
 which the very best education, founded on the 
 highest principles, can be procured at moderate 
 terms. 
 
 To none of her many benefactors in past time is 
 our Church and our nation more deeply indebted 
 than to the founders of her ancient schools and 
 learned universities. May God grant that a grate- 
 ful posterity may inscribe in that imperishable roll 
 the name of the Uev. N. Woodard. 
 
 £ uiuc' 
 
 v./
 
 A SERMON. 
 
 2 Kings iv. 41. 
 " But he said, Then being meal : and he cast it into 
 
 THE POT." 
 
 This chapter contains the record of divers miracles 
 wrought by the prophet Elisha. To one of these 
 I would this morning bespeak your attention, ra- 
 ther for its mystical and parabolic, than for its 
 more direct application. The narrative is full of 
 the wild and graceful simplicity which everywhere 
 characterises the unaltering East. The mighty 
 Prophet, on whose shoulders had fallen from his 
 very car of fire the mantle of Elijah, halts in one 
 of his rounds at the school of the sons of the Pro- 
 phets, at Gilgal. It was with them at that moment, 
 as it so often must be where the harvest of the year 
 is the year's supply of food, a time of biting dearth. 
 Instinct with the powers of his prophetic office, the 
 seer bids his servant prepare (as though it were a 
 time of plenty) to feed the gathered company ; and 
 as the preparation proceeds, " one" goes forth "into 
 the fields to gather herbs" for the seething pottage.
 
 6 
 
 From ignorance, or carelessness, or self-mil, he 
 gathers the gourds of a poisonous root on which he 
 lights ; and unsuspected hy others casts them, in 
 his self-sufficiency, into the hoiling pot. Nor was 
 it until they were already eating of the pottage, 
 that the presence of the deadly elements was ascer- 
 tained ; and then, in the hlank terror of men who 
 knew themselves to have heen poisoned, they cried 
 aloud to the seer, " Oh, thou man of God, there is 
 death in the pot !" Then said he, " Bring meal: 
 and he cast it into the pot." And, this done, the 
 power of God, acting through the Prophet's hand, 
 imparted to it such a healing quality, that it 
 changed the deadly mass into a wholesome food, 
 and there was no longer harm in the pot. 
 
 Here is the narrative, eminently picturesque in 
 its own simple record of superhuman power issuing 
 forth, in this material world, like the fountains of 
 the desert, from the hand of God's chosen servant, 
 hut containing, as it seems to me, heyond this, a 
 parable of all life, eminently suggestive of the 
 thoughts we need to-day. Por we are to lay the first 
 stone of a Chapel in which the inmates of this Col- 
 lege are henceforward to gather to hear God's Word, 
 to listen to His Truth, to how hefore His Presence, 
 to worship at His Throne, and to receive His most 
 Messed gifts of grace in the great Sacrament, which 
 is the special memorial of our Master's death, and 
 the special instrument of conveying to us the com- 
 munication of His Body and of His Blood, to he 
 the spiritual food of our souls. 
 
 Now in making this provision for worship, what 
 are we doing hut what the Prophet did of old ?
 
 Look somewhat closely into it, and see the strict- 
 ness of the parallel. 
 
 By the law of succession under which our race is 
 laid, the coming generation must, in some mode or 
 other, be trained by that which has preceded it. It 
 must succeed to the conquests or defeats, inherit 
 the thoughts, and be stamped with the impress of 
 that which goes before it. From which one of two 
 consequences must follow ; either that all parents 
 must give themselves up to the training of their 
 own children, in which case all pursuits must be 
 hereditary, and the attention of all must be given 
 merely to keeping what had been already acquired, 
 and not to the making acquisitions; from which 
 must soon result utter stagnation and decay ; or 
 that it must be the special business of some to teach 
 the young, and under these professed teachers the 
 pupils from different families must be gathered, 
 for a common instruction. Accordingly, every land 
 which has had any claim to be civilised has had its 
 schools. This was true even of the old heathen- 
 dom. What those schools were we may gather from 
 the plays of Aristophanes and Terence. Nor can 
 we wonder at what we there see of their condi- 
 tion ; for the old heathendom could not compre- 
 hend the value of the soul, or educate what she 
 scarcely knew to exist. 
 
 Schools, therefore, and colleges, in the highest 
 sense of those words, are among the many blessed 
 fruits of Christianity. Elisha's presence at Gilgal 
 in the school of the Prophets in the days of dearth 
 was a faint image of the coming in of the Christ 
 into these barely fed and straitened companies of
 
 8 
 
 pupils. That voice stirred the fainting earth to 
 action. New sounds broke upon its barren still- 
 ness. How must the mother's heart have throbbed 
 under the sound of " Suffer the little children to 
 come unto Me, and forbid them not I" And the 
 echoes of these first voices were multiplied from 
 hill to hill when, under the afflatus of the Spiuit, 
 the Apostles took up the note, and repeated, " Else 
 were your children unclean, but now are they 
 holy;" " Bring them up in the nurture and admo- 
 nition of the Lord." And then education was 
 lifted from the dust unto the heavenly heights 
 themselves when its new basis was proclaimed in 
 such an exhortation as this : " Having then gifts, 
 differing according to the grace that is given to us, 
 whether ministry, let us wait on our ministry ; or 
 he that teacheth, on teaching." 
 
 It was indeed a mighty change; and we may 
 trace the effect of it in every school, college, and 
 university with which, from that day to this, 
 Christendom has been overspread. 
 
 We may see the fruits of it not only in the 
 time-stained walls of our Oxford and Cambridge 
 Colleges, but in the newest of these quadrangles, 
 with which the faith, and zeal, and wisdom, of one 
 honoured man, supported by the faith and liberality 
 of his Bishop, is so richly furnishing our own Sus- 
 sex. And yet let no man gather that because this is 
 so, the strife is over or the warfare accomplished. 
 There is evil as well as good in every movement of 
 fallen man : great efforts for good afford of them- 
 selves opportunities of evil, which but for them would 
 never have existed. Elisha's unlooked for supply of
 
 9 
 
 the necessities of the perishing sons of the Prophets 
 at Gilgal, gave occasion for one to go into the field to 
 gather herbs and to take the wild vines' poisonous 
 gourds and shred them into the seething pottage. 
 And evermore this too is repeated. The storing of 
 the human mind in education ; the banishment of 
 the old starving barrenness ; the mighty discoveries 
 of science ; the keen subtleties of logical accuracy ; 
 the winding intricacies of metaphysics — all of these 
 have given occasion, as at different periods the great 
 seething human intellect has been stirred from its in- 
 action, for one and another to go forth as if to gather 
 wholesome herbs, and in the stead of them to bring 
 in poisonous fruits a whole lapful, and to shred 
 them unawares with all their poisons in them into 
 the mighty reservoirs of education and of literature, 
 from which the nations are fed. And then from 
 time to time breaks forth the despairing cry, " O 
 thou man of God, there is death in the pot." 
 " Better were it for us to bear our old dearth, than 
 drink in death from this poisonous abundance." 
 
 And so because, when unstable souls have fed 
 upon the deadly gourds of the wild vine of the 
 wilderness, the awakening of the human intellect 
 has been from time to time an occasion of the spread 
 of unbelief, or has subverted old dynasties, and 
 has covered with the bloodshed and the flame of 
 revolution lands in which after long repression the 
 stammerer first lisped the sweet song of liberty; 
 because of such gathering of gourds as these, the re- 
 proachful cry has sounded again and again, " There 
 is death in the pot." " Things were far better in the 
 old days of ignorance. This schooling and this
 
 10 
 
 teaching is working our ruin. Give us back the 
 blessed days of darkness and of slumber; let us 
 rather groan in our old dearth than die in your 
 poisonous plenty." And yet the cry has been but 
 the shriek of unfaithfulness. To listen to it is de- 
 struction, is to yield to a death more awful than 
 any which ever mowed down by mere bodily starva- 
 tion a helpless, indolent, inactive population. It is 
 to renounce our intellectual and spiritual heritage, 
 the freedom of our Father's house ; it is to deny 
 the goodness of His gifts, the greatness of His pur- 
 poses for us. 
 
 Eor man is not made to perish by hunger of the 
 mind any more than by hunger of the body; to 
 grope in the darkness of the spirit any more than 
 in that of the body : somewhere or other there 
 must be for him, if he will seek it, the deliverance 
 that he needs. It cannot be that he need cry 
 out in helpless terror, "there is death in the pot," 
 and so sit down and perish. But then the re- 
 medy for the poison must be found somewhere 
 else than in going back to the old starving time. 
 Then bring meal, saith the voice of the ancient 
 prophet ; and he cast it into the pot, and the whole 
 was healed. And can we not see that the very 
 act was significant ? It was not by throwing away 
 the Prophet's first gift, when it was poisoned by the 
 strange intrusion of the evil which through man's 
 carelessness, or ignorance, or self-will so often steals 
 into such heavenly portions, but by adding to it a 
 new gift from the Prophet's hand, that the wrong 
 was to be redressed. And so it is evermore. It is 
 not in a wretched despairing retrocession, but in a
 
 11 
 
 believing, loving progress that there is hope for man. 
 It must be in calling out more abundantly that 
 power of God which at first brooded with life-giving 
 energy over the lightless, soundless chaos, calling 
 order and beauty out of its shapeless and tumul- 
 tuous heavings, that the work of the new creation 
 must be accomplished. It must be the padding 
 the Divine element to the mingled and tainted 
 mass which will work its renovation. And even as 
 that which the Prophet cast in was not some 
 strange and unknown drug, but the common food 
 of all, even so must it be with us too in our day. 
 It is not by mixing with the mighty powers which 
 move the human intellect some rare correctives, 
 such as only the most highly educated can appre- 
 ciate and receive ; but by bringing in anew from 
 the hand of God's might that which is the com- 
 mon spiritual food of all, that the work is to be 
 wrought. 
 
 And here, brethren, it seems to me that we have 
 reached the great principle which is at once to ani- 
 mate our efforts, — leading us with a will which shall 
 vent itself this day in earnest prayers and in large 
 offerings to build this chapel, and which is also to 
 direct you who are the inmates of the College in 
 its after use. For here is the answer to the ques- 
 tion, How shall we secure the great work which 
 is to be done here from being poisoned by the in- 
 evitable intrusions of evil ? How shall we keep 
 the high education we would give here from poison- 
 ing souls through the infusion into it of such wild 
 gourds as developed selfishness, as carnal ambi- 
 tion, which is bred so readily of keen competition,
 
 12 
 
 as doubt, and speculation, and unbelief, and de- 
 spair, which will, like the gnats of the eventide, 
 fly in at the opened windows of the intellect ? 
 How is all this to be effected ? I answer, " Then 
 bring meal." Cast in to your life of study, and of 
 competition, and of growing intellectual power, the 
 common element of Christian training and Christian 
 action, and there shall be "no harm." 
 
 The promise of Christ standeth sure. " If any 
 man will do" (i.e. willeth to do) " His Will, he shall 
 know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." 1 Set- 
 tled distinct acts of religious obedience are the 
 conditions of our safety, and our safeguard against 
 poison. And what is real Christian worship but 
 at once the highest and the most common of these 
 acts ? Eor the essence of act, so far as concerns 
 the doer, is in the doing, and not in the thing done. 
 And where then can we find the very essence of act 
 so present as in worship ? for in it, the soul which 
 is inwardly conscious of doubt, or distance, or 
 impurity, or infirmity, but which willeth not to 
 doubt and question and speculate, willeth not to 
 remain at a distance, willeth not to grovel on in 
 its impurity, willeth not to go on evermore bowed 
 down by the spirit of its weakness, but willeth to 
 come to God, to reach to Him, to be cleansed, 
 to be delivered by Him ; willeth not to gaze upon 
 the Trinity in Unity as a dark enigma, or to 
 handle it as a curious question, to be wrangled over, 
 but to come and to adore, and to be satisfied, and 
 to be blest, and set free ; willeth not to abide in 
 darkness, but to draw near to the Everlasting Ea- 
 1 S. John vii. 17.
 
 13 
 
 ther through the Son revealing Him, and shel- 
 tering us, by the Holt Ghost breathing within 
 us, crying from within our own souls after Him, 
 the Hock of our Salvation, and lifting us up to the 
 ineffable communion of our spirit with our God. 
 
 Here is not hearing about religion, but practising 
 it : not dreaming about purity, but seeking it : not 
 resolving our God into a formula of belief, but 
 finding Him ; knowing Him by converse ; by the 
 very secret touch of the spirit of the man, which 
 draweth virtue out of the ever present Lord, and 
 proves to the cleansed rejoicing soul that He can 
 make the sick whole. Here is that, the fruit of 
 which goes back with us to common life with a 
 most enduring influence. Here surely then we can 
 see is the highest of all acts, and yet this is the 
 very "meal" of the Prophet, that whereon the 
 commonest soul may feed. Eor though worship 
 does refine and elevate the highest parts of man's 
 fearful nature, even as the plainest food nourishes 
 the highest and subtlest of the nerves and tissues 
 of the body, yet is it still common food within the 
 capacity of all. The least gifted boy within this 
 college, if he reaches forth after God, may worship 
 Him in the power of the Holy Ghost as truly as 
 the most highly endowed : for as the low figures of 
 an arithmetical formula disappear wholly from an 
 equation when you introduce infinity into it, so do 
 the less and the more of the intellect vanish when 
 you set it beside God. Here is the very wonder 
 of our being, that the poorest spirit of the least in- 
 structed man can reach up through Christ by the 
 Holy Ghost to the contemplation and the know-
 
 14 
 
 ledge of his God in holy worship ; whilst the pos- 
 sessor of the loftiest intellect, which seemed to 
 tower high above that of all his brethren, can do 
 no more. This then, is what we would do ; " bring 
 meal and cast it in." In the mighty, spiritual 
 moral and social experiment which, thank God, has 
 been tried now for years in this place, this is the 
 central point of all. The Christian life, in all its 
 other acts, must evolve itself from the central act 
 of ever renewed Christian worship : the chapel must 
 be the inner ring whereof the schoolroom, and the 
 hall, and the whole life of study and of action, ga- 
 thered here, are but outer and concentric rings; 
 they must in all the life they nourish be the outer 
 circles of that innermost circle which is the life of 
 worship. The confessions and absolutions of the 
 service of this chapel, its prayers and intercessions, 
 its thanksgivings and praises ; its aspirations under 
 God's "Word read and preached, its mysterious en- 
 folding of souls through the blessed Sacrament of the 
 Body and Blood of Christ, even into Oneness with 
 Himself, " we dwelling in Him, and He in us," these 
 inward spiritual acts must leaven all the life here if it 
 is to be free from the poison of the earth ; these must 
 heal that taint which evermore is sure to be brought 
 into all human institutions by some careless or 
 daring hand gathering his lapfiil of the gourds of 
 the tang ling wild vine of the wilderness around us, 
 and casting it in as if it were wholesome food into 
 the seething mass. 
 
 This, then, is to-day's question. Will you by 
 earliest prayers lay deep and true the strong foun- 
 dations of this future chapel ? Will you, by liberal
 
 15 
 
 offerings, make possible its full and seemly com- 
 pletion ? 
 
 And for you that are to use it hereafter, here too 
 is the very point to notice. The whole of your lives 
 will take their most real character from what passes 
 within it. Here the subtle poison of the world is 
 to be counteracted for every one of you ; here not 
 by your working yourselves up occasionally into 
 extraordinary fervour, but by the common meal of 
 daily worship : by the continual bowing of your 
 spirits in adoration; and so through their being 
 cleansed from their daily stains, by the blood 
 of sprinkling, refined by the Spirit of burning 
 and brightened by the inpouring of the uncreated 
 light. Here you are to lay down your daily bur- 
 den, win strength against daily temptations, gain 
 daily graces, and learn daily to rest your spirit 
 on God. Thus you will come to know by the in- 
 ward converse of your souls with Him that He is 
 present with you. And then all is peace ; for 
 neither taunts, nor sneers, nor days of darkness, nor 
 any other temptation, can make you doubt of what, 
 by His grace, you know, in the still deep of your 
 souls, with so calm and settled a knowledge, that the 
 surface ruffle of the waters cannot reach down to 
 stir or cloud it. Only settle it from the first in 
 your hearts, that your lives in their every action 
 will be real or unreal as you are real or unreal 
 here. And oh ! that the blessed Spirit of our God 
 may thus reveal to many of you in that future chapel 
 the secret of His Presence, and teach you so to 
 hide yourselves within it, that amidst the daily in- 
 creasing strife of tongues, and the growing pertur-
 
 1G 
 
 bations of this aged and reeling earth, you may 
 know the blessed calm which holds in perfect peace 
 the spirits of His chosen ones ; and after the pil- 
 grimage of this life may you each one appear 
 before your God in Zion, to spend yourselves 
 for evermore there where the open vision of His 
 glory is vouchsafed to the perfected, in that blissful 
 worship of eternity, the first secrets of which your 
 spirit learned within these uprising walls. 
 
 And now to God the Eather, the Son, and the 
 Holy Ghost, be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 By the kind permission of the Bishop of Oxford I am allowed to 
 append to his sermon the following statement : 
 
 The New Chapel at S. John's, Hurstpierpoint, is a work ur- 
 gently needed ; 
 
 First, because the present temporary chapel is required for 
 school room to meet the wants of the increasing number 
 of boys. 
 
 Secondly, because the present temporary chapel is itself of 
 barely sufficient size to allow for further increase of 
 numbers. 
 
 Thirdly, because in an institution of the size and dignity to 
 which S. John's has now attained, it is a requisite of 
 chief importance that the Chapel should be an edifice 
 capable of representing the due relation which the public 
 offices of religion, and the worship of Almighty Gob 
 should bear to the other duties of the place. 
 
 The numbers for whom provision must be made, and reasonable 
 regard to the becoming dignity of the Chapel require a large and 
 substantial building. The length of the choir is to be 125 feet, the 
 breadth 37 feet, the height to the wall plate 45 feet. No attempt 
 at unnecessary effect is contemplated. The building will be im- 
 pressive only by dimensions and proportions, but cannot be con- 
 structed at a low price. 
 
 The foundations which are in have cost about £400, including 
 the preparations for the stone-laying. 
 
 The next contract will be for building the carcase of the choir 
 and roofing it. The lowest tender for this is £3900 ; and this
 
 18 
 
 only provides temporary windows of a rude and unsightly ap- 
 pearance. 
 
 About £2000 has been collected or promised. It has been 
 raised in small sums, with the exception of a donation of £500 
 from one of the Fellows, and £100 from the principal landed 
 proprietor of the parish. 
 
 S. Nicolas College can do little as a body for this work. It 
 has to pay this month 6000 guineas for a site for its cheap board- 
 ing school, near Balcombe, about £700 at the same time for some 
 land at Hurstpierpoint, essential to the College there, and to carry 
 on its building at Lancing. 
 
 The school itself, though prosperous, can never from its small 
 earnings undertake works of such magnitude as this Chapel ; and 
 accordingly we have nothing to look to but that happily large body 
 of friends in the country, who tell us of the interest they take in 
 our work. 
 
 The parents of the boys have contributed upwards of £200, 
 and more is forthcoming from this source. The masters here will 
 raise another £150, independently of the gift already referred to. 
 The east window, representing an outlay of £250, is being taken 
 up by the sisters of the boys ; two side windows of £72 each are 
 under the patronage of a body of young ladies ; and a benefactor 
 has come forward who offers at his own expense to put in four 
 more at the same price. 
 
 We still need £2000 to get us into the building. This must be 
 raised by donations and annual subscriptions. £500 per annum 
 for four years is what is now asked ; and the object of this appeal 
 is to beg of all who are interested in the welfare of S. John's 
 College, Hurstpierpoint, to send their names as annual subscribers 
 of 10,s\ or £1 or donors of larger amounts, to the Rev. N. Wood- 
 ard, New Shoreham ; the Rev. Dr. Lowe, or Rev. J. Gorham, 
 at the College, Hurstpierpoint ; or to H. Tritton, Esq., the Trea- 
 surer, 51, Lombard Street, for the Hurstpierpoint Chapel Build- 
 ing Fund. 
 
 Edwauu C, Lowe. 
 
 Michaelmas Day, 1861. 
 
 . AT.DER9GATE BTBBZT, I