■Cj. 
 
 SERMON, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 VERY REVEREND R. C. TRENCH, 
 DEAN OF WESTMINSTER.
 
 tONDON : miKTED BT MT. LOWS, 
 182, HIOB HOLBORN.
 
 Matt. XXV, V. iO.—"And the King shall answer and say unto 
 them, *Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done in unto the least 
 (if these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.' " 
 
 If we were not dealing here with the words ot 
 the Son of God, with words which set forth the most 
 awful realities of our own doom, we might be temp- 
 ted to pause at that judgment scene, of which this 
 is but a single verse, and admire the wondrous skill 
 by which with a few simple strokes the sublimest 
 picture has been drawn. Others, and those not 
 mean adepts in the art of moving their fellows, in 
 describing the great day, have exhausted in prodigal 
 profusion the utmost resources of their art, have been 
 themselves borne away by the mighty passion of 
 those scenes which they were pourtrayini>'. Not so 
 the Divine Speaker here; He more calmly, as among 
 familiar things, uses the simplest, the coiiinionei-t, 
 the most every-day images to set forth the vastest, 
 the strangest, the most tremendous truths. A min- 
 gled flock of sheep and goats (and such are frequent 
 ID the East,) mingled during the day, and feeding in
 
 the same pastures, but at evening separated and sun- 
 dered from one another, folded apart and in different 
 pens, this simple pastoral image suffices Him for 
 the setting forth the present mixed condition of the 
 Church, good men and evil, faithful and unfaith- 
 ful, in the same outward fellowship and communion, 
 but in the end divided from one another, good 
 gathered only with good, and bad with bad, when at 
 His decisive word, all the light shall be gathered 
 upon one side and all the darkness on the other; 
 and saved and lost, righteous and wicked, shall stand 
 severally at the right hand and left of His throne. 
 
 And in setting forth the principles which shall re- 
 gulate this final distribution and separation, the same 
 simple grandeur reigns. We have Christian piety 
 in its primary elements ; and men are divided and 
 doomed according to a single law, as they were mer- 
 ciful or unmerciful, according as their faith WTOugbt 
 itself out in active deeds of love to their brethren; 
 or testified that it was 7io faith, but only a lifeless 
 imitation 0/ faith, in that it was barren and unfruit- 
 ful of these. 
 
 Let us consider a little, and in that order in which 
 we find them, the two great judgment acts which 
 are here described. The King is sitting upon his 
 throne; the nations are gathered before Him; the 
 trumpet of a great sound has summoned them from
 
 the four corners of the earth, and from His lips they 
 await their doom ; a doom already ominously fore- 
 shown in the places which they occupy, on the right 
 or on the left, good by a natural affinity having 
 gathered to good, and evil to evil. And then He, to 
 whom mercy is a welcome, as judgment is a strange 
 work, addresses Himself first to those wlio are the 
 objects of His mercy, as others had been the objects 
 of theirs. He pronounces them the blessed of His 
 Father ; He declares that in manifold ways they had 
 ministered to Him, fed Him when He was hungry, 
 clothed Him when He was naked, visited Him when 
 He Avas sick, sheltered Him when He was houseless. 
 Merciful themselves they shall obtain mercy in turn, 
 and He bids them to enter into the Kingdom pre- 
 pared for them from the beginning of the world. 
 Very remarkable is the joyful surprise, the glad per- 
 plexity with which this announcement is received. 
 He is ascribing to them an honour too great and 
 high for them with any right to appropriate to them- 
 selves. There may have been indeed in the days of 
 His flesh, when for a while He tabernacled upon 
 earth, holy women and devout men, a Mary or a 
 Martha, a Joseph or a Nicodemus, who ministered 
 to Him of their substance, received Him gladly un- 
 der their roof, or laid Hira reverently in their tombs, 
 but we, when saw we Thee hungry and fed Thee, a 
 stranger and took Thee in, sick or in prison, and
 
 came unto Thee. Counting little of what they had 
 done they cannot understand how He should count 
 BO much ; not imputing it to themselves as righteous- 
 ness, they were not prepared that He should so im- 
 pute it of His grace; while yet it was just,because they 
 had thought bo little, that therefore their Lord had 
 thought so much ; because they had forgotten, yet 
 therefore He had not forgotten ; because they had 
 written their deeds of mercy and love as in water, 
 but He had written them in the book of His ever- 
 lasting remembrance. 
 
 And may we not derive from hence, my brethren, 
 a precious assurance, an earnest motive to be always 
 abounding in the work of the Lord ? For what if 
 the day of judgment is a dreadful day, wherein all 
 hidden things of dishonesty and all unfruitful works 
 of shame shall be brought to light and put to open 
 shame ; it is a day as well in which all hidden 
 things of righteousness, all deeds of light, which yet 
 have shunned the light with no less care than if they 
 had been deeds of darkness, shall be manifested too. 
 Tiie act of self-denial, unmarked by any except him 
 that did it, the sacrifice of self-will unnoticed here, 
 but not unnoticed in Heaven, the wrestling, as of 
 Jacob with the angel, even to the break of day, the 
 alms which the right hand did and the left hand ne- 
 ver knew, all these shall be brought forward, shall 
 be drawn from the secrecy which they had chosen, 
 for that Ciod vitli whom we have to do is not un-
 
 righteous to forget the smallest labour of love that 
 is uToucrht for His Name's sake. And thouorhtmore 
 precious still, motive which mightvrell prove stronger, 
 yet to provoke us to love and good works, whatever 
 has been done to the least of Christ's brethren, to 
 the least of tiiose whose nature He assumed. He 
 shall then impute it as done to Himself — "inasmuch 
 as ye did it to the least of these mv brethren, je did 
 it unto me." It is He, the Lord of Glory himself, 
 whom in the naked one we clothe, in the stranger 
 we take in, in the sick we visit or relieve. We 
 hear of some of whom in the olden time is is said 
 that thev entertained angels unawares. Angels and 
 more than angels, even Him who is the Lord of 
 Angels as of men, we may entertain if only we will. 
 As we walk up and down in the world. He meets 
 us in his suffering members — He offers himself to 
 us under manifold disguises — strange and unlikely, 
 squalid, sordid, repulsive these disguises may often 
 be, but still He is there, to be detected by the eye 
 of faith, to be ministered unto by the hand of love. 
 Oh, what an immeasurable dignity would such a 
 thought as this impart to each lowliest service of love, 
 if only we would realize it (which who among us 
 does ?) to the full. 
 
 But the truth which Christ has been declarinsr 
 here, has also its sterner and sadder side. Oh, He 
 does not shrink from declarinp: as well '' Blessed are
 
 8 
 
 the merciful," contains in it as a necessary conse- 
 quence and complement, " Cursed are the unmerci- 
 ful." God's love of good is also His hatred of evil ; 
 His pleasure in rigliteousness is itself His displeasure 
 at unrigl)teousness. God's love to good, and hatred 
 of evil are not two different qualities or attributes in 
 Him, but only two different manifestations of one and 
 the same supreme moral energy,rejoicingin that "which 
 is like, repelling that which is unlike to its own per- 
 fect self. A God of Love must also be a God of 
 Anger ; he cannot truly love the good without being 
 also a hater of evil ; He cannot be a rewarder of one 
 who is not also a punisher of the other. " Our God 
 is love" and "our God is a consuming fire," so far 
 from contradicting one another, would not be true 
 the one without the other. And therefore, there 
 must needs follow on Christ's " Come ye blessed of 
 my Father," another and a sadder word " Depart 
 from me, ye cursed." Ye have chosen to abide at 
 a distance from TSIe, and now take for ever that 
 which ye have chosen. My love to you awoke no 
 answering love upon your parts toward Me, or to- 
 ward my Brethren and yours. The Kingdom of Love 
 rejects you, as you have rejected it. Be filled with 
 your own doings. Be gathered under your own 
 Head, under the banner of Him who is the Prince 
 of lust and selfishness and pride, as I am the Prince 
 of purity, of humility and of love, and would fain 
 have gathered ye under Mine.
 
 And then Brethren, very wonderful it is to observe 
 that exactly as the faithful should think no good of 
 themselves, these can think no evil — as those ex- 
 claim, When did we serve Thee ? so these, When 
 did we not ? a fearful commentary, and one which 
 may well lead to earnest heartsearching on the words 
 of the Psalmist, "The ungodly flattereth himself in 
 his own eyes, till his abominable sin be found out,' 
 as again on the words of the wise man, that all the 
 ways of a man may be clear in his own e' es, while 
 yet the end thereof is death. Of this, however only 
 by the "way. But wherein did the source and secret 
 of this their fearful mistake about themselves, of this 
 miserable delusion, not dissipated until it were too 
 late, consist? It consisted iu this : they tried them- 
 selves not by the measure of the good which they 
 had left undone, not by the measure of their omitted 
 duties, but only of their committed sins. These 
 wicked, these cruel and unmerciful, these whom the 
 Lord rejects, whom He puts away like drops, even 
 while He gathers up others as the pure gold into 
 His treasure house, they are not those which have 
 had positive pleasure in other men's pains, not the 
 active tormentors of the bodies or spirits of men, 
 not those who had pitilessly used up and consumed 
 their brethren for the gratification of their own lust 
 and pride, or the heaping up wealth in their own 
 storehouses — Their guilt is nothing so strong and 
 marked as that of such would be — the unmerciful
 
 10 
 
 of Scripture are just those who have stood aloof, 
 looking on and yielding no help, while the world 
 went upon its miserable way, who have wrapped 
 themselves close in the garment of their own selfish- 
 ness, for were they, they said, their brother's keep- 
 ers? who like Dives, has fed without fear, while a 
 Lazarus was lying, wounded and full of sores, at 
 their gate. ''Became ye did it ?iot.'" This is their 
 condemnation; it is this which Christ lays to their 
 charge. And then too, that very thing which added 
 so unutterable a price to each act of faithful love, I 
 mean Christ's Presence in his redeemed, adds also an 
 unutterable guilt to every omission and neglect of the 
 same. / was in those afflicted ones from whom you 
 hid your eyes, or seeing whom you passed by on the 
 other side. I lay hungering in the porch when you 
 did not see me ; I stood sliivering at the gate when 
 ye did not clothe me ; I was stretched u])on the bed 
 of sickness or of mortal pain, when no hand of yours 
 was stretched out to succour and to save. Because 
 ye did it not to the least of tliese My brethren, ye 
 did it not unto Me. But enough, brethren, by way of 
 general introduction — whatever time may remain to 
 us, 1 would bestow upon the immediate subject 
 which is brought before our notice to-day, at the 
 same time beseeching you not to disconnect what 
 will be spoken with what has been ; but to remem- 
 ber ever the blessedness and glory of ministering to 
 those wliom Christ has redeemed, or rather to Him
 
 11 
 
 in them ; the dreadful guilt and awful doom of 
 indulging in the spirit of selfishness and hardness of 
 heart which would cause us to leave these ministra- 
 tions undone. 
 
 The "House of Charity," whose claims I bring 
 before you to-day, is a charity which has some pecu- 
 liar features of its own, such as at once present 
 themselves to the notice of every-one who considers 
 what the field of lis operations is, and such as broad- 
 ly distinguish it from every other charitable institution 
 in this metropolis. The feature which eminently 
 distinguishes it is the freedom of operation which it 
 has reserved for itself. 1 do not mean to to deny 
 that it is most valuable and important for other 
 charities, that most charities should have their well- 
 defined fields of labour, their special ministrations to 
 some special want and woe of our suffering humanity; 
 that one, for instance, should seek to alleviate the suffe- 
 rings of the blind ; another to smooth the path of 
 the consumptive to their grave ; a third to treat the 
 sufferings and diseases of children ; well too, that 
 they should not seek to overstep the limits which 
 they have laid down for themselves, or be tem])ted 
 to intrude into another line of things, yet at the 
 same time there is an inconvenience, even a danger, 
 in this appropriation by different charitable instituti- 
 ons of their own special work, joined with the 
 restriction not to trarel beyond this. The inconve-
 
 12 
 
 nience is this — the forms of human Buffering, of 
 human need, are so infinite, they take such unexpec- 
 ted shapes, they rise up from such unlooked-for 
 quarters, that it is quite inipossible beforehand to 
 reduce them under any fixed formulas and schemes. 
 There is real danger therefore, nay, there is a 
 certainty, that multiply as you will, the charities 
 vith rigid rules laid down beforehand in regard of 
 the sufferings wliich they shall seek to alleviate ; 
 after all is done, much will be left out, much will be 
 left unprovided for. 
 
 Here then, the House of Charity steps in, and I 
 should not fear to call it, nor consider that I am 
 praising it too highly if I called it, a supplement to 
 all the other public charities of London. Its essen- 
 tial character is its elasticity — its power of adapting 
 itself to any and every emergent need. There is 
 almost no form of human woe or distress which 
 comes amiss to it — almost none which it by its very 
 constitution, is obliged to repel from its gates. The 
 poor convalescent, dismissed from the hospital as 
 cured, but still fiunt and weak from recent disease, 
 here finds for a little that nourishment and rest so 
 greatly needed at such a time; theyoung man in search 
 ofemploynient, who has come to London, and whose 
 little fun Is are exhausted before he has found that 
 which he was in search of, may here be enabled to 
 prolong his search, and meet others, who with more
 
 is 
 
 influence and a wider range of vision, willlielp bim in 
 it; those suddenly, and by no fault of their own, thrown 
 out of employment ; as by a great fire, or by the'death 
 or bankruptcy of an employer; friendless persons wait- 
 ing in this great city, weary ^days or weeks, till the 
 ship which shall carry them to some more hospitable 
 coast, shall sail — these have often found here a tem- 
 porary home. But I cannot enumerate all its various 
 ministrations of help, for one very characteristic 
 feature of this institution I would fain bring to your 
 notice. I speak not of the earnest ministrations of 
 its chaplain, as he seeks to make the time of sorrow 
 or anxiety a time for deepening and strengthening 
 the spiritual life of the inmates of this House, for 
 this we may thank God it has in common with 
 many, but I would rather call your attention to the 
 constant efforts of the conductors of this Institution 
 to he permanently useful to those whom they help — 
 to assist them into places where henceforward they 
 may be able to help themselves, and the singular 
 success which has attended their efforts in this direc- 
 tion, indicating on their part a wisdom, an energy, 
 a labor of love, for which we may well give, not them 
 (for they do not desire it), but God the praise. 
 
 And thus in the eleven years that have elapsed 
 since the foundation of this House, it has helped 
 some two thousand five hundred persons. Do not say, 
 "What is this, as compared with the misery, the dis-
 
 u 
 
 tr«ss, the waut au<.i woe, of this great metropolis of 
 ours?" or if you do say so, why then, enlarge your 
 gifts, open "wide your hands, and the two thousand 
 five hundred of the last eleven years may be the five 
 thousand, or the ten thousand, of the next eleven. 
 Indeed it is most earnestly desired to extend its 
 benefits to classes whom yet it does not reach, as 
 you "will see at large in the papers which have been 
 placed within your reach, and which I would earnest- 
 ly desire that you would peruse at your leisure. 
 
 But indeed, do not say, "What are two thousand 
 five hundred relieved, as compared with the unre- 
 lieved?" they may alas, be few ; but in themselves 
 how large, how blessed a company ! Numbers are 
 cold and heartless, I had almost said cruel, things — 
 vre must ever seek to get at the humanity that is 
 behind them. Think only of some one weary way- 
 farer on the road of life, weary and heavy laden, rea- 
 dy to lie down and die, in miserable doubt whether 
 there is any love for him in Heaven, or any love for 
 him on earth — in the heart of God or in the hearts 
 of men — let such a one be drawn by the Providence 
 of God within the wallsof the House of Charity ; let 
 him find there kind and sympathising friends ; coun- 
 sel, and comfort, and help ; shelter for the present, 
 and may be an opening for the future — will he not 
 take courage again ? will he not see, and rightly, in 
 tbii love of man, a witness for the love of God,
 
 15 
 
 who onlj could liave put this love into tiieir hearts? 
 will he not manfully and hopefully, gird up his loins 
 again for the battle of life; and address himself 
 to its task and toil, quite another man, far better 
 and far braver than he would have been, but for his 
 passing sojourn there ? 
 
 Or imagine some young widow, reduced suddenly 
 to abject distress — if she can wait a little while, 
 perhaps some way of life will open to her, but she 
 cannot afford to wait that little while. Hunger h 
 already at the door ; nay, it has entered in by the 
 door, and has seized her and her little ones. There 
 is one way indeed, a way only too easy, of escape 
 from present want. Is it nothing to have saved her 
 from this? from the foul fatal step which would 
 have joined her with the ghastly company of those 
 lost ones, who for a little while haunt our streets^ 
 and then go down to the chambers of death by the 
 steep stairs of infamy and scorn and shame, which 
 lead for these unhappy ones so swiftly and so inevi- 
 tably there. 
 
 But enough. I now leave the matter in your 
 bands. I will only remind you of the words of the 
 Lord Jesus, how that He said "It is more blessed 
 to give than to receive," and with this I will just 
 remind you of a fact which I am persuaded all expe- 
 rience bears out, namely, that if men will not give, 
 God will take. How often do we see men with-
 
 16 
 
 holding more than is meet, how often have we done 
 80 ourselves, but not to our gain — a false friend, or 
 a breaking bank, or an unfaithful steward, or a dis- 
 astrous fire, or a prodigal child, or an inexplicable 
 panic, or one of the turns and accidents of life, haa 
 swept away in an hour the unjust savings of years. 
 Accidents we call them, but they are nothing of the 
 kind. Because we M'ould not give, therefore God 
 took — took and left no blessing behind them, as He 
 would have done, if we had freely opened our hand. 
 It is to this free giving, which has the blessing, that 
 you are invited this day — to a plenteous sowing, 
 that you may cause a plenteous reaping hereafter.
 
 
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