EDIEi bt eal ‘ie : i i ff 4 . i) 5 our i if res nate ea ee LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA FROM THE LIBRARY OF Wittiam JAcKSON MorTON, Deie re aPLEASE RETURN 10 wT «YY Rev. WV mm. JJ. Morton. THE FIRE UPON THE ALTAR a oe OS Peal HED FO HARROW BOFS BY THE REY. J. E. GC. WELEDOW-A6 A. HEAD MASTER OF HARROW SCHOO SECOND SERIES 1887 TO I8go ew Work a we JAMES. POPE AND CO 14 & 16 ASTOR PLACE 1891PREP AGS Tats second volume of sermons, like the first which was published four years ago, will, I hope, appeal to Harrow boys and their parents or friends, and perhaps to other persons who are associated with Harrow. It is possible that here and there they will attract the notice of some one who does not possess this local interest ; but that is not their object. Even with this limitation, it may be said that there is no occasion for a new volume of School sermons. K such a remark will be true enough if anybody cares to make it; but he who makes it cannot know what a link such a book, given to boys at the time of ’ their leaving School, proves to be, as thes leretigpaant Eine jt eth DR ide vi Preface. years pass, between a Head Master and his pupils, who have so often listened to him in the School Chapel, and who take his sermons into different parts of the world, and are reminded by them from time to time of their School days, and, as some- times happens, may have no other possible means of spiritual instruction or meditation than them. J. B.C. W. Harrow ScHoou, February 1891,CN Tee re 1.24 The Sire upon the Altar. PAGE “The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out.”—Lrviricws VI. Day L IL. ¢ The Influence of the ast. “I have considered the days of old, the years of ancient times.”—PsauLmM Lxxvil. 5,' . ; ‘ oo LE: The Mehelations of Nature. “The Lord God planted a gurden.”—Gernzsis 0. 8,% = 28 £Vi The Lesson of the Lilies, “Consider tle lilies of the field.” St. Martruew v1. 28,= al Br oe es ce ties 7 — “a — Bi hh ; S CAHit- Sunday. ‘¢ And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they ?” —REVELATION Vil. 13, ae PAGE / A. V VE G7 Trintty Sundap. “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore and teach [or, ‘make disciples of’] all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”— St. MarroHew xxvir.18,19, . : ; Se V VIL O45 Sanctification, “And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.’— Si, JOHN xy. 19, - : : 69 VIll. 6 ¥ Esau and Aacob. i. ‘“Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing.” —GENESIS XXYII. 36,Contents. “sau and Yacob, li. ae . oe >AGI “And Esau said unto his father, Hast thou but one blessing, my fither? bless me, even me also, O my father. And Esau lifted up his voice, and wept.” —GENESIS XXVII. 38. 99 x. ( / Laughter, “And he said, Nay; but thou didst lauch,”_ GENESIS xyiit. 15. 105 Al. “Chat £ habe foritten £ habe tritten.” ‘Pilate answered, What I have written I have written.”—Sr, JOHN xrx. 22... ; P : a LO San 6s Astronomy and the Astronomers. “'T'he heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handy work.”—Psaum Mie, te 7 y ATT. The Silence of Earth. “The Lord is in His holy 'emple: Jet all the earth keep silence before Him.” —Harakkouk 11, 20, !init 5 ee Contents. v XIV. (2. Jf y The Silence of Weaben. « And when He had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.” REVELATION Vill. 1, PAGE 150 « Bngelfishness. «“ And he said unto him, Fear not: for the hand of Saul my father shall not find thee; and thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto thee.” —J] SamvuEL xxyu. 17, 161 «“Garrping by the Stuff.” « Ag his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff: they shall part alike.’”—1 SAMUEL XXX. 24, 172 ia XVIL GS & Eltiah the Wero. “Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a prophet of the Lord; but Baal’s prophets 22, 183 are four hundred and fifty men.”—1 Kine@s xvul. 22,Contents. XVII. GJY Eltiah the Coward. ‘“But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.”— 1 KiInGs xix. 4, XIX. G HO The Haw of Lmitation. “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Clirist.”—1 CORINTHIANS x1. 1 > XxX. ©G/ Salse CHitness and True. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.’”’—Exopwus xx. 16, vie, 2 Gg The National Life. +e 3efore Him shall be gathered all nations.”— ST. MaTrTHEW xxv. 82 > mA tt. Scenes of the Lord’s Yassion. i. THE AGony, “And He went a little further, and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, O My Father, if it be or 3? PAGE 193 204 DOSContents. heless, not possible, let this cup pass from Me: nevert 389 240 Ov, ag I will, but as Thou wilt.”—ST. MATTHEW XXVI. S/Xxi. 6 OY Scenes of the Lord's Wasston. 1. lee REAL. “ And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat : but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.”—St. LUKE XXII. 31, 32. “And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how He had said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny Me thrice. And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.”—St. LUKE xxu. Gis G2: 3% , dps XXIV. G OS oo E lar ( an? t Ses Scenes of the Lord's Jassion. ili. THE CRUCIFIXION. “ Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe? Be- hold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.”—Sr. JouN XVI. 31, Be. 207 + VXXV. GCOG Hast EXords. “But continue thou in the things that thou hast loamt 2 Timoruy ui, 14, . ; :: Che fire upon the itar. “The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go out.”—Lxvrricus vr. 16. Ir you remember the context of these words, or will look at it in your Bibles, you will see that they originally relate to a simple ritual provision of the Jewish. Law. It was enacted that the “burnt offering” “at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation” should be “ continual eat should be always shining, by night as well as by day ; its fire should never be dimmed, nor its ashes quenched ; it should be ever-wakeful ; it should “never go out.” Such an enactment, especially when the burnt offering was regarded as sym- bolizing the consecration of the worshipper who made it, was calculated to keep alive within men’s hearts the thought of perpetuity — of B Ee tee oe Ret Pt a 24 The Revelations of Nature. ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely ; as if gardening were the greater perfection.” Nor can you reflect at all upon the course of human affairs without feeling that one of the saddest features of the time is the massing of population in large towns, away from the song of the birds, the whisper of the wind amidst the leaves of the forest, the richness of the golden cornfield in the autumn, and all the light and liberty of the country. How much happier the world would be, and how much holier, if only the lust of money did not tear men away from the fields, where they can enjoy communion with God, into the towns! But, at all events, if man made the city, God made the country. He gives us the valleys and hills, the wolds and fountains, the groves which have been called His “ first temples,” and the solemn silent glory of the stars; He blesses us with the lavish wealth of nature, and it is our fault or folly if we choose to turn it to a wilder- ness of smoke. It is worth while, then, I think, before it is too late, to ask what lessons He woulda Lhe Revelations of Nature. 25 teach us, so far as we may learn them, in the natural world. Now, of Nature it may be remarked, as of man himself, that she shows what may be called the signs of a frustrated purpose. She is not all that she was meant to be; nor yet is man. If you consider your own nature; if you recollect that you possess noble powers or faculties, and do not always use them well; that you are capable of sublime and holy thoughts, in which you long to be like God, and yet that you often act ina way which wins your own contempt; and if you go on to think that what is true of yourself is true of all the myriads of human beings in the world, you will come to feel that the truest account of man’s history is probably that he was once better than he is now, and that he is seeking gradually to reassert his ancient goodness. A great theolo- gian* observed that when he looked out into the world, men seemed to him like the chil- dren of a noble parentage, who by some acci- dent had lost the consciousness of their home, 1 Cardinal Newman.26 The Revelaticns of Nature. and had been brought up in mean and dissolute surroundings. That is the Christian doctrine of the fall of man. But Nature too seems in a way to fail of her purpose. For, upon the whole, she seems to love us and to wish our good; she sends us the sunshine and the showers; she oladdens our hearts, and after the long winter the spring smiles again. And yet what a severity and even savagery is displayed in her famines, her tempests, her cataclysms! And besides them there is a sadness, which poets have felt, in the moods or aspects of the natural world. Nature's brightest langh sounds often as a sigh. ‘That is what St. Paul means when he says, in his letter to the Romans, that “the creature,” 7.e. the 99 creation, “was made subject to vanity;” it was in a certain sense blighted or frustated. I was quoting the other day to the Upper Sixth Form boys a passage in which Schelling expresses this sentiment in beautiful language. “ Nature,” he says, “with her melancholy charm, resembles a bride, who at the very moment when she was fully attired for marriage saw the bridegroomLhe Revelations of Nature. 2 to whom she was to be united die on the day fixed for the marriage. She still stands with her fresh crown and in her bridal dress, but her eyes are full of tears.” Without wishing, then, to disguise the sombre side of Nature—knowing that sometimes she smiles and sometimes, too, she frowns, and yet remembering that there was atime when He Who made her, and all that is in her, sawit to be “ very good ”—I think, if we look her full in the face, we shall apprehend that she speaks, though faintly perhaps, of a threefold revelation, which is written by Divine hands upon her brow. 1. There is, first of all, the revelation of order. She displays a method, a system, a purpose. The natural world is not a chaos, but a cosmos. It is governed by the unbroken reign of law. This is what may be called the scientific view of Nature ; but I think the earliest indication of it is to be found in the sacred narrative, which relates, as a Divine benediction, that “while the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night,ee eee ; igri itt PAOMMID idl 28 The Revelations of Nature. shall not cease.” Science at each new step of her progress reiterates the lesson of uniformity in Nature. There is something grand, something majestic, in this conception. The thought that the law which moulds the dewdrop on the grass, is the law which determines the form and move- ment of the planets, is calculated to fill the soul of man with awe. But for the present it is enough to notice that the fact of law in Nature is the condition which makes human progress possible. You can very easily see how this is so. You would not think it worth while to work for to-morrow, if you did not feel sure that the sun will rise then. The husbandman would not sow his seed in the winter, did he not know that it will mature to golden grain. ‘The seaman would not loose his vessel from her moorings, did he dream the compass would some day play him false. If man were only the sport of capricious elements, if gravitation were true to-day and untrue to-morrow, if day did not always succeed to night, nor summer to winter, then it is certain that we should all even now be savages. But itThe Revelations of Nature. 29 is because the reign of law is universal, because by observing and obeying it in Nature man becomes her master, that he has been enabled to cultivate the earth and subdue it, to call the lightning his servant and to read the secrets of the stars. 2. There is a second revelation of the natural world ; we may call it the revelation of beauty. The rainbow is one thing to the man of science; it is quite another thing to the artist. And there is a deeper joy, I think, in beauty than in knowledge, as love is greater than power. The human souls which feel God most have the most delight in His presence. Just think for a moment of the flowers ; for the Saviour said Himself, “ Consider the lilies.” I think it was Keats who, as he lay dying, whispered to Severn that the intensest pleasure of his hfe had been to watch the growth of the flowers. Why are the flowers so beautiful ? I wonder. Why is all the natural world so rich in beauty, even in the depths of a forest where no human eye has ever seen it? I cannot tell. But it may be that God Himself delights in theGh. By co is: + fal A eR ers ae 30) The Revelations of Nature. contemplation of it. The beauty of the world reflects the smile of the Almighty. It is not wholly meant for man, although he dwells among it; it is the intense expression of the Divine pleasure; it is the silent witness that God is for ever good. 3. Yet again, there is a third revelation of Nature, and it is greater than the revelation of order or beauty. This is the revelation of love. May I not say that it is one which we deeply need? For Nature might, indeed, have been orderly and yet unlovely, or lovely, as has been said, and yet unkind. Nay, we know that ever and again, in some strange wise, she seems to visit her wrath upon the children of men. It needs a Divine faith to catch the subtle harmony thrilling through the discords of the natural world. It needs such a faith to know that Nature speaks, when she speaks truest, not in the moaning of the storm-lashed ocean upon the strand, nor in the ery of the mother-bird when her young ones are reft from her, but in the matins of the lark and the vespers of the nightingale, in thehe Revelations of Nature. 31 ee Se “myriad laughter ” of the summer sun—yes, and in the rhythmic chant of those unresting sphe ron ** For ever singing as they shine, ‘The hand that made us is Divine,’ ” So true is it that the Almighty Father has not “left Himself without witness, in that He did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.’ But One only, I think, among men has fully y known that truth. For He looked, as others before Him, on the lilies; He saw that they ? came with each new spring to clothe the face of the earth in a beauty which Solomon’s pomp could never equal. But He saw, too, that the gospel of the lilies was not one of order or loveliness only, but of love; for He Who “so clothed,” with care so tender, “the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven,” would not forget, but would much more clothe and bless His children, though their faith were but as the dew of the morning. Or He looked on the sun shining in his strength ; and He thought not of theMa cae nee p maiecn a fy Gee ee ee ee The Revelations of Nature. 4 32 ceaseless uniformity, nor of the infinite splendour of its light, or not of these only, but of the Almighty Father’s love, Who “ maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” These are great thoughts; yet they are not wholly alien from the few words which I read to you at the first, “The Lord God planted a garden.” For to have learnt the threefold revelation of Nature—the revelations of order, of beauty, and of love—will be to enter a little into the Mind of the Highest. For there are three gardens of which the Bible tells; and though they seem so separate, yet are they near to each other. For, firstly, there is the Garden of Eden, which was the home of all the nations of men; and there, by the sin of one, was lost the blessing, which is the presence of God among mankind. And, secondly, there is the Garden of Paradise, for which we look, where is “the river of water of life,” as clear as crystal, and the tree “ whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.”Lhe Revelations of Nature. 23 ee ee But between them is the Garden of Gethse- mane, and in it we see the Saviour of the world kneeling in prayer among the olives, We will not now add another word. But it would seem that from the garden of innocence the way to the garden of bliss lies—must needs lie—through the garden of suffering. And, if it be so, then those of us who are called to be suf- ferers may think, perhaps, of the garden which is lost, and pray for the garden which shall some day be ours,Cie LV. he Lesson of the ities. “ Consider the lilies of the field.”,—St. Marrurw v1. 28. WHEN the spring comes and is passing into summer, it is well to think a little of the joys and beauties which it brings with it. We cannot be too glad of it, too thankful for it. It is a source of never-ceasing hope and _ happiness. When our hearts are saddened by the long death of the winter, it comes, with the voice of singing birds and the glory of flowers, to tell us of light and perfect peace and immortality. There 1s no one of us who, at such a time, cannot enter into the spirit of those touching lines in which St. Francis speaks of the Creation, as if its love- liness were the expression of its gratitude to the Jord and Maker of all— “ Praised art Thou, my Lord, by Mother Karth— Thou Who sustainest her and governest ; And to her flowers, fruit, herbs, dost colour give and birth.” 34Lhe Lesson of the Lilies. 35 Nor, indeed, among the natural charms of the springtime, are any more beautiful than the flowers. ‘They are everywhere, and we give them scarce a thought. They are strewn upon the face of the earth like the myriad stars of heaven. Every child of man—eyen the poorest and the weakest—may feel himself to be touched with a higher and holier influence by the silent sanctity of the flowers. ‘Surely flowers are the smiles of God’s goodness,” said a great philanthropist,! when his soul was weary of human selfishness and sinfulness. “Flowers are my music,” said a great theologian,? to whom music, as he sorrow- fully owned, was a sealed book. Some of you may recall the tenderness of the poet’s® words, when he makes his sad, death-stricken maiden pray to live until the spring came and robed the fields in verdure. “I wish the snow would melt and the sun come out on high; I long to see a flower so before the day I die.” Some may have heard of the English prison * Wilberforce. 2 Dr. Arnold. * Tennyson, The May Queen.ni i die 36 The Lesson of the Ltties. ee where, not long ago, one of the warders found an abandoned woman leaning her head on her hands and weeping in an agony of grief, and saw that she was pressing to her cheeks a little white flower, such as had bloomed each summer be- neath the lattice of her window at home in the days when she had been an innocent child. So I take as my text to-day, ‘‘ Consider the lilies.” Not that these are the pure white lilies as we know them, else the Lord could hardly have said of them that “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these;” but perhaps the Huleh lilies, as they are called, which grow wild at Nazareth, and are rich and variegated in their hues, with exquisite petals rising from the stem, so as to form a gorgeous canopy “such,” says a modern traveller,! “as art never approached, and king never sat under, even in his utmost glory.’ And the Lord bids us to “consider ” these lilies. He cannot bear that we should be indifferent to their beauty. Only He will not let us think that their beauty is everything ; it is in 1 Dr. Thomson.Lhe Lesson of the Lilies, 37 His eyes a lesson of the Divine love, which is as careful of the least things of the world as of the greatest, and lavishes itself in beneficence and grace. And he who would look upon Nature with the eyes of Christ, must always pierce through her forms, however lovely they may be, to the deep and solemn meaning of them all. It is not my business in this place, even if I were able, to teach you the lessons of botany. Yet it is one of the most perfect of the sciences ; and I cannot tell you what a wealth of happiness may be added to your lives if you will take the trouble, while you are young, to gain some slight scientific knowledge of the flowers. But to know the names of the flowers is very little; Jesus Christ named very few flowers indeed, and per- haps even here He did not use the “ lilies” speci- fically, but as standing for flowers in general. But to understand what truth it is that the flowers suggest, is to enter a little into the Mind of God. Let us, then, for a few minutes, “consider the lilies;” let us listen to their silent eloquenteo Say ste 38 The Lesson of the Lultes. voice. 1 will choose only two or three of the lessons they suggest. 1. Perhaps the first is the lesson of trust. This is what seems to have been foremost in the Saviour’s thoughts. He knew His disciples would have a hard time among men. They would be disliked and persecuted. They would often be left friendless. They would have cause to say, what you and I need never say, ‘‘ What shall we eat?” or, “ What shall we drink ?” or, “ Where- withal shall we be clothed?” And so He cheered their hearts by pointing them to the lilies. He told them not to forget God’s tender care for the flowers, even for the poor grass that sprung up on the housetops. “If God,” He said, “so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” Is not this a lesson that we may lay to heart? Perhaps we should lay it to heart the better if we felt our need of it. It has come home to men in hours of distress and solitude. Mungo Park was once alone in the African desert, five hundred milesLhe Lesson of the Lilies. from the nearest English settlement, sick and naked, in the midst of the rainy season, sur- rounded by savage beasts and still more savage men. ‘Then his heart sank within him, and he gave himself up to death. “At this moment” —I am giving you his very words—* the extra- ordinary beauty of a small moss in fructification caught my eye. ‘The whole plant was not larger than the top of one of my fingers. I thought, Can that Being, Who planted, watered, and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situa- tion and sufferings of creatures formed after His own image?” So he started up, and, disre- garding hunger and weariness, travelled on, until at last relief came to him. We do not need this lesson, it may be, as he did. And yet we are weary sometimes—are we not ?—we are downcast and sad. We feel as if all things were against us. We cannot believe that God has a work for us in the world. When that is so, let us think of the lilies. Let usDe die 40 The Lesson of the Lilies. remember with what beauty God clothes them. For He asks us, “Are not ye much better than they ?” 2. Again, the flowers, if we will let them, will teach us the lesson of modesty. They are still and sweet and humble. They live near the soil and are not defiled by it. They do not seem to court admiration. They rather hide themselves away from human eyes. “Full many a flower” (says the poet!) “is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air; ” but is not that just the beauty of them and the blessmg? They do not care to be seen. They live for God, and not for men. Yes, it is not upon the dusty high-roads that the sweetest violets blow, but far away in the forest, beneath umbrageous trees, where only the moonbeams are splintered among the branches, and the foot of man never echoes upon the sward. I sometimes think this lesson has sunk into the hearts of those who have known the flowers most and loved 1 Gray.Lhe Lesson of the Lilies. AI them best. You have heard of the great Linneeus, the founder of scientific botany, who gave names to so many flowers. Well, one day one of his pupils went to him, and said, “ You have named many flowers after other people ; will you not let one flower be named after yourself?” And he thought a while, and then he chose as his own a little flower—the Linnea Borealis, as it is now called—which is very humble and obscure, and is rarely seen, being only found, I think, in some northern regions and among the mountains of Switzerland. 3. But, once more, the flowers suggest the lesson of hope. Yes, and of hope beyond our pre- sent, passing lifetime. Tor the flowers die when the winter comes, and live again in the spring. Men were saddened once to think?! that the flowers, when they died, could come to life again, and be born with a new life another year, but that they themselves—so wise, so strong, so mighty—must sleep in the hollow earth their 1 The reference is to the well-known and beautiful lines of Moschus.A ach TD: i gi A2 The Lesson of the Lilies. long, unceasing, unawaking sleep. We do not think so to-day. God has taught us in Christ a more ennobling lesson—not that the flowers may live again, while we lie dead, but that, as they live, so shall we live a better life in the sunshine of His Infinite Presence. So the flowers are eloquent of hope; and being planted around the graves of our beloved ones, bid us believe and rejoice in their immortality. 4. Is there not yet another lesson, a great lesson, that the flowers may teach us? You will antici- pate what I mean—the lesson of purity. When the Royal founder of Eton College was choosing the arms for his now famous foundation, he gave it a sable field, to mark its perpetuity, and upon the field three fleur-de-lis argent, as expressing his hope that it would produce the brightest flowers in every kind of science, “redolent to the honour and most Divine worship of Almighty God and the undefiled Virgin.” It was a noble thought; and looking back across the ages, we may say it has been nobly fulfilled. But to us, too, the charge is given, notLhe Lesson of the Littes. 43 by royal lips, perhaps, but by the Lord Himself. It is that we smirch not, even by one foul word or thought, the candour of our souls, but, like the flowers, lift our eyes in virgin purity from this earth to His ineffable sanctity. For “as the lily among the thorns,” He says, “so is My love among the daughters;” so fair, so pure, so holy. It has been my wish to help you to “con- sider the lilies” in the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ. I have touched but a few of the thoughts that emanate from their beauty; I wish I could have told you more. But if you will reflect a little upon what I have tried this evening to say to you, there will be a new and solemn pleasure for you in Nature, and you will know what the poet} was thinking of when he wrote— ‘‘T’o me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” 1 Wordsworth.Mai ge V. Ccahit-Sundap, “ And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they ?”—REVELATION vit. 13. Tur Apostle St. John in his Apocalypse, as he relates it, saw a strange and remarkable vision. He saw an innumerable multitude, “ of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues,” standing before the throne of God and of the Lamb, every one of them clad in robes of spotless white, every one bearing in his hands a leafy palm branch. He heard them ery with a loud voice, “ Salvation to our God Which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.” And as they cried, he saw the angels around the throne, and the elders and the four mysterious living creatures, prostrate them- selves in awful adoration of God, the Supreme, the Everlasting. He saw it, I say, and he was 44Whit-Sunday. A5 astonished. Yet he dared not put the question which rose to his lips. Curiosity at such a time seemed profanity. But it was like his own thought coming home to him when one of the elders, as if he could read his heart, made answer to him, saying, “What are these which are arrayed in white robes?” or, if I may give the words of the Greek their absolute meaning, ‘These who are clad in the white robes, who are they ? and whence did they come ?” It will be natural to think a little of this ques- tion on this particular Sunday of the Christian year. For Whit-Sunday is historically the Sunday of the white robes. It has been so called in the general belief as being the Sunday when the neophytes, or young converts, wore the white robes of their Christian profession for the first, or, as some say, the last time, in the churches. It was not the only Sunday, I am aware, on which they wore them. There is another Sunday, the Sunday after Easter, some- times called Low Sunday (as being compared with the high festival of Easter), which is known46 Whit-Sunday. ecclesiastically as Dominica in albis, or the Sunday of the white robes; and the reason of its being so known was the same. But Whit-Sunday was, I think, the chief Sunday. Then it was that the largest number wore white robes. Nobody who had seen these young Christians dressed in white, devoting themselves sacramentally to God, could ever forget that solemn spectacle. But let us try to fix our eyes on those white robes which St. John in his Apocalypse beheld. Let us ask ourselves if ever, in this life or afterwards, we may hope to be clad in sucha garb. “ What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?” It is not impossible, I think, to discover four kinds of white robes which are offered to every one of us. 1. And, firstly, the white robes of tnnocence. It is these which God gives us at the first. None of us is born sin-stained ; we become sin-stained. The devil stains oursouls. The world, too, stains them. Alas! we stain them by our own folly and fault. But the wickedest man that ever lived upon thisWhit-Sunday. 47 earth, though he were one whose name is loathed by all mankind, was once, in the mercy of God, an innocent child. Ah! that innocence seems far off —does it not ?—to some among us. We have tasted of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; our eyes are opened; we have seen—what we have seen. Is there not somebody who, as I speak, recalls the day when he told, under what- ever pressure of circumstances, his first little lie; or let the first oath, the first profane word, however hastily it may have been, escape his lips; or the first breath of impurity pass, like a cloud, across the mirror of his conscience? How sinful, how dreadful, it seemed to him then! how bitterly he wept forit! And now, if he should do it again, or worse than it, it would seem, perhaps, a light thing, and would not cost him so much asa passing pang of regret. But is he better than he was, or stronger, or braver? Nay, it is only the robes of innocence that are true as steel, nor can any shaft of evil pierce that armour. We have lost that sacred innocence—most of us, Weare clad in other robes, though they tooBa ied ia RO —_ 48 Whit-Sunday. may be white. But it may be that some young boy, who has come this Term to Harrow, is living still, as the angels live, without thought of evil, and does not know what it is as yet to be mean or guilty, and the blush of shame would mantle on his cheek if sin drew near him. Then I say to you, who perhaps have bought a dear expe- rience, not as condemning you—God forbid !—but for his sake, Do not suffer him to learn evil first from you; do not besmirch those pure white robes with the dirt of school life. you, saying, Do not sin against the child?” You “Spake I not unto will not doit; I ask you not, in the name of Christ. 2. Secondly, there are the white robes of promise. These are the baptismal robes. They were put on in ancient days in the sight of the Church, as signs that the Christian in Holy Baptism had, as St. Paul says, “put off the old man with his deeds,” and “put on the new man” by putting on Christ. They were signs that he had pledged himself by a solemn vow to a life of purity and sanctity. Hence they were called “the mystical robes,” and they who wore them were called “theWhit-Sunday. 49 snow-white flock of Christ.” It was felt that there ought to be a correspondence between the spotless robes and the spotless Christian lives. “Fulgentes animas vestis quoque candida signat,” says the Christian poet Lactantius— “The white robe shows the brightness of the soul.” The priest, in vesting the neophyte in them, would say, “Take thou the white and immaculate robe, that thou mayest bear it spotless to the end, before the tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ, that so thou mayest have eternal life.’ It was the fashion for him to wear them for eight days, and then to lay them up as a memorial in the church. But if ever afterwards he did dis- honour to his profession, soiling his candid soul with deeds of sin and shame, then those white robes laid up in the church were the silent witnesses against him. We, too, have worn our white robes of promise. In Baptism, in Confirmation, we avowed ourselves the servants and soldiers of Christ. We robed ourselves in the alb of His righteousness. We E50 Whit-Sunday. became candidates (candidatc) for His kingdom. It seems but the other day that the long row of candidates for Confirmation was passing up this chancel, to take their sacramental vow of alle- giance before the Bishop, and to receive from his lips their investiture in the splendid chivalry of Christ. Ay, but what of those white robes now ? Is it a hard saying that to-day, after so short a time, some of them—I will not say many—are already stained with the sad dark lines of for- gotten and frustrate promises, and of heavenly hopes from which the glory has died away ? 3. Well, then, listen; there are, thirdly, the whate robes of cleansing. God gives us not one start alone in life; He gives us many. We make our promises, and we break them. Our robes of Baptism and Con- firmation are defiled. We hardly dare to look upon them any more. Then it is that men or boys, perhaps, come near us; they point their fingers at us tauntingly ; they say, “There you have failed, you have broken your good resolution - what is the use of trying to keep it any more?” Wea Whit-Sunday. 51 a es ine are like Christian sleeping in the grounds of Giant Despair. But God never speaks so to any human soul. He never bids us give up hope. He says, “Try again; though you have failed a thousand times, though you have made a thousand mistakes, yet try again,” It must have struck you, in reading the Gospels, that this is just the language used by Jesus Christ when He was on earth. He came across “all sorts and conditions of men ;” worse men, perchance, than you and I are likely to be— publicans, Pharisees, harlots, a dying thief on the cross. He never despaired of any one of them. He never let any one of them despair of himself. He told them all to sin no more; not to grieve for the irrevocable past, but to make the future happier and holier. He said, “ Thy sins be forgiven,’ “Go into peace,” “Sin no more.” That is what He says to you. Try to do better. Lift up your hearts. It is you, though you have done wrong, though this very week you have done something you are ashamed of,—it is you who shall sanctify the School. Yes, I knowall who try, however feeble they may be, however 52 Whit-Sunday. your white baptismal robes are stained. But I think I can hear the great words of the prophet, “Take away the filthy garments from him. . So they set a fair mitre upon his head, and clothed him with garments. And the angel of the Lord stood by.” Yes, I think he is standing by now. 4, And, lastly, the white robes of victory. It is to these that the text chiefly refers. For the answer to the question, “ Who are these ?”’ at the vision of the innumerable multitude, is given in the words, “These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Perhaps the palm branches, too, denote victory as well as joy; for the palm was the victor’s ensign. It will not always be striving here. It will not always be staining our robes and cleansing them anew, and then, alas! staining them once more. If we persevere, we shall win. If we hold out : to the end, He will bless. us. (It is not failing to succeed which is so bad, but failing to try.) AndWhit-Sunday. Re Jo often they may give in to the forces against them, shall at the last “stand before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands.” Such are the white robes, of innocence, promise, cleansing, victory; and yet in a sense they are all one. For it is recorded that, when St. Chry- sostom lay dying, he asked to be dressed once again in the white robes of his Baptism, and then, being dressed in them, received the Holy Eucha- rist, and so died. But I had almost forgotten that there is another question: “ What are these which are arrayed in ? white robes? and whence came they?” ‘ Whence came they?” I cannot tell. But it were a happiness passing words, if only it could be said on that great day, when the redeemed of Christ shall stand before the throne, that some of them —nay, not a few—in the mercy of God, came from Harrow.VI. Crinityp Sunday, “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore and teach Lor, ‘make disciples of’] all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”—Sr. Marruew XXVIII. 18, 19. ¢ Tus is Trinity Sunday, as you know; and I wonder if you have ever thought about it at all as possessing a practical value for your lives. It is a festival which many people lose sight of. They feel as if it somehow lacked reality, as if it did not touch their own human experience. Yet you and I, being Christians and Churchmen, ought not to think so. For it may be said that, in a certain sense, the Christian year ascends to Trinity Sunday; Trinity Sunday is the climax of that year. dt°is the last of the Church’s solemn festivals. “The Sundays which follow this o4Lriniwy Sunday. are only so many Sundays after Trinity, until Advent comes and begins the Christian year again. Still, Trinity Sunday differs from all the other festivals in one respect. They all com- memorate events; it does not commemorate an event, but a belief. Thus Christmas Day reminds us of Christ’s birth, Good Friday of His death, Kaster Day of His resurrection from the tomb, Ascension Day of His elevation into heaven. But Trinity Sunday is not charged with any such thought as these. It does not tell us that any event ever occurred. It only suggests—what is a very mysterious subject indeed—that the Nature of the Godhead may be conceived as compre- hending three Persons. If I try to speak to you this evening about the Trinity, I must ask your earnest attention to what I shall say. For the subject, as I have just said, is a mystery. It is difficult to think of it, and still more difficult to talk of it; and 1 know well that I can only lay before you some poor fragmentary thoughts in regard to it. Nor am I sure that I can make even these thoughts56 Lrinity Sunday. pertectly clear to you; but I will use as simple language as possible. The doctrine, then, of the Trinity in Unity means that God in a certain sense is One, and yet in a certain other sense is Three. Of course, it 1s easy enough to assert that this statement in itself is impossible. There are sume clever irreligious persons who seem to delight in making fun of it. They argue that “one” is not the same thing as “three,” that what is one cannot be three, and what is three cannot be one, and therefore the Church teaches nonsense. Now, I frankly admit that this argument is unassailable; what is one cannot be three, at least in the same sense in which it is one. But, althouch it is indubitably true that “one” is not the same thing, nor can ever be the same thing, as “three,” this is not, I think, a truth which has been discovered for the first time in the present nineteenth century. The acute intellect of the great Athanasius was not unequal to the task of apprehending the distinction between unity and plurality. And if he not only believed theLrinity Sunday. doctrine of the Trinity, but was prepared to stand alone against all the world and to lay down his life for it, it must have been because he felt it to express, or at least to suggest, some vital truth which the world could not well afford to lose. For it is not enough to say that this definition of God lies beyond human reason. So must every definition of God, if you will consider it. You would find it hard, I think, to give an account of your next-door neighbour, of the boy who sits at your side upon these benches. You know what he is like, but you could not tell at all events, you could not tell completely. But anybody who had never seen or heard of him how much more difficult it must be to give an account of Almighty God! For He is infinite ; but our faculties are poor and finite. He is ever- lasting ; but we live for a few years and then pass away. He is almighty; and all that we can do is only a fragment of what we would do, if we could. How can I bring this truth home to your minds? Did you ever stand in the open country some summer day, and look up at the limitless58 Lrinity Sunday. expanse of the blue heaven? It seems to spread, like an inviolate sea, from pole to pole; your eye travels over it to the line which men call the horizon; and yet, if you could stand at the horizon itself, you would find the blue heaven spreading beyond you for ever and ever. Such is God; and now you see that because He is so great, so infinitely greater than human thought can tell, it is impossible to define or describe His Being accurately. Nay, it is not too much to say that, if God could be comprehended, He could not be worshipped. If He were intelligible, He would cease to be adorable. Mystery is essential to His Being as much as majesty. “Clouds and darkness are round about Him: righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne.” When it is said, then, that “we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity,” this is an attempt to express in words what cannot be expressed by words except imperfectly, and yet must be expressed as well as it can. But, imperfect as it is, this expression is one whichTrinity Sunday. 59 touches and controls the thoughts of men, and not only of theologians, but of persons engaged in practical politics. Dr. Moritz Busch, who, as you probably know, is the Boswell of Prince Bismarck, relates a story which struck me, when I read it,as remarkable. It happened some time ago that King Frederick of Denmark conferred upon the great German Chancellor the Grand Cross of the Danebrog Order. One of the rules of that order is that every one who receives the decoration of its cross must set up his name and arms in the principal church at Copenhagen, with a motto which must be chosen by himself, and must bear a double or ambiguous meaning. “So I hit upon this motto,” said Prince Bismarck, “Tn Trinitate robur, alluding to the trefoil, the clover, which was the old device of our family.” «“ And what was the other meaning?” said Dr. Busch. ‘“ Was it, ‘My strength is in the Triune God’?” And the answer was given with a solemn gravity, “ Yes, just so; that is exactly what I meant.” Now let me remind you, looking at the textager Rid ae a 7 60 Trinity Sunday. | which I read a few minutes ago, that the Lord | Jesus Christ, in the last words which He ad- | dressed to His disciples, bade them assume the | task of evangelizing all the nations, “ baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” The Christian Church, which, to use Hdgar Quinet’s fine figure, has preceded the people in their emigrations like a pular of fire, has never forgotten this supreme charge of her Master. It is still true, after nine- teen centuries, that the many Christian denomi- nations, sundered as, alas! they are by dis- cordances of doctrine and practice, are yet united by their common adoration of the Triune God. | Nor is there one Christian formula so sacred or so venerable to a mind appreciative of historical associations as when, after each Psalm that is chanted in this chapel, you recite the ascription of glory to the Three Persons in the Unity of the Godhead ; or when you are dismissed to your several houses with the threefold blessing of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit; or when you Join, as you joined just now, in that stately hymnLrinity Sunday. 61 in which a poet-bishop? of these latter days has sought to express, with such truth as human words allow, the inexpressible majesty of the Triune God— “ Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty! God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity.” Let us look a little at this doctrine of the Trinity. As soon as we begin to think about God at all, we can hardly help coming to think of Him in a plural sense. For there is no way in which we can conceive a Being except in relation to a Being or Beings like Itself. Suppose, e.g., that a man were born and lived by himself always upon a desert island ; suppose that he never came across other men all through his life, and that he never dwelt with anybody, or spoke to anybody, or cared for anybody, how would it be possible to form an opinion of his character? How could you say that he was a good man? How could you feel for him affection or reverence? But the same is true of God. He cannot, if I may so say, stand 1 Bishop Heber.sg SN ye | 62 Trinity Sunday. alone. He cannot be conceived of as God except —_ in relation to some one Who is also God. Nay, | except in this way He cannot be conceived of as existing at all. If I may use the language of a | famous Danish theologian,’ “ Without the Son the Father could not say to Himself ‘I.’” There- fore we worship the Father in relation to the Son, and both Father and Son in relation to the Spirit. Nor is it harder to think of God as being Three in One than to think of ourselves as being so. Yet you know that this is the truth | about ourselves. I look upon you all here and | see your faces, but do I see all that makes you what you are? I see your bodies, but how much more is there which no human eye can see! Perhaps there is somebody here who remembers | standing by the death-bed of one whom he has | dearly loved; tell me, what was your feeling then? ‘There was the body just as before, the limbs and features were unchanged ; but was it your father or your mother whom you saw there? You know well how, as you gazed upon ’ Bishop Martensen.Lrinity Sunday. 63 that dead body, you said to yourself, “ He is not here ; he is gone away.” Thus the body, although it is part of man, is not the man himself. Body, mind, and spirit, these three, make the perfect man. So too, Father, Son, and Spirit, these three, make the perfect God. “And in this Trinity none is afore or after other: none is greater or less than another.” It is not possible, I think, to say much more about the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity. But we may well ask, What does that doctrine mean to us? What is the value of that doctrine for us? I will try to put it in a few simple sentences. We believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. What is it to believe in God the Father ? My boys, whatever is done or seen in the world has a cause. ‘That cause, too, has a cause which lies behind it, and so on. And as you reflect upon the multitude of causes, and trace them further and further till you lose yourselves in the darkness of the past, you are led to think of that64 Trinity Sunday. which is the Cause of all other causes, or, as it 1s often called, the Great First Cause. ‘That Great First Cause is God. But the question is, Is that Cause kind or unkind to us, the children of men? Men used to think at one time that It was un- kind. They tried to propitiate It with gifts and sacrifices. They know now, thanks to Jesus Christ, that It is kind. And when we feel that not only is God our Friend, but that He loves us with a love of which all human love is but a shadow, when we feel that He counts the universe less precious than the salvation of a single human soul, then it is that we believe in God the Father. What is it to believe in God the Son? My boys, a father is still a father, although he be far away. But it is not so easy then to keep alive the thought of his fatherhood. We are apt to forget him altogether. There may be some boys here whose fathers died when they were children, or have lived many years abroad in a foreign country. These boys have forgotten or have never seen their fathers. They can hardly CC MP vhsLrinity Sunda sr feel towards them as sons ought to feel. But that is just the case of God in relation to us. “No man hath seen God at any time,” or can see Him. So God sent some one to tell us about Himself. That Person was Jesus Christ. Who or what He was essentially is a difficult question ; but Christian theology, recognizing His unique character, calls Him by a unique name—the Son of God. We are all in one sense sons of God. But He is the Son of God in a pre-eminent sense. He was not altogether such as we are. It is my conviction that, if you study His biography, you will feel Him to have been not only man, but more than man. And if we believe that He came to show us the Father’s image, that He spoke in the Father's Name and with His authority, and that in the imitation of His ex- ample lies and must ever lie the redemption of the world from sin and shame, then it is that we believe in God the Son. What is it te believe in God the Spirit ? Jesus Christ, the Son of God, lived and died. But His Divine work lives on after His death. He Fa i ah PR a 66 Trinity Sunday. promised that it should live on until His return. He said that there should be a Power, unseen yet not unfelt in the world of men—a Power as strong and subtle as the wind, that should control the thouvhts, affections, and hopes of human hearts till they come into full accord with the will of God; that should break the bars of prejudice and pride, setting the prisoners free, breathing new life into weary souls and making them young again, and age after age guiding the consciences of men into a fuller and deeper apprehension of Divine truth. And he who believes in such a Power believes in the Spirit. But if so—if such be the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—what is it to believe in the Holy Trinity ? Let me answer the question by a story. It is told by one’ who was a stranger to the Christian faith. He relates how, when he was wandering in the Hartz Mountains, a little peasant girl, the daughter of his host, sat at his feet, and, looking up into his face, said, “ Dost thou believe in the 1 Heine.Lrinity Sunday. 67 Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?” He answers thus. It is poetry, but I will translate it into prose. “ When I was a boy, and sat upon my mother’s knee, I believed in God the Father, Who is good and great, and reigns on high, Who created the beautiful earth and the beautiful human beings who live upon it, and Who ordered the course of the sun and moon and stars. And when I grew bigger and could understand things better, I believed in the Son also—the dear Son Who loved us and revealed His love to us, and for His reward was crucified, as always happens, by the world. And now that I am grown up, and have read much and travelled far, my heart expands, and with all my heart I believe in the Holy Ghost. It is He Who has worked the greatest miracles, and He now works greater still. It is He Who burst the castles of oppression, and broke the bondsman’s yoke. He heals the ancient death-wounds, and renews the ancient right, so that men are by Him made equal, and all are a noble race. A thousand knights in goodly armour has the Holy Ghost ordained to do Hisir art a Pd A | | i) | 68 Trinity Sunday. will, and has breathed high courage into their souls. Their, good swords flash in the air, their | banners fly. Wouldst not thou, my child, be | such a knight as they ?” My boys, the end of all Christian teaching 1s to inspire you with this temper of Christian chivalry. May the Eternal Trinity bless you In the Name of the Father, and for the love of the Son, may you approve yourselves true warriors of the Spirit !VIL. Sanctification. “And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.”—Sr. Jonn Xvir. 19. ON this first Sunday of the Term, with its hopes and memories, will it not be well to choose a motto of our lives, to guide and animate us in the coming days, and to keep us from evil, and, if God will, to lift our hearts from earth to heaven? And if so, what can be more appro- priate as a motto than the ideal of Christian manhood, yes, and of Christian boyhood, set forth in the striking language of the text ?—* For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.” Perhaps it looks more solemn than the words we naturally ex- change one with another at our meeting after an absence. But the circumstances of to-day inspire 69ee ee 70 Sanctification. solemnity. ‘The holidays have been darkened by the deaths of two men,! very different in their experience, yet alike as being luminaries of the Church which the Saviour founded with His blood, and signal exemplars of a high and con- secrated life. And to us, too, death has come very near, taking away, as in a moment, a dear friend? the true and worthy son of Harrow, who so often worshipped here, and who seemed, so well we knew him, to be as one of ourselves, though years had passed since he left Harrow. And it may be, too, that some of us, as we think of the past, feel our hearts subdued and solemnized by the reflexion that if any stain has rested upon the school through sin of ours, or of others who would not perhaps have sinned had we only been a little bolder for the right, then it hes upon us this very day as a solemn duty to redeem the fair name of the School. Thus we turn in thought to words of Christ like these. They were spoken at a very solemn time. He 1 Cardinal Newman and Canon Liddon. 2 Arthur Macnamara.Sanctification. 7p was just going to die; it was the eve of His Passion. They are like last words which your father or mother may have spoken to you—I do not mean before your coming back to school (though such words are memorable, and I hope you will not forget them), but which they spoke when the cold hand of death was already upon them, and you could hardly catch what they said, it was uttered so feebly. Surely you cannot ever forget those last words. He was saying good-bye to His friends. He was very anxious about them. He knew that when He was gone away they would be exposed to temptation, and He did not know or He was not quite sure that they would overcome it. He had one great wish at heart for them. It was not that they should be strong, or bold, or glorious, but that they should be good. He wanted them to do the right, as He wants you. He dreaded the influence of others upon their lives. I think if you will let me repeat His words to you here to-night, it will seem as if His soul were tremulous with an emotion that still is audible across so many72 Sanctipication. centuries. “Holy Father, keep through ‘Thine own Name those whom Thou hast given Me, that they may be one, as We are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in Thy Name. ... And now I come to iDinee; 2. . [pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil. . . .. Sanctify them through Thy truth: Thy Word is truth.” What is it that the Saviour prays for those dear friends? It is, in one word, sanctification. It 1s that they may live the saintly life. There are some boys who are afraid of being called “saints.” They look upon it as a name of censure or clis- paragement ; they do not like its being used of themselves. But I wish you were all saints— yes, every one. Then I should have no fear for the School. Then could we all go on our way, happy and holy. Then could we awake in the morning, looking forward with glad hearts to all the day; and then in the evening we could give God thanks that another day has been laid to rest without the shadow of a stain.Sanctification, na For what is it to live as the saints have lived on earth ? Our Lord says in the text, “I sanctify Myself,” ze. “I make Myself a saint.” How shall you and I essay to be like Him? A saintly boy will not be apparently different from other boys. He will not make a great profession of religion. He will not talk about it much, or constantly insist upon it. He will take part in the common interests of School-life ; he will try to play well as much as to pray well. He will do his lessons carefully and honestly, even if he finds them harder than other boys, and does not succeed in them. He will not be proud, morose, or censorious. He will not be forward in speaking of other boys as wicked. He will think good of them if he can, and not evil. He will keep a cheerful tone and a courageous spirit. He will perhaps be alive with merriment and fun. but if it ever happens, as it may happen in a Public School, that some profane or vicious word—I will not say act—intrudes its sickly presence, though it be but for a moment, into the joys of social school- life, then he will forbid it by speech, or, better7A Sanctification. still, by silence; he wiil expel it; he will say, “It must not be; I cannot endure it; itis contrary to the sacred law of God.” For he will keep God ever in his thoughts. Upon his heart will be written the words, “Thou God seest me.” He will not be careful to seek popularity. He will ask himself not, What do other boys say ?—for boys are not infallible judges, and sometimes they laugh at what they know to be right—but, What does God say? And so he will respect his own conscience more than all the loud voices of the world. And so, too, if the call of duty comes to him, as it came to that disciple St. Matthew, whose festival the Church celebrates to-day—if he hears the same sweet voice saying, “ Follow Me”’—he will rise up at once and leave all that he has, and in life and even to death follow Him. Does any one of you think that this is too much to ask of a schoolboy ? But the answer is that there have been such schoolboys; nay, I do not doubt there are such now. You have heard, I dare say, of Sir Philip Sidney. Everybody knows this one story of him, that when he was woundedSi anctipication. before the walls of Zutphen, and in his agony called for water to quench his thirst, as it was brought to him and he was going to drink it, he saw a poor soldier who, as he was carried off the field, was looking with wistful eyes at the cup of water, and he put it from his lips and gave it to that soldier, saying, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” But to my mind it seems hardly less striking to learn how a boy* who entered Shrewsbury School on the very same day with Sir Philip Sidney, more than three hundred years ago, felt such a love and admira- tion of him at school, and so kept it all through his life, that when he died, the words which were inscribed by his own desire upon his gravestone told that he had been the “friend to Philip Sidney.” Soon after Philip Sidney was at school his father wrote him a letter. I wish I had time to read it all to you; but there are two lives of Sir Philip Sidney in the Vaughan Library, and you will find it in either of them. So I will quote only two or three sentences of it; but if you attend to 1 Lord Brooke.76 Sanctification. them, you will hear how a saintly boy was trained all those long years ago. “ Let your first action,” he said, “be the lifting up of your mind to Almighty God by hearty prayer; and feelingly digest the words you speak in prayer, with con- tinual meditation and thinking of Him to Whom you pray, and of the matter for which you pray. Give yourself to be merry, ... but let your mirth be ever void of all scurrility and biting words to any man, for a wound given by a word is oftentimes harder to be cured than that which is given with the sword. ... Let never oath be heard to come out of your mouth, nor word of ribaldry; detest it in others, so shall custom make to yourself a law against it in yourself... Above all things, tell no un- truth; no, not in trifles,... for there cannot be a greater reproach to a gentleman than to be accounted a liar. Study and endeavour yourself to be virtuously occupied, so shall you make such a habit of well-doing in you that you shall not know how to do evil, though you would.” Such is the saintly life; it is the life which everySanctification. we boy who loves good may live here to-day. And do you need a motive for doing it? Am I to tell you why you are called, why you are bound to live so? Well, the Saviour says in the text, “For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.” Yes, “for their sakes”—that is what makes all the difference. It is because you cannot be good or bad only for yourself, because what one boy does tells upon so many boys, because every one who does good makes it easier for others to be good, and every one who does evil makes it easier for others to be evil; and if to-day in this holy place, on this first Sunday of the Term, I may set before you a motive of holy living, it shall be that you may not commit the cruel wrong of injuring the souls of other boys who dwell at your side, in your house, or in your form, and who, according as you yourselves live nobly or vilely, will necessarily (whether you intend it or not) be exalted by the nobleness or debased by the ignominy of your example. This is our motto, then; we will keep itSanctification. through the Term. “For their sakes I sanctity Myself.” The Saviour Christ sought sanctifi- cation for Himself. We, too, need to seek it every day of our lives. May the Almighty God grant it to us all, that we too may sanctify our brethren !VIII. gsau and FYacob. “Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing.” —GeENESIS xxvul. 35. I am going to preach you two sermons about Jacoband Esau. The first of them will be chiefly about Jacob; the second will be chiefly about Esau. but their two characters are so closely interlaced, they gain so large a part of their effect from their mutuality, that it is difficult to speak of the one without at once speaking of the other. Let us see what they can teach us about ourselves. For, as you study the characters of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament, I am sure it must sometimes occur to you to say, “This is just like me. This is just what I should have done.” Or else, “ This is what I should never have done.” Certainly it is natural to a schoolmaster to think 7980 Esau and Facob. of some boys, whom he knows well, as being like Jacob, and others as being more like Esau. And if I could know which of the two you would choose to resemble, I should be able to tell some- thing of your character. I suppose most boys, when they come to think about these two brothers, would say that Esau was a very good fellow, and Jacob—well, Jacob was not. And, again, I suppose some boys think that the Bible praises Jacob more than Esau. ‘That is a thought which, if it were true, would cause much pain; for if the Bible approves one thing and our conscience approves another, what are we todo? Butit is not true. There is not a word in the Bible which tells that Jacob was better than {Esau. All you find in the Bible 1s that Jacob began by being bad and then in time became better. About Esau you find even less than this. The two characters stand before us in the picture; they are mixed characters, neither of them is wholly good or wholly bad, and yet each is entirely human, as I would say, and deserves an intimate study.Esau and Facob. SI It is true that Jacob got a certain blessing which Esau in the story does not get. It was said of them, “ The elder shail serve the younger.” But that was said, as St. Paul points out in his Epistle to the Romans, before they were born. It had nothine to do with the merits of both or either of them. It was merely a way of saying that God, in His wonderful providence, distributes His gifts and benedictions as He wills; He does not follow seniority or any other rule. “The elder shall serve the younger.” Nothing in the world is commoner than this. We are not all equally clever, or equally strong, or equally happy. Some of us have more money than others. Some have more brains. Whether we like this inequality or not, it is a fact upon which society rests; and nowhere is it more conspicuous than at school. Nay, how often it happens that in some point or other which counts for a good deal in school-life, an elder brother seems inferior to a younger one; and what a test that is of his patience and generosity! I greatly honour every boy who, when a younger schoolfellow fairly Ga ae sie eet 82 Esau and Facob, beats him at work or play, can go up to him with an open face and say, “I congratulate you.” However, what I want you to see now Js that the “ blessing of Jacob,” as it is sometimes called, was not given him because he deserved it—still less because he obtained it by cunning—but because it was the will of God to give it him. “Was not Esau Jacob’s brother? saith the Lord : yet I loved Jacob, and I hated Hsau,” ze. “I preferred Jacob to Esau ; I put him first.” - Now, I am going to tell you in a minute what I think of Jacob. You will not say, I am sure, that I think too well of him. But there are two or three points which ought not to be forgotten when we talk of him. I do not know if you have got your Bibles with you, but, if you have, it will be a good thing for you to open them and just see what is said. The first point is that he was a quiet man. He is called “a plain man” in the English Bible (Gen. xxv. 27), and I am not sure that you all understand what those words mean ; some of you may even think they mean that he was not good-looking. But the Hebrew wordte Esau and F$acob. 8 4 J translated “plain” is a word of praise ; it rather means “quiet,” as you find in the marein of the Revised Version. He was not loud or noisy, like Esau, but he went on his way quietly, “ dwelling in tents.” That is a good thing, I say, so far as it goes. Again, you must not forget that he was his mother’s favourite. Iam very sorry that he was. Mothers have no business to have favourites, or at least to show that they have. That favouritism was the beginning of Jacob’s fall. Look at ch. xxv. 28: “ And Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison: but Rebekah loved Jacob.” Her love, I am afraid, did him a great deal more harm than good. For it was his mother who taught him to cheat. She put him up to deceiy- ing his father. She actually offered to bear the curse of the deceit. If you turn to ch. xxvii. and begin reading at the sixth verse, you will see what a mother may be led to do, unless she fights against the subtle temptation of spoiling a favourite child. Only it is fair to Jacob, I think, to notice that in cheating his father he did what0 Oe On eel 84 Esau and Facob. his mother told him to do. I do not say that is much of an excuse for him, but it is something. L want you to see, too, that J acob really had deep feelings. He was not a shallow man. He sinned very badly; but he never forgot his old sin, and he was sorry for it. I am quite sure that, when he came to die, when Joseph’s two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, were brought to his bedside, as he and Esau had once been brought to Isaac’s, and he used those touching words, “The Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads ’”—I am sure he was thinking of his sad past life. For his thoughts were always running on the past. See how he goes home to his father, when he was yery old (ch. xxxv. 29): “ And Isaac gave up the host, and died, and was gathered unto his people, being old and full of days: and his sons Hsau and Jacob buried him.” Was not that a touching meeting at their father’s grave, after all that had happened ? See, too, how fond he remains of Rachel (ch. xlviii. 7), his dear wife who had died years ago at Ephrath. I dare say you recall the story of her death, but if not, look at ch. xxxv. 18 ;00. 8 O71 Esau and $a it was when Benjamin was born: “And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing (for she died) that she called his name Benoni” (i.e. “ the “but his father called him Benjamin ” (¢.e. “ the son of the right hand”). J 99 son of my sorrow remember saying once that I hoped you would always be Benjamins to your parents, and not Benonis, as some boys have been, “sons of sorrow.” See, too, how he longs to be taken home, to be buried in the cave of Machpelah, which was the centre of such -sacred memories. “There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife ; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah ” (ch. xlix. 31). Jacob, then, was, as I say, a man of deep feelings; he was an affectionate man, and I think, if we had known him well, we should have got fond of him. But he was not straightforward—at least, he was not in early life; he did two shabby, shifty things, and I tell you with all my heart I con- demn him for them. [ do not say much to-day about the first of them, It is related in ch. xxv. 29-34. It will86 Esau and Facob. come more naturally into the second of my sermons. Only, when Jacob took advantage of Esau’s hunger to make him give up the blessing of his birthright, he was acting like one of you who, if he wanted another boy to do something wrong, should try to bribe him by offering some gratification of the appetite. I suppose there might be some small boys who would do so still. Of course Jacob and Esau were not boys, or not small boys; but they lived in the boyhood of history. Now look at the twenty-seventh chapter. I want you to see how bad Jacob’s conduct was. It was worse, I think, than appears at first sight. For it is painful to notice that, when Rebekah suggested to him the idea of deceiving his father, it did not strike him as being utterly horrible. He was afraid of being found out, not of doing wrong. He did not say, “I cannot do this great wickedness and sin against God,” but he said (ver. 12), “ My father peradventure will feel me, and I shall seem to him as a deceiver; and I shall bring a curse upon me, and not a blessing.”Lisau and Facob. 87 I call that downright mean language, do not you? There is another thing which strikes me in the story as very bad. You will see it in ver. 20. It is his bringing in the Name of God. Men often do wrong, and we think badly of them; but we think much worse if they pretend to be religious. When Isaac asked how it was that he had found the venison so quickly, he said, “ Be- cause the Lord thy God brought it to me.” That is hypocrisy. ‘There was not the least need to bring in the Name of God. It is a great pity that Jacob told a lie, and told it in this hypo- critical way. I am very sorry, too, that, if he was going to do any one a wrong, it should be his brother; and, if he was going to tell any one a he, it should be his father. Jam afraid there are some boys—or there have been—who would not so much mind saying what is untrue to a master, but it seems much worse to say it to a father. Perhaps it 1s worse in a certain sense. For a master can only vet a title to your respect and confidence byin 1 Sy pg ee a a Ee I PES Wa SRR NI TT TLIO OY ET NT = : | 88 Esau and Facobd. trying hard for it, and we all know how hard he must try; but a father possesses it naturally. Besides, when the father is old and ill, and cannot see what is being done, and is obliged to put trust in his son—who would like at such a time to take him in? Ah! Jacob, Jacob, how I wish you had not been so mean ! But now look at the sequel of Jacob’s life. Do you think it was all happy afterwards? Do you think that, because he usurped his brother's blessing, he was never reminded of his sin? Nay, I know no story in the Bible which shows so clearly that sin brings its own bitter punishment. Just open your Bibles and see. First of all, he had to leave home (ch. xxvii. 43) for fear of his brother, and he never came back for many years. Then the deceiver was himself deceived. Laban cheated him of his wife (ch. xxix. 25), although he had worked so long for her and loved her so dearly. He cheated him, too, of his wages. “Your father,” says Jacob, “hath deceived me, and changed my wages ten times” (ch. xxxi. 7). At last, when he startedtsau and Facob. 89 to go homewards, it was necessary for him to pass through Ksau’s country. I need not tell you how much afraid he was of Esau. Then he suffered the great shame of one of his daughters (ch. xxxiy. 2). His eldest son Reuben did him a cruel wrong, just as he had done his father (ch. xxxy. 22); he could not forget it on his death-bed (ch. xlix. 4). Two other of hig sons brought him into trouble by their savagery (ch. xxxiy. 25-30). Rachel died on the way home, and he set up a pillar on her grave. You know how he lost Joseph, his favourite son, and thought he had lost Benjamin too. You know how he wept, and would not be comforted ; you can almost hear him say, “ My son shall not go down with you ; for his brother is dead, and he is left alone: if mischief befall him by the way in the which ye go, then shall ye bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave” (ch. xlii. 38). No, no; Jacob’s was not a happy life. He suffered suffered terribly—for his sin. He meant what he said when he used the words, “ Few and evil have the days of the years of mv life been.” Thereme a yee a RRO te a ager aera te > aro > eh / — ee rw a a a as mot a ” GS ee en ey 3 Seedpeer oe 5 a gO Esau and Facob. was never a soul so purified by suffering as Jacob's. But it was purified. He became another man. The hour of his change, or, as it would now be called, his conversion, was the hour when he wrestled with the angel. He gave up the old suspiciousness, the old selfishness. He became wise, tender, faithful, true. He ceased to be Jacob, the supplanter; he became an Israel, a prince of God. | That is the story of Jacob; and in it I seem | to see two lessons, which you must try this Sunday night to lay to heart. The first is, that even the worst of us may become good. There may be some boy sitting here who, as I speak, knows that he has been guilty of some mean, shabby act, which he would not for the world tell to anybody, and yet hates to keep to himself. Is he getting to despair of his own future? Let him take heart again. Let him try to do right. Let him pray to God, and wrestle with Him, if need be. Believe me, you will win the battle some day, although it will be perhaps a victory of pain.fisau and Facob. QI But the second lesson is that you must not cheat at all. It is such a happy thing to look all the world in the face. It is so miserable to be afraid of being found out. I wish I could think that, as the angel of God looks down into the consciences of you all, my boys, he could see no tainting thought, no lingering stain of sin, from which he turns his face away and weeps. Sometimes, you know, though not often, thank God, boys are sent to me for not doing their work fairly, as they ought to do. It may be that they only cheat the masters. It may be that they cheat their schoolfellows too. Then I think of the words, “Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away thy blessing.” And yet I remember that they too, like Jacob, if they will repent of their sin, may become princes of God. Such are the lessons which it has seemed to me possible to draw from the story of Jacob.—e se vem > Fryer ane ee eS EE, EE ae TX: gdesau and Facod, Pr “ And Esau said unto his father, Hast thou but one blessing, my father? bless me, even me also, O my father. And Esau lifted up his voice, and wept.— GENESIS XXVII. 38. You will remember that in my last sermon | discussed with you the character of Jacob. I tried to show you what was good in it and what was bad, and how the bad was transformed into the good. To-day it is my part to tell you what I think about the complementary character, which is Hsau’s. For, as I said then, the two brothers run in a couple; they are very unlike, and, being unlike, they illustrate one another, and they depend for their significance upon their contrast. Such a pair of characters occurs else- where in the Bible. I will mention the names of Cain. and Abel, of Moses and Aaron, and, at a 92Fisau and F$acob. 93 later time, of Orpah and Ruth, to show you how frequent they are. The difference between two brothers or two sisters is very striking. It has been impressively used by several great poets, e.g. by Sophocles and Shakespeare. It is often brought home to us here; for we see two brothers who have lived in the same family circle, have been subjected all their lives to the same influences, and have come from the same Schoo] to Harrow, and yet how widely different they are! Now, in studying the story of Esau, we will not be swayed by any prejudices in his favour or against him. We will take him exactly as he is. We will not mind if it proves upon examination that we think him a better man than Jacob. But in my opinion it is not the most profitable thing to ask who of the two brothers deserves our praise the more; for the true judgment of human character depends upon motives, and of motives we can never know the truth. It is better to ask how far each of them, as described in the Bible, seems to have acted rightly or wrongly.ore ep eee aS Ser LS LE RR 94 Esau and Facob. It is necessary, I think, to bear in mind that Jacob and Esau were not only brothers, but twins. They were not an elder and a younger brother in the common sense. ‘They were brothers of the same age. It was almost a chance, then, if I may say so, that Esau obtained the privilege of primogeniture, or the birthright, which in early Hebrew times counted for so much, and that Jacob, although his equal in years, lost it. Probably Jacob felt that he had pretty well as good a title to the birthright as Esau. Probably Esau felt that he could not do any wrong in giving up his birthright to Jacob. If there had not been some such feeling in their minds, it would be rather difficult to comprehend the transaction which took place between them when they were boys. But of this I will say something in a minute. The character of Esau is portrayed in the Bible in a few strong deep lines; but they are very few. We are told that he was “a cunning hunter, a man of the field,” or, as we should say nowadays, a good shot and very fond of sport.Lisau and Facob. 95 Without wishing to be unjust to him, I cannot help saying that he was not, I think, exemplary as a son; for I observe that he broke the patri- archal rule, by which sons were subjected to their parents in matters of marriage, as they are to some extent even now in some foreign countries, and married wives whom his father and mother did not like. It is said in Genesis, with a simple pathos, that Hsau’s wives “were a grief of mind unto Esau and to Rebekah.” When you, my boys, grow up and want to marry, I hope you will not make the same mistake. Again, there is no sufficient ground for supposing that Esau was always forbearing and forgiving, and did not resent an injury which had been done him; on the contrary, he “hated Jacob,” as we are told— although I admit he had a strong cause for hating him—and “said in his heart, The days of mourn- ing for my father are at hand; then will I slay my brother Jacob.” ‘There may be some of us who would cherish fierce, vindictive thoughts against a brother, and yet would shrink from. executing them at such a time. It is strangeee ee —— eee ati : men Fe ee PRR SN 96 Esau and Facob. that, when Isaac did die, the two brothers, as I said in my last sermon, met at his grave to bury him, being friends again. These are dark points in the character of Esau. But I do not wish to make him out worse than he was. I gladly turn to the interesting story of his reconciliation with Jacob. Nobody who has ever read it can have failed to be deeply touched by the manly, frank forgivingness of his conduct when, after the lapse of many years, he met the brother by whom he had been grievously wronged. “ And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him: and they wept.” With all my heart I admire that spirit of Esau. Jacob well might weep that day, and so might he. I think he was heaping coals of fire on Jacob’s head. I think he was revenging himself by charity upon Jacob. I hope, my boys, if any schoolfellow does you an injury, if he takes away from you by craftiness a blessing to which you are justly entitled, you will have the grace, not perhaps at first, but afterwards, to tell him with a great and true sincerity, “I forgive you.”Esau and Facob. 97 Believe me, schoolboy quarrels, like other quarrels, are not worth keeping up. We shall certainly be sorry for them some day. We shall wish we had shaken hands and made friends again. And it is better to be the boy who has been wronged and who holds out his hand in a forgiving, or, as we say, a Christian spirit, than the boy who has done the wrong and accepts the forgiveness. There are Esaus in the world even now. They are strong, athletic, manly people who are clever at sport, who are popular with their fellows, and who set the tone of society to their neighbourhood. Perhaps they are not very choice in their language. They say before gentlemen, perhaps before boys, things that they would not like to say before ladies, They live lives without any high purpose; they think of nothing but cricket, fox-hunting, and racing. But they are often (although not always) open- handed, they are generous and frank, and, if wrong is done them, after a while they forgive and forget it. H98 Esau and Facob. Only there is one thing which they lack, and Esau lacked it. They do not care for religion. They would not think of saying their prayers. They go to Church as seldom as they decently can. They like to treat the Sunday as any other day; they think it a fine thing to treat it so. Whether what they do is right or wrong, they never ask themselves, Is it according to the holy will of God? In a word, although they may be good fellows in their way, they are “profane persons,” as Hsau is called in the Epistle to the Hebrews; they do not care for religion. But religion is the one thing needful. Hsau shows you how many good points you may have without being religious. But he shows you also that you will not have the best point of all if you are not religious. I notice, as a curious fact, that he never names the Name of God. He never thinks of God at all. Even when he met his brother and forgave him, there was the prompting of a generous human heart, but there was apparently no religious feeling. He did notee ee £isau and F$acob. 99 "eer ee value that religious blessing, the birthright. He might have said, “No earthly gain sh induce me to forfeit my spiritual privilege,” Then he would have been like Moses, like Daniel, like St. Paul. But he said ] all ever 1€ would give up his privilege for a little red pottage that J acob was seething. It is all done without a minute’s thought. “He did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birth- right.” Did you ever think that there was another Man Who was hungry—a great de al hungrier than EKsau—and was tempted to surrender, like Hsau, His Divine prerogative? He too might have sold His birthright. He too might have sacrificed His soul. But He answered and “It is written, Thou shalt not liye by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” That Man was the Saviour of mankind, said, My boys, it will happen to you, in the process of the years, to be tempted to surrender your privilege of religion. Somebody will say to youee 100 Esau. and Facob. ge be here, it may be afterwards—* Do For some immediate oaln of violate the con- —it may what is wrong. money, applause, or influence, science which is your heavenly _ birthright. Cheat a little, that you may stand above other boys. Tell a le, because the truth would bring you trouble. Let some other boy do in your presence, or persuade you to do, what in your heart you know to be a sin against God. Go apart and in secrecy commit some action which you would not dare to commit if your master were standing by, and yet which boys do commit when their Divine Master is standing by. Oh, then, believe me, you will be tempted, as Esau was tempted, to choose the lower life instead of the higher, because at the moment it seems the easier and the pleasanter—to be selfish, mean, profane, and to prefer a poor passing satisfaction, whatever it be, to the benediction of your Saviour and your God. Do not, then, at such a time, “ for one morsel of meat” sell your birthright. But that is not the whole sadness of the story of Esau. You know how easily he sold his birth-Esau and Facob. 101 right, and therefore lost his blessing. But when he had lost it, he found out his mistake. He knew he had done wrong. He tried to undo it. But it was too late. For afterwards, as the writer to the Hebrews says, “when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance,” ¢.e. no opportunity of changing his mind, “though he sought it care- fully with tears.” It was too late. He had made his choice on the day when he parted with his birthright, and he could not make it again. You must not think he lost the blessing just by accident, because Jacob succeeded in cheating his aged father. He lost it because years before, at a critical moment, he had said he was willing to lose it. He had made his choice then. It was too late to reverse it now. “Too late”—oh! there is no sadder word in human lives than that. It is the word which strews the path we tread on earth with the wreck of faded hopes and blighted promises, and the infinitely mournful “might- have-beens” of human souls. I feel the sadness of it when, in the world, I look upon men who102 Esau and Facob. might have been strong, with shattered health and premature grey hairs paying the penalty of a wanton, dissolute past. I feel it in the sight or memory of men—schoolfellows, it may be, of my own—who might have been, who had such a power of being, good and great, and who already, young as they are, for lack of virtue have fallen, alas! into the physical and moral ruin from which it is so terribly hard to rise anew. I feel it now, I feel it with an intense regretfulness, when I know that any one of you, my boys, instead of being true to Christ and strong in Him, is wasting the golden years which can never be restored, and consenting with a strange wilfulness of folly to a life below the level of his own true self. “And Hsau said unto his father, Hast thou but one blessing, my father? bless me, even me also, O my father. And Esau lifted up his voice, and wept.” For it needs to be said, as a solemn, vital truth, that God has “one blessing” only for each of us—one blessing for each age, each school, each boy, each part or section of everyfisau and Facob. Tos J human life and that, if you lose it, you can never get it back. ‘There is one blessing only of life, and when you die you may wish a thousand times to live that life anew; but it is gone, it is gone from you beyond recall, and for all eternity you will not be what you might have been. There is one blessing only of youth; it is passing from you, and, when you are old, you will sigh perhaps to be young again; but the spent years shall seem to mock you with their laughter, and youth will be a dream of the past. The golden ball is offered once in every life, but to none, or to few, is it offered a second time. Once, but only once, in every life the heavenly vision dawns on the expectant soul. Oh, be not disobedient to it, lest it vanish for ever! Such a blessing, my boys, which cannot be renewed, will be given to you, or to some of you, ere I speak to you all again within this Chapel. It will come as a unique event in your lives. Never more will so many eyes look upon you. Never more will so many prayers ascend for you. Never will words that you shall speak104 Esau and Facob. be so momentous to your own life and to the life of the School. In the presence of God Who made you and Who reads your heart, in the pre- sence of your parents and friends who deeply love you, in the presence of the boys who know your life so weil, you will be asked on your Con- firmation morning, “Do ye... renew the solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at your Baptism?” That is the question. It will be put to you once, and never again. How will you answer it? I cannot tell. But I think there will be joy among the angels if you answer with a deep purpose, “I do.”x Laughter. “And he said, Nay; but thou didst laugh.” GENESIS xvii. 15. It is clear, I think, that somebody has laughed and has been taken to task for laughing. It is Sarah, as you will see if you look at the con- text; for when she was told what a_ blessing should come to her unexpectedly, she would not believe it, but “laughed within herself” at the idea of it. So far she was one of those people who feel a difficulty in receiving good news just because it is good, who despair of better things in themselves or in others than have been before, and who, if they are informed of some great human amelioration, are pretty sure to say scornfully, “It is impossible.” That is not the most exalted frame of mind—nay, it paralyzes what is best and noblest in our lives; but it is not unnatural, and we know it only too well. So 105PAS SS Sree iA SS or 106 Laughter. Sarah laughed—a bitter, infidel sort of laugh ; but its far-off echoes sound within our ears to-night. My subject is laughter. It is an elementary fact of human nature. Every child within a few weeks of its birth is seen to be capable of laughter. All through our life, unless it be intensely sorrowful, we are found laughing. Laughter and weeping, joy and sorrow, may be said to make up our poor sum of life. And laughter, like weeping, is uniquely human. It is not given, as Mr. Darwin himself admits, save in a shadowy sort of way, to the highest animals. But it characterizes the saddest, the most degraded of men. It is touching to read that when Laura Bridgman, that poor girl who, having been blind, deaf, and dumb from the day of her birth, seemed to be cut off from human interests and sympathies—you may perhaps have heard her name, as she died only a few weeks ago,—when she was made to understand, by the gesture-language which had been so wonderfully invented for conveying ideas to her, that one whom she knew and loved had sent hera kindLaughter. 107 message, she “ laughed and clapped her hands, and the colour mounted to her cheeks.” For laughter is the “outward and visible sign” of that gift of humour which God has bestowed upon men, to cheer them on their way, to make them see the bright side of things and not the dark, and, amidst the troubles of life, to keep them in good temper. And not only so, but it indicates the disposition and moral tone of every one of us; for you can generally say, I think, from listening to a person’s laughter, if his heart is true and his conscience clear before God. There are none who laugh so freely as the young. How familiar is one whose life is spent among boys with the merry ringing laughter of their playtime! Now and then, perhaps, it fills him with deep thoughts. It was once remarked by a man,’ who had an eminent know- ledge of boy-life, that there was something terrible to his apprehension in the spectacle of so much sin associated with so little sorrow. I would not altogether say that. I incline to think Dr. Arnold.108 Laughter. that he overrated boys’ sinfulness, or at least that he underrated their sorrows. But it is true (and for it we give God thanks) that the young are shielded, for afew years only, from life’s chief sad- nesses; they live without regret for the past, or without boding anxiety for the future; the heaven is bright above them, the earth around is green ; and in those years, unless the shadow of sin falls upon them, there is no bitterness, nor any malice or deceit, in the rich felicity of their laughter. But is it always so, that the laughter of boys is innocent? Is it always a sign of pure and wholesome spirits? I ask the question, and it needs an answer. For laughter, like other gifts, may be abused. It may be made subservient to unhappy purposes. It may issue not from the transparent spring of generous virtue, but from a source debased and defiled. Thus in Scripture it is represented as testing our nature, and reveal- ing to others and to ourselves what we really are. “J said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure.” Let me, then, mention two or three kinds of wrongfulLaughter. 109 laughter before I pass to the laughter which is a grace of Heaven. 1, And, firstly, the laughter of folly. It is com- mon enough in the world. It is the child of a weak head and a cold heart. It is meaningless and blessingless. It is what in the book called Ecclesiastes is so graphically likened to “the 9 crackling of thorns under a pot;” 4. to a fire of thorns burning quickly and loudly, but soon dying out and leaving only dead ashes behind. Do we not know the man or the boy whose laughter is such? He is shallow, frivolous, per- haps profane. He enters not into the profound lessons of life. . It is all a jest to him, as it was to one vain English poet... Nothing touches him, or nothing touches him deeply. He never reflects what the issue may be of his actions, still less of his words. Like the men in the parable, if an earnest word is addressed to him, he “ makes light of it,’ and goes his way unthinking. He revels in pleasure. His only idea is amusement. He never takes anything to heart. He laughs at 1 Gay.110 Laughter. nobleness, generosity, self-sacrifice. Oh! if there | is any one whom it is hard to honour upon earth , (although we are bidden by St. Peter to “ honour all men”), it is he. For, indeed, the laughter of fools is a pitiful thing; it robs life of half its dignity and beauty; and the heathen poet* was not far wrong when he said that “silly laughter was the silliest thing in the world.” Believe me, my boys, life is a very solemn thing. It is given us once for all, once only, to each of us; and we are responsible to God for the use we | make of it. Let none of us waste its precious hours in folly. He? who said, “Serious matters to-morrow,” in the ancient classical story, never saw that morrow’s dawn. So, too, we must not like fools laugh life away. “TLife is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; ‘Dust thou art, to dust returnest,’ Was not spoken of the soul.” 2. But, again, there is the laughter of cruelty. It is not the body alone that suffers wounds. There 1 Catullus. 2 The polemarch Archias at Thebes.Laugh Ler. iti are wounds, deeper and deadlier, of the spirit. Few indeed are they who can stand against such wounds. Do we not all dread are we not all afraid of—being laughed at? Does not such laughter seem to cut us like a sword? Yes, per- haps in this chapel there are not fifty boys who, if the truth were told, would not confess that at one time or other, for fear of being teased, or ridiculed, or sneered at, they have done what they wish now they had never done. But if so, how wicked is this use of laughter! How wicked it is to bruise young, tender, guileless souls by scoffing at their best and purest impulses! “There was a laughing devil in his sneer ’— so wrote the poet* who in early days had learnt his first lesson of bitterness at Harrow. Oh! let it not be said of any one of us. Laughter is holy, if it be the voice of generous human sym- pathies from boy to boy; it is accursed if it be used to sadden the lives which God has not made sad. So I pray you all, I pray the masters as well as the boys, however much they may see the 1 Byron,a SS ee EP 112 Laughter. humour of things among us, to control their lips, to stay the rising taunt, and not to allow the happy relation we bear to each other to be spoiled by a sudden, thoughtless, irrevocable, and yet most sacrilegious, word of sarcasm. 3. Thirdly, and finally, there is the laughter of sin. You know what I mean, although I cannot speak of it literally. But suppose somebody comes into your room, when the door is shut, and tells you some story which is not altogether such as you approve, or shows you a paragraph in a newspaper, or else a photograph, what do you say to it? Do you, too, join in the guilty pleasure of it? or sit by quietly, letting a smile perhaps just flit across your face? You say you did not know what it was; you never meant it. And I answer, “Nay, but thou didst laugh;” it was the fatal moment of compliance with sin. And the moral is, that if we would be pure, if we would guard the immaculate sanctity of our conscience, we must flee the sight and sound of all that, in literature, or life, or conversation, militates against the holy will of God.SS Laughter. 113 a ee ee ee Yet, after all, as I said before, laughter is holy. It is only the abuse of it which is sinful. I do not forget that there was once a Man living upon earth of Whom it is recorded that He wept, but not that He laughed. But the reason of that is that He was different from us, although most near to us as a Brother to His brethren ; for He was called to bear our sins, and to be the Christ for us, when none could ever be a Christ to Him, and therefore was His lot of life severer than ours. But we may laugh. Yes, laughter is good; I would not have any one of you laugh less, or less heartily, only let it be without the taint of sin. And this is perhaps the thought with which I may fitly end; it has a special solemnity just now ; for you were reminded only last Sunday, in touching words, that one of our body, who was known and dear to many of us, has passed into the presence of his Maker. And, as I listened, I could not help thinking of a passage in one of Dr. Arnold’s sermons, where he told the boys at Rugby how he had come from the sick-room in which one of their comrades lay dying through I114 Laughter. the playing-field, where the rest were all at their games, and how strange had seemed to him at first the transition from that still death-bed to the eager life and laughter around him; but, as he thought upon it, he felt there was no incon- eruity, no contrariety, between such happiness (because it was innocent) and the very presence of death; and then he went on to say how dit- ferent would have been his feelings if in passing through those fields he had heard one profane or guilty word, or had seen any action such as no pure heart may ever bear to see. So, then, it were good for us if in our hours of joy and merriment the Saviour Christ, could He come among us unexpectedly, should not rebuke us by any word or look for laughing, but, in His dear sympathy, should say, as He stood beside us, “Tt is well; laugh on.”XE * Cihat J have turitten ¥ have written.” “ Pilate answered, What I have written I have written.”—Sr, JoHN xrx. 22. THE Lenten weeks are drawing near to the Passion of Christ. At such a time we naturally ask ourselves who were responsible for that tragic event, and who must therefore bear the chief part of its guiltiness. Then the name of Pontius Pilate occurs to our thoughts. What a strange destiny has been that man’s! He was appointed Procurator of Judea in the twelfth year of the Roman Emperor Tiberius. How little he thought, when he received the appointment, and with it, I dare say, the congratulations of his friends, that it would be his fortune, in his official capacity, to earn himself an immortality of shame! Yet so it is, as often as we say in the Creed, “He [our Lord] suffered under Pontius Pilate.” Perhaps 116116 “ What T have written I have written.” we may see here the vanity of human ambi- tions. If it be asked what kind of man Pilate was, the answer is not far to seek. He was not so much a wicked man as a weak one. But there are occasions when weakness is wickedness, and Pilate had to face such an occasion. It is clear that he thought our Lord was innocent, and would have liked to save Him. ‘Thus it was that he examined Him privately; that he said, “I find no fault in Him;” that he thought of scourging Him and letting Him go; that he offered to set Him free in honour of the Passover ; and that when at last he gave Him up to death, he “ took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just Person: see ye to it.” But for all that Pilate did pronounce sentence of death upon Him. “Take ye Him,” he said, “and crucify Him: for I find no fault in Him.” So he tried to escape the responsibility which has clung to him, and will cling, for ever. Pilate, I say, was a weak man, a coward. Oh, my boys, I hope and pray you will be brave !ee es ee But it is not so much to Pilate’s general moral cowardice in the trial and judgment of our Lord, as to one particular point in illustration of it, that I would draw your attention this evening. You remember that when our Lord hung on the Cross, he wrote a “title,” or inscription, in the three sacred languages, and caused it to be put above His head. There can be little doubt that his object was to affront the Jews by proclaiming that the Crucified was their King. But the words, “ Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews,” contained a Divine truth, little as he may have known it. Like Caiaphas, when he said it was “expedient that one man should die for the people,” Pilate was an unconscious oracle of God. Jesus of Nazareth was the King of the Jews. But now see what happened. Many of the Jews read the inscription and did not approve of it. Pilate might have known, when he put it up, that they would say, “Write not, The King of the Jews; but that He said, I am King of the Jews.” Yet he would not change the words; he answered, ** What I have written I have written.”118 “ What I have written I have written.” What was the motive of that answer? I cannot tell you, at least not certainly. Perhaps, like many a weak man, Pilate may have thought that, after doing other people’s pleasure against his conscience, he would spite them by not pleasing them any more. But it has been the tradition of the Christian Church that Pilate was haunted by regretful memories of the part he had played in the Crucifixion, and that, even in writing the inscription on the Cross, he thought of cancelling, if he could, the act he had done. Some of you may know, if only because it is told by Sir Walter Scott in “ Anne of Geierstein,” the legend—it is merely a legend, of course—that for long years he sought to hide his remorse beside the Lake of Lucerne, on the mountain which still bears the name of Pilatus, and that at last, in the intensity of his grief, he plunged into the dark and dismal lake at the summit. ‘‘ And there ”— so the popular legend ran—“ a form is often seen to emerge from the gloomy waters and go through the action of one washing his hands; and, when he does so, dark clouds of mist gather first round the“What I have written I have written.” 1 19 bosom of the Infernal Lake (such it has been styled of old), and then, wrapping the whole upper part of the mountain in darkness, presage a tempest or hurricane, which is sure to follow in a short space.” But if Pilate did repent already, when he used these words, of the sentence he had passed upon the Holy One, it was a vain and fruitless peni- tence. What could be the good of his washing his hands before the people, when he gave up Jesus to their wicked will? What could be the good of his taking down the inscription, when the suffering Figure hung upon the Cross? It is not pure hands that God requires, but a pure heart. It is not the being sorry for evil when it has been done (though that, too, has its value in His eyes), but the not doing evil at all. “What I have written I have written,” said Pilate. Is there not many an one of us to whom it occurs, with a deep repentance, in the retrospect of our lives, that “what we have written,’ upon our own hearts or upon others, “we have written;” it cannot be undone ?120 “* What I have written I have written.” Let me take the words first in their purely literal sense. What is written, is written. ‘There is a certain solemnity in writing. You can find it in the contrast, often made or implied, between what is merely spoken and what is written. It is true, as you can see for yourselves, even of letters. A letter is in some sense a sacred thing. Recent political events have tended to fix men’s thoughts upon the nature and value of letters. But in private life we feel that nobody has a right to open another person’s letter, or to read another person’s letter without his consent, or, as I think, to send on a letter which he has received to a third person unless the writer permits him; for a letter is the expression of the relation in which he who sends it stands to him to whom it is written, and other people commit a certain wrong if they roughly intrude upon that relation. I remember how, in Dr. Johnson’s “ Rasselas ”—a book which you will all, I hope, read some day— the prince says to Imlac, who has been de- scribing to him the civilization of Europe, “They are surely happy who have all those——__ “What I have written I have written.’ 121 ee ee conveniences, of which I envy none go much as the facility with which separated friends interchange their thoughts.” Boys are not always so mind- ful as they should be of the duty of writing letters to their parents and friends. But if it be true, as indeed it is, that “ what is written is written,” and is endowed with per- manency, unlike the spoken word which flies and is forgotten, it becomes important, and I want you to bear it in mind, that you should not abuse the privilege of writing. For it is only too pro- bable that bad words, if once they are written, will do a world of harm, that you, when you wrote them, never dreamt of. It occurs to me to give you three rules which it will be well for you to observe in your life. Firstly, do not write angry words. You are sure to be sorry for them. For the anger which prompts the words will die away; perhaps you will come to see that it was always unjust, and that you ought not to have given way to it. But the writing, the angry letter, will remain. I¢ will remain to poison the fresh springs of122 “ What I have written [ have written.” friendship. And long years afterwards, when you are wiser and sadder, as you review what once you wrote in a passionate hour to somebody who seemed at the time to have done you wrong, you will say in your heart, “ What would I not give to have not written it Pe Again, I say, do not write malicious words. This is an age, I will not say of scandal, but at best of personal gossip. Everybody knows every- body’s business except his own. ‘he mere publicity of modern life fills people’s minds with the thought of their neighbours’ affairs. I earnestly beg you not to believe what you hear against the characters of other people, unless upon the best authority, and, if you do believe it, not to spread it abroad. TIll-natured letters do an infinity of mischief. It is much easier to tell evil than to stay its being told. But to think good of others is to be good yourself. And it is one of the truest signs of a noble nature that you should be sorry, and not glad, when it appears that men are not so noble as they have seemed to be, and that you would not“What I have written I have written.” 123 do any one the injury, if you could help it, of trying to take away his character. Need I add, do not write impure words? Nay, I will not say that; for if there be any one among you who would desecrate the School by writing what is foul and ought never to be read, or even thought of, may he leave the school this Term! For the words, “ What I have written I have written,’ reach beyond and above the literal act of writing, to the multitudinous influences that we exercise one upon another, and all upon the School. It lies with us to act as we will, but not with us to govern the effects of our actions. Our looks, our words, our letters, our examples, are written upon the hearts and lives of others; and we know not, we cannot know, what shall be the end of them. But the writing, though invisible to mortal eyes, shall be brought to light on the Great Day of Account. It shall be then seen how the good or ill that you have done has told, although you have known it not, upon the School. This it is which makes the life of each of you124 “What I have written [ have written.” so solemn. Beneath its happiness and bright- ness dwells its deep abiding seriousness. It sometimes looks as if boys thought they could do wrong and go on doing it, and when it 1s found out, just say that they are sorry and so be again as if they had not done it at all. But it is not so. You must not expect to be forgiven just as soon as you feel your own need of for- giveness; penitence, duty, sanctity, are hard; it is only by an effort you can reach them, and it may cost you all a lifetime to atone for the folly or the sinfulness of an hour. Thus the past is always the present, and it is with painful steps that we essay to undo whatever evil we have done. “What I have written I have written.” How the words come home to the moral experience of us all! how sure we are that they are true! and how much would we give, perhaps, that they should be less true than they are! Upon our own lives, perchance, we have written some ill habit that makes against the holy will of God. But we cannot free ourselves from it; it clings— “ What I have written I have written.” 125 about us, and we yield to it, despite ourselves, again and again, Or upon other lives—the God-given lives that are around us—we have written the fatal lines of bad example. Weare sorry now; we would cancel it, if we could; but the hand that sped the poisonous shaft may not recall it, and we hear the bitter words, “ Too late, too late!” Is it not such a thought which comes upon all our hearts, as we remember what we might have been and what we are? And, if upon all hearts, then surely most of all upon theirs who in a few weeks or days will quit these walls for another life, of larger hopes and_ responsibilities, elsewhere? They may say with the great poet! of Harrow— * What is writ, is writ; Would it were worthier! ” What they have written they have written, upon the life and character of the School. If it be good, then our hearts shall thank them for it in the days that yet shall be. If it be evil—ah! still it is written ; it cannot now be done away. 1 Byron.126 “ What I have written I have written.” Is it so? or is it still left for them to write, ere . they go hence, the last line on the last page of _ their young lives? Oh! then, tell the boys who will stay after you that it shall be their duty—and that it was yours, only you did not know it, or were not true to it as you might and should have been—to cherish, while they are here, an appre- ciation of the debt which they owe, at whatever personal cost, to the School, and to aim at making it, by the nobleness of their daily lives, not now only, but for all time, according to the blessing of God, the bome of culture, of piety, and of virtue.Mir Astronomy and the Astronomers, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handywork,”—Psaum xrx. 1. Ir was our privilege last night to hear a lecture} upon the greatest and most glorious of the celestial bodies. It has occurred to me that I may not unsuitably suggest to you two or three thoughts of a religious character arising out of that lecture. There is no science so majestic as astronomy. It has been called “the firstborn of the sciences.” Centuries ago, before the dawn of civilization had tinged the borders of the Western world with light, the Chaldean sages by day and night were watching the heavens, little dreaming of the 1 Sir R. S. Ball, F.R.S., Astronomer Royal for Ireland, had lectured upon “ The Sun” on the Saturday before this sermon was preached, 127128 Astronomy and the Astronomers. wonders to be learnt there. It deals with spaces, distances, times, proportions, gravities, which in their range and magnitude appal the mind. Thus, to take one instance, in a popular book on astronomy, a story is told which will illustrate the vastness of that unique, imperial body called the sun. A French professor at Angers, wish- ing to give his class of pupils some idea of the size of the sun in comparison with the earth, counted the number of grains of wheat in a litre. He found it to be 10,000; consequently there would be 100,000 such grains in a decalitre, and in fourteen decalitres 1,400,000. So he gathered the fourteen decalitres into a heap; then he held up one grain—one single grain—and said to his class, “ Here is the volume of the earth, and here” (pointing to the 1,400,000 grains) “is the sun.” Nor is there any achievement of the human mind which so exalts the conception of man’s intellectuality as his power of calculating with an absolute precision the movements of bodies careering, aS it were, in infinite time throughAstronomy and the Astronomers. 1 29 — infinite space, of co-ordinating them under sublime yet simple laws, and by the spectrum of even analyzing and determining their several constituent elements. It is no wonder that one of the foremost of modern observers,! when he is led to cite the supreme qualities of human nature, should place side by side with the “benevolence which extends not only to other men, but to the humblest living creature,” the ‘God-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system.” Yet astronomy, like every science, if reverently studied, teaches the lesson not of human great- ness, but of human weakness in contrast to the Divine greatness. It lifts the thought above phenomena, however marvellous, to Him Who is the Author and Sustainer of them all. Some of you may know an interesting Arabian tradition in regard to the childhood of tie patriarch Abraham. It is said that when Abraham was a child, as he was persecuted by the great Nimrod, then King of Chaldea, his mother, to save his life, hid him 1 Darwin. K130 6Astronomy and the Astronomers. for many months ina cave. As soon as he stepped for the first time beyond the cave, he saw a beautiful star, and exclaimed, “ This is my God, which has given me meat and drink in the cave.” But anon the moon rose in her beauty, surpassing the light of the star, and he cried, “ This is not God; I will worship the moon.” But towards morning, when the moon paled and the sun rose in the east, he said, “ Not the moon, but the sun, is my God.” And the sun, too, sank at last beneath the waves. Then he was silent, but thought within himself, “I acknowledge none of these as my God, but Him Who has created heaven and earth, and all that is in them.” So, too, we in the same spirit, as we think of the celestial bodies, and especially of the sun, as we think of its force, its distance, its im- mensity, its illuminating and energizing benefi- cence, shall bow our heads before the throne of the Supreme; we shall remember His omnipo- tence and our impotence; and we shall ery in sacred words, but with fuller intelligence than was given to the sacred poet himself, “ When IAstronomy and the Astronomers. 131 consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained : what is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him ?” It has been the fortune of astronomy to revo- lutionize man’s conception of himself, and of the world to which he belongs. No scientific dis- covery of the present or future can so profoundly metamorphose human thought as when it was seen that man, instead of being lord of a world which was itself the centre of the physical universe, is a being placed for a brief time upon one of the humblest bodies of a mighty system, embracing countless worlds, yet greater than his own, and being itself perhaps a part, and even a small part, of other systems as much vaster than itself as it is vaster than the world in which he lives. Such a discovery is a standing witness that none of us—neither man, nor state, nor Church—may justly pronounce, in the name of authority or faith, that any speculation of science, however improbable it may seem, is proved, or can be proved, to be untrue. It is a132 Astronomy and the Astronomers. witness that we may not fetter scientific research by the word of revelation as we interpret it; but that we must interpret revelation itself in the light and spirit of scientific research. For the history of astronomy suggests two thoughts—one humiliating, the other deeply encouraging. When the patient labours of the first great astronomers were elucidating the movements of the heavenly bodies, the Church took upon her- self to declare that their speculations were con- trary to religion. I say the Church in her official capacity, for there were Christians who were wiser and more enlightened than the Church. She embittered the lives of Tycho Brahé and Galileo. She shut her eyes against the light. She turned her back upon the truth when it was offered her. But the truth, thank God, was stronger than the Church. The Church has taken back her words. She has sat at the feet of the martyrs whom she persecuted. Only it is her penalty that, while the earth is owe with names of Christian origin and significance,Astronomy and the Astronomers. 133 there is not, I think, one such name among the bodies in the wide expanse of heaven. But if the Church called astronomy irreligious, the astronomers proved in their lives the grace of religion. I know no more touching or impres- sive record in Christian history than the biogra- phies of the great astronomers. I never hear that striking verse of the Benedicite, “O ye holy and humble men of heart, bless ye the Lord: praise Him, and magnify Him for ever,” but I think of the astronomers. Let me tell you the simple facts about some of them. You have heard of Copernicus, that simple- hearted man, who in his silent solitude, by the cathedral church of Frauenburg, thought out the problem of the universe; you know, perhaps, the touching story, that he just lived to see the first printed copy of his book, which was destined to change the course of human knowledge ; 1t was brought to him on his death-bed as he lay there, and he just put his hand on it and died. You have heard of the Copernican system, as it is called, and understand perhaps why it was once134 Astronomy and the Astrononeers. held to be un-Christian. Yet upon his tomb are inscribed some rude Latin verses, written, it is said, by himself; but, if not so, yet by one who knew him well, asking humbly for himself that he might have after this life, not the favour of St. Paul, nor the pardon once bestowed upon St. Peter, but only such as his dying Saviour upon the Cross had, of His mercy, given to the penitent thief. You have heard of Kepler, once a serving-boy in the little inn at HKlmendingen, and afterwards “the legislator of the heavens;” and he too, whose famous laws comprehend the ordered motions of the heavenly bodies, ended his work on the “ Harmony of Worlds” in these sentences : “J thank Thee, my Creator and Lord, that Thou hast given me this joy in Thy creation, this delight in the works of Thy hands. I have shown the excellency of Thy works unto men, so far as my finite mind was able to comprelbend Thine infinity. If I have said aught unworthy of I'hee, or aught in which I have sought my own glory, do Thou in Thy mercy forgive it.”Astronomy and the Astronomers. You have heard of Galileo; you know what long and painful sufferings he bore from the ignorance and prejudice of his day; yet at last, when he was quite blind, he wrote cheerfully, “This heaven, this earth, this universe, which I had enlarged a hundred, a thousand times beyond the belief of bygone ages, henceforth for me is shrunk into the narrow space which I my- self fill in it. So it pleases God; it shall there- fore please me also.” You have heard of Newton, “the whitest soul,” as he was called, “that ever lived ;” every Eng- lishman knows his greatness, his lofty intellect, his humility, his deep and fervent piety ; every one knows how he spoke of himself in his old age as a little child upon the shore, cathering up just two or three shells that the waves of time had washed to his feet, and looking out upon the infi- nite ocean beyond; and he, too, closes his Prin- cipia with an adoration of “the Most High God, the Eternal, the Infinite, the Omnipotent, and Omniscient, Who ruleth all things not as a mere spirit of the universe, but as the Lord136 Astronomy and the Astronomers. and Master of all, whose Name is the Lord God Almighty.” Such is the true spirit, the profoundly religious spirit, of true science. Lifting its head high above the clouds of earth, it bows in profound obeisance before the God of heaven. For if, as the text says, “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handy- work,” there is something else which shows it, and shows it yet more visibly. Do you not know the saying of Immanuel Kant, that two things filled his soul with wonder and awe—the starry heaven above, and the moral law within? It was a noble saying, but the Psalmist had anticipated it. For if you look at this Psalm—the nine- teenth—upon which I am speaking to you, you will see that after six verses describing the glory of the natural heaven, the Psalmist passes, at the seventh verse, to the glory of the Divine Law. “The law of the Lord is an undefiled law, converting the soul: the testimony of the Lord Is sure, and giveth wisdom unto the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, and rejoice theAstronomy and the Astronomers. 137 heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, and giveth light unto the eyes.” And is not this the lesson which you and I may learn to-day? As you look some summer noonday upon the sun shining in the mag- nificence of its strength, or lift your eyes in the silences of the night to the star-bespangled heaven, will you not reflect that the God Who created sun and moon and stars, is He Who made you, Who loved you, Who redeemed you, and Who penetrates every secret of your soul ? So the prayer you shall put up will be one not for greatness of place or power, nor even for the knowledge by which men may be said to become as gods, but for the holy, humble spirit which shall keep you in a perilous age from the love and thought of sin. “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be alway acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my Strength, and my Redeemer.”5) 4 cs /: z iba ee =) 4 ain Che Silence of arth. « The Lord is in His holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before Him.”—HaBakkok I. 20. THERE are two silences of which the Scripture tells; the one is the silence of earth, the other— very different from it—the silence of heaven. It is my devout wish to speak about the first of these silences for a short time this evening, and about the second on the last Sunday evening of the Term. Perhaps I am wrong, but I cannot help thinking the meditation upon them will fill our hearts with thoughts not wholly inappropriate to the last days of the term and of the year. Silence is greater than speech. For speech is finite; it tells its tale and that is all; we do not think of anything beyond it. But silence is infinite ; its home is mystery ; who can penetrate 138The Silence of Earth. 139 its profundity, its solemnity ? Thus the holiest thoughts on earth are thoughts of silence. The night is silent; the “earnest stars,’ in voiceless sanctity, look down upon the hush and pause of life’s tumultuous passions. What an intensity there is in this communion of the still earth with the still and awful heaven! The grave is silent; into it the strong, the beautiful, the holy, descend, in never-ceasing, never-resting stream, and not a voice comes back from it to cheer our gloom. God is silent. He sits in His holy temple, calm and silent, while men blaspheme His attributes of power and love; but never deigns He, by one utterance of His Will, to vindicate His terrible majesty. And as He is silent, so is silence—the deep, reverential silence of our hearts—the fittest worship that any one of us may offer to the Highest. “ The Lord is in His holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before Him.” Silence, I say again, is greater than speech. It ig the characteristic of exalted souls. It was pre-eminently the characteristic of Jesus Christ.140 Lhe Silence of Earth. I remember how an American preacher,! speaking of His Divine life, says, “ The whole life of Christ stands between two great spheres of temptation. The forty days of the wilderness, and the mid- night in the garden of Gethsemane, are as two great cloud-gates of entrance to His ministry and of exit from it. In both scenes, silence is the predominant quality.” In this respect, as in many another, His example is a lesson to us all. I deeply hope you will be workers, and not talkers. I hope you will learn, and, indeed, I will try to-day to show you, the blessing of silence. |The longer I live the more I distrust people who talk much. It is always unsafe to indulge in generalizations, yet I believe that, if you come upon any one in life who is given to much talking, he will not prove altogether true and trustworthy. And if it be so, then there is reason why we should take as our own a prayer which has a noble and sacred history —it was used, I think, every day by St. Augus- tine—* Inbera me, Deus, a multiloguio” —* Deliver me, O God, from much talking.” * Henry Ward Beecher.Lhe Silence of Earth. we But I shall make my meaning clearer, if I take two or three examples showing the strength and value of silence. 1, And, firstly, the selence of courage. It is not the brave who talk much about bravery. They are resolute, silent men. They do not predict success before beginning a work, nor do they boast of it when the work is done. One of them —one of the greatest and the noblest—is known in history by the name of William the Silent. That is in my mind a very splendid title. It may belong to nations as well as to individuals. It has often been noticed, e.g. by Lessing, in his «“ Taocoon,” that the Trojans in Homer's “ Iliad” (Iam referring to the first lines of the third book) marched to war ‘‘ With noise and clamour, as a flight of birds ;” but the Greeks, on the other hand, * words, “Thy kingdom come’ multitudinous ways of doing good; that it mayThe Silence of Earth. 149 come in bright and pure and holy conduct, in generous thoughts, in sublime aspirations ; that it may come in its majesty and might, touching with sacred fire the lips and souls of men, purging away whatever is mean and base among them, and making earth the very vestibule of heaven? Such is the Divine kingdom in the world and in our hearts; such is the Advent of the Son of man in His power; such the consummation for which we pray, “Thy kingdom come.”XIV. Che Silence of beaven. “ And when He had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.” —REVELATION vull. 1. You remember, perhaps, what I said to you in my last sermon. I spoke of the silence which God enjoins upon human souls. I tried to show you how great its lessons are, and how precious, courage, endurance, sincerity, faithfulness, reve- rence. I led you to see that words, if taken alone, are as nothingness, and that the one thing needful for us all is to keep innocency and do the thing which is right. Such, I said, is the silence of earth. But earthly things are the shadows of the heavenly. We live our life here half in light and half in darkness. We know in part; we hope some day to have perfect knowledge. We see 150Lhe Silence of Heaven. Pod God now “through a glass, darkly ;” we hope some day to see Him face to face. We hear His voice faintly, as it were, amidst life’s discords ; some day He shall speak to us as a man speaks to his friend. And the revelation of His providence on earth—His power, His purity, His love—is only a snadowy type of that eternal Being Whom we shall know and understand when we are in heaven. So there is a heavenly silence, too, as well as an earthly one. The Divine seer speaks of it in his Apocalypse, in the passage which I have chosen as my text: “ And when He [the Lamb] had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.” Let us reverently consider that silence. Many causes make us look into the future. We want to learn what may happen when this life is over. We are not at home here. It isa strange thing, but the more we have of this lite— the longer we live—the less it satisfies us, as you will all find, if you live to be old. It is only religion that can make old age beautiful; it is only religion that can illumine the darkness of152 Lhe Silence of Heaven. death. Some of us, some even of the youngest, have in this Term been bereaved of parents or very dear friends.) May God of His mercy comfort them! One of our number has himself passed into the silent world, and we cannot altogether forget him. The close of the year, and with it the close of many a school-life, suggests how near the future is, how soon we oo hence. The solemn Advent season points to the unseen world. We cannot help asking, What will it be hike, that future, heavenly life, which is our hope? I will try to tell you, however imperfectly ; only remember that, in speaking of it, [ am saying not what I know to be the truth, but what I beléeve. When I tell you of earthly things, when I bid you for Christ’s sake to hate sin and love virtue, then I know, I am sure, that I say what is right. It is not so when I speak to you of heaven. I may be wrong, I can only give you what seems to me; yet it is good, even for the conduct of this life, to meditate upon the life which is to come,Lhe Silence of Heaven. 153 I confine myself to the teaching of the text. The Apocalypse is essentially an unveiling of the “things which must shortly come to pass.” It touches that epoch of Divine Providence at which the visible world loses itself in the invisible. It is not to be literally taken, but broadly and suggestively, as shadowing forth beliefs too high for words. But the outlines of the picture are clear. Thus the book “written within and on the backside,” which is described at the begin- ning of the fifth chapter, is the eternal plan of God in Creation and Redemption. When it is said in that same chapter that none but the Lamb, Which had been slain, was potent to loose the seven seals of the book, there can be no doubt of the meaning that that plan receives its sole elucidation in the Person of Him Who died and is alive again. ‘The visions which follow at the breaking of the seals—you can look at them for yourselves when you are at leisure—denote the gradual assertion of His supremacy over the powers and forces of the natural universe. They indicate that not man only, but all creation, as154 The Silence of [Leaven. St. Paul in his Epistle taught the Romans, 1s cuncerned in the redemptive act of Christ. Then the vision confines itself to man; and the breaking of the fifth and sixth seals 1s a signal for the awful, yet inevitable, discrimination between those who have loved the cause of good and have suffered for it, and those who have loved it not. And here I pause, in passing, to say, Do not think, do not let any modern theory lead you to think, that whether you do good or evil in this life, whether you rank yourself with the friends of Christ on earth or with His foes, it shall be all the same with you at the last. It is not so; that is a subtle, dangerous error; it receives no warrant from the Bible. But one act still remains. ‘The six seals of the book have been broken. One only is. left. When the victory of holiness is won, when the souls of the redeemed are safe in the Divine keeping, when the tears are wiped away from human eyes, what follows? The text must tell. « And when He had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half anLhe Silence of Heaven. 155 hour.” Above the many tones of earth or heaven, above the deliverance from want, or weariness, or pain, is silence—the deep, eternal peace of God. The “half-hour” for which the silence lasts is not a short time, but, as Hengstenberg says, stands probably in contrast with the rapid succession of the earlier visions. What is the meaning of that silence? I can only just suggest two or three thoughts. 1. It is, firstly, the sélence of meditation. There is a blessing, which we know not yet, in thought. In this busy human life it is hard to think. “The world is too much with us.” It drowns the “ still small voice” of God. Even when we kneel in secret prayer by our bedsides, our thoughts fly wandering; we cannot pray as we would. The erace of meditation is difficult. We hardly know what it is nowadays to “commune with our own heart and in our chamber, and be still.” But in heaven thought will no more be dis- turbed. There will be no unsolved perplexities. There will be no distracting fancies.156 Lhe Silence of Fleaven. Is it asked, What will be the subject of medita- tion in the deep stillness of heaven? ‘The text itself suggests the answer. The book “sealed with seven seals” is the book of the Divine Pro- vidence; and it is at the opening of the last seal that the silence comes. When we think of God in this world we are puzzled; it is so full of sorrow, suffering, and sin; it seems so little like the work of One Who is holy and perfect in good- ness and power, and so it is difficult to believe. But in heaven faith passes into sight. The plan of Creation and Redemption will be unfolded. The discords of earth will be resolved in the celestial harmony. We shall see then, in the process of events from the creation to the con- summation of all things, the unbroken working of a providential love, which is now only a hope or a prayer to us. On that love of God we shall meditate through eternity; and in that medi- tation we shall “ be still.” 2. Again, it is the szlence of adoration. Wor- ship is the supreme act of. human nature. Man rises to his highest dignity when he prostratesLhe Silence of Heaven. himself before a Power higher and holier than himself. We can do nothing of ourselves nothing that is good. How poor are our very prayers! how faint our thanksgivings! how often in our holiest hours do we fall short, I do not say only of the adoration which is His due, but of such poor praise as we ourselves had thought to give Him! Thus it is that our prayers need to be prayed over again, and our penitences to be themselves repented of. It will not be so in heaven. When we see Him as He is, we shall praise Him as we ought. ‘The cloud which spreads between Him and us shall be done away. We shall enter into that rapture of worship which finds no voice in words. Our soul will lose itself in the infinite bliss of communion with Him Who is its Father and its God. And such is the silence of heaven. 3. And, thirdly, it is the szlence of frwtion. All the voices of earth are only so many cryings for something that is not of earth, but of heaven. They are expressions of a Divine dissatisfac- tion with the limitations of our human life. Is158 The Silence of Fleaven. there not something that we all desire and cry out for—to be rich, perhaps, or successful, or happy, or good? And will it not always be a desire, never fulfilled? For we are never satisfied. We cannot do what we want to do; we cannot be what we want to be. Could the dearest wish of our heart be granted to-day, another wish, still dearer, would arise to-morrow. livery new day dawns with a fresh purity upon our lives, but in the evening it is stained with failure and sin. We are always sighing for a holiness which is always unattained and unattainable. Nay, the blessings which God gives us do not Jast long. Over all our life there hangs the shadow of death. Nothing can we call our own. Friends, comrades, parents, brothers, pass away. very human affection is sanctified and saddened by the thought that it lasts but for an hour. We are always dreading—some of us are dreading now—to speak that saddest, tenderest word on earth, “Farewell.” There is “silence in heaven” because there is no loss nor any boding fear of parting still to come. They who live in theLhe Silence of Heaven. 159 Divine Presence are sheltered from the storms of time. No evil touches them. No severance mars their peace. They are safe for ever and ever. “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb Which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” OQ my friends, the young and the old who are here to-night, how can I better end my sermon than in these words? The thought of heaven is the one inspiring thought that may live with us. We stand at the parting of the ways. We shall have each his joys, his sorrows, his experiences, in the years that expand before us. God alone knows if we shall meet again, here or elsewhere. J.et us, then, make it our endeavour to live on earth in the daily con- sciousness of heaven. Let us claim our celestial citizenship. Let us seek the things that are above.160 The Silence of fLeaven. For if heaven be not a dream or a chimera, it is the home where our highest, holiest aspira- tions are fulfilled in the presence of God. It 1s the home from which pure thoughts and true desires and noble generous purposes descend upon earth. Let it be our prayer, then, every day of our lives, that, here or elsewhere, in the battle of life, in the fierce fires of temptation, in the victory over others and over ourselves, we may bear ourselves as the redeemed and ransomed of Christ, and that thus, as far as in us lies, the kingdom of God may come, and His Will be done on earth as it is done in heaven. is there at times a deeper or more degrading dread of deviating from the customary and the commonplace. Nowhere is there greater need of boys who, by force of character and grace of will, will stand alone, who will dare, if need be, to bear the reproach of eccentricity, and who, by refusing at times to follow the example of others, will set an example which others themselves shall do well to follow. See how it is that association colours life. A boy comes here in the innocent freshness of his youth; his spirit is clear and transparent as P210 The Law of [mitation. a flowing stream; he knows not evil in himself, nor thinks it of others. But he falls, perhaps, into bad company ; he hears words, it may even be he sees actions, that he ought not to hear or see, and he does not at once protest against them; he takes things as he finds them, for better or for worse ; he swims with the stream. Ah! whoever swims with the stream is swimming downwards. Does such a boy say in his heart that-he has not changed; that he lives under new con- ditions, but he is the same? Believe me, it is not so, it cannot be so; he has been affected by all that he has heard and seen. He is not what he was; his moral sense is blurred and blunted ; he will do now what he would not once have done, and what he does will seem more natural than it would have seemed. But suppose, when this is the case, another boy comes to him—perhaps a boy who is older than himself—and lays his hand upon his shoulder and says, “ You are going wrong; you are doing what you ought not to do, and are sinking gradually below your proper self: come, let meLhe Law of Imttation. DLE be your friend ; look to me for help and counsel ; I will do my best to save you from disgrace ;” then such words, so kindly spoken, are thrilling and stirring; he sees a vision of a future brighter than his past, and he becomes the child of his own new hopes and aspirations. What shall we call this change which happens before our eyes? It is conversion. You have seen it, and I have seen it; we see it to-day; and if it were needful to give God thanks for one special mercy, when His mercies are so many and so gracious, it should be for those boys who have not despaired of themselves, and who, by stern rebuke, or inspiring command, or noble example have been led to follow and imitate the good. For it is the simple truth, engraven on human hearts, that we must all be followers and imitators of somebody; and oh that he whom we choose as our model may be sublime! For, as Aristotle says in his Hthies, “It is clearly our duty in all things to imitate the highest.” And St. Paul in the text, giving this thought its Christian tone, says to his converts, “ Be yech eS i * 4 B 4 ry / aie The Law of Imitation. followers” (or, “ imitators”) “of me, even as I also am of Christ.” This is the service which every true boy renders to his school. Not that he does some- thing or says something, but that he 7s something which all other boys may wish to be. “The greatest gift the hero leaves his race Is to have been a hero.” That is his one imperishable benefaction, and there is none that can ever divest him of it. And if the religion of Jesus Christ stands above —far above—all other religions in the world, it is because it exhibits a perfect, sublime, immaculate Exemplar, before which we bow our heads in humble praise. “Follow Me,” said the Saviour. “Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.” “I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.” Let me sum up the lessons which this subject teaches. 1. Avoid bad company. You eannot live in impure air, but you will lose the native purity of your life-blood. In those fetid slums of LondonLhe Law of Imitation. gah which are now doomed to destruction, the death- rate has been double the death-rate of the City. The wretched inmates of those slums pined and perished ; they did not feel, perhaps, or say that their air was deadly, but they died in it. So, too, the life of the soul, if spent in an atmo- sphere of sickly thoughts and unwholesome words, and dark, degrading deeds, is near akin to death. 2. Do not injure other boys. And surely as you are imitating somebody, so is somebody imitating you. You cannot always only look up, you must also look down, and somebody else will look up to you and see your face. Do not let it be to him a sign of evil. Do not let him bitterly say, in after-years, that he learnt from you the lesson which he would give half his wealth now to unlearn. I have seen the strange unconscious influence of boys upon boys. I have seen boys copy unknowingly the voice, the manner, the very handwriting, of those who lived beside them and had a power over them. Yes, and I have seen more than this; I have seen a House or an214 The Law of [mitation. Eleven purified and sanctified by the high and fearless conduct of one devoted member. Do not, then, do or say what shall lower other boys. Be strong and brave for the right. 3. Set before yourself some bright and high ecample. History is full of the benign effects of good and bright examples in the world. Let me tell you of one. On October 31, 1841, in the parish church of New Windsor, a clergyman, who had just been consecrated Bishop of New Zealand, preached a sermon upon the missionary life. It was Bishop Selwyn; and in touching words he told how he was going out to found a Church for Christ in that far land, and then to die, perhaps neglected and forgotten. Could he have thought that in the congregation which hung on his words was an Eton boy, fourteen years old, standing because there was no seat left in the church, who should lie thirty years afterwards, he too a Bishop, martyred for the faith of Christ, far away beneath the Southern Cross, with the palm-leaf on his breast, and the five wounds, like his Saviour’s, in his body, and a smile asLhe Law of Imitation. 215 of awful victory upon his face—John Coleridge Patteson ? | You perhaps now know some boy who seems to you noble, who lives a higher life than most boys live, who is constantly pure and tender in his language, who tries to do good, who cultivates the grace of piety, and who rises above the everyday suspicions of common schoolboy life. Well, try to be like him; take him as your model, try to be his friend. It is not always easy to make friendships when you wish ; still they do come often, they are among the priceless blessings of your youth; and it may be, even though you are small, if you go on trying, that some day you will be found worthy of his regard. At all events, as you take him for your example, let your life be such that if he could know what it is, he would consent, nay, would desire, to call you his friend. And in that way “be a follower of him.” 4, But, lastly, lift your heart to the vision of Christ. St. Paul says, “ As I also am of Christ.” That was the secret of his beautiful life. It 1s216 The Law of Imitation. the secret of all beautiful Christian lives. The greatest treatise of Christian morals is called the Imitatio Christi—the “ Imitation of Christ.” You must not be content with human examples. You must look through the human to the Divine. There is One Who never fails or disappoints, Who is always all that we would wish to be. Yes, and He shall be your Friend; you can count upon Him. You may not succeed in winning the friend- ship of the boy whose affection it is your dearest wish to gain; but you are sure of the friendship of Christ. There are words of His which none who has once heard them can ever forget: “But I have called you friends.” There is no such blessing in earth or heaven as that friend- ship.x. Sfalse CGitness and Crue. ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” Exovts xx. 16. Mr. Boswe.t, in his celebrated biography, relates that Dr. Johnson once put the question to a company of friends, of which Mr. Garrick, if I mistake not, wasa member, “ What is the proper way of reading the ninth commandment?” It is evident that he meant, Which is the word, or words, on which a person, reading the commandment, ought to lay stress? Is it “shalt,” or “not,” or “ false,” or “against,” or “neighbour,” or two of these words or more? For you can see at once experimentally that it is possible to read the commandment in a number of various ways. But it seems to me sure that the really impor- tant word is false. Weare not forbidden to bear witness, nor to bear it against some other person, 217218 False Wrtness and True. nor against some one who chances to be our neighbour; but we are forbidden to bear a witness which is false. And the word “ witness” is to be taken not in a legal or technical sense, but as broadly as possible, to signify all that we can say one of another. Hence the ninth command- ment bids us, in the language of the Cate- chism, to keep our tongues “from evil-speaking, lying, and slandering,” as much as the eighth commandment to keep our hands “ from picking and stealing.” We need the one as well as the other in the conduct of life; for a good name is of more value than money, and we may rob a man or boy of character as truly as of cash. I do not dwell to-night upon the force of the commandment in this immediate or literal significance. I only say to you, my boys, if it forbids “evil-speaking,’ then it forbids all language of an unkind and uncharitable nature— swearing at boys in a moment of anger, swearing at servants who have no opportunity of retort, telling stories that do people harm, imputing badFalse Witness and True. 219 motives, getting up quarrels, abuse, scurrility, invective, defamation. And if it forbids “lying,” then it forbids not direct untruthfulness only, though that occurs sometimes, but every sort of equivocation and deceit. It forbids your hinting an untruth—pre- tending that the fault lies with somebody else rather than with yourself, saying that you did not understand what a master told you when you knew it quite well, or that you have forgotten it when you could have found it out in a moment, or that you have not finished your work when you have not begun it, or have spent an hour upon it when you have wasted half the time. And if it forbids “slandering,” then it forbids talking against people, whether untruly or truly, unless there be some positive reason for telling the truth; backbiting or disparaging them, or doing anything, except from public duty, to make their lives less happy than they might have been. All this is true; it is all the lesson of the commandment, if it be interpreted with the latitude of Christ; but it is not what | have at220 False Witness and True. heart to insist upon now. For if the text says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour,” the emphasis lying naturally on the word “false,” it asserts or implies a correlative duty, which is this, “Thou shalt, at least on certain occasions, bear true witness.” It lays upon every man and upon every boy the obliga- tion—at all events, the possible obligation—of giving testimony, I do not now say when or in what cases, or under what limitations—I will come presently to these points—but of giving testimony against evil which they know to exist in the world or the School, and against evil-doers. Yet perhaps there is no question of casuistry upon which you, as members of a Public School, are more exercised, if you think of it at all, than this—Ought I to tell of another boy who is doing evil? For it must happen that you come across evil from time to time; you see it or hear it, or hear it talked of; you want to put it down, (I am assuming, of course, that you are on the side of right); you know that it is dangerous and fatal to the interests of the School, and you findFalse Witness and True. 221 it growing and gathering strength in secrecy, because nobody has the courage to lift his voice against 1t. What are you to do? Are you to speak or to be silent? Are you to bear witness —true witness—against your neighbour or not? That is the question which I am going to answer to-day. It is right that I should give you an answer to it. For it is one of those questions upon which the opinions of masters and boys are sometimes discrepant. You may not think that what I say is rightly said. You may take a different view from my own. But my duty will be done, when I have given you a simple and clear rule of action ; whether you act upon it or not must rest with you. I begin, then, by saying that the strong re- luctance of boys to give evidence against other boys is in my eyes a worthy and an honourable characteristic. If it did not exist, if they were ready to tell tales about each other on every occasion, our corporate life would lose a great part of its charm. For we live here not to do each other harm, but to do good; to get our friends222 False Witness and True. and neighbours out of trouble if we can, rather than into it; to hold out helping hands to o gsin-bound souls: and to create the strugeling, healthy confidence that every one of us, as a member of a dignified society, would gladly suffer much in himself if by so doing he could mitigate the suffering of others. This is not the ease in all schools or societies; it is a mark of social and moral elevation. For I remember a man, who had spent a good deal of time in teaching boys, not at a Public School, but in a different institution, telling me that his difficulty was to prevent the boys giving, not to make them give, information one of another. But, speaking of Harrow or of any English Public School, I shall carry your approval if I assert that a boy who is fond of making out other boys to be bad, who complains of them and excites a prejudice against them whenever he can, and who is on the look out for occasions of revealing whatever faults or follies they may be guilty of—he is not an admirable boy. We agree that boys should not bear witness freelyFalse Witness and True. 223 against their neighbours, but we have still to ask, Is it ever, or in any circumstances, their duty to bear it? And here it is natural to make two observa- tions, and I do not see how any one of you can dissent from them, viz. (1) that in the world at large crime would habitually go unpunished if people would not give evidence against criminals ; (2) that nobody thinks the worse of people for giving such evidence—on the contrary, we regard them as performing a public duty. Let me illustrate what I say by an example taken from the recent history of Ireland. Of course I do not quote it in any political sense, but only to show you that, if people will not give evidence, it is impossible to punish crime. On the 29th of May, 1881, which was a Sunday, a man called Peter Dempsey started for church, with his two children, about Lt acm. Half an hour later, on his way to church, he was murdered. A great many people were going to the same church at the same time. Not one of them would give any information about the= Ay a : B i kj 224 False Witness and True. murder. The consequence is that the murderers were never brought to justice, but are at liberty now. You will probably say that the people who saw that murder committed ought to have informed about it, and, in fact, that they were cowards for not informing. But, if so, you admit that people have no right to hold their tongues, at least in some cases, if they see and know that evil is being done. For the fact is that every day people give evidence, and per- form a public duty by giving evidence, against evil-doers in the courts of law; nor could society exist if they did not. Is there any reason, then, why the’ practice which prevails among men in the world should not prevail equally among boys in a Public School? Yes, I think there is a reason, and I think it lies in the peculiar intimacy of the rela- tion which we bear one to another. For as a man would not tell about his son, or a brother about his brother, what he would readily tell about a stranger, so a boy is right in hesitatingFalse Witness and True. before he tells what his schoolfellow, who lives by his side, has wrongly done. Besides, a school, by its internal system, supplies various means of checking and putting down evil; it is not always necessary to have recourse to masters. Yet in some cases—certainly in stealing, perhaps in bullying—every good boy would feel himself bound to speak out, if it were necessary. Hence it is possible to express the duty of boys, if they know evil to be going on and want to stop it, in a few simple, pointed rules like these :— 1. A boy should not tell of another boy’s evil-doing if it is slight, or an isolated act (unless it be very bad), or not likely to do harm as an example. 2. He should not tell unless it is clear that his only object in telling is to serve the School; he should not tell out of malice or revenge, or with the view of gaining something for himself. 3. He should not tell, at least as a rule, without first trying if other means will succeed in putting down the evil; thus, if he knows a boy to be doing wrong, he may speak to him Q226 False Witness and True. about it as a friend, or may call on other boys to speak to him, or bring pressure to bear upon him, or may report it to boys high in the School who are responsible for good order, rather than to masters. 4. He should satisfy himself that the evil is one which ought to be put down at any cost, and that the only or best way of putting it down is by telling about it. If I state these rules so clearly, it is to show how anxious I am to avoid the bitter, extreme necessity of your having to bear witness against other boys. For confidence is the corner-stone of a Public School—confidence of masters in boys, of boys in masters, and, above all, of boys in other boys. Still, when all is said, the one thing needful in a School is not to create confi- dence, but to kill evil. We may be as strong and famous and fashionable as you will; but if evil is rife among us and none will lift his voice against it, this is not a noble Christian Public School. And therefore I give you this rule: If you know that some grave moral evilfalse Witness and True. 227 exists in the School or in the House to which you belong, if you know that it is vile and hateful and deadly, if you know that it may spread from boy to boy and from room to room like a plague, if you know that it will never be done away unless the wicked boy who is the source and centre of it all be put away from the society which he contaminates with his presence, then it is your duty—your duty to man, to Christ, to God—to bring it to light, even though it be necessary to cut off the diseased limb which, if it remains, will corrupt the whole body. And I will add this: If Jesus Christ could tell you who is the bravest boy in a Public School—not the bravest as men judge, but the bravest in God’s sight—it would, I think, be one who will not sit by with folded hands while evil flourishes, but will bear, if need be, any weight of responsibility so that he may keep himself and others pure. May God give us such boys, and many of them, at Harrow!oa. Che Mational Lite. “ Before Him shall be gathered all nations.” Sr. MaTtHEW xxv. 32. THE judgment of God, to which the Advent season points, is twofold. It is a judgment of individuals. “We must all appear,” each for himself, “before the judgment seat of Christ; ” each of us will stand then face to face with his Maker; each will see the revelation of his own heart’s secrets; each will answer to the dreadful inquisition ; each will receive the inexorable doom. But it is also, I think, a judgment of the nations. It shall visit the life which we lead not by ourselves but in community; it shall determine whether we as a nation, like other nations, have proved worthy or unworthy of the benedictions which God, Who rules the peoples of the world, 228The National Life. 229 has shed upon us. “ Before Him,” ae. before Christ at His Advent, “shall be gathered all nations ;” every one a grand total of individuals, but every one, too, an individual in itself. There is a solemnizing as well as an ennobling power in this reflexion. It emphasizes the deep responsibility of the corporate national life. It enlarges and expands the sentiment of moral obligation, until we cease to think what we must do each by himself, and think what we may all do as members of a great society. For nobody, | think, can read the Bible, however cursorily, without appreciating the strength of its testi- mony to the facts of the national life. The Old Testament is the history of a nation—not of a chosen individual, but of a chosen people. The promise given to the patriarch Abraham assured him that in his seed should the nations of the earth be blessed. It was the appointed work of Moses and Aaron to emancipate and consolidate a nation. All through the Jewish history the individual lives of judges, psalmists, and prophets are merged in the full stream of nationality.230 The National Life. In that eventful history it is, I say, not a person nor a succession of persons, but it is a people which is selected by God, distinguished from other peoples and consecrated to His service ; and that people, after being richly privileged, after lapsing into sin, after spurning its opportunities of self-reform, after submitting to its sentence of condemnation, is a witness, though an unwilling witness, at this hour to the reality and the responsibility of the national life. Nor were sadder words ever spoken upon earth than those in which the Saviour Christ, on the eve of His Passion, pronounced with tears that the elect nation of God had forfeited its election. “And when He was come near, He beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.” Is not England, too, a nation, an elect nation of God? Has she not a proud imperial duty and destiny? Are there not “things which belong unto her peace;” and is it possible that theyThe National Life. may some day be “hid from her eyes” ? Let us draw out these thoughts a little in detail. Every nation has a life, a character, a conscience. It may be composed, as in England herself, of diverse elements; but it fuses them into a corporate whole. It is distinguished from all other nations by certain physical, social, and moral attributes. How different is one nation from another—the English from the French, the French from the German, the German from the Italian or the Spanish! How hard it is—does not the story of England and Ireland prove this? —for one nation, however approximate in position, to enter into complete sympathy with another! Yet, widely as the nations are separated, there is none which is incapable of arousing and sustain- ing the enthusiastic sentiment which is known as patriotism. Men do great deeds and bear great sufferings for their country. Is there one of us to- night who does not thrill at the inspiring thought of English nationality ; one of us, man or boy, “ With soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is wy own, my native land”?eos i rrr heey oe 232 Lhe National Life. Is there one who does not believe with immutable faith in the God-given mission of the English people; one who does not reflect with personal satisfaction upon that strange, chequered web of struggles, passions, hopes, ambitions, failures, victories, and reverses that make the ancient tale of English history; one who does not feel a glow within his soul at the strong, self- conscious language of the poet — “This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror. Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true” ? And why is this? Because a nation is a living thing; it is born and dies; it is susceptible of a common sorrow or joy, a common shame or glory. Have not these last days brought home to many hearts the consciousness of a national sentiment? Has it not been with a feeling of humiliation—of common national humiliation— that we have read of deeds done by countrymen " Shakespeare,Lhe National Life. 23 ~ J of ours in the far dark land of Africa, where no eye looked on them but the one Omniscient Hye, which they forgot—deeds which have jeopardized the English character of humanity, which have shown that deep in the human heart lies still unredeemed such a savagery as would dishonour very savages, and which have demonstrated that nothing—nothing on earth save the fear of God can be a guarantee of honour, of clemency, or of decency, when the force of public opinion is removed ? And at sucha time, when the national heart was saddened and ashamed, has it not been as with a glow of national pride that we have seen the gallant crew, officers and men, of an English war-ship,’ at the sudden, awful call of doom, go down quietly, thinking not of them- selves, obeying and obeyed, without disorder or dismay, into the grave of the unfathomable deep ? Such is the common sentiment of English na- tionality ; such is the sentiment which makes the many one. But if it be so, then I ask you, What are the things which “ belong unto” a nation’s 1 ELMS, Serpent.234 The National Life. “peace”? What shall we try to do and to be as Englishmen, if we would serve and save our country ? Other nations, other powers, have had their day. They have been disciplined by suffering and purified by adversity; they have risen to the dignity of great vocations; then they have failed and declined, and are dead. Who can stand upon the Acropolis or the Capitol, who can call to mind the historical associations of which these hills have been the witnesses and the centres, and not ask himself if the fate of other nations—not less glorious in their day, or dignified, than England—will be the fate of the English nation as well? Let me mention three characteristics, as they seem to me, of a permanent national life. 1. The first is a national farth. “The fear of God,” says Mr. Froude, in his latest book, the Life of Lord Beaconsfield— “the fear of God made England, and no great nation was ever made by any other fear.” It is a true and profound saying. It does notThe National Life. 235 mean that all the citizens of a community will embrace one theory of religion; that may be desirable, but experience proves it to be im- possible. It does not mean that they will consent, even on rare and solemn occasions, to unite in common offices of worship. It does not mean, or it does not necessarily mean, that they will connect the body politic, by the method known as Establishment, with a Church or a plurality of Churches. But it does mean that the nation, not as individuals only, but as a body, will live in the faith and fear of God, will own and submit itself to His providence, will recog- nize the operation of His laws, will believe in its responsibility to His judgment, will prefer righteousness to expediency and justice to gain, and in its corporate actions, whenever it is called upon to pursue a common policy, will try, how- ever imperfectly, to accomplish the purposes of His All-Holy Will. 2. The second element of a nation’s weal may be said, I think, to be a national morality. For a nation, like an individual, has a con-236 The National Life. science. It has its sense of right and wrong. It may be stirred to a conception of duty. It may choose the path of virtue, or may refuse It. Nor is there any service which a statesman can render to his country so sublime as that of enlightening and energizing its conscience. What is the history of all philanthropic movements issuing from a people’s heart? Some one man, perhaps, wakes up to the sense of an evil which the world, until his day, has taken for granted; he is laughed at, then abused, called fanatical; his peace of mind is wrested from him; he stands alone; it may be that he, too, has his Calvary, ike his Master. But at last the great heart of the nation is touched. It owns the, wrong; it will consent to it no more. Then at last the battle is won. It was so in those awakenings of the national conscience which are known in history as the Puritan and Methodist Reformations. It was so in that awakening which issued under Clarkson and Wilberforce in the abolition of the Slave Trade. It is so now, or will soon be so, in the mightyThe National Life. causes of peace, of temperance, of purity. There is such a question which looms before the nation to-day. The demand that public men shall not offend the national conscience by private immo- rality is a new demand—it marks a positive advance of moral sentiment—but it is essentially a sound and valid demand. It is a protest for right- eousness and virtue. It is a refusal to subordinate morals to politics. It is a witness that as civil- ization itself ultimately rests, and must rest, on the domestic life, so it is the interest, the supreme interest, not of one party only in the State, but of all parties, to sustain that life in the fulness of sanctity and honour. 3. But there remains the third and _ last element of the nation’s life—national duty. A nation must regard itself as having a mission. It must not live, any more than an individual, to itself. It must believe and must profess that ‘t is summoned to a duty—a God-given duty. Is not this, too, a sense which belongs to us as Englishmen? Who can forget the stately words ‘n which Milton expresses his faith in theLhe National Life. privileged destiny of England: “ When God 1s decreeing to begin some new and great period in His Church, even to the reforming of the Reformation itself, what does He then but reveal Himself to His servants, and, as His manner is, first to His Englishmen ?” There is a duty, then, which lies upon England. It is"a high, a terrible duty. It is to set forth, before the eyes of men and nations, an example of elevated morality in life, in commerce, and in politics. It is to shed the rays of a pure and enlightened religion upon all dark regions of the earth. It is to exhibit the harmony of know- ledge and faith, of progress and reverence, of science and conscience. It is to prove that above all qualities of art and learning, above the gifts and graces of life, stands the in- alienable quality of character. It is to assert by example and precept that it is the duty, as of an individual so of a nation, to bow itself in its corporate capacity with deep and awful obedience before the throne of the Eternal God. This is the mission, if I mistake it not, ofLhe National Life. 2309 England. It is for this that God has given us the richest heritage, the amplest empire, the language most widely spoken among men. May He grant us to be not unworthy of our preroga- tives! May He fill us with the spirit of duty and sanctity! And at the last day, when “before Him shall be gathered all nations,” may He reward us as a nation with His blessing!XT. Scenes of the Loro’s |Passion, I. THe AGony. ‘¢ And He went a little further, and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me: nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt.”—Sr. MATTHEW XxvVI. 39. It is noticeable that the scene of the Lord’s Agony was not the mount of Crucifixion. There are two elements which would seem to be neces- sary to the highest tragedy; the one is the horror of anticipation, the other is the actual peace. Coming events, it is said, cast their shadows before ; and the shadow of the Cross is seen to fall upon one kneeling Figure in Gethsemane. Will you come with me for a few minutes to that garden, and in reverence watch Him as He kneels? It is the thought of His own death which fills 240Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. 241 His soul. A short while before, He had taken the cup and given thanks, and said to His disciples, “Take this, and divide it among yourselves.” That was their cup— the cup of blessing, which we bless.” But another cup was His. He had known it long ago. No doubt He was thinking of it when He said to the two disciples, who wanted to sit on His right and His left hand in His kingdom, “Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?” and they answered so lightly, “ We are able.” Those two disciples were with Him now in His agony. Do you think that they remembered these words? But at least they could not share that cup with Him. He “trod the winepress alone.” We will not pry into the mystery of His death. We will not seek to represent to ourselves the Crucifixion in all its awfulness of physical strain and anguish. It is enough that for all, as one thas said, “ for kings and for beggars, for the justly doomed and the unjustly, it is a hard thing to die.” In the anticipation of His death the Lord 1 Carlyle. R—— Cd ror ae FO . « ie “> — ss 242 Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. yearns for sympathy. There is something pro- foundly pathetic in this yearning. In the Preetorium, amidst the jeers and insults of the soldiery, with the ery, “ Away with Him!” ring- ing in His ears, He could stand alone unmoved. But He longed that His friends should feel for Him. His words are tremulous with that longing. “ With desire,” He said, “I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” Afterwards, when they came to the garden, He “ was torn away from them,” as St. Luke says—areor aon ar avrwv—as though the parting could only come by a violent effort. And to the three favoured disciples whom He took with Him He said, “Tarry ye here, and watch with Me.” That was why it was so bitter to Him, when He came back, to find that they had not watched, but had fallen asleep. So true is it that human sympathy 1s imper- fect. It is a poor anesthetic at the best. We cannot do much for others when they need us most. If you are conversant at all with human suffering, if you have ever stood beside the bedScenes of the Lord’s Passion. 243 of any one who was dear to you when he lay tossing in pain, then you know what is your impotence to alleviate, by any word or deed, the stress of physical misery. But at least we think that we could keep awake. If He bade us watch with Him, then we would watch. Well, perhaps so, and perhaps not. “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Hxhausted nature claims repose. Sorrow itself must be relieved. Peter and the two sons of Zebedee may be said to have formed the inner circle of the Lord’s disciples ; they had been the only witnesses at the raising of Jairus’s daughter, and again upon the hill of His Transfiguration (and there too, by the way, they fell asleep) ; they must have known now, for His words had clearly told them, that He was approaching the crisis of His history ; He was withdrawn from them only a stone’s throw in this hour of His agony; and yet they could not watch with Him even that one hour. “He came and found them asleep again: for their eyes were heavy.” I do not exaggerate the value of a sympathy244 Scenes of the Lord's Pass10n. ——— which can only watch and wait until the end comes. But it is something, and there are times when it is all that is possible. It would perhaps have proved some solace to Him, under the immensity of His soul’s sorrow, to know that eager eyes were following Him, and loving hearts were agonizing for Him in prayer. But if so, that solace was denied Him. His blood-drops fell unheeded to the ground. “ Their eyes were heavy ;” they were asleep. Was there, then, no eye that watched Him as He prayed? Did the night-winds only dissi- pate that prayer—that thrice-repeated prayer which I have chosen for my text—“ O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me: never- theless not as I will, but as Thou wilt” ? That is not a question which I shall fully answer to-night. There is a reason for keeping it to the last sermon which I shall preach, if God will, on the final Sunday of the Term. For the present, and for less than ten minutes, I ask your attention to three aspects of the prayer itself.Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. 245 Firstly, its nature. Secondly, its limitation. Thirdly, its answer. 1. “O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.” He does not meet death like a Stoic. He does not disdain to bow His head before the blast of it. The bitter cup is lifted to His lips. Then the cry bursts from Him, “ Oh that it might pass away!” It is intensely natural, is it not ? It is a witness to the perfectness of His humanity. His cry takes the form of a prayer. Every cry which bursts from the heart must take some form. It may be impatience. It may be despair. It may be blasphemy. But the only Divine cry is a prayer. Prayer is not rebellion against the Will of God. We shall not be less prayerful as we grow holier. We shall pray yet more earnestly, yet more effectually. It is not wrong to pray, “ Let this cup pass from me ;” for, as He prayed, so may we dare to pray. But there is another lesson in this prayer. It is that, before we can Say, “ Let this cup pass from me,” we must say, as He said, “ Our Father.’ay «i F Bd i ? H 246 Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. But did He say, “ Our Father” ? Not quite so. The words, as given in the Gospel, are, “O My Father.” He tells us to pray to our Father. But, when He prays Himself, He says, “My Father.” Jam satisfied that He had a purpose in so speaking. Among the minor evidential points which tend to show that Jesus Christ bore a unique relation to God, is this, that He never includes Himself with His disciples or with Christians generally under a single common term of Divine sonship. He was the Son of God, and so were they ; but they were not sons in the same sense that He was. Accordingly, He never says, “Our Father.” In speaking to Mary, when she had taken Him to be the gardener, He used the expression, “Go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and your Father ; and to My God, and your God.” So much for the nature of this prayer, “O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.” It reveals a human soul in the stress of suffering. It reveals the longing for deliverance from a burden too great to be borne. But itScenes of the Lord’s Passion. 247 reveals, too, in Him Who was the Son of God, a perfect trustfulness in a perfect Divine Father- hood. Christ never lost His’ faith in God, even upon the Cross. He Who could say, “ father, let this cup pass from Me,” could say also, “Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.” That is the nature of true prayer. 2. But secondly, notice its limitation. You will find it in two expressions of the text: “If it be possible . . . nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” A quaint old English writer * remarks that, when we say, “ Deo volente,” we generally put the words in a bracket, as though they did not much matter. We do not habitually think much of the Divine Will as controlling and limiting human desires. But prayer must always be conformed to that Will. We must always say, “Tf it be possible ;” not but that with God all things are possible, but because His Will or His Law implies a limit of moral possibility. or it cannot be too often said that in all our prayers 1 Fuller.248 Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. we are not seeking to bend the Divine Will to — ours, but to bend our will, however painfully, to His. Before any petition that we put up for ourselves stand in the Lord’s Prayer the words, “Thy Will be done.” And here, in the garden, He was true to His own teaching. Better was it that He should drink the cup to the dregs than that He should put it aside without God’s Will. The stress of His Agony is graphically described by St. Luke, when he says that “His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” For a sweat of blood is a patho- logical phenomenon which is known to be the accompaniment of extreme mental or spiritual tension. But the blood-drops, as in Carlo Dolce’s picture, are kindled into heavenly light in the sublime resignation of the words, “ Nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” Let us not lose the lesson of that resignation. The few friends of the Lord have fallen asleep. His enemies are awake and plotting. When He returned to the three disciples for the last time, He could say, “ Behold, he is at hand that dothScenes of the Lord’s Passion. 249 betray Me.” At such a moment He, being Man, could not help praying that the cup of His agony might pass from Him. But in so praying He added the words which hallow any prayer, whoever it be that offers it, ‘‘ Not My will, O God, but Thine be done.” 3. There remains only the answer of His prayer. He prayed, “‘O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.” But the cup did not pass from Him. He drained it to the dregs. In the counsels of Eternity it had been written that He should die; and the redeeming work had been impossible save by His death. Shall we say, then, that His prayer was not answered ? Does God answer prayer only when He grants it? That were to make Him the creature of man’s wishes. That were to destroy the power of the words, “Thy will be done.” He does not take away the pain, but He gives the grace to bear it. The blood-drops of the Holy One rained on the ground; but “ there appeared an angel unto Him from heaven strengthening Him.” So He rose up from the agony collected250 Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. and calm. The forces of evil had done their worst, and it was in vain. When He came to His disciples the third time, it was as if His need of human sympathy had vanished ; He said not, “Could ye not watch with Me one hour?” but, “Sleep on now, and take your rest.” As I read the Gospels, I feel that the ex- perience of the Divine Life is our experience, only it is spiritualized. In our agonies (if we have any), as in our temptations, the angels of God will not be seen at our side. We are not great enough or holy enough for that. But there may be a Divine strength which is breathed unto us by unseen and unknown presences of love. And so our prayer is answered, though not as we pray. It was so,as you will remember, in St. Paul’s life. In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians he speaks of the mysterious “ thorn,” or “stake in the flesh,’ which marred his life. He says, “I besought the Lord thrice that it might depart from me.” What was the answer? Did God take away the pain? He left him to bear it. But He said, “ My grace is sufficient forScenes of the Lords Passton. 251 thee: for My strength is made perfect in weak- ness.” So that St. Paul, instead of wishing his pain away, came to rejoice in it as an instance of Christ’s love. I do not know if you will wholly follow my meaning. We speak of pain as an evil, and it is so. But sometimes they who have had most knowledge of it, whether as sufferers or as sympathizers with suffering, have seemed to pierce through the dreadfulness of it to the blessing. I remember hearing that a devoted Christian lady, who had spent her life in nursing the sick, once remarked that, if by a single word she could blot out pain from the world of men, she would not speak it. I remember reading that the missionary David Brainerd spoke of his painful hours—and they were long and terrible— as having given him an intuition of God’s love such as he could not have gained by any earthly happiness. ‘This is the lesson of Gethsemane ; at least it is one lesson. We who have pain or eriefs of heart, or spiritual sorrows, may learn to bear them in the garden where the SaviourScenes of the Lord’s Passion. kneels amidst the olives. Oh! then, kneel for a moment, as it were, beside Him. “Turn not from His griefs away, Learn from Him to watch and pray.” Prayer is human; we cannot help it. But it becomes Divine, if we pray that the Will of God may for ever be done in us and by us. And He, Whose Will we humbly seek to do, shall send His angel to strengthen us, that we may do it.XXIII. Scenes of the Lord’s JPassion. LE “Ture ‘YRraa ‘“* And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.”—St. LUKE xxl. 31, 32. “ And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how He had said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny Me thrice. And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.”— Sr. Luke xxu. 61, 62. WE left the Lord, you will remember, in Geth- semane. We watched with Him, or tried to watch, in the hour when He prayed that His cup of suffering might pass from Him, He is standing now before His judge. It is the same Caiaphas who had given his counsel in favour of putting one man to death rather than of letting the whole nation perish. He 1s almost 203eee = a> ae ames FT 7 Sind ~~ 254 Scenes of the Lord’s Passton. the typical unjust judge. You know, probably, that the Lord was tried and condemned by the Sanhedrin, over which Caiaphas, as high priest, would preside, before being brought before Pilate. Time would fail me, even if I had the wish or the courage, to relate the circumstances of His trial. If they do not enthrall your hearts as you read the Gospels, nothing that I could say would help you to appreciate them. JBut as it will happen that a painter chooses one moment of a great subject, and tries to realize it in his art, knowing that only in its suggestiveness lies his hope of leading any one to understand the whole, so it will be enough for us, as students of the Passion, if to-day we can catch one momentary episode of that high tragedy. The central thought, then, of my sermon lies in the words, “The Lord turned, and looked upon Peter.” I have often wondered that they have not formed a more frequent theme of the pictorial art. But they demand a little preface and a little comment.Scenes. of the Lords Passion. 255 It seems to have been the case that, when the Lord was drawing near to His Cross, He ex- perienced a sort of special feeling for Peter. There was perhaps a reason for it in the fact that Peter had been one of His first disciples, and, more than any one else, had been intimate with the whole course of His life. For, I suppose, at every crisis of our history we are apt to think most of our old and. valued friends. At all events, the first two verses which I read to you show a certain affectionate interest in Peter. Thus you will observe that He calls him by his Christian, or, I ought in strictness to say, his Jewish name. He had Himself given him the name of Peter, and had invested it with a remarkable meaning. For I think it is im- possible to read impartially the famous promise made at Czesarea Philippi, without feeling that the rock upon which He said He would build His Church must be St. Peter. But here He comes back to the old name. It is as though you or I were talking to somebody in whom we had an interest, at a turning-point of his history, and[7 ' aed | A | te a el REF 256. Scenes of the Lord's Passion. we addressed him instinctively by his Christian hame. And then, you see, He repeats the name twice: “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you all.” ‘There is something even in this repetition. Those of you who know Shakespeare will recall the passage beginning, “ O Cromwell, Cromwell,” in King Henry VIII. It makes the sentence more impressive. I think He uses it only once besides in the Gospels, at the house of Lazarus. It is like the “Verily, verily,” which occurs so often in St. John. Observe, too, the next words: “ Behold ’—He says that to call attention—“ Satan demanded you all, that he might sift you as wheat: but I prayed for thee” —for thee, my friend—* that thy faith might not fail.” He seems to read the heart in these few words. They burnt themselves, I believe, upon Peter’s memory. For long years afterwards, when he was writing to his converts, he told them to be sober and vigilant, because their adversary the devil, like a roaring lion, went about seeking whom he might devour; and then, rememberingScenes of the Lord's Passion. 257 how the Lord had said to him before his falling, « When thou art converted ”’—or, “ when thou hast turned ”—* strengthen thy brethren,” he added, “But the God of all grace... after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.” I never hear that pas- sage but I think it is a sort of autobiographical confession. For St. Peter knew what was the power of Satan. He had passed through the sifting fan of trial. He had suffered, being tempted; and it had been granted to him, in the mercy of God, after being himself converted, to strengthen his brethren. « And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter.” It is very touching, I think, to notice that in His trial He was still thinking, not of Himself, but of His disciple. This is a part of that Divine self-forgetfulness which made Him tell the daughters of Jerusalem, as He went on His way to Calvary, to weep for themselves and for their children, and which afterwards made Him say even from the Cross, “ Father, forgive them ; for they know not what they do.” I think it must Ss258 Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. have worked a great effect upon Peter. I think he must have contrasted it in after-years, 1f not at the moment, with his own self-interested denial. Perhaps that is the reason why he wrote in his Epistle, “The eyes of the Lord are over the righteous;” and again, “ The face of the Lord is against them that do evil.” For his was an impressionable character; a singular mixture, as I think, of strength and weakness. It is one of the most dramatic characters in the New Testament. You remember how confidently he tried to walk to Christ on the water, and then, as soon as he found himself sinking, cried out in fear. Well, that is an anticipation, as it were, of the scenes recorded by St. Luke in this twenty-second chapter, from which my texts are taken; for there is only a brief interval between the words, “ Lord, I am ready to go with Thee, both into prison, and to death,” and the words, “T know Him not.” For the fact is that it was not only in the presence of Caiaphas that a trial was taking place that day. Jt was in the outer court, too, where a company was gathered roundScenes of the Lord’s Passion. 259 a fire which had been lighted to keep out the frosty cold of an Eastern spring. About the issue of Christ’s trial-scene there was no doubt. But of Peter’s—what should be the issue? Would he stand, or would he fall? Do not forget that we too have our trial-scenes as well as he. “And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter.” Let me try briefly, and in particular for the sake of those who have just been con- firmed, to interpret the significance of that look. 1. First of all, then, 1 think there was a certain reproachfulness in it. Had it not been so, Peter would not have shed such bitter tears. But it seemed to say to him, “ Remember.” What a world of thoughts lies stored for him and for any one of us in that one word! Re- member what might have been, and what is now. Remember thy high resolves, thy plighted vows. femember the day when, in answer to My appeal, thou didst ery, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” and then say if thou hast been true to thy belief. Remember thesolemn service in which thou didst promise, by thy sacramental vow, “to ficht manfully under His banner against sin, the world, and the devil; and to continue His faithful soldier and servant unto thy life’s end.” I do not know, my boys, if thoughts like these in distant days will ring reproachfully in your ears. God grant it may not be so. God garnt that you may be faithful; not, of course, without many a failure, but on the whole, and so far as the purpose of the heart may reach, to the pledges which have sanctified the past week. Only knowing so well the infirmity of our nature, knowing how prone we are to sin, and how soon we succumb in the hour of our spirit’s testing, I bid you not altogether forget the tender re- proachfulness of the look which the Lord turned upon Peter when he denied Him. And yet it eannot be wrong to suppose that reproachfulness was, after all, the least part of it. 2. For, secondly, it must have been full of affection. The heart of Jesus Christ went out in love towards those who had been the companionsScenes of the Lord’s Passton. 261 of His human life. “Having loved His own,’ says St. John, “which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.” He could not bear to be parted from them. Far less could He bear that they should deny Him. It is not clear, from the Evangelical narrative, whether He actually heard the conversation going on around the fire, although that is, I think, on the whole unlikely—or inferred the im- where Peter was seated port of it from the look of Peter and the rest, or even divined it by His supernatural knowledge. But probably no one noticed that look except Peter. His interlocutors may have wondered at his going out; I dare say they never dreamt that he went out to weep. It is ever so in the world. Our deepest experiences—the thoughts, the incidents which go to mould our being—they come to us, and to us alone; nobody else knows anything at all about them. At the most other people hear a sound, like St. Paul’s companions on the way to Damascus; but they do not hear “the voice of Him that speaks” to us. The Lord said, “I have prayed for thee.”Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. Will you notice one thing in His life? When you come to the record of the highest miracles, such as the miracles of healing, or, still more, raising the dead, you find that He works them on individuals, There is not an instance of His restoring a number of people to life. The Divine grace operates upon each one singly. So, too, in spiritual things it is impossible to save men in the lump. The look which melts the heart is meant for you, and nobody can see it, or, if he sees it, can know its meaning, except yourself. But how great is the lovingkindness of this in- dividualism! “The Lord turned, and looked upon Peter.” It was as though He would say, “'Thou forgettest Me or deniest Me before men, but I have not forgotten thee. I know thy need. I prayed for thee before. My eye rests now upon thee. It asks thee, ‘ Lovest thou Me?’ It assures thee that I love thee.” For to God, and so to Christ, each individual of us is as dear as though there was no other one in all the world beside. Hence it is possible to say, as the truest of all truths, that “there is joy in the presence ofScenes of the Lord’s Passton. 263 the angels of God over one sinner that re- penteth.” 3. But that look must have been also one of encouragement. The hours when we mourn for sin are not our hours of weakness. Peter was a stronger man when he went out with the salt tears surging to his eyes than when he boldly declared that, though all might prove traitors, he at least could never deny the Christ of God. For the Divine life is not a life of placid progress; it 1s a life of striving, succeeding, failing, repenting, and ever rising above past sins to nobler things. No doubt that look of Christ inspired such thoughts as these. For Peter’s was not, indeed, a hopeless penitence, like Judas’s when he hung himself in the field of blood. It was strong, and rruitful of noble, generous hopes for the saving of his own soul and the souls of others. As he went out from the high priest’s palace, or soon afterwards, there must have shone upon him as it were a rainbow born of his tears, the memory of that Divinely given promise, «And _ thou,264 ° Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. when thou art converted ”—or, “when thou hast turned ”—“ strengthen thy brethren”—kxat od TOTE ETLoTpEPac, oTHpPlooV TOVE adeApove COU. Conversion, as a theological term, means simply turning. ‘There is no need of any mystery about it. It is turning your back upon the sinful lusts of the past. It is setting your face towards the Celestial City. That is, I say, a simple, definite, moral action, Can I be wrong in cherishing the hope that among you who hear me not a few have been thus “converted” in the past week? It must, it must have been the case that many an one of you, kneeling in his room, or at these benches, or this morning at yonder table of the Lord, has said to himself, “I will give up what has been wrong in my life; I will try to do good, and not evil; I will not speak half-truths; I will not live selfishly any more; I will not indulge unholy thoughts; I will surrender myself to God; I will prove myself a Christian worthy of Christ.” Shall I give you a simple rule this Sunday evening which will help you to carry out yourScenes of the Lord’s Passton. 265 good resolves? It is this: “ When thou art con- verted, strengthen thy brethren.” Depend upon it, if you are only thinking of yourself, even though your thought be, “ What can I do—I myself—in the cause of God?” you will not be safe against the power of evil. The only Christian method of saving your own soul is to seek, at whatever cost, to save the souls of others. It is for this reason, unless I mistake it, that by the waters of Galilee the Lord, after His Resurrection, after putting three times to St. Peter, who had thrice denied Him, the question which went so straight to his heart, “ Lovest thou Me?” gave him this as His last charge, “ Feed My lambs.” You do not need me to tell you that Peter was true to that charge. He was true, to it, even to the death. The ecclesiastical tradition, which dates, I think, from St. Ambrose, is that, in the Neronian persecution, he was fleeing, at the request of all the Church, from the city, and that at the gate he met One Whom he knew to be Christ. He said to Him, “ Lord, whither goest266 Scenes of the Lord's Passion. Thou ? ”—* Domine, quo vadis ?”—and the answer was, “I go to Rome, to be crucified.” St. Peter knew what was meant. He turned back, and was afterwards crucified, but with his head downwards, that he might not even in his death presume to be like his Lord and Master. So he “strengthened his brethren” by his death as well as by his life. And you—what will you do for yours? Try to do something. Try to help some one boy. Try to save some one soul. Now that you are your- selves confirmed, confirm your schoolfellows. So at last shall He, Who gives you the command, give you also the benediction which comes of keeping it. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.”XETV. Scenes of the Lord’s JPassion. Til. THe CRUCIFIXION. “ Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe? Be- hold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.”—SrT. JoHN xvi. 31, 32. Tuts is the last of the sermons which I said I would preach to you upon the circumstances of the Lord’s Passion. We have followed Him, as you will remember, in our thoughts from the upper chamber at Jerusalem to Gethsemane, and from Gethsemane to the palace of the high priest. We stand now at the foot of the Cross. We lift our eyes to it. Our hearts are full to breaking. Upon it hangs that “ nail’d thorn-crowned Man.” There are just two or three facts of the Cruci- fxjon which I should like you to know. It was a punishment which was purposely invented to make 267268 Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. death as long and agonizing as possible. The sufferer, who had generally borne his cross to the place of suffering, stood by while it was planted in the ground. Most pictures of the Crucifixion make the Cross a great deal too high ; but it seems probable that the feet of the Crucified were lifted only a little way from the ground. Thus it was easy to carry on a conversation with Him so long as His strength lasted, and to moisten His parched lips with the hyssop. Then He was fastened to the transverse beam, with His arms extended. The nails were driven through His hands and then through His feet. So He was left to linger out His living death; for He would not, as you know, receive the draught which the soldiers, or some of His friends, compassionately offered Him to stay His pangs. I do not mean to dwell any more on His physical suffering; but I have shown you what it was, that you may remember it, if ever it happens in after-years, when you have left Harrow, that somebody in your presence shallScenes of the Lord’s Passion. 269 speak a light or heartless word about the Divine Passion. It is not His physical suffering, great though it was, which made His Passion a unique event in human history. What is it, then, which moves us most in the spectacle of His death? Is it only that He dics, and dies unjustly, the Holy One, by the hands of wicked men? Others, too, have died unjustly. So died Socrates in the prison, and More upon the scaffold, and the martyrs in the flames at Oxford. We sorrow for them, we honour them ; but not as Christ. His was the death of deaths. To Him alone of the sons of men was it given to say, “It is finished.” His was the exceeding bitter cry, “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto My sorrow, which is done unto Me.” What was His “sorrow’s crown of sorrow’ ? Was it not His loneliness, the exceeding deso- lation of His soul? “The hour cometh,” He says, “yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone.”eee eke a>) ame PM + is 270 6. Scenes of the Lord’s Passton. There is an awfulness in the mere thought of solitude. Man is not born to be alone. His spirit is attuned to friendship, to social harmony, to the sweet and happy intercourse of life. “He must be greater or less than man,” says the philosopher,’ “ who wills to live apart from other men; he must be either a god or a beast.” Do not doubt that the highest Man felt this human need of sympathy and support. I have tried in my other sermons to show you how true it was that, “having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.” Human nature, then, is social, interdependent. Hence the seasons of solitude, which come to us all; are awful. The night is awful; for the cheer and company of the day are gone, and we are alone. ‘The pilgrim passing through the bare and barren sands, the traveller voyaging on the far deep sea,—these, as they gaze upon the solemn stars above, know how dread a thing it is to be alone. But all of us, in the critical hours of life, are alone. The highest joy, the ' Aristotle.Scenes of the Lord's Passion. 271 deepest sorrow, are incommunicable. Little indeed we know, or can ever tell, of each other. “The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.” In all that is deepest and most human in humanity, in the vital experiences of our being, in the hour of death and in the day of judgment, we are and we must be alone. But what is this loneliness of which I speak ? There is an isolation which only means the absence of men. That is little. The ancient moralist! was wont to say that he never felt himself less lonely than when he was alone. We are often our own best companions. We can people the solitude with happy thoughts. We can commune with our own spirits and be glad. Such (if we may venture the thought)—such, perhaps, is the solitude of God. I do not admire the grandeur or spirituality of him who is ever afraid to be left solitary. A great man lifts him- self, like the Matterhorn, among his fellows— terrible, august, serene, alone. 1 Cicero.272 Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. But there is a solitude from which the true heart shrinks. A poet? who is dear to Harrow has sung of it. It is— “Midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men, To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess, And roam along, the world’s tired denizen, With none who bless us, none whom we can bless,— This is to be alone; this, this is solitude.” Lonely indeed, but not most lonely, were they who of old time fled afar into the wilderness and hid themselves amidst the lairs of savage beasts. It is lack of sympathy, not of society, which makes men lone. Those who are nearest to us may themselves be furthest from us, The friend whom we love may betray us with a kiss. So men are solitary with a great solitude in the market-place, or the parliament, or the palace, amidst the busy movement of a city’s life. ‘The theologian standing alone, like Athanasius, against a world inimical to the faith ; the man of science breathing out, like Galileo, his thoughts too high for the men of his own generation; the statesman facing alone, like Pitt, the passion of 1 Byron.Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. 273 a people for war; the spiritually minded man looking long in vain, like Simeon, for one Chris- tian soul with whom to say a prayer ;—these are, after all, the world’s true eremites, these are the lonely mountain-peaks of human life. Will you now consider the loneliness of Christ ? It is the penalty of greatness to be alone. Kings, they say, have no friends; for friendship is a form of sympathy, and loyalty forbids love. So, too, Christ was parted from His fellows by the royal magnificence of His purpose. They could not understand Him, They could not feel for Him. “The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” His life begins, as you remember, with misunder- standing. “ Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?” It ends with disappoint- ment. “ What, could ye not watch with Me one hour?” “Then all the disciples forsook Him, and fled.” So, in His lowliness and loneliness, betrayed by one, denied by another, abandoned by all, bearing His own cross of suffering and shame, He passed to the hour when the Father’s face x274 Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. was hid from Him in gloom. A horror of great darkness fell upon Him. The immensity of the gathering waters overwhelmed Him. Might He not say, as in the prophetic vision of Isaiah, “ I have trodden the winepress alone”? It was the consummation of His own predicted destiny: “The hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave Me alone.” We can see, perhaps, in some dim way that this must have been so. The cup of suffering had not been entirely bitter, had it been raised by loving hands to the Sufferer’s lips. There had been something common in the majesty of His sacrifice, had it been tempered by human sympathy and love. Alone, as Jacob upon Peniel, must He wrestle with the angel of death. The greatest pictures of the Crucifixion are those which display its isolation, its desolation—only the Cross and the darkness behind it, and upon it the Divine One with sunken head. Such is the death of Christ, as the Christian world conceives it. He died “ for us men, and forScenes of the Lora’s Passion. 275 our salvation.” Humanity, torn and bleeding, finds a covert in the side of the Crucified on Calvary. His is the archetypal sacrifice of which all other deeds of sacrifice are, as it were, only the shadows and imitations. But the dignity of the sacrifice is the measure of its loneliness, He could not rest on man, Who would redeem man. He could not rest—for a moment He could not rest—on God, for He would win God to man. Between heaven and earth He was lifted: He hung awhile. Two worlds, the worlds of nature and of grace, could only meet in a neutral zone; and they met in the desolation of the Cross. “Mercy and truth are met together; righteous- ness and peace have kissed each other. Truth shall flourish out of the earth ; and righteousness hath looked down from heaven.” Great deeds are done, great resolutions willed, in solitude. “ Ye shall leave Me,” said the Saviour, “alone.” But is this all? Does the veil which hides the sun destroy his power? Is all said when the cry has been wrung from His agonized lips, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken276 © ©Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. Me?” Is there not a word beyond, a deeper depth of truth Divine? “ Father,” He said—not “My God” only now, but “ Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit: and having said thus,” the Gospel notes, as though it were necessary that He should say this, “ He gave up the ghost.” His end was peace. How could it be otherwise, for He was the Prince of Peace? The everlasting arms encompassed Him. A light from heaven broke athwart the dark- ness. He was conscious of a power sustaining, strengthening, ministering gracious comfort to His soul. He was “alone, yet not alone, because the Father was with Him.” Brethren, this is the peace of God. It is the priceless privilege of religion—I do not say of Christ’s religion only. It is told of Mohammed that, as he lay in the cavern hard by Mecca, and the pursuers thirsting for his blood were heard at its mouth, “ We are but two,” said his one forlorn companion. “Nay, not so,” was the answer of the prophet ; “there is a third; it is God Him- self.’ He who believes not in God may haveScenes of the Lord’s Passton,. 22% pec ier crs nine A ee courage, purpose, dignity, splendour, strength, but not this comfort of peace. In the jarring wars of life, amidst the stir and stress of men, in suffering, bereavement, heartache, spiritual agony, to know indeed that all is well, to rest in quiet- ness and confidence upon One Who lives, and lives for evermore,—this, and nothing else than this, is religion. Jesus Christ revealed a God Whose providence feeds the ravens, clothes the lily in fair hues, and has numbered His children’s very hairs. He did not say that they who follow Him should lap themselves in subtle luxury of ease; nay, He promised them disappointment, defeat, despondency, persecution, as the reward of their great faith; they should pass through the fires of suffering, but One like the Son of God should be at their side; they should labour on the lonesome nightly waters, but a Divine Voice should bid them be of cheer. Is it too much to say that you and JI, in the evening of time, may frankly prove the truth of the Saviour’s words? We too may know the power and grace of God. He will not fail us.278 Scenes of the Lord’s Passion. His omnipresence will become a reality to us. We shall understand the rapture of devotion, the ineffable tranquillity of faith. Yes, and in the darkest, saddest hours of all our life, when we could almost wish we never had been born, we shall yet know that a Friend is very near us, and that in our loneliness of heart we are not alone. « Alone, yet not alone.” Christian experience finds its summary in the words. For we too have our crosses; and they are hard—God knows how hard—to bear. Life were sometimes un- endurable to all of us if there were no alleviation of its pains. Who shall lighten them by his presence, by his sympathy? Humanity fails. To whom shall we look, upon whom shall we call, nor call in vain? It is Thou, O God of heaven, Who art everywhere and for ever, and all in all, the Infinite, the Ineffable, the Eternal, our Maker, our Redeemer, and our Friend. So too we, like Thine own Son, are not alone; for Thou, our Father and His, art with us still.XE Last Ccords. ‘* But continue thou in the things that thou hast learnt.” 2 Trmorny mu. 14, ON the last Sunday of the Term, and of the School year, many thoughts oecur to the mind of one who holds an intimate and authoritative relation to boys, as I hold to you. He looks back over the weeks and months that have passed away, with their hopes and failings, their successes and disappointments. He thinks of what has been nobly achieved in work or in play, or not less nobly attempted, though perhaps not achieved, for the good of the School; and his heart is grateful to the boys who have done it, for they are the benefactors of the School and of us all. Yes, and if there be any one, as there well may be among this number, whether we know him or know him not, who has done us the 279280 Last Words. cruel injury of bringing evil into the School, to such an one he says, not in anger, but in sorrow, “Why did you doit? What right had you to live here as a Harrow boy, to enjoy the rich privileges and pleasures of this great School, and now to leave as a memorial of your School life only a blot? May God forgive you, as we forgive to-day!” Then the thought passes on- wards to the future, when you shall go hence into the large world with its perils and tempta- tions, and other boys shall sit here upon these benches, and shall learn the lessons that you have learnt, and play the games that you have played, and be the inheritors of your good and of your evil. Then he asks himself—how can he help asking ?—What will you do? Will your future be like the past, or wholly different? Will you “ continue in the things that you have learned,” or forget and forsake them? It is a great question. For a boy spends a few years here and then goes away. He leaves his name carved, perhaps, in the oaken panels; but that is all. “If against each boy’s name,” says a well-Last Words. 281 known writer,! who was once a master at Harrow— “if against each boy’s name could have been also cut the fate that had befallen him, the good that he had there learnt, the evil that he had there suffered, what noble histories would the records unfold of honour and success, of baffled temptations and hard-won triumphs; what awful histories of hopes blighted and habits learned, of wasted talents and ruined lives!” You are going out into the world. None can tell what will happen to you. You will lose the safeguards and supports that have helped you here. If at this moment there could spread before your eyes a chart showing the future, with its good and evil, of all the boys who are listening to me in this holy place for the last time, what a mingled world of feelings it would create! For it cannot be doubted that some of you will hold high place in Church and State; some will be lords of ample riches; some will accumulate stores of learning ; some will perform conspicuous deeds in peace or war; some will lay down their lives for 1 Archdeacon Farrar.2%2 Last Words. their country in far-off lands, and their names, it may be, will be commemorated in that aisle; some will pass through the fierce flames of moral temptation, and in the mercy of God the fire “shall have no power” upon them. And all these, and others beside them, shall do honour to the School, nay, shall keep alive perhaps the names of those who taught them here. For the glory of masters is in their pupils. “ Who had ever heard of Robert Bond, of Lancashire,” says Fuller, in his Holy State, “but for the breeding of learned Roger Ascham, his scholar?” And if so, is 1t not simply natural for me, at this parting of the ways, when the old and intimate relation between us is coming to an end, to long with all the force of my soul that you, my boys, in the after-years, should not altogether prove false or faithless to what has been said to you so often in this place—oh that it could have been said better and more wisely !—but that something of it all, some passage, some thought, some influ- ence, should remain with you, and guide and guard you on your way to your life’s end? ThusLast Words. the words of St. Paul to Timothy—his young friend, his pupil, then entering upon a position of ecclesiastical responsibility—come home to us all to-day with especial emphasis, “ But continue thou in the things that thou hast learnt,” do not forget them in the dark and difficult days which lie before you, when “all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution,” but be true to them, make them the principles of your conduct, “that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” What are “the things that you have learnt” —the things that I have tried to teach you as Harrow boys? What are the lessons that I would write upon your hearts in letters that the fire of experience shall bring to the light? Of course you will not keep them all; it has not been so when I could speak to you Sunday by Sunday, for there are boys here who have been told what is right, and then, alas! have done what is wrong; how much less will it be so when I shall speak to you never again! Yet it may284 Last Words. be that at some distant day, in some far land, you will recall the memory of four great principles which I have impressed upon you, and have been never weary of impressing, until they have seemed to sum up all that I wished to teach you, and which, as my last word, I commend to you to-day. First, the dignity of work. “Two men I 99 honour,” writes a great thinker,! “and no third. First, the toilworn craftsman that, with earth- made implement, laboriously conquers the earth and makes her man’s....A second man I honour, and still more highly: him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but the bread of life... . These two, in all their degrees, I honour: all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.” It will be one of your temptations to disparage industry, to spend money freely, and perhaps wastefully, and to forget that, if your fathers had been foolish as you are, there would have been nothing given you to spend. And you ’ Carlyle.Last Words. 285 may waste not money only, but time. You may be idle, you may “cumber the ground.” There- fore it is that I say to you, and have said often , Try to realize how much you owe to the labours of others who have gone before you, and try to labour for others in your turn. Do not be mere triflers and spendthrifts. Lay one stone, if it be one only, in the temple of human progress. Seek to learn something and to do something that is good. It is not living to waste what others have painfully gained. He alone lives who at the end of each day can avow that his life has not been spent in vain. That is the first lesson which I should wish you all, and most of all the rich and the clever, to learn at Harrow —the honourable dignity of work. The second is the sovereignty of conscience. The age in which we live is democratic. “Vow popult voe Dev” is its watchword: “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” Let me warn you against that great and fruitful error. There is no Divinity of numbers. God reveals Himself not to the many, but to the few. The greatest286 Last Words. crime ever wrought upon this earth was wrought by one who desired to do the people’s pleasure. I wish to say to you, then, and to those espe- cially who will hereafter tread the difficult and dangerous ways of public life, You may sympa- thize with the people as much as you like, you may hold it right that the will of the people should. be done; but nothing that the people say or do can alter by one hair’s breadth the law of right and wrong for you. You will gain respect, and, what is more, you will deserve respect, if you say to the people, not “I will do as you tell me, whether I think it right or wrong, but, “This I think right; this I will do. I shall be glad and grateful if you too think it right. J admit that your will, your judgment, should be done, but it shall not be done by me unless I approve it. My conscience owes alle- giance to God, but to none else.” Then, perhaps, there shall be seen again in public life that proud dignity, that noble and ennobling independence, which has of late, I fear, been too seldom dis- played in the world.Last Words. 287 Thirdly, I have taught you—or have tried to teach—the duty of philanthropy. Every generation has its own duties and re- sponsibilities. Nobody can tell why certain questions arise at a particular time and come to the fore; it is God’s will. And there can be no doubt that the distinguishing duty of your generation will be to soften and hallow the lives of the toiling poor.