On the illness or the Prince of Wales.
Chapel Royal, St James's, December 17th, 1871.
2 Sam. xix. 14. "He bowed the heart of all the men of Judah, even as the
heart of one man."
No circumstances can be more different, thank God, than those under which
the heart of the men of Judah was bowed when their king commander
appealed to them, and those which have, in the last few days, bowed the
heart of this nation as the heart of one man. But the feeling called out
in each case was the same--Loyalty, spontaneous, contagious, some would
say unreasoning: but it may be all the deeper and nobler, because for
once it did not wait to reason, but was content to be human, and to feel.
If those men who have been so heartily loyal of late--respectable,
business-like, manful persons, of a race in nowise given to sentimental
excitement--had been asked the cause of the intense feeling which they
have shown during the last few days, they would probably, most of them,
find some difficulty in giving it. Many would talk frankly of their
dread lest business should be interfered with; and no shame to them, if
they live by business. Others would speak of possible political
complications; and certainly no blame to them for dreading such. But
they would most of them speak, as frankly, of a deeper and less selfish
emotion. They would speak, not eloquently it may be, but earnestly, of
sympathy with a mother and a wife; of sympathy with youth and health
fighting untimely with disease and death--they would plead their common
humanity, and not be ashamed to have yielded to that touch of nature,
which makes the whole world kin. And that would be altogether to their
honour. Honourably and gracefully has that sympathy showed itself in
these realms of late. It has proved that in spite of all our
covetousness, all our luxury, all our frivolity, we are not cynics yet,
nor likely, thanks be to Almighty God, to become cynics; that however
encrusted and cankered with the cares and riches of this world, and
bringing, alas, very little fruit to perfection, the old British oak is
sound at the root--still human, still humane.
But there is, I believe, another and an almost deeper reason for the
strong emotion which has possessed these men; one most intimately bound
up with our national life, national unity, national history; one which
they can hardly express to themselves; one which some of them are half
ashamed to express, because they cannot render a reason for it; but which
is still there, deeply rooted in their souls; one of those old hereditary
instincts by which the histories of whole nations, whole races, are
guided, often half-unconsciously, and almost in spite of themselves; and
that is Loyalty, pure and simple Loyalty--the attachment to some royal
race, whom they conceived to be set over them by God. An attachment,
mark it well, founded not on their own will, but on grounds very complex,
and quite independent of them; an attachment which they did not make, but
found; an attachment which their forefathers had transmitted to them, and
which they must transmit to their children as a national inheritance,--at
once a symbol of and a support to the national unity of the whole people,
running back to the time when, in dim and mythic ages, it emerged into
the light of history as a wandering tribe. This instinct, as a historic
fact, has been strong in all the progressive European nations; especially
strong in the Teutonic; in none more than in the English and the Scotch.
It has helped to put them in the forefront of the nations. It has been a
rallying point for all their highest national instincts. Their Sovereign
was to them the divinely appointed symbol of the unity of their country.
In defending him, they defended it. It did not interfere, that instinct
of loyalty, with their mature manhood, freedom, independence. They knew
that if royalty were indeed God's ordinance, it had its duties as well as
its rights. And when their kings broke the law, they changed their
kings. But a king they must have, for their own sakes; not merely for
the sake of the nation's security and peace, but for the sake of their
own self-respect. They felt, those old forefathers of ours, that loyalty
was not a degrading, but an ennobling influence; that a free man can give
up his independence without losing it; that--as the example of that
mighty German army has just shown an astounded world--independence is
never more called out than by subordination; and that a free man never
feels himself so free as when obeying those whom the laws of his country
have set over him; an able man never feels himself so able as when he is
following the lead of an abler man than himself. And what if, as needs
must happen at whiles, the sovereign were not a man, but a woman or a
child? Then was added to loyalty in the hearts of our forefathers, and
of many another nation in Europe, an instinct even deeper, and tenderer,
and more unselfish--the instinct of chivalry; and the widowed queen, or
the prince, became to them a precious jewel committed to their charge by
the will of their forefathers and the providence of God; an heirloom for
which they were responsible to God, and to their forefathers, and to
their children after them, lest their names should be stained to all
future generations by the crime of baseness toward the weak.
This was the instinct of the old Teutonic races. They were often
unfaithful to it--as all men are to their higher instincts; and fulfilled
it very imperfectly--as all men fulfil their duties. But it was there--
in their heart of hearts. It helped to make them; and, therefore, it
helped to make us. It ennobled them; it called out in them the sense of
unity, order, discipline, and a lofty and unselfish affection. And I
thank God, as an Englishman, for any event, however exquisitely painful,
which may call out those true graces in us, their descendants. And,
therefore, my good friends, if any cynic shall sneer, as he may, after
the present danger is past, at this sudden outburst of loyalty, and speak
of it as unreasoning and childish, answer not him. "Give not that which
is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest
they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you." But
answer yourselves, and answer too your children, when they ask you what
has moved you thus--answer, I say, not childishly, but childlike: "We
have gone back, for a moment at least, to England's childhood--to the
mood of England when she was still young. And we are showing thereby
that we are not yet decayed into old age. That if we be men, and not
still children, yet the child is father to the man; and the child's heart
still beats underneath all the sins and all the cares and all the greeds
of our manhood."
More than one foreign nation is looking on in wonder and in envy at that
sight. God grant that they may understand all that it means. God grant
that they may understand of how wide and deep an application is the great
law, "Except ye be converted," changed, and turned round utterly, "and
become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of
heaven." God grant that they may recover the childlike heart, and
replace with it that childish heart which pulls to pieces at its own
irreverent fancy the most ancient and sacred institutions, to build up
ever fresh baby-houses out of the fragments, as a child does with its
broken toys.
Therefore, my friends, be not ashamed to have felt acutely. Be not
ashamed to feel acutely still, till all danger is past, or even long
after all danger is past; when you look back on what might have been, and
what it might have brought, ay, must have brought, if not to you, still
to your children after you. For so you will show yourselves worthy
descendants of your forefathers: so you will show yourselves worthy
citizens of this British empire. So you will show yourselves, as I
believe, worthy Christian men and women. For Christ, the King of kings
and subjects, sends all sorrow, to make us feel acutely. We do not, the
great majority of us, feel enough. Our hearts are dull and hard and
light, God forgive us; and we forget continually what an earnest, awful
world we live in--a whole eternity waiting for us to be born, and a whole
eternity waiting to see what we shall do now we are born. Yes; our
hearts are dull and hard and light; and, therefore, Christ sends
suffering on us to teach us what we always gladly forget in comfort and
prosperity--what an awful capacity of suffering we have; and more, what
an awful capacity of suffering our fellow-creatures have likewise. We
sit at ease too often in a fool's paradise, till God awakens us and
tortures us into pity for the torture of others. And so, if we will not
acknowledge our brotherhood by any other teaching, He knits us together
by the brotherhood of common suffering.
But if God thus sends sorrow to ennoble us, to call out in us pity,
sympathy, unselfishness, most surely does He send for that end such a
sorrow as this, which touches in all alike every source of pity, of
sympathy, of unselfishness at once. Surely He meant to bow our hearts as
the heart of one man; and He has, I trust and hope, done that which He
meant to do. God grant that the effect may be permanent. God grant that
it may call out in us all an abiding loyalty. God grant that it may fill
us with some of that charity which bears all things, hopes all things,
believes all things, which rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in the
truth; and make us thrust aside henceforth, in dignified disgust, the
cynic and the slanderer, the ribald and the rebel.
But more. God grant that the very sight of the calamity with which we
have stood face to face, may call out in us some valiant practical
resolve, which may benefit this whole nation, and bow all hearts as the
heart of one man, to do some one right thing. And what right thing?
What but the thing which is pointed to by plain and terrible fact, as the
lesson which God must mean us to learn, if He means us to learn any, from
what has so nearly befallen? Let our hearts be bowed as the heart of one
man, to say--that so far as we have power, so help us God, no man, woman,
or child in Britain, be he prince or be he beggar, shall die henceforth
of preventable disease. Let us repent of and amend that scandalous
neglect of the now well-known laws of health and cleanliness which
destroys thousands of lives yearly in this kingdom, without need and
reason; in defiance alike of science, of humanity, and of our Christian
profession. Two hundred thousand persons, I am told, have died of
preventable fever since the Prince Consort's death ten years ago. Is
that not a sin to bow our hearts as the heart of one man? Ah, if this
foul and needless disease, by striking once at the very highest, shall
bring home to us the often told, seldom heeded fact that it is striking
perpetually at hundreds among the very lowest, whom we leave to sicken
and die in dens unfit for men--unfit for dogs; if this tragedy shall
awaken all loyal citizens to demand and to enforce, as a duty to their
sovereign, their country, and their God, a sanatory reform in town and
country, immediate, wholesale, imperative; if it shall awaken the
ministers of religion to preach about that, and hardly aught but that--
till there is not a fever ally or a malarious ditch left in any British
city;--then indeed this fair and precious life will not have been
imperilled in vain, and generations yet unborn will bless the memory of a
prince who sickened as poor men sicken, and all but died, as poor men
die, that his example--and, it may be hereafter, his exertions--might
deliver the poor from dirt, disease, and death.
For him himself I have no fear. We have committed him to God. It may be
that he has committed himself to God. It may be that he has already
learned lessons which God alone can teach. It may be that those lessons
will bring forth hereafter royal fruit right worthy of a royal root. At
least we can trust him in God's hands, and believe that if this great woe
was meant to ennoble us it was meant to ennoble him; that if it was meant
to educate us it was meant to educate him; that God is teaching him; and
that in God's school-house he is safe. For think, my friends, if we, who
know him partly, love him much; then God, who knows him wholly, loves him
more. And so God be with him, and with you, and with your prayers for
him. Amen.