operations have been thus effected in the past, does it still maintain
its efficiency? I am glad to be able to give this question an answer
which none can gainsay. It never was doing a greater work, nor as
great a work, as at this very time. It gives grants to more than 850
curates; these grants amount to more than L56,000 per annum, and this
sum is met by about the same amount from other sources. Thus more than
L100,000 a year is expended directly through its instrumentality to
the ministerial staff of the Church. But it is not only the extent of
its operations which constitutes its claim on the support of all loyal
churches. The principle also of this administration demands their
allegiance. I do not desire to say one word of disparagement about
other societies which are constituted on a broader or a narrower base.
All are welcome; all are doing good service. There is work enough and
to spare for all. But this association appeals to loyal English
churchmen by the very fact that its foundation principle is neither
wider nor narrower than the Church it represents. It imposes no tests
which the Church does not impose; it requires no assents which the
Church does not require. Within its limits the individual opinions of
the clergymen count for nothing; the needs of the parish are all in
all. But if it has this paramount claim on all loyal churchmen, surely
it appeals to none more strongly than to the churchmen of this great
city. No diocese draws so large an amount from it as this of
Manchester; I believe I am right in saying that no city receives more
material aid from it; and remembering this I cannot think that you
will lay yourselves open to the charge of spiritual ingratitude, of
all ingratitude the worst. Let there, then, be a liberal response to
the appeal this afternoon, liberal in the sense that every giver will
feel his gift; that it will cost him some real sacrifice.
At this season, when we are especially called to glorify God in His
saints, you cannot afford to be niggardly. Such niggardliness drags
you downward, and is never more out of place than when you are
attempting to lift up your souls to dwell in the heavenly city where
Christ sits enthroned at the right hand of God. Ever, indeed, you need
to be reminded of your heavenly citizenship amidst the cares and
turmoil of life. It is with you as with the law-giver of old when he
descended from the mount. The radiance will vanish from your
countenance only too soon as you mingle with the busy crowd below. And
you too, like Moses, will need to reappear ever and again at the
mountain of God, that, standing face to face with the Eternal
Presence, you may gather once more in your city the rays of the
invisible glory.
AMBITION.
"I can do all things through Christ that strengthened me" [+Panta
ischuo en to endunamounti me+, "I have strength for all things
in Him that empowereth, enableth me"].--PHIL. iv. 13.
Ambition, the love of power, the thirst after influence--its use and
its abuse, its true and its false aims--this is no unfit subject for
consideration from a University pulpit.
Ambition in some form or other is an innate craving of man. All men
desire power, they cannot help desiring it. The desire is as natural
to them as the desire of health. Power and influence occupy the same
place socially that strength and vigour of limb do physically. Other
desires, though veiled under various disguises, resolve themselves
ultimately into a love of power. Knowledge is power. The cultivated
intellect has a command of the resources of the universe. The selfish
exaggeration of this feeling is a testimony to the underlying fact.
The self-satisfied soul congratulates herself that she is
"Lord over nature, Lord of the visible earth,
Lord of the senses five."
She communes with herself--
"All these are mine,
And let the world have peace or wars
'Tis one to me."
Again, money is power. A man desires wealth, not for the sake of the
stamped metal or the printed paper in themselves. These represent to
him a command of resources. The miser, indeed, by base indulgence
forgets the end in the means. In his own domain he resembles the
spurious mathematician to whom the letters and symbols are all in all,
who sees in them so many counters and nothing more, who is blinded to
the eternal relations of space and number which they represent. But
traced back to its origin, the miser's love of money is a love of
power.
Ambition, emulation, rivalry plays a highly important part in the
education of the world. We cannot shut our eyes to its splendid
achievements. In politics, in social life, in mechanical inventions,
in literature and art, its stimulus has produced invaluable results.
If ambition has been the last infirmity, it has also been the initial
inspiration of many a noble mind. If by ambition angels fell, by
ambition men have risen. It has heightened their ideal and drawn them
upwards from lower to higher. If it is chargeable with the worst evils
which have devastated mankind, it must be credited also with the most
splendid advances in human progress and civilization.
Ambition has its proper home in a University. Ambition is the life of
this place. What would Cambridge be without its honourable emulations,
its generous rivalries? Body and mind alike feel the stimulus of its
presence. Remove this stimulus, and the immediate consequence will be
torpor and degeneration and decay. The athletic ambitions and the
scholastic ambitions of the place, each in their own province, are
indispensable to its health and vigour.
To one who, revisiting the scenes amidst which the best years of his
life were spent, asks himself what topic may be fitly handled in this
pulpit, the subject of ambition will naturally suggest itself. The
University has lived through a period of exceptional restlessness and
change during the last three decades--change far more considerable
than during the preceding three centuries. Yet the spirit and life of
the place are unchanging. It is the ceaseless orderly march of a
mighty army moving forward. Cross it where you will along the line,
the gesture, the tread, the uniform, is the same; the faces only are
different. It is the broad, silent, ever-flowing river, changeless,
yet always changing. Wave succeeds wave; you gaze on it at intervals;
not one drop of water remains the same; and yet the river is not
another. The main currents of University life are the same now as
thirty years ago. Its moral and social condition is mainly, we may
say, the resultant of two divergent forces, its friendships and its
emulations. It is the latter alone that I purpose considering this
afternoon.
I speak to you, therefore, as to ambitious men. Those only are
beyond hope who have no spirit of emulation, no craving after
excellence--those only, in short, who are devoid of ambition. I invite
you, therefore, to be ambitious. Only I ask you to purify your
ambition, to consecrate it, to direct it through worthy channels and
to worthy aims. I desire to show you the more excellent way.
If, indeed, ambition has achieved splendid results, it can only have
done so by virtue of splendid qualities. It must contain in itself
true and abiding elements, which we cannot afford to neglect. Thus it
involves a love of approbation. This cannot be culpable in itself. As
social beings, we have sympathies and affections which lie at the very
roots of our nature; and the desire of approval is inseparably
intertwined with these. Who would blame the child for seeking to win
its mother's good opinion? But the principle cannot be limited to this
one example. It is co-extensive with the whole range of our social
relations. The end sought is commendable. Only it may be discredited
and condemned by the means taken to attain it; as, for instance, if we
disguise our true sentiment, or withhold a just rebuke, or connive at
wrongdoing, or sacrifice a noble purpose, for the sake of standing
well with others. It is then, and then only, that the praise of men
conflicts with the praise of God. Again, ambition implies a spirit of
emulation. Neither is this wrong in itself. If it were, this
University would stand condemned root and branch. Emulation is not
envy; emulation is not jealousy; emulation does not seek to injure or
rob another. An apostle avows it to be his aim to "provoke to
emulation." This provocation--this stimulus of comparison and
contrast--is an invaluable influence. We measure ourselves with
others; we see our defects mirrored in their excellences; our ideal is
heightened by the comparison. Thus there gathers and ferments in us a
_discontent_ with ourselves--not indeed, if we are wise, with our
capacities, not with our opportunities, not with the inevitable
environments of our position, but with the conduct of that personality
which is free to discipline, to mould, to direct, to develop our
endowments. This dissatisfaction with self is the mainspring of all
high enterprise and all moral advancement.
But the chief element in ambition is the pursuit of power. The
consciousness of power gives a satisfaction quite independently of the
exercise of power. Whatever form the power may take--whether
intellectual eminence, or social influence, or physical strength, it
is a thing which man desires, which he cannot help desiring, in and
for itself. It is a seed of God's own planting--a germ of splendid
achievements, if rightly trained and cultivated. It is only culpable
in its excesses and deviations. By our very constitution we feel a
happiness in making the best of ourselves, as the phrase runs--in
developing and improving our faculties, irrespective of any ulterior
results. But a faculty improved is a power gained.
Brothers, I desire before all things to kindle in you a lofty ambition
to-day. Therefore, I have striven to justify ambition to you as God's
very precious gift. I wish--God helping me--to inspire you with that
inward dissatisfaction, that discontent with self, that ceaseless,
sleepless craving after higher things, which gives you no rest day or
night, because it pursues an ever-receding goal. I would stimulate in
you that high spirit of emulation which, fermenting and seething in
your hearts, impels you to unknown enterprises. I ask you to pray for
power, to pursue power, to grasp at power, with all the force and
determination which you can command.
How can I do otherwise? Are not you the men, and is not this the
season, for the handling of such a topic?
Are not you the men? Who among you has not felt, at one time or
another, the spark of a divine fire kindling within you? Who has not
yearned with an intense, if momentary, yearning to do something
worthy, to be something worthy? Youth is the hey-day of hope, of
enthusiasm, of lofty aspiration. You have felt that there was within
you a latent power, a heaven-born capacity, which ought to work
miracles, if it were not clogged by self-indulgence, or cowed by
timidity, or choked by sloth and indulgence.
Are not you the men? As I have said to such audiences before, so I say
to you now. You do not know, you cannot know, with what reverence--a
reverence approaching to awe--older men regard the glorious
potentiality of youth, in all the freshness of its vigorous life, with
all the promise of the coming years. Our habits are formed; our career
is defined; our possibilities are limited. The wide sweep of moral
victory, still open to you, is closed to us for ever. But what
triumphs may you not achieve, if you are true to yourselves? What
instruments may you not be in God's hands, if only you will yield
yourselves to Him--not with a timid, passive, half-hearted
acquiescence, but with the active concentration of all your powers of
body and soul and spirit?
And again I ask, is not this the time? The first volume of your life's
history is closed. A clean page lies open, and with what writing shall
it be filled? This is the great crisis of your life. These earliest
few weeks of your University career, with which perhaps you are
trifling, which you are idling thoughtlessly away, are only too likely
to determine for you what you shall be in time and in eternity. It is
the great crisis, but it is also the signal opportunity. Thank God,
this is so; for the two do not always coincide. As the great break in
your lives, it is the great season for revision, for repentance, for
amendment, for the strong resolve and the definite plan. The old base
associations must be abandoned; the old loose habits must be cured;
the old indolence shaken off; and the old sin cast out and trampled
under foot. Never again will such a magnificent opportunity be given
you of rectifying the past; for never again can you reckon on the
leisure, the privacy, the aids and environments, needed by one who is
taking stock of his moral and spiritual life.
Who would not shrink from the responsibility of addressing you at such
a crisis? And yet I speak boldly to you. Do I not know that though the
hand of the swordsman is feeble, yet the weapon itself is
powerful--keener than any two-edged sword? Am I not assured that
though the preacher's words may be feeble, faltering, desultory,
without force and without point, yet God may barb the ill-fledged,
ill-aimed shaft, and drive it home to the heart? It is possible that
even now the live coal from the altar may be brought by the winged
seraph's hand, and laid on the sinful lips. I have undertaken to
glorify the power of God, and to hold it up to you as your truest
goal. How can I hope for a hearing, if I begin by distrusting it where
I myself am concerned?
It is here, then, that I bid you seek and find the true aim of your
ambition--in realising, appropriating, absorbing into yourselves,
identifying yourselves with this power of God. It alone is
inexhaustible in its resources and infinite in its potency. There is
no fear here lest the conqueror of a world should sigh and fret
because nothing remains beyond to conquer. If the craving is infinite,
the satisfaction is infinite also. Star beyond star, world beyond
world, will start out into view as your vision grows clearer,
spangling the moral heavens with their glows. +Panta ischuo+,
"I can do all things." +Panta humon+, "All things are yours."
Yes, but this promise of limitless strength has its condition
attached--+en to endunamounti me+, "In Him that empowereth me;"
yes, but this pledge of universal dominion is qualified by the sequel
+humeis de Christou+, "Ye are Christ's."
How can we better realise this power of God than by taking St. Paul's
statement as our starting-point? The Cross of Christ is "the power of
God." The Cross is the central revelation of God. The Cross has not
unfrequently been preached as a narrow technicality which shocks the
conscience and freezes the heart. It thus becomes a mere forensic
subtlety. But the Cross of Christ, taught in all its length and
breadth and height and depth--the Cross of Christ taught as St. Paul
taught it--the Cross of Christ, starting from the Incarnation on the
one side, and leading up to the Resurrection and Ascension on the
other, contains all the elements of moral regeneration and of
spiritual life.
(1) It is first of all a lesson of _righteousness_. It is the
great rebuke of sin, the great assurance of judgment, the great call
to repentance. Think--no, you cannot think, it defies all
thinking--yet strive to think, what is implied in the human birth, the
human life, the human suffering, the human death of the Eternal Word.
Ask yourselves what condescension, what sacrifice, what humiliation
is involved in this. Summon to your aid all analogies of
self-renunciation which history records or imagination suggests. They
will all fail you. No reiteration of the finite can compass the
infinite. You are lost in awe at the contemplation. And while your
brain is reeling with the effort, try and imagine the awe, the
majesty, the glory of a righteousness which could only thus be
vindicated. Then, after looking upward to God, look inward into your
own heart, and see how heinous, how loathsome, how guilty your guilt
must be, which has cost such a sacrifice as this. God's
righteousness--your sin,--these are brought face to face in the Cross
of Christ.
(2) But, secondly, while it is a denunciation of sin, it is likewise
an assurance of pardon. If the infinity of the sacrifice has taught
you the majesty of God's righteousness, it teaches you no less the
glory of His mercy. What may you not look for, what may you not hope
for from a Father who has vouchsafed to you this transcendent
manifestation of His loving-kindness? "He that spared not His own Son
... how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?" Is any
one here burdened with the consciousness of a shameful past? Does the
memory of some ugly school-boy sin dog your path, haunting and
paralysing you with its importunity? You feel sometimes as if your
whole life were poisoned by that one cruel retrospect. Brother, be
bold, and dare to look up. I would not have you think your sins one
whit less heinous. But if God's righteousness is infinite, so also is
His mercy. The Cross is reared before your eyes in this moral
wilderness, where you are dying, where all are dying around you. Dare
to look up. The bite of the serpent's fang is healed; the venom
coursing through your veins is quelled; and health returns to the
poisoned soul. Yes, and by God's grace it may happen that through your
very fall you will rise to a higher life; that the thanksgiving for
the sin forgiven will consecrate you with fuller consecration; and
that the acute moral agony through which you have passed will endow
you with a more helpful, more sympathetic, more loving spirit, than if
you had never fallen.
(3) But again, the Cross of Christ is not only a condemnation of sin,
not only a pledge of forgiveness; it is likewise an obligation of
self-sacrifice. "God forbid," says St. Paul, "that I should glory save
in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." But what next? Not "whereby I
am saved in spite of myself," not "whereby I am spared all personal
exertion," but "whereby the world is crucified unto me, and I to the
world." This conformity to Christ's death, this crucifixion of self
with Christ, always forms part of the doctrine of the Cross in St.
Paul's teaching. The dying with Christ, the being buried with Christ,
is the absolute accompaniment of the atoning death of Christ. We
cannot be at one with Christ unless we conform to Christ. The work
done for us necessitates the work done by us. The potentiality of our
salvation--of yours and mine--wrought through the Cross of Christ can
only then become an actuality, when Christ's death is thus
appropriated, realised, translated into action by us--by you and by
me. But it remains still the work of God's grace. Human merit is
absolutely excluded still, as absolutely as by the baldest and most
unqualified doctrine of substitution.
(4) Fourthly and lastly, the Cross of Christ is a lesson of the
regenerate and sanctified life. Dying and living, burial and
resurrection, these in the Christian vocabulary are correlative ideas.
The Crucifixion implies the Resurrection and the Ascension. The
raising up on the cross demands the raising up from the grave, the
raising up into heaven. The lifting up of the brazen serpent in the
wilderness is a symbol alike of the one and the other. And as with
Christ, so also with those who are Christ's. "If we died with Christ,
we shall also live with him." Those only can be made conformable to
Christ's resurrection who have been made conformable to His death. The
power of His resurrection is the counterpart to the power of His
cross.
Herein, then--in the Cross of Christ--resides this power of God which
is offered to you as the true aim of your ambition, inexhaustible,
omnipotent, infinite. Will you close with the offer? Then reverence
yourselves; believe in yourselves; consecrate yourselves.
Reverence yourselves. Begin with reverencing this your body. Reverence
it as God's handiwork fearfully and wonderfully made. Contemplate it;
yes, contemplate it with awe, if only for its marvellously subtle
mechanism. But reverence it still more as the consecrated temple of
God's Spirit. Do not neglect it; do not misuse it; before all things
do not defile and desecrate it. Young men, the problem of social
purity is thrown down for your generation to solve. Will you accept
this challenge? The conscience of England is awakening to the terrible
curse. To redress the crying social wrong, to raise womanhood from
degradation and shame, to hold up to reverence the idea of a pure,
chivalrous, manly manhood,--this is the crusade in which you are
invited to enlist. Will you, as consecrated soldiers of the Cross,
claim your part in the glory of this campaign? If so, the work must
begin now, must begin in yourselves. There can be no success against
the foe where there is disaffection and mutiny in the citadel.
Believe in yourselves; yet, not in yourselves as yourselves. Believe
not in your strength, but in your weakness. Believe in God who dwells
in you. Give full rein to your ambition. Trust this power of God. It
will not stunt or mar, will not crush, will not annihilate your
natural gifts--your social endowments, your political instincts, your
intellectual capacities. It will only elevate, harmonize, inspire,
purify them. Trust this power. There is nothing, absolutely nothing,
which you may not do, if you will only trust it. +Panta ischuo+,
"I have strength for everything," everything in heaven and earth. You
have youth, health, vigour, enthusiasm, hopefulness, everything on
your side now. Seize the great opportunity which can never return.
Consecrate yourselves. Empty yourselves of yourselves, that you may be
filled with God. Yield yourselves to Him, not with a passive
acquiescence, a sentimental quietism, but with the earnest, energetic
direction of all your faculties to this one end. A period must still
intervene for most of you before the active independent work of life
begins,--a period of discipline and waiting. Only by patience will you
win your souls. But the self-dedication must be made at once, and it
must be complete. Half-heartedness spoils the sacrifice. Postponement
is perilous. The opportunity despised turns its back on you for ever.
Consecrate, consecrate yourselves, body and soul and spirit, to God
now, this night.
FOOTNOTES
[1] _These sermons are printed from reporter's notes._
[2] Preached at Cambridge, Oct. 23rd, 1881.
[3] Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on Sunday Afternoon, September
6th, 1874.
[4] Mr. Foley, R.A., sculptor.
[5] Sermon preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on Sunday, May 21st, 1876.
[6] Sermon preached in Durham Cathedral on the Occasion of his
Enthronement, on Thursday, May 15th, 1879.
[7] Preached in St. Peter's Church, Bishop Auckland.
[8] Delivered at St. Paul's Cathedral, Tuesday evening, November 4th,
1873.
[9] Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral, Tuesday evening, November 11th,
1873.
[10] Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral, Tuesday evening, November
18th, 1873.
[11] Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, Thursday, June 19th, 1884, on
the anniversary of the Girls' Friendly Society.
[12] Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, on Sunday Afternoon, May 30th,
1875, before some of Her Majesty's Judges, the Lord Mayor, and members
of the Corporation of the City of London.
[13] Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, February 1st, 1884.
[14] Preached at Manchester Cathedral, at annual meeting of Additional
Curates Society, on Tuesday, November 1st, 1887.
* * * * *
Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury.
Transcriber's Note: In Table of Contents, ditto marks replaced by text
they refer to ("Christianity and Paganism"). Italics indicated by
_underscores_ and transliterated Greek by +plus signs.+ "Gallas"
changed to "Gallus" on page 79, "Constantine" to "Constantius" on page
93, and "god" to "gods" on page 112 (c.f. BCP Psalter xcvii. 7).
Punctuation errors corrected on pages 39 and 128. Spelling errors
corrected on page 80 ("fanactism") page 104 ("consciousnes") page
148 ("evey") and page 170 (+eu+). Different spellings of
apostasy/apostacy, and inconsistent hyphenation elsewhere, have been
retained. Illustration on title page is decorative emblem.