Chapter VIII’s sermon, Resistance Unto Blood, was incorrectly labeled

Transcriber's Note: Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold

text by =equal signs=

THE WAR AND THE GOSPEL

THE WAR

AND

THE GOSPEL

SERMONS AND ADDRESSES DURING

THE PRESENT WAR

By

HENRY WACE, D.D.,

Dean of Canterbury,

Hon. Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford;

Fellow of King’s College, London.

London:

CHAS. J. THYNNE,

28, Whitefriars Street, E.C.

1917.

PREFACE.

As is usual in Cathedrals, it is the duty of the Dean of Canterbury

to preach on the chief Festivals of the Christian year; and most of

the following Addresses have been delivered in the discharge of this

office. My comfort in the performance of this duty, especially to an

audience of soldiers, in these solemn days, has been the sense that I

was commissioned to deliver the message of a Gospel which has “brought

Life and Immortality to light,” and which proclaims the good news of

the presence of a Saviour in all the circumstances Of life or death. I

have simply endeavoured, therefore, to bring some of the light of this

Gospel to bear on the distressing and perplexing experiences which this

War has forced upon us all, and especially upon those who have borne

its chief sacrifices. I am sure that, if only believed and realized,

the message of this Gospel is sufficient to support and to strengthen

us under all such trials and strains; and I hope I am not presumptuous

in offering these slight contributions towards that purpose to a wider

audience than my Cathedral congregations.

H. WACE.

CANTERBURY, January 1917.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE CHRISTMAS MESSAGE (preached in

Canterbury Cathedral, Christmas Day,

1914) 1

II. CHRISTMAS AND THE WAR (preached in

Canterbury Cathedral, Christmas Day,

1915) 16

III. THE THINGS SEEN AND THE THINGS

NOT SEEN (preached in Canterbury

Cathedral, Easter Day, 1915) 28

IV. THE EASTER MESSAGE (preached in Canterbury

Cathedral, Easter Day, 1916) 40

V. THE NEED AND THE MEANS OF RIGHT

JUDGMENT (preached in Canterbury

Cathedral, Whit Sunday, 1915) 53

VI. THE ADVENT MESSAGE AND THE WAR

(preached in Canterbury Cathedral,

Advent Sunday, 1914) 67

VII. DIVINE JUDGMENT AND RENOVATION

(preached in Canterbury Cathedral,

October 11th, 1914) 82

VIII. RESISTANCE UNTO BLOOD (preached in

Canterbury Cathedral, Good Friday,

April 21st, 1916) 97

IX. INTERCESSION FOR KINGS AND RULERS

(preached in Canterbury Cathedral the

Day of the King’s Accession, May 6th,

1915) 105

X. THE CHRISTIAN SANCTION OF WAR (Address

at the Service of Intercession in Canterbury

Cathedral, August 9th, 1914) 117

XI. THE WARNING OF THE TOWER OF SILOAM

(preached in Canterbury Cathedral,

October 25th, 1914) 129

XII. THE RIGHTEOUS IDEAL (preached in Canterbury

Cathedral, January 15th, 1915) 143

XIII. REASONS FOR INTERCESSION (preached in

Canterbury Cathedral, June 17th, 1916) 158

XIV. THE ETERNAL SOURCE OF GOODNESS

(preached at Holy Trinity Church,

Margate, November 7th, 1915) 173

XV. THE NATIONAL IDEAL (preached in Canterbury

Cathedral, January 3rd, 1915) 188

XVI. RELIGION AND WAR (from _The Record_,

Thursday, September 3rd, 1916) 203

XVII. PRAYER FOR THE DEAD (from _The Record_,

Friday, November 20th, 1914) 215

XVIII. CHRIST AND THE SOLDIER (preached in

Canterbury Cathedral at the Military

Church Parade, September 27th, 1914) 228

XIX. THE ETERNAL LIFE OF THE SOUL (preached

in the Nave of Canterbury Cathedral

at the Military Church Parade, October

15th, 1916) 239

THE CHRISTMAS MESSAGE.

A SERMON PREACHED ON CHRISTMAS DAY A.D. 1914.

“_And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly

host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on

earth peace, good will toward men._”--St. Luke ii. 13, 14.

If Christmas this sad year is to be a real comfort and help to us,

we must realize very clearly what it is that was the cause of the

joy of the Angels, and has been always the source of the true joy of

Christmas, during the nineteen hundred years or more since that first

outburst of heavenly praise and song. The reason had been announced by

one Angel to the shepherds abiding in the fields in the words, “Fear

not; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall

be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a

Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” The Jewish people were looking and

longing for the Christ Who would come, as is expressed in Zacharias’

song, to deliver them from the hand of their enemies, and to grant

unto them that they “might serve Him without fear, in holiness and

righteousness before Him all the days of their life.” This was the

promise which, as Zacharias said, had been given by the mouth of God’s

prophets since the world began, for which they had craved through long

suffering, and captivity, and disappointment; and it is this promise

which the angel declared was now fulfilled. A Saviour had been born to

them, One Who was able to realize for them the great hopes of blessing

which the prophets had held out. He would be able, in the words of

another angel, “to save them from their sins,” and by saving them from

their sins to save them from the sufferings and sorrows which those

sins had entailed upon them. By the birth of our Lord that had become

an accomplished fact. There existed from that moment One Who stood

between heaven and earth, between God and man, and united both--the Son

of God and the Son of Man, with power “to save to the uttermost all

who come unto God by Him,” and able, first by His sacrifice for our

sins, and then by His exercise of the royal authority and power which

are entrusted to Him, to put down all enemies under His feet, and to

deliver up the Kingdom to God the Father, “that God may be all in all.”

That is the grand consummation which, to the vision of the Angels, was

comprehended in this simple saying, “Unto you is born this day in the

city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” Let us clearly

observe that it is not merely the future hope, but the present fact,

which causes the Angels’ rejoicing. The Saviour is born, the King is

revealed, the work of redemption is actually commenced. “Glory to God,”

they exclaimed, “in the highest, and on earth peace; goodwill toward

men.” The goodwill of God toward men is now embodied in the Babe Who

is Christ the Lord; or, as it is translated in the Revised Version

(in different words, but with the same meaning), God’s goodwill is

manifested “to men in whom He is well pleased.” It is much more than a

general declaration of peace and goodwill. It is a grand revelation, a

revelation which opened the heavens and evoked from a host of Angels,

such as had never before nor has since been seen, a burst of glory to

God for the blessing that from that moment there was a living Saviour

in human form in the world.

Now I wish to urge this fact upon you this morning in all its glorious

reality, because it is in that fact alone that we can find comfort

and help amidst the dark distress of such a Christmas as this, and

because it affords us the one supreme guidance in our deep perplexity.

The feeling is in all our hearts, and the phrase on many lips, “What

a contrast is exhibited by this tremendous and cruel war to the

words of hope and peace in the angels’ song,” and the old complaint

is uttered, Where is the promise of His coming--the coming of the

Prince of Peace? But we have only to consider the immediate sequel of

the first Christmas Day, to realize that the assurance given by the

angels, and their joy, involved no such facile creation of a time of

peace and righteousness as the eager hopes of men imagine. The first

result of the Saviour’s coming to His people, and claiming their trust

and allegiance, was that they rejected Him and crucified Him. He

rose from the dead and sent His Apostles to proclaim His resurrection

and His full assumption of His power as a King and Saviour, but they

continued to reject Him; and the result was that, instead of entering

on that Kingdom of righteousness and peace and glory of which their

prophets had spoken, their nation was crushed in scenes of “blood

and fire and vapour of smoke,” and all the bright hopes of Zacharias

were apparently extinguished. So the world went on, Christmas after

Christmas, and century after century, through successive scenes of war

and destruction and desolation, of which the spectacles of which we

read day by day afford us a horribly vivid example. If the angels’ song

had meant simply to promise peace on earth, it was contradicted by the

experience, not merely of bitter times like the present, but by every

year and every century which followed.

But where, then, is the fulfilment of the promise? You have the record

and the evidence of it in your New Testament. There, in the history of

the Apostles and disciples of our Lord, and in their Epistles, you

behold a body of men whose souls are filled with peace, and with the

sense of the goodwill of God, and who are living the life described

and enjoined by our Lord in the Gospels--the life of the Sermon on

the Mount, and of His parting discourses to His disciples recorded by

St. John. They are living in the midst of that world of passion and

violence and tyrannical domination of which I have spoken, and yet they

speak to us in tones of the most profound peace, and joy, and hope,

and even exultation. The reason is that, through faith in our Lord,

in His sacrifice, and in the promise of His spirit, they have found

peace with God--the peace of which the angels spoke; they live in the

blessed assurance of His goodwill, and they look forward with infinite

rejoicing to His return, to establish, as He promised, a new heaven and

a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

That spiritual Kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy

Ghost has subsisted continuously from that time to this. It is here in

the midst of us. There are souls whom we are privileged to know, who

are visibly living in that kingdom of Divine peace and goodwill, and

who, when they leave us here, pass, as we and they are assured, into

fuller realization of that kingdom, looking forward to its complete

establishment and revelation at the Day of the general Resurrection.

That is the kingdom Of the Lord’s elect, of the Saviour’s followers,

of the saints--perfect or imperfect, but still saints, of all ages,

the Church of Christ and the Kingdom of God. It is a kingdom within

which every Christian soul is admitted by baptism to his place and

his privilege, and it rests only with him to claim its blessings by

his faith and his life. In a word: the Acts of the Apostles and the

Epistles are the record of the fulfilment of the angels’ promise of

peace and love and Divine goodwill, for all who would submit to the

King and Saviour whose advent they proclaimed, and who would receive

His blessings in the way in which He offered them. To all whom would

“repent and believe and be baptised in the Name of Jesus Christ for the

remission of sins,” the promises of the angelic song were fulfilled,

and they have been fulfilled similarly to this hour.

But has the promise, then, no bearing on the ordinary secular life

of mankind? Are the instincts of men wrong in looking eagerly to it,

as they have done from generation to generation, for the prophetic

assurance of peace between men, as well as of peace between men and

God--of goodwill from man to man, as well as from God to man and man

to God. Most certainly they have not been wrong in that eager hope and

expectation; but where they have been wrong, and still are wrong, is in

their conception of the methods and means by which that secular peace

and those purely human blessings and happiness are to be realized. If

Christ is, as the angels said, the Saviour, the Saviour of the world;

if He is the King Who alone can save His people from their sins; and if

war and all the miseries of the world are, in one form or another, the

consequences of those sins, then the only way of obtaining salvation

from those sins, and deliverance from those miseries which are God’s

judgments upon them, is by submitting ourselves entirely to Him,

repenting of our failure in obedience to Him, living only by His laws,

and seeking His grace and His Spirit for our guidance and inspiration.

Have we done that? Has Europe at large been doing it these last fifty

years?

People ask how such a war as this can be possible after nineteen

centuries of Christianity. What do you mean by Christianity? If you

only mean that, during the greater part of those centuries, there has

been a general and nominal acknowledgment of the authority of Christ

and of His laws, such a description of the condition of the world

during that time may be allowed. But if you mean a real submission

of the mass of men and women, in heart and life, to the will, the

love, and the Spirit of Christ, then we have not really had nineteen

centuries of Christianity, and the state of the modern world, out

of which this war has arisen, has not been a Christian state. It is

notorious for instance, and not impugned anywhere, that the spirit of

Germany, which has provoked this war, has not only not been a Christian

spirit, but has been violently anti-Christian. The Divine authority

of Christ as the King and Saviour of the world has been openly and

vehemently impugned for at least a generation or two, especially in

the public and authoritative teaching in the Universities, which have

such immense influence in German life. Christ to them has not been the

King of kings and Lord of Lords, the very incarnation of God, “the

brightness of His glory and the express image of His person.”

If we are honest, we must also acknowledge that in far too great a

degree the same failure has prevailed among ourselves. It has, to say

the least of it, not been sufficiently recognized in our literature of

late years, or in our public life, that “all form is formless, order

orderless,” which is not entirely subject to Christ and informed by

His Spirit. The very vice with which we now charge the Germans has

been more than a temptation among ourselves. We have had great writers

among us exalting statesmen and kings of the past on the ground of

their mere strength. It was a great English writer of the last century

who glorified Frederick the Great of Prussia as an example of a really

strong king; and it is not a long step from that glorification to the

worship which has been paid on the Continent of late to the supremacy

of strength and self-assertion. That is not the Christian spirit, and

the “red ruin and the breaking up of laws,” into which Europe is now

plunged, is to be charged, not to any weakness in Christianity, but

to a grievous neglect, and in some degree to the very negation, of

Christianity.

The peace and goodwill which the message of the angels promised is,

in fact, within the scope of Christianity, and might be realized in

the world at large, but solely on the condition of the true methods

being observed--on condition, that is, of Christ, and the law of

Christ, being acknowledged from the heart as the true and only source

of peace and truth and goodwill, and on the condition of penitent,

humble, and earnest devotion to Him. That is the one supreme condition

on which peace to the world is promised by the Gospel. When emperors,

and kings, and statesmen, and soldiers, and men and women in general

believe the angels’ proclamation that Christ is their only Saviour,

their only King, that He alone, by His sacrifice, His laws, and His

grace can save His people from their sins, then, but then only, may

they hope in the life of the State, as well as in that of the Church,

to realize the angels’ promise of peace and goodwill. In a word: it is

not by strength, nor by liberty, nor even by law, that the blessings of

which Christmas holds out the promise can be realized. It is only by

Christian liberty, Christian law, and Christian strength--that is to

say, liberty and law, and strength exerted in obedience to the will of

Christ--that these blessings can be obtained. It is not Christianity

that has failed; it is not the angelic song that has disappointed us.

It is nominal Christians who have failed, from not being Christians

in reality. And the angelic song has proved its truth by the very

disasters which have fallen upon men who have not lived as though

Christ were their Saviour and their King.

But, thank God, if these considerations point to our weakness, they

also point to our hope, and to the means for our deliverance. We have

still as much reason to rejoice as the angels had when they sang this

song, because the great joy of it lies in the eternal fact that there

is a Saviour and there is a King, Who, if His people will trust Him,

will save them from their sins and all the miseries that their sins

involve. If our own lives and the life of our nation and the life of

Europe can be made truly Christian, if we can bring more of the love

of Christ and the life of Christ into our daily existence, we have the

assurance that He will save us, and will extirpate the abuses and the

falsehoods which have brought the nations of Europe to this terrible

pass.

In a few days we are to have a Day of Humble Prayer and Intercession

to Almighty God. Let it be, above all, a day of humble acknowledgment

of our failure as individuals and as a nation in His true faith and

obedience. I would fain it had been called by the good old Christian

and English name of a Day of Humiliation. We ought to be humiliated.

We have, in such ways as I have indicated, been contented with a

half-Christian life in public affairs and in society. We and our

men of letters, and men of learning, and men of affairs, have been

affected with the same half-heartedness in our allegiance to Christ,

which shocks us when we see it displayed in all its nakedness in other

countries, and especially in the one which is chiefly opposed to us.

Let us be humiliated for it before God, not caring, in comparison with

our true relation to Him, what interpretation the world may put on our

repentance.

But let us also rejoice more than ever in the assurance of Christmas

that a Saviour has been born to us, that we have an eternal King in our

Lord Jesus Christ, Who can save us from our sins, and our ruin, and

ourselves, if we will but give ourselves up to Him absolutely. Let us

realize with infinite thankfulness that the souls of those who are now

sacrificing their lives for us are in His saving and merciful hands.

Let us be reminded by the angelic vision that we ourselves, and the

souls of those who have passed and are passing away, are not brought

merely into contact with the “blackness and darkness and tempest” of

war, but are come unto “Mount Zion, to the city of the living God,

and to an innumerable company of Angels, and to the general assembly

of the Church of the Firstborn and to Christ the Judge of all, and to

the spirits of just men made perfect.” Let us realize this more than

we have yet done. Let us realize the truth of the Angels’ proclamation

that Christ and Christ alone is our Saviour and our King, that He alone

can save us, individuals and nations alike, from our sins; and then,

in spite of all the distress and anxiety which surrounds us, this may

prove the most blessed Christmas of our lives, and it may bring us a

happiness which will last unto life eternal.

CHRISTMAS AND THE WAR.

A SERMON PREACHED ON CHRISTMAS DAY A.D. 1915.

“_Who hath saved us and called us with an holy calling, not according

to our works, but according to His Own purpose and grace, which was

given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, but is now made

manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who hath

abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light

through the Gospel._”--2 Tim. i. 9, 10.

There has never been an occasion in our own lives, and there have been

few occasions in the world’s history, on which we have had more reason

for unbounded thankfulness for the blessed message of Christmas. We

are celebrating this Festival to-day in a sadder and darker world than

any of us can remember, amid scenes of bloodshed and desolation, of

which an adequate description can only be found in the lurid pictures

of the Book of Revelation, with war and hatred all around us instead of

peace and good will, and with death and destruction raging over a great

part both of Europe and of Asia. If we had to confine our vision to

the present world, and to the prospects it offers, men’s hearts might

well, in our Lord’s words, be “failing them for fear, and for looking

after those things which are coming on the earth”; but Christmas breaks

upon this dark scene with a message and a promise, which enable us to

lift our hearts and hopes above this present world and this earthly

scene. The heavens are opened; a great illumination bursts upon the

world; and an innumerable multitude of the heavenly host are heard

singing, in tones of rejoicing and thankfulness, “Glory to God in the

Highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men.” They are good

tidings of great joy, proclaiming peace and good will from God towards

men--good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people, that unto

us was born that day in the City of David “a Saviour, which is Christ

the Lord!” Such tidings of great joy are the very things for which our

hearts are yearning amid the distresses, bereavements and sorrows, and

the overwhelming anxieties of the moment, and such are the tidings

which Christmas brings. Let us beware of allowing the heavy burdens

and sorrows of the hour to obscure, or to muffle, to our hearts these

tidings of great joy. On the contrary, the darker the hour, the heavier

the burden; let us open our hearts the more to this glory of God

shining round about us, as on this day, and to the tidings of great joy

which are proclaimed to us by the Angelic Choir.

It is well we should remember, in the first place, that, even though to

ourselves this hour is peculiarly dark, it is but an aggravation, and

we may hope a comparatively brief one, of human experience throughout

all history. That history has been from the first marked by two

aspects, in the sharpest contrast to one another. In the first place,

from century to century it has been one of incessant struggle, of war,

of the rising of nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom;

and the Book of Revelation depicts the world as ending in scenes of

greater struggle and desolation than have ever gone before. That has

been the terrible reality of human experience from the commencement

to the present time. But, on the other hand, throughout these

distressing scenes there has always been heard a moral and spiritual

Voice, assuring men that God was controlling all these sufferings and

struggles, and that all was working for good, alike to the world at

large and to the individual.

You have the representation of the experience of every generation of

men in the pages of the Bible, and especially of the Prophet Isaiah.

He is known as the Evangelical Prophet, because he depicts in deeper

and nobler tones than any other inspired voice that blessed promise of

good will, of which the final proclamation was uttered to-day. But let

us bear in mind the circumstances under which the glorious promises

which we recite and sing at this season were uttered. Let us listen to

Isaiah’s own description of them in the twenty-fourth chapter: “Behold,

the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it

upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.... The

land shall be utterly emptied and utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath

spoken this word.... All joy is darkened; the mirth of the land is

gone. In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with

destruction.” These were the visible realities around him, but he is

inspired to look over them and through them; and he ends that passage

by declaring that “it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord

shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings

of the earth upon the earth;” and that, at the last, “the moon shall

be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the Lord of Hosts shall reign

in Mount Zion, and in Jerusalem, and before His ancients gloriously.”

Isaiah and his fellow-Prophets were surrounded by scenes of war and

bloodshed and desolation as terrible as any we have around us in our

own day, and it was over these fields of battle and destruction that

the glorious songs were heard which are our delight and encouragement

at this season. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people saith your God. Speak

ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and say unto her that her warfare is

accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she hath received at

the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” There is nothing more amazing

in the experience of the human heart, and more inspiring to ourselves,

than that these grand songs of hope and deliverance and comfort should

have echoed over the desolate fields of Judea, and lived in the hearts

of a people who were as crushed, and all but destroyed, as any of the

ruined nations of Europe of the present day.

It has been the same all through history. Even where there was not the

inspired voice of Revelation, there was still among the Greeks and

Romans the ineradicable hope of a Golden Age; and an inner witness

of God’s Spirit kept alive in the whole human race a firm belief in

His justice and His ultimate deliverance, both for the world and for

individuals, from age to age. Let us not think, therefore, that in the

strain and distress and suffering of the present hour we are undergoing

any novel or special experience; and if we should be tempted to be out

of heart, let us be shamed by the faith of the past, by the inspiration

of the Prophets, and even by the uninspired faith and courage of

mankind at large. Let us believe, through all, as they did, that the

Lord reigneth, and that though “clouds and darkness are round about

Him, righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat.” The

birth of our Lord, which we celebrate to-day, and the Divine Voice

which spoke in Him through human lips, have given us a final assurance

that He is reigning, and that He will judge the world in righteousness.

But it has done other things, of which my text more particularly

speaks, which are a source of still greater joy and assurance to us

individually. By the message which our Lord brought us, an infinite and

blessed light has been thrown over the great mystery which darkened

the minds, and dimmed the faith, of men before His time. The Apostle

says that our Saviour “hath abolished death, and hath brought life

and immortality to light through the Gospel.” Though looking first,

as we may and ought, with the Prophets, to the ultimate vindication

of righteousness and justice throughout the world, by the fulfilment

of God’s judgments in the struggles of mankind, there still remained,

and there remains at this moment, to many hearts among us, the mystery

of the sacrifice of life which such judgments involve--the mystery

of the destruction of thousands of lives precious in themselves, and

infinitely dear to those who loved them, and who lived with them and

for them here. Before the Gospel, men’s hearts strained at the burden

of that mystery, and it is wonderful that human nature endured it with

such courage and patience; but now, says the Apostle, God’s purpose and

grace in this bitter experience “is made manifest by the appearing of

our Lord Jesus Christ, Who hath abolished death, and hath brought life

and immortality to light through the Gospel.”

It would be rather truer to the original, and more closely

corresponding with the facts, to say--not that our Lord hath abolished

death, for, alas! that still remains around us--but that He hath

brought death to nought, annihilated its power, and destroyed its

strength. “The last enemy,” we are told, “which shall be destroyed is

death”; but meanwhile, for every Christian soul, its greatest distress

and terror is gone because our Lord has thrown a glorious illumination

upon it, and has “brought life and immortality to light through the

Gospel.” He has enabled us to see beyond the grave, beyond those

dreadful battlefields, strewn with the bodies of those whom we had

loved and honoured, and has made manifest to us that they still live

on in a new life, and a glorious immortality. Who can estimate the

mercy to sad and sorrowing hearts of the establishment of that blessed

hope on the firm assurance of our Lord Himself, who, after suffering an

agonizing death here, appeared to His Apostles and declared, “Fear not;

I am the first and the last: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and,

behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and

of death”? The pain of bereavement remains--that is like the loss of

a limb, which time alone can soften--but the definite assurance, from

the Saviour’s lips, that those who have died in His faith and obedience

have entered on a new and blessed life, must be of infinite comfort

to those who loved them. We are not left any longer to hopes and to

future expectations; but can grasp the assurance of present realities

which are vouched for by the Saviour who took our nature upon Him, who

lived our life, and died our death, and showed Himself alive beyond

the grave. This is what we owe to the Saviour’s birth, with all the

gracious revelation of which it was the commencement.

The Apostle’s assurance goes, indeed, beyond this illumination of our

present experience, and seems to throw a glorious light upon the whole

history of mankind. “God,” he says, “hath saved us, and called us with

an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own

purpose and grace which was given us in Christ Jesus, before the world

began.” It is now made manifest by the appearing of our Lord Jesus

Christ, but it existed from all eternity “before the world began.”

If so, then through those long ages which preceded our Lord’s birth,

this life and immortality were given to the millions to whom His Name

had not been manifested, but who died in the discharge of their duty,

and who faithfully made the sacrifices which were involved in His

government and just judgment of the world. Christ revealed the wars and

sufferings of this world as the inevitable consequence of the operation

of God’s righteousness and justice upon the evil, the sin, and the

Godlessness of mankind. Sooner or later those sins and evils gather to

a head, in some great corruption of society and political life, in some

enormous crime of ambition or pride; and the righteousness and justice

of God, working through the ordinary laws of human nature, evokes some

tremendous reaction against them; and we behold the overthrow of a

great Empire, or a European Revolution, or a world-wide clash of the

forces of right and wrong. That is the course of history, as determined

before the world began by the inscrutable righteousness and wisdom of

God.

That is the condition under which the world now exists, and people

who talk of abolishing war are like people standing on the crater of

a great volcano, and trying to persuade themselves that there will be

no more eruptions. As long as there is evil in the world and God’s

righteousness in the world, you will have the moral reactions between

the two bursting from time to time into some awful conflagration like

the present. That is the revelation of the whole Bible, brought to its

culmination in the Book of Revelation. But what was manifested to-day,

and proclaimed by the Heavenly Hosts, was God’s love and mercy to

the individual souls who have been the victims of these convulsions,

and who might seem to have been treated as mere passing elements in

the temporal scene. At the Birth of Christ, and by means of it, were

manifested and assured God’s peace and good will to every soul of man

who passes through this brief scene of struggle and, it may be, of

death. It proclaims that for each individual soul death may be said to

have been in effect abolished, that for every one of them, according to

the eternal purpose of God, “life and immortality” have been prepared

and assured; and that the struggles and sufferings of this mortal life,

terrible as they may be, are not worthy to be compared with the glory

that was designed, before the world began, for those who do the will

of God. This is the blessed revelation of Christmas, and it is our

privilege to fix our eyes and our hearts upon it, amid the sorrows and

troubles of the moment; and in proportion as we do so, we shall respond

with our whole hearts and souls to the exhortation of the same Apostle.

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always

abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your

labour is not in vain in the Lord.”

THE THINGS SEEN AND THE THINGS NOT SEEN.

PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, EASTER DAY, 1915.

“_For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet

the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which

is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal

weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but

at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are

temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal._”--2 Cor. iv.

16.

These touching words of St. Paul are based upon the grand truth to

which Easter Day is a standing witness. “Therefore,” he says, or “for

which cause, we faint not.” That cause is stated in the verse just

before, “Knowing that He Which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise

up us also with Jesus, and shall present us with you.” The Apostle

had just been giving a vivid description of the extreme strain, and

almost mortal struggle, in which the work of his ministry involved him.

“We are troubled,” he says, “on every side ... always bearing about

in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus

might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in

us, but life in you.” The Apostle was undergoing a strain which was

draining the very life of his body, in order to preach the Gospel which

was bringing life to the souls of others; but he endured it in the

knowledge that, even if it involved the sacrifice of his life, He Who

raised up the Lord Jesus would raise him up also by Jesus, and present

him in a new life at the day of the Resurrection. In this knowledge,

his experience that his outward man was perishing did not make him

faint, for he knew that his inward man was being renewed day by day.

If he was daily dying, he was but experiencing the dying of the Lord

Jesus; and thus, by entering into closer sympathy with his Lord, he

was becoming united also with His life. Christ’s resurrection in glory

was an assurance to him of his own resurrection, and the sufferings of

the moment were as nothing to him in comparison with that glory. That

affliction was, after all, light and momentary, when it was realized

that it was working out for him, more and more exceedingly, an eternal

weight of glory. The things which he saw and felt at the moment were,

after all, but temporary, whereas the things which were not then

visible were eternal. If the earthly frame, which was his present

tabernacle, were dissolved by death, he knew that there was ready for

him “a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens.”

Is not this application of the great message of the Resurrection

peculiarly opportune and welcome to us at the present moment? We are

living through a time when the things that are seen are distressing and

painful beyond anything in our experience--we might perhaps say, in the

experience of Christian Europe. We seem to have gone back, on a sudden,

to the days before the flood, when “the earth was corrupt before

God, and the earth was filled with violence”; and we seem to need a

re-issue of the Divine proclamation, after that world of violence had

been swept away: “Surely your blood of your lives will I require; at

the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso

sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image

of God made He man.” The curse of this violence and bloodshed is being

inflicted, day by day, upon innumerable homes; and day by day we each

apprehend it for our own families. In order to stay the curse, the

blood of our own brothers and sons is being poured out like water, and

the desolation of our homes is becoming more and more appalling. The

blood-stained fields of Belgium, France and Poland, the engulfing of

the innocent lives of women and children in the ocean--these are the

things that are seen; and we need some supreme assurance--nay we need

some Divine revelation--if we are to live through such experiences

in faith, and hope, and in Christian charity. We mourn, day by day,

the loss of precious lives, and we are appalled at the thought of the

further sacrifices of such lives, young and mature, which we fear must

be required; and so far as we look only on the things thus seen, our

hearts might well fail us. Like St. Paul, as he describes himself in

the context, “we are troubled on every side ... we are smitten down,

though not destroyed.”

Let us then observe the manner in which the Apostle meets this

overwhelming oppression. He looks off from the things which are seen

to the things which are not seen; “for,” he says, “the things which are

seen are temporal (or temporary), but the things which are not seen are

eternal.” Perhaps that is the first condition for our seeing things in

their true light. It is very difficult for us not to have our vision

almost wholly occupied by the visible things around us, which are also

the things of which we are the most immediately sensible, and which

naturally absorb our ordinary thoughts, feelings and energies. Yet, as

a matter of fact, as St. Paul reminds us, they are a very small part

indeed of the realities with which we are surrounded. “The things which

are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

Eternal as compared with temporary! Do we often realize sufficiently

what that comparison means? What is the longest life here? Call it

one hundred years, and what is that compared with life eternal,

everlasting, never ending? That is the ultimate reality with which we

are all concerned. Our hearts are filled, first, with the thoughts of

youth, then with those of manhood, then with those of old age; but

there lies before us, before each one of us, an interminable existence,

in which we are destined to experience profounder happiness, or

profounder unhappiness, than any we have experienced here. All that has

exercised our thoughts and feelings here will indeed leave its mark

upon us, but it will all pass away; it is essentially temporal, and

there lies before us an unending existence for weal or woe.

So far, therefore, as any individual life is concerned, so far as

those young lives are concerned, whose premature loss is so bitter to

their nearest and dearest, and seems so sad to all of us, it is well

we should clearly realize that to the individual life itself, a few

years more or less--nay, half a life-time more or less--is practically

insignificant. Are there fifty, or forty, or thirty years behind it?

There is all eternity in front of it. There is a fulness of life and

joy, and even glory, before it, which can never end. To one who has

lived, and who dies, in the true faith and love of Christ, all the

gracious and glorious promises of our Lord and His Apostles are fully

assured; and even if, in any particular case, we may not have the

full evidence of that entire Christian devotion, we may surely apply

to every life which is willingly sacrificed at the call of duty, for a

righteous cause, and with a generous self-surrender, the assurance of

St. Paul, that God will render “to every man according to his deeds.

To them who by patience in well-doing seek for glory, honour, and

immortality, eternal life”; or, as he says again, “Glory, honour, and

peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first and also to the

Gentile.” Or, as we may surely paraphrase it, to the Christian first,

and also to every human soul. If, in fact, our vision were merely

confined to this world, and we did but catch a doubtful glimpse of

what is beyond it, the spectacle of the sacrifice of human life, and

particularly of young human life in a war like this, would be scarcely

endurable. But let us have, not merely that “gleam beyond it,” of which

the Christian poet speaks, but that clear vision beyond it, of an

eternal life of which our Saviour assures us, and of “the grace of the

Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy

Ghost,” in the peace of which that eternal life will be spent, and we

may be able to feel, like St. Paul, that the affliction of the moment

is light, in comparison with the eternal abundance of glory which

awaits the soul in the future.

We are too apt, in a word, to take our stand within the horizon of

this life, and to judge of all things as they are reflected in this

world’s mirror; but if we would see them in their true perspective and

so measure their real values, we must take our stand in the life beyond

the grave. We must look, not at the things which are seen, but at the

things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal,

but the things which are not seen are eternal. In some degree, though

not to the same extent, we may apply a similar consideration to the

sufferings of nations, and of the world as a whole, in a great war. It

is revealed to us in the Book of the Revelation of St. John that, at

the consummation of all things, after scenes of carnage which are at

least equal in their horror to the dreadful spectacle now before our

eyes, a new heaven and a new earth will be created, by Him Who sits

upon the throne making all things new. Even so far as the present

world is concerned, the sufferings and sacrifices involved in great

wars have doubtless won for future generations the greatest blessings

of true Christian civilization--liberty, order, peace, and justice.

It might, indeed, be thought that the price of such blessings was too

high, if we judged of the sacrifices of individual lives in the light

only of the things that are seen; but when we can feel that every

life thus sacrificed, that every suffering thus unselfishly endured,

works out for the sufferer himself an exceeding and eternal reward,

we can look to the things which are not seen, and can again realize

that, in comparison with them, it is not too much to speak, with St.

Paul, of “our light affliction which is but for a moment.” That is the

grand comfort, also, of the mourners who are left behind, who may be

similarly assured that, in their patient acceptance of their bitter

share of these sacrifices, they will be united with those they have

loved and lost, in the eternal blessedness to which St. Paul looks

forward.

But who does not realize that we need very strong evidence, and the

firmest assurances, to sustain flesh and blood amid such bitter trials

as men and women are now experiencing--fathers and mothers, wives and

sisters, lovers and friends? It is not, perhaps, even a St. Paul whose

word alone would be sufficient to bear that strain. If we had only that

to depend on we could but speak of hope and trust; we could hardly say,

as he goes on to say, that “we know” that if our earthly house of this

tabernacle be dissolved we have a building of God, a house eternal

in the heavens. But the ground of his knowledge was the reality of

our Lord’s resurrection, and the assurances which our Lord, when so

raised, had given him. We know, he says, “that He Who raised up the

Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus.” The great certainty from

which St. Paul’s Gospel starts is that our Lord, Who had undoubtedly

suffered death in its most agonizing form, had not less undoubtedly

risen from the dead, and appeared again and again to St. Paul, as to

many others, and had given him the personal assurances on which we are

invited to rely. That is the cardinal fact of the Christian Faith. Had

our Saviour not risen, had He not appeared in such a form as to prove

that He had completely overcome death, then we should still, at the

best, have been in the region of hopes and imperfect beliefs, and of a

yearning trust. We could not have said, with the Apostle, that we know

that Christ is risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them

that slept. But now it is no mere prophet or Apostle, but the risen

Saviour Himself, Who stands in the midst of human life, as He stood in

the midst of His disciples on the morrow of His resurrection, and Who

said Himself, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth on

Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and

believeth in Me shall never die.” Those were His own words; that is the

conviction He stamped upon the mind and heart of such men as St. Paul,

St. Peter, and St. John; and that is the sure foundation on which we

stand in believing that, if we suffer and die with Christ, we shall

also live with Him.

Let me only add that this blessed revelation can only bring its full

blessing and comfort in proportion as we realize, for our own souls,

and for all who are dear to us, that union with Christ in spirit which

is essential to our union with Him in life, here and hereafter. “If

any man,” says St. Paul, “have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of

His.” There are, no doubt, degrees in which men can possess that spirit

of Christ; and even if we possess it in but a feeble degree, we may

humbly trust that He will not disown it, and that He will grant us some

portion of His grace and of His life. But if this eternal life, this

life of abundant glory, is open to us all provided we are in union with

Him, which of us will not be moved by the afflictions of the present,

and the eternal promise of the future, to seek for ever closer union

with that Lord of Life, looking less and less at the things that are

seen, and more and more at the things that are not seen, and knowing

that our life is hid with Christ in God?

THE EASTER MESSAGE.

PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, EASTER DAY, 1916.

“_If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,

where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on

things above, not on things on the earth, for ye are dead, and your

life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, Who is our life, shall

appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory._”--Col. iii. 1-4.

Easter Day brings us the most blessed message that could possibly be

proclaimed at any time; but at present it is perhaps more blessed and

more appropriate than at any other time in our experience. It tells

us, in the first place, that Christ was raised from the dead after His

crucifixion, and now sits at the right hand of God, Who has highly

exalted Him, and given Him a name that is above every name. But it

tells us, also, that the blessedness of that resurrection is open to

all of us, and that we are admitted to share in the glory which Christ

won for Himself; so that when Christ, Who is our life, shall appear

we also shall appear with Him in glory. If we appreciate what these

assurances mean, we shall be lifted up by them into the apprehension

of realities which transform our whole life in this world, and enable

us to look beyond it, to an eternal existence of the highest spiritual

bliss hereafter.

There are two ways in which men may think of their position in life.

The realities of this life may be predominant in their thoughts, so

as almost to absorb their whole minds. That, I fear, is the natural

tendency of most of us. The claim which the things of this world make

upon us is so incessant, and often so intense, that we have too often

neither the energy nor the inclination to look beyond it. There have,

indeed, been good and brave men, who have said that we should not look

beyond it; that we should concentrate all our energies on the work

and the duties imposed upon us, and leave the future to take care

of itself, even though it be that vast, and, as we believe, eternal

future, on which we shall enter at death. That was necessarily the

attitude of good men before the revelation of the Gospel. There have

been, unhappily, some good men among us in recent times who practically

live a similar life, not realizing or believing the truths that are

opened to them by the Gospel, but content to do their duty to the best

of their power. I fear a similar life is practically lived by too many

Christians. Their interest and their thoughts are mainly absorbed in

this present visible world, in their duties, their pleasures, and their

worldly happiness; and they do not, for the most part, think of much

beyond. One consequence of this attitude of mind is that they judge of

all occurrences by their effect on this life; and particularly they

are apt to consider all the dispensations of God’s providence, all

His judgments and all His mercies, with reference to their effect on

this world. How is it possible, for instance, they ask, that a God of

perfect goodness and love can permit such an awful dispensation to

fall upon men as a great war like the present, that He can allow the

sufferings, and the bereavements, and the miseries which such a war

involves? I think, if we are candid with ourselves, we shall find that

when that question is acutely felt, it is practically with reference

to this life that it is urged. Why should there be all this suffering

in the world in which we are now living? Why should so many young and

precious lives be sacrificed? Why should so many homes be darkened, and

so many hearts all but broken, in this present time? It is the present

suffering and the present time that are uppermost in our thoughts. We

are apt to speak and think as if the life in the present world of those

who are lost had been the matter of greatest consequence for them,

and as if we were without any positive compensation, to them and to

ourselves, except the victory of the cause for which they laid down

their lives.

Now the great blessing of the Easter message is that it entirely

reverses this aspect of life. It reveals to us, on the assurance of

Christ and His Apostles, that this world and this life are a very small

thing indeed compared with the realities which Christ has revealed

to us by His resurrection. He has revealed to us, first for Himself

and in His own person, and secondly for ourselves, that the world in

which we really live is an eternal and spiritual realm, in which we

are privileged to be in the company of Christ Himself, and of all the

souls who, from the commencement of the world, have lived and died in

harmony with the spirit of Christ and the will of God. That is the

real life into which every one in this congregation is admitted, if

he will. One of those great men in the past, to whom I have referred,

imagined the case of men having lived all their lives in a cave to

which only broken beams of sunlight penetrated, and who had no idea of

the splendid vision of the sun, and of the earth with all its beauties,

which would burst upon their vision the moment they stepped outside

their cave. That, as his marvellous wisdom perceived, is the case of

too many among us, even among Christians. We have our caves, created by

the temporal interests and obligations around us; and broken gleams,

from the truths of the Gospel which we imperfectly realize, afford

a dim religious light to our condition. But, in reality, there is a

spiritual, a glorious, and an eternal world around us, which will burst

upon us with overpowering splendour when, after death, we step out of

the cave of this flesh. The problems of God’s dispensations, both to

the world at large and to ourselves, are beyond our comprehension and

solution, because they have reference not merely to this world, in

which most of us live for no more than three score years and ten, but

to that eternal and infinite world of spirits, which will endure for

ever, and which is beyond our ken. To each individual soul, young or

old, the question of chief importance is not what happens to them in

this world, whether their life be short or long, whether it be a happy

life or a sad one, but what happens to them afterwards, in that eternal

career, which opens to them all at death. The only true Christian

attitude, as the Apostle says elsewhere, is to “look not at the things

which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, for the things

which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are

eternal.”

But what are these things that are eternal? That is one of the most

precious parts of the Christian revelation. In some respects, of

course, they must remain unknown to us while we are in the flesh, for

“eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart

of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”

But though we do not know what the external circumstances of that life

will be, we do know, because Christ Himself, and His Apostles on His

authority, have revealed it to us, what the essential part of them will

be so far as our spiritual nature is concerned. They will be simply

and precisely the spiritual things which are the highest and best in

this world. They will be perfect truth, and peace, and love, and, in a

word, all those graces and perfections which were manifested in Christ

Himself. The Apostle bids us “seek those things that are above, where

Christ sitteth on the right hand of God”; and then he proceeds to

explain what those things are. “Put on,” he says, a few verses further,

“as the elect of God a heart of compassion, kindness, humility,

meekness, long suffering; forbearing one another, and forgiving one

another; ... even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye; and above all

these things, put on love, which is the bond of perfectness ... and

whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus,

giving thanks to God the Father through Him.” That is the character of

the future world, the future society, to which we have the privilege of

being admitted at death: a world in which all the graces and glories

of the Christian character exist, without any of the imperfections by

which even the holiest lives are clouded here; a world of perpetual

thanksgiving to God the Father for the love with which He has loved us;

a world in short which is ablaze with the light and warmth of all love

and truth.

One blessed consequence from this revelation of the nature of the

spiritual world, in which the risen Christ reigns, is that we can enter

it, and live for it, even in the present life, without any disregard

of the obligatory claims which this world has upon us. However busy a

man’s life, however absorbed he may necessarily be in the requirements

and duties of his daily occupations, he can also be exerting his

energies of thankfulness and prayer to God, of truth and love and

compassion and meekness and peace, which make the life of the eternal

world. There is no occupation or condition of life in which those

blessed graces may not be exerted and cultivated; and men and women

may thus live in the spirit and light Of Heaven, even while they are

confined within the cave of the flesh. In proportion as they are living

in this light even here, they are being prepared for the eternal Heaven

of the future; they are fulfilling, all the more completely, their duty

to the society and the life of this world because they are guided by

the illumination, both of the present Heaven which overshadows their

souls, and of the future Heaven, of which the approaching gleams throw

flashes of light across their path.

But what I would more particularly ask, at the present moment, amid

the strain and distress of these months and years of war, is whether

the promise of this eternal blessedness, the vision of this unseen

and eternal world, does not justify the Apostle’s description of all

the sorrows and sufferings which he and his fellows underwent, as

“our light affliction, which is but for a moment.” If this world were

the main scene of our life and of our hopes, there would be something

appalling in the destruction, or mutilation, of so many of the best

lives among us, and the cruel bereavement of those who are left

behind. But in the light of this revelation, is it not our privilege

to regard it all as “a light affliction, which is but for a moment,”

and which is working for us all, for those who are taken and for those

who are left, a far more exceeding and eternal glory? What does it

matter to a life, however young and bright, that it should be cut short

in this world if, through death in the discharge of duty, it passes

to the full enjoyment of those “things that are with Christ,” in that

world where Christ will welcome it with the greeting: “Well done, good

and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?” It is,

indeed, a hard fate for those whose life in this world is, for the

future, maimed by injuries, or marred by bereavement. But for them,

too, there is the assurance of Christ that if they suffer with Him, and

in sympathy with Him, they shall also be glorified together, and that

all they suffer, in obedience to His will here, will help them forward

in the way that leads to everlasting life. These are not mere human

hopes and imaginings; they are the express promises and assurances of

the Lord, Who suffered and died upon the Cross, and of those Apostles,

whom He commissioned to bring His message to the world. This Heaven,

of the present and the future, has been constituted by them the great

reality, the greatest of all realities, the supreme reality, of our

lives, here and hereafter; and in proportion as we look at everything

here in the light of it, the sorrows and sacrifices of this life are

reduced to comparatively small proportions, and the hope and the

blessings of the eternal life become the great Heaven, the glorious

vault of God’s light and love by which we are surrounded.

It is thus that Easter Day brings home to us a message which satisfies

the deepest cravings and necessities of life, and affords a practical

solution of the difficulties which, without such a revelation, are

involved in the miseries of war. War itself, indeed, points to some

such solution, and compels men in practice to embrace it. It has been

said that war is the greatest of educators, and there are various

senses in which this is true. It educates, it exercises, it manifests,

as nothing else does, some of the highest excellences of human nature:

self-sacrifice, endurance, mutual devotion, faith and loyalty, and,

in Tennyson’s pregnant phrase, “all that makes a man.” But perhaps its

greatest educative influence consists in the fact that it compels men

to act, without hesitation, on the instinct, which God has implanted

in their hearts, that nothing in this world is of any importance in

comparison with the maintenance and the assertion of righteousness,

truth, justice, and mercy. The mass of a people may be living in

comfort and luxury, with their minds and affections mainly engaged in

the energies, the pleasures, and the interests of this life; but as

soon as some great challenge is offered to those supreme principles

of righteousness and mercy, on which the whole fabric of true human

life depends, their hearts spring up with an instinct that everything

they value in this world must be sacrificed in defence of those moral

and spiritual causes. The moment the note is struck of a great war

for righteousness, like the present, that moment men and women feel

compelled, by their very nature, to “set their affection on the things

above,” not on the things of this world; they realize, that to this

world they must become practically dead, and live for those high

moral and spiritual causes which are the supreme treasures of mankind,

and that, in this sense at all events, their “life is hid with Christ

in God.” If, as we may confidently say, we are warring for right and

truth, and for the maintenance of the will of God among men, we may

then apply even to the war itself, and all the national and individual

sacrifices it entails, the thankful conviction of the Apostle that

“our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far

more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” It is working out for our

nation and Empire, and for the world at large, the establishment on

a firmer basis than ever of true Christian civilization. Those whose

lives are sacrificed are but brought by death into the nearer presence

of Christ, where His love and His mercy, no less than His justice, will

be still more to them than in the world they leave; and those who are

left behind may learn to prize the privilege of suffering with their

Saviour, that they may in time be glorified with Him.

THE NEED AND THE MEANS OF RIGHT JUDGMENT.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, WHIT SUNDAY, 1915.

“_The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, Whom the Father will send in

My Name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your

remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you._”--St. John xiv. 26.

Never in our time, perhaps never in the history of the world, has there

been such urgent occasion as there is to-day for joining with all

our hearts, in the prayer of the Whit Sunday Collect, that God will

grant us, by the help of His Spirit, “to have a right judgment in all

things.” We have before our eyes the most tremendous illustration ever

afforded of the awful consequences which may ensue from the absence of

such a right judgment, and the prevalence of a wrong judgment. In the

first place, the war itself is entirely due to the exercise of a wrong

judgment by some person or persons. Nothing but a great misjudgment, on

one side or the other, of the circumstances which occasioned the war,

or of its consequences, could have precipitated all the nations of

Europe into such a deadly and disastrous conflict.

Every statesman, of course, thinks that some other statesman has

blundered, but the mutual recriminations form at least a general

confession of wrong judgment somewhere. When we see such wrong judgment

possible among the ablest and most powerful men in Europe, in a

matter which involves the sacrifice of tens of thousands of lives,

the desolation of thousands of homes, and the devastation of some

of the fairest countries in Europe, have we not need to cry to God,

with the most intense earnestness, that He will grant to us, and to

all who act for us and with us, the help of His Spirit to give us a

right judgment in all things? This gift of a right judgment may seem,

perhaps, in ordinary times, a comparatively small matter to be treated

as the culminating blessing won for us by the Death and Resurrection

and Ascension of our Lord. This is the final festival of the series

which commemorates the great events of His Life; for Trinity Sunday,

which follows, does but sum up the whole substance of the Christian

revelation, as that of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The Whit Sunday

Collect embodies the final craving of the Christian life, for those

gifts which, on our Lord’s Ascension, He became empowered to bestow

upon His Church. But we may appreciate, at this time, better than ever

before, why all those gifts are summed up in the prayer that we may be

granted a right judgment in all things. Upon that right judgment in

the leaders of the Christian nations depends the peace of the whole

world, and the possibility of ourselves leading a peaceable life in all

godliness and honesty. It is demonstrated, by the most awful example

ever given, that all the wisdom, all the experience, all the knowledge

of human nature, accumulated for twenty centuries, are insufficient, of

themselves, to ensure that right judgment; and we are driven to-day to

act upon the exhortation of St. James, “If any man lack wisdom, let him

ask of God” and “it shall be given him.”

But this failure of good judgment in the political management of the

world is not the only, nor the most terrible, exhibition which is

afforded at the present time of the grievous liability of human nature

to form wrong judgments. The worst and most distressing exhibition of

all is seen in the moral perversion of one of the greatest of European

nations. Unless our own judgment is absolutely perverted, Germany has

become possessed by an utterly false, un-Christian, and even inhuman

judgment in moral conduct. The case was justly summed up in a letter

published the other day by an eminent member of our Church, the Dean of

Exeter--“Women outraged, treaties broken, inoffensive citizens, women

and babes, murdered wholesale by land and sea, wells poisoned, deadly

gases taking the place of manly conflict, Houses of God ruthlessly

destroyed, fair lands desolated, noble cities destroyed without

provocation, without reasonable object or purpose, the world filled

with abominable lies, the hymn of hate chosen as a national anthem, and

a baleful curse placed, as a nation’s prayer, on the lips of children,

and placarded in the streets, a fit sequel to the hymn of hate”--this

is the moral and religious spectacle which Germany now exhibits, and

its rulers and guides not only allow these things to be done, but have

pleasure in them that do them. It is not merely that these un-Christian

and inhuman things are done, but that they are justified, that they are

treated as lawful and meritorious, that the spirit which promotes them

is recognized and applauded as the right spirit--this is the amazing

and appalling exhibition of wrong judgment which Germany now offers to

the world.

Let us, moreover, if we would duly appreciate the lesson to be derived

from such a spectacle, bear in mind the character and capacities of the

nation by which it is exhibited. We should bear in mind that Germany

is probably the most highly educated country in Europe; its science,

its literature, its arts, its industry have been among the finest

that the world has seen. In religion it gave Europe the Reformation;

and the great Protestant nations of the world, alike in Europe and

America, recognize the immense spiritual debt they have owed to it in

the past. Our own theological literature, during the last century,

has acknowledged an immense debt to it, and German scholars have, in

our own time, been in the front rank of the learning of the world. It

is a country which was proud of its culture, and, in such matters as

I have mentioned, with full justice. No thoughtful man can treat the

Germans, as a nation, as inferior to any other in Europe, in all the

externals of such culture. All the achievements of past history, all

the acquisitions of Christian civilisation, lay open before them, as

much as before ourselves, and they are bound to us by intimate ties of

blood and of common interests. It is a nation, in short, with every

equipment which human intellect, and art, and Nature can bestow; and

yet, notwithstanding all this, the nation, as a whole, has formed a

judgment so false and inhuman, on the very elements of moral duty, that

we are forced to recognize that in fighting it we are fighting not

merely a political foe, but a moral outlaw from Christian civilisation.

If such an awful perversion of judgment is possible, have we not

reason to tremble at the possibilities of human error? The horrors I

have recalled are a disgrace to Germany; but let us not disguise from

ourselves the lamentable fact that they are also a disgrace to human

nature. To this, we must realize, human nature can come, in spite of

literature, and science, and art, and the traditions of generations,

and profound religious capacities. One cannot divide the Germans from

all other human races, or even from ourselves, and say that they have

a human nature of their own. It is our common human nature which, in

this case, has succumbed to such a degraded judgment, and which has

become false to the inherited principles of Christian civilization.

What we ought to learn from so distressing a spectacle is the absolute

need of some influence higher than any that mere human nature, when

left to itself, can exert, if the moral judgment, the moral sense, the

moral character of nations and races, and of ourselves among them,

are to be kept true to the ideals towards which human nature, at its

best, has always been striving, and which our Lord Jesus Christ has

revealed as the eternal standard established by God. I am afraid

there can be no doubt respecting one cause, at all events, of this

terrible degradation. For the last generation or two, in consequence

of the prevalence in Germany of a false philosophy and an extravagant

criticism, the minds of the educated classes in that country have

been imbued with a complete distrust of the Scriptures, and of the

revelation of God in Christ; and, in consequence, they have abandoned

all deference to the authority of God’s Word and the example and

teaching of our Lord. I believe, indeed, that faith in God and God’s

Word, and love of Christ, still subsist in much of their old intensity

among the simpler classes of the German nation--among numbers to whom

the name and the teaching of Luther are still a venerated influence.

But they have ceased to mould the character and guide the thoughts of

the educated classes, and the consequence is that human nature has

broken loose from all control, and has abandoned itself to an unbridled

lust of power and of earthly pleasure.

It is painful to contemplate such a spectacle, and to recall it to

you; but it is necessary we should realize what it means, if we are

to learn the lesson which is the most imperative for us at this

moment, and if we are to take home to our minds the full blessing of

the promise of Whit Sunday. It is encouraging to bear in mind that a

similar spectacle and crisis existed in the world at the time when our

Lord spoke the words of the text. The Roman Empire, although, like the

German nation, it rendered great services to mankind, was in His day

developing into a terrible despotism, and its rulers were becoming

the incarnation of a ruthless and unscrupulous force. The age of the

twelve Cæsars, some of whom were monsters of violence and vice, was

commencing; and at that moment there appeared another influence, that

of the twelve Apostles, who proclaimed in the world the authority and

the inspiration of another King, their Lord and Master, who taught

the blessedness of another ideal--the ideal of poverty of spirit, of

mourning, of meekness, of mercy, of purity, and of peacemaking. The

two ideals struggled side by side for three centuries; but the spirit

of violence proved unable to crush the spirit of meekness, and had at

last to acknowledge its superiority, and to submit, in great degree, at

all events, to the authority and example of our Lord. The mostly highly

organized physical force that the world at that day had ever seen was

slowly but surely undermined by the spirit of Christian meekness and

love; and from that moment Christian principles of conduct extended

their authority more and more over the whole range of worldly life,

and even over the fierce passions and struggles of war. Gradually

there became established those principles of chivalry under which, as

our great philosophical statesman described it, there prevailed “that

sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain

like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity,

which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost

half its evil by losing all its grossness.” That great amelioration of

human passion and of human evil was won by the persistent contemplation

and assertion of the authority and example of our Lord, and by the

perpetual inculcation of the teaching of His Apostles. The Spirit

of God, descending as on this great day, inspired Evangelists and

Apostles to write those Gospels in which the Person, the teaching,

and the example of our Saviour are so marvellously depicted, and

those Epistles in which they are brought home to our hearts with such

touching force. The same Spirit was vouchsafed to the great teachers

and leaders of the Church, and quickened in the hearts of the people

at large the gracious seed which was thus sown. If the new embodiment

of the rule of force in human affairs is to be effectually overcome,

it can only be by the same means. It cannot be done by our arms alone.

Force alone is no remedy for force. The Spirit of Christ as it lives in

the Books of the New Testament, must again make its appeal to the minds

and consciences of the nations of Europe; and the Spirit of God, acting

through those examples and exhortations, must bring home to us, once

more, the life and love of Christ, must open men’s hearts to receive

His image, and so enable them once more to have a right judgment in all

things.

The prayer of the Collect, therefore, should turn our hearts and minds,

at this juncture, to the supreme necessity, if we would save ourselves

from the dangers of wrong judgment, and if, according to a famous

saying, we would “save Europe by our example,” of submitting our

hearts and lives with the deepest earnestness to the ideals set before

us in the Scriptures, and especially in the teaching and example of

our Lord and His Apostles, as the only sufficient means of maintaining

a right judgment among us on the great moral problems of life. As a

nation we have hitherto enjoyed unique advantages in this respect. To

no other nation in the world has it ever been given to have the Word

of God, the whole Word of God, read aloud in our churches, Sunday by

Sunday, for more than three hundred years; and to have thus had the

words and deeds of Christ, and the exhortations of His Apostles, and

the devotions of Psalmists and Prophets, impressed upon our minds

week by week, and sometimes day by day, until much of them has become

the most familiar of all the records of our memories. There has been

another means, moreover, especially in Scotland, but in England also,

by which we have been kept in constant touch with the same influence,

and that is the custom, which generally prevailed till recently, of

Family Prayer, and the reading of the Holy Scriptures in the family

circle. By these means that Divine Seed was sown in the hearts of young

and old, and it could not but produce much fruit. If we desire to

preserve the Christian instincts, which can alone protect us against

such dreadful relapses into a world of violence and ungoverned passion

as human nature has been proved capable of, let us submit ourselves

with renewed earnestness to those Divine Words, and to that Christian

discipline, which have maintained for so long, in this country, the

character of Christian gentlemen and gentlewomen, and have upheld among

us, in spite of our many faults and failures, at all events the main

principles of a right judgment. When our Lord says, in the text, that

His Spirit would bring all things to the remembrance of the Apostles,

whatsoever He had said unto them, He gave a promise which was in the

first instance fulfilled, as I have said, in the writings of the

Evangelists and the Apostles, but to which it is also the privilege

of every Christian to appeal. If we will read His Scriptures, He will

open our minds to understand them, He will bring home to us, by His

fellowship, the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God; He

will save us from false judgments of all kinds; and will enable us to

uphold in our own hearts, and in the world at large, that truth and

love, that meekness, gentleness, and humility, for the protection of

which we are now appealing to the arbitrament of battles, and of the

God of battles. May He grant us victory in that appeal; and when it

has been granted to us, let us strive to render the victory secure by

living more devoutly in His faith and fear, and seeking more diligently

the Grace of His Holy Spirit.

THE ADVENT MESSAGE AND THE WAR.

IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, NOV. 29, 1914.

“_Because He hath appointed a day, in which He will judge the world in

righteousness by that Man Whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given

assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead._”

The season of Advent, with which the Church’s year reopens brings to

us a message of peculiar appropriateness and encouragement at the

present moment. It does so because it lays the corner-stone of the

grand edifice of the Gospel, or the good news of God, of which we

shall follow the construction through the Church’s year. What is the

special message of Advent? It is the message of that grand verse in the

Psalms, “Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat.” It

proclaims to us the message of the prophets, opened to us in triumphant

tones by the prophet Isaiah in the Lesson of to-day, that righteousness

is the very foundation on which God is building up society; that it

is the very root from which our own lives and the life of our nation

derive their existence; that it was to promote this righteousness that

our Lord came into the world at His first Advent in great humility;

and that it is to establish that righteousness finally that He will

come again in great glory to judge the quick and the dead. This is the

beginning of God’s revelation to us, and it is also the end and the

culmination of His revelation. It is the beginning of the Gospel, and

it is also the end of the Gospel.

If we would understand the blessing of the Gospel, we must begin

with the conviction that the one great object for which this whole

dispensation of human society exists is that complete righteousness,

the glory of the Divine righteousness, may be established in it, and

that nothing but this can promote either the glory of God or the

happiness of man. Read the Psalms with this consideration in your mind,

and I think you will be deeply impressed with the fact that every

prayer to God embodies a prayer for the establishment of right against

wrong; so that the Psalmist only dares to pray for himself so far as

the deliverances and successes he prays for are in harmony with the

righteous will and purposes of God. Every prayer is in the spirit of

the exquisite Psalm of this evening: “Deliver me, O Lord, from mine

enemies: for I flee unto Thee to hide me. Teach me to do the thing that

pleaseth Thee, for Thou art my God: let Thy loving spirit lead me forth

into the land of righteousness.” We have no right to ask or expect help

on any other condition than that; for the one supreme work which God is

working day by day, and year by year, and century by century, is the

realization in human life of what that righteousness and judgment are,

which are the foundation of His throne.

Advent reminds us, in the first place, of this grand and simple fact,

and bids us make it the starting point of all our Christian thought

and hope; but it gives us the further assurance that God is not

only carrying forward that work of righteousness now, but that He

will complete it hereafter. It repeats that message which St. Paul

proclaimed to the world at large, through the Athenians, that “God hath

appointed a day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness

by that Man Whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance

unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.” That was

the culmination of St. Paul’s Gospel to the people of Athens. That

is the culmination of the message of the Gospel to ourselves at the

present day. What do we need more than all at this moment? What are our

minds full of but the dreadful spectacle before us of the whole earth

filled with violence, of an awful outbreak of hatred, unrighteousness,

injustice, wanton cruelty, and barbarity? The words of Isaiah read

this morning are exactly applicable to the spectacle of Belgium and

France at this moment: “Your country is desolate; your cities are

burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence,

and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. And the daughter of

Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of

cucumbers, as a besieged city.” Might not our hearts almost fail us

as we contemplate such a volcanic eruption of injustice and violence

after nineteen centuries of Christianity? But our hearts will not fail

us, any more than the heart of Isaiah failed him in his day. And why?

Because of this assurance--an assurance deep down in our souls--that

this unrighteousness cannot prevail. That conviction lies very deep in

human nature, even apart from God’s revelation in the Psalms and the

Gospel. But by this revelation it is given an irrefragable strength,

and we grasp with the deepest conviction the assurance of the Psalmist:

“Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful together

before the Lord, for He is come to judge the earth, with righteousness

to judge the world, and the people with His truth.” That is the message

of Advent, and there never was a time in history when we could grasp it

more thankfully with all our hearts and souls.

There is something inexpressibly elevating and inspiring in this

message of a future judgment and of the final vindication of

righteousness, as it enables us to look beyond this present scene

of distress and trouble, to realize that all that is passing around

us is in reality only part of a far larger and grander scene, and

that the events of the hour are but a brief passage in a universal

history, which has been carried forward for centuries under God’s

hand, and is being worked out under His guidance to a glorious and

righteous conclusion. If you allow your gaze and your thoughts to be

fixed mainly on your own lives, on the lives of your own generation,

or even of our own national history, you may well be distressed and

perplexed at the apparent defeat of righteous causes and purposes, at

the overthrow of the laborious work of years of peace, at what seems

like the destruction of those bonds of human society to which prophets

and saints and soldiers and statesmen had devoted their labours and

their very lives for generations. So it seemed to Isaiah in his day;

so it seemed to Habakkuk when he exclaimed, “that judgment doth never

go forth.” So it has seemed to many a devoted servant of God and man,

if he trusted only to his own eyes, from generation to generation.

Nothing but prophecy, the prophecy of the Old and New Testaments,

is, in fact, adequate to the strain thus put upon men and women by

these experiences. But only believe, as the prophets assure you, only

believe as our Saviour declared, and as His Apostles proclaimed

by His commission, that it is but part of one great history, one

great universal dispensation, in which God is steadily ensuring, by

whatever means may in His Divine wisdom be necessary, the supremacy of

righteousness and the overthrow of evil, and you can then live through

it, and struggle through it, not merely with the patience, but with the

exultation, which marked the Jewish prophets and psalmists. Belgium and

Northern France are now passing through the very experiences, to the

letter, which Isaiah described in the case of the people of Israel in

his day; but Isaiah looked through all these distresses to a time when

“the Lord’s House should be established in the top of the mountains and

should be exalted above the hills, and all nations should flow into

it”; when “out of Zion should go forth the law, and the word of the

Lord from Jerusalem”; when “He should judge the nations, and should

rebuke many peoples, and should beat their swords into ploughshares,

and their spears into pruning hooks, when nation should not lift up

sword against nation, neither should they learn war any more.” That

was Isaiah’s assurance, even in the dark days he describes. We have

a hundred-fold more ground for the same assurance when it has been

proclaimed to us by our Lord Himself, and sealed with His blood, and

countersigned with the assurance and the blood of His Apostles and

Saints.

Even from this general point of view, the message of Advent comes to us

with a supremely inspiring force in the crisis of our great national

struggle, but it has other aspects of profound grace and comfort as

well as of warning. The most gracious, perhaps, of all its aspects is

the assurance it gives us that the final judgment of the world, the

final establishment of righteousness, the final reward of the good,

will be in the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ. This, of course, is a

matter of faith, based on positive revelation, resting on the personal

assurance of our Lord and His Apostles. It is no matter of speculation,

no matter of opinion, but a positive statement of fact, which is one of

the corner-stones of the Christian religion. There is too much tendency

at present to resolve that religion into matters of mere human

thought and feeling and hope, and to make its acceptance depend on its

conformity to modern ideas; but there is no possibility of treating in

that manner such a point of definite, momentous, fundamental fact as

that our Lord Jesus Christ has been appointed by God to be the Judge of

quick and dead, to sum up the whole world’s destiny, and to assign to

each one of us, to every one in this congregation, his place hereafter

in the Kingdom of God or outside it. The office of judge, even in this

world, is a solemn one. How infinitely awful is the position of the

Eternal Judge of all! Now the substance of the revelation of Advent

is that this great office is not veiled, as it was to the Jews, and

as it must needs be, without revelation, to all the world, in the

mysterious, distant, and dread form of the absolute majesty of God

Himself; but that it is formally delegated to One Who is not only the

Son of God, but the Son of Man, to the Lord Jesus Christ, Who took our

flesh and blood upon Him, Who died for us and rose again. “God hath

appointed a day,” St. Paul says, “in the which He will judge the world

in righteousness by _that man_ Whom He hath ordained ... Whom He

raised from the dead.” The grace which is involved in this declaration

is so infinite that I hesitate to speak freely of it in my own words,

and I am thankful to be able to express it in language of one of the

most authoritative of all divines, our own Bishop Pearson, in his grave

and deliberate _Exposition of the Creed_. “If,” he says (page 305),

“we look upon the judgment to come only as revealing our secrets, as

discerning our actions, as sentencing our persons, according to the

works done in the flesh, there is not one of us can expect life from

that tribunal at the last day.... It is necessary, therefore, that

we should believe that _Christ_ shall sit upon the throne, that our

Redeemer shall be our Judge, that we shall receive our sentence, not

according to the rigour of the law, but the mildness and mercies of

the Gospel; and then we may look not only upon the precepts, but also

upon the promises of God. Whatsoever sentence in the sacred Scriptures

speaketh anything of hope, whatsoever text administereth any comfort,

whatsoever argument drawn from thence can breed in us any assurance,

we can confidently make use of them all in reference to the judgment

to come; because by that Gospel which contains them all we shall be

judged. If we consider Whose Gospel it is, and Who shall judge us by

it, ‘_we are the members of His Body, of His Flesh, and of His Bones;

for which cause He is not ashamed to call us brethren_.’ As one of our

brethren He hath redeemed us, He hath laid down His life as a ransom

for us.... Well, therefore, may ‘_we have boldness and access with

confidence_,’ by the faith of Him unto the throne of that Judge, Who is

our brother, Who is our Redeemer, Who is our High Priest, Who is our

Advocate, Who will not by His word at the last day condemn us, because

He hath already by the same word absolved us, saying, ‘_Verily, verily,

I say unto you, he that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent

Me hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is

passed from death into life_.’”

At a time when death is all around us, when so many of our nearest and

dearest and best may pass at any moment through the shadow of death to

the judgment which is beyond, it is of infinite comfort to be assured

by this Divine message that they pass, not to a severe tribunal which

will judge them by the letter of the law, and by a strict estimate

of their faults, but to this gracious and merciful throne of their

Brother, their Advocate, and their Redeemer, Who will judge them with

infinite mercy and equity. I do not hesitate to say that He will judge

them with peculiar sympathy, because they have died in the very cause

in which He died Himself, and which it is His office as a judge to

maintain--the cause of righteousness. In the ancient Church, martyrdom

was regarded as ensuring remission of sins and absolution. Soldiers, no

doubt, would feel that it would be putting their case too high to place

their sacrifice of their lives in the cause of their King and country,

in a war like this, on quite the same level as the heroic martyrdom of

the great Saints of old. But it is a sacrifice of the same nature. It

is coloured by the virtue of the sacrifice of Christ Himself, and of

His followers; and we may confidently be assured that those who meet

their death on the battlefields of this war in the spirit of faith in

Christ, and in simple devotion to duty, will be received by Him in the

sense of those gracious words, “Well done, good and faithful servant,”

and may hope to be admitted in some degree into the joy of their Lord.

According to the judgment of the ancient Church, and the greatest of

our own Divines, we may confidently bear the memories of them in our

prayers before that Throne of gracious judgment--not presuming to know,

or desiring to know, more than this, that they are in the hands of One

Who is at once a Judge and a Saviour, and trusting that, in praying

for His gracious and merciful reception of them, we are but giving

expression to the yearnings of His own Divine and Human Heart.

Such are some of the blessed assurances which the Advent Season brings

us, and we cannot be too thankful for them in our present time of

distress. But it brings us one lesson of warning, which it is equally

important for us to bear in mind. A war like this is undoubtedly a

judgment. It springs from the sins of men, from their passions and

their lusts, their lack of love, their unrighteousnesses of various

kinds. War shows us death, and all that is involved in death, as

the natural consequence of human passions, when not controlled by

the spirit of Christ and the Will of God. “When lust hath conceived

it bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth

death.” That is the law of Nature. It applies more or less to all

who are engaged in war, and we, in this war, must not shrink from

acknowledging our part in the accumulation of human wrong which has,

at length, exploded into this scene of violence and misery. Advent,

therefore, bids us look into our own hearts and lives, and ask

ourselves what there has been in them which is not in conformity with

the Will of God and with the law of the Saviour Who is to be our Judge.

One immense blessing conferred on us by the knowledge that He will be

our Judge is that we know, by His teaching and by His example, what

are the principles of that righteousness and judgment which it is His

office to enforce. It points us to the records of His love and teaching

in the Gospels, to the messages of His Apostles, and to the Bible

which was His law, as our guide in daily life in all circumstances

and relations. That is the standard by which we shall be hereafter

judged; and in proportion as we believe and realize this, shall we

devote ourselves to its study and strive after its fulfilment. We are

sadly reminded now that in this world there is no comfort on which we

can permanently rely; but there is one comfort in life and in death of

which we may be assured; it is that which our Lord revealed to us, when

He gave us at once this command and this assurance, “If ye love me,

keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you

another Comforter, that He may abide with you for ever.” Let us seek

that comfort in life and in death, and it will not fail us.

DIVINE JUDGMENT AND RENOVATION.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, OCTOBER 11, 1916.

“_And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things

new._”--Rev. xxi. 5.

These words were uttered by Him that sitteth on the throne, as the

interpretation of the grand vision which passed before the Apostle at

the conclusion of the Revelation vouchsafed to him. “I saw,” he says,

“a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth

were passed away.... And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying,

Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them,

and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and

be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and

there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall

there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And He

that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”

But this vision was the sequel of fearful scenes which had passed

before the Apostle as the future course of the Divine judgments

was unrolled before him. He had witnessed a terrible succession of

destructions, and plagues, and wars, falling upon the inhabitants of

the earth, involving miseries and sufferings incalculable. He had seen

passing before him the awful punishments inflicted upon the enemies of

God, of Christ, of righteousness, and truth. One quotation in the final

scene will be enough to remind you of the nature of the visions. “I saw

an angel,” says the Apostle (chapter xix. 17), “standing in the sun;

and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the

midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper

of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of

captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of

them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond,

small and great.” At length, when these fearful plagues and judgments

are completed the Apostle sees a great white throne and Him that sat

on it, from Whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, and there

was found no place for them. Then the books were opened, and the dead,

who stood before God, both small and great, were judged, every man

according to their works. Then it is, after this awful consummation,

that the Apostle sees a new heaven and a new earth. And He that sits

upon the great white throne says, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Such, in brief, is the burden of the Book of Revelation. It will

be observed that it involves these two cardinal points: First, the

judgment and the extirpation of all that is evil by a series of

struggles and agonies; and secondly, after this terrible experience,

the creation of all things new. The first part, however, in the

process of the Divine administration, consists of a series of scenes

of miseries, disasters, and bloodshed than which nothing more terrible

can be imagined, and which are described with a lurid force to which

no other human writing offers anything comparable. War and disease

and the confusion of all the elements of human society, and even of

heaven and earth, are brought before us, until men are reduced to

cry to the very mountains and rocks to cover them. All is described

as the inevitable result of the wrath of God against evil and its

representatives, and a fearful joy is ascribed to the heavenly beings

who behold this vindication of the Divine righteousness. The four and

twenty elders fall on their faces and worship God, saying (xi. 17), “We

give Thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, Which art and wast and art to

come, because Thou hast taken to Thee Thy great power and hast reigned.

And the nations were angry, and Thy wrath is come, and the time of

the dead, that they should be judged, and that Thou shouldest give

reward unto Thy servants the prophets, and to the Saints, and to them

that fear Thy Name, small and great, and shouldest destroy them which

destroy the earth.” And then in awful response are heard, in the temple

of God, “lightnings and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake and

great hail.”

These dread scenes, these fearful judgments, are depicted as the

inevitable preliminary in the manifestation of the Divine Will and

the establishment of the Divine Kingdom. This is the main fact which

stands out broadly from the Book. It is not necessary, for the purpose

of appreciating this, to comprehend the signification of each of the

awful scenes which are predicted. How far they are capable of any

explanation before the final events may well be doubted. Old Testament

prophecy remained in great part mysterious until the moment of its

accomplishment, and the full interpretation of Christian prophecy

can hardly be less dependent upon its actual realization. But one

thing is plain, that the establishment of the Kingdom of Christ upon

earth, the full realization of all its promises of peace and goodwill,

the complete manifestation of the glory and power of its King--that

these great hopes and blessed promises cannot, according to the Book

of Revelation, be realized without the world passing through scenes

of fearful struggle and misery, and without the execution of Divine

judgment upon the evil and falsehood with which it abounds.

These are stern truths which it is well for us to bear in mind amidst

the terrible scenes which are now being enacted in the present war. The

New Testament begins with promises of peace, and it ends with a vision

of peace and glory in which God will wipe away all tears from our

eyes; but the warning is conveyed to us, through the mouth of the last

Apostle, that this blessed condition cannot be reached except through a

manifestation of Divine justice and Divine wrath, which will bring upon

earth and upon all mankind inconceivable miseries. The sins of men must

be brought into judgment. The Divine righteousness must expose their

real character by the consequences they naturally involve. The truth

must be manifested that there is a Judge of all the earth, Who brings

every work of man into judgment, whether it be good or whether it be

evil; and the evil in the works of men is so deep and far-reaching

that its judgment must needs involve the most terrible suffering. In

proportion as God takes to Himself His great power and reigns, the

first result must be seen in these agonies of human nature, and must

culminate in the disruption of the very elements of nature itself.

It is well we should remind ourselves how fearfully these pictures

of the Apostle of love have been fulfilled in the history of the

world since his time. It was not long after he wrote, when a series

of persecutions broke upon the Christian Church, which were at length

avenged by terrible intestine wars between the heads of the Roman

Empire, and in due course of time, by the overthrow of that Empire

itself in a long series of wars and devastations, which can only be

fitly described in some of the vivid language of the Apocalypse itself.

It would be appalling if we could realize the extent to which Europe

was filled with “blood and fire and vapour of smoke” during the five or

six centuries which elapsed between the overthrow of the Roman Empire

and the establishment of the Christian civilisation of the Middle

Ages. Then followed the incalculable miseries and untold bloodshed

involved in the contest between the Christian and the Mohammedan

world, throughout the long period of the Crusades. Add to this all the

intestine wars between Christians themselves during the Middle Ages,

and the fearful devastation of which the East was the victim in the

course of Mohammedan conquests and revolutions, and you have before

your eyes a picture not adequately described elsewhere than in this

terrible Book. The Reformation was followed by a long series of wars,

during which a great part of the surface of Europe suffered the most

cruel devastations; and even to the present day the whole world open to

our observation has been suffering from almost continuous bloodshed in

one part or other of its surface.

The scenes which strike us with such horror at this moment are but a

specimen of agonies which have been endured for long generations in

the successive struggles of mankind; and if we are horrified at the

wars and agonies around us, we may be reminded, by the readiness of all

nations for such conflicts, that they are almost the normal condition

of humanity. In the middle of the last century Burke calculated that,

assuming the numbers of men then upon earth to be computed at 500

millions at the most, the slaughter of mankind in the various wars

and revolutions which were known up to that date amounted to upwards

of seventy times that number, or 35,000 millions. That, on what

he thought a moderate estimate, represents the amount of bloodshed

which the passions of men had, up to his time, inflicted upon human

society. How much more is to be added to that tremendous calculation

for the wars which have followed since that date in the East and West?

Taking these facts into account, we shall see good reason to recognize

that the Book of Revelation, in its fearful scenes, is but a true

description of the actual experience of mankind. The plagues, and

destructions, and slaughters which that Book depicts, as the result of

the just judgments of God, have, as a matter of fact, been realized,

and it is through scenes of suffering and misery of this nature that

the world is being conducted by the Divine justice to its ultimate goal.

But we have the more reason to be inexpressibly thankful that that

goal is revealed to us as one of peace and bliss. It is when we bear

in mind the miseries and agonies which the Book of Revelation depicts,

and which are brought so bitterly home to us by such a war as the

present, that we realize the full force of the promise that “God shall

wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death,

neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain:

for the former things are passed away.” Seeing what the world has

been hitherto, and the miseries by which it is burdened now, we might

well despair of such a result, unless we had the express assurance of

Revelation that there is One sitting upon the throne Who gives this

as the very definition of His work, “Behold, I make all things new.”

We should, indeed, be ungrateful not to recognize that the state of

things around us contains in itself some pledge and earnest of this

revelation. Grievously as the passions of mankind degrade them in

practice, there is nevertheless publicly recognized, in principle,

a higher standard of responsibility, a higher and more universal

obligation to maintain peace and goodwill on earth, than at any

previous time in the world’s history. Even amidst such a war as is now

waging, principles have been established for its conduct, which produce

a great alleviation of its miseries, compared with those which were

suffered in the great struggles of nations and of races in previous

ages, or even during the last century. But still, none must feel more

grievously than those who have the conduct of human affairs how slight

would be our hopes of the establishment of complete peace on earth, did

it depend simply on the wisdom or strength of even the wisest leaders

of mankind. They cannot extirpate the passions which are the real

ultimate cause of the wars and fightings among us. They cannot take out

of men’s hearts the lusts which war in their members, and which nullify

the best laws and institutions. Our hope lies in the assured faith

that all the terrible scenes of which the earth is full, like those

in the Book of Revelation, are under the control of Him that sitteth

on the throne, that they are working out great purposes of truth and

justice, that the actions of all men, small and great, are subject to

His ultimate judgment, and that, finally, when the issues of right and

wrong in this world have been thus worked out, in a manner which shall

vindicate the truth and righteousness of God, He will fulfill His great

work, in which He is even now engaged, of making all things new.

It is, indeed, an unconscious faith of this kind which sustains men,

and has ever sustained them, amidst the confusions and sufferings of

life and history. A deep instinct compels them to believe that they are

in the hands of a God of justice and truth, and to appeal to Him in

the midst of their struggles, and even in those crises in which their

best efforts seem to be defeated. But it is the special privilege, the

special grandeur, of the Christian Faith to have an explicit assurance

of this truth from the mouth of the Judge Himself. He said unto His

Apostle, “Write, for these words are true and faithful.” He, the King

of Peace, left with His last Apostle the warnings and the promises of

this Book. Lest men should be discouraged by the terrible experiences

through which they were yet to pass, He warned them beforehand that

such experiences were inevitable, and that the world would have to

pass through a purgatory of this kind; but at the same time He told

them that, when judgment was completed, a new Heaven and a new Earth

would be the result, and He bade them be assured that, amidst whatever

darkness and confusion, He was sitting on the throne making all things

new.

All that we have to do individually is to see that we are true to Him,

and in our hearts live in obedience to His will. In the text He goes

on to say to the Apostle, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the

end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the water of life freely.

He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and _I_ will be his God,

and he shall be My son.” “Blessed,” he says again, “are they that do

His commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and

may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs,

and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and

whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.” We are not able, with our limited

and earthly vision, to discern “the work that God worketh from the

beginning of the world,” or the course of His judgments in the world

at large. That is beyond us, and we must submit and take our part,

whatever it may be, in these mysterious manifestations, possessing

our souls in the patience which such assurances as those in the text

can alone provide. But we can have the comfort, for our own selves,

of passing through this strange and painful scene in sure and certain

hope of our ultimate blessedness, provided in our own hearts and souls

we give ourselves up to the rule and the order of Him Who is the

Beginning and the End, the First and the Last, provided we make it the

whole purpose of our lives to do His commandments, and, by His grace,

overcome the evil which besets us in our own lives. Our personal and

private lives reflect in greater or less degree those stern experiences

which this Book describes in the case of the world at large. We have

our sins, and as the consequences of our sins our sufferings and

sorrows, desolations and punishments of various kinds, and we must

expect to have to bear them till the moment of our departure arrives.

But by God’s grace we are also allowed in some measure to anticipate

the privilege which is held out to the world at large, and which is our

own ultimate hope. The fulfilment of the blessed promise of making all

things new is not merely commenced, but, if we will, is consciously

commenced, within our hearts and souls while we are upon earth. “We

ourselves,” says St. Paul, “groan within ourselves, waiting for the

adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body,” just as “the whole

creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” But we

have the first-fruits of the Spirit. His grace is within us at all

times to give us new hearts and new spirits, to introduce His peace

into our souls, and to enable us to spread that peace around us. Let

us only seek it faithfully, and the renewing and replenishing water of

life will restore us and maintain our energies, and will be in us as a

well of water springing up into everlasting life.

RESISTANCE UNTO BLOOD.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, GOOD-FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 1916.

“_Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin._”--Heb.

xii. 4.

“Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” That is

the manner in which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews applies

the Cross of Christ as an example and an inspiration to Christians. He

is exhorting them to “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth

so easily beset us,” and to “run with patience the race that is set

before us,” “looking unto Jesus the Author and Perfecter of our Faith,

who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross.” It is an

aspect of our Saviour’s Cross which it is most important to realize

if its significance for ourselves is to be duly appreciated. What was

it that brought our Lord to the Cross? Of course, the ultimate cause

was that the will of God required that sacrifice to be made for the

expiation of human sin. “Him,” said St. Peter, “being delivered up by

the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and

by wicked hands have crucified and slain.” But God’s counsel and will

were worked out by human agencies; and it is of infinite interest to

consider what were the motives which led men like the leaders of the

Jewish nation to commit the awful crime of putting to death the Son of

God, manifested in perfect human nature. The simple explanation is that

He “resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” Our Lord strove against

sin, and sinners could not endure His antagonism; and the opposition

between the two was so intense that one or other of the two antagonists

had to be overpowered. That is the substance of the story of our

Lord’s life as told by the Evangelists. Our Lord came proclaiming that

the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand--a Kingdom with higher claims and

severer judgments than the Jews could tolerate. It claimed a spiritual

perfection instead of a legal one, an obedience of the heart instead

of a mere compliance in external acts; it penetrated into the secrets

of the conscience; and our Lord further declared that He Himself was

the Judge by Whom these claims would be enforced. The Jewish rulers

felt that this amounted to superseding themselves and their authority,

and they treated our Lord as a usurper who must be suppressed. The

tremendous denunciation of the Scribes and Pharisees: “Woe unto you,

Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” was an act of open and righteous

hostility to the authorities who had rejected His mission and spurned

His claims. They felt that He or they must be overthrown, and they used

the Roman Government to destroy Him.

It thus appears that our Lord’s crucifixion was the culminating

struggle in the never-ceasing battle between right and wrong,

righteousness and sin, in which the history of mankind consists. Our

Lord appeared as the representative of absolute righteousness, and He

was put to death because men could not endure that righteousness. In

His rejection by the Jews and His crucifixion by the Roman Governor,

the highest official representatives of human righteousness at that

time and place combined to condemn themselves. But they could not have

consummated that sacrifice without the consent and even co-operation

of our Lord Himself. He had power, if He had chosen to exert it, to

destroy them and assert His Divine supremacy. “Thinkest thou,” He

said, “that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He shall presently

give Me more than twelve legions of angels? But how, then, shall the

Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” Instead of destroying

His enemies, He submitted to be put to death Himself. He allowed the

unrighteousness of human nature to break in full force upon His own

head; He Himself became its victim, and a victim of such infinite

greatness as to constitute an expiation for all the sin of mankind. Sin

and evil can only be avenged by an adequate exhibition and endurance

of their consequences. But that endurance and that manifestation were

afforded, in the highest conceivable form, in the destruction, so far

as men could effect it, of perfect goodness and holiness. That was

what our Lord’s submission to the Cross involved. When that expiation

had been made to God and God’s righteousness, our Lord assumed His

full authority as a Saviour and a Judge, and, by His Resurrection and

Ascension, established the Kingdom of Heaven in all its grace and

power. Henceforth men have lived under that dispensation of love as

well as of justice, and the Cross has been held aloft among them as the

means and the assurance of forgiveness and of grace.

No human being can imitate our Lord in that supreme act of

self-surrender to His Father’s will, by which He abandoned all His

right and power to avenge Himself on His enemies, and became the

supreme victim, and therefore atonement, for human sin. But it is

possible for men to follow Him in the course of action which brought

Him to that awful decision and agony. “He resisted unto blood, striving

against sin.” So far as we strive against sin and evil, whatever the

consequences to ourselves, we are following Him to the foot of the

Cross. It is not the mere endurance of suffering, the mere surrender

of life in itself, which renders us followers of our Lord in His

sacrifice: men have endured much and sacrificed much for more or less

selfish reasons, for ambition or for military glory and power. But

the essence of our Lord’s sacrifice was that it was made in the cause

of righteousness and truth only. “To this end was I born,” He said,

“and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness

unto the truth.” We are following Him so far as in all our words and

acts we are bearing witness unto the truth. That witness may at any

time involve suffering and death. God has so constituted mankind that

few great causes have ever been finally won without the voluntary

sacrifice of life. That sacrifice may sometimes be made, like that of

our Lord and of the martyrs, by the voluntary endurance of the cruel

penalties inflicted by the enemies of the truth; or it may be endured

in obedience to the claim of lawful authorities that we should take up

arms and offer our lives, in defence of some righteous cause. Men may

act in our Lord’s spirit if they submit to wrong in their own persons,

rather than avenge themselves. But the authorities who, as St. Paul

says, are the ministers of God, are bound to protect those committed

to their charge, and for that purpose have a right to call upon those

under them to use the sword at their command to defend the right. In

so using the sword at the command of their rulers, at whatever cost to

themselves, they also are acting in Christ’s spirit, because they are

upholding righteousness and asserting the truth in the manner required

by their duty. To all forms of organized sin the witness of the Jewish

sacrifices holds good. “Without shedding of blood is no remission.”

That, so long as the present dispensation lasts, is the unalterable law

of God’s Will and Word. Soldiers, therefore, who are obeying a lawful

command in defence of the right, are offering their lives in the spirit

in which Christ endured the Cross, and may claim the comfort of being

fellows with Him in the “holy war” of right against wrong.

But if the Cross of Christ is to be the centre of our lives, we must

strive to live in all things, and not only in such great crises as

those of war and the battlefield, in the spirit which brought our Lord

to His Cross--the spirit of absolute obedience in all things to the

righteous will of God. What the Spirit of the Cross requires of us

is the absolute surrender of our own wills to the will of God, and

the constant endeavour to bear witness to that will, and to promote

it in every part of our lives. It is not the mere meditation on the

sufferings of the Cross which will bring us into harmony with it.

The Apostles do not dwell much on them, profoundly as they must have

been moved by them. What they dwell on is the spirit which moved our

Saviour to accept them and to bear them. That spirit is to be discerned

throughout His life, as well as in His agony in the garden and in His

sayings on the Cross. It is embodied in His gracious words: “Whoever

shall do the will of My Father which is in Heaven, the same is My

brother and sister and mother.” The Cross is the highest and final

expression of His devotion and His Father’s will; but we can follow

that spirit in every duty, however humble. If the National Mission is

to fulfil its object, it must impress that spirit of supreme devotion

to the will of God, as revealed in Christ, upon the nation as a whole,

and the Cross must become the symbol of our national, no less than of

our individual, life.

THE KING’S ACCESSION AND INTERCESSION.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, 1915.

“_I exhort, therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers,

intercessions, thanksgivings, be made for all men: for kings, and for

all that are in authority: that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life

in all godliness and honesty._”--1 Tim. ii. 1.

It is in fulfilment of the duty prescribed in this text that we

hold every year a Service of Thanksgiving and Intercession on the

anniversary of our King’s accession to the throne, and I am sure we

all know and appreciate the abundant reasons we have for offering such

thanksgivings. We know that every public action of the King since he

came to the throne has borne witness to his unreserved devotion to the

welfare of his subjects in all parts of his Empire. His visit, for

instance, to India was a very arduous and anxious undertaking, and was

prompted by his own desire to assure the Indian people of his deep

personal care for them, and also to strengthen the bonds between them

and his subjects at home; and no doubt the generous service which

Indian princes and soldiers are now rendering to the Empire on the

plains of Flanders is in great measure due to the influence of that

visit, in deepening the loyalty and devotion of his Indian subjects.

We have had abundant evidence, moreover, in the last few months, of

the King’s deep sympathy with his people in the sorrows and losses

which this war is inflicting upon them. He has sent his son and heir

to serve with his soldiers at the Front, and has himself visited them

there to thank and cheer them, and he has lately set a very conspicuous

example of personal self-denial in the ordinary habits of life. We see

that the King and Queen live for the good of their subjects, and for

the promotion of all that is good and true and gracious throughout

their vast Empire, and that their example is one of the chief

influences which are working among us for these noble ends. Knowing and

appreciating all this, I need not say more to induce you to join with a

full heart to-day in the words of our Service, and to “yield unfeigned

thanks to God” that He was pleased, as on this day, to place His

servant our Sovereign Lord King George upon the throne of this realm.

But I think it may be desirable and opportune to lay some special

stress on those intercessions which we are bidden to offer “for

kings and for all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet

and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” Those words remind

us, first of all, that the purpose of God, so far as this world is

concerned, is that we may live a life of peace in all godliness and

honour--a state of peace in which men may enjoy the happiness for

which God intended them, in which they may “replenish the earth and

subdue it,” and develop to the utmost the faculties and capacities

with which God has endowed them. That is the main object to be kept in

view for the purpose of the present life. The next fact of which the

words remind us is that the maintenance of these peaceful conditions

of life depends mainly upon Kings and all that are in authority. It

does not depend merely upon Kings, but also upon those in authority,

who are the Kings’ Ministers. In some parts of the world, as in this

country, Kings no longer have the power by themselves, and of their own

motion, to determine the course of public affairs, to keep the peace or

to declare wars. Yet their position must always give them an immense

influence in the government of a nation; and even now, in the two

greatest countries of Europe--Germany and Russia, they have not merely

the supreme control, but the supreme initiative, in affairs of State.

The peace of the world, the possibility of our living a quiet and

peaceable life, depends in Europe, in the main, on the rulers of Russia

and Germany, upon those in authority in France, and upon the King of

England and his Ministers.

It is a momentous fact, and a surprising one to realize. God has so

constituted mankind that the welfare of the masses, of the millions of

ordinary men and women, depends upon the actions of a few dozens of

the leading men in the various countries of Europe. We are proud of

being a constitutional country, and of the fact that by the election

of members of Parliament--by selecting, that is, the members of the

House of Commons--the vast majority of Englishmen have a voice in

creating their own Government; and to a certain extent in that way we

govern ourselves. But nevertheless, in the last resort, the fate of the

country depends upon the dozen or two men who are placed in power by

the House of Commons. It is a simple fact that the mass of the people

in this country had no voice whatever in determining whether we should

or should not enter upon this terrible war. It was determined for us in

the course of a few hours by the King’s Ministers, and by the action

they took in their relations with other countries. In the nature of the

case it must be so. Whether they will or not, great masses of people

and great nations cannot do without a Government; and when they have

established one, that Government must necessarily act in many critical

emergencies without waiting to consult the people whom it governs. A

nation and its King, with his Ministers, constitute as much one body,

to use St. Paul’s image, as the various elements and limbs of the human

body and its brain. We become one single organism, under the control

and management of the brain of that organism, which is the King and

his Ministers. It is an awful responsibility for men to have entrusted

to them, to be able to declare war and thus to launch many millions

of men in their own country, and hundreds of millions of men in the

Empire and in other countries, upon a gigantic struggle, of which all

we know for certain at the outset is that it will involve a sacrifice

of tens of thousands of lives, the devastation of fair countries, and

the waste of enormous treasure. But so it is and ever must be. In the

freest republics that ever existed the chief rulers have had similarly

to act as the brain of the whole people; and it depends on their wisdom

and faithfulness, not merely at critical moments, but in that daily

administration of affairs out of which critical moments arise, whether

the people shall live a quiet and peaceable life or not.

We must add to this the fact--which no one would be more ready

to recognize than these leaders and rulers, Kings, Ministers, or

Presidents, themselves--that the affairs with which they have to deal,

the problems they have to solve, are too vast and mysterious to be

fully grasped by any human brain, and that they are liable to the

most grievous miscalculations. If you need evidence of this, look at

the outbreak of the present war. Our rulers in this country had no

idea at all, within a few days of the event, that such a war was about

to break upon us; the rulers of all other nations have been loudly

proclaiming, ever since it began, that they are not responsible for it,

and that it would not have happened but for circumstances which they

could not foresee or control. There seem, indeed, to have been wild and

unscrupulous spirits in Germany who were eager for it, and who had long

been intriguing for it; but none the less it burst upon Europe suddenly

and unexpectedly, and it baffled the foresight of European statesmen in

general. In the face of such imperfect competence for these problems

of statesmanship, and of such enormous responsibility for them, are

we not compelled to stretch out our hands towards Heaven, and implore

God’s guidance for the rulers who are feeling their way amidst such

dim lights--“for kings and for all in authority,” upon whose words

and actions the fate of the world and its peace, the happiness and

the very life of millions of men and women are dependent? If, indeed,

we could not do so, we might well despair. We should behold before us

a mass of nations rising against one another, blinded--as we see in

Germany that nations can be blinded--by passion and pride, and fighting

wildly, almost like men in the dark, and we might well feel helpless

before such a chaos. But knowing, as it is the privilege of Christians

to know, that “the Lord sitteth above the water-floods,” that “the Lord

remaineth a King for ever,” knowing, as another Psalm says, that “the

Lord is King, be the people never so impatient. He sitteth between the

cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet,” we cry unto the Lord in our

trouble, and implore Him to deliver us out of our distress.

There is another reason for our thus appealing to Him, which is, that

we are assured by His Word that the whole history of the world has

been under his control, and that He has been directing its course

throughout, and determining the fate of nations for His own purposes.

We have before us the most conclusive evidence of this in the history

of the Jews. The course of their history and their position in the

world at the present day were announced to Abraham and Moses thousands

of years ago, and they have fulfilled, and are now fulfilling, the

place and the function in the world which were then assigned to them.

There is nothing, accordingly, on which the Bible insists more urgently

and constantly than that the great issues of war and history are in the

hands of God. It is not merely that He exercises a general controlling

influence over them, but that He has His own purposes, which He is

gradually fulfilling by means of “the unruly wills and affections

of sinful men.” It teaches us that “except the Lord build the house

they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city the

watchman watcheth but in vain.” He does not merely interpose in the

course of the building, but He is the Builder. He is building up,

through the ages, some great design, and all nations will be made in

the end to conform to it.

It is certain, for instance, that it was not by our design or

forethought, or our skill, that the Empire which we are now called on

to defend was built up. A hundred years ago--nay, fifty years ago--no

statesman seems to have imagined that the British Empire would grow,

or could grow, to the vast dimensions it now possesses. Not merely

did they not imagine it--some of them actually deprecated its growth.

It has not been by our will and design, but in great measure against

them, that the British nations have been developed into one great

body politic. It must be the hand of God which we see in all that

development. We have, whether we will or no, a great work laid upon

us all over the world--in India, in America, and in the Islands of

the sea--and we recognize that it is by God’s will that this task and

responsibility, which is at the same time a great privilege, has been

laid upon us. We may well, therefore, implore continually His help

and guidance in the discharge of it. Is it not, then, an imperative

duty, is not St. Paul right in putting it in the very forefront of our

duties, that we should offer up supplications, intercessions, urgent

prayers for the King and for all in authority under him, that they

may be guided to know God’s will in the vast problems which are set

before them? that “God’s wisdom may be their guide and that His Arm may

strengthen them,” and that He may direct their actions and endeavours

to His own glory, to the accomplishment of His great designs, and to

the welfare of our people?

Let us ask ourselves earnestly whether we have realized, as we ought,

since this war began, that it is in God’s hands, and not in ours, to

determine its issue. War is not merely an appeal to the sword--it is,

in a far higher degree, an appeal, the final appeal, to God Himself.

Lord Bacon observes that great soldiers and Commanders have always been

conspicuous for their acknowledgment that the issues of their great

battles and campaigns all depended upon some supernatural power. They

knew better than others the infinite accidents and chances upon which

the issue of war depends, and they realized that it was in God’s power

to determine that issue as He pleased. I fear it must be owned that we

have not, as yet, acknowledged this truth in the present war as much as

we ought. If we had, would not the Services of Intercession in this

Cathedral and elsewhere be more frequently and more earnestly attended?

Let us be reminded then, by this Service of Prayer and Supplication,

on the anniversary of the Accession of our King, how deeply he and

his Ministers need that prayer and intercession, how wholly dependent

they are, in bearing the momentous burdens laid upon them, upon “the

good hand of our God upon them”; and let us henceforth “pray without

ceasing” for God’s blessing upon our King, and particularly, at this

time, for his victory over the bitter enemies by whom he has been

forced into this dreadful struggle.

THE CHRISTIAN SANCTION OF WAR.

AT THE SERVICE OF INTERCESSION FOR THE KING’S NAVAL AND MILITARY FORCES

IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, AUGUST, 1914.

We are assembled here this afternoon, at the call of our King in

Council and of our Archbishop, for the purpose of solemn intercession

with Almighty God on behalf of his Majesty’s naval and military

forces now engaged in war. That is in accordance with the solemn

practice of our fathers at all the great crises of our history; and

it is only about fourteen years since we were similarly interceding

with Almighty God in this cathedral, when the King’s forces were

engaged in an arduous struggle in South Africa. But the gravity of our

present struggle is greater than that of any in the memory of living

men, perhaps greater than that of any other in our history. The very

existence of our Empire, and even the independence of our Kingdom, is

at stake; and the Power by which we are threatened has been, of late

years, deemed the greatest military force in Europe, and a naval force

only second to our own. It may be that the capacities and resources

of our Kingdom and Empire will be strained as they have never been

strained before, and that all our manhood, and even our womanhood,

will be called upon for all the force and endurance of which they are

capable. Prayer to God is incumbent upon us at all times; but there

are special reasons why, in a great war, it is the most important of

all duties, and the most precious of all privileges. The issues of war

are, in an extraordinary degree, beyond the control of man. The issue

of a battle or a campaign may, in fact, be determined by incidents,

moral and physical, which no human power can foresee or control. Our

own deliverance from the Spanish Armada was certainly determined, in an

incalculable degree, by the tremendous storm which wrecked the Spanish

fleet at the critical moment; and again and again in history have

great battles been decided by influences of that nature, or by some

incalculable turn in the feeling and temper of an army. Consequently,

when nations go to war they place themselves and their fortunes in the

hands of God in a more absolute manner than in any other human affairs.

That is what we have now done by declaring war against Germany; and we

have, therefore, more reason than at any other time in our history to

fall before God’s footstool, and to implore Him for the protection and

blessing which He, and He only, can give us. It is still more true now

than in the Psalmist’s time that “there is no king that can be saved by

the multitude of an host, neither is any mighty man delivered by much

strength; an horse is counted but a vain thing to save a man, neither

shall he deliver any man by his great strength. Behold the eye of the

Lord is upon them that fear Him, and upon them that put their trust in

His mercy.” In that spirit we now bow before His throne--in the words

of our daily prayer in time of war and tumult--before the throne of

“the only Giver of all victory.”

Coming before Him in these solemn circumstances, and with this

momentous petition, it becomes us to ask ourselves whether we are doing

so in a spirit, and with a cause, in which we can expect His blessing,

and a favourable answer to our prayers. “If I incline unto wickedness

with my heart,” says the Psalmist, “the Lord will not hear me.” If we

are to offer our prayers with a believing and confident heart, we must

have our conscience clear; and before men ask God’s blessing in so

tremendous an issue as that of war, they must consider with the most

solemn earnestness whether they can feel assured that what they are

doing and asking is in accordance with His will.

As to the lawfulness of war itself, though some good Christian minds

are troubled by the question, the answer seems clear and simple. War

is justifiable for the same reason that it is lawful to put men to

death for great crimes, like murder and treason. The conscience of

mankind at large, the conscience of Christian States at large, has

uniformly wielded the sword of justice in avenging and averting, by the

punishment of death, such crimes of violence and treachery as destroy

the very frame of Society. That use of the sword of justice, moreover,

has the express support of Revelation, for St. Paul has declared that

the ruler “beareth not the sword in vain; he is the minister of God,

an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” But if it is

lawful to use the sword of justice against individuals, it must be

equally lawful to use it against a community of individuals--in other

words, against a society, or a nation, who are unjustly destroying or

threatening the lives and the peace of another society or nation. The

use of the sword--which is an elementary name for war--has been shown

by thousands of years of experience to be, in the last resort, the only

effectual means of punishing and preventing unjust violence. It is vain

to argue what might be possible or desirable if man were an uncorrupt

creature. He is, as a matter of fact, a sinful creature; and, as St.

Paul plainly says, it is God Himself who has put the sword into the

hands of human authority to punish, and to restrain, the effects of

that sinfulness.

Thus the mere fact of our resort to the sword need not of itself burden

our consciences. But if this account of its awful purpose be true, one

indispensable condition for its use is obviously requisite. If the

purpose of the sword is to punish injustice, then we must take care

that it is used for that solemn purpose only. It was not given to men

to enable them to gratify their ambition or pride, or to enlarge their

kingdoms at their pleasure, or for any selfish purpose whatever. He

who draws the sword for any purpose but that of upholding justice and

judgment on the earth is committing the crime of murder on the vastest

scale, and renders himself justly liable to the stern use of the sword

against himself. If, therefore, we are to come before God with a clear

conscience at this moment, we must be able to say, from our hearts,

that we have not now drawn the sword from any selfish motive, or under

the influence of any violent passion, but that we have drawn it simply

and solely in the discharge of our bounden duty, and in fulfilment of

just promises and engagements to our neighbours. My brethren, I believe

it may be confidently asserted that this country has never been engaged

in a war in respect to which this could be said with more unqualified

confidence than in the present case.

I think, indeed, we may thankfully consider, in reviewing our long

history, that the wars by which our Empire has been developed and

established have, on the whole, been of this character, and have

not been prompted by either national or dynastic ambition. The

wars under Queen Elizabeth, in which the germs of our Empire were

laid, were mainly prompted by a just indignation against the cruel

and superstitious tyranny of Spain; and the wars of Marlborough

and Wellington were similarly fought to protect Europe against an

overbearing and unjust domination. In the heat of those struggles we

may have been betrayed, in some instances, into an unjust use of the

sword; but, on the whole, we may thank God that the wars which have

established Great Britain in its present position have been--at least

mainly--fought in just causes. Certainly in the present instance we

have no other motive or object. We covet no other nation’s possessions;

we have not interfered--and do not desire to interfere--with any other

nation’s affairs; we would not willingly exert our influence for any

other purpose but that of promoting righteousness and freedom; and if,

in our later history, we have erred, as human beings can hardly avoid

erring sometimes, the errors have been due to a failure of judgment,

and not of motive or intention. As to the particular occasion of this

war, we have offered no provocation whatever, except what has been

called “the strong antipathy” of right to wrong; the provocation which

adherence to promise and treaties must ever offer to those who would

break them; the provocation which defence of the weak must ever offer

to those who would overbear them. We can say in a word, with a good

conscience, that we are at least earnestly endeavouring to act as the

servants of Him of Whom the Psalmist exclaims: “The Lord is King; the

earth may be glad thereof; yea, the multitude of the isles may be glad

thereof. Clouds and darkness are round about Him; righteousness and

judgment are the habitation of His seat.” It is in the cause of that

righteousness and judgment that we desire to act.

But there is one other condition that we must fulfil, if we are to

dare to claim the favour of God in this great struggle. We must not

only ask whether we are upholding righteousness in our public action

but whether we are observing it in our own hearts, and in our national

life. Sufferings, we are told in our Prayer Book, may be sent “to

correct and amend in us whatever doth offend the eyes of our Heavenly

Father.” Can we fail to be sensible that there is much in our lives,

both private and public, which must offend His eyes? Our private sins

must be left to our private consciences. But who has not listened

during the last few years, with a painful sense of their justice,

to reproaches among ourselves at the luxury, the extravagance, the

reckless pursuit of pleasure, the general self-indulgence, which have

been too prevalent among us? With what heart can men appeal for God’s

favour and protection, in their hour of need, who, in their hours of

well-being, have neglected His worship and disregarded His Word and

Sacraments? Before going into battle as a nation and as individuals,

let us seek His absolution in that comprehensive prayer of our Litany

“that it would please Him to give us true repentance, to forgive us all

our sins, negligences, and ignorances, and to endue us with the grace

of His Holy Spirit to amend our lives according to His Holy Word.”

In so far as we approach Him in this spirit, we may humbly hope for

His blessing on the bravery and the self-sacrifice of our sailors and

soldiers. Those sacrifices, moreover, alike for them and for ourselves,

will be relieved of their worst bitterness, and will be glorified by

a sacred and Divine example. They will not be fruitless sacrifices.

They will be sacrifices which will win for the fellow-countrymen of

those who offer them, and for the world at large, grand additions to

that edifice of righteousness and judgment, of Christian civilization,

towards which the hopes of mankind are directed with an inexpressible

yearning. If this war results, as we now pray that it may, in the

reassertion of principles which were in danger of being forgotten

or overridden, in the re-establishment of the faith of treaties,

and in the protection of the weak against the strong, it will have

established for Europe and the world a great consolidation and advance

in the essential principles of national truth and justice. It is a

comparatively poor thing to die for glory, or for power and wealth;

but it is a grand thing to die for righteousness and equity, for the

God who allows us to be His instruments in upholding them, and for

the King and country whose call we are proud to obey. If, moreover,

men go to war in this spirit, they may claim a still more Divine

privilege. In the sacrifice which soldiers make in a righteous cause,

they are following, in the most essential characteristic, the “author

and finisher of our Faith,” the “Captain of our Salvation,” whose

work is summed up in that soldier-like phrase, “He resisted unto

blood, striving against sin.” The soldier who sheds his blood on the

battlefield in a righteous cause, and with a righteous purpose, is

doing the very thing that Christ did, and he may be assured of Christ’s

approval and blessing. In quiet times we may fail to realize adequately

the solemn truth that, whenever we receive the Holy Communion, we are

receiving spiritual benefits which were won for us by the sacrifice of

the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ. If war, in one aspect, is a

horrible thing, so was the Cross; but the whole hope of the salvation

of mankind, here and hereafter, was won by that Divine bloodshed; and

its grace and glory are reflected over every battlefield, in which

blood is shed in the long struggle against unrighteousness. In these

convictions, and with these solemn resolves, let us now appeal to God,

in firm and humble faith, for His help in this hour of need; and let us

enter into this dread conflict with the full assurance that “God is our

refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”

THE WARNING OF THE TOWER IN SILOAM.

PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, OCTOBER 25, 1914.

“_I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise

perish._”--Luke xiii. 1-5.

“Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” In these solemn

words, twice repeated, our Lord affords us a flash of light upon the

principles and methods of the Divine judgments, and utters a solemn

warning; and I think that both the revelation and the warning will be

found intensely applicable to the distressing sufferings and anxieties

through which we and our country are now passing. Our Lord had been

speaking about the severity of the Divine justice, and about the

blindness of men in not foreseeing the approach of His judgments. “Ye

hypocrites,” He said, “ye can discern the face of the sky and of the

earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time? Yea, and why

even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?” and He warns them that

if they fall into the hands of justice, they will not depart thence

till they have paid the very last mite. At this mention of the Divine

judgment, some who were present told Him of a dreadful act of violence

which had recently occurred, of some Galilæans, “whose blood Pilate

had mingled with their sacrifices.” It would seem they were members of

an extremely zealous sect of Jews, who objected to the custom which

then prevailed of offering sacrifices in the Temple for the welfare of

the Roman Government; and Pilate treated their conduct as treasonable,

and had them slaughtered in the Temple while they were offering their

own sacrifices. The object of the interruption seems to have been to

ask our Lord whether these men had brought such a punishment upon

themselves by unusual sin, and it may also have been intended to tempt

Him to pronounce some censure on Pilate, and thus to bring Himself into

conflict with the Roman authorities. But our Lord’s reply lifts the

matter at once out of any personal or local bearings, and lays down a

principle which applies to all such tragedies. “Suppose ye,” He said,

“that these Galilæans were sinners above all the Galilæans because

they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye

shall all likewise perish.” He drives the truth home by applying it to

another recent tragedy, which might have seemed a mere accident. “Those

eighteen,” He said, “upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them,

think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem?

I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”

It is not for you, He seems to say, to be curious about the reason why

these particular men have suffered in this way. What you should do is

to learn that you are all liable to suffer in the same way, and that

you will do so unless you repent.

Now, it will be seen that there is a momentous revelation contained

in these words, respecting the real cause of such dreadful disasters

as these two incidents illustrated. When He says, “Except ye repent,

ye shall all likewise perish,” He clearly intimates that a Divine

judgment is going forward in the world, which sooner or later brings

suffering and destruction upon men in consequence of their sin. Even

what we might call a physical accident, like the fall of a tower which

kills eighteen persons, is a warning to men that they are liable to

such a death at any moment, and that, therefore, they should repent

and be prepared for it. It is an example of what may befall any of us,

and of what will befall all of us in one way or another, unless we

repent. If we look more particularly into the example of the men whom

Pilate slaughtered, we shall realize that it has a peculiarly close

application to our own day. These men, who were resisting the Roman

Government, were examples of the vehement passions which were at that

time surging among the Jewish people. Our Lord Himself was the victim

of the fierce hatred of foreign influence which prevailed among the

people. The priests and Pharisees said among themselves, “What do we?

For this man doeth many miracles, and if we let Him thus alone, all

men will believe on Him, and the Romans will come and take away both

our place and our nation.” And the High Priest, Caiaphas, replied, “Ye

know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us that one

man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.”

Thus it was that the passions of the Jewish people were worked up into

such blindness and wickedness, that they committed the awful crime of

putting our Lord to death; and then in forty years the prediction of

our Lord was fulfilled, and the great mass of them perished in just

such a slaughter as that which Pilate committed, the blood of the

nation being shed in torrents in the Courts of the Temple, and amidst

its sacrifices. These events--the massacre by Pilate, the murder of

our Lord, the destruction of the Jewish people--were not separate and

disconnected events. They were all the consequence of the sins and

evil passions which our Lord denounced among the Jews of His time;

and the disasters which the Jews suffered were the judgments of God’s

righteousness upon those sins.

Now what this reveals to us is the constitution of that world of human

society amidst which we live. The bedrock of it, the basis of its

whole constitution, is the righteousness of God and His unwavering

maintenance of His moral laws. As the Psalmist says, “Clouds and

darkness are round about Him,” and we cannot follow in all respects

His mysterious dispensations; but one thing we know for certain, that

“righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat.” All His

providential government of mankind is based on the assertion of right

and the punishment and repression of wrong; and, as another prophet

says, when you see God’s judgments in the world you may be sure that

the object of them is that the inhabitants of the world may learn

righteousness. But it is of the first importance we should realize

how those judgments are for the most part executed. It is not, as a

rule, by the special and visible interposition of God’s hand. There

have been times, indeed, as on various occasions in the history of

the Jews, such as the deliverance of His people from Egypt, when God

manifestly interposed, by miraculous means, to punish His enemies and

to deliver His people. But for the most part, and in the general course

of history, the moral and religious laws which God has established in

human nature are left to work out their natural consequences, and men

are punished not merely because of their sins, but by their sins, and

by the working out of their sins in their lives. The explanation of the

chief troubles of mankind, and in particular of the wars and sufferings

which have cursed the earth from generation to generation, is contained

in that statement of St. James: “From whence come wars and fightings

among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your

members? Ye lust and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot

obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask,

and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your

lusts.” When the men and women of whom a nation is composed give way

to those lusts of which St. James speaks, to covetousness, jealousy,

sensuality, and untruthfulness, they are gradually storing up the fuel

of passions for some great conflagration, which arises in the natural

course of things, as the consequence of some great public injustice

into which they are betrayed. They thus rouse the indignation of other

people, they commit injustices which must be resisted, and then the

world is convulsed in some great war like the present.

War, in fact, is the natural penalty by which, under God’s

constitution of the world, the evil passions of men punish themselves.

We may take an example from the physical world. The earth under our

feet is held together, and affords us a sure foothold, by virtue of

certain physical and chemical laws which are perpetually at work in it,

such as the law of gravitation and the laws of chemical attraction.

They are always working silently, and it is by means of the incessant

action of those laws that the whole face of the earth is maintained

from day to day. But from time to time, from some causes which we

do not yet understand, something occurs to disturb their ordinary

peaceful course, and then by their own natural action they produce

some tremendous convulsions, like earthquakes or the eruptions of

volcanoes. So it is with the moral world of national and international

life. It is maintained in peace and stability, as a rule, by the

principles of mutual trust and regard, if not of love, which are at

the root of social and political life; but if falsehood and jealousy

and covetousness accumulate in some part of the world, there is sure,

sooner or later, to be a terrible convulsion and a devastating

eruption of “blood and fire and vapour of smoke.” War is thus the

outburst, the visible embodiment, of the passions behind it, of the

accumulated sins which nations and generations have been indulging. We

look with horror on war and all its miseries, and justly so; but what

we ought to look on with more horror are the sins and wickedness and

passions of which war is the inevitable result. People say that war

is wrong, and of course it is wrong that there should be war; but the

wrong in it is not the actual waging of the war, not at least the using

of the sword, in the Name of God, to assert right against wrong; that

is the bounden duty of the lawful authority. Where the wrong lies is in

the passions which make the war, and which compel men to resort to so

terrible a vindication of righteousness.

Have we not, I must ask, a glaring illustration of the profound moral

principles thus asserted by our Lord in the present war? The means

of communication in our day enable us to realize the feelings which

are at work over the face of Europe amidst this terrible convulsion;

and there is one fact which is appallingly conspicuous in that

manifestation. That fact is the falsehood, the hatred, the violent

imputations of evil motives, the overbearing ambition which are at work

in the great nation--for a great nation it is--with which we are at

war. As I will presently observe, I am far from acquitting ourselves

of all blame in the matter. There was never a human struggle yet in

which either side was perfectly free from blame; but as to the gross

misrepresentations which are eagerly disseminated abroad respecting

the motives and the conduct of this country, there can be no question

whatever, and no adequate excuse. Whatever faults and errors we have

committed, our statesmen have not been animated in the development of

our Empire by greed and selfish ambition, or by a mere desire to be

supreme over other nations. So far as our enemies are acting upon these

ideas of our motives, they are absolutely blind; and there is nothing

more terrible in the revelations which this war affords than that

individuals and nations are capable of such absolute delusions, on so

vast a scale, respecting one another’s motives and characters. It is

plain that what has made this war is a total absence of that Christian

charity between individuals and nations which St. Paul inculcates as

“the very bond of all virtues,” and which is therefore the bond of all

society. The most heart-rending thing, after all, is not that we are at

war, but that Christian nations should be capable, in their daily life

and thought, of such an absolute negation of those principles of moral

life and faith which our Lord came to establish among us. Our Lord here

warns us that unless men repent of this uncharitable temper, and of the

sins associated with it, war can never be abolished, and we shall all

perish in some fearful conflagration. At present the conflagration,

like the tower in Siloam, has wrought its destruction mainly upon

others than ourselves. A modern despot, indignant, like Pilate, at

opposition to the claims of his nation, has mingled the blood of

Belgian men and women and children with their sacrifices, with their

ruined churches and desolated homes. But it is certainly not because a

people like the brave Belgians were sinners above all men that dwelt

in Europe that they have thus suffered. “I tell you, Nay,” our Lord’s

Voice is heard in this text; “but, except ye repent, ye shall all

likewise perish.” Look to yourselves; ask yourselves whether there are

or have been sins prevailing among you which, under the laws of God’s

righteousness, must work out their evil consequence in your social and

national life; and repent, lest ye likewise perish.

It is impossible, in dealing with this subject, not to express, as

I have done, a deep indignation at the motives and the spirit which

have been displayed by our enemies in this war. But we should miss the

whole purpose of our Lord’s warning unless we applied it in the first

instance, and in the main, to ourselves. Let us bear in mind that what

has happened in Belgium and France might in conceivable circumstances,

in the further development of scientific warfare, in the air as well

as in the sea, happen to ourselves; and let us take to heart the clear

warning of our Lord that the only way to avert such destructions, and

to avoid perishing ourselves, is to repent, and from our hearts to

cultivate among us those principles of charity, truth, righteousness

and religion, which alone can keep human nature in peace.

After all, can we be sure that we are not partly to blame for this

war by our own faults and failures? Have our statesmen, have we

as a nation, been looking facts in the face and meeting them with

faithfulness and self-sacrifice? Do not many among us ask whether this

war would ever have been possible if we had realized our danger and

our duty in time, and prepared ourselves, at whatever cost, to avert

the danger? How far have we, and those who guide us, allowed ourselves

to be diverted from the truth of our condition by sectarian and party

passions and uncharitable class jealousies? Have we seriously laid to

heart “the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions?” Is it

compatible with the love of God and of Christ that those divisions

should prevail so far as to lead to the curtailment of the Christian

instruction of our school-children, and the secularization of property

left by our ancestors for the hallowing of God’s Name and the promotion

of Christ’s Kingdom? We have, moreover, been on the verge of civil

war; and the very possibility of such war is proof enough, on the

principles we have been considering, that some of the passions which

lead to all wars have been rife among us. The possibility of that

intestine war seems, in fact, to have been one of the considerations

which encouraged the present attack upon us. Add to all this the social

and personal vices, against which good men among us and great societies

have been struggling for years, and have we not abundant reason to

apply earnestly to our nation and to our individual selves the Lord’s

warning: “Repent, or ye shall likewise perish?” For my part, I could

wish that we were afforded an opportunity, by some solemn appointment

of a Day of National Humiliation as well as Intercession, to search

our consciences in the sight of God, and to unite in one great act

of national repentance. But let us at least endeavour to discharge

this duty of repentance and amendment for our own souls and in our

individual lives; and we may then be assured that we are doing the best

we can towards averting from our nation that suffering and ruin, which

are brought so closely home to us in the miseries of our Allies.

THE RIGHTEOUS IDEAL.

AT CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, SEPTUAGESIMA SUNDAY, 1915.

“_Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,

nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the

scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord: and in his law

doth he meditate day and night._”--Ps. i. 12.

It is with the utmost appropriateness that this psalm is placed first

in the Psalter, for it expresses the spirit which underlies all other

psalms, and, in fact, the whole of the Scriptures. Its message lies,

indeed, at the root of the religion of the Old Testament, and of the

New Testament also. Let us notice, in the first place, that its opening

word--the word “blessed”--is the keynote of the Scriptures from first

to last. In the first chapter of Genesis, which we have read this

morning, we read, not only that God saw everything that He had made,

and behold it was very good; but more particularly, that when God made

man He blessed them, and gave them a special commission. He placed

them in the Garden of Eden, in which He made to grow every tree that

is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the Tree of Life also in

the midst of the Garden. He blessed them, and intended them to be

blessed; and He gave them a command which they had only to obey in

order to enjoy that blessing. Man forfeited the blessing by disobeying

the command; but the last chapter of the Bible, which we have read this

evening, describes the recovery of it by those who have faithfully

served Him. It describes a day when there shall be no more curse, but

the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in the new Garden of the

Tree of Life. “The throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and

His servants shall serve Him; and they shall see His face; and His name

shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and

they need no light of lamp, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God

giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.” Thus the

Bible holds out, from beginning to end, the prospect of blessedness, or

perfect happiness, as that which God designs for men, and which will be

ultimately bestowed upon His faithful servants. Between the beginning

and the end, in the midst of this great dispensation, when our Lord

appeared with His new covenant, His message is described as a Gospel,

as “good tidings of great joy,” and the first word He utters in that

great Sermon on the Mount, which contains his special teaching, is this

characteristic word “blessed.” He repeats it again and again, “Blessed

be ye poor.... Blessed are ye that hunger now.... Blessed are ye that

weep.” The promise of blessing is thus the keynote of our Saviour’s

message.

Now this characteristic of the Bible and of our Saviour’s teaching

explains, and in great degree justifies, the universal craving of

men and women for happiness. The pursuit of happiness in one form or

another is the most universal motive of human conduct. It inspires some

of our best exertions, and it prompts most of our sins. The motive

of our first mother, as described in the third chapter of Genesis,

is still that of nearly all of us, in one way or another. “When the

woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant

to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of

the fruit thereof and did eat.” The world, the flesh, and the devil

are perpetually offering men fruits of this kind, and the craving for

the happiness they promise is so great that men and women seize them,

in spite of the knowledge they have in their consciences that to do

so is wrong and against the will of God. In daily life we find that

different fruits--forbidden fruits--appeal to different classes of men

and women, but they are all liable to be attracted by some fruit or

other and to be possessed by some “ruling passion.” It is striking,

moreover, to look at the course of history, and observe how different

fruits, different ideals, have attracted the various nations of the

world. To the Greek the attraction was that of beauty and art, and

their temptation was to give themselves up to the pleasures which

those ideals could afford them, with but little moral restraint.

The fruit which most attracted the Roman mind was that of rule and

power. The passion, indeed, for creating great empires has been

one of the strongest in mankind. We see it in full strength in the

great Assyrian and Babylonian empires, and, unhappily, we see it in

full force in a great nation of the present day. These pleasures and

glories have accordingly been the subject of a vast amount of human

literature--poetry, and history, and song.

But the characteristic of the people of Israel, and of Jewish

literature, is that none of these ideals of happiness, whether of

beauty or glory or power, have animated their best representatives. The

one ideal which was always before the minds of their great prophets,

and poets, and teachers was the ideal of righteousness, the ideal of

the law of God, which is the subject of this first Psalm. The truth,

with which the Book of Genesis opens, that God has given a law to

men, that He has declared His will to them, and given them statutes

and commandments in which that will is expressed--this is the supreme

thought in the mind of the Jewish Psalmist or prophet, and, in spite

of all their faults, of the Jewish nation as a whole. Psalm cxix.

is, perhaps, the fullest expression of this conviction and passion.

That psalm is one long variation of its opening verse, “Blessed are

they that are undefiled in the way, and walk in the law of the Lord.

Blessed are they that keep His testimonies, and seek Him with their

whole heart.” “O how love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day.”

“How sweet are Thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to

my mouth! Through Thy precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate

every false way.” You will see that these phrases express a positive

passion in the mind of the Psalmist for the law of God--as strong a

passion at least, or even stronger, than the passions of some men for

the pleasures of sense, and of others for the pleasures of ambition and

worldly success. “I opened my mouth,” says the Psalmist, “and drew in

my breath, for my delight was in Thy commandments.” The whole frame of

the man, his body as well as his mind, is absorbed in this passion for

the law of God. The Jew craves for blessing, or for happiness, as much

as the Greek or the Roman, but he seeks that blessing in the knowledge

and obedience of the law of God. He knows it is to be found in the way

of righteousness and nowhere else. Thus the first Psalm is a fitting

introduction to all the rest. “His delight,” it says, “is in the law

of the Lord; and in His law doth he meditate day and night. And he

shall be like a tree planted by the waterside, that will bring forth

his fruit in due season. His leaf also shall not wither; and look,

whatsoever he doeth, it shall prosper.” This psalm, in short, embodies

the very essence of the belief of the true Jew, which is that the law

of God and the righteousness of God are the one source of all happiness

and blessedness, and that the highest privilege of men and women is

to give themselves up, body and soul, to the pursuit of the happiness

which is there to be found.

I think we shall all recognize that the tendency of men and women

is, for the most part, too different from this. They may wish to do

right and to avoid wrong, but it is comparatively rare for the supreme

passion of their lives to be the pursuit of righteousness, and for

the supreme love of their lives to be for the law of God. Is it not

our general tendency to pursue our own objects, to seek enjoyment,

and happiness, and success in our own ways, and to regard the law of

God, and the principles of righteousness, as a controlling power, an

external authority, which checks us when we are in danger of going

wrong and so far guides us? but the love of it, and the longing for

obedience to it, is too rarely the main motive of our lives. That is

the characteristic of those whom we regard as Saints, but it is not, I

fear, the characteristic of the mass of men and women. This, however,

is the ideal put before us, throughout the Scriptures, as that which

ought to be predominant in our hearts and lives. “Thou shalt love

the Lord thy God,” says Moses, “with all thy heart, and with all thy

soul, and with all thy might.” “This,” said our Lord, “is the great

commandment.” “Blessed,” according to this Psalm, “is the man whose

delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law doth he meditate day

and night.” It is not enough for such a man not to do wrong; his whole

soul is absorbed in the passion for doing what is right. He believes

that the law of God has set before him a great ideal, a vision of the

perfection of human nature; and his great craving is to realize that

ideal and to be what God intended him to be. He knows that all blessing

is to be found in that law and in those visions of perfection, and he

pursues them with his whole heart.

This spirit of the godly man is associated with another aspect of

the same truth which is ever present in the Bible, and which is very

imperfectly realized among men in general. We are apt to be satisfied

with recognizing right and wrong as one of the many elements with which

we are concerned in life. Life is a vast scene of innumerable passions,

and interests, and pleasures, and schemes--personal, social, political,

and imperial; and nearly all of us recognize, no doubt, that right and

wrong, righteousness and justice, have a momentous place among these

various energies and interests; but in the light of the Bible, and in

the teaching of our Lord, that is a very imperfect view to take of

their position. There, right and wrong, righteousness and justice, are

supreme over all other interests; they are the foundation on which

the whole edifice of life is built up; or they are, as it were, the

very cement by which the whole is held together. As the history of the

Jewish people is told in the Bible, every event in their career is

shown to turn on the question of their righteousness or wickedness.

God’s one object is to educate them to be a righteous nation, to keep

His commandments, and statutes, and judgments, so that they may realize

His great design for them. They suffer punishment, such as invasion

by enemies, or captivity by Assyria or Rome, not merely because of

the ambition of those nations, and of their own comparative weakness,

but because they were becoming faithless to the law of God, and not

living for His honour and glory. All that the world, and the worldly

historian, might see of them was that they had provoked the Assyrian

or Roman monarch by some act of self-assertion and pride, and that

he avenged himself by invading and desolating their country. But the

prophetical men who wrote the Books of Kings, and other historical

Books of the Old Testament, went behind this immediate cause, and

saw that it was by the providence of God that the people were thus

punished, because they had forgotten the God of their fathers, and

were ceasing to serve Him. They were inspired to see this element of

righteousness, and of the law of the Lord, as the most essential in

the whole history, and asserting itself continually under the control

of God’s providence.

I venture to think we might illustrate the matter by an example from

modern science. We know now that the most important and universal

force in nature is that of which one of the most familiar forms is

electricity. We know that its influence in the form of light and

magnetism pervades the whole of nature; we know that the very movements

of our limbs, of our hands and fingers, are dependent upon it, that

this is the force which animates our nerves and through them controls

our whole bodies. We know that the element in which it works--the

ether--pervades the whole universe, and that the light which flashes

from stars hundreds of millions of miles away is due to this subtle

force. And yet until less than a hundred years ago men hardly realized

its existence. It was an unseen force, which worked behind all other

forces, and even men of science had but a dim appreciation of it. So it

was with this supreme force of righteousness, until it was brought into

full light by the revelation of the prophets and of our Lord and His

Apostles. What they revealed to us, what the Bible is teaching in every

page, what our Lord, above all, impresses on us with supreme force, is

that God’s righteousness is like the ethereal fluid, which is at once

the illuminating agent and the motive force of all human life. It is

quiet for the most part, and men hardly observe it; but on a sudden it

bursts out into some great storm, like that which startled the author

of Psalm xxix. “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God of

glory thundereth: the Lord is upon many waters.” We see the flash of

the lightning of righteousness, and hear the crash of its thunder. “The

voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire. The voice of the Lord

shaketh the wilderness.” That is the meaning, no doubt, of a great war

like the present. Some evil had been accumulating, some passions of

ambition and greed, some failures in duty, some defections from truth,

faults of one kind in one nation, and sad failures of duty in another,

and, on a sudden, some spark lights an explosion, and the whole world

is ablaze with flames of fire. So it is also in our private lives. We

may go on for a long time yielding to weaknesses, or even sins, and

righteousness may seem to be silent, the voice of conscience may seem

to be a mere voice and not to be asserting its supremacy; but, on a

sudden, or after a long and gradual accumulation of wrong-doing, God

asserts His law, our neglect of righteousness finds us out, and God’s

justice is vindicated upon us.

These considerations ought to lead to a deeper devotion to those

principles of right and wrong, and to that supreme vision of

righteousness which the Bible and our Lord and His Apostles impress

upon us; but I would add that it is the great message we should take

home to ourselves, not merely in our individual lives, but in our

national life. We see before us a great nation, endowed with some of

the highest capacities of human nature, allowing itself to be absorbed

more and more, year by year, by a great passion for power and dominion

and supremacy in the world. This passion has taken such hold on it

that it thinks itself justified in over-riding and defying the laws

of truth and justice and mercy, even in the imperfect form in which

they have been formally recognized in the law of nations. Everything,

we are told, must yield to the demands of a nation which believes that

a certain supremacy in the world is necessary for it. The consequence

is that the air has to be cleared by this awful outburst of national

thunder and lightning. But let us apply the danger and the lesson to

ourselves. What is our own ideal as a nation and as an empire? Perhaps

we too have been in danger of being fascinated too much by that vision

of empire. It is a legitimate ideal when applied to right purposes,

and subject to the right control; but those purposes must be those of

Divine righteousness, and the control is the control of the law of

God. If we make it the main object of every power with which God has

entrusted us to promote His laws, to support and to spread further the

Kingdom of His Christ, to do righteousness and justice in the world, so

far as our power and influence reaches; if for that purpose we strive

to ensure that all our legislation, and all our imperial and national

action, is deliberately and constantly directed to the support and

extension of the law of God and of Christ, then we may hope for God’s

blessing on our achievements, and may trust to be preserved from those

perversions of national spirit, and from that military and arbitrary

passion, against which we have at this moment to maintain so desperate

a struggle. Let us strive after this great object, alike in ourselves,

in our country, and throughout our Empire, and then we may hope that as

a nation we may be, in the Psalmist’s words, “like a tree planted by

the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season,” and

that whatsoever we do may prosper. In a word, as a nation no less than

as individuals, let our delight be in the law of the Lord, and in His

law let us meditate day and night.

REASONS FOR INTERCESSION.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL: DAY OF SPECIAL INTERCESSION FOR THE WAR, JUNE 17,

1915.

“_The heathen make much ado, and the kingdoms are moved: but God hath

shewed His voice, and the earth shall melt away._”--Ps. xlvi. 6.

We are come here this evening to offer our earnest prayers and

supplications to God for His help in this grievous and dangerous crisis

of our national life, to entreat Him to grant the victory to our King

and his Allies, and to deliver our nation, our Empire, and the world

from the violence and oppression with which they are threatened by the

enemy. In order that we may do so aright, it is necessary we should

realize distinctly what is God’s special concern with the war, and

what is our own relation to Him in respect to it. Now, the one supreme

truth which I would urge upon you this evening is that the war, as a

whole--its origin, its course, its end, and its purpose--is in the

hands of God, and that we must look to Him, and to Him alone, for our

guidance in it, and our deliverance from it. I fear we are too much

disposed to think of the natural causes of the war, of the natural

means we have of conducting it, and of the human and physical forces

which are engaged in it; while we think of God as standing outside the

struggle, and appeal to Him to interfere in it, as we might appeal to

some great human power, in our extremity. We are too much disposed

to act and think as if the result depended entirely on the number of

men we can put in the field, upon the munitions of war we can obtain,

the guns and the shells and the other physical means we can bring

into action. It is true that these thing--men and the munitions of

war--are the indispensable instruments of success and victory. Even

in times when God interfered miraculously, He required His people, as

under Joshua and David, to put forth their full strength, and to make

the utmost sacrifices for their cause. But the main lesson which is

inculcated in the Scriptures respecting war is that it is one of God’s

great agencies for carrying out His will and accomplishing His own

purposes, and that its issue is in all cases absolutely in His hands.

It is He Who permits war; it is He Who in the exercise of His righteous

judgment, occasions war; it is He Who alone can determine the issue of

war; and it is His purposes, and not ours, which are brought to pass by

war.

If, in fact, we would apprehend our position and the position of our

Empire and of Europe in this war, we must in spirit see God upon His

throne, permitting by His judgment the fierce passions of war to break

forth, and controlling the whole course of the tremendous storms they

involve by His justice and His will. As the Psalmist says, “The Lord

reigneth, be the people never so impatient, He sitteth between the

Cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet.” Or, again, “The Lord is King,

the earth may be glad thereof; yea, the multitude of the isles may be

glad thereof: Clouds and darkness are round about Him, righteousness

and judgment are the habitation of His seat. There shall go a fire

before Him and burn up His enemies on every side. His lightnings gave

shine unto the world: the earth saw it and was afraid.” That might

be taken for a picture of war with the thunders and lightnings of its

“red artillery.” Let us, if we would turn this occasion to due account,

look up for a while from the human thunders and lightnings by which

the earth and sea are now shaken; let us raise our eyes and our hearts

to the Psalmist’s vision of God sitting on His throne, above all these

earthly and human struggles and sufferings, and though clouds and

darkness are round about Him, yet controlling them by His righteous

judgment.

Let us look into this general consideration a little more particularly.

War is the result of human passion, human error, and human sin. If

only men were unselfish, wise, and true, there would be no occasion

for the struggles from which it springs; but instead of that they are

covetous, foolish, and blind, and God has so constituted mankind that

the ultimate appeal of these passions and follies must be made to

force; and in the ordinary course of His providence He leaves them to

make that appeal. He lets their passions work themselves out to their

natural results, and so bring their own punishment upon themselves.

If, indeed, men sought His guidance and grace in all humility and

earnestness before war broke out, we may be confident He would guide

and control them; but the very danger of their pride and their passion

is that it makes them forget Him, and then He suffers them to find

their need of Him by leaving them to bear the consequences. But

when those consequences have broken out into war, they are then, in

the most absolute degree, subject to His over-ruling hand. It is an

essential characteristic of war that it sets forces loose which are

beyond calculation, and beyond human control. Ordinary ways of action

are suspended, and we become subject to the most unexpected and most

incalculable influences. We are beginning to see it ourselves in the

present war. We are forced to resort to public measures which all

confess to be absolutely unprecedented; and the whole world, old and

new, is immersed in dangers and disorders never before dreamed of. But

when men and nations are in this tumult and disorder and blindness,

then they realize, as they too often fail to do in quiet times,

that they are absolutely dependent on God. He has at His command

infinite natural and spiritual forces by which the result of a war

or a battle can be determined. As in the famous battle of Joshua, or

in the destruction of the Spanish Armada in our own history, storms

and tempests, or a mere turn in the weather, or it may be added, the

invisible interposition of some angelic agent, may defeat all human

schemes and determine the issue of a battle, and, through a battle,

the fate of an Empire. Of great commanders, moreover, no less than of

kings, the words of our Collect are true, that their hearts are in

God’s rule and governance, and that He disposes and turns them as it

seems best to His godly wisdom.

The message of the Bible, in fact, from first to last, the message of

Jewish history, and the message of the Psalms, is that God is in a

pre-eminent degree the “Lord of war,” with Whom it lies to bring on

men the judgment of war, to control war, and to make wars to cease.

“O come hither,” says the Psalm of my text, “behold the works of the

Lord, what destruction He hath brought upon the earth. He maketh wars

to cease in all the world, he breaketh the bow, and knappeth the spear

in sunder, and burneth the chariots in the fire. Be still, then, and

know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen and I will be

exalted in the earth.” Or, as it is expressed in another Psalm, “There

is no king that can be saved by the multitude of an host, neither is

any mighty man delivered by much strength. A horse is counted but a

vain thing to save a man, neither shall he deliver any man by his great

strength. Behold the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear Him, upon

them that put their trust in His mercy.” Or, once more, “We have heard

with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what Thou hast done in

their time of old; How Thou hast driven out the heathen with Thy hand,

and planted them in; how Thou hast destroyed the nations and cast them

out. For they gat not the land in possession through their own sword;

neither was it their own arm that helped them; but Thy right hand and

Thine arm, and the light of Thy countenance, because Thou hadst a

favour unto them.”

The first conviction, then, with which we should come before God to-day

is that, although the utmost efforts on our part are required, still,

when we have used the last ounce of our strength, and made the last

sacrifice of life and limb, we are absolutely dependent for the issue

upon the will, the power, and the over-ruling providence of God. We

are bound to fall at His feet as His helpless creatures, absolutely

dependent on His hand. We are bound to recognize that the wealth and

power we enjoy, the great position which this Empire occupies in the

world, have been gifts from Him, and that we gat not this possession

by our own sword; neither was it our own arm that helped us; but God’s

right hand and God’s arm, and the light of His countenance, because He

had a favour towards us, for some great purposes of His own.

But what were those purposes? If we feel that we are thus the

instruments of God’s hand, to be used as He pleases, we must needs

ask, with anxious earnestness, What are His great purposes? and can we

know whether we are acting in accordance with them? We know that we

are not in the hands of an arbitrary power or an unreasoning will. We

know that whatever God does is done with reason and justice and love.

Here, again, it is our privilege to have revealed to us, in God’s Word,

the great purposes for which He is working. His methods and His ways

of carrying His purposes out are beyond our comprehension, but He has

graciously told us what those purposes are. Their great object is the

manifestation of His glory, His truth, His love, to be the light, the

salvation, the infinite happiness of man. That was the object of the

whole of His work in establishing the people of Israel in their land,

in protecting them, in bringing punishments upon them, in delivering

them from their enemies, or allowing them to fall into captivity. By

means of them--through their history, their Prophets, their Psalmists,

and their Kings--He made known that grand revelation of Himself which

is recorded in our Bibles. All these acts were done, and their memory

is preserved, in order that all the world might see and learn that

in knowledge of Him, in obedience to Him, in love to Him and prayer

to Him, is life and health, in body and soul, in this world and in

the next. Let us be assured that that remains His purpose, and the

guiding rule of His providence, throughout all history, and in our

own, to the present day. If God has given us wealth, and strength, and

prosperity, and imperial power, we may be sure that it is in order that

we may be His instruments for the spread of His Kingdom, for bringing

the knowledge of Christ and of Christ’s salvation to the ends of the

earth, that the love of Christ, the example of Christ, the law of

Christ may be established throughout the world. Do not let us suppose

that there is any other object whatever in God’s dispensations. The

manifestation of God in Christ, and the bringing of all human souls,

all human life, into harmony with it, into the full enjoyment of it,

and consequently into perfect obedience to His will--this is the end of

all the struggles, of all the wars, of all the sufferings of mankind,

mysterious as they are, and utterly baffling to our feeble apprehension.

There is surely an infinite comfort in realizing this great revelation.

If we grasp the assurance that this is the sure and certain end

of God’s dispensations, we can bear with patience, and even with

thankfulness, the sufferings and sorrows through which they are worked

out. While we bitterly mourn the loss of those who are sacrificed in

such a war as this, we can feel that they have laid down their lives

in the eternal battle in which Christ is the Commander, and in which

we are all taking part, and that we remain one with them, and they one

with us, in serving Christ and asserting the will of God.

One army of the Living God,

To His command we bow,

Part of the host have crossed the flood,

And part are crossing now,

or will be crossing soon. Only let us take care, if we are to have the

reward, hereafter, of having served in this great army, that we are

working, fighting, dying, and suffering bereavement, in the cause of

this great Commander and in accordance with His will.

But if these are the purposes with which God has directed all history,

and controls all wars, we cannot dare to come before Him, and ask for

His help, unless the spirit in which we are joining in this war is

in harmony with His, and unless we mean, with His help, to act and

fight in entire devotion to Him, and in obedience to Christ. If we

fought merely to gain victory, to assert the supremacy of our Empire,

to establish our superiority over other nations, we could not expect

His countenance and help, and we should be affronting His Majesty and

His Holiness by asking for it; but these are not our aims. They are,

it appears, in the main, those of our enemy, and for that reason we

may be confident that God’s face will be against them. But, so far as

we are fighting for a kingdom and an Empire which acknowledges in all

things the sovereignty of our Lord Jesus Christ, which endeavours to

act, to govern, and to serve in accordance with His will, and which

will promote and protect the spread of His Kingdom--so far as we are

conscious in our consciences that that is our aim--we may confidently

come before Him and appeal to Him to help us with His right hand and

His holy arm. But we cannot thus serve Him and obey Him as a nation

unless we obey and serve Him in our own individual lives; and when

we kneel, therefore, before Him to-day we are called upon to pledge

ourselves, with the utmost sincerity and earnestness, to give our

hearts and wills and lives up to Him in all things, with greater truth

and singleness of heart than we have ever yet realized.

If we look candidly into the recent life of our nation, it must, I

fear, be acknowledged that we have in many respects grievously failed

in this Christian spirit. The habits of our people have in too many

respects declined from the Christian standard which was set us by our

forefathers in their best days. The worship and service of God and

Christ have not been held so high among us as the supreme duty of life.

We see it in the increasing neglect of the public worship of God, in

a less general piety of life, in a growing disposition to acquiesce

in standards of action which are not in all respects those of the New

Testament; in the failure to look to the authority of Christ and His

Apostles as the supreme rule in all the relations of life, in the

relations of men and women, in the ideals of domestic and private life.

We have lived too much for this life and too little for the next. We

have cared too much for time and too little for eternity. We shall not

be able to fulfil the purposes of God for our nation and for the world

unless we amend our lives in these respects, unless we humbly confess

our failure before Him, and set ourselves resolutely to live more

Christian lives in the future. If we kneel before Him this evening in

this spirit of confession for the past, and of heartfelt devotion for

the future, we may come boldly to His throne of grace; and we may be

thankful to be assured that our country and our country’s cause, and

the welfare of all who are dear to us, here and hereafter, are in His

hands. You are invited to begin your supplication this evening with

that penitential Psalm, in which David confessed from the bottom of his

heart his own grievous sin, but was also inspired by God’s Holy Spirit

to seek comfort and regeneration, righteousness and peace. That is the

spirit in which we should approach God at all times, but especially

in a time of sore trial like the present; and if we do so, we may

confidently join in the concluding petition, in which the Psalmist

beseeches God’s blessing upon His nation. “The sacrifice of God is

a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt Thou

not despise. O be favourable and gracious unto Zion; build Thou the

walls of Jerusalem. Then shalt Thou be pleased with the sacrifice of

righteousness,” with the devoted offerings and service of a regenerated

and Christian nation. God grant it, for Christ’s sake.

THE ETERNAL SOURCE OF GOODNESS.

PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, MARGATE, NOVEMBER 7, 1915.

“_Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh

down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither

shadow of turning._”--St. James i. 17.

In these words a singularly vivid picture is set before us. God is

represented to us as the Sun in the Heavens, from Whom light and warmth

are perpetually streaming. The text does not merely say that all good

gifts come from above and that none but good gifts come from thence.

It means also that those good gifts are perpetually being poured upon

us, just as light and heat are perpetually flowing from the sun. But

it points out one great difference between the physical sun and this

Divine source of grace and glory. The sun and the other lights of the

heavens which are dependent upon it are all liable to be obscured or

eclipsed. They are “subject to variableness and shadow of turning,”

that is, to the shadows occasioned by their turning in their daily

revolutions, so that daylight is succeeded by the darkness of night,

and the moon waxes and wanes. But the light of the Divine glory and

grace is never thus obscured from us. It is perpetually shining, and

we can enjoy its blessed influence at every moment. God is the Father

of Lights--the Father of Light of all kinds; and all grace and truth

are perpetually proceeding from Him. “Every good gift and every perfect

boon is from above,” coming down continually from “the Father of Lights

with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” This is the

great truth which is embodied in the beautiful words of the Collect

just used, “Lord of all power and might Who art the Author and Giver of

all good things.”

This is the first grand truth which is revealed to us by our Christian

faith. It is involved in the revelation of God to us as our Father in

Heaven, and it is impressed on us in the Sermon on the Mount, when our

Lord bids us live as “the children of our Father which is in Heaven:

Who maketh the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth

rain on the just and on the unjust.” It would be well for us to realize

this more fully and constantly. We see the sun in the Heavens; we are

sensible of its lifegiving influences day by day; but we do not always

have so vividly before us the Supreme Sun of the spiritual Heavens,

and we are tempted to live without the constant realization of His

presence. There are, indeed, experiences which are a great trial to our

faith in this constant Presence, and which even make men and women ask

themselves in perplexity whether there can be, in reality, any such

perpetually Divine source of all good things--whether any Divine Power

is really at all times pouring the best blessing upon mankind. What is

the meaning, for instance, many anxious hearts have asked themselves

at a time like this--what is the meaning and the explanation of such

fearful miseries as the world is now suffering through the present war?

Can it be a God from Whom all good things are perpetually coming Who

permits half the world to fall into such distresses and agonies as we

have heard of lately, and are daily hearing? The evil in the world has

at all times been a perplexity to faith, and when manifested on such a

tremendous scale, when it rises before us in the monstrous form of an

awful war, the question presses upon our hearts and minds with painful

force. But the privilege of the Christian is to maintain through all

these distresses the proclamation that the love of God, the goodness

of God, the mercy of God, the blessing of God are still at work,

notwithstanding the clouds with which they seem obscured. Clouds and

darkness may be round about Him, but righteousness and judgment are the

habitation of His throne.

The general explanation of this great mystery is that these sufferings

are the means by which God asserts the supremacy of righteousness and

truth. He has so ordered the world that unrighteousness, ungodliness,

untruth, immorality of all kinds inevitably punish themselves by

leading to appeals to force, and so provoke the wars and fightings

of which St. James speaks in this Epistle. “From whence,” he says,

“come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your

lusts, that war in your members? Ye lust and have not; ye kill, and

desire to have and cannot obtain”--can there be a truer description,

in brief, of the origin of the present war? These are God’s judgments,

in which He so orders the world that nations and individuals punish

themselves for their indulgence in covetous and unbridled passions.

They will not submit to be checked by conscience or by reason, and

therefore God leaves them to the natural consequences of their mutual

lusts and violences. In fact, the miseries of war are a conspicuous

instance of the great truth that good things are always coming from

God. Vengeance for evil is a good thing; and the punishment, even

the bitter punishment, of selfishness, whether in individuals or in

national life, the severest punishments of covetousness, arrogance,

forgetfulness of God, disobedience to Christ--these punishments are

good things; and if God is chastising Europe for such sins, and

ourselves in no small measure, He is doing it at once in judgment and

in mercy. It is a warning to every nation, and to every man and woman,

to consider in what respect they have been failing in their duty to God

and to Christ, to their neighbour, and even to themselves, and to pray

God to open their eyes and enable them to repent and amend. What we see

before us in a convulsion like this, is the outburst of the lightnings

and thunders of righteous judgment, and if it brings men to their knees

in penitence and amendment of life, it may prove one of God’s greatest

blessings to the world.

We may understand this the better if we consider, more particularly,

the means by which God is always pouring upon the world those blessed

influences of goodness and righteousness of which the text and the

Collect speak. They tell us that He is like the sun in the heavens

pouring His bright beams upon us and the world at large. Where is that

Sun? It is in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ, in all His words

and deeds, and in those Scriptures which, as He said, testify of Him.

The answer is contained in the truth that “God, Who, at sundry times

and in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers, by the

prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, Who is

the brightness of His glory and the express image of His Person.” “No

man,” we are told, “hath seen God at any time. The only begotten Son

Who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” He declares

Him in various ways. In the first place, the grace and truth and glory

of God are seen in the Face of Jesus Christ, in His life as recorded

in the Gospels, and in His words. “He that hath seen me,” said our

Saviour Himself, “hath seen the Father.” It is God Himself Who is seen

in every act and word of Jesus Christ, and if we want to know God, to

realize His character and His will, we have only to study the life and

words of our Lord, and we see it all in vivid human features. God in

Christ is as visible to the eyes of our hearts and minds as the sun in

the heavens. As the physical sun is visible to every human eye, so the

sun of the spiritual world--God Himself--is visible to every human mind

in the person of our Lord. This comparison is as old as the Psalms.

“The heavens,” says the 19th Psalm, “declare the glory of God, and the

firmament sheweth His handiwork,” and then it proceeds, “the law of

the Lord is perfect, converting the soul, the testimony of the Lord

is sure, making wise the simple.” The law of the Lord of which the

Psalmist spoke was that revelation of the Will of God which was given

to the Jews at sundry times and in divers manners, and is recorded

in the ancient Scriptures. But that law is now summed up, explained,

enlarged, and perfected in the face of Jesus Christ, and in His words.

In Him is God to be seen. In Him is the source of the highest moral and

spiritual goodness.

The Collect goes on to pray “Graft in our hearts the love of Thy Name,

increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness.” The Name

of God means the character of God, and if we are to love character we

must see it, and we can see it in Jesus Christ and nowhere else. If

you wish to love God, you must learn to love Jesus Christ. To love God

is to love righteousness, truth, and goodness, and in Jesus Christ we

see them in life and in human reality. Righteousness, goodness, truth,

purity, grace, may be loved, indeed, in the abstract; but the love

for them must be infinitely deepened if we see them concentrated in a

living person, so that the love of them is identified with the love of

Him. If, in fact, we would keep the love of these great things alive

in our hearts, if we would continually deepen it, if we would have

the eyes of our minds and hearts opened more and more, the supreme

necessity is that we should learn more and more of Jesus Christ, live

with Him by constant study of His deeds and words, and so open our

souls to the impress of His grace and truth. The history of the world

since He lived and died is the sufficient proof of this fact. The

Christian Church, which is charged with the duty and the privilege of

living in His spirit and working in His name, has, notwithstanding many

failures and faults, held up before the world the highest standard

of goodness and truth. There is no more conspicuous illustration of

this influence of Christ and His Church than the fact that the noble

Societies which, by their devoted care of the wounded, now mitigate the

horrors of war, are called “Red Cross” Societies, and were founded and

maintained in obedience to the spirit of Christ. Since Christ came,

it is through Him that all these good things do come, and if we would

enjoy them we must live and work in His light.

But this is far from being the sole means by which Christ is the source

of all good things. He promised His disciples before He died, that He

would send the Holy Spirit into the world Who should bring to their

remembrance all things that He had told them, and should be to them and

to their followers an adviser and comforter, such as He had Himself

been while He was with them--Who should convince them of sin, of

righteousness and judgment--teach them, that is, what sin is, and what

righteousness is, and bring home to them the nature of the judgment of

God. He formed them into a Society, to be a perpetual witness of Him to

the world; and He established two ceremonies (which we call Sacraments)

to be a perpetual pledge to His followers of His love and of His grace,

and to be a special means by which that grace should be bestowed on

them; so that the source of this Divine illumination and bounty is not

merely Christ in the past, in His life on earth, as we read of Him in

the words of the New Testament, but Christ living and working in His

Church by means of those words, and by means of the Sacraments which

testify of them and bring them home to every individual soul. The

words of Christ and the Sacraments of Christ are means which can be

seen and handled, by which the grace of God is manifested and conveyed

to us.

Moreover, He has told us, as I have mentioned, that the Old Testament

throughout, the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, speak of Him,

reveal His character and His Will. To the Jews, who had only the Old

Testament, He said, “Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye

have eternal life, and they are they which testify of Me.” Combined,

these are the visible, tangible, and audible instruments by which the

“Lord of all power and might, the Author and Giver of all good things,”

shines into our hearts and speaks to our inmost souls. There are,

indeed, and always have been, other influences in the world by which

goodness and truth are impressed upon us; and there are, and always

have been, many gracious human influences by which they are upheld in

our hearts and in the world at large; but these are all imperfect,

and liable to perversion, in comparison with the influence of Jesus

Christ and His Church and the Holy Scriptures; and we can never be

sure of their being kept true and unperverted, except so far as they

are brought to the test, and subjected to the influences, through the

Person of Jesus Christ and of His words in the Holy Scriptures, of that

Lord of all power and might from whom all good things do come.

These considerations may help to explain to us the source of the evils

which have plunged Europe into its present convulsions and they will

be the best guide to ourselves for our own action in the present and

the future. It is, unhappily, an unquestionable matter of fact that a

great part of Europe, and especially of Germany, has lost sight for a

generation or two of that Sun of Righteousness, Who is the Author and

Giver of all good things. They have rejected the authority of Christ,

and denied the Divine reality of the revelation of God’s will in the

Old Testament. The consequence is that they have deprived themselves

of the influences of that Divine light, and have been setting up

standards of right and wrong in national and individual life, which

are inconsistent with it. Some of the best instincts of a strong and

manly nation have consequently been perverted. National ideals have

been pursued which are inconsistent with Christian civilization, and

men have been driven by these perverted instincts and passions into the

hell of war. We may be sure that Europe will not again enjoy permanent

peace until, by the merciful correction of that Lord from Whom all good

things do come, the love of His Name has again been grafted in their

hearts, and the true religion of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ

revived and increased.

But it becomes us to apply to ourselves, very seriously, the same

considerations. Must we not admit that among ourselves also a similar

disregard of the only source from Whom all good things do come has

been sadly and increasingly prevalent of late years, and perhaps for a

generation or two past? What is the meaning of the acknowledged falling

off in attendance at Divine Worship, of the increasing disuse of family

Prayers, and of the daily reading of Scripture in the family, and of

the less distinctively Christian tone of much of our literature and

of our stage? Let us put it to our own consciences whether we live,

as we ought, in the constant sense that it is only in the word of God

and of Christ, as contained in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New

Testaments, in constant subjection to His word and to the influences

of His Spirit, that we can be sure of finding the true light to our

paths, and a rod and a staff to comfort us amidst the temptations and

perplexities of the world? Do we live under the constant influences of

the Scriptures, and of the ordinances and Sacraments of Christ? If not,

it can only be because we do not believe the blessed assurances of this

text, and of our Church’s Collect. Unless men and women are blinded for

the time by the influence of some strong passions, or of some perverted

teaching, could they fail to submit themselves day by day to the Lord,

from Whom all good things do come, so that those good and gracious

things may sink more and more deeply into their souls, mould their

characters, and guide them more and more into the way that leadeth to

everlasting life? Men will travel far to sunny lands for the healing

influences of this world’s sun upon their bodily health. Can they

fail, if they realize the blessing offered them day by day, to seek the

companionship of the Lord Jesus Christ and His Father, for the sake of

their spiritual health in this world and in the next?

Let us then, in the first place, be led back by these present trials

and agonies to the only source of all truth and light for this world

and the next, to the words which God spake “in sundry times and in

divers manners,” in ages past, and above all, to those which He spake

by His Son, the brightness of His glory and the express image of His

Person; and if we feel their supreme preciousness for ourselves, let

us do everything in our power to promote and spread those sacred

words and that divine light throughout the world, as you are asked to

help in doing this morning. Here lies the only hope for ourselves,

the only hope for our people at large, for our nation and empire.

Let us henceforth join with a new earnestness in the prayer of the

Collect: “Graft in our hearts the love of Thy Name, increase in us true

religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of Thy great mercy keep us

in the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

THE NATIONAL IDEAL.

PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, JANUARY 3rd, 1915.

“_Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded

you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye

may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess._”--Deut. v.

33.

We have been summoned this evening by our King and by the Chief Pastor

of our Church, to a Service of humble prayer and intercession to

Almighty God on behalf of our Nation and Empire now engaged in war;

and in the Form of Humble Prayer in which we have just joined there

is an exhortation explaining and urging upon us the spirit in which

that intercession should be made. In addressing you this evening I

would draw special attention to one point in that exhortation. Before

all else, we are told, we must remember that those who would receive

good at the hands of God must go to Him in humility, with a due sense

of their many faults and continual short-comings in His sight. In

other words, a humble prayer must be before all else a prayer of

humiliation. It is a principle which is impressed upon us every day

in the Exhortation at the beginning of our prayers. “The Scripture,”

we are told, “moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess

our manifold sins and wickednesses; and that we should not dissemble

nor cloke them before the face of Almighty God our Heavenly Father;

but confess them with a humble, lowly, penitent and obedient heart; to

the end that we may obtain forgiveness of the same, by his infinite

goodness and mercy,” and we are surely bound, on an occasion like this,

to take to heart the words which follow, viz., that “although we ought

at all times humbly to acknowledge our sins before God: yet ought we

most chiefly so to do, when we assemble and meet together” as we do

to-day, to implore His special mercy in the greatest crisis which our

nation and Empire has ever had to encounter. If every morning and

evening ought to waken in us a humble, lowly, and penitent confession

of our sins, surely an hour when, as a whole Nation, we are seeking

God’s merciful and gracious help calls for still deeper and humbler

confession of our sins.

There has been, I fear, some reluctance among us to yield ourselves

to this penitent humiliation, and it will be well therefore to remind

ourselves a little of the reasons there are for it. Now the first

and most patent of all the reasons why we should recognize our sins

and wickedness is the bare and ghastly fact of this war in itself.

We are all distressed and grieved by it, and are all saying what a

horrible thing it is that war--and such a war--should be possible in a

Christian Europe. But what we should first of all realize is that it

is a horrible exhibition of the sin and wickedness of human nature.

Just contrast what Europe was a few months ago with the scenes that

are now exhibited in Belgium, France, and Poland. A few months ago,

Europe was a prosperous country, full of wealth, comfort, and enjoyment

of all kinds. Its many millions were engaged in quiet occupations

which employed their energies happily. “They ate, they drank, they

bought, they sold, they planted, they builded.” Fathers and mothers

and children, families young and old, cities and villages were in the

enjoyment of plenty, and full of hope for the future. God had prospered

them, and there was much hope that the wants and sufferings which

were still the lot of too many among them might be gradually removed

by benevolent legislation and mutual help; but, on a sudden, at a few

days’ notice, this scene of happiness, and hope, and well-being is

overthrown as if by an earthquake. Some parts of it are overwhelmed

by “blood and fire and vapour of smoke,” and the whole of it, from

the extreme west of our Isles to the East of Russia, from the Baltic

to the Mediterranean is transformed into a vast Barracks, in which

sons and fathers are torn from their families, leaving behind them

too often the lamentation and mourning of wives and mothers, weeping

for those who are not. The language of the prophet is not too strong

for the occasion “The land was a Garden of Eden and is become a

desolate wilderness.” I ask you, is not such a sudden and disastrous

transformation the most clear proof we could have of some deadly evil

being at work in human nature? What else, but some deadly, inherent

evil could in a few weeks or days blot out all peace in Europe and let

loose a sort of hell in human society and human life. We were proud

of the growth of civilization, and were constructing all sorts of

schemes of social and political development, when, on a sudden, our

civilization explodes, and we find ourselves surrounded by its wrecks

in fire, and ruin, and carnage, and hatred, and violence of all kinds.

All this explosive force of evil must have been there. There must have

been corruptions, and sins, and vices at work which we did not surmise;

and fair as the life of Europe seemed outside, it must really have been

in some respects rotten to the core. This war has not been imposed

upon Europe from without, as it was when the great barbarian invaders

poured over it fourteen hundred years ago. All this horror, and misery,

and bloodshed, and ruin has sprung out of the materials--out of the

civilized materials--provided by Europe itself, and it must be some

internal disease, some original vice and corruption which is revealed

to us in the ghastly spectacle which is now presented by so large a

part of the most favoured lands of the world.

Some one perhaps may be tempted to say that this indictment applies to

the countries which have provoked this war, but not to Europe at large;

but that, I am sure, would be, if not unjust to those countries, at

least not candid with respect to ourselves. Is it not the case that, to

an increasing extent of late years, the civilization of Europe has been

united, and marked in the main by similar characteristics? Have not the

literature and many of the ideas of Germany penetrated the literature

and the thought of France and England? Has there been conspicuous

among us any protest against the habits of thought, the tendencies

of religious belief or unbelief, the luxuries if not the waste of

living, which have prevailed elsewhere? If the life and civilization

of Europe has ended in this great catastrophe, can we honestly stand

aside and claim to be free of all blame, and to have had no share in

the tendencies and evils which have produced so horrible a result?

We shrink from them in their full development, we denounce them, we

resolve to fight against them to the last, and to re-establish sounder

and more Christian principles of public and social life, but dare we

say that we have not dallied with them? Can we honestly claim to have

repudiated them at their source, so as to be free from any part or lot

in sins and errors which have led to so hideous a result? I will not

try to drive such painful questions further home. I will only say that

if we are honest with ourselves, we shall not venture to adopt the

Pharisee’s attitude and exclaim, on a day like this, “God, I thank Thee

that I am not as other men are, or even as this German.” In a word, we

have had some share, at all events, in the tone of thought and life

which has prevailed in Europe for the last two generations, and we

shall be more true to God and to ourselves if we are content, on this

day of humble confession and intercession, simply to exclaim “God be

merciful to me a sinner.”

But confession of sin should be but the first step to amendment of

life, and for the purpose of that amendment we must endeavour to

realize more particularly what the sins are, which in God’s righteous

judgment have brought this misery upon us. Many of them we have

acknowledged in the Litany in which we have joined. We have prayed

for deliverance from those sins wherein as a nation we have grieved

God. We have confessed to pride, boasting, and self-sufficiency, to

covetousness, worldliness, and indifference to the needs of others, to

drunkenness, impurity, and all manner of self-indulgence, to trusting

in our own strength and forgetting God, to want of faith in God, to

want of love to Him and to one another, to a want of charity towards

all men. These are the sins charged upon us by the chief pastors of

our Church, and they constitute surely a grievous catalogue of vices,

sufficient in themselves to account for the failure of the civilization

of which we form a part, and to require us to humiliate ourselves very

deeply before God. We are called upon by the Archbishops not merely

to pray, as we do in our daily Litany, against those evils, but to

acknowledge that they are sins wherein, as a nation, we have grieved

God. Now it must be left to our individual consciences to apply those

grievous confessions to our own hearts and lives. Of some of them,

perhaps, we shall all acknowledge ourselves to have been guilty; and

we are bound to put it earnestly to our hearts and consciences how

far we have individually been guilty of them. But it is not for the

preacher, who is deeply sensible of his own sins, to press such charges

upon others. I would rather adopt this evening the more gracious, and,

I hope, more helpful course of reminding you of the one supreme and

sufficient method by which all such sins, whatever they may have been,

may be overcome, and may be averted for the future.

It is the method and the obligation impressed upon us in the text by

the great Law Giver of Israel when he was laying the foundation of the

Jewish nation. It is instructive to remember that the discourses of

Moses recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy are described as having for

their first and immediate object to lay down the principles on which

the Jewish people could realize the great purpose which God had in view

for them, and could become a strong and prosperous nation. “These,”

said Moses, in the verses following the text, “are the commandments,

and the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord your God commanded

to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go to

possess it: that thou mightest fear the Lord Thy God, to keep all His

Statutes and His Commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son,

and thy son’s son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be

prolonged. Hear, therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it

may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily.” And then he

proceeds to sum up those statutes and judgments in the momentous words

which Our Lord Himself selected as the first and great commandment of

the Law, “Hear O Israel,” said Moses, “The Lord our God is one Lord:

and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with

all thy soul, and with all thy might.” That, in the words of the book

in which our Saviour sought the great principles of His own life, and

which He quoted again and again as laying down eternal truths--that

is the great principle on which a sound moral, religious, and secure

national life must be founded--the principle of loving the Lord our

God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our might.

The God Whom the people of Israel were thus called on to love with all

their heart, soul, and might, was the God Who had delivered them out of

Egypt and its bondage, and Who was about to establish them in the land

of Canaan by wonders and signs which could only have been wrought by

His supreme power, and Who, in the most solemn and awful circumstances,

had declared at Mount Sinai the cardinal laws of social and national

life. The God to whom our Saviour applies the principle was His Own

Father, the God Who is seen in His Own words and in His ministry, Whose

will is so graciously explained to us in the records of His life and in

the words of His Apostles, and Whose character, therefore, and will are

clearly and distinctly revealed. Our Lord, when He adopted these words

of Moses, declared to the whole world that in order that they may live,

and that it may be well with them, and that they may prolong their

days in the peace and happiness He designed for them, the one supreme

condition is that they should love the God Who is His Father, with all

their heart, soul, mind, and strength. If they do that, if the whole

of their lives is submitted to His will as revealed by His Son Jesus

Christ, then they will have a supreme authority, a secure guide in

their personal, their family, and their social life; and He adds to the

assurance of Moses the promise of His Holy Spirit to interpret His will

to them and to assist them in their struggles. That is the one and the

sufficient condition for realizing here on earth the blessing of the

peace which God designs for us. Life animated by that love would secure

it--and that alone.

Now the one question it would be well for us to put to ourselves on

this day of confession and self amendment is whether it has not been

the chief wickedness, and the growing wickedness, of Europe at large,

and of ourselves in particular, to fail to make this love of God,

this submission to God and to Christ, the one supreme principle and

inspiration of our whole life, private, social, and public. I would

ask whether religion, as people generally understand it, has not been

allowed to become of late years, in an increasing degree, too much of a

private and personal matter--a matter of individual preference, a part

of a man’s character which could hardly be treated as an absolute duty,

so that a man who did not live a religious life was, as it were, within

his rights, and that he could not be treated as neglecting a supreme

obligation? Has it not been our temptation, as a nation, to legislate

without a supreme regard to this first duty, so as even to allow our

children and the children of the nation to be educated without supreme

regard to it? Has not attendance at Divine Worship been grievously

neglected of late years as a consequence of this growing decay of the

love of God? Have not the words of our Lord and His Apostles been

losing the authority which they used to possess among us, and which

they must possess with all who believe them to be a revelation of the

supreme Will of Almighty God? As a consequence of all this, has there

not been a grievous loss among us of the sense that we are all under

the judgment of God, that we shall all stand before the judgment seat

of Christ, to give account of all that we have done in the body, good

or bad? And has not the most momentous of all controlling influences

been thus grievously weakened in our own lives? It is enough for one

like myself to suggest the question. It needs a prophet with a Divine

Mission to drive it home.

But the concluding considerations I would urge from such a review of

the condition of the Christian world, and of our own world at this

moment, is that if we would overcome the sins which have undermined

the peace of Europe and brought about the present awful convulsion,

if we would restore and re-establish among ourselves those principles

of Christian Faith which alone can make the nation great and happy,

and keep it so, the one effectual means which includes all others,

the one means which would at once enable us to know what we ought to

do and would provide us with the grace and power to fulfil it, is to

deepen in our own souls, and to revive all around us and among our

people at large, that love of God in Jesus Christ which reveals to us

“whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever

things are of good report,” which gives us a supreme and eternal motive

for following it, and which ensures us the power to overcome the

terrible temptations which beset us. Let us go home from these prayers,

not merely resolved to amend one particular fault, or to combat one

particular evil of our day, but surrendering ourselves more absolutely

than we have yet done to the will and love of God our Saviour, in all

things bringing the revelation of His will, in our Lord Jesus Christ

and in the Scriptures, to bear more than ever on our private, social

and public duties. In short, in the words of the text, let us resolve,

as the supreme law of our life, to walk in the ways which the Lord our

God and our Saviour Jesus Christ have commanded us, that it may be well

with us, and that we may prolong our days in the country and the Empire

in which His providence and His mercy have placed and supported us.

RELIGION AND THE WAR.

FROM “THE RECORD,” SEPTEMBER 23, 1916

The way in which this war is stirring the deepest thoughts of our

people has received a striking illustration during the last three weeks

in a discussion in the pages of the _Westminster Gazette_. In that able

journal religious questions have not ordinarily so congenial a home

as in the _Spectator_, and it is the more illustrative of the tone of

the public mind that, since August 28th last, hardly a day has passed

without the appearance in its columns of letters of great earnestness

on the subject of “Religion and the War.” The discussion was opened

on that day by an anonymous article under that title, which opened

with these words: “‘Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself.’ The

words of the Prophet come back to me when I hear the preachers trying

to reconcile the terrors and horrors of this war with the idea of an

all-powerful and all-beneficent Creator”; and around the difficulty

thus started the whole discussion has turned. The writer says he has

listened, during the last few months, to many sermons, and read many of

the articles and pamphlets and books “in which Divines and Philosophers

have endeavoured to plumb these deep waters,” and he states briefly

the principal arguments that he has found in them. It is not necessary

for the present purpose to quote them all, especially as I think the

writer has been unfortunate in his pulpits and his books. Several of

the pleas he quotes are mere platitudes, such as “that the ways of God

are unfathomable, and that one must walk in faith and believe that

things are somehow good.” The point to which he reduces the question is

that under the strain of our present experience “people see suddenly

that the doctrine of an omnipotent and all-loving Creator, as commonly

expounded in pulpits, is at war with the plain facts of the visible

world.” To this problem all the subsequent letters are directed, and

they afford impressive and painful evidence of the distress with which

many men and women seem to be groping in perplexity. There are many

striking and touching observations in them, and sometimes, as by Lord

Halifax, the central principles of the Christian Faith are applied

to the problem. But it is disappointing to find that it is not in

the Bible or in the Christian Faith that most of the writers seek

for a solution of their difficulties. Too many of them seek refuge

in philosophical discussions of matters like the Divine omnipotence

and the abstract problem of evil. The first writer comes to the

conclusion that “theology remains tangled up in its own conception of

omnipotence--which brings us at best to the conclusion that God has

so limited His own power as to permit the existence of evil, and at

worst invests Him with attributes which are the reverse of benevolent,”

and to this philosophical question writer after writer returns. The

consequence is that the light which is thrown upon the whole problem

by the Scriptures and by our Lord Himself is obscured in a maze of

philosophy and words.

What, then, has revelation to say upon the subject? The first thing,

and the most important, which it has to say is almost ignored in the

discussion. As has been said, the problem propounded by the opening

writer is to reconcile the terrors and horrors of this war with the

idea of an “all-powerful and all-beneficent Creator.” From the point of

view of the Bible, of the Psalms in particular, and of our Lord, that

description of the Creator leaves out His most important attribute.

If we add as the Psalms invariably imply, “an all-righteous Creator,”

an element is introduced into the problem which raises entirely fresh

considerations. If you merely ask the question how the pain and

misery of the war are compatible with perfect beneficence and perfect

omnipotence, the answer is obscure. But if you introduce the question

of the compatibility of the permission of such suffering with perfect

righteousness combined with benevolence, the problem is radically

altered. God is dealing with a creature who is not merely capable of

pain and happiness, but of a righteousness and a truth like His own;

and to bestow upon this creature happiness without righteousness would

be inconsistent with the main object for which he was created, and

such an idea would, in fact, involve a contradiction in terms. Once

recognize that there is no happiness possible for man except in the

harmony of his nature with the Divine righteousness, and it is evident

that the main object of an all-benevolent Creator must be to produce

this righteousness in man, and to repress and extirpate, by whatever

means may be requisite, the evil which is incompatible with his

happiness.

Now the Scriptures, from the third chapter of Genesis to the last

chapter of Revelation, exhibit God as employing suffering as a remedy

for unrighteousness or sin. It is a punishment, but it is also a cure.

It may be such suffering as is involved in the condemnation of man to

eat his bread by the sweat of his brow, instead of being able to “put

forth his hand” and seize whatever he craved without effort. It may be

the severer remedy of the punishment of death, or the bitter surgery

of war. But what the Scriptures reveal is that all the suffering of

life, slight or severe, is instituted by God, and employed by Him, to

promote and uphold that righteousness in man which can alone qualify

him for that harmony with God, which is the happiness for which he was

intended. The free will, whatever its degree, with which man has been

endowed, must be educated by the suffering which follows its misuse,

as well as by the satisfaction which is conferred by its right use.

Accordingly it appears to be the cardinal fact of man’s constitution

that unrighteousness throws his nature into disorder, and brings a

similar disorder into his whole social condition. Families, societies,

and nations can only realize their true purposes, they can only

exhibit a true order, when the individuals of whom they are composed

are righteous, and are thus qualified for their true functions. Let

the individuals or component parts become disordered, and the whole

society must be disordered, and involved in confusion and perhaps ruin.

I have sometimes imagined the case of a visitor introduced to some

vast machine, working under immense pressure, and being told by his

guide that unfortunately every part of the machine was more or less

imperfect, and some of the parts almost rotten. Would the visitor care

to expose himself long to the risks of the inevitable explosion? But

that is exactly the case of every human society, small or great. All

the individuals of which it is composed are grievously imperfect, and

some of them are positively vicious. Is it any wonder that it develops

antagonistic forces within itself, and that sooner or later it bursts

into a great conflagration--the conflagration of a revolution or a

war? God, in fact, by this constitution of mankind, has provided that

unrighteousness shall punish itself. He does not intervene, as a rule,

to inflict a special punishment. He leaves men to work out their own

punishment, and to realize from it that there was some corruption at

work in their lives.

If it be asked whether an all-powerful and all-beneficent Being could

not have provided some less distressing method of education, the

first reply may be that of Bishop Butler--that it is foolish for such

creatures as we are to try to devise schemes for the construction of

better worlds than the one we live in. But the Gospel has provided an

answer which removes all temptation to such folly. It reveals the

momentous fact that “God, of His tender mercy, did give His Only Son,

Jesus Christ, to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption.”

There is no need to enter upon theories of the Atonement in order to

appreciate the bearing of that solemn truth upon this problem. Christ,

Who lived and died for our redemption, found it necessary for that

purpose to submit to the sufferings of the Cross--sufferings at least

as bitter as any that are inflicted in war--and He said He submitted to

them because it was the will of His Father--of the God Whom He called

“His Father and our Father, His God and our God”--that He should do

so. It is one satisfactory feature in this discussion that the moral

authority of Christ is generally recognized; but it is very little

noticed, if at all, that that authority declares, both by repeated

assurances, and by the most touching personal experience, that the

infliction and endurance of death and agony are compatible with the

most perfect relations of love and tenderness between God and the

Sufferer.

Our Lord has thus given His blessed personal sanction to what, after

all, has been the instinctive belief of human nature, even before He

lived and died. Cicero, for instance, in his _De Officiis_, states it

more than once as a cardinal principle of human life and duty that

it is more contrary to nature to do or allow unjust acts than to

endure any suffering, loss, or even death. But the Cross of Christ

elevates this inspiring and consoling conviction to the height of a

Divine revelation and consolation; and to those who realize it, the

main practical problem of the sufferings of war is solved. All such

suffering is God’s remedy for moral evil, and is allowed because it is

the only means by which man’s nature can be purified and renovated.

From this point of view it becomes quite unnecessary to perplex

ourselves with philosophical questions respecting omnipotence. When God

has once established a constitution, either for nature or for human

nature, He has limited His Own action by the laws of that constitution

so long as it lasts. He can, indeed, interfere with it for good cause;

and He has done so, both in nature and human nature, by miracle. But

to interpose by miracle to avert all distressing consequences of those

laws would be to abolish the constitution altogether, and this He will

not do until the present dispensation is brought to an end. For the

present, God is governing and educating men by means of the laws which

He has established, both physical and moral, and He leaves men to take

the consequences of their moral violations of those laws, no less than

of their physical.

The example of Christ, in His submission, should be enough to prevent

any man “replying against God” for this constitution of things. The

reflection which should be aroused in our minds by such “terrors and

horrors” as those of this war is, on these principles, that there

must have been something terribly false and vicious in the condition

of the nations of Europe to produce so awful a manifestation of the

consequences of evil. They are the consequences which, under the laws

of human nature established by God, inevitably follow the prevalence

of unrighteousness; and for that reason they are justly described in

Scripture as the manifestation of “the wrath of God” against evil.

On the principles of the Christian Faith, in short, there is one

certainty amidst all our perplexities in this matter. The war and all

its miseries reveal to us the fact that great injustices and moral

evils were prevalent in Europe, and the greatness of the misery may

be taken as a measure of the greatness of the evil. We think we see

these moral and religious evils in the state of our enemies, and

particularly in the state of German life and religion. But we shall

make a fatal mistake if we allow ourselves to think that all the evil

and unrighteousness has been on their side. If we are candid with

ourselves, we shall recognize that a disregard of God and Christ,

a grievous disbelief in the revelation and the guidance they have

given us, and a consequent decay of religion, and looseness of moral

obligations of all kinds, have been making way among us, and have

affected not only our private life, but our standards of public action.

We are discovering more clearly, day by day, that if we are to meet

the terrible dangers by which we are threatened, we must revive, both

in public and in private, the standards of Christian principle which

we formally acknowledge--self-denial, self-control, truth in word and

deed, the fear of God, and the love of Christ; and in proportion as we

succeed in these efforts shall we find that the problems of “religion

and the war” are much simpler, better understood by our fathers, and

more easily grasped by ourselves, than is supposed in the discussion

from which we started.

PRAYER FOR THE DEAD.

FROM “THE RECORD,” NOVEMBER 20, 1914

The question of Prayers for the Dead, and particularly of the adoption

of such prayers in the public services of the Church, has for some time

been pressed forward among us, and under the strain of the distressing

bereavements of the present war it is likely to become urgent. An

attempt has more than once been made at St. Paul’s to celebrate what

would have been a formal _Requiem_ for those who have fallen; and

though it has not yet been fully successful, it may very likely be

renewed. In the forms issued by authority, both at the time of the Boer

War and during the present war, supplications on behalf of the dead

have been introduced, which provoked a gentle remonstrance from even

so moderate and tolerant an Evangelical as the Bishop of Durham. Other

forms will no doubt be prepared by authority for use at the national

intercession on the first Sunday of next year; and in many quarters

much anxiety is felt lest the introduction of such supplications

should be further extended.

This anxiety will not be lessened by the deliberate observations on the

subject which were made by the Primate, in a sermon he preached at All

Hallows, Barking, on All Souls’ Day, which is fully reported in the

_Guardian_ of November 5. He said that “we are not forgetful of the

long and mischievous abuse of the devotion” of praying for the dead “in

the later mediæval days, until,” as Dr. Mason said “it might almost

be said that the main object of religion in the fifteenth century had

been to deliver souls out of the ever-heightening horrors of Purgatory,

and to ensure the living against incurring them.” “We understand,”

said the Archbishop, “why repression of these mischiefs, prevention of

these perils, took in our formularies and our Prayer Books so stern,

so drastic, a character that no explicit Prayers for the departed at

all were admitted into the public language of the Church, and people

were taught to rely, in those public offices, upon that alone which

can be definitely proved by Holy Scripture. I have no word of censure

for those men--Laud and Andrewes, remember, were among them--who thus

handled the difficulties which they had to face. But,” the Archbishop

significantly proceeded, “surely now there is place for a gentler

recognition of the instinctive, the natural, the loyal craving of the

bereaved; and the abuses of the chantry system and the extravagances of

Tetzel need not now, nearly four centuries afterwards, thwart or hinder

the reverent, the absolutely trustful, prayer of a wounded spirit, who

feels it natural and helpful to pray for him whom we shall not greet

on earth again, but who, in his Father’s loving keeping, still lives,

and, as we may surely believe, still grows from strength to strength

in truer purity and in deeper reverence and love. I must not dwell on

that to-day, but in our thought of what our College of Clergy can do,

and has already done, ‘for the perfecting of the Saints, for the work

of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ,’ I do not like

to pass unmentioned a task of wise teaching and of careful guidance,

which at a time of such special opportunity and need may appropriately

be ours.”

These, I think it must be felt, are very significant words. They

indicate clearly that, in the mind of the Archbishop’s advisers, the

present time of bereavement and distress affords an opportunity for

authorizing the use of Prayers for the Departed, which go beyond “that

alone which can be definitely proved by Holy Scripture.” Now, I hope

that, without any lack of respect, I may say at once that, while there

are, as I believe, many members of the Evangelical School to whom some

modification in the language of our Prayer Book in reference to the

departed would not be unwelcome, we should be unanimous in deprecating

in the strongest manner the introduction of anything beyond “that which

can be definitely proved by Holy Scripture”--meaning, as no doubt the

Archbishop does, that which can be proved to be conformable to Holy

Scripture. Supplications which are not strictly conformable to Holy

Scripture may be “natural”--too natural--“instinctive,” and prompted by

a “loyal craving.” But the very place and function of Holy Scripture

is to direct and control our natural and instinctive cravings; and to

allow such natural and instinctive cravings to carry us beyond the

limits which a strict adherence to Holy Scripture would prescribe, is

to abandon an essential principle of the Church of England, and to

forsake the sure guidance which the revelation of the Gospel affords us.

This, in fact, is the very source of the superstitions by which the

worship of God has been corrupted in the Church of Rome. There is no

better illustration of this danger than is afforded by those abuses

in connection with the belief in Purgatory, which the Archbishop so

severely denounces. The Roman system of Prayers for the Dead did not

originally rise from the doctrine of Purgatory, though in their extreme

form they were based on that doctrine. But, historically, the doctrine

of Purgatory was developed out of an undue and unscriptural indulgence

of Prayers for the Dead; and in so far as natural instincts are allowed

at the present day to dictate any such unscriptural indulgence, a

tendency will again be encouraged towards a belief in some form of

Purgatory. The Archbishop asks whether we need be afraid of the abuses

of four centuries ago. But it is not a question of the circumstances

of four centuries ago; it is a question of the dangers of human

nature in every century, and not least in a century like the present,

when there prevails in the Church an avowed drift towards the errors

against which, as the Archbishop says, even Laud and Andrewes thought

it necessary to be on their guard. The condition of the departed is

a matter on which nature can tell us nothing. Our whole knowledge

respecting it, all our hopes respecting it, are derived from the

revelations of our Lord and His Apostles in the New Testament; and if

we wish our prayers in relation to the dead to be in accordance with

truth, and to be acceptable to God, we have more reason on this subject

than on any other “to rely in our public offices upon that alone which

can be proved by Holy Scripture.”

This is so cardinal a principle of our Church that I cannot but feel

confident that it is by an inadvertence, if language is used by

any persons in authority which seems to imply a disregard of it. I

apprehend that what it really means is that our Reformers excluded from

our Prayer Book forms of Prayer for the Dead which were in use in the

primitive Church; and that an appeal is being made to that primitive

example as an authority for their reintroduction. Now, I fully admit

that primitive practice has a _prima-facie_ claim to favourable

consideration; and, as I have urged for years, if that principle were

only acted upon, the Romish practices which are being forced upon our

Church by the ritualistic party would be at once condemned. What,

then, let us ask, were the Prayers for the Dead which were in use in

the primitive Church? The description of them given by Bingham in his

account of the ceremonies at the interment of Christians in the ancient

Church (vol. viii., Oxford edition, p. 151) is in perfect harmony with

that of Field and Ussher, and will not, I think, be questioned. At the

interment, as at the Communion Service, “a solemn commemoration was

made of the dead in general, and prayers offered to God for them--some

Eucharistical, by way of thanksgiving for their deliverance out of

this world’s afflictions, and others by way of intercession that God

would receive their souls to the place of rest and happiness, that

He would pardon their human failures, and not impute to them the sins

of daily incursion, which in the best men are remainders of natural

frailty and corruption; that He would increase their happiness, and

finally bring them to a perfect consummation with all His Saints by

a glorious resurrection.” The spirit and purpose of these prayers

is illuminated by an observation of Archbishop Ussher (_Answer to a

Jesuit_, chapter vii): “In these and other prayers of the like kind we

may descry evident footsteps of the primary intention of the Church in

such supplications for the dead, which was, that the whole man, not

the soul separated only, might receive public remission of sins and a

solemn acquittal in the judgment of that Great Day, and so obtain a

full escape from all the consequences of sin, _the last enemy being

now destroyed, and death swallowed up in victory_, and a perfect

consummation of bliss and happiness. All which are comprised in that

short prayer of St. Paul for Onesiphorus, though made for him while he

was alive: _The Lord grant unto him that he may find mercy of the Lord

in that day_.”

In other words, all these prayers are for those mercies and blessings

which are revealed and promised in Holy Scripture, and for them

alone. They are not prayers for any alteration in the condition of

the Christian soul during the mysterious period between death and

the Resurrection, respecting which very various opinions have been

held by the Fathers of the Church. They are simply prayers for the

fulfilment, especially at the Day of the Resurrection, of those

promises of justification or acquittal, and of final glory in body

and soul, which are definitely given us in the New Testament. The

objection has been raised that of the fulfilment of these promises we

have certain assurance, and that therefore we need not pray for them.

But, as Ussher and Field abundantly show, this objection is based

upon a serious misconception of the nature of prayer. The ancient

Church, in accordance with the whole spirit of the Scriptures, realized

the privilege of receiving everything from God in the nature of a

gift, and therefore prayed to Him for the very things He had most

surely promised. It is in that gracious childlike spirit that these

supplications for the Christian dead were made in primitive Christian

times; and though that spirit has become, unhappily, somewhat obscured

among us, yet no one can use the petition “Thy Kingdom come” without

being sensible that he is praying for a blessing which is most certain.

For these prayers of the early Church, therefore, there was a full

warrant in Holy Scripture, and there is no occasion to appeal to any

other authority for them.

Why, then, it will be asked, should they not be used in the Church of

England? The first and chief answer is that, in substance, they are

used. In the Burial Service we pray “that it may please Thee shortly

to accomplish the number of Thine elect and to hasten Thy kingdom that

we, with all those that are departed in the true faith of Thy Holy

Name, may have our perfect consummation and bliss in Thy eternal and

everlasting glory.” That is a prayer in the very spirit described by

Bingham and Ussher as that of the primitive Church. Nor can I interpret

in any less comprehensive sense the prayer in our Communion Service,

“that we and all Thy whole Church may obtain remission of our sins,

and all other benefits of His passion.” Field’s statement (vol.

ii., Cambridge edition, p. 97) is fully justified by these prayers.

“Touching Prayer for the Dead, it is well known that Protestants

do not simply condemn all prayer in this kind; for they pray for

the Resurrection, public acquittal in the Day of Judgment, and the

perfect consummation and bliss of them that rest in the Lord, and the

perfecting of whatsoever is yet wanting in them.”

If, therefore, in the Revision of the Prayer Book now pending, or

in official forms of intercession now under consideration, it is

contemplated to add anything to the language of the Prayer Book,

what we have to ask is that such additions may be kept within these

scriptural and primitive limits, and may not introduce petitions

which imply suppositions respecting the condition of the soul in

the intermediate state, of which Scripture tells us nothing. Even

the Archbishop’s language might give some encouragement to such

suppositions, when he speaks of praying “for him ... who still lives

and, as we may surely believe, still grows from strength to strength,

in truer purity and in deepened reverence and love.” Whoever believes

that does so without warrant of Scripture, and prayer based on such a

belief has no authority in revelation. The hope of the Christian is

not that his soul will be gradually purified after death, but that, in

the words of the commendatory prayer in the Service of the Visitation

of the Sick, it may, in death itself, be washed in the blood of that

immaculate Lamb, and presented, when it leaves the body, “pure and

without spot” unto God. Prayers, in short, which have any tinge of a

purgatorial view are unauthorized by Scripture, and inconsistent with

a most blessed element of Evangelical hope and faith. Short of this, I

could wish, for my own part, that we might imitate the purer forms of

prayer in the early Church by more specific mention of the departed,

as in what seems to me the beautiful expressions of the earlier Burial

Service. “We commend into Thy hands of mercy, most merciful Father,

the soul of this our brother departed, and his body we commit to the

earth, beseeching Thine infinite goodness to give us grace to live in

Thy fear and love, and to die in Thy favour; that when the judgment

shall come, which Thou hast committed to Thy wellbeloved Son, both this

our brother and we may be found acceptable in Thy sight.” After all,

in presence of the mysteries of death, and of the condition of those

we have lost, what prayer can be more comforting than one which simply

commends to our Father’s gracious hands, through our Saviour’s merits

and grace, the beloved soul after which we yearn? That is a Prayer for

the Dead which may be offered without scruple and without cessation,

and in which we may find, day by day, and in every moment of sorrow and

distress, our refuge and our consolation.

CHRIST AND THE SOLDIER.

ADDRESS AT THE CHURCH PARADE, IN THE NAVE OF THE CATHEDRAL, SEPT. 27,

1914.

“_Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in

Me._”--St. John xiv. 1.

My brethren, when your Commanding Officer did me the honour to ask

me to address you, I thought I would try to bring before you, in the

simplest and briefest form, the special message which is brought by the

Gospel of Christ to men in such a position as that in which you now

stand--a position of great anxiety and solemn responsibility. You will

meet that responsibility, of course, in the manly and cheerful spirit

which has marked soldiers of great races at all times, from the Jews,

Greeks, and Romans to our own days. But the Gospel of Christ has the

characteristic privilege of bringing good news to human nature in all

circumstances. It sheds a new and blessed light on life and all its

duties, on death and all its fears, and I would fain impress on you, in

one sentence of our Saviour, what is the supreme blessing and guidance

which it affords, especially to soldiers.

That blessing is contained in the few words of my text: _Ye believe in

God; believe also in Me_. They are the first words of our Saviour’s

address to His disciples, at the moment when they were in great trouble

and anxiety, on account of His having told them that He was about to be

violently taken from them. It was no ordinary trouble that they were

about to encounter, but one of the greatest and bitterest that ever

befell human beings. Yet He begins, at once, by bidding them not be

troubled. _Let not your hearts be troubled_, He said. But how were they

to avoid it? He gives them a short and sufficient reason: _Ye believe

in God; believe also in Me_. Remember who they were. They were Jews,

full of the faith of the old Covenant; familiar with the psalms which

we sing every day, believing in God as Abraham did, as David did, as

Isaiah did, and as He Himself had taught them to believe. That was

and is, a grand faith to live in. But our Lord brought an addition to

it, which made it, and makes it, infinitely better. _Ye believe in

God_, He said; _believe also in Me_. He uses the same word of belief

in Himself which He had used of belief in God. “You put your trust in

God,” He seems to say; “You give yourselves up to Him, to obey His

will for life and for death. Do the same for Me. Give yourselves up

also to Me, to obey Me, to trust Me and to love Me.” The privilege of

doing that is the reason He gives them for not letting their heart be

troubled. If they would obey and trust Him with the same faith which

they gave to God, they would have still surer ground for comfort and

strength than if they only believed in the God of their fathers.

This was a great claim for our Lord Jesus Christ to make. But He went

on to shed His blood on the Cross in attestation of it; and, according

to His promise, He rose again after being put to death, to assure us

that He was the living Son of God He claimed to be; and that is our

sufficient reason for believing it. For that reason we take His word

for it, and trust everything He said. But why does this assurance bring

that special comfort to His disciples, and to ourselves, which He

promises? There are many reasons; but on this occasion I will mention

only the one which He Himself proceeds to state. He goes on to declare

at once what is perhaps the greatest of all the comforts which He

brings. He tells us what is our eternal Home, whither He was Himself

going, and where we are meant to go. He says at once: _In My Father’s

house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go

to prepare a place for you; and if I go and prepare a place for you,

I will come again and receive you unto Myself, that where I am there

ye may be also._ Every one of us must ask himself, sooner or later,

where he is going; what is his eternal Home? More especially must we

ask ourselves this question when we are brought face to face, in any

way, with the great issues of life and death. When nations are marching

in their millions to conflicts which must mean an early death to many

of them, we must crave for an answer, more than ever, to the question,

What is beyond death? What is the life into which we shall pass from

this world?

Now, in these few words, our Saviour gives us an assurance on this

question which is more than sufficient. We shall go into a world in

which He is ready to meet us, and in which He is preparing mansions

for us. Without the Gospel, there is a complete veil over the future

life. But to the Christian that veil is lifted by the Saviour and His

Apostles in some glorious details, and above all--far above all--in

this: that the Lord Jesus Christ, that living Man of whom you read

in the Gospels, Whose character stands out so clearly there, in all

graciousness, justice, love, and power, is preparing homes for us, and

will be there to receive us unto Himself. David was inspired to sing,

_When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear

no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me_. It

was a great height of inspired faith to be able to utter that prayer

of trust in the great God of his fathers, surrounded, as he then was,

by clouds and darkness. But what a vastly greater blessing it is to

be able to say it of the Lord Jesus Christ, Whom we are privileged

to know, not only as God, but as Man in flesh and blood, and to be

assured that in death, as in life, we have with us all the sympathy,

all the tenderness, as well as all the righteousness and justice, which

He showed during His life on earth. Had He not reason to say: _Let not

your hearts be troubled; believe in Me_?

But if it is to be a comfort to us to know that we shall be received by

the Lord Jesus Christ when we pass from this world, and that, whether

we pass suddenly or slowly, we shall find ourselves in His hands, we

cannot fail to realize that one condition on our own part is essential.

We must come to Him with a character, and in a condition, which He

can approve. He will meet us in two capacities; first, as our Saviour

and friend, but also as our Judge. Without waiting for that ultimate

judgment which He has announced, the thought of our closer approach to

Him at death must make us deeply apprehensive of His personal judgment

on our character and our lives. If we desire to meet Him in happiness,

we must be preparing ourselves, while we are here, so as to be at least

in general harmony with His will and His character. In consequence of

those inveterate sins of mankind, which bring about wars and all other

such miseries, He Himself, with His own deliberate consent, was brought

to death, and sacrificed His life as an atonement for our evil; and

by that sacrifice He has won from God the Father, His Father and our

Father, the right to forgive us and to judge us mercifully. We may be

sure accordingly that He will receive us into the arms of His mercy,

and pardon our innumerable failures and offences, if we truly repent of

them. But if we are to be at peace with Him hereafter, in His mansions,

He must needs expect us, while we are here, to be trying to grow like

Him, and to be doing His will. This accordingly is the second main

point which follows from this assurance of our Lord. It places us under

the strongest possible obligation to live here as Christ would have us,

in order that we may look forward with full hope to living with Him

hereafter.

Consequently, this promise of Christ obliges us to Christen, as it

were, or to Christianize, the work of our lives, and every duty or

profession in which we are engaged. This is a principle which has

innumerable applications; and I will only apply it this morning to one

aspect of the profession of a soldier. Men had great ideals before

Christ came. Few things are nobler, in the profession of arms, than

the examples of self-sacrifice, of bravery, of generosity, exhibited

by the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans, and, in our own days, by the

Japanese. But the history of the Christian world has shown that it

is possible to raise those ideals, if not to a higher, yet to a more

gracious, height by adding a Christian touch or colour to them. The

knighthood of the Middle Ages, for instance, exhibited the highest

qualities of a manly soldiery, elevated, purified, and illuminated

by the supreme graces of gentleness, of mercy, of tenderness for the

weak, of that impulse to save the suffering and the crushed, which is

embodied in our Lord’s character as “the Saviour.” The knight of the

Middle Ages was essentially the saviour of the weak, the champion of

women, bound by oath to uphold all right and righteousness, to avenge

wrong, to maintain, in the midst of his stern duties, the mercies and

graces of Christian feeling. One of them, as he stood at the bier of

the most famous knight of his day, is described in the old romance as

exclaiming: _And now, I daresay, that Sir Lancelot, there thou liest:

thou wert never matched of none earthly knight’s hands; and thou wert

the courtliest knight that ever bare shield; and thou wert the truest

friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou wert the truest

lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou wert the kindest

man that ever stroke with sword; and thou wert the goodliest person

that ever came among press of knights; and thou wert the meekest man

and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the

sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest_.

Can we fail to be sensible that, even in such an imperfect example,

something of the grace of Christian tenderness has been shed over the

character--an essence of Christian feeling, which would make impossible

in such a soldier any brutal violence or wilful injustice? It was, in

fact, the conscious example of Christ which controlled them. They all,

more or less, resembled the knight of our own noble poet Spenser:

For on his breast a bloody cross he bore,

The dear remembrance of his dying Lord:

For Whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,

And dead, as living ever, Him adored;

Upon his shield the like was also scored,

For sovran hope which in his help he had.

That is the true badge not only of Christian service to the wounded,

but of Christian warfare itself.

Such, my brethren, is the spirit in which you can apply to your present

duties the exhortation of our Saviour in this gracious and cardinal

text. It bids you to add the belief in the presence of Christ, the

obligation of obedience to Christ, trust in Christ and love towards

Him, to all the other principles by which you are animated. The fact

that you are here, that you are making great sacrifices, that you are

ready to make the greatest sacrifice of all, for your country, is proof

enough that you are animated by high and generous motives, that you

wish to live and die for the greatest of all causes, for righteousness

and justice, for your King and your country. But if you would do the

best you can, do one thing more. Take care to add the spirit of Christ

to these motives and impulses; strive to enter more deeply, day by

day, into His heart and will, to realize more and more, even in the

midst of war, that “new commandment” which He gave us, _that we should

love one another_; and so prepare yourselves to meet Him whenever you

have to do so, as we all have, soon or late, in such a character that

He may be able to say to you: _Well done, good and faithful servant,

enter thou into the joy of thy Lord_. In a word: You believe in God,

and in all that the Name of God stands for--righteousness, truth,

goodness of all kinds: believe also in Christ, and let His love, His

mercy, His purity, His absolute self-sacrifice, add His own peculiar

grace to all your words and deeds, and then you may cherish the

confident hope that _where He is there you will be also_.

THE ETERNAL LIFE OF THE SOUL.

PREACHED IN THE NAVE OF CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, AT THE MILITARY CHURCH

PARADE, OCTOBER 15, 1916.

“_O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee._”--Psalm lxiii. 1.

These words ought to be in the heart and the mouth of every soul in

this congregation. They are the first words of a Psalm, which has been

used as a morning Psalm by many generations of Christians, and it is

the privilege of all of us to echo them. But let us consider carefully

what they mean. Who is the God to Whom they speak? We are in the House

of God, to worship God; and we open our worship, every Sunday, with

a Psalm which tells us who He is. “The Lord,” it says, “is a great

God, a great King above all Gods. In His hand are all the corners of

the earth, and the strength of the hills is His also. The sea is His,

and He made it: and His hands prepared the dry land. O come, let us

worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker.” That is

the God to whom the Christian speaks. He is the God Who made heaven and

earth, and whose will and power upholds them from hour to hour. He is

our maker, “and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His

hand.” In other words, “All things were made by Him, and without Him

was not anything made that was made.”

The word “God” is too often used lightly in common conversation among

us, but without due remembrance that it is the Name of the Most awful

and supreme reality that can be thought of. We do not use lightly the

name of our King, but God is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Our

lives and our souls are in the hollow of His hand every moment; and if

we considered only His supreme Majesty and our weak and passing frames,

we are perfectly insignificant beings before Him. But it is to this

Being that the Psalmist addresses the words “O God, Thou art my God;

early will I seek Thee.” We may all say that, as well as the Psalmist.

It is our privilege to speak to the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords,

as our own; we may call Him our God, our own God, we may tell Him that

we seek Him, that we seek Him above all things, and we may say, as the

Psalmist goes on to say, “My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh also

longeth after Thee: in a barren and dry land where no water is. Thus

have I looked for Thee in the sanctuary (in a Cathedral like this) that

I might behold Thy power and glory.” How is it that humble and feeble

creatures like ourselves can thus call the God of heaven and earth our

own, and speak to Him, and tell Him, in this earnest language, that we

cannot do without Him? Where, above all, can we find Him and approach

Him?

The Psalmist used these words, and we may use them too, because this

God is the nearest of all things in the world to us, and because we are

in daily contact with Him in our hearts and souls. It is true He is so

great and infinite, that He has made the world, and all its marvels

and glories; but we are more concerned to realize that He has made

our own selves, and our minds and hearts and consciences, and when we

look into those hearts, and listen to those consciences, we are only

experiencing, in ourselves, the work of His hands, and listening to His

voice. Above all other things, God made right and wrong, He made us to

realize the difference between right and wrong; He made the truth, and

enabled us to love it, and to hate what is false; in a word, He made

our consciences and our minds; and He lives and works in them, as much

as He does in the world at large. It is very well for us to look up

to the heavens, to think of Him as the Creator of all those stars and

worlds, or to look into the infinite mysteries of this world’s life,

its minute elements and atoms; but it is more important for us to think

of Him as the Giver, and Ruler, and Guide of our very souls and bodies,

Who determined what we were made for, and what we ought to do, what

sort of a life we ought to live, putting into our hearts the knowledge

of our duty, warning us of it by the constant voice of our consciences,

and bidding us realize that He will judge us, for our obedience or

disobedience to His will and His commands. Think of God, by all means,

in His greatness and His Majesty, and His awful powers, but then think

of Him as actually in contact with you in your own souls, teaching you

and speaking to you in your consciences, and calling to you, by your

sense of right and wrong, to remember that He is your judge, and that

your very life and happiness depend upon your union with Him. That is

the thought of God that should be incessantly in our minds. As the

Scripture says more than once, you need not go to the heavens to seek

Him there, you need not go into the depths of the earth to seek Him

there, but He is near you, nearer to you than anything else, in your

very souls and consciences; you hear His voice there, you feel the

influence of His Spirit; there you can always find Him, you can turn to

Him at any moment and say “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek

Thee.”

There is no reality in the world which can be compared, in its

momentous importance, to this. It must be brought home to us, by the

experience which is thrust upon us by the Great War, that everything

else with which we have to do, everything else in the world, passes

away from us. So it does indeed from everybody, at all times, whether

times of war or of peace. There comes a time to every soul when it

has to leave the body, and, with the body, everything else with which

it has been associated in this world. We all know it when we think

seriously about it; but the misfortune is that, in ordinary life, men

do not think seriously about it. All their thoughts and interests

are engaged in the business and the pleasures and the interests of

this life, and they seldom look beyond. But in days like the present

we are forced to look beyond them. You, above all, who, at the call

of duty, have laid behind you, for the present, all the ordinary

interests of life, and are offering yourselves to all the risks of the

battlefield--you have reason to ask, with supreme earnestness, what

is the reality for which you are making this sacrifice, and what will

remain to you if the full sacrifice should be exacted from you.

It is the grand answer of our religion, to say that, whatever happens,

God remains to you. This God, moreover, is not a distant God, not

merely the Maker of the heavens and the earth, but your God, the God

of your inmost soul, the God of your conscience, the God whose eye

sees into your hearts, and Whose hand has been with you from your

childhood, to help you, to guide you, and to inspire you with all the

thoughts of truth, of manliness, of faithfulness, of purity, which you

have felt working in you. Whenever the outward clothing of our souls

drops off from us, whether in the death of old age, or the death of

sickness, or the death of the battlefield, our souls will certainly

be in the immediate presence of One Supreme Reality; and that is the

God with Whom, in our conscience, our souls have been in contact day

by day, and night by night, throughout our lives. That is why we come

to worship Him here, that is why we pray to Him day by day, and I hope

hour by hour, and minute by minute. That is why we should say to Him

like the Psalmist “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee.”

Nothing else is of permanent and everlasting consequence to us, but our

relation to Him, and our union with Him--His relation to us, and His

love of us. While everything is shaking around us, while the kingdoms

are moved, and lives seem thrown away as things of small value, let

us remember that one great Living Being remains to all of us, to those

whose lives are lost on earth, and to those who remain, and that is

the Eternal God, the Giver of all truth, and righteousness and love;

and the greater the strain and stress of life and death, the more may

we confidently exclaim, in the tumult of the battlefield as much as in

the peace of this sanctuary, “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek

Thee.”

But when and where are you to seek Him? The question has been answered

in the truths of which I have reminded you. Seek Him in obedience to

that Voice of His, which you hear in your consciences, seek Him in

obedience to those principles of right, as against wrong, which He has

implanted in you, and which His Spirit is continually reviving in you;

seek Him in trying, day by day, to do His Will as He has revealed it to

you in His word, especially as He has revealed it to you in the life

and teaching of His Own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Seek Him in those

sacraments and ordinances of His Church which he has instituted for

our comfort. If you obey our Lord Jesus Christ, and try to follow His

life, His Spirit will speak to you continually in your consciences,

will help you to know your duty and to do it, and you will be saying

in practice what you say in words: “O God, Thou art my God; early will

I seek Thee.” Our Lord has told you that if you are true hearted in

trying to do this, He will forgive you your failures and weaknesses,

that He has died to make atonement for them, that He will take you

by the hand as you pass from this life to the next, and will be your

advocate and sponsor before the face of the righteous and Almighty God.

Let us bring this spirit into all we do and all we think, and we shall

then be able to join in the succeeding words of this Psalm, “Have I not

remembered Thee in my bed: and thought upon Thee when I was waking?

Because Thou hast been my helper: therefore under the shadow of Thy

wings will I rejoice. My soul hangeth upon Thee: Thy right hand hath

upholden me.” May God grant us all this faith and this eternal life

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Hunt, Barnard & Co., Ltd., Printers, London and Aylesbury.

WORKS BY HENRY WACE, D.D.,

Dean of Canterbury.

SOME QUESTIONS OF THE DAY.

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=The Atonement.=

=The Estimate and Use of the Holy Scripture in the Church of England.=

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* * * * *

Transcriber’s Note

Minor punctuation errors have been corrected (i.e. missing periods).

Original spellings and variations (i.e. civilization and civilisation)

have been retained, except for the following apparent typographical

errors:

Page 35, “temporaly” changed to “temporal.” (for the things which are

seen are temporal)

Page 89, “eleswhere” changed to “elsewhere.” (a picture not adequately

described elsewhere)

Page 94, “idolators” changed to “idolaters.” (whoremongers, and

murderers, and idolaters)

Page 106, “thoughout” changed to “throughout.” (gracious throughout

their vast Empire)

Page 223, “repecting” changed to “respecting.” (respecting which very

various opinions have)

Chapter VIII’s sermon, Resistance Unto Blood, was incorrectly labeled

as having taken place April 3, 1916. It has been corrected to read

April 21, 1916. (The correct date was listed in the Table of Contents.)

The following inconsistencies were present in the original text:

Differences in the titles given in the Table of Contents and chapter

headings for these sermons: