KEBLE COLLEGE SERMONS.*

Trims Sermons bear the deep impress of the mind to the influ- ence of which on our generation the erection of Keble College is due. Not that there has been any attempt to turn the Christian Year, or any other writings of Mr. Keble's, into the form of

sermons. The warden and tutors of Keble College are far too real in their conception of their work and duties for such an effort as that. But it is curious to notice how a particular type of genius,—even when it is not one of the most commanding,—may perpetuate itself through those of whose lives it has taken hold, till, without any conscious imitation, it lives and breathes again in lives widely separated from his in whom it was first embodied.

These sermons have all the intense seriousness, the affectionate- ness, the refinement, the delight in self-subordination to the Church's system, the enthusiastic sobriety—if we may be excused the paradox—the poetical receptiveness, the joy in limitation,

Which marked the life and work of the author of the Christian Feat-. Dr. Newman, we think, has recorded of Mr. Keble that when asked if some particular sermon was good, he replied, " Every sermon is good." That was very expressive of the man. We deny, indeed, that it was true. There is as much hollowness in sermons as in any department of thought, and we must maintain that a hollow sermon is worse than a hollow novel or a bad poem. But • the saying was eminently characteristic of Mr. Keble, who would rather have breathed a soul for himself into the hollowest and the most artificial bit of didactic rhetoric, than have faced the pain of plainly admitting solemn and high-sounding words to be only plausible and empty, at any rate while it was possible for him to read into them some meaning of his own of which the preacher never thought. In studying this volume we have often thought of Mr. Keble's saying,—not indeed, that any such charitable manipula- tion would have been necessary in the case of any of these sermons, for, as we have said before, they all of them breathe the verY'essence of Mr. Keble's own reverent, poetical, and intense, though, in one sense also, formal nature. But the number of suggestions scattered through the volume for giving the highest subjective significance to external occasions of intrinsically neutral purport, remind us of Mr. Keble's happy alchemy, which transmuted every sermon he heard into gold. Nothing can be nobler than many of the results of this spirit. But now and then

it produces in the reader what Mr. Keble's own deep but rigidly subdued religion produced, the effect of too much regulation and too little freedom ;—the effect of a religion not indeed conventional, because far too intense for such a phrase, but wanting in spontaneity,—of a religion that multiplies somewhat too largely the rules to be obeyed, and leaves too little to the free spirit of religious love. Thus the Warden himself, in a fine sermon on the then approaching opening of the new chapel of Keble College, makes a number of suggestions for more earnest worship in it, which seem to us conceived too much in the spirit of assiduous self-regulation :—

" And now, brethren, I say to you about the new chapel :— What you make its services, that they are likely to remain. What generation of Freshmen is to undertake the task of making hearty a service which you should hand down to them lukewarm or silent ? But, brethren, I am persuaded better things. I must indeed frankly say this much, that I think our responses have grown rather weaker lately; that you lean too much on the choir ; that there are too many mouths shut, too many whose look of indifference mast make it harder for others (I find it so myself) to be earnest. [The same thing applies, by the way, to grace in hall, and I should like to take this opportunity of asking you to make it hearty, instead of the half-ashamed mutter which it now often is.] But, as I have said once already, on the whole, our services are good. Let us make them better in the new chapel. In such ways as these. Let us all join in the responses with a clear voice. Let us make a point of joining in the musical parts according to our powers, and not according to our fancy; not singing music which we like, and leaving what wo dislike unsung. We are careful to provide books for all, Prayer-books, Bibles, and Hymn- books ; I should like to see a general habit among us of following the lessons in the Bible. Those who act as readers of the lessons should do honour to this subordinate but important part in the conduct of the service, by reading them, to the utmost of their power, audibly, intelli- gently, and with reverence of voice and manner. Our choir should be as full and good as possible; and to those who have the qualifications, I would suggest that they should join it, even at a slight sacrifice of time ; or of taste, if the music is not of the kind which they care most for -singing ; or of variety, if they are asked to take a part other than that which they would choose. I shall venture even to mention a very trifling matter, a mere detail of order ; I should be glad to get rid of the disorderly way which we have on Wednesday and Friday mornings, when some stand, some sit, in the pause between the psalms and the *'Sermons Fri:ached in the Temporary Chapel of Keble College, Oxford, 1870-76. London: Blvingnms. hymn ; I would ask all to continue standing. I purposely refer to a small point of this kind, to show you that the temper which I should wish each to have is impatience with the least blemish on order and perfection of our service which it depends upon himself to remedy."

Surely these things are matters on which it is not well to lay down too strict rules. Have we not all known responses far too load and monotonous for the spirit of worship,—responses which discourage instead of encouraging it ? Are there not times in

which it is far more natural for a man to join without open- ing his lips, instead of by following all the words of the con- gregation ? Again, as regards following the lessons in the Bible, are there not a great many, — especially if the lessons be adequately read,—to whom following them in the Bible is a hindrance, rather than an assistance to catching

the full spirit of them? These are trivial matters, but we notice them only as representing the more formal, and as we think, the weaker side of the High-Anglican system, and showing how Mr Keble's own gentle and reverent spirit, which was deeply imbued with the fear of not extracting from every form the whole of its significance, has descended to the able and thoughtful men

who now administer the College which bears Keble's name. The same remark is suggested by Mr. Illingworth's fine sermon on " Saints' Days." We can understand saints' days in the Catholic Church, where new saints are added to the calendar every year ; and where the pious tradition of the Church, discouraging rational-

istic inquiry, gives to its lives of the saints numbers of beautiful stories—some true and some legendary—of a nature to fill the memorial-days with meaning. But we never have understood the cultus of saints in the Anglican Church, where for centuries there have been no new saints to connect the spirit of Christianity with our modern times, and to give us the detail with which piety loves to fill up the outline of modern religious duty, and where, too, it is hardly considered decent to celebrate even such saints as St. Francis of Assisi or St. Bernard, who are identified with the system of the Roman Church. So it happens that while the Anglicans make much of saints' days, they are com-

pelled to fill up with barren conjectures a great part of the story which alone could furnish real religious suggestion. Take the sermon we have referred to, preached on St. Mark's Day. Of St.

Mark hardly anything is known, except that he was censured by St. Paul for leaving him abruptly in one of the missions to the Asian Churches,—it is only fair to remind ourselves that we have never heard St. Bariaabas's defence for him, or his own,—and that he was afterwards mentioned by St. Paul in later epistles as one of his faithful companions ; and further, that the most terse, and in some respects least impressive of the Synoptic Gospels is identified by tradition with his name. Well, Mr. Illingworth makes the most of these slender materials, and makes a very beautiful sermon out of them. But here, again, are not the High Anglicans making almost too much of the carefully lopped and pared remnants of the Roman Catholic system, when they dwell so much on such very bare materials, and yet refuse to avail themselves of the most complete materials for celebrating the memories of hundreds of Roman Catholic saints, only because they would often, of course, diverge widely from their theology ? It seems to us that Mr. Keble and the High Anglicans generally cling too much to the ideas and forms of the Roman Catholic Church, in connection with materials which on Anglican premisses are far too scanty for the purpose, and which, therefore, require them to dwell with excessive emphasis on the mere hints and suggestions remaining to them from the lavish wealth of an older but unreformed faith.

But let us not be supposed to underrate these fine, intensely devotional, and often most eloquent sermons. Every reader, however much he may feel inclined at times to make mental pro- tests, will be carried along by the earnestness and force of the various preachers. Such passages as the following, for instance, are not few, from a sermon of the Warden's :—

" The Lord, who made the world, governs the order of that which takes place upon it. In that order, then, look for traces of his hand. And when I take a great development like the spread of knowledge, and see among all its dangers, among many evils to which men abuse it, what incalculable good it has done, what foul and skulking cruelties have disappeared before the light of free discussion and publicity ; how many debasing superstitions and terrors, how many forms of misery, have been dissolved by the spread of honest knowledge as a common thing ; if I find that with security, peace, and national refinement, certain vices disappear, against which in other circumstances Christ- ianity spent its unaided strength in vain ; certain systems, like slavery, crumble, which Christianity hardly dared to attack ; certain graces and virtues, such as the delicacies of tolerance and charity, are developed, which, in rougher times, Christianity failed to form—what am I-to think ? Am I to set this down against Christ ? Am I to• erect an abstraction, which I call civilisation and progress, and make it his rival? Shall I not rather be reminded that he is 'the light which lighteth

every man that cometh into the world ?' The world, into the midst of which he came at his special manifestation in the flesh, was already his world, though corrupt. The world in which he left his Church was still his world, sustained, guided, in a measure enlightened by him, even though by comparison it were in darkness and the shadow of death. And, mark yen, since then there is in secular progress, as there always was, a good of its own; there is, secondly, a good which Christ- ianity helps it to draw out of itself by guiding it to recognise its own best ; there is, finally, the gobd which it absorbs directly and con- .eciously from Christianity. Education is good ; freedom is good. If the world's providential development has brought them, it is the Lord our Maker that we have to thank. Bat we do not know, perhaps, till we dwell upon it, bow much Christian influence has entered, like a chemical factor, into that development ; nor how much Christian light, teaching us what to appreciate, has enabled us to discern and appro- priate what it offered. Slavery had defied Christianity, and has yielded to progress; but I deny that you can set the two in opposition. They are mutually dependent operations of the same Lord. What did Christianity do to form the sentiment which secured that when the providential opportunity for enfranchisement came it should not be passed over? What does Christianity contribute to the chances which we have of using freedom to the permanent advantage of the world ?" •

And in this, again, of Mr. Illingworth's, from the sermon on Eternity :—

"It is therefore of eternity that nature and the Church alike are calling you to think. And now, if ever, there is need of our rendering obedience to the call. For, apart from all sentimental depreciation of the age we live in, it is an age of distractions, and wo glory in the fact. Patriarchal meditation in the fields at the eventide ; Oriental watchful- , ness among the midnight stars ; Greek philosophy, thought out when schools were still the homes of leisure ; monastic detachment; renaissance learning ; even the stately literature of the last century ; are now im- possible to ns, for repose has utterly perished from our lives ; and we think hastily, and read superficially, and speak and write and act pre- maturely, and possibly save time, but certainly lose eternity. Unto whom I swaro in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.' I•will ask you, therefore, to meditate upon the eternity of unseen things asa present fact, which gives its reality to all- your fair life of nature now, and now and not in a dim future, crowns its death with glory. To realise this, I know, requires an effort ; for we have heard the far- off music of the word 'eternity ' so often that it has ceased to have much meaning for our ears; and we are content to think of it vaguely as something that will come after 'time,' and then tarn out to be only 'time' of a more monotonous description. And so when Holy Scripture speaks of eternal life, and eternal fire, and inhabiting eternity, and the eternal city, and the unseen things which are eternal, the impression left upon our minds is of everlasting counterparts of the things we see around no, an endless repetition of the wear and tear of time. To some extent, I know, we cannot help this mode of thinking, because it is the very law and condition of all our thought that we should express spiritual and supersensual ideas, like ' God ' and soul ' and ' immor- tality,' by words which involve a metaphor borrowed from the things of sense. But this law is no fatality to be accepted in passive acquiescence; for however much it may curb and limit and make ridiculous our pride of intellect, it stimulates, and was meant to stimulate, our intellectual sloth. Tho very fact that at the best we can know so little of. the great realities is a reason for our pressing onward, grappling with them, wrestling with them, refusing with passionate insistance to let them go till we know their name. Eternity then is rather the quality of time- lessness, than a quantity of time. It is out of, and above, and beneath, and behind time. It does not go on for ever, but it always is ; and to introduce it into the temporal notions of after and before is like attempt- ing to cut water with an axe. It is meapfed by its intensity, not by its extension. And because timeless, things eternal are whole, and self-identical and changeless—' the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.'"

_Indeed, not one of the various preachers is common-place. They are all preachers who measure their words by life, and whose words therefore come with the force and the reality of deeds.