BOOKS,
DEAN CHURC H'S CATHEDRAL AND UNIVERSITY SERMONS.* THEnn are few sermons in our language which surpass those of the late Dean of St. Paul's in beauty, and, so far as the present writer's knowledge goes, so much as equal them in the atmosphere of peace which they diffuse. Isaac Williams used to say that the most powerful of Newman's sermons stirred up a certain anxiety in the mind, that the hearer or reader felt as if Newman were embarking on a quest, the end of which it was not quite easy to anticipate, as if, indeed, Newman's own answers to his own questions were only pro- visional, and would some day be superseded by other answers. There is some truth in that remark as to many of Newman's most powerful sermons, though we do not think that it applies to all of them, nor even to the majority. But it is never true of Dean Church's. In these you always feel the evidence of a mind riding at anchor, and yet keenly alive to all those difficulties which, as Cardinal New-
man declared, did not collectively imply a single doubt. Dean Church had much of Newman's unequalled power of
probing those thoughts which interfere with,—or one may say, diffract,—religious faith. But he had, perhaps, even. more than Newman's power of showing how, in spite of those inter- ferences and chromatic disturbances of religious faith, or perhaps even in consequence of them, the faith grows deeper, as the field, of vision is more and more adequately surveyed.
Take, for example, the singularly fine sermon on "The Light of the Epiphany," in which Dean Church dwells on the great sense of loss which every passing year brings with it, and yet the gain which is inevitably associated with and involved in
that loss. Even the manifestation of Christ, he says, was a glimpse of light withdrawn almost as soon as it was flashed upon the earth :—
" A little while, in the world's long history, men saw Him, and their hands handled Him, and their ears heard Him ; their sick bodies sprang to health under His power, their dead heard His voice and lived. And again, a little while, and they saw Him no more ; He cams not to stay, but to disclose Himself, and to go ; and the world and mankind were left, to the end of time, to re- member and to think of the overwhelming manifestation whieh had once been made to them. So is the light vouchsafed to us here. It is given us but in part, in broken lights, in glimpses most clear, most wonderful, most imperfect. It is given, not to sight, but to remembrance ; given us to remember if we will, to forget, also, if we choose : it is the knowledge of heaven, but received on earth, and with tho limitations of earth ; the know- ledge of One, really so near, seemingly so remote, of whom, in our deepest and truest selves we are sure, but whom, in our outer, surface life, we are unable to see, unable to point out, unable fully to prove. For the Infinite Majesty is not here; and it is of Him, His Person, His Will, His Doings, that the reflections come down into this little life of ours." (p.
And. then he goes on to show that, without those visions which become memories,—those memories which become new visions, —we ourselves could not be made new in the way in which it is eesential that we should be made new, if we are to have an.
immortal life of divine growth :—
"We will accept the great law of ceaseless change, for the com- Catigaral awl Thavonlity SC.1111011F. B R W. Minh, semetime Pose of St. Paul's, mud Follow of Oriel College, Orford, London; Macmillan and Co. pensating power which it brings along with it, amid the vicissi- tudes of circumstance, of changing in character and soul, from what we are to what we would be. We will say to ourselves, I change with all things,—I must change : this awful fact of my nature follows me everywhere, whether I will or no. But I can change within, not by necessity, but by choice. I can change from my old and dead self, to a new and higher self. Amid the wreck of what is taken from me, amid the ruins of what I was and what I loved, I can also, if I will, leave behind the restless desires, the sordid meannesses. the dark self-deceits, the miserable treacheries of the years that are past. I am meant to change, I must change, if I am ever to be what I was intended to be ;- change from weakness to strength and purity, from random care- lessness to self-government, from the standard of the world to the standard of Jesus Christ. That dread discipline of change from which I shrink, is God's order for the training of the soul, as it is for the trial and training of the race. If that which He has pre- pared for man is ever to come to me, it must be by the passing away of all that is old,—by its passing, through the overthrow and agonies of change, into that over which change shall have no more power,—the kingdom which cannot be moved,—the ever- lasting peace of God.' (pp. 934.) The "overthrow and agonies of change I " It would be im- possible to find a truer and finer expression for the pangs which are produced by the rending of old ties, and the apparent evanescence of the most inspiring visions. Yet it is " expedient " for us that those visions should not only be given, but should be partially and temporarily withdrawn. As Christ himself said : "It is expedient for you that I go away." It is only by the transfiguration of the light in memory that we fully discern what it was,—only by the loss of its brightness that we learn to divest ourselves of those flaws and faults in our own selves which rendered its loss so inevitable, and the renewal of its lustre so distant.
That sermon is one illustration of the manner in which Dean Church turned the shadows on our faith into stimulants of faith. Let us take another illustration from the fine sermon on" The Condescension of Our Lord." How many there are who have felt the Incarnation altogether too great to be believed, a con- ception which baffles and bewilders, and, in short, almost shatters the human intellect which attempts to grasp it. But how does Dean Church turn the question? He makes it the great guarantee of reality and sincerity in human character, by virtue of its overwhelming magnitude :— "We find it so hard, even in our moments of retirement and secret thought, to shake off the empire of appearances ; it is so easy, so tempting, it saves such trouble, to be content with some• thing short of the genuine truth, in our judgments, in our argu- ments, in our expressions of opinion : nay, in those devotions which no man sees, which we need not offer to God unless we like, how often have we to confess that we have been satisfied,—con- sciously, deliberately satisfied,—with a poor make-believe of seri- ous prayer. But in the presence of the awful reality of the In- carnation there is no room left for shadows of religion ; ' and we commemorate it year by year, that we may try to impress more and more on our minds, how stern as well as how gracious a truth it is. It can be the foundation of no idle and dreamy and senti- mental religion. So tremendous a fact in the history of mankind cannot be consistent with any religious system, or any religious practice, which does not feel its keenness and its force. It is too great, too definite, too solid a thing for a religion of words, and phrases, and formulas, repeated till they lose their meaning ; for a religion of understandings, and fictions, and conventionalities ; for a religion of mere forms, and orderly, impressive ceremonies. If it has doctrines, they mean what they say. If it has Sacra- ments, they are no figures of things past and absent. but assur- ances of things present. If it has worship, it sets us before the throne of God. If He, the Lord who ' humbled Himself,' has promised to be with us, He is indeed with us. If He has told us anything, we must take Him at His word. And in the presence of such a fact, nothing but soundness and honesty of character can stand. It is the only hope of our manifold shortcomings and failures, but it will not allow us to act a part, or amuse ourselves with mere fine sentiments. We cannot, in our dealings with others, with ourselves, with God, suffer unresisted the continuance of what we have felt to be unreal and hollow, without learning one day how terrible it is to ignore what we claim to believe."
In other words, the Incarnation is not too great to be true, when it is so great that it makes us true. In precisely the same atti- tude of mind, the attitude which seems to have the power of diffusing the very spirit of peace, Dean Church treats that greatest of all events, the coming of the Holy Spirit, which our Lord promised as the only means by which his own departure could be made up, and even more than made up, to his disciples. It was expedient for them that they should lose him, he said, for without ceasing to depend upon his personal presence and authority, they could not experience that re- newal of their whole nature, that awakening of a new spring of life and confidence in them, which was to supersede in them the almost childlike dependence on personal example and per- sonal love. And does not history assure us that this was a real event The Dean does not illustrate this point, as he might have done, from that contrast between the Gospels and the Epistles, of which some of the assailants of Christianity, —notably, M. Renan,—have made so much. But in the fol- lowing fine passage, he suggests the true answer to what those assailants have said :— "The coming of the Holy Ghost was as much a new thing in the world as the Incarnation and Sacrifice of the Eternal Son. Each is equally a part of what, in our human way of thinking, appears to us as God's supreme effort, in the infinite seriousness of His love, to recall and reclaim His creatures which had gone astray. It was not enough that man should have before him, visibly manifested before his eyes, the perfect image of the good- ness, the wisdom, the stainless beauty of the love and holiness. of God. Our own hearts tell us too well that that may be before our eyes and minds in vain ; may be gazed at and not felt ; may be felt and not loved ; may be loved, but with a wayward, fickle, and barren love. Something more was wanted than even the life of the Incarnate Son, than even the thought and the story of the Crucified, if hearts like ours were to take in their lessons. The whole history of the race, until the fulness of time came, shows how little resource men had in. themselves for keeping up, much less for raising the standard of purity, of faith, of truth. What they needed, what they had not, was power within them, and not only lessons without them.. And that power, that new and unknown gift to man, from his Father in heaven, was the promised gift of the Holy Ghost.. Almighty God had come to him in the flesh : Almighty God came to him also in the spirit. Man found that he had a light and strength within his soul, which not only made the look and value of all things new, which not only gave him, as he never had it before, the higher aim, the better mind ; but which enabled him, as never before, to fulfil it, to tread down sin and resist tempta-
tion.—The history, the proof, of this astonishing moral revolution is written in the Epistles of the New Testament : compare with
that, anything that was known before, of man's attempts at righteousness, and you feel that you are passing into a new condition and idea of life, new in purpose, new in hope, new in realisation. Compare the civilised world of Horace and Virgil, and Cicero, with that enthusiasm for goodness, for holiness, for likeness to Jesus Christ, which set in after Pentecost in the early Church, and never was altogether quenched again—and which, mistaken and ill-directed as it often has been, is one of the most marvellous facts in the history of mankind ; and no one can say that the change is an imaginary one. Whence, but from. Him, those new features of human character—new, at any rate and absolutely unknown before in the whole Gentile world, which, followed the coming of the Holy Ghost ; that new faculty, that new idea, so familiar to us, so unheard of till He came, except to the Psalmists of Israel, which we call, the love of God ; that new readiness, that new passion of unselfishness, which led men like St. Paul to spend and be spent for love of the souls of men?" (pp. 187-89.) That is the real answer to such works as M. Renan's St. Paul, and to such books as Not Paul but Christ, in, which the same jealousy, as it were, of the comparatively imperfect influence of the Holy Spirit over frail human minds, was expressed in contrast with its perfect embodi- ment in the life of him who was the Word made Flesh.
And yet that was exactly what the world needed, not merely the exhibition of divinity itself as it shines through the nature of man, but the renovating power of that divine life as it restored and re-created the disordered and turbid hearts of actual men. "The ugly little Jew," as M. Henan delighted to call St. Paul, who has given us so marvellous a picture of the renovating influence of the Holy Spirit on himself in his Epistles, is not, and of course could not be, a radiant whole like the central figure in the Gospels, for the Gospels depict one without sin, and the Epistles one whom the Holy Spirit was cleansing from sin and passing through. all the various, and more or less painful and passionate, stages of a regenerated life,—a recovery from despair. But without the Epistles, and especially without St. Paul's Epistles and St. John's, we should have had no early picture of the vast transformation which the Holy Spirit effected when it took the place of Christ's personal example in the infant Church. Of course, human nature in the process of regenera- tion is not the same luminous and stainless object as that which. the Gospels depict. How could it be, when its very subject was the story of a reforming and transforming influence, not the reflection of a heavenly presence? The very function of the Epistles is to show Judaism,—or rather, Jews,—undergoing the radical change which the Spirit was to bring ; and as Christ never underwent that change, but simply showed us the nature into which ours was to be changed, without the Epistles. we could never have seen that gradual remoulding of human nature which the Holy Spirit was sent to effect. Nor is it without significance that we should have that remoulding. presented to us in fuller detail in the apostleship of him who had never known Christ in the flesh, than it was in any of those who had been his personal disciples ; for St. Paul, of course, was in a position far nearer to that of the great multi- tude of Christians of all ages than either St. Peter, St. John, or St. James. The Dean, therefore, put his finger on the very phenomenon which is most characteristic of the re- novating work of the Holy Spirit, when he referred to St. Paul's Epistles as containing the first great testimony to the working of the new leaven in that measure of meal which it is ulti- mately to permeate throughout. Of the Dean's new volume of sermons, these two are a fair specimen. Dean Church's seem to us the finest sermons published since Newman's, even Dr. Liddon's rich and eloquent discourses not excepted,—and they breathe more of the spirit of perfect peace than even Newnian's. They cannot be called High Church or Broad Church, much less Low Church ser- mons ;—they are simply the sermons of a good scholar, a great thinker, and a firm and serene Christian.
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