KINGSLEY'S SERMONS ON NATIONAL SUBJECTS. * IT is too general a

charge against the priests of every religion not to have some foundation in truth, that they do not thoroughly

preach the great truths of the faith they profess. It is not merely i

that vice n high places is touched tenderly or left unnoticed, the prevailing weaknesses of respectable congregations handled

gingerly, or quitted for the errors of some rival sect or the back-

slidings of the poor. The broad fundamental truths of religion itself are ignored or explained away, when to enforce them would

ran counter to the general spirit of the age ; of which we see an

extreme and glaring case in the clergy of the American Slave States. Still we think the wits have been hard upon the priests. Their truckling may proceed less from wilfulness than helplessness.

It is not so much self-seeking or worldliness as the spirit of con- vention which they cannot overcome. To know this, that, or the other, as schoolboys or students know it, is not difficult : the task

ja aptly to apply the knowledge to the wants of the times. Any- heap may soon learn to talk politics or political economy, and yet be as far from statesmanship as when the studies began. We see aundreds of clever' cultivated, aspiring people labouring with aught and main to describe what they have actually seen—to de- pict thi„6s and persons which have struck them as worthy of de- Piation ; but they cannot do it. So, to take any code of religious rasrals and dilate upon them abstractedly—and uselessly, is easy ,...Sermons on National Subjects, preached in a Village Church. By Charles in

efley, Canon of hfiddleham, Yorkshire; and Rector of Eversley, Rants. Pub-

enough ; equally easy to condemn to perdition in strong language rival religionists, or mankind in general. It is quite another mat- ter to see and seize the spirit of past and present times ; to dis- tinguish real resemblance through seeming difference ' • to apply the doctrines of a creed to the special circumstances of the age or the congregation, and (in theological phrase) " to drive them home" in language fit, racy., and earnest. For complying in any way with contemporary vices, ministers of religion are culpable ; for' not rising to the " height of their great argument " and denoun- cin vices, they may be excusable, because it is not alto- getaer a matter of will. To do it properly, requires depth, oom- prehensiveness, a robust earnestness, and an original perception • all which a man can no more acquire by "taking thought," than he can add a cubit to his stature.

These qualities distinguish Mr. Kingsley's Sermons on National Subjects, and render them remarkable in a literary as well as in a religious point of view. "Preached in a village-church," and evidently to a congregation where the very humblest were present, • their manner and language, as well as the topics they urge, are often plain even to homeliness ; but the weight of matter, the truth as much as the novelty of view, and the earnest spirit, not only elevate them far above flatness but give them a freshness of style. Religiously there is no paltering in a double sense ; no attempt to explain away texts that run counter to our convenience or our conventions : God has spoken, and spoken truly ; it is man and his actions which are wrong, not Scripture. At the same time, there is nothing of a sour and gloomy theology in the sermons. "Election," in the narrow Calvinistic sense, has no hold upon the preacher's mind ; for it is inconsistent, he argues, not only with the words of Paul but with the love of Christ. With the truths and promises of the Gospel in his mind, the preacher can survey all the mate- rial and moral evils that beset us, and yet hope.

" Believing in Jesus, we can travel on through one wild parish after an- other, upon English soil, and see, as I have done, the labourer who tills the land worse housed than the horse he drives, worse clothed than the sheep he shears, worse nourished than the hog he feeds, and yet not despair : for the Prince of Sufferers is the labourer's Saviour ; He has tasted hunger, and thirst, and weariness, poverty, oppression, and neglect ; the very tramp who wanders houseless on the moor-side is His brother ; in his sufferings the Saviour of the world has shared, when the foxes had holes and the birds of the air had nests while the Son of God had not where to lay His head. He is the King of the poor, first-born among many brethren ; His tenderness is Almighty ; and for the poor He has prepared deliverance, perhaps in this

in

world, surely the werld to come—boundlesso deliverance, out of the trea- sures of His boundless love.

"Believing in Jesus, we can pass by mines, and factories, and by dungeons darker and fouler still, in the lanes and alleys of our great towns and cities, where thousands and tens of thousands of starving men and wan women, and children grown old before their youth, sit toiling and pining in Mam- mon's prison-house, in worse than Egyptian bondage, to earn such pay as just keeps the broken heart within the worn-out body ; ay, we can go through our great cities, even now, and see the women, whom God intended to be Christian wives and mothers, the slaves of the rich man's greed by day, the playthings of his lust by night—and yet not despair ; for we can cry, No! thou proud Mammon money-making fiend ! these are not thine, but Christ's; they .belong to Him who died on the cross; and though thou heed-. eat not their sighs, He marks them all, for He has sighed like them ; though there be no pity in thee, there is in Him the pity of a man, ay, and the in- dignation of a God ! He treasures up their tears ; He understands their sorrows • His judgment of their guilt is not like thine, thou Pharisee ! He is their 'Lord,. who said that to those to whom little was given of them shall

little be required. • • •

"Ay, if the worst should come, when neither the laws of your country nor the benevolence of the few righteous are strong enough to defend you; when one charitable plan after another is failing, and the labour-market is getting fuller and fuller, and poverty is spreading wider and wider, and crime and misery are breeding faster and still faster every year than educa- tion and religion ; when all hope for the poor seems gone and lost, and they are ready to believe the men who tell them that the land is overpeople that there are too many of 1114 too many industrious hands, too many cun- ning brains, too many immortal souls, too many of God's children upon

God's earth, which God the Father made, and God the Son redeemed, and God the Holy Spirit teaches : then the Lord, the Prince of Sufferers, He who knoWs your every grief, and weeps with you tear for tear, He shall come out of His place to smite the haughty ones, and confound the cunning ones, and silence the loud ones, and empty the full ones ; to judge with righteousness for the meek of the earth, to hearken to the prayer of the poor, whose heart He has been preparing, and to help the fatherless and needy to their right, that the man of the world may be no snore exalted against them.

"In that day men will find out a wonder and a miracle. They will see Turnip that are first last, and many that are last first."—Bermon on Good Friday. The sermons are "national "more by their treatment than their- subjects ; for except three on the Cholera, and one on the Thanksgiving for its cessation, the discourses are on the festivals or Sundays of the Church, or on some of the general subjects of Christian mo- rality. A national breadth is imparted to them by treating the congregation as a part of the nation, not in their common character as men and sinners, but as Englishmen of the present time. The humblest are types of the humble, the well-to-do of the respectable; all having the sins common to their class or affected by the sins of the other classes. In more strictly doctrinal topics, and in the midst of exultation for the spiritual blessings that are open to the nation, this breadth is still maintained, a warning voice is still raised. The following passage on the universality of the Pharisaic' spirit is from a sermon on the Covenant. Take your covenant privileges as the Pharisees took theirs; and they will turn you into devils while you are fancying yourselves God s especial fa- vourites. Now this was what happened to the Pharisees. They could not help knowing that God had shown especial favour to them, and that He had taught them more about God than He had taught the heathen. But instead of feeling all the more humble and thankful for this, and of remembering day and night that because much had been given to them much would be requited of them, they thought more about the honour and glory which God had put on them. They forgot what God had declared, namely, that it was not for their own goodness that He had taught them, for that they were in themselves not a whit better than the heathen around them. They forgot that the reason why He ta them was, that they were to de His work on earth, by witnessing for name, and telling the heathen that God was their Lord, as well as Lord of the Jews. Now David, and the old Psaltnists and Prophets, did not forget this. Their cry is, Tell it out among the heathen that the Lord is King.' 'Worship the Son of God, ye kings of the earth, and make your peace with Irun, lest lie be angry.' It was in vain,' he told the heathen kings, to try to, cast away God's government from them, and break His bonds from off them,' for the Lord was King, let the nations be never so unquiet.' "But the Jews gradually forgot this, and their daily boast was, that God had nothing to do with the heathen ; that Ire did not care for them, and ac- tually hated them ; that they, as it were, had the true God all to themselves for their own private property; and that He had neither love nor meroy mm-pt for them and their proselytes, that is, the few heathens whom they could persuade and entice not to worship the true God after the customs of their own country—that would not have suited the Jews' bigotry and pride— but to turn Jews, and forget their own people among whom they were born, and ape them in everything. And so, as our Lord told them, after compassing sea and land to make one of these proselytes, they only made him after all twice as much the child of hell as themselves. For they could not teach the heathen anything worth knowing about God, when they had forgotten them- selves what God was like. They could tell them that there was one God; and not two—but what was the use of that As St. James says, the devils believe as much as that, and yet the knowledge does not make them holy, but only increases their fear and despair. And so with these Pharisees. They had forgotten that God was love. They had forgotten that God was mercifuL They bad forgotten that God was just. And therefore, while they were talking of God, and pretending to worship God, they knew no- thing of God, and they did not do God's will and act like God ; for, as we find from the Gospels, they were unjust, tyrannous, proud, conceited, covet- ous themselves • and while they were looking down on the poor heathens, those very heathens,. the Lord told them, would rise up in judgment against them, for they, knowing little, acted up to the light which they had, better than the Pharisees who knew so much. And so it will he with us, my friends, if we fancy that Goes great favours to us are a reason for our priding our- selves on them, and despising Papists, and Irish, and French, instead of re- membering that just because God has given us so much He will require more of us. It is true, we do know more of the Gospel than the Papists ; who, though they believe in Jesus Christ, worship the Virgin Mary and the. Sainte, and. idols of wood and stone. And yet I was sorely shocked this very summer, and sorely frightened for our own favoured land of England, when found among the poor benighted Papists in Germany, more honesty, more purity, more industry, more love to man, more fear of God, more, in short, of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, than lever saw among the generality of English labourers in any English parish. Surely, I thought to myself, these poor Papists may rise up in the day of judgment and condemn us. For if they who know so little of God's will yet act so faithfully up to what they do know, what do we deserve, who know so much more, and yet act so much worse ? Instead of despising them, we had better despise ourselves."

One sermon, called the "Fount of Science," preached at St Mar- garet's Church, Westminster, for the Westminster Hospital, is in curious resemblance to the others as regards purpose but in sin- gular difference as regards manner. The theme of the preacher is to. contrast the piety of our forefathers, which ascribed everygood thing, to God, with the arrogant self-satisfied spirit of the age, which at- tributes all modern discoveries to man's own merit. He then' as in some of his other sermons, touches upon the selfishness and. sanitary neglects of the age, productive of so much of material misery as well as vice ; and, urging that the good we receive- is from God and the evil is of our own causing, concludes that to sup- port these institutions is a duty originating from our own ladies. The scholarly style in which this is done is quite different from the homely diction of the Village Church discourses ; and the illus- trations, drawn from our history and the lives of our worthies, is quite national, but quite above the reach of a country congre- gation.