Dr. Stanley, Dean of Westminster, preached to a crowded and
breathlessly attentive audience in Westminster Abbey last Thurs- day on the occasion of the 800th anniversary of the inauguration of the new Abbey, rebuilt by Edward the Confessor, on the 28th of December, 1065, a few days before the Confessor's death, and a few months only before the battle of Hastings. The sermon was
one of those picturesque: and refined historical surveys in which the -Dean of Westminster never fails, and which he never fails to colour with a real solemnity. His text was chosen with his usual skill from the reference in St. John's Gospel to Jesus walking in the Temple, in Solomon's porch, during the Feast of Dedication, when "it was winter." This, too, he said, was the feast of a dedication, not of a first foundation, but of a re-building by Judas Maecabams, and held in the same wintry season of the year, and the same feelings with which the Jews, and probably, Christ himself, recalled the history of the one renowned Temple we feel in recalling the history of the other. Dr. Stanley reminded his audience of the character of the pious but weak and mystic confessor, of the gloom which pervaded the nation in looking to the crisis which was to follow his death, and of the great history which eventually rose out of the dreaded invasion. He completely communicated to his audience that curious sense of national continuity which these great monuments of a past age alone give, and while he spoke eloquently of the faith and hope in which the great Abbey was founded, he did not omit to speak of the charity it had dispensed, or to appeal for the charitable institutions of the present.
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