1822016009938 JNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. SAN DIEGO 3 1822 01600 9938 r VV THE MEANING OF THE MASS. WITH OTHER SERMONS AND ADDRESSES BY STEWART D. HEADLAM. PRICE TWO SHILLINGS. LONDON : S. C. BROWN, LANGHAM & Co., LTD., 47, GREAT RUSSELL STREET, W.C. 1905. CONTENTS. PAGE THE SACRIFICE OF OUR REDEMPTION ... 7 THE LORD'S SOPPER . . . . .15 THE HOLY COMMUNION . . . . .25 THE HOLY EUCHARIST . . 35 THE MASS ...... 43 THE CHURCH ...... 51 CHRIST'S TEMPTATION ..... 63 THB ETHICAL VALUE OF THE PARABLES OF JESUS . . 70 TH CHURCH AND THE NATIONAL EDUCATION . . 85 WISH STEWARDSHIP . . . . .94 AN ADDRESS TO TEACHERS .... 102 THE REAL CHURCH DISORDERS .... no CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY ..... 118 THE ATTITUDE OF THE CHURCH TOWARDS THE DRAMA . 127 THE SACRIFICE OF OUR REDEMPTION. PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF ALL SOULS, ST. MARGARET'S-ON-THAMES, FEBRUARY 27TH, 1901. I HAVE been asked to speak to you on five evenings this Lent on the one great Christian act of worship, the only service founded by our Lord Himself: the service which in all essentials is the same now in the twentieth century as it was in the first, the same here in England as it is all over Christendom. And I propose to take, in order to guide us in our study, five of the names by which this service has been widely known. To-night I take " The Sacrifice of our Redemption." This title you will find, at any rate, as far back as the fourth century. I take it from the Confessions of St. Augustine, a charming as well as a valuable book, one of the great books of the world, which I specially ask you to get and make your own this Lent, if indeed you have not already done so. In the last chapter but one, speaking of his mother Monica's burial, he says : " We went and returned without a tear. Not even at those prayers which we poured forth unto Thee, when the body rests beside the tomb, before it is committed to the ground, and the Sacrifice of our Redemption is offered for the departed, as is the custom there not even at those prayers did I weep." And again, in the last chapter, still speaking of his mother, he says : 8 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. " For when the day of Thy purpose came upon her, she cared not that her body should be richly shrouded, or wrapped in spices ; she desired no proud monument, nor prayed for a grave in her native land. Not such were her last injunctions to us, but only she begged that we would remember her before Thy altar, which she had served without missing a day, whence, as she knew, is dispensed the Holy Victim, whereby the handwriting that was against us is blotted out, wherein the enemy that reckons up our sins, and seeketh for accusa- tions against us, and could find nothing in Him in whom we con- quer, is trodden under foot. Who should give Him back the price wherewith He bought us, that he should pluck us out of His hand ? With that Sacrament of our Redemption Thy handmaiden bound up her soul with the bond of faith." Now that is exactly what I want you to do : to use this Great Sacrament Sunday by Sunday as the means to bind up your souls ; to strengthen your wills, to fortify your inner, spiritual life. The outward world, the circumstances which surround you, have rightly and inevitably much influence with you : but after all the inner world thought, imagination, will that is the most important of all, it is there that the secret of your life is to be found. "Children of men ! not that your age excel In pride of life the ages of your sires : But that ye think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well, The Friend of Man desires." Material advantages, wonderful inventions, personal comfort : these are not the main things. It is not even the main thing that you should be better clothed, better fed, better housed, than your forefathers were. No, the main thing is that you should think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well : intelligence, feeling, conduct, these are the things which abide, these are the things which make life worth living. And it is to give you, and to keep with you, these things of the soul that the Sacrifice of our Redemption is offered, and the Holy Victim dispensed from the altar. THE SACRIFICE OF OUR REDEMPTION. 9 The demands of the senses are so imperious, the neces- sary getting and spending so engrossing, the little details of life so interesting, that it is essential that we should use this Sacrament from time to time lest we should become wrapped up in them, and becoming wrapped up in them, become spiritually dead : that we should deliberately, by an act of our will, realise every week that God when He became Man sacrificed everything for what we call principle, and that we should each make a conscious effort to assimilate His character with our character, to let His sacrifice influence us. The priest offers the Holy Sacrifice, you by your " Amen " after the consecration take your share with him in doing so : and you letting your imagination play round the fact that the perfect unique Man sacrificed Himself, letting your heart go out in worship of the Saving Victim, get strength to sacrifice the pride of life, the imperious senses, the getting and spending, the absorbing details, for the sake of intelligence, feeling, conduct to give up, where necessary, the outside for the real truth of ^ife. Thus week by week are you literally, in the strictest sense of the word, " saved " by this Sacrifice, put into a sound healthy condition, a con- dition necessary for you if you would be a true human being, a condition without which no society or nation can last long. But the Sacrifice is called the Sacrifice of our Redemp- tion: by means of it "the enemy that reckons up our sins, and seeks accusations against us, is trodden under foot." We are forced by the Holy Sacrament to face the fact of sin. Many keep away from it because they say they are not good enough ; others do not come because they say they can be good enough without it. Those who do come are inevitably convinced that they are sinners : IO THE MEANING OF THE MASS. and that notwithstanding their sins it can be well with them. A sense of sin is absolutely essential for you if you would be true men and women : nothing is more fatal to progress than for men to be thoroughly satisfied with themselves, and the world around them : a divine dis- content is an essentially Christian quality. We are sinners and miserable sinners: we do wrong and we suffer for it : we miss the mark at which we are aiming : we wander away from the path which we know is the right path : we utterly fail to attain to the ideal standard which has been set up for us : we do not " think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well " ; but are sadly lacking in intelligence, superficial in our silly sentiments, often outrageous, always faulty in our conduct. There is no truer word than this, that we are miserable sinners and the sooner we face the fact the better. The cry " Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy," with which in all ages the offering of the Sacrifice of our Redemption has been begun, is a genuine human cry, and the more you realise that the Eternal God who is the Righteous God has come down to us men in the perfect Man, Jesus Christ the more acute does this cry become, for your ideal standard becomes higher, and you feel the more intensely that in sinning you have wronged the Friend of Man. But this is not all : if it were all we should fall into despair or carelessness or reckless living : and so we have to learn that notwithstanding our sins it can still be well with us : that we have a Redeemer a Great High Priest who is always in absolution, and in whose name the priests in all the Churches are bound to act. And so most wisely the one great Christian service is called the Sacrifice of our Redemption, because by THE SACRIFICE OF OUR REDEMPTION. II means of it the enemy that reckons up our sins, and seeks accusations against us, is trodden under foot. You see that just as it would never do to be without a sense of sin, so also it would be fatal to all true human life and progress for men to be going about with the burden of their sins upon them. Some devout men and women have made their lives a nuisance to themselves and their neighbours by doing this : they have need to remember Bishop Butler's prayer "to be delivered from the ofiendiculum of scrupulousness " : they have need to remember the words I have quoted from St. Augustine that it is the part of the enemy, and not of the Friend, of man to be reckoning up sins and seeking accusations : that every time the Holy Sacrifice is offered it is made clear that that enemy is trodden under foot : that the handwriting against us is blotted out. That no man or devil is powerful enough to pluck us out of our Redeemer's hand, for none can pay the price He paid to make us His the sacrifice of His perfect life. And so we can say with the certainty that we shall be heard : " Oh Saving Victim, opening wide The gate of Heaven to man below, Our foes press on from every side, Thy aid supply, Thy strength bestow." Now do you not think that it is worth while to come and by assisting at this sacrifice, constantly, bind up your soul with the bond of faith ? Don't you think you will be better men and women by taking pains regularly to realise these unseen facts: don't you think it will help you to develope your character and train your temper : don't you think that by means of it you will be enabled to go out into the world strong and fearless, free 12 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. to enjoy the life which God has so abundantly given yon ? I remind you of one other fact in connection with our unique Christian Service a most encouraging comfor- ting fact, but one, nevertheless, which we do not take at all sufficient notice of. The Sacrifice of our Redemption is offered for the departed as well as for the present, for the dead as well as for the living. Jesus Christ by offering Himself as a Holy Victim has redeemed not only our life here but elsewhere. By faith in Him the unseen world beyond the grave need have no terrors for us. You can plead before the altar week by week the names of the friends who have been taken from you, knowing that their Redeemer liveth, that they are in His hands there, as they were here ; that all the spiritual influences which were brought to bear upon them in this life and which were partially successful in forming their characters, in destroying the evil in them and educating the good, will be continued in the next life ; that there, too, they will grow in grace : that as here, so there, methods will be found by which the rubbish of their lives will be burnt up in unquenchable fire, and all that is of real value saved and intensified. If any of you have been in the habit of bringing the names of those whom you love, or to whom you are indebted in this world, before the altar, and of uniting with the priest in offering the Holy Sacrifice on their behalf, as of course you are bound and I hope eager to do : and if, with some superstitious dread of superstition, you have, with what a wrench to your feelings you only know, deliberately dropped out their names after the coffin has been laid in the grave, then I charge you for their sakes and for yours to repent of your faithlessness. How dare you limit the sphere of our Redeemer's influence 1 THE SACRIFICE OF OUR REDEMPTION. 13 How can you deprive them of the benefit of your prayers ! Your dearest friend has gone : you want that " the idea of his life should sweetly creep into your study of imagination " : you want, now that you are deprived of outward intercourse with him, that his real self, of which his body was but the sacrament, should gradually become clearer to you and more powerful with you : what can avail to accomplish this better than the offering of the Sacrifice of our Redemption on his behalf? And he too, wants your help and your prayers. We have no reason to believe that the progress towards perfection, the attaining of the ideal, will be easier elsewhere than it is here : we have every reason to believe that it is absurd to suppose that most of us at the moment of our death are fit for the beatific vision or could enjoy it if we saw it : if, therefore, you have given your friend the benefit of your prayers here, you cannot refuse them to him there : prayers which are never, of course, intended to alter the mind of God towards us for that mind always is and must be one of perfect love but prayers which will link you and him together and bind you both about the feet of God. But we must not allow personal and individual facts however sacred, to occupy our whole attention when we are considering the meaning of the Sacrifice of our Redemption. There is a real danger of selfishness in religion : the devout worshipper may be thinking only of saving his own soul : it would be well, to prevent this, I venture to suggest, if no subjective pietistic hymns were sung before the altar. I conclude therefore by remindingyou that the Sacrifice which we offer is of Redemption for all mankind, not only of the pious few who may come to take their part 14 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. in it. And so the importance of offering that Sacrifice for the dead is not only of private and individual value, but is essential for the getting rid of dark narrow notions about God which too often have been current. It is impossible for those terrible denials of our Lord's great statement, " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me " to survive when the Host is elevated for the dead as well as for the living. It is impossible to be in any way exclusive when we offer the Sacrifice of our Redemption, when we remember in the words of the Church Catechism that God the Son, the Holy Victim who offered Himself, hath redeemed not merely me but all mankind. " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me" : that is the unlimited boundless Gospel of the Sacrifice of our Redemption. THE LORD'S SUPPER. PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF ALL SOULS, ST. MARGARET'S-ON-THAMES, MARCH 6TH, 1901. AN institution which has lasted through nineteen centuries, and which appeals to the instincts of all nations, will of necessity be known by different names at different periods, and each name will have its own valuable significance. I am speaking to you of the one unique Christian act of worship, the only one specially ordained by Christ Himself to which your Morning and Evening Prayer, your preaching and your singing, may with advantage be added, but of which they cannot possibly take the place. Last week we considered this institution under the name of " The Sacrifice of our Redemption." To-night we will consider the value of the name " The Lord's Supper." This is the title which heads the service in our Church of England Book of Common Prayer : " The Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper." We do not often hear it now so named : some of us perhaps, dwelling on other aspects of the service, have been rather glad that this name has been dropped. But I hope to be able to shew you that the facts which this name connotes are of the utmost importance to us : that whether we use the name or not, we must, if we would 15 l6 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. live the full complete Christian life, let these facts influence us. For the'.title " The Lord's Supper " reminds us that this institution took the place, for all the nations, which the Passover Supper held for the Jewish nation. Year by year the Jews celebrated their festival of national deliverance they remembered the time when they were a horde of slaves, and considered the means by which they were gradually developed and educated into a great nation. They commemorated, what we should nowadays call the great strike or revolution, which Moses had headed against the Egyptian tyranny. Their Passover Supper was a Feast of Emancipation, national and social emancipation. They believed that God spoke to each of them and said : " I am the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of bondage": "Thou shalt have none other gods but Me" the Deliverer, the Emancipator, the Saviour. The nations around them had imagined for themselves all sorts of dark cruel tyrant gods, whom they had to bribe and to propitiate in order to persuade them to be kind to them : they were to remember that the Eternal Power was Himself the deliverer from tyranny. And so Christ, who came not to destroy the old laws and customs of His nation but to fulfil them ; to expand and to develope them, to explain their full meaning and significance, made it clear that His great institution, which was to roll through the centuries, was not to be a mere private affair for the saving of individual souls, or the cultivation of an exotic piety, but to be for all the nations which largely through its influence were to be called into being the great public witness for national life and social freedom. The end of the world, THE LORD'S SUPPER. 17 the summing up of the age, was indeed to come : and there was to be a new heaven and a new earth ; the old Jewish conceptions of religion were to pass away, the great Roman empire was to be broken up : but not before they had done their work and the truths to which they had borne witness had been safeguarded for ever in the Christian Church. Now it is impossible to read the old Hebrew books, and sing the old Hebrew songs, as we in the Church of England are so rightly proud of doing so regularly, without having the sacredness of the national life forced upon us at every turn. Of course, there are personal cries in them, cries of individual distress and despair, aspirations of individual piety and devotion : but the trend of the whole literature is national and social. And so whenever the Lord's Supper is administered you are invited to remember that Christ has done for all classes, in all nations, what God did by the hand of Moses for the horde of slaves from Egypt. When you worship before the altar you worship One who is not only concerned with your own personal religion but with the well-being of your nation. In the words of the old prayer you will say : " We bring before Thee, O Lord, if Thou wilt graciously vouchsafe to behold, the tribulations of the poor, the perils of the people, the groans of prisoners, the miseries of orphans, the necessities of strangers, the helplessness of the weak, the depressions of the languishing, the infirmities of the aged, the aspirations of the young, the vows of virgins, the wailings of widows." You will get taken out of yourself, even out of your own religious needs, and feel yourself at one with your fellow men, of whatever condition, in whatever class. And, believe me, this is most necessary ; there are many religious people, especially religious women, who take B l8 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. their religion selfishly, who let it spoil them : to them the words of the poet should speak with authority : " It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye, That the old hysterical mock disease should die ; And I stood on a giant deck and mixed my breath With a loyal people shouting a battle cry." And further : " I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind." I want to urge you not to let the administration of the Lord's Supper pander to any hysterical mock disease : not to let it make you selfish in your religion, but on the contrary to use it as a means to get you out of yourselves, to make you feel with your native land, and be at one with your kind. Now in order that this may be so there is no absolute need that you should take part in what is technically called " politics," if you feel unable to do so though if you have a vote you must regard that as one of the most sacred trusts which God has given you and you must educate yourself so as to use it wisely. But even if you have no votes you are not on that account free from the obligation which every administration of the Lord's Supper the Feast of National Emancipation- lays upon you, of spending thought and action for the national well-being, as well as for the well-being of your own individual souls. I remind you that it was nations, and not merely individuals, that Christ summoned before Him for judgment. You cannot be a good Christian merely by being good privately, or in your family circle : you must also be a good citizen in order to be a good Christian. St. Paul, the great apostle, was the apostle of the nations. It was over the city which had lost its opportunity, as well THE LORD'S SUPPER. 19 as over the sisters who had lost their brother, that Jesus wept. What, then, can you do ? Well, you can educate your- selves, and see that all others have an opportunity to educate themselves, so as to be intelligent workers at whatever it is you are doing in return for the food, clothing and housing with which you are provided. If there is one lesson more than another which England ought to have learnt during the last terrible, in many respects disgraceful, year, it is that we want more intelligence everywhere : it is for you, for the sake of your nation as well as for your own sakes, to be intelli- gent in your business, to put more brains into it, and to see that every opportunity is given to the people of England to train their brains, as well as their bodies. But even here there may be a few of you who have no business, who are doing nothing in return for your food, clothing and housing : neither going out to work, nor managing the house, nor looking after the children : consuming the proceeds, not of what you have yourselves produced with brain or with hand, but of what your fathers or ancestors have produced. In such a case it is imperative on you to remember that you are in debt to the nation, and that it is your bounden duty as loyal Churchmen to use some portion of your means and of your leisure for the national well-being. I shall never forget one of the great Italian pictures of the Rich Man who you remember went to Hell not because he was rich but because he did not help the poor how he was represented not as living a dissolute, outrageous life, but an artistic refined life. You will find the whole thing, too, in Tennyson's " Palace of Art" if you willsit down and read it before you go to bed to-night. On you then, whom for the moment I am addressing, to a great degree, 2O THE MEANING OF THE MASS. as on all of you to some degree, it is incumbent to be doing something to help to make things better : to mitigate the evils of poverty, to share with the less fortunate some of your knowledge and refinement. There are endless ways in this great London diocese of ours in which this can be done. But on all of you, rich or poor, busy or leisured (those who go out to work or those who work at home in managing the house and minding the baby), there is a further tremendous responsibility resting, a responsibility which the weekly administration of the great Emanci- pator's Supper intensifies, while it gives us, thank God, the strength to comply with it : the responsibility for each one of us, whether the nation has given us the vote or not, whether we are people of leisure or people of business, to think out, and try and find out, what are the evils which are preventing our England from being the veritable Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, which it is intended to be. Against those evils, it is for each parish and diocese to create, and to persevere in maintaining, a strong public opinion : against those evils, strengthened by our Holy Sacrament, we should work unitedly. "Agitate, educate, organise," should be our motto as well as the motto of others ! I am not now speaking of personal evils, they indeed are more difficult to eradicate ! If two men love one woman, or two women love one man, there is sure to be trouble, jealousy, and sometimes disastrous conse- quences therefrom : there will always be tempers too quick and tempers not quick enough, hot tempers and sulky tempers, and so on. It is not to these evils that I refer to-night : but to national evils which, if we chose, could be remedied in a generation or two. THE LORD'S SUPPER. 21 What are they ? Well, here are four of them. 1. First of all there is that want of intelligence, that failing to think clear, of which I have already spoken ; which can obviously be remedied if the nation once feels that the mental training of its youth is of prime importance, and that brains to be healthy and worth training must be supplied with healthy blood. A great advance has been made this year by raising the age for leaving school to fourteen : it remains to make it easy for the chosen ones to stay on at school three years longer: it remains to organise what are called " secon- dary schools " : but, above all, it remains for the nation to claim from the employers of labour the services for a few hours a week of all young men and women up to the age of twenty-one in order that their education, mental, physical, and technical, may be continued. It remains further by economising the hours of labour generally to give every opportunity to adults to continue their education, and to be on our guard against class jealousy, which would hinder the people's progress. 2. Secondly, and notoriously, we have to admit that many Englishmen drink too much, and that the stuff they drink isn't good enough. We need not say with a lamented young Prince that " drunkenness is the only enemy that England has to fear " for that is an extravagance which spoils a cause: we need not run atilt against public-houses, for the fact of their being places for public social meeting is one great thing in their favour : we must not refuse reforms in drinking arrangements because we are teetotallers and think drink itself evil. No we have to get round this evil in all sorts of indirect ways : mainly, I think, by making all public-houses the property of the municipalities, and by giving people numberless 22 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. opportunities to realise that there are many pleasures much more exhilarating than the pleasure of drinking. Where people are allowed to spend their leisure in a reasonable way, and to drink in connection with their amusements, they drink very much less than they would in a public-house. One part of this evil of drunkenness could be got rid of by means of rational drinking in connection with rational amusements : another part by means of such a reasonable distribution of work as would make the work itself a healthy pleasure instead of a grind to be forgotten in drink or some other way : though, of course, the main defence against this evil, a defence strangely overlooked nowadays, is a strong will. You must, however, permit me to give you the remedy for this evil suggested by a little Bethnal Green girl a girl in one of those Board Schools which the high and mighty people of Twickenham want to keep out from their midst as if they were a plague, pestilence or infec- tious disease. The three best remedies against drunken- ness, she said, are " a blazing fire, a hot supper and a pleasant wife." I commend that little lady's answer to your thoughtful consideration. 3. Thirdly, and closely connected with this evil of drunkenness, is the evil of the overcrowded condition of the great mass of the poorest of our fellow citizens, an evil which is notorious and which is productive of endless other evils : an evil which is not remedied, but which is intensified, by turning the overcrowded families out, clearing the area, and building houses to be let at a rent which none of the old occupiers could possibly afford to pay. As to how this evil is to be remedied, some of the best men in Church and State are, as you know, giving their attention : what I urge upon you is that THE LORD'S SUPPER. 23 you should have this evil present with you constantly, when the Supper of the Saviour, the Deliverer, is administered : that you should have it in your mind till you are dissatisfied and discontented and utterly ashamed about it, till you have a troubled spirit, a broken and contrite heart about it, and that when the remedy is revealed to you, you should at all costs adopt it. 4. And, lastly, I think that if you want a remedy for this and many other of our material evils, you will have to seek it in the abolition of the root-material evil of all, viz., that the land of England (which ought to be the common property of all English people) is at present monopolised by a few, that it is only by their permission that the rest of us are allowed to live or work anywhere at all : and that in proportion as we live and work or want to live and work in any neighbourhood, does the land in that neighbourhood increase in value and that value goes, not to those who by their work and presence create it, but to those who happen to own it. I venture to say that at last this question is coming to the front, and that the time is not far distant when some of that value shall be returned to us in the form of rates and taxes for the benefit of the whole community, and that from this a natural re-housing of the people will ensue. There are other national evils to which I might call your attention but let these four suffice as a guide to you as to what I mean, when I say that at every ad- ministration of the Lord's Supper you should not be content to plead only your own personal needs, but should bring before the Saviour and Emancipator of mankind the needs of your nation. When you find education being hindered, drunkenness encouraged, overcrowding permitted, land monopolised : 24 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. you must not try and forget these facts when the Lord's Supper is administered ; on the contrary you must bring them with you, and seek there for strength and refresh- ment to enable you to take your share in obtaining your nation's deliverance from them : so you will be co-opera- tors with God in saving His people, the nation, from their sins. THE HOLY COMMUNION. PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF ALL SOULS, ST. MARGARET'S-ON-THAMES, MARCH I3TH, 1901. I AM talking to you again to-night about the one ser- vice which Christ left to be enacted by His followers : and the more I talk to you about it, the more one realises that the great object of it all was to put doing something in the place of talking about it. Preaching has its own place in the Church but by Christ's ordinance it has not the first, the unique place, that is confined to the great act, the great performance to be repeated Sunday after Sunday during the centuries, which we to-night consider under its name the Holy Communion. There- fore I entreat you not to let my talk about it, or anybody else's talk about it, or the holding of correct opinions about it, take the place of your own participation in the act itself the value of which is independent of your feelings and opinions. The Order of the Administration of Holy Communion. What do we find, if we look into it, this implies ? (:) Priests who are ordered or set apart for the purpose of administering it, not because they are better than other men, or because any magical or miraculous power is given to them beyond what is given to other men ; but because this most important business for the well- being of humanity is to be their special business ; (2) faithful people who are to lake their share with th priest in this act or performance ; and (3) the bread and 2 6 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. wine which the Lord has commanded to be received; these simply, with (4) our Lord's own words of consecra- tion, are all that is necessary for this great act through- out the world. No wonder that super-refined and high and mighty people stay away, because they think they can be good enough without that : but great wonder puzzle beyond discovery why simple common people, wayfaring men and women, do not gather round to take the sacred Food. Holy Communion : a little band of Galilean peasants with their Master before His death : a few more by and by in an upper room in Jerusalem believing in His Eternal Presence : soon men and women of all classes, slaves and masters alike, throughout the Roman Empire and so the thing spreads the act being performed on each Lord's Day through 1900 years. My friends, you really cannot afford to miss your share in this, to turn your back on it, to put Matins and Even- song in the place of it. It is one of the tremendous facts in the world's history, that we are doing here (at St. Margaret's-on-Thames), and they are doing there in Rome and in Moscow, just essentially what was done 1900 years ago in Jerusalem. What has kept this going everywhere all this time ? What does it all mean ? Well, first of all it means this : That when you kneel there before the altar, as you all will next Easter Day, and hold up your hands to receive the Bread, and when with reverent lips you taste the Wine ; that Jesus Christ then and there gives Himself to you to be your strength and your refreshment. You then and there are in com- munion with Him : that is the first and great thing to remember. This do, He said, in remembrance of Me : and, dear faithful people, you do it ; and doing it you not THE HOLY COMMUNION. 27 only benefit yourselves : you not only submit yourselves your lives and characters to the influence of His life and character : but you benefit your fellows also, for you keep alive, you keep before an indifferent or hostile world, the fact that Christ is : you make it clear that His life is still powerful : you make people think whether the world could do without Him. "This do, in remembrance of Me" Christ had, what, if His claims had not been true, would have been rightly called, the audacity to say that: the fact that having commanded it, you do it i goo years afterwards down here on the Thames, is the greatest possible proof that His claims were justified, and that His is the life and His the character which are intended to be the ideal for mankind. You, I again say, the quietest and most reserved of you, every time you receive the Holy Communion, are not merely getting for your own self abundantly I hope spiritual strength and refreshment, but are bearing public witness to the fact that Christ and all His claims are justified. What those claims are, it is not for me now to attempt to describe the Church throughout the Christian year brings these home to the people : they are, at any rate, tremendous and far reaching and you are certainly benefiting the common people by helping, as you do, to enforce them. And so, just as the most old-fashioned clergyman, whatever may have been his politics, or views on social questions, was by the mere fact of his baptising the labourer's little baby bearing witness to the truths of equality in a more far-reaching way than any French Revolution ever did : so the quietest and the most retiring of you when you kneel on Easter morning to receive Jesus Christ for your strength and refreshment, 28 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. are also bearing witness to truths which, when realised, will regenerate the world : which will put down the mighty, scatter the proud, empty the pockets of the rich. People talk to you sometimes of how they can be good enough without coming to the Holy Communion : and you associate with people who are doing splendid work for their fellow-men, but who have altogether, as they say, thrown over our religion : but we forget, and they forget, that their conduct is largely founded on the best Christian traditions ; that the character of Christ has to an important degree permeated the civilised world : that, as St. Paul says, we are in Him, surrounded by the spiritual atmosphere created by His Presence. And it is you the remnant of conscious worshipping Chris- tians you who obey His command, " This do in memory of Me," who are thus helping to save the world. And what is the next fact of which this service of ours, when we consider it under the name of the Holy Communion, tells us ? It is that Jesus Christ came to reveal a brotherhood, to found a Church. In speaking of the Eternal Power of whom all His nation was vividly conscious, of God, whom all nations in some form or another had to some degree been conscious of themselves, He pronounced that great word " Our Father" He gave emphasis to it, He constantly reiterated it. In the world of thought He delivered men from dark, vague, cruel notions about the Unseen, and brought the whole force of His being to get this great thought impressed on men's minds. He sacrificed Himself rather than give up this claim of the Fatherhood of God. And so, necessarily, in the world of action He revealed the brotherhood of men the Holy Communion. And then He founded the THE HOLY COMMUNION. 29 Church, a Society to keep these facts alive, to make them workable and vital. The earnest men to whom we owe so much before what we call the Catholic revival, were keen about personal religion, about each man getting his own soul saved : but besides that, and with a view to that, Christ knew that the Society was necessary, so that we might help each other, and hold together. " It is not good for man to be alone" even in his religion " I will build My Church " : and so during the last seventy years we have again made much of the Holy Communion, the service which tells of brotherhood, solidarity, co-opera- tion. Social religion has become as necessary as personal religion. Let us see what it pledges us to. Well, in a word the Holy Communion pledges us to live the common life, to share our spiritual and material wealth, to give a full return of mental or bodily pro- duction for what we each receive from the labour and mind of others. The first Christians were, as you well know, in the simplest sense of the word communists they put all their goods into a common fund and distribution was made to every man according to his need. And if in the process of God's ordering of the world things have become complicated and this simple communism is no longer possible, the principle which inspired it is eternally true. It is not for nothing that in the best language of our race " the State " is called "a Commonwealth " : it is not for nothing that our Prayer-book is called the Book of Common Prayer: alike in material as in spiritual matters we are still to be communists sh arers . And so I remind you (for to say the same things to you to me indeed is not grievous and for you it is safe : line upon line, precept upon precept ; here a little, there 3O THE MEANING OF THE MASS. a little) of St. Paul's great teaching that the valuable official whom we now call the rate collector or the tax collector is God's minister, that getting money from the individual for a common fund is a sacred business. More and more, if you are wise, will you see to it that you use this ministration as one great means for getting God's will that we should live as brothers done on earth as it is in heaven. i. And first of all for your Common Schools, which should be everywhere and far reaching, not only for the poor but for the people : not only for elementary purposes but for secondary, technical and university purposes also. So only will equality of opportunity be able to be offered to all alike. Already something is being done in this direction and I will not say the awkward ladder but the spacious staircase is gradually being set up be- tween the primary schools and the universities so that if Oxford sets up a house in Bethual Green, Bethnal Green can return the compliment and send her boys to Oxford (and, by the way, too, her girls to Girton, where a Board School girl has been a successful Latin tutor). You must rejoice, therefore, when your education rate is a heavy rate and must see to it that it is wisely spent. " Get learn- ingget discipline with a great sum of silver, and get much gold by her " : what you pay in silver will be repaid twenty times over in gold. You are not true Christian communists, you do not rightly appreciate the value of the Holy Communion, if you are niggardly or selfish in this matter, or if you would confine this common education to one class, if you would limit it to a few subjects, if you would compel young people to cease from it when they cease to be children. It is a matter of national importance that all young citizens should enter into their heritage well trained in mind and body : THE HOLY COMMUNION. 31 it is for the Commonwealth to see to it that this is done. It is being done so well for the poor that some of the middle classes are endeavouring to stop its development : this of course is unchristian : the true policy is to see that the middle classes get their share too. Primary education, secondary education, technical education, university education, should all be common managed and paid for as a matter of national importance by the Commonwealth lower classes, middle classes, upper classes, should all share alike in it. But how this talk about classes at all must jar upon your feelings when you think of the Holy Communion. 2. But I will tell you what will not jar upon your feelings, what you must, on the contrary, really feel quite in sympathy with at moments when you are thoroughly inspired with the meaning of this great service, and that is that the land of your country should not be monopolised by private individuals but should be treated as common property, and that its enormous value should be the basis on which the rate collector or tax collector should work in getting money for common public purposes. The recognition of this by the first Parliament of the twentieth century, the first year of a new reign, would be a most Christian way of beginning the century and the reign. I ask you most seriously to question yourselves about this matter : I suggest to you that as communicants you dare not shirk it : that it would be simply hypocrisy aye, even blasphemy for you to have on your lips words of brotherhood and of sharing, and not to be willing to consider the best means for making these things actual, practical. But rather, I am sure, my friends, I may put it to you in quite another way that you rejoice to think that the great truths which you as devout communicants 32 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. have so long recognised, should at last have some chance of being recognised by the great Council of the nation : that the Church once again, as so often, has guided, inspired and permeated the Commonwealth. 3. At the same time you would do well to be grateful for what you have already obtained. There seem to me to be two ideal ways in which a Christian Common- wealth could deal with the land : those who occupied any portion of it would pay the full annual value of that portion to the nation (that value, of course, rising or falling from time to time as people were anxious or un- willing to live or work in that particular neighbour- hood) : other portions would be held by the nation or the municipality for the common use of all. Now this latter is, of course, already the custom to some degree : the good old word " common" bears witness to it, and though in bad times many commons have been stolen from the people (for please remember it is just as possible to steal from the people as it is from an indivi- dual, and the command " Thou shalt not steal " compels you to consider how you can stop this), there are still splendid tracts of country left which are not private pro- perty, and one of the very best things which our London County Council can do (and which other public authori- ties can do) is, especially where the population is thick, to obtain plenty of open spaces for health and recreation. And so by degrees shall we realise that the earth is the Lord's, and that He hath given it unto the children of men : so by degrees shall the meek the simple, common people inherit the earth. 4. But, once more, there must be a community, a sharing of the intellectual things of life. You can get this, if you will take advantage of them, by means of your common schools, of which I have already spoken THE HOLY COMMUNION. 33 to you, especially if the whole body of the people would take advantage of them : you can get it, too, by means of your public libraries. But there is one special means by which you who live in the Condon diocese can make a valuable use of your common property: which, I hazzard the conjecture, most of you have not often done. The best books you may rightly say you can get now for yourselves very cheaply, for a few pence. But you cannot for a million pence make your own a picture by a great artist. And yet there are great galleries of such pictures all your own in London, which perhaps I do you wrong you seldom visit : even though some of us with infinite trouble, and at the cost of being called all sorts of bad names, have got them open for you for many Sunday afternoons in the year. I look forward to the time when the good ladies who manage the Sunday Schools in the crowded parts of London will take their pupils to the National Gallery on a Sunday afternoon. For it would indeed be fatal, if, while you are anxious to add to your common property, you did not make a full use of what you have already got. I am not unmindful, when I say this, of the answer I got from a little Bethnal Green girl, when I asked her, hoping to get the answer "the National Gallery": " Where have you more beautiful pictures all your own than even the Queen has at Windsor Castle or the Prince of Wales has at Marlborough House ? " and she replied : " In my mind, Sir." And that was a most sweet answer. Long may it remain true for her. But most of us want to take means in order to store our minds with beautiful thoughts and beautiful pictures : and we may be thank- ful that a Christian communism gives us the opportunity of doing so. 5. And lastly, as the ground and inspiration and 34 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. permeating cause of all this, we have a common Church : common schools, common land, common libraries, museums and picture galleries, all grow naturally out of a common Church. Not a little private sect into which people are admitted on the ground of their being converted men or because they have this or that opinion about doctrine or worship or discipline but a Church into which people are admitted simply on the ground of their humanity. This, believe me, is the most valuable of all your common property you would do well to take care that it is not stolen from you either by Parliament or the patrons whom Parliament imposes on you on the one hand ; or monopolised by the clergy and a few pious laymen on the other. Let the common people claim the Church as their own and it will save them from both material and spiritual degradation. When, then, you make your communion, when you take your part in the great Christian act or performance : these are some of the facts to which you are pledged, and to the truth of which you bear witness. THE HOLY EUCHARIST. PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF ALL SOULS, ST. MARGARET'S-ON-THAMES, MARCH 20TH, 1901. I SPEAK to you to-night about the Holy Eucharist and endeavour to bring out a little the meaning of that name. It is a title for our great Christian service which has been very much in use amongst us for the last sixty or seventy years : and surely it is well that it has been so, for it tells us that our service is a service of joy. Those who had had most influence in the Church of England for some years before this word came much into use were men to whom many a debt of gratitude is due : but somehow or other in their zeal for personal religion they seem to have forgotten that the Church was a Society ; and, whether intentionally or not, they certainly fostered dark views about God. The Unseen became an object of terror to so gracious and genial a poet as William Cowper, and Byron was driven by a black theology into rebellion. I/ittle children were made afraid by stories of Hell, and strong men became reckless atheists. Even now there are signs that the Puritan spirit is reviving, and the Church has her work before her to hold up before men the idea of God as the loving Father, and to banish every conception of God which contradicts that His essential character. Now like that beginning of miracles which Jesus did when He gave them wine, and wine of the best and plenty of it, at the village wedding; so the great 35 36 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. Christian service, when we think of it under the name of the Holy Eucharist, tells us that mirth and joy have a true place in all human life. I don't know whether many of you are in the habit of using privately the little introductory service which the priest often uses before the celebration, if you are not I think you would find it very helpful to do so : I mention it because it contains these words as an antiphon to the Forty-third Psalm : " I will go unto the altar of God, even unto the God of my joy and gladness." In the Latin it is " qui latificat juventutcm meant" (who gives joy to my youth). Most significant liberating words fit to precede a Holy Eucharist : like those other words of the Preacher, which, whether at the time he meant them cynically or not, are eternally true, as part of the Christian message: " Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth ; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thy heart, and in the sight of thine eyes." I have spoken to you previously as to its being your right and your duty to bring your own personal sorrows and difficulties before the Sacred Victim : I have urged you there to pray and plead for your dead friends : I have told you that the Supper of the Lord is an eman- cipating feast for all the nations, and that the evils which spoil our national life must be remembered by you when it is administered : I have tried to bring out the meaning of Holy Communion. I now tell you that it is equally your right arid duty to bring before the altar frankly all the joys of your life,'and to find in the Holy Eucharist the consecration of them and of all national and social rejoicings also. Anticipating for a moment another of our titles, it is quite a reasonable and Christian thing to say : THE HOLY EUCHARIST. 37 And the Mass shall be sung, And the bells shall be rung, And we'll keep the feast right merrily." And this is so because it is the whole of human life, every human faculty, that God by being made Man has sanctified. The Hebrew poet saw into this, though his words unfortunately are not quite well translated for us, but what he really said was speaking to the Eternal : " The singers and the dancers, yea, and all my fresh founts of joy shall be in Thee." The saintly John Keble saw it too when he said : "Oh I/ord, our God, the spoiler of our foes, There is no light but Thine : with Thee all beauty glows." And our L,ord Himself, besides giving His significant presence to the village merry-making, and answering His Blessed Mother's request for wine for them, Himself you know noticed the children at their little game of weddings and funerals, and was only displeased with the sulky children who would not play at all. You are told sometimes that you must be good in order to be happy, it is much more true that you must be happy in order to be good : have you not met many good people who are thoroughly miserable, but have you ever met a really cheerful person who was thoroughly bad? And you can do so much by being happy. May I take a great instance from classical literature, take Rosalind, from Shakespeare's brightest of comedies: she does all sorts of dreadful things, dresses up in boy's clothes, and goes about in that Forest, meeting all sorts of men but her wit, her repartee, her happiness, carry her through it all, so that it almost seems an insult to her to say that she passed with unscathed purity through it all : so I venture to say it is with numberless English 38 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. girls, who with sunshine in their own lives bring sunshine into the lives of others. And all this, and much more, which I must not dwell upon, for you may think that I am going a little beyond what you are accustomed to in church, is what our great Christian service when considered under the name of the Holy Eucharist bears witness to. Let us now see what is the necessary outcome of this Eucharistic teaching. In the first place it is this : that the Church must see to it that the people have plenty of amusement and recreation. People drink too much, as I reminded you the other day, because they have failed to realise how many and various are the delightful pleasures to be got out of life : yet only a few years ago there were serious religious people who told you that you must not dance, you must not play cards, you must not go to theatres, except perhaps to one or two, that you must certainly never go to music halls : and I verily believe if it were not for the redeeming influence of the Church of England if religion in England ever fell entirely into the hands of our dear brothers, the orthodox Protestant dissenters we should have all this kind of thing back again, and all opportunity for expansion and liberty would be denied to us. But indeed in this direction there is a more dangerous person than the orthodox Protestant dissenter about already I mean the ethical person, generally the son of a Protestant or Evangelical, who has given up religion, and adopted an austere narrow morality in its place : this he endeavours to enforce on everyone sometimes it is a woman who does this and then it is worse than ever on the ground that he is his brother's keeper and must look after his welfare, but he really means that he must be his brother's THE HOLY EUCHARIST. 39 despot and dominate his life. He would be as the Almighty, " about his path and about his bed and spying out all his ways." He quotes our Lord's saying : " If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee " ; but he fails to see that that is a strictly personal matter, and gives him no excuse for attempting to maim and mutilate his fellow citizens. From all these the Holy Eucharist is celebrated to deliver us ; at the same time it pledges us to do all that is possible for the reasonable and rational recreation of the people. Further it bears witness to the sacredness of the calling of those whose special business it is in our complicated modern life where everything has to be specialised to provide amusement and recreation. The theatres are intended to a large degree to be places of artistic education, but all of them exist to give pleasure, and some of them, together with other places, exist for amusement. As such the workers in them deserve the blessing of the Church : and yet it took three generations of Bishops to deliver a poor curate, who had been doing some hard work among the poor, from an episcopal ban which for twenty-one years was placed upon him for saying a few kind words about the dancers on the stage. Let me ask you, therefore, from time to time at your Eucharists to remember the artists in that honourable calling. Then again, if the principles I have laid down for you are trustworthy, you will have to face the question of the observance of Sunday. Sunday is the Lord's Day, and therefore whatever is true of our Lord's character and teaching tells on the true kind of Sunday obser- vance. It is the festival of His Resurrection, not the Jewish Sabbath. I doubt very much whether you keep it correctly you certainly do not, however much 4O THE MEANING OF THE MASS. you may come to Matins and Evensong, if you do not assist at the Holy Eucharist on that, the Lord's Day. You certainly do not, if you discourage those who have little opportunity for healthy physical recreation or much social intercourse on other days, from enjoying such recreation and intercourse, after they have assisted at the Eucharist. Keble and Kingsley who I suppose most people would rank as typical High and Broad Churchmen both agreed that lads in the country should be encouraged to play cricket and football instead of loafing about on a Sunday afternoon. Herein they were more Progressive than the London County Council. Anyhow, somehow or other, if you want to be good Catholic Churchmen, you must manage to make the Christian Sunday into a joyful weekly festival. I am not at all sure whether the clergy would not do well to concentrate their fifty-two Sunday evening sermons into discourses for Lent, Advent and special ecclesiastical occasions, and leave the Sunday evening for the social life which the Eucharist has sanctified. Further, I would say to you that this aspect or name of our Christian service always specially calls up to me thoughts of our Lady. I do not know quite what you think of her whether you ever speak to her in your private prayers, or think about her at all. But it is high time that ordinary English Churchmen should not allow it to be thought that it is only those who accept the infallible despotism of the Pope of Rome over the dioceses of Christendom, who give any thought to her. We do not want her to change the mind of her Son to- wards us, any more than we want our Lord to change the mind of the Eternal Father towards us, for that, entirely apart from anything we do or say or think, is eternally Love but you will find her powerful to change your THE HOLY EUCHARIST. 41 mind on many matters in which it wants changing, and to make you realise the perfect humanity of our Blessed lyord. I regularly say the " Hail Mary ! " and I strongly advise you to do the same. One other consideration remains which trenches somewhat on the instructions which you are receiving from your vicar. The thoughts and facts which group themselves round this name, the Holy Eu- charist, are those which have made it specially appropriate that this service should be celebrated from time to time with every possible accessory of dignity, tradition and beauty : that all that is best in music and art should a ccompany it : that vestments should be worn : that lights should be burning : that incense should be offered. None of these things are absolutely essential : but then you do not confine your own lives to those things merely which are absolutely essential for your existence, to the bare necessities neither should the offering of the Holy Eucharist be so limited. You want here as in your own lives from time to time expansion, freedom. You want a dignified ritual, cere- monial and accessories : you want from time to time in the outward performance of the service itself, to make clear by actual demonstration, what the service bears witness to, that joy and its artistic expression are sacred things. Everything of course should be dignified, nothing should be tawdry : you should err, if you err at all, on the side of severity, for severity in art is a true joy, but neither should it be bald nor meagre. The service should be done, performed, enacted, in such a way that anyone coming in, knowing little about our theology and religion and indeed there are many such now might be convinced that we were really in earnest : 42 THE MEANING OF THE MASS priest and people alike giving of their best in their worship. Believe me, a church full of people here every Sunday at ten o'clock, all hearty, intelligent worshippers, would be more powerful for the Gospel in the neighbourhood than years of eloquent sermons. And in this connection let me ask you to urge upon your vicar one thing, one most evangelical piece of ritual : and that is, that at the consecration of the Host, at the principal Eucharist of the day, the bell of your church should be rung : it would be a beautiful thing if you could have the Angelus rung at six, twelve and six consecrating your day and your work and your leisure. But, anyhow, get the bell rung at the Eucharist, to preach the gospel to the absent to the sick, to the indifferent : to rivet the attention of the whole parish for one minute at any rate on the Presence of the Christ who has redeemed them all. This evangelical bell-ringing I commend to you, as a means to make others interested in your Eucharist. But while you have it not, at any rate let everyone, by the brightness and good temper which you carry away with you from your service, be satisfied that your service indeed is a service of joy. THE MASS. PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF ALL SOULS, ST. MARGARET'S-ON-THAMES, MARCH 27TH, 1901. I HAVE spoken to you about the Sacrifice of our Redemption, the Lord's Supper, the Holy Communion, and the Holy Eucharist, and have tried to suggest to you what these great names signify. I now come to the name so common for our Christian service, but which, so far as its actual derivation goes, well no one quite knows what it does signify. " /&, missa est" (go, the Sacrifice has been offered), may be the origin of the word the Mass ; but really no one knows for certain, and yet " the Mass " is a most valuable word, which we cannot afford to do without. However, let me here say that, however good and valuable it may be, it is not an essential word ; you need not use it unless you like it ; and you really must not use it just for the sake of irritating those of your fellow Churchmen who, attaching a different meaning to the word Protestant to the meaning that you attach to it, dislike the word Mass. Neither, on the other hand, must you be sheep-faced and shy about using it because some people will despise you, and speak evil about you, and denounce you for using it. In fact, you must not use the word when the using of it will hurt a tender weak brother : you must not abstain from the using of it because it may cause a truculent brother to hurt you. What then, apart from its literal meaning, is the value 43 44 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. of this word the Mass ? Well, I think we shall appreciate its value when we remember that we are in danger in two ways : we are in danger from our English habit of isolation ; from forgetting that the Church of England is part of the Church throughout the whole world. We rightly, as I have pointed out, value our national life, but we have to remember that the Christian Church is international : that even the English-speaking races throughout the world, those colonies of which we have heard honourably heard so much lately, do not com- prehend the whole body of the nations, to all of whom the good Christian news was to be taken, and with all of whom we must recognise our brotherhood. We are not disparaging our sacred national life, when we remember also that we are a part of a Divine Universal Society. Now it is to this idea of international brother- hood that the word Mass specially bears witness : it is a protest against our insolent, insular isolation : a reminder that those who differ from us in language, in forms of government, and in many habits and customs, are still members of the same great Catholic Church : that essentially the same unique Christian service is offered in St. Petersburg, Vienna, Rome, Berlin, Paris, London. Again we are in danger in another way. We are in danger of thinking that the Church in England only began to exist at the period when it was, in some matters, reformed. As it is needful for us to be reminded that the Church of England is in all essentials at one with the Church throughout the world; so it is equally needful for us to be reminded of the continuity of the Church here, and now, with the Church of our fore- fathers planted by St. Augustine in England, and united with the remains of a still earlier Church planted by Christians from the Roman Empire, in Britain. THE MASS. 45 And this valuable continuity is also borne witness to by the use of the somewhat ancient word " the Mass." You may glory in the word Protestant or you may hate it : or you may adopt the more reasonable course of coldly considering its historical meaning and value : but in any case you must face the truth that the Church is one of the very oldest institutions in this country that it was largely instrumental in forming and consoli- dating the nation : that it really was not created by King Henry VIII. And all this is brought home to you by the use of the word " the Mass." The continuity of your own nation, and the importance of internationalism, these are the two facts to which, when you use this word, you are giving your assent. And, be quite sure of it, there is one assumption to which by the use of it you are not giving your assent. I mean the assumption that the Pope of Rome has any right to rule over the diocese of London, or the other dioceses of England : an assumption which grew naturally enough out of the fact that Rome, before the European nations came into being, was the centre of the civilised world but an assumption which was resisted in England long before the Reformation, and which will have to be resisted always, and whenever it is made. When we claim for our Church that it is not insular but international, not created at the Reformation but continuous : we are not only not claiming that it is Roman, but we are doing our utmost to resist Roman pretensions. You may say that these two matters, continuity and internationalism, do not much concern you : you don't read history, and you don't trouble yourselves about the foreign correspondence in the newspapers. May I say 46 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. that that is rather a dangerous admission for a Church- man to make ; may I suggest that if consideration of the value of this word " the Mass " does lead you to take an interest in the way in which God is educating other nations besides your own, and in the way in which He educated your nation in the past, it will have led you into a pleasant as well as into an edifying study. The use of the word " Mass " reminds us that God has been educating us in the past ; that He educates other nations also. Let me, for instance, suggest to you that you would find it very interesting in this connection to make a comparison between the conquest of the Saxons by the Normans, and the conquest of the Boers by the English. I will read to you what my great teacher Frederick Maurice wrote about the former thirty-five years ago. " The Saxon life, it will be said, whatever was its worth, vanished before the Norman conquest. Not, I believe, the Saxon life. By the Norman conquest, as by the Roman, as b}^ the Saxon, it was proved that nothing that lives can be swept away, that only what is dead finds the burial that it needs, and has been waiting for. The sottish- ness of the Saxon, the anarchy of the Saxon, the feebleness of the monarch who preferred to be an ecclesiastic, the ambition of the ecclesiastic who tried to be a monarch, the turbulence of the thane who would be a master and would not be a servant, these found their stern punisher. "The will which could reduce all lands, and all holders of land under itself, the will which could apportion lauds after its pleasure, the will which could lay waste lands for its entertainment these were assuredly in the Norman. He was the king and the foreign king. He might be the organising king, such as the first William was ; or the merely arbitrary king, like Rufus, one who acknowledged no power but force ; or the conciliatory king, like Henry, who saw that force could not avail without wisdom. Whoever he was he could create nothing, and except for the moment could destroy nothing " I think the history shews that the Norman assumption served to unite the country as it had never been united before, THE MASS. 47 the king was led to feel that the English were his subjects as well as the Normans, and that it might be his wisdom to enfranchise them in various ways, if it were only for the sake of curbing and counter- acting those who were more dangerous to him." I will leave you to work out for yourselves the lessons which may be drawn from this bit of historical study with reference to the present war in South Africa. I think they will allay your partizenship and give you hope for the future. I am suggesting to you that the continuity and internationalism implied in the use of the word the Mass should lead you to regard history as the record of the way in which God educates the world. It is not for nothing that the priest, when he says the Litany, exclaims : " O God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared unto us, the noble works that Thou didst in their days, and in the old time before them." And you really must take some pains, and thereby gain much pleasure, in order not to let those words be empty and meaningless. When you think of the one great Christian service under a name so ancient and so universal, you are compelled to look back to your origins to the rock whence ye were hewn and the hole of the pit from which ye were digged : to consider what were the powers which God used to make you into a nation : and you are compelled to remember that other nations, even nations with which you may be at war, have their own sacred qualities to be garnered, as well as their own follies to be burnt up : and that we, as well as they, may have to go through the same purifying processes. I give you one other instance of the importance of our learning this lesson of continuity and internationalism, which also bears directly on the subject of these five 48 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. Lenten lectures. I take you to Rome in the year 170. Get out of your public library Walter Pater's book entitled Marius the Epicurean : it will reveal to you in a masterly way the young Christian Church as it existed in the Roman Empire under Marcus Aurelius it will make you understand how Christianity grew and what a paramount part the Mass took in that growth. " The Mass indeed would seem to have been said continuously from the time of the apostles; its details, as one by one they become visible in later history, have already the character of what is ancient and venerable, .... and in the very first days of the final triumph of the Church, the Mass emerges to general view, already substantially complete." And then Mr. Pater describes how the Pagan Marius heard Mass for the first time in the Church in Cecilia's house, not knowing what he heard : and saw the won- derful spectacle " wonderful above all in its evidential power of those who believed." The master and slave side by side, every variety of human type present, and the various expression of every type of human sorrow assuaged : young men bending down discreetly on the details of their sacred service, young men who had faced life and were glad : women and troops of children stretching forth their hands, chanting with a reverent voice and with boldly upturned faces " Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy." The great hymn "Glory be to God on high " sung: readings from the old Hebrew scriptures : singing of old Hebrew songs. The whole mystery centring in one person distinguished by dress from the others but nevertheless having something about him like one of the wild shepherds of the Campagua but his hands seeming to be indeed endowed with mysterious hidden powers, as he places certain objects on the table before him, chanting in a cadence of a grave sweetness the leading part of the rite. Then the men and women come to the altar successively in perfect order, and deposit there, below the marble lattice, their baskets filled with wheat and grapes, their incense, and oil for the lamps of the sanctuary : bread and wine especially a veritable con- secration of the earth's gifts of all that we can touch and see. Then certain portions of that bread and wine are selected by the Bishop, THE MASS. 49 and thereafter it was with an increasing mysticity and effusion that the rite proceeded. Then the solemn dialogue " Lift up your hearts." " We lift them up unto the Lord." " Let us give thanks unto our Lord God." Then they all cried together: "We adore Thee, oh Christ, because by Thy cross Thou hast redeemed the world." Throughout the rite, he continues, there had been a growing sense and assur- ance of one coming yes, actually with them now according to the oft-repeated prayer, or affirmation, "The Lord be with you." Helped especially by the suggestions of that mysterious old Hebrew psalmody, to him so new lection and hymn and catching therewith a portion of the enthusiasm of those around him, Marius could discern dimly, behind the solemn recitation which now followed (at once a narrative and an invocation or prayer), the most touching image he had ever beheld. It was the image of a young man giving up one by one, for the greatest of ends, the greatest of gifts : parting with himself and above all with the serenity, the deep and divine serenity of his own mind, yet in the midst of his distress cry- ing out upon the greatness of his success, as if foreseeing this very worship. As the centre of the supposed facts, which for these people had become so constraining a motive of activity and hope, this image seemed to propose itself with an overwhelming claim on human gratitude : with this divine memory the names of the more recent dead were mingled. Then one by one the faithful approached and received from the chief ministrant portions of the great white wheaten cake he had taken into his hand. "May it bring you to eternal life" he prays, half silently, as they depart, and while what remained was borne away for the reception of the sick, the sustained gladness of the rite reached its final point in the singing of a hymn. "Ite, missa est," cried the young deacons : and Marius departed from that strange scene with the rest : The natural soul of worship in him had at last been satisfied as never before. He felt, as he left that place, that he must often hereafter experience a longing memory, a kind of thirst, for all that over again. I have quoted and ventured to condense from this wonderful chapter,* for I know of no better way by which to impress on you the lesson of continuity which the word "the Mass" carries with it. God grant that by * Messrs. Macmillan have kindly allowed The Church in Cecilia's House to be reprinted separately : copies can be obtained at -\d from Mr. Verinder, 376, Strand, W.C. 50 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. whatever name you call it this unique Christian Service may be to you a little of what it was to that young Church, and that any unbeliever or doubter who may be present at your worshipping here may find in your devotion and your joy evidence that indeed the Lord is present with you : that He has an overwhelming claim on human gratitude : that here the natural soul of worship in men can be satisfied as never before. And so our use of this word " the Mass " is no mere wilful imitation of the usage of our erring sister of Rome but is a tremendous witness to the great fact that history is a revelation of the way in which God educates the world ; and to the other fact, that it is not merely to one nation but to all the nations with their various sacred individualities that the Voice of the Lord has spoken, a witness to the continuity and catholicity of the Church. The Sacrifice of our Redemption, the Lord's Supper, the Holy Communion, the Holy Eucharist, the Mass we cannot afford to lose any of the lessons which these names teach us. May God grant that our consideration of them this Lent may make us intelligent and devout assistants in the great act itself. THE CHURCH. A SERMON PREACHED AT ST. MARY'S, CHARING CROSS ROAD, IN 1896, AND ELSEWHERE. " I wiu, build My Church." Si. Matthew xvi. 18. IT is well that now and again in your Church life, as in your private life, you should reconsider your position : should see how you stand : the annual recurrence of your patronal festival is a good opportunity for this reconsideration and review, and perhaps a stranger can help you to do this better, in some respects, than your own valued parish priest. I suggest to you, therefore, to-day that it is well for you to consider why you are Christians and Churchmen, well for you to review and bring again to the test of a larger experience, what it is in our lyord Jesus Christ which compels your loyalty and evokes your worship : that you will do well also to think how you can best in your daily commerce with your friends give a reason for the hope that is in you, the hope that Christ is the One who should come, and that you need look for none other : and that you will do well further, taking a larger view, going beyond your- selves and your friends, to note that though aggressive atheism is for the moment dormant there are still thousands who are not actively conscious of the Christian life, and to consider why this is so. Now when you thus review your own life, and your friends' lives, and the life of the world around you, in 52 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. relation to Christianity, there are many things in the work and character of your Divine Master to which you naturally turn. You lay stress on how He appealed to the conscience to that which is real and permanent in each one of us : how He was more concerned, as we would say, in getting the heart right, than in demanding obedience for any code of rules : how He occupied Himself in laying down principles, and in giving a motive power, which were calculated in the long run to produce conduct and to form character ; rather than in saying " you must do this, and you must not do that." You lay stress also on the fact that His own victory was won, and that according to Him the victory of His followers is to be won, by means of what we call without always quite thinking what it means self-sacrifice. Renunciation, the very reverse of that insolence and pride of life which so often accompanies worldly success, was the secret of the success of Jesus. He humbled Himself, He made Himself of no reputa- tion, He became obedient right through the whole of His life, obedient so far as to submit Himself to death, and the most ignominious death, death on the Cross, death on the gallows as we should say. And, further, when we want to strengthen our own faith, to stimulate our friends' faith, and to make an appeal to our fellow citizens to be more pronounced in their Christian loyalty, we lay stress on the fact that the tone and temper of Jesus Christ was, as a rule, not invariably but wherever possible, gentle and "sweetly reasonable " : that He attracted men by the charm and beauty of His religion and His character : that His anger was exceptional and therefore all the more terrible : His love being no mere sentimentalism and THE CHURCH. 53 His wrath no mere irritability, but the awful wrath of love. Now you certainly have no right to get slack and lax in your devotion to our Lord Jesus Christ, to say that what you used to believe, or were taught about Him, does not seem to stand the wear and tear of life the test of experience without at your best moments bringing these facts about His life and character clearly before yourselves for review : neither should you let a friend say that he has lost his hold on religion, that he can't now believe all that the clergy tell him, without also endeavouring to bring home to your friend that these facts which I have mentioned are among the essential facts in the life and character of Jesus Christ; and without suggesting to him that, having grasped these, he can hardly fail to be fascinated and attracted by Him in whose face we see God; by Him in the knowledge of whom our eternal life consists. And in the larger, though less important, work of public controversy it is to these facts, to this inwardness, self-sacrifice and sweet reasonableness of Jesus, that attention must be turned. If a man thiows in your teeth the alleged infallibility of the Bible, or the crude impertinence of some of the clergy, then it must be remembered that these infallibilities and impertinences are not the question : the question is whether any free, unprejudiced thinker can fail to be attracted and fascinated by " the temper, method and secret " of our Lord ; and whether, being so attracted and fascinated, it is not simple inertness and cowardice and hypocrisy on his part not to come plainly forward as a conscious, pronounced Christian worshipper. All this, much of which has been taught to us by one of the greatest of modern writers, is indeed so : un- 54 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. answerably so. But it is not all : there is something more. We want to get more swing and go and buoyancy, as well as more strength and discipline, into our life than could possibly come from each one by himself being even fascinated and attracted by the life of Jesus. The appeal to the temper, method and secret of our Lord, powerful as it is, is not enough. We want discipline, organisation, brotherhood, if human nature is to be brought to its full perfection. And so to-day we do well to lay stress on that whole body of truth which is summed up in that most exhilara- ting promise of Christ's "I will build My Church." * It is not good for man to be alone, not good for him to be alone even in the worship of Me, I will build My Church : I will found a divine family upon earth, a Kingdom of Heaven, a Brotherhood, a Society co-operating with the end in view of human completeness.' Our Lord wanted us all to be happy, to inherit a blessing, to enjoy our life, to see good days, to get a refined and noble pleasure out of life. It is too cold and hard a thing for each one to be trying merely by himself individually, to be saving his own soul ; it is too far off and distant a thing to be thinking only or chiefly of a life after death, and beyond the grave : and so Christ gave us this gracious promise, which indeed He has abundantly fulfilled, " I will build My Church." ' In this living human Society, with its priesthood, its sacraments, its disciplined life, its ordered worship, you shall begin to realise what eternal life is, what the Kingdom of Heaven is.' My friends, my main object in speaking to you to-day is to urge you to make much of the Church and to endeavour to get the people around you to arouse them- THE CHURCH. 55 selves from their inertness, and to awake to a more conscious, more pronounced Church life. In order that their lives may be fuller, stronger, happier, I want men to think out the matter freely and without prejudices : and then to pluck up courage, to have done with hypocrisy, and to present themselves once again in this England of ours by their hundreds before their parish altars. I say deliberately I want the ordinary men and women of this 'neighbourhood to awake to a more conscious Church life, and that with that end in view I want them to have done with hypocrisy. A more conscious Church life. I do not deny, indeed I am strenuous in asserting, that there are abundant indications everywhere of what the Latin theologians called the " anima naturaliter Christiana" the soul which is Christian as a matter of course. I/ike the man in the French comedy, who had been talking prose all his life without knowing it, there are hundreds around us who are unconscious Churchmen : the thing is in the air even those who openly deny the Catholic Faith are forming their lives, and getting the lives of their children formed, upon traditions which are mainly Christian, and which the Church has kept alive : which you, a small remnant though you are, are helping to keep alive. But that is not enough : men don't get half the pleasure out of life by going on in this unconscious fashion; they are wasting their latent power by not using it consciously : and when some wave of supersti- tion, or some cheap-jack 1 religionist comes along, these unconscious Christians go under, or if the men stand firm their wives, daughters and sweethearts are caught, which is rather worse. Just as in politics, it is not enough to be a citizen merely, to keep the obvious laws 56 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. and have the vote, using it now and again or even not using it : but you have to be a conscious citizen, alive to your responsibilities and duties, keen about your common property, your schools your 450 day schools, 333 night schools for your young people and adults your museums, your picture galleries, your parks and open places, your public libraries and swimming baths, and so on. So we want men to be keen and alive and conscious as Churchmen, claiming their rights, discharg- ing their duties, seeing to it that their children are admitted by means of the great sacrament of equality into the Christian Church : claiming for them their right to be confirmed : coming at least on the three great festivals to make their communions, and present- ing themselves from time to time before the altar at the one great Christian service for the worship and adora- tion of Jesus Christ, whom they know to be the highest Being in the range of their experience and in worshipping whom they worship God. And then as conscious Churchmen they will want to help to set the Church free to manage her own affairs, to elect her own clergy, to be a real power to help to bring about those secular reforms which are necessary in order to make this diocese of ours into a part, a beautiful part, of the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth. What we have to do then is to wake up ; to be conscious active Churchmen, to make much of the Church; to use her comfortable sacraments and far- reaching organisation. And to this end we must also have done with hypocrisy. A hypocrite is not only a person who pretends to be what he is not, but also a person who pretends not to be what he is. People talk as if the only hypocrite were a man who goes to church and does not act up to all the THE CHURCH. 57 Church's teaching : whose principles are better than his actions if that were so, then indeed we are most of us hypocrites. But a man is just as much a hypocrite who in his heart is religious who, if you tackle him privately, acknowledges the great Christian verities ; but for some reason or another keeps it all dark, and makes no outward profession of his faith. He, indeed, is the man who wears a mask; he goes about among his neighbours as an indifferent sceptical person, openly attacking this or that abuse or accident in religion, but never openly giving his adherence to the vital principles and verities of religion with which, if you probe him deep enough, you find that he really is at one. Once get rid of this hypocrisy and our churches will be full. We want therefore a more conscious Church life ; and to that end we want to have done with hypocrisy. The promise of Christ is not to the individual but to the Society: " I will build My Church and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it." It is not 'I will influence here and there separately, individually, alone, this man and that man, and each by virtue of that influence will be able to resist evil.' No, it is only by being a part of the great organisation with its priest- hood, sacraments, doctrines that you will be secure from the attack of the evil ones. It is against the Church, the united mass of Churchmen, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail. All our more modern notions of solidarity, co-operation, socialism come in to verify this. And it is because the people of this diocese have not recognised the need for this unity that many hellish evils abound in London. That is why I say that this promise of Christ's is so exhilarating and stimulating. Once get rid of the notion that we have mainly to 58 THE MEANING OF THK MASS. concern ourselves with life after death : once be clear that the Church in each parish means the whole body of the baptised in each parish : once clearly distinguish between the Church and the Church's servants, and then you will get some inkling of the fulness of the promise which Christ made when He said : "I will build My Church." For you know that the evils, the everyday secular evils, from which you suffer, are the evils which Christ attacked and which a united body of men and women will be powerful to prevent. Men have no right, for instance, to complain of long hours, or low wages, or intermittent work, or paltry meagre house room, or evil surroundings generally, unless they have done all that is reasonably within their power to prevent these things. Now it is against all these things the Christian Church exists to fight the whole diocese united as a Church against them would soon stop them : the parishes are not so united, therefore the London diocese suffers from them. St. Paul, you remember, went so far in this direction that he boldly said that disease and premature death were the result of neglecting or making little of the Holy Communion : and indeed what he said to the Corinthians, experience has shewn to be a rational state- ment probably true. Take whichever of the four names you like of that one great Christian service : The Lord's Supper, the Holy Communion, the Holy Eucharist, the Mass : each one of them has been witness to truths which, if rightly appreciated, would conquer secular evils as well as promote spiritual life. Human emancipation ; human brotherhood ; God the giver of joy ; and victory through sacrifice : a parish, a diocese, a nation inspired and dominated by these ideals would surely be powerful for social reform. THE CHURCH. 59 It is not without reason that we want to restore this one only service, specially founded by Christ Himself, to its own proper place in the Church's life. It is not without reason that certain people are opposed to such a restoration. " I will build My Church." In reliance upon this most humane promise of Christ's some of the best work of the world has already been done : it is only when, owing to the apathy of the people in claiming their rights in the Church, men have misread the promise into ( I will establish an infallible Pope,' or ' I will create a multi- tude of religious sects,' that confusion has come from it : it is to the whole body of the baptised, organised in each nation, and not to any one man or any set of specially pious men, that the promise of the conquest of evil is given. It is this which makes the abstinence of so vast a mass of the people from conscious Church membership so flagrant a sin not so much against God as against Humanity. Let us thank God, however, that men are beginning to realise this. For more than half a century now in England we have been gradually feeling the effect of that movement which originated in Oxford, and which was emphatically a movement in answer to our Lord's promise that it was to the Church and not merely to in- dividual souls that victory should come. They were consumed by the idea, the forgotten idea, that Christ came to found a Church. The Guild of St. Matthew, which was founded in St. Matthew's Church, Bethnal Green, in the year 1877 has endeavoured to bring this great principle of the Oxford Movement home to those who might not otherwise have grasped it. 60 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. The revival of Church life is to a large degree the result and outcome of that movement. And the influence of you few who avail yourselves of the Church's one great service is great far beyond your numbers. Be encouraged by this thought, my faithful friends, to perse- verance in your devotion and Church life ; you are perhaps but a few, a handful, a remnant (if you will) of the whole parish. It is for you to bring home to the whole parish, and for this parish to bring home to those around them, the knowledge of the fact that if they love life and would see good days they must make much more of the Church that great Society for the promotion of righteousness than they hitherto have done. I urge you, therefore, to deal with your friends and neighbours somewhat in this way : say to them : Bring your babies to that font for Baptism, so that they may be claimed, on the simple ground of their humanity, as present inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven ; so that it may be known that God is with them from the beginning, and that Christian equality is greater than either social or religious distinctions. Let their Baptism be followed as soon as may be by Con- firmation, so that they may receive the seven gifts of God's good Spirit, so essential for the formation of a true human character. Get them, in spite of the scorn of the Liberal Press or the gibes of an ignorant Protestantism, to reverence the priest in the exercise of his simple salutary craft of blessing, absolving and being the means to make men realise the presence of Christ, so that they may be delivered on the one side from an impertinent personal clericalism and on the other from the domina- tion of the religious minister who fluently asserts himself and puts the Bible in the place of the emancipating THE CHURCH. 6l Word of God, who has been made flesh and dwells among us full of beauty, full of truth. Say to them : Be regular in your stated Communions, and your constant worship at the altar, knowing that that altar is intended not for the religious luxury of the pious few, but for the constant strengthening and refreshing of common men and women battling, suffering and rejoicing in the stress of life. Aye, be bold to make the attempt to draw there, within the attractive presence of Jesus, even the modern young man, and, more difficult task still, the modern young woman, rejoicing in their knowledge and in their intellectual power, but just wanting that which they can assuredly get by stooping to this common, humiliating but most comfortable sacrament. Then further as pioneers, as a remnant, as the faithful few who, though no better than the others, are conscious of your Churchmanship, urge your friends and neigh- bours to face the fact of sin, and therefore of the essential human need for absolution, and to rejoice in the use of one of the Church's kindly arrangements whereby men can be delivered from themselves and can receive that absolution. Encourage them to come to the Church to have their marriage blessed: and to learn from that sacrament the sacredness of the family life. And then finally point out to them that when the time comes for them to pass away, having been fortified by the Church's sacraments during their life, they can go out bravely and hopefully, fortified by the last sacra- ments of the Church, prepared for whatever it may be which awaits them hereafter. Thus, or in some such way as this, will you, my friends, become Christ's co-operators, fellow workers with God in the building of His Church in this diocese. I exhort you, therefore, yourselves to go forward : a 62 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. remnant faithful and true. Persevere if you have already begun, begin if you have not begun, to make much of the Church and its sacraments : get interested in these things yourselves and get others interested : claim your rights : discharge your duties : so you will help to make the Church a real power for the healing of the nation and the gradual regeneration of the world. Thus, my friends, will you be able to realise what a gracious humane design Christ had in His mind when He said : "I will build My Church," a design only equalled by that other, of which it is a necessary comple- ment, when God said 4< Let Us make man in Our image after Our likeness." For, after all, the beauty and the value of the Church consists in this that it meets the needs of Humanity. CHRIST'S TEMPTATION. PREACHED AT KNELLER HALL, LENT, 1904. "THEN was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil." St. Matthew 'iv. i. DURING the whole season of Lent it is well for us to keep in mind the lesson of its first Sunday. That lesson is contained in the Gospel, and in it the Church brings before us the summary by one of the Reporters of the way in which Jesus Christ, just before He began His three years' work, was tempted to do wrong. It is a highly condensed report, but of intense interest ; for it must have been derived from Jesus Christ Himself, and though each of the three Reporters has his own differences of detail, they are all so much at one, that it is evident that this great crisis in our Lord's life must have been often spoken about by our Lord Himself, and have made a great impression on the Evangelists. The brevity of these reports is of itself a matter well worth noting, for it reminds us of how much there is left unrecorded in the Gospels : it reminds us that the Evangelists were not writing a life of our Lord, but were rather calling attention to certain salient features in that life, which they felt were of special and paramount importance. This, I say, is well worth noting, because an attempt has sometimes been made to discredit all sorts of depart- ments of human life and activity, because there is noth- ing recorded with reference to them in the Gospels. 63 64 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. The pious Puritan will say, " Do we hear of our Lord doing this or our Lord doing that," and will suggest that therefore we should not do it : forgetting that the Gospels in no sense profess to be biographies. Let us learn this lesson, at any rate, incidentally from the fact that the outcome of an intense forty days' mental and spiritual struggle is summed up in a few lines. The second thing which we learn not incidentally but directly and specially, and to our great satisfaction and encouragement, is that Jesus Christ, like the rest of us, was tempted to do wrong. Face that fact, I ask you, for your satisfaction and encouragement. According to the kind of teaching which you sometimes hear, it would have been the part of the Holy Spirit to lead Jesus away from temptation. There are men who make a fine show in the religious world, who forget what the great Milton taught us, that a that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by that which is contrary " : the one object of these men is not to make men strong enough to resist temptation, but to take away from them all causes of temptation. To take a homely instance, a little school-boy climbed up a water-pipe and fell down : remove the water-pipe said the managers of the school. Or again, people drink too much, therefore abolish the opportuni- ties for drinking, say some good but unchristian people : this or that is liable to be abused : don't use it at all, pro- hibit its use ; and so they make our blessed Lord and His forty days of Lent of none effect by their traditions. Let us therefore, my friends, if we care to be Christians, fairly and squarely face the fact that all good things are liable to abuse, that the better they are the more by means of them may you be tempted : that what you have to do is not to abolish the temptation but to strengthen the will ; not to aim at abstinence but to armour yourself CHRIST'S TEMPTATION. 65 with temperance that kind of virtue which consists in controlling your desires and .living soberly and modestly. Let us now try and learn a little, a very little, from the three great temptations to do wrong to which our Lord, when preparing Himself for the redemption of the world, was, by the leading of the Holy Spirit, subjected. First, He was tempted through His natural, human appetite. He was hungry and had nothing to eat, and the temptation was : " If Thou be the Son of God com- mand that these stones be made bread." Separate your- self from the desires and appetites and restrictions and inevitable conditions of the human race you have come to redeem ; rise superior to these common things : seed- time and harvest ; ploughing, sowing, reaping, threshing, corn-grinding, baking ; or the labour which has to be given in return for those who plough, sow, reap, thresh, mill and bake have nothing to do with these common human things. Be a God and get your bread without working for it : rise superior to the sweat and the toil which produces the bread : don't condescend to the work of brain or of hand which has to be given in exchange for the bread. If you are the Son of God don't be human, but be portentous, miraculous command that these stones be made bread. But our Lord was not going to separate Himself from His human brothers : He was not going to give sanction to those who get bread without work. He knew that the voice of God had sounded through the ages, " in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread." He knew that from the mouth of God had proceeded the words, " Six days shalt thou labour." He ranged Himself once and for all at the head of those who live by toil. Appe- 66 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. tite is good, healthy, natural, human, but it is to be satisfied in an orderly way. Perhaps the real practical value of this victory of Christ over the devil will be best understood by con- templating the untold harm which has resulted from those who, in unconscious obedience to the devil, have commanded the stones to be made bread have got their bread in some miraculously devilish way without working for it. The first victory of Christ is, then, over those who would get their daily bread not by daily work but by some trick. You, my brothers^and sisters, who live by toil, have many difficulties, but there are compensations, and among others this, that even if you are not very religious and sometimes slip, you are simply, by virtue of your honest toil, sharing with Jesus Christ this victory. The second victory was over the temptation which came to Jesus to do some startling act in order to compel people to attend to Him. What a reputation He would have got if He had thrown Himself from the top of the Temple and escaped unhurt ! What an audience He would have had afterwards ! What a magnificent adver- tisement and what an opportunity for usefulness He was missing by not thus calling attention to Himself. The turning the stones into bread alone by Himself in the wilderness would have been equally miraculous, but it would not have been heard of, there would have been no advertisement in it : but this other would have been irresistible. If Thou be the Son of God be notorious, self-advertising ! There are those who maintain that after resisting this temptation and let us pray God that all ministers of Christ may resist it also Christ through the three years of His ministry constantly CHRIST'S TEMPTATION. 67 yielded to it : they say that He did work after work in a portentous startling way in order to advertise Himself and to compel men, then and for ever afterwards, to give some attention to His teaching. Some, indeed, have gone so far as to ground their arguments in favour of our obedience to Him mainly on the supposition that He was perpetually working what they are pleased to call miracles. To some Christ is mainly a portent-worker who, by His miraculous portents, compels attention to His teaching. Let us, then, fairly face the fact that the resistance to this second great temptation makes it perfectly clear that Christ refused once and for all to startle people in- to attention and acquiescence, that His works afterwards wonderful as they doubtless were were deliberately not done in order to startle and command the attention of the people by their miraculousness, but that they were significant works, works of human deliverance, and that probably some of the details of them have got exagger- ated by unscientific reporters, who had not, as our Lord Himself had, gone through the trials necessary to make them understand the evil of sensationalism. To the divine worker of these works, at any rate, the miraculousness of them was quite the least important part, the essence of them being that they were works against disease and misery and premature death. It will make a whole world of difference in your appreciation of the life of our Lord when you know that His so-called miracles were not portents but signs. At any rate this lesson is obvious, that the ministers of Christ must, some of them, revise their objects ; they really must not say to themselves, at all costs we must get at the people. Do what you will with your attrac- tive sensational services and with your new methods, with 68 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. your armies and shoutings, you can't beat the devil's sug- gestion of jumping off the top of the Temple and alight- ing unhurt ; and therefore you had better go on steadily and quietly, ministering the sacraments, preaching the word, shepherding the people. Christ in this second victory of His, once and for all laid His ban on all that is startling, sensational and vulgar in religion. For, as the third temptation teaches us, you can pay too high a price even for getting the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, under the domain of Christ. If you choose to use the devil's means you can not only get the people to church or under the influence of religion, but you can also in a kind of way conquer the world, you can get enormous power for a time if you are perfectly unscrupulous in the means you employ to get it. The kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, art, literature, science : if you will but acknowledge what so many divines are eager to assert that they really belong to the devil, or, to use modern language, that they are essentially evil, you can get real power over them in a kind of way ; but if you recognise that in all these kingdoms good and evil are mingled, as they were mingled in the actual Roman and Jewish world, which our Lord saw, and in the other worlds which, with mind looking before and after, He contemplated and foresaw : then you will realise that the victory cannot be so easily won. The kingdoms of the world were indeed destined to become the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ : the Church was to conquer the Roman Empire : the revolution was to be accomplished : but the method by which this was to be done was to be all important. These good results were not to be'snatched at, but to be brought about by moral means, gradually. CHRIST'S TEMPTATION. 69 " All these things will I give Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me." The words without any ex- planation come home do they not ? to the human con- science. We are constantly yielding to this temptation, which Christ shewed that it was the true human thing to resist. What you learn from this third temptation is to be very particular about your methods, but to be willing to wait a long time for the results. If you want to achieve success quickly in anything, be utterly unscrupulous about the methods you employ : it is only in the long run that honesty is the best policy. The temptation came to Christ to snatch His victory by evil means : He resisted it ; He was particular about His methods : the result is that by slow degrees the kingdoms of this world are being recognised as His. There are many things to be learnt from this third victory, but I can see in it nothing more important to us than this to do our best to make sure that our means and methods are right and to leave the results to God. Thus we get some little insight into that mental strife through which Jesus went before He began His redeem- ing ministry : and as throughout that strife He refused to separate Himself from common men, as He answered the devil's sneer " if You be the Son of God " by proving Himself to be the Son of Man, His struggle has become the type of all human struggle, and His victory may be ours. THE ETHICAL VALUE OF THE PARABLES OF JESUS. A LECTURE GIVEN AT SOUTH PLACE, JULY a6TH, 1896. THERE are two stories about Jesus Christ not recorded by those reporters who have most credence amongst us, but still well worth considering. You may probably be familiar with them ; nevertheless, as they form a fitting introduction to what I have to say to you this morning, you will pardon me for repeating them. The first is that Jesus, when He was a child, was playing with the other boys and girls on the hillside at Nazareth, and, as boys and girls at all times will, they were making little figures and things with the stiff earth which was at hand : and the story says that they took to making figures of little birds, and that the child Jesus, having made His bird, turned to the other boys and girls and said : " See, I will show you how much greater I am than you are, for I will breathe upon My bird and My breath will give it life, and it will fly away." And that He did breathe upon the bird and away it flew. The other story is that there was a dead dog lying outside a city in Palestine, and that as the people passed by, one kicked it over with his foot, another hit it with a stick, and the women raised their dress so as not to touch it ; and that then a young man came by with a party of friends, and that He went up to the dog and looked at it and turned to His friends and said : " What 70 PARABLES OF JESUS. 71 beautiful teeth it's got," and passed on. And that some of the by-standers when He had passed on said : " Why that must be Jesus of Nazareth, for He sees something beautiful even in a dead dog." Now the relative credence which you give to these two stories is an excellent test as to whether you have rightly, with a true sympathetic insight, got hold of the character of Jesus Christ or not. Those who hold that the first story can by any possi- bility be true, shew that they have quite unintelligently read the beautiful literature upon which our chief knowledge of Jesus Christ's life depends. Especially have they failed to grasp the real meaning of those wonderful works or miracles of Christ's which, even if exaggerated in the recounting of them by unscientific reporters, were always works of human deliverance, never works of personal aggrandisement : they have forgotten also how, even in the highly condensed report of the great mental struggle through which Christ went before He began His public work, it is made clear that one-third of that struggle was with the temptation to do sensational personal acts in order to compel an ignorant populace to pay attention to Him : they have failed to see that inwardness an appeal to the conscience was His method, and renunciation, rather than self- assertion, was His secret : they have forgotten that it was not the wonder but the significance of his works upon which He dwelt. On the other hand, the second story bears upon the face of it that it is true ; true to nature, true to the nature of Him whom the most inspiring literature reveals to us. " What beautiful teeth it's got " ; " seeing some- thing beautiful even in a dead dog " : that is just what we should expect from One who was the friend of the 72 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. outcast men and of the despised women ; from Him round whom the children gathered confidingly, from Him who emptied Himself of all intellectual pride during His life, and who in accomplishing His great inward'revolution, was willing to die a felon's death. With the most perfect intuition He saw beauty in that which others despised or made little of. This is the kind of tone or temper in which I think we shall do well to approach our consideration of the Ethical Value of the Parables of Jesus. We are not dealing with the teaching of a Man who sought to claim attention to that teaching by means of self-asserting portents : we are dealing with the teaching of a Man pre-eminent by reason of His intuition and sympathy. And what are these parables ? There are some thirty or more of them which the chief reporters of the doings and sayings of Jesus have been the means of handing down to us. And they are almost invariably compari- sons between what Jesus saw going on in the everyday world around Him and the Kingdom of Heaven, as He phrased it, or, to use modern language, the righteous Society to be established on earth ; and I propose in speaking to you of these parables to dwell only on their ethical value the power, that is to say, which they have of inducing to right conduct, forming habits, making character. i. I ask you first of all to notice that it is with the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth that they deal : that neither in them nor indeed elsewhere did Jesus endeavour to induce to right conduct, to form habits and make character, by appealing to the joys or pains of life after death. He seems to have had an intuition that His followers would be tempted to waste their spiritual strength on the contemplation of such a future life, and PARABLES OF JESUS. 73 deliberately to have abstained from saying much about it. It was here, in this world, that His kingdom was to be established : and the eternal life (which with one of the reporters is almost synonymous with the Kingdom of Heaven of the other three reporters) is not the going on, like Tithonus, for ever and ever but the divine life, the life of righteousness, goodness, here and always. You will find most of the parables absolutely mean- ingless if you have not first found out that the Kingdom of Heaven in them does not mean a place beyond the clouds to be entered after death : you will find them delightfully interesting, and potent for conduct and character, if you know that they are dealing with human life here. 2. The second general consideration to which I call your attention is that Jesus in His parables was not merely aiming at the individual righteousness of those who were learning from Him, but at the establishment of a righteous Society. All those ideas which we now express vaguely under the terms solidarity, brotherhood, co-operation, socialism, seem to have been vividly present in Jesus Christ's teaching. Indeed you may remember that He went so far as to say that if men would but live as members of the righteous Society He came to found upon earth, being true to each other and to its laws or principles, they would soon be clothed as beautifully as the Eastern lily and fed as surely as the birds. Not only did He turn the attention of those who used to gather round Him away from a life after death, to a true human life here, but He also made it clear that the mere seeking of an individual personal perfec- tion here was not enough : that no one can be saved which of course means that no one can live a sound healthy life alone. 74 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. Let us now deal with the parables more in detail ; and let us take first the Parable of the Sower, the compari- son between the Eastern seed sower and the giving and receiving of influences tending towards righteousness. God is always speaking to men, Christ says that is to say, good influences are always at work in the world. What hinders them ? Three things specially : callousness^ shallowness, and want of integrity. Who will receive them and profit by them ? The man who is simply honest and sincere. Those, then, who want to be recipients of the thousand and one good influences which are constantly at work upon us, are warned that they must keep a tender heart. As one of Christ's chief apostles put it, the law is : " Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another." They must also be on their guard against superficiality ; and they must aim at living a simple life. If they thus avoid callousness, shallowness, and duplicity, their character will grow apace in strength and beauty simply by virtue of the influences which they will inevitably receive. All those benign processes, therefore, which tend to make men gentle and thorough and simple, are preparing for the spread of righteousness. A somewhat romantic life, you see, was what Christ wanted men to lead a life in which mere intellectual power or surface brilliancy, mere cleverness or smartness, did not count for much ; a life free, however, from care and worry, especially from the care and worry which choke those who desire to accumulate riches. Don't worry, but receive " the word of the Kingdom," the good news that a life of Brother- hood can be a full life, and yet free from care. In' several other parables Christ laid stress upon the fact that this Kingdom of Heaven, this life of Brother- hood, would develop very slowly and gradually, but still PARABLES OF JESUS. 75 that it would develop inevitably first a very little seed, then the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear : that that which was so small, hardly able to take care of itself, would by degrees become a shelter and defence to others : thus preparing His little society which at first an upper room at Jerusalem could easily contain, for its gradual spread throughout Palestine into Asia Minor, and to the centre of the civilised world. He thus taught them, and by them, mankind, the great lesson of patience, so well enforced by the first Bishop of Jerusalem, when he said : " Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts." Then also, still with homely agricultural, or domestic, or fishermen's processes in His mind, Christ went on to suggest to His followers that they must expect evil to grow up by the side of good in His Church : that there must be no attempting to form little societies of perfect people the highly respectable person, whether clever sceptic or vulgar religionist, was abhorred of Christ but that good and evil were to grow together. But they must also remember that from time to time a crisis would come, which would result in all the rubbish in men, societies and nations being burnt up, and all good garnered. Now this, of course, about a crisis or judgment, and much of the same sort, was not a magical prediction, but a rational intuition, the truth of which has been proved over and over again in the life of men and the history of nations. The Son of Man sending forth His angels to gather out of His Kingdom all scan- dals and iniquities, and casting them into a furnace of fire, is a matter which can be verified. It has happened 76 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. often, and is now a commonplace of history : and though Christ had certainly in His mind the great crisis which He foresaw was inevitable, when the Jewish world was to come to an end, His intuition is true for all nations and every crisis. If the language in which the great crisis is described is poetical rather than scientific, that is because poetry, as Wordsworth said, being the truth and finer spirit of all knowledge, Christ was more akin to the poet than to the scientist, and because the most important truths can be expressed better in terms of poetry than in terms of science : but translate them if you will into the baldest or vulgarest language, you will still find them true, and they enforce the absolute importance of character, as two further parables suggest, when Christ compared the Kingdom of Heaven, the attainment of right social conduct, with the pearl of greatest price, and the treasure worth itself more than the whole field in which it is hidden. If it is conduct, habit, character, that you are after : if it is personal and national life that you would perfect at all costs, Christ said, lay hold on that Kingdom, unite yourself to My Society, submit yourself to its laws and principles. All true human intelligences have had for their object the forming of right habits and character. Men and societies and nations, according to Christ, will inevitably suffer terrible loss if they do not organise themselves on the lines of righteousness and brotherhood which He laid down : if they disregard conscience and ignore the power of self-sacrifice, if they fail to be influenced by the fascination and sweet reasonableness of Christ's character. You cannot get rid of the reality of the Hell, the damnation, the fire, the outer darkness, the fetters of these parables, merely by ridiculing the mediaeval inter- PARABLES OF JESUS. 77 pretations which have been given to them. Bear in mind that Hell was a place outside Jerusalem, where the rubbish and ofial of the city was burnt up, that damna- tion means loss, that the fire separates the dross from the pure silver, and that a life of selfish isolation is the darkest and most fettered of all lives, and you will then at once see the ethical value of those commonplace Jewish symbols. But we shall do well not to postpone their application to some life after death but to get to understand history and our own lives better by remembering that we still have judgment here. The end of the world, then, of which Christ in sa many of His parables spoke, was not the far distant period of which some astronomers prophesy, when this earth shall drop into the sun, but the summing up of the Jewish age with its narrow religion and the break- ing up of the brute force Roman empire; of which events Christ had a reasonable intuition. The principles of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was to take their place, are ethical, founded on conduct and character, and their value can be verified. Let us now turn to another set of parables. I dare say you may have noticed that Paley and Mill have had to pick and choose a good deal among the records which the most accredited of the reporters of Christ's life have handed down to us, in order to establish their theses that the Christian virtues are chiefly passive and feminine (though indeed the women of this last generation have made the criticism rather unintelligible to us moderns). But a fair all-round study of Christ's character shews that those men were only reasonable who attributed to Him a series of eight woes as well as of eight blessings, and who spoke about His wrath and anger. One set of people constantly roused that wrath,. 78 THE MEANING OF THE MASS those who, as He said, had the key of knowledge and would not enter into the treasure house themselves, and put hindrances into the way of others who wished to enter. We are familiar with them, are we not, still ? privileged people who trust to themselves that they are righteous and despise others. It was with reference to these, and to their objection, " This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them," that the three notable parables of repentance and forgiveness were spoken, the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Prodigal Son. According to them, all that is best in the world is to be devoted to the restoration of men or nations lost, fallen, wandering, use what phrase you like, whether by their own silly fault, or the fault of others, or by their own deliberate wrong-doing : those who have no sense of sin are according to Christ in a most inhuman condition ; repentance and forgiveness are essential to a true human character. This want of true humanity, and the sub- stitution of a narrow religion in its place, was charac- teristic of the nation which knew that it was chosen but had forgotten what it was chosen to be and to do, the men to whom the parable of the Prodigal Son, for instance, was spoken, would have no doubt that the elder son symbolised themselves, that the younger, prodigal son, symbolised the nations whom they despised the same kind of teaching was apparent in the story of the good Samaritan : and the parable of the rich man and L,azarus would have hit hard the leaders of the nation of kings and priests who despised the Gentile world outside. According to Christ it was the rich man who was in Hell, and he was in Hell, not because he was rich, but because he did not use his riches to make others wealthy, but let the contrast go on unconcernedly. The sharing the righteous distribution not only of PARABLES OF JESUS. 79 material wealth, but of spiritual and intellectual wealth, is by the graphic language of this parable pressed home as the great ethical virtue. Here, as in many other parables, those men, nations or societies who happen for any reason to have been chosen ; who by study, or birth, or accident, are the salt of the earth or the light of the world, who are in positions of power or influence, are warned of the ruin which awaits them if they are not socialists in their use of their various powers. The privileged classes who object to the people being educated, the pious sectarians who would separate themselves from the common world, the social purists who would fence themselves off from those whom they call the fallen these are the people against whom Christ's common Kingdom of Humanity was founded to bear witness. According to Christ's parables it is the part of a true ethical man to entertain a righteous resentment against all such exclusiveness. Other parables deal perhaps more directly with the kind of individual character which each member of the Christian Society was to endeavour to cultivate, though there is probably hardly one of them which has not as much a national as an individual significance, making it clear that, from their own point of view, both the Roman and Jewish authorities were thoroughly justified in dealing with Jesus judicially. His ethical teaching was subversive of an empire founded on force, and of a religion which was essentially exclusive. But the set of parables dealing with individual char- acter mainly, makes it clear also what kind of character it is on which Christ insisted, and I am suggesting to you that no ethical society no society, that is to say, 80 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. which deals with conduct, habits, character can afford to ignore His teaching, that no ethical society, as regards private as well as public ethics, can be other than Christian either consciously or unconsciously. Reality, sincerity, integrity, for instance, are constantly insisted upon, the folly of talk without work being at least three times made evident. Again, the importance of being on the alert, the danger of intellectual and moral sluggishness, the absolute necessity of making the most of what powers you have, and the disastrous effects of losing an oppor- tunity these things, added to Christ's sarcastic regret that the good people are often so very foolish, so wanting in cleverness and initiative, compared with the bad ones, these things make it clear what were Christ's ethical aims so far as individual character is concerned. The young woman whose name was " Dull," whom the Bedfordshire tinker has immortalised, would have been abhorrent to Christ. Another character would be more abhorrent the self- asserting, pushing man, with his insolence and swagger and boastfulness your modern man of whom it was well said he was a self-made man and worshipped his maker. Christ looked forward to the time when that man should begin with shame to take the lowest room, for, as you have been taught of Jesus Christ, inwardness was His method, self-renunciation His secret, and His whole life and religion full of sweet reasonableness and persuasion. However, I must not dwell upon that, as it is not my business at present to shew you how an enthusiastic wor- ship of Jesus Christ will help men to be right morally indeed I understand that some of you have made up your minds to deprive yourself of the pleasures of religion, and get your ethics without it. So I must go no PARABLES OF JESUS. 8l further than to suggest to you that the ethics of Jesus, as taught in the parables, are, quite apart from any consid- eration as to His own character, of excellent value : and that in the parables the ethical value of renunciation, and the ethical evil of insolence, stand out pre-eminently. There are just one or two more points on which I want to dwell before I come to the last and greatest parable, and then I have done. I said some time back, that Christ laid special emphasis on the fact that the moral life of nations and men and especially the life of the kingdom He came to found was a life of growth, gradual, secret, inexplicable : this He enforced in half-a-dozen out of His three dozen para- bles. Let me repeat the little parable in which this is best summed up : it is so consoling and encouraging, and characteristic. If there are any teachers here, I would remind them that it is the parable which Matthew Arnold used to dwell upon as being specially helpful to them in their arduous work : " And He said, So is the Kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground ; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come." Now it is in harmony with this that Christ in two other parables enforced the correlative virtue of per- severance. You remember, perhaps, Rossetti's sonnet on " Vain Virtues." Vain virtues were all the good things we have done, if we lack this one virtue of perseverance, and we lack this one virtue because we forget that all good work is slow. But if perseverance is the crowning virtue, the virtue without which the others are vain, what is to be the 82 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. reward of it all ? Those who have persevered, what shall they have ? If this prodigal brother of mine, who has been on the loose all over the world, is rewarded with the fatted calf, and the music, and the dancers, on his return, what is the good of my having stayed virtuously at home ? To this question this churlish question of the self- righteous elder brother, so like the question of many religious people, and of some ethical people who, having thrown over religion, have put a hard narrow morality in its place Christ had already answered when He said, " Son, thou art ever with me and all that I have is thine " : but He enforced the answer in another parable, the parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard, when He replies to the individualistic churl's remark, " Thou hast made them, these workers of one hour, equal unto us, who have borne the burden and heat of the day." And what was the answer ? Why this, which goes to the root of all moral action, founded upon the fact that the ordinary work for our daily bread should in itself be a joy : this, that according to Christ's ethics work in the Kingdom of Heaven is its own reward, the inability to work the greatest evil : the wages of virtue is simply " going on and not to die." The reward for being good is being good, and that's the end of it. Happiness is not something outside you but is an energy of the soul in accordance with virtue. Let us with this in mind turn to the last great parable of judgment, the Sheep and the Goats. Let me read it to you (St. Matt. xxv. 39). Here indeed is Christ's exaltation of ethics of conduct. Here indeed is judgment. Notice that it is still national, social conduct nations and not merely individuals who are judged : and notice on what ground nations are PARABLES OF JESUS. 83 judged, are said to be good or bad ; a little startling in its simplicity, is it not ? For the judgment turns simply on the question as to whether the nations had seen to it that their people were properly clothed, fed and housed, and had shewn sympathy to those who were in difficulty and distress. It is this parable which seems to me to compel every Christian to be a socialist its ethical value is altruistic. Since it was spoken, crisis after crisis has taken place ; over and over again the Son of Man has come in His glory, and His blessing, the blessing of humanity, has been on those whose character and conduct have been such as He then blessed. Misery has resulted from callousness, selfishness life from brotherhood. So at least I read history, which, as they say, repeats itself. But here again I must restrain myself, for that is not the question with us now ; I must not assume that you worship Jesus. All I have a right to do is to point out to you that the ethical value of this last parable is essentially socialistic. Allow me, however, to say this : that the aims and aspirations of our friends meeting in Congress this week, in that they want to see the peoples of all nations properly clothed, fed and housed, are, whether they know Christ or not, distinctly Christian aims. They know at any rate the ethical value of this parable ; they know that punishment, ruin, loss, dam- nation, Hell, inevitably and always in the long run await that nation which ignores the great principle of brotherhood : they know that the performance of the simple home duties of which the parable speaks, results in national life. That life goes with brotherhood, death with isolation. Christ with His deeper sympathy and keener intuition saw further and knew that the misery which men, 84 THE MEANING OF THE MASS. nations, and societies suffer from their want of brother- hood is intended to purify them. There are some, there- fore, who believe that fire purifies, that punishment is remedial, and that Christ has harrowed Hell. I do not know what place Christ occupies with you, some have said that in His face we see God : I hope I have been able to indicate to you at any rate that the ethical value of His parables is of a high order, that they induce to conduct, to the forming of habits, and the making of character. THE CHURCH AND THE NATIONAL EDUCATION. PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF ST. ANNE'S, SOUTH LAMBETH, MICHAELMAS, 1901. set a high value on it, thank God for it, but let that be all the more a reason for your paying the utmost attention to your own proper Church work. WISE STEWARDSHIP. PREACHED AT THE CHURCH OF ST. ANNE'S, SOUTH LAMBETH, JULY 27TH, 1902. "AND his Lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely : for the sons of this world are for their own generation wiser than the sons of light" St. Luke xvi. 8. You come to church week by week to take your part in the one great service which Christ Himself has ordained : and as you come, you learn week by week, something new and interesting about our Lord's life and character. And we shall not learn the whole truth about Him, unless we take each revelation which He makes of Himself, frankly, as it is made : we must allow our general notions of Him to be corrected by the detailed facts which each Sunday's Gospel records : we must not explain away or water down any of His teaching which may seem to run counter to the popular opinion about Him : we must accept His revelation of Himself and modify our own opinions in accordance with it. For instance, we must deal fairly with our Lord's revelation of Himself contained in to-day's Gospel : we find our Lord to-day insisting on the importance of cleverness, intellectual development, mental alertness. We know, of course, that elsewhere He insists on the importance of religion and of conduct : we know that it is largely due to the teaching of His Church that it has been maintained that conduct is three-fourths of life : 94 WISE STEWARDSHIP. 95 that the little child is taught: " Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever." But here, to-day, it is not the importance of goodness but the importance of cleverness which is insisted upon : it is not conduct but intellectual alertness, shrewdness, on which our I