1
 
 THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 Crown 8vo, cloth gilt, price 2s. 6d. 
 
 THE RETURN TO THE FATHER. 
 
 Seven Sermons on the Prodigal Son. 
 With a Preface by the Rev. J. W. HORSLEY. 
 
 In Preparation. 
 
 "THE PECULIUM." 
 
 With a Preface by the LORD BISHOP OF GIBRALTAR.
 
 , Ex Librfc 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE 
 
 PULPIT AND THE PRESS 
 
 AND OTHER SERMONS 
 
 MOST OF WHICH WERE PREACHED AT S. NICHOLAS 
 COLE ABBEY 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS HANCOCK 
 
 XonDon 
 
 S. C. BROWN, LANGHAM & COMPANY, LTD. 
 
 47 GREAT RUSSELL STREET & 78 NEW BOND STREET 
 
 1904
 
 T >r> A j? V 
 f-Y ov r , TI1 
 
 SANTA BARBAR. 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 ONLY a few people heard these sermons when they 
 were preached, and a few more read them in the 
 pages of the Church Reformer. 
 
 The Guild of St. Matthew now offers them for the 
 study of all who are interested in the history of the 
 teaching Church during the last quarter of the nine- 
 teenth century ; and for the guidance of those who are 
 called to teach in the future. The former will, I think, 
 place Thomas Hancock by the side of Frederick Maurice. 
 The latter will, I hope, catch from him an inspiration not 
 to be forgotten. 
 
 The few footnotes were added by Mr. Hancock when 
 the sermons appeared in the Church Reformer. 
 
 STEWART D. HEAD LAM, 
 
 Warden, G.S.M. 
 May, 1904.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS . . .1 
 
 THE WORSHIP OF MAMMON .... 8 
 
 THE SOCIAL CARCASE AND THE ANTI-SOCIAL VULTURES . 15 
 THE HYMN OF THE UNIVERSAL SOCIAL REVOLUTION 22 
 
 THE BANNER OF CHRIST IN THE HANDS OF THE 
 "SOCIALISTS" . . . . . 31 
 
 THE POOR ARE GOD'S ELECT AND THE WORLD'S 
 
 CREDITORS . . . . . -41 
 
 RIGHT, AS JUSTICE, AND AS CHARITY . . 48 
 
 THE INDISSOLUBLE UNION BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND 
 THE NATIONS . . . . . $6 
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE STATE REQUIRES THE THEOLOGY 
 OF THE CHURCH. .... 67 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE PUBLIC-HOUSE: OR, TEMPERANCE 
 NOT TO BE USED AS A CLOAK OF MALICIOUSNESS . 75 
 
 A FEW OF THE THINGS WHICH "CLERGYMEN OF THE 
 CHURCH OF ENGLAND" HAVE SAID ABOUT LAND- 
 LORDISM AND ROBBERY . . . . 82 
 
 THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PENTECOST . . .92 
 
 CHRIST UNITING HIS CHURCH TO THE STATE, AND 
 
 ENDOWING HIS CLERGY . . IO2
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BREAD: THE GIFT OF GOD TO THE WHOLE NATION . 113 
 
 THE APOSTOLIC FUND IS NOT SILVER AND GOLD BUT 
 THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST OF NAZARETH . 122 
 
 JESUS CHRIST THE SUPREME RITUALIST . . .130 
 
 THE SIGHT OF GOD THE SOURCE OF ENDURANCE UNDER 
 
 WRONG ...... 140 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE COMMONWEALTH AS NATIONAL 
 EDUCATORS . . . . . .148 
 
 THE COMMON SALVATION AND SCHEMES OF SALVATION l6l 
 
 THE HEAVEN FROM WHENCE WE EXPECT THE SAVIOUR 
 
 OF OUR BODY . . . . .172 
 
 JESUS OVERCOMING THE TEMPTATION TO POPULARITY . 185 
 LABOUR DAY AND THE RED FLAG . . . 2OO 
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE CIVIL SCHOOL . . .212 
 
 THE NATIONS' APOSTLE AND OTHER APOSTLES . 221 
 
 PRIESTS AND POLITICAL PARTIES .... 233 
 THE LENTEN FAST ..... 240 
 ARCHBISHOP LAUD, THE MARTYR FOR RELIGIOUS EQUALITY 250 
 ST. PAUL'S POLITICAL COUNSEL TO THE ROMAN CHURCH . 266 
 THE DISENDOWMENT OF THE SAVIOUR . . 275 
 
 MY DUTY TOWARDS MY NEIGHBOUR . . 286
 
 THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS 1 
 
 " The disciple is not above his master : but every one that is 
 perfect shall be as his master." ST. LUKE vi. 40. 
 
 WE associate two ideas with the word master ; 
 they are kindred, but yet distinct. One is 
 government ; the other is education. By government 
 a master rules those who are under him ; by education 
 he trains those who are under him to self-rule, to liberty, 
 to equality. Both ideas are united in the Lord's two 
 sayings, " The disciple is not above his master " that is 
 to say, he is his inferior : " but every one that is perfected 
 shall be as his master " that is to say, he will be a faulty 
 disciple if he does not become his master's equal. 
 
 The relationship of teacher and taught, employer and 
 employed, master and disciple though its present 
 conditions are so unequal has its primary root in the 
 equality of all men before God. It only reaches its 
 highest ideal end, and is only " perfect," as the Lord 
 says when this equality is completely realised. A 
 bad master wishes to keep back some of his knowledge, 
 craft, and culture from his scholars ; he is fearful, not 
 eager, that his disciples should learn all that he has to 
 teach, rise fully to his level, end by becoming his equals. 
 A good master, on the contrary, is much more fearful 
 lest his disciples should not rise to his level, should not 
 apprehend in its entirety what doctrine he has to teach, 
 
 1 Fourth Sunday after Trinity, 1884. 
 
 2 J
 
 2 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 should not attain to equality with himself, should not 
 become " perfect," which is, as the Lord says, to become 
 as their master. The true master leads his disciples to 
 the Master of masters, in the beautiful spirit of that 
 ideal master, St. John the Baptist, who said, " He must 
 increase, but I must decrease." Jesus Christ dares as 
 the Only Begotten Son could alone dare to assert that 
 even the Master of the Universe desires that we sinful 
 men and women should actually become His equals. 
 Does this sound like a paradox ? The paradox is in 
 the astonishing words of Jesus Christ, " Be ye therefore 
 perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect," or, as in 
 the parallel words in St. Matthew, " Be ye therefore 
 merciful, as your Father also is merciful." 
 
 Both the ideas which we connect with a perfect 
 master the Lord and Ruler, and the Educator, 
 Liberator, Equaliser are realised in Jesus Christ. He 
 is the Lord of all : " All power is given unto Me in 
 heaven and on earth." He is the Teacher of all. " He 
 is the True Light who is enlightening every man who 
 comes into the world." That He is the Liberator of 
 all, men imply every time they use the words " Our 
 Saviour." That He is the Equaliser of all is evident 
 in the ever-recurring undertone of His Sermon on the 
 Mount : " That ye may be the children of your Father 
 who is in heaven." He, the Son of God, gives this 
 lesson to the disciples and the people because He is 
 eager that they and we all should be what exactly 
 He is. 
 
 We can hardly decide whether our Lord originally 
 spoke these words as a lesson for us as masters, or 
 as a lesson for us as disciples. Every man is both a 
 master and a disciple. We all teach, we all are taught. 
 If we connect them with the words which follow, we 
 must conclude that they were spoken most directly to
 
 THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS 3 
 
 masters, teachers, rulers, employers. "If the blind lead 
 the blind." A man who professes to clear his scholar's, 
 subject's, or servant's sight or insight to take the mote 
 out of his brother's eye must first of all assure himself 
 that he has clear sight and insight, that there is no 
 beam in his own eye. For every teacher but one, Jesus 
 Himself, some confession of blindness is necessary ; and 
 by such a confession the master or teacher equalises 
 himself with the taught, or acknowledges their common 
 equality before God, and so does what he can to rid 
 himself of the danger of being a "blind leader of the 
 blind." This is a confession which we do not ever hear 
 from those who give themselves out as the infallible and 
 clear-sighted guides of the blind. 
 
 The world is full of such guides. But by far the most 
 pretentious and noisy of these, and the most readily 
 accepted by blind or lazy men who want to find a swift 
 and easy road to right and truth, are the political or 
 ecclesiastical party-leaders and their disciples, the 
 political or ecclesiastical journalists, who have certainly 
 become perfect as their masters. Has any man ever 
 yet heard a political party guide of either colour, or a 
 journalistic "best possible instructor" confess that he 
 had a beam in his own eye ? What an edifying spec- 
 tacle the disciples of these "best possible instructors" 
 would have had a few weeks ago if they watched their 
 masters, the guild of conductors of the great daily 
 journals, who want to take the beam out of our eyes, 
 roaming about after a new sort of conjuror, called a 
 thought-reader ! 
 
 I was hinting last Sunday that the teaching of the 
 whole and full doctrine needed for social as well as 
 individual salvation is likely, by the grace and goodness 
 of God, to be thrown again upon the pulpit, because the 
 newspapers dare not fully handle such questions as those
 
 4 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 by which the poor and unrepresented are now mainly 
 perplexed. A great daily paper can only be produced 
 by enormous expenditure. Thus the keys of the treasury 
 by which a big journal lives are in Mammon's hands ; 
 they are not the keys at the right hand of the Father, 
 where the Son of Man is sitting. They are not the 
 keys which Christ Jesus gave to St. Peter, and with 
 which the apostle opened the doors of the universal- 
 human Church equally to the Jews and the nations. A 
 great newspaper dares not say what will displease 
 Mammon ; it dares not even give a full chronicle of 
 the merest news or facts, if they should be news or 
 facts which Mammon wishes to keep unknown, lest 
 Mammon should stop the supply by which alone a 
 great journal can be kept alive. I am not speaking of 
 what are called bad newspapers, the publicans of the 
 press, but of what are held to be irreproachably respect- 
 able newspapers the very Scribes and Pharisees of the 
 press. Do they not want nearly all their space for the 
 chronicling of the latest doings of the world, the flesh, 
 and the devil ? What fitter title than " blind leaders of 
 the blind " can we find for newspapers which give two 
 columns of the " latest betting," which allow " a sport- 
 ing prophet " the characteristic modern prophet of 
 Mammon to hint to one of his blind disciples the 
 readiest way of cheating another of his blind disciples 
 out of his money, perhaps his life, than the title which 
 the Lord has provided, " blind leaders of the blind " ? 
 It may be said that if gambling, adultery, robbery, 
 murder, and other crimes are going on, it is right that 
 we should know it. Well, but why are the newspapers 
 so silent about the social sources of these and other 
 crimes? Why do they say nothing, or so very little, 
 about the appropriation of the common land, the 
 common school, the common church, by the rich and
 
 THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS 5 
 
 powerful? We must turn to their sermons, to their 
 leading articles, which, as the " We " who compile them 
 so often tell us, are thought to be so superior to the 
 priest's sermon in the Church. Go behind this preten- 
 tious and infallible "We." What do you find? A 
 "blind guide" the hired spokesman of a political or 
 religious party, perhaps a Pharisee, perhaps a Sadducee ; 
 perhaps a Tory, perhaps a Liberal ; the Pharisees and 
 the Sadducees, the Tories and the Liberals, hate one 
 another, but neither hates the other half so bitterly as 
 each hates the Son of Man, the Liberator of men from 
 the cruel prison of party. It matters little what political 
 rosette the blind guide wears ; his business on earth is 
 always the same, and for any leading which the blind 
 guide gives to his blind disciple he might just as well wear 
 the one as the other. It is the function of this master 
 to show his blind disciples that his party is always in 
 the right, even when it does that which is wrong, and 
 that the opposite party is always in the wrong, even 
 when it does that which is righteous and good. The 
 Church will soon have a war in the Name of the Father 
 of all men, the Redeemer of all men, and the Inspirer 
 of all men against these tyrants, these blind guides. So 
 long as they are honestly newspapers, as they honestly 
 record what is going on in the Commonwealth, they are 
 doing God and men good service. But when they 
 pretend to be our infallible guides and masters, and 
 abuse the facts of the day or hour into texts upon which 
 they preach their hyperdogmatic and ephemeral lectures, 
 they become blind leaders of the blind. We priests, 
 whom God has constituted absolvers of humanity, the 
 looseners of men from their chains, are bound to tell 
 the blind, as our Master did, that their leaders are blind. 
 Do you ask why? The only perfect Master and 
 Leader has given you the reason. The conditions of
 
 6 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 true insight are (i) humility as to oneself, and (2) 
 charity as to all others. " Cast out first the beam out 
 of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull 
 out the mote that is in thy brother's eye." The man 
 who is always posturing as " We," as right in everything 
 which he writes, can hardly be humble. " A beam in 
 Our eye ! " A man whose business it is day by day to 
 convict all orators and writers of the opposite party as 
 wrongdoers and injurers of the Commonwealth can 
 scarcely have much charity. Charity would never do 
 for a party leader or for the editor of a party journal, 
 for Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, is 
 not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in 
 iniquity, believeth all things, hopeth all things. This 
 blind guide may be full of honesty and charity as a 
 private man ; but as a teacher he is obliged by the 
 demands of his strange function to be puffed up, and 
 to be always at enmity, to affect an infallibility which 
 he knows is not his, to feign a hatred which he does not 
 feel. 
 
 I will tell you why I think the poor priest in the 
 pulpit, if he is faithful to his function, is likely to be 
 a surer guide than the influential editor who assumes to 
 be the guide of half a nation, or than the clique of capi- 
 talists who are his masters. The Pharisee's nature, the 
 blind nature, is in us as in them. But we have to own 
 it. Our teaching is bound to be preceded by a humilia- 
 tion of ourselves. If the journalistic Pharisee thanks 
 God and when he guides a religious journal, he does 
 this ostentatiously it is because he is " not like other 
 men." He glories in the inequality which raises him 
 high above them. A confession he never makes. How 
 could he? It would be contrary to his function. But 
 his profession, if it were formulated, would probably run 
 thus : " We have never erred, nor strayed from the right
 
 THE PULPIT AND THE PRESS 7 
 
 way. Our paper, our party has never left undone those 
 things which it ought to have done. We have never 
 done anything which we ought not to have done. 
 There is no health in any party, in any paper but ours. 
 Have mercy upon those miserable offenders who are not 
 always in the right, as we are." 
 
 The teacher whom Jesus sends does not ascend the 
 pulpit until he has knelt on the same level with the 
 disciples as a fellow-wrongdoer. When he descends 
 from the pulpit he kneels on the same floor with the 
 disciples before the altar. Think what the priest equally 
 with the people, the teacher equally with the disciple, 
 the leader equally with the led, has to say in the Con- 
 fession at Matins and Evensong, in the Confession before 
 the Eucharist. In what the newspaper-teacher would 
 call "the sacerdotal system " there is such a confession 
 of the equality of all men before the Father as you do 
 not find elsewhere ; whatever affectation of superiority 
 the devil may suggest to us while we are preaching, God 
 compels us officially to renounce it when we have ceased 
 preaching. Then we say : Guides and teachers though 
 we are by our calling, we too, like those whom we lead, 
 "have erred and strayed from Thy ways and have 
 followed too much the devices and desires of our hearts. 
 We have done those things which we ought not to have 
 done : we have left undone those things which we ought 
 to have done : and there is no health in us."
 
 THE WORSHIP OF MAMMON 1 
 
 IN the great battle of human life on earth, social and 
 individual, the two forces ultimately opposed are 
 good and evil. To be Christ's soldier in this contest is 
 the service to which each of us was pledged in baptism. 
 But what is good and what is evil ? If we substitute 
 for good and evil God and the devil, or divide evil into 
 three chief agencies the devil, the world, and the flesh 
 we still have to seek for definitions. The Son of God, 
 in the very beginning of His ministry, when proclaiming 
 the laws of the kingdom of God and indicating the 
 processes by which alone the will of God can be done 
 and His kingdom can come on earth, cleared the 
 question when He declared God and mammon to be 
 the ultimately rival claimants for the possession of each 
 of God's creatures, individual and social man, family, 
 parish, and nation. " No man can serve two masters : 
 for either he will hate the one and love the other, or 
 else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye 
 cannot serve God and mammon." The name God, as 
 uttered by the co-eternal Word, does not stand as a 
 mere synonym for the ultimate Reality. It does not 
 merely declare, as our Teutonic word God does, that 
 the ultimately real is and must be the absolutely good. 
 Jesus means by God the One with whom men and 
 women "have to do" and to whom they are related 
 
 1 From a Lenten sermon (Oxhey Church, March, 1885). 
 
 8
 
 THE WORSHIP OF MAMMON 9 
 
 in as real a kinship as there is between parent and 
 child. God, He tells us, is the Father. " Your Father 
 in heaven " is the text and the ever-recurring burden of 
 the Son's Sermon on the Mount. Therefore, when Jesus 
 said, " Ye cannot serve God and mammon," He said to 
 His hearers then and to us, You are the sons and 
 daughters of God. Since you are the children of God 
 you cannot serve the Father and mammon. If you 
 would live in yourselves, your families, your parishes, 
 your nation, your humanity, as what you really are, the 
 children of God, as brothers and sisters, you must refuse 
 to serve mammon, to honour mammon as a master; 
 nay, you must be fighting against mammon as the chief 
 foe of the Father of mankind. 
 
 God is the Father that is clear. This is the gospel, 
 the joyful message from the eternal unseen, which the 
 Word of God brought to the Jews, and brings by the 
 Church to the English. God is the Father not only of 
 Jesus, but of all mankind. Jesus has united Himself to 
 every member of the human family by His Incarnation, 
 by becoming Man. The apostle of the nations expresses 
 this by calling Jesus the "second Adam." Therefore, 
 when God looks on men and women, He sees none of 
 those secular differences which mammon makes. He 
 sees no kings, no subjects ; no nobleman, no peasants ; 
 no philosophers, no fools ; no capitalists, no labourers ; 
 no rich, no poor. The Divine and all-equalising look of 
 the common Father sees in men and women only His 
 children. The sole distinction which the Father sees 
 in humanity is the distinction between goodness and 
 badness. He sees sons and daughters who are really 
 filial, brotherly, sisterly ; these are the godly that is, 
 like to God their Father in the person of Jesus Christ, 
 their elder Brother. He sees sons and daughters who 
 are unfilial, unbrotherly, unsisterly ; these are the
 
 10 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 ungodly, the estranged, the prodigal children of the 
 Father, and the whole work of God on earth by His 
 Son and His Spirit, and by His Church, has as its end 
 the reconciliation of the unfilial and unbrotherly ones to 
 their Father and to their brethren. 
 
 But who or what is this rival of the Father, this chief 
 foe of God's human family ? What is Mammon ? The 
 Son of God used a Chaldaean word which all His hearers 
 understood. St. Jerome says that it was used in the 
 same sense in Syriac, and St. Augustine says I that it 
 had the same meaning in his time in Punic. But if the 
 Lord were to appear among us, and speak to the English 
 instead of the Jews, what must He say to mean the 
 same thing? What English word would He take, in 
 our age, as the most fit and complete possible modern 
 personification of the worst enemy of God and of 
 humanity? The English for mammon, when our 
 version was translated, would have been "wealth" or 
 "riches." The English for mammon, in our present 
 condition of social development, is " capital." We 
 might say " fortune " ; but fortune may be either good 
 or ill, may stand for great gain or great loss ; it is not 
 sufficiently precise and exact to stand as the living 
 equivalent for what Jesus meant by " mammon." What 
 the Son of God and Son of Man, the Judge of every 
 creature, says to us Englishmen is this : " Ye cannot 
 serve God and capital." 
 
 Christ had "emptied Himself" of all to come into the 
 world as its Saviour ; He knew no way of making all 
 men and women rich but by making Himself poor. 
 The word with which He puts Himself afresh in contact 
 with us at the font of baptism is, " Renounce." Wealth 
 and gifts, as the Giver views them, are not any private 
 
 1 " Lucrum punice mammon dicitur." Cp. the English word 
 lucrative that is, " Mammonish."
 
 THE WORSHIP OF MAMMON 11 
 
 man's own. They are always common property in the 
 Father's view, lent to the one to use for the profit of all. 
 " Having food and raiment," says the apostle, " let us be 
 therewith content." " Take heed and beware of covetous- 
 ness : for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance 
 (or superfluity) of things which he possesseth." Life 
 does not subsist on superfluity, but on what is necessary. 
 " True it is," says Richard Hooker, " that the kingdom 
 of God must be the first thing in our desires ; but inas- 
 much as a righteous life presupposes life, inasmuch as 
 to live virtuously it is impossible unless we live : there- 
 fore the first impediment which naturally we endeavour 
 to remove is penury and want of things without which 
 we cannot live." You who are contented that you have 
 enough should be actively discontented, as there is one 
 man in the world who has less than enough. And 
 beware of greed. Jesus, the knight and champion of 
 the Father and of mankind against mammon, strikes at 
 all the forms of mammon-worship which men justify and 
 praise the greed of the fortune-hunter, the mere self- 
 helper, the man who " gets on " by getting others off as 
 well as at all the forms of it which men condemn. The 
 teaching of the Head and Emancipator of our race has 
 been justified by the historical experience of all nations, 
 and now that the civilised world is becoming crowded 
 more thickly with the hungry, naked, homeless, hopeless 
 workers with no work, the forgotten social doctrine of the 
 Lord is coming forth with a fresh confirmation. The 
 richer that the rich become and the poorer the poor, 
 the faster the nation develops into the likeness of the 
 Apocalyptic Babylon, which is contrary to the heavenly 
 Jerusalem, the city of God and of mankind, the more 
 multitudinous is the poverty, nakedness, and moral 
 degradation of thousands of its inhabitants. Wherever 
 there is superfluity there want and starvation are its
 
 12 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 inevitable fellows. In London, the richest city in the 
 world, one person out of nine dies in a workhouse. As 
 the Son of God could only save mankind by becoming 
 poor, so if any young Christian is determined to follow 
 Christ and be a saviour in his degree, he must make up 
 his mind never to spend an instant in seeking to be 
 rich. We want a guild for those who are tempted to 
 serve mammon, which, for the sake of God and 
 humanity, will pledge its members to do in our age, and 
 under our conditions, what Francis of Assissi and 
 Dominic did for Western Christendom in the twelfth 
 and thirteenth centuries by saving it from apostacy. 
 He is the true patriot who will bravely declare, " For 
 the Father's sake, for the sake of my fellow-men, for 
 dear England's sake, I will not seek to be a rich man." 
 What do I say ? he " must " and " will." Why, if he is 
 a Christian, if he has been baptized, he has already 
 declared it. The obligation is upon us, it is recorded 
 in our Christian name. We have one and all taken a 
 sacramental oath that we will never aim at making a 
 fortune ; we have one and all pledged ourselves to God 
 that we will " renounce," not that we will " gain " and 
 "grab." A Christian who deliberately makes it the 
 purpose of his life to " make a fortune," or " serve 
 mammon," as Christ calls it, to pull down his barns and 
 build greater, and there bestow all his goods, to heap up 
 a capital is already breaking the vow and promise 
 which he made to God in his baptism. You cannot 
 serve God and mammon. Jesus tells us by His parable 
 that the struggle to get more than enough, the perver- 
 sion of life into a hunt for a fortune, is more than 
 socially hurtful. It not only degrades Sion into a 
 Babylon, turns the city which God constructed for men 
 into a habitation of devils, but it perverts the individual 
 life of a man from its noble end. The rich man in the
 
 THE WORSHIP OF MAMMON 13 
 
 parable was the ideal man of the Babylonish world ; 
 he did what parents advise their sons to do. If he had 
 lived in our days he would have been knighted or put 
 into the House of Lords. When God had said to him, 
 " Thou fool ! " and he had died, his biography would 
 have been written and given away to boys as a school 
 prize ; his native town would have raised his statue with 
 acclamations. But God said to him, as God still says 
 to such men by fever, or bankruptcy, or a scapegrace 
 son, or burglars, or terror of death, " Thou fool ! " The 
 rich man had two ends in life. He was not like the 
 miser who has only one end. His first end was to make 
 money, to serve mammon, to exploit the labour of his 
 needy brothers and sisters in building up for himself a 
 splendid temple of capital. But he had a further end. 
 When the temple of mammon was built he meant to 
 take his rest in it " I will say to my soul, Soul, thou 
 hast much goods laid up for many years ; take thine 
 ease, eat, drink, and be merry." It was not his sin 
 against God and mankind that he meant to make a bad 
 use of wealth when he had it. Idle enjoyment of 
 wealth created by others, gluttony, drunkenness, and 
 luxury are sins ; but this man did not live long enough 
 to sin after this sort ; he was too much occupied with 
 the sin of covetousness and fortune-making. But sup- 
 pose this rich fool had said, " What shall I do, because I 
 have no room where to bestow my profits ? I will pull 
 down my factories and build greater, and there I will 
 earn a hundredfold increase of my profits. And I will 
 say to my soul, Soul, thou hast countless thousands well 
 laid out and bringing in magnificent interest ; take 
 thine ease, build hospitals, endow churches, support 
 charities for the poor and naked brothers and sisters by 
 whose labour thou has made thyself rich." To him also 
 God must say, " Thou fool ! " He had sinned all along ;
 
 14 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 as St. Basil puts it, " He has been a spoliator by using 
 God's gifts to all, as if they were his own property." 
 Or, as St. Bernard says, " God had all along been saying 
 to him through the groans and murmurings of the 
 hungry and unemployed, We have earned in cold and 
 want what thou storest up. What profit to us, whose 
 labour has created their value, are all thy exchanges, 
 the extension of thy fields, the things folded up in thy 
 baggages ? Ours is that which thou consumest ; from 
 us thou hast cruelly withdrawn that which thou spendest 
 in vanity. Yet we are the handiwork of God, we are 
 redeemed with Christ's blood. We, therefore, are your 
 brothers . . . Everything which adds to your vanities 
 is drawn from our necessities." 
 
 It is as illegal in the kingdom of God to aim at 
 heaping up capital in order to be a pious philanthropist, 
 as it is to aim at heaping up capital in order to be a 
 luxurious epicurean, or a patron of art and culture. It is 
 not the ulterior end, it is the primary end of such a life, 
 the perversion of individual life into an anti-Christian 
 and anti-social calculation how to make a fortune, which 
 the Saviour of mankind condemns ; because no man 
 can live this sort of life except by serving mammon, 
 and to serve mammon is to insult the Father and 
 wrong the family of God, which is mankind, and to 
 stifle that which is of God in individual life.
 
 THE SOCIAL CARCASE AND THE ANTI- 
 SOCIAL VULTURES 
 
 " For as the lightning cometh out of the East, and shineth 
 even unto the West : so shall also the coming of the Son of Man 
 be. For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be 
 gathered together." ST. MATT. xxiv. 27, 28. 
 
 WE have seen this week in our city, and in other 
 places of our nation, what may be called the 
 "coming of the lightning out of the East," and its 
 glaring, terrifying, destructive " Epiphany z unto the 
 West." In ancient Jerusalem, indeed, the East, the 
 seat of the sunrise, was the symbol of hope and new 
 life to man and the world. In the capital of our 
 Western island, "the East" has become a symbol of 
 misery and despair. It is the lair of the underpaid 
 work, and the want of work, whose direct children 
 crime and destruction are. In "the East" is generating 
 the anti-social force by which those whom God made to 
 be men and women are being dehumanised into the 
 vulture. If we English people, like the people of Jeru- 
 salem, refuse to be gathered together by the Son of 
 Man united rich to poor, educated to ignorant, as one 
 family of equal brothers and sisters in Him our day of 
 judgment, the end of our world, the consummation of 
 our age, cannot long be delayed. Unless England 
 repents, and rises out of her moral and social death, the 
 Son of Man must appear and let loose " the vultures " 
 
 1 " Shineth (phainetai) even unto the West." 
 15
 
 16 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 by whose dreadful ministry He will destroy the carcase 
 of a corrupt and putrid civilisation. 
 
 The Son of Man, as the Judge of the privileged and 
 as the Avenger and Knight of the unprivileged, called 
 His Apostles, and through His Apostolic Church now 
 calls the conscience and the nations to mark the two 
 awful social phenomena which are more or less present 
 in every form of so-called civilisation. It is probable 
 that he cited a proverb which had long been in circula- 
 tion, one of which He, as the Eternal Word, was the 
 original suggester, and which is to be found under some 
 variation in the daily speech of every people. 1 As in 
 the physical world, so in the social and spiritual world, 
 we see " the eagles " (" vultures " is a better rendering of 
 the original), and we see "the carcase." If the social 
 " carcase " were not lying in Jerusalem, or in London, or 
 in Leicester, or in Birmingham, defiling God's pure air 
 with its vile putrescence, there would be no gathering of 
 the " vultures." 
 
 What, then, is "the carcase"? It is the corrupt and 
 false society, not solidly built up and compacted upon 
 the foundation which the Father of all has laid for each 
 the common and equal brotherhood, the duty of all to 
 work, and to live by their work : but puffed up on the 
 treacherous and unreal foundations of privilege, interest, 
 class, caste, or party, which pervert brethren and sisters 
 into enemies and competitors. The one legitimate 
 object and end of society is that which the Head and 
 Bond of all fellowship in heaven and earth is indicating 
 to conscience and the nations, by sending His Church 
 into all the world with the Sacrament of Baptism. 
 The end and reason of society is the presenting of every 
 man perfect in Christ Jesus. No human creature can 
 
 1 Grotius speaks of Latin adages with similar meaning, and 
 quotes "What vulture's prey will this corpse be ?"
 
 THE SOCIAL CARCASE 17 
 
 develop into a vulture, a creature of prey and 
 destruction, if he receives that which God by the 
 Sacrament of Baptism is continually declaring to be 
 the property of the very lowest and grossest on the 
 earth first, an education and nurture as the dear child 
 of the Most High ; secondly, the duties and rights of 
 a free man in the government of the Kingdom of His 
 Son. The " carcase " is a national society, such as 
 Jesus saw in elect and privileged Jewry, proud and 
 vauntful of its commercial development and of its 
 religious vitality, but really " dead in (social) trespasses 
 and sins " a body from which the grieved Spirit of 
 God, the Lord and Life-giver, has departed. 
 
 It is the tendency of the old Adam in us, contrary 
 to the call of our new Adam, Christ Jesus, to look first 
 at the anti-social " vultures," and only afterwards, or not 
 at all, at the social " carcase." Whenever the forestar 
 of the Day of Judgment is in the social heavens, when 
 the lightning from the East glares upon the vile 
 corrupted social carcase in the West, we shall hear 
 urgent cries all around us, as the Son of Man said 
 we should, " Lo, here is the Christ ! or there ! For there 
 shall arise false Christs and false prophets " optimist 
 statisticians and lying political economists, dextrous 
 statemongers and solicitors-general to Mammon " who 
 shall show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, 
 if possible, even the elect." They will speak to us from 
 the editorial chairs of the newspapers, from the 
 platforms of public meetings for the protection of the 
 interests of Mammon and the few against the demands 
 of the Father of all. What will be their Gospel, their 
 new commandment, their counsel of perfection ? We are 
 hearing it already, " Shoot the vultures ! " 
 
 It is a crafty counsel, such as we might expect from 
 the synagogue of Satan. If we can but shoot or cage 
 
 3
 
 18 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 all " the vultures " which get within our range we shall 
 certainly save the God-offending carcase for a little 
 time longer. But the Son of Man in this parable does 
 not lay the stress upon the destructive force of " the 
 vultures," nor upon their multitudinous "gathering 
 together " their mobbing but upon the existence of 
 so horrible a thing as the social corpse, which stinks in 
 the nostrils of the Father, and which must inevitably 
 gather together, to devour and pillage it, these ministers 
 of His vengeance. "The vultures" are the men and 
 women, the boys and girls, the thieves and prostitutes, 
 whom by its cruel and selfish use or neglect of them, 
 while it was still inhabited by the Spirit of Life, the 
 society perverted out of humanity into vulturehood. 
 
 No sane man denies not the wildest revolutionist 
 who dreams that the heavenly Jerusalem can be built 
 up in London or New York in five minutes that 
 thieves, rioters, and looters ought to be caged on the 
 spot, and severely punished. The Christ of God is not 
 like the Vice-Christs in the Vatican. He grants no 
 indulgences to transgressors, poor or rich. Poverty and 
 hunger, like superabundance of wealth and fulness of 
 bread, are temptations, and behind each form of 
 temptation lurks the devil. Jesus is the Forgiver of all 
 our sins, and our Rescuer from all our temptations, and 
 for those very reasons He is the Punisher of the very 
 least sin. Every boy who throws a stone at a club- 
 window or steals a ring out of a jeweller's shop is urged 
 by the devil to the deed, and he is told by the Holy 
 Ghost, the Spirit of the Judge within him, at the moment 
 he is doing it, that he has no right to do it. 1 But a 
 
 1 How far he may justify those who are really maddened by 
 their hunger, or the hunger of their children, in taking bread, I 
 do not say : but we are bound sometimes to read in Church what 
 He said to the Pharisees and Sadducees of His age. (St. Luke 
 vi- 3, 4-)
 
 THE SOCIAL CARCASE 19 
 
 coarse thief who steals because he will not work is just 
 as truly a sinner against the Father and against the 
 brethren as a man who is devoting all his time and his 
 gifts to exploiting the hard work of his brothers and 
 sisters, in order to make a fortune for himself. The 
 deliberate thief, quite as much as the deliberate fortune- 
 hunter, or as the pocketter of a gambling-bet, is taking 
 something which the Father has not made his. The 
 same Judge and King who says outwardly and 
 inwardly, by His social laws and by His Spirit, to 
 the plutocrats, "Woe unto you that are rich, for you 
 have received your consolation," says, to all fortune- 
 hunters, " Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the 
 earth," says also to every poor boy and girl, "Thou 
 shalt not steal." 
 
 It can be no question, therefore, with the Christian, 
 or with any honest man, whether the rioting and looting 
 of "the vultures" ought to be condoned and left 
 unpunished. We need no prophet of the newspapers to 
 tell us that it is wicked to smash and pillage. The 
 point of the parable of our approaching Judge is that 
 the destructively wicked, as the Psalmist puts it, are 
 the sword of God, and that He suffers one form of 
 wickedness to rage against another form of wickedness 
 and become its punishment. But the Lord, in His 
 instruction of His Church, goes much farther than this. 
 He tells His apostles, and through them all His clergy 
 in all ages and nations, that they are to regard the 
 one form of wickedness as the inevitable product of the 
 other. It is the doctrine of Christ that the social 
 producer of evil, that which He calls " the carcase," is 
 fundamentally more horrible and anti-social than the 
 evil social product that which he calls " the vultures." 
 There could be no " vultures," or no " gathering 
 together" of them to national destruction according
 
 20 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 to Him who shall come to be London's Judge, unless 
 the national society, as in religious and wealthy 
 Jerusalem, had first of all become a " carcase." If a 
 Babylonish civilisation produces such a brutalised kind 
 of creatures as the pillagers and burglars, the procurers 
 and prostitutes, it is to be expected that the creatures 
 will act according to their kind. But it is less horrible 
 that they should act according to their kind than that 
 there should be a kind so to act. 
 
 In the Gospel of St. Luke, this saying of the Lord is 
 introduced as a direct answer to a question of the 
 apostles. They wanted to know when the end of the 
 world, the consummation of the age, was to be, and on 
 what spot the awful events of which He forewarned 
 them were to take place. They said unto Him, " Where, 
 Lord ? " And He said unto them, " Wheresoever the 
 body is, thither will the vultures be gathered together." 
 That is to say, wheresoever men are adding territory to 
 territory, field to field, and house to house, there society 
 must at last be exposed to the fury of the landless and 
 the houseless. Wherever men are building up fortune 
 and reputation in the West upon the work of the under- 
 paid and the half-starved in the East, there the 
 lightnings of the Son of Man must come out of the 
 hovels and garrets of the East, and scare and scorch the 
 palaces of the West. It always has been so ; it always 
 must be : if we go on building up a Babylon instead of 
 a Sion, what else can we expect ? 
 
 Let us leave it to that other Minister of God who 
 " bears not the sword in vain," to deal with the ravaging 
 of " the vultures." Christ calls upon His clergy and 
 laity to direct all their thinking and acting to the saving 
 of society from becoming a putrid " carcase," which 
 must of necessity gather together " vultures." It is our 
 function to recall the conscience and the nation to the
 
 THE SOCIAL CARCASE 21 
 
 forgotten and least fashionable portions of the doctrine 
 of Jesus, the whole of which are needed for the true end 
 of society the presenting of every man perfect in Christ 
 Jesus. We have to confront the wealthy and the 
 wealth-seeker with those texts in the New Testament 
 which they must wish could be proved to be false 
 readings, the texts which are never posted upon the 
 walls, the texts which are never chosen as the titles of 
 tracts, the texts which are rarely put at the head of 
 sermons, unless it is to prove that Jesus does not mean 
 what He says, the texts which make the heart of 
 Lazarus leap and the heart of Dives fail : " Woe unto 
 you that are rich " ; " Blessed be ye poor " ; " Go sell all 
 that thou hast " riches, power with men, learning, place, 
 art, or whatever else God has given thee and give it 
 back to Him in His poor, " and come, take up thy Cross, 
 and follow Me." Who can do it ? How shall we do it ? 
 Who can be sure that he is doing it ?
 
 THE HYMN OF THE UNIVERSAL SOCIAL 
 REVOLUTION ' 
 
 "He hath shewed strength with His arm; He hath scattered 
 the proud in the imagination of their hearts ; He hath put down 
 the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and 
 meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things ; and the 
 rich He hath sent empty away." ST. LUKE i. 51-53. 
 
 I THINK that this is a fair statement, in better words 
 than I can formulate, of the hopes and the objects 
 of the Guild of St. Matthew. We do not suppose that 
 we can fulfil them ; whatever strength we have comes 
 from our faith that God has pledged Himself, by the 
 birth of His Son into our flesh, to their fulfilment. You 
 are familiar with the words. They broke forth from her 
 who was at once the humblest and meekest of woman- 
 kind and the Lady of our race, when she knew that the 
 Christ was to be born, and that she was to be His 
 Mother. 
 
 Every nation has what is called its national hymn, but 
 the Magnificat is the hymn of all peoples. It is the 
 hymn of humanity, the hymn of all parishes. In every 
 local commune of the Western nations, where the 
 wholesome customs of the Church are kept, this hymn 
 is said or sung every afternoon. For at least twelve 
 
 1 Sermon preached for the Guild of St. Matthew at St. Mary- 
 the- Virgin, Crown Street, Soho, on the Sunday within the Octave 
 of St. Matthew's Day, 1886.
 
 HYMN OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 23 
 
 hundred years this has'been the practice of the Churches. 
 The parishes or communes of Christendom those old 
 local, secular societies which become by baptism the 
 congregations of the Church are far older societies 
 than the national Kingdoms and Republics ; so this 
 local parish hymn, the Magnificat^ much more ancient 
 in its use than any of the so-called national hymns, such 
 as " God save the Queen," or " Rufst du mein Vaterland!" 
 or the " Marseillaise'' It will outlive them all. For 
 every so-called national hymn has war, competition, the 
 murderous destruction or crippling of sister nations, as 
 its actual or implied motive ; while the Magnificat has 
 as its motive the scattering, disappointment, and 
 depression by God's Son of those classes in every nation 
 which make wars, which thrive by them, which stir up 
 unbrotherly hatred and competition between people and 
 people those three castes whom Mary calls " the 
 proud," " the mighty," and " the rich," against whom 
 the Everlasting Father, as He says by the incarnation 
 of His Son, has declared war. 
 
 When the Church, evening after evening, in all her 
 parishes, is saying this hymn, she is unconsciously fore- 
 telling the most ignorant and prejudiced of her priests 
 and people are foretelling that greatest of all revolu- 
 tions, which the Blessed Virgin saw to be involved in 
 the birth and work of Him whom she carried in her 
 womb. To Mary, at that awful moment of inspiration 
 in which her lips poured forth this song of humanity, 
 this Marseillaise of all the nations, was revealed the 
 stupendous social and political reversal which the birth 
 of the Son of God as the Son of Man, as the son of a 
 poor carpenter's wife, was bound sooner or later to 
 produce in all the world. She stood at that moment 
 upon the eternal ground where past and present and 
 future are unknown, where our distinction called "time"
 
 24 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 has no place : and therefore she spoke as if the far-off 
 end of the Father for mankind were near and present, 
 and already reached. She sings of the social revolution 
 not as about to come down from heaven, and to occupy 
 ages in the coming, but as having actually come. The 
 Magnificat is the inspired summary of the tendency and 
 direction of the future social history of the humankind. 
 We are so used to this daily hymn as we are to the 
 air by which we live that it is not easy for us without 
 a special act of thought to realise the tremendous 
 character of its contents, and its awful importance to all 
 sorts and conditions of men and women in the daily 
 ordering of their lives. In this afternoon hymn of the 
 universal Church every parish is declaring, and professes 
 to be joyfully proclaiming, what is the real end of God 
 in His government of the nations ; how the Son of God 
 is now actually using that supreme power which has 
 been given to Him in heaven and in earth ; to what 
 issue He that sitteth in the heavens is slowly but most 
 surely developing all " the imagination of the hearts " of 
 the Herods and the Pilates, the Pharisees and the 
 Sadducees, the Caesars and the mobs of every age and 
 every place. " We see not yet," as the Apostle says, 
 " all things put under Him." But we know by faith 
 that " He is showing strength with His arm, that He is 
 scattering the proud in the imagination of their hearts ; 
 that He is putting down the mighty from their seat ; 
 that He is exalting the humble and meek ; that He is 
 filling the hungry with good things, and that He is 
 sending the rich empty away." 
 
 The sword which went through Mary's bosom, as she 
 saw the apparent defeat of the Son of God upon the 
 Cross, must in its degree go through ours also as " we 
 see not yet all things put under Him." But all these 
 things the arm of the Lord had already rehearsed in the
 
 HYMN OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 25 
 
 Egyptian revolution, with which the history of Mary's 
 nation began, and wherein and whereby God revealed 
 the law and the process of the social future. The rudi- 
 mentary materials of Mary's song are historical and 
 political ; they are all to be found in outline in the song 
 of Hannah at the birth of the last great prophet of the 
 republican period of Israel, and in the national Psalter. 
 God is the same in all generations. If He looked upon 
 the children of Israel enslaved and cheated out of the 
 fruits of their labour in the brickfields of " the proud," 
 " the mighty," and " the rich " Egyptians, so He must 
 have been regarding the homeless, the workless, and the 
 hungry everywhere in Mary's day ; so must He be 
 regarding them in our day in London. Although they 
 think that He has forgotten them, although it often 
 seems to the lowly and the hungry as if God Himself 
 were neglecting them, they are everywhere more the 
 objects of His regard, more important to Him, than all 
 "the proud," "the mighty," and "the rich." God is 
 always and everywhere at war against these three 
 classes as the Church declares with joy every after- 
 noon in this hymn on behalf of the humble, the 
 meek, and the hungry. 
 
 The poor think that no one is on their side, but if 
 they have the faith of the carpenter's wife they will 
 see that their cause is moving " the arm of the Lord." 
 The object of the counsels of the Most High is 
 the " scattering " of the clever plots and arrangements 
 made by the proud statesmen and diplomatists of this 
 world in the conceit of their hearts ; the hurling down 
 of dynasties, as St. Luke has it in the Greek, " from 
 thrones," the confusion of imperialist schemes. The 
 invisible armies of the incarnate Word of God are 
 fighting on the side of those who are conquered and 
 beaten on earth ; the angelic almsgivers of the Father
 
 26 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 are giving joys and pleasures to ragged children in 
 narrow streets, and even a possession of the world 
 which the idle rich and the fine lady would be glad 
 to buy with thousands of pounds. A great lord 
 " owns " a park ; but he complains that he can never 
 enjoy it, as some poor landscape painter does who 
 perhaps has only a few pence in his pocket. 
 
 In the Magnificat we thank God for giving such 
 alleviations to the humble, the meek, and the hungry. 
 But the Song predicts, and it demands, for the millions 
 of our kind, much more than alleviations. The proud, 
 the mighty, and the rich in Jewry, Heathendom, or in 
 Christendom have never yet realised the actual con- 
 tents of the Magnificat. Have the faithful, the humble, 
 the hungry ever yet realised them ? No such revolu- 
 tionary hymn, no such socialist song, has ever been 
 sung by angry crowds, as that which is so quietly and 
 unsuspectedly said or sung every afternoon in the 
 thousands of Christian parishes. What is more 
 wonderful is that it is said or sung daily by the 
 proud, the mighty, and the rich themselves to their 
 own condemnation. If there had not been a tacit 
 assumption amongst us all that its words are not to 
 be taken in their plain meaning, that it is the business 
 of the clergy to spiritualise away its three terrible con- 
 trasts the moral contrast, the political-social contrast, 
 and the economical contrast into meaning something 
 distant and unreal, would not the police, in some lands 
 at least, have prohibited such words from being publicly 
 said or sung ? " This carpenter's wife," they would say, 
 " is exciting the parishes to revolution. Her so-called 
 hymn is nothing less than a disguised socialist war- 
 song ; it is setting class against class ; it implies that 
 the three classes, whom she describes as the proud, the 
 mighty, and the rich, are opposing themselves to God and
 
 HYMN OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 27 
 
 goodness, to the coming of the Father's Kingdom and 
 the doing of His Will on earth. She does not utter one 
 word in condemnation of the evident vices of the poor 
 and the hungry. She speaks of the proud being 
 scattered, the mighty put down from their seats, and 
 the rich sent empty away ; she actually rejoices in the 
 vision of this catastrophe of wholesale confiscation. 
 She has not a word to say on behalf of the rights of 
 property and class, or of a fair compensation. The 
 bishops and clergy, if they would earn their pay and 
 justify their social position, ought to point out the 
 dangerous tendencies of these revolutionary stanzas. 
 It would be a very fortunate thing for respectable 
 society if some eminent critic could prove that it was 
 spurious, or if some very early manuscript of the third 
 Gospel could be discovered in which the Magnificat is 
 wanting." Indeed, it is impossible to imagine anything 
 more contrary to the sort of hymn which would proceed 
 from the Virgin of Lourdes, or the Virgin of La Salette, 
 or the Virgin of Marpingen, or the Virgin of Einsiedeln, 
 or any other of those local Virgins to whose statues 
 sound Conservatives and Reactionists all over Europe 
 are now going on pilgrimage. A Pope has declared 
 that the Blessed Virgin is the great foe of Socialism. 
 If the Magnificat be her song, it would be far more 
 reasonable to call her the Mother of it. 
 
 It is my object simply to ask you to look into this 
 familiar hymn for yourselves. It would be impossible 
 in a short sermon formally to expound its successive 
 clauses. That which is called the spiritual exposition 
 of it, its application to the private soul, is quite fit in 
 its place, and will permanently remain a help and a 
 light to the conscience for the Magnificat is the hymn 
 of every creature. But God is now calling His Church 
 everywhere, as He called Moses, to consider before all
 
 28 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 else the low estate of the desolate and oppressed, who 
 do not now live as hermits, but in thick crowds. If 
 all generations are to call Mary " Blessed," their ground 
 for doing so must have some relation to the condition 
 of their own generation. What has the Magnificat to 
 say, or what are the parishes saying by it, to the men 
 who tramp their native land from end to end and can 
 find no work, to the men and women who in the 
 richest city in the world can find no bed at night 
 except on the seats by the riverside ? It was for their 
 sakes that the Only-Begotten Son of God was born 
 of the Virgin Mary, and her hymn must have restored 
 to it that predominantly secular meaning, that national 
 meaning for each nation, which it certainly had as it 
 broke forth from the lips of the daughter of Abraham 
 and David. " The Lord remembering His mercy," said 
 the patriotic Mary, " hath holpen His servant Israel ; 
 as He promised to our forefathers Abraham and His 
 seed for ever." In her Son, in whom is neither Jew 
 nor Greek, He has made the same promise to all the 
 peoples. The Social Revolution " the Restoration 
 of all things" as the apostle calls it which is now 
 the articulate or the implicit expectation and hope of 
 " the hungry " in every nation which so many dream 
 they can bring about by copying the inhuman methods 
 of " the proud," " the mighty," and " the rich " is pre- 
 sented to the heart and conscience in this hymn as the 
 " promise of the Lord." Mary declared that Revolution, 
 the parishes of Christendom in their daily afternoon 
 hymn proclaim it, to be the very object for which the 
 Son of God was made the Son of Man, the Champion 
 and Rescuer of Humanity, in Mary's womb. Is He 
 not revealing Himself in the history of the world, daily 
 more and more clearly, as the real Head of Humanity, 
 as the only possible Saviour not only of individual
 
 HYMN OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 29 
 
 souls, but of peoples? The great idea which runs 
 throughout this afternoon hymn of all the Christian 
 communes is the certainty of the restoration of the whole 
 world after the Father's original plan, and the assurance 
 that this reform is only possible by the judgment of 
 Christ upon those whose whole business and object 
 it is to thwart the plan of God for all His children 
 upon the proud, the mighty and the rich. It is God's 
 method as He had showed throughout the history 
 of Israel, as He showed at last to the whole world in 
 the mean birth of His Son, and in the election of 
 His apostolate, to choose and use "the humble and 
 meek " in spiritual character, those of " low estate " and 
 in social standing, even the "hungry," as the great 
 instruments of His providence. "He hath exalted the 
 humble and meek," He is exalting them ; He will exalt 
 them. The theories of Society which are thought out 
 by slaves under the lash of Egypt, by labourers 
 sweating in the fields and workshops of the modern 
 nations, and not those elaborated in the prudential 
 councils of statesmen or by comfortable professors of 
 plutocratic economy, are those which exhibit the fullest 
 reflection of the Kingdom of God's Son, and which 
 God has fore-ordained to prevail and to be realised. 
 " He hath put down the mighty from their seats," or, 
 as the Evangelist of the Nations renders it in his Greek, 
 " He hath deposed the dynasts from thrones." Is not 
 the Church praying for the prevalence and the realisa- 
 tion of the social theories of the "hungry" when she 
 says, " Father, Thy Kingdom come ; Thy Will be done 
 on earth, as it is in Heaven ; Give us this day our daily 
 bread?" By "the hungry" whom could the Blessed 
 Mother have meant except that part of society to 
 which she and St. Joseph belonged, and to which the 
 Lord of all was to belong carpenters, and fishermen,
 
 30 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 and those who worked daily for their bread ? If you 
 say she must have meant those who " hunger and thirst 
 for righteousness," would not this Mother reply, " There 
 is no ' righteousness ' so long as there is any soul in a 
 nation without a certainty of daily bread"? Would 
 she not say, " There is no ' hunger for righteousness ' 
 where it is not the supreme care of the commune and 
 the state that all may eat and be satisfied " ? The 
 " good things " with which she foresaw the Father had 
 pledged Himself by the Incarnation of His Son to fill 
 the hungry literally the "possessions" or property 
 ("mzt gutern" as Luther has it) must mean, as the 
 contrast in the text demands, such things as we are 
 fond of calling temporal and worldly. The gaining of 
 a great fortune, or a high social position, may be called 
 temporal or worldly in the unchristian sense ; for such 
 gains are a man's achievement for himself possibly 
 with the devil's and the world's help, and by the 
 oppression or outstripping of his brothers and sisters. 
 But " daily bread " is not temporal and worldly in this 
 sense, as the whole of the Old Testament bears witness. 
 It is the characteristic gift of the Eternal, and so the 
 Church confesses by the central place which she is 
 obliged to give it in her chief prayer in the Lord's 
 prayer. Yes, the Magnificat is a Secularist hymn ; and 
 its rich spiritual contents can only be fully disclosed in 
 an age like our own to those who are caring, praying, 
 and working for its secular fulfilment.
 
 THE BANNER OF CHRIST IN THE HANDS 
 OF THE "SOCIALISTS" 
 
 " In that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand 
 for an Ensign of the People. And He shall set up an Ensign for 
 the Nations and shall assemble the outcasts." ISA. xi. 10, 12. 
 
 I. 
 
 SOME years ago, before Johann Most was expelled 
 from Germany, he attempted to persuade the 
 German Socialists to what he called a " Massenaustritt " 
 a formal and deliberate exodus of the masses of the 
 " desolate and oppressed " from the fellowship of the 
 Church. He dogmatically and pontifically declared, 
 "Socialism shall not be Christian : all ye who would 
 enter into the new perfect social order must first of 
 all abandon Christ." Johann Most, if I err not, was 
 educated as a Catholic. He knew, therefore, that entry 
 into the Church is marked by a formal and personal act, 
 such as the simplest of our kind can understand. He 
 thought that a schism of the exploited men and women 
 from the Society of the Son of Man, and their in- 
 corporation in the new Socialist society, had become 
 a duty. He concluded that the departure of men out 
 of the Church ought to be marked by some act as 
 formal and personal as that by which they had entered 
 it. Most's conception allowing for the utter unlike- 
 ness of the Zeitgeist which ruled the seventeenth 
 century to that by which the nineteenth century is 
 
 31
 
 32 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 ruled was akin to that of the early German Ana- 
 baptists and English Quakers. They also were moved 
 by their horror at the moral apostasy of the Church, 
 at its complacent substitution of the precepts of 
 Mammon for the commandments of -the Father, to call 
 upon all who hungered and thirsted for righteousness to 
 " renounce" that Baptism which they had received from 
 the false and anti-Christian Church, and to enter by a 
 new baptism with water, as the Anabaptists said ; 
 without water, as the Quakers said into a wholly new 
 and more promising Church. I have no inclination to 
 condemn them. Christ sent them to condemn us, and 
 to call us to repentance. We see in our own age how 
 easy it is for straightforward men, when they observe 
 how the Church and the clergy are penetrated through 
 and through with worldliness how they reject, per- 
 secute, exclude from the full proof of their ministry the 
 " prophets and wise men and scribes " whom " the 
 Wisdom of God " never ceases to " send unto " them 
 to hurry to the conclusion that the Catholic Church, 
 or a National Church, or a Parochial Church, can be 
 nothing better than one of the provinces of that " whole 
 world " that " lieth in wickedness." It is easy for a just 
 man to imagine that the priests, quite as truly as the so- 
 called "patrons" to whom they owe the exercise of their 
 ministry, are nothing but creatures of " the world," its 
 historical products and its present servants. As I do 
 not feel any call to condemn the Anabaptists and 
 Quakers, neither do I feel any freedom to rail after 
 the fashion of a journalist or a mammonist at that 
 extravagant action of Johann Most. The Apostle of 
 the Nations has taught us to look first inside the 
 community of the elect people for the cause of that 
 which is ungodly, anti-Christian, outside the Church. 
 " The Name of God," he said to that apostate common-
 
 THE BANNER OF CHRIST 33 
 
 wealth of which he nevertheless thanked God he was 
 himself a member " is blasphemed among the nations 
 through you." If the Church has become apostate and 
 anti-Christian and who can dare to deny that it has ? 
 the remedy is not a schismatic Austritt, as Novations, 
 Donatists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Host's Socialists, 
 Secularists, and others whom the Eternal Word of 
 God in successive ages has inspired with a Christian 
 ideal, have imagined. The remedy, as the Church 
 of every nation and commune is now confessing by the 
 keeping of another Lent, is to be found in the re- 
 pentance and amendment of the Church itself. " The 
 time is come," as the Apostle Peter said, " that judg- 
 ment must begin at the house of God." 
 
 II. 
 
 The Church and clergy of England, and particularly 
 of London, have just been called, by Christ's providence 
 as Ruler of the Nations, to witness among ourselves 
 a spectacle the very contrary to that which Johann 
 Most attempted to produce in Germany. Week after 
 week lately, instead of a " Massenaustritt" we have 
 seen an astonishing " Masseniro/rtfc" The non-church- 
 going " masses " have taken to churchgoing. We have 
 seen what journalists of Mammon and Caste call an 
 "invasion of the Churches" by the poor Socialists. We 
 have seen nothing else like it in our generation. " This 
 is the Lord's doing ; and it is marvellous in our eyes." J 
 
 1 It is exactly a hundred years ago, in 1787, that King George 
 the Third issued a proclamation " requiring and commanding all 
 our loving subjects, of what quality or degree soever, and every 
 of them, decently and reverently to attend the worship of God 
 on the Lord's day, on pain of our highest displeasure, and of 
 being proceeded against, with the utmost rigour that may be, by 
 Law."
 
 34 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 For fifty years the National Bishops and the patron- 
 made clergy the pastors who have been chosen for the 
 " masses " by Mammon and Caste have been at their 
 wits' end how to persuade the crowds of the disinherited 
 and oppressed to become, or own themselves to be, 
 members incorporate of Christ's Church. They have 
 spent millions of pounds, they have held thousands 
 upon thousands of anxious discussions for the solution 
 of the pressing question " How are we clergy to get 
 the masses ? " I can only repeat, what I have perhaps 
 said often enough, that they are beginning at the wrong 
 end : that it is the will of God that the so-called masses 
 should " get " the clergy. So far as concerns the 
 National Bishops, and in a less degree all those clergy 
 who are appointed by the State, Commonwealth, or 
 Fatherland, they are indirectly "got" by the masses, 
 at least by so many amongst them as are freemen, 
 are citizens, possess votes. By becoming voters they 
 have become, in their place and degree, factors of the 
 Government, electors of the Government ; and thus they 
 indirectly, through their Government, nominate to the 
 bishoprics. But the parochial clergy, the pastors of the 
 local communes, do not even possess as legitimate and 
 as Christian a foundation for their position as that 
 which can be claimed by the parish Churchwardens. 
 The parish Churchwardens are the elect of the people, 
 Church, or congregation : they are the men chosen 
 for office by " the masses " : they stand on exactly as 
 secure a ground, in point of popular authority, as 
 St. Stephen or St. Philip did. They have been placed 
 where they are, as St. Stephen and St. Philip were, 
 by " the multitude of the disciples." The rector or 
 vicar, on the contrary, has not been placed where he 
 is by "the multitude of the disciples" by "the masses" 
 as we now talk. He has been placed there by some
 
 THE BANNER OF CHRIST 35 
 
 individual lord of land, some individual owner of money, 
 or by some caucus of trustees who want to confine 
 the Universal Church of all ages and all persons within 
 the narrow bounds of some party which represents 
 the prejudices, ignorances, and negligences of one 
 particular age or class. The assistant clergy who 
 in really civilised States and parishes are freely elected 
 by "the masses" in our semi-civilised England are 
 dismissible wage-servants of the patron-imposed in- 
 cumbent. Unless they are careful to offend neither 
 Caste nor Mammon the feudal and the commercial 
 exploiters of the one common Church they usually 
 find themselves, when they have arrived at middle- 
 age, excluded by these two allied Antichrists from 
 any further exercise of the ministry which they have 
 received of the Lord. No power but that of " the 
 multitude of the disciples," nothing but an extension 
 of the so-called " invasion of the Church by the masses " 
 from the material to the spiritual or social Church can 
 restore to Jesus Christ the service and ministry of which 
 He is now being robbed by Caste and Mammon. The 
 poor priests of the Lord ought to look to the poor 
 alone, to the masses of the common people, to "the 
 multitudes of the disciples," to liberate His Church 
 " from the patronage and control " not " of the State " 
 or sacred Fatherland, as the plutocratic Liberationists 
 say but from the patronage and control of anti- 
 Christian Caste and Mammon. "The mighty" and 
 " the rich " of the Magnificat, by getting the officering 
 of all the local congregations of Christ into the grasp of 
 landlords and money lords have not only despoiled 
 every local people of their highest spiritual rights and 
 obligations, but by substituting " patronage " for free 
 election they have perverted the very tribune of the 
 people, the local representative of Jesus Christ the
 
 36 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Redeemer the parish priest into a creature and 
 a representative of class and " property." 
 
 The " masses " know, or are beginning now in the 
 Father's good providence to know, not merely what it is 
 to be robbed, but that they have been and are being 
 robbed. They are beginning to learn that they have 
 been thrust off the common land : the " commons" of 
 the local commonwealths have been perverted into 
 sporting preserves for Caste, or into " eligible building 
 estates " for Mammon. They are beginning to learn 
 that the free common schools have been appropriated to 
 the sole profit of the same two Antichrists. But they 
 have yet to learn the last and most momentous lesson 
 of all that Caste " the mighty " and Mammon " the 
 rich " have successively expropriated " the multitude of 
 the disciples," or "the masses," or "the common people" 
 of that which is God's appointed witness to their rights 
 in the land and the school. Caste and Mammon have 
 made the Church and its priesthood their own. The 
 mighty and the rich have carried away Sion itself into 
 captivity in Babylon. If " the masses " the carpenters, 
 the fishermen, the rate-collectors, the tent-makers had 
 retained the common Church and her ministry, which 
 the Son of Man entrusted to their keeping, in which 
 His apostles declared them to be rightful freemen or 
 electors, it would have been impossible for them to be 
 robbed of the common land or of the common school. 
 If " the whole multitude of the disciples," the masses, 
 the common people, will but reassert their claims and 
 place in the universal Spiritual Society, in the common 
 Church of all the peoples, then the common land and 
 the common school must infallibly return to that whole 
 humanity to which the Lord gave the one and for which 
 He instituted the other. The Church is His permanent 
 spiritual and social witness to "all nations" by the
 
 THE BANNER OF CHRIST 37 
 
 apostolic or episcopal order, to every local parish or 
 commune by its own freely-elected priest that the 
 earth hath He given to the children of men, and not 
 to the caste of Raubritter or Raubadel, robber-nobles 
 or robber-knights, which in " the times of ignorance" 
 degraded Christ's freemen into its own slaves or villeins. 
 The bishops and priests of the common Spiritual Society 
 are God's witnesses that " every man that cometh into 
 the world" is the subject of His own inward enlightening 
 and educating Word, and therefore an inheritor by 
 divine right of the school. 
 
 III. 
 
 I am quite aware that some will object, " Do you 
 then call the organised mob of Socialists who thronged 
 into St. Paul's Cathedral on Sunday a " multitude of the 
 disciples " ? I will not stay to indicate in detail the 
 signs of discontent, murmuring, and quarrelling which 
 the apostles saw in those " masses " in Jerusalem, whom 
 they nevertheless included within " the multitude of the 
 disciples." A "disciple," I need scarcely tell you, is a 
 learner. A disciple is one who adopts the maxims and 
 laws of another as the only full and complete expression 
 of his own belief and his own duties. It is very hard 
 indeed to conceive of the minority whom the journalists 
 call "the respectable churchgoers" who regard the 
 church-going of the Socialists as an invasion of their 
 own private spiritual and ecclesiastical preserve, who 
 think that the proper use of St. Paul's Cathedral is to 
 provide gratuitous concerts and entertaining sermons for 
 the well-to-do as "disciples" of Jesus Christ. The very 
 first lesson which Jesus teaches every " disciple " who 
 enters into His school is the ungodliness and inhumanity 
 of the attempt to be rich. I need not quote texts. You
 
 38 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 know them all. Although you will not find them in the 
 publications of the Tract Societies which Caste and 
 Mammon maintain for the " conversion " of the masses, 
 and although you will never see them exposed upon the 
 walls of a railway station, you can easily find them in a 
 New Testament, or you may read them on the banners 
 of the Socialists. 
 
 If some old Athenian philosopher had risen from the 
 dead, or some Mohammedan, ignorant of the words of 
 Christ and His apostles, had come into the streets of 
 London on Sunday and watched the great multitude 
 surging into St. Paul's Cathedral, they would naturally 
 have asked, " Whose disciples are all these men ? 
 What leader do they follow ? From whom do they 
 derive the axioms and rules which are moving them ? " 
 
 Have you, my brethren, looked at the banners of this 
 " mob " ? Have you observed " whose image and super- 
 scription " they bear ? It is not Caesar's, not Victoria's, 
 not Gladstone's, not Schnadhorst's, not Hyndman's. 
 
 You see that they carry banners with mottoes upon 
 them. Who is the author of those texts which express 
 the social faith of this huge multitude ? From what 
 teacher have they borrowed the dogmas which they call 
 upon all the city to read and to respect, to observe and 
 to obey? On whose authority are these innumerable 
 crowds of the poor and rough doing this unwonted 
 thing ? They, or a great many of them, call themselves 
 " Socialists." Let us read what is on their banners ; let 
 us discover who is the ultimate dogmatist of this 
 multitudinous sect. 
 
 Christians, as you watch the mighty multitude pass 
 by, you will soon be shaken out of many of your hasty 
 d priori conjectures. Do you expect to read upon their 
 banners wild words of their own invention ? Do you 
 expect extracts from Babeuf or from Proudhon, or even
 
 THE BANNER OF CHRIST 39 
 
 from Ferdinand Lassalle or Karl Marx? Are not the 
 "Socialists" their disciples? Ought not the mottoes 
 by which they declare before the world their convictions, 
 their demands, their faith, to be extracted from Das 
 Kapital or from the Arbeiterprogramm ? Oh, come, all 
 ye faithful ! Look again and again at these inscriptions. 
 Recognise, while you have time, what they are : see, 
 clergy and laity, out of whose mouth the cries of " the 
 mob " have come. They are the words of your Master. 
 They are the laws of the Eternal Father. They are the 
 lessons which He taught us by His Son. They are the 
 new commandments which you and I were pledged 
 at our baptism to keep. " Feed My lambs ! " " My 
 house is a house of prayer, but ye (capitalists and 
 landlords) have made it a den of thieves ! " " / was 
 an hungred, and ye gave Me no meat ; naked, and ye 
 clothed Me not." It is a small matter to what sect 
 or party this great " multitude " fancies it belongs, or 
 by what denomination it pleases to call itself. You 
 can see to whom they have felt obliged to go in order 
 to find the fullest expression of their faith. "In the 
 name of our God," said the crowds of the London poor, 
 as well as the Hebrew psalmist, " we will set up our 
 banners." We have not seen in our generation any 
 other such warning, or any other such an acknowledg- 
 ment, that Jesus Christ the crucified is He whom the 
 Father has exalted to be the Head of Humanity, to lift 
 up an ensign for the peoples, to be the one and only 
 all-sufficient mediator, representative, spokesman, and 
 avenger of " all that are desolate and oppressed." This 
 " sign of the Son of Man " is all the more amazing 
 because it is so unintentional. 
 
 What is all the after-dinner talk at the tables of 
 Caste and Mammon, or all the unmoral and unsocial 
 wordspinning of Christian Evidence companies, over the
 
 40 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 possibility of reconciling Darwinism and " Christianity " 
 compared with that evidence which the Son of Man 
 Himself sets before the corrupt and unbelieving Church 
 in the faith and hope, in the hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness, of those who do not even know that He 
 is their teacher and their leader ? Can we doubt that it 
 is the Son of Man Himself who has come again into 
 His Church in the persons of this rough multitude of 
 His disciples ? " The Son of God goes forth to war." 
 These, whatever they may call themselves, are bearing 
 His banner ; they " follow in His train." They are 
 marching " manfully under His banner," as the office for 
 Holy Baptism puts it, " against sin, the world, and the 
 devil " against selfishness, Caste-rule, and Mammon- 
 rule. May each one of them " continue Christ's faithful 
 soldier and servant unto his life's end." May he freely 
 subject himself to the rule of Him by whom he sees 
 the world needs to be ruled. 
 
 The undogmatic " socialism " of the desolate and 
 oppressed, when it speaks freely out of its own heart and 
 conscience, falls back upon the words with which the 
 crucified and ascended Head of Humanity has provided 
 His brothers and sisters. It reminds " Christians " that 
 they are living in rebellion against Christ. It does not 
 articulately name itself " Christian Socialism." No : but 
 it declares inarticulately that the thing which econo- 
 mists, politicians, scholars in hatred or in love call 
 " Socialism " is itself " Christian."
 
 THE POOR ARE GOD'S ELECT AND THE 
 WORLD'S CREDITORS 1 
 
 " Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be 
 to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David 
 a Saviour ; which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign 
 unto you : Ye shall find the Babe wrapped in swaddling clothes 
 and lying in a manger." ST. LUKE ii. 10-12. 
 
 THE evangelist here shows us the contents of the 
 first Christmas Day sermon. He calls the Church 
 to look at the first preacher of the Gospel and the first 
 hearers of it. It is significant that we owe this story of 
 the shepherds, which the consciousness of Christendom 
 has always recognised as containing the very pith and 
 heart of the doctrine of Christmas, to St. Luke, the 
 evangelist of the nations, the disciple of St. Paul. We 
 can imagine with what joy this evangelist must have 
 recorded the fact that the elect congregation which the 
 Lord gathered first to hear the Gospel was not made up 
 of the world's Mite, but was made up of shepherds. 
 Shepherds were a very mean sort of men, as the respect- 
 able and learned among the Jews then judged. Nay, it 
 was worse than this. They were coupled by the strictly 
 religious world of that day with pagans. According to 
 the treatise called Sanhedrin, as Godet tells us, shepherds 
 were not to be admitted as witnesses in a court. " But 
 God," as St. Luke's master wrote to the Church of 
 
 1 Christmas, 1885. 
 41
 
 42 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Corinth, " hath chosen the foolish things of the world to 
 confound the wise : and God hath chosen the weak things 
 of the world to confound the things that are mighty ; 
 and base things of the world, and things which are 
 despised, hath God chosen." It was therefore in accord 
 with His law of action for Himself, exhibited so 
 repeatedly in history, that He should choose men 
 condemned by the religious world, and thought unworthy 
 to be witnesses, to be the first hearers of the Gospel, the 
 first witnesses to the birth of the world's Redeemer. 
 
 I. 
 
 "There were in the same country shepherds," says the 
 evangelist, " who were keeping watch over their flocks," 
 remaining out in the fields "by night." May we not 
 suppose them to have been shepherds, of quite excep- 
 tional character ? No : St. Luke omits the article ; he 
 does not say " the shepherds." There seems therefore to 
 be no ground for the fanciful imagination of some that 
 these elect of God may have been those particular 
 shepherds who kept the sacred flocks for the Temple 
 sacrifices. The evangelist has simply nothing to tell 
 the Church about the exceptional character of the men, 
 In a legend, or in a fable of class-invention, the men 
 chosen out of the whole human race to be the first 
 hearers of news so stupendous, and of such importance 
 " to all the people," would have been prodigies of piety 
 no common shepherds, but wonderful philosophers, 
 or poets, or prophets in shepherds' clothing. The 
 evangelist's language, because he is an evangelist, has 
 in it no hint that there was anything in them differencing 
 them from any ordinary group of wage-earning men, 
 thrown into one another's company by what we call the 
 chances of life, by the search for daily bread. They
 
 THE POOR ARE GOD'S ELECT 43 
 
 were simple, pious, and patriotic every-day Hebrews. 
 These three characteristics come out in the course of the 
 short narrative. But there was amongst them no David, 
 who out of a shepherd became a king ; no Amos, who 
 out of a shepherd became a prophet ; no Thomas Scott, 
 who out of a shepherd became a great priest of the flock 
 of God in England. We never hear again in the Gospels 
 of any one of these shepherds. Perhaps they were all 
 dead when the Lord Jesus began to teach and preach. 
 
 II. 
 
 God, according to His angel, elected these shepherds 
 to hear the happy Christmas news (i) for their own 
 sake, and (2) for the sake of their whole nation. The 
 message is an individual one " Fear not, for behold I 
 bring you good tidings." The bright angel out of the un- 
 seen world wishes the poor shepherds, and really brings 
 to these simple and ignorant men, a " merry Christmas." 
 His words stand in the Greek : " Fear not ; for behold 
 I evangelise you." Here we learn what it is, accord- 
 ing to the very first announcement of the Gospel, to 
 " evangelise " a man, a parish, or a people. The Gospel 
 out of heaven does not produce terror in poor and hard- 
 working men. No ; it finds terror and it removes it. 
 The preacher, whether angel or man, is not sent to 
 frighten simple and ignorant men, shepherds, daily wage- 
 earners. The preacher who thinks that he must first of 
 all terrify simple men and women, and then when their 
 terror has reached a fever heat not till then put before 
 them what he pleases to call " the Gospel," is no 
 evangelist, if the angel was a true " evangelist." God 
 sends His evangelists to the poor. God does not send 
 His evangelists, He sends His prophets, armed with 
 threats and terrors, crying " Woe unto you ! " not to
 
 44 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 the shepherds, not to the poor, simple, ignorant wage- 
 earners, in the fields at night, but to the rich, powerful, 
 respectable, learned, and religious in the Temple, in the 
 synagogues, in the schools, and in the palaces of Israel. 
 It seems a mockery and an irony, in our wicked land, 
 where thousands upon thousands are so much poorer 
 than the poorest Jewish shepherd was where thousands 
 are not even earning wages, and have small prospect of 
 permanently earning them to say to such, " I wish you 
 a merry Christmas." 
 
 Oh, if we but knew this day how to say to them, in a 
 living and an English form, exactly what the angel said 
 to the Hebrew shepherds, and if we but knew this day 
 how to make it mean to wretched and hopeless 
 English workers without work all that it meant to 
 those Hebrews on that night ! " Unto you is born this 
 day, in the city of London, in the city of Newcastle, 
 in the borough of Hackney, in the isle of Skye, a 
 Saviour ! " "A Saviour ! " " Christ ! " " Lord ! " Ah ! 
 they have heard the name of Jesus so often in the 
 churches and chapels and so-called mission-halls, that 
 they have come to think it to be nothing but the label 
 put upon a mythological or otherworldly figure, which 
 is talked about by comfortable gentlemen in pulpits, 
 and by patronising ladies in Sunday Schools. If any 
 angel came out of the unseen, and said to a group of 
 London crossing-sweepers, or of London sandwich-men, 
 or of East-end seamstresses for a great English con- 
 tractor, "To you is bora this day a Saviour, Christ, 
 Lord " do you think they would understand him ? 
 Why did the poor shepherds in the fields of Bethlehem 
 rejoice at that Gospel which to the poor men and 
 women who will try to sleep to-night on the stone seats 
 of London and Blackfriars Bridges means nothing at 
 all ? Because whenever a Jew heard the glorious title,
 
 THE POOR ARE GOD'S ELECT 45 
 
 "Saviour," Liberator, Redeemer, he connected it with 
 the real salvation, liberation, emancipation of his 
 wretched ancestors from their slavery to their task- 
 masters in Egypt. Whenever a poor Hebrew heard 
 the more glorious title "Christ," he looked forward to 
 the most complete possible institution of justice and 
 happiness for all in his own land on this earth. " The 
 law," as St. Luke's great Hebrew master said, " was our 
 schoolmaster to bring us to Christ." I am sure that 
 the Apostle of the Nations would tell us that we in 
 England, rich and poor alike, can never know what 
 the Gospel is, what the New Testament is, until we 
 understand what the Old Testament is, what the law 
 is that law every commandment of which comes 
 from the One who said : " I am the Lord thy God 
 who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of 
 the house of bondage. Thou shalt have none other 
 gods but Me" shall recognise none, trust none, but 
 the One who is Saviour, Liberator, Redeemer, Emanci- 
 pator of the oppressed and wretched and defrauded. 
 
 I have left myself small space and time to speak of a 
 point which to us is now still more important. "There" 
 was Caesar Augustus in Rome giving order that all the 
 world should be taxed. There was Herod in his palace ; 
 " there were " diligent priests in the Temple ; " there 
 were" learned scribes studying the text of Holy 
 Scripture to find out smart and ingenious things to say 
 about it and about the Christ ; " there were " pious 
 Pharisees laying down methods of devotion for those 
 who aimed at their own individual religious perfection. 
 None of these were startled by the vision of an angel ; 
 none of them were chosen by the Eternal Father to be 
 the first hearers of the Gospel of the birth of the 
 world's Redeemer. But, "there were, in the same 
 country, shepherds abiding in the field" a most
 
 46 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 despised class of the population, for whose conversion, 
 it may be, the other and wealthier classes were holding 
 " missions." Through that class it was made known 
 to humanity that its new Adam had appeared in the 
 world. The poor are God's elect ; they are God's 
 social mediators between Him and the other classes 
 into which society is divided. All the subsequent 
 history of Christendom is rich with confirmations, in 
 great matters and in small matters, of the principle 
 which was asserted and proclaimed in the beginning 
 of its history by the angel which no man has ever 
 asserted or proclaimed. "This shall be a sign unto 
 you : ye shall find a babe " it is not the babe in St. 
 Luke "wrapped in swaddling clothes, and lying" 
 where ? " lying in a manger." The Father had deter- 
 mined that His Eternal Son, the Mediator between 
 Him and all our kind, the Hope of every poor 
 shepherd, the Hope of Israel, the Hope of England, 
 shall be the Son of a poor woman, shall be first 
 recognised and worshipped by poor men, shall live 
 and die a poor man. In order to be the Redeemer 
 of every creature, He who was born on Christmas Day 
 was obliged to be poor. Humanity not only owes its 
 salvation, but Europe and England owe what little 
 and paltry degrees they have as yet attained towards 
 true "civilisation" to that Poor Man, who, like last 
 night's outcasts on London Bridge, had no fit bed 
 where to lay His head. 
 
 Christmas Day is indeed then, as our fathers before 
 us have perceived, the day on which above all other 
 days we ought to remember what we owe to the poor. 
 I do not mean what we ought to give them. I am 
 speaking of what the poor have given, and are still 
 giving, to us. Our debt to the poor is already so huge 
 that we can never hope by any amount of gifts to repay
 
 THE POOR ARE GOD'S ELECT 47 
 
 it. How poor all the rich would be, but for the poor ! 
 How miserable all the fortunate and happy would be, 
 but for the poor ! What fools and idiots all the learned 
 would be, but for the poor ! The houses in which we 
 live, and which they built ; the clothes which we wear, 
 and which they have made ; the food which we eat, and 
 which they have sown and reaped or brought over 
 stormy seas ; the books which make us scholars, or 
 give us pleasure, and which they have printed ; the 
 railways, which speed us to our homes and to our 
 friends, and on which they labour by these, and by 
 a hundred other signs around us, the King of the Poor, 
 announced on this day to the poor shepherds, is calling 
 upon us to pay what little we can of our debts. If we 
 do not pay it, He will come to us, as He came to other 
 nations, as the Judge of the poor. The poor are in 
 every nation the majority, and they multiply faster 
 than all other classes. If they willed, and if they were 
 to organise themselves, they could at any moment 
 destroy the whole fabric of society that now is. If 
 Christ Jesus, their King and Judge, were to lift up His 
 restraining hands, the poor would become the modern 
 Attila, "the scourge of God," to sweep clean His 
 befouled and corrupted Christendom. Let us all, in 
 such ways as Christ their King and Judge may open 
 to us, go to them with the evangelical tidings of great 
 joy taking care that it shall be what to shepherds and 
 poor men really is good news " Unto you is born this 
 day a Saviour, a Christ, a Lord ! "
 
 RIGHT, AS JUSTICE, AND AS CHARITY * 
 
 "Whatsoever is right, I will give you." ST. MATT. xx. 4. 
 (Holy Gospel for Septuagesima.) 
 
 ST. MATTHEW had been a tax-gatherer, and he 
 had consequently gained much experience about 
 money questions, though from their coarsely practical 
 rather than from their ideal side. Twice in the course 
 of this parable an ideal of money payment is erected. 
 First, when the householder sends into the vineyard 
 those whom he found unemployed at the third hour, he 
 said, " Whatsoever is right, I will give you " : and to 
 those whom he found unemployed at the sixth and 
 ninth hour, he "did likewise." Secondly, when he found 
 a number of men still unemployed at the eleventh hour, 
 he said to them also, who had lost all hope of earning a 
 full wage, " Whatsoever is right, that ye shall receive." 
 We are startled, as they and their fellow-workers were, 
 at finding that what they " receive " is exactly the same 
 as that paid to those who had the happy lot of being 
 employed all the day long. 
 
 I. 
 
 The covenant of the employer, however, taken by 
 itself, engages that work and wages are to be reconciled ; 
 they are to be proportionate to one another. For work 
 
 1 February 6, 1887. 
 4 8
 
 RIGHT, AS JUSTICE AND CHARITY 49 
 
 " Go ye also into the vineyard." For wages " And 
 whatsoever is right, I will give you." " Whatsoever is 
 right, that shall ye receive." 
 
 This is indeed a great engagement, a wonderful 
 contract, a daring covenant. Like all that is ideal, it 
 seems at the first glance to be somewhat vague, and it 
 arouses sceptical temper. What employer, what receiver 
 of wages for work done, can be quite trusted by the 
 other to rule the exact measure of " whatsoever is 
 right " ? The good employer fears lest he should give 
 less than what is right, and the good worker fears lest 
 he should take more than is right. The difficulty lies 
 in the standard of " right." We notice, indeed, that two 
 different standards of " whatsoever is right " are set up 
 successively in this parable of the kingdom of heaven. 
 We see the first in the opening of the history, where it 
 is said that the householder agreed with the labourer 
 for " a penny a day." That is a contract it is signed 
 by both sides ; they treat as equals. The same standard 
 reappears in the last chapter but one of the history, 
 where he says to the spokesman of the discontented 
 class, " Friend, I do thee no wrong : didst not thou 
 agree with me for a penny ? " But we see another 
 standard of right in the ending of the history. " Is it 
 not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own ? Is 
 thine eye evil because I am good ? " 
 
 " Right," that inexhaustible word, that inexhaustible 
 conception, is set before us by the Lord " the Lord our 
 Righteousness" in the course of this parable under 
 two successive aspects ; first as justice, and finally as 
 goodness, or as charity, or grace. The labourers in the 
 vineyard in our generation have begun to cry very 
 loudly to the employing classes " We want justice, not 
 charity." That is their conception of right, if not of 
 right in itself, yet of their rights ; I need not say here 
 
 5
 
 50 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 how my whole soul sympathises with it. But I am 
 bound to say that the conception of right as justice, or 
 as equity, or as equality, is not a full and adequate 
 conception of it. It is the legal or judicial idea of 
 right. It is not the moral idea of right. It is 
 the positive rather than natural or eternal conception 
 of it. I say "natural" or "eternal," meaning here 
 by " nature " that which is first of all and last of all, 
 that out of which everything has its beginning and 
 in which everything has its ending. " God is " by 
 nature, as His apostle says, " charity " " God is love." 
 It is as eternal charity, as eternal love, as eternal good, 
 that God is the source of right, the author of justice, the 
 institutor of law. The object of every parable of the 
 Kingdom of Heaven the kingdom which the creatures 
 entreat their Father " may come " on earth is to reveal 
 the nature of its unseen King. This parable opens on 
 earth ; it begins with a scene which is being exhibited 
 in thousands upon thousands of places every day a 
 simple contract between an employer of work and a 
 few workers. Every time I get into a railway carriage, 
 every time you buy anything across a shop-counter, 
 there is a repetition of the first scene between the house- 
 holder and the labourer. We become, in our degree, 
 employers. In that character, as the Son of God dis- 
 closes at the end of the drama however unconscious 
 we may be of it we are showing that we are made in 
 the image of God ; we are partakers, as the apostle 
 says, of His nature. 
 
 Our first demand from those whom we employ, and 
 their first demand from us, is justice. " Whatsoever is 
 right " means that they should give us exactly what 
 we buy, and that we should give them exactly the 
 covenanted price for it Justice, equity, equality, in 
 the covenant between man and man, is properly the
 
 RIGHT, AS JUSTICE AND CHARITY 51 
 
 first demand of every one, whether employer or 
 employed. "When he had agreed with the labourers 
 for a penny a day he sent them into his vineyard." 
 There was no " charity " here, in the sense in which we 
 ordinarily use (or rather degrade) that word. The 
 " penny " was as fully theirs as the vineyard was his. 
 If they would have starved but for his hiring them, 
 what would have become of his vineyard, and ultimately 
 of him, if they had not gone to work in it? Take 
 labour out of the world, and landlords and capitalists 
 will soon find that they only differ from the labourer as 
 men who starve at the ninth or eleventh hour of the 
 day differ from the man who starved early in the 
 morning. The householder needs the labourer in order 
 to keep himself alive, to save his own children from 
 sinking downward into savages and into beasts, and to 
 prevent the vineyard, whose fruit is for the joy of both, 
 from becoming a useless wilderness. "Right," in the 
 sense of justice, is in the actual world, as it is in this 
 parable, the first condition to be established between 
 man and man when they come into contact. If the 
 labourer has no right to work and wages, the house- 
 holder has no right to the vineyard and wine. His 
 title to the vineyard and its fruit rests on justice, and 
 the labourer has exactly the same title to work and 
 wages. A vineyard is probably chosen as the field of 
 the contract because the fruit of the vine individual 
 strengthening and social gladness was regarded by 
 the Hebrew people as the characteristic gift of God to 
 man as man, the gift to which a labourer had equal 
 divine right, as he had equal bodily need, as the house- 
 holder. This equality of householder and labourer as 
 fellow-needers and so fellow-possessors of the earth and 
 its fruits, cannot be manifested by " charity " so called. 
 Why ? Because in all " charities " the one must appear
 
 52 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 as the inferior of the other : the one be a gracious giver, 
 the other more or less a grateful receiver. 
 
 II. 
 
 At the ending of the parable, as we have seen, the 
 idea of " Right " again appears. It now appears 
 independently of justice, contract, or agreement. We 
 now see the realisation of the high ideal with which the 
 householder attracted the unemployed " Whatsoever 
 is right, that shall ye receive." He has raised them at 
 the last hour to a level with the more fortunate classes 
 of world-history. The malcontented classes, by the 
 mouth of their leader, raise the banner of "justice" 
 against goodness, against equality, against charity in its 
 fullest sense. " Thou hast made them equal unto us." 
 They do not indeed accuse the householder of being 
 unjust to all who have worked in the vineyard ; nor of 
 being unjust in himself. The complaint is a class- 
 grumble ; they accuse him of being unjust to their 
 particular class. They accuse him of expropriating 
 their class of its specific privilege and property. They 
 have been the very aristocracy of labour, and so they 
 indignantly protest against the elevation of a lower 
 class to equality with their class. The princes despise 
 the nobles ; the nobles sneer at the rich merchants ; 
 the merchants scorn the shopkeepers ; the shopkeepers 
 are displeased at the claims of the artisan ; the artisan 
 thinks the unskilled labourer ought to know his place. 
 They murmured against the good man of the house, 
 saying, "These last have wrought but one hour, and 
 thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne 
 the burden and heat of the day." They do not really 
 complain, as you see, of the violation of contract, but
 
 RIGHT, AS JUSTICE AND CHARITY 53 
 
 they complain of the presence of an equalising love, 
 charity, grace, and goodness. 
 
 This is the ultimate revelation of God's nature and 
 character, and of His relation to men. The house- 
 holder is now completely revealed as the image of the 
 Eternal Householder, whose the earth is, and of whose 
 family every man as a man is a member. The King of 
 the Kingdom of Heaven alone has the right to say no 
 earthly contractor can have such a right " Is it not 
 lawful for Me to do what I will with Mine own ? " 
 " The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof." 
 Therefore, as we now learn to say, it is not the land- 
 lord's. The vineyard by the standard of that " Right " 
 which is higher than justice and contract, that " Right " 
 which is eternal charity does not belong to the house- 
 holder ; neither does it belong to the noble or successful 
 classes whose work has made it fertile. It belongs 
 equally to the unsuccessful, who, in the hour of their 
 despair, are called into it to do what little they can. 
 Hence, at the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven and 
 at the doing of the will of the eternally Righteous One 
 on earth, the full and equal inheritance is given by the 
 Father of all, through the Brother and Judge of all, to 
 the disinherited. " Whatsoever is Right " is manifested 
 in His complete revelation of it, to be more than 
 justice ; it is shown to be the eternal charity, love, grace, 
 and goodness. "Is thine eye evil, because I am good? " 
 How has the inherent goodness, this absolutely perfect 
 " Right " of the Householder been manifested to the 
 jealous and grumbling class ? By His vindication in the 
 course of the parable (which is the course of history) 
 of the rights of a class below them in advantages to 
 equality with them in wage and in enjoyment. I ought 
 rather to say by His entire non-recognition of any 
 distinctions of class, of any aristocracy of age or merit,
 
 54 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 such as they had set up. " I perceive," said the apostle, 
 when the Father showed him that his Roman child was 
 as dear to him as His Hebrew children, " that God is no 
 respecter of persons." 
 
 " Right " as justice, right expressing itself as 
 " contract between equals," does not acknowledge the 
 claims of man as man. " Right " as charity right as 
 revealed in the Incarnation or man-becoming of Him 
 who is " the Lord our Righteousness " and in the 
 self-sacrifice of God's Eternal Word ignores the exist- 
 ence and privileges of classes, and acknowledges only 
 the equal rights of men. The mere contracting right, 
 merely legal justice, can only say : " Whatsoever you 
 have earned, whatsoever you can claim upon contract 
 a penny a day that shall you receive." But the Father 
 of all has said to needy men, as He does say to them 
 by His Eternal Word, Who is man's brother and man's 
 judge, "Whatsoever is right I will give you." Well, 
 what does He give ? Not whatsoever men have earned, 
 but whatsoever men need. The " penny a day " 
 promised by contract, stood for the just wage which 
 a man needed, whether employed or unemployed, in 
 order to be properly a man, in order to have a day's 
 shelter, food, clothing, and comforts of life. It is the 
 sum which is due therefore from humanity to every 
 man, if he is to live a humane life. It is his " daily 
 bread " : it is that which the grace of God, as " our 
 Father," gives to each man by making him a man. 
 His "right" to it is anterior to all contracts. 
 
 It is the chief business of every political common- 
 wealth on earth, as an image of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, to provide that each man shall have that 
 " penny a day " which God, who is love, has declared to 
 be his, and that a vineyard shall be opened in which 
 every man can earn his wage and enjoy its fruits. The
 
 55 
 
 Heavenly Economist declares that righteousness to all 
 men stands above all " rights," pleaded by the individual 
 or the class. " Take that thine is, and go thy way ; I 
 will give unto this last even as unto thee. Is it not 
 lawful for Me to do what I will with Mine own ? Is 
 thine eye evil because I am Good ? "
 
 THE INDISSOLUBLE UNION BETWEEN 
 THE CHURCH AND THE NATIONS ' 
 
 " Go ye therefore and teach all nations." ST. MATT, xxviii. 19. 
 
 " For I speak to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the apostle of 
 the Gentiles, I magnify my office." ROM. xi. 13. 
 
 " That I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, 
 ministering the Gospel of God." ROM. xv. 16. 
 
 " I am ordained a preacher and an apostle (I speak the truth 
 in Christ, and lie not), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and 
 verity." i TIM. ii. 7. 
 
 r I ^HE Epiphany is called, in an alternative sub-title 
 J. to the collect of that festival, " the Manifestation 
 of Christ to the Gentiles" The latter word is so archaic 
 and academic, it has become so exclusively a part of 
 the technical speech of the theologian, that it probably 
 slips by the general ear without calling forth any very 
 definite or practical thought. The word " Gentile " 
 seems to have about as much to do with the actual life 
 and business, the plans and excitements of men and 
 women in London, as the words Midianite, or Philistine, 
 or Samaritan, or Pharisee, or Sadducee less indeed 
 
 1 A Sermon preached at Bedford Chapel, Bloomsbury (the 
 Rev. Stopford Brooke's), Sunday, January 13, 1878. (It need 
 scarcely be said that this sermon was preached before Mr. 
 Stopford Brooke formally separated himself and his chapel 
 from the Church.) 
 
 56
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE NATIONS 57 
 
 than either of the four latter, since their names are not 
 out of date, they are still in hourly use amongst us 
 moderns as epithets. 
 
 I. 
 
 Let us translate the old language into our current 
 manner of speech : let us recollect that we profess to 
 come together to celebrate " the manifestation of Christ 
 to the Nations" " to the Peoples," or in pure English, 
 " to the Folks." Such a revision of words at least gives 
 a hint to those inside the Church and those outside that 
 a very daring claim is made for Jesus Christ by His 
 Society when it keeps the Epiphany. We are led out 
 of the Sunday region of technical preaching and com- 
 mentating, back to that same solid world with which we 
 are in contact during our every-day struggle for 
 existence which we connect rather with the roll of the 
 cabs and omnibuses outside this church, than with the 
 Psalms which we sing and the Lessons to which we 
 listen inside it. We should suffer no perceptible detri- 
 ment if the word " Gentiles " were abolished for ever 
 from the language of every one who is not a philologist. 
 It is a word of the University, not a word of the Folk. 
 We should suffer a far greater loss if the words 
 " Samaritan " or " Pharisee " dropped out of our daily 
 speech. But we should go back to barbarism, nay, to 
 bestiality itself, if it were possible to expel the word 
 " Nations " (with the whole cycle of its applications) 
 from our thought and our talk. 
 
 It is this word, or the fact represented by this word, 
 which lies at the ground of the accidental relation 
 between you and me this day. I, a stranger to all of 
 you, have no title to minister before the Lord for you in 
 this building, or to speak to you in His name, except 
 that which I derive from the fact that I am a Nation's
 
 58 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 priest, "a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and verity." 
 That is to say, I should have no right to be here if I 
 were a priest in some vague, diffused, ultramontanist, or 
 internationalist sense a minister of the Pope or the 
 Positivists ; if I received the law from the Jerusalem in 
 Rome or the Jerusalem in Paris ; nor if I were merely 
 a lecturer on religious topics ; nor if I were the agent 
 of a religious club or company totally independent 
 of the National order, the minister of a sect founded on 
 agreement in doctrine or discipline ; nor if I were a 
 pious person engaging in worship with a voluntary 
 aggregation of other pious persons. You can demand 
 of me my letter of holy orders as my title to minister 
 for you. 
 
 At a time while the Philistines are shrieking for the 
 separation of the Church and the State or Nation 
 that is, for the denial of any positive relationship be- 
 tween Christ and " the Gentile " I feel that " I magnify 
 my office " when I rejoice that the civil servants of the 
 Nation could expel me from this place if I were any- 
 thing less than the ecclesiastical servant of the Nation. 
 I am here, not to speak to you loosely as Christians, 
 but directly to " speak to you Gentiles " to assert by 
 my function, as well as by my doctrine, that which the 
 Apostle of the Nations declared again and again to 
 Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, and to his disciple 
 Timothy, that there is an organic relation between Jesus 
 Christ and the Nations : that the Catholic Church, or 
 Christ's universal human society, is inherently, and not 
 accidentally, connected with " all Nations " as Nations ; 
 that the minister of Christ's Church, whatever be his 
 individual theories about the proper relations of the 
 Church and the State, is in fact an ex-officio minister 
 of the Nation of which he is a native, and of the State 
 or Commonwealth of which he is a member and subject.
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE NATIONS 59 
 
 The subjection and service of Christ's bishops and 
 priests to the States or Nations of which God has con- 
 stituted them citizens and members, must not be 
 thought a fond thing vainly invented by Constantine, 
 or Justinian, or Charles the Great. It is antecedent to 
 all legislative expressions of it in the shape of so-called 
 establishment or endowment, and it is quite independent 
 of such accidents. The " union of Church and State " 
 cannot be dissolved but by the dissolution of one or the 
 other. It is of the same nature as the union between 
 Church and Family. Even although the historical 
 attempts to express this union by " establishment " or 
 by " endowment " of a certain number of the National 
 clergy should be swept away as a clumsy and insufficient 
 expression of it, the union itself will still subsist ; and it 
 will in all ages and all commonwealths somehow mani- 
 fest itself. For it belongs to the substance of the 
 Catholic Church as founded by Jesus Christ, and as 
 developed by St. Paul, the Apostle of the Nations to 
 be National. A Church that is not National, ideally or 
 actually, cannot be a part of the Church of Him who 
 sent His apostles to make disciples of " all Nations." 
 Nearly all the sorrows of the clergy of Christendom in 
 our generation have sprung from this that they have 
 striven to become independent of their Nation, and 
 dependent either upon an international authority in 
 the Holy City like those primitive Ultramontanists 
 of "the Circumcision" with whom the Apostle of "the 
 Nations" was in lifelong conflict or else dependent 
 upon some religious or political party which thinks 
 the world ought to accept its decrees. 
 
 II. 
 
 I can easily realise that a time may come to a com- 
 pletely developed Nation when it will be obliged to
 
 60 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 declare itself creedless and confessionless, and refuse 
 any further subsidy to the clergy of the Church. But I 
 find it hard to realise how any one can read the New 
 Testament, under the increasing light which has been 
 shed upon it during the last half-century of criticism 
 and political experience, without perceiving that the 
 word academically rendered " Gentiles " is almost its 
 most important word ; that its meaning is not reached 
 by any mere negative definition as " not Jews" or as the 
 totality of #circumcised men, nor even by the petty 
 positive definition of it as " the Pagans " or " the 
 Heathen " " die Heiden " of Luther's Bible, who, how- 
 ever, in the text (St. Matt, xxviii. 19) speaks of "alle 
 Volkner? The word " Nation," when it occurs in the 
 New Testament, demands the same positive interpre- 
 tation which it receives in the columns of the newspaper, 
 the chapters of the historian, or the appeals of the 
 patriot. In sending His apostles to Humanity, for the 
 proclamation of the Good News about man's relation to 
 God and the formation of a universal-human believing 
 society, Jesus, if we may trust the evangelists, recognised 
 as the two principal elements in our race Nationality 
 and Personality. Christ's Church, according to Christ's 
 plan, was to be a society for Nations and a society for 
 consciences. The two most precious liberties were at 
 least explicitly acknowledged in the original command 
 to preach the Gospel and offer Baptism to Humanity as 
 a whole. The apostolic founders of the Church, as com- 
 missioned by the Lord, had "all Nations" (according 
 to the first Gospel) " every creature " (according to the 
 second Gospel) set before them as their aim. Hence 
 the Catholic Church can no more cease through any 
 such political accident as "Disestablishment" to be 
 national, than it can cease to be catholic or to be human. 
 The national aim of the apostolic and ministerial calling
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE NATIONS 61 
 
 was so remarkably emphasised by the call of the 
 last, the most characteristically apostolical apostle, 
 " the Apostle of the Nations," as to be placed beyond 
 all doubt. Hence whenever the Christian clergy scorn 
 or ignore the Nations when they see in the State, 
 in the Commune or Parish, and in the national liberty, 
 culture, free development, and language, only something 
 carnal and worldly, outside the Kingdom of God and of 
 Christ they become not merely anti-national, but 
 manifestly anti-Christian. They invert the very meaning 
 of the Epiphany. Hence also if a State should say to 
 the Church, " I am no longer in union with you," the 
 Church will still be bound by its very nature and 
 invention to say to the State, " But I am still in 
 union with you." When the Church cares not to be 
 national, denies that it has any affinity to the Nation 
 as such, refuses a certain subjection to the Nation, 
 and attributes no more divine character to the State 
 than the State claims for itself it sinks into a 
 mere pious club, or a sect of clerics and clericalists. 
 Are you not glad that the Irish Church, after its 
 disestablishment by the State, is so possessed by the 
 original Christian consciousness as to assert its con- 
 tinued union with the State or Nation, as it does by still 
 calling itself " The Church of Ireland " ? The Church 
 of Christ is not " national " as the agents of rival 
 societies for protecting or destroying the property of 
 Church patrons may imagine because it is established 
 by the Nation, not because the Nation has permitted or 
 assented to its self-establishment. It is national simply 
 because it is the Church. Every Nation in Europe has 
 discovered that an established clergy is capable of 
 becoming the most anti-national force within its juris- 
 diction, nay, even of constituting a standing anti- 
 national opposition. But the national "clergy" are not
 
 62 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 the national "Church." The Church in its national 
 entirety (as we have seen in our own day in Italy, in 
 Germany, in France, and I think we may say, in 
 England) knows how to respect and to use its clergy 
 without accepting them as its political instructors, or 
 slavishly following them and the clericalists to the poll 
 in the matters of the State and the Commune. 
 
 III. 
 
 If I have been able to make even a drift of my 
 meaning clear, you will see why I think we cannot 
 regard the keeping of the Epiphany of Christ the 
 manifestation of the Divine Head of Humanity to the 
 Nations as an archaic and worn out observance, foreign 
 to modern modes of thought, unconnected with the 
 interests and excitements of the ordinary course of our 
 lives. The Church by maintaining the observance of 
 this festival has been teaching more than it has recog- 
 nised, infinitely more by the bare observance of it than 
 by the clergy's regulation interpretation of the obser- 
 vance. It is as citizens, not merely as Churchmen, that we 
 thank God for the Epiphany of Christ to the Gentiles, for 
 the making known of their King and Redeemer to the 
 Nations. The Church is forced, by the original character 
 of her mission, to look upon humanity, and upon all 
 the organic members of humanity nations, communes 
 or parishes, families, and persons in their ideal aspect, 
 and to hold and keep up its own ideal before each. 
 "Go ye into all the world, and make known the Good 
 News to every creature." What news ? That the most 
 sunken and hopeless slave or criminal has a personality 
 infinitely better and higher than he thinks. Tell the 
 slave that he can be free, the criminal that he can be 
 good ; tell the bondslave of evil that he is the Son of
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE NATIONS 63 
 
 The Good ; that all things can work together for him, 
 because the Source of Nature and the Manager of events 
 is his own Father. Call every such prodigal to " come 
 to himself " ; and when he is indeed face to face with 
 himself, he will there find the fundamental truth of his 
 being, his sonship to God. Hence the Church esteems 
 the vilest criminal, not first as a criminal, but first as 
 a man the fellow of the one indivisible humanity of 
 which Jesus is the Head. Hence also the Church, by 
 baptism and absolution, reconciles and unites to 
 humanity the very man whom the State is compelled 
 to regard first as a criminal, and to excommunicate 
 from its fellowship. The States or Nations rise to 
 the same plane as the Church when they make their 
 punishment remedial ; and I imagine that we may 
 claim the entire humane change of attitude taken by 
 States towards their criminal citizens to be one result of 
 the Manifestation of the Son of Man to the Nations. 
 
 IV. 
 
 As the Church of Jesus Christ is bound to regard 
 " every creature," so is she bound to regard " all 
 Nations " after this ideal and potentiality. The thief 
 has learnt from the Church that he is a man, a son of 
 God, and has converted himself from thiefhood to pure 
 manhood. So the hordes and tribes, and many a natio 
 irrendenta, the Israels in Egypt, have learned through 
 the Church that they were nations, or ought to be 
 learning that they are. The Church (which according 
 to the sectary, the heretic, and the internationalist, has 
 as such nothing to do with the Nations) has again and 
 again quickened the consciousness of nationality, and 
 has been the active developer of it, where the State has 
 either been the name for an imperialist tyranny attempt-
 
 64 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 ing to crush nationality, or has been a company of serfs 
 too feeble or depraved to assert it. I might attempt to 
 illustrate the doctrine of the Epiphany by reference to 
 the chief question which at this moment divides the so- 
 called Liberal party in our own nation the proper 
 relation between the Church and the modern State. 
 But I would rather ask you to look abroad, at that 
 corner of Europe toward which the eyes of all the 
 civilised nations are now directed, for an illustration 
 of the redeeming work which may be wrought in the 
 Nation by the perception that the Church and the 
 Nation are inherently united. There, a Nation has 
 been arising under our very eyes : and it is the Church, 
 rather than the State, which has perceived its implicit 
 subsistence, and which has called it into actual existence. 
 What has been "the State" in Bulgaria? If by the 
 State we mean the Turkish Khalif and Pashas, they 
 certainly had no desire that the Slav agricultural com- 
 munes in the Illyrian triangle should dream or assert 
 that they constituted a Nation. If by " the State " in 
 Bulgaria we mean (as I think we should mean) the 
 totality of the rude Bulgarian natives, the Common- 
 wealth of Bulgarian folk, it is by their Church that 
 the conviction of their nationality has been suggested 
 to them ; it is the Orthodox Church which has kept 
 alive in them the national instinct ; and the Church has 
 been the medium through which they *.have given it 
 expression. The tribes of that cruelly oppressed Slav 
 Israel in the Ottoman Egypt were probably no better 
 or more cultured than Pharaoh's Hebrew slaves ; but 
 they have believed for years that Christ has been 
 " manifesting Himself "to them, that there has been a 
 real relation between a divine and unseen Redeemer 
 and the Nation of Bulgaria. The baptism of the down- 
 trodden Slav has preserved his potential citizenship :
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE NATIONS 65 
 
 Christ's sacrament has kept alive in coarse farmers and 
 keen traders the national consciousness, while the rich 
 and aristocratic Christians of the East, who after the 
 fall of Constantinople passed over to Islam in order to 
 save their landed property and their social status, have 
 lost their nationality and must perish with the doomed 
 Turk. These communes of the Balkan would never 
 have known that they were the Bulgarian Nation had 
 they not remained the Bulgarian faithful, Christ's Bul- 
 garian Church. By the Bulgarian " Church " I mean of 
 course the entirety of Bulgarian Christians as by the 
 Church of England I mean the entirety of christened 
 English folk. Few persons in Western Europe know 
 what a marvellous national struggle the poor Bulgarian 
 priests and laity had fought and won (a pledge of their 
 right to acknowledge their national self-government) 
 before the war broke out, or before there was any pros- 
 pect that the Day of Christ was " nigh at hand," that 
 " redemption " from the Turk was near. I speak of 
 their long struggles for the use of the most sacred 
 language, their own native tongue, in their liturgy, 
 and for the genuine nationality of their Church by its 
 liberation from the orthodox form of Ultramontanism, 
 its subjection to foreign Greek-speaking bishops thrust 
 upon them by the alien Fanariot Patriarch of Constan- 
 tinople, the Vatican of the East, which has been for so 
 many ages the creature and the instrument of the Turk. 
 I say again, then, that upon every 6th of January and 
 in the following series of weeks we do not celebrate 
 under the archaic title of the Epiphany some extinct 
 theological hypothesis, but we come into contact with 
 the most modern and living of facts. The Catholic 
 Church sees " all Nations," each National Church sees 
 its own Nation, in the ideal aspect of Fatherland and 
 Commonwealth. "The Manifestation of Christ to the 
 
 6
 
 66 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Gentiles " is a fit subject for a recurring Eucharistic 
 thanksgiving to God for that indissoluble union which 
 Churches and States may ignore but which He has 
 "established " between the Church and the Nations. It 
 is the union between the Kingdom of Christ and those 
 Nations or States which the apostles of the King 
 everywhere found and find already implied or existing 
 in the anterior world-wide Kingdom of God. It is the 
 union between each man's baptism and each man's 
 citizenship. The Nations are the moulds and frame- 
 work of the Father, the fatherlands into which Christ 
 the Son intended His Church to be poured and to 
 subject itself, and after whose outlines and limits it is to 
 conform its own development. " Disestablishment " by 
 a Caesar or by a democracy, can no more " separate the 
 Church from the State " than it can separate the Church 
 from the Family, or God from Man.
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE STATE REQUIRES 
 THE THEOLOGY OF THE CHURCH ' 
 
 " For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, 
 Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou 
 shalt not covet ; and if there be any other commandment, it is 
 briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shall love 
 thy neighbour as thyself." ROM. xiii. 9. 
 
 IN this familiar passage of his letter to the Church 
 of Rome, the Apostle of Nations puts side by side 
 the religion of the State, and the religion of the Church. 
 I should speak more exactly if I were to say that St. 
 Paul brings forward the theology of the Universal 
 Church as the justification and the complement of that 
 religion which every State is obliged by its nature to hold 
 and to proclaim by laws. It has indeed been the 
 fashion of late years amongst some of our English sects 
 to deny that the State has a religion, even to affirm that 
 the State ought to be without a religion. Such a dogma 
 would have seemed monstrous and inhuman to the 
 citizens of Rome in the first century. If St. Paul had 
 held or taught this doctrine of our modern Manichaeans 
 which implies that the Civil Power is in its nature 
 unmoral, if not immoral, unreligious, if not irreligious 
 it would have been as useless for him to preach the 
 Gospel of Christ to Romans as to preach it to stones. 
 It is true that the State, abstractly viewed, has no 
 
 1 November 29, 1885. 
 67
 
 68 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 theological "religion." The State, as the State, is 
 neither Mosaic nor Mohammedan, nor Buddhist, nor 
 Christian, nor Positivist, just as the family, as the family, 
 is neither Jewish nor Christian, Secularist nor Positivist. 
 But as an actual living commonwealth of men and women, 
 of rich and poor, of good and bad, the State can neither 
 exist or thrive without a religion. The religion of the 
 State is chiefly negative ; it says to each subject and 
 citizen, " Thou shalt not " : whereas the religion of the 
 Church is chiefly positive ; it says to each man as man, 
 "Thou shalt love." The State must care that its 
 fatherless and its widows shall be visited in their 
 affliction, which, according to St. James, is true and 
 undefiled religion ; but it cannot insist that this true 
 religion shall be observed because it is demanded by 
 " the God and Father " of mankind. 
 
 I. 
 
 The chapter from which the Eucharistic Epistle is 
 taken opens with the apostolic reaffirmation of that 
 fundamental belief of the universal conscience, the belief 
 of every pagan Roman, that the civil power is 
 " ordained of God." The Roman Empire was not a 
 State or Nation, a Commonwealth or Fatherland, to all 
 its subjects, in the sense in which England is to English- 
 men and Englishwomen ; for it included under its rule 
 nations without freedom and millions of hopeless slaves. 
 But it stood in the place of a State to all its subjects and 
 citizens : and as such it was obliged, like every national 
 State, to hold and to establish a religion. Hence St. 
 Paul insisted, in this Epistle, that the Roman Church 
 ought to unite itself to the Roman State. The first link 
 of union between Church and State is the Church's free 
 confession that the State has the same origin and the
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE STATE 69 
 
 same unseen King as itself, that the State is " of God," 
 and that its ministers are " ordained of God." 
 
 What then is the necessary religion of every State or 
 Commonwealth ? That same national religion which the 
 eternal I AM revealed through Moses to the liberated 
 Hebrew slaves when they had been developed out of 
 a loose alliance of tribes into a State or Commonwealth. 
 There is an abiding national religion, which every nation 
 has felt to be necessary to itself, and it is to this religion 
 that the Apostle of the Nations here refers the Chris- 
 tians in Rome. Every State, if it is to be saved from 
 utter secular disintegration and ruin, must protect the 
 individual member and the entirety of its community 
 by its laws, as far as it is able, from adultery, from 
 murder and manslaughter, from theft, from libel and 
 lying, from greedy exploitation. 1 
 
 A State, even if all its members were heathen or 
 atheist, would find itself obliged to declare, in the form 
 of a law or " commandment " to each of its members and 
 citizens, to slaves and to freemen, "Thou shalt not 
 commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not bear 
 false witness, Thou shalt not covet." Hence when St. 
 Paul, whom God had chosen and called out to be the 
 Apostle of States or Nations, looked upon any State, 
 be perceived by the revelation of Jesus Christ that it 
 must be in itself, and because it was a State apart 
 from its acceptance or rejection of Christ's Gospel, apart 
 from the establishment or disestablishment of Christ's 
 Universal Church within it the sacred social creature of 
 God. He saw that every State must be as truly a 
 province of God's Kingdom as ever his own State of 
 Israel had been. A State can only live and thrive by 
 
 1 "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is not in the best copies : 
 but it is of course implied in the Apostle's climax, " and if there be 
 any other commandment."
 
 70 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 keeping the commandments of the God of Israel ; it 
 must decay and become extinct, or be enslaved by some 
 stronger power, if it ceases to keep them. 
 
 II. 
 
 In the last clause of the text, St. Paul brings forward 
 one commandment or as he calls it, " the Saying " or 
 " the Word " in opposition to the many and varied old 
 commandments which always had been and always are, 
 in some form or other, the laws of every State. He tells 
 the Church of Rome that the religion of the States, the 
 unifying and fundamental Law implied by the varying 
 laws of every State, " is briefly comprehended in this 
 saying " newest in manifestation but oldest in existence 
 " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." We 
 recognise this as the " new commandment " of Christ 
 our Lord. But it is " new" only in the like sense as He 
 is the "new Adam " and the " new Man " : the command- 
 ment, like the Commander, is Eternal, and is in this 
 sense older than the old Adam and the old laws. 
 
 The verb which the apostle has chosen deserves a 
 fuller attention than we now spare for it. He says that 
 not only the laws by which States condemn adultery, 
 murder, and theft, the laws of the second table of the 
 Hebrew State, but that all laws which ever have been 
 or can be passed by legislatures for the health and wealth 
 of the community are " gathered up again " (ana, re, 
 rursum} " under one head " (anakephalaioutai, are re- 
 capitulated). The disjointed secular fragments of the 
 one eternal Law are reunited to the original source. 
 " Again " an original and eternal law has once for all 
 commanded every spirit to " love." The original and 
 eternal commandment to love my neighbour as myself, 
 which my conscience recognises as authoritative, con-
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE STATE 71 
 
 tains within it every law by which the State can forbid 
 me to do any harm to my neighbour. 
 
 Do you not see the contrast between the many 
 " commandments " and the one " Word " ? " The powers 
 that be " in any State, the powers which are ordained 
 of God in the course of the historical evolution of a 
 People Caesar's magistrates in Rome or in Judsea, ours in 
 England can compel a great degree of observance of 
 their many and various commandments, such as " Thou 
 shalt not commit adultery," or "Thou shalt do no 
 murder," or " Thou shalt not steal." If the State is in a 
 fair degree of health it will go hard with the subject or 
 the citizen who is proved to be breaking them : " for," 
 as St. Paul says, " the minister of God (in the State) 
 beareth not the sword in vain." But thousands are 
 breaking these laws every day, and the State does not 
 punish them. It does not even detect them. Why do 
 they break them ? Because there is that in each man 
 which the State cannot reach ; there is in every ruler 
 and subject that which Christian theology calls " the old 
 man " and " the corrupt nature," which lusts to do those 
 evil deeds which the religion or law of the State forbids. 
 It is certain that if every subject and citizen kept the 
 " Saying," if he loved his neighbour as himself, there 
 could be no social sins no adultery, no robbery, no 
 cheating, no murder, no expropriation of the common 
 land, no exploitation of labour, no stealing by the rich 
 of the free schooling founded by ancient piety for the 
 poor. But every one sees that it would be absurd for 
 Caesar to promulgate an imperial rescript, or for our 
 Parliament to pass an Act solemnly commanding every 
 man, under penalty of fine or imprisonment, to " love 
 his neighbour as himself." It would be just as profitless 
 for kings or national councils to pass laws prohibiting 
 the look of lust or the feeling of spitefulness. Yet unless
 
 72 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 the members of the State keep the new and inward 
 commandment the " Saying " or " Word " of the 
 Eternal to every conscience, which is the source and 
 original of all the commandments they will constantly 
 be breaking all the other commandments. This saying 
 of the Eternal Word to the conscience is the one law 
 which the State needs to have observed by every one 
 of its members ; and yet it is a law which a State is 
 quite powerless to enforce upon any one. Why has the 
 State to pass so many thousand laws, year after year, 
 and century after century ? Because its members and 
 citizens do not keep this one original " Saying," the 
 Eternal Law. The very religion of the State, that 
 which is most sacred and permanent in State-life, that 
 which is absolutely necessary to the secular continuity 
 of a State, implies and demands a force which the 
 State cannot itself supply. It implies and demands the 
 union of the State with the Eternal Kingdom, with a 
 Commonwealth wider than itself. It implies and 
 demands the free self-subjection of every subject of 
 the State to the " Saying " of a King and Lord who 
 is unseen. 
 
 Where this other force and other kingdom are, what 
 they are, had been partly revealed, as the Apostle of 
 States believed, in the evolution of the laws of his own 
 native State of Israel. We have already seen that the 
 commandments against adultery, robbery, murder, and 
 any other good and needful laws and acts of rulers and 
 parliaments, express the religion of all States. They 
 are more or less the commandments of all States ; they 
 are the religion and the commandments of a State as a 
 State. To say that " the State as such has no religion " 
 is either to say that adultery and theft are not irreligious, 
 or else that the State as such needs no restraint of its 
 members from murder or bearing false witness, from
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE STATE 73 
 
 adultery or from burglary. But such commandments 
 were only a part of the commandments which St. Paul's 
 own beloved State, the Commonwealth of Israel, had 
 received. The citizens of Israel had been taught that it 
 is not the State alone which says to each of its members, 
 for the sake of the whole of its members, " Thou shalt 
 not commit adultery ; Thou shalt not steal." Every 
 citizen of Israel was taught that these political and 
 social commandments were being spoken to each man's 
 conscience by the Eternal I AM, who is the unseen 
 Creator and the unseen Ruler and Judge of the State. 
 The unseen and almighty One, who had found them 
 slaves and raised them into freemen, before giving them 
 those commandments which States are obliged to give, 
 first of all gave them the commandment, " Thou 
 shalt have none other gods but Me." An evangelical 
 theology, an historical theology, was proclaimed to each 
 conscience in Israel as the foundation and the justifica- 
 tion of the religion and commandments of the State. 
 " I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of 
 the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." 
 Therefore, " Thou shalt have none other gods but Me ; 
 Thou shalt not commit adultery ; Thou shall not bear 
 false witness against thy neighbour." 
 
 The revelation* of the original and ultimate Lawgiver 
 of the One who ever has been, ever is, and ever will 
 be saying His commandment directly to each con- 
 science had been given only in part to the State of 
 Israel. It was now made clear and open, according to 
 St. Paul, for every conscience and for all nations 
 through the Man-becoming of the Eternal Word. 
 Jesus Christ is Himself "the Saying" of God. "The 
 saying, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," is not 
 only heard internally, it is seen externally in Jesus 
 Christ. He, the true Light who is enlightening every
 
 74 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 man who comes into the world, has founded a universal- 
 human Society, greater and wider than any State, a 
 Catholic Church : and it is the function of this Church 
 to testify to every conscience and to all States their 
 obligation to bring their lives into subjection to the one 
 Law and the one commandment. Without obedience 
 to this " Word " or " Saying," the legislation of States 
 by their many laws on behalf of social righteousness is 
 powerless. The second table of the law, the State's 
 part of it, implies and needs the first table, the Church's 
 part of it. Religion, which each particular State is 
 obliged for its own sake to require from each of its 
 subjects and citizens, implies and needs a Catholic 
 Creed. Religion demands a Theology such as the 
 Universal-human Church professes when she testifies to 
 the good news of the Grace of God which has appeared 
 to all men slaves or freemen, outside the State or in 
 it through Jesus Christ. The secular commandment 
 implies and needs the Eternal Faith, or Creed. The 
 State, Nation, or Commonwealth everywhere implies 
 and needs the Catholic Church. Every law which a 
 national legislature enforces upon the individual subject 
 for the health and wealth of the whole people, implies 
 and needs the self-subjection of each conscience to the 
 inward Law or " Saying " of God's Word and Holy 
 Spirit, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE PUBLIC-HOUSE: 
 OR, TEMPERANCE NOT TO BE USED 
 AS A CLOAK OF MALICIOUSNESS 1 
 
 " As free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of malicious- 
 ness, but as the servants of God. Honour all men." i ST. 
 PETER ii. 16, 17. 
 
 TO-DAY has been announced as "Temperance 
 Sunday," at least in our Diocese of London, and 
 I believe that all preachers are desired to say something 
 in their sermons on behalf of one of the rarest of virtues. 
 The extract from St. Peter's first Letter, which serves 
 us this week as the Eucharistic Epistle, contains many 
 a passage which lends itself easily to such an applica- 
 tion. The aged apostle begins by urging the members 
 of the suffering and tempted Church of Christ in that 
 age to "abstain from fleshly lusts which war against 
 the soul." The soul or life is only in health, strength, 
 wholeness, and at peace when it breathes an atmosphere 
 of temperance. All forms and degrees of intemperance 
 from the gorging of the glutton and the tippling of 
 the drunkard to the frantic oratory and the unsocial 
 tyranny of the teetotaller have one and the same 
 common source, " fleshly lusts." Temperance is the 
 least pretentious and brilliant of all virtues : the sight 
 of temperance in our neighbour does not startle us into 
 
 " Temperance Sunday " (third after Easter, i
 
 76 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 admiration and applause of him, like the sight of faith, 
 or love ; yet it is one of the hardest virtues to acquire, 
 one of the hardest to keep when acquired. I may be 
 most intemperate in my commendation of temperance. 
 Temperance is interior liberty. St. Peter beseeches 
 us to live " as free." The intemperate whether in 
 meat, or drink, or thought, or deed, or dress, or speech, 
 are slaves. They are under a hard master and slave- 
 driver ; they are subjecting themselves to a yoke such 
 as Christ's freemen ought not to endure. His free- 
 men are indeed called to live as "servants," as the 
 apostle immediately adds ; but they are to live, he 
 says, as " the servants of God." Hence the Church says 
 daily in the second collect at the morning prayer of 
 every paristy, that " God's service is perfect freedom." 
 It is the only service which is not slavery or serfdom, 
 bondage or servility. Until we know that the absolutely 
 Good is our Master, and know God through His Son 
 Jesus Christ, and live as Christ's servants, we cannot 
 live "as free." We shall live in a ceaseless craven 
 terror of breaking somebody's laws, or losing somebody's 
 good opinion, or violating some conventional prejudice 
 or fashion which the world or age has set up in the 
 place of God's eternal and perfect law. All biography 
 shows that the only really free and independent souls 
 are those which are single-hearted and direct in their 
 service to God. Truly free men and women do not 
 take counsel with flesh and blood, with carnal lusts, but 
 go straight to Jesus Christ for the rule of life, and say, 
 like Saul when he was liberated out of his hard slavery 
 to the Pharisees : " Lord, what wilt Thou have me to 
 do ? " He was converted from the intemperance of 
 fanaticism to the true temperance of the service of Jesus 
 Christ. Unconverted Saul could only say intem- 
 perately, after the laws and traditions of the other
 
 CHURCH AND PUBLIC-HOUSE 77 
 
 Pharisees, who had called the Saviour a " wine-bibber " 
 " Touch not, taste not, handle not." The converted 
 Paul could give his own disciple Timothy the temperate 
 counsel, " Take a little wine for thy stomach's sake and 
 thine often infirmities." The converted apostle was 
 free, as an English preacher said in 1615, to "meet his 
 friends at the market of Appium, and drink at the Three 
 Taverns." If our intemperate temperance advocates 
 always had the courage of their opinions, they might 
 own, like the rationalising old Scottish woman, " I think 
 none the better of Paul for it " ; or perhaps they would 
 welcome as allies those rationalising critics who deny 
 the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles. 
 
 II. 
 
 But while we emphasise St. Peter's championship of 
 our freedom in Christ Jesus, we must not ignore the 
 condition with which he qualifies it. As God's service 
 is perfect freedom, so perfect freedom is God's service. 
 That is to say, a liberty which does not deliberately 
 choose to serve is no true liberty. Unless we chiefly 
 love freedom because it releases us and enables us to 
 serve, we have but the show of liberty, and not its 
 substance ; we are in the most wretched of all bondage, 
 we are slaves to the hideous tyrant selfishness. You 
 must live " as free," but also, as the apostle adds, " and 
 not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness." 
 The distance between liberty and libertinism is but a 
 span's breath to those who will not use their liberty for 
 the service of God, for doing good to man. Temper- 
 ance and tyranny, as we see by experience, lie equally 
 near. Because the one has become " virtuous " are the 
 many to have no more " cakes and ale " ? Will it not be 
 quite a legitimate accommodation of St. Peter's text to
 
 78 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 this day's purpose if we paraphrase it, " As Temperate, 
 and not using your Temperance for a cloke of mali- 
 ciousness " ? For as it is the special temptation of the 
 free man to abuse his liberty to libertinism in thought 
 and conduct, so it is the special temptation of the 
 professional temperance-man to rush into the wildest 
 degrees of tyrannical intemperance. It has become a 
 truism that he exceeds all the rest of mankind in his 
 intoxication. He has to be particularly on guard lest 
 his temperance, like the other's liberty, be used " as a 
 cloke of maliciousness." The maliciousness of the tem- 
 perance man, as the outsiders view it, assumes two 
 forms firstly, a most unreasonable social or rather anti- 
 social economy, which preaches against the public-house, 
 as if it were the very Babylon of the Apocalypse, and as 
 if the shortest and surest way of founding Sion in the 
 earth would be the burning down of all inns, ale-houses, 
 and hotels ; and secondly, a most uncharitable indication 
 of the landlords of inns as the chief agents of Satan and 
 the most hurtful of all the foes of individual and social 
 morality. A popular Independent preacher said a few 
 days ago to a crowded audience, " I could make a 
 garden of Eden down in the East End in three months 
 if I had my way." If he might " use his liberty," as 
 St. Peter puts it, what would be his use of his liberty ? 
 " My way," he continued, " would be a rough one at 
 the first. I should do nothing but burn down all the 
 breweries, and shut up all the public-houses. 'That is the 
 way back to Paradise." 
 
 Is it? Paradise is the home of undivided religious 
 unity as well as sobriety, and if we began by burning 
 all the public-houses to secure national sobriety we 
 should end by burning all the Churches, or all the 
 Dissenting Chapels, or all the Secular Halls to secure 
 national religious unity. That " rough " method has
 
 CHURCH AND PUBLIC-HOUSE 79 
 
 been tried as the infallible way to national religious 
 unity, and it has failed. Its failure would be equally 
 conspicuous as the way to national sobriety. Men are 
 not drunkards because there are breweries, but because 
 they get from breweries what if there were no breweries 
 they would get elsewhere. In " the Garden of Eden," 
 according to the tradition, there seems to have been 
 neither a brewery nor a public-house. Nevertheless, 
 the tempter found his way into the Garden of Eden, 
 and brought ruin upon all its inhabitants, who were 
 all strict teetotallers. Neither, according to the tradition, 
 did Cain come out of an inn when he murdered Abel, 
 although it is the habit of our intemperate temperance- 
 men to trace every modern murder directly or indirectly 
 to " the bottle." But Cain was certainly a teetotaller. 
 
 A public-house is ideally a very noble, humane, and 
 social institution. It is much more democratic than the 
 modern club. The club is too often the centre of a 
 caste, a class, or a party ; it is exclusive, pharisaic, and 
 anti-social. One club shuts out all who are not " gentle- 
 men," another all who are not working-men. One club 
 excommunicates Tories, another puts its bann upon 
 Radicals. But the public-house or inn, according to its 
 name, belongs to everybody, whatever his class, what- 
 ever his party. A man used to be welcome there, as in 
 the Church of God, because he was human, and not 
 because he was a sectary who could proffer some 
 pharisaic or aristocratic differentiation between himself 
 and the rest of the parish. The ancient relations 
 between the parish church and the parish inn, 
 as the spiritual and secular " public-houses " of 
 the local republic, had a very wholesome side. The 
 keen dialectic Archdeacon Paley chose an inn to write 
 in. The saintly Archbishop Leighton said that he 
 should like to die in an inn. Charles Kingsley, whom
 
 80 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 the greatest of modern theologians called " the best of 
 modern parish priests," would smoke his pipe in the 
 village public-house, and drink out of the same pot as 
 his poor parishioners. St. Francis de Sales, the most 
 sensitive and refined of prelates, advised all his paro- 
 chial clergy to begin by making a friend of the village 
 inn-keeper. That most terrible mischief is done in 
 public-houses as well as in churches and Dissenting 
 chapels is too evident for anybody to deny. But 
 nothing is so intemperate or fanatical as to sweep 
 away an institution with a fine ideal, and still capable 
 of being redeemed to excellent social service, because 
 that ideal is now blurred and those services are not now 
 rendered. The reasons why the public inn is degraded 
 and mischievous lie far deeper than the intemperate 
 " temperance-men " dare to look. 
 
 III. 
 
 It would much help us to grow in temperance if 
 we would recollect that when Christ's holy apostle 
 beseeches the Church to " honour all men " he does not 
 add "except inn-keepers." Those Christian bishops and 
 priests, whom I have just cited, honoured the "man" 
 in the inn-keeper, and that was the true way of awaken- 
 ing in him the consciousness of the honourable function 
 entrusted to him in the parish and the commonwealth, 
 to which the ancient title of " host " bears witness. 
 Samuel Fisher, the Quaker, in his answer to the attacks 
 of the famous Independent, John Owen, protested 
 against the Calvinist's denunciation of alehouse-keepers. 
 "The calling is as honest in itself," said the sturdy 
 Quaker, "as that of Gaius, the Church's host, or any 
 other inn-keeper, though it be often much abused. 
 What trade is not, when evil men manage it?" 
 
 I have but skimmed hastily the surface of an im-
 
 CHURCH AND PUBLIC-HOUSE 81 
 
 portant subject, which I could not pretend to handle 
 satisfactorily in so short a time. We cannot grow in 
 the inward liberty, which is true temperance, if we per- 
 vert our liberty or our temperance into a "cloke of 
 maliciousness." We do not change the ungodly 
 character of such abuse by giving it the specious 
 name of "Liberalism." To free our commonwealth 
 from the gross sin of drunkenness, and from the miseries 
 which follow it, is a noble and Christian object. But 
 we shall help little towards that liberation if we are 
 ourselves in bondage to the intemperate superstition 
 that inns are the cause of drunkenness, or if we indulge 
 the least degree of an intemperate and pharisaic spite- 
 fulness towards the inn-keeper. Rather " honour all 
 men " honour the man in the wretched slave of drink, 
 as the Saviour honours the man under that and 
 every other form and variety of sinner. Honour 
 the man in the inn-keeper, whom our manifold 
 social apostasies from Christ's Law, which I cannot 
 here specialise, has degraded from the "host" 
 which he ought to be, into a seducer of the poor 
 and a tool of the capitalist fortune-hunter, which he 
 ought not to be. The public-house does evil for the 
 same reason that every other social institution does evil, 
 because we have come to regard Mammon and not God 
 as its proper ruler, as the supreme inn-keeper. It may 
 be in part the fault of Christ's bishops and priests that 
 the landlords of inns are so often apostates from their 
 calling, and expropriate as their " customers " those 
 whom they ought to honour as their "guests." But 
 here in England, and in parts of the world, there are 
 still hosts who care for the health and soberness of their 
 guests, and who set their fellow Christians an example 
 of walking worthy of the vocation wherewith they are 
 called. 
 
 7
 
 A FEW OF THE THINGS WHICH "CLERGY- 
 MEN OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND" 
 HAVE SAID ABOUT LANDLORDISM 
 AND ROBBERY 
 
 " Remove not the old landmarks, and enter not into the fields 
 of the fatherless : for their Redeemer is mighty ; He shall plead 
 their cause with thee." PROV. xxiii. 10, n. 
 
 F^HE people are sorely oppressed," said Bishop 
 JL Hooper, in June, 1549, "by the marvellous 
 tyranny of the nobility." What direction was taken by 
 the tyranny and oppression of the greedy nobles of 
 Edward the Sixth's miserable reign is told us in the 
 August of the same year by John Burcher, when 
 speaking of the Rebellion of the Commons in June and 
 July. That social revolution which accompanied the 
 aristocratic disendowment of the National Church was 
 the product, as he said, of " the injustice and oppression 
 of the nobility. The nobility, partly by force and partly 
 by fraud, had converted to their own use the pastures 
 which had formerly been common." This old " member 
 of the Church of England " anticipated Mr. Headlam. 
 He said exactly the same thing in other words That 
 " the ground landlords had stolen land from the 
 people." 
 
 The building up of huge landed estates, and the 
 formation of new nobilities, out of the robbery of the 
 poor and the robbery of the Church, which is the 
 
 82
 
 LANDLORDISM AND ROBBERY 83 
 
 peculiar heritage of the poor, marked each of the four 
 great judicial epochs in the life of the English Church 
 during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The 
 dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. ; 
 the spoliation of the Church under Edward VI. and 
 Elizabeth ; the abolition of the National Episcopate 
 and the expulsion of all the Liberal and Catholic clergy 
 by the tyrannical Nonconformist Parliament during the 
 Civil War ; and the imposition upon the people of the 
 so-called " Commonwealth " by the military oligarchy 
 of Sectaries in 1649, all alike ended in the "estating" of 
 a greedy landlordism, old and new, out of the plunder of 
 the Church and of the poor. The fathers of Noncon- 
 formity and Disendowment, from the very first, had the 
 eager political support and encouragement of the aris- 
 tocracy and plutocracy. These two terms, indeed, were 
 not then used : the usual terms of the pulpit were 
 " Landlords and Usurers." Bishop Bancroft, in his 
 famous sermon at Paul's Cross in the year of the 
 Armada, 1588, referred to the confession which had 
 been made by the author of the " Ecclesiastical 
 Discipline," Travers, the opponent of Richard Hooker, 
 " Whilst the gentry hear us speak against the bishops 
 and cathedral churches," said he, " it tickleth their ears, 
 looking for the like prey they had before of monasteries. 
 Yea, they have in their hearts devoured already the 
 Church's patrimony. They care not for religion so they 
 may get the spoil. They would be content to crucify 
 Christ, so they might have His garments. Our age is 
 full of spoiling soldiers and of wicked Dionysiuses, who 
 will rob Christ of His golden coat as neither fit for Him 
 in winter nor summer." He described the heads of the 
 great land-stealing caste, who urged the Nonconformists 
 against the bishops, as " cormorants, who seek to fill 
 the bottomless sack of their greedy appetites." Some
 
 84 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 of these men kept Nonconformist chaplains in their 
 great houses, and even compelled their tenants to 
 attend the Separatist services in their own halls, and 
 abstain from communion with the " mixed assembly " 
 in their parish churches. 
 
 Throughout the reign of Elizabeth and James I. 
 there was a ceaseless protest from bishops and priests 
 of the English Church in their public sermons, against 
 the robbery of the poor, and of the Church as the 
 peculiar heritage of the poor, by the nobles and gentry. 
 The magnificent homiletical literature of the English 
 Church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has 
 been most industriously overhauled by the advocates of 
 our rival Church parties in the search by each for 
 historical darts to hurl at the other. But the English 
 sermons have never yet been studied as sources for the 
 culture-history of England, as words of our prophets in 
 which we trace the education of the nation by the 
 ever-living Word of God, and by His Vicar in every 
 conscience, the Holy Ghost, " the Father of the Poor.' 
 The most faithful bishops and clergy of England saw 
 clearly that the Puritanism of the great land-stealing 
 families throughout the reign of the Tudors and the two 
 first Stuarts was a covert for their robbery of the 
 Church and the poor. " They do greatly urge in the 
 ministry the apostolical poverty," said Bancroft to the 
 people at Paul's Cross, "to the intent that they may 
 obtain the prey." " I doubt not it is manifest to you," 
 said the Bishop of London and future Primate, "that 
 covetousness hath thrust them into this schism." The 
 bishops were hated alike by the aristocrats and pluto- 
 crats, who sneered at the prelates for their " mean 
 birth." The tu quoque of William Burton, preaching at 
 Norwich against the greed which these " Liberationist " 
 nobles and landed gentry hid under a pharisaical
 
 LANDLORDISM AND ROBBERY 85 
 
 pretence of zeal for religion, might be directed to the 
 same classes in our own day. " Why, say some of these 
 men, Can you not live as the apostles lived ? " " Why, 
 say I again, Let them lay down their goods at the 
 apostles' feet, and then let them ask the question." 
 The best of the reforming clergy did not shrink from 
 saying boldly in the pulpit that the monks at their 
 worst had been better than the nobles and gentry who 
 had appropriated the monastic lands. " If ye were not 
 stark blind," said Prebendary Thomas Lever at Paul's 
 Cross, in Edward the Sixth's disastrous reign, "ye 
 would see and be ashamed that fifty tun-bellied monks 
 given to gluttony, filled their paunches, kept up their 
 house, and relieved the whole country round about 
 them, where one of your greedy guts devouring the 
 whole house and making great pillage throughout the 
 country, cannot be satisfied." I could spend hours in 
 the citation of passages from sermons in which the 
 Anglican bishops and clergy attacked the great land- 
 lords for their systematic robbery of the common lands 
 from the poor. Their attempts in Kent to rob the poor 
 of the common school were foiled by the courage and 
 humane piety of Archbishop Cranmer. The stealing of 
 the common lands from the local commonwealths by 
 the infamous oligarchy which ruled England under 
 the name of the boy-king, Edward, was declared by 
 Thomas Lever from the pulpit to be " the greatest grief 
 that hath been unto the People of this realm." These 
 robbers were then recklessly enclosing " the commons of 
 every town," said Roger Hutchinson, " so that no poor 
 man can keep a cow upon them." The " covetous land- 
 lords," said Thomas Lever in his brave sermon before 
 the young King, " taking the grounds into their own 
 hands, turn all to pasture." He told the King and 
 Court that the increasing pauperism of the nation
 
 86 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 was the direct product of the grasping landlordism. 
 The country folk, evicted from their farms by the nobles 
 and gentry, despairingly streamed up to London. "So 
 now," said he, "old fathers, poor widows, and young, 
 lie begging in the miry streets." Turning from the 
 King and the robbers to Christ Jesus, the champion 
 of the poor, the preacher exclaimed, " O merciful Lord ! 
 What a number of poor, feeble, halt, blind, lame, sickly, 
 yea, with idle vagabond and dissembling caitiffs mixed 
 among them, lie and creep, begging in the miry streets 
 of London and Westminster ! " I need scarcely quote 
 from so classical a book as the splendid sermons of the 
 socialist and martyr bishop, Hugh Latimer, the darling 
 of the London poor. When preaching before the King 
 he fearlessly apostrophised the nobles and Court gentry 
 in language which would horrify a Philistine English 
 jury in our day " You landlords ; you rent-raisers ; 
 I may say, you step-lords ; you unnatural lords, you 
 have for your possessions yearly too much ! " He was 
 one of the first of the long and honourable series of the 
 English clergy who protested from the pulpit against 
 the "depopulation" of the country communes by a 
 restlessly aggressive landlordism. " Where there have 
 been a great many householders and inhabitants, there 
 is now but a shepherd and his dog." Parliamentary 
 laws had not helped the poor ; for though the laws 
 were good, the rich easily found a way to break them. 
 " We have good statutes made for the Commonwealth," 
 said the brave bishop, "as touching commoners and 
 enclosers, many meetings and sessions, but in the 
 end there cometh nothing forth." The " House of 
 Commons," in defiance of its name, became more and 
 more an assembly, not of commoners but of landlords. 
 " I remember mine own self," said he, " a certain giant, a 
 great man, who sat in commission about such matters ;
 
 LANDLORDISM AND ROBBERY 87 
 
 and when the townsmen should bring in what had been 
 enclosed, he frowned and chafed, and so near-looked and 
 threatened the poor men, that they durst not ask their 
 right." The aristocratic robbers, under Edward, as 
 afterwards under the Stewarts, made a stalking-horse of 
 the King ; in England, as in Prussia, as in Russia, as in 
 Sweden, the poor and the clergy fled to the King as 
 their only possible champion against the tyrannical 
 aristocratic landlordism. This is the explanation of the 
 undoubtedly historical truth that during the Civil War 
 between Charles and his Parliament, under the short- 
 lived "Commonwealth," and after the Cromwellian 
 coup d'etat, the sympathies of the English democracy, 
 the anti-puritanical masses, remained throughout on the 
 side of the King. " The King beareth the slander," said 
 Lever, in his appeal to Edward for the poor, "the poor 
 feel the lack ; but who hath the profit of such things ? " 
 "All the world seeth," he added, "that the Act of 
 Parliament for the maintenance of learning and relief 
 of the poor hath served some as a most fit instrument to 
 rob learning and to spoil the poor." 
 
 Francis Trigge, preaching at Grantham, Lincolnshire, 
 in Elizabeth's reign (1592), complained that "all towns 
 are almost decayed and undone. Their common things 
 and lands, whereby the common stocks of their town 
 hath been wont to be maintained, be by some means 
 or other taken from them? He cited " the good law 
 of the Romans," "which established that no houses 
 should be pulled down. This, thought they, in reason 
 should be a decay of their commonwealth. This we 
 may daily see in the country, where men nowadays 
 will buy nouses to pull them down, that they may have 
 a prospect, that they may have a garden, or such-like 
 pleasure. And so now, where Christ's Family hath 
 been maintained, grow trees or nettles." William
 
 88 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Symonds, one of the clergy of St. Saviour's, Southwark, 
 preaching in 1609 at Whitechapel Church, called 
 attention to this combined onslaught of landlordism 
 upon the Church and the Democracy. "The people, 
 blessed be God," said he, "do swarm in the land, as 
 young bees in a hive in June, insomuch that there 
 is scarcely room " in and about London " for one 
 man to live by another." The overcrowding, and the 
 evils which followed it, were traced by the bold priest 
 to the thievish landlordism of the day. " The mightier, 
 like old strong bees, thrust the weaker or younger out 
 of their hives. Lords of Manors convert townships, 
 in which there were one or two hundred communicants, 
 to a shepherd and his dog. The true labouring hus- 
 bandman who was wont to feed many poor, to set 
 many people in work, and pay twice or thrice as much 
 subsidy and fifteens to the King for his proportion of 
 earth as his landlord did for three times as much that 
 was wont to furnish the Church with saints, the Nation 
 with able persons to fight, is now in many places turned 
 labourer, and can hardly scape the statutes of rogues 
 and vagrants. The thoughtful poor woman, which hath 
 her small children standing at her knee and hanging on 
 her breast, she worketh with her needle and laboureth 
 with her fingers. Her candle goeth not out by night. 
 She is often deluding the bitterness of her life with 
 sweet songs that she singeth to a heavy heart." Three 
 years later, the eloquent Thomas Adams, whom the 
 Nonconformist Long Parliament expelled in his old 
 age from St. Bennett's, Paul's Wharf, preached in St. 
 Paul's Cathedral against the sacrilege which accom- 
 panied the depopulation unceasingly carried on by the 
 great landlords in the reign of James the First. The 
 sermon was an attack upon the "gallants" the con- 
 temporary social product of an idle landlordism the
 
 LANDLORDISM AND ROBBERY 89 
 
 new courtiers of the new King's reign, the aristocratic 
 and plutocratic " mashers " whom Adam called " heirs 
 of Esau, and as profane as their father." 
 
 They hated the Churchmen. "We bite them with 
 the salt of reproof; hence they storm." Some of this 
 caste affected Nonconformity, " refractory to established 
 orders " ; others affected Libertinism ; " no jest ends 
 in such laughter as that which is broken on a priest." 
 These prodigals were spending at the Court and in 
 London the wealth which Esau, their father, had filched 
 from the poor and from the Church, the peculiar heritage 
 of the poor, in the country. The preacher mentions 
 one "wicked Church robber," who had "pulled all 
 the lead off the Church roof, and thatched it " a 
 frequent form of robbery with the Nonconformist 
 nobles and gentry when they became stronger and 
 could use the Parliament as their tool, only in those 
 days they did not trouble to thatch it. 
 
 He sketches a portrait of the contemporary " sacri- 
 legious patron, the pirate of the Church." " Many of 
 these," he exclaimed, " are more cruel than Judas ; they 
 neither on repentance nor despair will bring back the 
 price of tke Poor's blood which they have sucked! 
 Behold the earthy churl, to make his son a gentleman, 
 prostituteth his honesty, conscience, soul, and forsaketh 
 his own mercy. As the proverb is (vile, if even true), 
 ' Happy is the son whose father goeth to the devil ! ' " 
 It is worth noting what a London priest meant by 
 going to the devil. " He hath mowed corn, or fatted 
 his ox, on the very place where the town stood (ubi 
 Trojafuif) ; nay, he hath kennelled his dogs within the 
 walls of its sanctuary. Non ignota cano!" "There are 
 some heirs," he says, " that exceed the tyranny of their 
 fathers." The preacher insisted on " restoration " to the 
 towns, the churches, and the poor, of that which the
 
 90 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 landlord had stolen from them. But even " the better- 
 instructed heir," he complains, does not think of this, 
 " Seeing and detecting his dead father's deader courses," 
 he withdraws his hand from extortion, from depopu- 
 lation. But what reasons can make him a restorer? 
 It is enough, he thinks, to cease wrong. But, "curse 
 ye Meroz, saith the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly 
 the inhabitants thereof, because they came not forth to 
 help the Lord in the day of battle." Did they fight 
 against God ? No, " they helped Him not." These 
 young heirs of this inhuman and sacrilegious land- 
 lordism, said the preacher in St. Paul's Cathedral, 
 " must restore the extorted lands and houses of their 
 brethren ; nay, remit some part of the debt" To the 
 Nonconformist nobles and gentry, who paid to their 
 Puritan domestic chaplains some small donation out 
 of their plunder of the poor and of the " anti-christian " 
 ornaments of the Church, Adams smartly said, "You 
 have not robbed Peter to pay Paul, but to pay Judas." 
 In a sermon to his own parish of St. Bennett's, Paul's 
 Wharf, in 1616, Adams compared the depopulator to 
 the wild boar "that will forage and lay all waste, if he 
 be not restrained. Yea, he lays waste the common- 
 wealth, though he encloseth to himself. He wasteth 
 societies, community, neighbourhood of people ; he 
 turns them out of their own ancient doors, sends them 
 to the wide world to beg their bread. Let this beast 
 be hunted." In 1618 he made another attack upon 
 "the destructive depopulator," "the oppressing land- 
 lord," " the Church defrauder." " He loves to ride in 
 his own ground ; and for this purpose expelleth all his 
 neighbours." " He rides over the heads and hearts of 
 the poor tenants." "The charitable man thinks of 
 building churches, but starts to thinks that these men 
 will pull them down again." In 1616 the same preacher
 
 LANDLORDISM AND ROBBERY 91 
 
 compared the " enhancers of estates " to field-briars. 
 " This island of ours, within the last few years, hath 
 bred a great shell ; crush that, and you kill him. Say, 
 therefore within thyself, What will become of me and 
 mine if I destroy the nest of breeding Christians (the 
 local commoners in the country), and having chopped 
 them in the pot, seethe old and young in one another's 
 blood."
 
 THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PENTECOST ' 
 
 " There be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not 
 the Spirit." ST. JUDE 19. 
 
 THAT which is anti-social, separatist, or sectarian 
 in our kind, according to the apostolic writer 
 is fundamentally anti-spiritual. So'cialism, however 
 materialist or "sensual" its temporary manifestations 
 may be, " is born of the Spirit." 
 
 I. 
 
 The day of the sending of the Holy Spirit, Whitsun 
 Day, was naturally the birthday of the human-universal 
 society, the Catholic Church. The birthday of the 
 Church was lately asserted by a writer in a German 
 Social Democratic journal, which is now published in 
 London, to have a significance which churchgoers are 
 slow to recognise. He sees in the gathering of Christ's 
 disciples at Jerusalem, and the consequent organisation 
 of this new society, " the first International Working 
 Men's Congress." I need scarcely tell you that the writer 
 who thus claims the " apostolical succession " for the 
 Social Democrats has renounced all communion with 
 the Church which the apostles founded. He does not 
 believe Jesus to be the Eternal Son of God, the Head of 
 
 Whitsun Day, 1884.
 
 SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PENTECOST 93 
 
 every man, the rescuer and healer of humanity, the 
 giver of the renewing and socialising Spirit for the con- 
 stitution and education amongst all nations of a human- 
 universal fellowship, the Catholic Church. It is there- 
 fore all the more instructive that such a man should 
 confess that the thing which he regards as most hopeful 
 and most healing in the modern world the Inter- 
 national Socialist movement began, or at least was 
 predicated, on Whitsun Day with the beginning of the 
 Church. The apostles of Jesus were the first inter- 
 nationalist socialists. As I hear a great deal about 
 " Scientific Socialism," about "Non-Christian Socialism," 
 as I am told that the thing Socialism must not be 
 damaged by qualifying it with the adjective Christian, I 
 am the more impressed by this unasked concession of 
 the exiled Freiheit that the historical origin of Socialism, 
 the first definite international working-men's movement 
 was Christian, and was Christian purely. It was not 
 indeed the interest of an undefinable and vague thing 
 called " Christianity," but it was the Name of the 
 crucified and risen Man, Christ Jesus, which gathered 
 together in one on Whitsun Day the poor and suffering 
 men and women of so many lands and tongues. 
 
 II. 
 
 " According to the Christian Legend," said the Freiheit 
 on the Whitsun festival of 1879, "A Man appeared on 
 this earth nearly 2,000 years ago who forced the rich 
 and powerful to see that the poor were their brothers, 
 and that the rich had no right to tyrannise over and 
 prey upon the poor. He tore the mask of hypocrisy 
 from the faces of the Pharisees. He sought to bring 
 about equality among men and peace upon earth." 
 The writer goes on to say, that it is " this bright and
 
 94 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 sunny side of the agitation started by Christ which has 
 been at all times popular amongst the poor and needy. 
 Some, at least, amongst the poorest folks have discerned 
 in Christ the God of their own class, and they have been 
 the more confirmed in their faith by hearing that it was 
 the great and mighty of His generation who caused Him 
 to be nailed upon the Cross." As the Master, so were 
 His disciples. They also " were poor fellows, and their 
 gathering at Jerusalem, when Christ was dead, on what 
 the Church calls the Day of Pentecost, maybe distinctly 
 characterised as the first International Working Men's 
 Congress." No such gathering of " devout men out of 
 every nation under heaven " had ever before been 
 experienced in the history of humanity. The Parthians 
 and Medes and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopo- 
 tamia and in Judaea, in Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, 
 Phrygia and Pamphylia, and in the parts of Lybia about 
 Cyrene, and in Egypt, and foreigners of Rome, Jews and 
 Proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, are all claimed by the 
 modern Social Democrat as representatives of the 
 labouring class in these various parts. " The people," 
 he says, "trusted the apostles of Christ, and ordered 
 their life and conduct according to their doctrine. Foes 
 and mocking critics said that the apostles and disciples 
 of Christ were drunk, and full of new wine ; others 
 opposed them and their movement, and said, ' They are 
 revolutionists, confiscators, dividers of property ; they 
 will turn the world upside down.' The preachers of the 
 new doctrine were not merely railed at, but were perse- 
 cuted ; and when persecution availed nothing against 
 the spread of their doctrine, then the rich and ruling 
 classes began to mix themselves up with the movement, 
 and bit by bit falsified the principles of the Church." 
 
 I need hardly say to any reader of St. Luke that the 
 assumption of the poverty of all the original disciples of
 
 SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PENTECOST 95 
 
 Jesus is not true to fact. There were rich men amongst 
 them, Joseph of Arimathaea, Barnabas, and others. St. 
 Luke shows that it was the action of the Holy and 
 unifying Spirit upon the wills of the rich amongst 
 Christ's first disciples which made the Christian 
 Socialism of the Church of Jerusalem a practical thing. 
 " All that believed were together, and had all things 
 common ; and sold their possessions and goods, and 
 parted them to all men, as every man had need " (ii. 44, 
 45). And again, at a later period (iv. 32-37, v. 1-3), 
 " The multitude of them that believed were of one heart 
 and of one soul ; neither said any of them that ought of 
 the things which he possessed was his own, but they had 
 all things common. Neither were there any among 
 them that lacked." After " they were all filled with the 
 Holy Ghost " poverty was for a time abolished. " For 
 as many as were possessors of lands, or houses, sold 
 them, and brought the prices of the things that were 
 sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet ; and 
 distribution was made unto every man according as he 
 had need." This wonderful Christian Socialism, so 
 isolated in the world's history, and so short-lived, was 
 Christian. It was not the product of outward laws or 
 institutions, but of the Holy Ghost, whom Jesus Christ 
 had sent unto men from the Father, directly working 
 upon the wills of the sons and brethren. So St. Peter 
 implied in dealing with the first instance of resistance to 
 the Holy Ghost in the Church. " Ananias, why has 
 Satan filled thy heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to 
 keep back part of the price of the land ? " 
 
 It is curious that the preacher of Atheistic Socialism 
 should take his stand upon ground exactly similar to 
 that upon which all the founders of Christian Sects have 
 built their various imaginary " churches." He assumes 
 that there has been a total " apostasy " of the real and
 
 96 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 historical Church from that standing (orao-te) on which 
 Jesus Christ stood her and from that Spirit with which 
 He inspired her. 
 
 All our religious sects are bound logically to assume 
 that a new Pentecost, a new outpouring of the Church- 
 creating Spirit occurred some time, and somewhere, 
 and in some elect persons, in the seventeenth, 
 eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. Our Sects lay 
 down the new foundation of a modern Independency, 
 an Anabaptism, a Plymouth Brethrenism, or some 
 other opinionative association, as the proper sub- 
 stitute for the apostasised Church ; they call upon 
 men and women to come out of the old Babylon and 
 enter into the new Sion which they have built. This 
 Social Democratic preacher would separate socialism 
 from the Church, and make it a sect. He follows in the 
 track of sectaries, and announces a new Whitsun Day, 
 a new gospel, a new apostolate, a new catholic or 
 universal-human society. "We, the Socialists, announce 
 to you to-day," said the Freiheit during the Whitsuntide 
 of 1879, "anew doctrine, the doctrine of liberty and 
 equality ; we aim to effect the brotherly union of all 
 men in the world. We, however, preach this freedom, 
 equality, and brotherhood not merely in the name of 
 Love, but what is much more significant, in the name of 
 Right. A new Day of Pentecost has dawned. In all 
 tongues and in all lands the same doctrine, the socialist 
 doctrine, the emancipation of all men, is being pro- 
 claimed." Some of the new preachers even went so far, 
 after Ferdinand Lassalle's untimely death by his duel in 
 Switzerland, as to proclaim, " Lassalle has died for you. 
 He has given his blood for you." Nay, there were even 
 some who believed that Lassalle had not really died, but 
 only disappeared, and would come again to emancipate 
 the poor and needy from the capitalist and the
 
 SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PENTECOST 97 
 
 oppressor. True, indeed, as is this Social Democrat's 
 sermon on behalf of his new sect, as a substitute for the 
 Son of Man's fundamentally Socialist Church, I take 
 leave to say that his own application of the facts of 
 Whitsun Day, the birthday of Christ's Church, is a proof 
 that there is no need of a new sect, but rather of a 
 penitent return of the Church to the principle with 
 which the Holy Ghost inspired her. 
 
 III. 
 
 You expected to-day to hear a priest of Christ's 
 Church preach a Whitsun Day sermon, and he has 
 asked you to listen to some extracts from a Whitsun 
 Day article written by one who calls himself an 
 " Atheistic Socialist." To some Christian hearers his 
 sermon may seem very dreadful. To me, I confess, it 
 seems very hopeful, and even to be more Christian than 
 many a sermon I have heard from Christian preachers. 
 I cannot say how much I learned from it five years ago, 
 when I first read it. Its half-unwilling and half-un- 
 conscious confession that if modern nations and men 
 are to be redeemed from the evils which now oppress 
 them, the Son of Man must die for them, a new society 
 for all nations must be founded, a gospel of universal 
 brotherhood must be preached to "all nations" and to 
 " every creature," strengthened my faith in the great 
 assertion of St. Peter on this day, that Jesus, the Son of 
 God and the Son of Man, the Head of Humanity, had 
 poured out His Spirit " upon all flesh." Here is a man, 
 one of that flesh, who quarrels with Christ's Church for 
 apostatising from her own original principle from the 
 faith once delivered to the saints. But when he comes 
 to state the Church's original principle, the faith once 
 delivered as he sees it what does he find it to be?
 
 98 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Exactly such a principle as the Social Democrat longs 
 to see established in all lands ; exactly such a faith as 
 the Social Democrat is exhorting all poor and suffering 
 men to hold, if they would be saved, or care for man- 
 kind's salvation. He accuses the Church of having 
 apostatised from the foundation on which she was built 
 up by the apostles that brotherhood and equality of 
 the rich and the poor, the master and the slave, the ruler 
 and the ruled. He sees that the Church has apostatised 
 from the doctrine communicated to her by the Holy 
 Ghost, that possession is not property. He holds that 
 a new Pentecost, a new gospel, a new apostolate, a new 
 confession are now needed, because the Church has not 
 effected that which Christ planned, and for which His 
 apostles laboured and suffered. He tries to show that 
 there is some difference between the new " church " of 
 Karl Marx and the Church of the Son of God wholly 
 to the preference of the former in that the apostles of 
 Christ proclaimed universal brotherhood in the name of 
 " Love," while the apostles of Marx and Lassalle pro- 
 claim universal brotherhood in the name of " Right," But 
 it is certain that in the Gospel " Love " and " Right " 
 or the fruit of the inward Spirit of God and the Law of 
 God are not represented as two differing forces. The 
 day on which the Spirit of love was poured forth upon 
 the disciples of Jesus Christ was being kept by them 
 and all the Jews on the day of the giving of the Law. 
 The Spirit is given us to enable us to keep the Law ; it 
 is only by love that a man can always and every- 
 where do Right to all. " Love is the fulfilling of the 
 Law." 
 
 The Social Democratic preacher degrades Love and 
 Right into mere things, or mere forces, by disconnecting 
 them with trust in and obedience to the living Spirit. 
 He is fighting in all men against their own selfishness
 
 SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PENTECOST 99 
 
 and hatred, and is inspiring men with their longing to 
 be right and to see right everywhere done on earth. 
 
 We may proclaim to all men that they are brothers, 
 in the name of Love, or in the name of Right : but this 
 will no more enable them to be brotherly, to forgive 
 their enemies, in the nineteenth century than it did in 
 the first century. Unless we have already been made 
 brothers, unless we are brothers, we cannot be made so 
 in Love's, or Right's, or in any thing's name. If we are 
 brothers there must be that in ourselves which witnesses 
 to the reality of our kinship a brotherly Spirit who is 
 uniting each to each, is calling each to brotherly con- 
 duct ; a common Spirit rebuking each and resisted by 
 each when his conduct is merely animal, separatist, 
 " sensual," unbrotherly, or as the apostolic writer says, 
 " having not the Spirit" 
 
 But a common spirit in men as brothers, whether it 
 inwardly inspires them to Love, or whether it inwardly 
 orders them to be and do Right, can be nothing else 
 than the spirit of a common and universal Father. 
 Brothers we are not, brothers we never can be, unless 
 the first article of the Catholic Creed the Faith for 
 " all Nations " and " every creature " be the first 
 principle of the social and political life of men, unless 
 we all have one Father. To preach to men the miserable 
 tidings, " You have no Father," is surely an odd way of 
 bringing the rich and the poor to believe that they are 
 all brothers : to proclaim to men, " No spirit of the 
 common Father of all men has been given to you," 
 is an odd way ot bringing the capitalist and the 
 labourer, the landlord and the commoner, to believe 
 that they have an inward power of regarding one 
 another and behaving to one another as brothers. 
 Every man knows if he yet quite knows himself that 
 there is that in him which St. Jude describes as sensual
 
 100 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 animal, separating, and unspiritual ; he knows that when 
 he lets it rule it makes him capable of every degree of 
 greed, tyranny, and unbrotherliness. You and I know 
 it. It is that in us which scorns, or dislikes, or hates, or 
 at last purposely does wrong, to this or that fellow-man. 
 It is in the Social Democrat as well as in the Christian : 
 it is the old Adam which lusts to banish, imprison, 
 crucify or hang the advocates of the poor and needy for 
 asserting they are robbed of the rights which are theirs 
 as the equals and brothers of the rich and powerful. Is 
 it not also the same old Adam which in the day of 
 revolution or judgment refuses to acknowledge a brother 
 in any man who has hitherto not been poor and needy, 
 and which exhibits its belief in universal brotherhood, 
 by fanatically cutting off the head of a brother because 
 he is a king or a capitalist ? 
 
 Things can do nothing. Love as a thing can do 
 nothing. Right as a thing can do nothing. Christianity 
 as a thing can do nothing. Socialism as a thing can do 
 nothing. But the Spirit, which the Father has given 
 through Jesus Christ to the Church and to mankind, 
 can do everything. We are feeble in ourselves to good, 
 we are powerful in ourselves to wrong, but omnipotent 
 in Him to all good. " I can do all things," said the 
 apostle, " through Christ who strengtheneth me." 
 The Church can do through Him, if she will let Him 
 have His perfect work upon her and Christ will judge 
 and punish her terribly if she does not all social and 
 individual good which the Social Democracy wishes to 
 see done, but which as a mere Sect it can never do. 
 " But," exclaims the doubter, who demands a new 
 Pentecost, a new gospel, and a new Church, " the Spirit 
 which Jesus Christ gave the disciples has been at work 
 in the Church and the world for nearly two thousand 
 years, and the social regeneration of humanity seems to
 
 SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PENTECOST 101 
 
 be as far off as ever." The Church declares that the 
 Spirit of God has not only been at work in her, but at 
 work in every one, in you that He has been and is 
 urging you to live as a son of the eternally Good and 
 Right, and as a brother of every man with whom you 
 come into contact or conflict. The Spirit has been 
 doing this for twenty, thirty, fifty, perhaps, seventy 
 years. What has this Spirit as yet effected in me and 
 in you ? Are you, am I, much less selfish, sensual, 
 separatist ; much more brotherly, social, spiritual now 
 than you and I were twenty years ago? 
 
 LIB 1 "* A P v 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF r / T ** 
 SANTA BARBARA
 
 " Into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this 
 house ! And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest 
 upon it : if not, it shall turn to you again. And in the same 
 house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give : for 
 the labourer is worthy of his hire. Go not from house to house. 
 And into whatsoever city ye enter, and they receive you, eat 
 such things as are set before you : and heal the sick that are 
 therein, and say unto them, The Kingdom of God is come nigh 
 unto you." ST. LUKE x. 5-9. 
 
 IN this portion of His charge to the seventy the 
 Lord has established for all times and all places 
 the principle of the Union of His Church with the pre- 
 existing forms of secular society domestic, civic or 
 parochial, and national. In it also He asserts, as a part 
 of His Gospel, the principle of the establishment and 
 endowment of His clergy. It is a fit text for St. Luke's 
 Day, not simply because it occurs in the Eucharistic 
 Gospel of the festival, but because the record of the 
 mission of the seventy is found only in this Gospel, and 
 because it is characteristic of the document which is 
 peculiarly the Gospel of the Nations. The Jews held 
 that Humanity had been divided and organised by God 
 in seventy, or seventy-two, Nations. It is also a fit text 
 for the present day, in which it is being loudly pretended 
 that Christ and His clergy as such have no proper rela- 
 tion to the forms in which God has providentially
 
 CHRIST UNITING CHURCH TO STATE 103 
 
 moulded secular society, to households, parishes, and 
 states ; but that a family, a city, or a nation, as such, 
 lies somewhere outside the Kingdom of God and His 
 Christ. A comparison in detail of the likeness and the 
 difference between the Lord's earlier mission of the 
 twelve apostles and the later mission of the seventy 
 disciples would be instructive ; but I cannot pause to 
 attempt so great a task now, because I have so much 
 to say much more indeed than I can hope to say 
 upon this section of His charge to the seventy. 1 
 
 I. 
 
 Jesus, as the Head of Humanity and the reconciler of 
 estranged men and estranged societies to their Father 
 and their fellow-men, sent out His seventy disciples, 
 first (as the fifth verse says) to households. He sent 
 them secondly (as the eighth verse says) to cities. The 
 general object of their mission, so far as it personally 
 concerned them and their own time and nation, was to 
 prepare Israel for His own coming. He "sent them, 
 two and two, into every city and place whither He 
 Himself would come." Their sending was the sum- 
 mons, from Him who stands at every door and knocks, 
 from the Head of each Jewish family, from the Ruler of 
 each Jewish parish, asking it freely to open its doors to 
 Him, to unite itself with His universal human Church, 
 and devote itself and its property to the service of the 
 Father and the brethren. 
 
 The Lord gave the seventy no brilliant promise. On 
 the contrary, He told them that they would find them- 
 selves to be inadequate, as to number and as to labour, 
 for the work which had to be done. " Therefore said 
 
 1 The mission of the twelve is given by St. Luke (ix. 1-6), St. 
 Mark (vi. 7-11) ; but with greater fulness by St. Matthew (xi. 1-42).
 
 104 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 He unto them, the harvest truly is great, but the 
 labourers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the 
 harvest, that He would send forth labourers into His 
 harvest." He repeated to the seventy what He had 
 already said, almost in the same words, to the twelve 
 apostles. " Go your ways : behold, I send you forth as 
 lambs among wolves. Carry neither purse, nor scrip, 
 nor shoes : and salute no man by the way." The former 
 of these two counsels was His first indication that it 
 was not a part of His plan that His bishops and clergy 
 should spend the most part of their time and powers in 
 the mere earning of their living, by fishing, or tent- 
 making, or school-mastering, or journalism, or literature, 
 still less in scheming how to escape all such work by 
 the getting what we in England mammonishly call a 
 " living." The latter part of His counsel, " Salute no 
 man by the way," indicated the eagerness, speed, ab- 
 sorption of mind with which they were to make straight 
 for that one object to which He directed them. 
 
 There was indeed to be no salutation before they 
 reached that object : but it was to be otherwise when 
 it was reached. " Salute no man by the way " : but 
 " into whatsoever household ye enter," salute it : " First 
 say, Peace be to this house." This is the salutation 
 which the Church bids the priest to use " first of all," 
 at his visitation of the sick in every household. " When 
 any person is sick," says the rubric, " notice should be 
 given to the minister of the parish : who, coming into 
 the sick person's house, shall say ' Peace be to this 
 house, and to all that dwell in it.' " 
 
 " Salutation," the Latin word for kindly and courteous 
 greeting, it is worth remembering, has the very same 
 thought at its root as the word " Salvation." It comes 
 from salus " health." It was natural that the Saviour 
 and health-bringer, the maker-whole, the elder brother
 
 CHRIST UNITING CHURCH TO STATE 105 
 
 of all the households in the world, should approach each 
 family and each city, first of all, with the good news of 
 His eager desire for their outward and inward health. 
 A salutation from Jesus, a greeting from Jesus to any 
 conscience or society, must be an offer of salvation of 
 that health and wholeness to which the conscience or 
 the society can alone return by owning its kinship to 
 Him, and by submitting to be informed and governed 
 by His Holy and whole-making Spirit. 
 
 Christ's salutation to men, through the mission of the 
 apostles and disciples to whom He entrusts it, is not to 
 be thought of as loose, haphazard, or spasmodic in 
 action. He, as Saluter and Saviour of Humanity, 
 sends His bishops and clergy directly to those organic 
 fellowships into which the Father has already consti- 
 tuted Humanity. Christ's " twelve " and Christ's 
 " seventy " are to go to men not as to mere individual 
 units, but as to members of the already existing pro- 
 vinces of the Kingdom of God to the household and 
 to the city. "Salute no man by the way." Do not 
 stop at the chance, self-isolated individual. Pass by 
 him who is self-separated from his fellows. Go straight 
 to men as I have made men, as members one of another. 
 Your function is domestic salute ye the household 
 Your function is political salute ye the city 
 
 The Son of God insisted (first of all, as the qp- angelist 
 tells us) that it belongs to the mission of His bishops 
 and clergy to acknowledge the household and the city 
 as the divine establishments of His and our Father. He 
 sent them forth to proclaim, first of all, the union of the 
 Church with the family, and the union of the Church 
 with the city and the town (Stadt and Markt, as Luther 
 has it). We discern here the presage and pledge of the 
 ultimate union of His Church (after the destruction of
 
 106 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Jerusalem and the falling to pieces of the false and 
 forced unity of the Roman Empire), with the greater 
 social organisms of the Nations or States. The union 
 of the Church with the household and family, the union 
 of the Church with the city, town, and parish, was 
 evidently in the plan of Jesus Christ. Since the state 
 or nation is a social organism which God's providence 
 as world-ruler has evolved out of the commune and 
 parish, as He evolves the commune out of the house- 
 hold, it must be a part of the plan of God's Son, and a 
 step towards the fulfilment of the Father's will, for His 
 Church to seek union everywhere with the nation, 
 fatherland, or state. 
 
 II. 
 
 Jesus is the Judge as well as the Saluter and Saviour 
 of Humanity. Hence He distinguishes between two 
 sorts of households, two sorts of cities. One sort of 
 household and city will " receive " His clergy, and will 
 sustain them so far as it can. Another sort of house- 
 hold and city will " not receive " them. But the 
 distinction between those two classes of households and 
 cities is altogether a moral distinction. It is a difference 
 of their own making, not of God's making. It is the 
 product of the good and bad will of the kinsmen of the 
 household or the burghers of the city towards the 
 Father and the brethren. This distinction is not in the 
 original call and constitution of the social organism of 
 household or city by God Himself. Every family, as 
 God made it, is good. Every city, as God congregated 
 it, is good. Therefore apart from the moral character 
 which the domestic or political society may itself after- 
 wards exhibit, apart from the welcome or rejection with 
 which it meets the salutation and salvation of the Son 
 of God His apostles and disciples are to approach
 
 CHRIST UNITING CHURCH TO STATE 107 
 
 every household as already God's family, every city as 
 already God's congregation. " Into whatsoever house- 
 hold ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house." Any 
 and every household, any and every commune in the 
 world, any and every nation or state, is assumed by 
 Jesus, quite apart from its conversion and obedience to 
 Him or its union with His Church, to be a divine 
 fellowship, a family and city of the Father, the social 
 product of His humane providence, a province of His 
 kingdom. For this reason it behoves Him who comes 
 to men in the Father's name to send His salutation to 
 it. Therefore Jesus, the Elder Brother, commissions 
 His bishops and clergy in all ages to greet the members 
 of every household as His brethren and sisters. There- 
 fore the Christ, the King whom the Father has anointed, 
 sends his apostles and disciples to call the burghers of 
 every commune to live as fellow-citizens with Him. 
 The mission of bishops and clergy is to proclaim to 
 each social organism what it is in the idea of God, how 
 magnificent its character is, what a vocation from God 
 and what a work for men belongs to it. He sends us, 
 as He goes on to say, " to heal the sick that are therein, 
 and say unto them, The Kingdom of God is come nigh 
 unto you." There is a sickness in every conscience, 
 household, parish, and nation until it knows, accepts, 
 and acts upon the glad tidings concerning itself which 
 Jesus sends to it by His Church. The Church holds, by 
 the gift of the Son of God and Son of Man, the one 
 valid tradition and the one only perfect ideal of personal 
 manhood ; the tradition and ideal of the family ; the 
 tradition and the ideal of organic neighbourhood ; the 
 tradition and the ideal of nationality ; the tradition and 
 the ideal of humanity. 
 
 Christ's apostles and disciples were thus ordered to 
 recognise and proclaim the divine character of every
 
 108 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 household and every city. The sectary or separatist 
 regards a household, a city, or a state, as such, as mere 
 parts of " the world," and consequently asserts that 
 " the Church," whatever he may mean by it, ought not 
 to be in union with them, but rather in opposition to 
 them. Hence his " Church " is not parallel with the 
 " congregation " which God has already gathered 
 together as one family, one parish, one fatherland ; but 
 it is an aggregation of individuals whom he has induced 
 to separate themselves from the divine, real and 
 necessary " Congregation." " Into whatever household 
 (oticta) ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house " (oticoe). 
 The one " house," or material building, is a symbol of 
 the oneness of the social "household," or family. In 
 the fellowship of kinsfolk and servants, "in the lively 
 stones," as St. Peter has it, the Master-builder and 
 Father of all, who has brought them together by nature 
 and providence, sees the indivisible oneness of a house 
 which He has built. Every household has a oneness 
 in Christ, and under Christ, of which His Spirit makes 
 its members mindful ; but its members may ignore and 
 deny that oneness, and split away each from the other 
 in conduct, character, politics, or religion. In the 
 households of Jewry, to which the Lord especially sent 
 forth the seventy, they may have found one member to 
 be a Pharisee, another to be a Sadducee, another to be 
 an Herodian, another to be a fellow-disciple, as we now 
 find in households one to be a Papist, another to be a 
 Wesleyan, another a Secularist, another in every sense a 
 Catholic. The individual members of a household, the 
 individual citizens of a city, may think they ought to 
 break from God's congregation, and individually aggre- 
 gate themselves into separatist houses, separatist cities. 
 But the apostles and the seventy, according to the 
 commandment of the Lord, must ignore the schisms
 
 CHRIST UNITING CHURCH TO STATE 109 
 
 and separations which the members of a household or 
 the parties of a city themselves originate, and must 
 address them one and all as an indivisible social unity 
 which the Father has established. The Church of 
 Christ does not correspond to Christ's ideal and plan, 
 nor to the facts of nature and providence, by establish- 
 ing a union with an individual or a group here and 
 there, but only by establishing a union with the house- 
 hold as a whole, with the city as a whole, and with 
 the nation or state as a whole. The union of Church 
 and State is an integral part of the Gospel of Christ. 
 He sent forth His apostles and disciples with the 
 mission of uniting His Church in all ages and places 
 with the household, the parish, and the state, which are 
 also His. 
 
 III. 
 
 I have spoken so long upon one aspect of the 
 Salutation which Jesus sent to households and cities by 
 the seventy, that I shall be obliged to say much less 
 than I intended upon the next clause of His commission. 
 He warned them that some households and cities would 
 reject His Salutation, and refuse to be in union with 
 His Church. But other households and cities would 
 gladly receive them. As to such He commanded, " In 
 the same household remain, eating and drinking such 
 things as they give, for the labourer is worthy of his 
 hire." Again, " And into whatsoever city ye enter, and 
 they receive you, eat and drink such things as are set 
 before you." 
 
 Here we see Jesus Christ Himself, as the Head over 
 all things to His Church, not only solemnly and 
 deliberately establishing, but solemnly and deliberately 
 endowing His clergy. The germ of every subsequent 
 parochial or national establishment and endowment lay
 
 110 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 in this daring charge of the poor and property-less Son 
 of Man. " In that same household," He said, " remain 
 ye " ; that is, " Establish yourselves in that household, 
 without hesitation or misgiving. The household, as 
 well as the apostolical brotherhood, is My Society. 
 The city, as well as the Church, is put by the Father of 
 humanity under Me." In the Person of Christ Jesus, 
 the Church and the State, the ecclesiastical and the civil, 
 what is eternal and what is secular in humanity, are 
 mediated and united. He does not obliterate the 
 distinction, but He insists upon the union, of Church 
 and parish, of Church and State. In obedience to Jesus 
 Christ's charge, in the full conviction of Christ's rights 
 as Lord over all human societies, the apostles established 
 the Church in the cities of the Roman Empire. In the 
 same faith His later missionaries established the Church 
 amongst the communes and the nations out of which 
 the modern States of Europe have been developed by 
 God's world-government. 
 
 But the Lord was not content with commanding His 
 clergy to establish themselves within the organic forms 
 which His Father had given, or might give, to secular 
 society. " Remain," He said, " eating and drinking such 
 things as they give." " And into whatsoever city ye 
 enter, and they receive you, eat such things as are set 
 before you." As the Head and Ruler of both societies 
 He assumes the right to take the shelter and food of 
 His families, His cities, and His states at least of those 
 of them which " receive " His apostles and His disciples 
 willingly and therewith to endow His clergy. " Accept 
 these endowments," He said to the seventy, " without 
 hesitation or misgiving ; know and preach that I have 
 a right to them." He claimed jurisdiction in every 
 household and every city to which He sent His 
 salutation and salvation. The rudimentary endowments
 
 CHRIST UNITING CHURCH TO STATE 111 
 
 of shelter and provision which the seventy received 
 during their mission were not to be regarded by them 
 as gratuities to themselves, but as debts due to the Lord 
 Jesus Christ. He claimed and claims to be the eternal 
 Householder, the abiding otKoSetrTrorijc of every family, 
 parish, and state. His very last missionary act before 
 His Passion, the object of His very last sending forth of 
 apostles, was the assertion of His right. "The Lord 
 hath need of them," was all which the apostles were to 
 say, as they loosed the ass and the foal. St. Peter and 
 St John were sent to demand as His right the tempo- 
 rary endowment of His Church with the guest-chamber 
 in Jerusalem for the celebration of the last Passover and 
 the first Eucharist. 
 
 It is important to recollect, amidst the controversies 
 now in front of us, that Jesus Christ being the Head 
 of the secular as well as the ecclesiastical society has 
 guarded and vindicated in His charge the rights and 
 liberties of His families, parishes, and states against all 
 undue encroachment and greed of His clergy. The 
 seventy were forbidden to force themselves upon un- 
 willing houses and unbelieving cities, or to demand 
 more than enough from the willing. Not only so, but 
 He proclaimed, as the principle of His establishment 
 and endowment, that " The labourer is worthy of his 
 hire." By this He not merely liberates His clergy from 
 all hesitation in accepting a sufficiency of shelter, food, 
 and other stipend, but He reminds His clergy that 
 every one who would have " hire " must be a " labourer." 
 Labour is that which Christ's secular societies house- 
 hold, parish, or state have a title from Christ to 
 demand of all the clergy to whom they give shelter, 
 food, or any sort of stipend. The state, the city, and 
 the family have a right from the Son of Man Himself 
 to regulate endowments and to disestablish and dis-
 
 112 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 endow every clerical idler. It is against the law of 
 Christ that a land-owning and purse-owning " patron " 
 a caricature of the true Father should have the 
 power of forcing any idler whom he pleases upon 
 Christ's households and parishes. He condemns it by 
 His principle that " the labourer is worthy of his hire," 
 and by His inference that the "hire" is given or with- 
 held by the Society.
 
 BREAD: THE GIFT OF GOD TO THE 
 WHOLE NATION * 
 
 " She had heard in the country of Moab how that the Lord had 
 visited His people in giving them bread." RUTH i. 6. 
 
 BREAD is almost the cheapest gift which can be 
 given. The professional tramp, whose lust is for 
 money rather than bread, often throws the gift away as 
 useless. I find it more easy to condemn his waste, as 
 every other idler's waste, than to condemn him. The 
 tramp is a man : therefore, as the Son of God says, he 
 does not " live " by " bread alone." He craves for what 
 is humane or spiritual ; and he knows that he can get 
 for a little money what mere bread will not give him 
 an hour of club-life in the warm and social tavern on the 
 roadside. It is hard to grudge him so short an episode 
 of brightness, since his life as a whole is cold and joyless 
 enough, compared with the lives of richer tramps, who 
 can rest in grand hotels instead of barns or hedges, but 
 who possibly do not excel him in their reverent esteem 
 for mere bread. 
 
 I. 
 
 Throughout the Bible, as in the Sacrament of the 
 Eucharist, this cheapest and meanest of gifts is set forth 
 as the symbol, the evidence, and the very vehicle of 
 
 1 Sermon preached at Harrow-on-the-Hill. 
 
 "3
 
 114 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 God's visitation to men. "The Lord had visited His 
 people in giving them bread." The harvest, as the 
 writer believed, was nothing less than a visit of God to 
 the nation, and so a sign to Israel that it was His own 
 people. All nations had harvests, and so the Hebrew 
 prophets began to perceive what the Gospel afterwards 
 declared, and what was later evidenced by the birth 
 of the Catholic Church on the Day of Pentecost, that 
 every nation must be a people of God. The English 
 harvest of this year is the Lord's visitation of England, 
 and His sign to us that we, as fully as ever Israel was, 
 are His people. 
 
 If you would see the harvest of 1888 for our English 
 nation, you must not go only into our English fields, 
 but you must go also along Thames' side and into the 
 docks. The land of England is not so English as it 
 once was. While we have been boasting of our progress 
 in empire, commerce, manufacture, politics, tolerance, 
 culture, and other things some good, some questionable 
 our native soil, in the process of our history, has been 
 becoming less and less ours, getting concentrated into 
 the hands of fewer and fewer landowners. It cannot be 
 said to be owned by England as a whole : it is not 
 owned by the parishes as communities. The process 
 of inclosing, or confiscating, lands once common has 
 gone on without a protest from either of the rival 
 political parties which divide the State, and in turn 
 share its profits amongst their chief agents. Neither 
 of them has been free from the sin of giving up to Party 
 what was meant for Mankind. Hence it is that 
 England is not yet England's own property, and is 
 not yet used mainly for the production of a harvest 
 for everybody in the land, as it ought to be ; but it is 
 largely misused for the production of fortune, pleasure, 
 social predominance, or political power for the few.
 
 BREAD: THE GIFT OF GOD 115 
 
 Our English harvest is not principally sown and 
 reaped upon English ground, but upon Russian, 
 Hungarian, American, and other foreign ground. We 
 undoubtedly owe God thanksgiving to-day for the 
 strength which He has . given to our foreign brethren 
 labouring in their fields, and for the fertility with which 
 He has visited and blessed soils beyond the sea. If 
 there were no land to supply us with bread except our 
 own England which is not yet completely ours we 
 English should be starving, or hurrying into bestial 
 savagery, instead of giving thanks. All culture begins 
 and continues through agriculture. Therefore we ought 
 not to forget in our Harvest Thanksgiving that we are 
 depending for our daily bread, for our salvation from 
 famine and from relapse into barbarism, not wholly 
 upon our own labour in our land, but chiefly upon the 
 continuity of peace with our foreign brothers. Our 
 great nation, although it has not lost its old creative 
 genius in art and science, is now forced to live upon 
 charity conditioned by commerce. Rich as we still are 
 in the inventive and discerning spirit, we are beggars 
 for our daily bread, though we beg with money instead 
 of words. The Old Testament ideal is certainly not 
 now realised in our New Testament land : " The Feast 
 of Harvest, the first fruits of thy labour which thou hast 
 sown in the field, and the feast of ingathering, which is 
 in the end of the year, which thou hast gathered in thy 
 labours out of the field." We have now to buy, at what 
 price the synods or " rings " of Mammon please, that 
 which other peoples have sown, and other peoples 
 gathered, in fields not our own. 
 
 It is true that our debt to our foreign brethren has its 
 good side. In the fact that so much of the daily bread 
 of England has again to be fetched in ships from Russia 
 or America, we may see something pentecostal, akin to
 
 116 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 the origin and purpose of the humane-universal fellow- 
 ship, the Catholic Church. It is the Lord's witness, like 
 the sign of tongues on Whitsun Day, that Moab and 
 Israel, Russia and England, are equally His chosen 
 peoples, under the culture of His common Spirit of life 
 and unity, dependent upon one another as fellow- 
 members of that indivisible Humanity of which His Son 
 is the King and Redeemer. 
 
 II. 
 
 The bankrupt widow Naomi, an emigrant in the 
 foreign land of Moab, "heard in the country of Moab 
 how that the Lord had visited His people" that is, her 
 own nation and fatherland Israel "in giving them 
 bread." A poor, desolate, half-ruined widow is the first 
 actress in this godly drama. For her sake, insignificant 
 as she looks upon the world's gay stage, there is a 
 harvest in Israel. For the sake of such as Naomi, the 
 Lord visits His people in all lands "giving them bread." 
 Is it not the office of His ordained servants to ask 
 whether they are getting what He is "giving them"? 
 A nation's harvest is here called the Lord's visitation : 
 it is a new coming of the Lord to the whole people. He 
 comes again, so to speak, with the people's yearly bread 
 in His hand. Whenever He comes it is as Saviour and 
 Judge. " The harvest," said the Lord to His apostles, 
 " is the end of the world " " the consummation of the 
 age." A secular harvest is a rehearsal, or is a revelation, 
 of that eternal harvest at which He opens His book and 
 judges the nations, separating them one from another, 
 blessing some and cursing others, according as they 
 have recognised Him, have fed and consoled Him, in 
 the hungry and thirsty, poor and naked, outcast and 
 persecuted, who are inseparable from Him. We ought
 
 BREAD: THE GIFT OF GOD 117 
 
 to ask ourselves, in the presence of the unseen great 
 white throne, whether it be in any degree our fault, 
 politically and socially, if the Lord does not visit His 
 people in England upon their own soil with bread 
 enough and to spare? We ought to ask ourselves 
 whether it be in any degree our fault that so many of 
 His people uncomforted Naomis, worse that unwedded 
 Ruths perish in England for lack of bread ? Ought 
 we not in the earth's culture, as in spiritual culture, to 
 be " looking for and hastening unto the coming of the 
 day of God"? If we are obliged to send to other 
 peoples to buy some of the bread which the Lord has 
 given them, is it because He has given us too little 
 land? Or is it because we are not insisting that the 
 land which He has given us shall be put to the use for 
 which He gave it, shall be made directly profitable to 
 poor Naomis and all His people, and less luxuriously 
 profitable to a very few of them ? I am not enough of 
 an expert to say how far our English land, if it were all 
 honestly and piously in use, would support all the 
 English people ; but having freshly come from sister- 
 lands Switzerland, Germany Belgium, and France I 
 have been struck afresh at the contrast between the 
 exhaustive use which their peoples make of their land, 
 even of their poorest land, and the unthankful and 
 niggardly use which we are making of our own noble 
 land. 
 
 The national priest owes it to his Master and his 
 brethren to say that no English parish can hold an 
 ideal harvest festival until all English land really 
 belongs to all England. We have the example of a 
 noble band of foregoers of our order. From the age of 
 the Tudors to the outbreak of the Civil War, the 
 Anglican episcopate and priesthood were never wanting 
 in men who gave prophetic " testimony before kings "
 
 118 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 against the aristocratic land-robbers and church-robbers, 
 although our partisan historians have taken little or no 
 notice of them. I know of no modern sermon more 
 faithful or revolutionary than the appeal of the brave 
 priest, Francis Trigge, to James the First, to be a 
 national king, the champion and tribune of the people, 
 against the puritanical nobles and gentry who were 
 turning arable land into great pastures, perverting the 
 public commons into private parks and gardens, depopu- 
 lating whole townships, decaying tillage, maintaining 
 obsequious Nonconformist preachers and services in 
 their halls in opposition to the priest of the community 
 in the common parish church. He aptly called his 
 appeal " The humble petition of two poor sisters, the 
 Church and Commonwealth, for the Restoring of their 
 ancient Commons and Liberties, which late Inclosure 
 with Depopulation hath taken away." A national 
 harvest festival, after the splendid type of the Old 
 Testament, must be preceded by the honest nationalisa- 
 tion of the land, and a parish harvest festival by a more 
 complete re-commonalisation of the land than Francis 
 Trigge could demand from Elizabeth or James. Look 
 at the land around our London where certainty of 
 daily bread is so sore a need, so hard for all to get ! Is 
 not the earth " groaning," as the Nations' Apostle said 
 to the Church of Rome, under the present tyranny of 
 the fleshly pomp and vanity, the devilish competition 
 and money-worship, of this wicked world? It is all 
 but exclusively grass land on the north of London, 
 separated from London itself by an ominous fringe of 
 " building land." Caste and Mammon, idle fashion and 
 busy competition, demand prodigious quantities of food 
 for their horses ; so the land cannot be spared to grow 
 corn and fruit for English men, women, and children, 
 and wholesomely employ them on its culture. Every
 
 BREAD: THE GIFT OF GOD 119 
 
 one must own, apart from any socialist or anti-socialist 
 theories which may be stained by the fallibility and 
 secularity of the mere Zeitgeist or age-spirit that the 
 Eternal Spirit, the Lord of Ages, is now showing us in 
 manifold ways that our land is not yet in the hands 
 which can turn it to the best use, the most national and 
 most humane use. We in London are being punished 
 with a plague of horses. We seem near a realisation of 
 the satirists' imaginary " State " in which men are 
 governed by horses. Even if a thousand fine ladies 
 could bring themselves to be drawn around the Park by 
 one horse instead of two horses, some land would be 
 redeemed to find bread for a thousand hungry sisters. 
 The idle " masher," who is strong enough to go on his 
 own legs like his poorer fellow-tramp, and whose time is 
 of no value to the Commonwealth, might walk instead 
 of dashing to and from his goal in a hansom. In the 
 midst of the Babylonish noise of the horses and wheels 
 of London, as well as in the stillness of the depopulated 
 sheep walk or deer forest, the Word of God in our flesh 
 is still asking, " Is not a man better than a beast ? " It 
 is a horror to think of the immense reaches of land 
 perverted from the humane and pious use of "giving 
 the Lord's people bread," and restrained to the breeding 
 of poor beasts and birds, in order that fashion and 
 idleness may prove their heredity from the "noble" 
 savage, and have "something to kill." 
 
 III. 
 
 If there be something pentecostal, carrying back our 
 thoughts to the beginning of the universal Church, in 
 the character which our national history and develop- 
 ment have outwardly given to the modern English 
 harvest, there is an abiding pentecostal character in
 
 120 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 the harvest festival itself. We celebrate it in the house 
 of Jesus Christ, who is the Bread of Life the sus- 
 tenance of every human spirit, soul, and body. The 
 every-day social life of the Church during her pentecostal 
 days is exhibited to us in the Acts of the Apostles as a 
 sort of continuous harvest festival. Our first fathers 
 and mothers in the Catholic faith and fellowship, 
 "breaking bread from house to house, did eat their 
 meat with gladness, and singleness of heart." They 
 recognised the grace and lovingkindness of the world's 
 Saviour in taking and consecrating the most vulgar 
 need of the world's life to serve as the symbol and 
 vehicle of the highest and deepest need of the individual 
 and the race joyful communion with the Eternal 
 Unity, and with one another in Him. Each ordinary 
 meal became to them, as it ought to be to the Christian, 
 a household eucharist, a little harvest festival, a sign 
 that the God of all was visiting them " in giving them 
 bread." But the exultant faith of the young Church 
 could not confine itself within the household. The 
 Churchman was more than a family man, more than 
 a citizen. He was the member of a body which had 
 been called out to bear witness to the filial relation 
 of every man, woman, and child to the Eternal. The 
 Church's joyous faith could only outwardly exhibit the 
 fulness of its contents for humanity in one simple form ; 
 it could be satisfied with nothing narrower than that 
 which we now call Socialism. Its socialism was in- 
 stinctive ; it was prophetic ; it was not scientific. It 
 saw, by the light of the Holy Spirit, that "our daily 
 bread " could be nothing meaner than the social gift 
 of God to His "people" not merely an individual 
 gift to so many persons as could get it, but His gift 
 for " distribution " to every person that " had need." 
 On the day of Pentecost, as the birthday of the Church,
 
 BREAD: THE GIFT OF GOD 121 
 
 the Spirit had revealed to the apostles whom Jesus Christ 
 had chosen, the unity and solidarity of man's whole 
 kind in Christ. He had shown them that all languages 
 were holy languages, and that every nation was a 
 people of God. It is an obligation inherited by the 
 bishops whom Christ has sent to the nations, by the 
 priests whom He has sent to the communes, to insist 
 by word and deed that the Lord's peoples everywhere 
 shall get in its fulness that which the Lord is "giving 
 them Bread."
 
 THE APOSTOLIC FUND IS NOT SILVER 
 AND GOLD BUT THE NAME OF JESUS 
 CHRIST OF NAZARETH ' 
 
 " Silver and gold have I none : but such as I have give I thee : 
 in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk." 
 ACTS iii. 6. 
 
 THE episode of the healing of the lame beggar at 
 the gate of the Temple holds an important 
 place, historically and doctrinally, in the life of the 
 Church. It is "the beginning of miracles" in the work 
 of Christ's body, the Church, like the turning water 
 into wine in Christ's own work. It is the first of the 
 recorded "Acts of the Apostles" after the definite 
 formation and equipment of the Church. It is the 
 earliest explanation of Pentecost, otherwise than by 
 preaching, to a man outside the Church. It is the 
 first preaching of the Gospel to an individual soul and 
 body. St. Peter's short saying is the first apostolical 
 orientation of the right position of the new universal- 
 humane Society, and particularly of the rulers of that 
 Society, towards silver and gold and bank-notes. 
 
 I. 
 
 A few words concerning the apostolical saying, and 
 especially the negative half of it, may be not un- 
 profitable upon a day when the successor of the 
 
 1 Fifth Sunday after Easter, 1889 (Bishop of London's Fund). 
 
 122
 
 THE APOSTOLIC FUND 123 
 
 apostles in the Church of London is asking all his 
 congregations to give him alms for the healing of the 
 thousands of lame souls and bodies at the gate of the 
 Temple, in the hope that they may enter with the 
 apostles, and the healed beggar, into the Temple at the 
 hour of prayer, "walking, and leaping, and praising 
 God." 
 
 The circumstances differ. It is the successor of the 
 apostle who asks the Church for alms that he may 
 give them, in the shape of clergy and churches, to the 
 successors of the lame beggar. It is not the successor 
 of the lame beggar who to-day asks the apostle for 
 alms, and gets something better. The London suc- 
 cessors of the lame beggar in Jerusalem, the poor, as 
 they make their cries articulate, do not seem to be 
 asking for apostles, bishops, priests, temples, or services. 
 Neither do they now openly ask for an alms. He 
 whom " God hath exalted with His right hand to be 
 a Prince and a Saviour," has so used the ruling and 
 liberating power given Him in heaven and on earth, 
 as to change the old cry for an alms into the new cry 
 for justice and right from apostles and from all in any 
 authority. Justice and right can at once be given to 
 those at the gate of the Temple, so far as apostles 
 can give it, less completely by giving them more clergy 
 and more services, than by giving back to them, after 
 the precedent of the apostles in Jerusalem, the full and 
 free election of the deacons and priests who are to serve 
 God and them in the new temples. 
 
 Oh that the Bishops of England, whom we honour 
 and obey as the successors of Christ's apostles, would 
 say to His now lame and beggared congregations in 
 their dioceses, " In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise 
 up and walk ! Be new and strong men in Christ ! Be 
 yourself the Church as you are fast becoming the
 
 124 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 State. Do not content yourselves with being mere 
 Church-goers. Make full use of the spirit of counsel 
 and the spirit of government conferred upon you as 
 members of the body of Christ." 
 
 May it not be because the successors of the apostles 
 now have " silver and gold " the subsidy and appro- 
 bation of the rich that they do not now say to the 
 successors of the lame beggar, "In the name of Jesus 
 Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk ? " The successors 
 of the apostles, not only in our Church, but in almost 
 all the national Churches of Christendom, age after 
 age, have been allowing Mammon's moneyed and 
 landed " patrons " so called, because they give, or their 
 ancestors gave, "silver and gold," to despoil Jesus 
 Christ of Nazareth's moneyless and landless lame 
 beggars of their most sacred function and ministry, 
 their share in the government of His congregation and 
 in the election of its officers. It is our great hope and 
 prayer that some day a Bishop of London, following 
 the example of the holy apostles in Jerusalem, will 
 go to the much "murmuring" (Acts vi. i) folk of the 
 parishes in East London, "call the multitude of the 
 disciples unto him," and say : " Brethren, look ye out 
 amongst you," not only churchwardens and sidesmen, 
 and singers, but deacons and priests, " of honest report, 
 full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may 
 appoint over this business." For the choice of all the 
 clergy is given by the Head of the Church to all His 
 people, but the ordination of the chosen to His apostles. 
 The first Bishop of London who thus follows St. Peter 
 will give to the lame beggars " power and healing in the 
 name of Jesus Christ, of the despicable Nazareth." 
 Such a miracle cannot be wrought by millions of 
 Mammon's silver and gold.
 
 THE APOSTOLIC FUND 125 
 
 II. 
 
 The English national episcopate is certainly now 
 " fastening " its gaze upon the wretched and pauperised 
 in England, and saying : " Look on us." The fund for 
 which your offerings are asked is our diocesan re- 
 petition, in a modern manner, of St. Peter's solemn 
 invitation. May we add that the invited in our great 
 cities, whose case is so desperate, give " heed unto them 
 expecting to receive something of them " ? 
 
 Silver and gold have I none. Neither as yet had the 
 Church much. But it had enough. An apostolic fund, 
 or a fund for the bishopric of Jerusalem, had been 
 already formed, as we learn from the foregoing chapter. 
 " All that believed were together, and had all things 
 common, and sold their possessions and goods, and 
 parted them to all men, as every man had need." 
 There is no escape from the position that, in the bright 
 morning glow of the full enlightenment of the Holy 
 Church by the Holy Ghost, it was the Catholic or 
 universal faith the first conviction of the Christian 
 conscience that it was a thing monstrous and un- 
 seemly for any individual Christian to be rich. 
 
 St. Peter says that there was no endowment of the 
 apostolate. " Silver and gold have I " apostle as I 
 am, and charged with such wide cares for spirit and 
 body " none." The sense has never been wanting, in 
 any age of Christendom, that it is not quite a decent 
 thing for a bishop, as a successor of the apostles, to be 
 a rich man. The deepest thinker in the English epis- 
 copate of the eighteenth century, Bishop Butler, was 
 once suddenly asked to give help to some needy man or 
 cause. Calling his steward, he said, " How much ready 
 money have I in the house ? " "A hundred pounds, my
 
 126 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 lord." " What a shame," exclaimed the prelate, " for a 
 bishop to have such a heap of money." He looked 
 upon the wealth of the bishopric as belonging to it, and 
 not personally to himself; and so convinced were his 
 kinsfolk of his way of looking at it, that they never 
 expected, like the kinsfolk of other bishops, to get 
 any share out of the episcopal property after the 
 bishop's death. 
 
 Pampered wits, overpaid statesmen, idle spendthrifts, 
 rich satirists, and capitalist journalists, as well as poor 
 men, take much delight in shooting their arrows at 
 "rich bishops." Let us grant that it is a monstrous 
 thing for a successor of the apostles to be a man of 
 great wealth. But why ? Merely because he is a 
 bishop ? I can imagine no more ultra-clericalist 
 argument. Is not every layman in the Church a 
 successor of the apostles? Is he not by call and 
 confession Christ's disciple? Did Jesus Christ say to 
 apostles and clergymen only, and to no other Christians, 
 " Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth " ? 
 I should like to see the Gospel in which our journalists 
 and cheap wits have found the texts, " Ye cannot serve 
 God and Mammon, if ye be bishops or priests, but if 
 ye be pious railway-directors or philanthropists or 
 theatrical stars, ye can." 
 
 Every argument from the New Testament, or from 
 Christian reason or economy, which tells against the 
 great estate and wealth of a bishop, tells with equal 
 force against the much greater estate and wealth of 
 a duke, a banker, a manufacturer, a stock-holder, a 
 tight-rope dancer, a painter, a popular preacher, or a 
 prima donna if these rich persons profess to be 
 Christ's disciples. Nay, if a bishop conscientiously 
 spends his endowment, as the apostles distributed the 
 endowment of the Church of Jerusalem, or as Bishop
 
 THE APOSTOLIC FUND 127 
 
 Butler spent the property of the See of Durham if he 
 leaves to his own kindred none of the money belonging 
 to the Church and the poor he may exhibit a clearer 
 title to his estates and riches, in my judgment, than 
 most of those to whom a journalist or dissipated satirist 
 never grudges the heap of silver and gold which they 
 spend upon feasting, drinking, revelling, gambling, 
 horse-racing, or operas. 
 
 III. 
 
 You see that we have opened an inexhaustible 
 subject, as indeed we always must do when we follow 
 one of the pregnant sayings of Christ's apostles, and 
 try to bring it into line with our own moral and social 
 life. Two correlative facts what money can do, and 
 what money cannot do continually present themselves 
 to us in the personal and public experience of all 
 men. 
 
 i. What silver and gold can do none of us need to be 
 told. Every circular which the post brings us, every 
 secretary and treasurer of a benevolent movement, as 
 well as every pulpit, keeps us informed of the miracles 
 which remain undone only because the would-be doers 
 of them have not enough "silver and gold." Yet a 
 world without money, except as an archaeological 
 curiosity in its museums, as a late novelist has in- 
 geniously shown us, is quite conceivable. If silver 
 and gold could do no good, the apostles would not 
 have encouraged the propertied Christians of Jerusalem 
 to sell their lands and possessions, and devote all their 
 individual goods to social uses. To withhold money, 
 on the plea that it is not so profitable as grace, is 
 a turning of the grace of God into lasciviousness. 
 Give silver or gold, but recollect how little you are
 
 128 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 giving, and how inferior a part of the divine and 
 humane work it can effect. 
 
 2. What silver and gold cannot do we need to be 
 always afresh reminded. It is a lesson which the 
 conscience and the Church may have learned again 
 and again by heart, and yet by the drift and colour 
 of our lives, or by the occurrence of unforeseen 
 necessities, may again and again forget. The chief 
 necessity of the Church, as " this beginning of miracles " 
 in the Church and the apostle's saying imply, is always 
 within her reach and at her call because " the name of 
 Jesus Christ of Nazareth" is always within her reach 
 and at her call. The first and great need of an apostle 
 for the healing of the spiritually or secularly lame and 
 beggared is not " silver and gold," which duchesses and 
 bankers have, and which he has to cajole or frighten 
 them into giving. An apostle's first need, and every 
 bishop's first need, is the bold and immediate use of 
 that which he already has, but which Dives does not 
 value at a farthing Jesus Christ's wonder-working name 
 and Word. " Such as I have give I thee ; in the name 
 of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk ! " When 
 the great theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, who had 
 renounced his aristocratic title and his property to serve 
 Christ and the poor in the Dominican order, was at 
 Rome, the Pope showed him the luxurious splendour 
 and wealth of the pontifical palace. " You see, Thomas," 
 he said, " Peter cannot now say, ' Silver and gold have I 
 none.' " " Neither can he now say," replied the saint, 
 " In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up and walk ! " 
 The supreme need of the beggars, lame from their birth, 
 the millions who are born and bred into disease and 
 pauperism, in all our populous cities, is not silver and 
 gold, but apostles a poor Peter and John. The whole 
 world has lately been observing how one poor Belgian,
 
 THE APOSTOLIC FUND 129 
 
 following the steps of the Holy apostles a Father 
 Damien has done in our age with little or no money, 
 but with such as he had, with the name of Jesus Christ 
 of Nazareth, spiritual and secular wonders such as the 
 Pope, the cardinals and the bishops of all churches 
 cannot do with their funds of silver and gold. 
 
 10
 
 JESUS CHRIST THE SUPREME RITUALIST 
 
 "And He taught saying unto them, Is it not written, My 
 house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer ? 
 But ye have made it a den of thieves." ST. MARK xi. 17. 
 
 *" I ^HE event which the Holy Gospel records held 
 JL so great a place in the earliest conceptions of the 
 life and work of Jesus that all the four Gospels contain 
 a notice of it. It was evidently the belief of the first 
 Christians that the act was twice repeated by the Lord. 
 It has never ceased, from their day to ours, to exercise 
 a powerful effect upon the Christian imagination and 
 conscience. It was the first and the only direct and 
 active interference of Jesus in the public life both of the 
 Church and of the State. We cannot fail to see that 
 He here at least allowed the multitude to proclaim Him 
 in the streets as the King of Israel, with no regard to 
 Caesar's authority ; and that He here, without consul- 
 tation of the leaders of the people or care for the 
 established authority of the priesthood, asserted a right 
 to act with authority, though He was not of Levi's tribe, 
 in the Temple of God. Like David, Solomon, Josiah, 
 Hezekiah, the regal constructors and reformers of the 
 Temple and the public worship of whom the excited 
 people were thinking as His predecessors Jesus, of the 
 tribe of Judah, showed Himself to be more priestly than 
 
 the priests. 
 
 130
 
 JESUS CHRIST SUPREME RITUALIST 131 
 
 This amazing interference of Jesus in the Temple 
 struck at two superstitions, as fashionable among us 
 moderns as among those ancient Jews, one social, the 
 other religious. It contained the eternal political 
 declaration of the King and Reformer of the world 
 against that age's and this age's notions of the invio- 
 lability of all that is called property. It contained the 
 eternal religious sermon of the High Priest of every 
 conscience against that age's and this age's superstitious 
 delusion that God, as He is a Spirit, can have no care 
 for what is material, outward, symbolical, secular, or 
 ritual in the conduct and manner of His common social 
 worship. 
 
 I. 
 
 Twice in the course of to-day's l Gospel our attention 
 is forced toward the first of these two points. The 
 Gospel opens with a startling preliminary hint how 
 Jesus regards, and how He deals with, the " sacredness 
 of property." Wherever and whenever He comes in 
 power as the world's King and Reformer, there will be 
 a questioning and a crisis of "property." Every great 
 political and social shaking of the people is nothing less, 
 if the Gospel be true, than an advent of Jesus as the 
 Christ to the holy city of that people. He sent forth 
 two of His disciples to take for His use an ass and a foal, 
 the property of some unknown owners. The disciples 
 were to loose the beasts, and lead them to Him. giving 
 no further reason for their strange interference with other 
 men's possessions, than the blunt message " The Lord 
 hath need of them." It is useless to debate whether the 
 owners of the two beasts were already disciples of 
 Jesus. The Gospel is the product of the Church ; it 
 
 1 First Sunday in Advent.
 
 132 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 only knows Jesus, as the Church confesses Him, as 
 absolutely " the Lord " the Lord who is Owner of all, 
 the Lord whose Word reaches every conscience and 
 enlightens every reason. We know that there is that 
 in us which tell us that nothing we possess is our own. 
 We should know this, sooner or later, even if there were 
 no Gospel. The Gospel tells us whose these things we 
 call ours, or call property, actually are. " Thou, the 
 owner ? Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required 
 of thee, and then whose shall those things be ? " You 
 think your outward possessions are yours. Why even 
 your inmost possession, your own soul, is not yours. 
 You have no fixed tenure of it. It was not the 
 outward word of the two apostles to the owners' ears, 
 but the inward word of Jesus Christ to each conscience, 
 which awoke in each this deepest and most abiding 
 conception of the meaning of property " It is the 
 Lord's." This Word of" the Lord " made them willing, 
 as the fullest and probably the earliest account of the 
 second Gospel says, to "let them go." 
 
 The owners were plain, ordinary men, whose property 
 in animals was used in their daily business, whatever 
 it was ; it had no pretence to be religious property ; yet 
 they were willing to part with them for the use of " the 
 Lord." 
 
 II. 
 
 Our Saviour's second interference with the rights of 
 "property" at His Advent to Jerusalem was altogether 
 different. " And Jesus went into the Temple of God, 
 and cast out all them that sold and bought in the 
 Temple, and overthrew the tables of the money-changers, 
 and the seats of them that sold doves," "and" (as St. 
 Mark adds) " would not suffer that any man should 
 carry any vessel through the Temple." In the first
 
 JESUS CHRIST SUPREME RITUALIST 133 
 
 case, the two beasts were probably returned to their 
 owner ; but, in the second case, there is a destruction 
 and confiscation of property, by the coming of the 
 Lord, without any compensation. Here, in a wonderful 
 manner, the only Revealer of God, and the Sender of 
 the Spirit, strikes a double blow at the age's false 
 conceptions of worship, hitting on one side its actual 
 worship, the " covetousness which is idolatry " and which 
 despises all that is not material ; hitting on the other 
 side its superstition of pseudo-spiritualism or anti- 
 ritualism, which despises all that is material. How 
 came all this heap of material property in the Temple of 
 God the tables of the money-changers, the stalls of 
 the traders in animals? Everything which Jesus at 
 His Advent overturned, and everybody whose property 
 He pitilessly damaged, was there under the pretence 
 of the necessities of the ritual of God's house. " Our 
 property," the traders might have said, " is no secular 
 and worldly matter, like the ass and the foal your 
 disciples have taken from their owners. There is a 
 sacred character about all our property. Everything 
 that we are selling here in the Court of the Nations 
 the animals, the oil, the wine, the meal, the salt, the 
 incense, and others things, all are wanted by pious 
 souls, who have travelled up to the Holy City from 
 all parts of the earth ; they demand them, and we 
 supply them, in order that they may conscientiously 
 keep the Feast in the Temple of the Lord according 
 to the Law of the Lord. The money-changers are here, 
 in order that the religious pilgrims from foreign lands 
 may get their Greek and Roman and other coins, 
 stamped often with vile, idolatrous emblems, hateful 
 to the one real God, changed into the sacred ' shekel ' 
 which can alone be offered to the Lord in His house." 
 What could be more reasonable, on the surface of it,
 
 134 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 than such an explanation of the presence and business 
 of the sellers, buyers, and money-lenders in the outer 
 court of the Lord's house? Neither the scrupulously 
 religious Pharisees nor the critical Sadducees seem to 
 have had the least objection to it But when Jesus 
 looked at it He condemned it as a desecration of God's 
 house by idolatry, as a singular desecration of the 
 Court of the Nations. The Son of God saw in it the 
 worshipping and serving of property or Mammon, 
 which is the supreme denial of "the Lord" as the Father 
 of all men and the Owner of all things. " And He 
 taught, saying, Is it not written, My house shall be 
 called of all nations the house of prayer ? But ye have 
 made it a den of thieves." He saw the inward and 
 spiritual contents of all this traffic to be " covetousness, 
 which is idolatry," and which is to be testified against 
 as idolatry wherever and in whatever degree His 
 kingdom comes to a people. The religious heads of 
 the Jewish people were of course familiar with the 
 passages from the prophets which Jesus cited ; they had 
 doubtless often preached upon them, and had probably 
 explained that they did not condemn this sale and 
 purchase in the Court of the Nations of the ritual 
 necessities of God's public worship. 
 
 The official representatives of religion, both the 
 teachers and the clergy, " the scribes and chief priests " 
 (as St. Mark and St. Luke record), when they " heard it," 
 took the side of the traders and usurers against Jesus, 
 " and sought how they might destroy Him." 
 
 III. 
 
 The men in power, both scribes and priests, were 
 doubtless strict enough supporters of that side of the 
 outward matter of worship which contributed to their
 
 JESUS CHRIST SUPREME RITUALIST 135 
 
 own dignity and their own property. This was the 
 secret bond of union between the vulgar trader and the 
 intellectual scribe, between the half-heathenish money- 
 lender and the orthodox priest. This inclined the 
 religious trafficker not to be hard upon the material 
 traffickers. The scribes and priests 'could pardon those 
 ritual offences which the Son of God so wrathfully 
 condemned the buying and selling in the Temple, the 
 carrying of burdens through the Temple. " God," they 
 would say, quoting Bible texts, " looks upon the heart. 
 We need not think that He can take offence at these 
 mere outward things." But, as the Lord has already 
 told them, they used a quite different speech about the 
 outward things related to worship, where their own 
 honour or their own profits were concerned. They paid, 
 and they insisted upon the payment of tithe of mint, 
 and anise, and cummin. It was the first article of the 
 Pharisee's brag in the Temple, " I pay tithes of all that I 
 possess." It was no scandal to him to see the Temple 
 swarming with traffickers and usurers. So have we seen 
 in later history, that the most bigoted anti-sacerdotalists 
 of all times and places, when they have found themselves 
 in a sacred office, have demanded the most rigid pay- 
 ment of their tithes or other ecclesiastical dues. The 
 Nonconformist and Separatist preachers who were 
 intruded upon the English parishes under the Long 
 Parliament, and under Cromwell's Empire, declared on 
 Sundays that they were not priests, but clamoured on 
 Mondays to the magistrates to imprison the Quakers 
 for refusing to pay them the tithe allotted by the 
 unrepealed law to the priests. The expulsion of the 
 national episcopate and priesthood brought in a rampant 
 and greedy Nonconformist and Separatist " clericalism," 
 such as the nation had never before seen or known, and 
 which goes far to explain the severity of its Act of 
 Uniformity.
 
 136 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 But that which Jesus asserted at His Advent in 
 Jerusalem, by His wrathful cleansing of the house of 
 God the real sacredness and importance of the outward 
 and secular side of God's common and national worship, 
 its symbol and ritual, as a common and universal 
 property had for the Pharisee or Puritan no meaning. 
 These Jewish Puritans, who sought to destroy the Son 
 of Man, like the Puritans and Manichaeans of all ages, 
 had lost all conception that the Temple was held in 
 trust for all the peoples not " the people " or Jewish 
 Church, but " the peoples " or all nations though it was 
 the main part of the inherited tradition of their race, and 
 though its symbol and ritual were to serve as the 
 alphabet for the spiritual education of the nations in 
 the Kingdom of Christ, in the world to come. 
 
 When our English Pharisees in the seventeenth 
 century filled St. Paul's Cathedral with shops and stalls, 
 and perverted the fund, which Archbishop Laud had 
 collected from all England for its restoration, to the 
 enrichment of the great Nonconformist aldermen and 
 councilmen, they had no conception that they were 
 guilty of sacrilege. " God," said they truly, " dwelleth 
 not in temples made with hands." " Therefore," asked 
 they, " is it not better that all this waste land, stone, 
 timber, and money should be employed in adding to 
 the comfort of ' His saints,' who have laboured for His 
 cause, than be perverted to the encouragement of 
 idolatry and superstition ? " 
 
 The outward sanctification of the Temple is to the 
 whole of the earth's space what the outward sanctifica- 
 tion of the seventh day is to the whole of the world's 
 time. Every poor shopman who puts up his shutters 
 with glad relief on Saturday, every poor woman who 
 puts on her best dress on Sunday, has to thank the 
 Lord, the Son of Man, for the liberation and the delight.
 
 JESUS CHRIST SUPREME RITUALIST 137 
 
 The Lord's ritual act has the deeper meaning for us 
 because it was our place in the old Jewish Temple, the 
 Court of the Nations, the most prophetic part of the 
 building, which was the scene of it, and because His 
 great ritual act was a judgment beforehand against that 
 false worship which is the peculiar temptation of the 
 modern nations " covetousness, which is idolatry." 
 The argument of the puritanical old man in the Jew 
 and the Christian against the ritual judgment of the 
 Son in His Father's house is put so often in the Son's 
 own words, " God is a Spirit, and they that worship 
 Him must worship Him in Spirit and in truth," 
 that we are easily blinded to the falsehood and wrong 
 which the old man deduces from His words. " God 
 is a Spirit : therefore we will dwell in our ceiled 
 houses, and let the house of God go bare. God is a 
 Spirit : therefore we will break down all the carved 
 work of God's house, and decorate our own houses with 
 it. God is a Spirit : therefore we will heap up all the 
 treasures of art and the products of man's genius and 
 skill into our palaces and clubs and villas. God does 
 not dwell in a house ; He is independent of all our 
 earthly and human splendours : He can be in need of 
 nothing. Let us therefore take to ourselves all that 
 we can." 
 
 It is this inveterate Manichaeism, this parody of 
 spirituality, this self-seeking Puritanism of the old man 
 in all ages and peoples, which the Lord judged and 
 condemned as thievery and sacrilege at His Advent 
 into the Temple. The act was an application to the 
 future common worship of the nations, of the same 
 principle which He had asserted at the opening of His 
 ministry, when He said : " Consider the lilies of the 
 field," and " Not one sparrow is forgotten before God," 
 and " The very hairs of your head are all numbered."
 
 138 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 That the unseen Father of men, the ultimately Real 
 One, cannot be careless about the minute and the 
 scrupulous and the superficially insignificant in His 
 material kingdom, was a part of the theology of the 
 Son's first public preaching. The same principle which 
 He there asserted to be true of the individual flower, 
 bird, and man here in His last great public act he 
 extends to that which is minute, scrupulous, and 
 seemingly insignificant in the material house of God. 
 The Temple, the church of wood or stone, is so sacred 
 in the Son of Man's plan, because it is the standing 
 witness that men are more than individuals, more also 
 than citizens of nations. The Father's house was 
 given, and it still maintains, so singular a distinction, to 
 keep men in mind that their spiritual education as 
 children and brethren calls for a public, uniting, or 
 common worship. What sermon preached within St. 
 Paul's Cathedral can be compared to that sermon which 
 generation after generation its great dome goes on 
 preaching to all London, and to those who daily flock 
 to London from all parts of the earth? If the supreme 
 work of a man is to save his own selfish soul, then it 
 matters little whether the house of God be defiled 
 or clean. Indeed, there is then no great need of any 
 outward house of God at all, since His house is not to 
 be called the house of the individual soul, but " the house 
 of all the peoples." But no man does save his own 
 soul so long as he is careless about all souls, or is 
 content that any other soul should be lost. If the 
 Church be our house, two things follow first, that we 
 are but a sect, whatever great titles we put upon our- 
 selves ; next, that we may do as we like to it and with 
 it. The material house of God differs from all other 
 houses in this, that it belongs, and every act and detail 
 in it should be made to belong, as really to those who
 
 JESUS CHRIST SUPREME RITUALIST 139 
 
 are absent from it, as to those who are present in it. 
 Therefore its central act must ever be, and all its 
 details must concentrate around that which is common, 
 Catholic, or universal-human in worship, around that 
 which is as much the concern of all the peoples outside 
 the temple as of the people within the " full perfect, 
 and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the 
 sins of the whole world."
 
 THE SIGHT OF GOD THE SOURCE OF 
 ENDURANCE UNDER WRONG' 
 
 "This is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God 
 endure grief, suffering wrongfully." i PETER ii. 19. 
 
 WE read in the Holy Gospel for Easter Day how 
 St. Peter and St. John went into the empty 
 tomb of Jesus, and how first the one, and then the 
 other "saw and believed." More and more of the 
 endless contents of that sight and that belief were 
 opened to them, as the text shows, in their later 
 experience, by the Spirit that quickeneth. It is no 
 doubt on account of this early Easter companionship, 
 and the new sight and new belief which they then and 
 there shared, that the Church has coupled them 
 together as Epistoler and Gospeller to-day, and will 
 couple them again next Sunday. They saw and 
 believed, as they both say to-day, what Jesus had 
 meant when He called Himself the Good Shepherd. 
 They saw that He had left the grave, as He had gone 
 into it, for man's sake. They saw all men also in a 
 new character ; whether " going astray " or whether 
 " in the fold," whether owning Christ as their Shepherd, 
 or ignorant of their relation to Him, since they were 
 men, they were Christ's sheep. "For ye," says St. 
 Peter to the Church, " were as sheep going astray : but 
 
 1 Second Sunday after Easter, 1890. 
 140
 
 THE SIGHT OF GOD 141 
 
 are now (as sheep) returned to the Shepherd and Bishop 
 of your souls." And St. John records the Shepherd's 
 words to the " little flock " of apostles which He had 
 gathered in His fold : " Other sheep I have, which are 
 not of this fold: them also must I bring." His disciples 
 were the first-fruits and the pledges of His ownership 
 and pastorate of all mankind. 
 
 St. Peter tell us, in these first words of the Epistle, 
 three amazing things which he and his fellow-apostle 
 saw and believed, after they had descended in doubt 
 and dread into the tomb of Jesus, and come out of it in 
 hope and faith. They did not, indeed, understand all 
 they saw at the time they saw it, as I have already said. 
 It may take the whole of our life to make us understand 
 but a part of the things which we learnt in our childhood. 
 " I have had much experience," said a French statesman 
 upon his death-bed, " and it has taught me in the end 
 that nothing is altogether true except the catechism." 
 
 The first sight was a man " suffering wrongfully " : 
 the second was a man enduring the grief forced upon 
 him by this suffering " for conscience towards God " : 
 the third, and not the least wonderful, was faith as well 
 as sight. They " saw and believed " the Almighty God 
 thanking a feeble man for what he endured and suffered. 
 
 I. 
 
 I need not say how full the world is of wrongful 
 suffering. There has never been an age in which the 
 conscience has been so keenly aroused as it is in our 
 age to the hideous universality of suffering and to the 
 perception of wrong as the cause of suffering. If we 
 could catechise every man who is in grief, we should 
 find that in most cases he would indicate some wrong 
 done perhaps by himself, but probably done by others
 
 142 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 as the origin of it. It is the testimony of all men that 
 these two things are inseparable ; that they are related 
 as cause and effect ; that wherever one is, there the 
 other must be. The inventors of Social Utopias 
 represent suffering, or the defect of sufficient comfort, 
 as the source of evil : the prophets and apostles of God 
 declare that sin, or the want of conscience towards God, 
 is the source of suffering. Even Christ, " who did no 
 sin," says St. Peter, in this Epistle, " His own self bare 
 our sins." The Utopist predicts that universal comfort- 
 ableness would produce universal justice and goodness, 
 or at least he hopes that it would produce a goodness 
 almost universal ; the apostle proclaims that universal 
 righteousness "the Kingdom of God and its righteous- 
 ness " is the first thing which a man has to seek, 
 whether its next results be comfort or suffering. 
 
 Meanwhile, neither goodness, justice, nor freedom 
 from suffering are yet universal. The apostle, coming 
 back to the world from the empty tomb of the risen 
 Shepherd and Saviour, sees the world as it is. The 
 grief is already here, the suffering is in the world, and is 
 likely for a long time to be, and likely in millions of 
 cases to be undeserved and wrongful. St. Peter saw 
 cruel tyrants seize upon their fellow-men, buy and sell 
 them, revile them, scourge them, crucify them, kill 
 them. The question then becomes an instantly practical 
 one, such as we cannot meet v/ith a new philosophical 
 or a new social theory, to be realised perhaps in some 
 distant year when we and our suffering neighbours are 
 dead. 
 
 St. Peter, as we see from the eighteenth verse, was 
 speaking here to those who were in the very lowest and 
 most degraded social condition in the Roman Empire 
 to servants, probably to slaves. Their masters and 
 owners might have said their suffering was legal ; the
 
 THE SIGHT OF GOD 143 
 
 apostle, having sight of a higher law, says it was 
 wrongful. It was his business, as a pastor of souls, to 
 give them what they needed, something for the actual 
 moment, and not some promise of a dim and distant 
 future. " It is a law of organic nature that no fruitful 
 change of environment or condition can be rapidly 
 produced." I 
 
 The first thing the apostle does is to raise their 
 estimation of themselves, and to inspire them with the 
 thought of their social solidarity. He tells them that 
 they are chosen of God, that they are kings, that they 
 are priests : not as mere individuals, but as members 
 one of another. " Ye are a chosen generation, a royal 
 priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people." All his 
 descriptions of them to themselves are social. 
 
 I was talking lately with a good old man, who after 
 seventy years of honest fight, and the death of all his 
 children, had been forced to choose between starvation 
 and the workhouse for himself and his aged wife. There 
 she died ; he had come to hei funeral, and was trudging 
 his desolate way back to the house which is no home. 
 Would it have been any help to such a man " enduring 
 grief, suffering wrongfully " to read him a chapter of 
 Mr. Bellamy's " Looking Backward " ? Ought I to have 
 given him the Manifesto of the Communist Party? 
 Should I have told him that a volume of Essays by the 
 Fabian Society would meet his condition better than 
 the Gospel of St. John ? In the presence of such a grief 
 since Christ our Shepherd tenderly cares for every 
 individual sheep, and not merely for the multitudinous 
 general flock a wholesome Christian scepticism arises 
 in us. We begin to ask whether a Thomas a Kempis is 
 not at least as profound and wide a social healer as a 
 Karl Marx. The suffering world needs both those who 
 1 Dr- Lombroso in Nouvclle Revue for March i, 1890.
 
 144 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 do not forget the one in their care for the many, and 
 those who do not forget the whole in their care for the 
 part. We see and believe that whatever is said or 
 planned for the social good of all by agnostics and 
 atheists, who tell the sheep that they have no Shepherd, 
 must have been taught them, for all men's sake, by One 
 whom they know not, "whose the sheep are." But 
 direct and immediate helpers of the suffering and 
 wronged one, except where they follow in the crucified 
 and risen Shepherd's footsteps, they are not. Those 
 whom social science cannot help, since life is so short 
 and science is so slow, Christ the " Shepherd and 
 Bishop of souls," can help ; He helps them at once. 
 Those whom social science cannot help, because it 
 demands understanding, while they are silly as "sheep," 
 He can help, because, " He is made unto them Wisdom." 
 
 II. 
 
 What then is the risen Shepherd's counsel, which the 
 apostle brings out of His empty grave for the help of 
 every man who is suffering wrongfully ? " Endure 
 grief." " Bear up under " (uTro^epe'pa ; Vulg. sustinef) 
 the wrongful attacks. Do not allow them to beat you 
 down, to sting you into reprisals, to deform you into 
 the image of your persecutors. 
 
 But this, you may say, is mere Stoicism. Why not ? 
 Is Stoicism, any more than Socialism, obliged to be 
 Anti-Christian? The other apostle, who went after 
 Peter into Christ's empty tomb, and there " saw and 
 believed," said that Christ is the true Light who is 
 enlightening every man who comes into the world. 
 Whatever has been thought out by men searching 
 honestly for the light, resolved to follow it, and anxious 
 to use it for the bettering of their kind and of them-
 
 THE SIGHT OF GOD 145 
 
 selves, must have a Christian element and inspiration in 
 it, if Christ be " that Light." Whenever a new pro- 
 fitable thought, or advance in science, or social scheme, 
 has broken upon the world, has He not always sent 
 some to claim it as His, or to show what was Chris- 
 tian in it ? Thus we used to hear of " Muscular Christi- 
 anity," in days when many feared it was almost wicked 
 to be athletic. Then we heard of " Christian Socialism," 
 or " Christian Secularism," or " Christian Agnosticism," 
 or " Christian Stoicism." When and where, for instance, 
 does Socialism merit the quality of " Christian " ? 
 Whenever and wherever it is at its best and highest, 
 when it does not conceitedly brag that it is scientific, or 
 ignorantly brag that it is atheist, or self-complacently 
 explain that it is only economic. When it is not the 
 product of jealousy, or irritation, or vanity, or malice, or 
 unneighbourliness, or revenge for wrong, but is the 
 product of " conscience toward God," which cannot be 
 sundered, as Christ has told us, from conscience toward 
 our neighbour. Stoicism is to " endure grief " callously 
 out of high disdain, or out of fanaticism, or cynical 
 indifference, or fatalism. Christian Stoicism is to " en- 
 dure grief, suffering wrongfully, for conscience toward 
 God." 
 
 III. 
 
 So important did the apostle see and believe this to 
 be that he does not state the two things our endurance 
 under wrong, and our sight of God in their historical 
 order, but in their moral or eternal order. As a matter 
 of experience men and societies are first conscious of 
 wrongful suffering, and then they begin to ask, " How 
 shall we meet it ? " But St. Peter transposes this 
 natural succession ; he places first the sight of God 
 whom by sense we see not ; and secondly the wrongful 
 
 II
 
 146 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 suffering which we sensibly feel or see. "Through 
 conscience toward God," he says, " bear up under grief 
 when you are suffering wrongfully." He had seen in 
 Christ's empty grave that the world which had crucified 
 its Saviour must be so out of joint that it could hardly 
 be expected to do anything else than wrong to one with 
 conscience toward God. One who cares to set it right, 
 and bears the cross through this care, shares the Shep- 
 herd's soul, and has felt His " conscience toward God." 
 But what is this " conscience toward God " ? It does 
 not simply mean conscientiousness, or scrupulous ten- 
 derness of conscience. It means that conscience which 
 the crucified and risen Son had toward the Father 
 through always seeing Him as He is. It means our 
 consciousness of God ; the sight of the invisible and 
 eternal Unity ; the possession of pure light on the Will 
 of wills and the relation of that Will to the world and 
 to us. Whoever has this sight can have no doubt of His 
 victory through man over wrong, even when wrong 
 seems to have power over us, to have got us down, and 
 to be defeating us. Christ, in His Passion, says St. 
 Peter, " committed Himself to Him who is judging 
 righteously." The secret of endurance, he says, is not to 
 be found in a stoic or ascetic hardening of ourselves, but 
 in looking at "the King immortal, invisible, the only 
 wise God " whom he and his fellow-apostle had seen 
 visibly in Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible God, 
 whom they always were seeing invisibly in the Spirit. 
 The " conscience toward God " of which St. Peter 
 speaks is the constant sight of the invisible God by 
 our reason and conscience, such a sight of God by men, 
 as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says, is 
 faith. Nothing less deserves the name of the " assur- 
 ance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not 
 seen." The Hebrew Christian found in it the expla-
 
 THE SIGHT OF GOD 147 
 
 nation of all that had ever been done and suffered by 
 men for the sake of God and mankind from the 
 beginning of history. " I have set the Lord always 
 before me : for He is on my right hand, therefore I shall 
 not fall " (Psa. xvi. 9, 10). By this conscience of God the 
 founder of their nation got power to redeem his enslaved 
 brethren ; " for he endured as seeing Him who is 
 invisible."
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE COMMONWEALTH 
 AS NATIONAL EDUCATORS 1 
 
 " What manner of child shall this be ? " ST. LUKE i. 66. 
 
 MUCH of the bitter warfare which now rages 
 throughout Europe over the question of 
 schooling might be avoided, or at least some of its 
 bitterness might be modified, if the combatants of each 
 party would agree to recognise the three simple facts 
 which confront every observer. What are these so 
 evident facts? (i) That the State sees that it is obliged 
 to reach after its ideal as a " fatherland," and become an 
 educator of its children ; (2) that the bishops and 
 priests of the Church will not cede their claim that they 
 are obliged by their commission to insist and prove 
 that they are the God-sent educators of the nations ; 
 (3) education is one thing, and schooling is quite 
 another. 
 
 I. 
 
 The State or National Commonwealth, somewhat late 
 in its history, is now everywhere awakening to the 
 recognition of the truth that it is bound, for its own 
 sake, to insist that every child born within its juris- 
 diction shall have a competent schooling. The English 
 people are asking, as they look at each new native 
 whom the Lord, by the first birth, adds to the nation : 
 
 1 Preached at Oxhey Church, Hertfordshire, on St. John 
 Baptist's Day, 1883. 
 
 '48
 
 CHURCH AND COMMONWEALTH 149 
 
 " What manner of child shall this be ? " That it is a 
 proper function of the State to be the great corporate 
 schoolmaster is not a novel theory invented by political 
 speculators, nor is it a plank in the platform of one of 
 the parties dividing the State ; but it is a conclusion to 
 which all practical statesmen have been forced by the 
 misery of men and the difficulties of just government. 
 As to the quality, as to the quantity, as to the exact end 
 and purpose of the schooling to be demanded or pro- 
 vided by the Commonwealth, politicians differ. Some 
 are afraid of over-schooling : a candidate at our Harrow 
 School Board Election this year 1 urged us to choose 
 him as our representative of desirable national culture, 
 because he would maintain " the important principle that 
 too much A, B, C often means an empty cupboard." 
 Others, who do not believe that the end of man's 
 nativity is the worship of Mammon, are more fearful of 
 too little schooling. Some hold that the real object of 
 public education is mainly individual, and that the 
 Commonwealth ought to set up schools in order to help 
 every boy and girl to "get on," as they phrase it 
 which too often means, as we have to reiterate, a train- 
 ing in the anti-social art and mystery of getting a 
 hundred less self-aggrandising fellows "off." Others 
 hold that the proper object of the schoolmastership 
 of the State is far higher and deeper ; that it is social ; 
 that it aims at the fulfilment of all that is implied in 
 the noble old English name for the State " the Com- 
 monwealth " ; that every common lad and lass ought to 
 be educated and schooled by the common authority, for a 
 common rather than a selfish or individual end. They 
 believe that the object of a ttational education, of a 
 State education, is not attained unless the schooling is 
 instinct with the moral meaning of the quality 
 1 Preached in 1883.
 
 150 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 " national," or makes the scholars more helpful and pro- 
 fitable members of that Nation or State into which the 
 providence of the Father has by birth or naturalisation 
 incorporated them. Indeed, whenever we hear men 
 arguing about " national " education, or " public " 
 schooling, we should insist that they do not forget 
 this meaning of the social adjectives which they are 
 using. Any schooling which develops a boy's selfish- 
 ness, or eagerness to be rich, or a girl's caste prejudices, 
 any schooling which does not mortify and restrain them, 
 has no just title either to call itself " national " or to call 
 itself " public." The charters of our old English local 
 schools, because they were founded under the commu- 
 nalising influence of the Church, lay great stress upon 
 the profitableness of the scholar to the " Common- 
 wealth " as the object of the school. It was a true 
 historical and ecclesiastical instinct which guided the 
 founders of our parish-schools, now vaguely and ab- 
 surdly called "voluntary schools," to name a parish- 
 school a " national school." The parish is an organ both 
 of the State, or body-corporate of all the born, and of 
 the Church, or body-corporate of all the re-born. 
 
 As Christians, or members of the universal-human 
 fellowship wider than the nation, we are all bound to 
 accept the highest view of the State. As a priest, or 
 one of the educators sent by Jesus and His apostles 
 to the nation, I am bound to teach no other. It is 
 through the Church that a nation learns all that it is. 
 Churchmen, laity and clergy, are pledged to desire and 
 to endeavour that all national and parochial schooling 
 even in its most secular aspects, and apart from any 
 directly theological or eternal elements in it shall 
 tend to inspirit the scholars to serve the Common- 
 wealth rather than to serve self; or, in Christian 
 language, to worship the Father by serving the brethren,
 
 CHURCH AND COMMONWEALTH 151 
 
 rather than to serve Mammon, Caste, Party, or Sect, 
 which are the Father's chief enemies and mankind's 
 chief dividers. And every boy or girl is serving the 
 Father, consciously or unconsciously, in proportion 
 as his or her life is helpful to the common family in 
 State or parish. 
 
 The bishops and clergy of the Church, we ought 
 always to remember, are ex-officio "national" servants. 
 The nationality of the clergy does not depend upon the 
 establishment and endowment of more or fewer of them 
 by the Commonwealth, but upon their apostolic 
 mission. Hence we of the clergy ought not only to 
 insist that the State's schooling shall be qualitatively 
 " national," but we are also bound to rejoice at the 
 modern demand that it shall be quantitatively 
 " national " that no native shall be left outside its 
 beneficial range. The demand is a sign that God has 
 answered the daily morning and evening petition of His 
 Church in England, and has not taken His Holy Spirit 
 from us. The very desire that all shall be educated 
 that the very worst and very best shall be educed out 
 of every native for the sake of all the nation must be 
 a product of that Spirit who, as St. Peter said at the 
 first festival of the Holy Spirit, on the birthday of the 
 Catholic Church, is poured out upon all flesh. When a 
 nation begins to recognise that it is an educator, and 
 to insist that every child born in it shall receive a com- 
 petent schooling, it has taken the first step, as I think, 
 upon that saving path of social repentance and social 
 amendment to which the Word of God in His prophets 
 and in His Son in vain called the nation of the Jews. 
 There -ought to be for a national clergy a great conso- 
 lation in the sight of the lofty schoolhouses which are 
 now everywhere standing in the midst of the mean 
 houses of the poor.
 
 152 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 II. 
 
 The first simple fact which I have asked you to 
 recognise is, then, this that the State, or totality 
 of citizens, as the representative of the nation, or 
 totality of natives, sees itself obliged to be an educator, 
 and that the modern State is everywhere awakening to 
 the obligation, and is setting up schools as its instru- 
 ments of national education. But the States are here 
 confronted with that other fact which we Church folk 
 cannot forget, and which no modern State can afford to 
 ignore, namely, the assertion of Christendom that God 
 has already provided humanity, nations, parishes, and 
 consciences with an authoritative and universal edu- 
 cator. Here is a society whose apology for its presence 
 in the nations and communes is that God has said to it, 
 "Go, Teach." For nearly 1900 years the bishops and 
 clergy of Christ's universal-human fellowship have been 
 claiming a title from God to be the educators of nations 
 and persons. Look at the Charter of the Church. 
 Jesus Christ commissioned His apostles to teach and 
 to ordain and send forth others to teach " all nations " 
 and " every creature." 
 
 Has God appointed two rival educators? It cannot 
 be any part of His will that the Church and the State, 
 the universal-human society and the national society, 
 should be enemies, for He is as really the Founder of 
 the State, as the Old Testament shows us, as He is the 
 Founder of the Church. Is, then, the State to educate 
 boys and girls for this world, and the Church to educate 
 them for some other world ? That was not the doctrine 
 of the Apostle of the States or Nations. You know 
 how great a part of his own educational letters to 
 various Churches is taken up with the enforcement of 
 the duties of masters and servants, of husbands and
 
 CHURCH AND COMMONWEALTH 153 
 
 wives, of parents and children, of rulers and ruled, of 
 neighbours, of friends and foes relationships which 
 belong to this world and are the cause of so much of 
 the business of every State. The Church is obliged by 
 her nature to seek concurrence with the State and the 
 parish, as she has already sought to concur with the 
 family, in the education of every boy and girl. 
 
 Yet it is exactly at this point that the great difficulty 
 begins. A State may be willing, even may be anxious, 
 to utilise the claims of the Church to be the teacher of 
 all nations and every creature. But if a State asks, 
 " What and where is the Church ? " it sees a score 
 of rival societies start up and claim the title, each for 
 itself, of being the true Church of Christ. How is the 
 State to discover which of all these claimants is properly 
 the Church? 
 
 Although this is a difficulty which does not occur to 
 you and me, or one which we think we have solved, we 
 must not ignore that the modern State cannot be 
 satisfied with our answer. To us the Church is an 
 organic reality, founded not upon opinion, but upon 
 the actual constitution of mankind into nations, com- 
 munes, families, and persons the whole of which the 
 Son of God sums up in Himself, and represents as our 
 Second Adam, the Head of every man. The business 
 of the State is the maintaining of justice or righteous- 
 ness. It is bound to show no favour to men on the 
 ground that they are Churchmen or clergymen, but to 
 deal equal justice to those who are without and those 
 who are within the Church. Indeed, the State, by its 
 very nature, does not know men as Christian men, but 
 simply as natives and as citizens. Meanwhile the 
 Church can never retreat from her position that she 
 is an educator by her very being, and that " all 
 nations " and " every creature " are indicated to her
 
 154 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 by God as her proper scholars. A bishop abuses the 
 gift of consecration, a priest or deacon abuses the gift 
 of ordination, a layman abuses the gifts of baptism and 
 confirmation, each ignores his share of the universal 
 priesthood, unless he is taking care, in one way or 
 another, to be always and everywhere a teacher. By 
 our admission into the Church we are all pledged to do 
 some part of the education of the family, the parish, the 
 nation, and the race into which the Father has incor- 
 porated us. For the Church is His witness what each 
 of these social organisms properly is. This educating 
 obligation is a fortiori true of the clergy of the Church. 
 If we were to renounce our claim of being the God-sent 
 educators of " all nations " and of " every creature," we 
 should violate the law of our existence, and gainsay the 
 reason of our calling. It would be less unfaithful, less 
 of an apostasy from Christ, for the Church to cease 
 meeting publicly for the common worship of God than 
 for her to cease in her activity as the obligatory 
 educator of all nations and every creature. Hence, 
 though the State becomes an educator, though it sets 
 schools in every commune, though it insists that every 
 native shall be taught in one or other of these State 
 schools, though it should in time to come prohibit the 
 Church from setting up any rival schools the bishops 
 and priests of the Catholic Church will still remain, and 
 still be bound practically to assert that they are the 
 rightful and divinely commissioned teachers of mankind, 
 nations, families, and consciences. Every bishop and 
 priest of the Church of Christ has a patent of teaching, 
 a sacred order and apostolical licence to educate, which 
 the State did not give, and which it can neither limit nor 
 take away.
 
 CHURCH AND COMMONWEALTH 155 
 
 III. 
 
 This apparent competition between the Church and 
 the Commonwealth as teachers leads me to remind you 
 of the importance of a third fact which we all acknow- 
 ledge, namely, that schooling is one thing, but education 
 another thing. As the State is everywhere appropriating 
 the schooling of the young as one of its functions, and 
 rightly as I think ; as the Church, and especially the 
 episcopate and priesthood, can never retreat from the 
 position Christ has indicated as obligatory towards 
 all nations and every creature, and may hereafter have 
 no schools (except schools for the clergy), the old 
 distinction between schooling and education assumes 
 a new political and ecclesiastical signification. Edu- 
 cation is far older than schooling ; it is the mother 
 of schooling ; it is practicable without schools : it may 
 even attain to a very rich development without schools. 
 I have talked with educated men who could neither read 
 nor write. I have talked with men who have obtained 
 an academical patent of some sort, but who nevertheless 
 could not be said, in the full Christian sense of the term, 
 to be possessed of much education. Schooling, how- 
 ever rich and full its contents may be, is never in 
 itself education, though it may be made a noble 
 instrument of it. The Eternal Wisdom founded a 
 Church, and not a school. When Jesus sent forth an 
 apostolic clergy to the nations, He joined something 
 with teaching : He joined together teaching and bap- 
 tizing ; and it is from baptism that I learn what 
 education rightly is. Education is a recognition, an 
 awakening, and a cultivating in " every creature " of 
 that childhood to God and brotherhood to every man 
 which is the central truth of his being. Or to put a 
 truth which we have learned from the Catholic theology
 
 156 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 into terms which are not theological Education is the 
 bringing forth in each boy and girl of that common and 
 equalising humanity which is the bond uniting man to 
 man, nation to nation, class to class, generation to 
 generation. It is certain that this education, helpful as 
 schools are to it, can be conducted without schools. 
 
 The Church in the apostolic age, though she gave a 
 common education to men of the most diverse nations 
 and classes Jews, Romans, Greeks, rich and poor, 
 slaves and free men possessed no schools. The clergy 
 of England during the last half-century in which the 
 masses of the people, though they have not ceased to 
 belong to the Church, have so largely ceased to take 
 part in the public worship of their parishes has pos- 
 sessed the schooling of the majority of them. The 
 nation and clergy have day-schooled and Sunday- 
 schooled the millions ; but have they educated one in 
 twenty of them ? No priest can be said to have taught 
 the alphabet of an ecclesiastical education unless he has 
 taught the children that their confirmation binds them 
 to be the Church, and not merely to go to the building 
 called the church, and that to be the Church involves as 
 much as to be the State or Commonwealth that is, to 
 exercise the duties and rights of a free man or elector 
 in the society. It is not only the disastrous wave of 
 Puritanism and its unchurching doctrine of " election " 
 of the few in the seventeenth century, nor the disastrous 
 wave of Methodism and its unchanging doctrine of 
 " conversion " in the eighteenth century, by which the 
 many have lost the sense and the use of their incorpora- 
 tion by baptism into the Kingdom of Christ. It is 
 rather that the education given by the national clergy 
 has not been so deep or so full, for very explicable 
 reasons, as the education given by statesmen has been. 
 Englishmen would be indignant nowadays if a patron
 
 CHURCH AND COMMONWEALTH 157 
 
 duke or banker were to appoint whom he pleased to 
 serve as their minister in Parliament ; but they still 
 continue so wretchedly uneducated as to feel no indig- 
 nation at the far greater scandal that a patron can 
 appoint whom he pleases to serve them as their minister 
 in the congregation of the Lord. 
 
 Fifty years hence, in every thoroughly civilised and 
 progressive State, the clergy will possess no schools. 
 The schools, in which the children of the rich and the 
 poor will sit side by side, will have become exclusively 
 a province of the State and the communes. Yet that 
 will be no reason why the bishops and priests of the 
 Educator of the world, fifty years hence, may not be 
 much more effectual teachers of the nations and edu- 
 cators of consciences than they now are, or have ever 
 yet been. The priest's lips should keep knowledge. 
 His function in the national order is permanent ; it is 
 not, like that of the prophet, exceptional and accidental. 
 The keeper of knowledge of that knowledge which 
 men need to know, but which the worse self in them 
 wants not to know, as well as the knowledge which 
 they want to know must be the teacher of teachers, 
 the teacher of father and mother, the teacher of school- 
 masters, the teacher of citizens, the teacher of statesmen 
 though not their teacher in those disciplines which 
 they understand far better than he does. The Church 
 is properly the educator of educators. She has no 
 more direct function to educate a boy than to educate 
 an old man. Neither is it any more the Church's duty 
 to keep a school for the workman's sons than for the 
 duke's daughters. The rich who go regularly to Church 
 have departed, at least as widely, from the social 
 doctrine of Jesus Christ as the poor have, who have 
 ceased to be Church-goers. The social doctrines of 
 Jesus are so contrary to the precepts of Caste and
 
 158 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Mammon, that we ask God to-day in the collect to 
 "make us," after St. John Baptist's example, "con- 
 stantly to speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and 
 patiently suffer for the truth's sake, through Jesus Christ 
 our Lord." 
 
 If the national bishops and priests are true, bold, and 
 patient in their educational calling, the Church will not 
 lose ,but will gain, and will become more fully the 
 educator of the nation, by having no schools which she 
 can call exclusively her own, and into which she can get 
 some of the children. For it is not in the charter which 
 Christ has given us that we should insist on merely 
 teaching some, as we should do if we set up schools in 
 rivalry to the schools of the Commonwealth, and private 
 and so-called voluntary schools over against the public 
 schools. " Nations," according to Christ's charter, are 
 the schools of His apostles ; and " every creature," 
 according to another reading of that charter, is the 
 scholar of the Church. To claim a few, instead of 
 claiming all, is to set up a new kind of Calvinism. It 
 is as absurd and wrongful a nomenclature to put the 
 name of " Church " schools upon clerical or clericalist 
 schools, as it is to call our aristocratic and capitalist 
 secondary schools, like Eton or Harrow, "public" 
 schools. No school is a public school, unless, like that 
 schooling of which the sacrament of baptism is the 
 A B C, it is open freely to "the public," to man as 
 man, not as the member of a birth- or a purse-caste. 
 Nothing is of the Church unless it is for all. Nor is 
 a school a " Church " school, a school of the universal- 
 human society, unless it teaches what every clergyman 
 is obliged to teach by Baptism often in spite of his 
 own social prejudices and superstition that Jesus 
 Christ, who is educating all men by His common 
 Spirit, is no respecter of persons or classes. No school
 
 CHURCH AND COMMONWEALTH 159 
 
 can really be a " Church " school until the children of 
 rich and poor are taught side by side in it the same 
 social and humane doctrine as they are taught by the 
 sacrament which brings them alike into the Church. 
 
 True it is that the clergy have been for many ages 
 not only the educators of the nation, but have possessed 
 and used schools as instruments of education. Hence 
 it may seem hard that they should now be forced, by 
 the processes of Christ's world-government, to give up 
 their schools, and to fulfil by other methods their per- 
 manent office as the educators of the nations. But 
 what the Lord is now doing will surely seem less hard 
 to us if we will but recollect that it is a mere accident in 
 the Church's history, that it is only by an exceptional 
 act of His providence, that His Church became and con- 
 tinues partially to be a keeper of any schools save such 
 as are for the particular education of the clergy. The 
 Church, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has said, is a society 
 for the promotion of all good. It is the society which 
 not only holds forth the ideal of all other societies, but 
 which supplements their defects. If in any time or 
 place the Church sees some good work undone through 
 the proper doers neglecting to do it, it is her business to 
 set about doing it as well as she can, until the work is 
 taken up by those whose proper function it is. This is 
 why the clergy have taught not only the gospel, which 
 they are permanently bound to teach, but have also 
 taught mathematics, history, geography, reading, writing, 
 summing, drawing, needlework, and all sorts of things 
 which do belong to their province as the educators of 
 the nations. On the same ground, in the Middle Ages, 
 it was the Church which provided the nations of Europe 
 with painters, architects, sculptors, musicians, philoso- 
 phers, scientists, and all the ministries of culture and 
 manners. On the same ground the Church became the
 
 160 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 reliever of the poor, the registrar of such census as there 
 was, and the parish priest often officiated as the secular 
 head of the local commune. 
 
 But a time comes in the providence of Him to whom 
 all authority is given in heaven and on earth, who is 
 head over all things to His Church, when these non- 
 ecclesiastical functions of the ministers of His Word and 
 sacraments and greatly by reason of the unperceived 
 educating influence of His Church upon the nations 
 are claimed by those to whom they properly belong. 
 So it has been with painting, architecture, music, science, 
 poor-relief, registration, and secular office. So it must 
 now be with schooling. All increase of the sense of 
 obligation to the whole in State and Commune, all 
 growth of conscientiousness in the society or the indi- 
 vidual, ought to be recognised and joyfully welcomed 
 by the Christian reason as a product of that one and 
 the same manifold grace of God which called him out of 
 darkness into light, and from self-seeking to duty to his 
 neighbour.
 
 THE COMMON SALVATION AND SCHEMES 
 OF SALVATION ' 
 
 " Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, 
 that every one of them may take a little." ST. JOHN vi. 7. 
 (Holy Gospel for Trinity XXV.) 
 
 IN to-day's Gospel, which is also the Gospel for 
 mid-Lent Sunday, the Lord reveals Himself as the 
 economical Reformer, as the Saviour of the bodies of 
 men, as that " King" whose manifestation in this world 
 the prophet foretells in to-day's Epistle, " A King shall 
 reign, and prosper, and execute judgment and justice in 
 the earth. In His day Judah shall be saved, and Israel 
 shall dwell safely ; and this is His name whereby He 
 shall be called, the Lord our Righteousness." It is an 
 especially seasonable Gospel in this particular year. It 
 is being read at every parish altar in the nation, at every 
 centre where the local community is called to the 
 " Common Prayer," during a week in which a great- 
 hearted and astute sect-founder, endowed with no mere 
 two hundred pennies, but with thousands of pounds, 
 and followed with the undiscerning laudations of the 
 rich, the mighty, and the noble of the world, is engaging 
 himself to do a miracle not unlike that which the Lord 
 did. What He did amongst the hungry by the power 
 of His Word and by the simple obedience of His twelve 
 
 November 23, 1890. 
 
 12 
 
 161
 
 162 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 chosen apostles, Mr. Booth promises to do by the power 
 of money, and by the work of his male and female 
 captains. A frightened world, or age, believes him, and 
 is pouring out its money at his feet. For, as Jesus said 
 to that age, in the discourse which precedes the miracle, 
 " I am come in My Father's name and ye receive Me 
 not If another shall come in his own name, him will 
 ye receive." 
 
 The contrasts between the Lord's salvation and Mr. 
 Booth's "scheme" of social salvation, I need not say, 
 are endless. The setting of some of these contrasts side 
 by side is no act of our choosing ; we see them forced 
 upon us by the Gospel and by the unthinking madness 
 and fashion of the world or age, which some days ago 
 followed Mr. Barnum, yesterday followed Mr. Stanley, 
 to-day follows Mr. Booth, and to-morrow will follow 
 another, pouring out its plaudits and its money upon its 
 temporary hero. Its heroes are in earnest, each in his 
 degree : but the world is not. The world must have 
 gigantic excitements, glaring advertisements, gorgeous 
 promises, and ambitious schemes, or else it will not 
 pause and attend. One day we run to Olympia to see 
 the biggest show ever puffed together ; another day we 
 hope that a new continent is opened for our Babylonish 
 competition and robbery ; another day we are fascinated 
 by a huge scheme for feeding and employing the victims 
 whom our Babylonish competition and robbery have 
 driven to starvation, forced idleness, prostitution, and 
 vagabondage. As we asked, "Have you seen Stanley?" 
 so we now ask, " Have you read Booth's book ? " But 
 now the excitement of fear and responsibility, the dread 
 of a great social catastrophe, and the conviction of guilt, 
 have laid hold upon us. We will gladly pay Mr. Booth 
 to rescue us, and to do our felt duties of brotherhood 
 and sisterhood by the proxies whom he has enlisted and
 
 THE COMMON SALVATION 163 
 
 commands, and whom he exhibits, in his highly coloured 
 picture, doing our duties as citizens and parishioners in 
 the military uniform of his sect. 
 
 He has two objects in view, first, a great social reform, 
 and next, as the means to it, an endowment of his own 
 Salvation Army. The most competent observers seem 
 to agree that it has failed most conspicuously in the 
 East End as a spiritual agency, but he thinks that it 
 may be made to succeed as a social agency. 
 
 1. The King who shall execute judgment and justice 
 in the earth is not an autocrat. 
 
 2. This King asks for no money ; He rather pours 
 contempt upon it, as an agent of salvation ; He uses 
 that which He finds, which the providence of the Father 
 and the diligence of men have placed in His hands. 
 
 3. He has no new scheme and no new agents. He 
 does all that He does by the ministry of the apostles 
 whom He has chosen, ordained, and sent. I cannot 
 now attempt to speak at length even of these few 
 contrasts, but I shall say a little upon two of them 
 autocracy, and the demand for money. 
 
 I. 
 
 " When Jesus then lifted up His eyes and saw a great 
 company come unto Him, He saith unto Philip, Whence 
 shall we buy bread that these may eat ? " He said 
 " We." 
 
 He did not autocratically say, as if God and men 
 could be separable in the work of saving love, " Whence 
 shall / buy bread ? " 
 
 Whence shall we buy bread? First, the Saviour 
 implies that the hungry have by their very hunger a 
 right to daily bread ; He repeated the doctrine which 
 He had already taught His apostles in the prayer which
 
 164 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 He had given them. Next He implies that the 
 obligation of care for the feeding of the hungry is 
 binding upon the whole society of which He is the 
 Head and we are the members. There is one body, and 
 one spirit. The apostles are to ask, as an apostle after- 
 wards did : " Who shall separate us from the love of 
 Christ ? " not only from that love which He has for us, 
 but from that love which He would show by us. The 
 King who shall execute judgment and justice on the 
 earth is not a beneficent emperor, pope, generalissimo, 
 or autocrat, who holds a place, so to speak, outside and 
 above the multitude. He first humbles Himself that 
 they may know Him to be their King and Prophet ; 
 He hungers that He may feed the multitude ; He 
 makes Himself poor that He may make the multitude 
 rich. " So He was their Saviour. In all their afflictions 
 He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence served 
 them " (Isa. xliii. 8, 9). Then He calls upon His 
 apostles and disciples to be one with Him by taking up 
 their cross and following Him. 
 
 The Church has learned, as she shows in the Creeds, 
 how it is theologically true that Jesus, when He acts 
 thus for the whole multitude, does not use the autocratic 
 " I," but implies that we all are in Him, and so are con- 
 naturally partners and co-agents with Him and He with 
 us, in the work of saving men. He is not a Son of God, 
 as the heathen heroes and demi-gods were thought to 
 be. He is the Son. You and I, and all the sons and 
 daughters of mankind, are included in Him ; so that in 
 every one of us there is a part of that childhood to God, 
 that real kinship to the Eternal One, the whole of which 
 sonship and kinship is summed up in Him and mani- 
 fested in Him, and represented by Him. He is that 
 true light who is enlightening every man who comes 
 into the world. He would have us know that He is in
 
 THE COMMON SALVATION 165 
 
 us ; therefore He says to us, " We." He is the " Christ 
 in all men," and " the Saviour of all men." He would 
 have us believe that He is the Christ in us, and that He 
 saves any man whom we help to save. " Neither is 
 there salvation in any other," said one who helped Him 
 in this saving of the multitude, " for there is no other 
 name under heaven given among men, whereby we may 
 be saved," and therefore He says to us, " We." This is 
 why the Church sings in the Quicunque Vult, the 
 Athanasian psalm, that the Son of God is " One ; not 
 by conversion of the Godhead into flesh : but by taking 
 of the Manhood" that is, the taking of you, and me, 
 and every human being without exception " into God ; 
 One altogether : not by confusion of Substance : but by 
 unity of Person. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is 
 one man : so God and Man is one Christ." Therefore 
 He says to us, What shall " we " do for the saving of the 
 multitude ? When Jesus lifts up His eyes, and sees a 
 company faint, hungry, driven by the robberies of Caste 
 and Mammon into despair and vagabondage, He also 
 sees and feels Himself in them. He is as really one 
 with the multitude as He is one with the apostolate. If 
 He teaches, feeds, and saves by the hands of His 
 apostles, He also hungers for knowledge, bread and 
 salvation in the souls of the people to whom He sends 
 them. He would have us see Him in all the faint, 
 hungry, oppressed, and despairing social outcasts. It is 
 part of His education of His apostles and of His Church 
 to make them understand their unity with all the 
 hungry in Him, to have the " fellowship of His suffer- 
 ings." We are not to think that He speaks in a mere 
 figure, but we are to believe that He reveals the whole 
 truth about humanity, when He says, " Inasmuch as ye 
 did it unto ' these,' or did it not unto ' these,' ye did it, 
 or did it not, unto Me." So He says to us " Whence
 
 166 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 shall we buy bread that these " our fellow-members of 
 the one body " shall eat ? " And this He says to-day 
 to us, as to His Apostle Philip, " to prove " us, to draw 
 forth and educate His own seed of salvation within us. 
 
 So in the real Saviour of Society there is nothing of 
 the autocrat. His salvation, as His apostle says, is 
 " the Common Salvation." He worketh in us both to 
 will and to do. He saves and reigns by our own free 
 will. He governs men through the will which His spirit 
 has first made free. Without liberty there can be no 
 salvation. Jesus can save because He does not " utterly 
 refuse to have any committee, or any interference what- 
 ever from the outside." He does not say, like a Caesar- 
 saviour, or a Napoleon-saviour, " Leave everything to 
 me : I can and will do nothing if any partners are thrust 
 upon me : all you have to do is to find me a prodigious 
 quantity of money, and /will ' buy bread that these may 
 eat.' " The true Saviour encourages us to question. 
 He provoked His apostles again and again, as we see 
 throughout the Gospels, to reason and ask Him questions. 
 
 II. 
 
 The next characteristic of the true Saviour's salvation 
 is the rejection of money, nay, the deliberate scorn and 
 expulsion of the purse and cheque-book, by which it is 
 preceded. First, to "prove" or educate His apostles, 
 He shows that He knows them. He asks the very 
 question aloud which He knew the old Adam, the carnal 
 and wicked nature in them, to be already silently and 
 inwardly asking. How can we get means " sufficient," 
 money enough, to abolish the gigantic want, hunger, 
 and misery in this social wilderness ? It has often been 
 our question. What has crowded the world with these 
 starvelings, tramps, drunkards, vagabonds, and harlots ?
 
 THE COMMON SALVATION 167 
 
 Is it not the sheer want of money? Dives is pious, 
 respectable, well-fed, properly clothed, has a roof over his 
 head, his sons feel no anxiety about their bread, his 
 daughters are married. Take away his money and he 
 would soon be also a hungry, houseless tramp, and his 
 daughters sink to the level of their moneyless sisters. 
 How plain it seems that it is not the reign of the Word 
 and Spirit of Christ Jesus, but simply more money that 
 is wanted in order to " execute judgment and justice in 
 the earth." How plain it seems that if the rich would 
 but give to some capable saviour " sufficient " money, 
 then London "might be saved," and England might 
 "dwell safely." 
 
 How truly the Lord had reached the thought of the 
 natural man in the apostle is clear from the apostle's 
 answer. " Philip answered Him, Two hundred penny- 
 worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of 
 them may take a little." We have not money enough to 
 save them. The apostle had forgotten that contrast 
 between the two rival kings, the two rival kingdoms, and 
 the two rival subjections, which the Saviour had shown 
 them in His first sermon. He then told them that if they 
 were to serve the Father, Him who is the daily Giver of 
 daily bread to the whole human family, they must first 
 cast off the service of Mammon. He warned them that 
 they could not save the nations by bank-notes. By the 
 Father's will, "as it is done in heaven," there is and 
 cannot but be certainty and sufficiency of bread in the 
 earth for every one who needs. So wherever and when- 
 ever the Son sets up His Kingdom in its fulness in the 
 earth, there and then (as this miracle shows) there is 
 immediate sufficiency of bread for all the hungry, 
 and more than sufficiency. Where Mammon's kingdom 
 is still in possession, and men and women are subjects to 
 it, there can only be certainty, and sufficiency of daily
 
 168 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 bread for the rich and the competent. All the rest 
 must depend for their bread, in a nearer or more remote 
 degree, upon the will of the landlord and the money-lord. 
 The one has appropriated, or inherited the appropriation, 
 of the land which is the only source of bread for all, and 
 which God has given to all, " to the children of men." 
 The landlord says to the hungry, whose commons he 
 has enclosed by laws made by those who have more than 
 sufficiency of bread, " Get off my land. I want it for a 
 park, or for a hunting-ground, or for a number of new 
 streets ; I will not have it ploughed and sown. Go 
 across the sea to some other land ; go into the towns, 
 and ask the money-lords for work." The money-lord 
 can say, " I have no work to give you ; my business is 
 bad ; I am overstocked. I must cut down your wages ; 
 if you cannot live upon them, there are hundreds out- 
 side who will gladly take your place." Contrast with 
 this the last words of the prophet in the Epistle, so 
 eucharistical and evangelical, " And they shall dwell in 
 their own land." When and where that true King 
 reigns and executes judgment and justice in the earth, 
 then and there the poor are fed, and therefore He says, 
 " Distribute it yourself. You must join the Army, and 
 not pay its General to find proxies to do your fighting, 
 and to receive the blows which ought to fall upon you." 
 " With what glad hearts and clear consciences might 
 noblemen go to rest," said Bishop Latimer to the 
 thievish Tudor Court, " when they had bestowed the 
 day in hearing Christ complain in His members, and in 
 redressing their wrongs." 
 
 III. 
 
 The Author of "the common salvation," which the 
 rich and the poor alike need, asks of us, and asks within 
 us, "What shall 'we' give that the hungry and the
 
 THE COMMON SALVATION 169 
 
 oppressed may be saved ? " We give nothing, He tells 
 us, although we subscribe thousands, until we give our- 
 selves. We give ourselves only by giving up all our 
 powers, and giving up reputation, honour, autocracy, self- 
 confidence, lust for leadership and dictation to others, 
 vanity and self-satisfaction in our own schemes. The 
 first requisite of every saviour of the wretched is 
 obedience. A man who says, like a Caesar or a Pope, 
 that the first requisite of his scheme of salvation is that 
 he shall and must be the one absolute commander, who 
 substitutes his own " I " for the Saviour's "We," can never 
 so reign as to execute judgment and justice in the earth. 
 The King who must reign, the true Saviour and 
 Leader, " though He were a Son," says the apostolic 
 writer to the Hebrews, "yet learned He obedience by 
 the things which He suffered, and being made perfect, 
 He became the author of eternal salvation unto all them 
 that obey Him ; called of God a High Priest after the 
 order of Melchizedek." I doubt, though you may not 
 share the doubt, whether a man fully obeys Christ so 
 long as he refuses to acknowledge Christ's apostles. 
 So St. Paul taught': so St. John taught : and the Lord 
 Himself said " He that heareth you heareth Me ; and he 
 that despiseth you despiseth Me." The pope of this new 
 international sect, like the Pope of Rome, may hold that 
 the Bishops of the English nation are no successors of 
 Christ's apostles, and in that case he does right in 
 ignoring their office. But if he so thinks of them he 
 ought plainly to say so, and not ask them to give him 
 money to endow his army. 
 
 The true Saviour is no " Separatist." Under His reign 
 " Judah shall be saved," the nation and not some natives 
 of it, " and Israel shall dwell safely." He by his birth 
 confessed fellowship with the whole of humanity, all who 
 are born. So by His circumcision He confessed fellow-
 
 170 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 ship with the entirety of His own nation. He set up 
 no new sect, and no new temple of His own invention. 
 He owned and purged from the robbers the national 
 and established House of His heavenly Father, and 
 claimed it as the house of common prayer for all nations. 
 As He used their loaves and would not turn the stones 
 of the wilderness into bread : so, as He said to the High 
 Priest, " I ever taught in the Synagogues and in the 
 Temple." He set up no separatist " barracks." His 
 Church was not one more addition to the world's sects, 
 it was the extension of the Kingdom of His father 
 David over every people, and made " Jerusalem a praise 
 in the earth," and has caused her " to be called by a new 
 name, which the mouth of the Lord shall name " the 
 kingdom of Jesus, the Holy Church throughout all the 
 world. 
 
 The " King " of whom the Epistle speaks has enlisted 
 and enrolled His own Army of Salvation, and sent His 
 apostles to " all nations " to call upon " every creature " 
 to take up his or her place in its ranks. Mr. Booth's 
 " Salvation Army " is a noble conception, but a limited 
 one, and its majors and captains (and privates, if there 
 are any) are enlisted and constituted after a wholly 
 different plan. It is a separatist, not a common army. 
 It is the latest English evolution of the Moravian- 
 Methodist conception that the life of religion begins in 
 an emotion towards God, and is marked by the 
 instantaneous flight from the terror of hell to the 
 assurance of heaven. It has this improvement upon the 
 older evolutions of Methodism, that its commander at 
 once sets all his converts upon work of some kind and 
 does not allow them to be mere religionists, lost in cares 
 about their own souls. But the army of Jesus has its 
 origin in the universal relation of mankind to God. 
 Most of us were unconscious babes when we were sworn
 
 THE COMMON SALVATION 171 
 
 into His sacramental host and were engaged, as the 
 Common Office for Baptism says, " manfully to fight 
 under His banner against sin, the world, and the devil ; 
 and to continue Christ's faithful servant and soldier unto 
 our life's end." We were not enlisted and enrolled in the 
 Common Saviour's Army because we felt an exceptional 
 emotion, or had an exceptional conviction concerning 
 ourselves, at some hot and noisy meeting amidst the 
 unwholesome glare of gas and blast of trumpets, and 
 thereby became spiritual aristocrats, entitled to look on 
 our fellow-men as a lower caste of outsiders, we being 
 " in the Blood " and they outside. But we were enlisted 
 as soldiers of the Son of Man because we were common 
 babes, vulgar children, such as He said were the con- 
 natural citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, exactly 
 like all our fellows who were not baptized, not enlisted, 
 but who equally with us have within them the new and 
 better manhood which is the seed and birth of God, the 
 kinsman of Christ, and the inheritor of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven.
 
 THE HEAVEN FROM WHENCE WE EXPECT 
 THE SAVIOUR OF OUR BODY i 
 
 " Who mind earthly things : For our conversation is in 
 heaven ; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body." PHIL. iii. 19, 20. 
 
 ON Sunday last we looked at some of the contrasts 
 which are forced upon every thoughtful observer 
 by the juxtaposition of Christ's acts of bodily salvation 
 over against these costly paper-schemes of salvation 
 which are advertised by the religious world. St. Paul's 
 words in the text set before us the chief of these con- 
 trasts : Our minding of earthly things is opposed to our 
 looking to that heavenly commonwealth in which the 
 Saviour is, and is always ready to be revealed. The 
 words occurred in the Eucharistic Epistle two Sundays 
 ago, but they are fit for Advent Sunday, because they 
 turn our thoughts to the appearing of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ to change our vile body, both individual and 
 social, that it may be made like unto His glorious Body. 
 This is Christ's " scheme," says St. Paul (meta- 
 schematisei). 
 
 Those " who mind earthly things " are not merely 
 persons outside Christendom, whom we may please 
 pharisaically to label as " the worldly." The apostle 
 was writing to a Church. He tells the Christians of 
 
 1 Advent Sunday, November 30, 1890. 
 172
 
 THE SAVIOUR OF OUR BODY 173 
 
 Philippi plainly that those whose conduct made him 
 weep as he wrote, and whom he so indignantly describes 
 as those " whose god is their belly, whose glory is in 
 their shame, who mind earthly things," were not such 
 persons as the religious world calls worldly men and 
 women, unconverted, or unbelievers, but that they were 
 Christians who had already made the profession that 
 "our citizenship is in heaven." The most humane of 
 our English novelists has shown us how his own belly 
 may be much more the god of a man who runs about 
 from tea-meeting to tea-meeting than of the honest, 
 vulgar inn-keeper and his guests. 
 
 I. 
 
 There is doubtless for our age and nation a somewhat 
 unseasonable tone in St. Paul's words. The contrast 
 between earthly things and heaven is out of fashion. It 
 is so contrary to the loudest cries of the Zeitgeist^ the 
 spirit of the age or world that now is, that only the 
 simple or the thoughtful are likely to make it. Every- 
 where we hear men saying, apostolic men as well as 
 others, if indeed they were not the first to say it : " We 
 must mind earthly things ; our citizenship may or may 
 not be in heaven ; we have preached too much about a 
 citizenship which is not knowable by the senses ; the 
 duty nearest to us is to procure for the great mass and 
 majority of mankind a more happy and hopeful citizen- 
 ship here upon earth." This was first said by Maurice, 
 who was persecuted and cast out for saying it. Many 
 who now so glibly repeat it, and would pervert it to the 
 building up of their own Babylons, are the children of 
 those who persecuted and cast out the prophets. 
 
 The " time-spirit " is nowhere more clearly discernible 
 in any age than in the formation of new sects. They 
 are its own products, and peculiarly exhibit what is best
 
 174 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 and what is worst in an age. The Church is the social 
 organ and expression of the mind of the eternal and 
 universal Spirit " unto whom," says our apostle, is 
 "glory in the Church by Christ Jesus throughout all 
 ages, world without end." Therefore in each age the 
 Church is witnessing to much which that particular age 
 thinks untimely, or proper enough for the past, or 
 possibly proper enough for the future. If the Church 
 be Catholic in time, as well as in place, it cannot be 
 otherwise. A sect, on the contrary, is one of the organs 
 and expressions of the transient and limited views of 
 that age in which it separates its adherents from the 
 universal-humane christened fellowship in the parish, 
 the nation, and the human-kind the Catholic Church. 
 An exact historical physiology of the sects would 
 demonstrate the particular contribution of the age-spirit, 
 the secular spirit, to every sect. An age imparts to its 
 sects a character which they would not have had if they 
 had separated from the Church in any earlier or latter 
 age. Thus it would have been impossible for Presby- 
 terianism, or Independency or Anabaptism, to have 
 arisen out of our age, or come to any vigorous growth in 
 it, because the thoughts and cares of the time are not 
 now directed, as they were in the sixteenth and seven- 
 teenth centuries, towards the realisation of a perfect 
 visible Church on earth, which shall contain no one who 
 is not a " saint." A new sect, if it is to thrive, must 
 catch and embody a quantity of the floating convictions, 
 opinions, and usages of its age, both good and bad. Its 
 inclusion of these gives strength to it while the age lasts, 
 but they become a source of weakness and decay within 
 it when a new age or world, with other thoughts and 
 other wants, confronts the sect, and then men fall off 
 from it to a newer sect, or to unbelief, or return to " the 
 mother of us all."
 
 THE SAVIOUR OF OUR BODY 175 
 
 There is no need to illustrate this truth by the history 
 of the sects which have already perished, or of those 
 which are now kept in a show of life by scarcely any- 
 thing but organisation, party-zeal, attractive preachers, 
 heredity, and money. We see it in that sect which is at 
 present the temporary idol of the religious and monetary 
 worlds, and is being so strangely bedaubed with un- 
 discerning praise by newspaper-men, by self-called 
 "practical" politicians and economists, by honest-hearted 
 lovers of their kind, and by the popularity hunters who 
 always follow a multitude to do evil, and therefore fail 
 of the insight or the bravery to criticise anything which 
 the noisy clamour of the moment is pleased to glorify. 
 The so-called " Salvation Army " which Mr. Booth has 
 enlisted, considered in itself and apart from the direction 
 along which he now promises to march it, is simply (as 
 I have already said) the latest English evolution of the 
 Moravian-Methodist-revivalist conception of religion as 
 an emotion towards God, and an instantaneous flight 
 from the terror of hell to the certain assurance of heaven. 
 " Every transient gleam of piety," said a wise and holy 
 critic, 1 " is concluded to be that flame in which the Holy 
 Ghost descended, and though it wants the main circum- 
 stance of resting on them, yet serves to personate the 
 Comforter." 
 
 It seems, upon the surface, to be the least of all 
 religious theories to " mind earthly things," even though 
 ever so innocent a use be made of the quality " earthly." 
 Nor had its astute founder, until a recent period in its 
 
 1 " Decay of Christian Piety," by the author of " The Whole 
 Duty of Man," 1665 (1672 ed. p. 153). Substitute the " Count " 
 (Zinzendorf) for the " General," and the descriptions of 
 Moravianism by the Rev. Thomas Green, 1755, may be read, 
 allowing for the difference of the two ages, as an exact description 
 of the " Salvation Army."
 
 176 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 history, any intention to divert the attention of his 
 captains from heaven to earth. But he has been forced, 
 by the character and demands of the age, to see that he 
 can only justify the continued separation of his captains 
 from Christ's whole Army of the baptized in the 
 parishes, in the fatherland, and in foreign nations, by 
 putting them upon secular service. He has been forced 
 to see that he can only ask the rich richly to endow his 
 sect or rather himself by devoting its supreme 
 attention to earthly things, by dressing it in a garment 
 of socialism, by finding some wholesome and thriving 
 social work for his officers to do. An "army" of 
 expensive officers cannot go on for a whole age beating 
 drums, blowing trumpets, enlisting recruits, and causing 
 its voice to be heard in the streets. So deeply has the 
 necessity of immediate social reform, and the fearful 
 looking for judgment in the shape of a social catas- 
 trophe, seized upon the mind of our age, that a sect is 
 now bound to be socialistic, or to be a failure. 
 
 II. 
 
 The autocratic English head of this new inter- 
 nationalist sect is not only appealing, as I was saying 
 last Sunday, to the age's faith in money as the worker 
 of miracles : he is appealing to the age's perception of 
 the need of a social revolution, to the age's terror of the 
 approach of a social catastrophe, and to the age's super- 
 stitious credulity in wholesale self-advertisers and 
 project-advertisers. The age, or world that now is, can- 
 not believe that the Saviour who shall bring forth judg- 
 ment on the nations, must be One who shall " not cry, 
 nor lift up, nor cause His voice to be heard in the 
 streets." Whatever is not big and loud, pretentious, 
 prodigal of promises, and tinctured with some quackery,
 
 THE SAVIOUR OF OUR BODY 177 
 
 it calls " theoretical " and " unpractical." It cannot 
 understand how " the Kingdom of Heaven is like to a 
 grain of mustard-seed, which indeed is the least of all 
 seeds " ; how the full power of it can only be given to a 
 " little flock " ; nor how the Church, the social organ of 
 the Kingdom, can begin in a small upper room. It 
 fancies the Kingdom of Heaven grows like the most 
 prodigious fungus, that its power can only be given to a 
 huge and clamorous multitude, and that a true Church 
 must hire nothing less than a hippodrome. Hence Mr. 
 Booth is asking those who have money to endow his 
 army, or rather himself, with colossal sums of gold and 
 silver, in order that he may experiment upon a costly 
 and elaborate scheme for the extirpation, or rather the 
 modification, of some of the evils of pauperism, or Mam- 
 mon's long tyranny over Christ's poor. He does not 
 propose to attack the tyrant. If he did, he would get a 
 prophet's, rather than a sect-leader's reward, and would 
 get few bank-notes. So mad is the age or world, that 
 he is sure to get the gold. Princes, bishops, archdeacons } 
 noblemen, merchants, theatre-managers, and popular 
 preachers, hasten to pour gold and silver at his feet. 
 Believe me, it is no pleasure to a quiet man to raise his 
 insignificant voice in discordance with their thunders of 
 applause. I have not felt free to waste time upon the 
 study of his scheme, which I am told is a conglomerate 
 plagiarism, like the degraded paste-and-scissors periodi- 
 cal " literature " of our age, from plans which others are 
 working, or schemes which others have originated. 
 Many years spent in the study of history have destroyed 
 my belief in all self-called " practical " men, and in all 
 schemes, except that scheme of God for all the ages, in 
 which we already live, and move, and have our being. 
 Hence, I have no inclination to make a detailed examin- 
 ation of the latest scheme. 
 
 13
 
 178 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 The one important thought for every Christian about 
 this scheme, as I said last week, is that its demand is 
 for "earthly things," of which money is the type and 
 chief. Its schemer cries " Money, money, money ! " 
 Money which is offered, or comes to us without the 
 foregoing demand of a material or spiritual highwayman, 
 is an oblation and a sacrifice ; and until money is out of 
 use will have its place in apostolic work. But in the 
 social disease the pursuit of money has been the original 
 seed of evil. I cannot think God will allow Mr. Booth, 
 or any one else, to cast out Beelzebub by the invocation 
 of Beelzebub, or Mammon by the help of Mammon. 
 These devils of despair, pauperism, oppression, vaga- 
 bondage, and harlotry, which he promises to cast out of 
 England if the rich will provide him with colossal riches, 
 are the necessary products of that very Mammon which 
 he is invoking, to which he is praying, and without 
 whose help he says he can do no such miracles. It is 
 not apostolic to be going all over England pursuing 
 riches, in order therewith to try and undo those very 
 evils which the pursuit of riches alone has done. " This 
 kind goeth not out " by riches. By the pursuit of riches 
 it enters in and dwells in our social body. How come 
 the streets and lanes of our city to be crowded with the 
 " submerged tenth " of paupers, harlots, and vagabonds ? 
 Because Mammon as Landlord has robbed them of their 
 own common lands to create estates for himself, driven 
 them despairingly into the towns to compete against 
 one another for the smallest wage which Mammon as 
 Capitalist will grant them. Has not the Lord raised up 
 prophets age after age to declare this truth to the rich ? 
 The sermons of our bishops and priests, from the 
 Reformation until the baleful victory of Puritanism over 
 Church and Commonwealth, and its suppression of 
 moral preaching in England, are full of that witness.
 
 THE SAVIOUR OF OUR BODY 179 
 
 We could cite Bishops Latimer, Scory, and Pilkington, 
 Doctors Some, Lever, Bernard, Gilpin, John Moore, 
 Henry Hammond and a hundred others. "There are 
 certain beggars," said an English priest (Dr. Robert 
 Some) in Elizabeth's reign, " who of purpose keep their 
 legs sore to get money by it. If they are justly misliked 
 who gain by their own sore legs, what deserve they to 
 be thought of who gain by other men's sore legs ? " 
 
 The undoubted good which Mr. Booth's captains have 
 here and there done, amidst the unconsidered evil which 
 they have done, and are doing, and are likely to do, 
 needs no emphasis. It is not wholesome for any of us 
 to be reminded incessantly of our own good works. 
 That they have never "reached," as the phrase is, the 
 intelligent among the poor, and cannot do so with their 
 doctrine, is evident on all sides. Whatever good they 
 have done seems to be due to the fact that they have 
 not had the riches which their " general " now asks for 
 them, but have been poor, and belonged to the poor. 
 It was the teaching of the Abbot Joachim and the 
 Minorite reformers that pauperism, with the social evils 
 it begets, is a giant far too powerful for so feeble a 
 dwarf as wealth to cope with. Poverty alone, as the 
 Saviour and His apostles proved and taught, has power 
 and nerve enough to cope successfully with such a 
 monster. " Your fight in the future," a venerable 
 American prelate is reported to have said to his clergy, 
 " will be with the front pew," that is, against the very 
 faith in money which has brought the Church and its 
 clergy into bondage, the poor into vagabondage, and 
 the existing divine "Scheme" of humane society into 
 anarchy. 
 
 You may set up a patent social factory for converting 
 the raw material of pauperism, vagabondage, and 
 harlotry into competent, orderly, and moral men and
 
 180 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 women ; but while you are busy on this, the Mammon 
 which has found the money for your factory does not 
 and will not cease to be as busy as ever in his own 
 factories, heaping up a hundred-fold denser mass of new 
 paupers, new vagabonds, and new harlots. 
 
 III. 
 
 The age, time, or world around us will not cease 
 telling us that we can do no great good without much 
 riches. " Fall down and worship me," says that world- 
 spirit, "and I will give you all the kingdoms of the 
 world " to save them. That in us which belongs to the 
 world, and is of the world, and is not of the Father, but 
 minds earthly things, listens with willing credulity. It 
 is only the new man within us which has ear to hear 
 and the heart to believe the hard counsel and word of 
 command which Jesus gives to those whom He sends 
 forth upon His battle for the redemption of their fellows. 
 <: And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto His 
 disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter 
 into the Kingdom of God ! " This explains the charge 
 which He gave to the Twelve whom He entrusted with 
 the keys of the Kingdom, and which He gave again, in 
 almost the same words, to the Seventy : " Provide 
 neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses." 
 " Preach, saying, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand ; 
 heal the sick, cleanse the leper, raise the dead, cast out 
 devils." 
 
 We see in the Acts of the Apostles how the first 
 soldiers of Christ understood and obeyed His command. 
 " Silver and gold have I none," said St. Peter to the sick 
 beggar, " but such as I have give I thee." What did 
 the apostle give him ? The Lord had not only told the 
 rich young man who wished to follow Him that he must
 
 THE SAVIOUR OF OUR BODY 181 
 
 first sell all that he had, and himself distribute to the 
 poor, and not by proxy, as an old man might do : but 
 He added that he should then have "treasure in heaven." 
 So He had said to the apostles, " Lay up for yourselves 
 treasures in heaven," where eternal health and whole- 
 ness are, where there is no wasting rust or destroying 
 moth. 
 
 St. Peter's treasure was in heaven, in that kingdom 
 which the apostles were to proclaim "at hand." St. 
 Peter's "citizenship," his "commonwealth," was where 
 St. Paul in the text says his also was, "in heaven." 
 That is, it was where Jesus Christ is, "whom," as St. 
 Peter said, in his sermon after the lame man's healing, 
 " the heavens must receive until the time of the resti- 
 tution of all things (and not simply of one lame beggar) 
 which God hath spoken by all His holy prophets since 
 the world began." The heaven which St. Paul contrasts 
 with "earthly things," and "from whence we (whether 
 apostles or lame men) look for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus 
 Christ, who shall change our vile body," is not future in 
 time, nor a long way off in space. Heaven lies all about 
 us, independent of time and space, and is where the 
 name and saving power of Jesus are, separate from us 
 only by a " veil." 
 
 St. Paul says emphatically that our citizenship or 
 commonwealth " is," not that it can be, may be, or here- 
 after will be, " in heaven." That " the Kingdom of 
 Heaven is at hand " was the first sentence of the 
 Gospel which the Lord commanded His apostles to 
 preach, the first article of the Christian tradition. The 
 heaven where the apostles' treasure and citizenship lay, 
 and where the lame beggar's power of walking proved 
 also to lie, was as near to the miserable man as were the 
 earthly things, his lameness and misery. 
 
 St. Peter's " gift " was the Lord's sign or miracle,
 
 182 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 showing how near our citizenship in heaven, and its 
 health, are to us men. " In the Name of Jesus Christ," 
 said St. Peter, " rise up and walk. And he took him by 
 the right hand, and lifted him up, and immediately," 
 heaven being so close at hand, " the feet and ankle- 
 bones received strength." Whence came that strength ? 
 Out of the heaven at hand, near to us, whence we look 
 for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, " who shall change 
 our vile body " (individual and social), " that it may be 
 fashioned like unto His glorious body." The miracle 
 which all the riches in the world cannot do, the poorest 
 man in the world, by the aid of science, or the fuller re- 
 velation of God's laws in nature, may some day approach 
 to doing. 
 
 It may be said, the apostles did not refuse silver and 
 gold. No, indeed. But they did not ask for it from all 
 sorts and conditions of men, caring not how it had been 
 gained. Neither did they promise, like the advertise- 
 ments of " the Salvation Army Building Association " 
 in Mr. Booth's War Cry, to give a good percentage 
 to those who endowed them with capital, engaging that 
 their investments should not only yield their earthly 
 things " four per cent," but also be used for extending 
 the Kingdom of " Mammon " ? No, the War Cry 
 amazingly says, " of Christ." When money was freely 
 offered to the apostles, they took it ; and then, not 
 " minding earthly things," those bold Christian politi- 
 cians used it for the immediate establishment of a 
 heavenly commonwealth upon the earth. 
 
 IV. 
 
 That apostolic socialism, that heavenly Jerusalem, 
 built up by Christ's apostles in the very streets and 
 houses of the Herodian and Pharisaic Jerusalem, you
 
 THE SAVIOUR OF OUR BODY 183 
 
 may say, soon fell. Yes, just as its King fell and was 
 crucified, died, and was buried to rise again from the 
 dead. That commonwealth has not perished ; it re- 
 turned to heaven, whence it came ; as St. Paul says, 
 it is in heaven, where mankind's King and Saviour is. 
 And, having once been manifested in the earth, as the 
 King was, it remains a possession for all ages, and will 
 never be forgotten so long as the world stands. But it 
 is not a mere memory ; there it is, as Christ is, expected 
 by all sufferers and all soldiers of righteousness to 
 appear again in " power and great glory " at the re- 
 stitution of all things. 
 
 Such was the use which the apostles made of the 
 money that was freely laid at their feet. Who can 
 imagine St. Peter saying, " Silver and gold have I none ; 
 but I will go to Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, the Pharisees, 
 and Sadducees, and beg or frighten them into giving 
 me a mountain of silver and gold, so that I may try 
 to heal every lame and wretched beggar in Jerusalem, 
 and divert from the city its coming judgment " ? The 
 apostles took what was freely offered, the willing obla- 
 tions forced upon them by those who had sold their 
 possessions and lands. They distributed it to the 
 whole Christian democracy ; they kept no autocratic 
 hand over it They called upon all the Christian people 
 to elect the distributors of it, so that it might serve all 
 as the common-wealth ; and they ordained those whom 
 the voice of the Holy Ghost, diffused through the whole 
 Church, elected as its ministers. 
 
 The apostolic refusal to be autocratic spenders of the 
 common wealth of the Church became one of the great 
 starting-points in the history of Christendom. Out of 
 it the Holy Spirit evolved and instituted for all ages 
 and all nations the sacred order of deacons. They now 
 serve as the Levites of the " High Priest after the order
 
 184 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 of Melchizedek," who is touched with the feeling of our 
 infirmities. 
 
 It is the express function of the deacons, as every 
 bishop in Christendom says to a deacon when ordaining 
 him, " To search for the sick, and poor, and impotent 
 people of the parish, to intimate their names, estates, 
 and places where they dwell unto the curate, that by 
 his exhortation they may be relieved with the alms 
 of the parishioners or others." It would not cost the 
 expenditure of one single penny for every deacon in 
 Christendom to begin so to fulfil his office. The earlier 
 Puritan sectaries had no craving for so wide a sphere as 
 a parish. They thought the parish too wide, as con- 
 taining the reprobate majority of parishioners as well as 
 the elect minority of " saints." Hence, they " gathered 
 churches," as they called it, out of the parish, and had 
 no desire that their churches should be big. But the 
 newer sectaries of the Moravian-Methodist evolution 
 complain that the parish is too small. "The world is 
 my parish," say they, with all the ambition of a Wesley, 
 but without his respect for the Church. " My preaching 
 powers, my organising gifts," says one after another 
 of these men, " are so great, that I cannot be content 
 with a narrow sphere ; I want a big chapel, a big hall, 
 big audiences." If you say, the deacons have failed to 
 do their work, what pledge have you that they would 
 have succeeded if they had been called " majors " or 
 " captains " ? Besides, our deacons are not elected by 
 the voice of the common Spirit in the whole local 
 Christian commonwealth, as the apostolic deacons were. 
 The ordination of our deacons is apostolic ; but their 
 call usually comes from merely one individual member 
 of the Church. How can we expect them rightly and 
 fully to execute their office, or even to understand it, 
 until the Church has her part restored to her in their call ?
 
 JESUS OVERCOMING THE TEMPTATION TO 
 POPULARITY * 
 
 THE "WESLEY CENTENARY" 
 
 "And Jesus went up into a mountain, and there He sat with 
 His disciples. . . . 
 
 " When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and 
 take Him by force, to make Him a king, He departed again into 
 a mountain Himself alone." ST. JOHN vi. 3 and 15. (Holy 
 Gospel for Lent IV.) 
 
 IF this mountain were mentioned only here, in St. 
 John's preface to the sign of the feeding, we should 
 hardly see its importance at this crisis in the life of 
 Jesus. St. John does not call it indefinitely " a moun- 
 tain," as our version does, but he twice calls it " the 
 mountain." It was some point in the heights above the 
 lake which Jesus first consecrated, and afterwards used 
 as a consecrated place. 
 
 I. 
 
 First, before the miracle of the feeding was wrought, 
 " Jesus went up into the mountain, and there He sat 
 with His disciples." He had chosen it as a place of 
 escape from the crush of the people and from the 
 dreadful temptation of popularity, as a seat of rest 
 and of quiet education of the future fathers of the 
 
 1 March 15, 1891. 
 185
 
 186 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Church, amidst whom He sat as Bishop in His pastoral 
 chair. It was the mother of the cathedrals, or mother 
 churches, of Christendom. When Jesus went up into 
 the mountain, He began in person an act of which 
 the building of our St. Paul's on the highest part of the 
 City of London, was a continuation by His Spirit. It 
 was from His cathedral throne, as the Bishop and pastor 
 of all souls and bodies, that He looked down upon the 
 thronging multitude, and taught His apostles to make 
 the questions of the bodily needs of the people a first 
 thought of their minds, as the fathers in God of the 
 hungry and of them that are out of the way. It was 
 from this mountain, and from the sacred synod He had 
 held there, that He descended to feed the crowd. 
 
 Secondly, after the miracle of the feeding, " He 
 departed again," says St. John, " into the mountain." I 
 do not know how the I5th verse, which records this 
 second ascent of the Lord into the sacred height, came 
 to be omitted from the Eucharistic mid-Lent Gospel of 
 the English Church. As St. John rounds off the episode 
 of the feeding with such harmonious completeness, by 
 showing that this work of the Saviour ended, so to 
 speak, where it had begun, I was led to examine 
 the mid-Lent Gospel in other National Churches of 
 Western Europe, to see if they also omitted it, and 
 I found that they include, as a part of the Latare 
 Gospel, the verse which relates the second retreat of 
 Jesus into this same hill of the Lord. 
 
 For the second verse in our text is as certainly 
 the epilogue of this history, as the first verse in our 
 text is the prologue of it. When the satisfied crowds 
 enthusiastically cried out, "This is of a truth that 
 prophet that should come into the world," Jesus found 
 Himself submerged in even a more terrible popularity 
 than that from which He had so lately fled. He saw
 
 JESUS OVERCOMING TEMPTATION 187 
 
 that the hungry and needy, of whom the kingdoms 
 and republics of this world take so little count, had 
 already in their hearts and imaginations elected Him as 
 their king, and that they were meaning to establish 
 an autocracy for Him by force. It was then, at this 
 crisis in His life, "when Jesus therefore perceived 
 that they would come and take Him by force to make 
 Him a king," that " He departed again into the 
 mountain." 
 
 St. John emphatically marks the difference between 
 His first and His second retreat. Although the sign 
 of the feeding was indeed concluded where it had 
 been planned, yet there was a distinction between 
 its beginning and its ending which must have power- 
 fully impressed St. John and his fellow-apostles. It 
 began in His sacred synod. He had made them His 
 comrades in the discussion of it, His fellow-workers 
 in the doing of it. But after it was done, and had 
 produced so startling a social-political result, Jesus not 
 only separated Himself from the multitude, as He 
 did before the miracle, but He separated Himself even 
 from His own chosen twelve, " He departed again 
 into the mountain," as one of them tells us, " by Himself 
 alone." The very word which the Evangelist chooses 
 to describe the Lord's second and solitary ascent, after 
 the miracle and the popular applause, differs from that 
 by which he described His first and social ascent with 
 the apostles before the miracle. Then He simply 
 "went up," the bodily action only is noted ; but now 
 there is a note of the moral and intellectual action ; 
 Jesus seceded : He " escaped," as St. Augustine has 
 it : He isolated Himself. 
 
 The mountain was not only a cathedral in which the 
 Bishop and Pastor of our souls had set His chair, and 
 taught His disciples : it was His oratory or closet into
 
 188 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 which, practising what He had taught in His sermon 
 on the Mount, He prayed to the Father who is in 
 secret. When He heard the signs of popularity ringing 
 in His ears, when public opinion was declaring Him to 
 be its prophet, when He saw the swift advance of a yet 
 more dangerous popularity, He entered into His closet, 
 and shut the door. Separating Himself from men, even 
 from His own elect, the Son " withdrew " into the unity 
 which He had with the Father and the Holy Ghost 
 before all worlds, and so could say, "Yet I am not 
 alone, for the Father is with Me." In this Holy 
 Communion with the Father, and subjection of Him- 
 self to His will in all things, the Only-Begotten in our 
 flesh gathered strength to contend by Himself alone 
 against the re-appearance of the temptation which He 
 had overcome alone in the wilderness, at the beginning 
 of His work. 
 
 II. 
 
 What was that temptation? It was the temptation 
 of every good man of power and greatness more than 
 ordinary. I speak of it to-day because it seems to me 
 to have been the temptation of John Wesley, who 
 certainly was a good man of more than ordinary power 
 and greatness. Therefore the temptation had to be 
 met by the Man who is alone in all things great, so 
 that He might fulfil all leadership, and be the example 
 to the great and forceful as well as to the small and 
 feeble of our kind. He was in all points tempted as 
 such men are. 
 
 It was the temptation of popularity, the temptation 
 to autocracy, the temptation to set up a kingdom for 
 one's self, the temptation not to discourage the 
 institution of a party or sect of which one's self 
 shall be the head, instead of bearing witness through
 
 JESUS OVERCOMING TEMPTATION 189 
 
 the Cross to the eternal Kingdom of God, the Kingdom 
 of the Father, which was already set up throughout 
 nature and humanity, and was to be discerned, as He 
 had told His disciples, within them. The Kingdom 
 could only become the Kingdom of Jesus Christ 
 through His renunciation of Himself, and obedience 
 unto death, even the death of the Cross : that is, He 
 must prepare for His rejection by those who have now 
 so enthusiastically elected Him. 
 
 It seems to me that our Lord was tempted by 
 Satan through the multitude to found what men call 
 " Christianity," a new system and sect of faith and 
 morals, over against the eternal and actual Kingdom 
 of God, as Mohammed founded Islam, and George Fox 
 founded Quakerism, and Wesley founded Methodism. 
 Is it not the common illusion of the sceptic and the 
 antisceptic that Jesus Christ, while He was on earth, 
 actually did set up an outward sect in His own name, a 
 " Christianity," instead of founding a Catholic Church 
 after He had ascended to the right hand of the Father ? 
 Has not every Catholic Christian reason to be grateful 
 to those critics who think they are destructive, but 
 who really bear unconscious witness to the Faith, 
 when they tell us that St. Paul, and not Jesus, was 
 the founder of " Christianity " ? In the solitude of the 
 consecrated mountain, the Lord contended against and 
 defeated the temptations of the social Satan, in the 
 form of the spirit of public opinion and popular 
 applauses and demands, exactly as He had already 
 in the solitude of the wilderness resisted and overcome 
 the temptation of the private Satan, in the form of 
 the friendly and prudent individual spirit concerning 
 itself for His success in life as an exceptionally brilliant 
 servant of God and benefactor of mankind. So Jesus 
 "escaped," to repeat the strong expression of St.
 
 190 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Augustine, into this consecrated spot, going "alone" 
 behind the veil, as our great High Priest, there to 
 appear in the presence of God for His Nation and 
 for us. 
 
 The Jews had no need, as we have no need, of that 
 which men call "Christianity," such as the multitude 
 wanted Jesus to set up. A Christian sect, whatever 
 name might have been put upon it, would really have 
 been something lower than that which men call 
 " Judaism " or " Mosaism." For what they call Judaism 
 was not a mere Sect, nor a mere religion, nor a mere 
 system of opinions and morals : it was a real people, 
 commonwealth, nation, church, a kingdom. It was 
 a Kingdom of God, called naturally into being, as 
 the universe was, by the living Word of the Lord 
 in the process of world-history. A Judaism, or a 
 Mosaism, or a Christianity (in the popular modern 
 senses of that word), would have been nothing but 
 a Sect, having only so much relation to the real or 
 natural order the Kingdom of God, revealed through 
 the forms of nation, parish, and family as Quakerism 
 has, or as Wesleyanism has. The Word of God had 
 subjected the circumcised nation to the Roman Caesar, 
 and this subjection galled the people, as it was meant 
 to do. The enthusiastic masses, under the wild ecstacy 
 of an instantaneous conversion, urged Jesus to become 
 their Saviour by allowing them to set Him up as their 
 King. But their and His own subjection to Caesar was 
 not viewed by Him as it was by them. He saw in 
 it the Father's judgment upon the elect nation for 
 their rebellion against the Kingdom of God within 
 them. For He told them that the Kingdom of God, 
 which the Father sent the Son into our universal flesh 
 to manifest, is not only outward over nature and 
 nations, and always revealing its laws in history, as
 
 JESUS OVERCOMING TEMPTATION 191 
 
 their prophets had taught ; but He told them that 
 it is at the same time that Kingdom which is inward 
 to every man upon earth, whose laws the universal 
 conscience recognises in its accusings and excusings, 
 even though it cannot (until it hears the Gospel of His 
 Son) satisfactorily account for them. " Yea Thy law," 
 said their Psalmist to God their King, " is within my 
 heart." 
 
 The Son did not bring the Kingdom of God into the 
 world by His birth into our nature. Nor did He at any 
 period of His life on earth set it up, or pretend to set it 
 up, as His apostles hoped He would do, and as the 
 multitude after the great feeding determined He should 
 do. But He proclaimed it to be "at hand," to have 
 been always in the world, and to be there and then 
 within men. The Kingdom of Christ, the Catholic 
 Church, was not a Sect which Jesus Christ of His 
 own will, or in compliance with the requests of His 
 disciples or the crowd, Himself set up. The Father 
 gave the Kingdom to the Son. It was natural for 
 Satan in the form of a wise religious adviser, or in 
 the form of the popular demands for a more humane 
 ordering of the world to suggest to Jesus that it 
 would be better for Israel and the whole world to be 
 under His autocracy than under Caesar's. Who can 
 doubt it? Nevertheless He would not allow a crowd 
 to make Him a King, which would have been the 
 seizing of a Kingdom for Himself. Hence it was 
 not during the humiliation in the earthly Jerusalem, 
 but out of His glory at the right hand of the Father 
 in " the Jerusalem above which is the mother of us all " 
 (as to-day's Epistle has it) that Jesus founded the 
 Catholic Church, the human universal fellowship for all 
 nations and every creature. Jesus, while He was upon 
 earth, spoke of His own Kingdom as future. "On
 
 192 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 this rock" the union of God and all Humanity in 
 Him" I will build My Church. " 
 
 Whether we are inside or outside the Church, we are 
 always in and under the Kingdom of God, and the 
 Kingdom is always within us. But we become members 
 of the Church by humbly taking His sign of humiliation 
 upon our proud foreheads, and so obeying the most easy, 
 rudimentary, and outward of His commands by His 
 apostolical legates to all nations and to every creature. 
 Our ambition for an individual distinction, or our natural 
 tendency to conceive of God after our likeness, may 
 prompt the old Adam in us to despise baptism as a 
 thing outward and unspiritual, or as a thing common 
 and levelling, which any vulgar body may have. 
 We fancy that our incorporation into the Church 
 ought to be the reward of some private merit of which 
 we can boast ; such is not catholic, but is wanting in 
 common men, women, and children. We forget that 
 Christ's Kingdom, the Church, is the elect witness to the 
 Kingdom of God out of which it issued, and in which it 
 dwells alongside with the States, the communes, the 
 families, and all else that has issued out of the Father's 
 Kingdom. We think of the Church as a sect or 
 aristocracy founded by Christ, in which such as are more 
 or less like Christ, or liked by Him, can buy membership 
 by their own individual conversion, their own spiritual 
 perception, their own faith, their own particular grace or 
 favour in His eyes, whereby they are differenced from 
 the catholic race of mankind, and so elevated and 
 distinguished above and from the rest of the family, the 
 mass of the commune, the generality of the nation. 
 
 III. 
 
 I think that the recollection of the common and self- 
 renouncing ground upon which the Church stands is not
 
 JESUS OVERCOMING TEMPTATION 193 
 
 out of place at this time when all the sects which have 
 
 grown out of the remarkable experience and work of 
 
 John Wesley have been busy, as some of you will know, 
 
 at the celebration of a " Wesley Centenary." The 
 
 co-existence of a churchly tendency and a sectarian 
 
 tendency in the character and work of Wesley seems to 
 
 me to be so evident as to justify alike the Church and the 
 
 Wesleyan sects in claiming him. The proofs that he 
 
 intended no schism, but desired his societies to remain in 
 
 communion with the Church of the parishes and the 
 
 nation are surely irrefragable. Nevertheless, the proofs 
 
 that the movement which he started, and the ways along 
 
 which he so autocratically directed it, could not but end 
 
 consistently in separation of his societies from the 
 
 Church, though contrary to his personal wishes, seem to 
 
 me to be equally clear. If the late Roman Cardinal 
 
 Newman had died on the eve of his submission to the 
 
 Pope, much such a controversy, with truth on both sides, 
 
 would have arisen concerning him. The evil is, as the 
 
 Holy Gospel teaches us, that any one individual Christian 
 
 should be exalted to such a prominence as to be made by 
 
 force a king, as Wesley was and is, or as Newman was and 
 
 is. John Hampson, who knew Wesley well, said of him 
 
 in the year of his death, " Mr. Wesley was, during the 
 
 last ten or fifteen years of his supremacy, the most 
 
 absolute of monarchs. His will was the law." And 
 
 again, " Like other sovereigns, Mr. Wesley was surrounded 
 
 by flatterers, and like them, too, he often mistook the 
 
 incense of adulation for the cordial offering of sincerity 
 
 and truth." One of Wesley's recent apologists has 
 
 compared his hero, with unintended irony, to the 
 
 Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Against that temptation 
 
 which the Lord rejected, and which the selfish 
 
 Bonaparte greedily accepted, the unselfish Wesley offered 
 
 little or feeble resistance. Whether he desired it or not, 
 
 14
 
 194 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 he allowed himself to be made an autocrat in the house 
 of the Lord, so that it depended upon his decree whether 
 his subject societies should or should not separate 
 themselves from the unity of the Church. 
 
 The departure of our King into the mountain by 
 Himself alone has always been recognised by the 
 conscience of the Church as His deliberate renunciation 
 of holy ambition. That profound mediaeval biographer 
 of the Lord, Ludolf of Saxony, fitly interposes in his 
 commentary upon this episode a long chapter on " the 
 ambition of the clergy and the religious." It would not 
 be hard to maintain the thesis that the ambition of the 
 good and religious, their too ready consent to be made 
 kings by force for the best of purposes, has done at least 
 as much hurt throughout all Christianity as the ambition 
 of the selfish and wicked. John Wesley's autocratic 
 reign has left a terrible inheritance of evils from which 
 the Church and the nations suffer, and are likely long to 
 suffer. I need only mention the grounding of religion 
 upon "Egoism stretched out into the Infinite," which 
 Carlyle saw to be the root of Methodism ; the constantly 
 recurring epidemic and plague of "revivals," which have 
 lost whatever naturalness they once had, and are now 
 glaringly artificial projects to help a "cause," rather than 
 to help souls ; the diseased ambition of preachers to have 
 great crowds hanging upon their words ; the worship of a 
 Barnum-like bigness, and the measurement of the work 
 of the Holy Ghost by size and number ; the increase of 
 that decay of general Church-going and Communicating 
 which began under the twenty years of the cruel Puritan 
 tyranny, when the Sacraments were first restricted as 
 privileges of the self-called "godly," and withheld from 
 the dear, common, vulgar people of every English parish. 
 Wesley meant to be an evangelist, and to a very 
 splendid degree he became what he meant to be. But
 
 JESUS OVERCOMING TEMPTATION 195 
 
 the Church is a part of the Evangel, its necessary social 
 complement in the commune and the nation ; and where 
 a sect is substituted for the historical and actual Church, 
 the gospel is maimed. There is nothing schismatic 
 or anti-social in an ecclesiola in Ecclesia, such as 
 Wesley aimed at, such as the German Pietists 
 had conceived, such as each monastic order was, 
 and as every Guild in the Church is. A certain 
 separation is involved in each. It only becomes 
 schismatic and anti-social when its members separate 
 themselves for selfish, religious reasons from that 
 parochial and national fellowship into which the Father 
 has incorporated them by birth and providence, and 
 which the Son has vindicated by becoming a fellow 
 within them, and which the Holy Ghost has sanctified by 
 the common baptism and the common eucharist, by a 
 common ministry and a common prayer. 
 
 I cannot but think that some historian who discerns 
 the Word of God in English as well as in Jewish history, 
 will hereafter have insight, faith, and patriotism to see 
 and declare what great evils, as well as what good 
 amongst us, have been products of Wesley's consent 
 to be made a king. Does not the survival and present 
 use of the word " Wesleyan " show how he spiritually 
 damaged and broke in pieces the parochial houses of 
 God in the land, as the Puritan Nonconformists and 
 Dissenters had materially damaged them, though he 
 originally was of a contrary mind to the Puritans, and 
 meant to build up what they had broken down ? They 
 believed that the Church of England was no Church at 
 all, and that it was a sin to belong to her ; but thanks 
 to his noble family, John Wesley had no share in the 
 Puritan legends and superstitions. Yet who is more to 
 blame than this pious autocrat is for the disastrous 
 " alienation of the masses," the absence of the Common
 
 196 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Folk from the Common Prayer of the neighbourhoods 
 of which the Common Father has made them members ? 
 The Community or Socialism of English Religion, wit- 
 nessed to in the English Book of Common Prayer, was 
 indirectly struck at by Methodism, as it had been 
 directly attacked by Puritanism, and an Individualist 
 saving or sanctifying of the self-seeking soul was by 
 each thrust into the place of the wholesome old com- 
 munal and national salvation. " What profit or interest 
 have I," asked and asks the selfish soul, " in joining in 
 this Common worship with all my unregenerate neigh- 
 bours, if I myself have no saving faith, if I am as un- 
 sanctified as my fellow-parishioners are ? " " If I am 
 elect, converted, saved, sanctified," said and says another, 
 " is it not a waste of my spiritual gifts, which exalt me 
 above the unsaved, to spend so much of my time in 
 kneeling at their side as if I really were of one body 
 with them, or in listening to a preacher who is so much 
 less fit to teach than I am?" John Wesley struck 
 indeed at the pharisaical spirit of sectarianism by re- 
 quiring his preachers and societies to receive the Holy 
 and Common Eucharist at the hands of the Common 
 priests. Yet it was rather at his own kingly order, than 
 at the command of the Holy Social Spirit of unity, that 
 the Methodists received the Common Body and Blood 
 of the One Lord side by side with their " unconverted " 
 or " unsanctified " fellow-parishioners. Wesley's own 
 individual experience and the dogmas of conversion 
 and sanctification which he drew out of himself, or his 
 Moravian teachers, or God's dealing with him, were 
 thrust into that high place which pertains alone to the 
 articles of the Catholic, Social, or Humane-universal 
 Creed, in which there is no mention whatever of these 
 individual and self-centred concerns. And in the 
 building of Wesley's societies, which after his death
 
 JESUS OVERCOMING TEMPTATION 197 
 
 naturally made themselves sects, these self-centred 
 Individualist Wesleyan doctrines held the place which 
 the Common Faith and the Common Humanity held 
 in Christ's building of His Church. " What is this 
 Methodism," to cite Carlyle again, "but a new phase 
 of Egoism stretched out into the Infinite?" So soon 
 as Wesley's own autocratic hand was removed, the 
 societies which had made him by force a king, assumed 
 to themselves that sovereign power which they had 
 conferred upon him. It was not wonderful that they 
 should separate themselves, or allow their ambitious 
 lay-preachers to separate them from the Common 
 Prayer and the Common Eucharist of the dear Com- 
 mon people of God. The Creed and Sacraments of 
 the Church humbled them to the level of the " pub- 
 licans and sinners " in every town and village, above 
 whom the Wesleyan dogmas highly exalted them. 
 Those whom he hoped to leave sincere members of 
 the Church had inherited from him little of his filial 
 love for the Mother of us all, but much of his applauded 
 capacity to do all things but obey. They began fierce 
 quarrels amongst themselves, and separations one from 
 another, so that now, as a Wesleyan writer on the 
 Wesley centenary has deplored, the Wesleyan sects 
 suffer (and many a Christian parish suffers still more) 
 the dire misfortune of having, not merely one of Mr. 
 Wesley's preaching-houses, but " two, three, and even 
 four Methodist chapels, and these within a village that 
 could maintain only one in strength and prosperity." 
 " Last week," said the President of the Primitive 
 Methodist Conference, " I was one of four preachers 
 who held four different services in connection with four 
 different denominations in one village, and I should 
 think the total of those congregations would not exceed 
 fifty persons." These men think it a great evil that
 
 198 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 the " Nonconformists," as they now absurdly call the 
 Dissenters, should not be united in every village in one 
 " common nonconformity." Yet that the Christians in 
 one parish, already jointed into one common body by 
 the Holy Spirit through the sacrament of the one 
 baptism, should be disunited, so long as Dissenters are 
 the disuniters, they think to be no evil, but the greatest 
 good. 
 
 We follow our real King Jesus Christ into His sacred 
 retirement into the mountain, as Quesnel said, when we 
 disappoint the designs which men have of raising and 
 advancing us in the world. It is here, I think, that we 
 see the contrast between Wesley and that far more 
 prophetic man to whom he owed all that was best and 
 most wholesome in his life and work, William Law. 
 What help to-day all over the world God gives through 
 William Law to those who read his books ; but who 
 would think of turning to one of the voluminous 
 " works " of John Wesley for aid and light ? As a 
 real teacher his brother Charles, through his hymns, 
 has a more lasting place than John Wesley can claim. 
 
 We can hardly exaggerate the social evil which is 
 wrought by schism. Our own individual profit is not 
 the only reason why we are called by the Spirit and the 
 Bride to humble our proud heads to the common 
 baptism. We unite in Holy Communion with the 
 common parish and the common nation, with "the 
 publicans and sinners " as Puritan and Methodist 
 pharisaism calls them, that we ourselves may be re- 
 deemed and liberated from our own anti-social egoism. 
 We are already in the common unity of parish and 
 fatherland, whether we like it or not, by the Will of the 
 Father, or by what we call necessity. We can only get 
 out of the Divine order which sects call " the world " by 
 getting into some other exactly like it, unless we go
 
 JESUS OVERCOMING TEMPTATION 199 
 
 back into savagery and bestiality. The Church sancti- 
 fies, by the common baptism and the common eucharist, 
 the social community which she already finds established 
 by the Father. No selfish profit, fancied by us to be 
 heavenly and spiritual, which we think we can gain by 
 separation from the dear common vulgar folk of Christ 
 in parish or nation, and by joining a sect, can possibly 
 compensate for what we must lose by separation, nor 
 for the wrong which we do the godly order of Society, 
 nor for the destruction of other men's faith in the One 
 of whom every family in heaven and earth is named.
 
 LABOUR DAY AND THE RED FLAG 1 
 
 "Let the brother of low degree rejoice in that he is exalted ; 
 but the rich in that he is made low." ST. JAMES i. 9, 10. 
 
 THIS passage occurs in the Eucharistic Epistle which 
 is read on the feast of St. Philip and St. James at 
 every altar in all the National Churches of the West. 
 The Church, by the providence of the Father of all, 
 is prepared for all the changes and chances of this 
 mortal life, although we Churchmen are so often blind 
 to this readiness. It is a coincidence not to be ignored, 
 that the first day of May, the joint-festival of these two 
 apostles probably the most " Hellenic " and the most 
 " Hebraic " of the Twelve has been celebrated this 
 year, and is certain to be celebrated for many years 
 to come, as a catholic, international, or humane- 
 universal Festival of Labour. These two saints stand 
 forth in the New Testament, however, less as the 
 apostles of the rival intellectual and theological parties 
 in the early Church, than as the apostles of labour and 
 social need. It was to St. Philip that the Liberator of 
 the world first turned, when He saw the dense crowds of 
 the weary and hungry drawing near to the mountain : 
 it was to him that Jesus suggested the first rudiments 
 of the social problem, "Philip, whence shall we buy 
 bread that these may eat?" How distinctive a place 
 
 1 Sunday, May 3, 1891. 
 
 200
 
 LABOUR DAY AND THE RED FLAG 201 
 
 St. James holds amongst the social teachers of 
 Christendom, as the pioneer advocate of the rights of 
 the labourer, and the champion of the poor and 
 oppressed, I need not say, for the whole letter out of 
 which the May Day Epistle is taken bears sufficient 
 testimony. 
 
 I. 
 
 In our native land, as in the other Teutonic lands, 
 whose folk seem less ready than the Latin peoples are 
 to sacrifice a day's wages to ideal holiday-keeping, 
 the Feast of Labour has been wholly, or in great part, 
 transferred, as we see to-day, from the first day of May 
 to the first Sunday in May. This new festival of work, 
 whether kept on May Day or the first Lord's Day 
 in May, has two great objects first a demonstration of 
 the unity and solidarity which binds, or ought to bind, 
 the wage-workers all over the world ; secondly, the 
 use of this demonstration for the shortening of the work 
 day, and for procuring to the workers a more just share 
 of the universe they live in and of the wealth which 
 they are producing. The cynic may point with a cheap 
 and easy sneer, to the quarrels and fightings, by word 
 and blow, which have marked the projected feast of 
 class-unity this year. But it is not a feast for angels, 
 but a feast for men whose conditions of life and work 
 are far from angelic. Moreover, it is not fair to expect 
 the popular agitator to be a greater saint than the 
 popular preacher. It is the temptation of each to lay 
 more stress upon the means than upon the end. He 
 often cares more for the excitement and publicity of 
 the demonstration, and even for what provocation may 
 be given by it, than for the object of the demonstration, 
 for which the weary and heavy-laden (the clients of 
 Christ and His two Apostles) mainly care.
 
 202 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 It is important for the worshippers in every parish 
 church to recognise that the final results in time of this 
 new Feast of Labour are bound to be those which 
 St. James prophetically indicates. We are gathered 
 here, not as separatists from humanity, but as the priest- 
 hood of humanity that universal priesthood to which 
 both orders, lay and clerical, and both sexes, men and 
 women, are alike ordained. "God hath begotten us 
 with the Word of His truth," says St. James to the 
 Church, " that we should be a kind of first-fruits of His 
 creatures." Every May Day for centuries, in every 
 city and village, at every cathedral and parochial 
 altar in the Western nations, the Catholic Church has 
 been saying feebly as the utterers or the hearers 
 may have comprehended the whole contents of the 
 sentence of "the Word of Truth" that the brother 
 of low degree must be exalted, and that the rich must 
 be made low. This is the inevitable end of the long 
 processes and many movements of history, as the 
 Father is directing them by His Word and Son Christ, 
 Jesus the Common Head and Brother of us all ; and 
 therefore " the brother of low degree " and " the rich," 
 as partakers of one faith, are called to "rejoice" together 
 in community at the dispensation of the common Father 
 of both. 
 
 The whole stream of historical tendency already 
 indicates that a levelling and equality, such as that over 
 which Christ's apostle calls poor and rich to rejoice 
 together, must come to pass, though for the time the 
 brother of low degree may regard it with hope, but the 
 rich with doubt and terror. In one sense, as St. James 
 saw, the exaltation of the poor and the making low 
 of the rich had both already occurred evangelically 
 and ideally in the Person of Him in whom the entire 
 history of mankind is summed up and prefigured. All
 
 LABOUR DAY AND THE RED FLAG 203 
 
 over the Roman Empire St. James saw a new kingdom 
 and commonwealth growing up, the Church of Christ, 
 within which the brother of lowest degree, the very 
 slave, was exalted by the Sacrament of Baptism to 
 equality and fraternity with the rich, and was rejoicing 
 in the knowledge that he was the child of God, the 
 member of Christ, and the inheritor of the kingdom 
 of heaven. In this new commonwealth also the rich 
 man, hitherto so high in the world's eyes and his 
 own, was rejoicing in that he by his baptism had been 
 made low. He had done what all his rich heathen and 
 philosophical peers thought madness, taken up his cross 
 to follow Christ, and had gained through it a deeper 
 fellowship and unity with the brother of low degree 
 than he had with the class to which he belonged 
 by birth, wealth, or culture. In this spiritual sense the 
 exaltation of the low and the humiliation of the rich 
 had already taken place. 
 
 II. 
 
 The word which St. James uses to characterise " the 
 brother of low degree " (raTravoc) shows, however, that 
 he is not here spiritualising the contrary estates of 
 poverty and wealth. It describes the outward and 
 material condition of the hopeless slave of the old 
 and the new " civilisation " alike. He is indeed outside 
 civilisation in the proper meaning of the word ; he is 
 no civil or freeman, but is a " pauper " and " abject." 
 Christ's apostle sees in the " exaltation " of the pauper 
 and the abject man, an event which is alike desirable 
 and inevitable. " Let the brother of low degree rejoice 
 in that he is exalted." It is as inevitable that this result 
 can only be brought about by the rich being comparatively 
 " made low." The world of man and the world of
 
 204 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 nature are in one universal order, the kingdom of God, 
 as Jesus had taught in many parables. So St. James 
 turns to the order of nature in the vegetable world 
 to fetch from thence a parable of this fore-doomed law- 
 determined, and necessary " fading away of the rich man 
 in his ways." For the " ways " of the rich, as St. James 
 shows in so many places in his Epistle, are the seeds 
 which have produced and go on producing the misery 
 and humiliation of the low. The " ways " of the rich 
 man was probably an allusion to the great " journeys " 
 by sea and land, to the whole extant organisation of 
 commerce and enterprise by which riches were gained, 
 and slavery and pauperism increased, in the apostolic 
 age, signs of which must have confronted the apostles of 
 Christ wherever they turned. So indeed St. John 
 seems to hint, when he says in the Apocalypse that 
 at the fall of Babylon the an ti- Christian and the anti- 
 human social mis-organisation " the merchants of 
 the earth shall weep and mourn," and "every ship- 
 master, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and 
 as many as trade by sea." Or the " ways " of the 
 rich man may be all the roads along which he moves 
 to his goal, the whole economy by which a great 
 fortune is gained ; or they may be his modes of 
 expenditure, his habits of life, his pleasures, recreationes, 
 as Menochius has it. All these are doomed to perish, 
 like the splendour of the flower, not merely by the rich 
 man's own individual death after which he can retain 
 none of them, but by the manifestation of the Son 
 of Man as Judge, in the fulness of the age, when He 
 will appear " for the comfortless troubles' sake of the 
 needy." So whatever degrees in social revolution 
 may be predicted or demanded by the new dogmatic 
 and agitating Scribes and Pharisees of our generation, 
 who reject Christ and His Church, wherever those
 
 LABOUR DAY AND THE RED FLAG 205 
 
 degrees are matter of rejoicing and good for the 
 whole human family, there it will be found that 
 Christ and His Church have anticipated them. 
 
 Yes, though there is so near a likeness in the end 
 of all things, as foreseen by Christ's apostle and by 
 the anti-Christian or non-Christian agitator, how wide 
 the difference is in the agitation and the preparation 
 for it. It is this difference which accounts for the 
 strangeness of the apostolic counsel. St. James 
 actually urges the rich man to " rejoice " at that 
 which the natural man within him can only regard 
 as the most dreadful of catastrophes for himself and 
 for society. If he be what St. James calls a " double- 
 minded man" if he looks upon the "low" as his 
 brother in the Church, but in business looks upon 
 him as his mere hand, or in politics looks upon him 
 as his enemy how will he be able to bear the other's 
 " exaltation," or to " rejoice " in his own humiliation ? 
 
 St. James is indeed chiefly writing, as the modern 
 social agitator speaks, to " the brother of low degree," 
 and for the labourer. His letter is addressed to the 
 twelve tribes " which are scattered abroad," expatriated, 
 and thereby "in divers temptations." One of their 
 temptations evidently was, as he shows in the next 
 chapter, their inherited tendency to give the rich man 
 precedence, even at common prayer in the common 
 Church, over the poor man. St. James identifies 
 himself throughout his apostolic letter with the poor 
 man and the labourer ; he makes their cause his cause. 
 He is kept back by no fear lest his apparent taking 
 of sides should alienate the rich from the common 
 fellowship of the Church, and drive them back into 
 their old Judaism, or Heathenism, or Philosophy, or 
 religion of Art, or idolatry of Money, or worship of 
 Science.
 
 206 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 To the one class he says, " Ye have despised the 
 poor." They had been " double-minded " ; they had 
 brought with them into the Church the world's pagan 
 and scientific estimate of "the brother of low degree," 
 which we see in the great Aristotle's economical justifi- 
 cation of slavery. " Ye rich men, weep and howl," says 
 the apostolical economist, " for the miseries that shall 
 come upon you ; your gold and silver is cankered, and 
 the rust of them shall be a witness against you." 
 " Know ye not that the friendship of the world is 
 enmity with God?" "Ye have heaped treasures to- 
 gether for the Last Days. Behold, the hire of the 
 labourers, who have reaped down your fields, which is 
 of you kept back by fraud, crieth ! And the cries of 
 them which have reaped are entered into the ears 
 of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on 
 the earth, and been wanton." When he calls upon 
 them to " rejoice " in the utter social reversion of these 
 conditions, what does he do but call them to repent 
 of all "the ways," economical, political, or personal, 
 which have produced a state of things so contrary to 
 the Kingdom of the Father and His Christ? 
 
 To the other social class he says, "Do not rich 
 men oppress you, and draw you before the judg- 
 ment seats ? Do not they blaspheme that worthy 
 Name by which ye are called?" "If ye have respect 
 of persons, ye commit sin." " My brethren, be not 
 many masters, knowing that we shall receive the 
 greater condemnation." 
 
 It seems to me that if we condemn a Socialist or 
 Anarchist agitator, merely upon the ground of the 
 violence or even the apparent savagery of his language, 
 we shall not find it easy consistently to exonerate this 
 holy " servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ." If 
 the Epistle of St. James had lain undiscovered until our
 
 LABOUR DAY AND THE RED FLAG 207 
 
 century, would not a host of scholars, under the bias 
 of class-sentiment, have doubted its claim to be a 
 primitive document of the Church? Would they not 
 have relied upon the " internal evidence " of the 
 " unchristian " spirit of many of its passages as sufficient 
 justification of their sceptical criticism? You have 
 heard how so great a theologian as Luther, when he 
 found that this Epistle cut across the bias of his 
 theology, in a fit of impatience called it " an epistle 
 of straw." 
 
 III. 
 
 What then is really the distinction between the 
 apostolic agitator and the new secular agitators, whose 
 language is so like his? The Church asserts, by keep- 
 ing his festival as a day of rejoicing for every 
 nation and commune, that St. James is the chosen 
 organ of that Eternal Agitator, who is the Author 
 of earthquakes in the material province of His 
 Kingdom and of revolutions in the social and 
 spiritual provinces of it. He was chosen, and 
 ordained, and sent by the Word and Son of the 
 Eternal to declare to the nations that the original 
 Agitator of nature and spirit, of conscience and society, 
 is "the Father of lights," with whom is no respect 
 of persons. His fiery words show how clearly he saw, 
 how deeply he felt, the terrible contrast between rich 
 and poor, employer and wage-worker. This he would 
 have seen and felt, we may believe, had Christ never 
 called him to leave his trade and become an agitator for 
 the Kingdom of God. But he is able to speak so 
 boldly, and is not afraid of being accused of setting the 
 brother of low degree against the rich man, and exciting 
 class against class, because he knows as Christ's apostle 
 that there is a bond of unity between the members
 
 208 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 of classes which is deeper than class, in the common 
 Brotherhood of both to Jesus Christ, in the common 
 Childhood of both to the Father. He knows that the 
 rich and the poor to whom he speaks have been alike 
 baptized into the Name which makes them one. 
 
 Hence it is that Christ's apostle is able, amidst his 
 severe denunciation of wrong, to keep a firm faith and 
 grasp upon the best article in the creed of the modern 
 Socialist or Anarchist. That article is " Fraternity," or, 
 to speak in our sacred mother-tongue, " Brotherhood." 
 We should be blind indeed if we did not see that it is 
 possible and as frequent for the unbeliever as for the 
 believer to be a Pharisee, and flagrantly to deny in his 
 social life that which he professes in his creed. All men, 
 say they and we in our creeds, are " brothers." But if we 
 depart from the faith, do not they also from their faith ? 
 In their creed, by whatever name they call it, all men 
 are " brothers " brothers because they are men. But in 
 the actual political-social exposition of their creed, in 
 newspapers and at meetings, do they not set up a privi- 
 leged aristocracy, a schismatic semi-fraternity, an un- 
 catholic church, a kind of Atheist-Calvinist sect? In 
 that strange fatherless and motherless brotherhood, 
 which says it believes in no God, and will have no 
 church, all men are not brothers. The sacred privilege 
 is restricted to the wage-earners. All the rich, all the 
 employers, all who owe their ease or their wantonness 
 of life to the hard labour of the poor, are reprobate out- 
 siders and predestinated enemies : they are not brothers 
 and sisters. Hence though they may be ready to follow 
 Christ's apostle by saying " Let the brother of low 
 degree rejoice in that he is exalted," they are not 
 advanced and liberal enough to go as far as he, and 
 to add, "But let the rich rejoice in that he is made low." 
 For the rich man, in their new fatherless and motherless
 
 LABOUR DAY AND THE RED FLAG 209 
 
 world, is not really a man ; for he is not a brother, but 
 a foe and a thief. They have not yet enough of 
 " Liberty " or " Equality " to open to him also the door 
 of " Fraternity." He is like those whom the Puritan 
 doctrine shut out for ever from all possibility of grace, 
 for whom there was no room in the "gathered Churches" 
 of Independency and Anabaptism ; he is beyond con- 
 version ; they look on him as a pest to be destroyed, as 
 the Calvinist soldiers of Cromwell looked on the Popish 
 Irish " Tories," or the soldiers of Mohammed upon 
 " idolaters " and " infidels." His very virtues, if he has 
 any, are but "splendid vices." What would in other 
 men be love and justice, charity and righteousness, are 
 in him mere prudential calculations. The Calvinist 
 anthropology, which has been exorcised from the 
 Church, and is fast being renounced even by the sects 
 which were originally founded as homes for it Presby- 
 terianism, Independency, and Anabaptism seems to be 
 seeking a new house in the anti-theological societies of 
 Socialism and Anarchism. That the rich brother should 
 " rejoice " in any state is not in their programme. That 
 he should " rejoice," as Christ's apostle asks, " in that he 
 is made low," as the Eternal Son of God rejoiced when 
 by His incarnation He made Himself poor and low, that 
 He might make the many rich and high must seem 
 impossible to those who accept the materialist con- 
 ception of history as dogma. They want him and all 
 his class to suffer, to be punished in the hell of Dives, to 
 pay the uttermost farthing, and to render blood for 
 blood. 
 
 I am sure that the new and better conscience, which 
 our whole human kind has from the indwelling Word 
 of God, is not to be reached by so narrow and un- 
 catholic a doctrine of humanity. You cannot separate 
 the rich and poor, the employer and the wage- worker, 
 
 IS
 
 210 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 because both are human. Suppose the poorest man 
 in the world, who is obedient to the universal humane 
 light of Christ within, sees the richest man in the world 
 struck down by some accident, bereaved of wife or 
 child, tortured with pain of body or agony of soul, 
 will he say, It is no matter to me, for he is rich and 
 I am poor? Does not the poor man's heart go out 
 to the rich man ? Is not the hand of the feeble, where 
 he is strong and full, stretched out to the help of the 
 strong in his emptiness and desolation? The earth 
 has not yet become a hell, though hell sends up its 
 flames into it. The common Brotherhood, which 
 makes the poor and the rich one, is deeper and 
 stronger than all the dividing accidents of life. 
 
 To many of us, priests and lay-folk, the uplifting 
 of the Red Flag on the feast of St. Philip and St. 
 James as an international social flag, as the common 
 standard of the labourer and the expropriated, who- 
 soever may for the hour carry it, is no symbol of 
 division and class-war. The Church knows no classes : 
 she knows only man and one humanity. Red is the 
 colour with which she adorns her parish altars on 
 this festival of the Apostles of Labour. Red is the 
 colour of the stole, the yoke of Jesus, which she puts 
 to-day upon her ministers. When we look at the 
 colour of the flag borne outside the Church, how can 
 we help seeing the concord of the symbolism without 
 and the symbolism within? Its colour reaches to a 
 height and depth, and length and breadth, more 
 Catholic or human-universal than our different social 
 classes are, or even than our different nations are. 
 " God," said the Apostle of Nations, " hath made of one 
 Blood all the nations of the earth." The colour of the 
 flag has more to say than is yet dreamed of by the 
 present generation of its bearers. When I take the
 
 LABOUR DAY AND THE RED FLAG 211 
 
 red stole from my shoulders, and go from the church 
 into the streets, and 
 
 "See the floating standard borne 
 
 By stalwart arms and courage good, 
 Red with all the hopes of morn, 
 The banner of Man's Brotherhood " ; 
 
 when I see the army of wage-workers carrying the 
 flag of the Socialists, the flag of the New Labour Day, 
 the flag of the old festival of the two apostles of labour, 
 how can I be blind to that which struck the German 
 poet, that the flag is, " Red, like the World- Redeemers 
 Blood" ? 
 
 It tells us not how the rich can help the poor, nor 
 how the poor may help themselves, but how He who 
 made Himself poor for all our sakes, has helped and 
 will help poor and rich as the one family of the One 
 Father. It tells us that the Son of Man is the Judge of 
 rich and poor as men. As it was to the poor St. Philip, 
 one of the Apostles of the May Day festival, that the 
 poor Jesus said, " Where shall we buy bread that these 
 may eat?" so it is by the poor James, the apostolic 
 tribune of the poor and oppressed, and the prophet of 
 revolutionary judgment, that He says to us all, " Grudge 
 not one against another, Brethren, lest ye be condemned. 
 Behold, the Judge standeth before the door."
 
 THE CHURCH AND THE CIVIL SCHOOL 
 
 "And He saith unto them, Whose is this image and super- 
 scription ? They say unto Him, Caesar's. Then saith He unto 
 them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's 
 and unto God the things that are God's." ST. MATT. xxii. 
 20, 21. 
 
 WE are happy in that we do not live under a 
 Caesar, but in a National State, a Common- 
 wealth. A Roman Caesar in the civil order, like a 
 Roman Pope jn the ecclesiastical order, is only 
 possible so long as the nation or Church is in tutelage, 
 unfree, or servile. We know that it was a judgment 
 upon the citizens of the once free commonwealth of 
 Judah that they should be obliged then and there to 
 " render unto Caesar the things " that should have been 
 the 'Son of David's, but which had been made, by the 
 judicial Word of God, in the history of the nation, " the 
 things of Caesar." " Woe be to the pastors," says the 
 prophet in the context of to-day's Epistle, " that destroy 
 and scatter the sheep of My pastures, saith the Lord. 
 Therefore, thus saith the Lord God of Israel against 
 the pastors that feed My people : Ye have scattered 
 My flock and driven them away." If they had been 
 faithful pastors, the flock would not have come under 
 the secular and alien rule of Caesar. We also know 
 that it was a part of the schooling of the new nations 
 
 1 November 22, 1891 (last Sunday after Trinity).
 
 THE CHURCH AND CIVIL SCHOOL 213 
 
 of Europe, by the living Word of God, that His 
 universal Church for all nations should have its 
 beginning within the secular framework of the quasi- 
 universal Roman Empire. 
 
 I. 
 
 Nevertheless the Jewish prophet tells the Church in 
 
 to-day's Epistle that the forced unity in which imperial 
 
 Egypt had formerly held the congregation of Israel, 
 
 and imperial Rome was then holding so many nations, 
 
 congregations, or flocks of the Lord, was a condition 
 
 by its nature temporary, and doomed to end when the 
 
 time had fully come. " I will gather the remnant of 
 
 My flock out of all countries whither I have driven 
 
 them, and will bring them again to their folds ; and I 
 
 will set up shepherds over them which shall feed them : 
 
 and they shall fear no more, neither be dismayed, 
 
 neither shall they be lacking, saith the Lord. Behold, 
 
 the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto 
 
 David a righteous Branch, and a King [instead of a 
 
 Pharaoh or a Caesar] shall reign and prosper, and shall 
 
 execute judgment and justice in the earth. In His 
 
 days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely: 
 
 and this is His Name whereby He shall be called, The 
 
 Lord our Righteousness." 
 
 I need not say how much more this prophecy means 
 to the Church than it means to the Jews. But it meant 
 this to the Jews, that they should again be a national 
 Free State or Commonwealth, and not one of the 
 subject parts of a huge imperial federation, an Egyptian 
 or a Roman Caesardom. There is nothing said to all 
 Israel, as a nation or congregation of the Heavenly 
 Shepherd who is the pastor of all peoples and every 
 soul, in this most national of books, which does not
 
 214 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 apply to every nation. For a nation is a flock or a 
 congregation called out of some house of bondage, 
 formed into a commonwealth or free state, educated 
 and judged by the living Word of God, as that supreme 
 Pastor and King of whom the Epistle speaks, whose 
 Advent in our flesh the Church is about to celebrate. 
 Hence it is that England daily says, and each parish 
 in England daily says, in the Venite, " We are the 
 people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand." 
 
 Few, I suppose, can be ignorant how the text was 
 once interpreted by our fathers in the Church of 
 England. When they saw how Christ's English con- 
 gregation was in danger of re-subjection to the foreign 
 Papal Caesar, or of being torn into quarrelling factions 
 by the Separatist sects, they said to the Christian 
 English folk, " Render therefore unto Henry, or unto 
 Elizabeth, or unto Charles the things that are Henry's, 
 or Elizabeth's, or Charles's." The national sovereign 
 was the symbol of the national freedom against the 
 foreign aggressor, and the symbol of the national unity 
 against the domestic sectaries. The Reformers saw 
 in the national kings the true successors of David, 
 Solomon, Hezekiah, and Josiah. There was no affecta- 
 tion in their comparisons of Henry or Elizabeth with 
 David ; we must uncritically idealise David's life, and 
 cut out half of it, if we cannot perceive many of the 
 likenesses which our fathers saw between him and their 
 own Henry VIII. Through the bitter military and 
 civil conflicts which ended with the Revolution, our 
 fathers were taught by the living Word of God that 
 the sovereign is the minister and not the despot of the 
 Commonwealth, subject to law and not above it. This 
 is as truly the product of the living Word of God, the 
 factor of all history, as any event in Jewish history is. 
 Hence I think we do not misinterpret His words when
 
 THE CHURCH AND CIVIL SCHOOL 215 
 
 we say to English priests and people, " Render there- 
 fore unto the Commonwealth the things which are the 
 Commonwealth's and unto God the things that are 
 God's." 
 
 II. 
 
 Our English Commonwealth, late enough in its 
 history, has done a great act of repentance. It has put 
 its own image and superscription upon the civil school- 
 ing of the greater part of the people, though it has not 
 yet, as we hope it soon may do, put them upon all our 
 schooling. What I said twenty-one years ago, preaching 
 at St. Stephen's, Lewisham, I say again with even less 
 hesitation to-day that the great public schools which 
 we see lifting their heads so high above the meaner 
 houses, as we go about London, are the hopeful tokens 
 of a national repentance. Not a few parties and persons 
 are still tempted to cry out thoughnot so manyas in 1870 
 "Schooling does not belong to the whole National 
 Congregation, Commonwealth, State, or Fatherland. 
 It is not one of ' the things of Caesar,' but one of ' the 
 things of God.' It belongs rightly to the National 
 Clergy sent by God to teach the nation : it belongs 
 rightly to the Roman Pope : a part of it ought fairly to 
 belong to this faction : a part of it ought by the rules of 
 fair competition to belong to the other." All manner 
 of English Parties and Sects, like the Jewish Pharisees, 
 Sadducees, and Herodians in the Gospel, would like 
 each to have its own or one another's varying images 
 and superscriptions upon the common civil schooling. 
 There are religious parties which say that the image 
 and superscription ought to be God's ; there are 
 secularist parties which say that the image and super- 
 scription ought not to be God's. The school is not a 
 sacrament, as one party seems inclined to make it ;
 
 216 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 neither is it a god, as the other party seems to make 
 it. But if the common civil schooling be honest, if it 
 be straightforward, if it be true in every matter which it 
 handles, it cannot but be God's, exactly as true scales 
 and measures are God's. The honest scales and 
 measures of men who can neither read nor write, but 
 who are resolved to be just, show us that the Word of 
 God is the educator of men. They show us that the 
 eternal and universal Pedagogue, as St. Clement of 
 Alexandria calls Him, has not left and never will leave, 
 even the civil education of consciences, families, parishes, 
 and nations exclusively to schoolmasters. If He did, there 
 could be no education where there is no schooling. If 
 He did, Christ's apostle and evangelist would be mock- 
 ing the humankind when he says that the Word of God, 
 the True Light, is enlightening every man who comes 
 into the world. 
 
 If the education of nations and consciences were left 
 by God to civil schools, then the apostolic writer to the 
 Hebrews would be wrong when he declares that " the 
 Word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any 
 two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder 
 of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is 
 a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart ; 
 neither is there any creature [social or personal] that is 
 not manifest in His sight : but all things are naked and 
 opened in the eyes of Him with whom we have to do. 
 Seeing then that we have a great High Priest that is 
 passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us 
 hold fast our profession." 
 
 When Caesar put his legal image and superscription 
 upon the Jewish tribute-money, he did not thereby say 
 to the Hebrew priests, "You must relinquish your 
 profession ; you must not bless the people, nor offer 
 sacrifice for them ; I am the Pontifex Maximus ! "
 
 THE CHURCH AND CIVIL SCHOOL 217 
 
 Neither did Caesar thereby say to the Scribes, or to the 
 Pharisees, or to the Sadducees, " You must not any 
 longer explain your laws, nor teach your doctrines, nor 
 gather your disciples." On the contrary, it was Caesar's 
 own chosen deputy who crucified the One whom the 
 Jewish religious teachers told him was the greatest 
 enemy to their laws, their schooling, and their religion. 
 Far less can it be said that our English Commonwealth, 
 by legally declaring the common civil schooling to be 
 its own proper province as the State or Fatherland, 
 interferes in any way whatever with the Divine rights of 
 the national bishops and priests whom Christ has sent 
 and ordained as the teachers of the nation, nor with the 
 Divine rights of fathers and mothers. Neither does the 
 Commonwealth, by putting its image and superscription 
 upon civil schooling, hinder the rightful liberties of any 
 Scribes, or newspaper men, or Pharisees, or Sadducees, 
 who think themselves to be the best teachers, but it still 
 allows and will allow them to gather as many as they 
 can to their sermons, or lectures, or dreary leading- 
 articles. Nay, may we not expect from what we have 
 learned of the Word of God in English history, that 
 the party-politicians will always be as anxious as Pilate 
 was, for politic ends, to gratify the Pharisees and 
 Sadducees, for the sake of their votes ? The sectaries 
 are already asking the civil powers to allow them to 
 hire the civil schools for " religious " use on Sundays, 
 that is, to employ them for seducing the young to 
 forsake or ignore the common worship of their parishes. 
 Our Commonwealth has simply evolved what is one 
 of the natural and proper functions of every living 
 commonwealth, and will henceforth itself supply what 
 had hitherto been supplied to it and for it by the 
 Catholic Church and other voluntary forces. The civil 
 school is inherent in germ in the national State. It
 
 218 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 belongs to every reasonable, religious, and spiritual 
 idea of a national commonwealth that it should become 
 an educator, and teach a true civility to every one of its 
 children and members. What less can we mean when 
 we speak of England as our fatherland, or as our 
 mother-country ? As a family is a teacher, so is a State 
 a teacher. Is it the part of the Church to say that the 
 State is a mere material being? Is not the State or 
 Commonwealth, unless every Hebrew prophet was a 
 deceiver and a liar, a spiritual fellowship ? Do they not 
 speak of the nation or State as a "congregation," a 
 flock gathered into unity and shepherded by the Lord 
 of spirits ? What less did the great Shepherd of souls 
 mean by solemnly uniting Church and State in His 
 commission, by sending His apostolic clergy to "the 
 nations " as such ? Or what else do we mean by 
 declaring that Christ's holy baptism belongs to every 
 child that is born in England ? The Church in past 
 ages supplied the Commonwealth with civil and secular 
 schooling, just as she supplied it with poor-relief and 
 with art, music, medicine, logic, rhetoric, grammar, 
 philosophy because the Commonwealth had not as yet 
 risen to the higher conception, held in trust for the 
 nations by the Catholic Church, that the schooling of 
 all the nation's boys and girls, and the rescue of all the 
 nation's poor from their wretchedness, is a first obliga- 
 tion of the organised public society. I do but repeat 
 what I am so often saying, that to the Catholic Church 
 is committed the highest possible ideal of every form of 
 public organic society ; and hence the State still has, 
 and is always likely to have, many a necessary lesson to 
 learn from the Catholic Church as the divine teacher of 
 the nations. Even in the ideal of schooling, the most 
 ignorant priest of a parish is still by his function, 
 whatever he may be by his opinions, far ahead of the
 
 THE CHURCH AND CIVIL SCHOOL 219 
 
 State as a national teacher. For put two public schools 
 side by side such as Eton College and Harrow School 
 on one side, and a Board School in Whitechapel on the 
 other side and then compare them with any parish 
 church. In the one school all are " gentlemen," in 
 the other school none are called gentlemen, but by some 
 uglier name. Whereas if boys from the one and boys 
 from the other meet together in the parish church, the 
 universal human teacher there, as priest of a local 
 commonwealth or parish, is obliged to address them all 
 alike as "dearly beloved brethren'' In our different 
 schools we see not yet Caste or Mammon disestablished ; 
 whereas in our common or parish church we see Christ's 
 community and equality already established. There is 
 a sectarianism in our schooling which is impossible in 
 our common worship. Do you think that this old 
 Catholic education, which is independent of schools, 
 and which goes so much deeper and wider than the 
 best civil schooling dares yet to go, is of small worth 
 because it is so familiar ? Familiar is the air, familiar is 
 water, familiar is the sunshine ; and yet we could not 
 live without them. The profoundest and most precious 
 education in the world is that which, like our Prayer 
 Book, is " Common," that which we are always 
 ignoring. 
 
 " Seeing then that we," our whole humankind and all 
 the nations in it, " have a great high priest who is 
 passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God," seeing 
 that He is the Word of God by which, as the prophets 
 declare, all the revolutions of political history are 
 ordered and moderated " let us [who have His baptism 
 and His ordination] hold fast our profession." The 
 apostles had not a monoply of the civil schooling, such 
 as our profession once had. I have reminded you 
 already how grievous a failure that very system has
 
 220 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 proved, which some amongst us are so eager to keep. 
 The English clergy have schooled and Sunday-schooled 
 the mass of the English poor. With what result ? The 
 poor have "lost the tradition of church-going," and 
 what is worse, almost of church-being. " How to retain 
 our elder scholars " is the topic of despondent debates 
 at hundreds of clerical gatherings. I have reminded 
 you how the French Jesuits in the last century had the 
 most consummate system of schooling in the world. 
 With what results? It produced the Encyclopaedists 
 and Atheists of the Revolution. Neither had the 
 apostles even one share of the civil schooling, such as 
 some of our profession would now content themselves 
 withal, leaving other shares of it to rival claimants, 
 so affecting that they are no longer the teachers of 
 the nation and the parishes, but are merely the teachers 
 of one of the " Denominations," or sects which divide 
 the national and communal unity in which the Word of 
 God has established us. The apostles had no civil 
 schools and no part in them. Their successors had in 
 all the world to confront an education which was 
 heathen, atheist, or agnostic. Nevertheless they held 
 fast their profession, and proved in the use of it that 
 they were the teachers whom God had sent to all 
 nations.
 
 THE NATIONS' APOSTLE AND OTHER 
 APOSTLES * 
 
 "Are they ministers of Christ? (I speak as a fool) I am more." 
 2 COR. xi. 23. 
 
 PROBABLY nowhere else, within so short a space, 
 is there so much ironical criticism upon men who 
 call themselves apostles and ministers of the gospel, 
 and who are taken for such by those who " suffer fools 
 gladly," as there is in St. Paul's second letter to the 
 Church of Corinth. We should like to have heard the 
 apostle himself apply his principles in detail to some 
 of the rich and mighty newspaper apostles who have 
 lately been the cause of so much noise and stir, so much 
 writing and sight-seeing, amongst the Church and 
 people of England. The Nations' Apostle would find 
 to-day amongst us the same clamorous parties as he 
 found in the Church of Corinth the politic Roman 
 Cardinal who cries, " I am of Peter " ; the wealthy and 
 popular Separatist preacher, with his " thirteen acres of 
 charming grounds," earned by sermons, who says, " I 
 am of Paul " ; 2 the autocratic Salvationist Generalis- 
 simo, who asserts, " And I am of Christ " ; the forward 
 preacher of comparatives, who trades in new^r methods 
 
 1 February 21 (Sexagesima Sunday), 1892. 
 * The Rev. Dr. Wright, editorial superintendent of the Bible 
 Society, in the British Weekly, February 18, 1892.
 
 222 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 and higher criticisms, and profounds views, as he 
 thinks, and says, " I am of Apollos." 
 
 I. 
 
 First of all, we may be sure, the apostle would have 
 owned all that he saw of the Light and Life of Jesus 
 Christ in every one of them. The objects of the 
 undiscerning flattery of the newspapers and of the 
 newspaper school of preachers are men, and therefore 
 to be loved and honoured. He rejoiced when any men 
 preached Christ anywhere and to anybody, even though 
 they preached Him of contention. I do not care to 
 hide my own belief that Popish preaching, Anabaptist 
 preaching, and Salvationist preaching, in the sight of 
 the Apostle of the Nations, would have seemed con- 
 tentious preaching. 
 
 Widely as these parties differ from one another, they 
 are ceaselessly bedaubing one another with praises. 
 But that there is more contentiousness than charity in 
 these tributes of admiration is evident from the fact 
 that the praises are always tied up with a depreciation 
 of the national bishops and priests. " The three most 
 important religious demonstrations lately held," says 
 a daily organ of the capitalist party in politics, "have 
 been in honour of persons who are distinctly outside 
 the Church of England." x The size and stir of Car- 
 dinal Manning's funeral, in comparison with the sobriety 
 of Archbishop Tait's funeral, is cited by the most 
 preposterous of pressmen, seated in "the Vatican, 
 London," as a proof that the Pope's " Archbishop of 
 Westminster," and not the nation's " A. C. Cantaur," 
 was the true primate of England, and the real suc- 
 cessor of Anselm and Becket. 2 
 
 1 Daily News, February 12, 1892. 
 Review of Reviews, February, 1892.
 
 THE NATIONS' APOSTLE 223 
 
 The object of these three sorts of preaching the 
 Popish, the Puritan, and the Methodist is fundamentally 
 the same, and they are really but three varieties of what 
 the apostle calls " another gospel." Hence there is more 
 affinity between the three, unlike as they seem upon 
 the surface, than there is between either of them and 
 the gospel of the Nations' Apostle, or between either 
 of them and that gospel which the Church of England 
 exhibits by being catholic and national. Neither of 
 them recognises the sanctity of the fatherland, in nation 
 and parish, wherein the Father has established us, 
 and whereof He has made us very members incorporate. 
 Consequently each of these " apostles," whose praise is 
 in the newspapers, is obliged by his "gospel" to carry 
 on a war of contention against the nationality and 
 against the neighbourly communality of the Kingdom 
 of Christ. They preach or fight in order to separate 
 as many souls as they can from that Kingdom which is 
 older than the Church, that Kingdom into which Christ 
 Himself was born as a citizen of Judah, as a villager of 
 Nazareth, and over which He was exalted as King at 
 His ascension, and to which He sends His apostles with 
 His baptism and discipline. This godly universal order 
 they hold to be merely natural, or secular, or national, 
 or parochial ; some sectaries even hold it to be diabolical, 
 or at best worldly. So they "preach Christ of con- 
 tention," eager to carry souls away as conquered 
 prisoners out of this kingdom into the empire of the 
 Pope, or into some Protestant sect, or into the dynas- 
 tical Army of the Booths. " They think of us," says the 
 Apostle of Nations, " as if we walked according to 
 the flesh." 
 
 The adulators of "false apostles" in the newspapers, 
 and the party-politicians who offer educational or other 
 civil bribes to the " false apostles " to get the votes and
 
 224 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 interest of their disciples at the next election, criticise the 
 simple ordinary parish priests, by whose daily work, 
 unpraised by men, Christ is leavening millions of lives, 
 and is holding the nation together, exactly as the 
 Apostle of the Nations says he was criticised in Corinth. 
 "His bodily presence is weak," say they, "and his speech 
 contemptible." What they said may have been true. 
 If so, St. Paul represents the thousands of every-day 
 priests and laymen, each quietly doing his own work in 
 his own place. As they hear the noisy plaudits around 
 the idols of the market-place, they are forced to demand 
 of the Church, with the Nations' Apostle : " Are they 
 Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. 
 Are they the seed of Abraham ? So am I. Are they 
 ministers of Christ? (I speak as a fool) I am more." 
 
 Yes, " more " ; " more " in the character of his work ; 
 " more " in the rewards of it ; " more " in the authority 
 whence it comes. If an apostolic man dies, who has been 
 loyal to the National Church, and has not gained high 
 place or fortune by seceding from the English household 
 of faith, bishops and archdeacons do not waste upon him 
 any of the praise they heap profusely upon a Newman, or 
 a Manning, or a Spurgeon. Have we not seen it in our 
 own days ? 
 
 When Maurice died, a man who had indeed come 
 forth from God, and by whom God has turned all 
 English Christianity into its new and socialist direction, 
 the bishops and archdeacons held their tongues. 
 
 St. Paul meekly accepted the Corinthian criticism upon 
 himself. Nevertheless he drew upon his own great 
 reserve of irony, which he ordinarily kept under restraint, 
 and gave them back measure for measure. " For we," 
 says he, speaking for himself and his own son in the Faith, 
 "dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare 
 ourselves with some that commend themselves. But
 
 THE NATIONS' APOSTLE 225 
 
 they, measuring themselves by themselves, and com- 
 paring themselves among themselves, are not wise. But 
 we will not boast of things beyond our measure, but 
 according to the measure of the Canon " (for that is the 
 word he uses, which we translate "rule") "which God 
 hath distributed to us, a measure to reach even unto you. 
 For we stretch not ourselves beyond our measure." The 
 tenth and eleventh chapters are full of light and 
 correction for the Church whenever or wherever she is 
 tempted to be led astray by the noise and bluster and big 
 shows of the hour, or to turn her back upon a quiet Paul 
 or a modest Titus, and follow such as he calls "false 
 apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into 
 the apostles of Christ." 
 
 II. 
 
 But, exclaim the Corinthians, have you read the 
 eulogies in the newspapers? Have you heard the 
 sermons by the newspaper preachers, not merely in 
 meeting-houses and churches, but even in the cathedrals 
 not only from Papists and Separatists, but even from the 
 successors of the Apostle of Nations ? Have you seen 
 the enormous size and costliness of the shows, on sea and 
 on land, and the countless multitudes which thronged to 
 gaze at them? Has there been anything equal in the 
 same way since the funeral of Tom Sayers, the great 
 pugilist? And you dare to say that men who can 
 command "demonstrations" so imposing, and sermons so 
 panegyrical, are " false apostles"? 
 
 " And no marvel," the apostle answers for himself, and 
 for us. " For Satan himself is transformed into an angel 
 of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers" 
 who are not evil spirits as he is, but are men as we are, 
 and therefore enlightened by the Holy Spirit "also be 
 
 16
 
 226 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 transformed as the ministers of righteousness, whose end 
 shall be," like the end of all other men, "according to 
 their works." 
 
 Every man who speaks and works for righteousness 
 and soberness, even though he preaches Christ of 
 contention, is a minister of Christ. Nay, the Lord shows 
 us, in his description of the Judgment of the Nations, that 
 every one who does an act of mercy, though he never 
 preaches, and avoid public committees, is a minister of 
 Christ. Cardinal Manning, like so many other English- 
 men, was full of chivalry and pity. Mr. Spurgeon, like 
 so many other Englishmen, was instinct with honesty 
 and straightforwardness. Every chivalrous, pitiful, 
 straightforward man or woman, about whom the world 
 makes no noise, is to that extent a " minister of Christ," 
 and "a minister of righteousness," though otherwise 
 labouring for the false unity of the Pope's empire, or for 
 the false spirituality of Sectarian separation. Such 
 graces could not be in them, nor be ministered by them 
 to others, unless the life and light of Jesus Christ, the 
 head of every man, had been imparted to them. 
 
 So much the Nations' Apostle grants as to the 
 preachers of "another gospel," in Corinth. But he 
 hastens to say that he regards himself and Timothy 
 ("fool" as the Corinthians may think him) to be the 
 ministers of Christ in another and a fuller sense. "I 
 speak as a fool : I am more." "I say again, Let no man 
 think me a fool." St. Paul knew, however, that the 
 Corinthians would so think him, and therefore, he grimly 
 added, "If otherwise, yet as a fool receive me." 
 
 It needs an apostolic "boldness" not to fear being 
 thought "a fool," or being thought a bigot. Let us at 
 least be honest, even though the Corinthians call us 
 fools and intolerant. For what, to use for an instant 
 the cant of the Zeitgeist, must be "the message" of a
 
 THE NATIONS' APOSTLE 227 
 
 Roman Cardinal to the city of Corinth or to the 
 Commonwealth of England? What must be "the 
 message" of a preacher of Anabaptism? It is nothing 
 to the purpose to say they were good men. It is 
 nothing to the purpose to say, as many do, that such a man 
 is better than his creed. This may be the self-satisfied 
 expression of our conceit that his creed is far inferior to 
 our creed. It is the sorrow of every good man that he 
 has never yet been as good as his creed. Every man's 
 creed, that which he indeed believes, is constantly bring- 
 ing him into judgment for falling so short of it in his 
 deeds. It is nothing to the purpose to say that they were 
 successful, and that they had their reward great place 
 and pomp in this present evil world, or great influence 
 and popularity in this present evil world. The thing 
 really to the purpose is, what did they tell you and me 
 and all mankind? What was their creed? 
 
 Manning's "message" was that we are all outside the 
 Church of Christ, and that to get within it we must 
 supplement Christ's sacrament of baptism with the 
 super-sacrament of individual submission to the Bishop 
 of Rome, and to such functionaries as he may be pleased 
 to send to be our bishops. Corinth, according to one 
 part of its "false apostles" was outside the common- 
 wealth of Christ, until every one of its citizens said, " I 
 am of Peter." You must all submit to the holy mother- 
 mistress Church of Jerusalem, and supplement your 
 baptism with her circumcision. The English nation, and 
 every English commune, said Manning, is outside the 
 Catholic Church of Christ, and will remain outside until 
 Englishmen say, "Whosoever is forced by the internation- 
 alist caucus of Cardinals upon the poor, unfree local 
 Church of Rome is its bishop : he is 'Peter' ; and to him 
 every soul in England ought to be subject. He is the in- 
 fallible judge in faith and morals." Baptism, which was the
 
 228 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Corinthian's witness to his freedom from the Jerusalem 
 below, as the Apostle of Nations taught, is the English- 
 man's witness to his freedom from Rome, which is but a 
 poor caricature of Jerusalem. 
 
 " By one Spirit," said Paul to the Corinthians, " are 
 we all baptized into one Body, whether we be Jews or 
 Gentiles, whether we be bond or free," and that baptism 
 is as independent now of Rome as it was then of 
 Jerusalem. That sacrament, as the Lord said at the 
 institution of it, belongs to " all nations." 
 
 Mr. Spurgeon's " message," as the newspapers call it, 
 was fundamentally as negative as Manning's, and equally 
 contradictory to the Gospel of the Nations' Apostle. 
 When he first began to preach in London I was taken 
 by some friends, who were Baptists, to hear the new 
 young orator, of whom they were naturally proud. I do 
 not remember a word of his sermon ; but one sentence 
 in his prayer before the sermon, which was somewhat 
 defiantly uttered, made an impression upon me which I 
 have never forgotten. It ran thus : " O Lord, give us 
 back our good old-fashioned Calvinist theology ! " I 
 honour Calvin as much as any man ; and I hope that I 
 am not blind to the good, as well as the evil, which 
 Europe and America owe to him. But the English 
 Church and nation had scarcely completed their freedom 
 from Rome when they were threatened with a hardly 
 less fearful bondage to Calvinism. Mr. Spurgeon's 
 " Calvinism " never had the ferocity of the men whom 
 he admired as theologians the men who murdered 
 Archbishop Laud, who robbed England of holidays, 
 who deprived the common people of the Common 
 Prayer, who abolished Christmas, battered down 
 cathedrals and theatres, who drove out priests and 
 players, who established a cruel Sabbatarianism, 
 destroyed the " merriment " of England, and built up
 
 THE NATIONS' APOSTLE 229 
 
 a new landlordism out of the plunder of the Church 
 and the poor. His doctrine grew milder and more 
 liberal as he grew in the practical knowledge of men. 
 With an irony not unlike St. Paul's, he said that he had 
 dismissed three " holiness men " whom he had employed 
 as gardeners, and instituted three " sinners," and that he 
 found the sinners to be more conscientious workmen. 
 Nevertheless he was obliged to tell our fatherland, and 
 every parish in it, that it was not the family of God, but 
 that only those who by their own " conversion " sepa- 
 rated themselves from the nation and the communes 
 were the true children of God. It is only just to say 
 that he as rigorously excommunicated himself from 
 Christianity until he was " converted," as he excom- 
 municated the majority of the nation and the race. 
 Preaching at a new chapel in a parish " in which 
 Ritualism abounded," he told his hearers that when he 
 was at school the clergyman said to him, " What is your 
 Christian name ? " He replied : " I have not any 
 Christian name ; I wish I had. I am not a Christian." 
 The clergyman said, " My dear boy, are you a heathen?" 
 He answered : " I almost wish I were : I should not 
 then have the responsibility of living in a Christian land 
 and not being converted." If he had been a true 
 Calvinist he would have known that the responsibility 
 was God's and not his own, for unless he belonged to the 
 predestinated number of the elect, his conversion was 
 impossible. He added that he had not " the impudence 
 to mock God by addressing Him as ' Our Father which 
 art in heaven,' when he felt that he was the child of the 
 devil." ' 
 
 This unapostolical, anti-national, and anti-social 
 theology was the germ of the sermons whose wide 
 circulation over the globe was so profitable to the trade, 
 
 1 The Christian World, November 7, 1873.
 
 230 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 and which have called forth the eulogies of newspaper 
 men and Church dignitaries. Nothing less than St. 
 Paul's own irony could bring out the full contrast 
 between these sermons of commercial Babylon and his 
 own sermons. His sermons, as he tells the Church in 
 the indignant autobiographical which she uses to-day as 
 her Epistle, brought him the persecution of the religious 
 world (the cruellest of all the forms of the world which 
 we renounced at our baptism) : they brought him 
 floggings on his bare body, the necessity of working for 
 his daily bread, and hardly getting that ; his sermons 
 brought him into hunger and thirst, into fastings also, 
 into cold and nakedness. 
 
 Some perverted form of Calvinist election and repro- 
 bation was no doubt one of the false gospels which the 
 Corinthians had preferred to the gospel of the Nations' 
 Apostle. St. Paul taught them that the childhood of 
 God and the childhood of the devil are not two 
 several persons, but the two contrary births and lives 
 of which every person, some time or other, is conscious 
 in himself, whether Jew or Greek, faithful or infidel. 
 Christ, the author of the Divine birth in consciences and 
 nations, by sending His apostles with His baptism and 
 His discipline to all nations and to every creature, 
 declared in action, as He had done by word in the 
 parable of the Prodigal Son, that the childhood of God 
 is the true and real childhood in every Corinthian and 
 every Englishman. 
 
 III. 
 
 Whether we like it or not, we are obliged by our 
 calling as the priests of the nation, to assert that we 
 have a kind of ministry which is " more," as the Nations'
 
 THE NATIONS' APOSTLE 231 
 
 Apostle says, than the ministry of nation-dividing and 
 parish-dividing apostles. Whatever truths they may 
 speak, or whatever good they may do, we are bound to 
 own in England, as St. Paul did in Corinth. But 
 " thoagh I should boast somewhat of our authority, 
 which the Lord hath given us for edification, and not 
 for your destruction, I should not be ashamed." The 
 authority of our ministry no more depends upon the 
 recognition of it by newspapers or by parliaments than 
 the authority of St. Paul's apostleship depended upon 
 the votes of the Corinthians. Our business in the nation 
 and its communes and families is not to satisfy news- 
 papers, nor so to conduct ourselves as to get influence 
 amongst political wire-pullers, and preserve the endow- 
 ments of those of our order who are endowed. Our 
 business in England, like his in Corinth, is to liberate 
 consciences from all tyrannies ; it is to " endeavour to 
 keep men within that divine unity of national fatherland 
 and communal neighbourhood and family order wherein 
 the Father has already established them, and wherein 
 His Spirit was educating them before He manifested His 
 Son to the nations, and sent forth His apostles with the 
 Catholic baptism and the Catholic discipline of which 
 we are the ministers : it is to cultivate in men that 
 catholic humanity by which the Father has made them 
 members of a greater society than the nation, or 
 commune, or family. What the tyrannies are to which 
 they are subject who reject the Nations' Apostle for 
 other apostles St. Paul tells the Corinthians in many 
 parts of his letters, and in to-day's Epistle he counts up 
 five of them. " For ye suffer if a man bring you into 
 bondage : if a man devour you : if a man talk of you : 
 if a man exalt himself: if a man smite you on the 
 face." 
 
 It is too late here to show how history, as the con-
 
 232 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 tinuous Word of God, prove these to have been again 
 and again the results of substituting the false unity of 
 the Roman Popedom, or the false spirituality of 
 Sectarianism, for that unity in which the Father has 
 established us, and for that common Spirit which He 
 has " poured out upon all flesh."
 
 PRIESTS AND POLITICAL PARTIES 1 
 
 " Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, 
 and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy 
 brother's eye." ST. LUKE vi. 42. 
 
 IN these words the Saviour of mankind and the true 
 Head of every nation in whom the men and citizens 
 of the most contrary parties have unity, detects and 
 condemns that evil spirit of division which rages and 
 seems to rule at times like the present. It sounds like 
 the satire of the eternal Word of God, the ultimate 
 factor of history, upon our Parliamentary elections, as 
 they are now conducted. For who sees not that it is 
 the chief business of the agent and slave of a political 
 party, and indeed that he regards it as his very duty, to 
 be what our Blessed Lord calls a "hypocrite"? He 
 uses pen and tongue, and newspaper and placard, 
 " first " to deny that there is any beam in his own eye, 
 and thereupon to show to his fellow-citizens how huge a 
 mote there is in his brother's eye ; or perhaps he invites 
 them to curse and rail at his brother for having a mote 
 in his eye. Jesus says that every such speaker or 
 writer, whether he calls himself Pharisee or Sadducee, a 
 Liberal or a Conservative, is a "hypocrite." He is a 
 man playing a part upon a stage, laying aside for the 
 moment, and for the action, his own true self ; that is, 
 
 1 Fourth Sunday after Trinity, July 10, 1892. 
 233
 
 234 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 his share in the common and indivisible Humanity 
 which he and all men have in Christ. He is blinded by 
 his own hypocrisy, Jesus says, by a beam in his own 
 eye. And what is the name of this blinding beam ? It 
 is " Party." The Saviour saw that the misery and 
 degradation of His own nation were due to the 
 blindness of the parties which divided it, political and 
 religious. All His awful " Woes " were delivered 
 against these parties, none of which had any place or 
 name in the real divine constitution of Israel any more 
 than our political parties of Whig or Tory, Liberal or 
 Conservative, or other such sects, have any place or 
 name in the constitution and statutes of England, or 
 any more than our ecclesiastical parties of High, Low, 
 or Broad have any place or name in the creed or canons 
 of the Church of Christ. Yet men fancy that these 
 unreal divisions, both in Church and Commonwealth, 
 are the real branches and members of each. It has 
 often been noticed that the Saviour uttered no " Woe " 
 against the national priests. Why ? Because, notwith- 
 standing they were most cruel enemies to Him and His 
 work, they had a name and place in the godly and 
 humane order of the fatherland. The priests of Jewry 
 were by their office witnesses, as the leaders of the 
 Jewish sects and parties were not, to that unity and 
 brotherhood in which the Father had established the 
 whole nation. The priests might individually be 
 Pharisees or Sadducees ; they might individually care 
 more for the triumph of their party than for the health 
 and wealth of the whole common People ; they might 
 pretend that the health and wealth of the Nation could 
 only be obtained by the blind Liberal Sadducee crush- 
 ing the blind Conservative Pharisee, or by the blind 
 Tory Pharisee keeping the blind Radical Sadducee out 
 of all places of power and profit in the State. But as
 
 PRIESTS AND POLITICAL PARTIES 235 
 
 priests they were against party, and for the nation. 
 They were the witnesses and the ministers of the great 
 national community and fellowship which included the 
 members of all parties. As priests they were obliged 
 to bless all the organical people, and not merely the 
 mechanical party of the Pharisee or the mechanical 
 party of the Sadducee. The Pharisee who was a priest 
 had in his sacerdotal character and function to bless the 
 very Sadducees, whom he cursed in his party character ; 
 and the Sadducee who was a priest had in the same 
 way, however grudgingly, to bless the Pharisees as 
 integral members of the elect people of God. As 
 national priests they were obliged to offer the Divine 
 sacrifice for the entire national congregation of the 
 Lord. It was their function as priests to absolve all the 
 citizens from their sins. So the priests were obliged to 
 deny in God's name the first assumption of each party, 
 that transgression is a characteristic solely of the other 
 party ; that its members have no beams in their own 
 eyes, and consequently have title and power to point 
 out, if not to pull out, each ugly and wicked mote that 
 is in their brother's eye, or, as they prefer to say, in the 
 " enemy's " eye. 
 
 II. 
 
 You will observe what it is which the Judge and 
 Saviour of the nations here does. He rejects our 
 nomenclature and substitutes His own. He calls that 
 man " hypocrite " or play-actor, whom we call a " noble 
 champion," " our glorious leader," the politician or 
 religionist " whose heart is in the right place." That 
 which we call magnificent insight, or foresight, or 
 clearness of vision in such a man, Jesus Christ calls a 
 blinding beam in that man's eye. The astute wire- 
 puller of one of our political parties gives this cruel title
 
 236 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 of "enemy" to his "brother" in the other party. I 
 need not say for which party he rages, since the Church 
 knows nothing of citizens under their self-made separa- 
 tions into Pharisees and Sadducees, or into Conservatives 
 and Radicals, but knows them only within their God- 
 given constitution as men and citizens. The wire-puller 
 of party, who has no name for his " brother " in the 
 opposite political camp but that of " the enemy," think- 
 ing that he saw signs of quarrel inside one of the dark 
 anti-Christian camps of his own party, adopted the 
 words of Nelson to some naval officers who had fallen 
 out, " Gentlemen, there is the enemy ; shake hands." 
 We priests should not only be hypocrites, but apostates, 
 if we did not at such a time as this remind the Lord's 
 congregation that Christ the Lord gives deliberately the 
 name of " thy brother " to that very man whom the 
 Antichrist of Party urges and inspires you to regard as 
 "the enemy." As we have been called, ordained, and 
 sent by Jesus Christ to His parishes in their entirety, 
 and to His whole English nation, that we may bless //, 
 that we may offer and present before the Father the 
 common Sacrifice of all and for all, and that we may 
 absolve all of their transgressions in His name and with 
 His power and authority, so we shall be traitors to 
 Jesus Christ, and to His whole congregation in parish 
 and State, if we side as priests with either of the parties 
 which pervert into " enemies " those whom He has called 
 and established into a brotherhood. It seems to me 
 more Christian to vote for a man than for a party, as we 
 see in that classical instance of the people's voting 
 St. Ambrose into the bishopric of Milan. 
 
 III. 
 
 The Lord does not merely warn us, however, that to 
 be saved from "hypocrisy," and to take our standing
 
 PRIESTS AND POLITICAL PARTIES 237 
 
 upon the fixed foundation of truth and reality, we must 
 renounce our nomenclature, which is of the old man, 
 and adopt His nomenclature, which is of the new man 
 created after God in Christ Jesus. He goes on to tell 
 us what we are " first " or at once to do. We are to 
 substitute His godly and humane order of time for our 
 anti-Christian order of time. He tells us to put first 
 things first. So long as the Radical is looking " first " 
 for the mote in the Tory's eye, or the Conservative is 
 looking " first " for the mote in the Liberal's eye, each is 
 blind, each is a " hypocrite," each is putting the second 
 thing in the first place. It is more important to the 
 whole family of the State for me to be right and clear- 
 sighted than to prove to as many as I can that the 
 other man is wrong and blind. That which seems on 
 the surface to be merely individual to you or me is 
 fundamentally social. I serve all society by casting 
 this beam of prejudice out of my own eye. 
 
 " Cast out first," says the common Saviour, to Liberal 
 and Conservative alike, " the beam out of thine own 
 eye : and then shalt thou see clearly." The newspaper 
 the holy bible of each party tells its own blind 
 partisan that there is no beam in his eye ; if there were, 
 he would not see so clearly as he does "the mote in 
 his " enemy's " eye." The " first " thing, says the Devil's 
 Unholy Scripture, alike in the Tory and Radical 
 translations of it, is to get our enlightened and faultless 
 party in power and place at all costs. The simple 
 sheep of each party, who run and vote in a flock as they 
 are told, are honestly fascinated by the ideal of the 
 party, and suppose that its loftiness is a palliation for 
 the bad morals of electioneering. The ideal is always 
 sure to be high and noble. That was as true of the 
 ideals of Pharisee or Sadducee as it is of those of Tory 
 or Radical. There always is something precious in the
 
 238 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 nation, the preservation of which to our children is 
 worth all our pains and struggles ; hence it is just and 
 rational that a Christian should be a Conservative. 
 There is always an accumulation of vile and corrupt 
 roots in the soil of the fatherland, and these must 
 develop hideous growths, which will be a curse to our 
 children if they are allowed to remain ; hence it is 
 righteous and reasonable that a Christian should be a 
 Radical. But he may be both, and may be both at 
 once, and yet remain firm in the liberty wherewith 
 Christ has made us free, and not sell himself into 
 bondage to either of the parties which pretend a 
 monopoly of those qualities of which they so 
 impertinently usurp the titles. This monopoly of what 
 is not exclusively ours is the very thing which Christ, 
 our Judge and Deliverer, calls " hypocrisy." Hence it 
 is that I am so glad that He in these last days, in His 
 character as Redeemer of all society, has called into the 
 field of politics the long silent and oppressed estate of 
 Labour. I will not say that He has founded a Labour 
 " party." Labour is for all : by it all live. So I can no 
 more regard the godly estate of Labour than I can 
 regard the holy order of the Priesthood, as a mere 
 party. If the wage- worker sells his soul to a party, he 
 will have the same condemnation as the priest who 
 becomes the slave of a party. Has not the Lord 
 already given us signs, as the world's all-ruling King, 
 that to this estate of Labour He has entrusted the 
 redemption of all other estates in the Commonwealth 
 from their present miserable captivity to the immoral 
 and anti-social parties of the " Ins " and the " Outs " ? 
 Oh may they be faithful, as the apostles were, to so great 
 and world-wide a trust It is the "first" necessity of 
 the Christian mind to look for the very best in the side 
 or interest opposed to his inclination. We own this in
 
 PRIESTS AND POLITICAL PARTIES 239 
 
 the Church whenever we speak of the reconciliation of 
 the parties and sects by which the {< one body " of the 
 baptized is now outwardly divided. It is morally 
 impossible to separate Church and State, so inextricably 
 has the Father of both united them. Ought we not to 
 extend the same principle to the State ? A Christian 
 Radical should be much more concerned at the beam in 
 his own eye than at the mote in his Tory brother's eye. 
 Why should political life be thought the one part of life 
 from which Christ and His Law are to be excluded ? 
 So a Christian Conservative, if he yields himself to be 
 led by Christ's Spirit, will be " first " eager to see and 
 discover the signs of Christ's mind in all the schemes 
 and plans of his Radical brother. How wide and 
 inexhaustible are the contents of that " Salvation " 
 which the world's Redeemer brings ! To be " saved " is 
 at the same time the liberation, emancipation, and 
 making whole which is the ideal of the revolutionist in 
 politics, and also the preservation of everything that is 
 precious, which is the ideal of the Conservative in 
 politics. Every parish in England is praying this week 
 that God being our Ruler and Guide, we English 
 citizens may so pass through things temporal that we 
 finally lose not the things eternal. " Things temporal " 
 is a name which we justly give to our political life. 
 " The things eternal," our common Fatherhood and 
 Brotherhood now revealed to all nations by God in 
 Christ Jesus our Lord, by which those who split them- 
 selves and their neighbours into wrangling parties, 
 struggling to disgrace and outwit one another, are 
 nevertheless really, inwardly, and spiritually held 
 together in one communion and fellowship by Him of 
 whom every fatherland in heaven and earth is named.
 
 THE LENTEN FAST ' 
 
 " Blow the trumpet in Zion ; sanctify a fast ; call a solemn 
 assembly ; gather the people ; sanctify the congregation ; assemble 
 the elders ; gather the children." JOEL ii. 15. 
 
 " But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head and wash thy 
 face, that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father 
 which seeth in secret." ST. MATT. vi. 17. 
 
 ONE of these passages occurs in the Epistle, and 
 the other in the Holy Gospel, which were read 
 before the common altar of the parish on " the first day 
 of Lent, commonly called Ash Wednesday." What 
 democratic and catholic significance lies in the phrase 
 " commonly called," which is repeated so often in our 
 English Book of Common Prayer, I shall hope to show 
 you on another Sunday. I have not joined together 
 these two Ash Wednesday texts to-day in order to 
 preach upon them, for each is full enough of matter 
 to occupy a preacher throughout the whole season ; but 
 rather because their junction on the first day of the fast 
 indicates what the whole of the fast ought to contain 
 and to be. 
 
 The two aspects of Lent, the national and the 
 personal, either of which can so easily be magnified 
 to the neglect of the other, are combined before the 
 altar of every parish on the first day. There and then 
 the Church associates the words of the Lord's prophet 
 
 1 February u, 1894. 
 240
 
 THE LENTEN FAST 241 
 
 to the whole national community with the Lord's own 
 words to the personal conscience. The Word of God, 
 which was uttered by the prophet Joel to the Common- 
 wealth of Judah, and is now self-uttered to all nations in 
 the person of the incarnate and universal Son, is the 
 Eternal Word, as His Church dogmatically teaches. 
 To confess Jesus as the Eternal Word is to say that He 
 always was, as well as is, God's Word to and in all ; 
 and therefore we may be sure that the people and 
 priests of the nation who heard the prophet's words 
 upon the fast, must also have heard His inward and ever- 
 speaking word to the conscience on the true and the 
 false fasting. This indeed the prophet implied by 
 saying in the Epistle exactly the same thing as Jesus 
 says in other words in the Gospel : " Rend your hearts, 
 and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your 
 God." 
 
 I. 
 
 Some of us have been preaching Lent after Lent, for 
 near a quarter of a century, the doctrine which the 
 Church places in the forefront on the first day of Lent, 
 not only by the choice of the Epistle, but by the whole 
 contents of the Commination Office. That doctrine is 
 that Lent is a season set apart by Christianity for the 
 discovery, denunciation, confession and amendment of 
 our open social sins ; and it is therefore, according to 
 the Church, a fast for the entirety of every nation, 
 city, and parish in Christianity. The dominant words 
 in the Epistle, " Zion," " Assembly," " The People," 
 " The Congregation," are all social phrases ; " the 
 Elders" and "the Children" include all the states of 
 social life. The Scribes and Pharisees of those news- 
 papers which profess righteousness, and care for the 
 poor, as Judas did, with their customary ignorance of 
 
 17
 
 242 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 the Church, and their intolerance toward her clergy 
 as such, pretend that such a use of Lent is a "novel 
 innovation." But this use of Lent is not made merely 
 by the sermons of those priests, few or many, who 
 intentionally adopt and vindicate it. They are simply 
 conforming to the Church which these newspapers 
 ceaselessly denounce. Every priest makes this use of 
 it. For the Church, as the mother and mediatrix of all 
 that are desolate and oppressed, has taken care by her 
 parochial offices for Lent that every priest as such shall 
 in every parish make this social use of it. I have much 
 more horror of the exceptional praise with which a 
 Party may belaud some of us, when it supposes we are 
 helping its worldly ends, than I have of its chronic 
 intolerance towards the whole estate of the national 
 clergy. 
 
 The social aspect of Lent used to need all the 
 greater emphasis at the time when we began to bring it 
 out of the Church's unchanging offices into our ever- 
 changing sermons, because Socialism did not then wear 
 silver slippers, and dine at rich men's tables, and 
 brought reproach instead of reputation. Besides, most 
 of our order, as was natural to the pastors of local 
 flocks, were ignoring the wide and deep social purposes 
 of Lent in their anxiety for the moral health of those 
 whom they best knew, the persons directly committed 
 to their charge. Even those who thought most 
 seriously of the corporate life of the Church, like the 
 Oxford Reformers, did not perceive how inseparable it 
 is from the corporate life of the commonwealth ; and so 
 they mainly urged their hearers to use Lent as a 
 time for each one of them to examine and forsake his 
 own individual sins against God and his neighbour 
 which are so often not open, but known only to his 
 Father who seeth in secret This is why they said
 
 THE LENTEN FAST 243 
 
 with so much emphasis, echoing the Pastor and Bishop 
 of all souls, Who both unites all and isolates each, " But 
 thou, when thou fastest." 
 
 To use Lent merely or mainly for the denunciation of 
 sins we are not inclined to, or are not likely to be in 
 a position to commit whether they be the class sins of 
 Tory landlords or the class sins of Radical capitalists, 
 or the class sins of drunkards, company promoters, and 
 gamblers is to narrow one of the most precious in- 
 stitutes of the human-universal fellowship, the Catholic 
 Church, to the pharisaic service of a sect or a party. 
 The Church is the city of refuge for common society and 
 the common conscience alike from the many Sects 
 which rend religion and the two Parties which rend 
 politics. Hence it is an obligation of the state of 
 the clergy, as I think, towards every other "state of 
 life " in the commonwealth, to avoid the possible 
 degradation of their Lenten sermons to the quarrelsome 
 level of leading articles in a political Party-newspaper, 
 or of speeches from a political Party-platform, whose 
 ends are not the same as the ends of the common 
 Church namely the spiritual healing of the common- 
 wealth and all its members, but rather the quack 
 pretence that it can only be healed by securing the 
 mechanical triumph of one political camp over another. 
 The seed of all class and party sins, from the worrying 
 of a rat to the crucifixion of a martyr, lies deep in every 
 self. Lent recalls us to the moral ABC, that every 
 such seed must be anti-socially fertile and reproductive 
 until self in all and each is put under Christ the 
 Lord. 
 
 Lent is indeed both national and personal, a time 
 for open denunciation and inward amendment. The 
 two things may be separable in public, but they are 
 inseparable in the sight of the Father of all and each,
 
 244 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 who seeth in secret. His sight of our " secret " is given 
 as part of the Gospel, or glad tidings to all mankind. 
 Hence every one who denounces ought to make quite 
 sure in secret of his call and mission. He ought to 
 examine himself and see how far he is qualifying 
 himself for so awful a work. Moses obtained the 
 right to denounce Pharaoh by first making the great 
 renunciation : he " refused to become the son of 
 Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction 
 with the People of God than to enjoy the pleasures 
 of sin for a season." Christ our Lord first emptied Him- 
 self, " made Himself of no reputation, and took upon 
 Himself the form of a slave," "though He was rich, yet 
 for your sakes He became poor," before He said to 
 the rich and full and life-enjoying men of other classes, 
 " Woe unto you that are rich ! Woe unto you that are 
 full ! Woe unto you that laugh now ! Woe unto you 
 when all men shall speak well of you ! " Yes, I see 
 clearly how to call upon landlords and capitalists to 
 renounce the spoiling of the people of God, and perhaps 
 I can make an income, a reputation, and a career by 
 doing it. I can earn two or three guineas from the 
 plutocratic owner of a newspaper by denouncing the 
 riches of an archbishop : I can write a laudatory article 
 upon St. Francis of Assisi in a comfortable study under 
 the inspiration of a bottle of champagne. But the 
 remorseless Word of God will come to me also, and 
 demand in secret, " What and where hast thou yet 
 renounced ? " 
 
 II. 
 
 The first day of Lent brings afresh to our sight the 
 impassable gulf betwixt the morality of the Church and 
 that of every Party, whether political or ecclesiastical. 
 It lies in the absolutely contrary attitude which each is
 
 THE LENTEN FAST 245 
 
 obliged to take towards sin ; but are equally fervid, or 
 ought to be, in their denunciation of sins. But what 
 does each mean by "sins"? A sin, according to the 
 teaching of every Party, is something altogether outside 
 its own tent, and never to be found inside it except 
 when one of its own adherents turns apostate, and joins 
 the other Party. The man may be impelled by con- 
 science or by interest : God alone knows by which. 
 But thenceforward he will be stigmatised as a Judas in 
 the camp which he has forsaken, and as the one most 
 sinful man in all the land. For who does not see that 
 sin is assumed by the Scribes and Pharisees of Party to 
 be a property exclusively inherent in the other Party ? 
 The hardest conflict of the Church must always be with 
 Party, more even than with class, though the Church, as 
 the one common fellowship, can acknowledge neither 
 classes nor parties. A class, however, does at times 
 good-humouredly or patronisingly concede the existence 
 of some good and right in other classes ; but all the 
 eloquence and wit of Party are put to the stretch in 
 casuistical efforts to prove that even the right done by 
 the other Party is wrong, and that the truth uttered by 
 it is false. 
 
 A Party Lent, if we could imagine so strange an 
 institution, could scarcely be used for the self-examina- 
 tion and confession of the Party's own misdeeds ; it 
 would be restricted to the numbering and denunciation 
 of the sins of its hinderers and opposers. A Party 
 thanks whatever it does thank, that it is not as that 
 other Party. Thus the common democratic conscience 
 of England perceived that the State-imposed " Fast and 
 Humiliation Days" of the Long Parliament, the Rump 
 " Commonwealth," and the Cromwellian Caesardom, 
 were the exact contrary to the old humane-universal 
 Lent, which was and is the fast for the organic entirety
 
 246 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 of each national and parochial community. Those 
 dreadful Lents and Comminations of the tyrannical 
 " Nonconformist conscience " were not only mere Party 
 fasts, but were what the prophet calls " fasts for strife 
 and debate," as any one may see who will read in 
 modern light the official " Fast Sermons " preached to 
 the State authorities at Westminster Abbey, St. Mar- 
 garet's, and Whitehall Chapel, by their Nonconformist 
 and Separatist chaplains ; or the amazing seven 
 " Motives " which Cromwell gave in his proclamation 
 for a fast to secure God's help in his unjust war against 
 Spain. A fast perverted to Party uses cannot bring 
 forth the humble confession and amendment of the 
 whole fellowship, which is the end of Lent, but can 
 only produce self-righteous blindness and self-justifying 
 reprisals. " I ask," said an English patriot who had 
 observed the immoral fruits of those Party fast-days of 
 the seventeenth century, " whether the holy Name of God 
 hath not been mightily profaned by the fasts which the 
 people of this nation have been forced to observe, even 
 against their hearts, souls, and consciences ? How did 
 the Parliament at first enforce the people of this nation 
 to fast and pray for the defence of Religion, King, 
 Parliament, Laws, and Liberties ? And did not the 
 King, at the same time, command that part of the 
 nation under his command to fast and pray for his 
 contrary forces, as fighting upon the very same grounds 
 and causes? " This was in 1652. We are now far 
 enough from these two Parties to see that the parlia- 
 mentary league of greedy Landlords and bigoted Libera- 
 tionists in one camp, and the wilful national king and 
 his followers in the other camp, were alike in need of a 
 common and catholic fast like Lent, wherein each might 
 confess their own sins, instead of denouncing the sins of 
 the other.
 
 THE LENTEN FAST 247 
 
 III. 
 
 The Church, as the mother of us all, whatever be our 
 Party in Church or commonwealth, calls every one to 
 come for forty days out of the narrow bounds of Party, 
 and look in a sincere and unbiassed light at our relations 
 to that great and all-including fellowship for whose 
 health and wealth every Party affects to exist and work. 
 Yes, Party is that anti-Christian Babylon out of which 
 the Lord calls His whole people, as a whole, by the 
 Lenten trumpet in Sion. Hence, I cannot but think 
 that to spend Lent in the mere denunciation of sins 
 outside us, and from which we are able to clear and 
 comfortably absolve our own selves as innocent, and to 
 neglect spending it in the examining, confessing, and 
 amending of our own contribution to the sins of the 
 Church and the Commonwealth, is to waste it. It per- 
 verts, as I have said, a common Churchly, Catholic, a 
 humane-universal institute into a class and sectarian 
 institute. If Lent be not only a national fast, but also 
 a personal fast for every citizen in Christianity, it must 
 be as needful and wholesome for the proudest and most 
 Pharisaical newspaper editor, as it is for the most modest 
 bishop, whom he denounces, as his foregoers did the 
 Lord Christ, as "a friend of publicans." 
 
 For when we turn from the cruel Parties to the 
 Church, the tender mother of us all, and ask her what 
 sin is, and where it is, how does she reply ? We behold 
 her lying in the dust, with the ashes of Lent upon her 
 sacred head. The Church, as the mother of us all, 
 knows nothing of our self-made classes and parties, 
 she knows only God-made men, women, and children. 
 Where is sin ? What is sin ? " Sin," the Church con- 
 fesses afresh on every first day of Lent, " is in me and 
 in you. Do not look out so eagerly and inhumanly for
 
 248 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 sin in others. Sin is the horrible thing which you and I 
 are committing against God and against our neighbour." 
 Surely it may moderate both our anger and our wonder 
 at the rage of the Scribes of the Party newspapers, and 
 of the Pharisees of the Party platforms and conventions, 
 against the bishops and priests of the Church, if we will 
 but recollect that they can never say anything more 
 bitter against us than the Church urges us to confess 
 to the Father and to His holy congregation against 
 ourselves. Illiberal and malicious as they are, they 
 tell the truth about us ! What is most to be dreaded, 
 is not their blame but their praise, lest it should bring 
 us under that sentence of the Lord, when " He lifted up 
 His eyes on His disciples and said : ' Woe unto you, 
 when all men shall speak well of you ! For so did their 
 fathers to the false prophets.' " 
 
 Denunciation of the social sins of our neighbours is 
 tolerable where it is the Father of all who says, 
 " Cursed are they," and where His priest officially 
 repeats His word, and applies it to the common con- 
 science, as in the Commination office, of which I have 
 so often spoken, and hope to speak later. But it is an 
 intolerable pharisaism, and brings the denouncer under 
 Christ's commination, when and where it is separated 
 from the search after, the confession, and the reparation 
 of our own personal sins. " Except your righteousness," 
 said Jesus to the " multitudes " of His nation and age, 
 "shall exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and 
 Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom 
 of heaven." The ideal commonwealth, the kingdom of 
 heaven on earth, is for " the multitudes," as its King 
 declares. But it cannot be realised or entered into by 
 the multitudes as the parties which divide and rend 
 the actual commonwealth pretend and promise that it 
 can through the immoral and mechanical process of
 
 THE LENTEN FAST 249 
 
 any one Party out-witting, out-bribing, out-voting, con- 
 founding and crushing any other Party. It can only be 
 realised or entered into upon earth, as every Lent 
 reminds us, by the new creation of ideal men, women, 
 and children. That new creation, as the Apostle of the 
 Commonwealth told the Ephesians, is the evolution and 
 education of " the new man " which is already in each 
 one of us through the man-becoming of the eternal Son 
 of God. In proportion as the new birth of humanity 
 grows and thrives within us we shall detect those 
 dangerous and fertile roots of all social evil which are 
 within ourselves ; we shall grow in a godly scepticism 
 of the braggart promises of any and every Party ; and 
 we shall look more and more for the light and grace of 
 God in all men, women, and children, and chiefly in such 
 as are least agreeable to us and most opposed to our- 
 selves and our class or party prejudices. This is more 
 than our old hearts of stone can do, and therefore on 
 " the first day of Lent " and every day throughout it, 
 the Church teaches us to ask the Almighty and Ever- 
 lasting, who hates nothing that He has made, to create 
 in us Churchmen new and contrite hearts.
 
 ARCHBISHOP LAUD, THE MARTYR FOR 
 RELIGIOUS EQUALITY * 
 
 " For I say, through the grace of God given unto me, to every 
 man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than 
 he ought to think ; but to think soberly, according as God hath 
 dealt to every man the measure of faith. For as we have many 
 members in one body, and all members have not the same office ; 
 so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one 
 members one of another." ROM. xii. 3-5. 
 
 I SPOKE to you some years ago, in my first sermon 
 in this church upon to-day's Epistle, of the rare and 
 fine equity with which St. Paul does justice alike to that 
 which we are at present calling " Individualism," and to 
 that which we are calling " Socialism." These terms are 
 merely secular or ephemeral things ; they are one day 
 in fashion and another day will be out of fashion with 
 the press, platform, and pulpit : they mean one thing 
 this year, another thing next year. But the truth which 
 each term attempts imperfectly to express, in the 
 language of the place and time, is as old and unchanging 
 as mankind is, and will last as long as that personality 
 and that community which have made us what we are, 
 and upon both of which we depend to make us better 
 than we have yet been. So inseparable are they, that 
 whatever this or that man, this or that generation may 
 mean by "Socialism," our common test of its worth is 
 
 1 Sunday morning, January 13, 1895. 
 250
 
 ARCHBISHOP LAUD 251 
 
 always in a person. We ask, Will the character and 
 condition of each individual man, woman, and child be 
 better or worse under it ? 
 
 The Apostle of Nations does not here recommend to 
 the Roman Church the establishment of any social 
 scheme. On the contrary, he asserts that God has 
 already established them within a social scheme by the 
 creation of a human kind in " one body," the Head of 
 which one body has appeared in the Incarnation, or 
 man-becoming of His own eternal Word and Son, Jesus 
 Christ. Those men, women, and children who are known 
 in Rome and elsewhere as the Church, have been called 
 out and separated from others, and baptized by the Holy 
 Spirit of the Father and the Son into the one universal 
 society, to testify to every individual conscience and to 
 all nations that men are already living in a society whose 
 real character and organisation the selfishness of sin 
 prevents them from seeing and comprehending. The 
 perfect social order, so far as the Will of the Father of 
 men is concerned, is not somewhere in the dim and 
 distant futnre : it is present in us and our neighbours 
 now, here, and everywhere. We are in need of no new 
 social organisation here or there : but we need to see 
 and know what the actual or godly organisation of all 
 human society now and everywhere is. He has sent 
 His own Son to be born, live, suffer, and die as man, He 
 has sent His own common Spirit of grace upon each 
 and all, in order that every individual man may be able 
 to see and understand the perfect unity and community 
 of the " one body " in which he is a member. The main 
 hindrance to the perception of this constitution by any 
 Christian in Rome, and to the harmony of his conduct 
 with this constitution, did not lie in the bad and dis- 
 ordered heathen society outside him ; but it lay in each 
 Roman Churchman's own individual self, and mostly in
 
 252 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 his individual conceit of self. " For I say, through the 
 grace of God given unto me," that communising moral 
 force which inwardly levels all, "to every man that is 
 among you, not to think of himself more highly than he 
 ought to think, but to think soberly, according as God 
 has dealt to every man the measure of faith." Faith is 
 that common grace whereby alone we grasp the ulti- 
 mately and eternally real and see through that which 
 merely seems to that which really is. " For as we " 
 individually "have many members in one" individual 
 " body, and all members have not the same office " : so 
 it is in the whole social body of humanity, of the nation, 
 of the parish, and of the family, as the Church is called 
 out and endowed to testify to every conscience and to 
 all peoples, " We being many, are one body in Christ, and 
 every one members one of another." 
 
 I. 
 
 It was for the oneness and community of the whole 
 body in Christ, especially in our England, that the great 
 English primate, William Laud, whose martyrdom wei 
 have this week celebrated, counted not his own reputa- 
 tion dear unto him, in a popularity-hunting generation ; 
 thought not of himself more highly than a man ought 
 to think, but laid down his life for God and the Common 
 People. In every great historical person by whose acts 
 the movement of ecclesiastical and civil society is revo- 
 lutionised, as all men are agreed England was by this 
 man's acts, we are confronted by two things his work 
 and his character. When the work of a great historical 
 person is successful and permanent as all Englishmen 
 now see, some with gratitude and some with vexation, 
 Laud's work was his character is attacked by those 
 whom his work has defeated. Where the victory pro-
 
 ARCHBISHOP LAUD 253 
 
 mises to be lasting, as his does, the detraction is carried 
 on from age to age. Laud was the Samson who broke 
 down at his death the theological and social pillars of 
 the idol-temple of Puritanism, and that inhumane 
 erection can never be set up again. 
 
 Even the archbishop's chaplains, who revered and 
 loved him, could not quite understand him, so high was 
 his perception above the highest level of his own gene- 
 ration. They were never free, as he was, from the 
 hereditary superstition that as " all members have not 
 the same office," therefore they cannot be equally 
 "members." It was the assumption amongst Confor- 
 mists, as well as of the Nonconformist clients and 
 chaplains of the powerful landlords and money-lords, 
 that religious equality and community could not or 
 should not be upheld for all estates of men in Christ's 
 holy Church ; but that the estate of nobles and 
 gentlemen, of great landlords and rich city mer- 
 chants, especially if they were patrons of Puritanism 
 and Sabbatarianism, as they mostly were, should be 
 allowed, in ecclesiastical and moral matters, to enjoy 
 privileges and immunities of personal and social trans- 
 gression which were denied to the low estate of the poor 
 commons. Laud had absolutely no respect for persons 
 in ecclesiastical or moral things. He would allow no 
 man, because he was a lord, or a courtier, or a gentle- 
 man, or because he thought himself a " saint " and a 
 member of "the godly Party," to transgress the one 
 common law of Christ, which is binding upon man as man. 
 Heylin seems to have thought that the archbishop could 
 have held his place and saved his life if he had paid the 
 same adulation to the proud, the mighty, and the rich 
 of the land as the Nonconformist leaders did. He 
 failed " in so many necessary civilities to the nobility 
 and gentry," says his affectionate biographer, "by
 
 254 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 which he might have obliged them, and indeed 
 himself." 
 
 The archbishop was himself a man of the Common 
 People. The fawning Puritan "trencher-chaplains" 
 of the great landlords, and the Puritan lecturers hired 
 and paid by the wealthy mercantile capitalists, sneered 
 at the meanness and obscurity of his parentage. Lord 
 Brook, one of that small group of aristocratic and 
 gentlemanly saints whom Richard Baxter placed in 
 heaven, upbraided Laud and the ablest of his suf- 
 fragan bishops with being upstarts who had sprung 
 efcece Plebis, out of the dregs of the people. The rage 
 of the great local landlords was unbounded when Laud's 
 "upstart" suffragans, in their visitation articles, pre- 
 sumed to administer to the churchwardens and sides- 
 men of every local commune in their dioceses the 
 offensive oath : " Swear that all affection, favour, hatred, 
 hope of reward, gain, displeasure of great men, malice, 
 or other sinister respect set aside, you shall deal 
 uprightly, truly, and justly, presenting all the truth, 
 and nothing but the truth, without partiality, having 
 God before your eyes." " Hath any neighbouring great 
 man encroached upon any part of the churchyard, 
 inclosing it to his garden, &c. Present him or them 
 so transgressing." " Is any maintenance given to Free 
 and Public Schools detained, or inverted ? By whom is 
 it practised ? " To put such questions to common men, 
 as a writer complained a few months before Laud's 
 death, while the great men held the dreaded confessor 
 in the Tower, was a " vassaldrie to the gentry of Eng- 
 land," who, from the time of the Tudor Liberationism, 
 had been impropriating wholesale the common property 
 of the people in their common church, their common 
 lands, and their common free schools. " Many nobles 
 and worthy gentlemen" said the complainant, "are
 
 ARCHBISHOP LAUD 255 
 
 curbed and tyrannised over by some base clergymen of 
 mean parentage." The archbishop was not content 
 with arresting the robberies in progress, but he com- 
 pelled the robber-nobles and robber-gentry to disgorge 
 their social plunder, wherever he could. This was 
 especially the case with the common schools, the aboli- 
 tion of which was peculiarly offensive to so generous a 
 patron and promoter of English culture as Laud was. 
 He cited powerful landlords into the High Commission 
 Court that place of terror to so many mighty, proud, 
 and rich plunderers, and place of relief to so many of 
 the poor, humble, and oppressed for seizing alms- 
 houses, common lands, the endowments of free schools, 
 portions of the common churchyards, and even for 
 " walling up the ancient ways." Those who have time 
 and opportunity for the study, will find instances in the 
 Calendar of State Papers and in the late publications of 
 the Historical Manuscripts Commission, where they may 
 come face to face with our martyr, and learn at first 
 hand how it was that Laud concentrated upon his head 
 the whole spite and vengeance of the combined force of 
 the Landlordism and the Liberationism the " Property 
 and Puritanism," as his enemy Fiennes named them 
 of that evil generation. He loved the Common People, 
 and was always forward to defend their religion, their 
 recreations and sports, their social liberty, their common 
 lands, and their free schools against the pharisaism, 
 oppression, and embezzlement of the proud, the mighty, 
 and the rich who had figured ever since the Reformation 
 as the patrons of the inhumane Calvin ist theology and 
 Puritanical nonconformity and separatism. Yet he had 
 in him nothing of the selfish demagogue, but had, as his 
 biographer tells us, " a dislike to that popularity which 
 was too much affected by his predecessor," Archbishop 
 Abbot.
 
 256 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 II. 
 
 None of our historians, not even the late Mr. Green, 
 has as yet attempted to write the history of England 
 from the standpoint of the Common People. Our 
 history has been taken to be nothing better than a record 
 of the struggles between two rival parties for political 
 supremacy on battlefields and in parliaments. Hence 
 every man's work has been too exclusively judged by its 
 probable services or hindrances to the dividing Party 
 Cause of Tory or Radical, to neither of which such a 
 man as Laud could possibly belong, because he worked 
 for neither, but for the Common People. The forces 
 which in a later generation were opposed to each other as 
 Whig and Tory, the trading power and the landed power, 
 were united in opposition to him because he represented 
 the unity and community of that one body in Church and 
 Commonwealth which they were both gainsaying. 
 
 Our latest historian of the seventeenth century, Mr. 
 Gardiner, has clearly been startled, if not staggered, at 
 the evident contrariety between the real Laud who 
 confronted him in the contemporary State papers and 
 other documents, and the legendary Laud of Whig- 
 Liberal Party tradition and Puritan superstition. He 
 seems to me to adopt not a few curious shifts to account 
 for the unlikeness of the Laud of history to the " Laud " 
 of party legend. Sir William Harcourt gave full 
 expression to the inherited and unexamined Whig 
 legend some years ago, when he light-heartedly described 
 him as " Archbishop Laud, whose ecclesiastical policy 
 was only equalled by the corruption of his private 
 manners." But Mr. Gardiner is too honest a student not 
 to tell a great amount of the hitherto concealed or 
 perverted truth which has confronted him; nevertheless 
 he is too much under the bias of traditions to be
 
 ARCHBISHOP LAUD 257 
 
 sceptical of the legends which have been masked as 
 truth. Hence he rarely tells any truth about Laud 
 without immediately supplementing it with a sort of 
 apologetic commentary, or attempt to moderate the 
 irritation which such a truth might possibly give to the 
 prejudiced reader. Yet even Mr. Gardiner is obliged to 
 say, whatever consternation it may produce, " The best 
 side of Laud's character was his grand sense of the equality 
 of men before the law." If so rare a thing in public men 
 be " the best side," what excuse can be made for the 
 political scribes and religious zealots who are so eager, 
 age after age, that Englishmen shall see nothing but his 
 worse side. As if all we need to know about St. Peter 
 is that he denied the Lord thrice, and about St. Paul that 
 he kept the clothes of those who stoned St. Stephen ! 
 
 Of such a common " equality of men," either before 
 the law of the Commonwealth or of the Church, the 
 Puritans, both Nonconformist and Separatist, had at that 
 time no " sense " whatever. So any one may see for 
 himself if he will read their terrible sermons before the 
 Lords and Commons of the Long Parliament, or if he will 
 observe the distinction which Cromwell was careful to 
 make in all his political speeches, between the " People 
 in England " and the " People of God in England." The 
 victorious Puritans assumed that all battles were fought, 
 all laws passed, and all ordinances imposed, for the sake 
 of the few whom they called the " People of God," and 
 not for the sake of the whole Common People, the " one 
 body in Christ." But it was this whole body of the 
 Common Christened People, according to the faith and 
 action of their great father-in-God, which constituted the 
 real elect People of God, the "one body in Christ, and 
 every one members one of another," in England as in 
 Israel. He asserted the divine right of every member of 
 this one body, which the Puritan disdained as the " Mixt 
 
 18
 
 258 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Multitude," to equality before the Law because of the 
 equality which each already had through Christ, the 
 common Head of all, before God. The Whig and 
 Nonconformist legend is crowded with stories, true and 
 false, of Laud's anger: but "nothing angered Laud so 
 much," says Mr. Gardiner, "as the claim of a great man 
 to escape a penalty which would fall upon others. 
 Nothing brought him into such disfavour with the great 
 as his refusal to admit that the punishment which had 
 raised no outcry when it was meted out to the weak and 
 helpless, should be spared in the case of the powerful and 
 wealthy offender." 
 
 The Archbishop would not even allow the King's 
 Court to serve as a sanctuary for offenders against 
 the Common law of Jesus Christ. "He intended the 
 discipline of the Church should be felt as well as spoken 
 of," said Lord Clarendon, "and that it should be applied 
 to the greatest and most splendid transgressors, as 
 well as to the punishment of smaller offences and 
 meaner transgressors." He was absolutely fear- 
 less of consequences to himself, as he was absolutely 
 just and equal to others, and therefore he struck 
 unflinchingly at " those who were not careful to cover 
 their iniquities, thinking they were above the reach of 
 other men, or the power or will to chastise. Persons 
 of honour and great quality, in the court and in the 
 country, were every day cited into the High Commission 
 Court upon the fame of their incontinence or other 
 scandal in their lives, and were there prosecuted to their 
 shame and imprisonment." 
 
 In the notional "sins" of Nonconformity, such as 
 dancing, Sabbath-breaking, and play-acting, his clear 
 mind saw no transgression of the moral law ; and while 
 Richard Baxter called upon the Parliament to order 
 poor men and women who played on Sunday to be
 
 ARCHBISHOP LAUD 259 
 
 whipped, as well as put in the stocks, the liberal-minded 
 archbishop simply insisted that they should join on 
 Sunday with their neighbours in the common worship of 
 God as well as in common play. 
 
 It was probably the first time in England that all 
 estates of men were made to feel, in administration, and 
 not merely in theory, that there was not one law for the 
 rich and mighty and another law for the poor and 
 humble. It was doubtless this, as the politic Lord 
 Clarendon could see, which enraged the House of Lords 
 and the House of Landlords called " Commons," jointly 
 against him, and made them take counsel together how 
 they should put Christ's terrible bishop to death. "The 
 shame," says Clarendon, " which they called an insolent 
 triumph upon their degree and quality, and a levelling 
 them with the Common People, was never forgotten ; but 
 they watched for revenge." The Primate was a more 
 true and full representative of the real " Commons " than 
 were all or any of the members in the House of 
 Landlords and Merchants called the House of Commons. 
 The "democracy" of England ought to know that Laud 
 died for the Common People. He was a martyr for 
 Religious Equality. 
 
 It is curious now to read a newspaper report of his 
 execution, published a few days after the martyrdom : 
 " The Archbishop of Canterbury was this day beheaded 
 on Tower Hill. The man did stand much upon his 
 integrity, and at his death did justifie his innocence, 
 expecting, I believe, some honour to be done unto 
 him in another age, in whose almanacks he would shine 
 in rubrick, and be canonized for some Saint, or be 
 crowned for a martyr." J It was due to him, more than 
 
 1 A Diary or an exact Journall, faithfully communicating the 
 most remarkable proceedings in both Houses of Parliament. 
 No. 33, Thursday, January 16, 1645.
 
 260 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 to any man, that the cry of the English democracy for 
 more than a hundred years was, " Church and King." 
 Sixteen years after his murder the common folk 
 of Reading, whose care had always been near his heart 
 as a local patriot, solemnly burned the Nonconformist 
 and Scottish Covenant in Reading market-place "in 
 memory of the precious blood of William, late Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury, spilt by this Covenant. For it 
 was this Covenant," said they, " murthered him who was 
 born in, and was a great benefactor to, this town of 
 Reading." x 
 
 No part of that restless and beneficent activity which 
 brought Laud to the martyr's death can be possibly 
 understood apart from his constant determination 
 that no man, so far as he could help, should endanger 
 the unity and community of the one body in Christ 
 by thinking of himself more highly than he ought to 
 think. His sermons are full of this point, especially 
 those preached before Parliament. There is not one of 
 them in which community in " Church and Common- 
 wealth " is not the main subject and the moral purpose. 
 There was no man who thought worse of himself than he 
 did, and it was his ready confession of his own sins 
 which led Prynne to the malicious suggestion that he 
 was probably guilty of unnameable wickedness. It 
 was the delusion of all men at the time that the unity 
 which St. Paul here says each man must realise for 
 himself, and see in himself the nearest obstacle to it, 
 could be outwardly established by force and restraint 
 upon others. What the pastoral conscience of Laud 
 perceived, and the armed enforcers of Nonconformist 
 Covenant Uniformity could not perceive, was the 
 necessity of exalting the Common and the Catholic 
 
 1 The Kingdom's Intelligencer, No. 23, June n, 1661.
 
 ARCHBISHOP LAUD 261 
 
 elements of Christianity and civility, or that which is 
 the property and the want of the whole " body " in 
 Church and Nation, above the self-assertion and class- 
 assertion of this or that particular " member," caste, or 
 party. Laud allowed the most wide and liberal range 
 to differences of opinion, as we see in his protection of 
 the " Latitude-men," Hales and Chillingworth, as well 
 as in his kindly dealing with every Nonconformist, who 
 was " peaceable." We cannot conceive of him, like 
 the members of Cromwell's Second Parliament, ordering 
 the tongue of the gentle Quaker, James Nayler, " to be 
 bored through with a hot iron " for what they called 
 " blasphemy." 
 
 His passionate zeal for such good as was " Common " 
 to all was the ground of the importance he laid upon 
 catechising in comparison with preaching, which was 
 then so full of opinionative individualism and quarrel- 
 someness. He saw that the Nonconformist clergy con- 
 tributed small moral and social profit by their 
 predestinarian sermons, which a modern man may readily 
 understand if he will compare their contents with the 
 contents of the last sermon preached by Dr. Hammond 
 at St. Paul's. The fierce opposition of the Noncon- 
 formists to the weekly catechising insisted upon by 
 Laud and his suffragan bishops was due in a great 
 degree to the fundamental assumption of Noncon- 
 formity, that only some favoured few, the spiritual 
 aristocracy of the so-called " godly," and not all the 
 common folk in their parishes, whom the Father had 
 unified, were the children of God, and the members of 
 Christ. The Nonconformist trencher-chaplain gathered 
 the time-serving few whom he called " the people of 
 God " into the hall of his mighty patron, the local land- 
 lord, and there held his separate worship : and he would 
 not give his " lecture " in the common or parish church
 
 262 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 until the " Common Prayer " was ended. Laud refused 
 to license these men as chaplains to the great local 
 noblemen or gentlemen unless they would consent to 
 take part in the " Common Prayer " of the " one body in 
 Christ." It must be remembered that all Catholic 
 Catechism, unlike the Nonconformist Catechism of the 
 Long Parliament's Erastian Westminster Assembly of 
 Divines, starts from the assumption that all the 
 catechised are already the members of the " one body 
 in Christ, and every one members one of another." 
 Catholic catechising is the unfolding and applying of 
 the doctrinal, moral, and social contents of the Common 
 Creed, the Common Law, the Common Prayer, and the 
 Common Sacraments of Christianity. 
 
 So when the archbishop defended the Sunday games 
 of the common folk in every parish, and the keeping 
 the Dedication feasts of their Common Church, against 
 the intolerant Puritan judges and magistrates, the great 
 point upon which he laid stress was that this neighbourly 
 merriment was "civilising." He and his bishops were 
 soon to be justified by the wholesale barbarism which 
 overspread England during the Puritan reign of social 
 terror, from whose horrible issues our nation has never 
 yet been completely liberated. We talk much about 
 "civilisation," but how readily we forget that it does not 
 mean a result, but a process. Laud could not imagine, as 
 the Nonconformists did, that God had created most of 
 these men, women, and children for damnation in hell. 
 His fatherly eye was quick to see that the fellowship of 
 the children of God in common play and recreation, rich 
 and poor together, must help each to grow up into 
 a true avis, a citizen ; not a mere taxpayer or rate- 
 payer, to be cajoled by this or that party out of a 
 vote, but an organic member with every other in 
 the unity of the local and national Commonwealth.
 
 ARCHBISHOP LAUD 263 
 
 Common play, like common worship, puts us upon a 
 ground .where we are high above all dividing parties, 
 and where the pride of the individual self is disciplined 
 by common and equalising rule. 
 
 This great father-in-God has neither wife nor children 
 of his own, but his large heart went out to all the poor 
 children of his province whom he conceived to be 
 wronged. There is an instance of this in his metro- 
 political visitation, amongst his injunctions and orders 
 to the dean and chapter of Chichester. " Use some 
 means with Mr. Peter Cox," a land-grabbing alderman 
 of the city of Chichester, " that the piece of ground 
 called Campus, now in his possession, be laid open 
 again ; that the scholars of your free school may 
 have liberty to play there, as formerly they had. And 
 if he shall refuse," said the archbishop, " give us notice, 
 or our vicar-general, upon what reason and ground he 
 does it." 
 
 Probably nothing in the canonical title of the collected 
 religious offices of England, " The Book of Common 
 Prayer," was more distasteful to the puritanical vicar 
 and lecturer than the adjective " common." For it 
 implies that those whom the Pharisee calls " the 
 publicans and sinners " are assured of religious equality 
 with himself in the worship of God, and that the 
 Church rejects his division of the " one body in Christ " 
 into the two parties of the elect and reprobate. The 
 " worship " of God, according to the doctrine of the 
 Nonconformists, could not properly be " common." 
 None but the elect, the saints, the godly, or the 
 predestinated individuals, could rightly worship God. 
 Hence all that could properly be " common " to the 
 godly and ungodly parties in the public religious 
 assemblies, as they held, was the sacred privilege of 
 "hearing." The parishioners, after the expulsion of
 
 264 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 their bishops and the prohibition of their Common 
 Prayer, were officially described as "hearers," and the 
 intruded Nonconformist State incumbents merely as the 
 " public preachers." 
 
 One of the complaints of Laud's adversary, Henry 
 Burton, against "the Common Prayer," was "it cut 
 short sermons." The worship that is social strikes at 
 the individualism of the man in the pulpit ; it is an 
 apostolical reminder to him " not to think of himself 
 more highly than he ought to think, but to think 
 soberly." The pulpit, the symbol of individualism, was 
 the idol which they set up in the place of the Eucharist, 
 the symbol of social unity and community. It was held 
 as part of the right relations of Church and State, both 
 amongst the Nonconformists and the Separatists, that 
 the civil magistrate ought to compel the " Mixt 
 Multitude," as they called the "one body in Christ," 
 to "hear" their sermons and lectures. 
 
 St. Paul demands from every one of us a severe and 
 self-disciplinary contribution to unity. It may humble 
 us the more to recollect that what the apostle demands 
 from us is so frankly negative. God, the eternal Unity 
 of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, into whose 
 social name each of us is baptized, has already taken 
 care for our unity and community by making us " one 
 body in Christ." The individual genius can make many 
 wonderful things, but unity it cannot make. By not 
 thinking of myself more highly than I ought to think 
 I do not contribute to the establishment of some novel 
 unity, but I shall be contributing in ways which I may 
 not see to the recognition of that everlasting and 
 indestructible unity in which He has established us by 
 making us members of one body. Unity is His gracious 
 gift, already given, and we have been called into it, and 
 we are within it ; and according to our " measure of
 
 ARCHBISHOP LAUD 265 
 
 faith " we may see that we are, because faith sees that 
 which really is, and acts upon that sight. Neither will 
 it ever be taken away : " for the gifts and calling of 
 God," as St. Paul has just said to the Church of Rome, 
 " are without repentance."
 
 ST. PAUL'S POLITICAL COUNSEL TO THE 
 ROMAN CHURCH i 
 
 "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers, for there 
 is no power but of God ; the powers that be are ordained of 
 God." ROM. xiii. i. 
 
 THERE is nothing more wonderful in the history 
 of politics in the highest sense of that term 
 than the political counsel of the Apostle of the Nations 
 to the members of the Church of Rome. I do not 
 merely refer to the significant fact that his assertion of 
 the Divine authority of the de facto civil rule was 
 expressly made to the Roman Church, nor to the 
 equally pregnant fact that the apostle's letter to that 
 Church omits all reference to the universal spiritual 
 authority which the bishops of that Church now pre- 
 tend has belonged to their seat, as the very highest of 
 " the higher powers," from the beginning of Christianity. 
 I refer, rather, to the political conduct which the 
 apostle declares to be binding upon every Roman 
 Christian as such. " Let every soul be subject unto 
 the higher powers." As in the last chapter we saw 
 that he looked upon the Churchman's individualist 
 conceit and self-assertion as the worst of evils in the 
 common body of the Church, so we see here that 
 he regarded the Churchman's individualist conceit and 
 self-assertion as the worst of evils in the common body 
 
 1 February 3, 1895. 
 266
 
 ST. PAULS POLITICAL COUNSEL 267 
 
 of the State. " Every soul," Jewish or Roman, is to be 
 " subject unto the higher powers." As it was not possible 
 for such a liberator of conscience to advise a mere blind 
 obedience which is the obedience of a fool and not of 
 a free spirit the apostle gives the Roman Church his 
 reason for his counsel. He grounds the conduct of 
 politics upon the theology of politics, which is the 
 apostolic science of politics. 
 
 I. 
 
 We are all ready, the Roman Church might say, to 
 obey the higher powers, so soon as we are reasonably 
 assured which of the two or more powers always con- 
 tending politically are the higher powers, and which 
 the lower, so that we may refuse obedience to the lower, 
 and gladly yield it to " the higher." 
 
 This, as you possibly know, was the argument with 
 which the hired pen of Milton justified the tyrannical 
 minority for its judgment and execution of the 
 Common King of the whole People. The People, he 
 said, are " the higher powers," the King is the lower ; 
 individually, he is but one of the People, whom his 
 fellows, for their own convenience, have chosen to be 
 their chief or sovereign. He is responsible to them. 
 The higher power which has a right to choose, has a 
 right to alter its choice, and to reject. If the People 
 can enthrone one of their number to be their King, they 
 can dethrone him. King Charles refused to be " subject 
 to the higher powers," and to the People ; so the higher 
 powers, and the People, cut off his head. What Milton 
 needed to prove was not that the whole is greater than 
 a part, even than the chief part, but how a handful of 
 colonels, parliament-men, great landlords, lawyers, and 
 fanatical preachers, who were hated by the People,
 
 268 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 could usurp to themselves any divine or human right to 
 call themselves "the People." As a matter of fact, 
 when the King's head was cut off, the most- truly 
 representative masses of the people, when they saw the 
 work done by those who took their name, groaned, and 
 shrieked, and sobbed ; and the brutal coldness of the 
 tyrannical minority beat the People for giving so clear 
 a manifestation of the actual democratic judgment 
 and the real popular sentence. Marchmont Needham, 
 who was the official newsman in turn of the Rump 
 Commonwealth, and of Cromwell its destroyer aided, 
 as I believe, by Milton attempted, week after week, in 
 a series of clever, casuistical articles, loaded with biblical 
 references, to prove that whoever had got mastery by 
 the sword became the " higher powers." 
 
 Under the four party-governments which followed 
 the execution of the Common National King the 
 Rump Parliament's " Commonwealth," the Barebone's 
 " Supreme Authority," Cromwell's arbitrary Caesardom, 
 and the Anarchy which tore the land during the interval 
 between his death and the Restoration of the one 
 Common King and the one Common Church the 
 English People could never bring themselves to believe 
 that any of these self-exalted powers were rightly the 
 "higher powers." Yet the people obeyed them all in 
 turn, "subject, not only for wrath, but also for con- 
 science' sake." Nay, the men who most disliked them, 
 and who were most barbarously silenced and persecuted 
 by them all as St. Paul was by the rulers whom he 
 obeyed were the most obedient men in England. 
 They took no part in Royalist plots. If Bishop Hall, 
 and Hammond, and Jeremy Taylor, and hundreds of 
 other such blameless confessors, had been asked why 
 they paid taxes, tributes, customs, fear, and honour, to 
 rulers so fanatical and cruel, would they not have
 
 ST. PAUL'S POLITICAL COUNSEL 269 
 
 answered in St. Paul's words, " There is no power but 
 of God : the powers that be are ordained of God " ? We 
 know from Bishop Sanderson's " Cases of Conscience " 
 how they justified their obedience. 
 
 II. 
 
 But is there not here something of a contradiction to 
 the whole tenor of the Hebrew history ? The nation to 
 which St. Paul belonged, of which he was so proud and 
 thankful to be a member, which had many a citizen in 
 the Church of Rome, had risen to be a nation by a strike, 
 a rebellion, a revolution. Were not Pharaoh and all his 
 host "the higher powers" when the tribes were in bondage 
 in Egypt? If Moses had said, "Let every soul be 
 subject unto the higher powers," where would Israel have 
 been? Nay, where would the Church of Jesus Christ, 
 born out of Israel, have been? Is not the whole moral 
 law of Israel and of the universal Church grounded upon 
 belief and trust in the God who inspired the Hebrew 
 slaves of Egypt to revolution ? In the Catechism we 
 teach English children to say, " I am the Lord thy God, 
 who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the 
 house of bondage." What then ? This is the first of 
 laws for each English boy and girl, " Thou shalt have no 
 other gods but Me." And who is the only Lord God 
 but He who inspired and blessed the rebellion of the 
 slaves in Egypt? 
 
 Now, St. Paul in one of his epistles had to deal with 
 the case not indeed of an enslaved people, but of one 
 slave. We know that he did not urge him, as Moses had 
 urged St. Paul's fathers in Egypt, to rebel against his 
 master. Yet who has proved the greater liberator in 
 the end, Moses or St. Paul ? Moses liberated one nation, 
 St. Paul has liberated many ; perhaps we may even say
 
 270 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 that the Apostle of Nations will prove to be, under Christ 
 the King, beyond all other men, the liberator of all 
 nations. Where, then, are we to look for the conciliation 
 of a difference which seems on the surface to be so 
 tremendous, as that between Moses, to whom the Jews 
 were then in bondage, and the apostle who was sent by 
 Christ Jesus to all peoples as a liberator ? The contrast 
 between the enslaving Jewish law of Moses and the 
 liberating universal, humane Gospel of Jesus Christ is a 
 contrast which runs through the whole of this epistle to 
 the Church of Rome. St. Paul wrote it to set men free. 
 I return to the point from which we started, namely, 
 that St. Paul was fighting the destructive individualist 
 self-conceit and self-assertion which lurks in every soul 
 (ira^a ^v\i]\ Jew or Roman, Greek or barbarian, slave or 
 freeman, in the one common Church. The first 
 necessity of the one common body from each member is 
 not the braggart self-assertion of the clever individualist 
 soul, but the free self-repression of the individualist 
 instinct of each soul to tyrannise, and of its in- 
 stinct to refuse self-subjection. The dictatorship and 
 demagogy of the individual spring out of one and the 
 same instinct. The Jews were known in Rome as a 
 rebellious, anti-social element, full of the conceited 
 political theories of a Judas, that a Jew was too noble a 
 man, too exclusively one of God's own aristocracy, to pay 
 the tribute, custom, honour, and any other supposed due 
 to a pagan and infidel ruler ; and the Church of Rome 
 was suspected of like instincts, because it would only be 
 known to the Roman rulers as one of the various Jewish 
 sects. Whether the majority of souls in the fellowship 
 of the Roman Church were Jews, or Romans, or Greeks, 
 or barbarians, we may leave to the critics ; the cursory 
 reading of the apostle's letter will show us how thoroughly 
 the Roman Church was permeated with Judaical
 
 ST. PAUL'S POLITICAL COUNSEL 271 
 
 prejudices and boastings. Therefore St. Paul reminds 
 every individual or soul amongst them at starting to 
 think first not of what he is by his own dignity of race 
 and birth, nor of what he is by his own insight into truth, 
 but to think of what they all are by God's gracious act in 
 the common baptism, to remember what the whole 
 Church of Rome is, " the called of Christ Jesus." Next 
 he tells them to think of what they are pledged to 
 be morally and socially, as Christ's Roman Society, in the 
 midst of Roman paganism and atheism, " called to be 
 saints," holy men, women, and children. Hence he had 
 nothing to tell them about the right judgment of this or 
 that political theory, nor about the proper attitude of a 
 Roman Churchman toward this or that political move- 
 ment in Rome, which is the very thing that Moses had to 
 tell the fathers about a social movement in Egypt. But 
 the apostle, beholding the perfect social " pattern in the 
 mount," the Eternal City, which even the universal 
 Church, as well as every State, falls so short of reaching 
 on earth, points " every soul " in the Church to the 
 theological and the moral ground for right political 
 conduct. It lies in each Christian not "thinking of 
 himself more highly than he ought to think " in the daily 
 life of the State, which is a civil Commonwealth, as well 
 as in the daily life of the Church. What the Roman 
 Churchman ought to do if " the higher powers " in Rome 
 should command him to sacrifice to idols, or to steal, or 
 to murder, or to commit adultery, or to bear false witness 
 against his neighbour, or to obey man rather than God, 
 does not once come into the question. Those who bring 
 this to the front are too often forgetful that we ought to 
 " obey God rather than men " in suffering, as well as in 
 acting. But the apostle's own conduct and suffering 
 supplied answer enough to such questions. His work is 
 to mortify the individualist Judaism, paganism, and
 
 272 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 atheism of the old man in the political conduct of the 
 regenerate, so that the new man of the perfect City, 
 Kingdom, and Commonwealth of Christ might take 
 deeper root, live and grow in every soul. This he does, 
 I say, by bringing before the reason and conscience of 
 each Churchman in Rome the theological and moral 
 ground of the whole field of politics and administration, 
 and reminding each what God is demanding from every 
 Churchman and from every official in the State, from the 
 Caesar Nero to the meanest tax-gatherer. 
 
 III. 
 
 The Jew, and probably therefore the Jewish Christian 
 also, had a superstition that Satan had founded the 
 Roman Empire, and that Nero was therefore reigning by 
 the grace of the devil. This became the doctrine a 
 thousand years later of the powerful bishop of the 
 Roman Church, Gregory VII., who boldly asserted in his 
 contest with the successor of Augustus and Nero for a 
 divine title to rule every soul as the higher power, that 
 the devil was the author and founder of the State. And 
 even in our own generation, the founders of the Libera- 
 tion Society, which they first called the Anti-State- 
 Church Society, grounded their political policy upon the 
 assertion that, as the State originates from the World, 
 and the Church originates from God, therefore Caesar 
 and Parliament ought to be bribed or frightened into 
 separating the Church from the World. The late Mr. 
 John Bright was so fogged by the early superstition as to 
 call the union of the Church and Commonwealth 
 " adulterous," as if it were a principle of Quakerism that 
 bishop and priest are ordained by God, but kings and 
 prime ministers and judges ordained by the devil. To 
 the Jews, to the Judaical Christian, to the Papist, and to
 
 ST. PAUL'S POLITICAL COUNSEL 273 
 
 the Liberationist, the Apostle of the Nations says, as the 
 Hebrew psalmist and prophet had indeed always said, 
 " There is no power but of God ; the powers that be are 
 ordained of God." In this point at least, they are like the 
 apostles, bishops, and priests of the Church. We honour 
 and obey the Queen, the Parliament, the local Council, the 
 judge, and the tax-collector upon the same theological 
 ground as we honour and obey the Bishop of London. 
 Any Judas or Barabbas, any fool or scoundrel, can supply 
 our individualist self-assertion, or our caste and party 
 conceit, with hundreds of reasons and excuses for break- 
 ing away from the common body in Christ by acts of 
 dishonour and disobedience. One of the hardest acts in 
 life, as we may know by experience, is to honour and 
 obey, for the common good of the whole body, such 
 rulers in the Church and the Commonwealth as indi- 
 vidually exhibit small claims to respect and obedience. 
 
 St. Paul passed from the theological to the moral 
 ground for the self-subjection of every individual soul to 
 the common authority, the State, which is the gracious 
 and glorious ordinance of our Teacher. Hence, whether 
 it takes the form of a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a 
 democracy, it is everywhere and always obliged, by God's 
 overruling, more or less to assert and vindicate the 
 common morality, which restrains the individual, and 
 holds the Commonwealth together in some degree of 
 unity. The most degraded of Commonwealths could 
 not keep itself alive, but would dismember into a form- 
 less anarchy, unless its rulers retained enough of the 
 image of God, and of the Perfect Unseen City, to say 
 with power to each of its subjects, " Thou shalt not steal, 
 Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit 
 adultery, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy 
 neighbour, Thou shalt not covet anything that is thy 
 neighbour's." " For rulers are not a terror to good 
 
 19
 
 274 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 works," says the apostle, "but to the evil. Wilt thou 
 then "(he is still speaking to the self-asserting individualist 
 mind) " not be afraid of the power ? Do that which is 
 good, and thou shalt have praise of the same. For he 
 is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do 
 that which is evil, be afraid ; for he beareth not the sword 
 in vain, for he is the minister of God, a revenger to 
 execute wrath upon him that doeth evil." 
 
 St. Paul's political precepts near the end of this letter 
 are not to be taken as detached axioms, but they are to 
 be interpreted by the apostolic dogma of the relation of 
 each individual to the " one body Christ," which underlies 
 all his counsels both as Churchman and Statesman. The 
 apostle's idea of political anthority, as Maurice has said, 
 was derived altogether from the Universal Church, and 
 not from the Roman Empire. For no State and 
 Commonwealth, no parish and commune, and no family, 
 can entirely know itself any more than a man can 
 rightly know himself, "come to himself" except by 
 going to the Father. "Every soul" within the Church is 
 to exhibit in his political conduct to emperors and rate- 
 collectors, the ecclesiastical principle of the " one body in 
 Christ " that principle which is perverted and distorted, 
 not only in the pseudo-universal body of the Roman 
 Imperial State, but even in the best National State 
 which the world has ever yet seen. What, then, is the 
 Christian "soul" to do? Is he to come out of the 
 Commonwealth, as out of a "Babylon"? Is he to 
 separate Church and State, and confine himself and all 
 his care within the Church, as the separated "Sion of 
 God"? No! he is to carry out to the worst of States the 
 godly and self-repressing principle of the Church, that 
 there is but one body in Christ, in which all members 
 have not the same office, and nevertheless, are every one 
 equally members one of another.
 
 THE DISENDOWMENT OF THE SAVIOUR 1 
 
 "And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's 
 field, to bury strangers in." ST. MATT, xxvii. 7. 
 
 JUDAS, the apostate Christian, by his contract with 
 the rulers of his nation, had at last brought about 
 the disestablishment and disendowment of Christ 
 the Lord. The founder of the Church had already been 
 disestablished so far as secular power can disestablish 
 Him that sitteth in the heavens of His claims to a 
 kingdom, a priesthood, and the prophetic and pastoral 
 functions. He was no longer going all over the nation 
 doing good. He was tied and bound in the malicious 
 toils of the Jewish sects and the Jewish State authorities. 
 He and His disciples, according to the slang of Phari- 
 saism, were an " alien " society ; they came from Galilee. 
 The eminent religious and political leaders had even 
 said to Him, " Thou art a Samaritan." He and His 
 Church were in " a minority," they had only gathered a 
 fragment of the people, though He pretended He had a 
 mission from God to the whole people. Judas saw with 
 horror his Teacher stripped and beaten, disendowed of 
 liberty and reputation, and about to be disendowed even 
 of life. 
 
 " Then Judas, which had betrayed Him, when he saw 
 
 1 April 7, 1895. 
 275
 
 276 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 that He was condemned, repented himself." Hence it 
 may be gathered that Judas had not expected so 
 horrible a disaster. He had seen the Saviour's mighty 
 works, and heard His omnipotent words, which no con- 
 science could resist ; and he probably thought, so far as 
 a man who lives for the individualist selfish moment is 
 able to think, that Jesus, either by a miracle or by His 
 eloquence, would redeem Himself from death. But now, 
 when the Lord's prediction of His death, which Judas 
 and the other apostles had disregarded, was being so 
 suddenly fulfilled, the traitor felt some remorse, "and 
 brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief 
 priests and elders," saying that he was resolved to 
 renounce his part in the contract, and undo so far as he 
 could what he had done, " I have sinned in that I have 
 betrayed the innocent blood." 
 
 I. 
 
 The two parties to this contract, the false Christian 
 disciple and the rulers of the Jewish people, had 
 different ends in the sale and purchase of Jesus. The 
 official statesmen thought only of their own immediate 
 political triumph, or of security in their profitable places 
 and power. There is no immorality of which the Party 
 Achitophels are incapable. But Judas cared nothing 
 for Party; he had been moved by selfish individualist 
 covetousness. As the evangelists declare, he had been a 
 preacher of Christ. He had himself worked for Christ's 
 kingdom, and perhaps with zeal. " For," as St. Peter 
 said, at the election of St. Matthias, " he was numbered 
 with us." But the slow and unshowy methods of Christ's 
 kingdom, and its apparent failure to get hold of the 
 majority, had disappointed his own social or monetary 
 ambitions. He had lately grumbled at a devout woman's
 
 DISENDOWMENT OF THE SAVIOUR 277 
 
 endowment of the Saviour with an "alabaster box of 
 very precious ointment" He had, thereupon, given vent 
 to the first insidious Liberationist speech in the history 
 of Christendom. When " the house was filled with the 
 odour of the ointment, then saith one of His disciples, 
 Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, who should betray Him, 
 Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred 
 pence, and given to the poor ? " Why was this 
 valuable sum thrown away upon the endowment of a 
 minority of One Person, though He be ever so good ? 
 It might have been made to profit all Jewry by paying 
 it to some great pharisaic contractor, who could at once 
 provide labour for the poor and make a well-merited 
 fortune for himself, by the constructing of baths and 
 wash-houses, libraries, polytechnics, museums, or parks ; 
 or it might be contributed towards the purchase of the 
 potter's field to bury foreigners in. 
 
 St. Matthew, whose business it had been to deal 
 with money, implies that the faithful apostles also were 
 carried away by the Liberationist and demagogic argu- 
 ment of Judas, and St. Mark tells us that "some " of them 
 certainly yielded to it. It may be that the traitor was 
 a man of strong intellectual character, and a ready 
 debater, and that he persuaded his simple colleagues 
 to believe that his projected disendowment of Jesus 
 Christ would really prove a benefit to the poor, whom 
 Jesus loved. Neither St. Matthew nor St. John, whose 
 fellow-worker he had been, attempted any pharisaic 
 and self-complacent contrast between him and them- 
 selves, or the other apostles. They were no puritans 
 after Pentecost. They then and there had learned 
 by the Holy Ghost that one and the same old Adam, 
 one and the same carnal man which is not after God, 
 was in them and in him, and must be mortified and 
 crucified in them before they could rise and sit with
 
 278 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Christ, and be strong in His new life to do all things. 
 We need no Scripture to tell us that the Church 
 defender or the apologist for catholic and national 
 Christianity, may be as bad a man as the Liberationist 
 or the political Machiavelli, nay, perhaps a far worse 
 man. It was the universal " infection of nature," that 
 $p6vr\na aapKos " which is not subject to the law of 
 God," which in Judas betrayed and sold the Saviour, 
 in Herod mocked Him, in Pilate gave Him to the 
 cross, in St. Peter denied the Saviour, and perverted 
 all the apostles into cowards who forsook Him and 
 fled. 
 
 Yet, notwithstanding the likeness between Judas 
 and his colleagues, the evangelist indicates, for the 
 Church's sake, the distinction which made him in 
 the end a separatist from the apostolic fellowship and 
 a conspirator with the secular rulers against Jesus. 
 St. John lays hold of the Liberationist and demagogic 
 argument of Judas for the endowment of the poor, in 
 order to mark the eternal or moral difference between 
 the separatist one and the faithful apostolic eleven. 
 They may have accepted his argument out of their 
 care for their poor fellow-citizens, whose hunger, 
 misery, rights, and need of a real gospel the Lord 
 had so often enforced upon their conscience by His 
 word and work. They may have thought that the 
 disendowment of Jesus for the endowment of the 
 poor was a sort of act after His own heart. 
 
 We may compare the apostles, before they received 
 the strength of Whitsun Day, to some weak-headed 
 Churchman who has become so blind a slave of 
 party as to confuse and confound a majority triumph 
 of his own political faction with the triumph of the 
 Kingdom of Christ ; and so persuades himself that he 
 can serve both God and Mammon, Christ's Church
 
 DISENDOWMENT OF THE SAVIOUR 279 
 
 and His own Party, by casuistically arguing that 
 Parliament may endow Christ's clergy with spirituality 
 by disendowing them of their daily bread, and giving 
 it to the rich or pushing contractors whom he speciously 
 calls " the poor." 
 
 But every man with an historical mind that is, 
 who takes heed to the infallible Word of God, in all 
 the past disendowments of Christ's spikenard see that 
 the profits of such cKsendowment have nearly always 
 hitherto gone to the rich, the mighty, and the proud, 
 and rarely, if ever, brought any help to the poor, humble, 
 and meek. It was so with the Liberationist Popes 
 of the Middle Ages, who disendowed the poor parish 
 priests and local churches of their tithes, and endowed 
 the rich and powerful monastic corporations with them 
 It was so with the Liberationist Tudor monarchs, who 
 endowed the great landlords, the Russells and Leicesters, 
 with the ecclesiastical funds which were seized under the 
 pretence of promoting higher education. It was so with 
 that den of Liberationist robbers, the Long Parliament, 
 whose members seized the episcopal lands and cathedral 
 lands under pretence of spending them upon the service 
 of " the Commonwealth," but voted them to one another 
 and to the payment of the arrears of the covetous 
 Ironside soldiery. The very same arguments which the 
 Judas of to-day cites for the disendowment of the 
 common Church, the Judas of yesterday used for 
 the disendowment of the common lands, and the 
 poor are likely to reap as small profit, and the rich 
 and pushing as great profit, out of the present 
 ecclesiastical disendowment, as out of the earlier 
 secular disendowment. They talk mostly of dis- 
 endowing " a rich Church," as if the Welsh Church were 
 one single individual, like a Vanderbilt or a Rothschild. 
 They might as reasonably lay hands upon all the
 
 280 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 wages of all the poor wage-workers in the nation, 
 and then say that they were merely disendowing " a 
 rich class." They are really disendowing the poor 
 parish priests ; they are indirectly robbing the poor 
 communes. And if the parties which divide and rend 
 the Commonwealth had not been too selfish and 
 cowardly to allow the parishes to elect their clergy 
 we might add that they are directly disendowing poor 
 parishes. There are already quarrels within the den 
 over the distribution of the plunder, to settle how much 
 of it shall be left to each parish, and how much go 
 to "Wales" at large. 
 
 St. John tells the Church that Judas was under no 
 such illusions as those wherewith his honest colleagues 
 were beguiled. He did not really desire that the poor 
 should be endowed by his Bill for the disendowment 
 of the Redeemer of the poor. "This he said," as the 
 Apostle of Charity tells the Church, " not that he cared 
 for the poor," as the great publican Zaccheus had cared, 
 "but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare 
 what was put therein." It was of his own endowment 
 that the scoundrel was thinking when he made his 
 famous Liberationist and demagogic speech. It was 
 from the apostolic fellowship of Christ, and covenanted 
 for his own endowment that he separated himself 
 with the faction which then ruled the State, and which 
 saw the value at that crisis of the services which he, 
 as a preacher of Christ, could render their party. He 
 lost his share of what was put into the bag of Christ and 
 His apostles ; but he got his " thirty pieces of silver, the 
 price of Him that was valued " by the Jewish political 
 council. So, too, it was of their own establishment that 
 the political caucus was thinking when it made its 
 contract with Judas. St. Matthew accuses the people 
 as well as the Government
 
 DISENDOWMENT OF THE SAVIOUR 281 
 
 " Whom they of the children of Israel did value," that 
 is, by their majority vote (on the side of the Pharisee 
 and Sadducee faction) " Crucify Him ! Crucify Him ! " 
 It was the act of the whole people, by their votes, 
 as the Prophet and Evangelist say : they could not 
 shuffle it off upon Judas, nor upon the Government. 
 
 II. 
 
 The text reminds the Church that the policy sug- 
 gested by Judas, in his Liberationist and demagogic 
 speech, was ultimately established by the Act of the 
 Government. I will not attempt to deal with the 
 apparent discrepancies between St. Matthew's account 
 in the gospel, and St. Peter's account to his fellows 
 at the election of St Matthias into the great bishopric 
 vacated by Judas. Nor could it be of any moral use to 
 spend time over the much-debated citation from the 
 national prophets. When the apostate Christian knew 
 the whole ghastly issue of his contract with the Govern- 
 ment, and wanted the rulers to relieve him of his part 
 by taking back the bribe, they derided him. " And 
 they said, What is that to us? See thou to that." 
 The Act has passed our Parliament and has received the 
 imperial sanction. " True progeny of Cain," exclaimed 
 Grotius, " they speak the language of Cain." They 
 refused to discuss the question. Whether Jesus in 
 Himself were innocent or guilty was no concern of 
 theirs. They were practical politicians, and they 
 wanted votes and influence against Him because they 
 knew Him only as a pseudo-Christ, and a danger 
 to the Government, and an obstacle to what they pleased 
 to call "the religion of the majority of the nation." So 
 Judas, "rushing out of their presence, cast down the
 
 282 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 pieces of silver in the temple, and departed and 
 went and hanged himself." 
 
 The Government of the Jewish people, St. Matthew 
 tells the Church, hereupon held a privy council, and 
 discussed how they should dispose of the price of the 
 Saviour's blood, the thirty pieces of silver which the 
 despairing Judas had flung down in the temple. It 
 had thus been turned into an offering to God, an endow- 
 ment to be thenceforward employed, as Dionysius the 
 Carthusian says, " in the maintenance and repairing of 
 the temple of God, and in the sustentation of the 
 ministers of the temple." The rulers collected, by their 
 servants, the money of Judas, now become the money 
 of God, the price of Jesus' blood. They accepted the 
 thirty pieces of silver which they had hitherto refused. 
 What should be done with this fund ? " And they took 
 counsel, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury 
 aliens in." Hence it is that St. Peter, in his address to 
 the disciples, said with justifiable irony that Judas was 
 the moral purchaser. " Now this man purchased a field 
 with the reward of iniquity," "the wages of unrighteous- 
 ness." St. Peter said that " it was known unto all the 
 dwellers at Jerusalem " : and the apostle, or else the 
 historian of the Church, added, "insomuch as that field 
 is called in their proper tongue Aceldama, or the 
 field of blood," as St. Matthew also says. Aceldama 
 would be an appropriate title for a museum or poly- 
 technic in a rich town, bought with the impoverishment 
 of Christ's poor priests, or with the disendowment of 
 some poor parish whose inhabitants may never set foot 
 in the museum. 
 
 We have time only to glance at the puritanical 
 casuistry of the State purchasers. The money, said 
 the Nonconformist conscience, is the price of blood ; 
 and yet as this endowment has been actually given to
 
 DISENDOWMENT OF THE SAVIOUR 283 
 
 God, as it has been offered in His temple, it ought to 
 be employed according to the original wishes of the 
 donor. It should be spent on something useful to the 
 community. The like has been said of most endow- 
 ments which have in various ages been obtained by the 
 impoverishment or starvation of Christ's poor parish 
 priests, or by depriving parishes of their common and 
 settled pastors. "It is not lawful to put them in the 
 treasury," said the rulers, " because it is the price of 
 blood." The powerful disendowers could not with any 
 show of piety, policy, or decency, directly and openly 
 use such a fund for the endowment of the disendowing 
 parties. The Tudor Liberationists would have ex- 
 pended it without misgiving upon their race-horses, 
 which are more costly than parish priests. But the 
 pharisaic conscience would now be appalled at so 
 scandalous an abuse ; nor would the modern farmer be 
 pacified by the transference of his tithe from the 
 support of the common worship of the Father in the 
 parish church to the service of the devil of gambling at 
 Epsom or Newmarket. The Jewish parliament decreed 
 that it should be used for some purpose, as Luke of 
 Bruges puts it, which could be represented to the public 
 as pious and necessary. " Simulando pietatem" said 
 Ludolf the Saxon five hundred years ago, " intendendo 
 iniquitatem." These Jewish parliament-men affected to 
 be doing acts of piety, but they intended an act of 
 unrighteousness. So they endowed the potter, or the 
 ground landlord of the potter's field, whose soil was too 
 exhausted to yield any further trade profits, with the 
 price of the Saviour's disendowment. It may remind 
 us, in this city parish, of those " great bargains in 
 bishops' lands " and in cathedral lands, and in the 
 stones and scaffoldings of St. Paul's, and the fund 
 collected by Archbishop Laud for the restoration of our
 
 284 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 Mother Church, which were contracted between the 
 Long Parliament and the wealthy Nonconformist alder- 
 men of London. 
 
 We have heard and read enough of late about the 
 true "religiousness" of disendowing Christ's parish 
 clergy and endowing museums and polytechnics, with 
 light-hearted perversion, either serious or comical, of the 
 example of St. Ambrose. From the parliamentary and 
 newspaper casuistry of our age we can understand all 
 the arguments which were used in the first age of the 
 Church by this council of the Jewish rulers. Everything 
 that could have been said by Pharisee or Sadducee in 
 that Council which condemned the Saviour of the world 
 His Passion and Cross has been said in the great 
 Council of our own nation, or written by the servile 
 Scribes of the party newspapers. 
 
 I cannot tell you how clearly I see, nor how keenly I 
 feel, that we have no right to condemn the Judas outside 
 us, unless we are fighting against the Judas within us. 
 Therefore I remind you again, as I try to keep myself 
 in mind, that the Judas nature is that old Adam common 
 to us all, and in us all. It is that fallen humanity 
 in men by which Jesus is always, everywhere, and by 
 all undervalued, rejected, disendowed, and crucified, 
 whether in Himself or in the person of the least of His 
 brethren, the hungry, the thirsty, the alien, the naked, 
 the sick, the prisoner. We have no right to imitate the 
 wrath of the Lamb against the sons of iniquity and 
 delusion unless we are willing to imitate His meekness, 
 humanity, and readiness for the cross, and to believe 
 that there is another, better, and more abiding sonship 
 in them. It is as true of the blind zealots of every 
 generation, as He said it was of the zealots who dis- 
 established and disendowed Him, " They know not what 
 they do." As He came forth from the grave on Easter
 
 DISENDOWMENT OF THE SAVIOUR 285 
 
 Day with absolution, love, and help for those who had 
 brought Him to the cross, so may His bishops and 
 priests in Wales, if Satan should get his blind and short 
 triumph over them, come forth with a new Easter and a 
 new Pentecost for the whole Welsh people.
 
 MY DUTY TOWARDS MY NEIGHBOUR 1 
 
 " Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that 
 seek the Lord. Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and 
 to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged . Look unto Abra- 
 ham your father, and to Sarah that bare you : for I called him 
 alone, and blessed him, and increased him. For the Lord shall 
 comfort Zion : He will comfort all her waste places, and He will 
 make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden 
 of the Lord : Joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanks- 
 giving, and the voice of melody." ISA. li. 1-3. 
 
 THE whole of this chapter is a sermon by a patriotic 
 citizen upon the reform of a city, and I think that 
 the text will be more suggestive than anything which I 
 can say about it. " Ye that follow after righteousness " 
 is a fair apostrophe, not only to those who cry for the 
 reform of London, but also to many who abstain from 
 joining in that cry lest they should involve themselves 
 in the bondage and unrighteousness of Party, but who 
 are nevertheless busy at work, each in his place, for the 
 reformation of our city. 
 
 I. 
 
 The committee of contraries which has named this 
 day " Citizen Sunday " sent me a post-card, and cour- 
 teously invited me to give the title of some " subject " 
 upon which I would preach. I hurriedly wrote down 
 
 1 Sunday, October 27 ("Citizen Sunday"). 
 286
 
 MY DUTY TOWARDS MY NEIGHBOUR 287 
 
 the simple question of the old English national Cate- 
 chism, "What is thy duty towards thy neighbour?" 
 I see that it is not included in the list which they have 
 issued, so that I am quite free to detach myself from 
 any show of partisanship, and attach myself the closer 
 to the great reforming society which the Lord has 
 established in our Sion, and in every single parish that 
 composes its unity. That reforming society which is 
 called by the Apostle of Nations, the patron saint of 
 London, the mother of us all, has laid hold of every 
 young Londoner whom she could reach, and has 
 solemnly asked him or her, " What is thy duty towards 
 thy neighbour ? " 
 
 The first thing which must strike every thoughtful 
 observer, when he sees the Church Catechism and 
 London Reform put side by side, is that not a few of 
 those who are now most forward in agitating about 
 London Reform are not less prominent in the agitation 
 against "Creeds and Catechisms." It is not a question 
 whether the Catechism ought to be taught as a part of 
 the common secular schooling where I should have no 
 quarrel with them but it is rather their question how 
 as few English children as possible may be kept from 
 learning the English Church's Catechism. They would 
 probably think it a glorious London Reform to burn 
 all the Catechism except the Fourth Commandment, 
 and to have the municipal powers interpret the Fourth 
 Commandment upon Separatist principles, by shutting 
 up all public-houses, keeping all museums and picture 
 galleries shut, and in course of time giving some civic 
 encouragement to revivalist meetings and the promo- 
 tion of Separatism. 
 
 Yet can anything be more peculiarly " civic " or 
 " municipal " than to ask the future citizen what is due 
 from him to his neighbour ? Can any words contain a
 
 288 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 more hopeful germ of reform for our Sion, than the 
 answer which the Church demands from every boy or 
 girl whom she asks, " What is thy duty towards thy 
 neighbour ? " I will not now read that answer. I hope 
 you all know it. If you know it, and have the spirit of 
 a reformer in you, you must wish that every child in 
 London could be brought up at the knees of the Church. 
 The children give that answer, as you know, in their 
 double character, as being children at the same time of 
 the English National Commonwealth, and of the world- 
 wide fellowship of Christ's Catholic Church. The 
 answer seems to me to contain a noble abstract of 
 " civic " duties, at all events of the inward neighbourly 
 soul and spirit of them. 
 
 Civic schooling, or instruction in the outward duties 
 and rights of the future parishioner and citizen, as I 
 often regret, has not yet become a recognised part of 
 our English common schooling, as it now is in some 
 other national commonwealths. It would be a step to 
 the reform of our citizenship if we English folk had for 
 all our children, as members of the local and the national 
 commonwealth, such a Catechism, as we already have 
 for those of them who have by Holy Baptism been 
 made members of the Universal Church. It is the 
 humane faith of the Church that every child born into 
 the world has received, through the man-becoming of 
 God's only-begotten Son, an election and title to be 
 made a member of the Church. Has not each child 
 received by birth a like " civic " election and title, and 
 that also from God, to be the member of a common- 
 wealth, local and national ? London is a huge colla- 
 teration of parishes, and every child born in London 
 belongs to one of them, and has " civic " rights and 
 duties as a parishioner, whereof he may live and die 
 profoundly ignorant.
 
 MY DUTY TOWARDS MY NEIGHBOUR 289 
 
 II. 
 
 But let us get rid of such foreign and platform words 
 as " civic," " municipal," " parochial," and the like, and find 
 some true English names for these qualities. To use 
 such words without interpreting them, as the Common 
 Prayer Book of England says of the ancient services of 
 the English Church, is to "read in Latin to the People, 
 which they understand not." And the "civic" schooling 
 of English children should surely first of all be English 
 popular, common, in " the vulgar tongue." We should 
 in our speech on these matters, as the reforming prophet 
 of Sion said to his fellow-citizens, " Look unto the rock 
 whence ye are hewn." The nations and parishes learn 
 from the Universal Church what a nation is, and what a 
 commune is, as each child learns from her what a man 
 rightly is. Hence, as an English priest, I may be 
 expected to say that the best English word for "citizen" 
 is that word which the Church has adopted, the word in 
 which she has discerned the very soul and spirit of 
 citizenship, the word " neighbour " which means the one 
 who is outwardly next or nearest to us. There are still 
 some old Teutonic communes where the technical and 
 legal name for the parish is Nachbarschaft, that is to say, 
 " neighbourhood " or " neighbourship." Our neighbour's 
 lodging, whether a hut or a villa, touches ours ; his 
 personal and family life has been so ordered by the will 
 of the Fatherly Providence as to bring him and his into 
 one and the same common parish with us and ours. 
 Whenever you and I get outside the sacred circle of our 
 family, we find that we are still closed around with the 
 walls of another circle, which is also of godly origin and 
 building ; it is that of the neighbourhood, the parish, the 
 city, or the congregation of unlike social elements, which 
 the Eternal Pastor, by so many strange acts in history 
 
 20
 
 290 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 and in His discipline over families and souls, has 
 compacted together into one body. A parish is no mere 
 club : it is no mere Separatist meeting. We do not 
 choose our neighbours : wherever we go we find them 
 already chosen for us by God. They are such as the 
 Father Himself has elected to be our fellows. 
 
 The Catholic Church has never omitted, in any age or 
 nation, to bear witness to this primary principle of all 
 wholesome " civic " reform, and so of all right " London 
 reform," by what is often called " her parochial system." 
 In one of the earliest records of London Separatism, 
 which the Dissenting historians quote with admiration, we 
 are told how a group of Londoners who imagined them- 
 selves to be too holy or too scripturally enlightened to 
 join the common worship with their neighbours, were 
 brought before the Lord Mayor and the Bishop of 
 London. It was on June 20, 1567, "in great Eliza's 
 golden prime," when Churchmen and Separatists alike 
 imagined it was the fuction of the State to act as a 
 dictator in religion. To all those who resented such a 
 claim, even though they did it in the interest of the 
 foreign Roman bishop or in the interest of a nation- 
 dividing Sect, we awe a great degree of honour and 
 gratitude. This company of Elizabethan Londoners, 
 under the pretence of keeping a wedding feast, had hired 
 Plumbers' Hall, and there they set up a Separatist 
 meeting, so that they might privately enjoy "the 
 sacramentes administered," as they said, " without 
 idolatrous geare." Their great complaint was that the 
 continuity of the Church in the parishes of London had 
 not been broken, by the arm of the State, when Queen 
 Elizabeth succeeded Queen Mary, but that parish priests 
 who had ministered in London under Bishop Bonner, 
 were still allowed to minister to the same parishes by 
 virtue of the same ordination, under Bishop Grindal.
 
 MY DUTY TOWARDS MY NEIGHBOUR 291 
 
 Although that prelate had contracted during his exile a 
 strong sympathy with Puritan Nonconformity, he had no 
 sympathy with Puritan Separatism, which seemed to him 
 to strike at the very root of the godly union of Christianity 
 and neighbourhood, or of the Church and the Common- 
 wealth. He corrected them for their casuistical pretence 
 to the sheriff that they wanted the hall for a wedding, 
 when they really wanted it for a Separatist religious 
 meeting. " We did it," said they, " to save the ' woman 
 harmless.'" "Yea," said the kindly bishop, "but ye 
 must not lie : that is against the admonition of the 
 apostle, ' Let every man speak the truth to his neigh- 
 bour"" The very point of divergence between the 
 Church and a Sect was rightly put by the Father in God 
 of the Londoners, whatever other mistakes he may have 
 made, when he said to them, " Ye have showed yourselves 
 disorderlie in absenting yourselves from your Parishe 
 Churches, and the assemblies of other Christians in this 
 Commonwealth." Nixon, one of the Separatists, seems 
 to have shared the Sabbatarian belief of some of our 
 modern Separatists who are forward in London reform. 
 It ought never to be forgotten by any English citizen 
 that the English bishops were denounced for a whole 
 century by the Puritans as the foremost patrons of the 
 Sabbath-breaking of the common people, as I hope 
 some of the preachers on " Museum Sunday " may tell 
 their hearers. "You can suffer bear-bayting, and 
 bowling, and other games to be used on the Sabbath 
 day," said the Separatist to the Bishop of London, " and 
 on your holy days." It was not the suffering of the 
 bears, as even Macaulay could confess, but the neighbourly 
 games on Sunday which made the Puritans angry. And 
 it would have been within the bishop's office to reply, 
 that the Sunday games which unite the neighbours of a 
 common parish, so that " joy and gladness shall be found
 
 292 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 therein," may be more " civilising," neighbourly, and 
 Christian than the Separatist meetings which break in 
 pieces the unity which God established by making them 
 all neighbours one of another, and break it under the 
 superstition that a schism is a peculiarly acceptable 
 service to the common Father of all. 
 
 III. 
 
 It is not historically correct, however, to call the 
 parochial system "the Church's parochial system," still 
 less to describe it as an Anglican peculiarity. The 
 Church was not sent into the nations to create new 
 systems ; her proper work, as her Sender said, is to "bear 
 witness." The parish is no crafty invention of apostles, 
 bishops, priests, or Christian statesmen : but that which is 
 often called "the Church's parochial system," in contra- 
 distinction to the Separatist system of "gathered 
 Churches," is simply the Church's pious and believing 
 recognition and acceptation of God's own social and civil 
 work in the parishes which He has made, the existing 
 local communes. The Catholic Church is obliged to be 
 parochial on the same grounds as she is obliged to be 
 national. The Father had already established a complete 
 godly and humane order in the earth before He sent His 
 Church into the earth. The Universal Church finds this 
 neighbourly or civic order of the Universal Father 
 everywhere extant in more or less completeness, first in 
 the half-civilised tribe, and then in the civilised commune. 
 To this order, Christ's Universal Society is as bound to 
 be conformable as the Son Himself was bound to 
 do the Father's will. The Catholic Church has in all 
 ages and nations confessed that it is no function of her 
 bishops and priests to set up some new system of their 
 own as a " Sion," and to call men to separate from the
 
 MY DUTY TOWARDS MY NEIGHBOUR 293 
 
 Father's established system of organic neighbourhood 
 and community, under the pretence that it is "Babylon." 
 On the contrary, she everywhere and always is bound 
 to christen, catechise, confirm, communicate, bless 
 marriages, visit the sick, bury the dead, and do all other 
 churchly works, in a religious conformity to that Divine 
 Kingdom which was established in the earth before she 
 was, which can never be moved, and to whose character 
 and relations she is to bear witness. 
 
 Hence you will forgive me if I say once more, what 
 you may think I say too often, that the most important 
 and desirable of all London reforms, from our eccle- 
 siastical point of view the one reform without which 
 every other local reform will prove lame and soulless 
 is that every organic neighbourhood or commune in our 
 Sion should have freedom, duty, and self-government in 
 its ecclesiastical as well as its secular life. Sooner or 
 later the bishops of England, like the apostles in the 
 ancient Sion, will find themselves obliged to call upon 
 the people of Christ to make use of the spiritual gifts of 
 discernment and familiarity with which the Holy Ghost 
 has endowed them for the service of their neighbours, 
 and to choose the men whom the successors of the 
 apostles may ordain or refuse to ordain, institute or 
 refuse to institute, to the ministry of each communal 
 Church. The Church of the old Sion, when the apostles 
 threw upon the whole multitude of the christened the 
 obligation of choice, chose such fit men for the deacons 
 that the apostles laid their hands upon every one of 
 them. 
 
 Wheresoever the Church is endowed with secular 
 property, there the secular ruler has an undoubted title 
 to interfere in the disposition of that which the civil 
 arm, the civil laws, the civil police have alone defended 
 and continue to defend from spoliation and sacrilege.
 
 294 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 If there were no organised Commonwealth, no State, 
 there would be no Church property, or only so much as 
 the Church members could keep from robbers by their 
 own physical force. 
 
 Our civil rulers had a happy opportunity, at the 
 passing of the recent Parish Councils Act, to come to 
 the help of the local Christian people in this most 
 necessary point of reform. But the party which was 
 then in power let the occasion slip, it may be through 
 partisan illiberality, or through defect of neighbourly 
 patriotism, or through a cowardly fear of offending the 
 Separatists and losing their votes. So instead of a 
 whole and generous parochial reform, embracing the 
 spiritual as well as the secular aspect of neighbourhood, 
 we got nothing better than that lame, blind, and decrepit 
 Parish Councils Act, by which they blunderingly 
 attempted locally to tear asunder the universal Christian 
 society from the civil society. Surely we ought t6 
 demand for our neighbours, as citizens of the world-wide 
 Christian society, the Catholic Church, the same fulness 
 of duty and right as we demand for them as members of 
 the civil commonwealth. The prophet of Sion shows us 
 in every line of his prophecy the ungodliness and the 
 inhumanity of a separation of Church and State. It was 
 a dark conception which first arose in the minds of those 
 who held that a "true Church" could only be erected on 
 the inhuman Calvinist conception that the Father had 
 damned the majority of men and women in every parish 
 before He had created them, and never intended such 
 reprobates to be the members of a "Church." What 
 reason can we give except the vested interests of caste 
 and mammon, or the jealousies of Samaria why a 
 neighbour should be "civilised" in things secular, but 
 continue under barbarism, or at least under feudalism, in 
 things ecclesiastical ?
 
 MY DUTY TOWARDS MY NEIGHBOUR 295 
 
 IV. 
 
 It is no enviable task faithfully to declare what is at 
 present the one great obstacle to a full civil and secular 
 London reform. " Fear ye not the reproach of men," 
 says our prophet, "neither be ye afraid of their revilings." 
 I do not think there can be a shorter or surer way to 
 bring upon ourselves a deluge of reproach and revilings 
 from all the time-servers, the fashionable scribes of this 
 present evil world, than to assert that our schism is the 
 great stumbling-block in the way of the reform of our 
 Sion. We have thousands of soldiers ; but they are no 
 organic army, because so many a one is fighting for his 
 own hand, or for his own victory, or for the arbitrary 
 rule of his own set, or for the victory of his schism over 
 the community. 
 
 I mean by schism every self-separation and class- 
 separation, civilly and ecclesiastically, from the common 
 " rock whence we are hewn, from Abraham our father, 
 and Sarah that bare us." The Father has made us all 
 neighbours. He has jointed every one of us into a 
 neighbourhood. But we have turned out of His way, 
 and have built up a number of social schisms, one or 
 other of which we look upon as our " Sion." There is 
 the schism of the West from the East, or, as our fathers 
 called it, the schism of " the town " from " the city " : 
 there is the schism of the rich few from the many poor, 
 the schism of the nobles from the commoners, the 
 schism of the Pharisees from the publicans and sinners, 
 the schism of the employers from the workers, the 
 schism of the cultured from the ignorant. 
 
 God forbid that I should say on which side blame 
 lies ; for in all schisms, as we learn from the Word 
 of God in history, both sides need confession and 
 absolution.
 
 296 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 The business of the Church is to uphold the simple 
 witness in the face of all, that "there is one Lord, 
 one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all " 
 for every neighbourhood. But side by side with the 
 Father's establishment of neighbourhood, and over 
 against the Son's social and sacramental witness to 
 neighbourhood, we are confronted with the worldly and 
 carnal establishments of a social Phariseeism, a social 
 Separatism, a social Sadduceeism, a social Mammonism, 
 whose members are saying to the common man of the 
 divine neighbourhood, as our prophet puts it, "Stand 
 by thyself come not near to me, for I am holier I am 
 richer, I am nobler, I am more cultured, I am more truly 
 converted, I am more progressive, more conservative 
 than thou." 
 
 But when we look unto the common rock " whence 
 we are hewn " in divers shapes, when we all look back 
 together unto Abraham our father, we come to the solid 
 foundation of brotherhood, sisterhood, equality, and 
 community, out of which citizenship, or the organic 
 estate of neighbourhood has not only been evolved, but 
 to which it must also return if it is to know its laws. 
 He who was more than a prophet said to the pious 
 Pharisaic segregation which despised the irreligious, and 
 to the critical Sadducaic segregation which despised the 
 unlearned, "Think not to say within yourselves, we have 
 Abraham as our father : for I say unto you, that God is 
 able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham." 
 And the Divine Reformer Himself said to the Sabba- 
 tarian ruler of the synagogue, whom He had offended 
 by breaking their Sabbath, " Ought not this woman, 
 being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound 
 for these eighteen years, be loosed from that bond on the 
 Sabbath day?" 
 
 Nevertheless, amongst all our dividing segregations
 
 MY DUTY TOWARDS MY NEIGHBOUR 297 
 
 whether religious, social, or intellectual we know that 
 there are hundreds who have a burning zeal for 
 righteousness and concord. They have a unity of the 
 spirit : they are sick of discord : God's law is in their 
 hearts : they long to see the neighbours gathered 
 together with them in one body, each caring for the 
 good of all. But it is hard for us to conceive of any 
 temple of the Lord in which no place is found for our 
 own private idols, our own class chapels. God forbid 
 that we should forget what the prophets show us, that 
 the Priests and Levites in His temple may be the worst 
 idolaters. Yet my idolatry cannot be an excuse for my 
 neighbour's separation from the organic neighbourhood, 
 established by the common Father of all for all. 
 Whether the separation be civic or ecclesiastical, it is 
 either an implicit denial that God has established any 
 such neighbourhood, or else it is a doubt whether the 
 actual neighbourhood in which we find ourselves and 
 our neighbours is a building of His foundation. Some 
 neighbours nickname the Church of London, or the 
 Church of the parish to which they belong, a " sect " or 
 a " denomination," as if the difference between it and 
 their various segregations from it lay in mere change- 
 able opinion : whereas it lies in the unalterable natures 
 of the Church and of a Sect. Even the splendid code 
 of citizenship in the Common Catechism, " My duty 
 towards my neighbour," is nicknamed " sectarian " ; and 
 you know how often the last sentence of it is ignorantly 
 misquoted, or mischievously perverted, as an excuse for 
 abusing the whole of it. In the age when that code was 
 compiled it was said that there were " three States (or 
 estates) of life in England," that of the governor, that of 
 the commoner, and that of the clergy. The prince as 
 well as the labourer has to learn the Catechism of the 
 Common Church, and the child says that whether God
 
 298 COLE ABBEY SERMONS 
 
 shall call him to become a legislator, a common citizen, 
 or a priest, he must do his duty in that estate of life. 
 
 A London child is not baptized or made a member of 
 the Catholic Church because his parents are members 
 of it, as the old Puritanism contended, but he is baptized 
 because he is born ; he is made a Church man, and is 
 catechised as one, because God has already chosen him 
 to it by making him a man. "Look unto Abraham 
 your father," cries the prophet to the citizens. The 
 father of all that are born among you, the father of all 
 your neighbours, the father of the national common- 
 wealth, is the father also of the faithful, the father of the 
 Church. Look away from the Parties which divide 
 you, look to the organic community in which they and 
 you are one body. You cannot by any wit or policy of 
 yours separate the Church from the State, so inextricably 
 has God bound them together. Baptism is His testimony 
 to their union. Neither is any christened London 
 citizen a member of his parish church, the common 
 church of his neighbourhood, nor has he his title to 
 Holy Communion at its altar, because he likes it better 
 than other churches, or because he chooses it no, but it 
 is because the Father of all has chosen him for it, 
 because the best and highest Will has made him a 
 " neighbour," and that not only of those who kneel at 
 his side, but of the generations of Londoners who have 
 knelt here before him, whom it is our duty as neighbours 
 to remember before God in the representation of the 
 one perfect, full, and sufficient Sacrifice once offered for 
 the sins of the whole world. 
 
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 THE PLACE OF THE 
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 Sermons and Addresses. 
 
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 CRITICAL QUESTIONS 
 
 A Series of Sermons on Critical Questions delivered at 
 St. Mark's, Marylebone Road, W. 
 
 With Preface by 
 
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 and a Bibliography by each Preacher. 
 
 CONTENTS : 
 
 How to Read the Old Testament. 
 
 By Rev. A. F. KIRKPATRICK, D.D. 
 
 The Trustworthiness of the Gospel Narrative. 
 
 By Rev. H. B. SWETE, D.D. 
 
 The Authority and Authorship of the 
 Book of the Acts of the Apostles. 
 
 By Rev. R. J. KNOWLING, D.D. 
 
 St. Paul. By Rev. A. C. HEADLAM, M.A. 
 
 The Virgin Birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 By Rev. W. SANDAY, D.D. 
 
 The Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
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 FOLLOWING ON TO 
 KNOW THE LORD. 
 
 Sermons preached in the Church of St. John the 
 Evangelist, Westminster, 
 
 By BASIL WILBERFORCE, D.D. 
 
 Archdeacon of Westminster, Chaplain to the Speaker, Rector of 
 
 St. John the Evangelist, Westminster, Select Preacher 
 
 before the University of Oxford. 
 
 CONTENTS : 
 
 What think ye of the Christ ? 
 Possessing a Faith, or Pos- 
 sessed by a Faith. 
 The Holy Trinity. 
 The Holy Ghost. 
 Epiphany. 
 
 No Monopoly in the Christ. 
 Septuagesima. 
 
 Sexagesima. 
 
 Quinquagesima. 
 
 All Saints. 
 
 All Souls. 
 
 Holy Angels. 
 
 Your Adversary the Devil. 
 
 Balaam's Ass. 
 
 The Lower Animals. 
 
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 THE CARDINAL 
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 And Other Sermons. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 Rev. W. C E. NEWBOLT, M.A. 
 
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 THE PSALMS OF 
 ISRAEL. 
 
 A Course of Lectures delivered in St. Patrick's 
 Cathedral, 1903. 
 
 CONTENTS : 
 The Psalter in the Temple Worship. 
 
 Rev. H. J. LAWLOR, D.D. 
 
 The Growth of the Psalter. 
 
 Rev. J. H. KENNEDY, D.D. 
 
 The Eschatology of the Psalms. 
 
 Rev. L. A. POOLER, B.D. 
 
 The Doctrine of a Future Life in the Psalter. 
 
 Rev. N. J. D. WHITE, B.D. 
 
 The Messianic Psalms. 
 
 Rev. N. J. D. WHITE, B.D. 
 
 The Imprecatory Psalms. 
 
 Right Rev. GEO. ALEX. CHADWICK, D.D., 
 Bishop of Derry. 
 
 The Penitential Psalms. 
 
 Very Rev. J. H. BERNARD, D.D., Dean of 
 St. Patrick's. 
 
 The Psalter in the Public Worship of the Church. 
 
 Rev. H. J. LAWLOR, D.D. 
 
 The Psalms in Christian History. 
 
 Very Rev. J. H. BERNARD, D.D. 
 
 Pall Mall. " They are full of expository beauty and charm." 
 
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 SIXTH EDITION. 
 
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 TEN YEARS IN A 
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 By FATHER DOLLING. 
 
 Late Priest in Charge of St. Agatha's, Landport (Winchester 
 College Mission). 
 
 With Portrait and Eighteen Full-page Illustrations. 
 
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 bring fresh lessons of courage and hopefulness." 
 
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 who desire to learn the secret of Mr. Dolling's wonderful success 
 in a most difficult task." 
 
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 unconventional pen, of the singularly successful work done by 
 him in connexion with the Winchester College Mission, in the 
 regeneration of the district of St. Agatha's, Landport." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. " Simply it is the record of ten years' 
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 moreover, it is a record most modestly even pathetically 
 modestly presented ; a record that is convincing in its bare 
 truth, and in every line of it beyond expression interesting. He 
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 that the book is absorbingly full of incentives to thought ; for 
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 THE TOUCH OF GOD, 
 
 BY THE LATE 
 
 Rev, HUGH MACMILLAN, D*D. 
 
 Author of " Bible Teachings in Nature." 
 
 CONTENTS. The Touch of God In the Cool of the Day 
 The Right Treatment of Idols Jacob and the Three Hebrew 
 Witnesses Bochim The Fear of Evil The Chain of Nature 
 and Providence God's Winnowing The Blamelessness of 
 Ignorance A Significant Purchase Personality and Imper- 
 sonality. 
 
 Daily News: "A volume of Nature sermons prepared for 
 publication before the death of the author, and revised by his 
 son. Interesting and instructive, with many admirable biological 
 illustrations and allusions." 
 
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 gifted preacher's ripest manner, and it is good to find them 
 included in the ' World's Pulpit Series.' A fine portrait of Dr. 
 Macmillan adds to the pensive interest of the volume." 
 
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 Scotsman. " The book will prove welcome to many, both for 
 its substantial value as popular divinity and as a memorial of its 
 author." 
 
 Publishers' Circular. "The last work of the cultured, refined 
 and eloquent preacher, who has been so faithful in the use of his 
 talents." 
 
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 THE WORLD'S PULPIT SERIES. 
 
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 TRUE RELIGION. 
 
 By the Very Rev. F. W. FARRAR, D.D. 
 
 Dean of Canterbury. 
 
 The Spectator. " Dean Farrar gives us here a very noble and inspiring 
 volume. ... He uses plain speech on many questions which touch the 
 public and private life of England." 
 
 The Christian. "Fresh and original. The way of Salvation and the pro- 
 vision for progress in the Christian life are pointed out so that the simplest 
 may understand and the most timid may be encouraged to step forward." 
 
 Family Churchman. " It has the value of being a guide, to those who read 
 it, to a higher and more spiritual worship." 
 
 THE GLORY OF LIFE. 
 
 By Rev. J. MONRO GIBSON, M.A., D.D. 
 
 Evangelical Magazine. " Finely suggestive illustrations light up this book. 
 From end to end the pages are alive. Clean vision, hopeful outlook, and strong, 
 fair-minded facing of facts are the characteristics of this volume." 
 
 Church Times. "Fresh, vigorous discourses." 
 
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 Nonconformist preacher is seen at his best" 
 
 OLD AND NEW. 
 
 By Rev. CANON SCOTT HOLLAND. 
 
 Guardian. "Canon Scott Holland's immense enthusiasm and invincible 
 hope." 
 
 Publishers' Circular." Earnest, thoughtful. . . . Sound religious teaching, 
 great scholarly treatment." 
 
 British Weekly." All the sermons are alive and energetic, and all of them 
 bear the unmistakable mark of deep conviction and sincerity." 
 
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 Publishers' Circular." ' The World's Pulpit Series,' which promises, if merit 
 goes for anything, to have a great success." 
 
 A NEW EARTH. 
 
 SERMONS, ADDRESSES AND LECTURES. 
 By Rev. JAMES ADDERLEY, M.A. 
 
 Church Times. " A notable addition to their excellent ' World's Pulpit Series.' 
 ... If any one wishes to read a straightforward and uncompromising defence 
 of the citadel of the Catholic position, written so as to be understood of all men, 
 we have yet to find a better book to recommend our readers than Father 
 Adderley's." 
 
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 There is honesty, passion and sincerity on every page." 
 
 Christian Common-wealth. "The Rev. James Adderley has made for himself 
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 Adderley is one of the most lucid of living exponents of Christian Socialism." 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth, gilt, with portrait. Price 35. 6d. 
 
 THE TEN VIRGINS 
 
 AND OTHER SERMONS. 
 By Rev. H. R. GAMBLE, M.A. 
 
 Christian Commonwealth. " One of the best collections of sermons I 
 have come across for years." 
 
 Oxford Chronicle. "Excellent examples of the best type of the Church of 
 England parish discourse. They are cultured in style and tone, abreast of 
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 uality." 
 
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