LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 GIFT 
 
 Accession 86.5.9.0..... Class 
 
itt the 
 
 0f 
 
 BACCALAUREATE SERMON 
 
 June 11, 1893 
 
Columbia 
 in ike City of 
 
 PROGRESS IN KNOWLEDGE 
 THROUGH LOVE 
 
 BACCALAUREATE SERMON 
 
 OF 1893 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED BARRY, D.D., D.C.L 
 
 CANON OF WINDSOR, LATE PRIMATE OF 
 AUSTRALIA AND TASMANIA 
 
 SUNDAY, JUNE n, 1893 
 
Eph. III., 18, 19 : That ye, being rooted and 
 grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend, with all 
 saints, what is the breadth and length, and depth and 
 Tieight, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth 
 knowledge, that ye may be filed unto all the fulness of 
 God. 
 
 All anniversary celebrations must be pregnant with 
 suggestive contrast, between that which endures and 
 that which passes away between the short life of 
 each generation and the long continuity of deep-rooted 
 institutions between forms and circumstances which 
 change, and principles which are immutable between 
 the necessity of actual growth, which is laid upon all 
 that is finite, and the steadfastness of the ideal which, 
 if it be true at all, is an attribute of the Infinite and 
 the Eternal. But I think that this general character- 
 istic comes out with some special force certainly to a 
 speaker, perhaps also to his hearers on such occasions 
 as this ; when one whose life is mainly in the past, 
 illuminated not by the magic brightness of hope, but 
 by the more prosaic light of experience, has to address 
 mainly young men, who are still in all the freshness of 
 their early manhood, looking onward to the unknown 
 capacity and expansiveness of the future ; when (as to- 
 day) he speaks, under the auspices of a University essen- 
 
4 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 tially like, yet in all associations and circumstances 
 utterly unlike, the ancient Universities, with which he 
 is familiar, in the familiarity both of knowledge and 
 of love ; and, above all, when he speaks in the House 
 of God, where necessarily all the changes and chances 
 of this mortal life are seen from the vantage-ground of 
 Divine and therefore imperishable truth, revealed to 
 us, as otherwise in divers measures and divers man- 
 ners of imperfection, so unique and perfect in the Lord 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 Out of the sense of such contrast we are taught 
 by the maturest philosophy that much of our best 
 and deepest knowledge comes. So it is with us 
 to-day. The consciousness of progress a rapid and 
 auspicious progress, if I mistake not is necessarily 
 your watchword. But progress, in the true sense of 
 the word distinct from mere vicissitude and change, as 
 the stream of a great river from the continual ebb and 
 flow of the waves upon the seashore depends on the 
 realization in right harmony of both these contrasted 
 conditions. It must have its capacity of change, ex- 
 pansion, growth ; but it must also have a continuity of 
 idea and principle and life, running like a golden 
 thread through the whole texture of what is woven by 
 the hand of Time. The hope of progress is almost 
 equally incompatible with belief in changeful, isolated 
 Individualism, and belief in an iron unchangeableness 
 of Law. It finds it always has found its best in- 
 spiration in that Christian belief, which at once real- 
 izes man and God, and realizes both as One resting 
 on the great mystery of nrysteries, which Trinity 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 5 
 
 Sunday has but now pressed upon our thought know- 
 ing the eternal and unchangeable Jehovah as our 
 Father indeed, who lives in His children by the In- 
 dwelling Presence of His dear Son, who quickens and 
 moves, without overwhelming, their free spirituality 
 by the breath of the Divine Spirit. 
 
 Let me speak to you to-day of this conception of 
 .true progress, under the guidance of the text, closing 
 St. Paul's sublime prayer for his converts in Asia, 
 which, as in all the deeper utterances of this Epistle to 
 the Ephesians, unites with fervour and passion of 
 enthusiasm the most philosophical coherence and com- 
 prehensiveness of thought. 
 
 I. In it we have his ideal of growth in knowledge, 
 " strengthening men to apprehend " at once lt all the 
 length and breadth," and " all the depth and height " 
 of truth. ' " To apprehend," as our Revised Version 
 rightly corrects the older translation, not " to compre- 
 hend " to grasp, that is, the real though partial know- 
 ledge, with which in respect both of Nature and Hu- 
 manity we are wisely content, without waiting for the 
 complete demonstrative knowledge, of which necessa- 
 rily a finite mind is incapable in contemplation of the 
 infinite, and which accordingly in us is possible only in 
 relation to the creations of our own minds, impossible 
 in relation to the creations of a higher Hand. 
 
 Through such apprehension there is, first a growth in 
 " the length and breadth," the visible and obvious ex- 
 pansion of our knowledge. This expansion is not only 
 continuous and irresistible, but it has its increase (so 
 to speak) of acceleration, as the ages roll on, Mar- 
 
6 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 vellous is the degree of that acceleration, which is 
 characteristic of our own time. New fields of observa- 
 tion and study are being opened day by day largely 
 by the growth of our mechanical and physical science 
 in all regions of the earth, in all depths of the sea, in 
 all the strata of the air around us, in all the vastness 
 of our planetary system, and the yet more illimitable 
 vastness, which spreads beyond. Larger inductions 
 of Law are continually extending themselves, not 
 merely in space but in time ; for everywhere the his- 
 torical method of study is triumphant, declaring true 
 knowledge of the present to be impossible without the 
 larger knowledge of an all but immeasurable past. 
 And from these expansions there naturally follows, as 
 the curriculum of your own University most plainly 
 shows, a continual enlargement, not only in variety but in 
 specialization of study, almost bewildering to those who 
 lived their academic life in older and simpler days, and a 
 continual development of inventions, utilizing that va- 
 riety of knowledge for the service of humanity. This 
 expansion scientific, literary, aesthetic is to the mass 
 of men the most certain, the most intelligible, the most 
 immediately valuable. Our age glories in it, demands 
 it for its own needs, rewards it with its prizes of 
 wealth and fame. Even our faith accepts it as a 
 gift of God, a broken light from the Infinite Knowledge 
 to which all things are present ; our universities are 
 therefore called upon to welcome it, in their twofold 
 character, as homes not only of education, but of re- 
 search : and they obey that call freely everywhere, not 
 least freely, if I mistake not, in this new and growing 
 country. 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. J 
 
 But there is another expansion " in depth and 
 height," which St. Paul seems to place in climax even 
 above this more visible and obvious expansion. 
 
 It is an extension in depth, insisting on going down 
 below this wide variety of visible phenomena to the 
 few great truths and energies which underlie them ; in 
 going back thro' the ages of the past, to the origin from 
 which all this Kosmos sprang ; in correlating all 
 various forms of thought and knowledge with one 
 another, not only in one great harmony but in one great 
 development. Everywhere the secondary strata of 
 thought are being examined, not merely for what they 
 themselves can reveal, but in order to pass through 
 them to the primal rock below. So in purely physical 
 science men seek to penetrate to the secret of Matter 
 and of Force, if indeed they be distinct from one 
 another ; in Physiological Science, to the secret of 
 Life ; in the study of man, to the secret of free spirit- 
 ual Personality ; and altho', as yet, they have to regard 
 these as distinct, yet to find out, if it may be, their rela- 
 tions to one another, and to the One Cause from which 
 they must ultimately proceed. In fact, they have to 
 acknowledge in some sense the old saying Omnia 
 abeunt in mysterinm, even when they will not give to 
 the word mystery the meaning which the New Testa- 
 ment places upon it as a secret (that is) of the Divine 
 Nature, to reason, it is true, indiscoverable, but to 
 faith a secret no longer, because revealed in the Lord 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 It is an extension, on the other hand, in height ; not 
 content to know all truths, as (so to speak) on one 
 level both of dignity and of importance, but just be- 
 
8 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 cause it recognizes in the human nature, which con- 
 templates truth, the subordination of body and soul to 
 spirit rising in a corresponding gradation from truths 
 material and psychical to truths spiritual. In each de- 
 partment of knowledge it seeks the supreme idea, up 
 to which all observation and discovery lead. In the 
 relation of these various departments to one another it 
 acknowledges distinction between the highest, which 
 is an end in itself, and the lower, which should simply 
 subserve it. And perhaps it feels these distinctions 
 most profoundly and most keenly, when it tries to 
 make these conceptions its grounds of action, and so 
 passes from the purely intellectual into the moral 
 sphere. In fact, like the Wise Man of old, it bids us 
 distinguish from mere knowledge and understanding 
 the true Wisdom, which is the grasp of the end and 
 purpose of man's own being. Perhaps it goes on 
 like him, to see that the attainment of it in each mind 
 is impossible, unless it has some glimpse of the end 
 and purpose of all creation ; which to one who believes 
 in God must be a glimpse, whether through reason or 
 through faith, of the Supreme Wisdom of the Creative 
 Mind. 
 
 In some sense it is clear that this latter extension is 
 in its method and object the opposite of the former ; 
 its eyes are set towards a brightening future, and not 
 towards the dimness of a distant past. As it traces 
 in the universe itself a constant evolution of higher 
 out of lower forms of being, so it looks on to a cor- 
 responding evolution of higher knowledge in the here- 
 after. But yet in either case the progress leads the 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 9 
 
 mind from the finite and actual towards the Infinite 
 and the Eternal. There is a true significance, although 
 clothed as usual in a crude material form, in the old 
 Indian legend, which tells how the two lesser gods 
 equally realized the infinitude of the Supreme Deity, 
 when the one dived unceasingly below, while the other 
 soared unceasingly above. 
 
 . Now in either aspect this extension of knowledge is 
 to the world far less obvious and certain than the 
 visible and tangible growth in length and breadth. 
 It is apt to seem transcendental, mystical, unreal; it 
 has no results of manifest usefulness to be applauded 
 and rewarded ; in the strong sense of practical needs 
 and difficulties the world looks with some impatience 
 on devotion to its service of the highest and keenest 
 intelligences. But I venture strongly to contend 
 that, just for this very reason, it should hold some 
 primacy of honour within the quiet and thoughtful 
 precincts of a University, in view of that double 
 function of which I have spoken: as a place, which 
 has leisure for research into the realities lying below 
 or above the busy world of immediate usefulness ; as a 
 place of education of the mind in its nobler capacities 
 to a recognition of something higher and deeper than 
 the occupations and interests, which will only too 
 certainly absorb the larger portion of actual life 
 hereafter. 
 
 It has been said regretfully that in the wide exten- 
 sion of secondary knowledge, which is new, the world 
 has lost the spirit of those older days, when the 
 standing-ground of men's idea was far narrower than 
 
10 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 now, but when in height it reached to heaven above, 
 and in depth to hell beneath. But, if it be so in the 
 world, it should not be so here. It is the very function 
 of a University to teach a nobler wisdom to insist 
 that the gain of the new need not be, and shall not be, 
 the loss of the old to see that the expansion of 
 the visible horizon of disco veiy around us shall not so 
 absorb our mental vision, as to make it unable or un- 
 willing to look into the darkness of the underlying 
 depths, and to the brightness of the heights above. 
 It was in the consciousness of this function that, by 
 that good old tradition which you, my brethren, have 
 inherited in your own College, and have faithfully pre- 
 served, the inner life of every University was so 
 strongly pervaded with the religious idea, which 
 whatever else it does must educate the highest spirit- 
 ual faculty, and must bring the soul face to face with 
 ultimate realities, both with the foundation on which 
 all rests, and with the perfection up to which all rises. 
 Ill will it be, if in zeal for what calls itself " positive 
 knowledge," the significance and the effectiveness of 
 that ancient connection should be lost. 
 
 II. Such is the Apostle's ideal of a full and harmo- 
 nious growth of knowledge an ideal, which must 
 approve itself to the soundest philosophy, as truly as 
 to the deepest religious faith. But what is essentially 
 and vitally religious in his view of it is his conception 
 of the subjective qualification of the soul for the dis- 
 covery of truth, and of the central objective reality, 
 which binds all truths together. He finds both in 
 Love. It is by " being rooted and grounded in love " 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. II 
 
 that the soul is to be made strong for apprehension ; 
 and that which ultimately it has to apprehend is a 
 Divine "love which passeth knowledge." In exactly 
 the same spirit he declares elsewhere to the Corinthians 
 that while "knowledge" the hard proud head-know- 
 ledge, which he rebukes in them only " puffs up," 
 " love builds up " in solid substantial growth ; and in 
 this Epistle makes the possession and use of truth to 
 be possible only when it is " truth in love." * 
 
 There is a profound and far-reaching significance in 
 this religious philosophy. For love in us is the 
 strong recognition, through mind and heart alike, of a 
 real unity, expressing itself in sympathy, between the 
 Ego and the non-Ego between the soul within and 
 the realities which are contemplated as around, below, 
 above it. And to see in Love the central life of all 
 these realities implies the conviction that this sym- 
 pathy in us is no mere imagination of our own, but is 
 the reflection of a Divine sympathy, of which the 
 whole Kosmos is but the visible expression. That 
 philosophy has on its subjective side at least this note 
 of truth, that in the search after reality it enlists man's 
 nature as an indivisible whole. It unites in the 
 pursuit of true knowledge the intellectual and moral 
 faculties, which on any other theory are apt to be 
 dissociated ; it acknowledges even in the poetic imagi- 
 nation, invariably personifying all on which it gazes, a 
 real insight into the heart of things. And on the 
 other side it holds surely not without reason that 
 the great ultimate and central reality the To'Qv, on 
 
 * See i Cor. viii., I ; Eph. iv., 15. 
 
12 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 which all mere phenomena depend must have in a 
 similar unity attributes corresponding to these facul- 
 ties in us, by all of which we approach to some know- 
 ledge of its nature. The faith which it involves is like 
 all the other higher faculties of our humanity in " the 
 realization of things not seen," but it has its essential 
 characteristic in this, that it sees not merely the 
 To aoparov, but the Tor 'Aoparov, " Him, who is in- 
 visible." 
 
 Let us look, first, at this fundamental principle on 
 its subjective side. Note how this need of love for 
 true insight is exemplified with an increasing force 
 and clearness, as we ascend fche scale of knowledge. 
 
 We study the world of Nature in its vastness and 
 grandeur, or in the minute perfection of each smallest 
 element, in its marvellous order under law, in the yet 
 greater marvel of its continuous development, in the 
 vast pervasiveness of its evident design, in the subtle 
 and exquisite manifestation of its beauty. To that 
 study in all its phases there rightly belongs a kind of 
 love rudimentary, I grant, in itself and imperfect 
 in the enthusiastic sense of wonder, delight, reverence, 
 which tinctures the cold dry light of intellect with 
 fche glow of emotion and imagination, and inspires the 
 search into Nature with something of poetry, some- 
 thing of affection, something even of moral earnest- 
 ness. To such enthusiasm, especially characteristic of 
 artistic and poetic genius, there is granted, as E-uskin 
 has so nobly taught us, an intuition of the great Laws 
 of Nature, and the unity binding all in one, to which 
 the more prosaic reason hardly attains. And we may 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 13 
 
 note that this enthusiasm not only grows in itself, but 
 assumes more and more the character of real sympa- 
 thy, as we pass from the world of inanimate Nature 
 to the world of Life, and especially w T hen we come to 
 know those orders of creatures, which have, in what 
 we roughly call instinct, the rudiments at least of our 
 own intellectual and social and moral nature, and 
 which accordingly stir in us the feeling of humanity, 
 and claim from it the recognition of some measure of 
 rights at our hands. Without something of this love 
 it may be questioned whether there can be a real in- 
 sight into the inner secret of Nature as a whole, as 
 distinguished from its outward form and partial devel- 
 opments ; it can hardly be questioned that the hard, 
 dry study of mere laws and forces fails to unfold and 
 educate our own full humanity. What noble, yet 
 what mournful, candour there is in the confession of 
 one great leader of Science in our own day, that " by 
 turning his mind into a great machine for grinding 
 general laws out of observation of facts," he had lost 
 his old capacity for the enthusiasm of wonder and ad- 
 miration, and produced in his nature a kind of moral 
 atrophy, a " colour blindness " to the sense of grandeur 
 and beauty ! 
 
 But it is when we pass from the lower realms of Na- 
 ture to the higher realm of humanity, that the need of 
 that which is more properly called love for full know- 
 ledge is most keenly felt. None can know his fellow- 
 men deeply and truly, who studies them as he would 
 study lifeless things, without one touch of sympathy. 
 The so-called knowledge of the world faithless, love- 
 
14 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 less, cynical seldom penetrates below the surface of 
 outward action; it knows little indeed of the inner 
 forces and capacities and aspirations of the soul, which 
 outward action can but faintly express. Nay, among 
 these, in virtue of its own nature, it can understand 
 only those impulses of self-regard and self-assertion, 
 which mark the survival in man of the dread struggle 
 for existence in the animal world; of the higher 
 humanity of loving self-sacrifice it is utterly uncon- 
 scious. Men are coming to see, as in political and 
 social life, how the keenest and brightest intellects, 
 thus destitute of sympathy, fail utterly in dealing 
 with men, falling into errors and follies fairly impossi- 
 ble, nay fairly incredible, to far duller men who have 
 hearts to feel. I note that in our days even the hard 
 Science of Political Economy is beginning to temper 
 its old belief in pure self-interest, and to take account 
 of the self-sacrificing enthusiasm of love, as at least 
 one of the great factors in organizing human society. 
 ! a man must love, if he would pierce to the real 
 heart of humanity-)-if, even in his erring and sinning 
 fellow-men, he would trace still the lingering impress 
 of the image of the Divine if he would have any con- 
 ception of that real and vital unity, by which human- 
 kind becomes an organic whole, and thrills with a 
 common life. 
 
 But if this law thus holds in the spheres of created 
 being, and thus increases its cogency in proportion as 
 they rise higher in gradation, must we not almost 
 necessarily infer its supreme application to the know- 
 ledge of the Supreme Creative Power ? In some de- 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 1 5 
 
 gree it is this application, which underlies even those 
 lower applications of which I have spoken. That en- 
 thusiastic love of Nature is it not really the reverent 
 love of some Being, insensibly and irresistibly personi- 
 fied, of whom Nature is the creation and the expres- 
 sion, and who in " Nature's voice " speaks to the soul ? 
 That love of humankind, strong in spite of all the fol- 
 lies and sins of actual men, unwearied by life's failures 
 and the world's ingratitude is it not really the love of 
 One, not a personified abstraction, but a living Being, 
 whose image is in humanity, and whom through hu- 
 manity we can best know ? But it is when the soul, 
 putting all else aside, seeks to know something of the 
 First Source of all life and being, that this Law comes 
 out in its highest strength and perfection. Then it is 
 that the Apostolic saying stands forth in transcendent 
 clearness " He that loveth not, knoweth not God," as 
 He really is. 
 
 I am far indeed from thinking that even a purely 
 intellectual research leads in no degree to a God even 
 to a personal and living God. The freshest modern 
 thought on the evolution, of the order of being tells 
 us plainly that behind it philosophy must acknow- 
 ledge " a Cause, of which the one thing we know is that 
 it is Teleological," implying Design and Purpose ; and 
 what is such a Cause as this but an Eternal Mind ? 
 Of the revelation of beauty in creation, as distinct from 
 order and usefulness, we have been profoundly 
 taught that, as it needs personality in us for its 
 apprehension, so it surely implies also a Supreme 
 Personality for its manifestation. The very ex- 
 
l6 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 istence in the world of a moral nature in its highest 
 creatures, and a great force in history, " which makes 
 for righteousness," must imply corresponding attri- 
 butes, only infinite in their greatness, in the Creative 
 and Ruling Power, on which all nature and history 
 rest ; and these attributes essentially belong to Per- 
 sonality. All these lines of thought, even if they are 
 studied in the coldest, most unsympathetic reasoning, 
 converge (as it seems to me) to one great conclusion, 
 and by the fact of convergence infinitely multiply their 
 strength. 
 
 But I do say that here, also, sympathy an infinitely 
 humble and yet confident sympathy is the key of 
 knowledge. It is through the sense of moral relation 
 to the Supreme Power, rightly absorbing the almost 
 boundless reserve in us of love the love of duty, 
 trust, reverence, self-sacrifice, which earthly objects, 
 even the noblest, cannot claim and cannot satisfy it 
 is through this that the knowledge of Grod assumes real 
 vitality and sovereign force. It is through this that it 
 calls for our recognition with an imperious moral 
 claim, which cannot be put off in a contented Agnosti- 
 cism, as though it were an abstract theory, having no vital 
 connection with life. It is through this that it comes 
 home to all minds, all ages, all characters of men, and, 
 wherever it thus comes home, assumes a dominant, an 
 all but exclusive, power over the soul and the life. 
 What infinite difference there is between the recogni- 
 tion, however clear, of a Supreme First Cause, an Al- 
 mighty Creator and Ruler, even an Eternal Source of 
 all being, and that moral consciousness of God, stamped 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. \J 
 
 upon the opening of Our Lord's Prayer, as really Our 
 Father in Heaven, whom we can love because He first 
 loved us ! The one (to use the old Patriarch's com- 
 parison) is the " hearing of Him by the hearing of the 
 ear," the other is the " seeing Him face to face " ; 
 the one is but the conclusion of reasoning, the other is 
 the victorious power which moves and overcomes the 
 world, and the knowledge of which, here and here- 
 after, is " the life Eternal." 
 
 III. Such is St. Paul's teaching on the subjective 
 side that the soul which would have, in all those ex- 
 tensions of which we have spoken, the knowledge of 
 things, of man, of God, must be for his phrase is re- 
 markable not fired and animated by love as a glori- 
 ous sentiment, but rooted and grounded in love as the 
 strong fundamental Law of knowledge. But the very 
 reason of this truth lies in the corresponding doctrine, 
 that the ultimate reality in the universe itself, the 
 ultimate object, which by contemplation and sympathy 
 we have to know, is a Divine " Love, which passeth 
 knowledge." 
 
 Note, my brethren, the full significance of this 
 phrase not only a God, but a God who is Love. It 
 needs no argument to one who knows what a concep- 
 tion of God is, that, if we believe in Him at all, then 
 knowledge of whatever kind must be in different de- 
 grees a Revelation of Him. It is to my mind not a 
 little significant that everywhere our philosophy traces 
 out what it calls Laws laws of Nature, under which 
 works its infinite variety of forces ; laws of humanity, 
 which guide and control, though they destroy not, the 
 
1 8 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 liberty of independent and conflicting wills ; laws of 
 thought, affection, moral sense, which our own inner 
 individuality must freely or by necessity obey. Yet 
 is it not too much forgotten, that the very use of the 
 word " Laws," drawn as it is from our political and social 
 experience, properly implies, as existing behind their 
 regularity, a Supreme Will, working with foreseen pur- 
 pose, working as expressing righteousness? Against 
 much common usage I venture even to contend, that 
 the word cannot be employed without danger of delu- 
 sion, except by those who see this Divine Will every- 
 where manifested or implied, and to whom, therefore, 
 as I have said, all kinds of knowledge are but veiled 
 forms of the knowledge of God. 
 
 But what is the central idea of this Divine Per- 
 sonality ? If it is simply the awfulness of Infinite 
 Power, the transcendence of Infinite Wisdom, even the 
 austere and unbending majesty of Infinite Righteous- 
 ness, then in all these He is immeasurably removed 
 from us, high as the heaven is high above the earth ; 
 and to Him, so conceived, though we may bow in 
 wonder, fear, submission, there can be no possibility in 
 us of love. But in the Gospel there is a better and 
 more inspiring teaching than this. God is indeed All- 
 mighty, All- wise, All-righteous; but His essential 
 Nature is that He is Love Love from all Eternity in 
 the threefold unity of Godhead Love from the be- 
 ginning of creation to all the creatures that He has 
 made. So to St. Paul to know Him is to know " the 
 Love that passeth knowledge." 
 
 It needs a Gospel indeed to make this sure and 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 19 
 
 certain to us now that modern thought has discovered, 
 and (I am inclined to think) exaggerated, the discor- 
 dant notes of evil of failure and waste, of suffering 
 and conflict, of sin in its degradation and malignity 
 jarring against that concert of witness to the 
 Divine Love, which the poetry, the philosophy, the 
 religion of the world have, I believe rightly, heard as 
 rising from the realms both of Nature and of Humanity. 
 Yet the perplexity is not new. No one has described 
 more terribly than St. Paul how all creation groans 
 under its burden how the soul in consciousness of sin 
 cries out " O wretched man that I am ! " how those 
 who have the first-fruits of the Spirit sigh most deeply, 
 under their keener sense of contradiction and imper- 
 fection from the high ideal which He has taught 
 them.* But as he knew the need of a Gospel, so from 
 his heart of hearts he believed that this need had 
 been more than satisfied. Therefore he speaks of 
 knowing not simply the Divine love, but the love of 
 Christ of God (that is) in Christ as that which can 
 be known, though it passeth knowledge. 
 
 As the first Christianity bore that joyful witness to 
 a weary and despondent world in his days, so, my 
 brethren, our Christianity has to bear it now, when we 
 see, and see without wonder, how gloomy, despondent, 
 dreary, pessimistic, is all non-Christian thought. 
 
 There is a cloud (men tell us) of blank ignorance 
 between the finite and the Infinite, in the cold gloom 
 of which all glow of love and sympathy must die 
 out. Yes ! we answer, but Christ is to us the Word 
 
 * Rom. vii., 24 ; viii., 22, 23. 
 
2O BA CCA LA UREA TE SERMON. 
 
 of God. " No man, we know, hath seen God at any 
 time," but " the only begotten Son has revealed Him," 
 and opened to us " the bosom of a true Father." 
 
 There is the darker cloud yet of sorrow, out of which 
 there come to us the cry of suffering, the complaint of 
 cruelty and injustice, the continual rain of tears. Yes ! 
 we reply again, but He has in His own Person con- 
 secrated suffering, to be the discipline of humanity, the 
 expression through sacrifice of love, the means of the 
 conquest of evil in the soul and in the world. Through 
 all these " the light affliction, which is but for a moment, 
 works for us a far more exceeding weight of glory." 
 
 Ay, but what (it is rejoined) can be said of the 
 darkest cloud of sin what of its horror what of its 
 mystery as striving against God, as outraging His 
 righteousness and His love, as marring the humanity 
 made in His Image, so that it were better for thousands 
 had they never been born ? And we, if we are honest 
 and wise, must acknowledge frankly and solemnly the 
 darkness of this mystery only seeing dimly that it 
 runs up into the yet greater mystery of the freedom, 
 on which depends the very possibility of moral good- 
 ness. We must confess what the study of the history 
 of all human thought, alike in philosophy and religion, 
 plainly shows us that for himself man can but feel 
 with an ineradicable consciousness that in some way 
 this mysterious power, being an anomaly monstrous 
 and unnatural, must be taken away, and yet can but 
 guess and speculate how these things shall be. But 
 the faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, while it does not yet 
 solve the mystery of the origin of evil, yet swallows 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 21 
 
 up its darkness in the transcendent brightness of the 
 greater mystery of salvation in those twofold gifts, 
 distinct yet inseparable, of Atonement in the Cross of 
 Calvary, taking away by Justification the guilt of sin, 
 and of regeneration by the indwelling Presence of 
 Christ in the soul and in the Church, breaking its bon- 
 dage by Sanctification and restoring to us the glorious 
 liberty of the children of God. It is enough for us to 
 know that " there is no condemnation," and no hopeless 
 and grovelling slavery under sin, " to those who are in 
 Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh but after the 
 spirit." 
 
 And if, after all these things, men point us at last to 
 the chill shadow of death as to that in which our very 
 self, when it has played its little part in the world's 
 drama, dies out for ever dwell on the intimate con- 
 nection of our humanity with the perishable and perish- 
 ing world of Nature and ask How can the creature 
 of a day have any trace of that likeness to the Eternal, 
 which alone can justify a confidence in the Divine 
 Love to us, and make possible a returning love to Him ? 
 then we come at last to that joyful word, clenched 
 by the Kesurrection and Ascension of Him who spake 
 it, " I am the Resurrection and the Life ; and he that 
 liveth and believeth in Me shall never die." 
 
 So every way it is clear that if we would know 
 not in mere flashes of speculation and hope, but in the 
 calm and ever brightening light of certainty that the 
 one great reality in all the spheres of life is a Divine 
 Love, which passes knowledge, we must know it as 
 it is manifested in Christ. For by that manifestation 
 
22 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 through a Divine humanity we know it as having the 
 tenderness of sympathy; nay, as involving through 
 that sympathy the willing sacrifice for us, which in 
 our conception is the crowning element in its perfec- 
 tion. We know, as St. Paul elsewhere teaches, that 
 we are followers of God, as walking in love, when 
 we add, " as Christ also loved us and gave Himself for 
 
 us." * 
 
 IV. Thus, my brethren, to the Christian the whole 
 ideal of progress in knowledge grows out the objec- 
 tive and subjective corresponding, as they always must 
 correspond, with each other. On both its sides I ven- 
 ture to press it upon you, in relation to the whole life 
 of this University. 
 
 The University is the highest School of Education. 
 The truth of which I have spoken brings out, in respect 
 of the education of our humanity, the contrast which 
 in some sense notes the great conflict of our time, be- 
 tween a purely intellectual and a moral ideal between 
 (that is) that which makes the development of under- 
 standing for the acquisition of knowledge the one 
 thing needful in education, and that which gives the 
 supreme place to the formation of character. 
 
 There is, I know, a lower ideal than either, which is 
 predominantly material, caring mainly, both in the 
 individual and in society, for the improvement not of 
 the true inner humanity, but of its outward circum- 
 stances and environment. It bids us estimate even 
 knowledge absolutely by its material usefulness ; it 
 makes the increase of material wealth, and that which 
 
 * Eph. v., i., 2. 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 2$ 
 
 it can buy, the test of progress, as in the individual so 
 in the collective life ; it holds up for each of us what 
 is called worldly success, in pleasure, in fame, in power, 
 as the object of all study and exertion and hope ; for the 
 community it mistakes bigness for true greatness ; nay 
 it professes to have outlived the illusions of national 
 magnanimity and duty, to refer all things to the test 
 of material usefulness, and to find the one principle of 
 action in the survival and victory of the strong. How 
 great how fatally great is the influence of that 
 basest of all ideals on the world of our century, I 
 need not tell you ; perhaps that influence is greatest 
 and deadliest in communities advancing most rapidly 
 in material growth and prosperity. We must even 
 sadly acknowledge its intrusion into higher spheres. 
 The thick yellow river of Pactolus can pollute the 
 clear fountain of knowledge, and even the stream of 
 living water, which flows, like Siloam, from beneath 
 the altar of God. But within the precincts of a Uni- 
 versity, surely that base materialism can have no open 
 acknowledgment of honour ; the very idea of liberal 
 education, as distinct from the technical instruction, 
 which the necessities of life demand, is belief in it 
 for its own sake and its effect on our general humanity, 
 without thought of visible and material usefulness. 
 It is one of the chief functions of a University to pro- 
 test against this basest ideal, both by word and life, in 
 the name of true humanity, for the sake of the happi- 
 ness and nobleness of the ages to come. Here, there- 
 fore, it seems to me, as I have said, that the overt 
 question lies between these two higher ideals of which 
 
24 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 I have spoken, and the question is surely one of im- 
 portance simply infinite. 
 
 Both, I freely grant, have a certain height and 
 nobleness. Far be it from me to depreciate for a 
 moment the education of the intellect by knowledge 
 in the right harmony of its faculties the extension 
 of the grasp through understanding of the laws of 
 things and men the insight of higher reason into the 
 principles which give life and inspiration to law the 
 intuition through the imagination of beauty, grandeur, 
 sublimity. It is simply an obedience to a law, in- 
 dicated by the capacities and opportunities of our 
 nature ; it is one part of that imitation of God which 
 is the object of our being. But still we ask, " Is it the 
 supreme law? Is it the imitation of the supreme 
 attribute of God ? 
 
 And the answer which the Gospel gives to that 
 question is an unhesitating answer. As God is in His 
 central essential Nature not Wisdom, but Love, so the 
 supreme end, to which human life must move, is to love 
 rather than to know. Therefore to educate rightly is 
 not primarily to develop the intellect, that it may 
 grow up by itself lonely, loveless, it may be merciless 
 using things, and creatures, and men, unsparingly for 
 the advance of knowledge, but to form character, to 
 train the will to do its appointed part in life, to 
 strengthen the sense of righteo'usness, to kindle the 
 spirit of love, to show men how to realize self in order 
 to sacrifice self, and to assert liberty with a view to the 
 " service which is perfect freedom." That this is the 
 ideal of our ancient Universities we know ; it is wit- 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 2$ 
 
 nessed to by the importance they assign, not merely to 
 teaching and study, but to the influence of their com- 
 mon life under a right harmony of freedom and 
 authority, to the cultivation of moral relations of duty, 
 loyalty, affection, to the ruling and exalting force in them 
 of the religious sanction of that common life, by the 
 power of faith and the inspiration of worship. In your 
 University here, my brethren, under perhaps different 
 forms and conditions, I trust that the same noble ideal 
 is as truly acknowledged and reverenced as in days 
 gone by. God forbid that it should ever be dethroned 
 from its rightful place as a supreme inspiration and a 
 supreme guide ! And you, my younger hearers, when 
 your time of study is over, and you go out into the 
 world to repay there to humanity what humanity has 
 here given you, remember that your supreme gift, your 
 supreme qualification, even before the bright, keen 
 insight of intellect, will be strength, purity, nobleness, 
 tenderness of character. It is this, which makes the 
 true man ; it is this which makes the true servant of 
 humanity and of God. 
 
 But the University is also a place of study and 
 research into truth. To it under this aspect the cor- 
 responding question presents itself, What is the great 
 ultimate reality which it is true wisdom to know ? 
 And the answer brings out here also an ultimate and 
 infinite contrast the contrast between a strong, vital 
 religion and a despondent or contented Agnosticism as 
 to absolute Being. 
 
 That there must be some great ultimate reality 
 we may take for granted. It is true that the growing 
 
26 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 sense of the vastness and complexity of knowledge, 
 demanding necessarily an increased division of intel- 
 lectual labour, tends to over-specialization, with the 
 danger of absorption in a single branch of study as the 
 one thing needful. But, as in protest against this, men 
 seem to me to be feeling more and more deeply the need 
 of some wider philosophy, which may correlate these 
 special discoveries in one great harmony and develop- 
 ment. There is, again, a system of thought, which bids 
 us be content with positive knowledge of the secondary 
 things wholly within oar comprehension, leaving all con- 
 sideration of the greater mysteries asking of the sum 
 of being simply, How ? and not Whence ? or Why ? But 
 that system is, I see, rejected, as dealing merely with 
 the husk and not the kernel, in the name not of reli- 
 gious faith but of true philosophy. No ! that search 
 into the height and depth must live, as it always has 
 lived, in the history of human thought. It is felt 
 dimly by all to be a necessity of our human nature ; 
 to the believer that necessity depends on the truth, 
 which St. Augustine has so nobly expressed in 
 words which no familiarity can make hackneyed that 
 " God made the soul for Himself, and that it is restless 
 and disquieted till it find Him." 
 
 For that search cannot be satisfied by the veiled or 
 unveiled Materialism, which finds the origin of being 
 in some physical Force self -moving and the source of 
 all motion. Against such theory there is an unanswer- 
 able protest in the consciousness of the essential supe- 
 riority, even in finite man, over all that is material, of 
 the power to think, to know, to feel, to love. Nor can 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 2>J 
 
 we rest on the more fascinating Pantheistic dream of a 
 pervading Soul of the universe " becoming in humanity 
 conscious of itself " ; for, if there be any human con- 
 viction absolutely ineradicable and irreversible, it is 
 that of a real personality of freedom of will in us, 
 which utterly refuses absorption. And if we are bid- 
 den to rest on Law, we see clearly that Law, if it be 
 anything more than a description of form and method, 
 implies some energetic Power working through it. 
 
 So, I repeat, the great alternative makes itself felt. 
 On the one hand, to give up the search either abso- 
 lutely, refusing even to ask whether the ultimate 
 reality is, or virtually, by holding it as existent indeed, 
 but " unknown and unknowable," and to endeavour, 
 with scant success, I think, to fill up the infinite void 
 so created, for the intellect by accumulation of lesser 
 knowledge for the soul by a vague worship of Nature 
 or Humanity. 
 
 On the other, to find everywhere, or rather (as St. 
 Paul teaches) to know as finding us everywhere, a 
 Supreme " Love which passeth knowledge " the Per- 
 sonality (that is) of a living God in His own Nature, 
 as the great mystery of Trinity Sunday teaches, love 
 from all eternity in His Creation, having true rela- 
 tion to all His creatures, from the least even to the 
 greatest, and, in the old simple words, not only making 
 but loving all. 
 
 Between these alternatives I find it hard to conceive 
 of hesitation ; for the one leaves unsatisfied the ful- 
 ness of our own humanity and the needs and aspira- 
 tions of its daily life ; the other satisfies all these 
 
28 BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 
 
 by what the text so nobly calls a " filling up to the 
 fulness of God," calling out, as in the first great com- 
 mandment, an answering love, as from all the heart of 
 emotion and soul of aspiration, so also from all the 
 mind of thought. 
 
 There is to me a deep interest in remembering that, 
 as the motto of our oldest English University cuts off 
 all such hesitation, when it acknowledges the Dominus 
 illuminatio mea since to the Christian the Supreme 
 Light is life, because it is Love so you, my brethren, 
 have borne the same witness in the motto of your own 
 College, In lumine tuo videbimus lumen. And unless 
 your assembling here to-day is a mere form, you must 
 yourselves personally take up, as your own, that noble 
 witness. For it is your custom that, at the gatherings 
 which mark the eras of your Academic life, some word 
 shall be spoken, drawing its inspiration not from the 
 collective wisdom of men, but from a revelation of God ; 
 therefore not content to find the Vox Dei merely in the 
 Voxpopuli the voice (be it observed) not of the multi- 
 tude, but of humanity, in its right orders and degrees, 
 but hearing the Vox Christi, as rising above and inter- 
 preting this lower witness. Nay more than this, that 
 same custom marks then, not merely by a self-con- 
 gratulating review of knowledge and of influence and 
 power, but by the worship, which implies the rest of all 
 energy and aspiration upon a Wisdom coming from on 
 high. 
 
 Again I venture to say, God grant that what is 
 here implied be to you all a living and effective reality, 
 not for your own sake only, but for the sake of 
 
BACCALAUREATE SERMON. 1 
 
 the true progress and nobleness of the University itself 
 for the sake of that higher national life, which it 
 should help to foster for the sake of that yet higher 
 service of God and man in the Catholic Church of 
 Christ, to which the leisure and wealth of thought 
 given to you here should supply those who can be the 
 best and truest servants ! God grant, I say, that it be a 
 reality ; and a reality it will be, just in proportion as you 
 conceive it, not in some vague transcendental vision of 
 the Infinite, beautiful and unsubstantial as a dream, but 
 in that simple, definite living knowledge, alike through 
 light and through grace, of God in Christ, which He 
 Himself declared to be the very " life Eternal," and 
 to be made through Him the treasure of even the 
 simplest humanity. 
 
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