3^3 'R53p )UTHERl OO 1 =S 1 § 8 f 2 ^^ 4 ^^i 3 ^1 6 ^^ 4 ^" THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES PATRIOTISM, AND ITS DUTIES; AND ENGLAND'S URGENT NEED OF A SYSTEM OF NATIONAL EDUCATION TWO SERMONS Preached, one on November 15th, the other ' on November 22nd, 1868, being the Sunday beginning, and the Sunday following the first week of the General Election. ^ BY C. W. ROBBERDS PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. LONDON: Edward T. Whitfield. MANCHESTER: Johnson & Rawson. OLD HAM : Thos. Dornan. Acts xxi, 39 part. — ^'A citizefi of ?io tfiean city." Paul — for it is he that gives here this description of himself — had clearly a pride in the place of his birth. A generous and loving pride it is always well for a man to take in the place and in the country of which he is a native. It is well that he should be proud and fond of it, and eager to do what he can to help in the promotion of its welfare. All influences are wholesome, the tendency of which is to lift us above engrossment with our personal cares and aims ; and the love of country acts powerfully upon us in this direction. Wrought upon by this, the man is merged in the citizen ; the prosperity, the repute, the life of the individual, in that of the people to whom he belongs. Of course, patriotism may have a narrowness, a selfishness, of its own. As with family, so with his country's, interests, a man may be too exclusively wrapped up in them, and be bent upon promoting them even at the cost of a breach of the rules of neigh- bourly equity and fair dealing. Eagerness to advance the great- ness, jealousy for the honour of his native land, may easily be pushed to the extreme of a disregard to the just claims of other lands and races. The patriotism of the nations and tribes of an- tiquity was universally disfigured by excesses of this character, and -the patriotism of modern times has been by no means free from its openness to reproach on the same grounds. Hence, with some, anything answering to the description, patrio- tic feeling, has fallen into discredit, and it has been alleged to be especially opposed to the world-embracing spirit of Christianity. Christianity, it is urged, knows nothing of distinctions of race or nation, and its consistent professors will disdain to acknowledge any community of narrower limits than the great brotherhood of man. And Christianity does indeed encourage us to look upon all men as brethren, inasmuch as they are all the oft'spring of God and alike free and invited to draw near unto their Father in Heaven, in the worship of the filial spirit. But it does not call 40600 upon us to ignore the especial claims upon a man of the place or land of his birth any more than it authorises him to neglect the yet nearer and more pressing claims of household and near kin- dred. It would be to little purpose that it called on us — supposing it to have done so — to do either of tl>ese things. Nature would be too strong for it, and it would not be hearkened to. We are bound, through the working of the constitution which God has given us, by the tie of an especial tenderness to the sharers with us of our homes, and to our kindred in the flesh. We are bound in like manner by a feeling of especial attachment to it, which more or less inevitably springs up, to the land in which we were born, to the land of our fathers before us, and that is to be the dwelling- place of our children after us. And human as he was in other respects, how clearly in his participation in this feeling also was Christ human. What a very passion of patriotic feeling was that which gave token of itself in the tears shed at the sight of Jeru- salem, and that found utterance in the cry, " O, Jerusalem, Jeru- salem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not." I must regard, then, as a thing of unnatural and unwholesome growth, that professed impartial and undistinguishing love of the whole world which is based upon indifference to the especial claims of certain subdivisions of it. I should greatly suspect a sad want in such a love of warmth and earnestness. Just as I should be disposed to put little trust in the genuineness and depth of the patriotic fei^vour of one who cared not for those of his own house, so I should be ready to question the substantial worth and power of endurance of a love for all mankind that had no root in a love of more especial intensity for fatherland and fellow-countrymen. In every stage of the development of the affections, it is those who lie nearest to us who first call forth from our hearts the manifesta- tions of a true love, if the capability of such a love exist in them ; upon those who lie nearest to us, again, it is that we have the most frequent opportunities of bringing our love to bear with practical effect. Let not, then, the love of couutry be discouraged under the idea that it is inconsistent with a love for mankind. It is more within the reach of most of us to be of service to our country than to be of service, immediately, to mankind at large ; and, generally speaking, the faithful discharge of our duty to our coun- try will be the most effectual means of doing good to other lands. But, then, in the discharge of that duty should never be held to be included the willing infliction of wrong upon other lands or communities. Let us love our country and be earnestly desirous, in proportion to the power given us so to do, of lending a helping hand in the advancement of her greatness and fair name ; only not by the way of any infringement of the rights, or wanton hurt to the feelings, of our neighbours of other nations. Her fair name indeed, of course, can do little but suffer from such a line of pro- cedure, nor can her true greatness be forwarded by it. But, restrained within the limits specified, the love of country is an honourable feeling, and zeal in its behalf a fitting as well as natural enthusiasm. As sons and daughters of England, you will, I doubt not, agree with me, fellow-worshippers, we have a country richly deserving of our love, and more than this, of our admiration and reverence. Ours is a country, if country ever was, I think I may venture to say, to be both attached to and proud of. What a greatness and a glory is hers, in many respects, at the present hour. What a history is hers, and what a literature has grown up with it in the past. Shall it go for nothing with us that we have stepped into the inheritance of the stout yeomen of the armies of the Plantagenets ; into the inheritance of the heroes of the Re- formation under the Tudors ; of the champions — that race of men of devout heart and iron will — of the champions, I say, of our civil rights, in the days of the Commonwealth ? Again, shall it go for nothing with us that we speak the language in which Spenser and Shakspeare and Milton wrote, and have been bom and bred upon the soil which nourished them ? As sons and daughters of England, my friends, we have an illustrious past behind us, and its issue is in the main a great and glorious present. If it in any measure rest with us to convert this glorious present into a yet more glorious future, to carry on a work, that in the stage which it has already reached is the outcome of the toils and sacrifices of brave and faithful forerunners during many generations, yet further towards completeness, shall we not feel ourselves greatly honoured in the task committed to us, and set our hands to its accomplish- ment with all our might ? And it does now rest with some of you, probably, as it assuredly rests with vast multitudes in our land, to aid in the work of our country's continous progress, as it never before rested. Thousands and tens of thousands who previously had no recognised voice in the matter are to be appealed to within a few days to help to de- cide, to some extent, the principles on which henceforth, or at all events, for some years to come, this great country is to be go- verned. It is a very grave addition to their responsibilities. Would to God that they were all prepared to see it in this light ; that they were all impressed with the sacredness of the obligation laid upon them to give, to the best of their judgment, a consci- entious vote. And would also that the position of him who has a vote to give were not so often rendered a painful one by the pressure put upon him by those whom circumstances invest with a fearful power over him, to induce, in so far as the free soul ever can be compelled, to compel him to vote, not as his judgment and conscience would prompt, but as a fellow-man dictates. What a mockery of the unfortunate elector's pretended privileges and free- dom is this. Far better, far kinder, it surely were, to withhold the franchise, than, having bestowed it, to seek to hang upon the limbs of the freeman the chains of the slave. Religion — the religion of Christ — should be seen to utter her stern protest against this un- warrantable and cruel abuse of power. The spirit of Christianity may be compelled to heave a sigh over the want of faith in God and his righteousness, of which the consent of the poor victim affords proof, but it must be moved to indignation by the conduct of the oppressor who tempts his weakness into wrong. May we all of us, my friends, be careful to respect the freedom of the humblest of our brother-electors, and in the exercise of our own privilege may we be actuated by no lower motive than the desire to promote this great country's good, and to give to the coming generations of our people cause to bless us. Amen. THOS. DORNAN, PRINTER, UNION STREET, OLDHAM. ENGLAND'S URGENT NEED OF A ^gstcni 0f J^attBital €hicatt0it. A SERMON preached November 22nd, 1868, being the Sunday- following the week of the Borough Elections at the General Election of that year. BY C. W. ROBBERDS. PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. LONDON: Edward T. Whitfield. MANCHESTER: Johnson & Rawson. OLDHAM : Thos, Dornan. HosEA IV, 6. part. — '^ My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.^ Many have been the states — an attentive study of history would, I think, teach us — whose downfall has been occasioned by the ignorance of the great mass of their people. It is ques- tionable whether, in the case of any great state, that downfall would have ensued, if its people had been universally well in- structed. An ignorant and brutish people is ever at the mercy of the ambition of princes or of the interested arts of flattering leaders ; and to this ambition, or to the instigation of this false and hollow-hearted guidance, may generally be traced the adoption of the policy that has ended in ruin. The experiences of the last few days will probably have re- vealed to many the existence among ourselves of an amount and depth of popular ignorance beyond what they had been prepared to find. Many, I should supposs, of those who have been actively engaged in the electoral struggles which the past week has seen waged, will have been brought into contact, in the course of them, with a stolidity of intellect, and an absence or utter deadness of all the finer sensibilities of our nature, which has surprised and shocked them. Any occasion, I fear, of an unwonted familiarity with the haunts and ways — with the manner of living and thinking and feeling of those who are lowest amongst us in the social scale — would be productive of a like result, We catch glimpses now and then — as regards the better-ordered and more cultivated classes of the community, it is seldom more than these passing glimpses that they get — -of a seething and festering mass at the base of the boasted edifice of our English wealth and civilisation — of ignorance, barbarism, and wretchedness, that may well make us shudder as we look. It makes us shudder, and glad perhaps to turn away. The morbid condition that meets our startled and horrified gaze is at once so sickening and so wide-spread. I can well understand the feeling of helplessness afid despair that visitors of those portions of our great cities in which the lowest of their population herd together, so often speak of as seizing hold of them. The evil of our popular ignorance and its consequences, is indeed quite beyond the power of individual effort, or of voluntary agency, to grapple with and remove. It is a national reproach, an ever more fruitful source of national difliculty and weakness, and demands that there should be brought i^ d ^ ^ 3^ to bear upon it the collective national intelligence and will as represented in the legislature and in the executive government. Well might our great popular orator"- confess the other day to the feeling of perplexity and alarm which had for years been awakened in him when he took note of the contrast exhibited in the wretchedness and po\erty to be encountered at one end of the social scale in this country, to the signs of a redundant wealth and luxury that are so conspicuous at the other. Every Christian heart must sympathise with him in this feeling. Between St. James's and St. Giles's lies, in truth, a strange and fearful distance. Inequalities of condition, and no slight one.s, of course there must ever be, according to the various capabilities, aptitudes, and conduct — to the various fortunes also, in a measure, — of men ; and to a city or a land that enjoys a great repute for wealth, Vvill, for that very reason, flock large numbers of needy adventurers and 'sturdy beggars'; but among a people, all of whom had been fairly taught, few, if any, would be found sinking down to that sad extremity of want and wretchedness from which are mainly fed our army of paupers and our too numerous criminal class. Granting also the existence of other causes of the presence in the midst of us of so much destitution and misery, than the want of education, by giving education you take a sure method of obtain- ing ultimately, and obtaining peaceably, their removal. Our country, however, is suffering not only from the absence of an education for all, and from the utter ignorance, and its natural accompaniments of want and wretchedness, in which, hence, great numbers of our humbler classes are living ; it is suffering likewise, and in danger of suffering in future more than it has yet done, from the inferior quality of much of the education enjoyed by those to whom it is accessible. The education given to mem- bers of our poorer classes is often imperfect and meagre in the extreme — by no means always so however, for there are many, for the purpose at which they aim, really good schools open to them^ — but take the great bulk even of our middle classes, and they are very far from being as efficiently and thoroughly in- structed as are the corresponding classes in many of the con- tinental states. With reference to the requirements of those to whom it is given, middle-class education with us, to a large extent, is perhaps in a yet more deplorably defective condition than the education proffered to our poorer classes. In the schools for the latter, where, under government inspection and conducted by certificated teachers, you have some security for a sound system of instruction and for efficiency in imparting it ; but in a large * Mr. John Bright in bis address to tiie working men of Edinburgh. proportion of the schools to which children from the middle classes resort, you have no security for this whatever, unless it be the testi- mony borne to them by a vague and possibly wholly undeserved repute. And who shall tell us the number of mere .ignorant adventurers who have risen to be the heads of most flourishing educational establishments, so called, through skill in the art, not of teaching, but of puffing ? In art-education, again, for our higher workmen and artisans, we are said to be far behind the more advanced of our continental neighbours. But I do not attach the importance to our inferiority, if such it be, in respect of this, that I do to the want among us of more and better elementary and general instruction. Our great manufactories and workshops are themselves, in a measure, and in no small measure, educational institutions, so far as technical instruciion is concerned, and would be this in a yet higher degree were those who are employed in them better grounded than they are in that elemicntary knowledge on which, as a foundation, all special knowledge is best and most readily built up. No doubt, however, in this particular of express provision for art-education, much might be done with advantage, and it will be wise in us to follow here the example that our neighbours have set us. Elementary education, middle-class education, art-education amongst us, call loudly all of them, and the two former especially, for improvement and wider diffusion. For want of more and better education in the three departments we are falling danger- ously behind some of our neighbours on the continent, behind also (in respect at least of the general possession of elementary knowledge) our kinsmen in the United States of America. And confining the comparison to the continental neighbours to whom I refer, it would be found, I fear, that class for class, alike our peasantry, our artisans, our manufacturers, and our merchants, are inferior in mental culture and accomplishment to the corits- ponding classes with them. Now this, if it be so, is a state of things that, looking at the matter for the moment simply from an economical point of view, is, I repeat, a dangerous one for us. For many a long 'year, thanks to the advantages of our insular position, to the great natural resources of our island, and to their more forward develop- ment, we enjoyed almost a monopoly in the field of manufactures and commerce ; and with moderate industry, and in despite of all drawbacks in the shape of a defective knowledge and culture, we could hardly do otherwise (as a nation I mean) than thrive and grow rich. But that monopoly is ours no longer. Our signal success has awakened a wide-spread emulation. Other mines of mineral wealth have been discovered and are largely worked — the raw material is being imported direct from the plantations on which it grows into foreign ports — the machinery with which we have now for some time been so busily and profitably engaged in supplying them, has got extensively to work; and with equal machinery, with the raw material as cheap, with cheaper labour, and, as we have seen, with possibly in many instances a more far-seeing intelligence in the conduct of their business, other nations are vigorously competing with, and often, even in our home-markets, beating us. Simply, then, I say, on economical grounds, this is no time for the English people to stand still in the matter of education. But on higher and holier than mere economical grounds, the presence amongst us of that sad and I fear growing mass of ignorance and poverty to which I have adverted as lying at the base of our social system, is, I maintain, at once a danger and a reproach to us. If it be true, and I fear it is only too true, that pauperism, that the number of those, so large already, who are dependent on parish-pay for support, is relatively, with all the boasted wealth and splendour of the upper classes of our com- munity, on the increase, where is this painful process to stop? And then rc/iect on all that is implied in the wide prevalence of ignorance and want, of which this vast and growing army of paupers is so significant a token. Think of the meanness and squalor as to outward surroundings, and of the too faithful indication that, as a rule, these are, of spiritual ruin and rottenness within. Think of the noxious miasmata, physical and moral, that must needs find their way from these festering masses into the social regions above them. Think of the disposition to discontent and turbulence that, so long as they remain, will necessarily be bred in them. And shall, then, no jinited efifort be made to purge us of this peril and shame. I say not that education alone will suffice to do this, but I do maintain that the intelligence of a generally educated people would soon be brought to discern what further measures were needful. I trust, then, that the greatly enlarged constituency, to whose voices the determination of the destinies of this great empire is now — so far as it rests at all with man to determine them — committed, will unite in the demand, as with one voice, from their representatives and rulers, 'Give us a sysLem of national education. Give us the bread on which our hungering minds desire to feed — the bread that is our very soul's life, that we die not !' UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. \'}f'\ ' ""^^^^Q M 7, Hup- MAR R K FEB 1 4 139b Form L9 — 15m-10,'48 (B1039 ) 444 UNIVERSITY W GAUFORNIA mmm 3 1158 01013 6223 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 001 182 436 4 ' s tX^