Sermon by the Bishop of Rochester, 1901

by Edward Stuart Talbot

SERMON BY THE BISHOP OF ROCHESTER.

[Extracted from the Eagle, Vol. xxii, No. 124, March 1901.]

Not fashioning yourselves according to your former lusts in the time of your ignorance: but like as He which called you is holy, be ye yourselves also holy in all manner of living.—1 Pet. i. 14, 15.

T is a great thing to have a standard of life. For want of one men drift and waste time and strength. In the book which we all read at Oxford for Class or Pass we were taught on the first page by the wisest of the Greeks that everything had its end or goal; and that man's thoughts about himself must be aimed at finding the end, or goal, or aim of his own life.

I suppose that even if a man chose a wrong or low end his life would gain in consistency and force; it would be more effective for evil. But as most men don't mean to do wrong, but slide or fall into it, a real attempt to choose what Aristotle calls an end, or we may call a standard, would with most men lift as well as steady their life.

Here, in these words, are two standards. The first is very easy to understand. Fashioning yourselves according to your desires.

One might call this ironical, or scornful; only that Bible language is generally too direct and too grave to be so described.

But it might be a subject for irony—a life which has for its standard the satisfaction of its own wishes—that motley and varying crew: the many desires of all sorts and kinds crossing, and clashing, and competing, some looking up, some pulling down; some innocent and instinctive, but easily running to excess; some wrong outright—selfish or mean or base—some of a doubtful sort between the two. But to call these a standard, to find any rule or guidance in them—what a mockery! We can all see that when we think; and that is one good thing which comes of thinking. But how many of us, seniors or juniors, can say that this please-yourself philosophy has not had too much hold upon our life. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. Notice how the Apostle speaks of it—"your former desires in the time of your ignorance." It had been the natural thing for them left to themselves: it was the life a man would lead till he learnt better.

I shall not say more about this to you, brethren, except to ask you to think seriously how many lives are frittered and wasted in this way; how many are drawn hither and thither, scattered, or in the old sense of that word dissipated in this way: while, as the down-grading of that word reminds us, many with "Pleasure at the helm" will steer on to the rocks, or into the whirlpools of real evil. Drift, at first self-indulgent, then, perhaps, becoming selfish or vicious, but at any rate a feeble and enervating thing is the bane of how many lives? Perhaps our time, which presents so much to distract and occupy, makes drifting particularly easy.

Now for the other half of the sentence. A great contrast; for here is the Christian Standard. The real strength of a religion is the height and greatness of its demands. The Greek standard was making the beautiful best of all your faculties: it was not a little true; and how it has held men fascinated! The Buddhist standard was the sacrifice of all desire. It mixed a great truth with a dark falsehood; and it had a more profound and mysterious attraction than the Greek. The Christian standard is the Life of God, and it has unique power to dignify and control and quicken.

Be ye holy for I am holy. All that men call Christian doctrine is included in that. For it says that God is, and that we can know Him, which means Christ; and that life in us has power to be like His, which means forgiveness and the Holy Spirit; and that there is natural kinship between us and Him, which means Eternal Life and the Kingdom of Our Father.

It is all there, if God helps us to see it. But, it may be said, what help in this majestic abstraction as a working standard for life? I am holy. It is a focus of burning light. But what eye can read in it that which the little lives of man copy. A Christian, of course, has the blessing of one clear, simple answer to this question. It is that through Christ God is known—'the knowledge of the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.'

But, perhaps, by the help of that light we may find some answer another way.

I am holy. What does the word mean? I turn to your great Cambridge commentator, Dr Hort. "Separated for consecration to God." It often means that; but when said of God it plainly cannot do so. 'Separate in the sense of eminence or perfection: in freedom from defect, and completeness; in purity; in personal and intrinsic perfectness.' This can be said of God, and indeed of Him only: yet there is something here to work by in imitation. To be steadily one's best and truest self not because it is oneself, but because it is the likeness of God; to separate oneself from defiling things; to live with singleness and sincerity. This is imitation of God Himself. It takes us above the aimless, shallow, shifting life that is according to the desires.

But if God's holiness means the perfectness of His Being, what, we ask, is that Being?

Surely He has given us answers not less real because partial.

For example, it is a Being of energy and order. Semper agens, semper quietus. God has turned many leaves of the book of Nature for us in the last half-century, and given us a new sense of the sway and majesty of order in His work, that is in the universe.

And is it not true that within limits the knowledge of that Order ennobles Life? It is seen by Science, and in a different way it is felt by Art. And though not every Scientist's or Artist's life is good or high, any more than every religious believer's is, yet the touch of the great Order on the man of Science and the man of Art is, in itself, a dignifying, steadying, lifting thing.

Evidently there is something then for imitation. Life with a purpose, centred, disciplined, ordered for that purpose; strenuous, persistent for it; faithful to it; such a life is in a measure holy, for God is holy.

But this carries us only a little way. We can come nearer God than by having a purpose; for our purpose may be like His, Be ye holy for I am Holy: the words come again from Our Lord Himself in more human tones; Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect: and another Gospel gives them in yet another form; Be ye merciful as your Father is merciful. Nature is witness of purpose in God: in Christ we learn its nature: it is a purpose of Love. Mercy, and all the actions and fruits of mercy, help, service; these are the symbols by which it is known.

We are, as individuals, and the Church has often as a body been, inconceivably slow in really getting hold of some of the things most clearly contained in that which we believe. Here is one of them. The Christian standard in the Life of God is a standard not only of perfection, as though each of us stood alone, but a standard of perfection by love; of perfect service to others; of going out of oneself (as we may reverently say God did in Creation and when He gave His Son and does by providence and grace) in love and help.

Here is the highest thing possible for man; but it is a thing that takes all the homeliest and most practical shapes. Whatever a man's profession and calling is to be it is part of the world's work; it comes under the great law of service. He may, and ought to, get his living by it; he may hope to distinguish himself and shine in it; but if he thinks truly he will see that neither the profit nor the reputation are the bottom reasons for its being done. This is to be found in some service or usefulness to human life of the work itself. You will see how much this is forgotten in common thought—perhaps specially in a time of strong competition like ours. Yet it is a simple moral truth, given back to us when we try to think of things in God's light. I leave it to you to think how much it does to ennoble drudgery and routine, and to help us in feeling that very common work here may be indeed a school for greater work beyond.

This truth gives dignity to all work; but it also gives a standard by which different kinds of work may be compared. Different forms of work happily suit different men, and all are honourable. But we cannot help regarding some as higher than others, and I would venture to say that the real test of higher and lower is this, which has in it most of service, and of difficult or needed service, to human life. The great callings of the Christian Ministry, of Education, of Medicine, gain each their special honour by this test. And that of Law, rightly regarded, and in its higher aspects, is not far behind. I commend this thought to those of you who have still the choice of a profession to make.

But a man's life is wider than his professional duty, and he is a poor citizen and a poor Christian who thinks of his time and thoughts and interest as divided between necessary business and leisure. These are not the men to whom the best life of a country owes most, but such as feel that they owe duties of a wider kind to the service of God and man. It is a duty for all, e.g., to help make a healthy, clear, vigorous, benevolent public opinion. It is a duty for a man, wherever he is placed in life, to be felt as one of those sturdy servants of good causes who can be relied upon when there is good work to be done. It is a duty for us all according to our power to swell the volume—alas, all too small, of the forces which make for the bettering, and helping, and enlarging, of the life of their community—be it city, or village, or parish, or nation, or Church.

I am with you here to-day to thank you for the work of your College Mission in crowded Walworth—and to beg of you to go on doing for it what you have done—and more. I might easily tell you—I should like to tell you—what some of you have seen for yourselves, the greatness and the variety of the need for such work, the pathos of the lives of men, women, and children in dull and squalid streets—out of sight of all the things which give to our life its grace, and spaciousness, and charm; with the streets, dirty in every sense, for the playground of the children; with homes which can hardly be homes, so closely are they packed and jammed together several in a house; with constant anxiety about the work on which a livelihood depends, obtaining it perhaps when they have to walk an hour to it early and back from it late, and when it is obtained tied to such a round of unchanging grey lives and unattractive drudgery, and yet with such a variety of human interest, such a response to the touch of kindness and sympathy, such opportunities for what University men can do amongst them.

But this I cannot do now, and on that part of the matter I will only ask you to come and see for yourselves. That is worth reams of talk. You will certainly be interested. Very likely you would look back upon a day or two spent there as giving you more interest and more fresh knowledge of life than any other days in the year.

Will you consider it? But I believe that there is another way to lay hold of men's interest, which, with some at least, is more powerful, and goes deeper. I mean the way of looking to the principle of the matter. That is what I have aimed at here. The Christian standard of life is the imitation of God, and all forms of human excellence are summed in this: steadfastness, self-control, purity, integrity, patience, and order—but above all these love. And if I have led your thoughts rightly this morning that highest thing in the Divine life must find its reflection in every life which desires to be Christian—in an active desire to help, and serve, and bless.

England has a great vocation to serve this world, and will be Christian in proportion as she understands and answers to it. But there is a call, of unequalled force and strength, to Englishmen to serve England, not only by fighting her battles abroad, but by service to her great populations at home. I am quite certain that a College Mission, as representing this and giving some opportunity for it, is a feature of real and inestimable value in the life of a College, more valuable perhaps than some which seem more distinctly academic. For it brings the touch of the great world, it adds to College life, so splendid in its opportunities of self-culture in body and mind, its reminder of the great human needs which, after all, all self-culture should help to serve.

This is the way in which I ask you to think of it; not as a beggar, which comes to you for the alms of a terminal coin; not as the fad of a few who have a turn for slumming: not as rather a generous thing which you do by helping a poor parson in a hard place: but as a real part of your College life, which helps to keep it all stronger and truer and better, by giving a definite, prominent, and honoured place in it to that work and spirit of service which is no small part of life after the standard of God.