The Eternal Life of the Soul.
PREACHED IN THE NAVE OF CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, AT THE MILITARY CHURCH PARADE, OCTOBER 15, 1916.
“O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee.”—Psalm lxiii. 1.
These words ought to be in the heart and the mouth of every soul in this congregation. They are the first words of a Psalm, which has been used as a morning Psalm by many generations of Christians, and it is the privilege of all of us to echo them. But let us consider carefully what they mean. Who is the God to Whom they speak? We are in the House of God, to worship God; and we open our worship, every Sunday, with a Psalm which tells us who He is. “The Lord,” it says, “is a great God, a great King above all Gods. In His hand are all the corners of the earth, and the strength of the hills is His also. The sea is His, and He made it: and His hands prepared the dry land. O come, let us worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker.” That is the God to whom the Christian speaks. He is the God Who made heaven and earth, and whose will and power upholds them from hour to hour. He is our maker, “and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hand.” In other words, “All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.”
The word “God” is too often used lightly in common conversation among us, but without due remembrance that it is the Name of the Most awful and supreme reality that can be thought of. We do not use lightly the name of our King, but God is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Our lives and our souls are in the hollow of His hand every moment; and if we considered only His supreme Majesty and our weak and passing frames, we are perfectly insignificant beings before Him. But it is to this Being that the Psalmist addresses the words “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee.” We may all say that, as well as the Psalmist. It is our privilege to speak to the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, as our own; we may call Him our God, our own God, we may tell Him that we seek Him, that we seek Him above all things, and we may say, as the Psalmist goes on to say, “My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh also longeth after Thee: in a barren and dry land where no water is. Thus have I looked for Thee in the sanctuary (in a Cathedral like this) that I might behold Thy power and glory.” How is it that humble and feeble creatures like ourselves can thus call the God of heaven and earth our own, and speak to Him, and tell Him, in this earnest language, that we cannot do without Him? Where, above all, can we find Him and approach Him?
The Psalmist used these words, and we may use them too, because this God is the nearest of all things in the world to us, and because we are in daily contact with Him in our hearts and souls. It is true He is so great and infinite, that He has made the world, and all its marvels and glories; but we are more concerned to realize that He has made our own selves, and our minds and hearts and consciences, and when we look into those hearts, and listen to those consciences, we are only experiencing, in ourselves, the work of His hands, and listening to His voice. Above all other things, God made right and wrong, He made us to realize the difference between right and wrong; He made the truth, and enabled us to love it, and to hate what is false; in a word, He made our consciences and our minds; and He lives and works in them, as much as He does in the world at large. It is very well for us to look up to the heavens, to think of Him as the Creator of all those stars and worlds, or to look into the infinite mysteries of this world’s life, its minute elements and atoms; but it is more important for us to think of Him as the Giver, and Ruler, and Guide of our very souls and bodies, Who determined what we were made for, and what we ought to do, what sort of a life we ought to live, putting into our hearts the knowledge of our duty, warning us of it by the constant voice of our consciences, and bidding us realize that He will judge us, for our obedience or disobedience to His will and His commands. Think of God, by all means, in His greatness and His Majesty, and His awful powers, but then think of Him as actually in contact with you in your own souls, teaching you and speaking to you in your consciences, and calling to you, by your sense of right and wrong, to remember that He is your judge, and that your very life and happiness depend upon your union with Him. That is the thought of God that should be incessantly in our minds. As the Scripture says more than once, you need not go to the heavens to seek Him there, you need not go into the depths of the earth to seek Him there, but He is near you, nearer to you than anything else, in your very souls and consciences; you hear His voice there, you feel the influence of His Spirit; there you can always find Him, you can turn to Him at any moment and say “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee.”
There is no reality in the world which can be compared, in its momentous importance, to this. It must be brought home to us, by the experience which is thrust upon us by the Great War, that everything else with which we have to do, everything else in the world, passes away from us. So it does indeed from everybody, at all times, whether times of war or of peace. There comes a time to every soul when it has to leave the body, and, with the body, everything else with which it has been associated in this world. We all know it when we think seriously about it; but the misfortune is that, in ordinary life, men do not think seriously about it. All their thoughts and interests are engaged in the business and the pleasures and the interests of this life, and they seldom look beyond. But in days like the present we are forced to look beyond them. You, above all, who, at the call of duty, have laid behind you, for the present, all the ordinary interests of life, and are offering yourselves to all the risks of the battlefield—you have reason to ask, with supreme earnestness, what is the reality for which you are making this sacrifice, and what will remain to you if the full sacrifice should be exacted from you.
It is the grand answer of our religion, to say that, whatever happens, God remains to you. This God, moreover, is not a distant God, not merely the Maker of the heavens and the earth, but your God, the God of your inmost soul, the God of your conscience, the God whose eye sees into your hearts, and Whose hand has been with you from your childhood, to help you, to guide you, and to inspire you with all the thoughts of truth, of manliness, of faithfulness, of purity, which you have felt working in you. Whenever the outward clothing of our souls drops off from us, whether in the death of old age, or the death of sickness, or the death of the battlefield, our souls will certainly be in the immediate presence of One Supreme Reality; and that is the God with Whom, in our conscience, our souls have been in contact day by day, and night by night, throughout our lives. That is why we come to worship Him here, that is why we pray to Him day by day, and I hope hour by hour, and minute by minute. That is why we should say to Him like the Psalmist “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee.” Nothing else is of permanent and everlasting consequence to us, but our relation to Him, and our union with Him—His relation to us, and His love of us. While everything is shaking around us, while the kingdoms are moved, and lives seem thrown away as things of small value, let us remember that one great Living Being remains to all of us, to those whose lives are lost on earth, and to those who remain, and that is the Eternal God, the Giver of all truth, and righteousness and love; and the greater the strain and stress of life and death, the more may we confidently exclaim, in the tumult of the battlefield as much as in the peace of this sanctuary, “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee.”
But when and where are you to seek Him? The question has been answered in the truths of which I have reminded you. Seek Him in obedience to that Voice of His, which you hear in your consciences, seek Him in obedience to those principles of right, as against wrong, which He has implanted in you, and which His Spirit is continually reviving in you; seek Him in trying, day by day, to do His Will as He has revealed it to you in His word, especially as He has revealed it to you in the life and teaching of His Own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Seek Him in those sacraments and ordinances of His Church which he has instituted for our comfort. If you obey our Lord Jesus Christ, and try to follow His life, His Spirit will speak to you continually in your consciences, will help you to know your duty and to do it, and you will be saying in practice what you say in words: “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee.” Our Lord has told you that if you are true hearted in trying to do this, He will forgive you your failures and weaknesses, that He has died to make atonement for them, that He will take you by the hand as you pass from this life to the next, and will be your advocate and sponsor before the face of the righteous and Almighty God. Let us bring this spirit into all we do and all we think, and we shall then be able to join in the succeeding words of this Psalm, “Have I not remembered Thee in my bed: and thought upon Thee when I was waking? Because Thou hast been my helper: therefore under the shadow of Thy wings will I rejoice. My soul hangeth upon Thee: Thy right hand hath upholden me.” May God grant us all this faith and this eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Hunt, Barnard & Co., Ltd., Printers, London and Aylesbury.
WORKS BY HENRY WACE, D.D.,
Dean of Canterbury.
SOME QUESTIONS OF THE DAY.
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SOME QUESTIONS OF THE DAY.
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PROPHECY, JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN.
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The Atonement.
The Estimate and Use of the Holy Scripture in the Church of England.
The Church of England and Roman Vestments.
The Main Purpose and Character of the XXXIX Articles.
London: CHAS. J. THYNNE.
Transcriber’s Note
Minor punctuation errors have been corrected (i.e. missing periods). Original spellings and variations (i.e. civilization and civilisation) have been retained, except for the following apparent typographical errors:
Page [35], “temporaly” changed to “temporal.” (for the things which are seen are temporal)
Page [89], “eleswhere” changed to “elsewhere.” (a picture not adequately described elsewhere)
Page [94], “idolators” changed to “idolaters.” (whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters)
Page [106], “thoughout” changed to “throughout.” (gracious throughout their vast Empire)
Page [223], “repecting” changed to “respecting.” (respecting which very various opinions have)
[Chapter VIII]’s sermon, Resistance Unto Blood, was incorrectly labeled as having taken place April 3, 1916. It has been corrected to read April 21, 1916. (The correct date was listed in the [Table of Contents].)
The following inconsistencies were present in the original text:
Differences in the titles given in the Table of Contents and chapter headings for these sermons:
Differences in the dates given in the Table of Contents and chapter headings for these sermons:
[Chapter XIII], Reasons for Intercession
[Chapter XVI], Religion and War