All Saints' Day and Other Sermons

by Charles Kingsley

This is the character of God, unless Scripture be a dream of man’s imagination. Thus far you may know God; thus far you may see God as He is; and know and see that He is just with the justice of a man, only more just; merciful with the mercy of a man, only more merciful; truthful with the truthfulness of a man, only more truthful; gracious with the graciousness of a man, only more gracious; and loving? That we dare not say: for if we say so much, the Scripture commands us to say more. The Scripture tells us that the whole absolute morality of God is summed up—as our own human morality ought to be—in His Love. That love is the fulfilment of the Moral Law in Him as in us; that it is the root and cause and spirit of His justice, mercy, truth, and graciousness; that it belongs not to His attributes, as they may be said to be, but to His essence and His spirit; that we must not, if we be careful of our words, say, God is loving, because we are bidden to say, “God is Love.”

Thus, the commands, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God—and thy neighbour as thyself, are shown to be not arbitrary and impossible demands, miscalled moral obligations, while they are merely legal and external ones; but true moral obligations, in the moral sense, to which heart and spirit can answer, “I rejoice to do thy will, O God; Thy law is within my heart.” You ought to love God, because He is supremely loveable and worthy of your love. You can love God, because you can appreciate and know God; for you are His child, made in His moral likeness, and capable of seeing Him as He is morally, and of seeing in Him the full perfection of all that attracts your moral sense, when it is manifested in any human being. And you can love your neighbour as yourselves, because, and in as far as you have in you the Spirit of God, the spirit of universal love, which proceedeth out for ever both from the Father and the Son to all beings and things which They have made.

And of one thing I am sure, that in proportion as you are led and inspired by that Spirit of God which showed in our Lord, in the very deepest and truest sense, as the spirit of humanity, just so you will feel a genial and hearty pleasure in lessening all human suffering, however slight; in increasing all harmless human pleasure, however transitory; and in copying Him who, at the marriage feast, gracefully and graciously turned the water into wine. I do not, of course, mean that you are to do no more than that; to prefer sentiment to duty, to amuse and glorify yourselves by paying tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith. But I do mean that you are not to distrust your own sentiments, not to crush your own instinctive sympathies. The very lowest of them—that which makes you shrink at the sight of pain, and rejoice in the sight of pleasure, is not natural, and common to you with the animals; it is supernatural and divine. It is a schoolmaster to bring you to Christ, to that higher inspiration of His, which tells your heart to alleviate the unseen woes which will never come into painful contact with your sensibilities, to bestow pleasures in which you yourself have no immediate share. It will tell your hearts especially in the case of this very Hospital for Consumption not to be slack in giving, because so much of what you will give—it is painful to recollect how much—will be spent, not in prevention, not even in cure, but in mere alleviation, mere increased bodily ease, mere savoury food, even mere passing amusements for wearied minds. Be it so. If (which God forbid) we could do nothing save alleviate; if (which God forbid) permanent cure, even lengthening of life, were impossible, I should say just as much, Give. Give money to alleviate; give, even though what you give were, in the strictly economic sense, wasted. We are ready enough, most of us, to waste upon ourselves. It is well for us to taste once in a way the luxury of wasting on others; though I have yet to learn that anything can be called wasted which lessens, even for a moment, the amount of human suffering. A plan, for instance, is on foot for sending twenty of the patients to Madeira for the winter. The British Consul, to his honour, guarantees their maintenance, if the Hospital will pay their passage out and home. Some may say—An unnecessary expense—a problematical benefit. Be it so. I believe that it will not be such; that it may save many lives—they may revive: but were it not so, I would still say Give. Let them go, even if every soul in that ship were doomed. Let them go. Let them drink the fresh sea breeze before they die; let them see the green tropic world; let them forget their sorrow for a while; let them feel springing up afresh in them the celestial fount of hope. We let the guilty criminal eat and drink well the morn ere he is led forth to die—shall we not do as much by those who are innocent?

But especially would I say, try to lessen such suffering as that for which I plead to-day, because it is undeserved in the true sense of that word—not earned by any act of their own. These poor souls suffer for no sins of their own; they have done nothing to bring on themselves a disease which attacks too often the fairest, the seemingly strongest and healthiest, the most temperate and most pure. They suffer, some it may be for the sins of their forefathers, some from causes of disease which science cannot as yet control, cannot even discover. They are objects of unmixed pity and sympathy: they should be so to us; for they are so to Him who made them. On this disease God does bestow a special alleviation—a special mark of His pity, of His tenderness, in a word of His grace. That unclouded intellect, that unruffled temper, that cheerful resignation, that brave and yet calm facing of the inevitable future, that ever-fresh hope, which is no delusion but a token that God Himself has taken away the sting of death and the victory of the grave, till the very thought of death has vanished, or is looked on merely as the gate to a life of health, and strength, and peace, and joy:—all these symptoms, so common, so normal, all but universal—this Euthanasia which God has provided for those who, humanly speaking, are innocent, yet must, for the general good of humanity, leave this world for another;—what are they but the voice of God to us, telling that He loves, that He pities, that He alleviates; and bidding us go and do likewise? God has alleviated where we cannot. He has bidden us thereby, if His likeness and spirit be indeed in us, to alleviate where we can; and believe that by every additional comfort, however petty, which we provide, we are copying the Ideal Man, who, because He was very God of very God, could condescend, at the marriage feast, to turn the water into wine.

SERMON XXXVI. USELESS SACRIFICE

Preached at Southsea for the Mission of the Good Shepherd. October 1871.

Isaiah i. 11-17. “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord: . . . When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts? Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination to me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgement, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”

I have been asked to plead to-day for the mission of the Good Shepherd in Portsea.

I am informed that Portsea contains some thirteen thousand souls, divided between two parishes. That they, as I feared, include some of the most ignorant and vicious of both sexes which can be found in the kingdom; that there are few or no rich people in the place; that the rich who have an interest in the labour of these masses live away from the place, and from the dwellings of those whom they employ—a social evil new to England; but growing, alas! fearfully common in it; and that vice, and unthrift, uncertain wages, and unhealthy dwellings produce there, as elsewhere, misery and savagery most deplorable. I am told, too, that this mission has been working, nobly and self-denyingly, among these unhappy people for some years past. That it can, and ought to largely extend its operations; that it is in want of fresh funds; that it is proposed to build a new church, which, it is hoped, will be a centre of civilization and organization, as well as of religion and morality, for the district; and I am bidden to invite you, as close neighbours of Portsea, to help in the good work. I, of course, know too little of local facts, or of the temper of the people of Southsea. But I am bound to believe it to be the same as I have found it elsewhere. And I therefore shall confine myself to general questions, and shall treat this case of Portsea, as what it is, alas! one among a hundred similar ones, and say to you simply what I have said for twenty-five years, wherever and whenever I can get a hearing. And therefore if I seem here and there to speak sharply and sternly, recollect that I pay you a compliment in so doing—first, that I speak not to you, but to all English men and women; and next, that I speak as to those who have noble instincts, if they will be only true to them:—as to English people, who are not afraid of being told the truth; to English people who do wrong rather from forgetfulness and luxury, than from meanness and cruelty aforethought; who, as far as I have seen, need, for the most part, only to be reminded that they are doing wrong, to reawaken them to their better selves, and set them trying honestly and bravely to do right.

Let me then begin this sermon with a parable. Alas! that the parable should represent a common and notorious fact. Suppose yourselves in some stately palace, amid marbles and bronzes, statues and pictures, and all that cunning brain and cunning hand, when wedded to the high instinct of beauty, can produce. The furniture is of the very richest, and kept with the most fastidious cleanliness. The floors of precious wood are polished like mirrors. The rooms have every appliance for the ease of the luxurious inmates. Everywhere you see, not mere brute wealth, but taste, purity, and comfort. There is no lack of intellect either:—wise and learned books fill the library shelves; maps and scientific instruments crowd the tables. Nor of religion either;—for the house contains a private chapel, fitted up in the richest style of mediæval ecclesiastical art. And as you walk along from polished floor to polished floor, you seem to pass in review every object which the body, or the mind, or the spirit, of the most civilized human being can need for its satisfaction.