Westminster Sermons / with a Preface

by Charles Kingsley

The doctrines which they held are a matter not for us, but for God and their own souls. The deeds which they did are matter for us, and for all England; for they have left their mark on the length and breadth of the land. They were inspired—cultivated, highborn, and wealthy folk many of them—with a strange new instinct

that God had bidden them to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to visit the prisoner and the sick, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and to preach good tidings to the meek. A strange new instinct: and from what cause, save from the same cause as that which Isaiah assigned to his own like deeds?—Because “The Spirit of the Lord was upon him.”

Yes, if those gracious men, those gracious women, did not shew forth the Spirit and grace of God with power, then there is either no Spirit of God, no grace of God; or those who deny to them the name of saints forget the words of Him Who said: By their fruits ye shall know them; of Him Who said, too: That the unpardonable sin, the sin which shewed complete moral perversion, the sin against the Holy Spirit of God, was to attribute good deeds to bad motives, and say: He casteth out devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils.

Yes, that old Evangelical School may now have passed its prime. It may now be verging toward old age; and other schools, younger and stronger, with broader and clearer knowledge of dogma, of history, civil and ecclesiastical, of the value of ceremonial, of the needs of the human intellect and emotions, may have passed it in a noble rivalry, and snatched, as it were, from the hands of the old Evangelical School the lamp of truth, to bear it further forward in the race. But God forbid that the spiritual children should be ungrateful to their spiritual parents, though God may have taught them things which their parents did not know.

And they were our spiritual parents, those old Evangelicals. No just and well-informed man who has passed middle age, but must confess, that to them we owe whatsoever vital religion exists at this moment in any school or party of the Church of England; that to them we owe the germs at least, and in many cases the full organization and the final success, of a hundred schemes of practical benevolence and practical justice, without which this country, in its haste to grow rich at all risks and by all means, might have plunged itself ere now into anarchy and revolution. And he must confess, too, if he is one who has seen much of his fellow-creatures and their characters, that that school numbered among its disciples—and, thank God, they are not all yet gone home to their rest—some of the loveliest human souls, whose converse has chastened and ennobled his own soul. Ah, well—

The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

And new methods and new institutions have arisen, and will yet arise, for seeking and saving that which is lost. God’s blessing on them all, to whatsoever party, church, or sect they may belong! Whosoever cast out devils in Christ’s name, Christ has forbidden us to forbid them, whether they follow us or not. But yet shall we not still honour and love the old Evangelical School, and many an Institution which it has left behind, as heirlooms to some of us, at least, from our mothers, or from women to whom we owed, in long past years, our earliest influences

for good, our earliest examples of a practical Christian life, our earliest proofs that there was indeed a Spirit of God, a gracious Spirit, Who gave grace to the hearts, the deeds, the very looks and voices of those in whom He dwelt; Institutions, which are too likely some of them to die, simply from the loss of old friends?

The loss of old friends. Yes, so it is always in this world. The old earnest hearts go home one by one to their rest; and the young earnest hearts—and who shall blame them?—go elsewhere; and try new fashions of doing good, which are more graceful and more agreeable to them. For the religious world, like all other forms of the world, has its fashions; and of them too stands true the saying of the apostle: That this world and the fashion thereof pass away. Many a good work, which once was somewhat fashionable in its way, has become somewhat unfashionable, and something else is fashionable in its place; and five-and-twenty years hence something else will have become fashionable; and our children will look back on our ways of doing good with pity, if not with contempt, as narrow and unenlightened, just as we are too apt to look back on our fathers’ ways. And all the while, what can they teach worth teaching, what can we teach worth teaching, save what our fathers and mothers taught, what the Spirit of God taught them, and has taught to all who would listen since the foundation of the world, “shewing man what was good:” and what was that—“What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Ah! why do we, even in religious and moral matters, even in the doing good to the souls and bodies of our fellow-creatures, allow ourselves to be the puppets of fashions? Of fashions which even when harmless, even beautiful, are but the garments, or rather stage-properties, in which we dress up the high instincts which God’s Spirit bestows on us, in order to make them agreeable enough for our own prejudices, or pretty enough for our own tastes. How little do we perceive our own danger—so little that we yield to it every day—the danger of mistaking our fashion of doing good for the good done; aye, for the very Spirit of God Who inspires that good; mistaking the garment for the person who wears it, the outward and visible sign for the inward and spiritual grace; and so in our hearts falling actually into that very error of transubstantiation, of which we repudiate the name!