Note, lastly, THE ANIMATING PROMISE by which the threefold exhortation is enforced:—
‘For in doing this thou shalt save both thyself and them that hear thee.’
‘Thou salt save thyself.’ A selfish motive some will argue. Nay, not more selfish than it is to exist. It is selfish to pursue our own advantage at the expense of others. It is not selfish to wish our own highest goal:—the wish is bound up in our existence.
And again, the Christian’s wish is not for himself alone; it is not lonely, solitary affection. He longs for immortality for himself; he longs for it also on behalf of and in company with others. ‘It is not a selfish instinct,’ writes one of our deepest Christian thinkers, ‘it is not a neutral one, it is a moral and a generous one, . . . Christianity knows nothing of a hope of immortality for the individual alone, but only of a glorious hope for the individual . . . in the eternal society of the Church triumphant. (Mozley’s University Sermons, p. 71.)
Such, then, is the promise held out to the faithful minister. He ensures his own salvation; he helps forward the salvation of others. He aims at nothing short of this; and he knows that his ‘labour is not in vain in the Lord.’ (1 Cor. xv. 58.)
To the work thus briefly sketched our brother in Christ is now to be sent forth.
This much would I only add, that having wrought side by side with him in this great London for years now not a few, I can testify from no superficial knowledge, as with no common warmth of affection, to what I cannot but feel to be his special fitness for the work which lies before him.
If experience gathered in the past is any pledge for the future; if work well done during years of patient toil is any assurance that work shall be well done in years which may yet remain; if thoughtful, careful preaching of the word of life, and the successful administration of the largest metropolitan parishes is any warrant for expecting the continuation of such ministry in a wider field of labour; then will no common hopes gather round this now Episcopate. Nor has there been wanting that highest of all training, the training of personal affliction. If we are taught to-day in the martyrdom of St. James, that the law of self-surrender is the law of ministerial success; if the voiceless tomb of the one Apostle and the silent dungeon of the other were the forerunners of the Church’s most rapid growth, when ‘the word of God grew and multiplied’ (Acts, xii. 24); the ministry of one, who has been taught in the same school, will issue, we may humbly hope, in a like result.
Our Church claims to have inherited Apostolic doctrine, an Apostolic framework, and a history which dates from the Apostolic age. The ninety-eighth occupant of the See of Rochester can boast of a long and distinguished spiritual ancestry. Founded in 604, some ten years after the landing of Augustine, the See is, with the single exception of that of Canterbury, the most ancient in the kingdom; and has numbered amongst its Bishops such eminent men as Paulinus the apostle of Northumberland; Gundulph, the greatest of Norman architects; Cardinal Fisher, beheaded by Henry VIII.: Ridley, the martyr; Turner, the non-juror; Atterbury, the high-churchman; and Samuel Horsley, the mathematician, the orator, and the divine. The See of Rochester carries with it therefore, the prestige of a venerable antiquity; but its interest to-day lies not so much in the records of the past, as in the living wants of the present.
Across the river which divides our city, lies a vast and dense population, soon to form part of this ancient diocese. Faithful men have been labouring there for years. The new Bishop goes forth amongst them, to guide, to stimulate, to encourage, and to strengthen.