SEPTEMBER 19
"We are often reminded that Christ left no code of commandments. It is in Him—in His Person and His work—the Law lies. He has given indeed for our instruction some applications of the negative precepts of the Decalogue to the New Order. He has added some illustrations of positive duties, almsgiving, prayer, fasting. He has set up an ideal and a motive for life; and, at the same time, He has endowed His Church with spiritual power, and has promised that the Paraclete, sent in His Name, shall guide it into all the Truth.
(The fundamental principle of the Christian Social Union is "to claim for the Christian Law the ultimate authority to rule social practice.")
"The Christian Law, then, is the embodiment of the Truth for action in forms answering to the conditions of society from age to age. The embodiment takes place slowly, and it can never be complete. It is impossible for us to rest indolently in the conclusions of the past. In each generation the obligation is laid on Christians to bring new problems of conduct and duty into the Divine light, and to find their solution under the teaching of the Spirit. The unceasing effort to fulfil the obligation establishes the highest prerogative of man, and manifests the life of the Church. From this effort there can be no release; and the effort itself becomes more difficult as human relations grow fuller, wider, more complex."
Christian Social Union Addresses, Bishop Westcott.
SEPTEMBER 20
"The sanction of this Law (the Christian Law) is not fear of punishment, but that self-surrender to an ever-present Lord, of those who are His slaves at once and His friends, which is perfect freedom. This Law animates the heart of him who receives it with the invigorating truth that character is formed rather by what we do than by what we refrain from doing. It requires that every personal gift and possession should minister to the common welfare, not in the way of ransom, or as a forced loan, but as an offering of love. It reaches to the springs of action, and gives to the most mechanical toil the dignity of a divine service. It makes the strong arm co-operate in one work with the warm heart and the creative brain. It constrains the poet and the artist to concentrate their magnificent powers on things lovely and of good report, to introduce us to characters whom to know is a purifying discipline, and to fill the souls of common men with visions of hidden beauty and memories of heroic deeds. It enables us to lift up our eyes to a pattern of human society which we have not yet dared to contemplate, a pattern which answers to the constitution of man as he was made in the Divine image to gain the Divine likeness. It forbids us to seek repose till, as far as lies in us, all labour is seen to be not a provision for living, but a true human life; all education a preparation for the vision of God here and hereafter; all political enterprise a conscious hastening of the time when the many nations shall walk in the light of the holy city, and the kings of the earth bring their glory into it."
Christian Social Union Addresses, Bishop Westcott.