It is not a very usual fortune for sermons in this day—but this one has flashed into the heart of several vexed questions, and surprised many minds into involuntary unanimity—and when we are told that we must fight our battles with our religion, and not for our religion’s sake extend the conflict, it is a great cheer and encouragement to us, heavily labouring in the common road, and unable to choose a more exalted way. Surely Christianity, of all things, has least need to be timid; yet we fear that much pious and well-intentioned training has had the effect of conferring an additional charm upon the world’s blandishments—the charm of forbidden pleasure—rather than of encouraging the neophyte manfully to pass them by. We have been half saddened, half amused, many a time, by a preacher’s terrified denunciation of the irresistible attractions of some theatre or assembly, which in truth was the dullest sham of pleasure-making that ever wearied man; and it is sad to see often an incompleteness and contraction in that life of unmistakable piety which ought to be the broadest, the most genial, and the most fully furnished of all the states of man.
Yes, we are all too apt, unconsciously and by implication—despite its being impracticable under present circumstances, Popery having made it dangerous—to take the life of the eremite, self-contained and contemplative, as the true type of the religious life; and it is strange to hear that we ourselves, astray among the noise of cities, or bearing the burdens of the soil, should be more fit exemplars of God’s service than any soul secluded in church or temple, and safe from the vulgar dangers of the world. Yet no one will be bold enough to say that Mr Caird has not established his position, and few serious minds can refuse to respond to this serious and powerful call upon them.
This sermon is admirably clear and simple in its diction, as well as weighty in its matter; there is little of the passion and vehemence of oratory, but a great deal of power, subdued and held within control; and the grave plain language of the preacher is luminous and dignified, worthy of the theme. We are indebted to Mr Caird for a manly exposition of what is possible to common people in everyday existence—triumphs of faith and principle beyond the reach of those who fly from the combat and the agony,—and grateful to his Royal hearers for sending to us all a lesson which makes no distinctions among us, either of wise and unwise, or of great and small.
Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh.
[1]. Labour: its Rights, Difficulties, Dignity, and Consolations. An Address delivered to the Mechanics’ Institute at Hull. By Samuel Warren, D.C.L., Q.C., Recorder of Hull.
[2]. The law of France takes a different view of such labour-contracts for life, prohibiting them on the ground that they are in reality not conducive to, but subversive of personal liberty.
[3]. “One of those combinations,” says Mr Warren, “was bound together by this oath (so atrocious that were it not on record in the authentic ‘debates’ of the day, I would not cite it):—‘I, A. B., do voluntarily swear, in the awful presence of Almighty God, and before these witnesses, that I will execute with zeal and sincerity, as far as in me lies, every task and injunction which the majority of my brethren shall impose on me, in furtherance of our common welfare; as,—the chastisement of nobs, the assassination of oppressive and tyrannical masters, or the demolition of shops that shall be deemed incorrigible: and also that I will cheerfully contribute to the support of such of my brethren as shall lose their work in consequence of their exertions against tyranny, or shall renounce work in resistance to a reduction of wages.’”
[4]. “To make her clergy fit ministrants of that priestcraft which is its certain fruit, the Romish system draws after it the enforced celibacy of their order, and so their separation from all the purifying and humanising influences which God’s holy ordinance of marriage sheds over a married priesthood; and, lastly, through the ever-encroaching presence, amidst the sanctities of family life, of one thus invested with a character of supernatural holiness, whom all are bound to make the official depositary of every secret, and who is cognisant of every real or suspected infirmity of his devotee, and so (unavoidably) of those who have shared with him in the sins he has from time to time confessed, it dissolves the most sacred ties by which God has bound society together,—introducing another, and how often an adverse counsel between father and child, between the mother and her daughter, between the husband and the wife of his bosom.”—Bishop of Oxford’s Sermon on the 5th of November 1855.
[5]. Numismata Hellenica. A Catalogue of Greek Coins, collected by William Martin Leake, F.R.S., one of the Vice-Presidents of the Royal Society of Literature. With Notes, a Map, and Index. London, 1854.