BOOKS.
CANON LIDDON'S SERMONS.* THERE are few sermons in the rich and varied literature of the pulpit which would compare with these sermons of Canon Liddon's for eloquence of expression, for depth of conviction, for delicacy of discrimination in distinguishing the most vivid elements of human experience, for power in describing the characteristic facts of human nature, and for that refinement of feeling which enables the preacher to use all his eloquence,
* The Contemporary Pulpit Library :—Sermons by H. P. Liddon, D.D., ACTA, Canon of St. Paul's. London Swan Sonnensohein, Lowrey, and Co. . all his earnestness, all his insight into imaginative beauty, and all his knowledge of human character, without for a moment jarring those chords of our nature on which the religious orator too often strikes so as to make us shrink from him, instead of so as to gain ascendency over us. The sermons are rich in power, and yet the power is never redundant, but concentrates itself on a particular end, as a sermon almost always should. We can only hope in this notice to give our readers some conception of the various
power and beauty which is embodied in these fine sermons,— the most beautiful, as it seems to us, that Dr. Liddon has published.
The first sermon, on the " disobedient" prophet who de- nounced Jeroboam's attempt to set up an idolatry at Bethel as related in the First Book of Kings, and on the older prophet of Bethel who by an invented false prophecy tempted him to return to Bethel against the command given to him, contains a fine picture of the elderly religious teacher who, in his own time, had been a tree servant of God, but whose envious feeling or worldly motive in this case overpowered his religious feeling, and made him tempt the prophet of Judah to disobe- dience. It would be hard to imagine a finer sketch of such a character than this:— "See here a tragical instance of the misuse of authority. The prophet of Bethel had the sort of authority which accompanies age and standing. It is an authority which comes in a measure to all who live long enough : it is an authority which belongs especially to fathers of families, and to high officers in Church or State, to kings, to statesmen, to bishops, to great writers, to con- spicuous philanthropists, to public eminence in whatever capacity. It is a shadow of a greater and unseen authority which thus rests upon His earthly representatives, and invests this or that creature of a day with something of the dignity of the Eternal. What can be more piteous than when, with deliberation or thoughtlessly, it is employed against Him Whose authority alone makes it to be what it is? What more lamentable than when the old make truth and goodness more difficult of attainment to those who look up to them, or when, like this prophet of Bethel, they deliberately allure youth into the paths of sin, by appealing to its simple confidence in the wisdom of riper years, or to its reverence for a claim to teach, which would speedily disappear if the world at large were to join them in undermining loyalty to God's commands ? Ah ! there are prophets of Bethel in all ages. We have all need to remind ourselves that advancing years do not always mean pro- gressive goodness, that they sometimes mean only progress in the fatal accomplishment of cynicism—that outward symbol of a seared conscience, and of a hardened heart. We have all much reason to be careful lest, with advancing years, we look with unfriendly eye upon higher forms of virtue or of enterprise than we ourselves have ever attempted, but which God has put it into the heart of younger men to attempt. We know the language of the modern prophet of Bethel, pouring out cold water very steadily upon efforts after piety and goodness of which he ought to be the natural guide and protector : Young man, when you have lived a few years more in the world, you will see the wisdom of what I tell you, and will give up that nonsense: And when the younger man had again set out, and had met his fate and all was over, and the report had reached the ears of the tempter, there was the same assumption—no doubt it was a sincere assumption—of an almost judicial solemnity at this striking spectacle of the foretold and due punishment of sin. And when the prophet that brought him back from the way heard thereof, he said, It is the man of God who was disobedient unto the voice of the Lord : therefore the Lord bath delivered him unto the lion, which hath torn him, and slain him, according to the word of the Lord, which He spake unto him.' This is the world's way. It first allures into disobedience and sin, and then, when we have gone far on the road to ruin, it assumes the airs of outraged re- spectability; it reproaches us for having obeyed its own guidance only too faithfully ; it wipes its mouth, and talks, like a very prophet, of truth and virtue, and it pronounces our social if not our moral doom."
Dr. Liddon has evidently suffered under some one of our not too spiritual Bishops, and has given us this sketch of the ecclesiastical overseer who depreciates all spiritual enthusiasrc, and then pharisaically condemns the offender who has really obeyed his own worldly precepts.
Let us illustrate Dr. Liddon's power in a very different field, from the very fine sermon on " The Beginning and the End." It would not be easy, we imagine, to find in the literature of the pulpit a more eloquent passage than this on the dissolution of human society which will come with the end of human things :- "The aggregate life of man, human society, contains within itself many a solvent which threatens its ruin, and the planet which we inhabit is a ball of fire, which may easily one day pour out over its fair surface the pent-up forces which already surge and boil beneath our feet. And when all is over, what will re- main ? He said unto me, It is done ; I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.' God, the Almighty, the All-wise, the Compassionate ; God, the Infinite, the Immeasurable, the Eternal Father, Son, and Spirit, undivided essence ; God remains. Before aught was made, He was as He is ; He will be as He is when all this present order of existence shall have passed away. The beginning—it is from Him that the planet on which we dwell, the society of which we form part, the souls and bodies which are ourselves, draw their being; the end—it is for Him that all exists, His good pleasure is the reason and warrant that any being exists that is not Himself. And when the creatures of His hand vanish He still is. He sits above the waterflood of human life, reigning a King for ever; He sits above it and its busy labours, its boisterous agitations, its insurgent passions, its madness and its scorn, its frivolity and its insolence, its forgetfulness of Himself, its defiance of Himself, its loud-voiced, foolish blasphemies against Himself, these die away, they die away upon the ear, and, except that they are recorded in His book, they are as though they had never been, and yet He remains. He is Omega as well as Alpha, He is the end as well as the beginning, He will have the last word after all. He is not merely a spectator, He is Judge, the most instructed and the most equitable, still a Judge. He will have the last word, the word of Mercy and the word of Justice."
But it is in the statement of the Christian argument that Dr. Liddon's greatest power is seen. It would be difficult to state the case against the view which Mrs. Humphry Ward has embodied in Robert Elsmere, more effectively than Dr. Liddon puts the case against those who hold that the Resur- rection never happened, in the following passage :- " The main purpose, the first duty, of the Apostolic ministry was to witness to the fact that Christ had risen. The Apostles did not teach the resurrection as a revealed truth, as they taught, for example, the doctrine of justification ; they taught the resur- rection as a fact of experience, a fact of which they themselves had had experience. And this is why the different Evangelists do not report the same appearances of our risen Lord. Each one reports that which he himself witnessed, or that which was wit- nessed by the eye-witness on whose authority he writes. Put the various attestations together, and the evidence is irresistible. That which these witnesses attest must be true, unless they have conspired to deceive us, or are themselves deceived. The idea that they are deceivers, however, cannot be entertained by any man who understands human character ; the idea that they were them- selves deceived is inconsistent with the character of the witness which they give. No doubt there are states of hallucination, states of mental tension, in which a man may fancy that he sees something which does not in fact present itself to his senses. The imagination for the moment is so energetic as to impose upon the senses an impression that corresponds to that, whatever it be, which creates an emotion within the soul. Nay, more, the New Testament itself speaks of inward revelations, sometimes during sleep, sometimes during the waking hours, as was that rapture, of which St. Paul wrote, into the third heaven, whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body I cannot tell—God knoweth.' But the accounts of the appearances of our risen Lord do not all admit of either of these explanations. If He had been seen for a passing moment only by one or two individuals separately, only in one set of circumstances, under one set of conditions again and again repeated, then there would have been room for the sus- picion of a morbid hallucination, or at least of an inward vision. But what is the real state of the case ? The risen One was seen five times on the day that He was raised from the dead; He was seen a week after ; He was seen more than a month after that ; and frequently, on many occasions, during the interval ; He was seen by women alone, by men alone, by parties of two and three, by disciples assembled in conclave, by multitudes of more than five hundred at a time; He was seen in a garden, in a public roadway, in an upper chamber, on a mountain, in Galilee, on the shore of the lake, in the village where His friends dwelt. He taught as before His death, He instructed, He encouraged, He reproved, He blessed, He uttered prolonged discourses which were remembered, which were reported, He explained passages of Scripture, He revealed great doctrines, He gave emphatic commands, He made large and new promises, He comnnmicated ministerial powers, and they who pressed around Him knew that His risen body was no phantom form, for He ate and drank before them just as in the days of yore, and they could, if they would, have pressed their very fingers into the fresh wounds in His hands and feet and side. In short He left on a group of minds, most unlike each other, one profound ineffaceable impression, that they had seen and lived with One Who had died indeed and had risen again, and that this fact was in itself and in its import so precious, so pregnant with meaning and with blessing to the human race, that it threw in their minds all other facts into relative insignificance ; it was worth living for, it was worth dying for. That which we have seen and heard, that which our hands have handled, that declare we unto you.' This was their concurrent testimony, and their testimony can only be set aside if the ordinary laws of evidence are set aside by which Live judge of the worth of other facts and experiences. It can only be set aside by some a priori doctrine which tells us, on abstract metaphysical grounds, what is deemed to be possible to be, or possible to be believed, and so decides that a miracle is not possible. Surely, my brethren, our common-sense might tell us to judge what may be by what has been proved to be, rather than to disbelieve what has been proved to be in deference to some abstract theory of what may or may not be. The actual, after all, is a safer criterion of the possible than the possible of the actual. ' I might disbelieve the resurrection,' said a shrewd man of our day—certainly with no very ecclesiastical, I fear with no perhaps very religious, bias= I might disbelieve the resurrection, if without it I could possibly explain the existence of the Christian Church.' Yes, if Christ did not rise, the existence of the Christian Church is unaccountable. The hopeless discredit and failure attaching to the crucifixion, if the crucified One did indeed rot in His grave, would have made it impossible, I do not say to set about the conversion of the world, but to interest any sensible person in the streets of Jerusalem. As it was, when men looked on that well-remembered tomb in the little suburban garden close to the hill of execution outside the city gate, they knew that it was empty, and Christians wrote over the entrance those words of the angel : Come, see the place where the Lord lay; He is not here, He is risen.' "
We must leave this striking volume with these imperfect specimens of the many striking pages it contains. It would answer no good purpose to discuss any of the theological ques- tions which Dr. Liddon raises, in a review which we wish only to make the vehicle of attracting attention and study to the volume itself. Criticism of Dr. Liddon would require more space than we have at our disposal, and would probably mis- represent our conception of his sermons, instead of effecting our true purpose,—namely, to induce our readers to become his readers. But for splendour of exposition, for fervour of feeling, for delicacy of insight, and for strength of reason, this volume might claim comparison with the greatest English sermons of any age.
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