Saintly Workers. By Frederick W. Farrar, D.D. (Macmillan.)— This volume
contains five "Lenten lectures," which Canon Farrar gave this year in the Church of St. Andrews', Holborn. This descrip- tion sufficiently expresses their purpose and character. They were addressed to hearers more or less thoughtful and intelligent, not pos- sessing any special acquaintance with the subject of which they treat, but able to appreciate them. To them, they must have proved both attractive and useful. Though Canon Farrar does not claim to have said anything original, or to have dealt with his subjects exhaustively, he has produced a book excellently adapted for its end. His style may seem too ornate to the student (in this volume, indeed, the orna- ment is more subdued than usual); but to an audience disposed to be interested rather than critical, it is remarkably captivating. Nor is it wanting in matter. It presents the results of no inconsiderable study, and is rich, like all that Canon Farrar writes, in illustration. The sub- jects of the five sermons are "The Martyrs," "The Hermits," "The Monks," "The Early Franciscans," and "The Missionaries." We may quote from this lad a passage which gives a fine expression to a great lesson :—
" I must say one word of one truth deeply needed now,—the lesson of the essential unity of the faith in men as unlike each other as the crusading warrior king and the consumptive clergyman ; as unlike as Benedict the monk and Brainerd the Calvinist ; as unlike as the high- born Jesuit, St. Francis Xavier, and the successful cobbler, William Carey ; as unlike as the poetic Heber in his lawn sleeves, and the
squalid St. Antony in his sheepskin cloak. Yet all those so utterly unlike each other in particular beliefs, in outward practices—all these, though some of them, had they lived at the same period, would have consigned one another to the thumbscrew and the stake—were yet all like each other, for they were all like their common Lord. Each of them was a bright planet in the firma- ment of human goodness, sparkling with a different lustre, but each irradiated by one common sun. Adoniram Judson, the American mis- sionary, tells us how God had never refused him one fervent prayer, I in almost the same words as St. Dominic, the medireval Spaniard; and Henry Mar tyn writes of happiness, in the midst of disease and failure, in the same tone as Francis Xavier and Henri Lacordaire. Yes, all these were one,—all one in Christ ; the hermit, qv monk, the papist, the fanatic, the mendicant, the Jesuit, the Inquisitor bad not only one Lord, one baptism, one God and Father of them all, who was above all, and through all, and in them all, but even essentially one faith with the English athlete, and the stern Calvinist, and the American Puritan, and the passionate reformer. Faith—faith in the unseen, faith in God, faith in Christ, and that faith leading to infinite solf-denial, and work- ing by incessant love—that was the secret of their common holiness, that is the lesson of their common example."
Previous page
