TEMPLE'S RUGBY SERMONS, 1862-67.*

Sticn is the simple—must we add unattractive ?—heading, of as valuable a little compendium of Christian thought as it is rarely, very rarely, our lot to meet with. " Sermon "is a wordof ill omen in the ears of a nineteenth-century generation, but it has occasion- ally the wisdom to recognize that which Mr. Helps has so happily designated the law of exceptivily, and Temple's Rugby Sermons will undoubtedly come within that law. Skeletons of divinity and dry bones of doctrine are, we all know by painful experience, too often all the preacher has to offer, and it is not because a man feels no spiritual hunger that he turns away in disgust. The .secret of Dr. Temple's power—and few who heard and few who read these sermons will deny the power---is the deep spiritual insight always so closely allied to an intense human sympathy. Nothing can seem tamer than the surface of these sermons. Open the book, and you probably light on some very unoriginal remark, taking it apart from its context ; you certainly meet with no new theories, no learned expositions, no new reading of the text. The longest sermon could scarcely have taken more than ten minutes to preach, and hardly one will contribute an iota to the already over-stuffed brains of the theologian. What, then,

is Dr. Temple's attitude as a teacher ? It is just that of a traveller amongst dark mountains where many have lost their way, who has himself, " with aching hands and bleeding feet," gained some clear height, and boldly turns back again to give a helping hand to those who are struggling below to find the path and avoid the dangers he has safely passed. Or, like a student who, having at considerable expenditure of heart

* Tompia's Rugby ,Yermora, 1862-07. London and New York: Macmillan and Co. 1871.

and brain solved many an intricate problem, helps his fellows, not exactly by giving them the key, but by working out with them once again the difficulties he has himself mastered. Dr. Temple thoroughly understands the truest use of the pulpit. To every thinking human being must inevitably come the moment when in bitterness of soul he fancies he is treading the wine-press alone. Grappling with some thought, perhaps, intense in its temerity or its evilness, suffocating in its struggle for mastery, he dares not tell his fellows, however intimate, the pain, the tempta- tion, the difficulty. The doubt must, with all its results for good

or evil, be encountered alone ; he gives no sign, or fancies he gives none, yet down into the dark pit plunges the master. 'I have been there once before you,' he seems to say ; you are sounding no unknown depths. In fact, you are not down so very deep, after all, if there were only daylight ; step up with me.'

And so in every phase of their inner life, in all their doubts, fears, difficulties, struggles, and temptations, the worst trial of all, the sense of utter loneliness, was for ever dispelled for those who listened to that Master's voice. In the third sermon, on "The Unknown Guidance of Gad," this is peculiarly illustrated.

No power probably seems more irresistible than the power of cir- cumstance. Dr. Temple never for a moment ignores this power. To the man who pleads the circumstances in which he was placed as the sufficient excuse for his fault; he thinks it generally use- less to give much answer ;" but, "to the Christian, who seeks not to make foolish excuses, yet feels all these strange doubts and perplexities about the circumstances of his own life,—to the Christian, who cannot repress a regret, perhaps a passionate regret, that circumstances should have so painfully corresponded with his weakness, and that he should have been tried just in the way he believes he was least fit for trial," he shows, with the sympathetic power of one who has trodden that rough road in spirit before, how God has led many in paths they have not known. He is quite ready to confess that for much, possibly to the and of life, the tried spirit may feel that trial did no good, but harm ; the burden may appear, to the end, too heavy, the temptation too

strong. It may be, he admits, that perplexities of this sort will not bo wholly cleared away, but yet enough be understood to throw some light on the dark road. " You have been tried, and you have fallen, and you wish you had never been so tried ; yet perhaps your fall was a revelation of your weakness, made in time to save

you from a worse fall of which you know nothing, but towards which you were just then rapidly approaching." Again, a little further on, " Our life may suit our needs, either by the outer being adapted to the inner, or by the inner being adapted to the outer." That is a sentence which will be pondered by many who heard it, in the after years, when some at least will be learning that

"Tasks in hours of insight will'd

Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd."

Nothing, perhaps, that Christ ever taught has been more fraught with meaning, and been more often missapplied, than his declara- tion that he who would save his life should lose it, but he who would lose it should find it unto life eternal. It is the key-note of this volume,—the key-note probably of the life of one of whom it may be said, his own life is hid with Christ in God. We need scarcely say the pitch is high throughout the volume. Dr. Temple might have the old saying of Bacon ever before his mind, that " he who aims high shoots the higher for it, though he shout not

as high as he aim." The capacity for self-sacrifice is still the gauge of the measure of a man's soul. The condition of all spiritual advancement, says Dr. Temple, is self-abandonment :—

" When we are told that the meek shall inherit the earth, we may think of this inheritance as an enjoyment to the man who thus obtains it ; or may think of the pleasure to the man's self of thus having power and influence and trust; we may think of it as an earthly reward. But it is obvious that the unselfish man cannot think of it so, or he loses the very unselfishness which won it all. He must by the nature of the case, unless ho sinks to a lower level, find it no pleasure of this sort, no mere place of repose, no such enjoyment as a rich man finds in his riches, no freedom from anxiety ; on the contrary, it is not unlikely that this very blessing may be to him an added burden, fresh anxiety, fresh responsi- bility, from which in his weaker moments ho would fain escape. It is a blessing ; but the blessing is found in the greater opportunity for being unselfish, in the deeper sense of surrendering his will to God's will, in the lifting of his unselfishness as it were to a higher and more heavenly standard."

He does battle to the utmost with the valetudinarian Christianity which is always on the look-out for spiritual ease. " The Gospel never teaches a sort of spiritual luxuriousness, whose enjoyment is that of fighting no battle, hearing no burden, making no effort. To ambition the Gospel promises not the highest rewards, but the most difficult tasks. To love the Gospel offers not shelter from suffering, but opportunities for self- sacrifice. To repentance the Gospel gives not the removal of temptation, but strength to meet it." He dreads above all things the apathetic attitude of the mind towards spiritual things which is one form of temptation at least special to the age. So much of positive evil has been combated and slain, so much of a public tone of life is at least decorous, almost Christian, that a man is in danger of thinking there is no special fight to be maintained. Dr. Temple does not quote the happy epigram of another teacher, and say that " the Devil is trying his last and greatest device of all, and is shamming dead ; " but he gives warning that the special danger to which those who heard him were exposed was not a risk of open, profligate, and deliberate sin, "but of slipping quietly down the stream, neither earnest lovers of truth, nor generous in their sacrifice for what is right, nor firm believers in the presence of God, nor devoted to what elevates our commou humanity." At times Dr. Temple turne round and propounds a question which, once asked, must by its very nature go on gathering force till it be answered. Thus, at one moment he puts the inquiry, " What ought greater knowledge and a better education to do for a loan? That surely was a question in which every member of his audience was interested, a question to which it was necessary their lives should furnish a reply. It must have seemed a very short ten minutes in which he gave his own solu- tion, but for its very brevity his concluding sentence would be more likely to be remembered :—" We ourselves shall one day fool with bitterest shame nothing is so worthless as a knowledge which does not ennoble." Perhaps, some of the most valuable of these pages are those devoted to what, after all, is one of the great facts to be faced in human life, the necessity of pain ; and perhaps no lesson ho ever gave, will in after years bear more fruit than that in which he proved how the highest pleasures and the deepest joys are won, often won only, by a liberal expenditure of pain. " Go from the lowest to the highest, go from the pleasures of indulgence to the pleasures of affection, and observe how the height of such pleasure is always founded on some sort of self-denial," We can see, he adds, how pain is bound up with the highest kind of life, even with the very happiness of that life ; then sight leaves us, and we are commanded to trust.

It is characteristic of the teaching in this little volume that much of the deepest thought in it is given in so unobtrusive a manner, in such extreme 'simplicity of language, that its force might be unperceived by any careless learner. And yet we could quote a page on the grain of mustard-seed alone which contains the germ of a thought which might influence a life-time :—

" Look at history, and see how true the doctrine is, not only of the kingdom of heaven, but of every other power that has really hold sway among man. In almost all cases the groat, the permanent work has been done, not by those who seemed to do very much, but by those who seemed to do very little. Our Lord's founding of the Church was but the most striking instance of a universal rule. IIe seemed to all outside spectators to do almost nothing. The Roman rulers hardly know of his name. At the time of his death, most assuredly no statesman living would have spoken of what he had done as having any real importance or likely to exert any real influence. And those who had heard of him would most assuredly have thought most of just that which we know was worth least. Had they tried to give an account of his power, they would have recounted how a great multitude followed him into Jerusalem with palm branches and with songs of triumph, and this they would have considered a proof that ho could make some impres- sion. But they would have ,said nothing, and could have said nothing, of the small band of Apostles and disciples who had drunk in from their association with him an impression that can never now be effaced from the souls of mankind. And this, I say, is but the greatest instance of a universal rule If we turn to other histories beside those of the ChOBOU people, there can be little doubt that had we lived at the timo we should have thought more of the work of Pericles than of the work of Socrates. The few men whom Socrates taught to think would seem a poor result of a great man's labour in comparison with the splendour with which Pericles surrounded his country ; and yet the thoughts of Sooratos are stirring us still, while the work of Pericles is nothing but a splendid memory."

But the whole of those five or six pages are full of condensed thought. " How hard it is," he adds, after showing the quicken- ing power of that inner life, " how hard it is to live by that truth ourselves, to feel that the power of life is to be found inside, not outside ; in the heart and thoughts, not in the visible actions and show ; in the living seed, not in the plant which has no root ":—

s How often do men cultivate the garden of their souls just in tho other way! How often do we try and persevere in trying to make a sort of neat show of outer good qualities without anything within to correspond, just like children who plant blossoms without any roots in the ground to make a pretty show for the hour! We find faults in our lives and we cut off the weed, but we do not root it up we find some- thing wanting in ourselves, and we supply it not by sowing the divine seed of a heavenly principle, but by copying the deeds that the principle ought to produce."

Notwithstanding his extreme simplicity, a simplicity which results from an absence of ambiguity in his thought, we have eel-

dons met with a book it is easier to misquote. With the fearless- ness of a mau who is afraid of no truth, he grapples with mysteries which, but for his wise handling, might have perplexed, possibly warped, the life of many whom he taught. These passages are the most valuable in the book. There is one on growth through falling which we long to quote, but our space forbids. But the moral courage which sustained the mind in uttering some of these dark truths is to be found in the speaker's personal realization of the divine fullness of the truth he puts in these words :—" When Janice and John were ambitious of high places near our Lord's throne, ho promised them, not that they should sit on his right hand or on his left, but that they should drink of his cup and be baptized with his baptism. And now Christians who wish to serve him shall be rewarded, not by his love—no, for that they have always had—but by being enabled to love him, for that is the highest of all blessings. To be loved is indeed a blessing ; but to love, what can compare with that ? Happiness it is, and strength, and holi- ness all in one, and the road by which we reach it is single- hearted obedience."