THE CHURCH ON THE MOOR.* THE publication of this volume
of sermons requires no apology, though Mr. Danks has prefaced it with one,—namely, the spontaneous subscription of two hundred members of his con- gregation. There is not a sermon in the volume which is not worth reading, and there are several which are worth reading several times over. Mr. Danko has a happy knack of giving a refreshing turn to old truths and commonplace thoughts, and he commands a style which is admirably terse, simple, and clear, with here and there a touch of genuine eloquence. Take, for example, his sermon on the festival of the Epiphany. The Pentateuch and the Prophets plainly implied that Judaism was a provisional system ; that the Jews were a chosen nation and a peculiar people for the express purpose of fitting them to be the missionaries of the Gentile world. " The knowledge of the Lord " was, through their agency, to " cover the earth as the waters cover the sea." Isaiah promised the dawn of a day when "the Gentiles shall come to Thy light, and kings to the bright- ness of Thy rising ;" and the fulfilment of that promise was proclaimed seven centuries afterwards by the aged Simeon, when he welcomed the child Jesus as " a light to lighten the Gentiles," as well as "the glory of Thy people Israel." But Judaism had, by the time of Christ, forgotten its noble heritage ; and instead of regarding itself as the centre of a light which was to radiate throughout the world, it sought to hide its light under a bushel, and leave the Gentile world for ever in darkness. " So to the Jews of our Lord's day the Epiphany had a very plain and a very odious meaning. Up to that time they had enjoyed, as they thought, a monopoly of God's favour. They were in the light, and everybody else in the dark. They were the children of Abraham; others were the children of—they cared not whom." The Epiphany of Christ to the Gentiles ; the participation of other nations in the blessings of Israel; the equality of all men as children of a common Father,—this was odious to the Jew. And Christians are not slow to condemn this Jewish bigotry and exclusiveness.
All this is very true and very trite. But what is not trite, though tree enough, is Mr. Danks's application of his text :—
" Let us pause for a moment. Is this old Jewish spirit dead and buried ? Or is it still alive under new forms in Christendom ? To judge by our conduct, ought we not to have some sympathy with the Jews in their jealousy for the preservation of their peculiar privileges ? Alas ! surely not in religion only, but in all things, there is a dear delight in feeling ourselves select and superior. To be cleverer than other people ; to be richer than other people ; to move in better society than other people ; to dress better, or live in larger houses than other people ; in short, to have any ground for looking down on other people, is too great a happiness for human nature lightly to forego."
And Mr. Danks might have added that what is true of men as individuals is true of them also as nations. The natural pro- pensity of a privileged people to look down upon other races, while it may add a certain kind of strength to the dominant race, makes it at the same time less prone to conciliate, and therefore to assimilate, heterogeneous elements. The tenacity of the Jew, and his persistent tribal separateness, have given him an immense advantage in the struggle for existence; but at what a cost! The sceptre has departed from Judah. What the Jew has gained as an individual he has lost as a nation. A people who refuse to assimilate mast cease to reign. So true is it that in the long-run it is " the meek," those who " stoop to conquer," who "shall inherit the earth." No small part of our own difficulty in Ireland is the heritage of a too Jewish temper in our dealings with that country.
Bat while Mr. Danks sees in the Epiphany the condemnation of a jealous and exclusive spirit towards inferiors, he sees in it also the folly of allowing such slights to poison or sour the temper :—
" I have no more right to be offended because a man does not ask me to his house than because he does not confide to me his family secrete, ask me to advise him about the education of his children, or consult me as to the making of his will. There is a sense in which we all ought to be proud. We ought to be too proud of our manhood, our womanhood, our citizenship of God's Kingdom, to let fancied • Ths Claire,' as flu Moor. Sermons Preached ' William Hanks, M.A., Vicar. London : Hamilton, as :ngcr Ilkley. • B affectations of superiority dwell in our minds or disturb our peace. Am I, to whom the whole realm of mind and soul is open, to whom are given 'thoughts that wander through eternity,' who have taken upon me the yoke and service of Him who did not strive or cry, who washed His disciples' feet, who rates the world with a crown of thorns and a sceptre of reed, am I to wreck my peace upon trifles light as air, jealousies I am ashamed to name ?"
Mr. Danko develops this theme by cogent reasoning and apt illustration.
Excellent, too, is the sermon on the lonely death of Moses, after viewing from the top of Pisgah the Promised Land which he was forbidden to enter. The following extract is a specimen of the easy and apparently effortless eloquence with which Mr. Danks can adorn an ordinary theme :-
" Beneath him lay the tents of Israel ready for the march ; and over against them, beyond the river, the stately pity of Jericho in its grove of palm-trees. And then sweeping far into the distance, his eye would travel over rook and pasture, forest and desert, fertile plains and mighty hills. Far away the cedar-covered Lebanon, and near at hand the hills of Juden, with Bethlehem on its narrow ridge, and the fortress of the future Jerusalem clear seen through the rents in the rocky walls. To reach that country, he had lived, and fought, and endured all these years. And now there was waiting for him, in that wild solitude, a grave which not even his children could know.
To die on the threshold of their reward, in hope and not in possession, this has been the destiny of the best and greatest, from Abraham and Moses onward. Nay, is it not true of us and our friends in our small fashion ? Has no friend of yours ever began EP began] a work which he did not live to finish P Do not men straggle for religion, for reform, for scientific discovery, and die, scarcely in eight of the winning-post ? Are we not all, so far as we are worthy of the bread we eat and of the air we breathe, trying to make this world a little happier, doing some little for the lessening of human sorrow and the healing of human woe ? But we shall never see more than distant promise of that good time coming. And just because this is so com- mon a thing, just because it is a law of human life, therefore the lonely figure of the dying Lawgiver, looking from his mountain peak across the land he had toiled for, but was never to enter, attracts and impresses us."
In an address, fall of sound sense, delivered to candidates for ordination at Ripon, Mr. Danks bids his hearers " remember how most unbelievers have been made such by the false and miserable views that have been taught them as the everlasting Gospel." The odious caricature of Christianity which Calvinism presents is doubtless responsible for much of the infidelity
prevalent among educated and intellectual men. Their moral sense revolts against a religion which indirectly imputes to the God whom it worships the most cruel injustice. We can under- stand how violent the shock to the moral sense is, when it could provoke so calm and philosophic a mind as that of the late Mr. J. S. Mill to exclaim, in his Examination of Sir William Hamil- ton's Philosophy, "If I must go to Hell for not believing in each a God, then to Hell I will go." The mistake, if not of Mr. Mill, yet. of many like him, was to identify the religion of Christ with so gross a misrepresentation of it. And even Churchmen, with no leaning at all towards Calvinism, have been too prone to dwell on the punitive aspect of the suffering which comes from sin, and too little given to enforce the inevitable connection—" by way of natural consequence," as Butler has it—between sin and suffering. It is perhaps a natural recoil from this that religions
teachers should " bend the stick " somewhat too much the other way, by seeming to regard all suffering as necessarily remedial, and Divine love as certain at length to overcome the obduracy of the most impenitent. It is clear that Mr. Danks does not regard all suffering as necessarily remedial, for he guards himself by saying :—" Sometimes it blasts and destroys. Yes ; even. suffering cannot make us saints against our will. Something is required of us, to win the benediction even of sorrow and pain." But he seems to us to forget this wise caution in the following passage, with which he confronts the gospel of Calvinism :-
" Bat tell me that though Hell is deep, the love of God is deeper ; tell me that suffering and sorrow on the track of sin, terrible as they are, are not Hell-bounds but redeeming angels ; tell me that the everlasting love is so set on my redemption from every sin, that it is leading me to anguish unspeakable but necessary ; into deeps where the spirit faints and seems to die, but finds in the pain and loss the germ and secret of a higher life ; let your message be fearful, as the message of Divine love to wilful sin must ever be, but let it be the message of Divine love, and not of Divine hatred—if hatred ever could be called Divine—and then I can believe it."
This appears to us to be pushing a true doctrine too far. A believer in a just Deity must doubtless believe that God's love is infinite on the part of God ; that there is no barrier- to its redeeming efficacy in the will of God. But is it so certain, as the passage quoted above seems to imply, that there is no barrier in the will of man P Aristotle, who surveyed human nature and the development of human character with a power and keenness of analysis which have never been equalled, and which have made his treatise on ethics a standard text-book in Christian Universities, came to the conclusion that perseverance in evil-doing might result in a moral paralysis of will which he described as "incorrigible." The argument from analogy may, of course, be pushed to an extreme ; but it is surely a legitimate application of it to remind ourselves of the stern law which prevails throughout the whole realm of organic life,—namely, the tendency of comparatively short periods to determine the character, the final set, of periods indefinitely long ; in other words, the growth from indeterminate immaturity and plastic mobility to settled fixity of form, which can henceforward develop only in one direction. Once grant the freedom of the human will, and you necessarily grant two inevitable corollaries,—the possibility of endless self-asser- tion, and the possibility of incorrigible perversion. It is there- fore safe to say that all men will eventually be as happy as their own characters will permit ; that there is no obstacle in the will of God. But we must add that both reason and Scripture combine to enforce the awful troth that wills which have the power and disposition to resist Divine love for a definite period may continue to resist it for ever. Love must attract ; it cannot compel. The human will may be won to holiness ; it cannot be forced.
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