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DR. LIDDON'S NEW SERMONS.*

DR. LIDDON'S name will probably always be associated with

the doctrine of the Incarnation, not only through the re- markable series of Hampton Lectures by which his fame as a theologian was first made, but through the many noble sermons which he has preached on the same subject. Of these, by no means the least remarkable are contained in the present volume, —sermons full of something much better than mere eloquence, of vivid reality of religious feeling, of keen apprehension of the best as well as the worst aspects of the religious tendencies of the day ; of a deep humility, as well as of a heartfelt spirit of Christian idealism ; and of an insight into the characteristic features of Hebrew literature such as very few of our best preachers have attained. Most of these qualities are united in the remarkable sermon on " The Fame of Ephratah," which connects the Hebrew history and the Psalms in which the Ark of the Covenant is commemorated, with the Gospels and Epistles in which Christ is described as the fullest manifesta- tion of the presence that filled the Ark and the Temple of Solo- mon with glory. This is a sermon such as only Dr. Liddon could

preach. He treats the old Hebrew history and literature with a delicacy and vividness all-his own. He makes us realise how

the long-drawn-out tradition of a glory resting in one par- ticular spot, and within the charmed circle of one particular class of sacred associations, was succeeded by a sense of want and craving lasting during long ages,—for six hundred years at least, during which there was no Ark, no Tables of the Law, no Shechinah, only a Temple in which the chief glory of the previous Temple was "conspicuous by its absence ;" and he points out that during these cycles, first of passionate exultation in what the Israelites possessed, next of passionate

yearning for what they had lost, they learned to dwell with the utmost ardour on the coming of their Messiah as an event that would restore more than all the glory they had lost, enshrine it in a higher kind of local tabernacle, and

connect it with more vivid symbols, both of consecration and of life

Thus we see how, first of all, the gift of the sacred ark and its accompanying prerogatives, and next its withdrawal for some six hundred years from the midst of Israel, might lead devout minds to the feet of our Lord and Saviour. The ark sanctioned and trained a religious desire for some intimate manifestation of the Presence of God ; and then the withdrawal of the ark left Israel with this desire, keener than ever, yet unsatisfied. Certainly every precious thing in ancient Israel ultimately led to Christ. Not only direct predictions which foretold His lineage, and Birth, and work, and character, and Sufferings, and Death, and Resur- rection, and triumph ; not only sacrificial rites, which had no efficacy- or meaning apart from the immense significance which • Christmastide in St. Paul's Sermons bearing chiefly on the Birth of our Lord and the End of the Year. By H. P. Liddon, D.D., D.0 L., Canon and Chancellor of St. Paul's. London: Biringtons. His sacrificial Death would flash back on them after the lapse of ages ; not only a long line of servants of God, heroes, prophets, and saints, each exhibiting, amid imperfections, some especial form of moral excellence, while all such excellences, without any accompanying imperfections, find a place in Him. The ark both pointed to Him by its contents and by the Presence which rested on it. The rod of Aaron might suggest His Priesthood, which was not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the -power of an endless life ;' and the pot of manna befits One Who could say of Himself, I am the Living Bread Which came down from heaven : if any man eat of this Bread, he shall live for ever : and the Bread that I will give is My Flesh, Which I will give for the life of the world.' But the tables of the covenant especially direct our eyes to Him Who alone perfectly fulfilled them. For all others that awful record of the Divine Will, when interpreted by the sensitive and enlightened conscience, could not but suggest a self-accusing sentence of condemnation. He could read it unmoved, and could challenge the world, Which of you convinceth Me of sin ?" I do always such things as please Him.' His Holy Manhood was an ark, within which the spirit as well as the letter of the Moral Law was preserved inviolate. He not merely obeyed, He lived the Law ; it was intertwined with the fibres of His moral Life. The Jewish ark was robbed of its contents ; before Solomon's time the rod and the manna had disappeared; the tables of the covenant did not outlive Nebuchadnezzar. But Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. He is for ever the Priest and the Food of His people ; and the Eternal Moral Law of God is for ever the law of His Life in glory. Still more did the Presence which rested on the ark, between the cherubims, suggest that Higher Uncreated Nature which was joined to His Manhood from the first moment of His earthly Life. Often, indeed, during that Life, men saw only the unilluminated cloud ; and they asked, Is not this Joseph's Son ? and is not His mother called Mary ? and His brethren, are they not with us ? ' if, indeed, they did not judge that there was no beauty in Him that they should desire Him. But at times the brightness from within the cloud flashed upon them, as by the tomb of Lazarus, or on the Mount of Trans- figuration, or at the door of the empty sepulchre; or when he said, He that bath seen Me hath seen the Father,' or I and the Father are one thing,' or • Before Abraham was, I am,' or ' No man knoweth the Son, but the Father ; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son,' or ' If any man love Me, My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him!"

Dr. Liddon does not here insist on what he might have re- ferred to, the extraordinary patience, manifest in the laws of physical and spiritual evolution alike, which distinguishes the spirit of the divine order,—century after century being expended in educating the Jewish people to rejoice in the physical signs of the divine presence, and then century after century in spirtualising their love by the sense of want and hope, as a preparation for the fullest and highest em- bodiment of the divine presence in a human form. If anything is to be learned with certainty from the story of the Jewish revelation, it is the minuteness of the agencies employed by God, and the innumerable generations through which those agencies were applied and reapplied, before any one of God's lessons was fully matured. This is as true in the field of Revelation as it is in that of Nature, and even more strikingly true, since we are apt to think of the taking away of a veil as if it were an act that could be done once for all, whereas it appears that it is a process, and a long process, which before it can produce its effect, at least upon a whole people, requires line upon line and precept upon precept,—requires the education of joy and sorrow, of vision and of the loss of vision, of possession and of want, of pride and of humiliation. When one realises even dimly what these long stretches of national discipline involve, how generation succeeds generation with the same unfulfilled longing, the same unsatisfied hunger, or the same passionate regret gnawing at the heart and slowly modifying the spiritual ideal of the race, one can understand better, perhaps, what that saying means, "In your patience ye shall win your souls,"—in other words, that it is by the slow and piecemeal deepening of a few great thoughts and lessons and attitudes of the mind and heart, that the character of man is slowly prepared to receive a new spring of life from the divine holiness and love. We sometimes wonder that the moulding of the individual character is so slow and gradual, and takes so many weary years of discipline, now in the welding of practical habits, and now again in the refining and chastening of spiritual hopes. But when we see what ages are lavished in the moulding of the stock of which all the highest prophetic characters were tobe specimens, we recognise that the patience displayed by Providence in the moulding of the race ought to lead us all to bestow a similar patience on the scol-education of the individual. This sermon of Dr. Liddon's on the connection between the earlier worship of the Israelites and that highest form of worship for which this early worship was a preparation, is one of the finest studies

in the spiritual unity and continuity of the teaching of the chosen people with which we are acquainted. There are other sermons in which sundry very fine illustrations of the unhasting and yet unresting unfolding of divine truth, and the gradual extension of its sway over the world, are given : for example, the following sentence, in the sixth sermon of this volume :—" For five centuries and a half, Christians still reckoned the passing years by the names of the Roman Consuls or by the era of Diocletian, just like the pagans around them. It was only in the year 541 that Dionysius the Little, a pious and learned person at Rome, first ranged the- history of mankind around the most important event in it,.

—the Birthday of Jesus Christ. Christendom at once recognised the justice of this way of reckoning time ; and no attempts to supersede it, such as that which was made in France during the First Revolution, have had a chance of success." No; but how seldom do we recall that it took five centuries and a half before even Christians became conscious that all their most influential habits of life and thought dated from an event which, up to that time, they had failed to recog nise as the formal beginning of a new era,—so slowly does man come to the clear knowledge of the greater changes which his life has undergone, even when they have really told sa powerfully upon him as to alter his thoughts more than they have altered the mechanical detail of his external life.

Very fine, too, is Dr. Liddon.'s sermon on the immense chasm between "Deism" and St. Paul's teaching concerning "God manifest in the flesh." He remarks in it, what is perfectly true, that the intellect of man has been much more gravely staggered by the assertion of the love and condescension of God, than by the assertion of his majesty, his almightiness, his awfulness. The Deists have " spiritualised, " as they called it, the idea of God by omitting from it not what it is most intrinsically difficult to conceive and grasp, like his. omnipotence, which they accepted willingly so long as that idea remained vague and abstract, but what seems to them to humiliate that omnipotence by giving it too much of the aspect of human tenderness and love ; they have not objected to "a passive, unproductive Benevolence smiling from some corner of the Universe over the tears of a

creation which it was too sublime to reach," bu they have regarded with scorn the idea of "an active, helping. interfering, practical Love, a Love studying sorrow in detail, and assuaging it or making of it a discipline that should' train men for perfect consolation in the mighty future." mi

short, Deism has thought a suffering God unspiritual, because suffering seems to derogate from power and complacency and because the Deist's notion of spirituality has always been one of self-dependent and complacent calm. It is easier to announce the dignity of God in terms which make men shrink. from before him, than to assert his love in terms which challenge us practically to test it :—

" No one truth in the Divine Character has been more per. sistently assailed by the Deists than that of God's special Pro- vidence ; let us rather say, of His Providence, because, if His Providence is not special, it is practically no providence at all_ They have had in their heads, as the ideal to which they would shape their thought of God, the image of some earthly potentate, so occupied with the administration of great affairs of State as to be unable to give thought and time to the wants of his individual subjects. In the case of a good earthly monarch, this idea of governing capacity might be true enough, simply because men's faculties are limited. Most of us are absorbed either by attention to general principles and laws, or by attention to details and particular circumstances. But the higher we ascend in the scale of human minds, the more clearly do we discern the power a combining attention to general laws with attention to particulars and details; it is in this combination that we find the most fruitful forms of genius. And can we doubt that in the Mind Which is above all minds, there is a consummate, a complete union of these different powers ; so that the Author of the most comprehensive. laws which govern the movements of the heavenly bodies, does also really number the hairs of our heads, and note each sparrow that falls to the ground, not merely without derogating from His. dignity, but in virtue of His Perfection ? Reason itself guides us thus far. Reason resists the notion that it belongs to God'S Majesty to be like an Eastern Sultan ; powerful to make laws which others will administer, and to produce on a great scale, and. by general measures, the happiness or misery of his subjects, but incapable, from the nature of the case, and not merely by reason of his presumed dignity, of enterng into the trials and hopes and fears of each of the millions around and beneath him. Still,. although right reason resists, our feeble thought finds it difficult to dwell continuously upon a Special Providence, especially under the stress of great sorrows and calamities, so long as all which illustrates it is invisible and abstract ; so long as it haa no. em,

bodiment and expression ; so long as nothing meets the soul's eye which enables it to say, 'Herein is the Love of God.' "

It is because the embodiment of God's love in Christ brings the divine love to a practical and vivid test that the Deist declares it "anthropomorphic," by which he only means that he believes God to be more like a man of passionless equanimity, than like a man of passionate fervour and self- forgetfulness. But, in truth, God has revealed himself in a nature of the latter type, and not in a nature of the former.

We have touched only here and there some few leading aspects of a volume rich in something more than theological insight,—in the power of Christian realism. But it would be impossible to enumerate all the impressive characteristics of even a few of the sermons of this striking volume. We can only hope to induce our readers to make acquaintance with it for themselves.