All Saints' Day and Other SermonsKingsley, Charles
Religion
All Saints' Day and Other Sermons
Kingsley, Charles
Church of England -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 19th century
I am going to speak to you on a deep matter, the deepest and most
important of all matters, and yet I hope to speak simply. I shall say
nothing which you cannot understand, if you will attend. I shall say
nothing, indeed, which you could not find out for yourselves, if you will
think, and use your own common sense. I wish to speak to you of
Theology--of God Himself. For this Trinity Sunday of all the Sundays of
the year, is set apart for thinking of God Himself--not merely of our own
souls, though we must never forget them, nor of what God has done for our
souls, though we must never forget that--but of what God is Himself, what
He would be if we had no souls--if there were, and had been from the
beginning, no human beings at all upon the earth.
Now, if we look at any living thing--an animal, say, or a flower, and
consider how curiously it is contrived, our common sense will tell us at
once that some one has made it; and if any one answers--Oh! the flower
was not made, it grew--our common sense would tell us that that was only
a still more wonderful contrivance, and that there must be some one who
gave it the power of growing, and who makes it grow. And so our common
sense would tell us, as it told the heathens of old, that there must be
GODS--beings whom we cannot see, who made the world. But if we watch
things more closely, we should find out that all things are made more or
less upon the same plan; that (and I tell you that this is true, strange
as it may seem) all animals, however different they may seem to our eyes,
are made upon the same plan; all plants and flowers, however different
they may seem, are made upon the same plan; all stones, and minerals, and
earths, however different they may seem, are made upon the same plan.
Then common sense would surely tell us, one God made all the animals, one
God made all the plants, one God made all the earths and stones. But if
we watch more closely still, we should find that the plants could not
live without the animals, nor the animals without the plants, nor either
of them without the soil beneath our feet, and the air and rain above our
heads. That everything in the world worked together on one plan, and
each thing depended on everything else. Then common sense would tell us,
one God must have made the whole world. But if we watched more closely
again, or rather, if we asked the astronomers, who study the stars and
heavens, they would tell us that all the worlds over our heads, all the
stars that spangle the sky at night, were made upon the same plan as our
earth--that sun and moon, and all the host of heaven, move according to
the same laws by which our earth moves, and as far as we can find out,
have been made in the same way as our earth has been made, and that these
same laws must have been going on, making worlds after worlds, for
hundreds of thousands of years, and ages beyond counting, and will, in
all probability, go on for countless ages more. Then common sense will
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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