Fifteen Chapters of AutobiographyRussell, George William Erskine
History
Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
Russell, George William Erskine
Politicians -- England -- Biography; Russell, George William Erskine, 1853-1919
Some thirty years later, I was introduced to Dean Randall at a London
dinner-party. After dinner, I drew my chair towards him, and said, "Mr.
Dean, I have always wished to have an opportunity of thanking you for a
sermon which you preached at St. Barnabas', Oxford, at the Dedication
Festival, 1872." The Dean smiled, with the graceful pleasure of an old
man honoured by a younger one, and said, "Yes? What was the text?" "The
text I have long forgotten, but I remember the subject." "And what was
that?" "It was the insecurity of even the best-founded hopes." "Rather a
well-worn theme," said the Dean, with a half-smile. "But not, sir," I
said, "as you handled it. You told us, at the end of the sermon, that
you remembered a summer afternoon when you were an undergraduate at
Christ Church, and were sitting over your Thucydides close to your
window, grappling with a long and complicated passage which was to be
the subject of next morning's lecture; and that, glancing for a moment
from your book, you saw the two most brilliant young Christ Church men
of the day going down to bathe in the Isis. You described the gifts and
graces of the pair, who, between them, seemed to combine all that was
best and most beautiful in body and mind and soul. And then you told us
how, as your friends disappeared towards Christ Church Meadows, you
returned to your work; and only were roused from it two hours later,
when a confused noise of grief and terror in the quadrangle below
attracted your attention, and you saw the dead bodies of Gaisford and
Phillimore borne past your window from their 'watery bier' at Sandford
Lasher."
On Advent Sunday, December 1, I saw and heard Dr. Pusey for the first
time. He was then in broken health; but he gathered all his physical and
mental energies for a great sermon on "The Responsibility of Intellect
in Matters of Faith." The theme of this sermon was that Intellect is a
great trust confided to us by God; that we are responsible to Him for
the use of it; and that we must exercise it in submission to His
revealed Will. What He has declared, that it is our duty to believe. Our
Lord Himself had uttered the most solemn warning against wilful
unbelief; the Athanasian Creed only re-echoed His awful words; and the
storm which assailed the Creed was really directed against the revealed
Truth of God. "This tornado will, I trust, by God's mercy, soon pass; it
is a matter of life and death. To remove those words of warning, or the
Creed because it contains them, would be emphatically to teach our
people that it is _not_ necessary to salvation to believe faithfully the
Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, or in One God as He has made
Himself known to us."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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