Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Religion
Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2
Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Christianity; Church and state -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Church history -- 19th century
How do men become for the most part "pure, generous, and humane"?
By personal, not by logical influences. They have been reared by
parents who had these qualities, they have lived in a society
which had a high tone, they have been accustomed to see just acts
done, to hear gentle words spoken, and the justness and the
gentleness have passed into their hearts, and slowly moulded their
habits and made their moral discernment clear; they remember
commands and prohibitions which it is a pleasure to obey for the
sake of those who gave them; often they think of those who may be
dead and say, "How would this action appear to him? Would he
approve that word or disapprove it?" To such no baseness appears a
small baseness because its consequences may be small, nor does the
yoke of law seem burdensome although it is ever on their necks,
nor do they dream of covering a sin by an atoning act of virtue.
Often in solitude they blush when some impure fancy sails across
the clear heaven of their minds, because they are never alone,
because the absent Examples, the Authorities they still revere,
rule not their actions only but their inmost hearts; because their
conscience is indeed awake and alive, representing all the
nobleness with which they stand in sympathy, and reporting their
most hidden indecorum before a public opinion of the absent and
the dead.
Of these two influences--that of Reason and that of Living
Example--which would a wise reformer reinforce? Christ chose the
last He gathered all men into a common relation to himself, and
demanded that each should set him on the pedestal of his heart,
giving a lower place to all other objects of worship, to father
and mother, to husband or wife. In him should the loyalty of all
hearts centre; he should be their pattern, their Authority and
Judge. Of him and his service should no man be ashamed, but to
those who acknowledged it morality should be an easy yoke, and the
law of right as spontaneous as the law of life; sufferings should
be easy to bear, and the loss of worldly friends repaired by a new
home in the bosom of the Christian kingdom; finally, in death
itself their sleep should be sweet upon whose tombstone it could
be written "Obdormivit in Christo."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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