Westminster Sermons: with a PrefaceKingsley, Charles
Religion
Westminster Sermons: with a Preface
Kingsley, Charles
Sermons, English -- 19th century
Yes, that old Evangelical School may now have passed its prime. It may
now be verging toward old age; and other schools, younger and stronger,
with broader and clearer knowledge of dogma, of history, civil and
ecclesiastical, of the value of ceremonial, of the needs of the human
intellect and emotions, may have passed it in a noble rivalry, and
snatched, as it were, from the hands of the old Evangelical School the
lamp of truth, to bear it further forward in the race. But God forbid
that the spiritual children should be ungrateful to their spiritual
parents, though God may have taught them things which their parents did
not know.
And they were our spiritual parents, those old Evangelicals. No just and
well-informed man who has passed middle age, but must confess, that to
them we owe whatsoever vital religion exists at this moment in any school
or party of the Church of England; that to them we owe the germs at
least, and in many cases the full organization and the final success, of
a hundred schemes of practical benevolence and practical justice, without
which this country, in its haste to grow rich at all risks and by all
means, might have plunged itself ere now into anarchy and revolution. And
he must confess, too, if he is one who has seen much of his
fellow-creatures and their characters, that that school numbered among
its disciples--and, thank God, they are not all yet gone home to their
rest--some of the loveliest human souls, whose converse has chastened and
ennobled his own soul. Ah, well--
The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
And new methods and new institutions have arisen, and will yet arise, for
seeking and saving that which is lost. God's blessing on them all, to
whatsoever party, church, or sect they may belong! Whosoever cast out
devils in Christ's name, Christ has forbidden us to forbid them, whether
they follow us or not. But yet shall we not still honour and love the
old Evangelical School, and many an Institution which it has left behind,
as heirlooms to some of us, at least, from our mothers, or from women to
whom we owed, in long past years, our earliest influences for good, our
earliest examples of a practical Christian life, our earliest proofs that
there was indeed a Spirit of God, a gracious Spirit, Who gave grace to
the hearts, the deeds, the very looks and voices of those in whom He
dwelt; Institutions, which are too likely some of them to die, simply
from the loss of old friends?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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