The After glow of a Great Reign
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A. F. Winnington Ingram >> The After glow of a Great Reign
THE AFTERGLOW OF A GREAT REIGN
Four Addresses Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral
by the
RIGHT REV. A. F. WINNINGTON INGRAM, D.D.
Bishop Suffragan of Stepney,
and Canon of St. Paul's Cathedral
London
Wells Gardner, Darton & Co.
3, Paternoster Buildings, E C
1901.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. HER TRUTHFULNESS
II. HER MORAL COURAGE
III. THE RAINBOW ROUND ABOUT THE THRONE
IV. THE LAW OF KINDNESS
The After-glow of a Great Reign.
I.
HER TRUTHFULNESS.
"Behold, Thou requirest truth in the inward parts."--_Psalm li. 6._
We stand to-day like men who have just watched a great sunset. On some
beautiful summer evening we must all of us have watched a sunset, and
we know how, first of all, we see the great orb slowly decline towards
the horizon; then comes the sense of coming loss; then it sets amid a
blaze of glory, and then it is buried, buried for ever so far as that
day is concerned, to reappear as the leader of a new dawn. In exactly
the same way have we for years been watching with loving interest the
declining years of our Queen, years that declined so slowly towards the
horizon that we almost persuaded ourselves we should have her with us
for ever. Then came, but a few weeks ago, a sudden sense of coming
loss, then her sun set in a blaze of glory, and yesterday she was
buried, buried from our sight, to reappear, as we believe, as a bright
particular star in another world. We do not grudge her her rest. Few
words can express more beautifully the thoughts of thousands than these
words just put into my hand--
"Leave her in peace, her time is fully come,
Her empire's crown
All day she bore, nor asked to lay it down,
Now God has called her home.
Let sights and sounds of earth be all forgot,
Her cares and tears
She hath endured thro' her allotted years,
Now they can touch her not.
From that fierce light which beats upon a throne
Now has she passed
Into God's stillness, cool and deep and vast,
Let Heaven for earth atone.
All gifts but one He gave, but kept the best
Till now in store;
Now He doth add to all He gave before
His perfect gift of rest." [1]
But, just as in the sunset a beautiful and tender after-glow remains
long after the sun has set, so we are gathered to-day in the tender
after-glow. And I propose that we should try and gather up one by
one--to learn ourselves and to tell our children, and the generations
yet unborn, as some explanation of the marvellous influence which she
exercised--some of the qualities of the Queen whom we have lost.
And let us first fix our minds upon something which at first sight
seems so simple, but yet seems to have struck every generation of
statesmen as a thing almost supernatural--and that is _her marvellous
truthfulness_. Said a great statesman, "She is the most perfectly
truthful being I have ever met." "Perfect sincerity" is the
description of another. Now what that must have meant to England, for
generation after generation of statesmen to have had at the centre of
the empire a truthful person, a person who never used intrigue, who
never was plotting or planning, or working behind the backs of those
who were responsible to advise her--to have had someone perfectly
sincere to deal with in the great things of state--that is something
which must be left for the historian who chronicles the Victorian era
thoroughly to paint. No, my friends, our task now is far simpler: it
is to ask what is the secret of this marvellous truthfulness, can we
obtain it ourselves, and does God demand it?
Let us take the last question first, and we take it first because it is
the question directly answered in our text. The answer is given by
someone who understood human nature, by someone who had sinned, had
been forgiven, had been roused out of the conventionalities of life by
a great experience, who had looked out of the door of his being and had
seen God. And he tells us, as the result of his experience, and as the
basis of his repentance, these words "Behold, Thou requirest truth in
the inward parts." It is one thing to say words which, understood in a
certain sense, are true, it is one thing to avoid direct breaches in
our action of the law of honour, but it is another thing to be in
ourselves absolutely sincere, to look up into the eyes of God, as a
truthful child looks up into the eyes of its mother, to possess our own
hearts like a flawless gem, with nothing to hide, nothing to keep back,
and nothing to be ashamed of--that is to have truth in the inward
parts, and that is what God demands. It is what He found in Christ,
one of the things which made Him say time after time, "This is My
beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased"; He found ever reflecting back
His Face as He looked down upon Him a perfectly sincere Person, true
through and through. That was the secret of His marvellous influence,
that was why little children came and crept under the ample folds of
His love, that was why young men came and told Him their secrets, that
was why everybody, except the bad, felt at home with Him, that was why
women were at their best with Him, that was why Herod the worldly found
he could not flatter Him, and Pilate the coward found Him devoid of
fear; it was because right through, not only in His words and actions,
but in His being He not only had, but He was, Truth in the inward
parts. And it is because our Queen, with her simple and beautiful
faith in her Saviour, caught from childhood this attribute of her Lord,
because she worked it out into her character, made it the foundation of
everything she did--it is for that reason she was able to keep the
Court pure, and the heart of the country true, to get rid of flattery,
meanness and intrigue, and to chase away the sycophant and the traitor.
Is it not a lesson which the country needs, is there any nobler
monument that we could build to her than this--to incorporate into the
character of the nation the first and great characteristic of her own
character, and to try and plant in society, in trade, and in Christian
work, truth in the inward parts?
Take, first, _society_. It is a cheap sneer, which speaks perpetually
of the hollowness of so-called society, as if rich people could not
make and did not make as honest friendships as the poor and middle
class; but, at the same time, few would deny how much of what would be
such a good thing is disfigured by display and insincerity, that
miserable attempting to be thought richer than we are, that pitiable
struggle to get into a smarter set than happens to be ours, the unreal
compliments, the insincere expressions, the sometimes hideous
treachery. If society were purged from these, it would not be the dull
thing which some people imagine, just as if this insincerity and
frivolity and unreality constituted the brightness of it. No, it is
these things which constitute the dulness and the stupidity. If they
were done away with, then society would be a gathering of true men and
women, true to themselves, true to one another, and true to God, and
would be a society which God could bless.
Secondly, take _trade_ and _commerce_. Speaking in the very centre of
a city reared upon a basis of honourable commerce, it would be more
than wicked to refuse to acknowledge the splendid honour and trust on
which such commerce is based; but when we clergy, not once or twice,
but constantly, get letters from those employed in firms and in
business up and down the country, saying, "How can I live a Christian
life, when I am obliged by my employer to do dishonest things in
business, when I am told to tell lies, or I shall lose my place?" When
we have, even within the last few months, terrible instances of breach
of trust among those who have been entrusted with the most sacred
interests by the widow and the orphan, must we not acknowledge that a
second great monument which we might build to our Queen would be to
restore to the trade and commerce of the country those principles of
honour and integrity on which the great firms were built up, and to
make it true again from end to end of the world that an Englishman's
word is as good as his bond.
And so, again--would to God we had not to add it!--what a revolution
would be worked in _Christian work_ itself--Christian work that is
supposed to demand from everyone who undertakes it perfect
forgetfulness of self, and entire self-abnegation, to have as its
workers men and women conspicuous for humility, for thinking of others
before themselves, for being ready to bear the cross on the way to the
crown. And yet can we deny--would God we could!--that in Christian
work there is an amount of self-advertisement, of jealousy among
workers, and of insincerity which lowers our cause, and damages the
progress of Christianity? Think for a moment what it would be if all
Christians were really united as Christ meant them to be, if they
worked with one another, showing a common front to the world, one great
society, as Christ conceived it, without jealousy, without conceit,
without pride, but throwing themselves into one magnificent common
cause. Why, nothing could stand before the Christian Church if it were
like that. Can we not in this coming reign, and the century just
begun, try and plant in the heart of every Christian worker truth in
the inward parts?
How are we, then--that comes to be the last question--how are we to
attain this wonderful gift, the secret of a strong character?
And, first of all, let us be perfectly clear as to the first essential.
The first essential is _detachment of mind_. Oh! what cowards we are
with regard to the opinion of others! You will find time after time
men and women, who think themselves free, living under the most
degrading tyranny of fear as to what will be thought of them by others.
Not to care at all what anybody thinks is inhuman, but to be bound by a
kind of trembling terror as to what people will say or think, is a
degrading slavery. Bit by bit it creates in the character a habit of
insincerity; little by little the question is in the heart and in the
mind, "Will this be popular or not? Shall I be liked for this?" We
speak or do something according to the reflection it will make in the
thoughts of others. There may be some here who know that that is their
temptation, who know that they are not true, that they are never
themselves, they are always somebody else, or the reflection of the
mind of somebody else. Let the example of our truthful Queen speak
like a trumpet note the old words of the New Testament, "Stand upright
on thy feet," and be a man.
And, if the first secret is detachment of mind, putting aside
self-consciousness, which is very often other-people-consciousness, the
second secret is _an increasing consciousness of God_. Is it not an
extraordinary thing that when we are only here for a few fleeting
years, and everybody around us is hurrying to his grave as fast as he
can, and when the only person whose opinion matters the least is the
eternal God, Who goes on generation after generation, and before Whom
everyone must appear at the last--is it not an extraordinary thing how
little we think of Him at all? How often during the past week have you
thought of God? To actually acquire a continual sense of His presence,
to be conscious that His eyes, the eyes of Him Who is from everlasting
to everlasting, are always fixed upon us, to rise in the morning with
the feeling, "One more day's work for God," and to go to bed in the
evening with only one care, "How have we done it?"--that is to
gradually foster in the character the second great thing which will
produce truth in the inward parts--a consciousness and love of God.
And then, thirdly, _learn truth like a lesson_. If we did not learn it
as the Queen did as a child, let us begin now. Watch every word. Are
we in the habit of boasting, are we in the habit of lying, are we in
the habit of being insincere? Not "What did we do?" but "Why did we do
it?" is the real question. Why did we give that donation to something?
For the good of the cause or to see our name in the paper? Why did we
do this thing? Was it done from a true and pure motive? And if, as we
try and learn truth like a lesson, step by step, in word and deed, we
also pray continually, "Give me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right
spirit within me," then there shall emerge gradually something that
will last beyond the grave--an image, which is also the pattern, the
character of the child, slowly won, but which was the prototype to
start with; and thus we may hope to be sincere, and without offence
until the day of Christ.
[1] Lines by the Rev. W. H. Draper, Rector of Adel, Leeds.
II.
HER MORAL COURAGE.
"Why are ye fearful? O! ye of little faith."--_St. Matthew viii. 26._
We saw last Sunday that we were like men who had just watched a great
sunset, that we were standing, as it were, in the beautiful and tender
after-glow, which so often follows a beautiful sunset, and we set
ourselves to try and gather up and meditate upon some of the great
qualities in the character of her whom we have lost, as some
explanation, of the influence which made her reign so great.
And we have already contemplated together what it was to have _truth in
the inward parts_. We thought over the truthfulness of one, of whom it
was said by a great statesman, that she was the most truthful being he
had ever met. And we saw what a revolution it would work in society,
in commerce, and in Christian work, if every one of us had that
downright sincerity and straightforwardness which characterized her.
We now take another quality, and I suppose I shall carry most of you
with me when I mention, as a second great quality for us to try and
incorporate into our own characters, and so into the life of the nation
for the new reign--her moral courage. She had plenty of physical
courage. She was a fearless horsewoman in her youth, she was proud of
being the daughter of a soldier, she loved her own soldiers and
sailors, and marked to the very last day of her life their gallant
deeds with delight. But there was throughout her life something more
than physical courage, and that was her moral courage.
Take, first of all, the way in which she bore her own personal
troubles. If there was anyone who could say with the Psalmist, "All
Thy waves and storms have gone over me," it was our late Queen. What
the loss of her husband was to her, you may gather from this beautiful
letter published in Lord Selborne's Life, which she addressed to him
years afterwards on the loss of his own wife: "To lose the loved
companion of one's life is losing half one's own existence. From that
time everything is different, every event seems to lose its effect; for
joy, which cannot be shared by those who feel everything with you, is
no joy, and sorrow is redoubled when it cannot be shared and soothed by
the one who alone could do so. No children can replace a wife or a
husband, may they be ever so good and devoted. One must bear one's
burden alone. That our Heavenly Father may give you strength in this
heavy affliction, and that your health may not suffer, is the sincere
prayer of yours most truly, Victoria, R.I." [1] There could hardly
have been penned, one would have thought, a more touching or more
beautiful letter, and penned years after the loss of her husband. It
revealed to the heart of the nation what that loss was to her. It was
followed in the years afterwards by the loss of children and
grandchildren. And the first thing, therefore, that strikes us is
that, in the midst of this personal sorrow, one stroke following after
another, with a moral courage which is an example to us all, she never
gave up her work; without fainting or failing, that huge pile of
documents, which, in a few days of cessation from her work, mounted
up--a great statesman tells us--so high, was dealt with, those
ceaseless interviews, that constant correspondence--were carried
through up to the last by one who proved herself faithful unto death.
And, as with personal sorrow, so with public anxiety. It has become
now common property that, in the dark days of December, 1899, the Queen
was the one who refused to be depressed in her court; when disaster
followed disaster it was the Queen who, by her moral courage, kept up
the spirits of those around her, and who, with a perfect trust in her
soldiers and sailors, and with an absolute confidence in the justice of
her cause, went steadily, brightly, and cheerfully on with her work,
upheld by the moral courage which I put before you and before myself as
our example for to-day.
And so, once again, her moral courage took the form--a rare form, too,
in these days--of the courage of her own opinions. One statesman has
told us that he never differed from a matured opinion of his Sovereign
without a great sense of responsibility; another, that when he once
acted directly against it he found that he was wrong and she was right.
Another has pointed out how we have lost among the crowned heads of
Europe, in her personal influence among them, one of the strongest
influences in Europe for peace and righteousness. And, therefore, when
we think to ourselves of the difficulty of acting always
constitutionally and yet strongly, and to know that our Queen, on all
hands, is admitted to have done this through a long lifetime, we see a
third aspect of the moral courage which we have to seek to emulate.
Now, the question is--for these sermons are meant in no sense to be
mere panegyrics--In what way can we, gathered here on a Sunday
afternoon, incorporate into our characters something of the moral
courage which characterized the Queen?
And the first thing which strikes us is this: What a vast field it is
on which we have to exercise it. To those who have to see a great deal
of the sorrows of others, sometimes life simply seems one series of
undeserved calamities. Take, for instance, that unhappy man who,
recently, in this cathedral, shot himself, and by his own act passed
into the other world. Look into his history, and you will find nothing
specially wrong that he had done up to then. He had just been one of
the unfortunates amongst us. He had been for years a steady workman,
able to keep himself; then his joints got stiff, too stiff for work.
"I cannot go on living on your husband's earnings, Rose," he said, on
the morning that he died, and without, no doubt, a proper understanding
of the guilt of self-murder, by his own act he passed--so he
thought--out of trouble into rest. We do well to pray that we
comfortable people in the world may be pardoned for any carelessness
and selfishness on our part which makes the world so intolerable to
many of our fellow creatures. But still, though we may soften by our
pity the act which he did, and even for such an one we can only speak
softly about the dead; though we know full well that some of the best
men that ever lived, in a fit of insanity, or under depression quite
impossible for them to control, have passed, by their own hand, out of
this world, yet we cannot hide from ourselves that self-destruction is
an act of cowardice, that where men and women break down is not in
physical courage, but in moral courage, and that those lines penned
long ago are true to-day:
"When all the blandishments of life are gone,
The coward slinks to death, the brave live on!"
But we need not go to such an exceptional occurrence as that to find a
field for this exercise of moral courage. Take all those incidents of
life which happen day after day--the little child snatched from us in
all its beauty and its innocence: the bright lad shot upon the field of
battle in a moment, taken away with all his brightness, and his
laughter, and his merriment; the man who loses in middle life his money
and has to begin the hard struggle of saving all over again--how are we
to explain it? What can we say to light up in any degree so vast a
problem? There is, my dear brothers and sisters, I believe, no full
explanation here, but there is a belief which comforts us, and that is,
that these calamities of life are all being used for a great purpose;
that when the Scripture says of God that "He sits as a refiner and
purifier of silver," it does give us some sort of clue which nerves us
to bear what we have to bear. Those who pass from us, pass, we
believe, into what has been called, "God's great Convalescent Home" in
another world, but to us who have to suffer, who receive these strokes,
the suffering is not useless; it is a furnace which has to fashion that
heavenly tempered thing which we call "moral courage," and to produce
it any suffering is worth bearing. Do think over that, you who may be
going through the furnace now, do remember that you have not lost that
lad, that child, for ever, that it is only a few years until you see
him again; but, meanwhile, while he is prepared there, you are being
prepared here. The character is everything, and if there can be
produced in you and in me that moral courage which makes us like our
Saviour, we shall not be sorry for it in the days to come.
And so, again, take that awful trial which comes at times of having to
suffer under a false accusation. I saw someone this week whom I
believe to be lying under a most terrible accusation which is
absolutely false. And, if anyone of you has ever been through that
terrible trial of suffering under an imputation on your honour, which
you know to be false, but cannot prove to be false, you realize what a
field such a state as that presents for moral courage. What are we to
say to anyone we see who is under that most terrible trial? What are
we to say to ourselves if such a misfortune and trial comes to us?
Why, we can only say this, and it is enough--that if it is true that a
general places his bravest soldiers in the hottest part of the battle,
if it is true that it is only certain strokes which can reach the most
sensitive parts of our character, if it is true that this very trial
came to Jesus Christ Himself, and He had it said of Him--"He works
through Beelzebub, the prince of the devils," "He saved others, Himself
He cannot save"--then, my brother, the secret of your strange
punishment is out, it means that it is a special mark of favour, it is
a Victoria Cross for service, it is Christ coming to you and bringing
the very cup out of which He drank Himself, and saying, "Are ye able to
drink of the cup that I drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism
that I am baptized with?" Pray hard, pray with all your strength, for
the moral courage to answer back, "I am able." "Therefore," as the
poet so beautifully says:--
"Therefore gird up thyself, and come to stand
Unflinching under the unfaltering hand
That waits to prove thee to the uttermost.
It were not hard to suffer by His hand
If thou could see His face; but in the dark!
That is the one last trial--be it so;
Christ was forsaken, so must thou be too:
How couldst thou suffer but in seeming else?
Thou wilt not see the face, nor feel the hand,
Only the cruel crushing of the feet,
When, thro' the bitter night, the Lord comes down
To tread the wine-press. Not by sight but faith,
Endure, endure; be faithful to the end."
And so, once again, looking out upon our ordinary life, what shall we
need to put backbone into life? What do we need to give a little more
strength to it, to enable us to be braver and firmer and stronger? It
is just that power of being able to take our own line against others;
it is just that courage of our opinions; it is consistent with being
perfectly humble, and ever ready to learn; it implies no conceit, and
no contempt of others, but it enables this one in the workshop to stand
up for the faith in which he believes, that one in the drawing-room to
take a strong moral line when people are sneering at virtue; it nerves
us to stand by our colours and to cry to the last,
"Faith of our fathers, living still,
We will be true to thee till death."
How then are we to gain the secret? What is the secret of moral
courage? And, in answering that question, let us be perfectly fair to
those who, like the Stoics of old, showed a wonderful endurance with no
knowledge whatever of Christ, and very little belief in another world;
let us be perfectly honest and frank with regard to the virtue of those
in our day who, having lost, to their infinite misfortune, their
childish faith, still say to themselves: "I will cling to my morality,
I will try and keep a clean hand and a pure heart"; let us give full
allowance to what we have heard of this morning in this cathedral--the
power and the influence of secondary motives, secondary motives allowed
sometimes to save us for the time before the primary motive comes
in--but still, making all allowance for that, what is the secret of the
best moral courage? It is not the highest moral courage merely to
endure, it is not the highest moral courage, like the old Roman, just
to fold our toga round us and die. There has come a new thing into the
world, a new kind of moral courage, and that moral courage is full of
inspiration and full of cheerfulness: it does not merely bear the
cross, it takes up the cross. It has in the midst of its own sorrow a
force and a power which shake the world; it has in the midst of
personal trouble,