Page:A Sermon Preached in the Temporary Chapel of Keble College.djvu/9

 prayer to Him who never denies the request of His assembled people, asking Him to accept what we do, and to grant that then and in all aftertimes the Chapel may receive His blessing, and be to His glory.

Let us kneel to pray for this; but then, according to the maxim "ora et labora," let us stand up to strive for it. And how is it to be attained? What will make the Chapel to be glorious, and to give glory to God? For the answer, let me refer you to the second chapter of the prophet Haggai. It was the time when the temple was built again after the return of the captivity. The older men, contrasting its reduced and common structure with the magnificent work of Solomon, of which they could still remember the glory and the fall, wept aloud. And then came the startling paradoxical word of the Lord by Haggai: "The glory of this latter house shall be greater than that of the former, and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of Hosts." We know the fulfilment to which those words pointed, and which they received, when He who was "Immanuel," God with men, was received in that same temple by Simeon as the "glory of His people Israel." The Jews had to learn that the true glory of God's temple consisted not in outward splendour of gold, jewels, and stone, but, according to the witness rightly understood of Moses' tabernacle and Solomon's temple, in that which was enshrined