Page:Sermon at the Church Congress 1902.djvu/12

8 The business is too big for want of thought. Not students only, or leaders, but our rank and file must be praying in their closets; they must be wrestling, themselves, for the living truths in Scripture, putting the truisms and commonplaces of religion into the fire of the Spirit till they glow white as truths indeed. Press home, face doubt, look into the problems, try your teachers, and choose the deepest. And all this because so to do it is to open the channels for the inflow of God's working, to keep ready for its touch, responsive to its call. Here is a matter on which each one here can determine to offer their mite to the common stock of the Church's real life.

The next is discipline. The lack of it amongst us is surely portentous. Think of the working of God in us and what it asks and requires—inlets ready and open for its entrance, space wherein to dwell—room, in simplest phrase, for its strength: a soul which is as the supple, pliable, well-tempered instrument for its use. Then think of what we are: all the unruliness, and thoughtlessness, and ineptitude; all the strong and wandering desires; all the stiff-jointedness and unreadiness; all the absorbedness (if so deep a word can be put to such use) in the changing, passing, ephemeral things. And when you have brought these two together and pondered on the contrast, then think of the prevailing absence, neglect, and, shall I say, contempt of all discipline, rule, method in spiritual things. Askesis, practice, exercise, training—where is it? We had it in ancient forms of fasting, vigil, and shrift; we had it in Puritan severities of Sabbath-keeping and amusements proscribed, and Bibles read from cover to cover; we had it in the dear domestic discipline of the English Christian home, the authority, perhaps too magisterial and stern of the father, the control, perhaps too prim and limited, of the mother; the family worship; the understood restraints. How much of any of these do we keep? We know how to criticise them all. What have we in their place? We have gained, no doubt, in a greater use at home and in school of love rather than fear; in less censorious judgment of other men's liberty; in more naturalness and freedom of growth; in the absence of bitter re-actions against harsh or irksome restraint. But where is the right severity, the wholesome restraint, the steady method, the pruning-knife of character and spirit?

Is it the case—I speak to my brethren in the ministry—that the younger men are found less ready for the small sacrifice of the three days' retreat, to which we of the generation above them owe so much of the little that we had? Or that if clergy are gathered for a devotional meeting, large numbers seem, when an address is over, to have no instinct or capacity for either devotion or thought of their own?

Is it not time that we lay stress upon this—that method, discipline, a measure of hardness and self-denial, are an essential