Page:Sermon at the Church Congress 1902.djvu/5

 Preached at the Church Congress, Northampton, October, 1902.

By the Right Rev., D.D., Lord Bishop of Rochester.

for energy and a reason for anxiety—the Apostle finds both in that primary truth of God's work within us which, at the end of his unrivalled recital of the stupendous condescension of Jesus Christ, is left freshly vivid before his mind.

Is the truth, so central to him, one of special significance for our own time? We ought, on an occasion like that which brings us here, to consider, to walk about Zion and tell the towers thereof, to take account, to see how we stand, to look whether we move and whither, to note what the days last past have done for us, where the hopes or dangers of those next to come may be. Perhaps there is no better or, in the deepest sense, more encouraging result of such thoughts and questionings than when they bring us to the clearer recognition of some great truth which has been the spring and common secret of movements outwardly diverse, towards which many paths run up, which sometimes the very failure of things wherein we trusted may serve only the more clearly to disclose; and to which, in proportion as we discern it, we ought more consciously and directly to turn for strength and help. It is as though in some hill country where we have been following our pleasant woodland tracks and mounting little heights and points of vantage, we come out upon the open and discern, high above us, the lofty peak or the solemn mass of the great hill or moorland about whose flanks we have been moving, whose swell and lift, though itself was unknown to us, has been under our feet as we mounted, and towards whose height converging