Page:Sermon at the Church Congress 1902.djvu/7

3 steady, quiet prayer, and study, and observance, and charity of the generation which saw the century open (the first, perhaps, which worshipped in this building)—these things give us warning and make us tremble.

And then, on another side, humility must open into effort, and prompt for each of us the question, What must I do? The answer is certainly not this, that we must give up, disheartened, and put out of countenance with those things of truth or practice which we have inherited or received and of which we trusted that it was they that should be the instruments of a victorious work. That were to make popularity, or, at least, success, the test of truth. Nor, on the other side, will it suffice to repeat with one more effort of emphasis, to dint in with one more dogged push or thrust the old contention, the old instruction or appeal, however patiently these must be maintained. Still less shall we seek help by "dotting the i's and crossing the t's" of our own practice or teaching; seeking ever to prolong a line of development continually in one direction; to force the note and give sharper accent to what is already loud and shrill. To do this may be the way to maintain or increase the members of a party, but not to speak home to the conscience of a generation. Even human wisdom may remind us that the strength of truth lies not a little in its wholeness, that a needed development of one sort may require only the more peremptorily some other and different element, not to supersede it, but to keep it in harmony. And, more deeply, we must not forget that God's teaching and leading ever keeps its own character of paradox: "His ways not as our ways, nor His thoughts as our thoughts." His word comes not at all where we should have expected: its call is ever new as well as old; it is heard only by those whose expectant and attuned ears are not altogether full of the sounds which their own voices make.

Therefore we shall look further and we shall look deeper. Generations have not their call alike: they may be successive and different; or, again, the call of one generation may be to see in that of its predecessor something which could not at the time be discerned, which comes clear only under time's sifting power. These are two possibilities. I shall say little of the first. But if he who seemed to see deepest and most discerningly amongst us of late years—I mean Brooke Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham—was right at all, the call to the Church in the thirties and forties to awake and remember herself, to assert her high commission, to speak with the tone of authority, to bring out the treasures of her ministry and sacraments, was succeeded half a century later by as loud a call, sounding still in our ears to-day, to meet, interpret, express, sanctify the instincts—spiritual, believe me, as well as material—which cry aloud for a bettering of social order, for a more real and effective brotherhood, for faith in motive forces higher