SERMON IX. THE AIMS OF CHRISTIAN STATESMANSHIP. DEUT. XXVIII. I. "And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently to the voice of the Lord thy God. that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth." ... THOSE who worship here will, I think, have recognized my desire that, amid the daily endeavour to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, we should not forget our national duties, our duties as human beings in the great family of man. We suffer even in our spiritual life when we confine our thoughts to the narrow horizon of our individual welfare. If the great remedy for selfishness be to lose ourselves in God, if the great example of 1 Preached in St. Margaret's, Westminster, Feb. 8, 1880. U unselfishness be the example of Christ, if the great work of Christ was to sacrifice Himself for the sins of the whole world, then surely he must be the best and truest man whose hopes and fears are not wholly absorbed into the silence and seclusion of his interior life, but who yearns for the religion of active service, who desires to follow in the Divine footsteps of Him who "went about doing good." But he who would live thus, while he strives to be a child of God, must never forget that he will be a better child of God in proportion as the whole influence of his life, whether in a large sphere or in a small, tends not to poison but to purify the current of the world's life. If at the words, "I am a man; and therefore in all things human I have a concern," the whole audience of a heathen theatre could rise up to shout their approval, ought not a Christian congregation to feel that those lessons are deeply religious which turn their thoughts to our own work in a Christian nation, and to the work of a Christian nation in the world? It is a mistake to suppose that such questions are too vast and vague. Results the most vast are brought about by the aggregate of small separate exertions. The coral insect is a small and ephemeral creature with soft and feeble body, yet the result of its insignificant existence, the contribution of its tiny grain, rears the leaguelong reef which forms a barrier in the ocean, or builds the bases of continents which form for untold ages the home of man. Let none of us try to prove that we have but little responsibility. "We never die; we are the waves of the ocean of life, communicating motion to the expanse before us, and leaving the history we have made on the shore behind." 2. And if any congregation may ignore the questions which affect our public and corporate usefulness, we cannot. This Church, as I have said before, has at least its memories. It is still, in name, the Church of the House of Commons. Here on every Ash Wednesday, and on every great occasion of national joy or national humiliation, in old |