All Saints' Day and Other Sermons - Charles Kingsley

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more and more, as the years and the ages rolled on, the glorious prayer which we have prayed this day, graciously to behold that family for whom He had been contented to die; and wisely and orderly to call each man to a vocation and a ministry, in which he might duly serve God and be a blessing to all around him, by the inspiration of Christ’s Holy Spirit; and to have mercy, in His own good time, upon all Jews, Turks, heathens, and infidels, and bring them home to His flock, that they may be saved, and made one fold under one Shepherd—Him who was dead and is alive for evermore.

      Therefore, my dear friends, if we wish to keep Good Friday in spirit and in truth, we cannot do so better than by trying to carry out the very end for which Christ died on this day; and doing our part, small though it be, toward bringing those poor heathens home into Christ’s fold, and teaching them the gospel and good news that for them, too, Christ died, and over them, too, Christ reigns alive for evermore; and bringing them home into His flock, that they, too, may find a place in His great family, and have their calling and ministry appointed to them among the nations of those who are saved and walk in the light of God and of the Lamb.

      I have refrained till now from speaking to you much about missionaries, and the duty which lies on us all of helping missions.  It seemed to me that I must first teach you to understand these first and second collects before I went on. to the third; that I must first teach you that you belonged to Christ’s family, and that He had called each of you, and appointed each of you to some order and degree in His Holy Church.  But now, if indeed you have learnt that—if my preaching here for fourteen years has had any effect to teach you who and what you are, and what your duty is, let me entreat you to go on, and take the lesson of that third collect, and think of those poor Jews, Turks, infidels, and heretics, who still—many a million of them—sit, or rather wander, and fall, and lie, miserably wallowing in darkness and the shadow of death, and think whether you cannot do something toward helping them.  What you can do, and how it is to be done, I will tell you hereafter; and, by God’s grace, I hope to see men of God in this pulpit, who having been missionaries themselves, can tell you better than I, what remains to be done, and how you can help to do it.  But take home this one thought with you, this Good Friday,—Christ, who liveth and was dead, and behold He is alive for evermore, if He be indeed precious to you, if you indeed feel for His sufferings, if you indeed believe that what He bought by those sufferings was a right to all the souls on earth, then do what you can toward repaying Him for His sufferings, by seeing of the travail of His soul, and being satisfied.  All the reward He asks, or ever asked, is the hearts of sinners, that He may convert them; the souls of sinners, that He may save them; and they belong to Him already, for He bought them this day with His own most precious blood.  Do something, then, toward helping Christ to His own.

      SERMON X.  THE IMAGE OF THE EARTHLY AND THE HEAVENLY

      Eversley, Easter Day, 1871.

      1 Cor. xv. 49.  “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.”

      This season of Easter is the most joyful of all the year.  It is the most comfortable time, in the true old sense of that word; for it is the season which ought to comfort us most—that is, it gives us strength; strength to live like men, and strength to die like men, when our time comes.  Strength to live like men.  Strength to fight against the temptation which Solomon felt when he said: “I have seen all the works which are done under the sun, and behold all is vanity and vexation of spirit.  For what has a man of all his labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he has laboured under the sun?  For all his days are sorrow, and his travail grief.  Yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night.  This also is vanity.  For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts: as the one dieth, so dieth the other: yea, they have all one breath: so that a man has no pre-eminence over a beast; for all is vanity.  All go to one place: all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.  Who knoweth the spirit of man that it goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that it goeth downward to the earth?”  So thought Solomon in his temptation, and made up his mind that there was nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and make his soul enjoy good in his labour.

      So thought Solomon, in spite of all his wisdom, because he had not heard the good news of Easter day.  And so think many now, who are called wise men and philosophers; because they, alas! for them, will not believe the good news of Easter day.

      But what says Easter day?  Easter day says, Man has pre-eminence over a beast.  The man is redeemed from the death of the beasts by Christ, who rose on Easter day.  Easter day says, Wherever the spirit of the beast goes, wherever the spirit of the brutal and the wicked man goes, the spirit of the true Christian goes upward, to Christ, who bought it with His precious blood.  Easter day says, The body may turn to the dust from which it was taken, but the spirit lives for ever before God, who shall give it another body, as it shall please Him, as He gives to every seed its own body.  And, therefore, Easter day says, There is something better for a man than to eat and drink and enjoy himself, for to-morrow he may die, and all be over; and that something is, to labour not merely for the meat which perishes with the perishing body, but to labour after the fruits of the spirit—love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.  These the life of the body does not give us; and these the death of the body not take away from us; for they are spiritual and heavenly, eternal and divine; and he who has them cannot die for ever.  And therefore, we may comfort ourselves in all our labour, if only we labour at the one useful work on earth, to be good, and to do good, and to make others good likewise.

      True it is, as St. Paul says, that if in this life only we have hope in Christ we are of all men most miserable.  For we do not care to be of the earth, earthy: we long to be of the heaven, heavenly.  We do not care to spend our time in eating and drinking, mean covetousness, ambition, and the base pleasures of the flesh: we long after high and noble things, which we cannot get on earth, or at best only in fragments, and at rare moments; after the holiness and the blessedness of ourselves and our fellow-creatures.  But we have hope in Christ for the next life as well as for this.  Hope that in the next life He will give us power to succeed, where we failed here; that He will enable us to be good and to do good, and, if not to make others good (for there, we trust, all will be good together), to enjoy the fulness of that pleasure for which we have been longing on earth—the pleasure of seeing others good, as Christ is good and perfect, as their Father in heaven is perfect.

      To be good ourselves, and to live for ever in good company—ah my friends, that is true bliss.  If we cannot reach that after death, it were better for us that death should make an end of us, and that when our body decays in the grave we should be annihilated, and become nothing for ever.

      But Easter day says to us, If you labour to create good company in this life, by trying to make other people round you good, you shall enjoy for ever in the next world the good company which you have helped to make.  If you labour to make yourself good in this life, you shall enjoy the fruit of your labour in the next life by being good, and, therefore, blessed for ever.  Easter day says, Your labour is not vanity and vexation of spirit.  It is solid work, which shall receive solid pay from God hereafter.  Easter day is a pledge—I may say a sacrament—from God to us, that He will righteously reward all righteous work; and that, therefore, it is worth any man’s while to labour, to suffer, if need be even to die, in trying to be good, noble, useful, self-sacrificing, as Christ toiled and suffered and died and sacrificed Himself to do good.  For then he will share Christ’s reward, as he has shared Christ’s labour, and be rewarded, as Christ was, by resurrection to eternal life.

      And so Easter day should give us strength to live like men—the only truly manly, truly human life; the life of being good and doing good.

      And strength to die.  Men are afraid of dying, principally, I believe, because they fear the unknown.  It is not that they are afraid of the pain of dying.  It is not that they are afraid of going to hell; for in all my experience, at least, I have met with but one person who thought that he was going to hell.  Neither is it that they are afraid of not going to heaven.  Their expectation almost always is, that they are going thither.  But they do not care much to go to heaven.  They are willing enough to go there, because they know that they must go somewhere.  But their notions of what heaven will be like are by no means clear.  They have

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