The Master-fact of human life
From Advent Sermons, 1885, by R. W. Church, Dean of St. Paul's
Change is as sure as death: with this disconcerting insight, Fr Richard William Church (1815-1890) confronts one of the Four Last Things traditionally treated of in Advent. From a line of Irish Quakers, he spent his early years in Florence, followed by an Evangelical boarding school in Bristol, before studying at Oxford. First a parish priest and tutor at Keble’s college, Oriel, he was nominated Dean of St Paul’s by William Ewart Gladstone. Though he was reputedly monotonous in delivery, the extract from this sermon published in 1885 reads with surprisingly modern cadence, free from some of the verbal clutter sometimes found in Victorian writers. This is fitting for its subject. Fr Church cuts through the paradoxical monotony of the constant change which necessarily characterises life in this world, maybe never more than now.
How do we respond? With ennui? Fatigue? Cynicism or sentiment? The promise of the Second Coming shakes us awake. With fear, certainly: to face the end of the world demands courage. But more, with hope, and a hope that does not descend into sentimental Christmas-card, John and Oko pastiche of heaven. We cannot know what the world to come will be. Scripture itself tells us as much. Nor can we know when it will be. But as we increase our longing for God, our hunger for Him in Word and Sacrament, and in the faces of our neighbours, we grow too in trust on His unchanging and enduring Presence in our midst. —T.P.
“For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”
Hebrews xiii. 14.
“Here we have no continuing city.” We are all of us under the unalterable necessity in one way or another of change. It is the absolute condition of existing, now and here. How shall we feel about this fact, as certain as death? how shall we meet it, when we no longer merely know it, but imagine and realise it? —no longer merely hear of it by the hearing of the ear, but see it with the inner eye of the living mind.
It may impress and affect us in many ways. It may darken or it may brighten life; it may depress and discourage, or it may inspire with boundless hope.
We may find in it the highest summons to courage or the excuse for the most enervating sentimentalism. We may bow our heads in sullen despair under the yoke of its necessity; we may cease to strive, and throw up the game in the vain attempt to master or to stem it; or we may see in it more gain than loss, and welcome it charged with infinite possibilities of recovery and advance. We may meet it, thankful that we are born under its dominion and its hopes; or we may meet it with the indifference with which we resign ourselves to what is inevitable; or with the regrets which see in it that which has robbed us of what we most loved and trusted, only a companionship with bereavement, decay, degeneracy; or with irritation at its monotony, its fruitlessness, its aimlessness, its undirected and purposeless course. We may meet it in placid submission to the order of natural law, curbing the restless instincts of the soul for something more and better, without ambition for a more stable and unchequered lot, without aspiration and without repining. We may meet it as fatalists, or as idlers, or as those who said, “Our time is a very shadow that passeth away; let no flower of the spring pass by us; for this is our portion, and our lot is this.”
There is no escaping from the consciousness of change. From the first, men have met it as wise men or as fools — with mockery and with selfish riotousness, or with the serious thought due to one of the master-facts of human life. …
This life of ours, locked and dovetailed into the vast framework of social existence, seems so solid that it needs an effort of imagination to think of it shaken. But that effort of imagination Scripture bids us make. It bids us think of ourselves in totally new conditions, in utterly altered relations to all around us; how strange, how awful, we know not, nor ever shall know here. It bids us think of this world itself, passing through endless phases, till the day of its doom. Search as we will, we can find nothing to rest upon, nothing that will endure the real trial, but the faith of the Psalmists in the eternal kingdom of God — the faith of the Psalmists lit up by the "grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ." May God grant us the heart to have this faith — the faith of men — of men who are not afraid to face their circumstances, who know the greatness of their venture, who are not afraid to trust God, because their hearts go up to Him in longing and self-surrender.
“Truly God is loving unto Israel, even unto such as are of a clean heart. Whom have I in heaven but Thee? My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.”