All Saints' Day and Other Sermons

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Charles Kingsley. All Saints' Day and Other Sermons

PREFATORY NOTE1

SERMON I. ALL SAINTS’ DAY

SERMON II. PREPARATION FOR ADVENT

SERMON III. THE PURIFYING HOPE

SERMON IV. THE LORD COMING TO HIS TEMPLE

SERMON V. ADVENT LESSONS

SERMON VI. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

SERMON VII. TEMPTATION

SERMON VIII. MOTHER’S LOVE

SERMON IX. GOOD FRIDAY

SERMON X. THE IMAGE OF THE EARTHLY AND THE HEAVENLY

SERMON XI. EASTER DAY

SERMON XII. PRESENCE IN ABSENCE

SERMON XIII. ASCENSION DAY

SERMON XIV. THE COMFORTER

SERMON XV. THOU ART WORTHY

SERMON XVI. THE GLORY OF THE TRINITY

SERMON XVII. LOVE OF GOD AND MAN

SERMON XVIII. COURAGE

SERMON XIX. GOOD DAYS

SERMON XX. GRACE

SERMON XXI. FATHER AND CHILD

SERMON XXII. GOD IS OUR REFUGE

SERMON XXIII. PRIDE AND HUMILITY

SERMON XXIV. WORSHIP

SERMON XXV. THE PEACE OF GOD

SERMON XXVI. SINS OF PARENTS VISITED

SERMON XXVII. AGREE WITH THINE ADVERSARY

SERMON XXVIII. ST JOHN THE BAPTIST

SERMON XXIX. THE PRESENT RECOMPENSE

SERMON XXX. THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

SERMON XXXI. THE UNCHANGEABLE CHRIST

SERMON XXXII. REFORMATION LESSONS

SERMON XXXIII. HUMAN SOOT

SERMON XXXIV. NATIONAL SORROWS AND NATIONAL LESSONS

SERMON XXXV. GRACE AND GLORY

SERMON XXXVI. USELESS SACRIFICE

SERMON XXXVII. THE SURPRISE OF THE RIGHTEOUS

SERMON XXXVIII. THE LORD’S PRAYER

SERMON XXXIX. THE DISTRACTED MIND

SERMON XL. THE LESSON OF LIFE

SERMON XLI. SACRIFICE TO CÆSAR OR TO GOD

SERMON XLII. THE UNJUST STEWARD

SERMON XLIII. THE RICH AND THE POOR

Отрывок из книги

The following Sermons could not be arranged according to any proper sequence.  Those, however, which refer to doctrine and the Church Seasons will mostly be found at the beginning of the volume, whilst those which deal with practical subjects are placed at the close.

A few of the Sermons have already appeared in “Good Words;” but by far the greater number were never prepared by their author for the press.  They were written out very roughly—sometimes at an hour’s notice, as occasion demanded—and were only intended for delivery from the pulpit.

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“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.”

Ah! what a Gospel lies within those words!  A Gospel?  Ay, if you will receive it, the root of all other possible Gospels, and good news for all created beings.  What a Gospel! and what an everlasting fount of comfort!  Surely of those words it is true, “blessed are they who, going through the vale of misery, find therein a well, and the pools are filled with water.”  Know you not what I mean?  Happier, perhaps, are you—the young at least among you—if you do not know.  But some of you must know too well.  It is to them I speak.  Were you never not merely puzzled—all thinking men are that—but crushed and sickened at moments by the mystery of evil?  Sickened by the follies, the failures, the ferocities, the foulnesses of mankind, for ages upon ages past?  Sickened by the sins of the unholy many—sickened, alas! by the imperfections even of the holiest few?  And have you never cried in your hearts with longing, almost with impatience, Surely, surely, there is an ideal Holy One somewhere, or else how could have arisen in my mind the conception, however faint, of an ideal holiness?  But where, oh where?  Not in the world around, strewed with unholiness.  Not in myself—unholy too, without and within—seeming to myself sometimes the very worst company of all the bad company I meet, because it is the only bad company from which I cannot escape.  Oh, is there a Holy One, whom I may contemplate with utter delight? and if so, where is He?  Oh, that I might behold, if but for a moment, His perfect beauty, even though, as in the fable of Semele of old, the lightning of His glance were death.  Nay, more, has it not happened to some here—to clergyman, lawyer, physician, perhaps, alas! to some pure-minded, noble-hearted woman—to be brought in contact perforce with that which truly sickens them—with some case of human folly, baseness, foulness—which, however much their soul revolts from it, they must handle, they must toil over many weeks and months, in hope that that which is crooked may be made somewhat straight, till their whole soul was distempered, all but degraded, by the continual sight of sin, till their eyes seemed full of nothing but the dance of death, and their ears of the gibbering of madmen, and their nostrils with the odours of the charnel house, and they longed for one breath of pure air, one gleam of pure light, one strain of pure music, to wash their spirits clean from those foul elements into which their duty had thrust them down perforce?

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