conduct and our thoughts; what hope, what inspiration! The pages of history open themselves for our guidance. Had you lived in the days of the prophets, had you lived in the days of Christ, had you lived in the days of St. Paul, of the Reformation—had you lived in any great age when new light streamed on the world-would you not long with a consuming desire to have been among the few who opened eyes and hearts to that light, and bravely sided with the few against the many-with light and charity and revelation and God, against darkness and cruelty and obscurantism and human passion even though they took the sacred name of "religion"? Would you not long for this with a consuming desire? Then remember that the struggle is incessant, and is quite as plain now as ever it was. Remember that it is a great age in which you are living; try to contribute to its greatness. We are called on by all the voices of the past, by the solemn duties we owe to the future, to conquer our lower selves, to subdue "the child that is in us" that craves exclusively for the external and the positive; we are called on to use these things as not abusing them, and to live as Christ bids us, in the spirit, and not to entangle ourselves again in the yoke of bondage. "Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free"; for that is the good news of the Gospel of Christ.

NOTE. Some of the later paragraphs were omitted or shortened in the delivery.

VIII

THE PRESENT CHURCH REVIVAL1

"Can these bones live?"-EZEK. xxxvii. 3.

The

THERE are two periods in our recent Church history which offer a suggestive comparison to the present time. One was the period of a hundred years ago, towards the close of the much-abused eighteenth century, the century of spiritual deadness and of theoretical morality in the Church of England. question of the prophet was then asked in different tones of incredulity by sceptics, by statesmen, and by Churchmen-" Can these bones live ?" And yet they were then moving with an altogether new life. The great influence of the Wesleys and Whitfield, visible during fifty years only on the masses outside the Church, was at last felt in the Church itself: below all the deadness there was a stir among the young; and in the persons of Scott and Milner and Venn and Simeon and many another there was a real revival of corporate life and of personal religion in the Church itself. Slowly and almost unnoticed the stream of influence poured in, and in a few

1 Preached in St. Mary's Church, Oxford, on Sunday evening, 8th February 1885.

years transfused into the Church a new ideal of holiness and of zeal for the souls of men, an ideal which has never been lost.

Fifty years passed away, and with them all the early heroes and fathers of that movement. Somehow the wave seemed to die away. Perhaps they lost their great principle of evangelisation and brotherhood of the saints; perhaps they reached the limit of their possible influence; but what had been a spirit of life fixed itself as a party, and the party crystallised itself where it was left by its early chiefs, and its life began to dwindle, and its voice to be less sturdy; and once more, fifty years ago, the inadequacy of the English Church to meet the vast and varied needs of the English nation began to press on many an earnest soul. Once more was asked the same question in the same varied tones, from within, from without-" Can these bones live?"

Yet you know that even then there was in full young life in Oxford a movement ridiculed by some few, dreaded and suspected by a few more, but ignored by the great majority of Churchmen, which, nevertheless, flooded the Church of England with a new power and energy which makes this nineteenth century a great epoch in our Church history.

Nevertheless, now again, within and without our Church, in the same tones of anxiety, of indifference, of triumph, is asked the same question-" Can these bones live?"

I am speaking to Churchmen in the strongest centre of Church feeling; and you may perhaps wonder that I so speak of the Church now. But be not deceived. We must not be under the illusion that fresh activity, and more churches, and more

I do

money, and more communicants, not even that stronger Church feeling and brotherhood and faith within the inner circle of the clergy, means life. This is to read history in vain. It may blind us, it may deafen us to the Voice now audible-Cut it down, cut it down, it cumbereth the ground. not mean only the political cry for disestablishment; this is but a symptom; and has besides other farreaching causes to which I do not allude. But I mean the far deeper feeling that our National Church and religion is not wholly truth-loving-nay, that it is tainted with insincerities and make-believes; and that it is not endeared to the heart of the nation. We are not rooted in their affections. What do the two millions newly enfranchised care for the Church? What do the many who are thoughtless, or the few who think, care for us and say of us? And so once more is heard in every society the old question, "Can these bones live?" It is asked in prayer, it is asked in scorn, it is asked in anger, and it is asked in incredulity.

I have said that these two periods, that of one hundred and that of fifty years ago, were parallel to our own. In each of them, as a rule, men failed to see the new hope. The old seemed to have reached its limit of growth, and there was nothing they could acknowledge as a new birth. The new hope seemed to lie in stiffening and straining the old principles. Therefore the dignity of the Establishment became more dignified; the dogmatism became more dogmatic. So it always was and so it They saw no new birth,

is, mutatis mutandis, to-day.

and yet there it was in both cases, in its humble cradle, before their eyes, had they had but eyes to see it.

What

And so the question forces itself on us, and most of all on you who are young, what and whence is the new birth of our time, if there is any? new and mighty current of life is already, almost unnoticed, unappreciated, beginning to pour into the streamlets of our Church, soon to fill its main channel? For fifty more years have passed, and the time has come.

I will try and tell you young men what I seem to see, for the vision is full of power and hope and faith; and I cannot but earnestly desire to help you all to pour your accumulated and glorious power of youth into this new current of hopeful life, to which some who have lately gone out from you are so nobly contributing.

The new current that has been setting in for some years, and is now, I think, clearly definable, is the resolution to deal as the Church of England, as a great national organisation—with great social reforms, and the conviction that the truest service of Christ, who went about doing good, is fidelity in the effort to "seek first the kingdom of God" here on earth. It may be too late to save the nation, it may be Quixotic; but the Church will try. To give precision to my meaning I add that amongst these great social reforms there stand most conspicuous the movements for temperance, purity, education, for better housing of the poor, better recreation, better land laws, and better labour laws: these and all else that concerns the total social condition of the millions that make the nation. The Church, as a Church, is resolving to deal with these questions.

This age is actually upon us before we are aware. The moral centre of gravity of the nation has shifted