Arthur Penrhyn Stanley

“ David’s churchyard, and stand upon it by the shore of that western sea, we shall see rising in the distant waters the green islands of the fairies, the vision of a land, not indeed of heaven, but still not of this earth. It is by taking our stand on that old British soil that we can catch for ourselves a glimpse of a higher, more romantic, ideal world than any other part of English history can show. ”

“ Far in the dim distance of primeval ages, is discerned the first figure in the long succession which has never since been broken,—in Ur of the Chaldees, the Patriarchal chief, followed by his train of slaves and retainers, surrounded by his herds of camels and asses, moving westward and southward he knew not whither, drawn on by a mighty destiny big with the hopes of ages,—the first Father of the universal Church,—Abraham, the Founder of the Chosen People, the Father of the faithful, whose seed was to be as the sand upon the sea-shore, as the stars for multitude. ”

“ But the world which they created still lives in that marvellous cycle of legends which gather round the name of King Arthur, and which, in our own day, has given to the first of our living poets the worthiest subject which our island could furnish—the career of the stainless king and his gallant knights, which our children and our children’s children will read with their souls more and more raised to nobler and higher thoughts. ”

“ Everywhere we shall find the wellsprings and the streams of the Christian history of England running beneath our feet; everywhere something to keep alive in our recollections the growth and spread of the Christianity of this great country. Almost every church and churchyard has its own antiquities. Almost every parish and every sect has its own strange spiritual experiences, past or present. In almost every county and province we may study those august trophies of Ecclesiastical History—instructive beyond those of almost any other country—our cathedrals. ”

“ Remember that there are things in heaven and earth more than our plain homely English philosophy has dreamed of. Such innocent, beautiful stories and thoughts, from whatever quarter they come, though not in themselves religious, yet smooth and purify the course of life. They prepare us for the poetry of parables like the Pilgrim’s Progress—they prepare us for the poetry of the Psalms and of the Prophets of the Bible. ”

“ Doubtless there are many points both in sacred and in common history, both in civil and ecclesiastical records, where we must be content to remain in suspense. History will have left half its work undone, if it does not teach us humility and caution. But essential truth can almost always be found—truth of all kinds can with due research be usually found: she lies, no doubt, in a well; but we may be sure that she is there, if we dig deep enough. In this labour teachers and students must all work together. What one cannot discover, many at work on the same point can often prove beyond doubt. ”

“ In no people does the history move forward in so regular a course, through beginning, middle, and end, as in the people of Israel. In none are the beginning, middle, and end so clearly distinguished, each from each. In none has the beginning so natural and so impressive a preparation, as that formed by the age of the patriarchs. In none do the various stages of the history so visibly lead the way to the consummation, which, however truly it may be regarded as the opening of a new order, is yet no less truly the end of the old. ”

“ Yet there was one channel in which the old British character displayed itself that directly bore on practical life—namely, the quick temper, the vivacious intelligence, which impart to other useful qualities exactly the stimulus they most need. Not seldom can we trace in families the sudden turn given to a sluggish, steady, stagnant stock of purely English extraction by contact with the imaginative, lively, mercurial character of Welsh or Celtic parentage. ”

“ Let us not fear lest we should, by the surpassing interest of the story of the elder Church, be tempted to forget the end to which it leads us. The more we study the Jewish history, the more shall we feel that it is but the prelude of a vaster and loftier history, without which it would be itself unmeaning. The voice of the Old dispensation is pitched in too loud a key [1] for the ears of one small people. The place of the Jewish nation is too strait for the abode of thoughts which want a wider room in which to dwell. ”

“ The Church of God is no longer confined within the limits of a single nation. The life and the truth, concentrated, up to this point, within the narrow and unbending character of the Semitic race, has been enlarged into the broad, fluctuating, boundless destinies of the sons of Japheth. The thin stream expands and loses itself more and more in the vast field of the history of the world. The Christian Church soon becomes merely another name for Christendom ”

“ Such enthusiasm is not sufficient by itself to produce true religion; it is compatible with a very imperfect morality and a very low stage of Christianity. Still it belongs to the great central fires which keep the human soul alive, and it has in various forms been God’s special gift to the Celtic races of mankind, especially in this country. If we were to remove it out of our national existence England would not be the great nation that she now is, and the English Church would lose one powerful means of raising the spiritual energies of the people. ”

“ We are told not only of his goodness, but of his sins; and we can there judge how wonderfully the history of the Church has gained by such a frank disclosure: how thin, how pale in comparison, would that biography have been, had the darker side been suppressed and the bright side only exhibited. Such a completeness of view we are almost driven to take when we explore, not one, but all the sources whence our knowledge can be drawn. We may still lament that the story of the lion is so often told only by the man ”

“ But there is a more general influence which has left its permanent mark on England. Within that old cathedral of St. David, of which I just now spoke, the most conspicuous tomb which rises in the midst of it, and which, according to the tradition of the place, saved the cathedral itself from destruction, is that of Edmund Tudor, father of Henry VII. and grandfather of Henry VIII., who, for its sake, spared the venerable church where it stands. ”

“ Theology is not above Christianity: the Christian Church is in many respects the best practical exposition of the Christian Religion. Facts are still the most powerful, the most solid, the most stubborn guides in the mazes of speculation and casuistry; they cut through difficulties which arguments cannot overturn; they overturn theories which will surrender to nothing else. Ecclesiastical History is thus, as it were, the backbone of Theology. ”

“ As these mountains, these bays, these rocks, which gave to us in their early days our poetic and romantic thoughts, have, in these later days, given to us our quarries and our harbours and our lighthouses and our piers, so it is that out of every generous and inspiring thought there may come at last the most solid, the most useful, the most comprehensive materials of God’s glory and man’s usefulness. ”

“ The further we advance, the more remarkable does the contrast become,—the mountains more bare, the river-bed more rich and green. At last its channel is contracted to the utmost limits; the cliffs on each side almost close it in; it breaks through, and over a wide extent, far as the eye can reach, it scatters a flood of vegetation and life, in the midst of which rise the towers and domes of the great city, the earliest and the latest type of human grandeur and civilization. ”

“ First let us remember that these graces of the Cambrian or Celtic character, which our Heavenly Father has thus vouchsafed to us, are also by His good providence blended in the English race with exactly those qualities which furnish their counterpoise—with that self-control, that moral discipline, that solid steadiness of purpose, without which poetic sentiment, religious fervour, mental vivacity are often useless, or worse than useless. ”

“ Practices which we insist on retaining or repudiating, as if they involved the very essence of the Catholic faith or of the Reformation, will appear less precious or less dangerous, as the case may be, in the eyes of the respective disputants, if history shews us clearly that we thereby make ourselves, on the one hand, more papal than the Pope, more Roman than Rome,—on the other hand, more Lutheran than Luther, more Genevan than Calvin. ”

“ That Tudor race, in their quick understanding, in their fiery temper, the true representatives of their ancient Celtic lineage, were the instruments raised up by God’s providence at the critical season of the new birth of England in the Reformation, for guiding, stimulating, freshening the Church and the nation to the performance of new duties, the fulfilment of new hopes, the application of new truths. ”

“ It is always useful to see, as must be seen in any extensive survey, how large a portion of our ecclesiastical diversities is to be traced, not to religious causes, but to the more innocent, and in one sense irresistible, influences of nation, of climate, of race, of the general course of human affairs. The bitterness of English partizanship will be greatly diminished in proportion as we recognise the fact, that the divergence between the Church of England and Nonconformists springs from differences not so much of theological principle or opinion, as of social and hereditary position. ”

“ Let us then, Englishmen or Welshmen, who are assembled here, ask, in no spirit of boastfulness or rivalry, but of thankfulness to God, what are the special gifts for good which the British Celtic race has contributed to our common country? As the Israelites had for their ancestors Abraham and Sarah, before their own special patriarch Israel or Jacob—ancestors by whom they were connected with other races besides their own, Edomite, Arabian, Mesopotamian—so we were Britons before we were Englishmen ”

“ The Gallican Church, first the most brilliant in Europe, brilliant alike in its works of active mercy and in its almost Augustan age of great divines,—Vincent of Paul, Bossuet, Fenelon, Pascal,—lived to become the miserable parent, and then the victim, of the great convulsion which, whilst it shook the belief of the whole of Christendom, in France for eleven years suppressed it altogether. The French Revolution must always be considered as an epoch in the religious history of man. Not only was its hostility to the Christian faith the most direct that the world has seen since the days of Julian ”

“ Study the actual statues and portraits of the men, the sculptures and pictures of the events: if they do not give us the precise image of the persons and things themselves, they give us at least the image left on those who came nearest to them. Study their monuments, their gravestones, their epitaphs, on the spots where they lie. Study, if possible, the scenes of the events, their aspect, their architecture, their geography; the tradition which has survived the history, the legend which has survived the tradition ”

“ If once we are inspired with a genuine desire of seeing the man as he really was, if he was worth being seen at all, we shall not be satisfied unless we see him altogether. Here, as in so many other respects, the sacred history of the Jewish Church is our best example. ”