T. Edmund Harvey

“ It is the danger that has beset the church from almost the earliest days, that the men who should be inspiring and setting others to work have too often simply done their work for them, or tried to do it. Doubtless the old robber baron returning from some murderous fray felt his heart uplifted as, rounding a comer of the road on the way to his castle on the hill, he came in sight, in the valley below, of the monastery he had founded, and thought of the holy lives of the monks, and of their prayers put up daily for him, who had such need of them. ”

“ Yet while language is still living it may regain something of its old power beneath the poet's healing fingers, and now and again a master of words will recall for us some dying form of speech. A writer of power is needed, surely to win us back the older and wiser use of the word sacrament as a spiritual symbol, the revelation of the unseen through the visible, the unfolding of the unknown through the known. ”

“ But we come, too, to a vision of the Infinite in other ways; whenever we see a good deed done, and behold its goodness, we are touching the hem of the robe of the Eternal. In the inward recognition of the supreme beauty of unselfish love we are directly conscious of a flash of intuition [p.129] which illumines not the intellect alone, but our whole nature. We are brought into touch with God at the very centre of our lives. Nature is indeed the priest of the Eternal, and every high place has still its altar, where we may worship in spirit and in truth. ”

“ Though not only for our own lives but for the whole life of humanity upon the earth it should prove that our processes of creed building and church making are necessarily imperfect, we must still for ever strive to express in thought and in act the life of the spirit, which grows and deepens as it is faithfully expressed. Creed and deed alike, we feel, are but the raiment of the life; they fade and are outgrown, yet they are not to be fiercely torn to pieces or lightly thrown aside. ”

“ Beneath the unanswered question now, there is the abiding sense of the reality that endures, a conviction that, though we do not understand its purpose, life is not purposeless, and that though we cannot lift the veil of death it is only a covering which hides from our eyes a wider and greater world than ours.
It may be that some will feel that all such talk of faith is meaningless to them. Religion and faith convey no such notions to their minds as they seem to imply to others. What they want is the clear demonstration, which a physicist might give us. ”

“ In the most famous mysteries of Greece, those which were celebrated at Eleusis, it would seem that along with the idea of revelation of truth went also the sense of upbuilding of the inward life, the purification of the soul and the assimilation of the Divine things imparted beneath the symbol. For revelation, the unveiling of truth, is no one-sided act; it involves response in the mind that receives; if the truth is apprehended, it must in part at least, be also assimilated. And so every mystery is something more than the unfolding of a hidden reality ”

“ But all have not this faith, it may be urged; it is strongest often when the intellectual powers are weak enough, and men of the greatest genius tell us they are wholly without it. Yet cannot we conceive of a community of people almost wholly devoid of one of our own five senses, say that of hearing? How difficult it would be for one of them whose ears were suddenly opened to explain to his friends the new world about him. Imagine these people watching a skylark, and looking on with astonishment at the joy of the one man who heard it singing. ”

“ It is no new thing; what is new to-day as a wide spread spirit is the desire to transcend our differences, not by despising or ignoring the things which separate us, nor yet by the victory of one church or sect over another, or the absorption of the lesser by the greater community, but by the better understanding of each other and of ourselves, the closer co-operation where co-operation is possible, and, it may be, the gradual realisation of a unity deeper than all that keeps us apart. ”

“ Our worship, our hymns and prayers, are full of unreality; we persuade ourselves, perhaps, that we still believe in dogmas which have ceased to have any influence upon our lives. We shut our eyes to new truths because we are really afraid to be free, and what was the chalice of a new truth to our fathers becomes a poison-cup to us and our children. If the Church is to regain and to retain the respect of honest thinkers we must welcome fair-minded inquiry wherever it be directed, and not fear to open our eyes to the sun. ”

“ Through all they trace the same instincts, and feel that the savage kneeling before a blood-smeared stone explains to them the Nicene Creed, that the hierarchy of the Church has its origin in the spirit-doctors and fetish-men of a simpler age.
Yet to some at least there may come far other thoughts than these, as they ponder over what they have seen. Everywhere they behold men stretching out their hands towards something above them, beyond them, struggling with fears, oppressed by dim consciousness of wrong, hoping for some way of peace. ”

“ Even money is not hopelessly lost for good. The sacramental efficacy of the widow's mite has not ceased through all the centuries since she cast it, in her humility, into God's treasury. The sand hides the gold of Pharaoh, and the imperial treasures of Augustus are vanished and forgotten, but that poor woman's gift still goes on: she gave to God, to the best and highest that she knew, and in giving, little thought that through the word of the Master of Masters, her tiny coin could become for ever a sacrament to humanity. ”

“ Yet if we have only once or twice experienced what unpremeditated prayer may be, when it is offered in the true priestly spirit, in deep sympathy with the needs and longings of those present, diverse though they be, and in close harmony with the peculiar demands of the time and place, we know how such prayer can, as nothing else, gather up our hidden desires and bring our whole souls with it into the sense of communion with the source of the strength and help that we need, towards which our arms stretch out as we listen, and are not stretched in vain. ”

“ One cannot but feel that when Marcus Aurelius cries to the Universe "that which is harmonious to thee, is to me too," he is conscious of something of this feeling in which our petty cares and troubles sink into nothingness amid the waters of the great ocean of universal life; though he arrived at the sense of this rather by inward meditation than by the contemplation of nature without him. And whatever the philosophers may have felt, one has no doubt of the poets. ”

“ The message of prophecy is one, as it seems, which reaches the subconscious self of the incomer, who suddenly beholds the realities of his own inner life in this flood of light that flows in upon him, piercing through the veil that custom and convention had wrought about him. But the prophetic word does not merely give this fuller knowledge of his own nature to the stranger; it puts him also into touch with a higher self. ”

“ The scientific mind, the practical, executive talent of the businessman, the speculative powers of the metaphysician and the creative gifts of the poet and artist, each have their place, and no one human mind can combine them all. So, too, it may be with the moral ideals realised here in our human lives. Because one is good, another is not wholly wrong. There may be varieties of goodness just as there are differences of shape and beauty between flower and flower. ”

“ It does not matter how his frail frame came to respond to the thoughts that so dominated his mind: the important thing for us is not the accidental consequence to the body, but the attitude of mind and spirit, the union of will with a Christ suffering for humanity, bearing the sins of the world. He who has come to be made thus, in the humblest way, the comrade of Christ, must be the comrade too of all his fellow-men. Church and individual alike must show in character and life the meaning of this fellowship — fellowship in joy and in sorrow, too, willingness to learn, to give and to serve. ”

“ Or silently in the quiet of the night, before the mystery of the starry sky, a great peace comes over us in which our own tiny life seems to take its place amidst the ordered harmony of all the spheres. ”

“ The union of Christians with each other is to be witness to the world of the Divine mission of Jesus. Men are to believe on him because they see how his life and spirit hold together communities with differing organisations and men of widely varying personality. The union is not to destroy personality or variety of character, but to underlie all difference. It is no external machinery to unite us in a single visible organisation by which individuality would be stamped out or fettered in growth. ”

“ In his eyes the sunshine falling alike upon good and evil men is a constant revelation of the Divine love, compassing just and unjust, overcoming evil with good. The beautiful flowers of the field, blooming for a moment and then destroyed, bring to him no thoughts of gloom, as they did to the Greek poet, but the certainty that the Power which gives such loveliness to the creatures of an hour will provide for His higher creation too. ”

“ It is very easy for us to recognise in a far off time the failure of institutions to realize the ideal that inspired their origin, and we readily admit, in the abstract, the need for the ideal to dominate [p.93] the institution and the danger of the institution running away with the ideal. It is harder to see in our own lives how far we are allowing the machinery to take us from its object, how far that machinery is out of date or out of gear, since we are in the thick of it all, our ears dulled by the roar of the wheels. ”

“ These are among nature's sacraments, and in the life of man we have, above all, the sacrament of the family, which at its best is an image of the love of the All-highest, and a foretaste of His Kingdom among men, of the city which is to be, in which all are members of one another, living to serve each other.
It may comfort us to think that the devil's sacraments are not so all-pervading; for night, which we think of as the cloak of evil, may itself be to the devout soul a symbol of the mysterious peace of God. ”