John Percival - Sermons at Rugby
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John Percival >> Sermons at Rugby
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8 SERMONS AT RUGBY
By the Rt. Rev. JOHN PERCIVAL, D.D., LORD BISHOP OF HEREFORD
SOMETIME HEADMASTER OF RUGBY
JAMES NISBET AND CO. LTD.
21 BERNERS STREET, LONDON. 1905
[Title page: title.jpg]
[Photograph of John Percival: john.jpg]
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
This little group of Rugby Sermons is to be taken and read as being
nothing more than a few stray chips from the workshop of a busy
schoolmaster, brought together by a kindly publisher, and arranged as he
thought best.
They represent no body of continuous doctrine. In one case the subject
may have been suggested by the season of the Christian year; in another
it was the meeting or the parting at the beginning or the end of a term
that suggested it; or more frequently some incident in the school life of
the moment.
Such, indeed, almost inevitably is the teaching of a schoolmaster,
engrossed in the training of the boys committed to his charge and growing
under his hand towards the destiny of their endless life.
To those boys, and to the masters, my colleagues, and to other fellow-
labourers--some gone to their rest, some still doing their appointed
work--I dedicate this brief reminder of our common life in days of happy
fellowship.
J. HEREFORD.
_July_ 1905.
I. RELIGIOUS PATRIOTISM.
"Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity in itself. . . . O pray
for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee. Peace
be within thy walls, and plenteousness within thy palaces. For my
brethren and companions' sakes I will wish thee prosperity. Yea,
because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek to do thee
good."--PSALM cxxii. 3, 6-9.
As we draw near to the end of our summer term, when so many are about to
take leave of their school life, there is sure to rise up in many minds
the thought of what this life has done for them or failed to do, and of
what the memory of it is likely to be in all their future years as they
pass from youth to age.
And it should be our aim and desire, as need hardly be said, that from
the day when each one comes amongst us as a little boy to the day when he
offers his last prayer in this chapel before he goes out into the world,
his life here should be of such a sort that its after taste may have no
regrets, and no bitterness, and no shame in it, and the memories to be
cherished may be such as add to the happiness and strength of later
years. And if, as we trust, this is your case, your feeling for your
school is almost certain to be in some degree like that which is
expressed in this pilgrim psalm. Its language of intense patriotism,
steeped in religious feeling, which is the peculiar inspiration of the
Old Testament Jew, will seem somehow to express your own feelings for
that life in which you grew up from childhood to manhood.
Indeed, the best evidence that your school life has not failed of its
higher objects is the growth of this same sort of earnest patriotic
enthusiasm. Do you feel at all for your school as that unknown Jewish
pilgrim who first sung this 122nd Psalm felt for the city of his fathers
and the house of God? "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall
prosper that love thee. For my brethren and companions' sakes I will
wish thee prosperity. Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God I
will seek to do thee good."
Experience shows us that those English schools have been the best in
which this feeling has been strongest and most widely diffused; and that
those are the best times in any school which train up and send forth the
largest proportion of men who continue to watch over its life, and to
pray for it in this spirit: "For my brethren and companions' sakes I will
wish thee prosperity. Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God I
will seek to do thee good." On the other hand, if this feeling is weak
in any school, or among the former members of it, or if it assumes
debased forms, as sometimes happens, we see there a sure sign of
degeneration. He who, having grown up in any society like ours, is
possessed by no such love for it, and stirred by no enthusiasm for its
good name, and no desire to do it good, and to see good growing in every
part of it, such an one has somehow missed the chief blessing that his
membership of his school should have brought to him. He may have been
unfortunate, or he may have proved unworthy. The atmosphere of his
school life, and the associations amidst which he grew up, may have been
such that the best thing he can do is to shake himself clear of them and
forget them. To such an one his school time has been a grave and
lifelong misfortune; and it is the condemnation of any society if there
are many such cases in it.
It is, however, exceptional in English life for men who have grown up in
a great school to be stirred by no glow of patriotic feeling for it.
Whatever their own experience of it may have been, they are not
altogether blind to the things that constitute its greatness, and they
love to hear it well spoken of.
But the quality of their patriotism will depend very much on the quality
of their own life; so that the task we have always before us is to be
infusing into our community such a spirit and purpose, as shall infect
each soul amongst us with those higher aims, and tastes, and motives,
with that hatred of things mean or impure, and that love of things that
are manly, honest, and of good report, which distinguish all nobler
characters from the baser, and which are produced and fostered, and made
to work strongly in every society that has any claim to good influence.
Seeing, then, that a man's patriotism is to a great extent the expression
of his personal life, how instructive is this picture of the patriot
which the 122nd Psalm sets before us. We see thus first of all how he
feels the unity of his people--their one pervading life, and himself a
part of it, though possibly far away--"Jerusalem is built as a city that
is at unity in itself: thither the tribes go up." Those were times when
Israel suffered from division of tribe against tribe, times when the
pulse of common life hardly beat at all, times of isolation or of
jealousy; but the true patriot in Israel, as everywhere, was always
possessed by the intense feeling of the oneness of his people under one
Lord; and whenever this feeling fails, we look in vain for the higher
forms of common life.
But we note, too, this Psalmist's passionate personal devotion to the
object of his patriotic love--"They shall prosper that love thee"--"For
my brethren and companions' sakes I will wish thee prosperity." Who can
read unmoved these noble and generous outpourings?
We see, moreover, how his feeling expresses itself, as true love always
does express itself in the desire to do good to its object, and, above
all, how it breathes the spirit of moral and religious earnestness. "Yea,
because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek to do thee good." If
ever you desire to test the sincerity and the worth of any love you bear
to person, place, institution, or society, you have only to turn to this
Psalm, and see if these words fit your thoughts, desires, and
endeavours--"They shall prosper that love thee--For my brethren and
companions' sakes I will wish thee prosperity--Yea, because of the house
of the Lord our God I will seek to do thee good." Here are the notes of
true patriotic feeling--personal love, public spirit, sanctified by moral
and religious purpose, desire to do good. These are the qualities which
are the salt of all societies, and it is by virtue of these that they win
their good name, if they do win it.
In the history of our own school we can point to abundant illustrations
of this truth. I will mention one only, familiar to those who know our
history. "I verily believe," wrote a School-house boy to his friend
fifty-three years ago--"I verily believe my whole being is soaked through
with wishing and hoping and striving to do the school good, or, rather,
to hinder it from falling in this critical time, so that all my cares,
and affections, and conversation, thought, words, and deeds, look to that
involuntarily."
Such was one of your predecessors as he sat here Sunday by Sunday, a boy
like any of you.
He was eager to follow those friends who had preceded him to Oxford as
scholars of Balliol; he was keenly interested in all intellectual
pursuits; he turned for his daily pleasure to literature or history; but
alongside of it all, or rather through it all, underlying it all, giving
earnestness and fervour, the true unselfish quality, to it all, there was
burning in his heart a consuming zeal for the good of his house and
school. "For my brethren and companions' sakes I will wish thee
prosperity. Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek to
do thee good."
It was through the spirit and the lives of such as he, growing up here,
and leavening all the life around them, and then going forth in the same
spirit, to live the noble and earnest type of life elsewhere, that the
name of Rugby School became honoured among schools, and this chapel came
to be looked upon as a sacred home of inspiring influences; and it is
only through an unfailing succession of such Rugbeians--growing up here
in the same spirit, and going forth endowed with the same character and
the same purpose--that this honourable name, this tradition of good
influences, can be perpetuated.
And, if we desire to see how close this is to the spirit and the work of
our Lord, how it is, in fact, one manifestation of that spirit which is
the saving influence in human life; we have only to turn from the text
with which I started to that with which I may conclude, from the Psalmist
meditating on the city and temple of his heart's affections, to the
Saviour, as He drew near to the Cross, praying for His disciples--"Father,
the hour is come. . . . I have glorified Thee on the earth: I have
finished the work Thou gavest Me to do. I have manifested Thy name unto
the men whom Thou gavest me out of the world." . . . "And for their sakes
I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified. Neither pray I for
these alone, but for them also which shall believe on Me through their
word."
The only change we see as we step from the Psalms to the Gospel, from the
Jewish pilgrim to the Saviour whom we worship, is that religious
patriotism has expanded into the love of souls, the love of Him who laid
down His life to save us from the power of sin and death.
It was for you and me that Christ was praying; and His prayer for us will
be answered so soon as it inspires us to follow in His footsteps, so that
we too, as we kneel before God each morning, each night, and think of our
duty to those around us, may be able to say, in these words of His, which
are at once a prayer and a consecrating vow--"For their sakes I sanctify
myself, that they also may be sanctified.'"
II. THE CHILD IN THE MIDST.
"And He took a child and set Him in the midst of them: and when He had
taken him in His arms, He said unto them, Whosoever shall receive one
of such children in My name, receiveth Me: and whosoever shall receive
Me, receiveth not Me, but Him that sent Me."--ST. MARK ix. 36, 37.
It is one of the characteristics of our time, one of its most hopeful and
most encouraging signs, that men are awaking to higher and purer
conceptions of the Christian life and what it is that constitutes such a
life. We are beginning to feel, as it was not felt by former
generations, that the only true religion, the only Christianity worthy of
the name, is that which aims at embodying and reproducing the spirit, the
thought, the ideas of the Saviour.
Through and underneath all ecclesiastical and mediaeval revivals, and all
vagaries of church tradition or of ritual, this feeling seems to be
growing with a steady growth, that the real test of a man's religion is
the evidence which his life affords of the Christ-like spirit. And this
growing feeling gives an ever-fresh interest to the words and the
judgment of the Lord on all matters of individual conduct and daily
intercourse; so that if we are possessed at all by it, the Saviour is
becoming more of a living person to us, and we ask ourselves more
frequently, more earnestly, with more of reality and more of practical
meaning in the question, how He would judge this or that side of our
life, whether our conduct is in harmony with His spirit, and whether the
standards of our life fit at all with His teaching and injunctions.
And how full of new meaning every familiar chapter of the Gospel becomes
to you, if you are once roused to this kind of feeling; if you are
feeling all the time, here is the spirit which should be dominating my
own life and determining it, here are the thoughts, ideas, and views of
conduct which should be mine also. How does my common life fit with all
this? And it is with something like this feeling in your minds that I
would ask you to consider the text I have just read to you. "Jesus took
a child and set him in the midst of them. He took him up in His arms and
said, Whosoever shall receive one of such children in My name, receiveth
Me." And while we are considering it, let us notice also that in St.
Matthew's narrative there are two other very emphatic expressions.
"Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not
enter into the Kingdom of Heaven"; and "Whoso shall offend one of these
little ones that believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstone
were hanged about his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
. . . Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say
unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of My
Father which is in heaven."
Here, then, is the child taken up by Jesus and set in the midst; we know
nothing more of him but this one thing, that he represents to us our
Lord's Divine love of little children, and His high estimate of
childhood, as the mysterious embodiment of that character and those
qualities which bring us close to the Divine life.
But this is quite enough to make us listen to the lessons of thought and
warning and hope, which Jesus expounds to us as He stands with the child
in His arms. His words may very well set every one of us thinking about
our own life and conduct. We look at this scene--the disciples standing
round, their hearts occupied, as ours are apt to be, with their own
ambitions, rivalries, and jealousies, and Jesus in the midst with the
little child; and we cannot mistake or misinterpret the lessons He
teaches us, the lessons which welled up in His heart whenever He saw, or
met, or took up in His arms, and blessed a little child.
"Let every child you meet," he clearly says to us, "remind you that if
you desire to be My disciple and to win a place in My kingdom, you must
fling off selfishness, and put in its place the spirit of service and
tenderness." "He that would be first must be servant of all." "You must
humble yourself as this little child."
And then He adds the blessing and the warning:--"Whoso shall receive one
such child in My name receiveth Me; but whosoever shall offend one of
these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged
about his neck, and he were cast into the sea."
We may pause for a moment to consider what it is in childhood, what are
the gifts, qualities, characteristics of the child, that drew from our
Lord this special love and care and these injunctions to His followers.
We do well to bear them in mind, because He has declared with such
emphasis that we have no part in His kingdom unless we retain or recover
these gifts. And we should bear them in mind, because of the blessing
promised to those who help to preserve these qualities in others.
Receive, help, cherish, or protect a child, make the way of goodness easy
to him, and shield him from evil, and Christ declares that inasmuch as
you have done it to the least of all His little ones, you have done it
unto Him.
On the other hand, offend any such child, that is to say, hinder, or
mislead, spoil or degrade him in any way; do anything to rob a child of
any of these Divine gifts, rob him of his innocence, or trustfulness, or
his guileless heart, and sow the seeds of evil habits or tastes in their
place, and you know the denunciation or curse which the Divine voice has
laid upon you for your evil deed.
A child, then, is, as it were, a living symbol of that which draws to us
the love of Christ, and we cannot doubt that he is so by virtue of his
innocence, his obedient spirit, his guilelessness, or simplicity of
character, his trustfulness, and by all the untarnished and unspoilt
possibilities of goodness in him.
It is in the blessed endowment of such gifts as these that the little
child looks in the face of Christ, and is embraced in the arms of His
love.
And these are, or they once were, your gifts. As you love the better
life, and hope for good days, hold them fast and cherish them, or if any
of them be unhappily lost, let it be your endeavour to recover it.
As we contemplate such a scene as this in our Lord's life with the little
child in the midst, and listen to the Saviour's words, all the commands
and injunctions to keep innocency, to keep the spirit of obedience, to
keep a guileless and trusting and loving heart, gain a new force. They
seem to speak to us with new voices; for if the true life, the life that
has in it the hope of union with Christ, must be a life endowed with
these gifts, whether in youth or age, what a blessed thing it will be for
you if you have never lost or squandered them. We cannot too soon learn
this lesson; for if under the influence of any wrong motives, or
following any wrong ideals, or misled by any bad example, you go astray
and rob your young life of these divine gifts, no man knows how, or when,
or where you will recover them, and become again as a little child.
And if we turn our thoughts from our own separate personal life, and look
for a moment at our duty as members of a society, how this picture of
Christ embracing the little child, and blessing those who receive or help
one such, should stir us to new and keener interest in social duty! Does
it not carry in it, this example and teaching of the Lord, does it not
carry in it the condemnation of a great many of our traditional notions
about our duty to the young? We see the Lord's tenderness and love and
care for the little child; we see how He values the childlike qualities;
and how He enjoins the nursing and the cherishing of these. If, then, we
have really learnt the lesson which He thus presses upon us, we shall
feel something like reverence for every young life, as it begins its
perilous and uncertain course on the sea of man's experiences; and with
this feeling we shall be eager to help and protect such lives whenever we
have the chance of doing it, and we shall be very careful to do them no
wrong.
But when we turn from the Gospel and these thoughts which it stirs in us
to our common life of every day, does it not rather seem sometimes as if
this teaching of the Lord were all a dream and had no reality? And yet
there is hardly one of us but would confess that, having once seen this
revelation of the Lord, we are put to shame if, as happens sometimes, a
young soul comes amongst us endowed with these very gifts of innocence,
and high purpose, and trust, and promise of all goodness, which so won
the Saviour's heart, and is met, when he comes, in school or house, not
by care, or sympathy, or guidance, or protection, as of an elder
brother's love, but by experiences of a very different sort. You would
agree that it is a shame to us if such an one comes only to find the
misleading influence of some thoughtless or bad companion, or to have
held up before him some bad tradition as the law which should rule his
life here.
I have known--which of us in the course of years has not known?--such
cases in our school experience. A child has come from a refined and
loving home, but only to meet with roughness or coarseness; and instead
of retaining those gifts and qualities of childhood, which are the
godlike qualities of life and meant to be permanent, he has been led to
grow up utterly unchildlike, depraved, debased, hardened; and there is no
sadder sight to see than a growth of this kind. And if you have ever
seen it; if you have ever noticed the falling away from childlike
innocence to sin, from purity to coarseness, from the open, ingenuous,
trusting spirit to sullen hardness, from happiness to gloom, you know how
terribly in earnest the Saviour must have been when He denounced that woe
on any one who causes such debasement of a young soul--"Whoso shall
offend one of these little ones, it had been better for him that a
millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of
the sea."
III. THE BREVITY OF LIFE.
"I must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day: the night
cometh."--ST. JOHN ix. 4.
There are few things more commonly disregarded by us in our early years
than the brevity of our life through all its successive stages, and the
fleeting nature of its opportunities.
In childhood we are almost entirely unconscious of both these
characteristics of life. Indeed, it would hardly be natural if it were
otherwise. That reflective habit which dwells upon them is the result of
our experience, and comes later. It is enough for a child if he follows
pure and safe instincts, and lives without reflection a healthy,
unperverted life, under wise guidance and good teaching. Growing in this
way, free from corrupting influences or the contagion of bad example, and
poisoned by no bad atmosphere, he develops naturally towards a manhood
which is rooted in healthy tastes, affections unspoilt, and in good
habits. Thus you see what the very young have a right to claim at the
hands of all their elders--that they should be careful not to mislead
them, and should see that they live in pure air, and feed their growing
instincts and activities in wholesome pastures.
During the stage of earliest growth it would be a sign of unhealthy
precocity if a child were much occupied with the continuity of things, or
the close union of to-day with to-morrow, or of all our thoughts, acts,
pleasures, and tastes, with the bent of character which is being silently
but surely formed in us; and it would be equally unnatural if his
thoughts were to dwell much on the essential shortness of our life, and
the flight of opportunity which does not come back to us.
It is part of the happiness, or, I fear, it must be said sometimes, part
of the pain of early life, that the time before it seems so long. The
day is long with its crowded novelty or intense enjoyment, or possibly
with its dreary and intolerable task-work; to-morrow, with all its
anticipations of things desired or to be endured, seems long; and the
vista of years, as they stretch through boyhood and youth, manhood and
age, seems to lose itself in the far distance of its length. So, viewed
from its beginnings, life is long.
But with the approach of manhood all this begins to change. As we grow
out of childhood our self-conscious and reflective life grows; and thus
there rises in us the feeling of moral responsibility never to be shaken
off again. Not, however, that we should leave all our childhood behind
us. It hardly needs to be said that there are some characteristics of
our earliest years which every man should pray that he may retain to the
end. Unless he retains them his life becomes a deteriorating life.
And first among these is the reverential or filial habit. This deserves
our careful attention, because we sometimes see an affectation of silly
and spurious manliness, which thinks it a fine thing to cast it off. This
reverential or filial feeling, which is natural to the unspoilt and
truthful nature of the child, is preserved in every unspoilt manhood;
only with a difference.
It is raised from the unreflective, instinctive trust in a father's
guidance or a mother's love to that higher feeling which tells us that,
as is the child in a well and wisely ordered home, so is each of us in
that great household of our heavenly Father. This spirit of true piety,
which uplifts, refines, strengthens, and gives courage to manhood, as
nothing else can do, is the natural outcome and successor of a child's
trustfulness, as we rise through it to the feeling that we are
encompassed by a Divine consciousness, and that our life moves in a holy
presence. Or again, we pray that we may not lose that simplicity and
freshness of nature which is at once a special charm of childhood, and,
wherever it is preserved, the chief blessing of a man's later years.
These qualities and characteristics of our infancy--trust, filial
reverence, freshness, simplicity--are not qualities to be left behind,
but the natural forecast of that religious spirit which is the highest
growth of maturity, and our own safeguard against the hardening and
debasing influences of the world and the flesh. And this was the
Saviour's meaning when He said, "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom
of God as a little child shall in nowise enter therein." And if there is
one thing more than another that constitutes the special curse of any
depraved influence acting on young lives, it is that it robs the later
life of these childlike qualities which are the gifts of God to bless us
in youth and age.
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