The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1874-09-12 00:00:00

FUNERAL SERMON FOR THE LATE
MR. J. H. FOLEY, R.A.

On Sunday the funeral sermon of the late Mr. Foley,
who was buried in St. Paul's the previous Friday, was
preached under the dome of that Cathedral to a large
congregation by the Rev. Canon Lightfoot. The
weather was, as on the day when Sir Edwin Landseer's
funeral sermon was preached in the same building
exceedingly unpropitious, the rain falling steadily.
The text was chosen from the Bth verse of the sth
chapter of St. Luke, which has reference to the mira-
culous draught of fishes in the day time after the men
had toiled all night in vain. After pointing out
how the majority of men live and labour and suffer
in this world, and die withou securing any endur-
Mg good, and how after the struggle for earthly
substance, the race after wealth and honour, the eager
pursuit of phantom good, they were constrained at last
to exclaim with the fisherman in the parable, "We
have toiled all night and have taken nothing," the
preacher continued i—" Two days ago we laid in the
vaults of this cathedral the last mortal remains of one
who has achieved for himself a foremost place amongst
the masters of his art in our own age. It was fit his
bones should lie here side by side with more than one
famous British sculptor who has gone before him—side
by side with men of the most illustrious names in the
sister art of painting—with Reynolds, whose easy grace
in the delineation if human portraiture stands quite
without a rival; with Turner, who succeeded ae no other
painter has succeeded in any age or country in pro-
ducing on canvas the subtle play of light and shade,
the ever varying depth and infinity of external nature;
with Landseer, too, our laid great guest in this our
artiste' resting-place, whose genial and vigorous
representations of the lower animals seem to invest
them with almost a human interest, and so teaching
us so many suggestive lessons of kindliness; side by
side, too, with England's greatest architects and Wren,
their prince, whose genius needs no words of eulogy
here, for his monument is above and around us. Such
a place of sepulchre well befitted such a man. It
is our tribute of respect for noble gifts nobly used;
it is an expression of thanksgiving to God, who thus
endows His servants that they may employ their
gifts to exalt and embellish human life. The most
enduring of human works are the works of the
sculptor. The stern, granite features of the Pharaoh
who befriended Joseph and persecuted Israel may still
look down on the land which they ruled with an iron
rule between three and four thousand years ago. The
winged hone and winged bulls which Sennacherib may
have gazed upon with awe in the royal palaces of
Assyria still confront us in our national museum, with
the same weird look unchanged, though all things else
are changed, surviving still, though a hundred genera-
tions of men have been born, lived, and died. And it may
lie in centuries to come some curious excavator may ex-
hume from the grass grown mounds of this then ruined
city, some work of art bearing the name of him who on
Friday last we bore to an honoured grave—perhaps the
effigy of a prince who livel in a remote epoch of the past.
when England was still a nation, who sank into
an untimely grave amidst a people's mourning, and
thus the sculptor's fame will have a second lease of
life. But after all thirty centuries are but as three
years or days compared with eternity. Yet man
thinks he was not made to die—he will not consent
to die. The materialist may tell him that when
the eye and the ear are dissolved into gas and de-
composed into dust it matters not to him with what
honour men adorn his memory or with what praises
they may celebrate his came; he too—his personality,
or what he is pleased to call his personality—
is dissolved, is dissipated, is gone; but the
materialist never yet has been able—never will be
able —to persuade mankind of its truth. The natural
instinct of men revolts against the assumption, and
the ambition of the Christian for eternity alone ex-
presses truly this general instinct of men to labour for
the good things of this world, to labour for fame in the
coining centuries. What is it after all if our views are
bounded by this narrow horizon! Why, then, like the
disappointed fishermen of the Galilean lake, we have
toiled all the night long in vain, and for our pains we
have 'taken nothing."