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

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DEAN 4TANLEY AT OXFORD.

Dean Stanley preached the University sermons on
Sunday afternoon before a large audience. His text
am the questim addremed to Jacob—" What is My
name ?" (Gen. :nil., r). The preacher deprecated
admen at the imuiries of modern science into the
physical nature of man. No one, after all, could go
deeper than the author of Genesis, who called the first
man Adam, or Clan St. Paul, who paid "the first man
was of the earth earthy." The Mosaic chronology
had been long snore abandoned, but its spirit might be
retained as completely as ever. To deny develop-
ment was againt all analogy, and would make man
of all creatures tie most miserable. The philosophers
themselves maintained the moral raising of min by his
own efforts. Adied our name, we !Meld answer
we were not ashamed of our origin or destiny. To
determine that, we must task not only what our physical
structure is, but s-hat our inner being. "Do what you
like with my body ; my body is not I, was the exclama-
tion of the martyr. The self of a man was what it
called his soul. There was the earthly man, the
natural, and, above all, the spiritual man; the last
shared in common with God Himself. What is the
soul? It is affection, faith; hope, charity. He who
makes the other parts subordinate to them is the
spiritual man. The physical man has on the whole
remained the same; the intellectual man has I
vanceol ; but the spiritual man has advanced even I
where the intellectual remained stationary. On this
rest our hopes for the future ; not on what our an-
cestors were, nor on our frame, nor on the Intellectual
nature, but on the moral. " The soul that sinneth it
shall die." There was something greater than the
resurrection of the body, which wile the immortality of
the soul, anol something greater than that, which was
the vivifying influence of the spirit. Of this soul it
was that it was said "What shall it profit a man if he
gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Expres-
sive of the same truth was Necl.,r's word to Mil:abeam
'You have too much sense and ability not to find
out in time that morality is in the nature of things."
So Luther, "I can do nothing against conscience.' So
Charles V., "To invade censcience is to invade the
citadel of Heaven." All civil authority must at last be
subordinate to this. We render to Caesar the things of
Caesar because this is ultimately rendering to Goal the
things which are God's. This is what justifies revolt
against Sanhedrin or Scribe, against Pontiff, Synod, or
Council. This is the foundation of all true indepen-
dence. In this spirit is the motto of a Northern 'Uni-
versity, " They say; what say they? Let them say."
This is the heat safeguard at once against the material-
ism of the looters-moan and that of the altar and
meristy, such as that which made salvation depend on
the dipping in the water of a child, or on theories of
Christ's body, or which taught that the agency of a
Bishop was necessary for the soul to be immortal, or that
the ordinary means to immortality was the physical
partaking of the Eucharist. These were all so many
attempts to resolve the spiritual into she material, the
eternal into the temporal. The Reformers' glory was
to declare that the essence lay in the spirit of the
believer. " The flesh profiteth nothing : the words
that I speak unto you, they are spud, and they are
life." The Kingdom of Cod is not meat and drink,
but righteousness and peace in the Ho olyeGhost. This
was the superseding of the material and the magical
by the rational sacrifice of the soul to Goel. The two
Catechisms oil' Great Britain begin, he said, with the
same question put in different ways, "What is thy
name? In the English it was answered by the
Christian name, implying that the essence of the
personds being was the moral service of the Holy and
the true—of Jesus Christ. In the Scotch Catochism
the answer was for the race,—" Man's chief end
is to glorify Good and to enjoy Him for ever."
I Again, there were two beings in this man—the
niean Jacob; the princely, nay, Divine, Lrael. The
many characters of David, the flux and reflux of
Peter's mind, the two Adarns, all illoostrated the
teaching of the duality of man's nature. This was
the true antidote of indiscriminating judgments. I
bade sus recognise the good and the bad alike in all
without partiality. We must recognise in Milton the
sublime poet and the savage antagonist, the darks and
lights in Wesley and in Botssuet, the splendours of the
Reformation and its deplorable failures. The preacher
concluded by a reflection appropriate to a place of
education. We were sometimes tempted to fancy
that Jacob must remain Jacob—the young remain
what they were. This was to a certain extent true,
lest often the whole man was transformed by the
atmosphere of teachers and companions. Thus the
Regent Orleans, whose character was portrayed
perhaps most vividly of all historical characters by
St. Simon, was debauched by the Cardinal Dubois.
Thus the second Dauphin under Folnelon promised to
grow up into the perfect man, such an one as might
have saved the Monarchy. For all, he coecludeol,
there was a possibility of regmeration. • We insist
lootk forward in all cases to the triumph of the good.
"'h. name shall he called no more Jacob, but Israel ;
for ass prince hotet thou power with God and with
men, and heat prevailed."