The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1875-06-19 00:00:00

TEMPLE CHURCH.

The morning and afternoon services at the Temple
Church were attended by large congregations, and the
Master, the Rev. Dr. Vaughan, preached in the morn-
ing. After a special prayer, given with the whole
congregation upstanding, for the Divine blessing upon
all Christian Churches and upon all the institutions of
the State, the preacher took the 17th verse of the
eighth chapter of St. Matthew—" Himself took our
infirmities and bore our sicknesses,"—words, he said,
which were tender and touching. "Himself,"
the Lord of all, dwelling from eternity in the
light unapproachable, instead of despising us
for self-made miseries, instead of hating us for
sins and abominations, took our infirmities and bore
our sicknesses. "Infirmity," the absence of strength,
and "sickness," the presence of disease, might be said
to divide between them the realm and empire of suffer-
ing, and de, in taking these upon Him, showed that
He came among U 3 for real work, real help, and, there-
fore, real anguish, and marked the difference between
Himself and any self-styled or man-pictured
deliverer, who might have come—who never had come
—from an uninfected atmosphere, from an intellectual
paradise, to look upon our burdens, to give directions
for us to bear them, but himself not to touch them with
one of his fingers! It might surprise some—they must
be superficial thinkers—why the Saviour, having all
power in heaven and on earth, did not put forth that
power to stop disease. If He had said, Let there be no
more sickness; let there be no more weakness—the order
must have been obeyed, and there would have been no
more palsy, nor fever, nor lunacy, nor possession, nor
death. Surely the news of this exemption, of this armistice
of plague and death, would have spread itself far and
wide; surely it would have been an evidence—none
could be greater—of the presence upon earth of the
Son of God. Thus argued human reason, thus
argued flesh and blood ; but thus argued not that reason
which stood above intellect, thus argued not the logic
of Heaven and God. If sin could not go all at once,
neither must suffering. If evil was not yet to cease
throughout God's universe, neither should sorrow,
which was at once the shadow and connexion of evil.
That which in its cessation would have been mis-
chievous, would have been illusory, would have
been destructive—for, though the suffering would
have gone, the sin would have remained—in its
transfer and in its substitution became all good;
for the Mighty One took the infirmities of the
sinner, the Holy One bore the sicknesses of the
lost. The preacher said that there were Christian
teachers with whom the soul was the man, and who
held depreciatory, disparaging, almost contemptuous
language concerning the body; but such was not the
method of the Saviour, and it would be an evil day for
the Gospel in which philanthropy and Christianity
should part company. It was not so in England yet, but
there was a danger of it wherever men made sphitual
comfort the whole of Christ's offer : and far better
would it be if they taught men the dignity and the
blessedness of a participation in the cross; better would
it be for us if we could rise to the idea of actually taking
the infirmities, hearing the weaknesses, and enter into
the secret of that willing, enduring, aspiring incorpora-
tion with the sufferer in his suffering, with the sinner
in his sin, which formed the beauty and the efficacy of
Christ. What was a man's paltry, trifling self that it
should be all-important to God and man, that it
should be instantly happy, that it should be all at once
joyful, while the very reverse of joy and happiness
seemed to be the very law of human being? Surely
when God looked morning by morning upon this
wandering star—this strange earth into which that
unnatural thing sin had found its way, causing count-
less homes and streets of this one great city to
begin the day in remorseless misery which was to
end in remorseless crime —it must seem almost
selfish that there should be thousands of believing
people making their own little safety, their own little
happiness, quite enough for their own consideration—
just accepting the Gospel of forgiveness because of its
sweetness, and refusing the Gospel of sacrifice because
of its difficulty. But Christians must never sur-
render the charm of philanthropy to unbelievers, and
suffer them to say that the Christians thought
of their own souls, but left the charge of bodies
and of the social life. Politicians, electioneers, moral
philosophers, political economists found in brethren of
low degree a study of interest, of absorbing interest,
and had theories, systems, schemes, gospels for ele-
vating the down-trodden race, or for making merchan-
dise of it. And could Christians forget that the Lord
when He came on earth, made the suffering class His
own' for its sake became poor, had not where to lay
His head. Dreadful it would be if the Gospel of the
19th century should become in any sense the luxury
of the rich or the commodity of the shop-keeper, and
be no longer the comfort of the artisan and the wealth
of the poor. The preacher went on to point out that
it was as One who cared for bodies that our Lord was
listened to when He spoke of souls, and strongly
urged that suffering was ever fruitful in blessing.
Thus accident, contagion, anguish, and agony called
forth on the one hand countless agencies of
skill, of enterprise, of self - denial of charity
which otherwise would have had no scope and no
existence, and eliciting, on the other, those graces of
patience, of gratitude, of humility, of piety which
years of ease, of luxury, of prosperity had done
nothing but starve, and freeze, and kill. Thus given
the mystery of the existence of evil, there was no
mystery at all in the existence of pain. A world of
sin which was not a world of suffering would indeed
have been a mystery, and would have suggested to more
than fools the inference that there was no God. As
Christ came as the Man of Sorrows, so the Christian
must be concerned in feeling for suffering, and in minis-
tering to it; and vast indeed was the field of suffering—
in terrible diseases, desolate homes, aching hearts, de-
ranged minds, horrible crimes, and disconsolate death-
beds—and to help in relieving suffering was given to
all. He warmly urged his hearers not to yield to the
temptation before which tens of thousands fell pros-
trate—that of abandoning all effort and doing nothing
because they could not do all. He begged' them to
remember that all could help in this annual "feast of
charity, and, quoting the words of an illustrious French
preacher, who said "Evangelical England has over-
come all prejudice and descended into the lowest depths
of physical and moral evil," he prayed them not to
yield this high praise, but to give help which would
csme to those who in this transitory life were in trouble,
sorrow, need, and sickness.

•
In the afternoon the Rev. Alfred Ainger preached.
The collections at both services amounted to
£209 180. 9d.

THE PRO-CATHEDRAL, KENSINGTON.

The sermon in aid of the Hospital Sunday Fund
was preached by Cardinal Manning in this church at
the High Mass, commencing at 11 o'clock. His Emi-
nence took his text from the First Epistle of St. John,
ch. 5, v. 20—" And we know that the Son of God is come,
and hath given us understanding, that we may know the
true God, and may be in his true Son. This is the true
God and life eternal." Coming to the subject of the day,
he said that Hospital Sunday, as it was called, had
been wisely and well instituted. It wasthe one day in.
the year when all men in this great city—this wilder-
ness of between three and four millions of people—united
together for one common act of charity. So divided
by religion, by politics, by opinions, by prejudices, by
contentions, were we Englishmen that this was the one
only day of the year on which we met together to do
one common act of mercy to our fellows. We ought
to be thankful that we had found at last a common
basis upon which we could stand to do a work of
charity and of duty—the broad basis of Christian
charity. There were in London about 2,200 places of
worship, and of that number rather more than 1,300
had united together to make this simultaneous collec-
tion. Some had given reasons of weight why they
were not able as yet to co-operate, but he had no
doubt they would hereafter do so. Every new work
gained slowly, but this had gained rapidly. Tb.
highest civic authority, the Chief Magistrate of the
City of London, had placed himself, and in him-
sslf his successors, at the head of this work. The