cile with all that is revealed to us of His mercy and of His justice, and with the whole meaning of the Gospel of Salvation.

I venture to think that such subjects should not frequently be treated in the pulpit, because the field of undisputed and essential truth is so large as to supply the amplest materials for moral and spiritual edification, without forcing us to dwell upon controverted questions. I have always acted upon this conviction. During twenty-five years I have scarcely ever done more than refer to the speculative question as to the nature and duration of future punishment. In six volumes 1 of school, university, parochial, and cathedral sermons, the reader will scarcely find any allusion to the controversy. I have held it sufficient to dwell on the certain and awful truth that, both in this world and the next, God punishes sin; that without repentance sin cannot be for

1 The Fall of Man, and other Sermons; 4th Thousand. The Witness of History to Christ. Hulsean Lectures for 1870; 7th Thousand. The Silence and Voices of God. University and other Sermons; 6th Thousand. In the Days of thy Youth. Practical Sermons at Marlborough College, 1871-1876; 7th Thousand. Saintly Workers. Lent Addresses at St. Andrew's, Holborn, 1879; 4th Thousand. Ephphatha; or, The Amelioration of the World. Westminster Abbey Sermons, 1880; 3rd Thousand.

given; that without holiness no man shall see the Lord; that by the death of Christ and the gift of the Spirit the love of our Father in Heaven has provided us with the means of redemption and given us the grace which leads to sanctification. But there would be no chance of religious sincerity or of spiritual progress, if we were never to enter a protest against the tyranny of human error when it encroaches upon the domain of faith and teaches for doctrine the mistakes and traditions of men. The pulpit of a metropolitan cathedral has always been considered a legitimate place for the treatment of questions which are not so well suited for ordinary parochial teaching; nor do I see any reason why Westminster Abbey, with its large and mingled congregations, should not occasionally be used for purposes analogous to those which made the pulpit of St. Paul's Cross so powerful in the days of the Reformation. Those who during the last four years have heard my sermons in the Abbey know full well that, there as well as at St. Margaret's, in ninetynine instances out of a hundred, my aim is entirely practical, and my subjects chosen. from the wide realm of those truths respecting which all Christians are agreed.

But I am not at all ashamed, nor do I in the least regret, that, when I was naturally led to deal with a question in which the popular theology goes far beyond the Catholic faith, I did not hesitate to express my strong conviction that the opinions traditionally accepted by the majority of those who have never seriously thought of them, are unwarranted and are dangerously wrong. To believe with awful reverence in Eternal Judgment is a very different thing from believing in the utter distortion and perversion of the language and metaphors of Scripture which ignorance and tradition, working hand in hand for centuries, have degraded into what a deeply religious modern poet has characterised as "obscene threats of a bodily hell."

It has been laid to my charge almost as if it were a grave fault that in those sermons I adopted a vehement tone. Is it a sin to feel strongly and to speak strongly? Are the Prophets and the Psalmists never vehement? Is St. Paul never vehement? Are St. Peter and St. James and St. John never vehement ? As for "adopting a vehement tone," my reply is that I never "adopt" any tone at all, but speak as it is given me to speak, and only use such language as most spontaneously and

naturally expresses the thoughts and feelings with which I write. "Every one," says Dr. Newman,1 "preaches according to his frame of mind at the time of preaching;" and it is quite true that at the time when I preached those sermons my feelings had been stirred to their inmost depths. I am not in the least ashamed of the "excitement" at which party newspapers and reviews have sneered. I do not blush for the moral indignation which most of what has since been written on this subject shows to have been intensely needful. In the ordinary course of parochial work I had stood by deathbeds of men and women which had left on my mind an indelible impression I had become aware that the minds of many of the living were hopelessly harassed and-I can use no other word-devastated by the horror with which they brooded over the fate of the dead. The happiness of their lives was shattered, the peace of their souls destroyed, not by the sense of earthly bereavement, but by the terrible belief that brother, or son, or wife, or husband had passed away into physical anguish and physical torment, endless, and beyond all utterance excruciating. Such

1 Apologia, Appendix, p. 15.

thoughts did not trouble the careless or the brutal, who might be supposed to need them. They troubled only the tender-hearted and the sincere. They were the direct result of the religious teaching which they had received from their earliest years. To the irreligious poor the common presentment of "endless torment" was a mere stumbling-block; to the best of the religious it was a permanent misery. The irreligious are driven to disbelieve in any punishment, because they have heard the punishment with which they are threatened described in such a way as to be utterly unbelievable; the religious accept these coarse pictures, and are either hardened by them into lovelessness or crushed into despair. Pharisaism and Infidelity are the twin children of every form of theology which obscures the tenderness of revelation, and belies the love of God.

Now to me it seemed that the Gospel of the grace of God ought to have in it at least some message of consolation for more than that mere handful of the bereaved who can feel sure that those whom they love are saved; and not for these only, but for all whose imagination is strong enough to realise what words mean, whose candour is sufficient to make them face