Love and loyalty

Front matter

BX 9843 .J6 L6 1907 Jones, Jenkin Lloyd, 1843-

JENKIN LLOYD JONB-S

"Grow old along with me.

Preface

"Printed sermons do not sell!" So say the publishers, and they know. Notwithstanding, here is another "book of sermons;" there is no use trying to disguise the fact — sermons with the inevitable repetitions and reiterations. They are published primarily for the benefit of the two hundred or more girls and boys to whom they were first delivered. With the exception of the introductory discourse, they are all of them "class sermons," arranged in the order of their delivery. Thus they represent a cross-section of twenty-five years of a busy city ministry, and the volume is offered as a humble contribution to the quarter-centennial celebration of All Souls Church, Chicago.

The text for each of these sermons is the class motto, for which the children sought diligently among the words of poet, prophet, ancient seer, and modern preacher. The search was often prolonged and laborious, but always delightful. No motto was chosen that did not finally represent a unanimity of opinion. Each text thus seemed at the time to be the keynote, not only to the studies but to the lives of those who cheerfully gave up their playtime one afternoon a week, from All Souls Day to Easter Day, that they might talk with their minister of the deep things of religion as discovered in the long story of humanity and the short story of their own experience. It is

X PREFACE

thus a book of aspirations and encouragements; it seeks to inspire rather than to analyze the holy life. It is a book of illustrations and not of arguments. To fittingly state is to prove the religious life, for it is a thing of experience and not of doctrine.

The conferences that led to these discourses frankly faced and freely discussed creeds and doctrines. The things that divide, the doctrines that provoke controversy, do not here obtrude themselves because the fundamentals are the universals; the conditions of nobility are the realities of religion.

Many of the boys and girls to w^hom these sermons were first delivered are now^ men and w^omen, knowing the joys and responsibilities of home-making and parentage. Their junior associates are pressing hard after. They all belong to the larger Confirmation Class, made up of those who would fain confirm their faith in the right, deepen their trust in truth, and make sacred the claims of duty, which rest in the thought of the divine fatherhood and the human brotherhood.

What is applicable to one group of youths may prove of value to another, and insofar as these sermons may reach the heart of the young, they will certainly appeal to their elders. Hence they are offered to such "public" as they may reach.

Jen KIN Lloyd Jones

Abraham Lincoln Centre, Chicago July 17, 1907

Table Of Contents

PAGE

I. Life's Commencements. IntroductBiy . . i

III. An Appeal to Youth (1887) 37