Rays of dawn

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Preface

It has brought back many happy memories to read over again and correct for the press these sermons and addresses dehvered in such various places, and especially is this true of those delivered in the course of the National Mission.

Why these particular ones survive out of the many hundreds which were delivered, is often a question of what the world calls chance. The first long one was taken down in shorthand, and it was delivered extempore to the Diocesan Conference of the London Dioceses, but it is a faithful summary of the message delivered from one end of England to the other, and as I read it over, I can see again the massed clergy of the Diocese of Ely in St. Mary's, Cambridge, the mixed gathering in Peterborough Cathedral, and the great congregation in the beautiful church at Grantham. I call up again before my mind Leeds Parish Church, where evening service was followed by a united communion next morning, Durham Cathedral vii

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crowded to the doors, Newcastle with all the clergy of the Diocese at a great service, the Chapter-house at Carhsle full of its clergy; Ludlow Parish Church, Hereford Cathedral, Liverpool Cathedral, Wolverhampton Parish Church, Rochester Cathedral, Edinburgh Cathedral, St. Alban's Abbey, and finally, Truro Cathedral, all full of the clergy and laity of the surrounding district ; while, in the Dioceses which preferred their gatherings to be in great halls, Sheffield, Huddersfield, Manchester, Oxford, Reading, Stratford, Colchester, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, Portsea, and Plymouth, stand out in my mind with special distinctness.

Of all the many outdoor addresses given in London in the great Parks, and in my walk through London, with stations at selected spots, I have only found space for one address, that given on Tower Hill (No. VH) ; and I am able to give that, owing to the mere chance that someone in the crowd was reporting for the Christian World Pulpit, to which I make acknowledgment for the report. It was given under a fire of interruptions, as, on arriving at Tower Hill, I found a demonstration in progress against the Church for the non-enlistment viii

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of the clergy of military age ; old experience, however, gained in East London of handling crowds, came in useful on that occasion, and the crowd gradually veered round in favour of the Church. The sermons and addresses given in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's survive because they were written out for delivery in those great buildings, but I must apologise for the curt and often terse form of the appeal in many of the other addresses, as they are just cries from mind to mind and soul to soul, in the course of my task of trying to win a great City to the Feet of God.

I have called the book Rays of Dawn, as I believe in each chapter there will be found some thought to kindle hope and some encouragement to those in the night of sorrow and desolation to look for the'"morning.

That there is a morning coming, I have no doubt at all. " Heaviness may endure for a night, but Joy cometh in the morning," and the chapters in this book give the reasons for my faith. I think I can see Rays of Dawn appearing ; not only of the Dawn of Victory for those who fight for the freedom of the world, but also of the Dawn of a better day for all mankind. Wickedness has sometimes to be

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seen in all its naked horror before it can be crushed, and it is only against the background of deep darkness that true Light is seen to be Light. It is in the hope that this book may help others to believe in the Light, " Follow the Star " through the darkness, and look for the morning that I send out Rays of Dawn.

A. F. LONDON.

PAGE

Contents

I.— NATIONAL MISSION ADDRESSES

I. The Church's Call to the Nation . 3

III. "What wilt Thou have me to do?" 51

II

" He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver." — Mal. iii. 3.

After two and a half years of war, we have arrived at the real test of our fortitude and courage; a wave of pessimism, please God, only a temporary one, is passing over the nation at home, though not, and this is to be noticed, over the soldiers in the field or the sailors at their respective bases.

" The advent of Rumania into the war " (so the talk runs), which was once thought to be about to shorten it, bids fair now, so we are told, to lengthen it by supplying the enemy with much-needed supplies. The successful extension of long-distance submarines is endangering the food supply of the nation ; nowhere have we yet been very successful, and Kut and Gallipoli have lowered our prestige throughout the East.

* An address delivered in Westminster Abbey on Advent Sunday, 1916.

And as always happens in all wars in all nations, a disappointed nation turns upon its leaders, and armchair Napoleons tell us day by day exactly what ought to be done.

But more formidable than this growing distrust with the leadership of the nation, is a latent disbelief in God Himself. " He really ought to be doing something to help us at last ; , of course we were bound to pay for our foolish mistakes about the peaceful designs of Germany ; we see now of course, our mad folly in not listening years ago to the old soldier who was allowed to utter disregarded in the wilderness his only too well justified warnings, and was told by some that he ought to have his pension taken away for his pains ; but we have surely paid for this folly now ; we have raised five million men by voluntary enlistment, and have given the precious blood of our nearest and our dearest, surely if we are fighting for the freedom of the world and are standing by the weak against the strong, and for international honour, and for the principles of chivalry in war, and if there is a God Who loves these things. He ought to be doing something soon. The enemy grows more ruthless, more merciless every hour ; thousands of defenceless Belgians are carried into slavery ; innocent merchantmen and even trawlers are sunk every day, and yet God does nothing."

But has it ever occurred to those who ask these questions so bitterly now, to ask themselves quite frankly : " How much they themselves trusted and served God in the days before the war ? "

In a striking letter quoted by Mr. Burroughs in his book 7he Valley of Decision I find this extract ; the letter was written from the trenches :

" The man who has come out here with a little faith, learns here to see the God he loves more clearly than ever before.

" The man who has brought no faith with him spends his time cursing the war, swearing at everything, fretting and worrying. ... I cannot honestly say that men often find their Saviour for the first time in the trenches, although perhaps an old love for spiritual things, long forgotten, is stirred up within them. Certainly in the hour of death, I think their thoughts turn to the possibility of a future life.

" But the man who comes out loving

God finds, when for the first time in his life he feels that any moment may be his last, that love spreads into a supreme trust."

And again he says :

" The huge trust which springs up in moments of peril will in a large number of cases leave men strong, keen and earnest Christians if and when God brings them back to the safety of their homes."

Now, as is often the case, these letters from the front, give us much food for thought at home ; is any such " huge trust " in God rising at home ? if not, why not ?

(i) Is it because we have not got even that minimum of faith and love, of which the writer so humbly and modestly speaks ?

What right has a man who has never prayed to God before the war for years, or a woman who has made her own comfort and pleasure her god, to expect God, while they have not changed, to make them His special favourites and the choice instruments of His Will ?

Nay ! How can we expect a nation, however righteous its cause, at once and without repentance or amendment, to be fully used and blessed by God.

There is a striking sentence and response which occurs in the service for the Consecration of a Church, As the parish priest brings up the vessels for consecration, the Bishop is directed to say :

" Be ye clean which bear the vessels of the Lord,"

and the priest answers :

" I will wash my hands in innocency, O Lord, and so will I go to Thine altar."

I believe myself fully that we have as a nation been called to " bear the vessels of the Lord " ; I have said a thousand times, and I say it again, that we as a nation never did a more Christlike thing than when we went to war in August 1914 ; I believe that we bear on high as a sacred trust the vessel of a world's freedom, purity and honour.

But is it consistent with this to have ten per cent, of the nation afflicted with a disease which ultimately comes from immorality ? Is it consistent with this to have the streets of London so dangerous that the very boys who have come across the seas to fight for us find here sometimes their ruin ?

" I will wash my hands in innocency, O Lord, and so will I go to Thine altar." Have we even begun to say it yet ? The only help you get from the prophets of the people amounts to this : " You can't be too particular what the boys do of an evening, when they are fighting so bravely for us," whereas it is just because they are so gloriously gallant and brave that we want to save them from a worse fate than death.

(2) " But these things all happen when men and women are drunk or have been drinking."

Is it really supposed that God, Who has told us that " No drunkard shall inherit the Kingdom of God," is likely to accept this as an excuse from those who are called to " bear the vessels of the Lord " ?

I have not forgotten my mid^iight march through Westminster a year or two before the war. In an hour I had collected from the public-houses in the immediate neighbourhood of the Abbey a number of men, mostly young and all half intoxicated. Thank God those late hours are stopped now, and must never be allowed to be reintroduced again.

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But even since the war began, in August 191 5, the Rev. F. B. Meyer wrote to the Times :

" If only people who may resent this letter would spend a week-end in a-certain broad thoroughfare with which I am familiar, they would, like Dante, have a vision of hell — jars and bottles of liquor are passed from hand to hand in the open street. The pavements are covered with groups engaged in drinking, fighting and screaming till one or two in the morning. Sunday is thus inaugurated and concluded."

But it is not only possibly bigoted Bishops or leading Nonconformist Ministers who speak like this. Mr. Alfred Booth, Chairman of the Cunard Line, addressing a Liverpool audience in December 1915, said :

*' The most glaring example of a form of consumption which we could perfectly well dispense with is the drink traffic. I am not thinking now of the Temperance side of the question. Important as that is, we have got far beyond that now. I am thinking of the demand which this trade makes upon the services of our ships, our railways and carts and of our labour. Thirty thousand tons a week of barley and other produce are brought into this country for the brewing and distilling trades. Think of the demand which this makes on the depleted resources of our mercantile marine. Then all this stuff, together with the larger quantity which is grown at home has to be carted and hauled by rail to the brewery or distillery, and then brought back again and distributed to the consumer. In addition to this, 6000 miners are kept permanently employed getting coal, and 36,000 tons of coal have to be sent every week to these breweries and distilleries. Taken in the aggregate the services absorbed by this trade are on a gigantic scale, and (notice this) the net result of it all is a decrease in national efficiency. I say in all seriousness," says Mr. Booth, " that, if we are to be able to maintain our armies in the field, we shall before very long have to choose between bread and beer."

That is the opinion of a business man, and there is no good blaming the Government ; it has been said that every nation gets the Government it deserves, and it is perfectly clear that, until public opinion is altered, the Government dare not take stronger measures. At present, as it w^as in the days of Isaiah, " The people love to have it so, and what shall there be at the end thereof ? "

(3) For can it be yet said that as a nation we have wholly come back to God ?

It is quite clear that " if there is a God, He is everything " ; Mr. Burroughs, in the book to which I have referred, finely quotes Browning in this connection :

" Religion's all or nothing ; it's no mere smile O' Contentment, sigh of aspiration, sir — No quality o' the finelier tempered clay- Like its whiteness or its brightness ; rather stuff O' the very stuff, life of life, and self of self."

Either Paul is mad or Festus ; if Paul is not mad, then Festus is — Festus who left out God, or who patronised Him or argued about Him, to pass the time of day.

And yet how many Festuses have we had ! How many may be among you who read these words ? '* Well ! I vote that there is a God,"

said a well-meaning man to encourage me after a lecture in the open air in an East End Park. And that dumb instinct for God has not been silenced by all the secularist arguments or the long reign of a materialistic gospel of comfort ; it is always there, and it is the hope of the future.

But could God, if He had judged by outward signs have known in recent years that we voted there was a God ? Was His Day more or was it less observed ? Was He more or was He less openly worshipped ? Did He control the national life ?

In a noble letter quoted in the Press, written by Blake and Deane to the Speaker, during Cromwell's first Dutch War, these words occur : " We dare not in this great business to promise anything for or to ourselves, because it is God alone Who giveth courage and conduct with opportunity and success in the day of His salvation."

Have we had the same open acknowledgment of God in our nation's life in recent years before the war ? It is for that reason that I would recall your minds to the great picture of God in the book of Malachi : " He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver." The trial goes on ; the fire burns ; the heat is great, but it is not purposeless ; the silver is there all right and there is going to be a great use made of it, but it still needs to be purified and refined.

We cannot remember too often the words of the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, Sir David Beatty : " When the nation turns to God with humble heart, and prayer upon its lips, then we may begin to count the days towards the End ! "

I hold this picture of God to be specially appropriate to-day.

(i) Because it recognises the beauty, the value of what has been revealed in the war. Officers can find no language adequate to describe the patience, endurance and courage of our men ; I asked the heads of the great City firms, when we held a memorial service for the hundreds of City clerks who had given their lives, if they did not feel like men who find a " treasure hid in a field " ? They little realised the heroes they v/ere breeding in their offices.

The silver has come out also in the service and loving sacrifice of our girls ; there is not an idle girl in England to-day, and as for the fortitude of our mothers — I speak as one who lives among the mourners — it is too beautiful for words.

Already the great Furnace of Affliction has purified the silver, and in the glowing metal, God already sees a reflection of Himself, the sacrifice of Calvary is being reproduced every day.

(2) In the second place, this picture of God is so encouraging because it reveals God at work.

He is not idle or forgetful, or uninterested ; " He is not on a journey," nor is He an absentee landlord of His world ; He is in the thick of it all as ever, but, as ever. He is obliged to work by the laws He has laid down for Himself in dealing with the children of men ; we are told that the Son of God Himself on earth " could do no mighty work because of their unbelief " — before He came into the world at all, He had to wait for the fulness of time, and the great Advent itself will only come when the times are ripe.

But He hopes on, and works on ; little by little the dross is purged away ; the silver becomes clearer ; this is a Day of God which is to change the world for ever, and the process must not be hurried.

Church and nation must humble themselves before His cleansing Hands, and there is nothing that He cannot do with a humble Church and a GoD-fearing nation ; we may change the Government or not ; we may reconstruct the Cabinet, but no change will avail, unless as a nation we put God first ; and no difficulty can be so great out of which God cannot lead a humble and GoD-fearing nation.

(3) But what is true of the nation is true of you and me. I have just come from a great gathering in one of our London theatres, and it was touching to hear two actors, a professor of art, and a great singer all bear their witness to the need of the human heart for God.

He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver, and part of the silver treasure which He longs to purify and use for Himself is the human heart and love and powers of each living soul.

Do you wonder that the trial is so hot, the loss so terrible, the anxiety so wearing that you have to bear ? Look up and see the object of it all ; He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver ; the fire is never allowed to be too hot ; there has no temptation taken you but such as is common to man and, if you look round, there is always the way of escape that you may be able to bear it ; He doesn't send the war, but He uses the war ; He turns evil into good ; He breathes upon the flame lest it scorch you up.

But more than that, He has sent His Son to be in the fire with you.

There is a story in the Old Testament which will never die ; there were three mortal men cast into the fire, and the fire was heated sevenfold more than it was wont to be heated ; but they came out to the astonishment of the world, and even the smell of fire had not passed over them.

What was the secret ?

There had been a fourth with them in the burning flame, and the form of the fourth was as the Son of God.

Ill

" And he, trembling and astonished, said, Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ? " — Acts ix. 6.

The conversion of St. Paul is one of those few events in human history which have really moved the world ; in the first place it is an absolutely certain event, so certain that — as is well known — it convinced of the truth of Christianity one of the leading deists of the eighteenth century ; there certainly was a man called Saul and he certainly became the character whom w£ know as St. Paul. But it is not only the certainty of the event which is so moving, but the touching character of it ; I never get tired of thinking of the great and dazzling light — " a light that never was on land or sea " — and the extraordinary romance of the voice which spoke and which rang in St. Paul's soul until the end of his

* An address delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral, Nov. 19, 1916.

life, " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me ? " " I am Jesus, Whom thou persecutest."

But of course the special characteristic of the great event was its permanent and lasting character ; the man himself became a changed man ; his old ideas, his old prejudices, his old conventionalities were blown away as by the bursting of a shell ; his very first question shows the practical character of his conversion : " Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ? " and to the letter and to the death this wonderful man lived out his own conversion ; he saw at the first instant that this stupendous experi- .ence must lead to action, nor did he once shrink from the difficult and dangerous action which he was instructed to take.

Now we have just arrived in the National Mission at the critical moment. As chief of the staff of it, I have finished my tour round thirty dioceses of England at Plymouth and Truro ; nine times a week in open air and crowded hall or great church have I spoken in London since the beginning of the Mission ; hundreds have done the same ; three hundred priest messengers have been sent forth from St. Paul's Cathedral and their work has been supplemented by laymen and women ; the same is going on from one end of the country to the other ; very moving accounts come in from all over the country ; often in London the messenger arrives at the parish without his name being divulged, and gives his message for two or three or four days to a people which have been previously prepared by weeks of prayer and intercession. Men who have not previously been known as great preachers have thrown themselves on the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Ghost has honoured their trust. Some of the most remarkable impressions have been made by those who have been looked upon up to now as men of only average attainments and powers.

But now comes the question — What is going to be the outcome of it all ? I have said it a thousand times and I say it again now : " If we are going back to the old England and the old Church of the time before the war, then not only will that Mission have been in vain, but our men and boys will have died in vain ; for the war to cease now and at once civil war in Ireland to break out ; the suffragette outrages to be resumed ; * and the great

* One of these three is settled ; please God, the other two will not lag far behind. — ^January 1918.

'What wilt Thou have Mc to do?'

industrial strife, only just averted by the war, to begin at last, if that is to happen, then the great day of opportunity w^ill have passed over our heads in vain. " If thou hadst knovi^n, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace, but now they are hid from thine eyes " — ^would be uttered over our country, as it was uttered with tears over Jerusalem two thousand years ago. No ! we must recognise that :

" Our world has passed away For wantonness o'erthrown, There's nothing left to-day

But steel and fire and stone ! " *

and it really does seem very like blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, to have all these hours of prayer, these fervent invocations of the Holy Spirit, and then to allow the National Mission to degenerate into a harmless way of spending the autumn for those who are not allowed to go to the front.

The Nation, the Church and the Individual are bound, if they have seen the light and heard the voice with St. Paul to also ask with him : " Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ? "

(i) Let us take the nation first, * Rudyard KipUng.

The nation acted up to its highest and most glorious traditions when it went to war in August 1914 ; and since then it has shown a grit and a power of initiative and a service and self-sacrifice which has astonished the world, and not the least the enemy which had dared to count upon the British as a decadent race.

So far we are all agreed.

But now what shallow critics fail to see is that it is the greatness of our vocation which induces Repentance ; it is only aspiration which makes anyone sorry that they are not better ; when we see the glorious role assigned to us by God in averting the degradation and slavery of the human race (what has happened in Belgium now is proof positive of this), and the trampling under foot of small nations and the " right to live " for Serbia, Belgium, Montenegro, Poland, Roumania, then it is that every true patriot deplores as he never deplored before — the broken fellowship which led to the evils of 191 4, the " hidden scourge " which affects our population, the ravages of drink in the nation ; the overcrowding of the slums in our great cities and the thousands in the country who live without any open acknowledgment of God. Here we are, called to

S5 a long and hard struggle to see the war through to the bitter end (for never must we leave it to be done all over again by our children) ; called to sacrifice our every comfort and even what we think necessities in ordinary times, while our men are daily sacrificing their lives ; called when the war is over, to shine like a great star with an overwhelming influence in the world we have never had before, and because we are called to do this, therefore we are all the more bound as a nation to ask : '' Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ! " How can I be worthy of this position ? If what we say and do and think is to influence the whole human race, as what the British Empire of the future says and does and thinks will influence the whole world, then can we be too careful that the religion we practice is the true religion, that the morality we profess reflects the will of God, and that the social condition of our own country shall be at least some reflection of the human brotherhood without which the world at large can never be a kingdom of God ?

" What wilt Thou have me to do ? " We are bound to ask it first as a nation, and a voice seems to come at once from Heaven : " Come

S6 back to God as a nation ; know Him in your homes ; worship Him in the houses set apart for the glory of His Holy Name ; abolish the false double standard of morality for men and women which has obtained too long ; let rich and poor work together in loving brotherhood ; let Capital and Labour cease their eternal wrangle ; I gave to the children of men plenty of land, plenty of water, plenty of food and plenty of air ; start again to see if human mismanagement and greed need always spoil the distribution ; it is the law of human life to work, but the fruits of industry are quite sufficient to sustain you all.

" What will I have thee to do ? Accept for the first time in the history of the country, the full Christian law of love, and you shall have a brotherhood at home which shall convince the world of the beauty and reality of a Kingdom of God on earth."