PREFACE. THE SERMONS Contained in this little book were suggested by the Judgment pronounced in the case of Mr. Voysey, and were consecutively preached in S. James's Chapel, York Street. Some matter now included in them was omitted in delivery, and the Sermon on Freedom in the Church,' though last in point of time, is now placed at the beginning, for obvious reasons. It takes the place of an introduction. I must apologise to some of my readers for the way in which some things are repeated over and over again in different words; but repetition, though dull, is not always a mistake. The reasons why I publish them appear sufficiently from the Sermons themselves. The Judgment itself is not impugned in them, but certain phrases on three great subjects, which, I believe, have crept in unawares, and which seemed to many to impose the views of a special party on the whole Church, are claimed as unintentional errors, or as intentionally modified by other phrases. With inferences, generally speaking, we have nothing to do. A legal decision looks only to the exact question before it. But these phrases (which are dwelt on in the text)—şince they were partly mixed up with the questions decided and seemed to go beyond them, and since the inferences naturally drawn from them were taken by many as actual decisions binding on the Clergy—troubled so many persons, and compromised the Clergy so much in the opinion of others, that it was impossible to be silent. It seemed, therefore, necessary to openly claim the liberty we had hitherto enjoyed in quiet, and to deny that the Judgment really intended to abridge it. To some these Sermons will seem too orthodox, to others the contrary; but I trust that all will recognise in them my sincere adherence to the great doctrines of the Divinity of Christ, of the necessity of a Revelation and an Atonement for sin, and the deep desire I possess that in the midst of those manifold differences of opinion, the existence of which I cherish as a means of arriving at truth, we may not lose our liberty through fear, nor our reverence for truth through recklessness of opinion on the one side, or through a blind devotion to transient forms of thought upon the other. STOPFORD A. BROOKE. |