VI. THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS.* 'O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.'— HAVE no scruple, honoured as I have been by the invitation of the Committee which has cared for the restoration of this venerable Cathedral Church, to preach to you this evening,-I have no scruple in turning aside from the ordinary range of the topics which form, and fitly form, the burden of the faithful preacher's message, to think of matters, most worthy of occasional discussion in a discourse to be spoken from the pulpit, which the very look of the restored and beautified sanctuary presses this evening upon my mind and yours. With the serious remem * Preached in the Cathedral Church of St Giles, Edinburgh, on the evening of Sunday, June 1, 1873. brance that the house of God in which we are met is a holy as well as now a beautiful place: amid the thronging associations of the ages through which, in the most diverse ways, Christian people who are gone have here worshipped God: with the earnest prayer for the sensible presence of that Blessed Spirit without whom no ritual, however ornate or however simple, can be acceptable worship; I desire to lead you to think for a little while of the point at which we stand in the National Church of this country in the respect of form and order in the public worship of God: doing this, as I trust, in a fashion which, not concealing my own strong prepossessions and convictions, may tend to conciliate and not to offend good Christian folk who think and feel quite differently: as indeed some few of my most esteemed friends do. No Scotchman who has lived to middle age can look round this choir; can remark its decorous arrangements, so familiar to some of us elsewhere though so rare here; can think of the type of worship (varied, indeed, only in non-essential details) which has been adopted since the re-opening of the cleansed and beautified structure, now retrieved from the disgrace of squalor and gloom that had come through years of neglect and ignorance: without feeling, as truly we are made to feel in many other ways and places, what a change has passed and is passing on the Scottish mind in the regard of Externals in the public service of God. The day was, wherein a confused but firmly-held belief prevailed, that the inspired declaration that God is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth was a declaration on the side of a severe simplicity in worship: I am sure you have heard the ever-memorable saying of our Blessed Redeemer quoted in that sense. Now, we know better. We know (a glance might always have shown it) that the famous text simply says that worship must be sincere and hearty; but adds not one syllable as to what kind of worship is likeliest to be so. Under the sublime vault of Westminster: amid the glories and memories of Canterbury: in the inexpressible loveliness of Wells with its environment of deep southern green and the enchantment of Glastonbury and Avalon; that text might be preached from in as good faith as in the homeliest Scotch country church amid its great trees and green graves this June. Dear to us, through the remembrances of our fathers and mothers gone, through the whispering memories, now in these careworn days when we are wearying in the pilgrimage, of bright summer Sundays when we went to church as little children, and watched, the long sermon through, the swaying branches through the opened windows with little brothers and sisters lost in the growth of years: dear to our Scotch hearts may be the humble sanctuary with its hearty psalms, as perhaps no grand cathedral that appeals to the calm æsthetic |