Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from How Shall the Parish Feast Be Dealt With?: A Sermon, Preached at St. Mary's, Bedford, on Wednesday, July 7, 1858, at the Visitation of the Lord Bishop of Ely
But it is too late now. Our Lord tells us, No man having put his hand to the plough and look ing back, is fit for the kingdom of God. The vows once taken are past recal. 'lhey encircle us so that it were better not to have been born, than to be come false to them. We are pledged in the sight of God, and angels, and men, never to cease our labour while work remains to be done and power remains to do it. We must give ourselves to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine, as those who know that the time is short we must bend all our energy to the great work of saving souls for Christ; we must be instant in season and out of season, as those who believe that (in the words of Chrysostom) then only will it be no time to reprove when our reproof shall have taken effect.
And when once we realize the urgent necessity of being ever on the watch for Christ, of ever taking heed that our lamps burn brightly, we shall think every matter of detail of consequence. The sum of our work is made of details, for each of which we must be prepared. Therefore it is that I venture to ask your attention, not to any large circle of our duties, which could only hastily be glanced at in the time allotted me, but to a single item of them, - our mode of dealing with the Annual Parish Feast. It is a more important subject than at first sight appears. If the Feast now gathers up, and brings to a centre, much of the evil going on in our parishes through the rest of the year; and if it be possible, God help ing us, to find means of lessening this evil, and even of drawing out good; then it must be a vital ques tion with us how we may use such a time to main tain and set forward, as much as lieth in us, quiet ness, peace, and love, among them that are com mitted to our charge. One consideration, espe cially, must make the Feast of great interest to ourselves, - the interest it creates in our people. We cannot safely neglect a day which is looked forward to, and dated from, in our village annals; a day when the usually sluggish current of rural life is stirred into activity. Wherever men's minds are opened to more than wonted feeling, there surely is needed our sympathy with it, if good; our rebuke of it, if evil; our direction of it, if good and evil combined. In the terrors of soul caused by sudden6 A Visitation Sermon.
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