VI.] GREEK & LATIN CHURCHES, POPES, 16TH CENTURY. 101 portion of Scripture history we have been considering, unless I were ready to accept it—subject to that change which our Lord Himself has proclaimed to us—as a real interpretation of modern facts, both when it seems to make in our favour and when it condemns us. The great schism of the Latin and Greek Churches, strikes the student of ecclesiastical records as a most startling contradiction in the history of a body which was to include all nations and races. Yet it was surely from the Lord. Idolatrous habits and feelings had been spreading in both divisions of the church. The sense of union in an invisible Head, though not lost, was fearfully weakened. A seeming union must have been preserved by the loss of all witness for real union; the division remains a standing witness against the possibility of a visible Head ever holding the Catholic body together.

The schism of rival popes in the western church during the fifteenth century was as great a scandal to Christendom as can be conceived. Yet it was surely from the Lord. It led men to perceive that there was corruption in the head and in the members of the ecclesiastical polity; it led to those disputes respecting the relative powers of popes and councils, which showed that neither could heal the wounds of the Church or preserve its unity. It led to that movement in the sixteenth century, which we all I trust believe to have been from the Lord, and which was really a declaration of faith in a living God, against a system of idolatry, that was rapidly passing into a system of organised unbelief. In each of these cases there were chances of reconciliation, such as were offered to Rehoboam when the people besought him to lessen their burdens. In each case there were grave counsellors advising reconciliation and noisy fanatics preaching uncompromising resistance. In each case the infatua

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[Serm.

tion of princes and rulers, ecclesiastical and civil, was carrying out a divine and eternal principle even when they were defying it. They could not restore unity by declamations, by concessions, or by persecution. Facts, spoke louder than the Prophet spoke to Rehoboam, "It cannot be. The thing is from the Lord."

In the last period to which I have alluded there were, in England as much as in any country, those who looked upon the new and reformed state of things merely as a means of establishing their own power, who regarded the Church as an instrument of keeping up that power; who valued a worship in their own language, not because it brought their countrymen nearer to God, but because it was a badge of separation from foreigners; who protested against the idolatry of papal nations, and were really making royalty, or the privileges of the upper classes, or money, as much objects of their idolatry, as the calves in Dan or Bethel were to the ten tribes. And therefore we must not shrink from the acknowledgment, that the different sects which rose up in this land, seemingly to rend the body of Christ more completely asunder than it had been rent already, were from the Lord. There were idolatries in the ruling body which made such divisions inevitable. The first impulses of those who began them were like those of Jeroboam, pure and honourable. They became spokesmen of hearts which were suffering under a burden; they encountered Rehoboams in the State and proud men in the Church, who said, "Let us change rods into scorpions;" compromises failed, persecutions failed; the thing was from the Lord. And the lesson was repeated again in those separating bodies. Politic men rose up, who sought to make the division permanent and hopeless. The separate priest, and

VI.]

COMMON SINS NEED COMMON CONFESSION.

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altar, and sacrifice must be introduced, that there might be no recollection of the bond which united them to those from whom they were severed. Hence the one sacrifice for mankind became lost in the notion of some special salvation for themselves. New forms of intellectual, if not sensual, idolatry appeared; the victims of them groaned under the narrowness and bondage, which they had been taught to call liberty. Are not many of them even now ready to turn for refuge from their sectarian faith and freedom, sometimes to the vaguest forms of unbelief, sometimes to the most perfect and universal despotism over conscience and will?

Oh, brethren! how intolerable would be these facts and recollections which show every party in Church and State to have been the cause of shameful scandals, which forbid us to cast stones at others because we are in the same sin, if we might not recur again and again to the words which I have quoted so often. But if the thing is of the Lord, there must be an end of all those strifes by which He has ordained that our idolatries against Him and cruelties to our brethren should punish themselves. There must be a day when all things in heaven and earth which consist only by Christ shall be gathered manifestly together in Him, when it shall be known and confessed that there is one king, one priest, one sacrifice; that we have been at war with each other, because we have not done homage to that one king, drawn nigh to God through that one priest, omitted to present that one perfect sacrifice. And those who are willing before God's altar to own that their self-seeking and self-will have been rending asunder their families, the nation, the Church, the world, may hope that God's Spirit will work in them henceforth to do all such acts as shall not retard, but hasten forward the blessed consumma

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[Serm. VI. tion for which they look. They may ask to be taught the mystery of daily self-sacrifice-how to give up their own tastes, opinions, wishes. They may ask that they may never be tempted to give up one atom of God's truth, or to dally for one moment with the falsehoods of themselves or of their brethren; because truth is the one ground of universal peace and fellowship, because falsehood and division are ever increasing and re-producing each other.

SERMON VII.

THE CALF WORSHIP DENOUNCED.

LINCOLN'S INN. CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL.-JAN. 25, 1852.

1 KINGS, XVI. 7.

Also by the hand of the prophet Jehu, the son of Hanani, came the word of the Lord against Baasha, and against his house, even for all the evil that he did in the sight of the Lord, in provoking him to anger with the work of his hands, in being like the house of Jeroboam; and because he killed him.

BAASHA occupies no very remarkable place among the kings of Israel, nor Jehu, the son of Hanani, among the prophets. But the narrative in the text is a compendious statement of the relations in which the kings and prophets of the ten tribes stood to each other after the division of the kingdom. I wish to consider this subject upon the present occasion, taking it up from the time of which I spoke in my last sermon, and continuing it to the reigns which received a new character from the prophecies of Elijah and Elisha.

A man of God, who, we are told, came out of Judah by the word of the Lord unto Bethel, marks the transition point between the older history and the new. The chapter