Westminster Sermons. Charles Kingsley

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СКАЧАТЬ degradation, so may we be?  Shall we not rather say—Their misery and degradation must pain His sacred heart, far more than our sinful hearts; and if He does not come down again on earth to help them Himself, it must be because He means to help them through us, His disciples?  Let us ask Him to teach us and others how to help them; to enable us and others to help them.  Let us pray to Him the one prayer which, unless prayer be a dream, is certain to be answered, because it is certainly according to God’s will; the prayer to be taught and helped to do our duty by our fellow-men.  And for the rest: let us pray in the words of that most noble of all collects, to pray which is to take refuge from our own ignorance in the boundless wisdom of God’s love—“Thou who knowest our necessities before we ask, and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our infirmities, and those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask, condescend to give us, for the worthiness of Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.”

      SERMON V.  THE DEAF AND DUMB

St Mark vii. 32-37

      And they bring unto Jesus one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech; and they beseech Him to put His hand upon him.  And He took him aside from the multitude, and put His fingers into his ears, and He spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, He sighed, and said, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.  And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain. . . . And they were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things well: He maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.

      Our greatest living philologer has said, and said truly—“If wonder arises from ignorance, it is from that conscious ignorance which, if we look back at the history of most of our sciences, has been the mother of all human knowledge.  Till men began to wonder at the stratification of rocks, and the fossilization of shells, there was no science of Geology.  Till they began to wonder at the words which were perpetually in their mouths, there was no science of Language.”

      He might have added, that till men began to wonder at the organization of their own bodies, there was no science of healing; that in proportion as the common fact of health became mysterious and marvellous in their eyes, just in that proportion did they become able to explain and to conquer disease.  For there is a deep difference between the wonder of the uneducated or half-educated man, and the wonder of the educated man.

      The ignorant in all ages have wondered at the exception; the wise, in proportion as they have become wise, have wondered at the rule.  Pestilences, prodigies, portents, the results of seeming accidents, excite the vulgar mind.  Only the abnormal or casual is worthy of their attention.  The man of science finds a deeper and more awful charm in contemplating the results of law; in watching, not what seem to be occasional failures in nature: but what is a perpetual and calm success.

      The savage knows not, I am told, what wonder means, save from some prodigy.  Seeing no marvel in the daily glory of the sunlight, he is startled out of his usual stupidity and carelessness by the occurrence of an eclipse, an earthquake, a thunderbolt.  The uneducated, whatever their rank may be, are apt to be more interested by the sight of deformities, and defects or excesses in nature, than by that of the most perfect normal and natural beauty.

      Those, in the same way, who in the infancy of European science, thought it worth while to register natural phenomena, registered exclusively the exceptions.  Eclipses, meteors, auroras, earthquakes, storms, and especially monstrosities, animal or vegetable, exercised their barbaric wonder.  The mystery and miracle which underlies the unfolding of every bud, the development of every embryo, the growth of every atom of tissue, in any organism, animal or vegetable—to all this their intellectual eye was blind.  How different from such a state of mind, that calm and constant wonder, humbling and yet inspiring, with which the modern man of science searches into the “open mystery” of the universe; and sees that the true marvel lies, not in the infringement of law, but in its permanence; not in the imperfect, but in the perfect; not in disease, but in health; not in deformity, but in beauty.

      These words are true of all nature; and specially true, it seems to me, of our outward senses and faculties; true of sight, hearing, speech.  The wonder, I think, with the wise man will be, not that there are deaf and dumb persons to be found here and there among us: but that the average, nay, the majority of mankind, are not deaf and dumb.  Paradoxical as this assertion may seem at first, a little thought I believe will prove it to be reasonable.

      Whatever view you take of the origin of sight, hearing, voice, the wonder to a thoughtful mind is just the same; how, under the storm of circumstances, and through the lapse of ages, those faculties have not been lost again and again, by countless individuals, nay, by the whole species.  For we must confess that those faculties are gradually developed in each individual; that every animal and every human being which is born into the world, has built up, unconsciously, involuntarily, and as it were out of nothing, those delicate and complex organs, by which he afterwards learns to see, hear, and utter sounds.  Is not the wonder, that he should, in the majority of cases, succeed without any effort of his own?

      And if I am answered, that the success is owing to hereditary tendencies, and to the laws by which the offspring resembles the parents, I answer: Is not that a greater wonder still?  A wonder which all the discoveries of the scalpel and the microscope have been as yet unable, and will be, I believe, to the last unable, to unravel, even to touch?  A wonder which can be explained by no theories of vibratory atoms, vital forces, plastic powers of nature, or other such phrases, which are but metaphysical abstractions, having no counterpart in fact, and only hiding from us our ignorance of the vast and venerable unknown.  The physiologist, when he considers the manifold combination of innumerable microscopic circumstances which are required to bring any one creature into the world with a perfectly hearing ear, ought to confess that the chances—if the world were governed by chance—are infinitely greater in favour of a child’s being born with an imperfect ear rather than with a perfect one.  And if he should evade the difficulty; and try to explain the usual success by saying that nature is governed by law: I answer—What is nature?  What is law?  You never saw nature nor law either under the microscope.  They too are metaphysical abstractions, necessary notions and conceptions of your own brain.  You have seen nothing but the fact and the custom; and all you can do, if you be strictly rational, is with a certain modern school to say, with a despairing humility, which I deplore while I respect—deploring it because it is needless despair, and yet respecting it because it is humility, which is the path out of despair and darkness into hope and light—to say with them, “Man can know nothing of causes, he can only register positive facts.”  This, I say, is one path—one which I trust none here will tread.  The only other path, I believe, is, to go back to the lessons which we ought to have learnt in our childhood, for those to whom the human race owes most learnt them thousands of years ago; and to ascribe the ever successful miracles of nature to a Will, to a Mind, to a Providence so like that which each of us exercises in his own petty sphere, that we are not only able to understand in part the works of God, but to know from the very fact of being able to understand them—as one of our greatest astronomers has so well said lately—that we are made in the image of God.  To say with the old Psalmist, that the universe is governed by “a law which cannot be broken:” but why?  Because God has given it that law.  To say “All things continue as they were at the beginning:” but why?  Because all things serve Him in whom we live and move and have our being.  To confess the mystery and miracle of our mortal bodies, and say with David, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made; such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me, I cannot attain unto it:” but to add the one only rational explanation of the mystery which, thank God, common sense has taught, though it may be often in confused and defective forms, to the vast majority of the human race in all times and all lands—that He who grasps the mystery and works the miracle is God; that “His eye sees our substances yet being imperfect; and in His book are all our members written, which day by day were fashioned, when as yet there were none of them.”

      And then to go forward with the Psalmist, and with the common sense of humanity; to conclude that if there СКАЧАТЬ