Project Canterbury

Sermons Preached on Special Occasions, 1860-1889

by H. P. Liddon

London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1897


SERMON XIII.
LOVE AND KNOWLEDGE.

[Preached in the Chapel of King's College, London, on the Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity, Nov. 9, 1873.]

Philippians i. 9, 10.

And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge.

SUCH a passage as this, in to-day's Epistle, must ever be of great practical value to serious Christians. One of the gravest questions of the Christian life--a question perpetually recurring--is, what it is best to pray for. Happily for us, children of the Church, this question is to a great extent settled, and settled authoritatively. The Church of England teaches us prayers which have been hallowed, many of them, by the usage of some fourteen centuries or more. The use of our Prayer Book associates us with millions of Christians, who, with the same words on their lips, and the same hopes and aspirations in their hearts, have trodden the path of life, often under circumstances as unlike our own as the imagination can conceive, on their way to the home which we all hope to reach at last.

But although we can never thank God sufficiently for thus providing for our wants, we cannot, I suppose, conclude that all the needs of single souls are thus provided for. Every soul has a history of its own; its own hopes and fears, its own failures and conquests, its own inner record of love and suffering,--known partly to itself--known perfectly to God. The most earnest prayer is based upon, grows out of, this inward region of felt, yet only half-appreciated facts; and the wide and general language of the Church, which befits the whole kingdom of souls, and in a large but most true sense meets the broad representative needs of each, fails from the nature of the case to touch all that is peculiar to the necessities of the solitary spirit. Every living soul prays some prayers which no collect has ever fully anticipated. Every soul must own to some wants, some difficulties, some apprehensions, which no liturgy has at any rate put into exact shape. And sincere communion with the All-Seeing and the Eternal involves necessarily the constant effort to place the facts of the human spirit's secret life before Him as they are--whether human language is equal to the task, or whether, as is probable, much must be left to those inward motions of the Eternal Spirit, which, we are told, cannot be uttered in language.

Now it is in this province of mental prayer (as it is called) that such an example as the Apostle's is peculiarly valuable. When St. Paul informs us what are the blessings which he would win for his flock by prayer, he gives us a regulating principle for many of our own private prayers. He does not prescribe the words. The words, and even the attending feelings, may, often will, take care of themselves. But he tells us in what direction the stream of entreaty is to move. And since sincere prayer must be based on sincere desire--and this is stimulated by our intimate apprehension of what is best for us--such rules for prayer as these are much more than rules for prayer; they are, by implication, schemes or ideals of what is best. Thus St. Paul is teaching us the law of true progress in the Christian life when he tells us for what he prays--"This I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more, in knowledge."

I.

Here, see, first, what St. Paul takes for granted as the basis, the underlying substance, the raw material of the Divine life in the soul of man. "This I pray, that your love may abound." It is not "This I pray, that your knowledge may abound yet more and more in love"--but "that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge." And this order of the ideas, need I say it, is by no means a rhetorical accident. Whenever in St. Paul's writings knowledge and love are put in competition with each other, the precedence is assigned to love. For as compared with knowledge, love is intrinsically a stronger thing; and it is worth more practically. To be knit to God by love is better religiously than to speculate about Him, however accurately, as an abstract existence. To enwrap other men, perhaps multitudes, in the flame of a passionate enthusiasm for private or public virtue, is better than to analyse in the solitude of a study rival systems of ethical or political truth. Each has its place, but love comes first; and if St. Paul said this, we may dare to say it was because the Divine inspiration which swayed him overruled the natural bent of his mind, and forced him to recognise the primacy of love. St. Paul, with all his passion, was, before everything else, a dialectician by nature; he bends here, as always, to the intrinsic force of things--let me rather say, to the genius of the Gospel. "Though he should speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and had not charity, he was but as sounding brass and as a tinkling cymbal." "Knowledge," he knew, "puffeth up; charity edifieth." "After that, in the wise providence of God, the world through philosophy knew not God; it pleased God through the foolishness of preaching"--the substance of that preaching was the Infinite Charity Himself--"to save them that believe."

"The philosophy of the world," he says, "is foolishness with God." "Charity," he maintains, "is even greater than the great graces of faith and hope;" how infinitely must it transcend knowledge!

It may indeed be objected that, if love is to exist at all, it must have an object, and that the loving soul must have some knowledge of this object. And reference may be made to St. Peter's precept, that Christians should give all diligence to add to their "faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity,"--where charity is represented not as the foundation but as the crowning of the spiritual edifice. An examination of this deeply interesting passage might prove that the order of Christian attainments in it has no kind of reference to their succession in the growing life of the soul. Yet, were this otherwise, in placing faith at the head of the list, St. Peter is not really contradicting St. Paul. Faith and love, so distinct in our treatises on Christian ethics--nay, often in the pages and arguments of the New Testament, are in the living soul practically inseparable; just as in the living body the nervous and arterial systems are indissolubly blended, although for the purposes of science they must be studied apart. Yes! faith which worketh by love is the only faith worthy of the name;3 the only faith, be well assured of it, which justifies the sinner. And if a soul loves, it loves because it already believes, because by one spiritually simple act faith has detected and love has forthwith embraced its only adequate object.

So it was practically in the first age; so it has been since. A personal affection for Jesus Christ our Lord was then, is now, the first step, the fundamental thing, Christian living. With the conscious life of a Christian soul begins the love of its Object. It sees Jesus Christ our Lord, and it loves Him. For He appeals at once to the affections, where they are not warped by some fatal twist, as the truest, the supreme Object of love. What is it that provokes love? Beauty. In a lower and transient sense, physical beauty; in a higher and permanent sense, moral, spiritual beauty. Our Lord's moral beauty acts upon the affections of a true soul as the sunshine acts upon the petals of a bud. The soul opens involuntarily at His bidding to welcome Him, to bask in His Light, to rejoice in His justice, His tenderness, His veracity, His self-sacrifice. Therefore St. Paul held that to know and not to love Jesus Christ was to be self-condemned; the power of loving Jesus Christ being an unerring test of a man's heart being in the right place. "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema maranatha."

Secondly, love is called forth by a specific kind of moral beauty, by generosity. The generosity of Jesus our Lord in giving Himself to become Incarnate and to die for us men appeals to the human heart even more powerfully than the faultless beauty of His character. The story of the Passion has melted heathen savages, ere now, to tears; the philosophy of self-sacrifice is always intelligible. "Scarcely for a righteous man," observes St. Paul, "will one die: yet perchance for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth His love to us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." "He loved me, and gave Himself for me;" this is the reflection which bids love spring up in the Christian heart; and thus "the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if One died for all, then were all dead: and that He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him that died for them, and rose again."

But, further, love is a distinct endowment. It is not evoked certainly, inevitably, by the operation of the great motives referred to upon our natural sense of fitness, or upon our conscience of right. There is much without, within us, God knows, ready to nip in the bud any fair flower; ready to stifle any pure and lofty impulses of the soul. The provocation from without must be reinforced, corresponded to by some heaven-sent influence within. And thus genuine Christian love is an infused grace: "the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost Which is given unto us." What else might have been a passing gust of feeling, human perhaps to the verge of sin in its real colouring, is thus transfigured, strengthened, steadied, made permanent by the breath of the Most Holy: it becomes thenceforth a constant and powerful influence, penetrating, swaying, ruling, the inmost life.

Yes! brethren, let us be sure of it--the fundamental thing in the renewed soul is the love of Jesus Christ, God and Man. To love Him our Saviour is to love God, and to love our fellow-men. To love Jesus is to love the awful, illimitable, inaccessible God, so presented as to be within the compass of our finite capacities; condescending to us in a form in which He and His Ineffable Perfections have become, if I may so say, concrete and intelligible. To love Jesus is to love man--man set forth before our eyes in such sort as worthily to claim our ungrudging love; man, relieved from the dreadful entail of his historical, ever-accumulating burden of corruption; man, restored for once to a perfect correspondence, which is at once evident, with the primal sketch, the complete idea, the archetype of his being. And thus the love of Jesus is the common source of all that is most purely spiritual in religion, and of all that is most fruitful and creative in philanthropy. It is with St. Paul as with St. John; it is now as in the first age; it will be to end of time, as now, the fundamental thing in the religious life.

II.

But St. Paul would have this love abound in knowledge.

The knowledge which St. Paul is thinking of is doubtless primarily religious knowledge. The higher knowledge--epignosis, not merely gnosis--is what he prays for, as the complement of love. There is a period in the growth of love when such knowledge is imperatively required. In its earlier stages the loving soul lives only in the light and warmth of its Object. It sees Him, as it were, only in a blaze of glory. It rejoices to be before Him, beneath Him, close to Him; it asks no questions, it has no heart for scrutiny; it only loves. It loves and worships; and worships and loves again; it passes its moments, it exhausts its energies in a wellnigh uninterrupted ecstasy. But from the nature of the case this period comes to an end. Not because love grows cold, but because it becomes exacting. Love cannot make certain that it will live in a cell, apart from thought, apart from society, apart from those many influences which may too easily, if neglected, act upon it as a destructive solvent. "No man," it has been said, "can permanently keep his philosophy in one mental compartment, and his devotion in another." And this being so, love has, sooner or later, to come to an understanding with thought, both private and public. In order to live it must essay to know something accurately about its Object. What is He? Whence is He? What can be known of His ways, His works, His will? It is easy to say that love ought not to ask questions: sooner or later it will ask them. And if these questions are not wisely and truly answered; if, instead of knowledge, nothing but guesses, surmises, myths are forthcoming; then, sooner or later, love in its disappointment sickens and may die. It may recoil with a sense of weary languor from the Object on which its gaze has been so intensely fixed; it may feel that He cannot really satisfy its own enthusiasm about Him, unless He, the Same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, shall stand out before it in clearer outline, unless it can grow more and more in such knowledge, as it may.

How repeatedly, as those must know who know anything of the religious trials of this generation, has this been realised within the last twenty years in the experience of single souls. Why is it that, in so many cases, the sons of deeply religious parents, or men who have been themselves deeply religious men--so far as we can know and speak of such a thing as that--why is it that they have often, in our days, under our eyes, passed from the fervour of love to the blank despair, to the deadly chills of some godless theory of the universe and of life? Well, my brethren, there are in some cases, no doubt, other reasons to be given for this catastrophe. But in some cases, at least, I dare to say, here is the governing reason;--that no care has been taken for them, or they have taken no care for themselves, that love should grow more and more in knowledge. So that a time has come to them, when facts which they might have seen to be embraced and fully accounted for in a comprehensive and yet strictly religious philosophy of being, break in upon their intelligence with a sort of brutal violence, and so suddenly, that they cannot recover their sense of the harmony of all facts in a new and wider survey; and so the vision of love which has hitherto entranced them seems to be intellectually forfeited. And then, as the whole life of spiritualised affection withers away within them, they conceive themselves martyrs, not to the neglect of knowledge, but to the exigencies of some scientific or metaphysical truth. It is a piteous spectacle; but if anything can add anguish to a Christian's sense of what it really means, it is the reflection that it need not, in many a case, have presented itself at all.

Further, this law we are considering will explain what happened in the history of the Christian Church. In the earliest Apostolical age--at Pentecost and for a while after--love reigned alone, uninquiring, ecstatic. There was daily worship; the daily Eucharist; the fellowship and doctrine of the Apostles. Love had her fill and was at peace. But ere the Apostles had passed away from earth, this earliest rapture of the Church had ceased. When the Gentiles pressed into the fold, questions were, could not but be, asked, about the terms of Church Communion. When the Life and Death and Resurrection of Jesus, inevitably suggesting the tremendous and vital problem of His Personality behind them, came into contact with the Greek Philosophy, a whole world of inquiry irresistibly suggested itself. It was part of the providence of God; it could not, so far as we can see, have been otherwise. And so, in God's providence too, love had to grow and did grow in knowledge. Each of the four groups of St. Paul's Epistles marks a distinct stage achieved under the guidance of Apostolic inspiration, in the doctrinal insight of the earliest Church. Each of the great Alexandrian teachers, Clement--yes! in his measure, Origen--certainly Dionysius, and greater than these, Athanasius and Cyril, poured some new light upon Christian inquiry. The Church passed from the prayers and agonies of the Coliseum and the Catacombs to define, under altered circumstances, her unchanging faith at Nicaea, at Constantinople, at Ephesus, at Chalcedon; not indeed presumptuously to add to what Apostles had taught once for all, but to scan, to catalogue, to study the Apostolical treasure of the Divine Words more accurately than before, and in face of those who would have impaired it. Men who have surveyed Christian Antiquity with jaundiced eyes have said that love had then grown cold, and had given place to dialectics. Men who believe in Christ's presence with His people may see in the great Councils an answer to the Apostle's prayer for love's growth in knowledge; may trace, at any rate thus far, its realisation in Christian history.

Nor, if the great Apostle had been among us now, would he have ceased, we may think, to pray this prayer. How much love, how much moral power, is wasted among us Englishmen only through our ignorance! Look at our religious divisions. Are they not due, at any rate in part, to widespread ignorance of the Will of God respecting the structure of His Church, and the true means of growth in grace? Look at our popular Charities. Are they not administered with a zeal which would achieve fifty per cent, more than it does, if it were dispensed according to economical knowledge? See the jealousy of science among religious people; I mean jealousy of scientific facts; there is abundant reason for being shy of the caprice of hypothesis. We may be assured that science is only waiting, in God's good time, to echo Revelation. Or consider the dislike of beauty, a bad tradition which we have inherited from the Puritanism of the seventeenth century, and which is now lashing the well-meaning fanaticism of the country into a stupid outcry against disinterested efforts to improve the tone and efficiency of public worship. Surely if love had grown a little more rapidly in knowledge, the natural hostility of the world to the efficiency and progress of the Church would not have been aided, as it is aided now, by the co-operation of many sincerely religious men. Who can doubt that we of this generation need to pray St. Paul's prayer more earnestly than ever?

III.

What has been said with more general reference applies, my brethren, with particular force to the theory, the law of Christian education.

Education, if it is to deserve its name, must begin with the heart. Until a pupil's affections are won, the true groundwork of the process is not mastered. That a certain communication of knowledge may be achieved without the mediation of love; that it may be achieved through the intervention of a strong sense of self-interest, or in a purely mechanical way, by the employment of social pressure, or even by apprehension of bodily discomfort, I do not deny. I am far from saying, too, that in a loftier system all these instruments can be entirely discarded; but, depend upon it, for real lasting work they will not suffice alone.

Probably many of us have been reading a book which has lately appeared, and which illustrates this truth, as it appears to me, with singular force; because it shows how the repression of love, as the first agent in the sacred work of education, will sooner or later assuredly avenge itself. In Mr. John Stuart Mill's Autobiography he gives us an account of the home training which contributed so largely to make him what he became in later years. And in reading that singular record it is difficult to say whether the persistent, merciless, intellectual forcing, which few minds would have been able to bear, or the rigid exclusion of all affection, is its more remarkable feature.

From first to last love is not merely repressed, it is ignored. There are no friends of that cheerless boyhood.

His mother is not once named. His father appears as a restless grim inexorable machine for stimulating thought and for enforcing discipline. Above all, He Who is the One Object of love, He Who made the human heart, and Who alone has the key to its deepest recesses, He is ignored of set purpose; or rather, I should say, "ignored" is not the word that does justice to the reality. At any rate, He is treated as if He were at best an hypothetical Being, Whose existence could not be scientifically verified, and Who therefore lay outside the range of practical considerations. Well, my brethren, we must admit it, this education achieved success. From one point of view it achieved splendid success; at any rate, such success as it ever aimed at. And few educated men of this generation--even among those who differ most widely from Mr. Mill on the most important questions that can possibly engage human attention--would deny that they owe something, at any rate, to his intellectual enterprise, to his clear and direct methods of investigation and of thought, to his passion for fact in that somewhat narrow sense wherein he understood the expression.

But did this theory of education, judged by its own measurements, entirely succeed? was the heart, during these years when its fresh and tender impetuosities should have been recognised and guided, was it indeed repressed with entire impunity? No, assuredly: as the old poet has it--

"Naturam expellas furcâ, tamen usque recurret."

It will reassert itself, this wronged or baffled human nature, when it is repressed in any name but His Who made it. A few years pass, and the deep fountains of a character which was not unendowed with strong and tender passion are broken up; and in Mr. Mill's later writings we see affection invading regions of inquiry, from which its rigid exclusion might have been advocated by others than professed philosophers. Not to go further--in his treatise on the Subjection of Women, and in the socialistic elements which colour some portions of his work on Political Economy, Mr. Mill pays, unconsciously, a most real, although an unintended, tribute to the claims of the heart in the work of education. Late in life, if not before, the heart asserts its rights, and in its revengeful insurrection against the stiff pedantry of boyhood and adolescence it imports its own prepossessions into the discussion of questions which, had its true place been recognised earlier, would doubtless have been decided, as they should be decided, by the light of a passionless logic, moving cautiously forwards in the cold but serene atmosphere of pure intellect.

There is, of course, a danger to be recognised from an opposite quarter. Education, which begins and ends with the heart, I have already said is, in all ages--in our day especially--full of grave risks to the heart's best interests. And the object of King's College, as its motto suggests, was assuredly to provide for both; for the heart first, and then for the understanding. "Sancti et Sapienter"--what is that but educated love increasing more and more in knowledge? It was a noble conception--entertained in a day when such conceptions were less common than they have since become--thus to blend in a great institution, in the face of the increasing irreligion of the time, and at the very centre of national activity and thought, the best discipline of the heart with the best discipline of the intellect, by leading intellect and heart alike to the very foot of the Throne of Christ. What wonder if such a project enlisted the support of names representing all that was noblest and best in England? what wonder if your first Principals--especially one never to be mentioned but with the highest honour, Hugh James Rose--and then a long succession of teachers, whose influence has spread widely and far beyond the walls of this institution, have justified before the world the motto which you dared to take; have shown how possible it was to combine the claims of a tender conscience, illuminated by faith, with the claims of high intellect, pushing its conquests far and wide across the realms of experimental or speculative truth?

But have you always succeeded? My brethren, let us, in this sacred presence, above all things, be sincere. Can I forget--I can never forget--the two years which I spent as a schoolboy (I had no part in the higher education of the place) in the vaults below this chapel, twenty-nine years ago? There was, indeed, training for the intelligence in abundance, and of the best kind, the "sapienter" was well provided for. But what of the "sancti"? Well, I must dare to say it, that if, after leaving King's College School, I had not come into contact with other influences, I might have shrunk to the end of my life from the religious truths which now have a first place in my heart! And why was this? Not because religion was ignored; we learnt Bible history, Church history, texts, dates, doctrines in abundance. Not, I am quite sure, because those who were charged with the administration of studies had not the claims of religion at heart; they were notoriously high-minded and deeply religious men. But the truth was, the chill tradition of an earlier generation--a dark cloud which might seem to have drifted down from the coldest skies of the eighteenth century, and to have cast its shadow over the youth of this place,--still rested there. We had not yet escaped into the sunshine which was ours by right, in virtue of our motto. Religion was an affair of the head, in which the heart had little place, if any. There were school prayers; there were religious lessons; there were examinations in religion, as in other things. But there was nothing to touch a boy's soul; there was nothing to reflect God; nothing to make the Christian life in its lofty and pure ideal a popular power among 500 boys; there was nothing to maintain even the semblance of a struggle against the inevitable, the terrible evils of schoolboy life. It was the spirit of Epictetus rather than that of Jesus Christ which we here felt, although the language, the forms, the associations were Christian. And a religious philosophy, however pure, cannot do the work of His Love Who died upon the Cross. . . . Since then it is notorious matters have changed, and in the direction which the Apostle, could he have been among us, would have prescribed. You are making common worship interesting and reverent. You are appealing to influences which no education can forget. You are recognising the claims of love as the basis of human training, without forgetting the claims of knowledge.

My brethren, education--let me say it once more and for the last time--must begin with the heart. Even where the deepest motives are not appealed to, the heart is appealed to, with success. We see this elsewhere in schools and universities, which, if they are prudent, make so much of the esprit de corps. What is the esprit de corps but love for a teacher and a home which represents a great tradition--a tradition to which centuries have contributed; a tradition entwined with the public history of the country, enriched, spiritualised by many a link with progressive thought and sacrifice in the Church; a tradition to which successes have added symmetry and completeness; a tradition which, in its ripe self-confidence, draws strength and new enthusiasm even from occasional failure; what is the esprit de corps, I ask, at bottom but love, stimulated by a very complex object which yet on the whole appeals with truth and power to the heart of every man or boy who comes under its influence?

It may be felt by some of those who, whether as teachers or taught, are associated with the present or the past of this great College, when they take stock of its existing resources and capacities, that whatever the triumphs of its pupils on the field of practical and public life, whatever the ability and accomplishments to which it can undeniably point during a long series of years in its teaching staff, it has been hitherto somewhat wanting in one great element of permanent moral power. Is it not the case that while men have given their labours here most ungrudgingly, they have given their hearts to some other home, and that the College has failed, as an institution representing a moral, religious, historical idea, to enlist the purest and strongest and most lasting sympathies of its pupils? In saying this I may be quite mistaken, as judging only from a narrow range of experience, and from a now distant past. But even if I am right--the times are changing. We are passing, my brethren--it is a truism to say it--through a transitional period. At our older Universities recent legislation has, excepting in the case of a single faculty, severed the tie which for centuries has bound these ancient bodies, and their associated colleges, to the English Church. And although one modern foundation is nobly struggling to repair the loss, and as yet the face of things has not been generally changed, and a stranger walking through our streets and quadrangles might persuade himself of the enduring continuity of our ancient life, they who live upon the spot and have to consider questions of the hour know that it is not so. Of course, the rosebud does not wither as soon as it is plucked; there may even be a moment of languid beauty when it first begins to droop--a moment which appears to justify the act of the spoiler. We have not yet had time to see the real effects of recent changes; and we are too probably on the eve of changes to come. Few can be so sanguine as to suppose that recent legislation is final, or that what yet remains to the Church in her ancient homes is not logically destined to be taken from her. We seem to be passing across the interval which separates a religious past--whose opportunities were, alas! too sadly neglected--from a future of pure secularism. And when this goal has been reached, institutions like King's College, if they are moderately true to their idea and principles, will enter--cannot but enter--upon a splendid inheritance. Their poverty will be their protection against the religious ruin to which ancient wealth now exposes the great foundations of our ancestors; they will stand erect, let us hope, teaching in its purity and without exaggeration--teaching without compromises or conscience clauses of any sort--teaching in fearless simplicity the faith of the English Church--teaching it still when older teachers are either silent or are boisterously or cynically hostile. ["One expression in the Sermon might give a false impression. There is a 'conscience clause' in the College system; that is to say, students are not obliged to attend Divinity Lectures if they plead a conscientious dissent. It seems to have been of long standing. But the author was not aware of it when he referred to the subject in his Sermon."--Extract from the Preface to this Sermon.] That day, depend upon it, will be the day of your opportunity. Who would not wish that that opportunity could have come, if later than it will, yet naturally, and at a less grievous cost? And yet these things are ordered, as all else, by a wise and loving Providence. His movements are too solemn to furnish matters of anything like complaint against human agents; it is no time for making the worst in a hard logical spirit of a cause which must be dear to all good men. All that can be said is that God's providence seems to be moving in the way I have described; we can but bow our heads and recognise, even when we cannot understand His action. But the great question for this and other places remains, whether they will be equal to the destiny which so probably awaits them; whether they will learn that education means much more than so much knowledge or so much mental exercise, even religious subjects being included; whether they will content themselves with perfecting a mechanical provision for the understanding--or will aim, with a nobler ambition, at taking captive the hearts of all who seek education at their hands. It is because the occasion of to-day seems to link itself naturally with such hopes as these, that we may so thankfully associate ourselves with it. In this beautiful building, in these bright services, in these many surrounding tokens of zeal and life, we may trace the energy of a new spirit, which is in its real essence and efficacy more precious far than anything that can charm the eye or fall upon the ear. It is the spirit of love taking its true place in the work of education. You cannot anticipate the centuries; you cannot, within the lifetime of a generation, crown a recent foundation with those attractions and graces that only come with time. Time, indeed, soon passes, and for those who succeed us he will have achieved his work; but we meanwhile can at least partially anticipate him, by taking care that love shall here ripen into knowledge, instead of expecting that mere knowledge will kindle love. Ah! what it might do--let me rather say, what it will do--in this place, a love which, entwining itself around all the incidents and associations of a great Institution, of a body of devoted students, teachers, and learners, should centre persistently in our Adorable Redeemer, and then should flood the created understandings around Him with light--light of all kinds and degrees of brightness, but especially that best of all kinds of light which is never divorced from love, and which will lead us on to the dawn of the Eternal Day!


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