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largely a question of temperament. We can only say that to us it is exactly the opposite of irreverent. To us it represents the appealing fact that He was crucified in weakness. Mystically, beyond all doubt, the Lord was reigning from the Tree. Realized in its inner purpose and effect, this Death is a kingly deed. But none the less, in actual historic fact that disrobed, thorncrowded Form was what the dying thief beheld; and it converted him, as it has converted multitudes ever since. The glorified Figure on the cross is neither so historic nor so constraining as a presentation of the actual facts. It is worth reflecting whether the period which represented the Crucified robed and glorified was not the period which tended to obscure Christ's true humanity by exclusive stress on His Divinity. It is difficult to think of the calm, serene, and kingly Figure as uttering the cry of desolation. This is not said in order to exclude it by any means. Let both forms of the crucifix be placed within the church. Only, the glorified crucifix can never take the place of or do the work of the crucifix in its unadorned reality. Perhaps their relation may be rightly expressed by saying that the ordinary crucifix may convert and the glorified crucifix console. But those who have experienced what the realistic crucifix can do by way of moral, constraining appeal, if not to prevention of evil, at least to penitence, will certainly agree that the substitution of the glorified for the real would be the loss of one of the most powerful agents in the conversion of mankind.

It is very wide Christian experience that the image of Jesus crucified awakens within us powerfully the realization of His love Who died that we might be redeemed. It is certain that the Rood with Mary and with John, the mother who bore Him and the disciple whom He loved, is so intensely human and yet Divine that the heart of the Christian religion finds expression in it.

That the crucifix is coming to be more valued than it was by English people is one of the most hopeful signs of awakening faith.

Editor of The English Church Review.

O

Father Stanton as a Preacher

From Arthur Stanton- A Memoir

By G. W. E. Russell

RATORY was the most conspicuous of the powers which Nature had bestowed upon him. He had all the graces of fluency and gesture; a sense for dramatic effect; a voice of flexibility and compass, wit, at times, a studiously deliberate intonation, which was extraordinarily effective. But though he was an orator he did not trust to oratory. From the beginning he meditated deeply on the subjects of his sermons, and in early days wrote them out, though he never took a manuscript into the pulpit. Although through long practice he had become a great master of the preacher's art, his care in preparing for the pulpit only increased as the years went on. His colleague, Mr. Russell, writes:

"Some who heard him went away with the impression that his utterances were the easy, spontaneous fluencies of his natural eloquence and cost him nothing. This is a great mistake. I have before me six quarto volumes in his handwriting; they are dated from 1894 onwards, and they contain on every page a more or less elaborated outline of one sermon; in all, over a thousand sermons. Apart from the intrinsic value of these outlines, they remain as evidence that the gifted speaker, who had been preaching regularly for thirty years, continued to the end to bestow equal trouble upon every sermon that he preached, preparing it as thoughtfully and writing down his thoughts as carefully as if he held his long experience of no account. He was not a great reader, but he thought much, and brooded over what he read and heard. Amongst the preachers for whom he had the greatest admiration, Phillips Brooks stood first, but he found more help in Spurgeon, whom he loved, and towards the end-in Dr. Parker, whose powers as an expositor he placed very high

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Nothing in Stanton's preaching was more noteworthy than his intimate knowledge of the Bible. In quoting it, he almost

invariably confined himself to the Authorized Version. He took little heed of disputed readings, and held himself untrammeled by the dogmas of textuaries and commentators. But of the words of Scripture, as it stands in its unequalled English, he had an easy and felicitous command. Prose writers he scarcely ever quoted, but he was extremely fond of quoting poetry, good and bad, and hymns, which though not always poetical, were when he declaimed them, extremely impressive. The constant, indeed the invariable, topics of his preaching were sin and forgiveness; the love of God towards the sinner, and the sinner's need of the cleansed heart; the guaranteed access to the Lord through the Sacrament of the Altar, and the reverent love due to the Blessed Mother of God. "People," he would say "who are not Marian are often Arian.”

The following is a description of Father Stanton's famous "Monday Evenings " given by an occasional attendant:

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Every Monday in August, as also in Advent and Lent, Mr. Stanton holds a special service at eight o'clock in the evening in St. Alban's Church. What Puritans pleasantly call "meretricious attractions " are utterly banished. The service is plain. Even the choir is banished. Yet an hour before the appointed time a great company of men and women, old and young, is pouring into Brooke Street, or winding into the church through the more devious paths of Baldwin's Gardens. A quarter of an hour later it is uncomfortably crowded. Every seat is occupied. Late-comers are driven into the chancel. All the choir stalls are full. Rows of extra seats are brought in. Men who can find no room to stand or sit, crouch on the Altar steps.

"As the clock strikes eight, Mr. Stanton climbs into the pulpit, huddling on his surplice as he goes. From the pulpit he conducts, in a slightly shortened form, the ordinary Evening Service of the Church. We read the Psalms, verse by verse, as if it were in some old-fashioned village church, untouched by the ritualistic movement; but, when we come to the Magnificat,' Our Blessed Lady's Own Song,' we sing it, as the preacher bids us, with a will. When the prayers are ended, we burst into a hymn -perhaps of Faber's type, perhaps of Sankey's; but in either

case, 'burst' is the right word; for the whole congregation sings with a fervour of devotion, pent-up but now liberated, and the great volume of male voices gives the singing a massiveness not usual in mixed congregations. Then Mr. Stanton rises from his knees, and begins to preach. His sermons are not easy to describe. They follow none of the conventions of the pulpit. They range widely over the broad field of faith and duty. The appeals to conscience are vivid and pointed; but they are interspersed with touches of humour and sarcasm which provoke a responsive sound dangerously like a laugh. Most notable is the preacher's whole-mindedness his intense grasp of his own beliefs, his absolute charity towards those who do not share them, and his abounding humanity.

"Backwards and forwards he sways his graceful form, unbent and undisfigured by age. He turns to the sea of faces in front of him. He wheels round to the overflow in the chancel. His voice, as Mr. Gladstone said of Bishop Wilberforce, is 'sometimes like a murmuring brook, sometimes like a trumpetcall.' Now it sings until it is nearly inaudible, and now you see the preacher's hold upon his hearers, for they stretch forward with hands to ears, and strained and anxious faces, lest they lose the smallest word of the spell which this magician is weaving round their hearts. And all this, remember, year after year, in a slum church, in the holiday season, on a week-day evening. I know no triumph equal to it, at any rate in the Church to which I belong.

"Now the preacher has come to an end. The service has lasted a little over an hour. Two thunderous hymns again shake the roof. The blessing is given, and we stream out towards Holborn and Gray's Inn Road. It has been, for all its frequency, a wonderful experience; and what is the meaning of it?

Dynasties come and go, Empires rise and fall, literatures vanish from the memory of man, forms of polity wax old and perish, and the ancient homes of great peoples survive only as the sepulchres of the dead; but the broodings of the soul on the hereafter never fade or die. To any fresh or earnest word on

those most solemn and mysterious of themes men listen with the eagerness which a fond imagination ascribes to the Ages of Faith."

W

Survival and Immortality

From the Hibbert Journal.

E are sometimes inclined to think, with a natural regret, that the conditions of life in the eternal world are

so utterly unlike those of the world which we know, that we must either leave our mental picture of that life in the barest outline, or fill it in with the colours which we know on earth, but which, as we are well aware, cannot portray truly the life of blessed spirits. To some extent this is true; and whereas a bare and colourless sketch of the richest of all facts is as far from the truth as possible, we may allow ourselves to fill in the picture as best we can, if we remember the risks which we run in doing so. There are, it seems to me, two chief risks in allowing our imagination to create images of the bliss of heaven. One is that the eternal world, thus drawn and painted with the forms and colours of earth, takes substance in our minds as a second physical world, either supposed to exist somewhere in space, or expected to come into existence somewhen in time. This is the heaven of popular religion; and being a geographical or historical expression, it is open to attacks which cannot be met. Hence in the minds of many persons the whole fact of human immortality seems to belong to dreamland. The other danger is that, since a geographical and historical heaven is found to have no actuality, the hope of eternal life, with all that the spiritual world contains, should be relegated to the sphere of the "ideal." This seems to be the position of Höffding, and is quite clearly the view of thinkers like Santayana. They accept the dualism of value and existence, and place the highest hopes of humanity in a world which has value only and no existence. This seems

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