Читать книгу Life of Octavia Hill as Told in Her Letters онлайн

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Ladies’ Guild,

March 27th, 1855.

To Emily.

Thank you for your two dear letters. They interested me very much indeed. Have you read “Brave Words”?^[17] I think G. and you might like to read it together. Mr. Maurice preached at Lincoln’s Inn on Sunday morning. I did not know of it. Since I have known him^[18] I have missed hearing him four times, Stepney, Whitechapel, lecture on Newspapers, and last Sunday. It was a funeral sermon for Mr. Mansfield; and all his friends met together afterwards. They are going to have it every year. Mama went with me in the afternoon. The text was the 27th verse of the fourteenth of St. John. Mr. Maurice began by saying that these words were not understood at the time they were spoken. The events which followed them seemed the most awful contradiction of them; for even He who had spoken them appeared to have lost then the gift which He promised. The question was, What peace was it which He gave? It could not be peace in the world; the wars, the contentions showed that that had not been given. The Gospel which they brought to the world seemed to bring divisions not unity, strife not peace. It could not be peace in the Church; for a few weeks it seemed as if this might be the gift which Christ had left. They had all things in common; and then arose contentions, people pretending to have sold their possessions, and given the whole value of them to the Church, when they had retained half. Paul rebuking Peter; discussions about circumcision. Was it outward peace for themselves? Never had any set of men experienced so little as the Apostles. Was it inward peace, a cessation of all fierce war with evil, of all conflict? Surely not. For that which Christ promised He must have realised Himself. They had heard the cry on the Cross, and seen the agony in the garden; surely there never was a more awful fight with evil than that which He had carried on. Above all, they had forsaken Him themselves. If anything would add to their sense that they had no peace, it would be that when they thought they were ready to die for Him, they had left Him; the cross and death did not divide Him from them so much as their unfaithfulness. But all this showed that the peace which He promised could be no outward peace; that it could not be felt till they were ready to give up that. The sense of a friend, a deliverer, the revelation of a Father, would give them really a peace which the world did not give, and could not take away. I forget how it came in, but Mr. Maurice mentioned Christ’s look to Peter which made him weep, and contrasted that with Judas’s remorse. I would give you a better account of this sermon, but I ought to have written it before. It is now confused in my mind with Kingsley’s, the one I heard on Wednesday, and with several things I have been reading.