Open Windows

And when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; (now his windows were open in his chamber toward Jerusalem;) and he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.—Daniel 6:10.

Windows as we use them to-day serve a double purpose. They not only admit the air, they also provide a view. We value them for vision as much as for ventilation. They feed our eyes as well as our lungs. Whether it be landscape or street, wooded valley, winding river and tree-crested hill, or thronged pavement, bustling crowd and jostling traffic, we crave to see out of our windows. If the wood shuts out our view, some trees must fall: if the room looks on blank walls, its rent is less. The modern man values his window for the world it opens to him without, not simply for the light it furnishes him within. And so when we can we choose the house with a view, the room with a view. When we re-model the old building, we plan cunningly to secure a vista. Walls are pierced and towers are reared and wings are built for the sake of the prospect. Happy the man who can afford it, secure it, and enjoy it. Many eyes go hungry for beauty most days of their life save for the sight of Gods changing sky.

In the architecture of the spirit there are fewer disabilities. I cannot choose the site on which my life has to be lived, nor can I decide the shape of the dwelling of the soul, but I can break through the wall and throw out a window where I choose. First, I must see to it that there are casements through which knowledge and love pour in plentifully. But this is not enough. I miss my birthright unless some opening be found or formed, though only a loophole, through which I can gaze on a chosen scene and descry the prospect I prefer. Without the window of vision, life lacks the splendour of spaciousness. We are invited to see not only the King in His beauty but also the far-stretching land. Though the house of my soul be but a hut, yet I can escape from littleness, if the land of far distances is open to my gaze. Though my lot be cast in a palace, if I have never learnt to throw back the shutters and to seek the horizon, I live a prisoned life.

Daniels open windows give us a revelation of—

The Courage of the Open Window.

The Piety of the Open Window.

The Imagination of the Open Window.

I

The Courage of the Open Window

1. The story of Daniel reads like a romance. He had been brought as a captive from Jerusalem at the age of twelve. On account of his comeliness and intellectual promise he had been selected, with other captive youths of noble lineage, to receive an education in Babylonian lore. He was assigned to the royal bounty at the kings table. A difficulty here confronted him. The meat that was spread upon the table had previously been offered on the altars of pagan gods. It is written, “Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the kings meat.” The alternative, which he chose, was a simple diet of pulse and water. He was the stuff that heroes are made of.

Time passed. Step by step he rose to successive positions of honour and responsibility until, the Medo-Persian Empire being divided into one hundred and twenty satrapies, he was made one of a triumvirate to rule over them. But his success and faithfulness had provoked the hostility of his pagan confrères; envy ever “hates the excellence it cannot reach.” In matters of public trust they could find no occasion against him; he was vulnerable only at one point—his religion. He was a Jew, a nonconformist. For many years he had been loyal to his ancestral faith. And just there the trap was laid for him. No doubt there were other Jews in Babylon. Daniel was a Jew who had reached a high place and influence. It was with Daniel as with Merlin in “The Idylls of the King”:—

Sweet were the days when I was all unknown,

But when my name was lifted up, the storm

Brake on the mountain and I cared not for it.

Right well know I that Fame is half-disfame,

Yet needs must work my work.

The conspirators knew the weakness of their king. They said to him, “King Darius, live for ever.” We “have consulted together to establish a royal statute, and to make a firm decree, that whosoever shall ask a petition of any God or man for thirty days, save of thee, O king, shall be cast into the den of lions.” It was, in fact, a proposition to deify the king. He was overcome by their flattery. The proclamation was drawn up, and the royal seal was affixed, making it “a law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not.”

The weak King blundered into the snare so dexterously spread at his feet. Not the faintest suspicion crossed his mind of the insidious design which underlay this piece of flattery. It pleased him to imagine that for a whole month, in all the provinces of his kingdom, men would be praying to him as to a god. And the proposal did not strike him as being in any way ridiculous. Among the Medes and Persians, the divinity that “doth hedge a king” was something more than a figure of speech. The monarch was regarded in some sort as an incarnation of Ahura Mazda, the Supreme Deity. His decrees were infallible, and could not be repealed. He dwelt in the privacy of his palace, secluded from the eyes of the profane crowd; fenced round by an etiquette fantastic in its stringency. The sculptures of Persepolis show the monarch wearing a peculiar kind of shoe, so as to elevate him above the stature of common men. The Persian kings, like the Emperors of Rome, were formally deified after death; their tombs became a kind of temple, where sacrifice was regularly offered. Thus Darius saw nothing absurd in his courtiers proposal, and readily gave his assent.1 [Note: P. Hay Hunter, The Story of Daniel, 295.]

2. Now it is evident that the Jews at Babylon might have conformed to this edict without any apparent sacrifice of principle. It did not touch the central doctrine of their faith; they were not commanded by it to worship any other God, they were not required by it to pay any Divine honour to the king. It was a negative, not a positive, decree. No royal mandate could touch their private devotions or check the free aspiration of their souls after God. The pious Jew might still hold converse with Jehovah; no law of Mede or Persian could render impossible that devout resolve of the Psalmist: “My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips; when I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches.” Persecution was not attempted; open apostasy was not required. Indeed, we can conceive that a spiritually-minded Jew might even have thanked God for the decree as not practically affecting his own religion, and yet, by a months suspension of idolatrous rites, striking a heavy blow at the false faith of his conquerors. Why, we may ask, should Daniel have fallen into a trap it was so easy to avoid? He need not drop one petition out of his daily prayers. He need not by word or gesture pay blasphemous honour to the new sovereign. Why should he obtrude his disobedience? Why should he expose himself to the skulking enemies who laid their treacherous ambush, and were bent upon his ruin? Was he courting martyrdom in its most awful form, as we know that some early Christians courted it with such enthusiastic self-devotion that at last the Church was compelled to anathematize the needless sacrifice of her sons? Was he reckless of the life so precious to his countrymen, who looked to him as their chief bulwark and champion, and whose hopes must have been bound up with the perpetuation of his influence?

There is something unspeakably sublime in the line taken by that Hebrew courtier. No fanatic was he, no headlong zealot, but the wisest and most diplomatic of statesmen and the farthest-sighted of men. Calmly and deliberately, with no false pride and no miscalculation of the danger, but perfectly aware of the risk, and counting all the cost to himself and to others, he “went into his house; (now his windows were open in his chamber toward Jerusalem;) and he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.”

What was it Luther meant when in the face of pope and council he insisted that the human intelligence must be freed? “Unless I be convicted of error by the Scriptures or by powerful reasons, neither can nor will I dare to retract anything. Here stand I. I can do no otherwise. God help me.” Oh the power and revelation of that word, Dare! It was the serious utterance of a brave, religious, human soul. So it has appealed to all human souls always. But it was the utterance of a soul conscious of God and of its own mysterious self. “I dare not retract,” it said. It was no outburst of wilfulness. The two compulsions, the compulsion to tell Gods truth to men, and the compulsion to come near to God Himself, held him so fast that he could not escape. There was no wilfulness. It was not that he would not be the slave of authority. He did not dare to be. It was not so much that he refused the obedience of men as that he gave himself heart and soul to the obedience of God.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Essays and Addresses, 381.]

II

The Piety of the Open Window

1. Daniel kneeled and prayed. He had arrived at an age when rash enthusiasm does not as a rule commend itself. And it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have refrained from making any open parade of his devotions. Who was to know, if he did not choose to tell, how Daniel passed his hours of seclusion? He was not a poor young captive now, but a great noble whose bidding multitudes obeyed, second only to the king himself; none dare intrude on his privacy. And it would not only have been the part of prudence to keep his religious observances to himself; he may well have felt that it would be for the interests of his adopted country that he and no other should steer the ship of State through the troubled waters of foreign policy. Mens prayers can be said in private as well as in public; and God would hear him no less in his secret chamber than if he were in the Temple at Jerusalem. If ever a man had good excuse for not making any open and public profession of unpopular beliefs, that man was Daniel. But yet he disobeyed the order of the king, and that with defiance. “When he knew that the writing was signed”—there was no delay until he might first gain the ear of the king and entreat his clemency—“when he knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; (now his windows were open in his chamber toward Jerusalem;) and he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.”

The story of Daniels trial is a parable of what happens every day, with young as with old. Things seem to be going well with us. Our lot is cast in a fair ground. We have a goodly heritage. Our religious life is easy, and requires no sacrifice, as it seems, either of comfort or fame or power. And then we suddenly discover that it would be for our advantage to conform more closely to the laws, social, moral, or religious, which the society around us prescribes. And self-interest urges that it is but a small matter, after all, that is at stake, and that it is not seemly to put ourselves in opposition to the opinions of the majority. Who are we that we should lay down rules for the conduct of life? Power and fame, these may be used for great and worthy ends; is it not the foolish part to sacrifice them for some fantastic scruple which even our best friends cannot understand? And so in our miserable self-deceit we silence the voice of conscience, and go on our way with one more link broken between ourselves and God. And if it be true quite generally—as indeed it is, and without qualification—that if we disobey any slightest hint of conscience, no matter whether other people understand it or not, we do so at our peril, it is even more plainly and emphatically true that we dare not tamper with conscience in the special matter of prayer. It was in this particular that Daniel felt, and rightly felt, that he dare make no change in his daily habits. Prayer is so intimately associated with all that is best and strongest in the religious life that anything which tends to lessen the sense of its importance or its solemnity is injurious to the health of the soul. Prayer: it is the very heart and centre of religion; and therefore it is that the habit of persistence in prayer under difficulty is one of the most important habits which we can acquire.1 [Note: J. H. Bernard, Via Domini, 265.]

“O prayer,” cried the impassioned preacher [Whitefield] in another part of his sermon at the second Calvinistic Methodist Conference, “O prayer, prayer! it brings and keeps God and man together; it raises man up to God, and brings God down to man. If you would keep up your walk with God, pray, pray without ceasing. Be much in set prayer. When you are about the common business of life, be much in secret ejaculatory prayer. Send, from time to time, short letters post to heaven, upon the wings of faith. They will reach the very heart of God, and will return to you loaded with blessings.”2 [Note: L. Tyerman, The Life of George Whitefield, ii. 56.]

2. Daniel prayed three times a day. Doubtless the points of time when he performed these acts of devotion were morning, noon, and night. The Jewish sacrifices morning and evening would suggest two of those times for prayer, if nature itself did not,—if suggestion were necessary. But, as Martineau has beautifully said, “All nations and all faiths of cultivated men have chosen the twilight hour, morning and evening, for their devotion,” “with an instinctive feeling” that the Being of God “is the meeting-place of light and shade, and that in approaching Him we must stand on the confines between the seen and the unseen.” Although the midday prayer was not so general, yet pious souls at noontide refreshed themselves with an act of Divine communion. Daniel observed these times of prayer “as he did aforetime.” He had formed the habit. Regularity as to times of prayer is necessary if devotion is to be sustained. It is not the irregular and impulsive act, but the restraint of impulse, or at least its guidance, that forms habit.

Daniel prayed three times a day, and, more than that, he had a particular place for praying, and a particular window at which he prayed, and a specific point on the western horizon towards which his devotions were directed. All of this was quite mechanical and formal; and yet we remember that Daniel was an exceedingly safe man in an emergency. The movements in the astronomic heavens are all of them along lines of mathematical precision, which at the first look may appear to rob the firmament and the dances of the stars of something of their poetry and song; and yet the fact, cold and unmelodious though it may be, enables us to compute the right ascension and declination of those stars for any given moment of the day, year, or century, which is something. Daniel was perhaps more methodical than poetic; but it is something to be able to forecast a mans latitude and longitude. The clock-work element in Daniels religion was quite conspicuous, and yet it is worth a good deal to have a man in trying times that will tick the minutes as distinctly as he, and strike with so full a ring when the hour comes round. It is good to have men who run so close with the sun that when it is foggy you can tell what time it is by looking in their faces.

The devout, diligent practice of regular and unhurried Secret Prayer is needed if only to protect and develop the freedom and the truth of habitual secret communion with God. And the momentary acts, anywhere and everywhere, of inmost heart intercourse with the ever present Lord are needed if only to keep burning the souls altar-fire, that it may glow both more promptly and more brightly when we shut ourselves in with Him at the stated hour.1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, Secret Prayer, 13.]

It seems needless to say we must have fixed times for prayer; that is obvious, but the difficulty lies in a thorough appreciation of the need for a fixed rule as to its practice and its diligent observance. The whole question of prayer is one of grace, and not unfrequently grace is most specially given where there is the most punctual obedience. Unless we adhere faithfully to our appointed hours of prayer, we are apt to be seeking self rather than God, and there is no slight danger that our time will be lost; indeed, were there no other benefit in a habit of punctuality, that of constantly giving up self-will would be great. It may be that when the appointed hour for prayer arrives, we are not inclined to pray, or chance circumstances would lead us to postpone the duty, and unless we persevere, we will soon acquire a habit of following our own inclinations, and our prayers will be regulated by mere taste or impulse; we will fall into the error of mistaking feeling for grace; our devotions will probably be curtailed, for when the right time has been let slip it is not easily replaced, and if we feel at liberty to choose our own times of prayer, we will no doubt also feel free to shorten our devotions. It is but a step further, if we have no definite rule, to give up all regular prayer. Without the help of grace weariness inevitably creeps in, and if we have no imperative rule to obey, we will surely be tempted to throw aside an irksome duty.2 [Note: Self-Renunciation, 2.]

3. The praying-place of Daniels chamber was in a different quarter from that of all the rest of the world. All the rest of the world looked eastward; he looked westward. The west was to them the region of death and darkness, while the east was the region of life and light. But to Daniel the west was the region of hope and new life. Salvation was to come not from the sunrise, but from the sunset, from the dark national calamities that were to endure for a night, while joy was to come in the morning, when the discipline of the darkness had purified and prepared his people for the light.

Sun-worship was an abomination to the Jews; and therefore the arrangements both in the Tabernacle and Temple were such as to cause the worshippers to face not towards the east, but towards the west, in the functions of religion. Such also was the practice of the Jews in the synagogue when the Temple disappeared after the destruction of Jerusalem; and by setting their faces in an opposite direction to that of the heathen worshippers of the sun, they attested their abhorrence of that worship. And hence the significance of the vision of Ezekiel, in which he saw, with horror-stricken eyes, a number of worshippers standing at the door of the temple of God, between the porch and the altar, with their faces towards the east, worshipping the rising sun in that quarter. This attitude implied that they had turned their back upon the Temple, and all the holy worship that was carried on in it; that they had forsaken the living and true God, and gone back to the idolatries of the heathen.1 [Note: H. Macmillan, Gleanings in Holy Fields, 68.]

4. The captive Jew of old in Babylon looked to the hills of Palestine. His desire was to them; his hope was from them. All the help that he expected to get in the world was to be derived from them. But the hills to which we are commanded and encouraged to look are higher than any earthly hills, and nearer too. We have to seek help from the highest source; and the highest source is not farthest off and most inaccessible, but nearest at hand and most easily got at. It is not hills on the remote horizon that are to give us help in our necessity, but hills that are around us, as the mountains are round about Jerusalem, closer, more impregnable, far richer in resources. Our help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. And let us remember that while His Divine presence fills immensity, His Saviour presence is peculiarly with His own.

Some of my children have learnt to feel the Presence of God, walking from here to there again and again. We move about in God. He is around us and within us. We are like tiny sponges immersed in the Ocean of God.

To gain the sense of this Presence is His gift, to be prayed for, and sought by continually doing little acts to please Him, so that almost unconscious prayer may grow more and more.

Set yourself specially to cultivate the sense of the Presence of God, i.e., that you are walking about, acting, thinking, in God. For He is nearer to us than the air which we breathe. The air enters into our bodies and is cast forth again; God enters our souls to abide there.1 [Note: Spiritual Letters of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 296.]

III

The Imagination of the Open Window

“His windows were open in his chamber toward Jerusalem.” Across far leagues, beyond palace and plain and desert, lay that city of the uplands. He would never see it again. The last living link with it had been snapped long ago. He had risen to a pinnacle of power in his adopted country. Vast affairs absorbed his attention. Yet his chosen chamber looked towards the west, and in the hours which he could call his own, when his inmost life was disclosed, he pushed back the lattices and looked towards Jerusalem as he knelt to pray. That unshuttered casement was the symbol of his spirit. Beyond the pomp and pageantry of the Persian capital, he ever turned to the city of his memories and his hopes. His was a soul with a view.

1. None but a great poet could declare what the open window towards Jerusalem meant to Daniel. It was the city of his birth and of his God, the capital of his nation and the loadstone of his hopes. Prosperous and exalted, he was still the exile; it was the city of his love and of his dreams. But it is worth while to point out that it was neither superstition nor sentimentalism that drew his gaze towards the hill city in its ruin. It was not superstition. Muhammad, when he was feeling his way towards ceremonial details of the new faith, taught his followers for a while to turn towards Jerusalem when they prayed. The Jews failing to join him, he altered the direction towards Mecca. In either case, the impulse was superstition and the result an act of ritual. Had Daniel supposed that Jehovahs influence was supreme only at Jerusalem, his faith could never have triumphed in a city of towering ziggurats from whose lofty summits looked down victorious gods. If ever he was tempted to brood upon the shattered towers and ruined homes of the city of his birth, his faith conquered. He came to that Chamber of Vision to pray, and his habitual prayer was thanksgiving. He “gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.” Sentimentalism is impossible to him who lives as “seeing him who is invisible.” No, that outlook towards Jerusalem meant for him the tenderness which memory awakes, impulse to present duty, the confirmation of a dauntless hope. It meant an escape from the hardness and materialism and idolatry that hemmed in his life. It meant an easier approach to God and a surer starting-point for faith. The soul with a view is a soul with a way of escape and a path of ascent and a fountain of courage.

Just as the Scottish emigrant in Canada dreams of the mountains and moors where he was born, and sees the glen again, and the burn swollen with the rain, and the dripping bracken, and the glory of purple heather; so Daniel in exile, heartsick if not homesick, craved for the land and the Temple that he loved. He could not see them; they were beyond his vision. It would bring them no nearer to fling wide the lattice. Yet an instinct that every one of us can understand moved him to open the window towards Jerusalem.1 [Note: G. H. Morrison, Sun-Rise, 212.]

Not every one is born where nature or history have enriched the soil, but there is an answering echo in most mens breasts to these words of R. L. Stevenson:—

Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,

Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,

Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,

My heart remembers how.2 [Note: R. C. Gillie, The Soul with a View, 13.]

An old lady, just returning from a visit to New Haven, said that there she sought the old homestead, to find not a vestige left except a venerable elm that had stood before her fathers door. “I would have kissed it,” she said, “but for the passers-by. As it was, I stood and affectionately stroked the bark of the old tree.” It may be that Daniel too had often looked away through these open windows, in fond remembrance of the scenes of his former life.3 [Note: D. J. Burrell, The Wondrous Cross, 118.]

2. But Jerusalem was to Daniel more than the city of his fathers and of his birth. It was the city of his faith. It symbolized for him not indeed religion but the religious community. There were Jews in the alien city where he ruled in magnificence; there were no doubt informal gatherings which were the rudimentary beginnings of the synagogue, but Jerusalem with its Temple and its sacrifices was representative of the whole race in its religious aspect. The narrator means such thoughts to pass through our mind when we read of the lattices thrust back at the hour of prayer. This man cared not simply for his own soul or for his fellow-exiles but for his whole race, and the tie which bound together his nation was religious even more than racial. Jerusalem, then, was to Daniel what the Church is to us to-day—the focal point of the Divine influence upon earth. That influence is in humanity everywhere but it flows most freely and most fully in the fellowship of believing people we call the Church. We find Christ there in a perfectly definite sense. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” said He who is the Light that lighteth every man. Togetherness accentuates His presentness. The faith and the faithfulness of Christs people make them in their fellowship the natural and chosen dwelling-place of the Spirit of God, who once deigned to glorify the Temple of Jerusalem with His over-shadowing might. The Church of Christ is our Jerusalem.

How blessed, how untiring, the joy of this great companionship [of the Christian Church]. Those who once had known all the loneliness of aliens, the misery of strangers and exiles, without any holy commonwealth, without any hope, are now no more strangers, and foreigners, but are “fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God; are built into a holy temple, fitly framed together,” laid upon the strong foundations of the Apostles and the prophets. They have a city in heaven, which is their dear motherland; “Jerusalem on high, which is the mother of us all.” There their citizenship lies; and on earth they walk in all the virtues of the holy citizenship, in the habits of delightful intercourse, in the beauty of fellowship; “with all lowliness and meekness, forbearing one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

It was no dead metaphor—no vague allegory—to those who heard the Lord and the Apostles tell of a family of God—of a household of Christ—of a country, a kingdom, a holy nation—of a temple fitly framed—of a body compacted and entire. Yet what meaning, what reality can our broken Christianity give to words like these?

And are we content that they should have no meaning? Are we content to shut ourselves up in the narrow question, “Am I saved?” Shall we fasten our eyes on nothing but our own private interest in Christ—our own personal receipt for getting to Heaven, as if that were something that concerned no one but ourselves?1 [Note: H. Scott Holland.]

3. Moreover, Jerusalem was to Daniel the ideal city, the city of daring hope. Piercing the shadowy future, he saw that its destiny was high, its career by no means ended; it was no mere melancholy survival of shattered hopes. From Jerusalem up to God and from God down to Jerusalem—these two paths the eyes of the prophet followed daily. God and Jerusalem he saw together, and each helped him to see the other.

To different eyes the vision will take diverse forms. Blake speaks of “a spiritual, fourfold London” of which he dreamed. He was not much concerned with the material aspect of the city. He knew that this would be admirable if the dwellings of the Spirit were well formed and nobly conceived and conscientiously built together. Here is his description of the real, essential London, of which streets and squares are but the material casing, revealing or obscuring it. “Lo, the stones are pity, and the bricks well wrought affections, enamelled with love and kindness; the tiles engraven gold, labour of merciful hands; the beams and rafters are forgiveness, the mortar and cement of the work tears of honesty; the nails and the screws and iron braces are well wrought blandishments, and well contrived words; firm fixing, never forgotten, always comforting the remembrance; the floors humility; the ceilings devotion; the hearths thanksgiving.” Blakes words buried for a century in obscurity have become a watchword to-day—

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In Englands green and pleasant Land.2 [Note: R. C. Gillie, The Soul with a View, 22.]

Open Windows

Literature

Almond (H. H.), Sermons by a Lay Headmaster, i. 94.

Arnold (T.), Sermons, iii. 175.

Bernard (J. H.), Via Domini, 262.

Burrell (D. J.), The Wondrous Cross, 114.

Byrum (E. E.), The Secret of Prayer, 23.

Campbell (R. J.), Sermons addressed to Individuals, 37.

Gillie (R. C.), The Soul with a View, 3.

Gray (W. H.), Our Divine Shepherd, 247.

Huntington (F. D.), Christ in the Christian Year: Trinity to Advent, 155.

Hutchings (W. H.), Sermon-Sketches, i. 288.

Jay (W.), Short Discourses, ii. 239.

Kempthorne (J.), Brief Words on School Life, 104.

Leach (C.), Old Yet Ever New, 221.

MacColl (M.), Life Here and Hereafter, 198.

Macmillan (H.), Gleanings in Holy Fields, 66.

McNeill (J.), Regent Square Pulpit, ii. 225.

Morrison (G. H.), Sun-Rise, 207.

Parkhurst (C. H.), The Pattern in the Mount, 90.

Rowland (A.), Open Windows, 9.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xiv. (1868), No. 815; xx. (1874), No. 1154.

Vaughan (C. J.), University Sermons, 199.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xvi. (1878), No. 1061.

Christian Age, xxviii. 275 (T. de W. Talmage).

Christian World Pulpit, xl. 273 (Canon Duckworth).

Church of England Magazine, xxv. 282 (H. S. Richmond); xxvii. 240 (B. H. Blacker); xlv. 240 (T. Grantham).

Churchmans Pulpit: Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity, xiii. 182 (W. Downey); Sermons to the Young, xvi. 357 (A. Aitken).

Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., v. 309 (J. Vaughan).

Literary Churchman, xxxviii. (1892) 444 (E. R. Sill).