Page:A Sermon Preached in the Temporary Chapel of Keble College.djvu/14

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

10

from which I shrink with horror, if I ask all of you who are communicants to do your best to fit yourselves for Communion that day, and to join with us in that "Eucharistia" which is at once a blessing and a thanksgiving, in that solemn invocation of our dear Lord's presence amongst us to accept and sanctify from the very first the worship of our Chapel. And then at every after Eucharist, and, in due kind and degree—according to His promise to those who gather in His Name—at every after Service in the Chapel, let us, helped by its outward beauty, strive to realize the fact of His presence amongst us.

O God! unseen, yet ever near,
Thy presence may we feel;
And so, inspired with holy fear,
Before Thine Altar kneel.

If we fail, brethren, in faith to realize this presence of our Lord amongst us, we miss what would be unspeakably precious, a comfort in sorrow, a refuge in temptation, a terror to sin, a sanctification in happiness, a stimulus to effort, an opportunity for seeking guidance and counsel: His presence would give us "the heart" both "to love and to dread Him." I would add, let our acknowledgment of it find its natural outward expression. I thank you, brethren, for my own part, and may I say for His sake, and for your own, for the general reverence of behaviour in Chapel. Let us maintain it and perfect it. I do not mean to ask individuals to seek new or marked