Seest Thou These Great Buildings?

A Sermon Preached At St. Dunstan&Rsquo;S Church, Liverpool,

1889.

‘Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down’ (Mark 13:2)

These words, on a first hearing, may startle you, and not sound like the right text for the day. But I hope to be able to show that they are eminently suited to the occasion which brings us together. Few, I should think, will deny that we are assembled for a very solemn and interesting purpose. We meet to consecrate to God, and open for public use by a special service, a new church. I pity those who find fault with such services, and fail to see their fitness and propriety. For this great building may stand for centuries, long after you and I are mouldering in our graves. Think how many myriads of immortal souls will assemble from year to year within these walls, think of the numberless sermons which will be preached and the sacraments which will be administered, think of the prayers and praises which will go up from these seats, think of the thousands to whom the means of grace begun today may be a savour of life and a help toward heaven when this congregation has left the world-- think of all this, as I bring before you a few thoughts which appear suitable to a consecration service.

The words of the text are a prophecy which was spoken by our Lord Jesus Christ a very short time before He was crucified. They were called forth by the remark of a disciple, who drew His attention to the magnificent buildings of the temple, as our Lord was walking out of it for the last time. That remark at once elicited a most fearful and unexpected reply: ‘Seest. thou these great buildings? There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.’ I see here much food for thought.

1. I ask you first to look carefully at the famous building which formed the subject of our Lord’s prophecy, and to consider its history. The temple of God at Jerusalem, of which our Lord foretells the complete destruction, was in many respects the most wonderful building on the face of the earth. Built at the first by Solomon, a thousand years before Christ, on Mount Moriah, rebuilt on the same site by Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, after the captivity in Babylon; restored and beautified by Herod just before our Lord began His ministry--there was no more remarkable place of worship in the world when the awful prophecy before you was delivered. In size, no doubt, whether in length, breadth, or height, it was far inferior to many a heathen temple, and many a modern cathedral. In costliness of material, and especially in the quantity of gold used internally, I suspect it was second to none. But in the divine authority of its design, and the priceless typical value of its furniture, the sun never shone on a building reared by man which could be named in comparison with it.

The temple of Jerusalem is the only place of worship ever built on earth of which God Himself was the Architect. Before a stone of it was laid we find it written: ‘Then David gave to Solomon his son the pattern of the porch, and of the houses thereof, and of the treasuries thereof, and of the upper chambers thereof, and of the inner parlours thereof, and of the place of the mercyseat... All this, said David, the Lord made me understand in writing by his hand upon me, even all the works of this pattern’ (1 Chronicles 28:11, 12, 19). We may admire, if we please, our majestic minsters and cathedrals, and contend for the merits of Gothic or Italian or mediaeval styles, according to our various tastes; but the very best of them is only the design of man. They are all human. Neither William of Wykeham, nor Bramante, nor Michael Angelo, nor Wren, nor Scott, nor Street could say of their grandest works, ‘I had the design of this from God.’ Again, the temple of Jerusalem was richly furnished with visible emblems of some of the deepest truths of our holy religion. The mercyseat, the candlestick, the altar of incense, the laver of water, the altar of burnt offering, were all given by God Himself to be lively types of good things to come, and to teach us by figures and pictures the glorious gospel of Christ. The finest heathen temples on earth were filled with degrading images of men and women and even beasts, or with vile emblems of which it is a shame even to speak. But the temple in every direction set forth Christ.

Again, the temple of Jerusalem was intimately associated with everything that was most holy in Jewish history. It is the place which God consecrated by His special presence on the day that Solomon dedicated it. ‘The house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord; so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord had filled the house’ (2 Chronicles 5:13-14). It is the place of which the Lord afterwards said, ‘Mine eyes and mine heart shall be there perpetually’ (2 Chronicles 7:16). It was the place which was honoured by kings and prophets, such as Jehoshaphat and Hezekiah and Josiah and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos. It was the place toward which Daniel prayed at Babylon, and Jonah out of the whale’s belly. It was the place in which the angel Gabriel appeared to Zacharias, and foretold the birth of John the Baptist. It was the place to which our blessed Lord was carried, when an infant, very soon after His birth, and taken into Simeon’s arms. It is the place where He was found at the age of twelve, ’sitting among the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions.’ Finally, it is the place where He often taught and preached during His earthly ministry, until the day when He left it to return no more.

Yet this is the wonderful, holy, and beautiful house about which our Lord pronounced the awful prediction, ‘Not one stone shall be left upon another.’ Had He spoken these solemn words about the temples of Karnak and Luxor in Egypt, about the temple of Diana at Ephesus, or Venus at Paphos, or Belus at Babylon, with all their supersititions and nameless abominations, we should not have been surprised. But such a prophecy about such a holy place as the temple at Jerusalem is at first sight amazing, astounding, and incomprehensible. A more unlikely and improbable event than its complete destruction could not be imagined.

And yet we know that the prophecy was fulfilled to the very letter. Only forty years after these remarkable words fell from our Lord’s lips, the city of Jerusalem was taken by the Roman army under Titus. The beautiful temple was completely destroyed, in spite of strict orders to spare it. The very foundations were ploughed up by Terentius Rufus, a Roman officer, and salt sown on them. Our Lord Himself had said, ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away’ (Mark 13. 31; and so it came to pass. Let me leave this branch of my subject with one practical remark. Remember, no prophecy of Scripture shall ever fail to be accomplished. Every word predicted under the teaching of the Holy Ghost shall come to pass. The second personal coming of Christ when the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled--the resurrection, the judgment of quick and dead--all these things have yet to come on Christendom, and come they will. To human eyes they may seem unlikely, improbable, or even absurd, so far away that it is waste of time to think about them. They are not what are called ‘practical politics.’ We shall go on for ever, men think, making money out of cotton, and corn, and coal, and iron, and ships. Tomorrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant. But no! men are utterly mistaken. The coming of the Son of man and the winding up of the affairs of this bankrupt world are events predicted, and events that will certainly be fulfilled. They will break on us suddenly, in an hour when no man thinketh, like the flood in the days of Noah. Our Lord’s wonderful words about the destruction of the temple were literally fulfilled, and so will be His words about His own Second Advent.

2. The second thing which I propose to do is to show the reason why our Lord pronounced the remarkable prediction which forms the subject of our text.

Questions such as these, I am sure, will arise in some minds--Why did our merciful and gracious Lord speak so sternly and severely about the holy and beautiful house on Mount Moriah? Why were such seats of superstition, idolatry, and immorality as existed at Karnak, and Luxor, and Ephesus, and Paphos spared, and such tremendous denuciations pronounced on the temple of Jerusalem? The answer to such questions is not hard to find, and it is very instructive.

The destruction of the temple predicted by our Lord was entirely owing to the sins of the Jewish Church, the sins both of priests and people. Concerning the nature and extent of these sins something needs to be said.

If we had walked through the streets of Jerusalem, or stood on Mount Olivet, and looked at the glorious building on Mount Moriah, in the days when our Lord was upon earth, I suspect we might have formed a very wrong impression of the real condition of the Jewish Church. We should have seen every ordinance and ceremony of the Mosaic law kept up with the most scrupulous regularity. We should have seen troops of white-robed priests in their courses attending on their duties with the utmost carefulness. The smoke of the daily sacrifice would have ascended from the altar every morning and evening. Psalms would have been daily chanted by well-trained singers. The great feasts of Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles would have been most regularly observed. The weekly Sabbath would have been kept most strictly. In short, we should have beheld an outward show of religion, such as the world never saw before, and has never seen since. He that would like to know what it was should study the late Dr. Edersheim’s little book on The Temple, its Ministry and Services in the time of Jesus Christ.

But what was there behind all this? The most enormous mass of formality and hypocrisy, of lip-service and hollow, heartless worship that ever existed. Our Lord Himself describes it in withering language in the 23rd chapter of St. Matthew. There was an utter absence of life and reality in the religion of the Church’s leaders. They professed to reverence the Scriptures, but made them void by traditions. They compassed sea and land to make proselytes, and then taught them for doctrines the commandments of men. They fasted, and said long prayers, and made broad their phylacteries, but only from ostentation, and to be thought good by others. They made clean the outside of the cup and platter, while inwardly they were filled with wickedness, extortion, and excess. They gave tithe of mint and anise and cummin, while they neglected the weightier matters of the law--judgment, mercy, and faith. The priests were blind leaders of the blind, and showed no one the real way to be saved. They shut up the kingdom of heaven against men, and neither went in themselves nor suffered those that were entering to go in. They made great ado about building the tombs of the prophets, and yet did not know that they themselves were like whited sepulchres, full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. They appeared outwardly righteous unto men, while within they were full of hypocrisy and iniquity. Party spirit was most bitter and intense, notwithstanding a thin mask of external unity: the Pharisees hated the Sadducees and the Sadducees the Pharisees, and neither party would have any dealings with the Samaritans. Worst of all, with the Old Testament in their hands and the clearest evidence under their eyes, they would not believe that Jesus was the promised Messiah. They rejected Him with hatred and scorn, and filled up the measure of their sins by murdering Him.

The singularly strong language which our Lord sometimes used about the leaders of the Jewish Church should give us some idea of their guilt and wickedness in His sight. Mercy, kindness, pity, and compassion were the general characteristics of our Lord’s words. Yet in one chapter we find Him saying eight times over, ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,’ and concluding His address with the fearful words, ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how shall ye escape the damnation of hell?’ (Matthew 23). And even of the beautiful temple itself, with its holy of holies, and the ark of the covenant, and the mercyseat, and the daily sacrifice, our Lord declared, ‘Ye have made it a den of thieves.’

Nothing, it is evident, is so wicked and offensive in the sight of our Lord Jesus Christ as hypocrisy in religion, nothing so abominable as privileges misused, knowledge not turned to good account, a form of godliness without the power, and high profession without the fruits of the Spirit; without faith, and heart, and holiness of life. It was this state of things that brought down on the temple the tremendous threat, ‘There shall not be left one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down.’ It was a fulfilment of the words of the prophet Amos: ‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities’ (Amos 3:2). But, after all, we must not forget that the ruin of the Jewish Church does not stand entirely alone. We have only to turn to the pages of Christian Church history, and we shall see abundant proof that there is nothing so displeasing to God as formality and hypocrisy. Where are the churches now to which the apostolic Epistles were addressed--Corinthian, Galatian, Ephesian, Philippian, Colossian, and Thessalonian? Who ever hears of them? Where are the Seven Churches to which the apocalyptic messages were written? Where are the ancient churches in which Ignatius, and Polycarp, and Chrysostom, and Cyril, and Athanasius, and Jerome, and Basil, and Gregory, and Cyprian, and Augustine once lived and laboured? Some of them have been completely swept away by the Saracens, and not a wreck has been left behind. The best of them, if any survive, is like a dried-up fountain, or a ruined lighthouse without a lantern, the mere shadow of its former greatness, and useless to mankind. And what has caused it all? The very same sins that ruined the temple of Jerusalem--deadness, formality, and utter dereliction of duty. Like the Jewish Church, they had ministers and sacraments and ritual and an outward show of religion. They had their bishops and priests and deacons and ascetics and eremites and holy women and liturgies and services and festivals. But, like the Jewish Church, they had neither truth of doctrine among the teachers, nor holy living among the taught, and so their candlestick was taken away. In short, for at least twenty-six centuries it seems to be a great principle in God’s dealings with Churches to require practice proportioned to privileges. The measure of men’s guilt is the quantity of light they enjoy. Even in Isaiah’s time He said to the rulers of Israel: ‘To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? Your appointed feasts My soul hateth’ (Isaiah 1:14). That principle will stand to the end of time. A form of religion without heart is abominable in the sight of God. We are utterly blind if we do not understand that the heart is the principle thing that God looks at in religion. What is apostolic succession of ministers, and what are beautiful liturgical services, or splendid ecclesiastical buildings, or gold, or silver, or marble, or stained glass, to Him who made the world, so long as the hearts and lives of professing worshippers are wrong? Like a child who prefers poppies to corn, ‘man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart’ (1 Samuel 16:7)- The humblest cottagemeeting, where Christ is preached, and the Scriptures honoured, and a few real believers are assembled, is more pleasing in His sight than the grandest cathedral in which the Gospel is never heard, and no work of the Spirit ever goes on.

3. And now, in the third and last place, let me try to show you the real secrets of a Church’s safety and prosperity.

I dare not leave this point untouched on the solemn occasion which assembles us together. This day we are adding one more noble building to the long list of parish churches which are the glory of our land, the parish churches of our good old Reformed Church of England. How long will this building be permitted to stand? How long will the Established Church itself, attacked as it is on many sides, maintain its position, carry on its work, resist every enemy, live and not die? Let me answer these questions.

If a visible Church is to stand and prosper she must have a full supply of ministers who do their duty in their pulpits; ministers who teach and preach scriptural truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; ministers who declare all the counsel of God, and keep back nothing that is profitable; ministers who preach Christ, warning every man and exhorting every man in all wisdom; ministers who make it their continual aim, not to please and flatter human nature, but to show men repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ; ministers who set forth truth in its right proportions, not putting the first things second and the second first, but giving to every part of the gospel message its place and order, and rightly dividing the word of truth concerning Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the lives which Christians ought to live. If a visible Church is to stand and prosper she must have a full supply of ministers who do their duty as pastors as well as preachers, ministers who go from house to house, and speak to their hearers at home as well as in the congregation, ministers who make it their business to become the friends and helpers of all their hearers, ministers who do not spend all their week in multiplied church services, but find time to go continually among their people, of all sorts and conditions, of all ranks and classes, to warn the unruly, to comfort the feeble-minded, to support the weak, and to secure the confidence of all by wise kindness and love unfeigned. If a visible Church is to stand and prosper she must have a full supply of lay members who know their duty, and do it as well as her ministers. She must not have a laity who leave all religion to their clergy, and behave like sleeping members of a great concern; who have only to get good, but not to do it; to receive dividends but take no part in business; who have only to sit still, shut their eyes, and allow the parson to manage everything. She must have a laity who are awake, and alive to their position; who know that the rank and file of the army are just as important as the officers; who understand that they are meant to be helpers in every good work, to teach, to visit, to check evil, to be home-missionaries to all around them, and to hold up the hands of their minister in every way, and in every part of his work. Such laymen are the backbone of a visible Church. Some persons are fond of saying that the Church of England has lost touch with the lower orders, that her services do not suit them, that she no longer possesses their affections, that she cannot reach the masses, that her sun is going down, that she is in danger of perishing for want of churchmen. I do not believe it for one moment, if the Church does her duty. So long as the Church of England is faithful to her Articles and Creeds, so long as she has ministers and lay members of the sort I have tried to describe, so long, I believe, she will not fall. She will hold her ground; no weapon formed against her shall prevail.

Give the Church of England ministers who make the Lord Jesus Christ and His offices and work for our souls the Alpha and the Omega, the chief subject of their teaching. We are all apt to forget that it is quite possible to make an orthodox statement of doctine, and yet not to present Christ to our hearers in the manner and proportion in which He is presented to us in the New Testament. I am struck with the undeniable fact, that most preachers who succeed in getting hold of the working classes, or indeed of any class at all, from the highest to the lowest--whether Whitefield, or Moody, or any other--give a very marked prominence in their sermons to the atoning death, the ever-living intercession, the boundless mercy, the almighty power to save, of that blessed Person in whose name Christian worshippers meet together. You have only to read reports of their preaching in order to see proof of what I say. And I will not hesitate to declare my firm belief, that if we would get hold of our congregations, we must make ‘Christ crucified and risen again’ the sun and centre of our sermons, far more than we have done in the Church of England. It is a lever which shook the world eighteen centuries ago, and is able to shake it now. It is a great magnet which, in every age, from the apostles downwards, has drawn men whom nothing else could draw. And it is a magnet, I am convinced, which has lost none of its attractive influence.

I cannot leave this point without quoting the words of a mighty layman, which deserve attention, a layman of great experience and observation, a layman who in his day has taken great interest in religious questions. The layman (William Ewart Gladstone.) I mean was once Prime Minister of England. He said on the 22nd March 1877: ‘It is the preaching of Christ our Lord which is the secret, and substance, and centre, and heart of all preaching; not merely of facts about Him, and notions about Him, but of his person, His work, His character, His simple yet unfathomable sayings--here lies the secret’ ( Times, 23rd March 1877). That witness is true. That great orator never said a truer thing in his life. The sermon full of Christ is the sermon which the Holy Spirit most usually blesses to the souls of all classes.

Give the Church of England ministers who are full of kindness and sympathy themselves, and continually press on their laity to be kind and sympathizing towards all, and not cold and selfish and hard. Oh that there was less idolatry of reason and cleverness and intellect and art and music and singing and fine speaking, and more Christlike sympathy both in the Church and in the world! This is the medicine which the times require in every branch of society. I believe the late Judge Talfourd (Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (died 1854).) hit the nail on the head when he said, in almost his last Charge to a Grand Jury, at Stafford Assizes: ‘Gentlemen, the great want of the age is more sympathy between classes.’ I entirely agree with him. I think an increase of sympathy and fellow-feeling between high and low, rich and poor, employer and employed, parson and people, is one healing medicine which the age demands. Sympathy, exhibited in its perfection, was one secondary cause of the acceptance which Christ’s Gospel met with on its first appearance in the heathen world. Well says Macaulay: ‘It was before Deity taking a human form, walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of the synagogue, and the doubts of the academy, and the fasces of the lictor, and the swords of thirty legions, were humbled in the dust.’--And sympathy, I firmly believe, can do as much in the nineteenth century as it did in the first. If anything will melt down the cold isolation of classes in these latter days, and make our social body consist of solid cubes compacted together, instead of spheres only touching each other at one point, it will be a large growth of Christ-like sympathy.

I believe that vast body of Englishmen whom we are in the habit of calling ‘the working classes,’ that body which has now got the voting power in its hands and practically rules the country--I believe that body is peculiarly open to sympathy, and the clergyman has peculiar opportunities of showing it. The working man may live in a poor dwelling, and after toiling all day in a coal-pit, or cotton-mill, or ironfoundry, or dock, or chemical yard, or railway station, he may often look very rough and dirty. But, after all, he is flesh and blood like ourselves. Beneath his outward roughness he has a heart and a conscience, a keen sense of justice, and a jealous recollection of his rights as a man and a Briton. He does not want to be patronized and flattered, any more than to be trampled on, scolded, or neglected; but he does like to be dealt with as a brother, in a friendly, kind, and sympathizing way. He will not be driven: he will do nothing for a cold, hard man, however clever he ‘may be. But give him a clergyman who really understands that it is the heart and not the coat which makes the man, and that the guinea’s worth is in the gold and not in the stamp upon it; give him a clergyman who will not only preach Christ in the pulpit, but come and sit down in his house, and take him by the hand in a Christ-like, familiar way during the week; give him a clergyman who realizes that in Christ’s holy religion there is no respect of persons, that rich and poor are ‘made of one blood,’ and need one and the same atoning blood, and that there is only one Saviour, and one Fountain for sin, and one heaven, both for employers and employed; give him a clergyman who can weep with them that weep, and rejoice with them that rejoice, and feel a tender interest in the cares and troubles and births and marriages and deaths of the humblest dweller in his parish; give the working man, I say, a clergyman of that kind, and, as a general rule, the working man will come to his church. Such clergymen will not preach to empty benches.

I invite the special attention of my clerical brethren to this point. We live in days when public work of all kinds seems every year to absorb more of a clergyman’s time. Committees, Bible classes, semisecular lectures, meetings, frequent services and communions, are rapidly increasing so much that they seem to leave ministers no time for old-fashioned house-to-house work, family work, and winning the confidence of individual souls. I warn them to be on their guard. The absence of house-to-house visitation and friendly, private, personal dealings with families, is one explanation of empty churches. Incessant daily services without this will never fill them, even when every seat in the church is free. A house-going minister is one secret of a church-going people. All the public work in the world, however good, will not compensate for the loss of opportunities for cultivating relations of sympathy between yourselves and your people. Make time for going among them, sitting down with them, holding friendly converse with them, talking face to face, and in the long-run you will find no time so well bestowed.

Men and brethren, the secrets of a Church’s stability and prosperity are not mysterious things, like Ezekiel’s temple, which it is hard to find out. Show me the visible Church of Christ in which there are such ministers and congregations as I have faintly tried to describe, and I will show you one which will never be overthrown. Infidels and heretics, and other blind though well-meaning foes, may rage around her walls, but they will rage in vain. God is in the midst of her, and God will not let her be destroyed. It shall never be said of her places of worship, ‘There shall not be left one stone upon another that shall not be thrown down.’ On the contrary, ‘The gates of hell shall not prevail against her.’

And now let me conclude this sermon with a few words of practical application.

(i) First and foremost, the text we have considered this day should teach all Churchmen the great need of increased humility and searching self-examination. No doubt, the outward progress of the Church of England in the last fifty years has been marvellously great, and we ought to be deeply thankful for it.

The restoration of old cathedrals and churches, the building of hundreds of new churches, the expenditure of more than thirty millions of pounds on these objects--all this has been a remarkable sign of the times. The subdivision of our large dioceses, the multiplication of bishops and clergy at home and abroad, the raised standard of ministerial life, the vast growth of lay agency--all these are striking facts. But what right have we to boast? Are we not apt to forget that Herod’s restoration of the temple at Jerusalem, and a rigid attention to the outward forms and ritual of religion, went side by side with an utter decay of all godliness? After all, what are we in the eyes of an all-seeing God, before whom we shall stand in the judgment day? Where is Christ-like love in the land? When the Son of man cometh shall He find faith in England? Are not his helpers in town and country a petty minority? Has real heart religion increased in England in any proportion to the increase of so-called ‘hearty services’ and outward and visible profession? What shall we say to the enormous quantity of drunkenness and impurity and covetousness and gambling, and idolatry of sports and amusements, and self-indulgence and Sabbath-breaking and neglect of public worship, which still disgraces our nation? What shall we say to the mass of semi-heathenism and utter disregard of all religion by which our city churches are too often surrounded? What shall we gay to the widely prevailing theological bitterness, narrowness, and want of love toward those who cannot pronounce our respective shibboleths? Have we no Pharisees and Sadducees among us? Have we no formal, useless High Churchmen, and Low Churchmen, and Broad Churchmen, and ‘no-party’ Churchmen among us, doing nothing really for Christ’s cause, and only cumbering the ground? Have we no semi-Romanists in our ranks who would gladly put the clock back and get behind the Reformation? Have we no sceptics, who sneer at inspiration and the atonement, and barely conceal their desire to throw overboard half the Bible? Are there not myriads of churchgoing people who shut up their religion from Sunday to Sunday, and never give a thought to the souls and bodies of Christ’s poor brethren at their gates? Alas! these are sorrowful questions, and only admit of one answer. Surely we ought to remember the temple of Jerusalem, and learn more humility. Let us not be high-minded, but fear.

(2) In the next place, the occasion which assembles us this day ought to fill our hearts with deep thankfulness. Let us praise God that, in a day of much covetousness and indifference to religion, there are still families to be found in Lancashire who are willing to give of their substance for the building and endowment of noble churches such as that which has been consecrated this day; families who do not migrate and carry away their wealth from Liverpool, and forget the spiritual wants of the great city in which their wealth was made. I am convinced that with such offerings as this church God is well pleased. I am thoroughly satisfied that he who wants to do real and lasting good to a large growing city like Liverpool cannot possibly do better than build and endow a church. The weekly religious services inside a new church are only a small part of the benefit it confers on the district in which it is built. Placed in the hands of a clergyman with heart and head in the right place, it becomes an endless fountain of blessings. Sunday schools, district visiting, temperance agencies, home and foreign missions, Bibleclasses, a general increase of the tone of morality, an insensible check to sin in the parish, causing its wheels to drive heavily, a raised standard of brotherly feeling among all ranks--all these and many other blessed results which I have not time to name, are sooner or later the result of a new church. Surely we ought to be thankful for the good work which is happily completed this day. (3) Last, but not least, let us all pray that the generous example set by the builders of this church may provoke others to emulation. The number of parishes in this Diocese with 9,000 or 10,000 or 12,000 people to one incumbent, is still very great. For disproportion of churches to population our Diocese of Liverpool, after all that has been done in the last forty years, still occupies a painful preeminence. We have not kept pace with our ever-growing population. We have still only one church to about every 5,000 people. ‘There remaineth yet much land to be possessed.’ Let us pray night and day that God may put it into the hearts of many wealthy inhabitants of this corner of Lancashire to come forward, like the builders of St. Dunstan’s, and say, ‘I also will build and endow a church. Here am I! Use me! Let me also have the privilege of doing some real solid good before I die!’