The National Church

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE NATIONAL CHURCH PART I I ESTABLISHMENT 1 JESUS ANSWERED, MY KINGDOM IS NOT OF THIS WORLD: IF MY KINGDOM WERE OF THIS WORLD, THEN WOULD MY SERVANTS FIGHT, THAT I SHOULD NOT BE DELIVERED To The Jews: But Now is My Kingdom Not From HENCE.?St. John xviii. 36. AND THE NATIONS SHALL WALK AMIDST THE LIGHT THEREOF, AND THE KINGS OF THE EARTH DO BRING THEIR GLORY Into It.?Revelation xxi. 24. It would be difficult to find in the whole number of calendared saints one who appeals less to the reason and to the conscience of a modern English Churchman than King Edward the Confessor, whose translation we celebrate here to-day. He was not a patriot like Alfred, the uncanonized but unquestioned royal saint of England: nor was he the victim of unmerited violence, a martyr by right of his wrongs if not of his witness, like the earlier monarch of his name, who has a place in the calendar; nor did he perish at the hands of persecuting heathen like theEast Anglian, St. Edmund, King and Martyr: nor was he, in a licentious age, conspicuously distinguished by his domestic virtues,1 like that hapless Stuart, whose tragic fate was long commemorated in the Reformed Church by an annual service of humiliation. At one point or another, Alfred, Edward, Edmund, Charles, appeal to us successfully, and evoke our admiration or our sympathy, but Edward the Confessor is exiled from our respect, almost from our comprehension, by the very traits which earned for him a place in the calendar, and drew to his name in rare measure the adoring reverence of many generations of Englishmen. Of the curiously carved reliefs in the Chapel of the Kings,2 which tell the story of his life as it was known to the mediaeval artists, thereis but one which carries any clear testimony to his personal c...