The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern Sermons Preached at the Opening Services of the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, in 1866

The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern, by Knowles King

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Title: The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern

Sermons Preached at the Opening Services of the Wesleyan

Methodist Chapel, in 1866

Author: Knowles King

Release Date: January 21, 2008 [eBook #24396]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WESLEYAN METHODIST PULPIT IN

MALVERN***

Transcribed from the 1866 John Snow and Co. edition by David Price, email [email protected]

THE WESLEYAN METHODIST PULPIT IN MALVERN.

SERMONS

preached at

THE OPENING SERVICES

of the

WESLEYAN METHODIST CHAPEL,

In 1866,

AT MALVERN,

by

With a Preface by Knowles King.

LONDON:

JOHN SNOW & CO., IVY LANE,

paternoster row;

WARREN HALL & CO., CAMDEN ROAD.

1866.

to

RALPH BARNES GRINDROD,

of malvern,

m.d., ll.d., f.l.s., f.r.g.s., f.g.s., &c., &c.,

This Volume of Sermons

is respectfully inscribed,

in thankful acknowledgment of the learned

doctor’s great gift of healing;

but more especially of his large charity,

and high christian character.

PREFACE.

The Sermons which make up this volume were preached at Malvern, in 1866, at, and immediately after, the opening services of the Wesleyan Chapel there.

This beautiful and commodious building owes its erection to the piety and energy of the Rev. W. M. Punshon, who, in the year 1862, proposed by Lectures, and otherwise, to raise a fund for building Wesleyan Chapels in places of summer resort.

This proposition was well responded to by Mr. Punshon’s friends, and the Wesleyan public, and forty thousand pounds have already been expended in the erection of new Chapels at Ilfracombe, Dawlish, the Lizard, Brighton, Weymouth, Eastbourne, Walmer, Folkestone, Bournemouth, Blackpool, Lancing, Llandudus, Rhyl, Saltburn, Bray, Matlock, Malvern, Keswick, Bowness, and the Isle of Wight.  Others are in progress.

These Sermons are published with the consent of the several preachers, but it must be stated that they were preached without any view to publication, and now appear in print, nearly word for word, as they were delivered, extempore, from the pulpit.  Some of them, indeed, have never been committed to writing by the authors; for instance, of the beautiful sermon of Mr. Arthur, not a word was written by him either before or since its delivery.

This will account for the fact that the subjects are not treated with any degree of scientific exactness, as essays might require; but in a manner intended to suggest useful thoughts to serious audiences.

Although myself of the Church of England, I have had many opportunities, during the past thirty-five years, of hearing discourses from Wesleyan ministers, and making personal acquaintance with them; and I believe the following Sermons are a fair specimen of the Wesleyan teaching in this country.

Why should not the Church of England and the great Wesleyan body be united?  Circumstances are entirely altered since Wesley, and his coadjutors, were compelled to run away from the Church of England.  Now, thank God, the majority of our clergy, like the Wesleyan ministers, are zealous, and energetic, and evangelical men; popular in the style of their addresses, distinguished by the vigour of their pastoral ministrations, and incessant in them; paternal in their care of the poor, of broad and social Christian sympathies, and earnestly pursuing the secular and religious education of the young.  Why should not the priests of the Church of England and the ordained Wesleyan ministers be permitted to exchange pulpits as they may think fit?  There is little danger that a Wesleyan minister would proclaim unsound doctrine.  Such an evil is much more shortly and sharply rectified by Wesleyan discipline, which the Courts of Law uphold, than by any mere legal action to which the Church of England is bound.

May it please God, by His Holy Spirit, to make these Sermons effectual for the spreading of His truth and the quickening of His people.

KNOWLES KING.

Sidmouth House, Malvern,

December 3, 1866.

* * * * *

If any profit shall accrue from this publication, it will be given to the religious institutions at Malvern.

THE LIVELY STONES.

REV. W. MORLEY PUNSHON.

Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.—1 Peter ii. 5.

There is a manifest reference in the fourth verse to the personage alluded to in Psalm cxviii. 22, 23: The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.  This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.  And this passage is applied by Christ to himself in Matthew xxi. 42: Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.  The Apostle therefore places the beginning of any connection with Christianity in coming to Christ, and assures believers that in their union with Him alone consists the fulness of their dignity and privilege.  And there is no truth that will more readily be acknowledged, or receive a heartier acquiescence from the heart of a believer.  What could we do without Jesus?  In our every necessity He is our refuge and strength, in our perils He compasses us about with songs of deliverance, his life is our perfect example, his death is our perfect atonement.  Well might the Apostle interrupt the course of his argument with the grateful apostrophe, Unto you, therefore, which believe, He is precious; and exhort them that ye should show forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.  The text presents us with topics of meditation worthy of our prayerful study, as it reveals to us—

I.—The Character.

II.—The Privilege.

III.—The Duty of Believers.

I.  You observe that in the text believers are presented as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood; two different illustrations, which, if you translate the word here rendered house by the more sacred word temple, will be found to have the same religious significance, and a close connection with each other.  Coming to Christ as the foundation-stone of the building, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious, the Church rises into a spiritual temple.  From Christ, the great High Priest, consecrated after no carnal commandment, believers rise into a holy priesthood by a majestic investiture that is higher than the ordination of Aaron.  There are two points in the character of the ransomed Church which are illustrated in these words:—spirituality and holiness.

Take the first thought, spirituality.  They are lively or living stones, built up into a spiritual house.  Any one who thoughtfully observes the successive ages of the world’s history, will not fail to discover that each generation of men has in some important particulars progressed upon its predecessor.  There has been not only an accumulation of the treasures of thought and knowledge but an increase of the capacity to produce them.  Hence in every age there has been a higher appreciation of freedom, a quickened enterprise of enquiry, the stream of legislation has refined and broadened in its flow, improvement has extended its acreage of enclosure, and principles proved and gained have become part of the property of the world.  Our nature has had its mental childhood.  The established laws of mind admit only of a gradual communication of knowledge.  It was necessary, therefore, that men should be first stored with elementary principles, then advanced to axioms and syllables, and afterwards introduced into the fellowship of the mystery of Divine truth.  Hence any reflective mind, pondering upon the dealings of God with men, will discover a progressive development of revelation, adjusted with careful adaptation to the preparedness of different ages of mankind.  In the first ages God spake to men in sensible manifestations, in visions of the night, by audible voice, in significant symbol.  As time advanced the sensible manifestations became rarer, and were reserved for great and distinguishing occasions.  From the lips of a lawgiver, in the seer’s vision, and in the prophet’s burden of reproof or consolation, the Divine spake, and the people heard and trembled.  At length, in the fulness of time, the appeal to the senses was altogether discarded; the age of spirituality began, and in the completed revelation men read, as they shall read for ever, the Divine will in the perfected and royal word.  And this progress, which appears through all creation as an inseparable condition of the works of God, present in everything, from the formation of a crystal to the establishment of an economy, is seen also in the successive dispensations under which man has been brought into connection with heaven.  You can trace through all dispensations the essential unity of revealed religion.  There have never been but two covenants of God with man—the covenant of works and the covenant of grace; never but two religions—the religion of innocence, and the religion of mercy.  Through all economies there run the same invariable elements of truth.  The first promise contains within itself the germ of all subsequent revelation—the Abrahamic covenant, the separation of Israel, all the rites and all the prophecies, are but the unfoldings of its precious meaning.  Sacrifice for the guilty, mediation for the far-off and wandering, regeneration for the impure, salvation through the merit of another; these are the inner life of the words, the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head.  The gospel therefore was preached unto Abraham.  Moses felt the potent influence of the reproach of Christ.  David describeth the blessedness of the man unto whom God imputeth not iniquity.  Of this salvation the prophets enquired and searched diligently.  Christ was the one name of the world’s constant memory, to Him gave all the prophets witness, and from the obscurest to the clearest revelation all testified in tones which it was difficult to misunderstand.  Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.  The patriarchal dispensation had no elaborate furniture nor gorgeous ritualism.  The father was the priest of the household, and as often as the firstling bled upon the altar it typified the faith of them all in a better sacrifice to come.  Then came the Jewish dispensation with its array of services and external splendour, with its expressive symbolism and its magnificent temple; and then, rising into a higher altitude, the fulness of time came, and Christianity—the religion not of the sensuous but of the spiritual, not of the imagination awed by scenes of grandeur nor bewildered by ceremonies of terror, but of the intellect yielding to evidence, of the conscience smitten by truth, of the heart taken captive by the omnipotence of love—appeared for the worship of the world.  Our Saviour, in his conversation with the Samaritan woman, inaugurated, so to speak, the dispensation of the spiritual, The hour cometh, and now is,—there is the moment of instalment, when the great bell of time might have pealed at once a requiem for the past and a