THE

MORNING SERMON

PREACHED BY:

THE REV. C. E. KENNAWAY,

*AT

TRINITY CHAPEL, BRIGHTON,

MARCH 24, 1847.

"Ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lust. Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you: cleanse your hands, ye sinners, and purify your hearts, ye double-minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourtheselves in sight of the Lord, and He shall lift you up."-Jamés iv., part of 2 and 3 and 8 and 10.

WE have selected these two passages, with the view of placing before you, first, the causes which we may believe to be generally instrumental in bringing upon persons, or upon nations, great and heavy visitations; and, secondly, that we may call your minds to those remedies under adversity, which are here authoritatively set forth,

If you look at the first part of the text, you will see reference made to the seed of sorrow and disappointment; "ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not; ye ask and receive not because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it on your lusts." There are two grand sources of personal and national sorrow distinctly stated. Improper prayer, or its entire absence, these are declared to us, by an Apostolic pen, to be the causes of those mighty miseries by which men and nations are afflicted. Let us not start at this declaration. We are in affliction now; at least, God has afflicted our land, and we ought, more or less, to be all of us in affliction because of it. It is an affliction, moreover, of a most unusual and heavy kind. We know not where to look for its parallel. It is not merely in the memory of living men that we in vain search for the exemplification of

such a sorrow; the pen of history itself, sacred or profane, has written down no such distressful accounts as our newspapers now chronicle as the ordinary events of every succeeding day. The sun rises and sets over half a population of human beings, and it beholds the stamp of famine more or less deeply pourtrayed upon all their gaunt and melancholy features. I will not enter into particulars now: I have already done it.* I want to bring my own mind and yours to the consideration of the intention and the causes of this sorrow, rather than to harrow them up by a recital of their horrid phenomena. I want to remind you, that whatever be the causes, ye should know certainly that "this is God's visitation ;" and I desire, at the same time, to shew that, without curiously prying into the mysteries of Providential counsels, we have here laid down by this very Apostle, in these very passages, which we have recited, both the grounds of these terrible Providences and the Scriptural means of their removal.

I. See, then, the grounds of these miseries: "Ye fight and war, yet ye have not because ye ask not." The Apostle James is addressing the twelve tribes in their dispersion. He was the first bishop of Jerusalem; and he seems to have looked at every Jew, wherever dwelling, as constituting a member of his diocese. He looks over the troubled waves of that great and scattered population, and he beholds everywhere disturbance. On the outskirts, among those who, perhaps, were many of them of the ten lost tribes, as we call them, he saw bad passions, jealousy, envy, backbiting, lust, deforming the beauty and destroying the grace of society. When he looked at home, turning his eye upon that glorious city which God had chosen for his own, declaring that He had longed for her," he saw the whole framework of society convulsed by intestine broils, and the nation threatened with foreign invasion. The history of Josephus contains an awful picture of the last days of the Jewish polity. The throes and convulsions of that wretched people before the spirit quite left them, and they lay like a lifeless carcase upon the earth, are such as to teach us an awful lesson of the just but terrible vengeance of God upon national transgression.

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But it would seem that even the Christian converts partook in these Jewish contentions. The wars and fightings" extended to them; for it is to them especially that St. James must have addressed himself. To them, as well as to their Jewish brethren, he said, "Ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.”

* In two sermons, published by Messrs. Rivingtons.

II. Now our appeal this day should be especially practical. Can the same charge be made against us? Can it be said to us as a people, "Ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not?" When we take a review of our national state and prospects, we can, perhaps, scarcely find any people that has been so successful in its general policy. Peace and war have alike ministered to our greatness. Ever since the period of the great impulse which was given to our energies by the bursting of the fetters of mind at the Reformation, there has been scarcely a pause in the growth of our power and the extension of our territory; and although in some instances we may perhaps be justly chargeable with improper violation of other men's homes, yet, at least we may say, with gratitude, that during later years, increase of colónial possessions, especially in India, has been forced upon us in spite of ourselves.

But all at once comes a sudden check. We have desired prosperity, and we have had it—we have greatly prospered Nay, we have seemed to have reached a height of prosperity from whence it would be difficult to cast us down. The last war which we were engaged in, terminated in great glory to our arms; and, what was infinitely better than military glory, there was a spirit of dependence on God in our commanders, and a moderation in their counsels after conquest, for which we were justly thankful to God, the God of battles, but greater title still," the Prince of Peace."

But while all this was proceeding, there was a woe preparing. A small cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, appeared in the northern and western horizon, There is a people in the west, our own fellow-subjects, living on a vegetable of easy cultivation, and most prolific growth. It is a wise proverb that, "necessity is the mother of arts." The very reverse has been manifested among that unhappy people. Labouring for three months in the year, and getting thereby wages to pay the rent of a miserable hovel, with an acre or two of potato garden attached to it; they have been reduced to a careless idleness during the remaining nine months. This kind of life has exposed them, as it would expose any of us, to all manner of temptations. It has exposed them, unhappily, to the worst influences. No one can compare the south of Ireland with the northern part of the same country, or with the west of Scotland, and not say that the influence of the Romish priesthood, thrown, as it has been, into the scale of agitation, has been a blight upon the hearts of the people; severing the ties which bind landlord and tenant in the first

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instance; and, secondly, almost bursting the links by which that whole land is connected with our own.

I am not, however, going to touch further on this. We all know the attractive features of the Irish character. We are all aware how brave in war, and how industrious in peace they become, when submitted to wholesome influences. The more they have been injured, the deeper they have been steeped in the wretchedness of poverty or superstition; the more should we mourn over them now, that to poverty and superstition are added famine, fever, and pestilence.

But whence cometh all this? "Ye fight and war, and ye have not, because ye ask not." Is not this something of an epitome of the conduct of this country in respect to her island sister? We have deeply neglected her spiritual interests. If any one be blessed with a son, and gets all he can out of that son's strength; if, as is done, or at least, has been done in many parts of our manufacturing districts, the parents send their children to labour at so early an age that their little hands, which ought to be engaged in no severer toil than that of holding the leaves of the school primer, or gathering meadow-flowers, yet soon become hard and horney with toil incessantly plied. If the growth of the body is stunted, and the mind grows not at all, or only grows in wickedness, is it wonderful if, in later life, that neglected child becomes a worthless man; a burden far inore than a blessing to his parents, or to society? and will any one justify that father in reproaching the child for those very evils which his own covetous neglect has produced?. But this is our picture as a nation. We have, until the last fifty years, almost utterly neglected that country. Enjoying the blessings of an open Bible ourselves, we have suffered them to remain with the leaves of that blessed book closed upon them. We know how greatly we prize our reformed Liturgy; and yet, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, that very book, which might, and would have at tracted the hearts of the people to the religion of the Reformation, was not permitted to be translated into the language "understanded by the people." It was positively forbidden to translate the prayer book into the native Irish tongue! Are we, then, because Rome took advantage of our neglect, to turn round upon those whom we have neglected, and charge upon them the consequences of our own misconduct ? Are we to reproach the, child with the dreadful results of the parents' unparental neglect? Nay, rather, we must take the lesson every one of us to ourselves. We must see manifestly brought out, though it be

in letters of fire, in the state of that unhappy country, the ruinous results of national delinquency.

And I say this on the present occasion on two accounts; if it is allowed that an unwholesome system has prevailed in the management of the land, and if the visitation of God upon the potato plant has been so awful, chiefly because of the dependence of so great a population upon that one esculent, I wish, ati the same time, that you should bear in mind the causes which have led to this state of things, and see how guilty we all are as a nation in this matter.

And if, again, it is said by some that the visitation is upon Ireland and on Scotland, and that the Fast and day of national humiliation should be in those countries and not in this. I desire to reply. My brother or my sister who thus may argue, do you remember the words of Scripture, "If one member suffer all the members suffer with it." This is doubly true. It is true spiritually and it is true naturally; we feel here already the effects of the famine by sympathy, just as the agitation of the waters is the greatest where the stone is cast in, and yet the whole surface of the lake more or less partakes of the disturb ance. The rise in the price of bread is the consequence of the failure of the potato. God is visiting every man in the country by this dearness of provision, and every man ought to feel that He is so. You cannot divide into two parts the pros perity of an empire. If one part suffer, the other must suffer in a thousand ways. But if so, and if we acknowledge, if we are obliged, in spite of all our thoughts about secondary causes, to acknowledge, that God is so visiting that afflicted country, and, together with it the hardy and patient race that inhabit the islands and highlands of Scotland, then most surely it is our duty to take the lesson to ourselves, to look on this terrible blight as God's book of warning and of judgment, and to inquire, if we may, into the causes which have produced it, and the effects which it is intended to have upon us.'

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Again, then recur to the language of the text, "Ye fight and war, and ye have not, because ye ask not." Look back at the history which I have been glancing at; consider again the arm of power, or the lure of gold which has been used in bygone days in the subjection and government of that country by this; and when you now vainly wish that you were rid of the trouble which it is causing, see in that vain wish the record of your own condemnation, "Ye have not, because ye ask not.” You, by your ancestors (i. e.), this whole country in ages past away, has