For the Crown

And every man that striveth in the games is temperate in all things. Now they do it to receive a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.—1 Corinthians 9:25.

So, says St. Paul, praising the effort and contemning the prize, “they do it to receive a corruptible crown.” And yet there was a soul of goodness in this evil thing. Though these festivals were indissolubly intertwined with idolatry, and besmirched with much sensuous evil, yet he deals with them as he does with war and with slavery—he points to the disguised nobility that lay beneath the hideousness, and holds up even these low things as a pattern for Christian men.

1. One of the most famous of the Greek athletic festivals was held close by Corinth. Its prize was a pine-wreath from the neighbouring sacred grove. The painful abstinence and training of ten months, and the fierce struggle of ten minutes, had for their result a twist of green leaves that withered in a week, and a little fading fame that was worth scarcely more, and lasted scarcely longer. The struggle and the discipline were noble; the end was contemptible. And so it is with all lives whose aims are lower than the highest. They are greater in the powers they put forth than in the objects they compass, and the question, “What is it for?” is like a douche of cold water from the cart that lays the clouds of dust in the ways.

2. There is both comparison and contrast here. Comparison, because there is between the athlete and the Christian a likeness upon which the Apostle is very fond of dwelling. Both have entered the lists; both have engaged in a contest wherein a vast amount of resolution and endurance is needed; both have set their hearts upon a certain prize. Contrast, because there is between the athlete and the Christian this great difference, among others, that the prize is of little worth in the one case, of unspeakable value in the other. “They do it to receive a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible.”

I

The Discipline

1. Strenuous effort.—If people would work half as hard to gain the highest object that a man can set before him as hundreds of people are ready to do in order to gain trivial and paltry objects, there would be fewer stunted and half-dead Christians among us. “That is the way to run,” says St. Paul, “if you want to obtain.”

Look at the contrast that he hints at, between the prize that stirs these racers’ energies into such tremendous operation and the prize which Christians profess to be pursuing. “They do it to receive a corruptible crown”—a twist of pine branch out of the neighbouring grove, worth half-a-farthing, and a little passing glory not worth much more. They do it to obtain a corruptible crown; we do not do it, though we professedly have an incorruptible one as our aim and object. If we contrast the relative values of the objects that men pursue so eagerly with the objects of the Christian course, surely we ought to be smitten down with penitent consciousness of our own unworthiness, if not of our own hypocrisy.

Everybody knows about the athlete, and knows that whatever he goes in for, there is no mistake about it. You cannot play cricket, or football, or anything else—to any purpose—with half your strength, or with half your heart. To do anything, to distinguish yourself in the least, you have to give yourself up to it. Everything else must give way; and everything that hinders, or enfeebles, or injuriously affects the play, must be given up. Everybody knows that. “They do it,” says the Apostle; they really do it; there is no humbug or pretence about it. If they play, they do not play at playing; they do it, and no mistake. It is possible to say that a man is a fool to make such efforts, and incur such sacrifices, in order to wear a cap of a certain colour, or be known as the champion in a certain game. But, at any rate, he has achieved something with much toil, and effort, and loss of rest, and after tremendous exertions; “they do it.”1 [Note: R. Winterbotham.]

Here is a little kingdom, which we shall characterize as the kingdom of merely muscular competition. Men are going to try muscular force with their fellow-men,—they are going to have a boat race. You and I cannot walk along the river-side and instantly take into our heads the notion that we will have a spin with these men and beat them all. That can’t be done. Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads even to athletic supremacy. The men are going into training; they are going to put themselves under tutors and governors; they are going to submit to a bill of fare and a course of discipline which you and I would take to very unkindly. But why are they going to do so? Because they have determined to take a higher seat in the kingdom of mere athletic exercise and enjoyment. Now it is a very strange thing that you, a man fourteen stones weight, cannot just get into the very first boat that comes in your way and outstrip the men who have been in drill and training and exercise for the last three months. But you cannot do so. As a mere matter of fact, a man who has been drilled, disciplined, exercised, will beat you, except a miracle be wrought for your advantage.1 [Note: Joseph Parker.]

2. Rigid self-control.—Every man that is striving for the mastery is “temperate in all things.” The discipline for runners and athletes was rigid. They had ten months of spare diet—no wine—hard gymnastic exercises every day, until not an ounce of superfluous flesh was upon their muscles, before they were allowed to run in the arena. And, says St. Paul, that is the example for us. They practised this rigid discipline and abstinence by way of preparation for the race, and after it was run they might dispense with the training. You and I have to practise rigid abstinence as part of the race, as a continuous necessity. They did not only abstain from bad things, they did not only avoid criminal acts of sensuous indulgence; they abstained from many perfectly legitimate things. So for us it is not enough to say, “I draw the line there, at this or that vice, and I will have nothing to do with these.” You will never make a growing Christian if abstinence from palpable sins only is your standard. You must lay aside every sin, of course, but also every weight. Many things are weights that are not sins; and if we are to run fast we must run light; and if we are to do any good in this world we have to live by rigid control and abstain from much that is perfectly legitimate, because, if we do not, we shall fail in accomplishing the highest purposes for which we are here.

Only on one occasion have I seen him angry, and I mention the circumstance now because I feel convinced that his lack of disciplinary power, which has been noted in the matter of his Harrow work, was due to excess rather than to defect of moral force. Conscious of his power, he was, I believe, afraid to let himself go, and so habitually exercised a severe self-restraint. It was in the early Peterborough days, as he and I were starting out for a walk, that, in passing through the passage, which was then being tiled, he remarked to the man at work that he was not laying the tiles straight. The man contradicted him, and then my father said something which seemed to annihilate the culprit. I was astonished at my father losing his temper, but more astonished still at the effect of his wrath: the man trembled and turned pale, and I thought he would be falling down dead.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, i. 351.]

The perfect poise that comes of self-control,

The poetry of action, rhythmic, sweet,—

That unvexed music of the body and soul

That the Greeks dreamed of, made at last complete.—

Our stumbling lives attain not such a bliss;

Too often, while the air we vainly beat,

Love’s perfect law of liberty we miss.2 [Note: Annie Matheson.]

3. Concentration of aim.—There are few things more lacking in the average Christian life of to-day than resolute, conscious concentration upon an aim which is clearly and always before us. Do you know what you are aiming at? This is the first question. Have you a distinct theory of life’s purpose that you can put into half a dozen words, or have you not? In the one case, there is some chance of attaining your object; in the other, none. Alas! we find many Christian people who do not set before themselves, with emphasis and constancy, as their aim the doing of God’s will, and so sometimes they do it, when it happens to be easy, and sometimes, when temptations are strong, they do not. It needs a strong hand on the tiller to keep it steady when the wind is blowing in puffs and gusts, and sometimes the sail bellies full and sometimes it is almost empty. The various strengths of the temptations that blow us out of our course are such that we shall never keep a straight line of direction—which is the shortest line, and the only one on which we shall “obtain”—unless we know very distinctly where we want to go, and have a good strong will that has learned to say “No!” when the temptations come.

It is not enough to have earned our livelihood. Either the earning itself should have been serviceable to mankind, or something else must follow. To live is sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we should continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it to some six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher moral obligation to be up and doing in the interest of Man 1:1 [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books.]

Doth life resemble clouds that come and go?

Or fitful sparks that but a moment glow?

Not so!

Man’s life is vast and deeper than the sea,

His purpose giveth birth to destiny,

He moulds and carves his own futurity.

Is life a senseless weary wail of woe?

A glittering bubble such as babes might blow?

Not so!

Life’s meaning is as lofty as the sky,

It stirs the heart to action pure and high,

It thrills the human breast with ecstasy.

Is life a noxious weed which whirlwinds sow?

A useless flint o’er which the waters flow?

Not so!

A life well spent has not its weight in gold,

It is the clearest crystal earth doth hold,

A gem beside which suns seem dull and cold.2 [Note: Gustav Spiller.]

II

The Reward

Christianity is sometimes charged with being a long-sighted worldliness. We are told that the enjoyment many Christians expect is just as worldly as the enjoyments which they now reject. The only difference between such Christians and worldly folk is not in the character of the crowns they seek but in the season when they wear them. The crowns are the same; but the worldly man wears his now, the Christian hopes to wear it hereafter. Now is that accusation entirely ill-founded? Are our conceptions of the future weighted and coloured by the worldliness which we have professed to reject? How are our thoughts of the future shaped? How do we talk about it? We sometimes speak of the unfairness with which things are distributed in this life. Wealth seems to be showered upon the undeserving. The deserving seem often to be kept in straits. From this we argue that there must be a future life to make this fair. If there be no future life, then the constitution of the world is monstrously unjust. Let us look at that. Let us assume that in this world the good always became the rich, and the wicked always became the poor; would the arrangement be perfectly fitting and just? If goodness were always paid for by money would you consider the traffic conducive to moral and spiritual health? This worldly and materialistic conception of crowns and rewards eats away the very strength and sweetness of our religion. We are wanting material crowns as a reward for saintliness, and they will not be given in this world or in the world to come. God has other crowns more precious and incorruptible, and He is lavish in the bestowal of them.

The prize system has frequently been denounced as unworthy and degrading, and there is a grain of truth in the charge. The danger is that the child may work solely for the prize, and not for the sake of knowledge. We have the same danger in the religious sphere when rewards of any kind are promised. Certain it is that rewards for well-doing are wrong and hurtful when they are of such a nature as to evoke a greedy or mercenary spirit, and it is equally certain that no man or woman should do right simply for the sake of reward. The higher we go in the sphere of rewards, the more spiritual they become, until they cease altogether to be mercenary. The soldier values the Victoria Cross far more than any pecuniary reward. The artist values your admiration more than the price you give for his pictures. No amount of money, however great, can ever be an equivalent of a brave deed or a great work of art.1 [Note: David Watson, In Life’s School, 160.]

If a religion were revealed to us to-morrow, proving, scientifically and with absolute certainty, that every act of goodness, of self-sacrifice, of heroism, of inward nobility would bring us, immediately after our death, an indubitable and unimaginable reward, I doubt whether the proportion of good and evil, of virtues and vices amid which we live would undergo an appreciable change. Would you have a convincing example? In the middle ages there were moments when faith was absolute and obtruded itself with a certainty that corresponds exactly with our scientific certainties. The rewards promised for well-doing, the punishments threatening evil were, in the thoughts of the men of that time, as tangible, so to speak, as would be those of the revelation of which I spoke above. Nevertheless, we do not see that the average of goodness was raised. A few saints sacrificed themselves for their brothers, carried certain virtues, selected from among the more contestable, to the pitch of heroism; but the bulk of men continued to deceive one another, to lie, to fornicate, to steal, to be guilty of envy, to commit murder. The mean of the vices was no lower than that of to-day. On the contrary, life was incomparably harsher, more cruel and more unjust, because the low-water mark of the general intelligence was less high.2 [Note: Maurice Maeterlinck, Life and Flowers, 100.]

The feeble soul that may be lured to love and service by the promise of reward is unworthy to be enrolled in the regiment of Heaven. We needs must follow with assent the words in which the Saint disclaims with poignant ardour all thought of personal advantage, the desire of Heaven and the fear of Hell being alike blotted out in the burning radiance of devotion: “Thou drawest me, my God.… Thy death agony draws me; Thy love draws me, so that, should there be no Heaven, I would love Thee. Were there no Hell, I would fear thee.”3 [Note: Lady Dilke, The Book of the Spiritual Life, 167.]

The symbol of the Gospel is a cross; but not a cross by itself; not a lone, bare, gaunt, naked cross. The symbol of the Gospel is a crown; but not a crown by itself; not a proud, cold, despotic, selfish, pitiless crown. The symbol of the Gospel is a cross and a crown; a cross lying in a crown; a crown growing around a cross; a cross haloed by a crown; a crown won by a cross.1 [Note: James I. Vance, Tendency, 207.]

I sorrowed that the golden day was dead,

Its light no more the countryside adorning;

But whilst I grieved, behold!—the East grew red

With morning.

I sighed that merry Spring was forced to go,

And doff the wreaths that did so well become her;

But whilst I murmured at her absence, lo!

’Twas Summer.

I mourned because the daffodils were killed

By burning skies that scorched my early posies;

But whilst for these I pined, my hands were filled

With roses.

Half broken-hearted I bewailed the end

Of friendships than which none had once seemed nearer;

But whilst I wept I found a newer friend,

And dearer.

And thus I learned old pleasures are estranged

Only that something better may be given;

Until at last we find this earth exchanged

For Heaven.2 [Note: Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.]

1. The corruptible crown.—Think of the corruptible crowns which are to so many the objects of a fond ambition. How many are seeking the tinselled crowns of gaiety, their daily luxury being found in the thin enjoyment of the world! How corruptible is the crown! The first cold shower that falls occasions its destruction. One of the most pitiful sights to be seen is that of a gay and shallow woman plunged into some sudden sorrow. She is like a butterfly in the rain. How many others are seeking the crown of fame! How many are possessed with the burning desire to be recognized, to be esteemed, to be influential, to be remembered. Yet how corruptible is the crown! Of how very few can it be said that their fame lasts as long as their gravestones. When the clock strikes the last stroke of the hour, there is a lingering and decreasing reverberation before the sound quite dies out. That reverberation represents a man’s posthumous fame, the short lingering remembrance that follows the final stroke of his life. If a man wins fame, he wins a corruptible crown. Others seek the crown of wealth. All they want is money. They measure their success by money. It is their standard and their crown. Yet how corruptible! “The wind passeth over it, and it is gone.” It is the prey of many foes. The moth can destroy it. The rust can corrupt it. The thief can steal it. These are types of the crowns admired by the world, coveted by the world, sought by the world, and they are all corruptible. If a man gains one he is regarded as having had a successful career.

The King [William iv.] ought not properly to have worn the crown, never having been crowned; but when he was in the robing-room he said to Lord Hastings, “Lord Hastings, I wear the crown; where is it?” It was brought to him, and when Lord Hastings was going to put it on his head he said, “Nobody shall put the crown on my head but myself.” He put it on, and then turned to Lord Grey and said, “Now, my Lord, the coronation is over.” George Villiers said that in his life he never saw such a scene, and as he looked at the King upon the throne with the crown loose upon his head, and the tall, grim figure of Lord Grey close beside him, with the sword of state in his hand, it was as if the King had got his executioner by his side, and the whole picture looked strikingly typical of his and our future destinies.1 [Note: The Greville Memoirs, ii. 140.]

I saw a truant schoolboy chalk his name

Upon the Temple door; then with a shout

Run off; that night a weary beggar came,

Leant there his ragged back and rubbed it out.2 [Note: Charles Murray, Hamewith, 54.]

2. The incorruptible crown.—The Christian’s crown is elsewhere spoken of as a crown of life, a crown of glory, and a crown of righteousness.

(1) The incorruptible crown is a crown of life.—If you want a summary of Biblical teaching respecting virtue and its crowns, you may find it in the Book of Revelation—“Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.” A crown of life! Your physician examines your body, the healthy workings of which have somehow or other become clogged with disease. He finds out the obstruction, ascertains its character, discovers its root. Then practically he says to the patient, “Attend to my instructions, loyally follow my prescriptions, be faithful to my word, and I will drive the disease out of your body and give your body a crown of life.” The reward of obedience is health, fresh, vigorous health, a crown of life! That is precisely what the Lord says to us about our souls. He says to me, Be thou faithful. Be loyal in My service. Be scrupulously obedient to My will, and I will heal thee of all thy diseases. I will remove all thy moral sicknesses and spiritual infirmities. I will give thee moral and spiritual health, make thee every whit alive—thou shalt have a crown of life! That is the reward of obedience and faithfulness—the incorruptible crown of life. The reward for doing a good deed is that you have more life to do another. That is the meaning of Christ’s benediction upon the faithful servant—“Thou hast been faithful over a few things.” His faithfulness had crowned him with life. He had greater life for doing greater service. At first he had only life enough for “few things,” but faithfulness had given him life enough for more. “Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things.”

Have you ever noticed closely that gracious list of beatitudes which Jesus tells us are the special possession and reward of the Christian life? How august are the payments! How incorruptible the crowns! Look at one or two. “Blessed are the merciful.” Why are they blessed? What is their reward, their crown? “They shall obtain mercy.” Beautifully suited is the crown to the virtue. God will give their hearts the same sweet feast as they have given to the heart of their fellows. “Blessed are the pure in heart.” In what consists their blessedness? What is their reward? “They shall see God.” How incorruptible the crown! And how appropriate that purity should be rewarded by visions, that they who have washed their eyes clean and clear should be able to feast them upon the beauty and glory of God! “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness.” Whence comes their blessedness? What is their reward? “They shall be filled.” Their spiritual hunger shall meet with spiritual satisfaction. The hunger for life shall receive the bread of life. The thirst for life shall receive the water of life.

I think I know many people who are already wearing the crowns in their hearts. It seems to me that there are many people from whom God has only to strip away their robes of flesh, and they will stand before Him—crowned! I think you must know such men and women, who have reached the west, and the brightness of whose crowns shines through their attenuated flesh. They wear the crown of humility, the crown of patience, the crown of brotherly kindness, the crown of hope, the crown of love. Do you think any one will be able to wear brighter crowns than these in the Kingdom of God? Do you think that in all heaven there is a brighter crown than the crown of love? It is the crown worn by the great God Himself! These are the crowns we must seek, the incorruptible crowns. Let us seek for such character as will be to us a worthy crown. Let us become more spiritual. Let us inspect our purposes and ambitions, and make it our one aim to be found at last in Christ, in possession of the righteousness which is of God by faith. Let us consecrate ourselves to one holy and supreme ambition, to wake at last in the likeness of our God.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

How many a Grecian youth of old,

Preparing for the Isthmian plain,

And driven by thirst of fame, was bold

For discipline that he might gain

An athlete’s vigour well-controlled,

And win the olive crown through pain!

But, when in time of wrinkled age

His earlier force had ebbed away,

And, closing now his pilgrimage,

He viewed the wreath’s forlorn decay,

Then he at last grew wise to gauge

The fleeting worth of glory’s day.

Therefore shall we give precious years

And sacred energies of soul

To win the world’s resounding cheers

And triumph at its vaunted goal?

Nay, such a guerdon calms no fears

When Doomsday’s awful thunders roll!

But rather may the second sight

Of Faith disclose the prize unseen,

And urge us, led by its delight

To tame the sins, that intervene,

And fight with joy a nobler fight

For crowns of never-fading green!1 [Note: G. T. S. Farquhar.]

(2) A crown of glory.—It is a crown of glory, and that means a lustrousness of character imparted by radiation and reflection from the central light of the glory of God. “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” Our eyes are dim, but we can at least divine the far-off flashing of that great light, and may ponder upon what hidden depths and miracles of transformed perfectness and unimagined lustre wait for us, dark and limited as we are here, in the assurance that we all shall be changed into the “likeness of the body of his glory.”

The promise of an incorruptible crown is not only for this life but also for the life to come. Here we have the promise of life, that fuller life which men want, “the life of which our veins are scant,” even in the fullest tide and heyday of earthly existence. But the promise sets that future over against the present, as if then first should men know what it means to live: so buoyant, elastic, unwearied shall be their energies, so manifold the new outlets for activity, and the new inlets for the surrounding glory and beauty; so incorruptible and glorious shall be their new being. Here we live a living death; there we shall live indeed; and that will be the crown, not only in regard to physical, but also in regard to spiritual, powers and consciousness.

But remember that all this full tide of life is Christ’s gift. There is no such thing as natural immortality; there is no such thing as independent life. All Being, from the lowest creature up to the loftiest created spirit, exists by one law, the continual impartation to it of life from the fountain of life, according to its capacities. And unless Jesus Christ, all through the eternal ages of the future, imparted to the happy souls that sit garlanded at His board the life by which they live, the wreaths would wither on their brows, and the brows would melt away, and dissolve from beneath the wreaths. “I will give him a crown of life.”

There is a pathetic and beautiful story related of Jenny Lind—Madame Goldschmidt. Her innate religious feeling caused her to leave the stage at the height of her extraordinary triumph. Some time after, an English friend found her at a seaside retreat. The famous artiste was “sitting on the steps of a bathing-machine, on the sands, with a Lutheran Bible open on her knee, and looking out into the glory of a sunset that was shining over the waters.” The friends talked “and the talk drew near to the inevitable question, ‘Oh, Madame Goldschmidt, how was it that you ever came to abandon the stage at the very height of your success?’ ‘When, every day,’ was the quiet answer, ‘it made me think less of this (laying a finger on the Bible), and nothing at all of that (pointing out to the sunset), what could I do?’ ”1 [Note: W. J. Lacey, Masters of To-morrow, 210.]

(3) A crown of righteousness.—It is a crown of righteousness. Though that phrase may mean the wreath that rewards righteousness, it seems more in accordance with the other similar expressions to regard it, too, as the material of which the crown is composed. It is not enough that there should be festal gladness, not enough that there should be calm repose, not enough that there should be flashing glory, not enough that there should be fulness of life. To accord with the intense moral earnestness of the Christian system there must be, emphatically, in the Christian hope, cessation of all sin and investiture with all purity. The word means the same thing as the ancient promise, “Thy people shall be all righteous.” It means the same thing as the latest promise of the ascended Christ, “They shall walk with me in white.” And it sets the very climax and culmination on the other hopes, declaring that absolute, stainless, infallible righteousness which one day shall belong to our weak and sinful spirits.

I love Dinah next to my own children. An’ she makes one feel safer when she’s i’ the house; for she’s like the driven snow: anybody might sin for two as had her at their elbow.2 [Note: Mrs. Poyser, in Adam Bede.]

Since the beginning of history thoughtful men have been asking what is man’s summum bonum, his highest good, his heart’s true ideal. ‘Power,” “wealth,” “pleasure,” “wisdom,” “culture,” are some of the answers. The true answer is “God.” “I have no good beyond Thee,” said one who had learned the secret. “Lord, give me Thyself,” was Augustine’s constant prayer; and he adds the exquisite reason, “Habet omnia qui habet habentem omnia,”—“he has all who has Him that has all.” Slowly or suddenly we rise from delight in God’s gifts to delight in Himself. “Unless,” says Hooker, “the last good, which is desired for itself, be infinite, we do evil making it our end. No good is infinite but God; therefore He is our felicity and bliss.” Every soul has capacities greater than the infinite sea, and only He who filleth heaven and earth, whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain, can satisfy one little human heart.1 [Note: J. Strachan. Hebrew Ideals, i. 75.]

Mysterious Death! who in a single hour

Life’s gold can so refine;

And by thy art divine

Change mortal weakness to immortal power!

Bending beneath the weight of eighty years,

Spent with the noble strife

Of a victorious life,

We watched her fading heavenward, through our tears.

But, ere the sense of loss our hearts had wrung,

A miracle was wrought,

And swift as happy thought

She lived again, brave, beautiful, and young.

Age, Pain, and Sorrow dropped the veils they wore,

And showed the tender eyes

Of angels in disguise,

Whose discipline so patiently she bore.

The past years brought their harvest rich and fair,

While Memory and Love

Together fondly wove

A golden garland for the silver hair.

How could we mourn like those who are bereft,

When every pang of grief

Found balm for its relief

In counting up the treasure she had left?—

Faith that withstood the shocks of toil and time,

Hope that defied despair,

Patience that conquered care,

And loyalty whose courage was sublime;

The great deep heart that was a home for all,

Just, eloquent and strong,

In protest against wrong;

Wide charity that knew no sin, no fall;

The Spartan spirit that made life so grand,

Mating poor daily needs

With high, heroic deeds,

That wrested happiness from Fate’s hard hand.

We thought to weep, but sing for joy instead,

Full of the grateful peace

That followed her release;

For nothing but the weary dust lies dead.

Oh, noble woman! never more a queen

Than in the laying down

Of sceptre and of crown,

To win a greater kingdom yet unseen,

Teaching us how to seek the highest goal,

To earn the true success;

To live, to love, to bless,

And make death proud to take a royal soul.1 [Note: Louisa May Alcott.]

For the Crown

Literature

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, v. 199.

Beaumont (J. A.), Walking Circumspectly, 144.

Edwards (F.), These Twelve, 338.

Fraser (J.), University Sermons, 204.

Hall (C. R.), Advent to Whitsun-Day, 83.

Hickey (F. P.), Short Sermons, ii. 50.

Hort (F. J. A.), Cambridge Sermons, 109.

Hutchings (W. H.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., ii. 170.

Little (H. W.), Arrows for the King’s Archers, No. 14.

Maclaren (A.), Christ in the Heart, 205.

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Williams (T. M.), Sermons of the Age, 173.

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