I need not fill my pages with numberless details. For my plea is that we should rather hold ourselves ready for the natural rise of such or such topics, and for a clear instructive word in season upon them, than that we should propose a theme and deliver a discourse. But I cannot too earnestly remind my Brethren how great _the need_ of instruction is among many of our kindly neighbours, even among our neighbours who go regularly to Church and are constantly to be seen at the Table of the Lord.
Let me take one pre-eminent subject as my illustration: the foundation-truth of the Godhead of our Blessed Redeemer. Are you at all aware how widely spread is ignorance and error on that subject, far beyond the limits of the "Unitarian"[17] community? I remember a pastoral visit long ago to a slowly dying parishioner, a labouring man somewhat stricken in years, who had been a church-goer, though not a communicant. I soon fell into a conversation with my friend which took a sort of catechetical shape; my aim was to see where the soul's hopes for eternity really rested. Who and What was JESUS, whose name I know he humbly reverenced? Was He a good Man? Yes. But anything more? There was a long hesitation, and then the dear man expressed a faltering persuasion that the Lord could not be less than "a blessed angel." That case, I am well convinced, is very much more representative than some of us may think. At a recent Church Congress I heard some remarks in just this direction from Bishop Walsham How, who speaks from a large pastoral experience; his anxiety about the immense extent of popular ignorance or misbelief about the Saviour's Person was at least as great as mine.
[17] A term which I use under protest. If a Unitarian means a believer in the Unity of the Godhead, every orthodox Christian is a true Unitarian. Only, he is a Trinitarian also, from another side. I may venture to refer on this subject to a small book of my own, _Outlines of Christian Doctrine_, p. 20.
And so too is ignorance and misbelief about the work of His Cross, and of His Holy Spirit. "I hope I shall have all my sufferment here," said one poor invalid to me in old days, speaking indeed from a very comfortless bed, in the slow pains of a dire disease. She had been long within sound of clear, bright Christian teaching. But deep in the soul, unmoved and ah, so difficult to dislodge, lay that notion of an atoning value in our own pains which is a radical contradiction to the glorious paradox of the perfect and unique work of Calvary:--