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The Mission and Extension of the Church at Home
The Mission and Extension of the Church at Home Author:John Sandford 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: every Sunday at St. Mary's. Nor can the value of the religious instructions there imparted be easily overrated. But then, unhappily, as is well known, numbers of... more » the under-graduates habitually absent themselves from the University sermons: and it seems impossible to enforce their attendance. Under these circumstances, I would ask with all humility, whether it would not be well to send the message to those who will not seek it; and to afford, at least occasionally, to every under-graduate, in his own college chapel, the all-important lessons which otherwise would never reach him ? Such privilege has been long afforded in the chapel of the college to which I myself belong. And even now, after an interval of many years, I can recall instructions delivered there, of which I hope the impressions may never pass away. " The lips of the wise disperse knowledge, and a word spoken in due season, how good it is !"a Why should not every student in this University enjoy like advantages, and be able hereafter to bear like testimony? There are few such opportunities of sowing seed unto life eternal, as every college chapel might afford. Proverbs xv. 7, 23. LECTURE VII. 1 Chronicles xxix. 1. " For the Palace is not for man, but for the Lord God." The religious life of a community may be not unfairly tested by the characteristics and accessaries of its worship. Mean and dilapidated buildings, a neglected ritual, slovenly and unfrequent services, inadequate spiritual provision and church accommodation, are unmistakable signs of a lethargic state of religion. The more so,—when contrasted with lavish expenditure and material progress in all that affects the interests of this world. No one denies that the condition of our parish churches, in the early part of the present century,...« less