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    David: Five Sermons
    David: Five Sermons
    David: Five Sermons
    Ebook74 pages1 hour

    David: Five Sermons

    By Charles Kingsley

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    David: Five Sermons
    Author

    Charles Kingsley

    Charles Kingsley was born in Holne, Devon, in 1819. He was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Helston Grammar School, before moving on to King's College London and the University of Cambridge. After graduating in 1842, he pursued a career in the clergy and in 1859 was appointed chaplain to Queen Victoria. The following year he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and became private tutor to the Prince of Wales in 1861. Kingsley resigned from Cambridge in 1869 and between 1870 and 1873 was canon of Chester cathedral. He was appointed canon of Westminster cathedral in 1873 and remained there until his death in 1875. Sympathetic to the ideas of evolution, Kingsley was one of the first supporters of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859), and his concern for social reform was reflected in The Water-Babies (1863). Kingsley also wrote Westward Ho! (1855), for which the English town is named, a children's book about Greek mythology, The Heroes (1856), and several other historical novels.

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      Book preview

      David - Charles Kingsley

      David, by Charles Kingsley

      The Project Gutenberg eBook, David, by Charles Kingsley

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: David

      Author: Charles Kingsley

      Release Date: November 27, 2003 [eBook #10326]

      Language: English

      Chatacter set encoding: US-ASCII

      ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAVID***

      Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

      DAVID: FIVE SERMONS

      NOTE:—The first four of these Sermons were preached before the University of Cambridge.

      SERMON I.  DAVID’S WEAKNESS

      Psalm lxxviii. 71, 72, 73.  He chose David his servant, and took him away from the sheep-folds.  As he was following the ewes great with young ones, he took him; that he might feed Jacob his people, and Israel his inheritance.  So he fed them with a faithful and true heart, and ruled them prudently with all his power.

      I am about to preach to you four sermons on the character of David.  His history, I take for granted, you all know.

      I look on David as an all but ideal king, educated for his office by an all but ideal training.  A shepherd first; a life—be it remembered—full of danger in those times and lands; then captain of a band of outlaws; and lastly a king, gradually and with difficulty fighting his way to a secure throne.

      This was his course.  But the most important stage of it was probably the first.  Among the dumb animals he learnt experience which he afterwards put into practice among human beings.  The shepherd of the sheep became the shepherd of men.  He who had slain the lion and the bear became the champion of his native land.  He who followed the ewes great with young, fed God’s oppressed and weary people with a faithful and true heart, till he raised them into a great and strong nation.  So both sides of the true kingly character, the masculine and the feminine, are brought out in David.  For the greedy and tyrannous, he has indignant defiance: for the weak and helpless, patient tenderness.

      My motives for choosing this subject I will explain in a very few words.

      We have heard much of late about ‘Muscular Christianity.’  A clever expression, spoken in jest by I know not whom, has been bandied about the world, and supposed by many to represent some new ideal of the Christian character.

      For myself, I do not understand what it means.  It may mean one of two things.  If it mean the first, it is a term somewhat unnecessary, if not somewhat irreverent.  If it mean the second, it means something untrue and immoral.

      Its first and better meaning may be simply a healthy and manful Christianity, one which does not exalt the feminine virtues to the exclusion of the masculine.

      That certain forms of Christianity have committed this last fault cannot be doubted.  The tendency of Christianity, during the patristic and the Middle Ages, was certainly in that direction.  Christians were persecuted and defenceless, and they betook themselves to the only virtues which they had the opportunity of practising—gentleness, patience, resignation, self-sacrifice, and self-devotion—all that is loveliest in the ideal female character.  And God forbid that that side of the Christian life should ever be undervalued.  It has its own beauty, its own strength too made perfect in weakness; in prison, in torture, at the fiery stake, on the lonely sick-bed, in long years of self-devotion and resignation, and in a thousand womanly sacrifices unknown to man, but written for ever in God’s book of life.

      But as time went on, and the monastic life, which, whether practised by man or by woman, is essentially a feminine life, became more and more exclusively the religious ideal, grave defects began to appear in what was really too narrow a conception of the human character.

      The monks of the Middle Ages, in aiming exclusively at the virtues of women, generally copied little but their vices.  Their unnatural attempt to be wiser than God, and to unsex themselves, had done little but disease their mind and heart.  They resorted more and more to those arts which are the weapons of crafty, ambitious, and unprincipled women.  They were too apt to be cunning, false, intriguing.  They were personally cowardly, as their own chronicles declare; querulous, passionate, prone to unmanly tears; prone, as their writings abundantly testify, to scold, to use the most virulent language against all who differed from them; they were, at times, fearfully cruel, as evil women will be; cruel with that worst cruelty which springs from cowardice.  If I seem to have drawn a harsh picture of them, I can only answer that their own documents justify abundantly all that I have said.

      Gradually, to supply their defects, another ideal arose.  The warriors of the Middle Ages hoped that they might be able to serve God in the world, even in the battle-field.  At least, the world and the battle-field they would not relinquish, but make the best of them.  And among them arose a new and a very fair ideal of manhood: that of the ‘gentle, very perfect knight,’ loyal to his king and to his God, bound to defend the weak, succour the oppressed, and put down the wrong-doer; with his lady, or bread-giver, dealing forth bounteously the goods of this life to

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