Chapter 15

SERMON XV. THOU ART WORTHY

Eversley, 1869. Chester Cathedral, 1870. Trinity Sunday.

Revelation iv. 11. "Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created."

I am going to speak to you on a deep matter, the deepest and most important of all matters, and yet I hope to speak simply. I shall say nothing which you cannot understand, if you will attend. I shall say nothing, indeed, which you could not find out for yourselves, if you will think, and use your own common sense. I wish to speak to you of Theology--of God Himself. For this Trinity Sunday of all the Sundays of the year, is set apart for thinking of God Himself--not merely of our own souls, though we must never forget them, nor of what God has done for our souls, though we must never forget that--but of what God is Himself, what He would be if we had no souls--if there were, and had been from the beginning, no human beings at all upon the earth.

Now, if we look at any living thing--an animal, say, or a flower, and consider how curiously it is contrived, our common sense will tell us at once that some one has made it; and if any one answers--Oh! the flower was not made, it grew--our common sense would tell us that that was only a still more wonderful contrivance, and that there must be some one who gave it the power of growing, and who makes it grow. And so our common sense would tell us, as it told the heathens of old, that there must be GODS--beings whom we cannot see, who made the world. But if we watch things more closely, we should find out that all things are made more or less upon the same plan; that (and I tell you that this is true, strange as it may seem) all animals, however different they may seem to our eyes, are made upon the same plan; all plants and flowers, however different they may seem, are made upon the same plan; all stones, and minerals, and earths, however different they may seem, are made upon the same plan. Then common sense would surely tell us, one God made all the animals, one God made all the plants, one God made all the earths and stones. But if we watch more closely still, we should find that the plants could not live without the animals, nor the animals without the plants, nor either of them without the soil beneath our feet, and the air and rain above our heads. That everything in the world worked together on one plan, and each thing depended on everything else. Then common sense would tell us, one God must have made the whole world. But if we watched more closely again, or rather, if we asked the astronomers, who study the stars and heavens, they would tell us that all the worlds over our heads, all the stars that spangle the sky at night, were made upon the same plan as our earth--that sun and moon, and all the host of heaven, move according to the same laws by which our earth moves, and as far as we can find