"The common interests of a wider fellowship": A Hackney Phalanx sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity

From A Course of Sermons, for the Lord's Day throughout the Year, Volume II (1817) by Joseph Holden Pott - associated with the Hackney Phalanx - an extract from a sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity. Against a sectarian apocalypticism, the sermon presents a vision of providence which addresses "the common interests of a wider fellowship ... the joint concerns of the community". God's providential ordering of creation and history, therefore, points away from sectarianism to a consistent Old High concern, that common life - universal and national, civic and domestic - should be viewed as blessed and sustained by God, and should therefore be ordered towards Him:

If we wish then to cultivate right dispositions for a due attendance on the providence of God, let us cast away that narrowness of mind which confines itself to present things alone. The sun which sets and rises, is not bounded to our skies or limited to our climate and proportion of the globe: nor should our thoughts be bounded to the circle of those lands and fields around us, which are visited by his beams. Let our good wishes then extend as far as the lot and heritage of our fellow creatures, whilst our daily supplications and addresses are put up to him who hath set up a Redeemer as the common hope of all ...

The prayers and supplications which our blessed Lord, in the season of his ministry and travel, tendered to his heavenly Father, were sometimes made for his first followers in particular, and sometimes they were made for all: if then, with him, we may have a special eye to what lies nearest to us, yet with him we must extend the eye to larger views, and must learn to unfold the heart to the common interests of a wider fellowship. Our first regard should indeed be directed to the joint concerns of the community, civil and spiritual, in which we have our part and privilege. We are bound, within our own sphere, to employ our efforts with a constant diligence, in order, more especially, to counteract those direful signs of vice and irreligion, which threaten ruin wheresoever they prevail. We have to promote the fear of God and the knowledge of his word around us; and to encourage the fair signs of future happiness in our own land, by a diligent and prudent application of our minds and efforts to all things by which the interests of religion, and the improvement of the hearts and lives of men can be promoted. We are bound also to take thought and to exercise a true endeavour, so far as we are able, for the common benefit of all.

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