'The season of decay': a Keble sermon for Stir-up Sunday

From a sermon by John Keble for The Sunday before Advent. In this rather beautiful introduction to the sermon, we can quite clearly hear the voice of the author of The Christian Year, evoking Autumn passing into Winter, on the cusp of Advent:

The time just before Advent is a very serious and thoughtful season to all who take notice of time as the Church invites them. It is just the season of decay: the last leaves are falling, and the last flowers are ceasing to blow. We naturally look back and begin to consider how the weeks and months have passed, since those leaves were fresh: how many things we meant to do then, more than we have really done, how unlike in many respects the face of things now is, to what we wished and expected then. Also, we must be very blind or very thankless, if we fail at such times to notice the many mercies, more than we could expect, and very far more than we deserve, which our gracious God has continued to us: kind friends, beloved kinsmen, peaceful times, helps to do good; above all, the means of grace and repentance in God's Church. We see the buds, which are to be leaves next year, forming already on the trees; and we are permitted to look forward with hope to the time when they will have come out in their beauty, and to make for ourselves good resolutions and rules against that time.

(The photograph by David Martin is of Keble's parish church, All Saints, Hursley, amidst frost and leafless trees on a December day.)

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laudable Practice

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