'So to think of your Bibles and so to use them': Keble, Advent II, and reading the Scriptures

 As we consider extracts from Keble's Advent sermons in his Sermons for the Christian Year: Advent to Christmas Eve, we turn to a sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent. As indicated last week, what guides these readings is my view that little, if anything, distinguished Keble's preaching from sermons delivered in Old High pulpits. 

Today's extract is a particularly striking example of this. Reflecting on the words of the collect for the Second Sunday of Advent, Keble urges faithful private reading of holy Scripture, and a serious devotion to such reading of the Scriptures. 

Two particular aspects of this extract are worth noting. Firstly, reflecting Old High convictions, the Scriptures of the New Testament are regarded as "the new law": in other words, we "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" the teaching of the New Testament in order that it may bear fruit in our lives. Good works and the moral life are the fruit of reading the Scriptures, not the declarations and professions of Enthusiasts. Secondly, the attentiveness to Scripture to which Keble calls his hearers reflects how Old High piety (following the Prayer Book) had a vision of what Thornton calls "an integrated and united community", with no "priest-lay gulf", in which all - clergy and laity alike - are, in a Benedictine fashion, called to attend to the Scriptures in corporate prayer and in private devotion. And note the repeated phrase "your Bibles" (emphasis added).

This is a sermon which evinces little in any way of a distinctive 'Tractarian spirituality' and is perfectly at home with the reformed catholicism of the Old High tradition.

Your Bibles, then, and the use you have made of them, will have a very great deal to do with your standing or falling in that great and dreadful Day. I might say, all will depend on them. Ponder now on this, my brethren, for on this particular Sunday especially the Church our Mother puts you in mind of it. Did you not hear what she said to you in the Epistle, that the Holy Scriptures are written for you to learn, not simply to learn as a lesson, but so as to have hope, i.e. a reasonable hope of going to Heaven, of being acquitted at the last day? And have you not been praying to the Holy Ghost over and over in today's service, that by His Holy Word you may "embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which Thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ" i.e. that you may have comfort from your Bibles in the Day of Judgement? 

This has been God's lesson to you, and this your prayer to God to-day. But have you really used yourselves so to think of your Bibles and so to use them ... especially out of that part of it which is properly called the new law, the New Testament or Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ ... I ask you, every one of you, have you used yourself on reading the holy and exact laws of God, to commune in this way with your own heart?

... You must labour and ask God by His heavenly grace to give you that true conversion of heart which shall make you love the Bible above all other books, and obey what is written in it for love's and not for custom's sake. Then you will cast away all your vain excuses, and throw yourself wholly on His mercy. And then, this Book of the new law, having been your guide here will be your hope and not your condemnation, when it is opened and you are judged out of it.

(The picture is of Keble's parish church, All Saints, Hursley, Hampshire.)