'While the day of self-examination and repentance lasts': a Keble sermon for Lent II

From a Keble sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent (in his Sermons for the Christian Year: Lent to Passiontide), another extract which exudes Old High piety. Central to the piety and pastoral practice of the Old High tradition was an understanding of the Christian life as definitively shaped by the covenant of Baptism, the bestowal of regenerating grace in the Sacrament calling us to holiness of life and, therefore, ongoing repentance. One result of this was a caution and reserve regarding 'deathbed repentance', exemplified in Taylor's writings on the matter. 

This is precisely what is seen in Keble's sermon. In typically Old High fashion, he refers to the teaching of the Catechism on Baptism: "wherein I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven". Here is our spiritual birthright. That we profane this gift as did Esau with his birthright undergirds the call to repentance. The gracious covenant of redeeming love in which Baptism places us must bear fruit in holy living.

It is significant that Keble, echoing Taylor, expresses grave caution regarding 'deathbed repentance'. This contrasts with what might have assumed to be a Tractarian emphasis on the efficacy of a last absolution at the point of death. Instead, Keble - with pastoral wisdom - aligns with the Old High emphasis on the necessity of ongoing, lifelong repentance. 

As Christ then is the First-born, so is each one of us. Every child newly baptized is in God's sight as an eldest son: and his birthright is, the Kingdom of Heaven. All this we have been taught, as many of us as have learned our catechism: we have known it as certainly as Esau knew the promises made to his father Isaac, and the share which he as the firstborn had in those promises. Have we, or have we not, despised this our birthright? are we, or are we not, in God's sight, guilty of profaneness like Esau's? alas! I fear that most of us have too much reason to tremble on putting such a question as this to themselves: but it is better to tremble now before your Saviour, than hereafter before your Judge, when it shall be too late. It is better to be strict in trying yourselves, now in Christ's accepted time, in His own forty days of trial and amendment, than to wait until you shall be tried by the fires of the Last Day ...

Now then, now in the accepted time, now while the day of self-examination and repentance lasts, let us bring this aweful matter home to ourselves; let each one ask his own heart as seriously as possible, am I not also guilty of Esau's sin? am I not a profane person in one way or another? either in neglecting to offer myself up, soul and body, with purpose of heart, in Christ's Holy Communion to serve Him truly all the days of my life ...

Perhaps some such, on coming to their latter end, feeling themselves to be on their death-bed, tried to repent, they sought place for repentance, and that earnestly, as it seemed to those around them. So far, there is hope for them; but it must be more or less an uncertain hope, a fearful and trembling hope: not such a hope as one would wish to feel, both in dying, and in waiting upon the beds of the dying. But alas! the far greater part, apparently, of those who trifle with their God as Esau did, come at the last to no better a repentance than Esau's.