PREFACE. BY THE VERY REV. W. R. FREMANTLE, AMONG the many Helps to Private Devotion which have been compiled for the use of Christians, the Churchman's Daily Remembrancer will be found to possess a value peculiarly its own. It supplies a want which has been long felt and expressed by members of the Church of England; they have never had a compilation of the best thoughts of the best standard Divines of the Church. It will be admitted that in many of the existing Manuals for private meditation, there is an absence of the deep, sober, practical, and Scriptural experience, which belongs to the writings of our Church theologians. In some there will be an excess of doctrinal peculiarity, in others an attempt to exaggerate spiritual emotion, in others an overstrained intellectualism, which, to a mind habituated to the quiet orthodoxy of the Church of England, fail to inspire that confidence and sympathy which are essential to profitable and edifying thought. No one will for a moment underrate the excellency of such works as those of Bogatzky, Tholuck, Mason, and Arndt, but there is a sphere of broad comprehensiveness which no individual writer upon so vast a subject as that of spiritual experience can attain, and which can only be reached by the aggregation of the testimony of holy men in all ages. It is with this view the present work has been undertaken, and, if a careful selection of choice and appropriate passages, from the writings of more than one hundred authors, extending from Clement and Ignatius to the present day, exhibiting one uniform interpretation of the Word of God, is calculated to kindle a steady and continuous train of thought from day to day, and from month to month, throughout the Ecclesiastical Year, the labours of the compiler will have not been in vain. Such a collection of individual and united testimony is of real importance in the present day, when schism, and indifference, and scepticism, are weakening the faith of many; and they who have not access to the works of our older Divines will be enabled to form a juster estimate of the theology of our Church. They will see how in each succeeding age, in the midst of heresies and martyrdoms, of declension and progress, the same standard of truth has been maintained through the successive generations of the Apostles, the Fathers, the Reformers, and Ministers of the Church, to the present hour; and will thus appreciate more and more fully, the communion of the body of Christ, and the certainty of the faith once delivered to the Saints. Of the manner in which the extracts have been made and arranged, it is enough to say, that the work has evidently been the result of much patient thought and labour, and that a wise discrimination marks the order both of the subjects and of the authors. Such a. grouping of the pious contemplations of holy and learned men, we may earnestly hope and pray will, by God's blessing, stir up much holy meditation, and help to comfort many an aching heart and quicken many an indolent spirit. W. R. FREMANTLE. |