"ALL SAINTS AND ALL BENEFACTORS."1

"Let us now praise famous men,
And our fathers who begat us

Such as did bear rule in their kingdoms,
And were renowned for their power
Leaders of the people by their counsels,

And by their understanding men of learning
Rich men furnished with ability,

Living peaceably in their habitations:

All these were honoured in their generations,

And were a glory in their days.

There be of them, that have left a name behind them

To declare their praises,

And some there be which have no memorial."

ECCLESIASTICUS xliv. 1-9 [R.V.]

O-DAY is All Saints' Day. It is a Festival

TO-DAY

of our Church which happily this year synchronises with the day on which we in this place are called upon to commemorate the Founders and Benefactors of our University. And the thought which gives meaning and reality to both commemorations is essentially the same-the Catholicity, the manifoldness of consecrated service. On this day our Mother Church asks us to recall

Sermon at Great St. Mary's, Cambridge, Sunday, November, 1, 1896.

with grateful memory and holy thanksgiving that noble company of the first-born, our unseen brothers in Heaven, our unrecognised comrades on earth, who, from the earliest days of Christian history down to this latest year, have heard God's call and obeyed it, have seen God's truth and proclaimed it, have felt God's life and have striven to live it-Apostles, Prophets, Martyrs, Confessors, Saints, Heroes of the Faith.

And on this day, also, our hardly less benign Mother in this place asks us to hold in pious memory, and to recite with joyous gratitude the names of that long roll of her heroes, "Honoured in their generations, and the glory of their days"; "Men of renown, giving counsel by their understanding"; Masters of knowledge, whose best dignity is that of leadership; Benefactors, whose best authority is that of service; seekers after truth, whose best courage is that born of reverence, and sincerity, and self-repression; champions of freed thought, who have won for us, at the price of their own heart's blood, the franchises of the mind and soul; "Rich men, furnished with ability," who made possible, for many of us in the days of our youth, the opportunities which we shared together here of sound learning, of disciplined loyalty, of generous life; "Leaders of the people by their counsel, men of learning by their understanding," Philosophers, Kings, Poets, Priests, Doctors, Soldiers, Statesmen.

The glory of the consecrated life, the authority

born of service for the common good, this thought, I repeat, it is which gives its true meaning alike to the Festival of all Saints, and the Commemoration of all Benefactors.

The historic origin of the Festival of All Saints is a little obscure. There seems, however, to be little doubt that in the Western Church, at any rate, this Festival in its earliest form is traceable to the Dedication Service held in the early part of the seventh century by Pope Boniface III. to commemorate the consecration of the Pantheon at Rome, with its crowd of private divinities and Augustal gods-the last monument of the old Paganism left in Christian Rome-to the service of the one true God, "in honour of St. Mary, ever Virgin, and all the Holy Martyrs and Confessors."

This conversion of a heathen temple to Christian uses indicates the same judicious methods of accommodation which you will remember Gregory the Great himself had so discreetly commended "concerning the case of the English," in his wellknown letter to the Abbot Mellitus, quoted in the early pages of Bede's History. "If these temples are well built," he said, "they ought of necessity to be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God, that while the nation sees that its temples are not destroyed, it may put away error from its heart, and acknowledging and adoring the true God, may the more familiarly meet at its accustomed places." I Bede, "Eccl. Hist.," i., xxx.

The Festival of All Saints was therefore, in its earliest form, simply a Dedication Festival, like the Dedication Festivals of other Churches, in commemoration of their local saints, but of higher celebrity than theirs, inasmuch as it was the commemoration of the final victory of Christianity over Paganism, of the Church of the Imperial Christ over the Temple of Jupiter Vindex.

By the middle of the ninth century, however, the Festival had taken its final place in the calendar, as one of the great Church Festivals, preceded as they all were by Fast and Vigil, a commemoration of the whole glorious band of the Church's Heroes, the noble succession of saints. and confessors and martyrs, whose deeds illuminate the pages of the divine history of the Church, a commemoration also of those others our comrades and brothers, who having once lived to God here below for our example live to Him still, beyond the veil, and watch us, we trust, with faithful and sympathising eyes, and lastly a commemoration of that company of the faithful departed, of all languages and tongues,

"The unknown good that rest

In God's still memory folded deep,

The bravely dumb that did their deed,

And scorned to blot it with a name ;

Men of the plain heroic breed,

Who love Heaven's silence more than Fame." I

"All Saints," by J. R. Lowell.

But the earlier origin of the Festival in the transformation of a Pagan Temple, with all its glory of Gentile art, into a Christian Church, need not surely be forgotten, for not only does that origin vindicate for us the intrinsic power of the Church of Christ to consecrate and transfigure whatever it touches, but it suggests also, I think, the wisdom of claiming, for purposes of commemoration in the public services of the Church, a somewhat wider range of saintly ideals than any that our existing Calendar contains.

It has always seemed to me that for the human soul there are no more natural acts of public worship than those which consecrate our feelings of reverence and gratitude for the memory of departed saints and the lives of great men, and which recognise the moral discipline there is to be gained from the enthusiastic commemoration of great ideals. Not only do

"Their phantoms arise before us,

Our loftier brothers but one in blood,
At bed and board they lord it o'er us,

With looks of beauty and words of good;"

but in the solemn services of worship, their lives and their example not only give us motive and inspiration, but are also in some sort a pledge for the consecration of similar gifts, however small, in ourselves. And therefore I have often wondered why it is, that believing as we profess to do in the continuous present inspiration of the Holy