Notes of a Sermon Preached by Rev. C. E. Darwent in Union Church, Tientsin, Sunday Evening October 14
Text: Ephesians 1V. 18.
"Until we all attain... unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."
The frequent assertion that theology is dull and dry is contradicted every day. We are all theologians after a fashion, because very few people are so silly as to have no interest in the questions with which theology deals. The daily papers on this coast utterly contradict the idea that people take no interest in theology, for a correspondence on the "Second Coming" carries on than the important ques-'What is a China pony?" That is a fact of great significance on this sporting coast, showing that mens' thoughts are deeper than is usually believed which 1s w hopeful fact. And so I can take for granted, that you are all interested in the question of what God requires of us and what He has done to help us to meet His requirements. There is no greater question for any man than that and to-night I am going to try and give an answer to it by the help of one of our great English writers. He has held his own for. three hundred years, and is still a fountain of wisdom to all who dip into his works as all whose business. it 1s to teach ought to do. I refer to Richard Hooker, generally called "the judicious Hooker." of the clock, and went to bed. if it was winter they ran up and down the cloisters to get their feet warm, before they went to bed. I should think, that this kind of life would either Kill a shy and delicate lad or make 1 scholar of him if he survived.
Hooker did survive it. He went out of College with all the learning of his time in his head. Appointed preacher at the Temple, he went up to London and was provided with lodgings with a draper. He arrived wet and miserable. The draper's wife said, that it would be far better if he had a wife to look after him. With this he agreed and rather incautiously promised to marry any lady his hostess suggested. She named her own daughter and Hooker was as good as his word and married her. The position at the Temple was too controversial for Hooker who was 1 of a gentle spirit; so he got a country living, and one of the famous pictures in all English Titerature is that of Cranmer, a nephew of the archbishop, calling on Hooker and finding him composing his great book and writing it while he rocked a cradle with one foot. Scholarship and domesticity combined.
He was born at Exeter in the Year 1554 and lived till the year 1600, so that his life covered the reign of Queen Elizabeth and made him Shakespeare's contem-para His father sent him to Oxford but had great difficulty in supporting him there. Life at Oxford, as it then was, would empty the univer: to-day if students had to live the life of men like—Hooker.—Undergraduates had to wait on their seniors. At Hooker's college there were 20 fellows and 20 undergraduates or discipuli. Each fellow had a diseipulus to wait en him and sleep in his bedroom. The meals and hours of Hooker's day would create a shock in Oxford to-day. We read in an account of the day that "There be divers that rise daily between four and five of the clock; from five to six devotions and from six to 10 have private study or lectures. At 10 of the clock, they have dinner where they be content with a penny piece of beef among four, having a few spoonfuls of porridge made of the broth of the same beef with salt and_ oatmeal and nothing else.' And we read that they studied again till five and had a supper like the dinner, then they studied again till 10
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.