Sermons Preached in Lincoln's Inn Chapel
Volume II
- This text
- New edition, in six volumes. London: Macmillan and Co., 1891.
- Length
- 101,000 words, about 7 hours' reading
This volume gathers Maurice’s preaching from Easter 1857 toward Advent, in a year shadowed by the Indian Mutiny, by Roman controversy, and by the restless question of what the Church of England is for. Maurice takes the era’s sharpest quarrels (Protestant and Catholic, science and faith, law and grace) and, instead of declaring a winner, digs beneath both sides to a forgotten common ground.
Underneath everything runs one conviction: God is not an accuser to be appeased but a Father who has already claimed the whole human family in Christ, and our task is not to win His favour but to stop denying the relationship we are already in.
Contents
The one-line summaries are guides drafted with the help of AI, not Maurice’s words.
- Title Page
- List of the Sermons
- The Faith of Protestants First Sunday after Easter
The Reformation recovered the truth that deliverance must reach sin itself, not only its penalties, so justification means being made righteous in Christ, and peace with God a daily dying to self-will.
- The Faith of Catholics Second Sunday after Easter
Protestants drawn to Rome feel a God-given hunger for unity, but the unity, continuity and communion they crave already belong to their own Catholic Church, so the answer is repentance, not conversion.
- The Faith of Englishmen Third Sunday after Easter
The English Church’s mocked middle position reconciles Protestant assurance of personal justification with the Catholic craving for unity, with Christ as the living centre, though sectarian self-assertion remains its great failure.
- National Holiness Fourth Sunday after Easter
Israel’s holiness is a status God gives the whole people, not an ideal won by the righteous, so sin is forgetting that given dignity, and every law and office is sacred under God, the nation’s present King.
- The Sacredness of Common Morality Rogation Sunday
Dwelling in God’s presence asks for ordinary honesty, truth-telling and refusing bribes and usury, rather than ritual or ascetic heroism, and Christ’s Ascension sharpens these demands rather than relaxing them.
- The Ascension of Christ Sunday after Ascension Day
Christ’s Ascension above every power completes what Romans and Galatians begin, and faith in him as humanity’s common Head grounds justification and the unity of nations, dissolving sects and breaking tyranny.
- Universality of the Whitsuntide Message Whit-Sunday
Whitsuntide speaks more urgently to a scientific, commercial age than to any before it, for Christ is Head over every power, and the gift of speech at Pentecost breaks down barriers between people and God.
- Conformity to the Mind of God Trinity Sunday
No outward authority can compel real obedience to God, since even the effort to submit is self-will, and conformity to his mind comes only as the Spirit renews the will, like spring quickening dormant life.
- Steps to Faith in the Holy Trinity First Sunday after Trinity
The Trinity is a resting-place for the humbled soul, not a puzzle for the proud: the scientist, the penitent and the spiritual seeker each find one Person and learn their unity only in fellowship.
- The Bond of Peace Second Sunday after Trinity
The unity of the Spirit is already given, to be kept with effort, not forced into being, and true peace rests not on uniformity but on the shared Name of Father, Son and Spirit.
- Christian Reverence and Subjection Third Sunday after Trinity
Submitting to one another needs a reverence no custom can supply, flowing from God’s Spirit and from seeing in every person, however degraded, a nature Christ has taken and glorified.
- The Apostle the Chief of Sinners Fourth Sunday after Trinity
Paul’s confession that he is chief of sinners is sober present truth, growing keener with age, for it rests not on outward deeds but on a will exposed as hostile to God.
- God’s Judgment and Our Judgment Fifth Sunday after Trinity
Judgment means discerning right from wrong, not a vague word for calamity, and when people shirk judging themselves, God does it within them, exposing hidden thoughts that suffering can make fruitful.
- Christ’s Death and Resurrection the Archetypes of Ours Sixth Sunday after Trinity
Christ’s death is the pattern of every human death, uniting rather than isolating us, and because death and resurrection are one in him, rising means restored union with ourselves, each other and God.
- How Sin Pays, and How God Gives Seventh Sunday after Trinity
Sin and righteousness are two masters, one paying death as wages and the other giving life freely, for eternal life is not a reward but Christ himself dwelling within as a living spring.
- The Fatherly Character of God the Only Ground of Repentance, Consolation, Hope Day of Humiliation
Amid the horrors of the Indian Mutiny, true repentance and comfort spring only from faith in God as a Father who is also a righteous Judge, not from abstract providence or fear of an offended power.
- Christ, Not Christianity, the Deliverance of Mankind Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity
England’s crisis in India is a failure of belief, not of missionary effort, and the real question is what we think of Christ, King of every nation and near to every conscience.
- Faith and Science United in the Work of the Missionary St. Luke’s Day
Luke the physician shows that bodily and spiritual healing come from one Spirit of Truth, and that the gospel was always meant to confront superstition with real cures as well as preaching.
- A Straitened Faith and a Narrow Gospel Not the Strait Gate and the Narrow Way of Christ Twentieth Sunday after Trinity
Christ’s strait gate is not a narrow creed for the few but his own path of trust in the Father, open to all, while the broad way is distrust of God, dressed as despair or self-righteousness.
- The Sealed Nation and the Universal Family All Saints’ Day
The sealed tribes and the countless multitude show that Jerusalem’s fall confirmed God’s promises, the baptized inheriting Israel’s calling, and heaven fulfilling every family’s hopes as a society, not a dissolving of persons.
- The Sermon on the Mount: Its General Principle Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity
The Sermon on the Mount is living law spoken by Christ the King, and its call to be perfect summons us not into an elite but into full humanity, as children of a boundlessly merciful Father.
- The Sermon on the Mount: Its Teaching Respecting Marriage Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity
Christ’s teaching on divorce recovers marriage’s original order as one flesh, older than the Law, against Pharisees who made Moses’ concession a rule, and true reverence for marriage springs from Christ’s union with humanity.
- The Sermon on the Mount: Its Teaching Respecting Forgiveness and Punishment Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity
Christ’s commands not to resist evil and to love enemies do not abolish the law of justice but reveal its divine root, separating retribution from private vengeance and leaving the magistrate’s sword in place.
About this digital edition
How the text was made, and the printer's errors corrected
The original book
Sermons, Volume 2 by Frederick Denison Maurice.
This edition
Produced 2026-11-01 from a page scan of the printed book, as part of a project to make F. D. Maurice’s works freely available in every useful digital form. The guiding principle throughout was fidelity to the printed text: Maurice’s own spelling, capitalization, punctuation, ligatures, and typography rule, except where a printing error was identified and deliberately emended (each such change is listed below).
How this text was made
The transcription pipeline combines automated tools, AI models, and page-by-page human review:
- OCR and conversion. The scan was OCRed (ocrmypdf/Tesseract) and converted to structured text (marker), then cleaned by language models (claude-sonnet-5 and claude-haiku-4-5-20251001) working chunk by chunk.
- Human review of every machine change. Every word the cleanup model altered was reviewed against an image of the printed line. Footnotes were verified against the printed page and renumbered uniformly.
- Quotation marks were normalized to the printer’s own conventions and validated by a nesting checker; every remaining irregularity was inspected against the page image. The final text has fully paired quotation marks.
- Italics were restored (the OCR text layer records none) by a vision model (claude-sonnet-5) cross-checked against a deterministic measurement of letterform slant on the page images, with per-word statistical calibration derived from the book itself. Every page was then reviewed by a human editor against the print. This edition carries 328 italic spans.
- Small capitals and ligatures (æ, œ) are reproduced as printed.
- Greek was checked word by word against the print. Its accents and breathings follow standard usage: where the printer’s are missing or differ, they were corrected silently and are not listed among the emendations below. Greek is set upright, as the book prints it.
- A whole-book audit (claude-sonnet-5) checked structure, headings, footnotes, and Greek; its findings were reviewed by a human editor against the print before any were applied.
The text contains 0 footnotes and 122 small-caps renderings of the print.
Emendations
Places where this edition deliberately differs from the printed book, each a correction of an apparent printing error, verified against the page image:
- p. 29: ‘twelth’ → ‘twelfth’
- p. 37: ‘convictions, and and’ → ‘convictions, and’
- p. 41: ‘they they were’ → ‘they were’
- p. 62: ‘wickedness, and and’ → ‘wickedness, and’
- p. 77: ‘artifical’ → ‘artificial’
- p. 78: ‘artifical’ → ‘artificial’
- p. 98: ‘wordly’ → ‘worldly’
- p. 106: ‘continally’ → ‘continually’
- p. 146: ‘reconcilation’ → ‘reconciliation’
- p. 154: ‘spectulations’ → ‘speculations’
- p. 162: ‘mainfested’ → ‘manifested’
- p. 172: ‘withdawing’ → ‘withdrawing’
- p. 181: ‘seperate’ → ‘separate’
- p. 244: ‘tenure’ → ‘tenor’
- p. 293: ‘jugdments’ → ‘judgments’
- p. 320: ‘scandles’ → ‘scandals’
- p. 338: ‘coarse’ → ‘course’
- p. ix: ‘bccause’ → ‘because’
Printer’s oddities that are not errors were left exactly as printed (including inconsistent proper-name spellings and the original’s own numbering gaps).