Sermons Preached in Lincoln's Inn Chapel
Volume IV
- This text
- New edition, in six volumes. London: Macmillan and Co., 1891.
- Length
- 80,000 words, about 6 hours' reading
This volume runs from the Sunday after Ascension 1858 to the last Sunday before Advent, with three Homilies added at the close. At its centre is a second series of sermons on the Eucharist, which Maurice reads as a declaration to all mankind that Christ died for all, as a share in His self-sacrifice, and as the key to prayer, confession and absolution: no private benefit for the devout, and no occasion for a priest’s probing of past sins.
Around it run the convictions of the whole collection: that God has planted one family for all nations in Christ, so that sects and parties are plants He did not plant, to be rooted out first in our own hearts; that every ruler, even Nero, is a minister answerable to a real Judge; and that Mercy and Truth, the eternal and the present, are never rivals in God. The Homilies carry the same faith into the public questions of 1858: the laying aside of the State Services, the government of India, and preaching to the poor.
Contents
The one-line summaries are guides drafted with the help of AI, not Maurice’s words.
- Title Page
- List of the Sermons
- God the Uprooter of Sects Sunday after Ascension
The Pharisees’ sect is the plant God did not plant, since He planted a family for all nations; we must root out party spirit in ourselves and never found a rival party.
- The Meaning of the Gift of Tongues Whit-Sunday
Pentecost’s tongues are a sign, not a vocabulary: what a missionary needs is sympathy and the Spirit uniting all nations in Christ, a gift for every age that lies and parties make seem withdrawn.
- The Uniting Name Trinity Sunday
Baptizing nations into the Name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not merely praising a better teacher, gives them a living Person as their bond; the Church’s divisions come from forgetting this.
- The Circumcision and the Uncircumcision Merged in Christ First Sunday after Trinity
Jew and Gentile are each renewed not by circumcision or its absence but in Christ, the living root of humanity; so England’s Christian faith cannot hinge on excluding or admitting Jews to Parliament.
- Daylight in the Heart the Preparation for the Day of Christ Second Sunday after Trinity
Sincerity is clearness of heart, like sunlight, that comes from looking to Christ the Light rather than to ourselves or public opinion; it keeps us from stumbling until the day of Christ.
- The Ministry of Sovereigns Third Sunday after Trinity
Even Nero is God’s minister for good, so all power is a trust answerable to a real Judge; faith in Christ, who makes the chief servant of all, underlies constitutional liberty.
- Why Christ Could Not Make His Authority Known to the Pharisees Fourth Sunday after Trinity
Christ meets the priests’ demand for His authority with a question about John because only those who take John’s call to repentance as meant for themselves can understand His kingdom.
- The Eucharist Considered as a Declaration of Christ’s Death to Mankind Fifth Sunday after Trinity
The Lord’s Supper, common bread and wine, proclaims to all mankind that the Lord died for all, so it is no private benefit; Romanist secrecy and Protestant exclusiveness both miss this.
- The Eucharist Considered as a Participation in the Unselfish Life of Christ Sixth Sunday after Trinity
Communion is not a way to save oneself but a share in the Son of Man’s self-sacrifice: whoever seeks his own life loses it, and whoever gives it up for Christ finds it.
- The Eucharist Considered as Interpreting All Other Acts of Devotion Seventh Sunday after Trinity
Prayer springs from the grace of Christ, the love of God and the Spirit’s communion, even where Christ is unknown, and the Eucharist, which declares this, interprets prayer rather than the reverse.
- The Eucharist Considered in its Relation to Confession and Absolution Eighth Sunday after Trinity
Read in light of the Eucharist, the Prayer Book’s counsel for troubled consciences means leading the burdened out of self to Christ, not a priest’s probing of past sins.
- The Eucharist Considered as Christ’s Voice to a Lukewarm Church Ninth Sunday after Trinity
The self-satisfied, neither-hot-nor-cold Laodicean Church mirrors our own age, yet Christ still stands knocking at the door, and the Lord’s Supper renews His promise of fellowship that humbles all in order to exalt all.
- The Book of Proverbs Illustrated by St. John Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity
Wisdom in Proverbs is a living Person, found rather than made, and Jesus is that Light of the world; following Him, even by the Cross, keeps a man out of darkness.
- Mercy and Truth Not Opposed in the Nature of God or in the Transactions of Men Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity
Mercy and Truth are never rivals in God, as theories of punishment and indulgence assume; together they purge iniquity, and the fear of that undivided Lord, not fear of penalty, turns men from evil.
- Christian Services and Christian Rewards Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity
Paul’s sowing and reaping describes obedience to a law, not a trader’s bargain: the Christian’s reward is love returned, fresh work for the Master, and rest in God, so selfishness is what must go.
- The Eternal Not Opposed to the Present Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity
Things seen are temporal and things unseen eternal, but both surround us now; eternity is no distant future but a present treasure in the unchanging Word, who frees us from Self, Sin and Death.
- The Renovation of the Will the Great Subject of Prayer Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity
The Psalmist’s confession that his soul clings to the dust, followed by the cry to be quickened, shows that the deepest prayer asks for a renewed will, which only God’s own will can free.
- Homily I: On National Celebrations
The State Services may rightly be laid aside, not because God has ceased to govern history, but because their language rang false; nations may celebrate again once a true Catholicism in Christ unites them.
- Homily II: On Theology and Government in India
Theology and government have never stayed apart, and India shows it again; the nation should preach a Gospel rather than propagate a faith, with ruler and priest each witnessing to one Kingdom.
- Homily III: On Preaching to the Poor
Preachers to rich and poor alike should do what John the Baptist did, announcing that the King of Heaven is at hand, rather than tailoring tricks to classes, and so call every man to repent.
- Note on the Second Homily
Fresh evidence backs the Homily on India: government aid to secular teaching cramps missionaries, and Colonel Edwardes’s plan to seize temple property would repeat Alexandria’s failure, not Paul’s healing witness at Ephesus.
About this digital edition
How the text was made, and the printer's errors corrected
The original book
Sermons, Volume 4 by Frederick Denison Maurice.
This edition
Produced 2026-10-07 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 a language model (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-5-5) 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 444 italic spans.
- Small capitals and ligatures (æ, œ) are reproduced as printed.
- A whole-book audit (claude-sonnet-5-5) 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 98 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. 43: ‘whether’ → ‘whither’
- p. 63: ‘Christ.” Philippians i. 10.’ → ‘Christ.”—Philippians i. 10.’
- p. 73: ‘tolerent’ → ‘tolerant’
- p. 101: ‘After’ → ‘after’
- p. 120: ‘you’ → ‘up’
- p. 175: ‘texts’ → ‘text’
- p. 211: ‘wordly’ → ‘worldly’
- p. 215: ‘Twenty-Fourth’ → ‘Twenty-fourth’
Printer’s oddities that are not errors were left exactly as printed (including inconsistent proper-name spellings and the original’s own numbering gaps).