Note on the Second Homily

Much evidence for the doctrine of this Homily is, I think, pouring in from different quarters. Intelligent officials complain against the practice of giving Government aid to the secular teaching in Missionary Schools. Should the Missionary want such aid? Does it not cramp his efforts by forcing on him a division he should not make, one he could only be tempted to make by imagining he has a thing called a Faith or Religion to teach, and other things that have nothing to do with it? Colonel Edwardes has also given important help to our conclusions. He goes beyond all my conceptions of how layman and clergyman should stand to each other: he would confiscate the property of the Hindoo Temples and the Mosques. Even from a soldier, this is startling. In his well-known work he boasted that in his province, which presumably no news of the Clive or Hastings policy had ever reached, an Englishman was thought incapable of an untruth. Can we keep that enviable, glorious, though somewhat perilous reputation if the acts he recommends are carried out? But we have another reason to protest. We know the Gospel grew mightily in Ephesus under an Apostle whom an impartial witness declared no plunderer of temples and no blasphemer of the Ephesian Goddess. Endued, as we believe, with powers from above, he used them to heal the sick and to show that the God he spoke of gives all good things. We also know that three centuries later in Alexandria a Bishop quite unlike Saul of Tarsus, aided and encouraged by the Imperial Government, led a mob to destroy the Temple of Serapis. We know what came of that effort to assert the true faith: it never became so false, so mixed with heathen abominations, as after it had so recklessly disposed of the outward symbols of heathen worship. We know Alexandria was destined in God’s counsels to be trodden underfoot by the Moslem, who was a better witness against idolatry than the Christian. We clergymen believe, as we must, that the success of the one experiment and the failure of the other follow necessarily from obedience and disobedience to the commands and example of our Lord Jesus Christ. In His name we must therefore adjure the Government not to imitate the Emperor of Constantinople, lest it be said that, while bearing the name of the Crucified, they have in practice been converted to the maxims of Juggernaut or of Mahomet.