Sermons Preached in Lincoln's Inn Chapel
Volume V
- This text
- New edition, in six volumes. London: Macmillan and Co., 1891.
- Length
- 86,000 words, about 6 hours' reading
This volume follows the Church’s year from Advent Sunday 1858 to the Sunday before Easter 1859. Its Advent sermons ground our patience in God’s own longsuffering, and refuse any hope in Christ confined to this life or to a few. Through the weeks after Epiphany come the sermons Maurice also printed in What is Revelation? as his answer to Mansel’s Bampton Lectures: Christ among the doctors, Paul at Athens, the miracles, the casting out of the evil spirit, and the parables. Each presses the same claim, that revelation is the unveiling of a Person to the conscience, not a set of rules to be accepted on authority.
In Septuagesima and Lent the conviction turns social. Christ is the Foundation, the Vine and the Head of every man, so human society is one body, and confession, not criticism of others, is the way back into it. With a general election coming and war threatening on the Continent, the volume ends with the Lord of Hosts revealed as the Lord of Peace.
Contents
The one-line summaries are guides drafted with the help of AI, not Maurice’s words.
- Title Page
- List of the Sermons
- God’s Patience the Ground of Our Patience Advent Sunday
The waiting husbandman of James’s letter is first of all God, whose longsuffering with persons, nations and Churches is the ground of our patience and of a hope wider than private escape.
- The Sleep of the Church Second Sunday in Advent
Christians fall asleep not through persecution or false doctrine but through lazy indifference to their neighbours; Paul wakes the Church with the nearness of a salvation from lovelessness, which Christ Himself kindles.
- The Misery of Limiting Our Hope in Christ Third Sunday in Advent
Paul’s warning that hope in Christ for this life only makes us most miserable does not belittle present joy; it rebukes a selfish contentment confining Christ’s redemption to this life and a few.
- Sorrow and Joy Necessary to Each Other Fourth Sunday in Advent
Paul’s paradox of sorrowing yet always rejoicing is real: sorrow, accepted as a gift, joins us to Christ’s sorrow for the world, and beneath it lies joy in the Father’s will, which Christmas commands.
- The Witnesses for the Glorified Son of Man St. Stephen’s Day
A martyr is a witness rather than a mere sufferer, and those who suffer for conscience testify against falsehood; Stephen’s vision of the Son of Man at God’s right hand is the Church’s witness.
- The Blessing and Curse of the Law First Sunday in the Year
Circumcision, God’s covenant to rescue a people from the flesh, reconciles David’s delight in the Law with Paul’s dread of it; free obedience comes only from trusting the Lawgiver as Father in Christ.
- Christ Among the Doctors First Sunday after Epiphany
The boy Christ, hearing and questioning the doctors in the Temple, reaches beneath their commentaries to the plain sense of their own sacred words, and shows them a power mightier than the letter they served.
- St. Paul at Athens Second Sunday after Epiphany
Paul’s sermon on Mars’ Hill affirms, against the safer method of denouncing pagan error, that the Athenians are already God’s offspring, near to a Father they have only dimly sought.
- The Miracles of Christ Generally Third Sunday after Epiphany
Christ’s miracles, from the water turned to wine to the healing of the leper, are not proofs demanding blind assent but disclosures of the Father’s grace, to be tested by whether they bear his likeness.
- Christ Casting Out the Evil Spirit Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
No law or chain can tame the Gadarene demoniac; only Christ’s direct claim upon his spirit heals him, a deliverance repeated in Paul’s conversion and in every reformation since.
- The Parables of Christ Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
Christ’s parables do not conceal divine mysteries behind homely images but unveil them, so that ordinary things such as seed, shepherd, and father become visible witnesses to anyone whose inner eye and ear are open.
- Practice and Speculation Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
Hoping for Christ’s coming manifestation is no idle speculation but the very ground of practical holiness, since knowing God as a calling Father, not a rulebook, is what makes obedience possible.
- Christ the Purifier of Priests and Laymen Septuagesima Sunday
Malachi’s refiner sits to purge priests and people alike, so the old Candlemas festival teaches that no saint shields sin and that humanity is purified in the Son of God.
- The Old and New Paradise Sexagesima Sunday
Not allegory but history links Eden’s tree and rivers to the New Jerusalem’s water of life, and the Spirit and the Bride invite everyone who hears, thirsts, or wills to drink freely.
- The Foundation and the Building Quinquagesima Sunday
The foundation of human society is already laid, Christ, a Person, not an opinion, so Lenten conversion turns us from prizing our opinions about Him and our superiority to others toward charity.
- The Vine and the Branches First Sunday in Lent
Our Lenten barrenness comes from disbelieving that the Father has already grafted us into Christ, the Vine, whose bond joins us to one another; abiding in Him, not self-effort, bears fruit.
- The Body and the Members Second Sunday in Lent
Human society is literally one body whose members suffer and rejoice together, and only a Person, Christ, the Head of every man, can bind it, so Lent means confessing our denials of that order.
- Theology and Morality Third Sunday in Lent
Micah’s call to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly cannot be met by moral maxims alone; only the Bible’s theology, the unveiling of the righteous God in Christ, gives it ground and power.
- The Sin of Man and the Justification of Man Fourth Sunday in Lent
All are condemned in Adam and all justified in Christ, Paul writes, so we should confess our own depravity, not a universal one, and never assume selfishness as society’s ground.
- Hatred Necessary to Love Fifth Sunday in Lent
David’s hatred targets whatever rises against the righteous God, beginning within; our boasted gentleness is often indifference, and true charity grows from hating falsehood, including the frauds of an election.
- The Lord of Hosts and the Lord of Peace Sunday before Easter
The God of armies and the Lord of Peace are one, and He Himself gives peace in every place, not as quiet repose but as the power of sacrifice issuing from the Cross.
About this digital edition
How the text was made, and the printer's errors corrected
The original book
Sermons, Volume 5 by Frederick Denison Maurice.
This edition
Produced 2026-10-09 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 435 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 118 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. 9: ‘εὔρηκα’ → ‘εὕρηκα’
- p. 11: ‘age the risince day’ → ‘age since their day’
- p. 25: ‘oppposed’ → ‘opposed’
- p. 79: ‘Thy’ → ‘They’
- p. 159: ‘wordly’ → ‘worldly’
- p. 239: ‘indorses’ → ‘endorses’
- p. 239: ‘his’ → ‘this’
- p. 291: ‘“’ supplied, not in the print — after “…it; so will it become yours.”
Printer’s oddities that are not errors were left exactly as printed (including inconsistent proper-name spellings and the original’s own numbering gaps).