Sermons Preached in Lincoln's Inn Chapel
Volume VI
- This text
- New edition, in six volumes. London: Macmillan and Co., 1891.
- Length
- 76,000 words, about 6 hours' reading
This volume completes the Lincoln’s Inn sermons, running from Easter Day to the Sunday before Advent 1859. Its Easter and Whitsun sermons treat the great doctrines as powers already at work in ordinary life rather than tenets to be defended: the Resurrection awakening good desires; the Ascension grounding truthfulness, honest work and faithfulness at home; the Spirit given to all as power, love and a sound mind; and the Trinity as the Name into which we are baptized, not a dogma.
Through the Trinity season Maurice turns to the England of 1859: revivals that stir the nerves rather than the conscience, officials and priests who forget that their calling is God’s, and fears of invasion, which he meets by calling the nation to its daily war with corruption, vice and greed. Throughout, the new heavens and earth are this creation renewed, and the hope of deliverance reaches to the body and to the animals that groan with it.
Contents
The one-line summaries are guides drafted with the help of AI, not Maurice’s words.
- Title Page
- List of the Sermons
- The Resurrection a Power as Well as an Event Easter Day
The Easter Collect’s modest prayer for good desires brought to good effect is no anticlimax, since the power that raised Christ is the same power now awakening and fulfilling those desires.
- God the Justifier of Man Second Sunday after Easter
Justification is the righteous God claiming the ungodly and raising them to trust him, as with Abraham and David, so faith is no party tenet but acknowledging a righteousness that is God’s.
- Christ Meeting with Doubters Third Sunday after Easter
The Emmaus disciples are as bewildered as doubters today, and the risen Christ meets them as He meets us, opening the Scriptures and breaking bread, so no later age is disadvantaged.
- Excommunication Fourth Sunday after Easter
Paul’s sentence on the Corinthian offender ratifies the man’s own choice of another master, aims at saving his spirit, and imposes no outward penalty; it is fearful because communion is life’s foundation.
- Christ’s Death and Resurrection the Solution of the Problems of the Universe Fifth Sunday after Easter
Moses and Paul answer men’s restless craving to know what lies in heaven above and the deep below: the word is near, and Christ has entered death and ascended on high.
- How Christ’s Ascension Bears upon Ordinary Practice Sunday after Ascension
Christ’s Ascension, with human nature glorified at God’s right hand, is the ground of plain duties like truthfulness, honest work and family faithfulness, since all are members of one family under one Head.
- The Help of Believing in a Spirit Who Has Been Given to Us Whit-Sunday
Fear is not God’s Spirit; the Spirit given to us is one of power behind all speech, healing and rule, of love, and of a sound mind, never ours to boast of.
- Faith in the Trinity Not Faith in a Dogma Trinity Sunday
Rather than a dogma to be defended with texts and tradition, the Trinity is the Name we are baptized into: Father above all, Word through all, Spirit in all, uniting men.
- Why We are Greater Than the Greatest of the Prophets First Sunday after Trinity
John’s baptism of repentance closes the old age by pointing beyond itself; the least in the kingdom is greater, sealed with the Name of Father, Son and Spirit and counted a son.
- Courage Second Sunday after Trinity
Courage is neither savage nor brutal but rests on trust that God is among his people, and the Gospel unites Hebrew, Greek and Roman courage in one both gentle and stern.
- Samuel’s Call Not an Exceptional Event Third Sunday after Trinity
God spoke inwardly to the child Samuel as He still teaches every child, so the story needs neither moralising applications nor a hunt for wonders, only the answer, Speak, Lord.
- The Glory and Deliverance of the Animal Nature Fourth Sunday after Trinity (Morning)
Creation’s groan, including the suffering of innocent animals, is a pang before deliverance: the creature subjected for man’s sake will be freed with God’s sons, and Christ redeems the body itself.
- Cry for God’s Judgments Fourth Sunday after Trinity (Afternoon)
Isaiah’s prayer that God rend the heavens, which natural religion shuns by keeping God distant, is the universal cry, answered in Christ, whose righteous kingdom opposes civil and ecclesiastical tyranny alike.
- The Honour and Degradation of an Official Fifth Sunday after Trinity
Both routine officialism and self-willed irregularity enslave; Paul, a steward bound to preach even when unwilling, trusts God’s good Will to make the cold official willing, so that duty and freedom meet.
- Revivals Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity
Superstition is the enemy of faith, not its excess: trust in a righteous God destroys it, so religious excitement that stirs the nerves rather than the conscience leads to moral harm.
- Priests and Saints Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity
Priests witness to a sacrifice and atonement God Himself makes, and saints are the whole called people; when priests lack righteousness and grasp at powers not given them, the people’s joy fails.
- The New Heavens and the New Earth Twentieth Sunday after Trinity
In Scripture “new” means renewed, not replaced: Peter’s new heavens and earth are this creation freed from falsehood and tyranny, where righteousness dwells, so the earth deserves reverence and prophetic panics mislead.
- Peace: What it is Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity
Christ’s peace is no escape from outward strife or inward temptation but His own filial trust in the Father, given afresh to the weak, kept only while shared, and pledged by His wounds.
- War: How to Prepare Ourselves for it Sunday before Advent
A nation’s strength against invasion depends on its daily war with spiritual wickedness, namely electoral corruption, vice and greed, which is won by owning our sins together and trusting the God of Right.
About this digital edition
How the text was made, and the printer's errors corrected
The original book
Sermons, Volume 6 by Frederick Denison Maurice.
This edition
Produced 2026-10-13 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 302 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 100 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. 25: ‘themselves,’ → ‘itself,’
- p. 25: ‘commend’ → ‘commends’
- p. 43: ‘“’ supplied, not in the print — after “…Him as such to the world;”
- p. 46: ‘intrepretation’ → ‘interpretation’
- p. 85: ‘“’ supplied, not in the print — after “…Lord God might dwell among them.”
- p. 110: ‘though’ → ‘through’
- p. 146: ‘Nebuchadnezzer’ → ‘Nebuchadnezzar’
- p. 222: ‘“’ supplied, not in the print — after “…a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”
- p. 223: ‘conection’ → ‘connection’
Printer’s oddities that are not errors were left exactly as printed (including inconsistent proper-name spellings and the original’s own numbering gaps).