"Why are ye fearful? O! ye of little faith."—St. Matthew viii. 26.

We saw last Sunday that we were like men who had just watched a great sunset, that we were standing, as it were, in the beautiful and tender after-glow, which so often follows a beautiful sunset, and we set ourselves to try and gather up and meditate upon some of the great qualities in the character of her whom we have lost, as some explanation, of the influence which made her reign so great.

And we have already contemplated together what it was to have truth in the inward parts. We thought over the truthfulness of one, of whom it was said by a great statesman, that she was the most truthful being he had ever met. And we saw what a revolution it would work in society, in commerce, and in Christian work, if every one of us had that downright sincerity and straightforwardness which characterized her.

We now take another quality, and I suppose I shall carry most of you with me when I mention, as a second great quality for us to try and incorporate into our own characters, and so into the life of the nation for the new reign—her moral courage. She had plenty of physical courage. She was a fearless horsewoman in her youth, she was proud of being the daughter of a soldier, she loved her own soldiers and sailors, and marked to the very last day of her life their gallant deeds with delight. But there was throughout her life something more than physical courage, and that was her moral courage.

Take, first of all, the way in which she bore her own personal troubles. If there was anyone who could say with the Psalmist, "All Thy waves and storms have gone over me," it was our late Queen. What the loss of her husband was to her, you may gather from this beautiful letter published in Lord Selborne's Life, which she addressed to him years afterwards on the loss of his own wife: "To lose the loved companion of one's life is losing half one's own existence. From that time everything is different, every event seems to lose its effect; for joy, which cannot be shared by those who feel everything with you, is no joy, and sorrow is redoubled when it cannot be shared and soothed by the one who alone could do so. No children can replace a wife or a husband, may they be ever so good and devoted. One must bear one's burden alone. That our Heavenly Father may give you strength in this heavy affliction, and that your health may not suffer, is the sincere prayer of yours most truly, Victoria, R.I." [1] There could hardly have been penned, one would have thought, a more touching or more beautiful letter, and penned years after the loss of her husband. It revealed to the heart of the nation what that loss was to her. It was followed in the years afterwards by the loss of children and grandchildren. And the first thing, therefore, that strikes us is that, in the midst of this personal sorrow, one stroke following after another, with a moral courage which is an example to us all, she never gave up her work; without fainting or failing, that huge pile of documents, which, in a few days of cessation from her work, mounted up—a great statesman tells us—so high, was dealt with, those ceaseless interviews, that constant correspondence—were carried through up to the last by one who proved herself faithful unto death.

And, as with personal sorrow, so with public anxiety. It has become now common property that, in the dark days of December, 1899, the Queen was the one who refused to be depressed in her court; when disaster followed disaster it was the Queen who, by her moral courage, kept up the spirits of those around her, and who, with a perfect trust in her soldiers and sailors, and with an absolute confidence in the justice of her cause, went steadily, brightly, and cheerfully on with her work, upheld by the moral courage which I put before you and before myself as our example for to-day.

And so, once again, her moral courage took the form—a rare form, too, in these days—of the courage of her own opinions. One statesman has told us that he never differed from a matured opinion of his Sovereign without a great sense of responsibility; another, that when he once acted directly against it he found that he was wrong and she was right. Another has pointed out how we have lost among the crowned heads of Europe, in her personal influence among them, one of the strongest influences in Europe for peace and righteousness. And, therefore, when we think to ourselves of the difficulty of acting always constitutionally and yet strongly, and to know that our Queen, on all hands, is admitted to have done this through a long lifetime, we see a third aspect of the moral courage which we have to seek to emulate.

Now, the question is—for these sermons are meant in no sense to be mere panegyrics—In what way can we, gathered here on a Sunday afternoon, incorporate into our characters something of the moral courage which characterized the Queen?

And the first thing which strikes us is this: What a vast field it is on which we have to exercise it. To those who have to see a great deal of the sorrows of others, sometimes life simply seems one series of undeserved calamities. Take, for instance, that unhappy man who, recently, in this cathedral, shot himself, and by his own act passed into the other world. Look into his history, and you will find nothing specially wrong that he had done up to then. He had just been one of the unfortunates amongst us. He had been for years a steady workman, able to keep himself; then his joints got stiff, too stiff for work. "I cannot go on living on your husband's earnings, Rose," he said, on the morning that he died, and without, no doubt, a proper understanding of the guilt of self-murder, by his own act he passed—so he thought—out of trouble into rest. We do well to pray that we comfortable people in the world may be pardoned for any carelessness and selfishness on our part which makes the world so intolerable to many of our fellow creatures. But still, though we may soften by our pity the act which he did, and even for such an one we can only speak softly about the dead; though we know full well that some of the best men that ever lived, in a fit of insanity, or under depression quite impossible for them to control, have passed, by their own hand, out of this world, yet we cannot hide from ourselves that self-destruction is an act of cowardice, that where men and women break down is not in physical courage, but in moral courage, and that those lines penned long ago are true to-day:

"When all the blandishments of life are gone,
The coward slinks to death, the brave live on!"

But we need not go to such an exceptional occurrence as that to find a field for this exercise of moral courage. Take all those incidents of life which happen day after day—the little child snatched from us in all its beauty and its innocence: the bright lad shot upon the field of battle in a moment, taken away with all his brightness, and his laughter, and his merriment; the man who loses in middle life his money and has to begin the hard struggle of saving all over again—how are we to explain it? What can we say to light up in any degree so vast a problem? There is, my dear brothers and sisters, I believe, no full explanation here, but there is a belief which comforts us, and that is, that these calamities of life are all being used for a great purpose; that when the Scripture says of God that "He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver," it does give us some sort of clue which nerves us to bear what we have to bear. Those who pass from us, pass, we believe, into what has been called, "God's great Convalescent Home" in another world, but to us who have to suffer, who receive these strokes, the suffering is not useless; it is a furnace which has to fashion that heavenly tempered thing which we call "moral courage," and to produce it any suffering is worth bearing. Do think over that, you who may be going through the furnace now, do remember that you have not lost that lad, that child, for ever, that it is only a few years until you see him again; but, meanwhile, while he is prepared there, you are being prepared here. The character is everything, and if there can be produced in you and in me that moral courage which makes us like our Saviour, we shall not be sorry for it in the days to come.

And so, again, take that awful trial which comes at times of having to suffer under a false accusation. I saw someone this week whom I believe to be lying under a most terrible accusation which is absolutely false. And, if anyone of you has ever been through that terrible trial of suffering under an imputation on your honour, which you know to be false, but cannot prove to be false, you realize what a field such a state as that presents for moral courage. What are we to say to anyone we see who is under that most terrible trial? What are we to say to ourselves if such a misfortune and trial comes to us? Why, we can only say this, and it is enough—that if it is true that a general places his bravest soldiers in the hottest part of the battle, if it is true that it is only certain strokes which can reach the most sensitive parts of our character, if it is true that this very trial came to Jesus Christ Himself, and He had it said of Him—"He works through Beelzebub, the prince of the devils," "He saved others, Himself He cannot save"—then, my brother, the secret of your strange punishment is out, it means that it is a special mark of favour, it is a Victoria Cross for service, it is Christ coming to you and bringing the very cup out of which He drank Himself, and saying, "Are ye able to drink of the cup that I drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" Pray hard, pray with all your strength, for the moral courage to answer back, "I am able." "Therefore," as the poet so beautifully says:—

"Therefore gird up thyself, and come to stand
Unflinching under the unfaltering hand
That waits to prove thee to the uttermost.

It were not hard to suffer by His hand
If thou could see His face; but in the dark!
That is the one last trial—be it so;
Christ was forsaken, so must thou be too:
How couldst thou suffer but in seeming else?

Thou wilt not see the face, nor feel the hand,
Only the cruel crushing of the feet,
When, thro' the bitter night, the Lord comes down
To tread the wine-press. Not by sight but faith,
Endure, endure; be faithful to the end."

And so, once again, looking out upon our ordinary life, what shall we need to put backbone into life? What do we need to give a little more strength to it, to enable us to be braver and firmer and stronger? It is just that power of being able to take our own line against others; it is just that courage of our opinions; it is consistent with being perfectly humble, and ever ready to learn; it implies no conceit, and no contempt of others, but it enables this one in the workshop to stand up for the faith in which he believes, that one in the drawing-room to take a strong moral line when people are sneering at virtue; it nerves us to stand by our colours and to cry to the last,

"Faith of our fathers, living still,
We will be true to thee till death."

How then are we to gain the secret? What is the secret of moral courage? And, in answering that question, let us be perfectly fair to those who, like the Stoics of old, showed a wonderful endurance with no knowledge whatever of Christ, and very little belief in another world; let us be perfectly honest and frank with regard to the virtue of those in our day who, having lost, to their infinite misfortune, their childish faith, still say to themselves: "I will cling to my morality, I will try and keep a clean hand and a pure heart"; let us give full allowance to what we have heard of this morning in this cathedral—the power and the influence of secondary motives, secondary motives allowed sometimes to save us for the time before the primary motive comes in—but still, making all allowance for that, what is the secret of the best moral courage? It is not the highest moral courage merely to endure, it is not the highest moral courage, like the old Roman, just to fold our toga round us and die. There has come a new thing into the world, a new kind of moral courage, and that moral courage is full of inspiration and full of cheerfulness: it does not merely bear the cross, it takes up the cross. It has in the midst of its own sorrow a force and a power which shake the world; it has in the midst of personal trouble,

"A heart at leisure from itself
To soothe and sympathize."

And what is the secret of that? And I would dare anyone here, whatever may be their private belief, to doubt or to dispute this, that it is produced and shown by no one else but those who believe that Jesus is with them in the ship; and that when you see some woman going through the most terrible trouble, perfectly calm, quiet, brave and cheerful; when some man, over whom all the waves and storms are bursting, stands there brave, and cheerful, and happy in the hour of trial, it is because, unheard by the world, he hears a voice in his ear saying, "Why are ye fearful? O ye of little faith," because, unseen by the world, he sees Someone standing with His hand upon the tiller, Someone Whom he believes to have supreme power in the last resort over the waves, and Who he knows, at exactly the right moment when it is best for him, will say the word before which every billow and every storm sinks to rest, "Peace be still."

The trial is that Jesus often seems asleep; the trial is that when the ship of State labours on in the trough of the waves there seems no steersman in view; the trial is that when the Church seems overwhelmed by controversy, and about to be buried under its waves, Jesus makes no sign; the trial is that Lazarus actually dies and lies dead, and Jesus still stays two days in the same place where He was; but the magnificent truth which we Christians believe is this—that, though apparently asleep, He never is asleep; that He rises from time to time and shows His strength; that He rose once and burst into fragments the power of death. They thought He was quite asleep in the grave, but He rose with all His power, and broke for every mourner throughout the ages that were to come, the power of death for ever. He rises in the midst of the Church, He brings the Church in His own time into a peace and calm which seemed at one time impossible; He rises in our own personal life, and while the world thinks how that poor man or poor woman is overwhelmed with trouble, we know that we are in a wonderful and supernatural calm.

And, therefore, the whole question is this: Have we got, or do we believe we have got, Jesus in the ship with us? Do we hear His voice saying, "Be of good cheer; it is I, be not afraid?" As we watch, then, the moral courage produced in our Queen by her simple, but strong faith, I beg you with me to pray God to grant us a living faith in Jesus Christ, which is the secret of strength, and we shall find that it will give us moral courage, not of earth, which the world can neither give nor take away.

[1] "Memorials: Personal and Political of the Earl of Selborne." Vol. IV., 161.