enceforth
of preventable disease. Let us repent of and amend that scandalous
neglect of the now well-known laws of health and cleanliness which
destroys thousands of lives yearly in this kingdom, without need and
reason; in defiance alike of science, of humanity, and of our Christian
profession. Two hundred thousand persons, I am told, have died of
preventable fever since the Prince Consort's death ten years ago. Is
that not a sin to bow our hearts as the heart of one man? Ah, if this
foul and needless disease, by striking once at the very highest, shall
bring home to us the often told, seldom heeded fact that it is striking
perpetually at hundreds among the very lowest, whom we leave to sicken
and die in dens unfit for men--unfit for dogs; if this tragedy shall
awaken all loyal citizens to demand and to enforce, as a duty to their
sovereign, their country, and their God, a sanatory reform in town and
country, immediate, wholesale, imperative; if it shall awaken the
ministers of religion to preach about that, and hardly aught but that--
till there is not a fever ally or a malarious ditch left in any British
city;--then indeed this fair and precious life will not have been
imperilled in vain, and generations yet unborn will bless the memory of a
prince who sickened as poor men sicken, and all but died, as poor men
die, that his example--and, it may be hereafter, his exertions--might
deliver the poor from dirt, disease, and death.

For him himself I have no fear. We have committed him to God. It may be
that he has committed himself to God. It may be that he has already
learned lessons which God alone can teach. It may be that those lessons
will bring forth hereafter royal fruit right worthy of a royal root. At
least we can trust him in God's hands, and believe that if this great woe
was meant to ennoble us it was meant to ennoble him; that if it was meant
to educate us it was meant to educate him; that God is teaching him; and
that in God's school-house he is safe. For think, my friends, if we, who
know him partly, love him much; then God, who knows him wholly, loves him
more. And so God be with him, and with you, and with your prayers for
him. Amen.

SERMON XXXV. GRACE AND GLORY

Chapel Royal, Whitehall. 1865. For the consumptive hospital.

St John ii. 11. "This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of
Galilee, and manifested forth his glory."

This word glory,