Sermons at Rugby

Excerpt

I.  RELIGIOUS PATRIOTISM.

“Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity in itself. . . . O pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.  Peace be within thy walls, and plenteousness within thy palaces.  For my brethren and companions’ sakes I will wish thee prosperity.  Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek to do thee good.”—Psalm cxxii. 3, 6-9.

As we draw near to the end of our summer term, when so many are about to take leave of their school life, there is sure to rise up in many minds the thought of what this life has done for them or failed to do, and of what the memory of it is likely to be in all their future years as they pass from youth to age.

And it should be our aim and desire, as need hardly be said, that from the day when each one comes amongst us as a little boy to the day when he offers his last prayer in this chapel before he goes out into the world, his life here should be of such a sort that its after taste may have no regrets, and no bitterness, and no shame in it, and the memories to be cherished may be such as add to the happiness and strength of later years.  And if, as we trust, this is your case, your feeling for your school is almost certain to be in some degree like that which is expressed in this pilgrim psalm.  Its language of intense patriotism, steeped in religious feeling, which is the peculiar inspiration of the Old Testament Jew, will seem somehow to express your own feelings for that life in which you grew up from childhood to manhood.

Indeed, the best evidence that your school life has not failed of its higher objects is the growth of this same sort of earnest patriotic enthusiasm.  Do you feel at all for your school as that unknown Jewish pilgrim who first sung this 122nd Psalm felt for the city of his fathers and the house of God?  “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.  For my brethren and companions’ sakes I will wish thee prosperity.  Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek to do thee good.”

Experience shows us that those English schools have been the best in which this feeling has been strongest and most widely diffused; and that those are the best times in any school which train up and send forth the largest proportion of men who continue to watch over its life, and to pray for it in this spirit: “For my brethren and companions’ sakes I will wish thee prosperity.  Yea, because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek to do thee good.”  On the other hand, if this feeling is weak in any school, or among the former members of it, or if it assumes debased forms, as sometimes happens, we see there a sure sign of degeneration.  He who, having grown up in any society like ours, is possessed by no such love for it, and stirred by no enthusiasm for its good name, and no desire to do it good, and to see good growing in every part of it, such an one has somehow missed the chief blessing that his membership of his school should have brought to him.  He may have been unfortunate, or he may have proved unworthy.  The atmosphere of his school life, and the associations amidst which he grew up, may have been such that the best thing he can do is to shake himself clear of them and forget them.  To such an one his school time has been a grave and lifelong misfortune; and it is the condemnation of any society if there are many such cases in it.

It is, however, exceptional in English life for men who have grown up in a great school to be stirred by no glow of patriotic feeling for it.  Whatever their own experience of it may have been, they are not altogether blind to the things that constitute its greatness, and they love to hear it well spoken of.

But the quality of their patriotism will depend very much on the quality of their own life; so that the task we have always before us is to be infusing into our community such a spirit and purpose, as shall infect each soul amongst us with those higher aims, and tastes, and motives, with that hatred of things mean or impure, and that love of things that are manly, honest, and of good report, which distinguish all nobler characters from the baser, and which are produced and fostered, and made to work strongly in every society that has any claim to good influence....