Introduction

By the Bishop of Ely

The following addresses were delivered in substance on Wednesdays and Fridays at the Early Matins in S. Catherine’s Chapel within Ely Cathedral. Having myself heard many of them with great interest and profit, I advised their publication, because they seemed likely to be useful in the private study of Holy Scripture, and to be especially fitted for family reading in households consisting of thoughtful and educated persons.

But I had a further reason for urging the publication of these addresses, in that they appeared to recognise a need which has been long felt, I believe, by devout members of many congregations — the need of regular instruction in Holy Scripture, — and to supply a good example of the way in which such need might be met by the Parochial Clergy.

There is probably no Branch of the Catholic Church in which more Sermons are preached than in the Anglican Communion; there is perhaps also no Branch of it in which there is less didactic exposition of the sacred text; less explanatory teaching as to the Constitution and Ordinances of the Church. The result is that the majority of ordinary Church people, when called upon to defend their own system, know less about it than the members of any other religious body. The sermons preached to our congregations are almost exclusively hortatory. It may be questioned whether the constant listening to addresses whose sole object is to awaken the conscience and move the affections, does not tend in some degree to defeat its own object. At any rate this kind of preaching requires, I am persuaded, to be supplemented by careful and regular expository teaching. Something analogous to this is adopted in the conduct of those Parochial Missions which are becoming familiar amongst us. The Mission Sermon is usually followed by the simpler and more direct “Instruction;” and these Instructions have in many places been that part of the Mission which has left the most abiding results. In a similar way it appears to me that the usual Sunday Sermon requires to be varied by addresses of a less rhetorical and more didactic character, which may lead to a better understanding of the Bible and the Prayer-Book.

Where there is a Daily Service it would, I feel assured, be very profitable if upon the Wednesday and Friday the Parish Priest were to read with his people short portions of some book of Holy Scripture with a brief explanatory comment.

When, as is the custom in so many Churches, there is only one Week-day Evening Service, such a systematic reading and exposition of a Gospel would, in my opinion, be more useful to the people, and less burdensome to the Parish Priest, than an additional sermon. In those places where there are no Week-day Services (although I am bound to say that, with the Order for Morning and Evening Prayer daily throughout the Year meeting us on the first page of the Prayer-Book, no Church ought to be shut up from Sunday to Sunday) it might, I think, be desirable to make the Sunday Morning Sermon an expository Address or Instruction, reserving the Sermon proper for the afternoon or “evening service.

The addresses now published may, it is hoped, lead to a more general adoption of this practice of Scripture Exposition in Church.

I heartily commend them to the Clergy of my Diocese for use in their Churches. In some they may be read exactly as they are printed. In others, they may be expanded or modified according to the character of the congregation.

To the younger Clergy especially they will be suggestive of the way in which other books of the New Testament may be treated, with the same profit to themselves and their people, which has, I believe, attended this attempt to read with an intelligent congregation the Gospel of S. Mark.

J. R. ELIENS.
Palace, Ely,
All Saints’ Day, 1884.