Ordination Addresses Author:William Stubbs Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CALL The address which in the Form for Ordering of Priests the bishop makes to those who are to be ordained contains four paragraphs... more » which may, I think, furnish us with topics of consideration at the service by which we close our day's work during the examination. The first of these paragraphs states very strongly the high dignity and weighty office and charge to which they are called, who by the inner movement of God's Spirit on their will and by the outward commission of the Church are brought to take this honour unto themselves as called of God. I will speak a word or two on this matter of dignity and weightiness, on the responsibility that you who are seeking to be ordained are seeking to take upon yourselves. In what we have to say about dignity, naturally we must think about humility, for the very high importance of the position which we accept as officers of the Church of Christ forcibly impresses upon us our own incapacity for filling it worthily ; thevery excellency of our ministry forces on us the recognition of how unworthy we are, and how unfit by any gifts and powers of our own to execute the office as it should be exercised. If I say less on this point now, it is really because I do not believe that any young man in his senses and at all sincere could have gone so far as you have already gone in offering himself as a candidate for the office without having realised this. This is, I do not doubt, present to you now; you know perfectly well, however conscious you may be of the gifts that God has given you, that you are aspiring to a dignity that is above you, and to a responsibility that you cannot maintain without special grace. I do not tell you to undervalue your gifts. If God has given to some of you an eloquent mouth, or a clear hea...« less