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The Unity of God and Man; And Other Sermons Preached at Bedford Chapel, Bloomsbury
The Unity of God and Man And Other Sermons Preached at Bedford Chapel Bloomsbury Author:Stopford Augustus Brooke General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1886 Original Publisher: G. H. Ellis Subjects: Unitarianism Religion / Christianity / Anglican Religion / Sermons / Christian Religion / Christian Ministry / Preaching Religion / Unitarian Universalism Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It ... more »has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: 6i [July, 1882.] THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us. "Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith." -- Hebrews xii. 1, 2. The Christian Church has for many generations set apart a day for the observance of the Feast of All Saints; and its eve, celebrated in poetry, in games, by wild and graceful superstitions, and bearing in its practices traces of heathen faiths and legend, has been called All-Hallows-Eve. The Feast was originally set up to put an end to the excessive multiplication of Saints' Days. These grew so rapidly -- each nation wishing to honour its own special saints -- that more than half the days in each month were turned into holidays. Work was neglected, and laziness seemed in danger of developing into a virtue. The Roman Church, then, while it wished to preserve reverence for these lesser saints, wished also to end the scandal, and threw the veneration and love of all these holy persons into one festival instead of many, and the day was called the Feast of All Saints. The term included not only the lesser but the greater saints as well; all were celebrated together; and the festival finally became the poetic form in which the doctrine of the Communion of Saints was enshr...« less