The Anglo=Catholic Pulpit.

Waiapu Church Gazette, Volume XI, Issue 10, 1 April 1921, Page 269

The Anglo=Catholic Pulpit.

ST. GEORGE FOR ENGLAND. A Sermon Preached" at All Saints', . Margaret Street, -.., On St. George's Day, By the Rev;- H.. B. F. MACKAY, M. A. "This is thankworthy, if a man for conscience towards God endure grief, suffering wrongfully." . 1 St. Peter 11.19. I want to make three points .m the short sermon this morning: (1) St. George the Martja* is a man, not a myth. (2) There is a certain gajn m knowing nothing about the peculiar characteristics of one's patron saint. (3) There is a singular suitability m St. George being the Patron of England.. ■ •'■ '" "- " *- .. '". ■••' ■ ' ,■',• St. George is a man— not a myth. Gibbon, as you all remember, suggested that St. George was a legendary , double of , the disreputable Bishop George of Cappadocia, the Arian opponent of St. Athanasius. ' 'This odious stranger," says Gibbon; '' disguising every circumstance of time and place, assumed the mask of a martyr, a saint, and 'a Christian hero, ■ and the infamous George of Cappadocia has been transformed into the . renowned St. George of England, the patron of arms, of ' chivalry, and the Garter." ■■■ '■• ■ ■ ■;" ■Gibbon, no doubt, enjoyed writing that passage. He would be 'disappointed to read the note which his latest editor, Professor Bury, has appended to it. "This story," says "Professor Bury, "has nothing to be said for \ it." On Gibbon's behalf it is fair to say that it is not impossible that certain incidents of the apocryphal acts of St. George :have been " borrowed from the story of .the Arian Bishop, but it is now : known that the cultus of St. George existed m the Arian Bishop's lifetime. Of the real St. George only one thing is certainly known. He .was a martyr of the last, ! the Diocletian persecution"; a man of position who had an estate at Lydda m Palestine. He was buried on his estate, and an extraordinary devotion to his memory at once grew up around his tomb, over which the Crusaders built the

church whose gaunt ruins still stand among the orange groves -of Lydda. ' Why St. George was a great martyr we do not know; that he was a great martyr we do know from the strength of the local devotion to his memory, at a time when there were many martyrs to be remembered, and from the very early spread of the cultus. He was martyred at the be- • ginning of the 4th century, and be-., fore the century was ended a church had • been dedicated to his memory at Thessalonica, and another, S. Georgio m Velabro, at Rome. - Although, we. do not' know what were the, circumstances m St. George's martyrdom which so profoundly impressed his contemporaries, we have a clear notion of what the Diocletian martyrs stood for. Diocletian was a very great man who saved the Empire when it was' in the greatest possible danger of being broken into. He was the saviour of the material world, and he was a profound believer m the spiritual world. Diocletian held that no human unity which is not a religious unity can last, and he was quite right, but his attempt to make the Empire a religious unity brought him ultimately into collision with the Church. To Diocletian external religion was only a variety of symbols used by men to express their belief m God, and from this point of view, which is the point of view of the majority of our public men m England to-day, Diocletian was pustified m thinking that Christians ought on solemn national occasions to conform to the State religion, provided they were generally allowed to worship m their own way. But the Christian insists that m the In- ' carnation external religion has become more than that. He claims that it is just this gulf between the symbol and that which it signifies, that the Incarnation has filled; that the use of the symbols of the Church is rewarded with grace as m the case of the sacramentals, or that the symbols themselves convey grace, as m the case of the Sacraments. Consequently, a Christian may perform no external religious act, however trivial, however occasional, which does {not aim at securing some of the grace of Jesus Christ. So the Church held out against the reunion schemes of Diocletian. The Emperor tried to avoid extreme measures^ He had Christian buildings, vessels and books destroyed, and he . tried to avoid taking life. But the attitude of the Christians was so fiercely determined, and even aggressive, that his hand was forced. And' m the, end there were more tortures and more deaths than ever before. 11. We know then what St. George stbod for,; he stood for uneompro- ' ihisihg 'fidelity to the Christian reli-

gion at the expense of the .internal peace of "the Empire 1 . And he and his friends won the day. The Diocletian martyrs were the conquerors;, this was the last pitched battle with the old paganism. Infleed, the last, stage of the persecution was scarcely over m the East when % the Christian 1 standard was carried/into Rome before the victorious' Consiantine. ■ ■ And it is m this fact that we have the key to the rich and fantastic legend of St. George. He became, by some process which we cannot trace, typical of the rest. In fact he was a great martyr; m legend he became the great martyr. And" the importance and glory, of the conquest which he and comrades won was thrown into the form of a hundred superhuman „ deeds. The story of the dragon we cannot trace back further than the Golden Legend which was compiled m the 13th century, but it may very well have a real connexion with the real St. George. Jaffa, on the coast near Lydda, is one of the places associated with the Perseus legend, and it is not impossible that gradually the exploit of the mythical hero became attributed to the Christian soldier-saint. ' Whether this be so or no, the. dragon myth remains, the most appropriate pictorial form of representing the triumph of the Diocletian martyrs, and as such it remains a true picture of' St. George. ' The growth of the connexion of England with Sifc. George you remember. Churches were dedicated to him m Saxon times, but Richard Coeur-de-Liori, who had been encamped during the Crusades for a long time at Lydda, brought back to England a great devotion to him. The white ensign first appears on the -seal of the town of Lyme Regis m 1284. It was the badge of our soldiers m the battle, of Creey. The Order of the Garter placed English knighthood under the patronage of the Saint. In 1222 St. George's Day was made a holy day; ,m 1415 Archbishop Chichele ordered it to be observed with as great solemnity 1 as Christmas Day. There is a certain gain', I said, m knowing nothing of the personal characteristics of our piatron Saint. The gain is that we are not tempted to dwell on his peculiar genius or charm. We are free to concentrate our homage on the perfect faithfulness of human nature m his person to the highest ideals, and on nothing else. Bishop Creighton, who loved laughing pleasantly at his countrymen, said that an Englishman hates a principle — when he sees it. If that be true it is an advantage that the Englishman should have a patron saiht who is a transparent embodiment of principle: the transparent embodi- • ment of faithfulness to the death m ' the use of powers which we all pos-

sess, and m that relation to our Lord m which we all stand. , Sir, Sidney JLee, speaking from • Stratford-on : Ayon, has proposed that we should dethrone St. George and substitute Shakespeare, as our patron saint. I trust that Sir Sidney has not brought' upon himself the malediction which is carved iipon the poet's grave, because I can conceive no proposal more likely to move the bones of Shakespeare m protest ;th'an this. The answer can be given m a sentence.; A patron saint must fre a possible example to his clients. None of us can ever imitate the genius of Shakespeare, but the youngest boy m vthis church can imitate the faithfulness of St. George, ' - .. 111. But further and lastly, there .is a peculiar suitability m St. George being the Patron of England. \ As far as the knowledge of' the Church on.earfh is concerned St. George, so great and dear to his contemporaries, stands now as an unknown private m the ranks of the armies of> Heaven. And England is celebrated, not for her eloquent or artistic romantic figures, but for the extraordinarily high quality of her unknown privates. . St. Francis of Assisi would make a good, patron saint for Italy, St. Theresa for Spain, St. Vincent de Paul for France— they would all be absurdly- incongruous as the Patron Saints of England. : But we have seen a great .wonder m the last six years. We have seen a vast multitude of our countrymen treading with perfect simplicity the pftth of loyaltyj obedience and duty, we have bent our heads m homage before the 'faithfulness unto death of the average man. We have seen the cheery, .normal, ordinary good fellows of everyday life making the sacrifice of comfort, ease, health and the most precious ties. We have seen them march away from us into darkness and silence, their bodies returned to mother earth and their souls garnered up m the unseen, and we have realised that after all these are the wonder-workers,- these are -the men who slay the dragon, for these un-. known men, by their Unswerving - loyalty, obedience, and duty have shaken: the known world. Brethren, St. George came to stand for all his fellows of the Diocletian persecution, but his silence and the reticence! which attaches to his name is startlingly suggestive of all that is best m English manhood. There is none so fit as he to-day to sum up .everything for which we thank God, m the sacrifice, of dtir brothers m the heroic years which are just past. Nor can we frame a better prayer for the English 61' the next generation than that they should, be still more closely conformed to- the likeness of the Martyrs of Diocletian.