TODAY is Sunday 5 October, and it is Harvest (or Rogation) Sunday. This is the day when we traditionally pause to reflect on the bounty that the earth has provided over the last few months. It is time to store food, preserve pickles, make elderberry wine and plan ahead for the Christmas feast.

To mark the date we publish today an extract from Cardinal Newman’s sermon, “Indulgence in Religious Privileges”. John Henry Newman (1801 – 1890) was probably the best known Catholic priest of Victorian England. He converted from C of E.

“These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear,” Jude 12.

CHRISTIANITY, considered as a moral system, is made up of two elements, beauty and severity; whenever either is indulged to the loss or disparagement of the other, evil ensues. In heathen times, Greek and Barbarian in some sense divided these two between them; the latter were the slaves of dreary and cruel superstitions, and the former abandoned themselves to a joyous polytheism. And so, again, in these latter times, the two chief forms of heresy into which opposition to primitive truth has developed, were remarkable, at least in their origin three hundred years ago, and at times since, the one for an unrefined and self-indulgent religiousness, the other for a stern, dark, cruel spirit, very unamiable, yet still inspiring more respect than the other.

Let us thus enter upon the rich and happy months which lie before us, when the earth puts forth all her excellence, and robes herself in her bright garments, and scatters her most precious gifts. Thus let us hallow Rogation Sunday, which is today, suitably to the Church’s intention which has made three days of abstinence attend upon it, by way of warning us that we must not enjoy our Father’s temporal blessings without reserve. “He visiteth the earth and blesseth it; He maketh it very plenteous … He provideth for the earth; He watereth her furrows. He crowneth the year with His goodness, and His clouds drop fatness.” [Ps. lxv. 9-12.] {122}

And we acknowledge His bountifulness, we commemorate His providence, we enter upon His gifts, by abstaining from them. As the Israelites brought the first fruits of their land in a basket [Deut. xxvi. 1-11.] and left it in the priest’s hand before the altar of the Lord their God, so do we in another way, but in the same spirit, begin our thankful use of God’s blessings by a prudent delay and a lowly prayer. We deprecate wrath, we entreat mercy; as Job sacrificed for his sons, so we for ourselves. We remind ourselves that though “every creature of God is good,” we ourselves, God’s creatures, are the one exception to that rule; that though His gifts are holy and innocent, our hearts are frail and wayward; that they are good in the sending, yet dangerous in the taking—good in the use, but harmful in the enjoyment. As before meat, day by day, we say a grace and then begin, so now do we ask a blessing on the whole year by pausing ere we enter upon it.

This is to feed ourselves with fear. Thus let us proceed in the use of all our privileges, and all will be benefits. Let us not keep festivals without keeping vigils; let us not keep Eastertide without observing Lent; let us not approach the Sunday feast without keeping the Friday abstinence; let us not adorn churches without studying personal simplicity and austereness; let us not cultivate the accomplishments of taste and literature without the corrective of personal discomfort; let us not attempt to advance the power of the Church, to enthrone her rulers, to rear her palaces, and to ennoble her name, without recollecting that she must be mortified within while she is in honour in the world, and must wear the Baptist’s hair-shirt and leathern girdle under the purple ephod and the jewelled breastplate.

ENDS