We meet To-day in God’s House to remember that blessing of health, and wealth and well-being, which we have enjoyed during this past year, and to shew, as we render thanks to the Giver, that we are not unmindful of others whose lives are less fortunate.  And the very fact that To-day, throughout the Diocese, from all the pulpits, goes forth an appeal for help to the sick and suffering, testifies that we remember that the bodies of each one of us are holy unto the Lord, and that we believe it is God’s will that so long as the breath of life is within our nostrils we are bound to see that those bodies are healed of their rents and wounds, and that the living earthly temples of the Holy Ghost are kept in repair for Him whose glory fills those temples. (p. 1)….

To-day is Hospital Sunday, and very fitly do the Foresters, with their Rangers, their Wood-wards and other officers, come together to-day, when our hearts and our alms are asked for the great Hospital cause.  They seem, by their presence, to emphasise the fact that a working man’s wealth is a working man’s health; and, as we give our alms to-day, we are not only bid to think of the awful agonies we, by those alms, can allay, the weary sufferings we can gently bear to a close, the triumphs of the science of medicine to which we may minister, but of the thousand bread-winners we can help to give back to their wives and children, who need their bread to be won for them. (p. 5)

If, as St. James said, “pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father” is “to visit the fatherless and widow in their affliction,” we can, by giving of our alms to the hospitals to-day, be purely religious, for how many women are widows, and how many children fatherless, while the winner of the bread for wife and children is on his bed of pain within the hospital wards? (p. 5)….

Go to any great metropolis of the old Pagan world, or look on the map at ancient Athens, Corinth, Rome, Rameses’ Heliopolis, you will see that all inside the walls has perished—all but the monuments that enshrined the great ideas of the souls or minds of the nation.  There is the temple, the ruined theatres, the race course, the arch of triumph, the public bath, the orator’s pillar, the hero’s bust, the poet’s shrine, the tomb—all these in ruins remain to tell us what the people thought worthy of monument, or worthy of mighty buildings or of public expenditure. (p. 7)

Now, imagine London, 2,000 years hence, in ruins.  What should we find?  All these monumental ruins; ay, and many others.  Besides St. Paul’s and the National Museum, here a home for the sightless, there a mighty asylum, here a great industrial school, there a vast workhouse or almshouse, here a large reformatory, there a huge orphanage, and last, in great numbers, noble remains—what of?  why, of homes for incurables and hospitals for the sick and wounded! (pp. 7-8)

Do you not see the difference?  Jesus Christ must have been in this ruined London.  He had not been in Rome or Athens—only with Him did pity enter into the world, and become a power among men. (p. 8)

If we wish to know what London would be to-day had the Church of Christ been silent and His Holy Spirit not been the continued Comforter to the English people for these 1,400 years past, we must turn all the maniacs out into the streets, let the blind lead the blind, that both may fall into the ditch; we must empty our almshouses of all their inmates, and cast out to be trampled underfoot, or only noticed by dogs, the poor, broken, wounded pieces of humanity that lie in the 10,000 beds of the London hospitals.  But Christ it is, Christ alone, and the power of His gospel, that has made this impossible for us to do.  We know on whom we have believed—we know we are members one of another, and that in bearing one another’s burdens we fulfil the law of Christ—and every penny that shall be given for the cause of the sick and suffering of our diocese to-day, can only be asked for because we are followers of Jesus Christ, and only blessedly and willingly given because we have determined to follow Him still. (p. 8)

 (Sermon Preached in Crosthwaite Church on Hospital Sunday, 11th May 1884)

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Lives nursed in quiet, where no cares intrude,
        ’Mid gentle sounds, things beautiful and free,
These grow to help the world, where’er they be,
Are undisturbed by any change of mood;
But, like the Esk, from her far solitude
Of inland peace and heather-purpled lea,
They move to mingle with the stormy sea,
In uncomplaining ministry of good.
So, as I jostled down the noisy quay
And leaned upon those giant-arms of stone
That hold all Whitby’s pride in their embrace,
And nurse what weary boats will rest and stay,
Methought the Lady Hilda well had done
To plant her Abbey in so fair a place.

(Sonnets Round the Coast, p. 166)

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The storm-winds break as whitely on Trevose,
        And bruise Trevalga’s cliff to lilac stain,
As when they bore thee from the battle plain
And laid thee on this headland, and there rose
Cries of a kingless people, and the woes
Of friends who felt all victory was vain,
If here above the melancholy main
Beneath his mound the victor must repose.
Yet what he did was very bravely done:
He slew the wolf, he tamed the long-horned ox,
Broke the wild tribes who warred upon his throne,
And saved his people and his people’s flocks—
And so they set him with his axe of stone
Among the news that wall about the rocks.

(Sonnets Round the Coast, p. 44)

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On to the field of the battle of prices we go, and upon entering we see drawn up in endless vista gipsy vans, and if one were a painter one probably would not wish to go beyond the first group, for more beautiful children and women can hardly be imagined than members of the Boswell family that are sitting at breakfast round their camp fire.  It is breakfast time for the whole assembly of potters and gipsies, and every group has some individual picturesqueness which makes one pause.  The vans themselves are gaily painted, the brass ornaments shine in the windows, the dogs sleep beneath, the cats sit on the driving board, the canaries sing in their cages, and children in inexhaustible supply toddle down the steps from the tiny sleeping rooms to be bathed or take their seats round the improvised breakfast table.  What lovers of oriental colour these dark-eyed gipsy folk are!  There is hardly a bit of crockery that they use for their breakfast that is not more gaily painted than any that we in the West are used to.  The bacon sputters in the boiling fat, the tea is hissing hot, and the eggs are boiled to a turn.  There is not a gipsy or potter to-day but has a breakfast fit for a king. (pp. 197-8)

Here is a group round the breakfast table—the grandmother, father, mother, uncles, and children.  They do not resent that you should stop and gaze.  On the contrary, in the cheeriest way they greet you, and if only another stool could be found, would ask you to take a seat.  The grandmother smokes her pipe, but the younger women do not intend to do that until they become grandmothers in turn.  What strikes one is their evident care for appearances.  Here is a boy carefully washing down the van wheels; there is another polishing the harness.  A mother here is washing her boy’s face with splendid care and earnestness.  All of them seem bent on blacking their shoes. (p. 199)

We went forward and found the common or fair field was in reality a large strip of open ground, about 100 yards wide at its widest and three-quarters of a mile long, that ran between the hedge and a steep bank that dipped towards the road. The potters’ vans were drawn up by the hedge, then came the booths for refreshment, interspersed with knots of horses or ponies ready for sale.  Nearer the road a second series of booths for refreshment ran along the course, leaving an intervening grassy street, which seemed to be filled with horses and men.  Another intervening grassy street ran parallel, and beyond it, on the edge of the bank that sloped to the road, were some booths, so that the common at its widest part had really been divided into two grassy thoroughfares, in which the main sales of the day would go forward. (pp. 199-200)….

Indeed, for horse fair folk [Brough Hill] was the centre of the world, and fortunate the man who could enter into the life of the day as an idle spectator.  Not so fortunate the droves of ponies, or the men who had to toil and sweat in the process of selling.  If ever pandemonium let loose was heard by mortal ears it was heard by mine at Brough Hill Fair. (p. 201)

Imagine half a dozen knots of wild, unbroken ponies only kept together by the shouting of their owners.  Then imagine a dash at one in the middle of the drove, who lifts his fore feet into the air, and, before they come to the ground, is seized by the nostrils and wrestled with till with a great yell he emerges dragged from the drove by two boys at his neck and one at his tail, and is sent scampering apparently into a crowd of men, who scatter right and left of him, put their hats on their whips, and add to the hubbub.  They strike at him with their sticks, and send him frightened and almost mad with alarm right down the grassy avenue, till, with more shouting and bellowings unutterable, the frightened creature is turned back, meets a friend from another drove flying in the opposite direction, cannons against him, knocks the boy over, and dashes wildly into a group of men who are taking their glass of beer in an adjacent booth.  The creature is unhaltered, the boys are hanging on its neck and haunches, it rears, turns back, feels that a hundred whips are waved in its face, hears the rattle of twenty hats, and the shouts of a hundred wild Indians in its ears, and does not pause until it makes a dash into the middle of its drove, and finds temporary shelter among its restless brotherhood.  Shouts of “Sold again” rise above the din, and buyer and seller go off to the booth to settle accounts.  How it comes that men escape with their lives on the Brough Hill Fair field I cannot tell, for as one gazes from a distance it looks as if a wild football match were being played—the ball of which is a maddened pony. (pp. 201-3)….

Homeward to the train the road was still thronged with multitudes still going to the Fair, and as one looked upon their faces one felt that it was worth while going all the distance, if there had been no booths, or potters, or gipsies, or ponies, or sheep, just to see the manly forms and the blue grey eyes and the bronzed cheeks of these sons of the Norsemen, who met at Brough Hill Fair. (p. 209)

(Round the Lake Country, pp. 192-209)

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