Sermon—St. Michael’s. Trinity 1, evening—the fourteenth of June in the year nineteen thirty six.

I am the Living Bread which came down from heaven; any man eat of this bread he shall live forever, yea, and the bread which I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.

We are in the Octave of the Feast of Corpus Christi, the feast of the Body of Christ, the Blessed Sacrament. For who among us who know and value even in part what the Blessed Sacrament means to us, can deny our duty to offer our adoration, praise and thanksgiving to God for this, His wonderful gift? In the General Thanksgiving found in our prayer books we thank God ‘above all, for the redemption of the world by our Lord, Jesus Christ …’ It ought, therefore, to occupy the foremost place among the innumerable gifts for which we thank God.

For this Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Lord is indeed the most precious thing in our lives. It is the centre of all our worship and devotion, the source of all our strength, the fountain of our very life, ‘Except ye eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood, ye have no life in you …’ God, in His holiness, intervening in this world of ours to enlighten, rescue and support us, His creatures, acting wholly in love to bring us to the perfection to which we are made. That perfection is to be found only in our lives in Christ. We cannot achieve it in or by ourselves. This is obvious to us as we look round and see in some places the highest human hopes come crumbling in the dust and in others lives, rich with promise, suddenly cut off in this world. We are made for perfection only in Christ.

How many souls had he saved and brought comfort to? Sorrow, earthly sorrow, had existed in his own family. His great grandfather had died, bitten by a rabid dog. He was a man who had sired fifteen children. Their individual histories, when they grew up were bound to colonialism. They took office under their colonial masters whom they served loyally. Theirs was a family of philanthropists whose wealth enabled them to be munificent and liberal dispensers of charity. They were designated Patriotic Natives under the colonial regime of the British. Yet, that cherished knighthood was never bestowed on that grandfather, that benevolent philanthropist who gave thousands of pounds sterling to charity—hospitals, schools, roads, churches. That knighthood was denied him during the era of the British Governor, Gordon. He, that benevolent native patriot, did not belong to that specially privileged social hierarchy within the country itself. The British Governor could not alienate that section from which the ruling caste was derived. Colonialism had to pander to those who held the regalia, the accoutrements of the hierarchy, born into a life of privilege.