Lot 89: KINGSLEY (CHARLES)

Autograph manuscript of his sermon 'I Am', preached at Eversley Church on the 5th Sunday in Lent and again on 30 May 1869, with extensive revisions and passages struck out, written into a home-made stitched booklet characteristic of Kingsley's sermon MSS, top right-hand corner initialled "CK.", 21 pages, some torn from larger sheets, on blue paper, some dust-staining, minor wear and tears to outer leaves, last leaf attached to an album leaf, with accompanying documentation (see below), oblong 8vo, first preached Eversley Church, Hampshire, Passion Sunday, 9 March 1856

AUTOGRAPH DRAFT OF ONE OF KINGSLEY'S MOST FAMOUS SERMONS, the text from Exodus II.10, 'I AM hath sent me unto you', opening: "I have often told you (& God knows I find it more & more true every day) that the Bible is full of good news from beginning to end. The gospel – that is good news & and the best of all good news, is to be found in every book of it – perhaps, if we knew how to search the scriptures – in every chapter & verse of it from beginning to end. For from beginning to end, from Genesis to Malachi, from the Gospel of St Matthew to the end of the Revelations, what our Lord said of the Bible stands true – They are they which testify of me. The whole Bible testifies, bears witness of him, the One Unchangeable Christ, who said to Moses Say to the people, 'I am hath sent me unto you'...". At the end of the sermon, Kingsley turns to the subject of children's education (one of course to be reprised a half a dozen years later in The Water Babies), asking his congregation to support National Schools, "Where in the true name of God is taught, for the very reason that paradoxical as it may seem, they try to make every child a theologian".

The text was published posthumously by Kingsley's widow Fanny under the title 'I Am' in the collection True Words for Brave Men issued in 1878. The published text naturally differs from our often heavily-worked draft. For example the opening sentence has been tidied up, in the printed version reading 'Every day I find it more and more true, that the Bible is full of good news from beginning to end'. It might be argued that what it gains in formality, it loses in immediacy.

Included in the lot is a covering-sheet inscribed by his widow and a touching letter by her of 1883 to the Lancashire dialect poet John Baron promising him the manuscript: "I will try & meet your wishes, by sending you one of my dear Husbands MSS Sermons just as he preached it at Eversley. I fear I have not a signature left, except on very private Letters... I wish you cd have heard him preach -- & seen his face – No 'Letters' of his, or 'Memories' of those who knew him can give a true idea of what he was in himself, his true nobleness, & almost divine unselfishness – or his constant dwelling in the Consciousness of God".