salvation

Of Dandelions and Oaks – Sermon Preached on 12th July 2026 (Sixth Sunday after Trinity)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Mary’s, Potterne

Romans 8.1–11; Matthew 13.1–9, 18–23

“Listen! A sower went out to sow…”

I thought I’d start today with a bit of science. Why does a mouse have dozens of babies, and an elephant just one? Some species, whether animals or plants, have a low number of offspring and put a lot of effort into raising them – we are one of these, so are elephants and gorillas, big animals like us, but so are parrots. Some species have lots of offspring, so cannot, of course, put the same amount of effort into raising any single one of them – rats famously breed like… well, rabbits.

A thickly painted oil landscape. A large yellow sun sits low on the horizon at the centre, its rays radiating outward across a yellow-green sky in short, dashed brushstrokes. Below the sun, a band of pale gold stubble or standing corn runs the width of the picture; a small blue farm building with a red roof stands at the far left, and dark trees mark the horizon at the right. The foreground is a broad ploughed field rendered in dense, choppy strokes of blue, violet, white, and orange, with a pale furrow curving through it. A peasant in a straw hat, olive jacket, and blue trousers strides across the field from the right, seed sack cradled against his body, his right arm swinging out as he casts. Three dark birds are scattered across the soil.
Van Gogh, The Sower (1888). Hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

A similar spectrum is seen in the world of plants – blow on a dandelion clock and many dozens of seeds will float on the breeze; oaks are very different, sometimes waiting for years to produce acorns, with each acorn loaded with enough reserves to survive decades of burial, drought, and being nibbled by squirrels – after all, the forest floor will still be there in fifty years’ time.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” writes St Paul to the Christians in Rome. There are many implications of the phrase “in Christ Jesus”. But one comes from remembering that Jesus is God, and God is Love – the Bible says so in those same three words. To be in Jesus Christ is to live in love. The Holy Spirit is love too – the love that flows between Father and Son, and a person in its own right, who ripples out from them through the whole universe, a universe whose beauty at every scale shows that it is loved.

We human beings are made in the image and likeness of our creator God; we reflect that image most clearly when we love. We are called both to receive God’s love as seed sown in us, and to sow seeds of that love in others.

God is constantly sowing seeds in our lives out of His love for us, usually without us really noticing. Some fall on the path, in the rocky ground, or amid the thorns. Sometimes our hearts are too hard for the seed to flourish; sometimes we’re too distracted by material things to respond; sometimes to respond to God’s love would mean doing unpopular or costly things, so we back off. We fear the condemnation of those around us, but the only condemnation we should truly fear is that of God, and when we respond to God’s love by sharing that love with others, then we are truly in Christ, and we need not, as St Paul reminds us, fear God’s condemnation. If you fear your harvest is thin, trust that the same God who sows in love also forgives and restores.

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The Madness of Mobs: Sermon Preached on 29nd March 2026 (Palm Sunday)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Philippians 2. 5-11; Matthew 21. 1-11

“When he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was in turmoil, asking, ‘Who is this?’”

A screenshot from the BBC television programme Wogan. Two people are seated facing each other in a talk-show setting with a neutral beige studio backdrop. On the left, a woman with short, voluminous auburn hair wears a bright teal blazer over a patterned blue and purple dress. She is looking toward her interviewer with a composed expression. On the right, a man with dark, collar-length hair, seen from behind and in profile, wears a dark grey suit and has his hands clasped together as if mid-conversation. The BBC logo is visible in the upper left corner and the programme name "Wogan" appears in the upper right. The styling and set design are consistent with British television production of the mid-to-late 1980s.
Lindy Chamberlain on the BBC Wogan Show in 1991. © BBC; used under Fair Use doctrine

Does anyone remember a lady in Australia named Lindy Chamberlain? If you don’t remember the name, you may remember her story. While camping at Ayers Rock in 1980, her nine-week-old daughter disappeared while she and her husband were making the evening meal at a barbeque pit. Chamberlain said she had seen a dingo leaving their family tent when she returned to check after hearing her daughter crying. Although other campers who were there that evening believed her, few members of the Australian public gave this unlikely story any credibility. I mean, “A dingo stole my baby…”—sure, love, whatever you say. Whipped up by the media, Chamberlain became a national and even international hate figure, with the hate exacerbated by the fact that she was a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and therefore seemed insufficiently grief-stricken by conventional norms.

Two years later, she was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour for murdering her own daughter, and soon exhausted every possible means of appeal. Yet she only served three years before the prosecution case fell apart: by chance, nearly six years after her disappearance, her daughter’s cardigan was found in a remote area with many dingo lairs; the prosecution’s forensic evidence also turned out to be full of flaws. Chamberlain was released: the hate figure turned out to be an innocent woman.

Somewhat closer to home, both in time and space, is Christopher Jefferies, a cultured and rather eccentric retired public schoolmaster from Bristol. When his lodger Joanna Yeates was murdered in 2010, the press went feral, portraying him as a sinister oddball who was almost certainly guilty. Yet he was entirely innocent; after the true killer was convicted, Jefferies sued multiple newspapers and won.

The social media era has brought a new arena for people to form mobs in. Because of that, the Internet gets blamed for changing human behaviour for the worse – and maybe it has – but the tendency to form badly-behaved mobs isn’t new at all. It goes back to the dawn of humanity.

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The Man with the Plan: Sermon Preached on 21st December 2025 (Fourth Sunday of Advent)

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An aerial photograph captures a vast, rugged mountain landscape with multiple layers of jagged ridges extending into the distance. The foreground features sharp, barren peaks in shades of dark blue and gray, casting deep shadows in the valleys below. Successive ridges fade progressively into softer blues and purples due to atmospheric haze, creating a sense of immense depth and scale. The sky above is pale and hazy with a warm golden tint near the horizon, suggesting early morning or late afternoon light, accompanied by scattered thin clouds. The terrain appears arid and rocky, with no visible vegetation, rivers, or human structures, emphasizing the raw, untamed wilderness of a high-altitude mountain range. This panoramic view evokes the dramatic grandeur of remote canyons and sierras.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne; Holy Cross, Seend; and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Romans 1. 1-7; Matthew 1. 18-31

“Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet…”

A painted mural on a white brick wall depicts a religious figure resembling Jesus Christ within a large, circular orange-red background resembling a halo or sun. The figure has long brown hair, a beard, and a serene expression, wearing a white robe with brown accents and a golden collar. On his chest is a glowing red Sacred Heart with flames and a cross. In his right hand, he holds the glowing heart outward, while his left hand cradles a blue and green globe representing Earth, showing the Americas. Below the circular portrait, a green rectangular banner with blue borders displays bold black capital letters reading "KEEP OUR WORLD CLEAN." The mural's style is folk-art inspired, with visible brushstrokes and slight wear on the wall surface.
“He’s Got the Whole Word in His Hands”, Willemstad, Curaçao © Gerry Lynch, 22 November 2007

♫♪“He’s got the whole world in is hands.”♪♫

It has been a very long time since I’ve started a sermon by singing from the pulpit. This song isn’t a Christmas song, but it is perfect for this last Sunday in Advent and the Bible readings set for us today—for both are saying that God has a long-term plan for the human race. Our Gospel reading says that strange story of Many conceiving by the Holy Spirit came about to fulfil what God said through the prophets; our other reading, from a letter St Paul wrote to the first generation of Christians in Rome, says that the good news of Jesus Christ had been foretold by the prophets long in advance.

So, this might give us a good chance to explore the long backstory of the first Christmas.

The Christian story starts at a mythical time, before history began, when human beings lived in harmony with one another, with nature, and with God. This was the Garden of Eden. Humans are identified right at the start of the Bible as being a very special part of creation – the last part to be created, made in the image and likeness of God, the summit of God’s handiwork. We were God’s apprentices, being trained to tend and keep the Earth, and made for eventual union with God. There were no rules in the garden – except for one. The only thing we were forbidden do was to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and we were told that if we did, we would die. We ate the fruit, because we wanted knowledge that we had been warned was too hot for us to handle—we’ll come back to that idea later.

The Garden of Eden is, of course, a myth, but it expresses a truth too profound for dry facts—that as humans evolved, we became alienated from our true nature. We know from archaeology that even before humans had writing, we were already out of balance with the rest of life. We know that it was us who wiped out the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, long before we learned how to write, or work metals, or make wheels.

Once we had writing, around 5,000 years ago, history began. It had many glorious and beautiful episodes, but also had the constant presence of war and slavery. We were out of balance with God and with one another, and that is how we remain.

Yet the Bible tells that although we were often wilful, cruel, and self-defeating, and God sometimes got angry with us and chastised us as a result, He never abandoned us. Somehow, despite God giving us simple rules for living in harmony, and us often being full of good intentions to live according to them, we were never able to escape the darker side of our own nature.

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How to Win by Embracing Failure: Sermon Preached on 14th September 2025 (Holy Cross Day)

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Preached at Holy Cross, Seend; St Peter’s, Poulshot; and St Mary’s, Potterne

Philippians 2. 6-11, John 3. 3-17

“Christ… became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”

A religious sculpture set within a stone archway, featuring a central wooden crucifix with a figure of Jesus Christ, flanked by two standing figures, likely the Virgin Mary and Saint John, all crafted in a stylized, weathered material. The scene is illuminated by soft lighting against a textured wall background.
The modernist rood in the Augustinerkirche, an Old Catholic parish church in Zürich. © Gerry Lynch, 11 July 2019.

You lot are a bunch of failures! A load of hypocrites who often do things against your own principles, and fail to deliver what you say you’ll do. Fair weather Christians who cave in too easily when the going gets tough. More than that, I know that at least some of you are here in Church today for decidedly mixed motives.

Don’t think you can try to hoodwink me, because I know all those things to be the case. I know they’re true, because they’re true of me also. And if we read the Bible, we find all that was true of the apostles, of Peter and James and all that lot, and that’s before we even begin talking about St Paul. And that is one of the most important things about Christianity—it’s not, despite what the Good Friday hymn says, a religion that promises to make us good; it’s a religion that makes promises to people who often aren’t very good.

So let me wish you a happy Holy Cross day!—For that is why I started my sermon in the way I did. The Cross has become probably the most successful visual brand in history, and that’s why we often miss that it’s actually a symbol of human failure. God walked among us in the person of Jesus Christ, actual God, healing and teaching and refusing both power and violence, and we put Him to death in one of the most horrific ways possible. We put Him to death in part because He told the truth, and we often hate the truth. Cosy lies often seem more comforting that the sometimes harsh cleanser that is truth. But we’ll come back to that.

The Cross upends everything. That’s the point of it. The means symbol Christ’s defeat is actually the means of his victory, and the symbol of our failure is actually the means of our liberation. The major part of that liberation we will experience only in the world to come, which the Cross opens to us. But some of that liberation we experience in the here and now, in the freedom from needing to be perfect the Cross provides.

I mean, would you have been one of the few who stayed by Jesus’ side even on the Cross? Would you have been with John and that handful of women? I’ve actually met a few of people who thought they would have done – who really thought they’d have managed what Peter and James and Thomas couldn’t do – and all have been the most egotistical pillocks, lacking all self-awareness. The rest of us know better than that. It is at the Cross that our delusions must die—and strangely, it is precisely knowing that we would have failed then, just as we so often do in our day-to-day lives, that liberates us to accept the flawed real people we are, the real people that God loves as they are.

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Never Mind the Bishops!: Sermon Preached on Candlemas (Sunday 2nd February 2025)

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A 13th Century drawing of Mary and Joseph presenting the infant Jesus to Simeon at the Temple in Jerusalem - or at least what a 13th Century artist thought that looked like - while Anna worships and nine onlookers watch.

Preached at St Mary’s Potterne and Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Hebrews 2. 14-18; Luke 2. 22-40

“he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might … free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”

“It’s rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”

A man in a suit and tie is standing and holding a piece of paper, appearing to be speaking or reading in a formal setting, possibly a legislative or governmental assembly. Several other individuals, also dressed in formal attire, are seated around him, listening attentively. The setting suggests a serious and official environment.
Presentations come in many shapes and sizes; Geoffrey Howe resigns on 13 November 1990. Used under the Fair Use doctrine.

Perhaps I am the first preacher ever to quote, in a sermon, this famous line from Sir Geoffrey Howe’s 1990 resignation speech as Deputy Prime Minister. Yet they were words that popped unbidden to mind as I returned from a fairly long and very pleasant leave, raring to get back into the fray, to find myself confronted with disastrous stories in the media about the Church of England, generated by our bishops: these are the people who are supposed to be our shepherds, our pastors. For it is rather like arriving at the crease, hoping to start a long and productive spell, only to find that my bat has indeed been broken.

What does that have to do with this morning’s Bible readings? Well, quite a lot as it turns out. One is the famous story of Jesus being presented by Mary and Joseph in the Temple, in fulfilment of Jewish religious law, as we would expect as today is Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation. The other reading is a passage from Hebrews which reflects on the implications of Jesus sharing our human nature in all its fullness. Both identify Jesus directly as the Christ, the Messiah, sent by God to deliver His people.

So it makes sense to have this pair of readings together on the same day, but they are to some extent in tension with one another. Our Gospel shows even Christ, God made human, binding Himself to the Law of Moses, and the religious system of the Temple at Jerusalem, in which sacrifices of animals played a major role. But the Letter to the Hebrews is all about making the case that the system of animal sacrifices has been ended by Christ, whose sacrifice of Himself on the Cross is enough for everyone, for all time. The Bible doesn’t give us simple answers. To read the Bible faithfully, we need to listen carefully when we find different parts of it in tension. It is always tempting to mine Scripture for simple answers; the trouble with that is that we then tend to find the answers we already wanted. If we honestly seek to puzzle our way to finding God’s will for us and for the world, it will be a job that we can barely make a start on in a lifetime.

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Cow Parsley and Heaven: Sermon Preached on 2nd June 2024 (Second Sunday after Trinity)

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A head of a cow parsley plant, in flower.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – 2 Corinthians 4. 13-5. 1 ; John 3. 1-17

 “…we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”

A sprig of cow parsley in full flower, close-up.
Cow parsley: in June, as common as muck, but a sign of life’s persistence; © Gerry Lynch, 24 July 2017.

Driving from Worton towards Seend the other day, I marvelled at the quantity of cow parsley in the hedges. The landscape is particularly thick with new growth when blossoming May gives way to bowery June. Yet I was struck by a rather sombre realisation. In just a few months, it will start to die back as we speed towards the dead, dark, weeks of December.

St Paul writes in this morning’s epistle reading that, “We are always being given up to death for Jesus’s sake.” Everything in this universe must eventually die. Not only living things, but, although we rarely think about it, the stars, and even the atomic particles which make up all matter, dead or alive. Their lifespan is almost beyond the human imagination, but is nonetheless finite. Indeed, science tells us that without the death of many stars over many billions of years, the complex elements which make up humans and all other living beings simply could not exist. Each of us too must eventually give way for new life. We are not meant to live forever, not in this universe, anyway—but as Christians, we have faith that Jesus Christ, the eternally living God, by dying opened the way to eternal life for us.

We human beings are indeed “clay jars”, as St Paul puts it: fragile creatures, with a limited lifespan, and far from perfect. Yet we are of such immense value that God gave Himself up to death for our sakes to give us the most valuable treasure possible, eternal life.

St Paul knew we were not meant to be perfect, any more than we are meant to live forever in our mortal bodies. Paul had once thought he was a particularly holy follower of God because he was so diligent in keeping all the rules which he found in Scripture. He forgot was that although God’s written word is indeed treasure, he was a clay jar. The vision of God he had on the road to Damascus was such a violent experience that it left him literally blind. Yet he considered it the most valuable experience of his life, one that taught this over-intense and rather self-certain man that it is a dangerous thing to be too sure you know God’s will.

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The End of the World: Sermon Preached on 24th December 2023 (Midnight Mass)

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A painting of Our Lady in a stable with the Baby Jesus in her arms; watched by St Joseph and the angels, who have halos, and shepherds and animals, who don't.

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Isaiah 9. 2-4, 6-7; John 1. 1-14

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”         

How would you react if a vicar, at Midnight Mass, in a medieval church, in a rather traditional village in the depths of Deep England, started preaching about the End of the World? Would you wonder if he had been teleported in from the American Bible Belt? Or perhaps, on hearing a certain accent, wonder if he was a friend of another Ulster preacher, whom some of you may remember, the man who liked to say “no” a lot?

A painting of Our Lady in a stable with the Baby Jesus in her arms; watched by St Joseph and the angels, who have halos, and shepherds and animals, who don't.
The Nativity by Giotto (1311-20), in the Basilica of St Francis, Assisi.

In fact, in the churches I go to I never hear anyone preaching on the end of the world. They’re far too moderate and sensible for that sort of thing. But lately, I’ve heard people talking about the end of the world on Radio 4 and in the pages of The Times.

That nice Matthew Syed, who won an Olympic medal in ping-pong, and makes those interesting radio programmes about quirky bits of modern history, had a column in The Times the other week saying our advancing technology meant that we might cause our own extinction. Then last Tuesday, when I was driving, Radio 4’s PM programme – not normally known for fire and brimstone sermons – had an interview with Geoffrey Hinton, the man often called “the godfather of artificial intelligence”, warning of the risks that AI might pose to human existence within the next 5-20 years. And all that’s before we talk about climate change, or nuclear war.

The world might be entering a very dark era.

So far, so cheerful!

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Destined for Salvation: Sermon Preached on 19th November 2023 (Second Sunday before Advent)

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The Parable of the Talents (2013), © Andrei Mironov

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – 1 Thessalonians 5.1-11; Matthew 25.14-30

“For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.”

So, Jesus Christ will return like a thief in the night to judge the world, and He told a story about what that judgement would be like that ended with a poor servant of a harsh man being thrown out into the outer darkness—where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. I have to be honest, this morning’s readings make me uncomfortable, and I suspect they made most of you uncomfortable too.

Partly, I think, our discomfort come from not wanting to be like those Christians, you know, the ones who are very sure that they are going to be Jesus Christ’s personal hitmen when He returns, when they’ll happily help Him out as He casts a few wretches into the outer darkness. We’ve all met a few of them in our time. It is right that we don’t want to be like those Christians, far too certain for their own good that they have this Christianity business nailed down – and far too inclined to forget that Scripture is clear that judgement belongs to Christ and Christ alone, and not to them nor anyone else.

The Parable of the Talents (2013), © Andrei Mironov
The Parable of the Talents (2013), © Andrei Mironov

But unless we ourselves are also too certain for our own good that we have this Christianity business nailed down, we should accept that if the Gospel is worth believing, it must be capable of disturbing our comfortable certainties. If Jesus Christ is going to actually come back in glory to judge the world – and He repeatedly stated that He would – that means He’s going to come back to judge us. And we all know that we aren’t quite the lovely people we like to pretend we are for public consumption – certainly, I know that I’m not. Quite apart from that, few of us could mount a case that we have made the spectacular 100% Return on Investment from the talents God has given us achieved by the profitable servants in this morning’s Gospel. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t solved many wars, ended many famines, or brought many people to Faith.

When I hear readings like these from the Bible, at first blush I can find myself thinking that God may be a being I need to fear, but He’s hard to love, and I even wonder sometimes if want to associate myself with this Jesus Christ fellow and His tales of mistreated servants.

But let’s dig a little deeper into the readings, because there are a few points that can be easy to miss, and which are far more hopeful.

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Why the Talking Snake Matters: Sermon Preached on Saturday 8th April 2023 (Easter Vigil)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Genesis 1.1 – 2.4; Genesis 3; Exodus 14.10-15.1; Ezekiel 37. 1-14; Romans 6. 3-11; Matthew 28. 1-10

Didn’t we have an awful lot of readings this evening? And weren’t a lot of them from odd bits of the Bible with unscientific stories like creation in six days, seas parting to open a walking path, and talking snakes? Wouldn’t we better just talking about God’s love and how God wants us to love others?

A tempera and gold painting on a copper base by William Blake of a radiant Eve being tempted by a golden, magnificently coiling, snake. Blake drew his inspiration for this scene from the book of Genesis in the Old Testament and from John Milton's epic poem 'Paradise Lost' (1667). Blake often experimented with painting techniques, and here the surface has flaked badly because of the poor adhesion between a glue-based paint and the copper support he used.
William Blake, Eve Tempted by the Serpent (1799-1800). Hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

I don’t agree. These readings form the main arc of the Christian story – how we are related to God, and why Jesus had to come into the world: that’s why we have them tonight. They aren’t a science textbook and God never intended them to be when He inspired them to be written.

Science may explain our biological evolution but it does not explain our moral evolution. One of the great unanswered questions of human origins is how did we change from being creatures of instinct like other animals, to creatures of reason, and creatures with a moral sense, the ability to tell right from wrong? Where does the sense of right and wrong come from? That question provokes another, related, one – why do we human beings so often do things that we know to be wrong? For we seem to be doomed to constantly damage not only other human beings, but other life-forms, however well-meaning our intentions might be.

One of the saddest realities of human existence is that, as we spread across the world, mass extinctions of the native wildlife followed us in every place we expanded into, soon after we arrived. That is true on every continent and island; ever since we had the spear and the ability to create fire, we’ve been wiping other creatures out. We drove the mammoth to extinction before we even had rudimentary agriculture.

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A Queen and A Poor Sinner: Sermon Preached in St Peter’s, Poulshot, Sunday 11th September 2022 (The Period of Mourning for the Death of Queen Elizabeth II)

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“every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life”

Readings – 2 Corinthians 4:16–5:4; John 6:35–40

As I prepared to preach a sermon as we mourn a long-lived monarch of deep Christian faith, the story of another royal death 106 years ago pushed its way into my mind. It is about the funeral of Emperor Franz Joseph von Habsburg, who was as deeply faithful a Christian as Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; he also sat on his throne for almost as long as she did on hers.

Franz-Joseph reigned for 68 years after assuming the throne as a result of the great Europe-wide popular uprisings of 1848, and died in the middle of the First World War. On one level his life story seems impossibly remote – even his surname invokes the medieval world; yet it was recent enough to encompass democratic elections, trade unions, worldwide telecommunications, and the sort of horrific artillery barrages we have seen recapitulated on the flats fields of Ukraine this year. Indeed, it was recent enough that it is possible to watch a few minutes of film footage from his funeral procession through the streets of Vienna on YouTube.

The procession was appropriately full of pomp and circumstance. Beautifully attired dignitaries and a detachment of elegant hussars on white steeds escorted a casket draped in the black and gold of the Habsburg family which had ruled vast territories for six hundred years.

Emperor Franz Joseph’s funeral procession through Vienna in 1916

When the procession arrived at the Imperial Crypt, a great iron door barred the way to the family mausoleum. On the other side stood the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna waiting.

The officer leading the casket stood at the door, knocked, and cried “Open!”

“Who goes there?” responded the Cardinal from behind the iron doors.

The officer replied: “We bear the remains of his Imperial and Apostolic Majesty, Franz Joseph the First, by the grace of God Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Defender of the faith…” continuing with all the Emperor’s thirty-seven titles.

“We know him not!”, the Cardinal replied abruptly.

The officer once more knocked the vast iron door, and again the Cardinal replied – “Who goes there?”

The officer this time used a shorter title for the deceased Emperor.

The Cardinal replied again, “We know him not!”

The officer then knocked for the third time. The Cardinal replied for the third time, “Who goes there?”

This time the officer’s answer was different: “We bear the body of Franz Joseph, our brother, a sinner – like us all.”

“This man we recognise”, replied the Cardinal finally, and the huge iron doors swung open to admit the body of an Emperor.

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