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IN QUEST OF REALITY BEING crucified is just “‘ sloppy folly,” as a certain distinguished man put it the other day. That is, quite frankly, how some people look at the message of Jesus. They cannot see the truth: they are the heartbreak and the perplexity of our ministry, and we find them sometimes drifting out of our churches, after years of teaching and apparent acquiescence, because they have not seen God in Jesus. How are we to get hold of them? How are we to make them see? Only by the truth and the whole truth expressed in the phrase, . “Christ and Him crucified.’’ The truth has the power to awaken its own sense of need ; ‘ we can depend on it. It is our business so to reveal it as to help them to see. Some one said the other day that a rediscovery of what Christ meant by faith would bring a revival of religion. There is something in that. But there is a prior work to be done. Faith is only our natural response to the vision of God in Jesus. That vision alone will awaken faith as a natural result. Can any one really see Christ without having the impulse awakened to trust Him? And there is a moral regenerating power in the message of THE PREACHER’S TASK 25 the truth in Jesus, in the reality of His love for men as seen in Calvary—where alone it reaches its point of flame against the back- eround of human sin—which can melt the very hardest heart. There lies our power. We are all familiar with the argument for: what is called the social gospel. There are people so enmeshed in an evil environment that they need almost to be dug out before they can begin to see the light and to be cared for, like a suffocated man, till they are at the point where their souls can function normally enough to breathe the spiritual atmosphere for themselves. But social service can never take the place of the message of the gospel of God’s love. Social service only reaches real effectiveness as it becomes, so to speak, the hands and feet of the messengers of God— a medium through which the love of God is made real, conveying the touch of Jesus. As such it is an essential element in the revelation of God the Father. But, however. far down they be sunk, never for a moment let us give people up as beyond the reach of - the truth of God just where they are. There : is a penetrative power in that light which 26 IN QUEST OF REALITY can reach the deepest dungeon. A wonderful illustration of this fact came to light lately in a little book called A Gentleman 1n Prison. A desperate criminal in a Japanese prison, — condemned to death for murder, was visited by two lady missionaries. They spoke to- him, but found him cold and indifferent. They left with him as they went a copy of - the New Testament. One day, in boredom mixed with curiosity, he took down the New Testament and opened it, and the story of what happened is told in one of a series of letters which he left behind. He began by read- ing the Parable of the Lost Sheep. “Still,” he says, “‘I was not sufficiently impressed to have any special belief in what I was reading. I simply thought they were words which any preacher might have used. I put the New Testament on the shelf again and did not read it for some time. A little later, when I was tired of doing nothing, I took down the book again and began to read. This time I read how Jesus was handed over to Pilate, was tried unjustly, and put to death by crucifixion. As I read this, I began to think. This person they called Jesus was evidently THE PREACHER’S TASK 27 a man who at any rate tried to lead others into the paths of virtue, and it seemed an in- human thing to crucify Him, simply because He had different religious opinions from others. Even I, hardened criminal that I was, thought it a shame that His enemies. should have treated Him in this way. ‘““T went on, and my attention was next taken by these words: ‘And Jesus said, “ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”’’ I stopped. I was stabbed to the heart as if pierced by a five-inch nail. What did the verse reveal to me? Shall I call it the love of the heart of Christ ? Shall I call it His compassion? I do not know what to call it. I only know that, with an unspeakably grateful heart, I believed. Through this simple sentence I was led into the whole of Christianity. This is how lI thought it out. I suppose a man’s greatest enemy is the one who seeks to take his life from him. There is surely no greater enemy than this. Now at the very moment when Jesus’ life was being taken from Him, He prayed for His enemies to the God of heaven, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not 28 IN QUEST OF REALITY what they do.’ What else could I believe — but that He was indeed the Son of God?” Never mind his rationalizing, if you call it — so. The thing that happened was, that he © saw God in Jesus the crucified, and seeing — Him was changed into another man. There is the miracle, for the production of which © our preaching is to be the vehicle. And the power that can do it, even in a dungeon and in a criminal’s heart, is the power of the truth breaking in to open the blind eyes. It is worth a lifetime’s study and a life laid down, to become the instrument of such reconciling love, and no art that produces any other impression, though it bring us to heights of popularity, can compare with the preaching of a man who brings even one soul into right relations with God. But my point is that the truth is its own searchlight ; the truth alone, without compromise—with- out regard to popular demand. The real question about a man’s message is not whether it is what the people want, nor even whether it is edifying, but whether it is true. Our business is with nothing less and with nothing more, though of course to see it THE PREACHER’S TASK 29 and present it in all its range and power will take all the sinews of our mind and soul. I] Now with this for a central aim, there are certain general rules which I venture to set: down. 1. Our preaching must be clear and simbple.: If the truth is to have its appeal, the people must see it in the clearest way. Nothing is going to reach the conscience which is not pellucidly clear to the mind. Some one says that “‘ what is spiritually necessary may be intellectually unintelligible.’ That is at least a very dangerous principle. There is a distinct peril lest, having banished magic from our cultus, we should enshrine something very like it in our vocabulary. “‘ These be good words,” says an old woman in Silas Marner. We are tempted to use certain phrases and terms familiar to ourselves, which to the people are either unintelligible, or else so crusted, like a ship with barnacles, with hoary superstition or pious associa- tion of a distinctly unattractive kind, that they carry people nowhere. To-day we are 30 IN QUEST OF REALITY denied an advantage which the preachers of a couple of generations ago possessed. They could safely take for granted a certain knowledge of religious phrases and _ theo- logical terms derived from home and Sunday- school training : such as, for instance, in the Shorter Catechism in Scotland. That may, or may not, have made for reality. But it made it comparatively easy for the preacher who, as a preacher must do, dealt largely in theology. To-day we can take nothing for granted. A person of considerable intel- lectual attainments and fairly wide reading in theology said to me the other day that we preachers take too much for granted. The Principal of Mansfield tells how he sent some working men to hear a well-known preacher in London, and asked them afterwards what they thought of it. ‘“‘ Blowed if we could understand a word of what the bloke was saying,’ was their comment. We shall— unfortunately —not be addressing people who have so little contact with our world of ideas, Sunday after Sunday, but we will be humiliated again and again to find how much the ordinary congregation often gets out of THE PREACHER’S TASK 31 an address to the children, just because it is clear and simple. We must get into the habit of refusing to let phrases pass currency for thought and do duty for an honest effort to reach the audience with our meaning. It is fatally easy to use pious phrases that: are only a shelter, even to ourselves, for’ intellectual sluggishness. And a phrase or a sentence may be sublimely true to our- selves, yet it may mean precisely nothing to the man or woman to whom we are talking, or may even mean something which is not really Christian. Oliver Wendell Holmes says somewhere that a great many of our familiar religious terms need to be “depolarized,” as he calls it, because their associations have so disguised their real meaning that people are misled. That was half a century ago in New England ; it is far truer to-day in Britain. It comes to this, then, that we must be careful to define our terms. Theology is a science that grows by the constant re- defining of terms. We will have to explain our vocabulary. Not long agoa lady was talk- ing to me who had been trying to find her way 32 IN QUEST OF REALITY — in the new psychology. She had read five or six books, but she was held up on every other page by the fact that she did not know the language terms, and she wanted to know if there was a simple book which would explain them. That is precisely our difficulty in preaching. The Bible itself is largely a closed book to some people for the same reasons ; the Epistles of St. Paul are a striking example. There is hardly a phrase of Biblical theology which we can take for granted. Take such terms as “‘ sin,’ for instance, or “ grace,” or “coming to Christ,’ or “the Kingdom of God,” or ‘‘ eternal life,’ or ‘“‘ conversion,’ or “faith.” What do they mean? This is fundamental work; but we will find an astonishing response of interest in tackling such phrases and giving new meanings to old terms. We can preach a whole series of sermons, answering questions which have thus become elementary. And every one of them will be for some people in our congrega- tions a window into a new country. It will throw floods of light on sealed pages. It will unwrap graveclothes to give dead words life. Think of the preaching of the first apostles THE PREACHER’S TASK 33 described in the Acts. What was the secret of its power? The people acknowledged that they heard the apostles “talking, each man in his own tongue, of the triumphs of God.” Real preaching is talking to people ° in their own language of the triumphs of God.. Words must stand for real things if preaching is to be real. They must not merely be the symbols of what, to many people, is either a theological figment or an unintelligible mystery. Whatever the gift of tongues was, clear speech is part of the means by which the message of God breaks through every- thing and wins its way past “ clay-shuttered doors.”’ 2. A second rule that should be followed- is that real preaching must be positive. The: truth must be trusted to do its own work: of correcting error or of self-defence. Two types of sermon commonly err on the negative side. The one is the argumentative sermon which aims at establishing a case by stating objections and meeting them. This type of preaching requires the greatest of care. The danger is that stating objections for the 3 e- 34 IN QUEST OF REALITY purpose of meeting them may only result in sowing our own doubts; for the capacity of the average hearer to follow an argument is limited. There is a place, of course, for the apologetic sermon, but it must not be forgotten that the sphere of apologetics is limited. Its true function is to prepare for the evangel, to remove obstacles out of the way of the man who is seeking the light. It is really only valid and worth while for those who “ ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward.”” That is the point. People must be sincere; they must be seeking truth, before our arguments will help to remove their objections. An apologetic * sermon is of very little use to a man to whom ‘doubt is not an agony, and that man is -already on the way to the truth. For people who want to find the truth, who want to believe, but to whom the way is blocked by intellectual difficulties, the right kind of argument can be an enormous help. It can bring a unity into their world, which is generally what is needed by those who have doubts. Some people stand on the threshold of the Kingdom, and it only needs the build- THE PREACHER’S TASK 35 ing of some bridge, or the demolishing of some barrier, to bring them into it. They are there already in spirit, but they have intellectually what the Quakers call “a stop in their mind.” A well-known scientist of our day confesses, in a little book, that for years he had been unable to accept Christianity till he found a bridge, as he puts it, over the Rubicon into the Christian faith. His particular bridge was an argu- ment for the truth of the Incarnation. It is a bridge which he confesses many others might smile at; he is disappointed, in fact, because it does not seem to appeal to certain learned theologians to whom he has ex- plained it. But it served his purpose, which was to put down a plank on which his feet could cross into the country where his heart was really dwelling. Once over, he no longer needs it. There is a place in such cases for the right kind of apologetic. Or, again, | there are people who are uneasy lest their faith or their experience should be a kind of illusion. They want to have the foundations’ examined to see that the structure has its: base in a reasonable world. Or, yet again,- 36 IN QUEST OF REALITY there are people who stand outside because they have never thought very deeply about religion. They have been put off by some catchword or some stupid objection which is really a blind, though they do not know it. And by argument or attack it is possible to demolish that barrier and make them think of God. We can help a great many people just by making them think. But, when all is said and done, argu- -mentative preaching can never bring a man Ca into the spiritual world: it cannot be the . basis of faith. In the long run the truth a is the only apologetic for the purposes of preaching. All the stock arguments against Christianity begin to vanish into thin air when a man has seen Jesus. Argument may demolish the barriers that hide; it can prepare the way of the Lord; it can never reveal Him; nor in the last resort prevent the man who is on the defensive against the truth from erecting other barriers. For there are people for whom, like the woman of Samaria, religious difficulties and dis- cussions are a refuge from a moral challenge. In a letter to one of his preachers, John THE PREACHER’S TASK 37 Wesley quotes a bit of advice his father gave him when he was young: “ You think to carry everything by dint of argument. But you will find, by and by, how very little is ever done in the world by clear reason.”’ And Wesley adds: ‘ Very true indeed.” Positive truth alone, shining by its own light, . quickening the perceptions, enlightening the - eyes, is the argument which has the power : in the long run. There is a very definite . danger that the preacher who pays too much attention to the person with religious diffi- culties and gives himself to the building up of logical bases for truth, may be keeping people from resting on the true foundation, which is an experience and not a syllogism. A word must be said of sermons of another negative type—sermons which are denuncia- tory or pugnacious. The psychologist has a startling commentary on stridency in the pulpit ; he puts it down to a conflict in the preacher himself, or, at least, to a subtle want of confidence in the truth. Be that as it may, sarcasm, or irony, or vehement con- demnation, is a mistake. A text which gives a chance for invective is very attractive, 38 IN QUEST OF REALITY especially when we are young. It may be questioned whether it ever does any real good. People generally apply it with unction to their neighbours and applaud _ the preacher’s courage. Those who in sincerity take the message to themselves will prob- ably not deserve it; or, if they do, may only be embittered or discouraged. To quote Wesley again: “I have often repented of judging too severely but very seldom of being too merciful.” It is true that Jesus could denounce, but He did it, as we know when we get behind the scenes, with a breaking heart. No one would plead for soft words - and honeyed accents. The truth will hurt ; ‘it will probably wound. There is no preach- ‘ing worth doing to-day which will not have . for its first effect a quickening of conscience - among religious people, bringing them face - to face with a moral issue in things which - many have been accustomed to look upon as . neutral ground. But denunciation will never -do it. It is the same with the wrong views which people hold: you can only meet and overcome them by the truth —the truth which is already rooted in the false view and THE PREACHER’S TASK 39 which is really giving to the latter its power. Denounce the grotesque ideas associated with Christian Science as we may, the question a ~man who is drawn that way will ask us, is what we have to put in its place. Many of our most flagrant errors are only the refuge for a mind that has been deprived of the fulness of the truth. _.In the biography of Dr. John Clifford, lately published, there is a quotation from his diary describing some sermons to which he had listened. In particular he tells of hearing ‘“‘a sermon on Acts iv. 12: Salva- tion through Jesus and salvation only through Jesus. The sermon was an attempt to expose the hollowness and uselessness of expedients for salvation, eg. (1) Govern- mental changes; (2) improvement in ex- ternal circumstances of men; (3) educa- tion; (4) metaphysical culture; (5) re- finement. There was much of everything except Christ. All these other forces were treated as though they could do no good to any one. It was a most unsatisfactory sermon, calculated to alienate all young and reflective minds. It lacked balance; worst 40 IN QUEST OF REALITY of all, it lacked Christ. And yet I do not doubt the preacher felt that he was preach- ing the gospel. ... The more I think of last night’s sermon the more I see the urgent need for reform in preaching.”’ Much could be said of such a line of argument as that suggested above, from the point of view of its truth. For who in these days would deny the influence of the Spirit in any one of these things which were condemned? Yet that is not what I am concerned with at the moment. The point I would make is, that to take up a large part of a sermon with a discussion of what the gospel is not is an entirely barren method, depressing and unenlightening. If the treatment of a subject seems to demand that misrepresentations or false ideas be first cleared out of the way, this should be done as briefly as possible and merely to make a pathway for the positive message. The presentation of Jesus and His message can safely be trusted to dethrone the false idols. “For oh! the Master is so fair, His smile so sweet to banished men, That they who meet Him unaware Can never turn to earth again.” THE PREACHER’S TASK 41 The cardinal fact about the gospel is that ° it is a gift. God comes to men seeking them. : He has taken the initiative. Religion is not ° primarily a problem to be solved: it is a’ gift to be received. There is a way of preaching * which leaves the impression that the truth is something so mysterious that only those who are willing to face an intellectual struggle, not far short of the heroic, can fathom the secret; whereas it is something that will unfailingly meet men’s needs in such a way as to convince them of its authority, if only they will be sincere with it. We carry to men in the Name of the Lord a message that makes them conscious of infinite Divine resources. That is what makes it a gospel. The demand God makes springs out of the gift God offers. His love creates the sense of duty, and provides the power that makes duty the joyful exercise of our souls in freedom. That message that we must work out our own salvation can be preached only in the light of the primal fact that God is working in us. God is a Redeemer Who is out to find us, if only we will allow ourselves to be found; in Him also is the grace to 42 IN QUEST OF REALITY conquer the last citadel of our unwillingness ; so that all we want to meet the deepest need of our intractable wills and spiritually de- pleted natures, isin Him. The all-sufficiency of God to find men wherever they are and bring them to Himself, is the very core of the gospel. 3. This brings me to say that real preach- ‘ing must be thorough; it must go to the ‘ root of the situation and must meet it with ~ the whole counsel of God. We can only help people by the full message of God in Christ. ‘ The temptation that besets us is to dwell on ' some aspects of the truth to the exclusion of . Others, till the truth becomes distorted. We . may dwell, for instance, on the Fatherhood ‘of God in such a way that God becomes * only a genial kind of parent who will tolerate ‘ almost anything in his child, and whose very forgiveness is only what Stevenson describes in the old laird of Ballantrae as ‘‘ the tears of senility.” Perhaps there is no word that needs more emphasis in our day than the exhortation: “If ye call on God as Father, pass the time of your sojourning here in THE PREACHER’S TASK 43 fear.”’ On the other hand, it is possible to state the necessity for repentance in such a way as to make people think that God is merely concerned with wounded feelings. Men are not going to be won into the Kingdom of God by abstracting this or that truth from the message. The gospel can do very little for people who will not allow it to do every- thing. People cannot be saved to-day from the things from which many of them are crying to be delivered, except by a full entrance into the real secret of Christianity. Only the fulness of the Christian message can really help people. Let me give an illustra- tion or two of what I mean. We take it for granted that the gospel ought to deliver men from fear; and so we preach it. “ Be not afraid,’ we say to people who are shrinking from some threatening terror in a world of risks. We preach to them the care and love of God. But to tell them that and nothing more will do little for them except build a kind of shelter behind which they tremble still and which the first big trouble will blow down. Faith in God thus preached is a very leaky ship in which to put to sea on a very » 44, IN QUEST OF REALITY dangerous ocean. And there are a great many people to whom faith is just that—an unreality by which they preserve with diffi- culty an unstable equilibrium they call peace. We have to go further. What is this love of God, and what is God in His love seeking todoforus? His is obviously not a love that merely seeks to keep us safe and comfortable, but a love that is out for our character as His children. And there is no peace till we see that and consent to it; which means, of course, a new valuation of life, and a new conception of the love of God—in other words, the acceptance of the outlook of Jesus both on God’s love and on life’s ideal. Outside of that, to speak of God’s care of us is mere sentiment which only keeps the trouble quiet, but does nothing to cast it out. Or take the message of forgiveness. To - many people it is an unreality because they are still conscious of the external results of sin, and it is from these that they are really seeking to be delivered. Or, in other cases, it is a mere shelter from punishment in the future life which they are seeking. THE PREACHER’S TASK A5 But there is no power in forgiveness till it’ means restoration to the fellowship of God through a new attitude that is ready to face: the sin with all its consequences, and is at. peace because there is nothing more to hide.. This means, however, seeing the good of life in fellowship with God and in the way of righteousness, whatever it may cost; it means insight into the real meaning of sin as estrangement from Him. No cheap and easy gospel, no genial proclamation of pardon, will produce the peace which is the peace that passeth understanding, and not a sham or a hypocrisy. Christianity is going to mean nothing as power in the world except as it saves men into the mind and attitude of Jesus through and through, and this involves a change which nothing but the full message of God's grace can produce and nothing but the fulness of His love can sustain. ( Christianity cannot survive at all in a world like this, upon an emasculated gospel or a message which is reduced to a few genial observations about the love of God.) The question for us is whether we are going to trim our preaching 46 IN QUEST OF REALITY to enable men and women to carry on with a certain amount of cheerfulness and courage and hope, calling them to “the task of happiness,’ or some such thing ; or whether we are going to ask them to face life in right relations with God the Father revealed in Christ crucified. With all due respect and admiration for these writers, we cannot get a gospel for the redemption of the world out of Stevenson’s philosophy or Kipling’s challenge to be a man. The message of God to men cannot be prostituted into ‘‘a handy book for the successful merchant,” nor into the inspiration to help a nation to win a war, nor into a panacea for life’s ills, nor into a means for supplying a world with comfortable amenities, nor indeed into any kind of re- inforcement to the spirit of man on the high road of his own ambition or his own self- chosen way of life. The Christian life is " eternal life in the midst of time, by the strength and under the eyes of God.” It is our difficult task to call people out - to do business in great waters. Only as . they are willing to follow, can we help them THE PREACHER’S TASK At to see “the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep.” It is no easy am- bassadorship. In the Covenanting times, you remember, a certain travelling merchant reported on preachers he had heard. Each had his own peculiar quality. ‘‘ One showed me the majesty of God, another the loveli- ness of Christ, and another showed me all my heart.’’ You will need to combine all three before you will get a gospel for this age or any age. This age of ours, however, has this peculiar advantage as a field of operations, that it is heartsick of unrealities and is not nearly so afraid of being hurt. For many of the old shelters have been blasted down, and countless people are out in the open, seeking, not for a covert from the stormy blast, but for a heart of peace in the midst of strife—a life which is storm- beaten and yet secure. Nevertheless, you. will be tempted to the easy way of popularity . and quick returns which has made ship- - wreck of many a promising ministry. You ° will be tempted (as the Roman Church in her mission was tempted and fell) to a way of preaching which aims at making people 48 IN QUEST OF REALITY ‘ comfortable in their souls rather than right ¢ with God, at taming the beast in man instead - of transforming him, at helping people to ‘walk by safe rules of good conduct instead © -of in the adventurous freedom of the Spirit. . To take the other way may mean for the time being smaller congregations, and a Church which is only a spiritual remnant, though signs are not even now wanting that there is a revival waiting the true message. But whatever it means, our aim in the ministry of preaching is nothing less than this, “‘ that they being rooted and grounded in love may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the height and breadth and length and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that they may be filled with all the fulness of God.”’ LECTURE II THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE IT is a mere commonplace to say that if we are to preach to men and women we must know them. If we are to be “ fishers of men,’ which was Christ’s own phrase for His apostles, we must know the nature and habits of the fish. The primary need of an effective sermon is that people must listen to it. We must get their attention. And we can only get their attention by appealing to their interests. In plain words, a sermon must be interesting. It is useless to excuse. ourselves for being dull by saying that people are not interested in a religious subject. Even if that were true, which it is not, we have got to make them interested. That is what preaching is for. I appreciate fully the suggestion that a congregation can do very much to help us in advance by a willing attention—by a strenuous effort to overcome 4 50 IN QUEST OF REALITY those persistent voices from the outer world that prevent the quiet recollection and con- centration upon God. ‘“ Happy is the man,” -says George Eliot, ‘““ who has an audience that demands his best.’’ There are con- gregations all over the country which, if only they would bring with them a spirit of ex- pectant attention, could change the whole atmosphere of their churches; they would turn many a dispirited messenger of Christ into a flaming prophet. All that is true. But that does not absolve us from the task of securing their interest. We have the people there without going out to seek them. They would not be there in days like these if there were not at least the suggestion of a hunger hid away somewhere behind the abstracted look. But we have no right to presume upon their attention. If we were going to the streets with our message, we should not prima facie look for attention. We should set about creating it or should expect to lose the audience. And we have no right to count on people listening to a sermon just because we have prepared it, or because we happen to be interested in it; THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 51 nor dare we presume upon the zeal or good- nature of a congregation so far as to give them ill-digested abstractions or imagine they will receive a message in any form in which we happen to offer it. In point of fact they will not, and by a psychological law they cannot. If they do not set about finding an interest, we must create it for them. Many sermons fail just here, because the people are not interested in the subject, and the reason why they are not interested in the subject is often, if the truth were told, because the preacher is not interested in them. A very true description of the differ-_ ence between an effective minister and an ineffective one is that the former is more interested in people than in ideas, while the latter is more interested in ideas than in people. We have got to find interests, then, in the minds of the people before us. We have got to find them also in real things—things that matter. And the interest must be a religious interest. It is no use knocking at doors to get a hearing for God, where He cannot well enter in. We can get people interested ‘on 52 IN QUEST OF REALITY the wrong side of their nature by stirring up feelings and enthusiasms it is useless to awaken. We must be on the alert to find a spot where-a man’s nature is “alive unto God.”” It may be some sore point, or some spiritually sensitive point, or, on the other hand, some point of aspiration where their nature is just waiting to break into a flame of faith. For let us remember the Gospel is good news to be received with welcome, and it is good news because it speaks to a condition of human need. ‘“‘ As living water to a thirsty soul ’’—that is the kind of metaphor which describes it. It is not something to be argued about or received with blind credulity ; it is truth which meets some ultimate need of the human soul and proclaims its authority in its power to satisfy it. We cannot, there- fore, preach to men’s condition unless we can diagnose their need and so proclaim our gospel as both to unveil it and supply it. For that purpose we must know men and women. How we are to win that knowledge is part of the making of a preacher, with which I will deal later. Some of us have had THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 53 experience of life from other points of view than that of college training. That is in- valuable. We should take every opportunity we can of learning about business, about other professions than our own, of the way in which people live, how they look at things, what they are thinking, where the yoke of life galls the raw flesh. A preacher will make little of it who has not taken the trouble to know, as intimately as he can, the peculiar problems and difficulties which his people meet with in their daily callings. He will put his foot in it very badly and make many a false appeal. Half his time he will be talking in the air. Nothing can be worse than to attempt to deal with a situation we do not know. Confidence will be shattered at a blow, and an air of unreality created which will perpetuate the fatal habit of looking at a sermon from a detached point of view as if it were spoken in a vacuum, and were not intended to be taken seriously. There is the other danger, of course, which is to confine ourselves to tame abstractions which may sound very sublime, but never reach any tender or sensitive spot, or convince a hearer 54 IN QUEST OF REALITY that Christianity is for him what William James called a “ live option.’”’ Nothing can be more futile than to watch a preacher mounting his favourite hobby-horse, be it theological or evangelistic, and setting off on a course of half an hour or so. The con- gregation knows he will get going all right and finish up possibly in grand style, so it goes to sleep, either literally or intellectually, till it is over, for it has no stakes on that horse, and has watched its career so often that it has lost interest in its paces. We must get _to know people, their difficulties, their be- setting sins, and what it is that makes their temptations, else we shall be guilty of apply- _ing remedies that simply do not meet the situation because we do not know its real poignancy or have failed to realize its glamour. We tilt at wealth and fashion, for instance, but ‘‘ wealth and fashion,” says O. W. Holmes, ‘‘ are two very solemn realities, which the frivolous class. of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff about. We have got to find the breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and fortune their tremendous THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCK 55 power.” We do not beat the devil by under- rating his wares. We have to measure the need, the longing, which sends people to certain illegitimate and paltry satisfactions, and to supply it from our message in a way that shall supplant the intruders. That is both sound psychology and common sense. There is another reason why we need to, know people. We want them to come to God, but people do not come to God in general. They come through the sharp challenge, with the call of God in it, that iS meeting them in daily life, or through some decision in practical things which throws open the choice between the darkness and the light. It is not a bit of use talking to people of a God who is in the skies, or a God who is in a book, or even a God who is in their own hearts. That may be sheer unreality, though it is true, of course, that God is in their own hearts. He is there in their experience of life and its inward reactions, or He is no- where for them. We simply cannot interest people in God in other than an academic way, unless we can show them how to find 56 IN QUEST OF REALITY Him just where they are, within the frontiers of their own world as they live in it day by day. We must take it for granted that we are speaking to people who have God in their lives, at the moment, in some recog- nizable element of experience. We can be sure of this, there is a vital point where God is meeting every man at the moment, in something which he perhaps has not recognized for the Divine, and we have got to lay hold of that, somehow, and illumine it: “Till God breaks through it and makes it store To the heart that was starving in darkness before.”’ To make God a living reality is our business, and we can only achieve it in the measure in which we are able to reveal His Spirit, even now, pulsing through the stuff of life. Modern psychology has laid open an enormous field in this respect, though it, like every newborn science in the omniscience of its youth, is in some quarters attempting to step beyond its sphere and to make affirma- tions about religion which it has no business to make, because that is not its province. We shall have to meet the suggestion that THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 57 all man’s experience is explained by the un- conscious without reference to God, which is -no more the case than that a spring in the hill- side is explicable without the rain that comes from the heavens. The psychologist has no more right as psychologist to declare that his science explains the origin of experience, than the evolutionist had in Darwin’s day the right to declare that his theories explained the primal origin of the world. The true function of psychology is really one of helping people to make the right adjustment to life so that reality can make its own appeal to them. Its business is to help men into an attitude of sincerity in relation to the world through which God reveals Himself. There is no doubt of a man’s response to the Christian message which is presented to him if only he will be sincere with it. That was the reason why the one thing that Jesus asked of people was that they should be sincere—open to the light from whatever quarter it might come, and whatever demands it might bring ; that response of sincerity with the truth being the one response which it is within the power of every man to make. 58 IN QUEST OF REALITY I Nothing, however, can keep us right and preserve our perspective, or give us such intimate knowledge of men, revealing us to them, and them to themselves, as the study of Jesus in His world.of men. Men are, what they are in the presence of Jesus; and the Gospels in their sincerity have preserved in the presence of Jesus His revelation of the thoughts and intents of the heart. In the Gospels with Him we are in a real world where human nature stands out in a light which makes that world a mirror of humanity for all time. We shall see there the things that shaped His message and perpetuated it. In a real sense, every word He spoke, and everything He did, was related to some need or trouble or defect in the lives of men around Him, calling forth the revelation of the heart of God which could deal with it. And the gospel stories were primarily recorded and kept alive because of the existence of these same needs and defects in the world of the early Church which wrote these stories down. What, then, are the elements which He THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 59 found in human life and which are still, to-day, the objective of our message and the living points of our appeal ? athirsteof: all. perhaps, there is fear; and, allied to it, the fungus growth of care ; both - of which have their being in a world which is empty of the sunlight of a clear vision of God. How much these were in Christ’s mind as an objective of His message, you can trace in the number of times He dealt with them. Again and again He attacked both fear and care. Some of the most character- istic words of His gospel are ‘‘ Fear not,” “Do not worry.’’ As He looked into men’s hearts, He saw there a haunted world. Men were afraid of all kinds of things—the future and the past, the trouble that might come to-morrow, and the evil fruits of yesterday. They were afraid of one another, afraid of themselves. “If there were only one man in the world,’ said Goethe, ‘“‘ he would be a terror to himself.” They were afraid of the Fates, even of God Himself as they knew Him. They were afraid of those who were their masters, of those also who were their slaves. They were afraid of changes, of 60 IN QUEST OF REALITY civil disturbance, of revolutions in religion, of any kind of change in the old order of things. They were afraid of death and the afterward, and of all the nameless and in- explicable and unpreventable suffering of life. To Jesus, fear and care had the same root. It was a wrong relation to God and therefore to life: the evil could only be put right by getting down to its roots and dealing with it there. It was sheer atheism, how- ever pure or worthy might be the motive behind it; a baptized unbelief, if you like, sanctified by a lovingly anxious mind and a high seriousness of purpose, but still unbelief. And you find the same fear haunting the world of to-day. How deeply the poison of it is infecting our social life in every direction we all know, breeding suspicion in all sorts of ways, creating strife between man and man, class and class, nation and nation. No social solution for the ills of our common life is going to be of any avail that does not eradi- cate fear, by removing some of its prevent- able and external causes. You find this fear also in the individual conscience which still “doth make cowards of us all.’’ You find THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 61 it in relation to God and the religious out- look. What a bankruptcy of any true vision of God is revealed by our familiar supersti- tions; the pathetic dependence, for instance, on mascots, which though apparently treated as a joke, really mask for many people— some of them professedly Christian—a super- stitious outlook upon life. What a chance for a message about Providence and God’s ways with men and a truly religious attitude to life, this provides for a preacher! It may seem a small thing that a man may dislike sitting down one of thirteen at table, but you have got a joint in his armour there, through which you can reach his mind with a new view of the universe and a new vision of God, and release him from a whole battalion of fears, of which he may have been uncon- scious, into a new freedom. That is only one illustration. But in various ways fear is operating, demanding security of material kinds—the security of money or of armaments, or of external authorities and ecclesiastically guaranteed truth—in all of which, of course, there is no real security but only, as Christ often pointed out, another breeding-ground 62 IN QUEST OF REALITY for further fear. When we preach our gospel, we have to take account of fear. Another element in man’s nature is pride, which also takes many forms and makes the heart very sensitive at certain points. There is the pride that shows itself in social ostracism of others who are down, or of those who are supposed to be _ inferior. There is the pride that manifests itself in the easily offended spirit, and the subtle pride which demands a religion of good works. Pride sometimes issues also in a remorse that looks very Christian and may be really very un-Christian: the root of it is the refusal to accept oneself and the situation one has created, and the low esti- mate of our character which moral failure has brought, and demands instead a rein- statement to self-respect on the terms of some kind of self-justification and not of the forgiving light of truth and love. A great deal of pride, of course, is due to fear—the secret fear that we are not as good as we ought to be, or are not so sure of ourselves as we think we are, and therefore we com- pensate for this sense of inferiority by THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 63 censoriousness or depreciation of others, or even by determined good works. It is easy to see what an opening for the gospel one can find at the sensitive point of pride, as it constantly offers itself to our attack. Class distinctions and social barriers, these » also Christ saw to be wrong with His world. Men had a wrong outlook to one another as individuals, as classes, as nations. The air was thick with prejudices. The great cleavage between the Jew and the Gentile illustrates some of them. A false patriotism created one barrier. The Jew had not learned the lesson taught by the great prophets and by that unknown genius who wrote the story of Jonah, that the place of - privilege is a place of responsibility, and that the only aristocracy among nations and men is the quality of the service they are fitted to give to the world. There were barriers too between the classes, between master and slave, between the imperialist race and the subject people, between the religiously respectable and the outcast. You can see how Christ is always trying to break them down in parable after parable—the 64 IN QUEST OF REALITY Good Samaritan, the Pharisee and the Publican; the greatest story in all the world, the story of the Prodigal and the Elder Brother. These barriers were always creating sore spots which He attacked in His message, and found them often ready for the healing surgery of truth. There is no need to point out that these barriers exist to-day, standing in the way of the gospel and blinding spiritual per- ception. Yet such is the reaction of evil that they provide a point at which we can bring men face to face with God. How easily men find their way into the secret of Jesus when these barriers are down, you can see in the case of the centurion. His open- ness to the glory of Jesus is explained just by the fact that, in his case, all the barriers were down. He had somehow overcome them all—the race barrier, the ecclesiastical barrier, the barrier of superiority which attaches to people of a dominant race, the barrier between officer and_servant—they were all down. There was about the man a fine catholicity, and this openness to what- ever was good in humanity laid him open THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 65 at once to the wonder of Jesus Christ. We cannot enough appreciate how much these barriers are hiding God. As we shall dis- cover, the thing that is keeping many people out of the Kingdom of God is just something wrong somewhere in their relations with another ; it may be in the home, it may be in business, it may be as part of a race or national prejudice which they share with their fellows. In many a life it is just some grudge, some wrong attitude, some bitter memory, some twisted relationship, that is holding up a great enlightening freedom. Keep hold of this truth—the great door into the Kingdom of God swings on some pivot in the personal life of the man or woman with whom you are dealing. People do not sur- render to Christ in general or in the abstract. The decisive step is never taken in the air, or at least does not become effective until it is embodied in some concrete thing. The illuminating vision comes in the aspect of , some living situation which it reveals. Some- times we recognize the coming of the light only by the shadow which it throws. And one of the commonest of the barriers that 5 +i. ema 66 IN QUEST OF REALITY hold the door in the lives of people is just the barrier between man and man. It is part of our great business to be reconcilers in ever so many ways, and among other reconcilements, to reconcile men to God by reconciling them to one another. Yet another kind of trouble which Christ discerned and which gave the shape to much of His message was false values. The root of a good many troubles and sins is there. Take the incident of the man who came with his plea for justice in the division of some property. ‘‘ Take heed,” said Christ, “ and beware of covetousness. For a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.” The man’s values were wrong. The real trouble was the rift between him and his brother, but what was troubling him was that he was not getting enough money. He was looking at the latter as the chief thing in life, instead of brotherliness, as it was to Jesus, and this false valuation was introducing all kinds of jealousy and strife. How many quarrels would be settled out of hand if money took its rightful place—quarrels, too, which can THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 67 eventually be settled in no other way! The same is, of course, true of a dozen other things. Even in many of our churches the average man is all wrong in his standards—his standards of greatness, of success in life, of the real good and satisfaction of it. The struggle of life grows hard and bitter because our values are false in various directions. Get right down to the social problem, to the competition which turns life into a jungle for both the fit and the unfit, and it is false values that create the fever in the blood. One of the keenest and most radical of our Labour leaders was discussing with a group of ministers what kind of message the Church ought to be delivering to-day, and where lay the real sore spot ; and he turned to them and said something like this: ‘‘ Your business, gentlemen, is not with the economics or other externals of the problem. Your business is to change the standards of success.” We need only think for a moment to realize how deep that suggestion cuts. The real thing that makes life so miserably poor for some and so miserably prosperous for others, is in the standards of success which men have set 68 IN QUEST OF REALITY up for themselves; or had forced upon them, as some have, by that bitter social struggle. If we can bring men to see that money is only valuable as a means of service, that true success consists in the kind of manhood we are building up, that real joy is found along the pathway of unselfishness, that persons are worth more than property, we shall have created the atmosphere in which alone any true reconstruction of society becomes possible. To change men’s values means to change everything for them—their interests, their desires, their ambitions ; it is in very truth the gift of a new heart. And, last of all, the trouble of life is rooted in veligious unreality. There were many excellent people among the religious folk of Palestine, as we know—many excellent people among the Pharisees. We can never forget that the temper of the race from which they sprang was that which sharpened the swords of the early Maccabees. But the trouble was that religion had become hardened into formula and ritual. Men who have to fight for a religious principle embodied in some creed, or ritual, or method of worship, nearly THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 69 always tend to stereotype their religion in that external thing, forgetting the principle and making the formula everything, losing the living spirit and sanctifying the ritual act or institution. Ritual becomes every- thing —the heart, nothing; the temple, everything—the God who is everywhere, forgotten ; the altar, supreme—the love and _ the surrendered will, nothing ; virtue or sin in the act, everything—the intention or the living will behind the act, nothing. Who shall say that Pharisaism is dead? As a matter of fact, it is the second stage of a religious experience that has lost touch with its original impulse. Part of our great business to-day is to bring men face to face with the living spirit. What is religious reality ? It is that attitude to God as per- - sonal holy love which finds expression through everything. It finds and seeks expression in ritual postures and praises, only that it may the more definitely and clearly keep that attitude in the daily work and relation- ships of life. Worship is only real when there is no contradiction in any of its acts or ritual, with our real relationship to God. { } 70 IN QUEST OF REALITY Love to God is only real when it finds ex- pression in love to men, its only medium. It is of no use a man calling Christ ‘“ Lord” who does not do the thing which He com- mands. It is mere mockery to recite a creed which is not the utterance of a joyful and convincing experience. To bring reality back into religion by helping men to find | afresh, and have ever recreated within them,, the living experience; to tear off masks \ which men put on to hide from the reality of | their own condition, or the reality of a love and forgiveness which they can get on no other terms than by a Father’s mercy—that is part of our task in preaching. But here, again, we can find a foothold for our message in extraordinary ways. ‘There are people in all our churches to whom your message along this line will be hard and distasteful in the extreme. But there are others who are long- ing for a right release from some burden of religious observances which is galling them, but which they cannot give up because they are held to these observances by holy associa- tions, or because they feel they ought to find in them the joy and peace which they are THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 71 seeking there. You will bring them release if you will first help them frankly to face the fact that they find nothing in these obser- vances and then open up for them that new contact with the Father by which the old wells once more are bubbling with living water. What a field for preaching on prayer, on worship, on the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper; reinterpreted in the light of our true relation to God the Father, and restored to a living medium of His intercourse with His children, and of their intimate brother- hood with one another ! I] So far I have been speaking of what might be termed the negative elements in human nature—the things that make our problem, and create what we call sin. For all acts of sin more or less proceed from these deep roots. This brings me to say that it is no use preaching against sin in general. There is no such thing, in the abstract ; any more than there is any such thing as goodness in the abstract. The fact that people are not worrying about their sins, to use a phrase 72 IN QUEST OF REALITY that became threadbare long ago, is really very largely due to the fact that our con- ceptions of sin have been often just as un- real as our conceptions of goodness—a series of conventional acts which had little obvious relation to our attitude to God as His children. Most of the ‘sins of society,” as they are called, can only be rightly seen as sins and convincingly condemned in the light of great principles which would equally condemn things that the ordinary man never thinks of calling sin. It is along these lines we can “convince the world of sin.” But that is to anticipate what I propose to deal with later on. Let me now for a little, touch on the more positive elements in the hearts and minds of men, which are our allies in bringing men ~tgGod. Twoillusions, I believe, are shattered for many people by the experience of the last few years, or will need to be shattered by our message. One is the mechanical: idea of progress. The notion that there is such a thing as a river or stream of progress that somehow carries us along if only we will just drift and so somehow “get better and THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 73 better every day”’ or every century, is gone for ever. The other illusion is the belief in a magical Christianity. The latter, I know, dies hard, and in some quarters it is fighting desperately for its life and making a brave show of vitality; but, generally speaking, sensible men are not now repeating so much as formerly the shibboleth that ‘“ Christianity has failed,”’ a phrase that really reflects a belief in some magical Christianity. The shattering of these illusions has, with many, only produced despair— despair of any progress, or of any power in the Christian faith, or of any help in God. But, on the other hand, with many there is a growing realization that God can help us, but only in the measure of the response of our whole personality, mind and heart and will, to His adventure of seeking, saving love. And there are many who are really asking, ‘‘ What must we do to be saved ? ’’—or as a young, alert man put it to me once, “‘ How do you get going in this business?” with the assurance that whatever it meant, he was in for it with his whole self. There is an eagerness, a wistfulness, abroad 74 IN QUEST OF REALITY in the world to-day. There is, for instance, the demand for some view of life that shall give it meaning and make sense of existence. Many people are looking at the world as F. W. H. Myers looked at the Sphinx, with one question which they long to ask, “ Is the universe friendly? ”’ It will be your business — to do for them what the princess in Turganev’s story did for herself. Her lover had given her a ring with a carved Sphinx upon it, to typify the strange conflict in her which he could not understand. After some years it was sent back to him, and he found she had scratched across the figure of the Sphinx, the form of a Cross. You will have to show men how it is in the Cross that the meaning of life is found. Further, people to-day are in many cases not only longing for some purpose in life that is big enough to explain it to the satisfaction of their minds; it must also be intelligible enough and practical enough for them to lay hold of it, and so to lay hold of it that it will take up every movement of their being and express the true selfhood which is the hidden urge of every personality, We can hardly ‘ THE PREACHER’S AUDIENCE 75 over-estimate what a secret curse to many a man and woman is the sense of futility in life. You will find it in the most unlikely quarters. The want of a purpose in life is at the root of half the cases that visit the psycho-analysts. Many of the younger people, whatever they may appear to be on the surface, are seeking some task which will give them three things, as I heard it once put 7) OA definite * purpose, in’ lie;