ljll/g8/81 {) bV 42ii .87 Stalker, James, 1848-1927. The preacher and his model THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS THE YALE LECTURES ON PREACHING, 1 [f; 2^/28^, c 1 REV. JAMES STALKER, D.D, , ..: Scll'-'^^- AUTHOR OF Imago Christi," " 1 he Life of Jesus Christ," "The Life ok St. Paul," etc. Quis yacit ut quid oportet et qucmadmodtiin oportct dicatur nisi in Cuj'iis tnanti sunt nos et nostri sermones ? St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana^ iv. 15 |[fb iorh: A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON, 51 E. xoTH St., near Broadway. 1891. Copyright, 1891, BY A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON. TO THE Divinity School of Yale University, ) New Haven, Conn., April 25, 1891. ) REV. JAMES STALKER. D.D., GLASGOW, SCOTLAND. Rev. and Dear Sir: At the close of your instructive and stimulating lectures in the Lyman Beecher Course before the members of this Theological School, we desire to express to you the satisfaction with which they have been listened to, and we are glad to know that, by their publi- cation in the United States and Great Britain, the pleasure and profit which we have all derived from their delivery will be enjoyed by a voider circle. Timothy Dwight, President. George E. Day, Professor of Hebrew. Samuel Harris, Professor of Systematic Theology. George P. Fisher, Professor of Ecclesiastical History. Lewis O. Brastow, Professor of Practical Theology. George B. Stevens, Professor of ATeiv Testament Criticism and Interpretation. Frank C. Porter, Instructor in Biblical Theology. PREFACE. THESE nine Lectures on Preaching were de- livered, on the Lyman Beecher Foundation,- to the divinity students of Yale University in the spring of this year. With the kind concurrence of the Senate of Yale, five of them were redelivered, on the Merrick Foundation, to the students of Ohio Wesleyan University at Delaware, Ohio. In the Appendix an Ordination Address is re- produced, which I wrote when I had been only four or five years in the ministry, and which I have been requested to reprint. My friend, the Rev. Dr. Walker, who was present when it was deliv- ered, having published it in The Family Treasury, another friend, noticing it there, had it printed as a pamphlet at his own expense and distributed to all the ministers of the Church to which he and I be- long. It was a very characteristic act ; and I have ventured, as a memorial of it, to dedicate this vol- ume to him. I do so, however, not for this reason PREFACE. only, but also because there has been no one in this generation who has done more than he has done, by the example of his own impressive ministry and by his generous encouragement of younger minis- ters, to promote the interests of preaching in his native land. My thanks are due to the Rev. Charles Shaw, who on this as on former occasions has kindly as- sisted me in correcting the press. Glasgow, October \st, 1891. CONTENTS. LECTURE I. PAGE Introductory i LECTURE IL The Preacher as a Man of God 29 LECTURE in. The Preacher as a Patriot 59 LECTURE IV. The Preacher as a Man of the Word 91 LECTURE V. The Preacher as a False Prophet 125 LECTURE VI. The Preacher as a Man 149 LECTURE VII. The Preacher as a Christian i79 xii CO /V TENTS. LECTURE VIII. PAGE The Preacher as an Apostle 205 LECTURE IX. The Preacher as a Thinker 237 APPENDIX. An Ordination Charge , 265 LECTURE I. NTRODUCTORY LFXTURE I. INTRODUCTORY. GENTLEMEN, it would be impossible to begin this course of lectures without expressing my acknowledgments to the Theological Faculty of this University for the great honour they have done me by inviting me to occupy this position. When I look over the list of my predecessors and observe that it includes such names as Bishop Simpson, Henry Ward Beecher, Dr. John Hall, Dr. W. M. Taylor, Dr. Phillips Brooks, Dr. A. J. F. Behrends, and Dr. Dale — to mention only those with which it opens — - I cannot help feeling that it is perhaps a greater honour than I was entitled to accept ; and I can- not but wish that the preaching of the old country were to be represented on this occasion by some one of the many ministers who would have been abler than I to do it justice. It is with no sense of having attained that I am to speak to you ; for I always seem to myself to be only beginning to learn my trade ; and the furthest I ever get in the way of confidence is to believe that I shall preach well next time. However, there may be some advantages in i^ 4 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. hearing one who is not too for away from the diffi- culties with which you will soon be contending yourselves ; and the keenness with which I have felt these difficulties may have made me reflect, more than others to whom the path of excellence has been easier, on the means of overcoming them. I warmly reciprocate the sentiments which have led the Faculty to come across the Atlantic the second time for a lecturer, and the liberality of mind with which they are wont to overstep the boundaries of their own denomination and select V their lecturers from all the evangelical Churches. It is the first time I have set foot on your continent, but I have long entertained a warm admiration for the American people and a firm faith in their des- tiny ; and I welcome an opportunity which may serve, in any degree, to demonstrate the unity which underlies the variety of our evangelical communions, and to show how great are the things in which we agree in comparison with those on which we differ. The aim of this lectureship, if I have apprehended it aright, is that men who are out on the sea of practical life, feeling the force and strain, of the winds and currents of the time, and who therefore occupy, to some extent, a different point of view from either students or professors, should come and INTRODUCTORY. tell you, who are still standing on the terra fir ma of college life, but will soon also have to launch forth on the same element, how it feels out there on the deep. Well, there is a considerable difference. The professorial theory of college life is, that the faculties are being exercised and the resources col- lected with which the battles of life are subsequent- ly to be fought and its victories won. And there is, no doubt, a great deal of truth in this theory. The acquisitions of the class-room will all be found useful in future, and your only regret will be that they have not been more extensive and thorough. The gymnastic of study is suppling faculties which will be indispensable hereafter. Yet there is room amidst your studies, and without the slightest dis- paragement to them, for a message more directly from life, to hint to you, that more may be needed in the career to which you are looking forward than a college can give, and that the powers on which success, in practical life depends may be somewhat different from those which avail most at your present stage. There are two very marked types of intellect to be observed amongst men, which we may call the re- ceptive and the creative. Receptive intellect has the power of taking fully in what is addressed to it by others. It separates its acquisitions and distrib- utes them among the pigeon-holes of the memory. 6 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. Out of these again it can reproduce them, as occa- sion requires, and even make what may be called permutations and combinations among its materials with skill and facility. The creative intellect, on the contrary, is sometimes anything but apt to re- ceive that which people attempt to put into it. Instead of being an open, roomy vessel for holding things, it may be awkwardly shaped, and sometimes difficult to open at all. Nor do things pour out of it in a stream, as water does from a pitcher ; they rather flash out of it, like sparks from the anvil. Instead of possessing its own knowledge, it is possessed by it ; it burns as it emits it, and its fire is contagious. The former is the serviceable intellect at college, but it is the latter which makes the preacher. There may, indeed, here and there, be miraculous profes- sors who attach more importance, and give higher marks, to the indications of the creative intellect than to the achievements of the receptive intellect. But few can resist the appeal made by the clear, correct and copious reproduction of what they have themselves supplied. Indeed, they would not, as a rule, be justified in doing so ; for the first indica- tions of originality are often crude and irritating, and they may come to nothing. The creative intel- lect is frequently slow in maturing ; it is like those seeds which take more than one season to blossom. INTRODUCTORY. But at a flower show it would not be fair to with- hold the prize from the flower which has blossomed already, and reserve it for one which may possibly do so next year. Of my fellow-students in the class to which I belonged at college, the two who have since been most successful did not then seem destined for first places. They were known to be able men, but they were not excessively laborious, and they kept them- selves irritatingly detached from the interests of the college. But the one has since unfolded a remark- able originality, which was, no doubt, even then organizing itself in the inner depths ; and the other, as soon as he entered the pulpit, turned out to have the power of casting a spell over the minds of men. Both had a sj^ark of nature's fire ; and this is the possession which outshines all others when college is over and practical life begun.* ' " A set o' dull, conceited hashes Confuse their brains in colleg'' classes, They gang in stirks, and come out asses, Plain truth to speak, An' syne they hope to speel Parna>sus By dint o' Greek. " Gi'e me a'e spark -o;« men. " Be more concerned about your ability than about your opportunity, and about your walk with God than either. " Your sphere is where you are riiost needed. " There is no place without its difficulties : by removing you may change them, it may be you will increase them ; but you cannot escape them." — Prediger. 220 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. day meeting at which a lengthy address is given. For these four discourses subjects have to be found ; materials for exposition and illustration have to be collected ; the mind has first to make each subject its own and then to shape it into a form suitable for popular effect. A sermon may sometimes, indeed, come in a flash, and perhaps there is something of sudden discovery in the very best work ; but even then time is required to work out the thought and enrich it with subsidiary thinking ; and there are many discourses which are of no value without ex- tensive investigation and the patient working-up of the quarried materials. Then follows the writing. This will take at least six or eight hours for a dis- course, and may easily take much more. Many ministers do not write more than one discourse a week fully out, and probably they are wise ; but many write two. Here, then, there is obviously ample work for a long forenoon on five days of the week. I have always had to add the afternoon of Friday and Saturday, and often the evening as well. Then comes the hard and exciting work of Sunday. It is a religious duty to rest on Monday, as we do not get the bodily rest of the Sabbath.* * " A sermon which costs little is worth as much as it has cost. Yet measure not the value of the sermon by the length and hardness of your labour." — Dupanloup. THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 221 There is the work of visitation. The sick and the bed-ridden must be visited ; and it is of enor- mous profit to visit the whole congregation from house to house. As Dr. Chahners said, the direct- est way to a man's heart is generally through the door of his home. Acquaintance with the actual circumstances of the families of the congregation gives wonderful reality and point to the prelections of Sunday. Our sermons must rise out of the con- gregation if they are ever to reach down to it again. Here, it is evident, there is abundant work for the afternoons which study leaves free. Many minis- ters have to add one or two evenings, the evening being the best time to find their people at home. There is a third mass of work of an exceedingly miscellaneous character which absorbs much time and strength. It includes such duties as perform- ing the ceremonies at baptisms, marriages and fu- nerals ; organizing the work of the congregation; attending church courts and sitting on committees; serving on school boards and the boards of benevo- lent societies ; preaching from home and addressing the meetings of neighbour ministers ; writing offi- cial letters ; raising money ; receiving visitors ; writing for the press. It would be easy for minis- ters in positions of any prominence to spend their whole time in duties of this description, none of 222 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. which might appear useless ; so great is the multi- tude of the claims which pour in from every side. I have said nothing of the time required for keep- ing abreast of the literature of the day or for culti- vating an intellectual specialty. It is extraordinary what some of the busiest men achieve in this re- spect ; but it is only managed by an economy and even penury of time for which a kind of genius is requisite. Of course there are seasons of the year when the pressure of public engagements is not so great ; and ministers are allowed longer holidays than other professional men. A couple of hours a day given from a holiday to great reading may shoot threads of fresh colour through the whole web of a season's work. Nor have I said anything of the time necessary for thinking over the devotional portion of the service of the sanctuary, though in our churches, where free prayer prevails, this de- serves as careful attention as the sermon. The glimpse which I have given you into the de- tails of a minister's week will help you to realise that the life which lies before you is a labourious one. Of course the labour may be shirked. Min- isters have their time in their own hands ; they have no office hours ; and, I suppose, a minister's life may be more ignobly idle than any other pro- fessional man's. That is, if he has no conscience. THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 223 How far a man who is conscientious and works hard may be justified in devoting himself to one branch of ministerial work for which he has special aptitudes or predilections, it is difficult to judge. Perhaps the Protestant Church has failed in making use of special gifts. Some eminent preachers, for example, neglect pastoral visitation ;* and there are, I suppose, many ministers who keep out of more general public work, because they have no taste for it. There may be some gain in this ; but there is also loss. When a preacher does not visit, he is apt to become an orator, who dazzles but does not feed the flock. When a minister keeps himself apart from public interests, the Church to which he be- longs is likely to be weak at that point. The most fatal neglect is that of study ; and per- haps it is the commonest. The part of our work which needs most moral resolution is undoubtedly the sermon— to get it begun, studied, written and finished. It requires the discipline of years in even * The first Sunday I was in America, I worshipped in the churches of Rev. Dr. W. M. Taylor and Rev. Dr. Jolin Hall, who are, I suppose, the two most eminent ministers of New York ; and I was astonished to hear both of them intimate that they would visit in certain streets during the week. There are no ministers anywhere more immersed than tliese in every kind of public duty ; yet they find time for regular pastoral visi- tation. On coming home, I mentioned this fact to an equally eminent minister in my own country. " Well," said he, " when I came to the city, the elders of my congregation advised me not to visit, and I followed their advice ; but it was the worst advice I ever got." 224 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. the most conscientious to win the mastery of them- selves in this particular; and it is probably at this point that three-fourths of all ministerial failures take place. It is not the reading of the material bearing on the subject which is difficult ; indeed, this may be luxuriously prolonged, till it is too late to think and write the sermon out. The hard and sour toil lies in facing the sweat of thought and the irksomeness of writing ; although, when the diffi- culty is overcome, the happiness and triumph of our caTling lie here also. Of course this difficulty is greatest in the small sphere. Here the temptation is, to be overcome by the monotony of the situation, to allow the powers to stagnate, to feel that anything will do, and put the people off with that which has cost no exertion. " I know," says one who wields a trenchant pen,* " how plausible the excuses are, and I know what relaxation of study results in — laziness in the morn- ing, increasing excesses in the daily papers, increased interest in gardening, several more pipes a day, and so forth. Breakfast comes finally to its long-de- ferred end about ten ; then there is a consultation with the gardener, which is, of course, business, and makes the idler feel that really his active habits are returiting ; then two letters have to be answered ; * Dr. Marcus Dods. THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 225 then, just as he means to go to his study, he sees Mr. Fritterday passing, and before he has finished his colloquy over the hedge with him, it is past midday. When he does get to his study, Macniil- lan or Blackwood is lying on his table, and he feels he cannot settle till he knows what is the fate of the heroine of the current story, or his window over- looks the busy hayfield of his neighbour, and he becomes ten times more interested in that work than in his own; and so his whole forenoon is gone, and he is summoned to dinner before he has earned his salt by one decent hand's turn." This kind of temptation, however, is not confined to the man in the small and easy situation: it is the common temptation of all ministers. Only in the city it comes in another form. The man who has a large congregation and a little popularity is beset with calls from every quarter to engage in every kind of duty outside his own sphere. His doorbell never ceases ringing. Every applicant supposes his own case the most important. There is a whirl of excitement, and there is an exhilara- tion in being able in many ways to serve the public. But, if the man gives up his habits of study, he is lost. His appearances become commonplace; the public tire of him, and throw him aside as ruthlessly as they have senselessly idolized him. Robert Hall 226 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. used to say that, when the devil saw that a minister was likely to be useful in the church, his way of disposing of him was to get on his back and ride him to death with engagements. To follow the course of St. Paul's labours and sufferings on the grand scale produces an over- whelming impression of earnestness and devotion; yet it is even more by entering into the minute de- tails of his activity that we find the apostle. One who has to deal with vast masses is apt to overlook details ; and it is so even in the work of Christ. An evangelist, for example, moving from place to place and surrounded with multitudes, may know very little of individuals. The minister of a large congregation is exposed to the same temptation. Indeed, we are all too desirous of crowds' and too little occupied with the units of which they are composed. But this is the greatest of all mistakes. St. Paul, amidst the constant change of scene and the pressure of large bodies of people in which he lived, never overlooked individuals. In his speech- to the elders of Ephesus he could challenge them to bear witness that he had taught not only pub- licly but from house to house, and had warned everyone night and day with tears. While, like his Master, he was moved by the sight of a multitude THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 227 and welcomed the opportunity of making known the glad tidings to many, he was quite as ready to preach to the small company of women of whom Lydia was one at the riverside or to the soldier to whom he was chained in the Roman prison. St. Paul was never a mere evangelist. The evan- gelist's work is to deal with the initial stage of the Christian life : he has to bring men to decision ; and, when this is done, he passes on, leaving to other agencies whatever more may be required. An evangelist sometimes knows very little of what becomes of his converts after he has quitted the place. But St. Paul was as eager about this as about the first impressions. However small the company of the converted might be, he formed them into a Christian Church, and ordained elders in every city. He often left an assistant behind to carry on and consolidate the work which he had begun. When at a distance, he was always eager for news about his churches. His epistles are full of such anxie- ties ; and, indeed, his epistles themselves are the best monument of his pastoral care ; for they were written to ask after the welfare of those whom he had left behind, or to give counsel on points about which they had consulted him. They brim over with the expressions of a tender and heartfelt love. He is able to assure those to whom he is writing 228 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. that he is praying for them, and that not only in the mass but one by one. He kept their faces and names ahve in his memory by thus recalHng them at the throne of grace ; and his life must have been one long prayer about his work. Sometimes he lets the prayer which he has been offering slip through his pen ; and then we see how high was the ideal of Christian attainment which he cherished on behalf of his converts. He was not content that they had turned from their old sins and taken the first steps in the Divine life. He longed to see them becoming creditable specimens of Christianity and ornaments to the Church^com- plete men, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. It was life itself to him to hear of their progress : " Now we live if ye stand fast in the Lord." And the crown to which he looked forward as the reward of all his toils and sufferings was to be permitted at last to present the soul of every- one of them as a chaste virgin to Christ. Gentlemen, I believe that almost any preacher, on reviewing a ministry of any considerable dura- tion, would confess that his great mistake had been the neglect of individuals. If I may be permitted a personal reference : when, not long ago, I had the opportunity, as I was passing from one charge to another, of reviewing a ministry of twelve years, the THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 229 chief impression made on me, as I looked back, was that this was the point at which I had failed ; and I said to myself that henceforth I would write Individ- uals on my heart as the watchword of my ministry. We make impressions in the church ; but we do not follow them up, to see that the decision is arrived at and the work of God accomplished ; and so they are dissipated by the influences of the world ; and those who have experienced them are perhaps made worse instead of better. It is a very significant thing that is said of the pastor in our Lord's para- ble — that he sought the lost sheep " until he found it." We seek : we even seek labouriously and pain- fully : but we frequently leave off just before finding. A minister told me that, on the Saturday even- ing before his first Sunday in his first charge, the experienced minister who was to introduce him to his people next day was strolling with him in the vicinity of the village and talking about his duties, when they chanced to pass a plantation of trees. Pointing to them, the aged minister asked, " If you had to cut these trees down, how would you go about it ? would you go round the whole plantation, giving each tree a single blow, and then go round them all again, giving each a second blow " ? " Well, no," he answered, " I think I should attack one tree and cut at it till it came down ; and then go on 16 230 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. and do the same to a second and a third, and so forth." " Well," said his experienced friend, "that is the way you must do here. After you have been settled a short time, you will discover which families and individuals are most impressed by your first efforts, and you must devote yourself to these sus- ceptible souls, till you have won them thoroughly ; and then in their enthusiasm for yourself and their willingness to work for the congregation you will have the best foundation for a successful ministry." In a former lecture I spoke of the power of dis- cerning in men and women of every class and con- dition the humanity which is common to all and speaking straight to that, without reference to the superficial differences which distinguish class from class and one individual from another. But minis- terial sympathy has to embrace what is peculiar to classes and individuals as well as what is common to all. Though St. Paul, like his Master, had a powerful grasp of what is universal in humanity, yet to the Jew he made himself a Jew, that he might gain the Jew, and to them that were without law as without law, that he might gain them who were without law; he was made all things to all men, that he might gain the more. His persuasion obviously was, that God was trying, by His revelation among those who possessed the THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. L'31 Written Word, and by His providence among those who did not possess it, to lead His children by divers ways to Himself; and his own duty was to join himself to each company at the stage which it had reached and offer to become its conductor. The Jew was more advanced, and he met him where he was ; the Gentile was further behind, and he had to go back and approach him also where he stood, that he might win his confidence and be allowed to lead him on. This is the persuasion which gives a minister faith in his own work. The souls of men are God's, His providence is a discipline intended to lead them to Himself; there are none with whom His Spirit does not strive. And it is only as our work co-oper- ates with His that it is of any effect. Where God has been working, opening and softening the heart, very simple efforts, put forth at the right moment, may go a long way, and the work of God be quickly done. What situation could be more pathetic to a sen- sitive and sympathetic mind than that of a minister when he stands up in the pulpit and looks down on the congregation ? What a variety of conditions are before him ! In one pew there is a man who dur- ing the week has been fighting a losing battle with his business and sees himself on the verge of bankrupt- cy ; in the next may be a merchant into whose lap 232 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. fortune has been pouring her gifts in handfuls. Here is a mother who is thinking of her son who has just left his home and is sailing on the sea; and there a girl whose heart is rejoicing in the happy dreams of youth. On the right may be a young man who is trembling on the brink of the great temptation of his life, and on the left another who is reeking from some orgy of secret sin. There is endless variety ; yet none are uninteresting ; and probably there is no one but, if you could meet him exactly where he stands, would respond to the in- fluence which you bring. It arrests men when you are able to show such a knowledge of the human heart that they feel themselves discovered ; and it disposes a man to answer to your call if he sees that you are familiar with the circumstances in which he will have to lead the life to which you are inviting him, and that you appreciate the diffi- culties of the situation. Therefore the more a min- ister knows of the variety of actual life the better; and, if he is to do really effective work, he must know how to come down from the pulpit and put himself alongside of individuals.* * " Get others to talk : what a man says to you has more influence upon him than all you can say to him. " It is not the time of sickness so much as the time of convalescence that decides the future life. Remember this, and seize opportuniues." — Pkedigkr. THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 283 Here I might again recommend the work of visi- tation and the practice of being accessible at home to the visits of those who come with confidences to communicate; but let me rather close this lecture with a word or two on some of the more favourable opportunities which ministerial life affords for direct dealing with individuals.* One of the best opportunities of this kind is when parents come seeking baptism for their children. When you are speaking in their children's interest, men will welcome an amount of faithfulness which they would not endure at other times. You can show how much their children's welfare in time and eternity may depend on their own religious condi- tion ; you can urge the duty of family worship ; and you must have very little skill if you cannot get very close to their hearts. Especially when a man comes about the baptism of his first child, he is perhaps in the most favourable state for an earnest talk in which you can ever find him. His soul is opened ,„^^ * " Much of the Gospels is taken up with conversations between Christ and individuals. Teaching so startling and difficult as His, with such an element in it of attraction and hope, naturally drew around Him many who sought to know further what this Gospel meant. He, on His part, was as eager to meet inquirers as they were to seek Him ; and we find that He bestowed as much care and pains in expounding the nature of His kingdom to individuals as He did when He was speaking to great multi- tudes. The audience, if small, was fit. Not only so, but we find that He put Himself in the way of individuals."— NiCOLL, The Incarnate Saviour. 234 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. with tenderness and overawed with the mystery of Hfe ; he is longing with his whole heart to do his best for his child ; and, if you show him that the best he can do for it is to become connected with the great source of holy influence himself, there is no other occasion on which a good impression is more likely to be made. The other opportunity which I should like to mention is when the young come to join the Church. I well remember that, when I was a stu- dent, there was no part of a minister's duty to which I looked forward with so much fear and trembling as this ; for I had the conviction, which I still have, that it is our duty at this crisis to bring the question of personal salvation in the most direct and solemn way before every intending communi- cant, and that it is ministerial treason to let the opportunity slip. Some of you may be looking forward to this with the same feelings ; and, there- fore, I am happy to tell you that in practice it is not neajiy so difficult as it seems at a distance. The applicants themselves expect you to be faith- ful ; if you are, they will honour you for it, and, if not, they will be disappointed. If they get the op- portunity, they are far franker than you would ex- pect. No doubt it is delicate work, and one has to guard against harshness and anything inquisito- THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 235 rial ; but it yields the most blessed results. This is the harvest-time of the minister's year, when he sees that his labour is not in vain. Even one such close talk, brought about in this way or otherwise, casts a glow of reality into one's work which does not pass away for weeks ; and, if a minister is so highly honoured as to receive many of these confi- dences, he acquires a skill in laying his finger on the very pulse of his hearers' deepest life which nothing else can give. LECTURE IX. THE PREACHER AS A THINKER LECTURE IX. THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. GENTLEMEN, in the foregoing lectures I have adverted very little to the studies, in prepara- tion for the work of the mjnistry, with which you are at present occupied. Indeed, I have rather ostentatiously kept to a standpoint at some distance from the academic one, for reasons which I ex- plained in the opening lecture. But the clue which I have endeavoured faithfully to follow has brought us at last to this point also ; and I welcome the opportunity of saying something about the more intellectual aspects of our work. The subject to-day is the Preacher as a Thinker. In my last lecture I §,poke of the vast sphere of operations assigned to St. Paul and of the almost su- perhuman exertions which he made to fill it. But what did he exert himself to fill it with ? It was not merely to overtake the ground and be himself present in so many countries and cities that he was so zealous. That which drove him on was the glori- ous message of which he was the bearer, with the 240 THE PREACHER AiXD HIS MODELS. sound of which he desired to fill the world. He often combines these two ideas in his writing's — that the Gentile world had been committed to him as a trust, to care for the souls which it contained, and that the Gospel had been committed to him as a trust, to be communicated to the Gentiles. These two things were included in his apostolate — on the one hand, the care of the heathen world, and, on the other, the publication of the Gospel. Of course he had not, like the original apostles, heard the Gospel from the lips of Christ ; but he had received it directly from Christ in some other way ; and you know how vigorously he claimed that he had not received it from man and was not indebted to the other apostles for it. He fre- quently calls it his own gospel, and he maintains it to be as authentic and authoritative as that preached by any of the other apostles. How it was revealed to him we cannot tell. This is the same mystery as we encountered in studying the prophets of the Old Testament. Both prophets and "apostles speak with a knowledge of the mind and will of God which has a certainty and authority peculiar to their writings. We ought to speak, if we speak at all, with certainty and authority too ; but there is a difference between ours and theirs. I know how difficult it is to define the difference ; THE PREACHER ASA THINR'ER. 241 we cover it up with the vague word Inspiration ; but I do not see any use in hiding from ourselves that it exists. Admitting, however, that there is this mystery, yet we can see, in some respects, how the truth, when it came, dealt with St. Paul, and how his mind was exercised about it ; and in these respects he is not beyond our imitation. What I wish to emphasize in this lecture is, that Christianity did specially lay hold of him in the region of the intellect. It is meant to lay hold of all parts of the inner man — the feelings, the con- science, the will, the intellect ; and it may lay hold of certain people more fully in one part of their be- ing and of others in another according to their con- stitutional peculiarities. Some suppose — and per- haps they are not far wrong — that the first preaching of the Gospel consisted of little more than the simple story of the life and death of Jesus ; that those who heard it sympathetically began forthwith to live new lives in imitation of Christ ; and that this was the most of their Christianity. In a fine and peculiar nature like that of St. John, again, the Gospel caught hold chiefly in the region of the emo- tions ; and his Christianity was a mystical union and fellowship between the Saviour and the soul. St. Paul was not by any means deficient in the other 242 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. elements of humanity ; but he was conspicuously strong in intellect. That is to say, he was one of those natures to which it is a necessity to know the why and the wherefore of everything — of the uni- verse in which they live, of the experiences through which they pass, of the ends which they are called upon to pursue. This natural tendency was strength- ened by the training of an educated man. And therefore the Gospel came to him as a message of truth, which cleared up the mysteries of existence and presented the universe to the mind as a realm of order. St. Paul often expresses the intense intellectual satisfaction which Christianity brought him, and the joy he experienced in applying it to the solution of the problems of life. The light which Christianity cast on the universe was to him, he says, like the morning of creation, when God said. Let there be light, and there was light. Before, all was darkness and chaos, but then all became sunshine and order. He often speaks with wondering gratitude of the fact that the mystery which had been hidden from ages and from generations had been revealed to him : Eye had not seen, nor ear heard, neither had entered into the heart of man, the things which God had prepared for them that love Him, but God had revealed them unto him by His Spirit. And by this THE PREACHER ASA THINKER. 243 mystery he meant the tangle of God's providence in history, which the coming of Christ disentangled and smoothed out into a web whose pattern the mind could discern. Having himself received Christianity as an intel- lectual system, he very specially addressed himself to the intellect of others. The door of the kingdom of heaven, it has been beautifully said, can only be opened from the inside ; but to that observation this other may be added, that in a sense there are many doors, but each man can only open to others the one by which he has entered himself, Christianity had come to St. Paul as the truth about God and the world and himself. There was plenty of emo- tion besides ; but the emotion for him came after the clear intellectual conviction and sprang out of it. And he expected that others would receive Christianity in the same way. Therefore he never spared the minds of those he addressed ; he ex- pected them to think ; and he would have said that, if they would not open and exert their minds, they could not receive Christianity. I hardly know anything more puzzling than the audacity with which he cast himself on the minds of his hearers and trusted them to understand him, when he was thinking his strongest and his deepest. Imagine an epistle of his arriving in Rome or Ephe- 244 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. sus, and read out in the audience of the church for the first time. Who were the hearers? The ma- jority of them were slaves ; many had till a short time before been unconcerned about religion ; in all probability not a tithe of them could read or write. Yet what did Paul give them ? Not milk for babes ; not a compost of stories and practical remarks; but the Epistle to the Romans, with its strict logic and grand ideas, or the Epistle to the Ephesians, with its involved sentences and profound mysticism. He must have believed that they would understand what he wrote, though scholarship has considered it necessary to pile up a mountain of commentaries on these epistles. Christianity, as it went through the cities of the world in St. Paul's person, must have gone as a great intellectual awakening, which taught men to use their minds in investigating the profoundest problems of life. How deeply he was interested in the intellectual reception of the Gospel is shown by the earnestness with which he prays that his converts may excel in mental grasp of the truth. " I pray," he says, " that your love may abound yet more and more in knowl- edge and in all judgment." And again he says, " Making mention of you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revela- THE PREACHER ASA THINKER. 245 tion in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your un- derstanding being enlightened," etc. But nothing proves so clearly the value which he set on this element of Christianity as his earnest- ness that his version of the Gospel should be kept pure and entire. He called upon younger ministers, like Timothy and Titus, to guard it as a precious treasure and to transmit it to faithful men who would be able to teach others also. It filled him with the most poignant anxiety and pain when the minds of his converts were assailed with doctrines subversive of the truth which he had taught. He had to encounter assaults of this kind coming from the side of orthodoxy as well as of heterodoxy, and no small portion of his energy had to be expended in refuting them. You remember, for example, with what a heat of zeal and affection he cast him- self on the Galatians, when they had lent an ear to false teachers : " O foolish Galatians, v/ho hath be- witched you ? " "If any man preach any other gos- pel unto you than that which ye have received, let him be accursed." Gentlemen, you are going to be teachers of Chris- tianity, and this implies that you should yourselves have mastered it in thought. A certain number of people will be more or less dependent on you for 17 246 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. the view they have of Christianity; and this really means the view they have of all the most impor- tant and solemn objects of existence ; for to them all things will be comprehended in Christianity; and on you will largely depend whether this view is true or false, narrow or noble. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance to men and women of their fundamental convictions about this universe in which they live. There is current, indeed, at present a way of speaking about the intellect, as if, while all the other faculties have to do with religion, it were only an intruder ; and there is a way of speaking about definite religious truth which really implies, if any strict meaning is to be attached to it, that in religion, when the truth is not found, the opposite may answer quite as well ; and yet, strange to say, this language is usu- ally to be heard from the lips of those who make special claims to intellectuality and affect to be the special champions of truth. But the intellect is a noble faculty and has an important office in religion. It is, properly speaking, antecedent to both feeling and will; and what is put into it determines both what feeling and choice will be. People are often, indeed, swept into the Church on some current of feeling ; and the pressure on every side of the Christian society, along with the examples of su- THE PREACHER ASA THINKER. 247 perior Christians, does much to develop the reHg- ious nature ; but probably in the great crises of temptation, when a flood of passion or some great worldly opportunity is about to sweep a man away from his connection with Christ, that which keeps hold of him is the force of conviction — if the roots of his mind have gone deep down and clasped them- selves about the great verities of the faith. Our Lord Himself called the truth the foundation on which the whole structure of life is built. All that a man is and does depends, in the last resort, on what he knows and believes. It will be a calamity for your hearers, if from your preaching they are not able by degrees to put together in their mincis a conception of Christianity both true and elevating, which will supply them with the fundamental principles of their life. Besides this sacred obligation to our people, there is the obligation to the truth itself. This was felt by St. Paul profoundly. A revelation of Chris- tianity had been committed to him, and he had to present it in all its splendour and apply it to all the details of life. So the Word of God is committed to us, and we are responsible for delivering its whole message. If we take up a single text of the Bible, our merit as preachers lies in bringing out attract- ively and comprehensively the truth which it con- 248 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. tains. It would be considered still more meritori- ous to present the whole message contained in a book of the Bible; and it would be quite in accord- ance with the theological fashion of the time if a preacher were able to show that he was master of some single section of Scripture, say, the Prophets of the Old Testament or the writings of St. John. I do not know why we should hesitate about the next step, which, if we have gone so far, we are logically bound to take — the mastery of the mes- sage of the Bible as a whole. This is what we are responsible for. The Bible is the message of the mind and will of the loving and redeeming God ; and this we are bound to deliver in such a way that neither its truth nor its glory will suffer in our hands. How this is to be done, of course it requires wis- dom to decide, and there will doubtless be different ways for different men and for different times. In a former generation a president of this college* preached in the College Chapel straight through the do.ctrines of Christianity, taking them up one by one in systematic order ; and his book was long a model to preachers both in this country and Great Britain. He was preaching to an academic audi- ence, and there are probably few congregations for * The earlier President Dwight. THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 249 which such a course would be suitable now ; although I know at least one able young minister in a country village who has been pursuing this method from the commencement of his ministry. Once a month he gives a sermon of the course ; perhaps his people do not know that he is doing so; but he is giving his own mind the discipline of investigating the doctrines of Christianity in their order; and I am certain both that he himself is growing a strong man in the process and that his people, though un- consciously, are getting the benefit of it. In the Lutheran and Episcopal Churches the observance of the Christian festivals gives occasion for regularly bringing the circle of the grand Christian facts be- fore the minds of the people. We have not this guidance; but a faithful minister is bound to make sure that he is preaching with sufficient frequency on the leading Christian facts and doctrines, and that he is not omitting any essential element of Christianity.* Not unfrequently ministers are exhorted to cul- tivate extreme simplicity in their preaching. Every- thing ought, we are told, to be brought down to the comprehension of the most ignorant hearer, * " Great subjects insure solid thinking. Solid thinking prompts a sen- sible style, an athletic style, on some themes a magnificent style, and on all themes a natural style. "-Phelps, My Note-book. 250 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. and even of children. Far be it from me to depre- ciate the place of the simplest in the congregation ; it is one of the best features of the Church of the present day that it cares for tlie lambs. I dealt with this subject, not unsympathetically I hope, in a former lecture. But do not ask us to be always speaking to children or to beginners. Is the Bible always simple ? Is Job simple, or Isaiah ? Is the Epistle to the Romans simple, or Galatians? This cry for simplicity is three-fourths intellectual lazi- ness ; and that Church is doomed in which there is not supplied meat for men as well as milk for babes. We owe the Gospel not only to the barbarian but also to the Greek, not only to the unwise but also to the wise.* I do not believe, however, that it is only in cult- ured congregations that this element of preaching is required. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that you will drive the common man away from the Church by strong intellectual preaching. You will do so no doubt if you preach over his * " We owe it to the Cliurch, we owe it to the time in which God has called us to labour, we owe it lo the restless and perplexed but often honest minds in whose presence we carry on our ministry, to be not merely a hard-wi rking but a learned clergy. To those great questions which both stir and disquiet men, we are bound to bring that knowledge which will give us a claim to be listened to. ' Know as much as you can ; ' that nught to be the rule to which an educated clergyman should hold himself forever tied. A clergyman ought to be a stitdent, a reader and a thinker, to the very end." — Dean Church. THE PREACHER ASA THINKER. 251 head,* and use a language which he does not un- derstand. You must find him where he is, and either speak to him in his own language or teacii him yours by slow degrees. But, if you accommo- date yourself to him so far, you will find him alert and willing to accompany you ; you will find that he has not only sturdy limbs for climbing, but even wings for soaring to the heights of truth. A greater difficulty lies in the preacher himself. At the beginning of his ministry he may be encum- bered with doubts and far from clear in his faith. This is a real obstacle, and the first years of minis- terial life may be a time of great perplexity and pain. I suspect our congregations have often a good deal to suffer while we are endeavouring to preach ourselves clear. It is vicarious suffering ; for they do not know what is perplexing us. They have to stand by and look on while their minister is fighting his doubts. But, if he is a true man, it is worth their while to wait. If these are the pangs of intellectual birth, and the truth is merely divest- ing itself of a traditional form in order to invest it- self in a form which is his own, he will preach with far greater power when the process is complete. * Richard Baxter confesses that he deliberately preached over the heads of his people once a year, for the purpose of keepinij them humble and showinn; them what their minister could do every Sunday of the year, if he chose ! /, 252 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. and he is able to speak with the strength of per- sonal conviction. But, gentlemen, it is important for you to see that your opening ministry is not enveloped in mist simply because you have never made a real study of Christianity. This, I am afraid, is the common- est source of a vague theology. In a former lect- ure I have recommended a wide acquaintance with the masterpieces of literature ; but some able men at college substitute this for the studies of their profession ; and this is a fatal mistake. Literature ought to be a supplement to these, not a substitute for them. I have watched the subsequent career of more than one student who had pursued this course ; and I must say it is not encouraging. Their supply of ideas soon runs out ; their tone be- comes secular ; and the people turn away from them dissatisfied. A student ought, while at college, to make him- self master of at least one or two of the great books of the Christian centuries in which Christianity is exhibited as a whole by a master mind. If I may be allowed to mention my own experience, it hap- pened to me, more by chance, perhaps, than wise choice, to master, when I was a student, three such books. One was Owen's work on TJie Holy Spirit., j another Weiss' New Testament Theology^ and the THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 25 3 third Conybeare and Howson's Life and Epistles of St. Paul. Each of these may be said, in its own wa)', to exhibit Christianity entire, and I learned them almost by heart, as one does a text-book. I was not then thinking much of subsequent benefit ; but I can say, that each of them has ever since been a quarry out of which I have dug, and probably I have hardly ever preached a sermon which has not exhibited traces of their influence. There is another valuable result which will fol- low from the early mastery of books of this kind. You will be laying the foundation of the habit of what may be called Great Reading, by which I mean the systematic study of great theological works in addition to the special reading for the work of each Sunday. Week by week a conscientious minister has to do an immense amount of miscellaneous reading in commentaries, dictionaries, etc., in con- nection with the discourses in hand ; but, in addi- tion to this, he should be enriching the subsoil of his mind by larger efforts in wider fields. It is far from easy to carry this on in a busy pastorate ; and it is almost impossible unless the foundation has been laid at collefje.* * " A sentence of Pascal would sometimes shoot more light and life through a sermon than all the commentators upon the text since th» days of Noah." — Principal Rainy. 254 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. One more hint I should like to give : it is a remi- niscence from a casual lecture which I listened to when a student and profited b^'. Besides attending to theological studies in general, one ought to have a specialty. The minister, and even the student before he leaves college, should be spoken of as the mao who knows this or that. Perhaps the best specialty to choose is some subject which is just coming into notice, such as, at present. Compara- tive Religion, or Christian Ethics, or, best of all, Biblical Theology, Such a specialty, early taken up, is like a well dug on one's property, which year by year becomes deeper. All the little streams and rivulets of reading and experience find their way into it ; and almost unawares the happy possessor comes to have within himself a fountain which makes it impossible that his mind should ever run dry. Of course I cannot attempt to give here even the slightest sketch of the doctrinal system of St. Paul ; but there are two characteristics of it which I should like to mention in closing, as they are essen- tial to the right management of the element of preaching with which I have occupied you to-day. The thinking of St. Paul went hand in hand with his experience. His Christianity began in a great experience, in which he discovered the secret of life THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 255 and found peace with God. He set his mind to re- flect upon this, so as to comprehend how it came about and what it involved ; and the theology of the first part of his apostolate was nothing but the result of these broodings under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. These in their turn, however, brought him still nearer to God and closer to Christ ; and so he obtained new and deeper experiences, of which the doctrines of his more advanced life are again the exposition. Thus his thinking was both ex- perimental and progressive. If his Epistles be ar- ranged in chronological order, it will easily be seen that there is a splendid growth in his theology from first to last. He never, indeed, gave up the doctrines of his earlier life ; there is no inconsist- ency between one part of his writings and another; but neither his experience nor his thinking ever stood still ; he made his first doctrines the founda- tions on which he reared a structure which was rising higher and higher to the very close of his life. St. Paul had the heartiest scorn for intellectual- ism in religion divorced from experience ; and it cannot be denied that it is this divorce which has brought contempt on the intellectual element in preaching. When doctrine is preached as mere dogma, imposed as a form on the mind of the preacher from without, no wonder it is dry and 25 G THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. barren. It is \\'hen the preacher's own experience is growing, and he is coming up with the doctrines of Christianity one by one as the natural expression for what he knows in his deepest consciousness to be true, that he utters the truth with power. Never, perhaps, is a sermon so living as when the preacher has found out the truth during the week as a novelty to himself, and comes forth on Sunday to deliver it with the joy of discovery. The other feature to which I wish to draw atten- tion is the perfect balance in St. Paul of the doc- trinal and the ethical. If reproach has been cast on the intellectual element in preaching by its want of connection with experience, this has been done no less by its want of connection with conduct. But St. Paul is not open to this reproach. This is made clear by the very external form of his writ- ings. An Epistle of St. Paul is divided into two parts, the first containing doctrines and the second practical rules for the conduct of life; and not un- frequently the two parts are of about equal length. JBut the connection is far closer than this. In St. Paul's mind all the great doctrines of the Gospel were living fountains of motives for well-doing; and even the smallest and commonest duties of every-day life were magnified and made sacred by" being connected with the facts of salvation. Take THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 25 7 a single instance. There is no plainer duty of every-day life than telling the truth. Well, how does St. Paul treat it ? " Lie not one to another," he says, " seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds." Thus truthfulness flows out of regen- eration. Treating of the same subject again, he says, " Lie not one to another, for ye are members one of another," deriving the duty from the union of believers to one another through their common union with Christ.* Thus does St. Paul every- where show great principles in small duties and stamp the commonest actions of life with the image and the superscription of Christ. This balance between the doctrinal and the moral is difficult to maintain. Seldom has the mind of the * Rev. Dr. Henderson, of Crieff, told me a story which illustrates in an amusing yet significant way the change which pa sed over the relig ous mind of Scotland in the beginning of the present century. His father, the late Rev. Dr. Henderson, of Glasgow, when newly licensed, was preaching, on the Saturday before a communion, for an extremely Mod- erate minister of the dignifi-d and pompous school. " I do not know, Mr. Hend rson," said the latter, " what is the difference between you evan- gelicals and us ; but I suppose it is that you preach doctrines, while we preach duties." " I do not know about that," said Mr. Henderson ; "we preach duties too." '' Well," tad the old man, " for example, my action sermon to-morrow is to be on lying ; and my divisions are — first, the nature of lying ; secondly, the sin of lying ; and thirdly, the consequences of lying : now what could you add to that ?." " Well," replied Mr. Henderson, " I would add two things — first, ' Lie not one to another, seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds,' and secondly, ' Put- ting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour ; for we are members one of another.' " " Mr. Henderson, these suggestions are admirable : I shall add them to my discourse ! " 258 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. Church been able to preserve it for any length of^ time. It has oscillated from one kind of one-sided- ness to another, sometimes exalting doctrines and neglecting duties and at other times preaching up morality and disparaging doctrine. To which side the balance may be dipping at the present time among you I do not know ; but among us, I should say, it was from doctrines towards duties. Perhaps in the last generation we had too much, preaching of doctrine, or rather I should say, too little preaching of duty. Younger preachers are be- ginning to dwell much on a nobler conception of the Christian life, and there is a strong demand for practical preaching. Undoubtedly there is room for a healthy development in this direction. Yet this is a transition about which our country has good cause to be jealous ; because it passed through a terrible experience of the effects of preaching morality without doctrine. I question if in the whole history of the pulpit there is a document more worthy of the attention of preach- ers than the address which Dr. Chalmers sent to the people of his first charge at Kilmeny, when he was leaving it for Glasgow. It is well known that for seven years after his settlement in this rural parish he was ignorant of the Gospel and preached only the platitudes of the Moderate THE PREACHER ASA THINKER. 259 creed ; but, the grace of God having visited his heart, he lived for other five years among his peo- ple as a true ambassador of Christ, beseeching them in Christ's name to be reconciled to God. This is his summing up of the results of the two periods : — " And here I cannot but record the effect of an actual though undesigned experiment, which I pros- ecuted for upwards of twelve years among you. For the greater part of that time I could expatiate on the meanness of dishonesty, on the villany of false- hood, on the despicable arts of calumny ; in a word, upon all those deformities of character which awaken the natural indignation of the human heart against the pests and the disturbers of human society. Now, could I, upon the strength of these warm expostu- lations, have got the thief to give up his stealing, and the evil speaker his censoriousness, and the liar his deviations from truth, I should have felt all the repose of one who had gotten his ultimate object. It never occurred to me that all this might have been done, and yet the soul of every hearer have remained in full alienation from God ; and that, even could I have established in the bosom of one who stole such a principle of abhorrence at the meanness of dis- honesty that he was prevailed upon to steal no more, he might still have retained a heart as completely 260 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. unturned to God and as totally unpossessed by a principle of love to Him as before. In a word, though I might have made him a more upright and honourable man, I might have left him as destitute of the essence of religious principle as ever. But the interesting fact is, that during the whole of that period in which I made no attempt against the natural enmity of the mind to God ; while I was inattentive to the way in which this enmity is dis- solved, even by the free offer on the one hand, and the believing acceptance on the other, of the Gospel salvation ; while Christ, through whose blood the sinner, who by nature stands afar off, is brought near to the heavenly Lawgiver, whom he has offended, was scarcely ever spoken of, or spoken of in such a way as stripped Him of all the importance of His character and His offices; even at this time I cer- tainly did press the reformations of honour and truth and integrity among my people ; but I never once heard of any such reformations having been effected amongst them. If there was anything at all brought about in this way, it was more than ever I got any account of. I am not sensible that all the vehe- mence with which I urged the virtues and the pro- prieties of social life had the weight of a feather on the moral habitsof my parishioners. And it was not till I got impressed by the utter alienation of the THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 261 heart in all its desires and affections from God ; it was not till reconciliation to Him became the dis- tinct and the prominent object of my ministerial exertions ; it was not till I took the Scriptural way of laying the method of reconciliation before them; it was not till the free offer of forgiveness through the blood of Christ was urged upon their acceptance, and the Holy Spirit, given through the channel of Christ's mediatorship to all who ask Him, was set before them as the unceasing object of their depend- ence and their prayers ; in one word, it was not till the contemplations of my people v/ere turned to these great and essential elements in the business of a soul providing for its interest with God and the concerns of its eternity, that I ever heard of any of those subordinate reformations which I aforetime made the earnest and the zealous, but, I am afraid, at the same time the ultimate object of my earlier ministrations. Ye servants, whose scrupulous fidel- ity has now attracted the notice, and drawn forth in my hearing a delightful testimony from your masters, what mischief you would have done, had your zeal for doctrines and sacraments been accompanied by the sloth and the remissness, and what, in the pre- vailing tone of moral relaxation, is counted the allowable purloining of your earlier days. But a sense of your Heavenly Master's eye has brought IS 262 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. another influence to bear upon you ; and, while you are thus striving to adorn the doctrine of God your Saviour in all things, you may, poor as you are, re- claim the great ones of the land to the acknowledg- ment of the faith. You have at least taught me that to preach Christ is the only effective way of preaching morality in all its branches ; and out of your humble cottages have I gathered a lesson, which I pray God I may be enabled to carry with all its simplicity into a wider theatre, and to bring with all the power of its subduing efficacy upon the voices of a more crowded population." There is nothing which I should more like to leave ringing in your ears than this remarkable statement of my great fellow-countryman. But I cannot close and bid you farewell without express- ing the happiness which I have derived from these weeks spent in your society and thanking you for the extremely encouraging attendance with which you have honoured me from first to last. To the authorities of the college, as well as to many citi- zens of this town, I have to express my indebtedness for an amount of kindness and courtesy which I can never forget, and which will always make my visit to this country one of the pleasantest of memories. THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 263 Let US, in parting, commend each other to the rrace of God : O God our Father, the infinite Power, the perfect Wisdom and the immortal Love, in Thy hands are all our ways, and the success of our purposes proceeds from Thee alone. Follow with Thy blessing our intercourse together and the work which we have now completed. Bless this University — its president, its professors and students. May knowledge grow in it from more to more, and, along with knowl- edge, reverence and love. May those especially who are preparing for the minis- try of Thy Son be filled with Thy Spirit, and in due time may they prove faithful stewards of the mysteries of God. Bless them in their studies, in their fellowship with one another, and in their efforts to advance Thy kingdom. We commend each other affectionately to Thee ; be our God and our Guide in life and in death, in time and in eternity. For Christ's sake. Amen. APPENDIX. AN ORDINATION CHARGE APPENDIX. AN ORDINATION CHARGE.* 1 SHOULD like to connect what I have to say with a text of Scripture, which you may remem- ber as a motto for tliis occasion. Take, then, that pastoral exhortation to a young minister in i Tim. iv. i6: "Take heed unto thyself, and to the doctrine ; continue in them ; for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself and them that hear thee." There are three subjects recommended in this text to one in your position — Jirsf, yourself ', second, your doctrine ; tJiird, those that hear you. I. Take heed unto thyself. — Perhaps there is no profession which so thoroughly as ours tests and reveals what is in a man — the stature of his man- hood, the mass and quality of his character, the poverty or richness of his mind, the coldness or warmth of his spirituality. These all come out in our work, and become known to our congregation and the community in which we labour. * Delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. William Agnew, Gallatown, Kirkcaldy, 1879. 268 APPENDIX. When a man comes into a neighbourhood, as you are doing now, he is to a large extent an unknown quantity ; and it is very touching to observe the exaggeration with which we are generally looked on at first, people attributing to us a sort of indefi- nite largeness. But it is marvellous how soon the measure of a man is taken, how he finds his level in the community, and people know whether he is a large or a petty man, whether he is a thinker or not, whether he is a deeply religious man or not. The glamour of romance passes off, and everything is seen in the light of common day. The sooner this takes place the better. A true man docs not need to fear it, lie is what he is, and nothing else. He cannot by taking thought add one cubit to his stature. Any exaggeration of his image in the minds of others does not in reality make him one inch bigger than he is. It seems to me to lie at the very root of a right ministerial life to be possessed with this idea — to get quit of everything like pretence and untruthful- ness, to wish for no success to which one is not en- titled, and to look upon elevation into any position for which one is unfit as a pure calamity. The man's self — the very thing he is, standing with his bare feet on the bare earth — this is the great concern. This is the self to which you are to AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 2G9 take heed — what you really are, what you are grow- ing to, what you may yet become. All our work is determined by this — the spirit and power of our preaching,- the quality of the in- fluence we exert, and the tenor of our walk and conversation. We can no more rise above our- selves than water can rise above its own level. We may, indeed, often fail to do ourselves justice, and sometimes may do ourselves more than justice. But that is only for a moment i the total impression made by ourselves is an unmistakable thing. What is in us must come out, and nothing else. All we say and do is merely the expression of what we are. Evidently, therefore, there can be nothing so im- portant as carefully to watch over our inner life, and see that it be large, sweet and spiritual, and that it be growing. Yet the temptations to neglect and overlook this and turn our attention in other directions are ter- ribly strong. The ministerial life is a very outside life ; it is lived in the glare of publicity ; it is always pouring out. We are continually preaching, ad- dressing meetings, giving private counsel, attend- ing public gatherings, going from home, frequenting church courts, receiving visits, and occupied with details of every kind. We live in a time when all men are busy, and ministers are the busiest of men. 270 APPENDIX. From Monday morning till Sunday night the bustle goes on continually. Our life is in danger of becoming all outside. We are called upon to express ourselves before con- viction has time to ripen. Our spirits get too hot and unsettled to allow the dew to fall on them. We are compelled to speak what is merely the rec- ollection of conviction which we had some time ago, and to use past feelings over again. Many a day you will feel this; you will long with your whole heart to escape away somewhere into ob- scurity, and be able to keep your mouth closed for weeks. .You will know the meaning of that great text for ministers, " The talk of the lips tendeth only to penury," — that is, it shallows the spirit within. This is what we have to fight against. The peo- ple we live among and the hundred details of our calling will steal away our inner life altogether, if they can. And then, what is our outer life worth? It is worth nothing. If the inner life get thin and shallow, the outer life must become a perfunctory discharge of duties. Our preaching will be empty, and our conversation and intercourse unspiritual, unenriching and flavourless. Wc may please our people for a time by doing all they desire and being at everybody's call ; but they will turn round on us in disappointment and anger in the day when, A A' ORDINATION CHARGE. 271 by living merely the outer life, we have become empty, shallow and unprofitable. Take heed to thyself! If we grow strong and large inwardly, our people will reap the fruit of it indue time: our preaching will have sap and power and unction; and our intercourse will have about itihe breath of another world. vWe must ^ViA time for reading, study, meditation and prayer. We should at least insist on having a large forenoon, up, say, to two o'clock every day, clear of interruptions. These hours of quietness are our real life! ' It is these that make the minis- terial life a grand life. When we are shut in alone, and, the spirit having been silenced and collected by prayer, the mind gets slowly down into the heart of a text, like a bee in a flower, it is like heaven upon earth; it is as if the soul were bathing itself in morning dews ; the dust and fret are washed off, and the noises recede into the distance ; peace comes ; we move aloft in another world — the world of ideas arid realities ; the mind mounts joyfully from one height to another ; it sees the common world far beneath, yet clearly, in its true ineaning and size and relations to other worlds. And then one comes down on Sabbath, to speak to the peo- ple, calm, strong and clear, like Moses from the mount, and with a true Divine message. 27-2 APPRiYDlX. In so doini^, my dear brother, thou shalt save thyself. Lose your inner life, and you lose yourself, sure enough ; for that is yourself. You will often have to tell your people that salvation is not the one act of conversion, nor the one act of passing through the gate of heaven at last ; but the renewal, the sanctification, the growth, into large and sym- metrical stature, of the whole character. Tell that to yourself often too. We take it for granted that you are a regenerated man, or we would not have ordained you to be a minister of the Gospel to-day. But it is possible for a man to be regenerate and to be a minister, and yet to remain very w^orldly, shallow, undeveloped and unsanctified. We who are your brethren in the ministry could tell sad his- tories in illustration of. this out of our own inner life. We could tell you how, in keeping the vine- yard of others, we have often neglected our own ; and how now, at the end of years of ministerial activity and incessant toil, we turn round and look with dismay at our shallow characters, our vmenriched minds, and our lack of spirituality and Christlikeness. O brother ! take heed to thyself — save thyself! II. Take heed to the Doctrine. — A very little ex- perience of preaching will convince you that in re- JA^ ORDINATION CHARGE. 273 lation to the truth which you have to minister week by week to your people you will have to sus- tain a double character — that of an interpreter of Scripture and that of a prophet. Let me first say something of the former. With whatever high-flown notions a man may begin his ministry, yet, if he is to stay for years in a place and keep up a fresh kind of preaching and build up a congregation, delivering such discourses as Scotch- men like to hear, he will find that he must heartily accept the role of an interpreter of Scripture, and lean on the Bible as his great support. C This is your work ; the Book is put into your hands to-day, that you may unfold its contents to your people, conveying them into their minds by all possible avenues and applying them to all parts of their daily life. It is a grand task. I cannot help congratulating you on being ordained to the ministry to-day, for this above everything, that the Bible is henceforth to be continually in your hands ; that the study of it is to be the work of your life ; that you are to be continually sinking and bathing your mind in its truths ; and that you are to have the pleasure of bringing forth what you have discovered in it to feed the minds of men. The ministerial profession is to be envied more for this than anything else. I promise 274 APPENDIX. you that, if you be true to it, this Book will become dearer to you every day ; it will enrich every part of your nature; you will become more and more con- vinced that it is the Word of God and contains the only remedy for the woes of man. But be true to it ! The Bible will be what I have said to you only if you go deep into it. If you keep to the surface, you will weary of it. There are some ministers who begin their ministry with a certain quantity of religious doctrine in their mind, and what they do all their life afterwards is to pick out texts and make them into vessels to hold so much of it. The vessels are of different shapes and sizes, but they are all filled with the same thing; and oh ! it is poor stuff, however orthodox and evangelical it may seem. To become a dearly loved friend and an endless source of intellectual and spiritual delight, the Bible must be thoroughly studied. We must not pour our ideas into it, but apply our minds to it and faithfully receive the impressions which it makes on them. One learns thus to trust the Bible as an inexhaustible resource and lean back upon it with all one's might. It is only such preaching, enriching itself out of the wealth of the Bible and getting from it freshness, variety and power, that can build up a congregation and satisfy the minds of really living Christians. AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 275 The intellectual demand on the pulpit is rapidly rising. I should like to draw your earnest attention to a revolution which is ;>ilently taking place in Scot- land, but is receiving from very few the notice which it deserves. I refer to the changes that are being made by the new system of national education. No one can have travelled much for several years past through this part of the island without his attention being attracted by the new and imposing school buildings rising in almost every parish. These are the index of a revolution ; for inside, in their man- agement and in the efficiency of the education, there has also been an immense change. I venture to say that nothing which has taken place in Scotland this century — and I am remembering both the Reform Bill and the Disruption — will be found to have been of more importance. There will be a far more ed- ucated Scotland to preach to in a short time, which will demand of the ministry a high intellectual standard. It is a just demand. Our people should go away from the church feeling that they have re- ceived new and interesting information, that their intellects have been illuminated by fresh and great ideas, and that to hear their minister regularly is a liberal education. * Nothing will meet this demand except thorough study of Scripture by minds equipped with all the 276 APPENDIX. technical helps, as well as enriched by the constant reading of the best literature, both on our own and kindred subjects. One of our hymns says that the Bible " gives a light to every age ; it gives, but bor- rows none." Nothing could be more untrue. The Bible borrows light from every age and from every department of human knowledge. Whatever espe- cially makes us acquainted with the mysterious depths of human nature is deserving of our atten- tion. The Bible and human nature call to each other like deep unto deep. Every addition to our knowledge of man will be a new key to open the secrets of the Word ; and the deeper you go in your preaching into the mysteries of the Word, the more subtle and powerful will be the springs you touch in the minds and hearts of your hearers. But preparation of this sort for the pulpit is not easy. It requires time, self-conquest and hard work. Perhaps the greatest ministerial temptation is idle- ness in study — not in going about and doing some- thing, but in finding and rightly using precious hours in one's library, avoiding reverie and light or desultory reading, and sticking hard and fast to the Sabbath work. I, for one, must confess that I have had, and still have, a terrible battle to fight for this. No men have their time so much at their own dis- posal as we. I often wish we had regular office- AA^ ORDINATION CHARGE. 2V7 hours, like business men ; but even that would not remedy the evil, for every man shut up alone in a study is not studying. Nothing can remedy it but faithfulness to duty and love of work. You will find it necessary to be hard at it from Tuesday morning to Saturdax' night. If )'ou lecture, as I trust you will — for it brings one, far more than sermonising, into contact with Scripture — you will know your subject at once, and be able to begin to read on it. The text of the other discourse should be got by the middle of the week at latest, and the more elaborate of the two finished on Friday. This makes a hard week ; but it has its reward. There are few moods more splendid than a preacher's when, after a hard week's work, during which his mind has been incessantly active on the truth of God and his spirit exalted by communion with the Divine Spirit, he appears before his congregation on Sabbath, knowing he has an honestly gotten message to lavish on them ; just as there can be no coward and craven more abject than a minister with any conscience who appears in the pulpit after an idle, dishonest week, to cheat his congregation with a diet of fragments seasoned with counterfeit fervour. But, besides being an interpreter of Scripture, a true minister fills the still higher position of a prophet. This congregation has asked you to become its 19 2V8 APPENDIX. spiritual overseer. But a minister is no minister unless he come to his sphere of labour under a far higher sanction — unless he be sent from God, with a message in his heart which he is burning to pour forth upon men. An apostle (that is, a messenger sent from God) and a prophet (that is, a man whose lips are impatient to speak the Divine message which his heart is full of) every true minister must be. I trust you have such a message, the substance of which you could at this moment, if called upon, speak out in very few words. There is something wrong if from a man's preaching his hearers do not gather by degrees a scheme of doctrine — a message which the plainest of them could give account of. What this message should be, there exists no doubt at all in the Church of which you have to-day been ordained a minister. It can be nothing else than the evangelical scheme, as it has been understood and expounded by the greatest and most godly minds in all generations of the Church and preached with fresh power in this country since the beginning of the present century. It has proved itself the power of God, to the revival of the Church and the conversion of souls, wherever it has been faithfully proclaimed ; and it is a great trust which is committed to your hands to-day to be one of its heralds and conser- vators. AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 279 Not that we in this generation are to pledge our- selves to preach nothing except what was preached last generation. That would be a poor way of follow- ing in the footsteps of men who thought so independ- ently and so faithfully fulfilled their own task. The area of topics introduced in the pulpit is widening, I think. Why should it not ? The Bible is far greater and wider than any school or any generation ; and we will fearlessly commit ourselves to it and go wherever it carries us, even though it should be far beyond the range of topics within which we are expected to confine ourselves. Your congregation will put one utterance side by side with another ; and, if you are a truly evangelical man, there will be no fear of their mistaking your standpoint. There is no kind of preaching so wearisome and unprofitable as an anxious, constrained and formal repetition of the most prominent points of evangelical doctrine. The only cure for this is to keep in close contact with both human nature and the Bible, and be absolutely faith- ful to the impressions which they make. Yet take heed that your doctrine be such as will save them that hear you. What saving doctrine is has been determined in this land by a grand experi- ment ; and it is only faithfulness to the history of Scotland, as well as to God and your people, to make it the sum and substance and the very breath 280 APPENDIX. of life for all you preaching. Our calling is emphat- ically " the ministry of reconciliation ; to wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Him- self, not imputing their trespasses unto them ; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Nc^W- then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us; we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God. For He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." This is the glorious message of the Gos- pel, which alone can meet the deep spiritual wants of men. Preach it out of a living experience. Bunyan, in his autobiography, gives an account of his own preaching, telling how, for the first two years of his ministry, he dwelt continually on the terrors of the law, because he was then quailing beneath them himself; how for the next two years he discoursed chiefly on Christ in his offices, because he was then enjoying the comfort of these doctrines ; and how, for a third couple of years, the mystery of union to Christ was the centre both of his preaching and his experience; and so on. That appears to me the very model of a true ministry — to be always preach- ing the truth one is experiencing oneself at the time, and so giving it out fresh, like a discovery AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 281 just made ; while at the same time the centre of gravity, so to speak, of one's doctrine is constantly in motion, passing from one section of the sphere of evangelical truth to another, till it has in succession passed through them all. III. Take heed to tJicm that hear you. — I alrnost envy you the new joy that will fill your heart soon, when you fairly get connected with your congrega- tion. The first love of a minister for his own flock is as original and peculiar a blossom of the heart as any other that could be named. And the bond that unites him to those whom he has been the means of converting or raising to higher levels of life is one of the tenderest in existence. You have come to a hearty people, who will be quite disposed to put a good construction on all you do. This is a busy community, that appreciates a man who works hard. If you do your work faith- fully and preach with the heart and the head, they will come to hear you. It is wonderful how lenient those who hear us are. You will wonder, I daresay, some Sabbaths, that they sit to hear you at all, or that, having heard you, they ever come back again. But, if a man is really true, he is not condemned for a single poor sermon. Honesty and thorough work and good thinking are not so easily found in the 282 APPENDIX. world that a man who generally exhibits them can be neglected. If we fail, it must surely generally be our own fault. The more we put ourselves on a level with the people the better. We stoop to conquer. It is better to feel that we belong to the congregation than that it belongs to us. I like to think of the minister as only one of the congregation set apart by the rest for a particular purpose. A congrega- tion is a number of people associated for their moral and spiritual improvement. And they say to one of their number, Look, brother, we are busy with our daily toils and confused with domestic and worldly cares ; w^e live in confusion and darkness ; but we eagerly long for peace and light to cheer and illuminate our life ; and w^e have heard there is a land where these are to be found — a land of repose and joy, full of thoughts that breathe and words that burn : but we cannot go thither ourselves ; we are too embroiled in daily cares : come, we will elect you, and set you free from our toils, and you shall go thither for us, and week by week trade with that land and bring us its treasures and its spoils. Oh, woe to him who accepts this election, and yet, failing through idleness to carry on the noble merchandise, appears week by week empty- handed or with merely counterfeit treasure in his AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 283 hands! Woe to him, too, if, going to that land, he forgets those who sent him and spends his time there in selfish enjoyment of the delights of knowl- edge ! Woe to him if he does not week by week return laden, and ever more richly laden, and say- ing, Yes, brothers, I have been to that land ; and it is a land of light and peace and nobleness: but I have never forgotten you and your needs and the dear bonds of brotherhood ; and look, I have brought back this, and this, and this : take it to gladden and purify your life ! I esteem it one of the chief rewards of our pro- fession, that it makes us respect our fellow-men. It makes us continuallythinkof even the most degraded of them as immortal souls, with magnificent unde- veloped possibilities in them — as possible sons of God, and brethren of Christ, and heirs of heaven. Some men, by their profession, are continually tempted to take low views of human nature. But we are forced to think worthily of it. A minister is no minister who does not see wonder in the child in the cradle and in the peasant in the field — rela- tions with all time behind and before, and all eter- nity above and beneath. Not but that we see the seamy side too — the depths as well as the heights. We get glimpses of the awful sin of the heart; we are made to feel the force of corrupt nature's mere 284 APPENDIX. inert resistance to good influences; we have to feel ** the pain of the slowness of the movement of gooc?- ness, as perhaps no other men do. ( Yet love and undying faith in the value of the soul and hope for all men are the mainsprings of our activity. For the end we always aim at is to save those who hear us.,' Think what that is! What a magnificent life work ! It is to fight against sin, to destroy the works of the devil, to make human souls gentle, noble and godlike, to help on the progress of the world, to sow the seed of the future, to prepare the population of heaven, to be fellow-sufferers and fellow-workers with Christ, and to glorify God. This is your work; and the only true measure of ministerial success is how many souls you save — save in every sense — in the sense of regeneration, and sanctification and redemption. (^. THE END. Date Due ^12'^^ 'p' 10 ^3 i SO "^th (JUH \1)0 ^i);JO ACUITY ■y ^e^^^f^ ^ ^p 1 '40 ^fy^h'^ s .If 9 'M I'^ ni TTiF fi ^ w^wf^lg Qye migiit ^i J^>//ife ^rZiki '