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 Goodell, Charles L. 1854- 
 
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 Heralds of a passion 
 
HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 Rev. CHARLES L. GOODELL, d.d. 
 
HERALDS 
 OF A PASSION 
 
 BY 
 
 v/ 
 
 Rev. CHARLES L. GOODELL, d.d. 
 
 SECRETARY, COMMISSION ON EVANGELISM 
 
 AND LIFE SERVICE OF THE 
 
 FEDERAL COUNCIL OF THE CHURCHES 
 
 OF CHRIST IN AMERICA 
 
 ^M^nPF/j//^ 
 
 NEW ^Ha^ YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1 92 1. 
 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
TO 
 
 MY TRUE FRIEND 
 
 JUDGE AMOS L. BEATY 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 I think it fair to my reader, my book and myself 
 to guard at the outset against any possible mis- 
 apprehension as to the form and purpose of my 
 message. Lest any one should be misled by the 
 word *' Passion" in my title and its recurrence 
 through many chapters, I hasten to say this book 
 is no plea for emotionalism or sentimentalism of 
 any sort. I am not interested in turning the steam 
 on the whistle; my concern is that there shall be 
 fire under the boiler. Nothing in this book can 
 be construed as an appeal to fear, or self-love, or 
 a spineless mysticism, or against criticism, high 
 or low. If scholars have brought virgin gold to 
 view, if criticism has cut an old truth into finer 
 facets, no one will welcome that more than I. 
 Each additional discovery makes the whole Chris- 
 tian world richer. It is a common treasure in 
 which men of all shades of opinion should rejoice. 
 
 You may be wiser than I, and that is well, not 
 because it is a treasure over which you may gloat, 
 but because it supplies you with the means to be 
 of greater service to your kind. He who knows 
 most must, therefore, do most, "for to whom much 
 is given of him also will much be required. ' ' I am 
 following after you as fast as I can. ** What I know 
 not, teach thou me," said the good St. Augustine. 
 Wesley cries, "Do not beat me down in order to 
 quicken my pace for then I can not follow you 
 
 ▼ii ^ 
 
viii FOEEWOED 
 
 at all. There is one thing greater than truth, 
 and that is love. You may die without the 
 knowledge of many truths, and yet be carried into 
 Abraham's bosom, but if you die without love, 
 what will knowledge avail? Just as much as it 
 avails the devil and his angels." 
 
 I am led to the choice of the stirring theme 
 which I present because it seems to me after mde 
 travel throughout the country and intimate asso- 
 ciations with men in the churches and out of them, 
 that the great need of the hour is a holy passion 
 for the souls of men. If the angel of the churches 
 was to bring once more a greeting and challenge to 
 the Church of the Living God, it would be a repe- 
 tition of the message to the Church at Laodicea. 
 Once it was said that 'Hhe coat-of-arms of the 
 twentieth century is an interrogation point ram- 
 pant above three bishops dormant, and its motto 
 'Query'." We are not passed far into the twen- 
 tieth century, but we have passed beyond that 
 attitude of mind. The church and the country are 
 in the throes of no great theological question — 
 the names of Darwin, of Spencer and of Huxley no 
 longer marshal the scientists and theologians to 
 battle. The effect of the great war has discounted 
 the position which was taken by many German 
 critics. Even higher criticism itself has spent 
 much of its forces; some of its contentions have 
 been established and others have been proven to be 
 of too little value longer to disturb and irritate the 
 Church. The great fundamentals of the Chris- 
 tian life were never more generally accepted inside 
 the Church than they are today, but the sad thing 
 about it all is that the world does not seem to be 
 enough interested in Christian things even to dis- 
 cuss them. Not long ago the question was pro- 
 
FOREWORD ix 
 
 pounded in literary circles, ' ' Do you find religious 
 unrest among your friends and what is the cause 
 of it?" The answer returned was, '*We know 
 nothing about religious unrest ; we are not dis- ■ 
 turbed at all, we sleep. We do not go to church 
 Sunday morning because we are in bed. We do 
 not take up religious questions because we are not 
 interested in them." So it appears that the 
 weapon which is being used against the Church and 
 religion today is not the sword or the stiletto, but 
 the sand bag. The neglect of these things which 
 we once held dear is due not to conviction but to 
 indifference. We do not make this as a sweeping 
 charge. There are happy exceptions throughout 
 the country. On the whole, no year has marked 
 as large gains in the Christian Church as the 
 present year, but it still remains true that com- 
 pared with what might be accomplished there is 
 such a dearth of zeal and such benumbing of 
 thought and activity as to sadden the heart of 
 every lover of righteousness. 
 
 This attitude of stolidity and indifference was 
 the one thing which Jesus could not stand. Next 
 to actual hypocrisy. He fulminated against it with 
 all the power of a flaming soul. He wanted men 
 to think things through and to do as they ought 
 to do. He could not brook indifference in any- 
 thing. The message to the Church at Laodicea 
 was: **Ye are neither cold nor hot. I would you 
 were either one thing or the other. I would rather 
 you would stand out openly against me than to be 
 cold and indifferent. You have plenty of money 
 and think you need nothing. You do not under- 
 stand. You are wretched and miserable and poor 
 and blind and naked." What a challenge that 
 
X FOREWORD 
 
 was to the first orthodox church in town, with a 
 tall steeple and a fine choir, a big congregation 
 and a great preacher! 
 
 I wish to bring this simple message of my 
 Master. When He ordained Peter, He asked him 
 no question in creed or church reform. There was 
 only one question, so often repeated that it burned 
 itself into Peter's soul, "Lovest thou me?" 
 Among the dilettanti, it is supposed to be bad 
 form to be interested in anything. The spirit of 
 wonder has died out. Nothing any more is grand, 
 dominant and imperative. The glory of Words- 
 worth's early morning has faded into the light of 
 common day. In some way we must get back our 
 old enthusiasm; in some way we must find once 
 more that passion which changed the face of the 
 ages and sent the Church with a pentecostal flame 
 to carry the good tidings everywhere. It is to 
 that purpose that these pages address themselves. 
 
 C. L. G. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAOK 
 
 Foreword vii 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I The Passion of Jesus 15 
 
 II The Table-Talk of Jesus 37 
 
 III Heralds of a Passion 55 
 
 IV Holy Boldness 65 
 
 V Culture — A Load or a Lift 75 
 
 VI The Passion of the Prophets .... 85 
 
 VII The Passion of the Great Evangelists . 91 
 
 VIII The Teacher's Passion 101 
 
 IX The Passion op the Church . . . . 109 
 
 X The Passion for Service 123 
 
 XI How to Nourish the Sacred Fire . . . 135 
 
Chapter I 
 THE PASSION OF JESUS 
 
HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE PASSION OF JESUS 
 
 That word "passion'* has gotten into bad com- 
 pany if, as Dr. Crothers says, *'a noun is known 
 by the company it keeps." The word itself is a 
 pure word. It simply means love on fire. A mas- 
 ter of English literature has said all high poetry 
 has its source in passion. Of course that passion 
 may take form in love, or jealousy, or hate, or any 
 other strong passion that transports the mind out 
 of and above itself. It was left for Christianity 
 to give to that word its highest meaning. The pas- 
 sions of the human heart were crowded into the 
 yearning of a life and the agony of the cross. The 
 symbol of our faith is a cross. On that cross our 
 Master died, and our chief business is to declare 
 a love that even the cross could not halt. Everyi- 
 thing great in life is a passion, and religion, if 
 alive, must be impassioned, must be threaded 
 through and through with a network of exquisite 
 nerves. I am the more anxious to impress this, 
 
 15 
 
16 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 because we are living in an age that aims to rob 
 religion of its *' inflammatory touch." There are 
 those who look upon all signs of emotion and devo- 
 tion with distress. They seek to set forth their 
 faith in mental crystals, they keep a cold bath for 
 every fervor, and when their epitaph is written, 
 sad-eyed angels will carve in the marble, ''They 
 died of too much self-control." "Light enough, 
 but no heat," was the way someone described an- 
 cient philosophy. That is a good description of 
 much of the theorizing of today. It is heat the 
 world needs quite as much as light. The path to 
 sound thinking is not always through a big brain, 
 sometimes it is through a warm heart. 
 
 "The heart is wiser than the intellect 
 And works with surer hands and swifter feet 
 Toward wise conclusions." 
 
 A big brain and a big heart ought to go to- 
 gether. Neither is complete without the other. 
 
 It is a life on fire that kindles another. The 
 fiercest enemy to be fought in our day is sheer 
 apathy. We have been talking about religious 
 imrest. As a matter of fact, there is too little 
 lof it — ^the people are asleep. What breaks the 
 heart of the enthusiast is to fire red hot shells 
 into a mud bank. 
 
 Have you ever meditated on the passion of 
 our Lord? Is there a more pathetic story in liter- 
 ature than the rejection of Jesus? He came 
 unto His own and His own received Him not. 
 
THE PASSION OF JESUS 17 
 
 He was poor and lowly. He was cast out as evil. 
 He died upon the cross — died deserted, and men 
 called Him mad. He was bom among the cattle 
 and He died among thieves. "We marvel how the 
 Jews could turn away from Him, but if the Lord 
 of Glory came among us today, would we give 
 Him any kindlier reception? He was eager; we 
 are cold. He was enthusiastic ; we are indifferent. 
 He wept over Jerusalem; we seldom weep even 
 for ourselves. The Church's thermometer has 
 dropped ; her step in many quarters is leaden and 
 her spirit dull. "We have lost the fine fervor of 
 our early rapture. There are too few with blaz- 
 ing eye and burning heart. Some way we must 
 win back that early enthusiasm. Do we not need 
 the coming of that spirit that shall convict of 
 sin and righteousness and judgment, so that our 
 hearts shall bum and our tongues kindle? Time 
 was when sin was an ugly thing; people were pos- 
 itive about moral things. There were two colors — 
 things were very black or very white. There was 
 a sharp line drawn between him who served God 
 and him who served Him not. In our disposi- 
 tion to be tolerant, have we not lost the real sense 
 of values? Our black and white seems to have 
 faded into a general gray. The bad are not so 
 bad as they might be; the good are not so good 
 as they think they are. As George Eliot says, 
 ''Like an omnibus, we take on board anybody 
 and anything which beckons as we pass. "We en- 
 
18 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 tertain Grod and the Devil on the same floor and 
 on equal terms." 
 
 How often we read in the Scriptures that 
 Jesus was moved with compassion. "When He 
 saw the multitude, He was moved." Not simply 
 touched, but swept as by a storm. He wept over 
 Jerusalem, because He saw the people sinning, 
 saw them missing the mark, saw the harvest of 
 it all. Of course it would be trite and I shall be 
 enrolled among those who ask silly and imper- 
 tinent questions, but may I venture to ask if any 
 of us ever really wept over Boston, or New York, 
 or Chicago, or St. Louis, or any lesser city, or 
 town where God gave us our place for service? 
 It was a beautiful Jerusalem that Jesus looked 
 upon; the temple like a mountain of snow, forty 
 and six years in building; palaces for Herod and 
 Caiaphas, a grand theater, and a great hippo- 
 drome ; three historic towers on the north and east, 
 and an acropolis, — a sight to stir the souls of 
 men, and an unspeakable anguish to contemplate 
 its catastrophe. Some of you have climbed the 
 Mount of Olives and marked what yet remains 
 of the walls the Saracen builded and the ruins 
 of other days. Have you also climbed the hills 
 around Boston or Pittsburgh? Have you gone 
 to the Metropolitan or Woolworth tower and 
 looked upon the riches of our great city, the 
 clustered spires of cathedral and university where 
 millions of people come and go, and have you 
 
THE PASSION OF JESUS 19 
 
 wept over those who go down those streets to 
 shame and death — the flotsam and jetsam of a 
 great city? Or have you cried as Bliicher cried 
 from the dome of St. Paul's, in London, **What 
 a city for pillage!" And have you gone down 
 to join the crowd in its quest after pelf to wrest 
 something for yourself out of the general forage 
 and plunder? I hardly dare venture to ask it, but 
 if you were to open your desk and take out your 
 diary, would there be in it any record of nights 
 of anguish and of prayer for lost men such as 
 they put down who wrote in the Gospels, the diary 
 of the Son of God? "At the foot of the cross," 
 says Sir Oliver Lodge, ''there has been a peren- 
 nial experience of relief and renovation. Ours is 
 not a creed, it is a passion. Men in every age 
 have died for it. In every land where its tale is 
 told and with every new sun that dawns, 
 drunkards may be found whom it has made sober, 
 thieves whom it has taught to be honest, harlots 
 whom it has lifted up to chastity, selfish men 
 who, touched by its preaching, live by a great 
 law of self-sacrifice. It is the root whence blos- 
 som great heroisms and charities. All human 
 sorrows hide in His wounds. All human self- 
 denials lean on His cross." 
 
 Well says Heine, "How great a drama is the 
 passion of Christ. How glorious a figure is that 
 of the Man-God. His words are a balm for all 
 the wounds this world can inflict, and the blood 
 
20 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 that was shed at Golgotha has become a healing 
 stream for all that suffer. The white marble gods 
 of the Greeks were spattered with His blood and 
 they sickened with terror and can never more 
 regain their health.'* 
 
 The simple record of three short years of 
 Christ's life has done more to regenerate and 
 soften mankind than all the disquisitions of phi- 
 losophers and all the exhortations of moralists. 
 
 If proof is wanted of the vital forces that dwell 
 in Christ, we find it in the impression He made 
 upon the men about Him. They were only fish- 
 ermen, sitters at the seat of custom — bits of com- 
 mon clay, but they caught the spirit and took 
 their impulse from Christ. His spirit so wrought 
 in them that when He himself had left the earth, 
 they became heralds not of a creed but of a pas- 
 sion. 
 
 Jesus opened the gates into a new universe. 
 He taught us that the cross on which the sinless 
 one died for the sinful is the supreme interpreta- 
 tion of God. He turned His face to the world in 
 the midst of His own suffering and cried, "He 
 that hath seen me hath seen the Father." In His 
 own person He brought a spiritual power and 
 dynamic which broke up the old order of the 
 pagan world and founded a system based upon 
 an uncalculating and overwhelming love. He 
 mastered men and events and broke into the 
 leaden night with a blazing passion that was vol- 
 
THE PASSION OF JESUS 21 
 
 canic and irresistible. He broke up the order of 
 His time to the breaking of His own heart. Well 
 says Forsythe, * ' He was an austere man, a severe 
 critic, a bom fighter, of choleric wrath and fiery 
 scorn, so that the people thought he was Elijah 
 or the Baptist. Yet He was gentle to the last 
 degree, especially to those ignorant and out of 
 the way. Clear, calm, determined and sure of 
 His mark. He was the next hour roused to such 
 impulsive passion as if He were beside himself. 
 But if He let himself go, He always knew where 
 He was going. He poured out His soul unto God 
 and unto death and He was the friend of publicans 
 and sinners." 
 
 At the cleansing of the temple. He was so hot 
 with imperious haste and mighty indignation that 
 from that moment His enemies said, '^You to the 
 death," and they never let up in their persecution 
 until they had Him nailed to the Cross. When 
 His disciples saw His fiery indignation, we can 
 imagine one as saying to the other, "Of what 
 does this remind you I" and the other answers, 
 "It reminds me of the Psahn in which it is writ- 
 ten, 'The zeal of thy house hath eaten me up.' " 
 The visual image of zeal as Coleridge calls it, is a 
 boiling pot. The root of the word is in the Greek 
 zeo — to boil. Could there be a more vivid word to 
 describe the boiling over with heat of the pas- 
 sions and emotions of the Son of God? Is it any 
 wonder that it is written, "As many as I love, I 
 
22 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 rebuke and chasten ; be zealous therefore and re- 
 pent/' The one thing that Jesus could not endure 
 was ease in Zion. The words to the church at 
 Laodicea fairly blistering us, ^*I know thy works, 
 that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou 
 wert cold or hot. So then because thou art luke- 
 warm and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee 
 out of my mouth.'' 
 
 What a phrase that is — *'to be eaten up with 
 zeal.'* All fear of what the people or the leaders 
 might do unto Him is forgotten. All sense of re- 
 serve and lamb-like meekness devoured. For the 
 first time we appreciate *'the wrath of the Lamb" 
 as we see what He did in His Father's house that 
 day. With far-reaching emphasis Alexander 
 White says, *'His holy zeal sustained Him and 
 impelled Him all through His life, and the same 
 ruling passion was His greatest strength in His 
 death." His disciples must have recalled it and 
 said to one another even while they forsook him 
 and fled, *'The zeal of His Father's house hath 
 eaten Him up." They must have said it to them- 
 selves as they stood afar off and saw His cruci- 
 fixion consummated. 
 
 Now the Saviour said Himself that it was 
 enough for the disciple to be as his Lord. We 
 bear His name; we represent His life to the 
 world; we are to personify His teachings. How 
 can we do that if we ourselves are not ablaze with 
 holy passion? It was a flame which was the 
 
THE PASSION OP JESUS 23 
 
 symbol of Pentecost. Those disciples, dis- 
 couraged and ashamed, were to have every barrier 
 melted away and to go forward with a blazing 
 passion that nothing could stop, until, as tradition 
 has it, Paul's zeal consumed his body and his 
 head rolled from the block. The rest of 
 the disciples had cruel mockings and scourgings 
 and imprisonments, their devotion so consuming 
 them that they had no heart left for anything save 
 Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It was not a new 
 thing for an absorbing passion to consume the 
 lives of men. Love of power had just eaten up 
 Julius Caesar ; love of praise had eaten up TuUius 
 Cicero ; love of liberty had eaten up Marcus Cato ; 
 love of pleasure had consumed Mark Antony. 
 Was it any wonder that Paul, consumed by 
 a greater passion than any of these, should say, 
 **I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. For 
 me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." Put 
 this over against any purely intellectual concep- 
 tion of Christianity, and how frigid all that 
 appears. The one thing necessary for every soul 
 is to catch his Master's passion. Small wonder 
 that Whitefield's cenotaph has carved upon it a 
 flaming heart, and that the grave of Adam Clark 
 bears similar testimony to a passion which con- 
 sumed a life in a blaze of flaming devotion. 
 
 The proposition which I wish to lay down as 
 the prerequisite to all evangelistic endeavor is 
 that no man can be the herald of his Lord's pas- 
 
24 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 sion if he does not himself share it. No man can 
 win for God unless he is willing to pay the price 
 in blood and tears. I make my plea to the church 
 and the ministry for a consuming zeal. "No 
 heart will long he pure that is not passionate, 
 no virtue safe that is not enthusiastic." Our 
 splendid cathedrals are built according to the most 
 approved plans of the architects, and our altars 
 are set up in noble and stately art. I am ready 
 to grant the virtue of apostolic succession to all 
 who minister there, but the question which I ask 
 with deep heart yearning is this one, Have the 
 fires been kindled and are they blazing on the 
 altar, or have they gone out and are men now 
 shivering in doubt where once God's prophets led 
 out His hosts in power? In many places the 
 priests of Jehovah seem to be as impotent as the 
 priests of Baal to call down the heavenly fires. 
 They have poured the waters of doubt over the 
 stones and the sacrifice and they stand forsaken 
 where once there were cleft skies, and falling 
 fires to consume sacrifice and altar and later lick 
 up the last drop of the waters of doubt and dem- 
 onstrate to all Israel that God and Baal do not 
 keep company on the same Olympus. From cry- 
 ing ' ' Thus saith the Lord, ' ' and saying with holy 
 assurance "I know whom I have believed," they 
 are shaking limp hands over a credo of faith 
 and immortality which has lost its power, and are 
 looking behind them with the hope that they may 
 
THE PASSION OF JESUS 25 
 
 be buttressed by scientific investigation rather 
 than the glad assurance of a triumphant faith. 
 
 We preach many sermons about the rejection of 
 Christ, and we blame the men of His century, but 
 what is the condition with us? We bow before 
 the conventional and are smug and comfortable. 
 If we had Jesus with us today, would we not find 
 Him a great inconvenience, and maybe send Him 
 either to jail or to an asylum as a disturber of the 
 peace? Such zeal as His was in the highest degree 
 uncomfortable for the dilettanti of His time. 
 Even those who represented the Church would 
 not abide it, but the record of history is that in 
 all its great ages humanity has bridged the gulf 
 which threatened it by "walking over the body 
 of some fanatic who made himself a highway for 
 his race." Jesus was a man of intense feeling 
 and He never held in His emotions. When He 
 saw men robbing their poor neighbors at the seat 
 of the money-changers, He overthrew their tables, 
 and lashed with His tongue those who had prosti- 
 tuted their opportunities and imposed upon their 
 neighbors. When He saw the city given over to 
 indifference and men walking holy places with 
 stolid heart, He wept. 
 
 We have a great deal to say in our conventions 
 and stately assemblies about emotionalism. We 
 are greatly fearful lest religion shall seem to 
 be a matter of life instead of a matter of creed. 
 As a matter of fact, there is no fear whatever in 
 
26 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 our time that there will be too much emotion 
 connected with religion. Even the great evan- 
 gelistic meetings are not open to that charge. I 
 have been in closest touch with them for the last 
 generation, and I am bound to say that I have 
 nowhere seen anything which approached emotion- 
 alism. I have seen tens of thousands of men 
 coming up to shake hands with evangelists, but 
 not one in a hundred had even a tear in his eye. 
 The impelling motive in most cases was purely 
 social or ethical, with no sense of such conviction 
 of sin as would blanch the cheek and make men's 
 knees knock together. He is a poor student of 
 psychology who does not know that the emotions 
 must lie at the base of all great thinking or doing. 
 Herbert Spencer said, **In the genesis of a sys- 
 tem of thought the emotional nature is a large 
 factor, perhaps as large a factor as the intellec- 
 tual. " It is a sad tribute which Charles Darwin 
 brings. After an experience which had dwarfed 
 his emotional life, he says *'At the age of thirty 
 poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure 
 and music was a great delight. But now for many 
 years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry and 
 I find Shakespeare so intolerably dull that it 
 nauseates me. I have lost my taste for pictures 
 and music. The loss of these tastes is a loss of 
 happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the 
 intellect and more probably to the moral character 
 by enfeebUng the emotional part of our nature.** 
 
THE PASSION OF JESUS 27 
 
 In his essays on " Criticism '^ Matthew Arnold 
 says, ''The permanent virtue of religion is that it 
 has lighted up morality, that it has applied the 
 emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the 
 sage along the way perfectly, for carrying the 
 ordinary man along it at all.'-* Dr. Sheridan 
 quotes John Stuart Blackie: ''The early church 
 worked by a fervid moral contagion, not by the 
 suasion of cool argument. The Christian method 
 of conversion, not by logical arguments but by 
 moral contagion and the effusion of the Holy 
 Ghost has with the masses of mankind always 
 proved itself the most effective." 
 
 Dr. John Watson will not be accused of lack 
 of clearness in thought; he says: "Every great 
 movement which has stirred the depth of life and 
 changed the face of history has sprung from some 
 profound sentiment and powerful emotion." Dr. 
 Alexander Maclaren, one of the clearest thinkers 
 of his time, is moved to say, "There is a kind 
 of religious teachers who are always preaching 
 down enthusiasm and preaching up what they call 
 'sober standards of feeling' in matters of re- 
 ligion. By which, in nine cases out of ten, they 
 mean precisely such a tepid condition as is de- 
 scribed in much less polite language when the 
 Voice from Heaven says, 'Because thou art 
 neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my 
 mouth. ' I should have thought that the last piece 
 of furniture which any Christian Church in the 
 
28 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 nineteenth century needed was a refrigerator. A 
 poker and a pair of bellows would be much more 
 needful to them. Not to be all aflame is madness, 
 if we believe our own creed." 
 
 **He shall baptize you with fire," and if it does 
 anything it will kindle emotion. The great glory 
 of the Gospel is to cleanse men's hearts by raising 
 their temperature, making them pure because they 
 are made warm, and that separates them from 
 their evils. 
 
 "William James ought to understand the 
 psychology of religious life, and he says, in his 
 "Varieties of Eeligious Experience": "I believe 
 that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and 
 that philosophic and theological formulas are 
 secondary products like the translations of a text 
 into another tongue. ' ' Dr. Jowett voices a great 
 truth when he says : ' ' If the church would be pure, 
 the church must be passionate. Elevation of 
 character depends upon warmth of affection. A 
 fiery heart by the energy of its own heat creates 
 a self -preserving atmosphere against the devil." 
 
 Among those liberal denominations which have 
 been quite inclined to accept the dictum of Presi- 
 dent Ehot that the religion of the future will be 
 intellectual and not emotional, that religious 
 emotion is the result of defective culture and will 
 cease when education and evolution have done 
 their work, there is a mighty swing of the pen- 
 dulum. They are holding evangelistic services 
 
THE PASSION OF JESUS 29 
 
 night after night. When the present writer was 
 asked to give an address on evangelization before 
 one of the important gatherings of one of the 
 liberal churches, he asked with a smile, ''Do you 
 think you can stand my message?" The reply 
 was, "We must have more vital religion." Of 
 .all the addresses which I have given, none were 
 received with greater apparent fervor than the 
 one delivered under such circumstances. 
 
 To feel the thrill of a great love and to be 
 profoundly interested in men and things is not 
 bad form, it is Christ-like. To warm up to a 
 publican and to warm over a Pharisee is the kind 
 of business which thrills the heart of God. He 
 said there was one thing all men needed, and that 
 was conviction. We have our foibles, our weak- 
 nesses, our indifferences, our by-plays and our 
 avocations. The crying need of the world is a 
 few first-class convictions. And what is a con- 
 viction? Is it not something that makes a convict 
 of you; that is, something that fastens a man 
 to one thing so that he is not at liberty to roam 
 everywhere to no purpose? Then he can say, 
 "This one thing I believe; this one thing I do." 
 A Christian without conviction is powerless and 
 is a contradiction of terms. A Christian that pre- 
 fers plans of salvation to salvation itself, that 
 raises definitions of the nature of Jesus above 
 surrender to the joy-giving Saviour is a travesty 
 on the Son of God. The seal on Adam Clark's 
 
30 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 grave, to which I have referred, is a candle burned 
 down to the socket. Underneath are the words 
 ''In living for others, I am burned away.'* 
 Livingstone burned out his life that he might over- 
 throw the slave trade of Africa. Aristotle said, 
 * ' No great genius was ever without some admix- 
 ture of madness." It was this joy in service, this 
 uncalculating devotion which has proven itself 
 mighty to change the hearts of men, and the age 
 in which it has lived. It was not Erasmus, the 
 polished, the learned, the vacillating, the 
 mightiest intellect of his time, but it was rough, 
 yearning, burning Martin Luther who made Ger- 
 many. In his last sermon Joseph Parker said, 
 *'As long as the church of God is one of many 
 institutions, she will have her little day. She will 
 die and that will be all. But just as soon as she 
 gets the spirit of Jesus until the world thinks she 
 has gone stark mad, then we shall be on the high 
 road to capture this planet for Jesus." 
 
 One fears that in some quarters the pulpit has 
 lost its nerve and forgotten the evidence of his- 
 tory, that whenever Christianity has been most 
 convincing she has been most victorious, and 
 whenever she has been most apologetic, she has 
 been most futile; and also that it is the schools 
 within Christianity which are constructive and 
 aggressive, and not the schools that are critical 
 and eclectic which have chiefly affected their gen- 
 eration. If, as some think, our fathers were too 
 
THE PASSION OF JESUS 31 
 
 sure about everything, it would be an immense 
 gain if some of their children were absolutely 
 certain of anything. It would be a great disaster 
 if the intellect of the Church should be so occupied 
 in recasting the form of the Scriptures as to have 
 no strength left for declaring the Gospel which 
 they contain. Is it not time that the strength of 
 the ministry were withdrawn from purely intel- 
 lectual exercises, from purely intellectual investi- 
 gations and destructive criticism and given to 
 evangelism? Have we not had enough of re- 
 canting? Is it not time for some confessing? We 
 are justified in disbelieving the things which have 
 not been proven, only if we believe and practice 
 upon the things which have been proven. There 
 are some who seem to be ready to refuse to believe 
 anything which our fathers believed, and are quite 
 ready to accept anything if it is not in the Bible. 
 A book which denies is supposed to be honest and 
 thoughtful, and a book which affirms, it is taken 
 for granted, must be narrow and prejudiced. 
 Those who doubt everything which the Church has 
 held for nineteen centuries give themselves amus- 
 ing airs of superiority, and the people who hold 
 the heart of the Christian creed are likely to be 
 regarded with intellectual pity. There is one thing 
 worse than the arrogance of wisdom and that is 
 the arrogance of learning, for the learned man 
 ought to be broad enough to know better. As a 
 matter of fact, there is no more ability in doubt- 
 
32 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 ing than in believing. If there is a bigotry of 
 orthodoxy there is also a bigotry of heterodoxy, 
 and the last appears to be the more insolent. 
 Why should so many prefer the evidence of non- 
 religious persons on faith to those who are its 
 chief experimental witnesses ? It does not follow 
 that because Darwin knew about earth worms 
 that he was an authority on the soul ; or because 
 Mr. Huxley was a most lucid teacher of natural 
 science that he had any right to say the last word 
 on miracles. Even in religion one must be scien- 
 tific and depend not upon amateurs but upon 
 experts. "In the high affairs of faith, are we not 
 more likely to arrive at the truth by listening to 
 the saints than by listening to persons whose 
 admirable studies have been among the lower 
 animals ? ' * John Watson says there are only two 
 provinces of absolutely sure knowledge — one is 
 pure mathematics and the other is the experience 
 of the soul. "If Paul had a right to say *I,^ and 
 we allow him to be a conscious being, then he had 
 a right to say *I know.* And if it be granted 
 that he could know anything, he had perfect right 
 to finish his sentence, and say, 'I know whom I 
 have believed,* and we can do no better than to 
 accept the certainty of such experience." 
 
 Faith is the center of the financial world. From 
 the man who sends his goods for money he has 
 not seen to the man who accepts the last dictum 
 of science, we move in this world by faith. Un- 
 
THE PASSION OF JESUS 33 
 
 belief blocks the wheels of all progress. Only 
 faith can right a ruined world. Only faith can 
 make men lay down their arms and pick up the 
 ax and the shovel, and faith finds its highest 
 exemplification in the matters of the soul. 
 
Chapter II 
 THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS 
 
CHAPTER n 
 
 THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS 
 
 The table-talk of great men is always fascinat- 
 ing. It is supposed to be the measure of a man 
 when he is among his friends and can speak un- 
 hindered by fear of misunderstanding or failure 
 to appreciate. It is years since I read the table- 
 talk of Martin Luther; from it I gained a new 
 idea of the great throbbing heart and the human 
 interest of that great leader of the Protestant 
 Reformation. To another generation the table- 
 talk of Hazlitt was full of literary surprises and 
 nuggets of wisdom, the depository of much that 
 would otherwise have been lost to the world, and 
 the loss of which would have made the world- 
 poorer. The master reporter of table-talk is Bos- 
 well. It is Boswell who gave Samuel Johnson 
 to the world. One hardly knows at times which to 
 admire the most — the stern old philosopher or the 
 loving scribe, who sets apples of gold in pictures 
 of silver. We like to know what men thought it 
 worth while to talk about to their friends, — what 
 were the values that they held to be supreme. 
 When there was no reason to trim one^s sails to 
 
 37 
 
38 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 social, political or ecclesiastical trade winds, how 
 did they sail their crafts'? 
 
 Perhaps there is no remark of Daniel Webster's 
 more frequently quoted than the one he is said 
 to have made at a table where distinguished 
 friends had gathered. One asked, "What is the 
 most important question you were ever called 
 upon to consider?'' His questioner may have 
 thought of the great legal and political questions 
 which had been submitted to the great lawyer. 
 He may have had in mind some of the grave ques- 
 tions concerning our Republic, but Mr. Webster, 
 running his eye down the table, asked, ' * Are there 
 any outsiders here?" "No, sir, all are your 
 friends. ' ' With deepest solemnity of manner the 
 great man said, "The most important question 
 that ever engaged my mind is that of my personal 
 responsibility to Almighty God." 
 
 I am sure the world is agreed that of all the 
 table-talk which has been caught by devout dis- 
 ciples from the lips of statesmen and philosophers 
 and passed on to a listening and adoring multi- 
 tude, none is so full of meaning or read with 
 such rapt attention as that which fell from His 
 lips who spoke as never man spake. We have 
 some of His words reported to us by His friends. 
 How we long for the thousands that must have 
 dropped by the wayside, or at the morning or 
 evening meal. What a sweet hyperbole is that 
 of John, "And there are also many other things 
 
THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS 39 
 
 which Jesus did, which if they should be written 
 every one, I suppose that even the world itself 
 could not contain the books which would be writ- 
 ten." If the world today could find some new 
 word which He thus spoke to His disciples, ita 
 presses would run night and day until every last 
 citizen could have another message from His lips. 
 Parables like those which now gladden the world 
 must have fallen without stint from His blessed 
 lips. A few of them have been preserved for us 
 and make us rich indeed, 
 
 Jesus was a famous diner-out. His enemies 
 charged upon him, that while John came as an 
 ascetic, Jesus was "a glutton and a wine bibber.'* 
 You do not think of it in that fashion, but close 
 examination will impress one with the humor of 
 Jesus. Who can read His parables, if he reads 
 with discrimination, without a smile; and then 
 how intense He was. *'If your eye offend you, 
 pluck it out"; '*if your hand offend you, cut it 
 off. ' ' Go drown yourself rather than say a word , 
 that shall offend one of these little ones. And' 
 what paradoxes were His! He that would save 
 his life shall lose it. He that would lose his life 
 shall save it. It was the heart of the man that 
 was thrilling in all His table-talk. It was the love 
 of His soul, the zeal that was burning and fairly 
 consuming Him that manifests itself here. His 
 whole life could be epitomized in the single sen- 
 tence **He had a passion for saving the lost." 
 
40 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 And at these wonderful dinner parties, this mes- 
 sage thrills out. 
 
 The table-talks of Jesus are not an interlude 
 to His passion, they are a part of it. They are 
 introduced here to show that in the most intimate 
 social relations in life one thought is ever upper- 
 most. He never temporized; He never kept the 
 yearning of His heart out of sight. Whether He 
 talked with Pharisee, or Sadducee, or publican, or 
 sinner, in public or in the privacy of their own 
 home, before the interview was over He had 
 told them in some form the one glorious fact that 
 was epitomized in Him — ''I am come that ye 
 might have life and that ye might have it more 
 abundantly." The table-talks of Jesus are such 
 talks as a father might give with his arm around 
 the neck of a thoughtless or a sinning child. This 
 was what He meant when He said, *' Whoso hath 
 seen me hath seen the Father." 
 
 Here are two dinner parties that we may first 
 consider. After Matthew, the publican, was 
 called from his disreputable profession, he did a 
 rather brave thing. He gave a farewell dinner 
 to his old friends in office to celebrate his going 
 away, and he invited Jesus. I suppose he wanted 
 the old comrades to see what sort of a man He 
 was to whom he had given his allegiance, and it 
 may be that he had hopes the Master's presence 
 and love would do for them what it had done for 
 him. One almost wonders at the courage of 
 
THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS 41 
 
 Matthew to invite the friends of the old life to 
 meet the One who had led him to the new. 
 Matthew must have been satisfied that his old 
 friends would feel at home with Him and he knew 
 that whatever Jesus said would be said with a 
 kindly heart, with no sense of aloofness, and least 
 of all with any sense of the attitude of the Phari- 
 see. What do you suppose the scribes and Phari- 
 sees, the members of the church, the high-toned 
 leaders of Capernaum said when they heard of it? 
 Do you wonder that they attacked His disciples 
 and said, ''Why eateth your Master with publicans 
 and sinners ? What does He have in common with 
 them?" You would not expect in our time a lot 
 of grafters and men of doubtful reputation to be 
 especially eager to meet the Archbishop of Can- 
 terbury or the Greek Primate. In whatever talks 
 Jesus had with Matthew before — and he must 
 have had many of them — we do not know what 
 approaches He made, or what Matthew said, but 
 at last He came one day to the tax gatherers' 
 office and said unto him, ''Follow me." Matthew 
 must have leaped with delight to think that all he 
 had done that was selfish and evil was so 
 thoroughly forgotten or forgiven that Jesus 
 wanted him to be with Him, and when he heard 
 that call he left all and followed Him. I suppose 
 Matthew never forgot his old business and the 
 stigma which went with it. I confess there is a 
 tug at my heart as I see where this humble dis- 
 
42 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 ciple, when he wrote the list of the apostles, put 
 in his own name and did not forget to round it 
 out by saying ''And Matthew, the publican.'' 
 Much that He said there we have no record of, 
 but with such a company and with such a host, 
 we know almost as well as if it were written down, 
 what He would have said. We know His stainless 
 purity would humble them, but we know also Hia 
 infinite yearning would make itself manifest, so 
 that they would see He loved them so that He was 
 willing to die for them. That was why publicans 
 and sinners drew near to hear Him, that was 
 why the common people heard Him gladly. He 
 opened His heart to them. He told them of His 
 love. You remember how Jesus answered the 
 Pharisees who murmured because He had gone 
 to Levi's house, "They that are whole need not 
 the physician, but they that are sick. I came not 
 to call the righteous but the sinners to repent- 
 ance.'* 
 
 Then there was another dinner. This time He is 
 invited to a Pharisee's house. It was after a busy 
 day that Jesus had an evening engagement to 
 dine with Simon, the Pharisee. That dinner has 
 been heard of throughout the world, not because of 
 the palace in which it was served and not because 
 of the courses which crowded the table, but simply 
 because of one broken-hearted woman who was a 
 sinner and who intruded herself upon the feast. 
 It looks as if she had met Him before and that 
 
THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS 43 
 
 she had already some cause for gratitude. Can 
 you not picture her — you who have seen her like 
 in the great city? Do you not understand why 
 she came there? Can you not see the pictures of 
 the days of innocence, which floated before her 
 eyes, maybe of a home of prayer; of an anxious 
 father and mother from whom she had turned; 
 of the promises made to them which she had 
 broken ; of the promises made to her which others 
 had broken? And so the poor girl with broken 
 heart and broken life steals in to the feast. 
 Whether she had told Him her story before or 
 not, we do not know. Whether she had heard that 
 wonderful story of the lost boy, we cannot tell, 
 but at any rate, in some way, hope stirs in her 
 heart and a changed life stretches before her, 
 pointed out by the tender love of the Man who 
 sits there at the feast. Her attitude is not one 
 of importunity, it is rather one of passionate 
 gratitude for something already granted her. 
 Maybe she is just leaving Capernaum to go back 
 to her mother and begin a new life, and this is 
 her last chance of showing her love. You picture 
 the scene — the guests reclining on couches around 
 the board, their feet resting on cushions, and then 
 this poor woman throwing herself with passion- 
 ate sobbing at the feet of the Master. The veil 
 is off her face and the fastenings from her hair. 
 If anything was necessary, these are the things 
 which tell of her life. An alabaster box of oint- 
 
44 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 ment she pours on His feet and with her glorious 
 hair she wipes them and presses her lips on them 
 with adoring devotion. 
 
 Of course everybody is disturbed. Simon is 
 courteous and condescending to his guest. The 
 neighbors are saying, "This prophet must have 
 known about the woman. Why does He let her 
 touch himT' Simon's thoughts are plainly 
 stamped upon his face. And now listen, — * ' Simon, 
 I have somewhat to say to thee." With some 
 restraint and rather sadly, Simon says, "Rabbi, 
 say on.'* And then comes the story of the big 
 debtor and the small one and how the gracious 
 creditor forgave them both, and the query which 
 of the two loved the giver most. We hear Simon 
 saying, "That does not interest me, but I presume 
 the one to whom he forgave most. ' ' Now Simon, 
 it is your turn. It may be the Master's hand crept 
 down his seamless robe and rested upon the head 
 of the penitent, "I would not have mentioned it, 
 Simon, but when I came to your house, you did 
 not even offer me water for my feet; but this 
 woman has wet my feet with her tears and wiped 
 them with her hair. You gave me no kiss of 
 greeting, but she, from the time I came in, has 
 not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil you 
 did not anoint, but she hath anointed my feet with 
 ointment. Wherefore I say unto you, her sins 
 which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much ; 
 but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth 
 
THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS 45 
 
 little." Is there any story that shows more 
 tenderly the yearning of the Master's heart? 
 There are many who identify this woman with 
 Mary Magdalen, and that fact is "imbedded in 
 centuries of Christian art and literature," and 
 the name will always persist as a synonym for a 
 fallen but penitent woman. If it is true, is it 
 not a beautiful and thrilling thing to see how the 
 devotion of that once abandoned woman never 
 failed by so much as a jot until the end? She was 
 one of the few who saw Him die on Calvary, and 
 regardless of the contumely and insult which 
 might be heaped upon her, she followed His body 
 to the grave and was the first at the sepulchre on 
 the glorious Easter morning. With agonizing 
 heart, she cries to him whom she took to be the 
 gardener; "Sir, if thou hast borne Him hence, 
 tell me where and I will take Him away," and 
 with the same voice that at first spoke peace to 
 her repentant soul, her Lord spoke the one word 
 ' * Mary ! ' ' Nobody else ever said it that way ; into 
 no other voice could such pure and tender solici- 
 tude be pressed. In an instant she knew the glad 
 truth that her Lord was risen, and she fell at 
 His feet crying, "My Master, my Master!" 
 
 How anybody could think of that dinner in the 
 house of Simon, the Pharisee, and what the Master 
 said, and all that flowed out of it and still re- 
 main indifferent to those who long for the saving 
 grace which comes from unstinted love must 
 
46 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 snrely pass human knowledge. It is a heart of 
 stone that can remain stolid, when he thinks of 
 what happened and how the joy of it never faded 
 away, but was crowned with glory on the resur- 
 rection morning. Small wonder that when Renan 
 was looking around for someone whom he could 
 make responsible for a resurrection which he 
 wished to deny, he should have cried, "Divine 
 power of love, sacred moments in which the pas- 
 sion of an hallucinated woman gives to the world 
 a resurrected God!" Is it strange that Renan 's 
 book and his theories were buried with him, while 
 the whole Christian world stands in adoring 
 wonder at Mary's side? 
 
 It was at another Pharisee's table that He smote 
 the heart of the cold and proud by telling of those 
 who give tithes of what amounts to nothing — the 
 mint and anise and en mm in — and neglect the 
 mightier matters of the law. When His host com- 
 plains that he had not performed the usual ablu- 
 tion, He showed the folly of those who were more 
 anxious to have clean hands than clean hearts, 
 who looked at the outside of the cup but paid 
 no attention to the filth that was within. 
 
 It was at the table of Simon, the leper, that 
 another Mary showed a love without bound or 
 limit, bom in homely fellowship, perfected at her 
 brother's grave. Perhaps the cap of the alabaster 
 box refused to open, and in her haste she broke 
 
THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS 47 
 
 the box and poured the ointment, fit for a king, 
 upon the head she loved. 
 
 It was when the utilitarian spirit flared out, as 
 it has done in all the days since ; it was when those 
 who take no account of love and sacrifice and holy 
 ideals but who weigh everything on the scales of 
 self-interest and measure everything by worldly 
 standards — it was when such people were taking 
 all merit out of a noble act and making it only an 
 impetuous movement of an ill-balanced mind, that 
 Jesus lifted this little woman upon a pedestal so 
 high that all the world will see her till the crack 
 of doom! Can anybody have any question as to 
 what Jesus thinks of uncalculating service? Can 
 anybody ever think of offering Jesus anything but 
 their best after this ? There it stands ; let it never 
 be blotted out. Let it be written on the fleshly 
 tablet of every devoted heart that is willing to 
 pay the price that his Lord demands — ''Verily I 
 say unto you, wheresoever this gospel shall be 
 preached throughout the whole world, there shall 
 also this, that this woman hath done, be told for 
 a memorial of her. ' ^ There is at least one pedestal 
 in the temple of fame which God has set up that 
 will never be vacant. With reverence let us muse 
 upon the reason! 
 
 Those who are troubled by many things, who 
 are examples of what Emerson said, ' ' Things are 
 in the saddle and they ride mankind,'^ let them 
 stand behind the Master at Martha's simple feast. 
 
48 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 ** Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus." 
 Three different types. The anxious housekeeper, 
 with a sense of responsibility, who brings things 
 to pass, a good manager, a capable woman who 
 has to be responsible for things. Here is one type 
 of those who hide their own feelings and never 
 like to see others express theirs. Sentiment does 
 not appeal to her and she is quite inclined to 
 take to task any whom she calls mystical, emo- 
 tional, sentimental. Martha has her good points, 
 may she never disappear from the family. The 
 wheels of daily life would drive heavily without 
 her. When her dear old hands are folded, more 
 tears will be shed for her possibly than she has 
 shed for others, but if Martha can only under- 
 stand the gentle reproof of the Saviour, she will 
 know that the sister whom she calls a dreamer, 
 who indulges in holy contemplation, and nourishes 
 a devout soul, is one of the pure in heart who 
 see God and are thereby the more lovable. * * She 
 hath chosen the good jpart which shall not be 
 taken from her." Let Martha and Mary twine 
 their arms around each other. They will each 
 be the stronger for the other's presence. Jesus 
 says, ''Don't fret, Martha, put the first things 
 first, and all things shall work together for good." 
 As for Lazarus, for whom the feast is given, 
 from him we hear nothing. Paterson Smith re- 
 calls the suggestion that he was the young ruler 
 who once made the great refusal, whom Jesus 
 
THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS 49 
 
 beholding loved and kissed him on t]ie brow. Per- 
 haps that is not true, but at any rate, Jesus loved 
 him with the yearning of a great heart, and Martha 
 and Mary knew that as much as He loved them, 
 Lazarus was preeminent, for they named him to 
 Jesus, "Him whom thou lovest." From that 
 dinner table may the love which gives each heart 
 its place around the family board be passed to 
 every home ! 
 
 Of all the Master's words at table, surely none 
 were so precious as those He spoke at the last 
 supper, when He was host himself. He and His 
 disciples knew it was the last talk He would have 
 with them before He faced the tragedy which they 
 could neither appreciate nor understand. We are 
 minded of a scene three hundred years before 
 when the sacred ship had come back from Delos 
 and the eleven had stricken off his chains that 
 Socrates might drink the fatal hemlock, and his 
 jailer was saying, "He was the gentlest and best 
 that ever came here. ' ' But beautiful as was that 
 scene against the clear blue of the Grecian sky 
 and beautiful as was that cheery message of him 
 who was going out upon a great adventure, this is 
 an hour before which all other human farewells 
 shine with a lessening ray. 
 
 Since there were no servants to do it, Jesus had 
 washed His disciples' feet and said to them, "He 
 that would be chief among you, let him be the 
 
50 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 servant of all. ' ' Judas has gone out ' ' and it was 
 night." 
 
 "What does he say as a pattern for all those 
 hours when the disciples talk together? The one 
 word which is in the air when words can be but 
 few, the one word which rolls in infinite reitera- 
 tion from His lips is the word which was the center 
 of His life and of His kingdom — *'Love." Here 
 is a new command — ' ' That ye love one another as 
 I have loved you." Here is the measure of your 
 discipleship — "Ye are my disciples if ye love one 
 another. The* measure of your love for me will be 
 the measure of your union with me. If ye love 
 me, ye will keep my commandments." And then 
 He falls to talking about the same thing that 
 Socrates talked about, only with an assurance and 
 depth of meaning which Socrates never knew, and 
 with good reason. 
 
 We are inclined to say with Philip of Spain, 
 who, when asked if he had noticed the eclipse, 
 said, **No, I am so busy with things down here 
 that I have no time to look up. ' ' There are many 
 who are restive at any word concerning the future 
 life. Not so Jesus. He revelled in it. His last 
 table-talk was pitched to the tune of it — *'Let not 
 your heart be troubled. I am going away from 
 you. In my Father's house are many mansions. 
 I am going to prepare a home for you and we are 
 all of us going to be there. Here you will be 
 
THE TAJBLE-TALK OF JESUS 51 
 
 lonely and you will be troubled, but I shall be 
 thinking of you and waiting for you. ' ' 
 
 If we could live on here without headache or 
 heartache ; if we could feel no want and know no 
 poverty; if no bitter words were spoken, and no 
 unkindly acts done ; if nobody grew old, and love 
 was never disappointed ; if no red flag ever waved, 
 and the sexton never plied his spade, what a world 
 this would be ! But Jesus said over the table at 
 the last supper, ''I am going to get a place like 
 that ready for you/* 
 
 Sam Johnson said he didn't like Wesley, for 
 just as he got his legs under the table for a long 
 talk, "Wesley would run off to see some old woman 
 who was in want. Here the days and nights of 
 friendship are short. Here we cry, ''AH hail," 
 and in the next instant, ' ' Good-by. It is time to 
 go." Jesus said that His was a land of perfect 
 fellowship, and there was never to be any night 
 with its darkness and separation. We say, "I 
 shall always be thinking of you," but Jesus said 
 more; He said, "I shall always be with you. 
 You will not see me, but I will be there, closer 
 than breathing, nearer than iiands and feet. The 
 Holy Spirit, one with me and the Father, will 
 walk and talk with you. He will lead you into the 
 paths of truth. He will be your comforter in 
 trouble, your wisdom in ignorance, and will bring 
 you safely through. Lo, I am with you always, 
 even unto the end of the world." 
 
52 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 After that they sang a song — His song — ^but the 
 message of it all was "death does not make any 
 difference with love." We can say to those to 
 whom our hearts are bound : 
 
 "Thee I loved always, 
 I love still but thee, 
 And thee will I love 
 Through eternity." 
 
 Death is only crossing a seam in the carpet, 
 passing through an open door. Here and there 
 and always, love never faileth. These are the 
 messages which fell from His lips when He who 
 spake as never man spake, talked with His friends 
 and with the world out of His heart. Do you 
 not feel the passion of them and do they not awake 
 an answering passion in your own soul? 
 
Chapteb III 
 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
CHAPTER m 
 
 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 We cannot be heralds of our Lord's passion 
 unless we enter into the fellowship of His suffer- 
 ing. He has left behind Him in the path He trod 
 a message written in His blood and fastened with 
 a nail to His cross — *'If any man will come after 
 me, let him deny himself and take up his cross 
 daily and follow me." We long for His triumph 
 and are fain to have some humble part in it, but 
 the condition on which we gain it is found in the 
 words, ''If so be that we suffer with Him, that 
 we may be also glorified together." If we may 
 attain unto that any price will be cheap. The 
 apostle was so convinced of that that he cries, ''I 
 reckon that the sufferings of this present time are 
 not worthy to be compared with the glory that 
 shall be revealed to us-ward." How can any of 
 us dare to represent Christ to men if we do not 
 know something of the thrill of His passion, if we 
 do not yearn after the souls of men so that we can 
 cry concerning our own flock, as John Knox cried 
 for Scotland, "Give me — or I die!" This and 
 no other is the passion which has transformed the 
 world. Paul had caught it from his Master when 
 
 55 
 
56 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 he exclaimed, '*I could wish that I myself were 
 anathema from Christ for my brethren's sake, 
 my kinsmen according to the flesh." 
 
 It is a wonder that we can go through the sub- 
 lime task which is laid upon us as heralds of a 
 passion with a sense that it is an ordinary and 
 
 " common task. "I marvel," said the old Puritan, 
 "how I can preach stolidly and coldly, how I can 
 let men alone in their sins, and that I do not go 
 to them and beseech them for the Lord's sake — 
 however they take it and whatever pains or trouble 
 it should cause me. When I come out of my 
 pulpit, I am not accused of want of ornaments 
 or elegance, nor of letting fall an unhandsome 
 word, but my conscience asketh me 'How could 
 you speak of life and death with such a heart? 
 How couldst thou preach of heaven and hell in 
 such a careless and sleepy manner? Truly this 
 peal of the conscience doth ring in my ears, *0 
 Lord, do that on our own souls that thou wouldst 
 use us to do on the souls of others.' " Are we not 
 
 »»to get a verdict % Are we not sent out, in modem 
 phrase, to actually sell goods? What boots it 
 us that when we come down from the pulpit steps 
 gracious ladies and cultured men thank us for 
 he sermon, but do not surrender their souls to 
 the will of their Lord ? Is preaching a proclama- 
 tion of a sublime and insistent truth, or is it 
 only a lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice 
 and can play well on an instrument? 
 
HERALDS OF A PASSION 57 
 
 Morley says of Gladstone, who gained in Ms 
 great Midlothian campaign, when over seventy, 
 one of the greatest oratorical triumphs of history, 
 that '*he bore his hearers through long changes 
 of strenuous periods as if he were now a hunter 
 and now an eager bird of prey, now a charioteer 
 of fiery steeds kept well in hand, and now and 
 again we seemed to hear the pity or dark wrath 
 of a prophet with the mighty rushing of wind and 
 the fire running along the ground." Would that 
 apply to much of our preaching today? As Dr. 
 Jackson asks, ''Are we not growing too quiet, too 
 tame, too subdued? Are we not sacrificing to 
 mere literary primness and prettiness and to a 
 mistaken self-restraint? Our preaching," he says, 
 "is too dry-eyed; there is no red blood visible 
 under the skin. The commonplace is not vital- 
 ized; the thin wire of words is charged with no 
 current that quickens and thrills. ' ' Men are often 
 apparently eager for some theoretical truth but 
 oblivious of the real purpose for which the truth 
 is presented. 
 
 Dr. Bonar, after listening to a minister who 
 was preaching with great gusto, said to him, ' ' You 
 love to preach, don't you?" "Yes, indeed, I do." 
 "But," said Bonar, "do you love the men to 
 whom you preach?" We do not have to choose 
 between a fervid ignorance and a passionless 
 culture. Thank God, we may have both a 
 knowledge and a zeal, a well trained mind and a 
 
58 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 warm heart. The man who knows the most ought 
 to feel the most and do the most. The material 
 which he gets together ought not to be a mass of 
 dead fuel, he ought to touch it with the prophetic 
 glow that shall set it ablaze. Only the divine 
 fire wrought out in his own experience and con- 
 viction can do that. A recent writer to ministers 
 has said, ''The cold-blooded pedantry which 
 affects to look down on all religious zeal as relig- 
 ious rant is being suffered to inflict the gravest 
 injury upon the whole life and work of the church, 
 and not least upon the life and work of the 
 preacher. '^ After all, nothing is so touching as 
 an honest enthusiasm, and other things being 
 equal, it is the man who is himself greatly moved 
 and is not ashamed to let it be seen, who will 
 greatly move others. Therefore, if a preacher 
 has received from God a rich, strong, emotional 
 nature, let him give no heed to the silly clatter 
 of those who tell him he has no right to work on 
 men's feelings — as if religion could do anything 
 for a man whose feelings are not worked on ! Let 
 him give his zeal full play and he will find it 
 mighty to the opening of many doors against 
 which his most profound logic will beat itself in 
 vain. In all true preaching spiritual passion is an 
 essential element. 
 
 After all, it matters little how excellent the fuel 
 if the fire be out. All that a man has of intellec- 
 tual strength to the last ounce, he can put into 
 
HERALDS OF A PASSION 59 
 
 the work of preaching, but intellect alone can 
 never make a preacher, and the man with no more 
 heart than can be made out of brains is in the 
 wrong place in the pulpit. Dr. Chalmers once 
 compared the sermons of the Moderates to a finej 
 winter's day: "They were short, clear and cold.! 
 Brevity is good, and clearness is better, but the 
 coldness is fatal. Moonlight preaching ripens no 
 harvest." 
 
 Dr.^ Jackson reminds us that whoever will go 
 over the great names in the history of the Chris- 
 tian pulpit will discover that the passion to win 
 men is the ultimate fountain of all preaching that 
 is of the prophetic order. Of Rutherford a con- 
 temporary said, ''Many a time I thought he would 
 have flown out of the pulpit when he came to speak 
 of Jesus Christ." John Knox was supported in 
 his old age by attendants to his place in the pulpit, 
 but when he arose to speak, the divine passion 
 blazed in his soul, until, one of his friends said, 
 *'So mighty was he in his yearning that I thought 
 he would break the pulpit into bits." Of Joseph 
 Alleine it was said, ''Infinite and insatiable greed 
 for the conversion of souls, he preached with far- 
 reaching voice, flashing eye and a soul on fire with 
 love. ' ' 
 
 Is not St. Paul the best of all examples for the 
 preacher? Hear him calling himself a servant 
 of Jesus Christ, "separated unto the Gospel of 
 God." He could say, "This one thing I do." 
 
60 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 The divine imperative was upon his soul. * * I must 
 see Rome," he cried, because he was eager there 
 to preach the gospel ; and shouts with holy fervor, 
 *'I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for 
 it is the power of God unto salvation." The 
 record shows that Paul was constrained by the 
 word. His message burned like a fire in his bones. 
 His passion to win men was a divine constraint 
 which gave him no rest. By the space of three 
 years, he told the Ephesian elders, "I ceased not 
 to admonish every one night and day with tears. * ' 
 When his friends urged him not to go to Jeru- 
 salem, he cried, "I am ready not to be bound only, 
 but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the 
 Lord Jesus." Does anyone doubt that a pas- 
 sion like that had been kindled by the altar fire 
 of Christ's own life? 
 
 What words are these from the hot heart of 
 an English teacher of preachers ! * ' Shall we re- 
 peat an old sermon? Yes, if you can recover the 
 heat in which it was first made, but if your soul 
 is no longer kindled by it, if the fire is gone out 
 of it, and it is now but a poor dead cinder, then 
 let it be put straightway in the place of cinders. 
 People do not care whether your sermon is old 
 or new; the only question is, 'Is it alive?' Alas 
 for the minister who forces the simple folks to 
 say, 'What he says is faultless enough, but it 
 leaves me strangely cold.' So will it be if the 
 truth which once was a glowing conviction at 
 
HERALDS OF A PASSION 61 
 
 which men warmed their hands becomes but a heap 
 of ashes from which the last glint of fire has died 
 out. That is the tragedy of more pulpits than 
 one cares to think of." 
 
 The greatest thing in the world is love. That 
 never faileth. It is the one thing which He asks 
 of us. We cannot simulate it, if we wear a mask 
 it will slip sometime. If love for man thrills our 
 every act the world will take knowledge of us that 
 we have been with Jesus* 
 
Chapter IV 
 HOLY BOLDNESS 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 HOLY BOLDNESS 
 
 The trouble with most Christian workers — 
 ministers and laymen — is that they are afraid, and 
 now as of old fear bringeth a snare. We are 
 afraid of what people will say, for the moment a 
 man does anything different from the ordinary, 
 that moment he is the target for criticism. Some 
 will call him too zealous, too personal and too 
 insistent. It is only perfect love and perfect con- 
 fidence and perfect abandon to the will of God 
 that casteth out fear and that brings the per- 
 sonal victory. The New Testament has a great 
 deal to say about boldness. We often quote the 
 passage "They took knowledge of them that they 
 had been with Jesus." But why did they? The 
 record says, ''When they saw the boldness of 
 Peter and John.'^ So it seems that boldness was 
 associated in the thought of the people with the 
 life of Jesus. Again the apostle says that he 
 declared the truth ''with all boldness," and the ef- 
 fect of that truth was a thrilling one on himself as 
 well as on those who heard. Conviction breeds 
 conviction. Hear the apostle say that "In noth- 
 ing we shall be ashamed, but that with all bold- 
 
 65 
 
66 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 ness as always so now Christ shall be magnified 
 in my body whether by life or by death." You 
 cannot hold a man like that — no pent-up Utica 
 contracts his powers. 
 
 So everywhere through the teachings of the 
 apostles, we are challenged to a boldness that 
 is not arrogance, or simply self-assertion, or dog- 
 matism, but an authority in boldness that has its 
 birth in a sense of the mighty consequences that 
 are at issue — a sense of the importance and im- 
 minence of a decision that outreaches time and 
 thought. No doubt there were friends who stood 
 by and said to John the Baptist, "Be careful 
 what you say to Herod." But John thundered 
 the truth into the very teeth of the royal sinner 
 though it cost him his own head. "Mind what 
 you say to Felix," Paul's anxious companions 
 might have said, but Paul reasoned of righteous- 
 ness and of judgment to come until the knees of 
 the proud ruler knocked together. "We boldly 
 proclaim the word," says the apostle again and 
 again. It was the same spirit in which he said 
 concerning himself and all of us that we were to 
 come holdly to the throne of Christ and find help 
 in every time of need. 
 
 Thousands of ministers are cribbed, cabined 
 and confined because they do not dare to make 
 the great adventure. Their faith fails them — 
 they will not put it to the test. If they could only 
 remember, "if thou hast faith like a grain of 
 
HOLY BOLDNESS 67 
 
 mustard seed thou shalt say to this mountain, re- 
 move hence to yonder place and it shall remove." 
 So many men who will not leave the safe harbor 
 and put with God to sea ! They are conventional 
 and smug and comfortable. They do not know 
 the joy of a great emprize. In this matter I am 
 speaking out of my own experience. I know the 
 temptations which face every minister through 
 the weakness of the flesh. Some of us are nat- 
 urally timid and shrink from the great contests 
 where there must be a decision — a victory or a 
 defeat. We would rather avoid it if we can, but 
 if we do, we shall only know the shallows of life. 
 For the comfort of some of my brethren, I 
 do not mind saying that again and again in my 
 early ministry, I was put to the test which almost 
 overwhelmed me. More than once I have walked 
 around a city block before I could get up courage 
 to go to the door and talk to a man about his soul's 
 interest. I shall never forget the struggle of my 
 own soul when I was asked to stand on the steps 
 of the City Hall in New York and to address an 
 audience of many thousands of men in the open. 
 As chairman of the Committee on Outdoor Service 
 for the Evangelistic Committee of the city, it was 
 suggested that it would greatly help our cause 
 and secure for our work helpful publicity if we 
 could arrange for a service on the steps of the 
 City Hall. When I asked permission, I was passed 
 on by the city officials from one department to 
 
68 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 another, but at last permission was granted, and 
 we were told that we should have all the police 
 protection that was necessary. I was quite aware 
 that in my audience were many who were more 
 inclined to scoff than to pray. I knew there were 
 anarchists and socialists by the hundred in front 
 of me, who cared for none of these things. It 
 was not an easy matter to screw my courage to 
 the sticking point and to say with shut teeth, as 
 Garrison said long before, **I will not equivocate 
 and I will be heard, ' ' and say without fear in the 
 face of all classes and conditions of men ''There 
 is none other name given under heaven among men 
 whereby ye must be saved but the name of Jesus,'* 
 or to say with Peter on the day of Pentecost, 
 "This same Jesus ye have taken and by wicked 
 hands have crucified. ' ' 
 
 It was not an easy thing for me, with a tem- 
 perament that shrinks from notoriety, to stand 
 on the seat of an automobile in Wall Street, under 
 the windows of J. P. Morgan's office, and preach 
 the unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ to a surg- 
 ing crowd; to stand on the steps of the Custom 
 House, the historic spot where the great political 
 leaders, presidents and senators of the United 
 States had stood, and to speak to thousands of 
 men, who looked up into my face, concerning the 
 one thing to which I had been called in the Chris- 
 tian ministry. 
 
 But out of every one of these experiences, which 
 
HOLY BOLDNESS 69 
 
 were so trying to me that I could hardly gather 
 courage to speak, there came such grace into my 
 own heart that in a few minutes I forgot all 
 about the crowd and only remembered my mes- 
 sage and my Master. Scores came to me as I 
 spoke at these places and told me how they had 
 decided to go back to their old manner of life and 
 to accept Jesus Christ as their Saviour. Some 
 of them were back-sliders, some had been super- 
 intendents and local preachers and class leaders, 
 but they had come into the city and had hidden 
 themselves away. They had said, * ' I have worked 
 hard for many years, now I will rest.'* In rest- 
 ing it soon happened that they lost their zeal, 
 and soon their love for the Master had become cold 
 and indifferent. I had the pleasure of knowing 
 that in many cases they came back to their old love 
 and united themselves for vital service with the 
 Church of the Living God. And many who heard 
 the Gospel for the first time — aliens by wilful 
 choice and wicked life from the kingdom of God 
 — came back to their Father *s house and to His 
 yearning love. 
 
 It was when I stood on the steps of the City 
 Hall, bringing home to the members of the church, 
 with all the force of which I was capable, the 
 fact that they were chosen of God for the world's 
 redemption and that they needed to throw them- 
 selves with uncalculating devotion into the work, 
 that I repeated several times the two words which 
 
70 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 stand at the head of this chapter, and urged that 
 those who were followers of Jesus, who counted 
 not His own life dear unto Himself, should them- 
 selves be able to proclaim with boldness His 
 truths and to stop short of no sacrifice for Him. 
 I delivered my soul with great earnestness of the 
 message which it seemed to me God had laid upon 
 my heart. It was some weeks after that when 
 one of the most successful preachers in America 
 laid his hand on my shoulder and said, "I owe you 
 a debt I shall never be able to pay,, and all on 
 account of two words which you used, but which 
 I believe were sent by the Holy Spirit. "When I 
 went home after hearing your message, those two 
 words kept ringing in my ears, 'Holy boldness, 
 holy boldness,^ and I said to myself, 'You are a 
 coward. You do not dare to venture. You will 
 not do what you know you ought to do. You are 
 afraid of that fine congregation that gathers at 
 your morning service. You want to observe all 
 the proprieties and have the most dignified and 
 proper service. You would not dare to preach a 
 message straight to their hearts and to urge them 
 to give themselves to Jesus Christ on the spot. 
 You would not dare to send your deacons among 
 that congregation and ask them to urge men and 
 women to be reconciled to God. ' I thought about 
 it and I prayed about it, and the more I thought 
 and the more I prayed, the more the conviction 
 laid hold upon me that I must make the great 
 
HOLY BOLDNESS 71 
 
 adventure. In order to preserve my own soul 
 alive, I must cast myself into the breach. I re- 
 membered how He said, * If any man will save his 
 life, he shall lose it, and if he will lose his life 
 for my sake and the GospePs, he shall find it.' 
 On the next Sabbath morning I called my officials 
 into the study and told them that I was greatly 
 moved. I felt that something ought to be done 
 and done at once; I feared that perhaps they 
 would not like it and that the congregation might 
 feel like resenting it, but I had in my heart 
 the same feeling which Luther had when he said, 
 'Here I stand, God help me, I can do no other.' 
 I told them all that was on my heart, and we had 
 a time of great heart searching and agony before 
 God. I asked them to spend the week in thought 
 and in prayer, and on the next Sabbath morning 
 as we gathered the atmosphere seemed to be sur- 
 charged with spiritual conviction. 'I want you,' 
 I said, 'tt) help me take the message this morning 
 and bring it to the thought and conscience of the 
 people for immediate action.' " 
 
 So, my friend said, when he had given his mes- 
 sage as hot with yearning as he knew how to 
 give it, he called the officials to the front, and, in 
 the presence of the congregation, charged them to 
 carry the message of the Master to their friends 
 among the people. *'It was such an hour as we 
 had never witnessed in the church. Strong men 
 bowed their heads upon the pews before them 
 
72 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 and many of my leaders were in tears. When I 
 gave the invitation for men and women to stand 
 for Christ and proclaim their choice of Him as 
 their life leader, one and another and another 
 responded until more than forty men and women 
 came to the front, and clasping my hand, made 
 a solemn promise to be true to God. I count that,'* 
 said the preacher, *'the greatest hour in my min- 
 istry hitherto, and, if I am ever tempted to be 
 unfaithful, I hope I shall hear those words 'holy 
 boldness' ringing in my ears, and that I may 
 never prove recreant to the call of my Lord." 
 
Chapter V 
 CULTURE 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 CULTURE 
 A LOAD OR A LIFT 
 
 May my tongue falter and my pen forget its 
 cunning before I say or write one word that 
 hinders any man in his search for the deepest and 
 broadest^ulture of which his nature is capable. 
 True culture should increase our capacity, en- 
 large our ability and quicken our perceptions. 
 When properly applied, it is the handmaid of 
 religion as well as the husbandman of the mind. 
 But is it possible that such a beneficent thing 
 may be throttled in its purpose, so that it becomes 
 a source of spiritual death instead of life? Here 
 the appeal must be not to theory but to fact. Does 
 anyone doubt that German Kultur came to be 
 a bhght upon the individual and the world? Ger- 
 many was unequaled in her intellectual attain- 
 ments of a certain kind, but the effect of it all 
 on her scholars in the atrophy of spiritual vision 
 and power will ever remain as an indictment of 
 a godless culture that cannot be overlooked or 
 explained away. Are we not right then in asldng 
 ourselves, ''Is the culture which I have and to 
 which I aspire strengthening my devotion to those 
 
 75 
 
76 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 things which are pure and lovely and of good 
 report? Are the most cultured men I know the 
 most devoted to the highest interest of humanity 
 and the most uncalculating and unselfish in the 
 measure of their service?" Surely there can be 
 no doubt that the standard of unselfish service is 
 the one by which, in the last analysis, the great- 
 ness of men will be determined. There has been 
 no dissent to the sublime affirmation of the Gali- 
 lean Teacher — ^**I ai!ite|^ng you as he that 
 serveth," and *'he that woSllfc||^chief among you, 
 let him be the servant of all!^^k|^^HMuiapply 
 this standard, the record of cultur^?no^!ways 
 pleasant reading. Emerson made his literary 
 bow to the world in his Harvard Phi Beta Kappa 
 oration on the alienation of men of letters from 
 the affairs of national life. 
 
 Like wealth and power of any sort, culture has 
 its insidious temptations. First of all, it is com- 
 pelled to be analytical and critical. It takes things 
 to pieces. Its flowers lose their perfume in the 
 study of calyx and sepal. \There is no song in 
 the nightingale 's throat when the scalpel is search- 
 ing for the source of its melody. ^It comes to the 
 city of Man-Soul as most of our railroads come 
 to town, through the purlieus of poverty and 
 waste. Because it does not find beauty there, it 
 is tempted to think the city has none. Because the 
 city's soul is not in the street, it is quite inclined 
 to believe that it has none. It loves to say it is 
 
A LOAD OR A LIFT 77 
 
 a searcher after truth for truth's sake, and is im- 
 patient with the pragmatic test. 
 
 What is truth for truth's sake? If you mean 
 a truth that is sterile, that does not eventuate in 
 life, then it is an impertinence in the sight of 
 God and man to talk of that kind of truth. From 
 the standpoint of a life spent in association with 
 Greek and Roman philosophers, who freely en- 
 couraged suicide and lived lives whose abomina- 
 tions smeUed to heave]^||fl|iPte had good reason 
 when he asked of ij^^Bltered Man before him 
 * ' What yjgkaj^ij^m^^Q, found out^ ^s any man 
 of cultur^aeea^to find out — "For this cause 
 was I born, that I might witness to the truth. 
 / am the truth." The only truth that counts inj^ 
 the realm of morals and religion is felt truth — 
 truth that is vital and imperative. A formal 
 creed is only the skin of truth stuffed. It is as 
 useless as a last year's bird nest on the boughs 
 of time. It is only when truth becomes incarnate 
 that the world bows its knee to it and accepts it. 
 That was what happened when a brown-frockedi 
 monk was walking up the holy staircase at RomeJ 
 and when the heart of an Oxford don wasi 
 strangely warmed in Aldersgate Street. 
 
 Another temptation to which culture is 
 especially susceptible is pride. It is fair to say 
 that those who most reveal it are those whose 
 culture is really limited, but, alas, there are so 
 many of that kind! It is always true that 
 
78 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 knowledge may be proud that it knows so much, 
 but wisdom will be humble that it knows so little. 
 There was a never-to-be-forgotten day when a 
 freshman in another college strolled into the 
 museum at Harvard. It was the opening of a 
 fairyland to him. Eager-eyed he was gazing at 
 specimen after specimen and wishing that he knew 
 more about them, when a sweet-faced man, whose 
 smile would have made summer in the Arctic, was 
 standing at his side. Captivated by the man, the 
 freshman heard him say, '* These are my pets. 
 May I tell you about them"?" He lifted a trilobite 
 and told the ignorant boy how that fossil was old 
 when Pharaoh build ed the pyramids and Attic 
 poets sang. With infinite patience he answered 
 questions which must have seemed foolish. When 
 the wonderful man was interrupted and called 
 away, the freshman asked a guide, ''Who is that 
 man?" "Don't you know — that is Agassiz!" 
 
 It is always true that a little learning is a dan- 
 gerous thing and most of us with all our culture 
 have yet but little knowledge compared with what 
 
 I is before us, and yet we are proud. Edison has 
 said, ' ' No man knows one seven-billionth part of 
 
 I anything." There is an arrogance of ignorance 
 which we greatly condemn, but there is an arro- 
 gance of culture which ought with greater justice 
 to be condemned, because the cultured man ought 
 to know better. 
 
A LOAD OR A LIFT 79 
 
 Culture is tempted to interest itself in the form 
 of things. It needs to be reminded 
 
 ** 'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant.*' 
 
 It is more life and fuller which is the need of the 
 hour. John Stuart Mill was the greatest thinking ■ 
 machine in England in the last century. At twelve 
 years of age he knew more Greek than most of the 
 professors in Oxford, and at fourteen the greatest 
 mathematicians took off their hats to him. At the 
 morning walk with his father, at the mature age 
 of thirteen, they discussed the problem of Gib- 
 bon *s "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire." 
 When I was a boy in college, few names were more 
 quoted in cultured circles than his, but I have 
 seldom heard his name mentioned in the last 
 twenty years. His latest historian says of him, 
 ' * There was no fire under his boiler. ' ' His culture 
 was aloof and academic. He had no thrill of 
 human interest, no glow of conviction. Toward 
 the world's needs, he was as heartless as a graven 
 image. When asked how he would feel if the prin- 
 ciples he advocated were universally accepted, he 
 said, '*! would not feel." He was the consum- 
 mate flower of the culture of his time, but it was 
 the culture of the dilettanti. 
 
 Perhaps no two men of the same age better 
 illustrate the difference between culture and ser- 
 vice than Erasmus and Luther. Erasmus was the 
 greatest scholar of his day. There were none to 
 
80 HEEAEDS OF A PASSION 
 
 challenge his supremacy. He thoroughly agreed 
 with the principles of Martin Luther, but when 
 Luther's friends asked him to come out in the 
 open and stand with him he said, ''Why should 
 I lose my living or my head?" He realized all the 
 abominations of the Church of Rome. He said 
 that instead of saying their prayers the monks 
 were eating gingerbread that they might take 
 more kindly to their beer, but he left Luther to 
 fight alone for God and men. If he had only stood 
 with the little monk at the Diet of Worms he could 
 have changed the thought of half the world and 
 projected himself for the help of men through 
 untold millenniums. Luther sighed over his de- 
 flection and might have chanted with Browning in 
 his Lost Leader, 
 
 *'Just for a handful of silver he left us, 
 Just for a riband to stick on his coat." 
 
 If you want to see culture as a load, read 
 Fronde's ''Times of Erasmus and Luther." If 
 you wish to see culture as a lift, there is Henry 
 Drummond, the scholar; "Chinese" Gordon, the 
 soldier, 
 
 'Who always and everywhere 
 Gave his help to the weak, 
 His sjmipathy to the suffering, 
 His substance to the poor, 
 And his heart to G-od." 
 
 There is Philhps Brooks, the pre^icher, and Bor- 
 den P. Bowne, the greatest philosopher that 
 America has produced and one of the most faith- 
 
A LOAD OR A LIFT 81 
 
 ful, eager-hearted Christians I have ever known. 
 
 Li Conferences and Assemblies and Synods 
 throughout the country, I have had ministers by 
 the score ask, ''Why is it that with deeper, more 
 scholarly culture and training, I am less effective 
 in moving men to God?" The answer is not far 
 to seek — your culture has become a load instead 
 of a lift. While you have been busy with the de- 
 lights of scholarship the fire has gone out upon 
 the altar. Thus so many of the prophets of God 
 stand shivering around the altars where the fires 
 have failed and are as impotent as were the 
 priests of Baal to call down the fires of God from 
 the ascenting heavens. 
 
 Knowledge ought to be power. Culture, if it is 
 to be a lift and not a load, must be transmuted 
 into service for God and man. When the culture 
 of the mind exceeds the culture of the soul, a 
 man is educated beyond his capacity. He is doing 
 too much business for his capital. It is a prosti- 
 tution of talent when he who knows the most does 
 the least. It might be well for the best of us 
 with all our culture to lay our finger on our lips 
 and listen to the greatest Teacher of all the ages, 
 Son of Mary and Son of God, who says to His 
 friends in words which the world will never allow 
 to be discounted or to perish, ' ' If any man will do 
 my will, he shall know of the doctrine." 
 
Chapter VI 
 THE PASSION OF THE PROPHETS 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE PASSION OF THE PROPHETS 
 
 No one can look at Sargent's picture of the 
 Prophets in the Boston Public Library without 
 feeling a tug at his soul. What glorious men they 
 were — ^laymen all of them — gatherers of sycamore 
 fruit, cup bearers to the king, but whatever else 
 they did, one great absorbing passion for the 
 Israel of God was on their souls. They were not 
 only forth-tellers of the truth^ but they Kved it 
 out. There was Israel turning from God, giving 
 herself up to idols, and they were sore distressed. 
 See stem old Elijah, the greatest of them all, for 
 whom to this day every child of Abraham sets a 
 chair at his solemn feast, the man whom they say 
 locked up by his prayers the cisterns of the 
 heavens and carried the keys of them for three 
 long years in his pocket ! How shall he let Israel 
 and its king go on to their destruction? A king is 
 seeking him but he will not temporize his message, 
 ''Art thou he that troubleth Israel?'* Elijah 
 answered, "Not I, but you and your father's 
 house have wrought the overthrow of this peo- 
 ple. ' ' And he told him that in Naboth 's vineyard, 
 where of all places on God's green earth the king 
 
 85 
 
86 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 would least desire to meet the prophet of Jehovah. 
 See him on Carmel calling back Israel to her old- 
 time faith. He will not temporize or equivocate, 
 stern old prophet of righteousness. He will not 
 let things drift. It is a time of decision. ''Choose 
 ye this day whom you will serve ; if God be God, 
 serve Him, and if Baal, serve him." More of the 
 Saviour's challenge — decide something, don^t 
 drift ! And then that a race to Jezreel — a king in 
 a chariot bested by a prophet on foot, and the 
 prophet oversped by the rain drops of the mercy 
 of God! Small wonder that when John the Bap- 
 tist came, they said it was Elijah, and when Jesus 
 came they said it was the spirit of Elijah and the 
 thunderous voice of John the Baptist rolled into 
 one. 
 
 And here is Isaiah, perhaps the most gifted of 
 all the prophets, a man of great natural endow- 
 ments, intensified and consecrated to the loftiest 
 ends by his self-surrender to God. He had the 
 intellectual grasp of a great statesman and the 
 fervid imagination of a great poet. He was a 
 seer who could see. How his yearning soul por- 
 trayed the love of God and His righteous indig- 
 nation! What irony, what ridicule, what ch^- 
 lenge to heights of spiritual experience! How 
 utterly all his gifts were mastered as he sought to 
 win Israel back to God. His were the words that 
 Jesus loved to quote, and no prophetic words are 
 oftener on the lips of preachers today than the 
 
THE PASSION OF THE PROPHETS 87 
 
 words of this marvelous prophet. He is the great 
 evangelist, the proclaimer of the good things. 
 **Ho, everyone that thirsteth oome ye to the 
 waters, buy wine and milk without money and 
 without price." And those Messianic prophecies 
 — *'He was wounded for our transgressions; the 
 chastisement of our peace was laid upon him, and 
 by his stripes are we healed. ' ' May my soul stand 
 in holy wonder before such a flaming heart and 
 fiery tongue until I myself have caught the blaze 
 of iti 
 
 Of Jeremiah it was an English preacher who 
 said, ** However many Isaiahs there may have 
 been, I am glad there was only one Jeremiah." 
 He seems to think that one weeping prophet and 
 one set of jeremiads was enough, but would it not 
 tend toward the multiplication of good shepherds 
 who would give their lives for the sheep if there 
 were many who could come to say '*0 that my 
 head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of 
 tears that I might weep day and night for the 
 slain of the daughter of my people." 
 
 What shall I say more for the time would fail 
 me to tell Daniel and Nahum and Amos, gatherer 
 of sycamore fruit, and Jonah, and Habakkuk, 
 whose prayer, Webster said, was the most sub- 
 lime thing in literature, and all the long list of the 
 prophets down to Malachi, who with a challenge 
 which bums in our soul, cries, ''Will a man rob 
 God," and all the yearning of his soul condensed 
 
88 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 into one glorious prophecy at which the heart of 
 God's people will bound for joy until they see the 
 prophet himself in the land of his fruition, ' * Then 
 they that feared the Lord spake often one to 
 another and the Lord harkened and heard it, and 
 a book of remembrance was written before him 
 for them that feared the Lord and that thought 
 upon His name, and they shall be mine, saith the 
 Lord of Hosts, in that day when I make up my 
 jewels and I will spare them as a man spareth 
 his own son that serveth him.'* 
 
Chapter VII 
 THE PASSION OF GREAT EVANGELISTS 
 
CHAPTER Vn 
 
 THE PASSION OP THE GREAT EVAN-GBLISTS 
 
 Where shall we begin the story of evangelism? 
 Who were the great evangelists? We can only 
 touch upon one here and there, for their number 
 is legion. Prophets, apostles, the church fathers, 
 the reformers themselves were all what they were 
 because of the great evangel which trembled upon 
 their lips. Perhaps we cannot do better than to 
 mention first that wonderful evangelist, John 
 Bunyan. How we love him! How we have 
 marched with him to the city of the great King, 
 the new Jerusalem! He has led us all the way 
 into the green pastures by the delectable moun- 
 tains, past the slough of despond, and all the won- 
 derful path until we come in sight of the City of 
 the Saved. All this he crowded into a narrow 
 cell in Bedford Jail. It was there he heard sweet 
 angels singing lauds for him, and because of what 
 happened there, he would be willing to go back and 
 stay "until the moss grows over my eyebrows 
 rather than in anywise to deny my Lord.'* Look 
 at his wonderful characters and the names they 
 bear — Mr. Great Heart, Christian, Faithful, and 
 Mr. Valiant-f or-Truth. How many souls has John 
 
 91 
 
92 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 Bunyan led out of the City of Destruction? He 
 could not have led others if he had not gone that 
 way himself. It is out of his own great expe- 
 rience that he is speaking, and no man can lead 
 others unless he himself is led of God. John 
 Bunyan had known the sinful life, but with what 
 fulness and depth he came to know his Saviour is 
 found in the sweet story of Grace Abounding. 
 May we all stand at last with Mr. Valiant-for- 
 Truth and see the heavens filled with the chariots 
 of God and hear the trumpets sound for us on 
 the farther shore. 
 
 Next we turn for a moment to the man who 
 traveled more miles to bring the gospel to the 
 lost, as Birrell says, ''than any man who ever 
 bestrode a beast^'; a man whose devotion was 
 marvelous from the days when he was a student 
 in Lincoln College in Oxford, but who says that 
 all that availed him nothing until that day which 
 Christendom will never allow to pass out of its 
 sight, when his heart was "strangely warmed" 
 and he went out to do for England more than was 
 done by the armies and navies of England in the 
 whole length of his life. What courage and what 
 toil! Ease and he had parted company, and as 
 for money, he lived upon a pittance and gave 
 away more than $200,000. Abused and maligned 
 in his time, he could say, '*! leave my reputation 
 where I leave my soul — in the hands of God.** 
 He said to his brother Charles, ''When I devoted 
 
PASSION OF GREAT EVANGELISTS 93 
 
 to God my ease, my time, my labor, did I exempt 
 my reputation." So lie traveled 225,000 miles 
 and preached 2,400 sermons, and, amid misrepre- 
 sentation and abuse, never knowing the delights 
 of love at home, subject to incessant attacks of 
 the mob, the pulpit and the press, he did not abate 
 a jot of heart or hope until he had reached the age 
 of eighty-eight and ceased at once to labor and 
 to live. Canon Farrar says, "Overwhelming 
 evidence exists to show that the church and peo- 
 ple of England in his day were dull, vapid and 
 soulless and the preaching was careless, the land 
 steeped in immorality. To Wesley was granted 
 the task for which he was set apart by enviable 
 consecration — ^the task which even an archangel 
 might have envied him, of awakening a mighty 
 revival of religious life in those dead pulpits in 
 that slumbering church and moribund society. 
 His was the religious sincerity which not only 
 formed the Wesley Community but, working 
 through the heart of the very church which had 
 despised him, he flashed fire into her whitening 
 embers. It was he who discovered that lost secret 
 of Christianity — the compulsion of human souls. 
 He was the voice that cried over the valley of dry 
 bones, ' Come from the four winds, oh spirit, and 
 breathe upon the slain that they may live.' " In 
 Westminster Abbey, that great temple of silence 
 and reconciliation, one may read three of his 
 great sayings : one fuU of holy knowledge, *'I look 
 
94 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 on all the world as my parish"; another full of 
 triumphant confidence, ' * God buries His workmen 
 but His work goes on"; the third, his cry in age 
 and feebleness extreme, the best of all is, ** God 
 is with us." 
 
 In the long list of great evangelists, no name 
 stands out clearer in the light of an absorbing 
 passion than that of Whitefield. To him two con- 
 tinents acknowledge their debt and keep green 
 the traditions of his marvelous power. Most of 
 the leaders and charmers of men have come to 
 their service from under the low lintels of the 
 poor, and Whitefield was no exception. Uniting 
 with Wesley to form the Holy Club at Oxford, he 
 was at first morbid in his spiritual earnestness. 
 He wore patched clothing, ate coarse food, prayed 
 under the trees far into the winter nights in such 
 agony of soul that the sweat ran down his face. 
 At last he laid hold on God by simple faith. He 
 had traveled his own via dolorosa and through 
 pain he came to peace ; thereby he was enabled to 
 help others who journey alone in the cypress path. 
 
 Ordained at twenty-two, he began to preach 
 immediately with tremendous effect. Probably 
 no man since the days of Paul excelled him in 
 sacred eloquence. Said John Newton, ''If you 
 ask me who is the second preacher in the world, I 
 do not know; but if you ask me who is the first, 
 there can be but one answer." 
 
 Franklin went to hear him plead for his orphan 
 
PASSION OF GREAT EVANGELISTS 95 
 
 school in Georgia, but resolved he would give 
 nothing. After listening a little, he decided to 
 give his coppers, then his silver and then his gold, 
 and emptied his pockets into it when the plate 
 was passed. Hopkinson left his money at home 
 purposely, but was moved to borrow of his neigh- 
 bors. Garrick said he could repeat the word 
 *' Mesopotamia" so that it moved him to tears. 
 
 But after all has been said about his eloquence, 
 his power with men depended most upon the pas- 
 sion of his soul which absorbed every lesser am- 
 bition and used every God-given power to lead 
 men to the personal choice of Jesus Christ as 
 Saviour and Lord. He was a kindred spirit with 
 Jonathan Edwards in this regard and together 
 they led the Great Awakening of our young Re- 
 public. No man was more untiring in devotion 
 than he. At one time he writes, *'Lord when thou 
 seest me in danger of nestling down put a thorn 
 in tender pity into my nest,'^ and again, "I am 
 determined to go on until I drop, to die fighting 
 though it be on my stumps." 
 
 When nations forget their dependence upon 
 Him and personal allegiance is lightly held and 
 the individual conscience is benumbed, when form 
 triumphs over spirit, and worship degenerates 
 into heartless ceremonials, God sends his mes- 
 sengers of flame. So came the old prophets to 
 Israel; so came Savonarola to Italy; Luther to 
 Germany; Knox to Scotland j Wesley to England, 
 
96 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 Edwards and Whitefield to America. In such 
 manner God in all ages has called back His people 
 from apostasy. 
 
 When Whitefield preached in Boston, the city- 
 was at white heat. Twenty thousand heard him 
 in Philadelphia, and thirty thousand crowded Bos- 
 ton Common to listen to him. Mr. Cooper, pastor 
 in Boston, said, ** Under Whitefield 's preaching 
 more people came to me in one week in deep 
 concern about their souls than in the whole 
 twenty-four years of my ministry." Mr. Prince, 
 another pastor, said in substance the same thing. 
 Mr. Webb said about 1,000 in deep conviction 
 came to him in three months. The pastors unite 
 in saying the same spirit prevailed for more than 
 a year and a half after Whitefield had gone. 
 
 Speaking of his passion. Dr. Parsons said of 
 him, in a sermon preached on the day of his death : 
 **We were convinced that he believed the message 
 he brought to be of the last importance. ' ^ On the 
 marble cenotaph above his dust at Newburyport 
 these words are carved: **As a soldier of the 
 Cross, humble, devout, ardent, he put on the whole 
 armor of God, preferring the honor of Christ to 
 his own interest, repose, reputation or life.*' In 
 thirty-four years he crossed the Atlantic thirteen 
 times and preached 18,000 sermons. For his 
 seal he had a lambent flame and under it the 
 motto, "Let us seek heaven." 
 
 In his time, Whitefield, like Wesley, was ac- 
 
PASSION OF GREAT EVANGELISTS 97 
 
 cused of almost every crime. As Dr. Squintum, 
 he was caricatured by Foot, the actor, from one 
 end of Great Britain to the other, even after he 
 was in his grave. He was called the clerical pick- 
 pocket, and accused of appropriating his great 
 collections to himself, but those accusations only 
 live in history to fasten obloquy upon those who 
 made them. In Cowper^s words, 
 
 "He loved the world that hated him. The tear 
 That dropped upon his Bible was sincere. 
 Assailed by scandal and the tongue of strife 
 His only answer was a blameless life." 
 
 The record of his last hours at Newburyport is 
 thrilling beyond words to tell. He is preaching 
 his last sermon. His subject is "Faith and 
 Works." With far carrying tones he cries, 
 "Works, Works, a man get to heaven by Works! 
 I would as soon think of climbing to the moon on 
 a rope of sand ! ' ' But his voice begins to fail, ' ' I 
 go, ' ' he said, ' ' to my everlasting rest. My sun has 
 risen, shone, and is setting. Nay, it is about to 
 rise and shine forever. I have not lived in vain, 
 and though I could live to preach Christ a thou- 
 sand years, I die to be with Him, which to me is far 
 better. ' ^ He was to preach that night, but he felt 
 he could not. He took his candle to go up to bed, 
 but midway on the outside stairs he paused with 
 his candle in his hand. Answering the importu- 
 nity of the people, he spoke with the passion of 
 his blessed Lord until the candle burned down to 
 
98 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 its socket and went out. Wonld that a picture of 
 that scene at Newburyport might hang in every 
 preacher's study in America! He went up to his 
 room and to an agonizing night, then 
 
 "Just as the sun in all his state 
 Illumined the eastern skies 
 He passed through glory's morning gate 
 And walked in Paradise." 
 
 Whitefield was no organizer like Wesley. He was 
 the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ** Pre- 
 pare ye the way of the Lord, ' ' and America owes 
 him a debt which it does not fully appreciate and 
 which it can never repay. 
 
 Time would fail me to tell of Fox and Tennant 
 and Brainerd ; of Finney, losing his strength that 
 he might gain his power; of Moody saying, 
 ** There shall be one man completely consecrated 
 to show the world what God can do with a soul 
 entirely given up to His service; and scores of 
 men, some of whom have finished their evangel in 
 victory, and others who still move the people up 
 to God, both in the pulpit and out of it. They 
 are the heralds of a passion which stopped not at 
 the Cross, and they shall share here and hereafter 
 the glory and benediction of their Lord." 
 
Chapter VIII 
 THE TEACHER'S PASSION 
 
CHAPTER Vni 
 
 THE teacher's PASSION 
 
 There is one miracle of grace by which a wan- 
 dering soul comes back to God. There is another 
 by which a soul itself touched with infinite love 
 feels an absorbing passion to go after another 
 who, Uke itself, had gone astray. There is no 
 place where one who has felt this high commission 
 can hope to win greater trophies than in the Sun- 
 day School. Birrell says of John Wesley that 
 **he was out of breath pursuing souls." If only 
 the same panting desire might be born in the heart 
 of every Sunday School teacher! 
 
 Thompson pictures, in ''The Hound of 
 Heaven," God out after the soul; pursuing it up 
 and down the universe. The hunted one flees, as 
 men so constantly flee, from the highest and seeks 
 refuge in every human thing that could be called at 
 all good, but the point of the poem is that the good 
 must never hide men from the best. So the soul 
 is never allowed to rest in lower things ; just as 
 the soul would nestle in some new covert, she is 
 turned from it by the imperious best of all that 
 claims her for its own. 
 
 Now in the teacher's life there are many oppor- 
 
 101 
 
102 HEEALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 tunities to advance the good, to develop intelleo- 
 tual taste, to encourage the scholar's thirst for 
 learning, but none of these must stand in the way 
 of the one thing for which the teacher is called tc 
 his high eminence. Nor literature, nor ideals of 
 any sort can take the place of the one ideal — the 
 perfect life in Christ Jesus. So the Sunday 
 School of itself is not an end; teaching of itself 
 is not an end. The result of the Sunday School 
 is the production of life and character, and the 
 end of teaching is that Christ may be formed in 
 each scholar, the hope of glory. 
 
 In order to teach such lessons, it goes without 
 saying that one must have experience in the thing 
 he teaches, so that no one may turn upon him and 
 say, ''Sayest thou this thing of thyself or did 
 another tell it thee of me!" Has he first hand 
 information? Does he speak out of a rich and 
 full experience, which has been wrought in him 
 by holy ventures and has entered through the 
 travail of his soul into the substance of his life? 
 To a heart which has such an experience, what a 
 challenge presents itself! Twenty-seven millions 
 of young people in this country who are not in the 
 Sunday School and almost as many millions more 
 already within its reach ! 
 
 Of old one crusade followed another. That the 
 sepulchre of Jesus might be won from the Sara- 
 cen, Peter the Hermit cried *'God wills it," and 
 hundreds of thousands of men marched on the 
 
THE TEACHER'S PASSION 103 
 
 first crusade. Fifty years later a million and a 
 quarter set out for Jerusalem, no one of wliom 
 saw the Holy Land. So one crusade followed 
 another, and little enough resulted from them. 
 Perhaps the saddest of all crusades was the Chil- 
 dren's Crusade in 1212. An army of thirty thou- 
 sand French children, unarmed, led by a boy 
 nwned Stephen, set out for the Holy Land by way 
 oc Marseilles, and a similar army of German 
 ciildren marched over the Alps and came to the 
 ]y^editerranean. They thought the sea would di- 
 v.de for them and they would pass over to the 
 Holy Land in safety. Most of them perished on 
 tie march, or were lost at sea, or were sold into 
 s'avery. 
 
 Now the time has come for a crusade for the 
 ciildren. A challenge of unspeakable importance 
 rists upon the heart of the church. Shall we be 
 a^le to win these millions to the service of the 
 Kaster? You may rear buildings, but the torch 
 0* the incendiary may consume them or the temp- 
 eit may overthrow them, but when we put our 
 tmch upon the plastic soul of youth, it will remain 
 tiere when the wax has changed to adamant. We 
 nust not bungle our work. We see men and 
 •vomen who were the subject of malpractice in 
 tleir youth by careless or ignorant servant or 
 piysician. They will walk the path of life to the 
 g'ave and every step they will go with pain. Life's 
 fpctions instead of being a joy have become an 
 
104 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 agony. Sad as is that picture, it is not for a 
 moment to be compared with the work of one who 
 bungles in the forming and transforming of the 
 soul, who brings only human diagnosis and rem- 
 edy in the place of the wisdom and power of God. 
 Every teacher must realize that her students sre 
 looking not simply into her face but into her soil, 
 that the thing she is is greater than the scierce 
 she teaches. Garfield said if he could sit on oae 
 end of a log aud have Mark Hopkins, ,Presid€nt 
 of Williams College, on the other, it would be ill 
 the college he required. 
 
 Here as nowhere else comes the gospel of .he 
 personal touch. I cannot bear to think that he 
 soul of a child should be either mishandled or 
 neglected. That thrilling story of human expe- 
 rience, ''Twice Bom Men," was called in Englaid 
 ''Broken Earthenware." I do not want the far 
 vase of life broken. Thank God it sometines 
 happens that a broken vase may be mended >y 
 His grace so that it can hold the water of life, hit 
 let me protect and surround the vase so thai it 
 may not be shattered. It is a sad comment on h.e 
 passion and the efficiency of our teaching foce 
 that one out of every five who come to the Suncay 
 School is won to Christ in the School, one afer 
 they leave the School, and three are not won at 
 all. It is time we taught our children that tley 
 are never too young to surrender their hearts to 
 Jesus Christ. It is time our teachers felt tiat 
 
THE TEACHER'S PASSION 105 
 
 their work has been in the most important part 
 failure, unless by personal experience their mem- 
 bers are coming to know Him whom to know 
 aright is life eternal. 
 
Chapter IX 
 THE PASSION OF THE CHURCH 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE PASSION OF THE CHURCH 
 
 If one were asked what should be the passion of 
 the church, there could be but one answer from 
 progressive or conservative, and that would be 
 "to serve the world." The Master's thrilling 
 challenge would rise to our lips, "Ye are the light 
 of the world, ye are the salt of the earth." The 
 church ought not to be divided into two camps 
 when it comes to the application of this great 
 principle. At heart, we believe, the Church is 
 really one, though it has often happened that, as 
 in the old story, men looking at different sides of 
 the same shield have called it silver or gold and 
 have fallen to blows over their differences, when 
 if each had taken the viewpoint of the other, their 
 differences would have disappeared. May we 
 venture an irenic word with the hope that it may 
 serve in the end to make matters a little clearer 
 and to unite for a common purpose forces which 
 have seemed at times to be arrayed against each 
 other? 
 
 A little careful thought will show that there is 
 no antagonism between a personal and a social 
 gospel. It is no doubt true that men have been 
 
 109 
 
110 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 slow to realize that iu addition to the burden 
 which rests upon them from a sense of personal 
 wrong-doing, they are also face to face with 
 corporate iniquities and national selfishness and 
 organized brute force, and that somebody is to 
 blame for it. "We are all diseased and with our 
 surfeiting and wanton waste have brought our- 
 selves into a burning fever, and we must bleed for 
 it." It is doubtless true that a conscience awak- 
 ened to responsibility in social guilt will soon 
 focus itself upon the more immediate circle of life 
 about its possessor and bring to sight the hideous 
 consequences of his own self-seeking, unfairness, 
 indulgence and distrust. But it is also true that 
 in most cases, the conscience does not become 
 awakened to a sense of social guilt until it has 
 become sensitive by a* personal touch with Him 
 who is the illumination of the soul. We do not 
 come to love God through love to men, but we 
 come to love men through love to God, and then 
 the two are seen to be in essence one. 
 
 The great task which the church has is to bring 
 men first to loyalty to Jesus Christ as Saviour and 
 Lord; from that will flow the second loyalty to 
 God's world, to do justly, to love mercy and to 
 walk humbly with Him, and with that will go the 
 passion to spend and to be spent for those for 
 whom Christ thought it not beneath Him to go 
 himself to the cross, and who said, '*If any mar 
 will come after me, let him deny himself and tak'* 
 
THE PASSION OF THE CHURCH 111 
 
 up his cross daily and follow me." There is a 
 third loyalty to which our attention is called, 
 namely, loyalty to the Church, to prayer, the study 
 of the Bible, the worship of God's house, the fel- 
 lowship which comes with a life of love. No one 
 will accuse Henry Sloane Coffin of Union Theolog- 
 ical Seminary with not having the modern view- 
 point. He says : *' Religion is not primarily some- 
 thing useful, but something fruitful. It is not a 
 means of improving mankind alongside of other, 
 means, such as education, art, politics and moral- 1 
 ity ; it is the parent of them all — their fountain of \ 
 life. It is not one among several factors cultivat- 
 ing the soil of humanity, it is the source of its fer- 
 tility. We are busy today directing the flow of 
 Christian motives into many trenches to irrigate 
 tracts of life which hitherto have been desert. 
 And the church must stand then, through its min- 
 istry, not simply as a mere instructor imparting 
 facts; the pulpit stands for the application of 
 truth to create character. The minister preaches 
 not to make men wise about books, or scientific dis- 
 coveries, but to give them the power and grace of 
 an endless life. The final test in preaching does 
 not then lie in the fact imparted, but in the use of 
 any fact to create an ennobled life." Dr. Crocker 
 has well said, ''When the teacher has set a fact in 
 the mind, like a brick in the wall, he has practically 
 finished his work, but the preacher must plant 
 that fact in the soil of the soul to grow as the seed 
 
112 HERAiDS OF A PASSION 
 
 of a new life. " It is true that the great need of 
 the time is a social conscience, but what is a social 
 conscience'? Is it something concerned only with 
 hours and wages and profits and conveniences? 
 We certainly need a corporate conscience, so that 
 we will not permit corporations to do what indi- 
 viduals have no right to do. But the social con- 
 science that we need is one that shall concern 
 itself primarily with those social duties and obli- 
 gations out of which grow a noble life — a con- 
 science about prayer and worship and Christian 
 nurture, and not a social conscience that only 
 concerns itself in a fair division of things. The 
 stability of society is not dependent primarily on 
 industrial conditions but on religious duties and 
 spiritual ideals. 
 
 Dr. Roberts truly says, "There are such things 
 as social or collective sins, but conscience does not 
 deal with them on that plane. Sin is an intensely 
 individual thing and the man who has had a con- 
 troversy with his conscience knows that it is the 
 ambassador within him, not of a certain social 
 order, but of the moral order of the whole uni- 
 verse. It is not the mere reverberation in a man's 
 soul of a social order evolved by way of a natural 
 selection; conscience is native, elemental, primi- 
 tive. It is impossible to get behind the beginning 
 of it. The thing which invests wrong with wrong- 
 nees, and right with rightness and speaks in ^he 
 
THE PASSION OF THE CHURCH 113 
 
 imperative mood is an indigenous thing, ante- 
 cedent to the most primitive society." 
 
 Roger Babson affirms: "Religion is both the 
 anchor and the rudder of prosperity. The real 
 security of the nation is not its militia, but its 
 religion. The real protectors of our homes are 
 not the policemen but rather the preachers. Only 
 as religion saves the world, can we save ourselves. 
 A religious spirit makes better employers, better 
 workers, and a better public spirit with which to 
 deal. Furthermore, without such a religious 
 spirit, all legislative, cooperative and other plans 
 are of no avail. Religion is to the world what a 
 spring is to a watch, and the sooner it is generally 
 recognized the more people will be healthy, happy 
 and prosperous." This man of business makes 
 bold to say that the three things which the busi- 
 ness world, the world of labor and of capital need 
 are not the nostrums of socialism but spiritual 
 power, faith and prayer. We hear, and properly, 
 a very great deal about the material form in which 
 Christianity should express itself, but are we not 
 in danger of putting so much emphasis on works 
 that we forget the source of conduct? If we are 
 to have fruit, must we not realize that fruitage 
 depends upon rootage? What will the hand do 
 if the heart ceases to beat ? If we have no wealth 
 of soul to give, of what use will mechanics be? 
 
 One of the most illuminating of modern writers 
 has said, "The most urgent demand is not for 
 
114 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 service, but for spirituality. A soul fed from on 
 high will certainly bow down and lift the lowly, but 
 a generation that has lost faith in God and ceased 
 to love Jesus will not serve humanity.'^ The gos- 
 pel of Jesus was nothing more nor less than the 
 gospel of the inner life. His whole inaugural, the 
 declaration of His purpose in the world could be 
 condensed into a single sentence, ' * I am come that 
 they might have life and that they might have it 
 more abundantly. ' * The beatitudes are not bless- 
 ings upon belief, they even go deeper than conduct 
 and service; they go down to the roots of life. 
 What are His parables — ^nothing more nor less 
 than pictures of life ; the leaven, the mustard seed, 
 the wise virgin, the used talents, the good Samari- 
 tan. The abundance of the soul life is the thing 
 which He came to bring, and so far as Jesus Him- 
 self was concerned, it was not His teachings — ■ 
 though they were the most sublime ever uttered 
 • — ^but the spirit of His life. When He examined 
 Peter for his ordination. He did not ask him ques- 
 tions of creed or ethics, or doctrines of any sort; 
 the only question which He asked, and that He 
 repeated again and again, was "Lovest thou me?" 
 It was the things that Jesus stood for that won 
 the disciples at the first, or in any other age of the 
 world ^s history. It was a life. It was He who 
 said, ''I am the life.'^ The world has had many 
 great teachers, but who goes to a life of self-denial 
 along a path so hot as to blister their feet because 
 
THE PASSION OF THE CHUECH 115 
 
 of these teachings ? What was it that sent Father 
 Damien to the leper, Paton to the South Sea 
 Islands, Morrison to China, Livingstone to Africa, 
 Grenfell to Labrador? Nothing but a personal 
 love for a personal Saviour. May we always re- 
 member that we must give ourselves to the needy 
 and to the oppressed. A Unitarian has written, 
 ** There is more danger that the source of per- 
 sonal piety will dry up than that children will 
 starve or go naked. ' ' 
 
 There is deep wisdom in the words of Paterson 
 Smith in his "People's Life of Christ": **Men are 
 teaching laws of economics and principles of 
 utilitarianism and ethical persuasions on the duty 
 of doing good, but they are leaving out Christ; 
 and they are not succeeding and they know it. 
 Our political and industrial and social leaders feel 
 their impotence, their lack of some great spiritual 
 impulse to make their projects work. It is re- 
 ligion that is needed. It is not enough to tell us 
 to do right. We want a pressing motive and a 
 power," 
 
 There is only one challenge I wish to give — * * Is 
 thy heart as my heart? If it be, give me thy 
 hand." There is room for almost infinite differ- 
 ences of opinion but there can never be any dif- 
 ference in the matter of a whole-hearted devotion 
 to the Kingdom of God. The dying Scott said to 
 Lockhart, his son-in-law, * * Give yourself royally. ' ' 
 Paul, speaking of Jesus Christ, says in a verse 
 
116 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 that is matchless and stupendous, "Christ gave 
 himself." Dying millionaires have given away 
 their millions only when Death, the grim archer, 
 had sent his arrow to their hearts and the rigors 
 of death had loosed their grasp upon their treas- 
 ure. But Jesus spent His life in giving himself. 
 If, after having spent a life in ease and self- 
 indulgence, in toying with our tasks and in shirk- 
 ing all we could, we should come up to the heavenly 
 gate, over which is written, ''These are they who 
 came out of great tribulation," would we have the 
 effrontery to pass in? Would we not ask for some 
 lesser gate where we might hide our selfish and 
 diminished head? But Heaven has no such gate. 
 Its twelve gates are all alike, one motto is over 
 them and one word is the password at each. 
 When a rich man died a neighbor asked, "How 
 much did he leave," and the village wag replied, 
 "He left every cent." All you can hold in your 
 cold dead hand is what you have given away! 
 Well says Bishop Quayle, ' * The angel at the gate 
 of life will make inquiry of every comer, ' Did you 
 spend all your estate?' " When Ian MacLaren's 
 "Doctor of the Old School" was dying, he faintly 
 murmured, "I am tired to death!" He had used 
 up every ounce of his strength and ability to help 
 those to whom he ministered as a good physician. 
 There is Whitefield utiUzing the last bit of his 
 strength, stopping on the stairs on the way to his 
 chamber to preach a last message to the crowd at 
 
THE PASSION OF THE CHURCH 117 
 
 Newburyport, and then going' upstairs to die. 
 There is Wesley, riding more miles for the Master 
 than any man who ever bestrode a beast, giving 
 all he had of money and energy and time, and at 
 the last leaving, as his biographer says, *'a 
 good library, a well-worn clergyman's gown, a 
 much abused reputation and so — the Methodist 
 Church." Paul used that gigantic word of his 
 Lord, ''He emptied Himself" to the last drop of 
 His blood, and as for Paul himself, hear his own 
 modest epitome of his service — ' ' In stripes above 
 measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. 
 Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes 
 save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once 
 was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night 
 and a day I have been in the deep. In journeyings 
 often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in 
 perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the 
 heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the 
 wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among 
 false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in 
 watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings 
 often, in cold and nakedness." 
 
 Let us put that up against the spirit of our own 
 devotion that it may be a challenge that shall 
 nerve us in times when the fire bums low and the 
 path of dalliance seems to be strewn with flowers. 
 
 "Which shall we choose to be, an Ananias or a 
 Paul, — an Ananias keeping back part of the price 
 and dying of shame, or to empty ourselves for aD 
 
118 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 time and be filled of God*s grace for all eternity? 
 The apostle says, ''What things were gain I 
 counted lost for Christ." He takes no credit to 
 himself, but he says, ** Though I preached the 
 gospel I have nothing to glory of, for necessity 
 is laid upon me. Yea, woe is unto me if I preach 
 not the gospel. ' * Having seen the vision, he must 
 be true to it, and the one thing that glorified his 
 life down to j;he time when he said, * 'I have fought 
 a good fight, I have finished my course, I have 
 kept the faith," was the blessed fact that he **was 
 not disobedient unto the heavenly vision." Do 
 we not need to have something of his burden? 
 We are not to misunderstand this. We shall know 
 something of what he said, that though he was 
 cast down, he was not forsaken; though he was 
 poor, he was making many rich; though he was 
 in tears, yet was he also in bounding joy. The 
 very measure of his anxiety and longing became, 
 on the other hand, the measure of his delight and 
 victory when the desire of his heart was accom- 
 plished. So we would hear him saying, **I have 
 great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart, 
 for I could wish that myself were accursed from 
 Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to 
 the flesh." It is the same spirit which a father 
 knows when he would rather have lost his life 
 than that his own son should be killed, the same 
 spirit which a mother feels when she will gladly 
 wear herself out for the sake of her child, and will 
 
THE PASSION OF THE CHURCH 119 
 
 not leave him even at the prison door or the 
 scaffold's step. It is for this spirit that we yearn. 
 When the world sees it, it wiU be no longer faith- 
 less but believing. 
 
Chapter X 
 THE PASSION FOR SERVICE 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE PASSION FOR SERVICE 
 
 It goes without saying that whosoever will fol- 
 low his Master must live a life of service. "I am 
 among you as he that serveth," said the Master, 
 and washing His disciples' feet, He set the pace 
 for helpful, gracious ministries of every sort. 
 AVhat we need is a vast number of charter mem- 
 bers for the Society of the Towel and the Basin. 
 When an imperious mother asked of Jesus that 
 one of her sons should be on His right hand and 
 the other on His left in His Kingdom, she was 
 speaking from the standpoint of the same selfish- 
 ness and greed which we are facing today. We 
 find men who want preeminence even in the min- 
 istry. There are plenty of us who would like to be 
 major prophets, but who among us wants to be 
 classed as a minor prophet? Who envies the man 
 who is known as James, the less? It was very 
 significant that when some time ago, reporters 
 asked men in the streets of New York who was the 
 greatest man in America, different men were 
 named because a different valuation was placed 
 upon the effect of their lives, but the basis on 
 which each of them was named was not of position, 
 
 123 
 
124 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 of office, of power, or of money, but only on the 
 basis of service. Whatever difference there might 
 be in the estimate of their achievements, there 
 was no difference as to the cause of true greatness. 
 It has always been so — the history of the world 
 shows plainly that it has counted as its greatest 
 men those who have most truly served. Every 
 institution and every organization is measured by 
 its service to mankind. When a nation proves 
 itself unfitted for a task, it must pass away, and 
 the same thing is true of the Church. What a 
 fulfilment of this declaration we have seen in the 
 last few years ! 
 
 "Lord, where are kings and empires now 
 Of old that went and came?" 
 
 He hath put down the mighty from their seats and 
 exalted those of low degree. We have seen many 
 of the thrones of Europe emptied, discarded 
 crowns by the dozen have fallen into the scrap 
 heap. Why all this? Because they were useless, 
 because God said, ''I am tired of kings — I suffer 
 them no more." There is no more any divine 
 right of kings. The motto of the Prince of Wales 
 — "I serve" — is the only motto fit to be engraved 
 over any throne. 
 
 After traveling through the country and being 
 in touch with schools and colleges, as well as with 
 the men of the street, after reading modern 
 literature in the magazines and weekly papers, 
 one is impressed with the fact that there is a sort 
 
THE PASSION FOR SERVICE 125 
 
 of materialistic epicureanism which is seeking to 
 make its way in high places. There is a drying up 
 of the great source of life, of the old sense of the 
 outreach of humanity, of destiny outlasting the 
 stars, and a high calUng that is not ended with 
 dollars and position. As a recent writer in one 
 of our leading magazines has said, '* Robbed of 
 eternity, we mean to make time pay to the utmost. 
 Hence this nervous, feverish activity. Our anx- 
 iety is an unconfessed manifestation of our im- 
 mense sense of loss. We have but a few minutes 
 in which to rob the house of life, let us seize all 
 the articles in sight. Death, the householder, is 
 even now waiting to take us into custody.'^ As 
 we look back at our old Puritan ancestors, we pity 
 them for their narrow quarters, and all the hard- 
 ships which they must have endured from lack of 
 the conveniences which have become necessities 
 to us. We live so much more comfortably and 
 easily. In the dread winters which they passed, 
 they must fell the trees and chop the wood and 
 throw it into the great fireplace where most of 
 the heat disappeared up the chimney. To light 
 their homes, they had the tallow dips, which they 
 prepared with much labor. Now if we want heat 
 or light, we press a button. Conveniences of 
 every kind await our nod. Handicapped as our 
 fathers were, we often wonder was their life worth 
 living. But as a matter of fact, they seem to have 
 been rather happier than we are. The wilful 
 
126 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 poverty of our spiritual lives must vastly impress 
 us as we contrast that with the holy joy which is 
 reflected in the story of their lives, which they 
 have handed down to us. 
 
 At a recent church convention, the question 
 arose on what issue to put special emphasis. 
 Some thought it should be on social regeneration, 
 some that it should be on legal enactments to 
 outlaw sin, and others that it should be the appli- 
 cation of religion to business, but it was finally 
 decided that the crying need of the hour was first 
 to get some religion that could be applied, to have 
 some ideals that were good enough to regenerate 
 the world when they were applied. 
 
 A recent article in one of our leading magazines 
 makes bold to say that the destiny of man was 
 once talked of as a spiritual mystery, connoting 
 endless endeavor and opportunity. Terror and 
 splendor attended the Word. Now the highest 
 dream of high destiny is a porcelain bathtub, or 
 some safe shelter behind a wire screen where we 
 shall be impervious to the attack of germs. We 
 have need of a profounder faith, a more poignant 
 fear than this age knows. 
 
 One of our New York papers asked this ques- 
 tion, ''What is the matter with our mode of life?'* 
 and these were the answers given by the men 
 whom the reporters stopped on Broadway: "We 
 are drifting away from the faith of our fore- 
 fathers. There are 65,000,000 heathen in Amer- 
 
THE PASSION FOE SERVICE 127 
 
 ica. That alone answers the question. ' ^ Another 
 said, ''People are fighting for the material things 
 of this world, instead of the spiritual. ' ' And the 
 next man said, ''We are drifting away, from the 
 teachings of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
 We need to be transformed instead of reformed. 
 We are in the grip of a materialistic philosophy." 
 I think we are all agreed that the need of the 
 hour is the restatement of the great verities which 
 always have been and always will be supreme in 
 the lives of men. We want the same upholding 
 strength which the patriarchs knew and by virtue 
 of which they went out to a land which they knew 
 not, because they heard the call of God. We never 
 needed more than we need now the consolations 
 which uplift the soul in the midst of catastrophe 
 and loss. They tell us that our churches are 
 empty, but our asylums and our morgues are fuU. 
 There is nothing that will so steady men in the 
 midst of strain and calamity to play the game, to 
 fight the good fight to the end, as to realize the 
 besetting and forefending God. If we have lost 
 our faith, our hope in immortality, how did we 
 lose it? Must we not go back to the place where 
 we had it last and see if we cannot find it? "If 
 we have been robbed of incalculable hopes and 
 aspirations, who robbed us? Do we not owe it 
 to ourselves and to our children to bring the 
 robbers to trial and to take from them that which 
 
128 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 they have filched from us, making us and our 
 children hankrupt indeed?" 
 
 One of our liberal papers some time ago had 
 two editorials, the heading of which seemed like 
 an affront to our whole Christian life. The first 
 question asked was, ' ' Can democracy tolerate the 
 Church?" At first one was inclined to be indig- 
 nant at the iconoclast who could even frame such 
 a question, but it all resolves itself into a question 
 of fact. If the church is the friend of the people, 
 if the church is helpful in those things which are 
 lovely and of good report, if the principles which 
 it advocates make life safer, property more se- 
 cure, and conserve the highest interest of society, 
 there can be no question but that democracy must 
 be the greatest ally which the church has, and 
 the church the greatest organization to consum- 
 mate a true democracy. The other question was, 
 "Can Christianity tolerate the church?" The 
 answer to that must lie in the question, "What 
 is the church in its essential spirit and what is it 
 seeking to become?" Christianity cannot tolerate 
 the church unless the church is Christian, that is 
 unless it has the principles of Christ in its life, 
 unless it puts the first things first and enthrones 
 spiritual values above all others and gives itself 
 uncalculatingly and unstintingly to those things 
 to which the Master gave Himself. It must cease 
 to discriminate between the rich and the poor, or 
 even between the ignorant and the learned, or 
 
THE PASSION FOR SERVICE 129 
 
 between those socially at the top or socially at the 
 bottom. Jesus was no respecter of persons. He 
 has one gospel for the Pharisee and the Publican 
 — one gospel for Dives and for Lazarus. 
 
 Customs hoary with age have passed away be- 
 cause they were useless, because they did not 
 benefit mankind. Once slavery flourished in every 
 land. That was service under compulsion. It was 
 right dominated by might, and God said, ' * It must 
 go." The same is true of organization and 
 methods of business and everything else that does 
 not serve humanity. Their doom is written in the 
 nature of things. Customs which curse and not 
 bless cannot long survive, for they bear their 
 doom in their own deeds. 
 
 We invite to our clubs and to our secret socie- 
 ties men who occupy a similar social plane, or who 
 are congenial, or men of common tastes. If we 
 want to make a club of the church, we can do the 
 same thing there, but such a church will go down 
 to ruin. A church must serve all classes and con- 
 ditions of men, and he who has caught the spirit 
 of his Master will go with a bounding love and 
 a heart on fire to give service to those who need it 
 most. It needs to be everywhere proclaimed that 
 while the first duty of a man is to get his own 
 soul right with God, he cannot grow in grace or 
 even preserve his own sense of acceptance with 
 God unless he throws himself with absolute aban- 
 
130 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 don into the same work for which his Master lived 
 and died. 
 
 "God does with us as we with torches do 
 Not light them for themselves; 
 For if our virtues go not forth of us 
 'Twere all the same as if we had them not." 
 
 The church need have no fear of anarchy or so- 
 cialism or sabotage or skepticism of any sort, if 
 it will give itself to service. 
 
 But it is not enough, as we have said, to care 
 for the lesser needs of our human life. '* A man's 
 life consisteth not in the abundance of the things 
 which he possesses." "We are to lead men to a 
 larger life. Here is our greatest service. We 
 must seek for better conditions for men, but we 
 must realize that first and last and all the time 
 our object is to make better men. 
 
 I know scores of fathers and mothers who are 
 in anguish not because their sons are not well 
 paid, not because they do not live in good houses 
 and under the best of sanitary conditions, but 
 their hearts are breaking because their children 
 are reaping the wages of unrighteousness, be- 
 cause in the midst of all their plenty they have 
 turned from God to serve the world, the flesh and 
 the devil. No one can read the daily papers with- 
 out staggering under the fact that men of social 
 prominence and many of our leaders, both among 
 workers and capitalists, are men of ungodly lives 
 who use the advantages of better conditions of 
 
THE PASSION FOR SERVICE 131 
 
 labor and better returns of capital to weigh their 
 souls down to hell with the additional temptations 
 which these successes have given them. 
 
 The church is to be the regenerator of the world 
 — to throw itself into the breach, and since it 
 stands supremely for spiritual things, it is to put 
 these things at the very front. How can a pastor 
 sleep nights or enjoy the comforts of life until he 
 is conscious that he is doing the utmost within his 
 power to put life under the ribs of this death? 
 How can any member of the church go to his place 
 of worship, receive the holy sacrament, which 
 marks afresh the sacrifice of his Lord and recalls 
 his own holy promise to be true to Him, without 
 realizing that by daylight and by dark he must 
 sound forth the call of his Master by his lips and 
 by his life? When the passion of such a service 
 shall possess the heart of the church, the world 
 will throw off its indifference and the church will 
 come to its own by the preeminence of its life and 
 the power of its sacrifice. 
 
Chapter XI 
 HOW TO NOURISH THE SACRED FIRE 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 HOW TO NOURISH THE SACRED FIRE 
 
 ''Follow me,'' said Jesus, "and I will make you 
 fishers of men." A man cannot become such of 
 his own self. He is not equal to a task so super- 
 nal. As we have been saying all along, nothing 
 but the touch of the Master's passion can create 
 or conserve the soul's spiritual life. 
 
 Boreham remarks on the transformation which 
 took place in the life of Thomas Chalmers. He 
 was the brilliant pastor of a little church in 
 Kilmany, a marvelous preacher when he was only 
 twenty-three. He was a good pastor and won 
 their unstinted admiration and love. But they 
 could not understand why when they came to the 
 kirk on the Sabbath day he fulminated at that 
 little company against the heinous wickedness of 
 theft, of murder, and of adultery. After they had 
 spent a hard week's work in field and stable, why 
 should they be berated by their minister as if they 
 had spent the week in open shame? "This," says 
 Chalmers' biographer, "continued from 1803 to 
 1811, but then something happened. Chalmers 
 ceased to thunder against the grosser crimes and 
 against the iniquities of Napoleon, but every day 
 
 135 
 
136 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 he had something fresh to say about the love of 
 God, about the cross of Christ, and about the way 
 of salvation.'^ ''He would bend over the pulpit 
 and press us to take the gift," says one of his 
 hearers, "as if he had it that moment in his hand 
 and would not be satisfied until every one of us 
 had got possession of it. And then when the ser- 
 mon was over and he rose to pronounce the bene- 
 diction, he would break out afresh with some new 
 entreaty, unwilling to let us go until he had made 
 one more effort to persuade us to accept it." 
 
 He says that in 1811 he was converted. When 
 he was called away to a great city parish this was 
 what he said to his humble parishioners : "For the 
 first eight years of my twelve with you, I thun- 
 dered away against crimes of every sort, but the 
 interesting fact is that during the whole of that 
 period I never once heard of any reformation 
 being wrought among you. It was not until the 
 free offer of forgiveness through the blood of 
 Christ was urged upon you that I ever heard of 
 those subordinate reformations which I made the 
 ultimate object of my earlier ministry. You have 
 taught me that to preach Jesus Christ is the only 
 effective way of preaching morality, and the les- 
 son which I have learned in your humble cot- 
 tages, I shall carry into a wider field." 
 
 Bunyan said the same thing long before the 
 days of Chalmers. He says : " I went for the space 
 of two years crying out against men's sins and 
 
HOW TO NOURISH SACRED FIRE 137 
 
 their fearful state because of them. After which, 
 the Lord came in upon my own soul with peace 
 and comfort through Christ. He gave me many 
 sweet discoveries of blessed grace through Him. 
 Wherefore now I altered in my preaching and did 
 much labor to hold forth Christ in all His offices, 
 relations and benefits unto the world. After this 
 God led me into something of the mystery of the 
 union with Christ. Wherefore that I discovered 
 and showed it to them also." Ah, if we could 
 only measure to the heights of that personal ex- 
 perience of which it is written "What we have 
 seen and felt with confidence we tell." 
 
 Theories may be cold, but reality is full of pas- 
 sion. When one has an experience of his own, 
 then he hastens to bring others into the same 
 blessed knowledge, and when once others are 
 brought in his own confidence is thereby multi- 
 plied. What a miracle of grace to be able to win 
 a soul to God and what infinite comfort to the 
 soul who wins another! Nothing can take the 
 place of it. Mr. Valiant-for-Truth cries out, when 
 the summons to go hence seized him, ' ' My sword I 
 give to him who shall succeed me in my pilgrim- 
 age; my courage and skill to him who can get 
 them ; my marks and scars I carry with me to be 
 my witness that I have fought His battles who 
 will now be my rewarder." When a man has 
 victories hung up in the high halls of memory, 
 how his faith increases! He won them himself 
 
138 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 at the point of a Damascus blade, which is the 
 word of God, and he is fain to say with David, 
 * * There is none like it ; give it to me. ' ^ 
 
 It is a sad thing in the life of the individual 
 when the child spirit dies ; when he ceases to won- 
 der and adore. How supremely true it is in the 
 life of him who proclaims the message that he 
 will lose its power when the wonder and marvel 
 of it fades out of his soul! A man need have no 
 troubles over the miracles of the first century, 
 when he sees them reproduced in his own life at 
 the touch of the pierced Hand. If one can feel the 
 compelling glow of those adoring words, 
 
 "When I survey the wondrous cross 
 On which the Prince of glory died 
 My richest gain I count but loss 
 And pour contempt on all my pride." 
 
 he will be able to say 
 
 "Jesus, I love thee, thou art to me 
 Dearer than ever mortal can be." 
 
 As well think of restraining the ardor of the 
 bridegroom as to lay restraining hands upon his 
 devotion. His love is as fire shut up in his bones. 
 That will transform the pulpit and kindle a blaze 
 which will draw men from every walk in life to see 
 it burn. 
 
 We must make more personal the message 
 which we bring to men. Dr. Jefferson will not be 
 accused of failing to emphasize the social note or 
 of being unduly moved by his emotions, but in his 
 
HOW TO NOURISH SACRED FIRE 139 
 
 Yale Lectures, he says, ' ' Many a man is preaching 
 to a dwindling congregation because his sermons 
 have lost the personal note. He chills by his 
 vague generalities, or enrages by his wholesale 
 denunciation. This is not the age in which the 
 preacher can afford to lose the personal touch. 
 Many forces conspire to blur the edges of indi- 
 viduality and melt men into a common mass. ' ' 
 Even organized philanthropy has a tendency to 
 lose the individual. It is the lack of this personal 
 touch which is multipljdng our problems and deep- 
 ening the blackness of human tragedy. Thou- 
 sands of men and women all over the world have 
 lost their grip upon the high things of life because 
 no one but God feels for them. There is no one on 
 earth who cares for their souls. Men are lost to 
 the church as soon as they are submerged in the 
 crowd. Dr. Jefferson adds, ''In fact, the preacher 
 is in danger of losing himself." 
 
 It is a matter of history that on one occasion 
 when Julia Ward Howe invited Charles Sumner 
 to meet a distinguished guest at her house, he 
 replied, " I do not know that I wish to meet your 
 friend. I have outlived my interest in individ- 
 uals." Recording in her diary that night the 
 Senator ^s surly remark, Mrs. Howe wrote after 
 it, ''God Almighty, by latest accounts, had not got 
 so far as this." 
 
 The great secret of power is the personal touch. 
 God Himself put on a soul and a body when He 
 
140 HERALDS OF A PASSION 
 
 came to ns. They were arms of flesh and blood, 
 like ours, which stretched wide upon the cross, 
 and which when taken down and folded over the 
 lifeless bosom invisibly folded a saved world in 
 their embrace. 
 
 "What a beautiful testimonial that was to the 
 matchless personality of Henry Drummond, that 
 when an artisan was dying, his wife knocked at 
 Drummond 's door and said, ''My husband is 
 deeing', sir. He's no' able to speak to you, and 
 he's no' able to hear you, and I dinna ken as he 
 can see you ; but I would like him to hae a breath 
 o' you aboot him afore he dees." No books can 
 ever nourish a believing heart as will the goodness 
 and patience and truth which is reflected in in- 
 dividual lives. 
 
 Here then is the conclusion of the whole matter. 
 Jesus said, "I am come that ye might have life 
 and that ye might have it more abundantly. ' ' By 
 vital contact with Him who is the way, the truth, 
 and the life, we must keep our souls alive. The 
 inner light must not fail ; our passion for the souls 
 of men must never cease. But if, alas, our passion 
 for the souls of men has in any sense failed, we 
 must get it back. We must have our trysting 
 place with God and meeting Him there. He who 
 heareth in secret will reward us openly, and we 
 shall have power with men. However great our 
 natural abilities, they are only the channels 
 through which the tides of holy passion and power 
 
HOW TO NOURISH SACRED FIRE 141 
 
 must run. Let us not mistake the channel for the 
 power, and let us be careful that no act of ours 
 shall sever our connection with the source of 
 power. The secret of the Lord is with those who 
 fear Him. In fellowship with Him we shall catch 
 His love — a love which stopped not at the cross. 
 We cannot do better than to utter the prayer of 
 the old hymn which for generations has aroused 
 the church to a waiting pentecost. 
 
 "Oh, that it now from heaven might fall, 
 And all our sins consmue, 
 Come, Holy Ghost, for thee I call. 
 Spirit of burning come. 
 
 "Refining fire, go through my heart, 
 Illuminate my soul. 
 Scatter thy life through every part, 
 And sanctify the whole." 
 
 The Master's call is upon us. It is hot with 
 haste. Rise up ; let us go ! 
 
 THE END 
 
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