RV 4010 .H9 
 
 Hut chins, William James, 
 
 If Treacher's ideals and 
 
 The preac 
 
The Preacher's Ideals 
 and Inspirations 
 
Lectures on the George Shepard Foundation 
 Bangor Convocation, jgi6 
 
 The Preacher's Ideals 
 and Inspirations 
 
 By 
 
 WILLIAM J. HUTCHINS 
 
 Professor of Homiletics in the Oberlin Graduate 
 School of Theology 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1917. ^y 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York; 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London : 2 1 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
To 
 Mr FATHER 
 
Foreword 
 
 THE addresses which make up this 
 book were prepared not for the ex- 
 traordinary preacher, but for the 
 average man who in a small parish in the 
 face of grave difficulties tries to continue true 
 to the dreams of his youth, to the teachings 
 of his seminary days, and to the demands of 
 the living present. 
 
 The lecture on Abraham Lincoln was given 
 to an evening audience in which laymen pre- 
 dominated. 
 
 The colloquial style of spoken address has 
 been retained in the hope that it may bring 
 to the reader a little of the atmosphere of 
 frank comradeship which pervaded all the 
 gatherings of the Convocation. 
 
 I cannot fittingly express my gratitude to 
 the President and Faculty of Bangor Semi- 
 nary, and to the friends made at the Convo- 
 cation, whose friendship is a permanent asset 
 of my life. 
 
 W. J. H. 
 
 Oberliftf Ohio* 
 
Contents 
 
 I. The Preacher and His Times . 1 1 
 
 IL The Preacher and His Sermon . 47 
 
 ni. The Preacher and His Bible . . 87 
 
 IV. Abraham Lincoln : The Preacher's 
 
 Teacher 121 
 
 V. The Preacher and His Master . 155 
 
I 
 
 The Preacher and His Times 
 
THE PREACHER AND HIS TIMES 
 
 AS a man looks through a preacher's 
 eyes at the Hfe of our times, there 
 seems at first much to dishearten 
 him. We turn back with envy to the great 
 days of the Puritans, when men actually went 
 to church. Old Judge Sewall writes in his 
 diary, " Extraordinary cold storm of wind 
 and rain ; blows much more as coming home, 
 and holds on," or again, " Bread was frozen 
 at the Lord's table, yet was very comfortable 
 at meeting." If we could only have been 
 preachers then I We read long articles 
 about the workingman's indifference or hos- 
 tility to the Church. Edward Lewis, himself 
 a minister and formerly a pastor, writes of 
 the Church as a diminishing and decaying 
 institution from which power and authority 
 in the world are swiftly passing. We are 
 contiimally reminded that the Church is ec- 
 clesiastical bric-^-brac. The query is raised, 
 Has the Church collapsed ? Are we to have 
 a constituency for Christianity ? 
 
 In a preachers' magazine I read of the 
 
 13 
 
14 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 Rout of the Theological Seminaries, and the 
 imagination conjured up the spectacle of 
 faculties, theologues and buildings, all swiftly 
 decomposing into a heterogeneous mass to 
 form some lateral moraine along the margin 
 of the glacial stream of history. At last a 
 man who has honestly identified his life with 
 the life of the Church and the ministry re- 
 minds himself of the old soldier beggar, who 
 bore upon his breast this legend : " Have 
 pity on me, been in five battles, wounded 
 twice, children four, total eleven." But just 
 as we have voted, unanimously, that the 
 Church and especially the ministers and pre- 
 eminently the seminaries have descended to 
 Avernus, there appear above the horizon 
 certain facts, which force us to move a re- 
 consideration of our question. I might re- 
 mind you of certain facts of history ; for 
 example in 1803, so great and good a man 
 as the first President Dwight of Yale de- 
 clared, " We have a country governed by 
 blockheads and knaves. Who can paint 
 anything more dreadful this side of hell ? " 
 It was at this very time that the lower courses 
 of the fair structure of our Republic were 
 being laid. Writing in 185 1, Amiel said, 
 " The age of great men is going, the epoch 
 of the ant-hill is beginning. The statistician 
 will register a growing progress, and the 
 
The Preacher and His Times 15 
 
 moralist a gradual decline." Yet this epoch 
 of the ant-hill was the epoch of Webster and 
 of Lincoln, of the men who were to create 
 America's golden age. From the begin- 
 ning of recorded history there have been 
 great and good men who have sat raven-like 
 upon the pallid bust of the mighty past, and 
 muttered their ** Nevermore." Macaulay, 
 you remember, said, ** All my days I have 
 seen nothing but progress and heard of noth- 
 ing but decay." 
 
 But I prefer to speak to you of certain 
 facts of the present. And the first fact, a 
 most hopeful fact, is the current discontent in 
 the industrial and in the religious world, 
 technically so called. In the industrial world 
 the discontent reveals itself indeed in strikes, 
 lockouts, murders. In the ** religious " world 
 the discontent is less conspicuous ; it is none 
 the less real. While educated Japan throws 
 away her idols for the worship of the emperor 
 or the worship of nothing; while China 
 throws her gods into the river ; while India 
 is being stirred to scepticism of the ancient 
 systems ; with us religious discontent reveals 
 itself in the ceaseless search for some new 
 thing, or in the total disregard of all organ- 
 ized religion. 
 
 Now the encouraging feature of the cur- 
 rent discontent is this : Almost invariably it 
 
i6 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 is discontent with the unchristlike aspects of 
 our life and thought. I know that there are 
 Pharisees intent upon maintaining the present 
 status who will deny this. I know too that 
 there are men intent upon winning pleasure, 
 leisure, treasure, who would seem to disprove 
 the asserdon, but speaking broadly we are 
 convinced the statement is true. Men refuse 
 to rest content, as they look upon New York 
 ** reeling crazy drunk with money," and look 
 upon New Yorkers staggering with starva- 
 tion. They rise in wrath against a Christian 
 civilization which in a single year kills nearly 
 three thousand of those who in the darkness 
 of the earth bring to the earth's surface 
 Emerson's " portable climate," a civilization 
 which in a recent year killed or injured nearly 
 200,000 people on its steam and electric rail- 
 ways, a civilization of bread lines and limou- 
 sines. They scorn a commerce which as an 
 author says, " holds in one hand the slum 
 and in the other the mission field ; " a com- 
 merce which might still lead a candid observer 
 to approve the course of the Indian chief of 
 Cuba, who, I read, ordered his people to wor- 
 ship a lump of gold to conciliate the white 
 man's God. Men will not believe that a 
 Church rent by discord can fitly represent the 
 body of Christ. The prevalent discontent is 
 discontent with those aspects of our thought 
 
The Preacher and His Times 17 
 
 and life which are out of harmony with the 
 life and teachings of Jesus Christ. And who 
 is He ? He is the sole Lord and Leader of 
 the Christian preacher. 
 
 Another most encouraging feature of the 
 life of our times is the failure of panaceas. 
 Industrial and political panaceas have been 
 as numerous as the demons who once in- 
 habited the swine of Gadara, and who, you 
 recall, drove their possessors into the sea. 
 In those regions in which the panaceas have 
 been tried most faithfully, they have been 
 found at best to alleviate, never to eradicate 
 the real evils of the world's life. I remind 
 you of Australia, where until the Great War 
 set men upon nobler issues, money love and 
 pleasure love threatened to strangle the life 
 out of men. ** In America," says Jefferson, 
 " we have suffered a heart-breaking disillu- 
 sionment. We expected great things of 
 liberty and education, and have found them 
 broken reeds. Neither our wealth nor our 
 science has given us peace or joy. The four 
 wizards, liberty and education and wealth 
 and science, have performed their mightiest 
 miracles under our flag, but they cannot do 
 the one thing essential, they cannot keep the 
 conscience quick or the soul alive to God." 
 We can now send the recognizable human 
 voice over 4,600 miles of land and sea, but 
 
i8 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 what if that voice shall but echo the death 
 cries of Poland or Armenia ? 
 
 Nor has the *' religious " world been with- 
 out her panaceas. Ever and again some 
 Aaron erects his altar and upon it places his 
 particular pet calf, and cries to our wander- 
 ing Israel, " This is thy god which shall lead 
 thee up out of Egypt ! " But notwithstand- 
 ing seeming temporary success, every one of 
 these panaceas fails, because it fails to deal 
 radically with the radical problem of all re- 
 ligion. And that is what ? Sin. I have un- 
 derstood that Dr. Shedd's theology is some- 
 what out of date. He says at least one true 
 word : "A profound consciousness of sin in 
 the heart, and a correspondingly profound 
 theory of sin in the head are fundamental to 
 any soundness of view in the general domain 
 of theology." And a religious panacea 
 which knows no consciousness of sin in the 
 hearts of men, and offers for the heads of 
 men no theory of sin, but sin's denial, has no 
 healing for the hurt of the daughter of my 
 people. 
 
 Now what is the meaning of this universal 
 discontent, so deep seated, so pathetic? 
 What is the meaning of this failure of pana- 
 ceas ? You have seen a little lost child 
 brought into a police station. The big 
 friendly officers do their best to still his sob- 
 
The Preacher and His Times 19 
 
 bings ; they cannot do it. Kindly neighbour 
 women come, try to still his sobbings, but 
 they cannot do it. At last a woman rushes 
 in, clasps the child to her arms, and the baby 
 is at rest. Perhaps he cannot tell why. The 
 reason is that he has found his mother. 
 Blind, unconsoled, humanity seeks for a 
 Saviour, and unless this world of ours is a 
 mad-house, humanity shall find the Saviour 
 and in His arms be at rest ; but not yet has 
 any man discovered a name under heaven 
 given among men, by which humanity can 
 be saved, other than the name of Him who 
 is the sole Lord and Leader of the Christian 
 preacher. 
 
 Further, as we study the life of our times, 
 we are impressed by a wonderful new aspir- 
 ation, the aspiration after brotherhood. That 
 seems to me a significant story, which Mott 
 tells. A Scotch soldier was brought into the 
 hospital. He was holding fiercely in his hand 
 a German helmet and would not let it go. 
 ** Did you kill him ?" said the nurse. ** No, 
 he was my friend ; " and then the boy told 
 how, when he was wounded so that he could 
 not help himself, he chanced to see a Ger- 
 man soldier, wounded so that he could not 
 help himself. Each crawled slowly towards 
 the other, each staunched the other's wounds, 
 
20 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 each saved the other's life ; and when they 
 were carried to their separate hospitals, the 
 Scotch boy gave the German his cap and the 
 German gave the Scotch lad his helmet, for 
 that day on that field of death they knew 
 that they were brothers. The man who 
 wrote the ** Chant of Hate " would to-day, I 
 suspect, willingly suppress it. You read the 
 word of a military officer after the first 
 Christmas of the war : " Another such day, 
 and our troops will quit and go home." If 
 you give them but the chance to know each 
 other, you cannot make men, manly men, 
 persistently hate each other. 
 
 In labour circles, men are achieving a very 
 real if a very partial brotherhood. Surely 
 the class-conscious struggle is a passing 
 phase. Until with the beginning of " the 
 great mad war," professors lost all sense of 
 humour, and began sending back home their 
 degrees and decorations, we had grown fa- 
 miliar with the fine brotherhood of nien of 
 letters. All truth, wherever learned, used 
 to be, and will once more become, '* the 
 property of men of thought throughout 
 the world." Pan-Americanism is a proph- 
 ecy ; internationalism is a hope. There 
 are millions of men who are daring to cry, 
 ** Above all nations, humanity." Ecclesias- 
 tical federation is in the air. The World 
 
The Preacher and His Times 2 1 
 
 Conference of Faith and Order may summon 
 us to something closer than federation. Our 
 Canadian brothers, our missionaries in China, 
 India and Japan, are shaming our sects at 
 home into some semblance of unity. 
 
 As you go up and down the country, are 
 you not continually delighted and humbled 
 as you think upon the number of ** good peo- 
 ple," as we call them, men whom you meet 
 unexpectedly, to find that they are brotherly 
 men, caring for the things you care for, lov- 
 ing the things you love ? As you meet some 
 crisis of your life you are amazed at the num- 
 ber of people who quietly, unostentatiously 
 but aggressively, do the loving brotherly 
 thing. 
 
 I think of that story of the Civil War. The 
 Confederates were storming some Union for- 
 tifications. In the ascent of the hill, they 
 reached a gully, from which they could not 
 move. The wounded were dying of thirst. 
 A lad of eighteen gathered all the empty 
 canteens he could carry and slipped like 
 a snake to the foot of the hill and filled 
 the canteens at the brook. He must hurry 
 back in full sight of the men on the fortifica- 
 tions. The Union soldiers saw him, but they 
 saw also his purpose, and there burst from 
 the ramparts a volley, not of rifle shots, but 
 of cheers for the man who would die for his 
 
22 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 brothers. Never has there been a time when 
 brotherhood was so dear to men, and men 
 there are whom we count enemies of the 
 brotherly life, who in their hearts applaud, 
 approve, and long to be like the man who 
 pays the price of brotherhood. 
 
 Already the aspiration after brotherhood 
 has become a majestic movement. Put your 
 ear to the ground and you hear its watch- 
 words. In the world of business, you hear 
 two strange old-fashioned words, Honesty, 
 Service, words actually made a slogan by the 
 advertising men of America, except, one 
 would judge, by the advertisers of cigarettes 
 and of whiskey. In the world of inter- 
 national politics, above the noise of battle 
 you hear clear and distinct the watchword. 
 Peace. In the world of ecclesiastics you hear 
 louder than the echoes of the Kikuyu con- 
 troversy, the watchword, Unity. In the 
 world of social life, you hear just one watch- 
 word. Social Salvation, the Redemption of 
 Society. One man seeks to foster rural re- 
 construction, another the social hygiene of 
 the city, another calls us to a crusade of 
 brotherhood on behalf of the negro. , A while 
 ago a modest man, graduate of Western Re- 
 serve University, began to think about the 
 immigrants streaming into the city of his 
 alma mater. He took a camera and caught 
 
The Preacher and His Times 23 
 
 upon his films the evidences of the chicanery 
 and brutality of cabmen towards the immi- 
 grants coming into the city, and that obscure 
 man soon found the courts of law, the public 
 institutions, the municipal offices of Cleve- 
 land, not obstacles to, but vehicles of social 
 redemption. 
 
 Consider the times in which we live, times 
 which furnish an atmosphere for the carrying 
 of such watchwords as these. Suppose that 
 in the time of Frederick the Great a man 
 had uttered such words ; he would have 
 spoken in a vacuum, there would have been 
 no atmosphere to carry them. Yet each one 
 of these watchwords, Honesty, Service, Peace, 
 Unity, Social Salvation, is one word of the 
 evangel of Jesus Christ, the sole Lord and 
 Leader of the Christian preacher. 
 
 Along with this new aspiration we observe 
 as an encouraging fact of our times a new 
 emphasis, the emphasis upon personality. 
 We are coming to discount creeds, institu- 
 tions, constitutions as such. We are coming 
 to recognize the imperious need of the man, 
 the man who can ** lift 'em, lift 'em, lift 'em, 
 through the charge that wins the day." In 
 America we have been obsessed by the idea 
 of salvation by legislation ; but the obsession 
 passes. The thirteenth, fourteenth and fif- 
 
24 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 teenth amendments to the Constitution leave 
 the Negro a slave except in name. Up from 
 slavery he must be led by men, by Arm- 
 strong and Booker Washington and their 
 comrades. Before 1902 we had laws enough 
 to make all business honest, but a man was 
 needed to organize the ethical revolution, in 
 the midst of which we are still fighting. 
 Again and again that word of wide applica- 
 tion comes back to a man, " What the Law 
 could not do." We are forced to appreciate 
 anew the word of Isaiah : '* A man," not a 
 creed, " a man," not an institution, ** a man," 
 not a constitution, ** a man shall be as a hid- 
 ing place from the wind and a covert from 
 the tempest, as streams of water in a dry place, 
 as the shade of a great rock in a weary 
 land." Now what is the meaning of this 
 new emphasis upon personality ? Any com- 
 plete reliance on any human being brings 
 into fatal publicity the pathetic weakness of 
 the man. I suppose that Asquith, Balfour, 
 and Lloyd George are the strongest men in 
 England. They seem like swimmers strug- 
 gling against the currents of Hell Gate. I 
 suppose that the Kaiser is the strongest man 
 on the continent. How puny is the power 
 of a man who even if victorious must bleed 
 his country white. As the world grows 
 thoughtful, is not the world getting ready to 
 
The Preacher and His Times 25 
 
 trust the personality of the Man who once 
 walked in GaUlee, whose touch hath still its 
 ancient power, " man's best Man, love's best 
 Love, the perfect life in perfect labour writ, 
 all men's Comrade, Servant, King or Priest," 
 even Jesus Christ, the sole Lord and Leader 
 of the Christian preacher? 
 
 " In his life, the Law appears 
 Drawn out in living characters." 
 
 Again we are impressed by certain new 
 appreciations. There is in our times a new 
 appreciation of religion. One is perfectly 
 safe in talking of religion with any man one 
 meets upon the street. You recall that word 
 of a friend to Justice Holmes of the Supreme 
 Court : ** There is only one interesting thing 
 in the world, and that is religion." Men are 
 finding that out. When we are all through 
 talking about baseball and football and 
 preparedness and the war itself, the one per- 
 manently, fundamentally interesting thing in 
 the world is religion. The crowds will throng 
 a park, mechanics will pack a shop meeting, 
 taking time from their lunch-hour to hear a 
 man of God as he gives his word from God. 
 Revivalists are heard with all the old time 
 relish even when they speak in coarse, crude 
 language of God and sin, and death and life 
 eternal. If Billy Sunday were speaking upon 
 
26 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 any other theme in the world, could he begin 
 to draw the crowds which flock to hear 
 him? 
 
 Slowly, too, men are coming to appreciate 
 not alone the supreme interest of religion, 
 but its supreme importance. Amos prophe- 
 sies a great famine in the land, not a famine 
 of bread, nor a thirst for water but of hearing 
 the words of Jehovah. Well, the famine has 
 come to many men. To any well fed and 
 healthy soul, there are essential reason and 
 hope and love and the choice of the highest. 
 No word from God I The reason asks the 
 question Why? Why am I here? What's 
 the meaning of Hfe ? What's the meaning of 
 growth? What's the meaning of the per- 
 sistent upward look of men? What's the 
 secret of the great personalities who have led 
 and liberated the generations ? No word 
 from God I The reason starves. 
 
 As the reason considers the great person- 
 alities of the world, love reaches out to em- 
 brace them. Love unless perverted seeks the 
 loveliest. But these loveliest take us by the 
 hand and lead us up to — God? But now 
 there is no word from God, and love is 
 stunned and starved. 
 
 To a healthy soul, there are essential great 
 hopes. When we are at our best we dare to 
 hope that no paradise stands barred to entry. 
 
The Preacher and His Times 27 
 
 We dare even to hope for personal immortal- 
 ity for ourselves and those we call our friends. 
 Van Dyke, standing by the grave of his 
 friend Stedman, says : 
 
 << You followed through the quest of life, 
 The light that shines above 
 The tumult and the toil of men, 
 And shows us what to love. 
 
 *< Right loyal to the best you knew. 
 Reality or dream, 
 You ran the race, you fought the fight, 
 A follower of the Gleam. 
 
 .'* We lay upon your folded hands 
 The wreath of asphodel ; 
 We speak above your peaceful face 
 The tender word Farewell ! 
 
 ** For well you fare, in God's good care, 
 Somewhere within the blue. 
 And know, to-day, your dearest dreams 
 Are true, — and true, — and true ! " 
 
 But now there is no word from God. So far 
 as we know, our dearest dreams are false and 
 false and false. 
 
 When we are at our best we dare to hope 
 for the ideal civilization. Indeed we think 
 we see it coming. Out of the chaotic kalei- 
 doscopic elements of the present we believe 
 that we can see arising a cosmos, a fair and 
 ordered and beautiful thing. But now there 
 is no word from God. The hopes that make 
 us men begin to wither in our hearts. 
 
28 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 And as we hope, we choose. There have 
 been those who supposed that if there were 
 no word from God men could be persuaded 
 still to choose the good and eschew the evil. 
 It is very far from certain. We have often 
 marked the word of the Japanese Minister of 
 Home Afiairs to the representatives of the 
 three great religions of Japan, Buddhism, 
 Shintoism and Christianity : ** Teach well 
 your religions." Why? Scandals, suicides, 
 social deterioration have made it clear to the 
 elder statesmen of Japan that an ethics un- 
 supported by religion is a house built on the 
 sand. 
 
 *' Drink, for you know not whence you came nor why. 
 Drink, for you know not why you go, nor where." 
 
 Jane Addams has publicly declared that were 
 she to enter again upon her gracious work, 
 she would use more largely, more positively, 
 the redemptive forces of religion. 
 
 With this new appreciation of religion, its 
 interest and importance, there is a new and 
 profound appreciation of Jesus, not neces- 
 sarily of the Christ of our orthodox faith, but 
 a new appreciation of Jesus, His teachings. 
 His character, His regal authority in the 
 realm of spirit. 
 
 We have not forgotten the blackguard 
 speech of the representative of the anti- 
 
The Preacher and His Times 29 
 
 Christian Socialist League of England : 
 ** Many of the parsons or modern medicine 
 men, flunkies of the supernatural, have been 
 seriously troubled by the people falling away 
 from Christism. Politics have been attract- 
 ing the working people more and more, re- 
 ligion less and less. For this reason the 
 reverend hypocrites have suddenly discovered 
 that Jesus was a socialist. Christ's teaching 
 is antagonistic to all sound morality and 
 sound progress. Human freedom and hap- 
 piness can only be obtained by repudiating 
 Christism of all kinds and all its works." 
 But this utterance is so exceptional as to be 
 almost unique. It has been well said, " His 
 name is great among the Gentiles." Labour 
 agitators, communists, socialists all do Him 
 reverence. The Jew scarcely finds words to 
 express his devotion to the man Jesus. 
 Rabbi Kohler, in opening a Jewish Congress 
 in 1893, exclaimed, ** Jesus the keeper of the 
 poor, the friend of the sinner, the brother of 
 the sufferer, the comfort of the sorrow laden, 
 the healer of the sick, the uplifter of the 
 fallen, the lover of men, the redeemer of 
 women, we [we Jews] claim him as our 
 own." You have noticed the sinister sug- 
 gestion that during the war a moratorium on 
 Christianity be proclaimed. You read the 
 question presented in Parliament : " As there 
 
30 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 is nothing doing in Christianity at present, 
 isn't it important that clergymen should 
 enlist?" But do not words like these simply 
 throw into clearer relief the conviction of 
 men that as the present collapse of civiliza- 
 tion is the fruit of unchristlike international 
 relations, so the proper organization of po- 
 litical and social life involves the enthrone- 
 ment of the principles and purposes of Jesus ? 
 
 What does the new appreciation of re- 
 ligion, the new appreciation of Jesus mean ? 
 Surely this, a growing acceptance of Jesus, 
 until He shall be crowned King of kings and 
 Lord of lords. But Jesus Christ, I repeat, is 
 the sole Lord and Leader of the Christian 
 preacher. 
 
 The times clamour for those " durable satis- 
 factions " which our Lord and Leader alone 
 can bring to men. 
 
 As the preacher estimates his times, he is 
 compelled to ask how the times estimate 
 him. Am I as preacher equipped to mediate 
 to the times the durable satisfactions for 
 which they cry ? 
 
 It is argued that the magazine, the news- 
 paper, the moving picture show, the book, 
 have supplanted the preacher in the instruc- 
 tion of the people. We may take comfort 
 from the remark reported of the late H. R. 
 
The Preacher and His Times 31 
 
 Haweis, to the effect that ** in the persistence 
 of preaching is a conspicuous example of the 
 survival of the fittest. If preaching could 
 have been killed, it would have been killed 
 long ago by the thousands of imbecile 
 sermons that have been poured from count- 
 less pulpits throughout the ages of the 
 Church." A keen observer has said that in 
 no country whatever is a genius for public 
 speaking a more useful and commanding 
 endowment than in America. Men do not 
 like to listen to dullards, but men still delight 
 to listen to the man who utters truth through 
 personality. A Congregational minister in 
 the middle west has as good a moving picture 
 apparatus as is to be found in the state. He 
 tells me that in the long run the preacher can 
 beat the pictures. As contrasted with the 
 speaking man how ineffective is the written 
 page. Professor Palmer said to his wife, 
 Alice Freeman Palmer : " When you are 
 gone, people will ask who you were, and 
 nobody will be able to say." ** Why should 
 they say? I am trying to make girls wiser 
 and happier. Books don't help much towards 
 that. They are entertaining enough, but 
 really dead things. Why should I make 
 more of them ? It is people that count. 
 You want to put yourself into people ; they 
 touch other people, these others still, and so 
 
32 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 you go on working forever." " This speak- 
 ing one — there is need of him yet." 
 
 It is argued that the prejudice against 
 the Church precludes the wide hearing of 
 the preacher's message. There is prejudice 
 against the Church, but one notes with in- 
 terest that Montana chambers of commerce 
 still regard the presence of churches as one of 
 the best advertisements of boom towns. We 
 are to become increasingly familiar with such 
 rebukes as that which a socialist leader ad- 
 dressed to an irate comrade who was inveigh- 
 ing against the Church : " Cut out those 
 attacks on the Church. They're doing the 
 best they know how, and I believe they are 
 trying to give us a square deal." One of the 
 most biting of the recent critics of the Church 
 says, " Let not the reader think of me as a 
 spiteful critic of the churches. Far from it ; I 
 believe that they are the hope of the world, 
 and carry its future." The prejudice against 
 the Church is almost invariably directed 
 against the Church as it is, not as it ought 
 to be, can be, as by God's help it shall be. 
 The statistics of the churches for the year 
 1 91 5 tend to confirm the belief that as people 
 begin to think, they begin to turn not from 
 the churches but towards them. There is a 
 growing recognition of the fact which another 
 has stated: *' Break up the Christian As- 
 
The Preacher and His Times 33 
 
 sembly for a generation and Christ's grip 
 upon the nations is broken." 
 
 But it is insisted that there is not the old 
 time respect for " the cloth." No, thank God, 
 there is not. In other days the " cloth " 
 might cover a menagerie of clean and un- 
 clean beasts. To-day the cloth is respected 
 if and only if it happens to cover a man. But 
 then, how greatly is it respected. Easily the 
 first citizen of Columbus, Ohio, is a minister. 
 Was not Edward Everett Hale the first 
 citizen of Boston ? It is more than possible 
 that the first citizen of your own town is a 
 minister. Certainly the first citizen of many 
 a town and hamlet in this broad country is a 
 minister of Christ. If any man dreams that 
 there is not a present day respect for the man- 
 covering cloth, he may do well to consider the 
 efforts of the liquor dealers to make the cloth 
 cover one of their spokesmen. President 
 Wilson did not think he was wasting his time 
 when he made the journey from Washington 
 to Columbus simply for the sake of expressing 
 his interest in the rural church. Nor did he 
 think that he or his cause lost influence when 
 he confessed that he was the son of a country 
 preacher. 
 
 But surely the preacher has lost much of 
 his power in the community because the 
 higher criticism has disintegrated the faith 
 
34 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 of men ? It is to be confessed that the two 
 decades before 1910 were hard days for the 
 younger men in the ministry. Historical 
 criticism has done and is doing a work which 
 simply cannot be undone. Much rubbish has 
 been removed. Strong and massive rise the 
 preachable truths of our religion ; Jesus Christ, 
 the unveiling of God the Father, saviour from 
 sin, founder and pioneer of the civilization of 
 brotherly men, prince of the eternal life. 
 What would one have? 
 
 " But do you not think that the preacher*s 
 field has been invaded and largely occupied 
 by various modern organizations, the As- 
 sociations of young men and young women, 
 the social settlement, the neighbourhood 
 house and the rest ? " We need scarcely be 
 reminded that every one of these enterprises 
 is the child of the Church. Not one of them 
 could live for five years without the help of 
 the Church. A friend of mine well says : 
 ** It is easy to drink of a stream, and to for- 
 get the source." But as all of these organi- 
 zations are the constant beneficiaries of the 
 Church, practically all of them are now the 
 willing allies or rather auxiliaries of the 
 Church. The representatives of these or- 
 ganizations invariably have to explain them- 
 selves or plead for their right to exist in a 
 community, the priest-prophet never. His 
 
The Preacher and His Times 35 
 
 function is as old as the family, and will pass 
 when there is no man left to hear his message. 
 
 The New York Eveniyig Post is not the 
 organ of the Intermediate Endeavour Society, 
 nor is it the advertising agent of any theo- 
 logical seminary. You may have read this 
 significant editorial : " Christianity has been 
 preeminently the preached religion. In- 
 spired preaching has in it the greatest power 
 known to man, that of a kindled personality. 
 It is the most potent fascination which any- 
 thing external in the Church can wield, more 
 vivid than music, more direct than even 
 grand architecture, and fit adornment of 
 the temple. We ourselves believe that the 
 dearth of great preachers is only temporary. 
 The high themes are there, the human heart 
 remains the same, the opportunity and the 
 aspiration appeal to lofty natures as of old. 
 We shall once more hear the sincere and 
 moving voices, which from the beginning till 
 now have best carried Christian truth to the 
 hearts and minds of men." 
 
 But to pass from questions to assertions that 
 can scarcely be questioned. The preacher is 
 set to instruct and inspire the one organiza- 
 tion which is commissioned and equipped to 
 preserve, to interpret and to proclaim to our 
 times the book which has rightly been called 
 the Word of God. We gladly remember 
 
36 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 that a few of our colleges and both of our 
 Christian Associations are giving some in- 
 struction in the Bible. At the best they reach 
 only an infinitesimal part of the population. 
 The Bible is practically banished from our 
 public schools. Where its use is permitted, 
 it is usually read, not studied. We shall 
 have occasion later to consider the certain 
 disaster which would accompany the loss of 
 this literature to our people. 
 
 Again the preacher is set to instruct and 
 inspire the one organization to which our 
 times must increasingly look for the defense, 
 the preservation of the Christian Sabbath. 
 The state can establish a holiday, but cannot 
 establish a holy day, a day of re-creation, 
 from which a man may, as one puts it, ap- 
 proach a new week of work " with a clearer, 
 happier sense of God and duty." Often you 
 have been reminded of the forces which are 
 breaking down our Sabbath, the forces of " the 
 money-makers and the merry-makers." The 
 Sabbath is to-day what it was in the days of 
 Emerson, ** the core of our civilization, the 
 jubilee of the whole world." It is God's 
 great gift of love to tired people. 
 
 Still further the preacher ministers to our 
 times, as he instructs and inspires the or- 
 ganization which by its history and constitu- 
 tion seeks the sanctity of the home. Our 
 
The Preacher and His Times 37 
 
 faith was born in a home which found shelter 
 for the time in the stable of the inn of Beth- 
 lehem. In the upper room of a private house 
 the Master and His disciples gathered for the 
 last supper. In the upper room of a private 
 house the infant Church was born. There was 
 a church in the house of Philemon, another 
 church in the house of Priscilla and Aquila. 
 In times of persecution, the Church has always 
 fled for refuge to the home. There have been 
 times when the cloister and the hearth were 
 supposed to be on different levels of religious 
 life. In the thought of Jesus the cloister sur- 
 rounds and shelters the hearth, and in that 
 cloister walk father and mother, and children's 
 voices mingle with theirs, and the hearth itself 
 becomes an altar. ** The whole effort of Jesus 
 on its human side," says Matheson, ** is to 
 make the world a cosmopolitan home. . . . 
 There should be no going out from the family 
 circle into the world ; there should be a bring- 
 ing of the world into the family circle." To- 
 day the pressure of population and of poverty, 
 the factory system which separates a man 
 from his tools, the crimes of the pleasure 
 seeker, the popular lack of ideals are all 
 working for the destruction of the home. 
 But Professor Peabody, the teacher of us all, 
 has truly said : " The home holds the key to 
 the salvation of the state." I look without 
 
38 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 hope to any other institution than the Church 
 to save to us the home. The Church must 
 and can do it. 
 
 To speak more largely : the preacher is 
 set to instruct and inspire the organization 
 which beyond all others is commissioned and 
 equipped to keep the soul of our country 
 alive. A German has divided his country- 
 men into Soul-Germans and Stomach-Ger- 
 mans. There are soul- Americans, and then 
 there are stomach-Americans. How can the 
 soul of our country be kept alive except by 
 the multiplication of soul-Americans, Ameri- 
 cans whose souls are alive to God ? The task 
 is not small. Swiftly the conditions change. 
 In a single spring time, 200,000 people 
 move into the single state of North Dakota. 
 Graham Taylor calls our attention to the 
 Frontier in the Rear, the crowded tenement 
 sections of our great cities. Thirty solid 
 blocks, for example, in New York fill up with 
 Italians. The task is not small, but it is 
 supremely the task of the Church, backed, 
 led by the Christian preacher, to keep the 
 soul of our country alive. " Let it never 
 be forgotten," says Silvester Home, ** that 
 modern America sprang out of the ideal 
 relation between a pastor and a church, a 
 man of God and a people of God." 
 
 But if the preacher helps to keep the soul 
 
The Preacher and His Times 39 
 
 of America alive, he is doing much to quicken 
 the faltering, dying souls of other lands. 
 Your business men are familiar with the ex- 
 ceeding mobility of our foreign population. 
 With every winter, and especially with every 
 time of financial stringency multitudes of our 
 immigrants have been accustomed to pass 
 through the outward swinging gates of our 
 republic. I noticed that on a December day 
 of a recent year, the steamer President 
 Lincoln set sail from New York for Naples, 
 carrying 3,600 Italians. What did those Ital- 
 ians know about Lincoln's country ? How 
 much did they know of Lincoln's God, Lin- 
 coln's Bible, Lincoln's loving human brother- 
 hood ? It is estimated that at the close 
 of the war, 500,000 of our foreign born may 
 return to their native lands. These mis- 
 sionaries to broken-hearted Europe, these 
 men who go at their own charges, who know 
 the vernacular of speech and of thought, 
 understand the prejudices and presupposi- 
 tions of their listeners, these men who under- 
 stand the psychological climates of their 
 countries, these men it is the preacher's func- 
 tion, directly or indirectly, to touch with the 
 life of God, and through them to quicken the 
 souls of their own lands, the soul of Europe. 
 And this leads me to say that the preacher 
 ministers to our times, as he instructs and 
 
40 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 inspires the one organization which must 
 finance and man that enterprise which Mac- 
 kenzie the historian declares to be foremost 
 of those enterprises which are destined to 
 transform the face of the world. I refer to 
 the enterprise of foreign missions. You may 
 ask your Jewish philanthropist to build your 
 hospitals for America. In many a non- 
 Christian land, the Church must build them. 
 You may ask your infidel brother, with 
 more or less hope of response, to care for the 
 blind, the deaf, the hunger-bitten and the 
 leprous of America. The burden of this work 
 in many a non-Christian land falls upon the 
 Church at home. Who will send forth God's 
 missionaries to thwart the devil's missionaries 
 over there ? Who will send forth ambassadors 
 of the religion of love who shall avert or allay 
 the friction which always arises when West 
 meets East ? Who will send forth interpret- 
 ers of Jesus who shall undo the infernal work 
 of misinterpretation wrought by the great 
 war? Who will carry the evangel to in- 
 dividuals whose religion has brought to them 
 only bad news ? Sacrificial as they are, the 
 Christians of Europe for a generation will be 
 hamstrung in their efforts at world-evangeliza- 
 tion. For a generation almost exclusively, 
 for the generations very largely, the burden 
 of the Christianization of the world will rest 
 
The Preacher and His Times 41 
 
 upon the organization which the American 
 preacher is set to instruct and to inspire. 
 The words of John Ruskin have lost none of 
 their meaning : " The issues of Hfe and death 
 for modern society are in the pulpit." 
 
 Better than any other man, in a fashion 
 absolutely unique, the preacher is enabled to 
 turn the life of our times from its discontents 
 and failures to Him who is the only source of 
 satisfaction, to present to men the personality 
 which alone meets and responds to the as- 
 pirations, the emphasis, the appreciations of 
 our times. The times are on tiptoe to greet 
 the preacher, always provided the preacher is 
 the right kind of man. 
 
 What kind of man must the preacher be, 
 if he is to be the preacher for the times ? In 
 the finest sense of the term he must be a man 
 of the world. His life must thrill with the 
 life of his times. By the experience of his 
 own heart or by spiritual imagination, he 
 must understand the discontents and failures, 
 the aspirations, the emphasis, the apprecia- 
 tions. As Schauffler suggests, he must be 
 more familiar with the church sons than the 
 church fathers, better acquainted with Jim 
 and Sam than with Origen and Chrysostom 
 — whom by the way he ought to k7iow. He 
 must be the voice of the inarticulate multi- 
 
42 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 tude, saying what the multitude longs to say, 
 but cannot. After all there must be a differ- 
 ence. The clerical garb is a symbol, rather 
 pathetic symbol perhaps, of a separateness 
 which ought to exist between the preacher 
 and the world. The preacher while a man 
 of the world must be God's man. As God's 
 man, he must hold or rather be held by cer- 
 tain great convictions. When the Congre- 
 gationalists of Japan were revising their 
 creed, one Japanese preacher said, ** I would 
 put into my creed only those convictions for 
 which I should be willing to die." Whatever 
 may be the penumbral beliefs of the preacher's 
 study, the preacher in his pulpit must be 
 conquered by certain convictions for which 
 he would gladly die, yes, for which he would 
 gladly let his loved ones die. It is a good 
 thing for a man occasionally to face this 
 question : " For how many of the beliefs I ut- 
 tered last Sabbath should I be willing to die ? 
 Nay, in imagination I will stand, as many of 
 my brothers have stood, prisoner on the 
 bloody floor of a Chinese yamen. There I 
 will face this alternative : Give up the belief 
 you preached last Sunday, or your little child 
 will be killed before your eyes, your wife will 
 be tortured and killed before your eyes, and 
 then you will be tortured and killed." Some 
 beliefs that have seemed central, fundamental, 
 
The Preacher and His Times 43 
 
 will slip silently away to climb your study 
 stairs, to rest undisturbed upon the top of 
 your Hebrew Bible. Other convictions will 
 come forth naked, unashamed, living, glori- 
 ous, conquering. 
 
 This means of course that the preacher for 
 our times must be a man of courage. He 
 must be able to enter into the experience of 
 Frederick Robertson, who says, *' Once in my 
 life I knew and I rejoiced to know that I was 
 pronouncing the sentence of a coward's and 
 a liar's hell." The preacher may not be one 
 of Dawson's ** tame prophets bound with 
 chains of gold." No slave can preach. He 
 must have a prophet's heroism, take the 
 prophet's risk, be ** a hero for the invisible," 
 glad to know that 
 
 " Life may be given in many ways, 
 And loyalty to Truth be sealed 
 As bravely in the closet as the field." 
 
 As God's man, the preacher for our times 
 must be a man of divine compassion. We 
 have read somewhere of a man who had only 
 so good a heart as could be made out of 
 brains. God has no work for that man in 
 the pulpit. I delight in that story told of 
 Beecher. He was asked, ** Mr. Beecher, what 
 is the feeling dominant in your heart as you 
 face your vast audience ? " He replied, " Com- 
 passion, Compassion." Most of us, as we face 
 
44 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 our audiences, are filled with our sermons or 
 our fears. As Jesus faced the five thousand 
 on the grassy slopes of the Lake of Galilee, 
 He was moved with compassion. The Pu- 
 ritan preacher remembered that Jerusalem 
 had sinned, and he poured out his woes upon 
 her guilty life. The preacher for our times 
 remembers the sin, oh yes, but he also re- 
 members the banishment and the bondage, 
 the harps hanging on the willows, the silenced 
 songs of the exile ; and he speaks comfort- 
 ably straight to the heart of Jerusalem. 
 
 Again, as God's man, God's devotee, the 
 preacher for our times will know in his heart 
 and express in his words the joy of the 
 soldier who marches on to victory. What 
 was it that made the sad old world listen to 
 the first message of Christianity ? It was 
 the joy of the Christians. What gives power 
 to some of the newer sects with their feeble 
 elephant-breath philosophies? It is their 
 note of victorious joy. As the average 
 preacher stands in his pulpit, you ask your- 
 self involuntarily, " Who's dead ? " or you 
 sigh, " There must be whooping cough again 
 at the parsonage.'* Just think of that man 
 Paul. Beaten and imprisoned in Philippi, 
 hurried secretly out of Thessalonica, driven 
 from Bercea, laughed out of Athens, in 
 Corinth haled before the judgment seat of 
 
The Preacher and His Times 45 
 
 Gallio, everywhere bonds and afflictions 
 abide him . . . yet he cries jubilantly, 
 " Thanks be to God who always leadeth us in 
 the triumph train of Christ and by us as censer 
 bearers sheddeth abroad the fragrance of the 
 knowledge of him in every place through- 
 out the world." May not the preacher have 
 the glorious morning face of the man who 
 has achieved ''the eternal worth while " ? 
 
 We hear a brother preacher reply to all 
 this: *' You don't know my field, its sceptics 
 and critics and cynics and dyspeptics." No 
 I don't. But I know other fields. I got a 
 letter a while ago from one of our graduates : 
 "The church was organized with thirteen 
 members, and by October of the next year it 
 had grown to eighteen. Of these, three of 
 the charter members never really came to 
 church. Three more of the charter list and 
 two of the others had left town, and two 
 others had withdrawn to assist in starting a 
 * Christian ' church. Of the eight who re- 
 mained in good standing, three are half- 
 hearted in their support of the church." No, 
 I don't know your church ; but I remember 
 a certain monk by the name of Luther who 
 began to preach to his times in a little room 
 twenty by thirty feet. I have heard of a 
 certain tinker of pots and kettles and pans, 
 who walked through the muddy streets of 
 
46 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 Elstow, or lay in the foul prison of Bedford, 
 yet sojourned in the Palace Beautiful, walked 
 the heights of the Delectable Mountains, 
 made his way by the gates into the city. I 
 have read that Charles Kingsley *' spent his 
 whole life in a little patch of moorland, a 
 parish with but seven or eight hundred 
 people, not one of whom when he began his 
 ministry could read or write." We have 
 heard of the man who said, " My garden is 
 very small, but oh, it is wondrous high,** 
 and I think that there is no man who tills a 
 garden so small, but that it reaches up and 
 up to the suburbs of Paradise. 
 
 That is a fine word of the Chronicler; 
 " From day to day men came to David to 
 help him, until there was a host like unto the 
 host of God." So I see them coming. To 
 the man of the world, who with David has 
 tasted the deep experiences of humanity, to 
 God's man, convinced, courageous, compas- 
 sionate, joyous, I see them coming. Com- 
 ing to hear him preach ? I do not say that. 
 I see them coming, to catch the inspiration 
 of the 'message of his life — I see them com- 
 ing, until there gathers about that man a 
 host like unto the host of God. 
 
 The 'great days of preaching are coming 
 back. Only let us go forth to meet them 
 and to greet them as they come. 
 
II 
 
 The Preacher and His Sermon 
 
II 
 
 THE PREACHER AND HIS SERMON 
 
 AS a prelude to our discussion, I would 
 say a few words regarding the min- 
 ister's wife. In this prelude there 
 are " three heads, all small, bald," but we 
 trust not quite "empty." First, the minister's 
 wife and the congregation ; Second, the min- 
 ister's wife and her children ; Third, the min- 
 ister's wife and her husband. 
 
 First and least important : The minister's 
 wife and the congregation. The minister's 
 wife will learn to keep silence in seven lan- 
 guages. Has her husband worked pretty 
 hard for a week ? She will not refer to the 
 fact. Has her husband a poorly prepared 
 sermon ? She will not go around telling how 
 the dear man has had nervous indigestion 
 all the week. She knows everything about 
 the congregation, but in the ladies' meetings 
 she knows nothing. A gossip comes and 
 pours forth some tale of some son of worth- 
 lessness, and she replies, *' Is that so? By 
 the way, don't you think that the new Boys' 
 Scout troop is just fine ? " 
 
 She will learn not only to keep silence ; 
 
 49 
 
50 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 she will learn also to refuse election to office. 
 If there is another woman in the congrega- 
 tion, that woman must be the president of 
 the Women's Society. The minister's wife 
 may encourage, soothe, direct, but never 
 lead. Her best work is done by writing 
 letters, by calling quietly upon the sick, by 
 helping the mothers and their little ones. I 
 know such a woman. She couldn't speak in 
 meeting if she were given as reward a trip to 
 Europe in peace times. But she has a way 
 of slipping into a sick room. She puts a 
 bunch of carnations on the table beside the 
 sick woman, and smoothes the pillow a little, 
 and leaves in the room the radiant sunshine 
 of her love. She takes to her home Mrs. 
 Jones's three older children while little 
 Johnnie has the measles. Now this is not 
 advertised in the Oscaloosa Thunderer^ but 
 it is noticed in heaven, whence she came. 
 
 Second : The minister's wife and her chil- 
 dren. The minister's wife will do her best to 
 see that her children do not disgrace the min- 
 ister and the church. This task is not so 
 easy as at first it might appear. Every min- 
 ister's small son is supposed to be an ensample 
 to the flock. Any well organized boy hates 
 to be pointed out as the minister's son, and 
 he may be tempted to go far to effect a dis- 
 guise. The mother moreover will do her 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 51 
 
 best to see that her children do not acquire a 
 perfect abhorrence of the ministry, of the 
 church and of rehgion. Are Mrs. J's eccen- 
 tricities accentuated at the family table ? Is 
 Deacon S's stinginess dwelt upon ? Is Pas- 
 tor Q's wiliness the main topic of conversa- 
 tion ? The small boy will determine within 
 his little soul, " By all the clergymen in the 
 United States, I will never be one." 
 
 Third : The minister's wife and her hus- 
 band. The minister's wife will love her hus- 
 band, but she will not coddle him. She will 
 compel her husband to pay his bills to the 
 butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, 
 and to pay them at the first of the month, if 
 he does not pay at the time of purchase. 
 She will probably insist that the minister give 
 her a stated allowance, with which she may 
 do the buying for the family. If the minister 
 claims that he has no money at the begin- 
 ning of the month, the wife will tell him that 
 it is simply because of the ragged, wretched 
 system of church support which he has in- 
 troduced or tolerated. Loving her husband, 
 but not coddling him, she will compel him to 
 tear up all letters emanating from firms 
 which long to sell him oil stock, gold mines, 
 and the like. These firms spend vast sums of 
 money upon us ministers, knowing that of all 
 men on earth we have the least common sense. 
 
52 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 The minister's wife will compel her hus- 
 band to be a law-abiding citizen. He has 
 no more right to run across the grass in 
 front of the church than has the member of 
 ^ the inknt class. He has no right to run in 
 
 ^ upon Mrs. Nomaid, when she is preparing 
 
 supper. These things the wife will show to 
 
 • her husband, who half unconsciously con- 
 
 siders himself like Napoleon above all law. 
 The minister's wife will compel her husband 
 to be cleanly in his person. I know a prom- 
 inent minister who damages his influence 
 unspeakably because his coat is not clean, 
 his face is not clean, his hair is not cut. The 
 minister is an absent-minded beggar. When 
 his mind is absent, his wife must lend him 
 hers. 
 
 Loving her husband, but refusing to cod- 
 dle him, the minister's wife will compel him 
 to work and to work hard. SJae will insist 
 that her husbapd be in his office at eight A. M. 
 If possible his office should be in the church 
 and not at home, so that the people of the 
 town will see that he goes to work as they 
 go to work. Not only that : she must in- 
 sist that her husband study when he is in his 
 study. To read the newspapers is not to 
 study. To read the average magazine is 
 not to study. She will see that he stays in 
 his study from eight A. M. to twelve M. and 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 3*3 
 
 studies. No chickens in the back yard, no 
 children in the front yard, no vegetables 
 going to waste in the garden, can ever ex- 
 cuse him from working at his job. 
 
 Again, this minister's wife will insist that 
 no sweetness and light, no pastoral calls 
 upon the halt, the lame, the blind ; no funer- 
 als, no weddings, no Y. P. S. C. E. ad- 
 dresses, no temperance lectures, can ever 
 take the place of his preaching. No hur- 
 ried preparation at two o'clock Sunday 
 morning, no reference to Henry Ward 
 Beecher's preparation after Sunday break- 
 fast, will excuse this man from the most 
 careful pulpit preparation. He is a preacher. 
 He must ** begin, continue, close the work 
 for which he draws the wage." 
 
 On Sunday afternoon, the minister's wife 
 will make a few notes on the morning ser- 
 mon. To these she will not allude on Sun- 
 day. In the evening as she loves her hus- 
 band and pities him she will be allowed to 
 stroke his head, to hold his hand ; but Mon- 
 day, rather, Tuesday morning, she will come 
 to his study and tell him the truth. She 
 will frankly say to him, "My dear, I have 
 heard many poor sermons in my life, but 
 none quite so bad as Sunday's.'* Nor will 
 that suffice. She must tell him why and 
 how it was bad. **The matter was badly 
 
54 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 arranged, and there wasn't much matter to 
 be arranged. Your delivery was execrable. 
 You have a curious way of holding wildly 
 to your pulpit as to a life raft." Loving her 
 husband truly and intelligently she gradu- 
 ally transforms him into a real minister. 
 
 The minister's wife does not have as many 
 new hats as her classmate. The dress in 
 which she graduated from college must ap- 
 pear at the high school commencements of 
 her parish for many years. She wears the 
 crown of a people's peculiar personal affec- 
 tion, and the angels toil day after day upon 
 the fabric of the new robe which she will 
 never have to change or turn. 
 
 I must omit a prelude which I should like 
 to give, entitled. The Preacher and his Sex- 
 ton. Each man of us doubtless has suffered 
 many things from many sextons. For ex- 
 ample, there is the sexton who thinks that he 
 has done the whole duty of a sexton when 
 he has heated his building so that no crea- 
 ture but a salamander could escape suffoca- 
 tion. There is the sexton who on a cold 
 winter morning decides to take care of his 
 fires fifteen minutes before service. Henry 
 Ward Beecher tells us that in his first church 
 he was his own sexton. I have often thought 
 that this was one reason for his early success 
 as a preacher, I would defy Beecher himself 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 55 
 
 to keep his audience awake when preaching 
 in the atmosphere to which a sexton will now 
 and again subject the congregation. There 
 is a sexton who shall be nameless, for I know 
 that many of you would immediately offer 
 him a salary larger than he is getting. He 
 does not overheat or underheat his building. 
 He does not shake the furnace when you are 
 in the midst of the pastoral prayer. He 
 does not open the windows at the most im- 
 portant point in the sermon. Like a good 
 usher and a virtuous woman, his price is 
 above rubies. The good sexton is the si- 
 lent but indispensable partner of the good 
 preacher. 
 
 Shall we consider now the immediate sub- 
 ject in hand ? We have all sat at the feet of 
 great preachers, and have heard them praise 
 our calling. We have heard Dr. Forsyth 
 remark, " I will venture to say that with its 
 preaching Christianity stands or falls," and 
 we have said, " Amen." We have heard 
 Dr. JefEerson say, " Preaching is your highest 
 business. Nothing can ever take its place. 
 You are to be administrators, but administra- 
 tion will not take the place of preaching. 
 Unless you are preachers, you are not likely 
 to have much to administer." And again 
 we have said, ** Amen." We have heard 
 
^6 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 the short ugly word of Dr. Brown before the 
 English Baptist Union : " A minister must 
 be able to preach." And again we have 
 said, " Amen." Indeed there is no man of 
 us who does not offer daily the worthy 
 prayer, ** O God, make me a good preacher." 
 And yet as we face a new Sabbath, we face, 
 each of us, a new pile of glittering white 
 paper, each sheet of which seems to jeer: 
 ** You know very well you can't preach. 
 You never could preach, you never will 
 preach. You haven't one new thing to say 
 next Sunday." Can we help each other? 
 The thought of " Ecce Homo " cheers one : 
 " While the prophet whose prophecy is new 
 in substance is no prophet, so the prophet 
 whose prophecy is old in form is no prophet 
 but a plagiarist." 
 
 As preachers, speakers for God, we do not 
 for an instant claim that the substance of our 
 message from Sabbath to Sabbath is new. 
 Rather we glory in the fact that our task has 
 been, is and always will be the same ; to 
 bring every thought of men into captivity to 
 the obedience of the God who reveals Him- 
 self in Jesus Christ. 
 
 ** Subtlest thought shall fail and learning falter, 
 Churches change, forms perish, systems go, 
 But our human needs, they will not alter, 
 Christ no after age shall e'er outgrow." 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 57 
 
 If by God's grace we can only preach Christ, 
 so that men shall see Him, we shall have ful- 
 filled our highest, our sole ambition. 
 
 The substance of the message is not 
 new ; on the other hand, the prophet whose 
 prophecy is old in form is no prophet but 
 a plagiarist. 
 
 How then shall we gain the novelty of 
 sermonic form, which the prophecy of to-day 
 requires? Or to state our question more 
 broadly and truly, How may we hope to 
 prepare and preach sermons to our times ? 
 
 We shall read books, not widely perhaps, 
 but well. We have all made note of the 
 retirement of Dr. Clifford from his London 
 church after a continuous pastorate of fifty- 
 seven years. See what he says of his read- 
 ing : ** I believe in keeping a good biography 
 on hand for stimulus, encouragement and in- 
 spiration. The second kind of reading is 
 what I would call disciplinary. It is reading 
 with the deliberate purpose of keeping the 
 machine in order, of keeping one's mental 
 knife edge as keen as possible. Such hard, 
 stiff reading is a sine qua non for the 
 preacher who would protect his mind against 
 the cheapening, shallowing process which 
 operates upon every man who does not in 
 some real sense remain a student all his 
 days. The third type of reading is the ex- 
 
58 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 plicitly professional, the reading definitely 
 for next Sunday's sermon." Benson as well 
 as Clifford emphasizes the importance of 
 biography, and suggests that we should read 
 especially the lives of great contemporaries. 
 These men are the fruits of the past and 
 the roots of the age that is to be. Some 
 preachers read many sermons of other men. 
 Most of us would find the burden laid upon 
 us greater than we could bear. But some 
 sermons are stimulating. In reading a ser- 
 mon, one finds it interesting to get at the 
 processes by which a great preacher works 
 his way into and out of his subject. What 
 led him to think of this idea? How did he 
 proceed to that next idea ? Innocent but in- 
 quisitive Delilahs, we shall compel this Sam- 
 son of a preacher to tell us wherein his great 
 strength lieth. 
 
 As we study the printed page, we shall be 
 students of nature. What a curious fact is 
 that, noted by Nash, that while Calvin lived 
 long by Lake Geneva, there is no evidence 
 that he ever really saw it. 
 
 As we study books and nature we shall 
 study men, men who are now upon the earth. 
 Here for example is the man in the pew. In 
 one of his annual reports, Dr. Pritchett says, 
 "A hundred years ago ministers were the 
 educated men of their communities, and their 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 59 
 
 power was in proportion. In the interval, 
 the congregations have risen enormously in 
 the scale of general education. With this 
 rise, the law and medicine have to a large 
 extent kept pace, but the Church has rela- 
 tively fallen back. In the Protestant churches 
 where the power of authority has largely 
 passed away, the Church depends upon the 
 quality of the religious leadership of its 
 preachers. The efficiency in this leadership 
 is low." Study then the man in the pew. 
 You discover that your message is not heard 
 simply because it is the message of the 
 Church or of the preacher. Your judgment 
 is weighed, and not seldom found wanting. 
 "You sit in your tower study all the week 
 and then come down to censor us, who have 
 been bearing the burden of the day and the 
 scorching heat." 
 
 But you follow this ** man in the pew " to his 
 home. Once in a while you hear a very 
 great preacher or a very small theologue 
 disparage pastoral calls. He will not be 
 bothered by pink tea visitations. You go 
 to the hospital to sit beside a young fellow 
 who, in order that his mother at his death 
 may have his insurance money, has attempted 
 to commit suicide. Is that pink tea visita- 
 tion? You call upon an aged woman who 
 is about to slip out into the other world, you 
 
6o The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 repeat to her the old words, " He that be- 
 lieveth on me, though he were dead, yet 
 shall he live, and whosoever liveth and be- 
 lieveth on me shall never die." You talk 
 with a Sunday-school teacher about the best 
 way to handle a large class of small boys. 
 You take the hand of a father whose daugh- 
 ter has gone wrong. Is that pink tea visita- 
 tion ? 
 
 I suppose one of the most impressive 
 preachers in New York is Dr. Jowett. I do 
 not know how much calling he does, but 
 these words of his are significant : " When I 
 have got my theme clearly defined, and I be- 
 gin to prepare its exposition, I keep in the 
 circle of my mind a dozen men and women 
 very varied in their natural temperaments 
 and very dissimilar in their daily circum- 
 stances. These are not mere abstractions. 
 Neither are they dolls and dummies. They 
 are real men and women whom I know, pro- 
 fessional people, trading people, learned and 
 ignorant, rich and poor. When I am pre- 
 paring my work, my mind is constantly 
 glancing round this invisible circle, and I con- 
 sider how I can so serve the bread of this 
 particular truth as to provide welcome nutri- 
 ment for all. What relation has this teach- 
 ing to that barrister ? How can the truth be 
 related to that doctor? What have I here 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 6l 
 
 for that keenly nervous woman with the ar- 
 tistic temperament ? And there is that poor 
 body, upon whom the floods of sorrow have 
 been rolUng their billows for many years. 
 What of her ? And so on, all round the cir- 
 cle." Perhaps a man can do that kind of 
 sermon preparation without pastoral calling. 
 Could you? When John Mitchell was asked, 
 *' What courses of study would you introduce 
 into the seminary?" he replied, "Several 
 courses in human sympathy." Speaking of 
 Charles Brown, of England, one writes : ** He 
 belongs to the happily once more increas- 
 ing class to whom pastoral visitation is a holy 
 ministry. One could not picture him like a 
 very eloquent preacher it was my misfortune 
 to know, writing to one of his regular mem- 
 bers three months after his death." 
 
 Nor will the preacher confine his studies of 
 men to the man in the pew ; he will study 
 as well the greatly overworked man in the 
 street, the man who finds utterance in the 
 lodge rooms, in the labour conclaves of the 
 country, in the secular press. " What good 
 came of it at last ? " The sensible question 
 of little Peterkin is being asked insistently. 
 The man in the street sees splendid church 
 edifices, discovers the preachers apparently 
 neither among the toilers nor the spinners. 
 He marks the remission of taxes on church 
 
62 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 property, and the correspondingly increased 
 taxation upon other property. He measures 
 achievements by the yard-stick of his own 
 business. You may recall an editorial in the 
 Springfield Republican a while ago : " Next 
 Sunday the churches of the city of Spring- 
 field will be opened after the summer vaca- 
 tion. It will now be their task to show the 
 people of this city if they are worth the ex- 
 pense involved in opening and maintaining 
 them." 
 
 Bishop Spaulding of Utah, that gallant 
 young knight whose sudden death we lament, 
 said to us men in Oberlin : " There is no man 
 who can cut down through so many strata of 
 society as the minister." Let us cut down. 
 
 A student of all sorts and conditions of 
 men, the preacher will be as well a student of 
 movements of thought and organization. 
 Here are religious enterprises outside the pale 
 of Protestant orthodoxy, enterprises which 
 appeal to numbers of well dressed and sup- 
 posedly intelligent people, whose devotion to 
 their creed and church puts us all to shame, 
 who point with perfect confidence to the fruits 
 of their faith to validate their creeds. Such 
 enterprises deserve reflection rather than ridi- 
 cule. The study of movements will involve 
 the more hopeful and profitable study of the 
 Federal Council of Churches, the League to 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 63 
 
 Enforce Peace, the World Alliance of the 
 Churches for the Promotion of International 
 Friendship. A student need not be an ex- 
 pert. But only by such study can we escape 
 the sharp stab of the epigram of Voltaire, 
 quoted by Vedder, *' Medicine is the art of 
 putting drugs of which we know little into 
 bodies of which we know less, to cure diseases 
 of which we know nothing at all." Isn't 
 that a charming suggestion: "A preacher 
 should have in his study one mirror but 
 many windows" ? 
 
 Now all this sympathetic study of ours re- 
 lates itself more or less consciously to the 
 main task of life. There are few more pathetic 
 sights about a college campus than the sight 
 of a man who has gone on studying, study- 
 ing, adding initials to his name, only that 
 and nothing more. The student is the free 
 servant of the preacher. The minister must 
 be able to preach. 
 
 " Well," you say, '* while you have been 
 indulging in these glittering generalities, 
 that pile of glittering white paper has been 
 staring at me, jeering at me. What of my 
 particular Sunday sermon?" Perhaps that 
 question was or ought to have been decided 
 last summer when you were thinking through 
 your plan of campaign for the ensuing year. 
 In the summer you labelled great envelopes 
 
64 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 or folders with such titles as Communion, 
 Thanksgiving, Foreign Missions, New Years. 
 As a non-ritualist, you have found special 
 delight in planning for the large use of the 
 days of the Christian Year. It is one of the 
 ways in which we may emphasize our fellow- 
 ship with multitudes of our brethren in the 
 Christian Church throughout the world. You 
 have of course marked certain folders, Christ- 
 mas, Palm Sunday, Easter. Perhaps you 
 have decided to observe such days as 
 Epiphany, Whitsunday, Ascension Day. 
 You have always found it particularly hard 
 to preach on the evening of a great feast 
 day. You were glad to notice that the ob- 
 servance of the Christian year suggests the 
 26th of December as St. Stephen's Day, the 
 day commemorating the man who better 
 than any of his contemporaries to date un- 
 derstood the implications of the message of 
 Jesus. 
 
 Again, last summer you labelled certain 
 folders with the names of the days of pa- 
 triotism. You determined in some fashion 
 to mark Forefathers' Day, Lincoln's Birth- 
 day, Washington's Birthday. A discriminat- 
 ing Englishman said to me that a serious 
 calamity to England at the present crisis is 
 the long failure of England to teach pa- 
 triotism to her industrial classes. 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 65 
 
 Last summer too, you determined that this 
 year you would observe at least by some 
 pulpit reference, in the morning or the even- 
 ing, certain days of reform, like Prison Sun- 
 day, Universal Peace Sunday. You made 
 tentative plans for the suitable celebration, in 
 the fall, of Covenant Sunday, when you would 
 speak particularly to the parents and teachers 
 of the Bible School pupils. You thought a 
 little way into a special service and sermon 
 for Children's Day. Not that you decided 
 to make of yourself a talking almanac, but 
 that you did decide to meet in a sympathetic 
 and helpful way the mood and temper of 
 your people and your community. As you 
 were considering your plan of campaign for 
 the church year, you thought at or through 
 certain plans for the evening services. There 
 were to be brief courses of consecutive ser- 
 mons. Or you decided that on the first 
 Sunday of each of four months you would 
 preach an expository sermon on one of the 
 parables, on the second Sunday you would 
 make a preacher's study of some great biog- 
 raphy, on the third Sunday you would con- 
 sider some aspect of social or civic reform, 
 on the last Sunday you would preach an 
 evangelistic sermon. 
 
 Thus the labelled folders began to multiply ; 
 but you remind me of that busy woman who 
 
66 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 in an attempt to catch up with her corre- 
 spondence found much comfort in addressing 
 and stamping envelopes, which she never 
 filled. A labelled envelope is not a sermon. 
 That is true, but it is also true that thoughts 
 fly to labelled envelopes as doves fly to their 
 windows. 
 
 In those summer days moreover you de- 
 cided what should be the special emphasis 
 of your work for the new church year. Per- 
 haps you said nothing about this to any one ; 
 but you determined to emphasize definite 
 and persistent Bible study, or some aspect of 
 world evangelism, or individual work for 
 individuals, or the reconstruction of the busi- 
 ness and social life of your community in 
 accordance with the teachings of Jesus. 
 This decision has helped to dictate not alone 
 your reading but your choice of the year's 
 sermon material. 
 
 But alas, how can a man give novelty of 
 form to one hundred and four sermons deal- 
 ing with the same old substance of thought ? 
 The task is not light, but it is not impossible. 
 In obedience to a suggestion of George Adam 
 Smith, you were giving some months of study 
 to the book of Deuteronomy. You were not 
 getting along very well, but at last came 
 to this passage, " The eternal God is thy 
 dwelling-place, and underneath are the ever- 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 67 
 
 lasting arms" ; and you saw the Jerusalem of 
 Josiah's day, ground as wheat beneath the 
 upper and the nether millstones of Assyrian 
 and Egyptian policies, busy politicians hurry- 
 ing hither and yon to find some new master to 
 serve, an ignorant populace climbing to the 
 house roofs to discover some new gods to 
 worship, a young king with more zeal than 
 wisdom trying to reform Jehovah worship. A 
 book is discovered in the debris of the temple. 
 As it is read to the king it approves itself to be 
 the law of God. As the king hears, he rends 
 his garments and weeps, but at the last of 
 the book the great words come to his ears, 
 '* The eternal God is thy dwelling-place, and 
 underneath are the everlasting arms." " O 
 King, no king's palace is thy dwelling-place, 
 the eternal God is thy home. No arms of 
 flesh sustain thee ; underneath are the ever- 
 lasting arms." You have your sermon. All 
 that home means, when it means most. Life, 
 Love, Rest, Joy, that and more God means. 
 That and more. Why more? Because God 
 is God, and one marks the emphasis upon 
 that word Eternal. ** The eternal God is thy 
 home." We are Hke the children of a king 
 who on the palace floor build their little 
 shacks. Let them tear down the shacks, 
 they will find themselves in the palace. 
 Again, " Underneath are the everlasting 
 
68 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 arms." All that a father's arms mean when 
 they mean most, that and more God's sup- 
 port must mean. What do a father's arms 
 mean? Protection, Peace, Strength, We 
 remember seeing a little baby placed in his 
 older brother's arms. The baby cried for 
 fright. The baby did not realize that both 
 he and his brother were in the strong arms 
 of the mother. Underneath, away down 
 underneath, are the everlasting arms. So 
 your sermon grows in your folder sermon 
 garden. 
 
 Or again, in your reading of the New 
 Testament, you happened upon Dr. MofTatt's 
 literal translation, and there flashed upon you 
 the words, "We are a colony of heaven." 
 How beautiful I . . . and all your fading 
 memories of the rights and obligations of the 
 Roman colony came to your mind, and 
 another sermon began to grow. 
 
 You chanced to be reading a sermon of 
 Campbell, and you came upon words like 
 these, " As I was climbing a mountain one 
 misty morning, I saw what I took to be a 
 monster. As I drew nearer I saw it was a 
 man. As I met him I saw he was my 
 brother." And by some association of ideas, 
 there came to you, without your seeking, the 
 great words, *' The dayspring from on high 
 shall visit us, to shine upon them that sit in 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 69 
 
 darkness and the shadow of death, to guide 
 our feet into the way of peace." " Illumina- 
 tion, Guidance." With the coming of the 
 day-dawn, men who have groped about in 
 the half light seeing monster shapes now 
 find the pathway to peace, and in every man 
 see their brother. 
 
 One evening you were reading Mrs. 
 Browning's " Casa Guidi Windows." You 
 came upon these lines : 
 
 ** So rise up henceforth with a cheerful smile, 
 And having strewn the violets, reap the corn. 
 And having reaped and garnered, bring the plough, 
 And draw new furrows 'neath the healthy morn, 
 And plant the great Hereafter in this Now." 
 
 The thought gripped you : *' Planting the 
 great Hereafter in this Now." As you knelt 
 in prayer that night, it held you still : " Plant- 
 ing the great Hereafter in this Now." The 
 next morning you woke with the idea which 
 would not let you go. You didn't read Mrs. 
 Browning to get a sermon ; but as an addi- 
 tional largess, she gave you the germ of one 
 which would grow in your sermon garden. 
 
 You were glancing over an Atlantic 
 Mo7ithly : "The writer knows a young 
 Frenchman who when the war broke out 
 had lived for three years in this country, 
 and hoped to make it a permanent home. 
 To him his mother wrote, * My son, your two 
 
JO The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 brothers are at the front. Are you not com- 
 ing back to fight for France ? * " Are you 
 not coming back to fight for — for what? for 
 France? Will a man leave comfort, peace, 
 life, and lay them all a willing sacrifice on the 
 altar of patriotism, and shall we not find 
 Americans who will answer the summons of 
 the Kingdom ? So you thought, not in order 
 to preach. So you thought because you 
 were a preacher. And your seed was planted 
 which one day would become a sermon on 
 The Call of the Kingdom. 
 
 Or you noticed a news item : " Now in 
 preparation for another raid this winter, the 
 Turks have built a temporary railroad, con- 
 necting with the Damascus Haifa line down 
 through Nablus and Lydda to Beersheba. 
 They have torn up the tracks from Jaffa as 
 far as Lydda but retain the Jerusalem con- 
 nection." The little item was just the needed 
 spark to set your mind aflame to start a 
 series of sermons which should deal with 
 certain other travellers along those ancient 
 paths, or perhaps with the problems of the 
 Life and Leaders of the Early Church. 
 
 So, now it is a Bible passage that yields 
 you your sermon germ, now it is a narrative 
 from the common life, now a poem, now a 
 letter, now the careful consideration of some 
 theme of theology. The infinite riches of life, 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 71 
 
 of all life, are ours. Dr. Jefferson has some 
 delightful remarks to this effect : " It is not 
 well to cultivate the homiletic habit, the 
 habit of demanding a pound of sermonic 
 flesh from every Antonio you chance to 
 meet. One ought not to be thinking shop 
 all the time. A man who is always working 
 for sermons is as foolish as a man who is 
 always working for money. Landscapes and 
 historic ruins and children, and all other 
 lovely things are to be enjoyed. We wrong 
 a book when we read it simply for the things 
 which we can use. It is desecration of a 
 poem to read it for fine phrases with which 
 to deck a sermon, and we wrong the master- 
 piece of an historian if we follow him only 
 for an illustration with which to brighten up 
 an argument. It is only when we gloriously 
 forget ourselves, as Mrs. Browning has re- 
 minded us, and plunge headlong into the 
 depths of the author's thought that we get 
 out of a book the best thing which the book 
 has to give." 
 
 We may accept the teaching of the para- 
 graph, while remembering at the same time 
 certain facts : A preacher may not read a 
 poem in order to find a sermon, but as he 
 reads he does not cease to be a preacher. I 
 have been interested to sit behind a con- 
 servatory professor during the concert of 
 
72 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 some great musician who plays the instru- 
 ment which the professor teaches. The pro- 
 fessor's body sways back and forth with the 
 rhythm of the music. Indeed his nervous 
 system seems to be a harp on which the 
 musician plays, and yet on the morrow the 
 professor will point out to his pupils the 
 accuracy or the defects of the artist's tech- 
 nique, will analyze with merciless fidelity the 
 elements of the master's art. In listening to 
 the concert, the professor does not cease to 
 be a professor. The homiletic faculty, if you 
 please, does not sleep when the faculty of 
 appreciation is most awake. When Jowett 
 made a little toy water-wheel for his child, 
 and used the waters of the Welsh hills to 
 drive the wheel, he did not help his child in 
 order to preach, but his task lost none of its 
 fascination, as he was led by it to think as a 
 preacher that a man may get the great river 
 of God's life and power to operate the little 
 mill of his personal life, as his task reminded 
 him of the text, "The Lord is MY Strength." 
 Speaking to the younger men in the ministry, 
 I should dare to go even further, and to re- 
 mind them that Bushnell *' cultivated deter- 
 minately the preacher's habit of mind." It 
 is instructive to study the biographer's ex- 
 cerpts from Phillips Brooks's early note- 
 books, and to see how the man was making 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 73 
 
 his reading, his experiences, his observations 
 serve his preaching. One who has dealt at 
 all with seminary students will bear me out 
 in saying that while in their college courses 
 they have been walking over acres of homilet- 
 ical diamonds, they come into the seminary 
 utterly unaware of their wealth. The homiletic 
 habit is not a disastrous habit for a young 
 man to cultivate provided it does not be- 
 come a monomania. Walking is easy when 
 you know how to walk. The homiletic habit 
 does not need to be cultivated, when you 
 have it, and the reason is that the habit 
 persists and flourishes without assistance 
 
 Still that Sunday sermon goes unwatched, 
 untended. What about it? I think I can 
 see a sickly little sprout sticking its head 
 above the ground. Let us try to cultivate it. 
 " But I don't feel like preparing a sermon 
 this morning." That doesn't make any dif- 
 ference. We shall do everything within our 
 power to make ourselves feel like working. 
 You remember that James suggests : ** Com- 
 pared with what we ought to be, we are half 
 awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are 
 checked. We are making use of only a small 
 part of our possible mental and physical re- 
 sources." 
 
 I heard of one man, who when he felt 
 
74 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 " like a walrus on an ice floe, heavy, nielan- 
 choly, ineffective," could warm and vitalize 
 and make efficient his powers if he put on a 
 dress-suit, and went to his desk as to a dance. 
 A friend of mine has a victrola, which by re< 
 quest will play for him a Beethoven sonata, 
 and lift him up into the seventh heaven, where 
 he hears unspeakable tv^ords which it is not 
 lawful for a man to utter. The experience 
 however gives him words to speak to his 
 congregation. The winds of heaven may 
 not always blow upon a man's sails, but the 
 sails must be ready to catch them when they 
 come. You have read the word of Philo, 
 " At times, coming to my work empty I have 
 suddenly become full, ideas being sown upon 
 me in showers from above." We have all 
 tasted of that divine experience. Eight hours* 
 sleep, a light breakfast, a quiet sunny room 
 for uninterrupted study, a room which as one 
 suggests is not so much an office as an ora- 
 tory, — these for most preachers are essentials. 
 Have you ever ventured into the workshop 
 of a poor preacher? It reminds you of the 
 anteroom of a children's nursery, or the ves- 
 tibule of the morgue. All is explained, the 
 cluttered sermon, the chilling sermon, the 
 dead sermon. 
 
 Let us then assume that the external con- 
 ditions of study are favourable. Let us as- 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 75 
 
 sume that we have our text. Deliberately 
 we study it. Then with great care we study 
 the context. In case of doubt as to exegesis, 
 we dig into an International Critical Com- 
 mentary, provided the correct volume has 
 come from the press. I am planning to will 
 to my descendants my order for the complete 
 set, which I executed a decade ago. If the 
 International Commentary is not available, 
 we shall use some other commentary which 
 compels us to think rather than permits us 
 to stop thinking. There are great names 
 subscribed to letters commending homilet- 
 ical commentaries which would make a man 
 a mental Mephibosheth for life. No preacher 
 ever thrived on peptonized food. 
 
 Gradually out of the gloom our theme ap- 
 pears, the thing we are going to preach about, 
 the sermon in little. Perhaps it chances to 
 develop into a straight ethical sermon. How 
 is a man going to be saved from saying an 
 undisputed thing in such a solemn way? 
 Has not a writer said, " Men see already with 
 exasperating clearness what their duty is " ? 
 Yes, they do, sometimes. Sometimes a man 
 will say to you quite plainly as a man said 
 a while ago to Rauschenbusch, " I cannot be 
 a Christian ; there is too much lying in my 
 business." To men who see their duty with 
 exasperating clearness, our message is the 
 
76 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 message of the cross. And at a time when 
 ninety-five per cent, of Europe's university 
 men have been sent to the front, and the 
 greater part destroyed, I will not believe that 
 the men of America will refuse the call of the 
 cross. Will Jesus not find men in the indus- 
 trial life of America who will dare to be Chris- 
 tians ? Jesus has found them, will find them. 
 
 " And where is the man who comes up from the 
 
 throng, 
 Who does the new deed, and who sings the 
 
 new song. 
 And who makes the old world as a world that 
 
 is new ? 
 And who is the man ? It is you ! it is you ! 
 And our praise is exultant and proud. 
 We are waiting for you there, for you are the 
 
 man ! 
 Come up from the jostle as soon us you can ; 
 Come up from the crowd there, for you are 
 
 the man, — 
 The man who comes up from the crowd." 
 
 But there are hosts of men who do not see 
 their duty clearly, who would like to do their 
 duty if they knew it. Your ethical sermon 
 will help these men to find the narrow but 
 divinely wide gate that leads into Jesus' way. 
 And as you prepare your sermon you will 
 find courage for your task in the words of 
 Faunce : ** There is more eagerness to hear 
 a worthy appeal to the sense of duty to-day 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 77 
 
 than ever since Miles Standish stepped on 
 Plymouth Rock." 
 
 Or your sermon turns out to be a strictly 
 doctrinal sermon. We have hesitated to 
 preach sermons dealing with doctrine, but I 
 ask you men who have been preaching the 
 past years what sermons have met the most 
 immediate, obvious and hearty response. I 
 venture to believe they have been sermons in 
 which you have spoken of the God we trust, 
 the Master we serve, the Eternal Life. Presi- 
 dent Eliot truly says : *' Through constant 
 changes in direction of interests, theological 
 themes remain the themes of supreme interest 
 to thinking men." But can we put the an- 
 cient message of doctrine into new forms? 
 Not only can we do so. We must do so. 
 You know men, I doubt not, in your very 
 seminary, men who know all the old argu- 
 ments, who are fighting in half despair for 
 their faith in the personality of God, the su- 
 premacy of Christ, the reality of the Eternal 
 Life. Only this week it may be you received 
 a letter from a man of choicest spirit who sees 
 no other hope for the after-death than that of 
 ** the choir invisible, of those immortal dead, 
 who live again," — who live alone — " in lives 
 made better by their presence." The prep- 
 aration of your doctrinal sermon becomes not 
 a cloister study in theology. It is the prep- 
 
78 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 aration of food for starving men, it is the 
 launching of a life-boat for wrestlers with the 
 troubled sea. 
 
 Or your sermon turns out to be an experi- 
 mental sermon, and deals with the deep ex- 
 periences of your people, their sorrows, their 
 fears, their joys. Learning does not help a 
 man whose reputation has been ruined. Ed- 
 ucation does not uphold a woman whose 
 heart has been crushed by the death of her 
 little daughter. You remember that fine 
 word regarding Dr. Watson : " He had a 
 great eye for the sunrise " ; and that personal 
 word of his, ** Never can I forget what a dis- 
 tinguished scholar who used to sit in my 
 church once said to me, * Your best work has 
 been to put heart into men for the coming 
 week.' " Our dean told me that his baby 
 daughter used to sleep in a crib beside the 
 father's bed, and sometimes in the darkness 
 of the midnight, the father would hear the 
 baby's voice : " Hand, Hand," and when the 
 father's hand was upon her own she was at 
 rest. Your experimental sermon as it devel- 
 ops in your study is no mere affair of homi- 
 letics. It is a great loving effort to put heart 
 into men for the coming week, to make men 
 conscious of the hand which presses strong 
 and tender upon the hand of each bewildered 
 child of God. 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 79 
 
 But it is most probable that you will not be 
 able very glibly to identify your sermon as 
 ethical or doctrinal or experimental. Your 
 ethics passes into doctrine, your doctrine into 
 ethics, and both into Christian experience. 
 Dr. Fosdick calls attention to the words of 
 George MacDonald in his " Robert Falconer," 
 " This is a sane, wholesome, practical work- 
 ing faith, first, that it is a man's business to 
 do the will of God, second, that God takes on 
 Himself the special care of that man, and 
 third, that therefore that man ought never to 
 be afraid of anything." In the enunciation 
 of that wholesome practical working faith, 
 we shall emphasize now the ethical, now the 
 doctrinal, now the experimental aspect. 
 
 As you sit at your desk, or join the peri- 
 patetics, of whom Crothers speaks, and walk 
 back and forth, back and forth in your room, 
 the sermon stuff grows. At last you have 
 before you a pile of half sheets, each with a 
 jotting, a note, an illustration. Out of the 
 chaos order develops, and the dry land of an 
 outline. According to the main heads or 
 headlands of this rough outline, you divide 
 your material into three, four or five piles, or 
 possibly like Robertson into two piles. " Let 
 us see : this thought goes under my II, that 
 under my III, this goes into the Introduction." 
 
 Then we begin to write, or perhaps we don't. 
 
8o The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 At this point we divide into two groups. 
 There are men who never write out their ser- 
 mons in full, there are others who must write 
 every word. I wonder sometimes whether 
 we quite appreciate the possible change that 
 may be wrought in sermon preparation by the 
 invention and prevalent use of the typewriter. 
 There is many a man who in the old days sim- 
 ply did not have the time to write his sermons 
 in full, who finds that his best thoughts come 
 to him as he pounds fast and furiously upon 
 the keys of his typewriter. The mechanical 
 operation of the hands tends to keep the 
 brain and heart active. The homiletical aris- 
 tocrat may find it possible and wise to dictate 
 to a typist, or preferably to a dictaphone. 
 In three, four hours, the writing is com- 
 plete. Now he who has written with fury 
 corrects with phlegm. (This is one homiletical 
 instruction that I remember from my semi- 
 nary days.) There is rearrangement, read- 
 justment. The adjectives are dropped that 
 the gold dust nouns may do the preacher's 
 work for him. The long words are short- 
 ened. ''When in doubt," says Hare, "use 
 the plainest, the commonest, the most idio- 
 matic. Eschew fine words as you would 
 rouge. Love simple ones as you would na- 
 I tive roses on your cheek." We remember 
 "^ the word of Beecher, ** Don't whip with a 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 81 
 
 switch that has the leaves on, if you want to 
 tingle." Have we fallen unconsciously into 
 the essay style ? We break it up. Here dia- 
 logue, there question. Have we forgotten 
 the radical distinction between the teacher's 
 desk and the preacher's pulpit? We shall 
 remember now, and reconstruct sentences, 
 make the past the present, that the ancient 
 warriors may live again and lead our people 
 in their long crusade. 
 
 Then the preacher draws off a brief preach- 
 ing outline, which may cover a page or two 
 of coarsely written catch words. Then the 
 sermon is laid away until Sunday morning. 
 
 Sunday morning comes, always about 
 forty-eight hours too soon ; with it comes an 
 early breakfast, then two or three hours of 
 definite pulpit preparation. What shall this 
 preparation be ? There are a few men, I sup- 
 pose, who must ever be chained to a manu- 
 script. They are fewer than we sometimes 
 imagine. Our people would usually rather 
 have us read sermons well prepared than 
 have us deliver without manuscript sermons 
 which we should be ashamed to put into 
 manuscript ; but there is no question that 
 they prefer a good sermon without manu- 
 script to an equally good sermon with manu- 
 script. For most of us the question resolves 
 itself into this : Are the two or three hours 
 
82 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 needful for specific pulpit preparation worth 
 the investment? In ninety cases out of a 
 hundred the time so spent yields dividends 
 of priceless value. 
 
 The pulpit preparation is made, not from 
 the manuscript, but from the preaching out- 
 line. There is no conscious memorization of 
 the manuscript material, though naturally 
 phrases, sometimes sentences and even whole 
 paragraphs may be uttered as previously 
 written. But that morning in his study the 
 preacher sees them all. There is the young 
 girl, with eager questioning eyes, there the 
 young man who is fighting the half lost fight 
 of virtue, there the grocer whose competitor 
 across the street is underselling him and lying 
 about him. There is the boarding-house 
 keeper whose boarders suddenly, unreason- 
 ably left her last week, leaving her with a 
 house rent of fifty dollars to pay at the 
 first of the month. So the preacher thinks 
 through his message for his people. Then 
 ten minutes' walk in God's out-of-doors, then 
 a few moments when with God the preacher 
 shares the silence of eternity, then to the 
 pulpit. 
 
 But right here I am interrupted. A 
 preacher tells me, " Man, I have to teach a 
 men's Bible Class immediately before the 
 morning service." I answer, "I beg your 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 83 
 
 pardon, but you do not." If you teach a 
 class before the morning service, you are 
 selling your preacher's birthright, I will not 
 say for a teacher's mess of pottage, but sell- 
 ing it to your great harm and loss. 
 
 Into the pulpit the preacher may or may 
 not carry his preaching notes. To some 
 men such notes bring embarrassment, to 
 some they bring just the needed peace and 
 self-control. We probably shall not refer to 
 them at all in the course of the sermon, but 
 they are there, telling us that no crying baby, 
 no fainting woman, no fire-engine siren, 
 need disturb the flow of sermonic thought. 
 
 The hymns were chosen before the Sab- 
 bath ; they harmonize with the preacher's 
 thought and the temper of the sermon. The 
 Scripture reading leads up to or illustrates 
 the idea to be developed. The prayer 
 was thought out in the week time, for the 
 preacher would feel ashamed to speak to 
 God in words less thoughtful than the words 
 he speaks to men. The choirmaster has 
 been gently but firmly reminded that the 
 sermon is not the servant of the choir music, 
 but that the choir music is the servant of the 
 service. The choir has been courteously 
 informed that the choir gallery is not a 
 whispering gallery. 
 
 Then the sermon. The whole power of a 
 
84 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 kindled personality is at work, not to recall 
 thoughts, words, phrases, paragraphs, but to 
 get God's message into the hearts and lives 
 of God's people. Most instances of poor 
 delivery seem to be instances of inadequate 
 preparation. '* Nothing," says one, " is more 
 certain than that the man who has learned 
 early the right modulation of the voice, and 
 has learned to be content with those simple 
 gestures that are natural and dignified, has 
 mastered what is fundamental in pulpit 
 oratory." Some instances of poor delivery 
 are not due to inadequate preparation but 
 to lack of fire. It has been said of Martin 
 Luther that he never did anything well until 
 he was angry. I know laymen who would 
 gladly insult their preacher, if only he would 
 get really " mad " at something, some one, 
 anything, any one. At any rate in our 
 preaching there will always be the note of 
 urgency, of crisis, if you will. "You can't 
 step twice into the same river." No, and 
 you cannot speak twice to the same audi- 
 ence. Even granted that the people com- 
 posing the congregation Sunday after Sunday 
 are called by the same names, the experiences 
 of the week have made them difTerent people. 
 " This, this is my last chance to speak to these 
 men and women and boys and girls, God's 
 children." 
 
The Preacher and His Sermon 85 
 
 "But I find myself continually harassed 
 by the fear of men." Do you recall the re- 
 mark of Campbell Morgan? He said that 
 he never felt any nervousness in the pulpit. 
 His friend Thomas Champness replied, 
 ** Neither do I, and the reason is the same 
 both in your case and mine, — we have no 
 reputation to lose." May not some such 
 thought help us? The preacher is but a 
 voice. Horton quotes what he calls the 
 grand but singular petition of the Moravian 
 liturgy : " From the unhappy desire of be- 
 coming great, Good Lord, deliver me." The 
 herald has no concern for his reputation. He 
 is so identified with his king and his mes- 
 sage that he fears the face of no man. 
 
 But the most courageous preacher may 
 well fear the face of the clock. The most 
 vicious sermon may have one virtue: it 
 may be brief. How many of us seem to 
 hope by the murder of time to win im- 
 mortality 1 I remember one theologue who 
 was gently criticized for preaching for fifty 
 minutes. He replied, ** Gunsaulus does." 
 The answer was upon our tongue, but we 
 did not wish to be rude. " A hundred ser- 
 mons," says Fenelon, ** are too long, where 
 one is too short." There are others besides 
 Daniel's Antiochus who wear out the saints 
 of the most high. A half hour to raise the 
 
86 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 dead ? Precisely that ; but if a half hour 
 does not suffice to raise the dead, fifty 
 minutes will infallibly seal the tomb. 
 
 The preacher had hoped to raise the dead, 
 but after he has pronounced the benediction, 
 and the organ has begun the postlude, as the 
 people stroll out into the light of common 
 day, he can seldom detect a motion of the 
 risen life. Has his word quickened his 
 people ? He may hear that one man re- 
 peated for himself what R. L. Stevenson 
 once wrote, " I have been to church and am 
 not depressed." Well, that is something. 
 He may chance to hear of a woman who 
 said that after the sermon she felt as did the 
 woman who was accustomed to listen to 
 Beecher: **When I left Plymouth the sun 
 was always shining, whatever the weather." 
 More than this the preacher may never 
 know. But those who have honestly tried to 
 clothe the old message with the new form 
 dictated by their times and their individuality, 
 may be well assured that they have wrought 
 with God in His creative. His recreative, work. 
 
 ** And ofttimes cometh our wise Lord God, 
 
 Master of every trade, 
 And tells them tales of daily toil. 
 
 Of Edens newly made, 
 And they rise to their feet as He passes by, 
 
 Gentlemen unafraid." 
 
Ill 
 
 The Preacher and His Bible 
 
in 
 
 THE PREACHER AND HIS BBLE 
 
 THE preacher may be a student of 
 many books. He must be the 
 master of one book, the Bible. 
 Of this book there is to-day an astound- 
 ing popular ignorance. Professor Phelps of 
 Yale remarks, '' If all the undergraduates of 
 America could be placed in one room, and 
 tested by a common examination on the 
 supposedly familiar stories of the Old 
 Testament, I mean on such instances as 
 Adam, Eve, the Garden of Eden, Noah, 
 Samson, David and Goliath, Moses .and 
 Pharaoh, the result would be a magnificent 
 contribution to American humour. The ex- 
 perience of teachers with other books is 
 almost never the same, but ask any teacher 
 in the United States what luck he has with the 
 Bible, and he throws up his hands in despair. 
 I inquired of one fine young specimen of 
 American manhood what he thought Shake- 
 speare meant by the phrase, *Here feel we 
 not the penalty of Adam,* and he replied, 
 * It was the mark put on Adam for having 
 slain his brother.' To another lad who was 
 
 89 
 
90 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 every inch a gentleman, I put the question, 
 
 * Explain the line, *' Or memorize another 
 Golgotha,' ' ' and his face became a blank. I 
 came to his relief with the remark, * Golgotha 
 is a New Testament reference.' A light of 
 intelligence illumined his handsome face : 
 
 * It was Goliath.' " Professor Phelps de- 
 clares : ** The ignorance of college students 
 of Biblical literature is universal, profound 
 and complete." 
 
 I suppose that the Freshmen of a widely 
 known Christian college, which automatically 
 rejects as candidates for the Freshman class 
 the lowest third of the graduating class of 
 any high school, may fairly represent the 
 culture of our intelligent Christian homes. 
 One is continually impressed by the prevail- 
 ing ignorance. I asked a question regard- 
 ing the fate of John the Baptist and got this 
 written reply : *• Herod, a wicked king disUk- 
 ing John the Baptist, had a large supper and 
 while all were there, John said, * Whatever ye 
 ask it shall be given you.' And Herod's 
 daughter, following her mother's advice, 
 asked for his head upon a platter. He would 
 not reject her, thus showing his strong faith 
 in God." I do not say that this is typical 
 I can hardly say it is exceptional. 
 
 After numberless experiences of this kind, 
 one trembles to think what would happen 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 91 
 
 should an average Freshman Bible examina- 
 tion be given to an average Sunday con- 
 gregation. " I will confess," says one of our 
 great English preachers, " that one of the 
 mistakes of my ministry has been my failure 
 to preach with the remembrance of my 
 hearers' disuse of the Scripture." Casual 
 Biblical allusions which we assume to be 
 familiar to our audiences pass them by as 
 doth the idle wind. 
 
 Consider the significance of this prevailing 
 ignorance. It means that our people are 
 unfamiliar with the supreme literature of the 
 world. It is a literature supreme in the 
 sublimity of its style. Its style has well been 
 called the style of the heavenly court. Let 
 me read you a few lines : 
 
 *' O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get 
 
 thee up on a high mountain ; 
 O thou that tellest good tidings to Jerusalem, 
 
 lift up thy voice with strength ; 
 Lift it up, be not afraid ; say unto the cities 
 
 of Judah, Behold your God." 
 
 Think over again the Twenty-third Psalm, 
 ** The Lord is my shepherd ; " or the first 
 eighteen verses of John, ** In the beginning 
 was the Word and the Word was with God 
 and the Word was God." Read again the 
 eighth of Romans, "Who shall separate us 
 from the love of God?" Read again the 
 
92 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 second of Philippians, " Have this mind in 
 you which was also in Christ Jesus,'* or the 
 seventh of the Revelation, " These are they 
 that come out of the great tribulation, and 
 they washed their robes, and made them 
 white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore 
 are they before the throne of God ; and they 
 serve him day and night in his temple : and 
 he that sitteth on the throne shall spread his 
 tabernacle over them. They shall hunger 
 no more, neither thirst any more ; neither 
 shall the sun strike upon them, nor any heat : 
 for the Lamb that is in the midst of the 
 throne shall be their shepherd, and shall 
 guide them unto fountains of waters of life : 
 and God shall wipe away every tear from 
 their eyes.'' I do not read language like that 
 anywhere outside the covers of this book. 
 
 Again, it is a literature supreme in the 
 variety and the unity of its contents. Here 
 are sixty-six books : history, prophecy, legend, 
 parable, allegory, philosophy, proverbs, fa- 
 miliar correspondence, masterpieces of public 
 discourse, homilies ; books written at various 
 times in a period measured by centuries, 
 gathered together and called The Book. The 
 Book was not made one by the fiat of councils. 
 For all its variety the Book is organically one, 
 one with the unity of a common purpose, the 
 unity of a common Presence. 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 93 
 
 The Bible is a literature supreme in the 
 universality of its appeal. Take a single 
 story, that of the Prodigal Son. Read that 
 story to an audience in a street mission in 
 Singapore or Hong Kong. The hard-faced, 
 soft-hearted sailor, the almond-eyed mer- 
 chant, the woman whom the world has 
 abandoned, the waif of the street, the stu- 
 dent who has come from the West to learn 
 the lore of the East, — there is not one of 
 them whom that single story does not find 
 at the deepest depths of his being. 
 
 Again the Bible is a literature supreme in 
 its power. It is the most powerful book in 
 the world. A single verse of the Old Testa- 
 ment, the first, led a young Japanese student, 
 Neesima, to the one God, towards the founda- 
 tion of the Christian University of the Do- 
 shisha. Of a single book of the Old Testa- 
 ment we read, " The psalms have written a 
 new history for themselves in the experience 
 of many Christian men and women, and in 
 some of the memorable movements of the 
 Church and of the world. What a wonder- 
 ful story they could tell if we could gather it 
 all from lonely chambers, from sufTering sick- 
 beds, from the brink of the valley of the 
 shadow of death, from scafiolds and from 
 fiery piles ! " 
 
 To speak of the Old Testament as a whole : 
 
94 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 this was the Bible of John the Baptist. From 
 his favourite prophecy he took the words 
 which expressed his great commission. The 
 Old Testament was the Bible of Jesus. Here 
 the Master found His answers to the Tempter 
 and the warrant for His work of mercy. From 
 the Old Testament, indeed, from one of the 
 prophecies now most completely forgotten, 
 Peter wrought his apologetic at Pentecost. 
 Paul regarded the same Old Testament as 
 the oracles of God. The dry system of laws 
 of which we think almost with aversion, he 
 counted a slave to lead men to the school 
 of Christ. It was the Old Testament which 
 taught the world that ** righteousness is sal- 
 vation." 
 
 Turn for a moment from the Old Testa- 
 ment to the New. One verse of that little 
 book caught the eye of a young debauchee 
 named Augustine, and transformed him into 
 a preacher who became at once the father of 
 Romanism and of Protestantism. One verse 
 of that New Testament shook from the soul 
 of Luther the shackles of Romanism, sent 
 him forth, a free man, to set free the western 
 world. Take from the New Testament a 
 single story, that of Jesus, and you take from 
 men the knowledge of Him who hath brought 
 life and immortality out into the light. 
 
 It is needless to speak of the New Testa- 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 95 
 
 ment as a whole. William Wilberforce tells 
 us that once on a long journey he read 
 through the New Testament, and from the 
 perusal arose, a new creature. A Hindu well 
 said, " If I were a missionary, I would not 
 argue, I would simply say, * Here is the New 
 Testament, read that.' " 
 
 If we think for a moment of the entire 
 Bible we remind ourselves that it has puri- 
 fied languages, it has created literatures. 
 ** The German language," says one, " is 
 moulded by the Bible." The Bible has been 
 the poor man's friend, the handbook of democ- 
 racy. We can scarcely quote too often the 
 words of Green : *' No greater moral change 
 ever passed over a nation than passed over 
 England during the years which parted the 
 middle of the reign of Elizabeth from the 
 meeting of the Long Parliament. England 
 became the people of a book, and that book 
 was the Bible. . . . Everywhere its words 
 kindled a startling enthusiasm. . . . Sun- 
 day after Sunday, day after day, the crowds 
 that gathered round Bonner's Bibles in the 
 nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that 
 hung on the words of the Geneva Bible in 
 the devotional exercises at home were leav- 
 ened with a new literature. . . . Eliza- 
 beth might silence or tune the pulpits ; but 
 it was impossible for her to silence or tune 
 
96 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 the great preachers of justice, and mercy and 
 truth who spoke from the book she had again 
 opened for her people. ... A new con- 
 ception of Hfe and man superseded the old. 
 A new moral and religious impulse spread 
 through every class. . . . The whole na- 
 tion became, in fact, a Church." The Anglo- 
 Saxon .lawmakers have all gone to school 
 to the Bible. The heretics of yesterday, 
 Waldo, Wyclifle, Huss, gained their mes- 
 sages from the Book. The Pilgrims and the 
 Puritans came across the sea to build a new 
 world upon the old Book. It is a true word : 
 *' The Hebrews did not make a civilization, 
 but they made a book which has sent other 
 nations to making civilizations." I have 
 read somewhere that the Bible created the 
 idea of humanity. It is certain that the great 
 workers for humanity have been men of the 
 Book. In Africa, the Bible was Livingstone's 
 one trusted guide. Paton, Morrison, Spur- 
 geon, Brooks, Drummond, men of widely 
 differing points of view, were all men of the 
 Book. Of Lincoln it has been said, " He 
 built up his entire reading on his early study 
 of the Bible ; he had mastered it absolutely, 
 mastered it as later he mastered very few 
 books." An oriental book, it has worked its 
 way into western life. Become a western 
 book, it now goes back to the East to win do- 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 97 
 
 minion. Wherever the Book goes, it makes 
 liars honest, libertines pure, cowards brave. 
 Professor Huxley has remarked, " I have 
 been seriously perplexed to know how the 
 religious feeling which is the essential basis 
 of conduct can be kept up without the use of 
 the Bible." 
 
 The Emperor Diocletian made a deter- 
 mined efTort to destroy all the copies of the 
 Scripture in his realm. As one thinks of 
 the influence of the Bible upon the history 
 of the world, one is appalled at the thought 
 of what would have happened had he suc- 
 ceeded. And yet Spurgeon's words have 
 sting in them, " The Bible is in every house, 
 but in many the dust on it is so thick that 
 we might write on it : Damnation." If dust 
 gathers upon the Bibles which lie in such 
 saintly but deathlike repose on the lower 
 shelves of the centre tables of our people, 
 Diocletian will achieve his desire without the 
 shedding of blood, always a disagreeable 
 necessity. 
 
 Along with the amazing ignorance of the 
 Bible which still prevails, there has developed 
 within the past few years an amazing inter- 
 est in the Bible. A report compiled Decem- 
 ber 7, 1913, states that during the preceding 
 year, there had been printed 28,000,000 
 copies of the Scripture and of portions of the 
 
98 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 Scripture. About half of these copies were 
 in English, the remainder in five hundred 
 languages and dialects of the world. Add 
 to this the number of commentaries upon the 
 Scriptures, the number of Sabbath School 
 and other printed discussions of the Scrip- 
 tures, and the quantity of literature is simply 
 enormous. The life of the average book is 
 not more than two or four years ; then it is 
 dead " beyond all hope of resurrection." 
 Much of the material of the Bible was written 
 more than twenty-five hundred years ago. 
 All of it was written more than eighteen hun- 
 dred years ago. To-day it is the best selling 
 book in the world. I do not overestimate 
 the value of such statistics. I recall Mr. 
 Dooley's discussion of the problem : " Says 
 I, * Th' only books in me libr'y is the Bible 
 an* Shakespeare,' says I. * They're gr-reat 
 f'r ye,' says she ; * so bully f'r th' style. 
 D'ye read thim all th' time ? ' she says. * I 
 niver read thim,' says I ; ' I use thim f'r pur- 
 poses iv definse. I have niver read them, 
 but I'll niver read annything else till I have 
 read thim,' I says. * They shtand between 
 me an' all modhren lithrachoor,' says I. 
 * I've built thim up into a kind iv break- 
 wather,' I says, * an' I set behind it calm and 
 contint, while Hall Caine rages without,' 
 says I." But grant the peril, the statistics 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 99 
 
 remain significant of an extraordinary in- 
 terest in the Bible. 
 
 One of the striking phenomena of our 
 student world is the increase of voluntary 
 Bible study. Among the students of the 
 colleges of the United States and Canada, 
 approximately one hundred thousand women 
 and fifty thousand men are engaged in vol- 
 untary Bible study in groups. The Summer 
 Bible Conferences have multiplied. Under 
 the statesmanlike leadership of the Associa- 
 tions of young men and young women, there 
 have been brought together for intensive 
 Bible study thousands of those who are to be 
 leaders of the leaders of our country. 
 
 The organized Bible Class movement has 
 spread like wild-fire. Elaborate courses for 
 normal instruction are now being offered by 
 city Sunday-School Associations. Some of 
 our states are giving high school credit for 
 certain specified Biblical work done in the 
 Sabbath School. The Gary plan with its 
 various modifications is likely to give new 
 impetus to Bible study among our boys and 
 girls. Warren H. Wilson speaks with au- 
 thority of the Sabbath School, which of course 
 centres its work upon the teaching of the 
 Bible : " If only the teachers and ministers 
 realized the value of the Sunday-school and 
 its acceptance with the people, there would 
 
loo The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 be needed no other machinery for building 
 the country community." 
 
 Now there is danger in this very revival of 
 interest in the Bible. An unenlightened in- 
 terest is not so dangerous as utter ignorance. 
 Paul was able to rejoice if Christ were pro- 
 claimed whether in truth or in pretense. But 
 when one remembers that Luther's hostile at- 
 titude towards Copernicus was determined 
 by his attitude towards Scripture, when 
 one remembers the witchcraft delusion of 
 Salem, and all the crimes that have been 
 committed in obedience to Scripture, one 
 notes with chilled enthusiasm certain aspects 
 of the revived interest in the Bible. A new 
 interest in the Bible leads one man to be- 
 come a Mormon, another to become a dis- 
 ciple of Dowie. Bible classes organized 
 under the auspices of certain schools of 
 thought are likely to lead to darkness and to 
 ditches as often as to daylight and the great 
 ascent. 
 
 Has not the preacher come to his kingdom 
 for such a time as this ? The preacher does 
 not have to fight for his place. He is uni- 
 versally recognized as the authorized inter- 
 preter of Scripture. He is supposed to be a 
 Biblical expert. In this field he has no com- 
 petition to fear. The Bible is the preacher's 
 Book. A spectator sometimes wonders 
 
The Preacher and His Bible lOi 
 
 whether we preachers have quite appreciated 
 our strategic position, wonders whether we 
 might not declare a closed season for pulpit 
 discussions of the latest novel. Professor 
 Moulton, a critic of literature, is able to pack 
 a church even on a prayer-meeting night. 
 The people come to hear him read the Bible 
 in a way that gives sense. If we can inter- 
 pret Browning, Milton, Winston Churchill, 
 Ernest Poole, well and good. But if we use 
 them to draw our audiences and to preach 
 our sermons for us, are we not silently giving 
 notice to the community, ** In these days of 
 popular ignorance of the Bible, yet increasing 
 interest in the Bible, in these days of rampant 
 and widely advertised misinterpretations of 
 the Bible, I believe it is impossible to interest 
 this community in the one book concerning 
 which I am supposed to speak with expert 
 knowledge and authority " ? Do not the 
 people of the community read that silent no- 
 tice, when they read our advertisement of 
 what we regard as a more attractive program 
 than that of Biblical preaching ? 
 
 Why do we not possess our possessions? 
 I believe one reason to be this : All of us as 
 preachers are afEected, infected by the Ameri- 
 can tendency to change. With childlike sim- 
 plicity we stake our success upon method. 
 
102 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 The method fails, it must be wrong ; we must 
 try another method. We tried the Boys' 
 Scouts. They ** petered out." We tried the 
 Knights of King Arthur. We gave up that 
 organization. Why? Was there anything 
 wrong about the method ? There may have 
 been everything right about the method. 
 No method will work, unless there is a man 
 to work the method. We tried to preach 
 Biblical sermons, but the people were not in- 
 terested. Was there anything wrong about 
 the method ? The prime necessity is not a 
 new method, but a new conscience, a new 
 confidence, a new enthusiasm, a new man. 
 Old things are passed away, behold they are 
 become new. 
 
 In parenthesis it ought perhaps to be said 
 that there are doubtless circumstances that 
 will beat any man. It is to be questioned 
 whether a man can successfully preach Bib- 
 lical sermons or any other kind of sermons 
 in a church which ought to be burned to the 
 ground in the interest of the kingdom of God. 
 It ought also to be added that most of us are 
 victims of ** the lust for statistics." I would 
 not indeed think that a minister proved his 
 spirituality or preaching power by emptying 
 his church, but are we not all greatly indebted 
 to Dr. Jefferson for insisting on the difference 
 between getting an audience and building a 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 103 
 
 church ? I am persuaded that in trying to 
 win an audience a man may undermine his 
 church and lose his preacher's soul. 
 
 But I suspect that our failure to possess our 
 possessions is largely due to the influence of 
 modern Biblical scholarship. With cheerful 
 heart and without reservation, we used to 
 quote as equally authoritative verses of Scrip- 
 ture wherever found, in Ecclesiastes or Ephe- 
 sians, in Esther the book of the bigot or in 
 the Logia of Jesus. We used to treat as of 
 equal historicity the story of Noah's voyage 
 in the ark and the story of Paul's voyage in 
 the ship of Adramyttium. We used to delve 
 into and delight in word studies. Our task 
 was to harmonize passages of Scripture, so 
 as to frame a system of Biblical theology, 
 which we thought was preachable whether it 
 was rational or not. If some passages abso- 
 lutely refused to submit to our treatment, we 
 allegorized them, and regarded the allegory 
 as a demonstration rather than an illustration. 
 
 In our study of prophetism we emphasized 
 prediction as its chief element, failing to 
 realize the truth of the word of J. M. P. Smith : 
 "The prophets insisted constantly that the 
 present was the future in the making, and 
 that there could not possibly be any divorce 
 between the two. Prediction then was to 
 some extent a homiletical method for achiev- 
 
104 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 ing moral and spiritual results in the present." 
 One needs but to read the libretto of the ora- 
 torio of the " Messiah," and then in the light 
 of modern scholarship, to read the texts which 
 Handel used, to perceive what a change has 
 taken place in the preacher's point of view. 
 We had been wont to look out upon the future 
 through the windows of the Aposde Paul, and 
 seldom noticed that the windows of John 
 offered somewhat different vistas, nor did we 
 recognize the fact that the windows of both 
 alike were stained here and there by the 
 radiance of the current apocalyptic. 
 
 Biblical scholarship has called to its aid all 
 history, archaeology, comparative literature 
 and religion, the psychology of religion, a 
 new world view. Questions have paralyzed 
 our hitherto dogmatic assertions. The censer 
 bearer in Christ's triumph train becomes not 
 seldom the herald, to use Mathews' phrase, 
 *' of the good news of pentateuchal analysis " ; 
 the crusader becomes the critic ; and you re- 
 call the definidon of the critic, " A critic is the 
 valet who brushes the clothes of the truth." 
 I am bound to add with all respect that often 
 the valet bungles his job, and frays or soils 
 the clothes. The man who has supposed 
 himself to be breathing the free airs on the 
 mountain top of truth now breathes and 
 breathes out the airs of a spiritual dissecting- 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 105 
 
 room. I do not say that this is the charac- 
 teristic influence of the historical criticism. I 
 do say that upon many men it has exerted 
 this influence. But surely, brethren, these 
 things ought not, need not, so to be. Surely 
 we betray a singular lack of faith in God and 
 in His word. 
 
 Suppose we think for a moment with a man 
 who has just come under the influence of 
 modern Biblical scholarship, an influence 
 which indeed no man can escape. Let us see 
 what encouragements there are for this man 
 as he faces the facts. 
 
 First comes to the preacher's remembrance 
 the glorious ancient word carved on the front 
 wall of the New York Library, '*But above 
 all things truth beareth away the victory." 
 Then comes to his remembrance the word 
 of Huxley, *' Science seems to me to teach in 
 the highest and strongest manner the great 
 truth which is embodied in the Christian con- 
 ception of entire surrender to the will of God. 
 Sit down before fact as a little child, be pre- 
 pared to give up every preconceived notion, 
 follow humbly wherever and to whatever 
 abysses nature leads, or you shall learn noth- 
 ing." And the preacher determines to sit 
 down before fact, if only he can find it, be- 
 fore fact as a little child. 
 
 Then for his sober encouragement in meet- 
 
io6 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 ing facts comes that word of George Adam 
 Smith. We are reminded that he looked 
 through the vast correspondence of Henry 
 Drummond ; that *' some letters came from 
 the silence and loneliness of the far margins 
 of our world, some came from the centres 
 of civilization. One and all told how the 
 literal acceptance of the Bible was what had 
 driven them away from religion/' He writes, 
 ** It is astonishing how many of the questions 
 had to do with the Old Testament, with its 
 discrepancies, its rigorous laws, its pitiless 
 tempers, its open treatment of sexual ques- 
 tions, the atrocities related by history and 
 sanctioned by law." The preacher recalls 
 from his own observation more than one 
 instance of the tragic recoil from literalism 
 to infidelity. Again the preacher takes heart 
 of hope as he remembers that while modern 
 scholarship makes it almost unendurable to 
 read certain old preachers of the second rank, 
 the old preachers of the first rank, men who 
 knew nothing of our higher criticism, speak 
 to us still with an intense, vital, exigent pres- 
 ent day appeal and power. The preacher 
 then considers the notable fact brought out 
 by Dr. Bosworth that alone of the religions 
 of the world, Christianity has dared to sub- 
 ject its sacred books to the most searching 
 scrutiny. How fine it is to think that we 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 107 
 
 are not afraid to be investigated. He gathers 
 up the positive results of this criticism. For 
 example, the prophets who were buried in 
 nicely whitewashed tombs come forth to live 
 again, strong men, human men, heroes by 
 the grace of God, men who long to share 
 with us their visions of God and God's will, 
 men who would tell us how to fight our 
 beautiful fight. Think of the fact that in the 
 study of Jonah we find not so much the 
 opportunity to discuss the capacity of a 
 whale's belly, as the opportunity to disclose 
 the gospel before the Gospel, to enter into 
 the prophet's thought of the length and 
 breadth and height and depth of the love of 
 God. 
 
 The preacher remembers that this same 
 Biblical scholarship has given back to us the 
 historical Jesus, whom we were in danger of 
 losing. A writer calls our attention to the 
 fact that " every life of Christ worth reading 
 outside the Gospels has been written since 
 1835, that therefore our generation knows 
 the historical life of Christ more perfectly 
 than any generation since Christ was on 
 earth, can judge more accurately and inter- 
 pret more certainly the meaning of His every 
 act and word." Our study of the mystery 
 cults helps us see that Paul used terms 
 which his age could understand in order to 
 
lo8 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 state what to him was the worth of Christ. 
 Our study of the Logos doctrine helps us 
 see how the writer of the fourth Gospel strove 
 to carry over the good news of Jesus into 
 the atmosphere of Greek culture, and sought 
 to state in terms of the generation which he 
 knew, the value of the Jesus whom he knew 
 and loved. The preacher is now able to 
 gather up every bit of broken light which 
 has shone from God upon his brother man 
 anywhere, and is able in turn to share with 
 him the white light of the knowledge of the 
 glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 
 Our Biblical scholarship has set us free from 
 what has been called adjectival Christianity, 
 and has saved to us a substantive Chris- 
 tianity which can be preached, and a Bible 
 which needs no league of defense. 
 
 We have often been told that to a great 
 life two factors are essential, work and friend- 
 ship. The real secret of the power of the 
 Bible has been this, that it has introduced 
 men to the supreme work and to the supreme 
 friendships of the world. Biblical scholar- 
 ship has not lost to the Bible its secret. On 
 the contrary, at this moment, the Bible re- 
 veals to us in new and beautiful fashion the 
 great work and the great friendships. 
 
 Modern scholarship has brought into more 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 109 
 
 vivid light the age-long power of the Bible 
 to introduce men to the kind of work which 
 alone can permanently satisfy men. To-day- 
 it calls to men, ** Work for the kingdom of 
 God : work for the world-wide society of the 
 brotherly sons of God. That work will bind 
 all the tasks of life into one lifelong task. 
 That work will call out your highest enthusi- 
 asm from sunrise to sunset." When a man 
 catches a vision of the task to which the Bible 
 and the Bible alone of books introduces him, 
 all tasks seem cheap and tawdry, unless they 
 can be subordinated to, made a part of the 
 eternal and eternally satisfying task. 
 
 Modern scholarship, as we have said, has 
 only made more obvious the persistent power 
 of the Bible to introduce men to the great 
 friendships of the great life. The Bible to- 
 day welcomes men to the vital friendship of 
 Amos, the dresser of sycomore-trees, who 
 entered as it were the Westminster Abbey 
 of Israel, to deliver his message of God's 
 law ; to the friendship of Hosea, who crossed 
 the threshold of his ruined home, to speak 
 to men of the sin which breaks the heart as 
 well as the law of God. Alone of books, the 
 Bible is able to acquaint men with Elijah, 
 the man who stood before Jehovah, with 
 Jeremiah, the man who looked up from the 
 pit and saw the stars ; with Peter, the pas- 
 
no The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 sionate, disloyal, Io3^aI friend of Jesus ; with 
 the disciple whom Jesus loved, the man who 
 leaned upon the Master's breast at supper 
 and stood by the Master at the cross. Alone 
 of the books of the world, the Bible is able 
 to introduce men to a vital friendship with 
 God, and this primarily because the Bible 
 alone is able to introduce men to Jesus, the 
 revealer of the Father. This is the per- 
 sistent wonder of the Book, that it can guide 
 the beggar, the peasant, the prince, into the 
 court of heaven, there to sit beside the King 
 upon His throne. 
 
 The sovereign power of the Book is not a 
 memory. Nor will that power pass with the 
 process of the suns. No new researches of 
 comparative religion, no new discoveries or 
 pseudo-discoveries of archaeologists, no news- 
 paper announcements that Noah rather than 
 Eve ate the fatal apple, can hurt the preacher. 
 All truth is his. Scholarship serves, but no 
 longer scares him. The Lord Jehovah hath 
 given him the tongue of them that are taught 
 that he may know how to sustain with words 
 him that is weary. He wakeneth morning 
 by morning. He wakeneth his ear to hear as 
 they that are taught. And the Lord Jehovah 
 wakens His disciple's ear most often and most 
 surely with the sustaining and sympathetic 
 words of the Word of God. 
 
The Preacher and His Bible ill 
 
 The preacher who has come inevitably un- 
 der the influence of modern Biblical scholar- 
 ship needs simply to remember Campbell 
 Morgan's story : George Borrow when taken 
 by a guide to see the sources of the Severn 
 and the Wye, insisted, not only on seeing, 
 but on drinking the pure spring waters. ** I 
 must drink deeply of these springs," he said, 
 *' that I may speak of them with authority." 
 
 What then ? At all hazards let us give to 
 our people the Bible. No Sunday service 
 need be an absolute failure if the preacher 
 will read with understanding and power the 
 great utterances of Scripture. If the evening 
 audience is small, the preacher may decide 
 to remove the pulpit from the platform, 
 transform his congregation into a Bible class, 
 with its blackboard, its mimeographed out- 
 lines, its Socratic method. With delibera- 
 tion the preacher may become the teacher. 
 It is barely possible that a man may decide 
 to combine into one service of instruction 
 and inspiration the Bible School and the 
 preaching service of the morning. But 
 rather than employ these somewhat dubious 
 experiments let us be ambitious to be Biblical 
 preachers. Let us heed the implied exhorta- 
 tion of the words spoken of Frederick W. 
 Robertson, " Perhaps the first thing that 
 arrests our attention is the distinctively 
 
112 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 Biblical quality of his preaching. He illus- 
 trates most suggestively the fruitfulness of 
 Biblical study for homiletic use, furnishes the 
 most attractive model of effective Biblical 
 method, and has exerted an important in- 
 fluence upon the best Biblical preaching oi 
 our day." 
 
 Let us treat our texts with honest reverence. 
 Let us not hurry away from them, as Cook's 
 tourists from the supreme treasures of Euro- 
 pean art galleries, as all of us from the 
 infinitely precious commonplaces of life. 
 How significant are the words of Ruskin's 
 friend, who had been asked to make a visit 
 to Rome : " I ought to go with you to Rome, 
 but my difficulty is to appreciate my own 
 back garden, our copper beech, our weeping 
 ash, our little nailed up rose tree, and twist- 
 ing nailed up creepers. I think when I have 
 finished with the back garden, I will go as 
 far as Rome." 
 
 We shall preach more expository sermons. 
 Beecher and Brooks both advocate this by 
 precept if not by example. Jowett urges it 
 by example if not by precept. In introducing 
 one sermon he says, "If I were to repeat my 
 text this morning, I should have to repeat 
 the whole of the Epistle to the Colossians. I 
 think it is well that at times we should get 
 away from inspecting the individual flower 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 113 
 
 however beautiful, and even away from the 
 wonders of the single hedgerow, and the 
 glories of the larger garden or field, and 
 ascending some conspicuous height contem- 
 plate and comprehend some commanding 
 landscape. And I think it is well even in 
 public worship that we should occasionally 
 get away from the winsomeness of some 
 particular text, and climbing some available 
 height, survey a wide expanse of Christian 
 truth such as is unveiled to us in one of the 
 letters of the Apostle Paul, and I do not think 
 that exercise was ever more necessary than 
 it is to-day." 
 
 By the expository sermon we may do two 
 things : We may enforce the lesson we wish to 
 teach, and at the same time do what we sel- 
 dom do in a topical sermon, we may help our 
 people to fall in love with the Bible itself. In 
 the passage we propose to expound, we shall 
 seek one mother idea within whose ample 
 embrace all the children ideas may be 
 gathered, not to fight but to help each other. 
 We shall heed Horton's advice, and never 
 stay more than twelve months away from 
 any portion of the Scripture. With our 
 people we shall think of the morning stories 
 of Genesis, show their points of similarity to 
 the stories of the Babylonish world, yet their 
 wonderful superiority. We shall take the 
 
114 ^^^ Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 story of the fall, note the fidelity of the old 
 legend to the permanent facts of life ; for ex- 
 ample, the temptation which so subtly ap- 
 peals to the entirely legitimate and laudable 
 aspiration for self-realization, the sin which 
 seeks comradeship, but which casts the 
 blame upon the fellow sinner and finally back 
 upon God Himself, — "The woman whom 
 ^/lou didst give me," — the sin which begets 
 fear and guilt and brings a curse upon all 
 nature and all life. Occasionally we shall 
 turn to Scriptural legislation. We shall bid 
 our people construct battlements for the roof, 
 that the place of rest and of play and of 
 prayer may be made safe. In a brief, per- 
 haps casual way we shall compare and con- 
 trast the Mosaic Code with the Code of 
 Hammurabi. We shall glory in the fact that 
 God hath spoken unto the legislators not 
 alone of one nation. Every law whether in 
 or out of the Bible, we shall bring into the 
 presence of Jesus, by Him to be judged. If 
 our people are inclined to emphasize ex- 
 ternals, we may lead them by the way of the 
 ancient covenant past Jeremiah's dream of a 
 new covenant, up to Jesus' ratification of the 
 new covenant at the Last Supper, on into the 
 life of the new covenant as Paul reveals it in 
 II Corinthians. 
 
 We shall spend much time with the New 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 1 15 
 
 Testament correspondence, then swing back 
 into the hymn-book of the second temple, to 
 hear once more the silver trumpets calling us 
 to worship, to see once more the pilgrims in 
 whose hearts are the highways to Zion. For 
 a while we shall sit down with Job, as he 
 studies with eyes washed clean by tears the 
 problem of his pain. We shall listen to 
 Koheleth as he concludes that that which is 
 crooked can never become straight, that there 
 is nothing better for a man than that he 
 should eat and drink and make his soul 
 enjoy good in his labour. We shall then 
 listen to the prophet as he hurls back the 
 triumphant word, '* The crooked shall become 
 straight,'* or to Paul as he cries, ** I am per- 
 suaded that neither death nor life, nor angels 
 nor principalities, nor things present nor 
 things to come, nor powers, nor height nor 
 depth, nor any other creature shall be able to 
 separate us from the love of God, which is in 
 Christ Jesus our Lord." 
 
 We shall spend much time in the study of 
 the biographies of the obscure pilgrims of the 
 Roa.d. Here is Andrew, the quiet man who 
 was always introducing men to Jesus. Here is 
 Onesiphorus, the man whose heathen parents 
 had named him at birth, " Profit-bearer," but 
 who later became a Christian. No profit- 
 bearer now ! But he happened to be in 
 
1 16 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 Rome, remembered that there was a certain 
 near-sighted Jew by the name of Paul who 
 was spending the last months of his life in 
 some jail. From prison to prison he went, 
 inquired for Paul, found him, came again 
 and yet again to see him, refreshed him, 
 cooled him off, as Paul puts it. His coming 
 was like a breath from the Alban hills to the 
 aged prisoner of Jesus. But surely the man 
 was untrue to his name ? Not so. He 
 brought profit to the apostle, and to Timothy, 
 yes, and to his household. What would you 
 like to leave to your children at your death ? 
 A few dollars which your sons may use 
 or lose? Would you not rather have the 
 prayers of some apostle of Jesus Christ, call- 
 ing down upon them God's blessings from 
 the heights of heaven ? But surely One- 
 siphorus was unprofitable to himself? A 
 man mustn't melt himself down into oil for 
 the tallow trade. Well, how much would 
 you give for a half hour's talk with the Apostle 
 Paul? Would you insist on damask cush- 
 ions? Would you insist on an airy front 
 office overlooking the harbour, a room with 
 electric lights and a buzzing electric fan ? 
 
 Most often shall we bid our people look 
 upon Jesus as He walks through the gardens 
 and along the roads of Galilee and of our 
 own dear land. 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 117 
 
 "Behold him now where He comes ! 
 Not the Christ of our subtle creeds, 
 But the Lord of our hearts, of our homes, 
 Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs ; 
 The brother of want and blame, 
 The lover of women and men. 
 With a love that puts to shame 
 All passions of mortal ken." 
 
 Have you never had this experience ? You 
 have been preaching away to a soggy, 
 sodden, sleepy congregation, and then you 
 spoke of Jesus, and each man awoke as if he 
 caught "sight of a sweepy garment vast and 
 white, with a hem that he could recognize." 
 
 An old professor of mine remarks, " Some 
 preachers are always on castors." I believe 
 one reason for their extraordinary mobility is 
 their failure as Biblical preachers. The min- 
 ister must run away before his material runs 
 out. The words of William Watson, written 
 indeed with another thought in mind, are 
 specially pertinent to the preacher and his 
 use of the Bible. 
 
 " The knights rode up with gifts for the king, 
 And one was a jewelled sword, 
 And one was a suit of golden mail, 
 And one was a golden Word. 
 
 *' He buckled the shining armour on 
 And he girt the sword at his side ; 
 But he flung at his feet the golden Word 
 And trampled it in his pride. 
 
Il8 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 '< The arraour is pierced with many spears, 
 And the sword is breaking in twain ; 
 But the Word hath risen in storm and fire 
 To vanquish and to reign." 
 
 The preacher who makes his own the 
 golden Word, with that golden Word shall 
 rise to reign in the kingdom of the preacher. 
 
 " You have apparently implied that, as we 
 have been inevitably influenced by the his- 
 torical criticism, we are bound to preach it. 
 Do you believe this?" That was a fine 
 prayer of an old Union Seminary friend of 
 mine, " From half baked Drivers, Cheynes 
 and Briggses in the pulpit. Good Lord, de- 
 liver us." In the frank and intimate fellow- 
 ship, give and take, question and answer of 
 the Normal Bible Class we shall lead our 
 people into the liberating truths of the 
 modern scholarship. In the pulpit we shall 
 assume and use the assured results of his- 
 torical criticism, but shall not label them. In 
 general we shall burn our own smoke. I 
 came upon this fascinating translation of 
 Paul's advice to his callow theologue friend, 
 Timothy : " Adjure them before the Lord not 
 -.o bandy arguments — no good comes out of 
 that, it only means the undoing of your au- 
 dience. Do your utmost to let God see that 
 you at least are a sound workman, with no 
 need to be ashamed of the way you handle the 
 
The Preacher and His Bible 1 1 9 
 
 word of the Truth. Shut your mind against 
 fooHsh, popular controversy; be sure that only 
 breeds strife. And the Lord's servant must not 
 be a man of strife ; he must be kind to every- 
 body, a skilled teacher, a man who will not re- 
 sent injuries ; he must be gentle in his admoni- 
 tions to the opposition — God may perhaps let 
 them change their mind and admit the Truth ; 
 they may come to their senses again and es- 
 cape the snare of the devil, as they are brought 
 back to life by God to do His will." 
 
 Of course the preacher has no right to make 
 his pulpit ** a coward's castle," and no man 
 enters the kingdom of the preacher without 
 tribulation. But I ask you to notice that there 
 are two kinds of men who in days past have 
 died violent deaths. There are the men whom 
 the world crowns as martyrs, God's witnesses. 
 There are the men whom the world com- 
 passionates or condemns as fanatics and 
 fools. The minister who says : " I am going 
 to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing 
 but the truth, always and under all circum- 
 stances and to all men," deserves the fate he 
 invites, and does not need to pose for a mo- 
 ment as a martyr. When a man writes me 
 that he has been driven from his church for 
 preaching the higher criticism, I am inclined 
 to send him back this syllogism and ask him 
 to discover the fallacy : 
 
1 20 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 All prophets suffer. 
 
 You suffer. 
 
 Therefore you are a prophet. 
 
 George A. Gordon remarks that the best 
 thing he got out of his seminary days was 
 the word of a Methodist minister : ** God and 
 a fool might do as much good in the world 
 ^ as God and a wise man, but they have never 
 done it." 
 
 Paul was no coward, but when he was 
 dealing with babies, he gave them milk. 
 To the last Jesus withheld some truths from 
 His disciples, because they could not bear 
 them. No preacher will go far wrong in his 
 use of the Bible if he is able reverently to 
 make his own the words of Jesus, " The 
 spirit of the Lord is upon ME because the 
 Lord hath anointed me to preach good 
 tidings to the poor, to proclaim release to 
 the captives, and recovering of sight to the 
 blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, 
 to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." 
 
 Let us teach our people first to trust our 
 love, our faith, our honesty AND our wis- 
 dom. If our people trust our love, our faith, 
 our honesty AND our wisdom, then they 
 will follow us, though at times we lead them 
 by new paths to " the fair world, and the 
 beautiful lights of heaven," 
 
IV 
 
 Abraham Lincoln : The Preach- 
 er's Teacher 
 
IV 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: THE PREACH- 
 ER'S TEACHER 
 
 NOT all of us are called preachers, 
 but all of us are interested or wish 
 we were interested in preaching. 
 A friend said to me, *' I am perfectly willing 
 to serve the church. I should be entirely- 
 willing to shovel coal into the furnace but I 
 do not like to listen to sermons ; " and yet 
 this very man would have listened with rapt 
 attention to Phillips Brooks. And I suspect 
 that most of us would subscribe to the words 
 of the writer who says: "The churches 
 are made up of plain people, and the plain 
 people always know what they want. Fad- 
 dists may think that the day of preaching 
 has gone by, but the churches have never 
 been so certain as they are to-day that the 
 man most essential in extending the work of 
 the kingdom of God is the preacher." 
 
 What is more, all of us are in a very real 
 sense preachers bearing by the lips some sort 
 of life message. Particularly true is this of 
 Congregationalists, for I never heard of a 
 Congregationalist who belonged to the sub- 
 
 123 
 
124 ^^^ Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 merged and silent multitude. I would speak 
 then of Lincoln as our teacher in the fine art 
 of preaching. 
 
 February is a month of memories. We 
 remember the birthday of Washington ; we 
 remember the birthday of Lincoln. There 
 are other memories. On February 4, 1861, 
 the delegates from six seceding states met 
 at Montgomery, Alabama. On February 9, 
 1 86 1, Jefferson Davis was elected President 
 of the Confederacy. On February 11, 1861, 
 Lincoln left Springfield for Washington, bor- 
 rowing money enough we are told to pay 
 the expenses of his first few months in the 
 White House. A few days later he eluded 
 the first attempt at assassination. On Feb- 
 ruary 23, he reached the capital. 
 
 Glance for a moment at the task which 
 faced our teacher on that February day of 
 1 86 1. It was a twofold task. Lincoln un- 
 derstood at the time but half of it. The 
 first half of his task was the preservation of 
 the Union ; and yet we read, " Before his 
 inauguration the seceding states had control 
 of practically every fort, arsenal, dockyard, 
 mint, customs-house, court-house in their en- 
 tire territory." Robert E. Lee, whom Scott 
 regarded as the ablest officer in the army, 
 resigned and took command of the forces 
 of Virginia. A federal army of less than 
 
Abraham Lincoln 125 
 
 20,000 men, and these widely scattered, was 
 at Lincoln's command. The sentiment at 
 the North was divided. Many blatant politi- 
 cians insisted that Lincoln should belie the 
 promises of his platform and compromise 
 with the South for the sake of unity. Many 
 of the most influential orators and newspa- 
 pers insisted that we should allow ** our err- 
 ing Southern sisters to depart in peace." 
 
 The second half of Lincoln's task as it de- 
 veloped was the abolition of slavery. And 
 yet as Lincoln said in his second inaugural 
 address, " One-eighth of the whole population 
 were coloured slaves, not widely distributed 
 over the union, but localized in the southern 
 part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar 
 and powerful interest." Slavery had affected 
 the whole life of the nation. Scarcely a vote 
 was cast at the polls, scarcely a decision was 
 rendered in a court of justice, scarcely a dol- 
 lar's worth of business was transacted, but 
 upon it fell the shadow of the curse. Mean- 
 while in 1861, the thought of immediate abo- 
 lition was the thought of a few so-called 
 " sciolists " and fanatics. Truly " the pilot 
 was hurried to the helm in a tornado." 
 
 What of the pilot ? A child of poverty, his 
 father barely able to scrawl his name, his 
 mother buried one dismal day, her cofifin 
 made of green lumber, cut by the father's 
 
126 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 whip-saw ; a lad with about a year's school- 
 ing all told ; a young man with his dreams, 
 his loves, his disappointments, his great sor- 
 rows ; a rural lawyer, a legislator of the fron- 
 tier, a congressman of one term, and now a 
 man fifty-two years of age, an old man, as he 
 calls himself, a poor man. In a letter dated 
 i860, he writes, "I could not raise ten thou- 
 sand dollars if it would save me from the fate 
 of John Brown." 
 
 The task then, a task which Lincoln said 
 was greater than that which rested upon 
 Washington, and the man ? Can we won- 
 der that the people of the East looked cold 
 and sad ? And yet the man, this man, met 
 and mastered his task, 
 
 I 
 
 " Grew up a destined work to do 
 
 And lived to do it — four long-suffering years; 
 Ill-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report, lived through. 
 And then he heard the hisses change to cheers." 
 
 The Union was saved, slavery was abol- 
 ished. ** He bound the Union, he unbound 
 the slave." This man finished his ** great 
 job." A contemporary cartoon represents 
 Lincoln holding in his hand an envelope in- 
 scribed ** Thirteenth Amendment to the Con- 
 stitution." He smiles and says, " This is like 
 a dream I once had in Illinois." The dream 
 of Lincoln's life had come true. 
 
Abraham Lincoln 127 
 
 Before us, preachers all, lies not indeed 
 the same task as that of Lincoln. We do not 
 unduly magnify our office if we compare our 
 task with his. Each minister of the Gospel in 
 pulpit or in pew is a leader of those forces 
 which are seeking to bind the union, not of 
 states, but of men, not in the bonds of polit- 
 ical unity, but in the bonds of '' a world-wide 
 civilization of friendly workmen." Each 
 preacher is a leader of those forces which are 
 seeking to unbind the slaves of evil condi- 
 tions and of evil dispositions, to lift the arti- 
 ficial burdens from the shoulders and the 
 hearts of men, to give to all men " a fair chance 
 at all good things." And here are we, men 
 who feel profoundly inadequate to our task, 
 like Lincoln, it may be, with little education, 
 with little prestige among the elite, with 
 empty purse. " But," you say, ** the analogy 
 does not hold good, for Lincoln controlled the 
 armies and the navies and the boundless re- 
 sources of the nation, and he dedicated them 
 all to the relentless crushing of the foe." 
 That^s true ; but mark you, he could not have 
 compelled army, navy or resources for twenty- 
 four months except by the methods which are 
 at our command, the methods of persuasion, 
 the methods of the preacher. 
 
 And perhaps the first suggestion that our 
 teacher would make to us is this, that the 
 
128 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 preacher does not need to be prepossessing. 
 You recall the man who solemnly gave Lin- 
 coln a jack-knife, saying, ** This knife was 
 placed in my hands some years ago with the 
 injunction that I was to keep it until I should 
 find a man uglier than I was. Allow me to 
 say, sir, that I think you are fairly entitled to 
 this property " Closing an autobiographical 
 sketch written in 1859, Lincoln says, *' If any 
 personal description of me is thought desira- 
 ble, it may be said I am in height six feet, 
 four inches nearly, lean in flesh, weighing on 
 an average one hundred and eighty pounds, 
 dark complexion, with coarse black hair and 
 gray eyes. No other marks or brands rec- 
 ollected." Men were quick to note 
 
 " His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face. 
 His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling 
 
 hair, 
 His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease, 
 His lack of all we prize as debonair, 
 Of power or will to shine, of art to please." 
 
 And yet we are told that when he was awak- 
 ened he became transfigured, so that a man 
 who heard him said, " He was the handsom- 
 est man I ever saw." And our teacher raises 
 this query : If, homely as we are, we could 
 just once, only once be thoroughly awak- 
 ened, would not our very homeliness become 
 handsome ? 
 
Abraham Lincoln 129 
 
 Lincoln hasn't much to teach us regard- 
 ing delivery. His gestures were sometimes 
 strangely awkward. In his debates with 
 Douglass, he had a way, we are told, of 
 coming down, bending his knees, and then 
 rising up to more than his full height. This 
 habit gradually wore away ; but one would 
 not study his gestures to imitate them. Nor 
 need we envy the voice of our teacher. It is 
 said that he had a high pitched tenor voice, 
 rising at times of emotion into a falsetto ; but 
 there is one thing to be noted : " His voice 
 could carry farther than Douglass's heavy 
 basso." Nor did he trust implicitly the 
 range of his voice. When he was about to 
 give his famous Cooper Union speech, he 
 planned that a friend should sit in the rear of 
 the room and lift his umbrella if the speaker 
 could not be easily heard. Perhaps none of 
 us has a vice more irritating than that of 
 dropping the voice at the end of each sen- 
 tence, so that if the congregation follows the 
 discourse at all, it is by skill in lip-reading. 
 
 Has Lincoln anything to teach us as to the 
 choice of words ? The words of his choice 
 were not merely the happy inspiration of the 
 untrained linguist. When preparing his 
 telegrams for the front, we read, he would 
 sit a long while chewing the end of his pen, 
 a habit of his, until he found the right word. 
 
130 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 Seldom is this right word one of the great 
 mouth-filling words. Almost always it is a 
 word chosen from the common speech of 
 common men. 
 
 In a certain town, not two thousand miles 
 away from Oberlin, a little girl sat in church 
 with her mother, and whispered, " Mama, 
 what is the minister trying to say?" **Why, 
 my dear, he is telling us to be good." '* Oh, 
 I wish he would stop, I will be good. I want 
 to hear the music again." How many of our 
 hearers would agree at once to be good, if 
 we would only stop, or else use the language 
 of the homes and the hearts of men. 
 
 ** Think not that strength lies in the big round word, 
 Or that the brief and plain must needs be weak. 
 
 There is a strength 
 Which dies if stretched too far or spun too fine, 
 Which has more height than breadth, more depth 
 
 than length. 
 Let but this force of thought and speech be mine, 
 And he that will may take the sleek fat phrase, 
 Which glows and burns not, though it gleam and 
 
 shine, 
 Light but not heat, a flash but not a blaze." 
 
 There is a story told of a literary genius, who 
 at night would wake stung by the splendour 
 of a sudden thought, and would say to his 
 wife, '* Mary, get up and light a candle ; I 
 have thought of a good word." At last the 
 
Abraham Lincoln 131 
 
 worm turned : " William," said Mary one 
 night, *• get up yourself and light a candle ; 
 I have tliought of a bad word." And yet 
 with some risk to family felicity, we might 
 still be blest, should we take more care to 
 choose the good word, always remembering 
 that particularly good word of Lowell, ** The 
 highest outcome of culture is simplicity." 
 
 Let us question our teacher somewhat 
 further, and ask him of his style of speech. 
 I suspect that he thought comparatively little 
 about it, and yet he was not indifferent to it, 
 and we know that an eminent teacher of 
 English at Yale followed him about in New 
 England, that he might learn and teach the 
 secret of his strength. 
 
 You are all familiar with the sermon of 
 Dr. Hitchcock, entitled, *' The Eternal Atone- 
 ment." Professor Bliss of Palestine Explora- 
 tion fame told me that he read this sermon 
 once a twelvemonth for the tonic of thought: 
 but mark the language here and there. For 
 example : ** The Hebrew mind as represented 
 by Philo was only just beginning to be trini- 
 tarian when Christ's life in the flesh compelled 
 the Hebrew mind as represented by Peter and 
 Paul and John to a new theology. After 
 Pentecost, bald unitarianism was anach- 
 ronous. Christian experience logically re- 
 quired three divine persons, of one and the 
 
132 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 same divine essence. Economic trinity re- 
 quired essential trinity." Now I know that 
 to you this is clear as "a cloudless moon.'* 
 But theologues who have read this sermon 
 as a task of the curriculum have expressed the 
 wish that Hitchcock had studied at the feet 
 of Lincoln. 
 
 As we study Lincoln's style, we note its 
 exceeding compression. Perhaps you should 
 expect this compression in telegrams ; but 
 take this sent to McClellan, " I have just re- 
 ceived your despatch about sore- ton gued and 
 fatigued horses. Will you pardon me for 
 asking what the horses of your army have 
 done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues 
 anything?" Or this to Grant: "General 
 Sheridan says, * If the thing is pressed, I 
 think that Lee will surrender.' Let the thing 
 be pressed." One might perhaps expect this 
 compression of style in a casual note of com- 
 mendation like this : " My dear sir, the lady, 
 bearer of this, says she has two sons who 
 want to work. Wanting to work is so rare 
 a want that it should be encouraged." But 
 take this typical remark : " Grant is a copious 
 worker and fighter, but a very meager writer 
 or telegrapher." 
 
 In a letter to James Conkling, there is a 
 striking illustration of this compression of 
 style. ** There are those who are dissatisfied 
 
Abraham Lincoln 133 
 
 with me. To such I would say, You desire 
 peace, and you blame me that you do not 
 have it. But how can we attain it? There 
 are but three conceivable ways ; first to sup- 
 press the rebellion by force of arms ; this I 
 am trying to do. Are you for it? If you 
 are, so far we are agreed. If you are not 
 for that, a second way is to give up the 
 Union. I am against this. Are you for it? 
 If you are, you should say so plainly. If 
 you are not for force, nor yet for dissolution, 
 there only remains some imaginable compro- 
 mise. I do not believe that any compromise 
 embracing the maintenance of the Union is 
 now possible." Carl Schurz explains this 
 characteristic of style : " As a boy, Abe soon 
 felt the impulse to write, not only making 
 extracts from books which he wished to re- 
 member, but also composing little essays of 
 his own. First he sketched these with char- 
 coal on a wooden shovel, scraped white with 
 a d'rawing knife, or on bass-wood shingles, 
 then he transferred them to paper, which was 
 a scarce commodity in the Lincoln house- 
 hold, taking care to cut his expressions close 
 so that they might not cover too much space." 
 With us paper is too cheap. A while ago a 
 friend of mine was asked to write a daily 
 hundred word sermon for the newspaper. It 
 was a *' salt and bitter and good " experience. 
 
134 The Preacber*s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 Again our teacher would bid us speak in 
 such fashion as to compel our hearers' ears 
 to serve as eyes. In the art he urges, Lincoln 
 is himself past master. Note his method. 
 " Every man, black, white or yellow, has a 
 mouth to be fed, and two hands with which 
 to feed it, and bread should be allowed to go 
 to that mouth without controversy." And at 
 once you see three men, one black, one white, 
 one yellow, the mouth of each man, the two 
 hands of each reaching for the bread to con- 
 vey it to the mouth. Again : " Douglass 
 thinks he sees the last tip of the last joint of 
 the old serpent's tail just drawing out of 
 sight ; " or again : " The Judge thinks that 
 the Almighty has drawn a moral climate line 
 across the continent, on one side of which 
 labour must be performed by slaves." Know- 
 ing well the value of visualization, he urges 
 us by his practice to use germ parables. 
 "You will not abide the election of a Repub- 
 lican president. In that supposed event, you 
 say, we will destroy the Union. And then 
 you say the great crime of having destroyed 
 it will be upon us. That is cool. A high- 
 wayman holds a pistol to m)^ ear, and mut- 
 ters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or 
 I shall kill you, and then you will be a mur- 
 derer.' " Or again, *' I do not allow myself 
 to suppose that either the convention or the 
 
Abraham Lincoln 135 
 
 League have concluded that I am either the 
 greatest or the best man in America, but 
 rather they have concluded that it is not 
 best to swap horses while crossing the river, 
 and have further concluded that I am not so 
 poor a horse that they might not make a 
 botch of it in trying to swap." 
 
 Every now and then the germ, we ob- 
 serve, should be developed into a full blown 
 parable. Permit me to remind you of two 
 familiar and famous illustrations. He is 
 speaking of the proposed expansion of sla- 
 very into the territories. *' If I find a venom- 
 ous snake lying on the open prairie I seize 
 the first stick and kill him at once, but if the 
 snake is in bed with my children, I must be 
 more cautious lest I shall, in striking the 
 snake, also strike the children or rouse the 
 reptile to bite the children. But if the ques- 
 tion is whether to kill it on the prairie or put 
 it in bed with the other children, I am in- 
 clined to think we'd kill it." The illustration 
 has all the force of a demonstration. 
 
 His critics came to him quite distracted 
 by his sins of omission and commission. 
 *' Gentlemen, suppose that all the property 
 you were worth was in gold, and you had 
 put it in the hands of Blondin to carry across 
 the Niagara River on a rope, would you 
 shake the cable, or keep shouting to him, 
 
136 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 * Blondin, stand up a little straighter ; Blondin, 
 stoop a little more, go a little faster, lean a 
 little more to the north, lean a little more to 
 the south ' ? No, you would hold your breath 
 as well as your tongue and keep your hands 
 off until he was safe over." That parable 
 needs no elucidation. 
 
 Our people are surrounded by innumerable 
 appeals to the eye. There has been a great 
 change in this matter even since some of us 
 younger men began to preach. No maga- 
 zine except the Hibbert Journal and the 
 Atlantic without its pictures, no newspaper 
 without its cuts and cartoons. The theatres 
 and moving picture shows all speak to the 
 eye. Charles M. Sheldon has learned to 
 speak to the eye. At the other pole of plat- 
 form speech is Billy Sunday. Can we doubt 
 for a moment that much of his unquestioned 
 power arises from his ability to make men 
 see with their eyes the things which they hear 
 with their ears ? 
 
 I jot down in my note-book another sug- 
 gestion of our teacher, namely, that a deadly 
 earnestness of speech is entirely compatible 
 with the play of humour. Lincoln's humour 
 is not always very subtle. In his early days 
 he sees Adam and Eve at work, "sewing 
 aprons, the first sewing society, the mother 
 of all sewing societies." Later he tells us 
 
Abraham Lincoln 137 
 
 that Douglass's popular sovereignty idea 
 '* is being simmered down until it has be- 
 come as thin as the homoeopathic soup 
 made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon 
 that has starved to death." But he is always 
 being reminded of a story. When friends 
 come to him to tell him of a beautiful way to 
 end the war, he is reminded of a man who 
 was trying to head up a barrel, but found 
 that the boards always fell in. A brilliant 
 idea came to him. He would put his little 
 boy inside to hold up the boards. The plan 
 succeeded to admiration, but the man found 
 to his surprise and regret that he had nailed 
 his little boy inside. When some citizens 
 propose a naval diversion in the South, he is 
 reminded of an old lady of Salem, who had 
 a singing in her head, and put a plaster of 
 psalm tunes on her feet to draw the singing 
 down. 
 
 I know it is easy to win the reputation of 
 the buffoon, the court fool. There is no 
 sadder death to die than the death of the 
 after-dinner speaker; but by his humour 
 Lincoln drew the poison from the fangs of 
 madness, and kept his own mind sane. Can 
 you not see the Master smile as he tells of the 
 devil who goes out of a man, wanders about 
 in waterless places, seeking rest and finding 
 none ; who thinks of the old homestead, dis- 
 
138 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 covers it empty, swept and garnished, and 
 brings trooping after him seven other devils 
 worse than himself? The laughter which 
 laughs never at people, but with people, 
 helps to carry a strong man's message to 
 men. 
 
 And in this speech of Lincoln's, so com- 
 pressed, so concrete and picturesque, so shot 
 through with humour, there is always an 
 extraordinary directness of address. " Let 
 me talk to some gentleman down there who 
 looks me in the face," this at Quincy ; or 
 again at Alton, " Let me take the gentleman 
 who looks me in the face and let us suppose 
 that he is a member of the territorial legisla- 
 ture." Always he seems to be saying to 
 each of his hearers: *'I am not talking to 
 the crowd of people down there : I want to 
 take YOU by the hand and reason this thing 
 out with you personally, sure that we shall 
 agree just as soon as we understand the 
 matter aright." "Watch me as I sail up 
 into the empyrean !" None of that. " Come 
 now and let us reason together." So shall a 
 man become a persuader of men. 
 
 I may have given the impression that in 
 this speech of his there is little of dignity, 
 beauty, distinction ; but we should wrong 
 our teacher by leaving such an impression. 
 It is true that in the early days there was a 
 
Abraham Lincoln 139 
 
 good deal of that flamboyant speech which 
 still characterizes some of our sophomoric 
 contests. For example, in 1842, as he speaks 
 on temperance he says, ** Happy day, when 
 all appetites controlled, all poisons subdued, 
 all matter subjected, mind, all conquering 
 mind, shall live and move the monarch of the 
 world. Glorious consummation. Hail, fall 
 of Fury, Reign of Reason, all hail." Of 
 course this is pretty bad ; but mark the 
 change and listen to his words uttered little 
 more than a month before his death : ** Fondly 
 do we hope, fervently do we pray that this 
 mighty scourge of war may speedily pass 
 away. Yet if God wills that it continue until 
 all the wealth piled by the bondman's two 
 hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil 
 shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn 
 with the lash shall be paid by another drawn 
 with the sword, as was said three thousand 
 years ago, so still must it be said, the judg- 
 ments of the Lord are true and righteous 
 altogether." 
 
 But does the preacher wish to win the at- 
 tention of the plain people? Must he not 
 go for his language to the gutter and the 
 prize-ring, or, at the very least, to the sport- 
 ing page of the New York Jour7ial? Re- 
 cently one of our eminent ministers speak- 
 ing upon the Prodigal Son announced his 
 
140 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 subject, ** Home from the Hog-Pen." Surely 
 this is the short swift path to popularity. 
 Well, one day Lincoln said to thousands of 
 the plain people of America, surrounded by 
 the graves of other thousands of the plain 
 people of America, " The world will little 
 note, nor long remember what we say here/* 
 and then he began to utter words so pure, 
 so lofty, that one would say he spoke the 
 truth, that the world would indeed little note 
 nor long remember ; but for once Abraham 
 Lincoln did not speak the truth, for those 
 same pure and lofty words will be remem- 
 bered by the plain people of America when 
 the Civil War shall be a myth. Are all the 
 people going to be fooled all the time ? 
 
 As Lincoln speaks to us of his choice of 
 words and his style of speech, he tells us that 
 both have been dictated mainly by his desire 
 to be understood. He seems to be sure 
 that the understanding of his message will 
 mean the acceptance of his message. A 
 writer remarks : " He was so clear that he 
 could not be misunderstood or misrepre- 
 sented." In one of those revealing bits of 
 autobiography Lincoln says : " I remember 
 how, when a child, I used to get irritated 
 when anybody talked to me in a way that I 
 could not understand. I do not think that I 
 ever got angry at anything else in my life, 
 
Abraham Lincoln 141 
 
 but that always disturbed my temper and 
 has ever since. I am never easy now when 
 1 am handUng a thought, till I have bounded 
 it north, and bounded it south, and bounded 
 it east, and bounded it west." It is not easy 
 to bound on all sides the thought which the 
 preacher has to handle, but does not the 
 very difficulty of the problem bind us to 
 make our hearers understand ? 
 
 And this leads us to listen to another con- 
 sideration. As we pass from the clothes of 
 Lincoln's thought to the thought itself, it is 
 fascinating to note that our teacher would 
 have us always strike for what he calls ** the 
 central idea " or '* the naked issue." ** That's 
 the naked issue, and the whole of it," he 
 would say. " Public opinion has a central 
 idea." This he must always find. " If I 
 can clean this case of technicalities and get 
 it properly swung to the jury, I'll win it." 
 "In law," and he might have added, in re- 
 ligion, "it is good policy never to plead 
 what you need not lest you be obliged to 
 prove what you cannot." " Judge Doug- 
 lass," he would say, "is playing cuttlefish, 
 a small species of fish that has no mode of 
 defending itself except by throwing out a 
 black fluid which makes the water so dark 
 that the enemy cannot see it, and thus it 
 escapes. Is not the Judge playing the cut- 
 
142 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 tlefish ? *' The foes of the common good 
 are expert in playing cuttlefish, and they 
 are never quite so happy as when we 
 good preachers are lost in the murk and the 
 dark of the unnecessary and the extraneous. 
 Happy the preacher who strikes for the 
 " central idea," the '' naked issue." 
 
 We ask our teacher how in the midst of 
 the universal confusion and sophistry he 
 managed to discover the central ideas, the 
 naked issues. Not without immense labour 
 did he find them. He would walk nine miles 
 to get a book. The weighty volumes of 
 Blackstone which a stranger left in his store 
 in the bottom of a barrel he read. *' Never 
 in my whole life was my mind so thoroughly 
 absorbed. I read until I devoured them." 
 Much of Lincoln's power came from his 
 careful statement of fact gained by hard 
 study. With a great price he bought his 
 power, and can a smaller man pay a smaller 
 price ? 
 
 Much of our reading is a substitute for 
 thinking. A writer reminds us that the poet 
 Southey was telling a Quaker lady and with 
 some pride, how his time was occupied. He 
 studied Portuguese while he was shaving. 
 He studied Spanish an hour before breakfast. 
 He read all the forenoon, and wrote all 
 the afternoon. '* Friend," said the Friend, 
 
Abraham Lincoln 143 
 
 "when does thee do thy thinking?" So 
 I hear Lincoln say to us, " Friend, let no 
 pride of the hale fellow well met, no glory 
 in the tide of * mixer,' vilest of all ministerial 
 titles, lose to you the leisure for thought, the 
 chance to make your own the central ideas, 
 the naked issues of the faith you preach." 
 
 And now our teacher would tell us some 
 of the inner secrets of his power as a per- 
 suader of men. One secret was his early al- 
 legiance to a great and unpopular Cause. As 
 early as 1837 Lincoln joined with one other 
 state representative of Illinois in signing a 
 resolution which is said to have been the 
 first formal declaration against the system of 
 slavery made in any legislative body in the 
 United States, at least west of the Hudson 
 River. In 1849, Lincoln in Congress moved 
 an amendment instructing the proper com- 
 mittee to report a bill abolishing slavery in 
 the District of Columbia. He got hold of 
 this thought, '' Freedom is national, slavery 
 is sectional." Just before he entered upon 
 his duties as President, he wrote to a South- 
 erner : " You think slavery is right, and 
 ought to be extended, while we think it is 
 wrong and ought to be restricted." When 
 he became President his new position in- 
 volved the primacy of a new allegiance, the 
 allegiance to the Union. Strikingly is the 
 
144 rhe Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 change suggested by that letter to Greeley, 
 which suggests as well every quality of the 
 preacher's style, for which our teacher has 
 pleaded. After certain discriminating and 
 gently chiding words, we read, " As to the pol- 
 icy I seem to be pursuing, as you say, I have 
 not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would 
 save the Union, I would save it in the shortest 
 way under the Constitution. If there be 
 those who would not save the Union unless 
 they could at the same time destroy slavery, 
 I do not agree with them. My paramount 
 object in this struggle is to save the Union, 
 and is not either to save or destroy slavery. 
 If I could save the Union without freeing 
 any slave I would do it. And if I could save 
 it by freeing all the slaves I would do it, and 
 if I could do it by freeing some and leaving 
 others slaves, I would also do that," Al- 
 ways indeed he knew that to further the 
 cause of the Union was to further the cause 
 of freedom. It was in the fall of 1862 that 
 the two causes became inextricably united. 
 The permanency of the Union involved the 
 Proclamation of Emancipation. 
 
 But mark the influence of this allegiance 
 to a Cause. At the summons of his Cause, 
 he was perfectly willing to surrender the po- 
 litical promotion which he honestly openly 
 desirod. At the summons of his Cause he 
 
Abraham Lincoln 145 
 
 determined that if he failed, he would still do 
 all he could for his Cause. One of the most 
 pathetic pieces of literature is that private 
 memorandum written shortly before his sec- 
 ond election. *' This morning as for some 
 days past it seems exceedingly probable that 
 this administration will not be reelected. 
 Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with 
 the president-elect as to save the Union be- 
 tween the election and the inauguration, as 
 he will have secured his election on such 
 grounds that he cannot possibly save it af- 
 terwards." How fine it would be if a pastor 
 looking forward to his compulsory retire- 
 ment from his church could write for his 
 guidance a memorandum like that. At the 
 summons of his Cause, he showed an almost 
 Christlike magnanimity. He could take into 
 his cabinet the man who had called him the 
 original gorilla. He could keep in his cab- 
 inet the man who had actually proposed that 
 Lincoln should surrender to him the reins of 
 government. He could keep in his cabinet 
 the man who was making an active canvass 
 for the presidency, and then when oppor- 
 tunity offered, he could make this man Chief 
 Justice of the United States. At the sum- 
 mons of his Cause he looked, fearless, into 
 the daily face of death. As the months 
 passed, the pile of assassination letters grew, 
 
146 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 but he held not his life of any account as 
 dear unto himself that he might fulfill his 
 course and the ministry assigned him by the 
 Cause. It is a great word of Fairbairn, 
 " The man who is as it were annihilated by 
 his mission, is most magnified by it. He 
 becomes an organ of deity, a voice of God." 
 Was Lincoln's Cause more compelling, more 
 imperious than that which claims our al- 
 legiance ? To be Comrades of the Cause, to 
 know no failure but the failure of the Cause, 
 no triumph but the triumph of the Cause, 
 that is one of the great teachings of our 
 great teacher. 
 
 Lincoln leads us back of this fact of al- 
 legiance to a Cause to certain other charac- 
 teristics which make him one of the preach- 
 er's sovereign teachers. We note first his 
 confidence in himself. He was utterly with- 
 out those bulwarks of self-respect which most 
 of us have. He was a very sensitive man. 
 He was criticized, condescended to. He was 
 made to wait at the door of McClellan's 
 headquarters. In a letter to Hackett the 
 actor he says, " I have endured a great deal 
 of ridicule without much maHce and have re- 
 ceived a great deal of kindness not quite free 
 from ridicule. I am used to it." When the 
 presidency came to him, he said in a speech 
 to the New York Legislature, *' I trust that I 
 
Abraham Lincoln 147 
 
 may have their assistance in piloting the ship 
 of state through this voyage, for if it should 
 suffer wreck now there will be no pilot ever 
 needed for another voyage." And yet know- 
 ing that he might be the last pilot of the ship, 
 he did not hesitate to take the helm. He 
 called to his assistance men whom the world 
 and they themselves regarded as far greater 
 than himself. He met diplomats, representa- 
 tives of world powers, great captains with 
 their guns and drums, and always on terms 
 of perfect equality, as friends, comrades. A 
 minister came home after preaching his even- 
 ing sermon and said to his wife, " I swear I 
 will never preach again." •* Did any one 
 thank you for your sermon ? " ** No." '* I 
 thought not." Garfield said of his wife, " She 
 is unstampedable." To have an honest self- 
 respect, the conviction that whatever other 
 men may say we have a message from God, 
 this is to have one of the secrets of Lincoln's 
 power over men. So a man speaks with au- 
 thority and not as the scribes. 
 
 Along with this confidence in self, Lincoln 
 would lead us into his own comradeship with, 
 and confidence in, the people. He was called 
 by the one party, " Nigger, nigger-lover," by 
 the other party, " the slave-hound of Illinois." 
 His generals failed him. Congress failed him, 
 the papers lampooned him, yet his comrade- 
 
1^8 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 ship grew into a beautiful tenderness. " Massa 
 Linculm am ebery where," said the negro. 
 
 " He was the north, the south, the east, the west, 
 The thrall, the master, all of us in one." 
 
 And with this comradeship there was, as I 
 have suggested, an unwavering confidence 
 in the people. He dared to trust them, to 
 trust us. He allowed his privacy to be in- 
 vaded that he might take what he called his 
 *' weekly opinion bath." Ever he seems to 
 be saying with Paul, ** I speak as to wise 
 men, judge ye what I say." In his first in- 
 augural address, he asks, *' Why should there 
 not be patient confidence in the justice of the 
 people ? Is there any better or equal hope 
 in the world ? " Contrast this with the word 
 of Carlyle to Emerson : ** Beat this thing, I 
 say, under thy dull hoofs, O dull public. 
 Trample it and tumble it into all sinks and 
 kennels. If thou canst kill it, kill it in God's 
 name. If thou canst not kill it, why then, 
 thou wilt not." A letter came recently to 
 your desk, a letter from a minister, which 
 breathed an absolute contempt for the people 
 whom he served. Another letter came to 
 your desk, a letter from a minister, which 
 breathed a lofty condescension towards his 
 people. Neither man can do permanent 
 good. Keep your comradeship with the 
 
Abraham Lincoln 149 
 
 people, your confidence in the people. So 
 may you become what Lincoln was, the 
 voice of the people when speaking their best 
 thoughts. 
 
 Still we have left out of account the secret 
 of the secrets of our teacher's power. Lincoln 
 had confidence in himself, he had confidence 
 in the people, but both these were dependent 
 upon his confidence in God. At first we do 
 not see in him any great confidence in God. 
 There is more of the frontier superstition. 
 He will not begin a journey on Friday. He 
 dreams, and he dreams that his dreams come 
 true. But as life hurls him up against its 
 great problems, up from superstition rises 
 trust. He lifts ** lame hands of faith " and is 
 caught by the strong hand of God. Lincoln's 
 creed is not long, but it is the creed of his 
 life : " I believe in a living God." One is 
 reminded of Beecher's word : " I have heard 
 men pray * O God of Abraham, O God 
 of Isaac, O God of Jacob, O God of Zion,' 
 but I never heard men pray ' O God of 
 Brooklyn, O God of America ! ' Why do you 
 not pray in the name of your father, in the 
 name of your mother, in the name of your 
 town?" 
 
 Further, would Lincoln say : " I believe in 
 a God who hates the wrong and loves the 
 right." Significant to us preachers, all, are 
 
150 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 his words to a clergyman who expressed the 
 hope that the Lord was on our side. ** I am 
 not at all concerned about that, for I know 
 that the Lord is always on the side of the 
 right, but it is my constant anxiety and prayer 
 that I and this nation should be on the Lord's 
 side.'* 
 
 " Swiftly the politic goes : Is it dark ? He 
 borrows a lantern. 
 Slowly, the statesman, and sure, guiding his 
 feet by the stars." 
 
 Again he would say : " I believe in a God 
 who answers prayer." Lincoln calls upon 
 his people again and again to join him in pe- 
 tition. He is deeply grateful to know that 
 they are praying for him. He says of him- 
 self, ** I have often been driven to my knees 
 by the overwhelming conviction that I had 
 nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and 
 the wisdom of all about me seemed insufficient 
 for the day." 
 
 Another word of his creed is this : ** I be- 
 lieve in a God who is a loving heavenly 
 Father." I know that the letter is more 
 familiar to you than to me : but I should 
 wrong you if I did not read it to you once 
 more ; a letter whose almost unmatched 
 English but expresses the perfectness of his 
 trust in our Father, 
 
Abraham Lincoln 15 1 
 
 Executive Mansion^ 
 Washingto7iy Nov, 21^ 1864. 
 To Mrs. Bixby, 
 Boston, Mass. 
 
 Dear Madam : — I have been shown 
 in the files of the War Department a state- 
 ment of the Adjutant General of Massachu- 
 setts that you are the mother of five sons who 
 have died gloriously on the field of battle. I 
 feel how weak and fruidess must be any 
 word of mine which should attempt to 
 beguile you from the grief of a loss so over- 
 whelming. But I cannot refrain from tender- 
 ing you the consolation that may be found 
 in the thanks of the republic they died 
 to save. I pray that our heavenly Father 
 may assuage the anguish of your bereave- 
 ment, and leave you only the cherished mem- 
 ory of the loved and lost, and the solemn 
 pride that must be yours to have laid so 
 costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. 
 Yours very sincerely and respectfully, 
 
 A. Lincoln. 
 
 Till his little boy died, he seems never to 
 have given much hopeful thought to im- 
 mortality ; but then through the guidance of 
 a friend, he was led to add one more word to 
 his creed : ** I believe in the life everlasting." 
 In his creed is no word which bespeaks the 
 necessity of uniting with the visible church. 
 Our preachers had not yet learned to strike 
 for the central ideas, the naked issues. But 
 
152 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 through all his life he was accustomed to 
 attend church. Always he kept in close 
 touch with the churches. Earnestly he 
 sought their cooperation. Again and again 
 he thanked them for the gifts of love and of 
 life which they had ofTered to the country. 
 I have not the slightest doubt that were he 
 alive to-day he would be found among those 
 bound formally as well as vitally to the 
 Christian Church. 
 
 But I think that at the last our teacher 
 would lay his great friendly hand upon the 
 shoulder of each one of us, his pupils, and 
 would say, ** One thing, one thing is needful. 
 Have faith in God." 
 
 It is true that Lincoln's faith did not make 
 him the radiant Christian of whom we dream. 
 A writer speaks of " that abiding melancholy, 
 that painful sense of the incompleteness of 
 life which had been his mother's dowry." 
 In his last ride with his wife he said, ** We 
 must both try to be more cheerful in the 
 future. Between the war and the loss of our 
 darling boy, we have been very miserable." 
 But after all, he was one 
 
 *' Who never doubted clouds would break, 
 Never dreamed, though right were worsted, 
 
 wrong would triumph, 
 Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight bettei^ 
 sleep to wake." 
 
Abraham Lincoln 153 
 
 You remember the story that Dr. A. J. 
 Lyman tells us of Beecher. The t\Vo were 
 coming from some scene of funeral solemnity. 
 " Well, Lyman," said Beecher, ** I suppose 
 they will try to take me out to Greenwood 
 some day, but God knows I shan't stay 
 there." " Where shall we look for you then, 
 Mr. Beecher?" "Somewhere in the midst 
 of things fighting for my country." So I 
 love to think of him who has been our 
 teacher, as somewhere in the pidst of things, 
 still fighting for his country, and teaching us 
 to fight the better, with persuasive words 
 chosen from the armoury of the common 
 speech, welded with exceeding care into 
 weapons directed straight to the hearts, the 
 wills of men. I think of him as teaching us 
 rather to ally ourselves with the cause of the 
 world-wide civilization of brotherly men, to 
 confide anew in our noblest selves, in our 
 fellow men, in our fathers' God, in our own 
 God. More willingly I think of that incident 
 which occurred at the close of the war. Lin- 
 coln was passing through Richmond. An 
 old coloured mammy held high in air a 
 little sick white child : " Look at de saviour, 
 honey ; touch the hem of his garment, honey, 
 and yuh pain will be done gone." I think 
 of Lincoln as our nation's saviour, through 
 whose healing virtue a nation's agony was 
 
'l54 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 assuaged, a nation's saviour, who would 
 teach each of us in his own place to be in 
 some sense a saviour of mankind. 
 
 " Admire heroes if thou wilt," says one, 
 "but only admire and thou remainest a 
 slave. Learn their secret, to commit thyself 
 to God, and to obey Him, and thou shalt 
 become a hero too." 
 
V 
 The Preacher and His Master 
 
THE PREACHER AND HIS MASTER 
 
 THE Master looks forward to the day 
 of universal empire, to the time when 
 His personality shall dominate hu- 
 man life. The words which the fourth Gos- 
 pel puts into His lips express the certain 
 conviction of His heart: "I, if I be lifted up 
 from the earth, will draw all men unto my- 
 self." He says to a little group of fishermen, 
 *' Ye are the salt of the earth, ye are the light 
 of THE WORLD." Jesus expects His king- 
 dom to be not only universal but eternal. 
 Though the world empires become as the 
 chaff of the summer threshing floor, His 
 kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, 
 and His dominion, one that shall not pass 
 away. 
 
 And yet — the fact would strike us as amaz- 
 ing if it were not a commonplace of our 
 religion, — Jesus expects to win this empire, 
 universal and eternal, by an appeal to men. 
 From the wilderness to Golgotha, Jesus 
 steadfastly refuses to use force in the ex- 
 tension and establishment of His kingdom. 
 He will hypnotize no man, He will break 
 
 157 
 
J 58 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 down no man's doors. ** Behold I stand at 
 the door and knock." Nor will He use 
 the men and the means of Caesar. The apol- 
 ogists for war have reminded us of Jesus' 
 cleansing of the temple as an instance of His 
 use of force ; but surely the whip of small 
 cords and the overturning of the money 
 changers' tables were but the symbols of 
 that zeal for Jehovah's house which con- 
 sumed His spirit. He does say, **T came 
 not to bring peace but a sword." But it 
 is the exegesis of an insane asylum which 
 would at this place put a literal sword into 
 the hand of the follower of Jesus. The sword 
 is the symbol of division. If a literal sword 
 should by any possibility be intended, it is 
 fairly clear that the sword would be wielded 
 not by Jesus' friends but by His foes. His 
 friends are not to conquer by murder. They 
 are to conquer by martyrdom. At the last 
 supper, we hear the disciples strenuously dis- 
 cussing material preparedness : ** Lord, here 
 are two swords." Two swords, forsooth, to 
 defend thirteen men I " It is enough," said 
 Jesus. " I have been with you so long, but 
 still you do not understand me." *' Let him 
 sell his cloak and buy a sword ": what does 
 that mean ? ** Thus far you have been sheep, 
 following me, the good shepherd. Thus far 
 you have been children, following me, as 
 
The Preacher and His Master 159 
 
 Friend. Now I am to leave you. Now you 
 are to have another temper, that of the sol- 
 dier, who girds his sword upon his thigh ; you 
 are to march out with the weapons of grace 
 and truth to meet and master the world." 
 When in the Garden poor Peter, ill prac- 
 ticed with the sword, cuts ofi the ear rather 
 than the head of the servant of the high 
 priest, what does Jesus say ? ** Put up again 
 thy sword into its place, for all they that 
 take the sword shall perish with the sword." 
 
 Is not that a suggestive story told by Sil- 
 vester Home ? A little boy had received as 
 a Christmas present a toy sword, with which 
 throughout the day he killed great numbers 
 of imaginary soldiers. Towards evening, his 
 mother began to speak quietly to him of the 
 meaning of the coming of Jesus, spoke of 
 the life of love and tenderness and sacrifice, 
 until at last the little face grew serious and 
 thoughtful, and the boy said, *' Mother, I 
 think I will hide my sword. I shouldn't like 
 Jesus to see it." 
 
 A Christian nation can get no aid or com- 
 fort from Jesus, as she goes to war, unless 
 she is able to convince herself that her war is 
 a corollary in action of the teaching of Jesus, 
 in which He summarizes the law and the 
 prophets : " Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
 God, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy- 
 
i6o The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 .self." No nation which claims to be Christian 
 can go to war, unless her citizens are able 
 honestly to declare before the world in the 
 presence of God, "We love the Lord our 
 God, we love our neighbour nation as our- 
 selves ; therefore we go against our neigh- 
 bour nation with aeroplanes and superdread- 
 naughts and submarines, and infinite muni- 
 tions and asphyxiating gases. Our guns 
 are expressions in steel of the grace and 
 truth which we as followers of Jesus are 
 alone permitted to use." Does that mean 
 that we can never go to war ? I do not say 
 that, but I do say that any honest obedience 
 to the word of Jesus would have made im- 
 possible most of the wars of the world, with 
 *' their mud and blood and blasphemy." 
 No Christian nation could possibly make her 
 own the slogan, " Remember the Maine." 
 Had we been a Christian nation, our only 
 conceivable battle cry in Cuba would have 
 been, " Rescue the Perishing." 
 
 As men then who would preach Christ, let 
 us ask ourselves : What is the appeal of 
 Jesus ? That is : To what motives does 
 Jesus appeal? Negatively we may say, 
 Jesus does not appeal to the very natural de- 
 sire of men for the sensational, the spectacu- 
 lar. He will not win men by the asceticism 
 of the Baptist. He will walk and talk and 
 
The Preacher and His Master l6l 
 
 eat and drink with men, a friendly man. 
 He will win no man by the duplication of the 
 mysteries of Eleusis. " Come and See, Come 
 and See." His very miracles, which were 
 but the inevitable outflow of the compassion 
 and power of His personality, brought to 
 Him a notoriety which embarrassed and ham- 
 pered His real work. The multitudes would 
 have followed with a glad heart a Messiah 
 who should suddenly drop from the pinnacle 
 of the temple into the temple court. De- 
 liberately He rejects the role of the wonder- 
 monger. ** No sign shall be given to this 
 generation, but the sign of Jonah." The 
 sign seekers belong to a prolific race, but 
 Jesus to-day as yesterday is singularly unre- 
 sponsive to their demands. " He shall not 
 cry nor lift up nor cause his voice to be heard 
 in the street." He will come into the lives 
 of men as the night mist comes upon the 
 grass, as the spring time comes upon the 
 world. 
 
 Again Jesus does not appeal to the very 
 natural desire of men for a present paradise 
 of sensuous blessedness or material well-be- 
 ing. He is no Demas luring earth's pilgrims 
 to his silver mine. He has no sympathy 
 with that ancient, modern code of ethics 
 which declares that a man must live, which 
 proclaims that it is better for a man to steal 
 
l62 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 than to starve. " If any man would come 
 after me, let him deny himself, and take up 
 his cross daily and follow me," and starve if 
 the need come, yes, and let all his family 
 starve, if the need come. ** The time is at 
 hand when he that killeth you will think that 
 he doeth God service." One of His startling 
 parables pictures to us a certain rich man 
 who had won his paradise of sensuous bless- 
 edness and went to sleep, who woke to find 
 himself a fool. " Come to our church. We 
 have the finest organ, the most delicious 
 music, the most elegant and eloquent preacher 
 in town. Come, be a citizen of the kingdom 
 of God. Haven't you noticed that the ablest, 
 most prominent, most successful business 
 men in our town are Christians ? Be good 
 and you will be a welcome guest at the bank. 
 Haven't you observed that the captains of 
 our football teams for seven years have all 
 been Christians ? " I miss such words from 
 the appeal of Jesus. 
 
 Nor does Jesus appeal to any narrowing 
 self-centered desire to escape from a future 
 hell and to win a paradise of spiritual bless- 
 edness or immaterial well-being. Jesus did 
 regard the life here and the life hereafter as 
 of one piece. We see a freshman going 
 wrong, and we say to him, ** My dear fellow, 
 see where you are going. You are losing, 
 
The Preacher and His Master 163 
 
 losing, losing until at last YOU will be lost." 
 Jesus bade men look whither they were 
 going, nor could He speak as a teacher who 
 believed that the path ended in the blind 
 alley of the grave. Jesus used the religious 
 terminology of His people, its words speaking 
 of rewards and punishments ; but the holi- 
 ness motivated by a selfish fear of hell, or by a 
 selfish desire for heaven would be unholy, it 
 would be smirched. Such holiness has no 
 heritage in the heaven of Jesus ; it is the pos- 
 session of the man who, as one says, *' put- 
 ters around in his own petty self-made hell.'* 
 In St. Louis a while ago I saw a sign painted 
 on the windows of a mission, " Holiness or 
 Hell." In Ashtabula I saw the announce- 
 ment of a sermon, " Eternity, Where ? " 
 There is a way of preaching heaven and hell, 
 which leads one to sympathize with the 
 woman of long ago who went through the 
 streets of Alexandria, with a torch in one 
 hand and a pitcher of water in the other, and 
 who cried, ** I would burn up heaven with 
 this torch, and extinguish hell with this 
 water, that man might love God for Himself 
 alone." 
 
 At the very outset Jesus would seem to 
 ignore those motives by which alone He 
 might hope successfully to appeal to men. 
 Indeed the crowds do turn from Him. The 
 
164 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 soldiers adorn Him with an old purple robe. 
 Pilate writes in the languages of the world 
 the inscription for the cross : ** This is the 
 king of the Jews," and a roar of laughter in 
 the praetorium follows this sharp sally of 
 Roman wit. 
 
 To what motives does Jesus appeal ? Pos- 
 itively, Jesus appeals to the universal desire 
 of men for the knowledge of God, for friend- 
 ship with God. To know God, to know God : 
 this has been the desire of the nations and of 
 the ages. " Religion," says Fairbairn, " is so 
 essential to man that he cannot escape from it. 
 It besets him, penetrates him, holds him even 
 against his will." A German critic has re- 
 marked, " Religion is the most pernicious 
 malady of humanity." It is a persistent di- 
 vine disease of men. Now and then you do 
 come across one of those farmers of Thoreau 
 who would carry their God to market if they 
 could get anything for Him. Now and then 
 you come across one of those monstrous 
 fishers of men and of nations who sacrifice 
 unto their own nets, and burn incense unto 
 their own drags. Once in a while you meet 
 with one of those psychologists who " cannot 
 persuade themselves that divine personal be- 
 ings, be they primitive gods or the Christian 
 Father, have more than a subjective ex- 
 
The Preacher and His Master 165 
 
 istence." Occasionally you see men who go 
 about the world proclaiming how little they 
 believe, as if somehow their infidelity lifted 
 them to summits of thought and wisdom 
 above those on which walked Isaiah and 
 Paul and Jesus. But one always feels that 
 such men have never tasted life, or else are 
 deceiving their own souls. They speak more 
 truly who say with Maeterlinck, " It is only 
 by the communications we have with the 
 Infinite that we are to be distinguished from 
 each other." Walt Whitman speaks for the 
 race when he uses those words which we all 
 know and love : 
 
 " A noiseless patient spider 
 
 I marked, where on a little promontory it 
 stood isolated, 
 
 Marked how to explore the vacant vast sur- 
 rounding, 
 
 It launched forth filament, filament, filament, 
 out of itself, 
 
 Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding 
 them. 
 
 «* And you, O my soul, where you stand, 
 
 Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans 
 of space. 
 
 Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seek- 
 ing the spheres to connect them 
 
 Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the 
 ductile anchor hold. 
 
 Till the gossamer thread you fling catch some- 
 where, O my soul," 
 
l66 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 To know God I Wherever in all the world 
 a man has been found who seemed to know 
 anything about God, that man has been 
 hated, it may be, loved, it may be : that man 
 has always been followed. 
 
 Now the fundamental postulate of Christi- 
 anity — perhaps the words are another's — is 
 this, that God can be known ; and the second 
 postulate of Christianity I take to be this, 
 that God can be known as a friend. In all 
 lands and times, friendship with deity has 
 been regarded as beatitude. Does God see 
 and know and care for us ? '* Come unto 
 me," says Jesus, "and I will make you to 
 know God. I will make you to know God 
 as your friend, as your Father. He is your 
 Father. You may become in a new sense his 
 Child. Come unto me : I am the way, I am 
 the way from the meanest man, the most ig- 
 norant man, the most degraded man, straight 
 to the Father's home and the Father's heart." 
 When the Danish missionaries were trans- 
 lating the Word, they came to the passage 
 which reads, " They shall be called sons of 
 God." The native amanuensis laid down 
 his pen : " Missionary, this is too much. Let 
 me write it : * They shall be permitted to kiss 
 His feet.' " Nay, they shall be called sons of 
 God. And I say to you that wherever you 
 can find an honest man who has dug his way 
 
The Preacher and His Master 167 
 
 down the least distance beneath the surface 
 of life, there you find a man who answers 
 back, " Master, canst Thou do it ? Canst 
 Thou make me to know God as my friend, 
 as my Father ? Then Thou wilt draw me to 
 Thee, and hold me fast to Thee forever." 
 
 And this leads me to speak of a second 
 appeal of our Master. Jesus appeals to the 
 universal desire of men for a man's life. Even 
 where the great religious teachers have taught 
 that the goal of life is a ceaseless dreamless 
 sleep, the human heart has rebelled, and in- 
 sisted that it is life, not death, it is life and 
 fuller that we want. But a man's life ! What 
 does that mean ? Think it through. A man's 
 life. What is needful that a man should live 
 a man's life ? That a man may live a man's life, 
 the forces which now tend to impoverish life 
 must themselves positively enrich life. What 
 forces tend to impoverish life? "Well," one 
 will say, '* sickness, poverty itself, the ebb and 
 flow, the ups and downs of circumstance." 
 You remember the word of Rosebury speak- 
 ing of Napoleon on St. Helena, **For six 
 years he tasted the bitterness of slow, re- 
 morseful, desolate death." The tragedy is 
 not less real, when it is less conspicuous. 
 Often in the great city, one sees a man 
 who has given himself body and soul to a 
 certain business. The business has been 
 
l68 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 undermined by the rapid economic changes 
 of the years. And the man's hands are 
 empty, his heart is shrivelled. He is poor. 
 Then there is bereavement. Do you happen 
 to know the derivation of the word Bereave- 
 ment ? I have been told that it roots in an 
 Anglo-Saxon word which means to steal, to 
 plunder, to rob. When our friends go from 
 us we say that we are bereaved, literally, 
 plundered, robbed, despoiled. Though we 
 may hope to make life longer and safer, 
 though we may dare dream of the time when 
 the inhabitant shall not say, " I am sick," 
 yet no man can claim exemption from life's 
 changes ; but if a man is to live a MAN'S life, 
 these changes which so often impoverish 
 must actually enrich life. 
 
 Perhaps more impoverishing is the deadly 
 and meaningless monotony of life. A letter 
 came the other day to a preacher friend of 
 mine : " At the next morning service, will 
 you have a special message for those whose 
 vision is dimming and whose hold on God is 
 slipping under the pressure not of great be- 
 reavement, but of steadily grinding care and 
 responsibility ? Perhaps you have met such 
 a situation. At all events you seem to have 
 learned the secret of a vital steadying rela- 
 tionship with God. You have already helped 
 me, and I beg your further help before every- 
 
The Preacher and His Master 169 
 
 thing goes, and the bitterness already creep- 
 ing in overmasters me. I despise anonymous 
 letters, but remain, A troubled parishioner." 
 We try at times to amuse ourselves with 
 fool's gold, to avoid the meaningless mon- 
 otony by an equally meaningless ** accelera- 
 tion." We know in our hearts that we are 
 not living a man's life ; we are poor. 
 
 If a man is to live a man's life, the forces 
 which now tend to destroy life must them- 
 selves be destroyed. Then sin must be killed 
 out of a man. I suspect that there is to-day 
 a decline of the sense of sin. A preacher 
 tells me, •' In Cleveland, I don't meet men 
 who regard themselves as sinners." But 
 men know very well that they are the vic- 
 tims of the divided self. At the desk of the 
 city business man is a telephone, and he may 
 be called up by the Salvation Army or the 
 grill room, by the gambling hell or the So- 
 ciety for the Prevention of Cruelty to Chil- 
 dren. They may be on the wire at the same 
 time. Isn't it true ? A letter, a bit of sun- 
 shine, a fit of depression, a word of gossip, and 
 lo, the friend, or the scholar, or the libertine, 
 or the pessimist within a man calls him up and 
 at times all these personalities will seem to be 
 struggling within him to get a hearing. We 
 do not speak much of sin, we call it by all 
 sorts of pretty names, but still there are hosts 
 
lyo The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 of men who share the longing of Kipling's 
 pilgrim, who came to the curator of the 
 museum at Lahore with his story of the 
 River of the Arrow : " Where Buddha's 
 arrow fell, there broke out a stream, which 
 presently became a river, whose nature by 
 our Lord's beneficence is that whoso bathes 
 in it washes away every taint and speckle of 
 sin. Where is that river, Fountain of Wis- 
 dom, where fell the arrow ? Surely thou 
 dost know. See, I am an old man. I ask 
 with my head between thy feet, O fountain 
 of wisdom. We know he drew the bow. 
 We know the arrow fell. We know the 
 stream gushed. Where then is the river? 
 My dream told me to find it. So I came. I 
 am here, but where is the river ? " Where 
 is the river in which a man may cleanse 
 away every taint and speckle of sin ? The 
 nations do not know. Mr. Mott says, " I 
 have asked the students of forty different 
 nations to show me any power except Christ 
 that could save their life from sin, and give 
 them strength. Only one young man ever 
 claimed knowledge of such a power. I said 
 to him, ' I am glad to meet you. Come with 
 me, and give your message to the young 
 men of the world. I need your help.' That 
 same evening that young man came to me 
 and said that he was a slave of sin, and the 
 
The Preacher and His Master 171 
 
 power of which he spoke, his own will, had 
 not been able to save him." 
 
 If, in order that one may live a man's life, 
 the forces now tending to destroy life must be 
 destroyed, then death must be put to death. 
 Don't you think that death is a pretty shabby 
 ending of a man's life ? "A beautiful ad- 
 venture " ? Yes, if death is not death. I 
 talked a while ago with an old friend of mine. 
 1 said, ** How tall are you ? " " Well," said 
 he, " I used to be six feet, two and a half. I 
 am not that any more. I am not six feet 
 any more." Isn't that pathetic ? So we 
 shrivel and shrivel until our grave clothes 
 fit us. 
 
 ** The phenomenon of consciousness ceases 
 with the death of the cerebral cells." How 
 lightly we say over the words. Think what 
 they mean. Do you recall that letter of 
 Huxley to Morley ? 
 
 4 Marlboro Place, N. W., 
 
 December ^Oy i88j. 
 My dear Morley : 
 
 All our good wishes to you and yours. 
 The great thing one has to wish for as time 
 goes on is vigour as long as life lasts, and 
 death as soon as vigour flags. It is a curious 
 thing that I find my dislike of the thought 
 of extinction increasing as I get older and 
 nearer the goal. It flashes across me at all 
 sorts of times with a sort of horror that in 
 
172 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 1900 I shall probably know no more of what 
 is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner 
 be in hell a good deal, at any rate in one oi 
 the upper circles, where the climate and com- 
 pany are not too trying. I wonder if you 
 are plagued in this way. 
 
 Ever yours, 
 
 T. H. H. 
 
 In his book, ** Facts and Comments," Her- 
 bert Spencer says, " It seems a strange and 
 repugnant conclusion that with the cessation 
 of consciousness at death, there ceases to be 
 any knowledge of having existed." I grant 
 that there are times, tired times, when noth- 
 ing seems so desirable as a long sleep, but 
 even then the thought of the extinction of 
 our loved ones seems unspeakably horrible. 
 Omar of course has an easy answer to all 
 our questionings. 
 
 " Would you be happy? Hearken then the way. 
 Heed not to-morrow, heed not yesterday. 
 The magic words of life are here and now. 
 O fools, that after some to-morrow stray." 
 
 That is, put your memory to sleep, put 
 your hope to sleep, and then be happy like 
 a dog or like a cat, but not like a man. If 
 a man is going to live a man's life, then 
 death must be put to death, or life, as the 
 universe itself, is indeed God's great joke, 
 rather a jest perpetrated by some Caliban 
 
The Preacher and His Master 173 
 
 of a god. " What must I do to inherit eter- 
 nal Ufa ?" The cry of the rich young man is 
 echoed by every man worthy the name of a 
 man. The rich young man did not wish 
 " a ladylike tea-party elysium, where there is 
 a tedious cooing of bliss from everybody.'* 
 He was not seeking " sugar plums " for him- 
 self. He was seeking LIFE. He might 
 have gone to the rabbis of his own people, 
 he might have gone to the stoics of Rome, 
 he might have gone to the pundits of the 
 East. Their best philosophies would have 
 taught him to obey an impossible law, to 
 endure an unendurable life, to get free from 
 the wheel of things. Alone, unique, among 
 the teachers of the world, our Master speaks 
 to men, " Come unto me and I will give you 
 LIFE. I will give you the real, the rich, the 
 abounding, the eternal life." And again I 
 say, wherever you can find an honest man, 
 who has dug down beneath the surface of 
 existence, there you find a man who answers 
 back, " Master, canst Thou do it ? Canst 
 Thou give me a man's life ? Then * of all 
 mankind I cleave to Thee, and to Thee will 
 I cleave alway.' " 
 
 Again, there is a third appeal of Jesus, 
 which cannot be logically separated from the 
 others. Jesus appeals to the universal de- 
 
174 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 sire of men for leadership, a leadership other 
 than their own. 
 
 We have often observed the longing of 
 men for a king. Far back in the days of 
 the Judges Israel longed for a king. A little 
 while ago, one of the countries of Europe 
 was scouring the continent to find a king. 
 What we see in the realm of politics, we see 
 in the realm of science. In an Ohio univer- 
 sity there is an eminent surgeon whose stu- 
 dents call him '* the king," and they follow 
 him with a devotion as eager as was ever that 
 of the soldiers of the Little Corporal. What 
 we see in the realm of science we see in the 
 realm of religion. The devotion of the Mos- 
 lem to Mohammed, of the Hindu to Krishna, 
 the devotion of the Mormon to Joseph Smith, 
 of the Christian Scientist to Mrs. Eddy, these 
 are all the expressions of the desire for a 
 king. And this desire is by no means a 
 maudlin sentiment. I hold it to be the king- 
 liest quality of men. Your little woman 
 whose chief interests are low necks and high 
 teas thinks she has no need of a king. 
 But let her live a while. Your great 
 woman, your Frances Willard, your Harriet 
 Beecher Stowe, needs a king. Your ordi- 
 nary woman who for one half-hour has 
 looked out into that world in which to-day 
 breaker boys are taking in dust and death 
 
The Preacher and His Master 175 
 
 with the same breath, that world in which 
 to-day the seamstress sews a double thread, 
 a shroud as well as a shirt, that world in 
 which little children are sent barefooted 
 out into the night, while their fathers shoot 
 each other to death and call war glorious, 
 that woman needs a king. I was struck by 
 the word of Jane Carlyle, who confessed 
 that she had a devil inside her which was 
 always bidding her March, March, but which 
 burst into laughter when she asked where 
 she was to march to. 
 
 Your litde man, a chip on the face of the 
 waters, thinks he doesn't need a king. Let 
 him live a little while and he will learn his 
 need. 
 
 *•' Last night my soul drove out to sea, 
 Down through the pagan gloom, 
 As chartless as eternity, 
 As dangerous as doom. 
 
 <* By blinding gusts of no-god chased. 
 My crazy craft plunged on. 
 I crept aloft in prayer to find 
 The lighthouse of the dawn. 
 
 ** No shore, no star, no sail ahead, 
 No lookout's saving song, 
 Death and the rest athwart my bow. 
 And all my reckoning wrong." 
 
 Meanwhile your great man, your Lincoln, 
 your Gladstone, needs a king. Your ordi- 
 
176 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 nary man who has stood for one half-hour 
 gazing into that stupendous melting pot of 
 God, in which we are bidden see the races 
 and the nations fusing and reforming, — he 
 needs a king, some one on whose throne 
 steps he may kneel and bow obeisance, some 
 great commander in whose comradeship he 
 may be strong. 
 
 Never was the desire for leadership so 
 imperious as at this hour. We are tasting 
 the ripe fruits of the industrial development 
 of the last thirty years, and those fruits taste 
 of human blood. We are tasting the unripe 
 fruits of a recent industrial development, with 
 its forced growth, and again the fruits taste 
 of human blood. The public square of the 
 great city is lined with benches, and the 
 benches are filled with drunks and bums, 
 and the great city like the Roman matron of 
 old must say, " These are my jewels." Now 
 *' ascetic Christianity," says Rauschenbusch, 
 ** found the world evil and left it. The times 
 call for a revolutionary Christianity that shall 
 find the world evil and change it." Yes, and 
 whether Christians or not, men want to 
 change it. Did you notice the remark of 
 Lyman Abbott? He said, "For some ten 
 years I have been giving myself to preach- 
 ing among collegians, and in all that time 
 I have never been asked the question, What 
 
The Preacher and His Master 177 
 
 must I do to be saved? But many times 
 have I been asked, What must I do to save 
 others ? " Certain it is that the passion for 
 saving others burns white hot within the 
 hearts of manly men to-day. 
 
 *' Sometimes with a rush the intolerable craving 
 Shivers throughout me like a trumpet call. 
 Oh, to save these, to perish for their saving, 
 Die for their life, be offered for them all." 
 
 Yes, but how to save these? One doesn't 
 exactly like to "run the hazard of his life 
 against a hen-roost." How by death to win 
 life for others ? How to make a sacrifice not 
 only complete but completely serviceable? 
 You recall the Chicago saloon-keeper who 
 speaking of a recent anti-saloon agitation 
 said, ''This is no Willy-Hold-the-Baby 
 proposition. This is hell." The job which 
 faces men to-day is no job for nursemaids, 
 male or female ; it is for us to extinguish 
 hell. But how? All about us are fakirs 
 with their patent fire extinguishers telling us 
 how to put out the fire. The only trouble 
 with them is, they can't do it. Some years 
 ago, Jesus said to a couple of fishermen, 
 " Come ye after me and I will make you 
 fishers of men." A litde later to a larger 
 group, He said, ** Go ye and make disciples 
 of all the nations, and lo, I am with you all 
 the days, even unto the consummation of the 
 
lyS The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 age." And down through the years, the 
 preacher's Master has been calling to men, 
 *' Come unto me and I will be your leader. 
 I will lead you into a life of power, a life 
 strong to climb towards God, a life strong to 
 stoop and bear the burdens of your brothers, 
 a life strong to sway and strong to serve the 
 world." And once more I say, wherever 
 you can find a man in whom any manhood 
 survives, a man who has worked his way 
 down beneath the mere surface of life, there 
 you find a man who answers back to Jesus, 
 " Master, canst Thou do it ? Canst Thou be 
 my leader ? Then I will follow Thee * through 
 heaven and hell, the earth, the sea and the 
 air.' " 
 
 Does Jesus appeal to these universal de- 
 sires of men to thwart them ? After the in- 
 struction of the centuries it is but a truism to 
 say that Jesus appeals to these desires of men 
 to satisfy them with a sublime fulfillment. 
 Men longing for the knowledge of God, for 
 friendship with God, have placed their hands 
 in the hand of Jesus and have felt the pres- 
 sure of the heavenly Father's hand. Men 
 whose lives have been one long struggle for 
 life have tasted of Him the living bread and 
 have never hungered any more. Through 
 the desert of the years pilgrims have sought 
 
The Preacher and His Master 1 79 
 
 and in Jesus they have found the fountain of 
 living- waters, and no man who has drunk of 
 that fountain has ever thirsted any more. 
 There has risen within him a fountain spring- 
 ing up unto eternal life. "Jesus," says 
 Brooks, " was not so much the deed doer or 
 the word sayer ; He was rather the life giver." 
 Such He has ever been. Through Him men 
 have come to Hve a Hfe of such a character 
 that its cessation would proclaim the world a 
 madhouse. Men have come to Jesus seeking 
 leadership. They have entered a sad world, 
 but wherever they have followed Jesus they 
 have turned sorrow into joy. They have 
 come into an impure world, but wherever 
 they have placed their feet in the footprints 
 of Jesus there have grown the flowers of do- 
 mestic purity. They have come into a cruel 
 world, a world which delighted to see ten 
 thousand gladiators contend for life in the 
 arena. Wherever they have followed Jesus 
 they have transformed cruelty into mercy. 
 
 It was my privilege to be in Toronto at the 
 dedication of the glorious pile of buildings 
 known as Knox College, the Presbyterian 
 theological school connected with the Uni- 
 versity. As we sat in the Gothic chapel and 
 listened to words of faith and hope and love, 
 almost constantly through the half open win- 
 dows we could hear the sharp commands of 
 
i8o The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 sergeants drilling their awkward squads of 
 boys. Two hundred, three hundred, four 
 hundred, they marched across the campus 
 back and forth hour after hour. Why ? That 
 they might all too possibly die in the wild 
 war. But in the addresses, this thought 
 was expressed again and again : The peace 
 which must at last close this war will be the 
 signal for a greater, madder war, in which 
 shall be involved not only the United States 
 but the entire Orient, if, if that peace is not 
 made in accordance with the principles of 
 Jesus Christ. This I profoundly believe. A 
 friend of mine was telling us of a picture in 
 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New 
 York. It represents the Crusaders come at 
 last to the holy city, the goal of their desires. 
 Below them shine the domes and minarets of 
 Jerusalem. Not an eye is turned thither. 
 Rather every eye is turned towards the heav- 
 ens, where in vision is seen Jesus Christ, who 
 has led them all the way. And to this day, 
 wherever you meet crusaders who have ac- 
 tually achieved the rescue of any quarter of 
 the captive city, there you find men who con- 
 sciously or unconsciously have followed Jesus 
 Christ, our Master. 
 
 Had Jesus used the weapons of physical 
 conquest He would never have conquered 
 human hearts. Those words of Chunder 
 
The Preacher and His Master 18 1 
 
 Sen uttered in 1879 still speak the truth : 
 ** Who rules India ? It is neither diplomacy 
 nor the bayonet which sways our hearts. 
 Armies never won the heart of a nation, and 
 you cannot deny that our hearts are touched, 
 are won, are overwhelmed by a higher power, 
 and that power is Christ. Christ rules British 
 India, not the British government. None but 
 Jesus, none but Jesus, none, I say, but Jesus, 
 ever deserved this bright diadem, and Jesus 
 shall have it." Had Jesus sought the sensa- 
 tional, the spectacular, He would never have 
 appealed to the wise ; had He appealed to the 
 desire for ease, He would never have appealed 
 to heroes. Jesus knew what was in man, 
 dared to bide His time, dared to appeal to 
 those motives which beneath all that segre- 
 gates us, colour, race, money, national an- 
 tipathies, still rule the hearts of men. Into 
 the inner realms of life, the preacher's Master 
 enters, sure that the day will come when He 
 shall be acknowledged King. 
 
 May I speak then to the Master's preach- 
 ers ? Shall not the appeal of Jesus come to 
 us with resistless compulsion ? May we not 
 count ourselves among those for whom Cuth- 
 bert Hall speaks as he addresses the men of 
 the East : *' Educated men of the West hold 
 the faith of Christ not as a fragile treasure to 
 
1 82 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 be guarded against the rough onslaughts of 
 unbelief, but as a mighty impregnable fortress 
 against which the gates of hell shall not 
 prevail " ? 
 
 And the Master's preacher has no other 
 task than this, to voice the appeal of Jesus, 
 Woe to us if we are guilty of the charge made 
 against us that we are ** sellers of rhetoric." 
 Ours to proclaim a living God, whom men 
 may love, an eternal life which men may live, 
 a leader whom men may trust, a living way 
 if you please, which men may follow to the 
 journey's end. 
 
 How then shall we preachers voice the 
 appeal of Jesus ? By our words. This of 
 course. The thought that we are simply 
 voicing the appeal of Jesus will keep us from 
 all scolding, from all pulpit smartnesses, from 
 all assumption, from all dogmatism. A min- 
 ister may say almost anything to his people 
 if they know that his words are the pleading 
 of a great Christlike love. 
 
 Again we shall voice the appeal of Jesus, 
 like Jesus Himself, by our works. Gesta 
 Christi, the deeds of Christ, speak a language 
 which the men of every tongue understand. 
 As we listen to a great preacher, we think, 
 ** Oh, if we only had his voice, his piercing 
 glance, his brains, his immense and available 
 learning, which he wears as lightly as a 
 
The Preacher and His Master 183 
 
 flower." And then we think of that letter of 
 Fitzgerald : '' Oh, this wonderful, wonderful 
 world, and we who stand in the middle of it 
 are in a maze, except poor Mathews of Bed- 
 ford, who fixes his eyes upon a wooden Cross 
 and has no misgiving whatsoever. When I 
 was at his chapel on Good Friday, he called 
 at the end of his grand sermon on some of 
 the people to say merely this, that they be- 
 lieved Christ had redeemed them ; and first 
 one got up, and in sobs declared that she 
 believed it ; and then another, and then an- 
 other — I was quite overset — all poor people : 
 how much richer than all who fill London 
 churches ! " You remember Jehovah's word 
 to Ezekiel, " Thou art unto them as a very 
 lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, 
 and can play well on an instrument, for they 
 hear thy words, but they do them not." 
 How often men listen to the eloquent 
 preacher as to a skilled musician who fills 
 an hour with a pleasing song, but stirs no 
 soul to action. On the other hand there are 
 men who like Moses were neither eloquent 
 before Jehovah spake to them, nor after the 
 vision of Jehovah, but by their deeds have 
 spoken the language of compelling appeal. 
 
 We think, ** Oh, if we could only be 
 great city preachers." And then we get 
 such a word as this : ** In Boston it was 
 
184 The Preacher's Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 recently revealed that about eighty per cent, 
 of the pastors and Christian workers of the 
 four leading denominations of the city were 
 born and reared in the country." What 
 does that mean? For one thing it means 
 this : that in quiet country places disciples of 
 Jesus have stood beside the cross, preaching 
 with the words of the pulpit, yes, but rather 
 with the more effective speech of the day's 
 work, so that lads going up to college and 
 down to the city have not forgotten, but 
 have begun in their turn to voice the appeal 
 of Jesus. 
 
 I knew two preachers. One of them had 
 rare felicity of utterance, an extraordinary skill 
 in exegesis. Sunday after Sunday he voiced 
 the appeal of Jesus, but day after day as he 
 walked the streets in silence he preached a 
 sermon that shouted down the message of 
 his Master. The other man had no felicity 
 of utterance, no skill in exegesis. He had a 
 singular inability to get his message, as our 
 boys say, over the desk. But day by day as 
 he walked the streets, women pointed him 
 out to their husbands, ** There is a holy man 
 of God, who passeth by us continually." 
 Little children loved to meet him ; and the 
 simple fact is this, that the daily sermon of 
 that preacher's life transfigured the sermon 
 of the Sabbath, and on the Sabbath men 
 
The Preacher and His Master 185 
 
 listened to him as once in Antioch or Con- 
 stantinople men listened to John of the 
 Golden Mouth. 
 
 A certain woman broke an alabaster box, 
 and poured the precious ointment upon the 
 feet of Christ. Nineteen hundred years have 
 passed, and the fragrance of that ointment 
 has filled every apartment in the vast house 
 which shelters Christendom. Her quiet deed 
 has preached a sermon to the generations. 
 The hands which bear the stigmata have 
 indeed singular power to call men to " the 
 Lord of Calvary." 
 
 But men have followed Jesus not alone for 
 what He said and did, but for what He was. 
 And He is the first born among many breth- 
 ren. As we preachers, brethren of the Master, 
 seek to voice His appeal, we shall fulfill our 
 calling most effectively by the silent speech of 
 character. When my friend Harlan P. Beach 
 was walking along a street in China, he 
 chanced to overhear one Chinese speak to a 
 friend, '* There goes Jesus." It has been said 
 that men came ostensibly to hear Rutherford 
 but really to see Jesus. I asked a friend re- 
 garding a certain minister : ** Do you count 
 him a strong man ? " ** If you mean a bright 
 man, yes : if you mean a spiritual man, no." 
 In some real sense we must eat the flesh and 
 drink the blood of the Son of Man. In some 
 
i86 The Preacher^s Ideals and Inspirations 
 
 real fashion the life of Christ must enter ours, 
 so that to us to live shall be Christ. 
 
 ** Ideas," says George EHot, '* are often 
 poor ghosts. Our sun-filled eyes cannot dis- 
 cern them — they pass athwart us in their 
 vapour, and cannot make themselves felt 
 But sometimes they are made flesh, they 
 breathe upon us with warm breath, they 
 touch us with soft responsive hands, they 
 look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak 
 to us in appealing tones ; they are clothed in 
 a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its 
 faith and its love. Then their presence is a 
 power, then they shake us like a passion, 
 and we are drawn after them with gentle 
 compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame." As 
 the ideas of Jesus are clothed in our human 
 souls, may we gain the ultimate power of 
 the preacher, a power which can never be 
 monopolized by the preachers whom the world 
 calls wise and mighty and noble. 
 
 Shall our Master's appeal, as we give it, be 
 effective ? Grant that we may not succeed. 
 If by the language of our words, our deeds, 
 our characters, we have voiced that appeal, 
 we can say with Paul, ** I am pure from the 
 blood of all men. If any man commits soul 
 murder or soul suicide, I am not responsible." 
 Shall the appeal be effective ? Not with every 
 man ; any more than in the days when Jesus 
 
The Preacher and His Master 187 
 
 lived with Judas, loved him, lost him. Nor 
 yet may the appeal of Jesus be successful in 
 every company known as a church of Jesus 
 Christ. The word may be true, " The church 
 must be a much smaller thing before it can 
 be a bigger." 
 
 But the world is going Jesus* way. Men 
 have not believed it. They have trusted the 
 minutes against the centuries ; but the world 
 is going Jesus* way, and the man who is 
 against Jesus has the universe against him. 
 The man who is on the side of Jesus, and with 
 limitless confidence voices His appeal to men, 
 that man may seem to walk a very lonely 
 way : he is in the current of events, strong in 
 their strength ; the universe is on his side. 
 
 So I would close these studies, using the 
 words which Jones of Haverford taught me, 
 words with which we may address those who 
 discount our ideals : 
 
 " Dreamers of dreams ? We take the taunt with 
 
 gladness. 
 Knowing that God beyond the years you see 
 Hath wrought the dreams that count with you 
 
 for madness 
 Into the substance of the life to be." 
 
 The preacher's Master will not permit the 
 preacher's hope to be put to shame. 
 
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