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VITAL ELEMENTS OF PREACHING 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
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 TORONTO 
 
VITAL ELEMENTS 
 OF PREACHING 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR S. HOYT 
 
 PBOFESSOB OF HOMILETICS AND SOCIOLOGY 
 IN AUBURN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 AUTHOB OF 
 "TH2 WORK OF PREACHING/' AND " THE PREACHER 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1914 
 
 All right* reserved 
 
 

 Copyright, 1914, 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1914. 
 
 NottoootJ $r«B 
 
 J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
 SEP 24 1914 
 
 ©CI.A379620 
 
XTo 
 
 JAMES STEVENSON RIGGS 
 
 COLLEAGUE, NEIGHBOR, 
 FRIEND OP MANY TEARS 
 
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 o<) 
 
PREFACE 
 
 ( These lectures were given at the University 
 of Chicago, in the summer term of nineteen 
 hundred and twelve, and for three years to 
 senior classes at Auburn Seminary. x The re- 
 sponse of students encourages the hope that 
 they may be helpful to a wider circle of readers. 
 
 To those who have read the author's previous 
 works on preaching, " The Work of Preaching," 
 and "The Preacher," the present book will 
 seem a nearer approach to the secret of effective 
 preaching. 
 
 "The Work of Preaching" dealt with the 
 sources and formation of the sermon for the 
 present age ; " The Preacher " placed emphasis 
 upon a vital, spiritual personality in giving the 
 message ; " The Vital Elements of Preaching " 
 touches the temper of the man both as to the 
 truth and the lives of his hearers. Preaching 
 is a social virtue. " Nothing can be more funda- 
 mental to the preacher than his humanity." 
 The deepest needs and desires of the age must 
 be felt in his life, if his word interprets aright 
 the Gospel of the new man. 
 
viii Preface 
 
 The book discusses the psychology of preach- 
 ing, though without formal and philosophical 
 analysis. It always has in mind the question, 
 How shall we speak so as to help men into the 
 largest life? It is sent forth with the hope 
 that it may help many into fuller faith in the 
 divineness of preaching. 
 
 ARTHUR S. HOYT. 
 
 Auburn, N.Y., 
 May 15, 1914. 
 

 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 
 OHAPTEI 
 I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Called Man 3 
 
 n. 
 
 The Open Door 
 
 
 
 25 
 
 in. 
 
 The Vision of Man . 
 
 
 
 49 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Secret of the Heart 
 
 
 
 71 
 
 v. 
 
 The Human Touch . 
 
 
 
 95 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Ministry of Comfort 
 
 
 
 117 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Children's Portion . 
 
 
 
 . 141 
 
 VIII. 
 
 A Man's Gospel 
 
 
 
 . 163 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Preacher's Growth 
 
 
 
 185 
 
 X. 
 
 The Preacher and his Age 
 
 
 
 205 
 
 XI. 
 
 Simplicity of Speech 
 
 
 
 223 
 
 XII. 
 
 The Cost of Preaching . 
 
 
 
 243 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Sense of Message . 
 
 
 
 265 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Positive Preaching . 
 
 
 
 291 
 
 XV. 
 
 The Master's Method 
 
 
 
 307 
 
 IX 
 
LECTURE I. THE GALLED MAN 
 
 Isaiah 6 : 1-8. " Also I heard the voice of the 
 Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go 
 for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me." 
 
 
 
I' 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 The Called Man 
 
 It is a great thing to have a large view of 
 truth, and know one's relation to it ; to have 
 a clear view of life, to see life clear, and to 
 see life whole, and to know one's part in it. 
 
 The Christian ministry is a calling that 
 depends upon its vision of truth and life, and 
 its sense of relation to them. The older 
 divines emphasized the divine call to the 
 ministry. Whatever be the theory, the con- 
 viction of calling must be none the less sure. 
 We are here because we feel that we are 
 chosen men. 
 
 I am not sure that the Christian preacher 
 is chosen of God more than other men. 
 There has been rightly a great widening of 
 the idea of service. God is not only the God 
 of the hills, but also of the valleys. The 
 Incarnation tells us that God has cleansed 
 human life and nothing is to be called common 
 or unclean. All life may be full of God and 
 all work his service. 
 
 " Honest toil is holy service ; faithful work is praise 
 and prayer." 
 
 3 
 
4 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 The largest duty is the sanctification of the 
 commonplace. The priesthood of the be- 
 liever is the New Testament conception of 
 life, and the realization of this thought in the 
 manifold ways of life is perhaps the strongest 
 reason for the lessened number of preachers 
 and the forces of righteousness beyond the 
 limits of the church. 
 
 No doubt Mr. Hughes and Mr. Roosevelt 
 are chosen men quite as much as Mr. Beecher 
 or Mr. Moody. There are chosen sons of 
 Science and Literature as well as of Religion. 
 Burns saw the spirit of Scotland calling him. 
 
 " I saw thee seek the sounding shore, 
 Delighted with the dashing roar ; 
 Or when the North his fleecy store 
 
 Drove through the sky, 
 I saw grim Nature's visage hoar 
 
 Struck thy young eye." 
 
 And Wordsworth felt himself a dedicated 
 spirit. He must follow the call of poetry 
 or sin greatly. 
 
 No man can do his work as he ought, unless 
 he feels that he is where God wishes him to be ; 
 unless he have sooner or later the divine 
 sanction on his work. The preacher, above 
 all other men to-day, because of the nature 
 of his work as a ministry to the soul and 
 because of its peculiar difficulty and danger, 
 
The Called Man 5 
 
 needs the assurance that he is called of 
 God. 
 
 So, in the vital elements of preaching, the 
 man comes first. And it is well for us to 
 study the called man, as found especially in 
 the experience of Isaiah. 
 
 Some of the most interesting and impressive 
 parts of the Bible are the records of the calling 
 out of men for some especial service. What 
 variety in these calls as to age and social con- 
 dition ! Amos, the prophet of social right- 
 eousness, was called from his flocks and 
 herds, the shepherd of Tekoa. Hosea, the 
 prophet of the divine betrothal, was a poet 
 and a patriot, a man of noble gifts and large 
 experiences. Moses was trained in the most 
 splendid court of his times, and Elijah, rough 
 and bold, flitted from court to desert in coarse 
 and unkept raiment; Peter and John were 
 the untutored fishermen of Galilee, and Paul 
 was the master of the highest culture of his age. 
 
 Samuel heard the call of God as a young 
 man in the Tabernacle, while Moses, an old 
 man in the desert, felt the divine impulse 
 that must be followed. John brought the 
 enthusiasm and the sensitiveness of youth to 
 the Master's school, while Matthew left the 
 habits and work of manhood to follow and 
 proclaim the new teaching. 
 
 
6 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 The history of the Christian pulpit fur- 
 nishes couDtless parallels to this variety in 
 God's calls. There is no fixed age or condi- 
 tion for God's use. While the special de- 
 mands of the modern pulpit call for youth 
 and long training, God has always called 
 his special messengers in ways men have 
 little thought. Many a preacher like Paul 
 has not been taught his message of man. 
 
 Men like Basil, Chrysostom, Ambrose; 
 Bossuet, Bourdaloue ; Barrow, Jeremy Tay- 
 lor, Liddon ; Brooks, — had the advantage of 
 wealth and social position, the most famous 
 schools and teachers; while Bunyan and 
 Spurgeon, Parker and Moody, rose like 
 Lincoln from the undistinguished mass, not 
 by favor of birth or school, but by the irre- 
 sistible force of their own nature and vision. 
 Spurgeon, Parker, Maclaren were preachers 
 while still in their teens. Chrysostom began 
 at 39, and Augustine at 36. A man may 
 begin his prophetic work at any age. But 
 a test of his call is his desire to make good 
 his deficiencies. John Knox began the study 
 of Greek at 42, and then turned to Hebrew 
 at 49. 
 
 I think the experiences of the prophets 
 often come as personal and practical lessons 
 to the modern preacher. The Apostles had 
 
The Called Man 7 
 
 the extraordinary work of establishing the 
 infant Church, of putting the fact and truths 
 of Christ in imperishable form. In a cer- 
 tain sense that peculiar work can never be 
 repeated. But the work of the prophets 
 is ever going on. They were identified with 
 their people. They felt the social oneness 
 of the community. They came from the 
 people; they spoke to them, and their fate 
 was involved in the fate of the nation. The 
 prophetic office was to their age what the 
 pulpit is to this. They spoke for God. 
 They were the moral and religious teachers 
 of their age. They sustained personal reli- 
 gion. Like a rock in the desert, to use the 
 striking and beautiful figure of Isaiah, they 
 kept men from being overwhelmed by the 
 silt of the desert sands, by the drift of the 
 evil times. Under their influence fruitful 
 lives sprang up, and their words of hope were 
 the shadow of a rock in a weary land. "The 
 Lord hath given me the tongue of a disciple 
 that I should know how to speak a word in 
 season to him that is weary." 
 
 The prophets were the greatest force in 
 the higher life of the nation. Principal 
 George Adam Smith suggestively says, in 
 "The Prophets as Preachers to their own 
 Times' ' : "Almost everywhere the prophets 
 
8 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 began to speak to the new generations ; from 
 the time of the Reformation to our own, 
 there never has been a city of Protestant 
 Europe which has been stirred to higher 
 ideals of justice and purity, without the 
 reawaking of those ancient voices which 
 declared to Jacob his sin and to Israel his 
 transgression. The fidelity which sought 
 to discover what the prophets actually meant 
 to the men of their own time was rewarded 
 by the inspiration of their message to the 
 men of all times." 
 
 The calls of the prophets, from their 
 far-away tone, may seem to us exceptional 
 and unusual. But look through the wrap- 
 pings of circumstance and I am sure we shall 
 find the truth common to all men. The 
 truths that made Isaiah a prophet may be 
 the very same that call us into our work and 
 sustain us in it. And I cannot think of an 
 efficient pulpit living under less heavenly 
 motives and sanctions. The called man has 
 a vision of God, a vision of human need, and a 
 vision of opportunity. 
 
 Some vision of God is the first element of 
 a man's call. Isaiah was twenty years old 
 when he had the vision of God. He was a 
 native of Jerusalem, probably of royal birth. 
 He knew the court and the social fife of the 
 
The Called Man 9 
 
 city. He saw the outer prosperity and devo- 
 tion to religious form, but he saw also the 
 inner corruption, the avarice and cruelty and 
 lust of the leaders, the moral dulness and 
 brutality of the multitude. 
 
 Uzziah, the great king, had been smitten 
 by Jehovah. He lay at last dead in his 
 palace. The young nobleman Isaiah passed 
 with others into the chamber of death. His 
 imagination was oppressed by the stillness 
 of the palace. This, then, was the end of 
 greatness. The glory of man was only for 
 the dust. He passes from the palace to 
 the temple. He goes into the place where 
 the Invisible and Eternal is worshipped. 
 The forms of human pride and splendour 
 vanish ; even the ways by which man would 
 express his sense of the Infinite pass from 
 sight, and God alone remains. He fills 
 the temple in majesty and glory. God is 
 the high and holy one. 
 
 "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw 
 the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and 
 lifted up, and his train filled the temple. 
 Above his head stood the seraphim; each 
 one had six wings; with twain he covered 
 his face, and with twain he covered his feet, 
 and with twain he did fly, and one cried unto 
 another and said, Holy, Holy, Holy is the 
 
10 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Lord of Hosts ; the whole earth is full of his 
 glory" (Isaiah 6: 1-3). 
 
 The glory of God, the high and holy one, 
 the transcendent God, — that was the first 
 message to Isaiah. That his whole life is 
 controlled by the vision is seen by his proph- 
 ecy. As all knowledge is vision to Paul, 
 from his great experience on the Damascus 
 road, so Isaiah is ever trying vainly to express 
 the conception of the Eternal One. "As 
 high as the heavens are above the earth, so 
 are his thoughts above our thoughts." 
 
 The majesty and holiness of God are the 
 first message. But the nearness of God is 
 also taught. There is some slight foretaste 
 of the graciousness of Christ's revelation, 
 not to overwhelm the finite spirit, but to 
 draw it to the higher. "The earth is full 
 of his glory." And that the further message 
 of God's nearness was learned by the prophet 
 is shown by his words. Where else before 
 Christ is there such expression of the par- 
 ticular and personal interest of God in all 
 that concerns his creatures? "O Lord, 
 thou art my God ; I will exalt thee, I will 
 praise thy name. Thou hast been a strong- 
 hold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy 
 in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a 
 shadow from the heat, when the blast of the 
 
The Called Man 11 
 
 terrible ones is as a storm against the wall" 
 (Isaiah 25: 1-4). 
 
 God's pity for his people, his interest in 
 everything that concerns human life, comes 
 from the vision of his majesty. 
 
 Every called man has the vision of God, 
 this all-possessing sense of the presence of 
 God. And life will be a call, a mission, a 
 divine service, in proportion to the fulness 
 and vividness of the vision. Both thoughts 
 of God are needed to make the strong call, 
 the majesty of God, and the nearness of God, 
 his transcendence and his immanence. 
 
 In the thought of to-day the immanence 
 of God is emphasized. He is in the processes 
 of nature and in the ways of men. 
 
 "He is closer to us than breathing, 
 Nearer than hands and feet." 
 
 His highest expression is in humanity. 
 God does as the best human life would wish 
 to do. 
 
 But there may be a weakness and little- 
 ness without the sense of the glory of God. 
 God is too great to be put into postulates 
 of reason. And in the presence of the stu- 
 pendous mystery of being, it should not be 
 hard to sympathize with Matthew Arnold's 
 hesitation to call the Almighty God a per- 
 
12 Vital ^Elements of Preaching 
 
 son, as we understand that term. A demo- 
 cratic age is tempted to pull the loftiest 
 conceptions down to its own level. Men 
 have somewhat lightly said that in a demo- 
 cratic society men elect their own God. 
 In a critical and flippant age, when it is 
 easier to jest than to pray, when the most 
 sacred things are treated with irreverent 
 touch, there is need of the conception of 
 God as a high and Holy One. If modern 
 theology, in advance of the old, has dwelt 
 upon the kinship of God and man, do we 
 not need the vision of the infinite perfections 
 of God, to solemnize and deepen our thoughts, 
 to make us walk humbly, to give us instant 
 and complete obedience ? 
 
 In manifold ways the vision of God may 
 come to men. Many a soul has had a new 
 sense of God, which has subdued the whole 
 nature, before some majestic force of Nature. 
 We lift up our eyes to the hills ; their lofty 
 forms suggest the mystery and sublimity 
 of God. Coleridge's hymn in the Valley of 
 Chamouni is the expression of many a 
 devout soul. 
 
 "0 dread and silent mount, I gazed upon thee, 
 Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, 
 Didst vanish from my thought. Entranced in prayer, 
 I worshipped the Invisible alone." 
 
The Called Man 13 
 
 Some striking providence, as in Luther's 
 case, some critical event in which the life 
 had seemed as helpless as a bit of driftwood 
 on the illimitable sea, has made God known. 
 God is found even in the crowded ways of 
 men. 
 
 " His heart is millions merged in one, 
 And thro the world it beats." 
 
 Devout lives are a mirror that reflect the 
 beauty of the Holy One. Happy the man 
 whose earliest lessons were of God, to whom 
 the thought of home suggests the thought of 
 God, who has never departed from the 
 Father's face. 
 
 It is a commonplace to say that the study 
 of Christ, thought of him, and service for 
 him, all that belongs to his kingdom, should 
 make God real. The willing learner will 
 have moments when the glory of God shines 
 in the face of Jesus Christ, and all else is 
 nought to that vision. 
 
 To have the sense of divine call, it must 
 be a personal vision of God. We must use 
 the ordinary means of spiritual knowledge, 
 — study, meditation, prayer, duty, service ; 
 but every soul cries for that sense of God, 
 that inner light that might be likened to an 
 immediate vision. Men may call it mystical ; 
 
14 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 it has been the possession of all great souls, 
 it has been the gift and the authority of all 
 the great voices of the Church. When the 
 late Dr. Henry B. Smith of Union Seminary 
 was crossing the Atlantic on his way to Ger- 
 many, as a young man, restless with current 
 thoughts about the Gospel, dreading the 
 future and desiring above all to be true, he 
 had such a vision of Christ as the heart of 
 revelation, as the centre and soul and goal 
 of human progress, that he never doubted 
 again. 
 
 The called man must have the vision of 
 human need. It will be his own need first. 
 The vision of God always makes a man feel 
 his sin. That was the thought of Moses 
 in the silence of the desert as he caught the 
 vision of God and his call. "Who am I?" 
 The young priest Ezekiel felt the same way. 
 When in the vision he has given us in the 
 first chapter, suited to the subtle and pro- 
 found nature of the man, he had some con- 
 ception of the glory of God, he fell flat on 
 his face in the dust. Peter, the manliest 
 and frankest of the Apostles, before the sudden 
 vision of the supernal nature of Jesus, said 
 impulsively, "Depart from me, Lord! for 
 I am a sinful man." And Isaiah, before the 
 vision of the High and Holy One, with the 
 
The Called Man 15 
 
 voices of the thrice holy in his ears, felt his 
 own sin. " Woe is me : I am a man of un- 
 clean lips." The sense of imperfection is 
 the attitude of honest, reverent manhood. 
 Every added vision of God will deepen this 
 sense of sin. Every true conception of 
 Christ will sharpen a man's self -estimate, 
 and that will add to the thought of ill- 
 desert. 
 
 Some of your experience may be as that 
 of one I knew in my student days. His 
 life had been one of natural piety. No sharp, 
 dark moments had ever broken the smooth 
 and easy flow of the years. And now he was 
 going forth to his work, but with no mighty 
 compulsion. He felt that his experience 
 should be deepened if he were to have a 
 message of life. He prayed and struggled 
 for a more vivid conception of Christ; and 
 it came through a look into his own heart, 
 at the depth of selfishness and unbelief, 
 and a new sense of need and the divine for- 
 giveness. I doubt whether any man is 
 called to preach the Gospel of Redemption 
 who has not felt in some deep sense the guilt 
 of sin and his need of pardon and cleansing. 
 Is not this the trouble with the easy descrip- 
 tions of the religion of the future — reli- 
 gion the achievement of the cultivated few, 
 
16 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 and not the necessary life of every man, the 
 ignoring of the deep, elemental struggle be- 
 tween the good and evil, that spiritual prog- 
 ress is a battle with the beast ? 
 
 The vision of human need is not only 
 personal, but social. It identifies self with 
 the sin and suffering and struggle of men. 
 "And I dwelt amongst a people of unclean 
 lips." There is no sense of superiority, and 
 separation from men. The people were 
 his people and their life was his life. His 
 patriotism was a part of his religion. He felt 
 the shame of the national sin as his own. He 
 was identified in a thousand ways with the 
 men about him. 
 
 A sense of social solidarity is a part of 
 every full vision of human need. We are 
 part of a people of unclean lips. We are 
 involved in the weakness and guilt of the 
 age. The progress of civilization so far is 
 over the buried hopes and broken bodies of 
 multitudes. The mark of blood, the blood 
 of the helpless and the innocent, is on the 
 clothes we wear, and the food we take. The 
 growing social consciousness must give a 
 more penetrative and inclusive definition 
 of sin, a keener sensitiveness to human 
 relation and action. To us belongeth con- 
 fusion of face. The sense of social sin 
 
The Called Man 17 
 
 should keep us from all hardness and cen- 
 soriousness and self-righteousness, and fill 
 us with a divine pity for the multitudes. 
 
 The sense of lack, of moral defect, the 
 humility that knows and confesses it has not 
 attained, is the condition of all growth, use, 
 leadership in religious life. There is no 
 conflict between true self-respect and the 
 deepest humility. In fact, the nobler expres- 
 sion of self is born of the meek and lowly 
 spirit. A man is never so much himself 
 as when he bows before God. A man must 
 be beaten out of all self-conceit before God 
 can make any large use of him. The child- 
 like spirit is the path of spiritual greatness. 
 A self-satisfied man cannot understand 
 God's voice, and is often saying "not so, 
 Lord" to the simplest commands of Christ. 
 
 God pardons the humble soul. The joy 
 of forgiveness must precede any real teach- 
 ing of transgressors God's ways. The moral 
 majesty and the eternal compassion of God 
 mast be felt before his word shall command 
 the life. The live coal from the altar touches 
 the lips. Iniquity is taken away and sin 
 is purged. Fellowship is restored. Love 
 makes the soul ready. Love constrains. 
 Nothing can be too great for love to offer. 
 
 The called man has the vision of opportunity. 
 
18 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 "Whom shall I send and who will go for 
 us?" You will notice that it is an invita- 
 tion, and not a command. God does not 
 wish any unwilling messengers, any slaves, 
 driven to their tasks by the lash, but sons, 
 friends, co-workers, who regard service as 
 the privilege of love, and cooperation with 
 the Master as the highest human honor. 
 We need to bring all the motives to bear 
 upon our work and not to despise the lowest. 
 The stern sense of duty may need often to 
 compel us or hold us to our tasks. And 
 duty is the voice of God, and " wears the 
 Godhead's most benignant grace." But the 
 power that most effectively constrains is 
 love, Phillips Brooks compares the second- 
 ary motives of the ministry (such as the 
 joy of work, the love of influence, the per- 
 ception of moral order, the concern for truth) 
 and the chief motive (the realized value of 
 the human soul, the passion for humanity) 
 to the staff around the commanding officer. 
 
 "'I am not convinced by what you say. 
 I am not sure but that I can answer every 
 one of your arguments/ said a man, with 
 whom a preacher had been pleading; 'but 
 there is one thing which I confess I cannot 
 understand. It puzzles me, and makes me 
 feel a power in what you say. It is why you 
 
The Called Man 19 
 
 should care enough for me to take all this 
 trouble, and to labour with me as if you cared 
 for my soul.' It is a power which every 
 man must feel. It inspires the preacher; 
 and his hearers, catching its influence, be- 
 come softened and ready to receive the truth. 
 It is strength in the arm which strikes, and 
 tenderness in the rock which receives the 
 blow." (" Lectures on Preaching," page 257.) 
 
 Isaiah saw the need of his people. He felt 
 their tragic failure to live as the chosen of 
 God. He saw the opportunity to give the 
 word of warning, of judgment, of comfort and 
 hope. The soul of the prophet responded to 
 the call. "Here am I. Send me." There 
 was entire freedom, and entire committal. 
 
 The vision of God and of human need is 
 our opportunity. We cannot fail to see 
 it as we look at modern life. Men all 
 around us, reckless of their gifts, trying to 
 satisfy the craving of the immortal spirit 
 with a fools' Paradise; multitudes in con- 
 ventional religious life, who have no vital 
 faith; who have lost the way, and need 
 some one to show them the Father ; multi- 
 tudes more, so pressed by the struggle of 
 life that the soul seems to have dropped out ; 
 the neglected on all our frontiers; those 
 scattered on the mountains as sheep having 
 
20 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 no shepherd ; the congested masses of great 
 cities, who live sore lives, dumb and numb 
 under their low sky ; and the peoples who do 
 not know that the Sun of Righteousness has 
 risen, with healing on his wings. Whom 
 shall I send? And who will go for us? 
 Here am I. Send me ! 
 
 "Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer him, 
 Be jubilant, my feet." 
 
 To be a called man, to have the sense of 
 the chosen of God ! This gives the worth, 
 the dignity, the purpose of life. Several 
 years ago, in returning from a Western vaca- 
 tion, by the Great Lakes, the steamer stop- 
 ping in the early evening at Detroit, I found 
 myself in a square before the Russell House, 
 listening to a street preacher. 
 
 The motley throng that gathered is al- 
 ways of dramatic interest, — working men 
 and women, going home with their pails, 
 loungers from the corners, drawn by idle 
 curiosity, women of the town, and here 
 and there a man, going out to dine. And 
 through all indifference and interruption 
 the preacher held his appointed way, with 
 a purpose and a passion that did its arrest- 
 ing and convincing work. 
 
 In the midst of the sermon he stopped, 
 
The Called Man 21 
 
 and began the song with the familiar refrain, 
 — " Since Jesus is mine, I'm the child of a 
 King." Many a time since then has the 
 voice of the street preacher been God's 
 word : in moments of weariness, when the 
 soul shrank from the pitiful contrast be- 
 tween the ideal and the actuality, and in 
 moments of moral failure, when the whole 
 sky of life seemed overcast, have sounded the 
 brave, cheery words of the street preacher, 
 "Since Jesus is mine, I'm the child of a 
 King." 
 
 We can never fail, as long as we hold fast 
 to our sonship, as we have the assurance 
 that we are the called of God. We can never 
 be satisfied with some low, unmanly content. 
 We shall never lose the spirit of the learner, 
 the mind of the true prophet. It sends 
 purpose, vigorous, consecrated purpose, 
 through all the veins of life. 
 
 Is the preacher's work to-day hard ? Are 
 the multitudes indifferent to his voice? Is 
 it a difficult and unrewarded task to be a 
 true prophet? "All noble things are diffi- 
 cult," was a favorite saying of Dr. Blaikie. 
 "Those who have the true heroic and chiv- 
 alric spirit of Christianity will not be 
 repelled, but drawn by difficulties," says a 
 recent British Weekly, commenting on the 
 
22 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 career of Dr. Campbell Morgan of West- 
 minster. 
 
 "Dr. Campbell Morgan, when he had at 
 his command the pulpits of the richest 
 churches in England and America, delib- 
 erately chose Westminster Chapel, without 
 guarantee of any kind, and his example 
 has heightened and brightened alike the 
 ideals of ministers and of laymen.' ' 
 
 No prophet ever lived in a more trying 
 time or had a more difficult service than 
 Isaiah. Yet he lives in all the growing life 
 of the Kingdom of God. 
 
LECTURE II. THE OPEN DOOR. 
 
 I Corinthians 16 : 9. "A great door, and effectual 
 is opened unto me, and there are many adversaries." 
 
£ 
 
LECTURE II 
 The Open Door 
 
 Paul could not get by Ephesus. He had 
 to stop and work. "I will tarry at Ephesus 
 until Pentecost." The field irresistibly ap- 
 pealed to him. It was not an easy field. 
 There could not have been a harder field 
 in the Roman Empire. Ephesus was the 
 centre of heathen philosophies, and the 
 workshop for heathen idols. Philosophy, 
 religion, trade, social custom were all against 
 him. But Paul was a brave man, as every 
 preacher of the Gospel ought to be. He was 
 stirred by danger. It challenged his man- 
 hood. He knew that opposition was proof 
 of the vitality of the Gospel, and the witness 
 of human need. He put the door and the 
 adversaries together. "A great door and 
 effectual is opened unto me, and there are 
 many adversaries.' ' 
 
 Door is the simplest and boldest word for 
 opportunity. The very difficulty and opposi- 
 tion that Paul met made the opportunity. 
 And this is my theme, that the very things 
 25 
 
26 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 that make preaching so hard to-day constitute 
 the special opportunity of the preacher. 
 
 I. What are the adversaries to our work? 
 What forces are hostile to the modern pul- 
 pit ? It is always dangerous to attempt the 
 analysis of one's own age. It is too much 
 like attempting a self-estimate. It is apt 
 to be complacently laudatory, or morbidly 
 critical. There are many that heckle the 
 Church, that proclaim preaching a lost art, 
 that turn from the pulpit to other forms of 
 service ; and there are others who resent 
 criticism as denial of faith, who glorify things 
 as they are, who are never stirred by divine 
 discontent. 
 
 We are so much a part of our own age 
 that it is hard to objectify, and get an honest 
 and adequate view of it. It will be for the 
 future to look at us with reason, and not 
 with prejudice, and so to understand us 
 fully. But some facts are so evident — 
 like deep gulleys, ploughed across our plains 
 by mountain freshets — that we must take 
 account of them. All thoughtful men agree 
 in regard to them. They seem to be ad- 
 versaries to the pulpit. I use familiar terms : 
 the materialistic spirit, the critical temper, 
 the social unrest. 
 
 (a) A subtle wave of materialism has 
 
The Open Door 27 
 
 swept over our age, it might almost be called 
 a tidal wave. It is not philosophic material- 
 ism, for the thoughtful denial of the spiritual 
 is rare. But it is a practical materialism, 
 an absorbing interest in the things of this 
 world and this life. Charles Kingsley called 
 it the most sensuous age since the Northern 
 tribes overran the Roman Empire. Presi- 
 dent Tucker has expressed it well when he 
 says: "Not only is there more of the world 
 than at any previous time, but most of the 
 things in the world are worth more. One 
 cannot calculate by just how much the valua- 
 tion of the world is increased. The moral 
 effect of this increase lies in the appeal which 
 the world of to-day makes to sense, rather 
 than to faith. In spite of the great con- 
 trasts in material condition, no one can mis- 
 take the satisfaction which men take in the 
 material world as they know it, as they 
 possess it. With some it is a purely sordid 
 gratification, the mere sensual enjoyment of 
 prosperity; with others it is the satisfac- 
 tion which comes from the opportunity 
 of search and struggle, the hot competition 
 of the business world. With others still 
 it is the joy of investigation, and physical 
 research, the pursuit of knowledge for the 
 sake of knowledge. We cannot overestimate 
 
28 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 the fact that the world, this physical world, 
 means more to us than it ever meant to 
 living men. Never before did men possess 
 so many lands, or subdue so many seas. 
 Never before did men know so well the 
 secret of wealth. And never before have 
 there been open to them so many provinces 
 in the invisible realms of matter." 
 
 As in Shakespeare's time, the sudden 
 opening of the world led to an intense in- 
 terest in life, as seen in the drama, so the 
 conquest of earth and sky and sea, the do- 
 minion of man over nature, has for the mo- 
 ment dimmed the spiritual eye. At least, 
 it has made the spiritual world less real and 
 controlling. Life here and now is the su- 
 preme good. And the stage, and the novel, 
 whatever tells us of life, and gives us all its 
 sensations, are effective rivals of the pulpit 
 and the sermon. 
 
 This spirit has special power in our own 
 land, from the eager climate, the quickening 
 commingling of races, and the new fields of 
 adventure and achievement not yet closed, 
 as in older lands. Take the two forms of 
 the materialistic spirit — commercialism, and 
 the love of pleasure. Business is the chief 
 interest of our people. It affects even the 
 higher phases of our life. Education has 
 
The Open Door 29 
 
 changed its emphasis from the cultural value 
 to the practical. A pleasant critic of our 
 life has recently said : 
 
 "The great educationist with us is often 
 a great scholar. In America he is a pioneer 
 in his own profession. Practical rather than 
 theoretical ability is demanded in all fields." 
 It has been well called "the stone age of the 
 college." It is not less so in the state. The 
 policy of the states is industrial and eco- 
 nomic. The critical points of world-politics 
 are the questions of the new fields of trade. 
 And even the Church feels it. The same 
 English observer says : "American preachers 
 are compelled to become the engineers, 
 rather than the prophets of religion." 
 Churches are too apt to be judged by the 
 splendour of their buildings, and the wealth 
 of their pews. It was said of one of our noble 
 ministers, who had done heroic work upon 
 our frontiers, and in the congested centres 
 of great cities, but now in middle life is the 
 pastor of a prosperous people, "Our friend, 
 you know, has a splendid field now. Why, 
 he is the pastor of the Ivory soap men!" 
 The good man who made the remark, and 
 the men thus referred to, would be the first 
 to repudiate such a commercial view of life, 
 nevertheless unwittingly the heart spoke. 
 
30 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 It's a straw, showing the direction of the 
 current. 
 
 "The world is too much with us. 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." 
 
 And pleasure men will have at any cost. 
 They ransack the earth for new delights. 
 The tables of Lucullus never ministered "to 
 the palate as all the zones of to-day. Old 
 restraints and habits of home and worship 
 and religious service are relaxed or broken. 
 It is not a true optimism to ignore the fact. 
 Look at the pews a pleasant Sunday morn- 
 ing, and you can tell what people are owners 
 of automobiles. Mr. Emerson was not much 
 of a Puritan, and yet he knew the value 
 of one day devoted especially to religion. 
 One rainy Sunday Mrs. Emerson permitted 
 the children to play battledore and shuttle- 
 cock. When their father heard the noise, 
 he opened the door and said : "Such a thing 
 has never been known since New England 
 existed, and I'm not going to have it in my 
 house." We can tell how far we have come 
 when the grandchildren of Emerson and 
 Holmes and Lowell think nothing of play- 
 ing a tennis match or ball game Sunday 
 afternoon. 
 
 My college chum recently showed me a 
 
The Open Door 31 
 
 list of seventy men, all reputable business 
 and professional men of a great city, willing 
 to do anything for him personally, willing 
 to support the Church through their wives 
 and daughters, but rarely darkening the 
 doors themselves. So pressed by cares, so 
 feeling the killing pace of the age, that they 
 demanded one day of freedom, and of play. 
 I am noting facts, tendencies, but it should 
 be said in passing that the tendency is not 
 necessarily irreligious. It is partly a reac- 
 tion from the legal strictness of Puritanism, 
 and in some degree, perhaps, due to the 
 widening conception of religion, regarding 
 all true life as religious, and whatever will 
 make a strong body and a light heart as 
 essentially pleasing to God. It is certain, 
 however, that the pressure of work and 
 the lure of pleasure make men dull to the 
 voice of the preacher. 
 
 The critical temper of the age often seems 
 a foe to the pulpit ; at least, it makes its 
 work more difficult. Old creeds are dis- 
 solved in many minds, and a vital faith has 
 not taken definite and positive form. The 
 current thought has passed into a proverb 
 that it makes no difference what a man be- 
 lieves if his life is only right. And even 
 within the Christian society, the preacher 
 
32 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 is not sure to meet assent to the statements 
 of the most fundamental facts and truths 
 of the Gospel. The preacher's word is not 
 received because he is a preacher and the 
 spokesman of a church. 
 
 It is the critical attitude toward all ex- 
 ternal authority, the inevitable attendant 
 of the democratic movement and the scien- 
 tific spirit. The lowest man has found his 
 soul and asserts his right, and not seldom re- 
 volts against the seeming restrictions of 
 his person. Life is good, and if man were 
 only free to follow his soul, the way of truth 
 would be found. 
 
 And the effort to find an orderly unity 
 to the world has led to the scientific view of 
 life and the doctrine of development, a new 
 view of the universe, a new philosophy of 
 human history. Men search for origins of 
 ideas and institutions. They trace their 
 growth. They are dealing with secondary 
 causes, and may forget the Divine Life back 
 of all, and in all. They apply the same laws 
 of literary and historical criticism to our 
 sacred books, and trace the development of 
 our religion, and compare its ideals and claims 
 with ethnic faiths. 
 
 One cannot mistake the temper of the 
 modern mind towards former conceptions 
 
The Open Door 33 
 
 of religion and the worth of the pulpit. 
 Literature is the surest interpretation of 
 life, and it is not hard to read its spirit. We 
 are greatly indebted to our essayists for 
 quickened thought and purified taste, but 
 they have not always been the teachers of 
 faith. Carlyle hit the hollow mockeries 
 of the world with his great cast-iron words, 
 but he was a Calvinistic sceptic who found 
 it hard to think of God in terms of personal 
 will and love. Emerson was an extreme 
 individualist. He had faith in his own soul 
 and cared not for the past and the voices 
 of other men. He was a fearless experi- 
 menter. Nothing to him was sacred or 
 profane. "I build to-day, to tear down 
 to-morrow.' ' And to Matthew Arnold the 
 old dogmatic faith had been blown away by 
 the age-spirit. 
 
 Our great poets have been men of faith, 
 but the lesser voices are full of the ques- 
 tioning note. One cannot forget the sensi- 
 tive and sincere Arthur Hugh Clough, the 
 poet " stung with Life's unrest," foiled "with 
 riddles dark, and cloudy aims," or Henley, 
 who can only cling to his " unconquerable 
 soul," or James Thomson, in his gloomy 
 temple where all the voices are dumb be- 
 cause "they have no truth to tell." 
 
34 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Our novelists have given us beautiful 
 and pathetic scenes of life and cleansing 
 glimpses of the heart, but rarely have they 
 been the teachers of religion. Life is a 
 tragic struggle against a poor sort of Fate, 
 not the discipline and unfolding of a plan 
 of infinite good. To George Eliot, God was 
 a sort of Brocken shadow, reflecting on a 
 giant scale the hopes and fears of men. 
 
 And this spirit of question has touched all 
 sorts and conditions of men. Men who 
 know little of critical theories are affected 
 by the results. They draw the conclusion, 
 however illogical, that if all the Bible narra- 
 tives are not literally true, the Bible can be 
 no word of God to them. And so it is the 
 fashion of the age to take nothing on au- 
 thority. In the Church and outside of it 
 the temper is critical towards religious 
 teaching, not one of ready and glad accept- 
 ance. And so life is not so receptive of 
 truth, or responsive to the ventures of 
 faith. Dr. Henry van Dyke has keenly 
 and wittily said that the sign of the age is 
 an interrogation point, its coat of arms a 
 question mark rampant, over three Bishops 
 dormant ! 
 
 And social unrest marks the civilized world, 
 and has acute form in our own land. There 
 
The Open Door 35 
 
 have been the rapid loosening of old ties 
 and the massing of men under new condi- 
 tions, many times fatal to justice and happy 
 life. The personal relation in work has 
 lessened through great organizations and 
 absentee owners. A new patrician class 
 has grown up in democracy, with all the 
 power of the old, and without their sense of 
 responsibility. There are gulfs between 
 classes and contrasts of condition the greatest 
 the world has ever seen. Dr. Gladden' s 
 words are hardly extreme: "No such orgy 
 of extravagant expenditure has ever greeted 
 the eyes of men as that on which the world 
 has been looking in Democratic America 
 during the last quarter of a century. The 
 workers have grown weary and bitter and 
 reckless and despairing as they have watched 
 this growth. In their narrow lot, in their 
 struggle to keep a roof over their heads, 
 and to maintain themselves and their chil- 
 dren, they will go great lengths.' 7 Witness 
 the frequent contests in the labour world and 
 the persistent advocacy and growth of radical 
 theories that would change the form of 
 society. 
 
 The spirit of organized labour is indifferent 
 to the Church and often hostile to it. Labour 
 leaders are rarely identified with the Church. 
 
36 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 The meetings of labour unions are commonly 
 on Sunday, and devotion to them is a sub- 
 stitute for the Church. Men find in the 
 labour movement the idealism that to them 
 is a religion. The Christianity of the Church 
 is misunderstood and often thought a foe 
 to their good. A multitude of men care 
 no more about the worship and service of 
 the Church than about last year's weather 
 reports. There are a hundred thousand 
 young Jews in New York whose only heaven 
 is the earthly paradise promised by Social- 
 ism. Miss Jane Addams was asked to speak 
 to the ministers of Chicago on the relation 
 of the working man to the Church ; and she 
 startled her hearers by saying that there 
 was no relation. The average working man 
 did not know that there was a Church. 
 
 Are there many adversaries? Has the 
 preacher fallen upon perilous times? 
 
 II. There's an open door. There never 
 was a better time to live, never a more effec- 
 tual door into the real life of the world. 
 And the very adversaries mark the oppor- 
 tunity for the prophetic and devoted preacher. 
 
 The conquest of the world that makes 
 earthly interest so absorbing is the conquest 
 of mind. Christianity that teaches the worth 
 of the individual man and has so quickened 
 
The Open Door 37 
 
 his power has given him the hundred arms 
 for the mastery of Nature. The material 
 progress and so the absorbing interest in 
 the earth and the present life is the proof 
 of the soul of man. And the soul will assert 
 itself. There are abundant signs that the 
 material levels of life are too stifling an air. 
 Knowledge and power and pleasure will 
 never satisfy the spirit. The very abandon 
 of pleasure is the sign of the craving of the 
 soul. The very restlessness of the age is 
 the sign of an unsatisfied heart. "If thou 
 knewest the gift of God/' might be said to 
 many a life to-day as Jesus said it to the 
 woman of Sychar. Money cannot heal a 
 wounded conscience or cure a broken heart. 
 
 "'There is no God/ the foolish saith, 
 But none, ' There is no sorrow ' ; 
 And Nature oft the cry of faith, 
 In bitter need will borrow ; 
 And eyes the preacher could not school, 
 By wayside graves are raised ; 
 And hearts cry, ' God be pitiful/ 
 That ne'er said — 'God be praised.' " 
 
 And as long as men grow weary and suffer 
 they will need some one to speak to them of 
 God. If we only had ears sensitive enough, 
 we should hear the busy sounds of life taking 
 the articulate cry, "We have lost the way; 
 show us the Father and it sufnceth us." 
 
38 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Then look at the witness of denial. The 
 very substitutes which men have tried to 
 put in the place of Christianity are the im- 
 perative call of the religious nature. They 
 are proofs of the vitality of faith. 
 
 We cannot know God, men say. On 
 every side of us is the sensible and material 
 through which the mind cannot penetrate 
 in its search for truth. God may be back 
 of it all or through all, but we cannot know. 
 Our knowledge comes through the senses. 
 But if we must be agnostic, we are not 
 irreligious. We can still keep the attitude 
 of worship. We can reverence and bow down 
 before the mystery of the Unknown. 
 
 Again men say — faith has been swept 
 away by science, but we have the flower 
 and fruit of religion. The ethical attain- 
 ment, the graces of character, the social 
 ideals that we have inherited from Chris- 
 tianity — these are the permanent posses- 
 sion of the race. We still have religion, but 
 it must be ethical. We still cherish the 
 spirit of love and purity and trust. 
 
 And once more, we cannot have God or 
 mystery, but we have man. He is ever 
 growing. We have not arrived. There is in 
 the great stream of life that which makes 
 for the higher life. Shall we not worship 
 
The Open Door 39 
 
 man — at least the noblest man ? Hero- 
 worship is the unconscious tribute to the 
 divine in man. The religion of humanity is 
 the worship of the highest human ideals. 
 
 So the very substitutes for faith prove 
 the vitality of the soul. 
 
 Men are never happy in denial. They 
 find no peace in it. Who can forget the 
 anguish of many a heart at the thought "the 
 great companion is dead." Is there any- 
 thing more pathetic than the literature of 
 denial? You are familiar with Matthew 
 Arnold's "Dover Beach" — in which the 
 infinite pathos of a faithless world has its 
 finest and sincerest expression. 
 
 "The sea is calm to-night. 
 The tide is full, the moon lies fair 
 
 Upon the straits : — on the French coast the light 
 
 Gleams and is gone. The cliffs of England stand, 
 
 Glimmering and vast out in the tranquil bay. 
 Come to the window, sweet is the night air ! 
 
 Only, from the long line of spray 
 
 Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, 
 
 Listen ! — You hear the grating roar 
 Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling, 
 
 At their return, up the high strand, 
 Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 
 
 With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 
 
 The eternal note of sadness in. 
 
 Sophocles long ago 
 
 Heard it on the iEgean, and it brought 
 
40 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 
 
 Of human misery ; we 
 
 Find also in the sound a thought, 
 Hearing it by this distant Northern sea. 
 
 The sea of faith 
 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
 
 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. 
 
 But now I only hear 
 
 Its' melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
 
 Retreating to the breath 
 Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
 
 And naked shingles of the world. 
 
 Ah, love, let us be true 
 To one another ! for the world, which seems 
 To lie before us like a land of dreams, 
 So various, so beautiful, so new, 
 Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
 Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; 
 And we are here as on a darkling plain 
 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
 Where ignorant armies clash by night." 
 
 And the social unrest tells the same story. 
 It is proof of the vitality of the spirit of man. 
 It is the aspiration and struggle for a better 
 life. Professor Peabody remarks that the 
 contests of labour are the mark of a free and 
 civilized society, that there are no labour 
 troubles in Turkey. That was true when 
 he wrote, for there was no freedom then. 
 But the week after the new constitution 
 was promulgated there was a strike on the 
 street cars of Constantinople. 
 
The Open Door 41 
 
 Workmen are not insensible to the reli- 
 gious appeal. Too much must not be in- 
 ferred from their hissing the Church yet 
 cheering the name of Jesus, but it shows 
 that they are not sunk below enthusiasm 
 for an ideal — and that means much. 
 
 During the railroad riots of '79, when an 
 infuriated mob of strikers threatened to 
 sweep up Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, and burn 
 the homes of the rich, General Devereux, 
 the president of one of the roads involved, 
 went to the shops and finally got the ear of 
 the men to speak to them. What should 
 he say? Finally, without premeditation, 
 he began to tell the story of Jesus, his life 
 of patient kindness and well-doing, his 
 interest in every life, his understanding and 
 sympathy, his love of the poor, and toiling, 
 and suffering, the love that gave his very life 
 for men. 
 
 As the simple story proceeded, the hard 
 lines gradually faded from the faces of the 
 men, the fierce passions cooled, and some- 
 thing of the peace of Christ came into their 
 hearts; the men recognized the ties of hu- 
 manity and the danger was past. I do not 
 say that this is faith, but it is the capacity 
 of faith, and whenever the Son of Man is 
 presented in his divine reality, the hearts 
 
42 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 of men will respond to it. Many adversaries, 
 and a great and effectual door ! 
 
 When Dr. Thomas Guthrie had left the 
 beautiful parish of Arbilot on the North 
 Sea for the new parish of St. John's, Edin- 
 burgh, cut out of the Cowgate, the poorest 
 and most neglected part of the city, he was 
 standing one day on George IV Bridge, the 
 street that spans the Cowgate, looking down 
 upon the narrow, filthy closes, filled with 
 their noisome brood, and longing, with a 
 heavy heart, for the green fields and kind 
 friends he had left, when he felt a heavy 
 hand on his shoulder and heard the deep, 
 gruff voice of Dr. Chalmers say, as with 
 the other hand he swept a wide gesture over 
 the parish, "A magnificent field of opera- 
 tions, sir, — a magnificent field of opera- 
 tions !" 
 
 This is what every brave soul must say 
 of the age in which we live. "Talk about 
 the time for the preacher and the Church 
 being gone ! There never was a time when 
 both were more needed. It is an anxious 
 time, a time of great problems, a time of 
 radical changes, a time of testing and suf- 
 fering. But we may live through it all, 
 and keep heart and courage up, and abide 
 in our place, and do our work, and stand in 
 
The Open Door 43 
 
 our lot to the end of the days if only we have 
 faith and the vision and judgment which come 
 from faith." (British Weekly, Sept. 14, 1911.) 
 
 A great door and effectual is opened unto 
 us, and the very adversaries are the witness 
 to the need of the soul and the vitality of our 
 Gospel. 
 
 III. Who can enter the door? Who can 
 make the largest use of opportunity? The 
 man of sympathy — the man who can feel 
 with us the difficulties of faith, who is free 
 from all superiority and disdain and cen- 
 sorious spirit, the man who feels as his own 
 loss the tragic failure of men to realize their 
 sonship, whose heart is filled with a great 
 compassion at the ignorance and wayward- 
 ness of men, the man who loves until he 
 gives. Every man should long to have as 
 his own characteristic the inscription on the 
 statue of Phillips Brooks, "the preacher of 
 the word of God and the friend of man." 
 
 The man of magnanimity, — the large- 
 mindedness in thought and feeling that 
 shall recognize the common things of life, 
 but not be limited by them, that shall pass 
 over all petty barriers that the pride and 
 selfishness of men are forever raising, and 
 shall forever deal with truth and life in the 
 largest way. 
 
44 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Large-mindedness is the opposite of that 
 narrow selfishness that regards all persons 
 and events and truths as they affect one's 
 self — that provincialism of the pulpit. It 
 is the recognition of truth and sincerity 
 in the men who do not follow us, the power 
 to interpret the half-truth in error and reveal 
 the God whom men ignorantly worship, 
 to see through the seeming confusion of 
 moral things the order that God is working 
 out, to lay hold of the essential, universal 
 truths of Christianity, to refuse to deal with 
 any petty side lights, any eccentric "isms," 
 so that men shall feel their kinship with God 
 and with one another. 
 
 Edward Thring, the great schoolmaster 
 of Uppingham, defined moral greatness as 
 the "power to move among common things 
 with a sense of their divineness." The 
 narrow mind is apt to be the closed mind. 
 It may lose the power to see by refusing to 
 lift the eyes beyond the routine of the day's 
 work. A man may be in the heart of a 
 great empire, just awakening to its unity 
 and power, fairly seething with the forces 
 of new intellectual and spiritual life, calling 
 for leadership, — and yet be blind to all 
 this and helpless before these unloosed eth- 
 nic powers. 
 
The Open Door 45 
 
 There is special call for the large-minded 
 minister in our land to-day. Only such a 
 man can harmonize conflicting views of 
 truth. Only such a man can lift men out 
 of petty individualism into the cooperation 
 of an organic life. Only such a man can 
 understand the meaning of the peoples 
 gathered here, what the thoughtless and 
 worldly mind calls "the scum of the earth," 
 and use those patient and sympathetic pro- 
 cesses of spiritual training that shall yet 
 develop the highest expression of Christian 
 life. 
 
 The man of faith, — to whom God is the 
 great reality and his will in Christ supreme, 
 who feels the certainty of his word and the 
 perfect fitness of that word to the deepest 
 need of men, who knows the relation of the 
 simplest duty to the final victory of the king- 
 dom, whose eye is daily lightened by that 
 shining goal. 
 
 The man of courage, whose spirit rises 
 with danger, who is not deterred by diffi- 
 culty, who is willing to face odds, who plays 
 a man's part, who endures and hopes to the 
 end, who believes in the eternal years of 
 God. 
 
 To such a man the age is an open door — 
 the difficulties and emergencies of life a divine 
 
46 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 opportunity. The late Mr. E. R. Sill has 
 pictured such a man in " Opportunity. " 
 
 " This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream : — 
 
 There spread a cloud of dust along a plain ; 
 
 And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged 
 
 A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords 
 
 Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner 
 
 Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes. 
 
 A craven hung along the battle's edge, 
 
 And thought, ' Had I a sword of keener steel — 
 
 That blue blade that the King's son bears — but this 
 
 Blunt thing ! ' — he snapt and flung it from his hand, 
 
 And lowering crept away and left the field. 
 
 Then came the King's son, wounded, sore bestead, 
 
 And weaponless, and saw the broken sword, 
 
 Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand, 
 
 And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout 
 
 Lifted afresh, he hewed his enemy down, 
 
 And saved a great cause that heroic day." 
 
LECTURE III. THE VISION OF MAN 
 
 John 4: 35. "Lift up your eyes, and look on the 
 fields, that they are white already unto harvest." 
 
>v 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 The Vision of Man 
 
 Men are ranked by their vision. In a 
 very real sense the vision makes the man. 
 It gives him his reach and his power. One 
 man sees nothing new in the materials of life 
 and work, and he becomes one of the world's 
 drones, or one of the world's blind drudges. 
 Another man sees an engine in the kettle, 
 a new language in the clouds, an angel in 
 the marble, a hero in the child, a people in 
 the multitude ; and he becomes an inventor, 
 an artist, a prophet, a statesman. 
 
 One man keeps his eye on the ground. 
 He is a realist. He takes things as they are. 
 He believes in the actual and the practical. 
 He rarely looks beyond his day or his spot 
 of earth. He is a comfortable or restless 
 mole, with no eyes beyond his little burrow. 
 Another man lifts up his eyes. The ladder 
 of his life does not lie flat upon the ground, 
 but, as in Jacob's vision, it is raised to heaven, 
 and there are angels of God ascending and 
 descending upon it. He believes in the ideal, 
 e 49 
 
50 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 the possible man, and he labors to make the 
 ideal the actual. 
 
 No man does anything worth doing who 
 has not first some vision of it. It is first 
 simply an idea of his mind, a desire of his 
 heart, a bright vision before his eyes. "See 
 that thou make all things according to the 
 pattern showed thee in the mountain," is 
 the divine law for building character or any 
 worthy temple of achievement. "All that 
 God does is in prosecution of a plan, an eter- 
 nal idea come to utterance." Nothing can 
 be built without a plan — that is, an ideal. 
 The boy who did not know what he was 
 making by his whittling was not engaged by 
 the master. The longer the plan, the larger 
 the life. That is not worth doing that can 
 be done in a brief day. 
 
 And the ideal not only directs the aim and 
 the energy of life, but it is the great dis- 
 coverer and quickener of man's nature. 
 He is more and does more because he reaches 
 out beyond the present and the actual. 
 
 "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
 Or what's a heaven for ? " 
 
 The same influence is upon preaching. 
 The pulpit is often divided between the 
 realists and the idealists. One preacher is 
 
The Vision of Man 51 
 
 under the power of the actual, the visible, 
 the local. He regards men as they seem. 
 He knows all the local gossip about the men 
 and women of his parish. He comes to 
 dwell upon the littleness and the weakness 
 of men. He does not believe them capable 
 of any large life and does not expect it. He 
 does not lift them up, call them into the 
 realm of nobleness and magnanimity, into 
 the larger life of the race, into the new man 
 of spiritual progress. He does not live 
 there himself, and how can he help men to 
 live there ? 
 
 "I am contemplating another move, since 
 there seems to be little chance of develop- 
 ment here. Though I have been here but 
 eighteen months, it has been long enough to 
 test myself in this rural field. We have 
 fitted in all right, and everything is pleasant 
 as regards our relation to the community, 
 but the work does not move except in an old 
 and deep rut. About all I can do here is to 
 keep a garden, raise chickens, pitch hay 
 occasionally for the neighbours, eat big din- 
 ners, and preach every Sunday when it does 
 not rain. I do not feel that this is all there 
 is for me to do." 
 
 Another man who went to a similar field 
 found that there were forty-three families of 
 
52 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Protestant antecedents within three or four 
 miles of the Church, who never, save in the 
 case of funerals, set eyes within the Church. 
 I wonder if these two men are examples of 
 what Charles Kingsley has expressed in his 
 lecture on "Mr. Eyes and Mr. No-eyes"? 
 
 Another preacher has spiritual eyes. He 
 looks beneath the surface view of life, into 
 its heart. He knows that man was made 
 for God and is restless until he finds God. 
 He knows that Christ was made in accord- 
 ance with the power of an endless life, and 
 therefore you cannot put any narrow, earthly 
 limits to what man may become. This is 
 the vision of the spiritual preacher. 
 
 It is Christ's vision of man. It has strik- 
 ing illustration in the passage from which I 
 have chosen a text for the lecture. A crowd 
 of Samaritans were coming out of Sychar, 
 attracted by the word of the woman — 
 "Come, see a man who told me all things 
 that ever I did." They were drawn together 
 by curiosity as any crowd of men might be 
 anywhere in the world. We would not 
 think them very interesting or very promis- 
 ing. The disciples did not think them so. 
 They were not a pure race, — half Jew, half 
 Canaanite ; their religion was as impure as 
 their blood ; they were low down in the 
 
The Vision of Man 53 
 
 social and moral scale. You could not 
 expect any good thing from them. They 
 were a dry and unpromising field. Christ 
 did not think so. He saw men as they 
 really were. He knew what was in man. 
 And he says to the dull-eyed disciples ; 
 "Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields 
 that they are white already to harvest.' ' 
 
 And this was always the mind of Christ. 
 His eye was single and so it was full of light. 
 He saw things whole and he saw things 
 clear. He looked through all the disguises 
 and wrappings of life, all the artificial barriers 
 that hide and divide men, and saw the real 
 man, the essential man, man as a living soul, 
 a child of God. 
 
 An hour before this, he had met the woman 
 at Jacob's well. She was ignorant, super- 
 stitious, degraded. We should be tempted 
 to withdraw from her as from contagion. 
 A modern congregation might feel uncomfort- 
 able if she came in to worship. What could 
 she know of God ? What could she have to 
 do with the pure and holy Jesus? Surely, 
 she was too low down in the scale ! And 
 yet, notice how Christ dealt with her ! What 
 courtesy, what kindness, what understand- 
 ing ! Well might Charles Lamb call Jesus 
 "the first gentleman." No selfish attitude 
 
54 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 of superiority to her, no haughty condescen- 
 sion, no speaking down to her ! He recog- 
 nized her spiritual nature, the secret need 
 and craving of her heart. He tried to awaken 
 it and then to satisfy it. To this ignorant, 
 superstitious, degraded woman he spoke, 
 as though it were hers by right as well as 
 his, the loftiest truth He ever spoke to man, 
 the spiritual nature of God and of all true 
 worship of God. 
 
 And so it was with Christ always. He was 
 a revealer of life. He spoke to the best in 
 man and called it forth. He saw in Peter 
 and John, the rough, untutored fishermen, 
 the open-mindedness and loyalty and cour- 
 age of great apostles. He saw in the sinful 
 woman who washed his feet with tears of 
 penitence and wiped them with her hair, 
 not the outcast, but the soul, washed of its 
 sin, capable of great love and sacrifice. He 
 saw in Levi, the despised tax-gatherer, 
 that poverty of spirit, that hunger after a 
 better life, that would make him a true dis- 
 ciple and the writer of the first Gospel. He 
 saw in Saul, the conscientious Pharisee, the 
 religious zealot, the capacity for profound 
 conviction and sustained enthusiasm and 
 unwearied labor that made him the mis- 
 sionary Apostle. 
 
The Vision of Man 55 
 
 The early Church had much of the idealism 
 of Christ. It was the vision of the white 
 harvest fields of human life that scattered 
 the early disciples everywhere preaching 
 the word, and in a single generation made 
 men messengers of the Christ from the pillars 
 of Hercules to the gates of India. 
 
 Paul, in his missionary journeyings, had 
 come to the western limits of Asia. If the 
 day were clear, he could look across the 
 iEgean and see the dim outline of a new 
 continent. He was ambitious to conquer 
 new lands and he went to sleep with that 
 hope in his heart, and he had a dream that 
 changed the face of Europe, and made pos- 
 sible a Christian civilization beyond the sea. 
 A man of Macedonia stood before him with 
 that cry which has been the watchword of 
 Christian advance ever since. "Come over 
 and help us." 
 
 To Paul man was the greatest word next 
 to God. He was not thinking of men as 
 they were. Macedonia did not know of his 
 gospel and did not care. No committee 
 from Macedonia with urgent appeal called 
 for the service of Paul. Then, as now, men 
 were indifferent to their high calling, or 
 ignorant of it. God sent the vision and not 
 man — but it was the vision of man. It was 
 
56 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 man as God saw him — his need and his 
 hope that made Paul the great optimist and 
 the master-missionary. 
 
 You have but to study the word saints in 
 the Epistles to know the magnanimity of the 
 Apostles, their faith in goodness, their vision 
 of the possible man. Take the church at 
 Corinth. It was formed from the most cor- 
 rupt city of the world. They were im- 
 perfect in their faith and still more in 
 their life. None of them were as good as 
 they ought to be. Read the letters of Paul 
 to see how factious and selfish, worldly and 
 even sensual, many of them were. And yet 
 Paul calls them saints; he looks through 
 their stained and crippled lives and sees the 
 men that are to be. He believes that Christ 
 can make — is making — new men of them. 
 Paul was a Christian idealist — and so an 
 optimist. The vision of the possible man 
 has quickened the blood of every true op- 
 timist. 
 
 Long after, Tennyson prays : 
 
 "0, for a man to arise in me, 
 That the man that I am may cease to be ! " 
 
 and the Gospel is the answer that God gives 
 to every one with this longing. 
 
 Paul's faith in men is something wonder- 
 
The Vision of Man 57 
 
 ful because he knew what Christ had done 
 for him, and he believed in the living Christ. 
 I suppose the Roman Christians were in no 
 sense a superior body. And yet, with what 
 appreciation and confidence Paul writes 
 to them! "I am persuaded of you, my 
 brethren, that ye yourselves are full of good- 
 ness, filled with all knowledge, able also to 
 admonish one another " (Rom. 15 : 14). 
 
 It is the vision of the soul of man, its 
 worth, its need, its redemption, that has writ- 
 ten the best chapters of the Church, the 
 story of loving and self-denying service in 
 many lands, of heroic devotion to the spir- 
 itual good of the nations. And modern 
 missions has been led by the same vision. 
 For the first time, something of the greatness 
 of Christ's thought has been seen. Men 
 begin to have the mind of Christ in his view 
 of the world. Man is thought of as man- 
 kind. The differences of race and land and 
 tongue are superficial. The oneness of man- 
 kind is essential and vital. Christianity is 
 a world religion, or it is only an imposture, 
 it is for all men or it can be nothing for any 
 man. In this vision and hope the finest 
 men and women of our time have labored. 
 They see the future in the instant, the white 
 harvest fields where life is the poorest and 
 
58 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 most forbidding. They find joy in the 
 hardest sowing of the seed. 
 
 Take life as we shall find it, as we have 
 found it, — men and women of common 
 clay, absorbed in very earthly pursuits, 
 seemingly far more interested in work and 
 play than they are in our message ; many 
 vulgar and petty and disagreeable; many 
 slaves of sin in gross or refined forms ; many 
 whose studies and pursuits have led them to 
 consider the Gospel a far-away tale; who 
 have no use for what they term the " stage 
 properties" of the other world, who are 
 supremely interested in the affairs of this 
 life; some who would write themselves 
 " lovers of their fellow-men" who seem un- 
 certain even of the fact of God. Shall we 
 take these people at their own estimate? 
 Or shall we look at them with deeper eyes, 
 the mind of Christ ? 
 
 The pulpit is powerfully influenced by its 
 own time. We are all greatly tempted to 
 look at life through the atmosphere of com- 
 mon opinion. We are not above the social 
 prejudice that separates classes and races 
 and blinds the eye to the possible good. We 
 have bowed down to the idols of the market- 
 place and the forum. Take the different 
 peoples that confront our Christianity and 
 
The Vision of Man 59 
 
 make the practical race problem for our 
 churches. The dull-eyed world says, " There 
 is no good Indian but a dead Indian, " but 
 Dr. Riggs, who laboured for forty years among 
 the Sioux, and whose "Mary and I" is the 
 very idyll of beautiful life, said, "I went to 
 my work thinking of the Indian as an Indian, 
 but I soon came to think of him as a man." 
 The dull-eyed world says, "The negro is a 
 brute, fit only for the servile work of the 
 world"; but the vision of Christ speaks 
 through thousands of great-hearted lives : 
 "Give the man a chance, whom your own 
 civilization has kept a brute. The soul of 
 the black man is as precious in the sight of 
 God as the soul of the white." 
 
 The dull-eyed world says, "He is only a 
 Sheeny," and the lip curls in scorn at the 
 word. And we may regard the most vital 
 and religious race of the world as hopeless. 
 The race prejudice of our American Chris- 
 tianity is as irrational and pagan and despi- 
 cable as the castes of India. 
 
 The dull-eyed world speaks of the China- 
 man as a "yellow peril." "He never can 
 become a true Christian." But the vision of 
 Christ speaking through that noble states- 
 man, Mr. John Hay, and the most prophetic 
 men of the church says : "The Chinaman has 
 
60 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 intellectual and spiritual capacity of the high- 
 est order. We shall yet see in the East the 
 highest development of Christianity." The 
 dull-eyed world says: "He is only a Dago. 
 He may do our dirty work, he may dig our 
 sewers and pave our streets, but he never 
 can become one of us. He is a menace to 
 our society by his low standards of living." 
 But the mind of Christ says: "He is the 
 countryman of Dante and Petrarch, of 
 Raphael and Angelo, of Verdi and Salvini, of 
 Cavour and Mazzini and Garibaldi. He still 
 has the soul of music and art, of liberty and 
 religion. It is our work to touch that soul 
 and make it live again." 
 
 One of our young poets, Robert Haven 
 Schauffler, the grandson of the famous 
 missionary of Constantinople, and son of 
 the missionary to the Bohemians, has taught 
 our eyes to see aright the polyglot peoples 
 that have flocked to our shores: 
 
 "Countrymen, bend and invoke 
 Mercy for us blasphemers, 
 For that we spat on these marvellous folk, 
 Nations of darers and dreamers, 
 Scions of singers and seers, 
 Our peers and more than our peers. 
 'Rabble and refuse/ we name them 
 And ' scum of the earth ' to shame them. 
 Mercy for us of the few, young years, 
 
The Vision of Man 61 
 
 Of the culture so callow and crude, 
 
 Of the hands so grasping and rude, 
 
 The lips so ready for sneers 
 
 At the sons of our ancient more-than-peers. 
 
 Mercy for us who dare despise 
 
 Men in whose loins our Homer lies ; 
 
 Mothers of men who shall bring to us 
 
 The glory of Titian, the grandeur of Huss ; 
 
 Children, in whose frail arms shall rest 
 
 Prophets and singers and saints of the West. 
 
 " Newcomers all from the Eastern seas, 
 Help us incarnate dreams like these. 
 Forget, and forgive, that we did you wrong. 
 Help us to father a nation, strong 
 In the comradeship of an equal birth, 
 In the wealth of the richest bloods of earth." 
 
 How many a country parish, that may 
 seem common and unattractive, is full of 
 interesting and promising life, if we only 
 had the eyes to see it. I have passed the 
 summer in a small hill town of Massachusetts 
 where for a hundred years Marget Howe 
 and William McClure, and Domsie and 
 Drumsleigh and many more like them could 
 be found. I am sure that the narrow little 
 hamlet of Drumtochty never had finer 
 characters than many a country community 
 of New England. Only you must have the 
 big heart and vivid imagination of an Ian 
 Maclaren to bring them out. 
 
62 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 The true story of Dr. Watson's ministry 
 is found in his Scottish sketches. He never 
 forgot the people of the glen, or the great 
 lesson of his earlier ministry — that noble 
 lives were often found in hard conditions 
 and behind rough faces. How beautiful 
 his answer to the Highland parish on the 
 25th anniversary of his ordination ! 
 
 " Nothing could be more encouraging to 
 a minister than to know that after the lapse 
 of a quarter of a century his ordination day 
 is still remembered in the glen where he began 
 his work. From a great city and from very 
 different scenes my thoughts turn with 
 fondness to the slope of the Grampians and 
 the parish which was then so much secluded 
 from the outer world, and where on that 
 account the hearts were so true and deep. 
 When wearied by the din of the city and hard- 
 driven by its many demands, I often wish 
 that I were again in the Manse garden, or 
 by the side of the Almond, or on the hill 
 below the quarry where the wind is blowing 
 free and clear, or in the little Kirk with the 
 familiar faces of the past, old and young, 
 looking at me. . . . Oh, the days that have 
 been, and shall be no more, but love re- 
 maineth." 
 
 Take the rude, wild life of our frontiers, 
 
The Vision of Man 63 
 
 where the elemental passions of men seem 
 to rage at times in their wildest fury. "The 
 frontiers of civilization," said Henry Ward 
 Beecher, "are the fringes of hell." But 
 a Sky Pilot sees behind these rough faces 
 and hard conditions the capacity for pure 
 feeling and heroic devotion, and in that 
 vision he preaches the Christ without whom 
 none of us can live the life of men. 
 
 Or take the more hopeless and sodden mass 
 of some great city. Mr. Huxley was of the 
 opinion that the savages of Patagonia were 
 in a better state than many in London's 
 East End. You can go in ten minutes from 
 your stately churches to where sin has 
 stripped off all the garments of beauty and 
 appears in her hideous and repulsive de- 
 formity. People are crowded together in 
 unwholesome conditions where a decent fam- 
 ily life seems impossible. "Worse housed 
 than our hacks and our pointers." They 
 cannot earn the wages of a decent living. 
 They labour sore and die without thought 
 and without hope. Is it an unpleasant sight ? 
 Do men turn away from the hopeless prob- 
 lem? "I always shut my eyes," said a soci- 
 ety woman, "when I have to go down Third 
 Avenue Elevated." 
 
 There are men and women — like Jacob 
 
64 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Riis and Miss Jane Addams and Dr. Graham 
 Taylor — and a growing number of them, 
 who look through the eyes of Christ with his 
 divine pity for the multitudes and his hope 
 also. There are men who have the faith 
 that 
 
 "Beneath the veriest ash, there hides a spark of soul, 
 Which quickened by love's breath may yet pervade 
 
 the whole 
 0' the gray." 
 
 This faith in the spiritual capacity of men 
 is necessary for the most effective preaching 
 to them. The most fatal unbelief is not 
 criticism of certain views of the Bible or 
 denial of the authority of venerable creeds, 
 but loss of faith in the power of the Gospel 
 to make a new life, and loss of faith in the 
 capacity of men to respond to that life. You 
 cannot help a man unless you have faith 
 in his power to become a good man. This 
 surely is one element in the divine forgive- 
 ness. God says to us that confidence is now 
 restored and we can become worthy of his 
 love. A Christian optimism is essential 
 to all leadership. "Why do you judge life 
 by its worst phases and faith by its low- water 
 mark of depression? " said the late David 
 Swing to one of our young ministers in 
 
The Vision of Man 65 
 
 Chicago. "If I lose faith in men one hour 
 in twenty-four, in the twenty-three hours 
 of faith I will do my work for humanity." 
 
 What are the helps for the preacher tow- 
 ards this spiritual vision of man ? 
 
 To bring our lives daily and rigorously 
 under the mind of Christ, to seek more 
 earnestly than we can express to have his 
 view of life and work. We must carry the 
 atmosphere of prayer and fellowship with 
 us, or our vision will certainly be coloured by 
 the atmosphere of the world. If we do not 
 make Christ supreme, we shall bow before 
 the idols of the market and the forum. 
 
 It is a help to cultivate the spiritual 
 imagination, that interpretative power of life, 
 to fill the mind with fair visions, to grow in 
 magnanimity, to dwell in thought constantly 
 upon the true and beautiful and good. A 
 prosy, lifeless minister is apt to be a blind 
 minister, and one is the cause of the other. 
 Not to dwell on the ideal side — ever to 
 remember that God has sent us and that 
 God will help us — is to be false spies and 
 cowardly leaders, who have no place in the 
 promised land. And whatever will purify 
 the vision and give us the divine impulses 
 that attend it will help the preacher to in- 
 terpret truth and life in the light of the largest 
 
66 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 hope. That is why ministers, of all men, 
 should cultivate the imagination. That is 
 why Lord Bacon urged the study of poetry — 
 as the training of the eye to see and the heart 
 to feel more than the common man. " Poesy 
 was ever thought to have some participation 
 of divineness because it doth raise and erect 
 the mind, by submitting the shews of things 
 to the desires of the mind." 
 
 It is also a help to have large interests, to 
 get out of the local and provincial, and, in 
 our studies and sympathies, get into the deep 
 currents of the race. We not only need to 
 write individuals on our hearts, but also 
 humanity, to connect each one with the larger 
 idea. That each one, however weak, is 
 a part of that race that shall move on to the 
 perfected kingdom of God. 
 
 A young minister expressed his joy in an 
 exchange of pulpits with a neighbouring 
 minister. It helped him to forget the petti- 
 ness and littleness of a too close and narrow 
 view of men and rise to that truer, ideal view 
 of a congregation, that " impression of preach- 
 ing to humanity, and so to keep the truth 
 that he preaches as large as it ought to be." 
 Phillips Brooks calls looking across the face 
 of a congregation like looking the race in 
 the future. "All the nobleness and re- 
 sponsibility of his vocation comes to him." 
 
The Vision of Man 67 
 
 And there is no help for the spiritual vision 
 like the determined purpose to seek men. 
 We lose faith in men because we don't love 
 them enough. We don't yearn for their 
 salvation. How startled many preachers 
 would be when they come down from their 
 finished pulpits to hear some man utter the 
 cry of the Philippian jailor ! Every faithful 
 effort to win men will lay bare their spirit- 
 ual nature and worth. Faithless, visionless 
 preaching comes from moral indifference. 
 The preacher whose heart is stirred, who is 
 intent on the salvation of men, has a vision 
 of what the soul is worth. "It is by working 
 for the soul that we best learn what the soul 
 is worth. If ever in your ministry the souls 
 of those committed to your care grow dull 
 before you, and you doubt whether they have 
 any such value that you should give your 
 life for them, go out and work for them, 
 and as you work their value shall grow clear 
 to you. Go and try to save a soul and you 
 will see how well it is worth saving, how 
 capable it is of the most complete salvation. 
 Not by pondering upon it, nor by talking of 
 it, but by serving it, you learn its precious- 
 ness." (Brooks.) 
 
LECTURE IV. THE SECRET OF THE 
 HEART 
 
 John 4 : 10. "If thou knewest the gift of God, and 
 who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink." 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 The Secret of the Heart 
 
 1. There are preachers who stand out 
 as great interpreters of truth, and there are 
 others who are felt to be great interpreters 
 of life. Liddon and Alexander Maclaren are 
 of the first class; Robertson and Spurgeon, 
 Beecher and Brooks, of the second. Canon 
 Liddon was a critical student of the Scriptures. 
 For twenty-five years he had the chair of 
 New Testament Exegesis at Oxford. At the 
 same time he was a master of philosophical 
 thinking, especially as it touches the forms 
 of Gospel truth. And he made all this ex- 
 perience and culture vocal in his preaching. 
 He was intent on clear thinking, he took his 
 hearers through processes of scripture in- 
 duction. With his wealth of critical and 
 philosophical knowledge he unfolded the 
 truths of Scripture over against what he held 
 to be the erroneous thinking of the day. 
 The supreme work of Alexander Maclaren 
 was to master and teach the Scriptures. 
 He was a lifelong student of the Bible. No 
 71 
 
72 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 modern preacher has so honoured its pages. 
 Almost no modern sermons are so scriptural 
 in care for the exact truth of the writer, in 
 the use of the Scripture for both illustration 
 and argument, and in bringing the very- 
 atmosphere of the Gospel into the pulpit. 
 He had such faith in the divineness of the 
 message that he was intent only on interpret- 
 ing the Scripture, certain that it would prove 
 its own fitness to the human heart. 
 
 He was the spiritual teacher, tracing in the 
 Scriptures and in the experiences of the dis- 
 ciple the truths of the "new man." It 
 would be difficult to find in modern sermons 
 more systematic teaching of the sources of 
 life, the beginning, the steps of growth, the 
 duties and traits of the spiritual man. 
 And, as corresponding to these, as their 
 source and divine means, the careful and 
 systematic unfolding of the truths of the 
 Gospel. " Faith saves by getting a living 
 hold of the Christ who saves. The object 
 of faith is not a creed, but a person. The 
 work of the creeds is simply to make him 
 known. The Christ is not simply example 
 and teacher, but the crucified and risen Lord, 
 the atoning Saviour, and the glorified head 
 of a redeemed race." Alexander Maclaren 
 combined the interpretation of the word of 
 
The Secret of the Heart 73 
 
 God and the analysis of human experience 
 in that life. So he attained to something 
 like a science of the spiritual life, a practical 
 philosophy of the Gospel. 
 
 F. W. Robertson knew his Bible, but he 
 knew man and his own heart still better. 
 He had a subtle power of penetrating to the 
 very heart of the human secret. Like the 
 finest literature, his sermons deal with the 
 drama of the inner life. Spurgeon also 
 knew what was in man. He did not come to 
 it like Robertson through his imagination, 
 but by his sturdy common sense, his genial 
 sympathy, and his large experience of the 
 average man. 
 
 Beecher was a student of literature and 
 life, all that would help him to sympathy 
 with men and the understanding of their 
 natures. Like a great harp, his heart vibrates 
 to every human touch. He always deals 
 with the elemental passions and aims to 
 speak so as to touch the motives of action. 
 
 Phillips Brooks was prophetic in his effort 
 to teach the essentialness of Gospel truth, 
 and still more in his subtle understanding 
 of the human heart. His sermons, like 
 Tennyson's poems, search the age-conscious- 
 ness to its lowest depth. The heart is laid 
 bare with startling truthfulness, its secret 
 
74 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 motives and loves, the complex working out 
 in action and character. 
 
 2. The Bible is the book of life. Its 
 truth is always through life and for life. In 
 its historic revelation, it gives the deepest 
 experiences of the race in religion. The arc 
 is long enough to know the meaning of action. 
 Real men and women live in its pages. We 
 trace the origin and growth and fruit of good 
 and evil. All the play of motive is here. 
 It is a mirror in which we see ourselves. The 
 writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks 
 of the Word of God as " living and active 
 and sharper than any two-edged sword, 
 and piercing even to the dividing of soul 
 and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and 
 quick to discern the thoughts and intents 
 of the heart.' ' And the teacher who really 
 interprets the Bible, who regards it as some- 
 thing more real than a treasury of proof- 
 texts for his doctrine, will hold this mirror 
 up to Nature. No man can be a true 
 interpreter of Scripture without revealing 
 the heart of man. 
 
 3. But there is a definite and specific 
 use of the Scriptures for unveiling the inner 
 life and there are preachers who are essen- 
 tially interpreters and revealers. 
 
 4. It is evident, I think, that this inter- 
 
The Secret of the Heart 75 
 
 pretation of life is a large office of the pulpit. 
 We must get beneath the surface of life, 
 behind the conventions of society, back of 
 the maxims and standards of popular thought. 
 We must understand and reveal man the 
 individual, and man as a part of humanity. 
 
 Men are not what they seem. There is 
 a nobler and baser man too. The forces of 
 convention and of habit, of association and 
 of opinion, hide the real heart. The worst 
 of it is that they are able to hide the heart 
 from itself. Men so live in self-comparison, 
 in the estimate of others, in the sunshine of 
 popular favor and worldly success that they 
 live in the surface of their lives. They may 
 live thirty, fifty, seventy years without look- 
 ing deep enough to know what sort of men 
 they really are. Life can never be real. 
 There can never be any spiritual growth 
 without a deep revealing. 
 
 There are secret longings half felt and never 
 voiced. There are men and women who 
 seem untouched by the ministry of the 
 Church, indifferent to her voice, the soul dead 
 in them or never born, who are restless and dis- 
 satisfied — the soul of man shown even in 
 its ruins, to use the thought of Bushnell. 
 
 "Here, within the soul's gloomy chamber, 
 the loosened passions rage and chafe, im- 
 
76 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 patient of their law ; here huddle on the wild 
 and desultory thoughts; here the imagina- 
 tion crowds in shapes of glory and disgust, 
 tokens both and mockeries of its own creative 
 power, no longer in the keeping of reason ; 
 here sits remorse, scowling and biting her 
 chain ; here creep out the fears, a meagre 
 and pale multitude ; here drives on the will 
 in his chariot of war; here lie trampled the 
 great aspirations, groaning in immortal thirst ; 
 . . . and yet, despite all this, a fact which 
 overtops and crowns all other evidence, you 
 are trying and contriving still to be happy, a 
 happy ruin ! Oh this great and mighty soul, 
 were it something else you might find what 
 to do with it ; — charm it with the jingles 
 of a golden toy, house it in a safe with ledgers 
 and stocks, take it about on journeys to see 
 and to be seen. Anything would please it 
 and bring it content. But it is the godlike 
 soul, capable of rest in nothing but God, 
 able to be filled and satisfied with nothing 
 but his fulness and the confidence of his 
 friendship." 
 
 And Browning has voiced the spirit-life 
 of man in his baseness — (Christina) : 
 
 "Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows ! 
 But not quite so sunk that moments 
 Sure though seldom are denied us, 
 
The Secret of the Heart 77 
 
 When the spirit's true endowments 
 Stand out plainly from its false ones, 
 And apprising it if pursuing 
 Or the right way or the wrong way, 
 To its triumph or undoing. 
 
 "There are flashes struck from midnights, 
 There are fire-names noondays kindle, 
 Whereby piled up honours perish, 
 Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, 
 While just this or that poor impulse 
 Which for once had play unstifled 
 Seems the sole work of a lifetime 
 That away the rest have trifled." 
 
 To make men conscious of the secret 
 processes of their lives, to fathom for them 
 the depths of their unbelief and godlessness, 
 to make them see and feel the power of sinful 
 desire in their hearts that pulls them down 
 and turns the fairest promise into earthliness, 
 as the earthworm pulls in the leaf, this is 
 the first work of the Spirit, and the first work 
 of the preacher through the agency of the 
 Spirit. "And he, when he is come, will 
 convict the world in respect of sin, and of 
 righteousness, and of judgment " (John 
 16:8). 
 
 There is no better example of this revealing 
 the secrets of the heart than in the chapter 
 by J. G. Holland on "the Vices of The Imag- 
 
78 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 ination" in "Gold Foil." "We often wonder 
 that certain men and women are left by God 
 to the commission of sins which shock us. 
 We wonder how, under the temptations of 
 a single hour, they fell from the very heights 
 of virtue and honor into sin and shame. 
 The fact is there are no such falls as these, 
 or there are next to none. These men and 
 women are those who have dallied with 
 temptation, who have exposed themselves to 
 the influence of it, and have been weakened 
 and corrupted by it. If we should get at the 
 secret histories of those who stand suddenly 
 discovered as vicious, we should find that, 
 underneath a blameless outward life, they 
 have welcomed and entertained sin in their 
 imaginations, until their moral sense was 
 blunted, and they were ready for the deed of 
 which they thought they were incapable. . . . 
 This world of sense built by the imagination 
 — how fair and foul it is ! Like a fairy 
 island in the sea of life, it smiles in sunlight 
 and sleeps in green, known of the world not 
 by communion of knowledge, but by per- 
 sonal secret discovery ! The waves of every 
 ocean kiss its feet. The airs of every clime 
 play among its trees, and tire with the volup- 
 tuous music which they bear. Flowers bend 
 idly to the fall of fountains, and beautiful 
 
The Secret of the Heart 79 
 
 forms are wreathing their white arms and 
 calling for companionship. Out toward this 
 charmed island by day and by night a 
 million shallops push unseen of each other, 
 and of the world of real life left behind, for 
 revelry and reward ! The single sailors never 
 meet each other : they tread the same paths 
 unknown of each other: they come back 
 and no one knows and no one asks where 
 they have been. There is vice enough in the 
 world of actual life, and it is there that we 
 look for it, but there is more in that other 
 world of the imagination that we do not see 
 — vice that poisons, vice that kills, vice that 
 makes whited sepulchres of temples that are 
 deemed pure, even by multitudes of their 
 tenants." 
 
 The history of preaching is rich in examples 
 of this power to look into the heart and lay 
 bare its secret life. In this, also, Christ 
 was our supreme example. He was the 
 great interpreter of life. He knew what was 
 in men. The good came to his light, and 
 the evil fled from him into deeper darkness. 
 He recognized the secret unrest and craving 
 of the woman at the well. "If thou knewest 
 the gift of God, and who it is that saith to 
 thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldst have 
 asked of him and he would have given thee 
 
80 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 living water." In sharp, stinging rebuke 
 he touched the proud, exclusive, hard, selfish 
 spirit of Simon. With unerring touch he 
 found the weak spot in the life of the rich 
 young ruler, the secret unconscious love 
 making a god of money within the temple of 
 respectable obedience. In words of tender 
 compassion and hope he answered the love 
 of the broken-hearted woman who washed 
 his feet with her tears. 
 
 Paul had this power of showing a man to 
 himself. He was brought bound before the 
 splendid court of Felix and given liberty to 
 speak his message. And he so reasoned of 
 self-control, righteousness, and the certainty 
 of judgment that Felix was before Paul, 
 trembling at the picture of himself. This 
 was the power of Jonathan Edwards, the 
 reading of his own heart, and through imagi- 
 nation looking into the hearts of others. 
 His view of truth led him to see the darkest 
 lines of character and so to draw them that 
 men were afraid of their sin and trembled 
 at its judgment. Mr. Spurgeon was often 
 interviewed after his sermons by men in deep 
 conviction, and sometimes by men in the 
 spirit of resentment that he had discovered 
 in their lives the secret sin or desire they 
 supposed known only to themselves. It 
 
The Secret of the Heart 81 
 
 was simply his native insight, quickened and 
 purified by the spirit of God. 
 
 It was said of Dr. John A. Broadus, the 
 noble preacher of the South and the author 
 of " The Preparation and Delivery of the 
 Sermon/ ' that "He interpreted people to 
 themselves. He enabled them to know what 
 they did know, and to feel what they had 
 long felt. He explained to them their own 
 experiences. He laid hold upon things in 
 their hearts which had long lain there dormant, 
 and told them what they meant. He told 
 them all things that they ever did. He said 
 things that were so homely and true that 
 they thought they had known them all their 
 lives. This he did to such an extent that 
 the people sometimes suspected that he had 
 stolen their thoughts." (" Life of Broadus.") 
 
 How can the preacher gain this power of 
 knowing and interpreting the secret of the 
 heart ? 
 
 1. By the deep knowledge of self. There 
 has been a morbid self-examination in the 
 past, often a minute and fearful examina- 
 tion of the states of the soul, an unreal 
 condemnation of life, almost a nursing of the 
 invalid soul, a secret pride and joy in the con- 
 fessions of miserable sinners. The devotions 
 of the Church have been far too introspective 
 
82 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 and subjective. Our hymnology has often 
 sinned against a wholesome view of nature 
 and of man. The conception of saint has 
 sometimes been narrow and ascetic. It has 
 repelled men with red blood in their veins 
 to whom life is good. The morbid view of 
 self has shut men up to littleness and weak- 
 ness. They have felt helpless before the 
 mysteries of their own lives, paralyzed before 
 the forces of evil. They have not been 
 rightly conscious of spiritual power. 
 
 There is a far more wholesome spirit to-day 
 in the outward look. The larger interest 
 in life, in nature and man, the missionary 
 spirit, the social conscience, the enterprise 
 of the world, all tend to interpret and em- 
 phasize the teachings of the Gospel that look 
 to other lives, to the service of men. The 
 strongest appeal of Christianity to-day is to 
 the desire to serve, to make life count for 
 the largest good. To tell young men that 
 Christ speaks peace to troubled conscience 
 may not win, but in his name to give the 
 call of Labrador or China arrests attention 
 and calls forth the deepest loyalty. Faith 
 matches the truest psychology, that we know 
 and grow in the religious life by doing. 
 Faith is the question of obedience. 
 
 And yet, we may easily err on the side of 
 
The Secret of the Heart 83 
 
 the active life. The pendulum to-day swings 
 to the other extreme. We may be much 
 without in visiting and committees, in or- 
 ganizations and addresses, and little within 
 in that searching of the spirit that reveals 
 the deep things of life. It is often remarked 
 that the preaching to-day deals too lightly 
 with sin and consequently there is a slight 
 conviction of ill-desert, almost no heart- 
 agonies, an easy entrance upon the Christian 
 profession, and a slight grasp of its significance. 
 We would not go back to the prolonged 
 disquiet of a Bunyan, a Finney, or even a 
 Beecher. We could not and be true to the 
 life of our age and our conception of the 
 Christian faith. But the Gospel is radical 
 in its demands, and cleansing in its life ; and 
 we shall not rightly interpret it and be able 
 to adapt it to the human heart without that 
 self-knowledge that comes from an honest 
 look within and the convincing light of the 
 Spirit of God. We must know ourselves. 
 We must take time to salute our souls and 
 learn what sort of men we are. Every 
 minister needs daily an honest, searching 
 look at life in the quiet of meditation and in 
 the pure air of prayer. We must step aside 
 from the rush of human effort and the con- 
 fusion of earthly opinions and standards, 
 
84 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 try to extricate ourselves from the things we 
 are doing, and put the mind of Christ upon 
 our life. 
 
 "Take heed to thyself " was the earnest 
 charge of a great Apostle to a young minister 
 as dear to him as his own son. "Preach to 
 your own faults, and you will speak to the 
 conscience of men," is the word of a noted 
 modern teacher. All vital teaching is per- 
 sonal. It comes from self-knowledge and 
 experience of the truth. And this deep 
 self-knowledge will be the key to unlock other 
 lives. 
 
 2. The secret of the heart cannot be gained 
 without sympathy with men, feeling the 
 "call of the folk," and genuine interest in 
 individual men. Self-examination alone may 
 lead to eccentric and morbid views of the 
 truth. Men have meditated upon truth 
 until it seemed to stand before their eyes a 
 splendid reality, they have elaborated their 
 systems with matchless logic, but they have 
 been as unreal as a fabric of the air because 
 they did not take account of man and inter- 
 pret truth in terms of human sympathy. 
 Edwards' doctrine of man was of this nature 
 — man developing the seeds of evil, without 
 any element of good, in God's world yet 
 untouched by God. Such a man is a pure 
 
The Secret of the Heart 85 
 
 abstraction. He is the creation of a merciless 
 logic. He never lived. Every human life 
 is a complex of good and evil and " Christ 
 is the light that lighteth every man that 
 cometh into the world." 
 
 John Henry Newman, trained in the ex- 
 treme Calvinism of the Puritan theology, 
 got his first rude awakening when preaching 
 in Saint Mary's, Oxford. He found that his 
 scheme of truth did not fit men, that, by 
 actual life, his people could not be divided 
 between saints and sinners. " Always it is 
 the higher life, pressed, watched, hunted 
 by the lower ; always it is Judah with Edom 
 at its gates." 
 
 Men purely of the library or of a class, of 
 the scholastic or exclusive spirit, rarely in- 
 terpret the heart and speak a living word to 
 it. You have heard sermons that might just 
 as well have been preached in another world. 
 They had little humanity in them, and so 
 they were not the gospel for men. "The 
 sermon should have God for its father, and 
 earth for its mother," says a quaint old writer. 
 
 Fellow-feeling not only helps us to read 
 the heart, but it is the magic key that un- 
 locks the heart. Such a man inevitably 
 becomes a father-confessor to his people. 
 That is what Charles Kingsley was at 
 
86 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Eversley and to a world-parish. From all 
 parts of the English-speaking world came 
 letters, laying bare the heart and asking 
 directions for the life. Men who had read 
 his " Sermons for the Times," his novels, his 
 lectures, felt that here was a preacher who 
 really lived with men, felt with men and 
 understood men. "I should be ashamed to 
 write at such length to any ordinary man," 
 says a newspaper man, "but you understand 
 things.' ' And Mrs. Kingsley testifies that 
 when his sermons were the most pathetic 
 and moving, it was always because he was 
 trying to minister to some special case of need, 
 which he alone knew. 
 
 I remember a boyhood friend who had this 
 divine gift of sympathy. Many a time on 
 the way to school I have seen him stop and 
 talk with some man working on the street, 
 and in a perfectly simple and natural way 
 would soon have him talking about himself 
 and telling the story of his life. And it is 
 sympathy that has given him the secrets of 
 many hearts and made him the minister of 
 life to so many men. 
 
 3. It must be the large sympathy that 
 puts the man first, that understands in order 
 to help, and the farthest removed from that 
 curious interest that noses among other 
 
The Secret of the Heart 87 
 
 people's affairs, and loves nothing so much 
 as talking about them. There is human 
 interest and there is idle gossip. The one 
 is the bond of a fair society, the other is the 
 acid that eats out the strongest structure. 
 A gossip in the pulpit, the easy rehearsal of 
 personal experience, the sensational flavour- 
 ing of the sermon with anecdotes and inci- 
 dents, many of them too peculiar or too sacred 
 for public utterance, is not proclaiming the 
 nobleness of truth or searching the hearts of 
 men. 
 
 The sermon is the most personal when the 
 personal elements are the most thoroughly 
 suffused in the truth; it is the most con- 
 vincing and cleansing when the person is 
 the most self -unconscious in the message. As 
 to all the secrets of life, the preacher should 
 have the honour of the doctor; he should 
 have the sensitiveness and discretion to make 
 such knowledge sacred. A careless speech 
 here will shut the door of the heart and make 
 the truth worse than futile. 
 
 4. The secret of the heart is gained in a 
 large sense by the increasing knowledge of 
 human life. He may not know men best 
 who is simply intimate with his few asso- 
 ciates. No man can be fully understood by 
 the local and provincial light. It is less 
 
88 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 true every year that men stand alone. The 
 solidarity of man is the marked characteris- 
 tic of our time and it will be increasingly so 
 until mankind are really one. We are get- 
 ting a world-view of life and the smallest 
 hamlet is affected by world-thought and 
 movements. Theories whose very names 
 are unknown will at last percolate to the 
 very bottom of the social structure. The 
 preacher should be large-minded, have large 
 interests, who would do most for the indi- 
 vidual. Not only does such a preacher bring 
 the tonic of a higher world and is able to see 
 facts in their proportion, but he is able to 
 interpret each life in the light of its broader 
 relations. We are not only to study single 
 lives but the facts and forces of the life of 
 the age, the great movements of thought and 
 action that form the ideas and shape the 
 lives of men. 
 
 5. There have been gifted men and women 
 whose divine work has been to show man to 
 himself, to lay bare the secret motives and 
 impulses of human life, to trace the course 
 of a soul in the world of probation, to give 
 the laws of character in terms of life. They 
 are the world's poets and seers. The liter- 
 ature of a people is the best index of its 
 life, and its clearest mirror. Matthew Arnold 
 
The Secret of the Eeart 89 
 
 has spiritual insight when he defines litera- 
 ture as the " interpretation of life." Tenny- 
 son rightly calls the poet the seer. 
 
 "He saw through life and death, through good and ill, 
 He saw through his own soul. 
 The marvel of the everlasting will, 
 An open scroll, 
 
 Before him lay. — " 
 
 A great poet searches the consciousness 
 of the age to its lowest depth. He reveals 
 depths that we had never sounded, he bodies 
 forth the dim and misty strivings that come 
 to all men. A great drama like "Macbeth " or 
 "Lear" or many a modern play weaves before 
 us the very stuff of our life, brings into visible 
 action the subconscious life which so power- 
 fully directs our course. Many a life for 
 the first time catches a glimpse of its kin- 
 ship with a race sinning and suffering, and 
 instinctively exclaims with the Doctor in 
 the sleep-walking scene of " Macbeth," before 
 the sudden disclosure of guilt — "God, God 
 forgive us all." A soul kindly, thoughtless, 
 loving the color and stir of life, might pause 
 with startled warning before Mrs. Wharton's 
 " House of Mirth," at the merciless sincerity 
 of the portrayal, the inevitable descent of 
 the lovers of pleasure. 
 
90 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 The preacher who would know the secrets 
 of the heart must study such books. They 
 will keep the imagination alive, which is the 
 power to see what is hidden to the common 
 mind. They will connect with the springs 
 of pure feeling. They will strengthen those 
 universal sympathies which shall help us to 
 have the Master's compassion upon the 
 multitudes. The well-known preacher was 
 not wrong, who connected a sermon on 
 prayer, that interpreted the universal in- 
 stincts of the heart, and made prayer seem 
 natural and necessary, with a winter's 
 special study of the dramas of Shakespeare. 
 
 The realism of the heart needs to be 
 matched by the realism of the sermon if 
 our preaching is to be convincing and cleans- 
 ing. Language cannot wholly reveal, the 
 best speech is but approximate, but we need 
 to be convinced of the dignity and worth of 
 speech so that we shall regard the sensa- 
 tional as untrue, the showy and vainly rhe- 
 torical as unworthy an earnest man. "Give 
 me the plain, nervous style," said John 
 Wesley. "I am for plain, sound English." 
 This realism of speech was one secret of his 
 power. Calm, simple, direct, intense, such 
 preaching had not been heard in England 
 for a century. We shall avoid all abstrac- 
 
The Secret of the Heart 91 
 
 tion, all vagueness and unreality, and aim at 
 the vivid and genuine and sympathetic 
 expression of truth and life as we know them. 
 We shall strive for the simplicity that always 
 marks reality, the unveiled truth. 
 
 Need I say that the whole process of such 
 preaching is connected with the moral life 
 of the preacher? To give truth its voice, 
 we must see clearly and feel strongly. That 
 is spiritually connected with the whole 
 moral nature. Freedom from the profes- 
 sional and class spirit, regard for man as 
 man, stripped of the accidents of place and 
 work, the singleness to this ideal in the Gospel 
 of the Son of Man, are the moral conditions 
 for spiritual vision, for knowing and inter- 
 preting the secret of the heart. 
 
LECTURE V. THE HUMAN TOUCH 
 
 Matthew 8 : 3. "And he stretched forth his hand, 
 and touched him." 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 The Human Touch 
 
 It is significant that in nearly every act 
 of healing Christ conveyed his power through 
 personal touch. The touch was the neces- 
 sary point of contact. It expressed his 
 feeling with men, his oneness with them, and 
 established the relation of sympathy by 
 which his power could be felt. 
 
 1. The touch is the illustration of the 
 transcendent act by which the Son of Man 
 became flesh. It is the symbol of his per- 
 fect identification with the nature and needs 
 of our human life. The very same word is 
 used in the Epistle to the Hebrews to de- 
 scribe the Incarnation: "For verily, not of 
 angels doth he take hold, but he taketh hold 
 of the seed of Abraham." 
 
 2. The personal touch is the law of the 
 Incarnation. It is the universal law of help. 
 What Christ did, we must do, if we are to 
 help men in his name. The truth is to be 
 propagated, the new life given by personal 
 contact. " Faith saves by getting a living 
 
 95 
 
96 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 hold of the Christ who saves." No man 
 was ever saved except by bringing him into 
 personal relation with the Christ. Not 
 creeds, forms, activities, — save as Christ 
 lives in them and through them, — touch 
 the lives of men. "And ye shall be endued 
 with power after that the Holy Ghost is 
 come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses 
 for me at Jerusalem and in Samaria and unto 
 the uttermost parts of the Earth." The 
 power is the spirit of God in the lives of 
 men, and the method is the personal touch 
 of vitalized lives. 
 
 3. In this matter of touch, Christianity 
 is no exception. It does not violate our 
 nature. It is in the completest accord with 
 the laws of life. It simply uses and sancti- 
 fies the laws of human nature. It is the uni- 
 versal law of help. Men must be helped 
 just where they are. We cannot form our 
 beautiful ideals, and knock out all the 
 rounds of the ladder, and say, "Go up there 
 and be saved." The unknown must be 
 taught in the terms of the known. Enlarged 
 knowledge and life must grow from present 
 experience. That's the way the child learns 
 and man never outgrows the law. If we are 
 to convince men we must begin with ad- 
 mitted truth. We must stand where they 
 
The Human Touch 97 
 
 are and show the way. The appeal must be 
 to experience, and it can never get beyond 
 this tried guide. The power of illustration 
 is the new flash on common knowledge ; 
 it lights up familiar truth or translates the 
 unknown. In teaching to-day, much is 
 rightly made of the point of contact. It is 
 the getting hold of the child, forming some 
 bond of interest and sympathy. Nothing 
 can be done without it. 
 
 The study of lives is ever more important 
 than the study of books. How useless the 
 teacher who does not remember his own boy- 
 hood, and how matchless the influence of 
 him who keeps the youthful spirit, who is 
 just a big boy ! And he who would minister 
 in Christ's name cannot get too close to 
 others. There must be no isolation, or 
 superiority, no exclusiveness, or condescen- 
 sion, but a genuine brotherhood, a true 
 Messianic entrance into the sins and bur- 
 dens, the struggles and hopes of men. We 
 must not despise the lower feelings of men 
 if we would elevate them. It is very easy 
 to pitch the key too high for men to follow. 
 
 A man said of his pastor, "he presents the 
 truth so that I should like to follow it, and 
 he makes me feel that I can follow it." 
 Charles Kingsley used to say that he found 
 
98 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 men by their leading ideas, and then tried, 
 often insensibly, to bring them to his lead- 
 ing ideas, the redemption through Christ. 
 
 We must not shrink from the unlovely 
 and degraded. Natural love must be con- 
 trolled by a higher love. Instinct, taste, 
 appreciation, reward must all be governed 
 by the love of Christ. Christ put forth his 
 hand and touched the leper, and our hand of 
 sympathy and helpfulness must be upon the 
 sorest need of man. 
 
 It is easy to let the conventional spirit in 
 form and method interfere with the reaching 
 of men. Tradition and habit may fail to 
 meet the changing conditions of life. It is 
 said of the men of the Church, " There is a 
 progressive spirit among our men that insists 
 on getting things done for the saving of men, 
 even though old and honoured methods must 
 be laid aside. There is a willingness to study 
 the use of things fitted to the day's needs that 
 is vitalizing hundreds of churches, and mak- 
 ing religion real to many men who have 
 hitherto held it as a matter of creedal belief. 
 The dignified and historic in our church life 
 can the better be conserved, if we will use it 
 to sanctify ingenious and efficient means of 
 saving men, even though they may possibly 
 be entirely unconventional." 
 
The Human Touch 99 
 
 Here, if anywhere, is the weakness of our 
 voluntary Christianity. We have followed 
 too much the natural law of the world. 
 All that helps men in a material sense, better 
 sanitation, better wages, better food, better 
 homes, tends to separate them from the less 
 worthy, or the less fortunate. The despair 
 of our Christian civilization are the Belgra- 
 vias and White Chapels, the Fifth Avenues 
 and Mott Streets, the walls of moral and 
 social separation. Against these walls the 
 common efforts of the churches seem as 
 helpless as waves against a rocky shore. 
 Christian brotherhood alone will break these 
 walls down. The heathenism of our great 
 cities, and the heathenism of foreign lands 
 will never yield, save by the personal touch. 
 
 "Is charity the giving of worn-out gar- 
 ments?" asks an earnest thinker. "Is it a 
 ten-dollar bill, given to a paid visitor or sec- 
 retary of some benevolent organization in 
 the Church? Shall the man never go and 
 give the gift himself? Shall the woman 
 never deny herself her reception or party or 
 musicale, and go and actually touch, herself, 
 the foul, sinful sore of diseased humanity, as 
 it festers in the great Metropolis? Shall 
 charity be conventionally and easily done 
 through some organization? Is it possible 
 
100 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 to organize the affections so that love shall 
 work disagreeable things by proxy ?" In 
 vain will be our philanthropy, education, 
 religion, unless it comes warm through the 
 touch of a brother man. 
 
 Let me say again that our very Gospel has 
 come in this way. Christ did not think his 
 heavenly superiority something to be grasped 
 and held for himself, but he emptied him- 
 self, became a man, subject to all the limi- 
 tations of our earthly life. The redemptive 
 power of God must come through a human 
 life. 
 
 And every noble servant of Christ is an 
 example of this law. How Paul embodied 
 it ! See him working on the coarse goats' 
 hair tents, perhaps with rough, godless men, 
 that he might get closer to the lives of others 
 and not be a burden to the young churches ! 
 He loved men so that he gave himself to them. 
 "We were well pleased to impart unto you, 
 not the Gospel of God only, but also our 
 own souls." 
 
 There is a special demand for the personal 
 touch now. The old individualism is pass- 
 ing and giving place to a sense of humanity. 
 And Christianity must incorporate itself in 
 the entire life of man. A hopeful expression 
 of this spirit is the Social Settlement, where 
 
The Human Touch 101 
 
 the best men and women live where they are 
 the most needed, and carry the spirit of Christ 
 into the mass of pinched and crippled and 
 hopeless life. How can salt save, unless it 
 touches the thing to be salted ! 
 
 Of all the men of our times, the foreign 
 missionary most needs and I think best 
 exemplifies the personal touch of Christ. 
 Every true missionary is a social settlement. 
 He seeks to establish close, friendly relations 
 with the community. About him are the 
 seemingly impenetrable walls of strange 
 language, customs, religion. He is not 
 wanted. He is looked upon with suspicion, 
 and perhaps with hatred. He is called a 
 foreign devil. His purpose is not under- 
 stood, and ugly stories are told about him, 
 and terrible prejudices raised against him. 
 He may preach the Gospel until every man 
 has heard, but that is not fulfilling Christ's 
 command "to make disciples of all nations." 
 Ears have they, but they hear not. Here is 
 the wall of ignorance, misconception, and 
 hatred ! Little by little it is broken down, 
 by simply living in the closest and most lov- 
 ing way, identified with their life, here a 
 little, and there a little, a kind word and a 
 helpful act, the patient endurance of suffer- 
 ing, the unselfish ministry of love, until the 
 
102 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 real life is known, the personal touch is made, 
 and the power of Christ is felt to heal. 
 
 I have tried to draw this truth of the 
 human touch on a large scale, showing its 
 relation to all life, that we may feel how 
 universal and invariable the principle is. 
 Preaching is just as much subject to it as 
 any other action that tries to affect men. 
 In fact, preaching is the most subtle and 
 effective example of it. 
 
 The human touch understands that which 
 is most urgent in the life of men, the thought 
 and speech that reach the age, and the use 
 of these. Lincoln had the human touch, 
 when he felt the life of the nation and viewed 
 it with such matchless simplicity in his 
 Gettysburg address. The late Dr. John 
 A. Broadus had the human touch, when he 
 ignored the diffuse and inflated speech with 
 which religious sentiment was expressed by 
 the popular preachers of his time and used 
 the simple realism of daily speech for the 
 vital truths of religion. 
 
 Some men preach and their word meets 
 the barrier of alien hearts. Men do not 
 find themselves in it, or anything they should 
 desire. The word of others recognizes the 
 kinship of human lives, and it finds the heart 
 and wins the response of faith and obedience. 
 
The Human Touch 103 
 
 The late Dr. John Watson (Ian Mac- 
 laren) has finely expressed the human touch 
 in the sermon by the word humanness. In 
 the lecture on the technique of a sermon, he 
 states the fourth canon as humanity. "One 
 has heard able and pious sermons which might 
 as well have been preached in Mars, for any 
 relation they had to our life and environ- 
 ment. They suggested the address a dis- 
 embodied spirit might give to his brethren 
 in the intermediate state, where it is alleged 
 we shall exist without physical correspon- 
 dence. While the preacher should be very 
 sparing with I, it ought to be possible for 
 an expert to compose a biography of him 
 from a year's sermons. 
 
 " The minister ought to be soaked in life ; 
 not that his sermons may never escape from 
 local details, but rather that, being in con- 
 tact with the life nearest him, he may state 
 his Gospel in terms of human experience. 
 No doctrine of the Christian faith is worth 
 preserving which cannot be verified in daily 
 life, and no doctrine will need to be defended 
 when stated in human terms — above all, 
 in the language of home. It was Jesus' 
 felicitous manner to remove his Evangel 
 from the sphere of abstract discussion, and 
 to assert its reasonableness in the sphere of 
 
104 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 life. 'What man among you?' was his 
 favourite plea. God does exactly what a 
 man does or wants to do when he is at his 
 best. The divinity of a sermon is in pro- 
 portion to its humanity." (" Cure of Souls," 
 p. 55.) 
 
 Why do certain preachers lack the human 
 touch t 
 
 1. From an undue intellectual interest. 
 They are men of the library, devoted to in- 
 tellectual pursuits and tastes. They love 
 books more than they do men. They be- 
 come members of the most exclusive set, the 
 set of the intellectually cultured, and there 
 is narrowness and limitation in any intellec- 
 tual caste. "An exclusive, undemocratic 
 spirit is a sorry defect in any musician!" 
 All the great poets are universal in their 
 sympathies. This gives them their pro- 
 phetic element. And the man who preaches 
 the largest truth must have something of 
 this universal touch. 
 
 It must be confessed, there is something 
 splendid in Mrs. Stowed picture of the 
 Puritan minister, in "A Minister's Wooing," 
 moulding his system of thought, and living 
 It out with rapt enthusiasm. But we must 
 also feel that the warm, human blood does 
 not flow in it. Such intellectual exclusive- 
 
The Human Touch 105 
 
 ness not only takes a man away from the 
 mass of his fellows, so that he is unable to 
 understand their life, but it makes his mes- 
 sage an unreal thing to them. Live awhile 
 in the University atmosphere, and then 
 walk the streets, and enter the shops and 
 stores, and you will feel the " worlds apart " 
 in these lives. 
 
 A minister must be a man of two worlds. 
 And there is a subtle temptation to feel that 
 if the people do not understand him and 
 respond to his tastes, it must be their fault, 
 and not his. "I am throwing my life away 
 on this shoe town," such a minister once 
 wrote to Austin Phelps, of course asking 
 his help in getting a more cultivated field. 
 And Dr. Phelps tried to show him that the 
 peculiar power of the Gospel and its highest 
 glory was in doing just such kind of work. 
 If it could not save a shoe town, it was 
 worth nothing. 
 
 "A preacher had better work in the dark, 
 with nothing but mother-wit, a quickened 
 conscience, and a Saxon Bible to teach him 
 what to do and how to do it, than to vault 
 into an aerial ministry, in which only the 
 upper classes shall know or care anything 
 about him. You had better go and talk the 
 Gospel in the Cornish dialect to the miners 
 
106 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 who told the witnesses, summoned by the 
 committee of the English parliament that 
 they had 'never heard of Mister Jesus in 
 these mines/ than to do the work of the 
 Bishop of London. Make your ministry 
 reach the people; in the forms of purest 
 culture, if you can, but reach the people; 
 with elaborate doctrine if possible, but reach 
 the people; with classic speech, if it may 
 be, but reach the people. The great prob- 
 lem of life to a cultivated ministry is to make 
 their culture a power, instead of a luxury. 
 Our temptations are all one way; our mis- 
 sion is all the other." (Austin Phelps, 
 "Theory of Preaching," p. 583.) 
 
 2. Preachers lack the human touch through 
 the dogmatic spirit. This comes also from 
 the preponderance of intellectual interest. 
 Clear thinking, correct belief, are made the 
 chief thing. The Gospel is put into formulas 
 of belief and the important work is to bring 
 the human mind to assent to these proposi- 
 tions. Such a preacher is out of sympathy 
 with men who differ from him. Correct 
 views are important, but far more important 
 is the attitude of the inner life, desire, and 
 will toward the life demanded. Where there 
 is no tolerance, the feeling that truth is in- 
 finitely more than our view of it, and that 
 
The Human Touch 107 
 
 all difference of opinion may be harmonized 
 in the love of God, there can be little sym- 
 pathy, and so little human touch. 
 
 3. There may be a sort of idealism far be- 
 yond the reach of men, too good for human 
 nature's daily food. Certain men have a 
 type of other-worldliness, a pietistic spirit 
 that does not take note of common things, 
 that does not bring heavenly wisdom down 
 to dwell among men. I know a devoted 
 minister who told me that he had given up 
 all general reading and studied only his 
 Bible. He bears the mark of isolation on his 
 face; there is a gulf ever growing between 
 his thought and the people's. It is an ex- 
 ample of the contest which has frequently 
 taken place in the history of Christianity 
 between humanism and pietism. Humanism, 
 the love of beauty in the world, in Art, and 
 Literature, the love of life in all its forms 
 and activities, — this must be harmonized 
 with piety, the love and service of God. All 
 heavenly truths and inspirations must be 
 brought to common men to make all life 
 more interesting and to dignify and glorify 
 their part in it. 
 
 There is an other-worldliness that can 
 never appeal to men — Christ did not take 
 hold of angels, but of men. It comes from 
 
108 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 a partial view of the Gospel as a scheme im- 
 posed upon us, rather than a life born in us, 
 as essential and human and livable as the life 
 of the race. 
 
 How shall we have and express the human 
 touch in our preaching? 
 
 1. Be determined to know what men think 
 and feel, by daily rubbing up against men, and 
 by the study of those works in which the life 
 of the age is revealed. The late Dr. Edward 
 Everett Hale gave as one of the principles of 
 his own life the effort to come in contact daily 
 with all sorts of men. The cultivation of 
 friendship is the training of heart and speech 
 for the sympathetic ministry to real condi- 
 tions. It was said of Dr. John Watson as 
 a student at Edinburgh University: "No 
 matter where you put him down, he will be 
 at home with the man at his elbow." 
 
 Dr. Faunce, speaking of the "Education 
 of the Minister by his Task/' says: "After 
 spending years in the study of literature and 
 theology, it is a startling and wholesome ex- 
 perience to be flung out into a parish, and 
 to be compelled to face those primitive human 
 experiences which are the source of all the 
 theologies of the ages. The average Semi- 
 nary gives a man so little of that clinical 
 experience which is the special aim of the 
 
The Human Touch 109 
 
 Medical school, that the young minister may 
 feel far more at home in the alcove of a 
 library than in a group of men assembled 
 to discuss some public wrong, or in a com- 
 pany of friends gathered to comfort a be- 
 reaved household. It is his intellectual sal- 
 vation to be plucked out of a bookish life, 
 and thrust into the tumultuous and com- 
 plicated strivings of a neighbourhood, where 
 the noblest and meanest passions of humanity 
 are grappling for mastery. Amid such lurid 
 and pathetic realities, how pale and shadowy 
 seem the classroom discussions ! What a 
 flood of light is poured on the old problems 
 by the new emergency ! Actually to face 
 the drunkard and the libertine, and pull him 
 out of the miry clay, actually to grapple 
 with the greed of gain as it throttles leading 
 members of the Church, actually to meet 
 the sneers of the scornful with patience, and 
 the objection of the sceptic with candour, to 
 offer some genuine consolation to the man 
 whose last hope is under the sod, and to re- 
 joice with them that do rejoice — which is 
 often harder than to weep with them that 
 weep — this is to gain such insight into 
 human souls as no poetry or fiction or Uni- 
 versity study can give, and to undergo inev- 
 itable revisions of one's formulation of truth." 
 
110 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 The first change in Newman was when he 
 found that the sharp division of the old 
 Evangelicals was not borne out by the actual 
 life of men. Bishop Potter took an East 
 Side parish for one of his summer vacations. 
 In such ways his sermons gained the note of 
 reality when they touched upon social ques- 
 tions. It is in this spirit that Ambrose 
 Shepperd of Glasgow says that every preacher 
 might well have one year in a factory. And 
 in his sermons you feel that note of reality 
 that comes from a deep experience. He 
 actually knows how men think and feel and 
 his word meets actual conditions. 
 
 Dr. Winnington-Ingram, the present 
 Bishop of London, always speaks on a level 
 with men. There is a wonderful accent of 
 genuineness and humanity, conviction and 
 sympathy, in everything that he says. And 
 he had his training in East London. He 
 learned how men actually lived. He learned 
 to preach on Bethnal Green, where the 
 audience had the liberty of talking back, and 
 freely exercised it. There he learned to feel 
 with men, and speak to their hearts. 
 
 2. We can determine to test truth our- 
 selves, pass it through our own experience. 
 Truth thus humanized will be free from 
 speculation and exaggeration. Such truth, 
 
The Human Touch 111 
 
 honestly applied to ourselves, cannot fail 
 of the human touch — if we make no de- 
 mand of our hearers that we have not first 
 made of our own hearts — only, we must 
 not make the mistake of applying the rule 
 of thumb to the visions and agonies of 
 prophets and apostles ; we must not imagine 
 that "the mystery of godliness" can be 
 wholly sphered in our personal experience 
 of it. A truer knowledge of the inner life 
 of men, especially the right interpretation of 
 our own experience, will certainly give to the 
 pulpit a closer touch with the human heart. 
 " Perhaps the chief value of the study of 
 human growth and development is in the 
 reinforcement which comes to the central 
 truths of Christianity when they are inter- 
 preted in terms of life. Many theological 
 difficulties are to be solved, not by the path- 
 way of metaphysics, but by a deeper under- 
 standing of the spiritual fife of man. Per- 
 haps the chief advance which preachers like 
 Robertson of Brighton and Phillips Brooks 
 made on their predecessors lies here. We 
 cannot claim that these modern prophets 
 excel their great forbears in philosophic 
 grasp, in logical acumen, but they clearly 
 do excel in their psychological power, in 
 their capacity for intuition into the hopes 
 
112 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 and fears and remorses and aspirations of 
 humanity. They lay bare our hearts ; they 
 flash a torch in the secret chambers of 
 imagery; they expose our deepest motives 
 to our startled gaze, and interpret our con- 
 fused struggle with a seer's insight." (Faunce, 
 p. 183.) 
 
 3. The human touch comes from faith in 
 the Christ to meet the nature of man and 
 faith in man to respond to the truth. Its 
 spirit is hopefulness. It believes in the son- 
 ship of man and calls it forth. There is no 
 place for censoriousness in a pulpit that is 
 touched with the feeling of our infirmities, 
 and knows the struggles and fears of the 
 human heart. A critical mind is necessary 
 that can separate the false from the true, 
 the accidental from the essential. But a 
 positive, hopeful, constructive preaching is 
 that which knows the real nature of man, 
 lays hold of his deepest needs, and awakens 
 and sustains in him the life of the spirit. 
 
 The human touch — the brotherhood of 
 the preacher — will express itself in the most 
 subtle and effective ways. It will permeate 
 the message of the sermon, and make it felt 
 as a word of life. Truth will be regarded 
 not as something thought out, but also felt 
 out, and lived out. The effort will be not 
 
The Human Touch 113 
 
 so much to give the opinions about truth, 
 as to connect the message with every man's 
 life. The sermon is not a mere thoughtful 
 and suggestive discussion about some truth 
 of Christ, but the effort, as a messenger, 
 directly to convey his word. Its supreme 
 aim is not the giving of knowledge, but the 
 giving of life. 
 
 So, inevitably, the preacher of a broad and 
 sympathetic humanity will not magnify local 
 and individual peculiarities, but dwell upon 
 those truths that are for all men. He will 
 be forever trying to get beneath that form 
 of truth which is temporary and arbitrary, 
 to that which is natural and essential and 
 eternal. 
 
 Here, I take it, is the special power of the 
 message of Phillips Brooks. It is so fitted 
 to man, so human in the divinest sense, so 
 essential in its nature, that it has the power 
 of the great heart from which it comes, and 
 adaptation to every man. 
 
 The preacher with the human touch will 
 constantly make his appeal to life, will show 
 his kinship with men. His first thought 
 will be to find the point of contact with his 
 audience, and all he says and does will have 
 the aim of helpfulness. Explanation, pro- 
 cesses of reasoning, illustration, will have one 
 
114 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 test applied, will it commend the word to 
 the hearts of men ? Its speech will be human, 
 the best speech of daily life. It will not wear 
 the garments of a profession, it will not speak 
 a peculiar dialect, known to the religious ; 
 it will be instinct with life, using such speech 
 as will quickest convey the message to the 
 hearts of men, such speech as you use with 
 men when you discuss matters of common 
 interest. However, let it be remembered that 
 it is no mark of genuine sympathy with men, 
 and never commends the Gospel of the Son 
 of Man, to use careless, irreverent speech. 
 
 The spirit of humanness is seen in the whole 
 attitude of the preacher to his people. He is 
 a brother-man, unable to condescend, and too 
 brave to flatter, a man of like passions, strong 
 to rebuke evil and quick to pity the sinner, 
 commanding by virtue of his manhood, and 
 persuading by the reasonableness of his word 
 and the tenderness and sincerity of his feeling. 
 
LECTURE VI. THE MINISTRY OF 
 COMFORT 
 
 Isaiah 50 : 4. "The Lord hath given me the tongue 
 of the disciple, that I should know how to speak a word 
 in season to him that is weary." 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 The Ministry of Comfort 
 
 Austin Phelps in "Men and Books' ' 
 speaks of the frequent failure of the pulpit 
 in the ministry of comfort. "If there is one 
 thing more obvious than another in the 
 general strain of apostolic preaching, it is 
 the preponderance of words of encourage- 
 ment over those of reproof and commina- 
 tion. In no other thing did inspired 
 preachers disclose their inspired knowledge 
 of human conditions more clearly. The 
 world of to-day needs the same adaptation 
 of the pulpit to its wants. We preach to a 
 struggling and suffering humanity; tempted 
 men and sorrowing women are our hearers. 
 Never is a sermon preached, but to some 
 hearers who are carrying a load of secret 
 grief. To such we need to speak as to 'one 
 whom his mother comforteth.' What deli- 
 cacy of touch, what refinement of speech, 
 what tenderness of tone, what reverent ap- 
 proach, as to holy ground, do we not need to 
 discharge this part of a preacher's mission, 
 117 
 
118 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 and therefore what rounded knowledge of 
 human conditions !" 
 
 Dr. John Watson held that the chief end 
 of preaching was comfort. " Never can I 
 forget/' he writes, "what a distinguished 
 scholar, who used to sit in my church, once 
 said to me : ' Your best work in the pulpit 
 has been to put heart into men for the coming 
 week ! ' I wish I had put more. And when 
 I have in my day, like us all, attempted to 
 reconcile science and religion, one of the 
 greatest men of science, who used also to be a 
 hearer in my church, never seemed interested, 
 but when I dealt with the deep affairs of the 
 soul, he would come round in the afternoon 
 to talk it out." 
 
 No preacher of our time has spoken more to 
 the heart of his people, and yet after he had 
 resigned his pulpit at Sefton Park, Liverpool, 
 Dr. Watson, in a series of articles in the British 
 Weekly, on "It might have been," reviewing 
 his ministry of twenty-five years, regrets his 
 failure in this particular, and says that if he 
 had his life over again, he would more fre- 
 quently in his sermons have words of 
 comfort. 
 
 I. Cases that need comfort. It is well to 
 consider some typical cases found in every 
 congregation, that we may understand the 
 
The Ministry of Comfort 119 
 
 universal, ever present need of the preaching 
 of comfort. 
 
 There is the sorrow that comes from the 
 loss of loved ones. Little children are taken 
 with their fresh and innocent lives, and 
 heaven seems to have gone out of earth. 
 Young men and maidens leave us, full of 
 fair hopes and beautiful promises. Men 
 and women in the prime of life, bearing bur- 
 dens, essential to the home and the Church 
 and society, are stricken down; their lives 
 were bound up with ours, we do not see how 
 we can live without them. Their going is 
 a rude shaking of our lives, we are never 
 quite the same again. Amid all the bright, 
 joyous things of life there is a note of sadness. 
 The aged, the weak, the infirm pass from our 
 sight. It may be like the garnering of a 
 ripened sheaf, but we are never ready for it. 
 The loss may be felt in proportion to their 
 dependence, to the burden and assiduity of 
 our care. 
 
 A young minister, considering a change of 
 work, said, "I do not see how I can leave my 
 people. Why ! I have either married some 
 one, or buried some one from every home of 
 my congregation. " So many families have 
 been bereft that the very church seems some- 
 times like a house of mourning. With our 
 
120 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 youthful vigour, with the warm blood pulsing 
 in our veins, with life all before us, we may 
 ignore the shadows of life. We make our 
 plans and do our work as though death were 
 not. But the familiar words of Longfellow 
 are the truest words of human experience. 
 
 "There is no flock, however watched and tended, 
 But one dead lamb is there ! 
 There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, 
 But has one vacant chair ! 
 
 "The air is full of farewells to the dying, 
 And mournings for the dead ; 
 The heart of Rachel for her children crying, 
 Will not be comforted !" 
 
 Many a mother has buried her dearest 
 hope out of sight, and goes with a broken 
 heart all her days until she is laid by the 
 child of her early love. And I have known 
 an old man of nearly ninety, reticent of his 
 feelings, never revealing his heart to his 
 dearest friends, speak the name in his last 
 hours of the baby girl that he had lost more 
 than sixty years before. These wounded 
 hearts are before us every Sunday that we 
 preach. 
 
 There are deeper sorrows than those of 
 death, the tragedies of moral failure. A 
 child, seemingly trained with the utmost 
 
The Ministry of Comfort 121 
 
 care, takes the reins of life into his own 
 hands and drives in the path of unrestrained 
 desire. The youth, once so sensitive and 
 reverent and highminded, has now grown 
 coarse and sceptical and flippant. Lives 
 that began in love and trust have now grown 
 apart. I do not know any dramatic inter- 
 pretation of this common experience of the 
 silent and gradual alienation of lives equal to 
 Browning's "By the Fireside," in "James 
 Lee's Wife." 
 
 "Who lived here before us two? 
 Old-world pairs. 
 
 Did a woman ever — would I knew ! — 
 Watch the man 
 With whom began 
 
 Love's voyage full-sail, — (now gnash your teeth !) 
 When planks start, open Hell beneath 
 Unawares?" 
 
 The glory of the dawn has faded into 
 common day, and though careful to maintain 
 the outward appearance, they both face the 
 hollow mockeries of life. Many a noble 
 woman is bound, to use Kingsley's strong 
 words, 
 
 "0 waste of nature — to a craven hound, 
 To shameless lust, and childish greed of pelf, 
 Athene to a satyr." 
 
122 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 There are sorrows where one would least 
 expect them. Not the pains of parting, or 
 of moral failure, but the pains of growing life. 
 The sorrows of youth are no less keen than the 
 sorrows of age. There is a time when the 
 youth finds little satisfaction in himself, 
 when the world of life suddenly widens, 
 when he reaches out beyond self after other 
 things and other lives. It is the first sharp 
 sense of the limitation of life. So much to 
 know, so much to do, such heights to attain ! 
 The way so steep and rough, the strength so 
 little ! When the youth goes to college or 
 school, or enters upon work there is the sud- 
 den widening of the horizons of life. The 
 new experiences refuse to be stated in the 
 familiar forms. 
 
 "So many worlds, so much to do, 
 So little done, such things to be." 
 
 (" In Memoriam.") 
 
 Sometimes it leads to doubt and always to 
 unrest, and often to despondency. Do you 
 remember when you awoke for the first time 
 to the sense of responsibility for others? 
 The old, sweet, care-free life was gone for- 
 ever, and the burdens of others' sins and 
 sorrows and weaknesses pressed upon your 
 unused faculties with painful force. It is 
 
The Ministry of Comfort 123 
 
 one of the sorrowful experiences of youth; 
 and the time of vigour and hope and joy, the 
 beautiful days of youth are to some natures 
 of peculiar sensitiveness the period of pathetic 
 sorrows. 
 
 There is the sorrow of loneliness. There 
 are some lives that are physically separate 
 and isolated. They are left in the world 
 without kindred, the remnant of a broken 
 family, the last leaf on the tree. If to this 
 natural isolation is added the force of mis- 
 fortune, business reverses, physical weakness, 
 keeping them from active touch in the world's 
 affairs, they are largely shut up to themselves, 
 in the community and yet not vitally of it. 
 
 Then there are natures of peculiar sensitive- 
 ness, perhaps morbidly so, to whom the world 
 is a rough and unfeeling place, who suffer from 
 daily contact with men, whose feelings are 
 bruised, and pure tastes offended, who do not 
 make themselves understood, who are not 
 only misinterpreted, but under harsh and 
 false judgment. Their timidity is called 
 pride, their sensitiveness exclusiveness. 
 They think themselves incapable and un- 
 lovable, and living brings its sorrow. And 
 there is a certain isolation in goodness itself. 
 Higher ideals, purer tastes inevitably tend 
 to separate from the mass of men. And yet, 
 
124 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 these very lives have the strongest desire 
 to be one with men and be helpful to them. 
 Robertson in his sermon on "The Loneliness 
 of Christ" describes such lives. " There are 
 times when hands touch ours, but only send 
 an icy chill of unsympathizing indifference 
 to the heart : when eyes gaze into ours, but 
 with a glazed look which cannot read into 
 the bottom of our souls : when words pass 
 from our lips, but only come back as an echo 
 reverberated without replying through a 
 dreary solitude — when the multitude throng 
 and press us, and we cannot say as Christ 
 said, ' Somebody hath touched me/ for the 
 contact has been not between soul and soul, 
 but only between form and form." 
 
 Then there is the sorrow of seeming failure. 
 The ocean of faith is not always full, and 
 sometimes the tide is out, and the flats of life 
 lie bare and ugly, and full of the malaria of 
 the doubting spirit. The world is not a 
 friend to God. Spiritual forces cannot be 
 estimated by worldly standards, and we are 
 all affected by the sign-seeking generation. 
 Spiritual life does not seem rewarded and "we 
 fret ourselves because of him that prospereth 
 in his way, because of the man who bringeth 
 wicked devices to pass." 
 
 To many the attainment of life seems out 
 
The Ministry of Comfort 125 
 
 of proportion to the discipline and the 
 struggle. There is the sorrow of the un- 
 attained. They reach middle life, and there 
 are no great changes ; there is the same daily- 
 routine, the same daily temptations and the 
 same need of forgiveness at the day's close. 
 Their religious faith is the persistency of 
 long habit more than the outreaching of the 
 living spirit. They expect no great changes 
 in themselves or in others; the forces of life 
 they know, and no more seems possible to 
 them, and their lives sink into a regretful 
 indifference or a restless pessimism. They 
 are too good to enjoy evil and they are not 
 good enough to be happy. 
 
 These five are typical cases of sorrow to be 
 met in every congregation. And besides 
 these broad classes, there are special cases to 
 be detected by the pastor who really feels 
 the pulse of his people. The loss of goods, 
 the changes of home, the perplexities of 
 faith, the mystery of suffering, a sense of the 
 world-sorrow. 
 
 II. How shall we minister in our preaching 
 to the comfort of men? 
 
 The first thing we are to do and the best 
 thing we can do, and often the only thing 
 we can do, is to give the sense of God. To 
 make men feel the reality of God's person 
 
126 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 and presence. You cannot explain the 
 mystery of suffering, but anything that will 
 make God known, or awaken in men the in- 
 stinctive, latent sense of God will still their 
 fears and quiet the tumults of the heart. 
 You remember as a child waking at dead 
 of night and crying out for father or mother. 
 The answer comes back through the gloom, 
 1 ' What is it, my boy ? " That is all you need 
 to know. You do not care to tell your 
 trouble. The fact of your father's presence 
 gives you rest. Just the fact of God is the 
 deepest comfort men can have, and there is 
 comfort nowhere else. 
 
 "I smile to think God's greatness 
 Flows around our incompleteness : 
 Round our restlessness 
 His rest." 
 
 The ministry of comfort gives the sense of 
 the reality and certainty of spiritual forces. 
 We see how the resurrection lifted the dis- 
 ciples out of sorrow and depression ; the 
 cross and the grave were not the end of the 
 Gospel story, but they were only the steps 
 of a larger life. The sacrificial life is the 
 victorious life. In this spiritual vision they 
 lived and laboured, even counting it joy to 
 suffer for Christ's sake. 
 
The Ministry of Comfort 127 
 
 Many of the deepest sorrows of men are 
 because of their short-sightedness. They do 
 not see the meaning of their lives. Events 
 and forces touch them and break their plans, 
 or defeat their most unselfish labours, and 
 they question whether the forces of life are 
 moral and spiritual. One is sometimes 
 forced to say with Arthur : 
 
 "0 me ! for why is all around us here 
 As if some lesser God had made the world, 
 But had not force to shape it as he would." 
 
 To interpret life, to show how it is always 
 moral, all things under law from the eagle's 
 wing to the seed vessel that finds its place 
 in the earth, how that nothing is forgotten, 
 nothing omitted, that God's word in the soul 
 is as sure as God's word in Nature, that "he 
 that goeth forth with weeping, bearing 
 precious seed, shall without doubt come 
 again with rejoicing bringing his sheaves 
 with him," — this is to bring consolation 
 and inspiration to weary and despondent 
 man. 
 
 " Strengthen ye the weak hands, and con- 
 firm the feeble knees." " Wherefore, my 
 beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, immovable, 
 always abounding in the work of the Lord, 
 forasmuch as ye know that your labor is 
 
128 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 not vain in the Lord." The true preacher 
 should seek to deserve the words of Faber : 
 
 "Thrice blessed is he to whom is given 
 The instinct that can tell 
 That God is on the field when He 
 Is most invisible. 
 
 " Blest too is he who can divine 
 Where real right doth He, 
 And dares to take the side that seems 
 Wrong to man's blindfold eye." 
 
 Then we should dwell upon the present 
 compensations of life. Our preaching should 
 make the Christian life the most glorious 
 life possible. No man has more reason or 
 right to be happy than the Christian preacher. 
 To feel the divine sanctions of his calling, 
 and to have the vision of its ultimate issue 
 is to sustain in the life a noble optimism. 
 Galton's characterization of the Protestant 
 clergy in his " Hereditary Genius" as "men 
 of a gently complaining spirit" is a serious 
 criticism upon their faith. Our message of 
 cheer must not be a sort of "whistling to 
 keep our courage up," but must be the 
 natural and inevitable outflow of a life that 
 is spiritual and so sees above the cloud rack. 
 
 The late Dr. Maltbie Babcock, standing 
 upon our campus one brilliant October 
 
The Ministry of Comfort 129 
 
 morning, said of a man who has given com- 
 fort to many of our time: "Our friend is 
 just like this October morning — no clouds, 
 no mists, no malaria, the air clear to the ut- 
 most marge : the very sight of him puts new 
 heart into life." Such a life preaches a nor- 
 mal and shining gospel, it makes " godliness 
 profitable for the life that now is." Is life a 
 struggle? That is what a true man glories 
 in. Does it cost pain and hardship and 
 self-denial? That is true of everything 
 good, and nothing is so good as the life of 
 faith. 
 
 And we are not to emphasize the cross at 
 the expense of the natural joy of life. We 
 are to present such a conception of the Chris- 
 tian life that it will seem the only normal life, 
 the life with the greatest treasures and hopes 
 and possibilities here. Paul gives the truest 
 philosophy of preaching in his letter to the 
 Philippians : 
 
 " Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 
 things are honorable, whatsoever things are 
 just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever 
 things are lovely, whatsoever things are of 
 good report, if there be any virtue, and if 
 there be any praise, think on these things." 
 
 We must not fail to give the comfort of 
 the Immortal Life. The hope of it hangs 
 
130 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 in the sky of human life like a golden promise. 
 Christ does not satisfy our curiosity, but He 
 makes the hope of heaven very real. The 
 infinite spaces are not filled with mysterious 
 dread, but are folded down upon us in meas- 
 ureless benediction. Jesus calls it the 
 Father's house. To tried and suffering men 
 the Apostolic writers ever speak of the 
 heavenly hope. 
 
 The hymns that picture the future bliss 
 have been among the chief consolations of 
 the Church. I know it is not the fashion 
 for the modern pulpit to speak much of the 
 future reward or the future punishment. A 
 wise agnosticism leads men to be silent about 
 those things of which Christ spoke so little. 
 But we cannot be wholly silent concerning 
 the undying yearning for life, and concerning 
 the truth revealed by the word and resurrec- 
 tion of our Lord. Souls need this supreme 
 word for comfort. Bernard of Cluny voices 
 it for us : 
 
 "For thee, dear, dear country, 
 Mine eyes their vigils keep ; 
 For very love, beholding 
 Thy happy name, they weep. 
 The mention of Thy glory 
 Is unction to the breast, 
 And medicine in sickness, 
 And love and life and rest." 
 
The Ministry of Comfort 131 
 
 A word about the spirit of the special 
 ministry of comfort. We should always have 
 some definite person in mind to be helped. 
 Thus our words will be kept from unreality 
 and the professional tone, and have the com- 
 passion and fitness of a living message. 
 
 We are to cultivate a brave, hopeful spirit 
 in all our preaching. The presence of sorrow 
 must not give a minor key to our preaching. 
 Optimism is the only Christian spirit, and by 
 the brave looking upon the best we can put 
 heart and hope into men. 
 
 And our preaching must call to practical 
 life and service. There are no more touch- 
 ing words in the Gospel than those of Jesus 
 on the Cross to his mother and to John. To 
 his mother, sorrowing above other mothers, 
 he gave a new love, in the young John ; and 
 to the beloved disciple, suffering more than 
 others in the prospect of loss, he gave a new 
 affection and care in Mary. That is the very 
 secret of comfort, that is the way God often 
 gives the oil of joy — it is in new interests 
 and new duties that take the thoughts out of 
 self into a larger life. 
 
 Richard Baxter testifies that at one period 
 of his ministry he was singularly unable to 
 comfort his people, his best efforts were in 
 vain until he had led them to take an interest 
 
132 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 in the work of the Gospel in other lands. To 
 think chiefly of the personal career may be a 
 losing game. Our friends pass, our powers 
 one by one fail, the story of life is soon told. 
 But to turn from these personal and earthly 
 concerns to fix the thought on the redeemed 
 soul, upon the social good, to lose ourselves 
 in the strong, deep currents of the race, this 
 is to be endlessly, youthfully happy. 
 
 How can the preacher have this ministry of 
 comfort? It must not be sought after for 
 itself, but must come springing up out of 
 his own life of sympathy. All that makes 
 the preacher sensitive, thoughtful, apprecia- 
 tive, helpful, will give this element to his 
 sermons. 
 
 His own bitter experiences will help him. 
 It is difficult for a man to speak comfortingly 
 whose veins have always tingled with health, 
 who has never seen his most beautiful, earthly 
 hope shattered, who has never walked in the 
 deep and dark valley of the shadow of death. 
 It is often remarked that ministers as a class 
 are no strangers to sorrow. There is some 
 meaning in the suffering that so many of our 
 brothers go through. The best things of our 
 lives have come through suffering. What 
 we learn in sorrow, we teach in song. "I 
 have learned more of the Gospel since my 
 
The Ministry of Comfort 133 
 
 little boy died/' said Bushnell, "than from 
 all the books I have studied." 
 
 The study of men who have been great minis- 
 ters of comfort. I mention two such preachers, 
 — John Watson for the ministry to special 
 cases, and Phillips Brooks for the ministry of 
 splendid, inspiring truth. 
 
 In a volume called "The Potter's Wheel" 
 Dr. John Watson has written one of the truest 
 books of consolation in recent years. They 
 are not sermons in form, yet evidently taken 
 from sermons, and always characteristic of 
 the preacher. Take a single chapter on 
 "Broken Homes," where the special purpose 
 is to minister to those who have lost young 
 children. He discourages the effort to try to 
 know too explicitly the reason for such loss, 
 and yet he suggests some spiritual ends that 
 may be gained through such sorrow. Let us 
 remember that we had them for a little while. 
 "No little child has ever come from God and 
 stayed a brief while in some human home — 
 to return again to the Father — without 
 making glad that home and leaving behind 
 some trace of heaven." 
 
 In many instances death has been a merci- 
 ful escape from evils of body or mind. Is it 
 not an unconscious and cruel selfishness of 
 love that would wish for such a child a pro- 
 
134 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 longed hospital life? There are worse evils 
 than pain of body ; and no one can look on 
 the innocent face of a little child that has 
 fallen on sleep without thanking God for vic- 
 tory before the battle. 
 
 "Last night, as my dear babe lay dead, 
 In agony I knelt and said : 
 
 God ! What have I done, 
 Or in what wise offended Thee, 
 
 That Thou should'st take away from me 
 My little son ? 
 
 " Upon the thousand useless lives, 
 Upon the guilt that vaunting thrives, 
 Thy wrath were better spent ! 
 Why should'st Thou take my little son — 
 Why should'st Thou vent Thy wrath upon 
 This innocent ? 
 
 " Last night, as my dear babe lay dead, 
 Before mine eyes the vision spread 
 Of things that might have been : 
 Licentious riot, cruel strife, 
 Forgotten prayers, a wasted life 
 Dark red with sin ! 
 
 " Then, with sweet music in the air, 
 
 1 saw another vision there : 
 A shepherd in whose keep 
 
 A little lamb, — my little child ! 
 Of worldly wisdom undefiled, 
 Lay fast asleep ! 
 
The Ministry of Comfort 135 
 
 " Last night, as my dear babe lay dead, 
 In those two messages I read 
 A wisdom manifest ; 
 And though my arms be childless now, 
 I am content — to Him I bow 
 Who knoweth best." 
 
 (Eugene Field.) 
 
 Death leaves behind many peaceable fruits 
 — a certain seriousness of thought and feeling 
 that are not easily learned. Family bereave- 
 ment also works a singular and beautiful 
 gentleness that can be detected almost with- 
 out fail in the expression of the eye — in the 
 tone of the voice. And death is a very suc- 
 cessful teacher of that faith we all long to 
 possess, the conviction of the unseen. "A 
 young child with Christ does more to illu- 
 minate the other world than all the books that 
 ever have been written, and it has often come 
 to pass that at the touch of this unseen hand 
 hard and sceptical men have arisen and set 
 their faces toward God, for the hope of seeing 
 again a golden head on which the sun was ever 
 shining. " 
 
 Many of the sermons of Phillips Brooks 
 have the ministry of comfort in the largest 
 sense ; not in special treatment of a particular 
 case of sorrow, but in such noble treatment of 
 truth and life that the soul is lifted above the 
 
136 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 clouds and the shadows. The Easter sermon 
 in the first volume is a good example of this 
 generous, positive method, and I close with 
 two selections from it. 
 
 "'I am He that liveth.' He declares con- 
 tinuous, eternal life. There is a long, large 
 life that is not transitory. When we know 
 that just as the children's lives set themselves 
 into the life of their father which seems to 
 them really eternal, just as the leaves, coming 
 and going, growing and dropping, find their 
 reason and consistency in the long, unchang- 
 ing life of the tree on which they grow ; so our 
 lives find their place in this long, unchanging 
 life of Christ, and lose the vexation of their 
 own ever-shifting pasts and futures in the per- 
 petual present of His being. A Christ that 
 liveth redeems and rescues into His eternity 
 the broken, temporary lives and works of His 
 disciples." 
 
 "The living Christ, dear friends! the old, 
 ever new, ever blessed Easter truth ! He 
 liveth : He was dead : He is alive for ever- 
 more. Oh that everything dead and formal 
 might go out of our creed, out of our life, out 
 of our heart to-day ! He is alive ! Do you 
 believe it? What are you dreary for, O 
 mourner? What are you hesitating for, O 
 worker ? What are you fearing death for, O 
 
The Ministry of Comfort 137 
 
 man ? Oh, if we could only lift up our heads 
 and live with Him ; live new lives, live high 
 lives, lives of hope and love and holiness, to 
 which death should be nothing but the break- 
 ing away of the last cloud, and the letting of 
 the life out to its completion." 
 
LECTURE VII. THE CHILDREN'S 
 PORTION 
 
 I John 2 : 13. "I have written unto you, little chil- 
 dren, because ye know the Father." 
 
LECTURE VII 
 
 The Children's Portion 
 
 Horace Bushnell thought it a great 
 blessing for the preacher to turn from men 
 and women with their intricacies and deep 
 profundities of sin and unbelief to children 
 with their natural faith and their easy 
 affinities for goodness. The highest growth 
 for the preacher as well as for his faith is in 
 the childlike spirit. We have not preached 
 well to mature minds because we have not 
 learned to preach well to children. And the 
 late Dr. Maltbie Babcock, nearly fifty years 
 after, gives the same testimony. He felt 
 that preaching to children in connection 
 with the worship of the Church was the great 
 duty and privilege of every pastor. He had 
 found the richest recompense in it. He had 
 seen the faith and growth of young Chris- 
 tians, and he had learned lessons of genuine- 
 ness and simplicity and brightness for all 
 his public speech. 
 
 We feel that public worship, necessary for 
 Christian character, for the maintenance of 
 
 141 
 
142 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 the Church and for its world-wide evangelism, 
 is largely a question of habit, and these 
 habits must be formed in childhood. The 
 Sunday school, sometimes called "the chil- 
 dren's church/' can be no substitute for public 
 worship. Bishop Vincent, who has done 
 more than any living man, perhaps, for the 
 improvement of the Sunday school, has 
 repeatedly said that if the choice had to be 
 made between the Sunday school and the 
 worship of the Church, the child should give 
 up the school and go to public worship. 
 Few thoughtful men will dispute this. 
 
 Children need to be with their parents in 
 love for the Church and part in its worship 
 and service. The family is as much the 
 unit in religion as in society, and cannot 
 be separated without serious loss to both. 
 Children need to be trained in reverence, 
 attention, in desire for spiritual truth, in 
 seriousness of thought and purpose, and never 
 so much as now. The ideal of the congre- 
 gation is all ages and conditions, and for 
 this we are to strive, with all reasonable 
 and persistent method. How shall the pres- 
 ence of the children be gained? I have 
 nothing to say about marks and attendance 
 cards and prizes. Let those use them who 
 think they are of worth. At best, they can 
 
The Children's Portion 143 
 
 only be the means to an end, and that end 
 is the teaching and training of the children 
 in the religious life. If children are perma- 
 nently a part of the congregation, then they 
 must be interested and taught and persuaded 
 by the preacher. We must preach to chil- 
 dren. How shall this preaching be done ? 
 
 I. Common methods of preaching to children. 
 
 One method is a special children's sermon 
 each Sunday morning as a part of the regu- 
 lar worship of the Church, and preceding the 
 regular sermon. It is a common practice 
 in the free churches of England, and followed 
 in this country by here and there a pastor. 
 It makes extra demands upon the preacher, 
 in this country especially hard to meet, and 
 might leave a gulf between the two parts of 
 the service, the children listless and unfed 
 during the service that followed. In fact, 
 in some churches the children are allowed to 
 go out after their portion is given. 
 
 Another method is a children's service 
 once on Sunday (taking the place of a second 
 service) or at stated periods, once a month, 
 or once a quarter, the whole service devoted 
 to them, prayers, hymns, as well as sermon 
 being adapted to them. Such a service 
 might be had once in three months, the 
 morning worship and the Sunday school 
 
144 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 session united, and some truth of the quarter 
 be chosen for the message. Such a service 
 would not make extra demands upon the 
 young preacher, and it would be the best 
 training for more frequent preaching of this 
 sort. The presence of the congregation 
 would give seriousness to the thought and 
 preparation. 
 
 In a few churches in this country, the 
 Sunday school in the afternoon is closed with 
 a short children's service in the church or 
 united with the vesper service of the congre- 
 gation. In the established churches of Eng- 
 land, Scotland, and Germany such a second 
 service is common. At the Kreutzer Kirche, 
 Dresden, I once attended the most impres- 
 sive children's service, the great church being 
 rilled with children in classes with their 
 teachers, one of the pastors leading and 
 speaking, a great chorus of children with 
 the organ, no snatchy, worthless jingles for 
 tunes, but the worshipful music, a simple 
 but noble liturgy, and all the children atten- 
 tive and taking part. I did not see a single 
 child that was not singing or repeating its 
 part. Of course, the discipline of the Ger- 
 man home and school is much stricter than 
 ours, — the children are used to being drilled. 
 But the point is, they were trained in habits 
 of worship. 
 
The Children's Portion 145 
 
 By another method, no special children's 
 service or sermon is provided, but a special 
 application of the truth to children is given 
 at a certain point of the sermon. It might 
 be done occasionally with good effect, but 
 the habit might interfere with the proper 
 development of the sermon. It would be a 
 break in the thought, and might lead the 
 preacher to the unhappy conclusion that 
 now, having met the child's need, he could 
 devote the rest of the sermon to the adult 
 mind. 
 
 Many pulpits have no regular sermon or 
 portion for children, but the effort in every 
 sermon is to make truth so simple that any 
 bright child may understand. The sermon 
 always has the children in view and breathes 
 the childlike spirit. The late Joseph Par- 
 ker, in spite of his flashes of genius and his 
 profound sayings, had such pictorial and 
 dramatic elements that he always interested 
 children and youth. 
 
 " What did you suffer from ? fear ? Once 
 I feared death." Then he pictured a child 
 afraid to go to sleep in the dark, but the 
 mother's presence took the fear away. 
 Christ has suffered death and there is no 
 fear now. "You cannot learn to swim by 
 standing shivering on the river's brink. 
 
146 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 You must throw yourself into the water, 
 as into a mother's arms." " Letters of J. R. 
 Green: 'Send me half a crown in stamps. 
 I will make half a dozen children happy.' 
 That is better than all his history," — such 
 are some of the sayings from a single ser- 
 mon, bright tales for old and young. 
 
 Simplicity always marks the preaching of 
 the Bishop of London. He is not afraid to 
 tell a story in the pulpit. It seems a little 
 strange at first to hear some lowly tale of the 
 East End under the splendid dome of St. 
 Paul's, but you soon feel that it gives a reality 
 to his message and is in keeping with the very 
 spirit of the Master. 
 
 "The other day I went to see one of my 
 little friends in a hospital. Jennie had not 
 long to live and she was afraid of death. I 
 said to her, 'Jennie, you would not be afraid 
 if I should come and take you up in my 
 arms and carry you to another room?' 
 ' Oh, no, Sir ! ' ' Well, that is what Jesus 
 will do.' And then, the next day, when I 
 went to see her, I found that Jesus had come 
 for her, and she was not afraid." 
 
 Mr. Campbell of the City Temple is a 
 lover of children and often has a word for 
 them. A recent account of a sermon on 
 Immortality closes with these words : "Noth- 
 
The Children's Portion 147 
 
 ing was more beautiful than the simple story 
 with which the sermon closed. It was the 
 story of an only child, loved as only chil- 
 dren are. It was her father's custom to 
 look into her room the last thing before she 
 fell asleep, and always the little voice would 
 bid him the same farewell. 'Good night, 
 father, I'll see you in the morning.' Sick- 
 ness came and the beloved child drew near 
 her end. Just at the last, she put her arms 
 around her father's neck and said, with fail- 
 ing breath, 'Good night, father, I'll see you 
 in the morning.' She was right. The little 
 child is always right in the spiritual kingdom." 
 
 II. Examples of sermons to children. 
 
 I take examples of children's sermons from 
 the English pulpit, where the habit has be- 
 come fixed and the best sermons are preached. 
 The usual way of preaching to children by 
 the free churches is to have a short sermon 
 to children — from five to ten minutes, 
 closing with a special hymn — come in the 
 first part of the service, after the Scripture 
 lessons, between the lessons and the pastor's 
 prayer. 
 
 This has been the invariable method of 
 Dr. Monro Gibson at the St. John's Wood 
 Presbyterian Church, London. Sometimes 
 Dr. Gibson will preach both sermons him- 
 
148 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 self, sometimes his assistant will preach the 
 sermon to the young. I found it the same 
 at the Crouch End Congregational Church, 
 Dr. Alfred Rowland; the Allen Street Con- 
 gregational Chapel, Mr. Silvester Home; 
 and the Westbourne Park Chapel, Dr. 
 John Clifford. Here are four of the 
 strongest Free Churches of London, thor- 
 oughly representative, and they all have the 
 short children's sermon, preceding the regu- 
 lar sermon. We may be certain that they 
 have found it helpful, or they would not 
 follow the practice. 
 
 Perhaps I can make the matter the clearest 
 by giving the substance of three or four of 
 these sermons. 
 
 Dr. Clifford's sermon was a parable from 
 the seashore. He announced no text at 
 first. He pictured a scene and gave its 
 spiritual lessons. He had been, during the 
 week, at Bournmouth on the South Shore. 
 There at ebb tide, on the sandy beach, he 
 had seen the seaweed, dry and apparently 
 lifeless. But as the tide began to come in — 
 these masses of dry weed seemed to be wait- 
 ing for the tide — and as the first spray touched 
 them, they rose and swelled and drank in 
 their life-giving food, the supply of the sea 
 they were ready and waiting to receive: 
 
The Children's Portion 149 
 
 their life came from' the sea. We are life- 
 less for higher things without the food of 
 God. We must expect and receive the tide 
 of divine life. There is a tide of divine life 
 upon youth. We must wait and receive : 
 be open and filled. 
 
 Here came the text — two verses : " Wait 
 on the Lord : Now is the acceptable time." 
 Youth is God's time. His influence must be 
 received now. The figure of Time with 
 forelock, and bald behind, was used. Quo- 
 tations from Longfellow and Goethe enriched 
 and enforced the truth. And the sermon 
 closed with lessons from the mistakes of old 
 men, their unreceptiveness, their dried-up 
 and wasted power, their lost opportunities. 
 
 The sermon was clear so that children could 
 understand, but so strong as to hold the atten- 
 tion of every mature mind. And the truth 
 had relation to the sermon that followed 
 (the whole service had unity) which was 
 upon building up the Church, especially the 
 use of young lives, drawn from Paul's use 
 of Timothy. 
 
 Mr. Silvester Home's sermon to children 
 was also connected vitally with the regular 
 sermon ; it did not anticipate it, and take 
 from it, but when both were spoken, you 
 understood the relation. 
 
150 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 The regular sermon was from Romans 
 6:14. "Sin shall not have dominion over 
 you : for ye are not under law, but under 
 grace." Sin to be conquered by grace. The 
 children's sermon was from II Corinthians 
 12:9. "My grace is sufficient for thee." 
 It was developed in the sphere and by illus- 
 trations of child life. A child's trouble was 
 pictured — some coveted pleasure inter- 
 rupted or prevented by accident or weather. 
 His friends, say, his parents, "Never mind, 
 we'll stay and play with you." And in 
 that companionship the loss is more than 
 made good. So the Father's grace is his 
 great gift. Paul could not do his work as 
 he wished, so he prayed. God's answer — 
 my grace. I cannot take away the weakness, 
 but I will give you grace. The strongest 
 thing in the world is the grace of God. And 
 this was enforced by illustrations from 
 child life. 
 
 Two other sermons may help to show the 
 variety of the children's sermon. Mr. A. E. 
 Garvie, who was then a pastor, but now has 
 a chair of theology in New College, London, 
 preached upon the scripture doctrine of 
 Immortality, from Psalms 17 : 15. The 
 thought of the sermon was that the pledge 
 of the future was a righteous life here, and 
 
The Children's Portion 151 
 
 the form of that future was the likeness to 
 Christ. 
 
 The children's sermon was from the pic- 
 ture of Christ in the first chapter of Revela- 
 tion, the description of Christ in his glory. 
 How did Jesus look ? There was no authen- 
 tic portrait. Painters had tried to give 
 their ideals. Yet there was a certain like- 
 ness. Certain things had been handed down 
 by tradition, and there was a certain resem- 
 blance to the oldest portraits. Hence the 
 argument that the outward appearance of 
 Christ had been impressed upon his friends 
 and handed down by tradition. Pictures 
 on grave clothes were in a sense true. It was 
 an illustration of the spiritual truth. The 
 face of Christ will welcome us. The legend 
 of Veronica has a truth in it. If we give 
 our lives to Christ, then His own likeness 
 will be found in us. If now Jesus in His 
 grace is seen by us, then the Jesus of glory. 
 
 Mr. Clow of Glasgow, now Professor of 
 Homiletics in the Free Church College, is 
 one of the brightest and most enthusiastic 
 preachers of that city. He combines the 
 scripturalness of the expository method with 
 the pictorial and practical power of the 
 topical. His sermon to children was from 
 Luke 19:21. "I feared thee, because thou 
 
152 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 art an austere man." He spoke of the wrong 
 idea that children sometimes get of God, 
 thinking of Him simply as a great taskmaster, 
 and so disliking Him. And what a different 
 idea Christ gave us ! The idea of God and 
 its effect upon life was illustrated from a 
 child's experience. A boy slept alone and 
 on the wall of his room was a text that his 
 mother put there: "Thou God seest me." 
 And it made him afraid. He had a false 
 idea of God, and that great eye seemed to 
 peer at him through the dark and keep 
 him awake with dread. But the boy became 
 a Christian and is to-day a great public 
 man. He is now always strengthened by 
 the thought of God. And his mother's 
 text, which he once so feared, is now on the 
 wall of his room, and one of the great com- 
 forts of his life. 
 
 Mr. Clow is the only preacher to children 
 that I heard who did not connect his chil- 
 dren's sermon with the regular sermon of 
 the hour. Usually it was a phase of the 
 truth, or the preparation for it, or its appli- 
 cation to child life. It was not an interrup- 
 tion of the service of the hour, but added to 
 its unity and fulness of impression. 
 
 The children's sermon did not leave the 
 children uninterested and untouched for the 
 
The Children's Portion 153 
 
 rest of the hour. In every case there was 
 something in the main sermon also for the 
 children, and the children were attentive 
 throughout. Mr. Garvie's sermon was devel- 
 oped in its strongest places by illustrations 
 from child life. 
 
 I think that the work of preaching to chil- 
 dren had its effect upon the preaching of 
 all these men. They seemed to be conscious 
 throughout that the children were before 
 them, and that the minds once interested 
 must not be left unfed. The sermons were 
 free from abstract and subtle and overrefmed 
 trains of thought. They were marked by 
 simple, vivid, and practical preaching. 
 
 I asked myself the question why these 
 men should preach a separate children's 
 sermon? It was so much extra work, and 
 if many things in the regular sermon could 
 be understood by children and they could 
 be brought and interested, why have a sepa- 
 rate portion at all? No doubt they knew 
 best. The fact that they did so was suffi- 
 cient argument in its favour. A children's 
 portion would positively attract the chil- 
 dren, make them feel their place in the house 
 of God, train them to listen to and under- 
 stand the preaching, and such preaching 
 would be a rare training in simplicity for the 
 
154 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 preacher. We cannot say that they would 
 preach so well without the practice for 
 children. The children's sermon does not 
 prolong the service to weariness, for it does 
 not take as much time as the American 
 quartette choirs take for anthems and solos 
 that often fail to lead the congregation in 
 worship, and leave them listening much in 
 the spirit of the concert hall. 
 
 The four sermons that I have mentioned 
 prove that any man who is called to preach 
 at all can also preach to children. They 
 differed in nature and interest, but they were 
 all worthy children's sermons. The men are 
 as varied in gifts as four men could well be. 
 Dr. Clifford is a reformer and philosopher of 
 life; Mr. Home a platform orator, with 
 fondness for historical illustration; Mr. 
 Garvie a critical and theological student; 
 Mr. Clow is the only one whose general work 
 and qualities seem to fit him particularly for 
 a children's preacher. Yet all these gifts 
 and attainments came into play. The defi- 
 nite purpose in each case helped the man to 
 accomplish the result. One man described 
 a fact of nature, another told the story of a 
 man's life, the others, by descriptions of 
 familiar experiences, and illustrations of 
 child life, made real what is taking place 
 
The Children's Portion 155 
 
 within the soul. All men alike in their 
 effort to make a single picture, leaving the 
 impress of a single truth. 
 
 I refer to a single American preacher to 
 children, Dr. Charles E. Jefferson of the 
 Broadway Tabernacle, New York. It is a 
 surprise to find that he is a children's preacher. 
 He is a thinker, a student, the chief doctri- 
 nal preacher, essentially a preacher to men. 
 Yet he has published one of the best vol- 
 umes of sermons to children, "My Father's 
 Business. " 
 
 I judge he preaches to children only at 
 certain seasons, for the book seems to be 
 made up of annual sermons. They are so 
 simple and pictorial that the youngest child 
 in church will be interested to get the mes- 
 sage, yet so thoughtful and vital that they 
 are almost equally food for mature minds. 
 
 All the sermons of the volume are good. 
 Perhaps the first is most characteristic. 
 "Line upon line," Isaiah 28:10. He uses 
 the very Hebrew words to gain attention. 
 The lazy, selfish, drunken people of Samaria 
 mock the prophet. "Do you take us for 
 children, always speaking the same things 
 to us?" "Tsar la tsar, tsar la tsar: quar 
 la quar, quar la quar." Boys and girls some- 
 times talk and act like these drunkards of 
 
156 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Samaria, drunk with anger-pride. "Why, 
 mother, you have told me that twenty times. 
 You are always harping on the same old 
 string." 
 
 The theme is, "Why line upon line?" 
 and the plan consists of four very plain steps. 
 
 1. They are commanded of God. 
 
 2. In order to get these things into your 
 
 heart, to impress truth and destroy 
 evil. 
 
 3. Only a few essentials. As letters of 
 
 the alphabet, figures in numbers, 
 tones in music, so only a few laws of 
 life. 
 
 4. They see what you do not. 
 
 There will be a worse monotony if you 
 fail to heed your parents. Accus- 
 ing conscience will say, "Line upon 
 line." 
 The sermon is strong in its use of scrip- 
 ture, and the illustrations of daily life. Take 
 a single illustration : 
 
 "It takes a great deal of repetition to get 
 a big idea into a small boy's soul. Did you 
 ever see a pile driver driving piles? The 
 pile driver shoots up into the air a great mass 
 of iron, and without a moment's warning 
 lets it drop upon the head of the pile. The 
 pile does not mind the first blow very much, 
 
The Children's Portion 157 
 
 and stands almost as proud and tall as ever. 
 But the pile driver keeps right on at its work. 
 It lifts the iron into the air and lets it drop 
 five times, ten times, fifty times, perhaps 
 a hundred times, and by and by the pile is 
 driven down deep into the river-bed, and is 
 so firm and safe that men are not afraid to 
 make it part of the foundation of a house. 
 Fathers and mothers must drive principles 
 into their children's hearts because these 
 principles are the piles upon which the house 
 of character must be erected. It is for your 
 eternal good that precept is placed upon 
 precept and line is placed upon line." 
 
 III. Certain deductions as to the children's 
 sermon. 
 
 1. The text and theme should be pictorial 
 and concrete, — something that will appeal 
 to the experience and imagination of the 
 child. 
 Richard Newton : 
 
 Prov. 30 : 28. " The spider taketh hold 
 with her hands, and is 
 in King's palaces." 
 The spider's example. 
 Luke 1 : 15. " He shall be great in the 
 sight of the Lord." 
 The great man in God's 
 sight. 
 
158 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Ps. 119 : 105. " Thy word is a lamp unto 
 my feet." 
 The wonderful lamp. 
 Jefferson : 
 
 Luke 2 : 46. " Hearing them and asking 
 them questions. " 
 The duty of asking ques- 
 tions. 
 Luke 2: 51. "And was subject unto 
 them." 
 The beauty of obedience. 
 Luke 2 : 49. " Wist ye not that I must 
 be about my Father's 
 business ? " 
 My father's business. 
 Luke 2 : 52. " And Jesus advanced in 
 wisdom and stature and 
 in favor with God and 
 Man." 
 The silent years. 
 2. The plan should be clear and simple, a 
 very few steps, put in a way to arrest the 
 thought and be held in mind. Questions 
 are good that may arrest attention and call 
 for response. Dr. Richard Newton, the 
 prince of children's preachers a generation 
 ago, was a master in the art of asking ques- 
 tions. His plans were often a series of ques- 
 tions, and his style bristled with these marks 
 
The Children's Portion 159 
 
 of personal inquiry. Dr. Jefferson's plans 
 are so simple and inevitable as to be easily 
 remembered. 
 
 3. The material should be worthy, not 
 simply a string of stories. Respect the mind 
 of the child, but remember that imagination 
 is the great faculty of youth. So illustra- 
 tion will abound, especially such as shall 
 cause the child to use his eyes. 
 
 4. The lessons should be unmistakable 
 and drawn for the child, not left to inference. 
 
 5. The style should be simple, but not 
 childish, on the level of the child, not speak- 
 ing down to him. Short words and sentences, 
 the best oral style, not linear measure. 
 
 How can we speak well to children? 
 We must remember that those who preach 
 well to children must know children and love 
 children. None so quick as they to tell who 
 are their friends, and who understand them. 
 They are true spiritual barometers. A man 
 who has never had a genuine childhood is 
 not fit to preach to children, nor a man who 
 has forgotten his childhood. "To lose one's 
 love for children, that is a dreadful sort of 
 old age," says George Macdonald. 
 
 An admirer of Dr. Clifford's says that the 
 secret of his sway over children and youth 
 
160 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 is his resolute belief in Life's unfading charm. 
 " Youth believes that the world is young. 
 Consequently they gather round a preacher 
 who shares their belief. And as he cries in 
 their eager, unspoiled ears 'sin is modern, 
 love is eternal, 
 
 " ' Grow old along with me ! 
 The best is yet to be ! ' 
 
 is it any wonder that so many cleave to him 
 in adoring discipleship !" 
 
 Idealism, courage, hope, these are the 
 qualities of immortal youth. The man who 
 has these may laugh at the years. 
 
LECTURE VIII. A MAN'S GOSPEL 
 
 I John 2: 14. "I have written unto you, fathers, 
 because ye know Him which is from the beginning. 
 I have written unto you, young men, because ye are 
 strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye 
 have overcome the evil one." 
 
LECTURE VIII 
 A Man's Gospel 
 
 A Scotch elder once remarked concerning 
 three ministers who had served his church : 
 "The first was a minister, but not a man; 
 the second was a man but not a minister; 
 and the third was neither a minister, nor a 
 man." If men are to be won to Christ, it 
 must be by a manly ministry. Professor 
 Mtinsterberg of Harvard in the Atlantic 
 (Nov., 1910) says that the strong men of 
 the colleges are attracted to business and 
 other callings of active leadership and achieve- 
 ment, and that the men of less masculine 
 qualities, who lack the power of initiative, 
 take up teaching and other work of a more 
 spiritual nature. 
 
 I do not know how true his generalization, 
 but if there is any large degree of truth in it, 
 it accounts in part for the small proportion 
 of men in the average American congrega- 
 tion. It would be a shame to disparage the 
 worth and work of woman in the church, 
 but a feminine church is not the New Testa- 
 163 
 
 
164 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 ment conception and can never be a conquer- 
 ing church. Women and children are easily 
 led into faith. Their natures seem more 
 sensitive to spiritual truth, and they are 
 certainly less exposed to the withering blasts 
 of scepticism, or the hardening and corrupt- 
 ing forces of the struggle for existence. The 
 Gospel has special fitness to men, and makes 
 special appeal to them, and the preachers 
 who embody it, and present it in its fulness, 
 are the ministers to the fathers and to the 
 young men. 
 
 1. The preacher must represent a manly 
 religion. He must embody its masculine 
 qualities. John writes to the young men as 
 the strong ones (Xcrxvpoi). It' is equivalent 
 to the Latin "vir" — the embodiment of 
 manly excellencies — what we mean by 
 manliness. Mr. Hughes, writing of the power 
 of Charles Kingsley to reach men, noble 
 soldiers and writers and men of affairs, said 
 that he always presented the manliness of 
 Christ, no doubt more or less reflected in 
 his own person. 
 
 The preacher must have these qualities 
 to reach men. Three qualities you would 
 say belong to a manly man, and to a manly 
 religion, loyalty, great-heartedness, and up- 
 rightness. A manly man will be a seeker of 
 
A Man's Gospel 165 
 
 truth. He shrinks not from its clearest 
 light. He wishes to bring his life and his 
 convictions to the fullest light. He will not 
 be easily content with conventional views, 
 he must prove all things for himself. Once 
 convinced of truth, he is loyal to it, he gives 
 himself to it. The truth possesses him. 
 No plausible sophistries will be suffered to 
 blind his vision. No personal allurements 
 will turn his feet from its path. 
 
 Men wish magnanimity and tolerance in 
 their ministers, but they despise an inverte- 
 brate. They know it is a sign of mental or 
 moral weakness. To say that a minister is 
 on both sides of every question is the charge 
 of incompetence, or cowardice. They honour 
 a man who believes something and advocates 
 it and is willing to suffer for it. They may 
 not accept his creed, but they believe in the 
 man. And this is the first condition of a 
 preacher's work. 
 
 And the second element of a manly reli- 
 gion is great-heartedness. The Gospel brings 
 its great truths to the heart and profoundly 
 moves the lives of men. Let these truths 
 get possession of the heart, and the tides 
 of feeling pulsate to the extremities of con- 
 scious life. Who is the " Great Heart " 
 but Jesus, whose life is radiant with Immortal 
 
166 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Love, who so felt for every man that he got 
 under the burdens of the race. 
 
 The intellect is barren until fructified by 
 the heart. "We are but shadows, we are 
 not endowed with real life till the heart be 
 touched. That touch creates us. Then we 
 begin to be, thereby we are beings of reality, 
 and inheritors of eternity. " (Hawthorne.) 
 And Longfellow finely says of the builder 
 of the ship : 
 
 "His heart was in his work, 
 And the heart giveth grace unto every art." 
 
 The heart feeds the oil in the lamp of all 
 high endeavour. The great heart is always 
 the element of strength. It is quick to feel 
 and quick to respond. It touches others by 
 its ready sympathy. It gives birth to enthu- 
 siasm and inspires to heroic action. Great- 
 heartedness implies large-mindedness, large 
 visions of truth and life, power to interpret 
 and sympathize with men who differ. It al- 
 ways wins men to the person of the preacher. 
 And uprightness is the moral foundation 
 for spiritual gifts and influences. Without 
 this the house is built upon the sand. It 
 means self-control of the faculties and pas- 
 sions of the body, denying the ungodly lusts 
 and obeying the law of purity. It means 
 
A Man's Gospel 167 
 
 a masterful self-control of the mind, deny- 
 ing its vagrant impulses, keeping the facul- 
 ties at hard and at times unpleasant tasks, 
 that mental power may be developed. It is 
 such self-possession for a true purpose, that 
 the power of body and mind shall be in true 
 harmony, each kept in its proper place, and 
 doing its true work. Uprightness is where 
 the subjection of all the members of life to a 
 wise purpose is the most absolute. And the 
 truest freedom is where obedience has be- 
 come natural and involuntary. 
 
 It goes without saying that moral integrity 
 must characterize a spiritual manhood. Con- 
 science will be clear and strong in a true spirit- 
 ual ideal. A fine sense of honour will govern 
 all the relations of life. 
 
 Ministers, by the mistaken devotion of 
 their people, are sometimes shielded from the 
 hard knocks of the world, and so they may 
 come to feel that they are exceptions to the 
 conditions and obligations of the common 
 man. It is a fatal mistake that eats out 
 the heart of manliness. 
 
 Men especially demand uprightness of 
 their minister in three ways. 
 
 A fine sense of honour in all financial 
 matters. 
 
 He is supposed to live above mere com- 
 
168 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 mercial law, yet cannot violate it without 
 weakness and dishonour. To be eager for 
 gain, or to use his position to get things at 
 less than their value, is fatal to influence. 
 He must live strictly within his income, 
 avoid debt as he would the plague, and 
 promptly meet his obligation. To most 
 ministers it must mean the strictest economy, 
 even at times pinching self-denial ; but it is 
 the first principle of uprightness, and without 
 it a man's influence counts for nothing. 
 The spirit of sacrifice must mark the ministry, 
 or it utterly fails in its witness and message. 
 And the first demand of self-denial may be 
 in a life of poverty. Whatever the bestow- 
 ment or withholding of worldly means, un- 
 questioned honesty and simplicity should 
 mark the minister's use of money. One of 
 the most brilliant preachers of New England 
 was lax in money matters, was not will- 
 ing to practise honest self-denial, until the 
 trustees were compelled to pay his debts for 
 the honour of the church, and compel him 
 to pass on. 
 
 Men demand uprightness of the minister 
 in all sex-relations. The minister is pecul- 
 iarly exposed to sexual temptation and more 
 men fail here than from all other causes put 
 together. The minister is welcomed into 
 
A Man's Gospel 169 
 
 the homes and finds himself on familiar terms 
 with women. Often the temperament that 
 makes him a preacher, the sensitiveness to 
 thought and feeling, makes him acceptable 
 to the nature of women. He is appreciated 
 by them and the feeling easily passes beyond 
 admiration. A look of the eye longer than 
 wise, a pressure of the hand, an unguarded 
 touch, we do not know what volcanic pas- 
 sions we may arouse in women and in our- 
 selves. Six of our own men have failed here 
 in recent years and have passed from sight 
 as though they were buried in the sea. 
 
 A manly man will have a chivalric sense 
 of honour towards all women, in the case of 
 the weak a spirit of deferential courtesy, 
 which will throw its charm over all, and be 
 likewise an armour of defence. A spiritual 
 man will guard against the beginnings of evil, 
 the first look or word of careless familiarity. 
 The chivalric spirit of Frederick W. Robertson 
 gave his boyhood the romantic worship of 
 womanhood as its ideal, and gave his man- 
 hood that reverence for woman and the 
 delicate sense of honour that gained the 
 friendship of women without the first taint 
 of unholy sentiment. 
 
 Men know instinctively whether a minister 
 is careless in his relations to women, and 
 
170 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 they suspect him accordingly. To be known 
 as a woman's favourite is the sure way of 
 losing the respect of men and of womanly 
 women too. 
 
 And then promptness in meeting one's 
 engagements. Modern business life means 
 order, system, fidelity, despatch, the economy 
 of time and strength, and the same spirit 
 pervades all successful fife to-day. It must 
 characterize the minister's work if he is to 
 gain the respect of men. A conscientious 
 regard for the work he has taken means 
 fidelity in preparation and promptness in 
 meeting obligation and opportunity. He 
 must be a man of his word. He must live 
 the gospel of duty. For him duty must wear 
 the " Godhead's most benignant grace." 
 
 To saunter into his pulpit behindhand, 
 to be frequently late at his prayer-meeting, 
 to be careless in time and work of his many 
 church or civic appointments, is often the 
 index of loose mental ways, or indifference 
 to the convenience of others. In either case, 
 it is the result of an undisciplined, unethical 
 life. The men of the community can have 
 no deep respect for the preacher who causes 
 them to suffer from his bad habits. 
 
 It is said of Dr. Alexander Whyte of Edin- 
 burgh that he is the busiest man in Scotland 
 
A Man's Gospel 171 
 
 and the best prepared too. He is always 
 at it, and he is always ready when his time 
 comes. 
 
 II. The minister must maintain a manly 
 relation to men. 
 
 That means that he must try to know them. 
 I know there is a natural shrinking from men. 
 They are often coarse, careless of speech and 
 manner, lacking in respect for religious life, 
 misinterpreting the very motive and effort 
 of the preacher. All your training and 
 tastes and ideals tend to separate you from 
 such men. And they will impose a barrier 
 from their side. They will very likely feel 
 uncomfortable in your presence. The min- 
 ister's presence may suggest the life they 
 ought to lead, and are not willing to under- 
 take. They do not care to have conscience 
 uncomfortably active. 
 
 The minister's very presence should be 
 the voice of the higher life. That's a beau- 
 tiful story told by Mr. Crooker in "The 
 Church of To-day," of a shopkeeper who 
 said of a certain minister of his city, " When- 
 ever he walks by my shop, I say to myself, 
 ' There goes a true man ' and that moment 
 everything good in me feels stronger and I 
 find that it is then easier for me to live as I 
 ought." 
 
172 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Of Norman MacLeod of Glasgow, a man's 
 minister, a shoemaker said, " He kens leather," 
 and a blacksmith said, " When he comes into 
 my shop, he talks with me as though he had 
 been a blacksmith all his life, but he never 
 goes away without leaving Christ in my 
 heart." 
 
 We can break through the barriers of men 
 by our simple humanity. We have far more 
 in common with men than any differences. 
 And we can find and assert the common 
 tie. Phillips Brooks did this with the men 
 of Harvard. The service he rendered his 
 Alma Mater as resident preacher was pecul- 
 iarly prized by him. It is said that during 
 the last service of this kind that he rendered, 
 he went one morning into some students' 
 rooms, as his wont was. He took in the 
 situation at a glance, men who had spent 
 the previous night in dissipation, averted 
 eyes and pallid faces of men who did not care 
 just then to look into their own lives. But 
 Bishop Brooks spoke no word of censure to 
 them. With his great humanity, his big- 
 heartedness, he soon touched matters of 
 common interest, the likes of young men, 
 the college they all loved so well. But when 
 he went out, he said with his deep eyes, and 
 heavy tones that seemed to penetrate into 
 
A Man's Gospel 173 
 
 the very heart of things, "Well, boys, it 
 doesn't pay, does it?" And in that presence 
 their sin turned black before their eyes. 
 They felt ashamed of it. They knew it 
 unworthy of their manhood. 
 
 Charles Kingsley knew every man, woman 
 and child in his parish. He always found 
 some common bond of interest that helped 
 him to be a friend and revealed the life to 
 him. Edward Everett Hale gave as one of 
 the three rules of his own life that he tried 
 to rub up against all sorts of men. 
 
 And we must believe in men if we are going 
 to be their ministers. We can make no ap- 
 peal to men unless we believe in them, be- 
 lieve in their capacity for goodness. Front- 
 ing the facts of life with open eyes, we must 
 still hold to the divineness of life, the noble, 
 heroic qualities of the common man, and 
 that the majority are not incarnations of 
 evil. 
 
 "Through one another — through one another — 
 No more the gleam on sea or land — 
 But so close that we see the brother — 
 
 And understand, and understand ! 
 Till, drawn in swept-crowd closer, closer, 
 
 We see the gleam in the human clod, 
 And clerk and foreman, peddler and grocer, 
 Are in our family of God." 
 
 (James Oppenheim.) 
 
174 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Mr. Stokes well says in "A Ministry to 
 Men," "The man who would draw back the 
 Protestant masses to the church must have 
 faith in them. The minister who talks of 
 'our immigrant rabble/ who has no confi- 
 dence in plain people, will never fill his church 
 with wage-earners. Whether we like it or not, 
 we are more than blind if we do not see that 
 we are living in a democratic age, an age in 
 which the people are growing in power, and 
 are impatient of domination from ' above.' 
 This being true, the minister who wishes the 
 common people to hear him gladly, as they 
 did Jesus of Nazareth, must have a large 
 faith in them." 
 
 "The faculty of seeing things to love in 
 individuals and taking them into his personal 
 regard is the tap-root of his influence. He 
 sways the masses and wins their heart just 
 because there are to him no masses" was 
 said of Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 The minister must identify his life with 
 the community. He should love his place, 
 bearing his burden, rejoicing in its life, 
 a citizen first of all. He should love 
 his place as Samuel Johnson loved London, 
 loved its "central roar," or as Phillips Brooks 
 loved Boston. After a summer in Europe, 
 the latter looked from his study window over 
 
A Man's Gospel 175 
 
 the long stretches of tile roofs and exclaimed 
 that it was the most beautiful sight in the 
 world. It meant home and human lives and 
 his work. And that is what your own town 
 or city may mean to you, in spite of its 
 commonness or ugliness, the most beautiful 
 place in the world, because home and friends 
 and ministry. "What a dreary view you 
 have here, Mr. Ruskin," said a friend one 
 day of his London home, " nothing but waste 
 water and old junk!" "Oh, I don't feel 
 so," replied the great prose-poet, "for when 
 I look out, I always see the sky." 
 
 The minister, by his large interests, his 
 broad humanity, his public-spirited service, 
 can recover the meaning of parson, and make 
 men rejoice to recognize him as "our minis- 
 ter." 
 
 III. He must preach a manly gospel. 
 
 1. That means a thoughtful gospel. A min- 
 ister that is not thoughtful in his work, that 
 is not a systematic student of the great prob- 
 lems of religion and life, cannot minister to 
 the men of the community. They will not 
 go to church from force of habit. They will be 
 attracted only by a worthy message. It must 
 be the best thought of the time on the ques- 
 tions of religion. It must appeal to man by 
 its reasonableness, in accordance with the 
 
176 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 revealed nature of God and the nature of 
 man; a fair, just, balanced view of truth 
 and life. I do not see how it is possible to 
 present a balanced view of truth and life 
 without preaching the Christ in his simplicity 
 and fulness. And to preach Christ in any 
 real and large way is to preach a manly Gospel. 
 
 It is possible to present the exceptional 
 qualities of Jesus, those that make him 
 unique, such as purity, love, forgiveness, 
 humility, in a non-human way, so that they 
 will seem unreal and unrealizable, too good 
 for human nature's daily food, unworkable 
 in this world where men toil and struggle and 
 suffer. 
 
 2. It must have the authority of expert 
 knowledge and experience. The preacher 
 is a moral and religious teacher. He cannot 
 be an authority in everything. It was said 
 of Dr. Whewell, who became an English arch- 
 bishop, that his foible was omniscience. And 
 it is certainly a weakness in the pulpit to go 
 beyond the field of religion and morals. 
 When any question of work, society, and the 
 state rises directly into the moral realm, the 
 preacher cannot keep silent without losing 
 his power, but he must guard against the 
 assumption of an easy omniscience. Nothing 
 is so cheap and easy and worthless as words. 
 
A Man's Gospel 177 
 
 He must guard against partial and ill- 
 balanced views. There is the greatest danger 
 to-day in an earnest pulpit dabbling in too 
 many things. Men will lose respect for our 
 word if it is careless and ill-judged and exag- 
 gerated. Not without reason does James 
 say: "Be not many teachers, my brethren, 
 knowing that we shall receive greater judg- 
 ment. For in many things we all stumble. 
 If any stumbleth not in word the same is a 
 perfect man, able to bridle the whole body 
 also." (3 : 1-2.) 
 
 3. It must be ethical rather than senti- 
 mental, strong more than beautiful, and mak- 
 ing its appeal to conscience. This agrees 
 with a recent characterization of Dr. George 
 A. Gordon: "He is such a combination of 
 mind and heart, both in quantity and qual- 
 ity, that his emotion and enthusiasm never 
 seem sentimental, and his intellectual expres- 
 sion never cold." 
 
 4. It must be a Gospel that can be lived, 
 practical helps for daily life. And it must 
 not fail to present the largeness of the Chris- 
 tian life, and lay great obligation upon a 
 man's strength. "When the church offers 
 a man's job, then it can claim and have a 
 man's life." (Pinchot.) 
 
 It is evident that the life of young men is 
 
178 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 full of idealism. That is particularly true 
 of college men. "They are quick to respond 
 to the claims of Christ.'' And it is true of 
 men everywhere. The age is commercial 
 rather than materialistic. Men are com- 
 pelled to think of the economic basis of life, 
 but it is not in the mere getting of things, 
 but in their use for man that the zest of life 
 consists. 
 
 And the age is full of movements that 
 promise a better life, and any movement, 
 however idealistic, — visionary, if you will, 
 — does not call in vain for recruits. Mr. 
 Robert Speer says that the way to reach 
 young men is to appeal to the heroic, and the 
 work of the Student Volunteer movement, 
 and the Y. M. C. A. in its foreign work, is 
 shining proof of the truth. They do not 
 need to call a second time for any work that 
 needs a man's energy and devotion. Once 
 at Harvard, Dr. Grenfell called for four 
 volunteers for his summer work in Labrador, 
 and he had the men before he left the 
 room. 
 
 Here, I take it, is a good lesson in psy- 
 chology for the preacher who would reach 
 the men of his community with the Gospel. 
 Is it not to preach a Gospel that demands the 
 whole man, and all a man can do? "A 
 
A Man's Gospel 179 
 
 man's job" — that's the natural expression 
 of a man. The energy of large use, the 
 achievement of efficiency is the mark of life 
 everywhere. Every man desires three things 
 by virtue of his manhood. 
 
 A proper self-expression — you hear the 
 common term to-day of self-realization; 
 
 The proper use of his powers and so a 
 worthy achievement ; 
 
 And the adequate reward of his labours, 
 or the appreciation of his life. 
 
 I think it is our business in preaching to 
 help men to see that the greatest things are 
 not the visible and material, and that the 
 deep desires of a man's heart can only be 
 realized by a life of Christian faith and devo- 
 tion. Christian faith brings out the noblest 
 expression of the man. In fact, Christianity 
 may be called God's way of making a man. 
 Henry Drummond taught us to think of 
 Christianity in this way — not as some- 
 thing imposed upon us, but exactly fitted to 
 our nature and necessary to its completest 
 development and use. And it makes all 
 the difference with the man whether his 
 powers are used for some personal and selfish 
 end, or for the highest good of others as seen 
 in the kingdom of God. And the highest 
 honour of life is to have a part in that king- 
 
180 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 dom into which the very nations shall at 
 last bring their glory. 
 
 It is a practical demand of men to have a 
 work that is worth while. It is inevitable 
 that they should test our gospel by its use 
 for the largest life. In this respect the 
 claim of pragmatism is just and convincing. 
 
 The devotional test which the pulpit 
 sometimes lays upon men is not true enough 
 or large enough for the whole of life. You 
 might just as well draw a regiment of soldiers 
 around the Church to keep men out, as ask 
 them to subscribe to certain creed statements, 
 or publicly talk about their religious experi- 
 ence, or lead the devotions of men. However 
 valuable these acts are for certain men, they 
 cannot be imposed as a test of faith, or the 
 necessary means of its growth. It is an age 
 of action, but an age growingly reticent about 
 its deepest feelings. 
 
 I think we should preach the Gospel so 
 that its ethical demands shall rest upon the 
 conscience of men. It is to permeate all 
 life, and to govern and sanctify all its rela- 
 tions and activities. And this must mean a 
 social Gospel. Christ must be made a master 
 of all men. He must not be shut out of any 
 haunt or sphere of man. 
 
A Man's Gospel 181 
 
 " This is the Gospel of labor, — ring it, ye bells of the 
 
 kirk — 
 The Lord of Love came down from above, to live with 
 
 the men who work." 
 
 (van Dyke, "The Toiling of Felix.") 
 
 And the men who hear this Gospel and 
 catch its note of humanity and brotherhood 
 cannot live for themselves, but must do their 
 part towards a better race and a happier 
 earth. This is the vision of the Kingdom of 
 God which makes the loudest call to the men 
 of our age, and which our age specially needs. 
 The preacher who puts his truth in the ethi- 
 cal and social form of the Kingdom of God 
 makes the noblest appeal. It was Christ's 
 distinctive message and his great imperative : 
 "Let the dead bury their dead, but go thou 
 and preach the Kingdom of God." 
 
 Such a pulpit has a manly message for a 
 world of men. The words of Kipling apply 
 to the preacher, as well as to every genuine 
 toiler, 
 
 "Go to your work and be strong, halting not in your 
 
 ways, 
 Balking the end half-won, for an instant dole of praise. 
 Stand to your work and be wise, certain of word and pen, 
 Who are neither children nor Gods, but men in a world 
 
 of men.'' 
 
LECTURE IX. THE PREACHER'S 
 GROWTH 
 
 Isaiah 40 : 4. " He wakeneth my ear to hear as they 
 that are taught." 
 
LECTURE IX 
 
 The Preacher's Growth 
 
 Growth is the law of life. Every living 
 thing grows. When growth stops, death 
 begins. Man is higher than other earthly- 
 life in the power of his growth. He has the 
 power of an ever unfolding, expanding, end- 
 less life. 
 
 "Finds progress man's distinctive mark, 
 
 Not God's and not the beast's : God is, alone, they are. 
 
 Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be." 
 
 (" A Death in the Desert.") 
 
 A live preacher should be a shining example 
 of the law of growth. 
 
 The age demands this growth in the 
 preacher. He cannot be an exception to the 
 condition of success. Its enterprise, its 
 struggle, its hope of mastery, call for a grow- 
 ing life. It sounds the note of efficiency. 
 It calls for an increasing mastery of the 
 powers and materials of work. It is ever 
 calling for the vision and courage and energy 
 of youth. It is seemingly ruthless in its 
 treatment of weakness and neglect. " Take 
 185 
 
186 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 the talent from him, and give it to him that 
 hath ten talents' ' is the inevitable judgment 
 upon the man that fails to grow. The dead 
 line, the arrest of growth, wherever reached, 
 is a bar to usefulness. 
 
 The charm of a young minister, the demand 
 for young men in the churches, is in large 
 part the promise of growth. He is to be 
 a stronger, wiser, better man, and all the 
 forces of the Church are to develop under 
 the leadership of his expanding, enriching 
 life. He has the potency and promise of 
 success. 
 
 And the very message of the preacher is 
 the gospel of the new man. Christianity is 
 full of personal and social hope. It is ever 
 calling to the possible man, that the man 
 that is to be may arise and hear God's voice 
 and enter into the life of a son. The Gospel 
 demands and gives a growing life. The per- 
 sonality of Christ is the quickening and uni- 
 fying force for the individual and the race. 
 A stagnant minister is a denial of the power 
 of the Gospel. 
 
 The best work of the preacher is con- 
 ditioned by his growth and gives incentive 
 to it. He must be a wise householder that 
 bringeth forth things new and old from his 
 treasury. There are but few principles of 
 
The Preacher's Growth 187 
 
 religion and those need endless iteration; 
 but only a growing soul can repeat them so 
 as to form a literature of spiritual power. 
 Truth is not a discovery made once for all, 
 stored up to be used at demand. But truth 
 is a life never fully attained, ever struggling 
 and learning, ever seeing and doing more 
 because of its growth. 
 
 It is growth that sustains the ideal, the 
 vision of what ought to be and what can be 
 by the grace of God. It does not suffer the 
 soul to rest in any comfortable and low 
 content. A living message, the truth for 
 to-day, and not the scribe's dull repetitions 
 of yesterday, must be the word of a life that 
 is ever learning. 
 
 And the true preacher finds in the very 
 conditions of his work the greatest incentive 
 to growth. He seeks for permanent re- 
 lations with men. He is not like the teacher 
 who must give the same lessons to changing 
 classes. He is not like the evangelist who 
 repeats the same truth to different communi- 
 ties. Such men may find little growth in 
 their work, and it is almost a miracle if they 
 escape mental hardness and sterility. But 
 the true preacher moves on with his class. 
 He ministers to the same lives in childhood 
 and youth, in manhood and old age. There 
 
188 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 must be the growing truth to feed the growing 
 life. He cannot be the spiritual leader of a 
 generation, making a wholesome impression 
 upon the community, giving fruitful life 
 to all that he touches, without that vitality 
 of faith that comes from an increasing un- 
 derstanding and appropriation of the truth. 
 To build the church means to build the 
 preacher. 
 
 The hindrances to the preacher's growth 
 are many and subtle. They lie in the very 
 nature of the man and his work. The pulpit, 
 with other so-called learned professions, is 
 naturally, perhaps necessarily, conservative. 
 The lawyer deals with statutes and prece- 
 dents, and seeks to guard what has been 
 gained. The doctor is under the power of 
 great examples, but deals with material 
 of nature and life that is ever open to new 
 interpretation. The preacher has an his- 
 toric faith, deals with a body of truth, often 
 put in great creedal forms, and is inclined 
 to study the past and rest upon what has been 
 found. 
 
 The pulpit has a strong tendency to mental 
 and moral fixedness. Amid the shifting and 
 passing persons and opinions of earth is 
 the abiding word, and the preacher too 
 easily identifies his personal creed and work 
 
The Preacher's Growth 189 
 
 with the unchanging and the eternal. The 
 Christian pulpit is rightly conservative of 
 what is true and best, but it is fatal to 
 character and power to make this a bar to 
 progress. 
 
 We must repeat simple and fundamental 
 truths; men will always need to be taught 
 the elemental things of faith, and this fact 
 may tend to a routine that has no vision, no 
 joy of first discovery. There are men who 
 repeat the truths they have been taught, 
 who never find for themselves, who simply 
 receive, who have not the hunger of the 
 seeker, to whom the world is never new. 
 They are the pessimists of the routine. 
 "That which hath been is that which shall 
 be; and that which hath been done is that 
 which shall be done; and there is no new 
 thing under the sun." (Eccl. 1 : 9.) 
 
 And yet, there never was such possibil- 
 ity of spiritual progress. This is the age of 
 vision. The philosophies, born of new 
 sciences, a larger study of religion, a finer 
 sense of responsibility, born of the social 
 consciousness, are bringing to men new views 
 of truth and duty. Every day sheds its 
 new light upon the world, and at night God 
 flings his visions across the skies. 
 
 The word of God, in its more vital inter- 
 
190 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 pretation, the unfolding of our own nature, 
 bringing to every man insistent questions, 
 the movements of thought and life that often 
 have such far-reaching and radical intent, 
 the stirrings of nations, breaking the bars 
 of isolation and intolerance, and throwing 
 wide open the doors of opportunity, — all 
 bring their visions. And yet the preacher 
 may be so under the power of routine as 
 to see little or nothing of all this. I have 
 seen a man in the heart of a great empire, 
 just awakening to the sense of race-con- 
 sciousness, the new social and moral ideals all 
 around him fairly seething with new life 
 and calling for leadership and expression, — 
 as dull and dead to all this — a blind mole 
 lost in the minutiae of his work — as though 
 he were hid away in the most isolated corner 
 of America. The forces of his work and 
 the very laws of habit may make the preacher 
 a man with a closed mind. Where there is 
 no open vision, the prophet's voice is not 
 heard and the people perish. 
 
 Then the preacher may easily be lost in the 
 details of his work. The modern church is 
 so highly organized that he may forget his 
 great mission in visitings and circulars and 
 clubs. He may be the busiest man in town 
 and yet leave his first task unfulfilled. There 
 
The Preacher's Growth 191 
 
 may be growth in social management, but 
 not in the intellectual and spiritual power 
 of a Christian teacher, and leader. Plans 
 of self-training may yield to the pressure of 
 secondary demands. There may be no hard, 
 consecutive work on the things that make 
 the preacher. 
 
 " Preaching is your highest business. Noth- 
 ing can ever take its place. You are to be 
 administrators, but administration will not 
 fill the place of preaching. Unless you are 
 preachers, you are not likely to have much 
 to administer. You are to be organizers, 
 but the organizing gift will never compensate 
 for the lack of the gift of preaching. Men 
 who cannot preach have ordinarily little to 
 organize. When you see a man at the head 
 of a large and living church, displaying large 
 gifts of organization and administration, 
 do not suppose that these are the gifts by 
 which his church came into being, or which 
 keep it glad and strong. He or some one 
 else created it by preaching. Unless a man 
 knows how to present truth in such a way 
 as to get it into the blood of those who hear 
 him, he need never hope for a living, growing, 
 conquering church, no matter what other 
 gifts he may be possessed of." (Jefferson, 
 " Building the Church," page 279.) 
 
192 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 The preacher's life goes into his word. 
 Virtue goes out of him at every vital message. 
 There can be no cautious withholding if 
 faith is to be communicated to men. All 
 the treasures of life, the deepest and fullest 
 personality, must be imparted by the preacher 
 who makes the Gospel a living word. 
 
 It is the costliest expenditure known to 
 man. No wonder that the candle of life 
 burns low and the pulpit sometimes gives 
 a feeble and flickering light. No wonder 
 that the fountain of life is drained and the 
 sermon is like a brook with only stagnant 
 pools. The body must be full of light. 
 There must be a well of water within ever 
 springing up. The gathering must be as 
 rich and constant as the spending. Life 
 must be kept at the full if the pulpit is to be 
 real and vital and commanding. The preacher 
 must aim at the full-grown man, through 
 the ever increasing process of intellectual 
 and spiritual culture. 
 
 The social, sympathetic side of many a 
 preacher has been his undoing. He has not 
 had the courage and resolution to face the 
 lonely tasks of study and meditation, the 
 patient and thorough processes of large prep- 
 aration. An agreeable or lazy good nature 
 has taken the easiest course, has shirked the 
 
The Preacher's Growth 193 
 
 discipline of the prophet. There has not 
 been the large prevision for himself and his 
 church, looking through the years, not the 
 purpose for growth and service that holds 
 its way, cuts its way through whatever 
 obstacles. Life has lost the force and rush 
 of the mountain stream, and now takes its 
 sluggish and meandering way through the 
 alluvial of the plain. 
 
 "What is the matter with your friend? 
 He does not grow, he has not fulfilled the 
 promise of his youth," was said concerning 
 a minister of marked gifts and lovable nature. 
 "Oh," was the reply, "he spends too much 
 time, too many morning hours, on dry-goods 
 boxes." 
 
 The very temperament that makes the 
 preacher may keep him from the highest and 
 best of which he is capable. The artistic 
 nature, the sensitiveness that responds to 
 the environment, may not always find in his 
 hearers the tastes and demands of spiritual 
 and enduring work. It may not be popular 
 to be thoughtful and thorough. It may bring 
 quicker and larger returns to be sensational 
 and shallow. The people may not wish the 
 preacher to bring them the fruit from the 
 very highest boughs of the tree of life. Shall 
 the preacher simply meet the popular de- 
 
194 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 mand, be "unto them as a very lovely song 
 of one that hath a pleasant voice/ ' or shall 
 he try to awaken the deeper hunger of the 
 soul and satisfy it ? In all his work shall he 
 build after the pattern in the mount? 
 Shall he be strenuous of this higher reward, 
 though the world be adverse to desert ? 
 
 "There are no more subtle or powerful 
 temptations in the modern world than those 
 which beset the oratorical temperament, 
 face to face with the swift judgments and 
 imperative demands of a great popular 
 audience. Let each one of us look about him 
 and see that the gravest tragedies of the 
 pulpit are not those of men who have lost 
 their places, but those of men who have kept 
 them by descending in spirit." (Fatjnce, 
 "Educational Ideals of the Ministry, " page 
 262.) 
 
 When Robert W. Dale became the pastor 
 of Carr's Lane Chapel, Birmingham, in suc- 
 cession to Henry Angell James, he began to 
 preach carefully prepared expository sermons, 
 as the best form for himself and his people. 
 He was met one day by a minister of much 
 experience and power, of the fervent type, 
 who said to him, "I hear you are preaching 
 expository sermons to Carr's Lane; they 
 won't stand it." "They will have to stand 
 
The Preacher's Growth 195 
 
 it," was the determined reply of young Dale. 
 The reply was not arrogant and dogmatic, 
 but a glimpse of the noble plan of work 
 which would take the whole man and years 
 of consecutive service, and which gave the 
 promise of the richest returns in character 
 and service. It is possible that Dr. Dale 
 might have been a more popular preacher, 
 but it is hard to see how he could have been 
 truer to a nobler conception of his office, or 
 how he could have served the church and 
 generation better. 
 
 In what direction should the preacher strive 
 to grow f 
 
 He should grow in the knowledge of his 
 speciality, the religious truth and life of men. 
 He is the forthteller for God, an interpreter 
 and teacher of the spiritual life. Influence 
 he has from his position and Church and 
 Bible, but his real authority must spring from 
 his recognized knowledge and character. 
 Men must never say, "He talks easily of the 
 greatest truths, of which he knows no more 
 than the rest of us," — he is to be an expert 
 in his work, an expert of the Christian re- 
 ligion, whatever interprets the Bible and 
 other religions as they throw light upon 
 Christianity, and the religious experience of 
 men. 
 
196 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 There must be a growing perception of 
 truth, and a growing appropriation of it for 
 the prophetic spirit. There can be no 
 spiritual leadership without this — the read- 
 ing of the hearts of men, the understanding 
 of their difficulties, and the ministering of 
 the divine life to them. Every man is a 
 part of his age ; the age forms the problems 
 of the religious life. And the growing inter- 
 pretation of truth is the effort to incorporate 
 Christianity in the life of each age. Truth 
 is the same, but the conception of it must 
 grow, if it is to be living and life-giving. A 
 man's faith is not a child's faith, though one 
 will grow out of the other. Paul felt so, — 
 when he became a man, he put away childish 
 things; and in any life where religion is 
 supreme, faith has been an attainment. 
 
 Dr. Clarke closes his " Sixty Years with 
 the Bible" with a beautiful confession as to 
 the growth of his Christian life. "I might 
 have tried to live until now upon the ideas 
 of the Bible and of God to which I had 
 attained at the end of the fifties of the nine- 
 teenth century, true ideas and not unworthy 
 then, but too small, too unreasoned, too 
 ill-supported, too unspiritual, for the needs 
 of my later years; and I was glad that I 
 could say to God and to my own soul that 
 
The Preacher's Growth 197 
 
 I had spent the lifetime of a man in enlarg- 
 ing, deepening, and correcting the ideas that 
 as a child I had received, and in seeking better 
 foundation for a better faith. " 
 
 The preacher should grow in his fellowship 
 with men. 
 
 Friendship is the key of life. It unlocks 
 the closed doors of indifference and prej- 
 udice. Life should lie open ever wider and 
 wider in its interests and relations. Many 
 a preacher stands in an ever narrowing world. 
 His professionalism or eccentricity leave the 
 mass of men untouched. His lack of magna- 
 nimity and his narrow interests make a cell 
 of life and not a hospitable mansion. To be 
 a friend of man is the highest ideal for any 
 life. 
 
 Robertson was the master of the spiritual 
 capacities because he was able to put himself 
 in the place of others. " He was thus enabled 
 to reveal men to themselves, to tell them what 
 their life meant, and how to idealize it and 
 ennoble it ; to draw out in them what was 
 best and highest ; and all this with a gracious 
 tact, due also to his sensitiveness, which 
 seldom did too little, and never went too far." 
 
 Henry Drummond, who was a prophet 
 to the young men of his day, had a genius 
 for friendship. And Dr. John Watson, who 
 
198 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 interpreted the Gospel in the terms of the 
 widest human interest, overflowed with hu- 
 manity. It was said of his university days, 
 " Wherever you put him down, he will be 
 a friend to the man at his elbow.' ' 
 
 The preacher should grow in spiritual wis- 
 dom, the power to interpret life and minister to 
 it aright. 
 
 Every man makes mistakes, he must serve 
 his apprenticeship, but the years should 
 bring the fruits of ripened experience. It is 
 a great tribute to a man to say that he speaks 
 the fitting word and does the right thing. 
 It means the growth of gentleness and large- 
 mindedness, of sacrificial love and of a far- 
 seeing faith. 
 
 The preacher should grow in instructive, 
 persuasive speech. 
 
 Art is long, and preaching is the longest and 
 hardest of all arts. It does not come of 
 fluent speech. It may be a fatal hindrance 
 to the highest use. Life must be rich, if 
 speech is to be of worth. The training of 
 life comes to fruit in the words of our lips. 
 The best speech is only approximate in the 
 expression of truth. And how can we put 
 the great thoughts of God into our rough 
 moulds ! The exhortation of St. James 
 might be oftener repeated, "Be not many 
 
The Preacher's Growth 199 
 
 teachers !" But it is our business to preach, 
 to speak better, to gain increased mastery 
 of the most wonderful instrument of life, 
 to honour the word. 
 
 How shall the preacher's growth be gained f 
 It can never be gained save by planning 
 for it. Growth will come through service, a 
 live preacher will be trained by his calling; 
 but even the service will decline without the 
 systematic enrichment of life. The ceaseless 
 giving of the preacher demands a ceaseless 
 getting. How often a minister's library tells 
 the story of his life ! The books of college 
 and seminary days, when his intellectual 
 life was under guidance, a few books of 
 popular fiction, a few current magazines and 
 a church paper or two, — a scanty record of 
 weekly thinking. The strong new books 
 are not there, the new light upon the Bible, 
 the modern interpretations of great truths 
 and of the life of the age, the records of 
 dynamic movements. A preacher must be 
 alive to his fingertips, if he is to minister to 
 an age like ours. 
 
 No man should enter upon his church year 
 without a plan that shall in a large sense 
 cover his private study and his public teach- 
 ing. There is no planless growth. There 
 is no strength of the Church that is not 
 
200 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 built up step by step. The plan will save 
 life from being broken into unrelated frag- 
 ments, from being squandered in useless 
 trifles. It means a large vision of life, the 
 redemption of its time, the vitalizing of its 
 powers, the worthy accretion of the material 
 and sense of message. 
 
 "The preacher can plan his studies in 
 theology, history, biography, and poetry, — 
 four branches indispensable to a man who 
 wishes to be a master-teacher of men. Cer- 
 tain subjects will be assigned to each of the 
 years, and certain volumes will be set apart 
 for each of the months, and no sort of con- 
 spiracy on the part of men or devils will be 
 allowed to break down the minister's de- 
 termination to pursue the prearranged course 
 to its end. Desultory reading and spasmodic 
 study have slain their thousands. A man 
 who forms a clean-cut plan and clings to it 
 heroically through the oppositions of the 
 years is a man who advances in wisdom and 
 in stature and in favour with God and men." 
 (Jefferson, "The Building of the Church," 
 page 264.) 
 
 The phrase "a good mixer" may stand for 
 a cheap and superficial kind of minister, 
 but it voices a demand for the knowledge of 
 life that can come only from a sympathetic 
 
The Preacher's Growth 201 
 
 contact. The many current discussions, such 
 as Mr. Francis Leupp's, in a recent Atlantic, 
 are not always intelligent criticisms of present 
 theological training, but they rightly insist 
 that the preacher must be trained as a man 
 of humanity and not a man of a class. Not 
 only his duties, but his recreations, should 
 bring him close to the haunts and bosoms 
 of men. He should make a cult of friendship. 
 For the sake of his own manhood he needs 
 to grow in heart-lif e, to grow in sympathy and 
 appreciation and hopefulness, in all that will 
 strengthen his kinship with men. 
 
 And then the preacher must love his calling 
 above every other, rejoice that he is alive, 
 with such opportunities of loving service 
 and growing speech. He would be nowhere 
 else and do nothing else in the world. He 
 would cherish all the high traditions of his 
 profession and eagerly use the means for 
 a nobler message and a more winning speech. 
 The preacher must be alive if he would 
 be the interpreter and transmitter of a living 
 word. Like his master, he comes that men 
 may have life and have it abundantly. Only 
 as he is open to the messages of God, only 
 as the life of humanity sweeps through his 
 own being, can he voice the meaning of God 
 and lead men into the fulness of life. 
 
202 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Such a preacher will never grow old. 
 Life will have its unfading interest and charm. 
 Truth will never lose its wonder. The work 
 of helping men into a better life will never 
 grow dull. He will have the abiding spirit 
 of youth. He will bring forth fruit in old 
 age. It would be well if we talked less of the 
 dead line of the ministry, and thought more 
 of the power of an endless growth. Mr. 
 De Morgan, the English artist and novelist, 
 wrote "Joseph Vance " at sixty-seven, and 
 began a new day for the English novel. Our 
 Dr. Weir Mitchell, the eminent physician and 
 writer of Philadelphia, kept adding to our 
 delight in story and poem as though he were 
 a man of forty. And Alexander Maclaren 
 was still a matchless preacher at eighty-two. 
 
 "Grow old along with me, 
 The best is yet to be, 
 
 The last of life for which the first was made. 
 Our times are in his hand, 
 Who saith, 'A whole I planned, 
 Youth shows but half; trust God; see all, nor be 
 afraid I'll 
 
LECTURE X. THE PREACHER 
 AND HIS AGE. TIMELINESS 
 
 I Cor. 9 : 22. "I am become all things to all men 
 that I may by all means save some." 
 
 Rom. 12:2. "And be not fashioned according to 
 this age. 
 
LECTURE X 
 The Preacher and His Age 
 
 " Dangerous or not, I will preach it. 
 Twenty and two years have I seen truth 
 made of no effect by trying to suit it to cir- 
 cumstances. I will have none of it. I will 
 make myself all things to all men ; but I will 
 keep truth the same, immutable and eternal." 
 (Charles Kingsley.) 
 
 "The preacher should be the child of his 
 age. The atmosphere which he breathes is 
 that of the age in which he has been born. 
 He is the son of that special epoch. He owes 
 it reverence, but he does not owe it, nor any 
 age, servile homage or thoughtless flattery. 
 Reverence the age in which you live, but do 
 not dread it. Yield it the homage which 
 all those born in it are bound to give it, but 
 do not be enslaved by it. To put this in 
 another form, you must be in your age, but 
 you must not be wholly of it. Recognize 
 that you are the child of your age. Resolve 
 not to be its slave." (Bishop Boyd-Car- 
 penter.) 
 
 The two quotations from Paul and the 
 
 205 
 
206 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 words of Charles Kingsley and Dr. Boyd- 
 Carpenter present the seeming contradic- 
 tions of preaching to one's age, — the timely 
 and the eternal elements of the Gospel. 
 The preacher is to be in the world, yet not of 
 it ; child of his age, understanding it, sympa- 
 thizing with it, speaking its language ; fitting 
 his message to its deepest need; its real 
 leader and teacher, — yet above his age, so 
 that he shall see the long past from which 
 the life and truth of his age have come, and 
 able to see the better age to be, and work for 
 its better realization ; and able to present the 
 life that shall be the divine answer to every 
 age, Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, to-day, 
 and forever, "the eternal contemporary " 
 of the race. I wish to take up these thoughts 
 one by one. 
 
 I. We are children of the age. We draw 
 our nourishment from the soil of our age; 
 we breathe the atmosphere of our age. In 
 a very real sense we are what the age makes 
 us. We cannot separate ourselves from the 
 life of our time. The age ? What is it ? 
 This composite, this present expression of 
 manifold persons and forces, this intangible, 
 yet all-pervasive spirit of the air. It gives 
 us our ideas, it shapes our habits, it offers our 
 opportunities. 
 
The Preacher and His Age 207 
 
 II. And we must understand our age. It 
 is close to us — the very air we breathe — 
 and we are a part of it ; and this very close- 
 ness, this vital inseparable relation, may make 
 it hard for us to understand our age. It is 
 hard to objectify it. It is hard to get out 
 of its smoke and its dust, to look at it with 
 our reasons and not with our prejudices. It 
 may be easier to know the age of Calvin than 
 that of Moody or Phillips Brooks, to analyze 
 the doctrines of the Westminster Confession 
 than to understand the real belief of men 
 about us. The one may be found and studied 
 in authoritative books ; the other takes the 
 sympathetic heart and the slow impress of 
 long and patient brooding and fellowship. 
 
 I once went with a small boy to the Central 
 Park Zoo in New York. Like nearly all 
 boys of his age, he was intensely interested 
 in animals, and a more animated and happy 
 boy it would have been hard to find. After 
 several hours it was hard to get him away 
 from the cages of the animals. 
 
 The next day we went to Boston and while 
 there visited the Peabody Museum at Har- 
 vard, and here was a larger world of animals, 
 but all lifeless and fixed, the record chiefly 
 of the past. The boy was absolutely lost 
 in wonder. He dwelt in fairyland. And 
 
208 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 at the end of the day I said to him, " Which 
 do you like better, the Central Park Zoo or 
 the Peabody Museum ?" I confess to a great 
 surprise at the answer. Instantly he said : 
 "The Peabody Museum. The animals are 
 fixed, you know, so that you can really see 
 them." 
 
 The past has become fixed in some great 
 forms so that we may study and know them. 
 The present is in motion, swift and ceaseless 
 as a weaver's shuttle, and we do not always 
 know the pattern we are weaving. 
 
 To know the age in the sense of knowing 
 the men and women of the age, and in that 
 larger sense of knowing the environment of 
 life; the theories and hopes that form the 
 ideals of men, the spirit that controls their 
 actions ; the social and industrial and moral 
 forces that make the work and life of men ; 
 — this is the interpreter's call and difficulty. 
 We must try to know man as the individual 
 and man as a part of present-day humanity, 
 if we are to preach to our age. 
 
 III. And we must appreciate the life and 
 truth of our age. It is easy to fail here. We 
 may easily be the critic of our age ; it is the 
 severest and noblest task to be the interpreter 
 of the age. Our studies may glorify the past. 
 The men and institutions may seem large 
 
The Preacher and His Age 209 
 
 in the distant haze, as the features of a 
 landscape. Or the visions of the future may 
 so shine in our eyes that we shall be almost 
 blind to the life in which we move. We 
 may think of its crudeness and failures, its 
 littleness and unbelief. 
 
 I do not believe any man can help his age 
 unless he rejoices in it, unless he sees the 
 forces for good and strengthens them, unless 
 he believes in the noble possibilities and calls 
 them forth. To be honest and fearless critics 
 is often our painful duty, but the pessimist 
 is powerless to help. A man must believe 
 in his age, if he is to speak to its heart. 
 The Christian optimist is the wisest leader. 
 
 Dr. John Owen, the Puritan, was a great 
 theologian and he thought profoundly upon 
 the truths that were emphasized by Puritan 
 theology. But he was as profoundly ignorant 
 of his own age and called the philosophy of 
 Sir Isaac Newton fatal to the authority of 
 Scripture. How many times have Christian 
 teachers repeated the folly of the council 
 that condemned Galileo ! Dr. Hitchcock of 
 Amherst was thought an enemy of religion 
 because he found the bird-tracks in the Con- 
 necticut limestone and argued long, pro- 
 gressive ages of creation. Horace Bushnell 
 was denied Christian standing because he 
 
210 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 saw the spirit of God working in other ways 
 than the traditional ones of the Church ; viz. 
 in the quiet, pervasive process of the home 
 and the school. One of our churches was 
 closed to Professor George Adam Smith 
 because the officers heard that he was a 
 higher critic. A professor of a western 
 university, who was also an officer of a church, 
 asked for the name of a minister who would 
 not take every occasion to denounce the 
 theory of evolution as atheistic. 
 
 It is the greatest blunder to think that 
 every movement of thought is hostile to 
 faith. It is intellectual and spiritual myopia. 
 The same faith which wrote the great con- 
 fessions is busy to-day on mission fields, 
 in hospitals and schools, in industrial better- 
 ment and social righteousness. The very- 
 interest in this earth, the passion for knowl- 
 edge and possession and pleasure is the 
 craving of man for a higher life and may be 
 turned in the end to the accretion of faith. 
 The new light that critical and historical 
 study has brought to the Bible, the new light 
 in which scientific thought regards nature 
 and man, is not of the Evil One. To say 
 that the Devil was the first higher critic 
 solves no problem, sheds no new light. We 
 believe in the living Lord, if our faith is more 
 
The Preacher and His Age 211 
 
 valuable than the pride of opinion. His 
 spirit cannot be shut up to those who teach 
 certain approved opinions. He is the spirit 
 of all true work, of all that shall add to the 
 knowledge and well-being of man. "He 
 is the light that lighteth every man that 
 cometh into the world." What is true in 
 nature is just as true as that which is true in 
 religion. And both are the word of God. If 
 evolution is the best working hypothesis of 
 life, then it should furnish the strongest helps 
 to faith. We can see that last of all he sent 
 his son, and that the future of the sons of 
 God is the development of the spiritual 
 principle of life. 
 
 "It is the office of science to discover truth ; 
 it is the function of the Church to make all 
 facts live in the lives of men. The one 
 illuminates the face of nature; the other 
 vitalizes human hearts with ethical motives. 
 Therefore, the more truth scientific discovery 
 may present to the world, the greater the 
 need of the Church to make this truth ef- 
 fective and productive in human character. 
 The swifter the progress of knowledge, the 
 larger the necessity and the opportunity of 
 the minister. 
 
 " Probably one of the chief reasons of the 
 present weakness of the Church is the fact 
 
212 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 that so many ministers have not come out 
 into the real modern world and laid hold of 
 its vast resources and applied them to human 
 life, in behalf of piety and morality as ought 
 to have been done. Overburdened with 
 fading traditions and fettered by archaic 
 forms, clergymen have often spoken in feeble 
 and flattering tones, when in fact the world 
 is full of newly discovered truths that reveal 
 God more fully than ever before, and that 
 ought to have been used to enforce moral 
 law. The permanent duty of the Church is 
 to transform truth into life, and the present 
 increase of knowledge enlarges this duty." 
 (Ckooker, "The Church of To-day," page 
 138.) 
 
 The social idealism to-day that demands 
 a restatement of truth is the work of Christian 
 love. Many good men fear the movements 
 of democracy. They regard the voice of 
 the people as a demon, not the voice of God. 
 But, in spite of many harsh and discordant 
 cries, we must believe, as we believe in the 
 living God, that the spirit that regards the 
 humblest man as of worth, and is trying to 
 write this into the law of the nations, giving 
 to every life a chance for use and growth and 
 joy, is from him who so loved men that he 
 gave himself for them. " Every one that 
 
The Preacher and His Age 213 
 
 loveth knoweth God." And surely the spirit 
 of humanity, the social consciousness, the 
 most distinct mark of our generation, will 
 give the Church a more adequate conception 
 of redeeming love, and make the Church a 
 mightier force for the kingdom, whose very 
 law is love, the filial spirit towards God and 
 the fraternal spirit towards men. The sense 
 of imperfect life, the desire to help, the prac- 
 tical love, is bound to express Christian 
 truth in terms of life. 
 
 IV. We must speak the language of the 
 age. It is easy for religion to have a speech 
 of its own apart from the language of life. 
 It comes from the historic nature of the Gospel, 
 its truths given definite expression and handed 
 down through successive stages of creedal 
 form. And all men who do certain things 
 belonging to their work become accustomed 
 to doing them in a more or less fixed way. 
 They move in ruts or grooves of thought and 
 speech, and in so far as this is so, it may be- 
 come a lifeless thing. We have all heard 
 Christian truth spoken in such a way that 
 it seemed a far-away echo. 
 
 We must speak in the language of the age 
 if men are to understand us. It must be as 
 real as farms and factories, as business and 
 politics. The power of Mr. Finney's preach- 
 
214 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 ing was that he threw away the theological 
 terms and the formal methods of the preachers 
 of his time and clothed the Gospel truths 
 in the garments of present life. And Mr. 
 Beecher did the same. All life mirrored the 
 truth, and the best speech of daily life was 
 instinct with the Evangel. 
 
 V. We are to speak the truth adapted to 
 the age. That there is a proper adaptation 
 of the Gospel finds ample warrant and il- 
 lustration in the New Testament writings. 
 It is probable that the different forms of the 
 Gospel narrative came not only from the 
 special nature and experience of the writer, 
 but were governed also by the needs of the 
 people for whom they were prepared. Both 
 the doctrinal and the practical emphasis of 
 the Epistles is brought out by the state of 
 the people to whom they were written. And 
 this principle of adaptation is a well-known 
 fact in the development of doctrine. Here 
 a latent truth has been brought to its full 
 place, there an old form has been modified 
 or carried to its logical conclusion or given 
 a new application. 
 
 The thought of the time in other realms, 
 the new truths or errors of doctrine and life, 
 have brought out one by one the develop- 
 ment of Christian truth. 
 
The Preacher and His Age 215 
 
 Absolutism in the Church led to the asser- 
 tion of the freedom of the conscience and 
 the doctrine of justification by faith alone. 
 Absolutism in the state led to the new asser- 
 tion of the sovereignty of God. Against 
 a formal and lifeless orthodoxy and a practi- 
 cal and hopeless paganism came the new 
 emphasis on the grace of God, able to reach 
 the downmost and farthest man. The hu- 
 manity of Christ was urged in an age that 
 had exalted him by theological speculation 
 beyond the reach of life. And the fuller 
 expression of the love of God came from an 
 age that was marked by new humanity. In 
 a day of growing social consciousness we are 
 finding a larger meaning of duty in the mes- 
 sage of Christ, the social implications of the 
 great Christian truths, and in his life and 
 sacrifice the dynamic for the larger ethical 
 demands. 
 
 We must speak truth to the need of the 
 age. Our emphasis may well be frequently 
 over against the special speculative or prac- 
 tical difficulties and errors of our age. 
 
 It is certain that our age is placing great 
 stress upon secondary causes. Everything 
 is traced to natural law, and a materialistic 
 and fatalistic philosophy practically governs 
 the thought and fives of many men. They 
 
216 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 doubt the possibility of spiritual truth and 
 the genuineness of religious experience. 
 
 Should not the emphasis be placed in our 
 preaching more on obey than believe? 
 Should we not try to awaken the moral sense 
 by demands upon it? Correct views of 
 Christ and the doctrines of grace are not 
 unimportant, but the primary matter to 
 men of our time is ethical, — it is the attitude 
 of the inner life to Christ's ideal of life. And 
 the moral conditions of faith should be 
 pressed with all the force and persuasion 
 possible. 
 
 Closely allied with this is the practical 
 apologetic of religious and philanthropic 
 movements. A wise teacher said to a young 
 minister that if he were in the pulpit he would 
 preach once a Sunday on some truth or duty 
 of the Christian faith, and then the second 
 time give some example of the practical 
 application of the truth to life, the biography 
 of some noble Christian leader, the study 
 of some missionary or social or philanthropic 
 effort. This meets the practical test which 
 men are demanding of every sphere, and 
 equally of religion. To show that Christian 
 faith is an effective life, leading to the noblest 
 character and to the welfare of men, is 
 preaching to the need of the age. 
 
The Preacher and His Age 217 
 
 And we must speak truth in the form that 
 the age will understand and receive. Men 
 are studying life and the relations of life, 
 and there is faith in the common man. 
 Biology, sociology, democracy, are forms of 
 the age-truths. And these facts must color 
 and shape the truth, if we really preach to 
 the men of our time. 
 
 Take the doctrine of sin. It is not enough 
 to discuss it as our fathers did. That may 
 not be enough to convince of sin and bring 
 to the life of genuine faith men whose private 
 lif e is irreproachable, but who are guilty of the 
 gravest offences against the well-being of the 
 many. "Sin and Society" shows how the 
 sense of society must give a new and deeper 
 sense of responsibility. 
 
 Or take the doctrine of the Atonement. 
 In an age that dwells upon faith and con- 
 ceives every truth, not as a matter of plan 
 and outer word, but of vital inner relation, 
 it is not enough to speak of the death of 
 Christ as a plan of salvation, and faith as a 
 transaction. It must be presented as the 
 law of life, as the personal relation of God to 
 man, and illustration of the principle of all 
 life, God and man under one divine law. 
 
 That's the way you will find it again and 
 again in the New Testament. That's the 
 
218 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 special form that John gives to it, the deepest 
 philosopher of faith. " Hereby perceive we 
 love, because he laid down his life for us; 
 and we ought to lay down our lives for the 
 brethren." The Cross is the principle of the 
 helpful life. 
 
 Let us always follow the constructive 
 method in presenting what may seem new 
 views of truth. Truth is for life, and you 
 are after lives. It is not the question of 
 liberal and conservative so much as the spirit 
 and method of the man. If the preacher has 
 the patient, truth-loving qualities of the 
 genuine scientific spirit, if he is humble and 
 devoted, without pride of opinion and lust 
 of power, intent solely on truth for the soul's 
 sake, he can be trusted, he is under the spirit 
 of God. "I would not disturb the most 
 superstitious faith if I could not put a better 
 in its place." (Maurice.) 
 
 And let us try to turn the new knowledge 
 and experience of the age to faith. To show 
 the presence of God in the life of to-day, to 
 help men to see that the plan of God is 
 being unfolded in the work of scientist and 
 philosopher, statesman and toiler, — that 
 all life is in the plan of God and will in the 
 end reveal Christ, — is true preaching to the 
 age. 
 
The Preacher and His Age 219 
 
 VI. We are to speak the truth that is ageless. 
 
 The real problem is how to lift men above 
 their times for spiritual use, to give men 
 elevation and outlook. The true historic 
 spirit will help to this. No age stands alone 
 in its life and in its problems. It is only one 
 phase of the continuous life of the race. We 
 need to cultivate the historic sense of religion, 
 to get rid of the feeling that we have dis- 
 covered truth for the first time. The past is 
 true and lives in all that we know and feel. 
 Other men have laboured and we have entered 
 into their labours. And the faithful ones of 
 the past do not receive the full promise. 
 There is a unity of faith that demands our 
 contribution — "that without us they should 
 not be made perfect." 
 
 We need to feel the unity of life and the 
 unity of faith. And through the ages the 
 living Christ stands alone fitted to the power 
 of an endless life ; he alone is found worthy 
 to open the book of human destiny. Unbelief 
 comes through the forces of life and can be 
 met only by a truer, greater life. The person 
 of Christ meets the need of every age. Here 
 is the chance of growth, without the weakness 
 of faith. In him is stability of truth with 
 the progress of life. 
 
 "If you are to be ministers to the sorrows 
 
220 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 and teachers of the ignorance of men, you 
 must grasp something which is sure and 
 changeless. You must be ready to speak 
 with modesty, but also with conviction and 
 moral earnestness. We may not, we cannot, 
 claim to satisfy all the doubts, and to solve 
 all the problems, which beset the minds of 
 men of our generation, but we may have, not- 
 withstanding, a clear and assuring word for 
 their hearts and consciences. For this we 
 need to go back to the simple and spiritual 
 attitude of the childlike in heart. Our 
 glance must never be only around us. We 
 need to look upward and inward if we are to 
 bear any true message to those who are around 
 us. Whatever confusion may fill our minds, 
 in God who is the Father of all, in the Son in 
 whom is redemption for all, in the Spirit by 
 whom all may be sanctified, there is no change. 
 
 " There are truths and spiritual principles 
 which do not change. We must lay hold 
 of these principles if our message is to be a real 
 and assuring one to men who live in the midst 
 of so much that is liable to change. " (Dr. 
 Boyd-Carpenter.) 
 
 Christ is the Eternal Contemporary and, 
 when truly presented, he will not fail of 
 meeting the deepest needs of men. 
 
LECTURE XI. SIMPLICITY OF 
 SPEECH 
 
 II Cor. 11:3. "I fear lest by any means your minds 
 should be corrupted from the simplicity that is toward 
 Christ." 
 
 Matt. 5:37. "Let your speech be yea, yea; nay, 
 nay." 
 
LECTURE XI 
 
 Simplicity of Speech 
 
 I have been speaking in these lectures of 
 some vital elements of preaching; they are 
 spiritual qualities, not external ; they belong 
 essentially to a man's conviction and sympa- 
 thies and conduct. It cannot be said often 
 enough that the man makes the preacher. 
 And I am not departing from this principle 
 when I speak of the way the truth and life 
 are spoken. Style is vital. The Frenchman 
 long ago gave the truth its sententious form. 
 Simplicity of speech is something vital. It 
 has a living connection with the preacher 
 and his work. 
 
 What is simplicity of speech? It is the 
 exact correspondence between the world 
 within and the world without ; between the 
 substance and the form of the message, be- 
 tween the thought, feeling, and purpose, and 
 the expression of them. One can go deeper 
 than this and say that it is to hold truth 
 and speech with clear-grained sincerity; to 
 spare no pains to find the truth and to follow 
 its leading, and to remove all obstruction 
 223 
 
224 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 from its clear shining. Simplicity is being 
 true to one's self and the truth. It is doing 
 everything for truth and nothing for show. 
 It is to serve men and not to please self. 
 
 It is something more than clearness, though 
 it is not always easy to tell just what the 
 something more is. It is clearness — there 
 can be no simplicity without clearness — 
 but clearness with an added grace. It is 
 the added grace of humility that keeps self 
 from holding or deflecting the pure rays of 
 truth. It is the added grace of beauty that 
 so presents truth that it shall win its way. 
 I find a definition in a recent Outlook in an 
 article on "Givers of Good Music." It says 
 of Mr. Hugo Heerman, the concert master 
 of the new Cincinnati orchestra, "Few 
 violinists of the day equal Mr. Heerman in 
 musicianship. As a soloist he makes no 
 display. When he comes upon the stage, 
 he appears like a quiet, studious German 
 professor, and when he plays, he plays as if 
 he were not thinking of himself or his tech- 
 nique or even of his instrument, but only 
 of the music ; and he plays so that the 
 audience forgets everything but the music 
 too." That is the simplicity of playing, 
 and the simplicity of speaking is so that the 
 audience will forget the speaker and even 
 
Simplicity of Speech 225 
 
 the way he is doing it, and think only of the 
 message. 
 
 Three contemporaneous London preachers 
 were thus described. The first made you 
 feel what a wonderful man he was ; when the 
 second spoke you were lost in admiration at 
 the way truth was unfolded. You said 
 " What a wonderful sermon ! " But when the 
 third spoke you soon felt your own need and 
 what a wonderful Saviour you had. Was not 
 this the simplicity that was toward Christ ? 
 
 Simplicity of speech must be a relative 
 matter. It must have regard to the truth, 
 the person, and the audience. The truths of 
 the Gospel are not alike. Some make their 
 appeal to the commonest thought and ex- 
 perience, and others are reached through 
 imagination or some height of spiritual 
 attainment. To talk to some people of the 
 fragmentariness of life and the unifying 
 power of faith would signify little. They 
 do not think in universals. Everything is 
 personal and concrete. While others would 
 find the very answer to life in such a message. 
 And simplicity of style is not a fixed matter, 
 to be reduced to definite laws of words and 
 sentences. The great, rushing flood of 
 Phillips Brooks is no more like the straight 
 speech of Mr. Moody than the water-main 
 
 Q 
 
226 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 is like the river, with its thousand springs 
 in the mountains. But both carry the simple 
 water of life. 
 
 Horace Bushnell suggests that words may 
 not wholly reveal. The best speech is not 
 a perfect instrument. There is always more 
 in a man's heart than comes to his lips. 
 And life is not as common and plain as the 
 garden walk. Life sometimes shades into 
 mystery as the landscape shades into the 
 distant blue, and simplicity is not violated 
 if it convey the infinite reach of truth and 
 make the soul reverent before what it knows 
 as reality but cannot see to the utmost verge. 
 
 But — the ideal of all writing and speak- 
 ing is simplicity. It might be called the 
 truthfulness of nature. Mr. Charles Dudley 
 Warner has said that it was the immortal 
 element in literature. And we know that 
 when men speak in this way, it has been 
 gained at a great price. To think truly, to 
 have genuine feeling concerning the truth, 
 and to speak so that men may see and feel 
 as we do — this is the highest art because 
 it is coming back to nature, the childlike 
 spirit of simplicity. 
 
 All true education tries to do three things 
 for us ; to help us see things as they are, to 
 draw just conclusions from them, and to 
 
Simplicity of Speech 227 
 
 express these truths accurately and con- 
 vincingly. 
 
 What are the reasons for simplicity of speech f 
 The pulpit has special need of simplicity; 
 simplicity of thought and simplicity of style. 
 And unless the preacher realizes its impor- 
 tance, and thinks about it and tries in 
 every reasonable way to make himself fully 
 understood by the people, he will fail in this 
 primal and necessary virtue of the pulpit. 
 And if he fails there, the failure is radical. 
 No matter how much energy and earnest- 
 ness he may put into single expressions and 
 into his delivery, no matter how much beauty 
 there may be in single parts, if the people 
 do not fully get the message, the preacher is 
 not in the best sense a teacher of truth. One 
 of our weekly papers has recently published 
 a striking article by an elder, setting forth 
 a plea for "a chair of simplicity. " 
 
 We ought to realize that what may be 
 clear to us as trained men, acquainted with 
 the thought and style of books, and familiar 
 with the special discussions of theology, may 
 fail to convey clear, distinct impression to 
 some of our hearers. We shall have as well- 
 trained men in our audiences as ourselves. 
 And the plea for simplicity is no plea for 
 weakness. It is the plea that we are speak- 
 
228 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 ing to instruct and win men and not to please 
 ourselves. And therefore our style is not 
 to have the odour of the study, the exclusive 
 tone of culture, but the qualities that shall 
 win their way directly and easily into the 
 thoughts and sensibilities of men. In the 
 preface to the life of Dr. John Hall, his son, 
 the biographer, says : 
 
 "He gave his life for his generation. He 
 sought no reputation as either a theologian 
 or a man of letters. Indeed he deliberately 
 turned away from work great gifts fitted him 
 to do, for that which he deemed more im- 
 portant ; the calling of men to life eternal in 
 Christ Jesus our Lord. The purpose of these 
 pages is to prolong a little the savour of his 
 memory, to interpret, however weakly, the 
 sincerity and singleness of aim that marked 
 the man, to a generation that needs inspira- 
 tion to simplicity." 
 
 We need, then, to keep the people constantly 
 in mind in our speech; the whole people, 
 not a few favoured ones. We must reckon 
 with a good deal of mental inertia on the part 
 of an audience. What is not understood 
 readily will not be understood at all. And 
 where there is a failure to understand, the 
 mind begins to wander, and so important 
 truth and hard study are lost. 
 
Simplicity of Speech 229 
 
 The very familiarity with the general 
 features of the Gospel may be a hindrance, 
 not a help to simplicity. Truth must be 
 put in sharper, clearer, more distinctive forms 
 of expression that there may be intelligent 
 hearing, that the particular phase or relation 
 of truth may not be confounded with some- 
 thing else. Singleness of thought and single- 
 ness of aim and the disciplined speech that 
 shall make truth vocal give to simplicity 
 its importance and force. 
 
 How shall we gain simplicity of speech? 
 I say gain, for, in the best sense, it is not 
 a gift, but an attainment, a long, patient, 
 laborious discipline of life and of speech. 
 It is both an intellectual and moral and 
 rhetorical product and comes from the union 
 of all these elements. 
 
 Simplicity of thought lies back of simplic- 
 ity of speech. Not theological uncertainty, 
 not conflicting views of truth, but that 
 singleness of thought which is called by 
 Paul the " simplicity toward Christ. " Clear 
 thinking lies back of clear style. If a man's 
 thoughts are hazy and obscure, lacking in 
 sharp outline and well-defined relation, the 
 expression must partake more or less of the 
 same lack. 
 
 Canon Liddon was a man of clear and 
 
230 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 sharply defined thought and had little sym- 
 pathy with a man half idealist and half 
 mystic, with any conception, however great, 
 if it were dim and vague. And he once said, 
 when a dense fog had spread over London, 
 that Bishop Westcott must have opened his 
 windows at Westminster ! 
 
 There can be no simplicity without a 
 worthy amount of thought. There is such 
 a thing as fatal fluency of speech, a love of 
 speaking for speaking's sake. There is a 
 fascination in standing before men, conscious 
 of a certain power of mastery. There is 
 a charm in the rhythmical flow of words, in 
 the subtle modulation of voice that seems to 
 bear no inseparable relation to the message. 
 It was said that if George Whitefield only spoke 
 the word " Mesopotamia," the audience would 
 exclaim that an angel from heaven had 
 spoken to them. And such a gift carries 
 with it the subtle temptation to speak before 
 God has spoken unto us. 
 
 Who has not felt after listening to the abuse 
 of the holy power of speech as if preaching 
 were almost worthless ! It is Shakespeare's 
 satire on " words, words, words I" 
 
 " Why did you speak so loud this morning ? " 
 said the young Henry Ward Beecher to his 
 father. 
 
Simplicity of Speech 231 
 
 "Oh, I always holler when I have little 
 to say," was the witty and laconic reply. 
 
 I believe that a serious danger to simplicity 
 of speech lies in the common feeling that a 
 minister must always have something to say, 
 and that he must speak so long whether pre- 
 pared with helpful thought or not. Every 
 man has a mission in teaching the dignity 
 and worth of speech, that words are to be 
 symbols of realities, that a sermon is to be 
 a message of God, — the words to be used 
 solely to convey the truth and impressiveness 
 of the message. 
 
 Vagueness of thought is fatal to simplicity. 
 If we are trying^to express what we but im- 
 perfectly understand ourselves, trying to 
 picture that which seems to loom large and 
 uncertain through the fog of lazy, weak, and 
 illogical thinking, the result must inevitably 
 be a dim and imperfect style. A man should 
 form the habit of close, consecutive thinking 
 upon a subject without the use of the pen. 
 It is a mistake to think that the mere use 
 of the pen will shape obscure thought into 
 simplicity. The lazy habit of beginning a 
 sentence without knowing how it will end 
 injures the singleness and simplicity of 
 thought. 
 
 Then there are men who affect profound 
 
232 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 thought. They are never simple preachers. 
 There are profound thinkers who have taken 
 no pains to make their thought simple in 
 expression and so intelligible to common 
 minds. Bishop Butler is an example of this 
 in his great " Analogy." Robert Browning, 
 though the profoundest master of the human 
 heart since Shakespeare, is almost a crypto- 
 gram to many readers, and numerous are the 
 witticisms at his expense. It is said that 
 Jean Paul Richter was once asked the mean- 
 ing of an obscure passage. He said, "once 
 there were two who knew, God and Jean 
 Paul ; but now God alone knows ! " 
 
 There are men who speak only for the 
 thoughtful world. To make philosophic and 
 scientific truth popular by putting it in 
 simple and intelligible form is called among 
 the Germans "to vulgarize it," with some- 
 thing of the accent of contempt. But our 
 example of teaching is not to be taken from 
 the world's greatest ones, but from him of 
 whom it was said, "the common people heard 
 him gladly." It is the glory of the Gospel 
 that it is to be vulgarized, brought close to 
 the thought and need of the people. And 
 it should be the ambition of every pulpit 
 to be heard just as the Master was. 
 
 There are men called of God to minister 
 
Simplicity of Speech 233 
 
 to certain types of mind, to certain tastes 
 and conditions. Spurgeon and Liddon were 
 both simple; each intent only on the truth 
 for life, each having the spirit of moral great- 
 ness, the loss of self in the message. Yet 
 each was true to his nature and providential 
 training. The one spoke from his homely 
 wit, and sturdy common sense, and great 
 heart, and touch with common life. The 
 other made learning and culture, a long view 
 of thought and life, give breadth and force 
 to his message. The one ministered chiefly 
 to humble folk ; the other spoke to all classes 
 and conditions of men. And each had power 
 by the genuineness of his word, and his rec- 
 ognition of the essential man. Universal 
 sympathy conditions this ministry of truth 
 to the common heart. There can be no great 
 art without it. An authority in musical 
 criticism has said, "An exclusive, contempt- 
 uous, undemocratic spirit is a sorry defect in 
 any musician.' ' How much more of him 
 who speaks, not chiefly of beauty, but of 
 character and duty ! 
 
 It must be confessed that there is at times 
 an affectation of profoundness that is akin 
 to obscurity. It is the weakness of some 
 strong men. The use of philosophic and 
 theological phrases, the terminology of the 
 
234 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 schools, that is practically speaking in an 
 unknown tongue ; or if the words themselves 
 are familiar, they are a scripture mosaic 
 that deals in general and abstract ideas. 
 The language of religious sentiment that 
 dwells in a mystical realm does not convey 
 a personal and specific truth ; neither does 
 the speaking of truth in sententious phrases 
 that sound deep and strong, but if tested are 
 found little more than sound. 
 
 The Bible is a treasury of profound truth. 
 It gives the literature of religion as well as 
 its alphabet. It is philosophy and poetry as 
 well as fact and duty. And it is our business 
 to teach the profound principles of the Gospel 
 as well as the easy lessons. And every 
 simplest truth on its Godward side at last 
 shades off into mystery where the eye of man 
 can no longer follow. We can make the 
 profoundest truth simple by clear style and 
 familiar illustration. And it is our business 
 to do so. 
 
 We once had a course of lectures in this 
 seminary by President Schurman of Cornell 
 on Modern Philosophical Thinkers and their 
 relation to Theology, — three Germans, Kant, 
 Hegel, and Schleiermacher ; three English, 
 Hume, Mill, and Spencer. More difficult 
 subjects it would be hard to conceive, and 
 
Simplicity of Speech 235 
 
 yet he made them so interesting and under- 
 standable by personal incident and familiar 
 illustration that the audiences grew until 
 they were removed from the chapel to the 
 audience room of the First Presbyterian 
 Church, and the older pupils of the high 
 school were constantly found among the 
 listeners. 
 
 It was the power of Abraham Lincoln that 
 he put great principles in a way that appealed 
 to the common intelligence and common 
 sense of his audience. He had the pro- 
 foundest respect for the average man, and he 
 could not be satisfied until he so held his 
 thought and so clothed it that it found the 
 heart of the average man. 
 
 Is it possible to make all truth simple? 
 I answer — all truth as far as we know it. 
 All truth that we ourselves see, and just as 
 far as we see it, we can clothe in simple 
 language if we give ourselves to it. But 
 the language of the pulpit may convey and 
 it ought to convey something of the mystery 
 there is about our life and the far greater 
 mystery of Godliness. 
 
 The style of Horace Bushnell would not 
 be fitted to the life of our age. We demand 
 something more direct and concrete and vivid. 
 We do not like to think quite so hard. We 
 
236 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 wish to listen without conscious effort. The 
 clouds and the storm sometimes gather about 
 Bushnell's pathway, but there are always 
 rifts into the infinite blue beyond. And it 
 must have been a wonderful training in 
 thought, in reverence and ideality, in the 
 deeper elements of faith, to have heard his 
 word. The language of the pulpit thus 
 serves its high purpose if it helps to teach 
 the lesson of reverence and humility. 
 
 The moral qualities of simplicity are in 
 personality. It may be enough to say that 
 a sincere manhood, seeking the truth and 
 nothing else, seeking the true life of men 
 and nothing else, will surely lead to that 
 singleness of thought and singleness of aim 
 that are the moral source of simplicity of 
 speech. An earnest man cannot play with 
 words. He cannot create forms of speech 
 for his own pleasure. He will break through 
 the barriers of prejudice and indifference and 
 find the quickest and surest way to the heart. 
 And the childlike spirit of humility, free from 
 vanity and self-seeking, caring nothing for 
 the praise of men, will suffer nothing to 
 obscure the truth. 
 
 It is not necessary to dwell upon the rhetori- 
 cal sources of simplicity of speech. They 
 are familiar to all readers of good English. 
 
Simplicity of Speech 237 
 
 I think the preacher should be careful to 
 use natural illustrations, especially those 
 that belong to daily experience and homely 
 life, and such as rise from the subject as a 
 very part of the thought. And he needs to 
 make a study of words, the familiar word and 
 the exact word. John Wesley's advice to 
 his preachers was full of sound sense, quoting 
 the words of Aristotle, " Though you think 
 with the learned, you must speak with the 
 common people.'' And there is truth in 
 Vinet's saying, "For each idea there can be 
 but one word." 
 
 A recent writer compares Hawthorne with 
 a well-known English theologian. "The latter 
 is the awkward, lumbering gait of the village 
 clown in contrast with the strength and grace 
 of the Greek athlete. The English writer 
 spatters his target all over with bullets, 
 before he hits the bull's eye ; the great Ameri- 
 can says precisely what he means to say, 
 and says it in clear, bright sentences which 
 leave on the mind an unforgetable impression. 
 Who has not suffered under sermons which, 
 because the preacher did not know words, 
 jarred on all one's nerves with their crude 
 colours and harsh discords ; or because he had 
 never laboured to be concise, were full of 
 sprawling, broken-backed sentences, which 
 
238 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 came to an end, no man knew how; or, be- 
 cause he had never learned to marshal his 
 thoughts in due order, like Elisha's servant 
 ' went no whither ' ? " 
 
 And then the preacher should eschew all 
 exaggeration, the vice of the special pleader, 
 "the vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself 
 and falls on the other.' ' It shows a very small 
 faith in truth to try to make her walk on 
 stilts. We should have Milton's confidence 
 — "Though all the winds of controversy 
 were let loose, who ever knew truth put to 
 the worse in an open and free encounter ?" 
 
 "The mental and physical restlessness 
 which impress the observer of Sargent's 
 portraits of the men and women of our time, 
 the eager keenness, the total eclipse of con- 
 templation is typical of our magazine prose. 
 We force the note. 'If I don't exaggerate,' 
 says a scientist whose laboratory is justly 
 renowned, but whose popular magazine 
 articles give alarm to his friends, 'if I don't 
 exaggerate, the public will have none of me.' 
 So say the child and the chorus-girl, and all 
 lovers of the limelight and the megaphone." 
 
 And what shall we say of the preaching 
 that makes the end justify the means, that 
 uses coarse and flaming speech and manner 
 to tickle the ears of the groundlings, that has 
 
Simplicity of Speech 239 
 
 the consuming egotism to think that the 
 Gospel of the grace of God demands billings- 
 gate and vaudeville to win men with immortal 
 natures. It is a piece of impious impertinence 
 in the presence of God, a pitiful confession 
 of lack of faith in the power of truth and in 
 the spiritual nature of man. 
 
 The Gospel is never commended by care- 
 less or irreverent speech. It demands the 
 purest and best that we can give. No man 
 has spoken straight to the heart of the com- 
 mon man more than John Wesley did. He 
 reached the brutal paganism of the English 
 mines and towns. But England had no 
 truer gentleman in his century. He never 
 thought it needful to vulgarize his message 
 before any audience or to make any con- 
 cessions to coarseness. And, in our day, 
 no missionary has reached all sorts of men 
 more effectively than Henry Drummond. 
 He could not be true to himself or his Gospel 
 save by the purest speech. 
 
 "What concord can the English Bible 
 have with aught that is slipshod and mean ? 
 When we remember what manner of book 
 the Bible is, how its words "break into the 
 dull round of common life like a shaft of sun- 
 light on a cloudy day, or a strain of solemn 
 music in a mean street, what can be more 
 
240 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 unseemly than the vulgar speech and in- 
 credible anecdote which have so often been 
 its ignoble garniture ?" (Jackson.) 
 
 "A man's gifts of exposition and exhorta- 
 tion, his knowledge, force, indignation, humor, 
 pathos, lose nothing of their power to move 
 the most unlettered because they are linked 
 with dignity and purity of speech." 
 
 There is an undying charm in simplicity 
 of speech. There is an unequalled power in 
 letting truth make her own impression. 
 It is making speech the perfect instrument of 
 the Spirit of Truth. It is an ideal toward 
 which we may well strive. The masters 
 have been great because they have so largely 
 learned it. 
 
LECTURE XII. THE COST OF 
 PREACHING 
 
 Ex. 27 : 20. "And thou shalt command the children 
 of Israel, that they bring unto thee 'pure olive oil, 
 beaten for the light, to cause a lamp to burn continually." 
 
 Luke 8: 46. " Jesus said, Some one did touch me; 
 for I perceived that power had gone forth from me." 
 
LECTURE XII 
 
 The Cost of Preaching 
 
 "The wrong notion about sermons has 
 led to a great deal of the bad talk which is 
 running about now among both laymen and 
 clergymen about the excessive amount of 
 preaching. 'How is it possible/ they say, 
 'that any man should bring forth two strong, 
 good sermons every week ? It is impossible. 
 Let us have only one sermon every Sunday ; 
 and if the people will insist on coming twice 
 to the church, let us cheat them with a little 
 poor music, and a few remarks and call it 
 Vesper service, or let us tell a few stories to 
 the Sunday School and call it Children's 
 Church ; but let us not preach twice to men 
 and women; it is impossible. ' It is impos- 
 sible if by a sermon you intend a finished 
 oration. It is as impossible to produce that 
 twice as it is undesirable to produce it once 
 a week. But that a man who lives with God, 
 whose delight is to study God's words in the 
 Bible, in the world, in history, in human 
 nature, who is thinking about Christ and man 
 and salvation every day, that he should not 
 
 243 
 
244 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 be able to talk about these things of his heart, 
 seriously, lovingly, thoughtfully, simply, for 
 two half hours every week, is inconceivable, 
 and I do not believe it. Cast off the haunting 
 incubus of the notion of great sermons. 
 Care not for your sermon, but for your truth, 
 and for your people ; and subjects will spring 
 up on every side of you, and the chances to 
 preach upon them will be all too few." 
 (Phillips Brooks, "Yale Lectures," page 
 152.) 
 
 This may seem easy advice from a man with 
 nature so gifted and training so large and 
 rich, but it helps to put before us the cost 
 of preaching. There are certain difficulties 
 to preaching; they lie in the way of all 
 success and must be overcome. The first is 
 suggested by the quotation, viz. the false 
 idea of the sermon. 
 
 The sermon may partake of the elements 
 of the highest literary art, but it is not to be 
 regarded as a work of art. It is an instru- 
 ment for service and not a work for intel- 
 lectual and aesthetic delight. Mr. Aldrich, 
 when editor of the Atlantic, returned the 
 poem of a certain young contributor with the 
 word, "If you had not written many others 
 as good, I would accept this." It was a 
 broad hint to write less and so better. We 
 
The Cost of Preaching 245 
 
 must not compare the sermon with any form 
 of literature, though we are to make the 
 sermon as good as we can. 
 
 The mental and physical indolence of many 
 men stand in the way of success. One of our 
 Indian ministers in his examination for licen- 
 sure was asked " What is original sin ? " And 
 he answered that he did not know what other 
 people's was, but he knew that his own was 
 laziness. Many a man has reached the dead 
 line long before he was fifty. If a minister 
 fails of the industry and persistence to grow, 
 he has already begun to die. The only lazy 
 line is the dead line. 
 
 Dr. Tucker quotes the saying of a keen 
 critic that the two besetting sins of the pul- 
 pit are laziness and lying. By lying he means 
 all unreality of life and speech ; and by lazi- 
 ness "the disposition or the willingness to do 
 the lesser in the place of the greater duty." 
 Our profession is no exception to the law that 
 success is only to be gained by the hardest 
 kind of work. Mr. Gilder describes Mr. 
 Cleveland as a fisherman. He was always at 
 it ; he never gave up. And that is what the 
 fisher of men must do. 
 
 Men who do not lack energy and industry 
 sometimes fail of the best work through un- 
 disciplined powers. They have never been 
 
246 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 trained to consecutive thought. They do 
 not know how to concentrate the faculties 
 upon their tasks. 
 
 The long, quiet hours of the study are 
 monotonous and tiresome. They want the 
 stir and colour of life. They are like children 
 who do not love their home, but are drawn by 
 the lure of the street. They must touch arms 
 and go dancing down the pavement. The 
 long, patient thought to follow the writer 
 through one of the New Testament letters ; 
 the rebuilding step by step of the world in 
 which a prophet lived and wrote, and so the 
 understanding of his message ; the meditation 
 upon the fact of Christ until he lives before 
 the mind a visible glory, in all the splendid 
 invitation and command of his ideal and 
 redemptive life; the effort to master some 
 prophetic mind who interprets God in modern 
 life ; the labour that makes the truth grow into 
 the living message, and expresses it so that it 
 shall be real and living for other lives, — 
 this is distasteful and impossible to an 
 untrained man. It is not the question of the 
 schools, but whether the preacher has a dis- 
 ciplined life. It is the question whether the 
 whole man, — body, intellect, and moral na- 
 ture, the whole personality — can be com- 
 manded and used by the purpose of ministry. 
 
The Cost of Preaching 247 
 
 The disciplined armies have won the battles 
 of the world. The trained preacher faces his 
 task without dismay. It is an impossible 
 task without God. But the servant knows 
 what to do and how to do it. He says with 
 George Meredith, 
 
 "Life is but a little holding, 
 Lent to do a mighty labour." 
 
 The body is ready to add to the power of the 
 spirit, the will bends to its work, the mind is 
 alert to receive and give. 
 
 There are dull men who are workers, who 
 do the best with their powers, and receive 
 the "well done" at last. God calls his ser- 
 vants from every sphere, and through mani- 
 fold experience, but every man thus honoured 
 is greatly disciplined in his work. Charles 
 H. Spurgeon took an old, historic pulpit at 
 nineteen, in the heart of South London, but 
 he suffered no man to despise his youth, and 
 grew by the unfolding and devotion of every 
 power he had. God helps those who help 
 themselves is a spiritual law also. The 
 Spirit is the friend of law ; his inspirations 
 come to the men who are faithful. 
 
 And the demand for disciplined and con- 
 centrated energy is found in the multiplication 
 of duties. The executive demands of the 
 
248 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 modern church through its multiform agencies 
 and activities, the social and civic calls upon 
 the preacher who has the gifts and spirit of 
 leadership, may leave little time and strength 
 for the preparation of the message. A man 
 needs the sense of proportion, putting the 
 first things first, and then the disciplined 
 strength to redeem the time, to make the 
 best use of his powers for his great task. 
 It is therefore well to think of the cost of 
 preaching. 
 
 All noble achievement seems to be so easy ; 
 there is such a joy in it that we do not see 
 the law of sacrifice that governs this too. 
 We look at some great masterpiece and dis- 
 miss the whole thought of the work with 
 that easy word — genius. But was it not 
 Leonardo da Vinci who offered the prayer 
 as he worked, — "Thou, O Lord, sellest all 
 good things at the price of labour!" And 
 Longfellow sees the process when he says, 
 
 "In the elder days of art, 
 Builders wrought with greatest care 
 Each minute and unseen part, 
 For the gods see everywhere." 
 
 ("The Builders.") 
 
 A modern preacher like Dr. George A. 
 Gordon or Dr. Charles E. Jefferson has such 
 insight into truth, such mastery of the in- 
 
The Cost of Preaching 249 
 
 struments of expression, that we think it 
 simply a gift. We do not think of the pain- 
 ful, patient processes of attainment, the slow 
 gains in many fields of thought, the increased 
 self -direction for a worthy end; the depth 
 of desire, the strivings of spirit, the devote- 
 ment of life to the chosen calling. He who 
 is not willing to pay the cost cannot have 
 the power. 
 
 "Oh, the painfulness of his preaching," 
 says quaint Thomas Fuller of some noble 
 preacher of his day. 
 
 I. It costs to receive the word of God. It 
 must be taken out of a dead parchment, from 
 between the covers of a book, and be made 
 into a living word. It must be read from 
 the many books of human life, from the 
 many coloured leaves of nature, and grow into 
 a conviction, an imperative, a passion that 
 shall carry the whole man under its sway. 
 Such a word does not come easily. If it 
 seems to be the inspiration of the moment, 
 there are forty years behind it, to use the 
 well-known saying of Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 It means the intellectual knowledge of the 
 word, the study that shall be able to apprehend 
 something of its true meaning. It means the 
 light of other knowledge that shall authen- 
 ticate and distinguish and vivify the word, 
 
250 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 the holding of the Gospel truths as essential 
 and rational concepts of the human mind. 
 
 It means the meditation upon these truths 
 of redemption; holding them fixedly before 
 the mind, holding the life to them as divine 
 standards, working them out in their relation 
 and application to life, finding their meaning 
 for oneself and for other men. Alexander 
 Maclaren, when asked his method of sermon- 
 preparation, humorously replied, — "it was 
 sitting in his chair and looking at the backs 
 of Meyer's commentaries. " All teachers of 
 the race, from Moses and Isaiah and Socrates 
 to the real prophets of our own day, have cul- 
 tivated the power of withdrawing the mind 
 from the strife of tongues and the confusion 
 of moral things and dwelling upon the essen- 
 tial and eternal truths of God and the soul, 
 as though there were nothing else in the 
 universe. 
 
 We must be quiet if we hear those voices 
 of God; not in the earthquake or the fire, 
 but in the still voice that is like silence itself. 
 We must be still if the eye of faith is to ob- 
 serve truths so far-reaching in their results. 
 We must rise above the din and confusion 
 of the local and temporal, if we are to see 
 truths for all men, and feed their hearts with 
 the word that abideth forever. 
 
The Cost of Preaching 251 
 
 The foundation on which the great tele- 
 scope rests must be laid deep down on the 
 rock-bed of the earth, that it may not be 
 troubled by the life about it. The least 
 vibration here may mean thousands of miles 
 difference up yonder. 
 
 It means prayer, the conscious and purpose- 
 ful effort to realize the person and presence 
 of God, the removal from life of whatever 
 interferes with such fellowship, the consider- 
 ing of truth and duty in that atmosphere 
 free from earthly mists and distractions, the 
 opening of the life to the Spirit to take the 
 things of Christ and reveal him to us, to 
 lead us into all truth, the seeking from God 
 the answer to the deepest cravings of the 
 heart. "To pray with the heart and the 
 understanding, to believe that God hears 
 prayer and yet verily doeth what pleases 
 him, this surely," said Coleridge, "is the 
 highest exercise of the faculties of the human 
 spirit." 
 
 And then to make all the truth our own 
 by honest acceptance and loyal obedience, 
 never suffering any truth to remain a the- 
 ory, a speculative knowledge, but as in the 
 prophet's vision " eating the roll" that it 
 may become a part of life itself. 
 
 "We have to remember that the Word of 
 
252 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 God is not merely a collection of truths which 
 can be written in a book and learned by rote. 
 It is not merely a number of principles which 
 require to be applied under new circumstances 
 to different cases as they arise. But it is 
 a vital energy passing from God to man at a 
 given time and in a given place, which may 
 be compared to a hammer that pounds the 
 quartz rock, or a keen blade that severs the 
 ligaments and nerves in the hands of a dis- 
 sector. For the reception of this word the 
 soul must, to use David Brainerd's expres- 
 sion, be ' drawn out ' ; it must pass up to 
 God like great feelers seeking nutriment; 
 it must wrestle and strive in its narrow cham- 
 ber until it is enlarged. If we are deter- 
 mined, if we are persistent in prayer, if we 
 can toil at books and men, always praying, 
 never fainting; if we can tread the desert 
 ways of meditation, always praying; if we 
 can, in humble temerity and with resolution, 
 made firm by weakness, grapple with God, 
 spirit to spirit, knee to knee, hand to hand, 
 — since he graciously permits it — we may 
 hear the still, small voice ; we may find truth 
 flowing towards us like the dayspring from 
 the dewy eyelids of the morning, or like the 
 waters which issue from the cool, clear foun- 
 tains of the untainted rocks ; we may speak 
 
The Cost of Preaching 253 
 
 to men, not in the faltering accents of sur- 
 mise, but in the sharp-cut and convincing 
 speech of thus saith the Lord." (R. F. 
 Horton. " Verbum Dei," page 202.) 
 
 We are to buy the truth and sell it not. 
 It costs to possess any truth, to make it 
 really our own, so that when we speak the 
 truth it is the issue of life. Bishop Greer 
 speaks of a plagiarism of doctrine quite as 
 evil as the plagiarism of words. "The 
 preacher who goes week after week to some 
 venerable storehouse of doctrine and opens 
 the door and takes some venerable doctrine 
 out, and gives it forth to his people simply 
 because it is taught by his church, without 
 having first, in some sense real and true, made 
 that doctrine his own, is a plagiaristic preacher, 
 and such a preacher is not an effective 
 preacher." ("The Preacher and his Place/ ' 
 page 76.) 
 
 And then further on in the same lecture 
 he speaks of a woman whose speaking moves 
 him as few preachers ever do. He does not 
 agree with some of her truths. "But she 
 believes them and her whole personality 
 seems to be saturated with them; and the 
 earnestness with which she speaks is not 
 simulated and feigned, but most intensely 
 real. And it is that real, unfeigned, and deep 
 
254 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 personal earnestness which touches me as 
 well as others and makes me more alive" 
 (page 94). 
 
 II. It costs to interpret the lives of others. 
 There are men of special emotional and 
 imaginative endowment who are able to 
 interpret life broadly and truly from their 
 own natures. And others from a world 
 literature understand the forces of humanity. 
 But no man ever preached well who did not 
 know life well, and this knowledge of life 
 comes from that identification with the 
 nature and needs of men which means the 
 life of self-sacrifice. It may be easy to know 
 our friends; it will not be a hardship to 
 sympathize with those of kindred nature 
 and tastes. But to try to know and win 
 those who care nothing about us, to enter 
 into the life of those of different nature and 
 training and social conditions, — this takes 
 the purpose and persistent devotion that is 
 never without sorrow and pain. To be a 
 man of humanity and not a man of a single 
 intellectual and social class means the sharing 
 of the burdens and sins and sorrows of others. 
 There is no other way to understand. 
 
 There are some men who do not know what 
 the other man thinks. There are leaders 
 of thought and service who are fearfully 
 
The Cost of Preaching 255 
 
 provincial, who only speak to their class. 
 Powerful conservative interests may check 
 constructive ideas and retard the spiritual 
 good of the people. 
 
 " Unconsciously the chair, the pulpit, the 
 rostrum, the sanctum, and the salon are 
 tinctured by the political creed of their 
 element, which is close-knit, positive, and 
 influential." (Ross, " Changing America.") 
 
 This striking illustration in political 
 thought of the principle that the eye deter- 
 mines the vision and that the eye is affected 
 by the life of the person, is just as true in 
 religious life. It is often a mark of self- 
 denial to break the bonds of circumstance 
 and feel with "men, my brothers." It is 
 the condition of spiritual leadership thus to 
 identify one's life with the larger world and 
 try to interpret the spiritual meaning of it. 
 It is not a pleasant thing to come into daily 
 contact with coarse and vulgar and selfish 
 men and women ; try to find the germs of 
 good in them and help it to grow. 
 
 Who that has heard Mr. Frank Higgins, 
 the sky pilot of the loggers, can forget his 
 story of the old man and his dog, that one 
 chord into a closed heart found and made to 
 carry the message of a new life ? 
 
 Really to know men in their sorrows and 
 
256 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 struggles, their hopes and fears, means the 
 ceaseless outgoing of sympathy, which is 
 the most exhausting experience of life. The 
 late Dr. Anson J. Upson, who was one of the 
 most successful and distinguished teachers 
 of his day, gave as his chief reason for leaving 
 the pastorate for the professor's chair, the 
 ceaseless drain of ministering to the afflicted. 
 We cannot stand of! and bear the burdens 
 of men at arm's length, or hire some one else 
 to take all the pressure of it. We cannot get 
 used to the sins and sorrows of men. We 
 can never, like the surgeon, make our min- 
 istry depend upon the mechanical certainty 
 of our stroke. We must constantly renew 
 the horror of sin. We must feel the defeats 
 and pains of men as our own hurt. " Ac- 
 quainted with grief" is the striking picture 
 of the burden-bearer. Grief ! so various and 
 so intricate ! Acquainted ! Only by effort, 
 by long and hard process, does one really 
 know. We must get under the load our- 
 selves. Whatever cripples, hinders, bur- 
 dens, pains my brother man, I must feel, if 
 I help him to endure or remove. 
 
 We can understand something of Paul's 
 meaning when he wrote to the Thessalonians, 
 "We were well pleased to impart unto you, 
 not the gospel of God only, but also our own 
 
The Cost of Preaching 257 
 
 souls, because ye were become very dear 
 unto us." What a glimpse we get of the 
 ministry of the true pastor in the holiday 
 verse of the late John W. Chadwick, when for 
 a moment he cast off burdens and became a 
 care-free boy again ! 
 
 "And oh, the gleam of the birches' stems, 
 And the new green of the pines, 
 And the hemlock-fingers sweeping low, 
 Till they touched the creeping vines ! 
 
 " And every bank was studded thick 
 With wild flowers sweet and rare ; 
 While the ferns seemed made of spirit-stuff, 
 They were so slight and fair. 
 
 " Could it be, I thought, in the world with this 
 There was dust and heat and glare ? 
 Could it be there was sorrow and hate and sin, 
 And terror and wild despair ? 
 
 " Alas ! it could ; but for this one day 
 I would live as if it could not ; 
 I would dream that the world from end to end 
 Was only this one dear spot." 
 
 This is how Dr. John Watson speaks of 
 the pastoral work of the true preacher: 
 
 "With the true pastor, visitation is a 
 spiritual labour, intense and arduous, beside 
 which reading and study are light and easy. 
 When he has been with ten families and done 
 his best by each, he comes home trembling 
 
258 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 in his very limbs and worn out in soul. 
 Consider what he has come through, what he 
 has attempted, what, so far as it can be said 
 of a frail human creature, this man has done. 
 He has tasted joy in one home, where the 
 husband has been restored to the wife from 
 the dust of death ; he has shared sorrow with 
 another family, where pet Marjorie has died ; 
 he has consulted with a mother about a son 
 in a far country, whose letters fill the anxious 
 heart with dread; he has carried God's 
 comfort to Darby and Joan, reduced suddenly 
 to poverty, and God's invitation to two young 
 people, beginning life together in great pros- 
 perity. 
 
 "It is exhausting to rejoice or to sorrow, 
 but to taste both sensations in succession is 
 disabling ; yet this man has passed through 
 ten moods since midday, and each with all 
 his strength. His experiences have not all 
 been wiped out, as a child's exercises from his 
 slate ; they have become strata in his soul.'* 
 ("The Cure of Souls," page 113.) 
 And Robertson Nichol says of him : 
 "The characters, the dangers, and the 
 sorrows of his people were ever in his mind. 
 More than once after his death he was called 
 an interpreter. He knew men so well that 
 he spoke home to them. He knew life so 
 
The Cost of Preaching 259 
 
 well that he understood the Bible and could 
 make it a living book. His familiarity with 
 life's tragedy and comedy saved him from 
 cynicism and caricature, and kept him sound 
 and sweet at heart. He exercised a priest- 
 hood of love as well as a priesthood of truth. 
 That priesthood of love was fulfilled with 
 constant vigilance, with unsparing labour, 
 and with such a severe self-denial as gave 
 dignity to his whole character.' ' 
 
 III. It costs to gain the power of true ex- 
 pression for the Message. Many of us know 
 the difficulty of self-expression. We know 
 how feeble our words are to express what is 
 in our hearts. To train speech so that it 
 will shadow forth our thought, so that it will 
 pulse with the feeling of our heart, this is the 
 longest and hardest art. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson had the supreme 
 gift of taking pains. "I imagine nobody 
 had ever such pains to learn a trade as I 
 had ; but I slogged at it day in and day out ; 
 and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire 
 industry) I have done more with smaller 
 gifts than almost any man of letters in the 
 world." (Balfour's " Lif e of Stevenson," 2: 
 169.) 
 
 Mr. Joseph Chamberlain gained his leader- 
 ship in the Commons by the rapier-like thrust 
 
260 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 of his speech, by his sentences that went to 
 their mark like rifle-balls. And he said to a 
 group of younger speakers, "The trouble 
 with you young fellows is that you don't 
 take enough pains with your speeches." 
 
 Every one knows the clearness of Mr. Hux- 
 ley's essays. Language never expressed 
 thought more unmistakably. And they were 
 written over and over until criticism had done 
 its utmost. And that's the way Newman 
 gained his style that has the revealing quality 
 of the light. "I have been obliged to take 
 great pains with everything I have written." 
 
 And when our words try to express God's 
 thought, to interpret the person and purpose 
 and love of the Divine Father, we may well 
 exclaim with the prophet, "I cannot speak; 
 I am a little child" ; or with another, "I am 
 a man of unclean lips." 
 
 We ought to feel that nothing is good 
 enough for the Gospel. The message is the 
 great thing, but surely the garment should 
 not be unworthy of it. It is a monstrous bit 
 of irreverence to deal carelessly with the word, 
 in any way to fail to commend the Gospel 
 by our speech and manner. 
 
 Colonel Verbeck of Manlius in an address 
 in this city told of the cost of a Japanese 
 sword. He described minutely the making 
 
The Cost of Preaching 261 
 
 of the sword of the old Samurai class. In- 
 finite pains were taken with it ; a man's 
 whole life often went to the making of a 
 knight's sword. And we dare not be care- 
 less with the forming of the word, the sword 
 of the Spirit. 
 
 Dr. John Watson believed that what could 
 be done to make style and manner winsome 
 ought to be done. We know what distinc- 
 tion he gave to his truth, how he laboured to 
 make his message simple and persuasive. Yet 
 he confessed to a lack. "He came to think 
 that he had spent too little time on the form 
 of his sermons. The want of distinction in 
 the case of a speaker dealing with the most 
 majestic ideas he thought a crime. ' It is a 
 species of profanity. It is an act of intellec- 
 tual indecency.' He said that if he went 
 back he would seek more earnestly a becoming 
 dress for the message of God." 
 
 I have spoken of the cost of true preaching 
 not to make it seem so difficult that men will 
 shrink from the task, but to make it seem so 
 great that men will seek divine help and the 
 discipline of life for it. No man is worth 
 much in the Kingdom of God who is not 
 beaten out of all self-conceit, and made to 
 see that in preaching also the way of the 
 cross is the way of growth and of power. 
 
262 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 But the man who stands as the true inter- 
 preter of the word and the lives of men and 
 comes to this at whatever cost has a sense 
 of privilege in his hardest work, and an as- 
 surance of ministering to the highest wants of 
 human life that nothing else can give. The 
 pain of discipline is nothing to the joy of 
 service. 
 
 Henry Drummond said that he had had 
 some of the finest joys of earth, — the joys of 
 books and of art, of nature and of travel 
 and sport, of friends and honour ; but there 
 was no joy like the assurance that your word 
 had brought the life of faith to men. 
 
LECTURE XIII. THE SENSE OF 
 MESSAGE 
 
 I Cor. 9: 16. "For if I preach the Gospel, I have 
 nothing to glory of; for necessity is laid upon me; 
 for woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel." 
 
LECTURE XIII 
 
 The Sense of Message 
 
 The sense of message is the prophetic 
 element in preaching. It is the mark of the 
 preacher, — the inner witness of his call, 
 the imperative reason for his vocation. 
 Amid the various voices of the world stands 
 the man who claims to speak for God. It 
 is not the question whether the pulpit has 
 declined or not, whether other work has at- 
 tracted the most gifted sons of the Church, 
 whether other means of teaching are multi- 
 plying the work formerly done by the pulpit 
 alone ; it is the question of its distinctive 
 claim and authority and influence. The 
 preacher is the man with a message. He 
 believes that he has a word of God, the mes- 
 sage of God's presence and working in human 
 life. It is a truth that has found him and 
 masters him ; he feels it to be God's truth 
 to his own life, and so he must speak it to 
 other lives. It is an absorbing, possessing, 
 impelling word; it is a "fire in the bones," 
 a "woe is me" in the heart, a "love con- 
 straining" on the lips. 
 265 
 
266 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 All great preachers have had the sense of 
 message, their very greatness, their impress 
 upon the age due to the positiveness and 
 dominance of the message. When Peter 
 and John were threatened by the rulers of 
 the Jewish church and forbidden to speak in 
 the name of Jesus, you remember their 
 answer, — 
 
 " Whether it be right in the sight of God 
 to hearken unto you rather than unto God, 
 judge ye ; for we cannot but speak the things 
 which we saw and heard " (Acts 4: 19). 
 
 And this has been the mark of the pro- 
 phetic spirits through the ages, the master- 
 ing, compelling sense of God's word, — Chrys- 
 ostom in the corrupt court of Constantine, 
 Augustine amid the conflicting philosophies 
 and race-conflicts of the Eastern Church, 
 Ambrose in the growing splendour and power 
 of the Western Church, Savonarola speaking 
 to the heartless, cynical luxury and culture 
 of Florence, — Hus, Wyclif, Luther, Calvin, 
 Knox, voicing the protest of the awakened 
 conscience against a worldly hierarchy, and 
 giving God's message once more to the in- 
 dividual soul. What a line of beacon lights, 
 of men with the profound sense of the pres- 
 ence and will of God ! And the moderns 
 who have kept the truth alive, who have 
 
The Sense of Message 267 
 
 helped to its larger incarnation in our age, 
 have been just as manifestly under the il- 
 lumination and guidance of the divine word. 
 
 "I don't care," said Robertson to a cap- 
 tious critic of his preaching. 
 
 "Do you know what 'I don't care' came 
 to?" asked his critic with sanctimonious 
 seriousness. 
 
 " Yes," was the prompt reply of the fearless 
 preacher. "He was crucified on Calvary." 
 
 When Robert W. Dale grew into the con- 
 ception of the living Christ, the vision dom- 
 inated his preaching ever afterwards, as the 
 sun drives away the mists and shadows and 
 floods the landscape. For months he could 
 think of nothing else and speak of nothing 
 else. Hugh Price Hughes, the leader of the 
 Wesley an Inner Mission, and Bishop West- 
 cott, of the Established Church, so under- 
 stood how the other half lives, and so felt 
 the burden of poverty and so understood the 
 relation between extreme want and godless- 
 ness and misery, injustice and wretchedness, 
 that they read a larger message in the Gospel 
 and taught the social implications of the 
 Cross. And from such men the pulpit has 
 gained the true accent for a social and indus- 
 trial age. 
 
 Mr. Moody was possessed by the thought 
 
268 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 that the redemptive power of Christianity 
 was in the love of God. He was so full of 
 the thought that he even stopped a stranger 
 on the street with the striking word, "The 
 grace of God has appeared unto all men, 
 bringing salvation. " "Men know that they 
 are sinners," he would say, "They do not 
 believe that God loves them. Only convince 
 men of this love and they will be saved." 
 And the love of God gave light and warmth 
 and power to his speech. It is borne in upon 
 Dr. Jefferson that the Church is too much 
 ignored in the religious life of to-day. Spir- 
 itual and religious movements are far wider 
 than the Church and their leaders often fail 
 to connect them with the motive and train- 
 ing that the Church gives. And so he 
 holds up the divineness of the Church and 
 calls men to a new loyalty to the body of 
 Christ. 
 
 These are striking examples of the sense of 
 message. And you notice the special em- 
 phasis in this sense of message. It is some 
 special phase of the Gospel, before neglected 
 or partially stated, that has become a reve- 
 lation to the soul and makes the prophetic 
 element and power of the message. Not 
 that the preacher sees only one phase of the 
 truth and so gives an eccentric Gospel. He 
 

 The Sense of Message 269 
 
 sees all truth from one standpoint and so 
 corrects and enlarges the view of truth, and 
 gives the message its convincing timeliness. 
 And so, through the generations, the ever 
 new, ever old Gospel, is unfolding its fulness 
 and divineness. 
 
 This truth is the more evident in excep- 
 tional natures. Men have the sense of mes- 
 sage in proportion to the fulness and vitality 
 of their natures. But every preacher may 
 have the mark of the prophet in some degree. 
 All will hold the essential truth of the Gospel 
 as necessary for their own life and so for all 
 men, and then each man will hold and express 
 the essential truth with the special light or 
 emphasis that comes from his experience 
 and that will fit him the best to serve the 
 religious life of his age. 
 
 The sense of message is not only the mark 
 of the preacher. It is also the justification 
 of the preacher. There is a professional 
 spirit that is always preaching, always in- 
 structing men in their duty, that points a 
 moral from every event of life. Such men 
 always wear the clerical garments. They 
 are fearful lest the world forget they are 
 preachers, and turn every song into a sermon. 
 For such professionals Mr. John Burroughs 
 must have written his suggestive essay, 
 
270 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 "Thou shalt not preach.' ' Some things will 
 come without our striving; Nature herself 
 is no mean preacher. 
 
 " Nor less I deem that there are powers 
 Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
 That we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness. 
 
 " Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum 
 
 Of things forever speaking, 
 
 That nothing of itself will come, 
 
 But we must still be seeking?" 
 (Wordsworth, " Expostulation and Reply.") 
 
 There are some experiences of life before 
 which silence is the divinest wisdom. The 
 more we speak, the more we darken counsel 
 without wisdom. The more we try to pene- 
 trate with our unaided reason, the more im- 
 penetrable the mystery grows. The preacher 
 may be as foolish as Job's friends. All we 
 can do and the best we can do is to be dumb 
 before the Lord. Life itself is moral and 
 spiritual, and we may trust men to read what 
 is written there. There are other ministries 
 of God beside the sermon. And it is well 
 that the preacher should let other voices 
 speak, that he should listen before he at- 
 tempts to preach. 
 
 But men will listen and not grow weary 
 to a man who has a real sense of message. 
 
The Sense of Message 271 
 
 Who ever tires of Thackeray's sermons 
 against the shams and foibles and snobbery 
 of the world ! We admit all that the critics 
 may say against the lessening of his art by 
 his weakness forever to moralize, — but we 
 never skip his sermons in the interest of art, 
 but read all the outpourings of this big heart 
 because it breathes the scorn of the base and 
 the love of the good. 
 
 There never was so much preaching as now, 
 and people never listened more intently for 
 the true and brave word. Only preaching, 
 as in every age of awakened moral life, is 
 often outside the churches. The preacher 
 may not stand with the sanctions of the 
 Church or use the familiar method of the 
 pulpit. He may be a President lifting up 
 the primary principles of public morality, 
 a Secretary of State, trying to interpret di- 
 plomacy in the light of Christian brotherhood, 
 a Governor calling the citizenship of a state 
 to a finer responsibility, an editor or a novel- 
 ist, voicing the dim and confused strivings 
 of an age, and calling for deeper reality in 
 religion. The preacher is the man of the 
 hour. 
 
 "But this modern preaching has shaken off 
 the shackles of the homiletic firstly and 
 secondly, it has escaped from surplice and 
 
272 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 pulpit and dim religious light ; it has ceased 
 to care for metaphysical formula, and girding 
 itself with the weapons of the time, it sallies 
 forth in broad daylight into market-place 
 and mill and legislature and court, to do 
 battle for the moral ideals of the race. And 
 the multitude throng and crowd to hear it. 
 Preaching out of date ? There is more eager- 
 ness to hear a worthy appeal to the sense of 
 duty to-day than ever before since Miles 
 Standish stepped on Plymouth Rock." 
 (Faunce, " Educational Ideals of the Min- 
 istry.") 
 
 Men will listen to the preacher with the 
 sense of message. They are always looking 
 for such men. The world cannot live with- 
 out his word. All the higher interests of life 
 depend upon this message from above. The 
 intellectual life of the world depends upon a 
 vital pulpit in ways it is not always willing 
 to acknowledge. The worth of man as a child 
 of God, the use of his powers in harmony with 
 the highest law, the aim of all achievements, 
 the welfare of man, — has its clearest teaching 
 and strongest support from the Christian 
 pulpit. And the social movement, to give 
 justice and humanity to all the relations of 
 society, where will it find the sufficient motive 
 and bond save in the message of the Gospel ? 
 
The Sense of Message 273 
 
 And the training of the individual life, 
 the gift of hope to the broken-hearted, sup- 
 port to them that are weary, the light of a 
 higher world upon the common things of life, 
 the certainty of the moral meaning of life 
 and the triumph of moral forces, — how can 
 the world live without the prophet's word ? 
 It would lapse into barbarism without the 
 open vision. 
 
 Ezekiel's vision may be honestly applied 
 to-day. A renewed temple signified a re- 
 newed Judaism. The waters that healed all 
 they touched, that made a garden of the 
 desert, that turned the dead sea into teeming 
 life so that the fishermen plied their trade 
 there, flowed from the altar of the sanctuary. 
 And the Christian pulpit is a source of cleans- 
 ing and quickening influences for the higher 
 life of the race. Religion depends upon its 
 teachings. We cannot magnify its office 
 enough. We cannot do enough to give it 
 honour and power. 
 
 Only, let us not measure the preacher by 
 the numbers that listen to him and the popu- 
 lar name he may win, but by the divineness 
 of his truth and the spiritual impulses and 
 the moral changes that can be traced to his 
 word. For this is the authority to which men 
 will bow, — not the authority of a church or 
 
274 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 a creed, but the authority of a life convinced, 
 directed, inspired by a message whose ut- 
 terance is as convincing as the light, that 
 awakens the sense of God and the need of 
 God, and leads to a life that bears in itself 
 the sanctions of its truth. "Upon this rock 
 I will build my Church," said Jesus of the 
 man who made the first great confession, 
 "And the gates of Hell shall not prevail 
 against it." I say again the sense of mes- 
 sage is the prophetic element in preaching. 
 How can one preach unless he be sent ! How 
 can one preach unless he have a message of 
 God to give ! 
 
 So, of all the questions about preaching, 
 nothing is more important than this, — How 
 shall the preacher have the sense of message? 
 
 The preacher must speak so much, he gains 
 such facility by his much speaking, that he 
 of all men is most in danger of idle words. 
 Tennyson waited twelve years for a home of 
 his own that he might be true to his calling, 
 find his own message, and give it a worthy 
 form. That is a keen criticism by George 
 Eliot of a well-known preacher of her day 
 that "he had the misfortune of speaking too 
 early and too easily upon the greatest 
 themes." 
 
 The sense of message is no natural endow- 
 
The Sense of Message 275 
 
 ment of a sensitive and magnetic personality. 
 All gifts can be used in its service, and the 
 highest gifts are not too much for its best 
 expression. But it is no gift of fluent speech. 
 It is deeper and harder than this. In fact, 
 natural eloquence may be its greatest hin- 
 drance. " Eloquence," says Dr. Horton, "is 
 a prancing palfrey that the Son of Man rarely 
 rides. " Many a false prophet has been 
 eloquent, and many a word of God has come 
 through stammering lips. 
 
 It is always to be kept in mind that a man's 
 message comes in some way from his life, if 
 it is a vital message. It is infinitely larger 
 than his life, an ideal ever before him, a 
 banner leading him on, but something that 
 he has found precious and that he is ever 
 trying to attain. And this gives to life its 
 criticalness and to all our experiences their 
 significance. A man is trained in his work. 
 It is the law of the spiritual life that we 
 learn by doing. The clearness and fulness 
 of a man's message comes by living. We 
 are in a world of beautiful and beneficent 
 order. Nothing comes amiss in God's world. 
 Nothing can be ignored, nothing can be ex- 
 cepted. ' ' The past meets us in every turning 
 point of the way." A life of singleness, his 
 "meat to do the Father's will," gave to Jesus 
 
276 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 the sense of certainty, and to his word its 
 divineness. 
 
 There are some strange and exceptional 
 ways of God's training. How vivid the 
 relation between experience and message in 
 the prophets of the Old Testament. Each 
 man stands out for the individuality of his 
 training and so for the individuality of his 
 word. The knowledge of his people and of 
 Egyptian life, the silence of the desert, and 
 the majesty of the mountains are read in 
 the law of Moses. The tumultuous passions 
 and dramatic experiences of David gave his 
 songs their universal message. The lessons 
 of hard and dangerous toil, the truth under 
 the stars and in the open fields, the contact 
 with life beyond the narrow limits of his own 
 people, are all in the ethical and social mes- 
 sage of Amos with something of the inevi- 
 tableness and universality of the will of God. 
 And Hosea could never have taught the long- 
 suffering and forgiving love of God and made 
 it the appeal of a purer life and loyalty with- 
 out the heart-breaking experience of his own 
 home. 
 
 "Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, 
 And doubt his own love can compete with it?" — 
 
 The tenderness and faithfulness of God are 
 read in the life and message of every true 
 
The Sense of Message 277 
 
 prophet. Without the obscure, shut-in years 
 in the little parish of Logiealmond, John 
 Watson might never have trained that power 
 to understand and interpret common life. 
 The song that voiced the deepest experience 
 of the human heart and the deepest lesson 
 of the Cross came from the sightless eyes of 
 young George Matheson. "I have learned 
 more of God since my little boy died than 
 from all the books I have read/' was pressed 
 from the suffering, but submissive, heart of 
 Horace Bushnell. The blackness of a father- 
 less world, the patient loyalty to the most 
 simple and primary fact of duty was in the 
 message of Fred. W. Robertson and gave it 
 a power over minds unsatisfied by the tra- 
 ditional teachings of the day. We do not 
 know what God has in store for us, but we 
 are sure that he has nothing but good. 
 And if he calls us through trying experiences, 
 we will not think of ourselves as the afflicted 
 ones, but get from it the truth of a nobler 
 faith. 
 
 The special influence of the times may help 
 to give the sense of message and shape its 
 form. Out of the movements of thought and 
 life, new light may be thrown upon the truth, 
 a new sense of need be felt and a new adap- 
 tation of truth be reached. We live in a 
 
278 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 larger world than our fathers. The limits of 
 knowledge that have been pushed back by 
 science reveal a more wonderful universe. 
 The thought of man that has grown by study 
 of all the past and by relation to the larger 
 life of the race speaks of a more wonderful 
 being. In the larger thought of nature and 
 of man we interpret anew the mind and will 
 of God. Christ as the most perfect mani- 
 festation of God is the interpreter and ruler 
 of all nature, and the law of life for all men. 
 Out of a mechanical world of the past, we 
 are privileged to enter a world of life. What 
 is our larger conception of God? What is r 
 our more vital conception of Christ? Is it 
 larger only because more diffused and vague ? 
 Is it vital only in the sense that it has the 
 mystery of life? Surely the spirit of God 
 in the study and work and expansion of the 
 world has a fuller truth for us, a new glory 
 for Christ. Shall the spiritual interpreta- 
 tion of our age give the preacher a deeper 
 sense of message and to his voice a clearer 
 and diviner word ? Every man whose nature 
 is open and sensitive enough to be impressed, 
 must record that impression in his own ex- 
 perience and so in his own sense of values. 
 And it should be said that men will find 
 a true sense of message, who have passed 
 
The Sense of Message 279 
 
 through no trying and peculiar experience, 
 who do not stand where they are forced to 
 feel the drift or sweep of the age-thought. 
 It may be the light upon the common ways 
 of life. To stand in one's place, to meet the 
 daily duties of our calling with cheerfulness 
 and enthusiasm, is the assurance of a growing 
 conviction of the worth of our calling and 
 the increased clearness of its message. The 
 path of duty lies mostly along the valleys, 
 but it will climb now and then the hill-tops 
 where the wider vision is had, where the past 
 is understood and the future unrolled before 
 the eyes. And he is surest of these moments 
 of revelation, of the sense of message, who is 
 most consistently given to the tasks of the 
 daily journey. 
 
 How shall the preacher have the sense of 
 message? That involves processes, habits, 
 that are common to all men. The sense of 
 message is intellectual and moral in its source. 
 
 What has the sense of message to do with 
 the intellectual life? It comes from such a 
 study of the Bible and the questions of re- 
 ligion that the great message of Christianity 
 shall be simple and clear. Dawdling over 
 papers and current literature will never give 
 it. Strength consumed in parish machinery 
 will never give it. The Church needs more 
 
280 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 prophets and not more priests. Only the 
 steady effort to master the great books of 
 religious experience will help a man to see 
 truth clear and see truth whole. A preacher's 
 library is the index of his attitude towards 
 the message; his intellectual methods the 
 revelation of his shallowness or the depths 
 of his spiritual life. Many things may be 
 unknown. His foible will not be an easy 
 omniscience. His strength will be the ex- 
 pert knowledge of the supreme question 
 of life. Nothing but honest, hard, self- 
 denying study can give a man the grasp of 
 the central, essential truths of the Gospel. 
 We should have more prophets in the pul- 
 pit, if men took more time to find the word 
 of God. 
 
 The sense of message comes from a knowl- 
 edge of life, from what men are thinking 
 and doing to-day. It will be a present mes- 
 sage and not the faint echo of other voices. 
 There can be little isolation to-day. So the 
 preacher fails of the nobility of his work who 
 speaks to a fragment of man, or to a narrow 
 group of natures and conditions. The pul- 
 pit sometimes fails to know the real diffi- 
 culties of life, the many obstacles and ways 
 of faith, the real processes of the human soul. 
 
 The preacher may not go beneath for- 
 
The Sense of Message 281 
 
 mularies and creeds to what is actually taking 
 place in the soul. He may not have a mes- 
 sage to life. To have this touch with life, 
 this sense of message to the men of his own 
 age, he must be alive to the thoughts and 
 interests of men. Whatever will interpret 
 the age, the air that all men breathe, and in 
 which they see and act, whatever will unlock 
 the secret of any heart, — that he will strive 
 to know, — philosophies, sciences, poems, 
 the day's work, — these may be vital to his 
 message as well as his Bible and theology. 
 The one will help the other. On his voyage 
 to Australia for his college evangelism, 
 Henry Drummond took a complete set of 
 Browning. And he wrote to a friend, 
 "None can approach Browning for insight 
 into life, or even into Christianity.' ' A 
 young country pastor, who was getting a 
 strong grip upon men, recently said, "I am 
 studying agriculture just now as much as 
 theology." The prophets of all ages have 
 had this spirit. The Bible is the book of life, 
 and its interpreters must know life. 
 
 Not until the knowledge of truth and life 
 becomes the personal possession does it have 
 the moral quality of message. The preacher 
 must be a witness before he can be a mes- 
 senger. The most effective message may be 
 
282 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 the testimony of life and speech. Not until 
 he finds the truth precious, can it be a word 
 of life to other men. Study gives it form. 
 Experience, call it prayer, meditation, the 
 resolve and effort to be doers of the word, 
 fills it with life. Experience is the element 
 that makes truth transforming, that gives 
 it the accent of certainty, the spell of au- 
 thority. Such a man will have something 
 to say. He speaks out of his own life the 
 message he has received, with the profound 
 sense that what he has to speak men need to 
 hear. The great message will be known and 
 felt and applied every time he speaks to the 
 actual life of men. 
 
 What will this sense of message do for the 
 preacher f 
 
 (a) It will be the teacher of effective speech. 
 There is nothing like the sense of message 
 to give definiteness and purpose to the work 
 of the pulpit. And purpose is the fashioner 
 of style, clear, vivid, personal, practical. If 
 a man has something to say, that he must 
 speak, that he is profoundly convinced men 
 need for their life, if he has something defi- 
 nite to gain by his speech, then he will find 
 a way to say it, the message will compel 
 training and command the obedience of 
 language and person. Nothing is suffered 
 
The Sense of Message 283 
 
 to interfere with the purpose. Nothing is 
 of use that does not convey the message. 
 Nothing shall be unused that may express 
 the message. There can be nothing vague 
 and diffused like the electricity of the at- 
 mosphere; truth must be brought to the 
 point of light and power. 
 
 When Dr. Robert W. Dale was giving his 
 lectures on preaching at Yale, he was asked 
 by the faculty and corporation of the uni- 
 versity to speak upon English politics. He 
 was a great citizen as well as preacher, and 
 had stood upon many a platform by the side 
 of Bright or Gladstone, and driven his own 
 conviction into the conscience of English- 
 men. But the presence of strangers, the 
 critical atmosphere of a university, the un- 
 certainty of their knowledge and sympathy, 
 made Dr. Dale hesitate in his speech. This 
 great public speaker seemed almost dumb 
 before his hearers. He seemed to be strain- 
 ing and struggling for utterance. But at 
 last his rich experience of English life, his 
 rich understanding and love of their history, 
 the great watchwords and leaders and aims 
 of his party, took possession of mind and 
 heart, drafted every power into use, and made 
 the whole man vocal of his truth. It was as 
 though some vast volume of water, held back 
 
284 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 by the work of man, had at last broken 
 through its barriers and swept all things with 
 it towards the sea. 
 
 The sense of message is the discipline of 
 sincerity and reality. It will give singleness 
 of thought and purpose; the distinguishing 
 marks of Chalmers and Liddon and Mac- 
 laren ; of Bushnell and Beecher and Brooks. 
 Alexander Maclaren said to a visitor, dis- 
 cussing his knowledge for half a century of 
 the English and Scotch pulpit, that the sub- 
 tlety and over-refinement and vagueness of 
 certain younger preachers of the Scotch 
 church, compared with the distinctness and 
 passionate directness of the best English 
 preachers, he felt, was due to the weakening 
 of the sense of message by the too exclusive 
 attention to critical and literary studies. 
 
 (b) The sense of message gives the personal 
 quality to speech. It is born of personal 
 vision and the sense of personal need. The 
 preacher puts his own life into it and so gives 
 life to others. There is no way in which the 
 person is so subtly interfused with the word 
 and vitalizes it. "It was real preaching; 
 it made me feel so uncomfortable,' ' was one 
 way of testifying to its power. "Whether 
 Augustine knew truth for all men, he knew 
 the sin of all men and had grappled with it 
 
The Sense of Message 285 
 
 in a death grapple as that worn and marred 
 face powerfully indicated.' ' 
 
 (c) The sense of message gives the courage 
 to be true. It is not an easy matter to speak 
 the truth. There is always the cautioning 
 voice that comes from the thought of one's 
 imperfect life. There are besetments about 
 the pulpit that may stifle its freedom. Shall 
 it speak what men expect? what suits 
 their religious and social views? Shall it 
 lull men into a low content? Shall it have 
 the optimism of the ostrich, burying its head 
 deep in what is and refusing to see what is to 
 be and what ought to be ? Shall it keep men 
 in ignorance of the highest truth, or of what 
 their own lives ought to be in the light of it ? 
 There are many reasons for modifying truth 
 and emasculating the force of the sermon. 
 
 " There will always be a demand for smooth 
 things, and an appropriate reward for him 
 who is willing to supply them in the name 
 of God. Popularity is a thing which will 
 always be coveted ; and under certain con- 
 ditions it is a thing to be thankful for. If it 
 means that the truth is prevailing, and that 
 men are yielding their minds to its sway, it 
 is a precious gift of heaven. It is a good 
 thing to see many coming out to hear the 
 word of God, and to both preacher and 
 
286 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 hearers there is a great deal of exhilaration 
 and inspiration in a full church. But popu- 
 larity may be purchased at too dear a rate. 
 It may be bought by the suppression of the 
 truth, — and the letting down of the demands 
 of Christianity. There will always be a 
 demand for a religion which does not agitate 
 the mind too much or interfere with the pur- 
 suits of a worldly life." (Stalker.) 
 
 But the preacher is not his own master. 
 He is the sent-man. He has a given word. 
 He cannot really believe the truth unless he 
 is faithful to it. He cannot really love men 
 unless he is faithful to them. 
 
 (d) The sense of message sustains the fervour 
 of preaching. It is the routine of life that is 
 so deadly for many men. It is the long 
 dead level that takes the heart out of them. 
 What new thing can be said upon this old 
 truth? How can men be made to feel the 
 truth when they have grown so callous by 
 its common handling ! And so the glory 
 of the morning fades into the dull gray of 
 the long day. When the fire burns low and 
 the word drags heavily, as it will sometimes 
 with the best of men, the sense of message 
 will keep a man at his task, and shed the 
 light of a higher world upon it, and connect 
 it with the final victory of the truth. Moral 
 
The Sense of Message 287 
 
 greatness is the moving among common 
 things with a sense of their divineness. 
 
 (e) And here to sum the matter up in a 
 final thought is the very secret of influence 
 on the manward side. Men will forget every- 
 thing save the truth when the preacher is 
 bent on giving nothing but that. Such 
 speech is signed with the Cross and has the 
 attractive power of the Cross. Men forget 
 everything, even time, when they listen to 
 a man who puts his very life into his message. 
 It breaks down opposition, penetrates dulness 
 and indifference, and produces conviction. 
 It quickens moral sluggishness and energizes 
 life to divine purpose. Nothing would so 
 stir the mass of indifferent, half-hearted, 
 worldly Christianity as the renewed sense 
 of message in the pulpit. 
 
LECTURE XIV. POSITIVE 
 PREACHING 
 
 II Coeinthians 4:5. "We preach not ourselves, 
 but Christ Jesus, our Lord." 
 
 I John 1:3. "That which we have seen and heard 
 declare we unto you." 
 
LECTURE XIV 
 Positive Preaching 
 
 We must be impressed with the positive- 
 ness of the Apostolic teaching. It is the key 
 of all the addresses, the note of all New 
 Testament writings. They were certain of 
 one thing : that Jesus was the Messiah, the 
 realization of Jewish history and hope, that 
 God had spoken through him, that his 
 death upon the Cross brought forgiveness, 
 that he triumphed over the grave, that he 
 was the living Lord, the giver of new life to 
 men. 
 
 They held these truths as facts, in a 
 simple, untheological way, — they were slowly 
 shaped into the great creedal forms by Greek 
 thought and Roman law, — but they were 
 unmistakable verities to the early preachers. 
 They believed them with all their hearts, 
 they gave their lives to them, they staked 
 their all upon them, they went everywhere 
 preaching them, and they spoke in a way to 
 convince men of their authority. They are 
 so certain of the truths, they are so bound 
 together as one thing in their minds and lives, 
 291 
 
292 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 that they call it "The Word," and their 
 enemies call it "The Way." 
 
 With what accent of certitude do they 
 speak ! 
 
 " Let all the house of Israel know assuredly 
 that God hath made him both Lord and 
 Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified " (Acts 
 2:26). 
 
 " This Jesus did God raise up, whereof we 
 are all witnesses " (Acts 2 : 32). 
 
 "Be it known unto you therefore, brethren, 
 that through this man is proclaimed unto you 
 remission of sins " (Acts 13 : 18). 
 
 "Justified by faith, we have peace with 
 God through our Lord Jesus Christ " (Rom. 
 5:1). 
 
 "Other foundation can no man lay than 
 that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ " 
 (I Cor. 3:11). 
 
 "Far be it from me to glory, save in the 
 cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom 
 the world hath been crucified unto me and I 
 unto the world " (Gal. 6 : 14). 
 
 "Walk by the Spirit and ye shall not fulfil 
 the lust of the flesh " (Gal. 5 : 16). 
 
 "I know him, whom I have believed, and 
 I am persuaded that he is able to guard that 
 which I have committed unto him against 
 that day " (II Tim. 1 : 12). 
 
Positive Preaching 293 
 
 "We did not follow cunningly devised 
 fables, when we made known unto you the 
 power and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" 
 (II Peter 1:16). 
 
 "That which we have seen and heard 
 declare we unto you " (I John 1:3). 
 
 "Hereby know we love, because he laid 
 down his life for us ; and we ought to lay 
 down our lives for the brethren " (I John 
 3:16). 
 
 "And we know that the Son of God is 
 come, and hath given us an understanding, 
 that we know him that is true, and we are 
 in Him that is true, even in his Son, Jesus 
 Christ. This is the true God and eternal 
 life'' (I John 5: 20). 
 
 These men had a message. That was the 
 characteristic of their speaking. They were 
 certain of their message, and they always 
 spoke with the accent of conviction. They 
 left men in no doubt as to their conviction 
 and as to the meaning and claim of their 
 message. 
 
 1 . This positiveness is the mark of all great, 
 effective preaching. A Leo the Tenth may 
 keep up the splendid shell of the Church 
 when the heart of its faith is eaten out and 
 the priests' quips may elevate the mass. But 
 
294 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 a Savonarola comes with a faith as strong 
 as life itself and lays bare the hollow mock- 
 eries of religion and calls men to the realities 
 of the Gospel. Luther forces the thought 
 of men through all ecclesiastical machinery 
 to a living person and makes faith in that 
 person the soul of religion. In an age that 
 had become cool of head and cool of heart, 
 sceptical of religion and sceptical of virtue, 
 above all sceptical of itself, John Wesley 
 believed in a Christ, able to save unto the 
 uttermost, and he preached this mighty 
 Saviour with a conviction and a passion that 
 laid its redeeming power on men in the utter- 
 most depths of sin. And in the time of the 
 questioning spirit, born of the new sciences 
 and the philosophies that come from them, 
 when there seemed no certainty in religion 
 and no foundation of morals beyond the 
 variable word of human experience, men like 
 Phillips Brooks have proclaimed the Gospel 
 with an essentialness and inevitableness that 
 awakened the sense of sonship and won men 
 with the glory of the spiritual life. 
 
 2. What is the source of positive preaching f 
 It comes from personal experience. "One 
 thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now 
 I see." "I know in whom I have believed. " 
 "That which we have heard, that which we 
 
Positive Preaching 295 
 
 have seen with our eyes, that which we be- 
 held, and our hands handled, concerning the 
 word of life." A man who really prays does 
 not long remain without proof of the power of 
 prayer. He may not answer the philo- 
 sophical questions that men may ask concern- 
 ing it, but he knows that he is a better man 
 for his prayer, and that his own faith impels 
 him to ask for others the spiritual blessings 
 he himself receives. That experience helps 
 him to speak with the accent of certainty. 
 He no more doubts prayer than he does his 
 own being. He could not live without it. 
 And so he speaks of the truth of prayer with 
 the positiveness of experience. 
 
 And it is the same way with any other 
 religious truth. Cold, selfish hearts that 
 have been broken into tenderness and re- 
 pentance by the sacrifice of Christ do not 
 doubt the power of the Cross. Men who 
 have given way to their evil passions, who 
 have felt the failure of sin and the shame of 
 it, and then have turned to Christ and felt 
 a hatred of sin and a new power to conquer 
 it, have little trouble with the critical ques- 
 tions concerning the person of Jesus. Such 
 questions cannot be understood save in the 
 light of human need. And the sinner may 
 know the power of the Redeemer. 
 
296 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 The preacher needs the calmness and 
 strength of a Gospel based on experience. 
 Books may vary, theories and philosophies 
 change. The mind may be disturbed ; not 
 so the life that rests on the unshaken knowl- 
 edge of experience. 
 
 " Behold I lay in Zion for a foundation a 
 stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone 
 of sure foundation : he that believeth shall 
 not make haste " (Isaiah 28 : 16). 
 
 It must be remembered that this personal 
 experience is of Christ, and not simply of self. 
 It is not a consciousness of one's own states 
 of mind and feeling, not an impressionist's 
 religion, but the knowledge of what Christ 
 has done in the life and for the life. The 
 knowledge of Christ has been the beginning 
 of faith and its growth is from that increased 
 knowledge. The authority of the preacher 
 is not external, from a church, a creed, or a 
 Book. It is inner, in the man's personality ; 
 his personal experience of the truth. But 
 it is not inner in the sense of being solely 
 the preacher's subjective states, his thoughts 
 and feeling. The authority is also objective, 
 the message from the living Christ. The 
 message has helped to make the person, and 
 the person is of use as he gives the message. 
 
 It is often said the man counts to-day and 
 
Positive Preaching 297 
 
 not what he believes. It is one of those 
 plausible half-truths easier to make than 
 laboriously to find the whole truth. "No 
 man has any right in the pulpit in virtue of 
 his personality or manhood in itself, but only 
 in virtue of the sacramental value of his per- 
 sonality for his message." (Forsyth, " Posi- 
 tive Preaching," page 60.) 
 
 "It is not our experience we preach, but 
 the Christ who comes in our experience. We 
 preach not ourselves, but Christ." The 
 Cross is the message that makes the preacher. 
 
 The positiveness of our preaching depends 
 not on how much truth we preach, but on 
 how thoroughly we believe what we do preach. 
 The Christian agnosticism which marks the 
 thought of the present pulpit about some doc- 
 trines that were very much preached by our 
 fathers may be a sign of humility and sin- 
 cerity if they lead to the certainty of a deep 
 experience concerning the one thing needful. 
 The outworks may be abandoned if the 
 central fortress is impregnable. "Our 
 creeds," says Dr. Parkhurst, "have got to 
 come from out of our experience of God and 
 not out of our prayer-book or our confessions 
 of faith. Creed is experience trying to put 
 itself into forms of thought. Putting on 
 leaves does not bring the spring, but the 
 
298 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 spring coming puts on the leaves. Creeds 
 will be right enough so long as experience is 
 right and fresh and strong." ("The Blind 
 Man's Creed.") 
 
 If our personal experiences of life and truth 
 are deep enough, if we refuse to live in books 
 and theories however hard and thoroughly 
 we study them, if our purpose is "ourselves 
 your servants for Jesus' sake," trying to 
 help men to live and so keeping our faith as 
 salt and light, we shall never have a false 
 adaptation to our age; we shall never dim 
 or diminish the essential and eternal word of 
 redemption. 
 
 3. The need of positive preaching. Any 
 true reading of modern life will convince 
 us of the need of constructive work. Many 
 of the old buildings had to be pulled 
 down. They were badly worn by time and 
 new forces, — too badly out of repair to be 
 safely remodelled. The foundations of others 
 had to be relaid, that a safer, fairer structure 
 might be reared thereon. But that men 
 badly need homes of the soul, I am sure we 
 must feel. Scientific thought has rendered 
 the ancestral home of faith seemingly im- 
 possible to many thoughtful and earnest lives. 
 If man is the product of so many generations, 
 if so many subtle and complex forces of en- 
 
Positive Preaching 299 
 
 vironment shape him into being, where is 
 the place for God's gracious work, or for the 
 freedom of the soul ? And so many reverent 
 minds think they are compelled to say, "We 
 do not know," to the question of a personal 
 God, and his grace in Christ and the im- 
 mortal life. 
 
 And the scientific thought that has quick- 
 ened and directed the historical and critical 
 spirit to the origin and growth of religion has 
 inevitably given new or changed conceptions 
 of the Bible and the relation of Christianity 
 to the ethnic faiths. In the transition be- 
 tween the old, and we believe a stronger, 
 faith some things have been shaken, and it is 
 no wonder that many think, even within the 
 Church, that all things have been shaken. 
 Among good men there is distressing un- 
 certainty that makes life less strong and 
 triumphant. 
 
 And among the rank and file of men there 
 is the weakening of moral restraints, and the 
 following of natural desires. We see enough 
 to know that the entire loss of faith would be 
 the complete wreck of morals. 
 
 We see the tendency to make the Gospel 
 either an ethic or a philanthropy. The 
 Christian impulse remains, though the con- 
 nection with the Cross is slight or sundered. 
 
300 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 The theology is largely swept away, men say, 
 but the ethics of Christ remain. It is the 
 highest expression of the moral life of the 
 race, and as such has authority and must be 
 given a fuller application and sway. Or 
 they turn to the imperfect, crippled, suffering 
 lives of a majority of their fellow-men and 
 they wish to help; they say with Leigh 
 Hunt, 
 
 " Write me as one who loves his fellow-men." 
 
 But it is a dreadful misreading of life or of 
 Christianity to put the chief emphasis upon 
 ethics or philanthropy. The deepest fact 
 of the world is sin and not suffering. The 
 greatest need is not new houses, but new 
 hearts. Mr. Sidney Webb, the noted Eng- 
 lish writer on social questions, recently said, 
 "The greatest need is not more power for 
 the people, but to get the people to use the 
 power they now have." That is another 
 way of saying what every man knows for 
 himself sooner or later, — that the real weak- 
 ness of life is not in circumstances, but within, 
 in the low motives, the unholy loves, the lack 
 of a divine impulse ; and here is the power of 
 Christianity. The Gospel is a redemption, 
 and this message must be held and proclaimed 
 if men are to feel this divine dynamic. 
 
Positive Preaching 301 
 
 4. What are the marks of positive preaching ? 
 
 (a) It is scriptural. It deals with those 
 great truths and duties that have their 
 clearest, fullest statement in the Bible and 
 their embodiment in the person of Christ. 
 We cannot treat the Bible in a mere casual 
 way, as suggestive literature, the mere in- 
 spirer of our thought. It has a growing, dis- 
 tinctive, authoritative message which com- 
 mands and impels us. We must rescue the 
 Bible from the single text view, as a mere 
 seed-thought for the preacher's inventive- 
 ness. We must cultivate the free, large, 
 organic view treatment of its truth, which 
 is best expressed by expository teaching. 
 The very text is a sign of the positivity of 
 our Gospel. 
 
 The tendency to make preaching bright 
 at the expense of instruction is no doubt due 
 to the demand of a people who have had little 
 training in religious truth, to whom the 
 Bible is largely a sealed book. And this 
 problem, created by the lack of Bible knowl- 
 edge in the people, can only be met by such 
 preaching as will renew their interest in the 
 Bible. Scripture preaching requires the great 
 truths, the authoritative statement of them 
 in the terms and spirit of Christ. 
 
 Dr. Forsyth speaks of criticism redis- 
 
302 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 covering the Bible as Luther did the Gospel, 
 and then how to use such knowledge: 
 
 "We must avoid irritating the people with 
 discoveries of what it is not, and statements 
 of what is upset ; and we must kindle them 
 with the positive exposition of what it is now 
 found to be for heart, history, faith, and 
 grace. . . . Perhaps you have no idea how 
 eager people are to have the Bible expounded, 
 and how much they prefer you to unriddle 
 what the Bible says with its large utterance, 
 than to confuse them with what you can 
 make it say by some ingenuity. It is thus 
 you will get real preaching in the sense of 
 preaching from the real situation of the Bible 
 to the real situation of the time" (page 166). 
 
 (b) Positive preaching is always constructive. 
 It recognizes the limitation of human 
 knowledge, and that no man or group of 
 men can measure the infinite of truth. It 
 must admit that others who differ may also 
 have the spirit of God and see other sides 
 of truth. It rejoices in everything that 
 brings out and perfects the spirit of Christ. 
 It seeks for the charity that embraces all 
 men in the love of God. It would not force 
 any man's opinion, or do injury to the most 
 sensitive conscience. " Knowledge puffeth 
 up, but charity buildeth up." It preaches 
 faith, not doubt, in a way to support and 
 
Positive Preaching 303 
 
 create faith, not to weaken the feeblest and 
 most imperfect faith. It would not put a 
 stumbling-block in the way of any of Christ's 
 little ones. 
 
 Preaching that is constructive never gives 
 truth as the conclusion of the intellect, 
 something thought out, and finding its com- 
 pletion in the assent of the reason; but 
 something to be lived out, to be proved and 
 found by obedience, true to the life of the 
 soul and the relation of man to man, and find- 
 ing its verification and realization only in 
 character and the life of society. Positive 
 preaching seeks to present the Gospel as 
 ethicized and socialized. 
 
 (c) And, finally, positive preaching is saving 
 preaching. Its message is the Evangel and it 
 strives to present the message so that it will 
 be a savour of life unto life and not of death 
 unto death. By this sign it can be told from 
 the dogmatic spirit. It does not condemn the 
 world, it does not sit in the seat of the Al- 
 mighty and decide the fate of men. It has 
 the pity and yearning of the Friend of Sin- 
 ners. It tries to stand in Christ's place, 
 persuading men to be reconciled to God, 
 and by all the behaviour of life and speech, 
 it would give a persuasive, saving Gospel. 
 
 " Preachers will again stand in the pulpit 
 as the messengers of God, rebuking men 
 
304 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 boldly for their sins in the name of the eternal, 
 and assuring the penitent of the Divine 
 mercy, declaring with confidence that Christ 
 has finished the work of salvation, and offer- 
 ing that salvation without money and with- 
 out price unto all who believe. There will 
 be a sure word for the minister to carry to 
 the guilty sinner whose conscience cries 
 aloud in its agony, and a comfortable word 
 for the dying, when they are face to face 
 with eternity. There will be a revival of 
 religion throughout the land which never 
 has come and never will come save by the 
 preaching of the Gospel, which will strengthen 
 the Church throughout all her borders, and 
 revive every missionary and charitable cause 
 in our land. What can never be done by 
 learning or ritual shall be accomplished before 
 our eyes, when the voice of the Gospel is 
 once more heard in its fulness, throughout 
 the land which it blessed in the past and 
 again will bless. We are in the valley now 
 where the shadows lie heavy, but already 
 the East is reddening, and we shall live to 
 see the feet of God's messengers, beautiful 
 upon the mountains, because they are bring- 
 ing good tidings of good, because they are 
 publishing salvation." (Dr. John Watson, 
 "The Return of the Gospel.") 
 
LECTURE XV. THE MASTER'S 
 METHOD 
 
 Matt. 7:29. "He taught them as one having 
 authority and not as the scribes." 
 John 7 : 46. "Never man so spake." 
 
LECTURE XV 
 
 The Master's Method 
 
 I wish to close this course on some of the 
 vital elements of preaching with a brief 
 study of Jesus as the preacher. He who 
 gave the message must have something to 
 say to us on how to give it. He knew what 
 was in man, and he knew how to speak to 
 man, and his words called forth the wonder 
 and praise of men. They called forth the 
 best in men. Here also he is our highest 
 example. And while there is so much beyond 
 even our thought in his perfect life, it is well 
 for us to dwell upon the imitableness of his 
 example. What can we learn from the 
 Master's method of preaching? 
 
 He certainly believed in preaching. He 
 certainly had faith in the spoken word. He 
 left not a single written word. The only 
 record we have of his writing is the stooping 
 down and writing with his finger on the sand 
 to hide his mingled shame and sorrow at the 
 hardness of men. There certainly never was 
 such faith in the power of speech. He 
 307 
 
308 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 staked his kingdom on the vitality of the 
 spoken word. He staked his all upon it. 
 The message that was to be the life of the 
 world was trusted to the memory of the few 
 eager hearts that heard him. 
 
 The oral method was the chief method of 
 the day. Men were trained to listen and 
 to hand down with exactness what they heard. 
 
 We cannot claim that the oral method has 
 the same relative importance to-day; we 
 must rejoice that the pulpit to-day has so 
 many allies, that the Providence of God has 
 so multiplied the ways of teaching the world. 
 But the life of faith is propagated by life, 
 and one unchanging way of expressing life 
 is by speech. That is our calling. And we 
 should gain increased faith in it as the en- 
 during and vital method from the example 
 of Jesus. 
 
 Those who heard Jesus speak were deeply 
 impressed by it. Matthew records the fact 
 that the people were astonished at his doc- 
 trine, for he spoke "as one having authority 
 and not as the scribes." 
 
 I wish that we could think ourselves back 
 into that spring morning of Galilee and feel 
 again the very impressions made by that 
 hill-sermon. Of course, we cannot do that. 
 The word and the speaker so far away have 
 
The Master's Method 309 
 
 helped to make us what we are; they are 
 the common thoughts of our hearts; the 
 atmosphere in which we live. 
 
 A man speaks to us. He lays his master- 
 ful spell over our minds. There is no trick 
 in it, if the sway is true and constant. It is 
 through laws of the mind that God himself 
 has made. How does the speaker have real 
 authority? By the truths he speaks, the 
 way he speaks, and the man that speaks. 
 And in thinking of Jesus as a preacher we 
 must consider these elements blended in his 
 personality. 
 
 I. The truth that Jesus spoke was not 
 original in the sense of never having been 
 spoken before. He built on the past; he 
 received from others. The doctrines of 
 God, man, immortality, the Messianic idea, 
 were truths common to the Jewish Scrip- 
 tures. He had deep reverence for the proph- 
 ets who had spoken before him. Fre- 
 quent parallels are quoted from the writings 
 of Jewish scribes gathered in the Talmud. 
 Sentiments approximating the Sermon on 
 the Mount are found in the sacred books of 
 other nations, in the sayings of Confucius 
 and Laotzi and Gautama. But we can well 
 believe that the total impression of Christ's 
 words was something wonderfully fresh and 
 
310 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 real and vital. It went right to the souls 
 of men ; it awoke echoes of inmost, yet un- 
 realized aspirations; it called up visions 
 and hopes of a new world and yet a world 
 for which they were born. "He spoke with 
 authority and not as the scribes.' ' 
 
 While Jesus reverenced the Old Testa- 
 ment, and built his message upon it, he was 
 independent towards the temporary and non- 
 essential elements of that teaching, and he 
 handled with loving fearlessness the current 
 beliefs of his day. He selected and rejected 
 as he saw the truth. He gave his own 
 emphasis to it that made it new truth as 
 much as the touch of Shakespeare re-created 
 the old plays and chronicles of his age. And 
 he spoke out of his own life what no prophet 
 had seen before, that which he had received 
 of the Father. 
 
 The people were astonished at his doctrine. 
 They were not used to such boldness of speak- 
 ing. We can yet see the sharp and fearless 
 flashing of these eternal verities. How little 
 he cares for custom and prejudice when they 
 hide God and duty from the soul ! He loves 
 men too supremely to keep them in ignorance. 
 The truth shall be declared with all plain- 
 ness though it may be startling and para- 
 doxical and revolutionary. Men need to 
 
The Master's Method 311 
 
 know the truth for through it alone are life 
 and liberty. 
 
 Christ speaks his message as primitive, 
 universal, and necessary truths. No shib- 
 boleths of party can be fostered by them ; 
 no narrow and sectional spirit can come from 
 them. They are for all men and for all time. 
 The highest life can only come from the 
 broadest truth. 
 
 And you notice how these truths seem to 
 come forth spontaneously, gushing forth 
 from the great fountain of his life. No doubt 
 in many ways he had to learn them, — the 
 perfect vision did not come at once. But 
 in his speaking there are no gradual and 
 cautious approaches to truth. He knows 
 them as his own life and out of his own life 
 and so he speaks. He does not argue about 
 the person of God. He takes the fact and 
 the faith for granted ; everything rests upon 
 it and comes from it ; he manifests God. 
 He does not prove the soul of man. He 
 speaks straight to the soul and the soul 
 knows its Master. 
 
 Christ does not appeal to the traditions of 
 men, to other great teachers, but to the 
 supreme authority of truth. He laid bare 
 the foundations of moral truth covered up by 
 men. Traditions had turned its life into a 
 
312 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 petrifaction. "The sayings of the elders 
 have more weight than those of the proph- 
 ets/ ' was a maxim of the time. Hillel 
 mispronounced a word because his teacher 
 before him had done so. The foundation 
 stones of the great temple of Ephesus were 
 buried twenty feet deep by the washing and 
 drifting of the centuries. Men had to dig 
 down through the deposit to lay bare the 
 truth of the past. And that is what Christ 
 did. The great spiritual principles of the 
 law had been covered up by the constant 
 accretions of human thought and desire. 
 Christ lays them bare and men see again how 
 firm and divine they are. 
 
 And Christ does more than this. He de- 
 clares a new era. The essential truths of 
 the law shall remain, the eternal and uni- 
 versal principles of right and wrong. But 
 certain forms shall pass away ; certain truths 
 adapted to the age shall be superseded by 
 the more spiritual principles. He was the 
 fulfilment of the law. Its truth and beauty 
 and power were to be seen and felt in him- 
 self. No longer a law, but a life, whom to 
 know is to love and to obey. " All's law, yet 
 all's love." They revered the Fathers ; they 
 worshipped their Scriptures. But Christ 
 declares Himself greater than both. "But 
 
The Master's Method 313 
 
 I say unto you — " He speaks with personal 
 authority. 
 
 Christ not only claims the right to change 
 the old and declare new truth ; but, as their 
 spiritual King, men are bound to obey his 
 word, and he will stand at last as their Judge. 
 
 It becomes us to walk reverently in the 
 presence of Jesus ; but may we not say that 
 in giving the message, we are to follow his 
 example ? 
 
 We are to regard the past, know what men 
 have thought and taught concerning the 
 Gospel, that we may have the true perspec- 
 tive of faith, that we may have the spirit of 
 reverence and humility before the generations 
 of experience. Our faith is a priceless heri- 
 tage, which we are to touch with no profane 
 hands. The spirit of God has taught the 
 line of noble scholars and devoted servants 
 of Christ, and the creeds of the Church are 
 the best expressions of what they have found 
 true of the Gospel. We need the historic 
 sense ; the persistence and the sobriety that 
 come from the unity of faith. 
 
 But we can never speak with authority, 
 if we have the spirit of the scribes; if we 
 are content to repeat what other men have 
 found. It will not be true to us unless in a 
 veritable sense we have the discovery for 
 
314 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 ourselves, unless creeds and the Church help 
 us to interpret the living Christ, unless each 
 man receive for himself the Word of God. 
 
 The conception of the Gospel cannot be a 
 fixed and changeless conception. Its life is 
 in its growth. Each generation brings new 
 problems into the field, new demands upon 
 the truth; and the preacher loyal to his 
 Master will rejoice in the task, and try to 
 understand and interpret the truth that 
 makes the Christ the old yet ever new mes- 
 sage, the " Eternal Contemporary." 
 
 Jesus spoke to his own people. But twice, 
 I think, does the record speak of his going 
 beyond the bounds of Palestine. And he 
 rarely ministered to any others than Jews. 
 He was literally sent to the house of Israel. 
 This man who first had the world-wide view 
 of religion, who first taught us to think of 
 men as mankind, to whom the differences 
 of race, and tongue and creed are superficial, 
 whose breadth in "Our Father" we imper- 
 fectly understand, and whose "Go ye, there- 
 fore, and make disciples of all nations" the 
 Church has so partially obeyed, shut his 
 own ministry up to a small parish. 
 
 He spoke to many at times. He had power 
 over the multitudes. The people heard him 
 gladly. But he was never swept by the 
 
The Master's Method 315 
 
 thought of numbers. He spoke to Andrew 
 and Levi, to Simon and the woman of 
 Sychar, with the same interest and purpose 
 as to the multitudes that followed him. He 
 was entirely free from self-seeking or false 
 self-assertion. He thought only of truth 
 and the life of men. The desire for the ears 
 of the crowd never affected the grace or the 
 truth of his word. He was a teacher as 
 much as a preacher. In speaking to the 
 many, he had a few chosen souls in mind, 
 the open and eager hearts, the men bound 
 to him by friendship ; and these, in public 
 and private, he trained in patience and 
 hope, thus stamping upon these sensitive 
 plates the impress of his own life, and send- 
 ing them forth to make innumerable copies. 
 
 And in his message he is single, — narrow, 
 if you please. He spoke the one truth of 
 the Kingdom of God. Infinite in its applica- 
 tion, limitless in its influence, he gave the 
 message to the individual soul. Never in 
 reformer, ecclesiast, patriot, did he lose his 
 single and supreme work of prophet. Dr. 
 Jefferson finely says, in his "The Character of 
 Jesus" : 
 
 "He made an impression because he 
 stayed in one place and hit the same nail on 
 the head until it was driven completely in. 
 
316 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 Had he wandered over the earth, speaking 
 his parables, they would have fallen into 
 more ears, but moulded fewer hearts. By- 
 staying in Palestine, and keeping his heart 
 close to a few chosen hearts, he became in- 
 creasingly influential. The men who were 
 nearest to him became so passionately in 
 love with him that they were ready to die 
 for him. He made himself thus mighty by 
 limiting himself. It is with men as it is 
 with rivers; a river becomes a river only 
 by the assistance of its banks. Take away 
 its banks, and the river becomes a swamp. 
 By limiting himself, our Lord came off con- 
 queror. . . . Jesus attempted to do one 
 thing only, and that was to perform the 
 work which his Father had given him to do. 
 At the end of his life he could look into his 
 Father's face and say, — 'I have finished 
 the work which thou gavest me to do.'" 
 
 There is surely a great principle here for 
 every man who would be a true preacher. 
 The largest work in the world can be done 
 by doing the best work for those whom God 
 has given you. The gifts to reach the mul- 
 titude are to be craved and cultivated, but 
 he does most for the Kingdom of God who 
 so speaks that men will become new creatures 
 and grow unto a perfect man. One man 
 
The Master's Method 317 
 
 transformed is a greater work than a thou- 
 sand men simply drawn to the preacher. "I 
 would rather see one man practising one of 
 my sermons, " said Theodore Parker, "than 
 hear all men praise them." 
 
 And in this work of changing men the 
 preacher must give the word of redemption. 
 He loses his power if he fails to exalt the one 
 message. The Gospel is as wide as human 
 destiny and touches every interest of man, 
 but it goes to the extremities of human life 
 only through the force of its heart. The 
 preacher must give the heart of the Gospel. 
 
 II. Jesus was the Master of the oral method. 
 The way he spoke to men is only less re- 
 markable than his message. Dr. Griffith- 
 Jones says, " Preachers and teachers will 
 find a rich reward in entering thus seriously 
 for themselves into the study of the method 
 of the Master, who spoke as never man 
 spake, and who adapted his message to 
 His audience with a tact so unfailing and a 
 wisdom so wonderful that its impressiveness 
 is traceable almost as much to its perfect 
 form as to its divine and saving power.' ' 
 
 Five qualities mark the speech of Jesus. 
 It was simple, vivid, concrete, portable, and 
 incorruptible. 
 
 It was simple. The profoundest truth was 
 
318 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 spoken in the speech of every day, and men 
 could not fail to know what he meant. 
 He spoke to no class but to the common in- 
 telligence and wants of men. He did not 
 use the language of professional religion, but 
 the language of life. The common people 
 heard him gladly, and to the poor the Gospel 
 was preached. It had singleness of thought 
 and singleness of aim, and everything he said 
 made this known. He always had the sense 
 of God, and his own life was so single and 
 so consistent that everything he did and 
 everything he said, the most spontaneous 
 and unpremeditated, revealed something of 
 God. And so with his sense of the worth 
 of man, — every touch of life, every word 
 to the heart, the whole attitude toward life, 
 the spirit and method of dealing with in- 
 dividual cases, tell what he thinks of man. 
 
 Here is the moral condition of simplicity 
 of speech, — singleness of life, — and where 
 this is strong, the simplicity of form is sure 
 to follow. Take Christ's warning against 
 anxiety in the sixth chapter of Matthew. 
 Is there anything more simple and beautiful, 
 too, in the literature of the spoken word? 
 Could any mind fail to get its truth ? 
 
 And his speech was vivid. It was put so 
 that men felt it. It flashed like a diamond 
 
The Master's Method 319 
 
 or cut like a sword-blade. It was a picture, 
 and men saw it. The truth was not dim 
 and vague and abstract, demanding the 
 closest attention and to be received after 
 long and hard process of reasoning, but it 
 fairly stood before them in visible form and 
 colour. 
 
 "Ye are the salt. Ye are the light. If 
 the eye be single, the whole body is full of 
 light. Lay up for yourselves treasures in 
 heaven. By their fruits ye shall know them. 
 He that putteth his hands to the plough, and 
 looketh back, is not fit for the Kingdom of 
 God." 
 
 Was ever clearer, stronger word spoken? 
 There is not an opaque word in it. Every 
 word makes its quickest, strongest appeal to 
 the thought and feeling of men. 
 
 And then the style is concrete. Christ 
 makes use of current events, and familiar 
 figures on the street, and well-known stories 
 and popular proverbs and visible scenes to 
 convey the sense of reality in what he says. 
 Somewhere on the hillside men were sowing 
 the seed and he was giving the immortal 
 parable of the sower. A man had been 
 robbed on the Jericho road and in the story 
 of the Good Samaritan Jesus gave such a 
 definition of neighbour that the quibbling 
 
320 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 lawyer confessed its truth. Dives and Laz- 
 arus, Simon and the sinful woman, the 
 Pharisee and the Publican are as familiar 
 figures as any that walk our streets. How 
 this concreteness stands out everywhere in 
 Christ's speaking ! Truth is a life. In him 
 is life and the life is the light of men. 
 
 It follows from this that Jesus' speech is 
 portable. People carried it away. They 
 could not forget it. Parable and paradox 
 and epigram challenged attention and stuck 
 in the memory. The picture, the story, lives 
 long after the abstract principle is forgotten. 
 " Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit 
 the earth. No man can serve two masters. 
 He that saveth his life shall lose it. To him 
 that hath shall be given. Come ye blessed 
 of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared 
 for you from the foundation of the world." 
 Largely upon this unforgetable form of 
 truth depend the riches of the Gospel to-day. 
 
 The incorruptible quality of Jesus' speech 
 I need barely mention. As hatred and op- 
 position grew around him, he was led to 
 veil the thought in parables, the story pre- 
 serving the form of the teaching unchanged 
 while the truth would be sought by those 
 eager to be taught. 
 
 Jesus has taught us as no other that 
 
The Master's Method 321 
 
 nature and life are full of God, that every- 
 where there are symbols of truth for the 
 open heart. No man loved nature better, 
 and none loved man so well. And this 
 wealth of pictorial truth came not only from 
 his full, rich life, but from the love that 
 used all for the service of men. Nothing 
 ministers to beauty alone, but all is the ser- 
 vant of the soul. 
 
 The preaching that interests, and instructs 
 and persuades to noble life, must have the 
 pictorial element, the symbolism of nature 
 and of life. And such forms are the inevi- 
 table expression of strong natures that think 
 keenly and feel deeply and have the master- 
 ing purpose of saving men. 
 
 III. There must be one thought more. 
 We can analyze words and manner, but a 
 more subtle element lies back of them, which 
 gives the sermon its final authority, the power 
 of a life. The best preaching is a life. Men 
 cannot understand truth until it is put into 
 human experience. Men cannot feel its 
 power save in the touch of a human hand 
 and the pulse of a human heart. There was 
 something attractive, convincing, transform- 
 ing in the personality of Jesus. He lived 
 the truth that he spoke. He was all and 
 more than he taught. He alone can say, 
 
322 Vital Elements of Preaching 
 
 with simple and matchless humility, "I am 
 the truth ! " How can we measure this ? 
 What experience of ours is deep enough to 
 penetrate into this mystery? 
 
 We can practise something of his fellow- 
 ship with the Father, we can try to follow 
 his loyalty to truth at whatever cost, we 
 can grow in the supreme note of love for 
 men, which will give insight, sympathy, 
 power. To grow into a perfect man, unto 
 the fulness of the stature of Christ, is the 
 ambition and hope of the spiritual preacher. 
 
 The sainted Tholuck, who was the spirit- 
 ual father of thousands, who spoke in the 
 pulpit and in the school and in the best 
 literature of the century, gave as the single 
 secret of his life, — "I have but one passion, 
 and that is Christ." And Charles Kingsley, 
 who spoke to men as few others of his day, 
 once said to one who asked concerning the 
 secret of his life, one near enough to have 
 the right to ask such an intimate question, — 
 "I have a friend." 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adversaries, to the preacher, 
 
 26. 
 Age, knowledge of the, 207; 
 
 appreciation of, 208 ; the 
 
 language of, 213 ; truth 
 
 adapted to, 214. 
 Arnold, Matthew, "Dover 
 
 Beach," 39. 
 Atonement, the form of the 
 
 age, 217. 
 
 B 
 
 Babcock, Maltbie, the chil- 
 dren's sermon, 141 ; saying 
 of, 129. 
 
 Baxter, Richard, the comfort 
 of his people, 131. 
 
 Boyd-Carpenter, Bishop, on 
 the preacher and his age, 
 205. 
 
 Broadus, John A., his inter- 
 pretation of the heart, 81. 
 
 Brooks, Phillips, Easter Ser- 
 mon, 136; chief motive of 
 the ministry, 18 ; story 
 of, at Harvard, 172. 
 
 Browning, Robert, "By the 
 Fireside," 121 ; quotation 
 from "Christina," 76 ; from 
 "Rabbi Ben Ezra," 202. 
 
 Browning, Mrs., "The Cry 
 of the Human," 37. 
 
 Bushnell, Horace, "Dignity of 
 human nature shown from 
 its ruins," 75; preaching 
 to children, 141 ; the mys- 
 tery of speech, 226. 
 
 Campbell, R. J., illustration 
 
 of a child, 147. 
 Chadwick, John W., poem of, 
 
 257. 
 Children's Sermons, methods 
 
 of, 143. 
 Clifford, John, a sermon to 
 
 children, 148. 
 Clow, W. W., a sermon to 
 
 children, 151. 
 Coleridge, " Hymn in the Vale 
 
 of Chamouni," 12. 
 Commercialism, its influence 
 
 on our life, 29. 
 Courage, and the power of the 
 
 preacher, 45. 
 Critical Temper, effect upon 
 
 religious life, 31. 
 Crooker, "The Church of 
 
 To-day," 212. 
 
 D 
 
 Denial, witness of, 38. 
 
 Devereux, General, experi- 
 ence in railroad riots of '79, 
 41. 
 
 E 
 
 Education, its threefold pur- 
 pose, 226. 
 
 F 
 
 Faber, hymn of, 128. 
 
 Faith, and the power of the 
 
 preacher, 45. 
 Faunce, President, education 
 
 323 
 
324 
 
 Index 
 
 of the minister by his task, 
 
 108; insight of modern 
 
 preachers, 111. 
 Field, Eugene, "Last night, as 
 
 my dear babe lay dead," 
 
 134. 
 Financial honour, essential to 
 
 uprightness, 168. 
 Foreign missionary, example 
 
 of the personal touch, 101. 
 
 Garvie, A. E., a sermon to 
 
 children, 150. 
 God, transcendence of, 10 ; 
 
 immanence of, 11. 
 Gordon, George A., character- 
 ization of, 177. 
 Growth, the law of life, 185 ; 
 
 the demand of the age, 185 ; 
 
 the hindrances to, 188 ; 
 
 direction of, 195; how 
 
 gained? 199. 
 Guthrie, Thomas, and St. 
 
 John's, Edinburgh, 42. 
 
 Hall, Dr. John, simplicity of, 
 
 228. 
 Hawthorne, simplicity of, 237. 
 Hay, John, his prophecy 
 
 concerning the Chinaman, 
 
 59. 
 Holland, J. G., "Vices of the 
 
 Imagination," 77. 
 Home, C. Silvester, a sermon 
 
 to children, 149. 
 Horton, R. F., on receiving the 
 
 Word of God, 251. 
 
 Immortal life, comfort of, 130 
 
 hymns of, 130. 
 Interpretation, cost of, 254. 
 Isaiah, the call of, 8. 
 
 Jefferson, C. E., a sermon to 
 children, 155; "The Build- 
 ing of the Church," 191. 
 
 Jesus, at Jacob's well, 53 ; 
 a revealer of life, 54; 
 boldness of speech, 310 ; 
 personal authority, 312 ; 
 word to his own people, 
 314; word to individuals, 
 315 ; master of the oral 
 method, 317 ; reverence for 
 the Scriptures, 309 ; speech 
 simple, 317; vivid, 318; 
 concrete, 319; portable, 
 320 ; incorruptible, 320. 
 
 Kingsley, Charles, father-con- 
 fessor to his people, 86 ; 
 finding men by their leading 
 ideas, 98 ; the secret of his 
 life, 322. 
 
 Kipling, "Go to your work 
 and be strong," 181. 
 
 Labour, organized, and the 
 Church, 35. 
 
 London, Bishop of, simplicity 
 of preaching, 146. 
 
 Loneliness, sorrow of, 123. 
 
 Loyalty, an element of manli- 
 ness, 164. 
 
 M 
 
 Maclaren, Alexander, interpre- 
 tation of the Scriptures, 71. 
 
 Magnanimity, and effective- 
 ness of the preacher, 43 ; an 
 element of manliness, 165. 
 
 Manhood, its threefold de- 
 mand, 179. 
 
Index 
 
 325 
 
 Meditation, a means of re- 
 ceiving the Word, 250. 
 
 Message, and the age, 277 ; a 
 knowledge of life, 280 
 cost of its expression, 259 
 effect on the preacher, 282 
 how gain the sense of ? 274 
 intellectual and moral 
 sources, 279 ; justification 
 of the preacher, 269 ; mark 
 of the preacher, 265 ; moral 
 quality of, 281. 
 
 Morgan, Campbell, influence 
 of, at Westminster Chapel, 
 22. 
 
 N 
 
 his 
 
 Newman, John Henry, 
 
 first awakening, 85. 
 Newton, Richard, children's 
 
 sermons, 157. 
 Novelists, and faith, 34. 
 
 Oppenheim, James, quotation 
 
 from, 173. 
 Owen, John, relation to his 
 
 age, 209. 
 
 P 
 
 Parker, Joseph, and the chil- 
 dren, 145. 
 
 Paul, his knowledge of the 
 secret heart, 80 ; vision 
 of the man of Macedonia, 
 55. 
 
 Plagiarism, of doctrine, 253. 
 
 Phelps, Austin, on the minis- 
 try of comfort, 117; on 
 reaching the people, 105. 
 
 Poets, modern, and faith, 33. 
 
 Positiveness, marks of, in 
 preaching, 301 ; of great 
 preaching, 293 ; need of, 
 298 ; source of, in preach- 
 ing, 294. 
 
 Prayer, a means of receiving 
 
 the Word, 251. 
 Preacher, The, love of his 
 
 calling, 201 ; plan for his 
 
 studies, 200. 
 Preaching, authority of, 274 ; 
 
 demand for, 271 ; cost of, 
 
 249; positive, 291. 
 
 Realism, of the sermon, 90. 
 Riggs, S. R., his thoughts of 
 
 the Indian, 59. 
 Robertson, Fred W., "The 
 
 Loneliness of Christ," 124. 
 
 S 
 
 Saints, use of word in Paul's 
 letters, 56. 
 
 Schauffler, Robert H., poem, 
 "Scum o' the Earth," 61. 
 
 Sermons, barriers to success 
 in, 245 ; the wrong notion 
 of, 243. 
 
 Sex-relations, the minister 
 tested by, 168. 
 
 Sill, E. R., poem, "Oppor- 
 tunity," 46. 
 
 Simplicity of speech, illustra- 
 tion of, 224 ; how gain ? 
 229; moral qualities, 236; 
 a relative matter, 225 ; 
 reasons for, 227 ; rhetorical 
 sources, 237. 
 
 Sin, a deeper interpretation of, 
 217. 
 
 Smith, George Adam, message 
 of the prophets to all times, 
 7. 
 
 Smith, Henry B., experience 
 of, 14. 
 
 Social idealism, true interpre- 
 tation of, 212. 
 
 Social unrest, in America, 35. 
 
 Spurgeon's insight into life, 80. 
 
326 
 
 Index 
 
 Stokes, a ministry to men, 174. 
 Sympathy, and the effective- 
 ness of the preacher, 43. 
 
 Temperament, the preacher's, 
 193 ; temptations of, 194. 
 
 Tholuck, the secret of his 
 life, 322. 
 
 Tucker, William J., sensuous 
 nature of the age, 27. 
 
 U 
 
 Uprightness, an element 
 manliness, 166. 
 
 of 
 
 Van Dyke, Henry, 
 Toiling of Felix," 181. 
 
 "The 
 
 Voluntary Christianity, its 
 weakness, 99. 
 
 W 
 
 Watson, John, importance of 
 style, 261 ; ministry in the 
 Highlands, 62 ; humanness 
 in the sermon, 103 ; minis- 
 try of comfort, 118; "The 
 Potter's Wheel," 133; the 
 work of a pastor, 257; "The 
 Return of the Gospel," 304 ; 
 why an interpreter? 258. 
 
 Wesley, John, style of, 90. 
 
 Wordsworth, ' ' Expostulation 
 and Reply," 270. 
 
 Youth, sorrows of, 122. 
 
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