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THE PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING 
 
THE 
 
 Philosophy of Preaching 
 
 A. J. F, BEHRENDS, D.D. 
 
 Pastor of the Central Congregational Church, 
 Brooklyn, N.Y. 
 
 
 tit 
 
 "d.0 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1890 
 
J3V4- 
 
 $* 
 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1890, 
 BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 
 
TO MY WIFE 
 

PBEEATOBY NOTE. 
 
 This little volume contains the lectures 
 given in the month of February of the pres- 
 ent year, before the Divinity School of Yale 
 University, on the Lyman Beecher founda- 
 tion. It is not a treatise on homiletics. The 
 questions connected with the preparation and 
 the delivery of sermons have been intention- 
 ally passed by. The aim has been to deal 
 with the more fundamental inquiry of the 
 end of all preaching, and to emphasize the 
 universal elements of all effective religious 
 address. There has been no citation of 
 authorities, for the simple reason that none 
 were consulted and used. The views here 
 presented had slowly taken form during a 
 ministry of twenty-five years, and they have 
 at least the merit of profound personal con- 
 viction, which the author has been encour- 
 
Vill PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 aged, by friends in whose critical judgment 
 he has great confidence, to believe may be 
 of service to a wider circle than the one to 
 which they were first given. The form of 
 direct address has been preserved, as a change 
 of literary dress would have involved a rad- 
 ical reconstruction of the material, with the 
 danger of an enlargement in bulk, which 
 might have proved unwelcome to the reader. 
 For in an age when many books are written, 
 brevity is a quality which every busy student 
 appreciates. A J F B 
 
 Brooklyn, N.Y., March, 1890. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Philosophy of Preaching. 1 1 
 
 The Philosophy of Preaching. II. . . B , 24 
 
 The Personal Element in Preaching ... 57 
 
 The Ethical Element in Preaching ... 78 
 
 The Biblical Element in Preaching . . . 104 
 
 The Spiritual Element in Preaching. I. . 130 
 
 The Spiritual Element in Preaching. II. . 166 
 
 The Practical Element in Preaching . . 196 
 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF PEEACHING. 
 I. 
 
 No man can achieve solid and satisfactory 
 success in any calling, who is not convinced 
 that the services which he renders are of 
 substantial benefit to the public, and that 
 what he gives is a full equivalent for what 
 he receives. He who suspects that he is 
 merely tolerated, or that he occupies the 
 place of a dependent, or who discovers that 
 he is retained when he has ceased to supply 
 a living demand, inevitably suffers in the 
 consciousness of manly independence ; and 
 where manhood shrivels, work loses its dig- 
 nity and power. I have always admired 
 the spirit of the man, who is said to have 
 applied for employment to a wealthy and 
 charitable merchant. The poor fellow was 
 told to remove a huge pile of stones from 
 one end of a field to another. When this 
 task was completed he was ordered to re- 
 place them in their original position. This 
 
 1 
 
Z PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 
 
 he did somewhat reluctantly, but when his 
 employer sent word to have the operation 
 repeated a second time and as often as the 
 employee chose, the latter promptly and 
 firmly rebelled. He did not care to busy 
 himself at a useless task. It made him feel 
 like a beggar, and this conscious degrada- 
 tion was to him a greater evil than hunger. 
 And he was right. There is dignity in 
 labor only when it is directed to useful 
 ends, and the vigor with which a true man 
 will prosecute and push his chosen work 
 will depend upon his conviction of its ne- 
 cessity to the welfare of the world. The 
 final cause of labor is an ethical and extra- 
 personal one. The immediate stimulus is 
 supplied by the physical needs of the indi- 
 vidual, and by the requirements of the 
 household, but amid the multitudinous in- 
 dustries of modern civilization the stagna- 
 tion and degradation of character can be 
 prevented, and the noblest manhood can 
 come to maturity only through the convic- 
 tion that the humblest toiler is a public 
 benefactor. 
 
 To this wholesome law the pulpit is no 
 exception. It is idle to claim for it the 
 august dignity of a Divine institution ; for 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 3 
 
 such a claim can be substantiated only by 
 the eternal necessity, and the essential ra- 
 tionality, of its sphere. It is not enough 
 for some men to insist, with whatever 
 honesty and emphasis, that God has called 
 them to preach ; unless their message com- 
 pels an audience, and produces conviction 
 of its Divine origin and intrinsic worth, the 
 world will look upon its prophets as mis- 
 guided enthusiasts. The counsels of God 
 are always the embodiment of infinite power, 
 wisdom, holiness, and love. They are woven 
 into the essential and eternal needs of hu- 
 man nature, and of human history. No 
 commission can be supposed to bear the 
 Divine seal, which does not convey a mes- 
 sage which every man needs to hear, and 
 which cannot grow obsolete with any con- 
 ceivable advance in civilization. Is preach- 
 ing such an agency, instituted for definite 
 and lofty ends, incapable of being eliminated 
 or supplanted while history runs its course ? 
 That question confronts us at the very be- 
 ginning of our work, and every man should 
 settle that debate in his own mind before 
 he takes upon himself the holy vows of 
 Christian ordination. 
 
 Paul exhorted Timothy to suffer no man 
 
4 PHILOSOPHY OF PBEACHING. 
 
 to despise him, to maintain his self-respect 
 by making full proof of his ministry, even 
 as he was not ashamed of the Gospel of 
 Christ, among angry Jews and mocking 
 Greeks, because he knew it to be the power 
 of God unto salvation for all that believed. 
 The advice has not become obsolete. It 
 was never needed more than now. There 
 is no place where decay and loss of power 
 so surely *and swiftly follow upon moral 
 timidity, or that want of intellectual poise 
 which a noble self-respect insures, as the 
 pulpit. The preacher, as the herald of 
 God, should be the humblest of men ; but 
 that humility should inspire him with an 
 unusual and sustained boldness when he 
 speaks to his fellows, under the profound 
 conviction that what he has to say the 
 whole world, from prince to beggar, needs 
 to hear and heed. 
 
 All this may seem to you commonplace, 
 requiring no argument. For years your 
 studies and associations have been such as 
 to impress upon you the necessity and" the 
 dignity of the preacher's vocation. But 
 you will soon leave these quiet retreats of 
 Christian learning, and you will be sum- 
 moned to wrestle with a prosaic world. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 5 
 
 There are some things which no theologi- 
 cal seminary can teach you. There is no 
 preparation which can save you from the 
 wrench which every man must endure 
 when the call for adjustment to his practi- 
 cal environment presses upon him. Some 
 men never heed that call, and they either 
 drift out of the ministry, or they console 
 themselves with the doctrine of total de- 
 pravity, bewailing the degeneracy of hu- 
 man nature which prevents any man from 
 having more than a handful of hearers 
 unless he be either a heretic or a mounte- 
 bank. You must have faith in your mes- 
 sage, and you must have faith in men ; and 
 if your message fails to command attention, 
 the most sensible thing is to conclude that 
 you have been lacking in practical skill. 
 Never suffer the suspicion to shadow you 
 that the message is not adapted to the 
 hearer, nor that the Christian preacher is 
 gradually becoming crowded out of his 
 place. 
 
 That suspicion pervades the air of mod- 
 ern life. There are men who will treat 
 you with haughty indifference, or with 
 condescending civility, simply because you 
 are a clergyman. They do not believe in 
 
6 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 the manliness of your vocation. They will 
 rarely come to hear you preach. They 
 may take a personal liking to you, and 
 they may avail themselves of your services 
 at funerals and weddings, but they would 
 think more of you if you were a hod-car- 
 rier or a bricklayer. They will say it is a 
 pity that you became a priest, seeing there 
 is so much manly stuff in you. A senti- 
 ment like that cannot be argued down. 
 You must live it down, and you can live it 
 down only as the conviction in you is at 
 white heat that your work is the manliest 
 under the sun, seeking the highest practi- 
 cal ends and securing the most stable re- 
 sults. That will give tone and nerve to 
 your speech. That will make you impa- 
 tient of all rhetorical redundancies and 
 pyrotechnics. That will give pungency 
 and power to your style. The ingrained 
 consciousness that your work is manly, 
 will make your pulpit a throne of manli- 
 ness, of strong and sturdy utterance, and 
 they who once sneered will come to listen 
 with respect, and will not go away without 
 profit. But even if they do not come, you 
 cannot afford to enter upon your work un- 
 less you have faith in its essential manli- 
 ness, and in its eternal worth. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 7 
 
 Nor is it simply the non-Christian ele- 
 ment of society which discounts the value 
 of preaching. The sermon has become the 
 butt of universal ridicule. Even ministers 
 speak slightingly of it. You will be re- 
 minded that if you pray more than five 
 minutes you are insufferably tedious, and 
 that a sermon of half an hour is as much as 
 the average audience will endure. In many 
 churches the sermon has been crowded out 
 by the service, and has come to be regarded 
 as an appendage. In the Roman ritual it 
 is altogether overshadowed. The printing 
 press is supposed to have made the pulpit 
 superfluous, or at least to have seriously 
 narrowed the scope of its influence ; and 
 there are not a few earnest Christian men 
 who raise the question whether some read- 
 justment is not called for, whether tl;e 
 preacher should not gracefully retire before 
 he is forced to withdraw, and is left behind 
 like a shattered hulk by the retiring tide. 
 May it not be that the preacher was in- 
 dispensable while there were no movable 
 types, and that with the invention of print- 
 ing, and the diffusion of intelligence, his 
 importance has ceased? The inquiry is 
 not a very logical one, in the face of the 
 
8 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 fact that during the Middle Ages, when 
 there were no printing presses, there was 
 very little preaching, and that since the 
 days of Gutenberg there has never been so 
 much as now. The printed page has not 
 made speech obsolete. We do not read let- 
 ters to each other in the household, and we 
 drop the pen and the telegraph in favor of 
 a personal interview, when we are deter- 
 mined to secure our end. I have known 
 men to cross the continent to procure in- 
 formation promptly and at first hand. The 
 pen may be mightier than the sword, but 
 it is not mightier than the tongue. Things 
 are talked about before they are written 
 about, and all great movements, such as 
 the Reformation, the revival under the 
 Wesleys, the anti-slavery campaign, and 
 the temperance reform, depend, for their 
 inauguration and success, upon the proph- 
 ets of fiery speech. There never has been 
 an important political campaign when the 
 stump did not take precedence of the tri- 
 pod. The truth is that the power of speech 
 is man's supreme physical endowment, as 
 the power of thought makes him the 
 crowned and sceptred monarch of the 
 universe. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 9 
 
 The printed page is only an enlarge- 
 ment in the sphere of the written manu- 
 script; and if the manuscript cannot 
 supersede the spoken word, there is no 
 reason to suppose that any cheapening 
 process of multiplying copies can do it. 
 There are things which the types cannot 
 reproduce. The recorded sermons of White- 
 field do not glow with the fire of his won- 
 derful oratory. The discourses of Jonathan 
 Edwards fail to disclose the secret of his 
 quiet and resistless power. The speeches 
 of the greatest orators are read without 
 emotion, when the audiences that heard 
 them were swept and swayed as by a 
 whirlwind. The face of Cicero gave power 
 to his words. The concentrated energy of 
 Demosthenes carried conviction with his 
 argument. The kindling eye, the play of 
 emotion on the mobile countenance, the 
 curling of the lips, the pointed finger or 
 sudden thrust of the hand, the erect and 
 quivering frame, the blood mounting to the 
 temples, the momentary pause, the rush of 
 rapid, eager speech, all that belongs to an 
 intense and vital personality, grappling 
 with great thoughts, moved by strong pas- 
 sions, urged forward to high endeavor, 
 
10 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 
 
 cannot be transferred to plates of metal 
 and traced upon paper. If sublimity con- 
 sists in the employment of the simplest 
 agents for the attainment of the loftiest 
 ends, then there is nothing sublimer than 
 hinging the triumph of righteousness in 
 the earth upon the energy of human speech. 
 The Greeks laughed at the dream. In 
 their judgment it was concentrated folly. 
 They might have reflected that their great- 
 est reformer and philosopher, the peerless 
 Socrates, never wrote a line, but left the 
 deep impress of his ministry upon their 
 intellectual and moral life by the use of 
 incisive speech. John the Baptist was only 
 a voice, but he was a voice that waked the 
 dead. It was by the spoken word that our 
 Lord Himself began and completed His won- 
 derful career. In that choice they all acted 
 rationally and deliberately. It is the spoken 
 word that pierces to the core, and secures 
 immediate results. There is no disparage- 
 ment of the press in this judgment. It has 
 a mighty, a noble, a wide, and enlarging 
 mission. It is the ally of human speech, 
 not its enemy or supplanter. So long as 
 language remains the exponent and vehi- 
 cle of thought, so long must the lips retain 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 11 
 
 the primacy in its expression and enforce- 
 ment. Speech must remain to the end of 
 time the chief agency in the dissemination 
 of truth, and in the inculcation of right- 
 eousness. 
 
 Assuming, then, that you are conscious 
 of the dignity and of the vital importance 
 of your calling, as an agency whose neces- 
 sity is rooted in the moral order of human 
 life and history, disclosing the evidence of 
 its Divine appointment in the pertinacity 
 of its continuance, and in its quiet refusal 
 to be shelved by studied neglect, or crowded 
 out of place by competing aspirants, it is 
 pertinent, before dealing with the specific 
 elements which should enter into all preach- 
 ing, to inquire : What is the mission of the 
 Christian preacher ? What -should be the 
 ultimate aim of his endeavor? In what 
 vital, organic, permanent relation does his 
 vocation stand to the unfolding life of the 
 world? The traditional answers to these 
 questions have long been familiar to you ; 
 but they have dealt more with the construc- 
 tion of the single sermon, than with the 
 philosophy of preaching. They have not 
 brought out distinctly the final cause of all 
 preaching, in view of which it is seen to be 
 
12 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 a rational unity amid all the forms which 
 it has assumed, and in whose attainment it 
 should find its perpetual inspiration and its 
 final reward. 
 
 One large, earnest, aggressive section of 
 the Christian Church, whose piety and con- 
 secrated zeal are beyond dispute, maintains 
 that preaching should not only be evan- 
 gelical, but evangelistic. The preacher is 
 simply a herald, and the substance of his 
 message is the proclamation of the free for- 
 giveness of sins, and the heritage of eternal 
 life, through the mediation of Jesus Christ. 
 In obedience to that gracious assurance, 
 men are to repent of their sins and believe 
 on Christ. The message of the pulpit is 
 mainly to the unconverted, and every new 
 disciple is regarded as under immediate and 
 incessant obligation to increase the registry 
 of converts. To save souls is said to be 
 the preacher's business, and the salvation 
 of the soul is associated with some definite, 
 formal, and public act of confession and 
 committal. The preacher, therefore, should 
 incessantly urge men to immediate and pro- 
 nounced decision. The normal life of the 
 Church is assumed to be one of perpetual 
 revival, in the restricted sense of that 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 13 
 
 phrase. Under such a theory, preaching 
 becomes hortatory. It never passes beyond 
 the rudiments of religious instruction. It 
 may make use of the Pauline epistles, but 
 it cannot move in their deep and broad 
 grooves. It is constantly tempted to dis- 
 count and discourage thorough and system- 
 atic training in Christian intelligence, and 
 to make numerical increase the standard 
 of ministerial efficiency. It counts the con- 
 verts, it neglects to weigh them. Its am- 
 munition is speedily exhausted, and it can 
 live only by frequent change of place. It 
 is ill adapted to long pastorates, which 
 demand a wider range of instruction. 
 
 I am not condemning the evangelistic 
 school of preachers. They have been an 
 immense blessing to Christendom. They 
 have had, and have still, a providential 
 mission. We do not want less, but more, 
 of the evangelistic temper. The revival- 
 istic form of preaching is the only one which 
 is suited to pagan communities, and with- 
 out it no inroads can be made upon the 
 ignorant and degraded masses of nominal 
 Christendom. It is needed, too, in the 
 highest places, where the pride of reason 
 and the complacency of self-righteousness 
 
14 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 resist and resent the claims of the Gospel. 
 Its fire should burn in the heart of every 
 herald of the cross. No preacher should 
 permit himself to lose the power of direct, 
 searching, practical appeal, and the ever- 
 lasting " Now is the day of salvation " 
 should be the undertone and momentum of 
 all his speech. But the evangelistic theory 
 of preaching is partial. It fails to reach all 
 classes, and it cannot long hold those whom 
 it does reach. It has no meat for strong 
 men. It is too exclusively emotional, deal- 
 ing only with the rudiments of religious 
 truth. It fails to touch the intellectual 
 and social life of man at a thousand points. 
 Christianity, as embodying the power and 
 wisdom of God, must be comprehensive and 
 cosmopolitan. It must have a message for 
 all, and it must master all the forces of 
 civilization. It cannot neglect the univer- 
 sity in order to redeem the hovel. It has 
 no choice in the matter, if it be the Word 
 of God to man ; and hence, in every age, 
 the Church has been the patron of sound 
 learning and the founder of schools. There 
 must be an educated ministry. There must 
 be Christian scholars, experts in historical 
 and literary criticism, equipped with all 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 15 
 
 the learning of their day. While therefore 
 the evangelist has his place, his methods 
 and aims do not exhaust the function of 
 preaching, and we must seek for a more 
 comprehensive statement of the Christian 
 preacher's mission. 
 
 The evangelistic theory of the sermon is 
 faulty in another respect. When the aim 
 of preaching is regarded as inciting men to 
 believe on Christ, that they may be saved, 
 a twofold danger is imminent. Salvation 
 is apt to be regarded as synonymous with 
 future and eternal blessedness, and the re- 
 lation of faith to such blessedness assumes 
 a mechanical aspect. The eternal destiny 
 of a soul is made to hinge upon a single 
 formal act or word. The Biblical emphasis 
 is on holiness, not on happiness, on a pres- 
 ent and progressive purity of life ; and 
 faith is the soul's habitual fellowship with 
 God in Christ, by whose Spirit renewing 
 and sanctifying energy is imparted. The 
 evangelistic theory of preaching is really 
 sacramentarian at heart. It assumes that 
 the cleavage between heaven and hell is 
 made by the word spoken and heard ; just 
 as the Romanist confines the grace of eter- 
 nal redemption to the baptized. It virtu- 
 
16 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 ally restricts the operation of the Holy 
 Spirit within the lines of evangelical 
 Christendom, and makes the pulpit the 
 throne of eternal judgment. But no one 
 has ever ventured to press the logic to its 
 inevitable and paralyzing conclusion. The 
 universal salvation of all who die in in- 
 fancy is an article of Christian faith which 
 cannot be made to harmonize with the 
 theory that the design of preaching is to 
 fix the eternal destiny of souls, to save 
 them in the sense of getting them into 
 heaven. That article has been adopted by 
 the sternest school of Calvinism in our 
 day. Granting it to be true, it is plain 
 that the ordinary means of grace cannot 
 constitute the general and fundamental 
 condition of eternal redemption. The great 
 majority of the saved are presumed, by the 
 theory of infant salvation, to belong to 
 those who never in this life heard even the 
 name of Jesus Christ. The sweep of re- 
 demption is wider than the voice of the 
 preacher. He is not the representative of 
 God's judicial action. It will not do to 
 say that only adults fall under the rule 
 that eternal destiny hinges upon receiving 
 or rejecting the Gospel, that infants and 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 17 
 
 idiots constitute a gracious and reasonable 
 exception; for in that case infanticide 
 might be regarded as a virtue ; and besides, 
 the exception is so tremendous that it 
 hopelessly vitiates the generalization which 
 assumes that preaching is the great sifting 
 process by which the wheat is separated 
 from the chaff. It cannot be the preacher's 
 business to people heaven. He does not 
 carry the keys of death and of the un- 
 derworld upon his girdle. The eternal 
 destinies of men are in God's secret and 
 unsearchable keeping, and cannot, in con- 
 sistency with our faith in the salvation of 
 infants, which we regard as Scripturally 
 warranted, be supposed to be bound up 
 with the work assigned to the preacher of 
 the Gospel. Both in its milder and in its 
 sterner form, therefore, the evangelistic 
 theory of preaching fails to be consistent 
 and satisfactory. 
 
 In sharpest contrast with the evangelis- 
 tic conception of preaching is what I venture 
 to call the evolutional. It assumes that the 
 religious life is germinally and potentially 
 present in every human soul. It substi- 
 tutes culture and development for conver- 
 sion. It addresses every man as a son of 
 
18 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 God and an heir of heaven, and endeavors 
 to stir within him the recognition of these 
 prerogatives. It makes the sermon a pious 
 meditation, a devotional monologue, an 
 emotional deliverance. It claims that in 
 Christian assemblies, at least, the only true 
 function of preaching is the development 
 of the religious sentiment, enveloping and 
 pervading the community. Men are asleep, 
 not dead. They need waking up, not resur- 
 rection from a moral grave. This theory 
 of the sermon finds its most illustrious ad- 
 vocate and exponent in Schleiermacher, and 
 in the German pulpit its influence has been 
 marked and salutary. It crowded the shal- 
 low and lifeless rationalism to the wall, by 
 the universal basis for religion which it 
 found in human nature, in the sense of abso- 
 lute dependence. Maurice, Kingsley, and 
 Robertson are notable representatives of the 
 same school, and this form of the sermon 
 is characteristic of Broad Churchmanship. 
 Robertson's frequent thrusts at the Evan- 
 gelicals are not due to slight and occasional 
 divergencies in doctrinal judgment, but to 
 radical difference of method in dealing with 
 men. They addressed men as sinners, who 
 could be made the sons of God only by 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 19 
 
 a supernatural act of grace ; he regarded 
 adoption as a universal act in Christ, the 
 indefeasible dignity and heritage of every 
 child of Adam, a treasure hidden in the 
 field, of whose existence every man should 
 be apprized. Thus the burden of the ser- 
 mon becomes, " you are saved," not " flee 
 from the wrath to come." Whatever judg- 
 ment may be passed upon this theory of 
 preaching, the earnestness and power of its 
 exponents cannot be called in question. 
 They have sapped and undermined the 
 movement toward Unitarianism. 
 
 The profound and permanent revolution 
 inaugurated by Schleiermacher is familiar 
 to every student of religious life in Ger- 
 many. In his own case the theory of the 
 sermon grew out of his theological system, 
 so far as he had any. It is difficult to class 
 him. He was a pantheist in philosophy, a 
 Calvinist in his doctrine of decrees, a 
 Universalist in his conception of the scope 
 of redemption. The incarnation was the 
 historical emergence and expression of a 
 universal fact. The mediation of Christ 
 involved a universal restoration to holiness. 
 The decree of God is one and singular, 
 executed in the final and eternal extinc- 
 
20 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 tion of evil. Effectual calling is universal. 
 At the core of the most imbruted soul 
 hides and throbs the indestructible germ 
 of life, "wrapped about by the sheathings of 
 ignorance and sin. To tear off these band- 
 ages, and to give that hidden life its oppor- 
 tunity of expression and expansion, is the 
 business of the preacher. The soul of man 
 is religious by creative constitution; it is 
 Christian by the redemptive energy of the 
 Son of God. Faith is its normal life, 
 through the feeling of absolute depend- 
 ence, which no amount of scepticism or 
 immorality can eradicate. 
 
 With such a philosophical basis, the ser- 
 mon could be nothing else than a gentle, 
 persuasive appeal to the muffled inner man. 
 Nor can it admit any exception. It must 
 speak the same language in Pekin as in 
 Berlin ; and if it has failed to evangelize 
 the capital of German Christendom, its 
 moral energy will not suffice to storm the 
 citadels of heathenism. It may work well 
 with a limited class, but the limitation of 
 its efficiency proves that the theory upon 
 which it is based does not agree with the 
 stubborn facts. Christlieb pronounces it 
 an ideal conception, something to be earn- 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 21 
 
 estly and devoutly hoped for and kept in 
 view, but he insists that the aggressive and 
 missionary vocation of the Church demands 
 also the evangelistic form of preaching, with 
 its pungent and urgent summons to imme- 
 diate repentance. But all men need to hear 
 and heed that call. The new birth is a 
 universal necessity. The incompleteness 
 of Schleiermacher's method lies in the fact 
 that his diagnosis of human nature is par- 
 tial. He has read only half its testimony. 
 He emphasizes dependence, to the neglect 
 of obligation. He has interrogated the 
 emotions, but not the conscience. He sees 
 the universal restlessness and weakness of 
 man more vividly than he does his univer- 
 sal and wilful wickedness. He does not 
 apprehend the exceeding sinfulness of sin. 
 The majesty of the moral law does not 
 receive adequate recognition at his hands. 
 The dependence of man is at once constitu- 
 tional and moral ; in its highest form it is 
 the equivalent of duty. And duty implies 
 the opposite of weakness. It proclaims 
 man's dignity and unqualified personal re- 
 sponsibility for his moral state ; " I ought " 
 means " I can, if I will," and that makes 
 the will in man the target of moral assault 
 
22 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 and appeal. The evolutional or devotional 
 theory of preaching overlooks these stern 
 facts, and cannot therefore be accepted as 
 defining the preacher's vocation. 
 
 Shall we combine the two? Shall we 
 say that preaching should be both evange- 
 listic and educational, that it should aim at 
 conversion and edification? That would 
 seem to be the natural conclusion, and it 
 is the theory upon which many preachers 
 act. They divide their audiences into saints 
 and sinners. They address one class in the 
 morning, and the second class in the even- 
 ing ; and if the evening is stormy, the saints 
 get what was intended for the sinners. Or, 
 the sermon ends with a twofold application, 
 one to believers, and the other to the unre- 
 generate. Such a method cannot fail to 
 produce mental confusion and distraction. 
 The audience is not treated as a unit, and 
 no one hearer gets the full force of the mes- 
 sage. And, yet, this is unavoidable, if the 
 preacher construes his vocation as involv- 
 ing, first, the elimination, through the proc- 
 lamation of the Gospel, from the mass of 
 mankind, of those who are chosen unto 
 eternal life ; and second, the training of 
 Christian believers in doctrine, character, 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 23 
 
 and active service. No mortal man is com- 
 petent to work along these parallel lines 
 with, equal and balanced effectiveness. He 
 will inevitably gravitate to one extreme, or 
 the other, adopting either the hortatory or 
 the didactic as his ordinary and favorite 
 tone, unless he can combine the two in 
 some higher and inclusive method. It is 
 evident, too, that under such a working 
 theory, the pulpit must be content with a 
 comparatively narrow and restricted field. 
 It is debarred, by its own act, from influenc- 
 ing public opinion and life at a thousand 
 vital points, bringing upon it the charge of 
 indifference to present and practical evils, 
 through its absorption in the invisible and 
 the future. A double, or twofold theory 
 of preaching discredits itself; for unity is 
 the test of philosophical analysis; and a 
 theory which makes preaching a separat- 
 ing or sifting agency, intent upon the en- 
 largement and edification of the Christian 
 Church, surrenders the universality of its 
 outlook, and proclaims itself to be simply 
 an instrument of ecclesiastical proselytism. 
 And for myself, I want both unity in the 
 philosophy, and universality in the out- 
 look. 
 
II. 
 
 In the preceding lecture the question 
 was raised : What is the ultimate aim of 
 preaching, the single and comprehensive 
 practical purpose which the preacher should 
 have in mind, in all his studies, in the 
 preparation and in the delivery of every 
 sermon ? Sermons have been divided into 
 textual and topical; into expository, doc- 
 trinal, experimental, and practical; into 
 hortatory and didactic ; but these divisions 
 are in order only when the germinal idea 
 of the sermon has been clearly thrown into 
 conscious relief. There is something in 
 the true sermon which distinguishes it 
 from every other form of public speech. 
 Nor is that distinction due simply to the 
 contents. The form is hardly less impor- 
 tant than the matter, and form is largely 
 determined by the presence or the absence 
 of deliberate intention. Each sermon will 
 24 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 25 
 
 have its specific intention, but all the ser- 
 mons of a year, and of a lifetime, are prop- 
 erly an orderly and progressive unity ; in 
 which, to use the phraseology of Herbert 
 Spencer, the integration keeps pace with 
 the differentiation. The sermon has its 
 definite place and purpose, and to these it 
 should be held as rigidly as the planets are 
 held by the force of gravity. 
 
 Nor does the preacher stand alone. He 
 belongs to a great, living army, whose num- 
 bers must keep step together, and move 
 along many widely separated lines, and by 
 many different paths, towards a common 
 goal. There is not one law for the metrop- 
 olis, and another for the frontier settlement ; 
 one law for nominally Christian commun- 
 ions, and another for pagan populations. 
 Consciously or unconsciously, intentionally 
 or otherwise, the preaching of any age is a 
 vital and vitalizing unity, a definite force 
 designed, in the Divine plan, to produce a 
 definite result. 
 
 The generations, too, are interlocked. 
 There is such a thing as an integration of 
 dispensations, an evolution of history, which 
 is but another name for the march of God's 
 redemptive thought. In this evolution and 
 
26 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 march preaching has its appointed place ; 
 and though, for purposes of literary criti- 
 cism, we may distinguish between modern, 
 and mediaeval, and apostolic, and prophetic, 
 and ante-diluvian preaching, the classifica- 
 tion must proceed upon a principle which 
 introduces unity into the diversity. The 
 preaching of Noah was very different from 
 that of Paul, both in form and in substance, 
 in point of time and range of thought ; but 
 so far as both preached, there must have 
 been identity in the Divine intention. 
 Preaching is like a wide-branching oak 
 or elm, whose every twig and leaf are 
 nourished and colored by the sap which 
 flows from the tap-root. It is not a dis- 
 tinctively Christian agency. It had a re- 
 markable history in the eighth and succeed- 
 ing centuries before Christ, whose records 
 are preserved for us in the prophetic books 
 of the Scriptures, and whose mighty influ- 
 ence upon subsequent Jewish life is not 
 even yet adequately understood. It was 
 prominent and powerful in the days of 
 Samuel, in whom again we discover only a 
 revival of the spirit of Moses. The prophet 
 was the true oracle of the theocracy ; its initi- 
 ating, conserving, guiding force. Not upon 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 27 
 
 Aaron, but upon Moses, rested the common- 
 wealth of Israel. By the hands of a prophet 
 the Decalogue was given, and by prophets 
 the will of God was made known. Tem- 
 ple and sacrifice belonged to the vanishing 
 form of the dispensation, but the prophet 
 was master of a universal tongue, and his 
 speech is as pungent and piercing as ever. 
 Preaching has only become more frequent 
 and widely diffused, with a larger store of 
 truth at its command; but though the 
 stream has deepened and widened, the 
 pulse and push of the fountain-head remain 
 unchanged. And if we want to know what 
 the preacher's definite vocation is, we can- 
 not afford to neglect inquiring into the 
 philosophy of prophecy; for prophecy con- 
 stitutes the vital bond between the Mosaic 
 and Christian dispensations. The priest 
 has gone, the prophet remains; first in 
 appearance, perpetual in his ministry. 
 
 Advancing, then, from negative criticism 
 to positive statement, let me begin by say- 
 ing that, in my judgment, no better and 
 more helpful definition of the preacher's 
 vocation has been given, in recent years, 
 than the one to which the first incumbent 
 of this lectureship gave expression, sup- 
 
28 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 porting it by an appeal to the words 
 of Paul in his Epistle to the Ephe- 
 sians. " Reconstructed Manhood" was the 
 vivid phrase into which he packed his 
 theory of the sermon ; and if we may pre- 
 sume that he entertained no individualistic 
 restriction, but had in mind a reconstructed 
 humanity or human society, a redeemed 
 race of mortal men and women on earth, 
 the definition may be accepted as complete 
 and comprehensive. It certainly supplies 
 the preacher with something definite and 
 tangible. It makes him deal with men as 
 they are, as needing moral reconstruction, 
 and it urges him to look for immediate and 
 practical results in life and conduct. The 
 Gospel becomes a living message to living 
 men. Salvation means a present manhood 
 after the ideal in Christ, through the in- 
 strumentality of Divine truth and by the 
 agency of the Holy Spirit ; not a boon to 
 be secured at death. It is the man in his 
 mortal body with whom the preacher wres- 
 tles, instead of fixing his thoughts upon 
 the disembodied spirit. The heaven into 
 which he urges men is the reign of right- 
 eousness on earth ; the hell from which 
 he would pluck them, as brands from the 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 29 
 
 burning, is the hell of greed and lust, 
 of brutal passion and degraded life. He 
 makes holiness urgent now and always. 
 He insists upon an immediate and radical 
 repentance, a change of conviction issuing 
 in a new creation, whose order and beauty 
 transfigure a prosaic and busy world. 
 Eternity is to make time radiant by the 
 triumph of righteousness in all lands. All 
 powers of body and soul, all achievements 
 of industry, learning and art, the life of 
 home and the policies of nations, are to 
 answer with joyful alacrity the touch of 
 Christ's pierced hands. 
 
 Cicero said of Socrates that "he caused 
 philosophy to descend from heaven to 
 earth, to enter into the cities and homes 
 of men," by his conception of wisdom as 
 dealing with the principles and the prac- 
 tice of personal and political virtue. It 
 was a great and fruitful revolution in the 
 method and aim of speculative thought. 
 And the theory of preaching which con- 
 centrates all its attention upon the recon- 
 struction of human society, urging indi- 
 vidual repentance and regeneration with 
 a view to pervasive and universal moral 
 rectitude, brings the pulpit into living 
 
30 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 touch with all that concerns human weal. 
 It answers the severe tests of unity and 
 universality, without which no philosophy 
 can establish its claim to truth. It has the 
 same message for every man, in every age 
 and in every clime. It invests the present 
 life, and the march of history, with a sig- 
 nificance which the probationary theory of 
 our present existence does not, and cannot, 
 give to it. It makes the ethical the real 
 eternal ; and bids us look for the golden 
 streets, and the gates of pearl, and the 
 walls of jasper, as the glory of a city which 
 is to descend out of heaven, to become the 
 capital of an earthly empire. It looks upon 
 literature and art, upon commerce and gov- 
 ernment, as subject to the authority which 
 it represents, and as destined to become its 
 powerful allies. It claims all human life 
 as its own, to be purified, sweetened, en- 
 larged by its Divine ministry. It preaches 
 the same old Gospel, but it makes the 
 message intensely urgent and practical. It 
 demands not only decision, but obedience, a 
 faith whose fruit is abundant and precious. 
 It does not save here that it may reap here- 
 after. It wants to fill the garners of earth 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 31 
 
 to overflowing, that God may be honored 
 and men may be blessed. 
 
 It is true that preaching has never been 
 able wholly to ignore the importance of the 
 present, earthly life, and has always insisted 
 that true religion encourages and urges to 
 true morality. But the emphasis has been 
 oftener, and more generally, upon future 
 destiny than upon present character. The 
 old formula, that out of the Church there 
 is no salvation, meant that the gates of 
 heaven opened only at the bidding of the 
 priest. And the Protestant tests of faith 
 and repentance, or of an experimental 
 knowledge of Christ's saving power, have 
 been regarded in the same way, as evi- 
 dences here of what their professors shall 
 secure hereafter. Hence the charges and 
 countercharges of Romanist and Protestant, 
 that religion and morality, piety and purity, 
 have been sundered or united by artificial 
 bonds. Hence the charge so frequently 
 made that popular and traditional Christi- 
 anity makes virtuous conduct of no prac- 
 tical account, by its doctrines of priestly 
 absolution or of saving faith ; and that in 
 this matter Luther is as great a sinner as 
 Tetzel, as in either case it is the state after 
 
32 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 death which absorbs attention. For my- 
 self, I must frankly confess that the grave 
 charge has only too much truth in it ; and 
 that there is but little relief in urging that 
 an assured hope of heaven cannot fail to 
 make a man pure. The sad facts do not 
 bear out the statement; for the greatest 
 scandals have come from men who have 
 been loudest in affirming the assurance of 
 salvation ; and besides, it does not, to say 
 the least, seem to be a very high morality 
 which cultivates decency in behavior under 
 the pressure of future reward. There is 
 certainly much to commend a theory of 
 the preacher's vocation, which compels an 
 emphasis upon present character, and which 
 deals with the hereafter only incidentally 
 and by implication. I am not sure but it 
 would be wise to give to the doctrine of an 
 earthly probation a different theological 
 turn ; so that, instead of saying that every 
 man's eternal destiny is determined at 
 death, we should affirm that the preacher's 
 vocation deals directly only with the life 
 on this side of the grave. Let him do his 
 utmost to make the life of God, and the 
 grace of Jesus Christ, real in the men and 
 women to whom he speaks and among 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 33 
 
 whom he lives, and he may encourage 
 them to be fearless of that future whose 
 secrets are pierced only by the eyes of om- 
 niscience. It may seem as if the idea of 
 reconstructed manhood, or of a redeemed 
 human society on earth, is a serious nar- 
 rowing of the preacher's vocation, but it 
 has the advantage of a clearly outlined 
 task, in whose performance he touches all 
 men in the use of all their faculties. And 
 if it should appear that this conception 
 pervades the Scriptures, and constitutes the 
 unvarying undertone of its most impres- 
 sive appeals, woven into its history, color- 
 ing alike its precepts and its promises, 
 breathed in its prayers and its praises, 
 stirring in its prophecies and pealing in its 
 judgments, it will be the part of wisdom 
 to bring ourselves into close and loving 
 adjustment with the methods and aims of 
 those who spake as they were moved by 
 the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Now, the very structure of the Bible is 
 such as to suggest that preaching was de- 
 signed to be a historical agency for the 
 moral training of the race, instead of a 
 means for the determination of personal, 
 eternal destiny. Upon the latter assump- 
 
34 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 tion, the long delay in the advent of Christ, 
 and the acknowledged imperfection of all 
 preceding revelation, constitute a most se- 
 rious embarrassment in any attempted vin- 
 dication of the impartial justice and love 
 of God. It may be defended on the plea 
 of the Divine sovereignty, as unconditional 
 and inscrutable ; but such a logical proce- 
 dure is too summary for Christian intelli- 
 gence. I am not surprised that modern 
 theodicies, starting with the assumption 
 that the Gospel is to be preached among 
 all nations in order that the elect may be 
 gathered into heaven, are pushed to the 
 conclusion that the gracious proclamation 
 must be continued through the intermedi- 
 ate state, in order that every soul may have 
 its equal and full opportunity for intelligent 
 and deliberate action. The vice in the 
 logic is in the major premise, for which I 
 have failed to find any support in the Word 
 of God. Preaching appears, throughout 
 the inspired pages, as a historical agency, 
 widening in its scope, increasing in the in- 
 tensity of its power, accumulating its stores 
 of truth, designed and fitted to produce a 
 historical result. 
 
 The Bible is the most living of all books. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 35 
 
 Every chapter and paragraph, every psalm 
 and prayer and prophecy, bears the birth- 
 mark of some great and earnest soul. It is 
 the fragmentary record of sixteen centuries, 
 more correctly of forty-one centuries of Di- 
 vine education ; starting with the promise 
 of the serpent-bruiser, and crowned by the 
 sublime Gospel from the pen of John. If 
 its creation was a vital, historical evolution, 
 what can its mission be, now that it is 
 winged and fully equipped for its task, but 
 a historical leavening of the life of human- 
 ity which shall be commensurate with the 
 long story of its production? An instru- 
 ment which was forged and shaped in the 
 fires and on the anvils of four thousand 
 years, while cities were built, and wars 
 were waged, and empires vanished, and 
 great literatures were created, all of them 
 meanwhile preparing the opportunity of 
 its use, and opening a path for the display of 
 its power, must have for its immediate aim 
 a subjugation and transfiguration of terres- 
 trial life, whose sublime grandeur no fancy 
 can sketch, and which can find expression 
 only in the extraordinary imagery of the 
 Apocalypse. The dream of Babylon's fa- 
 mous king is involuntarily recalled, where 
 
36 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 the huge image of gold, silver, brass, iron, 
 and clay, representing the march of political 
 history, is smitten by the stone, hurled of 
 unseen hands, grinding the image into pow- 
 der, and covering the whole earth. Such an 
 issue, the universal reign of righteousness 
 on earth, makes luminous the long and 
 severe educational process which culmi- 
 nated in the advent of Jesus Christ, and 
 in the apostolic ministry. 
 
 A second corroborative proof that preach- 
 ing is a divinely appointed agency for the 
 accomplishment of a historical result, is 
 found in the comparative silence of Holy 
 Scripture on the life beyond the grave. I 
 say comparative silence, because personal 
 immortality is involved, by necessary impli- 
 cation, in its doctrine of what God is, and 
 in its description of His relation to man as 
 created in His image, and summoned to in- 
 timate and confidential fellowship with Him. 
 But the future life is not the great burden 
 of its revelation. There is no explicit af- 
 firmation of it in the Pentateuch. Only 
 once does its hope burst from the lips of 
 Job, and even then the meaning of his 
 words is not perfectly clear. In the lofti- 
 est psalms it finds only vague expression. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 37 
 
 The prophets maintain the same strange 
 reserve. All through the Old Testament, 
 Hades is the underworld shrouded in im- 
 penetrable gloom; and the disembodied 
 state is not regarded as an abode of rest, 
 nor as the transfer to a higher sphere. 
 Not until we reach the New Testament and 
 read the story of our Lord's resurrection do 
 we come to clear visions of the future. The 
 gloom vanishes ; the ancient silent faith 
 speaks out in jubilant tones, that to have 
 died and so to be with Christ is far better. 
 But even here the revelation is scanty, and 
 leaves a thousand questions unanswered. 
 Uninterrupted personal identity, and an 
 advance in blessedness, we may confidently 
 affirm for all who die in the Lord; but even 
 for them there is something lacking until 
 Christ shall come at the end of the world ; 
 while the state of the impenitent dead is 
 veiled in startling imagery, whose exact 
 import we cannot determine. 
 
 There is certainly something very sug- 
 gestive and impressive in this silence and 
 in these scanty references. If they do not 
 form the staple of revelation, they certainty 
 cannot properly be the burden of our preach- 
 ing. The field surveyed is the earth, human 
 
38 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 life in its present moral conditions, capaci- 
 ties, and obligations. It is altogether an in- 
 adequate statement of the case to say that 
 the Bible represents the present earthly 
 life as the only period of moral probation. 
 It does more than that. It deals with the 
 future life only by indirection, as a corol- 
 lary or implication at most, while the per- 
 vading or overshadowing emphasis is on 
 the life that now is. The Old Testament 
 thought moves, almost exclusively, within 
 the limits of temporal rewards and punish- 
 ments, the present blessedness of the man 
 of God, and the shame which shall surely 
 come over the wicked; while in the New 
 Testament precept and promise bear a pre- 
 ponderant relation to present godliness. 
 Our current methods invert all this. We 
 labor for revivals, we pray for the baptism 
 of the Holy Ghost, we urge men to come 
 to Christ, with our thoughts fixed upon 
 the grave, and upon the word of hope that 
 may be spoken over the man when he is 
 gone. We believe that this world is a lost 
 world, and yet its condemnation and ruin 
 are practically viewed as in suspense, pro- 
 spective calamities to be avoided and escaped 
 by fleeing to Christ as the appointed refuge 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 39 
 
 from the coming wrath. And so we teach 
 and sing : 
 
 " While the lamp holds out to burn, 
 The vilest sinner may return." 
 
 We do not mean to place a premium 
 upon deathbed repentances, we do not mean 
 to encourage dissoluteness of life ; but the 
 moral imperative, demanding immediate 
 and obedient recognition, is shorn of its 
 majestic might by the undertone of an 
 appeal to prudential motives. Salvation is 
 made an affair of commercial barter, where 
 men pay a certain price and secure a fut- 
 ure gain. If prudential considerations 
 must play a part in securing repentance, 
 ought we not to adopt the prophetic and 
 apostolic method, in which the judgment 
 of God is represented as in actual and fear- 
 ful execution upon all who repress the 
 truth in unrighteousness ? It is a personal, 
 earthly, historical judgment which Paul so 
 tersely outlines in his first chapter of the 
 Epistle to the Romans. The current pa- 
 gan life, with its universal license, with its 
 unnatural crimes, with its degradation of 
 the home, with its political cruelty, law- 
 lessness, and insecurity, was a revelation 
 
40 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 of the Divine indignation, whose righteous 
 fury would smite men more and more se- 
 verely, unless they repented and ceased 
 doing evil. The epistles are full of the 
 homeliest instructions and appeals, many 
 of which are disguised in our translation, 
 and which we should hardly dare to repro- 
 duce in their original plainness, all of them 
 bearing upon the necessity of an immediate 
 and radical change in the existing life. 
 The universal emphasis is on present char- 
 acter and condition, and a revival of bib- 
 lical preaching must deal boldly, almost 
 exclusively, with the mortal life of men. 
 Sin brings present disgrace and ruin to 
 body and soul, to home and country ; it 
 breeds distrust, it enervates manhood and 
 womanhood, it incites to murderous re- 
 venge, it arrays class against class, it 
 kindles the volcanic fire of social hate, it 
 is a menace to domestic peace, to social 
 order, and to international amity ; and from 
 all this there is salvation only by that per- 
 sonal integrity and social righteousness 
 which are the free gift of God to men by 
 faith in Jesus Christ. Is not that the bur- 
 den of Old Testament prophecy ? Is it not 
 the kernel of the Pauline logic, when by 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 41 
 
 an argument purely historical in his great 
 epistle, he shows that the Gospel alone is 
 competent to do what the wisdom of the 
 Greek, and the law of Moses, had failed 
 to accomplish? The pierced hands alone 
 can rescue the world out of that abyss 
 of woe into whose fathomless depths sin 
 is hurling it with an ever accelerated ac- 
 tivity. Here is your task and mine, as it 
 was that of prophets and apostles before 
 us, to make this earth the abode of purity 
 and the paradise of God. 
 
 Look once more into your Bibles, and 
 note that central phrase around which all 
 its practical admonitions cluster and re- 
 volve, as planets around the sun. In the 
 earliest biography of our Lord's life and 
 ministry, Ave are told that Jesus "came into 
 Galilee preaching the Gospel of the king- 
 dom of God, and saying, The time is ful- 
 filled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, 
 repent ye, and believe the Gospel." What 
 was the Gospel? It was the glad tidings 
 that "the kingdom of God" was at hand; 
 and men were urged to change their minds 
 and believe the announcement. They were 
 summoned to abandon their dream of polit- 
 ical rule, and to accept citizenship in that 
 
42 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 moral empire, whose laws He expounded, 
 and of which. He claimed to be King. That 
 was the burden of His personal ministry, as 
 it had been that of His forerunner. Around 
 that conception of a Divine kingdom, Mat- 
 thew weaves the materials of his Gospel. 
 Christ is a King, the Founder of a new and 
 universal theocracy. The Sermon on the 
 Mount holds the same place in Matthew's 
 sketch, Avhich the book of the law has in 
 the Pentateuch. It expounds the condi- 
 tions and the duties of citizenship in the 
 new commonwealth. The parables illus- 
 trate its nature, its purifying power, its 
 expanding energy, and its sifting processes. 
 The forty days between the resurrection 
 and the ascension were devoted to instruc- 
 tions " pertaining to the kingdom of God," 
 and the book of Acts ends with the state- 
 ment that Paul, upon his arrival at Rome, 
 gathered the chief of the Jews together, 
 and expounded to them, by an appeal to 
 Moses and the prophets, the doctrine of 
 Christ, and of "the kingdom of God." 
 
 It was not a new phrase upon the lips of 
 the Baptist; it had been the watchword of 
 patience, and of hope, through many weary 
 centuries. It was the keynote of prophetic 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 43 
 
 warning and encouragement, and it meant 
 the rule of God in all the earth, the house 
 of the Lord becoming the resort of worship 
 for all nations. The blessing of the cove- 
 nant was to be the heritage of all races and 
 lands. Against the carnal and political 
 methods by which that sovereignty was 
 hoped to be secured, our Lord most ear- 
 nestly protested ; but he mustered his disci- 
 ples under the same banner, and summoned 
 them to the same work, when He taught 
 them to pray, " Thy kingdom come. Thy 
 will be done in earth as it is in heaven,' ? 
 petitions which are also promises and proph- 
 ecies. And hence it was that the apostolic 
 emphasis, in preaching and in epistle, was 
 ever upon the return of Jesus Christ in 
 power and in glory. It was not death, but 
 the second advent, upon which the disciples 
 fixed their gaze. They were busy prepar- 
 ing the way for the King, watching for 
 Him with trimmed and burning lamps. 
 They were understood by many to teach 
 that the final coming was near at hand, and 
 the Church fell into chiliastic dreams, from 
 which she was rudely awakened by the 
 barbarian invasion and the fall of Rome. 
 That opened for her the path to a new 
 
44 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 dominion, and inspired her with the ambi- 
 tion of universal empire, in securing and 
 consolidating which she freely employed 
 the methods of political intrigue, and the 
 agency of the sword. She grasped the 
 crown, and burnt her preachers. Luther's 
 hammer wrecked the ambitious project, and 
 the last remnants of ecclesiastical despot- 
 ism are vanishing. The Pope is a prisoner 
 in his own palace, a stranger in his own 
 city, and at any moment he may be 
 an involuntary exile. Rome's idea of the 
 kingdom of God has proved to be as base- 
 less as the earlier fancies. And yet, that 
 kingdom is the practical theme of revela- 
 tion, the keynote of all dispensations. It is 
 not of the world, and yet it is to conquer 
 the world. It is not to come with obser- 
 vation, heralded by startling phenomena, 
 shaking thrones and convulsing nations, 
 and yet its advent is to be with irresistible 
 might. It is righteousness, and peace, and 
 joy, in the Holy Ghost. That is the ad- 
 vent upon which the gaze of every disci- 
 ple is to be fixed, and whose hastening 
 should enlist the preacher's zeal. 
 
 In a word, the historical triumph of Chris- 
 tianity is the immediate and practical result 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 45 
 
 designed to be attained by the preaching of 
 the Gospel. We make the world's evan- 
 gelization, the discipling of all nations, in- 
 cidental and subordinate ; it is, in reality, 
 supreme and exclusive. The present pro- 
 saic earth is the territory which we are 
 summoned to subdue to the obedience of 
 Jesus Christ. Here, where sin threw down 
 the gauge of battle and made man an exile 
 from Paradise, the conflict is to be fought 
 out to its bitter end, until Eden comes back 
 with a fairer and a perennial beauty. What 
 socialism blindly aims at through revolu- 
 tionary and anarchial measures, Chris- 
 tianity is fitted and destined to accomplish 
 for man. The cry of the poor is to be 
 answered. Every burden is to be loosed, 
 every yoke of oppression is to be broken. 
 Ignorance is to be supplanted by the wis- 
 dom whose beginning is the fear of the 
 Lord. Drunkenness is to be exterminated, 
 and Sabbath desecration is to cease. The 
 monster of lust is to be cast into the bottom- 
 less pit. The meek are to inherit the earth. 
 The idolatries and cruelties of Paganism 
 are to be swept away. And all this is to 
 be done, not by repressive and punitive 
 legislation, but by the expansive and con- 
 
46 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 quering energy of the Holy Spirit, enter- 
 ing into individual souls, through faith in 
 Jesus Christ as He is revealed in the Gospel. 
 That is only a means to an end, an epi- 
 sode in a larger history. Beyond it lie the 
 day of judgment and the eternal years, 
 with their unfolding story which God has 
 reserved to Himself. The philosophy of 
 mortal history is all that has been disclosed 
 to us, and that we have been slow to mas- 
 ter. We have been more curious than con- 
 secrated. Whatever mighty results the 
 volume of the future may contain, the 
 introductory chapter concerns the present 
 conquest of. humanity to righteousness, 
 until the wilderness shall blossom as the 
 rose, and the lion and the lamb shall lie 
 down in peace together. Earth is the 
 battle ground of the eternities, and moral 
 forces are to determine the issue of the 
 encounter. 
 
 This conception makes the Christian 
 pulpit a living, burning, perpetual need. 
 The vocation of the preacher is seen to 
 stand in organic relation to the develop- 
 ment of human history. He blazes the 
 way to the appointed goal, and marshals 
 the growing and victorious battalions along 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 47 
 
 the widening highway. This is the vision 
 of prophets and apostles, of Daniel in idola- 
 trous Babylon, and of John in the isle of 
 Patmos. The kingdoms of this world are 
 to become the kingdom of our God, and of 
 His Christ, and He is to reign forever and 
 ever. It requires no ordinary faith to be- 
 lieve this. It demands no ordinary courage 
 to confess it in the face of doubt and denial. 
 It seems chimerical. The pessimistic esti- 
 mate of the world's future is more congenial 
 to the reigning temper. It is so much easier 
 to wait for a catastrophe, than to convert 
 the world by the foolishness of preaching. 
 We get weary of the strain, and long for 
 the descending fire, the advent of our Lord. 
 But He is here. His banners are unfurled, 
 and He bids us unite with the Sword of the 
 Spirit, which is the Word of God. This, 
 then, I conceive to be the Scriptural theory 
 of the Christian preacher's vocation, the 
 Divine philosophy of his commission, the 
 reconstruction of humanity, the historical 
 triumph of Christianity in all the earth. 
 
 I am aware that such an interpretation 
 of the final cause of preaching will seem, 
 at first inspection, to divest it of any special 
 Divine significance, and to reduce it to a 
 
48 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 very ordinary agency for securing moral 
 improvement. The peculiar idea of re- 
 demption seems to be eliminated, and the 
 immortality of the soul appears to be re- 
 duced to an inference, which might as well 
 be explicitly ignored. But neither of these 
 inferences is logically involved in the doc- 
 trine here propounded and defended. The 
 matter of preaching remains exactly the 
 same, in its essential basis, and in the logi- 
 cal order of its separate doctrines. The 
 supernatural revelation of God for the 
 redemption of man, culminating in the per- 
 son and mediation of our Lord, and con- 
 tinued through the personal ministry of 
 the Holy Spirit, is assumed and most ear- 
 nestly maintained. The profound biblical 
 conceptions of sin, and law, and atonement, 
 and regeneration, are not divested of their 
 supernatural import, and relegated to the 
 vocabulary of natural ethics. I am not 
 pleading for another Gospel, nor for a new 
 and attenuated version of the old Gospel, 
 but for such a use of it as shall deal with 
 man as he is, and shall secure his present 
 redemption from the power and pollution 
 of sin. Use the same rifle, powder, and ball, 
 but aim low. I have no confidence in the 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 49 
 
 preaching which confines itself to the expo- 
 sition of ethical maxims, which urges men 
 to avoid falsehood and vice on the ground 
 of the constitutional dignity of human 
 nature, which does not introduce the mo- 
 tives growing out of a veritable Divine 
 intervention, and which ignores the sanc- 
 tions of the Divine judgment ; for upon 
 such a view, Socrates and Confucius are 
 older, and so far, better authorities than 
 Jesus Christ. For all literature has its 
 tragic undertone, and the altar is every- 
 where the confession of sin, and a memorial 
 of fear. Man needs Divine redemption. 
 Something must be clone for him. Hu- 
 manity must be rescued by the hand of 
 God, as well as startled by His voice and 
 welcomed to His heart. It must be born 
 from above. Its prison doors mast be 
 broken, its manacles must be melted, the 
 tide of death must be checked and reversed 
 in the prisoner's veins. Reformation will 
 not answer ; it only administers anodynes, 
 whose only effect is to retard for a season 
 the inevitable collapse. Socrates did not 
 save Greece ; the Stoics did not save Rome ; 
 Confucius and Sakya-Mouni have not saved 
 China and India. Ethical injunctions will 
 
50 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 not save man; the experiment has been 
 widely tried, and it has always been a sad 
 and conspicuous failure. Humanity needs 
 a Redeemer, an historical and personal 
 descent of the living God into the stream 
 of its poisoned life, if that life is to be 
 cleansed and sweetened. And this is the 
 burden of the Gospel, that God was in 
 Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. 
 That was more than a republication of the 
 moral law. It was more than the revela- 
 tion of God's universal Fatherhood. Love 
 wins and conquers by what it does, not by 
 what it says, and the glad tidings of the 
 New Testament are in what Jesus Christ did 
 for men, and in the abiding energy of that 
 work. The pierced hands are no myth, 
 the broken heart is no accident, the open 
 grave is no poetic fancy. They reveal 
 much ; they have achieved, and are achiev- 
 ing more. The air is not more indispensa- 
 ble to physical life than is Jesus Christ to 
 man's redemption. My aim has been to set 
 forth the tremendous realism of the eternal 
 priesthood of Jesus Christ, its profound 
 historical necessity, and its design as a his- 
 torical fact, to produce a definite historical 
 result, — the redemption of man. 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 51 
 
 Nor, under this conception of the preach- 
 er's vocation, is man to be treated as the crea- 
 ture of time. That would be an irrational 
 procedure, for the simple reason that man's 
 spirit bears the image of God, and is there- 
 fore immortal in its essential constitution. 
 You must address him as the child and heir 
 of eternity; only you need to remember 
 that the eternity which thus crowns him is 
 not prospective merely, but present. All 
 that he does and is has eternal significance. 
 It is unending in duration of effect, because 
 it is eternal in present quality. It is an 
 unscriptural distinction which limits time 
 to the present and eternity to the future. 
 The present moment is all that has reality, 
 and time and eternity are only different 
 faces of the NOW. " The things that are 
 seen are temporal, the things that are not 
 seen are eternal," says the great apostle. 
 And everywhere, at every moment, the 
 seen and the unseen confront us. They 
 meet in our composite personality ; the vis- 
 ible body is temporal, the invisible soul is 
 eternal. They balance and interpenetrate 
 each other in what we call the universe ; 
 so far as it is visible, it is temporal and 
 changing, but its invisible energy, as rooted 
 
52 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 in the will of the Living God, is immutable, 
 constant, eternal. That is the Pauline dis- 
 tinction, and it embodies the profoundest 
 philosophy. He does not say that the vis- 
 ible is unreal, nor does he say that the in- 
 visible is ideal; he is neither an idealist 
 nor a materialist. The visible and the in- 
 visible are equally real : Paul speaks as a 
 natural dualist. But the invisible is the 
 root of the visible. It is the immutable, 
 constant, eternal principle of the changing 
 and transient. Wherever the invisible is, 
 there is the eternal : and if there be an 
 omnipresent, invisible God, eternity is con- 
 densed into every flying minute. Every 
 conscious, responsible soul holds the awful 
 secret in its grasp. In virtue of its consti- 
 tutional relationship to God, and in virtue 
 of its natural sonship, its present attitude 
 and action are invested with eternal signi- 
 ficance. Immortality is not eliminated, but 
 it is traced to its living root, in the invisible 
 spirit, and eternity shows its majestic face 
 behind the thin veil of time. 
 
 The truth is that our philosophy of mor- 
 tal life has been altogether too meagre. 
 Our estimate of history has been singularly 
 inadequate. We have been disposed to 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 53 
 
 regard the present life as full only of 
 vanity, as indeed it is to him who uses 
 it mainly for eating, drinking, getting rich 
 and being merry. We have rattled the 
 skeleton in men's faces. We have taken 
 our practical theology from Ecclesiastes, 
 instead of from the Gospel of John. But 
 now is the accepted time, now is the day of 
 salvation. The air is full of sunshine and 
 song. The last days are upon us, in which 
 God has spoken to us by His Son, and set 
 up His tabernacle among men. The future 
 has no dignity which does not fill each 
 passing hour, and eternity is the pulse, the 
 throbbing heart, of time. And, therefore, 
 the present life is not a temporary scaffold- 
 ing, a period of moral probation, but the 
 deep and broad foundation which God is 
 laying by human hands for the temple of 
 His building ; and the history, slowly syl- 
 labling itself in the world's redemption, is 
 the first and formative chapter in the glo- 
 rious records of the future. Present life 
 alicl present history are eternal, of intrin- 
 sic and imperishable worth. To save men, 
 then, in their mortal bodies, and to sub- 
 due the earth unto righteousness, through 
 the preaching of the Gospel, is to give to 
 
54 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 
 
 eternity its living place in the annals of 
 time. 
 
 For more than ten years I have rested in 
 this conclusion, and each review has only 
 confirmed my confidence in its correctness. 
 It has given me poise and gladness amid 
 the eschatological discussions which have 
 disturbed our theological schools, and 
 which have marred the peace of our mis- 
 sionary gatherings. I have felt that I had 
 other work to do than to frame theories as 
 to how God would deal with those who 
 have never heard the Gospel. I do not 
 know what He will do with those who 
 hear the Gospel from my lips. The rejec- 
 tion of my message may not involve their 
 eternal perdition, I am not the organ of 
 God's retributive justice, and I would not 
 be for ten thousand worlds. The inter- 
 mediate state is a terra incognita, on which 
 I have ceased to speculate, simply because 
 human reason is incompetent to conduct 
 the debate to any certain issue, and because 
 the Scriptures have not been made the ve- 
 hicle of any revelation on the subject. 
 The dead are in God's hands, where we 
 should be both content and glad to leave 
 them; the living millions are on your 
 
PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 55 
 
 hands and mine, and the)' should burden 
 our hearts. Surely, on this ground we can 
 clasp hands, and push to the utmost the 
 energies of Christian activity, until their 
 widening lines shall compass all the na- 
 tions. Until then, the Christian pulpit 
 must remain as the mightiest of conserva- 
 tive moral forces, and as the most potent 
 of all aggressive regenerating agencies. 
 
 It seems to me that this theory of preach- 
 ing unites the evangelistic and evolutional 
 conceptions in a higher, single, comprehen- 
 sive formula. It agrees with the evange- 
 listic in recognizing this world as a lost 
 world, as dead in trespasses and sins, as 
 exposed to imminent and eternal judgment, 
 as summoned in these last days to immedi- 
 ate repentance, and requiring that renewing 
 and sanctifying energy of the Holy Spirit, 
 which is connected with an obedient faith 
 in the Gospel, for its rescue. It does not 
 ignore the individual in the universality 
 of its outlook. It accentuates personal 
 responsibility. It paints sin in the darkest 
 colors. It maintains the majesty of moral 
 law. It knows only Christ and Him cruci- 
 fied, as the sinner's hope of pardon and 
 purity. It addresses each man as an im- 
 
56 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 mortal being, and invests every moral 
 choice with eternal significance. It does 
 not soothe with unfounded hopes. It urges 
 to immediate and decided action. On the 
 other hand, it agrees with the evolutional 
 or educational theory of the sermon by 
 recognizing that the Incarnation was a 
 historical crisis, that the Resurrection was 
 a historical victory, and that the Mediato- 
 rial Reign of Jesus Christ is a historical 
 process. The present life of man is to be 
 sanctified and sweetened, and the whole 
 earth is to be made the abode of piety and 
 peace. That eternal issues are involved 
 in the process, no thoughtful man, who 
 reverently reads his Bible, can for a mo- 
 ment doubt, and must be assumed on the 
 ground of the soul's indestructible being 
 and the absolute authority of moral law; 
 nor can these considerations be eliminated 
 from the message which the pulpit must 
 deliver ; but the immediate object of attain- 
 ment must be the present conversion of men 
 to holiness of life, by faith in Jesus Christ. 
 This will give living unity to the sermon, 
 and cannot fail to impress the 1 preacher 
 with a profound conviction of the historical 
 necessity and importance of his vocation. 
 
THE PEKSONAL ELEMENT IN 
 PREACHING. 
 
 " Know thyself," was the short, pithy 
 sentence into which the best Greek thought 
 compressed its practical wisdom. This 
 constitutes the problem of a sound philoso- 
 phy, and it is indispensable to genuine 
 oratorical power. For it is not the word 
 which holds the subtle, conquering energy, 
 but the thought which the word aims to 
 carry, and thought comes with its mightiest 
 force only when the soul is stirred to its 
 profoundest depths, is roused in the com- 
 pass of all its powers, and thrusts itself 
 forward with eager and hastening step. 
 Language is only the vehicle of thought, 
 and thought is the mind in conscious ac- 
 tion. If words are to burn their way, 
 thought must be at white heat, and the 
 soul must be on fire. We preach to per- 
 suade men, and the secret of persuasion is 
 
 57 
 
58 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 the impact of soul upon soul, in which 
 obscurity is overcome by clearness, and 
 doubt by faith, and narrowness by breadth, 
 and fancies by facts, and partiality by com- 
 prehension, and hesitation by decision. 
 As a rule, audiences are more responsive 
 than sympathetic. Often they are cold 
 and critical, if not positively hostile. 
 When at their best, they wait to be moved, 
 and they can be powerfully and perma- 
 nently moved only by words that convey 
 strong personal conviction, and provoke 
 an instant affirmative response. Whether 
 we like it or not, whether we justify the 
 attitude, or condemn it, the hearer need 
 not be expected to surrender in advance. 
 Preaching is always an athletic contest, a 
 close grappling and serious wrestle, and 
 whether the result shall be conquest, or 
 defeat, or a drawn battle, will depend upon 
 the perfect command the preacher has of 
 his thoughts and of himself. The sword 
 must grow to his hands, must be double- 
 edged, and he must be master in its use. 
 The soul in you must make the souls of 
 your hearers captive. You must speak 
 with authority ; not the authority of self- 
 conceit, nor that of paraded learning, nor 
 
THE PERSONAL ELEMENT, 59 
 
 that of ecclesiastical decisions, but the 
 authority which accompanies personal cer- 
 titude. 
 
 This is the only personal element which 
 has any legitimate place in the theory 
 of preaching, and without it preaching is 
 emptied of its persuasive power. All else 
 is subsidiary and incidental, peculiar to the 
 individual, whether the peculiarity be physi- 
 cal, or mental, or rhetorical. Individuality 
 and personality are not equivalents in mean- 
 ing. The individual is the limited, the par- 
 tial, the changing; the personal is the 
 essential, the inclusive, the permanent. It 
 is the fixed, intelligent certitude of soul, 
 rooted in that knowledge of self which is 
 the outcome of a personal testing of Divine 
 truth, which constitutes the unfailing and 
 inexhaustible source of moral power in the 
 preacher. The Gospel must be in him, a 
 well of water springing into everlasting 
 life, untouched by drought or frost, refresh- 
 ing his own spirit, and quenching the thirst 
 of others. If any of you entertain the 
 notion that anything can be a substitute for 
 this, a ministry of ten years will strip you 
 of the illusion. 
 
 I want to make a threefold application 
 
60 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 of this principle : first, to the physical con- 
 dition of the preacher ; then, to his devo- 
 tional temper ■ and finally, to his rhetorical 
 culture. 
 
 Our age is an age of physical culture. 
 The gymnasium crowds hard upon the 
 lecture-room. Muscle enters into competi- 
 tion with scholarship in our halls of learn- 
 ing. Within certain limits the tendency 
 is a sound and healthy one. For the in- 
 telligent care of the body is a religious 
 duty ; and conscientiousness is sadly de- 
 ficient when it permits the habitual dis- 
 regard of hygienic laws. Sickliness is not 
 an evidence of saintliness ; a pale face is 
 not prima facie evidence of power ; and a 
 sturdy, vigorous frame is not the sign of 
 animalism. But there is need of remem- 
 bering that the body is not the measure of 
 the soul, that insignificance and weakness 
 may hide a giant frame, and exceptional 
 force may dwell in a frail body. This 
 needs no proof. You will recall Bernard 
 and Calvin and Kant and Paul. We have 
 all seen men of imposing presence, for 
 whom our reverence vanished as soon as 
 they opened their lips ; while others bound 
 us to them as by links of steel, whose phys- 
 
THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 61 
 
 ical insignificance provoked our laughter 
 or compassion. Even the ancient proverb 
 of a sound mind in a sound body needs 
 serious qualification; for history abounds 
 in instances of men whose mental sanity 
 and moral power have suffered no appre- 
 ciable hindrance from constitutional and 
 physical infirmities. There is danger here, 
 as everywhere else, of hasty generalization, 
 from a partial induction of facts. The 
 truth is more nearly this, that thorough- 
 going rectitude involves reverence for all 
 law, physical or moral, human or Divine. 
 There is a sense in which all law is moral 
 and Divine, universally and eternally obli- 
 gatory, ignorance of which is blamable, and 
 violation of which is sin. It is your busi- 
 ness to understand your body, as much as 
 it is your business to understand your soul. 
 It is as much your duty to watch over and 
 care for }^our body, as it is to save your 
 soul. Christ came to redeem them both, 
 and you may not do less than fall into line 
 with Him. 
 
 Here I place the emphasis, upon an intel- 
 ligent, conscientious, reverent care of the 
 body, not upon its native vigor, least of 
 all upon the magnitude of its proportions. 
 
62 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 You are not responsible for either height 
 or weight. You cannot add to your stat- 
 ure. You cannot change the color of your 
 eyes or hair. And some of you will have 
 a perpetual contest with inherited and con- 
 stitutional infirmities. There is one thing 
 you can do, are morally bound to do, have 
 an intelligent care for the body which is 
 yours. You can put your personal integ- 
 rity into your mortal flesh. You can pay 
 the debt which, under God, you owe to 
 brain, and lungs, and stomach. You can 
 eat, drink, and sleep, to the glory of God. 
 Don't discount these bills. Pay them 
 promptly, gladly ; and pay a hundred 
 cents on a dollar. You will not understand 
 me to advocate self-indulgence ; but such 
 an intelligent oversight as the owner of 
 horses would give to the animals in his sta- 
 bles. It is the moral element in physical 
 culture which is of universal obligation ; 
 and it is here that the principle applies that 
 he only who is faithful in the least can be 
 faithful in the highest. Conscientiousness 
 admits of no exceptions. Financial honesty 
 is a matter of pennies. Veracity does not 
 permit lying in little things. Art does not 
 disdain exactness in trifles. And it is, in 
 
THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 63 
 
 the very nature of things, impossible for a 
 man to treat his body with systematic neg- 
 ligence or disregard, without suffering in 
 mental sanity and moral power. The whole 
 history of asceticism proves this. Fastings, 
 and vigils, and flagellations unhinged the 
 mind, filling it with vagaries and dreams, 
 sapping its normal strength, and undermin- 
 ing its moral power. The personal integ- 
 rity, therefore, the stern and habitual fidel- 
 ity to self, which is the secret of moral 
 energy, must extend its sovereignty over 
 the province of the body, and guard it 
 from needless waste. 
 
 What I have said about the care of the 
 body is also true of style, and of all those 
 minor proprieties which have to do with the 
 conduct of public worship. Genuineness 
 and simple heartiness are the charm of all 
 speech, the beauty of all services. The 
 Christian preacher should be a gentleman ; 
 that is, a man who is moved by a genuine 
 respect for all that is, and who is so true 
 that he cannot treat sacred things with 
 levity, nor conduct the worship of God in 
 a slovenly manner. Many years ago, in 
 my church, I had a blunt old Irishman. 
 He was a diamond in the rough. He was 
 
64 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 very poor, but not a beggar. He was un- 
 educated, but he knew his Bible. He was 
 without polish, ignorant of social etiquette, 
 but he was the soul of courtesy and polite- 
 ness, unassuming and catholic. He told 
 me once that he always put on his coat be- 
 fore he conducted family prayers. It was 
 a little thing, but it meant a great deal. I 
 do not suppose that it would have been a 
 sin for him to pray in his shirt sleeves ; but 
 he felt that God was entitled to the same 
 forms of respectful approach which he 
 would have scrupulously observed in call- 
 ing upon his friends. He was simply true 
 to the inherent fitness of things, and that 
 is the soul of courtesy and refinement. 
 
 Hence even the personal habits and dress 
 of the minister are worthy of his attention. 
 He has no business to be slovenly and vul- 
 gar. I recently listened to two distinguished 
 scholars who occupy important chairs in 
 the University of Berlin. One appeared 
 in rusty garments and soiled linen, while 
 he droned away in a lifeless fashion for 
 nearly an hour. The sight roused in me 
 an instinctive resentment. I felt that his 
 appearance was an insult to his hearers, 
 and that it betokened a want of self-respect, 
 
THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 65 
 
 however far these things may have been 
 present to his conscious thought. They 
 ought to have been present to him. There 
 is an everlasting incongruity between great 
 learning and dirty collars. The other man 
 held an equally high rank in scholarship, 
 but he was dressed in faultless taste. His 
 neck was clean, his linen was immaculate. 
 His beard was closely cropped and care- 
 fully brushed, his coat was closely buttoned. 
 He was "a gentleman and a scholar." 
 There was nothing foppish about him ; he 
 was simply a clean, wholesome man, who 
 had a keen perception of the fitness of 
 things. It was a pleasure to look at him, 
 and he spoke as he looked, with freedom, 
 exactness, and fiery animation. 
 
 Now, there is an artificial cultivation of 
 manners. It infects the tone, the attitude, 
 the dress. The elocution becomes pom- 
 pous. The dress becomes prescribed and 
 official. Mannerism is the worst of man- 
 ners. When primary or undue attention 
 is given to the form, the life suffers and 
 shrivels. And yet, to be perfectly natu- 
 ral, observing always that outward deco- 
 rum which befits the occasion, demands the 
 severest and most unremitting self-disci- 
 
66 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 pline. It requires the culture of the heart, 
 until the spirit in you obtains such clear- 
 ness of vision, such intensity of grasp, such 
 an intuitive perception of what the occa- 
 sion requires, such a fixed purpose to meet 
 every emergency as it arises, that the pro- 
 prieties will almost take care of themselves, 
 as fragrance radiates from the rose and light 
 from the sun. Keep the central fires burn- 
 ing. I know that my remedy is a severe 
 and searching one, and I confess that it is 
 easier to preach than to practise ; but I 
 confidently appeal to you whether I am 
 not right. It is in the conduct of worship, 
 as with godliness ; you can have the form 
 without the power, but you cannot have 
 the power without its appropriate form, 
 and where the power is perfect the form 
 will be perfect. All beauty comes from 
 life, and all vigorous life builds in lines of 
 beauty. • 
 
 There is, probably, no part of public 
 worship and of pastoral duty which is so 
 trying as that of prayer. At the bedside, 
 at funerals, on the Lord's day, the prayer 
 is the minister's most arduous service. He 
 soon discovers that preparation is indis- 
 pensable, unless a dead and dry formality 
 
THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 67 
 
 shall be permitted to eat out of him all 
 elements of fresh and forcible devotion. 
 But how shall he prepare himself ? Shall 
 he use regular forms, hallowed by antiquity, 
 made precious by association, or shall he 
 write out his prayers, and commit them to 
 memory ? Both methods have been recom- 
 mended, and we cannot condemn them as 
 wrong, so long as they give free flow to 
 spiritual devotion. Much may be gained 
 from the study of liturgies. The prayers 
 composed by great and saintly men may 
 give a deeper tone to our petitions, and a 
 wider range to our supplicatory speech. 
 Certainly the psalms cannot safely be neg- 
 lected, and it may be well sometimes to 
 make the pen the instrument of devotion, 
 that golden apples may gleam in a frame- 
 work of silver. But mechanism must be 
 avoided. That is the death of devotion, 
 and they who use written forms need ever- 
 more to pass them through the fiery cruci- 
 ble of personal brooding, until they glow 
 and burn again. You must retreat within 
 yourself. You must feel the burden of 
 your own wants, your blindness, your 
 weakness, your sin. You must make the 
 sorrows of others your own, and see in the 
 
68 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 dead face your own mother or babe. Then 
 the tiniest hands will open the flood-gates 
 of your sympathy. You must impersonate 
 the throng, the aged, the mature, the young, 
 hearts that are glad, and hearts that are 
 crushed ; men and women who are unmur- 
 muring and patient, and others who are 
 hard and rebellious; and then, with the 
 vision of an omniscient and loving Father 
 mastering your own soul, you will pray. 
 It is a task from which we shrink ; it in- 
 volves a long retreat and a wide disper- 
 sion, a falling back upon the living centre 
 of personal life, whence alone sympathy 
 radiates into the universal and Divine ; 
 but when you have accomplished the ardu- 
 ous task, and the full stream of human want 
 courses through your spirit, the coal of fire 
 will lie upon your lips. Let us hear once 
 more the words of the Master: "When 
 thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and 
 when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy 
 Father which is in secret." That is the 
 law of all prayer. Every man finds God 
 where Augustine found him — within him- 
 self. Retreat then within yourself, and 
 your prayer will bring the heavens near. 
 The secret of devotion is the secret of a 
 
THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 69 
 
 forcible style. There is a higher teacher 
 than text-books on rhetoric and logic. You 
 do well to master these, but if you let them 
 master you, your most careful composition 
 will lack the intensest vitality. You must 
 have your own style and logic. And by 
 that I do not mean such petty idiosyncra- 
 sies as some men assiduously cultivate, 
 mistaking singularity for originality, but 
 simple and thorough-going harmony be- 
 tween your thought and its form. Do not 
 overlay it with factitious adornment. Too 
 many jewels are offensive. Preach as you 
 would talk to a friend on the theme of 
 which you are full. Elevated thought will 
 weave its own royal robes. Strong thought 
 will always flash out in terse phrases. 
 There is a mechanical and a vital use of 
 language. It becomes a mechanical instru- 
 ment when the primary attention is fixed 
 upon words and phrases ; and then it is no 
 more than sounding brass and a tinkling 
 cymbal. It becomes a vital organ when 
 the only care is that the thought shall have 
 clear and pungent expression, and then it 
 speeds to its mark like a bullet from a 
 Minie-rifle. That which you elaborate 
 ■within the inmost centre, and is then 
 
70 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 clothed in the language which meanwhile 
 has taken shape, will be remembered " by 
 you both in substance and form with the 
 greatest ease, and will be uttered by you 
 with all the energy of natural fervor. The 
 failure of severely and systematically doing 
 this explains, in my judgment, more than 
 anything else, the difficulty which so many 
 ministers experience in speaking without 
 the use of manuscript. The sermon is 
 thought out during the process of composi- 
 tion. It should have been thought out be- 
 fore a line was written. There is too wide 
 a chasm between the thought and the lan- 
 guage. The manuscript is too mechanical 
 a product ; it is not the free and natural 
 utterance of the burning thought. The 
 style is full of strain and labor, and, if the 
 sermon so composed should be committed 
 to memory, and then preached, everybody 
 would detect the incongruity. Such ser- 
 mons must be read, for a free style cannot be 
 elaborate. You must preach as you think, 
 and as you would speak, when your thought 
 is at white heat. There are manuscript 
 sermons which are composed in that way, 
 under the rush of a kindled intelligence, 
 and with the whole order of thought clearly 
 
THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 71 
 
 grasped in advance, and should such man- 
 uscripts be mislaid, the preacher would find 
 but little trouble in reproducing the whole 
 in free speech. The rule is a universal one, 
 that he who is master of himself, whose 
 thought assumes the form of profound, 
 personal conviction, will find it compara- 
 tively easy to cultivate a clear and forcible 
 utterance, and will escape the slavery 
 which compels some men to clutch their 
 paper as if in conscious danger of momen- 
 tary shipwreck. 
 
 I think you will agree with me that the 
 various recommendations given in treatises 
 on homiletics, bearing on the personal ele- 
 ment in preaching, may be reduced to this 
 one: the clearness and certitude of self- 
 knowledge. There must be no haziness. 
 There must be no doubt. And then there 
 is required the simple courage which is 
 content to let the inner man have his way. 
 In a word, be yourself. That is the easiest 
 said and the hardest done. The real man 
 in us all is overlaid with artificialities and 
 traditionalisms, whose wrappings cling to 
 us and hinder free movement, as did the 
 bandages which fettered the risen Lazarus. 
 It requires bravery, energy, and time to 
 
72 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 tear them away. If within twenty years 
 yon have sncceeded in becoming yonrself, 
 in clearly grasping your real thought, and 
 clothing it in the forms of natural speech, 
 you have done a great work. The ministry 
 of pure law is always one of condemnation. 
 The attempt to cultivate an external con- 
 formity to its precepts, keeps us forever in 
 bondage. It is only when law becomes life, 
 when the spirit itself is roused from its 
 lethargy and comes into conscious posses- 
 sion of its indefeasible heritage, that the 
 reign of liberty begins. Then the rules 
 learned by rote, and received upon author- 
 ity, enact themselves, and thought runs 
 along the prescribed lines without friction. 
 Logic, it has well been said, does not teach 
 us how we ought to think, but how we 
 do think. Its function is not legislative, 
 but descriptive. Rhetoric does not teach 
 us how we ought to speak, but how we do 
 speak when we have something to say. 
 Its function is not legislative, but descrip- 
 tive. No man has mastered either logic or 
 rhetoric until he has mastered himself; for 
 logic only interprets the processes of clear 
 thinking, and rhetoric is only the science 
 of clear expression. 
 
THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 73 
 
 So then "Know Thyself" is the preacher's 
 simple and comprehensive canon. And its 
 simplicity constitutes its severity. It com- 
 pels you to be a philosopher. It summons 
 you to severe and incessant introspection. 
 It forces you back upon the primitive de- 
 liverances of consciousness. It compels 
 you to sift these, until only the purest 
 wheat remains. Psychology and ethics are 
 the handmaids of oratory. No preacher 
 can afford to neglect these studies, not 
 merely because they are the instruments of 
 the severest mental discipline, but because 
 they force him to understand himself, and 
 to find within his own nature the eternal 
 basis of certitude. Frederick W. Robert- 
 son read Plato and Aristotle for mental 
 inspiration and equipment. This may seem 
 a very severe diet, but roast beef makes 
 blood and is better than ice cream and 
 cake. The earnest attempt to find out 
 what Kant is after in the Critique of Pure 
 Reason, and the intelligent comparison of 
 his assumptions and conclusions with the 
 unvarnished testimony of your own con- 
 sciousness, will help you more in preach- 
 ing, than devouring a whole library of 
 modern literature. We read too much, we 
 
74 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 think too little. The first is easy, the 
 second is hard. You may say that meta- 
 physics are dull and make your head ache. 
 That is inevitable ; for if you want the best, 
 you must pay the price. You complain 
 that philosophy leads to nothing practical. 
 It brings you face to face with yourself, 
 and nothing is more supremely practical 
 than that. You reply that the results are 
 meagre at the best, and that they are often 
 contradictory, if not incomprehensible and 
 absurd. But bulk is not the measure of 
 value, and he who seeks to know himself, 
 digs in the deepest mines where the choic- 
 est treasures are stored. You insist that 
 it is the preacher's business to know his 
 Bible, and to interpret the mind of God ; 
 but it is in the primary and necessary deliv- 
 erances of your rational and moral nature 
 that the conviction of God's existence 
 forces itself upon you; you can under- 
 stand your Bible only in personal experi- 
 ence of its redemptive revelation ; and you 
 can know in certainty the mind of God 
 only as that has mastered your own reason 
 by its inherent rationality. When you 
 transcend the bounds of personal convic- 
 tion, your speech is empty and impotent. 
 
THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 75 
 
 You tell me that the preacher should be a 
 student of human nature. It is a favorite 
 phrase, and it is often said that ministers 
 do not know men. So far as there is any 
 truth in the charge, it is because the 
 preacher does not know himself. The 
 man in him has become a bandaged and 
 dried-up mummy, and the remedy is in 
 setting his own manhood at liberty. The 
 knowledge of others conies primarily by 
 the knowledge of self. Find out what you 
 are ; catalogue your own fears and hopes ; 
 survey the field of your own moral conflict ; 
 note carefully the force which any state- 
 ment makes upon your own mind and 
 heart ; analyze the secret of that authority 
 before which you lie prostrate in the dust ; 
 and you will know every other man. All 
 men are like yourself ; and in the clear 
 study of that bit of human nature which 
 you have and are, you will reach the sci- 
 ence of humanity in its essential life. 
 There need be no timidity here ; utter 
 yourself, and your words will command 
 universal attention and acceptance. 
 
 It is equally clear that such a method 
 imposes its restrictions. It is often said 
 that we must have a theology which can 
 
76 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 be preached. This is only another way of 
 saying that theology has for us its neces- 
 sary limitations, and that these limitations 
 grow out of the relation between the 
 preacher and his hearers. They must be 
 persuaded, and to persuade them he must 
 first himself be persuaded. He must speak 
 of his own knowledge. The force of his 
 appeal lies in the energy of his personal 
 conviction. He is pre-eminently and ex- 
 clusively a witness. He must be a seer. 
 He must be rigid with himself in excluding 
 speculation from his public utterances, 
 courageously confessing ignorance where 
 ignorance describes his real mental attitude. 
 He must be bravely true to himself, and 
 speak only that of which he is firmly 
 convinced. It behooves him to master his 
 own doubts first, before he thrusts them 
 upon others. He must tear down only 
 when he is fully prepared to build up. Do 
 not feed your people on green apples. 
 Wait until they are ripe. From the fierce 
 and fiery conflict with doubt, no thoughtful 
 man can be exempt. There will come days 
 and weeks when the midnight and tempest 
 are upon your soul, when you cry beneath 
 heavens of brass. But even then you will 
 
THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 77 
 
 feel that you need a God, that the soul 
 hungers after righteousness ; that truth 
 and holiness are priceless and binding, 
 even if death ends all. Preach these things 
 amid the enveloping blackness ; be true to 
 yourself even then, and your ministry will 
 not be in vain. By and by the old faith 
 will come back. You will not drift away 
 from your mother's knees, where you first 
 learned to pray; you will not lose the 
 radiant vision of your Lord. Your path 
 may lie through thick and tangled forests 
 and over rocky steeps, but you will stand 
 at last upon the lofty table-lands, kissed 
 by the rays of an eternal noon. Remem- 
 ber, I pray you, the words of your Lord 
 and mine : "If any man wills to do Crods 
 will, he shall know of the doctrine." 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT IN 
 PREACHING. 
 
 I am aware that the wording of my 
 theme is calculated to arouse suspicion and 
 distrust. For it is the fashion in some 
 quarters to denounce ethical preaching, 
 and the preaching of ethics. We are all 
 warned that such a procedure is the open 
 door into naturalism and rationalism. Ev- 
 erything here depends upon our definitions. 
 If by naturalism we understand that tem- 
 per and system of thought which excludes 
 the supernatural and makes every man his 
 own and only redeemer, then the preaching 
 which starts with, and incessantly appeals 
 to, the ethical testimony of human nature, 
 riddles the naturalistic philosophy and 
 leaves it without a line of defence. Bush- 
 nell was right when he made the soul of 
 man the major premise in his argument for 
 the supernatural. And that this was Paul's 
 78 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 79 
 
 method is clear from the single statement 
 in which he gives us the method of his min- 
 istry, that he sought to commend himself 
 to every man's conscience as in the sight 
 of God. He made little use of external 
 evidence. He did not trouble himself 
 about the canon. He appealed to but one 
 miracle, the miracle of our Lord's resurrec- 
 tion from the dead ; and that was verified 
 to him not solely by historical testimony, 
 but by personal experience of the power 
 of the risen Christ. He let his own soul 
 speak, and the argument went straight 
 home. No preaching ever was more natu- 
 ral, though it was supernatural in every 
 fibre. The philosophy which eliminates the 
 supernatural is hopelessly shattered in the 
 court of every man's conscience. The 
 denial of the living God involves discredit 
 of the moral nature, whose ingrained sense 
 of guilt and consciousness of weakness 
 demand a pardoning and redeeming God. 
 Hence, Tertullian speaks of the soul's tes- 
 timony as naturally Christian; and Augus- 
 tine describes the heart of man as restless 
 until it found its rest in God. If our 
 preaching is to be vital, and not mechanical, 
 it must be fearlessly natural, grounded in 
 
80 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 the conviction that the scheme of redemp- 
 tion is perfectly adapted to the needs of 
 man, and fitted to evoke his intelligent and 
 cordial response. 
 
 And what is meant by rationalism ? He 
 who takes the ground that the unaided 
 reason of man is competent to fathom the 
 depths of his own being, to explain the 
 riddle of his own existence, to solve the 
 problem of his own moral contradiction 
 and unrest, cannot even convert himself 
 to his creed, much less disciple others. Be 
 it so, that we are only children, " crying 
 in the night, and with no language but a 
 cry," the cry is there ; and in that cry, 
 which nothing can stifle, the reason in man 
 leaps over the boundaries of inductive logic. 
 It falls back upon its primitive constitution 
 as demanding a higher and an infallible 
 tuition. We believe the Gospel, with its 
 revelation of the impartial and infinite 
 love of God, its assurance of free forgive- 
 ness, its promise of Divine help, and its 
 disclosure of the life everlasting, to be an 
 answer to that cry, breathing peace, coins 
 age, and undying hope into human hearts ; 
 and that makes it supremely rational. Here 
 again we may learn from Paul. His author- 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 81 
 
 ity was frequently challenged. The high- 
 church party of his day claimed that he 
 was not an apostle, because he had never 
 been a personal disciple of Christ ; and the 
 eleven had distinctly decided, when they 
 proceeded to fill the vacancy created by 
 the apostasy and suicide of Judas, that the 
 lapsed bishopric could be held only by a 
 man who belonged to the ranks of those 
 who, from the baptism of John to the 
 ascension, had followed Christ. They cast 
 their lots, and solemnly ordained Matthias 
 by the laying on of hands. We hear 
 nothing more of him. He had the title ; 
 but the energy descended upon Saul of 
 Tarsus, a man who never received apostolic 
 ordination, though he did secure apostolic 
 recognition at the Council of Jerusalem. 
 Upon what did he base his claim to be 
 regarded as the peer of James, John, and 
 Peter, the pillars of the infant church? 
 He declared that he, too, had seen the 
 Lord. The miracles of an apostle had 
 been wrought by him, and he could appeal 
 to these as the credentials of his Divine 
 commission. But he laid the primary 
 emphasis upon the results of his preach- 
 ing. He was of insignificant stature and 
 
82 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 lacked many of the graces of oratory ; but 
 he could say that he had been mighty 
 through God in pulling down strongholds, 
 in casting down imaginations and every 
 high thing which exalted itself against the 
 knowledge of God, bringing into captivity 
 every thought to the obedience of Christ. 
 That describes his preaching. It was a 
 mighty intellectual wrestle, before which 
 every antagonist went down. It was not 
 the logic of the schools, but it was that 
 mightier logic w^hich Sir William Hamil- 
 ton said Dr. Guthrie possessed, in which 
 there was but one step between the premise 
 and the conclusion. There is generally 
 the most of reason where there is the least 
 of argument, where the speech compels 
 every man to listen to the authority within. 
 Let us not deceive ourselves. The preach- 
 ing which subdued the Roman and the 
 Greek, which vanquished the sword and 
 the pen, the preaching of which Paul was 
 the most eminent and successful represen- 
 tative, is the only preaching which can 
 master and subdue the life of our day. It 
 must be rational. It must make the thought 
 of man captive. It must make the hearer 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 83 
 
 see that fidelity to self compels glad sur- 
 render to Jesus Christ. 
 
 There are some who make a distinction 
 between the intellectual and the moral 
 nature, between the understanding and 
 the reason, on the basis of the Kantian 
 philosophy. It has been a favorite and 
 familiar thesis that the reason leads us 
 only a little way, and then hands us over 
 to the authority of faith. Reason shows 
 the necessity of revelation and redemption, 
 and must examine the credentials of a 
 Divine messenger ; but at that point reason 
 must submit. It never has submitted, and 
 it never will submit. It insists that the 
 message, in all its parts and as an organic 
 whole, shall be rational, shine in the radi- 
 ance of self-evident truth. You cannot deal 
 with the reason and neglect the conscience. 
 The soul is a living unity, in whose con- 
 scious life the intellectual and the ethical 
 elements perpetually blend. You can have 
 no psychology which does not assume the 
 veracity of consciousness ; you can have 
 no true thought which does not reverence 
 each separate fact, and all the facts in their 
 natural order and in their completeness. 
 The ethical is the primary and inclusive 
 
84 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 category of the understanding, and all true 
 thinking is at heart an ethical process. 
 Nor, -on the other hand, can the moral 
 nature act in severance from the intel- 
 lectual. Every moral deliverance is an 
 act of judgment, a -consciously rational 
 verdict. Thus the science of the soul is 
 an organic, indissoluble unity, where the 
 intellectual and the ethical elements con- 
 stantly balance and interpenetrate each 
 other; so that we may say that nothing 
 is rational which is not right, and nothing 
 is right which is not rational; while the 
 relation between God and the soul is such 
 that nothing can be rational and right for 
 man which is not also rational and right 
 for God, and nothing can be divinely ra- 
 tional and right for God which does not 
 command the soul's prompt and cordial 
 response. Men need only to be true to 
 themselves, to have the truth of God mas- 
 ter them. This does not make the human 
 reason the seat of primary authority and 
 infallible ; but it does affirm the capacity 
 of the reason in man to discern and verify 
 the truth of Divine revelation. Otherwise, 
 inspiration itself would be impossible and 
 inconceivable ; for in inspired men the 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 85 
 
 highest thoughts of God burn and glow in 
 words and phrases that are full of the fire 
 of personal rational conviction. And so 
 the Bible continues to be the greatest of all 
 books, because it lies nearest to the level 
 of true human thought. Ethical preach- 
 ing and the preaching of ethics do not, 
 therefore, involve a lapse into naturalism 
 or rationalism, as systems of thought which 
 exclude the supernatural. They carry us 
 resistlessly into the supernatural ; nay, the 
 ethical life moves and has its being in the 
 supernatural. Man is already in the realm 
 of the supernatural and needs no railway 
 of logic to convey him to its edge. 
 
 But now, let me say further, that a sharp 
 distinction must be made between ethical 
 preaching and the preaching of ethics. The 
 two are not synonymous. When you change 
 the adjective into a noun, you radically 
 change the conception. In the one case 
 you define a certain quality of the preach- 
 ing, its pervading and peculiar tone, 
 without saying anything about its con- 
 tents. In the other case you trace the 
 boundaries of the subject matter of preach- 
 ing. Ethical preaching is something very 
 different from the preaching of ethics ; at 
 
86 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 
 
 least, in clear thinking, the two should not 
 be confounded. I plead for the first, not 
 for the second. It is the good news of re- 
 demption in Jesus Christ which we are to 
 preach, not a code of theoretic and practi- 
 cal morals. There are a thousand ques- 
 tions in casuistry upon which the Bible 
 does not touch, and upon which the preacher 
 has no right to pronounce judgment. The 
 Scriptures deal first of all with a succession 
 of great redemptive acts, culminating in 
 the Incarnation, Atonement, and Ascen- 
 sion ; then with fundamental, self-evident, 
 and universally authoritative principles of 
 moral life ; and with specific precepts only 
 as these grow out of principles. The apos- 
 tle Paul could not take up a collection for 
 the poor in Jerusalem, without referring 
 to the unspeakable gift of God in Jesus 
 Christ. What men shall eat and drink, 
 what raiment they shall wear, what houses 
 they shall live in, what ticket they shall 
 vote, what amusements and recreations 
 they shall indulge in, it is not for the 
 preacher to say. In these matters every 
 man must stand and fall to his own mas- 
 ter. The responsibility rests with him, and 
 him alone, of making personal application 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 87 
 
 of the general principles of righteousness. 
 He may not make a brute of himself ; he 
 may not ignore the claims of God and of 
 his fellow-men ; he may not bargain away 
 the eternities for temporal advantage ; you 
 may and must summon him to integrity, 
 honesty, chastity, charity; and the more 
 you do this, the more impregnable will be 
 your vantage-ground, the more authorita- 
 tive will become your speech. But when 
 you attempt to be a censor of private 
 morals or a critic of public policy, how- 
 ever honest your intentions or commend- 
 able your motives, you will provoke dissent 
 from every hearer whose good will it is 
 worth while to retain. For you are to 
 preach to men, whom you are to urge to 
 thoughtful, personal independence, whose 
 character is to be unfolded from the germ 
 of personal integrity. 
 
 Even on the widest definition, the 
 preacher is vastly more than a lecturer 
 on ethics. For ethics, as a science, deals 
 with the elucidation of principles of con- 
 duct and character on the basis of an in- 
 ductive psychological analysis, and with 
 the applications of these principles to pres- 
 ent earthly relations. It cannot bring to 
 
88 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 view the highest motives to repentance, 
 such as are found in the love of God and 
 the sacrifice of the Cross. It may com- 
 mand and rebuke, but it cannot create 
 anew and comfort. Its message is legal, 
 not evangelical, and you are summoned to 
 speak of pardon and purity as made avail- 
 able for man by the grace of God in Christ 
 Jesus. But while it is not your vocation 
 to be a preacher of ethics, the ethical qual- 
 ity must be regnant in all your preaching, 
 determining your own personal mental tem- 
 per, controlling your interpretation of the 
 Gospel, and giving definiteness of aim to 
 your speech. 
 
 The temper of your own mind must be 
 ethical. Moral rectitude is the first canon 
 which you are to regard in the preparation 
 of every sermon, in the selection of every 
 text, in its interpretation, in the unfolding 
 and application of its doctrine. The sub- 
 tlest temptations of the preacher are along 
 the lines of mental and spiritual demagog- 
 ism. He is tempted to act the politician, 
 to use unworthy means in order to secure 
 laudable ends. He is in danger of playing 
 with himself and with his message. It has 
 been said of Chalmers that his most marked 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 89 
 
 quality was the white heat of his earnest- 
 ness. His sentences were long and in- 
 volved, his logic was circular and kaleido- 
 scopic ; but the repetition of his thought 
 only made its transparent and glowing hon- 
 esty all the more apparent ; and while in 
 rhetoric and logic the eminent Scotch 
 preacher may not be your ideal, in the 
 ethical loyalty of his mind he commands 
 our admiration and is worthy of our imita- 
 tion. Here is the primary root of personal 
 power. It distinguished Knox and Calvin 
 and Luther and Paul. Nowhere is it more 
 marked than in the recorded discourses of 
 our Lord, whose sublimity is in their sim- 
 plicity, whose authority is in their radical 
 integrity. We are never weary of insisting 
 that the preacher must be a good man; 
 that he must live out of the pulpit as he 
 talks in it, and we do well. But we do not 
 carry the ethical imperative far enough 
 when we stop there ; we must extend its 
 authority over the subtlest, and most secret, 
 mental and spiritual processes. The ethi- 
 cal temper of which I speak will prevent a 
 man from making an unauthorized use of 
 Scripture language, and will prompt him 
 to commit his manuscript to the flames, if 
 
90 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 at the eleventh hour he discovers that his 
 interpretation is vicious or even doubtful. 
 It will guard him against overstatement 
 and undue emphasis, and make him jealous 
 to maintain the natural perspective of truth. 
 I heard a sermon some years since, of which 
 a friend said to me : " It was excellent, but 
 the first sentence was not true." The crit- 
 icism was deserved. The preacher over- 
 shot the mark, and so threw away his op- 
 portunity at the outset. The introduction 
 cannot be too severely simple and trans- 
 parent. With equal naturalness should the 
 theme grow out of the text. Infinitely 
 better is it to do without a text than to 
 twist it to your purpose. That is dis- 
 honest, and the noblest argument will be 
 vitiated by it. Even on the rostrum of 
 political debate sincerity conquers, and 
 special pleading digs its own grave ; in the 
 pulpit, and when you venture to speak in 
 the name of God, you can command a hear- 
 ing for your cause only as you establish a 
 reputation for intellectual sincerity. 
 
 It is this demand for ethical uprightness 
 which has swept the Presbyterian churches, 
 most conservative of all ecclesiastical bodies, 
 into the revision controversy. The West- 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 91 
 
 minister Confession does not represent the 
 living pulpit. Its phrases are repudiated ; 
 the logical order of its doctrines is re- 
 jected. Men feel that they have haggled 
 long enough about substance of doctrine, 
 a phrase which every man interprets to 
 suit himself. They want a creed to which 
 they can subscribe without mental reserva- 
 tions and unworthy subterfuges, and this 
 great church will renew its youth when it 
 shall have burst asunder these shackles. 
 For orthodoxy is right thinking, and when 
 a creed ceases to represent the sincere con- 
 victions of those who subscribe to it, the 
 professed orthodoxy is the rankest kind of 
 heresy, which neither wealth nor numbers 
 can save from the contempt to which even 
 the semblance of dishonesty is doomed. 
 
 But the ethical element must not only 
 give tone to the preacher's habitual mental 
 temper ; it must determine his theological 
 method as well. He deals with ethical 
 verities, with God and the soul, with sin, 
 lav/, grace, salvation, and judgment. These 
 truths are ethical in their content and 
 import, whatever may be the etymological 
 origin of the words. They must be ethi- 
 cally interpreted. 
 
92 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 The doctrine of an inspired Bible, for 
 instance, in whatever form it may be stated, 
 reposes at last upon the perception of an 
 ethical fact. Reach it, if yon will, by the 
 path of authenticity and integrity of the 
 documents, and thence by appeal to proph- 
 ecy and miracle, your primary affirmation 
 is that the writers were credible witnesses. 
 They did not lie, and they could not have 
 been deceived. That ethical affirmation is 
 the bed-rock upon which the elaborate ar- 
 gument is based, and by which its every 
 part is sustained. Or take the more usual 
 method in contemporary dogmatics. You 
 believe in the Bible because you believe 
 Jesus Christ; and you believe Him be- 
 cause you believe in Him. Your confidence 
 in what He says, is based upon your con- 
 fidence in His personal integrity. His 
 moral sanity and sincerity subdue you. 
 You hardly think of the miracles ; His 
 ethical perfection and His spiritual eleva- 
 tion win your confidence, and make it easy 
 for you to believe Him when He makes the 
 most startling declarations about Himself 
 and the future. You believe Him to be 
 God because you have faith in Him as 
 man. You believe in eternal retribution, 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 93 
 
 in heaven and hell, because He taught it. 
 He holds you. To suggest that He ever 
 lost his mental poise is to you blasphemy. 
 Thus Christianity rests upon the percep- 
 tion of an ethical fact which no criticism 
 has been able to invalidate ; and the more 
 closely you keep that fact in view, the 
 more pungent and powerful will your 
 preaching be. Let me urge you never to 
 permit any conscious slacking in the ten- 
 sion of this profound ethical confidence in 
 your Lord. Christianity is Christ. 
 
 The contents of Christian teaching de- 
 mand a similar treatment. They are rightly 
 understood, either as separate doctrines or 
 as an articulated system, only when they 
 are ethically interpreted. The letter kill- 
 eth; only the spirit maketh alive, and a 
 living theology is always in danger of be- 
 ing strangled by an excessive literalism, 
 under whose pressure the ethical element 
 vanishes. If we regard the Gospel in its 
 widest aspect as the revelation of redemp- 
 tive action in man's behalf, our construc- 
 tion of this action in the several forms of 
 atonement, regeneration, faith, and repent- 
 ance will depend upon our previous con- 
 ception of what God is and what man is. 
 
94 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 Grace, as unmerited favor, leads to sov- 
 ereignty, the infinite freedom of the Divine 
 nature ; sin, as the transgression of law, 
 implies the existence of definite relations 
 between the offender and the judge. Or, 
 to phrase it differently, the remedial sys- 
 tem is imbedded in the moral system, and 
 must be conformed thereto. What that 
 moral system is, of which the Gospel is the 
 crowning exposition, will depend upon our 
 theological and anthropological postulates. 
 Start with the absolute freedom of God, as 
 the essential energy lying back of His nat- 
 ure, determining its contents and expres- 
 sion, resolving Him into causative will, 
 and you are forced either into virtual 
 pantheism, denying the existence and effi- 
 ciency of second causes, or into a mechani- 
 cal interpretation of moral government, 
 where covenants and constitutions play 
 their mysterious and bewildering parts. 
 Power becomes the basis of authority, de- 
 manding blind submission, refusing a dis- 
 closure of its rational ground. Supralap- 
 sarianism completely eliminates the ethical 
 element in the government of the world. 
 Nor does it obtain its rightful place where 
 one Divine attribute is made central, im- 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 95 
 
 posing its limitations upon all the rest, as 
 in those systems where justice is declared 
 to be necessary and love optional, where 
 law is regarded as universal in its opera- 
 tion, while grace is limited to the elect. 
 The gravest objection to such a construc- 
 tion is not that it perplexes and outrages 
 the human sense of impartial treatment, 
 but that it surrenders and shatters the 
 eternal ethical unity of the Divine Being, 
 introducing conflict and contradiction into 
 His essential nature. Reverse the order 
 by making love primary and regnant, re- 
 ducing justice to a conglomerate of benevo- 
 lence and wisdom, divesting it of its ideal 
 and immutable sovereignty, and you are 
 involved in the same inconsistency and con- 
 tradiction. Grace reigns through right- 
 eousness. Holiness and love are coefficients 
 in all Divine ethical action, whether in 
 redemption or in judgment. The ethical 
 unity, or eternal moral perfection, of God, 
 is vastly more important for biblical theol- 
 ogy than the unity of His essential Being. 
 If we turn to man as the subject of Divine 
 rule, the ethical interpretation of his nat- 
 ure, relations, and responsibilities again de- 
 mands sovereign recognition. No doctrine 
 
96 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 of original sin, nor of imputation, nor of 
 human inability can stand which presses 
 figurative phrases into its support, which 
 leaves unnoticed the numerous qualifying 
 statements, and which contradicts the nor- 
 mal testimony of the moral consciousness. 
 Responsibility and sovereign grace receive 
 equal and balanced emphasis in the Scrip- 
 tures. No theory of responsibility is bibli- 
 cal which makes man competent to save 
 himself. No theory of grace is biblical 
 which makes man passive in regeneration, 
 supernaturally acted upon without his 
 knowledge and election, irrespective of the 
 moral temper of his personal life. Natural 
 ability, fettered by utter moral impotence, 
 will not cut the Gordian knot. Such ability 
 is only a phrase, a misnomer, an utterly 
 illusive possession. Moral law implies some 
 form or degree of moral ability, however 
 inadequate and impartial that ability may 
 be. The bondage of the will is not its 
 paralysis or extinction. There may be only 
 a despairing cry, like that which escaped 
 from Paul when he pictured the man in 
 whom the Divine law had made its living 
 authority felt; but there is life in a cry. 
 I am not attempting to frame a science of 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 97 
 
 moral government; I am simply insisting 
 that in such a science the procedure must 
 be consistently and thoroughly ethical, 
 preserving the ethical unity of the Divine 
 nature, and doing no violence to the ethical 
 nature of man. Neither responsibility nor 
 grace may be reduced to a thing of me- 
 chanics. The Bible does not do that. It 
 affirms both with equal boldness, with an 
 utter absence of conscious contradiction; 
 and, in its ever-blending homage to the 
 behests of moral law, and the confession 
 of moral weakness, in its language of 
 mingled self-condemnation and appeal for 
 mercy, the soul of man but repeats and 
 confirms the speech of inspiration. Augus- 
 tinianism and Pelagianism, Calvinism and 
 Arminianism, have yet to meet, by converg- 
 ing lines, upon a common platform, where 
 equal justice shall be done to God as moral 
 sovereign, and to man as his moral subject. 
 Responsibility involves ethical freedom ; 
 the Divine sovereignty is an ethical energy, 
 in whose exercise all the moral perfections 
 combine, and every soul is reached. 
 
 The whole of what we call moral law, or 
 moral government, is included in our doc- 
 trine of what God is, and what man is. 
 
98 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 There are only two ethical verities, God 
 and the soul; all other phrases do but 
 describe the personal relations between the 
 two, and these personal relations are deter- 
 mined by the respective natures of the 
 beings related. These beings are ethical, 
 and hence their relations must be ethical. 
 They are brought face to face, not joined 
 by intermediary compacts. Moral law and 
 moral government are not a tertium quid, 
 having independent existence and author- 
 ity. Moral law is simply the expression 
 of the Divine judgment, and in that judg- 
 ment His eternal ethical personality is 
 voiced; and so moral law is in perfect 
 correspondence with the ethical nature of 
 man ; moral government is simply the ethi- 
 cal energy of God's personal rule. We 
 are in constant danger of being misled by 
 the figurative quality of all language. 
 Our rhetoric gets the best of our logic. 
 Our imagination plays tricks with our rea- 
 son. Popular phrases are converted into 
 philosophy. We sharply rebuke men for 
 speaking of evolution, natural selection, 
 and the like, as if these made a creative 
 and directing intelligence needless. We 
 reply that a scientific phrase can do nothing, 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 99 
 
 that it can only indicate how a thing is 
 done, that evolution implies an energy 
 which evolves, and natural selection an 
 energy which selects. But we do not take 
 our own medicine. We talk of a moral 
 system, of Divine covenants and constitu- 
 tions, as if these were actual things, instead 
 of being simply human phrases by which 
 we attempt to define the eternal ethical 
 relations between God and man. If I may 
 speak for myself I would say that I can 
 use all the verbal forms of every school of 
 Christian theology ; but at a certain point 
 in my thinking, I drop them all, and I am 
 conscious of only two things, — what God 
 is, and what I am. These are the two fixed 
 centres in the far-sweeping ellipse of Chris- 
 tian thought, and from them the whole field 
 of moral truth must be surveyed. Perhaps 
 you will be disposed to emphasize a Christo- 
 centric attitude, as Christ is both the visible 
 embodiment of God and of man. For prac- 
 tical purposes there would be no difference 
 between us; but I need only remind you 
 that you cannot define the person of Christ 
 until you have made clear to yourself what 
 God is, and what man is, to make it plain 
 that my statement only carries the matter 
 
100 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 a step further back, and lays stress upon 
 the primary, fundamental ethical concep- 
 tions which dominate the whole circle of 
 theological thought. Every doctrine dis- 
 closes, in the final analysis, these two ele- 
 mentary ethical conceptions, and in their 
 light the doctrines must be interpreted, 
 whether separately or in their rational com- 
 pleteness. Along the entire line of Chris- 
 tian exposition, from the idea of creation 
 to that of the final judgment, the kernel 
 of truth has been reached only when its 
 ethical elements have been clearly appre- 
 hended and firmly grasped ; and from this 
 inner centre of mystery the return will be 
 easy to the free use of all the varied 
 imagery which has been consecrated in 
 Christian speech. 
 
 Now, then, with soul erect and rifle 
 charged, what shall be your aim? It is 
 your vocation to beseech men to be recon- 
 ciled to God, to give joyful credence to the 
 message of free forgiveness in Christ, and 
 to take the yoke of obedience to Him upon, 
 them. But to secure such a response, you 
 must evoke from them the confession of 
 personal guilt, and open their eyes to the 
 glory of the Lord. They must see their 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 101 
 
 own sin, and they must see His righteous- 
 ness. It is an ethical result which you are 
 seeking to gain, and therefore your appeal 
 must be to the ethical nature. In popular 
 phrase, you must train your guns upon the 
 conscience of the hearer. And what is 
 conscience? The best definition of the 
 word, closely following its etymological 
 derivation, which I have ever seen, makes 
 it the soul's power of passing judgment 
 upon itself, upon its thoughts, motives, 
 and actions, a universal, pervasive, judicial 
 quality of its conscious life. It does not 
 supply its own law. That makes its appeal 
 to the reason, and is discerned by the rea- 
 son, but when once the rational imperative 
 has been heard, the soul instantly passes 
 judgment upon itself in view of its con- 
 formity to the law which the moral reason 
 has proclaimed. The appeal to the con- 
 science, therefore, is simply a summons to 
 the soul to exercise its highest ethical pre- 
 rogative. It is only indirectly, and medi- 
 ately, that you can convince any man. He 
 must convict and convince himself. Hence 
 illumination is represented as the primary 
 function of the ministry of the Holy Spirit ; 
 while spiritual perception, and the moral 
 
102 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 judgment following it, are the acts of the 
 soul under the revelation of the truth. 
 Personal responsibility requires no argu- 
 ment. The moral law is in need of no de- 
 fence. The perfections of God are radiant 
 in their own light. The life and teachings 
 of Jesus Christ commend themselves to 
 every honest and earnest hearer. These 
 great themes are to be handled by you in 
 the profound conviction that their author- 
 ity cannot be impugned, with an urgency 
 which will give the hearer no rest until he 
 passes judgment upon himself, and shapes 
 his course accordingly. This will not make 
 your preaching hortatory. It is a good rule 
 that the exhortation should be brief, with 
 the force of solid argument behind it. In 
 its direct form it may often be wise to omit 
 it. Leave the truth to do its own work. 
 Throw the man upon himself. If you have 
 brought him face to face with God, you 
 may retire. But to secure that should be 
 your overmastering passion, so that the 
 Divine presence may produce self-convic- 
 tion, confession, penitence, faith. Never 
 permit yourself to forget that to provoke 
 men to self -judgment, in the sight of God, 
 is your vocation, and should be the aim of 
 
THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 103 
 
 all your discourse ; and if your preaching 
 be directed to this ethical end, its eternal 
 undertone, majestic and mighty, will be, 
 " Now is the day of salvation" summoning 
 to instant decision and prompt obedience. 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT IN 
 PEEACHING. 
 
 You have been taught that the Reforma- 
 tion of the sixteenth century was distin- 
 guished by two things : the appeal to Holy 
 Scripture in the settlement of all questions 
 of Christian faith and conduct, and the 
 conception of religion as justification by 
 faith, as constituted and conserved by per- 
 sonal and spiritual acts, not by priestly and 
 sacramental offices. These are, respectively, 
 the formal and the material principles of 
 Protestant Christianity. Of the two, the 
 latter is by far the more radical and revo- 
 lutionary, because the preliminary and pre- 
 cedent conception of religion becomes, 
 consciously or unconsciously, a canon of 
 criticism and interpretation. It gives us, 
 whether we recognize it or not, an imperium 
 in imperio, a Bible within a Bible, a single 
 sovereign message dominating the whole 
 course, and explaining all the contents, of 
 104 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 105 
 
 Divine revelation. This explains Luther's 
 attitude towards the epistle by James. It 
 was to him a letter of straw, because he 
 could not find in it the Pauline conception 
 of the Gospel. The judgment was not 
 based upon a critical sifting of historical evi- 
 dence, much less was the procedure ration- 
 alistic, as proceeding from a denial of the 
 supernatural ; it was simply applying his 
 conception of the Gospel to each separate 
 document, and determining its relative au- 
 thority by the comparison. It is a danger- 
 ous principle in the hands of weak men, and 
 easily leads into all manner of vagary ; for 
 it is not so much an intellectual judgment, 
 as it is a spiritual intuition, through the ex- 
 perimental mastery which comes only by 
 moral conflict, of that single message which 
 constitutes the vital substance and form of 
 the Bible. If Luther knew anything, he 
 knew what it was to be justified by faith in 
 Jesus Christ ; and this made him alike inde- 
 pendent of ecclesiastical tradition, and of a 
 slavish interpretation of the mere letter. 
 A nominal apostle had for him no more 
 authority than the decree of a Pope. 
 
 After him and with the decadence of 
 earnest spiritual life, the point of emphasis 
 
106 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 shifted from the material to the formal 
 principle, from the Gospel itself to the 
 Bible which contains it in written form. 
 Justification by faith became itself only 
 a dogma, while the main contention con- 
 cerned the authority of the Scriptures, and 
 the ground upon which that authority re- 
 posed. Against the infallibility of councils 
 and Popes was set the literal infallibility of 
 Scripture, involving the theory of mechan- 
 ical and verbal inspiration, which thence- 
 forward assumed the primary place in 
 Christian dogmatics. It was an unfortu- 
 nate and mischievous change of base. It 
 exposed Protestant Christianity to a double 
 assault. Rome replied that the Church 
 existed before the New Testament, and had 
 always been the custodian of the sacred 
 books, whose authenticity and integrity 
 assumed the veracity of this traditional 
 testimony, as the autograph manuscripts 
 had long since disappeared ; while Biblical 
 criticism pointed out that the Hebrew 
 vowels were the addition of latter copyists, 
 that the extant manuscripts varied widely 
 in their textual reading, and in the books 
 which they contained, that the Septuagint 
 differed from the received Hebrew text, 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 107 
 
 especially in its chronology, and that many 
 of the books of the Old Testament, with 
 the synoptic Gospels, and the epistle to the 
 Hebrews, were either of anonymous author- 
 ship, or uncertain in date of composition, 
 or composite in literary structure. The 
 history of dogmatic thought, for the last 
 two hundred and fifty years, has been 
 largely an attempt to evade the force of 
 these objections, either by reconciling the 
 theory with the facts, or by endeavoring 
 to withdraw from a position which has 
 come to be regarded as untenable. 
 
 A clear and consistent doctrine of Scrip- 
 ture is something which Protestantism has 
 not yet formulated, and which is still in 
 process of constant revision, no version com- 
 manding general and hearty assent ; and 
 many have taken refuge in the practical use 
 of the Bible, without inquiring into the nat- 
 ure of inspiration, or the scope of that au- 
 thority which inspiration guarantees. Such 
 an agnostic position cannot long be main- 
 tained, and must act as a perpetual check 
 upon ardent souls, who insist upon certainty 
 as indispensable to mental poise and moral 
 enthusiasm. There can be no biblical 
 preaching which does not seize the hide- 
 
108 PHILOSOPHY OF PBEACHING. 
 
 structible element of Scripture, the one 
 message which dominates its entire and 
 intricate framework, which is independent 
 of lower and higher criticism alike, and 
 whose authority is inseparable from its 
 proclamation. And in thus passing from 
 the letter to the quickening spirit, from 
 a collection of pamphlets to the Gospel 
 which they contain, we are simply going 
 back to Luther, to Paul, and to Christ 
 Himself. This is only another way of say- 
 ing that the Bible is an organism, a vital 
 unity, and not a collection of disjecta mem- 
 bra, and that therefore it must be under- 
 stood as a whole, before there can be any 
 profitable study of its component parts. 
 Lower criticism may content itself with a 
 comparison of manuscripts, the edition of 
 the text, and with grammatical interpreta- 
 tion ; higher criticism may advance to the 
 more intricate questions of date, author- 
 ship, and internal structure ; but the preach- 
 er meanwhile must be doing his work. He 
 cannot wait for the last word from Tre- 
 gelles or Teschendorf, nor for the latest 
 theory propounded at Tubingen or Berlin ; 
 he must deal with the constant factor 
 which all these researches assume ; he must 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 109 
 
 give voice to that Living Word, whose re- 
 ality and power are independent of human 
 scholarship. He cannot be indifferent to 
 what is going on in the universities ; he 
 ought to keep himself fully abreast of the 
 intellectual life of his time ; but the fierce 
 debate should be mainly helpful to him in 
 clarifying his discernment of what is pri- 
 mary and essential, and of what is secondary 
 and of subordinate importance. The net 
 result of Christian scholarship will be a 
 simple Gospel, whose transcendent and 
 transfiguring message glows undimmed 
 and uninjured in the fiercest crucible, and 
 wins the joyful assent of every earnest 
 heart. 
 
 I find myself in hearty agreement with 
 a living writer, when he says that " many 
 points which now occupy the attention .of 
 biblical scholars, and call forth learned 
 dissertations and elaborate treatises, are 
 not worthy of the attention given them ; 
 and their labors will be regarded as the crit- 
 ical tithing of the mint, anise, and cumin." 
 Some of you may live to see the day when 
 the critical acumen of the nineteenth 
 century will be regarded as a waste of 
 intellectual energy, as we now label the 
 
110 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 scholastic ingenuity of the Middle Ages, 
 and the Gnostic speculations of the earlier 
 centuries, when men will wonder that the 
 simplicity of the preacher's task, in the 
 use of the Bible, should ever have been 
 mistaken. The pulpit is not the place for 
 raising questions to which an authoritative 
 answer cannot be given. Its power is 
 in dealing with the universal and self- 
 evidencing element in Holy Scripture, with 
 a firm reliance that this vital message will 
 come home in the power and demonstration 
 of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 I am aware that this conception of the 
 biblical element in preaching contravenes 
 the traditional use of the Scriptures. We 
 are never weary of asserting that every 
 Christian ought to read his Bible, that 
 preaching should be pervasively biblical, 
 and that Christian theology, in its separate 
 doctrines, and in their logical order, should 
 issue from a careful study of the holy 
 oracles. I can subscribe to all that. We 
 agree in maintaining the plenary religious 
 authority of the Bible. It is the preacher's 
 text-book, as it is every disciple's manual. 
 But what am I to read my Bible for ? Am 
 I to make no discrimination in its literary 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT, 111 
 
 contents ; am I to place all its histories, 
 and miracles, and legislation upon the same 
 level, and insist that everything recorded 
 within its covers is of equally binding 
 authority upon faith and conduct? Was 
 not this the blunder of the early Puritans, 
 who found in the enactments of the Jewish 
 theocracy the fundamental law for civil 
 government, and who therefore believed 
 in the forcible suppression of heresy? 
 They were true to their logic, but the 
 major premise of their reasoning was vi- 
 cious, because it assumed that all legislation 
 was equally authoritative, unless it had 
 been specifically revoked at a subsequent 
 time. Are we to be debarred from follow- 
 ing the principle of spiritual discrimina- 
 tion, which is so marked in our Lord's 
 teaching, and whose bold use distinguishes 
 the apostle to the Gentiles ? Is there not 
 need that we should heed those sharp 
 words of rebuke which our Lord uttered 
 in the synagogue at Capernaum, " It is the 
 spirit which quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth 
 nothing; the words which I have spoken 
 unto you, they are spirit, and they are 
 life"? There is a literalism which dis- 
 honors the Bible, because it strangles its 
 
112 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 life, and silences its sublime testimony. 
 It discovers meanings in names and num- 
 bers which they were never intended to 
 suggest. It finds types of Christ in every- 
 thing, with interpretations and applications 
 as fanciful as anything ever perpetrated by 
 the allegorical school of Alexandria. It 
 converts the Bible into a storehouse of 
 texts, without any regard to the linguistic 
 peculiarities of the writer, the people whom 
 he addressed, and the end which he had 
 in view. The concordance of Cruden is 
 made the commentary of Scripture, and 
 an insane man becomes the interpreter of 
 an inspired volume.. Balaam's words are 
 invested with the same authority as those 
 of Moses and Isaiah ; and Caiaphas becomes 
 as truly inspired as Paul and John. No 
 distinction is made between good men and 
 bad men, and even the words of the devil 
 are quoted as inspired. Should you ever 
 have occasion to preach from the fourth 
 verse of the second chapter of Job, where 
 we read, " Skin for skin : yea, all that a 
 man hath, will he give for his life," I advise 
 you to begin your sermon with the sen- 
 tence, " That is a lie " / The devil is 
 represented as saying that ; and the book 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 113 
 
 of Job proves that he lied when he said it. 
 The statement is unqualifiedly false. Men 
 will die for their honor, for their country, 
 for God and truth. 
 
 You may think that I have selected an 
 extreme illustration, and that there is a 
 touch of sensationalism in my language, 
 but my purpose is simply to remind you 
 that the words and the sentences of the 
 Bible are not, without further discrimina- 
 tion, the Word of Grod which you and I 
 are to preach. If you quote Eliphaz, the 
 Temanite, or Bilclad, the Shuhite, I shall 
 feel at liberty to criticise their ambitious 
 theodicies, and under the shield of God's 
 own emphatic repudiation, both in the book 
 of Job and elsewhere, I shall not shrink 
 from labelling their logic as partial, and 
 their rhetoric as bombastic. And I should 
 do this, because I am jealous of the Word 
 of God, because I love it with a holy passion, 
 and insist therefore that the real message 
 shall not be indiscriminately confounded 
 with the literary forms under which it has 
 been recorded and preserved. 
 
 The time has forever gone by when the 
 human element in the composition of the 
 Scriptures can be ignored, or regarded as 
 
114 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 incidental. They can be fully understood 
 only in so far as we are able to reproduce 
 the actual environment of their writers, 
 and make due allowance for the peculiar 
 phraseology in which they uttered their 
 thoughts. They used the language and 
 the formal logic of their times, and the 
 oldest times of the great book are those of 
 the imaginative Orient, of the beginnings 
 of history, of primitive tradition in poetic 
 and pictorial form. Hence the New Testa- 
 ment comes more closely home to us than 
 the Old. The gospels and epistles are 
 written in a language essentially modern, 
 with a modern atmosphere and outlook. 
 The Sermon on the Mount and the epistles 
 of Paul fall in with our habits of thought 
 and our use of speech. The farther back 
 we go, the more pictorial becomes the lan- 
 guage, until it becomes difficult to disen- 
 tangle the historical from the ideal in the 
 recorded tradition or narrative. 
 
 Nor is the human element confined to 
 the phraseology. The theory that the 
 writers of Scripture were qualified for their 
 work by the gift of supernatural informa- 
 tion is, at least in its unqualified form, an 
 utterly gratuitous assumption. Luke, at 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 115 
 
 least, has told us how he went to work in 
 preparing to write the gospel which bears 
 his name, and the Acts of the Apostles. 
 These books have generally been regarded 
 as entitled to a place in the New Testa- 
 ment canon, on the assumption that Luke 
 was the companion of an inspired apostle. 
 But there is no evidence that Paul had 
 anything to do with Luke's literary labors, 
 or that he read Luke's manuscripts before 
 they were sent to Theophilus. Luke wrote 
 for a personal friend, and in the introduc- 
 tion to the first part of the story, which 
 outlines the life of Christ, he referred to 
 the sources of his information, and to the 
 care which he had taken to collate, com- 
 pare, and critically sift them. From all 
 that appears, Luke acted the part simply of 
 an earnest, patient, historical student, claim- 
 ing no supernatural illumination, and never 
 dreaming that his private letters would 
 become universally recognized authorities. 
 Does this simple explanation deprive these 
 letters of their authority? Not in the 
 least ; but, on the other hand, their verac- 
 ity is more firmly established. For while 
 they only profess to record in some logical 
 or chronological order the things which 
 
116 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 were surely believed at the time, the eye- 
 witnesses and ministers of the word had 
 been consulted, and the result of the 
 inquiry was communicated in private let- 
 ters — a form of literary composition in 
 which any doubt would have been freely 
 expressed. 
 
 Nor can Luke be regarded as exceptional 
 in this matter. If his writings are to be 
 regarded as trustworthy and authoritative, 
 the presumption is that the free use and 
 incorporation of unknown documents and 
 traditions were freely resorted to in the 
 compilation of the historical portions of 
 the Bible. A faithful use of the royal and 
 the priestly archives was all that was needed 
 for the composition of the books of the 
 Kings and of the Chronicles. Nor can it 
 be necessary to maintain that the Penta- 
 teuch, as we have it, was written by Moses, 
 and that the portions preceding his own 
 call were supernaturally communicated to 
 him. Even the Mosaic authorship of the 
 Pentateuch, which can hardly be said to 
 have been seriously assailed, does not com- 
 pel us to assume that Genesis is anything 
 more than a careful compilation of current 
 traditions, serving as an introduction to the 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 117 
 
 real theme of the history. The emphasis 
 is on the establishment of the Jewish com- 
 monwealth, under the law given at Sinai, 
 and not on the length of the creative clays, 
 or on the nature of the forbidden fruit, or 
 on the extent of the deluge, or on the 
 building of the tower of Babel. 
 
 Thus each separate book must be read 
 in the light of its living, germinant idea 
 and intention. Nor can we stop here. 
 When the inductive and analytic process 
 has been completed, the results must be 
 compared and co-ordinated in their histor- 
 ical order, and the main thought which 
 dominates the whole must be eliminated. 
 That will be the law, the prophets, and 
 the Gospel, which you are to preach, 
 faintly gleaming in the first promise of 
 the seed who should bruise the serpent's 
 head, and making radiant the face and 
 ministry of Jesus Christ. 
 
 It has been said with truth that criticism 
 has not essentially altered the main facts 
 of Israel's history. It has labelled some 
 things as legendary and allegorical. But 
 the Decalogue, the Temple service, the 
 Psalms, and the Prophets have remained, 
 as showing the great thoughts, and record- 
 
118 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 
 
 ing the profound spiritual experiences, 
 which stirred a multitude of hearts when 
 paganism was well-nigh universal, and dis- 
 closing the ground upon which that sub- 
 lime faith reposed. And it may be said, 
 even more emphatically, that a criticism 
 which in its extreme form leaves us four 
 great Pauline epistles, and which confesses 
 that the belief of the early Christians in 
 the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ is 
 incapable of psychological explanation, has 
 accomplished nothing to discredit Chris- 
 tianity, and has only placed in stronger 
 relief the spiritual energy of that Gospel 
 which knows only Christ and Him cruci- 
 fied. Thus, with even the most meagre 
 equipment, pushing the logic of elimina- 
 tion to its utmost verge, the great verities 
 of God, and law, and sin, and redemption 
 by Jesus Christ, remain as the most potent 
 energies in personal experience and in the 
 march of history. You can trace these 
 thoughts in their orderly development and 
 final expression in the fragmentary pam- 
 phlets which make up your Bible. If you 
 place them in chronological order, the Gos- 
 pel by the apostle John will crown the 
 literary structure, and the whole will be 
 
TEE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 119 
 
 radiant in the glory of Him who declared 
 that He had come to reveal the Father, and 
 to give His life for the world's redemption. 
 Here is the vital pulse and the beating 
 heart of all Scripture, in the revelation of 
 Gcod, in his self-expression, by word and 
 deed, by law and prophecy, by precept and 
 promise, in personal experience and his- 
 tory, in redemption and judgment. You 
 are to read the Bible to find out what God 
 has to say about Himself, to discover what 
 He is, what He thinks of you, and what 
 He has done for you. Every one of the 
 autograph manuscripts has been lost — 
 what of that? There are a hundred thou- 
 sand variations in the Greek text of the 
 New Testament alone — what of that? 
 The genealogies and the chronology of the 
 Bible are in hopeles confusion — ivhat of 
 that? You are reading a human transla- 
 tion — what of that? Suppose Moses did 
 not write the major part of the Pentateuch ; 
 suppose the Levitical legislation to be 
 largely post-exilian ; suppose the latter 
 part of Isaiah to be from the pen of an 
 unknown author, and Daniel to be an 
 anonymous composition of unknown date ; 
 suppose Job to be a drama and Jonah an 
 
120 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 allegory ; suppose the greater part of Gen- 
 esis to be the survival of primitive tradi- 
 tions in pictorial or poetic form ; suppose 
 all this, and much more — what of that ? 
 It is well to remember the words of Cardi- 
 nal Baronius, that the Scriptures tell us 
 how to go to heaven, not how the heavens 
 go. Nor were they given us to tell us how 
 they came to be that they are, but what 
 we must do to be saved, and that God, in 
 His love, sent Jesus Christ to save us. 
 
 Is not that Paul's doctrine, when he 
 declares that the Scriptures are able to 
 make us wise unto salvation, that their 
 design is instruction in righteousness ? 
 And did not our Lord declare that " eter- 
 nal life " was the hidden theme of all 
 prophecy, a perpetual anticipation of, and 
 testimony to, that Divine redemptive pur- 
 pose which secured historical fulfilment 
 in Himself ? Let us cease, at least in the 
 pulpit, to discuss the cosmogony of Gen- 
 esis, the passage of the Red Sea, the 
 manna in the wilderness, the story of 
 Balaam and his ass, of Jonah and the 
 whale, of Joshua and the sun, of demoni- 
 acal possession, and especially of the 
 Gadarene swine, upon which latter narra- 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 121 
 
 tive Mr. Huxley discourses at such length 
 and with so much feeling, as if the fate of 
 a few thousand pigs had anything to do 
 with the history of man's redemption. 
 Are these things the vital, universal mat- 
 ter of the Scriptures? For myself, I be- 
 lieve in a personal devil and in demoniacal 
 possession, though I frankly own that I do 
 not know what to make of Balaam and 
 Jonah ; but I am not prepared to say that 
 a man cannot be saved unless he believes 
 in Satan ; I am satisfied if he believes on 
 the Lord Jesus Christ. I have heard some 
 say as they banged the Book that they be- 
 lieved every word within its covers. So 
 do I ; but I insist upon reading my Bible 
 as that Bible tells me to read it, as the 
 revelation of God, as giving me a vivid 
 and glorious disclosure of His character, 
 and purposes, and redemptive deeds, and 
 so waking in me patience, faith, hope, love, 
 and joy. The true use of the Bible is not 
 that of minute exegesis, nor that of in- 
 terpretation from the context, nor that 
 of synthetic exposition of each separate 
 book, but that of a firm grasp upon its 
 great fundamental and universally domi- 
 nant verities, which verities are vital and 
 
122 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 regnant now, and would be, if every copy 
 of the Bible should be destroyed. Do not 
 misunderstand me. Exegesis cannot be 
 too exact. Analysis and synthesis cannot 
 be too careful. But when all this has been 
 done, it still remains for you to co-ordinate 
 all the results under that which is the su- 
 preme law of Holy Scripture — the revela- 
 tion of God in redemption. That is what 
 I mean by biblical preaching, in which 
 sin and salvation constitute the perpetual 
 undertone, the inspiration of all worship, 
 the secret of all emotion, the urgency of 
 every appeal, the fire and the force of all 
 reasoning. 
 
 If this is not the true use of the Bible, 
 then why is it that the Bible is just such a 
 book as it is? Surely God could easily 
 have so shaped events as to have preserved 
 every autograph manuscript of every book 
 and psalm in the Bible. In such a case 
 we should have been saved all perplexing 
 questions of authorship, date, structure, and 
 the like. Criticism might have been made 
 forever impossible, or only the employment 
 of fools. But such is not the Bible which 
 we have ; nor can I conceive of any other 
 reason why we do not have such a Bible 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 123 
 
 as I have described, than that God never 
 intended that we should have such an one ; 
 that He was indifferent as to its literal 
 preservation ; that just such a Bible as we 
 have, with its critical difficulties and un- 
 certainties, was meant to be placed in our 
 hands and used by us ; and that, therefore, 
 the critical problems which are paraded 
 with so much ostentation, and which are 
 a trial to the faith of so many, are of sub- 
 ordinate importance, and should not be per- 
 mitted to disturb us in the slightest degree. 
 They do not annoy the ignorant man in his 
 devotions, to whom the Scriptures are a 
 Divine lamp, filled with beaten oil and 
 glowing with a celestial flame, lighting up 
 for him the path of his pilgrimage through 
 the gloomy gates of death, to where the 
 heavens are forever blue and radiant ; and 
 it is an abuse of scholarship when it is per- 
 mitted to diminish the intensity, or to inter- 
 rupt the continuity, of this spiritual and 
 Divine fellowship. The refuge of the 
 preacher is not in ignorance, nor in spe- 
 cial pleading, nor in suspended judgment, 
 but in the candid recognition of all doubt- 
 ful and debatable questions, and in such a 
 conception and estimate of the Bible that 
 
124 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 he can use it with ever-increasing facility 
 and force, with the utmost assurance that 
 the freest and most thorough scholarly re- 
 search can only help in the end the cause 
 of truth, whatever havoc it may make with 
 traditional verdicts and judgments. 
 
 I have tried, in this discussion, not to 
 lose sight of the fact that I have been 
 asked to lecture on preaching. I have re- 
 sisted the temptation to make excursions 
 into the field of dogmatics, and I have re- 
 frained from an attempt to discuss the burn- 
 ing questions of modern biblical criticism. 
 I have simply reminded you that there is 
 no agreement on the nature of inspiration, 
 nor on the literary sources which the writers 
 of the Scriptures used in their work. Not 
 one of us is indifferent to these inquiries, 
 but while they are being prosecuted, we 
 must have a Bible which we can conscien- 
 tiously use, or else manfully step down and 
 out. 
 
 Of course I speak of reverent and Chris- 
 tian criticism. I leave wholly out of the 
 account that school whose philosophical 
 postulate is a denial of the supernatural, 
 whose definition of the word " scientific " 
 involves the impossibility of miracles, and 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 125 
 
 who insist upon accounting for the history 
 of the Jewish commonwealth and for the 
 establishment of the Christian Church, as 
 they would in tracing the events which led 
 to the establishment of the American Re- 
 public ; though, even in the latter case, the 
 supernatural element emerges in the pro- 
 found religious convictions which drove 
 the Pilgrims from Scrooby to Leyden, and 
 from Leyden across the waste of waters to 
 Plymouth Rock. As Descartes insisted 
 that absolute doubt involved the existence 
 of the doubter, defying elimination by any 
 process of dialectics, so it may be said that 
 personality is itself the affirmation of the 
 supernatural, and that even he who denies 
 the existence of a personal God proves that 
 the idea of the supernatural is a perfectly 
 indigenous and familiar form of thought. 
 It is a waste of time to argue with an athe- 
 ist or a pantheist. The short method with 
 such people is the direct appeal to the sense 
 of personal dependence, and of personal ob- 
 ligation. The only argument here is that 
 of self-conviction ; and that can never fail, 
 for the soul is eternally at war with any 
 system which eliminates the ethical, and 
 
126 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 the ethical means a personal and righteous 
 God. 
 
 Nor have I sought for a common ground 
 with those who reduce Christ to a myth, 
 or who refuse to recognize His prophetic 
 authority and redeeming energy. There 
 can be no religion without a personal God, 
 and there can be no Christianity without 
 the Lord Jesus Christ. The personal reve- 
 lation of God in Christ is assumed, not 
 merely, nor even mainly, on the ground 
 of historic evidence, but on the incontro- 
 vertible ground of personal experience, in 
 ever widening circles, and in ever deepen- 
 ing intensity. The life of the world was 
 never so full of the personal Christ as it 
 is to-day. But this revelation of the per- 
 sonal God in Jesus Christ, which is the 
 supreme fact and the conquering energy 
 of our time, is the only thing which I have 
 postulated, and my contention is that this 
 is the essential element in that long his- 
 tory, whose broken and fragmentary records 
 make up the Scriptures. That constitutes 
 not only the unity of Moses, David, Isaiah, 
 Paul, and John, but also the unity of the 
 Bible and of our living Christianity. The 
 broad and widening stream is thereby seen 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 127 
 
 to be one with its original sources, traced 
 to the origin of man. Therein lies the 
 value of the Bible, and that must be the 
 supreme canon of interpretation. God in 
 Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, 
 is its great theme. All other questions, 
 whether dogmatic or critical, are subor- 
 dinate, and may be ignored in your voca- 
 tion as preachers of the Gospel. 
 
 I am perfectly aware that all this is not 
 new to you. You have gone all over this 
 ground in the lecture-room. But the atmos- 
 phere of the pulpit is not that of the library. 
 You can read the story of Napoleon's wars, 
 and study the maps of his campaigns, with- 
 out palpitation of heart; but your face 
 would blanch at the flash of sabres, and 
 you would dodge the cannon-balls if you 
 saw them speeding from the guns. To 
 proclaim upon the housetops what has been 
 whispered in the ear, requires moral cour- 
 age. Still, that which gives a relief to 
 you, you are bound to give to others. You 
 may not, even by your silence, countenance 
 a claim for the Bible, which claim every 
 intelligent hearer knows to have been dis- 
 credited by Christian scholarship. To do 
 that will subject you to the charge, either of 
 
128 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 ignorance or of cowardice. You need not, 
 you should not, make the pulpit the arena 
 of debate upon questions in dispute ; you 
 need not, you should not, pose as the ad- 
 vocate of this or that theory of inspiration, 
 of this or that school of critical inquiry ; 
 but you can, and you ought to, use your 
 Bible as the record of the revelation of 
 God to men, and give men plainly to under- 
 stand that this is the vital marrow of Scrip- 
 ture, a living fact whose presence and power 
 cannot be ignored, and which is wholly 
 independent of either the lower or higher 
 criticism. Let your hearers see, by your 
 personal attitude, that they need not be 
 perpetually dodging cannon-balls, accom- 
 panied with smoke, and flash, and roar, 
 that through the serried ranks of locked 
 bayonets the real Bible sweeps onward to 
 the conquest of the earth. Do not under- 
 take to wear Saul's armor. Go forth with 
 sling and pebble, as David did, when he 
 answered the challenge of the proud Phil- 
 istine. The simplest view of the Bible is 
 the best, both for yourself and for your 
 hearers. Its free and reverent handling 
 will invest it with a power little dreamed 
 of; so profound in its insight, so searching 
 
THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 129 
 
 its disclosure of the secrets of personal 
 unrest, and of national decadence, so true 
 to life its description of the moral conflict 
 which wages in every soul, so convincing 
 its revelation of the character of God, so 
 winning its p'ortraiture of Christ, so assur- 
 ing and inspiring its promises and predic- 
 tions. Bring men at once into the Holy 
 of Holies, and they will forget the mer- 
 chants and money-changers, the din of 
 whose voices fills the outer courts. 
 
 Of course, such a preaching of the Gos- 
 pel takes for granted that the personal 
 revelation of God in Jesus Christ has been 
 verified for you in personal experience. 
 The secret of the Lord must be in your 
 possession. With it, the most meagre 
 attainments in scholarship may make you 
 a messenger of power; without it, the 
 amplest literary equipment and the loftiest 
 eloquence will leave your speech " as sound- 
 ing brass, or a tinkling cymbal" 
 
THE SPIEITUAL ELEMENT IN 
 PEEACHING. 
 
 I purpose in the present lecture to fol- 
 low up the hint so admirably phrased by 
 the honored and mourned occupant of this 
 chair for 1884, but which he reluctantly 
 dismissed from thorough discussion, con- 
 tenting himself with saying that "a ser- 
 mon gets to be a sermon, and saves itself 
 from being a lecture, by being made and 
 delivered in the Holy Ghost." That ex- 
 presses the exact truth, and I deeply regret 
 that the man who could put the whole 
 matter so tersely, did not address himself 
 to its full exposition ; for a clear analysis 
 of the elements of what is called spirit- 
 uality, is of supreme importance both for 
 the preacher and for the hearer. I had 
 not read the sentence which I have quoted 
 until long after I had marked out the plan 
 of the present course, and had become 
 130 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 131 
 
 deeply absorbed in the theme on which I 
 venture to speak ; but I heard in it a 
 voice responding to my own convictions, 
 and urging me to renewed and severer and 
 prayerful reflection. That the preacher 
 should be a spiritual man, and that every 
 sermon should be saturated with the spirit- 
 ual element, as the atmosphere is charged 
 with moisture Unci light, will be at once 
 admitted by every one; but the very 
 promptness of the admission constitutes 
 one of the difficulties of the discussion, as 
 if the self-evidence of the proposition pro- 
 vided also its definition. I shall, therefore, 
 ask you, first, to consider what spiritu- 
 ality is, and secondly, to inquire by what 
 methods it may be cultivated and cher- 
 ished. 
 
 There is a vast deal of vague and un- 
 satisfactory thought about the first ques- 
 tion. 'Spirituality is frequently spoken of 
 as if it consisted in a peculiar tempera- 
 ment, the constitutional possession of a 
 few, or as if it were a special, super- 
 naturally imparted gift. A distinction is 
 often made between that general opera- 
 tion of the Holy Ghost, which issues in 
 regeneration, assurance and sanctification, 
 
132 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 the universal heritage of all believers, and 
 that special indwelling of the Spirit which 
 constitutes a baptism, or an enduement 
 with power. They are regarded as essen- 
 tially distinct, as proceeding upon different 
 conditions, moving in different planes, 
 and designed for different ends. But 
 when Paul describes the gifts of th6 Spirit, 
 he not only makes them the manifesta- 
 tions and the operations of a single 
 energy, reducing all difference to one of 
 degree, he also affirms that the law of 
 distribution is a thoroughly rational and 
 impartial one, determined not only by the 
 personal sovereignty of the Holy Ghost, 
 dividing to every man severally as He will, 
 nor merely by the principle of grace or un- 
 merited favor, but also graduated to the 
 proportion of faith, "the receptive fac- 
 ulty," as Alford says, " for all spiritual 
 gifts." Sovereignty, grace, and the meas- 
 ure of faith are co-ordinated, and must be 
 regarded as interdependent and organically 
 indivisible ; and in the measure or propor- 
 tion of faith, personal responsibility and 
 personal activity are most clearly affirmed. 
 For while faith is the gift of God, it is also 
 the universal duty and prerogative of man ; 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 133 
 
 not an isolated or mechanical act, securing 
 the gift of personal salvation, defined as 
 trust in a person, but an habitual and 
 elevated state or grace of the soul, its 
 maturing power of spiritual perception, 
 appropriation, and activity. Our business, 
 therefore, concerns this personal attitude, 
 the completeness of our voluntary subjec 
 tion to faith ; for faith is the human condi- 
 tion determining and limiting the distribu- 
 tion of spiritual gifts. 
 
 Now faith is defined, in its generic and 
 essential being, as the substance of things 
 hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 
 It deals with the invisible, and has an im- 
 mutable conviction of the unseen as the 
 eternal reality, which rational conviction 
 urges to and secures moral conformity. 
 Faith is contrasted with sight, never with 
 knowledge. It is knowledge of the high- 
 est order, reason apprehending the unveiled 
 and eternal secrets of being, human and 
 Divine, so true that in their clear and com- 
 plete perception the moral law enacts itself 
 with all its sanctions. The spiritual man 
 is he who has the mind, the cfrpovrj/jLa of 
 the Spirit, who cherishes the thoughts, the 
 desires, and the aims of the Spirit, who 
 
134 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 views all things in God, who adopts the 
 Divine estimates and purposes, who regards 
 all that is from its invisible and eternal 
 side, and who gladly, even eagerly, brings 
 his own life into habitual conformity with 
 the revelation. He is a seer, and he does 
 not permit himself to be disobedient to the 
 heavenly vision. Spirituality, then, is an 
 intensely active state. It is rational and 
 voluntary, a frame of mind which Paul 
 makes the evidence of regeneration, when 
 he declares that the mind of the Spirit is 
 life and peace, and which he contrasts with 
 the mind of the flesh, that carnal, sensu- 
 ous, self-centred, and selfish way of think- 
 ing and acting, against which every man 
 is warned as sure to end in death. 
 
 This rules out the notion that spirituality 
 is the equivalent of ecstasy, a breaking 
 through of the limits of conscious person- 
 ality, a contemplative absorption, in which 
 the reason is benumbed or paralyzed. This 
 is mysticism, and mysticism is a pantheistic 
 transformation of New Testament Christi- 
 anity. It is the child of the Orient, whose 
 heaven is Nirvana, and at an early day it 
 began to influence Christian thought and 
 worship. Against this error Paul entered 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 135 
 
 his earnest protest in his correspondence 
 with the Church of Corinth, warning them 
 not to make the mistake of supposing that 
 spiritual perceptions or experiences were 
 unintelligible, either to the recipient or to 
 the hearer. They spake with tongues, and 
 in such a state of excitement, that when 
 they sang, *or prayed, or exhorted, nobody 
 could understand them; while the confu- 
 sion was increased by several taking part 
 at one and the same time. The apostle 
 insisted that all this was wrong. He laid 
 down the doctrine that God is the God of 
 order, and that the spirits of the prophets 
 are subject to the prophets, that the highest 
 spiritual state is a conscious and voluntary 
 one. He appealed to his own experience. 
 He reminded his hearers, that he too had 
 the gift of tongues, and in a more remark- 
 able degree than they all, that he had been 
 caught up to the third heaven, when he did 
 not know whether he was in the body or 
 out of the body, but that even then he saw 
 and heard, the recipient of an intelligible 
 and remembered revelation, which he did 
 not feel at liberty to communicate ; and 
 that when he sang or prayed, it was not 
 only an act of the spirit, but also of the 
 
136 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 understanding. He recognizes no excep- 
 tion to the rule that the spiritual state is 
 always a conscious, intelligent, and intelli- 
 gible one. It is the pagan notion of inspi- 
 ration, that the deity mesmerizes the man, 
 throws him into physical convulsions, in- 
 duces epilepsy and mental vacuity, so that 
 he does not know what he is doing or say- 
 ing. Not such is Biblical inspiration, for the 
 writers of the Bible knew what they meant 
 to say, and to get at that meaning is our 
 chief business as reverent students of the 
 Word. Inspiration was not ecstasy, a Di- 
 vine mesmerism ; and least of all is spirit- 
 uality such a mood. 
 
 Nor is spirituality, primarily or mainly, 
 an emotional state, a condition of unusual , 
 intensity of feeling, expressing itself in 
 boisterous or pathetic speech. It is not a 
 thing of tears and tones. The general law 
 of the sensibility is that it is not under the 
 direct control of the will. Its states are 
 involuntary and necessary concomitants of 
 perception and action, whether physical, 
 mental, or moral. Some nerve must be 
 touched and jarred before there can be 
 pain, and then the pain comes without 
 your consent, nor can it be dismissed at 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 137 
 
 your option. You cannot make yourself 
 hungry or thirsty whenever you choose, 
 nor can you quiet the empty stomach and 
 cool the fever of parched lips by a com- 
 mand. Whether you shall have a bitter or 
 a sweet taste in your mouth, depends upon 
 your taking a lump of sugar or a quinine 
 pill. From a pleasant dream you wake 
 refreshed and sunny ; from a horrible one 
 you wake exhausted and trembling. Good 
 news makes you happy; bad news fills 
 you with alarm. Bright thoughts make 
 your face shine ; gloomy thoughts make 
 the countenance sad ; bitter thoughts create 
 a scowl. Love and hate are the reflex in 
 sensibility of the action of reason and will. 
 You can learn to love those whom once you 
 hated, by studying them more carefully, 
 judging them more impartially, by becom- 
 ing better acquainted with them ; and the 
 same process may change your attachment 
 into aversion. The emotion changes under 
 the new estimate which prolonged atten- 
 tion creates. If that attention, which is 
 only reason held to its task by the will, 
 discloses some element of good behind the 
 most repulsive wrappings, love will come 
 to its birth. 
 
138 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 Not otherwise is the love for God waked 
 in human hearts. It comes through the 
 revelation of what God is and does, by 
 the apprehension of His veracity and in- 
 finite goodness. The will compels the 
 soul to look and listen, to hear and heed 
 the revelation; and when this result has 
 been secured, the emotions of peace and 
 joy bring their sunshine and their song 
 into life. So far as the process of con- 
 version can be traced, it begins in the 
 will as compelling attention, and it is com- 
 pleted in the gradual clearing away of mis- 
 apprehensions, in the emergence of right 
 ethical perceptions and judgments, in an 
 intelligent, unprejudiced view of self, and- 
 of God's attitude towards man in Jesus 
 Christ. Repentance is simply change of 
 mind, induced by serious and prolonged 
 attention, which attention becomes a fixed 
 voluntary mental habit, and the convic- 
 tions thus formed become the formative 
 elements of the regenerated character and 
 conduct. The new mental perceptions, 
 changed through the will into the organic 
 law of moral life, evoke, by necessary 
 reflex action, the appropriate emotions of 
 penitence, peace, hope, joy, and love. So 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT 139 
 
 that the Scriptural injunction is as pro- 
 foundly philosophical as it is practical, 
 "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 
 things are honest, whatsoever things are 
 just, whatsoever things are pure, whatso- 
 ever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
 are of good report ; if there be any praise, 
 think on these things." The emphasis is 
 on the rational, not on the emotional; if 
 men will only think upon the right things, 
 the things that are true and fair and pure, 
 with an intensity and continuity that shall 
 make every rational perception a law to 
 the moral nature,, and a principle of per- 
 sonal conduct, the appropriate feelings will 
 come of themselves, as perfume exhales 
 from flowers. 
 
 There are many who sneer at doctrinal 
 preaching, who tell us that intellectualism 
 in religion is cold and chilling, and that 
 the true sphere of Christian experience is 
 in the sensibilities. Matthew Arnold's fa- 
 mous phrase that religion is "morality 
 touched with emotion," expresses this 
 phase of modern religious philosophy. Re- 
 ligion is viewed as the poetry and sentiment 
 of practical life. In the biblical conception, 
 it is not emotion which transfigures moral- 
 
140 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 ity into religion, but the open vision of the 
 living God, the profound and habitual 
 conviction of His presence, His moral ma- 
 jesty, and His eternal compassion. Men 
 are changed into the image of Christ by 
 the Spirit of the Lord, through that fixed 
 attention which reveals, and in revealing 
 imparts, the spiritual glory of the Son of 
 God. The process is voluntary and rational, 
 not emotional. Let practical morality be 
 moved by the thought of what God is, as 
 revealed in Jesus Christ, and it will become , 
 Divine. The earthly, the sensual, the sel- 
 fish, will drop away, as dead leaves fall be- 
 fore the push of swelling buds. And the 
 fountains of the deep will be broken up. 
 There will be tears and laughter, trembling 
 and hope, shame and exultant joy. Great 
 thoughts are what Herder called for, when 
 he lay dying; and great thoughts are the 
 bread which men must eat if they are to 
 become sinewy and strong, with the flush 
 of health upon the cheek. 
 
 A rational religion cannot be passionless. 
 To look upon the things that are invisible, 
 to have an abiding personal conviction of 
 their reality and their eternal majesty, can- 
 not leave a man icy and inactive. It will 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT 141 
 
 make every nerve in him quiver, every drop 
 of blood in his veins boil. The vision will 
 evoke the passion. Let a man drift down 
 the Niagara River, with hands folded, and 
 half asleep, until the warning roar of the 
 cataract rouses him and makes him atten- 
 tive. What makes him seize the oars, and 
 bend to his work, until every muscle is at 
 its utmost strain, and the breath comes hot 
 and quick from his lips ? He has seen the 
 impending danger, and he has heard the 
 angry tones of the abyss. Should he suc- 
 ceed in gaining the shore, or make the aw- 
 ful plunge without loss of life, no one would 
 need to tell him to rejoice. The danger 
 would be that the necessary reaction in the 
 sensibility would throw him into a swoon, 
 if it did not paralyze the action of the 
 heart. Neither can any man have a vivid 
 conception of what God is, in His holiness 
 and grace, in His majesty and power, in 
 His infinity and eternity, without experi- 
 encing the correspondent emotions of alarm, 
 of remorse, of penitence, of despair, of hope, 
 of joy. What the feelings shall be will 
 depend upon the attitude which the will 
 assumes to the disclosure. The thought 
 which is real and vital to the soul, before 
 
142 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 whose authority the will bows, and to 
 which it compels obedience, cannot main- 
 tain its place and do its work without 
 rousing the sensibilities, any more than a 
 bar of red-hot iron can be applied to your 
 flesh without provoking a cry of pain. 
 You can play at thinking, give yourself 
 up to intellectual amusement, and learn to 
 laugh when you deal with the most awful 
 themes ; but then you do not really believe 
 or see them, they have not become eternal 
 realities to you. When thought does be- 
 come vital, and when your will locks arms 
 with your conviction, you will have all the 
 feeling you can take care of. " Meditate 
 on these things " was the great apostle's 
 parting word to Timothy, " give thyself 
 wholly to them, that thy profiting may 
 appear to all " ; an excellent rule for the 
 individual Christian, and for the Christian 
 preacher. 
 
 That the feelings are not directly under 
 our control, and should not form the bur- 
 den of our immediate anxiety, is plain also 
 when you consider another fact of great 
 importance. One emotion may be crowded 
 out by another and an opposite one. You 
 can become unconscious of hunger, weari- 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 143 
 
 ness, and even acute pain, by complete ab- 
 sorption in something else. You may not 
 be able to eat while your thought is brood- 
 ing, and you may be insensible to great 
 physical discomfort. A great joy, or an 
 overwhelming sorrow, takes away your ap- 
 petite. A sudden danger makes you care- 
 less of appearances. Sleep forsakes you 
 when the sick demand your attention. 
 Fear vanishes when a great crisis is upon 
 you. The lower emotion retreats before 
 the higher. But how ? You do not deal 
 directly with your feelings ; something 
 comes in to change the direction of your 
 thoughts, until by attention they are di- 
 verted and riveted, and as these new 
 thoughts master you, the feelings change 
 without effort on your part. Now, this 
 fact is of the highest practical impor- 
 tance. If you want to change your own 
 feelings, or the feelings of others, there 
 must be a change in the thoughts ; you 
 must give to the mental vision a different 
 direction. 
 
 I might tarry here to show that this sim- 
 ple rule provides you with a principle of 
 the highest order for your pastoral duties, 
 in your treatment of inquirers, in your 
 
144 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 visits to the sick, in your converse with 
 the bereaved and the despondent. You 
 must honor the law of expulsion, and you 
 must expel by the earnest use of other 
 thoughts, until you have induced a healthy 
 mental vision. But this is not my present 
 purpose ; and a hint is, perhaps, all that is 
 needed here. I am trying to make it clear 
 that spirituality is not an emotional state, 
 as the emotions are not directly under our 
 control, and cannot therefore be regarded 
 as moral or spiritual per se; and that a 
 higher emotion can displace a lower one 
 only by the introduction of another and 
 intenser thought. The lions in the way 
 filled Christian with alarm, until he saw 
 that they were chained, and then he marched 
 between them singing. The valley of shad- 
 ows did not affright David, because he 
 knew that the Divine shepherd was with 
 him. It was under the power of a rational 
 judgment that Paul sacrificed the world 
 for Christ. There was not a particle of 
 sentiment in his decision, and in his adher- 
 ence to it. He looked at his stripes and 
 scars as medals of honor, stamped into his 
 frail and mortal bod) r . To die was to fin- 
 ish his ministry with joy, and then to be 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 145 
 
 forever with his Lord. He never whined. 
 There is no "holy tone" in his epistles, 
 and there could have been none in his 
 speech. He rejoiced in tribulation, be- 
 cause it brought glory. He apologized 
 for referring to his sufferings and his ex- 
 alted privileges, as if ashamed of institut- 
 ing any comparison between himself and 
 other men, or of calling attention to what 
 was purely personal to himself. He did 
 not ask for pity when he lay in a dungeon 
 and anticipated martyrdom ; he wanted to 
 be congratulated, and he was always joy- 
 ful himself. Now, this was not a matter 
 of temperament with him, nor were his 
 courage and hope miraculously imparted 
 and sustained; it was the inevitable emo- 
 tional result of his way of looking at things. 
 He, like Moses, endured as seeing Him who 
 is invisible ; and such rational perception 
 of the eternal is always and everywhere 
 the essence of heroism. He who walks 
 with God is mighty, and will hush men 
 into awe. 
 
 The apostle himself defines spirituality, 
 when he speaks of it, as "the spirit of 
 power, of love, and of a sound mind." 
 The statement is anti-climactic. It in- 
 
146 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 eludes the will, the emotions, and the rea- 
 son ; but the mood has its rise in mental 
 sanity, produces love, and issues in moral 
 energy. The first thing is soundness of 
 mind, looking at things as they really are, 
 and at all things in their ordered and eter- 
 nal unity. Spirituality is simply downright 
 common sense. I do not even say " sanc- 
 tified " common sense, for unsanctified com- 
 mon sense is the baldest nonsense. " Be 
 spiritual " is only another way of saying, 
 "Be sensible," for the man is a fool who 
 never thinks of his immortal soul, and 
 who puts God out of his thoughts. 
 
 It accords with this that the common 
 designation of the Holy Spirit is the 
 "Spirit of Truth." He convicts men of 
 sin, righteousness, and judgment. He 
 takes of the things of Christ, and reveals 
 them unto us. He brings them to our 
 remembrance. He regenerates and sanc- 
 tifies men through the truth. He moves 
 the heart by enlightening the understand- 
 ing. He opens our eyes and unstops our 
 ears ; and when once the soul has seen the 
 glory of the Lord, responding to it by a 
 prompt obedience, the lips break forth in 
 song, and the life will be transfigured. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 147 
 
 The sword of the Spirit is the Word of 
 God, His revealed and living thought, 
 piercing to the marrow, dissecting soul and 
 spirit, discerning the thoughts and intents 
 of the heart. The spiritually minded man 
 is he who accepts the judgment resulting 
 from this comparison, and who gives to 
 the revealed thought of God the sole, and 
 continuous, and comprehensive supremacy 
 over himself. This is the (j>povrnia rod irvev- 
 fjLaTos in which every sermon should be 
 made and preached, and without which 
 it is not a sermon at all. It includes a 
 rational, an emotional, and a voluntary 
 element ; for all these are involved in the 
 word which Paul uses ; but, as we have 
 seen, the emotional quality comes in by 
 reflex action, while the rational and the 
 voluntary features are the ones with which 
 we are summoned actively and energeti- 
 cally to deal. Spirituality is the fixed and 
 obedient mental habit of piercing to that 
 which is essential, universal, and eternal. 
 
 Now, the invisible universe, so far as 
 we have any knowledge of it, is consti- 
 tuted by two factors, and only two, — God 
 and the soul. Everything else resolves 
 itself into the interpretation and the rela- 
 
148 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 tion of these two personal subsistences. 
 Law and government, whether human 
 or Divine, are not separate entities ; they 
 inhere and are identical with the living 
 thoughts of God or of man. They are 
 what they are, simply because God and 
 man are what they are. They could not 
 be other than they are, nor can they ever 
 suffer change, simply because God is what 
 He is by an eternal, voluntary, moral ne- 
 cessity, and because He made man in his 
 image. The task of spirituality in preach- 
 ing, then, is this, to estimate the soul as 
 it really is, and to estimate God as He 
 really is. 
 
 And who are you, and who are they to 
 whom you speak ? What is man ? You may 
 define him by the physical element of his nat- 
 ure, whose powers are insignificant, whose 
 days are an handbreadth, whose achieve- 
 ments are vanity. You may define him in 
 the terms of his moral consciousness, under 
 the dominion of sin and guilt, restless in 
 his bondage, yet hopelessly enslaved. But 
 in all this you have not reached the living 
 thought of God. You are more than all 
 this, though you might never have dreamed 
 of it had it not been revealed to you. You 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT 149 
 
 are a child of God. You are a temple in 
 ruins ; but, as John Howe says, you are a 
 temple still ; or as Horace Bushnell says, 
 there is an awful dignity in your degrada- 
 tion even. If you are honest and fearless 
 with yourself, you will be habitually peni- 
 tent and contrite, in view of jovly repeated 
 failures and shortcomings ; broken in heart, 
 contrite in spirit, because you are so great 
 a sinner, falling so far short of what you 
 ought to be. You will never outgrow the 
 fifty-first Psalm. You can never become 
 proud and self-conceited, nor rest content 
 with your best work. You will never over- 
 take either your personal or your profes- 
 sional ideal. You may not burn last 
 year's sermons, but you will not preach 
 them a second time, until they have been 
 born again in the travail of j^our better 
 thought. But you will advance beyond this 
 estimate of your conscious moral imper- 
 fection and immaturity. There will come 
 to you also the thought that the prodi- 
 gal son, ragged, hungry, and disgraced, 
 is a son still. This is the transfiguring 
 touch upon our self-knowledge. You have 
 looked into your own mirror, and have 
 seen an immortal soul under the power of 
 
150 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 sin. Now, look into your genealogy, and 
 into the face of Jesus Christ. God has 
 never surrendered, not qualified in the 
 least His paternal claim upon you, and 
 there is not one of you whom He is will- 
 ing to lose. There is a place in His heart 
 and in heaven for you ; and it will be for- 
 ever empty, if you do not come back to 
 fill it. " Beloved, now are we the sons of 
 God," is the repeated refrain of John, in 
 gospel and epistle, the silver bugle-note to 
 which his every thought marches; and 
 that will lift you to the highest heavens. 
 Think of yourself in that way, and pov- 
 erty will lose its sting, any sphere of ser- 
 vice will be great, whether on the frontier 
 or in the metropolis, whether among the 
 cultured or the savage, powers will be 
 consecrated and grow lustrous, obscurity 
 will be radiant, fame will shine with a 
 supernal glory, grief will have its mighty 
 consolation, life will be an unending song, 
 and death will be the open gate to your 
 Father's house. 
 
 And remember, what you are, as thus 
 read in the light of God's living thought, 
 everybody else is — the beggar, the out- 
 cast, the millionnaire, the laborer, the white 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 151 
 
 man, and the black man. All men are 
 made in the Divine image. All men are 
 dear to God. All men are redeemed in 
 Christ. There is no monopoly in the Di- 
 vine adoption; for the blood of Adam 
 courses in all veins, and the blood of Jesus 
 Christ is the seal of a universal reconcilia- 
 tion. Now this way of estimating man is 
 the spiritual way, because it fixes attention 
 upon the invisible and essential kernel of 
 being; and that is the only rational pro- 
 cedure. Under such an estimate you will 
 respect and love all men, however ignorant 
 and debased they may have become ; and 
 you will not cease to pray for them, and 
 labor with them, until they are withdrawn 
 from earth. For upon this estimate, there 
 must always remain an infinite chasm be- 
 tween the most abandoned man or woman, 
 and a brute. It is this perception which 
 distinguishes the Christian civilization from 
 all preceding and contemporaneous ones. 
 It was a theatrical flourish, when Terence 
 cried out, " Nothing human I count foreign 
 to myself " ; a hollow mockery of senti- 
 ment, when you recall the frightful scenes 
 of the gladiatorial contests, and read of the 
 cold-blooded butcheries of the Coliseum. 
 
152 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 The thought was not a vital and vitalizing 
 one. There was no regard for human life, 
 no respect for woman, no pity for children, 
 no compassion for the slave. The infinite 
 value of the human soul in the sight of 
 God, it has well been said, came upon the 
 thoughts of men like a new and startling 
 revelation ; and its leavening power is yet 
 far from having done its mighty work. It 
 is the hardest practical thing for you and 
 me to do, to estimate men by what they 
 are as immortal and moral beings, infinitely 
 dear to God, and to treat them accordingly. 
 But that is the foremost sign and evidence 
 of spiritual-mindedness. It will make you 
 tender and solicitous. It will make you 
 brave and impartial. It will make you dem- 
 ocratic. It will make you cosmopolitan, 
 with a hand for every man, and a heart for 
 all the world. It will make your preaching 
 spiritual because it will reflect the mind of 
 the Holy Spirit, and so be eternally true. 
 
 It has not escaped you, I am sure, that 
 I have not been able to speak of the esti- 
 mate of man as our point of departure, 
 from which we should proceed to the mak- 
 ing and delivery of every sermon, without 
 passing over to the view of God which 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 153 
 
 should shape our conscious and habitual 
 thought. I have transcended the testi- 
 mony of natural psychology in affirming 
 that man is made in the image of God, 
 and that he is the child of God, and in in- 
 sisting that this is the only rational stan- 
 dard of valuation for ourselves and for 
 others. I have assumed a revelation of 
 God in defining what man is ; I have put 
 my theology into my anthropology. For 
 sonship involves fatherhood, and the filial 
 dignity can be measured only by the pater- 
 nal rank and provision. But this was in- 
 evitable ; for the whole truth is not stated 
 when we say that our conceptions of what 
 God is must be necessarily anthropomor- 
 phic in their content and expression : it is 
 also true, and it is the deeper truth, that 
 our conceptions of what man is, must, in 
 order to be exact and complete, be theo- 
 morphic. Man must be viewed in God, 
 that is, in the light of God's eternal, living 
 thought, which is inseparable from his 
 essential being. For what God is, deter- 
 mines what man, created in His image, is 
 by original vocation, what he ought to be, 
 and what he may become ; and what God 
 is, discloses what His thoughts and pur- 
 
154 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 poses must be concerning man. So that 
 the knowledge of God has priority, in the 
 logical order, over the knowledge of man ; 
 but in the chronological or experimental 
 order, the relation is reversed. For the 
 knowledge of God, which is eternal life, 
 is not the precipitate of deductive logic, 
 starting from some metaphysical concep- 
 tion of Him, implicitly lodged in the ra- 
 tional intuition of the soul. It is the fruit 
 of inductive reasoning, based upon the facts 
 of a historical revelation, reaching its ma- 
 turity in the person and ministry of our 
 Lord. He reveals the Father, and in so 
 doing He interprets man's place and gra- 
 cious prerogative. 
 
 I shall have more to say of this farther 
 on ; at the present I wish only to empha- 
 size the thought that what God is, deter- 
 mines the mind of the spirit, or the spirit- 
 uality of the preacher. His mental tone 
 and temper will be shaped by his living 
 thought of God. There is no department 
 of dogmatics where he needs to exercise 
 greater care, where he requires greater 
 accuracy, docility, and comprehensiveness, 
 than in forming his doctrine of God. A 
 partial view, or a distorted one, in which 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 155 
 
 the scripturally historical perspective is 
 not jealously maintained, will vitiate all 
 his mental processes and his spoken words. 
 He must prepare himself to give to every 
 revelation which God has made of Himself, 
 its natural and unqualified force, even if 
 he should find it impossible to combine 
 them all into a perfectly coherent unity. 
 It may be that the Divine majesty, its bal- 
 anced and rounded moral perfection, while 
 it was incarnated in a human life, cannot 
 be reproduced in mental concepts, nor pho- 
 tographed in the speech of man. The point 
 of supreme importance is that God be rec- 
 ognized as the Living One, the Subjec of 
 conscious, voluntary movement in thought, 
 emotion, and action. His Being may be so 
 construed as to eliminate the reality of 
 all human personality, and to recognize in 
 second causes only a nominal energy ; and 
 it will make little difference whether this 
 pervasive and exclusive presence be defined 
 in terms of substance, as Spinoza does, or 
 in terms of thought, as Hegel does, or 
 in terms of will, as Jonathan Edwards 
 does, an unethical fatalism will be the re- 
 sult ; and a kind of speechless awe will 
 characterize the resultant piety. The glory 
 
156 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 of God will be regarded as the final cause 
 of all things, to be secured and displayed 
 at any cost, giving no account of itself to 
 angel or man ; and I do not see how any 
 man can avoid feeling sometimes, that such 
 a God, while commanding unselfishness — 
 is supremely selfish Himself. 
 
 But this is the God of metaphysical 
 theology, which makes Will in God pri- 
 mary, inclusive, and sovereign. Such a 
 God is a speculative fiction; He is not 
 the God who reveals Himself in the his- 
 tory of the world, in the record of Scrip- 
 ture, and in the face of Jesus Christ. 
 These media disclose a sovereignty which 
 has given reality to second causes, to the 
 life of created reason, and to moral re- 
 sponsibility in man, and which is infinitely 
 sensitive and conscientious in maintaining 
 and guarding what it has called into exis- 
 tence. The immanence is such that it 
 eliminates neither the Divine personal tran- 
 scendence, nor the full reality and respon- 
 sibility of the dependent creature. "In 
 Him we live, and move, and have our 
 being " ; but in that interpenetration there 
 is a Him, and there is a We; the per- 
 sonal distinctions are rigorously conserved. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 157 
 
 That fact is of infinitely greater practical 
 importance for us than a speculative theory 
 of the nexus between God and the world. 
 An inductive logic compels us to rest in 
 theological dualism, just as Ave are forced 
 to recognize a natural dualism in an induc- 
 tive philosophy of perception. Theological 
 determinism is open to the same objections 
 which lie against philosophical idealism; 
 it does not deal honestly with the facts, 
 and the logical process is deductive, not 
 inductive. The facts reveal a God who, 
 while Sovereign, does not regard the cre- 
 ated universe as a shadow, nor use men as 
 machines. Freedom is a real thing, not 
 merely formal ; and even God does not in- 
 vade its prerogatives. He does not choose 
 for me, nor does He, in any strict sense, 
 choose in me. In a word, He is the Liv- 
 ing God, alive to what is due to Himself, 
 alive to what is due to everything that He 
 has made, promoting His glory by promot- 
 ing the highest well-being of the universe. 
 The doctrine of the Divine immutability 
 supplies another instance in which a deduc- 
 tive logic has thrust the living God prac- 
 tically out of sight. His unchangeableness 
 has been conceived as erasing all distinc- 
 
158 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 tions in time, in thought, in emotion, and 
 in action. He, we are told, dwells in an 
 eternal Now ; with Him there is no past, 
 and no future. Strictly speaking, it has 
 been urged, there can be no conscious suc- 
 cession of thought in God, no real change 
 in His feelings, no separate and succes- 
 sive volitions. The whole conscious life 
 of Deity is interpreted " sub specie eterni- 
 tatis," in which succession and change can 
 form no conceivable part. The past, the 
 present, and the future, are represented as 
 held in the grasp of a single thought ; all 
 separate volitions as merged in a single, 
 eternal act of the will ; and no varying 
 emotional states are recognized as having 
 anything more than an apparent, anthro- 
 pomorphic reality. 
 
 You may call such a Being the Living, 
 Personal God; but it is difficult to see 
 how such an activity differs from an eter- 
 nal and hopeless quiescence. I am free to 
 say, that to my way of thinking, an eter- 
 nal Now, as that phrase is theologically 
 used, is eternal nonsense. It is a pure 
 assumption that omniscience destroys the 
 differences between memory, present per- 
 ception, and prevision. It is a pure as- 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT, 159 
 
 sumption that unity of thought eliminates 
 separateness and succession in conscious 
 thinking. It is a pure assumption that 
 unity of will resolves all separate voli- 
 tions into a figure of speech. It is a pure 
 assumption that the ethical blessedness of 
 God makes it impossible for Him to be the 
 subject of emotional change, to pass from 
 wrath to pity, and from pity to love, and 
 from love to indignation. And all this is 
 squarely in the teeth of all that God has 
 said, through the records of Scripture, and 
 by the words of Jesus Christ. He speaks 
 of Himself as grieving over sin, as plead- 
 ing with men, as roused to judgment, as 
 hearing and answering prayer, as remem- 
 bering His covenant, as preparing the way 
 for future displays of power and grace. 
 He is never surprised, nor is He ever out- 
 witted. Foreordination is eternal and in- 
 clusive ; but that does not destroy the 
 distinction between what God remembers 
 as past, and what He sees as present, and 
 what He knows as future. The separate 
 and successive Divine volitions are co- 
 ordinated in the eternal will, — not one of 
 them is arbitrary, revolutionary, disturbing 
 the vital unity of His holy purpose, — but 
 
160 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 that does not destroy the difference, in the 
 Divine consciousness, between what God 
 has done, and is now doing, and will do 
 hereafter. The will, like the thought of 
 God, is in living, conscious movement. 
 Change and succession are in them, as well 
 as unity. 
 
 Nor is it otherwise with the emotional 
 life of God, when scripturally interpreted. 
 There is pain in His blessedness. Sin 
 rouses His indignation, and the perception 
 of penitence, as with us, wakes in Him the 
 sense of gladness and provokes His instant 
 approval. A rational ethical unity under- 
 lies and pervades all this, but the unity 
 only gives eternal validity to the change 
 which comes to the heart of God, when 
 the sinner becomes a penitent. All this is 
 as clear as noonday when what God says 
 about Himself is allowed its natural force ; 
 and I need not stop to show how such a 
 perception of God makes Him intensely 
 real, in vital contact with the soul of man. 
 
 But the most important thing yet remains 
 to be said. Nothing is more indispensable 
 for the spiritual life of the preacher, and 
 for the spiritual power of his preaching, 
 than a firm grasp upon the ethical unity 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 161 
 
 of God's nature, and so upon the ethical 
 unity of His moral government. Here 
 the great battle has been between the 
 justice and the mercy of God, between 
 His holiness and His grace. The atone- 
 ment has been represented as their eternal 
 reconciliation, or as an economic compro- 
 mise between their conflicting claims, as if 
 God were doing the best He CQuld to pay 
 His own debts, or paying no more than 
 was actually necessary. Whether it is so 
 intended or not, such a representation 
 makes God in painful conflict with Him- 
 self, and destroys the unity of his ethical 
 life. Then, again, the justice of God has 
 been made central, and love has been 
 remanded to a subordinate place, as in 
 the Westminster Confession, and in the 
 Calvinistic theology generally. Grace has 
 been limited to the elect, and election has 
 been supposed to embody an eternal, sov- 
 ereign, unconditional decree. Explain it 
 as you will, the sober, plain Christian 
 judgment pronounces such a doctrine hard, 
 cruel, irrational, immoral, and blasphemous. 
 It is an outrage on man, and an insult to 
 God ; and agitation will not cease until in 
 all the symbols the love of God is given 
 
162 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 an equal place with His justice, instead 
 of being crowded into a preliminary and 
 introductory definition ; until the ethical 
 unity of the Divine nature gets its full 
 recognition, in which his justice is his 
 mercy, and his grace is his holiness. 
 
 And finally, the ethical unity of the 
 Divine nature and government has been 
 sacrificed in the theory of probation, 
 whose logical outcome is its extension 
 beyond death until every soul has faced 
 the " historic Christ." The antediluvians 
 were not fairly treated, if this theory is 
 true ; the patriarchs had an exceedingly 
 hard time of it ; the millions of the heathen 
 have been cruelly neglected of God, though 
 we hope that He will settle His account 
 with them by and by to their satisfaction ; 
 only a very insignificant part of the human 
 race has been treated in moral equity, 
 though between this and the final judg- 
 ment God will correct all the blunders of 
 His past and present administration. But 
 who has authority to say that righteousness 
 and grace are thus held in practical sus- 
 pense, and relegated to the unknown fut- 
 ure ? If all this issues from the doctrine 
 of mortal probation, then for one, I will 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 163 
 
 eliminate it as an Arminian heresy from 
 my dogmatic system, rather than destroy 
 the ethical unity of God's character, and 
 deny the fact of a present and universal 
 order of righteousness in human history. 
 
 I want a present and living God, a God 
 who puts His whole ethical being into every 
 moment of time, who deals with every 
 soul, infant and adult, Christian and pa- 
 gan, in Jesus Christ ; though I may not be 
 able to make manifest to my reason this 
 immanent and universal blending of right- 
 eousness and grace. I appeal to the Scrip- 
 tures, and to the natural force of their 
 language, that God is neither an omnipo- 
 tent and exclusive energy, nor a mechan- 
 ically immutable and unemotional entity, 
 nor an arbitrary and partial Sovereign, nor 
 a being in whom ethical unity is a figment, 
 of whom the organic balance and living 
 co-operation of moral qualities can be 
 affirmed only as a transcendental fact, and 
 who deals with men on purely arbitrary 
 principles, suspending a present, moral 
 equity of administration for a future im- 
 partial treatment ; but the " Father " from 
 the beginning, and the Father of all men. 
 This is the last and inclusive word in the 
 
164 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 self-revelation of God to men, and he who 
 contents himself with anything less, robs 
 himself of what the best thought of God 
 can give him, and so far forth he fails of 
 conveying the full spiritual power of his 
 message. For this is the mind of the 
 Holy Spirit, that it hath pleased the 
 Father, by the blood of the cross, to rec- 
 oncile all things unto Himself ; and if the 
 history of redemption is the fulfilment of 
 an eternal purpose, the vital unfolding of 
 the eternal thought of God, then you have 
 no right to think of God in any other way. 
 Fatherhood constitutes the final and inclu- 
 sive definition of His nature, and of His 
 government. The law which commands 
 and exacts holiness is paternal legislation. 
 The severest judgments are the warnings 
 and the punishments of a Father. His 
 pity and His patience are paternal in their 
 quality, scope, and continuance. True, it 
 is an ethical Fatherhood, uniting holiness 
 and love ; but it is a Fatherhood, not an 
 ethical, imperial sovereignty, or merely 
 moral governorship. The paternal con- 
 ception of God does not ignore the ethical 
 element of holy authority, but transfigures 
 it under the higher thought of an infinite, 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 165 
 
 universal, absolutely unselfish love; and, 
 in so doing, it legitimates that estimate of 
 man which has already commanded our 
 attention. The rational, voluntary, and 
 joyful recognition of these organically re- 
 lated estimates of what man is, and what 
 God is, constitutes the essence of spiritual- 
 mindedness, and every sermon issuing 
 from such an habitual mental and moral 
 temper will be made in the Holy Ghost, 
 and will be preached in the demonstration 
 of the Spirit, and in power. For the Word 
 of God is only then preached, when it con- 
 veys the Father's message to His blind and 
 wayward and guilty children. 
 
 A consideration of the methods by which 
 spirituality may be cultivated and cher- 
 ished, is a matter of too serious moment 
 to be overlooked, and too important to be 
 despatched in a few sentences. I shall, 
 therefore, resume the discussion at this 
 point in the next lecture. 
 
II. 
 
 In defining spirituality as a fixed mental 
 and moral habit, to be carefully distin- 
 guished from ecstasy or from emotional 
 excitement, having its rational ground in 
 the clear discernment of what God and 
 man are in their essential nature, and in 
 their mutual relations, and its ethical 
 quality in the voluntary and habitual sub- 
 jection of the conscious and active life to 
 the judgments which such discernment 
 forms, I have propounded no theory of my 
 own. I have simply given to the language 
 of Scripture its natural force. Spirituality 
 is, in the carefully selected phraseology of 
 Paul, cf>p6v7]/jba rod TrvevfJLaros, the mind of 
 the spirit. The word ^povrjiia has no 
 exact English equivalent. It is not sy- 
 nonymous with vovs, the equivalent of our 
 word understanding or reason, the faculty 
 of rational perception and judgment. Our 
 166 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 167 
 
 nearest approach to such a use of the word 
 "mind" as makes it reflect the meaning 
 of (f)p6v7)fjLa is in the frequent popular say- 
 ing, "I have a great mind to do this or 
 that," a phrase which not only expresses 
 a rational judgment, but also announces 
 an intention, ^povrj/xa is derived from 
 the root (fyprjv, which, literally, means 
 " diaphragm," the muscle which separates 
 the heart and the lungs from the lower 
 viscera, and so it became descriptive of all 
 the organs clustering around the heart, 
 which together constitute the seat of phys- 
 ical life. By a natural transition it was 
 carried up to describe the interior consti- 
 tution of the invisible and conscious self, 
 the sum total of the soul's rational, emo- 
 tional and volitional powders, the organ of 
 grief, love, anger, and courage, of mental 
 perception and thought, of will and pur- 
 pose. It is the man in the centre of his 
 personality, stripped of all that is seeming 
 and accidental. The "mind" in you is 
 what you are, in your thoughts, desires, 
 and aims. Not all the thoughts which 
 you have belong to your mind, but only 
 such thoughts as are intensely vital, stir- 
 ring your deepest emotions and impelling 
 
168 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 you to action. Not all that you feel 
 belongs to your mind, but only such emo- 
 tions as spring out of your thoughts and 
 shape your conduct. Not everything that 
 you do shows what your mind is, but only 
 such actions as are the outcome of rational 
 conviction and genuine love. The " mind " 
 of a man, is what he is, in the organic 
 unity of his secret thoughts, affections, and 
 aims. He has the mind of the flesh, if the 
 gravitation of his inmost self is towards 
 the things of the flesh, the things that 
 minister to selfish ease and ambition, no 
 matter how refined his pursuits and habits 
 may be. The carnally minded man is not 
 necessarily a coarse man. He need not be 
 a glutton, or a drunkard, or a debauchee. 
 He may be a man of blameless reputation. 
 But he is, everywhere and always, selfish, 
 self-centred, and self-seeking, with his eye 
 on the main chance, taking care of number 
 one, an altruistic egoist if he gives any 
 thought to his neighbor, counting nothing 
 real which does not bring present and 
 tangible advantage. And to be spiritually 
 minded is to have the thoughts, the desires, 
 and the aims of the spirit, to survey and 
 measure all things from the centre of the 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 169 
 
 invisible and the eternal, judging yourself 
 as God judges you, treating your fellow- 
 men as God would have you treat them, 
 estimating life as God estimates it, honor- 
 ing God as He deserves to be honored. 
 
 A curious illustration of the vagueness 
 which encompasses this important question 
 of spirituality, the mental fog in which 
 many preachers labor when they venture 
 to give definite outline to their thought 
 upon it, has recently fallen under my eye 
 in a report of an elaborate sermon, preached 
 by one of our city pastors. The concord- 
 ance had been freely and faithfully used. 
 There were Scriptural quotations in abun- 
 dance, and these gave a decidedly evangeli- 
 cal flavor to the discourse. There was a 
 certain rude logical order in the arrange- 
 ment of the biblical material, but it was 
 purely verbal, and of a real analysis there 
 was not the slightest trace. The only 
 approach to a real discernment of the 
 problem was in the hint, now and then 
 .obtruded, that spirituality was the reverse 
 of ceremonialism in worship and conduct ; 
 but it was evident that such interjected 
 phrases were little more than the mechan- 
 ical repetition of current platitudes of 
 
170 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 speech, and that their real significance had 
 not become clearly outlined to the preach- 
 er's mind. The sermon bore the marks of 
 faithful, painstaking work. The tone was 
 modest and quiet; there was no attempt 
 at theoretical display ; and it was evidently 
 the work of an earnest and devout man ; 
 but it left the hearer just where it found 
 him, with a mass of biblical texts, not one 
 of which had been compelled to yield its 
 mighty secret. It was unutterably lifeless 
 and dull, for the simple reason that it was 
 unintelligible. It lacked definite mental 
 perception, and, therefore, ended in mental 
 cloudiness and confusion. Much was said 
 about being " filled with the Spirit," but 
 the phrase touched no living chord; it had 
 a mystical ring, as descriptive of some 
 strange, supernatural or miraculous opera- 
 tion, in which the soul is passive, and 
 which defies explanation and expression. 
 It may seem to you a hard and narrow 
 rule, but it is an eminently practical and 
 salutary one for the preacher, as I believe 
 it to be inexorably universal, that what is 
 true is always intelligible, that revelation 
 is unveiling, not mystification, and that 
 the time of the sermon is worse than 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 171 
 
 wasted, unless the message is so phrased 
 that every man can understand it. 
 
 There is nothing shadowy or mystical 
 in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and 
 in the resultant spirituality of life. It is 
 an intelligent and intelligible state. It is 
 conscious and voluntary. The preacher to 
 whom I have referred might have made 
 his sermon luminous and searching by sim- 
 ply inquiring what ceremonialism in wor- 
 ship was. It is membership in the visible 
 church, observance of the Sabbath, sub- 
 scription to a creed, a reverent posture in 
 prayer, a decent behavior among men, the 
 regular and reverent participation in ordi- 
 nances. It is devotion to externals! It is 
 contentment with forms. It is regard for 
 appearances. In or out of the church, that 
 is Pharisaism, the mind of the flesh, giv- 
 ing no true liberty, and cursing the soul 
 with drought and increasing impotence. 
 It is living in the realm of the seen and the 
 temporal. And what is the opposite of 
 ceremonialism ? It is the worship of God 
 in spirit and truth, the converse which is 
 the natural and habitual outcome of a clear 
 knowledge of what God is and of what 
 you are, the conscious and mutual ex- 
 
172 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 change of thought between an erring, 
 needy, penitent child and its Holy, Loving 
 Father, who is in heaven. In or out of 
 the church, that is spirituality, the fixed 
 habit of dealing with invisible and eternal 
 realities. To be filled with the Spirit is 
 simply to be under the dominance of those 
 convictions which give reality to God and 
 the soul, as the two sole factors by which 
 the universe is constituted, and by which 
 time and eternity are shaped. For when 
 the heavens and the earth pass away, God 
 remains and the soul abides. The reason 
 and the will are the sphere of the Divine 
 impact and indwelling ; these are not mys- 
 tical, but dynamic, and they are dynamic 
 by illumination of the understanding and 
 by securing voluntary obedience to the 
 revelation. To be filled with the Spirit is 
 the same thing as being guided by the 
 Spirit into all truth ; it is to see things as 
 they really are, and to act in accordance 
 with that vision. Spirituality, therefore, 
 is a rational and voluntary state. It begins 
 with mental sanity, piercing through all 
 shams and deceptive appearances, to God 
 as the Holy Father, and to man as His lost 
 and wandering child. It is easy enough to 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 173 
 
 repeat these phrases, but they are not real 
 perceptions unless they become the fixed 
 and habitual temper of your whole mental 
 and moral life, the standard of universal 
 rational judgment, and the living law of 
 obedience. With every advance in the 
 clearness of your apprehension of what 
 God is and what man is, there must come, 
 pari passu, the prompt and voluntary prac- 
 tical response. You must live as you 
 think ; you must be obedient to the heav- 
 enly vision ; for God and the soul, father- 
 hood and sonship, are not figures of speech, 
 the empty generalizations of the specula- 
 tive understanding, but the only eternal 
 realities in a universe of change. 1 
 
 1 The nature of man is rational, ethical, spiritual ; 
 it may be regarded as vovs, as avpeitiriffts and as irvevfxa. 
 How do these differ ? 
 
 Considered as rational, the quest of the soul is 
 Truth. Its watchword is Reality. 
 
 Considered as ethical, the soul fixes attention upon 
 a peculiar quality with which truth is invested, giving 
 to it the force of an imperative, demanding personal 
 conformity, and enforcing universal self-judgment. 
 Its watchword is Obligation. 
 
 Considered as spiritual, the soul fixes attention 
 upon God as the eternal fountain of Truth, and the 
 creative source of Moral Law, Himself the uncreated 
 and sovereign Reality and Imperative. 
 
174 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 
 
 I have spoken of spirituality as a fixed 
 mental and moral habit, and habit involves 
 careful and patient cultivation. I proceed, 
 therefore, to speak of the methods by 
 which this quality must be developed into 
 healthy and vigorous maturity. Of these, 
 the first place must be given to attention. 
 If even the physical universe does not 
 yield its secret to the inattentive and su- 
 perficial observer, if the inspection must be 
 repeated and discriminating, with the per- 
 sistent use of microscope and telescope 
 and the most delicate instruments, much 
 more true is it that the invisible realities 
 
 Tlvevfxa, as Julius Muller says, does not primarily 
 mean the human spirit, but the Divine Spirit ; and 
 man becomes spiritual only as, by his free act, his 
 rational and ethical life is pervaded, purified, and per- 
 fected by and in the Holy Ghost. Spirituality is a 
 voluntary state of rational and ethical subjection. 
 Hence, the Germans translate UvevixariKhs, by the 
 word geistlich, not geistig, — spirit-like; that is, con- 
 formity to spirit, conformity to the Spirit of God. 
 Spirituality represents a capacity, which may and 
 ought to become a reality ; but not a constituent ele- 
 ment of universal human nature, like the rational or 
 the ethical. Reason is an essential property. Every 
 man thinks. The process is involuntary and neces- 
 sary. Conscience is a universal characteristic of 
 human nature. It is incapable of increase or de- 
 crease. Judas has as much conscience as Paul, or 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 175 
 
 of Divine and human being demand hon- 
 est, patient, and prolonged attention. No 
 physiological processes can give us so 
 much as a glimpse of the soul, or cast any 
 light upon its essential constitution. You 
 might as well attempt to construct the 
 science of anatomy by an analysis and 
 synthesis of the deliverances of conscious- 
 ness. The soul is an ultimate and invisi- 
 ble fact, the whole evidence of whose real 
 existence is crystallized in the personal 
 pronoun "I," and whose real nature can be 
 understood only by the cross-examination 
 which reflection employs. If psychology 
 
 Peter, or John. Every man judges himself, and is 
 the subject of self-approval, or of self-reproach. The 
 process is involuntary and necessary. The spiritual 
 is a constitutional capacity, whereby, in a free act and 
 state, man places himself under the tuition and the 
 guidance of God, becoming like Him in thought, in 
 feeling, in volition, and in life. Its distinguishing 
 characteristic is the supreme place which it gives to 
 the Free Will in man, that will summoning the rea- 
 son to face its creative Original, and securing an 
 instant and joyful compliance with the revelation 
 thus imparted. The process, throughout, is rational 
 and ethical ; but spirituality results through the habit- 
 ual temper of voluntary subjection to Him who is 
 Truth and reveals it, who is Holy and makes us holy 
 by making us like Himself. In other words, man be- 
 comes spiritual through the grace of Faith. 
 
176 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 
 
 has been less rapid in its advance than the 
 physical sciences, the reason is that the 
 processes of psychological attention are 
 more difficult and exhaustive than the pro- 
 cesses of sensuous observation. But he 
 who deals with the souls of men must 
 patiently face his own soul, and cannot be 
 excused from giving continuous attention 
 to what it has to say on its own behalf. 
 
 Nor can there be any real conviction that 
 there is a God, much less an adequate 
 knowledge of what He is, except by pro- 
 found and habitual attention to all the 
 media through which His eternal Godhead 
 is disclosed. The conviction is intuitive 
 only in the sense that it is not foreign to 
 the mind, intruded upon it from without, 
 traditional, or the refuge of mental impo- 
 tence, the necessary choice between two 
 inconceivables. It is intuitive because it 
 is inevitable to him who reflects, and be- 
 cause repeated attention makes it only more 
 irresistible to thought. It is not the pre- 
 cipitate of observation; it emerges in ra- 
 tional reflection. I need hardly remind you 
 that the elaborate ontological, cosmological, 
 teleological, and historical arguments for 
 the Divine existence are no longer regarded 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 177 
 
 as invulnerable and conclusive. They as- 
 sume what they prove ; they do no more 
 than trace the reflecting process by which 
 the native and personal conviction justifies 
 and interprets itself. No man climbs to 
 the throne of God, by the pathway of the 
 stars, who does not find the evidence of 
 His existence and sovereignty first of all, in 
 himself. I do not mean that there is any 
 God-consciousness in him, — a barbarous 
 translation of the German phrase, which 
 strictly means only a native, rational, im- 
 mediate conviction of the Divine existence. 
 Consciousness is only of self ; but a rational 
 attention to what this consciousness of our 
 personal, mental, and moral states discloses, 
 finds its root and synthesis only in the 
 affirmation of the Divine existence and 
 supremacy. The rational and the ethical, 
 as we are conscious of them in ourselves, 
 are uncreated and absolute in their quality ; 
 we cannot think of them as relative and 
 limited; and our whole conscious life is 
 thrown into endless and hopeless contra- 
 diction, unless we postulate the existence 
 and the sovereignty of Reason and Right 
 in the uncreated and eternal personal God. 
 The process is not one of speculation, but 
 
178 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 of definition by attention. Attention scat- 
 ters the mists, and reveals the uncreated 
 glory, the eternal and sovereign reality. 
 In biblical phrase, God reveals Himself to 
 man, through faith ; to him whose attention 
 is voluntary, sincere, and habitual. Here is 
 our first duty ; to meditate long and lov- 
 ingly upon ourselves and upon Him whose 
 image we bear, until God and the soul shall 
 master us with their reality. * 
 
 You are already prepared for a second 
 suggestion, that if you would be spiritually 
 minded, you must be men of prayer. For 
 such attention as I have emphasized, is 
 itself the heart of prayer. The Socratic 
 method is the spiritual method. It bristles 
 with interrogation points. It is perpetually 
 asking questions, seeking that it may find, 
 knocking that doors may be opened. For 
 while adoration, and confession, and thanks- 
 giving, are inseparable from true prayer, 
 petition is its heart; and petition always 
 subordinates its request to the Divine will, 
 the demand softening into the inquiry what 
 that will is, so that we may pray as we 
 ought. There is a lower use of prayer in 
 which many rest. They come to God only 
 when they need something, when the guilt 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 179 
 
 and shame of sin oppress, when grief 
 embitters life, when the spirit is over- 
 whelmed with the sense of its weakness. 
 The Lord is a strong refuge and a high 
 tower, into which we run when our spears 
 are broken and our shields trampled into 
 dust. We think only of ourselves, and 
 our speech is burdened with the enum- 
 eration of our wants. But it is far more 
 important that God should have His way 
 with us, than that we should have our way 
 with Him. For God knows us infinitely 
 better than we know ourselves, and we shall 
 ask most wisely when we let Him show 
 us His mind. The twenty-third Psalm 
 is the sweetest of all religious lyrics, be- 
 cause of its discovery that God is the 
 Shepherd of the soul. That not only 
 secures against want; it drives out the 
 very thought of want, so that David has 
 no request to make. The path is always 
 luminous, the table is always a royal ban- 
 quet, the way is always secure, and even 
 the grave is within the enclosure of the 
 Divine' pasturage. 
 
 This is the higher use of prayer, in which 
 we question God about what He is and 
 what we are, setting our psalm of life to 
 
180 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 the key of His self-revelation. He who 
 does that will be jubilant, not sad-toned ; 
 for all God's thoughts are a Gloria in Ex- 
 celsis. It is the law of true politeness, 
 when you are a guest, not to talk about 
 yourself, unless your host leads the way 
 and pursues the inquiry. You win his 
 favor by admiring his home, his grounds, 
 his library, his pictures, by falling into his 
 line of thought, and enriching yourself by 
 his experience. The more renowned and 
 successful the man whom you meet, the 
 more anxious you are to let him tell his 
 story to you. If I could have Paul as my 
 guest a week, I would not use five minutes 
 of the time to tell him what I thought, nor 
 would I open Meyer or Godet once during 
 the interview. I should do nothing but 
 ask questions, and let him do the rest of 
 the talking. I should be perpetually anx- 
 ious to know his mind. And tfo know the 
 mind of God, what He thinks, desires and 
 purposes, and what He is, is the highest 
 function of prayer. You do not need to 
 tell Him what you are, for He knows more 
 than you do about that ; let Him tell you 
 what He is, and how He regards you, for 
 you will never know either, unless you sit 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 181 
 
 silently and attentively at his feet. And 
 this inquiring attitude must be habitual. 
 It is well to pray morning, noon, and night; 
 it is well to pray when you open your 
 Bible and choose your text; it is well to 
 pray with pen poised over the blank sheet ; 
 it is well to pray before you utter the 
 first word of your message ; but you may 
 and must do more. Docility must be 
 ingrained. Reverence must be habitual. 
 Prayer must be your native air. In the 
 utmost strain of your intellectual activity 
 there must be a receptive and inquiring 
 temper, which makes you eagerly respon- 
 sive to anything which casts new light 
 upon the character of Him in whom all 
 live and move, and by whom all must be 
 judged. So shall it not be you who speak, 
 but the Spirit of your Father who dwelleth 
 in you. 
 
 No mistake, however, could be more 
 serious than to imagine that because spir- 
 ituality is the fixed mental and moral habit 
 of dealing with the invisible and eternal 
 realities of God and the soul, matured 
 through attention and prayer, it is there- 
 fore best promoted by contemplative de- 
 votion. Self -absorption, even when deal- 
 
182 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 ing with the thought of God, has its 
 dangers. We may easily mistake our 
 fancies for the suggestions of the Spirit, 
 as the ignorant and untrained are per- 
 petually tempted to do. The old slave 
 population of the South were the professed 
 recipients of many such revelations ; but 
 an honored friend of mine, whose early 
 ministry was spent among them, said that 
 the men thus honored, confessed, when 
 they were questioned, that the Holy Ghost 
 used the negro dialect, never the speech 
 of a white man. That pricked the bubble, 
 and proved the inspiration to be a mental 
 hallucination. True spirituality is catholic 
 and cosmopolitan. It moves along that 
 level of common sense, which is a universal 
 inheritance and possession. It deals with 
 realities which lie close to all earnest 
 thought. All souls are alike, and God 
 does not change. He. cannot be to me 
 what He is to no one else. His impar- 
 tiality as the Father of all men, forbids 
 the notion that He will make me the 
 special and exclusive organ of a revelation, 
 which wakes no response in any other 
 heart, and which good and true men reject 
 as blasphemous and silly. So I would 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT, 183 
 
 rather mistrust my own judgment than 
 break with the general drift of testimony 
 in the living community of believers. 
 There is a via media between intellectual 
 isolation and an unreasonable subjection 
 to traditional judgment. True thought is 
 like a magnet introduced into a mixture 
 of iron particles and sands. It sifts by 
 attracting. The thought which attracts 
 nothing to itself, proclaims itself thereby 
 unmagnetized and untrue. What I see 
 everybody else can see, if they will only 
 use their eyes, though no one may see it 
 until I direct his attention to it ; but if no 
 one can see what I claim to see, the natu- 
 ral inference is that there is something 
 wrong with my eyes, and that it is time 
 for me to consult an oculist. No one can 
 see for me ; but the general perception is 
 more trustworthy than my own. For if 
 a thing is real, it must at least be real to 
 every one who is constituted as I am. It 
 is not otherwise with spirituality or the 
 perception of invisible realities. These, 
 too, must be dismissed as illusions, unless 
 other men yield their prompt assent. 
 They may have escaped attention, but they 
 must compel conviction from every honest 
 
184 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 and thoughtful man. Upon no other 
 theory can we cherish the assurance that 
 Christianity is destined to supplant every 
 other religion. It must triumph by its 
 inherent energy to subdue all rational and 
 sober thought. 
 
 With this corresponds the New Testa- 
 ment doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Individ- 
 uals are the organs of His special revela- 
 tion, and so become qualified to act as 
 inspired prophets and apostles, only because 
 the entire household of faith is under His 
 instruction and guidance. The apostle does 
 not stand alone ; he is only the organ of 
 the Church, making clear and articulate 
 the universal conviction, vague in the 
 many, definite in him, and through him 
 becoming definite in all. The Church is 
 spoken of as the Body and the Bride of 
 Christ ; and union with Christ by the 
 Spirit is always represented as involving 
 spiritual fellowship with the Christian com- 
 munity. The tuition of the Spirit is not 
 exclusively individualistic ; it is also ge- 
 neric and social. It is carried on, corrected, 
 and completed in the household of faith. 
 It may seem as if the estimates of God, 
 and of man, which I have so frequently 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 185 
 
 emphasized, as the sources of spiritual 
 power, are the spontaneous suggestions of 
 clear thinking; but they are not. They 
 have never emerged as vitalizing elements 
 in pagan philosophy. That God is Father, 
 and that man is His child, is the peculiar 
 and authoritative testimony on the nature 
 and relations of God and man, which is 
 the priceless heritage of the Christian 
 Church. You and I have learned the les- 
 son from her lips, though it depends upon 
 us whether it shall be merely a traditional 
 shibboleth, or a vital and vitalizing truth. 
 It is not true because she has taught it; 
 she has taught it because it is true ; but 
 we have come to the knowledge of it 
 through the Word which she has preached, 
 through the sacraments which she has ad- 
 ministered, and through the prayers which 
 we have caught from her lips. So far I, 
 too, am a Churchman, and draw back from 
 the erratic tendency of an isolated individ- 
 ualism. I believe in the Holy Catholic 
 Church, the communion of saints, which 
 is the household of the Spirit, and to whose 
 consentient testimony I bow, as embodying 
 a profounder and healthier wisdom than 
 my own. And in so doing, I learn to dis- 
 
186 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 tinguish between the shadow and the sub- 
 stance, between a mere mental impression 
 however vivid, and the living reality, which 
 is universal and cogent in many minds, 
 between an illusion and a revelation. Other 
 men, too, have the Spirit of God, and are 
 guided by Him, and He cannot be sup- 
 posed to produce isolated and contradictory 
 impressions, so that comparison and elimi- 
 nation of that which is purely individual, 
 must help us in the discovery of what the 
 Spirit's teaching really is. This will secure 
 for us mental modesty and moral sobriety, 
 indispensable qualities for the Christian 
 preacher. 
 
 The critical and sifting process must be 
 carried a step farther. For the Church that 
 now is, is herself the product and the 
 vehicle of an inherited faith. In this mat- 
 ter the third century has no advantage 
 over the nineteenth. The stream must be 
 traced to its sources, for in the origin of 
 the Church we must find the root of her 
 past and her present authority. The docu- 
 mentary records of our faith, therefore, are, 
 and must ever be, of special significance. 
 If we must test and correct our subjective 
 mental impressions by the spiritual testi- 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 187 
 
 mony of the Church, we are further bound 
 to test and correct the latter by the judg- 
 ment of the Holy Oracles, the Scriptures 
 of the Old and New Testaments. This 
 legitimates the Great Reformation of the 
 sixteenth century, and constitutes the suffi- 
 cient and unanswerable reply to the charge 
 of schism, for the separation was made in- 
 evitable by the movement of return to the 
 form of Christian doctrine as contained in 
 the Pauline epistles, to which on any theory, 
 a higher authority must be conceded than 
 to any subsequent decrees of councils or 
 judgments of individual men. No inter- 
 pretation of Christianity can maintain its 
 ground which does not fully and fearlessly 
 challenge comparison with the transmitted 
 testimony of those who founded the Church. 
 Pure Christianity must be primitive Chris- 
 tianity, in its ruling conceptions and prin- 
 ciples, whatever enrichment subsequent 
 thought may have added, either to creed 
 or ritual. The oak is not the acorn, but 
 the germinant seed contains the type and 
 the law of all succeeding development. 
 That which is an involuntary and necessi- 
 tated process in physics, must be secured 
 by critical comparison in all movements of 
 
188 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 voluntary life. The State perpetually ap- 
 peals to its fundamental law, to the inten- 
 tion of its founders, whose political wisdom 
 it hesitates to call in question, for it may 
 be assumed that the men who are sum- 
 moned to meet great and grave emergen- 
 cies will be guided to discharge their duties 
 with a sagacity and a courage equal to the 
 task. The stars on the national banner 
 may be increased fourfold within a cen- 
 tury, but the flag remains the same, and 
 the ruling ideas of the constitution con- 
 tinue to be the controlling forces of the 
 national development. Christianity with 
 its wider outlook, conscious of its Divine 
 origin, and ambitious of universal suprem- 
 acy, is forced to the most careful and 
 exhaustive criticism of its documentary 
 records, which contain the story of the 
 planting and the training of the Church. 
 The New Testament must be our final 
 court of appeal, compelling us to reject all 
 that is subversive of its teaching, and re- 
 manding to the sphere of personal liberty 
 everything upon which it does not speak 
 with clear and decisive authority. 
 
 Primitive Christianity is the only rational 
 formal basis of Christian union, not the 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 189 
 
 councils of the first six centuries, nor even 
 the Apostles' Creed, whose doctrine of 
 Christ's descent into Hades trenches upon 
 the inferential and doubtful. So long as 
 this result has not been reached, the debate 
 between Wittenberg and Rome cannot be 
 concluded; and within the lines of Prot- 
 estantism, the severe cross-examination 
 must continue until the ferment and the 
 friction of thought shall undermine all 
 unauthorized claims, eliminate all foreign 
 elements in doctrine, policy, and ritual, 
 restoring the simplicity and the vitality of 
 the apostolic faith. A historic episcopate, 
 for example, is an illogical compromise, 
 and an impossible condition to Christian 
 Catholicity. Its antiquity may be ad- 
 mitted, its beneficent historical influence 
 may be granted, but it can never be made 
 binding unless the Acts and the Epistles 
 disclose its apostolic institution. The 
 testimony of the Church is not to be lightly 
 esteemed, and we should be hesitant to 
 charge its leaders with deliberate deception, 
 but we are bound to test all its judgments 
 by the authority of the Scriptures, which 
 on any theory of their origin, is primary, 
 and so far plenary and final. If we may 
 
190 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 not break with the living Church, much 
 more, and on that very account, may we 
 not break with our Bibles. Spirituality 
 must move within the sphere of scriptural 
 testimony. Our mental impressions must 
 be tested and corrected by the records 
 which contain the primitive revelation. 
 Our views of what God is, and what man 
 is, must combine into exact and harmoni- 
 ous proportions, all that is disclosed in 
 precept and in promise, in judgment and 
 in blessing, in personal discipline and in 
 national history. God and the soul are 
 the great, permanent invisible realities ; 
 they constitute, for us, the moral and eter- 
 nal universe ; and of these realities, the 
 Scriptures give us the oldest, the complet- 
 est, and the most authoritative account. 
 They constitute a carefully prepared and 
 sifted library on these important themes, 
 which we neglect at our peril in the study 
 of God and of man ; and spirituality pre- 
 serves its healthy tone, guarded from the 
 extravagances of unregulated individual 
 conceit, only by a careful and habitual 
 attention to what the Holy Oracles teach. 
 They must be our celestial telescope, 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 191 
 
 through which we discover the secrets of 
 invisible being. 
 
 One more step must be taken. For 
 while the Scriptures are the authentic and 
 authoritative record of the revelation of 
 God to man, they are not themselves the 
 revelation. The Divine disclosure, as the 
 record plainly shows, passed from lower to 
 ever higher stages. It became more defi- 
 nite, more exalted, more fruitful, more 
 energetic, until it culminated in the holy 
 mystery of the Incarnation. Holy men of 
 old spake as they were moved by the Holy 
 Ghost; but in Jesus Christ the fulness of 
 the Godhead dwelleth bodily. It is a long 
 step from Moses to Isaiah, and a longer 
 step from Malachi to John. If we had 
 only Moses, we should have much; but 
 having Christ, it behooves us to honor Him 
 as our Master. It is the theology of Christ 
 we want. It is the spiritual vision of 
 Christ, His estimate of God and of man, 
 which we should strive to attain. And by 
 that I do not mean the separation of Christ 
 and of His teaching from all that preceded 
 His advent, and followed after His ascen- 
 sion. Cut the heart out of the body, and 
 both become lifeless. Christ is the heart 
 
192 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 of the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures, 
 and the criticism which proceeds upon the 
 principle of excision will have neither a 
 living Christ, nor a living Bible. The 
 God-man emerges in the fulness of time, 
 and He can be understood only in the 
 light of his vital environment, as the hope 
 of all the prophets, and as He to whom all 
 apostles bear joyful and united testimony. 
 But He is the sun in the hierarchy of 
 spiritual teachers. He is the vine in 
 whom we must have our abiding, if we are 
 to bear much fruit. His flesh we must 
 eat, and His blood we must drink. At 
 His feet we must sit, and His Spirit must 
 transfigure our own. We must not only 
 preach Him, but we must preach what He 
 preached, and as He preached it. It is not 
 enough to hide behind Him ; He must 
 shine through us, stirring our hearts, shap- 
 ing our thoughts, illumining our faces. 
 Ringing the changes on the sentences and 
 clauses of the creeds of Chalcedon and of 
 Constantinople is not preaching Christ. 
 An orthodox Christology does not consti- 
 tute you a Christian preacher. Eloquent 
 and impassioned eulogy of the Cross is not 
 preaching Christ, and Him crucified. He 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 193 
 
 must subdue you until your whole rational, 
 emotional, and volitional life moves along 
 the level of His own, until His estimates 
 of God and of the soul become your own, 
 and secure your glad and habitual subjec- 
 tion. For He was God and He was man. 
 He understood both exhaustively, and in 
 His active and passive obedience the 
 mighty achievement of human rescue and 
 redemption was secured. So the world 
 needs to know not only what He is, and 
 what He has done, but what He thought 
 about God and man. 
 
 Nay, more, God is what He is, and man 
 ought to be what He is ; so that every 
 problem, Divine and human, finds in Him 
 its solution. He must be our guide in the 
 interpretation of the Scriptures. For crit- 
 ical and scientific purposes, it is well to 
 trace the revelation of God in its historical 
 development; but for practical purposes, 
 and in preaching, the order should be re- 
 versed, and the voice of Jesus Christ be 
 made to ring in the ears of men. Do not 
 tarry in the outer court. Do not linger 
 in the holy place. The veil has been 
 rent, and 3^ou should not stay until your 
 hands are on the mercy-seat. Make 
 
194 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 Christ's estimates your own. Think of 
 Him as the manifested God. His tears at 
 the grave of Lazarus, and over doomed 
 Jerusalem, His prayer on the cross for 
 those who put Him to death, and His 
 dying charge to John to care for His 
 broken-hearted mother, are worth more as 
 a disclosure of what God really is, than all 
 the labored conceits of the scholastic phi- 
 losophers. Get your theology from the 
 parable of the prodigal son. Think of jus- 
 tice as having tears in it. Make the 
 Fatherhood of God, as taught by Christ, 
 and illustrated by His conduct among men, 
 real to yourself, and your preaching will 
 have spiritual power. There is anger in 
 God, but it is always the anger of out- 
 raged Fatherhood, and that gives to the 
 Divine anger its moral majesty and power. 
 And what man is, you can best learn from 
 Him who brake bread with publicans and 
 sinners, who blessed the little children, 
 who prayed for Peter, that his faith might 
 not fail, and whose withering curse fell 
 only upon one class of men, the hypo- 
 crites, souls honeycombed with falsehood, 
 in whom moral integrity had been deliber- 
 ately crushed out. The world needs His 
 
THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 195 
 
 Gospel, the Church needs His Spirit more ; 
 and His Gospel will not conquer the world, 
 until His Spirit pervades and rules the 
 Church. Nor will it ever pervade and rule 
 the Church, so long as it is in any way re- 
 strained in us, who believe ourselves com- 
 missioned to preach the Gospel in Christ's 
 name. You must have Peter's vision, that 
 nothing which God has made, and upon 
 which He has set the seal of His ownership 
 and adoption, is common or unclean. The 
 man who is not ready to be the servant of 
 the most degraded has not the spirit of 
 Christ in him ; and though he may be tol- 
 erated in the Church, he is unfit to take 
 the lowest place in the ranks of the 
 Christian ministry. 
 
 Here I must leave you, face to face with 
 Him, whom, having not seen, you love, in 
 whom you trust, to whose service you have 
 pledged your lives, and with whom you 
 must walk, if you would know the truth, 
 and secure the baptism of power. I have 
 taxed your attention long; but the su- 
 preme importance of the theme must be 
 my apology and justification. 
 
THE PEACTICAL ELEMENT IN 
 PBEACHING. 
 
 Among American preachers, Charles G. 
 Finney will always hold a deservedly high 
 place. For whatever may be said of his 
 theological views, of the crudeness of his 
 style, and of his revival methods, they 
 were all the instruments of an intensely 
 earnest nature, and they were wielded with 
 extraordinary power. It was his constant 
 insistence that ministers should preach with 
 a view to immediate results ; and that this 
 could be done only as the hearer could be 
 made to see that the theology of the pulpit 
 was rational, vital, and thoroughly consis- 
 tent. No man believed in sound doctrine 
 more than did he, but his lawyer's instinct 
 made him feel that a doctrinal system which 
 put a strait-jacket upon him, and prevented 
 him from securing a prompt and practical 
 response, ought to be flung aside, and dis- 
 carded without a moment's hesitation. And 
 196 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 197 
 
 therein he was right. There is such a thing 
 as dogmatic tyranny, against which the 
 pulpit is summoned to exercise eternal 
 vigilance. As between the chair of dog- 
 matic theology and the pulpit, the primacy 
 belongs to the latter ; and whenever a sys- 
 tem becomes so hard and unyielding that 
 it withers the sinews of practical appeal, it 
 has not only outlived its usefulness ; it con- 
 victs and condemns itself as both illogical 
 and inadequate. A theology which can- 
 not be preached fearlessly and faithfully, 
 which takes refuge in wire-drawn distinc- 
 tions and reservations, which confuses the 
 speaker and confounds the hearer, cannot 
 be a true reading either of God or man. 
 God is not playing hide and seek with us, 
 and we may not speak to men in His name, 
 using phrases and defending doctrinal state- 
 ments which perplex an honest soul. 
 
 It may be that Mr. Finney has un- 
 consciously overdrawn the picture of the 
 preaching to which he was accustomed to 
 listen in his early manhood, when men 
 were urged to repent, and then told that 
 the very ability to repent was the gift of 
 an unconditional decree of Divine elec- 
 tion ; when they were summoned to believe 
 
198 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 in Christ, and informed in the next breath 
 that they could not believe until they had 
 been supernaturally regenerated. The de- 
 scription, however, is anything but a cari- 
 cature. Thousands of men have felt the 
 palsying effect of the system against which 
 this fiery preacher revolted. The memory 
 of such preaching comes back to me, with 
 the terror and agony which it awakened, 
 supposed at the time to be evidences of a 
 Divine operation, but which I have long 
 since come to regard as diseased mental 
 and moral states ; and I have good reason 
 to believe that this style of preaching is 
 far from having become obsolete. In a 
 recent correspondence with the head of one 
 of our American theological seminaries, 
 the position was deliberately taken that 
 all true moral freedom was lost in the fall 
 of our first parents, that the only liberty 
 which survived the apostasy in Eden was 
 the formal one of choosing between dif- 
 ferent courses of sin, leaving the soul un- 
 conditionally dependent upon an act of 
 Divine power before it was invested with 
 the ability to repent and believe. It is 
 possible for a man to hold such a specula- 
 tive system, and then preach with an utter 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 199 
 
 disregard to it, on the principle that as the 
 Divine decree is secret and unsearchable, 
 every man must be addressed as if no such 
 decree existed ; but in such a case it might 
 be as well to eliminate the doctrine of de- 
 crees altogether. The longer you preach, 
 the profounder will become your convic- 
 tion that men can be quickened into spirit- 
 ual life only by the power of the Holy 
 Ghost ; and you will discover, pari passu, 
 that you cannot grapple with men unless 
 you charge upon them the full and exclu- 
 sive responsibility for their moral state. 
 These are the two poles of thought betAveen 
 which all theology swings, with the con- 
 stant temptation to eliminate either the 
 one or the other in the interest of scien- 
 tific unity. The worse heresy, however, of 
 the two, in my deliberate judgment, is that 
 which fails to emphasize the reality of 
 man's moral freedom ; which, for example, 
 appears to invest him with it in recogniz- 
 ing his natural ability, and then reduces it 
 to zero by the doctrine of moral impotence. 
 But whether you agree with me in this 
 attitude or not, the point of urgency is 
 this, that your theology must be the out- 
 come of your preaching, not its antecedent, 
 
200 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 superimposed condition and limitation. It 
 must be forged anew, link by link, in your 
 earnest grapple with men. The Word of 
 God is a hammer, a coal of fire, a two- 
 edged sword. A hammer breaks ; fire 
 burns ; the sword pierces ; and you must 
 have a theology which does all that. Do 
 not understand me as undervaluing thor- 
 ough and systematic theological training. 
 The years which you are spending in these 
 quiet halls, and under the instruction of 
 tried and trained teachers, are years which 
 you should improve to the utmost. They 
 will familiarize you with the great systems 
 of thought, which have been patiently 
 wrought out amid the stress and strain of 
 fierce controversy ; and there is nothing so 
 conducive to mental sobriety and balance 
 as the careful study of historical theology. 
 The sublime unity of the Christian faith 
 will command growing and grateful recog- 
 nition amid the widest diversity of state- 
 ment. The discovery will give you anchor- 
 age for all the years to come ; it will 
 prevent you from mistaking eccentricity 
 for originality, and will guard you from 
 that waste of intellectual energy, which 
 ignorantly spends its strength in rehabili- 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT, 201 
 
 tating old and exploded dogmas. But 
 this conservative temper, provoked and 
 fostered by historical study, will also make 
 you more genuinely and profoundly cath- 
 olic. It will make you impatient of 
 theological partisanship. Robertson, of 
 Brighton, made frequent use of the prin- 
 ciple, which he borrowed from the Hege- 
 lian philosophy, that all true thought 
 proceeds from thesis and antithesis, to 
 synthesis, from affirmation and denial, to 
 a more comprehensive formula. It is Atha- 
 nasius against Arius, Augustine against 
 Pelagius, Anselm against Grotius and Soci- 
 nus, Luther against Zwingle, Calvin against 
 Wesley ; and the heretics manage in time 
 to tone down the extreme positions of their 
 antagonists. The living thought of our 
 time refuses to be confined in the vocabu- 
 lary of any preceding theological school; 
 and what we have been pleased to call 
 consistent Calvinism, or improvements upon 
 the Genevan theology, is only a euphemism 
 covering the practical abandonment of cer- 
 tain positions once deliberately taken and 
 stoutly defended. In this matter Prince- 
 ton has been as great a sinner as New 
 Haven ; and Charles Hodge was as much 
 
202 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 an innovator as Nathaniel W. Taylor; 
 while the younger Hodge found it neces- 
 sary at almost every step to say that he 
 did not quite agree with his father, or that 
 he preferred a slightly different statement. 
 Calvinism has been Arminianized, and Ar- 
 minianism has become Calvinized ; and the 
 patient reading of Wigger's monograph 
 on Augustinianism has convinced many of 
 us that Pelagius was not so great a heretic 
 as we once imagined. There is something 
 to me very suggestive in the fact that of 
 all the fathers, as we call them, the most 
 modern is Chrysostom, who was a great 
 theologian only as he was a great preacher, 
 working out his theology under the pres- 
 sure of tremendous practical emergency. 
 No system of theology can be absorbed, 
 which must not be again broken to pieces, 
 and passed through the fiery crucible of 
 personal meditation, shaping itself into logi- 
 cal forms and phrases of your own, before 
 you can find the truest freedom in preach- 
 ing. You must wear your own coat, fitted 
 to your own person; and you must have 
 your own theology. 
 
 The conservatism and the catholicity of 
 which I have spoken, should be at once 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 203 
 
 an encouragement to independence and a 
 salutary restraint upon it. The substance 
 of your message can never be of your in- 
 vention. But the treasure has come to 
 you in earthen vessels, and even the lan- 
 guage of the Bible may be followed in the 
 spirit of mechanical bondage. It is the 
 prophetic and apostolic thought which you 
 must seize, and then reproduce it in your 
 own vernacular. For language is every- 
 where mobile. It is in perpetual flux. It 
 bears the impress of time. The dictionary 
 is not -always an infallible court of appeal. 
 Classical usage may mislead you. And if 
 this is true, even of the Scriptures, much 
 more is it true of the long line of the great 
 teachers of the Church, who have given 
 their best powers to the exposition of the 
 Gospel. Every one of them shows the in- 
 fluence of his training, of his mental and 
 moral peculiarities, of the philosophy which 
 dominated him, and of the logical meth- 
 ods current in his time. 
 
 In no department of language is this 
 element of change more patent than in 
 the use made of illustrations. At one 
 time they are imperial, as in the psalms 
 and the prophets ; at another time they are 
 
204 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 legal, as in the epistles of Paul and in 
 the Augustinian theology ; at another time 
 they are commercial or governmental^ as 
 in more recent years. Thus on the basis 
 of Paul's comparison between Adam and 
 Christ, introduced by way of illustration, 
 the whole doctrine of sin and of redemp- 
 tion has been constructed, with the notion 
 of imputation rigorously carried through 
 every part. So, again, the idea of a cov- 
 enant, as embodying the peculiar feature 
 of Jewish national life, has been carried 
 back into Eden, and into the counsels of 
 eternity, resolving all moral history into 
 the execution and fulfilment of a con- 
 tract. Illustrations are impressive and 
 useful, so long as they are used by way of 
 suggestion ; but they are mischievous when 
 they are charged with the office of logical 
 construction ; and a very large part of the 
 preacher's intellectual task consists in seiz- 
 ing the vital truth, which hides behind all 
 analogies, and which must not be allowed 
 to become imprisoned in any, using them 
 all, dispensing with them all, and creating 
 more fitting ones, as the case may require. 
 In all this, one thing requires emphasis, 
 ■ — you must be theologians. You must 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 205 
 
 have a clear-cut, definite, symmetrical body 
 of religious convictions, supported by a 
 close and patient study of the Bible. You 
 will be despised if your mental equipment 
 consists of rags ; you will be laughed at 
 if it is made up of an incongruous assort- 
 ment of patches. Your doctrinal system 
 may be very meagre, and it may be 
 very comprehensive and exhaustive; but 
 whether the one or the other, it must be 
 homogeneous and consistent, bearing in 
 its every part the impress of your per- 
 sonal elaboration, as the famous shield of 
 classic story is said to have been so forged 
 that were it broken into a thousand frag- 
 ments, every one of them would have pro- 
 claimed the name of its maker. You can 
 make no greater mistake than to abandon 
 the study of systematic theology upon 
 your graduation. In science, in art, you 
 may be content that your hearers shall be 
 greatly your superiors ; but in your mi- 
 nute and systematic knowledge of the 
 Bible, the occupancy of a pulpit compels 
 you to seek for such mastery that your 
 aptness to teach will be recognized by all. 
 Now and then I meet a man who says, 
 " Well, since I left the seminary I have 
 
206 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 dismissed theology, and have been content 
 to read the New Testament." But an 
 hour's talk has convinced me that the New 
 Testament had fallen into the same neg- 
 lect, that the reading had become scrappy 
 and superficial, that thought had become 
 hazy, uncertain, and confusing, and that 
 the preaching had lost its manly vigor. 
 No man can read the psalms, the prophets, 
 the epistles, without girding his intel- 
 lectual loins, and without being forced to 
 search for and seize the ruling ideas by 
 which all the separate utterances are 
 shaped and co-ordinated. Nothing is of 
 greater practical importance than this per- 
 sonal, independent mastery of the vital 
 theology which is contained in the Holy 
 Oracles. In the prosecution of this en- 
 deavor, the best books will soon come 
 under your notice, and find their way upon 
 your library shelves, critical, exegetical, 
 historical, and theological. Nor will you 
 be able to conduct these inquiries with- 
 out constant reference to psychology and 
 ethics ; for it is still true that no difficulty 
 emerges in theology which is not also a 
 problem in philosophy, and in which ethi- 
 cal conceptions do not play a most impor- 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 207 
 
 tant part. Nor can you afford to ignore 
 political economy, in either of its two 
 great departments, civil and economic sci- 
 ence. For not only are these integral parts 
 of the Mosaic code ; but the record of 
 Scripture is largely a revelation of God in 
 His treatment of nations, and a disclos- 
 ure of the forces by which national pros- 
 perity, decadence, and ruin have been 
 determined. The science of government 
 is a moral science, because it deals with 
 man, and no governmental statutes may 
 trench upon the moral dignity of the hu- 
 man subject. Nor can economic science, 
 in its discussions, ignore the moral factor, 
 discoursing of capital and labor, of pro- 
 duction and distribution, in terms of im- 
 personal speech ; for it is the man, who is 
 capitalist or laborer, producer or con- 
 sumer; and economic regulations and cus- 
 toms must not be permitted to crush or 
 deface the manhood of the lowliest. 
 
 In the controversy on electrical light- 
 ing, the courts of New York decided that 
 corporate rights were limited by public 
 safety ; and that whenever it became clear 
 that human life was endangered by any 
 corporation, the latter became a public nui- 
 
208 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 sance, which any man had a right to abate. 
 Man is the only sacred thing on the globe, 
 whose natural rights may not be ignored, 
 who may neither be enslaved nor imbruted. 
 We may do what we will, with all that 
 grows in the soil, or is found in the for- 
 ests, or is hidden in the earth, or flies in 
 the air, or swims in the sea ; but he who 
 sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his 
 blood be shed. It is the fearful lesson of 
 universal history, that there is something 
 in man which resents the touch of oppres- 
 sion, so that tyranny always builds its 
 throne upon an earthquake. There is no 
 beast so ferocious, no serpent so venomous, 
 that you cannot exterminate them or drive 
 them into harmless seclusion ; but these 
 arts cannot safely be plied with men. The 
 memory of wrong abides ; the power of 
 retaliation slowly gathers ; the whisper be- 
 comes a wail ; the wail mounts into a cry 
 of rage ; and the rage bursts into blind and 
 ruthless vengeance. 
 
 Let us not deceive ourselves. The 
 forces which destroyed Egypt and Baby- 
 lon, which hastened the fall of Rome, and 
 which heaved in the French Revolution, 
 slumber in every human breast, within 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 209 
 
 which rankles the sense of wrong. What 
 the white man will not tolerate, the black 
 man will not forever endure ; what the 
 rich man resents, the poor man will not 
 quietly suffer ; and however proud we may- 
 be of our Anglican and American civil- 
 ization, we must not forget that disdain of 
 man, and injustice to him, develop a storm 
 centre before whose fury nothing can 
 stand. This is the practical side of relig- 
 ion, to love your neighbor as yourself, not 
 to carry him, but to give him all the elbow 
 room which you demand for yourself ; and 
 this is not a sentimental duty, a grace of 
 refined life, an ethical superfluity, but the 
 sternest of all political and industrial im- 
 peratives, apart from which there can be 
 no permanent security to person or prop- 
 erty. To this bold defence of universal 
 manhood, your vocation consecrates you. 
 That must be your message to those who 
 bear rule in the state, and who control the 
 industries of the country, taking care 
 meanwhile not to meddle with questions 
 of method and of application, for which 
 your hearers are presumed to be better 
 qualified than you possibly can be. For 
 the Christian preacher should never permit 
 
210 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 himself to sink to the level of a mere 
 social and industrial reformer. He will do 
 his best work if he resolutely refrains from 
 becoming a partisan, from identifying him- 
 self with methods and measures which 
 come within the realm of expediency, and 
 the endorsement or criticism of which does 
 not involve the application of universal 
 ethical principles. You are to keep your 
 eye fixed upon the man, made in the image 
 of God, and therefore inviolable ; not upon 
 his environment, which is incidental and 
 subordinate, and which in a perfect society 
 would remain as varied as are the capac- 
 ities and endowments, the industry and 
 energy, of the individuals who constitute 
 the social organism. I do not say that 
 occasions may not arise when you must 
 range yourselves on one side of a great 
 popular contest or on the other, when to 
 be silent would be cowardice and betrayal 
 of your trust; for the pulpit should be 
 God's mouthpiece against tyranny and op- 
 pression, whether ecclesiastical or civil or 
 social or industrial. Of this you must 
 be the judges ; but you ought to be per- 
 fectly sure that an intelligent zeal for 
 God and man is the fire which burns in 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 211 
 
 your bones, and which unseals your lips, 
 and that it is not a feverish excitement pro- 
 duced by the heated and unwholesome 
 atmosphere of the time. 
 
 Yon will conclude, from what I have 
 said, that a pretty broad field of intel- 
 lectual activity awaits your entrance, in 
 which your powers will be taxed to the 
 utmost, and incessantly. That is just the 
 conviction which I wish to impress upon 
 you. The preacher's mission is no sin- 
 ecure. It is not an elegant leisure to 
 which you are summoned, where you may 
 indulge your scholarly tastes, and become 
 the centre of a select and refined circle. 
 You are to be fishers of men, and the 
 most costly tackle in the market is worth- 
 less if the trout do not leap when you cast 
 the fly. The Gospel of Christ is needed 
 wherever you go, and you must so preach 
 it as to set men to thinking about the mes- 
 sage which you have brought to them. 
 Alas for you if they only praise the ser- 
 mon, or the grace of your polished utter- 
 ance; you must plant barbed arrows in 
 their hearts, which shall leave behind them 
 the pain of a godly sorrow. - God and 
 Christ, sin and salvation, redemption and 
 
212 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 judgment, must be made intensely real to 
 them ; and you can make real to others 
 only what is vivid to yourself. So I say 
 again, and would repeat it a thousand 
 times : Be theologians. Let your theol- 
 ogy be practical, never swinging in air, 
 but let there be theology. You must 
 have something to say, and the thing 
 which you say must be an expression 
 of the thought of God, and of the mind 
 of Christ; which again amounts to this, 
 that the Christian preacher must be a 
 Christian theologian. 
 
 When, twenty-five years ago, I was 
 graduated from the theological seminary, 
 and ordained as pastor over a quiet sub- 
 urban church on the banks of the Hudson 
 River, I determined that my first work 
 should be a close and patient study of the 
 Person of Christ. I felt that I must know 
 who my master was. The first book I 
 purchased was Dorner's History of the 
 Person of Christ, which still remains the 
 best monograph on the subject. For more 
 than two years I plodded along, reading 
 right and left, as my time and resources 
 would pernit, in systematic and historical 
 theology, with close and constant refer- 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 213 
 
 ence to the Gospels and Epistles as writ- 
 ten in their chronological order. I have 
 never regretted the choice I made, nor the 
 studies with which I followed it, when I 
 made Miiller's monograph on the doctrine 
 of sin the subject of an equally close 
 reading. I doubt whether a theological 
 graduate can do better now, than to be- 
 gin his pastoral studies with Christology. 
 Until that is mastered, I would shelve 
 eschatology. For in my deliberate judg- 
 ment, the constitution of our Lord's Person 
 is the one thing on which the most defi- 
 nite instruction is needed, and with regard 
 to which there is a subtle and insidious 
 tendency in modern thought to depart 
 from the New Testament representation. 
 The evangelical, and even the ecclesias- 
 tical phrases are retained; but the}^ are 
 emptied of their meaning. The Incarna- 
 tion is interpreted in the light of man's 
 creation in the image of God. God and 
 man are regarded as homogeneous in 
 nature, as mutually inclusive, and not 
 exclusive. This philosophical postulate is 
 Scriptural, and is of immense advantage ; 
 but it has paved the way for a new series 
 of Christological errors. The man Christ 
 
I 
 
 214 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 Jesus, the bearer of a sinless and perfect, 
 an ideal and archetypal humanity, has 
 come by many to be regarded as ipso facto, 
 the manifested God; and his deity has 
 been reduced to a unique divinity. It is 
 a new form of Unitarianism, retaining the 
 language which Christian usage has con- 
 secrated. According to this view God was 
 indeed in Christ, but only as He is poten- 
 tially in every man, as He is consciously 
 and energetically in every holy man, as he 
 must be in plenary power in the holiest of 
 men, in the man whose moral altitude is 
 the loftiest. 
 
 Such an interpretation might possibly 
 cover the description in the Synoptic Gos- 
 pels, and even the statements in the Pauline 
 Epistles ; but it will not fit the facts which 
 emerge in the Gospel of John, which 
 embodies the ripest fruit of the matured 
 apostolic reminiscence and reflection. For 
 in this Gospel our Lord is represented as 
 having affirmed His conscious existence 
 in Abraham's day, as having claimed the 
 right to equal honor with the Father, and 
 as having prayed that He might be inves- 
 ted with the glory which He had with the 
 Father before the world was. The sinless 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 215 
 
 man could not have said these things, if 
 they were not true ; and they disclose to 
 us the deepest ground of His disciplined 
 and matured personal consciousness. There 
 is a great and impassable gulf here be- 
 tween Him and all other men. The period 
 before birth is to us all an absolute blank ; 
 and the first years of our infancy are 
 shrouded in the same impenetrable gloom. 
 No philosopher, no saint, has been able to 
 pierce to the beginnings of mortal life. 
 What must the personal consciousness be 
 which leaps back to Abraham's time, and 
 to the period antedating creation ? Out 
 of that reminiscence grew in John's mind 
 the doctrine of the Logos, in the prologue 
 to his Gospel ; which doctrine is thus seen 
 to be not a speculative notion, borrowed 
 from Alexandria, but a strictly inductive 
 conclusion from the facts which our Lord's 
 utterances disclosed. It may not be pos- 
 sible to define the exact nature of the 
 indwelling Deity in the man Jesus Christ ; 
 but it certainly was altogether unique, 
 constituting Him the only begotten Son 
 of God; and the spiritual indwelling of 
 God in believers cannot be accepted as an 
 analogue, for the simple reason that there 
 
216 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 were elements in Christ's matured personal 
 consciousness, which are wanting, even in 
 the most rudimentary forms, in the con- 
 scious life of humanity. 
 
 "On the nature of the indwelling of God 
 in Christ, the Church has never been able 
 to pronounce judgment, and it probably 
 will never be able to do so. It has con- 
 tented itself with negative deliverances. 
 It has rejected Nestorianism, because that 
 kept the God and the man too far apart ; 
 it rejected Eutychianism, because that 
 brought them too close together, making 
 of them an incongruous mixture ; it rejec- 
 ted Apollinarianism, because that truncated 
 the man; and. it has rejected every notion 
 which suggested a dormant, or paralyzed, 
 or quiescent God, or which regarded Him 
 as having reduced Himself to the dimen- 
 sions of a human soul. It has insisted 
 upon leaving intact the man Christ Jesus ; 
 but it has also claimed that what He said 
 about Himself disclosed a unique indwell- 
 ing of essential Godhood, whose reality 
 cannot be gainsaid without impeaching 
 either his veracity or his mental saniry. 
 And it is equally plain that the unique 
 and mysterious personal constitution of 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 217 
 
 our Lord gives a peculiar authority to his 
 teachings, a singular force to his precepts 
 and promises, a unique function to his 
 death, resurrection, ascension, and inter- 
 cession. My apology for this doctrinal 
 digression must be the important part which 
 this theme has had in my own early studies, 
 and the central place which it holds in the 
 theology of the present. The most practi- 
 cal thing any of you can do is to make 
 your footing in Christology firm and secure, 
 so that you can preach the Living Christ 
 as the wisdom and the power of God unto 
 salvation. 
 
 Of hardly less practical importance is 
 the rule that the preacher should always 
 aim to make himself perfectly understood 
 by all who listen to him. By this I do not 
 mean that his thought and utterance must 
 be on a level with the youngest and the 
 least matured in his audience. A certain 
 degree of mental and moral activity is re- 
 quired in the hearer ; and this preliminary 
 discipline belongs more properly to the 
 household, than to the preacher in the con- 
 duct of public worship and in the discharge 
 of his office as a Christian teacher. The 
 pulpit must address itself to men and 
 
218 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 women, and to all whose years have brought 
 them to habits of reflection, and to the 
 period of clear-cut conscious personal re- 
 sponsibility ; while parents must be urged 
 to be priests in their own homes, rearing 
 their children in the nurture and admoni- 
 tion of the Lord. The pulpit must be mas- 
 culine, not infantile. Even the children 
 will be attracted by its manliness. For 
 they soon become impatient of any mode 
 of address, or tone of utterance, which sug- 
 gests condescension on the part of the 
 speaker ; and I apprehend that we do not 
 give them full credit for the intellectual 
 and moral activity of which they are com- 
 petent. Almost before you know it, your 
 boys and girls, if you have cultivated their 
 acquaintance and secured their friendship 
 in a manly way, will become your most 
 attentive listeners and your keenest critics. 
 I have frequently been surprised at the 
 way in which lads twelve and fourteen 
 years of age, and young misses no older, 
 have spoken to me of the help given them 
 by discourses which I had supposed to be 
 beyond their comprehension, in the prep- 
 aration and delivery of which I had simply 
 endeavored to use the language of the peo- 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 219 
 
 pie ; and my own ministry has convinced 
 me that children are keener listeners than 
 we suspect. 
 
 A much more serious and prevalent ob- 
 stacle to the preacher's success, than the 
 immaturity of his hearers, is the distraction 
 of their thought, their volatile and incon- 
 stant temper. They are active about too 
 many things, and the will is not summoned 
 to exert its power of restraint. There is a 
 lack of attention, and that can never be 
 remedied by anything but the manliest ad- 
 dress, where weighty thought is commu- 
 nicated in clear, dignified, and forcible 
 speech. Do not put on the air of a phi- 
 losopher. Do not speak in the language of 
 a professional theologian. On the other 
 hand, do not become a clown nor pose as a 
 wit, nor run into story telling, nor fall into 
 the slang of the street. The true speech 
 of the pulpit is plain, direct, unconven- 
 tional, conversational, with a quiet, manly 
 dignity befitting the occasion and the 
 theme. 
 
 I have spoken of the imperative neces- 
 sity of recasting the results of your profes- 
 sional studies into logical and verbal forms 
 of your own. The process needs to be car- 
 
220 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 ried a step farther, to the translation of 
 your own theological conceptions into the 
 vocabulary of the people. It is reported of 
 one of the Alexanders that he once sup- 
 plied the place of a theological student in 
 a rural pulpit near Princeton, where no 
 one knew him, and that one of the elders 
 wrote back to the seminary, that while the 
 old man was not as fine a preacher as their 
 regular supply, he was a " mighty good 
 talker," had interested the people very 
 much, and that everybody would be glad 
 to hear him again. A good talker is the 
 most effective preacher. He will wear the 
 longest and command the highest regard. 
 Sound, sensible talk, when it is dashed with 
 wholesome passion, and vital with intense 
 earnestness, will break out into the most 
 genuine eloquence and pathos. 
 
 I am afraid that we have studied models 
 of eloquence too much. There is a won- 
 derful similarity between the great and 
 effective preachers of any single period. 
 There is an equally marked difference be- 
 tween the great and effective preachers of 
 any given period, and those who preceded 
 or followed them. There is often the, 
 greatest contrast between the early and the 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 221 
 
 later style of the same man, as may be no- 
 ticed in the case of Charles H. Spurgeon. 
 The change is partly clue to personal de- 
 velopment, but mainly to an increasingly 
 closer identification with popular habits of 
 speech. Language, too, is an elastic in- 
 strument ; it is in a state of constant flux : 
 and the speech of the pulpit, where it is 
 most vigorous and effective, always betrays 
 the current forms of earnest and thoughtful 
 address. As in the pronunciation and defi- 
 nition of words we frequently pass from 
 the dictionaries to ordinary usage, so must 
 language be studied and mastered as a liv- 
 ing organism, not as an embalmed or pet- 
 rified relic of the past. Macaulay, and 
 Robert Hall, and Foster, may be read to 
 great advantage, but so may the periodicals 
 and the newspapers of the present day. 
 The current speech may not be as classical 
 and polished as your scholarly tastes might 
 wish it were, but you must take it as you 
 find it, avoid its coarseness, and make the 
 best use of it possible. You may not ig- 
 nore it, any more than you would ignore 
 the coat, vest, and pantaloons, Avhich society 
 has adopted as a man's regulation dress. 
 You may think knee-breeches, and a scarlet 
 
222 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 waistcoat, and silver shoe-buckles, and pow- 
 dered hair, and lace ruffles, much more pic- 
 turesque and becoming, but you would 
 hardly appear in such an outfit in the pul- 
 pit. Style is the dress of thought. It must 
 conform to popular usage. It must not be 
 antique and antiquated, but modern and 
 practical. Instruction in rhetoric and logic 
 is not confined to a few classical models ; it 
 must be sought, with equal diligence, in 
 the language which the great majority uses. 
 And this common speech will be found 
 not to be lacking in dignity and force. It 
 is a noble instrument, by the use of which 
 society conducts its intellectual exchange, 
 and whose simple nervous energy the best 
 literature appropriates and preserves. Talk 
 in the pulpit as earnest men talk to each 
 other, and as they talk to you. That will 
 be almost sure to lead you to cultivate 
 what is called extemporaneous preaching, 
 — which is neither memoriter recitation, 
 nor loose, unconnected, unpremeditated 
 speech, — but the free utterance of clear 
 and thoroughly mastered thought. You 
 ought to be able to read a book, and then, 
 without a memorandum to help you, to 
 give an intelligent and connected state- 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 223 
 
 ment of its argument and conclusions, just 
 as the best recitation in the class-room is 
 the free reproduction of the assigned les- 
 son. I remember reciting page after page 
 of Butler's Analogy without any conscious- 
 ness of verbal bondage, having been solely 
 intent upon grasping the thought in all its 
 windings and in its logical termination. 
 And you ought to be able to write a care- 
 ful and connected "synopsis of a sermon, 
 amounting almost to a fully written dis- 
 course, and then reproduce it in the speech 
 which the thought will spontaneously sug- 
 gest. The secret consists in the mastery 
 of the matter, and in the clearness of the 
 logical analysis. It involves the abandon- 
 ment of an ambition to say fine or eloquent 
 things, and to make your discourses bril- 
 liant with literary adornment ; though the 
 truest eloquence will come often when you 
 are least laboring for it, when your thought 
 is at white heat, and when phrases will leap 
 to your lips which half an hour afterwards 
 you may not be able to reproduce. The 
 secret of forcible extemporaneous speech is 
 in having something weighty to say, and in 
 the determination to make yourself clearly 
 understood. Whether you use the pen or 
 
224 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 not, in the work of preparation, is a matter 
 of subordinate importance, though the rule 
 will be a pretty free and careful use of the 
 pen, without a slavish bondage to the lines 
 which are traced upon the paper. 
 
 I do not object to written sermons. I 
 do not object to their being read. There 
 are occasions when every man resorts to 
 that method, and for some men it may be 
 ordinarily the best. But I do not believe 
 that the extemporaneous preacher should 
 be regarded as the exceptional man; nor 
 that free speech in delivering the message 
 of God to men is the ideal form, in the 
 sense of its being the prerogative of the 
 elect few. That assumption nips a whole- 
 some ambition in the bud, and will 
 make a young man who conscientiously 
 attempts it feel, in spite of himself, that 
 he is regarded as vain and conceited. 
 The extemporaneous method is the ideal 
 method, only because it is the normal 
 method. It is not the easiest. It is, of 
 all methods, the most exacting and per- 
 ilous. It exposes to the greatest ex- 
 tremes, and makes havoc of any attempt 
 to maintain a fair average. But its very 
 difficulties constitute its practical power. 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 225 
 
 It kej^s the preacher to the utmost physical, 
 mental, and moral tension. It brings out 
 all the man there is in him; while the 
 erectness of his posture, the kindling of 
 his eye, the naturalness of his tone, them- 
 selves constitute an instrument of convic- 
 tion. It is worth all it costs ; and there 
 are few men who, by diligent and faithful 
 endeavor through a series of years, cannot 
 become acceptable and forcible masters of 
 extemporaneous speech, while many men 
 part with half of their power through an 
 early and long-continued surrender to the 
 written manuscript. You may not publish 
 as many volumes of sermons if you pursue 
 this method, for a sermon uttered in free, 
 conversational speech hardly ever reads 
 well ,- but then sermons are not read much 
 anyhow, and when you remember how 
 widely and eagerly Robertson's sketches 
 have been read, not one of which was 
 written before he preached it, you will 
 conclude that a sermon lives not because 
 it was carefully written, but because it was 
 preached at white heat. There is no 
 special need, that I know of, why there 
 should be an increase of sermonic literature, 
 and an average of one printed sermon in 
 
226 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 twenty years for every minister in the 
 United States would add annually five 
 hundred volumes to our libraries ; so that, 
 on the whole, we might as well be content 
 to let the ordinary sermon do its work at 
 the moment of its utterance. Strike that 
 one blow with all the power that you can 
 muster. 
 
 But it is not enough for you to preach 
 in such a way that men cannot fail to 
 understand you. You must command not 
 only their attention, but their approval. 
 By this I do not mean that you are to be 
 anxious of popular applause. Behind many 
 a cheer there is a covert sneer, and at the 
 heart of many a curse there is involuntary 
 homage. Popularity is neither to be 
 sought nor to be avoided; but the assent 
 of the moral judgment should be every 
 preacher's earnest and constant aim — com- 
 mending himself to every man's conscience 
 in the sight of God. The Gospel which 
 you are commissioned to preach is for 
 every man and for all men. It ignore^ all 
 differences of rank, and distinctions of 
 race, in its urgent appeals to repentance, 
 in its ethical instructions, and in its gracious 
 promises. It is no respecter of persons. 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 227 
 
 That does not mean that it looks with 
 equal contempt upon everybody, but with 
 equal and genuine regard. It maintains 
 inviolate the prerogatives and privileges, 
 the duties and the dignities, of each and 
 all. It speaks a universal language, touch- 
 ing upon matters which come home to all 
 with equal force. The preacher should 
 never permit himself to speak in such a 
 way as to divide his audience into parties, 
 whose concurrent moral judgment he is 
 unable to command. 
 
 This rules out the discussion of all topics, 
 however vital and important in their way, 
 on which equally honest men may earnestly 
 disagree. Never meddle with party poli- 
 tics in the pulpit. It is the devil's snare. 
 The ethical principles involved in the con- 
 stitution and the administration of govern- 
 ment, and in the discharge of the duties of 
 citizenship, are legitimate themes for dis- 
 cussion by the preacher; but the applica- 
 tion of these principles to specific cases 
 must be left to every man's independent 
 and intelligent decision. If you advise 
 him from the pulpit, you are assuming the 
 role of a political boss, and the resentment 
 will be natural and righteous. And even 
 
228 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 in the inculcation of the ethical principles 
 of political economy, it is the part of 
 wisdom to make them prominent when 
 the popular pulse is not feverish. Election 
 sermons accomplish little good, however 
 cautious the argument, and however unob- 
 jectionable the matter, because j r our hearers 
 will be perpetually wondering what ticket 
 you are trying to help. Don't preach on 
 temperance on the Sunday before the polls 
 open, when the prohibition candidates are 
 canvassing for votes. You may injure a good 
 cause by advocating it at an inopportune 
 time ; and even if you are a pronounced 
 political prohibitionist on conscientious 
 moral grounds, many of your hearers are 
 not, and they have as good a right to 
 judge for themselves in matters of practical 
 legislation as you have. Take the stump, 
 if you want to, though I think you had 
 better not; but at all events, let your 
 pulpit voice only the authority of Jesus 
 Christ. A prominent New York pastor 
 told me recently that the most effective 
 sermon which he ever preached on Christian 
 giving fell upon a Sunday, when the bas- 
 kets were not passed, and the people knew 
 that they would not be. He did it delib- 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 229 
 
 erately, and the result amazed him. When 
 the next collection was taken, everybody 
 was eager to give, and the contributions 
 doubled. They stayed there, too. The 
 effect was permanent. There is in this a 
 practical hint of the greatest importance, 
 that the minister's best work is always 
 done when no one can suspect that he is 
 posing as a special pleader. 
 
 Few things are of greater practical im- 
 portance, than securing, and keeping, the 
 confidence of your hearers in your per- 
 sonal integrity, and in your enthusiastic 
 devotion to your work. Respect for the 
 cloth is rapidly disappearing. You must 
 be a man among men. Do not whine. 
 Do not fish for compliments. Do not go 
 about with hat in hand as if you were a 
 beggar. Live within your income, and if 
 it is not paid promptly, appeal to the man- 
 liness of your church or parish officers. 
 Be a straightforward business man in busi- 
 ness matters. Make both ends meet. You 
 can do it as easily as the men to whom you 
 preach, the majority of whom do not handle 
 as much money as you do. Pay your debts 
 promptly, and do not suffer them to accu- 
 mulate until your people become ashamed 
 
230 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 of you and cancel them for you. Such 
 favors will destroy your self-respect, and 
 make you the object of silent but severe 
 contempt. Wherever you are, do your 
 best. Do not permit yourself to regard 
 your parish as only a temporary abode, a 
 stepping-stone to something more desira- 
 ble and more worthy of you. The men 
 who do that, as I could easily prove to 
 you by reference to living examples, are 
 the bitterly disappointed men, who end 
 their days in neglected sadness. He«who 
 seeks his life is sure to lose it. Self-for- 
 getfulness must be your habitual temper. 
 You may see inferior men preferred to you. 
 Honors may come to them, while you are 
 ignored. If so, do not complain. Do not 
 become morose. Do not permit yourself 
 to cherish the idea that you are slighted, 
 or the victim of a conspiracy. Do your 
 own work all the more heartily. Give it 
 all your time and strength. Your church 
 has a right to them, and you will make a 
 most stupendous blunder if you imagine 
 that, by dispersing your activity, you can 
 increase your influence. 
 
 Be a king at home, and surrender the 
 domestic reins to no other hands. Be 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 231 
 
 chary of pulpit exchanges. Preach in your 
 own pulpit, and let your own people see 
 that you do this on principle, and by de- 
 liberate preference. And whenever you 
 preach, always do your best. Do not 
 hoard your resources, doling them out by 
 weight and measure, holding back more 
 than you give, from fear that no new sup- 
 plies can be gathered. Empty the cup- 
 board. The healthiest state you can be 
 in on Sunday night is that of complete 
 exhaustion, not physical, but intellectual ; 
 the feeling that you have pumped your- 
 self dry. That will compel you to fresh 
 and deeper study. That will foster the 
 temper of mental vigilance ; and that will 
 make you grow. And your people will be 
 quick to discern the generosity and unself- 
 ishness of your disposition. Devotion will 
 provoke devotion. Confident of your in- 
 tegrity and fidelity, they will make all due 
 allowances for you. They will not expect 
 you to strike twelve every time you preach ; 
 and you will be surprised to find how much 
 of good they discern in your most stum- 
 bling speech. Give yourself wholly to them, 
 and put your whole soul into every service, 
 and you will not fail to fasten them to you 
 
232 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 as by bands of tempered steel. They will 
 not grow weary of you when you grow 
 old. The dead line in the ministry, as in 
 any other calling, is the line of laziness. 
 The lawyer cannot use last year's briefs. 
 The physician cannot depend on last week's 
 diagnosis. The merchant cannot assume 
 that a customer of ten years' standing will 
 not be enticed elsewhere. And the preacher 
 must be a live, wide-awake, growing man. 
 Let him dye his brains, not his hair. Let 
 his thought be fresh, and his speech be 
 glowing. Sermons, it has well been said, 
 are like bread, which is delicious when it 
 is fresh ; but which, when a month old, is 
 hard to cut, harder to eat, and hardest of 
 all to digest. Be resolute in this matter. 
 Some of your friends may urge you to take 
 things more easily. There is danger in 
 overwork; but laziness is more generally 
 the ministerial besetting danger and sin ; 
 and as soon as a man yields to that, he 
 will find the people becoming listless, and 
 one by one dropping out of their pews. It 
 is your business to keep them full, so far 
 as Christian earnestness and fidelity, on 
 your part, can do it. 
 
 I have but one more suggestion to make, 
 
THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 233 
 
 and that is this : Never fail to make your 
 hearers feel their plenary personal respon- 
 sibility. Every utterance of the pulpit 
 must urge, either explicitly or implicitly, 
 to moral decision and action. The hearers 
 must be made to see that there is something 
 for them to do, and that it must be done 
 at once, that the moral obligation may be 
 neither evaded nor postponed. However 
 broad the range of your preaching, it must 
 always grapple with the individual con- 
 science, and summon the soul to bow to 
 the moral judgment which it passes upon 
 itself. This is bringing men face to face 
 with God in Jesus Christ ; and such preach- 
 ing cannot fail to be in power, and in the 
 demonstration of the Holy Ghost. 
 
 My task is done. I have spoken plainly 
 and strongly, but not unadvisedly. I have 
 brought you the sifted wheat of a quarter 
 of a century of ministerial experience ; and 
 I leave you to separate from it the chaff 
 that may be mixed with it. I have put 
 my profoundest personal convictions into 
 these lectures, under the feeling that in 
 this way I could serve you best in the dis- 
 charge of my duty. I thank you for your 
 patient attention. It has been a pleasure 
 
234 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 
 
 for me to meet you. I shall always be 
 glad to give you the grasp of a brother's 
 hand ; and I shall not cease to pray for you, 
 that your ministry may be abundantly 
 fruitful, bringing glory to our Lord, cheer 
 and strength to your fellow-men, and a 
 deepening joy to your own hearts. Let 
 me close with the great apostle's earnest 
 charge to Timothy : 
 
 u Be thou an example of the believers, in 
 word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, 
 in faith, in purity. Grive attendance to 
 reading, to exhortation, to doctrine. Neglect 
 not the gift that is in thee, which was given 
 thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the 
 hands of the presbytery. Meditate upon 
 these things ; give thyself wholly to them, 
 that thy profiting may appear to all. Take 
 heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine ; 
 continue in them ; for in doing this thou 
 shalt both save thyself and them that hear 
 thee." 
 
 Typography by J. S. Cushing & Co., Boston, Mass. 
 
 P 
 
 Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston, Mass. 
 
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