m*:S'-:- ,:s ye.) <¦¦/? /<_•orn.* * " Aber nicht bloss die Erzeugung der Predigt geschehe im heiligen Geist, sondern auch ihr Vortrag. Es lasst sich nicht aussprechen, welch' ein Unterschied zwischen der Wiirkung einer Predigt, welche bloss aus der Erinnerung von der Kanzel herabgesprochen wird — wie trefflich sie auch ubrigens seyn mag — und welche dort zum zweiienmal geboren wird in lebendigem Glauben. . . . Die Prt- digt muss eine That des Predigers auf seinem Studirzimmer, sie muss abermals eine That seyn auf der Kanzel ; er muss, wenn er herunter kommt, Mutterfreuden fuhlen, Freuden der Mutter, die unter Gottes Segen ein Kind geboren hat." THE PREACHER ASA MAN OF THE WORD. 119 Some preachers have an extraordinary facility of putting themselves at once, and every time, en rap port with the audience, so that there is from first to last, whilst they speak, a commerce between the mind in the pulpit and the minds in the pews. To others this is the most difficult part of preaching. The difficulty is to get down amongst the people and to be actually dealing with them. Many a preacher has a thought, and is putting it into good enough words, but somehow the people are not listening, and they cannot listen. If the Senate of this University were ever to try the experiment of asking a layman to deliver this course of Lectures on Preaching, I am certain he would lay more stress on this than we do, and put a clear and effective — if possible, a graceful and eloquent — delivery among the chief desiderata of the pulpit. I do_ not know how it may be among you ; but, when I was at college, we used rather to despise delivery. We were so confident in the power of ideas that we thought nothing of the manner of set ting them forth. Only have good stuff, we thought, and it will preach itself. We like to repeat, with Faust, " True sense and reason reach their aim With little help from art and rule ; Be earnest ! then what need to seek The words that best your meaning speak ? " 120 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. So we thought ; and many of us have since suffered for it. We know how many sermons are preached in the churches of the country every Sunday ; but does anyone know how many are listened to ? The newspapers supply us now and then with statistics of how many hearers are present in our congrega tions ; but who will tell us what proportion of these are listeners ? If we knew the exact percentage, I suspect, it would appal us. Yet it is not because there is not good matter in the sermons, but be cause it is not properly spoken. In the manufact ure of steam-engines the problem is, I believe, to get as much work as possible out of the coal con sumed. In every engine which has ever yet been constructed there has been a greater or less waste of heat, which is dispersed into the surrounding air or carried away by the adjacent portions of the ma chinery, without doing work. Engineering skill has been gVadually reducing the amount of this waste and getting a larger and larger proportion of work out of the fuel ; and a perfect engine would be. one in which the whole of the coal consumed had its full equivalent in work done. One of our problems, it seems to me, is a similar one. There is an enormous disproportion between the amount of energy expended during the week in preparation and the amount of impression made on the hearers THE PREACHER AS A MAN OF THE WORD. 121 on Sunday. Ministers do not get enough of result in the attention, satisfaction and delight of their hearers for the work they do ; and the failure is in the vehicle of communication between the study and the congregation — that is to say, in the delivery of the sermon. What I am pleading for is, that there should be more work to show for the coal consumed.* * Adolphe Monod, himself a distinguished master of the art of delivery, gives i-ome good hints on it in a p per on The Eloquence of the Pulpit^ translated and published as an article in The British and Foreign Evan gelical Review \ January, jy8t : — " In general, people recite too quickly, far too quickly. When a man speaks, the thoughts and feelings do not come to him all at once ; they take birth little by little in his mind. It is necessary that this 1 ibour and this slowness appear in the reciting, or it will always come short of nature. Take time to reflect, to feel, and to allow ideas to come, and hurry your recitation only when constrained by some particular consider ation.1' . . . " Talk not in the pulpit. An exaggerated familiarity would be a mis take nearly as great as declamation : it happens more seldom ; it is, nevertheless, found in certain preachers, those especially who have not studied. The tone of good conversation, but that tone heightened and ennobled, such appears to me the ideal of pulpit delivery." . . . "In order to rise above the tone of conversation, the majority of preachers withdraw too far from it. They swell their delivery, and de claim instead of speaking. Now, when bombast comes in, nature goes out." In regard to the first of these extracts I should say that many Scotch speakers fail through lack of pace in the delivery. The interest is lost in the pauses between the sentences. A slow delivery is only effective when a thought is obviously being born, for which the audience is kept intently waiting. But the most remarkable thing in the article is the following quotation from Talma, the actor : — "We were rhetoricians and not characters. What scores of academ ical discourses on the theatre, how few simple words ! But by chance I 122 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. 4. Allow me, gentlemen, in closing this lecture, to emphasize another sense in which the prophets were men of the Word, and in which they are worthy of imitation. They were masters of the Written Word. They not only spoke the word of God, but wrote it for publication, in a form sometimes more diffuse and sometimes more compressed than their oral ut terances ; and by this means they not only extended their influence in their own day, but have enor mously prolonged it since. It is surprising how few of those who have spoken found myself one evening in a drawing-room with the leaders of the party of the Gironde. Their sombre countenance, their anxious look, attracted my attention. There were there, written in visible letters, strong and powerful interests. They were men of too much heart for those interests to be tarnished by selfishness ; I siw in them the manifest proof of the danger of my country. All come to enjoy pleasure ; not one thinking of it ! They began to discuss ; they touched on the most thrilling questions of the day. It was grand ! Methought I was attend ing one of th^ secret councils of the Romans. ' The Romans must have spoken like these,' said I. ' Let the country be called France or Rome, it makes use of the* same intonations, speaks the same language : there fore, if there is no declamation here before me, there was no declamation down there, in olden times ; that is evident ! ' These reflections rendered me more attentive. My impressions, though produced by a conversation thoroughly free from bombast, deepened. ' An apparent calm in men agitated stirs the soul,' said I ; ' eloquence may then have strength, with out the body yielding to disordered movements.' I. even perceived that the discourse, when delivered without efforts or cries, renders the gesture more powerful and gives the countenance more expression. All these deputies assembled before me by chance appear to me much more elo quent in their simplicity than at the tribune, where, being in spectacle, they think they must deliver their harangue in the way of actors — and actors as we were then — that is, declaimers, full of bombast. From that day a new light flashed on me ; I foresaw my art regenerated." THE PREACHER AS A MAN OF THE WORD. 123 the word of God have cultivated this mode of deliver ing it ; and it is perhaps equally astonishing how few of those who have cultivated it have done so in ear nest. In the last century, promotion in the Church of England was won by literary achievement ; but the would-be bishop did not generally think of re ligious literature : he published a political pamphlet or edited a Greek play. Among the Scottish Moder ates there was a keen ambition for literary distinction ; but it was the more prized the more remote the fields in which it was won lay from a minister's peculiar work. This led the Evangelicals to discountenance literary productivity, which they regarded as spring ing from unholy motives and as likely to distract the mind from the true ends of the ministry. Rut surely there is. a juster point of view than either the Moder ate or the Evangelical. This work ought to be cultivated with precisely the same aims as preaching and with the same earnestness. When a man is truly called to it, it brings a vast audience within his range, and there may rest on it a remarkable bless ing. Here is a significant extract from the history of British Christianity: Richard Baxter wrote A Call to the Unconverted, and Philip Doddridge was converted by reading it; Philip Doddridge wrote The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, and William Wilberforce was converted by reading it ; 124 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. Wilberforce wrote the Practical View, and Thomas Chalmers was converted by reading it. What a far- extending influence does each of these names repre sent I The writing of books is perhaps the likeliest of all avenues by which to carry religious influence to the most select minds. LECTURE V. THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET LECTURE V. THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET. UPON anyone who is studying the physiognomy of the age of the prophets there is one disa greeable feature which obtrudes itself so constantly that even in the briefest sketch it is impossible to pass it by. This is the activity of the false proph ets.* It culminated in the lifetime of Jeremiah, whose whole career might almost be described as a conflict with them. Again and again he and they came to open war ; and on at least one occasion the whole body combined to take away his life. Ezekiel was scarcely less afflicted by them. They were perhaps not so prominent an element in the life of Isaiah, but he also refers to them frequently; and, indeed, their sinister figures haunt the pages of all the prophets. * As t! is subject is somewhat novel, ihe following collection of texts may be acceptable ; but it is not given as exhaustive : — Isa. ii. 6; xxviii. 7 ; xxx. 10, 11 ; xlvii. 13; lvi. T0-12. Jer. ii. 8, 26 ; iv, 9 ; v. 31 ; vi. 14 ; xiv. 13-16 ; xviii. 18 ; xxiii. 9-40 {locus classicus) ; xxvi. 8 ; xxvii. 9, 16 ; xxviii. xxix. 8. Ezek. xii. 24 ; xiii. (locus classicus) ; xiv. 9 ; xx. 25 ; xxi. 23 ; xxii. 25, 28. Micah ii. 11 ; iii. 5, 11. Zeph. iii. 4. Zech. a. 2 ; xiii. 2-4. 128 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. It is a kind of humiliation to speak of them at all, and I would gladly pass them by ; but the figure of the true prophet will rise before our eyes more clearly by the contrast of the false : and it is per haps a duty to look also at the degradations to which our office is liable. The higher the honour attaching to the ministerial profession, when it is worthily filled, the deeper is the abuse of which it is capable in comparison with other callings ; and its functions are so sacred that the man who dis charges them must either be a man of God or a hypocrite. Yet there are plenty of motives of an inferior kind which may take the place of right ministerial aims. Though it is painful to speak of such things, yet here again the method which we have adopted in these lectures, of following the guidance of Scripture, may be leading us better than we could have chosen ourselves ; and it may be wholesome to have to look at an aspect of our subject which of our own accord we would avoid. There are two things in Scripture which I have never been able to think of without strong move ments of fear and self-distrust. One of them is that, when the Son of God came to this earth, He was persecuted and slain by the religious classes. His deadly opponents were the THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET. 129 Scribes and Pharisees. But who were the Scribes and Pharisees ? The Scribes occupied almost exactly the position in the community which is held among us by the literary, the scholastic and the clerical classes ; and the Pharisees were simply what we should now call the leading religious laymen. Had they been adherents of a false religion, there would have been nothing surprising in their resistance to the final revelation of the true God. But the religion which they professed was the true religion ; the Scribes were the expounders of the Word of God, and the Pharisees occupied the foremost places in the house of God. Yet, when the Son of Jehovah, whose name they were called by, appeared amongst them, they rejected Him and took away His life. Many a time, as I have followed Jesus step by step through His lifelong conflict with their illwill and contradiction, the question has pressed itself pain fully upon my mind ; If He were to come to the earth now and intervene in our affairs, how would the re ligious classes receive Him ? and on which side would I be myself? If to any this question may seem fantastic, let them change it into this other, which cannot appear idle, though it means exactly the same thing : What is the attitude of the religious classes to the manifestations of the spirit of Jesus in the life of to-day? do they welcome them and back 130 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. them up ? or have the new ideas and movements in which Christ is marching onward to the conquest of the world to reckon on opposition, even from those who call themselves most loudly by His name? The other circumstance which has often affected my mind in the same way is that which comes before us to-day — that the true prophets of the Old Tes tament had to face the opposition, not of heathens, and not of the openly irreligious among their own countrymen only, but of those who had the name of God in their mouths and were publicly recognised as His oracles. To us these are now false prophets, because time has found them out and the Word of God has branded them with the title they deserve ; but in their own day they were regarded as true prophets ; and doubtless many of them never dreamed that they were not entitled to the name. They must have been a numerous and powerful body. Jeremiah mentions them again and again along with the king, the princes and the priests, as if they formed a fourth estate in the realm ; and Zephaniah mentions them in the same way along with the princes, the judges and the priests. They evidently formed a separate and conspicuous class in the community. They cannot have been equally bad in every generation ; and there may have been many degrees of deviation among them from the character THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET. 131 of the true prophet ; but as a body they were false, and the true servants of God had to reckon them among the anti-religious forces which they had to overcome. This is an appalling fact — that the public repre sentatives of religion should ever have been the worst enemies of religion ; but it cannot be denied that even in Christendom, and that not once or twice, the same condition of things has existed. At the time these men did not suppose that this was the position they held ; but history has judged them. It is not easy for a man to admit the thought into his own mind that in him his office is being dishonoured and its aim frustrated ; and it is far more difficult to do so if he has the support of the pre vailing sentiment and is going forward triumphantly as a member of the majority. But there is enough in the history of our order to warn us to watch over ourselves with a jealous mind, lest we too, while clad in the garb of a sacred profession and in the author ity of an ecclesiastical position, should be found fighting against God. It will not do to think that, merely because we sit in Moses' seat and have the Word of God in our mouths, therefore we must be right. Nor must we be too confident because we are in the majority. If we have faith in our own views, it is quite right, indeed, that we should try 132 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. to make them prevail ; and there is a legitimate joy in seeing a good cause carrying with it the sympa thies and suffrages of men. But we are all too easily persuaded that our cause is good simply because it can win votes. In ecclesiastical affairs there is often as feverish a counting of heads as in party politics. The majority have the same confidence that the case is finally decided in their favour ; and there is the same exultation over the defeated party, as if their being in the minority were a clear proof that they were also in the wrong. But this is no criterion, and time may sternly reverse the victory of the mo ment. Even in the Church the side of the false prophets may be the growing and the winning side, while Jeremiah is left in a minority of one. The false prophets were strong, not only in their own numbers, but in their popularity with the peo ple. This told heavily against the true prophets ; for the people could not believe that the one man, who was standing alone, was right, and that his op ponents, who were many, were wrong. The seats and the trappings of office always affect the mul titude, who are slow to come to the conclusion that the teachers under whom they find themselves in providence can be misleading them. This is, to a certain extent, an honourable sentiment ; but it throws upon public teachers a weighty responsibility. THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET. 133 If they are going wrong, they will generally get the majority of the people to follow them. So com pletely may this be the case, that by degrees the popular taste is vitiated and will not endure any other teaching than that to which it has been accus tomed, though it be false. There is no sadder verse in all prophecy than the complaint of Jere miah, " The prophets prophesy falsely, and my peo ple love to have it so." Like prophet, like people ; the public mind may be so habituated to what is false, and satisfied with it, that it has no taste or even tolerance for the true.* Jeremiah could not gain a hearing for his stern and weighty message from ears accustomed to the light and frivolous views of the false prophets ; and to Baruch, his young coadjutor and amanuensis, who was starting on the prophetic career with the high hopes of youth, he had to deliver the chilling message, " Seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not." The path to popularity and eminence was not open to anyone who did not speak according to the prevail ing fashion. The false prophets won and kept their popularity by pandering to the opinions and prejudices of the * " Sicut autem cuius pulchrum corpus et deformis est animus, magis dolendus est, quam si deforme haberet et corpus, ita qui eloquenter ea quas falsa sunt dicunt, magis miserandi sunt, quam si talia deformiter dicerent." — St. Augustine. 10 134 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. people. The times of Jeremiah were big with com ing calamities, and he had to predict that these calamities were sure to come ; for there were no signs of deep or genuine repentance, and, indeed, the time for repentance was past. The self-flattering, ease- loving people hated to hear these disagreeable facts. Their frivolous minds were engrossed with the gossip and excitement of the passing day, and it was too great an exertion to give their attention to the majestic views of the Divine justice and the far- reaching sweep of the Divine providence to which Jeremiah tried to direct their attention. They wished to enjoy the present and to believe that all would come right somehow. The false prophets flattered these wishes. They said that the calamities which Jeremiah was foretelling would not come to pass, or that at least they would be much less formidable than he represe/ited. They were, as Jeremiah says, like an unconscientious physician, who is afraid to probe the wound to the bottom, though the life of the patient depends on it. Ezekiel accuses them of making nightcaps to draw over the eyes and ears of their countrymen, lest they should see and hear the truth, and of muffling with a glove the naked hand of God with which the sins of the people should have been smitten. The constant refrain of their prophecies was, " Peace, peace," though the storm-clouds of ret- THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET. 135 ribution were ready to burst. The people said to them, "Prophesy to us smooth things" ; and the false prophets provided the supply according to the demand. We cannot flatter ourselves that this is a danger which belongs entirely to the past. There will always be a demand for smooth things, and an appropriate reward for him who is willing to supply them in the name of God. Popularity is a thing which will al ways be coveted ; and under certain conditions it is a thing to be thankful for. If it means that the truth is prevailing and that men are yielding their minds to its sway, it is a precious gift of heaven. It is a good thing to see many coming out to hear the Word of God, and to both preacher and hearers there is a great deal of exhilaration and inspiration in a full church. But popularity may be purchased at too dear a rate. It may be bought by the suppression of the truth and the letting down of the demands of Christianity. There will always be a demand for a religion which does not agitate the mind too much or interfere with the pursuits of a worldly life. I have seen a very trenchant article from an American pen on the power of the moneyed members of a church to dictate the tone of the pulpit ; and it is a common accusation against ministers, that they flatter the prevailing classes in their congregations. 136 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. If their congregations are wealthy, they are afraid, it is said, to speak up for the poor, even when justice is calling out on their side ; and, if their congregations are poor, they take the side of the working-man, right or wrong. I should question whether temptations so gross as these are much felt. Far more dangerous are the subtler temptations — to truckle to the spirit of the age, to keep at all hazards on the side of the cultivated and clever, and to shun those truths the utterance of which might expose the teacher to the charge of being antiquated and bigoted. Let a preacher dwell always on the sunny side of the truth and conceal the shadows, let him enlarge continually on what is simple and human in Christianity and pass lightly over what is mysterious and Divine : let him, for example, dwell on the human side of Christ but say nothing of His deity, let him enforce Christ's example but say nothing of His atonement, let him extol the better elements of human nature but say nothing of its depravity, let him preach frequently on the glories of the next world but never mention its terrors : and very probably he may be popular and see his Church crowded ; but he will be a false prophet.* * Even popularity honestly won may be a great snare. Vanity, it must be allowed, is prob.ibly the commonest clerical weakness ; and, when it is yielded to, it deforms the whole character. There are few things more touching or instructive than the entries in Dr. Chalmers* journal, which show with what earnestness he was praying against this, THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET. 137 Who were these false propets, and how did there come to be such numbers of them? These are questions which an attentive reader of the Bible cannot help asking; but it is not by any means easy to answer them. The prophets whose names have come down to us are not by any means numerous ; but, besides them, there must have been many other true prophets. There were times when the spirit of religion was breathing through the community, and then men were not wanting who felt called to be its organs. The spirit of inspiration might fall on anyone at any time ; no prescribed training was necessary to make in the height of his popularity, as a besetting sin. If this were common, there would not be the slight accent of contempt attached to the name of the popular preacher which now belongs to it in the mouths of men. The publicity which beats on the pulpit makes veracity, down to the bottom of the soul, more necessary in the clerical than in any other call ing. u A prime virtue in the pulpit is mental integrity. The absence of it is a subtle source of moral impotence. It concerns other things than the blunt antipudes represented by a truth and a lie. Argument which does not satisfy a preacher's logical instinct ; illustration which does not commend itself to his aesthetic taste ; a perspective of doctrine which is not true to the eye of his deepest insight ; the use of borrowed mate rials which offend his sense of literary equity ; an emotive intensity which exaggerates his conscious sensibility; an impetuosity of delivery which overworks his thought ; gestures and looks put on for scenic effect ; an eccentric elocution, which no human nature ever fashioned ; even a shrug of the shoulder, thought of and planned for beforehand — these are causes of enervation in sermons which may be otherwise well framed and sound in stock. They sap a preacher's personality and neutralise his magnetism. They are not true, and he knows it. Hearers may know nothing of them theoretically, yet may feel the full brunt of their nega tive force practically." — Austin Phelps, D.D., My Note Book, 138 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. a man a prophet. It might come, as it did to Amos, on the husbandman in his fields or the shepherd among his flock. It might alight on the young noble amidst the opening pleasures of life, as it did on Isaiah and Zephaniah ; or it might come, as it did on Jeremiah and Ezekiel, on the young priest preparing for his sacred functions. But some of the more noted prophets endeavoured in a more systematic way to diffuse the spirit which rested upon themselves, and thus to multiply the number of the prophets. They founded schools in which promising young men were gathered and plied with the means of education available in that age, cultivating music, reading the writings of the older prophets, and coming under the influence of the holy man who was at their head. These were the Schools of the Prophets, and their students were the Sons of the Prophets. Samuel seems to have been the first founder of these schools. They were flourish ing in the times of Elijah and Elisha, and they probably continued to exist with varying fortunes in subsequent centuries. Perhaps all who went through these schools claimed, or could claim, the prophetic name. Those who took up the profession wore the hairy mantle and leathern girdle made familiar to us by the figure of John the Baptist ; and they probably subsisted on the gifts of those who benefited from THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET. 139 their oracles. Their numbers may have been very large ; we hear of hundreds of prophets even during an idolatrous reign, when they were exposed to persecution. In times when the spirit of inspiration was abroad or when the schools enjoyed the presence of a mas ter spirit, it is easy to understand how valuable such institutions may have been, and how they may have been centres from which religious light and warmth were diffused through the whole country. But they were liable to deterioration. If the gen eral tone of religion in the country declined, they partook in the general decay ; an inspiring leader might be taken away and no like-minded successor arise to fill his place; or men who had received no real call beforehand, might join the school and pass through the curriculum without receiving it. Only they had learned the trick of speech and got by rote the language of religion. They had no per sonal knowledge of God or message obtained di rectly from Him ; but it was not difficult to put on the prophet's mantle and talk in the traditional prophetic tones. The fundamental charge against the false prophets is always this : " I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran ; I have not spoken unto them, yet they prophesy." If I am right in tracing the origin of false proph- 140 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. ecy to the schools of the prophets, this gives a suggestive hint as to the point at which the same danger may beset ourselves. It is obviously the duty of the authorities of the Church to make pro vision for the training of those who are to be the future ministers of the Gospel ; and it is natural for those who have the honour of the Church at heart to covet for her service the talents of the gifted. Parents, too, will often be found cherishing an in tense desire that the choicest of their sons should become ministers. These wishes of superiors have a legitimate influence in determining the choice of our life-work. The wishes and prayers of pious parents are especially entitled to have very great weight. Yet there is a danger of an outward influ ence of this kind being substituted for genuine per sonal experience and an inward call. When, a generation ago, in the rural parts of England, the church in many a parish was looked upon as " a living," to be allocated to a junior member of the family, who was educated for the position as a matter of course, the custom, whatever happy re sults it might produce in exceptional cases, was not fitted to fill the pulpits of the land with men of prophetic character. The pious wishes of parents, however beautiful they may be, require to be made absolutely conditional on a vocation of a higher THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET. HI kind ; otherwise we get a manufactured ministry, without a message, in place of men in whom the spirit of inspiration is stirring and who speak be cause they believe. Having no message of their own, what were the false prophets to do ? The best they could do was to repeat and imitate what had been said by their predecessors. It is with this Jeremiah reproaches them when he says, " Behold, I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal My words everyone from his neighbour." The older proph ets used to begin their utterances with the phrase, "the burden of the Lord;" and Jeremiah com plains that this had become an odious cant term in the mouths of his contemporaries ; and in the same way Zechariah complains that in his day the great word " comfort," which from the lips of Isaiah had descended like dew from heaven on the parched hearts of the people of God, had become a dry and hackneyed phrase in the mouths of false prophets. How dangerous this habit of stealing the words of others might become, when practical issues were involved, may be illustrated by a striking example. The inviolability of Jerusalem had been a principle of the older prophets, which was quite true for their times ; and Isaiah had made use of it for 142 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. rousing his fellow-citizens from despair, when the army of Sennacherib stood before the gates. But in Jeremiah's time the change of circumstances had made it to be no longer true ; and yet the false prophets kept on repeating it ; and no doubt they seemed both to themselves and others to be occu pying a strong position when, in opposing him, they could allege that they were standing on the same ground as Isaiah. All the time, however, they were betraying those who listened to them. There is a sense in which the truth of God is un changeable ; it is like Himself — the same yesterday and to-day and forever. But there is another sense in which it is continually changing. Like the manna, it descends fresh every morning, and, if it is kept till to-morrow, it breeds loathsome worms. Isaiah describes the true prophet as one who has the tongue of the learner — not of the learned, as the Authorised Version gives it — and whose ear is opened every morning to hear the message of the new day. What was truth for yesterday may be falsehood for to-day ; and only he is a trustworthy interpreter of God who is sensitive to the indica tions of present providence. It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that the only form which false prophecy can take is a dried-up orthodoxy, mumbling over the shibboleths THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET. 143 of yesterday. If he who stands forward as a speak er for God is out of touch with God and has really no Divine message, he may make good the lack of a true Divine word in many ways. The easiest way is, no doubt, to fall back on some accepted word of yesterday ; but he may also strike out on the path of originality, announcing a gospel for to morrow, constructed by his own fancy, which has no Divine sanction. Neither orthodoxy nor het erodoxy is a guarantee : the only guarantee is a humble mind living in the secret of the Lord. I have mentioned that the prophets subsisted on the contributions of those to whom their oracles were supposed to be valuable. There is, indeed, very little information on this head ; but they are accused of prophesying for bread, and avarice and a greedy appetite for the good things of this life are reproaches frequently cast at them. It is not likely that prophecy can ever have been a paying profession, but it would appear to have been at least a means of livelihood ; and there are indica tions that those who enjoyed an exceptional popu larity may have occupied a high social standing. Ezekiel, whose characterizations of the false proph ets are remarkably striking, uses about them a sig nificant figure of speech. He says that, while a 144 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. true prophet was like a wall of fire to his country, standing in the breach when danger threatened and defending it with his life, the false prophets were like the foxes that burrow among the ruins of fallen cities. What mattered it to them that their coun try was degraded, if only they had found comforta ble places for themselves ? This also is a painful side of the subject. It is inevitable that the ministry should become a means of livelihood, and yet it is fatal to pursue it with this in view. It is the least lucrative of the profes sions, and yet, in the pressure of modern life, it may tempt men to join it merely as a profession. Even if it has been entered upon from higher mo tives, the attrition of domestic necessities may dry up the nobler motives and convert the minister into a hireling who thinks chiefly of his wages.* The commercial spirit is nearly omnipotent in our day ; and merf who can buy everything for money * " That which in its idea is the divinest of earthy employments has necessarily come to be also a profession, a line of life, with its routine, its commonplace, its poverty and deterioration of motive, its coarseness of feeling. It cannot but be so. It is part of the conditions of our mortality. Even earnest purpose, even zealous and laborious service, cannot alone save from the lowered tone and dulness of spirit which are our insensible but universal and inveterate enemies in all the business of real life. And that torpor and insensibility and deadness to what is high and great is, more than any other evil, the natural foe of all that is characteristic and essential in the Christian ministry ; for that ministry is one of life and reality, or it is nothing."— Dean Church. THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET. 145 think that ministers are procurable in the same way. Thus they tempt men away with bribes of money from work to which God has called them. I am far from questioning the importance of the mission of the pulpit to the wealthier classes; and we must have men of culture to preach to the culti vated. I would no more think of setting up the poor against the rich, as the exclusive objects of the Church's attention, than the rich against the poor. But perhaps the most essential work of the Church at the present time is to win and to hold the work ing classes. I should like to see ministers coveting work among them ; and let him who has learned to wield such an audience, where he can speak with the freedom and force of nature, beware of being bribed away to a position where he will be tamed and domes ticated, and have his teeth drawn and his claws cut. So monotonous is the evil side of the false prophets that one longs for a gleam of something good in them. Can they not at least be pitied ? May they not have been weak men, who were elevated to a position which proved too much for them ? The times were full of change and difficulty, and it required a clear eye to see the indications of Provi dence. It is not everyone who has the genius of an Isaiah or the magnificent moral courage of a Jere- 146 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. miah. Was it riot possible to take a milder view of the world than Jeremiah did and yet be a true man ? May they not at least have been mistaken, when they ventured to emit prophecies which history falsified ? Such sentiments easily arise in us ; but they are driven back by what we read of the personal charac ter of these men. " Both prophet and priest," says Jeremiah, " are profane ; yea, in My house have I found their wickedness, saith the Lord." " I have seen," he says in God's name, " in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing: they commit adultery and walk in lies." Jeremiah's view of them might be thought to be coloured by his own melancholy temperament ; but Isaiah's is not less severe : " The priest and the prophet," he says, " have erred through wine, they are swallowed up of wine, they are out of the way through strong drink." And he gives this terrible picture of them : " His watchmen are blind, they are ignorant ; they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand ; they all look to their own way, everyone to his gain from his quarter. Come ye, say they, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves with strong drink ; and to-morrow shall be as this THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET. 147 day and still more abundant." The representations in the other prophets are to the same effect. Zeph- aniah passes on the whole class the sweeping judgment, that they are light and treacherous per sons. But the lowest deep is reached in Zechariah, who foresees a time, close at hand, when the very name of prophet will be a byword, and the father and mother of anyone who pretends to prophesy will thrust him through, to deliver themselves from the reproach of having any connection with him.* The influence of such a travesty of the sacred office as these passages describe must have been deplorable ; and without doubt it was one of the principal causes of the overthrow of the Jewish State. Jeremiah says expressly, that from the prophets profaneness had gone out over the whole land. They who, from their position and profession, ought to have been an example to their fellow-country men were the very reverse. They were the com panions of the profane and licentious in their revels, and they joined with scorners in scoffing at those who led a strict and holy life. So God charges them by the lips of Ezekiel : " Ye have made the hearts of the righteous sad, whom I have not made * This may perhaps help to determine the age of the portion of Zechariah to which this pas=age belongs. Is there any proof elsewhere that a degradation of the prophetic office as deep as this had taken place, or was imminent, at the period to which it is usually assigned ? 148 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. sad, and strengthened the hands of the wicked, that he should not return from his wicked way. This is a terrible picture. Yet there have been epochs in the history of the Christian, and even of the Protestant Church, when its features have been reproduced with too faithful literality. Let us be thankful that we live in a happier time ; but let us also remember the maxim, " Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." If a Church lose the Spirit of God, there is no depth of corruption to which it may not rapidly descend ; and a degraded Church is the most potent factor of national decay. Allow me, gentlemen, to say, in closing, that I believe the question, what is to be the type and the tone of the ministry in any generation, is decided in the theological seminaries. What the students are there, the ministers of the country will be by- and-by. And, while the discipline of the authorities and the exhortations and example of professors may do something, the tone of the college is determined by the students themselves. The state of feeling in a theological seminary ought to be such, that any man living a life inconsistent with his future pro fession should feel thoroughly uncomfortable, and have the conviction driven in upon his conscience every day, that the ministry is no place for him. LECTURE VI. THE PREACHER AS A MAN 11 LECTURE VI. THE PREACHER AS A MAN. GENTLEMEN, in the foregoing lectures I have finished, as far as time permitted, what I had to say on the work of our office, as it is illustrated by the example of the prophets ; and to-day we turn to the other branch of the subject — to study the modern work of the ministry in the light cast upon it by the example of the apostles. When we quit the Old Testament and open the New, we come upon another great line of preachers to whom we must look up as patterns. The voice of prophecy, after centuries of silence, was heard again in John the Baptist, and his ministry of re pentance will always have its value as indicating a discipline by which the human spirit is prepared for comprehending and appreciating Christ. I have already given the reason why I am not at present to touch on the preaching of Christ Himself, al though the subject draws one's mind like a magnet. After Christ, the first great Christian preacher was St. Peter ; and between him and St. Paul there are 152 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. many subordinate figures, such as Stephen, Philip the Evangelist and Apollos, beside whom it would be both pleasant and profitable to linger. But we have agreed to take St. Paul as the representative of apostolic preaching, and I will do so more exclusively than I took Isaiah as the representative of the prophets. It is, I must confess, with regret that I pass St. Peter by. There is a peculiar interest attaching to him as the first great Christian preacher ; and there is something wonderfully attractive in his rude, but vigorous and lovable personality. Besides, a study of the influences by which he was transmuted from the unstable and untrustworthy precipitancy of his earlier career into the rocklike firmness which made him fit to be a foundation-stone on which the Church was built would have taught us some of the most important truths which we require to learn ; because these influences were, first, his long and close intimacy with Christ and, secondly, the out pouring on him, at Pentecost, of the Holy Spirit ; and there are no influences .more essential than these to the formation of the ministerial character. But I have no hesitation in devoting to St. Paul the remainder of this course ; because, as I indi cated in the opening lecture, there is no other figure in any age which so deserves to be set up as the model of Christian ministers. In him all the sides THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 153 of the ministerial character were developed in al most supernatural maturity and harmony ; and, besides, the materials for a full delineation are available. It is my intention to speak of St. Paul, first, as a Man ; secondly, as a Christian ; thirdly, as an Apostle ; and fourthly, as a Thinker. To-day, then, we begin with St. Paul as a Man. If I had had time to set before you what St. Peter's life has to teach us, its great lesson would have been what Christianity can make of a nature with out special gifts and culture, and how the two in fluences which formed him — intimacy with Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit — can supply the place of talents and educational advantages ; for it is evident that, but for Christ, Peter would never have been anything more than an unknown fisherman. But St. Paul's case teaches rather the opposite les son — how Christianity can consecrate and use the gifts of nature, and how talent and genius find their noblest exercise in the ministry of Christ. Paul would, in all probability, have made a notable figure in history, even if he had never become a Christian ; and, although he himself delighted to refer all that he became and did to Christ, it is evident that the big nature of the man entered also as a factor into his Christian history. 1j4 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. Once at least St. Paul recognises this point of view himself, when he says, that God separated him to His service from his mother's womb. In Jere miah's mind the same idea was awakened still more distinctly at the time of his call, when Jehovah said to him, " Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and, before thou earnest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." This implies that, in the origi nal formation of his body and mind, God conferred on him those gifts which made him capable of a great career. Here we touch on one of the deepest mysteries of existence. There is nothing more mys terious than the behaviour of nature, when in her se cret laboratories she presides over the shaping of the rudiments of life and distributes those gifts, which, according as they are bestowed with an affluent or a niggardly hand, go so far to determine the station and degret: which each shall occupy in the subse quent competitions of the world. It is especially mys terious how into a soul here and there, as it passes forth, she breathes an extra whiff of the breath of life, and so confers on it the power of being and doing what others attempt to be and do in vain. Undoubtedly St. Paul was one of these favour ites of fortune. Nature designed him in her largest and noblest mould, and hid in his composition THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 155 a spark of celestial fire. This showed itself in a certain tension of purpose and flame of energy which marked his whole career. He was never one of those pulpy, shapeless beings who are always waiting on circumstances to determine their form ; he was rather the stamp itself, which impressed its image and superscription on circumstances. I. He was a supremely ethical nature. This per haps was his fundamental peculiarity. Life could under no circumstances have seemed to him a trifle. The sense of responsibility was strong in him from the beginning. He was trained in a strict school ; for the h v of life prescribed to the race of which he was a member was a severe one ; but he responded to it, and there never was a time when the deepest passion of his nature was not to receive the approval of God. Touching the righteousness which was in the law, he was blameless. After his conversion he laid bare unreservedly the sins of his past ; but there were none of those dalliances with the flesh to confess into which soft and self-indulgent natures easily fall. He could never have allowed himself that which would have robbed him of his self-respect. His sense of honour was keen. When, in his sub sequent life, he was accused of base things — lying, hypocrisy, avarice and darker sins — he felt intense pain, crying out like one wounded, and he hurled 156 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. the accusations from him with the energy of a self- respecting nature. It was always his endeavour to keep a conscience void of offence not only towards God, but also towards men ; and one of his most frequently reiterated injunctions to those who were in any way witnesses for Christ was to seek to ap prove themselves as honest men even to those who were without. He was speaking out of his own heart when he said to all, " Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report : if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things." I cannot help pausing here to say, that he will never be a preacher who does not know how to get at the conscience ; but how should he know who has not himself a keen sense of honour and an awful reverence for moral purity? We are making a great mistake about this. We are preaching to the fancy, to the imagination, to intellect, to feeling, to will ; and, no doubt, all these must be preached to ; but it is in the conscience that the battle is to be be won or lost.* The great difficulty of missionary *" The Sybarites of to-day will tolerate a sermon which is delicate enough to flatter their literary sensuality ; but it is their taste which is charmed, not their conscience which is awakened : their principle of con duct escapes untouched. . . . Amuse. nent, instruction, morals, are dis tinct genres."— Amiel. THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 157 work is that in the heathen there is, as a rule, hardly any conscience : it has almost to be created before they can be Christianized. In many parts of Christendom it is dying out; and, where it is ex tinct, the whole work of Christianity has to be done over again. 2. St. Paul's intellectual gifts are so universally recognised that it is hardly worth while to refer to them. They are most conspicuously displayed in his exposition of Christianity, on which I shall speak in the closing lecture. But in the meantime I re mark, that his intellectual make was not at all that usually associated in our minds with the system- builder. It was, indeed, massive, thorough and severe. But it was not in the least degree stiff and pedantic. It was, on the contrary, an intellect of marvelous flexi bility. There was no material to which it could not adapt itself and no feat which it could not perform. You may observe this, for example, in the diverse ways in which he addresses different audiences. In one town he has to address a congregation of Jews; in another a gathering of heathen rustics ; in a third a crowd of philosophers. To the Jews he invariably speaks, to begin with, about the heroes of their na tional history; to the ignorant heathen he talks about the weather and the crops ; and to the 158 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. Athenians he quotes their own poets and delivers a high-strung oration ; yet in every case he arrives naturally at his own subject and preaches the gos pel to each audience in the language of its own familiar ideas. Even outside of his own peculiar sphere altogether, St. Paul was equal to every occa sion. During his voyage to Rome, when the skill of the sailors was baffled and the courage of the soldiers worn out by the long-continued stress of weather, he alone remained cheerful and clear headed ; he virtually became captain of the ship, and he saved the lives of his fellow-passengers over and over again. We think of the intellect of the system-builder as cold. But there is never any coldness about St. Paul's mind. On the contrary, it is always full of life and all on fire. He can, indeed, reason closely and continuously; but, every now and then, his thought burets up through the argument like a flaming geyser and falls in showers of sparks. Then the argument resumes its even tenor again ; but these outbursts are the finest passages in St. Paul. In the same way, Shakespeare, I have observed, while moving habitually on a high level of thought and music, will, every now and then, pause and, spreading his wings, go soaring and singing like a lark sheer up into the blue. When the thought THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 159 which has lifted him is exhausted, he gracefully de scends and resumes on the former level ; but these flights are the finest passages in Shakespeare. 3. The intellectual superiority of St. Paul is univer sally acknowledged ; and to those who only know him at a distance this is his outstanding peculiarity. But the close student of his life and character knows, that, great as he was in intellect, he was equally great in heart, perhaps even greater. One of th'e subtlest students of his life, the late Adolphc MonoJ, of the French Church, has fixed on this as the key to his character. He calls him the Man of Tears, and shows with great persuasiveness that herein lay the secret of his power. It is certainly remarkable, when you begin to look into the subject, how often we see St. Paul in the emotional mood, and even in tears. In his famous address to the Ephesian elders he reminded them that he had served the Lord among them with many tears, and again, that he had not ceased to warn everyone night and day with tears. It is not what we should have expected in a man of such intellect ual power. But this makes his tears all the more impressive. When a weak, effeminate man weeps, he only makes himself ridiculous ; but it is a dif ferent spectacle when a man like St. Paul is seen weeping; because we know that the strong nature 160 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. could not have been bent except by a storm of feeling. His affection for his converts is something ex traordinary. Some have believed that there is evi dence to prove that in youth his heart had suffered a terrible bereavement. It is supposed that he had been married, but lost his wife early. He never sought to replace the loss, and he never spoke of it. But the affection of his great heart, long pent up, rushed forth into the channel of his work. His con verts were to him in place of wife and children. His passion for them is like a strong natural affec tion. His epistles to them are, in many places, as like as they can be to love-letters. Listen to the terms in which he addresses them : " Ye are in our heart to die and live with you " ; "I will very gladly spend and be spent for you, though, the more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved " ; " There fore, my brethren, dearly beloved and longed for, so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved." To his fellow-labourers in the Gospel especially, his heart went out in unbounded affection. The long lists of greetings at the close of his epistles, in which the characters and services of individuals are referred to with such overflowing generosity and yet with such fine discrimination, are unconscious monuments to the largeness of his heart. He could hardly mention a THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 161 fellow-worker without breaking forth into a glowing panegyric: "Whether any do inquire of Titus, he is my partner and fellow-helper concerning you ; or our brethren be inquired of, they are the messengers of the churches and the glory of Christ." There is no more conclusive proof of the depth and sincerity of St. Paul's heart than the affection which he inspired in others ; for it is only the loving who are loved. None perhaps are more discriminat ing in this respect than young men. A hard or pedantic nature cannot win them. But St. Paul was constantly surrounded with troops of young men, who, attracted by his personality, were willing to follow him through fire and water or to go on his messages wherever he might send them. And that he could v/in mature minds in the same way is proved by the great scene at Miletus, already referred to, where the elders of Ephesus, at parting with him, " all wept sore, and fell on Paul's neck and kissed him, sorrowing most of all for the word which he said, that they should see his face no more." The nature of St. Paul's work no doubt immensely developed this side of his character, but, before pass ing from the subject, it is worth remembering how the circumstances of his birth and upbringing were prov identially fitted to broaden his sympathies, even be fore he became a Christian. He was not simply a 162 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. Jew, but a Hebrew of the Hebrews ; and he felt all the pride of a child of that race to which pertained the adoption and the glory and the covenant, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises. He could always put himself in touch at once with a Jewish audience by going back on associations which were as dear to himself as to them. Yet, although so thoroughly a Jew, he be longed by birth to a larger world. He was not born within the boundaries of Palestine, where his sym pathies would have been cramped and his horizon narrowed, but in a Gentile city, famous for its beauty, its learning and its commerce ; and he was, besides, a freeborn citizen of Rome. We know from his own lips that he was proud of both distinctions; and he thus acquired a cosmopolitan spirit and learned to think of himself as a man amongst men. Nor ought we, perhaps, to omit here to recall the fact, that he fearned in his youth the handicraft of tent-making. This brought him into close contact with common men, whose language he learned to speak and whose life he learned to know — acquire ments which were to be of supreme utility in his subequent career. Gentlemen, it is generally agreed that a certain modicum of natural gifts is necessary for those who THE PREACHER AS A MAN. IB 3 think of entering the ministry. Here is Luther's list of the qualifications of a minister: you will observe that most of them are gifts of nature : I. He should be able to teach plainly and in order. 2. He should have a good head. 3. Good power of language. 4. A good voice. 5. A good memory. 6. He should know when to stop. 7. He should be sure of what he means to say. 8. And be ready to stake body and soul, goods and reputation, on its truth. 9. He should study diligently. 10. And suffer himself to be vexed and criticized by everyone. The first consciousness of the possession of un usual powers is not unfrequently accompanied by an access of vanity and self-conceit. The young soul glories in the sense, probably vastly exaggerated, of its own pre-eminence and anticipates, on an unlim ited scale, the triumphs of the future. But there is another way in which this discovery may act. The consciousness of unusual powers may be accom panied with a sense of unusual responsibility, the soul inquiring anxiously about the intention of the Giver of all gifts in conferring them. It was in this way that Jeremiah was affected by the information that special gifts had been conferred on him in the scene to which I have already referred in this lecture. He concluded at once that he had been blessed with exceptional talent's in order that he might serve his 104 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. God and his country with them. And surely in a gifted nature there could be no saner ambition than, if God permitted it, to devote its powers to the ministry of His Son. There is no other profession which is so able to absorb and utilise talents of every description. This is manifest in regard to such talents as those men tioned by Luther — a good voice, a good memory, etc. But there is hardly a power or an attainment of any kind which a minister cannot use "in his work. How philosophical power can serve him may be seen in the preaching of Dr. Chalmers, whose sermons were always cast in a philosophical mould. The philosophy was not very deep; it was not too dif ficult for the common man ; but it gave the preach ing a decided air of distinction. How scientific acquirements may be utilised is shown in the sermons of some of our foremost living preachers, who find an inexhaustible supply of illustrations in their scientific studies. Literary style may supply the feather to wing the arrow of truth to its mark. That poetic power may serve the preacher it is not necessary to prove on the spot where Ray Palmer wrote " My faith looks up to Thee." Business capacity is needed in church courts and in the management of a con gregation. In some other professions men have to bury half their talents ; but in ours there is no THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 165 talent which will not find appropriate and useful exercise. We perhaps lay too much stress, however, on intel lectual gifts and attainments. These are the only ones which are tested by our examinations in col lege ; yet there are moral qualities which are just as essential. The polish given by education tells, no doubt ; but the size of the primordial mass of manhood tells still more. In a quaint book of Reminiscences recently published from the pen of a notable minister of the last generation in the Highlands of Scotland, Mr. Sage of Resolis, there is a criticism recorded, which was passed by a parishioner on three successive ministers of a certain parish : " Our first minister," said he, " was a man, but he was not a minister ; our second was a minister, but he was not a man ; and the one we have at present is neither a man nor a minister." There is no demand which people make more im peratively in our day than that their minister should be a man. It is not long since a minister was certain of being honoured simply because he belonged to the clerical profession and wore the clerical garb. People, as the saying was, respected his cloth. But ours is a democratic age, and that state of public feeling is passing away. There is no lack of respect, 12 166 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. indeed, for ministers who are worthy of the name ; perhaps there is more of it than ever. But it is not given now to clerical pretensions, but only to proved merit. People do not now respect the cloth, unless they find a man inside it. Perhaps the educational preparation through which we pass at college is not too favourable to this kind of power. In the process of cutting and polishing the natural size of the diamond runs the risk of being reduced. When we are all passed through the same mill, we are apt to come out too much alike. A man ought to be himself. Your Emerson preached this doctrine with indefatigable eloquence. Perhaps he exaggerated it ; but it is a true doctrine ; and it is emphatically a doctrine for preachers. What an audience looks for, before everything else, in the texture of a sermon is the bloodstreak of experience ; and truth is doubly and trebly true when it comes from a man who speaks as if he had learned it by his own work and suffering. It will generally be noticed in any man who makes a distinct mark as a preacher that there is in his composition some peculiarity of endowment or attainment on which he has learned to rely. It may be an emotional tenderness as in McCheyne, or a moral intensity as in Robertson of Brighton, or in tellectual subtlety as in Candlish, or psychological THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 167 insight as in Beecher. But something distinctive there must be, and, therefore, one of the wisest of rules is, Cultivate your strong side. But what tells most of all is the personality as a whole. This is one of the prime elements in preach ing. The effect of a sermon depends, first of all, on what is said, and next, on how it is said ; but, hardly less, on who says it. There are men, says Emerson, who are heard to the ends of the earth though they speak in a whisper.* We are so constituted that what we hear depends very much for its effect on how we are disposed towards him who speaks. The regular hearers of a minister gradually form in their minds, almost unawares, an image of what he is, into which they put everything which they themselves remember about him and everything which they have heard of his record ; and, when he rises on Sunday in the pulpit, it is not the man visible there at the moment that they listen to, but this image, which * The finest description of a speaker known to me is this of Lord Bacon in Ben Jonson's Discoveries ; and it is evident that it was the man rather than the manner or even the matter which made the im pression : " Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language, where he could spare or pass by a jest, was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke ; and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was, lest he should make an end." 168 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. stands behind him and determines the precise weight and effect of every sentence which he utters. Closely connected with the force of personality is the other power, which St. Paul possessed in so supreme a degree, of taking an interest in others. It is the manhood in ourselves which enables us to understand the human nature of our hearers ; and we must have had experience of life, if we are to preach to the life of men. Some ministers do this extremely little. Not once but many a time, I have heard a minister on the Sabbath morning, when he rose up and began to pray, plunging at once into a theological medi tation ; and in all the prayers of the forenoon there would scarcely be a single sentence making refer ence to the life of the people during the week. Had you been a stranger alighted from another planet, you would never have dreamed that the human beings assembled there had been toiling, rejoicing and sorrowing for six days ; that they had mercies to give thanks for and sins to be forgiven ; or that they had children at home to pray for and sons across the sea. There is an unearthly style of preaching, if I may use the term, without the blood of human life in it : the people with their burdens in the pews — the THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 169 burden of home, the burden of business, the burden of the problems of the day — whilst, in the pulpit, the minister is elaborating some nice point, which has taken his fancy in the course of his studies, but has no interest whatever for them. Only now and then a stray sentence may pull up their wandering attention. Perhaps he is saying, " Now some of you may reply " ; and then follows an objection to what he has been stating which no actual human being would ever think of making. But be pro ceeds elaborately to demolish it, while the hearer, knowing it to be no objection of his, retires into his own interior. If what was said in a former lecture about the distinctive difference between the preaching of the Old Testament and that of the new be considered, it will at once be recognised how vital is this aspect of the matter. The prophets of the Old Testa ment, in common with the thinkers of antiquity in general, thought of men in masses and regarded the individual only as a fragment of a larger whole. But Christ introduced an entirely new way of think ing. To Him the individual was a whole in him self; beneath the habiliments of even the humblest member of the human family there was hidden what was more precious than the entire material world; and on the issues of every life was suspended an 170 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. immortal destiny. This faith may be said to have made Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world ; for He saw in the lost children of men that which made Him live to seek them and die to save them. And it is by this same faith and vision that anyone is qualified to be a fellow-worker with Christ. No one will ever be able to engage with any success in the work of human salvation who does not see men to be infinitely the most interesting objects in the world, and who does not stand in awe before the solemn destiny and the sublime possibilities of the soul. It is by the growth and the glow of this faith that the worth of all ministerial work is measured. It is far easier, however, to acknowledge this view in the abstract than to cherish it habitually towards the actual men and women of our own sphere and our own vicinity. That man is the most interest ing object in the world ; that the soul is precious ; and that it is better for a human being to lose the whole world than to miss his destiny — these are now commonplaces, which everyone who bears the Christian name will acknowledge. Yet in real ity few live under their power. Many a one who has paid the tribute of love and admiration to the spectacle of Christ's compassion for the outcasts, and melted with aesthetic emotion before a picture of the Woman taken in Adultery or the Woman that THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 171 was a Sinner, has never once attempted to save an actual woman of the same kind in his own city, and would be utterly at a loss if such a one, in an hour of remorse, were to throw herself on his pity and protection. There is a great difference between a sinner in a book or a picture and a sinner in the flesh. Multitudes in their hearts believe that all the remarkable and interesting people lived long ago or that, at any rate, if any are now alive, they live many miles away from their vicinity. They be lieve that there were remarkable people in the first or the ninth century, but by no means in the nine teenth ; they believe that there are interesting peo ple in Paris or London or New York; but they have never discovered anything wonderful in those liv ing in their own village or in their own street. Many who consider themselves enlightened will tell you that their neighbours are a poor lot. They fancy that, if they were living somewhere else, fifty or a hundred miles away, they would find company worthy of themselves ; though it is ten to one that, if they made the change, their new neighbours would be a poor lot also. If a minister allows himself to harbour sentiments of this sort, he is lost.* No one will ever win men * It has often astonished me to observe how easily ministers' wives in this respect find for themselves the right path. One would think it 172 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. who does not believe in them. The true minister must be able to see in the meanest man and woman a revelation of the whole of human nature ; and in the peasant in the field, and even the infant in the cradle, connections which reach forth high as heaven and far as eternity. All that is greatest in king or kaiser exists in the poorest of his subjects; and the elements out of which the most delicate and even saintly womanhood is made exist in the com monest woman who walks the streets. The harp of human nature is there with all its strings com plete ; and it will not refuse its music to him who has the courage to take it up and boldly strike the strings. The great preacher is he who, wherever he is speaking, among high or low, goes straight for those elements which are common to all men, and casts himself with confidence on men's intelligence and experience, believing that the just suggestions of reason a*nd the terrors of conscience, the sense of the nobility of goodness and the pathos of love and pity are common to them all.* would be very difficult sometimes for those who have been brought up in cities or in a secluded circle to adapt themselves suddenly to a remote and unselect society ; and they have not, like their husbands, had the opportunity of meditating long on the duties of a public p sition. A hearty and cordial humanity in the members of a minister's family lends an im mense assistance to his work. A minister ought to belong to no class of society, but to have the power of moving without constraint in every class. * " Not a heart but has its romance, not a life which does not hide a secret which is either its thorn or its spur. Everywhere grief, hope, THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 173 Let me close this lecture with a few words on a great subject, to which a whole lecture might have been profitably devoted. No safer piece of advice could be tendered you than to let the beginning of your ministry be marked by care for the young. This is work which more than any other will encourage yourselves, and it is more likely than any other to establish you in the affections of a congregation. To work successfully among children you must know their life and have the ehtre'e of their little world of interests, excitements, prizes and hopes. It is not difficult to get it, if only we are simple and genuine. Children will approach their minister gladly, and make him their confidant, if only he is accessible to them. By the ministers of an older generation they were kept at an awful distance. When they were out of temper or doing wrong, they were threatened with a visit from the minister in the same way as they might be threatened with the policeman, or the parish beadle, or a still more awful functionary of the universe. This, let us hope, has passed away, and in most parishes a ministerial visit is spoken of as a promise instead of a threat. comedy, tragedy; even under the petr. faction of "Id age, as in the twisted forms of fossils, we may discover the agitations and tortures of youth. This thought is the magic wand of poets and preachers." — Amiel. 174 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. A minister is proud nowadays if a child flies up to him in the street and ruffles his feathers with bois terous familiarity, or if a group of children pin him into the corner of a room and order him, under pains and penalties, to tell them a story. We are returning to the ideal of Goldsmith, in the Deserted Village : — " The service past, around the pious man With steady zeal each loyal rustic ran ; Even children followed with endearing wile, And plucked his gpwn to share the good man's smile." More important even than accessibility is genuine respect for the children. We ought to respect their intelligence. When we are preaching to them, we should give them our very best. I venture to say, that a much larger proportion of the sermons preached to children is never written out than of sermons to adults. The preacher, having thought of two or three lines of remark and got hold of two or three stories, enters the pulpit with these materials lying loosely in his mind, and trusts to the moment for the style of the sermon. Of course, if a man has trained himself to preach in this way always, it is all right ; but, if not, it is a mistake. Children are greatly affected by felicity of arrangement and the music of lan guage ; they do not know to what their pleasure is THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 175 due, but they feel it ; and, if a preacher has the power of original thought or of beautiful diction, there is no occasion when he should be more lib eral in the use of it than when he is addressing them.* The truth is, it is a complete mistake to make the children's sermon so different from other sermons as to create the impression that it is the only utterance from the pulpit to which they are expected to listen. It is not easy to get children to begin to listen at all to what is said in church ; the children's sermon is a device to catch their at tention ; but it ought also to be a bridge conduct ing them over to the habit of listening to all that is said there. If they acquire the habit, they are our best hearers. A boy of twelve or thirteen can fol low nearly anything ; and there is no keener critic of the logic of a discourse or warmer appreciator of any passage which is worthy of admiration. But, while we respect the intelligence of the young, there is something else which we need to believe in still more. We do not half realise the * This may be a reason for rather devoting a whole diet of worship to the children once a month or once a quarter than only giving them a few minutes every Sabbath. But many follow the latter practice with excel lent results. Perhaps there ought to be something specially for the chil dren at every service. If I may mention my own practice, I have, during my whole ministry, preached to children once a month ; and every Sun day I have a children's hymn in the forenoon and a prayer for children in the afternoon. 176 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. drama of religious impression going on in the minds of children. We forget our own childhood and the movements excited in our childish breasts under the preaching of the Word — how real the things unseen were to us; how near God was, His eye flashing on us through the darkness ; how our hearts melted at the sufferings of Christ ; how they swelled with unselfish aspirations as we listened to the stories of heroic lives ; how distinctly the voice of conscience spoke within us ; and how we trem bled at the prospect of death, judgment and eter nity. What we were then, other children are now ; and what went on in us is going on in them. It is the man who believes this and reveres it who will reap the harvest in the field of childhood. There is no surer way to secure for ourselves the interest of the old than to take an interest in the young. Of course a forced interest in children, shown with this in view, would be hypocrisy and deserve contempt. We must love the children for their own sakes. Yet we may quite legitimately nourish our interest in the young by observing that it is one of the strongest instincts of human nature which makes fathers and mothers feel kindnesses shown to their children to be the greatest benefits which can be conferred on themselves. An Edin burgh minister, who has had conspicuous success in THE PREACHER AS A MAN. 177 preaching to children as well as in every other de partment of the work of his sacred office, once, in a gathering of divinity students, of whom I was one, told an incident from his own life which is almost too sacred to be repeated by any lips except his own, but which I hope he will excuse me for en riching you with, as it puts in a memorable form one of the truest secrets of ministerial success. On the morning of the day when he was going to be ordained to his first charge, he was leaving his home in the country to travel to the city, and his mother came to the door to bid him good-bye. Holding his hand at parting, she said, "You are going to be ordained to-day, and you will be told your duty by those who know it far better than I do ; but I wish you to remember one thing which perhaps they may not tell you — remember, that, whenever you lay your hand on a child's head, you are laying it on its mother's heart." LECTURE VII. THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN LECTURE VII. THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN. IN the last lecture I spoke of St. Paul as a Man, showing how remarkable were his endowments and acquirements, and how these told in his apos tolic career. But it was not through these that he was what he was. Great as were the gifts bestowed on him by nature and cultivated by education, they were utterly inadequate to produce a character and a career like his. It was what Christianity added to these that made him St. Paul. It is right enough that we should now recognise the importance of his natural gifts and trace out the ways in which Providence was shaping his life towards its true aim before he was conscious of it. But St. Paul himself had hardly patience for such cool reflections. He turned away with strong aver sion from his pre-Christian life as something con demned and lost ; and he delighted to attribute all that he was and did to the influence of Christ alone. In my last lecture I quoted a single passage to show that he himself recognised that his natural endow ments had been bestowed in order to fit him for the 13 182 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. peculiar work which he was destined to accomplish in the world ; but I question if from all his writings I could have quoted another passage to the same effect. It was only for a moment that he allowed himself to stand on this point of view ; whereas we could quote from every part of his writings such say ings as these : " By the grace of God I am what I am " ; "I laboured more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God in me"; "It is no more I that live, but Christ liveth in me." That this was his habitual way of estimating his own achievements is strikingly illustrated by his mode of thinking and speaking of certain defects in the equipment with which nature had supplied him for the career on which he was embarked. Gifted as he was, even he did not possess all gifts. He lacked one or two of those which might have been thought most essential to his success. It would appear that he lacked the rotund voice and copious diction of the orator ; for his critics were able to allege that, whilst his written style was powerful, his spoken style was contemptible. Painters have represented him as a kind of demi-god, with the stature of an athlete and the grace of an Apollo. But he seems to have been diminutive in stature ; and there appears to be evidence to prove that there was that in his appearance which, at first THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN. 183 sight, rather repelled than attracted an audience. He felt these defects keenly, and could not but wish sometimes that they were removed. But his habit ual and settled feeling about them was, that he ought to look upon them as sources of strength rather than as weaknesses, because they made him rely the more on the strength of Christ. This was an unfailing resource, on which he felt that he could draw without limit. And so he gloried in his in firmities, that the power of Christ might rest upon him.* It might be said that it was only the enthusiasm of Paul which made him attribute to Christ that which really belonged to himself. But his own point of view is the just one. It was Christ who made him ; and, if we are to understand a ministry like * The most charming chapter of Adolphe Monod's Saint Paul is on the subject of these two paragraphs. It is difficult to quote from it, because one would like to quote it all ; but I allow myself the pleasure of borrow ing these golden sentences : ' ' C'est qu'en depit de tant de promesses faites & la foi, nous sommes toujours plus on moins affaiblis par un reste de force propre, comme nous sommes toujours plus on moins troubles par un reste de propre justice, que les plus humbles eux-mcmes trainent partout avec eux. Cette malheureuse force propre, cette eloquence propre, cette science propre, cette influence propre, forme en nous comme un petit sanc- tuaire favori, que notre orgueil jaloux tient ferme a la force de Dieu, pour s'y reserver un dernier refuge. Mais si nous pouvions devenir enfin faibles tout de bon et desespcrer absolument de nous-memes, la force de Dieu, se repandant dans tout notre homme interieur et s' infiltrant jusque dans ses plus secrets replis, nous remplirait jusqu'en toute pleui- tude de Dieu ; par ou, la force de I'homme etant echangee contre la force de Dieu, rien ne nous serait impossible, parce que rien n'est impossible a Dieu." 184 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. his, we must try to measure the influence of Christ upon him, or, in other words, investigate the ele ments of his Christianity. I. Paul could claim that even in his pre-Christian days he had lived in all good conscience towards both God and man. Yet this profession of upright ness does not prevent him from confessing else where that deep down in his consciousness there had been a mortal struggle between the principles of good and evil, in which the good was far from always winning the victory: "We all," he acknowledges, " had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath even as others." In the seventh chapter of Romans he has drawn a picture of this struggle, and it is to the very life. Theologians have, indeed, disputed among therfiselves as to the stage of experience there referred to — whether it is the state of an un converted or of a converted man. But the human heart has no difficulty in interpreting it. The more thoroughly anyone is a man, the more easily will he understand it; and especially the more upright and conscientious anyone is, the more certainly must he have experienced what is described in words like these, " That which Idol allow not, for what I THE PREACHER- AS A CHRISTIAN. 185 would that do I not, but what I hate that do I " ; " For the good that I would I do not, but the evil that I would not that I do " ; "I find, then, a law that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man ; but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. Oh wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the body of this death ? " Thus Paul had been a lost man, in hopeless bondage to sin. But he had to repent of his own righteousness as well as of his sin. He had inherited the passionate longing of the Jewish race for fellowship with God — the longing expressed a hundred times in the poetry of his fathers in words like these : " As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God " ; " My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God ; when shall I come and appear before God?" He had been taught that the great prize of life is to be well-pleasing to God, and he had learned the lesson with all the passion ate earnestness of his nature. Yet he never could attain to that for which he longed. There always seemed to be a cloud on the Divine face, and he was kept at a distance. Luther went through the very same experience. His was also a passionately 186 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. religious nature, and he strove with all his might to get into the sunshine of God's face ; but his efforts were entirely baffled. Wash them as he would, his hands were never clean. What could an earnest nature do in such circum stances but seek to bring still greater sacrifices? Probably this was the source of Paul's zeal in the work of the persecutor. He was vindicating the honour of God when he exterminated the enemies of God. The work must have gone sorely against the grain of a nature as sensitive as his, especially when he saw scenes, like the death of Stephen, in which the gentleness and heroism of his victims shone out with unearthly beauty. But he only flung himself more passionately into his task ; because, the more trying it was, the greater was the merit of doing it, and the more certain was he of winning at last the fulLapproval of God. This portion of Paul's career seems to be capable of complete vindication on the ground of conscien tiousness. Indeed, in reviewing it, he stands some times on this point of view himself, and says that God had mercy on him because he did it ignorantly in unbelief. But oftener he thinks of it with over whelming shame and remorse. The whole course of life which had logically led up to work so inhuman in its details and so directly in the face of God's pur- THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN. 187 poses was demonstrated by the issue to have been utterly ungodly. His thoughts had not been God's thoughts nor his ways God's ways. The scenes cf the persecution, when, haling men and women, he cast them into prison ; the hatred and fury which in those days had raged in his breast ; the efforts which he had put forth to oppose the cause of Christ, which it was his firm resolution to extinguish to its last embers — these memories would never afterwards quit his mind. They kept him humble; for he felt that he was the least of the apostles, who was not worthy to be called an apostle, because he had per secuted the Church of God. He called himself the chief of sinners, and believed that God had in his case exhaustively displayed the whole wealth of His mercy for a pattern to all subsequent generations. The first element of St. Paul's Christianity, then, was the penitence of a lost man and a great sinner, who owed to Christ the forgiveness of his sins and the redemption of his life from an evil career. And he believed that Christ had purchased these benefits for him by the sacrifice of His own life. 2. The second great element of St. Paul's Chris tianity was his Conversion, which set a gulf between the portion of his life which preceded and the por tion which followed it. It was the chief date of his life, and confronted him every time he looked back. 188 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. Its influence extended to every part of his experi ence ; but perhaps its most important effect was to set Christ up within him as a living Person, of whose reality he was absolutely assured. Probably Paul's opposition to Christianity was from the first very specially opposition to Christ Himself. When he struck at the disciples, he was really striking at the Master through them. It is easy to conceive what an affront the pretensions of Jesus must have been felt to be by Paul. Jesus had been a man of about his own age — a young man ; he had sprung from the lowest of the people, being a villager and mechanic ; he had never sat in the schools of learning; the men of ability and author ity had had no hesitation in condemning Him. That such a one should be esteemed the Messiah of the Jews and worshipped as if He were Divine, raised a storm of indignation in the heart of Paul. Probably tiothing could have converted him ex cept the miraculous occurrence which God em ployed. Christ had to come to him in person and in a visible shape — in the shape of the glorified hu manity which He wears somewhere in that empire of God which we call Heaven. Paul knew the light in which he was enveloped to be a Divine light ; the sound of the voice calling him was the thunder which from of old had been recognised by the race THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN. 189 to which he belonged as the voice of God ; he was looking straight up to the place of God ; and in that place he saw Jesus, whom he was persecuting. Most Divine of all, however, were the sweetness, the clemency and the respect of the words in which he was addressed. This Jesus, against whom he was raging, came to him, not with corresponding rage, to take vengeance and destroy him, but with winning words of ruth and with the call to a high and blessed vocation. It was this which broke the heart of Paul and attached him to Christ for ever. He always afterwards believed that what took place on this occasion was what I have said — -that Jesus of Nazareth descended from the right hand of God to prove to him who He was and to claim him as His servant and apostle — and never after wards did he for a moment doubt that the man whom his fellow-countrymen had crucified, and whom he himself had persecuted, was seated on the throne of heaven, clothed with Divine blessedness and omnipotence. Of course others have doubted this. It may be said that what Paul saw was only a vision, and that therefore his new life was founded on a mistake. I believe his own account to be the correct one ; but perhaps we need not dogmatize too much about 190 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. what he saw ; because it was not in reality on any theory of this vision that his faith was founded. It was not because he saw Christ that day with the bodily eye, or believed he did so, that he became or continued a Christian ; it was because, trusting Christ, thus revealed, he obtained that for which he had all his life been longing: he was no longer banished or kept at a distance, but brought nigh to God ; he was reconciled, and the love of God was shed abroad in his heart. He had all his lifetime been asking in despair, " What must I do to be saved?" but now he was saved. The humiliating bondage in which his spiritual nature had been held was dissolved, and, following Christ, he advanced from victory to victory. This is the test of all conversions; it is the best evidence of Christianity ; and it is the power of preaching. We believe in Christ not only because there is sufficient historical evidence that He ex isted eighteen hundred years ago and did such acts as proved that He was sent from God, but because He proves Himself to be living now by the trans formation which He brings to pass in those who put their trust in Him. We are certain that there is a Saviour, because He has saved ourselves. I am happy to see that this evidence of our religion is at present coming again to the front. One of your THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN. 191 younger scholars, Dr. Stearns of Bangor, Maine, has developed it, in a book just published, with great breadth of theological knowledge ; and a former Yale lecturer, Dr. Dale of Birmingham, has given a telling exposition of it at the same time.* This is the vital force of preaching. We are witnesses to Christ — not merely to a Christ who lived long ago and did wonders, but to a Christ who is alive now and is still doing mcral miracles. And the virtue of any man's testimony lies in his being able to say that he has himself seen the Christ whom he preaches to others, and himself experienced the power which he recommends others to seek. 3. After his conversion the whole life of St. Paul was comprehended in one word ; and this word was Christ. There has often in modern times been a Christianity which has contained very little of Christ. Mr. Sage, of Resolis, one of whose quaint say ings I quoted in my last lecture, has solemnly left it on record that, when he was a student at Aberdeen, the Professor of Divinity, who was also Principal of the University, in a three years' course of lectures on the principles of the Christian religion, never once mentioned the name of Christ ; and in those times sermons were perfectly common in which * Stearns, The Evidence of Christian Experience ; Dale, The Living Christ and the Four Gospels. 192 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. there was not the slightest allusion to the Saviour. In our day this is entirely changed. Yet we are also surrounded with a Christianity which is ex tremely vague. Almost every sentiment in which there is anything devout or humane receives the name of Christian ; and the question which many are asking is how little it is necessary for one who claims the Christian name to believe and profess. Even this question may, indeed, in some cases indi cate a state of mind far from unpromising, which requires the utmost pastoral sympathy and skill ; but, if we wish to know what Christianity is in its power, we must not live in this unhealthy region, but find a Christianity in which the distinctively Christian element is not a minimum but a maxi mum. Such was St. Paul's Christianity. Its most prominent peculiarity was that there was so much of Christ in it. He expressed this in the character istic saying^ "To me to live is Christ," which was only a Greek way of saying, To me life is Christ ; and, from whatever side we look at his life, we see that this was true. Christ had obtained, and He retained, an exten sive hold on his emotional nature. St. Paul's was a large heart, and it was all Christ's. We are shy of speaking of our personal feeling towards the Saviour ; and we probably feel pretty often that the conven- THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN. 193 tional terms of affection for Him, which are made use of, for example, in the hymns of the Church, transcend our actual experience. St. Paul, on the contrary, has no hesitation in employing about Christ the language commonly used to describe the most absorbing passion, when love is filling life with a sweet delirum and making everything easy which has to be done for the sake of its object. St. Paul's achievements and self-denials were almost more than human; but his own explanation of them was simple : " The love of Christ constraineth us." He had to forego the prizes which to other men make life worth living ; but what did he care ? "I count them but dung," he says, "that I may win Christ." If only he retained one thing, he was willing to let all others go : " Who shall separate us from the love of Christ ? Shall tribulation or distress or persecution, or famine or nakedness, or peril or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ our Lord." These sound like the fervours of first love ; but they are the words of a man at the height of 194 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. his powers. And in old age he was still the same : still to him Christ was the star of life, and the hope of being with Him had annihilated the terrors of death : " I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better." But Christ was enthroned in St. Paul's intellect no less than in his heart. It was an intellect vast in its compass and restless in its movements; but all its movements circled round Christ, and its most powerful efforts were put forth to reach the full height of His glory. Everyone acquainted with his writings knows how full of Christ they are. What is technically called his Christology is both splendid and profound ; but, indeed, his whole thinking is Christological ; he saw the whole universe in Christ. Perhaps, however, we see even more suggestively how his whole mind was occupied with this subject by observing the way in which the mere incidental mention of the name of Christ sends him off into the most sublime statements regarding Him. For example, when he is speaking to husbands about loving their wives, the thought strikes him that this love is like that of Christ to His people; and he breaks forth: " Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church and gave Himself for it, that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN. 195 washing of water by the word, that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot orwrinkle or any such thing." In like manner, happening to be recommending generosity, he thinks of the generosity of Christ, and away he breaks into an incomparable description of His de scent from the throne of the Highest to the death of the cross: " Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God," and so on ; and, not content with following Him down, in accordance with the thought with which he started, he pursues the subject under the impulse of sheer love, following Him up to the highest heaven : " Wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things in earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." When is it that the mind thus starts off into a subject at any chance hint or sug gestion, pouring out the most astonishing ideas in the most felicitous language? It is only when it is possessed with it, and when its ideas are so hot and molten, that they are ready to avail themselves of any outlet. 196 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. What may be called the inner or spiritual life of St. Paul may most of all be said to have been all Christ. His own theory of this innermost life is that it is a kind of living over again of the life of Christ : we die with Him to sin ; we are buried with Him in baptism ; as He rose, so we rise again to newness of life ; He ascended to sit on the throne of the Father, and we are seated with Him in heavenly places. He is the very soil in which this life grows, and the atmosphere which it breathes; a Christian is " a man in Christ," and all the functions of his interior and even of his exterior life are per formed in this element : he speaks in Christ, he marries in Christ, he dies in Christ, and in the res urrection he will rise in Christ. This is what would be called the mysticism of St. Paul ; and doctrines resembling this have sometimes been associated in religion with fantastic specula tion and unpractical dreaming. In St. Paul, how ever, mysticism had no such results. If there was any part of his life on which the influence of Christ was more conspicuous than another, it was the prac tical part. To him any pretended connection or in tercourse with Christ in secret had no meaning un less its outcome was visible in a Christlike life — " If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of His." THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN. 197 To his own person he applied this principle in the most rigorous manner. Christ, he is fond of saying, lives in him ; he almost speaks as if in his flesh the Son of God had experienced a second in carnation ; but he relentlessly draws the practical conclusion. When Christ lived in His own earthly tabernacle, what did He live for? It was for the salvation of men ; He went about continually doing good ; He lived to seek and save the lost. If so, then, living in St. Paul, He must have the same pur pose — to make use of his powers of mind and body for the salvation of the world. In this way Christ was really still carrying on the work which had been interrupted by His death. St. Paul dares to say that he is filling up that which was lacking of Christ's sufferings for the sake of His body, the Church. He says that the heart of Christ is yearn ing after men in his heart ; that the mind of Christ is scheming for the kingdom of God in his brain ; he even compares the marks of persecution on his body to the wounds of Christ. There is nowhere else on record — at least there was not till St. Paul had taught it to the Christian world — such a merging of one life in another. And it is all the more remarkable when it is con sidered how big and strong a nature St. Paul's was. If any other man might have coveted an original 14 198 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. and independent life, surely he was entitled to be something in the world ; but he had utterly sunk himself into the echo and the organ of Another.* Gentlemen, I have taken up nearly the whole of the lecture with this minute analysis of St. Paul's Christianity for two reasons. I have done so, first, because I wish to create in your minds a genial estimate of the man himself whom I am setting up in this course of lectures as the model for preachers. It is not uncommon to speak as if the earliest apostles had been formed by their association with Jesus, and, strong only in their affection for Him, had gone forth to tell the world the simple story of His life and death ; but St. Paul, being a man of a colder nature and of strong intel lectual proclivities, drew Christianity away from the person of Jesus and transmuted it into a hard * " I feel rriost strongly that man, in all that he does or can do which is beautiful, great or good, is but the organ and the vehicle of something or some one higher than himself. This feeling is religion. The religious man take* part with a tremor of sacred joy in those phenomena of which he is the intermediary but not the source, of which he is the scene but not the author, or rather the poet. He lends them voice, hand, will and help, but he is respectfully cartful to efface himself, that he may alter as little as possible thehigherwork of the Genius who is making a momentary use of him. A pure emotion deprives him of personality and annihilates the self in him. Self must perforce disappear when it is the Holy Spirit who speaks, when it is God who acts. This is the mood in which the prophet hears the call, the young mother feels the movement of the child within, the preacher watches the tears of his audience. So long as we are conscious of self, we are limited, selfish, held in bondage."— Amiel. THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN. 199 intellectual system. I think I have proved that this is a totally mistaken impression, which does gross injustice to the great Apostle. None of the apostles, not even St. John, was more filled with the glow of personal attachment to Christ. He had a larger nature than any of them, but it was pene trated with this passion through and through. Be ing of the intellectual type, he could not help think ing out Christianity : but Christ entered into every thought he had about it. The other reason why I have attempted to an alyze so fully to-day the Christian experience of St. Paul is because I believe that the great motive of the ministry lies here — the very pulse of the ma chine.* There are many motives which may go to con stitute a powerful ministry and enable us to rejoice in our vocation. I have dealt with some of them already in this course of lectures. There is, for ex ample, the one with which I dealt in my last lecture, that the ministry gives satisfying and exhilarating employment to all the powers of the mind. There is, again, that which I mentioned in an earlier lect ure, that ours is a patriotic service : we are doing * As enthusiasm for Christ is the soul of preaching as far as the preacher is concerned, so in a spiritual congregation there will always be found a jealous desire for this element in what they hear. 200 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. the very best for our country when we are perme ating its life with the spirit of true religion. An as pect of the ministry which attracts many minds at present is that it is a service to humanity ; the heart and conscience of the age are stirred by the misery of the poor, and this is the most obvious and effective mode of rescue. These are inspiring motives ; and others might be mentioned. But far more important than them all is a strong per sonal attachment to the Saviour. This is the mo tive of the ministry which goes deepest and wears longest. It may have many roots. It may be rooted in impressive convictions about the person of the Sav iour and enthusiastic admiration of His character. It may spring from a profound sense of the lost condition from which He has rescued ourselves and of the destiny to which He has raised us. It may be due most of all to the impression made on our mind and heart by the sacrifice at the cost of which Jesus procured salvation for us. And here the depth or shallowness of our theology will be sure to tell. If our views are superficial either of the difference which salvation has made to ourselves or of what Christ did to constitute Himself the Sav iour, the likelihood is that we shall love little. It is the man who knows that he has been forgiven THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN. 201 much and saved at a great cost, who loves much. And the amount of love is the measure of sacrifice. In all ages this has been the secret of devoted lives. It has made the great preachers — St. Augus tine and St. Bernard, Luther and Wesley, Samuel Rutherford and McCheyne. It has made those too who have not been great in the eyes of men, but by their self-denying lives have made the king dom of God to come. In one of his sonnets Mat thew Arnold tells of meeting with a minister, " ill and o'erworked," on a broiling August day in the East End of London, and asking him how he fared in that scene of sin and sorrow. " Bravely," was the answer, " for I of late have been much cheered with thought of Christ." It is said to have been an actual incident.* At all events, it is the explanation of thousands of heroic lives passed in similar des perate situations. At present the adherents of a humanitarian philanthropism are loud in proclaim ing the woes of the world, as if they had been the first to discover them, and propounding schemes for their amelioration ; but their methods have all been anticipated by the humble followers of Jesus ; and nine-tenths of the genuine philanthropic work of the world are being done by men and women who *See an article by the Rev. John Kennedy, D.D., in The Evangelical Magazine, April, 1891. 202 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. make no noise, but who cannot help working for the ends of Jesus, because His love is burning in their very bones, and because the life of Christ in them cannot help manifesting itself after its kind. Down the Christian centuries there has come floating a kind of hymn : the words are said to be by St. Patrick : the sentiment may well be called the music to which the true Church militant has always marched : — Christ with me, Christ before be, Christ behind me, Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ at my right, Christ at my left, Christ in the fort, Christ in the chariot seat, Christ in the poop, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks to me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.* * Here may be introduced a few notes which are to me of inestimable value. The happiness of my visit to the Stttes, which was great, was overshadowed at the close by the news of the death of the best friend I had on earth— the Rev. Robert W. Batbour, of Bonskeid. None who knew him will need to have it explained why I should think of him at this point ; because, while he had drunk deeply of the spirit of the time and was possessed of a rare love for men, the deepest source of the sacred extravagance with which he lavished himself and his many talents on every good cause was nothing else than the passion for Christ which I am try ing in this lecture to illustrate. He took a warm interest in this course of lectures, and sent me the following Aphorisms on Preaching, to be used as I might think fit. I reproduce them entire, as they came from him. Perhaps they were the very last literary work he did : — The Book and the Library. The preacher must be master of many books, but servant of one, THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN. 203 Closet and Desk. Study as though thou mightest preach for fifty years ; pray as though thou mightest preach for five. Divine and Human. Speak as though the mouth were God's ; but let the voice be a man's. First and Second Aims. All gifts (presence, voice, gesture, culture, style, and so on) may be wings, if kept behind one's back ; the mo ment they are seen they become dead weights, Two strings to one's bow will do with any shafts but the arrows of the King. Letters, the press, the lyre, the porch, must stand in the back ground behind " this one thing." Think less and less of everything t-lse, and more and more of thy mes sage. Aims and No Aims. Aim at something, you will hit it; also draw your bow at a venture. " Make full proof of thy ministry?1 Try every method — writing, reading, committing, extending, extemporising. Imitate every man, but mimic none. Nothing makes a preacher like preaching. Whence comes it that my nature is subdued To that it works in, like the dyer's hand. Pulpit Form. Respect your hearers. Do not gird at them ; angle for them— and agonize. Address yourself to one at a time — first to the man in the pulpit. He who has hit himself first will not miss others. He who trembles at the word of the Lord, men will tremble at his word. (Borrowed) A preacher must either be afraid of his audience or his audi ence of him. fanua Domini. Always enter the pulpit by the Door (John x. 7). Contents and Omissions. Put everything yuu can into every address. Omit everything you can from every address. "Faith cometh by hearing." Therefore, to begin with, be audible. The Sermon on the Mount commences thus: " He opened His mouth" (Matt. v. 2). Time and Eternity. Speak to men's fleeting hopes and passing in terests ; speak also to their grey hairs and to their midnight hours. Ultimata. Desire to prophesy (1 Cor. xiv. 1) ; covet to prophesy (id. 39) ; do not preach if thou darest be silent (1 Cor. ix. 16). LECTURE VIII. THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE LECTURE VIII. THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. GENTLEMEN, in the two last lectures we have investigated two of the principal sources — per haps I might say the two principal sources — of a minister's power — his manhood and his Christianity. These may be called the two natural springs out of which work for men and God proceeds. Out of these it comes as -a direct necessity of nature. If anyone is much of a man — if there be in him much fire and force, much energy of conviction — it will be impos sible for him to pass through so great an experience as the reception of Christianity without making it known ; and, if he be much of a Christian — rif there be in him much of the spirit of Christ, which is the spirit of self-sacrifice and benevolence — it will be impossible for him to refrain from approaching men in their sin and misery and endeavouring to com municate to them the secret of blessedness. He will make but a poor minister who would not be an earnest worker for God and man, even if he were not a minister. These impulses were conspicuously strong in St. 208 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. Paul. Yet there was also another source from which he drew the motives of his ministry. This was the fact that God had appointed him to the office of an apostle and allotted him a specific sphere of activity as the apostle of the Gentiles. The other two sources of motive are, as I have said, natural ; this one, on the contrary, is official. This may raise a prejudice against it. So many and such grave mistakes have been made through re garding official appointment as the only warrant for Christian work, to the prejudice of the antecedent qualifications of a genuine and sympathetic man hood and a deep personal Christianity, without which it is nothing, that there is a disposition to ignore this kind of motive altogether. But St. Paul acknowledges it. Although he was always, no doubt, far more of a man and a Christian than an official, yet, in reply to opposition, he insists with great vehemence on his apostolic rank ; and evidently he felt that this imposed on him additional obligations to be earnest and faithful in the work to which his manly and Christian instincts prompted him. It is, indeed, of great consequence to anyone who has become a Christian, and who begins to feel stir ring in his breast those impulses to serve God and bless the world which are native to the Christian THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 209 spirit,* to obtain a definite sphere to fill and a definite work to do. Otherwise these God-inspired impulses, expressing themselves in mere words and sentiments, gradually decay through want of exercise, or they are dispersed over so many objects that nothing is done. But, when a special task is obtained, the force of these sentiments is concentrated upon it and transmuted into actual work. The Christian man says : Here is my own task ; if I do not accomplish it, no one else can ; this is my corner in the great labour-field, which I, and no one else, have to make fruitful and beautiful ; I shall be answerable to the Judge of all at the last for the manner in which the work assigned to me is done. Such sentiments had a strong hold of the mind of St. Paul. One of his commonest ways of thinking of his office was as a stewardship, which he was ad ministering, and for which by-and-by he would have to render a reckoning. "And," says he, "it is re quired in stewards that a man be found faithful."* Similarly, he thought of himself as a workman with * An indication of the intensity with which St, Paul's mind worked upon the subject of the ministry is to be found in the number and vai iety of his metaphors for it. The following are those which I have noted, but there may be more — nurse (i Thess. ii. 7), father (r Cor. iv. 15), gar dener (1 Cor. iii. 6), labourer (1 Cor. iii. 9), builder (1 Cor. iii. 10), servant (1 Cor. iv. 1), bondman (2 Tim. ii. 24). steward (1 Cor. iv. 1), ambassador (Eph. vi. 20), soldier (1 Tim. vi. 12), herald (1 Tim. ii. 7), shepherd (Acts xx. 28), workman (2 Tim. ii. 15), athlete (1 Tim. iv. 7),, vessel (2 Tim. ii. 21). 210 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. a certain portion of a temple to build ; but the great Taskmaster was coming round in the evening to in spect the work — ay, and even to test it with fire ; and, when that testing-time came, he desired to be a workman not needing to be ashamed. All the work of his apostleship appeared to him a curricu lum which he had to cover before he could win the prize of the Divine approval. This is his favourite figure of speech, and he applies it in many direc tions. For example, the athlete in the racecourse has to keep himself in training and to put every muscle on the stretch. So St. Paul felt the obligation to put every power he possessed into his work. " Give thyself wholly to them," he says to a young fellow- labourer about his duties ; and what he preached he practised. " Stir up the grace of God that is in thee," he says to the same friend again ; and he called on his own nature continually for the utmost exertion of its powers. He was always growing ; but the increment of his faculty and influence went all to the same object. An athlete in the games naturally laid aside every weight, divesting himself of everything which might impede his running and rob him of the prize. He dared not glance aside at any object which would take his eye off the goal. So St. Paul sacrificed THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 211 everything for the Gospel's sake ; he had but one end and no by-ends. He was often, indeed, accused of aiming at some end of his own. With especial persistency he was accused of avarice. It is very ludicrous now to think of this great man having been supposed capable of so mean a vice. But his motives were too high and pure to be intelligible to his accusers, and they naturally attributed to him the motive which was the strongest of which they were conscious themselves. But they only brought out the true greatness of the man. He believed in the right of preachers of the Gospel to live by the Gospel, and he looked forward to the general recog nition of this as soon as Christianity had obtained a footing in the world. But he himself lived above all such claims. He accepted support from his con verts, indeed, and thanked God for it, when he had good reason to think that his motives were under stood. But, where they were suspected or the suc cess of the Gospel seemed to be in any degree endangered by his acceptance of money, he would not take a cent, but would rather sit up half the night and work his fingers to the bone to earn his livelihood. There is no sublimer scene in history than the great Apostle, who was bearing the weight of Christianity on his shoulders and carrying the future of the world beneath his robe, toiling with 212 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. his hands for his living by the side of Aquila and Priscilla, in order that he might keep Christianity from being tarnished with the faintest suspicion of mercenary motives. Gentlemen, among the many attractions of our calling on which I should like to congratulate you this is not the least, that it provides a definite sphere for the exercise of the benevolent impulses which you may feel as men and as Christians and, by ex ercising, develops them. These impulses may be the strongest and most sacred in our nature. But in other occupations, in the excitement and compe tition of life, they are in great danger of being slowly extinguished. In our calling, on the contrary, they receive constant opportunities of nurture and devel opment. Their healthy and spontaneous activity is the soul of ministerial work ; and this is stim ulated by the sense of responsibility to fill the sphere allotted ?o us and exhaust its possibilities. But, besides the sense of duty, there is a stimulus of a still more affecting kind which comes to a man when he is set over a congregation of his own. When I first was settled in a church, I discovered a thing of which nobody had told me and which I had not anticipated, but which proved a tremendous aid in doing the work of the ministry. I fell in love with my congregation. I do not know how otherwise to THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 213 express it. It was as genuine a blossom of the heart as any which I have ever experienced. It made it easy to do anything for my people ; it made it a per fect joy to look them in the face on Sunday morn ing. I do not know if this is a universal experience ; but I should think it is common. For my part, I like to meet a man who thinks his own congregation, however small it may be, the most important one in the Church and is rather inclined to bore you with its details. When a man thus falls in love with his people, the probability is that something of the same kind happens to them likewise. Just as a wife prefers her own husband to every other man, though surely she does not necessarily suppose him to be the most brilliant specimen in existence, so a congregation will generally be found to prefer their own minister, if he is a genuine man, to every other, although surely not always entertaining the hallucination that he is a paragon of ability. Thus to love and to be loved is the secret of a happy and successful ministry. Taking up the responsibilities of his office in the spirit which I have described, St. Paul would have found any sphere, however limited, laborious. But, . in point of fact, the sphere allotted to him was an enormous one. It was nothing less than the whole Gentile world. 15 214 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. The known world was not, indeed, in that age, of anything like the same dimensions as it is today. It consisted only of a narrow disc of countries round the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet to any other man the vocation to evangelize it all must have been bewildering and even paralyzing. St. Paul, however, accepted it in all seriousness, and ever afterwards, till the day of his death, he regarded the populations of these countries as people to whom he owed the message of the Gospel. Speaking of the two recog nised divisions of the Gentile world of that day, he says, " I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise." Of course he did not live long enough to preach the Gospel to all the inhabitants of even the little world of his day. Yet it is amazing to think of the range of his labours. He preached in nearly all the great cities of that world — in Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Athens,_Rome and many others— his pre dilection for cities being obviously due to the hope that, when Christ was made known in these crowded centres, the sound of his doctrine would echo through the surrounding regions. And this hope was justi fied. The cities in the province of Asia, for example, to which St. John sent the letters in the beginning of Revelation, were probably all evangelized from Ephesus by converts of St. Paul, though he himself THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 215 may have visited none of them but Ephesus. The passion burned continually in his mind to get for ward and cover new ground. He could not bear to build on another man's foundation. The wide unful filled provinces of his apostolate ever called him on. His first journey was merely a circuit of the coun tries bordering to the west and north on his own native Cilicia, and lay chiefly among barbarians. But the second, after a still more extended tour among the barbarians, brought him to the borders of that wonderful world of culture and renown in which dwelt the Greeks as distinguished from the barbarians. He was standing on the shore of Asia and looking across to the shore of Europe. In Eu rope were the two great eyes of the Gentile world — Athens and Rome — the one the centre of its wisdom and the other of its power. How could the Apostle of the Gentiles help wishing to preach the Gospel there? He crossed the narrow strait, and then ad vanced from one Greek town to another, till he stood on the very spot where Socrates had taught and Demosthenes -thundered. In his third journey he had to concentrate his work on Ephesus; because, like a skilful general, he would not leave territory in the rear unconquered. But Rome was now the aim of all his desires — Rome, the very citadel of the world which he had to conquer. He approached it 216 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. at last in the garb of a prisoner and in a gang of prisoners. But, as we follow him, we feel as if we were going with a victorious army to take part in a grand triumph. Indeed, as you accompany this great spirit, this is often the feeling you have. He had it himself. " Thanks be unto God," he says, " who always causeth us to triumph." Only to his mind the occupant of the car of victory was not him self, but Christ ; he was only a satellite, showering largess in the name of the Victor among the crowd around the chariot-wheels. Such is the image of the Apostle which grows on the imagination as we read his extraordinary life. Yet there was another side. To us now his career is heroic and glorious ; but to him, at the time, it was beset with innumerable obstacles ; and, wonder ful as were his labours, more wonderful still were his sufferings. He went from town to town inces santly ; but seldom did he leave any place without having been in peril of his life. Sometimes the mob rose against him and only left him when they had cast out of their town his apparently lifeless body, as they would have flung away the carcase of a dog. Sometimes the authorities apprehended him and subjected him to the rigour of the law. But hear the catalogue of his sufferings from his own lips : " Are they ministers of Christ ? so am I : in labours THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 217 more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft; of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one, thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered ship wreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep ; in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren ; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in cold and nakedness ; besides those things which are without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches." Yet, when he wrote this, he was only midway in his career. These incidents are glorified now by the influence of time, but, when they had to be endured, they were real and painful enough. To take but a single instance, what must it have been to a man of such sensitive honour and engaged only in doing good to be so frequently in the hands of the police and in the company of malefactors ? In his epistles he can not conceal the irritation caused by his "chain." Although in victorious moods he felt himself, as we have seen, borne onwards in triumph, in other moods he felt himself at the opposite extreme : " I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death ; for we are made a spec- 218 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. tacle unto the world and to angels and to men ; we are made as the filth of the world and are the off scourings of all things " ; the reference being to the gladiators whose cheap lives were sacrificed to em bellish the conqueror's triumph. Yet it was never long before he could rally from such depression at the thought of the cause in which he suffered all ; and his habitual mood, in the face of accumulating difficulties, was expressed in these heart-stirring words, " None of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy and the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the Gospel of the grace of God." It is good to linger beside one who was so faith ful to his charge, so hard a worker and so patient a sufferer. We may learn from these extraordinary labours and sufferings to do honest work and to en dure hardness ourselves. Our sphere is, indeed, very different from his. His was so vast as to be almost limitless ; ours may be very circumscribed. He was continually moving from place to place and encountering new people ; we may have to labour among the same handful of people for a lifetime. He lived amidst daily novelty and excitement ; we may have to fulfil an existence of deep monotony. And all the disadvantages do THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 219 not belong to the large, difficult and dangerous lot. It may seem easy to be faithful in a small sphere and to exhaust all its possibilities. But the narrow lot has its trials as well as the wide one, and perhaps it does not require less virtue to overcome them. A stronger sense of duty may be needed to prepare an honest sermon week by week to a small and compar atively ignorant congregation than to bear the brunt of danger in an exposed post of the mission field.* Nowhere can the ministry be easy if its responsi bilities are realised and its duties honestly dis charged. Look forward, I would say to you, to a labourious life. If you are thinking of the ministry otherwise, you had better turn back. Ours is a more crowded existence than that of any other profession. There is the work of study and preaching. I do not know the details of a minister's week among you ; but in Scotland ministers have, as a rule, two discourses to prepare for Sunday, besides a lesson for the Bible Class, which may involve as much work as a sermon ; and we have at least one week- * ' ' Go where you can do most for men, not where you can get mostf ro?n men. " Be more concerned about your ability than about your opportunity, and about your walk with God than either, " Your sphere is where you are most needed. " There is no place without its difficulties : by removing you may change them, it may be you will increase them ; but you cannot escape them." — Prediger. 220 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. day meeting at which a lengthy address is given. For these four discourses subjects have to be found ; materials for exposition and illustration have to be collected ; the mind has first to make each subject its own and then to shape it into a form suitable for popular effect. A sermon may sometimes, indeed, come in a flash, and perhaps there is something of sudden discovery in the very best work ; but even then time is required to work out the thought and enrich it with subsidiary thinking ; and there are many discourses which are of no value without ex tensive investigation and the patient working-up of the quarried materials. Then follows the writing. This will take at least six or eight hours for a dis course, and may easily take much more. Many ministers do not write more than one discourse a week fully out, and probably they are wise ; but many write two. Here, then, there is obviously ample work for, a long forenoon on five days of the week. I have always had to add the afternoon of Friday and Saturday, and often the evening as well. Then comes the hard and exciting work of Sunday. It is a religious duty to rest on Monday, as we do not get the bodily rest of the Sabbath* * " A sermon which costs little is worth as much as it has cost. Yet measure not the value of the sermon by the length and hardness of your labour. " — DUFANLOUP. THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 221 There is the work of visitation. The sick and the bed-ridden must be visited ; and it is of enor mous profit to visit the whole congregation from house to house. As Dr. Chalmers said, the direct- est way to a man's heart is generally through the door of his home. Acquaintance with the actual circumstances of the families of the congregation gives wonderful reality and' point to the prelections of Sunday. Our sermons must rise out of the con gregation if they are ever to reach down to it again. Here, it is evident, there is abundant work for the afternoons which study leaves free. Many minis ters have to add one or two evenings, the evening being the best time to find their people at home. There is. a third mass of work of an exceedingly miscellaneous character which absorbs much time and strength. It includes such duties as perform ing the ceremonies at baptisms, marriages and fu nerals ; organizing the work of the congregation ; attending church courts and sitting on committees; serving on school boards and the boards of benevo lent societies ; preaching from home and addressing the meetings of neighbour ministers ; writing offi cial letters ; raising money ; receiving visitors ; writing for the press. It would be easy for minis ters in positions of any prominence to spend their whole time in duties of this description, none of 222 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. which might appear useless ; so great is the multi tude of the claims which pour in from every side. I have said nothing of the time required for keep ing abreast of the literature of the day or for culti vating an intellectual specialty. It is extraordinary what some of the busiest men achieve in this re spect ; but it is only managed by an economy and even penury of time for which a kind of genius is requisite. Of course there are seasons of the year when the pressure of public engagements is not so great ; and ministers are allowed longer holidays than other professional men. A couple of hours a day given from a holiday to great reading may shoot threads of fresh colour through the whole web of a season's work. Nor have I said anything of the time necessary for thinking over the devotional portion of the service of the sanctuary, though in our churches, where free prayer prevails, this de serves as careful "attention as the sermon. The glimpse which I have given you into the de tails of a minister's week will help you to realise that the life which lies before you is a labourious one. Of course the labour may be shirked. Min isters have their time in their own hands ; they have no office hours ; and, I suppose, a minister's life may be more ignobly idle than any other pro fessional man's. That is, if he has no conscience. THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 223 How far a man who is conscientious and works hard may be justified in devoting himself to one branch of ministerial work for which he has special aptitudes or predilections, it is difficult to judge. Perhaps the Protestant Church has failed in making use of special gifts. Some eminent preachers, for example, neglect pastoral visitation ;* and there are, I suppose, many ministers who keep out of more general public work, because they have no taste for it. There may be some gain in this ; but there is also loss. When a preacher does not visit, he is apt to become an orator, who dazzles but does not feed the flock. When a minister keeps himself apart from public interests, the Church to which he be longs is likely to be weak at that point. The most fatal neglect is that of study ; and per haps it is the commonest. The part of our work which needs most moral resolution is undoubtedly the sermon — to get it begun, studied, written and finished. It requires the discipline of years in even * The first Sunday I was in America, I worshipped in the churches of Rev. Dr. W. M. Taylor and Rev. Dr. John Hall, who are, I suppose, the two most eminent ministers of New York ; and I was astonished to hear both of them intimate that they would visit in certain streets during the week. There are no ministers anywhere more immersed than these in every kind of public duty ; yet they find time for regular pastoral visi tation. On coming home, I mentioned this fact to an equally eminent minister in my own country. " Well," said he, "when I came to the city, the elders of my congregation advised me not to visit, and I followed their advice ; but it was the worst advice I ever got." 224 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. the most conscientious to win the mastery of them selves in this particular; and it is probably at this point that three-fourths of all ministerial failures take place. It is not the reading of the material bearing on the subject which is difficult ; indeed, this may be luxuriously prolonged, till it is too late to think and write the sermon out. The hard and sour toil lies in facing the sweat of thought and the irksomeness of writing ; although, when the diffi culty is overcome, the happiness and triumph of our calling lie here also. Of course this difficulty is greatest in the small sphere. Here the temptation is, to be overcome by the monotony of the situation, to allow the powers to stagnate, to feel that anything will do, and put the people off with that which has cost no exertion. "I know," says one who wields a trenchant pen,* " how plausible the excuses are, and I know what relaxation of study results in — laziness in the morn ing, increasing excesses in the daily papers, increased interest in gardening, several more pipes a day, and so forth. Breakfast comes' finally to its long-de ferred end about ten ; then there is a consultation with the gardener, which is, of course, business, and makes the idler feel that really his active habits are returning; then two letters have to be answered ; * Dr. Marcus Dods. THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 225 then, just as he means to go to his study, he sees Mr. Fritterday passing, and before he has finished his colloquy over the hedge with him, it is past midday. When he does get to his study, Macmil- lan or Blackwood is lying on his table, and he feels he cannot settle till he knows what is the fate of the heroine of the current story, or his window over looks the busy hayfield of his neighbour, and he becomes ten times more interested in that work than in his own ; and so his whole forenoon is gone, and he is summoned to dinner before he has earned his salt by one decent hand's turn." This kind of temptation, however, is not confined to the man in the small and easy situation: it is the common temptation of all ministers. Only in the city it comes in another form. The man who has a large congregation and a little popularity is beset with calls from every quarter to engage in every kind of duty outside his own sphere. His doorbell never ceases ringing. Every applicant supposes his own case the most important. There is a whirl of excitement, and there is an exhilara tion in being able in many ways to serve the public. But, if the man gives up his habits of study, he is lost. His appearances become commonplace; the public tire of him, and throw him aside as ruthlessly as they have senselessly idolized him. Robert Hall 226 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. used to say that, when the devil saw that a minister was likely to be useful in the church, his way of disposing of him was to get on his back and ride him to death with engagements. To follow the course of St. Paul's labours and sufferings on the grand scale produces an over whelming impression of earnestness and devotion ; yet it is even more by entering into the minute de tails of his activity that we find the apostle. One who has to deal with vast masses is apt to overlook details ; and it is so even in the work of Christ. An evangelist, for example, moving from place to place and surrounded with multitudes, may know very little of individuals. The minister of a large congregation is exposed to the same temptation. Indeed, we are all too desirous of crowds and too little occupied with the units of which they are composed. Buf this is the greatest of all mistakes. St. Paul, amidst the constant change of scene and the pressure of large bodies of people in which he lived, never overlooked individuals. In his speech to the elders of Ephesus he could challenge them to bear witness that he had taught not only pub licly but from house to house, and had warned everyone night and day with tears. While, like his Master, he was moved by the sight of a multitude THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 227 and welcomed the opportunity of making known the glad tidings to many, he was quite as ready to preach to the small company of women of whom Lydia was one at the riverside or to the soldier to whom he was chained in the Roman prison. St. Paul was never a mere evangelist. The evan gelist's work is to deal with the initial stage of the Christian life : he has to bring men to decision ; and, when this is done, he passes on, leaving to other agencies whatever more may be required. An evangelist sometimes knows very little of what becomes of his converts after he has quitted the place. But St. Paul was as eager about this as about the first impressions. However small the company of the converted might be, he formed them into a Christian Church, and ordained elders in every city. He often left an assistant behind to carry on and consolidate the work which he had begun. When at a distance, he was always eager for news about his churches. His epistles are full of such anxie ties; and, indeed, his epistles themselves are the best monument of his pastoral care ; for they were written to ask after the welfare of those whom he had left behind, or to give counsel on points about which they had consulted him. They brim over with the expressions of a tender and heartfelt love. He is able to assure those to whom he is writing 228 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. that he is praying for them, and that not only in the mass but one by one. He kept their faces and names alive in his memory by thus recalling them at the throne of grace ; and his life must have been one long prayer about his work. Sometimes he lets the prayer which he has been offering slip through his pen ; and then we see how high was the ideal of Christian attainment which he cherished on behalf of his converts. He was not content that they had turned from their old sins and taken the first steps in the Divine life. He longed to see them becoming creditable specimens of Christianity and ornaments to the Church — com plete men, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. It was life itself to him to hear of their progress : " Now we live if ye stand fast in the Lord." And the crown to which he looked forward as the reward of all his toils and sufferings was to be permitted at last to present the soul of every one of them as a chaste virgin to Christ. Gentlemen, I believe that almost any preacher, on reviewing a ministry of any considerable dura tion, would confess that his great mistake had been the neglect of individuals. If I may be permitted a personal reference: when, not long ago, I had the opportunity, as I was passing from one charge to another, of reviewing a ministry of twelve years, the THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 229 chief impression made on me, as I looked back, was that this was the point at which I had failed ; and I said to myself that henceforth I would write Individ uals on my heart as the watchword of my ministry. We make impressions in the church ; but we do not follow them up, to see that the decision is arrived at and the work of God accomplished; and so they are dissipated by the influences of the world ; and those who have experienced them are perhaps made worse instead of better. It is a very significant thing that is said of the pastor in our Lord's para ble — that he sought the lost sheep " until he found it." We seek : we even seek labouriously and pain fully : but we frequently leave off just before finding. A minister told me that, on the Saturday even ing before his first Sunday in his first charge, the experienced minister who was to introduce him to his people next day was strolling with him in the vicinity of the village and talking about his duties, when they chanced to pass a plantation of trees. Pointing to them, the aged minister asked, " If you had to cut these trees down, how would you go about it ? would you go round the whole plantation, giving each tree a single blow, and then go round them all again, giving each a second blow " ? " Well, no," he answered, " I think I should attack one tree and cut at it till it came down ; and then go on 16 230 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. and do the same to a second and a third, and so forth." " Well," said his experienced friend, " that is the way you must do here. After you have been settled a short time, you will discover which families and individuals are most impressed by your first efforts, and you must devote yourself to these sus ceptible souls, till you have won them thoroughly; and then in their enthusiasm for yourself and their willingness to work for the congregation you will have the best foundation for a successful ministry." In a former lecture I spoke of the power of dis cerning in men and women of every class and con dition the humanity which is common to all and speaking straight to that, without reference to the superficial differences which distinguish class from class and one individual from another. But minis terial sympathy has to embrace what is peculiar to classes and individuals as well as what is common to all. ThougTi St. Paul, like his Master, had a powerful grasp of what is universal in humanity, yet to the Jew he made himself a Jew, that he might gain the Jew, and to them that were without law as without law, that he might gain them who were without law ; he was made all things to all men, that he might gain the more. His persuasion obviously was, that God was trying, by His revelation among those who possessed the THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 231 Written Word, and by His providence among those who did not possess it, to lead His children by divers ways to Himself; and his own duty was to join himself to each company at the stage which it had reached and offer to become its conductor. The Jew was more advanced, and he met him where he was ; the Gentile was further behind, and he had to go back and approach him also where he stood, that he might win his confidence and be allowed to lead him on. This is the persuasion which gives a minister faith in his own work. The souls of men are God's. His providence is a discipline intended to lead them to Himself; there are none with whom His Spirit does not strive. And it is only as our work co-oper ates with His that it is of any effect. Where God has been working, opening and softening the heart, very simple efforts, put forth at the right moment, may go a long way, and the work of God be quickly done. What situation could be more pathetic to a sen sitive and sympathetic mind than that of a minister when he stands up in the pulpit and looks down on the congregation ? What a variety of conditions are before him ! In one pew there is a man who dur ing the week has been fighting a losing battle with his business and sees himself on the verge of bankrupt cy ; in the next may be a merchant into whose lap 232 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. fortune has been pouring her gifts in handfuls. Here is a mother who is thinking of her son who has just left his home and is sailing on the sea; and there a girl whose heart is rejoicing in the happy dreams of youth. On the right may be a young man who is trembling on the brink of the great temptation of his life, and on the left another who is reeking from some orgy of secret sin. There is endless variety ; yet none are uninteresting ; and probably there is no one but, if you could meet him exactly where he stands, would respond to the in fluence which you bring. It arrests men when you are able to show such a knowledge of the human heart that they feel themselves discovered ; and it disposes a man to answer to your call if he sees that you are familiar with the circumstances in which he will have to lead the life to which you are inviting him, and that you appreciate the diffi culties of the situation. Therefore the more a min ister knows of the variety of actual life the better; and, if he is to do really effective work, he must know how to come down from the pulpit and put himself alongside of individuals.* *." Get others to talk : what a man says to you has more influence upon him than all you can say to him. ^ "It is not the time of sickness so much as the time of convalescence that decides the future life. Remember this, and seize opportunities." — Prediger. THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 233 Here I might again recommend the work of visi tation and the practice of being accessible at home to the visits of those who come with confidences to communicate; but let me rather close this lecture with a word or two on some of the more favourable opportunities which ministerial life affords for direct dealing with individuals.* One of the best opportunities of this kind is when parents come seeking baptism for their children. When you are speaking in their children's interest, men will welcome an amount of faithfulness which they would not endure at other times. You can show how much their children's welfare in time and eternity may depend on their own religious condi tion ; you can urge the duty of family worship ; and you must have very little skill if you cannot get very close to their hearts. Especially when a man comes about the baptism of his first child, he is perhaps in the most favourable state for an earnest talk in which you can ever find him. His soul is opened * " Much i f the Gospels is taken up with conversations between Christ and individuals. Teaching so startling and difficult as His, with sucii an element in it of attraction and hope, naturally drew around Him many who sought to know further what this Gospel meant. He, on His part, was as eager to meet inquirers as they were to seek Him ; and we find that He bestowed as much care and pains in expounding the nature of His kingdom to individuals as He did when He was speaking to great multi tudes. The audience, if small, was fit. Not i nly so, but we find that He put Himself in the way of individuals." — Nicoll, The Incarnate Saviour, 234 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. with tenderness and overawed with the mystery of life ; he is longing with his whole heart to do his best for his child ; and, if you show him that the best he can do for it is to become connected with the great source of holy influence himself, there is no other occasion on which a good impression is more likely to be made. The other opportunity which I should like to mention is when the young come to join the Church. I well remember that, when I was a stu dent, there was no part of a minister's duty to which I looked forward with so much fear and trembling as this ; for I had the conviction, which I still have, that it is our duty at this crisis to bring the question of personal salvation in the most direct and solemn way before every intending communi cant, and that it is ministerial treason to let the opportunity slip. Some of you may be looking forward to this- with the same feelings ; and, there fore, I am happy to tell you that in practice it is not nearly so difficult as it seems at a distance. The applicants themselves expect you to be faith ful ; if you are, they will honour you for it, and, if not, they will be disappointed. If they get the op portunity, they are far franker than you would ex pect. No doubt it is delicate work, and one has to guard against harshness and anything inquisito- THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE. 235 rial ; but it yields the most blessed results. This is the harvest-time of the minister's year, when he sees that his labour is not in vain. Even one such close talk, brought about in this way or otherwise, casts a glow of reality into one's work which does not pass away for weeks ; and, if a minister is so highly honoured as to receive many of these confi dences, he acquires a skill in laying his finger on the very pulse of his hearers' deepest life which nothing else can give. LECTURE IX. THE PREACHER AS A THINKER LECTURE IX. THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. GENTLEMEN, in the foregoing lectures I have adverted very little to the studies, in prepara tion for the work of the ministry, with which you are at present occupied. Indeed, I have rather ostentatiously kept to a standpoint at some distance from the academic one, for reasons which I ex plained in the opening lecture. But the clue which I have endeavoured faithfully to follow has brought us at last to this point also ; and I welcome the opportunity of saying something about the more intellectual aspects of our work. The subject to-day is the Preacher as a Thinker. In my last lecture I spoke of the vast sphere of operations assigned to St. Paul and of the almost su perhuman exertions which he made to fill it. But what did he exert himself to fill it with ? It was not merely to overtake the ground and be himself present in so many countries and cities that he was so zealous. That which drove him on was the glori ous message of which he was the bearer, with the 240 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. sound of which he desired to fill the world. He often combines these two ideas in his writings — that the Gentile world had been committed to him as a trust, to care for the souls which it contained, and that the Gospel had been committed to him as a trust, to be communicated to the Gentiles. These two things were included in his apostolate — on the one hand, the care of the heathen world, and, on the other, the publication of the Gospel. Of course he had not, like the original apostles, heard the Gospel from the lips of Christ ; but he had received it directly from Christ in some other way ; and you know how vigorously he claimed that he had not received it from man and was not indebted to the other apostles for it. He fre quently calls it his own gospel, and he maintains it to be as authentic and authoritative as that preached by any of the other apostles. How it was revealed to- him we cannot tell. This is the same mystery as we encountered in studying the prophets of the Old Testament. Both prophets and apostles speak with a knowledge of the mind and will of God which has a certainty and authority peculiar to their writings. We ought to speak, if we speak at all, with certainty and authority too ; but there is a difference between ours and theirs. I know how difficult it is to define the difference ; THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 241 we cover it up with the vague word Inspiration ; but I do not see any use in hiding from ourselves that it exists. Admitting, however, that there is this mystery, yet we can see, in some respects, how the truth, when it came, dealt with St. Paul, and how his mind was exercised about it ; and in these respects he is not beyond our imitation. What I wish to emphasize in this lecture is, that Christianity did specially lay hold of him in the region of the intellect. It is meant to lay hold of all parts of the inner man — the feelings, the con science, the will, the intellect ; and it may lay hold of certain people more fully in one part of their be ing and of others in another according to their con stitutional peculiarities. Some suppose — and per haps they are not far wrong — that the first preaching of the Gospel consisted of little more than the simple story of the life and death of Jesus ; that those who heard it sympathetically began forthwith to live new lives in imitation of Christ ; and that this was the most of their Christianity. In a fine and peculiar nature like that of St. John, again, the Gospel caught hold chiefly in the region of the emo tions ; and his Christianity was a mystical union and fellowship between the Saviour and the soul. St. Paul was not by any means deficient in the other 242 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. elements of humanity ; but he was conspicuously strong in intellect. That is to say, he was one of those natures to which it is a necessity to know the why and the wherefore of everything — of the uni verse in which they live, of the experiences through which they pass, of the ends which they are called upon to pursue. This natural tendency was strength ened by the training of an educated man. And therefore the Gospel came to him as a message of truth, which cleared up the mysteries of existence and presented the universe to the mind as a realm of order. St. Paul often expresses the intense intellectual satisfaction which Christianity brought him, and the joy he experienced in applying it to the solution of the problems of life. The light which Christianity cast on the universe was to him, he says, like the morning of creation, when God said, Let there be light, and there*was light. Before, all was darkness and chaos, but then all became sunshine and order. He often speaks with wondering gratitude of the fact that the mystery which had been hidden from ages and from generations had been revealed to him : Eye had not seen, nor ear heard, neither had entered into the heart of man, the things which God had prepared for them that love Him, but God had revealed them unto him by His Spirit. And by this THE PREACHER ASA THINKER. 243 mystery he meant the tangle of God's providence in history, which the coming of Christ disentangled and smoothed out into a web whose pattern the mind could discern. Having himself received Christianity as an intel lectual system, he very specially addressed himself to the intellect of others. The door of the kingdom of heaven, it has been beautifully said, can only be opened from the inside ; but to that observation this other may be added, that in a sense there are many doors, but each man can only open to others the one by which he has entered himself. Christianity had come to St. Paul as the truth about God and the world and himself. There was plenty of emo tion besides ; but the emotion for him came after the clear intellectual conviction and sprang out of it. And he expected that others would receive Christianity in the same way. Therefore he never spared the minds of those he addressed ; he ex pected them to think ; and he would have said that, if they would not open and exert their minds, they could not receive Christianity. I hardly know anything more puzzling than the audacity with which he cast himself on the minds of his hearers and trusted them to understand him, when he was thinking his strongest and his deepest. Imagine an epistle of his arriving in Rome or Ephe- 244 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. sus, and read out in the audience of the church for the first time. Who were the hearers? The ma jority of them were slaves ; many had till a short time before been unconcerned about religion ; in all probability not a tithe of them could read or write. Yet what did Paul give them ? Not milk for babes ; not a compost of stories and practical remarks ; but the Epistle to the Romans, with its strict logic and grand ideas, or the Epistle to the Ephesians, with its involved sentences and profound mysticism. He must have believed that they would understand what he wrote, though scholarship has considered it necessary to pile up a mountain of commentaries on these epistles. Christianity, as it went through the cities of the world in St. Paul's person, must have gone as a great intellectual awakening, which taught men to use their minds in investigating the profoundest problems of life. How deeply he was interested in the intellectual reception of the Gospel is shown by the earnestness with which he prays that his converts may excel in mental grasp of the truth. " I pray," he says, " that your love may abound yet more and more in knowl edge and in all judgment." And again he says, " Making mention of you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revela- THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 245 tion in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your un derstanding being enlightened," etc. But nothing proves so clearly the value which he set on this element of Christianity as his earnest ness that his version of the Gospel should be kept pure and entire. He called upon younger ministers, like Timothy and Titus, to guard it as a precious treasure and to transmit it to faithful men who would be able to teach others also. It filled him with the most poignant anxiety and pain when the minds of his converts were assailed with doctrines subversive of the truth which he had taught. He had to encounter assaults of this kind coming from the side of orthodoxy as well as of heterodoxy, and no small portion of his energy had to be expended in refuting them. You remember, for example, with what a heat of zeal and affection he cast him self on the Galatians, when they had lent an ear to false teachers : " O foolish Galatians, who hath be witched you ? " " If any man preach any other gos pel unto you than that which ye have received, let him be accursed." Gentlemen, you are going to be teachers of Chris tianity, and this implies that you should yourselves have mastered it in thought. A certain number of people will be more or less dependent on you for 17 246 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. the view they have of Christianity; and this really means the view they have of all the most impor tant and solemn objects of existence ; for to them all things will be comprehended in Christianity; and on you will largely depend whether this view is true or false, narrow or noble. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance to men and women of their fundamental convictions about this universe in which they live. There is current, indeed, at present a way of speaking about the intellect, as if, while all the other faculties have to do with religion, it were only an intruder ; and there is a way of speaking about definite religious truth which really implies, if any strict meaning is to be attached to it, that in religion, when the truth is not found, the opposite may answer quite as well ; and yet, strange to say, this language is usu ally to be heard from the lips of those who make special claims to intellectuality and affect to be the special champions of truth. But the intellect is a noble faculty and has an important office in religion. It is, properly speaking, antecedent to both feeling and will; and what is put into it determines both what feeling and choice will be. People are often, indeed, swept into the Church on some current of feeling ; and the pressure on every side of the Christian society, along with the examples of su; THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 247 perior Christians, does much to develop the relig ious nature ; but probably in the great crises of temptation, when a flood of passion or some great worldly opportunity is about to sweep a man away from his connection with Christ, that which keeps hold of him is the force of conviction — if the roots of his mind have gone deep down and clasped them selves about the great verities of the faith. Our Lord Himself called the truth the foundation on which the whole structure of life is built. All that a man is and does depends, in the last resort, on what he knows and believes. It will be a calamity for your hearers, if from your preaching they are not able by degrees to put together in their minds a conception of Christianity both true and elevating, which will supply them with the fundamental principles of their life. Besides this sacred obligation to our people, there is the obligation to the truth itself. This was felt by St. Paul profoundly. A revelation of Chris tianity had been committed to him, and he had to present it in all its splendour and apply it to all the details of life. So the Word of God is committed to us, and we are responsible for delivering its whole message. If we take up a single text of the Bible, our merit as preachers lies in bringing out attract ively and comprehensively the truth which it con- 248 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. tains. It would be considered still more meritori ous to present the whole message contained in a book of the Bible ; and it would be quite in accord ance with the theological fashion of the time if a preacher were able to show that he was master of some single section of Scripture, say, the Prophets of the Old Testament or the writings of St. John. I do not know why we should hesitate about the next step, which, if we have gone so far, we are logically bound to take — the mastery of the mes sage of the Bible as a whole. This is what we are responsible for. The Bible is the message of the mind and will of the loving and redeeming God ; and this we are bound to deliver in such a way that neither its truth nor its glory will suffer in our hands. How this is to be done, of course it requires wis dom to decide, and there will doubtless be different ways for different men and for different times. In a former generation a president of this college* preached in the College Chapel straight through the doctrines of Christianity, taking them up one by one in systematic order ; and his book was long a model to preachers both in this country and Great Britain. He was preaching to an academic audi ence, and there are probably few congregations for * The earlier President Dwight. THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 249 which such a course would be suitable now ; although I know at least one able young minister in a country village who has been pursuing this method from the commencement of his ministry. Once a month he gives a sermon of the course ; perhaps his people do not know that he is doing so; but he is giving his own mind the discipline of investigating the doctrines of Christianity in their order; and I am certain both that he himself is growing a strong man in the process and that his people, though un consciously, are getting the benefit of it. In the Lutheran and Episcopal Churches the observance of the Christian festivals gives occasion for regularly bringing the circle of the grand Christian facts be fore the minds of the people. We have not this guidance; but a faithful minister is bound to make sure that he is preaching with sufficient frequency on the leading Christian facts and doctrines, and that he is not omitting any essential element of Christianity.* Not unfrequently ministers are exhorted to cul tivate extreme simplicity in their preaching. Every thing ought, we are told, to be brought down to the comprehension of the most ignorant hearer, * " Great subjects insure solid thinking. Solid thinking prompts a sen sible style, an athletic style, on some themes a magnificent style, and on all themes a natural style." — Phelps, My Note-book. 250 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. and even of children. Far be it from me to depre ciate the place of the simplest in the congregation ; it is one of the best features of the Church of the present day that it cares for the lambs. I dealt with this subject, not unsympathetically I hope, in a former lecture. But do n'ot ask us to be always speaking to children or to beginners. Is the Bible always simple ? Is Job simple, or Isaiah ? Is the Epistle to the Romans simple, or Galatians? This cry for simplicity is three-fourths intellectual lazi ness ; and that Church is doomed in which there is not supplied meat for men as well as milk for babes. We owe the Gospel not only to the barbarian but also to the Greek, not only to the unwise but also to the wise.* I do not believe, however, that it is only in cult ured congregations that this element of preaching is required. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that yo*u will drive the common man away from the Church by strong intellectual preaching. You will do so no doubt if you preach over his * " We owe it to the Church, we owe it to the time in which God has called us to labour, we owe it 10 the restless and perplexed but often honest minds in whos1? presence we carry on our ministry, to be not merely a hard-w< rking but a learned clergy. To Ihose great questions which both stir and disquiet men, we are bound to bring that knowledge which will give us a claim to be listened to. ' Know as much as you can ; ' that ought to be the rule to which an educated clergyman should hold himself forever tied. A clergyman ought to be a student, a reader and a thinker, to the very end." — Dean Church. THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 251 head,* and use a language which he does not un derstand. You must find him where he is, and either speak to him in his own language or teach him yours by slow degrees. But, if you accommo date yourself to him so far, you will find him alert and willing to accompany you ; you will find that he has not only sturdy limbs for climbing, but even wings for soaring to the heights of truth. A greater difficulty lies in the preacher himself. At the beginning of his ministry he may be encum bered with doubts and far from clear in his faith. This is a real obstacle, and the first years of minis terial life may be a time of great perplexity and pain. I suspect our congregations have often a good deal to suffer while we are endeavouring to preach ourselves clear. It is vicarious suffering ; for they do not know what is perplexing us. They have to stand by and look on while their minister is fighting his doubts. But, if he is a true man, it is worth their while to wait. If these are the pangs of intellectual birth, and the truth is merely divest ing itself of a traditional form in order to invest it self in a form which is his own, he will preach with far greater power when the process is complete, * Richard Baxter confesses that he deliberately preached over the heads of his people once a year, for the purpose of keeping them humble and showing them what their minister could do every Sunday of the year, if he chose I 252 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. and he is able to speak with the strength of per sonal conviction. But, gentlemen, it is important for you to see that your opening ministry is not enveloped in mist simply because you have never made a real study of Christianity. This, I am afraid, is the common est source of a vague theology. In a former lect ure I have recommended a wide acquaintance with the masterpieces of literature ; but some able men at college substitute this for the studies of their profession ; and this is a fatal mistake. Literature ought to be a supplement to these, not a substitute for them. I have watched the subsequent career of more than one student who had pursued this course ; and I must say it is not encouraging. Their supply of ideas soon runs out ; their tone be comes secular ; and the people turn away from them dissatisfied. A student ought, while at college, to make him self master of at least one or two of the great books of the Christian centuries in which Christianity is exhibited as a whole by a master mind. If I may be allowed to mention my own experience, it hap pened to me, more by chance, perhaps, than wise choice, to master, when I was a student, three such books. One was Owen's work on The Holy Spirit, another Weiss' New Testament Theology, and the THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 253 third Conybeare and Howson's Life and Epistles of St. Paul. Each of these may be said, in its own way, to exhibit Christianity entire, and I learned them almost by heart, as one does a text-book. I was not then thinking much of subsequent benefit ; but I can say, that each of them has ever since been a quarry out of which I have dug, and probably I have hardly ever preached a sermon which has not exhibited traces of their influence. There is another valuable result which will fol low from the early mastery of books of this kind. You will be laying the foundation of the habit of what may be called Great Reading, by which I mean the systematic study of great theological works in addition to the special reading for the work of each Sunday. Week by week a conscientious minister has to do an immense amount of miscellaneous reading in commentaries, dictionaries, etc., in con nection with the discourses in hand ; but, in addi tion to this, he should be enriching the subsoil of his mind by larger efforts in wider fields. It is far from easy to carry this on in a busy pastorate ; and it is almost impossible unless the foundation has been laid at college.* * " A sentence of Pascal would sometimes shoot more light and life through a sermon than all the commentators upon the text since the days of Noah." — Principal Rainy. 254 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. One more hint I should like to give : it is a remi niscence from a casual lecture which I listened to when a student and profited by. Besides attending to theological studies in general, one ought to have a specialty. The minister, and even the student before he leaves college,- should be spoken of as the man who knows this or that. Perhaps the best specialty to choose is some subject which is just coming into notice, such as, at present, Compara tive Religion, or Christian Ethics, or, best of all, Biblical Theology. Such a specialty, early taken up, is like a well dug on one's property, which year by year becomes deeper. All the little streams and rivulets of reading and experience find their way into it ; and almost unawares the happy possessor comes to have within himself a fountain which makes it impossible that his mind should ever run dry. Of course I cannot attempt to give here even the slightest sketch of the doctrinal system of St. Paul ; but there are two characteristics of it which I should like to mention in closing, as they are essen tial to the right management of the element of preaching with which I have occupied you to-day. The thinking of St. Paul went hand in hand with his experience. His Christianity began in a great experience, in which he discovered the secret of life THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 255 and found peace with God. He set his mind to re flect upon this, so as to comprehend how it came about and what it involved ; and the theology of the first part of his apostolate was nothing but the result of these broodings under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. These in their-turn, however, brought him still nearer to God and closer to Christ ; and so he obtained new and deeper experiences, of which the doctrines of his more advanced life are again the exposition. Thus his thinking was both ex perimental and progressive. If his Epistles be ar ranged in chronological order, it will easily be seen that there is a splendid growth in his theology from first to last. He never, indeed, gave up the doctrines of his earlier life ; there is no inconsist ency between one part of his writings and another; but neither his experience nor his thinking ever stood still ; he made his first doctrines the founda tions on which he reared a structure which was rising higher and higher to the very close of his life. St. Paul had the heartiest scorn for intellectual- ism in religion divorced from experience ; and it cannot be denied that it is this divorce which has brought contempt on the intellectual element in preaching. When doctrine is preached as mere dogma, imposed as a form on the mind of the preacher from without, no wonder it is dry and 256 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. barren. It is when the preacher's own experience is growing, and he is coming up with the doctrines of Christianity one by one as the natural expression for what he knows in his deepest consciousness to be true, that he utters the truth with power. Never, perhaps, is a sermon so living as when the preacher has found out the truth during the week as a novelty to himself, and comes forth on Sunday to deliver it with the joy of discovery. The other feature to which I wish to draw atten tion is the perfect balance in St. Paul of the doc trinal and the ethical. If reproach has been cast on the intellectual element in preaching by its want of connection with experience, this has been done no less by its want of connection with conduct. But St. Paul is not open to this reproach. This is made clear by the very external form of his writ ings. An Epistle of St. Paul is divided into two parts, the first containing doctrines and the second practical rules for the conduct of life ; and not un- frequently the two parts are of about equal length. But the connection is far closer than this. In St. Paul's mind all the great doctrines of the Gospel were living fountains of motives for well-doing; and even the smallest and commonest duties of every-day life were magnified and made sacred by being connected with the facts of salvation. Take THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 257 a single instance. There is no plainer duty of every-day life than telling the truth. Well, how does St. Paul treat it ? " Lie not one to another," he says, " seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds." Thus truthfulness flows out of regen eration. Treating of the same subject again, he says, " Lie not one to another, for ye are members one of another," deriving the duty from the union of believers to one another through their common union with Christ.* Thus does St. Paul every where show great principles in small duties and stamp the commonest actions of life with the image and the superscription of Christ. This balance between the doctrinal and the moral is difficult to maintain. Seldom has the mind of the * Rev. Dr. Henderson, of Crieff, told me a story which illustrates in an amusing yet significant way the change which parsed over the religious mind of Scotland in the beginning of the present century. His father, the late Rev. Dr. Henderson, of Glasgow, when newly licensed, was preaching, on the Saturday before a communion, for an extremely Mod erate minister of the dignifi' dand pompous school. "I do not know, Mr. Henderson," said the latter, " what is the difference between you evan gelicals and us ; but I suppose it is that ynu preach doctrines, while we preach duties." " I do not know about that," said Mr. Henderson ; "we preach duties too." u Well," .caid the old man, " for example, my action sermon to-morrow is to be on lying ; and my divisions are — first, the nature of lying ; secondly, the sin of lying ; and thirdly, the consequences of lying: now what could you add to that?" "Well," replied Mr. Henderson, " I would add two things— .-first, ' Lie not one to another, seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds,' and secondly, ' Put ting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour ; for we are members one of another.'" "Mr. Henderson, these suggestions are admirable : I shall add them to my discourse ! " 258 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. Church been able to preserve it for any length of time. It has oscillated from one kind of one-sided- ness to another, sometimes exalting doctrines and neglecting duties and at other times preaching up morality and disparaging doctrine. To which side the balance may be dipping at the present time among you I do not know ; but among us, I should say, it was from doctrines towards duties. Perhaps in the last generation we had too much preaching of doctrine, or rather I should say, too little preaching of duty. Younger preachers are be ginning to dwell much on a nobler conception of the Christian life, and there is a strong demand for practical preaching. Undoubtedly there is room for a healthy development in this direction. Yet this is a transition about which our country has good cause to be jealous ; because it passed through a terrible .experience of the effects of preaching morality without doctrine. I question if in the whole history of the pulpit there is a document more worthy of the attention of preach ers than the address which Dr. Chalmers sent to the people of his first charge at Kilmeny, when he was leaving it for Glasgow. It is well known that for seven years' after his settlement in this rural parish he was ignorant of the Gospel and preached only the platitudes of the Moderate THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 259 creed ; but, the grace of God having visited his heart, he lived for other five years among his peo ple as a true ambassador of Christ, beseeching them in Christ's name to be reconciled to God. This is his summing up of the results of the two periods : — " And here I cannot but record the effect of an actual though undesigned experiment, which I pros ecuted for upwards of twelve years among you. For the greater part of that time I could expatiate on the meanness of dishonesty, on the villany of false hood, on the despicable arts of calumny ; in a word, upon all those deformities of character which awaken the natural indignation of the human heart against the pests and the disturbers of human society. Now, could I, upon the strength of these warm expostu lations, have got the thief to give up his stealing, and the evil speaker his censoriousness, and the liar his deviations from truth, I should have felt all the repose of one who had gotten his ultimate object. It never occurred to me that all this might have been done, and yet the soul of every hearer have remained in full alienation from God ; and that, even could I have established in the bosom of one who stole such a principle of abhorrence at the meanness of dis honesty that he was prevailed upon to steal no more, he might still have retained a heart as completely 260 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. unturned to God and as totally unpossessed by a principle of love to Him as before. In a word, though I might have made him a more upright and honourable man, I might have left him as destitute of the essence of religious principle as ever. But the interesting fact is, that during the whole of that period in which I made no attempt against the natural enmity of the mind to God ; while I was inattentive to the way in which this enmity is dis solved, even by the free offer on the one hand, and the believing acceptance on the other, of the Gospel salvation ; while Christ, through whose blood the sinner, who by nature stands afar off, is brought near to the heavenly Lawgiver, whom he has offended, was scarcely ever spoken of, or spoken of in such a way as stripped Him of all the importance of His character and His offices ; even at this time I cer tainly did press the reformations of honour and truth and integrity #among my people ; but I never once heard of any such reformations having been effected amongst them. If there was anything at all brought about in this way, it was more than ever I got any account of. I am not sensible that all the vehe mence with which I urged the virtues and the pro prieties of social life had the weight of a feather on the moral habits of my parishioners. And it was not till I got impressed by the utter alienation of the THE PREACHER AS A THINKER. 261 heart in all its desires and affections from God ; it was not till reconciliation to Him became the dis tinct and the prominent object of my ministerial exertions ; it was not till I took the Scriptural way of laying the method of reconciliation before them; it was not till the free offer of forgiveness through the blood of Christ was urged upon their acceptance, and the Holy Spirit, given through the channel of Christ's mediatorship to all who ask Him, was set before them as the unceasing object of their depend ence and their prayers ; in one word, it was not till the contemplations of my people were turned to these great and essential elements in the business of a soul providing for its interest with God and the concerns of its eternity, that I ever heard of any of those subordinate reformations which I aforetime made the earnest and the zealous, but, I am afraid, at the same time the ultimate object of my earlier ministrations. Ye servants, whose scrupulous fidel ity has now attracted the notice, and drawn forth in my hearing a delightful testimony from your masters, what mischief you would have clone, had your zeal for doctrines and sacraments been accompanied by the sloth and the remissness, and what, in the pre vailing tone of moral relaxation, is counted the allowable purloining of your earlier days. But a sense of your Heavenly Master's eye has brought 18 262 THE PREACHER AND HIS MODELS. another influence to bear upon you ; and, while you are thus striving to adorn the doctrine of God your Saviour in all things, you may, poor as you are, re claim the great ones of the land to the acknowledg ment of the faith. You have at least taught me that to preach Christ is the only effective way of preaching morality in all its branches ; and out of your humble cottages have I gathered a lesson, which I pray God I may be enabled to carry with all its simplicity into a wider theatre, and to bring with all the power of its subduing efficacy upon the voices of a more crowded population." There is nothing which I should more like to leave ringing in your ears than this remarkable statement of my great fellow-countryman. But I cannot close and bid you farewell without express ing the happiness which I have derived from these weeks spent iti your society and thanking you for the extremely encouraging attendance with which you have honoured me from first to last. To the authorities of the college, as well as to many citi zens of this town, I have to express my indebtedness for an amount of kindness and courtesy which I can never forget, and which will always make my visit to this country one of the pleasantest of memories. THE PREACHER ASA THINKER. 263 Let us, in parting, commend each other to the grace of God : O God our Father, the infinite Power, the perfect Wisdom and the immortal Love, in Thy hands are all our ways, and the success of our purposes proceeds from Thee alone. Follow with Thy blessing our intercourse together and the work which we have now completed. Bless this University — its president, its professors and students. May knowledge grow in it from more to more, and, along with knowl edge, reverence and love. May those especially who are preparing for the minis try of Thy Son be filled with Thy Spirit, and in due time may they prove faithful stewards of the mysteries of God. Bless them in their studies, in their fellowship with one another, and in their efforts to advance Thy kingdom. We commend each other affectionately to Thee ; be our God and our Guide in life and in death, in time and in eternity. For Christ's sake. Amen. APPENDIX. AN ORDINATION CHARGE APPENDIX. AN ORDINATION CHARGE.* I SHOULD like to connect what I have to say with a text of Scripture, which you may remem ber as a motto for this occasion. Take, then, that pastoral exhortation to a young minister in i Tim. iv. 16: "Take heed unto thyself, and to the doctrine ; continue in them ; for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself and them that hear thee." There are three subjects recommended in this text to one in your position — first, yourself; second, your doctrine ; third, those that hear you. I. Take heed unto thyself. — Perhaps there is no profession which so thoroughly as ours tests and reveals what is in a man — the stature of his man hood, the mass and quality of his character, the poverty or richness of his mind, the coldness or warmth of his spirituality. These all come out in our work, and become known to our congregation and the community in which we labour. * Delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. William Agnew, Gallatown, Kirkcaldy, 1879. 268 APPENDIX. When a man comes into a neighbourhood, as you are doing now, he is to a large extent an unknown quantity ; and it is very touching to observe the exaggeration with which we are generally looked on at first, people attributing to us a sort of indefi nite largeness. But it is marvellous how soon the measure of a man is taken, how he finds his level in the community, and people know whether he is a large or a petty man, whether he is a thinker or not, whether he is a deeply religious man or not. The glamour of romance passes off, and everything is seen in the light of common day. The sooner this takes place the better. A true man does not need to fear it. He is what he is, and nothing else. He cannot by taking thought add one cubit to his stature. Any exaggeration of his image in the minds of others does not in reality make him one inch bigger than he is. It seems to me to lie at the very root of a right ministerial life to be possessed with this idea — to get quit of everything like pretence and untruthful ness, to wish for no success to which one is not en titled, and to look upon elevation into any position for which one is unfit as a pure calamity. The man's self — the very thing he is, standing with his bare feet on the bare earth — this is the great concern. This is the self to which you are to AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 2G9 take heed — what you really are, what you are grow ing to, what you may yet become. All our work is determined by this — the spirit and power of our preaching, the quality of the in fluence we exert, and the tenor of our walk and conversation. We can no more rise above our selves than water can rise above its own level. We may, indeed, often fail to do ourselves justice, and sometimes may do ourselves more than justice. But that is only for a moment ; the total impression made by ourselves is an unmistakable thing. What is in us must come out, and nothing else. All we say and do is merely the expression of what we are. Evidently, therefore, there can be nothing so im portant as carefully to watch over our inner life, and see that it be large, sweet and spiritual, and that it be growing. Yet the temptations to neglect and overlook this and turn our attention in other directions are ter ribly strong. The ministerial life is a very outside life; it is lived in the glare of publicity ; it is always pouring out. We are continually preaching, ad dressing meetings, giving private counsel, attend ing public gatherings, going from home, frequenting church courts, receiving visits, and occupied with details of every kind. We live in a time when all men are busy, and ministers are the busiest of men. 270 APPENDIX. From Monday morning till Sunday night the bustle goes on continually. Our life is in danger of becoming all outside. We are called upon to express ourselves before con viction has time to ripen. Our spirits get too hot and unsettled to allow the dew to fall on them. We are compelled to speak what is merely the rec ollection of conviction which we had some time ago, and to use past feelings over again. Many a day you will feel this ; you will long with your whole heart to escape away somewhere into ob scurity, and be able to keep your mouth closed for weeks. You will know the meaning of that great text for ministers, " The talk of the lips tendeth only to penury," — that is, it shallows the spirit within. This is what we have to fight against. The peo ple we live among and the hundred details of our calling will steal away our inner life altogether, if they can. i\nd then, what is our outer life worth ? It is worth nothing. If the inner life get thin and shallow, the outer life must become a perfunctory discharge of duties. Our preaching will be empty, and our conversation and intercourse unspiritual, unenriching and flavourless. We may please our people for a time by doing all they desire and being at everybody's call ; but they will turn round on us in disappointment and anger in the day when, AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 271 by living merely the outer life, we have become empty, shallow and unprofitable. Take heed to thyself! If we grow strong and large inwardly, our people will reap the fruit of it in due time: our preaching will have sap and power and unction; and our intercourse will have about it the breath of another world. We must find time for reading, study, meditation and prayer. We should at least insist on having a large forenoon, up, say, to two o'clock every day, clear of interruptions. These hours of quietness are our real life ! It is these that make the minis terial life a grand life. When we are shut in alone, and, the spirit having been silenced and collected by prayer, the mind gets slowly down into the heart of a text, like a bee in a flower, it is like heaven upon earth; it is as if the soul were bathing itself in morning dews ; the dust and fret are washed off, and the noises recede into the distance ; peace comes ; we move aloft in another world — the world of ideas and realities ; the mind mounts joyfully from one height to another ; it sees the common world far beneath, yet clearly, in its true meaning and size and relations to other worlds. And then one comes down on Sabbath, to speak to the peo ple, calm, strong and clear, like Moses from the mount, and with a true Divine message. 272 APPENDIX. In so doing, my dear brother, thou shalt save thyself. Lose your inner life, and you lose yourself, sure enough ; for that is yourself. You will often have to tell your people that salvation is not the one act of conversion, nor the one act of passing through the gate of heaven at last ; but the renewal, the sanctification, the growth, into large and sym metrical stature, of the whole character. Tell that to yourself often too. We take it for granted that you are a regenerated man, or we would not have ordained you to be a minister of the Gospel to-day. But it is possible for a man to be regenerate and to be a minister, and yet to remain very worldly, shallow, undeveloped and unsanctified. We who are your brethren in the ministry could tell sad his tories in illustration of this out of our own inner life. We could tell you how, in keeping the vine yard of others, we have often neglected our own ; and how tiojv, at the end of years of ministerial activity and incessant toil, we turn round and look with dismay at our shallow characters, our unenriched minds, and our lack of spirituality and Christlikeness. O brother ! take heed to thyself — save thyself! II. Take heed to the Doctrine. — A very little ex perience of preaching will convince you that in re- AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 273 lation to the truth which you have to minister week by week to your people you will have to sus tain a double character — that of an interpreter of Scripture and that of a prophet. Let me first say something of the former. With whatever high-flown notions a man may begin his ministry, yet, if he is to stay for years in a place and keep up a fresh kind of preaching and build up a congregation, delivering such discourses as Scotch men like to hear, he will find that he must heartily accept the rdle of an interpreter of Scripture, and lean on the Bible as his great support. This is your work ; the Book is put into your hands to-day, that you may unfold its contents to your people, conveying them into their minds by all possible avenues and applying them to all parts of their daily life. It is a grand task. I cannot help congratulating you on being ordained to the ministry to-day, for this above everything, that the Bible is henceforth to be continually in your hands ; that the study of it is to be the work of your life ; that you are to be continually sinking and bathing your mind in its truths ; and that you are to have the pleasure of bringing forth what you have discovered in it to feed the minds of men. The ministerial profession is to be envied more for this than anything else. I promise 274 APPENDIX. you that, if you be true to it, this Book will become dearer to you every day ; it will enrich every part of your nature; you will become more and more con vinced that it is the Word of God and contains the only remedy for the woes of man. But be true to it ! The Bible will be what I have said to you only if you go deep into it. If you keep to the surface, you will weary of it. There are some ministers who begin their ministry with a certain quantity of religious doctrine in their mind, and what they do all their life afterwards is to pick out texts and make them into vessels to hold so much of it. ¦ The vessels are of different shapes and sizes, but they are all filled with the same thing; and oh ! it is poor stuff, however orthodox and evangelical it may seem. To become a dearly loved friend and an endless source of intellectual and spiritual delight, the Bible must be thoreughly studied. We must not pour our ideas into it, but apply our minds to it and faithfully receive the impressions which it makes on them. One learns thus to trust the Bible as an inexhaustible resource and lean back upon it with all one's might. It is only such preaching, enriching itself out of the wealth of the Bible and getting from it freshness, variety and power, that can build up a congregation and satisfy the minds of really living Christians. AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 27 '5 The intellectual demand on the pulpit is rapidly rising. I should like to draw your earnest attention to a revolution which is silently taking place in Scot land, but is receiving from very few the notice which it deserves. I refer to the changes that are being made by the new system of national education. No one can have travelled much for several years past through this part of the island without his attention being attracted by the new and imposing school buildings rising in almost every parish. These are the index of a revolution; for inside, in their man agement and in the efficiency of the education, there has also been an immense change. I venture to say that nothing which has taken place in Scotland this century — and I am remembering both the Reform Bill and the Disruption — will be found to have been of more importance. There will be a far more ed ucated Scotland to preach to in a short time, which will demand of the ministry a high intellectual standard. It is a just demand. Our people should go away from the church feeling that they have re ceived new and interesting information, that their intellects have been illuminated by fresh and great ideas, and that to hear their minister regularly is a liberal education. Nothing will meet this demand except thorough study of Scripture by minds equipped with all the 276 APPENDIX. technical helps, as well as enriched by the constant reading of the best literature, both on our own and kindred subjects. One of our hymns says that the Bible " gives a light to every age ; it gives, but bor rows none." Nothing could be more untrue. The Bible borrows light from every age and from every department of human knowledge. Whatever espe cially makes us acquainted with the mysterious depths of human nature is deserving of our atten tion. The Bible and human nature call to each other like deep unto deep. Every addition to our knowledge of man will be a new key to open the secrets of the Word ; and the deeper you go in your preaching into the mysteries of the Word, the more subtle and powerful will be the springs you touch in the minds and hearts of your hearers. But preparation of this sort for the pulpit is not easy. It requires time, self-conquest and hard work. Perhaps the greatest ministerial temptation is idle ness in study — not in going about and doing some thing, but in finding and rightly using precious hours in one's library, avoiding reverie and light or desultory reading, and sticking hard and fast to the Sabbath work. I, for one, must confess that I have had, and still have, a terrible battle to fight for this. No men have their time so much at their own dis posal as we. I often wish we had regular office- AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 277 hours, like business men ; but even that would not remedy the evil, for every man shut up alone in a study is not studying. Nothing can remedy it but faithfulness to duty and love of work. You will find it necessary to be hard at it from Tuesday morning to Saturday night. If you lecture, as I trust you will — for it brings one, far more than sermonising, into contact with Scripture — you will know your subject at once, and be able to begin to read on it. The text of the other discourse should be got by the middle of the week at latest, and the more elaborate of the two finished on Friday. This makes a hard week ; but it has its reward. There are few moods more splendid than a preacher's when, after a hard week's work, during which his mind has been incessantly active on the truth of God and his spirit exalted by communion with the Divine Spirit, he appears before his congregation on Sabbath, knowing he has an honestly gotten message to lavish on them ; just as there can be no coward and craven more abject than a minister with any conscience who appears in the pulpit after an idle, dishonest week, to cheat his congregation with a diet of fragments seasoned with counterfeit fervour. But, besides being an interpreter of Scripture, a true minister fills the still higher position of a prophet. This congregation has asked you to become its 19 278 APPENDIX. spiritual overseer. But a minister is no minister unless he come to his sphere of labour under a far higher sanction — unless he be sent from God, with a message in hisheart which he is burning to pour forth upon men. An apostle (that is, a messenger sent from God) and a prophet (that is, a man whose lips are impatient to speak the Divine message which his heart is full of) every true minister must be. I trust you have such a message, the substance of which you could at this moment, if called upon, speak out in very few words. There is something wrong if from a man's preaching his hearers do not gather by degrees a scheme of doctrine — a message which the plainest of them could give account of. What this message should be, there exists no doubt at all in the Church of which you have to-day been ordained a minister. It can be nothing else than the evangelical scheme, as it has been understood and expounded by the greatest and most godly minds in all generations of the Church and preached with fresh power in this country since the beginning of the present century. It has proved itself the power of God, to the revival of the Church and the conversion of souls, wherever it has been faithfully proclaimed ; and it is a great trust which is committed to your hands to-day to be one of its heralds and conser vators. AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 279 Not that we in this generation are to pledge our selves to preach nothing except what was preached last generation. That would be a poor way of follow ing in the footsteps of men who thought so independ ently and so faithfully fulfilled their own task. The area of topics introduced in the pulpit is widening, I think. Why should it not ? The Bible is far greater and wider than any school or any generation ; and we will fearlessly commit ourselves to it and go wherever it carries us, even though it should be far beyond the range of topics within which we are expected to confine ourselves. Your congregation will put one utterance side by side with another ; and, if you are a truly evangelical man, there will be no fear of their mistaking your standpoint. There is no kind of preaching so wearisome and unprofitable as an anxious, constrained and formal repetition of the most prominent points of evangelical doctrine. The only cure for this is to keep in close contact with both human nature and the Bible, and be absolutely faith ful to the impressions which they make. Yet take heed that your doctrine be such as will save them that hear you. What saving doctrine is has been determined in this land by a grand experi ment ; and it is only faithfulness to the history of Scotland, as well as to God and your people, to make it the sum and substance and the very breath 280 APPENDIX. of life for all you preaching. Our calling is emphat ically "the ministry of reconciliation ; to wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Him self, not imputing their trespasses unto them ; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us ; we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God. For He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin ; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." This is the glorious message of the Gos pel, which alone can meet the deep spiritual wants of men. Preach it out of a living experience. Bunyan, in his autobiography, gives an account of his own preaching, telling how, for the first two years of his ministry, he dwelt continually on the terrors of the law, because he was then quailing beneath them himself; ho\t for the next two years he discoursed chiefly on Christ in his offices, because he was then enjoying the comfort of these doctrines ; and how, for a third couple of years, the mystery of union to Christ was the centre both of his preaching and his experience ; and so on. That appears to me the very model of a true ministry — to be always preach ing the truth one is experiencing oneself at the time, and so giving it out fresh, like a discovery AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 281 just made ; while at the same time the centre of gravity, so to speak, of one's doctrine is constantly in motion, passing from one section of the sphere of evangelical truth to another, till it has in succession passed through them all. III. Take heed to them that hear you. — I almost envy you the new joy that will fill your heart soon, when you fairly get connected with your congrega tion. The first love of a minister for his own flock is as original and peculiar a blossom of the heart as any other that could be named. And the bond that unites him to those whom he has been the means of converting or raising to higher levels of life is one of the tenderest in existence. You have come to a hearty people, who will be quite disposed to put a good construction on all you do. This is a busy community, that appreciates a man who works hard. If you do your work faith fully and preach with the heart and the head, they will come to hear you. It is wonderful how lenient those who hear us are. You will wonder, I daresay, some Sabbaths, that they sit to hear you at all, or that, having heard you, they ever come back again. But, if a man is really true, he is not condemned for a single poor sermon. Honesty and thorough work and good thinking are not so easily found in the 2S2 APPENDIX. world that a man who generally exhibits them can be neglected. If we fail, it must surely generally be our own fault. The more we put ourselves on a level with the people the better. We stoop to conquer. It is better to feel that we belong to the congregation than that it belongs to us. I like to think of the minister as only one of the congregation set apart by the rest for a particular purpose. A congrega tion is a number of people associated for their moral and spiritual improvement. And they say to one of their number, Look, brother, we are busy with our daily toils and confused with domestic and worldly cares ; we live in confusion and darkness ; but we eagerly long for peace and light to cheer and illuminate our life ; and we have heard there is a land where these are to be found — a land of repose and joy, full of thoughts that breathe and words that burn : feut we cannot go thither ourselves ; we are too embroiled in daily cares : come, we will elect you, and set you free from our toils, and you shall go thither for us, and week by week trade with that land and bring us its treasures and its spoils. Oh, woe to him who accepts this election, and yet, failing through idleness to carry on the noble merchandise, appears week by week empty- handed or with merely counterfeit treasure in his AN ORDINATION CHARGE. 283 hands! Woe to him, too, if, going to that land, he forgets those who sent him and spends his time there in selfish enjoyment of the delights of knowl edge ! Woe to him if he does not week by week return laden, and ever more richly laden, and say ing, Yes, brothers, I have been to that land ; and it is a land of light and peace and nobleness: but I have never forgotten you and your needs and the dear bonds of brotherhood ; and look, I have brought back this, and this, and this : take it to gladden and purify your life ! I esteem it one of the chief rewards of our pro fession, that it makes us respect our fellow-men. It makes us continually think of even the most degraded of them as immortal souls, with magnificent unde veloped possibilities in them — as possible sons of God, and brethren of Christ, and heirs of heaven. Some men, by their profession, are continually tempted to take low views of human nature. But we are forced to think worthily of it. A minister is no minister who does not see wonder in the child in the cradle and in 'the peasant in the field — rela tions with all time behind and before, and all eter nity above and beneath. Not but that we see the seamy side too — the depths as well as the heights. We get glimpses of the awful sin of the heart ; we are made to feel the force of corrupt nature's mere 284 APPENDIX. inert resistance to good influences ; we have to feel the pain of the slowness of the movement of good ness, as perhaps no other men do. Yet love and undying faith in the value of the soul and hope for all men are the mainsprings of our activity. For the end we always aim at is to save those who hear us. Think what that is ! What a magnificent life work ! It is to fight against sin, to destroy the works of the devil, to make human souls gentle, noble and godlike, to help on the progress of the world, to sow the seed of the future, to prepare the population of heaven, to be fellow-sufferers and fellow-workers with Christ, and to glorify God. This is your work ; and the only true measure of ministerial success is how many souls you save — save in every sense — in the sense of regeneration, and sanctification and redemption. THE END. A REMARKABLE BOOK BY THE SAME AUTHOR. Seventh Thousand. i2mo Cloth, $1.50. IMAGO CHRISTI : The Example of Jesus Christ. By Rev. JAMES STALKEll, D.D., Author of "The Life of Jesus Christ," "The Life of St. Paul? " The Preacher and His Models" etc. "Each of the sixteen chapters are brief; all are packed with matter; the hook is one of the most suggestive and striking of the many books inspired hy the unique character of Christ." — New York Evangelist. " The life of Jesus has been studied through the centuries and will be studied through all time. It is one of the most valuable books of its class we have ever seen." — Pittsburg Christian Advocate. " The style is clear and forcible. The comprehensiveness and definiteness of the treatise are excellent. The work is one of the best for helping earnest believers in Christ to see how to realize the divine ideal in their daily career." — New York Observer. Chicago Advance says : " This book is sure to have a wide circulation. It is a thoroughly readable book. This topical method of treating the subject has an advantage which win be warmly appreciated. It will be proved a specially useful book in connection with the study of the Life of Christ and in the Sunday-school Lessons for the year," Presbyterian Review, January, 1890 : u Dr. Stalker has brought fresh treas ures out of a field that has often been explored, but not in his method. The volume is interesting as well as instructive. The author thinks clearly and writes lucidly. The book is a worthy companion to the impassioned devotion of Thomas :i Kempis." Rev. Dr. McCOSH says: "It is a most precious book; full of pra-tical wisdom and tenderness, fitted to quicken and nourish the spiritual life in the soul." ENGLISH NOTICES. "It is the finest piece of devotional literature the Church has received for many a year. The freshness of thought, lucidity of style, reverence of spirit, and direct practical tone will make it prized as a book for quiet hours." — Christian Leader. "The study of the methods and matter of Christ's teaching, which he has continued from his Life of Christy is even fresher and better than any thing in that brilliant little book." — Scots Observer. "His previous books on the Life of Christ and the Life of St. Paul have had a great vogue here and abroad. But this is a greater book than either, and fitted to exercise a still wider influence. We need not dwell on the many-sided culture manifested every-where, or the author's remarkable literary gifts, shown especially in pregnant aphorisms and vivid descriptions. His thoughts are always arranged and expressed with exquisite order and lucidity, and he throws an occa sional plummet marvelously far into the depths of his subject. But the power and beauty and life of the work mainly come from this, that the author has been in living contact with Christ and man." — British Weekly. u It is not easy to speak of Dr. Stalker's book without exaggeration, and we are not surprised that some of our contemporaries have pronounced it superior to his Life of Christ. A more suggestive book for the Christian teacher we have not read for years. It abounds in new and true ideas, always clearly, often strik ingly expressed." — Methodist Recorder. " This work supplies a real desideratum in theological literature. Dividing the circle of human life into segments, each of which represents an extensive sphere of experience and duty, the author follows our Lord through them one after another, and shows us how he conducted himself in each. The pages are beacon lights, guiding us in our life's journey ; and no one can peruse them with out being profoundly impressed with the wealth of the gospels in counsels of per fection as to human conduct." — Christian. Copies sent by mail, Post-paid, on receipt of price. A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON, 51 East Tenth Street, New York.