Heralds Of God

Stewart
Heralds of God

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Heralds of God

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KANSASCITY, MO PUBLIC LIBRARY

D QQD1 0213SbO S

HERALDS OF GOD

tty the same Author
A MAN IN CHRIST : Vital Elements of St. Paul's Religion

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF JESUS CHRIST
THE GATES OF NEW LIFE

THE STRONG NAME

HE R ALDS
OF GOD

By

JAMES S. STEWART,
D.IX

How are they to believe in One of whom.
they have not heard ? And how are they
ever to hear, -without a herald ? And how-
can men be heralds, unless they are sent
by God ?

St. Paul to the Romans.

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

COPYRIGHT, 1946, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Printed in the United States of Ameiica
G-s.6o[MHJ

All nghts reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons

ROSAMUND
ROBIN and JACK

PREFACE

I HAVE chosen the title of this book to stress one
fundamental fact, namely, that preaching exists,
not for the propagating of views, opinions and ideals,
but for the proclamation of the mighty acts of God.
This is demonstrably the New Testament conception
of the preacher's task; and it is this that will always
give preaching a basic and essential place at the very
heart of Christian worship.

To write about preaching is therefore to deal with
an enterprise with which not only the man in the pulpit
but the whole worshipping community is vitally and
intimately concerned: a fact which emboldens me to
hope that the pages which follow, addressed originally
as Lectures in the Universities of Edinburgh and
St. Andrews to Divinity students and ministers, will
have something to say to the wider circle of those who
Sunday by Sunday are hearers of the Word of God,
"loving the habitation of His house and the place
where His honour dwelleth," and perhaps even to
the critic in the back pew.

I desire here to record my thanks to the Trustees
of the Warrack Lectureship, for their invitation to

5

HERALDS OF GOD

me to undertake this task ? and to my friend^ the Rev.
Graham W. Hardy, B.D., who has revised the proofs.

James S. Stewart,

NORTH MORNINGSIDE CHURCH,
EDINBURGH.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE 5

CHAPTER

I. THE PREACHER'S WORLD 9

II. THE PREACHER'S THEME . . . . 58

III. THE PREACHER'S STUDY . 100

IV. THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE ... 141
V. THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE . . .190

CHAPTER I
THE PREACHER'S WORLD

There shall always be the Church and the World

And the Heart of Man

Shivering and fluttering between them, choosing and chosen,

Valiant, ignoble, dark, and full of light

Swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate.

And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.

Darkness now, then

Light. T. S. ELIOT, The Rock.

MONG the tributes paid to the memory of Sir
Walford Davies, one of the noblest was that of
a brother musician. Dr. Vaughan Williams. He dwelt
on the sacrifice which Walford Davies had chosen to
make quite deliberately the sacrifice of the more
aloof, self-centred life of the composer, for that of the
organizer, the advocate, the musical propagandist, the
educator of popular taste and opinion; and then he
added: "It is an eternal problem that confronts all
those who feel they have the creative impulse 'shall
I shut myself up from the world and follow the dic-
tates of my artistic conscience, or shall I go down to
the world of men and show them what I have learnt
about eternity and beauty?' Walford Davies had no
doubts he was a born preacher and he determined
to go and preach to the Gentiles. This decision,"
declared Vaughan Williams, "was probably right/' I

9

HERALDS OF GOD

fancy that no one who knows what Walford Davles
did for music in this generation will dispute that
verdict.

Now the same problem, the same critical decision
to which Vaughan Williams called attention in the
realm of creative art, reappears even more forcibly in
religion; and here it is a problem, not for the few
who possess the elusive quality of genius, but for the
whole company of believers. " Shall I, as a Chris-
tian, be content to pursue the religious quest as a
private hobby, and to develop my own spiritual life;
or shall I concern myself personally for those outside,
and take upon my heart deliberately the whole world's
need for Christ ? M No man, with the New Testament
in his hand, can have a moment's hesitation about the
answer. "What I live by," declared St. Augustine,
"I impart."

You have decided this matter in the most emphatic
way of all, putting your life itself into the decision. Or
rather, it has been decided for you, by the constraint
of a higher will. For you the issue has been settled,
To bring men face to face with Christ has seemed to
you a matter of such immense and overruling urgency
that you propose to devote your whole life to doing
nothing else. You are determined, God helping
you, to go down to the world of men, and show
them what you have learnt what indeed you shall
go on learning more clearly every day you live
about the eternity of redeeming love and the beauty
of the Lord.

1C

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

It is a thrilling, noble enterprise. It demands and
deserves every atom of a man's being in uttermost
self-commitment.

"To go down to the world of men. 7 ' That thrusts
upon us this crucial fact that our work as preachers
has to be done in the actual setting of a contemporary
situation.

The Gospel, it is true, stands unchanged from age
to age. It remains yesterday, to-day, and for ever
the same. In the twentieth century, it is the identical
message which was sent by the Lord to former genera-
tions through the mouths of His servants Spurgeon
and Wesley and Latimer and Xavier and Chrysostom
and the apostles. No protean fashions of thought
can alter it. No ebb and flow of the tides of history
can prevail to modify it. It is as immutable as God
Himself.

But while the basic message thus remains constant
and invariable, our presentation of it must take account
of, and be largely conditioned by, the actual world on
which our eyes look out to-day. The Gospel is not
for an age, but for all time: yet it is precisely the
particular age this historic hour and none other
to which we are commissioned by God to speak. It is
against the background of the contemporary situation
that we have to reinterpret the Gospel once for all
delivered to the saints; and it is within the framework
of current hopes and fears that we have to show the
commanding relevance of Jesus,

1 1

HERALDS OF GOB

This is not a plea for so-called "topical" sermons,
It is deplorable that God's hungry sheep, hoping for
the pasture of the living Word, should be fed on
disquisitions on the themes of the latest headlines. It
is calamitous that men and women, coming up to the
church on a Sunday with God only knows what
cares and sorrows, what hopes and shadowed memories,
what heroic aspirations and moods of shame burdening
their hearts should be offered nothing better for their
sustenance than one more dreary diagnosis of the
crisis of the hour.

But this is not to say that the preacher must stand
aloof, cultivating a spirit of detachment from the
march of events. "What is history," cried Cromwell,
"but God's unfolding of Himself?" and the real
work of the ministry in this generation will not be done
by any man who shuts himself in with his academic
interests and doctrinal theorizings, as though there
were no surge and thunder of world-shattering events
beating at his door. Surely in this immensely critical
hour, when millions of human hearts are besieged by
fierce perplexities; when so many established land-
marks of the spirit are gone, old securities wrecked,
familiar ways and habits, plans and preconceptions,
banished never to return; when the soul is destined
to meet, amid the crash of old beliefs, the ruthless
challenge and assault of doubt and disillusionment;
when history itself is being cleft in twain, and no man
can forecast the shape of things to come the Church
needs men who, knowing the world around them, and

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THE PREACHER'S WORLD

knowing the Christ above them and within, will set
the trumpet of the Gospel to their lips, and proclaim
His sovereignty and all-sufficiency.

The question, therefore, is this : If the Gospel, in
itself unchanging, must always be set forth in the
nexus of a particular historical situation, what are the
characteristic moods and tendencies which must in-
fluence the presentation of the message to-day ?

Attempts are sometimes made to define the spirit
of the age in a single phrase to call it, for example,
"an age of doubt, " "an age of rationalism, " "an age
of revolt," and so on. But all such generalizations are
misleading. The reality cannot be thus simplified.
We have to reckon with a mental and spiritual climate
full of the most baffling contradictions. It would
indeed be true to say that tLe most characteristic
feature of the modern mood is precisely the unresolved
tension between opposing forces. Here we touch the
very nerve of the preacher's problem. There are three
directions in which this element of tension, of radical
paradox and spiritual conflict, of thrust and counter-
thrust, is manifesting itself dramatically in the world
we face to-day.

First, there is the tension between Disillusionment
and Hofe.

You are going out with the evangel into a world
which has reacted strongly and even violently against
the bland humanistic optimism which dominated the

HERALDS OF GOD

opening decade of the century. Then the great watch-
words were the adequacy of materialism, the inevit-
ability of progress, and the sufficiency of man. Science,
having finally broken through the bondage of ignor-
ance, and having shattered the tyranny of superstition,
was hailed as the New Messiah, the supreme disposer
of human destiny. Indeed, so startling and spectacular
were the boons and bestowals of this new Messianic
age, so strange and exciting the faculties put at man's
disposal, that one sinister fact went almost unobserved:
all its gifts were double-edged. The dazzling splen-
dours of its achievements masked only too effectively
the grim truth later to be learnt at an immeasurable
cost of blood and tears that science (to quote the
words of Reinhold Niebuhr) "can sharpen the fangs
of ferocity as much as it can alleviate human pain/'
That aspect was conveniently ignored. With this new
Messiah leading the way, it was argued, was there any
limit to what humanity might accomplish ? It was an
intoxicating prospect. Would not social effort, rein-
forced by all the resources of technology, speedily
bring the New Jerusalem down to earth from heaven ?
Surely the wilderness wanderings of the children of
men were over, and the path of progress must now
lead straight and unbroken to the shining Utopia of
their dreams. The Renaissance humanists and the
ancient sophists had been perfectly right: man was
indeed the measure of all things. His will was the
architect of destiny. His intelligence, storming the
secrets of the universe, had occupied the throne of God.

H

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

"Thou art smitten, thou God/' shouted Swinburne
vociferously,

thou art smitten; thy death is upon thee, O Lord.
And the love-song of earth as thou diest resounds through

the wind of her wings
Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of

things.

Now it was hardly to be expected that in the heyday
of this confident utopianism religion could remain
uninfluenced and immune. The Bible might insist
that "your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion,
walketh about, seeking whom he may devour," but
theological liberalism smiled to itself in a superior and
even contemptuous way : it was not going to take such
rhetoric too seriously. The conceptions of the world
as fallen, of human nature as infected with a radical
taint, of sin as a vicious circle which could be broken
through only by supernatural action from outside
these were classed as outmoded fictions, and relegated
to the scrap-heap of an antiquated theology. The
evolutionary hypothesis, so fruitful in other fields,
began to invade the deepest sanctities of the soul: it
now appeared that all man had to do for his redemption

was to

Move upward, working out the beast.
And let the ape and tiger die.

The Kingdom of Heaven was not, as Jesus and the
apostles had proclaimed it, a gift of God breaking into
history from the beyond: it was a human achievement,

15

HERALDS OF GOD

the product of social amelioration, culture and scien-
tific planning. Jesus Himself according to this view,
was the Pioneer of progress, the supreme Leader, the
apex of the vanguard of the pilgrim host of humanity
not a terrific Being shattering history with the
explosive word, " Before Abraham was, I am/' Chris-
tianity sounded in men's ears as good advice, rather
than good news: an exhortation to be up and doing,
to fight the good fight and follow the gleam, not the
announcement of something which God had already
done, decisively and for ever. There was accordingly
an inclination to regard the preacher as the purveyor
of religious homilies and ethical uplift, not the herald
of the mighty acts of God. So far did the prevailing
mood push the tendency to " change the glory of the
uncorruptible God into the image of corruptible man"
that there actually appeared a plagiarizing hymn,
"Nearer, Mankind, to thee, Nearer to thee"; a senti-
ment, said G. K, Chesterton tersely if somewhat
scurrilously, which " always suggested to me the
sensations of a strap-hanger during a crush on the
Tube," Characteristic of this whole attitude was the
reduced emphasis upon a theology of atonement and
redemption. Why should man, conscious as never
before in history of his own vast potential resources,
grovel as a miserable sinner, or confess himself im-
measurably indebted to sheer unmerited grace ?

Every virtue we possess,

And every victory won,
And every thought of holiness
16

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

were not "His alone," emphatically not that our
personal meritorious achievement, the praiseworthy
product of our innate spirituality. It was a mood
which came dangerously near to making religion itself
the handmaid and confederate of that pride which is
the final blasphemy and the basic sin of man.

To-day the scene is changed. When you go forth
as preachers bearing Christ's commission, it is to a
generation which has very largely repudiated the con-
fident optimism of its predecessors. The great tower
of Babel collective man's monumentum aere perennius
has crashed, and the world is littered with the
wreckage of disillusionment.

Back in 1918, a few days after the signing of the
Armistice, Lord Curzon, moving the Address in the
House of Lords, quoted the chorus from Shelley's

Hellas:

The world's great age begins anew.
The golden years return.

Such sanguine words sound almost sardonic now.
"We are living," confessed Aldous Huxley, "in a
rather grisly morning-after." The shining dream has
proved to be a mirage. Of what profit is man's creative
power, theme of his proudest boasts, if it is to become
by a strange irony of fate the very instrument of his
self-destruction ? The old, ruthless dilemma, to which
St. Paul gave classic expression in the seventh of
Romans, has man in its torturing grip. And across the
human scene to-day there echoes the haunting, un-
bearably poignant cry of Jeremiah long ago: "The

HERA L D S OP GOD

harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not
saved,"

Along with this, there has crept a deeper note into
theology. We are no longer inclined to underestimate
the radical stubbornness of sin. It has been borne in
upon us that human wisdom cannot solve the dark
enigma, nor can human action break the fast-bound
fetters of the world. If there is any healing for
humanity's hurt, it must come, not from man's side,
but from God's.

There is, however, a danger here. It is possible for
the reaction from the creed of human self-reliance to
be so violent that the disillusioned spirit is carried by
it right across into pessimism and despair. Dark
suspicions rear their heads. Has faith been a ghastly
mistake? Is there perhaps no rationality anywhere?
What if the spiritual interpretation of life is nothing
more than the creation of pious sentiment, muddled
thinking and credulity? How can the Christian
evangel be relevant in a blatantly non-Christian world?
Do not its basic axioms look frightfully incongruous
and inapposite? Never forget as preachers that all
around you to-day are men baffled and tormented by
the assault of that fierce ultimate doubt.

I would have you notice, moreover, that theology
itself, in certain of its aspects, has shared in the pessi-
mistic reaction. There are those, for example, whose
reflections on the contemporary scene have landed them
in hopeless dualism. The world, as they see it, is the
battleground where dark demonic forces wage war

18

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

unceasingly with the hosts of heaven. By this conflict
God Himself is limited, thwarted in His purposes,
constrained to strive and struggle indecisively for the
realization of His holy will. It is a recrudescence of
the Manichaean heresy. It is quite oblivious of the re-
peated trumpet-note of the New Testament that at the
Cross once for all Christ raided the dark empire of evil,
and vanquished the demons, and led captivity captive.

With others, again, the pessimistic mood expresses
itself in religious quietism. They have carried their
distrust of human nature to the point of denying the
worth of any social action. Confronted with the
collapse of the humanist gospel of man's self-redeem-
ability, they seek refuge in the unethical mysticism of
a thoroughgoing otherworldliness : "Oh that I had
wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and
be at rest.*'

Once again, there are those for whom the pressure
of disillusionment has resulted in theological irration-
alism. Man, according to this view, is so radically
corrupt that there is no point of his nature left at which
the living God can take hold. If ever he was made in
the divine image, so completely has that image been
obliterated that to talk of fellowship between man and
his Creator is downright sophistry and self-deception.
The light of reason itself is treacherous and perfidious.
He that would frame dogmas, let him abjure the aid
of logic. He that glorieth, let him glory in his irra-
tionalism! It is hard to believe that this position,
supported though it is by great and honoured names,

19

HERALDS OF GOD

can maintain itself indefinitely. God intends His
pilgrims to struggle through the Slough of Despond,
not to make it their theological home.

Here let me interpolate a quite personal remark. If
you as preachers would speak a bracing, reinforcing
word to the need of the age, there must be no place for
the disillusioned mood in your own life. Like your
Master, you will have meat to eat that the world knows
not of; and that spiritual sustenance, in so far as you
partake of it daily, will strengthen your powers of
resistance to the dangerous infection. Surely there
are few figures so pitiable as the disillusioned minister
of the Gospel. High hopes once cheered him on his
way: but now the indifference and the recalcitrance of
the world, the lack of striking visible results, the dis-
covery of the appalling pettiness and spite and touchi-
ness and complacency which can lodge in narrow
hearts, the feeling of personal futility all these have
seared his soul. No longer does the zeal of God's
House devour him. No longer does he mount the
pulpit steps in thrilled expectancy that Jesus Christ
will come amongst His folk that day, travelling in the
greatness of His strength, mighty to save. Dully and
drearily he speaks now about what once seemed to
him the most dramatic tidings in the world. The edge
and verve and passion of the message of divine forgive-
ness, the exultant, lyrical assurance of the presence of
the risen Lord, the amazement of supernatural grace,
the urge to cry " Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel"
all have gone. The man has lost heart. He is

20

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

disillusioned. And that, for an ambassador of Christ,
is tragedy.

How to maintain yourselves against the menace of
this mood that I shall speak of more specifically when
we come to consider the preacher's inner life. But
maintain yourselves you must: or else don't try to
speak to men in the name of God ! For your task is
to confront the rampant disillusionment of the day,
and smash it with the Cross of Christ and shame it
with the splendour of the Resurrection. What makes
your calling in the Church so urgent and so critical is
the fact that human hearts, bombarded with grim
perplexities and damaging shadows of despair, are
crying as never before, "Is there any word from the
Lord?" Men who have seen war's scourge let loose
twice in a generation are not going to be put off with
polite trivialities and polished essays and pulpit dia-
lectic. They don't want our views, opinions, advice
or arguments. Is there any word from the Lord? Tell
us that, they demand. Has Christianity failed? Must
God's hopes be wrecked for ever on the rock of man's
anarchic nature? Are we mad to pray "Thy kingdom
come" ? These demonic forces of evil in the universe,
mocking all our dreams and best endeavours are they
fated to have the last word ? It is all very well to stand
up in church and sing :

So be it. Lord! Thy throne shall never,
Like earth's proud empires, pass away;

Thy Kingdom stands and grows for ever,
Till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.

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HERALD S OF GOD

But is that true ? What if it is only a pose, the silly
pretence of the self-deceiving? Was Thomas Hardy
perhaps right when he recommended Christianity to
" throw up the sponge and say '1 am beaten, 5 and let
another religion take its place"? There is the vast,
intolerable mystery of suffering. Is there any word
from the Lord about that ? There is the more intimate
and personal disillusionment, the monotonous misery
of defeat in a man's own soul : "the good that I would,
I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do,
O wretched man that I am!" Is there any word from
the Lord about that? Such is the demand which
thrusts itself clamorously and uncompromisingly upon
the Church to-day. And to that demand, you please
God shall have a right to speak.

Let me at this point remind you, for your encourage-
ment, that if there is a vast amount of disillusionment
going about in the world to-day, there is also an
immense stirring of eager and passionate hope. The
tension between these two attitudes is indeed one of
the cardinal factors in the situation. Nor is this
strange blending of disillusionment and hope in the
minds of men so paradoxical as at first sight it may
appear, For a complete breakdown of humanist self-
confidence is a true praeparatio evangelical it makes
straight through the desert a highway for our God.
Preach to a soul strong in untroubled egotism, mem
sibi conscia recti and it will be like hammering at
granite. But bring the Gospel to bear upon a soul

22

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

whose self-trust has been broken, and there before
your very eyes the ancient miracle may be renewed,
and the glory of the Lord be revealed. Complacence
of any kind whether it be national or social, intel-
lectual or moral, humanitarian or religious is God's
greatest enemy. But when the foundations are under-
mined, and the edifice of man's vaunted achievements
comes down with a crash, then is the time, declared
Jesus, to "look up, and lift up your heads; for re-
demption draweth nigh/ 7

Thus the very disillusionment of to-day is the raw
material of the Christian hope. Men are beginning to
suspect that no new order which seeks to erect itself
on the ruins of the old can have one atom of survival-
value, or be other than a patchwork and a sham, unless
it has direct and deliberate reference to the mind and
programme of God for humanity. Consider in this
connection the following verdict, which comes signi-
ficantly from Dr, C. E. M. Joad: "There is in many
Englishmen to-day, and especially in young people
newly come to maturity, a renewed interest in the
religious view of the world, and a disposition to examine
afresh, in the light of it, the traditional answers to
fundamental questions which Christianity has pro-
vided. . . That the seeds of a spiritual revival are
germinating in the minds of the people of this country,
I, for one, do not doubt," The fact is that to-day, as
so often in past history, the very complexity of the
human predicament becomes in Christ's hands a
weapon for the further advance of His Kingdom. And

HERALDS OF GOD

if your calling as preachers in this generation is one of
immense difficulty, you will be strong in hope, giving
glory to God, not in spite of the difficulties, but pre-
cisely because of them. For still to-day, as at the first,
it is when the doors are shut, in the bitter hour of dis-
illusionment, that Christ is apt to break in, and stand
in the midst, and say "Peace be unto you." And then,
out of the dark misery of self-despair, men begin to
arise and shine, knowing that their light is come!

Don't listen to the lugubrious voices that incessantly
deplore the deadness of the age, and groan about the
thankless uphill task of the Christian ministry and the
desolating lack of response. It is a thrilling hour in
which to bear the commission of your Lord.

I find certain words of St. Paul to the Romans
dramatically relevant here, The eighth chapter is one
of the most lyrical and triumphant things that ever
came from the heart of man; but the note of dis-
illusionment is there. "To this day/ 1 wrote the
apostle, "the entire creation sighs and throbs with
pain." For none knew better than he that the shining
civilization was demon-ridden, and that ruthless forces
held the souls of men in bitter thraldom* But what
his piercing insight saw was this, that the mood of
tragic desperation was itself the harbinger of hope,
Just because this sighing, groaning creation was racked
with pain, it was also tense with a breathless ex-
pectancy:

Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade.
24

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

"The whole creation/' wrote Paul, "waits with eager
longing for the sons of God to be revealed. " It is
listening for the sound of a distant pilgrim chorus,
the march of a great consecrated brotherhood in
Christ, the decisive emergence of a new race, the true
sons of God, sealed with the Cross, It is scanning the
roads down which that ransomed host, that nobler
breed of saints, shall come at destiny's hour to bring
history to its fulfilment.

"Src~4s- a daring, magnificent conception. Are we
wrong to see in it a parable of that thrust and counter-
thrust of disillusionment and hope upon which we look
out to-day, and with which as preachers we have to
reckon ? When a generation has been robbed of its
familiar gods of material security, progress, human
self-sufficiency, or when the individual soul has found
its conventional religion stolen away by the marauding
forces of agnosticism, trouble and despair, then strikes
God's hour to break in with His salvation. Must we
not say that any weariness, unsettlement or consterna-
tion is in the last resort a blessed thing if it makes a
man or an age in the mood to welcome God? It is
a. great thing to be brought right down to the depths,
if so be that there at last we strike that bedrock which
is the Rock of ages; a great thing that life itself should
break up even violently the hard core of our proud
self-reliance, if so be that the human spirit may be
ready then to cast itself upon its ultimate resource in
Jesus Christ.

Therefore I counsel you let no fog of spiritual

25

HERALDS OF GOD

defeatism chill your ministry. Refuse to listen to the
lying voices which insinuate that this is an unpro-
pitious hour for the proclamation of the faith. You
are to be the heralds of a religion which once saw the
blackest, most desperately unpropitious hour in history
the hour of the crucifying of Jesus turned into
history's crowning glory and mankind's brightest hope.
Go forth, then, in the heartening assurance that this
present cataclysmic hour is alive with spiritual poten-
tialities.

To take but one striking line of evidence, there is
the new demand, particularly amongst youth, for a
cause worthy of sacrifice or devotion, the new urge
towards complete self-commitment. It will be tragic
if the Church cannot take that generous impu|se and
baptize it into Christ. If you are wise, you will not
in your preaching mask or minimize the overwhelming,
absolute nature of Christ's demand. Men are ready
for a Leader who will unhesitatingly claim the last
ounce of His followers' courage and fidelity. Field-
Marshal Wavell has told, in his notable lectures
entitled Generals and Generalship^ the story of how
Napoleon, when an artillery officer at the siege of
Toulon, built a battery in such an exposed position
that he was told he would never find men to man it,
But Napoleon had a sure instinct for what was required.
He put up a placard **The battery of men without
fear": and it was always manned. This is no time
to be offering a reduced, milk-and-water religion. Far
too often the world has been presented with a mild

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THE PREACHER'S WORLD

and undemanding half-Christianity. The Gospel has
been emasculated long enough. Preach Christ to-day
in the total challenge of His high 3 imperious claim.
Some will be scared, and some offended: but some,
and they the most worth winning, will kneel in homage
at His feet.

ii

I pass on now to a second form in which the fact of
tension, of paradox and conflict so characteristic, as
we have remarked, of the mental and spiritual climate
of to-day thrusts itself upon the preacher of the
Word. This is the radical tension between Escapism
and Realism. You will encounter nothing more
baffling than the way in which an urgent quest for
reality and an intense desire to avoid reality at all costs
can apparently consort together.

Consider the latter tendency first. Some of you will
know St. John Adcock's striking poem The Divine
Tragedy. It is an imaginative attempt to conceive
what would happen if Jesus of Nazareth were to come
back to the modern world ; if some of those who profess
our holy religion, and remain safe and snug behind a
facade of second-hand dogma and devotion, were
suddenly confronted with the blazing reality of Christ
Himself. Hear the poet's conclusion ;

When a blithe infant, lapt in careless joy.
Sports with a woollen lion if the toy
Should come to life, the child, so direly crost,
Faced with this Actuality were lost. . . .
27

HERALDS OF GOD

Leave us our toys 5 then 5 happier we shall stay

While they remain but toys, and we can play

With them and do with them as suits us best;

Reality would add to our unrest. . . .

We want no living Christ 5 whose truth intense

Pretends to no belief in our pretence

And ? flashing on all folly and deceit,

Would blast our world to ashes at our feet, . . .

We do but ask to see

No more of Him below than is displayed

In the dead plaything our own hands have made

To lull our fears and comfort us in loss

The wooden Christ upon a wooden Cross !

Who will dare to say that the poet's imagination has
misled him? Men have always been ready, in sheer
self-defence, to erect some vague idealistic image of
Jesus in the temple of their spirits. But that is the
image which we have to break, that the living Christ
may reign.

" Reality would add to our unrest." Indeed it
would. Hence the familiar hiatus between piety and
practice, the scandal of the divorce between sacred and
secular, between religion and the common life. Hence
the intent debating of theological controversies totally
irrelevant to human need. Hence the cult of a religion
that is garrulous about minutiae of form and procedure,
and dumb about social injustice: ''straining at a gnat
and swallowing a camel/' Of all such obfuscations of
the flaming challenge of Christ, John Oman once
pungently declared: "A minister who can do it will

28

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

go far; but the Church that does it is in its grave-
clothes. People want to have everything in them
spoken to except their consciences/* Or in the blunt
words of the late Bishop Gore, " We do like to lie to
ourselves about ourselves!"

In every age the preaching of the Word has had to
reckon with this perverse, tenacious mood. From the
days of Amos and Isaiah to the present, * 'Prophesy
unto us smooth things" has been an ever-recurring
demand; and Gore, to quote him again, once averred
that "the disease of modern preaching is its search after
popularity." But it is the false prophet who plays
down to men's craving for security when he ought to
be showing them the lightnings of God flashing about
their sins. "When God commands to take the
trumpet, " wrote John Milton in a famous passage,
"and blow a dolorous or jarring blast, it lies not in
man's will what he shall say, or what he shall conceal."
The true prophets have never been pious dreamers and
idealists, with their heads in the clouds. They have
dealt with concrete situations and urgent realities : in
the name of their God they have set up their banners
against every wrecking force in the life of the world
around them, and "Thus saith the Lord" has been
their clarion cry.

The trouble is that there is something deep in human
nature which objects to God, and will use even religion
as a defence-mechanism against the thrust of reality.
"The way to be successful," wrote Dr. W. R. Inge
with a characteristically caustic touch, "is to give the

29

HERALDS OF GOD

public exactly what it wants, and about ten per cent,
more of it than it expects." "Don't go out for popu-
larity/' Spurgeon used to implore his students,
" preach nothing down but the devil, and nothing up
but Christ I"

It is quite impossible to preach Christ faithfully
without saying many things which will sting the natural
heart of man into opposition and rebellion. You will
have to declare, for example, that to imagine one can
receive God's forgiveness while refusing oneself to be
forgiving to others is sophistry and deceit: a hard
saying that for many. Or take the doctrine of the
divine Fatherhood. There are still those who accept
that doctrine and sun themselves in its warm and
comforting glow, but resent being confronted with its
disconcerting and inexorable implications in the realm
of practical brotherhood and social ethics. "Give us
the simple Gospel," they cry: escapism rationalizing
itself again. Take even the missionary challenge and
the conception of a universal Church, We believe
that, just as no man is truly awake to-day who has not
developed a supra-national horizon to his thinking,
so no Church is anything more than a pathetic pietistic
backwater unless it is first and fundamentally and all
the time a world missionary Church. But there are
stubborn strongholds into which that truth has yet to
penetrate minds which, for one reason or another,
persistently regard the missionary enterprise as the
province of a few enthusiasts, a side-show., an extra:
not realizing that here is something which every pro-

30

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

fessing Christian must espouse with all his heart and
soul, or else surrender his right to march beneath the
banners of Christ. It is your task as preachers to
summon men to share with Jesus in the great crusade
which began at Calvary and Pentecost, and shall never
cease until the whole earth is filled with the glory of
the Lord; and where the narrower view prevails, you
must at all costs disturb its contentment and bid it
reflect what it will feel like for any disciple to stand
before Christ at last and say, "The world mission of
Your religion had no help from me I"

Therefore resist all temptations to dilute your Gospel
Your task is not to send people away from church
saying, "That was a lovely sermon" or "What an
eloquent appeal! 77 The one question is: Did they,
or did they not, meet God to-day? There will always
be some who have no desire for that, some who rather
than be confronted with the living Christ would
actually prefer what G. K. Chesterton described as
"one solid and polished cataract of platitudes flowing
for ever and ever," But when St. Peter finished his
first great sermon in Jerusalem, reported in the Book
of Acts, I do not read that "when they heard this, they
were intrigued by his eloquence/' or "politely inter-
ested in his literary allusions," or "critical of his logic
and his accent," or "bored and impassive and con-
temptuous"; what I do read is: "When they heard
this, they were pierced to the heart." The heart of
man has a whole armour of escapist devices to hold off
the danger when reality comes too near. But I would

3 1

HERALDS OF GOD

remind you that Peter's theme that day Jesus cruci-
fied and risen is your basic message still: still as
dynamic, as " mighty through God to the pulling down
of strongholds," as moving and heart-piercing, as when
men heard it preached in Jerusalem long ago.

There is, however, another side to the matter. Just
as we noted how profoundly the modern mind is
dominated by the tension between disillusionment and
hope, so now we have to observe that over against the
escapist attitude, countering it and setting up a further
tension, there exists a strange passion for reality.
Illogical ? Undoubtedly. But there is the fact govern-
ing the relationship of multitudes at this moment to
the religion of Christ what repels, attracts; what
disturbs and disconcerts, haunts and convinces. In
the very moment of the headlong flight from reality,
the drive towards reality makes itself felt; and " Depart
from me, for I am a sinful man" becomes " Nearer,
my God, to Thee!"

It is one of the mightiest safeguards of a man's
ministry to be aware of that hungry demand for
reality breaking inarticulately from the hearts of those
to whom he ministers. For that cry puts everything
shoddy, second-hand or artificial utterly to shame.

You do not need to be eloquent, or clever, or
sensational, or skilled in dialectic: you must be real.
To fail there is to fail abysmally and tragically. It is
to damage incalculably the cause you represent.

Anything savouring of unreality in the pulpit is a

3*

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

double offence. Let me urge upon you two con-
siderations.

On the one hand, you will be preaching to people
who have been grappling all the week with stern
realities. Behind a congregation assembling for wor-
ship there are stories of heavy anxiety and fierce
temptation, of loneliness and heroism, of overwork
and lack of work, of physical strain and mental wear
and tear. We wrong them and we mock their struggles
if we preach our Gospel in abstraction from the hard
facts of their experience. It is not only that they can
detect at once the hollowness of such a performance,
though that is true: there is also this that to offer
pedantic theorizings and academic irrelevances to souls
wrestling in the dark is to sin against the Lord who
died for them and yearns for their redeeming.

But there is a further indictment of unreality in
preaching. This is rooted not so much in the hard
problems men and women are facing what Whittier
called this " maddening maze of things" as in the
very nature of the Christian faith itself. The Gospel
is quite shattering in its realism. It shirks nothing.
It never seeks to gloss over the dark perplexities of
fate, frustration, sin and death, or to gild unpalatable
facts with a coating of pious verbiage or facile consola-
tion. It never side-tracks uncomfortable questions
with some naive and cheerful cliche about providence
or progress. It gazes open-eyed at the most menacing
and savage circumstance that life can show. It is
utterly courageous. Its strength is the complete

33

HERALDS OF GOD

absence of Utopian illusions. It thrusts Golgotha
upon men's vision and bids them look at that. The
very last charge which can be brought against the
Gospel is that of sentimentality, of blinking the facts.
It is devastating in its veracity, and its realism is a
consuming fire.

This is the message with which we are charged.
How grievous the fault if in our hands it becomes
tainted with unreality!

Of course, this is an issue which concerns the whole
Church, and not only the individual minister. Nothing
so gravely compromises the Christian witness as the
suspicion that organized religion is failing to practise
what it preaches. There are at least three directions
in which the Church to-day is having to meet and to
answer the challenge of the craving for reality. The
first relates to worship. Do our forms of worship
convey at every point the ringing note of entire sin-
cerity and truth ? The second has to do with the social
implications of the Gospel. Has it not happened all
too frequently that men of generous and noble nature,
tormented by the spectacle of the wrongs of society
and the sufferings of humanity, and on fire to help
their brethren "bound in affliction and iron/' have
cried out against what seemed to them the appalling
torpor and inaction of the Church, dragging its slow
ponderous length along, with leisurely, lumbering
organization, and have flung away from it in impatience
and despair ? The third challenge concerns Christian
unity. Is it legitimate, is it convincing, for a Church

34

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

to summon men to brotherhood and solidarity, while
its own ruinous divisions are manifest to all ? Is it
real in a day when the thrust and pressure of anti-
Christian forces ought to be driving all believers to
close their ranks and march together, in a day moreover
when the reaction from the hyper-individualism of a
bygone age is leading the younger generation to new
experiments in the realm of community is it real to
maintain and perpetuate the partisan loyalties which
disrupt true fellowship and drive Christians asunder?
"Physician, heal thyself!"

In these ways, then, the demand for reality impinges
upon the witness of the Church at large. But what
mainly concerns us here is the more personal issue.
If you are wise you will register a vow, at the very-
outset of your ministry, to make reality your constant
quest. In the fine language of Scripture, "Her
merchandise is better than silver, and the gain thereof
than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies:
and all the things thou canst desire are not to be
compared unto her/' Richard Baxter, who after three
hundred years is still so sure a guide, has some plain-
spoken words on this matter. " It is a lamentable case,
that in a message from the God of heaven, of ever-
lasting consequences to the souls of men, we should
behave ourselves so weakly, so unhandsomely, so
imprudently, or so slightly, that the whole business
should miscarry in our hands, and God be dishonoured,
and His work disgraced, and sinners rather hardened
than converted." By way of contrast, take this signi-

35

HERALDS OF GOD

ficant account of the effect produced by a great
nineteenth-century preacher on two of the most acute
and discriminating minds of his day. " We have just
been to hear Spurgeon," wrote Principal Tulloch,
describing a visit paid by Professor Ferrier the meta-
physician and himself to the Surrey Gardens Music
Hall one Sunday morning in 1858, "and have been
both so much impressed that I wish to give you my
impressions while they are fresh. As we came out we
both confessed, 'There is no doubt about that? and I
was struck with Perrier's remarkable expression, *I
feel it would do me good to hear the like of that; it
sat so close to reality/ The sermon is about the most
real thing I have come in contact with for a long time."
That focuses the basic element of the true preacher's
power. " It sat so close to reality/ 7 si sic omnes!

To make this quite concrete, let me urge upon you
the following maxims.

Be real in worship. If you are to lead others in
worship, you must be truly sharing in the act of worship
yourself. No doubt this sounds self-evident: yet it
does need to be emphasized. It means, for instance,
that you are not to occupy the time of hymn-singing
conning the Scripture lessons or fidgeting with a sheaf
of intimations or moving restlessly about the pulpit or
scanning the congregation for absentees. It is un-
natural to bid your people lift up their hearts to the
Lord and then fail to join your voice with theirs in the
common act of praise. Moreover, it is by realizing
the attitude of worship in your own spirit that you will

36

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

best find deliverance from awkward mannerisms, from
the blight of self-consciousness, and even from that
deadly menace, the " pulpit voice, " than which nothing
is more infallibly destructive of the atmosphere of
reality. And if you will remember that the sermon
itself should be an act of worship, a sacramental show-
ing forth of Christ, will not that save you from a
multitude of pitfalls? You are not likely to become
pompous or pretentious or pontifical if you are truly
seeing Jesus and helping others to see Him. You will
not scold or rate or lecture when God's Word is on
your mouth. "Have you ever heard me preach?"
Coleridge asked Charles Lamb one day; to which
Lamb replied, "I never heard you do anything else.**
But it is a different preaching which creates the hush
that tells when Christ is in the midst. There is nothing
like worship, when it is real, for destroying every shred
and atom of a man's self-importance. A minister of
God who carries a sense of his importance about with
him, even into the pulpit, is a dreadful and pathetic
sight : but who will say it is unknown ?

There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond,
And do a wilful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dress'd in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit;
As who should say, "I am Sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!"

Not that the corrective of a stiff and ostentatious for-

37

HERALDS OF GOD

mality is to be a slovenly and casual informality!
4 * Some people imagine/' declared the late Bernard
Manning of Cambridge, "that informality in the pulpit
in itself induces a belief in their sincerity or genius.
It induces only a belief in their bad taste, and makes us
want to get under the seats. Do not behave with a
triviality, a casualness, a haphazardness, as if not
merely God were absent, but as if all decent people
were absent too/' There is one thing, and one thing
only, which can rescue the preacher from the immense
besetting dangers of his position, and that is to have
his own spirit bathed in the atmosphere of worship,
awed and subdued and thrilled that Christ should
come so near. In the words of a great tribute once
paid to John Brown of Haddington by no less a
critic than David Hume, " That's the man for me,
he means what he says: he speaks as if Jesus was at
his elbow/'

Be real in language. Shun everything stilted,
grandiose, insipid or pedantic. Do not be like the
learned preacher who in the course of a sermon in a
village church remarked, "Perhaps some of you at
this point are suspecting me of Eutychianism." In your
business of bringing the Christian religion decisively
to bear upon the needs and problems of a twentieth-
century congregation, the language of Nicaea, or even
of the Westminster Divines, may be a hindrance rather
than a help. It is sheer slackness to fling at your
people great slabs of religious phraseology derived
from a bygone age, and leave them the task of re-

38

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

translation Into terms of their own experience : that is
your task, not theirs. Beware lest with facile platitudes
and prosy commonplaces you cheapen the glorious
Gospel of the blessed God. Eliminate everything
which does not ring true. Be chary of indulging in
oratory. "If a learned brother/' said Spurgeon, " fires
over the heads of his congregation with a grand
oration, he may trace his elocution, if he likes, to
Cicero and Demosthenes, but do not let him ascribe it
to the Holy Spirit." If you have a tendency towards
purple passages, suppress it sternly. A generation
which is suspicious and impatient of high-sounding
declamatory language in Parliament and press and on
the public platform is not likely to be impressed by it
in the pulpit ; and if you once give men the idea that
you are indulging in self-conscious artistry, they will
hardly believe that the things of which you speak are
overmastering realities. John Bunyan declares, In the
Preface to Grace Abounding^ "I could have stepped into
a style much higher than this, and could have adorned
all things more than here I have seemed to do." But
he is quite candid about his reason for refusing such
tricks of elegance and ornament: "I dare not. God
did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play,
when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me ; where-
fore I may not play in relating of them, but be plain
and simple, and lay down the thing as it was." You
are to be dealing in your preaching with real things:
temptation, crushing grief, the fear of death, the grace
of Christ. On such themes, you cannot indulge in

39

HERALDS OF GOD

florid writing and preciosity without seeming to deny
their reality. "We talk now/' exclaimed Joseph
Parker, "about sermons being polished, and finished,
and exquisite, with many a delicate little touch artistic.
The Lord send fire upon all such abortions and burn
them up, till their white ashes cannot any more be
found!"

This is not to ban emotion from preaching. Any
such advice would be supremely foolish. No man who
realizes what is at stake the depth of the human
plight and the wonder of the divine remedy will lack
the authentic touch of passion. The preacher, said
Lacordaire, is like Mount Horeb: "before God strikes
him he is but a barren rock, but as soon as the divine
hand has touched him, as it were with a finger, there
burst forth streams that water the desert/' What I
would warn you against is not the genuine note of feel-
ing that will carry your words like winged things into
many a heart : it is that self-conscious straining after
effect which may be legitimate in the schools of the
sophists but is totally out of place at the mercy-seat
of God. "Great sermons/* declared Henry Ward
Beecher, "are nuisances. Show-sermons are the tempta-
tion of the devil." Life and death issues are in your
mouth when you preach the Gospel of Christ; and it is
simply tragic trifling to make the sermon a declamatory
firework show, or a garish display of the flowers of
rhetoric. Have you ever marvelled at the Bible's
sublime economy of words? Take a story like the
coming of Ruth and Naomi. There is no striving

40

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

after literary effect; the whole thing is told in short,
quiet, almost staccato sentences; not a word is wasted,
Yet how packed with emotion it is, how truly and pro-
foundly moving! Or take the chapter which describes
how David in the unguarded hour broke faith with
his own soul and with God. Could any flamboyant
eloquence of denunciation have equalled the over-
whelming effect of those quiet words at the close:
"But the thing that David had done displeased the
Lord"? Above all, take the Passion narratives in the
Gospels. How their restraint rebukes our vain em-
bellishments ! How crude and turgid those cherished
purple passages begin to look in the light of the Word
of God! Christ's messengers are sent forth armed
with a Word able to break men's hearts and heal
them. But remember as Richard Baxter told the
preachers of his day " you cannot break men's
hearts by patching up a gaudy oration." Be real in
language !

Finally, I would say this : Be real in your total attitude
to the message. There is something wrong if a man,
charged with the greatest news in the world, can be
listless and frigid and feckless and dull Who is going
to believe that the tidings brought by the preacher
matter literally more than anything else on earth if
they are presented with no sort of verve or fire or
attack, and if the man himself is apathetic and un-
inspired, afflicted with spiritual coma, and unsaying
by his attitude what he says in words? There is no
prayer that ought to be more constantly on your lips

41

HERALDS OF GOD

than those lines of Charles Wesley, surely the most
characteristic he ever wrote:

O Thou who earnest from above,
The pure celestial fire to impart,

Kindle a flame of sacred love
On the mean altar of my heart.

There let it for Thy glory burn.

Think of the news you are ordained to declare.
That God has invaded history with power and great
glory; that in the day of man's terrible need a second
Adam has come forth to the fight and to the rescue;
that in the Cross the supreme triumph of naked evil
has been turned once for all to irrevocable defeat; that
Christ is alive now and present through His Spirit;
that through the risen Christ there has been let loose
into the world a force which can transform life beyond
recognition this is the most momentous message
human lips were ever charged to speak. It dwarfs all
other truths into insignificance. It is electrifying in
its power, shattering in its wonder. Surely i't is
desperately unreal to talk of themes like these in a voice
deadened by routine, or in the maddeningly offhand
and impassive manner which is all too familiar. It
ought not to be possible to conduct a Church service
in a way which leaves a stranger with the impression
that nothing particular is happening and that no
important business is on hand, "Went to Church
to-day/' wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in his journal,
"and was not greatly depressed/' If that is the best

42

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

we can do for people, is it worth doing? "Certainly I
must confess/' cried Sir Philip Sidney, "I never heard
the old song of Percy and Douglas, that I found not
my heart moved more than with a trumpet/' And to
you has been committed the infinitely more heart-
moving story of the Word made flesh : " that incredible
interruption/' wrote G. K. Chesterton, "as a blow that
broke the very backbone of history/' "It were better/'
he declared, "to rend our robes with a great cry against
blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgment, rather than
to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism, in
the presence of so catastrophic a claim."

What strikes you about the preachers of the New
Testament is that they had been swept off their feet
and carried away by the glory of the great revelation.
They went to men who had sinned disastrously, and
they cried, "Listen! We can tell you of reconciliation
and a new beginning/' They went to others who had
nothing but the vaguest fatalism for a religion, and
they proclaimed exultingly the love of the eternal
Father. They went to desolate and weak and lonely
souls, and with shouts of confidence exclaimed, "Lift
up your heads ! You can do all things through Christ
who strengthens you/' They went to others shivering
in cold terror at the thought of death's onward in-
exorable march, and they bade them "Rejoice! Christ
has conquered. Death lies dead!" It is the same
tremendous tidings for which the world is hungry yet.
To discover, after a hundred defeats, that it is still
possible in Christ to make a fresh beginning ; to have

43

HERALDS OF GOD

distrusted God for half a lifetime of prayerless years,
and then to be told that He cares intensely, and that
the way to His heart lies open now; to have felt
utterly inadequate for life's demands and for the wear
and tear of worrying days, and then to learn of vast
incalculable reserves of power just waiting to be used;
to have had nothing to look forward to but the snapping
of the ties that matter most, and then to find that death
has ceased to count, because victory and immortality
belong to love this is the glorious news, too often,
alas, made dull and commonplace by our poor bung-
ling, and desupernaturalised by our stolidity and
ineptitude.

Suppose the apostles were to come back to earth
to-day, and watch us at our weekly worship. Would
they recognize the religion in whose dawn they had
found it such bliss to be alive ? Might they not have
to say, "What has happened? Is this the faith that
once stirred the world like a thousand trumpets? Is
this the miraculous religion that burnt us with its
flame ? How can these our descendants repeat with the
chill of lackadaisical boredom words that once awak-
ened the dead? 'God was incarnate': can they say
that, and not be thrilled and dazzled by the amazement
of it? 'The Son of God was crucified, dead, and
buried' : can they think of that and not be overwhelmed
by its awful meaning? ' Christ is risen': can they tell
that, and not want to shout for the glory of it ? Why
have they allowed these breathlessly exciting facts to
be written in the dull catalogue of common things and

44

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

suffocated by the formalities of a routine religion?
Why seek ye the living among the dead? 7 '

" Were there but such clear and deep impressions
upon our souls/' wrote Richard Baxter, "of the
glorious things that we daily preach, O what a change
it would make in our sermons and in our private
course. I marvel how I can preach of them slightly
and coldly. I seldom come out of the pulpit but my
conscience smiteth me that I have been no more
serious and fervent. 'How could'st thou speak of life
and death with such a heart ?'" The fact is that all
our assiduous planning for increased efficiency in
organized religion will lead to nothing unless we have
a Church which is tingling and vibrating with the
wonder of its own evangel. Then, only then, will the
Christian forces make their God-intended impact on
the world ; and then we shall begin to understand the
saying that is written: "The zeal of Thy house hath
eaten me up/'

I am not suggesting that you should simulate a
warmth and passion which you do not feel. Such
"synthetic unction/' as Dr. W. R. Maltby has called
it, "may impress simple souls, but it corrupts the
preacher. Emotion arises out of the truth: emotion-
alism is poured on to it." That is the great difference.
But you will need no cheap substitute for the real
thing if you are living close to Christ. Your heart will
burn within you as He talks with you by the way; and
something of that inner glow will communicate itself
to your preaching, and kindle a flame in other lives.

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This will be true, not only of sermons belonging to
what is sometimes called the prophetic function of the
ministry, but also of those in which the teaching note
predominates, A ministry extending over many years
in one place can be effective and fruitful only if much
of its strength is given to systematic exposition of the
Bible and regularly planned instruction on the great
doctrines of the Christian faith. But what I am con-
cerned to insist on at the moment is that even your
teaching sermons ought to have in them, and can have,
something of the authentic thrill of the evangel. Do
not believe the defeatist moan that the production of
two vital sermons each week is neither mentally nor
spiritually possible. For if there are indeed " un-
searchable riches" in Christ, you will always be
pioneering and exploring, always discovering new
depths in the Gospel, and the streams of the river of
life will never for you run dry. The longest ministry
is too short by far to exhaust the treasures of the Word
of God. Certainly if you preach your own theories and
ideas, using Scripture texts merely as pegs to hang
them on, you will soon be at the end of your resources
and the sooner the better. But if you will let the
Scriptures speak their own message, if you will realize
that every passage or text has its own quite distinctive
meaning, you will begin to feel that the problem is not
lack of fresh material, but the very embarrassment of
riches; and with the Psalmist you will cry, "I rejoice
at Thy Word, as one that findeth great spoil/' Thus
in teaching and exposition no less than in direct

46

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

evangelism, in your continual task of instructing your
people in the whole counsel of God no less than in the
act of appealing for decision, the message will be alive,
throbbing with vital force, imbued with the redeeming
energy of the Holy Spirit: " quick and powerful, and
sharper than any two-edged sword. 7 ' No one will
doubt or question its reality.

It was this characteristic which R. W. Dale of
Birmingham noted in the work of D. L. Moody. "He
preached in a manner which produced the sort of effect
produced by Luther. He exulted in the free grace of
God. His joy was contagious. Men leaped out of
darkness into light, and lived a Christian life after-
wards." There is no reason why your ministry, in its
own degree, should not achieve visible results, provided
you keep alive within you a sense of the wonder of the
facts you preach and of the urgency of the issues with
which you deal. Every Sunday morning when it comes
ought to find you awed and thrilled by the reflection
"God is to be in action to-day, through me, for these
people: this day may be crucial, this service decisive,
for someone now ripe for the vision of Jesus." Re-
member that every soul before you has its own story
of need, and that if the Gospel of Christ does not meet
such need nothing on earth can. Aim at results.
Expect mighty works to happen. Realize that, al-
though your congregation may be small, every soul is
infinitely precious. Never forget that Christ Himself,
according to His promise, is in the midst, making the
plainest and most ordinary church building into the

47

HERALDS OF GOD

house of God and the gate of heaven. Hear His voice
saying, "This day is the Scripture fulfilled in your ears.
This day is salvation come to this house." Then
preaching, which might otherwise be a dead formality
and a barren routine, an implicit denial of its own high
claim, will become a power and a passion; and the
note of strong, decisive reality, like a trumpet, will
awaken the souls of men.

in

Up to this point, we have been considering the
preacher's task as influenced by two crucial factors in
the contemporary scene: the tension between dis-
illusionment and hope, and the tension between
escapism and realism. We turn now finally to a third
characteristic mood with which we have to reckon in
our presentation of the Gospel to this age. This is the
critical tension between Scepticism and Faith. You are
going out to a world which is literally "in a strait
betwixt two/' torn by an inner conflict between the
spirit of denial and the spirit of affirmation, between
the loud self-confident dogmatism of the thorough-
going sceptic and the deep wistfulness of the seeker
after God. "Poore intricated soule!" cried John
Donne long ago, contemplating the unresolved ten-
sions of man's nature, "Riddling, perplexed, laby-
rinthicall soule!"

That there has been, on the one hand, a widespread
failure of belief is all too apparent. Evidences of it

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

can be found In the neglect of public worship; in the
indifference to the Bible; in the astounding ignorance
even amongst well-educated people as to what Chris-
tianity really is; and in the prevalence of the type of
humanism we have already referred to, which dethrones
God and sets man in the centre of the picture. The
causes of the sceptical mood are various. Some have
been driven from the citadel of faith by the formidable
assaults of science. Others have found their religious
beliefs crumbling away before the ruthless, terrifying
aspect of a world at war. Others have felt the desolat-
ing stab of doubt and misgiving as they grappled with
the mystery of suffering. Many have lost the vision
through failure to maintain a disciplined devotional
life. Many have lacked the necessary powers of
resistance to ward off the infection of a predominantly
secularist society.

There, then, is the challenge you are called upon to
meet. I am not thinking now of that flippant, super-
ficial type of scepticism which will stand in the presence
of the profoundest mysteries without a trace of awe or
wonder, which will talk jauntily of its emancipation
from the ethics of Christ, and smile patronizingly at
the prayers of the saints, and look with pity upon those
who still frequent the worship and ordinances of the
Church. Nor am I thinking of the intellectually half-
baked scepticism which has a naturalistic explanation
for every phenomenon of the religious life, which
calls prayer auto-suggestion, and conscience a utili-
tarian social contract, and immortality flagrant wishful-

49

HERALDS OF GOD

thinking, and God a projection of the human mind:
as if such a travesty of the facts, such a "weary, stale,
flat, and unprofitable" jargon, compounded of bad
psychology and unintelligent rationalism, could cancel
out the witness of the Christian centuries, or be the
dynamite to blast and to destroy the Rock of ages!
I am thinking rather of the deeper and more serious
challenge which accosts our ministry in this age when
beliefs which once seemed inviolable are fighting for
their very life, and when the faith of multitudes of our
fellow-men has gone down defeated before the wild
surge and onset of militant doubt. Have you, as
Chtrist's ambassadors, the word of the Lord for such a
situation? Can you confront it with the decisive
testimony of an irrefragable first-hand experience?
"I believe/' cried the psalmist, "therefore have I
spoken." It is a great thing to be able, like the
apostle, to add: "We also believe, and therefore
speak."

To be aware, however, of the prevalent mood of
scepticism and of the widespread failure of belief is
not enough. For beneath the surface there is an acute
tension: the thesis and antithesis of doubt and faith,
the drive of the spirit of denial, and the urge of the
quest for God. Do not allow the drift away from the
Church, and the apparent indifference and even hostil-
ity to organized religion, to deceive you. Everywhere
to-day, even in the least likely places, there are men
dimly seeking the Lord, "if haply they might feel after

So

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

Him, and find Him." You will remember how the
invincible wistfulness of faith kept glimmering even
through the scepticism of Thomas Hardy;

That with this bright believing band

I have no claim to be.
That faiths by which my comrades stand

Seem fantasies to me,
And mirage-mist their Shining Land,

Is a strange destiny.

Surely if we had ears to hear and eyes to see, we should
recognize the same deep ache and yearning to-day even
in lives apparently devoid of Christian convictions,
lacking any conscious background of God for their
thinking and activity, with no flame of prayer on the
altar of their spirits, and no conception of a risen,
regnant Christ who has overcome the sharpness of
death and opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all
believers. To all intents and purposes, the sceptical
mood and the assault of doubt and denial have choked
their spiritual life, as the Philistines choked the wells
of Abraham in the valley of Gerar long ago; but you
will find, as Isaac did, that the underground wells are
still there, buried but undestroyed, and needing only
the touch of faith and love to set them flowing free
again. That is the measure of your opportunity.

Signs are indeed not wanting that the sceptical mood
is less sure of itself to-day than a generation ago. Its
armour has been pierced. Its self-confidence has been
badly shaken. You will not be handicapped, as were

5*

HERALDS OF GOD

some of your predecessors, by having to preach a
spiritual view of the world to an age drugged with the
narcotic of a thoroughgoing materialism. " We are no
longer tempted/' wrote Eddington in Science and the
Unseen World^ "to condemn the spiritual aspects of
our nature as illusory because of their lack of concrete-
ness. We have travelled far from the standpoint which
identifies the real with the concrete. " Many who in
the heyday of revolt and emancipation threw over the
trammels of orthodoxy are beginning to suspect that
the Christian interpretation of life may after all be
more credible, more intellectually respectable, than any
of the alternatives. Robert Browning's dramatic
defence of the faith in Bishop Blougram is doubly
cogent now. What the poet saw with piercing clear-
ness was that, if the difficulties facing belief are bad
enough, those confronting unbelief are much worse;
and that all that scepticism does is to land the mind in
problems far more intractable and embarrassing than
those it is seeking to escape. This is the fact which is
forcing itself into recognition again at the present hour.
Hence you start your ministry with an immense
advantage. Multitudes of people to-day are haunted
by the suspicion that the world is perfectly meaningless
apart from God. That is a good atmosphere in which
to have to preach the Gospel. If you can bring to
troubled hearts the assurance that the Christian faith
does make sense of the universe and give a credible
interpretation of life, if you can show them God at the
heart of their experience, you need never fear that your

52

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

word will return unto you void, nor that your ministry
will be suggestive of the sounding brass and the
tinkling cymbal. The sceptical mood has had its
innings, and has failed to satisfy. Therefore "lift up
thy voice with strength ; lift it up, be not afraid ; say
unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!"

You will do well to remember that, whenever you
speak to men in the name of Jesus Christ, unseen
instincts deep within them are reinforcing your words.

Thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.

"The belief in God," said Rabbi Duncan, " presses
multifariously upon man." Let that be your con-
fidence !

You do not preach in a vacuum. Those secret
allies of God are always there, working in the hearts of
those to whom you are sent. One of the greatest is the
sense of sin. However much men may romanticize
the guilty conscience, or rationalize with clever casu-
istry the restless misery of the disintegrated and
dishevelled soul, there are stubborn questions which
refuse to be silenced: How shall I make my peace with
God? Can the damage be atoned for? Can the
frightful dilemma be resolved?

O how shall I, whose native sphere
Is dark, whose mind is dim.

Before the Ineffable appear.

And on my naked spirit bear
The uncreated beam?

S3

HERALDS OF GOD

Another of those secret allies on which you can
count in your ministry is the human heart's need of
comfort. Was it not Ian Maclaren who, near the end,
declared that if he could begin his life-work over again
he would strike the note of comfort far oftener than he
had done? The amount of trouble in the average
congregation is far greater than any unimaginative
onlooker would ever guess. So many who face the
world gallantly and uncomplainingly are wearing
hidden sackcloth next their hearts: "men of sorrows,
and acquainted with grief." "Who but my selfe,"
cried John Donne in a sermon in London in 1626,
"can conceive the sweetnesse of that salutation when
the Spirit of God sayes to me in a morning. Go forth
to-day and preach, and preach consolation, preach
peace, preach mercy?*' And when the Spirit of God
thrusts you forth on that same compassionate errand,
your words if you are careful to avoid all senti-
mentality, and to offer only the strong, bracing com-
fort of the New Testament, the authentic faraklesis
will make a highroad to many hearts.

But best of all God's secret allies in the souls to
whom you preach is the eternity God Himself has
planted there, the hunger for the bread of heaven.
Often only an inarticulate craving, concealed deliber-
ately sometimes behind a mask of apathy and irreligion,
it is nevertheless the decisive element in the situation
and the supremely hopeful factor of your ministry.
No man's soul can be satisfied indefinitely with the
wretched husks of a materialist philosophy. It begins

54

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

to starve for something better than such poor earthly
stuff. Sooner or later, the famine grips it. It grows
homesick. Try as it may, it can never quite delude
itself into believing that the atmosphere of a secular
society is its native air. It wants to fling its windows
open towards Jerusalem. It cries aloud for the God
who is its home. The blank space in the modern
heart, said Julian Huxley, is a "God-shaped blank/*
How can preaching ever die out while these things are
so? Do not listen to the foolish talk which suggests
that, for this twentieth century, the preaching of the
Word is an anachronism, and that the pulpit, having
served its purpose, must now be displaced by press or
radio, discussion group or Brains Trust, and finally
vanish from the scene. As long as God sets His image
on the soul, and men are restless till they rest in Him,
so long will the preacher's task persist, and his voice
be heard through all the clamour of the world.

It ought to fill you with something of the glad fear-
lessness of the apostolic preachers, the farresia of the
New Testament, to know that, even before you open
your mouth to speak, God's secret allies have been at
work in the hearts of those now waiting for the Word.
It will save you from the false diffidence of misplaced
apologetic. Shame on our apologizing for the truth
of Christ! Shame on our timid offering of some pith-
less Gospel denuded of the supernatural, dull un-
kindled ethics with a Christian tinge, views and
impressions of current events with a smattering of the
Sermon on the Mount, tame humanistic exhortations

55

HERALDS OF GOD

to brotherhood and neighbourliness and the observance
of the Golden Rule! Cannot we hear the hearts of
men crying for the living God? Do we think Christ
purchased the Church with His blood that it should
be only a depository of doctrine, only a social con-
science, only a glorified discussion group? Nothing
about a Church no culture or enlightenment, no
assiduous attention to the details of organization, no
elaborate machinery of good works can avail any-
thing or compensate one atom for the radical defect,
if it is not a place where men and women can come
quite sure that their hungry hearts will find the living
bread.

Have you that gift to offer? In the last resort,
everything depends on the inner certainty of your own
soul. Two hundred years ago, George Whitefield
preached a sermon in Glasgow on The Duty of a Gospel
Minister. "You will never preach," he said, "with
power feelingly, while you deal in a false commerce
with truths unfelt. It will be but poor, dry, sapless
stuff your people will go away out of the church as
cold as they came in. For my own part," he cried,
"I would not preach an unknown Christ for ten
thousand worlds. Such offer God strange fire, and
their sermons will but increase their own damnation."
Izaak Walton has described John Donne in the pulpit
of St. Paul's, "preaching the Word so, as shewed his
own heart was possest with those very thoughts and
joyes that he labored to distill into others." Does not
that lay bare our deepest need ? We want something

56

THE PREACHER'S WORLD

better than second-hand religion and borrowed theo-
logy, and stolid unkindled Churches which are merely
efficient and competent machines, dealing with reality
at a distance and sending earnest seekers away with an
aching, disappointed sense that something vital is
lacking. We want that thrilling sense of immediacy,
that directness of touch, that spiritual drive and
momentum, which only a personal encounter with God
can ever impart. "It is good," declared Phillips
Brooks, "to be a Herschel who describes the sun; but
it is better to be a Prometheus who brings the sun's
fire to the earth. " "I came into the town," wrote
John Wesley in his Journal^ "and offered them Christ."
To spend your days doing that not just describing
Christianity or arguing for a creed, not apologizing for
the faith or debating fine shades of religious meaning,
but actually offering and giving men Christ could
any life-work be more thrilling or momentous ?

57

CHAPTER II
THE PREACHER'S THEME

" From the beginning of time until now, this is the only
thing that has ever really happened. When you understand
this you will understand all prophecies, and all history."

DOROTHY L. SAYERS, The Man Born to be King.

IN that profoundly moving book, Tolstoy's War and
Peace^ one of the most memorable scenes describes
the night at Russian Headquarters when a messenger
brought to Koutouzow, the old Commander-in-Chief 3
the first news of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.
After the years of terrific strain and agony to which the
soul of Russia had been subjected, the tidings sounded
incredible. The envoy finished his report and then
waited for orders in silence. A Staff Officer was about
to speak, but Koutouzow checked him with his hand,
and tried to say something himself. Not a word would
come. Finally the old man turned away to where the
sacred images stood against the wall. And then sud-
denly and unrestrainedly, "Great God/' he cried, "my
Lord and Creator! Thou hast heard my prayer!
Russia is saved! " And then he burst into tears.

To-day the envoy of the Gospel is charged with
tidings more moving and more wonderful by far. If
this message is fantasy, there is no hope for humanity
anywhere. If this is true, the whole world is saved.

We proceed, therefore, to a consideration of the

58

THE PREACHER'S THEME

content of the message. What is the preacher's
theme ?

Some years ago there appeared a composite volume
with the intriguing title If I Had Only One Sermon to
Preach. It was an interesting experiment: yet one
suspects that upon most of the contributors the neces-
sity of including the whole of revelation within the
narrow limits of one all-comprehensive sermon must
have exercised a somewhat depressing influence and
imposed a considerable handicap. It would prove too
much even for an apostle. You will find that your best
sermons best in the sense of being most truly charged
with spiritual power are not those you compose when
the mood seizes you to write something outstanding
and exceptional and definitive; in all probability^ not
even those you construct with special occasions in view;
on the contrary, your best sermons will get themselves
made in the ordinary course of your ministry week by
week. You are likely in the good providence of God
to have not only one sermon to preach but hundreds,
and you must order your methods accordingly: so
that over a course of months and years your sermons
will balance and correct one another in their emphasis
on different aspects of what the apostle called the
' * many-coloured " wisdom of God. You will soon
discover that one of the most important arts you have
to learn is the art of omission. You have apostolic
authority for endeavouring to "become all things to
all men" ; but Paul never suggested that the right way
to do it was to pack a little of everything into every

59

HERALDS OF GOD

sermon, mixing your ingredients in order to have
something in the dish for every palate! There is a
cautionary recipe in an eighteenth-century book for the
making of a salad. It specifies scores of different
delicacies, and bids the ingenuous cook add a little of
this, a touch of that, a flavour of something else, until
every imaginable ingredient has been included; then
somewhat sardonically it goes on to say, " After mixing
well, open a large window and throw out the whole
mess." To concentrate too much into one miscellane-
ous masterpiece whether it be a salad or a sermon
is the surest way to fail All sermons should indeed be
crammed with the Gospel, and it is nothing less than
" the whole counsel of God" that you are commissioned
to declare; but to say that all sermons should comprise
every facet of Christian doctrine is absurd. " There
are those highly illuminated beings," complained
Joseph Parker, "who expect a whole scheme of
theology in every discourse, I trust," he added,
"they will be starved to death,"

There is, however, another sense in which the
thought behind the title Iff Had Only One Sermon to
Preach may prove salutary; and Richard Baxter's
injunction "preach as a dying man to dying men 1 '
is not simply to be discounted as morbid hyperbole.
For every gathering of God's people for worship is a
quite distinctive event; and though a congregation
may meet twice a Sunday all the year round, no such
event ever exactly repeats itself. Always there are
differentiating circumstances; always "Now is the

60

THE PREACHER'S THEME

accepted time/' One thing at least is clear: we have
no right in our preaching to waste time on side-issues
and irrelevances. In other words, if we are not
determined that in every sermon Christ is to be
preached, it were better that we should resign our
commission forthwith and seek some other vocation.
Alexander Whyte, describing his Saturday walks and
talks with Marcus Dods, declared: " Whatever we
started off with in our conversations, we soon made
across country, somehow, to Jesus of Nazareth, to His
death, and His resurrection, and His indwelling'';
and unless our sermons make for the same goal, and
arrive at the same mark, they are simply beating the
air. It was a favourite dictum of the preachers of a
bygone day that, just as from every village in Britain
there was a road which, linking on to other roads,
would bring you to London at last, so from every text
in the Bible, even the remotest and least likely, there
was a road to Christ. Possibly there were occasions
when strange turns of exegesis and dubious allegor-
izings were pressed into service for the making of that
road; but the instinct was entirely sound which de-
clared that no preaching which failed to exalt Christ
was worthy to be called Christian preaching. This is
our great master-theme. In the expressive, forthright
language of John Donne: "All knowledge that begins
not, and ends not with His glory, is but a giddy, but
a vertiginous circle, but an elaborate and exquisite
ignorance."

61

HERALDS OF GOD

But what does it mean to " preach Christ"? The
phrase calls for definition. I suggest that you should
go, for the true touchstone in this matter, to the preach-
ing of the early Church. When Henry Ward Beecher
began his ministry, he was baffled by a disappointing
absence of results and an almost total lack of response.
The chariot wheels dragged; there were no signs of an
awakening; the indifferent remained sunk in their
indifference. But one day the thought gripped him:
"There was a reason why, when the apostles preached,
they succeeded, and I will find it out if it is to be found
out." That was sound strategy, and it had an im-
mediate reward. It would be well for us if a similar
experience should drive us back to the New Testament,
to search for the secret of the first generation of
preachers of the Word. What was this message which
consumed these men like a flame, and through them
kindled the world ?

It is worth noticing, to begin with, what it was not.
It was not a theory or an idea. It was not something
they had arrived at by the processes of their own
thought and research. It was neither an argument
with paganism, nor a panegyric on brotherhood;
neither ethical exhortation, nor religious edification;
neither mystical experience, nor spiritual uplift. It
was not even a reproduction of the Sermon on the
Mount; nor was it an account of their subjective
reaction to the teaching and example of their Lord,

62

THE PREACHER'S THEME

In Its essence, it was none of these things. Doubt-
less it included some of them, but basically it was quite
different. It was the announcement of certain con-
crete facts of history, the heralding of real, objective
events. Its keynote was, "That which we have seen
and heard declare we unto you." Declaration, not
debate, was its characteristic attitude. The driving-
force of the early Christian mission was not
propaganda of beautiful ideals of the brotherhood
of man; it was proclamation of the mighty acts
of God.

What were these historic events thus heralded far
and wide? There were two events, which in reality
were not two but one. "Christ died for our sins."
That was fundamental. At the very heart of the
apostles' message stood the divine redemptive deed on
Calvary. But this literally crucial event was never in
their preaching isolated from the other which crowned
and completed it, forming as it were the keystone of
the arch. In the terse language of the Book of Acts,
they preached "Jesus and the Resurrection." "So we
preach," wrote Paul summarily to the Corinthians,
"and so ye believed/' It is worth remembering that
when towards the end he was indicted before Festus
and Agrippa, it was this unceasing witness to the
Resurrection which formed the major count in the
charge his accusers brought against him. All the
trouble centred in "one Jesus, which was dead, whom
Paul affirmed to be alive." In other words, the
Resurrection so far from being dragged in or tacked

63

HERALDS OF GOD

on to the Gospel of the Cross was implicit in every
word the preachers spoke.

But they went further. For they declared that in
these two shattering events, now seen to be one, the
Kingdom of God had broken in with power. Its con-
summation still lay out of sight, waiting for the fulness
of the time and the completion of the purposes of God;
but the new epoch foretold by the prophets had actually
dawned. From the realm of the invisible beyond, the
one far-off divine event had suddenly projected itself
into history. What had formerly been pure eschat-
ology was there before their eyes: the supernatural
made visible, the Word made flesh. No longer were
they dreaming of the Kingdom age : they were living
in it. It had arrived. This was the essential crisis
of the hour.

They went still further. The death and the resur-
rection of Jesus, they said, were nothing less than God
in omnipotent action. What assailed the crowds in the
streets of Jerusalem at Pentecost was no abstract
scheme of salvation ; nor was it the story of a spiritual
genius who had gone about continually doing good,
uttering beautiful thoughts about the divine Father-
hood and the whole duty of man, and founding a new
religion. It was the stupendous tidings, dwarfing all
other facts whatever, that the sovereign Power of the
universe had cleft history asunder, travelling in the
greatness of His strength, mighty to save, "We do
hear them speak in our tongues," they cried, "the
wonderful works of God/' This was the apostolic

THE PREACHER'S THEME

theme. This was the characteristic kerygma of the
Church. And its power was irresistible.

I have dwelt on this, because it bears so directly on
the contemporary situation and on our own work as
preachers. There is an extraordinary amount of vague-
ness, even among enlightened people, as to what
Christianity really is. One recalls a striking passage in
Galsworthy where Jolyon and his son are discussing
things together and the talk turns to religion. " 4 Do
you believe in God, Dad? I've never known/ * What
do you mean by God?' he said; 'there are two irre-
concilable ideas of God. There's the Unknowable
Creative Principle one believes in That. And there's
the Sum of altruism in man naturally one believes in
That.' 'I see. That leaves out Christ, doesn't it?'
Jolyon stared. Christ, the link between those two
ideas! Out of the mouths of babes!" But you will
find to-day that, even where Christ is brought in, the
vagueness is apt to persist; and in many quarters there
are only the haziest notions of what it means to be a
Christian, The Gospel is regarded as a codification of
human ideals and aspirations; religious instruction
means teaching the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount;
Jesus is the noblest pattern of the good life. This, it
is assumed, is basic Christianity: anything which goes
beyond it is " sectarian theology," mere debatable
theory. What this view fails utterly to realize is that
the Christian religion is not primarily a discussion of
desirable human virtues and qualities not that at all
but a message about God: not a summary of the

65

HERALDS OF GOD

ways men ought to act in an Ideal society, but an
account of the way in which God has acted in history
decisively and for ever.

There can be no doubt that for this prevalent vague-
ness the Church itself must accept some share of the
blame. Too often we have wandered away from our
true centre. Perhaps almost unconsciously we have
shifted the emphasis from where the apostles put it.
We have become entangled in side-issues. We have
concentrated too little on the primal verities of the
faith, too much on what Phillips Brooks once called
44 the bric-k-brac of theology/' Do not misunderstand
me. I am not arguing against detailed instruction in
the implications of our holy religion for life and char-
acter and conduct. On the contrary, I believe that an
interpretation of the Gospel in terms of its ethical,
social and economic challenge is to-day an urgent
necessity. Dr. L. P. Jacks was entirely right to remind
us that "every truth that religion announces passes
insensibly into a command. Its indicatives are veiled
imperatives." But what I am concerned to assert is
that in the Christian religion the indicatives are basic
and fundamental And nothing could be more marrow-
less and stultified and futile than the preaching which
is for ever exhorting "Thus and thus you must act/'
and neglecting the one thing which essentially makes
Christianity: "Thus has God acted, once and for all."
Glorious more glorious, is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down,
By meekness called thy Son:
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THE PREACHER'S THEME

Thou that stupendous truth believed 5
And now the matchless deed's achieved,

DETERMINED, DARED, and DONE.

Surely it is a great thing to realize that, just as the
early Church knew itself commissioned for something
far more vital and incisive than vague talk about topical
problems, far more dynamic and explosive than the
propagating of interesting ideas or the fostering of a
new type of piety, so you are being sent forth to-day to
thrust God upon men, to announce that in the fact of
Christ God has bridged the gulf between two worlds,
has shattered the massive tyranny of the powers of
darkness, has changed radically and for ever the human
prospect and the total aspect of the world, and brought
life and immortality to light! Here is no academic
speculation or cold, insipid moralizing ; here is no dull
collection of views and impressions, schemes and
theories ; here is a Gospel, able to bind up the broken-
hearted, proclaim deliverance to the captives, and bid
a distracted world stand still and see the glory of the
coming of the Lord.

How foolish, then, the clamour for non-doctrinal
preaching ! And how desperately you will impoverish
your ministry if you yield to that demand ! The under-
lying assumption is, of course, that doctrine is dull : a
perfectly absurd misapprehension. It is indeed lament-
ably true that the sublimest doctrine can be treated in
a way that will reduce the average congregation to
leaden apathy and boredom. "Buy a theological
barrel-organ, brethren," growled Spurgeon scathingly,

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HERALDS OF GOD

"with five tunes accurately adjusted! 1 ' John Keats
complained that " Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
unweave a rainbow''; and he might have added that
there is a formal type of preaching which all too
successfully clips the wings of wonder and unweaves
the rainbow arch of the salvation of God. But to
maintain that doctrine, as such, is necessarily a dull
affair is simply a confession of ignorance or downright
spiritual deficiency. Only a crass blindness could fail
to see that such a truth as that presented in the sentence
"The Word was made flesh" is overpoweringly
dramatic in itself and utterly revolutionary in its
consequences. "If this is dull/' exclaims Dorothy
Sayers, "then what, in Heaven's name, is worthy to
be called exciting? "

This, I believe, is the true answer to the anxiety
which haunts many a young minister at the outset of
his work, the anxiety lest he may exhaust the subject-
matter of the faith he has to preach long before his
course is run. Take comfort! Enshrined at the heart
of the faith are facts of such perennial vitality and
incalculable force that you will never, to your dying
day, tell more than a fraction of the truth that God has
blazed across your sky. "We preach always Him,"
declared Luther, "the true God and man. This may
seem a limited and monotonous subject, likely to be
soon exhausted, but we are never at the end of it."
Why should you imagine that the stimulating atmo-
sphere of expectation which surrounds you at the
opening of your ministry must inevitably give way

68

THE PREACHER'S THEME

sooner or later to a sultry air of tedious disenchant-
ment ? Does spring, regularly returning year by year,
ever become monotonous ? Is not its wonder as fresh
and unspoilt still as when the morning stars sang
together and the sons of God shouted for joy? And
are God's mighty acts in history and redemption less
enthralling than His mighty acts in nature? Drop
dogma from your preaching, and for a brief time you
may titillate the fancy of the superficial, and have them
talking about your cleverness ; but that type of ministry
wears out speedily, and garners no spiritual harvest
in the end. Therefore settle it with your own souls
now that, whatever else you may do or leave undone,
you will preach in season and out of season God's
redemptive deed in Christ. This is the one inexhaust-
ible theme. " We may call that doctrine exhilarating,"
writes Dorothy Sayers again, "or we may call it
devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call
it rubbish ; but if we call it dull, then words have no
meaning at all." I am not counselling you to keep
harping on one string, for variety is the very breath of
life in preaching. I am insisting on what is para-
doxical but true that the more resolutely and stub-
bornly you refuse to be deflected from the one decisive
theme, the greater the variety you will achieve ; while
the more you seek variety by wandering from your
centre, the faster the descent to bathos and monotony.
God's deed in Christ touches life at every point. It
speaks to every aspect of the human predicament. It
stretches all horizons inimitably. It bursts through

HERALDS OF GOD

the narrow orbit of habitual thought-forms, hackneyed
social attitudes, doctrinal predilections. There is no
plummet that can sound this ocean's depth, no yard-
stick that can measure the length and breadth of this
Jerusalem. And the surest way to keep your ministry
living and vigorous and immune from the blight of
spiritual lassitude and drudgery is to draw continually
upon the unsearchable riches which in Christian doc-
trine are lying to your hand; and to remember that
you no less than the New Testament preachers are
commissioned for the purpose of kerygma^ the pro-
clamation of news, the heralding of the wonderful
works of God.

ii

Now here we come in sight of that much-debated
question : What is the relationship between preaching
and worship? You are doubtless aware that there
exists to-day a tendency to set preaching and worship
in opposition. According to this view, the prayers
and praises of the sanctuary, and the celebration of the
Sacraments, are divine, in the sense that there we have
direct touch with God; whereas preaching is merely
human, as representing reflections, appeals and ex-
hortations issuing from the mind of man. It is
characteristic of this attitude to disparage preaching,
to regret that the sermon should ever have come to
hold so important a place in the services of the House
of Prayer, and even to hint that the position it occupies
is a subtle form of selfishness, detracting from the

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THE PREACHER'S THEME

glory of GocL No doubt this view is largely to be
explained as a reaction from the disgraceful custom of
regarding prayers and praises as mere "preliminaries"
to something more important to follow: a horrid
caricature of true worship, which to-day would be
almost universally repudiated. But surely it is deplor-
able that some, going to the opposite extreme, should
deny to preaching any integral place in the context
of the act of worship, or at best should tolerate it as
an intrusion, regrettable but inevitable, of the human
element into what is essentially divine. The ominous
thing about such an attitude is the complete misunder-
standing it betrays, not only of the preacher's function,
but even of the nature of the Christian faith. If
Christianity were the formulation of a body of human
ideals; if the pulpit were a public platform for the
dissemination of personal opinions or the propagation
of a party programme ; if the preacher were a kind of
religious commentator on current events; if his main
function were to explore the contemporary situation
and to diagnose the malady of society; if the sermon
were a literary lecture, a medicinal dose of psychological
uplift, or a vehicle for the giving of good advice the
distinction between preaching and worship would be
justified. But, in fact, that distinction is based either
on a seriously defective understanding of the Gospel
itself, or on a refusal to realize what happens when the
Gospel is truly preached. If Christianity is indeed the
revelation of God, and not the research of man; if
preaching is the proclamation of a message which has

7*

HERALDS OF GOD

come not merely through human lips, but out from the
deeps of the eternal ; if the preacher is sent (in St.
Paul's expressive phrase) to "placard" Christ, to
declare a Word which is not his own, because it Is the
Word of God Incarnate it follows that the attempt
to segregate preaching from worship is fundamentally
false. The fact is that the sermon is divinely intended
to be one of those high places of the spirit where men
and women grow piercingly aware of the eternal, and
where a worshipping congregation forgetting all
about the preacher sees "no man, save Jesus only,"
And ours must have been a singularly barren and un-
fortunate experience if we have never, when sitting in
church listening to the preaching of the Word, been
moved to adoration, never seen the angels ascending
and descending on the ladder linking Bethel to the
world unseen, and never whispered to ourselves, "This
is none other but the house of God, this is the gate of
heaven/ 7

In this connection, I would recall to your minds the
famous passage in Robert Wodrow's Anakcta^ where
an English merchant of three hundred years ago
describes to his friends in London certain preachers
he had heard during a business visit to Scotland. At
St. Andrews he had listened to Robert Blair. "That
man," he said, "showed me the majesty of God."
Afterwards he had heard "a little fair man" preach
this was Samuel Rutherford: "and that man showed
me the loveliness of Christ." Then at Irvine he had
heard a discourse by "a well-favoured, proper old

72

THE PREACHER'S THEME

man" David Dickson: "and that man showed me
all my heart. " These, surely, are the supreme func-
tions of preaching in every age. And if these things
are happening, if in a congregation one soul here and
another there may be receiving, as the sermon pro-
ceeds, some vision of the majesty of God, some glimpse
of the loveliness of Christ, some revelation of personal
need beneath the searchlight of the Spirit, is the
ministry of the Word to be minimized, or regarded as
less divine, more doubtfully devotional, than other
parts of the service ? Is not such preaching worship ?
The late Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. William
Temple, once propounded a thesis which, he admitted,
many people would feel to be outrageous and fantastic.
"This world, " he said, "can be saved from political
chaos and collapse by one thing only, and that is
worship." Certainly, as it stands, that dictum may
look eccentric and absurd. But Dr. Temple proceeded
to define what worship is, (Notice how significantly
the three elements enshrined in Wodrow's story make
here their reappearance.) "To worship is to quicken
the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind
with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the
beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God,
to devote the will to the purpose of God." But are
not these precisely the aims and ends of all genuine
preaching? And that being so, is not the supposed
antithesis between the sermon and the devotions of
the sanctuary again discovered to be thoroughly mis-
leading and untenable ? Is not true preaching worship ?

73

HERALDS OF GOD

I grant you that such a conception of the preacher's
task may well overwhelm us with a sense of personal
inadequacy and unworthiness. But no lower concep-
tion can do justice to the stupendous theme of which
we are the heralds. Moreover, the very recognition
of preaching as an integral part of worship will save
us from many errors. It will restrain us from using
the pulpit for the expression of views, preferences and
prejudices which are purely personal and subjective.
"The pulpit/' wrote Bernard Manning, "is no more
the minister's than the communion table is his." It
will make us resolute to eliminate from our preaching
everything that is cheap and showy and meretricious.
It will give us a salutary horror of flashy rhetoric,
slovenly informality and elegant frippery. It will arm
us against the vulgarity of a self-conscious exhibition-
ism. "No man," declared James Denney, "can give
at once the impressions that he himself is clever and
that Jesus Christ is mighty to save." Above all, it will
inspire us to make our preaching "a living sacrifice,
which is our reasonable service." It will drive us to
our knees. It will baptize every sermon in the spirit
of importunate prayer. Then preaching will be
worship indeed.

in

We have seen that the apostolic kerygma which at
the first carried the Gospel like fire across the world
centred in two historic events. To the supreme facts
of the Cross and the Resurrection, which are really not

74

THE PREACHER'S THEME

two but one, our preaching must ever return, and from
them it must continually derive fresh strength and
urgency and inspiration.

** I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men
unto Me/' There is no magnetism like that. Show
men Calvary "towering o'er the wrecks of time," and
you will not preach in vain. Incomparably the greatest
service you can ever perform for those committed to
your charge is to thrust the Cross before their eyes.
Leave this out, and all your other appeals and exhorta-
tions will be as nothing: empty, useless, unsubstantial
words. Set this at the centre, and it will prove itself
to be, in the twentieth century as in the first, the power
of God unto salvation.

Now the herald of the Cross has a twofold task. He
must present his theme in a double setting. On the
one hand, he must preach the Cross in the context of the
world's suffering. Your own congregation will be a
microcosm of humanity; and for many of those to
whom you minister, the dark mystery which has
haunted the sons of men from the dawn of time will be
no abstract, impersonal problem to be academically
explained, but a grim reality to be faced and fought.
Be very clear about this, that what men and women
need, face to face with the mystery of pain and trouble
and tragedy, is not a solution that will satisfy the
intellect, not that primarily at any rate, but a force that
will stabilize the soul; not a convincing and coercive
argument as to the origins of evil or the reasons why
such suffering is permitted on the earth, but a power

75

HERALDS OF GOD

that will enable them to "stand in the evil day, and
having done all, to stand": in short, not an explana-
tion, but a victory.

Right down in the heart of this situation you are to
set the Cross. You may, indeed, lead up to the great
light that breaks from Calvary by calling attention to
certain gleams that pierce the darkness of the way.
For example, you will surely be constrained to show
that much of what men suffer is but the other side, the
necessary correlative, of the immense gain and privilege
of living in a world where law and not caprice holds sway ;
that those who accept the assets of corporate member-
ship in the human family must also be prepared to accept
its liabilities ; that any system which guaranteed pre-
ferential treatment to the righteous and immunity from
trouble to the unoffending would in point of fact
corrupt the very ethic that it seemed to stablish and
support; that in any case man demands danger, and
thrives on hazard, and wants no lotus-land of ghastly
ease; above all, that it is possible to use trouble
creatively, transmuting pain into power and sorrow
into love, so that in the end such trouble positively
adds on to life's total experience, instead of negatively
subtracting from it. All this may rightly enter
into the message by which you seek to reinforce
faith and to rally the courage in the depths of sorely
burdened hearts. Nor will you lack vivid illustra-
tion of the thrilling truth that the worst sufferings
may be the raw material of character and Christlike
loveliness of soul.

THE PREACHER'S THEME

Yet I should pity the man who has to stand and face
a congregation with no surer word than that. And I
would implore you not to mock the bitterness of human
hearts with facile phrases about the nobility of pain,
nor to invade with well-meaning platitudes the holy
ground where angels fear to tread. There are experi-
ences desolating experiences of calamity, of wrecked
homes and shattered dreams, of frantic pain, of the
tragic and apparently senseless waste of precious lives
in the face of which the most rational and philo-
sophical interpretation and even the best theistic
theories must sound hollow and irrelevant. It were
better, if there is no clearer light to give, to be silent
altogether in the presence of the ultimate mystery; or
else to leave with those who suffer the immeasurably
poignant message of one who died some twenty years
before Christ was born: "O passi graviora, dabit deus
his quoque finem."

But the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than
Vergil when he penned that mighty line. For we have
seen the Cross. We have found the clue to the enigma.
Long ago there was a prophet who, bewildered by the
ways of Providence and appalled by the grim and
harrowing aspect of the world, took counsel with his
soul and made a high resolve: "I will stand upon my
watch-tower, and set me upon the outlook-turret, and
will watch to see what He will say unto me/' And a
great part of our task as preachers is to help others,
battered and besieged by the assaults of doubt, to
climb to that high rampart above the dust and smoke

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HERALDS OF GOD

and tumult, the watch-tower of Mount Calvary. For
there the new perspective is given which makes men
more than conquerors. None of our poor human
explanations of life's dark mystery can heal the hurt of
baffled and tormented souls. Nothing can suffice but
this to see Love Incarnate taking upon itself the very
worst that suffering and evil can do upon the earth,
God going into action once for all against the powers
of darkness, Christ reigning from the deadly tree, and
making His victory there the pledge and the assurance
for all the sons of men.

Preach the Cross in the context of the world's suffer-
ing, and men will learn, not only that Christ is with
them in the dark valley, God "afflicted in all their
affliction/' gathering up their distress and desolation
into His own eternal heart not only that, though that
indeed, even if there were no more to be said, would be
a mighty reinforcement: they will learn this other
great thing, that God in His sovereign love still leads
captivity captive, still transforms the wrecking circum-
stances of life into means of grace, the dark places into
a Holy of Holies, and the thorns that pierce into a
crown of glory. For the Cross means that even when
things are at their worst, even when life does not bear
thinking about, God is master of the situation still,
and nothing can spoil His final pattern or defeat His
purpose of love.

I would point out that this is a Gospel you can preach
without any fear of sentimentalism. There is always
a danger that the longing to help the troubled and to

THE PKKACHER'S THEME

bind up the broken-hearted may lead to a preaching
of the wrong kind of comfort. There is a type of
consolation which tends to romanticize the burden of
the mystery, and to interpose religion as a cushion
against the blows of fate. Beware of all such expedi-
ents : they are far removed from what the New Testa-
ment means by comfort. They serve only to hypnotize
the troubled mind and to enervate the soul ; and in the
end they reduce efficiency for the battle of life. "The
noblest specimen in existence/' according to Principal
W. M. Macgregor, "of the preaching of consolation
is found in the First Epistle of Peter/ 7 True Gospel
comfort never plays down to natural weakness : it lifts
up to supernatural strength. There is nothing en-
feebling or demoralizing about it, no flying to the drug
of fantasy: it is essentially virile, bracing, reinforcing.
And what gives it this character, preserving it from the
risk of sentimentalism, is the Cross at the centre of it.
In the last resort, the human heart is too big to find its
comfort in any soothing anodyne of consolatory words.
There is no comfort short of victory. And it is this,
nothing less, that the preacher of the Gospel is em-
powered to offer to all who turn their faces to the Cross
the comfort of mastering every dark situation, and
triumphing in every tribulation, through the grace of
Him who conquered there.

IV

But the herald of the Cross has a further task. He
must present his theme, not only in the setting of

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HERALDS OF GOD

human suffering, but also in the context of the world's
sin. He will not allow any superficial appearances of
complacence to deceive him. For he knows that all
history is the record of man's age-long desperate en-
deavour to answer the dilemma of moral failure and
defeat. He knows that God is sending him to people
wrestling with the same stubborn predicament. He
knows the secret struggles, frustrations and contradic-
tions of his own soul. He dare not on this matter be
hesitant or ambiguous. His preaching will never
really touch a single heart unless it brings some sure
word about sin and its forgiveness.

There have been, indeed, certain classical answers
to the dilemma, to which men cling pathetically even
to-day. There is the answer of the Jew : over against
the guilt and power of sin, the Jew sets the sacrificial
system and the efficacy of an elaborate cult. There is
the answer of the Greek : it was characteristic of the
Greek mind, with its double allegiance to art and
philosophy, that it believed man could work out his
own salvation aesthetically and intellectually. There
is the answer of the Roman: law and order would
redeem the race from disintegration, moralism and
disciplined conduct would guarantee the soul. These
three historic answers to the human dilemma have
made their way right down the centuries, resurrecting
themselves in every new generation. Multitudes of
our fellow-men and some of those to whom you will
preach have no other creed to-day. Religious ob-
servance and the due performance of ritual acts, the

80

THE PREACHER'S THEME

development of culture and the application of logic and
intelligence, the natural virtues of the human heart
and the attention to good works what more, it is
asked, does man require for his deliverance? But our
age, perhaps more than any of its predecessors, is being
visited by doubts. It suspects that the malady is too
radical to yield to any of these expedients. It has had
such an appalling insight into what the apostle called
"the mystery of iniquity" that its poise and confidence
have been irreparably disturbed. It dare not face a
future in which man is his own redeemer.

Wherefore God be thanked that right down in the
heart of that situation you can set the Cross ! Rising
out of the midnight of man's despair, smiting the
darkness like a sudden dawn, comes the solving word,
the divine decisive deed; and all the classic answers
of Jew and Greek and Roman fade away before the
glory of it.

Now when you set the Cross in the context of the
world's sin, there will be three main notes in your
preaching.

You will preach the Cross, first, as Revelation.
Where else does the terrible truth about sin stand so
nakedly revealed as at the place where it crucifies the
Son of God? All the habitual rationalizations which
reduce sin to ignorance, or biological maladjustment,
a thing to be cured by education, social planning or
psychological suggestion, are seen at Calvary to be
bland distortions of the truth. Let your preaching of
the Cross drive home the fact that the same sins which

81

HERALDS OF GOD

put Christ there are rampant in the world to-day; that
it was no monstrous eruption of iniquity that per-
petrated the deed of Calvary, but familiar, common
things like pride and cowardice and apathy and self-
seeking which make their dwelling in the hearts of
all; and that these things, rooted in our own lives,
working themselves out eventually on the scale of
society and gathering themselves up into the collective
evil of the world, still crucify the Lord of glory.
''Why persecutest thou Me?"

Moreover, you will hold up the Cross as a revelation,
not only of the hatefulness of sin, but also of the divine
judgment upon it. For on the day when Christ died at
its hands, rather than submit or come to terms, He
showed once for all what God's mind is about sin to
all eternity. Here the divine uncompromising antag-
onism was irrevocably proclaimed. No way of dealing
with sin which blurred the moral issue could be
tolerated ; for otherwise the chaos on the earth, so far
from being removed, would have been intensified, and
there would now have been added to it chaos in heaven
as well. Before sin could be overcome, it must be
judged. And Christ, by resisting it unto blood, has
pronounced its utter condemnation. God has judged
it for ever.

But greatest of all the paradoxes you will have to
preach is this that the same event which unveils evil
in its terrifying, demonic malignity reveals also in-
vincible love. That God should have taken the most
awful triumph of naked, unmitigated iniquity, and

82

THE PREACHER'S THEME

made precisely that the vehicle for the supreme revela-
tion of Himself here surely is a marvel that beggars
description: here is the ultimate hope of our sin-
tormented world. You do not preach the Cross aright
until you make men hear, on the lips of the Crucified,
such words as Joseph spoke to his betrayers: "So
now it was not you who sent me hither, but God."
Call the Cross the nefarious deed of Annas, Caiaphas
and Pilate, call it the supreme revelation of the inmost
essence of sin, call it the act of our own contemporary
society or (in Pauline phrase) of "the potentates of the
dark present, the spirit-forces of evil" and you will
tell the truth, but not the whole truth, not the final and
decisive truth. Call it the act of God, call it the
mightiest of all His mighty acts, call it the point in
history where love divine was supremely master of the
situation and the deeper truth will begin to emerge.
You will be helping men to realize that the most
desperate chaos sin can perpetrate to-day is not too
grim for this amazing love to handle and transform.
And through your preaching please God they will
understand in a new and living way the magnificent
outburst of the apostle: " He that spared not His own
Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He
not with Him also freely give us all things?"

This leads me to the second note in your preaching
of the Cross. Preach it as Victory. If you speak of
Calvary only in terms of revelation, you may be gain-
ing the approval of the opponents of a " transactional
theology," but you are certainly diluting disastrously

83

HERALDS OF GOD

the faith of the New Testament. No Pentecost will
ever attend a ministry which boggles at the implications
of Christ's cry upon the Cross, "It is finished!" For
something happened then which settled the issue
for ever. "Once and for all" that is the authentic
trumpet-note of apostolic religion. "I beheld Satan
as lightning fall from heaven." That is decisive,
After Calvary, it can never be midnight again. Long
and hard may be the campaign: for "we wrestle
against principalities and powers." But we know now
that we are fighting a defeated enemy. "Christ died
for our sins," says Peter in his epistle, "the just for the
unjust, once for all." "In that He died," writes Paul
to the Romans, "He died for sin, once for all." "He
has appeared," declares the epistle to the Hebrews,
"once for all to abolish sin by the sacrifice of Himself."
By all means, drop the word "transaction" if you
please: no doubt the term has been abused. But do
not mutilate the Gospel of the Cross by reducing it to
a doctrine of subjective influence. Preach the Cross
as victory. Here where the very greatness of the
apparent triumph of iniquity was its own irrevocable
defeat; here where evil once for all has shot its bolt,
and its deadly weapon s turned against itself; here
where eternal love is see i asserting its sovereignty, not
just in spite of the tragi : mystery of sin, but as by a
master-stroke of divim strategy precisely through
that mystery here is the ground of all our hope.
Here the human prospc ct has been transfigured radi-
cally and for ever.

THE PREACHER'S THEME

Preach the Cross, then, as God's all-sufficient answer
to man's perpetual question, "How can I win salva-
tion? How can I achieve self-conquest?" There are
people in all our congregations to-day asking that
question, just as Saul of Tarsus asked it in the lecture-
room of Gamaliel, as Luther asked it in the monastery
at Erfurt, as John Wesley asked it in the Holy Club
at Oxford. Laboriously these men hewed out (to use
Jeremiah's figure) their broken cisterns, toiling to store
up their good works and creditable achievements, their
charities, austerities and penances. But for Saul and
Luther and Wesley the day came when their question
"How shall I win salvation?" was answered from the
throne of God. And the answer was, "You can't!
Take it at the Cross for nothing, or not at all" "I
have gotten me Christ," cried Donald Cargill in the
hour of his execution, "and Christ hath gotten me
the victory!"

But it is the whole human situation, not simply the
plight of the individual, which the Cross transforms.
Let no one, listening to your preaching, have any
doubt that when we Christians say that the dark
demonic powers which leave their dreadful trail of
devastation across the world are ultimately less power-
ful than Jesus, we really mean it just as the early
disciples meant it when they declared that Christ had
raided the realm of Satan and broken the fast-bound
chains of hell. If there are professing Christians to-day
who do not see the relevance of the Gospel to the
desperate situation of this tortured world, it can only

85

HERALDS OF GOD

be because there is still a veil upon their hearts when
they stand at Calvary. It is for you to show them the
Cross as it truly is Christ in action, victor over death,
vanquisher of the demons, going forth conquering
and to conquer.

Finally, your preaching of the Cross, having struck
the notes of Revelation and Victory, will include the
note of Challenge. Our own hearts bear witness that
there is nothing like the Cross of Jesus to shame our
selfishness, to abase our pride of intellect, to rebuke
our false ambitions, and to bring to birth within us a
passionate longing that our lives might reveal some-
thing of the spirit which shone so gloriously in His,
No doubt, as Bernard Manning has argued, it is a
weakness of Cardinal Newman's great hymn " Praise
to the Holiest in the height" that after the strong,
pungent theology of the earlier verses the penultimate
stanza descends to anti-climax " humanitarian tink-
ling/' Manning calls it:

And in the garden secretly,
And on the Cross on high.

Should teach His brethren, and inspire
To suffer and to die.

The sacrifice of the God-Man was infinitely more, as
we have seen, than an example of gallantry and forti-
tude, a lesson to humanity how to suffer and die.
Nevertheless, the element of challenge persists: and
in every soul out of which the sense of honour and
chivalry has not died the Cross lets loose a cleansing
tide of penitence and hope, and creates a motive

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THE PREACHER'S THEME

stronger even than the instinct of self-preservation.
Lead men straight to Calvary, if you would bind them
to Christ's allegiance with the unbreakable fetters
which alone give perfect freedom. "He died for us
that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together
with Him."

v

But now let me raise a question. What is the most
characteristic word of the Christian religion ? Suppose
you were asked to single out one word to carry and
convey the cardinal truth of the Gospel, what word
would you choose ? I suggest it would have to be the
word Resurrection, That is what Christianity essenti-
ally is a religion of Resurrection. Go back and listen
to the preachers of the early Church. They never
pointed men to the Cross without showing them the
Resurrection light breaking behind it. Even when,
like Paul, they "determined to know nothing save
Jesus Christ and Him crucified/' what gave their
preaching such grip and converting power was the
testimony, implicit in every word, that this same Jesus
was alive, and present, and at work in the world. That
was the tremendous truth that coloured and con-
ditioned all their thinking. It did not merely give a
distinctive accent to their preaching: it throbbed
through every word they said. How could it be other-
wise? Christ risen and alive was for them the one
dominating reality of life and the very centre of the
universe. Paul might have put things even more
strongly than he did to the Corinthians. "If Christ

HERALDS OF GOD

be not risen," he declared, "then is our preaching
vain." He might have added that, without the
Resurrection, the voice of the Christian preacher would
never have been heard in the land. There was no
Christian congregation in that early age which did not
recognize itself to be a community of the Resurrection :
and there is no hope of revival in the Church to-day
until that basic, glorious truth is reasserted and comes
back into its own. Far too often we have been inclined
to regard the Resurrection as an epilogue to the
Gospel, an addendum to the scheme of salvation, a
codicil to the divine last will and testament: thereby
betraying not only a deficient historic perspective and
a singular disregard of the whole tenor of the New
Testament, but also a failure in spiritual understanding
and an insufficient hold upon the great verities of the
faith. This is no appendix to the faith. This is the
faith. He is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. To
preach this is your life-work: and there is no Gospel
without it.

Now here let me stress the urgency of showing forth
the Resurrection in its dynamic relevance to world-
history. The trouble is that many good, devout people
have not yet begun to grasp the full range and sweep
of the Easter Gospel. Their conception of it is much
too narrow and individualistic, too remote from the
struggles of humanity. To them the Resurrection
means only the escape of Jesus from the grave, the
return of the Master to His disciples, the lovely stories
of His meetings with Mary, with Peter, with Thomas,

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THE PREACHER'S THEME

with the two men on the Emmaus road. They have
not gone beyond that, nor seen this event related to the
perpetual conflict of which history is the arena the
conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, God
and the demons. Therefore I would urge you to
preach the Resurrection as the one fact above all others
which vitally concerns, not only the life of the in-
dividual Christian, but the entire human scene and
the destiny of the race. It is the break-through of the
eternal order into this world of suffering and confusion
and sin and death. It is much more than the dramatic
reanimation of One who had died: it is the vindication
of eternal righteousness, the declaration that the heart
of the universe is spiritual. It is the Kingdom of God
made visible. No wonder Paul, meeting the risen
Christ outside Damascus, suddenly fell blinded to the
earth! It was no glare of Syrian sunshine that had
dazzled him. The man had seen, for one tremendous,
piercing moment, the unveiled purpose of God.

Can it be right, then, when our people come up to
God's House on Easter morning, that we should treat
them to reflections on the reawakening of the earth in
springtime, or to a rechauffe of the arguments for
immortality? It is a desolating corruption of the
Resurrection Gospel to regard it merely as one more
argument for individual survival. The human heart
indeed cries out for light beyond the grave. All
through your ministry you will hear that cry; and you
will seek, God helping you, to answer it. Nor can you
ever point to any light more clear or steady or reassur-

HERALDS OF GOD

ing than that which shines from the empty tomb of
Jesus. But I do beseech you to let men see the Easter
hope destroying not only the fear of death, but every
other fear besides, and very specially the fear of the
principalities and powers and wicked forces that corrupt
human nature and fill the earth with ruin. I beg you
to swing the Resurrection light not only over the dim
shadows of the narrow grave, but over the thick dark-
ness of the whole wide world. For the Resurrection
was, and is, the sign of God's unshakable determination
to make Christ Lord of all. The concentrated might
of arrogant iniquity is puny and pathetic and impotent
against the power that took Jesus out of the grave,
This was the conviction which at the first launched
Christianity like a thunderbolt upon the world, and
made its ambassadors superbly fearless. This is the
certainty which burns undimmed in every truly Chris-
tian heart to-day. The power which went into action
in the raising again of Jesus will never, through the
darkest of dark ages, fail nor be discouraged : one day
it will resurrect the world. "This is the Lord's doing,
and it is marvellous in our eyes."

But there is a further fact which makes the high
calling of the preacher of the Resurrection immeasur-
ably thrilling and momentous, and it is this. Christ,
being raised from the dead, is an abiding presence for
ever; and you, the preachers of the Resurrection, are
not only the heralds of a historic event, but also the
mediators of a living presence. This is no exaggerated
clich^ of a nebulous mysticism : it is a strictly accurate,

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THE PREACHER'S THEME

unrhetorical statement of fact. You remember Words-
worth's plaintive cry to the shade of Milton, whose
mighty voice had long since ceased to speak :

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters.

But if men, looking out upon the stricken human scene
to-day, are fain to cry, u Christ, Thou shouldst be
living at this hour: the world hath need of Thee!"
back comes the answer with a thousand trumpets in it,
"Should be? He is!" "I am He that liveth, and
was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore."
And you, the commissioned servants of the Lord of
the Resurrection, are to tell men that the same Jesus
who was with Larimer and Ridley in the fire, with
Margaret Wilson tied to a stake on the Solway Sands,
with Bunyan in prison, with Gordon in Khartoum,
with Shackleton on the great ice-barrier, with Paul in
the wilds of Asia, with John in the convict-mines of
Patmos, with Peter in the Roman arena that this
same Jesus still travels through the world in the great-
ness of His strength, mighty to save, still meets the
troubled heart with the divine promise, "Lo, as I was
with all those others, so will I be with thee! " Nothing
else your ministry may achieve will be of much account
unless you show men that Christ, and get their eyes
open to the real presence of the risen Lord. If in the
grace of God you can do that, they will bless you for it,
and the power of the Spirit will go through the Church
again; and hearts will burn with that authentic fire

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HERALDS OF GOD

without which all altars are cold and all worship
dead.

Need I add that the first essential is that your
own life should be possessed utterly by the truth and
the glory of the Resurrection Gospel? Perhaps the
vitalizing of many a ministry waits upon some such
experience as that which came to R. W. Dale. The
story is familiar how one day when he was engaged
upon writing an Easter sermon for his people the
reality of the all-but-incredible fact broke in upon him
as it had never done before. "Christ is alive/* he
found himself crying, "alive! Living as really as I
myself am! It came upon me as a burst .of sudden
glory. Christ is living! My people shall know it."
It may not come to us the great heart-piercing con-
viction in any such dramatic way: but if not, then
come in some more secret way it must, or we have no
awakening Gospel to preach. Pray God that the truth
of the Resurrection may smite you with its glory, and
go through your mind and spirit with its consuming
flame! Only so will you be able to lead others out of
the torpor of vague half-belief to the vitality of passion-
ate conviction. John Keats said of his poem Lamia
that it had "that sort of fire in it that must take hold
of people some way"; and of Christian preaching the
same claim should be true. Too often in our churches
we are still on the wrong side of Easter. We are like
the groping, fumbling disciples between Good Friday
and the Resurrection, How our congregations would
worship, with what joy and eagerness and abandon the

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THE PREACHER'S THEME

sacrifice of praise would rise to God, if all worshippers
knew themselves in very truth to be sons and daughters
of the Resurrection !

Alfred Noyes has a striking poem. The Lord of
Misrule^ which confronts us with the challenging
thought that if the facts of our holy religion and our
supernatural faith no longer move us to exultation,
then the pagan world itself will rise up and condemn
us that pagan world which revels in the lesser gifts
of nature. The poem is based on the tradition reported
by an old Puritan writer that "on May-days the wild
heads of the parish would choose a Lord of Misrule,
whom they would follow even into the Church, though
the minister were at prayer or preaching, dancing and
swinging their may-boughs about.' 1

Come up, come in with streamers !

Come in, with boughs of may!
Now by the gold upon your toe

You walked the primrose way.
Come up, with white and crimson!

O, shake your bells and sing;
Let the porch bend, the pillars bow,

Before our Lord, the Spring!

Then into the pulpit itself, where a few moments before
the preacher had been droning his drowsy flock to
sleep, the Lord of Misrule pushes his way, and faces
the congregation:

"You chatter in Church like jackdaws,
Words that would wake the dead,

Were there one breath of life in you,
One drop of blood," he said.

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HERALDS OF GOB

Finally, the organ itself takes up the challenge :
'Come up with blood-red streamers.'

The reeds began the strain.
The vox humana pealed on high,

'The spring is risen again!'

The vox angelica replied 'The shadows flee away!
Our house-beams were of cedar. Come in, with boughs

of may!'

The diapason deepened it ' Before the darkness fall,
We tell you He is risen again!
Our God hath burst His prison again !
The Lord of Life is risen again; and Love is Lord of all.'

So out of the mouth of paganism itself our dull loss of
wonder is judged and our half-belief stands condemned.
For if the rebirth of nature is a theme for shouts of joy,
how much more the rising from the dead of a Saviour
God! And if we, the children of the Resurrection,
should hold our peace, would not the stones immedi-
ately cry out ?

Make it, then, the goal of your endeavour to help
others to discover, or to rediscover, the magnificence
of their Christian heritage. The splendour of the Re-
surrection Gospel baffles speech, and breaks through
language and escapes. But there is a Spirit who will
take our poor, faltering, stammering words, and will
work even through these to smite men with the glory
of Christ's rising.

vi

One point remains. Apostolic preaching, as we
have already noted, set forth the facts of the Cross and

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THE PREACHER'S THEME

the Resurrection in their organic relationship to the
Kingdom of God. In these supreme events, it declared,
the Kingdom, long dreamt of and foretold, had now
appeared. By this invasion of the supernatural into
human experience all life's issues were immeasurably
deepened, and the sense of urgency and crisis dramatic-
ally intensified. The new era of the Spirit had broken
in with power. Until we recapture and restore this
apostolic perspective and emphasis, our preaching will
be maimed and crippled.

If the trumpet give an uncertain sound on this
matter, the whole cause of the Kingdom will suffer.
And at no point has there been greater confusion, even
amongst Christians. Some have thought of the King-
dom of God as a New Jerusalem for man to build.
Some have postponed it to an indefinite future, a far-off
divine event in which man has no part. Thus two
opposing attitudes have emerged and come into colli-
sion : the activism of a thoroughgoing thisworldliness,
and the quietism of a thoroughgoing otherworldliness.
Your Gospel of the Kingdom must act as a corrective
of both these distorted views. To those who stand for
the former, it will say: "You are right to bear the
world's injustices and oppressions upon your souls,
and to go forth against these with the passion of
crusaders. You are right to denounce a piety that
talks incessantly to men about the bread of heaven,
and never stirs a finger to give them bread for their
bodies or employment for their energies or decent
housing for their families. You are right to insist that

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HERALDS OF GOD

if Christianity once turned the world upside down, it
can do the same to-day. But you are wrong to dis-
regard the one true source of all strong action and
effective power. You are wrong to think the human
demand can ever be satisfied with improved communi-
ties and garden cities. You are wrong to think that
the best economic Paradise will ever still the tumult
of a heart that goes crying out for ever for ' a city which
hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God V
On the other hand, to those who stand for a pre-
dominantly otherworldly quietism, your Gospel of the
Kingdom will declare: "You are right to dwell in the
secret place of the Most High. You are right to walk
with God as pilgrims and sojourners here, looking
beyond this transitory scene to the bliss of life eternal.
You are right to believe that to God alone belong the
Kingdom, the power, and the glory. But you are
wrong to lock yourselves up in that secret place of
devotion. You are wrong to reduce religion to an
unethical, sentimental irrelevance. You are wrong if,
in the presence of social misery and injustice, you do
not see Christ's eyes blazing like a flame of fire, nor
hear His voice, like a trumpet, crying 'I will have
mercy, and not sacrifice !'"

It is not within the scope of these Lectures to discuss
Christianity and the social order. This only I will say.
Carlyle once wrote a letter to Emerson, warning him
against a philosophy of spiritual aloofness. " Alas, it
is so easy to screw one's self up into high and ever
higher altitudes of Transcendentalism, and see nothing

THE PREACHER'S THEME

under one but the everlasting snows of Himmalayah,
the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo firma-
ment sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for you y
for me: but whither does it lead? Well, I do believe,
for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own
generation, turning quite away from it, * Be damned ! '
It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same
cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking,
very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it,
I tell you/' So too, in your presentation of the great
facts of faith, you must resolutely work out the ethical
implications of the doctrines you preach. The sus-
picion that the Church of Christ lacks zeal for social
righteousness can be terribly damaging. Nor can it
be denied that too often in the past organized religion
has tended to play for safety. As Phillips Brooks once
put it: "The pillars of the Church are apt to be like
the Pillars of Hercules, beyond which no man might
sail." It is the function of economists, not of the
pulpit, to work out plans of reconstruction. But it is
emphatically the function of the pulpit to stab men
broad awake to the terrible pity of Jesus, to expose
their hearts to the constraint of that divine compassion
which haloes the oppressed and the suffering and
flames in judgment against every social wrong. Dr.
]. S. Whale has put it forcefully and well: "Any
present-day theology which has not a revolutionary
sociology as part of its implicit logic is not truly
Christian/' There is no room for a preaching devoid
of ethical directness and social passion, in a day when

97

HERALDS OF GOD

heaven's trumpets sound and the Son of God goes
forth to war.

The conclusion of the matter, then, is this, that if
you would keep your emphasis right, avoiding extremes
on either side, you must continually be returning, in
your preaching of the Kingdom, to the insight of the
New Testament preachers. In, Jesus Christ, they
declared, the great new age had broken through into
history. It was really and actively present. Those
who had tasted its power were living in a transformed
world. But not yet was the divine purpose completely
fulfilled. Not yet was the human burden of bodily
weakness, frustration and death removed. And so,
beyond the mighty acts of the Cross and the Resur-
rection, these men awaited the crowning verification.
The drama of history would have a climax and a goal.
God Himself would bring in His perfect Kingdom,
and make Christ Lord of all.

These things are true. These we believe, and these
we preach. We do not minimize the present, when
we say Christ is coming again. On the contrary, It is
just because we know the divine will must at last be
regnant and supreme that we are passionately con-
cerned that it should rule upon the earth here and now.
Just because the future belongs to Christ, we preach
that now is the accepted time, now is the critical hour
for the assertion of His sovereignty in all the affairs of
men, now is the day of salvation.

I have spoken to you of our theme as Christian
ministers. Who can measure the responsibility of

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THE PREACHER'S THEME

those who are heralds of such tidings? The late
Bishop Gore used to give his final charge to candidates
on the eve of their ordination in these impressive
words: "To-morrow I shall say to you, wilt thou,
wilt thou, wilt thou? But there will come a day to you
when Another will say to you, hast thou, hast thou,
hast thou?" God grant us unwavering fidelity to our
high theme, lest we be ashamed to stand at last before
the face of the Son of Man.

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CHAPTER III
THE PREACHER'S STUDY

" This excuses no man's ignorance, that is not able to preach
seasonably, and to break, and distribute the bread of life according
to the emergent necessities of that Congregation, at that time ;
Nor it excuses no man's lazinesse, that will not employ his whole
time upon his calling 5 Nor any man's vain-glory, and ostentation,
who having made a Pye of Plums, without meat, offers it to sale
in every Market, and having made an Oration of Flowres, and
Figures, and Phrases without strength, sings it over in every
Pulpit." JOHN DONNE.

ERNEST RAYMOND, novelist and essayist, has
described the most impressive sermon he ever
heard. In itself, he relates, the sermon was ordinary
enough: intellectually negligible, aesthetically ragged.
Its construction was faulty, its delivery abominable.
Yet its effect was overwhelming. It was during the
war of 1914-18. A group of men had gathered in a
cellar to hear an Anglo-Catholic father. They went
expecting some dry-as-dust theology or perfervid moral
exhortation. But what actually happened was quite
different. The preacher, sitting down, and staring at
the floor or ceiling in search of words so halting was
his speech spoke of the text, "Come unto Me, all
ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest.'' "I think," wrote Raymond, "he spoke for an
hour, and not a man of us moved, and most of us were
very quiet all that night."

100

THE PREACHER'S STUDY

There you have a striking testimony to the power
of preaching to mediate the Real Presence of Christ.
What matter though all the rules be broken, as long
as men are made piercingly aware of Jesus in the
midst? It is one thing to learn the technique and
mechanics of preaching : it is quite another to prtach
a sermon which will draw back the veil and make the
barriers fall that hide the face of God. If that is not
achieved the most careful craftsmanship is worthless;
while on the other hand, all mannerisms can be forgiven,
all violent infringing of the rules condoned, if there
comes as through the sermon which so moved Ray-
mond and the others that night some authentic touch
of the unseen, some deep subduing sense of the eternal*

"Can I ever forget," wrote Joseph Parker, "the
sermon Gilfillan delivered in my pulpit in Manchester ?
Nothing like it was ever seen under the sun. He took
the sermon out of his trouser pocket and laid it in
little heaps on the pulpit Bible, and took it up scrap
by scrap, and read each at the pulpit lamp as if he were
announcing a bazaar or a tea-meeting. 77 You would
scarce credit it that any message could survive the
handicap of a delivery so execrable. But listen to the
words in which Parker goes on to describe the effect
produced. "First the shock, then the almost-laugh,
then the wonder, then the prayer, then the heart-felt
thanks. It was very wonderful, and often beautiful
exceedingly. " When preaching impels the hearers to
prayer, you may be sure that, whatever its defiance of
the accepted canons of the art, it is preaching Indeed.

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HERALDS OF GOD

The great Thomas Chalmers, as Professor Hugh Watt
in a recent study has reminded us, preached with a
disconcertingly provincial accent ("the bruising bar-
barism of his pronunciation," to use Professor Masson's
phrase), with an almost total lack of dramatic gesture,
tied rigidly to his manuscript, with his finger following
the written lines as he read. Yet vast congregations
hung breathlessly upon that preaching, and those
sermons went like fire through the land. In that very
striking account of a spiritual pilgrimage, A Wan-
derer's Way^ Dr. Charles Raven has described an
incident which occurred during his student days at
Cambridge. It was the visit of a well-known preacher
at whose methods and message some were inclined to
scoff. "The sermon was as an argument puerile,"
writes Raven, "but the man was aflame, radiating a
power of loving that filled his simple words with mean-
ing and with an atmosphere of worship. Here was a
man not only passionately convinced of his gospel, but,
for whatever the words mean. God-possessed. . . .
Here surely was the real Christianity, that had changed
the course of human history : if this man were deluded,
I should almost be content to share this delusion. The
scoffer stayed to pray," Is it not manifest that the
ultimate secret of true preaching the preaching which
begets worship and mediates a Presence and wields
converting power is something quite apart from any
rules of logical structure or artistic form ? "The wind
bloweth where it listeth: and thou canst not tell
whence and whither."

1 02

THE PREACHER'S STUDY

This is not to say, however, that the craftsmanship of
preaching is to be belittled or despised. That would
be quite a false deduction from our premises. To
argue that, because the message in itself is so all-
important, we can afford to ignore the mere form of
its presentation, would be arbitrary and wrong-headed.
On the contrary, it is precisely because the message
entrusted to us is of such paramount importance that
we should labour at it night and day, sparing no pains
to become skilled in our craft and to make the earthen
vessel as worthy as we can of the treasure it contains.
St. Paul thanked God for the Corinthians, that they
were " enriched in all utterance, 'and in all knowledge,"
for it is essential that those who know the truth of
Christ should also learn how to set it forth convincingly
for others. In this regard, congregations to-day are
much more exacting than they were a generation ago.
Probably in no small measure this is due as a recent
writer in the Spectator suggested to the influence of
Broadcasting House, "If people listen to competent
speaking on all kinds of subjects during the week, they
will ask for equal competence from the pulpit on Sun-
day." Slovenly work, careless technique, faulty construc-
tion and inarticulate delivery have had their day : they
will pass muster no longer. And surely the preacher's
task, undertaken at God's command for Christ's dear
sake, demands the very best that unremitting toil and
care and disciplined technical training can bring to
it. "Neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the Lord
my God of that which doth cost me nothing."

103

HERALDS OF GOD

Beware, however, of any lecturer who on the
Warrack foundation or any other should announce
a course on "How to Preach: By One who Knows/'
The creature is an impostor! No man knows how to
preach. You will have to reckon with this significant,
disconcerting fact, that the greatest preachers who
have ever lived have confessed themselves poor
bunglers to the end, groping after an ideal which has
eluded them for ever. When you have been preaching
for twenty years, you will be beginning to realize how
incalculably much there is to learn. There will be
days when the Socratic knowledge of your ignorance
will desolate and overwhelm you. Even if Providence
should spare you to this work for fifty years, your
thought will be, as the gloaming closes in around
you, "If only I could start all over again now!"
There is no vocation in all the world which has
such rewards to offer of deep and satisfying joy.
But it is also true that there is no vocation so per-
petually humbling to a good man, no task in which
failure is so inescapably the fate appointed. How,
indeed, could it be otherwise ?

I who have giv'n to Thee my best
Rejoice Thy word is unexpressed 5
And inexpressible must be
On this side of Eternity j
And I with all my travail vast
Am glad that I must fail at last.
If I had found the Word complete,
No glory could I march to meet:
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THE PREACHER'S STUDY

A pilgrim home from pilgrimage!
A soldier with no fight to wage !
But now my powers I still must spend,
And go on failing to the end.
But failing I shall leave behind
Some hints of the Eternal Mind,
And hungry pilgrims, where I went,
May find a broken Sacrament.

In any case, take courage! It is right that the vast
difficulty of the task should humble you. It is wrong
that it should paralyse you. When you sit down in
your study to write a sermon, you are not without vijtal
resources behind you. All your experience of God, all
your acquaintance with life, all your knowledge of
men, all your fellowship with the great minds of the
centuries, will come in then to your aid.

I do not dwell here on the fundamental resource
your personal, first-hand communion with God. Of
that I hope to speak in a subsequent lecture. But what
of your acquaintance with the world, your knowledge
of your fellows, your understanding of the problems
and vexations that besiege the souls of men ? To be
merely bookish and academic is quite fatal. It is a
damaging criticism of any preacher, that he is out of
touch with the actualities of other men's lives, ignorant
of the conditions with which they have to grapple, and
therefore incompetent to speak to their needs or to give
them counsel and guidance for their struggle. There

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HERALDS OF GOD

is no reason why any man's ministry should be crippled
by such aloofness and inhumanity. There is every
reason why the ambassador of Christ, more than anyone
else, should be alert and sensitive to men's difficulties,
aspirations, conflicts, bafflements, to their social and
economic strains and stresses and insecurities, to their
dreams and defeats, heroisms and tragic blunders.
Everything that can help you there all first-hand
acquaintance with contemporary conditions, all work-
ing knowledge of psychology, all practical experience
of living in community will bring an indispensable
contribution to the resources of insight, understanding
and sympathy out of which you are to preach. In this
connection, let me urge upon you the immense import-
ance of the preacher's work as pastor. Have nothing
to do with the foolish suggestion that the two offices
might advantageously be severed. Let no specious
arguments about the necessity of conserving your
energies, or of concentrating on other tasks, organiza-
tion, committees, and the like, deflect you from your
primary duty of knowing the people whom you are
sent to serve for Jesus' sake. Above all, I would ask
you to consider this paradox. Would you know men
better ? Then get closer to God ! For indeed the only
way to understand your brother truly is to see him as
God sees him, to look out upon him through the eyes
of the great Father of us all.

There is another resource which will come in power-
fully to your aid in the preparation of your messages
week by week: your fellowship with the great minds

1 06

THE PREACHER'S STUDY

of the centuries. No minister of the Gospel has any
right to cease to be a student when his College days
are done* However burdened he may be in after years
with the crowding cares of a large city congregation,
however wearing to body, brain and spirit the toils of
his twelve hours' day, he must and he can by resolu-
tion, self-discipline, and the grace of God remain a
student to the end. The preacher who closed down
his mind ten, twenty, thirty years ago is a tragic figure.
Keep alert to what theology is saying. Refresh your
soul with the living waters of the spiritual classics.
Augustine's Confessions, Baxter's Reformed Pastor,
Pascal's Thoughts, William Law's Serious Call, Wesley's
Journal, von Hiigel's Letters all these and many more
are your rightful heritage: and who could dwell with
these and not be "strengthened with might by God's
Spirit in the inner man"? Enlarge your range some-
times to include the great enemies of the faith. Be
debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians. Know
what men have said against our holy religion. See
how even there God turns the wrath of man to His
praise, and the damaging arguments of the sceptics to
the greater glory of Christ. Nor will you, if you are
wise, neglect literature of a more general kind. You
will find that history and biography, science and
literary criticism, drama, fiction, poetry all have some
gift to bring for the preparation of your message. Not
that you are to direct your reading with a deliberate
eye to the garnering of sermon material ! That makes
for homiletical professionalism. But to have com-

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panied with Shakespeare and Plutarch, Tolstoy and
Dickens, Robert Bridges, Chesterton, Eddington,
T. S. Eliot, is to find all your horizons stretched and
widened. Such intercourse will impart new qualities
of breadth, insight, dignity and precision to all your
work. Therefore, in the words of the apostolic injunc-
tion, "give attendance to reading,"

Need I remind you that when Paul laid that charge
upon Timothy he was thinking supremely of Scripture
reading? "I do not know/' exclaimed Spurgeon,
"how my soul would have been kept alive if it had not
been for the searching of Scripture which preaching
has involved." It is your immense privilege that the
very nature of your calling compels you to live daily in
the pages of the Bible. But do not, I beg you, debase
the Word of God by regarding it as a mere hunting-
ground for texts and subjects. Let there be a deeper
constraint behind your Bible study than the feverish
question, "Now what am I going to preach about next
Sunday?" If all our people need the devotional use of
the Bible for their spiritual nourishment and growth in
grace, how much more do we, who have to speak to
them in the Name which is above every name ! Nothing
can atone for slackness and indiscipline at this point.
Let us give ourselves day by day to prayerful and
meditative study of the Word, listening to hear what
God the Lord will speak: lest, when we seek to inter-
pret the Scriptures to others, it should have to be said
of us, in the words of the Samaritan which were once
applied to Robert Southey's attempt to interpret the

1 08

THE PREACHER'S STUDY

life and character of Wesley, "Thou hast nothing to
draw with, and the well is deep!"

ii

Now before proceeding to discuss the practical
questions of sermon construction, there are three pleas
I wish to make.

The first is a plea for expository preaching. This is
one of the greatest needs of the hour. There are rich
rewards of human gratitude waiting fof the man who
can make the Bible come alive. Congregations are
sick of dissertations on problems, and essays on aspects
of the religious situation : such sermons are indeed no
true preaching at all. Men are not wanting to be told
our poor views and arguments and ideals. They are
emphatically wanting to be told what God has said,
and is saying, in His Word. There is no durable
satisfaction in anything less than that. Therefore we
do wrong when we take a text and read our message
into it. Let the Bible speak its own message. Inci-
dentally, this will deliver us from the peril of monotony.
The preacher who expounds his own limited stock of
ideas becomes deadly wearisome at last. The preacher
who expounds the Bible has endless variety at his dis-
posal. For no two texts say exactly the same thing.
Every passage has a quite distinctive meaning. It is
not the Holy Spirit's way to repeat Himself. If you
can write a sermon, and then attach it to any one of
half a dozen texts indiscriminately, you would do well

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to be suspicious of that sermon ! Do not be like the
preachers Spurgeon describes, who, having announced
their text, " touch their hats, as it were, to that part of
Scripture, and pass on to fresh woods and pastures new."
Open up the riches that the particular text contains.
Remember there is something there which occurs
nowhere else. Bring to light its buried treasure. Why
should we so often find ourselves racking our brains
and cudgelling our souls, and producing in the end
only some poor disquisition lamentably devoid of any
qualities of vivid interest or grip or appeal? It is
because we will persist in driving along the path of our
own thoughts and preconceptions instead of following
where the Bible leads. Give the strength of your
ministry to expository preaching, and not only will you
always have a hearing, not only will you keep your
message fresh and varied, but, in the truest sense, you
will be doing the work of an evangelist; and from
many of those quiet words of grateful acknowledg-
ment which are amongst the most precious and sacred
rewards of any man's ministry, you will know that
through the Scriptures God has spoken again, as He
spoke to the fathers by the prophets.

The second plea is for a due observance of the
Christian Year. Your own personal devotional life
stands to gain much, in discipline, vividness and
vitality, by active celebration of the great Christian
festivals. Moreover, such observance has no small
ecumenical value : it is one way of asserting, through
all differences and divisions, our essential unity in

no

THE PREACHER'S STUDY

Christ. But what mainly concerns us here is its place
in preaching. The great landmarks of the Christian
Year Advent, Christmas, Lent, Good Friday, Easter,
Whitsunday, Trinity set us our course, and suggest
our basic themes. They compel us to keep close to the
fundamental doctrines of the faith. They summon
us back from the bypaths where we might be prone to
linger, to the great highway of redemption. They
ensure that in our preaching we shall constantly be
returning to those mighty acts of God which the
Church exists to declare. In passing, I would remind
you that the true meaning of Christmas can unfold
itself only to those who have climbed the slopes of
Advent, that the joy of Easter in all its splendour of
victory can lay hold only upon those who have watched
through Lent and have been with Christ in His passion,
and that the power of Pentecost can be fully revealed
only to those who, "with one accord in one place, "
have waited expectantly for the gift from heaven.
Throughout these periods of the year, therefore, our
preaching ought to be specifically directed, Sunday by
Sunday, towards preparing our people in mind and
heart for the fresh disclosure of Himself which it is
God's will to send. Then indeed the great triumphant
festivals of universal Christendom will become high
places of the spirit: a mighty means of grace to a
people prepared for the Lord.

My third plea is this. Put into your sermon-making
the very best you have in you. Stint no toil to achieve
clear thought, fit language, true construction, decisive

in

HERALDS OF GOD

appeal. The late Viscount Grey once confessed to
Lord Bryce the difficulty he experienced in composing
speeches. ''You need not be disturbed/' was the
answer, "as long as you feel like that. The time to
become alarmed is when you find that you can speak
quite easily without having anything to say/' If you
are gifted with facility of utterance, what Coleridge
once shrewdly described as "a premature and unnatural
dexterity in the combination of words/' beware! If
it is your lot to stand on "the slippery floor of a
popular pulpit" to use a phrase of Alexander Whyte's
be doubly on your guard. There will be subtle
temptations to scamp the work of preparation. You
will be tempted to rationalize your other crowding
duties into a justification for relaxing the inexorable
discipline of your study-desk. If you are not resolute,
the very constitution of the Church itself its intricate
machinery of meetings, committees, conferences, organ-
izations will seem to aid and abet that weaker, slacker
self within which is only too glad to escape the travail
of lonely wrestling with the Word of God. If the
Church cannot, or will not, break through that vicious
circle, you must do it for yourself. You are called to
speak to men in the name of God. Dare you think
lightly of such an undertaking, or of the stern discipline
of heart and mind which it involves? "I earnestly
beseech you all," wrote Richard Baxter well-nigh three
hundred years ago to his brethren in the ministry, "in
the name of God, and for the sake of your peoples'
souls, that you will not slightly slubber over this work,

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but do it vigorously and with all your might and make
it your great and serious business."

The preparation of two sermons a week, to say
nothing of other talks and addresses, is indeed a
tremendous task. I would urge you, for your own
peace of mind, to systematize your days. Aim at
having one sermon finished by Wednesday night, the
other by Friday. As far as lies in your power, guard
your mornings from interruption. God, says Jeremiah,
"rises up early/' to send His prophets: on which John
Oman comments pithily, "Naturally His prophets
should follow His example/* " A man in his study in
his bedroom slippers, unshaved and in his dressing-
gown, is in about as perilous a state for his soul as a
man who takes to secret drinking." "These," says
Phillips Brooks, "are the race of clerical visionaries
who think vast, dim, vague thoughts, and do no work."
A lifelike picture! It would probably be agreed that
a sermon which cannot be prayed over before it is
preached is hardly likely to set the heather on fire, or
to bring to any seeking soul "the fulness of the blessing
of the gospel of Christ." And can we honestly pray
over a bit of scamped work, or any sermon into which
we have not cared to put our best ? Dr. Sloane Coffin
once declared that "the recipe for compounding many
a current sermon might be written ; ' Take a teaspoon-
ful of weak thought, add water, and serve.' The fact
that it is frequently served hot, may enable the con-
coction to warm the hearers; but it cannot be called
nourishing," You will remember how mercilessly

"3

HERALDS OF GOD

William Cowper pilloried certain preachers of his day
whose shoddy sermons belied the dignity of the
prophetic vocation and brought it into contempt:

The things that mount the rostrum with a skip,
And then skip down again; pronounce a text;
Cry hem! and reading what they never wrote,
Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work,
And with a well-bred whisper close the scene !

Overdrawn? No doubt. Yet the race of " clerical
visionaries" is not extinct.

Yours is a task, I repeat, which demands and
deserves sheer hard work, sweat of brain and discipline
of soul. You must not, for example, allow your week's
sermon preparation to be at the mercy of moods. You
must not wait for the inspired hour before getting
under way. Spurgeon indeed urged his students, when
deliberating on the right text to choose, to "wait for
that elect word, even if you wait till within an hour of
the service." It may have been the wise policy for a
Spurgeon; but then Spurgeons are few and far be-
tween. Ordinary creatures like ourselves will be well
advised to follow the less spectacular and dramatic
path of plodding diligence and patience. In any case,
you will often find it is as you pursue that hard and
apparently thankless way that quite suddenly the fire
from heaven begins to fall. Speaking of the art of
writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch roundly declared
that "solid daily practice is the prescription and 'wait-
ing upon inspiration' a lure. These crests only rise
' 04

THE PREACHER'S STUDY

on the back of constant labour. " If that is true of
writing in general, it is certainly true of sermon pre-
paration in particular. "Only out of long preparation
can come the truly triumphant flash/ 1 If you persist
in waiting for the divine afflatus, you will waste valu-
able hours which might have been more profitably
spent in making dogged progress with the work, "line
upon line, here a little, and there a little." Anthony
Trollope, in the Autobiography^ described his own
methods of work. "It had at this time become my
custom to write with my watch before me, and to
require from myself 250 words every quarter of an
hour. I have found that my 250 words have been
forthcoming as regularly as my watch went." We
may feel disposed to deride such a practice as hope-
lessly mechanical. What we regard as our artistic
temperament cries out against it. But let us not be
blind to the wisdom it contains. Certainly we have
little right to preach to others about conquering the
power of moods if our own sermon preparation is
swayed by that tyranny!

Nor must we presume upon the text which runs,
"Take no thought how or what ye shall speak; for it
shall be given you in that same hour," Only textual
vivisection of the worst kind could twist that passage
into meaning that it is a meritorious action to enter the
pulpit unprepared. It is quite a false antithesis which
would set the toil and premeditation of the study over
against guidance by the Holy Spirit. Jesus was refer-
ring to the special grace which would be ministered to

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His followers when the hour of emergency leapt upon
them, and they were dragged before rulers and
governors. The sudden crisis. He assured them,
would bring with it a sudden reinforcement. " As thy
days, so shall thy strength be/' That is manifestly
true, in the twentieth century no less than in the first.
But when we as preachers count upon the aid of the
Holy Spirit to give us utterance, we would do well to
reflect that the promise is conditional upon the loyalty
of common days. The Spirit of the Lord will be upon
us in proportion as our work has been earnest and
faithful and ungrudging.

There are, of course, those who would argue that the
place of preaching has long been grossly exaggerated.
They minimize its value. Long hours of preparation
they regard as waste of energy and effort. They are
particularly scornful of anything which may be called
"popular preaching." This they would exclude as
incompatible with the worship of God. Moreover,
they say, its very popularity proves that it is riddled
with insincerity. Preaching "mere" preaching, as
the derogatory phrase expresses it has had its day:
let us be finished with the cult of preaching, or at least
reduce it to a quite subsidiary place. Let those hours
in the study be devoted to more profitable and practical
ends! But the pulpit need not fear the battery of such
superior critics. It is likely to outlive them all.
William Cowper, speaking of the pulpit in that same
poem, The Task,, from which I have already quoted,
confesses :

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I name it filled

With solemn awe, that bids me well beware
With what intent I touch that holy thing;

and he prophesies that it

Must stand acknowledged, while the world shall stand.

Indeed, as I pointed out in an earlier lecture, the
fashion of disparaging preaching is simply due to
muddled thinking. It represents a failure to under-
stand what preaching essentially is the heralding of
the eternal Word of God and a consequent inability
to grasp its integral place in all true worship. Nor
should we be misled by any strictures on " popular "
preaching. To aim at a cheap popularity would indeed
be a despicable disloyalty. But does it not stand
written of our Lord that "the common people heard
Him gladly"? John Kelman was a popular preacher:
and there are scores of men to-day who would confess
that it was to Kelman, under God, that they owe their
souls, Studdert-Kennedy was a popular preacher:
and Studdert-Kennedy did far more to stir the social
conscience of the country than any of the critics who
label popular preaching as dope. This disparaging of
preaching is a passing phase. Do not be misled by it.
Resist the suggestion that to sweat blood over your
sermon preparation is a subtle form of pride and selfish-
ness, or at the least a reprehensible misdirection of time
and energy. Long after all such pontifical utterances
of a one-eyed dogmatism have passed away, it will still

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be pleasing God by the foolishness of preaching to save
them that believe.

There is no short-cut to escape the burden and the
toil. Any evasion of the cost will inevitably rob a
man's ministry of power. Any refusal to accept the
relentless, implacable discipline will result in dimin-
ished spiritual influence. Put into your sermons your
unstinting best. When Carlyle was toiling at his
French Revolution, he wrote to Emerson: "That
beggardly Book hampers me every way. To fling it
once for all into the fire were perhaps the best; yet I
grudge to do that. It is impossible for you to figure
what mood I am in. One sole thought. That Book!
that weary Book! occupies me continually. For the
present, really, it is like a Nessus* shirt, burning you
into madness; nay, it is also like a kind of Panoply,
rendering you invulnerable, insensible, to all other
mischiefs." Surely we, who have to wrestle with the
Word of truth for the immortal souls of men, must ask
no easier way. "What," cries Richard Baxter, "have
we our time and strength for, but to lay both out for
God? What is a candle made for, but to be burnt?"

in

It may be well at this point to underline two guiding
principles which the preacher must constantly keep
in sight.

Remember, first, that what you are hoping to pro-
duce is a sermon not an essay, not a lecture, not a

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College exegesis, but a sermon. That is to say, when
you sit down to write in your study, you must visualize
a gathered congregation. This will give your work
those qualities of directness, liveliness, verve and
immediacy which are so essential. It will prune
drastically your involved, elaborate periods, and sternly
repress any addiction to purple passages. It will
eliminate irrelevances. It will constrain you to clarify
your own ideas. It will urge you to translate abstrac-
tions into concrete terms. It will embolden you to use
personal forms of address. It will banish the dull
stilted tediousness of the sermon-essay. It will keep
the dominant notes of urgency and reality, of appeal
for a verdict, sounding unmistakably. Roman oratory
of the classical age had three rules: placere, docere^
movere. To please, in the sense of gripping the hearers*
minds and keeping interest alert; to teach and in-
struct, as distinct from the purveying merely of ex-
hortation and uplift, and the recital of pious platitudes ;
to move the heart, and sting the will into action is not
this the Christian preacher's task? And where is the
possibility of its accomplishment unless there stands
vividly before his consciousness, as he prepares his
sermon in his study, the vision of his waiting congrega-
tion, the thought of the men and women, with all their
crowding, clamorous needs, to whom as Christ's
ambassador he is to speak ?

In this connection, let me draw your attention to a
striking passage in Jebb's Lectures on The Growth and
Influence of Classical Greek Poetry^ in which the Greek

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poet and the Christian preacher are compared. The
paragraph is well worth pondering. "In every pro-
vince of intellectual activity, and in that of poetry
among the rest, the Greeks of the classical age de-
manded a living sympathy of mind with mind. What
they felt in regard to the poet can be best understood
by comparing it with the feeling which not they alone,
but all people, have in regard to the orator and the
preacher. The true orator, the great preacher, speaks
out of the fulness of genuine conviction and emotion
to the minds and hearts of those who hear him;
through all variations of mood and tone, he keeps in
mental touch with them. The excellence of the class-
ical Greek poet was tried by the same test. No elabora-
tion of art could sustain the poet through his ordeal, if
he failed in truth to nature. False sentiment may pass
muster in the study, but it is inevitably betrayed by its
own unveracity when it is spoken aloud before listeners
whose minds are sane, as those of the Greeks pre-
eminently were; the hollow ring is detected; it
offends; and the exemption of the best Greek poetry
from false sentiment is a merit secured by the very
conditions under which that poetry was produced."
Remember, therefore, to keep your congregation
before you as you write. For no array of literary
merits can possibly redeem a discourse which lacks
the living sympathy of mind with mind.

The other basic principle is this. Make sure that
every sermon you preach has a definite aim. To say
this is indeed simply to apply in one particular and

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very important direction a truth which ought to govern
a man's whole ministry. Why are we in this work at
all? To bring men to God through Jesus Christ.
That is the ultimate goal of all our striving, the purpose
of our commission. It ought to be our one consuming
ambition to help men and women, through the services
of the sanctuary, to meet the living God. And if ever
we lose sight of that commanding goal, if we grow hazy
and uncertain about our aim, if we eventually reach a
point where we have ceased expecting the Holy Spirit
to act mightily amongst our people with convincing
and converting power, the Lord have mercy on our
souls! "Why should it be thought a thing incredible
that God should raise the dead" yes, even through
our poor preaching ? Therefore, as our whole ministry
must press toward that mark, as it can have meaning
and value and momentum only by keeping that goal
in sight, so every sermon must have its own quite
definite aim. " A sermon," said Beecher, "is not like
a Chinese fire-cracker to be fired off for the noise which
it makes. It is the hunter's gun, and at every discharge
he should look to see his game fall." There is some-
thing wrong with a preacher who sends people away
with the bemused and puzzled feeling, "Now what
was all that about? What was the fellow driving at
to-day?" The artist in Don Quixote, on being inter-
rogated what precisely he was painting, replied, "That
is as it may turn out." Who has not suffered under
sermons evolved in the same deplorably haphazard
way? The acid test is to confront yourself, before ever

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you put pen to paper, with the question: "What is
the aim and intention of this sermon ? What is the
central truth it is to convey? Can I concentrate that
into a single sentence?" It is true, no doubt, that
when Dickens first invented Pickwick there were only
the haziest outlines of an idea in the author's mind
what to do with the character he had created, true that
the early instalments of the story were launched upon
the world in serial numbers before any course had been
charted or any plot conceived. But for the preacher it
is imperative to see the end from the beginning. In
every sermon, he must know exactly what truth it is
that he is proposing to drive home to the hearer's
minds. He must see clearly the objective to which he
hopes to lead them. He ought to be able to define it
to himself in a dozen words. Without such definite-
ness of aim, preaching remains self-stultified and in-
effectual, and may never touch a single life. With it,
the simplest words, taking wings from the Spirit of
God, may reach the hidden depths of many hearts.

IV

I am reserving to a later point in our discussion the
crucial matter of the choice of texts and subjects. In
the meantime let us come to grips with the more
technical questions of construction. Let us assume
that a particular theme has laid hold upon your mind,
so that you feel constrained to preach on it. You have
prayed about it, and your main objective is clear.

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THE PREACHER'S STUDY

What next? The immediate step is to set down on
paper without any regard at this stage for logical
sequence all the thoughts, suggestions, illustrations
which your chosen theme brings clustering into your
mind. Do not let the resultant disarray and confusion
unduly daunt you! However chaotic that page, go
ahead: get everything down. That done, your next
undertaking is to reduce the chaos to order. Out of
that jumbled mass of material you are to hammer a
coherent shape. Now here 1 would urge you to spare
no pains. Clarity, logical progression, natural transi-
tions, closely riveted connections these are duties you
owe to your hearers. The preacher who stints toil at
this point, being disinclined for the strenuous mental
discipline involved, is laying upon his congregation the
onus of a task which is really his, not theirs. He is
transferring to them a burden he ought to have taken
on himself. Is it surprising that their acceptance of it
should, to put it mildly, lack enthusiasm? Never
grudge the labour which clear thinking and methodical
construction demand. A sermon which has some
symmetry about it, built to an orderly plan and showing
evidence of carefully chiselled thought, is likely to have
far more thrust and grip and attack upon the hearers'
minds than any amorphous collection of fine ideas.
There is a story of a young minister who, concerned
about the apparent failure of his preaching, consulted
Dr. Joseph Parker in the vestry of the City Temple.
His sermons, he complained, were encountering only
apathy. Could Dr. Parker frankly tell him what was

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lacking? "Suppose you preach me one of your
sermons here and now/' said Parker; and his visitor,
not without some trepidation, complied. When it was
over, the Doctor told him to sit down. ''Young man,"
he said, "you asked me to be frank, I think I can tell
you what is the matter. For the last half-hour you
have been trying to get something out of your head
instead of something into mine!" That distinction is
crucial Wrestle with your subject in the study, that
there may be clarity in the pulpit. "For if the trumpet
give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to
the battle?"

Now comes the actual writing of the sermon. Im-
mediately the question confronts you, How to begin ?
It was the almost invariable habit of the preachers of a
bygone generation, having announced a text, to start
off by expounding its Scripture setting and historical
background. Nor is this method by any means to be
despised to-day. For one thing, it provides a corrective
of that arbitrary treatment of Scripture which, breaking
all the canons of exegesis, imports meanings into texts
in complete disregard of what the original writer meant
to say. For another thing, the historical setting, if
briefly and vividly sketched, will illuminate and make
doubly relevant the message of the text itself. Thus,
for example, a sermon on Zechariah's young man with
the measuring-line might well begin with some account
of the danger which the prophet sensed in the rebuild-
ing of Jerusalem the danger, namely, that the new
community might be constructed precisely upon the

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lines of the old, a facsimile of the city that had stood
there before the divine judgments in history had swept
it away. Is that not a real peril still, that men should
have their faces to the past rather than to the future,
hankering after the social structure or the economic
security or the ecclesiastical divisions which their
fathers knew ? Or again, if you have decided to preach
on Isaiah's " Watchman, what of the night?" you
might not unfittingly introduce your subject by show-
ing that the watchman is one of the great figures of
Scripture, to be descried on page after page, standing
on the walls of beleaguered cities, peering through the
darkness infested by foes, scanning the horizons for
the coming of a deliverer, keeping vigil (as the apostle
saw him) over troubled hearts like the sentinel peace
of God. Given the saving grace of brevity, and some
faculty of historical imagination, much is to be said for
the recognized tradition of starting from the Scripture
context, and working on from that to the message for
to-day.

There is, however, another method which is better
adapted to grip your hearers' attention and secure their
interest at the very outset, especially in these days
when so many of them have the notion the quite
erroneous but stubbornly prevalent notion that the
world of the Bible is remote and alien from their own.
This is to start from present-day experience. Begin
where your hearers are. Meet them on their own
ground. Let us assume, for example, that you are
going to preach a sermon on the conquest of depres-

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sion, taking for your text the words in I Samuel,
"David encouraged himself in the Lord his God."
Instead of starting with a historical introduction based
on the Biblical incident, go straight to the experience
of your hearers themselves. Your first sentences will
arrest their attention, if you speak of the disheartened
moods which no one quite escapes, and of those difficult
days when work is a weariness and resilience is low, or
when life has defeated some cherished hope and dreams
have died. Then ask them to observe how one brave
spirit faced this very test and emerged victorious.
Show them David, as that most moving page of Old
Testament biography depicts him, girding himself to
meet a succession of adversities that might well have
made any man a nervous wreck. Not by the method
of the Stoic, who lectures his own soul on the matter of
morale ; not by the way of the wishful thinker, who
practises a comfortable self-deception; not by these
did this man triumph, but by letting God in upon the
situation, by an act of religious realism that smote the
low mood and brought dawn breaking through the
midnight of the soul Or again, suppose your subject
is Handicapped Lives, and your text Paul's thorn in
the flesh. If you begin with a disquisition on the
apostle's disability, your hearers may accord you only
that tepid interest which a doubtfully relevant theme
elicits. But start off from the fact that almost every
life is conscious of a handicap of some kind whether
of health, or talent, or opportunity, or personality, or
social gift and immediately their attention is engaged :

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: or you will be touching the very nerve of their own
experience. Then you will go on to show how Paul,
3y the grace of Christ, turned his limitations to glorious
*ain, and how any man or woman to-day may do the
same.

A useful variant of this method of approach is to
3egin with some arresting incident or picture from
ife or literature. Take, for instance, a subject on
which you are bound to speak to your people not once
3Ut many times, the immemorial question "Does God
;are ?" You might prelude your sermon on this theme
#ith that extraordinarily vivid picture Carlyle gives
lear the beginning of Sartor the philosopher gazing
)ut across the city at midnight from his lofty attic,
mising on the mingled joys and sorrows, hopes and
niseries of the half-a-million human beings huddled
ound him there: "But I," he exclaims at last, "I sit
ibove it all; I am alone with the Stars." Is God like
hat an aloof, spectator God? Or you might begin
vith that youthful outburst in one of Hugh Walpole's
itories. "You know that there can't be a God,
Vanessa. In your heart you must know it. You are
L wise woman. You read and think. Well, then, ask
rourself : How can there be a God and life be as it is ?"
The great initial advantage of this method is that it
dvifies the crucial issue with which you are proposing
o deal. Right at the outset in a couple of sentences
>r little more as in the vivid strokes of a lightning
itist it focuses the dramatic relevance of the theme,
tnd thrusts it compellingly upon mind and heart.

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HERALDS OF GOD

It will not have escaped your notice, in this connec-
tion, how often our Lord Himself in His teaching
found His point of departure in some incident, scene
or inquiry uppermost in His hearers' minds at the
moment. Instead of beginning with an exposition of
the fundamental verities of religious faith. He would
begin with the concrete stuff of life, the raw material
of familiar experience; and thence would lead on and
up to the eternal truth it was His mission to declare.
Jesus got His texts, time and again, from the con-
gregations gathered around Him. So, too, with St.
Paul at Athens. "As I passed by, I found an altar
'To the Unknown God.'" That arrested attention
immediately. That nailed down the issue, fastening it
firmly to contemporary fact. Rightly and wisely, the
apostle began just where his hearers were, hoping that
as his argument marched to its climax he would be able
to lead them through to an acceptance of the ultimate
revelation in Christ. Let me add that the trouble
about that Athenian sermon was, not that he began
there, but that he stayed there too long. The blunder
was and mark this well, for it is a common fault with
preachers still that half his discourse that day was
introduction. Indeed, it was only at the end that the
trumpet-note of God's mighty act in Christ was heard.
Perhaps Paul on Mars' Hill was conscious of a latent
antagonism in his congregation. Perhaps his surpris-
ing adoption of alien methods rhetoric and phil-
osophy, classical allusions and bits of poetry was a
deliberate peace-offering intended to neutralize the

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unspoken criticisms with which the atmosphere seemed
sultry. At all events, reflecting subsequently on the
comparative failure of that sermon, he resolved that
never again would he lengthen out his prologue so
discursively, nor travel to his goal by so roundabout a
road. Between Athens and Corinth, the decision was
reached. He would indeed meet his hearers on their
own ground, but he would take them straight from
there to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Well for us
if we have learnt the same lesson, and made the same
vow in our own souls! If you have a propensity
towards long and involved introductions, check it ruth-
lessly. A few vivid sentences can be so much stronger
and more telling than the most elaborate historical or
theological approach. "Gentlemen," said Spurgeon
to his students, " don't go creeping into your subject,
as some swimmers go into the water, first to the ankles,
and then to the knees, and then to the waist and
shoulders: plunge into it at once over head and ears!"
Before passing from this matter, let me add that
perhaps the ideal sermon introduction is that which
consists in a judicious combination of the two main
methods outlined above. One example must suffice.
Take the striking incident of Paul's encounter at
Ephesus with the group of disciples who had never
"so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost."
A sermon on this text might begin from the Biblical
passage itself. You might portray Paul puzzling over
the lack of vitality and the sense of strain in the religious
life of those Ephesian converts, until the root of the

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trouble was disclosed; and then you would draw the
parallel with that desupernaturalized Christianity so
familar to-day, which awaits a fresh baptism of power.
Or alternatively, your sermon might set out from the
contemporary situation, from the manifest failure of
the Christian forces to make their God-intended impact
upon this generation, and from the disturbing question
haunting so many hearts, "Why has my religion not
made a more vital difference to me ? ' ' Then you would
ask your hearers to observe the Word of God con-
fronting this precise perplexity, diagnosing the trouble
with sure insight, and dealing with it decisively. But
better than either of these lines of approach to the
cardinal truth of the narrative in question would be an
introduction which combined them both. Here is how
John Hutton does it note how in three arresting
sentences we are taken, not only to the crux of the
problem at Ephesus, but to the heart of our own
predicament to-day: " Wasn't it too bad of those who
taught them the rudiments of the Christian faith to
leave those poor innocents in their little boat with
nothing but oars! Not telling them that they might
step a mast and let loose a sail, for there was always a
favouring breath on the face of those waters ! What a
fool indeed a man would be who should decide to-day
to cross the Atlantic, rowing !"

If I have dwelt at some length upon this question of
how to begin, it is because it is so essential to gain your

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hearers* interest at the outset. Those first two or three
minutes are vitally important. But now we pass to the
main body of the sermon. Is the time-honoured usage
of divisions " heads," as they are called to be re-
commended? My advice would be to avoid any
slavish bondage to tradition at this point. It is
certainly not necessary that all sermons, like Gaul,
should be divided into three parts. There is no
intrinsic sanctity in the tripartite sermon division, nor
is it (as some appear to hold) a prerequisite of sound
doctrine and essential to salvation. Sometimes your
discourse may have six heads, sometimes none. Vary
your methods deliberately. Cultivate flexibility. .It
is bad to cast all your sermons in one mould, so that
people know infallibly in advance what shape they will
be. Principal Rainy once spoke of sermons to which
congregations listened "with respectful resignation,
foreseeing clearly how it was all to be, and conscious
that mental consuetude had superseded mental life/'
Refuse to allow any one form of sermon structure to
dominate your preaching. In any case, a sermon ought
to be a living thing of flesh and blood: do not, there-
fore, let the bones of the skeleton obtrude themselves
unduly. It is the finished building men want to see,
not the builder's scaffolding. "The well is deep and
you must have something to draw with. But there is
no need," says Dr. W. R. Maltby, "to make people
drink out of the bucket, still less to chew the rope."

The value of heads is, of course, that they drive
home to your hearers' minds the truth for whose

HERALDS OF GOD

acceptance you are pleading. They focus the issue,
and so help towards obtaining a verdict* They may
stick in the memory when all the rest has been for-
gotten. Some texts indeed supply their own divisions.
Thus, if you are to preach on "The Church at Wor-
ship/' from the words "They continued stedfastly in
the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking
of bread, and in prayers "; or on "The Fight of
Faith," from the apostolic injunction "Watch ye,
stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong";
or on "The Four Dimensions of Redeeming Love,"
from the prayer of intercession "That ye may be able
to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and
length, and depth, and height" it will hardly be
necessary to search far for your divisions, for in each
case they are shouting at you from the text itself. With
other texts, again, appropriate heads reveal themselves
on due consideration and reflection. You are going to
preach, let us say, on the words "Looking unto Jesus."
What does a steady Christward look involve? It
means looking outward, and not inward ; upward, and
not downward; forward, and not backward. There,
then, are your divisions: and you proceed to show that
the characteristic trend and direction of our life as
Christians must be outward to the objective facts of
revealed religion (though of course you will express
this differently), not inward to our subjective moods
and processes; upward to our divine destiny, "the
measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ/' not
downward to any earthy origins; forward to the

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greater disclosures Christ has yet to make to us, not
backward to the record of past attainment. Or suppose
that one day, feeling constrained as you often will
to lead your people to the very crux of God's dealings
with them, you take the texts from Hebrews: "It was
not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should
take away sins"; "He hath appeared, to put away sin
by the sacrifice of Himself." Your theme is man's
desperate dilemma and God's decisive answer. You
begin by remarking that the whole history of humanity
has been the record of the age-long endeavour to
answer the stubborn question. How to make peace
with life. How to be right with God. You proceed to
point to three classic answers to the problem, three
historic expedients which have been tried: the answer
of the Jew, the answer of the Greek, the answer of the
Roman. You show that each of us has in his con-
stitution something of all three: something of the
Jew, who hoped to deal with sin by the intricacies of a
religious cult; something of the Greek, who thought
to deliver his soul aesthetically and intellectually;
something of the Roman, who trusted to moralism and
disciplined conduct. Finally, where all three answers
break down, through the night of man's despair comes
God's answer, smiting the darkness like a sudden
dawn. Every other experiment fails: only Christ's
the experiment of the Cross triumphantly suc-
ceeds.

All for sin could not atone:
Thou must save, and Thou alone.
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HERALDS OF GOD

It was quite a common practice with preachers of a
former generation to announce the main divisions of
their subject at the very outset of a sermon. Now this
is bad psychology. It gives everything away. It holds
no surprises in reserve. It may, indeed, if used on rare
occasions prove effective enough. But, on the whole,
It is apt to be destructive of interest if people know in
advance exactly where you intend to lead them. You
handicap yourself if you divulge incontinently the
heads you are proposing to use. But let me repeat,
whether you formally announce any divisions or not,
you must have them clear in your own mind. It is
quite fatal to embark on a sermon without having a
plainly charted course to follow. How can you hope
to have any freedom or conviction in delivery if there
is no connecting-thread running through from start
to finish, no measured march and progression of
thought? Far too many sermons wander erratically
from one thing to another, going off at sudden tangents,
perpetrating aimless involutions, anon returning upon
their own tracks, moving in circles, with divisions over-
lapping, heads leading to anticlimax, transitions muddy
and blurred. The manuscript of Carlyle's essay on
Robert Burns went for revision before publication to
Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review. When the proof
sheets came, the author found he complained "the
first part cut all into shreds the body of a quadruped
with the head of a bird, a man shortened by cutting out
his thighs and fixing the knee-caps on the hips 7 '; and
Carlyle refused to let his work appear " in such a horrid

*34

THE PREACHER'S STUDY

shape/* His words might stand as a description of a
certain class of sermon misshapen, disjointed, lop-
sided and ill-proportioned. Make sure that each point
you are going to include receives due weight. Avoid
giving so much space to the earlier and perhaps
subordinate stages of your argument that you have to
foreshorten and telescope the matters of main import-
ance. Aim at a cumulative effect. Keep your most
telling points to the last. Lord Palmerston, whose
style was apt sometimes to be slipshod and untidy, was
speaking one day in Parliament. "I think/' he
declared, "the honourable member's proposals an out-
rageous violation of constitutional propriety, a daring
departure from traditional policy, and, in short, a great
mistake." Bathos, which can play havoc with a
sentence, can also damage seriously the total structure
of a sermon. Never forget you are working for a
verdict. You are hoping and praying to leave your
people face to face with God in Christ. That goal
must never fade from sight. Make the whole sermon
an ascent thither. Construct it with that end in view.
Fashion it with that deliberate design; and please God,
it will lead men through the outer and the inner courts
to the altar of incense, and the Holy Place, and the
very presence of the Lord.

VI

This brings us to the crucial matter of sermon-
endings. There are preachers who experience the

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HERALDS OF GOD

greatest difficulty in drawing to a conclusion. " I must
desist/* exclaims Beecher, taking a sudden grip of
himself at the close of his great discourse on "Hin-
drances to Religious Life," and openly and undis-
guisedly ramming on the brakes, "I must desist! The
clock gets through before I do, every Sunday. I
would that it were slower; for, though I often begin
sorrowfully and heavily, the time for me to stop never
arrives that I do not feel that I would fain continue till
the going down of the sun." No doubt, with a Beecher
in the pulpit, men may listen gladly for hours on end.
But if you are wise, you will cultivate conciseness. And
it is no easy art. Someone once asked Woodrow
Wilson how long he took to prepare a ten-minute
speech. "Two weeks, " was the answer. "How long
for a speech lasting an hour?" continued the ques-
tioner. "One week," declared the President. "How
long for a two-hour speech?" "I am ready now!"
Prolixity needs no midnight oil ; but to be concise, to
achieve compression, to nail down the issue and bring
the whole matter to a terse and trenchant close hoc
opus, hie labor est. But such toil and care are never
wasted. You desire your sermon, under God, to make
a difference to human lives. You hope that the result
may be some vow secretly ratified, some bondage
broken, some cross more resolutely shouldered, some
song in the night more bravely sung, some area of life
more thoroughly surrendered to the sovereignty of
Christ. The weakness of too many sermons is that
they meander along and beat about the bush; never

THE PREACHER'S STUDY

bringing the hearer to the point of saying, "This
means me"; never leaving him facing Christ and
asking, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?"
They are like the Abana river, making a brave show
for part of its course, but losing itself eventually and
dying out and vanishing in the waste. See to it that
your sermon shall not hirple vaguely to a lame, in-
effectual close. Why should the Word of the Lord
peter out in the desert sands ? Clinch your message as
decisively as you can, and do not hesitate to use the
note of direct personal appeal.

In thus urging upon you the crucial importance of
your final paragraphs and sentences, I am not suggest-
ing the use of elaborate perorations. Far from it. The
day of the florid, self-conscious climax is past. People
are rightly suspicious of, and tend to grow restive
under, a sermon culminating in a blaze of literary fire-
works, like a sonata with a noisy coda. Diminuendo,
not crescendo^ ought to be the rule as you draw near the
end. Much better conclude quietly and even abruptly
than indulge in any declamatory pyrotechnics. If you
wish to see how powerful and effective the abrupt close
can be, read some of Reinhold Niebuhr's sermons.
You will never weaken the force of your final appeal by
keeping it restrained. In nine cases out of ten, quiet
notes are better there than crashing chords. No doubt
there are exceptions. One occasion in St. George's,
Edinburgh, was long spoken of with bated breath by
those who were present. It was a Communion Sunday,
and Dr. Alexander Whyte had chosen his text from the

HERALDS OF GOD

story of Gethsemane. He took his hearers into the
darkness of the Garden, and spoke of our Lord's
prayers, of the anguish of the conflict and the sweat of
blood; he spoke of the seamless robe with the red
marks of that agony upon it ; then suddenly he broke
off into Mark Antony's appeal to the citizens of Rome :

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
You all do know this mantle: I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on;
'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent

and the preacher, having quoted the almost unbearably
moving passage, added the cry that broke from the
Roman's lips when the crowd at last caught fire
"Now let it work." Then back to the Garden, and
the place of prayer, and the dark betrayal night, and
the eternal love that agonized for sin; and it is said
that when the sermon closed that day with a great
shout "Now let it work!" the spiritual effect was well-
nigh overwhelming.

Such occasions, however, are the exceptions which
prove the rule. Have you noticed how often there
comes in the greatest literature, after the surge and
passion of a mighty theme, the contrasted beauty of a
quiet and measured close ? You have it in the Greek
tragedians : if Aeschylus and Sophocles sometimes
bring the dramatic tension near to breaking-point, they
invariably relax it in the final scene. You have it in
the closing lines of Paradise Lost, of the Idylls of the
King, of the Tale of Two Cities, of Sohrab and Rustum,

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THE PREACHFR'S STUDY

of The Everlasting Mercy. Inexpressibly moving is the
long falling close of Matthew Arnold's poem, in which
after the noise and dust of conflict, and the desol-
ating grief of the father who unwittingly has slain his
son we are made to see the majestic river Oxus
flowing on

Out of the mist and hum of that low land,

Into the frosty starlight. . .

A foiPd circuitous wanderer: till at last

The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide

His luminous home of waters opens, bright

And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bath'd stars

Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.

You have it superbly in the twenty-ninth Psalm, where
whirlwind and tempest and thunder give way in the
last verse to a still small voice: "The Lord will give
strength unto His people; the Lord will bless His
people with peace." You have it at the end of St.
Paul's magnificent description to the Corinthians of
death and the hereafter, of crashing worlds and tempest
blasts, of judgment and the resurrection : suddenly
comes the subduing hush " Therefore, my beloved
brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abound-
ing in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know
that your labour is not in vain in the Lord/'

Let these things be your pattern. Men are not
saved by declamation, nor are souls carried on the
wings of peroration into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Cultivate the quiet close. Let your last words of

HERALDS OF GOD

appeal have in them something of the hush that falls
when Christ Himself draws near. Remember that,
even at the best, "we prophesy in part/' and that
"whether there be tongues, they shall cease." But if,
when our poor stammering words have fallen silent,
there comes forth then out of the silence the one
eternal Word; if men are able in that silence to hear
even though only dimly and far away the challenging
and healing cadences of the voice of God, the work
will have been done, and we shall not have preached
in vain.

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CHAPTER IV
THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

" What skill doth every part of our work require, and of how
much moment is every part ! To preach a sermon, I think, is not
the hardest part ; and yet what skill is necessary to make plain
the truth, to convince the hearers j to let in the irresistible light
into their consciences, and to keep it there, and drive all home ;
to screw the truth into their minds, and work Christ into their
affections ; to meet every objection that gainsays, and clearly to
resolve it ; to drive sinners to a stand, and make them see there is
no hope, but they must unavoidably be converted or condemned :
and to do all this so for language and manner as beseems our work,
and yet as is most suitable to the capacities of our hearers. This,
and a great deal more that should be done in every sermon, should
surely be done with a great deal of holy skill. So great a God,
whose message we deliver, should be honoured by our delivery
of it.*' RICHARD BAXTER.

was a day when that flaming prophet of
the eighteenth century, George Whitefield, was
preaching to a vast throng on the power of saving faith.
The pride of reason and worldly wisdom, he declared,
would lead the soul downward to inevitable destruc-
tion: only faith in Christ led heavenward. To drive
the point home to his hearers' minds, he used an
illustration. He begged them to imagine a blind man,
with a dog, walking on the brink of a precipice. So
vividly did the preacher describe the scene, so acute
became the tension as he brought the blind man
nearer and nearer to the fatal edge, that suddenly Lord

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HERALDS OF GOD

Chesterfield, who was sitting in the congregation,
sprang up exclaiming, "Good God! The man's
gone!" "No, my lord/' answered Whitefield, "he is
not quite gone; let us hope that he may yet be saved."
Then he went on to preach deliverance from the delu-
sions of blind self-trust through faith in Jesus Christ.

Now, we may not possess one-tenth of George
Whitefield's dramatic imagination. Nevertheless, the
art of illustration is a thing no preacher can afford to
neglect. Abstract truth has to be translated into con-
crete terms, if it is to impinge upon the average mind.
The preacher who will not condescend thus to translate
his meaning, who disdains the use of illustration, con-
sidering it undignified and puerile, is being very foolish.
Surely our Lord's example is decisive here. Jesus did
not speak of the efficacy of importunate prayer : He
showed us a man shamelessly hammering at his
neighbour's door at midnight. He did not say that
wrong personal relationships were inimical to religious
reality: He said it would be wise to leave our gift
before the altar, and go and make peace with our
brother, and then come back and offer the gift. When
a certain jurist, an expert in definitions, demanded
"Who is my neighbour?" the answer was "A certain
man went down to Jericho," and the story of the Good
Samaritan. Truth made concrete will find a way past
many a door where abstractions knock in vain.

This is an art, of course, which calls for careful
handling. Illustrations dragged in at random and
needlessly multiplied betoken a slovenly mind. Any

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

Illustration which is only doubtfully relevant to the
main theme ought to be rigorously banned. No
matter how vivid it may be in itself, if it does not
immediately light up the particular truth under dis-
cussion, exclude it ruthlessly. Otherwise it will simply
distract attention and defeat your purpose. On the
other hand, illustrations sparingly and appropriately
used can be a vital source of power and illumination.
You are describing, let us say, man's search for God,
the soul's age-long quest for spiritual reality, and the
thrilling moment of supreme discovery. Have you
read Madame Curie's Life? Do you remember the
moving account of the night of magic when, after years
of experimenting, she saw across the darkness of the
unlit laboratory the first faint streak of phosphorescent
blue, and knew that it was radium ? Or suppose you
are speaking of the remorse which lashes the guilty
soul in the hour of its awakening. There is an un-
forgettable instance you might adduce the dramatic
moment in Saint Joan where the Chaplain, who has
stood and watched the end, consenting to the death of
the saint, bursts in suddenly upon the Earl of Warwick
with the lamentable cry, "I let them do it. If I had
known I would have torn her from their hands. O
God, take away this sight from me ! O Christ, deliver
me from this fire that is consuming me ! She cried to
Thee in the midst of it: Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! She is
in Thy bosom; and I am in hell for evermore/ 7 Or,
once again, your theme may be the companionship of
Jesus : you are trying to show the power of that com-

H3

HERALD S OF GOD

panionship to keep life calm and strong and un-
defeated through days of stress and storm. You recall
how Joseph Conrad, in The Mirror of the Sea, quotes
from a letter of Sir Robert Stopford, who commanded
one of the ships with which Nelson chased to the
West Indies an enemy fleet nearly double in number.
Describing the desperate hardships of that daring ad-
venture, Stopford wrote: "We are half-starved, and
otherwise inconvenienced by being so long out of port.
But our reward is we are with Nelson ! " How much
deeper and more ineffable the serenity of those who
through all the hazards and uncertainties of life can
say, " We are with Christ!"

The question may well be raised. How is the
preacher to obtain an adequate store of illustrative
material? I would warn you against being content to
allow others to do this garnering for you. Ready-made
collections of illustrations are a snare. Omnibus
volumes of sermon anecdotes are the last refuge of a
bankrupt intelligence. The best illustrations are those
which come to you as the harvest of your own reading
and observation. In this realm as in others, there is far
more zest and thrill in personal discovery than in
second-hand borrowing. Be your own anthologist.
Little incidents of daily life, significant happenings in
the world around you, moving pages in the books you
read all can serve to illuminate the truth committed
to your charge. These things are apt to be fugitive
and memory precarious: therefore note them down.
Elaborate card-indexing of illustrations is a work of

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

supererogation. If a passion for mental tidiness leads
you to adopt it, well and good: only beware lest the
mechanism of cross-references and the like becomes
despotic! For those of us to whom such intricate and
even formidable methods must remain counsels of
perfection, quite beyond the compass of our less
disciplined ways, something much simpler a loose-
leaf commonplace book, with headings will prove
adequate. It scarcely matters how rough-and-ready
such a compendium may be, as long as it is veritably
your own, sheaves of your own harvesting from the
fields of literature and of life. In any case, avoid over-
loading. Do not scorn the aid of illustration, but use
it sparingly in your sermons, and with discretion. And
remember the maxim : Better one illustration that is
strong and apt and gripping than ten that are shoddy
and irrelevant and sentimental.

ii

Passing on to the place of quotations in preaching,
we should do well to reaffirm the same rule : be sparing.
"Let your moderation be known unto all men."
People are not really so avid as some preachers suppose
to learn what Confucius said in 500 B.C., or Emerson
in A.D. 1850, or the Brains Trust in 1945. Beyond a
certain point, the formula "As So-and-so has said"
tends to become for some hearers merely irritating, for
others positively soporific. Reference was made in an
earlier lecture to St. Paul's sermon at Athens, its points

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H ERALDS OF GOD

of strength and of weakness. It is not without signific-
ance that the occasion when the apostle, oppressed
perhaps by the shadow of Demosthenes, appears to
have argued with himself, "If they want literary allu-
sion poetry, philosophy, comparative religion let
them have it," was one of the conspicuously less
successful days of his ministry: so that going on from
there to Corinth, and meditating as he journeyed on
the recent disappointment, he " determined not to
know anything save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified."
There is one class of quotations which might well be
dispensed with altogether those which have grown
hackneyed and threadbare through over-use. It would
be much kinder to W. E. Henley and A. H. Clough
if all preachers everywhere would agree to give
"Invictus" and "Say not, the struggle nought avail-
eth" a complete rest for the next ten years. It is a
different matter, of course, when some commonplace
allusion can be set in a suddenly new light or viewed
from an unfamiliar angle. Take, for example, Sir
Oliver Lodge's dictum, "The modern man is not
worrying about his sins." I wonder in how many
thousand sermons that remark has made a punctual
reappearance? Ought it not now to be disqualified,
and to have its sermon-licence suspended sine diet
Certainly, if only the obvious sense of the words is
intended. But suppose that one day in a sermon you
are concerned to emphasize the crucial paradox, so
imperfectly understood by many, that the more a man
sins the less he is able to realize that he is a sinner (the

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

damaging thing about sin being what the Bible calls its
unconscious " hardening," its ominous way of blinding
a man to its own nature and doping his spiritual per-
ceptions without his knowing that anything of the kind
is happening): then indeed you may use the familiar
quotation with fresh point and force. For now you
are setting it in a new light, "Not worrying about his
sins"? No, precisely; for sin's characteristic action
is to insensitize the soul, to incapacitate it progressively
from seeing that there is anything to worry about. Or
take, for another example, the stanza from Omar
Khayyam :

Ah Love ! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire.
Would not we shatter it to bits and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire !

Banal enough in all conscience, if you are using it
merely to illustrate the intractability of life or the dis-
illusionment of a pagan ethic. But there is an inspired
flash in Professor A. E. Taylor's comment on the lines
when he bids us "put the heart itself at the very head
of the list of things to be shattered and remade."
There the hackneyed stanza of the Eastern rhymester
is suddenly redeemed from its banality, and thrust
dramatically into the service of the truth.

Profuse and indiscriminate quotation, then, is a
mark of bad preaching. On the other hand, to be able
to focus the message at the right moment by quoting
some memorable and gripping phrase is a real source
of strength. You are preaching, let us say, on the

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words of the twenty-third Psalm, "He restoreth my
sour': God's secret ministry in days of spiritual re-
action and fatigue. There comes to your mind a
sentence from one of Baron von Hugel's letters: " Am
doing what I can for her: pray for her. Have ex-
plained how she requires a second conversion this
time against the dust and drear when the physical
enthusiasm dwindles/ 7 Does that not nail down the
issue? Or you are speaking of our Lord's vivid use
of the " how much more'* argument: " If ye know how
to give good gifts unto your children, how much more
your Father in heaven! 7 ' If parents will sacrifice
themselves for their little ones, how much more God!
If a man will lay down his life for his friends, how
much more God ! If you will suffer for one whom you
love, how much more God! Do you remember how
Lacordaire once dramatized this very truth? "If you
would wish to know how the Almighty feels towards
us, listen to the beating of your own heart and add to it
infinity" (Incidentally, there you have the whole book
of the prophet Hosea the man's personal history and
his religious message to the world in one golden
sentence.) Or, again, you are dealing with what
theologians barbarously describe as "the Kenotic
Theory of the Incarnation" what you will prefer, in
your sermon title, to call more simply "The Humility
of the Divine": "He divested Himself of the glories
of heaven," wrote Paul to the Philippians, "and became
a servant and stooped to die upon the Cross." In one
of her stories, Sheila Kaye-Smith depicts a character

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upon whom, as he knelt one day within a church, this
great, subduing truth broke with all the force of a
personal revelation. " There was not one pang of his
lonely, wandering life, no throb or ache or groan of his
up to that moment when the light of his eyes and the
desire of his heart were taken from him at a stroke, that
had not been shared by God. For if man has known
the stars, so God has known the dust." There is a
sentence which positively demands quotation. And
is it not possible that, long after everything else in your
sermon has been forgotten, such a shining word as
that " If man has known the stars, so God has known
the dust" may grip the memory of some who heard
it, and go to work in secret ways within their hearts?

in

It may be well at this point to say something on the
question of language. Two pitfalls against which I
have already warned you are professionalism of
vocabulary or pulpit jargon, and the temptations of the
purple passage: on these nothing further need be said.
Let me rather go on to stress one great positive rule
which ought to determine your choice of language
throughout: Be simple and direct. "People think,"
exclaimed Matthew Arnold, "that I can teach them
style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say,
and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only
secret of style. " Surely Arnold was right. Every man
at Pentecost heard the Gospel, we are told, in his own

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tongue; and that is the basic condition of effective
preaching still. Have something to say, and when you
are saying it avoid periphrasis and over-elaboration:
say it as clearly as you can. Dr. L. P. Jacks maintains
that "two lines of Wordsworth

But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me !

are a more adequate expression of human grief than
all the funeral sermons ever preached. 7 ' It is simple
directness, not literary embellishment, that moves the
hearts of men.

Let us hark back, by way of contrast, to St. Paul's
Cathedral at Christmastide 1624, and listen to this
trumpet-toned, tremendous utterance of John Donne.
He is speaking of the Psalmist's word, "I will sing of
mercy and judgment." "If some King of the earth,"
cries Donne, "have so large an extent of Dominion, in
North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer
together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and
West, as that he hath day and night together in his
Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgment
together; He brought light out of darknesse, not out
of a lesser light; He can bring thy Summer out of
Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the
wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience,
thou have been benighted till now, wintred and
frosen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed,
smothered and stupified till now, now God comes to
thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the
bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate

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all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all
penuries, all occasions invite His mercies, and all times
are His seasons." That is magnificent but try
modelling your sermon language upon it, and the
result is likely to be disastrous. Or take this, from a
preacher of a very different kind, Talmage of Brooklyn.
He has just quoted the railing cry of the impenitent
malefactor at Calvary, "If Thou be the Son of God"
and he goes on, "If? Was there any if about it?
Tell me, thou star, that in robe of life didst run to point
out His birthplace. Tell me, thou sea, that didst put
thy hand over thy lip when He bid thee be still. Tell
me, ye dead, who got up to see Him die. Tell me, thou
sun in mid-heaven, who for Him didst pull down over
thy face the veil of darkness. Tell me, ye lepers, who
were cleansed, ye dead, who were raised. Is He the
Son of God? Aye, aye! responds the universe. The
flowers breathe it the stars chime it the redeemed
celebrate it the angels rise up on their thrones to
announce it. And yet on that miserable malefactor's
*iP millions shall be wrecked for all eternity." That,
again, is great preaching: and you, too, may have
please God, will often have those moments when
language, winged with the emotion of a mighty theme,
soars aloft in genuine eloquence. But artificial elo-
quence, like sham emotion, is a dreadful thing. Learn
to prune your language. Reject every expression that
is merely florid and ostentatious. Prefer simple and
even homely words to those that are abstract and diffi-
cult, direct and pointed speech to involved circuitous

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sentences. Not that you need be arid and prosaic:
but you must be lucid. Do not be like the writers
Quiller-Couch describes, "perpetually shuffling around
in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms. " Canon
Liddon was writing a letter to a friend one dark Christ-
mas from Amen Court. " London is just now," he
wrote, "buried under a dense fog. This is commonly
attributed to Dr. Westcott having opened his study-
window at Westminster." That, of course, was quite
unfair. But clarity is a consummation so devoutly to
be wished that you must be ready to sacrifice almost
anything to achieve it.

In thus urging upon you the necessity of lucid and
simple language, I am certainly not suggesting that the
best preaching is that which makes a minimum demand
upon the hearers for mental exertion and hard thinking.
Simplicity is a very different thing from shallowness;
and if it is bad to preach over people's heads, not to
preach to their heads at all is worse. I trust that to your
dying day you will "preach the simple Gospel," but it
is well to remember that there is nothing which so
stretches men's mental horizons as God's revelation in
Christ, It was a true insight that led the apostle to
declare, "The world by wisdom knew not God": but
it is a deplorable attitude which would divorce evan-
gelism from the duty of disciplined thought. There is a
type of preaching which apparently regards it as more
important to generate heat than to supply light:
sermons devoid of any element of positive teaching,
compounded of anecdotes, appeals and homiletical

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4 * gush/' an affront to any decent man's Intelligence,
"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Some
preachers have the fixed idea that the way to reach the
human heart is to by-pass the human understanding.
It is emphatically mistaken strategy. Das Denken ist
auch Gottesdienst; and nothing could be more tedious
than the preaching which is all uplift and exhortation
with no food to feed the mind. Resolve, then, that
your pulpit work shall represent not only your truest
fervour but also your best thought. Your congrega-
tion deserves it, and will welcome it. But even with
the deep and difficult themes that tax the rnind with
these, indeed, most of all the rule applies: Be clear,
be direct. Rabbi Duncan was discussing with a friend
one day the merits and demerits of a certain essay. " Is
it not deep?" his friend inquired admiringly. "No,"
came the blunt expressive answer, "not deep, but
drumlie!"

IV

We proceed now to consider the fundamental ques-
tion of the choice of texts and subjects. To every
preacher this is a matter of constant and absorbing
concern. Indeed, at the outset of a man's ministry,
the prospect of having to find two fresh themes each
week may well daunt the imagination and weigh upon
the mind. Let me bring to you at this point a word of
reassurance based on personal experience. You will
discover with relief and delight, as the weeks and years
go on, how punctually and unfailingly the promise is

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ratified, "The Lord will provide." But there is one
condition: unremitting Bible study. I have already
urged upon you the vital importance of expository
preaching. Here let me add that it is only as we live
in the Bible devotionally, and as students of the
sacred Word that we can hope to find the manna
falling regularly for our people's need.

Again and again in your reading of the Bible,
phrases, sentences, whole passages will leap out from
the page, each of them positively thrusting itself upon
you, and clamouring "One day you must preach on
me! " This is where your private notebooks come into
action. When a text has once gripped you, do not let
it escape. Jot it down at the head of a page, and under-
neath it any thoughts, illustrations, potential sermon
divisions it may have brought with it. There is a
tragic page in the biography of Hector Berlioz the
composer, which tells how one night there came to him
quite suddenly an inspiration for a new symphony.
The theme of the first movement, an Allegro, was
ringing in his head: he knew he ought to capture it
there and then, and set the music down in manuscript,
but he refrained. The following night it returned,
and again he heard the Allegro clearly, and sang it to
himself, and even seemed to see it written down: but
again he failed to take his pen. The next day, when he
awoke, all remembrance of it was gone: the lovely
melody refused to be recaptured, and the symphony
which might have thrilled the world was never written.
Let that sad episode be a warning. No elaborate

THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

system of tabulation is necessary. All you require is
a single reference at the top of a page, and a couple of
lines of comment. Very often as you turn the pages
of such a reference-book you will find that your theme
has been given you ; and in a dry season you will thank
God you have a reservoir !

It is hardly necessary perhaps to point out that there
is one obligation which the very act of preaching from
the Word of God binds upon us. I mean the duty of
exegetical honesty. There are some sermons which,
starting out from a word of Scripture, proceed quite
flagrantly to violate the intention of the original writer.
This practice of importing alien meanings into texts is
strenuously to be discountenanced. To say this is not,
of course, to suggest that allegorizing is necessarily
bad ; nor does it imply a rigid and excessive literalism
distrustful of all spiritual lines of interpretation. There
is no reason why you should not, occasionally at least,
extend the reference of a text beyond its immediate
setting. For example, when Jesus declared "What
God hath joined together let not man put asunder,"
He was speaking specifically of marriage and divorce.
But the principle there proclaimed runs through the
whole of life; and therefore you might well preach
from that text on some of those other God-intended
alliances which we break at our peril Faith and
Reason (so tragically divorced in the long conflict
between the Church and Science), Evangelism and
Ethics, Justice and Mercy, Freedom and Discipline,
Man the Sinner and Christ the Saviour. Or again,

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take the closing words of Psalm ex: "He shall drink
of the brook in the way, and go on with lifted head."
It would be pedantic to deny your right to use such
words for a sermon on some of the soul-refreshing
streams Nature, Art, Friendship, the Lord's Day,
the Bible, Prayer which God has provided along our
pilgrim road. But the strongest and most helpful
preaching is that which expounds a text or passage in
dynamic relationship to its actual setting in Scripture.
Loyalty to the Word of God demands scrupulous care
in exegesis. Doubtless it would be possible, on the
basis of the text "The simplicity that is in Christ," to
paint a vivid picture of the homeliness of the Galilean
ministry simple in its lowly origins, simple in speech,
in companionship, in teaching, in faith. But we are
using Scripture quite illegitimately if we fail to show
that what the apostle had in mind was not primarily the
simplicity of Jesus at all, but the necessity of simple and
single-hearted devotion towards Jesus on the part of
Christian converts. Or again, it is more than question-
able to use King Agrippa's famous dictum, "Almost
thou persuadest me to be a Christian, " in the sense that
here was a soul openly acknowledging the ultimate
dilemma, avowedly trembling on the verge of spiritual
decision. In point of fact, it seems to have been sting-
ing disdain that inspired the words (though, of course,
the bravado may have been self-defence, a smart retort
disguising an uneasy conscience): "At this rate, Paul,
you will be thinking you have made a Christian of me! "
The point is that it is imperative to allow the Scripture

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to speak its own message. Build your sermons on a
solid foundation of accurate exegesis. Be honest with
the Word of God!

Such strict attention to basic meanings carries with
it rich rewards. In the very process of tracking down
the original sense of a text or passage, you will find new
suggestions leaping out upon you. To take just one
case in point, there is that lovely affirmation of St. Paul
to the Philippians: "The peace of God, which passeth
all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds
through Christ Jesus/' Even as it stands in the
Authorised Version, it is moving and expressive. But
notice how much more vivid it becomes when the verb
is given its full meaning. "The peace of God shall
keep guard over, shall stand as sentry to, your hearts
and minds/' It will hold the fort in the day of siege,
and keep the central citadel inviolate. There, surely,
is a conception of inner peace far removed from the
sentimentalisms which have all too often blemished this
noble theme. Christian serenity, as the apostle en-
visages it, is no passive exemption or easy immunity
from the assaults of life: it is the active strength of a
God-garrisoned heart.

In your choice of subjects it is wise, as a general rule,
to avoid the bizarre and the sensational. It is easy
enough to hit upon quaint, outlandish texts; easy
enough, by announcing such a text, to intrigue your
congregation with the thought "Now what in all the
world will he be able to make of that?" But there is
really very little merit in such performances. The

HERALD S OF GOD

chances are that they will leave an impression of the
preacher's ingenuity rather than of the majesty of God :
and that is failure devastating and complete. Far
better gird yourself to grapple with John iii. 16 or
Matthew xi. 28 than spend your time pursuing eccen-
tric texts or fashioning odd and startling sermon-titles.
"Remember Peniel," says Dr. W. R. Maltby, "and
wrestle with the great themes, even if they throw
you."

At the same time, it is worth recognizing the fact
that on page after page of the Bible there are texts
possessing a quite peculiar quality of grip, a dramatic
power of arresting attention from the very moment they
are announced. To preach from such a text is to
implant in your hearers' minds a seed which may go
on germinating long after the sermon itself has been
forgotten. What converted Spurgeon was not the
Methodist lay preacher's sermon in the chapel at Col-
chester: it was his text "Look unto Me and be ye
saved, all the ends of the earth." "He had not much
to say, thank God," declared Spurgeon afterwards,
"for that compelled him to keep on repeating his text,
and there was nothing needed by me, at any rate
except his text." When you preach on such a word of
Scripture, you start with an enormous initial gain.
For from the very outset the text itself goes actively
to work, awakening and challenging, smiting and
binding up.

For example, you may be anxious to make vivid to
your people's minds the wonderful way in which God

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comes to us through the fact of friendship, using the
human relationship with its experiences of trust, for-
giveness and loyalty to interpret and make luminous
for us the very heart and nature of the eternal. Do
you remember Jacob's grateful cry to his brother whom
he had wronged, when Esau welcomed him back
magnanimously after the long estrangement? "I have
seen thy face as though I had seen the face of God/'
How memorably these moving words express the
experience of encountering the divine in the human !
Such a text, by its own force of impact and momentum,
will break through many barriers and thrust deep into
heart and conscience.

Or again, you may wish to stress the fact that the
most important thing about any man is his final inter-
pretation of life. What does life mean to him, on a
total view of it ? What is his ultimate verdict on its
significance? Is it a fortuitous succession of events,
without rhyme or reason, a sorry tale of injustice and
frustration? Or is it a plan of God? You might well
invite your congregation to approach this question by
way of one of the greatest stories in the world. You
might take for your text that simple-looking but im-
mensely deep saying of Joseph in Egypt to the men who
had enslaved him: "So now it was not you that sent
me hither, but God." Set out from that, and your
message will have a double reinforcement. For not
only is there the dramatic power of the words them-
selves : there is also the fact that the whole setting of
the text in Genesis sheds light upon your theme.

HERALDS OF GOD

You will be able to show that God does not will the
baffling evils of the world to-day, any more than He
willed the treacherous conduct of Joseph's brethren ;
that, nevertheless, when sin has taken the game into its
unclean hands, God is still master of the situation, using
tragedy creatively and making the wrath of man to
praise Him; and that the divine alchemy which thus
brings good out of evil depends on our willing co-
operation, just as it was by refusing the way of bitterness
and recrimination, and by keeping his spirit even at
the darkest hour alert and sensitive to God, that Joseph
was able to turn his necessity to glorious gain and to
lead captivity captive.

Or it may be your purpose on another occasion to
expose the inadequacy of a merely derivative and
borrowed religion in this day of crisis. There is that
swift retort of Jesus to Pontius Pilate, who had been
vaguely sounding our Lord about His claims to sover-
eignty: " Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others
tell it thee of Me?" How that rapier-like challenge
pierces the pretensions of a second-hand religion ! Or
you are eager to impress upon your people the Chris-
tian's paramount obligation to be an active witness
among men to the truth and the power of the Gospel.
Do you remember the four lepers at the gate of
Samaria who were the first to discover that the besieg-
ing Syrians had fled? "We do not well,' 1 they cried,
4 * this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our
peace." Or you are concerned to stress the dangers
of a half-hearted, sentimental religion, the need for a

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

dogged, stubborn devotion which will be ready to face
the austerity of the divine demand and to pay down the
price of discipleship, Jeremiah, writing of the return
of the exiles, has a magnificent word about that : * * They
shall ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward/'
Or you may be wanting to strengthen and encourage
those who may be passing through the difficult and
testing times when faith burns low, and the note of
rapture dies out of the Christian song, and dulness and
dry ness possess the soul. There is a gloriously re-
assuring word for such a mood in Paul's letter to the
Romans Dr. Moffatt has translated it: "God never
goes back upon His call." Or you are impressed with
the necessity of setting clear before your people's eyes
the twofold character of the Christian life, the indis-
soluble connection between personal religion and social
passion, between dwelling in the secret place of the
Most High and going forth on crusade against in-
justice and oppression and all manner of evils every-
where. You will find it all summed up in the noble
words of the prayer of Asa, king of Judah, on the eve
of a great battle long ago: "O Lord our God, we rest
on Thee, and in Thy name we go against this multi-
tude."

Such words of Scripture, used as texts, are weapons
of immense penetrating power. Even if the sermon
should be utterly incommensurate with its theme, the
Word of the Lord on which it is based will not return
unto Him void. There are texts which in themselves
are like a sudden rending of the veil. One of my own

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earliest recollections is of a day when Dr. Alexander
Whyte of St. George's, Edinburgh, visiting the church
in which my parents were members, preached his
famous sermon on Micah vii. 18. Everything in the
discourse that day has long since faded from memory,
but still across the years there come the tones in which
the preacher repeated over and again his mighty text:
" Who is a God like unto Thee?" Whatever you do,
never forsake the custom of preaching week by week
from the very words of Scripture. Surely the faithful
preacher, with such soul-piercing weapons in his
armoury, can never ultimately fail!

There are times when two weapons are better than
one; and you may occasionally vary the traditional
method by taking two or more texts together. This
if used sparingly can be very effective. Thus, for a
sermon on the spiritual pilgrimage of the human soul
in its apprehension of the fact of Christ, you might
bring together the four brief, dramatic utterances:
"Behold the Man," "Behold the Lamb," "Behold
your King," "Behold your God." For has not that
precisely been the pilgrim's progress of many a soul
in relationship to Jesus Christ fascinated by His
manliness, moved to the depths by His sacrifice,
surrendering to His sovereignty, confessing His
divinity? Or you may sometimes set two texts side
by side by way of contrast. The wonder of the divine
welcome to sinners will stand out arrestingly if you
link Jephthah's curt demand to the elders of Israel,
"Why are ye come unto me now when ye are in dis-

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

tress ?" with the gracious invitation of our Lofd, "Him
that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out"; or
the churlishness of Bethlehem, " There was no room/'
with the hospitality of the king's feast, "Yet there is
room!" Or take the Psalmist's cry, "Oh that I had
wings like a dove! for then would I fly away and be at
rest," in juxtaposition with the apostolic injunction,
"Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier";
and immediately you touch the very nerve of one of the
most radical tensions in human experience. Some-
times, too, a single word, occurring suggestively in
different contexts, will go to work within your mind,
and give you the nucleus of a strong and well-knit
sermon. You have been impressed, let us say, by the
prevalence of two diametrically opposite attitudes in
religion : on the one hand, the attitude of some pro-
fessing Christians who confidently assume that Christ
is of their company, whereas in point of fact they have
lost Him utterly; and on the other, the attitude of
those seeking souls who feel desolately that He is far
beyond their reach, whereas in truth He is standing by
their side. Do you remember Joseph and Mary who
lost Jesus on the Jerusalem road, "supposing Him to
have been in the company," and Mary Magdalene who
met Him in the garden and knew Him not, "supposing
Him to be the gardener"? There the word common
to the two passages gives you your theme, and from it
you develop your sermon on "Mistaken Suppositions"
the contrasted errors of those who think Christ
present when He is absent, and of those who think

HERALDS OF GOD

Him absent when He is present. Or again, you may
have been struck, in reading the Epistles, by the
dramatic use Paul makes of two short, simple words
"But now.'* Again and again they break out of his
argument like the sudden note of a trumpet or the beat
of a drum. "By the deeds of the law shall no flesh be
justified. But now the righteousness of God without
the law is revealed/* "The end of those things is
death. But now being made free from sin." "Ye
were without God in the world: but now ye are made
nigh." "If in this life only we have hope in Christ,
we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ
risen from the dead." By the coming of Christ, Paul
is saying in these four passages, something has got a
foothold in history which turns man's struggle into
victory, his sin into redemption, his solitude into divine
communion, his setting sun into the daybreak of an
eternal morning. And all the way through, that
trumpet-toned text will keep sounding forth the truth
that God's new era for the sons of men is not mere
vision and prophecy, for in Christ it has already
appeared. It is not a pious dream, it is historic fact.
It is not to-morrow, it is to-day. It is not yonder, it is
here. But now!

Here let me add that your very calling as expositors
of God's Word implies that often you will preach, not
from isolated texts or groups of texts, but from whole
passages and narratives and incidents. No sermons
are more likely to meet with a response of genuine
interest and gratitude than those in which the spiritual

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

message of a dozen or a score of verses is faithfully and
concisely set forth, A single phrase from Psalm cxxxix
or Ephesians i might well provide material for a
sermon : but why should you not also make the ex-
periment of taking such a psalm or chapter entire, and
grappling with it until you can discern, running right
throi^gh it from start to finish, one clear line along
which to lead your people's thoughts ? You will find
it a fascinating and rewarding study. Read Isaiah vi
analytically, and you may feel an urge to preach on the
wings of the seraphim, or the smoke that filled the
house: nor is there any reason why you should not
obey that urge. Read it as a unity, and there will
emerge, ckar-cut and decisive, the outlines of a totally
different kind of sermon : now, with the whole chapter
as your text, you will preach on the three visions which
came in rapid succession to the prophet and enter still
into the experience of every true servant of the Lord
the vision of God, the vision of himself, and the vision
of a waiting world. The point is: do not be in bond-
age to the tradition of the single text and the isolated
phrase. Use the microscope by all means; but do not
neglect the wider view and the far horizon, I would
even, greatly daring, suggest that you should try
occasionally, as a useful discipline of your own mental
processes and spiritual perception, to concentrate into
one sermon the basic message of a whole book, such
as Amos, Hosea, or Revelation. There are tens of
thousands of people to-day who are quite unable, where
the Bible is concerned, to see the wood for the trees.

HERALDS OF GOD

You will be doing no small service if, leading them to
vantage-points above the lower levels, you show them
the country spread out before them like a map, and the
glory of the land of far-stretching distances.

Further, I would advise you in the choice of texts
and subjects to aim at comprehensiveness. Your task
is to surprise your hearers with "the many-coloured
wisdom of God," not to bore them with the restricted
aspect of the truth which happens to appeal most to
yourself. It is a wearisome business for a congregation
when the man in the pulpit incessantly thrusts his own
preferences, insights and viewpoints upon them, as
though these were the sum total of the evangel. Of
course, the personal equation is bound to influence
your work: and that message alone will ring true
which a man can call "my Gospel/' But that is no
reason why you should jog monotonously down the
well-beaten tracks, or drag your people week by week
along the grooves of your own favourite ideas. Take
stock of your pulpit work from time to time. Ask
yourself: "Is there some aspect of the faith which I
have been neglecting ? Some doctrine which has been
missing from my teaching? Have I been doing justice
to the many-sided message of the Scriptures?" Use
the diversity of the Word of God to widen your own
spiritual range. Reject resolutely the tempting tyranny
of the obvious and the congenial. And remember
Paul's parting words to the elders of Ephesus: "I
have not shunned to declare unto you the whole
counsel of God."

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This brings another important matter into view
the value of *' courses" of sermons. Much is to be
said for the tradition of intimating from time to time a
connected sequence of studies on one particular theme
or section of Scripture. For one thing, this method
gives scope for that systematic instruction in Christian
truth which forms so essential a part of any vital
ministry. Moreover, it is an immense gain to the
preacher himself to have his path for the next six or
seven Sundays clearly mapped out in advance. Not
only does it mean a saving of valuable hours which he
might otherwise waste in a haphazard and fruitless
search for texts; there is also the fact that, once the
subject is fixed, his mind keeps working at it sub-
consciously, gathering materials and hammering them
into shape. Spurgeon argued against courses of
sermons on the ground that the Holy Spirit does not
work that way: to prescribe a route in advance by
announcing a list of projected themes is to lay a fetter
upon one's own soul, and to limit the possibilities of
divine inspiration. That is, to say the least of it,
debatable did not an apostle once describe the Holy
Spirit as the " Spirit of saving discipline " (sophromsmos) ?
but perhaps there is enough truth in it to serve as a
warning. Just as it is unwise, as a general rule, to give
away your proposed divisions or heads at the outset of
a sermon, so the announcement of a consecutive series
may seem to involve surrendering that invaluable

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weapon of the preacher the element of surprise. On
the other hand, it will be found that most congrega-
tions will welcome an occasional course of reasonable
length: they will feel with relief that there is a satis-
factory definiteness in it, as contrasted with the preach-
ing which bandies them about in a desultory fashion
from Genesis to Revelation, without plan or system.

"An occasional course" I emphasize that: for it
is inexpedient to stereotype your methods, running
one series of sermons after another all the year round
without a break. And "of reasonable length 7 * that
is vitally important. You may have only three or four
sermons in a course. As a maximum I would suggest
eight or nine. Six would be an ample number. Dr.
Alexander Whyte once preached for a whole winter
in St. George's, Edinburgh, on one text, Luke xi. I,
"Lord, teach us to pray": but then he was a giant of
the pulpit, and could dare things not permitted to
lesser men. It is told of one of the early eighteenth-
century ministers of the City Temple, Robert Bragge,
that he announced a course of sermons on the mystical
meaning of Joseph's coat of many colours, and con-
tinued it Sunday by Sunday for four months. As a
contemporary described it:

Eternal Bragge, in never-ending strains.
Unfolds the wonders Joseph's coat contains;
Of every hue describes a different cause,
And from each patch a solemn mystery draws.

The extraordinary thing is that Bragge's popularity
with his congregation appears to have survived even

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that severe and searching test. But that was two
centuries ago, and is not for emulation to-day. Spur-
geon confessed that the epistle to the Hebrews came
near being ruined for him in his youth by a seemingly
interminable series of discourses to which it was his
fate to listen. " I wished frequently that the Hebrews
had kept the epistle to themselves, for it sadly bored
one poor Gentile lad. That epistle exhorts us to suffer
the word of exhortation, and" he added grimly
u we did so/ 7 The passion for comprehensiveness is
doubtless a laudable virtue; but it can ruin a man's
preaching unless it is held in check by common sense
and by a judicious application of the art of omission.

Take, for example, the book of Jeremiah. Might it
not be possible, by careful planning and wise selection,
to concentrate the main message of Jeremiah into a
course of six or eight addresses ? The experiment is at
least worth trying. It will certainly involve an immense
amount of preliminary study, mental spade-work and
spiritual discipline. But granted fidelity of prepara-
tion, such a course of sermons is likely to meet with an
eager and deeply encouraging response. Let me
taking Jeremiah still as illustration reinforce my plea
for this kind of preaching by urging upon you three
considerations. For one thing, the message of the
book is so decisively significant for the present hour.
Do you wish a vivid interpretation of God's will for a
time of national crisis ? You will find that here. Are
you concerned about the part that organized religion
ought to play in face of the challenge of the social and

HERALDS OF GOD

economic conditions which mould the lives of men ?
You will find that here. Are you anxious to show what
faith can say about the mysteries of Providence, and
what God means by allowing life sometimes to be so
terribly difficult for those who take His way? You
will find that here. Moreover, the man himself is such
a fascinating study. Jeremiah has laid bare to us, not
only the outward events of his life, but also the inner
struggles of his spirit. And finally, here is a book
which inevitably leads the preacher straight to the
burning heart of personal religion. Thus the strength
of such a course of sermons is that history and bio-
graphy become alive, contemporary, challenging; and
exposition merges in evangelism.

By way of variety, a series on the message of a book
of Scripture might well be followed by a set of char-
acter studies. Some preachers are inclined to disdain
this type of sermon and to minimize its usefulness.
They regard it as merely an easy and not particularly
commendable expedient involving a minimum of
thought and positive teaching. This is really very
foolish and unimaginative. In point of fact, few
sermons can be so spiritually searching and incisive as
those in which the preacher, singling out some char-
acter from the vast portrait-gallery of Scripture, shows
us the actual man, striving, struggling, sinning, repent-
ing, with the living God intersecting his experience
and invading his soul. John Galsworthy, in Flowering
Wilderness, makes one of his characters, Adrian Cher-
well, exclaim: "It's the sudden personal emergency

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coming out of the blue, with no eyes on you, that's
the acid test. Who among us knows how he'll come
through it?" What wealth of material lies to your
hand in the pages of the Bible, to show how different
men react to the sudden personal emergency, leaping
on them out of the blue, in the unguarded hour!
Souls at the Crossroads," you might call your sermon
sequence: and you speak in turn of Esau, of Balaam,
of Samson, of David, of Gehazi, of Daniel of each
man in that crucial hour when, as Browning puts it,

God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up beneath his feet both tug.

It will be strange indeed if, through such a course,
many in your congregation do not become aware of
God dealing with their own souls in judgment and
mercy. Or at another time you may plan a series with
the title "Encountering Jesus." From the crowded
record of the Gospels you choose out six or seven men
and women in the moving and dramatic moment when
their several paths crossed the path of Jesus Nico-
demus, the woman of Samaria, Zacchaeus, the cen-
turion of Capernaum, the man born blind, the Syro-
Phoenician mother, the dying thief and it may be
that as you endeavour with the aid of imagination
(which is just another name for the insight of faith) to
reconstruct these scenes, the Gospel story will begin to
repeat itself in your congregation ; and one here and
another there, forgetting all about the preacher and
"seeing no man save Jesus only/' will register secret

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decisions and ratify new vows, knowing that to them
also it has been given as veritably and as vividly as
to those men and women long ago to encounter the
Saviour of the world.

VI

Let me add, in passing from this question of the
choice of texts and subjects, two final remarks. It is
possible that, in spite of vigilance and fidelity, bad
weeks will occur when inspiration seems to have
deserted you : no theme lays a coercive grip upon you,
no text cries peremptorily "Preach on me." What are
you to do then ?

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention !

But waiting for that kindling moment is a risky busi-
ness, with Sunday rushing on inexorably. Nor is it
advisable in days when the going is difficult and the
fire burns low to take the easy way out and preach an
old sermon over again. Certainly there is no reason,
if you have once toiled over a sermon and put your best
into it, why you should not use it a second time; and
the advice sometimes given, "burn the lot," is surely
more reckless than heroic. Thomas Chalmers once
had an unusual experience. He was growing weary
of the gaping crowds that thronged his ministry; and
one Sunday morning, being determined to end this
displeasing vogue and to prevent the annoyance of
overcrowding, he intimated that in the evening he
proposed to preach, not a different sermon, but the

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same one which he had just delivered. That night the
church doors were rushed ! But have a care what moral
you deduce from that story. You will be wise not to
discard your old sermons. But you will be doubly
wise never to have recourse to any of them as a means
of escape from the heavy self-discipline, mental and
spiritual, of unlit days and difficult weeks. "Thou
therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus
Christ."

But is there any positive and practical counsel one
can give against such hours of emergency, when the
mind seems barren, the supply exhausted, and the harp
hangs silent on the willows ?

Biting my truant pen.
Beating myself for spite,

Fool, said my muse to me,
Look in thy heart, and write.

That is the first essential. Get closer to God. Ponder
anew your own immeasurable debt to Him. Has He
not delivered, time and again, your eyes from tears,
your feet from falling, your soul from death? That
recollection will loosen the grip of the low mood from
your spirit, as spring breaks up the grip of winter.
Then open your Bible. Do not pursue elusive texts.
Stop racking your brain for a subject. Take a whole
psalm, a complete Gospel incident, or a solid section
from an epistle of St. Paul. Set yourself to interpret
it faithfully. I am almost inclined to believe that the
Holy Spirit deliberately sends such bad weeks occasion-
ally, in order to force the preacher to rediscover the

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virtue of plain, downright exposition. Your wisdom
at such a time is to desist from weaving fancies around
isolated phrases of Scripture: it is to take an entire
passage, and let the Word of God speak for itself. It
may be you will find that it is precisely the sermon
wrought out in these difficult, ebb-tide hours for which
God reserves His richest blessing.

The other remark to be added here is this. Resolve
that every sermon you preach shall be in the truest
sense your own. This indeed is involved in the very
nature of the Gospel itself.

What we have felt and seen
With confidence we tell.

"This/* wrote Elgar at the end of the original score of
his great oratorio The Dream of Gerontius^ "this I saw
and knew" ; and there is little hope of preaching being
effectual unless the preacher can implicitly say the
same. Every sermon must have something of your
own life-blood in it. It is your personal act of witness.
That which we have seen with our eyes, and our hands
have handled, of the Word of life, declare we unto you."
Not that you are to bestrew your discourse with frag-
ments of autobiography! Keep the first personal
pronoun severely in the background. The pulpit is
no place for indulging a propensity to egotistical
reminiscence. To say that the preacher's sermon
should be his own does not at all mean the obtruding
of self into the picture. It does emphatically mean that
God has a higher ideal in view for His commissioned

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servants than that they should be mere borrowers and
copyists.

It Is hardly necessary to labour the point that to
borrow another man's thoughts, ideas and expressions,
and to present them as one's own, may be one way of
reducing labour and maintaining the supply, but in
God's eyes it is to be a castaway. Here is someone,
let us say, who is so preoccupied throughout the week
with a medley of good works, all of them doubtless
legitimate and worthy in their own way, that at the
week-end, finding himself sermonless and in desperate
straits, he is driven to use another man's material,
"reaping where he has not sown, and gathering where
he has not strawed." Is it likely that such preaching
should ring true ? May not such a habit, if persisted
in, neutralize and negative the grace of the preacher's
ordination? Must it not imperil his spiritual vitality,
and ultimately jeopardize his soul? The five wise
virgins who refused to share their surplus oil with their
five foolish sisters were not being stingy and can-
tankerous : they were simply giving realistic expression
to the undoubted truth that in this world there can be
no shining with a borrowed light. Far better the
poorest and most halting discourse that is veritably a
man's own than the most elaborate work of art tainted
with the breath of plagiarism. But indeed it were
superfluous to emphasize this further. The basic note
of preaching must ever be reality. And where is
honour towards God to be looked for if not in the work
of those who are His heralds ?

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HERALDS OF GOD

VII

We pass now from the making of the sermon to its
delivery. You have found your message. In the
quietness of your study you have pondered it and
wrestled with it. You have fashioned it to the best of
your ability. But that is not the end. There still
remains the all-important final stage of the process.
You have now to send that message to work as a living
thing in other minds. You have to endeavour, face to
face with a company of your fellow men and women, to
get the Word of the Lord out of your heart into theirs.

No wise man will underrate this ultimate task. Far
too many a competent and carefully constructed sermon
has been nullified and ruined by a careless or incom-
petent delivery. To-day, more than ever before in the
history of preaching, this matter is vital. Broadcasting
has brought right into the homes of the nation dis-
tinguished voices speaking on all manner of subjects
literature, politics, science, religion: and people who
have thus grown accustomed to well-articulated and
effective speech are less likely to be indulgent to a
preaching manner that is ponderous or mumbling or
uncouth, or to the dull tedium of that hateful thing, the
" pulpit voice." The message entrusted to the preacher
is not less but far more important than any wireless
talk however fascinating on a literary, scientific or
sociological theme. That a message of such vast
consequence should be delivered in a manner which
virtually denies its urgency is witless and inexcusable,

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

Now here there inevitably arises the question of the
relative merits of read and spoken sermons. This is
an old debate and it is not necessary to rehearse all the
"pros" and "cons." Let me rather make one or two
general suggestions on the main issue, and then draw
attention to three specific points which have been
singularly overlooked.

You will be well advised, whichever method of de-
livery you are proposing to adopt, to begin by writing
out your sermons fully. During the first ten years of
your ministry and perhaps over a much longer period
than that there is no substitute for this essential
discipline. It will safeguard your work against diffuse-
ness, ambiguity and redundance. It will make for
clarity of thought and perspicuity of style. Therefore
establish it as a rule that one of your two sermons each
week some would go further and say both shall be,
not merely drafted, but wrought out in full from
beginning to end.

But having your sermon thus completely written,
what are you to do with it ? Are you to take the manu-
script into the pulpit and read it word for word ? That
this method has manifest advantages is not to be
denied. Thus, for example, it ensures that the balanced
presentation of a subject, for which the preacher has
laboured in his study, shall not be lost. Moreover, it
defends a helpless congregation from the worst evils of
extemporaneous padding and prolixity! It defends
the preacher from the nightmare experience of floun-
dering in the morass, and fumbling in vain for the

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HERALDS OF GOD

right word and the telling phrase. Joseph Parker once
asked R. W. Dale of Birmingham why he read his
sermons; to which Dale frankly replied, "If I spoke
extemporaneously I should never sit down." "My
command of words," he confessed, "is such that as a
young man I could preach standing on my head. To
be condensed is my object in writing my sermons."
It is eminently desirable that a sermon should be com-
pact, clean-cut and as far as possible free from literary
aberrations and logical anacoloutha: herein lies the
virtue of the read sermon. Nor ought we to be in-
fluenced by what Phillips Brooks once called "the
general impression of the piety of extemporaneous-
ness": a crude, erroneous notion, based on a naive
doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Have we not all heard
sermons delivered without a scrap of paper which
moved us not a whit, and merely left us feeling "The
Lord was not in the wind"? And have we not
listened to read discourses which were memorable
in the deepest sense and charged with spiritual
power ?

There is, however, another side to this matter. The
preacher who suffers himself to be tied slavishly to his
manuscript is surrendering something a quality of
directness and pointedness, of versatility and verve and
liveliness which he can ill afford to lose. There is the
ever-present danger that the typed or written sermon
on the pulpit-desk in front of him may act as a barrier
between himself and those to whom he speaks. Chris-
tian preaching strikes notes of challenge and appeal

THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

which are almost bound to sound muffled and un-
natural where bondage to the written word holds sway.
The minister of the Gospel is essentially a herald of the
most magnificent and moving tidings that ever broke
upon the world; but how shall he make the world feel
the living urgency of the message if he is perpetually
fettered and shackled by the tradition of the read
discourse? If you dispense with your manuscript, and
preach freely from a single page of notes, your sermon
may indeed lose something of artistry and literary
expression ; there may be gaps and broken sentences
occasionally even murdered grammar. " Brethren/'
cried Father Taylor, the sailor-preacher, finding him-
self entangled in a sentence from whose labyrinthine
subordinate clauses there seemed to be no exit, "I have
lost the nominative of this sentence, and things are
generally mixed up, but I am bound for the Kingdom
anyhow!'' You may lose some polished idiom or
nicely rounded phrase; you may perpetrate many an
abrupt and violent anacolouthon. What matter if you
do? Take courage: you are in good company. Are
there no anacolouthistic sentences in the New Testa-
ment, beginning one way, ending another? In any
case, what you stand to lose is more than compensated
by the gain in personal grip, in directness and urgency
and reality, in the immediate impact of mind upon
mind and the living encounter of heart with heart.
Do you remember Jeanie Deans, in The Heart of Mid-
lothian, telling Reuben Butler of her decision to make
the long journey to London and plead in person for

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HERALDS OF GOD

Effie's life before the king and queen ? "Writing winna
do it a letter canna look, and pray, and beg, and be-
seech, as the human voice can do to the human heart. A
letter's like the music that the ladies have for their spinets
naething but black scores, compared to the same tune
played or sung. It's word of mouth maun do it, or nae-
thing, Reuben." There is something there worth
pondering by those whose task it is to plead with men,
beseeching them in Christ's stead to be reconciled to
God.

It would be very unwise, of course, to prescribe any
general rule on this matter. Each man must find his
own method for himself. You might decide, for
instance, as many preachers have done, to use alter-
nately both methods described, reading one sermon
each Sunday and speaking the other. But let me pass
on to three facts bearing on this whole debate, which
are apt to be strangely overlooked.

First, the preacher's method must be adapted to the
needs of the present age. It is no good saying, for
example, that because the tradition of read sermons
satisfied a former generation it is necessarily valid
to-day. It is our lot to have been called to the ministry
at a time when the Church is being challenged to get
out into the open. All the evidences indicate that this
demand will grow even more insistent in the coming
years. Can you imagine a preacher facing a crowd in
the open-air, the factory, the camp, and reading his
address off a manuscript ? The thing is absurd. And
if your open-air preaching thus delivers you from bond-

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

age to the letter, why not carry that immense gain
across into your pulpit work in church ? Let no man,
in this hour when the Church is being challenged to
come out from behind its own walls and barriers, reject
that opportunity with the disclaimer " It is not in my
line/' Christ has issued His marching-orders: what
else matters ? Make up your mind to take a full share
of this vital work in the wider field and to meet men
on their own ground. Not the least of the results will
be a new sense of freedom in your ministry. Having
once cast off subservience to your own written words,
you will not readily submit to a reimposition of the
yoke. Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has
made you free!

Second, it is worth emphasizing that freedom of
delivery in the pulpit depends upon carefulness of con-
struction in the study. It is surprising how often this
point has been missed in the debate between read and
spoken sermons. To the question " Ought I to risk
oral delivery of my sermon ?" the right answer surely
is that ic all depends on the sermon. Some sermons it
would be almost impossible, even for the man who
wrote them, to carry in the mind at all. They meander
with mazy motion; they return upon their tracks;
ideas overlap; single paragraphs trail on and on for
pages; there is not one illustration like a beacon to
light the way. For such sermons, oral delivery would
involve prodigious feats of memory and that is no
true preaching. On the other hand, it should be quite
possible for the preacher, without the stiltedness of

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HERALDS OF GOD

mechanized memorizing, to get a sure grip and clear
conspectus of his own sermon, provided that certain
conditions have been observed in the writing of it.
These conditions are clarity of logical structure ; well-
defined divisions and subdivisions; exclusion of ir-
relevances; short paragraphs, with a single clear-cut
thought in each, not long unbroken stretches, where a
dozen ideas jostle; balance and progress and develop-
ment; with one or two strong and vivid illustrations
marking out the track. The point is that freedom of
delivery will tend to vary in direct proportion to accuracy
of construction. If you can fashion a sermon which
stands out clearly in all its parts before your own mind,
the tyranny of the manuscript is broken.

Third, remember that the opening years invariably
tend to fix the methods of a man's whole ministry.
Any preacher, even the most tongue-tied and diffident,
can achieve freedom of utterance on two conditions :
he must be willing to face the necessary self-discipline,
and he must begin early enough. Those first years are
big with enviable opportunity and critical decision:
for it is then that ways and habits are developing
which, once formed, are apt to bind irrevocably. In
this matter of delivery, every preacher is at the
beginning master of his fate. You may be led to
adjudge that you can serve God best in your pulpit
by reading your sermons. But if you feel another
method beckoning you, have no misgivings. Do not
precipitately decide against it. If you want to be free,
you can.

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

VIII

As regards pace, I am disposed to propound a mild
form of heresy. The orthodox attitude would be to
warn you against the errors of a too rapid delivery, and
to beg and beseech you to go slow: put on the brake,
and keep it on ! 1 suggest that too much Andante with
never a touch of Allegro or even Presto can be quite as
fatal. You will not, of course, emulate the preacher
whom Spurgeon described, "tearing along like a wild
horse with a hornet in its ear." Common sense will
teach you to regulate speed in accordance with the
acoustics of the building in which you are speaking.
But just as a dragging organ accompaniment can ruin
congregational praise, so a too deliberate pulpit delivery
can gravely decelerate interest in the message. Preach-
ing ought to resemble a purposeful, rhythmic march
rather than a slow-paced saunter: it is degraded when
it becomes a slouch or a shuffle. There are speakers
who proceed with such irritating leisureliness that
those listening to them can forecast, before each sen-
tence is half-finished, exactly how it is going to end.
No congregation ought to be subjected to such a horrid
ordeal. If you are temperamentally inclined to dash
ahead like an express train, let reasonableness moderate
your impetuosity. But if the voice of orthodoxy in
these matters has almost persuaded you that Largo di
molto must be the invariable rule of the pulpit, you
would do well to consider whether this tempo de-
liberate and stately and dignified, verging sometimes

HERALDS OF GOD

on the ponderous is really the best adapted for con-
veying to your hearers' minds a Gospel urgent and
glorious and amazing beyond all other tidings in the
world.

In tone, no less than in speed, variety is essential.
It is strange that so often the effect of standing in a
pulpit should be that a man's natural speaking voice
is immediately transformed into something forced and
artificial and monotonous. Savonarola declared that
many a Gospel hearer had " become like unto a rook
on a steeple, that, at the first stroke of the church bell,
takes the alarm and hath fear, but then, when accus-
tomed to the sound, percheth quietly on the bell,
however loudly it be rung." Learn to modulate the
voice, and avoid like the plague the conventional pulpit
monotone; lest your people, " accustomed to the
sound," cease to heed the message. Always begin
quietly. Even when your theme, as it develops, takes
hold of you irresistibly (as it ought to do if you are
truly preaching), bring yourself back again and again
deliberately to the conversational level. As Hamlet
put it to the players, " In the very torrent, tempest, and,
as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must
acquire and beget a temperance that may give it
smoothness/' Never bellow! Remember Savona-
rola's rook perching disdainfully on the bell, "how-
ever loudly it be rung." Let yourself go occasionally
if the Spirit moves you ; but clamour is not necessarily
inspiration, and shouting saves no souls. A good
sermon can have its total effect reduced fifty per cent

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

by an over-emphatic and hectic delivery; and plati-
tudes which might disclose new meanings if treated
quietly become merely tiresome or absurd when shouted
and declaimed,

This insistence on being natural applies also to
gesture. There is no necessity that the preacher
should aim at reproducing the immobility of a graven
image; but neither is there any necessity that he should
saw the air like a windmill, or behave like a schoolboy
with the fidgets. You will be wise, at almost any cost
of strenuous self-discipline, to eradicate and eschew
all meaningless mannerisms which, so far from adding
emphasis to what is being said, serve only to distract.
Temperament and individuality play here so large a
part that imitation of any kind is bound to be disastrous :
the gesture which in one man is right and unexception-
able might be ludicrous in another. Dr. Carnegie
Simpson, in his Recollections, has described how once
as a youth he heard Spurgeon preaching in the old
Metropolitan Tabernacle, on the subject of the in-
spiration of Holy Scripture. At one point the preacher
took up some book into his hands, and crying dram-
atically, "Here is a work of current science its day
will pass," let the volume drop. "Here," he went on,
taking up another book, "is a fashionable novel it
soon will be dead," and it also he let fall. Then, taking
the big pulpit Bible bodily off its desk, clutching it in
his arms and holding it aloft, he cried, "Here is the
Word of God which endureth for ever." Spurgeon
could dare the startling gesture, and it would be

HERALDS OF GOD

magnificently impressive: but with ninety-nine men
out of a hundred the risk of an abrupt descent from
the sublime to the ridiculous would be prohibitive.
It is a wise rule to be sparing of gesture, and to suffer
no movement which is not the natural and instinctive
expression of a deeply felt mood.

The fact is that this whole matter of delivery can be
resolved into two precepts which are not so paradoxical
as they appear: Be yourself Forget yourself. God
has given to each man his own individuality, and
standardization is emphatically no part of the divine
intention for your ministry. How intolerably dull it
would be if every preacher had to be cut to the same
pattern ! You are to give free rein to your personality.
"We are too formal/' cried Dr. Alexander Whyte.
"We have too much starch in our souls/' And he
went on, in his downright way : "Starch is more deadly
than sin. Your soul may be saved from sin, but
scarcely from starch/' Henry Ward Beecher was no
less outspoken: "There may be a propriety in a man's
preaching that will damn half his congregation, or
there may occasionally be almost an impropriety that
will hurt nobody, and accompanied with the right
manner will save multitudes." Do not think that
personal idiosyncrasies are merely to be suppressed
and levelled out. Be yourself. And do not complain
if you cannot be someone else. Nothing is more
preposterous or pathetic than the sedulous attempts
which are sometimes made to imitate external manner-
isms or ways of speech. "David played before the

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

Lord," says the sacred writer^ "on all manner of
instruments/' If God has made you a clarinet or a
flute, do not complain that you are not a violin or a
harp. Shall the trumpet say to the oboe, "I have no
need of thee" ? Or the drum to the 'cello, " I have no
need of thee"? Shall the great Master Musician,
who controls them all, say to the humblest of His
instruments, "I have no need of thee"?

Be yourself, then; but also, forget yourself. You
are to use for the delivery of the Word every faculty
God has given you; and simultaneously you are to
renounce yourself utterly, so that in the end the
messenger shall be nothing, the message everything.
You are not to cramp or stifle your individuality; but
you are to offer it so completely to God upon the altar
that, when the service closes, the dominating thought
in the worshippers' minds will be, not of any obtrusive
human proficiency or cleverness, but only this "The
Lord was in His holy temple to-day!"

We are desperately self-conscious creatures, and that
miserable fact of self-love tends to thrust its way into
the picture, even in our work for Christ. To achieve
release and self-obliteration, one thing is essential for
the preacher; as he leads the worship of his congrega-
tion, let him see to it that he is worshipping along with
them. As he uplifts the supplications of his people to
the throne, let him be bowing there himself in heart
and mind. Then, when he stands up to preach, he
will have found deliverance through worship from the
tyranny of self. Not only so, but his words will now

HERALDS OF GOD

come forth throbbing with a fervour and reality totally
unlike the pseudo-animation of a pretentious and self-
conscious delivery. "When the work of the com-
poser," wrote Jebb of the Greek poets, "failed to be
vital and sincere, this, the unpardonable fault, was
described by the expressive word psychros, frigid. The
composition was then no longer a living thing, which
spoke to the hearers and elicited a response. It was
stricken with the chill of death/' Jebb might have
been writing there of the Christian preacher. In the
moment when sincerity goes, the whole business of
preaching is stricken with the chill of death ; and the
obtrusion of self is always destructive of sincerity. In
the last resort, everything depends on the degree in
which awareness of self is swallowed up in the vision
of God. As he delivers his sermon, the man who has
himself entered through worship into the holy place
will preach with something of the glow and freedom
which mark true inspiration. Among those listening
to him there will be some who, as the sermon proceeds,
are conscious less of the actual speaker than of a ringing
and authentic "Thus saith the Lord!" some who
beyond the human tones will hear, pleading and com-
manding, the very voice of Jesus. And long after the
sermon is finished, that voice will keep sounding on.
Paul plants, Apollos waters; but the real issues are
wrought out at levels where Paul, Apollos and every
other human factor have vanished out of sight. It is
not your personality that has to be impressed redeem-
ingly upon other souls thank heaven for that; it is

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THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE

not you who are to dazzle men with your grasp of the
truth, or your powers as a defender of the faith ; it is
not you who are going to convert souls and unlock the
shining gates to which only Jesus has the key. Bring
everything you have and are to your ministry your
best craftsmanship, your most concentrated study,
your truest technique, your uttermost of self-consecra-
tion, your toil and sweat of brain and heart bring it
all without reserve. But when you have brought it,
something else remains: Stand back^ and see the
salvation of God.

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CHAPTER V
THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

" The zeal for God that is not according to knowledge is a zeal
that dies in the middle years by the pessimism of experience ; but
the zeal that is fed by His broken Body and His outpoured Blood
devours us still, in an age of weariness and cynicism."

BERNARD MANNING.

THERE is a Franciscan story which tells how the
saint on one occasion invited a young novice to
accompany him on a preaching expedition through the
town, and how they passed through one street after
another and eventually returned to their starting-point,
and not a word had been spoken. "But, father," said
the probationer, puzzled and disappointed, "I thought
we were going to preach?" " We have preached/' re-
plied Francis, "we were observed as we walked. They
marked us as we went. It was thus we preached."

You have chosen a vocation or rather, Christ has
chosen you for it which more than any other calling
in the world depends upon the quality of life and the
total witness of character which by the grace of God a
man may bring to it. "Preaching/' inquires Bishop
Quayle, "is the art of making a sermon and delivering
it?" and he answers his own question: "Why, no,
that is not preaching. Preaching is the art of making
a preacher and delivering that. It is no trouble to
preach, but a vast trouble to construct a preacher,"

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THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

When Gefaazi went at Blisha's command to resurrect
the dead, he took the prophet's staff with him, but no
miracle happened; for the virtue of the staff was
negatived by the hands that held it* "I was con-
firmed/' wrote John Milton, "in the opinion that he
who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well in
laudable things ought himself to be a true poem."
Homiletics may indeed be taught by books and
lectures; but at the heart of everything stands the
personal equation, and the real work is done, not on
the level where a man acquires a knowledge of tech-
nique and rules and devices, but on the deep levels of
self-commitment where he rigorously disciplines his
life for love of Jesus Christ. One hesitates to say any-
thing on a matter so intimate and sacred: here words
can be but few and faltering. Yet it would be a poor
service to analyse the elements of preaching and be
dumb about what matters most. "Anything destined
to be strong and efficacious in action" Father Martin-
dale reminds us> " needs a drastic preparation of
Character" And if there is truth in the saying pectus

acit theologum^ it is no less true that the inner life makes

,he preacher.

Sometimes it will happen that your most carefully
prepared sermon discomfits you by missing fire com-
pletely & salutary if humbling experience. Then is
the time to put some searching questions to your own
soul: "Why did it fail so palpably? Was it because I
had neglected the flame on my own altar ? Can It have
been that I was so busy preparing my sermon that I

191

HERALDS OF GOD

omitted to prepare myself ?" Now, just as this discip-
line of self-preparation is necessary for every sermon
a man preaches, so it must form the constant back-
ground of his total ministry. I am not suggesting a
double standard of sanctification one level of holiness
for the Christian layman as he goes about his business
and another for the ordained minister of the Word ;
for with God there is no respect of persons, and every
Christian without distinction is committed to live for
Christ with every atom of his being. But I am saying
that if I presume to point out to others the heavenward
way, while failing to bend all my spiritual energies to
its pursuit, I shall receive from God the greater con-
demnation. The ambassador of Christ shares all men*s
involvement in sinful corruption and it was the greatest
ambassador who ever lived who confessed himself to
be the chief of sinners. But the preacher is essentially
a seer, bringing back to men first-hand reports of
divine truth and authentic visions of that Jerusalem
which is the mother of us all : and if he cannot induce
the vision nor evoke it at will, he can at least keep clean
the window through which his vision is likely to come.
"Take heed unto yourselves, and to all the flock" was
Paul's parting injunction at Miletus to the elders of
the Church to yourselves first, for only so can the
hungry sheep be fed. You must believe intensely and
with total conviction, if you are to persuade others to
believe. Your own spirit must be subjected to the full
force and challenge of Christ's ethic, must be energized,
supernaturalized, if you are to bring God's help to bear

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THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

upon the gaping needs of men. The trouble is, as
Richard Baxter put it bluntly to the clergy of Ms day,
that "many a tailor goes in rags that maketh costly
clothes for others ; and many a cook scarcely licks his
fingers, when he hath dressed for others the most
costly dishes." It is a solemnizing thought for any
preacher that what he speaks to men in the name of
God is going to be mightily reinforced or mercilessly
negatived by the quality of life behind it. Chaucer
summed it up succinctly when he wrote of his good
priest :

Cfaristes lore^ and His apostles twelve,

He taught^ and first he folwed it him^-selve.

It might indeed be supposed that the very nature of
the preacher's calling would guarantee an invincible
fidelity and consecration. But all sacred things are
double-edged; and if the tasks of the ministry may be
a safeguard and a panoply they have also their peculiar
perils 3 and they exact vengeance from those who handle
them with undue familiarity, Robertson of Brighton
was right when he spoke of "the hardening influence
of spiritual things " ; for the prophetic awe and wonder
in presence of the revelation of God can all too easily
deteriorate into a mere mechanical trafficking with the
ordinances of religion* To quote Baxter again: **It
is a sad thing that so many of us preach our hearers
asleep; but it is sadder still if we have studied and
preached ourselves asleep^ and have talked so long
against hardness of heartj till our own grow hardened
under the noise of our own reproofs/ 1 There is no sure

193

HERALDS OF GOD

defence against that grim and tragic loss of reality and
zeal and faith except in a daily renewed surrender of
life to Christ, nor is there any easy alternative by which
to evade the cost of this rigorous and surgical self-
discipline and commitment. There is no by-pass road
round Calvary. "He is like a refiner's fire, and He
shall purify the sons of Levi."

Let us inquire, then, what manner of man the
preacher must be in his inner life. What are the seals
and marks of his apostleship ? It is, of course, not
possible here to explore the full range of this theme, or
indeed to do more than touch upon certain distinctive
qualities, singling them out from many others which
might equally have been mentioned. I suggest the
following points.

First, the true preacher will be a man utterly dedicated
to his work. "This one thing I do." The Christian
ministry opens a door into the most absorbing life-
work under heaven; and there is something seriously
wrong with the man who, entering it, is not wholly
absorbed. Unless we are prepared, with joyous and
deliberate abandon, to be mastered, dominated and
controlled by the great task, we ought to thrust it from
us once for all, and not mock Christ with tepid loyalties
and divided interests. This kind of spiritual concen-
tration is, of course, a totally different thing from the
strained and stubborn austerity which refuses to relax.
It is hardly likely that any preacher will enhance his

194

THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

efficiency by going from one year's end to another
without a holiday or a hobby, as though it were glori-
fying God to ignore the Master's word, "Come ye
yourselves apart, and rest awhile. " Equally mistaken
is the absorption which consists in shutting oneself off
from life, dwelling remote from the common interests
of market, street and home, out of touch with the
crowding cares and hopes and joys and agonies that
mould the lives of men. The condemnation of that
attitude is that it is downright inhuman and terribly
unlike Jesus. But the fact remains that the servant
of the evangel more than anyone else, more than
scientist, artist, composer or man of affairs must be
possessed, heart and mind and soul, by the momentous
enterprise that has laid its compulsion upon him.

It would be unnecessary to emphasize this, were it
not that slackness is such an insidious peril. This
common sin has beggared the rich promise of many a
ministry and blunted the cutting edge of its spiritual
power. The very conditions of a minister's work
which put into his own hands the control of his time
and the ordering of his days impose a peculiar re-
sponsibility. If he fritters time away in idleness, if he
squanders in desultory reading of the newspaper and
magazine reviews those precious morning hours which
ought to be rigorously safeguarded for wrestling with
the Word of God, if when Sunday comes he offers to
his people sermons shoddy with lack of thought, he
damages his troth to Christ and dishonours his high
calling. He proves himself to be culpably impercipient

195

HERALDS OF GOD

of the deep spiritual needs and longings of those whom
the great Shepherd has committed to his care. He
has never heard the inarticulate crying of the hungry
flock: "O refresh us, travelling through this wilder-
ness/ 1 He is the hireling who careth not for the sheep.
What right (to put it no higher) have we to speak to
the labouring and the heavy-taden, if we are not our-
selves as busy as the hardest toiler amongst them?
Common decency ought to tell us that to stand in a
pulpit on Sunday, and presume to instruct in the things
of God men and women who all the week before have
been beating us in simple faithfulness to duty, is a
mockery and a sham. Rudimentary as this considera-
tion is, it nevertheless calls for emphasis and plain
speaking. Beware the professional busy-ness which
is but slackness in disguise! The trouble is that we
may even succeed in deceiving ourselves. Our diary
is crowded. Meetings, discussions, interviews, com-
mittees throng the hectic page. We are driven here,
there, everywhere by the whirling machinery of good
works. We become ail things to all men. Laziness ?
The word, we protest, is not in our vocabulary. Are
we not engrossed from morning till night ? Do we not
conspicuously spend our days under the high pressure
of an exacting life ? But God, who searches the heart,
knows how much of our outward strenuousness is but
a rationalization of a latent slackness. What does it
all amount to- the whole paraphernalia of good works
and religious machinery if there is lacking the intense
concentration on the message which is to deliver men's

196

THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

eyes from tears, their feet from falling, and their souls
from deathj the lonely wrestling with God at Peniel
without which no blessing comes ?

"We are seeking/ 1 cried Richard Baxter to his
brother preachers, "to uphold the world, to save it
from the curse of God, to perfect the creation, to attain
the ends of Christ's redemption. And are these works
to be done with a careless mind or a lazy mind or a lazy
hand? O see that this work be done with all your
might I Study hard, for the well is deep/' It is indeed
intolerable to be slack or lethargic in the preparation
of a message upon which issues of such incalculable
moment hang* What is at stake in our work is the
lives of men. Every sermon is to be preached in the
knowledge that for someone present it may be now the
fulness of the time and the day of salvation- "I take
you to record this day/* exclaimed Paul, "that I am
pure from the blood of all men/* Dare we look such
words in the face? There was a day when Ezekiel,
caught up in the Spirit, heard a voice from heaven
crying, "If the watchman see the sword come, and
blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned;
if the sword come, and take any person from amongst
them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood
will I require at the watchman's hand/* And as he
pondered the vision, suddenly with terrific dramatic
force the voice went on: "So thou, O son of man, I
have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel/*
Age after age, this has been the great prophetic motive.
Always the man of God has been the watchman on the

197

HERALDS OF GOD

ramparts of the world. Always the preacher of the
Word has known himself to be a sentinel, appointed to
keep vigil over immortal souls. Always the pressure
of the immense responsibility has constrained him to
cry, "Necessity is laid upon me: woe is me, if I preach
not the Gospel!" That is not rhetoric. It is not the
vehement, declamatory talk of the pietist or the fanatic.
It is the plain unemotional declaration of the man who
has grasped the essential issues of his calling. "These
sheep of the Saviour's flock, these blundering, sinning,
suffering, lovable men and women, these I must render
again to the Lord who has given them to me, these I
must offer at the throne in righteousness: else God
will ask the reason why! Their blood will God require
at the watchman's hand/' It is when this ultimate
challenge stabs our conscience that we learn to see
slackness, that ruinous besetting sin of so many a
ministry, in its true colours, and make our vows unto
the Lord against it.

Redemptive work is always costly. There is no
hope of ease for the faithful servant of the Cross, It is
involved in the very nature of his task that he can never
be at the end of it. Not his to evade the burden and
the heat of the day: physical weariness, sickness of
heart and bitter disappointment, the strain of the
passion for souls, all the wear and tear of vicarious
burden-bearing these he will know in full measure.
He may even find himself wondering sometimes why
he ever accepted a commission in a warfare in which
there is no discharge. He may have moods when a

198

THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

haunting sense of anticlimax overwhelms him. It is
one thing to set out gallantly when the flags are waving
and the drums summoning to a new crusade, but it is
quite another thing to keep plodding on when the road
is difficult and the Initial impetus has spent its force
and the trumpets of the dawn have ceased to blow. It
is one thing to have inspirations : it is another to have
tenacity. "My little children/* wrote Paul to the
Galatians, "of whom I travail in birth again until
Christ be formed in you": a swift and startling turn
of phrase giving a profoundly moving insight into the
price of true Christian ambassadorship. For

it is by no breath^

Turn f eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with
death !

and if ever a man finds the work of the ministry becom-
ing easily manageable and surmountable, an undemand-
ing vocation without strain or any encumbering load of
care, he is to be pitied, not congratulated: for he has
so flagrantly lost touch with One whose ministry of
reconciliation could be accomplished and fulfilled only
through Gethsemane and Calvary. "Without shed-
ding of blood there is no remission of sins." Unless
something of the evangelist's life-blood goes into his
quest for souls and into the word he brings them from
the Lord, the quest remains fruitless and the word
devoid of delivering power.

That the ministry should be regarded (as in fact it
has sometimes been regarded) as a profession a career
whose main qualifications are a certain amount of

199

HERALDS OF GOB

organizing ability, tact and culture? the reputation of
being a good " mixer" and a shrewd judge of men,
some measure of facility of speech, and a decent level
of piety this is shocking and deplorable. No ministry
is worth anything which is not first and last and all the
time a ministry beneath the Cross. Let a man reckon
the cost ere he closes with the call.

There are, indeed, mighty compensations and in-
comparably precious rewards. You will receive letters
which you will treasure all your life as sacred, because
they tell gratefully of some vision received, some
challenge accepted, some discovery made of the won-
derful friendship of Jesus; and when, for one reason
or another, your work is taking more out of you than
you care to tell, and disappointments are encountered,
and the haunting question "What is the use? M stands
at your door and knocks, you will thank God at such a
time that it is possible by opening the drawer where
these letters lie, and reading one or more of them again,
to send the low mood flying, and to rally and comfort
your soul with a sudden vision of the essential worth
and splendour of the task, the amazing privilege of
being in it at all, and the magnificence of the faithful-
ness of God.

The true preacher, then, is a man completely dedi-
cated to the high mission on which he is sent forth.
He will be resolute and vigilant, lest any secret slack-
ness should invalidate the message he proclaims. Not
that he will obtrude his labours, or take credit from his
crowded days, or wish that anyone should know the

200

THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

burden of his toil Nothing could be further from his
thoughts : for he is so piercingly aware that the utter-
most of his devotion is a paltry, miserable return for
what Christ has done for him* " If there is anything/'
exclaimed Rabbi Duncan, "in which I would be
inclined to contradict my Lord, it would be if 1 heard
Him say ? "Well done 5 good and faithful servant/"

ii

This first mark of the herald of Christ leads on
inevitably to the second. He will be a man of prayer*
Here again, of course, it is necessary to guard against
any suggestion of a double standard as though the
cultivation of the devotional life were a professional
obligation limited to the few, and not the manifest duty
of all* 66 A man of prayer" that must be the ideal,
not only of the ordained servants of the Gospel, but of
everyone who bears the Christian name. All are here
alike, for the New Testament knows nothing of a
possession of the Spirit as a priestly monopoly, and the
life of devotion is meant to be normal Christianity.
The basic reason why a minister must pray is not
because he is a minister (that would savour of official
piety, always an odious thing), but because he is a poor,
needy creature dependent on God's grace.

That is fundamental. But is it not also evident that
the weight of his peculiar responsibility must drive him
to his knees ? If he is taking his work seriously at all,
there will be days when Moses' hot outburst to the
Lord will echo in his heart: "Wherefore layest Thou

201

HERALDS OF GOD

the burden of all this people upon me ? Have I con-
ceived all this people? Have I begotten them, that
Thou shouldst say unto me. Carry them in thy bosom ?
I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is
too heavy for me." It is out of such a mood of desper-
ate defeat and bankruptcy that there rises, like a bright
and morning star, the discovery of prayer's unsearch-
able riches, its power to steady the staggering soul, to
replenish the lost virtue and the nervous energy which
the toil of the passion for souls has drained away. Day
after day, year after year, you will be expending your-
selves, giving out to others. You simply cannot face
the strain, except on one condition : you must simul-
taneously be taking in from God.

Once there was lived upon this earth a life of
terrible self-giving, yet of uttermost serenity. Do not
we, who grow so hectic often and strained and tired
and overburdened, long to share the secret of Christ's
peace ? It was the secret known to the mountain-tops
where He outwatched the stars, to the olive trees in the
garden which heard His voice at midnight, to the winds
and waves that were His shrine while He communed
with God. How shall any man be strong to do Christ's
work to-day, with the purposefulness and passion and
mastery of life that shine on every page of the Gospels,
if he neglects Christ's hidden secret ? Chalmers was
indeed going to the root of the matter when he declared
that most failures in the ministry were due, not to lack
of visiting or of study or of organizational activity, but
to lack of prayer.

202

THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

There is more at stake in this than the reinforcing
of your spirit or the culture of your private devotions.
For whether your congregation be large or small a
great part of your task on its behalf lies in the realm of
intercession. I do not simply mean asking God to
bless your people collectively though, of course, you
will do that I mean praying for every family, each
separate soul, by name. Let me assure you that this
suggestion is entirely practicable, whether you have a
hundred members or two thousand. Method and
system, of course, are necessary; but is there any reason
why prayer should not be methodical? Take your
Communion Roll. Use it as a directory of intercession.
Single out, say, three families each day. Mention each
member of these homes by name. Visualize their cir-
cumstances. Think of their work, their difficulties,
their temptations. Remember very specially any who
may have been growing indifferent to religious ordin-
ances and drifting away from the Church. Bear them
individually upon your heart to the mercy-seat. From
such concrete and particular intercession two results
will follow. On the one hand, there will be a blessing
for those for whom you pray. On the other hand, there
will be revealed to you from time to time, even as you
intercede for them, practical ways of helpfulness, new
avenues of sympathetic understanding, opportunities
of showing to this one or that other something of the
kindness of God for Jesus* sake. And when you look
into their faces on the Sunday, as you lead their worship
and proclaim to them afresh the all-sufficient grace of

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HERALDS OF GOB

Christ, that background of your hidden intercessions,
of your pleading for them name by name, will lift your
words and wing them with love and ardour and reality,
God will not refuse the kindling flame when secret
prayer has laid its sacrifice upon the altar. And you
will prove in your own experience the truth to which
that great soldier of the Cross, Samuel Rutherford,
gave expression long ago: "I seldom made an errand
to God for another, but I got something for myself/'

Is it too much to say that revival in the Church
depends upon the prayer-life of its ministers? Too
often we take for granted that here at least all is well.
But still to-day, as when the winds of Pentecost stirred
the world, the first essential is the broken spirit and
the contrite heart of those who preach the Word, the
sense of dreadful inadequacy driving every apostle to
his knees. To realize, face to face with the task, that
it is hopeless trying to go on unless higher hands take
hold of you; to know the feeling of utter incapacity
which creates a trust that is vital just because it is
desperate ; to cry to God out of that depth of humilia-
tion every day you live this is to learn the secret of
the apostles, whose very weakness was turned through
the alchemy of prayer into their strongest asset, whose
human inadequacy itself became the vehicle of the
conquering might of Christ. " We have this treasure
in earthen vessels, to show that the excellency of the
power is of God, and not of us." It is when a man
strikes rock-bottom in his sense of nothingness that he
suddenly finds he has struck the Rock of ages. Then

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PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

his ministry is supernaturalized* and through

him the Spirit can act with power* "In Love's
service, 5 " says the Angel in Thornton Wilder's play,
"only the wounded soldiers can serve," And only
those who have been wounded in the region of their
human confidence, whose self-sufficiency has been
shattered into supplication, only they can be the
healers of this ailing world* Be sure of this, that if
men are to be blessed by your ministry, prayer must
be its alpha and its omega. "Our sufficiency is of
God."

in

This brings us to the third characteristic note of the
preacher's inner life. He will be a man marked ty a
great humility of heart. Nowhere surely are pride and
self-importance and conscious striving after effect more
incongruous and unpardonable than in the servant of
the Cross, Yet pride would not be the basic sin it is,
if it did not possess this demonic quality, that precisely
where you would expect to find it lying dead for ever,
there it reappears, insinuating itself in even subtler
guise, u The final human pretension/' Reinhold
Niebuhr has reminded us, **is made most successfully
under the aegis of a religion which has overcome human
pretension in principle/* "I am an apostle/' wrote
Paul to the Romans; "I magnify mine office" for it
is right to think greatly of a calling so momentous in
its issues for the Kingdom of Christ and the souls of
men. But that there can be a false magnifying of the

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HERALDS OF GOD

ministerial office, Paul himself reminds us trenchantly
in another passage. Read the fourth chapter of First
CorinthianSj and you will see the apostle's irony flash-
ing like a rapier against the self-display, the acceptance
of adulation, and all the stratagems of a latent egotism
which too often have intruded themselves into the
service of the Lord. Two hundred years ago, William
Law in his Serious Call laid it down flatly that to serve
Christ self-importandy is to be both a thief and a liar:
"It has the guilt of stealing, as it gives to ourselves
those things which belong only to God; and it has the
guilt of lying, as it is the denying the truth of our state,
and pretending to be something that we are not."

This, certainly, is true Biblical teaching. "Who
maketh thee to differ from another ? What hast thou
that thou didst not receive ? Why dost thou glory, as if
thou hadst not received it?" Imagine a poor dauber
setting his amateurish efforts alongside a Raphael or a
Titian: "Yes, it is rather good, that work of mine!'*
What are our best words for Christ compared with the
Christ of whom we speak ? What is our uttermost of
devotion in the presence of that blazing holiness?
"All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags," all our
anxious concern "Did I preach well to-day ?" is dust
and ashes in the presence of the Cross: that every
mouth may be stopped before God.

Observe that there are three contributory factors
here. The first we have noted already. It is the
magnitude of the task. To build something of the
New Jerusalem in your own parish and field of labour,

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to fight for social justice and the Christian ethic in the
wider community, to carry upon your heart the sorrows
and shames and sins of the souls committed to your
care, to be amongst them as a witness and a herald,
44 to present" (as Paul put it) "every man perfect in
Christ Jesus" could you conceive any task more
humbling in its appalling responsibility? There is a
great sermon of John Donne's, delivered in the year
1624, in which he sets forth his conception of the awful
burden on the preacher's heart. "What Sea/' cries
Donne, "could furnish mine eyes with teares enough
to poure out, if I should think, that of all this congre-
gation, which lookes me in the face now, I should not
meet one at the Resurrection, at the right hand of
God! When at any midnight I hear a bell toll from
this steeple, must not I say to my selfe, what have I
done at any time for the instructing or rectifying of
that man's Conscience, who lieth there now ready to
deliver up his own account and my account to Al-
mighty God?" Is it to be wondered at that many a
man of God besides Elijah and Jeremiah has tried to
run away from a commission so crushing and intoler-
able ? Nothing but the grace of God can hold you to
it. The magnitude of the task is the first element in
evangelical humility.

The second is the unworthiness of the preacher.
Who are we to expound categorically the mysteries of
God and the soul? Our best insights are so frag-
mentary ? our ignorance so abysmal. Never forget that
in your congregation there will be those who had been

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"born again" before you were born at all. You will
be preaching to some who will always be 54 further ben"
in the deep things of God than yourself. Must not
that reflection replace false confidence with modesty?
But ignorance and finitude are not ? of course, the sum
total of our unworthiness. "Woe is me! for I am un-
done; because I am a man of unclean lips: mine eyes
have seen the King/' "Only once," wrote Dr, Alex-
ander Whyte, "did God choose a completely sinless
preacher/' Our doom it is that with no atom of
personal merit or deserving, with nothing indeed but
broken contrition and the shame of sin's radical cor-
ruption, we have to tell of Jesus and His love. Let the
preacher, charged to mediate the word of God to men,
pause ere he mount the pulpit-steps and breathe the
secret prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner."
There will be days when the sense of personal un-
worthiness smites and shatters us, until we cry "My
God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" It is then, by
some miracle of divine lovingkindness, at such a
moment of desolation, that there comes the angel,
touching a man's lips with a live coal from the altar
of God.

There is a third reason for the humility which will
always mark the servant of the evangel. This is the
fact that anything his work may achieve is God's doing,
not his own. If visible results attend his ministry if
souls are brought out of darkness into lights if the
faithful are strengthened and the apathetic awakened
and the spiritually dead resurrected (and, mark you,

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unless he Is aiming at these things he has no right to
be in the ministry at all), if success in this deep sense
is granted? he will not seek to depreciate it or ignore it,
for that would be dangerously like the sin against the
Holy Ghost: but equally he will not take to himself
one grain of credit for it, for it is the doing of the Lord
alone. It is only God who can take the five loaves and
the two fishes our paltry, scanty offering and make
it a banquet for the hungry souls of men. Moreover
preaching (as we saw in a previous lecture) is essentially
worship, and in worship all human glorying is excluded,
for the God whom we adore fills the whole horizon,
and our mood is that of prostrate Abraham: " Behold
now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord,
which am but dust and ashes." Spurgeon in one place
describes the clergyman who says, "When I was
preaching at such-and-such a place, fifteen persons
came into the vestry at the close of the service, and
thanked me for the sermon I had preached/' And
Spurgeon, unable to restrain himself, lets fly furiously
at the complacent creature: "You and your blessed
sermon be hanged ! Take not to yourself the honour
which belongeth unto God only/'

All we can do is nothing worth, unless God blesses the deed;

Vainly we hope for the harvest-tide, till God gives life to
the seed.

Here, in the knowledge that the human agent is
nothing vox et fraeterea nihil is the final source of
the preacher's humility of heart. He will rejoice when-
ever another soul, through his ministry, stumbles upon

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HERALDS OF GOD

the crowning revelation and breaks loose from Its
fetters and enters the Kingdom; but he will give God
the glory. Flesh and blood have not revealed it, but
only the Father in heaven.

IV

In the light of what has just been said, the fourth
mark of the true preacher, to which we now pass, may
appear at first sight paradoxical. He will be a man of
authority. It is quite mistaken to suppose that humility
excludes conviction, G. K. Chesterton once penned
some wise words about what he called "the dislocation
of humility," "What we suffer from to-day is humility
in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the
organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the
organ of conviction ; where it was never meant to be.
A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but
undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly
reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of
men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplica-
tion table." Humble and self-forgetting we must be
always, but diffident and apologetic about the Gospel
never.

When D. L. Moody first carried his evangelism into
one of our great University centres, there was some
initial opposition. His first meeting was persistently
interrupted, punctuated with scoffing epithets. At
last Moody broke out. "You jeered at the hymns,"
he exclaimed, "and I said nothing. You jeered at the

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prayers and I said nothing. But now you jeer at the
Word of God, I would as soon play with forked
lightmngl " Surely the diffidence and lack of assurance
which would be appropriate enough in the propagating
of private theories or the giving of human advice
become ludicrous and nauseating in the proclamation
of a Word so swift and powerful and tremendous. " It
is not God's ordinary way/' cries John Donne, "to be
whispering of secrets. For Publication of Himselfe He
hath constituted a Church, And in this Church, His
Ordinance is Ordinance indeed; His Ordinance of
preaching batters the soule, and by that breach, the
Spirit enters; His Ministers are an Earthquake, and
shake an earthly soule ; they are the sonnes of thunder,
and scatter a cloudy conscience."

The very terms describing the preacher's function
herald, ambassador manifestly connote authority.
Far too often the pulpit has been deferential and apolo-
getic when it ought to have been prophetic and
trumpet-toned. It has wasted time balancing prob-
abilities and discussing opinions and erecting interroga-
tion-marks, when it ought to have been ringing out
the note of unabashed, triumphant affirmation "The
mouth of the Lord hath spoken it!"

It is significant that when the vision of the glory of
God struck Ezekiel prostrate to the ground, the first
words that shattered the silence were "Son of man,
stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee." God
wants no grovelling, faint-hearted creatures for His
ambassadors: He wants men who> having communed

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HERALDS OF GOD

with heaven, can never be intimidated by the world.
You will re'member how the same note sounds again
in Paul's account of his conversion. " Who art Thou,
Lord?" "I am Jesus whom thou persecutes^ But
rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto
thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister*" It is
always thus in every age the ministers of the living
Christ are made the crashing, paralysing sense of
abject worthlessness, the self-esteem broken and rolled
in the dust, and then a man rising to his full stature as
God's commissioned messenger. " Chief of sinners/'
" least of all saints" such was Paul's self-estimate ;
yet with what royal, unqualified authority he pro-
claimed the word and the will of the Lord !

The Christian preacher is the bondslave of Christ
and the servant of all : but let him not confound such
apostolic servitude with spiritual servility. The Gospel
is not servile: it is "mighty through God to the pulling
down of strongholds." Dr. G. L. Prestige, in his
biography of the late Bishop Gore, has described a
sermon Gore preached before the University of Oxford,
in which he sought to distinguish between true humility
and false deference. "Some who heard it long recalled
the trumpet tones and accompanying snorts of derision
with which he quoted the Magnificat^ interspersing
each passage with contemptuous cries of * Servile?'"
" Stand upon thy feet," said the voice to Saul of Tarsus,
"for I will make thee a minister, delivering thee from
the people" i for to have stood before Christ is to be
clothed with an authority that defies subservience and

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THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

no face of man. To quote Donne again "So
the Apostles proceeded; when they came in their
peregrination to a new State, to a new Court, to Rome
It selfe, they did not enquire, how stands the Emperour
affected to Christ, and to the preaching of His Gospel ?
This was not their way; They only considered who
sent them; Christ Jesus: And what they brought;
salvation to every soul." This is the note that modern
preaching must recapture. For this is no time for
Christ* s accredited servants to be soft-pedalling their
distinctive message; no time for that peculiarly un-
pleasant form of servility which regards it as a feather
in the Church's cap if some scientist or philosopher or
Brains Trust specialist speaks approvingly and patron-
izingly of our holy religion; no time to be watering
down the radical and challenging content of the
Christian faith to suit the taste of any vague indeter-
minate humanism that boggles at the supernatural.
We shall never do Christ's work to-day unless like
our Master we dare to speak with authority, and
not as the scribes.

But whence comes this authority ? It springs, first,
from the fact that it is God's Word, not our own, that
we proclaim. When that noble ambassador of Christ,
Temple Gairdner of Cairo (whose life-story is one of
the classics of missionary biography), was an under-
graduate, he took some share in student meetings
organized by one of the religious societies in the
University. "Do I speak at a meeting?" he wrote in
a letter to a friend, "I am asked, ' Are you better than

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HERALDS OF GOD

those here, that you speak to them?' Nay, but Christ
is better I do not speak of myself but of Him/ 9 It
is this that redeems our stammering lips from con-
fusion, and gives the veriest sinner words that ring like
iron and shine like flame. "You have not chosen Me/'
says Jesus that would be too flimsy and fortuitous
to be a basis for apostleship " but I have chosen you " :
that rallies all the latent courage of the soul. It is "in
Christ's stead," declared St. Paul, that we who in
ourselves are fallible and sinful creatures announce the
Gospel of reconciliation; and the preacher across
whose consciousness that thrilling word "in Christ's
stead" has pealed needs no other apostolic succession
to invest him with the insignia of authority. He is not
diffidently offering men the dubious results of his
private speculation: he is standing on his feet to
deliver to them, in the name of the King of kings, a
word that cannot return void. He preaches as if the
Lord God omnipotent were there at his right hand:
as indeed God is. The keynote of his preaching is not
"Thus I think": it is "Thus saith the Lord." The
late Sir George Adam Smith has described the early
years of Dr. Alexander Whyte's ministry in St. George's,
Edinburgh, and the great preacher's influence on the
student community in particular, to which at that time
Smith himself belonged. "I remember how one of us
coming out of church one day said: * Well, till hearing
Whyte I never realised that paradox of St. Paul, / . . .
yet not // There was the natural man himself, the
strong, gifted, ardent personality with his own features,

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THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

accents and styles, and his own experiences, all of
which came home to our hearts, but it was the Spirit
of the Lord which we felt pouring through him/'
That penetrating analysis goes right to the roots of the
secret of true preaching. "I yet not I, but Christ!"
Not mine the witness, not mine the cry and beseeching,
not over my poor lips but out from the depths of the
eternal breaks the word that is to convict and save. I
plead with men, yet not I : Christ pleadeth in me. In
Christ, God goes forth in action through the Spirit.
44 He that hath ears to hear, let him hear "

There is a second, subsidiary source of the preacher's
authority. This is the testimony of the Christian cen-
turies behind him and of the universal Church around
him. Not as an isolated, lonely figure, intruding oddly
upon the contemporary scene, does he stand in his
pulpit to-day. What matter though his sphere of
labour be thankless and obscure, and his own gifts and
talents meagre and unimpressive? Behind him stand
Spurgeon and Liddon and Newman and Chalmers and
Baxter and Jeremy Taylor and Latimer and Luther
and Francis and Augustine and Chrysostom and Paul.
Those who belittle the vocation of the preacher prove
the poverty of their own historic imagination: for
behind every pulpit from which the Word is faithfully
proclaimed to-day there stretches the august pageant
of the gathering ages. It is an immensely thrilling
experience to know, when you tell men of Christ the
Lord, that your poor words are backed and reinforced
by the witness of two thousand years. Indeed, the very

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HERALDS OF GOB

indestructibility of the Church out of whose bosom
you speak^ its survival of desperate vicissitudes^ its
defiance of the gates of hell this is itself impressive
proof of the eternal significance of your ministry and
vocation. If ever you feel lonely in your task and
there will be days when crashing loneliness besets you
remember who are your kith and kin, Columba and
Xavier and Savonarola and Knox and Wesley and all
the multitude who in every generation have preached
the identical Christ whom you preach to-day 5 one Lord^
one faith, one baptism 5 one Cross, one victory,, one
mercy-seat, one building not made with hands, eternal
in the heavens. Nor need you turn your gaze to the
past only. Lift up your eyes, and look around you;
and realize that, while you stand solitary in your pulpit,
yonder at that very moment beyond the walls of
your church and out to earth's remotest bounds a great
host of witnesses are publishing the same tidings which
you now bear upon your heart. So the littleness and
the inadequacy of the individual preacher are caught
up into the context of historic Christianity; and his
message rings, not with the dogmatism of a self-
assured complacency, but with the authoritative testi-
mony of a great cloud of witnesses, the glorious
company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the
prophets, the noble army of martyrs, and the holy
Church throughout all the world,

Yet even this is not enough. The preacher pro-
claims God's word, not his own ; and he proclaims it
out of the midst of the Christian fellowship. But a

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THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

third factor is needful to vest him in the authority of a
true ambassador* He must possess the word or
rather, he must be possessed by it -as a living, personal
experience. Why is it that two men, enunciating the
very same truths, may differ utterly in results achieved ?
The one declares the salvation of Christ, and little or
nothing happens. The other, using almost the identical
words, declares the same salvation, and chords are set
vibrating in a hundred hearts. It is in the realm of
personal experience that the difference lies. There
were certain Jewish exorcists, the writer of the Book of
Acts narrates, who tried to do the works of God and
cast out evil spirits by using the formula, "I adjure
you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth, 1 ' As if miracles
could be wrought in the name of someone else's Christ!
Are we to tell men to-day of a Christ whom the apostles
preached, or Luther, or the Wesleys, or our own im-
mediate fathers in the faith ? It is not surprising that
the sons of Sceva in the Book of Acts, adjuring their
congregation by Jesus- whom Paul preached, met the
blunt retort " Jesus we know, and Paul we know,
but who are ye?" You may preach Paul's Christ or
Calvin's Christ, and not break a single shackle of sin
or bind up one broken heart. There is not authority
enough in second-hand religion to rouse the listless and
set the captives free. But how different it is when, like
the apostle, the twentieth-century preacher can declare
"my Gospel," when he is manifestly building not on
rumour and hearsay but on the proved facts of his own
experience, and when those hearkening to his word are

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HERALDS OF GOD

constrained to say " There is a man who has been
with Jesus!"

This, of course, is not to say that you are to keep
talking about your own soul, or dragging your secret
experiences into the light. Emphatically not: such
self-exposure in the pulpit is apt to make all decent
men and women squirm, and the note of autobiography
soon becomes mawkish and insufferable, " Stand out
of the way," men feel like saying to such a preacher,
"and let us through to Jesus!" But if self-obtrusion
is to be discountenanced, the fact remains that the only
sermon the world wants to hear is one that throbs with
the vitality of first-hand knowledge and experience.
This alone carries authority and conviction. This
leaves men saying, "God spoke to us to-day."

Therefore it is essential that, right on to the very end
of his ministry, the preacher's own vision of God in
Christ should be a growing and expanding thing. No
doubt the last sermon that you ever preach on earth
will contain the same Gospel with which you first
launched out on the day of your ordination. Yet
surely there will be a difference. For all along the
road, God will have been speaking to you, enlarging
your experience with new disclosures of His grace.
And if, as we have seen, authority is born of personal
apprehension of the truth, it is well to remember that
such apprehension is never final : it is always, as Hosea
expressed it, a "following on to know the Lord."
God asks no man to face to-day in the strength of
yesterday's grace, or to hoard for his sustenance to-

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THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

morrow manna gathered to-day. "I will make thee a
minister and a witness," said the risen Christ to Saul
of Tarsus, "both of these things which thou hast seen,
and of those things in the which I will appear unto
thee 7 ': for beyond the Damascus vision there was a
whole world of spiritual knowledge waiting to be
explored, and when he lay in prison near the end he
was reaching out to know Christ better still in the
power of His Resurrection and the fellowship of His
sufferings. However long your ministry, there need
be no danger of the blight of staleness and stagnation,
if your personal experience of Christ is growing all the
time. Here is the ultimate secret of authoritative
preaching a first-hand knowledge, never inert and
static, never dependent merely on remembered epi-
sodes, shining and decisive God-encounters long ago,
but always dynamic and developing, always with insight
added to insight, and wonder piled on wonder, from
the moment when you first gird on your armour for
the fray, until the last sermon is preached and the long
campaign is over and your work on earth is done.

We have been inquiring into the nature of the
preacher's inner life. We have distinguished certain
vital marks of his apostleship. There are others, too
numerous to mention here. Let it suffice to call
attention to one final, indispensable quality. He will
be a man on fire for Christ.

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HERALDS OF GOD

God help the preacher who tries to ply this work
with no overpowering sense of its urgency! When
you remember, as you stand in your pulpit, that some
around you there have been lifting you to God, to gird
your soul with strength and your words with the
authority of Jesus; that never a congregation gather$ 3
but some expectant souls are presents hoping and
hungering for the open heavens and the vision of the
Lord; that always there are some trembling on the
verge of spiritual decision, so that for them this very
service might be the hour of life's supreme encounter;
that every one of those into whose faces you look is so
infinitely precious that for their sakes Christ was willing
to endure the Cross and despise the shame -when you
reflect on this, must not your spirit catch fire, and all
listlessness and formality be burned up in the glow of
the evangel ? Here is the source of authentic inspira-
tion, "the demon of preaching, 55 as it is sometimes
called. When all is said and done, the supreme need
of the Church is the same in the twentieth century as
in the first; it is men on fire for Christ.

I beg you not to commit the fearful blunder of
damping down that flame. It is, of course, under-
standable and right that you who are going out into
the ministry should distrust, and set your faces against,
the spurious fervour which notoriously brings discredit
on the faith. But the pity is that there are preachers so
frightened of this taint that they have actually done
violence to the flame Christ has kindled within them,
choosing deliberately an attitude of cool and imperturb-

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THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE

detachmentj and perhaps even confounding frigid-
ity with philosophic depth and logical precision with
spiritual power. Let us have precision of utterance
and clarity of exposition by all means: but even pre-
cision and logic are bought too dear if they stifle the
living flame. The radical mistake, of course^ is in
supposing that precision and the heart on fire are
somehow exclusive of each other. It is a supposition
manifestly disproved by every page of the New Testa-
mentj but it can do untold damage to the Church.
"I indeed baptize you with water/' said John to his
desert congregation,, "but He that cometh after me
shall baptize you with fire' 9 ; and the weakness of many
an otherwise competent ministry is that it has been
content with the first baptism and neglected the second^
has tried to do with water what can be accomplished
only with the fire of Christ. "She introduced me/*
said Frederic Myers of that noble woman Josephine
Butler, "to Christianity as by an inner door: not to its
encumbering forms, but to its heart of flame, " That,
under God, is your high calling; and how shall you
tend the flame upon other altars if it is not burning on
your own ? The whole nation was destined to know the
impact of the hour when John Wesley in the Alders-
gate Street meeting-house felt his heart " strangely
warmed within him; and even in the wilder chaos of
the twentieth century there is nothing which the Holy
Spirit might not accomplish through a generation of
preachers on fire for Christ.

Yours is the greatest of all vocations- You will stint
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HERALDS OF GOD

no pains or labour to prepare for it. But do remember
that there is nothing that can avail if the warmth of the
Christ passion is lacking, nor any substitute for a heart
that burns within you as He talks with you by the way.
I pray that God will mightily bless your ministry.
May He fulfil and verify in your experience those words
which stand in the enactments of Leviticus 5 but which
must surely mean far more for you to-day than the
writer of any code in Israel could ever comprehend:
"THE FIRE SHALL EVER BE BURNING UPON THE ALTAR:
IT SHALL NEVER GO OUT/'

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