THE BOHLEN LECTURES
THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS
BY BISHOP PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D.
Uniform with " Lectures on Preaching"
Crown %vo, Cloth, 5s. net
CONTENTS
The Influence of Jesus on
The Moral Life of Man
The Influence of Jesus on
The Social Life of Man
The Influence of Jesus on
The Emotional Life of Man
The Influence of Jesus on
The Intellectual Life of Man
Expository Times. " The Influence of
Jesus is theologically the most characteristic
of all Bishop Brooks s works. Mr Allenson
has given us a new and attractive edition."
Baptist Magazine. " The purpose of the
book is established with an irresistible force of
logic and a wealth of choice illustration. The
re-issue of the book is altogether timely."
The Aberdeen Journal. "These lectures
appeal with a living force that marks them out
as a possession for all time. From the theo
logical point of view this volume contains
the very best of Bishop Brooks s work, and
modern theologians and preachers ovre the
publishers a deep debt of gratitude for this
new, attractive and cheap edition of a most
instructive and thought-compelling book."
The Guardian. "Messrs Allenson are to
be thanked for a new edition which strikes us
as pretty nearly the exact form in which a
religious classic should appear, that is to say,
printed in clean-cut type on good paper, with
ample margins. These lectures, delivered
twenty-eight years ago, are as well worth
reading as ever, and a better means of making
acquaintance with them than is afforded by
this issue will not easily be found."
LONDON: H. R. ALLENSON, LTD.
LECTURES ON PREACHING
BY THS
RT. REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D.
AUTHOR OK " THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS "
"THE I.IFK WITH GOD" ETC
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
S>fv>fnft2 Scbool of 3ale College
IN JANUARY AND FEBRUARY iS
LONDON: H. R. ALLENSON, LIMITED
RACQUET COURT, FLEET STREET, E.G.
BV
42 1 1
Bi
tWMANUEL
From the Records of the Corporation of Ynle Collect,
April 12, 1871.]
" Voted, to accept the offer of Mr. HENRY N. SAGE, of Brook
lyn, of the sum of ten thousand dollars, for the founding of a
lectureship in the Theological Department, in a branch of Pastoral
Theology, to be designated The Lyman Beecher Lectureship on
Preaching, to be filled from time to time, upon the appointment
of the Corporation, by a minister of the Gospel, of any evangelical
denomination, who has been markedly successful in the special
work of the Christian ministry."
14586
Printed in Great Britain
by Turntull &* Shears, Edinburgh
CONTENTS.
LECTtTRE rAGI
I. THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING . t
II. THE PREACH EK HIMSELF 85
III. THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK . 72
IV. THE IDEA OF THE SERMON . 108
V. THE MAKING OF THE SERMON .
VI. THE CONGREGATION .
VII. THE MINISTRY FOR OTTR AGE . e 217
VIII. THE VALUE 0* TUB liUMAN SOUL ( 255
LECTURES ON PREACHING.
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PEEACHING.
OINCE I received, some months ago, the invitation
^ to deliver these lectures which I begin to-day, I
have been led to ponder much upoi the principles by
which I have only half consciously been living and
working for many years. This is j.,rt of the debt
which I owe to those who have honored me with their
invitation. It is interesting to one s self to examine
and recognize and arrange the ideas which have been
slowly taking shape within him during the busy years
of work. I shall be very glad if you too are inter
ested, as I try to recount them to you, and very thank
ful if you find in them any help or inspiration.
The personal character of this lectureship is very
evident. It is always to be filled by preachers in act
ive work, who are to come and speak to you of preach
ing. It is not a Homiletical Professorship. It is each
man s own life in the ministry of which he is to tell
2 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
But certainly you do not expect from your successive
lecturers a series of anecdotes of what has happened
to them in their ministry, nor a mere recital of their
ways of working. It cannot be intended that this
lectureship should exalt the interviewer into an or
ganized and permanent institution. The hope must
rather be that as each preacher speaks of our common
work in his own way, whatever there may be of value
in his personal experience may come, not directly but
indirectly, into what he says, and make the privilege
of preaching shine for the moment in your eyes with
the same kind of light which it has won in his.
I feel as I begin something of the fear which I
have often felt in commencing a new sermon. It has
often seemed to me as if the vast amount of preach
ing which people hear must have one bad effect, in
leaving on their minds a vague impression that this
Christian life to which they are so continually urged
must be a very difficult and complicated thing that it
should take such a multitude of definitions to make it
clear. And so there is some danger lest these multi
plied lectures upon preaching should give to those
who are preparing to preach an uncomfortable feeling
that the work of preaching is a thing of many rules,
hard to understand, and needing a great deal of com
mentary. For my part, I am startled when I think
how few and simple are the things which I have to
say to you. The principles which one can recognize
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 3
in his ministry are very broad and plain. The appli
cations of those principles are endless ; but I should
be very sorry indeed if anything that I shall say
should lead any of you to confound the few plain
principles with their many varied applications, and so
make you think that work complicated and difficult
which to him who is equipped for it, and loves it, is
the easiest and simplest work in life.
Let me say one word more in introduction. He
who is called upon to give these lectures cannot but
remember that they are given every year, and that he
has had very able and faithful predecessors. There
are certainly, therefore, some things which he may
venture to omit without being supposed to be either
ignorant or careless of them. There are certain first
principles, of primary importance, which he may take
for granted in all that he says. They are so funda
mental, that they must be always present, and their
power must pervade every treatment of the work
which is built upon them. But they need not be de
liberately stated anew each year. It would make
these courses of lectures very monotonous ; and one
may venture to assume that there are some elemen
tary principles upon whose truth all students of the
ology are agreed, and whose importance they all feel.
I cannot begin, then, to speak to you who are pre
paring for the work of preaching, without congratu-
4 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
lating you most earnestly upon the prospect that lies
before you. I cannot help bearing witness to the
joy of the life which you anticipate. There is no
career that can compare with it for a moment in the
rich and satisfying relations into which it brings a
man with his fellow-men, in the deep and interesting
insight which it gives him into human nature, and in
the chance of the best culture for his own character.
Its delight never grows old, its interest never wanes,
its stimulus is never exhausted. It is different to a
man at each period of his life ; but if he is the minis
ter he ought to be, there is no age, from the earliest
years when he is his people s brother to the late days
when he is like a father to the children on whom he
looks down from the pulpit, in which the ministry
has not some fresh charm and chance of usefulness to
offer to the man whose heart is in it. Let us never
think of it in any other way than this. Let us rejoice
with one another that in a world where there are a
great many good and happy things for men to do,
God has given us the best and happiest, and made us
preachers of His Truth.
I propose in this introductory lecture to lay before
you some thoughts which cover the whole field which
we shall have to traverse ; and the lectures which fol
low will be mainly applications and illustrations of
the principles which I lay down to-day. It may make
Th R TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 5
my first lecture seem a little too general, but perhaps
it will help us to understand each other better as we
go on.
What, then, is preaching, of which we are to speak ?
It is not hard to find a definition. Preaching is the
communication of truth by man to men. It has in it
two essential elements, truth and personality. Neither
of those can it spare and still be preaching. The
truest truth, the most authoritative statement of God s
will, communicated in any other way than through
the personality of brother man to men is not preached
truth. Suppose it written on the sky, suppose it em
bodied in a book which has been so long held in rev
erence as the direct utterance of God that the vivid
personality of the men who wrote its pages has well-
nigh faded out of it ; in neither of these cases is there
any preaching. And on the other hand, if men speak
to other men that which they do not claim for truth,
if they use their powers of persuasion or of entertain
ment to make other men listen to their speculations,
or do their will, or applaud their cleverness, that is not
preaching either. The first lacks personality. The
second lacks truth. And preaching is the bringing
of truth through personality. It must have b^th ele
ments. It is in the different proportion in which the
two are mingled that the difference between two great
classes of sermons and preaching lies. It is in the
defect of one or the other element that every sermon
6 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
and preacher falls short of the perfect standard. It
is in the absence of one or the other element that a
discourse ceases to be a sermon, and a man ceases to
be a preacher altogether.
If we go back to the beginning of the Christian
ministry we can see how distinctly and deliberately
Jesus chose this method of extending the knowledge
of Himself throughout the world. Other methods no
doubt were open to Him, but He deliberately selected
this. He taught His truth to a few men and then
He said, " Now go and tell that truth to other men."
Both elements were there, in John the Baptist who
prepared the way for Him, in the seventy whom He
sent out before His face, and in the little company
who started from the chamber of the Pentecost to
proclaim the new salvation to the world. If He gave
them the power of working miracles, the miracles
themselves were not the final purpose for which He
gave it. The power of miracle was, as it were, a
divine fire pervading the Apostle s being and opening
his individuality on either side ; making it more open
God-wards by the sense of awful privilege, making it
more open man-wards by the impressiveness and the
helpfulness with which it was clothed. Everything
that was peculiar in Christ s treatment of those men
was merely part of the process by which the Master
prepared their personality to be a fit medium for the
communication of His Word. When His treatment
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 7
of them was complete, they stood fused like glass, and
able to take God s truth in perfectly on one side and
send it out perfectly on the other side of their trans
parent natures.
This was the method by which Christ chose that
His Gospel should be spread through the world. It
was a method that might have been applied to the
dissemination of any truth, but we can see why it was
especially adapted to the truth of Christianity. For
that truth is preeminently personal. However the
Gospel may be capable of statement in dogmatic form,
its truest statement we know is not in dogma but
in personal life. Christianity is Christ ; and we can
easily understand how a truth which is of such pecul
iar character that a person can stand forth and say
of it, " I am the Truth," must always be best conveyed
through, must indeed be almost incapable of being
perfectly conveyed except through personality. And
so some form of preaching must be essential to the
prevalence and spread of the knowledge of Christ
among men. There seems to be some such meaning
as this in the words of Jesus when He said to His
disciples, " As My Father has sent Me into the world,
even so have I sent you into the world." It was
the continuation, out to the minutest ramifications of
the new system of influence, of that personal method
which the Incarnation itself had involved.
If this be true, then, it establishes the first of all
8 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
principles concerning the ministry and preparation
for the ministry. Truth through Personality is our
description of real preaching. The truth must come
really through the person, not merely over his lips,
not merely into his understanding and out through
his pen. It must come through his character, his
affections, his whole intellectual and moral being. It
must come genuinely through him. I think that,
granting equal intelligence and study, here is the
great difference which we feel between two preachers
of the Word. The Gospel has come over one of them
and reaches us tinged and flavored with his superficial
characteristics, belittled with his littleness. The Gos
pel has come through the other, and we receive it
impressed and winged with all the earnestness and
strength that there is in him. In the first case the
man has been but a printing machine or a trumpet.
In the other case he has been a true man and a real
messenger of God. We know how the views which
theologians have taken of the agency of the Bible
writers in their work differ just here. There have
been those who would make them mere passive in
struments. The thought of our own time has more
and more tended to consider them the active messen
gers of the Word of God. This is the higher thought
of inspiration. And this is the only true thought of
the Christian preachership. I think that one of the
most perplexing points in a man s ministry is in a cer-
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 9
tain variation of this power of transmission. Some
times you are all open on both sides, open to God and
to fellow-man. At other times something clogs and
clouds your transparency. You will know the differ
ences of the sermons which you preach in those two
conditions, and, however little they describe it to
themselves or know its causes, your congregation
will feel the difference full well.
But this, as I began to say, decrees for us in general
what the preparation for the ministry is. It must be
nothing less than the making of a man. It cannot
be the mere training to certain tricks. It cannot be
even the furnishing with abundant knowledge. It
must be nothing less than the kneading and temper<
ing of a man s whole nature till it becomes of such a
consistency and quality as to be capable of transmis
sion. This is the largeness of the preacher s culture.
It is not for me, standing here or anywhere, to depre
ciate the work which our theological schools do. It
certainly is not my place to undervalue the usefulness
of lectures on preaching, or books on clerical manners.
But none of these things make the preacher. You
are surprised, when you read the biographies of the
most successful ministers, to see how small a part of
their culture came from their professional schools. It
is a real part, but it is a small part. Everything that
opens their lives towards God and towards man makes
part of their education. The professional schools
10 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
furnish them. The whole world is the school that
makes them. This is the value of the biographies of
the great preachers if we can only read them largely
enough, if we can read them not in a small desire to
copy their details of living, but in a large sympathetic
wish to know what their life was, to see how the men
became the men they were. This is the value of Bax
ter s story of himself, so unsuspiciously confident of
the reader s interest in everything that concerns him,
or of Eobertson s painful but precious history, or of
the strong, manly, constantly advancing life of Nor
man Macleod. I think that either of these books
might be the ruin of a young minister who read it for
the methods of his work, as either of them might be
the making of him if he read it for the spirit and the
spiritual history of the man of whom it told the story.
In a time which abounds in biographies as ours does,
especially in the biographies of preachers, it is worth
while, I am sure, to remember that another man s life
may be the noblest inspiration or the heaviest bur
den, according as we take its spirit into our spirit,
or only bind its methods like a fagot of dry sticks
upon our back.
One other consequence of the fundamental char
acter of preaching which I have stated must be the
perpetual function of the pulpit. Every now and
then we hear some speculations about the prospects
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 11
of preaching. Will men continue to preach and will
other men continue to go and hear them ? Books are
multiplying enormously, Any man may feel reason
ably sure on any Sunday morning that in a book which
he can choose from his shelf he can read something
more wisely thought and more perfectly expressed
than he will hear from the pulpit if he goes to church.
Why should he go ? One answer to the question cer
tainly would be in the assertion that preaching is only
one of the functions of the Christian Church, and that,
even if preaching should grow obsolete, there would
still remain reason enough why Christians should
meet together for worship and for brotherhood. But
even if we look at preaching only, it must still be
true that nothing can ever take its place because of
the personal element that is in it. No multiplication
of books can ever supersede the human voice. No
newly opened channel of approach to man s mind and
heart can ever do away with man s readiness to re
ceive impressions through his fellow-man. There is
no evidence, I think, in all the absorption in books
which characterizes our much reading age, of any
real decline of the interest in preaching. Let a man
be a true preacher, really uttering the truth through
his own personality, and it is strange how men will
gather to listen to him. We hear that the day of the
pulpit is past, and then some morning the voice of a
12 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
true preacher is heard in the land and all the streets
are full of men crowding to hear him, just exactly as
were the streets of Constantinople when Chrysostom
was going to preach at the Church of the Apostles, or
the streets of London when Latimer was bravely tell
ing his truth at St. Paul s.
The same is true of reading sermons. I think, as
I shall have occasion to say more fully in some other
lecture, that a sermon that has the true sermon qual
ity in it, when it is made, preserves that quality even
under the constraints of manuscript or print. And
books of sermons which really bring the truth through
personality to men, were never bought and read more
largely than they are to-day.
No ; the truth about this matter of the competition
of the printed book with the preached sermon, seems
to be what is true of every competition. It has led
to more discrimination. There were things which
people went to hear once but which they will not go to
hear to-day. They can read better things of the same
sort at home. But those things are not sermons.
They never were sermons. The competition of print
has interfered very much, is destined to interfere
much more, we may hope will not cease to interfere
till it has caused it to disappear, with the " pulpit
droning of old saws," with the monotonous reitera
tion of commonplaces and abstractions ; but the true
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PEE AGEING. 13
sermon, the utterance of living truth by living men,
was never more powerful than it is to-day. People
never came to it with more earnestness, or carried
away from it more good results.
I cannot help begging you, in the ministry which
is before you, to beware of excusing your own failures
by foolish talk about the obstinate aversion which the
age has to the preaching of the Gospel. It is the
meanest and shallowest kind of excuse. The age has
no aversion to preaching as such. It may not listen
to your preaching. If that prove to be the case, look
for the fault first in your preaching, and not in the
age. I wonder at the eagerness and patience of con
gregations. I think that there are two things which
we ministers have to guard against in this matter :
one, the tendency of which I have just spoken, to
blame the impatience which men feel with false pre
tences of preaching, for the lack of success which our
preaching brings ; the other, an exactly opposite tend
ency, to trust so confidently to the much tried pa
tience of the people, that we shall do our work care
lessly from feeling too secure about our power. He
who escapes both of these dangers, he who feels the
magnitude and privilege of his work, he who both
respects and trusts his people, neither assuming their
indifference, so that he is paralysed, nor assuming their
interest, so that he grows careless, that man, I think,
14 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
need envy no one of the preachers of the ages that
are past the pulpit in which he stood, or the congre
gation to which he preached.
Let us look now for a few moments at these two
elements of preaching Truth and Personality ; the
one universal and invariable, the other special and
always different. There are a few suggestions that
I should like to make to you about each.
And first with regard to the Truth. It is strange how
impossible it is to separate it and consider it wholly
by itself. The personalness will cling to it. There
are two aspects of the minister s work, which we are
constantly meeting in the New Testament. They are
really embodied in two words, one of which is " mes
sage," and the other is " witness." " This is the message
which we have heard of Him and declare unto you,"
says St. John in his first Epistle. " We are His wit
nesses of these things," says St. Peter before the Coun
cil at Jerusalem. In these two words together, I think,
we have the fundamental conception of the matter of
all Christian preaching. It is to be a message given
to us for transmission, but yet a message which we
cannot transmit until it has entered into our own ex
perience, and we can give our own testimony of its
spiritual power. The minister who keeps the word
" message " always written before him, as he prepares
his sermon in his study, or utters it from his pulpit,
is saved from the tendency to wanton and wild specu-
THIS TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACH I NO. 15
lation, and from the mere passion of originality. He
who never forgets that word " witness," is saved from
the unreality of repeating by rote mere forms of state
ment which he has learned as orthodox, but never
realized as true. If you and I can always carry this
double consciousness, that we are messengers, and
that we are witnesses, we shall have in our preaching
all the authority and independence of assured truth,
and yet all the appeal and convincingness of personal
belief. It will not be we that speak, but the spirit of
our Father that speaketh in us, and yet our souship
shall give the Father s voice its utterance and inter
pretation to His other children.
I think that nothing is more needed to correct the
peculiar vices of preaching which belong to our time,
than a new prevalence among preachers of this first
conception of the truth which they have to tell as
a message. I am sure that one great source of the
weakness of the pulpit is the feeling among the
people that these men who stand up before them every
Sunday have been making up trains of thought, and
thinking how they should " treat their subject," as the
phrase runs. There is the first ground of the vicious
habit that our congregations have of talking about
the preacher more than they think about the truth.
The minstrel who sings before you to show his skill,
will be praised for his wit, and rhymes, and voice.
But the courier who hurries in, breathless, to bring
16 LECTURES ON PEEACUINQ.
you a message, will be forgotten in the message that
he brings. Among the many sermons I have heard, I
always remember one, for the wonderful way in which
it was pervaded by this quality It was a sermon by
Mr. George Macdonald, the English author, who was
in this country a few years ago ; and it had many of
the good and bad characteristics of his interesting
style. It had his brave and manly honesty, and his
tendency to sentimentality. But over and through it
all it had this quality : it was a message from God to
these people by him. The man struggled with lan
guage as a child struggles with his imperfectly mas
tered tongue, that will not tell the errand as he re
ceived it, and has it in his mind. As I listened, I
seemed to see how weak in contrast was the way in
which other preachers had amused me and challenged
my admiration for the working of their minds. Here
was a gospel. Here were real tidings. And you lis
tened and forgot the preacher.
Whatever else you count yourself in the ministry,
never lose this fundamental idea of yourself as a mes
senger. As to the way in which one shall best keep
that idea, it would not be hard to state ; but it would
involve the whole story of the Christian life. Here
is the primary necessity that the Christian preacher
should be a Christian first, that he should be deeply
cognizant of God s authority, and of the absoluteness
of Christ s truth. That was one of the first principles
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PEE ACHING. 1*7
which I ventured to assume as I began my lecture.
But without entering so wide a field, let me say one
thing about this conception of preaching as the telling
of a message which constantly impresses me. I think
that it would give to our pleaching just the quality
which it appears to me to most lack now. That qual
ity is breadth. I do not mean liberality of thought,
nor tolerance of opinion, nor anything of that kind.
I mean largeness of movement, the great utterance
of great truths, the great enforcement of great duties,
as distinct from the minute, and subtle, and ingenious
treatment of little topics, side issues of the soul s life,
bits of anatomy, the bric-a-brac of theology. Take
up, some Saturday, the list of subjects on which the
ministers of a great city are to preach the next day.
See. how many of them seem to have searched in
strange corners of the Bible for their topics, how
small and fantastic is the bit of truth which their
hearers are to have set before them. Then turn to
Barrow, or Tillotson, or Bushnell "Of being imitators
of Christ ; " " That God is the only happiness of man ; "
" Every man s life a plan of God." There is a paint
ing of ivory miniatures, and there is a painting of
great frescoes. One kind of art is suited to one kind
of subject, and another to another. I suppose that
all preachers pass through some fantastic period when
a strange text fascinates them ; when they like to find
what can be said for an hour on some little topic on
18 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
which most men could only talk two minutes ; when
they are eager for subtlety more than force, and for
originality more than truth. But as a preacher grows
more full of the conception of the sermon as a mes
sage, he gets clear of those brambles. He comes out
on to open ground. His work grows freer, and bolder,
and broader. He loves the simplest texts, and the
great truths which run like rivers through all life.
God s sovereignty, Christ s redemption, man s hope in
the Spirit, the privilege of duty, the love of man in
the Saviour, make the strong music which his soul
tries to catch.
And then another result of this conception of preach
ing as the telling of a message is that it puts us into
right relations with all historic Christianity. The
message never can be told as if we were the first to
tell it. It is the same message which the Church has
told in all the ages. He who tells it to-day is backed
by all the multitude who have told it in the past.
He is companied by all those who are telling it now.
The message is his witness ; but a part of the assur
ance with which he has received it, comes from the
fact of its being the identical message which has come
down from the beginning. Men find on both sides
how difficult it is to preserve the true poise and pro
portion between the corporate and the individual con
ceptions of the Christian life. But all will own to-day
the need of both. The identity of the Church in all
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 19
times consists in the identity of the message which
she has always had to carry from her Lord to men.
All outward utterances of the perpetual identity of
the Church are valuable only as they assert this real
identity. There is the real meaning of the perpetua
tion of old ceremonies, the use of ancient liturgies,
and the clinging to what seem to be apostolic types
of government. The heretic in all times has been not
the errorist as such, but the self-willed man, whether
his judgments were right or wrong. " A man may be
a heretic in the truth," says Milton. He is the man
who, taking his ideas not as a message from God, but
as his own discoveries, has cut himself off from the
message-bearing Church of all the ages. I am sure
that the more fully you come to count your preaching
the telling of a message, the more valuable and real
the Church will become to you, the more true will
seem to you your brotherhood with all messengers of
that same message in all strange dresses and in all
strange tongues.
I should like to mention, with reference to the
Truth which the preacher has to preach, two tenden
cies which I am sure that you will recognise as very
characteristic of our time. One is the tendency of
criticism, and the other is the tendency of mechanism.
Both tendencies are bad. By the tendency of criti
cism I mean the disposition that prevails everywhere
to deal with things from outside, discussing their re-
20 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
lations, examining their nature, and not putting our
selves into their power. Preaching in every age fol
lows, to a certain extent, the changes which come to
all literature and life. The age in which we live is
strangely fond of criticism. It takes all things to
pieces for the mere pleasure of examining their nature.
It studies forces, not in order to obey them, but in order
to understand them. It talks about things for the
pure pleasure of discussion. Much of the poetry and
prose about nature and her wonders, much of the in
vestigation of the country s genius and institutions,
much of the subtle analysis of human nature is of this
sort. It is all good ; but it is something distinct from
the cordial sympathy by which one becomes a willing
servant of any of these powers, a real lover of nature,
or a faithful citizen, or a true friend. Now it would
be strange if this critical tendency did not take pos
session of the preaching of the day. And it does.
The disposition to watch ideas in their working, and
to talk about their relations and their influence on
one another, simply as problems, in which the mind
may find pleasure without any real entrance of the
soul into the ideas themselves, this, which is the criti
cal tendency, invades the pulpit, and the result is an
immense amount of preaching which must be called
preaching about Christ as distinct from preaching
Christ. There are many preachers who seem to do
nothing else, always discussing Christianity as a
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 21
problem instead of announcing Christianity as a
message, and proclaiming Christ as a Saviour. I do
not undervalue their discussions. But I think we
ought always to feel that such discussions are not the
type or ideal of preaching. They may be necessities
of the time, but they are not the work which the great
Apostolic preachers did, or which the true preacher
will always most desire. Definers and defenders of
the faith are always needed, but it is bad for a church
when its ministers count it their true work to define
and defend the faith rather than to preach the Gospel.
Beware of the tendency to preach about Christianity,
and try to preach Christ. To discuss the relations
of Christianity and Science, Christianity and Society,
Christianity and Politics, is good. To set Christ forth
to men so that they shall know Him, and in gratitude
and love become His, that is far better. It is good 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 called the other tendency the tendency of mechan
ism. It is the disposition of the preacher to forget
that the Gospel of Christ is primarily addressed to in
dividuals, and that its ultimate purpose is the salvation
of multitudes of men. Between the time when it first
speaks to a man s soul, and the time when that man s
soul is gathered into heaven, with the whole host of
the redeemed, the Gospel uses a great many machineries
which are more or less impersonal The Church
22 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
with all its instrumentalities, comes in. The preacher
works by them. But if the preacher ever for a
moment counts them the purpose of his working, if he
takes his eye off the single soul as the prize he is to
win, he falls from his highest function and loses his
best power. All successful preaching, I more and
more believe, talks to individuals. The Church is for
the soul. I am not thinking of the fault or danger of
any one body of Christians alone when I say this, not
of my own or any other. The tendency to work for the
means instead of for the end is everywhere. And, my
friends, learn this at the beginning of your ministry,
that just as surely as you think that any kind of fault
or danger belongs wholly to another system than your
own, and that you are not exposed to it, just so surely
you will reproduce that fault or danger in some form
in your own life. This surely is a good rule : when
ever you see a fault in any other man, or any other
church, look for it in yourself and in your own church.
Where is the church which is not liable to value its
machineries above its purposes, whose ministers are
not tempted to preach for the denomination and its
precious peculiarities, instead of for men and for their
precious souls ? Let your preaching be to individuals,
and to the Church always as living for and made up
of individuals.
Of the second element in preaching, namely, the
preacher s personality, there will be a great deal to
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 23
say, especially in the next lecture. But there are
two or three fundamental things which I wish to say
to-day.
The first is this, that the principle of personality
once admitted involves the individuality of every
preacher. The same considerations which make it
good that the Gospel should not be written on the sky,
or committed merely to an almost impersonal book,
make it also most desirable that every preacher should
utter the truth in his own way, and according to his
own nature. It must come not only through man but
through men. If you monotonize men you lose their
human power to a large degree. If you could make
all men think alike it would be very much as if no
man thought at all, as when the whole earth moves
together with all that is upon it, everything seems
still. Now the deep sense of the solemnity of the
minister s work has often a tendency to repress the
free individuality of the preacher and his tolerance of
other preachers individualities. His own way of doing
his work is with him a matter of conscience, not of
taste, and the conscience when it is thoroughly awake
is more intolerant than the taste is. Or, working just
the other way, his conscience tells him that it is not
for him to let his personal peculiarities intrude in such
a solemn work, and so he tries to bind himself to the
ways of working which the most successful preachers
of the Word have followed. I have seen both these
kinds of ministers : those whose consciences made
24 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
them obstinate, and those whose consciences made
them pliable ; those whose consciences hardened them
to steel or softened them to wax. However it comes
about, there is an unmistakable tendency to the
repression of the individuality of the preacher. It is
seen in little things : in the uniform which preachers
wear and the disposition to a uniformity of language
It is seen in great things : in the disposition which
all ages have witnessed to draw a line of orthodoxy
inside the lines of truth. Wisely and soberly let us
set ourselves against this influence. The God who
sent men to preach the Gospel of His Son in their
humanity, sent each man distinctively to preach it
in his humanity. Be yourself by all means, but let
that good result come not by cultivating merely super
ficial peculiarities and oddities. Let it be by winning
a true self full of your own faith and your own
love. The deep originality is noble, but the surface
originality is miserable. It is so easy to be a John
the Baptist, as far as the desert and camel s hair
and locusts and wild honey go. But the devoted
heart to speak from, and the fiery words to speak,
are other things.
Again, we never can forget in thinking of the
preacher s personality that he is one who lives in con
stant familiarity with thoughts and words which to
other men are occasional and rare, and which preserve
their sacredne^s mainly by their rarity. That fact
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACH I NO. 25
must always come in when we try to estimate the in
fluences of a preacher s life. What will the power of
that fact be ? I am sure that often it weakens the
minister. I am sure that many men who, if they
came to preach once in a great while in the midst of
other occupations, would preach with reality and fire,
are deadened to their sacred work by their constant
intercourse with sacred things. Their constant deal
ing with the truth makes them less powerful to bear
the truth to others, as a pipe through which the water
always flows collects its sediment, and is less fit to let
more water through. And besides this, it ministers
to self-deception and to an exaggeration or distortion
of our own history. The man who constantly talks of
certain experiences, and urges other men to enter into
them, must come in time, by very force of describing
those experiences, to think that he has undergone
them. You beg men to repent, and you grow so
familiar with the whole theory of repentance that it
is hard for you to know that you yourself have not
repented. You exhort to patience till you have no
eyes or ears for your own impatience. It is the way
in which the man who starts the trains at the railroad
station must come in time to feel as if he himself had
been to all the towns along the road whose names he
has always been shouting in the passengers ears, and
to which he has for years sold them their tickets, when
perhaps he has not left his own little way -station all
26 LECTURES ON PREACH INO.
the time. I know that all this is so, and yet certainly
the fault is in the man, not in the truth. The remedy
certainly is not to make the truth less familiar. There
is a truer relation to preaching, in which the constancy
of it shall help instead of harming the reality and
earnestness with which you do it. The more that you
urge other people to holiness the more intense may be
the hungering and thirsting after holiness in your
own heart. Familiarity does not breed contempt ex
cept of contemptible things or in contemptible people.
The adage, that no man is a hero to his valet de
chambre, is sufficiently answered by saying that it is
only to a valet de chambre that a truly great man is
unheroic. You must get the impulse, the delight,
and the growing sacredness of your life out of your
familiar work. You are lost as a preacher if its
familiarity deadens and encrusts, instead of vitaliz
ing and opening your powers. And it will all depend
upon whether you do your work for your Master and
His people or for yourself. The last kind of labor
slowly kills, the first gives life more and more.
The real preparation of the preacher s personality
for its transmissive work comes by the opening of
his life on both sides, towards the truth of God and
towards the needs of man. To apprehend in all their
intensity the wants and woes of men, to see the prob
lems and dangers of this life, then to know all through
us that nothing but Christ and His Eedemption can
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 27
thoroughly satisfy these wants, that is what makes a
man a preacher. Alas for him who is only open on
the man-ward side, who only knows how miserable
and wicked man is, but has no power of God to bring
to him ! He lays a kind but helpless hand upon the
wound. He tries to relieve it with his sympathy and
his philosophy. He is the source of all he says. There
is no God behind him. He is no preacher. The
preacher s instinct is that which feels instantly how
Christ and human need belong together, neither thinks
Christ too far off for the need, nor the need too in
significant for Christ. Never be afraid to bring the
transcendent mysteries of our faith, Christ s life and
death and resurrection, to the help of the humblest
and commonest of human wants. There is a sort of
preaching which keeps them for the great emergen
cies, and soothes the common sorrows and rebukes the
common sins with lower considerations of economy.
Such preaching fails. It neither appeals to the lower
nor to the higher perceptions of mankind. It is
useful neither as a law nor as a gospel. It is like a
river that is frozen too hard to be navigable but not
hard enough to bear. Never fear, as you preach, to
bring the sublimest motive to the smallest duty, and
the most infinite comfort to the smallest trouble.
They will prove that they belong there if only the
duty and trouble are real and you have read them
thoroughly aright.
3
28 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
These are the elements of preaching, then, Truth
and Personality. The truth is in itself a fixed and
stable element; the personality is a varying and
growing element. In the union of the two we have
the provision for the combination of identity with
variety, of stability with growth, in the preaching of
the Gospel. The truth which you are preaching is the
same which your brother is preaching in the next
pulpit, or in some missionary station on the other side
of the globe. If it were not, you would get no strength
from one another. You would not stand back to back
against the enemy, sustaining one another, as you do
now. But the way in which you preach the truth
is different, and each of you reaches some ears that
would be deaf to the most persuasive tones of the
other. The Gospel you are preaching now is the
same Gospel that you preached when you were first
ordained, in that first sermon which it was at once
such a terror and such a joy to preach ; but if you have
been a live man all the time, you are not preaching it
now as you did then. If the truth had changed, your
life would have lost its unity. The truth has not
changed, but you have grown to fuller understanding
of it, to larger capacity of receiving and transmitting
it. There is no pleasure in the minister s life stronger
than this, the perception of identity and progress in
his preaching of the truth as he grows older. It is
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING 29
like a man s pleasure in watching the growth of his
own body or his own mind, or of a tree which he has
planted. Always the same it is, yet always larger.
It is a common experience of ministers, I suppose, to
find that sentences in their old sermons which were
written years ago contain meanings and views of truth
which they hold now but which they never had thought
of in those early days. The truth was there, but the
man had not appropriated it. The truth has not
changed, but the man is more sufficient for it. Here
is the power by which the truth becomes related to
each special age. It is brought to it through the men
of the age. If a preacher is not a man of his age, in
sympathy with its spirit, his preaching fails. He
wonders that the truth has grown so powerless. But
it is not the truth that has failed. It is the other
element, the person. That is the reason why sometimes
the old preacher finds his well-known power gone, and
complains that while he is still in his vigor people
are looking to younger men for the work which they
once delighted to demand of him. There are noble
examples on the other side: old men with a personality
as vitally sympathetic with the changing age as the
truth which they preach is true to the Word of God.
They have a power which no young man can begin to
wield, and the world owns it willingly. People would
rather see old men than young men in their pulpits if
30 LECTURES ON P RE AGEING.
only the old men bring them both elements of preach
ing, a faith that is eternally true, and a person that is
in quick and ready sympathy with their present life.
If they can have but one, they are apt to choose the
latter ; but what they really want is both, and the
noblest ministries in the Church are those of old men
who have kept the freshness of their youth.
It is in the poise and proportion of these two ele
ments of preaching that we secure the true relation
between independence and adaptation in the preacher s
character. The desire to meet the needs of the people
to whom we preach may easily become servility.
Many a man has lost his manliness and won people s
contempt in a truly earnest desire to win their hearts
for his great message. Here is where the stable and
unchanging element of our work comes in. There is
something that you owe to the truth and to yourself
as its preacher. There is a line beyond which adapta
tion becomes feebleness. There are some things which
St. Paul will not become to any man. Nothing but
this sense of the unchanging demands of the truth
which we are sent to preach can keep us from giving
our people what they want, instead of what they need.
Keep a clear sense of what your truth requires of you.
Count it unworthy of yourself as a minister of the Gos
pel to comfort any sorrow with less than the Gospel s
whole comfortableness, or to bid any soul be perfectly
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 31
happy in anything less than the highest spiritual joy.
The saddest moments in every preacher s life, I think,
are those in which he goes away from his pulpit con
scious that he has given the people, not the highest that
he knew how to give, but only the highest that they
knew how to ask. He has satisfied them, and he is
thoroughly discontented with himself. When a friend
of Alexander the Great had asked of him ten talents,
he tendered to him fifty, and when reply was made
that ten were sufficient, " True," said he, " ten are
sufficient for you to take, but not for me to give."
If it is the decay of the personal element that weakens
the ministry of some old men, I think it is the slight
ing of the element of absolute truth that degrades the
work of preaching in many young men s eyes, and
keeps such numbers of them, who ought to be there,
from its sacred duties. The prevalence of doubt
about all truth, and to some extent also the general
eagerness of preachers to find out and meet the people s
desires and demands, these two causes together have
created the impression that the ministry had no cer
tain purposes or definite message, that the preacher
was a promiscuous caterer for men s whims, wishing
them well, inspired by a certain general benevolence,
but in no sense a prophet uttering positive truth to
them which they did not know before, uttering it
whether they liked it or hated it. Is not that the iru-
32 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
pression which many young men have of the ministry ?
Is it not natural that with that impression they should
seek some other way to help their fellow-men ? And
is there not very much indeed in the way in which
preachers do their work to give such an impres
sion ? Everywhere, for the strengthening of the weak
preacher, the enlivening of the dull preacher, the
sobering of the flippant preacher, the freshening of
the old preacher, the maturing of the young preacher,
what we need is the just poise and proportion of these
two elements of the preacher s work, the truth he has
to tell and the personality through which he has to
tell it.
The purpose of preaching must always be the first
condition that decrees its character. The final cause
is that which really shapes everything s life. And
what is preaching for ? The answer comes without
hesitation. It is for men s salvation. But the idea
of what salvation is has never been entirely uniform
or certain ; and all through the history of preaching
we can see that the character of preaching varied
continually, rose or fell, enlarged or narrowed, with
the constant variation of men s ideas as to what it
was to be saved. If salvation was something here
and now, preaching became a direct appeal to man s
present life. If salvation was something future and
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 33
far away, preaching died into remote whispers and
only made itself graphic and forcible by the vivid
pictures of torture addressed to the senses whose pain
men most easily understand. If to be saved was to
be saved from sin, preaching became spiritual. If to
be saved was to be saved from punishment, preaching
became forensic and economical. If salvation was the
elevation of society, preaching became a lecture upon
social science. The first thing for you to do is to see
clearly what you are going to preach for, what you
mean to try to save men from. By your conviction
about that, the whole quality of your ministry will be
decided. To the absence of any clear answer to that
question, to the entire vagueness as to what men s
danger is, we owe the vagueness with which so many
of our preachers preach.
The world has not heard its best preaching yet. If
there is more of God s truth for men to know, and if
it is possible for the men who utter it to become more
pure and godly, then, with both of its elements more
complete than they have ever been before, preaching
must some day be a completer power. But that better
preaching will not come by any sudden leap of inspi
ration. As the preaching of the present came from
the preaching of the past, so the preaching that is to
be will come from the preaching that is now. If we
34 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
preach as honestly, as intelligently, and as spiritually
as we can, we shall not merely do good in our own
day, but help in some real though unrecorded way the
future triumphs of the work we love.
THE PKEACHER HIMSELF.
"II /TY last lecture indicated very clearly the impor
tance which I think belongs to the preacher s
person in the work to which he is ordained. In my
second and third lectures I want to dwell upon this
subject and consider distinctively the preacher. After
that we will look at the sermon. And in considering
the preacher, we may think of him first in himself and
then in relation to his work. It is not a distinction
that can be accurately and constantly maintained.
The two views run together. But it will help me in
making an arrangement of what I have to say ; and
if we do not insist on it too strongly, it will aid our
thoughts. To-day I take the first of these two topics,
and shall speak of the preacher s personal character,
the preacher in himself.
Let us ask, then, first, What sort of man may be a
minister ? It would be good for the Church if it were
a more common question. Partly because the motives
which lead a young man to the ministry are so per
se
36 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
sonal and spiritual, partly because of our sense of the
magnitude and privilege of the work, which makes us
fear to be the means of excluding any worthy man
from it, partly because, at present, while the harvest
is so plenteous the laborers are so very few, for these
and other reasons, there is far too little discrimination
in the selection of men who are to preach, and many
men find their way into the preacher s office who dis
cover only too late that it is not their place. When
our Lord selected those to whom He was to commit
His gospel, we are impressed with the deliberation
and solemnity of the act : " And it came to pass in
those days that He went out into a mountain to pray,
and continued all night in prayer to God. And when
it was day, He called unto Him His disciples, and of
them He chose twelve, whom also He named apostles."
There has certainly grown up in the Church a strong
misgiving as to the whole policy of charitable people
and benevolent societies who, with their lavish offers of
help, gather into the ministry, along with many noble,
faithful men, a multitude who, amiable and pious as
they may be, are of the kind who make no place in
life for themselves, but wait till some one kindly makes
one for them and drops them into it. I am convinced
that the ministry can never have its true dignity or
power till it is cut aloof from mendicancy, till young
men whose hearts are set on preaching make their way
to the pulpit by the same energy and through the same
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 3*7
difficulties which meet countless young men on their
way to business and the bar. We believe the influ
ence which brings men to the pulpit to be a far holier
one. It ought, then, to be a far stronger one ; and
yet we trust less to its power than we do to the power
of ambition and self-interest. It is a part of the whole
unmanly way of treating ministers, of which there
will be more to say.
It is not easy to describe, with our large views of
personal liberty and personal rights, what methods of
inspection and authentication it may be well to use on
the admission of preachers to their sacred work ; but
what we most of all need is a clearer understanding
and a fuller statement of what are the true conditions
of a minister s success, and so what qualities we have
a right to ask of ourselves and of one another before
we can feel that the true call to the ministry has been
established. We must not draw the line too nar
rowly. There is nothing more striking about the
ministry than the way in which very opposite men
do equally effective work. You look at some great
preacher, and you say, " There is the type. He who
is like that can preach," and just as your snug con
clusion is all made, some other voice rings out from
a neighboring pulpit, and the same power of God
reaches the hearts of men in a totally new way,
and your neat conclusion cracks and breaks. Spur-
geon preaches at his Surrey Tabernacle, and Liddon
38 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
preaches at St. Paul s, and both are great preachers,
and yet no two men could be more entirely unlike.
It must be so. If the preacher is after all only the
representative man, the representative Christian doing
in special ways and with a special ordination that
which all men ought to be doing for Christ and fel
low-man, then there ought to be as many kinds of
preachers as there are kinds of Christians ; and there
are as many kinds of Christians as there are kinds of
men.
It is evident, then, that only in the largest way can
the necessary qualities of the preacher be enumerated.
With this provision such an enumeration may be
attempted.
I must not dwell upon the first of all the necessary
qualities, and yet there is not a moment s doubt that
it does stand first of all. It is personal piety, a deep
possession in one s own soul of the faith and hope and
resolution which he is to offer to his fellow-men for
their new life. Nothing but fire kindles fire. To
know in one s whole nature what it is to live by
Christ ; to be His, not our own ; to be so occupied
with gratitude for what He did for us and for what
He continually is to us that His will and His glory
shall be the sole desires of our life, I wish that I could
put in some words of new and overwhelming force
the old accepted certainty that that is the first neces
sity of the preacher, that to preach without that is
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 39
weary and unsatisfying and unprofitable work, that
to preach with that is a perpetual privilege and
joy-
And next to this I mention what we may call men
tal and spiritual unselfishness. I do not speak so
much of a moral as of an intellectual quality. I
mean that kind of mind which always conceives of
truth with reference to its communication and re
ceives any spiritual blessing as a trust for others.
Both of these are capable of being cultivated, but I
hold that there is a natural difference between men
in this respect. Some men by nature receive truth
abstractly. They follow it into its developments.
They fathom its depths. But they never think of
sending it abroad. They are so enwrapt in seeing
what it is that they never care to test what it can do.
Other men necessarily think in relation to other men,
and their first impulse with every new truth is to give
it its full range of power. Their love for truth is
always complemented by a love for man. They are
two clearly different temperaments. One of them
does not and the other does make the preacher.
Again, hopefulness is a necessary quality of the
true preacher s nature. You know how out of every
complicated condition of affairs one man naturally
appropriates all the elements of hope, while another
invariably gathers up all that tends to despair. The
latter kind of man may have his uses. There are
40 LECTURES ON P RE AC Hi NO.
tasks and times for which no prophet but Cassandra
is appropriate. There were duties laid on sonu? of
the old Hebrew prophets which perhaps they might
have done with hearts wholly destitute of any ray of
light. But such a temper is entirely out of keep
ing with the Christian Gospel. The preacher may
sometimes denounce, rebuke, and terrify. When he
does that, he is not distinctively the preacher of Chris
tianity. If his nature is such that he must dread
and fear continually, he was not made to preach the
Gospel.
If I go on and mention a certain physical condition
as essential to the preacher, I do so on very serious
grounds. I am impressed with what seems to me the
frivolous and insufficient way in which the health of
the preacher is often treated. It is not simply that
the sick minister is always hampered and restrained.
It is not merely that the truth he has within him finds
imperfect utterance. It is that the preacher s work is
the most largely human of all occupations. It brings
a man into more multiplied relations with his fellow-
man than any other work. It is not the doing of cer
tain specified duties. You will be sadly mistaken if
you think it is, and try to set down in your contract
with your parish just what you are to do, and where
your duties are to stop. It is the man offered as a
medium through whom God s influence may reach his
fellow-men. Such an offering involves the whole
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 41
man, and the whole man is body and soul together.
Therefore the ideal preacher brings the perfectly
healthy body with the perfectly sound soul. Kemem-
ber that the care for your health, the avoidance of
nervous waste, the training of your voice, and every
thing else that you do for your body is not merely an
economy of your organs that they may be fit for cer
tain works ; it is a part of that total self-consecration
which cannot be divided, and which all together makes
you the medium through which God may reach His
children s lives. I cannot but think that so high a
view of the consecration of the body would convict
many of the reputable sins against health in which
ministers are apt to live, and do the fundamental
good which the tinkering of the body by specifics for
special occasions so completely fails to do.
I speak of only one thing more. I do not know
how to give it a name, but I do think that in every
man who preaches there should be something of that
quality which we recognize in a high degree in some
man of whom we say, when we see him in the pulpit,
that he is a " born preacher." Call it enthusiasm ;
call it eloquence ; call it magnetism ; call it the gift
for preaching. It is the quality that kindles at the
sight of men, that feels a keen joy at the meeting of
truth and the human mind, and recognizes how God
made them for each other. It is the power by which
a man loses himself and becomes but the sympathetic
42 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
atmosphere between the truth on one side of him and
the man on the other side of him. It is the inspira
tion, the possession, what I have heard called the
" demon " of preaching. Something of this quality
there must be in every man who really preaches. He
who wholly lacks it cannot be a preacher.
All of these qualities which I have thus enumerated
exist in degrees. All of them are capable of culture
if they exist at all All of them are difficult to test ex
cept by the actual work of preaching. I grant, there
fore, fully, that it is difficult to draw out of them a set
of tests which the secretary of an education society
can apply to candidates, as a recruiting sergeant
measures volunteers around the chest, and mark
them as fit or unfit for the ministry. But from their
enumeration I think still that there does rise up be
fore us a clear picture of the man who ought to be a
preacher. Full of the love of Christ, taking all truth
and blessing as a trust, in the best sense didactic,
hopeful, healthy, and counting health, as far as it is
in his power, a part of his self-consecration ; willing,
not simply as so many men are, to bear sickness for
God s work, but willing to preserve health for God s
work ; and going to his preaching with the enthusiasm
that shows it is what God made him for. The nearer
you can come to him, my friends, the better preachers
you will be, the surer you may be that you have a right
to be preachers at all.
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 43
And the next question will be, When you have the
right kind of man to make a preacher of, what are
the changes you will want him to undergo that he
may become a preacher ? The formal ordination
which he will meet by and by will be nothing, of
course, unless it signifies some real experiences which
have filled these years since his soul heard what it
recognized as God s call to the ministry. We may
set him apart from other men with what solemn cere
monies we may please, but he will be just like other
men still, unless the power of the work to which he
looks forward has entered into him during his careful
preparation and made him different.
What does this difference consist in ? What is the
true preparation ? First, and most evident, there are
his special studies which have been filling him with
their spirit. Most men begin really to study when they
enter on the preparation for their professions. Men
whose college life, with its general culture, has been
very idle, begin to work when at the door of the pro
fessional school the work of their life comes into sight
before them. It is the way in which a bird who has
been wheeling vaguely hither and thither sees at last
its home in the distance and flies towards it like
an arrow. But shall I say to you how often I have
thought that the very transcendent motives of the
young minister s study have a certain tendency to be
wilder him and make his study less faithful than that
44 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
of men seeking other professions from lower motives ?
The highest motive often dazzles before it illuminates.
It is one of the ways in which the light within us be
comes darkness. I never shall forget my first experi
ence of a divinity school. I had come from a college
where men studied hard but said nothing about faith.
I had never been at a prayer-meeting in my life. The
first place I was taken to at the seminary was the
prayer-meeting ; and never shall I lose the impression
of the devoutness with which those men prayed and
exhorted one another. Their whole souls seemed ex
alted and their natures were on fire. I sat bewil
dered and ashamed, and went away depressed. On
the next day I met some of those same men at a Greek
recitation. It would be little to say of some of the
devoutest of them that they had not learnt their les
sons. Their whole way showed that they never learnt
their lessons ; that they had not got hold of the first
principles of hard, faithful, conscientious study. The
boiler had no connection with the engine. The devo
tion did not touch the work which then and there
was the work and the only work for them to do. By
and by I found something of where the steam did
escape to. A sort of amateur, premature preaching
was much in vogue among us. We were in haste to
be at what we called " our work." A feeble twilight
of the coming ministry we lived in. The people in
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 45
the neighborhood dubbed us " parsonnettes." Oh,
my fellow-students, the special study of theology and
all that appertains to it, that is what the preacher
must be doing always ; but he never can do it after
wards as he can in the blessed days of quiet in Arabia,
after Christ has called him, and before the Apostles
lay their hands upon him. In many respects an igno
rant clergy, however pious it may be, is worse than
none at all. The more the empty head glows and
burns, the more hollow and thin and dry it grows.
" The knowledge of the priest," said St. Francis de
Sales, " is the eighth sacrament of the Church."
But again, the minister s preparation of character
for his work involves something more intimate than
the accumulation of knowledge. The knowledge
which comes into him meets in him the intention of
preaching, and, touched by that, undergoes a trans
formation. It is changed into doctrine. Doctrine
means this, truth considered with reference to its
being taught. The reason why many men dislike the
word " doctrine " is from their dislike of the whol^
notion of docility which is attached to it. Just as a
citizen who is preparing himself for public office con
siders the law and character of the State not ab
stractly, but with reference to their application to the
people whom he aspires to govern ; just as the student
in a normal school learns everything with an under-
46 LEG TU RES ON PEE ACHING.
consciousness that he is going to teach that same thing
some day, influencing all the methods of his learning ;
so the student preparing to be a preacher cannot learn
truth as the mere student of theology for its own sake
might do. He always feels it reaching out through
him to the people to whom he is some day to carry it.
He cannot get rid of this consciousness. It influences
all his understanding. We can see that it must have
its dangers. It will threaten the impartiality with
which he will seek truth. It will tempt him to prefer
those forms of truth which most easily lend them
selves to didactic uses, rather than those which bring
evidence of being most simply and purely true. That
is the danger of all preachers. Against that danger
the man meaning to be a preacher must be upon his
guard, but he cannot avoid the danger by sacrificing
the habit out of which the danger springs. He must
receive truth as one who is to teach it. He cannot, he
must not study as if the truth he sought were purely
for his own culture or enrichment. And the result
of such a habit, followed with due guard against its
dangerous tendencies, will be threefold. It will bring,
first, a deeper and more solemn sense of responsibility
in the search of truth ; second, a desire to find the
human side of every truth, the point at which every
speculation touches humanity ; and, third, a breadth
which comes from the constant presence in the mind
of the fact that truth has various aspects and presents
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 4*7
itself in many ways to different people, according to
their needs and characters.
Along with this preparation for preaching goes an
other. I said the man who studied with the intention
of teaching learned to see and seize the human side
of all divinity. It is true, also, that he learns to seize
the divine side of all humanity. The sources from
which his preaching is to be fed open on every side of
him, I can remember how, as I looked forward to
preaching, every book I read and every man I talked
with seemed to teem with sermons. They all sug
gested something which it seemed as if the preacher
of the Gospel ought to say to men. I have not found
the sermons in them all as I went on ; not, I believe,
because I was mistaken in thinking they were there,
but because I have grown less eager or keen in find
ing them. I think there is no point in which minis
ters differ from one another, and in which we all differ
from ourselves, more than in this, this opeu-minded-
ness and power of appropriating out of everything the
elements of true instruction. I find two classes of
ministers of different habits in this respect. One of
them abjures everything outside the narrowest lines
of technically religious reading, has no knowledge of
literature or art or science. The other minister cul
tivates them all, but his life in them is wholly outside
of his life as a preacher. He changes his nature when
he turns away from his sermon and takes a volume
48 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
from his shelves. And his shelves themselves are di
vided. His secular and his religious books are ranged
on opposite sides of his study. There is something
better than either, a true devotion to our work
which will not let us leave it for a moment when we
are once ordained ; preachers once and preachers al
ways ; but a conception of our work so large that
everything which a true man has any right to do or
know may have some help to render it. And this is
what you ought to be laying the foundation of in
these preparatory days.
You will see that I place very great value on this
preparation, in which a man who is devout and
earnest comes to that fitness for his work which St.
Paul describes in a word that he uses twice to Timo
thy, " apt to teach," " JiSa/m/co?," the didactic man.
It is not something to which one comes by accident
or by any sudden burst of fiery zeal. No doubt there
is a power in the untutored utterance of the new con
vert that the ripe utterances of the educated preacher
often lack ; but it is not so much a praise to the new
convert that he has that power as it is a shame to the
educated preacher that he does not have it all the
more richly in proportion to his education. And
whatever else he has, the man who has leaped directly
from his own experience into the pulpit will almost
certainly be wanting in that breadth of sympathy and
understanding which comes in the studies of the wait-
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 49
ing years. He will know that other men are not
made just like himself, but he will realize only him
self, and preach to them as if they were. He will be
like the man whom Archbishop Whately tells of, who
was born blind and afterwards brought to sight.
" The room he was in, he said, he knew must be part
of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole
house could look bigger than that one room." So our
new Christian experience only slowly realizes that it
is but one part of the universal Christian life. Only
as our study carries us from room to room does the
whole house grow real to us.
Suppose our minister now actually preaching, and
next let us ask, What are the elements of personal
power which will make him successful ? Eemember
success in preaching is no identical, invariable thing.
It differs in all whom we call successful men, and so
only the broadest and most general description can
be given of the qualities that will secure it. Special
successes will require special fitness. But he who
has these qualities that I enumerate is sure to succeed
somewhere and somehow.
And first among the elements of power which make
success I must put the supreme importance of char
acter, of personal uprightness and purity impressing
themselves upon the men who witness them. There
is a very striking remark in Lord Nugent s " Memo
rials of John Hampden," where, speaking of the English
50 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
Reformation, he is led to make this general observa
tion : " Indeed, no hierarchy and no creed has ever
been overthrown by the people on account only of its
theoretical dogmas, so long as the practice of the
clergy was incorrupt and conformable with their pro
fessions." I believe that that is strictly true. And it
is always wonderful to see how much stronger are the
antipathies and sympathies which belong to men s
moral nature than those which are purely intellectual.
Baxter tells us in an interesting passage how in the
civil wars " an abundance of the ignorant sort of the
common people which were civil did flock in to the
Parliament and filled up their armies merely because
they heard men swear for the Common Prayer and
bishops, and heard men pray that were against them.
And all the sober men that I was acquainted with who
were against the Parliament were wont to say, The
king hath the better cause, but the Parliament the
better men. " The better men will always conquer
the better cause. I suppose no cause could be so
good that, sustained by bad men and opposed by any
error whose champions were men of spotless lives, it
would not fall. The truth must conquer, but it must
first embody itself in goodness. And in the ministry it
is not merely by superficial prejudice, but by the sound
est reason, that intellect and spirituality come to be
tested, not by the views men hold so much as by the
way in which they hold them, and the sort of men
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 51
which their views seem to make of them. Whatever
strange and scandalous eccentricities the ministry has
sometimes witnessed, this is certainly true, and is al
ways encouraging, that no man permanently succeeds
in it who cannot make men believe that he is pure and
devoted, and the only sure and lasting way to make
men believe in one s devotion and purity is to be what
one wishes to be believed to be.
I put next to this fundamental necessity of char
acter as an element of the preacher s power, the free
dom from self-consciousness. My mind goes back to
a young man whom I knew in the ministry, who did
an amount of work at which men wondered, and who,
dying early, left a power behind him whose influence
will go on long after his name is forgotten; and the
great feature of his character was his forgetfulness
of self. He had not two questions to ask about every
piece of work he did, first, " How shall I do it most
effectively for others ? " and second, " How shall I do
it most creditably to myself ? " Only the first question
ever seemed to come to him ; and when a task was
done so that it should most perfectly accomplish its
designed result, he left it and went on to some new
task. There is wonderful clearness and economy of
force in such simplicity. No man ever yet thought
whether he was preaching well without weakening his
sermon. I think there are few higher or more de
lightful moments in a preacher s life than that which
52 LECTURES ON PRE ACHING.
comes sometimes when, standing before a congrega
tion arid haunted by questionings about the merit of
your preaching, which you hate but cannot drive
away, at last, suddenly or gradually, you find your
self taken into the power of your truth, absorbed in
one sole desire to send it into the men whom you are
preaching to ; and then every sail is set, and your ser
mon goes bravely out to sea, leaving yourself high
and dry upon the beach, where it has been holding
your sermon stranded. The second question disap
pears out of your work, just in proportion as the first
question grows intense. No man is perfectly strong
until the second question has disappeared entirely.
Devotion is like the candle which, as Vasari tells us,
Michael Angelo used to carry stuck on his forehead in
a pasteboard cap, and which kept his own shadow
from being cast upon his work while he was hewing
out his statues.
The next element of a preacher s power is genuine
respect for the people whom he preaches to. I should
not like to say how rare I think this power, or how
plentiful a source of weakness I think its absence is.
There is a great deal of the genuine sympathy of sen
timent. There is a great deal of liking for certain
people in our congregations who are interesting in
themselves and who are interested in what interests
us. There is a great deal of the feeling that the clergy
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 53
need the cooperation of the laity, and so must cultivate
their intimacy. But of a real profound respect for the
men and women whom we preach fco, simply as men
and women, of a deep value for the capacity that is in
them, a sense that we are theirs and not they ours, I
think that there is far too little. But without this
there can be no real strength in the preacher. We
patronize the laity now that our power of domineering
over them has been mercifully taken away. Many a
time the tone of a clergyman who has talked of the
relations of the preacher and the people, setting forth,
with the best will in the world, their mutual functions,
reminds one of the sermon of the medieval preacher,
who, discoursing on this same subject, on the necessary
cooperation of the clergy and the laity, took his text
out of Job i. 14: " The oxen were ploughing and the
asses feeding beside them." There is no good preach
ing in the supercilious preacher. No man preaches
well who has not a strong and deep appreciation of
humanity. The minister is often called upon to give
up the society of the cultivated and learned to whom
he would most be drawn, but he finds his compensa
tion and strength in knowing man, simply as man,
and learning his inestimable worth.
I think, again, that it is essential to the preacher s
success that he should thoroughly enjoy his work. I
mean in the actual doing of it, and not only in its
54 LECTURES ON PREACSIN9.
idea. No man to whom the details of his task are re
pulsive can do his task well constantly, however full
he may be of its spirit. He may make one bold dash
at it and carry it over all his disgusts, but he cannot
work on at it year after year, day after day. There
fore, count it not merely a perfectly legitimate pleasure,
count it an essential element of your power, if you can
feel a simple delight in what you have to do as a min
ister, in the fervor of writing, in the glow of speaking,
in standing before men and moving them, in contact
with the young. The more thoroughly you enjoy it,
the better you will do it all.
I almost hesitate as I speak of the next element of
the preacher s power. I almost doubt by what name I
shall call it to give the impression of the thing I mean.
Perhaps there is no better name than Gravity. I
mean simply that grave and serious way of looking
at life which, while it never repels the true lighthearted-
ness of pure and trustful hearts, welcomes into a
manifest sympathy the souls of men who are oppressed
and burdened, anxious and full of questions which for
the time at least have banished all laughter from their
faces. I know, indeed, the miserableness of all mock
gravity. I think I am as much disgusted at it as any
body. The abuse and satire that have been heaped
upon it are legitimate enough, though somewhat
cheap. The gravity that is assumed, that merely hides
with solemn front the lack of thought and feeling,
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 55
that is put on as the uniform of a profession, that con
sists in certain forms, and is shocked at any serious
thought of life more truly grave than it is, but which
happens to show itself under other forms which it
chooses to call frivolous, this is worthy of all satire
and contempt. The merely solemn ministers are very
empty, and deserve all that has been heaped upon
them of contempt through all the ages. They are
cheats and shams. As they stand with their little
knobs of prejudice down their straight coats of
precision, they are like nothing so much as the chest
of drawers which Mr. Bob Sawyer showed to Mr.
Winkle in his little surgery : " Dummies, my dear
boy," said he to his impressed, astonished visitor;
" half the drawers have nothing in them, and the
other half don t open." I know what the abuse of
such men means. I know there are men who deserve
it. But I cannot help thinking that we have about
come to the time when all of that abuse is of the
safe and feeble character which belongs to all satire
of unpopular foibles and abuses which are in decay.
I think that at least there is another creature who
ought to share with the clerical prig the contempt
of Christian people. I mean the clerical jester in all
the varieties of his unpleasant existence. He appears
in and out of the pulpit. He lays his hands on the
most sacred things, and leaves defilement upon all he
touches. He is full of Bible jokes. He talks about
56 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
the Church s sacred symbols in the language of stale
jests that have come down from generations of feeble
clerical jesters before him. The doctrines which, if
they mean anything, mean life or death to souls, he
turns into material for chaff that flies back and forth,
like the traditional banter of the Thames, between the
clerical watermen who ply their boats on this side or
that side of the river of Theology. There are passages
in the Bible which are soiled for ever by the touches
which the hands of ministers who delight in cheap and
easy jokes have left upon them.
I think there is nothing that stirs one s indignation
more than this, in all he sees of ministers. It is a
purely wanton fault. What is simply stupid every
where else becomes terrible here. The buffoonery
which merely tries me when I hear it from a gang of
laborers digging a ditch beside my door angers and
frightens me when it comes from the lips of the cap
tain who holds the helm or the surgeon on whose skill
my life depends. You will not misunderstand me, I
am sure. The gravity of which I speak is not incon
sistent with the keenest perception of the ludicrous side
of things. It is more than consistent with it is even
necessary to humor. Humor involves the perception
of the true proportions of life. It is one of the most
helpful qualities that the preacher can possess. There
is no extravagance which deforms the pulpit which
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 57
would not be modified and repressed, often entirely
obliterated, if the minister had a true sense of humor.
It has softened the bitterness of controversy a thou
sand times. You cannot encourage it too much. You
cannot grow too familiar with the books of all ages
which have in them the truest humor, for the truest
humor is the bloom of the highest life. Eead George
Eliot and Thackeray, and, above all, Shakespeare.
They will help you to keep from extravagances with
out fading into insipidity. They will preserve your
gravity while they save you from pompous solemnity.
But humor is something very different from frivolity.
People sometimes ask whether it is right to make
people laugh in church by something that you say from
the pulpit, as if laughter were always one invariable
thing ; as if there were not a smile which swept across
a great congregation like the breath of a May morn
ing, making it fruitful for whatever good thing might
be sowed in it, and another laughter that was like the
crackling of thorns under a pot. The smile that is
stirred by true humor and the smile that comes from
the mere tickling of the fancy are as different from one
another as the tears that sorrow forces from the soul
are from the tears that you compel a man to shed by
pinching him.
And there is no delusion greater than to think that
you commend your work and gain an influence over
58 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
people by becoming the clerical humorist. It builds
a wall between your fellow-men and you. It makes
them less inclined to seek you in their spiritual need.
I think that many of us feel this, and have a sort of
dread when we see laymen growing familiar with
clergymen s society. That society is on the whole
lofty and inspiring, but there are some things in it of
which you who are soon to become clergymen must
beware. Keep the sacredness of your profession clear
and bright even in little things. Eefrain from all jok
ing about congregations, flocks, parish visits, sermons,
the mishaps of the pulpit, or the makeshifts of the
study. Such joking is always bad, and almost always
stupid; but it is very common, and it takes the
bloom off a young minister s life. This is the reason
why so many people shrink, I believe, from personally
knowing the preachers to whom they listen with
respect and gratitude. They fear what they so often
find. But really the minister s life may be a help and
enforcement of all his preaching. The quality which
makes it so is this which I call gravity. It has a deli
cate power of discrimination. It attracts all that it
can help and it repels all that could harm it or be
harmed by it. It admits the earnest and simple with
a cordial welcome. It shuts out the impertinent and
insincere inexorably. Pure gravity is like the hinges
of the wonderful gates of the ancient labyrinth, so
strong that no battery could break them down, but
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 69
so delicately hung that a child s light touch could
make them swing back and let him in.
There is another source of power which I can
hardly think of as a separate quality, but rather as
the sum and result of all the qualities which I have
been naming. I mean Courage. It is the indis
pensable requisite of any true ministry. The timid
minister is as bad as the timid surgeon. Courage is
good everywhere, but it is necessary here. If you are
afraid of men and a slave to their opinion, go and do
something else. Go and make shoes to fit them. Go
even and paint pictures which you know are bad but
which suit their bad taste. But do not keep on all your
life preaching sermons which shall say not what God
sent you to declare, but what they hire you to say.
Be courageous. Be independent. Only remember
where the true courage and independence comes from.
Courage in the ministry is, I think, one of those
qualities which cannot be healthily acquired if it is
sought for directly. It must come as health comes in
the body, as the result of the seeking for other things.
It must be from a sincere respect for men s higher
nature that you must grow bold to resist their whims.
He who begins by despising men will often end by
being their slave. A passionate desire to do men
good is always the surest safeguard that they shall
not do us harm. Jesus Himself was bold before men
out of the infinite love which He felt for men. That
5
60 LECTURES ON PRE ACHING.
was the way in which He ruled them from His cross,
and was their Master because He was their servant
even unto death.
There is one other topic upon which I wished to
dwell in this lecture, but on this I must speak very
briefly. I wanted to try to estimate with you some of
the dangers to a man s own character which come from
his being a preacher. The first of these dangers, be
yond all doubt, is Self-conceit. In a certain sense
every young minister is conceited. He begins his
ministry in a conceited condition. At least every
man begins with extravagant expectations of what
his ministry is to result in. We come out from it
by and by. A man s first wonder when he begins to
preach is that people do not come to hear him. After
a while, if he is good for anything, he begins to wonder
that they do. He finds out that old Adam is too
strong for young Melanchthon. It is not strange that
it should be so. It is not to the young minister s dis
credit that it should be so. The student for the
ministry has to a large extent comprehended the force
by which he is to work, but he has not measured the
resistance that he is to meet. He knows the power
of the truth of which he is all full, but he has not
estimated the sin of which the world is all full. The
more earnest and intense and full of love for God
and man he is, the more impossible does it seem that
he should not do great things for his Master. And
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. tt 1
then the character of men s ministries, it seems to me,
depends very largely upon the ways in which they
pass out of that first self-confidence and upon what
condition comes afterwards when it is gone.
The first way in which life affects this self-confi
dence and lifts men out of their conceit is by Success,
by letting us see the work which we are undertaking
actually going on under our hands. It is only in poor
men and in the lower things that success increases
self-conceit. In every high work and in men worthy
of it, success is always sure to bring humility. "Re
cognition," said Hawthorne once, " makes a man very
modest." The knowledge that you are really accom
plishing results, and the reassurance of that knowledge
by the judgment of your fellow-men, opens to you the
deeper meaning of your work, shows you how great
it is, makes you ashamed of all the praise men give
you, as you see gradually how much better your work
might have been done. I think that some of the
noblest and richest characters among ministers in all
times are those who have been humiliated by men s
praises and enlightened by success.
But there is another way by which men go out of
their first satisfaction, by a door directly opposite to
this, by Failure. Failure and success to really work
ing ministers are only relative. Remember that no
true man wholly succeeds or wholly fails. But the
main difference in effect between what we call success
62 LECTURES ON PEE ACHING.
and what we call failure in the ministry is here :
success makes a man dwell upon and be thankful for
how much a preacher can do ; failure makes a man
think how much there is which no preacher can do,
and is apt to weigh him down into depression. It
confronts him with the magnitude of the task of the
Christian ministry, not as a great temptation, but as
a great burden. He is paralyzed as Hamlet was.
" The time is out of joint : cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right ! "
Such an end of a young man s first high hopes h
terrible to see. The very power that once made him
strong now weakens him. The weight that was his
ballast and helped his speed sinks him when once the
leak has come. There is no help except in a profounder
retreat of the whole nature upon God, such a percep
tion of Him and of His dearness as shall take off our
heavy responsibility and make us ready to fail for Him
with joy as well as to succeed for Him, if such shall
be His choice ; and ready to work as hard for Him in
failure as in success, because we work not for success
but for Him. The drawing of the man back into God
by failure is always a noble sight, and no region of
life has such noble specimens of it to show as the
Christian ministry.
There is another refuge when the young preacher s
first self-conceit is shaken. It is into another self-con-
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 63
ceit which is smaller than the first. The beleaguered
householder refuses to surrender, and retreats from
his strong outer ramparts, defending one line after
another till at last he dwells only in his most mean
and worthless chamber. A man makes up his mind
that he is not going to convert the world. The strong
holds of the Prince of Evil evidently will not fall before
him. He is to leave the unbuilt kingdom of God very
much as he found it when he came into the ministry.
But then he falls back upon some petty pride. " My
church is full ; " " My name is prominent in the
movements of my denomination ; " " My sermons win
the compliments of people ; " or simply this, " I am a
minister. I bear a dignity that these laymen cannot
boast. I have an ordination which separates me into
an indefinable, mysterious privilege." Here is the
beginning of many of the fantastic and exaggerated
theories about the ministry. The little preacher
magnifies his office in a most unpauline way. And
you hear a man to whom no one cares to listen
quoting the solemn words of God about " whether
men will hear or whether they will forbear," as if
they had been spoken to him as much as to Ezekiel.
What shall we say then ? What is the true escape
from the crudeness of the untried preacher which
settles and centres all his thought upon himself ? It
is an escape which many a preacher has found and
gradually passed into. It is the growing devotion of
64 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
his life to God, the more and more complete absorp
tion of his being in the seeking of God s glory. As
he goes on, the work unfolds itself. It outgoes all his
powers. But as he looks over its increasing vastness
he sees it on every side touching the omnipotence of
God. As he sees more and more clearly that he will
never do what he once hoped to do, it becomes clear
to him at the same time that God will do it in His own
time and way. His own disappointment is swallowed
up and drowned in the promise of his Lord s success.
He becomes a true John Baptist. He is happy with a
higher joy, and works with an energy that he never
knew before. This is the true refuge of the minister
in the disenchantment of his earliest dreams.
Another of the dangers of the clergyman s life is
Self - indulgence. The ways and methods of the
minister s work are almost wholly at his own control.
It is impossible for him to reduce his life to a routine.
There are but few tests which he must meet at special
times, as a business man must meet his notes when
they are due. And a great deal of his work is of that
sort which requires spontaneity for its best execution.
The result of all these causes working together is to
create in many a minister a certain feeling that his
faithfulness in his work is not to be judged as other
men s faithfulness in their work is. Indeed, I think, the
very consciousness of labouring under a loftier motive
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 65
has often a tendency to weaken the conscientiousness
with which each minute detail of work is met. There
is a lurking Antinomianism in many a most Arminian
study. We are apt to become men of moods, thinking
we cannot work unless we feel like it. There is just
enough of the artistic element in what we have to do, to
let us fall into the artist s ways and leave our brushes
idle when the sky frowns or the head aches. But the
artistic element is, after all, the smallest element in
the true sermon. Its best qualities depend on those
moral and spiritual conditions which may be always
present in the devoted servant of God. And so the
first business of the preacher is to conquer the tyranny
of his moods, and to be always ready for his work.
It can be done. The man who has not learned to do
it has not really reached the secret of Jesus, which
was such utter love for His Father and man, between
whom He stood, as obliterated all thought of Himself
save as a medium, through which the divine might
come down to the human. We read of Jesus that He
again and again grew heavy in spirit. In utter weari
ness, sometimes, when His work was done, He would
withdraw into a mountain, or put out in a boat upon
the lake. We can feel the fluctuations of that human
ity of His, and, interpreting it by our own, we can
seem to see how one bright morning by the seaside
He was exuberant and joyous, and on another morn-
66 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
ing He would be sad and burdened. We can trace
the differences in the kind of preaching of the two
different days. But through it all there is nothing in
the least like self-indulgence. We are sure that no
day ever went without its preaching, because it found
Him moody and depressed. He did no mighty works
in Nazareth ; but it was because of the people s unbe
lief, not because of His own reluctance. So it may be
with us. It is part of the privilege of our humanity,
it is part of the advantage of our people in having
men and not machines for ministers, that we preach
the truth in various lights, or shades, according as
God brightens or darkens our own experience ; but
any mood which makes us unfit to preach at all, or
really weakens our will to preach, is bad, and can be
broken through. Then is the time for the conscience
to bestir itself and for the man to be a man.
I wish that it were possible for one to speak to the
laity of our churches frankly and freely about their
treatment of the clergy. The clergy are largely what
the laity make them. And though one may look
wholly without regret upon the departure of that
reverence which seems to have clothed the preacher s
office in our fathers days, I think he must have many
misgivings about the weaker substitute for it, which
in many instances has taken its place. It was not
good that the minister should be worshipped and
made an oracle. It is still worse that he should be
THE PREACHER HIMSELF, 6*7
flattered and made a pet. And there is such a ten
dency in these days among our weaker people. 1
have already spoken of the way in which many men
are petted into the ministry. It is possible for such
a man, if he has popular gifts, to be petted all through
his ministry, never once to come into strong contact
with other men, or to receive one good hard knock
of the sort that brings out manliness and character.
The people who gather closest around a minister s
life, believing his beliefs, and accepting his standards,
make a sort of cushion between him and the unbelief
and wickedness which smite other men in the face and
wound them mercilessly at every turn. It is not
wholly unnatural. The minister stands in a unique
position to the community. In no other man s private
affairs, his health, his comfort, his freedom from
financial care, are so many people so directly interested.
It is not strange that that interest in him and care for
him, which ought simply to put him where, without
personal fear or personal indebtedness, he may bravely
and independently be himself and speak out his own
soul, should often be corrupted into a poison of his
manhood, and a temptation to his self-indulgence. It
is beyond all doubt the weak point of our American
voluntary system, which brings the minister into those
close personal relations to his people which on the
whole are good and healthy, but which have this one
defect and danger.
68 LECTURES ON 1 RE ACHING.
If you have read the life of Frederick Robertson
you know how hateful many of the incidents of the life
of a popular minister were to him. So they must be
to every true man. If a man is not wholly true they
find out his weak point and fix upon it. He begins
to expect different treatment from other men. His
personal woes and pains seem to him things of public
interest. He grows first unhuman in the separation
from the ordinary standard of his race, and that
makes him inhuman, unsympathetic. The weak is
always cruel.
Mr. Galton, in his work on " Hereditary Genius,"
summing up the result of his reading in clerical bio
graphies, declares that " A gently complaining and
fatigued spirit is that in which Evangelical Divines
are very apt to pass their days." These words tell
perfectly a story that we all know who have been in
timate with many ministers. That which ought to be
the manliest of all professions has a tendency, practi
cally, to make men unmanly. Men make appeals for
sympathy that no true man should make. They take
to themselves St. Paul s pathos without St. Paul s
strength. Against that tendency, my friends, set your
whole force. Fear its insidiousness. " I feel no in
toxicating effect," wrote Macaulay when the first flush
of his success was on him, " but a man may be drunk
without knowing it." Insist on applying to yourself
tests which others refuse to apply to you. Eesent
THE PEE A CHER HIMSELF. 6 9
indulgences which are not given to men of other pro
fessions. Learn to enjoy and be sober ; learn to suffer
and be strong. Never appeal for sympathy. Let it
find you out if it will. Count your manliness the soul
of your ministry and resist all attacks upon it however
sweetly they may come.
I had hoped to say some words, to-day, about one
other danger of the preacher s life, I mean the danger
of narrowness. We all live within the rings of con
centric circles. They extend one beyond another till
they come to that outmost circle of all, the horizon
where humanity touches divinity, as the earth meets
the sky. Now I hold that all that is by God s appoint
ment, and is intended for our best good. The narrow
ness is for the sake of breadth. I hold that every
smaller circle is meant to carry the eye out to the
next larger than itself, and so, at last, to the largest
of all. You stand firm on your one little spot, and
thence you look out and find yourself, like Tenny
son s eagle, " ringed with the azure world." So every
smaller circle of your moral life is meant to carry you
out, and make you realize the larger circles. You
may be a better minister because you are clear in
your denominational position as a Congregationalist
or Episcopalian : and because you are a minister you
may be a better man. The danger is lest the smaller
circle, instead of tempting the sight onward, jealously
confines it to itself. Narrowness is to be escaped, not
70 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
by deserting our special function, but by compelling
it to open to us the things beyond itself. You will
not be a better man by pretending that you are not a
Christian, nor a better Christian by pretending to have
no dogmatic faith. The true breadth comes by the
strength of your own belief making you tolerant of
other believers ; and by the earnestness of your Chris
tianity teaching you your brotherhood even to the
most unchristian men.
I must stop here. I have spoken very freely of these
dangers and hindrances with which the preacher s
occupations beset his character. Yet you must not mis
understand me. There is no occupation in which it
is so possible, nay so easy to live a noble life. These
tares grow rank only because the soil is rich. The
wheat grows rich beside them. The Christian minis
try is the largest field for the growth of a human soul
that this world offers. In it he who is faithful must
go on learning more and more for ever. His growth
in learning is all bound up with his growth in char
acter. Nowhere else do the moral and intellectual so
sympathize, and lose or gain together. The minister
must grow. His true growth is not necessarily a
change of views. It is a change of view. It is not
revolution. It is progress. It is a continual climb
ing which opens continually wider prospects. It re
peats the experience of Christ s disciples, of whom
THE PREACHER HIMSELF.
their Lord was always making larger men and then
giving them the larger truth of which their enlarged
natures had become capable. Once more, I rejoice
for you that this is the ministry in which you are to
spend your lives.
TT7"HEN I was just about to begin the writing of
this lecture, I chanced to be thrown for a day
or two into the company of a young man who had
been engaged in the work of the ministry only a few
months. He was in the first flush and fervor of his
new experience, and in listening to him I recalled
much of the spirit with which I myself began many
years ago. The spirit had not passed away, but the
first freshness of many impressions had been ripened,
I hope, into something better, but still into something
soberer. He revived for me the delight of that new
and strange relation to his fellow-men which comes
when a young man who thus far in his life has had
others ministering to him, finds the conditions now
reversed and other men are looking up to him for cul
ture. There is the sober joy of responsibility. There
is the surprised recognition of something which we
have learned in some one of our schools of books or
life, and counted useless, which now some man we meet
welcomes when we give it to him as if it were the one
78
TEE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 73
thing for which he had been always waiting. There
is the hopefulness that fears no failure. There is the
pleasure of a new knowledge of ourselves as others
begin to call out in us what we never knew was there.
There is the joy of being trusted and responded to.
There is the deepened sacredness of prayer and of
communion with God when we go to Him, not merely
for ourselves and for the great vague world, but for
a people whom we have begun to love and call our
own, while we know that they are His. There is the
discovery of the better and devouter nature in men.
There is the interest of countless new details and the
inspiration of the noblest purpose for which a man
can live. All these together make up the happiness
and hope of those bright days in which a strong and
healthy and devout young man is just entering the
ministry of the Gospel.
I wish to speak to you to-day about the preacher in
his work, and what I shall have to say will naturally
divide itself into suggestions with reference to the
nature, the method, and the spirit of that work.
I must recur to what I said in the first lecture about
the true character of preaching. Preaching is the com
munication of truth through a ID an to men. The
human element is essential in it, and not merely acci
dental. There cannot really be a sermon in a stone,
whatever lessons the stone may have to teach. This
being so, we must carry out the importance of the
74 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
human element to its full consequence. It is not only
necessary for a sermon that there should be a human
being to speak to other human beings, but for a good
sermon there must be a man who can speak well, whose
nature stands in right relations to those to whom he
speaks, who has brought his life close to theirs with
sympathy. In every highest task there is an instinc
tive tendency of men to shirk and hide under the pro
tection of some idea of fate. And very often we hear
ministers trying to escape responsibility by vague and
foolish statements that the truth is everything, and
that it ought not to make any difference to a congre
gation how or from whom they hear it. It is a latent
fatalism, a readiness to count out of the highest oper
ations the play of human free will and choice, which
lies at the bottom of such speeches. The same reason
which requires a man for a preacher at all requires as
wise and strong and well- furnished, as skilful and as
eloquent a man as can be found or made. The duty
of making yourself acceptable to people, and winning
by all manly ways their confidence in you, and in the
truth which you tell, is one that is involved in the very
fact of your being a preacher. And the dignity of the
purpose gives dignity to many details which in them
selves are trivial. The study of language and of
oratory, which would belittle you if they were merely
undertaken for your own culture, are noble when you
undertake them in order that your tongue may be a
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 75
worthier minister of God s truth ; and the assiduous
attention to people, and their tastes and habits and
ways of thinking, which would be slavery if it had
no object besides their pleasure or your own repute,
is a lofty exercise, if it has for its purpose the
finding out on which side of every man you can best
bring to him the truth. Here stands a man, and two
other men are watching him. Both of them are
studying his character. Both want to know what he
thinks about, what his tastes are, how he spends his
time. One of them is trying to find how he can best
win from him a dollar or a vote. The other is trying
to see what is his true way to preach the Gospel to
that fellow-man. There are the meanest and the
noblest relations which any man can occupy towards
his fellow-man. The first is ignominious beyond
description. It is a relation too low for any man to
hold. A true man would rather starve than occupy
it. But the other is a relation in which every man
must stand who means to really preach to any
brother. It is but the effort after what it is in our
feeble power to attain of that knowledge of humanity
which was in Him who " knew what was in man," and
who, therefore, " spake as never man spake."
It follows from this that the work of the preacher
and the pastor really belong together, and ought not
to be separated. I believe that very strongly. Every
now and then somebody rises with a plea that is very
76 LECTURES ON PEE ACHING.
familiar and specious. He says, how much better it
would be if only there could be a classification of
ministers and duties. Let some ministers be wholly
preachers, and some be wholly pastors. Let one class
visit the flock, to direct and comfort them ; and the
other class stand in the pulpit. You will not go far
in your ministry before you will be tempted to echo
that desire. The two parts of a preacher s work are
always in rivalry. When you find that you can
never sit down to study and write without the faces
of the people, whom you know need your care, looking
at you from the paper ; and yet you never can go out
among your people without hearing your forsaken
study reproaching you, and calling you home, you
may easily come to believe that it would be good in
deed if you could be one or other of two things, and
not both ; either a preacher or a pastor, but not the
two together. But I assure you you are wrong. The
two things are not two, but one. There may be
preachers here and there with such a deep, intense
insight into the general humanity, that they can
speak to men without knowing the men to whom
they speak. Such preachers are very rare ; and other
preachers, who have not their power, trying to do it,
are sure to preach to some unreal, uuhuman man of
their own imagination. There are some pastors here
and there with such a constantly lofty and spiritual
view of little things, that they can go about from
THE PREACHEE IN HIS WORK. 77
house to house, year after year, and deal with men
and women at their common work, and lift the men
and women to themselves, and never fall to the level
of the men and women whom they teach. Such pas
tors are rare ; and other men, trying to do it, and
never in more formal way from the pulpit treating
truth in its larger aspects, are sure to grow frivo
lous gossips or tiresome machines. The preacher
needs to be pastor, that he may preach to real men.
The pastor must be preacher, that he may keep the
dignity of his work alive. The preacher, who is not
a pastor, grows remote. The pastor, who is not a
preacher, grows petty. Never be content to let men
truthfully say of you, " He is a preacher, but no pas
tor ; " or, " He is a pastor, but no preacher." Be both ;
for you cannot really be one unless you also are the
other.
Of the pastor s function considered by itself there
is, I think, but very little to be said. I count of little
worth all sets of rules, all teaching directly on the
subject. The books that teach a pastor s duty except
in the way of the most general suggestion are almost
worthless. They have the fault which belongs to
all books on behaviour, which are needless for those
who do behave well and useless for those who do not.
The powers of the pastor s success are truth and sym
pathy together. " Speaking the truth in Love," ia
the golden text to write in the book where you keep
78 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
the names of your people, so that you may read it
every time you go to visit them. Sympathy without
truth makes a plausible pastor, but one whose hold
on a parish soon grows weak. Men feel his touch
upon them soft and tender, but never vigorous and
strong. Truth without sympathy makes the sort of
pastor whom people say that they respect but to
whom they seldom go and whom they seldom care to
see coming to them. But where the two unite, so far
as the two unite in you, I think there will be nothing
that will surprise you more than to discover how cer
tain their power is. The man who has them cannot
help saying the right word at the right time. You
go to some poor crushed and broken heart ; you tell
what truth you know, the truth of the ever ready and
inexhaustible forgiveness, the truth of the unutter
able love, the truth of the unbroken life of immortal
ity ; and you let the sorrow for that heart s sorrow
which you truly feel, utter itself in whatever true and
simple ways it will ; then you come away sick at heart
because you have so miserably failed ; but by and by
you find that you have not failed, that you really did
bring elevation and comfort. You cannot help doing
it if you go with truth and sympathy. This is the
constant experience of the minister. This is the
ground of confidence and hope with which he presses
on from year to year.
I am inclined to think, as I have already intimated,
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 79
that the trouble of much of our pastoral work is in
its pettiness. It is pitched in too low a key. It tries
to meet the misfortunes of life with comfort and not
with inspiration, offering inducements to patience and
the suggestions of compensation in this life or another
which lies beyond, rather than imparting that higher
and stronger tone which will make men despise their
sorrows and bear them easily in their search for truth
and nobleness, and the release that comes from for-
getfulness of self and devotion to the needs of other
people. The truest help which one can render to a
man who has any of the inevitable burdens of life to
carry is not to take his burden off but to call out his
best strength that he may be able to bear it. The
pastorship of Jesus is characterized everywhere by its
frankness and manliness. He meets Nicodemus with
a staggering assertion of the higher needs of the
spirit. The man who wants the inheritance divided
is encountered with a strong rebuke of his presump
tuous selfishness. And Simon Peter has the assur
ance of his forgiveness offered him in a demand for
work. All three of these instances and many others
are richly suggestive of contrasts with what many of
the ministers of Christ would do in the same circum
stances. It is the utter absence of sentimentality in
Christ s relations with men that makes his tenderness
so exquisitely touching. It is in the power, even in
the effort, to awake the stronger nature of mankind
80 LECTURES ON PEE ACHING.
that our modern pastorship is apt to be deficient. It
ministers to women more than to men. It tries to
soothe with consolation more than to fire with ambi
tion or to sting with shame.
Perhaps there will be no better place than this for
me to say that it is in the absence of the heroic ele
ment that our current Christianity most falls short ot
the Christianity of Gospel times. We keep still the
heroic language, but does it not often suggest strange
incongruities ? Have not the pictures of some of our
hymns, for instance, seemed sometimes strangely out
of keeping with the lips that sang them ? A row of
comfortable, self - contented, conservative gentlemen
and ladies standing up, for instance, and singing
" Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war," or
" Hold the fort for I am coming, Jesus signals still,"
reminds us all the more of how unmilitary and un-
heroic are the lives they live. It is not the mere
difference of dress. I doubt not the Christians in the
Catacombs, or the colliers who listened to Whitefield
when he preached at Bristol, might have sung hymns
that were built on the same imagery, and nothing in
congruous would have been suggested. And yet they
were as evidently men of peace as are our congrega
tions. But they were conscious of and showed the
true intenseness of spiritual warfare. They knew
the fight within, the terrible reality of the enemy,
the terrible suspense of the struggle, the glorious
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 81
delight of triumph. No, it is the unheroic character
of modern life and especially of modern Christianity.
The life of Jesus Christ was radical. It went to the
deep roots of things. It claimed men s noblest and
freest action. We, if we are His ministers, must
bring the heroic into the unheroic life of men,
demanding of them truth, breadth, bravery, self-
sacrifice, the freedom from conventionalities and an
elevation to high standards of thought and life. We
must bring men s life up to Him and not bring Him
down to men s life. This is the Christian pastor s
privilege and duty.
It seems to me that a large part of the troubles and
mistakes of our pastoral life come from our having
too high an estimate of men s present condition and
too low an estimate of their possibility. If this be
true, then what we need to make us better pastors is
more of the Gospel which reveals at once man s im
perfect condition and his infinite hope. Jesus was
the perfect pastor in the way in which He showed
men what they were and what they might become. He
never deceived and never discouraged them. The con
tact with His perfect humanity brought them at
once shame and hope. And when He comes near
to us now, when His Spirit does His appointed work
of taking Him and showing Him to us, the same
power, combined of shame and hope, comes into our
lives. Let that be the model of our pastorship.
82 LECTURES ON PREACH I NO.
But to return more definitely to preaching. I think
that one of the preliminary considerations about it
one characteristic of it so prominent that we are sure
that He who sent men out to preach must have de
signed it is that which I have already once alluded
to, the pleasure that belongs to it, the way in which
it thoroughly interests the best parts of the man who
does it. I remember, as I recur to it, how much I have
already said about it, and may have yet to say ; but
it is much upon my mind. For I think there is some
thing unhappy in the frequency with which ministers
dwell upon their work as if it were full of hardships
and disappointments. Every power of man which
has its natural and legitimate purpose brings two
pleasures, one in the anticipation and attainment of
its end, the other in its own exercise. There is a de
light in exercising faculties as well as in doing work,
and in all the best activities of men the two will go
together. This is all true of preaching. Its highest
joy is in the great ambition that is set before it, the
glorifying of the Lord and the saving of the souls
of men. No other joy on earth compares with that.
The ministry that does not feel that joy is dead. But
in behind that highest jcy, beating in humble unison
with it, as the healthy body thrills in sympathy with
the deep thoughts and pure desires of the mind and
soul, the best ministries have always been conscious
of another pleasure which belonged to the very doing
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 83
of the work itself. As we read the lives of all the
most effective preachers of the past, or as we meet
the men who are powerful preachers of the Word to
day, we feel how certainly and how deeply the very
exercise of their ministry delights them. The best
sermons always seem to carry the memory of the ex
cited spring or quiet happiness, with which they are
written or uttered. The soldier enjoys the battle as
well as the victory. The carpenter enjoys the saw
and plane as well as the prospect of the full-built
house. When Wilberforce heard of Macaulay s first
offer of a chance of public life, he was silent for a
moment, and then his face lighted up and he clapped
his hand to his ear and cried, " Ah, I hear that shout
again. Hear ! Hear ! What a life it was ! " In the
case of the preacher this secondary pleasure, if I may
call it so, consists in the enjoyment of close relation
ship with fellow-men and in the orator s delight in
moving men. The fastidious man or the cold man
loses a great deal of the stimulus and unfading fresh
ness of the ministry. Sometimes this pleasure grows
very keen. I always remember one special afternoon,
years ago, when the light faded from the room where
I was preaching and the faces melted together into a
unit as of one impressive, pleading man, and I felt
them listening when I could hardly see them ; I re
member this accidental day as one of the times when
the sense of the privilege of having to do with people
84 LECTURES ON PEE ACHING.
as their preacher came out almoc overpoweringly.
It is good to treasure all such enjoyment of the actual
work of preaching. It bridges over the times when
the higher enthusiasm flags, and it gives a deeper
delight to it when it is strongest.
I think that as we study the preaching of Jesus
we admire above almost everything the way in which
He was at once the Leader and the Brother of the
men He taught. He spake as one having authority
always, but always His power was brought near to
men by the complete way in which He made Himself
one of them, by the evident reality with which He
bore their sins and carried their sorrows. So that by
as much as the Son of God was above men in His
nature, by so much the more He came near to them in
his sympathies and was a truer Son of Man than any
of the wonderfully human prophets of the Old Testa
ment, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, to whom the same
name is constantly applied. Now when we compare
the ordinary preacher s life with that of Jesus, I think
we see how much more apt he is to have kept the
position of leader than the position of brother of the
people. At any rate, what we miss in a great deal of
our preaching is that beautiful blending of the two
whose power we recognize in the word and work of
Jesus. We are the leaders of the people. Woe to
our preaching if in any feeble, false humility we abdi
cate that place. The people pass us by and pity us
THE rREACHER IN HIS WORK. 85
if they see us standing in our pulpits saying, " We
know nothing particular about these things whereof
we preach ; we have no authority ; only come here
and we will tell you what we think, and you shall tell
us what you think, and so perhaps together we can
strike out a little light." That is not preaching.
There has been pulpit talk like that, and men have
always passed it by and hurried on to find some one
who at least pretended to tell them the will of God.
No, the preacher must be a leader, but his leadership
must be bound in with his brotherhood. It was as
Man that Christ led men to God. It must be as men
that we carry on the work of Christ and help men s
souls to Him. This truth seems to me to lie at the
bottom of all the best successes, and the forgetfulness
of it at the bottom of all the worst failures of the
ministry. There is no real leadership of people for a
preacher or a pastor except that which comes as the
leadership of the Incarnation came, by a thorough
entrance into the lot of those whom one would lead.
And again, the limits of the preacher s leadership
are very clear, and it is necessary that the young
minister should know them. Sometimes a preacher
finds himself and oftener still, some foolish friends
by his side will make him think himself one of
the wisest men, perhaps the wisest man in his small
circle upon any of the ordinary topics of thought,
upon art, or politics, or letters, or education. It is
86 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
good for him to use his wisdom as it is for any
other man. It is wrong for him to leave his wisdom
unused as it is for any other man. He may do
much good to the people, he may indirectly help
his own peculiar mission by sharing his knowledge
with them. One of the most interesting pages of
clerical life of which I know is Norman Macleod s
account of his lectures to the weavers at Newmilns,
on geology. Would that more of us were able
to follow his example. All that is well ; but we
must know that there is nothing in our quality as
preachers that gives us any claim to be authoritative
guides to men in any of those things, neither in poli
tics, nor in education, nor in science. On one thing
only we may speak with authority, and that is the
will of God. Nor even in the details of religious
thought need we aspire to be their guides. I do not
want and certainly I know that if I did want I never
should be able to make the people who listen to me
accept every view of Christian truth which I utter
before them. I have no reason to believe that what
I utter is clothed with an infallibility. In much of
what one preaches he is satisfied if men take home
what he says as the utterance of one who has thought
upon the subject of which he speaks and wishes them
to think and judge. Surely he does not declare to
them his belief about the method of the atonement,
with the same authority with which he bids them
THE PREACHER IN HIS WOEK. 87
repent of sin, and warns them that without holiness
no man shall see the Lord. Such line of difference
every true preacher draws, and freely lets men see
where it runs. If you attempt to claim authority for
all your speculations you will end by losing it for
your most sure and solemn declarations of God s will.
One difficulty of the preacher s office is its subjec
tion to flippant gossip, along with its exemption from
severe and healthy criticism. There are people enough
always to find out a minister s little faults, and let him
hear of them ; but it is wonderful how he can go on
year after year, without being once brought up to the
judgment-seat of sound intelligence, and hearing what
is the real worth of the words that he is saying, and
the work that he is doing. There are plenty of people
to do for him the office of the man whom Philip of
Macedon kept in his service, to tell him every day
before he gave audience, " Philip, remember thou art
mortal," but hardly ever does he meet that sound and
prompt investigation of his special work which comes
to the author from his public, or the lawyer from his
judge. This makes for many men the worst possible
condition to labor in a constant fretting by small
cavils, and no large estimation of the whole. It is
like standing in a desultory dropping fire without
being allowed to plunge into the battle, and settle at
once the question of life or death. It makes supremely
essential to the minister that independence of men s
88 LECTURES ON PRE AGEING.
judgments which can only come by the most absolute
dependence on the judgment of the Lord by living
" ever in the great Taskmaster s eye."
I should have liked to speak of one other danger of
the preacher from his work. It is that which comes
from the paralysis of great ideas. There are times
when the vast thoughts of God stimulate us to action.
There are other times when they seem to take all
power of action out of us. These last times grow
very frequent with some men, till you have the race
of clerical visionaries who think vast, dim, vague
thoughts, and do no work. It is a danger of all
ardent minds. The only salvation, if one finds himself
verging to it, is an unsparing rule that no idea, how
ever abstract, shall be ever counted as satisfactorily
received and grasped till it has opened to us its
practical side and helped us somehow in our work.
The spirit of practicalness is the consecration of the
whole man, even the most ideal and visionary parts
of him, to the work of life.
With regard to the second point of which I spoke,
the methods of the preacher s work, there are two diffi
culties which beset us : one is the absence of method,
and the other is the tendency to wrong methods. Let
me say a few words to you on each of these.
There is a certain air of spontaneousness, a certain
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 89
dislike of rule and system which belongs to a great
many ministers fundamental conception of the work
of preaching. Eightly studied and weighed, no
doubt, the teachings of Christ and of the whole
New Testament all look one way. They all involve
the simple truth that he who works for God must
work with his best powers; and since among the
effective powers of man the powers of plan and
arrangement stand very high, the whole of the New
Testament really implies that he who preaches must
lay out the methods and ways of preaching, as a mer
chant or a soldier lays out a campaign of the market
or the battle-field. But at the same time there are
many passages in the New Testament which seem to
have in them something like a promise of immediate
inspiration. Christ bids His disciples : " Settle it,
therefore, in your hearts not to meditate before what
ye shall answer. For I will give you a mouth and
wisdom which all your adversaries shall not be able
to gainsay nor resist." These words, and others like
them, were spoken indeed to certain disciples, and in
view of certain special emergencies of their life ; but,
with our vague unscientific notions about inspiration,
they have been easily appropriated by many a poor
uninspired creature who has found himself the sub
ject of ordination ; and a general impression of the
piety of extemporaneousness has spread more widely
90 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
and reached more thoughtful and intelligent men than
we suppose. I think, too, that the revolt of Protestant
ism against the minute and overstrained organization
of the Eomish Church has had very much to do with
the creation of that distrust of methodicalness which
prevails so largely among preachers. However it has
come about, the fact is clear enough. Look at the
way in which the pulpit teaches. I venture to say
that there is nothing so unreasonable in any other
branch of teaching. You are a minister, and you are
to instruct these people in the truths of God, to bring
God s message to them. All the vast range of God s
revelation and of man s duty is open to you. And
how do you proceed ? If you are like most ministers
there is no order, no progress, no consecutive purpose
in your teaching. You never begin at the beginning
and proceed step by step to the end of any course of
orderly instruction. You float over the whole sea of
truth, and plunge here and there, like a gull, on any
subject that either suits your mood, or that some
casual and superficial intercourse with people makes
you conceive to be required by a popular need. No
other instruction ever was given so. No hearer has
the least idea, as he goes to your church, what you
will preach to him about that day. It is hopeless for
him to try to get ready for your teaching. I am sure
that I may say (I suppose that this is partly the
reason why as an Episcopalian I have been asked to
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 91
lecture here) that I rejoice to see in many churches
outside our own that to which we owe so much as a
help to the orderliness of preaching, the observance
of a Church year with its commemorative festivals,
growing so largely common. It still leaves largest
liberty. It is no bondage within which any man is
hampered. But the great procession of the year,
sacred to our best human instincts with the accumu
lated reverence of ages, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany,
Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Whitsunday, leads
those who walk in it, at least once every year, past
all the great Christian facts, and, however careless
and selfish be the preacher, will not leave it in his
power to keep them from his people. The Church
year, too, preserves the personality of our religion.
It is concrete and picturesque. The historical Jesus
is for ever there. It lays each life continually down
beside the perfect life, that it may see at once its
imperfection and its hope.
But not to dwell any longer on this special instance,
the order and course of preaching, the same absence
of method is apt to show itself everywhere in a
preacher s life. Besides the reasons for it which I
have already suggested, it comes from a feeble sense
of responsibility. The mental and the moral natures
have closer connections than very often we allow
them, and traits which we think wholly intellectual
are constantly revealing to us moral bases upon
92 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
which they rest. We talk of clearness, for instance,
as if it were purely a quality of style, but clearness in
every speech addressed to men comes out of sym
pathy, which is a moral quality. So force implies
conviction. And so the truest method involves con
scientiousness. The intellectual and the spiritual
belong together. Logical arrangement of thought haa
real connection with a sincere desire to do right. The
more you mean to do all the right, the more clearly
your whole thinking processes will dispose themselves,
and then, by the law of reaction, your orderly think
ing will make it easier for you to do right. That
which all men ought to remember, it behoves the
minister more than all men not to forget, how closely
the mental and moral natures are bound together in
their characters and destinies.
On this high ground, and on a ground that perhaps
is lower but still is sound, I urge upon you the
need of method and order in your life and work. Do
not be tempted by the fascination of spontaneousness.
Do not be misled by any delusion of inspiration.
The lower ground is the support which well-con
sidered and settled methods of operation give to the
higher powers in their weaker moments. No one
dreads mechanical woodenness in the ministry more
than I do. And yet a strong wooden structure run
ning through your work, a set of well-framed and
well-jointed habits about times and ways of work.
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 93
writing, studying, intercourse with people, the admin
istration of charity and education, and the propor
tions between the different departments of clerical
labor, is again and again the bridge over which the
minister walks where the solid ground of higher
motive fails him for a time. Eoutine is a terrible
master, but she is a servant whom we can hardly do
without. Eoutine as a law is deadly. Eoutine as a
resource in the temporary exhaustion of impulse and
suggestion is often our salvation. Coleridge told the
story when he sang,
"There will come a weary day
When, overtaxed at length,
Both hope and love beneath
The weight give way.
Then witli a statue s smile,
A statue s strength,
Patience, nothing loth,
And uncomplaining, does
The work of both."
But patience, while a strong power, is not quick-
sighted, and works in ways and habits which have
been made before.
Of mistakes of method as distinguished from absence
of method in the ministry, experience has seemed to
me to show that there is one comprehensive head un
der which a wonderfully large proportion of them all
may be included. It is the passion for expedients. I
know of no department of human activity, from the
94 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
governing of a great nation to the doctoring of a little
body, where the disposition is not constantly appear
ing to invent some sudden method or to seek some
O
magical and concise prescription which shall obviate
the need of careful, comprehensive study and long-
continued application. But this disposition is no
where so strong, I think, as in the ministry. The
bringing of truth, of Christ the Truth, to man, of the
whole Christ to the whole man, you can think of no
work larger in its idea than that. And evidently its
methods must be as manifold as are the natures with
which it deals. But we are constantly meeting people
who seem to have epitomized all the needs of the
Church, all the requirements of the successful minis
ter, into some one expedient, some panacea which, if
it could only be applied, would overcome every ob
stacle and bring on at once the perfect day of preach
ing. These expedients are things good in them
selves, making no doubt some very useful part of the
great whole ; but when they are magnified into soli
tary importance and offered as solutions of the diffi
culties that beset the Gospel, they are ludicrously in
sufficient. Many a young minister to-day is staking
his whole ministry on some one such idea. He at
tributes every defect to the imperfect apprehension
of that idea in his community. He hopes for every
good as that idea comes to be completely realized.
He can expect no good without it. He can hardly
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 95
conceive of any evil in connection with it. Perhaps
his favorite idea is free churches ; a good idea indeed,
an idea without which there could have been no
Christian church at all ; an idea which beyond all
doubt does represent the standard of Christianity,
and to which Christian practice must some day re
turn ; but by no means the only idea of worship, nor
suggesting by any means the only or the principal
difficulty in the way of spreading the Gospel. You
might break down every pew door and abolish every
pew tax and yet wait to see your churches and the
kingdom of God fill themselves full in vain. An
other s consuming thought is congregational singing.
As you listen to him rushing hither and thither
shouting the praises of his favorite method and deal
ing dreadful blows at the four-headed Cerberus which
he detests, you are almost ready to believe that if all
the people only could lift up their voices and sing the
walls of wickedness must tumble into dust. It is a
good and healthy agitation. It is well that we should
break through the tyranny of old methods and really
sing the praises of the Lord. But it is not going to
do the work of casting out sin and winning righteous
ness. When the army goes into battle the bands
must play, but they do not lead the host. And so it
is again with the hobby of inter-denominational inter
course, of Christian union. It is well, and I would
that we had more of it. But, to borrow the army
96 LECTURES ON PEE ACE ING.
simile again, no courtesies between two regiments
ever yet defeated the other army. And so of the
church sociable which tries to entice the passer-by to
the altar of the Lord with the familiar but feeble odor
of a cup of tea. And so with the children s church ;
one of the best and purest of the Church s inventions
for her work, but by no means enough to make a
special and peculiar feature of in any congregation.
It almost always weakens the preacher for his preach
ing to adults. There is nothing so insignificant that
some petty minister will not make it the Christian
panacea. A young pastor said to me once, " Wher
ever else I fail, there is one point in which my minis
try will be a success." " And what is that ? " said I,
expecting something sweet and spiritual. " In print
ing," he replied. He had devoted himself to setting
forth elaborate advertisements, and orders of services,
and Sunday-school reward cards, and most compli
cated parish records, and I suppose his parish is
strewn thick with those thick-falling leaves unto this
day. No ! The clerical or parish hobby is either the
fancy of a man who has failed to apprehend the great
work of the Gospel, or the refuge of a man who has
failed to do it. Its evils are endless. It makes a
fantastic Christianity. It keeps us battering at one
point in the long citadel of sin and lets the enemy
safely concentrate all his force there to protect it. It
robs us of all power of large appeal and confines the
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 97
truth which we preach to some small class of people.
It makes us exalt the means above the end, till we
come to count the means precious, whether it attain
the end or not. That is the death which many a
parish life has died. As George Herbert has it,
" What wretchedness can give him any room
Whose house is foul while he adores his broom 1 "
But finally, and worst of all, the passion for expedi
ents and panaceas narrows our standards of Christian
life, and gives us false tests of what are Christians.
It is possible to come to think that there can be no
conversion in a rented pew ; and that God will not
hear the music of a choir, however devoutly it bears
the praises of the people up to Him. Beware of hob
bies. Fasten yourself to the centre of your ministry ;
not to some point on its circumference. The circum
ference must move when the centre moves.
The escape from the slavery of expedients is not in
finding each one insufficient, and so changing it for
another. The escape from despotism is never in a
mere change of despots. Some men s ministry has
been occupied all through in the substitution of
hobby for hobby year after year. Their history is
made up of the record of the dynasties of successive
expedients, following each other like the later Emper
ors, each murdering his predecessor and murdered in
his turn. The escape must come in a larger human
98 LECTURES ON PEE AGEING.
life for the minister. He must come into larger
knowledge of men, and be in the truest and best
sense a man of the world. He must get out of the
merely ecclesiastical spirit ; that is, he must cease
to think of the Church as a petty institution, to be
carried on by fantastic methods of its own. It must
seem to him what it is, the type and pattern of what
humanity ought to be, so to be kept large enough
that any man, coming from any exile where the
homesickness of his heart has been awakened, may
find his true and native place awaiting him. The
preacher then will know all kinds of men, keeping his
life large enough to enter into sympathy with them.
Let me make one special remark upon this head.
Apart from its incidental advantage, to his style and
manner, I think it is good for a minister to do some
work besides clerical work, and to write something
besides sermons. But he must do it as a minister.
And the proof of how large is his vocation, is that he
can do it and yet be a minister in it all. He can
write books, and yet be not a literary man but a min
ister. He can help the government, and yet be not a
politician but a minister. There are bad ways, but
there are also good ways in which a clergyman may
carry his clerical character with him wherever he
goes. It may be to your discredit, or to your credit,
that strangers say of you, " I should know he was a
minister." For the best minister is simply the fullest
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK 99
maru You cannot separate him from his manhood.
Voltaire said of Louis XIV., " He was not one of the
greatest men but certainly one of the greatest kings
that ever lived." It would not be possible to say that
of any minister. He who was one of the greatest of
ministers must be one of the greatest of men.
The faults of a minister s method are apt to be of
the simplest sort ; as his virtues are of no intricate or
complicated kind, but the primary virtues of human
ity. I cannot then pass by what, after all, has seemed
to me to lie at the bottom of a very large part of the
clerical failures and half-successes which I have wit
nessed. What is called a " success " in the ministry
is, indeed, a curious sort of phenomenon, very hard
to analyze. It is half clay, half gold. It is half
secular and half religious, and the two halves are
mingled so that it is impossible to separate them.
There is too much of religious feeling in our com
munities to call a minister successful unless he seems
to be doing a really spiritual work, and on the other
hand there is too steady a watch kept upon economi
cal considerations, to give the praise of success to
mere spiritual devotion, unless it carries with it the
signs of material prosperity. The " successful minis
ter" is a being of such mingled qualities that he
leaves open room enough for many men who are not
called successful, to be thoroughly good and nobly
useful and very happy. But still this standard of
100 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
success has its advantages. It is intelligible. And
it brings at once forward the simplest of all causes of
failure, and shows it to be the same that brings fail
ure in every department of life. That cause is mere
unfaithfulness, the fact of men s not doing their best
with the powers that God has given them. I think
that it is hard to believe how common this trouble,
underlying all troubles, is in the minister s life. I
want to urge it upon you very earnestly. You watch
the career of some man who does not seem to succeed.
You know his piety ; you recognize his intelligence ;
you make all kinds of elaborate theories about what
there is in his peculiar character that unfits him for
effectiveness ; you dwell on his fastidiousness, his re
serve, the wonderful sensitiveness of his nature. You
picture him to yourself writing exquisite sermons, full
of thought, which the people are too coarse to compre
hend. And then, with this picture of him in your
mind, you come to know the habits of his life, and
all your fine-spun pity scatters as you learn that,
whatever other hindrances there may be, the hin
drance that lies uppermost of all is that the man is
not doing his best. His work is at loose ends ; he
treats his people with a neglect with which no doctor
could treat his patients and no lawyer his clients ; and
he writes his sermons on Saturday nights. That last
I count the crowning disgrace of a man s ministry. It
is dishonest. It is giving but the last flicker of the
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 101
week as it sinks in its socket, to those who, simply to
talk about it as a bargain, have paid for the full light
burning at its brightest. And yet men boast of it.
They tell you in how short time they write their
sermons, and when you hear them preach you only
wonder that it took so long. Ah ! my friends, it is
wonderful what a central power is the moral law.
The primary fact of duty lies at the core of every
thing. Operations which we think have no moral
character, move by the power which is coiled up in
that spring. Derange it in any man, and his taste
becomes corrupted, and his intellect suffers distortion.
The first necessity for the preacher and the hod-carrier
is the same. Be faithful, and do your best always for
every congregation, and on every occasion. 1
A very curious study in human nature is the way
1 An unknown friend has called my attention to these good
words of Cotton Mather, since this lecture was delivered. They
are from the Ratio Disciplince, pp. 59 and 60.
"If churches hear of ministers boasting that they have been
in their studies only a few hours on Saturday, or so, they reckon
that such persons rather glory in their shame.
" Sudden sermons they may sometimes admire from their
accomplished ministers, when the suddenness has not been a
chosen circumstance. But as one of old, when it was objected
against his public speeches (in matters of less moment than the
salvation of souls), replied, I should blush at the incivility of
treating so great and wise a people with anything but what
shall be studied ; BO the best ministers of New England ordi
narily would blush to address their flocks without premedi
tation."
102 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
in which the moral sense sometimes suffers in connec
tion with the highest spiritual experiences. A man
who will cheat nowhere else will be a hypocrite in
religion. A man who really wants to convert his
brethren will sometimes try to do it by preaching
other people s sermons as if they were his own. It is
partly, I suppose, the vague sense of elevation which
seems to have somewhat enfeebled the hold of the or
dinary morality upon a man, as the earth s gravita
tion weakens for him who mounts among the stars.
And in some men it is that demoralization which
comes from feeling themselves in a place for which
they are not fit, burdened with duties for which they
have no capacity. And that, in political, or commer
cial, or clerical life, is the most demoralizing con
sciousness that a man can feel.
This question of faithfulness touches, I believe, al
most all the difficulties in the way of constraint or dic
tation which a minister meets with from his people.
I am apt to believe that almost all the troubles be
tween ministers and parishes are from the minister s
folly if not from his fault. Not that there is not
often enough blame upon the other side. But it
seems to me reasonable that the minister, having an
intenser and more concentrated interest in his parish
than any layman has, should have that measure of
control which, wisely used, might hinder almost any
trouble before it grew vigorous enough to enlist the
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 103
angry interest of the people whose lives are largely
occupied with other things. There are such things
as parish quarrels. If I am right, my friends, you
will never have one in your parish which you might
not have prevented, and never come out of one with
out injury to your character and your Master s cause.
It is wonderful to me with what freedom a minister
is left to do his work in his own way, if only his
people believe in his scrupulous faithfulness. Take,
for instance, the matter of preaching old sermons. It
is not good. A new sermon, fresh from the brain,
has always a life in it which an old sermon, though
better in itself, must lack. The trouble is in the
prominence of that personal element in preaching of
which I spoke in my first lecture. You may take the
sermon off the shelf, and when you have brushed the
dust off the cover it is the same sermon that you
preached on that memorable day when you were all
afire with your new line of study or with the spiritual
zeal that was burning about you. You may repro
duce the paper but you cannot reproduce the man,
and the sermon was man and paper together. No, I
would make as rare as possible the preaching of the
same sermon to the same people. But what I wanted
to say was this, that the main objection which the
people have to the preaching of old sermons is in the
impression that it gives them of unfaithfulness and
idleness. Let a minister s whole life make any such
104 LECTURE? ON PREACHING.
suspicion impossible and there is no complaint. The
minister in whose faithfulness his people believe may
use his own discretion. He must not play any tricks.
He must not put old sermons to new texts. To put
new sermons to old texts is better. But he may use
his judgment, and those sermons, of which there is
a certain class, which do not lose but rather gain by
repetition, he may repreach again and again till they
grow to be to people like their most cherished hymns
or passages from some long-loved book of devotion.
One of the most remarkable things about the
preacher s methods of work is the way in which they
form themselves in the earliest years of his ministry,
and then rule him with almost despotic power to the
end. I am a slave to-day, and so I suppose is every
minister, to ways of work that were made within two
or three years after beginning to preach. The new
ness of the occupation, that unexpectedness of every
thing to which I alluded when I began to speak to
you this afternoon, opens all the life, and makes it
receptive ; and then the earnestness and fresh en
thusiasm of those days serves to set the habits that a
man makes them, to clothe them with something that
is almost sacredness, and to make them practically
almost unchangeable. They are the years when a
preacher needs to be very watchful over his discretion
and his independence. When the clay is in the bank,
it matters not so much who treads on it. And when
the clay is hardened in the vase, it may press close
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 105
upon another vase and yet keep its own shape. But
when the clay is just setting, and the shape still soft,
then is the time to guard it from the blows or pres
sures that would distort it for ever. Be sure, then,
that the habits and methods of your opening ministry
are, first of all, your own. Let no respect, however
profound or merited, for any hero of the pulpit make
you submit yourself to him. Let your own nature
freely shape its own ways. Only be sure that those
ways do really come out of your own nature, and not
out of the merely accidental circumstances of your
first parish. And let them be intelligent, not merely
such as you happen into, but such as you can give
good reasons for. And let them be noble, framed
with reference to the large ideal and most sacred pur
poses of your work, not with reference to its minute
conveniences. And let them be broad enough to give
you room to grow. It is with ideas and methods of
work as it is with houses. To remove from one to
another is wasteful and dispiriting ; but to find the
one in which we have taken up our abode unfold
ing new capacity to accommodate our growing mental
family, is satisfactory and encouraging. It gives us
the sense at once of settlement and progress. He is
the happiest and most effective old man whose life
has been full of growth, but free from revolution ;
who is living still in the same thoughts and habits
which he had when a boy, but has found them as the
Hebrews say that the Israelites found their clothes in
106 LECTURES ON PREA CHINQ.
the desert during the forty years, not merely nevei
waxing old upon them, but growing with their growth
as they passed on from youth to manhood.
I hope that I shall not have disappointed your ex
pectation in what I have said about the preacher s
methods by dwelling so largely upon principles, and
going so little into details. It would be easy enough
for any minister to amuse himself, and perhaps
amuse you, by recitations from his diary. But it
would not be good. I want to make you know two
things : first, that if your ministry is to be good for
anything, it must be your ministry, and not a feeble
echo of any other man s ; and, second, that the Chris
tian ministry is not the mere practice of a set of
rules and precedents, but is a broad, free, fresh meet
ing of a man with men, in such close contact that the
Christ who has entered into his life may, through his,
enter into theirs.
I have but a few words to add upon the spirit in
which the preacher does his best work. After what I
have been saying, my points will need no elaboration.
Forgive me if I venture to put them in the simplest
and strongest imperatives I can command.
First, count and rejoice to count yourself the
servant of the people to whom you minister. Not in
any worn-out figure but in very truth, call yourself
and be their servant.
Second, never allow yourself to feel equal to your
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 107
work. If you ever find that spirit growing on you,
be afraid, and instantly attack your hardest piece of
work, try to convert your toughest infidel, try to
preach on your most exacting theme, to show your
self how unequal to it all you are.
Third, be profoundly honest. Never dare to say in
the pulpit or in private, through ardent excitement or
conformity to what you know you are expected to
say, one word which at the moment when you say it,
you do not believe. It would cut down the range of
what you say, perhaps, but it would endow every
word that was left with the force of ten.
And last of all, be vital, be alive, not dead. Do
everything that can keep your vitality at its fullest.
Even the physical vitality do not dare to disregard.
One of the most striking preachers of our country
seems to me to have a large part of his power simply
in his physique, in the impression of vitality, in
the magnetism almost like a material thing, that
passes between him and the people who sit before
him. Pray for and work for fulness of life above
everything ; full red blood in the body ; full honesty
and truth in the mind ; and the fulness of a grateful
love for the Saviour in your heart. Then, however
men set their mark of failure or success upon your
ministry, you cannot fail, you must succeed.
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON.
T HAVE dwelt long upon the preacher and his
-*- character because he is essential to the sermon.
He cannot throw a sermon forth into the world as an
author can his book, as an artist can his statue, and
let it live thenceforth a life wholly independent of
himself. That is the reason why sermons are not ordi
narily interesting reading. At least that is one of the
reasons. Now and then you do find a volume of
sermons which, as it were, keep their author in them,
so that as you read them you feel him present in the
room. But, ordinarily, reading sermons is like listen
ing to an echo. The words are there, but the personal
intonation is gone out of them and there is an
unreality about it all. Now and then you find
sermons which do not suggest their ever having been
preached and they give you none of this feeling.
But they were not good sermons, scarcely even real
sermons, when they were preached. In general it is
true that the sermon which is good to preach is poor
to read and the sermon which is good to read is poor
108
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 109
to preach. There are exceptions, but this is generally
true.
Whatever is in the sermon must be in the preacher
first ; clearness, logicalness, vivacity, earnestness,
sweetness, and light must be personal qualities in
him before they are qualities of thought and lan
guage in what he utters to his people. If you have
your artist you have only to supply your marble
and chisel with the mere technical skill, and you have
your statue. If you have your preacher very little
more is needed to set free the sermon which is in him.
In this lecture and the next I want to speak about the
sermon. I make a division which will not be very
precise, but may be of some service ; and shall speak
to-day more of the sermon in its general purpose
and idea, and next Thursday more of the make and
method of the sermon.
It seems to me, then, that at the very outset the defi
nite and immediate purpose which a sermon has set
before it makes it impossible to consider it as a work
of art, and every attempt to consider it so works in
jury to the purpose for which the sermon was created.
Many of the ineffective sermons that are made owe
their failure to a blind and fruitless effort to produce
something which shall be a work of art, conforming
to some type or pattern which is not clearly under
stood but is supposed to be essential and eternal.
But the unreasonableness of this appears the moment
110 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
that we think of it. A sermon exists in and for its
purpose. That purpose is the persuading and mov
ing of men s souls. That purpose must never be lost
sight of. If it ever is, the sermon flags. It is not always
on the surface ; not always impetuous and eager in the
discourses of the settled pastor as it is in the appeals of
the Evangelist who speaks this once and this once only
to the men he sees before him. The sermon of the
habitual preacher grows more sober, but it never can
lose out of it this consciousness of a purpose ; it never
can justify itself in any self-indulgence that will hinder
or delay that purpose. It is always aimed at men.
It is always looking in their faces to see how they are
moved. It knows no essential and eternal type, but
its law for what it ought to be comes from the needs
and fickle changes of the men for whom it lives. Now
this is thoroughly inartistic. Art contemplates and
serves the absolute beauty. The simple work of art
is the pure utterance of beautiful thought in beauti
ful form without further purpose than simply that it
should be uttered. The poem or the statue may in
struct, inspire, and rebuke men, but that design, if it
were present in the making of the poem or the statue,
vitiated the purity of its artistic quality. Art knows
nothing of the tumultuous eagerness of earnest pur
pose. She is supremely calm and independent of the
whims of men. Phidias cast among a barbarous race
must carve not some hideous idol which shall stir
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. Ill
their coarse blood by its frantic extravagance, but the
same serene and lofty beauty of Athene which he
would carve at Athens. If it wholly fails to reach
their gross and blunted senses, that is no disgrace to
it as a work of art, for the artistic and the didactic
are separate from one another.
And yet we find a constant tendency in the history
of preaching to treat the sermon as a work of art. It
is spoken of as if it were something which had a value
in itself. We hear of beautiful sermons, as if they
existed solely on the ground that " beauty is its own
excuse for being." The age of the great French
preachers, the age of Louis XIV. with its sermons
preached in the salons of critical and sceptical noble
men, and of ladies who offered to their friends the en
tertainment of the last discovered preacher, was full
of this false idea of the sermon as a work of art.
And the soberer Englishman, whether he be the Puri
tan praising the painful exposition to which he has
just listened, or the Churchman delighting in the pol
ished periods of Tillotson or South, has his own way
of falling into the same heresy. I think it does us
good to go back to the simple sermons of the New Tes
tament. I do not speak of the perfect discourses of
our Lord, though in them we should find the strong
est confirmation of what I am now saying : but take
the sermons of St. Peter, of St. Stephen, of St. Paul,
and from them come down to the sermons which have
112 LECTURES ON PREA CHW0.
been great as sermons ever since. Through all their
variety you find this one thing constantly true about
them : they were all valuable solely for the work they
could accomplish. They were tools, and not works of
art. To turn a tool into a work of art, to elaborate
the shape and chase the surface of the axe with which
you are to hew your wood, is bad taste ; and to give
any impression in a sermon that it has forgotten its
purpose and been shaped for anything else than what
in the largest extent of those great words might be
described as saving souls, makes it offensive to a truly
good taste and dull to the average man, who feels an
incongruity which he cannot define. The power of
the sermons of the Paulist fathers in the Romish
Church and of Mr. Moody in Protestantism lies sim
ply here : in the clear and undisturbed presence of
their purpose ; and many ministers who never dream
of such a thing, who think that they are preaching
purely for the good of souls, are losing the power out
of their sermons because they are trying, even with
out knowing it, to make them not only sermons, but
works of art. There was an old word which I think
has ceased to be used. Men used to talk of " sermon
izing." They said that some good preacher was " a
fine sermonizer." The word contained just this vice :
it made the sermon an achievement, to be attempted
and enjoyed for itself apart from anything that it
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 113
could do, like a picture or an oratorio, like the Venus
of Milo or the Midsummer-Night s Dream.
And here lies the truth concerning the way in
which really high truth and careful thought may be
brought to a congregation. We hear a good deal
about preaching over people s heads. There is such
a thing. But generally it is not the character of the
ammunition, but the fault of aim, that makes the
missing shot. There is nothing worse for a preacher
than to come to think that he must preach down to
people ; that they cannot take the very best he has to
give. He grows to despise his own sermons, and the
people quickly learn to sympathize with their minis
ter. The people will get the heart out of the most
thorough and thoughtful sermon, if only it really is a
sermon. Even subtlety of thought, the tracing of in
tricate relations of ideas, it is remarkable how men
of no subtle thought will follow it, if it ia really
preached. But subtlety which has delighted in itself,
which has spun itself fine for its own pleasure in see
ing how fine it could be spun, vexes and throws them
off ; and they are right. Never be afraid to call upon
your people to follow your best thought, if only it is
really trying to lead them somewhere. The confi
dence of the minister in the people is at the bottom
of every confidence of the people in the minister.
What I have been saying bears also on what we
114 LECTURES ON PREA CHINO.
hear, every now and then, from the days of the
" Spectator " down, the expression of a wish that
moderate ministers, instead of giving people their
own moderate thought, would recur to the good
work which has been already done, and read some
sermon of one of the great masters. There too, there
is the " sermonizing " idea. The real sermon idea is
lost. Such a practice corning into vogue would
speedily destroy the pulpit s power. Not merely
would it be a confession of incapacity, but the idea
of speech, of present address for a present purpose,
would disappear. I do not think we could anticipate
any continual interest, scarcely any perpetual exist
ence for the preaching work in case such an idea
became prevalent and accepted.
The first good consequence of the emphatic state
ment that a sermon is to be considered solely with
reference to its proper purposes will be in a new and
larger freedom for the preacher. We make the idea
of a sermon too specific, wishing to conform it to
some preestablished type of what a sermon ought to
be. There is nothing which a sermon ought to be ex
cept a fit medium of truth to men. There is no model
of a sermon so strange and novel, so different from
every pattern upon which sermons have been shaped
before, that if it became evident to you that that was
the form through which the message which you had
to tell would best reach the men to whom you had to
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 115
tell it, it would not be your right, nay, be your duty
to preach your truth in that new form. I grant that
the accepted forms of preaching were shaped origin
ally by a desire of utility, and only gradually as
sumed a secondary value and importance for their
own sakes. That is the way in which every such
superstitious value of anything originates. I grant,
therefore, that the young preacher may well feel that
a certain presumption of advantage belongs to those
types of sermons which he finds in use. He will not
wantonly depart from them. I am sure that all
hearers of sermons will say: "Better the most abject
conformity to rule than departure from rule for the
mere sake of departure. Better the stiff movements
of imitation than the fantastic gestures of deliberate
originality." But what I plead for is, that in all
your desire to create good sermons you should think
no sermon good that does not do its work. Let the
end for which you preach play freely in and modify
the form of your preaching. He who is original for
the sake of originality is as much governed by the
type from which he departs as is another man who
slavishly conforms to it ; but he who freely uses the
types which he finds, and yet compels them always to
bend to the purposes for which he uses them, he is
their true master, and not their slave. Such original
ity as that alone at once secures the best effectiveness
of the preacher, and advances at the same time the
116 LECTURES ON PEE A OHINO,
general type aiid idea of the sermon, preserving it
from monotony and making it better and better from
age to age.
Now let me turn to some of those questions
affecting the general idea of what a sermon ought
to be, which are continually recurring, and say a
few words on each.
One of the most interesting of those questions,
which appears in many forms, arises from the necessity
of which I have already so much spoken, of mingling
the elements of personal influence and abstract truth
to make the perfect sermon. There are some sermons
in which the preacher does not appear at all ; there
are other sermons in which he is offensively and
crudely prominent; there are still other sermons where
he is hidden and yet felt, the force of his personal
conviction and earnest love being poured through
the arguments which he uses, and the promises
which he holds out. Of the second class of sermons,
in which the minister s personality is offensively
prominent, the most striking instance is what seems
to me to have become rather common of late, and
what I may call the autobiographical style of preach
ing. There are some preachers to whom one might
listen for a year, and then he could write their bio
graphy, if it were worth the doing. Every truth
they wish to teach is illustrated by some event in
their own history. Every change of character which
THE TDEA OF THE SERMON. 117
they wish to urge is set forth under the form in which
that change took place in them. The story of how
they were converted becomes as familiar to their con
gregation as the story of the conversion of St. Paul.
It is the crudest attempt to blend personality and
truth. They are not fused with one another, but only
tied together. It has a certain power. It is wonder
ful how interesting almost any man becomes if he
talks frankly about himself. You cannot help listen
ing to the garrulous unfolding of his history. And
in the pulpit no doubt it gives a certain vividness,
when a popular preacher whose people are already in
terested in, and curious about his personality, after
enforcing some argument, suddenly turns, and in
stead of saying, after the pulpit manner, " But the
objector will reply," briskly breaks out with, " Last
Monday afternoon a man came into my study," or
" A man met me in the street and said, Mr. this or
that " (using his own name), " what do you make of
this objection ? " It gives a clear concreteness to
the whole, and feeds that curiosity about each other s
ways of living out of which all our gossip grows.
The evils of the habit are evident enough. Not to
speak of its oppressiveness to the best taste, nor of the
way in which its power dies out, as the much-paraded
person of the minister grows familiar and unimpos-
ing, it certainly must have a tendency to narrow the
suggested range of Christian truth and experience.
118 LECTURES ON PEE ACHING.
In parishes where such strong prominence belongs to
the preacher s personality, where the people are always
hearing of how he learned this truth or passed
through that emotion, all apprehension of thought
and realization of experience narrows itself. It is
expected in just that way which has been so often
and so vividly pictured. It is distrusted if it comes
in other forms. The rich variety and largeness of
the Christian life is lost. There are some parishes
which, in the course of a long pastorate, have become
but the colossal repetition of their minister s person
ality. They are the form of his experience seen
through a mist, grown large in size but vague and
dim in outline. Every parishioner is a weakened
repetition of the minister s ideas and ways. I think
that what a minister learns to rejoice in more and
more is the endless difference of that Christian life,
which is yet always the same. It shows him the pos
sibility of a Christianity as universal as humanity, a
Christianity in which the diversity and unity of hu-
manity might both be kept. And any undue promi
nence of himself in his teaching loses the largeness
on which the hope of this variety in unity depends.
There is something better than this. There is a
fine and subtle infusion of a man into his work, which
achieves what this crude fastening of the two together
attempts, but fails to accomplish. Take, for instance,
the sermons of Robertson. You will know, from
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 119
allusions to them which I have already made, that I
sympathize very fully with that high estimate which
such multitudes of people have set upon those re
markable discourses. I think that in all the best
qualities of preaching they stand supreme among the
sermons of our time. And one of the most remark
able things about them is the way in which the per
sonal force of the preacher, and the essential power
of the truth, are blended into one strong impressive-
ness. The personality never muddies the thought,
I do not remember one allusion to his own history,
one anecdote of his own life ; but they are his ser
mons. The thought is stronger for us because he has
thought it, The feeling is more vivid because he has
felt it. And always he leads us to God by a way
along which he has gone himself. It is interesting
to read along with the sermons the story of his life,
to see what he was passing through at the date when
this sermon or that was preached, and to watch, as
you often may, without any suspicion of mere fanci-
fulness, how the experience shed its power into the
sermon, but left its form of facts outside ; how his
sermons were like the heaven of his life, in which the
spirit of its life lived after it had cast away its body.
There have, indeed, been preachers and writers
whose utterance of truth has fallen naturally in the
forms of autobiography, and yet who have been at
once strong and broad. You can gather all of
120 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
Latimcr s history out of his sermons, and Milton has
given us a large part of his teaching in connection
with the events of his own life. But ordinarily
that is true in literature, and certainly in preaching,
which is true in life. It is not the man who forces
the events of his life on you who most puts the spirit
of his life into you. The most unreserved men are
not the most influential. A reserved man who cares
for truth, and cares that his brethren should know the
truth, who therefore is always holding back the mere
envelope of accident and circumstance in which the
truth has embodied itself to him, and yet sending
forth the truth with all the clearness and force which
it has gathered for him from that embodiment, he is
the best preacher, as everywhere he is the most influ
ential man. Try to live such a life, so full of events
and relationships that the two great things, the
power of Christ and the value of your brethren s
souls, shall be tangible and certain to you ; not sub
jects of speculation and belief, but realities which you
have seen and known ; then sink the shell of personal
experience, lest it should hamper the truth that you
must utter, and let the truth go out as the shot goes,
carrying the force of the gun with it, but leaving the
gun behind.
There is something beautiful to me in the way in
which the utterance of the best part of a man s own
life, its essence, its result, \diich the pulpit makes
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 121
possible, and even tempts, is welcomed by many men,
who seem to find all other utterance of themselves
impossible. I have known shy, reserved men, who,
standing in their pulpits, have drawn back before a
thousand eyes veils that were sacredly closed when
only one friend s eyes could see. You might talk
with them a hundred times, and you would not learn
so much of what they were as if you once heard them
preach. It was partly the impersonality of the great
congregation. Humanity, without the offence of in
dividuality, stood there before them. It was no vio
lation of their loyalty to themselves to tell their
secret to mankind. It was a man who silenced them.
But also, besides this, it was, I think, that the sight
of many waiting faces set free in them a new, clear
knowledge of what their truth or secret was, un
snarled it from the petty circumstances into which it
had been entangled, called it first into clear conscious
ness, and then tempted it into utterance with an au
thority which they did not recognize in an individual
curiosity demanding the details of their life. Our
race, represented in a great assemblage, has more
authority and more beguilement for many of us than
the single man, however near he be. And he who
is silent before the interviewer pours out the very
depths of his soul to the great multitude. He will
not print his diary for the world to read, but he will
tell his fellow-men what Christ may be to them, so
122 LECTURES ON PEE ACHING.
that they shall see, as God sees, what Christ has been
to him.
I think, again, that this first truth of preaching, the
truth that the minister enters into the sermon, touches
upon the point of which I spoke in my last sermon,
the authority of the sermon. The sermon is God s
message sent by you to certain of your fellow-men.
If the message came to your fellow-men just as it
came from God it must be absolutely true and must
have absolute authority. If the fallible messenger
mixes himself with his infallible message, the ab
solute authority of the message is in some degree
qualified. But we have seen that the very idea of
the sermon implies that the messenger must mingle
himself with the message that he brings ; and, as a
mere matter of fact, we know that every preacher does
declare the truth from his own point of view and fol
lows his own judgment, enlightened by his study and
his prayer, when he declares how the eternal truth
applies to temporary circumstances. Some things
which you say from the pulpit you know ; other
things are your speculations. This is true very
largely of the anticipations and prophecies about the
destiny of the Gospel, about the relations which the
Gospel holds to the circumstances of special times in
which ministers indulge. John Wesley used to say
that " Infidels know, whether Christians know it or
not, that the giving up witchcraft is in effect giving
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 123
up the Bible." When we were children it used to be
preached to us that the Bible must stand or fall with
human slavery. And now we hear continually that
this or that will happen to religion if such or such a
theory of natural science should be accepted. Such
prophecies are always bad. Tests which are not es
sential and absolute tests do great harm. But these
are instances of the way in which speculations, per
sonal opinions, prejudices, if you will, must attach
themselves to any live man s utterance of the truth.
It is inevitable ; and what must be the result ? Either
all speculation must be cut away and the sermon be
reduced to the mere repetition of indisputable and
undisputed truth; and the mere primary facts of
Christianity which alone are held absolutely " semper,
ubique et ab omnibus " must make the sum of preach
ing ; or else the preacher must let the people clearly
understand that between the facts that are his message
and the philosophy of those facts which is his best
and truest judgment there is a clear distinction. The
first come with the authority of God s revelation.
The others come with what persuasion their essential
reasonableness gives them. Now the first method is
impracticable. No man ever did it. No man who
claims to preach nothing but the simple Gospel
preaches it so simply that it has not in it something
of his own speculation about it. The other method
is the only method. Even St. Paul came to it in his
124 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
epistles. But how few preachers frankly adopt it :
We cover all we say our crude guesses, our igno
rant anticipations with a certain vague and unde
fined authority ; and men, hearing themselves called
on to believe them all, and seeing part of them to be
untrue, really believe none of them in any genuine or
hearty way. We stretch our authority to try to make
it cover so much that it grows thin and will not de
cently cover anything at all. Frankness is what we
need, frankness to say, "This is God s truth, and this
other is what I think." If we were frank like that,
see what good things would come. The minister
would have room for intellectual change and growth,
and not have to steal them as if they were something to
which he had no right. The people could hear many
men preach, and hear them differ from each other, and
yet not be bewildered and confounded. And every
preacher, with the clearly recognized right, would
have to accept the duty of being a thinker in the
things of God.
One of the most interesting questions which meet
us as we try to form an idea of what the sermon
ought to be, is that suggested by the occasional or
constant outcry against the preaching of Doctrine,
and the call for practical sermons, or for what is
called "preaching Christ only." Let me speak of
this. I do not hold that the outcry is absurd. I do
not think that it is one to which the preacher ought
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 125
to shut his ears. It is a very blind and unintelligent
cry, no doubt. All popular outcries are that. Every
popular movement and demand has in general the
same history. It begins with a vague discontent that
never even attempts to give an account of what it
means, and it passes on into three different manifes
tations of itself ; one, an honest attempt by its own
adherents to declare its philosophy and give an intel
ligible reason for it ; another, an effort by those who
dislike it to misrepresent and to defame it ; a third,
the adoption of its phrases by people who care little
about it but like to affect an interest in whatever is
uppermost. In this last stage the popular movement
becomes a fashionable cant. There never was a stir
and dissatisfaction, a dislodging and outreaching of
men s minds which did not show itself in all these
forms. This dissatisfaction with what is called doc
trinal preaching appears in all three. At the bottom
it is a discontent with something that the souls of
men feel to be wrong. Then comes the endeavour of
men to state the grievance, which is often very fool
ishly done, and would, if carried out, sweep away
everything like positive Christianity together. Then
comes the misrepresentation of the popular demand,
which talks about it as if it all came of the spirit of
indifference or unbelief. And then finally succeeds
that which is the lowest degradation to which anything
which might be an intelligent opinion can be reduced,
126 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
the affectation which pretends to be in horror at any
thing like dogmatism, and repeats without meaning
the praises of an undogmatic preaching. Now the
minister meets all of these. What shall he do ? It is
easy enough for him to expose the illogical reasoning,
easy for him to see its misconceptions, easy for him
to despise its cant, but it ought not to be easy for him
to shut his ears to that out of which they all come,
that deep, blind, unintelligent discontent with some
thing which is evidently wrong. He must bring his
intelligence to bear on that. It cannot tell what it
means itself. He must find out what it means, and
not be deterred by the offensiveness of any of its ex
hibitions from a careful understanding of its true
significance.
For it does mean something, and what it means is
this : that men who are looking for a law of life and
an inspiration of life are met by a theory of life.
Much of our preaching is like delivering lectures
upon medicine to sick people. The lecture is true.
The lecture is interesting. Nay, the truth of the lec
ture is important, and if the sick man could learn the
truth of the lecture he would be a better patient, he
would take his medicine more responsibly and regu
late his diet more intelligently. But still the fact re
mains that the lecture is not medicine, and that to
give the medicine, not to deliver the lecture, is the
preacher s duty. I know the delusiveness of such an
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 127
analogy. Let us not urge it too far ; but let us own
that the idea which has haunted the religious life of
man, and which is not true, has had a serious and
bad effect on preaching. That idea is that the tenure
of certain truths, and not the possession of a certain
character, is a saving thing. It is the notion that
faith consists in the believing of propositions. Let
that heresy be active or latent in a preacher s mind,
and he inevitably falls into the vice which people
complain of when they talk about doctrinal preach
ing. He declares truth for its own value and not
with direct reference to its result in life.
It is not my place to argue here that the idea of
faith from which such preaching comes is not the
scriptural idea, not the idea of Jesus. But it does
come within my region to point out the influence that
a man s first idea of saving faith must have upon
his whole conception of a sermon. The preacher who
thinks that faith is the holding of truth must ever be
aiming to save men from believing error and to bring
them to the knowledge of what is true. The man
who thinks that faith is personal loyalty must always
be trying to bring men to Christ and Christ to men.
Which is the true idea ? That, as I said, it is not for me
to discuss. But I may beg you to consider seriously
what the faith was that Christ longed so to see in his
disciples, and what that faith must be whose " trial "
or education St. Peter says "is much more precious
128 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
than of gold that perishes." Such words as those
carry us inevitably into the realm of character, which
we know is the one thing in man which God values
and for which Christ labored and lived and died.
This does seem to me to make the truth about the
preaching of doctrine very plain. The salvation of
men s souls from sin, the renewing and perfecting of
their characters, is the great end of all. But that is
done by Christ. To bring them, then, to Christ, that
He may do it, to make Christ plain to them, that they
may find Him, this is the preacher s work. But I
cannot do my duty in making Christ plain unless
I tell them of Him all the richness that I know. 1
must keep nothing back. All that has come to me
about Him from His Word, all that has grown clear
to me about His nature or His methods by my inward
or outward experience, all that He has told me of
Himself, becomes part of the message that I must tell
to those men whom He has sent me to call home to
Himself. I will do this in its fulness. And this is
the preaching of doctrine, positive, distinct, charac
teristic Christian Truth. Only, the truth has always
character beyond it as its ulterior purpose. Not until
I forget that, and begin to tell men about Christ as if
that they should know the truth about Him, and not
that they should become what knowing the truth
about Him would help them be, were the final pur
pose of my preachingnot until then do I begin to
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON, 129
preach doctrine in the wrong way which men are try
ing to describe when they talk about " doctrinal
preaching."
The truth is, no preaching ever had any strong
power that was not she preaching of doctrine. The
preachers that hav moved and held men have always
preached doctrine. No exhortation to a good life
that does not put behind it some truth as deep as
eternity can seize and hold the conscience. Preach
doctrine, preach all the doctrine that you know, and
learn forever more and more ; but preach it always,
not that men may believe it, but that men may be
saved by believing it. So it shall be live, not dead.
So men shall rejoice in it and not decry it. So they
shall feed on it at your hands as on the bread of life,
solid and sweet, and claiming for itself the appetite of
man which God made for it.
I am inclined to think that the idea of a sermon is
so properly a unit, that a sermon involves of necessity
such elements in combination, the absence of any one
of which weakens the sermon-nature, that the ordinary
classifications of sermons are of little consequence.
We hear of expository preaching and topical sermons,
of practical sermons, of hortatory discourses, each sep
arate species seeming to stand by itself. It seems as
if the preacher were expected to determine each week
what kind of sermon the next Sunday was to enjoy and
set himself deliberately to produce it. It may be well,
130 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
but I say frankly that to my mind the sermon seems a
unit, and that no sermon seems complete that does not
include all these elements, and that the attempt to make
a sermon of one sort alone mangles the idea and pro
duces a one-sided thing. One element will prepon
derate in every sermon according to the nature of the
subject that is treated, and the structure of the ser
mon will vary according as you choose to announce
for it a topic or to make it a commentary upon some
words of Christ or His apostles. But the mere pre
ponderance of one element must not exclude the
others, and the difference of forms does not really
make a difference of sermons. The preaching which
is wholly exposition men are apt to find dull and
pointless. It is heat lightning that quivers over
many topics but strikes nowhere. The preaching
that is the discussion of a topic may be interesting,
but it grows unsatisfactory because it does not fasten
itself to the authority of Scripture. It tempts the
preacher s genius and invention, but is apt to send
people away with a feeling that they have heard him
more than they have heard God. The sermon which
only argues is almost sure to argue in vain, and the
sermon which only exhorts is like a man who blows
the wood and coal to which he has not first put a
light. Either is incomplete alone ; but to supplement
each by the other in another sermon is certainly a
very crude, imperfect way to meet the difficulty. It
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 131
is better to start by feeling that every sermon must
have a solid rest on Scripture, and the pointedness
which conies of a clear subject, and the conviction
which belongs to well-thought argument, and the
warmth that proceeds from earnest appeal. I spoke
of vagueness as the fault that most of all attended
what is ordinarily called expository preaching. Be
sides this, there is the other fault of narrow view. I
know that fault does not belong to it of necessity. I
know that the expositor may refuse to become the
mere ingenious interpreter of texts and the distiller
of partial doctrines out of one petal of a great book
or argument which is a symmetrical flower. He may
insist on taking in the purpose of the whole Epistle
as he comments upon one isolated chapter. He may
claim light from the manifold radiance of the whole
New Testament to let him see the meaning of a
doubtful verse. But we all know the danger of the
mere expositor of any book, whether that book be
Shakespeare or the Bible. There is no reason why,
in the Bible as in Shakespeare, the minute study of
parts should not be dangerous to the conception of
the whole. The same powers and the same weak
nesses of the human mind are present in the sacred
study as in what we call the profane study. The es
cape is not in the abandonment of minute and faith
ful study, but in the careful preservation of the larger
purpose and spirit of the work. Our literature
132 LECTURES ON PREA CH1NQ.
abounds in illustrations of the difference. Compare
the noble and vivid pages of Dean Stanley s " Jewish
Church " with the labor of the ordinary textual com
mentator, and which is the true expositor of the Old
Testament ? The larger view in which the poetry
and the essential truth reside comes in the attempt to
grasp the topic of the whole. And so that preaching
which most harmoniously blends in the single sermon
all these varieties of which men make their classifica
tions the preaching which is strong in its appeal to
authority, wide in its grasp of truth, convincing in its
appeal to reason, and earnest in its address to the
conscience and the heart, all of these at once that
preaching comes nearest to the type of the apostolical
epistles, is the most complete and so the most power
ful approach of truth to the whole man ; and so is the
kind of preaching which, with due freedom granted
to our idiosyncrasies, it is best for us all to seek and
educate.
There is, indeed, another classification of sermons
which often occurs to me and which I think is not
without its use. It belongs not to the mere form
which a sermon takes, but to the side on which it
approaches and undertakes to convince the human
mind. Every reality of God may be recognized by us
in its beauty, its righteousness, or its usefulness. I
may see, for instance, of God s justice, either the abso-
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 133
lute beauty of it, may stand in awe before it as the
perfect utterance of the perfect nature, may desire to
come near to it as the most majestic thing in the
whole universe, may love it solely for itself. Or I
may be possessed with the relations which it holds to
my own moral nature. It may impress me not so
much as a quality in God as a relationship between
God s life and mine. It may fill me with a sense of
sin, make me realize temptation, and stir the depths
of moral struggle in my life. Or, yet again, I may
realize that justice as the regulative power of the
universe, see how conformity to it means peace and
prosperity from centre to circumference of this vast
order. I may rejoice in it not for what it is but for
what it does. Of these three conceptions of God s
justice, one appeals to the soul and its intuitions of
eternal fitness, the second to the conscience and its
knowledge of right and wrong, the third to the prac
tical instinct with its love of visible achievement.
Now here we have the suggestions of three different
sermons. The message which we have to bring is
the same message, but we bring it to three different
doors of the same manhood which it desires to enter.
And one preacher will bring his message oftenest to
one door, appealing mostly in his sermons to the soul,
or to the conscience, or to the practical sense. And
one congregation or one generation will have one door
134 LECTURES ON PREA CHINO.
more open than the others, its circumstances in some
way making it most approachable upon that side.
Here is the free room for the personal differences
of men to play within the great unity of the sermon
idea. Among the great French preachers there has
always been drawn an evident distinction correspond
ing very nearly to this which I have denned. Massil-
lon is the interpreter of the religious instinct, speak
ing to the heart. Bossuet is the preacher of dogma,
appealing to the conscience. Bourdaloue is the
preacher of morality, addressing himself to reason.
Either of these sermons may be of the expository or
of the topical sort. All of them are able to bring
Christ in some one of His offices to men, as Priest,
Prophet, or King. Each of them is capable of blend
ing with another. There is no such distinction be
tween them that we may not find a great sermon here
and there where the three are met, and where Christ
in His completeness as the satisfaction of the loving
heart, as the convicter and guide of the awakened
conscience, and as the hope and inspiration of a
laboring humanity, is perfectly set forth. According
to the largeness of your own Christian life will be
your power to preach that largest sermon. Only I
beg you to remember in what different ways sermons
m&y all be messages of the Lord. Let it save you
from the monotonous narrowness of one eternally
repeated sermon. And, what is far more important,
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 135
let it keep you from ever daring to say with cruel flip
pancy of some brother who brings his message to an
other door of humanity from you, that he " does not
preach Christ."
The best sermon of any time is that time s best
utterance. More than its most ingenious invention or
its most highly organized government, it declares the
point which that time has reached. So I think that a
man s best sermon is the best utterance of his life. It
embodies and declares him. If it is really his, it tells
more of him than his casual intercourse with his
friends, or even the revelations of his domestic life.
If it is really God s message through him, it brings
him out in a way that no other experience of his life
has power to do, as the quality of the trumpet de
clares itself more clearly when the strong man blows
a blast for battle through it than when a child
whispers into it in play. Kemember this, experience
it in yourself, and then, when you hear your brother
preach, honor the work that he is doing and listen as
reverently as you can to hear through him some voice
of God. They say that brother ministers make the
most critical and least responsive hearers. I have not
found them so. I have found them always fullest of
sympathy. It would be much to their discredit and
excite serious suspicions of their work if their mere
familiarity with its details made them less ready to
feel its spirit and to submit to its power. It is not
136 LECTURES ON PPEA UHINO.
so. Do not begin by thinking that it is so, and you
will not find it so.
I should like to devote part of what time remains
to-day to some suggestions about the true subjects of
sermons. I used a few minutes ago the phrase
" preaching Christ " ; and, without cant, it is Christ
that we are to preach. But what is Christ ? " The
saving power of the world," we say. Where is His
power, then, to reach ? Wherever men are wrong ;
wherever men are capable of being better ; wherever
His authority and love can make them better. Wher
ever the abundance of sin has gone, there the abun
dance of grace must go. There you and I, as ministers
of grace, are bound to carry it. I confess that at the
very first statement of it this idea of Christ opens
to me a range of the subjects, with which it is the
preacher s duty and right to deal, which seems to
have no limit.
But let us go more into particulars. We hear to
day a great deal about how desirable it is that the
pulpit, partly because it is, and partly that it may
more fully be, a power, should deal more directly
than it does with the special conditions of the time,
with the special vices and the special needs of the
days in which we live. It is urged that we ought to
hear more often than we do now from our preachers
concerning the right use of wealth, concerning the ex
travagance of society, concerning impurity and licenti-
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 137
ousness, concerning the prevalent lack of thorough
ness in our hurried life, concerning political corrup
tion and misrule. I believe the claim is absolutely
right. I believe no powerful pulpit ever held aloof
from the moral life of the community it lived in, as
the practice of many preachers, and the theory of
some, would make our pulpit separate itself and con
fine its message to what are falsely discriminated as
spiritual things. But with regard to this interest of
the pulpit in the moral conditions of the day, while
I most heartily and even enthusiastically assert its
necessity, I want to make one or two suggestions. The
first is, that nowhere more than here ought the per
sonal differences of ministers to be regarded. Some
men s minds work abstractly, and others work con
cretely. One man sees sin as an awful, all-pervading
spiritual presence; another cannot recognize sin un
less he sees it incarnated in some special vicious act,
which some man is doing here in his own town. One
man owns holiness as an unseen spirit ; to another,
holiness is vague, but good deeds strike his enthusi
asm and stir him to delight and imitation. Now,
neither of these men must ask the other man to
preach just in his way. The first man must not call
the second a " mere moralist " ; the second must not
answer back by calling his accuser a pietist. Grant
ing that the preacher must attack the special sins
around him, it is not true that every preacher, be the
138 LECTURES ON PEE A CUING.
nature of his genius what it may, must be goaded
and driven to it. It is good for us that there should
be some men to preach, as it would not be well that
all men should preach, of truth in its pure, invariable
essence, and of duty in its primary idea, as it issues a
yet undivided stream from the fountain of the will of
God.
But again, the method in which the pulpit ought to
approach the topics of the time is even more import
ant. It seems to me to be involved, if we can find it
there, in the perfectly commonplace and familiar state
ment that the visible, moral conditions of any life, or
any age, are only symptoms of spiritual conditions
which are the essential thing. But what is the mean
ing and value of a symptom ? Are there not two ?
A symptom is valuable, first, as a sign and test of in
ward processes which it is impossible to observe di
rectly, and it has a secondary value under the law of
reaction, by which a wise restraint applied to the re
sult may often tend to weaken and help destroy the
cause. How, then, are symptoms to be treated ? Al
ways with reference to the unseen conditions which
they manifest. They are to be examined as tests of
what these conditions are, and they are to be acted
upon, not for themselves, but in the hope of reach
ing those conditions in behind them. Apply all this.
You and I are preachers in the midst of a corrupt
community. All kinds of evil practices are rife
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 139
around us. We know it is the first truth of the re
ligion which we preach that these evil practices are
not the real essential evil. It is the heart estranged
from God, the soul gone wrong, the unseen springs
of manhood out of order, upon which our eye is
always fastened, and to which alone we know the
remedy can be applied. What have we, then, to do
with these evil practices, which we see only as the
outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual
disgrace ? Just what I said above : First, honestly
treat them as tests ; honestly own that, so long as
these exist, and wherever these exist, the spiritual
condition is not right; frankly admit of any man,
whatever his professions of emotional experience,
whatever he believes, whatever he " feels," that if he
does bad things he is not a good man. So cordially
put the spiritual processes of which you preach within
the judgment of all men who know a good life from a
bad one. And in the second place strike at the symp
tom always for the sake of the disease. Aim at all
kinds of vicious acts. Eebuke dishonesty, licentious
ness, drunkenness, cruelty, extravagance, but always
strike in the interest of the soul to which you are a
messenger, of which your Master has given you part
of the care. Never let men feel that you and your
gospel would be satisfied with mere decency, with the
putting down of all vicious life that left the vicious
character still strong behind. Surely such a protest
10
140 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
against vice as this ought to be far more earnest,
more uncompromising, more self-sacrificing than one
that worked on lower motives and took shorter views.
It can make no concessions. It strikes at all vices
alike. It will not merely try to exchange one vice
for another. It will hate vices more deeply in pro
portion as it realizes the depth of sin.
Do not these two methods of dealing with all
symptoms describe the true attitude of the Christian
preacher toward the evident vicious practices by
which he is surrounded ? Conceiving of them thus,
he is neither the abstract religionist devoted to the
fostering of certain spiritual conditions, heedless of
how they show their worth or worthlessness in the
moral life which they produce ; nor is he the enlight
ened economist, weighing with anxious heart the evil
of sins, but knowing nothing of the sinfulness of
sin from which they come. He is the messenger of
Christ to the soul of man always. His sermon about
temperance, or the late election, or the wickedness of
oppression, is not an exception, an intrusion in the
current of that preaching which is always testifying
of the spiritual salvation. He is ready to speak on
any topic of the day, but his sermon is not likely to
be mistaken for an article from some daily news
paper. It looks at the topic from a loftier height,
traces the trouble to a deeper source, and is not satis
fied except with a more thorough cure.
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 141
I do not know of any other principles than these
which can be applied to the somewhat disputed ques
tion of political preaching. These seem to me suffi
cient. I despise, and call upon you to despise, all the
weak assertions that a minister must not preach poli
tics because he will injure his influence if he does, or
because it is unworthy of his sacred office. The in
fluence that needs such watching may well be allowed
to die, and the more sacred the preacher s office is
the more he is bound to care for all the interests of
every child of God. But apply the principles which
I laid down, and I think we have a better rule. See
in the political condition the indication of the nation s
spiritual state, and aim in all you say about public
affairs, not simply at securing order and peace, but
at making good men, who shall constitute a " holy
nation." The first result of the application of these
principles will bo that only a true moral issue will
provoke your utterance. You will not turn the pul
pit into a place whence you can throw out your little
scheme for settling a party quarrel or securing a party
triumph. But when some clear question of right and
wrong presents itself, and men with some strong pas
sion or sordid interest are going wrong, then your
sermon is a poor, untimely thing if it deals only with
the abstractions of eternity, and has no word to help
the men who are dizzied with the whirl and blinded
with the darkness of to-day. It was good to be a
142 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
minister during the war of the Kebellion. A clear,
strong moral issue stood out plain, and the preacher
had his duty as sharply marked as the soldiers. That
is not the case in the same clear way now. It will
riot ordinarily be so. But still, the ordinary talk
about ministers not having any power in politics is
not true. In a land like ours, where the tone of the
people is of vast value in public affairs, the preachers
who have so much to do in the creation of the popu
lar tone must always have their part in politics.
I close this lecture with three suggestions, on which
I had meant to dwell at large, but I have used up all
my time.
You never can make a sermon what it ought to be
if you consider it alone. The service that accom
panies it, the prayer and praise, must have their in
fluence upon it.
The sermon must never set a standard which it is
not really meant that men should try to realize in life.
No sermon to one s own people can ever be con
ceived as if it were the only one. It must be part of
a long culture, working with all the others.
And yet, in spite of all these definitions and sug
gestions, I beg you to go away believing that the idea
of the sermon is not a complicated, but a very simple
thing.
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON.
T AM to speak to you to-day about the making of a
-*- sermon, and if you compare their titles you will
see in what relation this lecture and the last stand to
each other, for the make of a sermon must always
be completely dependent upon the idea of a sermon.
The idea is perfectly supreme. It is the formative
power to which all accidents must bow. If any rule
of the composition or form contradicts the idea, it is
rebellious and must be sacrificed without a scruple.
I have heard sermons where it was evident that some
upstart rule of form was in rebellion against the essen
tial idea, and the idea was not strong enough to put
the rebellion down, and the result was that the ser
mon, like a country in the tumult of rebellion, had
neither peace nor power. What I say to-day, then,
is in subordination to what I said before. Any law of
execution which I may lay down that is inconsistent
with the idea and purpose of preaching is an intruder
and must be thrust aside.
The elements which determine the make of any par-
148
144 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
ticular sermon are three ; the preacher, the material,
and the audience ; just as the character of any battle
is determined by three elements : the gun (including
the gunner), the ammunition, and the fortress against
which the attack is made. The reason why a sermon
preached last Sunday in the Church of St. John Lat-
eran at Eome differed from the sermon preached in
the First Congregational Church of New Haven must
have been partly that the preacher was a different
sort of man, partly that the truth which he wanted
to preach was different, partly that the man he wished
to touch and influence was different, at least in his
conception. Make these three elements exactly alike,
and all sermons must be perfectly identical. It is be
cause these three elements are never exactly the same,
and yet there always is a true resemblance, that we
have all sermons unlike one another and yet a certain
similarity running through them all. No two men
are precisely similar, or think of truth alike, or sea
the men to whom they speak in the same light. Con
sequently the make of every man s sermon must be
different from the make of every other man s. Nay,
we may carry this farther. No live man at any one mo
ment is just the same as himself at any other moment,
nor does he see truth always alike, nor do men always
look to him the same ; and therefore in his sermons
there must be the same general identity combined
with perpetual variety which there is in his life. His
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 145
sermons will be all alike and yet unlike each other.
And the making of every sermon, while it may follow
the same general rules, will be a fresh and vital pro
cess, with the zest and freedom of novelty about it.
This is the first thing that I wish to say. Establish
this truth in your minds and then independence
comes. Then you can stand in the right attitude to
look at rules of sermon-making which come out of
other men s experience. You can take them as help
ful friends and not as arrogant masters. I wish that
not merely in sermon-writing but in all of life we
could all come to understand that independence and
the refusal to imitate and repeat other people s lives
may come from true modesty as well as from pride.
To be independent of man s dictation is simply to de
clare that we must live the special life which God has
marked out for us and which He has indicated in the
. special powers which we discover in ourselves. We
are fit for no other life. There can be nothing more
modest than that. It is not pride when the beech-tree
refuses to copy the oak. He knows his limitations.
The only chance of any healthy life for him is to be
as full a beech-tree as he can. Apply all that, and
out of sheer modesty refuse to try to be any kind of
preacher which God did not make you to be.
The lack of flexibility in the preacher, resulting in
the lack of variety in the sermon, has very much to
do with our imperfect education. The true result of
146 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
education is to develop in the individual that of which
I have been speaking, the clear consciousness of iden
tity, together with a wide range of variety. The really
educated man will be always distinctly himself and
yet never precisely the same that he was at any other
moment. His personality will be trained both in the
persistency of its central stock and in its susceptibility
and responsiveness to manifold impressions. He will
have at once a stronger stand and a wider play of
character. But an uneducated man will be either
monotonously and doggedly the same, or else full of
fickle alteration. The defects of our education are
seen in the way in which it sometimes produces the
narrow and obstinate specialist, sometimes the vague
and feeble amateur in many works, but not often the
strong man who has at once clear individuality and
wide range of sympathy and action. This is the
kind of man that the preacher above all ought to be.
Education alone, thorough education, nothing but
true, wise, devoted study, can make him so. Educa
tion alone gives a man at once a good stand and a
good outlook It is the Frenchman s rule for fen
cing, " Bon pied, bon ceil," a good foot and a good eye.
As I begin to speak to you about literary style and
homiletical construction, I cannot help once more
urging upon you the need of hard and manly study ;
not simply the study of language and style itself, but
study in its broader sense, the study of truth, of his-
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 147
tory, of philosophy ; for no man can have a richly
stored mind without its influencing the style in which
he writes and speaks, making it at once thoroughly
his own, and yet giving it variety and saving it from
monotony. I suppose the power of an uneducated
man like Mr. Moody is doing something to discredit
the necessity of study among ministers and to tempt
men to rely upon spontaneousness and inspiration. I
honour Mr. Moody, and rejoice in much of the work
that he is doing, but if his success had really this
effect it would be a very serious deduction from its
value. When you see such a man, you are to con
sider both his exceptioualness and his limitations.
In some respects he is a very remarkable and unusual
man, and therefore not a man out of whom ordinary
men can make a rule. And his work, valuable as it
is, stops short at a clear line. He leaves undone
what nothing but an educated ministry can do, and
he who is most filled with thankfulness and admira
tion at that man s career ought to go the more
earnestly to his books to try to be such a preacher
as can help fulfil the work which the great revivalist
begins.
Every preacher s sermon style, then, ought to be
his own; that is the first principle of sermon-mak
ing. " The style is the man," said Buffon. Only we
must remember that the man is not something in
variable. He is capable of improvement. He is
148 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
something different when he is tilled with know
ledge and affection and enthusiasm, from what he
was in his first emptiness. The practical conclusion,
then, that will come from our first principle will not
be simply that every preacher is to accept himself
just as he finds himself, and hope for nothing better ;
but rather this, that style is capable of indefinite
cultivation, only that its main cultivation must come
through the cultivation of the man ; not by mere criti
cal discipline of language, which at the best can only
produce correctness, but by lifting the whole man to
a more generous and exalted life, which is the only
thing that can make a style truly noble. I think,
indeed, that the question as to wherein lies the
power of a sermon style corresponds very largely
with the question about the inspiration of the Scrip
tures. Various ideas have prevailed about the point
in which was lodged that quality of the Bible which
makes us separate it from other books and talk about
it as inspired. One idea of inspiration puts it in tha
language, and supposes each word to be a dictation of
the Holy Ghost. Another idea puts it in the writer,
and supposes, with a profounder philosophy, that the
power of exalted and truthful utterance was a truth
ful and exalted soul. Another idea puts it in the
material. The history itself was full of God, and when
men wrote that God-filled history their writings were
different from other men s, more full of the divine
atmosphere, because of the strauge divine character of
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON 149
the things they wrote about. And so the sennori comes
forth peculiar. Wherein does its peculiarity reside ?
Is it that a certain language, certain forms of speech,
belong there which do not belong to other literature ?
Is it that the sermon-writer is in a condition and an
attitude that no other man ever quite assumes ? Is it
that the subjects with which the sermon deals are
more solemn, and more touching, more divine than
any others ? No doubt all three ideas are true in their
degrees, but no doubt, also, he who looks to the deepest
truth in the matter will get the deeper power. He
who aspires to the strength of truth and character
will be a stronger man than he who tries to prevail
by the finish and completeness of his language.
The history of a particular sermon begins with the
selection of a topic. Ordinarily, except in purely ex
pository preaching, that comes before the selection
of a text. And the ease and readiness of this selec
tion depend upon the richness of a man s own life,
and the naturalness of his conception of a sermon.
I can conceive of but two things which should cause
the preacher any difficulty in regard to the abundance
of subjects for his preaching. The first is the sterility
of his own mind, the second is a stilted and unnatural
idea of what the sermon he is going to write must be.
Let the man s own mind be everywhere else except
upon the things of God, let his own spiritual life be
meagre and uusuggestive, let him feel no developing
150 LEOT URES ON PRBA CHI NO.
power in his own experience, and I can see him sitting
in despair or hurrying hither and thither in distrac
tion, as the day approaches when he must talk of some
thing, and he has nothing of which to talk. Or let
him once get the idea that every sermon, or that any
particular sermon, is to be a great sermon, a " pulpit-
effort," as the dreadful epithet runs, and again he
is all lost. Which of these quiet, simple, practical
themes that offer themselves is suitable to bear the
aspirations and contortions of his eloquence ? The
first of the difficulties I say no more about, only be
cause I seem to have talked to you of nothing else
than the way in which there must be a man behind
every sermon, though, indeed, I do think that the
most important, I had almost said the only important,
thing in this matter of learning to preach. But I say
no more of that just now. This other matter let me
dwell on for a moment. The notion of a great
sermon, either constantly or occasionally haunting the
preacher, is fatal. It hampers, as I said, the freedom
of utterance. Many a true and helpful word which
your people need, and which you ought to say to
them, will seem unworthy of the dignity of your
great discourse. Some poor exhorter coming along
the next week, and saying it, will sweep the last recol
lection of your selfish achievement out of the minds
of people. Never tolerate any idea of the dignity of
a sermon which will keep you from saying anything
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 151
in it which you ought to say, or which your people
ought to hear. It is the same folly as making your
chair so fine that you dare not sit down in it. There
will come great, or at least greater sermons in every
live minister s career, sermons which will stand out
for vigor and beauty, distinctly above his ordinary
work, but they will come without deliberation, the
dowers of his ministry, the offspring of moments
which found his powers at their best activity and him
most regardless of effect. It is good and encourag
ing, it helps one s faith in human nature, and it has
an influence to keep us from the pulpit s besetting
follies, when we see how universally the deliberate
attempt to make great sermons fails. They never
have the influence, and they very seldom win the
praise, that they desire. The sermons of which no
body speaks, the sermons which come from mind and
heart, and go to heart and mind with as little con
sciousness as possible of tongue and ear, those are
the sermons that do the work, that make men better
men, and really sink into their affections. They are
like the perfect days when no man says, " How fine
it is," but when every man does his best work and
feels most fully what a blessed thing it is to live.
I think, too, that this wrong notion about sermons
has led to a great deal of the bad talk which is run
ning about now among both clergymen and laymen
about the excessive amount of preaching. " How is
152 LECTURES ON PEEA CHINO.
it possible," they say, " that any man should bring
forth two strong, good sermons every week ? It is
impossible. Let us have only one sermon every Sun
day ; and if the people will insist on coming twice to
the church, let us cheat them with a little poor music
and a few remarks, and call it vesper service, or let
us tell a few stories to the Sunday-school, and call it
children s church ; but let us not preach twice to
men and women. It is impossible." It is impossible,
if by a sermon you intend a finished oration. It is
as impossible to produce that twice as it is undesir
able to produce it once a week. But that a man who
lives with God, whose delight is to study God s words
in the Bible, in the world, in history, in human na
ture, who is thinking about Christ, and man, and sal
vation every day that he should not be able to talk
about these things of his heart seriously, lovingly,
thoughtfully, simply, for two half-hours every week,
is inconceivable, and I do not believe it. Cast off
the haunting incubus of the notion of great sermons.
Care not for your sermon, but for your truth, and for
your people ; and subjects will spring up on every
side of you, and the chances to preach upon them will
be all too few. I beg you not to fall into this foolish
talk about too much preaching. It is not for us min
isters to say that there is no need of more than one
discourse a day. If you have anything to say, and
say it bravely and simply, men will come to hear you.
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 153
If you will preach as faithfully and thoughtfully at
the second service as at the first, the second service
will not be deserted. At any rate, it is our place to
stand by our pulpits till men have deserted us, and
not, for the sake of saving our own credit, to shut the
church doors while they are still ready to come and
hear.
But to return more closely to our subject ; having
settled in general what topics may be preached upon,
how shall the topic for a single sermon, the sermon
for next Sunday, be selected ? I answer that there
are three principles which have a right to enter into
the decision. They are the bent of the preacher s in
clination, the symmetry and " scale " of all his preach
ing, and the peculiar needs of his people. I mention
the three in the order in which they are apt to pre
sent themselves to the minister as he makes his choice.
Keverse that order, begin with the last, and you
have the elements of a right choice rightly arranged.
First comes the sympathetic and wise perception of
what the people need ; not necessarily what they con
sciously want, though, remember, no more necessa
rily what they do not want. This perception is not
the sudden result of an impression that has come
from some lively conversation which has sprung up
on a parish visit, not the desire to confute the cavil
of some single captious disputant ; it is the aggregate
effect of a large sympathetic intercourse, the fruit of
154 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
a true knowledge of human nature, combined with a
special knowledge of these special people, and a cor
dial interest in the circumstances under which they
live. That evidently is no easy thing to win. It re
quires of a minister that timeliness and that breadth
which it is very hard to find in union with each other.
It is not something to be picked up in the easy inti
macy of parochial visiting. It may be helped there,
but it must be born of an alert mind fully interested
in the times in which it lives, and a devout soul really
loving the souls with which it has to deal
The second element of choice, the desire to preserve
a symmetry and proportion in our preaching, of
course comes in to modify the action of the first.
Not merely by our present perception of what people
need, but in relation to our whole scheme of teaching,
to what has gone before and what is to come after,
the subject of next Sunday is to be selected. I have
suggested to you in another lecture how great a help
the ancient calendar of the Church year is in this
respect. The prolonged and connected course of ser
mons is a safeguard against mere flightiness and par-
tialness in the choice of topics. The only serious
danger about a course of sermons is, that where the
serpent grows too long it is difficult to have the
vitality distributed through all his length, and even
to his last extremity. Too many courses of sermons
start with a very vital head, that draws behind it by
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 155
and by a very lifeless tail. The head springs and the
tail crawls, and so the beast makes no graceful pro
gress. I think that a set and formally announced
course of sermons very seldom preserves both its
symmetry and its interest. The system of long
courses is apt to secure proportion at too great an
expense of spontaneity. The only sure means of
securing the result is orderliness in the preacher s
mind; the grasp of Christian truth as a system,
and of the Christian life as a steady movement of
the whole nature through Christ to the Father.
Then comes the third principle by which the choice
is regulated, the principle that a man can preach best
about what he at that moment wishes to preach
about, the element of the preacher s own disposition.
You can see why it should not be made the first ele
ment. I could tell you of pulpits which have sinned
and failed by making it the first element. But you
can see, also, why it must come in at least as the
third element. It gives the freshness and joyousness
and spring to the other two. You cannot think of a
people listening with pleasure or vivacity to a sermon
on a subject which they knew the minister thought
they needed to hear about, and thought the time had
come to preach about, but which they also knew that
he did not care for, and did not want to preach upon.
The personal interest of the preacher is the buoyant
air that fills the mass and lifts it.
11
156 L EOT URES ON PEE A CHING.
These three considerations, then, settle the sermon s
topic. Evidently neither is sufficient by itself. The
sermon preached only with reference to the people s
needs is heavy. The sermon preached for symmetry
is formal. The sermon preached with sole reference
to the preacher s wish is whimsical. The constant
consideration of all three makes preaching always
strong and always fresh. When all three urgently
unite to settle the topic of some special sermon I do
not see why we may not prepare that sermon in a
solemn exhilaration, feeling sure that it is God s will
that we should preach upon that topic then ; and,
when it is written, go forth with it on Sunday to our
pulpit, declaring, almost with the certainty of one of
the old prophets, " The Word of the Lord came
unto me, saying."
Let me add this, that the meeting of these various
elements of choice is clearest when the selection is
most deliberate. Always have the topic of your
sermon in your mind as long as possible before
you begin your preparation. Whatever else is hasty
and extemporaneous, let it not be your decision as to
what you will preach about.
The subject chosen, next will come the special pre
paration for the sermon. This ought to consist mostly
in bringing together, and arranging, and illuminating
a knowledge of the subject and thought about it
THE MAKINV OP THE SERMON. 157
which has already been in the possession of the
preacher. I think that the less of special prepara
tion that is needed for a sermon, the better the
sermon is. The best sermon would be that whose
thoughts, though carefully arranged, and lighted up
with every illustration that could make them clearer
for this special appearance, were all old thoughts,
familiar to the preacher s mind, long a part of his ex
perience. Here is suggested, as you see, a clear and
important difference between two kinds of preachers.
One preacher depends for his sermon on special read
ing. Each discourse is the result of work done in
the week in which it has been written. All his study
is with reference to some immediately pressing occa
sion. Another preacher studies and thinks with far
more industry, is always gathering truth into his
mind, but it is not gathered with reference to the
next sermon. It is truth sought for truth s sake, and
for that largeness and ripeness and fulness of char
acter which alone can make him a strong preacher.
Which is the better method ? The latter beyond all
doubt. In the first place, the man of special prepara
tions is always crude ; he is always tempted to take
up some half-considered thought that strikes him in
the hurry of his reading, and adopt it suddenly, and
set it before his people, as if it were his true convic
tion. Many a minister s old sermons are scattered all
158 LECTURES ON PREA CHINO.
over with ideas which he never held, but which once
held him for a week, like the camps in other men s
forests where a wandering hunter has slept for a
single night. The looseness and falseness, the weak
ening of the essential sacredness of conviction which
must come from years of such work, any one may
see. And in the second place, the immediate pre
paration for a sermon is something that the people
always feel. They know the difference between a
sermon that has been crammed, and a sermon which
has been thought long before, and of which only the
form, and the illustrations, and the special develop
ments, and the application of the thought, are new.
Some preachers are always preaching the last book
which they have read, and their congregations always
find it out. The feeling of superficialness and thin
ness attaches to all they do. The exegesis of a pas
sage which the man never thought of till he began to
preach about it may be clever and suggestive, but it
inspires no confidence. I do not rest on it with even
that amount of assurance which the same man s
careful study would inspire. It is got up for the
occasion. It is like a politician s opinions just before
election. But the strongest reason for the rule which
I am stating comes from the very nature of the
sermon on which I have dwelt so much. The sermon
is truth and man together ; it is the truth brought
through the man. The personal element is essential,
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 159
Now the truth which the preacher has gathered on
Friday for the sermon which he preaches on Sunday
has come across the man, but it has not come
through the man. It has never been wrought into
his experience. It comes weighted and winged with
none of his personal life. If it is true, it is a book s
truth, not a man s truth that we get. It does not
make a full, real sermon.
If I am right in this idea, then it will follow that
the preacher s life must be a life of large accumula
tion. He must not be always trying to make sermons,
but always seeking truth, and out of the truth
which he has won the sermons will make themselves.
I can remember how, before I began to preach, every
book I read seemed to spring into a sermon. It
seemed as if one could read nothing without sitting
down instantly and turning it into a discourse, But
as I began and went on preaching, the sermons that
came of special books became less and less satisfac
tory and more and more rare. Some truth which
one has long known, stirred to peculiar activity by
something that has happened or by contact with
some other mind, makes the best sermon ; as the best
dinner comes not from a hurried raid upon the
caterer s, but from the resources of a constantly
well-furnished house. Constant quotations in ser
mons are, I think, a sign of the same crudeness.
They show an undigested knowledge. They lose the
160 LECTURES ON PEE A CHINQ.
power of personality. They daub the wall with un-
tempered mortar. Here is the need of broad and
generous culture. Learn to study for the sake of
truth, learn to think for the profit and the joy of
thinking. Then your sermons shall be like the
leaping of a fountain and not like the pumping of
a pump.
For over six hundred years now it has been the
almost invariable custom of Christian preachers to
take a text from Scripture and associate their thoughts
more or less strictly with that. For the first twelve
Christian centuries there seems to have been no such
prevailing habit. This fact ought to be kept in mind
whenever the custom of a text shows any tendency to
become despotic or to restrain in any way the liberty
of prophesying. At the present day there can be no
doubt that the change in the way of considering the
Bible which belongs to our times has had an influence
upon our feeling with regard to texts and our treat
ment of them. The unity of the Bible, the relation
of its parts, its organic life, the essentialness of every
part, and yet the distinct difference in worth and dig
nity of the several parts, these are now familiar ideas
as they were not a few years ago. There was a time
when to many people the Bible stood, not merely a
collection of various books, all equally the Word of
God, all equally useful to men, but also as a succes
sion of verses, all true, all edifying, all vital with the
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 161
Gospel. A page of the Bible torn out at random and
blown into some savage island seemed to have in it
some power of salvation. The result of such a feel
ing was, of course, to clothe the single text with inde
pendent sacredness and meaning. It hardly mat
tered from what part of the Bible it might come.
Solomon s Songs and St. John s Gospel were preached
from as if they taught the same truth with the same
authority. The cynical author of the Ecclesiastes
was made to utter the same message as the hopeful
and faithful St. Paul. This is not the place to re
count the causes for the change, nor to estimate its
value or its dangers. Considered simply as it has
affected the preacher s relation to the Bible, I think
there can be no doubt of the improvement it has
brought. It has made the single text of less import
ance. It has led men to desire an entrance into the
heart and spirit of the Bible. It has made biblical
study to consist, not in the weighing of text against
text, but in the estimating of great streams of tend
ency, the following of great lines of thought, the ap
prehension of the spirit of great spiritual thinkers who
" had the mind of Christ." The single verse is no
longer like a jewel set in a wall which one may pluck
out and carry off as an independent thing. It is a
window by which we may look through the wall and
see the richness it incloses. Taken out of its place it
has no value. To enter thoroughly into the spirit of
162 LECT URES ON PEE A CHINU.
this new and better relation to the Bible seems to me
to be all that the preacher needs to guide him with
reference to the selection and the use of texts. Make
them always windows. Go up and look through
them and then tell the people what you see. Keep
them in their places in the wall of truth. I would
not say that it is not good to use them, though cer
tainly there may be true sermons without them.
They are like golden nails to hold our preaching to
the Bible. Whether the subject spring out of the
text as stating the divine philosophy that underlies
some Scripture incident, or the text spring out of the
subject as describing some incident that illustrates
divine philosophy, is unimportant. There are both
kinds of sermons and both kinds are good. Only, as
one rule that has no exceptions, let your use of texts
be real. Never make them mean what they do not
mean. In the name of taste and reverence alike, let
there be no twists and puns, no dealing with the
word of God as it would be insulting to deal with the
word of any friend. The Bible has suffered in the
hands of many Christian preachers what the block of
wood which the savage chooses for his idol suffers
from its worshipper. The same selection which con
secrates it as more sacred than other blocks of wood
condemns it also to have all his ugly fancies and fan
tastic conceits painted and carved upon it. It is the
most sacred and most hideous block of wood in the
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 163
village. So the sacredness of the Bible has subjected
it to a usage that no other book has received. Such
a fantastic and irreverent way of manifesting our
reverence has lasted too long. It is time that it were
stopped. I beg you to do what you can to stop it.
At least make your own use of the Bible reverent
and true. Never draw out of a text a meaning which
you know is not there. If your text has not your
truth in it, find some other text which has. If you
can find no text for it in the Bible, then preach on
something else.
I pass on to a few remarks, which will be mere
suggestions, about the style of sermons. The matter
will control the style if it is free. The object of
every training of style is to make it so simple and
flexible an organ that through it the moving and
changing thought can utter itself freely. I pity any
man who writes the same upon all topics. He is evi
dently a slave to himself. To be yourself, yet not to
be haunted by an image of yourself to which you are
continually trying to correspond, that is the secret of
a style at once characteristic and free. I go to hear a
preacher whose style is peculiarly his own, and very
often indeed I find him a slave to his own peculiari
ties. He must not think anything except what is
capable of being said in a certain way. A true style
is like a suit of the finest chain armor, so strong that
the thought can go into battle with it, but so flexible
164 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
that it can hold the pencil in its steel fingers for the
most delicate painting. For the acquisition of such
a style no labor is too great. I think that it is good
for every minister to write something besides ser
mons, books, articles, essays, at least letters ; pro
vided he has control of himself and still remains the
preacher, and does not become an amateur in litera
ture instead. If he can do it rightly, it frees him
from the tyranny of himself, and keeps him in con
tact with larger standards. Some of our noblest
thinkers fail of effect for want of an organ of utter
ance, a free pulpit-style. The trouble with them,
often, is that they never wrote anything but sermons.
Indeed I do not think there is any such thing as a
sermon-style proper. He who can write other things
well, give him the soul and purpose and knowledge
of a preacher and he will write you a good sermon.
But he who cannot write anything well cannot write
a sermon well, although we often think he can. To
him who has no literary skill all subjects are alike.
If you cannot swim, it matters not whether there be
twenty or forty feet of water.
In a word, then, I should say, get facility of utter
ance where you can ; in part at least, outside of
sermon- writing. Make your style characteristic and
forcible by never writing unless you have something
that you really want to say ; then let the changes of
your truth freely play within it and shape its special
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 165
forms. A style which is really a man s own will
grow as long as he grows. One of the best things
about Macaulay s life is his belief that as a writer
he was improving to the last. It belonged to that
vitality of which the man and the writing were both
so full.
The range of sermon- writing gives it a capacity of
various vices which no other kind of composition
can presume to rival. The minister may sin in the
same sermon by grandiloquence and meanness, by
exaggeration and inadequacy. He needs a many-
sided watchfulness, or rather a perfectly true literary
nature, in order that he may do what Eoger Ascharn
so quaintly and tellingly sums up thus : " In Genere
Sublimi to avoid Nimium, in Mediocri to atteyne
Satis, in Humili to eschew Parum." The way that
he advises to do it is to study Cicero. Certainly,
stated more generally, the true way is to know first
what style is for, that it is an instrument and not an
end, and then as an instrument to perfect it by
every noble intimacy and laborious practice.
It would be impossible to speak of this matter of
style without saying something of the danger of imi
tation and the way to guard against it. It is con
nected with that personalness of the work of preach
ing about which I have said so much. A successful
preacher is not like a successful author. He stands
out himself more prominently through his work.
166 LECTURES ON PREA CHINO.
Men realize him more and feel in themselves the
same powers by which he has succeeded. A mere
finished result such as the author gives us in his
book does not excite the desire of imitation like the
sight of the process going on in personal action be
fore us in the pulpit. This is the reason why those
preachers whose power has in it the largest element
of personality are the richest in imitators. There are
some strong voices crying in the wilderness who fill
the land with echoes. There are some preachers who
have done noble work of whom we are often com
pelled to question whether the work that they have
accomplished is after all greater than the harm that
they have innocently done by spoiling so many men
in doing it. They have gone through the ministry,
as a savage goes through the forest, blazing his way
upon the trees that stand around him, so that you can
tell as you travel through the land just where they
have been by the tones of voice and the turns of sen
tences which they have left behind them. They leave
their imitators behind them when they die, and in a
sense which is not pleasant, " being dead, yet speak."
Often the circle of one man s influence widens, grow
ing feebler and feebler until it meets the wave that is
spreading from another centre, another popular pulpit,
and only there they obliterate each other, and calmness
is restored and freedom to be one s self is reasserted.
The dangers of imitation are two one positive,
7777? MAKING OF THE SERMON. 16 7
the other negative. There is evil in what you get
from him whom you imitate and there is a loss of your
own peculiar power. The positive evil comes from
the fact that that which is worst in any man is al
ways the most copiable. And the spirit of the copy
ist is blind. He cannot discern the real seat of the
power that he admires. He fixes on some little thing
and repeats that perpetually, as if so he could get the
essential greatness of his hero. There is a passage
in Macaulay s diary which is full of philosophy. " I
looked through ," he says. " He is, I see, an imi
tator of me. But I am a very unsafe model. My
manner is, I think, and the world thinks, on the
whole a good one, but it is very near to a very bad
manner indeed, and those clear characteristics of my
style which are the most easily copied are the most
questionable." All this is very true of ministers.
There is hardly any good pulpit-style among us which
is not very near to a very bad style indeed, and the
most prominent characteristics are very often the
most questionable. The obtuseness of the imitator
is amazing. I remember going years ago with an in
telligent friend to hear a great orator lecture. The
discourse was rich, thoughtful, glowing, and delight
ful. As we came away my companion seemed medi
tative. By and by he said, " Did you see where his
power lay ? " I felt unable to analyze and epitomize
in an instant such a complex result, and meekly I
168 LECTURES ON PEE A CHINQ.
said, " No, did you ? " " Yes," he replied briskly, " I
watched him and it is in the double motion of his
hand. When he wanted to solemnize and calm and
subdue us he turned the palm of his hand down ;
when he wanted to elevate and inspire us he turned
the palm of his hand up. That was it." And that
was all the man had seen in an eloquent speech. He
was no fool, but he was an imitator. He was looking
for a single secret for a multifarious effect. I suppose
he has gone on from that day to this turning his
hand upside down and downside up and wondering
that nobody is either solemnized or inspired.
The negative evil of imitation, the loss of a man s
own personal power, is even more evident and more
melancholy. If it were only the men who were in
capable of any manner of their own that caught up
other people s manners it would not be so bad, but
often strong men do it. Men imitate others who are
every way their inferiors, and so some pretentious
blockhead not merely gives us himself, but loses for
us the simple and straightforward power of some bet
ter man, as a log of wood lodged just in the neck of
the channel stops the water of a free, live stream.
I am convinced that the only escape from the
power of imitation when it has once touched us and
remember it often touches us without our conscious
ness ; you and I may be imitating other men to-day
and not at all aware of it lies in a deeper serious-
TEE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 169
ness about all our work. What we need is a fuller
sense of personal responsibility and a more real rev
erence for the men who are greater than we are.
Give a man real personal sense of his own duty and
he must do it in his own way. The temptation of
imitation is so insidious that you cannot resist it by
the mere determination that you will not imitate.
You must bring a real self of your own to meet this
intrusive self of another man that is crowding in
upon you. Cultivate your own sense of duty. The
only thing that keeps the ocean from flowing back
into the river is that the river is always pouring
down into the ocean. And again, if you really rev
erence a great man, if you look up to and rejoice in
his good work, if you truly honor him, you will get
at his spirit, and doing that you will cease to imitate
his outside ways. You insult a man when you try
to catch his power by moving your arms or shaping
your sentences like his, but you honor him when you
try to love truth and do God s will the better for
the love and faithfulness which you see in him. So
that the release from the slavery of superficial imita
tion must come not by a supercilious contempt, but
by a profounder reverence for men stronger and
more successful than yourself.
With regard to the vexed question of written or
unwritten sermons I have not very much to say. I
170 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
think it is a question whose importance has been
very much exaggerated, and the attempt to settle
which with some invariable rule has been unwise,
and probably has made stumbling speakers out of
some men who might have been effective readers, or
stupid readers out of men who might have spoken
with force and fire. The different methods have
their evident different advantages. In the written
sermon the best part of the care is put in where it
belongs, in the thought and construction of the dis
course. There is deliberateness. There is the assur
ance of industry and the man s best work. The truth
comes to the people with the weight that it gets
from being evidently the preacher s serious conviction.
There is self-restraint. There is some exemption from
those foolish fluent things that slip so easily off
the ready tongue. The writer is spared some of
those despairing moments which come to the extem
poraneous speaker when a wretched piece of folly
escapes him which he would give anything to recall
but cannot, and he sees the raven-like reporters catch
the silly morsel as it drops. Whatever may be said
about the duty of labor upon extemporaneous dis
courses, the advantage in point of faithfulness will
no doubt always be with the written sermon. King
Charles II. used to call the practice of preach
ing from manuscript which had arisen during the
civil wars, "this slothful way of preaching," but he
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 171
was comparing it probably with the method of
preaching by memory, the whole sermon being first
written and then learnt by heart, a method which
some men practice, but which I hope nobody com
mends. On the other hand, the extemporaneous dis
course has the advantage of alertness. It gives a
sense of liveliness. It is more immediately striking.
It possesses more activity and warmth. It conveys
an idea of steadiness and readiness, of poise and self-
possession, even to the most rude perceptions. Men
have an admiration for it, as indicating a mastery
of powers and an independence of artificial helps.
A rough backwoodsman in Virginia heard Bishop
Meade preach an extemporaneous sermon, and, being
somewhat unfamiliar with the ways of the Epis
copal Church, he said " he liked him. He was the
first one he ever saw of those petticoat fellows that
could shoot without a rest."
It is easy thus to characterize the two methods, but,
when our characterizations are complete, what shall
we say ? Only two things, I think, and those so simple
and so commonplace that it is strange that they
should need to be said, but certainly they do. The
first is that two such different methods must belong
in general to two different kinds of men ; that some
men are made for manuscripts, and some for the open
platform ; that to exclude either class from the minis
try, or to compel either class to use the methods ol
12
172 LECTURES ON PEE ACHING.
the other would rob the pulpit by silencing some of
its best men. The other remark is that almost every
man, in some proportion, may use both methods ;
that they help each other ; that you will write better
if you often speak without your notes, and you will
speak better if you often give yourself the discipline
of writing. Add to these merely that the proportion
of extemporaneous preaching may well be increased
as a man grows older in the ministry, and I do not
know what more to say in the way of general sugges
tion. The rest must be left to a man s own know
ledge of himself and that personal good sense which
lies behind all homiletics.
But there is one thing which I want very much to
urge upon you. The real question about a sermon is,
not whether it is extemporaneous when you deliver it
to your people, but whether it ever was extem
poraneous, whether there ever was a time when the
discourse sprang freshly from your heart and mind.
The main difference in sermons is that some sermons
are, and other sermons are not, conscious of an audi
ence. The main question about sermons is whether
they feel their hearers. If they do, they are enthusi
astic, personal, and warm. If they do not, they are
calm, abstract, and cold. But that consciousness of
an audience is something that may come into the
preacher s study ; and if it does, his sermon springs
with the same personalness and fervor there which it
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 1*73
would get if he made it in the pulpit with the multi
tude before him. I think that every earnest preacher
is often more excited as he writes, kindles more then
with the glow of sending truth to men than he ever
does in speaking ; and the wonderful thing is that
that fire, if it is really present in the sermon when
it is written, stays there, and breaks out into flame
again when the delivery of the sermon comes. The
enthusiasm is stowed away and kept. It is like the
fire that was packed away in the coal-beds ages ago
and conies out now to give us its undecayed and uii-
wasted light. As you preach old sermons, I think you
can always tell, even if the history of them is forgotten,
which of them you wrote enthusiastically, with your
people vividly before you. The fire is in them still.
Fe nelon had a favorite maxim that anything which
was truly written with enthusiasm could be quickly
learned even by some one else than its author. It
is the same idea : that which once has true life in it
never dies. Believe me, this is the most important
principle about the matter. It differs, no doubt, in
different subjects. Some kinds of discourses we can
never write. They must be made as we deliver them.
Others we may better write, if we can write with the
people there before us. Some medicines you must
mix on the spot ; others you may mix beforehand and
they will keep their power. Only be sure that you
are a true preacher, that you really feel your people
174 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
and the details of method may be settled by minnte
and personal considerations, by your special fitness,
in some degree even by your peculiar taste. I really
think that you will be surprised to see how often this
idea describes the secret of some power in a sermon
which you have found it hard to discover while you
have felt it very deeply. The minister who reads his
manuscript had you with him as he wrote those
pages. In the calm air of his study, sacred with the
thought and prayer of years, nothing came in between
him and you; and so the accidents of the paper
and the reading amount to nothing. The sermon
still speaks to you. But sometimes to an extem
poraneous preacher his very extemporaneousness proves
a dull, dead cloud, which wraps itself around him,
and separates him from the people who are crowded
up close about his feet. The struggles of thought are
on him. He is busy with the choice of words. His
mind is watching its own action as it seizes on
thought after thought. There is a process of memory
and a process of anticipation going on all the time
which prevent his perfect occupation in the present
act. He is forced to recollect himself, and so he
does not feel the people. This, I am sure, is a true
account of what is no unusual condition of the extem
poraneous preacher s mind. I think that the best
sermons that ever have been preached, taking all the
qualities of sermons into account, have probably been
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 175
extemporaneous sermons, but that the number of
good sermons preached from manuscript have prob
ably been far greater than the number of good ser
mons preached extemporaneously; and he who can
put those two facts together will arrive at some
pretty clear and just idea of how it will be best for
him to preach.
Let me offer only a few suggestions upon one or
two other points, and first with regard to illustra
tions. The Christian sermon deals with all life, and
may draw its illustrations from the widest range.
The first necessity of illustration is that it should be
true, that is, that it should have real relations to the
subject which it illustrates. An illustration is pro
perly used in preaching either to give clearness or to
give splendor to the utterance of truth. Both ob
jects, I believe, are legitimate. Euskin says that " all
noble ornament is the expression of man s delight in
God s work." And so I think that we confine too
much the office of illustration if we give it only the
duty of making truth clear to the understanding, and
do not also allow it the privilege of making truth
glorious to the imagination. Archbishop Whately s
illustrations are of the first sort, Jeremy Taylor s of
the second. The ornament that fills his sermons is
almost always the expression of man s delight in
God s truth. But both sorts of illustration, as you
see, have this characteristic ; they exist for the truth,
LECTURES ON PREACHING.
They are not counted of value for themselves. That
is the test of illustration which you ought to apply
unsparingly. Does it call attention to or call atten
tion away from my truth ? If the latter, cut it off
without a hesitation. The prettier it is the worse it
is. Here as everywhere the love of truth for itself
is the only salvation. Love the truth, and then, for
your people s good and for your own delight, make it
as beautiful as you can.
As to the subjects from which illustrations may be
drawn, I cannot but think that it would be well if we
made a much greater use of the history of the Old
Testament to illustrate the Gospel of the New. And
for these reasons : first, that the two have an essential
connection with each other and so they come together
with peculiar sympathy and fitness ; second, that the
very antiquity of that history makes it timeless and
passionless, as it were, and so enables us to use it
purely as ornament or illustration, without the dan
ger of its introducing side issues from its own life ;
and thirdly, we should thus revive and preserve
people s acquaintance with the Old Testament, which
is always falling into decay. The second of these
reasons shows where the weak spot is in the illus
tration drawn from the events of the current hour,
which is otherwise so strong and vivid. It is difficult
to make it serve purely as an illustration. It brings
in its own associations and prejudices. It is too alive,
THb MAKING OF THE SERMON. 1*7 7
It is as if you made the cornice of your house out of
wood with so much life in it that it sprouted after it
was up, and hid with its foliage the architecture
which it was intended only to display. It was hard
during the rebellion to illustrate the Christian war
fare by the then familiar story of the soldier s life
without hearing through the sermon the drums of
the Potomac, and seeing the spires of Eichmond
quite as much as the walls of the New Jerusalem in
the distance. Besides this, an over-eagerness to catch
the last sensation to decorate your sermon with gives
a certain cheapness to your pulpit work. With cau
tions such as these in mind, we cannot still afford to
lose the freshness and reality which comes from let
ting men see the eternal truths shining through the
familiar windows of to-day, and making them under
stand that the world is as full of parables as it was
when Jesus painted the picture of the vineyard be
tween Jerusalem and Shechem, or took his text from
the recent terrible accident at Siloam.
One prevalent impression about sermons which
prevails now in reaction from an old and disagree
able method is, I think, mistaken. In the desire to
make a sermon seem free and spontaneous there is a
prevalent dislike to giving it its necessary formal
structure and organism. The statement of the sub
ject, the division into heads, the recapitulation at the
end, all the scaffolding and anatomy of a sermon is
178 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
out of favor, and there are many very good jesta
about it. I can only say that I have come to fear it
less and less. The escape from it must be not nega
tive but positive. The true way to get rid of the
boniness of your sermon is not by leaving out the
skeleton, but by clothing it with flesh. True liberty
in writing comes by law, and the more thoroughly
the outlines of your work are laid out the more freely
your sermon will flow, like an unwasted stream be
tween its well-built banks. I think that most con
gregations welcome, and are not offended by clear,
precise statements of the course which a sermon is
going to pursue, carefully marked division of its
thoughts, and, above all, full recapitulation of its
argument at the close. A sermon is not like a pic
ture which, once painted, stands altogether before the
eye. Its parts elude the memory, and it is good be
fore you close to gather all the parts together, and as
briefly as you can set them as one completed whole
before your hearer s mind. Leave to the ordinary
Sunday-school address its unquestioned privilege of
inconsequence and incoherence. But give your ser
mon an orderly consistent progress, and do not hesi
tate to let your hearers see it distinctly, for it will
help them first to understand and then to remember
what you say.
Of oratory, and all the marvellous mysterious ways
of those who teach it, I dare say nothing. I believe
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 179
in the true elocution teacher, as I believe in the exist
ence of Halley s comet, which comes into sight of
this earth once in about seventy-six years. But
whatever you may learn or unlearn from him to
your advantage, the real power of your oratory must
be your own intelligent delight in what you are doing.
Let your pulpit be to you what his studio is to
the artist, or his court room to the lawyer, or his
laboratory to the chemist, or the broad field with its
bugles and banners to the soldier; only far more sa
credly let your pulpit be this to you, and you have the
power which is to all rules what the soul is to the body.
You have enthusiasm which is the breath of life.
I have spoken to-day about the making of a ser
mon. I alluded at the beginning of one lecture to a
young man whom I saw just entering on his work.
To-day I have been thinking of one whom I knew
nay, one whom I know who finished his preaching
years ago and went to God. How does all this seem
to him ? these rules and regulations of the preach
er s art, which he once studied as we are studying
them now. Let us not doubt, my friends, that while
he has seen a glory and strength in the truth which
we preach such as we never have conceived, he has
seen also that no expedient which can make that
truth a little more effective in its presentation to the
world is trivial, or undignified, or unworthy of the
patient care and study of the minister of Christ.
THE CONGEEGATION.
HAVE said what I had to say about the preacher
* and about the sermon. To-day I want to speak
to you about the congregation. There is something
remarkable in the way in which a minister talks
about " my congregation." They evidently come to
seem to him different from the rest of humankind.
There is the rest of our race, in Europe, Asia, Africa,
and America, and the Islands of the Sea, and then
there is " my congregation." A man begins the habit
the moment he is settled in a parish. However
young, however inexperienced he may be, he at once
takes possession of that fraction of the human family
and holds it with a sense of ownership. He immedi
ately assumes certain fictions concerning them. He
takes it for granted that they listen to his words
with a deference quite irrespective of the value of
the words themselves. He talks majestically about
" what I tell my congregation," as if there were some
basis upon which they received his teachings quite
different from that upon which other intelligent men
130
THE CONGREGA TION. 181
listen to one who takes his place before them as their
teacher. He supposes them to be subject to emo
tions which he expects of no one else. He thinks
that, in some mysterious way, their property as well
as their intelligence is subject to his demand, to be
handed over to him when he shall tell them that he
has found a good use to which to put it. He imag
ines that, though they are as clear-sighted as other
people, little devices of his which are perfectly plain
to everybody else impose upon them perfectly. He
talks about them so unnaturally that we are almost
surprised when we ask their names and find that
they are men and women whom we know, men and
women who are living ordinary lives and judging
people and things by ordinary standards, with all the
varieties of character and ways which any such group
must have, whom he has separated from the rest of
humanity and distinguished by their relation to him
self and calls " my congregation."
I think that a good deal of the unreality of clerical
life comes from this feeling of ministers about their
congregations. I have known many ministers who
were frank and simple and unreserved with other
people for whom they did not feel a responsibility,
but who threw around themselves a cloak of fictions
and reserves the moment that they met a parish
ioner. They were willing to let the stranger clearly
see that there were many things in religion and the-
182 LECTURES ON PREA CHINQ.
ology which they did not know at all, many other
questions on which they were in doubt, points of
their Church s faith which they thought unimportant
to salvation, methods of their Church s policy which
they thought injudicious. All this they would say
freely as they talked with the wolf over the sheepfold
wall, or with some sheep in the next flock ; but in
their own flock they held their peace, or said that
everything was right, and never dreamed that their
flock saw through their feeble cautiousness. The re
sult of all this has sometimes been that parishioners
have trusted other men more than their minister just
because he was their minister, and have gone with
their troublesome questions and dark experiences to
some one who should speak of them freely because
he should not feel that he was speaking to a member
of his congregation.
It is easy to point out what are the causes of this
feeling which we thus see has its dangers. The bad
part in it is a love of power. The better part is an
anxious sense of responsibility, made more anxious by
the true affection which grows up in the preacher s
heart. It is almost a parental feeling in its worse
as in its better features, in its partialness and jeal
ousy as well as in its devotion and love. But besides
these there is another element in the view which the
preacher takes of his congregation which I beg you
to observe and think about. It is the way in which
TEE CONGREGATION. 183
he assumes a difference in the character of people
when they are massed together from any which they
had when they were looked at separately. This is
the real meaning of the tone which is in that phrase
" my congregation." It is to the minister a unit of
a wholly novel sort. There is something in the con
gregation which is not in the men and women as he
knows them in their separate humanities, something
in the aggregate which was not in the individuals, a
character in the whole which was not in the parts.
This is the reason why he can group them in his
thought as a peculiar people, hold them in his hand
as a new human unity, his congregation.
And no doubt he is partly right. There is a prin
ciple underneath the feeling by which he vaguely
works. A multitude of people gathered for a special
purpose and absorbed for the time into a common in
terest has a new character which is not in any of the
individuals which compose it. If you are a speaker
addressing a crowd you feel that. You say things to
them without hesitation that would seem either too
bold or too simple to say to any man among them if
you talked with him face to face. If you are a spec
tator and watch a crowd while some one else is speak
ing to it, you can feel the same thing. You can see
emotions run through the mass that no one man there
would have deigned to show or submitted to feel if he
could have helped it. The crowd will laugh at jokes
184 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
which every man in the crowd would have despised,
and be melted by mawkish pathos that would not
have extorted a tear from the weakest of them by him
self. Imagine Peter the Hermit sitting down alone
with a man to fire him up for a crusade. Probably
all this is less true of one of our New England audi
ences than of any other that is ever collected in our
land. In it every man keeps guard over his individ
uality and does not easily let it sink in the character
of the multitude. And yet we are men and women
even here, and the universal laws of human nature
do work even among us. And this is a law of nature
which all men have observed. " It is a strange thing
to say," says Arthur Helps in " Realmah," " but when
the number of any public body exceeds that of forty
or fifty, the whole assembly has an element of joyous
childhood in it, and each member revives at times
the glad, mischievous nature of his schoolboy days."
Canning used to say that the House of Commons as
a body had better taste than the man of the best
taste in it, and Macaulay was much inclined to think
that Canning was right.
What are the elements of this new character which
belongs to a congregation, a company of men ? Two
of them have been suggested in the two instances
which I have just quoted, the spontaneousness and
liberty, and the higher standard of thought and taste
It is not hard to see what some of the other elements
THE CONGREGA TION. 185
are. There is no doubt greater receptivity than there
is in the individual. Many of the sources of antag
onism are removed. The tendency to irritation is put
to rest. The pride of argument is not there ; or is
modified by the fact that no other man can hear the
argument, because it cannot speak a word, but must
go on in a man s own silent soul. It is easier to give
way when you sit undistinguished in an audience,
and your next neighbor cannot see the moment when
you yield. The surrender loses half its hardness
when you have no sword to surrender and no flag to
run down. And, besides this, we have all felt how
the silent multitude in the midst of which we sit or
stand becomes ideal and heroic to us. We feel as if
it were listening without prejudice, and responding
unselfishly and nobly. So we are lifted up to our
best by the buoyancy of the mass in which we have
been merged. It may be a delusion. Each of these
silent men may be thinking and feeling meanly, but
probably each of them has felt the elevation of the
mass about him of which we are one particle, and
so is lifting and lifted just as we are. Who can say
which drops in the great sweep of the tide are borne,
and which bear others toward the shore, on which
they all rise together ?
This, then, is the good quality in the character of
the congregation. It produces what in general we
call responsiveness. The compensating quality which
186 L EOTURES ON PREA CH1NQ.
takes away part of the value of this one is its irre
sponsibility. The audience is quick to feel, but slow
to decide. The men who make up the audience
taken one by one, are slower to feel an argument or
an appeal to their higher nature, but when they are
convinced or touched, it is comparatively easy to
waken the conscience, and make them see the neces
sity of action. I have often heard the minister s
appeals compared to the lawyer s addresses to the
jury. " Look," men say, " the lawyer pleads, and gets
his verdict. You plead a hundred times. You argue
week after week, and men will not decide that Chris
tianity is true, nor steadfastly resolve to lead a new
life." The fallacy is obvious. We are like lawyers
pleading before a jury which in the first place feels
itself under no compulsion to decide at all; and in
the second place, if it decides as we are urging it,
must change its life, break off its habits, and make
new ones, which it does not like to contemplate.
There is no likeness between it and that body of
twelve men who cannot go home till they decide one
way or the other, and who have no selfish interest to
bias their decision. No wonder that our jury listens
to us as long as it pleases, perhaps trembles a little
when we are most true and powerful, and then, like
Felix, who was both judge and jury to St. Paul, shuts
up the court, and departs with only the dimmest feel-
THE CONOREOA TION. 187
ing of responsibility, saying, " Go thy way for this
time. I will hear thee again of this matter."
The result of all this is that in the congregation
you have something very near the general humanity.
You have human nature as it appears in its largest
contemplation. Personal peculiarities have disap
peared and man simply as man is before you. This
is a great advantage to the preacher. " It is more
easy to know man in general than to know a man in
particular," said La Eochefoucauld. If in the crowd
to whom you preach you saw every man not merely
in general but in particular, if each sat there with his
idiosyncrasies bristling all over him, how could you
preach ? There are some preachers, I think, who are
ineffective from a certain incapacity of this larger
general sight of humanity which a congregation
ought to inspire. It has been said of the French
preachers that Bossuet knew man better than men,
but Fe nelon knew both man and men. There are
some preachers who seem to know men, but hardly to
know or to be touched by man at all. They are
ready with special sympathies and with minute ad
vice in the dilemmas of detail which men encounter ;
but the sight of their race does not rouse them, and
they are not able to bring to bear upon a people
those universal and eternal motives of the highest
human action which, however they may distribute
188 LECTURES ON PREA CHINO .
themselves into special motives for special acts, still
have a real unity and are the springs of many good
nesses of many kinds. Such men may have a cer
tain fitness to be the spiritual advisers of individuals,
but it is not easy to see how they can be powerful
preachers to mankind.
I think that it is almost necessary for a man to
preach sometimes to congregations which he does not
know, in order to keep this impression of preach
ing to humanity, and so to keep the truth which he
preaches as large as it ought to be. He who minis
ters to the same people always, knowing them
minutely, is apt to let his preaching grow minute,
to forget the world, and to make the same mistakes
about the Gospel that one would make about the
force of gravitation if he came to consider it a special
arrangement made for these few operations which it
accomplishes within his own house. I think there are
few inspirations, few tonics for a minister s life better
than, when he is fretted and disheartened with a hun
dred little worries, to go and preach to a congregation
in which he does not know a face. As he stands up
and looks across them before he begins his sermon, it
is like looking the race in the face. All the nobleness
and responsibility of his vocation comes to him. It
is the feeling which one has had sometimes in travel
ling when he has passed through a great town whose
name he did not even learn. There were men, but
THE CONORECrA TION. 189
not one man he knew ; houses, shops, churches, bank,
post-office, business and pleasure, but none of them
individualized to him by any personal interest. It is
human life in general, and often has a solemnity for
him which the human lives which he knows in par
ticular have lost. And this is what we often find in
some strange pulpit, facing some congregation wholly
made up of strangers.
But this should be occasional. A constant travel
ling among unknown towns would no doubt weaken
and perhaps destroy our sense of humanity alto
gether. There can be no doubt that it is good for a
man that his knowledge of a congregation should be
primarily and principally the knowledge of his own
congregation, certain dangers of a too exclusive re
lationship being obviated by preaching sometimes
where the people are all strange. It is remarkable
how many of the great preachers of the world are in
separably associated with the places where their work
was done, where perhaps all their life was lived. In
many cases their place has passed into their name as
if it were a true part of themselves. Chrysostom of
Constantinople, Augustine of Hippo, Savonarola of
Florence, Baxter of Kidderminster, Arnold of Eugby,
Robertson of Brighton, Chalmers of Glasgow, and in <
our New England a multitude of such associations
which have become historic and compel us always to
think of the man with the place and of the place with
190 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
the man. Everywhere a man must have his place.
The disciples are sometimes set before us as if our
pastoral life of modern times were an entire depart
ure from their methods ; and yet they had their pas
torates. Think of St. Paul at Ephesus. Think of St.
John in the same city. Think of St. James at Jeru
salem. The same necessity, may we not say, which
required that the Incarnation should bring divinity,
not into humanity in general, but into some special
human circle, into a nation, a tribe, a family, requires
that he who would bear fruit everywhere for human
ity should root himself into some special plot of
human life and draw out the richness of the earth by
which he is to live at some one special point. There
is nothing better in a clergyman s life than to feel
constantly that through his congregation he is get
ting at his race. Certainly the long pastorates of
other days were rich in the knowledge of human
nature, in a very intimate relation with humanity.
These three rules seem to have in them the practical
sum of the whole matter. I beg you to remember
them and apply them with all the wisdom that God
gives you. First. Have as few congregations as you
can. Second. Know your congregation as thor
oughly as you can. Third. Know your congregation
so largely and deeply that in knowing it you shall
know humanity.
I have lingered too long upon the congregation as
THE CONGREGATION. 191
a whole. Let me go on to speak of that which ap
pears to every minister as he takes a certain congre
gation to be his congregation and comes to know
them very well. Then the unity in which he saw
them the first time he stood before them breaks up,
and they are divided into various classes. Between
that one great gathering which fills the house and the
individuals of whom it is composed there are divi
sions into various groups, which, with certain modifi
cations here and there, appear in every congregation
in the land. Let us see what they are.
First and most prominent in every congregation
there are some persons who peculiarly represent it
to the world. They live in the Church, as it were.
Their whole life is bound up in its interests. They
may be church officers or not. They are part of its
history and of its present life. The congregation
goes by their name almost as readily as, in your Con
gregational fashion, by the minister s. They are the
persons to whom every new enterprise in church life
looks first for approval and then for the means of its
execution. They are what are sometimes called the
" pillars of the Church." And such people are very
valuable. Often their lives are very noble and de
voted. There are people so prominently representa
tive of churches whose life is as truly a consecrated
life, with an ordination of its own, as any minister a
They give a solidity and permanence to the congre-
192 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
gallon, preserve its continuity and identity in the
midst of the continual changes of these parts of it
which are less firmly fixed. They gather their
strength about the minister. They save him from
falling into that heresy which has beset all Christian
history and been the fruitful source of many kinds
of woes, the heresy that the clergyman is the Church.
They constantly remind him that the people are the
Church, and that he is the Church s servant. I recog
nize the value of this element in the congregation
very heartily. I think that every parish needs such
laymen. It would be a very loose and incoherent
thing without them. But still I want you to notice
the dangers that may come in connection with the
special prominence and special usefulness of a few
members of the Church. There is chance always of
the Church becoming a sort of club, providing for the
wants, perhaps, indeed, the highest spiritual wants, of
a few, but forgetting that it has the world about it
and was meant for all men. This is a danger which
belongs to the very fact of a recognized body called
the congregation. It is a danger which is intensified
when in the centre of that body there is a core which
emphasizes all its qualities and spirit, the congrega
tion of the congregation. The congregation ought
to be exclusive only, as our old professor of theology
used to say of the Gospel, as the light in the Pharos
was covered with glass merely that it might burn the
THE CONGREGATION. 193
more brightly and shed the more light abroad. Re
member this danger. Give much time and thought
uinl care to the outskirts of y^ur pnrish, to its loo.se
and ragged fringes seek the people who just drift
within your influence, and who will drift away
again, if your kind, strong hand is not upon them.
Do not spend too much time in the safe sheepfold
where the ninety-nine are secure, while there are
sheep upon the mountains. Be sure that nothing
will make the core and heart of your congregation so
solid as a strong drawing inward of its loose circum
ference. The strong and settled men of your Church
will value you and your usefulness to them more
highly if they see you busy among the wretched, the
careless, and what men dare to call the worthless
souls. And there is another danger, I think, which
the congregation in the congregation brings with it.
The laymen who are most active and interested in
church life are very often not the most receptive
hearers. They are apt to take a few truths for
settled, and, realizing them very fully, using them in
their church work constantly, to ask no more, indeed
to be hardly open to any more. They are half
clergymen, half laymen, without the full receptivity
and mental enterprise which belongs to either. This
is the reason why they sometimes become dogmatic,
and not merely do not care themselves to speculate
or learn, but, with an honest and narrow fear, be-
194 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
grudge the clergy and their fellow-laymen an eager-
ness for truth which overruns their own settled lines.
The strongest bigotry is often found among theological
laymen rather than among clergymen. The pillars of
the Church are apt to be like the Pillars of Hercules,
beyond which no man might sail Dean Stanley, in
an essay upon the connection of Church and State,
says of the lay element in Church Synods : " The lay
men who as a general rule figure in such assemblies
do not represent the true lay mind of the Church,
still less the lay intelligence of the whole country.
They are often excellent men, given to good works,
but they are also usually the partisans of some
special clerical school ; they are, in short, clergymen
under another form rather than the real laity them
selves." He is writing on an English subject, but
his words describe a danger which we in America
can recognize, and which makes us glad to go on and
find in the congregation other elements besides this
most valuable, this indispensable one of which I have
been speaking.
To pass at once, then, to the other extreme, there is
in very many, if not in all, congregations in these
days what we may call the supercilious hearer. He
is a man who for some reason comes to church, but is
out of sympathy with what goes on there. He is
sceptical about the truth of what we believe and
preach. You come to know that hearer. You are
THE CONOREGA TION. 195
sure that he is critical. You are aware that some
safe, sonorous, and unmeaning statements, which
some of your people will take because they have the
right words in them and the true ring about them,
he seizes on the moment that they fall from your lips
and tears their nimsiuess to pieces in his merciless
mind. Sometimes your heart has sunk as you have
said some foolish thing and not dared to look him in
the face, but felt sure that it has not escaped him.
In one of his Lent discourses Massillon upbraids
such hearers. "It is not to seek corn," he says,
" that you come into Egypt. It is to seek out the
nakedness of the land. Exploratores Estis, ut vide-
atis infirmiora terras hujus venistis." Now, such an
element in a congregation, though it may be very
small, cannot but influence the preacher. What shall
he think about it ? He ought to start, it seems to
me, by feeling that the very presence of such men
in church means something. They have not come
wholly, certainly they will not come continually, for
the malicious reason which Massillou ascribes. There
is some better and deeper cause, even though the man
is not conscious of it himself. The preacher has a
right to believe this, and so the man s presence may
become not an embarrassment but an inspiration*
And then, when this is gained, he may become a help
in other ways. He keeps the atmosphere of the
church fresh. He makes you aware as you preach of
196 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
the unbelief which you have no right to forget. He
incites you with the sense of difficulty and the con
sciousness of criticism. A parish of critics would
be killing, but a critic here and there is tonic. He
keeps the walls of your church from growing so solid
that as you preach you cannot, as you ought, look
through them as if they were glass, and preach in the
present remembrance of the multitudes who never
come to church, and do not know your truth, and yet
for whom your truth is just as true and might be just
as helpful as it is to you. This man makes all this
real to you. He compels you to remember it. It is
strange how the general scepticism about us may not
put us out, or disturb us at all, while a special case
close by us will excite us and waken all our powers.
It is like the way in which you can go on with your
private work or thought, perfectly well, perhaps all the
better, for the general roar of the city, while a single
hammer clanging under your window distracts you
and compels you to hear it. How shall such a critic
enter into your preaching ? What influence shall it
have upon your sermon to know that he is there ?
The influence, I should say, of making the whole
sermon more true and conscientious, more complete
in the best qualities that belong to all good sermons.
But not the influence of changing the sermon s
essential character. Preach the Gospel all the more
seriously, simply, mightily if you can, because of the
THE CON GREG A TION. 197
unsympathetic criticism that it has to meet, but let it
be the same Gospel which you would pour into ears
hungry to receive it. The two faults that you have
to avoid in preaching to unbelief are, Defiance and
Obsequience. One makes the unbeliever hate your
truth, and the other makes him despise it. Be frank,
brave, simple. There is nothing the unbeliever
honors like belief. Let the influence of your super
cilious and sceptical audience be primarily upon
yourself, making you more serious and eager, then
let it come indirectly into your sermon, not changing
its topic, but filling it with a stronger power of con
viction and of love. Of course I am speaking now,
not of the sermons in which one specially deals with
some special phase of scepticism, but only of the
general tenor of a man s preaching in view of this
part of his congregation.
The next element in the congregation of which I
wish to speak is less interesting than these two ;
perhaps, also, more puzzling. In every congregation
there are many people who come to church, as it
seems, purely from habit. As with the supercilious
hearers, it is hard to tell why they come, but not now
because of any positive reason why they shoulJ not,
but merely from the absence of any reason why they
should. Such a hearer seems to be docile, but his
docility consists in never doubting or denying what
you say He has probably grown up in the Church
198 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
There is more or less of the notion of respectability
attaching to that mysterious impulse which every
Sunday turns his steps towards the sanctuary. Prob
ably if you could get deep enough, deeper than his
own consciousness of its causes, you would find that
some vague fear had something to do at least with the
origin, perhaps with the continuance of this strange
habit. He is no unusual sight. He comes and goes
in all our churches. In many churches it seems as if
such as he made up a large part of the congregation.
Now what shall we say of him ? First of all, cer
tainly, as we said of the critic, that we have a right
to believe that we have not wholly fathomed the
secret of his presence. At least we may hope that,
however unconsciously and vaguely, the spirit of the
place has reached him. Hoping this, you may expect
to see the unconscious impulse develop into a con
scious seeking, if you can intensify the spirit of the
place, and make it more positive about him. The
form in which the change takes place will vary ac
cording to his character. It may be sudden and
vehement; a conversion as true and picturesque as
any that comes to one who, after years of brutal
ignorance, hears for the first time the story of the
Saviour. Or it may be very gradual, the slow, still
drawing to a focus and quickening into fire of that
heat which he has been absorbing, without knowing
O O
it, so long. There are two effects of every sermon,
THE CONGREQA TION. 199
one special, in the enforcement of a single thought,
or the inculcation of a single duty ; the other gen
eral, in the diffusion of a sense of the beauty of holi
ness and the value of truth. To the second of these
effects this routine listener has been susceptible dur
ing many a service and sermon that seemed to pass
across him like the wind. However the awakening
comes, there is no happier sight for any minister to
see. It puts new vigor into him, makes him believe
his truth by one more evidence, and teaches him that
lesson which the preacher must know, but which he
can only learn thoroughly out of experiences such as
this, that it is not his business to despair of anybody.
Perhaps, so far as the minister is concerned, this is
the final cause of this most discouraging being s pre
sence in the congregation. He furnishes the minister
now and then with an encouragement such as nobody
but himself could furnish. And, in the meantime,
sitting there with the calm countenance which has
faced so many sermons, if anything could sting the
jaded and commonplace minister into freshness and
pointedness, it would seem as if it must be this man s
presence. He shames you and inspires you. He
makes you feel your responsibility, and makes you
eager not to boast of it. He reminds you of your
duty and your feebleness. He rebukes anything fan
tastic or unreal in your preaching. He tempts your
plainest, and directest, and tersest truth. There is a
200 LECTURES ON PEEACHINQ.
prayer in an old Russian Liturgy which always
seemed to me the very model of the minister s
prayer, which I wish that all of us ministers could
learn to pray continually, and which this man in your
congregation makes you pray with double earnest
ness, " Lord and Sovereign of my Life, take from
me the Spirit of idleness, despair, love of power, and
unprofitable speaking."
But from these classes let us turn to that part of a
congregation which constitutes its chief and most in
spiring interest. I mean those who in any way are
to be characterized as earnest seekers after truth. It
is the element that calls out all that is best in a
preacher. Very often as we read Christ s teachings,
we can almost feel His eye wandering here and there
across the motley crowd around Him, till He finds
some one man evidently in earnest, and then the dis
course sets towards him, and we almost feel the Sav
iour s heart beat with anxiety to help some poor for
gotten creature, who has long since passed out of the
memory of man, but in whom on that day so long
ago He saw a seeker. And we may say with cer
tainty that any man who has not in him the power
of quick response to the appeal of spiritual hunger
lacks a fundamental quality of the true preacher.
There are some men who cannot see bodily pain with
out a longing to relieve it which begets an ingenuity
in relieving it, out of which springs all the best re-
THE CONGREGATION. 201
fineraents of the doctor s art. There are other men
who, just in the same way, perceive the wants and
longings of men s souls, and in them is begotten the
holy ingenuity which the true preacher uses. The
soul quickens the mind to its most complete fertility.
I do not subdivide this class. It includes the
whole range of personal earnestness. The heart just
conscious of some need, all ignorant of what it is, dis
satisfied and restless, not alone from the uusatisfac-
toriness of earthly things, but likewise from a true
attraction which comes to it from a higher life, this
heart is close beside another which has long known
the truth and long rested on the love of Christ, but
yet is always craving a deeper truth and a more
unhindered love. The two hearts belong together.
They help to throw the same kind of spirit into the
congregation. They send up the same kind of in
spiration to the preacher. It is good always to think
of these two hearts together, to count your congrega
tion, not by the point in Christian attainment which
you conceive them to have reached, but by the spir
itual desire and eagerness which you can perceive in
them. We may mistake the first. We can hardly
be mistaken about the second. Here must be the
preacher s real encouragement. Behind all tests
which the church-membership lists and the con
tribution boxes can furnish, there lies the know
ledge, which comes out of all his anxious inter-
202 LECTURES ON PEE A CJIING.
course with them, whether these men and women
to whom he preaches are seeking for more truth and
higher life. It seems as if one of the ways in which
the Lord s beatitude about the hungerers and thirsters
after righteousness came true was by the power to
help them which the very sight of their thirst and
hunger gave to those whom God had sent to be their
feeders.
And I believe that the proportion of this class in
the general congregation is much greater than we are
apt to imagine. In all life, and nowhere more than
in what we say about the Church and its work, cyni
cal and disparaging ideas are capable of much more
clever, epigrammatic statement than hopeful ideas.
So they have easy currency and impose on people.
It is easy to draw the picture of the faithless or friv
olous elements in a congregation till it appears as if
the whole company which meets every Sunday were
in an elaborate conspiracy to make sport of itself, as
if a crowd of people came together to criticise what
none of them believed, and to endure with half-con
cealed impatience what none of them cared anything
about. But such a picture, the more cleverly and
sweepingly it is drawn, evidently disproves itself. If
that were the congregation, evidently there would
not long be any congregation. If that were what
their meeting meant, evidently they would not meet
again and again year after year. No mere momen-
THE CONGREGATION. 203
turn of a past impulse could carry along so dead a
weight. No, there is in the congregation as its heart
and soul a craving after truth. Believe in that. Let
it give an expectant look to the whole congregation
in your eyes. Let it fill your study as you write at
home. And if among the elements which make up
your great congregation you grow bewildered and
cannot tell to which one you ought to write or speak,
I do not hesitate at all to say let it be this one. This
is the spirit to which if you speak you will be sure to
speak most universally. One sermon here and there
to those who are entirely indifferent, beating their
sleepy carelessness awake ; one sermon here and there
to those who are scornfully sceptical, showing them
if you can how weak their superciliousness is, a ser
mon fired if need be with something of " the scorn of
scorn " ; one sermon here and there perhaps for those
rare few whose life seems to have mastered truth
and bathed itself in love, a sermon of congratulation
and of peace ; but almost all your sermons with the
seekers in your eye. Preaching to them you shall
preach to all. The indifferent shall be awakened
into hope ; the scornful shall feel some sting of
shame; and before those who are most conscious
of what God has done for them shall open visions
of what greater things He yet may do, and like St.
Paul they may forget the things behind and press
forward with a new desire.
14
204 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
It is from the recognition of this element in the
congregation that the minister s perception of the
necessary variety of Christian life proceeds. All
earnestness emphasizes individuality. So long as
you see no personal anxiety in your people s eyes,
you may calmly form your own plans about them,
make up your mind what they are to be made, and go
to work to make them that with certain expectation
that they will take your truth in just your way, and
shape their lives into the mould which you lay before
them as if it showed the only shape of Christian char
acter. But when you feel the anxious wish of men
and women really seeking after truth, when the cry
" What must I do to be saved ? " sounds in your
quickened ears from all the intent and silent pews,
then is the time when you really learn how wide and
various salvation is. The revival and the inquiry
room must always widen a man s conception of Chris
tianity, and they are only the emphatic expressions of
what is always present and may always be felt in
every congregation. A minister once said to me how
strange it seemed to him that he had been preaching
one truth in one language for years and yet the
people who came to him moved by the truth he
taught never conceived it in his form, nor used, as
they told him their experience, the language in which
he had set the truth before them. It troubled him.
It made him wonder whether the language he had
THE QONGREGA TION. 205
used was wrong and false ; perhaps, also, whether the
truth which they stated so differently really was the
same truth which he had tried to teach them. To me
it rather showed that there must have been truth and
noble reality about his words, a genuinely feeding
power, that men should have taken them as they take
the healthy corn out of the fields and turn it into
all kinds of strength and work. However that may
have been, the more truly you think of your congre
gation as seekers after salvation, to whom you are to
open the sacred doors, the more ready you will be to
see each entering into a salvation peculiarly his own.
You will be glad and not sorry when a man tells you
what God has done for him, and only gradually you
find that it is the truth which you told him, trans
formed into some new shape of which you never
dreamed, that is the new treasure of his life.
These, then, are the elements which make up the
congregation. They are the constant factors. In
order to realize the congregation entirely, we must
think of it as not closed, but open, and always includ
ing some people who as mere strangers have wan
dered in and taken their seats among the people who
are always there. They suggest the outside world.
Their unfamiliar faces remind the preacher of the
general humanity. They are not classified at all.
They are simply men and women. I think it is a
great advantage to a congregation that it should have
206 LECTURES ON PREA CHINQ.
such an element. They are to a congregation what
the few people who came into contact with Jesus who
were not Jews such as the Syrophenician woman,
and the Centurion, and the Greeks, who asked to see
Him were to Christ s disciples. They kept men s
conception of His ministry from closing in tightly to
the Jewish people. This is the danger of the country
parish, where you know everybody who comes into
the church. You forget the mission to the world. I
know no safeguard against such forgetfulness but a
deep sense of the general humanity of the people
underneath their special characters, which shall make
them true specimens of the race, as well as the dis
tinct individuals, whose faces, names, and ways you
know.
These are the elements, then. Now mingle these
elements in your mind, and ask what sort of body
they make. What will be the general characteristics
of this assemblage, so heterogeneous and yet with
such a true unity in it, which we call The Congrega
tion ? It has the genuine solidity which comes from
certain fundamental assumptions. It is gathered as
a Christian gathering. It is not loose and incoherent,
like the multitude who stood about Paul on the Hill
of Mars, merely asking in general for what is new,
or, more earnestly, for what is true. It has a positive
character. It accepts a positive authority. And yet
it is alert and questioning. The truth which it de-
THE CONGREGATION. 207
sires is open to abundant varieties of conception and
application. It is this combination of solidity with
vitality, this harmonizing of settled conditions with
constant activity and growth, which makes, I think,
the most marked character of the Christian congrega
tion. It is an institution pervaded with individual
life ; it is an assembly of individuals to which has
been given something of the coherence of an institu
tion. It is the home at once of Faith and Thought.
Try to keep all of this character in your congrega
tion. Remember both its institutional character and
its individual character. Do not try to make it a
highly organized machine, nor to let it merely dissi
pate into an audience. Make it one without losing
its multitude ; treat it as many, without forgetting its
oneness. Let it be full of the spirit of authoritative
truth, and at the same time of personal responsibility
for thought and action.
If we look at the Christian congregation in another
and perhaps a simpler way, it stands as perhaps the
best representative assembly of humanity that you
can find in the world. Men, women, and children
are all there together. No age, no sex must monopo
lize its privileges. All ministrations to it must be
full at once of vigor and of tenderness, the father s
and the mother s touch at once. Eiches and poverty
meet indifferently in the idea, however it may be in
the reality, of the congregation. Even learning and
208 LECTURES ON f REACHING.
ignorance are recognized as properly meeting there.
However difficult it may be to do it, it is clearly re
cognized that men ought to preach so that the wisest
and the simplest alike can understand and get the
blessing. Here, then, is pure humanity. What other
assembly so brings us together on the simple warrant
of our race ? This is what I always think is meant by
that record of the ministry of Jesus, " The common
people heard Him gladly." It was not the poor
because of some privilege that belonged to their
poverty. It was those, rich or poor, wise or rude, in
whom the fundamental elements of human life were
unclouded by artificial culture. Pharisee or publican,
fisherman or philosopher, if they had not forgotten
to be men, they were still " common people," and
heard the human Saviour gladly. It was to their
humanity He preached, and nothing that He knew
of God was too precious to be brought, if He could
bring it, to their understanding. Preach to this same
humanity, and you too will give it your best. Trust
the people to whom you preach more than most min
isters do. Begin your ministry by being sure that if
you give your people your best thought, it will be
none too good for them. They will take it all. Only
be sure that it is real, and that you are giving it to
them for their best good, and that it is what, if they
did receive it, would do them good, and then give
them the very best and truest that you know. For
THE CONOREGA TlOh . 209
one minister who preaches " over people s heads "
tliere are twenty whose preaching goes wandering
about under men s feet, or is flung off into the air, in
the right intellectual plane perhaps, but in a wholly
wrong direction.
Not that there must not be discrimination : only ifc
must not be in the quality of your thought. Never
your best thought for the old, your cheap thought for
the children ; never your best thought for the rich
and poor thought for the poor. The best that you
can give is not too good for any one ; but in that giv
ing of the best there is need for the most true and
delicate discrimination as to how it shall be given,
and which part of it shall be given to this congrega
tion and which to that. It is not a matter of rule.
It belongs to wise and sympathetic instinct. To cul
tivate that instinct, to learn to feel a congregation, to
let it claim its own from him, is one of the first duties
of a minister. Until you do that you may be a great
expounder, a brilliant " sermonizer," but you cannot
be a preacher. Never to be tempted to profoundness
where it would be thrown away ; never to be childlike
when it is manly vigor that you need ; never to be
dull when you mean to be solemn, nor frivolous when
you mean only to be bright ; this comes from a very
quick power of perception and adaptation. Our
work has always had some curious connections with
the art of fishing. Let me quote you from Isaak
210 LECTURES ON PREA OH ING.
Walton what Piscator says to Venator while they sit
by the stream-side at breakfast, on the morning of
the first lesson in trout-fishiug. I was struck by its
appropriateness to the subject of discrimination in
preaching. It may help you, if you remember it,
when you come to " fish for trout with a worm "
yourself, and may make no unfit rule for real timeli
ness in the pulpit " Take this for a rule," he says :
" when you fish for trout with a worm, let your line
have so much and not more lead than will fit the
stream in which you fish ; that is to say, more in a
great troublesome stream than in a smaller that is
quieter ; as near as may be so much as will sink the
bait to the bottom and keep it still in motion and not
more." Weight and movement, these are what we
need in fishing and in preaching.
The congregation being what it is, let me ask in
the few moments that remain to-day, what it can do
for the preacher, both in the way of help and in the
way of danger.
In the way of help, it brings him the inspiration of
its numbers, the boldness and freedom of its miti
gated personality, and the larger test of his work. It
is not safe to judge of the effect of your work by any
one individual ; but when a congregation pronounces
on it, not by the unreliable witness of praise, but by
the testimony of its evidently changed condition, its
THE CONGREGA TION. 211
higher life, its more complete devotion, it is iiever
wrong. Do not despise the witness that even the
meanest of your people bear to your faithfulness or
unfaithfulness. When it really rains, the puddles as
well as the ocean bear witness of the shower. Trust
your people s judgment on your work : what they say
about it, a good deal ; but what it does upon them,
much more.
And I cannot help bearing witness to the fairness
and considerateness which belong to this strange
composite being, the congregation. His insight is
very true, and his conscience on the whole is very
right. If he sees that his minister is totally devoted
to him, and giving his life up to his work, he stands
by that minister of his and provides for him abun
dantly. If he sees that his minister is taking good
care of his own interests, he lets him do it as he
would let any other man, and does not trouble him
self about it, as there is no reason that he should.
Whether the minister feels the congregation or not,
the congregation feels the minister. Often the horse
knows the rider better than the rider knows the
horse. There may be exceptions which would not
justify my confidence. In all these lectures I am
only giving you the impressions which have come out
of my own experience. I am sure it will be well if
you can never allow yourself to complain that your
congregation neglect you without first asking your-
212 LECTURES ON PREA CHIN a.
self whether you have given them any reason why
they should attend to you.
Indeed, the danger of the congregation to the min
ister comes more from their indulgence than from
their opposition. The feeling of the strongest minis
ters about the superficialness of clerical popularity is
very striking. Nothing seemed to vex Robertson so
much as to be talked of as the idol of the crowd.
Indeed, he is absolutely morbid about it, and hates
that to which he need only have been indifferent. It
would seem as if mere popularity, to a man of any
independence, was the driest of all Dead Sea fruits.
And there is reason why it should be so. It is the
worst and feeblest part of your congregation that
makes itself heard in vociferous applause, and it
applauds that in you which pleases it. Robertson,
in one of his letters, says of a friend : " He has lost
his power, which was once the greatest that I ever
knew. The sentimental people of his congregation
attribute it to an increase of spirituality, but it is,
in truth, a falling-off of energy of grasp." These
words suggest the cause of many a minister s decay,
the Capua where many a preaching Hannibal has
been ruined. " Turba est argumentum pessimi,"
says Seneca. There are certain other causes which
help to produce the impression, but still there is
truth in the belief that much of the best thinking
and preaching of the land is done in obscure parishes
THE CONGREGATION. 213
and by unfamous preachers. The true balance, if we
could only reach and keep it, evidently is in neither
courting nor despising the popular applause, to feel
it as every healthy man feels the approval of his
fellow-men, and yet never to be beguiled by it from
that which is the only true object of our work, God s
truth and men s salvation. And remember this, that
the only way to be saved from the poison of men s
flattery is to be genuinely devoted to those same men s
good. If you really want to drag a man out of the
fire, you will not be distracted into self-conceit by his
praises of the grace and softness of the hand that you
reach out to him. You will say, " Stop your compli
ments and take hold."
The subject of the popularity of ministers is indeed
a curious one, and may well merit a few moments
study. We hardly realize, I believe, how far the
desire for popularity in this time and land has taken
the place of the ambition for preferment which we
read of in English clerical history, and which has so
strongly and so justly excited our dislike. He who
used there to seek the favor of a bishop, or some
other patron, bids here for the liking of the multi
tude. It is a question hardly worth the asking,
which ambition calls out the lower arts or does the
greater mischief. Both are very bad. To set one s
heart on being popular is fatal to the preacher s best
growth. To escape from that desire one needs to
214 LECTURES ON PREA OHINO.
know that the men who are in no sense popular fa
vorites do much of the very best work of the minis
try. In all work there seems to be generally two
classes of workers, one whose processes of working
are apparent, the other whose results only appear.
Now most popular preachers seem to me to belong to
the first class, and to owe their popularity to that
characteristic. Not only what they do, but the way
in which they do it, interests people. It is not only
the power of the truth which they declare : it is the
eloquence of the sermons in which they declare it. It
is not only the gracious influence they exercise ; it
is their gracious way of exercising it, the smile, the
tone, the transparent vision of the kindly heart. Let
a man understand this, and it will certainly require
no very profound philosophy or devotion for him
to let the popularity go if he can do the work. The
popularity is an accident : the power is essential.
And, no doubt, the absence of lively popular favor
has an influence in enabling a minister to apprehend
the larger indications of the successful working of his
truth. The people s applause emphasizes the small
success, and tempts a man to be content with that.
He who works in silence becomes aware of the larger
movements of the truth and the surer conquests of
the power of God. The small signs fail ; there is no
glitter in the arms, no shout of triumph anywhere,
THE CONGREGA TION. 215
but often the very silence lets one hear more clearly
the great progress that is going on all over the field.
Again, there is great difference in men according as
they seem to possess or to lack themselves the quali
ties and conditions which they try to create in other
people. Some men are all afire themselves, and seem
to fire others by contagion ; other men appear cold,
but send forth fire from their very coldness. Some
men are full of movement, and so make others move ;
other men seem sluggish, and yet awaken others to a
vitality which they do not seem to possess themselves.
" The enormous axle-tree
That whirls (how slow itself !) ten thousand spindles."
In general, the popularity, the quick general sym
pathy and admiration, will go with the first class of
men. The others will do their work in quietness,
with much power but not much observation.
To be your own best self for your people s sake
that is the true law of the minister s devotion. " Lo-
quendum ut multi, sapiendum ut pauci " the thought
of the few in the speech of the many that describes
a popular power which any preacher has not only the
right but the duty to covet.
The whole of the relation, then, between the
preacher and the congregation is plain. They be
long together. But neither can absorb or override
216 LECTURES ON PREACH IN G.
the other. They must be filled with mutual respect.
He is their leader, but his leadership is not one con
stant strain, and never is forgetful of the higher guid
ance upon which they both rely. It is like the rope by
which one ship draws another out into the sea. The
rope is not always tight between them, and all the
while the tide on which they float is carrying them
both. So it is not mere leading and following. It is
one of the very highest pictures of human compan
ionship that can be seen on earth. Its constant pre
sence has given Christianity much of its noblest and
sweetest color in all ages. It has much of the inti
macy of the family with something of the breadth and
dignity that belongs to the state. It is too sacred
to be thought of as a contract. It is a union which
God joins together for purposes worthy of His care.
When it is worthily realized, who can say that it may
not stretch beyond the line of death, and they who
have been minister and people to each other here be
something holy and peculiar to each other in the City
of God forever ?
THE MINISTEY FOE OUE AGE.
T AM to speak to you to-day upon the preacher in
-*- his special relation to our own time. There is a
strange sound, perhaps, when we think about it, in
the very suggestion that the preacher of the Gospel is
to be something special with reference to the special
time in which he lives. For we have dwelt upon the
one universal and eternal message which the preacher
is sent to carry to the world. That message never
changes. The identity of Christianity lies in its
identity. Nay, the identity of man is bound up with
it ; and so long as man is what he is, what God has
to say to him by His servants will certainly always
be the same. And so the preacher, as the bearer of
that message, must have his true identity, must stand
before men in essentially the same figure and speak
with essentially the same voice in all the ages.
Where, then, does the adaptation of a preacher to
his own age come in ? The best answer, perhaps,
would be, by way of illustration, in the position which
every live and cultivated man holds with reference to
217
218 LECTURES ON PREA Off ING.
the time he lives in. He is, in the first place, a man
in universal human history. His are the rights, the
duties, and the standards which belong to all men
simply as men. In proportion as he is a strong, wise
man this larger life is real to him. He knows that
he will live his special life more healthily for himself
and more helpfully to his brethren, not by forget
ting, but by remembering his place in the general and
continuous humanity. It will keep his sight truer
Many times it will preserve his independence when
it is in danger from the fleeting passions of the hour.
But yet he lives the special life. He is a man of
his own day, thoroughly interested in the questions
that are exciting men around him, pained by the
troubles, delighted by the joys, and busy in the tasks
of his own time. His broad humanity and broad cul
ture make him a man of all days ; his keen life and
quick sympathies and healthy instincts and real de
sire for work make him a man of his own day. We
can all see the ideal completeness of such a life.
Whenever we have seen a man at all attaining it we
have felt how complete he was. The incompleteness
of men comes as they fall short of this on one side or
the other. The man who belongs to the world but
not to his time grows abstract and vague, and lays
no strong grasp upon men s lives and the present
causes of their actions. The man who belongs to his
time but not to the world grows thin and superficial.
THE MTNTSTR Y FOR OUR AGE. 219
And just exactly this is true about the preacher.
There are the constant and unchanging needs of
men, and the message which is addressed to those
needs and shares their unchangeableness ; and then
there are the ever-varying aspects of those needs to
which the tone of the message, if it would really reach
the needy soul, must intelligently and sympathetic
ally correspond. The first of these comes of the
preacher s larger life, his study of the timeless Word
of God, his intercourse with God in history, his per
sonal communion with his Master, and the knowledge
of those depths of human nature which never change
whatever waves of alteration may disturb the surface.
The second comes from a constantly alert watch of
the events and symptoms of the current times, begot
ten of a deep desire that the salvation of the world,
which is always going on, may show itself here and
now in the salvation of these particular men to whom
the preacher speaks. If we leave out the difference
of natural endowments and of personal devotedness,
there is nothing which so decides the different kinds
as well as the different degrees of ministers successes
as the presence or absence of this balance and pro
portion of the general and special, the world-con
sciousness and the time-consciousness. The abstract
reasoner, laying his deep trains of thought which run
far wide of the citadels where sin is now entrenched,
and never shatter a stone of present wickedness with
15
220 LECTURES ON PREA CHINQ.
their ponderous explosions, whatever other good
things he may do, fails as a preacher to men. The
mere critic of the time who, with no deep principles
and no long hopes, goes on his way merrily or fiercely
lopping off the ugly heads of the vices of the time
with his light switch or valiant sword, he, too, fails in
his work, and by and by is wearied and distressed as
he finds the surface character of all the reformation
to which he brings his converts. It is the first sort
of preaching that wearies men when they complain
of what they call a very profound but a very dull
sermon. The second is what makes people dissatis
fied with a sense of unthoroughness as they come
home still mildly tingling from what they call a sen
sational sermon. The first man has aimed at truth
without caring for timeliness. The second man has
been so anxious to be timely that he has perhaps
distorted truth, and certainly robbed her of her com
pleteness. Truth and timeliness together make the
full preacher. How shall you win such fulness ?
Let me say one or two general words, and leave par
ticulars of the method to come out, if they may, all
through the lecture. First, seek always truth first
and timeliness second, never timeliness first and
truth second. Then let your search for truth be
deliberate, systematic, conscientious. Let your search
for timeliness consist rather in seeking for strong
sympathy with your kind, a real share in their occu-
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 221
pations, and a hearty interest in what is going on.
And yet again ; let the subjects of your sermons be
mostly eternal truths, and let the timeliness come in
the illustration of those truths by, and their applica
tion to, the events of current life. So you will make
the thinking of your hearers larger, and not smaller,
as you preach to them.
So much in general. But now let us come to this
most interesting age in which we live and in which
we are set to preach. I want to point out two or three
of its broadest characteristics and see how they affect
the preacher s work. I do not undertake any such
task as a general estimate of the character of our
strange century and country. I only want to indicate
some points in it which come directly home to you
and me, and to see, if we can, how we shall treat
them. Let me speak of the feeling of our time about
Truth and Life in general, about the Ministry and
about the Bible.
In the first place, then, there are certain vaguely
conceived but real difficulties lying in people s minds
to-day against which the Gospel that we preach
strikes. We meet them in a great variety of forms.
We find their spirit appearing in regions of intelli
gence where there cannot be any understanding of
their intellectual statements. The most common, the
most wonderfully subtle and pervasive of all these is
the notion of Fate, with all the consequences which ib
222 LECTURES ON PREACJTTNQ.
brings with it to the ideas of responsibility and even
to the fundamental conceptions of personal Life.
We are so occupied with watching the developments
of fatalistic philosophy in its higher and more scien
tific phases that I think we often fail to see to what
an extent and in what unexpected forms it has found
its way into the common life of men and is governing
their thoughts about ordinary things. The notion of
fixed helplessness, of the impossibility of any strong
power of a man over his own life, and, along with
this, the mitigation of the thought of responsibility
which, beginning with the sublime notion of a man s
being answerable to God, comes down to think of him
only as bound to do his duty to society, then de
scends to consider him as only liable for the harm
which he does to himself, and so finally reaches the
absolute abandonment of any idea of judgment or
accountability whatever, all this is very much more
common than we dream. It runs down through all
the degrees of lessening consciousness. There is
nothing stranger than to watch how the intelligent
speculations of the learned become the vague preju
dices of the vulgar. You can shut up nothing within
the scholar s study-door. For good or for mischief
all that the wisest are thinking becomes in some form
or other the basis upon which the ignorant live.
Partly this, and partly a power which works just the
other way. Partly that the learned are led on by
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 223
their oneness with all their brethren to take for the
subjects of their study those things to which the in
terest of the unlearned has been turned, and to reduce
to philosophical expression those ideas by which the
rudest are shaping their lives. Whatever the inter
action of the two causes may have been, the result is
here in a certain suspicion of fatalism all around us.
With it come the inevitable consequences of hopeless
ness and restraint pervading all society and influenc
ing all action, different in different natures, hard and
defiant in some, soft and luxurious in others, but in
all their various forms unfitting men for the best hap
piness, or the best growth, or the best usefulness to
fellow-men. This is what we find scattered through
the society in which we live. This is what you have
got to preach to, my young friends. You will not
escape it by ministering to one class of people rather
than to another, for it runs everywhere. You will
leave it in the study only to find it in some new form
in the workshop. You will silence it m the dull queru
lous discontent of the boor only to hear it in the
calm and resigned and lofty philosophy of the sage.
What preaching can you meet it with ? Certainly one
may point out the broadest features of the preaching
which alone can meet it. It must be positive preach
ing. There never was an age when negative preach
ing, the mere assertion of what is not true, showed its
uselessuess as it does to-day. It does no good to
224 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
show the fatalist that fatalism is untenable. He does
not really believe it ; it is only that he seems to be
unable to believe anything else. You disprove it,
and that only adds another to the heap of things that
are incredible. You must preach positively, telling
him what is true, setting God before his heart and
bidding it know its Lord. And it must be preaching
to the conscience. The conscience is the last part of
our personality that dies into the death of fatalism.
It must be the first part of us that wakens to the
privileges and obligations of personal life. Make a
man know that he is wicked and that he may be
good, and his self and God s self will be realities to
him which no juggle of words can make him believe
do not sxist. And, thirdly, there never was an age
that so needed to have Christ preached to it the
personal Christ. In His personality the bewildered
soul must re-find its own personal life. In the service
of Him it must re-discover the possibility and the
privilege of duty. "The haunting scepticism must be
invaded by preaching such as this. The doubt which
has grown up so vaguely and will give no account of
itself must be overshadowed and undermined, over
shadowed by the vivid majesty of God in Christ,
undermined by the sense of sin and the necessity of
righteousness. The only hope of its complete disper
sion is to produce the Christian life which is its own
THE MINISTRY FOB OUR AGE. 225
assurance, declares its own freedom, and prophesies its
own possibilities.
I speak of this tendency to doubt concerning spirit
ual and personal forces principally as it appears all
through the movements of society and the lives of
common men. I have not much to say here about
the way in which the preacher meets it in the theories
of science, the guesses at the philosophy of the uni
verse which the philosophers of our time have made
so plentifully. But nobody can listen to sermons
nowadays and not be struck by seeing how confus
edly the purpose of preaching and the function of
the preacher seem to be apprehended by those who
preach. Among the preachers who busy themselves
with what modern science is doing and saying, w
can easily discern several classes. One class claims
competently to criticise the work of specialists and to
revise their judgments, even about those subjects on
which they ought to be authorities. It attempts to
pronounce with competence upon the results of scien
tific inquiry in a summary way which it would never
tolerate with reference to its own peculiar subjects of
study. It is needless to say how this class puts itself
into the power of those whom it criticises. It can
get the material for its criticism only from them. So
soon as it leaves the field of general reasoning and
attempts to touch the question of scientific fact, it
226 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
must look for its facts to those who, for the time, it
is treating as its adversaries. It is reduced to some
thing of the helplessness to which the Israelites were
brought when the Philistines who had conquered
them compelled them to come to their smiths to
sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and
his axe, and his mattock. Another class seems to
stand ready, not merely to disown the power of
competent criticism, but to accept with headlong zeal
every momentary conclusion of modern science, even
before the scientific world itself has learned to treat
it as more than a probable hypothesis ; and seems
to be all the more eager to accept it the more
entirely it seems to be in conflict with the faith of
Christianity. No one will deny, I think, that there
are among the disciples of natural science to-day
some men who curiously repeat on their own ground
every offensive and arrogant peculiarity of the priest
craft whose historical enormities they so fondly and
truly upbraid. It is an interesting illustration of
how human nature is the same at heart, and, if it be
bad, will show the same kind of badness whether it
wear the priest s surplice or the professor s gown.
To this overbearing assumption this second class is
always in great haste to prostrate itself. Surely the
spirit of both of these classes is not good. Either is
bad, either the competence with which some clergy
men attempt to pronounce upon the value of scientific
THE MINISTB Y FOR OUR AGE. 227
theories, or the panic in which other clergymen seem
to be waiting only to surrender to the first man with
a hammer or a microscope who challenges them.
There is another class still which seems to be merely
frightened. A sense of vague inevitable danger is
continually haunting those who feel how wholly in
competent they are to master or even to compre
hend the thing they fear. They hate and dread the
very name of Science. They would really, literally,
silence its investigations if they could. As the best
thing which they can do, they are very apt to devise
or to adopt some exceedingly fantastic and exagger
ated form either of church government, or of ritual,
or of doctrine, which they clothe with artificial
sacredness, and then set it up to keep the advanc
ing monster back, as they said that the Chinese piled
their most sacred crockery upon the track to stop the
progress of the first locomotive that came thundering
through their land. All fanaticism is closely bound
to fear.
These are the dispositions with which some
ministers meet the spirit of the day. These are the
various classes. Among these classes comes some new
minister, and stands and says, To which shall I
belong ? Is there not something better than either ?
Indeed there is. It is possible for you and me,
taking the facts of the spiritual life, to declare them
with as true a certainty as any preacher ever did in
228 LEG TV R ES ON PEE A CUING.
what meii call the " ages of faith. They are as true
to-day as they ever were. Men are as ready to feel
their truth. The spiritual nature of man, with all its
needs, is just as real a thing, and Christ is just as
truly and richly its satisfaction. To speak to it and
offer Him is your privilege and mine. And yet not
to be unregardful of what men are thinking by our
side, to watch it, so far as we may to understand it
all, but always to watch it with a desire to see, not
what it will say to overthrow, but what it will say to
strengthen and enlarge the truth we preach ; to watch
it with a feeling that it may modify our conception
and statement of the truth, but with no fear at all that
it ever can destroy the truth itself ; this does seem to
me to be the temper for the preacher of to-day. Our
truth stands on its own evidence, but it has its connec
tions with all the truth that men are learning so
wonderfully on every side. To listen to what they
learn, not that we may see whether our truth of the
soul and of God is true, but that we may come to
truer and larger ways of apprehending it this is our
place. If we can take this place, it will give us both
firmness and freedom ; it will free us alike from the
uselessness of doubt and the uselessness of bigotry.
I seem to see strange panic in the faces of the min
isters of to-day. I have seen a multitude of preach
ers gathered together to listen to one who expounded
scientific theories upon the religious side, and making
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE, 229
the hall ring with vociferous applause of statements
which might be true or not, but certainly whose truth
they had not examined, and in which it certainly was
not the truth but the tendency to help their side of
the argument that they applauded. I think that that
is not a pleasant sight for any one to see who really
cares for the dignity and purity of his profession.
The preacher must mainly rely upon the strength
of what he does believe, and not upon the weakness
of what he does not believe. It must be the power
of spirituality and not the feebleness of materialism
that makes him strong. No man conquers, no true
man tries to conquer merely by the powerlessness of
his adversary. I think the scene which I just de
scribed was principally melancholy because it sug
gested a lack of faith among the ministers themselves.
And one feared that that was connected with the ob
stinate hold upon some untenable excrescences upon
their faith which they chose to consider part of the
substance of their faith itself. So bigotry and cow
ardice go together always.
But after all, in days like these, one often finds
himself falling back upon the simplest truths con
cerning the whole matter of belief. If there be dis
proof or modification of what we Christians hold, the
sooner it can be made known to us the better. We
are Christians at all, if we are Christians worthily, be
cause we are first lovers of the truth. And if our
230 LECTURES ON PREA CHING.
truth is wholly true, it is God s before it is ours, and
we may at least trust Him with some part of its care.
We are so apt to leave Him out.
And there is one strong feeling that comes out of
the extravagant unbelief of our time which has in it
an element of reassurance. The preacher and pastor
sees that in human nature which assures him of
the essential religiousness of man. He comes to a
complete conviction that only a religion can over
throw and supplant a religion. Man wholly unrelig-
ious is not even conceivable to him. And so, however
he may fear for single souls, the very absoluteness of
much of the denial of the time seems to offer security
for the permanence of faith.
But the main thing is to know our own ground as
spiritual men, and stand on its assured and tested
strength. And that strength can be tested only by
our own experience ; and so once more we come round
to our old first truth, that the man is behind the min
istry, that what is in the sermon must be in the
preacher first.
Here must come what useful work we can do for
those who are bewildered and faithless in these trying
times. If you are going to help men who are mate
rialists, it will not probably be by a scientific disproof
of materialism. It will be by a strong live offer of
spiritual realities. It is not what the minister knows
of science, but how he grasps and presents his spirit-
TV?"/? MINIS TR Y FOR OUR AGE. 231
ual verities, that makes him strong. Many ignorant
ministers meet the difficulties of men far wiser than
themselves. I may know nothing of speculative
atheism. It is how I know God that tells.
I do not disparage controversy. Theology must be
prepared to maintain her ground against all comers.
If she loses her power of attack and defence, she will
lose her life, as they used to say that when the bee
parted with his sting he parted with his industry and
spirit. Only not every minister is made for a contro
versialist, and the pulpit is not made for controversy.
The pulpit must be positive, telling its message,
trusting to the power of that message, expecting to
see it blend into harmony with all the other truth
that fills the world ; and the preacher, whatever else
he may be elsewhere, in the pulpit must be positive
too, uttering truth far more than denying error
There is nothing that could do more harm to Chris
tianity to-day than for the multitude of preachers
to turn from preaching Christ, whom they do under
stand, to the discussion of scientific questions which
they do not understand. Hear the conclusion of the
whole matter. Preach positively what you believe.
Never preach what you do not- believe, or deny what
you do believe. Eejoice in the privilege of declaring
God. Let your people frankly understand, while you
preach, that there is much you do not know, and that
both you and they are waiting for completer light.
232 LECTURES ON T REACHING.
I must not linger longer on this topic. May God
help you, as you meet it constantly, to be wise and true.
Another of the questions which belong to this time
of ours in some peculiar ways is the question of tol
eration, the relation of truth to partial truth and
error. This again, like every deep pervading question,
has its form for the learned and for the unlearned.
To the scholar it comes with the speculations, for
which the enlarged acquaintance with other lands
and times has furnished such abundant food, about
comparative religion. To the unscholarly it offers
itself in the prevailing disposition to exalt conduct
above belief, and ask not what views a man holds,
but what sort of life he lives. In both these cases
the tendency of our time is no doubt towards toler
ance. The scholar and the ignorant man alike are
both content that their neighbors should think differ
ently from them about religion. The very desire for
the stake has died away. We look back to the six
teenth and seventeenth century and wonder at the
enormities of bigotry. We are all thankful for the
progress ; but often as we read the books of the time,
often as we talk with our friends, there is a misgiving
which intrudes. How much of this toleration is indif
ference ? How many of these people that are kindly
to their neighbors faiths are careless about their
own ? How much of the difference between us and
the zealots of the seventeenth century has come from
THE MINISTRY FOE OUR AGE. 233
our weakened hold on truth ? They believed with all
their hearts, and were intolerant ; we have grown tol
erant, but then we do not believe as they believed.
We must realize their intensity before we presume to
sit in judgment on their intolerance. So often we
are only trying to be mutually harmless. We are like
steamers lying in the fog and whistling, that we may
not run into others nor they into us. It is safe, but
commerce makes no great progress thereby, and it
shows no great skill in navigation. And then there
conies the picture of a higher state than either the
seventeenth or nineteenth century has reached. We
see that here, as everywhere, mankind has been ad
vancing in a halting and awkward way, first dragging
one side forward, and only gradually dragging the
other side along to meet it. There was a time when
men were standing with their love of truth in advance
of their love of personal liberty. We see that we are
standing now with our love of personal liberty in ad
vance of our love for truth. We anticipate a time
when the love of truth shall come up to our love of
liberty, and men shall be cordially tolerant and ear
nest believers both at once. When that comes it will
be a new thing in the world. It has been seen in
beautiful or splendid individuals scattered all through
the ages, but there has been no age in which the mass
of thinkers were at once strong in positive belief and
tolerant of difference of opinion.
234 L EOTURES ON PEE A CHING.
Now it is certainly the minister s duty to inculcate
positive belief. We rejoice that it has also been re
cognized as the minister s duty to foster charity and
tolerance. In the minister, then, would seem to rest
the hope of that better time to come when both of
these together are to bless the world. As he goes
about among his people he is perpetually saddened
by their unnatural divorce. He hears some member
of his church talk about truth. He listens to clear
statements of the Gospel ; wise, sound discrimina
tions ; true scriptural explanations of the mysteries
of God and man and grace. And all uttered with a
deep fervor which shows how the man loves the truth
he knows. The preacher says, " What clearness ! "
" What faith ! " and rejoices over his disciple. And
just then some stray word drops from the glowing
lips which shows with what a strangeness, amounting
almost to antipathy, this believer looks upon other
people who hold truth differently from himself ; with
what a sense of narrow and exclusive privilege he
treasures his orthodox belief. Or, just the opposite.
Some hearer of your preaching delights you with his
ardent charity for all religions, until you find that
he has no real religion of his own. He upbraids the
bigot without ever having dreamed of the intense be
lief which has made the bigot what he is. In either
case there is a disappointment in the result of your
work as it appears in these two men. Belief and
THE MINISTR Y FOR OUR AOE. 235
charity are not yet in their true association. Mercy
and truth have not yet met together. And you set
yourself, as you walk home from your two parish calls,
to think what you can do to bring about their union.
What the minister can really do is this. I give it
in no special rules. I know none. If I did I should
not think it worth my while or yours to come here
and repeat the little methods of my working which
would not help you. I only give here, as I have tried
to all along, the principles for which the grace of God
and your good sense, if you have both, will find for
you the applications. The preacher can, first, always
insist on looking and on making his people look on
doctrines not as ends but means ; and so, if other
men less perfectly reach the same ends by means of
other doctrines, he will be able to rejoice in their at
tainment of the end without doing dishonor to or
valuing one whit the less the truth which, as it seems
to him, leads much more directly and fully to the
great attainment. " Master," said John, " we saw one
casting out devils in Thy name ; and we forbade him,
because he followeth not with us." And Jesus said,
" Forbid him not : for there is no man which shall do
a miracle in My name, that can lightly speak evil of
Me. For he that is not against us is on our part."
I suppose the day is past when people strengthened
their sense of the importance of the Gospel and of
their privilege in hearing it, and of their duty to
16
236 LECTURES ON PREA CHING.
carry it to the heathen, by asserting that no heathen
could be saved who had not heard it. But some
thing of the same spirit lingers still at home. The
grosser forms of an error will often disappear before
its milder ones. And many men, many ministers, are
apt to emphasize the value of the truth to themselves
by asserting or at least implying consequences whicb
they do not really think would follow on its rejection
by their neighbors. The abandonment of such a way
of thinking and talking would be a great step forward
towards the desired union of belief and charity.
And, again, the preacher may industriously and dis-
criminately set himself to discern what there is good
in the heart of the system that he tolerates, and, tol
erating it for that good, may so keep his absolute
standards and his love for his own truth unimpaired.
The weakness of a large part of our tolerance for
other systems than our own is that it is not discrim
inating. It is a mere sentiment. It thinks that it is
narrow not to tolerate, and so it says, " Come now
and let us tolerate ; " but it never dissects out that
soul of goodness in things evil or only half good
which should make it possible to tolerate them cordi
ally and be glad of their existence ; and so, while it
wastes its cheap and unmeaning compliments upon
them, it often has no real sympathy with them, and
either despises or hates them underneath its compli
ments. This is the kind of tolerance that haunts the
THE MINISTR Y FOR OUR A OE. 237
anniversary platforms where sects are met together,
where men seem to have forgotten that there are any
differences between them, and from which they go
back to their pulpits without a perceptible mitigation
in the blindness with which they misapprehend the
whole position of their neighbor who is preaching in
the next street to them. Toleration as a mere fashion
and sentiment is very feeble. It must study and ap
preciate that which is good in what it tolerates. To
see the positive truths that underlie the Roman Cath
olic errors, that is the only way to be cordially toler
ant of Romanism and yet keep clearly and strongly
one s own Protestant belief.
It is possible for earnest belief to be united with
ardent charity, and it is for us who preach the
Gospel of Christ to show the possibility in all our life
and preaching. Value the ends of life more than its
means, watch ever for the soul of good in things evil,
and the soul of truth in things false, and beside the
richer influence that will flow out from your life on
all to whom you minister, you will do something to
help the solution of that unsolved problem of the
human mind and heart, the reconciliation of hearty
tolerance with strong positive belief.
I have been speaking of some of the intellectual
characteristics of our time which the preacher must
encounter. They are very prominent. But there are
other characteristics of a different sort that force
238 LECTURES ON PEE A OHINO.
themselves upon us almost as much. We talk about
the scientific character of our age. We think of it as
wholly given up to the search after knowledge. But
after all there is a vast preponderance of the activity
of our time which is in no sense scientific. The com
mercial and social and political movements which go
on about us cannot be said, I think, to have any more
of the scientific spirit, to show any more tendency to
revert to facts and trust to established principles,
than those same movements have always manifested.
The trouble with these great continuous and univer
sal interests of life no doubt has its connections with
the danger which besets the study of science. What
we have to fear is the magnifying of second causes to
the forgetfulness of the first cause and the final cause
of things. We need to remember as we preach with
what enormous urgency this danger is pressing upon
the lives of the men and women to whom our preach
ing is addressed. The men and women are living in
the midst of the intense but superficial excitement
which comes of the unnatural and exclusive vividness
of second causes. It seems to the business man as if
Wealth were the king of everything ; as if it made
reputation, made happiness, almost made character.
It seems to the man or woman of society as if Fash
ion, in some supreme reserve of queenship where she
sits and whence her undisputed mandates come, were
the supreme arbiter of destiny. It is the frankness
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 239
with which men own that their views of the forces
which govern things stop with these immediate
causes, wealth and fashion and the pleasure of the
senses, that appals us now. They do not even go
through the form of recognizing some spiritual force
farther back. " Alas, there are no more hypocrites
now," cried the Abbe* Poulle in France in the last cent
ury. And it was indeed a symptom. As humanity
is constituted, when men no longer give themselves
the trouble to make an imitation, it proves how little
the reality is honored ; and the very carelessness of
men about affecting any thought of higher causes is
an indication of how the lower causes have absorbed
the attention and are trying to satisfy the needs of
men.
This is the world to which we have to bring the
Gospel, the story that begins with " God created the
heaven and the earth," and goes on with the record
of God s power and love until it comes to the pro
phecy of the spiritual Judgment Day. What can we
do to get that story of the one first cause home to the
heart of this eager, feverish age worshipping in its
Pantheon of second causes ? First, my brothers,
who are to be pastors of the Church, we can take
watchful care that the Church herself is true to her
belief in God as the source of all power. One of the
most terrible signs of how the spirit of sordidness has
filled the world is the lamentable extent to which it
240 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
has pervaded the Church. The Church is constantly
found trusting in second causes as if she knew of no
first cause. She elaborates her machineries as if the
power lay in them. She goes, cap in hand, to rich
men s doors, and flatters them and dares not tell them
of their sins because she wants their money. She lets
her officers conduct her affairs with all the arts of a
transaction on the street or an intrigue in politics, or
only shows her difference of standards and freedom
from responsibility by some advantage taken which
not even the conscience of the exchange or of the
caucus would allow. She degrades the dignity of
her grand commission by puerile devices for raising
money and frantic efforts to keep herself before the
public which would be fit only for the sordid ambi
tions of a circus troupe. You must cast all that out
of the church with which you have to do, or you will
make its pulpit perfectly powerless to speak of God
to our wealth-ridden and pleasure-loving time. You.
must show first that His Church believes in Him and
trusts Him and is satisfied in Him, or you will cry in
vain to men to come to Him. To do this you must
not only cast out at your doors the disreputable tinsel
of church life of which I have been speaking ; you
must believe in man as the child of God enough to
preach to him at once the highest spiritual truth
about his Father. Many a well-meaning preacher is
all wrong here, I think. He says, " You must take
THE MINISTR Y FOR OUR AGE. 241
men as you find them. You must speak to such
faculties and perceptions as are awake in them."
And so because he sees the economical perceptions
very acute in our commercial time, he preaches the
economy of goodness. He shows men how holiness
will pay. He knows there is a higher truth, but he
cannot trust men to hear it. He hopes to lead them
on to it by and by. Ah, that is all wrong. There is
in every man s heart, if you could only trust it, a
power of appreciating genuine spiritual truth ; of be
ing moved into unselfish gratitude by the love of God.
Continually he who trusts it finds it there. A hun
dred men stand like the Spanish magnates on the shore
and say, " You must not venture far away. There is
no land beyond. Stay here and develop what we
have." One brave and trustful man like Columbus
believes that the complete world is complete, and
sails for a fair land beyond the sea and finds it. The
minister who succeeds is the minister who in the
midst of a sordid age trusts the heart of man who is
the child of God, and knows that it is not all sordid,
and boldly speaks to it of God his Father as if he ex
pected it to answer. And it does answer ; and other
preachers who have not believed in man, and have
talked to him in low planes and preached to him half
gospels which they thought were all that he could
stand, look on and wonder at their brother-preacher s
unaccountable success. There have always been il-
242 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
lustrations of this. There never were more striking
ones than in our time. With all the sordidness of
our time, the preachers that have been the most pow
erful have been the most spiritual. His theology has
something of the taint of mercenarmess about it, but
of all the great revivalists I do not know where we
shall find any one who has preached more constantly
to the good that there is in man, and assumed in all
men a power of spiritual action, than Mr. Moody.
There is nothing finer than to see a soul, which
amazes the men in whom it rises, rise up in men,
when he who trusts it to answer to the highest call
speaks to it of the love of God. In all your preach
ing echo the ministry of Jesus, who spoke to the low
est and most sensual people directly of the everlasting
love, and by the trust He had in them brought them
to His Father.
I do not think that one could rightly suggest the
characteristics of our time which a minister encount-
ters without naming a tendency to sentimentalness
which shows itself in a great deal of our religion, and
which, both directly and indirectly, does our work
great harm. It is connected, with the other features
of the time, with the prevalence of doubt and unbe
lief. It is most natural that when a multitude of
men have more or less deliberately taken up the idea
that the foundations of faith are shaken, when they
are afraid to say that they hold the truths of religion
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 243
to be literally and absolutely true, when even the
authority of religion as the lord of morality is dis
turbed, and men are looking somewhere else than to
God for a constant reason why they should do right,
and wht;ii yet, with all this, the impulses of reverence
and worship remain strong, it is inevitable then that
a certain religion of sentiment should grow up, of
which it is impossible to say how much it believes, but
which delights in glowing and vague utterances of
feeling. No one can read our hymns, whether they
be of the rudest revival sort or the translated medie
valisms of ritualism, without feeling what I mean
They are very beautiful often, but, compared with
the hymns that our fathers sang, they are weak
They lack thought, and no religion that does not
think is strong. It may be in reaction from the way
in which many of the old hymns were made to labor
with a process of reasoning that struggled on most
unlyrically from verse to verse that the favorite
hymn of to-day discards connected thought and
seems to try only to utter moods of mystic feeling, or
to depict some scene in which the spiritual parable
is apt to be lost in the brightness of the sensuous
imagery. I think that the same thing is true of
prayers. A prayer must have thought in it The
thought may overburden it so that its wings of devo
tion are fastened down to its sides and it cannot as
cend. Then it is no prayer, only a meditation or a
244 LECTURES ON PREACHING,
contemplation. But to take the thought out of a
prayer does not insure its going up to God. It may
be too light as well as too heavy to ascend. I saw
once in a shop- window in London a placard which
simply announced " Limp Prayers." It described, I
believe, a kind of Prayer Book in a certain sort of
binding which was for sale within ; but it brought to
mind many a prayer to which one had listened, in
which he could not join, out of which had been left
the whole backbone of thought, and to which he could
attach none of his own heart s desires.
I know that there have always been sentimentalists
in religion. Mysticism, which at its best is a very
high and thorough action of the whole nature in
apprehending spiritual truth, is always degenerating
into sentimentalism. But it is dangerous to-day be
cause it so frankly claims for itself that it is religion.
Disowning doctrine and depreciating law, it asserts
that religion belongs to feeling, and that there is no
truth but love. You will meet it surely in your first
parish at the very door. Some of the sweetest and
noblest natures there are sure to be full of it, and
show it to you very winningly. Others will set it be
fore you as mere weak self-indulgence. You will find
many of the strongest brains and consciences in town
separated entirely from the church because they con
sider it, as they would say if they spoke their whole
minds out to you, to be the very shop and banquet
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 245
room of sentiruentalism. You cannot ignore this as
you preach. You cannot help struggling against its
influence upon yourself. The hard theology is bad.
The soft theology is worse. You must count your
work unsatisfactory unless you waken men s brains
and stir their consciences. Let them see clearly that
you value no feeling which is not the child of truth
and the father of duty. And to let them see that you
value no other feeling you must value no other feel
ing either in yourself or them.
It is natural for sentimentalism and scepticism to
go together, like the fever and the chill, and the same
mixture of deeper faith and more conscientious duty
must be medicine for both.
We ministers cannot help noting with interest
among the symptoms of our time the way in which
the preacher himself is regarded. To remark the
changed attitude which the people generally hold to
wards ministers is the most familiar commonplace ; to
mourn over it as a sign of decadence in the religious
spirit is the habit of some people. But the reasons
of it are plain enough and have been often pointed
out. The preacher is no longer the manifest superior
of other men in wit and wisdom. That deference
which was once paid to the minister s office, upon the
reasonable presumption that the man who occupied it
was better educated, more large in his ideas, a better
246 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
reasoner, a more trustworthy guide in all the various
affairs of life than other men, if it were paid still
would either be the perpetuation of an old habit, or
would be paid to the office purely for itself without
any presumption at all about the man. This latter
could not be long possible ; no dignity of office can
secure men s respect for itself continuously unless it
can show a worthy character in those who hold it. I
am glad that the mere forms of reverence for the
preacher s office have so far passed away. I am not
making a virtue of necessity. I rejoice at it. Noth
ing could be worse for us than for men to keep tell
ing us by deferential forms that we are the wisest
of men when their shelves are full of books with
far wiser words in them than the best that we can
preach ; or that we are the most eloquent of men
when there are better orators by the score on every
side ; or that we are the best of men when we know
of sainthoods among the most obscure souls before
which we stand ashamed. No manly man is satisfied
with any ex-officio estimate of his character. Whether
it makes him better or worse than he is, he cares
nothing for it. And so the nearer that ministers
come to being judged like other men just for what
they are, the more they ought to rejoice, the more, I
think, they do rejoice. But what then ? Is the min
ister s sacred office nothing ? Does not his truth gain
authority and his example urgency from the position
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 247
where he stands ? Indeed they do. It seems to me
that the best privilege which can be given to any man
is a position which shall stimulate him to his best and
which shall make his best most effective. And that
is just what is given to the minister. An official
position which should substitute some other power
for the best powers of the man himself, and should
make him seem effective beyond his real force, would
be an injury to him and ultimately would be recog
nized as an empty sham itself. I quarrel with no
man for his conscientious belief about the high and
separate commission of the Christian ministry. I
only quarrel with the man who, resting satisfied with
what he holds to be his high commission, is not eager
to match it with a high character. The more you
think yourself different from other men because you
are a minister, the more try to be different from other
men by being more fully what all men ought to be.
That is a High Churchmanship of which we cannot
have too much.
I hold, then, that the Christian ministry has still in
men s esteem all that is essentially valuable, and all
that is really good for it to have. It has a place of
utterance more powerful and sacred than any other
in the world. Then comes the question, What has it
to utter ? The pedestal is still there. Men will not
gather about it as they once did, perhaps, without re
gard to the statue that stands upon it. But if a truly
248 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
good statue stands there the world can see it as it
could if it stood nowhere else.
There are two great faults of the ministry which
come, one of them from ignoring, the other from re
belling against, this change in the attitude of the
minister and the people towards each other. The
first is the perpetual assertion of the minister s
authority for the truth which he teaches. To claim
that men should believe what we teach them because
we teach it to them, and not because they see it to be
true, is to assume a place which God does not give us
and men will not acknowledge for us. Many a Chris
tian minister needs to be sent back to him whom we
call the heathen Socrates, to read these noble words
in the " Phsedo " which whole dialogue, by the way,
is itself no unworthy pattern of the best qualities of
preaching. " You, if you take my advice, will think
little about Socrates, but a great deal about Truth."
And the other fault is the constant desire to make
people hear us who seem determined to forget us.
This is the fault of the sensational preacher. A
large part of what is called sensational preaching is
simply the effort of a man who has no faith in his
office or in the essential power of truth to keep him
self before people s eyes by some kind of intellectual
fantasticalness. It is a pursuit of brightness and
vivacity of thought for its own sake, which seems to
come from a certain almost desperate determination
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 249
of the sensational minister that he will not be forgot
ten. I think there is a great deal of nervous uneasi
ness of mind which shows a shaken confidence in
one s position. It struggles for cleverness. It lives
by making points. It is fatal to that justice of
thought which alone in the long run commands con
fidence and carries weight. The man who is always
trying to attract attention and be brilliant counts the
mere sober effort after absolute truth and justice dull.
It is more tempting to be clever and unjust than to
be serious and just. Every preacher has constantly
to make his choice which he will be. It does not be
long to men, like angels, to be " ever bright and fair "
together. And the anxious desire for glitter is one
of the signs of the dislodgment of the clerical position
in our time.
There is a possible life of great nobleness and use
fulness for the preacher who, frankly recognizing and
cordially accepting the attitude towards his office
which he finds on the world s part, preaches truth
and duty on their own intrinsic authority, and wins
personal power and influence because he does not
seek them, but seeks the prevalence of righteousness
and the salvation of men s souls.
The relation of our time to the Bible is another
subject which must interest a preacher very deeply.
The Bible is the authority by which we preach ; and
to find the people whom our preaching interests so
250 LECTURES ON PEE A CHINff.
largely uninterested in and ignorant of the source
from which our truth is drawn must awaken some
questions as to whether our preaching is wholly
right. I do not speak now of the prevalent doubts
about the Bible, though they are, of course, connected
very closely, both as cause and effect, with men s
ignorance about it. I speak merely of the fact of
that undoubted ignorance. Who is there among our
people who knows the Old Testament ? Where are
the people that in any real sense know the New ?
If we look for the reasons of such ignorance about
a book which lies on everybody s table, and whose
name is on everybody s lips, they are not hard to
find. First there is in our time a great reaction from
the belief that men once had in the saving power of
the Bible. Men who have read a book not because it
was true or because they wanted to get at its lessons,
but because they thought it was safe to read it and
unsafe not to read it, just as soon as the notion of
safety is loosened from it, will be less ready to care
for its truth and to feel its power than that of other
books. This is human nature. The stronger feeling
about the Bible has kept down the more familiar feel
ing which attaches us to other books. Another
reason is, of course, the crowd of other books, their
cheapness and their apparent pressingness. Even
the man who knows that the Bible is the best of
books will read the last new treatise on religion in-
THE MINTS TR Y FOR OUR AGE. 251
stead of the Bible, because he knows the Bible be
longs to all ages, and can never pass out of date,
while with this " latest publication " it is to-day or
never. And yet another reason is the prevalent dis
position to consider the Bible the clergy s book. We
wonder at the pusillanimity with which the people of
the Middle Ages and the Eomanists of to-day have
submitted to restrictions on the reading of the Bible,
and to the acceptance of whatever account of it their
preachers chose to give. The real truth is that they
like this state of things ; and many of our Protestants
like it too, and of their own free will treat the Bible
so exactly as the Mediaeval Christian was compelled
to treat it that it ought not to seem strange. And
another reason is that the clergy, by their unreal fan
tastic treatment of the Bible, often do what they can
to make the people think that it is indeed unintelli
gible except to one who holds a very complicated key,
and so that it is not for the like of them to touch it.
This is the evil of all unreal exegesis. It throws an
unreal air about the book of God. I heard of a ser
mon on the first verse of the Forty-first Psalm which
declared it to be a statement of the mission of Christ
and the scheme of the Atonement. Imagine a believ
ing disciple going home after that sermon and read
ing his Bible with the slightest hope of knowing what
it meant ! And another reason still is our unbiblical
preaching. I mean our preaching about all topics
17
252 LECTURES ON PEE A CITING.
with various degrees of wisdom but with nothing
which would suggest that what we give men is only
a few drops out of a spring of truth and life, and so
would send them eagerly to the fountain to drink
their fill.
Against these tendencies to make the Bible unreal
and uninteresting there has come the protest of the
new way of treating it and the new books about it.
I know the danger of superficialness which attends
the realistic treatment of the Bible. I know how apt
it is to carry the mind up to a certain point of ama
teur interest and leave it there. Certainly no one can
praise it except as an introduction to a spiritual rich
ness which is far deeper than itself, but in our day
it is something to be very glad of that Milman and
Stanley, and Farrar and the author of " Ecce Homo,"
in literature, and Holman Hunt and Bida, in the re
gion of art, have made the outer life of the Bible live
anew, and by sweeping aside the mist of unreality
that hung about its door have opened the way for
a deeper entrance into its spirit than man has yet
attained.
There is need of every special effort to make men
know the Bible. The Bible class, the expository lec
ture, the illustrative picture, none of them can do too
much. But there is yet greater need that you and I
who preach should let the people see that we are men
of the Bible, that we know its letter and are possessed
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 253
by its spirit, that out of it directly comes the support
of our own religious life and the food which we offer
in our preaching.
I must not let my lecture grow any longer. I
have tried to point out to you some of the peculiari
ties of our time which we as preachers must en
counter. I must not close without begging you not
to be ashamed or afraid of the age you live in, and
least of all to talk of it in a tone of weak despair.
In the beginning of the last century many men
talked of Christianity as if it were an effete super
stition. And yet behold the new life which has
come forth since from that which men then called
dead. The state of things which then existed may
seem to be renewed, though it is not possible for men
to be as wholly unbelieving in the nineteenth century
as they were in the eighteenth. But out of what men
now call a slow death new life will come. In many
ways we can see clearly that it is not death, but some
strange change and progress of the methods of life
by which we are surrounded. To be thoroughly in
sympathy with the age, to admire everything in it
that is admirable, to rejoice in its great achievements,
to see the beauty of the superb material structure
which it is building for the better spirituality which
is to come to dwell in it, to love to trace the strange
nomadic currents of spiritual desire which run, often
254 LECTURES ON
grotesquely or frantically, through its tumultuous
life, to see with joy how its new needs bring out
new sides of helpfulness in the ever helpful Gospel
of Christ, this is the true culture of a preacher for
our time. He believes in it and loves it, and sees its
great strong faults against the background of its
noble qualities. He thanks God, who sent him here
to work ; for he is sure that while there have been
many centuries in which it was easier, there has been
none in which it was more interesting or inspiring for
a man to preach.
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL.
nnHEIlE is a power which lies at the centre of all
-*- success in preaching, and whose influence reaches
out to the circumference, and is essential everywhere.
Without its presence we cannot imagine the most
brilliant talents making a preacher of the Gospel in
the fullest sense. Where it is largely present it is
wonderful how many deficiencies count for nothing.
It has the characteristics which belong to all the most
essential powers. It is able to influence the whole
life as one general and pervading motive ; and it can
also press on each particular action with peculiar
force. Under its compulsion a man first becomes a
preacher, and every sermon that he preaches is more
or less consciously shaped by its pressure ; as the
whole round world and each round atom are shaped
and held in shape by the same laws. Without this
power preaching is almost sure to become either a
struggle of ambition or a burden of routine. With
it preaching is an ever fresh delight. The power is
865
256 LECTURES ON PREA CHING.
the value of the human soul, felt by the preacher,
and inspiring all his work.
The power of that motive has been assumed in all
that I have said to you. But it seems to me to be so
supremely important ; the ministry which is full of it
is so rich ; the ministry which lacks it is so poor, that
I determined, when I undertook the duty which I
complete to-day, that this last lecture should be given
to a serious consideration of the importance and
value of this mainspring, which lies coiled up within
all the complicated machinery of the ministry, the
realized value of the human soul.
As to its importance, we get our clearest impression
if we look at the earthly ministry of Jesus. There
are many accounts to be given of His wondrous work.
People may say many ingenious things about it, and
many of them are true. But we are sure that he has
put his hand most certainly upon the central power
of Christ s ministry who holds up before us the in
tense value which the Saviour always set upon the
souls for which He lived and died. It shines in
everything He says and does. It looks out from His
eyes when they are happiest and when they are sad
dest. It trembles in the most loving consolations,
and thunders in the most passionate rebukes which
come from His lips. It is the inspiration at once of
His pity and His indignation. And it has made the
few persons on whom it chanced to fall, and in whose
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 257
histories it found its illustrations, the men and
women who represented humanity about Him in
Palestine Nicodemus, Peter, John, the Pharisees,
the Magdalen, the woman of Samaria, and all the rest
luminous forever with its light. That power still
continues wherever the same value of the human soul
is present. If we could see how precious the human
soul is as Christ saw it, our ministry would approach
the effectiveness of Christ s. " I am not convinced
by what you say. I am not sure that I cannot
answer every one of your arguments," said a man
with whom a preacher had been pleading, " but one
thing which I confess I cannot understand. It
puzzles me, and makes me feel a power in what you
say. It is why you should care enough for me to
take all this trouble, and to labor with me as if you
cared for my soul." It is a power which every man
must feel. It inspires the preacher ; and his hearers,
catching its influence, become soft and ready to
receive the truth. It is strength in the arm which
strikes, and tenderness in the rock which receives
the blow.
The other motives of the minister s work seem to
me to stand around this great central motive as the
staff officers stand around a general. He needs them.
They execute his commands. He could not do his
work without them. But he is not dependent upon
them as they are upon him ; any one of them might;
258 LECTURES ON PREA CHINO.
fall away and he could still fight the battle. The
power of the battle is in him. If he falls the cause
is ruined. So stand the subordinate motives of the
ministry around the commanding motive, the realized
value of the human soul. They are the motives
which I have had occasion to dwell on one by one in
the course of these lectures. They are the pleasure
of work, the mere delight in the exercise of powers,
which is natural to any man who is healthy both in
body and mind ; the love of influence, that gratifica
tion in feeling our life touch another life for some
good result, which is also natural and healthy ; the
perception of order, that love of regulated movement,
of the rhythm of righteousness in the lives and ways
of men, which in its higher forms is noble, though in
the lower it degenerates into routine ; and lastly the
pure concern for truth, the pleasure in seeing right
ideas take the place of wrong ideas, which may be
quite separate from any regard for the interest of
the person in whom the change takes place. These
are the nobler members of the staff of the great
general. There are more ignoble ones who volunteer
their services and wear something like his uniform
and cannot always be distinguished from his true
servants ; such as emulation, and the love of fame, and
the pride of opinion, and the enjoyment of congenial
society. I will not dwell on those. These others are
the real staff of the general. But when we look at
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 259
their group, how the commanding motive whom they
serve towers up far above them all. They get their
highest dignity from serving him. For in his service
each of them, which is abstract in itself, comes into
actual contact with man ; and no abstract principle
has shown its full power or given its full pleasure
until it has opened the essential relations which exist
between it and human nature. It is the great
privilege of the ministry that it is kept in constant
necessary contact with mankind. Therein lies its
healthiness. Man in his mystery and wonderf ulness is
more full of the suggestion of God than either abstract
truth or physical nature. And so the truth preacher,
in spite of his imperfect opportunities for study, in
spite of his separation from the beauty of the natural
world, has the chance to know more of God than
the profoundest speculative philosophy or the most
exquisite scenery of earth could reveal to him.
Let me try, then, to point out to you what some of
the effects will be in a man s preaching from a true
sense of the value of the human soul, by which I mean
a high estimate of the capacity of the spiritual nature,
a keen and constant appreciation of the attainments
to which it may be brought. And first of all it helps
to rescue the Gospel which we preach from a sort of
unnaturalness and incongruity which is very apt to
cling to it. This is, I think, very important. Con-
aider what it is that you are to declare week after
260 LECTURES OX PREACHING.
week to the men and women who come to hear you.
The mighty truths of Incarnation and Atonement are
your themes. You tell them of the birth and life and
death of Jesus Christ. You picture the adorable love
and the mysterious sacrifice of the Saviour. And
you bind all this to their lives. You tell them that
in a true sense all this was certainly for them. I do
not know what you are made of, if sometimes, as you
preach, there does not come into your mind a thought
of incongruity. What are you, you and these people
to whom you preach, that for you the central affec
tion of the universe should have been stirred ? You
know your own life. You know something of the
lives they live. You look into their faces as you
preach to them. Where is the end worthy of all this
ministry of almighty grace which you have been de
scribing ? Is it possible that all this once took place
and, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, is a per
petual power in the world, merely that these machine-
lives might run a little truer, or that a series of rules
might be established by which the current workings
of society might move more smoothly ? That, which
men sometimes make the purpose of it all, is too un
worthy. The engine is too coarse to have so fine a
fire under it. You must see something deeper. You
must discern in all these men and women some in
herent preciousness for which even the marvel of the
Incarnation and the agony of Calvary was not too
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 261
great, or it is impossible that you should keep your
faith in those stupendous truths which Bethlehem
and Calvary offer to us. Some source of fire from
which these dimmed sparks come, some possible
renewal of the fire which is in them still, some sight
of the education through which each soul is passing,
and some suggestion of the special personal perfectness
to which each may attain all this must brighten
before you, as you look at them ; and then the truths
of your theology shall not be thrown into confusion
nor faded into unreality by your ministry to men.
The best thing in a minister s life is the action of his
works and his faith on one another ; his experience
of the deeper value of the human soul making the
wonders of his faith more credible, and the truths of
his faith always revealing to him a deeper and deeper
value in the soul.
I think that nobody can preach with the best power
who is not possessed with a sense of the mysterious-
ness of the human life which he preaches to. It must
seem to him capable of indefinite enlargement and
refinement. He must see it in each new person as
something original and new. This must be some
thing which belongs to his whole conception of man
as the child of God. It must not be the mere inspira
tion of his whim, attributed in great richness to some
lives which chance to take his fancy, but ignored in
others. He must see it in all men simply as men.
262 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
When he undertakes to lead them he must feel the
mystery and spontaneity of the lives that he takes
under his teaching. He must be a careful student
of the characters he trains. He cannot carry people
over the route of his ministry as a ferryman carries
passengers across the river, always running his boat
in the same line and never even asking the names of
the people whom he carries. He must count himself
rather like the tutor of a family of princes, who, with
careful study of their several dispositions, trains the
royal nature of each for the special kingdom over
which he is to rule.
Here is where the preacher and the poet touch.
Every true preacher must be a poet, at least in so
far as to see behind all the imperfections of men a
certain ideal manhood from which they have never
separated, which underlies the life and lends its value
to the blurred and broken character of every one. A
belief in the Incarnation, in the divine Son of Man,
makes such poets of us all. It is interesting to see
in how many ministers the hopefulness of this ideal
poetic view of human life overcomes the tendencies
of natural temperament, the discouragement of
poverty and disease, and the disenchanting influence
of intercourse with men, and keeps ministers the most
hopeful class of men. They are always standing
where, if they will, they may listen for the bells that
shall " ring in the Christ that is to be." I have seen
THE VALUk OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 263
ministers try to crush back this noble tendency of
their vocation and to assume a cynicism and a hope
lessness which they did not feel, so that other men
might not call them childish. And I have seen men
of the world disappointed when they came to such
ministers and did not find in them the childlike hope
and trust that they expected, but only false and de
spairing thoughts of human nature like their own ; as
if the ice came up to the fire to warm itself, and found
the fire ashamed of being warm and trying hard to
make itself as cold as ice.
I might dwell, also, on this value of the human soul
for its own sake, as constituting the constant reserve
of pleasure in the ministry. There are other pleasures
in our work, as I have recounted to you already; but
they are all, to a certain extent, dependent upon cir
cumstances. A parish uproar which reveals the bad
reality of life may scatter some of them. Poverty,
which deprives you of the means of culture, and takes
away the power of carrying out your plans, may rob
you of others. But the mere pleasure of dealing with
man as man, as a being valuable in himself, for this
no peculiar happiness of circumstances is needed.
Wherever men are, you may have it. Nobody but
Robinson Crusoe is shut out from it, and even to
him the man Friday is sure to come.
And herein lies the real fellowship of the ministry.
There are no fellow-workers who come so close to-
264 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
gether as fellow- workers in the ministry of the Gospel ;
and their companionship is closest when they most
deeply know this truth of the essential value of the
human soul. A preacher comes to me from Africa, or
from some church of another denomination in the
next street, which often seems farther off than Africa.
It depends upon what the power of our preaching is,
how near we come together. If we are both given to
machineries, each of us valuing only what a certain
sort of people may become under the peculiar culture
of the denomination which he represents, then we talk
together, however pleasantly, only over our fences,
and shake hands, however cordially, only through
the slats. If we both really value the soul of man,
we understand each other ; the different methods of
our work do not keep us apart, but bring us together,
for they are the means by which we manifest to one
another the deep motive which is the power of both our
lives. The fences are turned into bridges. Certainly,
Christian union, whenever it comes, must come thus :
not by compromise and the adjustment of various
forms of government and worship, but by the devel
opment in all preachers of all kinds of that value for
man in Christ which burrows far beneath the differ
ences of forms and flies far above them. It may be
given to some people in these days to take direct steps
towards organic Christian union. I bid them God
speed. But if that is not our task let us know, and
THE VALUE OF TEE HUMAN SOUL. 265
let us rejoice in knowing, that we are doing, perhaps,
as much as they for the millennium, if, in ourselves and
those who hear us, by whatever partial name we and
they may he called, we are doing what we can to make
strong that sense of the value of the human soul which,
by its very nature, is universal, and cannot be partial.
Here is where the zealous partisan, who is at the same
time an earnest Christian, is often working better than
he knows. He is like a jealous farmer who prays for
rain to water his field that it may be richer than his
neighbor s ; but the heaven is too broad for him, and
will not limit its bounty by the intention of his prayer.
It will rain, but it cannot rain between fences ; and so
his selfish prayer brings refreshment for the alien
acres for which he does not pray.
And as this power in the ministry lies deepest, so
it lasts longest. The veteran preacher, I think, keeps
the enjoyment and tries to keep the practice of his
work later in life than the veteran in almost any other
occupation. That always seems to me a touching and
convincing proof of the excellence of our calling. It
shows better and better as it grows older. The de
lightful French artist, Millet, used to say to his pupils :
" The end of the day is the proof of a picture " " La
fin du jour, c est I e preuve d un tableau." He meant
that the twilight hour, when there is not light enough
to distinguish details, is the most favorable time to
judge of a picture as a whole. And so it is with the
266 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
ministry. When the cross-lights of jealous emulation
and the glare of constant notoriety are softening to
wards the darkness in which lies the pure judgment
of God and the peace of being forgotten by mankind,
then that which has been lying behind them all the
time comes out ; and the old preacher who has ceased
to care whether men praise or blame him, who has
attained or missed all that there is for him of success
or failure here, preaches on still out of the pure sense
of how precious the soul of man is, and the pure de
sire to serve a little more that which is so worthy of
his service, before he goes.
Let me follow still farther the enumeration of the
qualities which grow up in the preacher from his
value for the human soul. Courage is one of its most
necessary results. The truest way not to be afraid of
the worst part of a man is to value and try to serve
his better part. The patriot who really appreciates
the valuable principles of his nation s life is he who
most intrepidly rebukes the nation s faults. And
Christ was all the more independent of men s whims
because of His profound love for them and complete
consecration to their needs. There come three stages
in this matter : the first, a flippant superiority which
despises the people and thinks of them as only made
to take what the preacher chooses to give to them, and
to minister to his support ; the second, a servile syco
phancy which watches all their fancies, and tries to
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 26*7
blow whichever way their vane points ; and the third,
a deep respect which cares too earnestly for what the
people are capable of being to let them anywhere fall
short of it without a strong remonstrance. You have
seen all three in the way in which parents treat their
children. I could show you each of the three to-day
in the relation of different preachers to their parishes.
Believe me, the last is the only true independence, the
only one that is worth while to seek, or indeed that
a man has any right to seek. An actor may encour
age himself by despising or forgetting his audience,
but a preacher must go elsewhere for courage. The
more you prize the spiritual nature of your people,
the more able you will be to oppose their whims.
There must be the fountain of your independence.
And here, too, is the power of simplicity and abso
lute reality. All turgid rhetoric, all false ornament,
all doctrinal fantasticalness must disappear in the
presence of a supreme absorbing value for the souls
of men. The conscience and the taste, when both are
pure, will coincide. Every divorce which separates
them is a parting of what God has joined together.
The two are most essentially united in the functions
of our sacred office. The man whose eye is set upon
the souls of men, and whose heart burns with the de
sire to save them, chooses with an almost unerring in
stinct what figure will set the truth most clearly before
their minds, what form of appeal will bring it most
18
268 LECTURES ON PEE A Oil ING.
strongly to their sluggish wills. He takes those and
rejects every other. The mere un warlike citizen goes
lounging through the Tower of London, and among
the old armor there he praises that which he calls
beautiful. The soldier walks through the same halls,
and, with a soldier s instinct, thinks no armor beauti
ful which will not kill the enemy or protect the man
who wears it. That is the final principle of all right
choice, the touchstone of good taste. The sermon is
to be sacrificed to the soul, the system of work to the
purpose of work always. It strikes at the root of all
clerical fastidiousness and the tyranny of order. It
is wonderful how the character of all ornament in a
sermon declares itself. That which really belongs to
the purpose of the sermon is always good. That
which is there for its own sake every pure taste, how
ever untrained, instantly feels to be bad. The one is
like the sculpture on an old cathedral which, however
rude, was meant to tell a story. The other is like the
carving on our house-fronts which is meant merely to
look pretty, and so fails of even that. There are some
men born to positions of such dignity that they are
doomed to be either illustrious or ridiculous. And so
ornament when it is applied to a sermon must either
do the lofty work of making truth plain and glorious
or it fails of everything. It cannot be allowed simply
to amuse or please as may the ornament of an essay
or a poem.
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 269
But our principle goes deeper than this. This con
trolling value of the human soul must save a preacher,
also, from a narrow treatment of the souls under his
care. If he values them more than any theory of his
own about how souls generally are to be treated, he
will be broad and try only to lead each into that en
tire obedience to God which results in such different
experiences for us all. The ascetic theorist values
self-sacrifice for its own sake and would enforce it in
discriminately. The theorist of self-indulgence says,
" No, pain is a curse. Pleasure is good. Shun pain.
Do what is pleasant." The teacher who values the
souls which he teaches more than any theory says
something different from either. He says, " Not en
joyment and not sorrow, but the meeting of your will
with the will of God, whatever it may bring, is the
purpose of all discipline. Be ready for any way which
God shall choose to bring your will to His." But to
this large wisdom no teacher can be brought except
by a true sense of the preciousness of the soul of man.
It cannot be denied, and it must not be forgotten,
that this absorbing conviction of the value of the
human soul has its besetting danger. That danger is
not slight nor casual. It is important and essential.
The danger is lest, in our eagerness to help the spirit
ual nature which we so highly value, we should be led
to judge of the truth of any idea by what we think
might be its influences on the soul for which we are so
270 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
anxious. The tendency to estimate and treat ideas
according to what appear their probable effects on
human character has been, no doubt, a great besetting
sin of spiritual teachers always. I suppose that it can
not be wholly separated from any vocation which is
bound at once to seek for truth and to educate
character. This is the way in which a great deal of
half-believed doctrine comes to be clinging to and
cumbering the Church. Men insist on believing and
on having other people believe certain doctrines,
not because they are reasonably demonstrated to be
true, but because, in the present state of things, it
would be dangerous to give them up. This is the
way in which one man clings to his idea of verbal in
spiration, and another to his special theory of the di
vine justice, and another to his material notion of the
resurrection, and yet another to his notion of the
Church s authority and the minister s commission. It
is a very dangerous danger, because it wears the cloak
of such a good motive ; but it is big with all the evil
fruits of superstition. It starts with a lack of faith
in the people and in truth and in God. Jesus bids
us not to cast pearls before swine, but He does not
bid us to feed even swine on pebbles. " God forbid,"
says Bishop Watson, "that the search after truth
should be discouraged for fear of its consequences.
The consequences of truth may be subversive of sys
tems of superstition, but they can never be injurious
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 271
to the rights or well-founded expectations of the hu
man race." There is nothing that one would wish to
say more earnestly to our young and ardent ministers
than this : Never sacrifice your reverence for truth
to your desire for usefulness. Say nothing which you
do not believe to be true because you think it may be
helpful. Keep back nothing which you know to be
true because you think it may be harmful. Who are
you that you should stint the children s drinking from
the cup which their Father bids you to carry to them, or
mix it with error because you think they cannot bear
it in its purity ? We must learn in the first place to
form our own judgments of what teachings are true
by other tests than the consequences which we think
those teachings will produce ; and then, when we have
formed our judgments, we must trust the truth that
we believe, and the God from whom it comes, and tell
it freely to the people. He is saved from one of the
great temptations of the ministry who goes out to his
work with a clear and constant certainty that truth
is always strong no matter how weak it looks, and
falsehood is always weak, no matter how strong it
looks.
But if we bear this danger in our minds, and are
upon our guard against it, then the value for our breth
ren s souls will help us to avoid many false standards.
It will give interest to many people whom otherwise
we should find very uninteresting. There is much iu
272 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
the minister s training to make him value purely in
tellectual companionships. There is a tendency in
many ministers, whose disposition leads them to value
truth more than men, to let themselves be drawn
almost exclusively into the society of those whose ways
of thought are like their own. I think it is a wonder
to many people who are not ministers, how one man
who is the pastor of a great parish can be genuinely
interested in so many people of such various char
acters and lives A good many people, and even some
clergymen, take it for granted that it is not possible,
and treat the appearance of such universal interest as
a pretence, necessary in order to keep up the parish
feeling, and so a very valuable accomplishment in a
minister. But it is not so. No man ever did it suc
cessfully, year after year, as a pretence. The secret of
it all is simply the great sense of the value of the hu
man soul brought home and individualized upon these
human souls committed to our care, as a magistrate
sees all the dignity of the law represented in the set
tlement of the petty quarrel that is brought before his
court. The large conception of the value of humanity
must go before the special value of one s own parish
ioners, otherwise the pastoral relation softens into
mere personal fondness, or else hardens into a rigid
and formal treatment of the people according to arbi
trary classifications which lose alike their general
humanity and their personal distinctness. There is a
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 2*73
ministry which is all the more personal because of its
broad humanness ; a ministry which, beginning with
the sacredness of man, counts all men sacred, and
touches, with its own peculiar pressure upon each, the
lives of strong men and little children, of women and
boys and girls, of working-people and people of idle
lives, of saints and sinners, as the rain and dew of
God which water the earth feed both the oak-tree and
the violet; a ministry which makes its care for every
soul dearer and more sacred to that soul because it is
evidently no mere personal fondness, but one utter
ance of that Christliness which deeply feels the
preciousness of the souls of all God s children.
I have not time to dwell upon the help which a per
petual value for the souls of men must render to our
own spiritual life, and so to our efficiency as preachers.
Indeed, it is the great power by which our souls must
grow. This is the ministry of the people to the
preacher, which is often greater than any ministry
that the preacher can render to the people. I assure
you that the relation between the pastor and his parish
is not right if the pastor thinks the obligation to be
all upon one side ; if while he lives with them and
when he leaves them he is not always full of gratitude
for what they have done for him. A pastor who is in
sensible to this cannot do the best good to his people.
And the sort of help which a minister gets from his
congregation whose souls he values is a direct com-
274 LEOTUKES ON PMEACHING.
plement of the good which he gets from his study.
He needs them both. His study furnishes him with
ideas, with intellectual conceptions, and his congrega
tion furnishes him with an atmosphere in which these
ideas ripou to their best result. The minister as he
grows older changes some of the opinions which he
used to hold. The new opinions, it is to be hoped, are
truer than the old ones. But greater than all such
changes are the deepening convictions about all spirit
ual things which come from the long years of deal
ing with men s souls and which color every opinion
whether new or old. The conviction that truth and
destiny are essential and not arbitrary, that Chris
tianity is the personal love and service of Christ, and
that salvation is positive, not negative, convictions
such as these they are that fill and richen the
preacher s maturer years ; and they are convictions
whose clearness and strength he owes to that occupa
tion which has both demanded and cultivated a
value for the souls of men.
As to the nature of this value for the human soul,
notice, I beg you, that it is something more than the
mere sense of the soul s danger. It is a deliberate
estimate set upon man s spiritual nature in view of its
possibilities. The danger in which that nature stands
by sin intensifies and emphasizes the value which we
set upon it, but it does not create that value. I think
that this is important. I think that we are sometimes
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 2*76
apt to let our anxiety for the salvation of souls de
generate into a mere pity for the misery into which
they may be brought by sin ; and the result of such a
low thought is that when we have been brought to
believe that a soul is, as we say, " safe," that it has
been forgiven and will not be punished, we are satis
fied. The thought of rescue has monopolized our
religion and often crowded out the thought of culture.
I think that the tone of the New Testament is different
from this. I know how eminently there the truths
of danger and rescue always appear. I know that
Christ " came not to call the righteous but sinners to
repentance," and that He was called Jesus because He
should " save His people from their sins " ; but all the
time behind the danger lies the value of that spiritual
nature which is thus in peril. It is not solely or princi
pally the suffering which the soul must undergo ; it is
the loss of the soul itself, its failure to be the bright
and wonderful thing which, as the soul of God s child,
it ought to be. That is the reason why the process
of salvation cannot stop with the removal of penalties
and the forgiveness of sins. It must include all the
gradual perfection of the soul by faith and love and
obedience and patience. This is the reason, too, why
those who have taken only a half view of the complete
salvation are apt to be severe on those who have seen
only the other half. Half a truth is often more
jea]ous of the other half than of an error.
276 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
This larger and deeper value for the human soul, I
think, is seen in all the sermons of the greatest
preachers. It is not mere pity for danger that in
spires them to plead with men. That might move
them to a sort of supercilious exertion, no matter
how intrinsically worthless was the thing in peril, as
one might start up to pluck even an insect from the
candle s flame. But it is a glowing vision of how
great and beautiful the soul of man might be, of
what great things it might do if it were thoroughly
purified and possessed by the love of God and so
opened free channels to His power.
There are special causes which make this great
power of which I have been speaking, the sense of the
value of the soul, more difficult to win and keep in
this age of ours than it has been in many other times.
There are two characteristics of our time which have
their influence upon it. One is the tendency of philo
sophy to divert itself from man and turn towards
other nature, and in its study of man to busy itself
least with his spiritual nature, most with his physical
history. The other is the strong philanthropic dis
position which prevails about us, the desire to relieve
human suffering and to promote human comfort and
intelligence. The first of these tendencies would cer
tainly make it more than usually hard to realize the
spiritual value of humanity ; and the second, while it
makes much of man, cares mainly for his material
TIIR VALVE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 277
well-being and is always disposed to treat the indi
vidual as subservient to the interests of the mass.
The general result is one of which I think that there
can be no doubt, a difficulty in the real, vivid per
petual sense of the worth of man s spiritual nature
such as has very rarely beset those in other ages
who have tried to serve their fellow-men. At such
a time we need to hold very strongly to the constant
facts of human life which lie below all such temporary
changes, and to be very sure of their reappearance.
We need a keen, quick-sighted faith which shall
discover the first signs of what must surely come, a
reaction from the partial tendencies of the time.
We need a generous fairness to discover thought and
feeling which is really spiritual, but which has
cloaked itself, even to its own confusion, in the forms
and phrases of the time.
But, more than all of these, we who are preaching
in such days as these need to understand these
methods by which in any time we must acquire and
preserve the sense of the preciousness of the human
soul. What are these methods ? First of all, before
a man can value the souls of other men, he must
have learnt to value his own soul. And a man
learns to value his own soul only as he is conscious
of the solemn touches of the Spirit of the Lord upon
it. Ah, my friends, here is the real reason why he
who preaches to the inner life of others must himself
278 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
have had an inner life. Not that he may take his
own experience and narrowly make it the type to
which all other experiences must conform, but that
having learnt how God loves him, having felt in many
a silent hour and many a tumultuous crisis the pres
sure of God s hands full of care and wisdom, he may
know, as he looks from his pulpit, that behind every
one of those faces into which he looks there is a soul
for which God cares with the same thoughtfulness. In
his closet he has first seen the light which from his
closet he carries forth to illuminate the humanity
of his congregation and bring out all its colors. The
personal desire to be pure and holy, the personal
consciousness of power to be pure and holy through
Christ, reveals the possibility of other men.
Again, a preacher s view of all theology ought to
be colored with the preciousness of the human soul.
It is possible for two men to hold the same doctrine
and yet to differ very widely in this respect. To one
of them the Christian truths reveal much of the glory
and mercy of God, to the other they shine also with
the value of the spiritual manhood. To this last the
Incarnation reveals the essential dignity of that nature
into union with which the Deity could so marvel
lously enter. The Redemption bears witness of
the unspeakable love of God, but also of the value
underneath the sin of man, which made the jewel
worth cleaning. And all the methods of Sanctifica-
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 279
tion, all the disciplines of the Spirit, open before the
watchful minister new insight into the possibilities of
that being upon whom such bounty of grace is
lavished. I think that we ought to distrust at least
the form in which we are holding any theological
idea, if it is not helping to deepen in us the sense of
the preciousness of the human soul, first impressing
it as a conviction and then firing it into a passion.
There is not one truth which man may know of God
which does not legitimately bear this fruit. I beg
you more and more to test the way in which you
hold the truth of God by the power which it has to
fill you with honor for the spiritual life of man.
It is evident as we look at the ministry of Jesus
that He was full of reverence for the nature of the
men and women whom He met. There was nothing
which He knew of God which did not make His
Father s children precious to Him. We see it even
in His lofty and tender courtesy. How often I have
seen a minister s manners either proudly distant and
conscious of his own importance, or fulsome and
fawning with a feeble affectionateness that was un
worthy of a man, and have thought that what he
needed was that noble union of dignity and gentle
ness which came to Jesus from His divine insight
into the value of the human soul.
One other source from which the knowledge of this
value comes let me mention in a single word. It is
280 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
by working for the soul that we best learn what the
soul is worth. If ever in your ministry the souls of
those committed to your care grow dull before you,
and you doubt whether they have any such value that
you should give your life for them, go out and work
for them ; and as you work their value shall grow
clear to you. Go and try to save a soul and you will
see how well it is worth saving, how capable it is of
the most complete salvation. Not by pondering upon
it, nor by talking of it, but by serving it you learn its
preciousness. So the father learns the value of his
child, and the teacher of his scholar, and the patriot
of his native land. And so the Christian, living and
dying for his brethren s souls, learns the value of
those souls for which Christ lived and died.
And if you ask me whether this whose theory I
have been stating is indeed true in fact, whether in
daily work for souls year after year a man does see
in those souls glimpses of such a value as not merely
justifies the little work which he does, but even
makes credible the work of Christ, I answer, surely,
yes. All other interest and satisfaction of the
ministry completes itself in this, thab year by year
the minister sees more deeply how well worthy of
infinitely more than he can do for it is the human
soul for which he works.
I do not know how I can better close my lectures
to you than with that testimony. May you find it
TEE VALUE OF TEE HUMAN SOUL. 281
true in your experience. May the souls of men be
always more precious to you as you come always
nearer to Christ, and see them more perfectly as He
does. I can ask no better blessing on your ministry
than that.
And so may God our Father guide and keep you
always.
THE KNIX
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WILLIAM J. MAY. Crown 8vo, cloth, 53. net.
This volume of Children s Talks is one that can be highly commended to parents,
speakers, and preachers. They have already interested the young folk where
delivered, and another child who has read them is eagerly looking for the published
rolume. Here is real comradeship with the children. It will teach them much
nature lore, and gently instil most beautiful lessons in Christian character.
DELIGHTFUL TALKS WITH YOUNG PEOPLE
SUNSHINE AND WATTLEGOLD. Thirty-nine
Talks. By the Rev. Y, W. NORWOOD, D.D., of the City Temple.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 53. net.
This collection is addressed to rather older children than the majority of children s
talks are intended for. It is a remarkably fine volume of insight into the needs of
young people, and is a delight to read on account of its refreshing and invigorating
style. Stories from entirely new sources abound, and are told with a directness and
charm that is not usual to this class of book. Preachers and teachers of older classes
will find it a most helpful book.
SPLENDID CHARACTER-BUILDING TALKS TO BOYS
HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF LIFE.
Twenty-four Talks to Boys and Boy Scouts. With Foreword by
LORD HAMPTON. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. net
English Churchman. " These Talks are admirable in every way: they are
written by men who understand boys, telling them how to live healthy lives, giving
them good advice for the management of their bodies, as well as their minds."
THE IMPRISONED SPLENDOUR. Nine
Sermons on Philippians iv. 8. By Rev. MURDOCK MACKINNON,
M.A., D.D. Crown 8vo, cloth, 35. 6d. net.
Churchman. " The utterance of a preacher of wide culture and originality, one
who can leave the beaten track without ever deviating from the Truth. To have
extracted so much from a single verse is proof of the capacity both of preacher and
of text."
Life Of Faith. "This helpful little volume."
LONDON
H. R ALLENSON, Ltd., Racquet Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
*
IMPORTANT AND WELCOME INFORMATION
A NEW VOLUME OF MEDITATIONS BY THE
REV. ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER, M.A., B.D.
Author of those very successful books
" The Glory in the Grey," " A Day at a time," " The Stuff of Life "
BY SUN AND CANDLE-LIGHT. Forty-two Brief
Talks on Every-day s Most Quiet Needs. By Rev. ARCHIBALD
ALEXANDER. Crown 8vo, cloth, 55. net.
Christian World. "Mr Alexander is the apostle of the homely rirtues, the
ommendator of the commonplace duties, the seer of the romance of the routine.
comm
which simple people may live either at war or at peace.
PREACHER S STARTING POINTS. A New
Collection of Original Outlines of Sermons. By the Rev. THOMAS
BREEWOOD. Third edition, handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 35. 6d.
net.
For many years Mr Breewood enjoyed the friendship of the late Dr
Alex. Maclaren, and in this book he prints three most interesting letters
from the doctor. Mr Breewood s aim throughout has been to be practical.
Here are many outlines of sermons that have proved of service in his owa
general ministry ; also are included outlines for Harvest, Sunday School
Anniversary Services, and a dozen Children s Addresses.
London Quarterly. u Very good outlines. Fresh and evangelical."
Tht Christian. " Terse and suggestive calculated to be useful in many
circumstances."
RE-ISSUE OF A MOST SUCCESSFUL BOOK
A BOX OF NAILS. For Busy Christian Workers.
One hundred and sixty Outlines and Bible Readings. By Rev.
CHARLES EDWARDS. Fifth edition, crown 8vo, cloth, zs. 6d. net.
Methodist Recorder. " Will be time-saving as giving thought a derinite
direction. We commend the book very heartily.
The Christian. " Here are Nails of many sorts. The pages abound in
material sound in substance and direct in aim."
Expository Times. " They are good nails, of sterling quality, and well shaped."
LATEST ADDITION TO THE "SANCTUARY BOOKLETS"
A GREAT FAVOURITE IN THE DEVOTIONAL LIFE
THE FAITHFUL PROMISER. By J. R.
MACDUFF, D.D. Cloth, is. net ; paste grain leather, gilt edges,
2s. net.
This well-known piece of devotional literature is now made freshly
available in this successful little series, and in its new type and new dress
should prove to the generation of to-day as useful as it did to the people
of fifty years ago. It forms a very delightful companion to " The Bow in
the Cloud," " Morning and Night Watches," by the same Author, already
comprised in the series.
LONDON
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FINE NEW VOLUME OF CHILDREN S ADDRESSES BY THB
AUTHOR OF "SUNBEAMS FOR SUNDAY
A most happy and suggestive volume for Workers with Children
SUNSHINE AND SMILES. Twenty-five Addresses
to Children. By the Rev. W. VENIS ROBINSON, B.A., Author of
Sunbeams for Sunday," and " Angel Voices." Handsome cloth,
crown 8vo, 176 pages, 35. 6d. net.
Choice illustration, bright appeals, crisp dialogue, qualities which
obtained a ready recognition in this Author s two earlier books are again
to the fore in "Sunshine and Smiles." It will be a most valuable aid to
the home, to the teacher, and particularly the preacher in his Sunday
mornings talk with the youngsters.
SPLENDID STORY FOR MOTHERS AND CHILDREN
NANCY. Or the Cloud with the Silver Lining. By
SISTER ADA (ADA WRIGHTSON). Re-issue, crown 8vo, cloth,
is. 6d. net.
Nancy is a little slum child, who sells matches when she can ; her day
of happiness arrives with the recurring visit of an old organ-grinder in the
neighbourhood of her pitch. It is a story old and young can enjoy.
THE BISHOP OF STEPNEY writes: "I have read your book with real
pleasure. I myself was brought up upon allegories. I like your book for the same
oortof reasons that made me like them. I can imagine myself reading it to children
with rtal pleasure, and setting them to guess what it all means."
A FINE MISSIONARY ROMANCE
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MICHAEL S QUEST. By MILDRED HILL, Author
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Aberdeen Free Prus. "A sweet healthy story for young people, with a fine
missionary atmosphere pervading it."
The Ckurck Gazette. "A charming itory, brightly and limply written. It ii
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A SPLENDID MISSIONARY STORY FOR BOYS AND GIRLS
LOYAL HEARTS. By REGINALD CALLENDER, M.A.
Crown 8vo, cloth, with frontispiece, 2s. net.
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improve one another in the process. Incidentally some fine missionary
spirit is evident.
NEW TALKS TO CHILDREN BY DR R. C. GILLIE
FOR LISTENING CHILDREN. More Little
Sermons to the Children. By Rev. R. C. GILLIE, M.A., D.C.L.,
Author of " Little Sermons to the Children," "What I said to
the Children," etc. Fcap, 8vo, cloth, zs. net.
It is eleven years since "What I said to the Children" appeared, and a
new volume has been, for years past, in constant request.
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A THOUGHT-PROVOKING VOLUME
PORTRAITS OF MEN OF THE OLD TESTA
MENT. By the Rev. T. E. MILLER, M. A. Crown 8vo, cloth,
6s. net.
Life Of Faith. "This singularly fresh and helpful book will be a delight to-
Sunday school teachers, who will revel in the illustrations they will find here, and
many a hard pressed preacher will give God thanks for such suggestive outlines."
British Weekly. "May be confidently recommended both as a commentary
on Old Testament history, and as a book full of stories which never grow old."
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE OF THOUGHT.
By Mrs HORACE PORTER. Crown 8vo, cloth, 33. 6d. net.
Methodist Recorder. " A strong, well-ordered, sensible book, evidencing fine
powers of mind, and wide study."
Life Of Faith. " This very readable and practical book teaches us in what way
we can manage our thoughts, instead of (as so often happens) their managing us.
Mrs Porter has read widely, and she has the faculty of clear explanation and
appropriate illustration."
RACY AND HELPFUL ADDRESSES TO GROWING BOYS
SENSIBLE RELIGION. By the Rev. E. W.
SHEPHEARD-WALWYN, B.A. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. net.
Scotsman. "As an alternative to the sloppy piety 1 which so often chokes
off youtig men from Christianity. It is a very successful attempt to explain some
difficulties in religion and in life to senior scholars. With breezy directness, and
using many racy illustrations, it makes an interesting appeal well calculated to-
bold the attention of those for whom it is intended."
TWENTY-FOUR SPLENDID TALKS TO BOYS
HOW TO MAKE THE MpST OF LIFE.
Talks to Boys and Boy Scouts. With Foreword by LORD
HAMPTON, Chief Commissioner, Boy Scouts Association. Crown
8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. net.
This valuable book contains " Talks " by Rer. Lionel Ford, Harrow ; Dr W. T. A.
Barber, Leys School; J. L. Paton, Manchester ; Dr W. J. Dawson ; G. C. Leader ;
E. W. Shepheard-Walwyn, and many others.
English Churchman." These Talks are admirable in every way."
Head Quarters Gazette." These Scoutmasters who hitherto have felt unabla
to personally deliver the address at their Scout s own, or those who are dissatisfied
with the efforts they have made, will gain help and encouragement from the study
of this little volume."
A BEAUTIFUL SELECTION OF HELPFUL PIECES
GLEANINGS FROM MANY FIELDS. Com
piled by Mrs BEATRICE HAVERGAL SHAW. Demy i6mo, cloth,
2s. 6d. net.
Church Family Newspaper. " Precious thoughts which will bring hope
comfort, and joy to many a reader."
A VALUABLE COMPILATION OF PRAYERS
PRAYERS FOR HEALING. From the Ancient
Liturgies and other Offices of the Church. Compiled by E. B. II.
With Foreword by the Rev. The Hon. E. LYTTLETON, D.D.
Third Edition. Demy i6mo, cloth, 2s. 6d. net.
The Bishop Of Kensington writes : " I like it greatly."
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A THRILLING STORY TOLD WITH SPIRIT AND VIGOUR
BEN GOLD: From Pugilist to Preacher. By
ROBERT BRYMER, Author of " Rough Diamonds among the
Lads." Crown 8vo, cloth, 33. 6d. net.
Methodist Recorder. "A fine story, well worth reading."
Glasgow Herald." A book like this will have its public. This youth by turn*
ragamuffin, tervant, pugilist, sober worker and honest Christian, is not at all an
impossible creation. The result is a pleasing and manly character, and a good
testimony to the power of the Christian gospel."
This book is heartily recommended by the leaders of Christian life to-day, viz. :
The Bishop of Chelmsford ; Dean Inge ; Dr Alex. Smellie; Dr S. Parkes Cadman;
Dr F. B. Meyer ; Dr R. C. Gillie ; Rev. Dinsdale T. Young ; Rev. James Cregan,
and others, a* a manly presentment of the saving power of the gospel of tht Lord
Jesus Christ.
FINE NEW VOLUME OF ESSAYS
THE STRENGTH OF THE HILLS: A Series
of Nature Studies in the West Country. By WILLIAM STANFORD.
With Fourteen Beautiful Illustrations of Tintern Abbey, The
Windcliffe, etc. Large crown 8vo, cloth, 6s. net.
The author has rambled through the byway* of Monmouthshire with bis eyet open
and has set down what he has seen and felt.
The following quotation from,. Sterne accurately describes these beautiful essays:
" What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of lif
by him who interests his heart in everything ; and who, having eyes to fee what
time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on hij way,
misses nothing he can fairly lay his hands on."
The Scotsman. " A series of pleasant essays."
The Bookman. " It is pleasant to turn to these quiet essays. They breathe
deep reverence for beauty, a keen sense of the grandeur of the eternal hills, mingled
with the reflections of a devout and earnest mind."
RIPPING TALES OF THE SEA
SOU WESTERS: Stories of Devon and Corn-
wail. By the Rev. NICHOLAS OLIVER. Crown 8vo, cloth,
33. 6d. net.
Mid Devon Advertiser. "A most interesting series of stories. When the
reader has perused one he or she will be irresistibly induced to go on to the others,
every tale presenting its special attraction, the tales are go good and human that they
are well worth reading again and again."
These itories are good to read at working parties, missionary gatherings, mother*
meetings, etc.
A FUNNY STORY IS ALWAYS WELCOME, HERE ARE MANY
THOSE DREADFUL CHOIR BOYS. By the
Rev. E. W. LEACHMAN. Crown 8vo, cloth, 35. 6d. net.
Church Family Newspaper. "The book i* brimful of capital stories and
incidents a mine of good stories."
John o London s Weekly. " As good a book of humoroa* stories as I hare
read for many years. Boisterous fun some of it is, about uproariously funny,
things."
The Guardian. "Uproariously funny."
LONDON
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"THH ART OP BOY-WINNING," says Dr P. B. MEYER
ROUGH DIAMONDS AMONG THE LADS,
By ROBERT BRYMER. With Introduction by Dr R. C. GILLIK.
Crown 8ro, cloth, 35. 6d. net ; postage 6d.
Dr CILI.IK sayi: "The author has been out on a splendid quest and tell*
what happened in an honest way. It is his mingled boldness and patience, strength
and tenderness, insight and observation, which have made such results possible."
Dr F. B. MEYER, the veteran social worker, writes : " Rough Diamonds it-
quite admirable. A book after my own heart. It made me long to start again tot
work for the uplifting of boys. Nothing pays better; and, certainly our friend
Brown is an adept in the Art of Boy-winning. I wish the book a wide and
Inspirational circulation. "
British Iftekly. "A book worth reading."
THIRTY-SEVEN TALKS TO BOYS AND GIRLS
THE SKYLARK S BARGAIN. By the Rev. G
H. CHARNLEY. Crown 8vo, cloth, 55. net ; pottage 5d.
Sunday School Chrmiclt. "It is the best volume of children s stories we havo
ever read. He knows what to say to children and how to say it. Many of them are
perfect. We congratulate the author npon his gift, and assure all who have to talk
to children about religion and moral duty that they are more than worth the five
shillings charged for them."
Mtthodist Kecorair.ln kis S.S. Notes the Rev. J. Williams Butcher, writes :
"Many have said to me, He s the best hand at a children s address that I have
ever come across : that s pretty big praise. Mr Charnley hai the gift of
being able to talk to children about the highest thing! In a way that
arrests. I advise preachers, Sunday School workers, and parents to
buy the book."
ANOTHER ALLURING BOOK OF CHILDREN S TALKS
THE MOUSE THAT STOPPED THE TRAIN,
and twenty other Stories and Parables told to the Children. By
the Rev. J. ERNEST PARSONS. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3*. 6d. net.
The author says : "Years of work among young folks have convinced me that
the quickest and surest path to the child-heart is through the avenue of the imagina
tion. Hence these stones and parables."
The publisher says: "They are first-rate and will be very useful to speakers."
TWO VERY USEFUL BOOKLETS for PARENTS and TEACHERS
THE TORCH CATECHISM : Being the Faith of
Jesui interpreted for little children. By Ross CUTHBKRT.
Printed in bold clear type, 6d. net ; by post 7d.
Scottish Churckts Ttaektrt Magaxint. " It expresses the essentials beautifully
and simply in thirty-nine questions and answers. There are several pages of use
ful notes for teachers. "
London Quarterly Rtvitw. "The questions are simple, the answers clear."
THE CHILD S PRAYER-BOOK. By the Rev,
ARTHUR H. DUNNETT, B.D. Second Edition. 32010, paper,
6d. net ; by post yd.
Lift and Work. " The little book is one which parents might use with great
profit with their children, and which the children might learn to use by themselves."
JCiimarnack Standard. " Mr Dunnett has rendered a real service to parents,
teacher*, and ministers, not less than to children by the preparation of this little
volume." ____________^___^
LONDON
H. R. ALLENSON, Ltd., Racquet Court, Fleet Street, E.G.
WORKS BY BISHOP PHILLIPS BROOKS
LECTURES ON PREACHING. By PHILLIPS
BROOKS, D.D. Crown 8yo, cloth, 55. net
CONTMNTS : The Two Elements in Preaching ; The Preacher Himself; The
Preacher in His Work ; The Idea of the Sermon ; The Making of the Sermon ; Th
Congregation ; The Ministry for our Age ; The Value of the Human Soul.
Expftittry Times. " A book of permanent value. "
Church Times. "Well worth reading and re-reading by young clergy. Thy
an hardly study th great preacher s methods without learning much, very much,
t help and strengthen them."
Mithedist Times. "We hare more than once commended this delightful book.
There is no preacher, hardly any public speaker, who can read these lectures with
out learning something profitable. We wish all our preachers could own, and make
their own, the sterling truth of this delightful and valuable book."
THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS. By Bishop
PHILLIPS BROOKS, D. D. Uniform with "Lectures on Preaching."
Crown 8vo, cloth, 53. net.
CONTENTS: The Influence of Jesus on the Moral Life of Man ; The Influence
of Jesus on the Social Life of Man ; The Influence of Jesus on the Emotional Life
of Man ; The Influence of Jesus on the Intellectual Life of Man.
Exftsitory Times. "The Influence of Jesus is theologically the most char
acteristic of all Bishop Brooks works. Mr Allensoa has given us a new and attractive
dition."
DR REICHEL S FAMOUS OBJECT SERMONS
WHAT SHALL I TELL THE CHILDREN?
Thirty-seven Object Sermons with many illustrative Anecdote*.
By the Rev. GEORGE V. REICHEL, M.A. Crown 8vo, cloth, 55.
net. New Edition.
British Weekly. " It is rather a nice book, and will be very useful to teachers and
those who preach to children. The merit of the velume is that it has freshness."
S.S. Ckrtnicle. " It is thoroughly modern and alert. There is nothing
hackneyed and stereotyped in its pages. Its author is full of information and of
anecdote."
FINE NEW VOLUME BY JAMES LEARMOUNT
FIFTY-TWO TALKS TO YOUNG FOLK. By
the R*v. JAMES LEARMOUNT. Crown 8vo, cloth, 55. net.
The same splendid fund of illustration will be found here as in the previous six
successful volumes by this author.
Belfast News Letter. " Mr Learmount has so fully justified his claim to be a
writer of most suitable addresses for young people that all that is necessary to say
with regard to the present volume is that it is equal to any of the previous six he has
published. We have read all Mr Learmount s publications, and know nothing more
fitting for pulpit adaptation than his talks to those of tender years."
FINE NEW VOLUME OF SERMONS
THE CRUCIBLE OF EXPERIENCE. Sermons
preached in Carr s Lane Chapel, Birmingham. By the RCY.
SIDNEY M. BERRY. Crown 8ro, cloth, 75. 6d. net.
The predominant note in these fine sermons is their relation to experience, they
art practical and reflect a most helpful ministry.
LONDON
H. R. ALLEN SON, Ltd., Racquet Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
TWENTY-FOUR FINE ADDRESSES BY R. C. GILLIE
WHAT I SAID TO THE CHILDREN. By the
Rev. R. C. GILLIE, M.A. Neat cloth, fcap. 8vo, 2s. net.
British Cangregationalist. " These addresses are some of the best we have lets.
Several of them are allegories, and in these Mr Gillie especially excels."
REALLY GOOD TEMPERANCE ADDRESSES
LITTLE TALKS ON TEMPERANCE. By the
Rev. R. C. GILLIE, M.A., Author of "Little Sermons to th
Children." Fcap. 8vo, cloth, 2s. net.
Mr Gillie in the most happy manner imaginable has struck an altogether new
note in these Temperance Talks. Taking in the first series six of the Old Eastern
Fairy Tales as the basis of hi^ talk, he weaves the lesson into the fabric of the story
in a most winsome manner. In the second series he introduces A NBW WAY WITH
OLD LRSSONS, and deals simply and interestingly with the young student s search for
alcohol in Geography, History, English Literature, etc. This book is altogether an
innovation in Temperance Literature.
Front tarly Reviews. "Admirable," "Excellent," "Capital," "New and faf
cinating," "Novel," " Fresh," " Charming," " Will serve admirably as models."
LITTLE SERMONS TO THE CHILDREN.
By Rev. R. C. GILLIE, M.A. Neat cloth, fcap. 8vo, 2s. net.
Scotsman. "Ministers who have difficulty in preaching to children will find
Little Sermons to the Children an extremely valuable and suggestive book."
Shifoeld Independent. "There are twenty sermons. Each is of sterling value,
But in addition, there is an introdution on The Art of the Little Sermon, and
a conclusion, The Sermon in the Child. Each of these should be read by every
man who is of opinion that he has received a call to the pulpit. They are not far
removed from the best sixteen pages that the parson can be invited to read. The
man who will read them and thoroughly assimilate them will be a worthier man
than ever before."
NEW ADDRESSES TO CHILDREN
WANTED A BOY: And other Addresses. By the
Rev. G. C LEADER. Handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net|
by post, 2s. lod.
Ytrkihire Observer. "Mr Leader understands boys, and his addressei are
particularly appropriate."
Lijt tj Faith. " This is a manly book for manly boys."
ADMIRABLE TALKS WITH BOYS
LOOK STRAIGHT AHEAD: Twenty Talks with
Boys and Boy Scouts. By the Rev. E. W. SHEPHEARD-
WALWYN. Handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net ; by
post, 2s. lod.
Fine sympathy with boy nature is found throughout this book. Mr Shepheard-
Walwyn ii in great demand to speak at School Gatherings, and this book will easily
testify the reason why. Twenty first-rate Talks
THE KING S SCOUT: And Twenty-one other
Talks with Children. By Rev. H. G. TUNNICLIFF, Author
of " Wet Paint." Handsome cloth, fcap. 8vo, 2s. net.
Mr TanniclifTs "Wet Paint" was quickly recognised as a really fresh and happy
addition to the growing volumes of children s addresses. "The King s Scout" u
splendid collection of addresses upon Hiblical characters. Altogether good.
LONDON
H. R. ALLENSON, Ltd., Racquet Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
FINE NEW OBJECT LESSONS
THE CHALK, THE CHILD, THE CITY.
Eighteen Constructive Blackboard Talks to Children. By the
Rev. G. W. EWART, M.A. With eighteen full-page demonstra
tions. Crown 8vo, stout paper wrapper, 35. 6d. net ; by post
3$. lOd.
A very able and suggestiv* volume, the result of many years of experience in
dealing with children. The demonstrations will enable the least skilled to make an
attractive cartoon or blackboard drawing.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "LOOK STRAIGHT AHEAD"
THE STARVED TOP-KNOT. Seventeen Chats
with Boys and Girls. By the Rev. E. \V. SHKPHEARD-WALWYN.
Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. net ; by post 2s. lod.
Scotsman. "Chatty, practical addresses.
Irish Presbyterian. "Straightforward manly chats, in very modern lingo, not
too preachy. Full of fresh illustrations."
OUTLINE MISSIONARY TALKS AND
STORIES. By E. E. ENTWISTLE (Mrs WHIMSTER). Fcap.
8vo, cloth, 2s. net ; by post 2s. 3d.
Primitive MithodistLta.de>-. " If you want to give a missionary address that
the child can understand, get this book."
The Ckristiatt. " Vividly told, a striking incident from each of the twelve
PREACHING FOR BEGINNERS. By the Rev.
T. J. WALKER, M.A. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. net; by post
2S. IOd.
Tkt Challenge." Really a little heart-to-heart talk on the subject of preaching."
FINE NEW MISSIONARY STORY
MICHAEL S QUEST. By MILDRED HILL, Author
of " His Little Bit o Garden. Crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. net.
Twenty years residence on a lonely farm in Australia, a voyage to England by
way of Ceylon and Central Africa form the background of Miss Hill s capital new
story. Altogether a fair field for Michael s quest of hii uncle who has fought in th
Great War and lost his memory. How he is traced by his nephew, aided by varioui
missionaries and natives, makes an absorbing missionary romance.
CAPITAL VOLUME OF FRESH ILLUSTRATIONS
PEARLS FROM LIFE S OCEAN. By the Rev.
JOHN APPLEYARD, M.A., D.Litt. With a Foreword by the Rev.
F. B. MEYER, D.D. Foolscap 8vo, cloth, 2s. net.
Dr MBYER says : " It is a great blessing to walk through life in fuch company^;
and next to visible companionship, we may be thankful for the recounting of his
personal experiences, as herein let down."
A TALK ON IDEALS TO OLDER GIRLS
WHAT IS WORTH WHILE. By ANNA
ROBERTSON BROWN. Paper covers, is. net; neat cloth, is. 6d. net.
S.S. Times. "A woman student s message to the students, present and past of
Lady Margaret, Oxford, and pleadi for a wise choice among the clamoroui claims
that press upon us all."
Aberdeen fr ret Press. "Pleads for honesty, sincerity and contentment. Mw
Brown writes finely and with true insight about friendship and faith."
LONDON
H. R. ALLENSON, Ltd., Racquet Court, 114 Fleet Street, E.C.
MAKE THE CHILDREN HAPPY
LAURA RICHARDS 1 INIMITABLE PARABLES
THE GOLDEN WINDOWS. A Book of Fables
for Young and Old. By L. E. RICHARDS, Author of "Captain
January." Handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 55. net
THE BISHOP OF LONDON ha. made linking useof someoftheso parable,!.
hu recent book "Joy in God." The Bisbop in one reference says, " I was readinr
,?*7 1 C , J lr ~, b ,?J S J of the . Ch P el RT*1 charming little story out of a book
called the Golden Windows. He proceeds to tell the story. Again, when speak-
ing to the girls of St Paul s School, the Bishop says, " I was very much struck with
a beautiful story in a book called The Golden Windows.* I should like to leave
this a, my last picture on your mind." Then he told them " The Wheatfield," one
of th many gems the book contains.
Rev. BHNARD J SNBLL writes :-" I regard Golden Windows as the most
charming book that has come into my hands for many years. Every little casket of
a itcry holds a gem of a truth. How in the world is it so slow in getting known? "
FINE COMPANION VOLUME TO "GOLDEN WINDOWS"
THE SILVER CROWN. Another Book of Fables.
By LAURA E. RICHARDS. Handsome cloth, 55. net.
The Rev. G. A. JOHNSTOM Ross, M. A., writes : I am charmed by thesetit-biu
f the knowledge of life, they are chosen so shrewdly, humorously, fairly: they aro
ervd up so daintily : and they taste so sweet. They will willingly be taken by the
children.
Bttist Ttmet." Exceedingly short, delicate in structure, graceful in style, full
I tho wisdom of life. Each parable containi material for a fascinating and in-
ttructive adres
"PERFECTLY DELIGHTFUL"
FIVE-MINUTE STORIES. A Charming Collection
of ioi Short Stories and Poems. By LAURA E. RICHARDS,
Author of "Golden Windows." Square crown 8vo, illustrated*
handsome cloth, 7s. 6d. net.
Though primarily a book for children, it contains a wealth of stories that will catch
the children i attention immediately if used from tht Platform or Pulpit. Two of the
stories. " Buttercup Gold "and "The Money Shop," alone are worth the price of
the whole book.
Glasftw Hirald." Mommy cannot possibly go wrong if she at once procures it "
Tht Church Tines." Five-minute Stories is one of those volumes which the
relatives of young folk are glad to fall back upon when the request Please do tell ui
another story finds them at a loss."
Britith Wttkly. "Every variety of itory i* to b found in this volume to rait
ovary mood of every child."
FINE NEW VOLUME BY H. G. TUNNICLIFF, B A.
THE ROAD OF ADVENTURE. By the R er
H. G. TUNNICLIFP, B.A. A Children s Parable in Twenty-two
Chapters. Crown 8vo, paper covers, 2s. 6d. net ; cloth, 35. 6d. net.
CtristiK* World. Lucky, indeed, were the children in Mr Tunnicliff s con
gregation who heard this exciting Serial week by week. The Road of Adven-
turo is a capital example of the serial type of children s address. It could hardly
fail to be for it is simply an imitation of The Pilgrim s Progress, with children fo
LONDON
H. R. ALLENSON, Ltd., Racquet Court, Fleet Street, E.C,
ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER S INSPIRING MESSAGES
THE GLORY IN THE GREY, Forty-two Talki
on Every-day Life and Religion. By the Rev. ARCHIBALD
ALEXANDER, M.A., B.D. Tenth Edition. Handsome cloth,
crown 8vo, 55. net.
The late Dr ALEXANDER WHYTK. " I have spent a delightful and a refreshed
vening over your book. And I thought again and again what an excellent
rift book The Glory in the Grey would be. Your took has choice literature
in it, fine feeling, a gracious glow throughout, and withal a great body of lound
tense sanctified."
Dr GKORGK H. MORRISON." I cannot refrain from writing to congratulate
you on the book. Its freshness, variety, suggestiveness, and poetry have fascinated
me. It teems to me one of the best things I have read for years. All success to
it. I hare found it a little haven of rest in these troublous times.
r* Glasgow tJtrald. "This ii a kook of hope, a tonic for the dejected and
dispirited. The author has very successfully concentrated his attention on drawing
out the elements of glory, of purpose, from the grey experiences of lif. Obviously
the man who can do this has a peculiarly suitable message for the present day : tni*
on* could scarcely be sent out more opportunely. The talks are all i&ort , m
odd moments the book may be opened at random, and one it safe to say the reader
will find something to sanction his faith m the healing forces of life. This book; 11
cure of success."
A DAY AT A TIME. Thirty Talks on Life and
Religion. By the Rev. ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER, M.A., B.D.
Fourth Edition. Handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 33. 6d. net.
Dr JOHN KKLMAN. " I find it everywhere an excellently timely and helpful
Tolume. Its common-sense, good humour, and genuine humanness of out
nd of expression are very refreshing and wholesome. It is the sort of book which
ii needed by large numbers of people, and it will do real service to the spiril
the nation."
Tk4 Lift tf Faith. " When Mr Alexander produced his first book, The
Glory in the Grey, we were unstinted in our praise of its value and w< s can gi-
as cordial a welcome to the present volume. There la gomethlng bracing and
Xhllaratlng In these tlk, which will commend them to many people
quest of tonic."
THE STUFF OF LIFE. Forty-two brief Talks on
Daily Duty and Religion. By ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER, M.A.,
B.D. Third Edition. Handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 53. net.
Dr T R P SCLATKR. " Mr Alexander s latest book should prove a boon to
hi. fellow-ministers and to others who have to speak on religion. Its range,
iuggestiveness, aptneis of quotation and illustration give it a distinction all its ow
Local Preacher , Magatine" Good stuff, too, stuff which rightly used will
rnak. fufeboif brighter and better. One feel, that the authorjoiowi what he i.
talking about, and knows too, the need of those he is talking to.
Ckristian Wtrld.-" This third book has the same qualities. Mr Alexander
It the apostle of the homely virtues, the commendator of the commonplace, th
Mer of the romance of routine."
GlMSfew w* i> 7YfM.-"Hecatchei yon and holds you till he has said hi.
y on every theme." _^____
LONDON
H. R. ALLEN SON, Ltd., Racquet Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
FOR YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN
PORTRAITS OF WOMEN OF THE BIBLE.
By the Rev. T. E. MILLER, M.A. Crown 8vo, handsome
cloth, 55. net. {Third Edition.
Mr Miller modestly speaks of his book as consisting of a seriei of
Character-sketches. Such an attitude towards his own work is no doubt
becoming, but it in no way describes or suggests the rich qualities of
imagination and common-sense which together make his lectures a most
vivid portrayal of the old-world incidents associated with the subjects of
his addresses. Readers of these thorough studies will find themselves
transported into the times of sacred history, accompanied by a most able
guide and interpreter.
WHAT JESUS TEACHES. Lessons from the
Gospels for Girls of To-day. By MARY Ross WEIR. Handsome
cloth, crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net.
The author of this book has for a long time been conducting a Young
Women s Bible Class, and in " What Jesus Teaches " she gives her own
contribution towards what she has often felt to be a real want, viz. a book
suitable to put into the hands of an intelligent girl, perplexed by the many
problems, both intellectual and practical, that meet her in life.
GOD S GENTLEMEN. Vigorous Sermons to Young
Men. By Prof. R. E. WELSH, M.A., D.D., Author of "Man
to Man," etc. Sixth Edition. Handsome cloth, crown
8vo, 5$. net.
British Weekly. " This is a frank and manly book, stamped with a strong and
sympathetic vitality. Young men will read it because it never ignores the other
ide of the question. Any author who brings a young man face to face with life,
weighs good and evil before him in the balance, has done a work which will not be
forgotten. "
Dundee Arlvtrtistr. "A series of ethical essays of rare value strongly commended
as a gift book for men, whether young, old, or middle-aged. The man who would
fly a sermon could not fail to be attracted by the fin* flow of language and by the
noble aims and sane admonitions of the author."
RECOMMENDED BY THE BISHOP OF ELY
HOMELY TALKS WITH MOTHERS. By
Mrs L. C. E. MARSHALL. Neat cloth, fcap. 8vo, 2s. net. ; by
post, 2s. 2d.
Twenty-four most useful suggestive papers for speakers.
The BISHOP OF ELY sayi : "They seem to me models of what addresses to
mothers should be simple, practical, earnest, devout, brightened by touches of
poetry and humour."
Tht Christian. " It is a pleasure to call attention to so useful a little work.
Even experienced workers will find in its pages much that is suggestive."
BREAD FROM HEAVEN. Addresses to Com
municants. By LUCY C. E. MARSHALL, Author of " Homely
Talks to Mothers." Neat cloth, fcap. 8vo, 6d. net ; by post, yd.
The same qualities of beautiful interpretation which characterised
1 Homely Talks " is abundantly evident in these new addresses.
LONDON
H. R. ALLENSON, Ltd., Racquet Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
STRIKINGLY FRESH ADDRESSES TO CHILDREN
UNDER THE BLUE DOME. A Series of Open-
Air Studies with Young Folk. By Rev. J. S. HASTIK, B.D.
Handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 35. 6d. net
CONTENTS
RAIN.
SNOW.
ICB.
RIVERS.
WELLS.
CLOUDS.
LAKBS.
FENCES.
THB SKA. THK LIFEBOAT. THE DAISY.
THE HARBOUR. THE FARMER. THE BUTTERCUP.
THE LIGHTHOUSE. GRASS. HONEYSUCKLE.
THE FISHERMEN. THB WOODLAND COLTSFOOT.
THB BOATS. FLOWERS. TREES.
S S. Chronicle. " As a sanctified study of nature it a one of the freshest books
of it s kind we have seen for a long time. We congratulate Mr Hastie, and cordially
rcommend ministers, superintendents, and teachers to peruse this book, and then to
go and do likewise."
AN ENTIRELY NEW VOLUME TO CHILDREN
THE WONDERFUL RIVER. Sixty-three Talks
to Young People. By Rev. JOHN A. HAMILTON, Author of
" A Mountain Path." Crown 8vo, cloth, 55. net.
Dr HASTINGS, in Expository Times, says : " Mr Hamilton has returned to what
il manifestly his special gift and how priceless a gift it is of preaching to children."
Preachers Magazine" Very bright and very fresh."
British. Weekly." This writer is a true story-teller. These attractive addresses
will be most acceptable to children and teachers."
IN GOD S ORCHARD. Addresses to Children on
"The Fruits of the Spirit," "The Beatitudes," "The Lord s
Prayer," " The Best Things," etc. By the Rev. JAMES LEAR-
MOUNT, Author of " Fifty-two Addresses to Young Folk," " Fifty-
two Sundays with the Children," " Thirty Chats to Young Folk,"
etc. Handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 250 pages, 53. net.
Mr Learmount has made for himself a distinct reputation as a very
happy and successful speaker to children. This new volume of his,
containing as it does four complete series of addresses on subjects of
eternal interest, is likely to still further add merit to his previous reputation,
Dundee Advertiser." It will be welcomed by Ministers, Sunday School Teachers,
Superintendent!, Boys Brigade Workers, and the Mother at home with the li
n ** " FIFTY-TWO FASCINATING NATURE TALKS
GOD S OUT-OF-DOORS. Fifty-two Talks on Nature
Topics. By the Rev. JAMES LEARMOUNT, Author of " Fifty-two
Sundays with the Children," "In God s Orchard," etc. Hand
some cloth, crown 8vo, 55. net.
London Quarterly Review." This is the writer s fifth volume. Its texts are
found in the crocus, the cuckoo, wasps, snails, and other natural objects. Ihe
papers are brief but full of lite and spirit. Just what a child would enjoy.
Preachers Mag-atine." As fresh and stimulating as ever.
THEIR WEDDING DAY, and other Stories. By
ADELAIDE M. CAMERON. Handsome cloth, cr. 8vo, as. 6d. net.
These stories will be found very useful to Mothers Meetings, Working
Parties etc Many of them are true stories of events which have come under
the author s notice. Each told in a most winsome and engaging manner.
Church Times." Just the thing for Mothers Meetings ; will be enjoyed for their
insight into human nature."
LONDON
H. R. ALLENSON, Ltd., Racquet Court, Fleet Street, E.C
BIBLE OCCUPATIONS. Addresses to Young
People. By the Rev. GKORGK SINCLAIR, Glasgow. Hand
some cloth, crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net
Thit book may be described as an exceedingly able volume ihowing how interets-
ing and attractive real Bible studies can be made. Starting out with an intro
ductory address on "What is thine Occupation T" Mr Sinclair steadily takes the
children through the Bible industries as exemplified by " A Gardener," " A
Shepherd," "A Farmer," "A Musician," "A Smith," "A Nurse," "A Steward,"
A Potter," etc. In all, sixteen delightful chapters.
VERY FRESH VOLUME FOR CHILDREN
THE MAGIC PEN. Stories for Children. By
EDWARD W. LEWIS, M. A., Author of "The Invisible Companion,"
etc. Handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 33. 6d. net ; by post, 35. lod.
These thirty-two stories are now published for the first time in volume form.
Speakers to children will find in them much very useful and strikingly interesting
material for addresses. Children themselves will greatly enjoy Mr Lewis s itudy
folk and his adventures with them. One of the freshest volumes the publishers have
met with for some years.
WORKS BY DR J. H. JOWETT
BROOKS BY THE TRAVELLER S WAY.
Twenty-six Week-night Addresses. By J. H. JOWETT, M.A.,
D.D. Crown 8vo, 55. net. Seventh Edition.
British Weekly. " Mr Jowett s religious addresses need no recommendation.
We knew what to expect, and we are not disappointed. As of Dr Maclaren, so of
Mr Jowett, it may be said that whenever he treats any religious theme, he invariably
sheds fresh light on some passage of Scripture. In a sentence is the sure seed of a
sermon."
Glasgow Herald. "Full of life all through, they serve to explain the speaker s
rapidly acquired reputation, and to justify the wisdom of the congregation which
chose him to occupy the pulpit of the late Dr Dale."
Baptiit Times. " Many of the addresses might profitably be extended into
long sermons."
THIRSTING FOR THE SPRINGS. By the
Rev. J. II. JOWETT. A further selection of Twenty-six Addresses
delivered at Carr s Lane. Crown 8vo, 53. net. Fourth Edition.
Independent (New York). " To read this volume is to understand why the week-
night meeting at Carr s Lane is one of the most successful in England. Mr Jowett
gives his people of his best his best in thought, observation, and reading."
CHOICE WORK OF A MODERN MYSTIC
BEHIND THE BLINDS. By VESTA TERENCE.
Small crown 8vo, cloth, 2s. 6d. net ; by post, 2s. gd.
Rev. H. R. GAMBLE writes: "I have been reading the book and find a great
deal of beauty and tenderness in the thoughts which it contains."
Rev. W. R. INGK, D.D., writes:" I have now read the little book Behind the
Blinds. I think it contains a great deal of good matter."
A GEM IN DEVOTIONAL LITERATURE
LITTLE FLOWERS OF ST FRANCIS. Demy
24mo, 416 pages, paste grain, gilt edges, 7s. 6d. net ; Rexine gilt
edges, 55. net.
A reprint of this fragrant work of devotion, now for the first time printed
on India paper, uniform with " Great Souls at Prayer." The size of this
choice edition is only 5^ x si by \ inch in thickness.
LONDON
H. R. ALLENSON, Ltd., Racquet Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
FINE NEW EDITIONS OF J. M. NEALE S WORKS
SACKVILLE COLLEGE SERMONS. Vol. I.
Thirty-one Sermons, Advent to Lent. Handsome cloth, crown
8vo, 35:. 6d. net each.
Thi Church Times." We can never have too much of Dr Neale. Gladly, there
fore, do we welcome a reprint of the Sackville College Sermons. The great preacher
teems at last to be attaining his rightful and assured place. There is perhaps no
preacher of the pan century whom the younger clergy would be better advised to
take for their model. Neale is never old-fashioned, for it is the eternal truth of God
that he has ever to tell us."
SERMONS ON THE BLESSED SACRA-
MENT. Twenty-two Sermons. By the late JOHN MASON
NEALE, D.D. Handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 35. 6d. net.
A fine new edition of this much-sought-for book, uniform with the new
edition of " Sackville College Sermons."
THE OUTLOOK OF THE SOUL. By Canon
KNOX LITTLE. Handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 356 pages, 35. 6d.
net.
This volume, previously entitled " Labour and Sorrow," contains some
striking sermons by the popular Canon of Worcester : The Duty of
Strength ; The End of Sorrow ; The Outlook of the Soul ; The Soul and
the Unseen ; Love and Death, etc.
PROFESSOR MOMERIE S MOST STRIKING BOOK
IMMORTALITY, AND OTHER SERMONS.
By ALFRED W. MOMKKIE, M.A., LL.D., etc. Cloth, crown
8vo, 3$. 6d. net. Forty-one Sermons altogether. [Fourth Edition.
Expository Times. "A serious and strong contribution to a subject which
apparently will never lose its interest while the world lasts."
Literary World. " Dr Momerie s arguments are worth the study of all
thoughtful persons. Even those who are not much given to serious reading
will be struck by the vivacity of his styl and his easy maintenance of interest."
Scottish Guardian." Possesses all the brilliant originality and gifts of expres
sion that characterised his other discussions ef religion and philosophy."
FINE MANUAL FOR CHRISTIAN WORKERS
HEARTILY RECOMMENDED BY THE BISHOP OF LONDON
METHODS OF CHRISTIAN WORK. Hints for
Preachers, Teachers, and Lay Workers. By Officers of the
Church Army. Edited by Captain W. R. DAVEY. Handsome
cloth, crown 8vo, 2s. net. [Second Edition.
Some of the Contents of this practical book : Individual Dealing ;
Positive Witnessing ; The Evangelist s Character and Aim ; Passion for
Souls ; After Meetings ; In Search of Subjects ; Sick Visiting ; Cottage
Meetings ; Effective Open-Air Services ; Work amongst Young Women
and Girls ; Scouting ; Correct Breathing and Voice Production ; Equip
ment for Service.
Local Preachers Magazine. "Twenty weighty addresses of sterling value."
Preachers Magazine. " Very practical and very much alive."
Church Times. " The chapters deal with practical points in mission work, for
th most part sensibly and shrewdly."
LONDON
H. R. ALLENSON, Ltd., Racquet Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
Choice Books of Mysticism
SPIRITUAL TORRENTS. By MADAME GUYON.
Handsome cloth, crown 8vo, 160 pages, 33. 6d. net.
This delightfully expressed book on the interior life has long been out of
print, and is now re-issued from the excellent translation by Miss A. W.
Marston. It forms both a sequel and companion to the well-known
" Short and Easy Method of Prayer."
FIRST COMPLETE CHEAP ISSUE FOR 100 YEARS
A SHORT AND EASY METHOD OF PRAYER,
By MADAME GUYON. Paper, is. net ; cloth, is. 6d.
Tht Guardian. "This convenient little reprint will be sur of a welcome from
many to whom the name of the author is better known than her works. They will
eagerly read what is taught about prayer by one who proved so often and through so-
many hardships the reality of her inner experience."
THE LIFE OF MADAME GUYON. By
T. C. UPHAM, Author of "The Interior Life." With New
Introduction by Rev. W. R. INGE, M.A. 516 pages, large
crown 8vo, handsome cloth, 7 s - 6d. net.
Mtthodist Recorder. " Her letters make the heart glow."
Scotsmen. "Perhaps the most fascinating of all the spiritual autobiographies,
this re-issue is all the more valuable for beinz brought in by m studious and
ympathetic introduction from the pen of Mr W. R. Inge."
Chvrch. Quarterly Rtview."A. most welcome reprint."
HISTORY AND LIFE OF DR JOHN TAULER,
AND TWENTY-FIVE SERMONS. Translated by Mis*
SUSANNA WINKWORTH. With Preface by CHARLHS KINGSLEY,
and an Introductory Letter by Dr ALEXANDER WHYTE, of
Edinburgh, 426 pages, large crown 8vo, handsome cloth,
75. 6d. net.
Glatgow HeraM. "Mr Allenson has conferred a service on all lovers of the
mystics by this re-issue of an excellent work."
British Weekly." Very handsome and convenient, the reprint is most welcome."
AN INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTIAN
MYSTICISM. A Lecture by ELEANOR C. GREGORY, of
the Deanery, St Paul s Cathedral, London, Editor of "A Little
Book of Heavenly Wisdom." With Prefatory Letter by Dr
ALEXANDER WHYTE, Edinburgh. Fcap. 8vo, cloth, is. 6d. net j
by post, is. 8d. Paper, is. net ; by post, is. ad.
Dr WHYTK. " This lecture will form an admirable introduction to the greatest
and best of all studies."
LONDON
H. R. ALLENSON, Ltd., Racquet Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
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