'My heart had great experience.'--The Preacher.
'I will give them pastors after Mine own heart.'
Experience, the excellent shepherd of the Delectable Mountains, had a
brother in the army, and he was an equally excellent soldier. The two
brothers--they were twin-brothers--had been brought up together till they
were grown-up men in the same town of Mansoul. All the Experience
family, indeed, had from time immemorial hailed from that populous and
important town, and their family tree ran away back beyond the oldest
extant history. The two brothers, while in all other things as like as
two twin-brothers could be, at the same time very early in life began to
exhibit very different talents and tastes and dispositions; till, when we
meet with them in their full manhood, the one is a soldier in the army
and the other a shepherd on the Delectable Mountains. The
soldier-brother is thus described in one of the military histories of his
day: 'A man of conduct and of valour, and a person prudent in matters. A
comely person, moreover, well-spoken in negotiations, and very successful
in undertakings. His colours were the white colours of Mansoul and his
scutcheon was the dead lion and the dead bear.'
The shepherd-brother, on the other hand, is thus pictured out to us by
one who has seen him. A traveller who has visited the Delectable
Mountains, and has met and talked with the shepherds, thus describes
Experience in his excellent itinerary: 'Knowledge,' he says, 'I found to
be the sage of the company, spare in build, high of forehead, worn in
age, and his tranquil gait touched with abstractedness. While Experience
was more firmly knit in form and face, with a shrewd kindly eye and a
happy readiness in his bearing, and all his hard-earned wisdom evidently
on foot within him as a capability for work and for control.' This,
then, was the second of the four shepherds, who fed Immanuel's sheep on
the Delectable Mountains.
But here again to-night, and in the case of Experience, just as last
Sabbath night and in the case of Knowledge, in all this John Bunyan
speaks to children,--only the children here are the children of the
kingdom of heaven. The veriest child who reads the Delectable Mountains
begins to suspect before he is done that Knowledge and Experience are not
after all two real and true shepherds going their rounds with their
staves and their wallets and their wheeling dogs. Yes, though the little
fellow cannot put his suspicions into proper words for you, all the same
he has his suspicions that he is being deceived by you and your Sabbath
book; and, ten to one, from that sceptical day he will not read much more
of John Bunyan till in after-life he takes up John Bunyan never for a
single Sabbath again to lay him down. Yes, let the truth be told at
once, Experience is simply a minister, and not a real shepherd at all; a
minister of the gospel, a preacher, and a pastor; but, then, he is a
preacher and a pastor of no ordinary kind, but of the selectest and very
best kind.
1. Now, my brethren, to plunge at once out of the parable and into the
interpretation, I observe, in the first place, that pastors who are
indeed to be pastors after God's own heart have all to pass into their
pastorate through the school of experience. Preaching after God's own
heart, and pastoral work of the same divine pattern, cannot be taught in
any other school than the school of experience. Poets may be born and
not made, but not pastors nor preachers. Nay, do not all our best poets
first learn in their sufferings what afterwards they teach us in their
songs? At any rate, that is certainly the case with preachers and
pastors. As my own old minister once said to me in a conversation on
this very subject, 'Even God Himself cannot inspire an experience.' No.
For if He could He would surely have done so in the case of His own Son,
to Whom in the gift of the Holy Ghost He gave all that He could give and
all that His Son could receive. But an experience cannot in the very
nature of things be either bestowed on the one hand or received and
appropriated on the other. An experience in the unalterable nature of
the thing itself must be undergone. The Holy Ghost Himself after He has
been bestowed and received has to be experimented upon, and taken into
this and that need, trial, cross, and care of life. He is not sent to
spare us our experiences, but to carry us through them. And thus it is
(to keep for a moment in sight of the highest illustration we have of
this law of experience), thus it is, I say, that the apostle has it in
his Epistle to the Hebrews that though Christ Himself were a Son, yet
learned He obedience by the things that He suffered. And being by
experience made perfect He then went on to do such and such things for
us. Why, for instance, for one thing, why do you think was our Lord able
to speak with such extraordinary point, impressiveness, and assurance
about prayer; about the absolute necessity and certainty of secret,
importunate, persevering prayer having, sooner or later, in one shape or
other, and in the best possible shape, its answer? Why but because of
His own experience? Why but because His own closet, hilltop, all-night,
and up-before-the-day prayers had all been at last heard and better heard
than He had been able to ask? We can quite well read between the lines
in all our Lord's parables and in all the passages of His sermons about
prayer. The unmistakable traces of otherwise untold enterprises and
successes, agonies and victories of prayer, are to be seen in every such
sermon of His. And so, in like manner, in all that He says to His
disciples about the sweetness of submission, resignation, and
self-denial, as also about the nourishment for His soul that He got out
of every hard act of obedience,--and so on. There is running through all
our Lord's doctrinal and homiletical teaching that note of reality and of
certitude that can only come to any teaching out of the long and deep and
intense experience of the teacher. And as the Master was, so are all His
ministers. When I read, for instance, what William Law says about the
heart-searching and heart-cleansing efficacy of intercessory prayer in
the case of him who continues all his life so to pray, and carries such
prayer through all the experiences and all the relationships of life, I
do not need you to tell me where that great man of God made that great
discovery. I know that he made it in his own closet, and on his own
knees, and in his own evil heart. And so, also, when I come nearer home.
Whenever I hear a single unconventional, immediate, penetrating,
overawing petition or confession in a minister's pulpit prayer or in his
family worship, I do not need to be told out of what prayer-book he took
that. I know without his telling me that my minister has been, all
unknown to me till now, at that same school of prayer to which his Master
was put in the days of His flesh, and out of which He brought the
experiences that He afterwards put into the Friend at midnight, and the
Importunate widow, as also into the Egg and the scorpion, the Bread and
the stone, the Knocking and the opening, the Seeking and the finding.
His children thus most dear to Him,
Their heavenly Father trains,
Through all the hard experience led
Of sorrows and of pains.
And if His children, then ten times more the tutors and governors of His
children,--the pastors and the preachers He prepares for His people.
2. Again, though I will not put those two collegiate shepherds against
one another, yet, in order to bring out the whole truth on this matter, I
will risk so far as to say that where we cannot have both Knowledge and
Experience, by all means let us have Experience. Yes, I declare to you
that if I were choosing a minister for myself, and could not have both
the book-knowledge and the experience of the Christian life in one and
the same man; and could not have two ministers, one with all the talents
and another with all the experiences; I would say that, much as I like an
able and learned sermon from an able and learned man, I would rather have
less learning and more experience. And, then, no wonder that such
pastors and preachers are few. For how costly must a thoroughly good
minister's experience be to him! What a quantity and what a quality of
experience is needed to take a raw, light-minded, ignorant, and
self-satisfied youth and transform him into the pastor, the tried and
trusted friend of the tempted, the sorrow-laden, and the shipwrecked
hearts and lives in his congregation! What years and years of the
selectest experiences are needed to teach the average divinity student to
know himself, to track out and run to earth his own heart, and thus to
lay open and read other men's hearts to their self-deceived owners in the
light of his own. A matter, moreover, that he gets not one word of help
toward in all his college curriculum. David was able to say in his old
age that he fed the flock of God in Israel according to the integrity of
his heart, and guided them by the skilfulness of his hands. But what
years and years of shortcoming and failure in private and in public life
lie behind that fine word 'integrity'! as also what stumbles and what
blunders behind that other fine word 'skilfulness'! But, then, how a
lightest touch of a preacher's own dear-bought experience skilfully let
fall brightens up an obscure scripture! How it sends a thrill through a
prayer! How it wings an arrow to the conscience! How it sheds abroad
balm upon the heart! Let no minister, then, lose heart when he is sent
back to the school of experience. He knows in theory that tribulation
worketh patience, and patience experience, but it is not theory, but
experience, that makes a minister after God's own heart. I sometimes
wish that I may live to see a chair of Experimental Religion set up in
all our colleges. I fear it is a dream, and that it must have been
pronounced impracticable long ago by our wisest heads. Still, all the
same, that does not prevent me from again and again indulging my dream. I
indulge my fond dream again as often as I look back on my own tremendous
mistakes in the management of my own personal and ministerial life, as
well as sometimes see some signs of the same mistakes in some other
ministers. In my dream for the Church of the future I see the programme
of lectures in the Experimental Class and the accompanying examinations.
I see the class library, and I envy the students. I am present at the
weekly book-day, and at the periodical addresses delivered to the class
by those town and country ministers who have been most skilful in their
pastorate and most successful in the conversion and in the character of
their people. And, unless I wholly deceive myself, I see, not all the
class--that will never be till the millennium--but here and there twos
and threes, and more men than that, who will throw their whole hearts
into the work of such a class till they come out of the hall in
experimental religion like Sir Proteus in the play:
Their years but young, but their experience old,
Their heads unmellowed, but their judgment ripe.
It is quite true, that, as my old minister shrewdly said to me, even the
Holy Ghost cannot inspire an experience. No. But a class of genuine
experimental divinity would surely help to foster and develop an
experience. And, till the class is established, any student who has the
heart for it may lay in the best of the class library for a few
shillings. Mr. Thin will tell you that there is no literature that is
such a drug in the market as the best books of Experimental Divinity. No
wonder, then, that we make such slow and short way in the skilfulness,
success, and acceptance of our preaching and our pastorate.
3. But, at the same time, my brethren, all your ministers' experience of
personal religion will be lost upon you unless you are yourselves
attending the same school. The salvation of the soul, you must
understand, is not offered to ministers only. Ministers are not the only
men who are, to begin with, dead in trespasses and sins. The Son of God
did not die for ministers only. The Holy Ghost is not offered to
ministers only. A clean, humble, holy heart is not to be the pursuit of
ministers only. It is not to His ministers only that our Lord says, Take
up My yoke and learn of Me. The daily cross is not the opportunity of
ministers only. It is not to ministers only that tribulation worketh
patience, and patience experience, and experience hope. It was to all
who had obtained like precious faith with their ministers that Peter
issued this exhortation that they were to give all diligence to add to
their faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance,
and to temperance patience,--and so on. Now, my brethren, unless all
that is on foot in yourselves, as well as in your ministers, then their
progress in Christian experience will only every new Sabbath-day separate
you and your ministers further and further away from one another. When a
minister is really making progress himself in the life of religion that
progress must come out, and ought to come out, both in his preaching and
in his prayers. And, then, two results of all that will immediately
begin to manifest themselves among his people. Some of his people will
visibly, and still more will invisibly, make corresponding progress with
their minister; while some others, alas! will fall off in interest, in
understanding, and in sympathy till at last they drop off from his
ministry altogether. That is an old law in the Church of God: 'like
people like priest,' and 'like priest like people.' And while there are
various influences at work retarding and perplexing the immediate
operation of that law, at the same time, he who has eyes to see such
things in a congregation and in a community will easily see Hosea's great
law of congregational selection in operation every day. Like people
gradually gravitate to like preachers. You will see, if you have the
eyes, congregations gradually dissolving and gradually being consolidated
again under that great law. You will see friendships and families even
breaking up and flying into pieces; and, again, new families and new
friendships being built up on that very same law. If you were to study
the session books of our city congregations in the light of that law, you
would get instruction. If you just studied who lifted their lines, and
why; and, again, what other people came and left their lines, and why,
you would get instruction. The shepherds in Israel did not need to hunt
up and herd their flocks like the shepherds in Scotland. A shepherd on
the mountains of Israel had nothing more to do than himself pass up into
the pasture lands and then begin to sing a psalm or offer a prayer, when,
in an instant, his proper sheep were all round about him. The sheep knew
their own shepherd's voice, and they fled from the voice of a stranger.
And so it is with a true preacher,--a preacher of experience, that is.
His own people know no voice like his voice. He does not need to bribe
and flatter and run after his people. He may have, he usually has, but
few people as people go in our day, and the better the preacher sometimes
the smaller the flock. It was so in our Master's case. The multitude
followed after the loaves but they fled from the feeding doctrines, till
He first tasted that dejection and that sense of defeat which so many of
His best servants are fed on in this world. Still, as our Lord did not
tune His pulpit to the taste of the loungers of Galilee, no more will a
minister worth the name do anything else but press deeper and deeper into
the depths of truth and life, till, as was the case with his Master, his
followers, though few, will be all the more worth having. The Delectable
Mountains are wide and roomy. They roll far away both before and behind.
Immanuel's Land is a large place, and there are many other shepherds
among those hills and valleys besides Knowledge and Experience and
Watchful and Sincere. And each several shepherd has, on the whole, his
own sheep. Knowledge has his; Experience has his; Watchful has his; and
Sincere has his; and all the other here unnamed shepherds have all theirs
also. For, always, like shepherd like sheep. Yes. Hosea must have been
something in Israel somewhat analogous to a session-clerk among
ourselves. 'Like priest like people' is certainly a digest of some such
experience. Let some inquisitive beginner in Hebrew this winter search
out the prophet upon that matter, consulting Mr. Hutcheson and Dr. Pusey,
and he will let me hear the result.
4. Now, my brethren, in closing, we must all keep it clearly before our
minds, and that too every day we live, that God orders and overrules this
whole world, and, indeed, keeps it going very much just that He may by
means of it make unceasing experiment upon His people. Experiment, you
know, results in experience. There is no other way by which any man can
attain to a religious experience but by undergoing temptation, trial,
tribulation:--experiment. And it gives a divine dignity to all things,
great and small, good and bad, when we see them all taken up into God's
hand, in order that by means of them He may make for Himself an
experienced people. Human life on this earth, when viewed under this
aspect, is one vast workshop. And all the shafts and wheels and pulleys;
all the crushing hammers, and all the whirling knives; all the furnaces
and smelting-pots; all the graving tools and smoothing irons, are all so
many divinely-designed and divinely-worked instruments all directed in
upon this one result,--our being deeply experienced in the ways of God
till we are for ever fashioned into His nature and likeness. Our faith
in the unseen world and in our unseen God and Saviour is at one time put
to the experiment. At another time it is our love to Him; the reality of
it, and the strength of it. At another time it is our submission and our
resignation to His will. At another time it is our humility, or our
meekness, or our capacity for self-denial, or our will and ability to
forgive an injury, or our perseverance in still unanswered prayer; and so
on the ever-shifting but never-ceasing experiment goes. I do beseech
you, my brethren, take that true view of life home with you again this
night. This true view of life, namely, that experience in the divine
life can only come to you through your being much experimented upon. Meet
all your trials and tribulations and temptations, then, under this
assurance, that all things will work together for good to you also if you
are only rightly exercised by means of them. Nothing else but this
growing experience and this settling assurance will be able to support
you under the sudden ills of life; but this will do it. This, when you
begin by experience to see that all this life, and all the good and all
the ill of this life, are all under this splendid divine law,--that your
tribulations also are indeed working within you a patience, and your
patience an experience, and your experience a hope that maketh not
ashamed.