designed him in her largest and noblest mould, and hid in his
composition a spark of celestial fire. This showed itself in a
certain tension of purpose and flame of energy which marked his whole
career. He was never one of those pulpy, shapeless beings who are
always waiting on circumstances to determine their form; he was rather
the stamp itself, which impressed its image and superscription on
circumstances.
1. He was a supremely ethical nature. This perhaps was his fundamental
peculiarity. Life could under no circumstances have seemed to him a
trifle. The sense of responsibility was strong in him from the
beginning. He was trained in a strict school; for the law of life
prescribed to the race of which he was a member was a severe one; but
he responded to it, and there never was a time when the deepest
passion of his nature was not to receive the approval of God. Touching
the righteousness which was in the law, he was blameless. After his
conversion he laid bare unreservedly the sins of his past; but there
were none of those dalliances with the flesh to confess into which
soft and self-indulgent natures easily fall. He could never have
allowed himself that which would have robbed him of his self-respect.
His sense of honour was keen. When, in his subsequent life, he was
accused of base things--lying, hypocrisy, avarice and darker sins--he
felt intense pain, crying out like one wounded, and he hurled the
accusations from him with the energy of a self-respecting nature. It
was always his endeavour to keep a conscience void of offence not only
towards God, but also towards men; and one of his most frequently
reiterated injunctions to those who were in any way witnesses for
Christ was to seek to approve themselves as honest men even to those
who were without. He was speaking out of his own heart when he said to
all, "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest,
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any
praise, think on these things."
I cannot help pausing here to say, that he will never be a preacher
who does not know how to get at the conscience; but how should he know
who has not himself a keen sense of honour and an awful reverence for
moral purity? We are making a great mistake about this. We are
preaching to the fancy, to the imagination, to intellect, to feeling,
to will; and, no doubt, all these must be preached to; but it is in
the conscience that the battle is to be won or lost.[43] The great
difficulty of missionary work is that in the heathen there is, as a
rule, hardly any conscience: it has almost to be created before they
can be Christianized. In many parts of Christendom it is dying out;
and, where it is extinct, the whole work of Christianity has to be
done over again.
2. St. Paul's intellectual gifts are so universally recognised that it
is hardly worth while to refer to them. They are most conspicuously
displayed in his exposition of Christianity, on which I shall speak in
the closing lecture. But in the meantime I remark, that his
intellectual make was not at all that usually associated in our minds
with the system-builder.
It was, indeed, massive, thorough and severe. But it was not in the
least degree stiff and pedantic. It was, on the contrary, an intellect
of marvelous flexibility. There was no material to which it could not
adapt itself and no feat which it could not perform. You may observe
this, for example, in the diverse ways in which he addresses different
audiences. In one town he has to address a congregation of Jews; in
another a gathering of heathen rustics; in a third a crowd of
philosophers. To the Jews he invariably speaks, to begin with, about
the heroes of their national history; to the ignorant heathen he talks
about the weather and the crops; and to the Athenians he quotes their
own poets and delivers a high-strung oration; yet in every case he
arrives naturally at his own subject and preaches the gospel to each
audience in the language of its own familiar ideas. Even outside of
his own peculiar sphere altogether, St. Paul was equal to every
occasion. During his voyage to Rome, when the skill of the sailors was
baffled and the courage of the soldiers worn out by the long-continued
stress of weather, he alone remained cheerful and clearheaded; he
virtually became captain of the ship, and he saved the lives of his
fellow-passengers over and over again.
We think of the intellect of the system-builder as cold. But there is
never any coldness about St. Paul's mind. On the contrary, it is
always full of life and all on fire. He can, indeed, reason closely
and continuously; but, every now and then, his thought bursts up
through the argument like a flaming geyser and falls in showers of
sparks. Then the argument resumes its even tenor again; but these
outbursts are the finest passages in St. Paul. In the same way,
Shakespeare, I have observed, while moving habitually on a high level
of thought and music, will, every now and then, pause and, spreading
his wings, go soaring and singing like a lark sheer up into the blue.
When the thought which has lifted him is exhausted, he gracefully
descends and resumes on the former level; but these flights are the
finest passages in Shakespeare.
3. The intellectual superiority of St. Paul is universally
acknowledged; and to those who only know him at a distance this is his
outstanding peculiarity. But the close student of his life and
character knows, that, great as he was in intellect, he was equally
great in heart, perhaps even greater. One of the subtlest students of
his life, the late Adolphe Monod, of the French Church, has fixed on
this as the key to his character. He calls him the Man of Tears, and
shows with great persuasiveness that herein lay the secret of his
power.
It is certainly remarkable, when you begin to look into the subject,
how often we see St. Paul in the emotional mood, and even in tears. In
his famous address to the Ephesian elders he reminded them that he had
served the Lord among them with many tears, and again, that he had not
ceased to warn everyone night and day with tears. It is not what we
should have expected in a man of such intellectual power. But this
makes his tears all the more impressive. When a weak, effeminate man
weeps, he only makes himself ridiculous; but it is a different
spectacle when a man like St. Paul is seen weeping; because we know
that the strong nature could not have been bent except by a storm of
feeling.
His affection for his converts is something extraordinary. Some have
believed that there is evidence to prove that in youth his heart had
suffered a terrible bereavement. It is supposed that he had been
married, but lost his wife early. He never sought to replace the loss,
and he never spoke of it. But the affection of his great heart, long
pent up, rushed forth into the channel of his work. His converts were
to him in place of wife and children. His passion for them is like a
strong natural affection. His epistles to them are, in many places, as
like as they can be to love-letters. Listen to the terms in which he
addresses them: "Ye are in our heart to die and live with you"; "I
will very gladly spend and be spent for you, though, the more
abundantly I love you, the less I be loved"; "Therefore, my brethren,
dearly beloved and longed for, so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly
beloved."
To his fellow-labourers in the Gospel especially, his heart went out
in unbounded affection. The long lists of greetings at the close of
his epistles, in which the characters and services of individuals are
referred to with such overflowing generosity and yet with such fine
discrimination, are unconscious monuments to the largeness of his
heart. He could hardly mention a fellow-worker without breaking forth
into a glowing panegyric: "Whether any do inquire of Titus, he is my
partner and fellow-helper concerning you; or our brethren be inquired
of, they are the messengers of the churches and the glory of Christ."
There is no more conclusive proof of the depth and sincerity of St.
Paul's heart than the affection which he inspired in others; for it is
only the loving who are loved. None perhaps are more discriminating in
this respect than young men. A hard or pedantic nature cannot win
them. But St. Paul was constantly surrounded with troops of young men,
who, attracted by his personality, were willing to follow him through
fire and water or to go on his messages wherever he might send them.
And that he could win mature minds in the same way is proved by the
great scene at Miletus, already referred to, where the elders of
Ephesus, at parting with him, "all wept sore, and fell on Paul's neck
and kissed him, sorrowing most of all for the word which he said, that
they should see his face no more."
The nature of St. Paul's work no doubt immensely developed this side
of his character, but, before passing from the subject, it is worth
remembering how the circumstances of his birth and upbringing were
providentially fitted to broaden his sympathies, even before he became
a Christian. He was not simply a Jew, but a Hebrew of the Hebrews;
and he felt all the pride of a child of that race to which pertained
the adoption and the glory and the covenant, and the giving of the
law, and the service of God, and the promises. He could always put
himself in touch at once with a Jewish audience by going back on
associations which were as dear to himself as to them. Yet, although
so thoroughly a Jew, he belonged by birth to a larger world. He was
not born within the boundaries of Palestine, where his sympathies
would have been cramped and his horizon narrowed, but in a Gentile
city, famous for its beauty, its learning and its commerce; and he
was, besides, a freeborn citizen of Rome. We know from his own lips
that he was proud of both distinctions; and he thus acquired a
cosmopolitan spirit and learned to think of himself as a man amongst
men.
Nor ought we, perhaps, to omit here to recall the fact, that he
learned in his youth the handicraft of tent-making. This brought him
into close contact with common men, whose language he learned to speak
and whose life he learned to know--acquirements which were to be of
supreme utility in his subsequent career.
* * * * *
Gentlemen, it is generally agreed that a certain modicum of natural
gifts is necessary for those who think of entering the ministry. Here
is Luther's list of the qualifications of a minister: you will observe
that most of them are gifts of nature: 1. He should be able to teach
plainly and in order. 2. He should have a good head. 3. Good power of
language. 4. A good voice. 5. A good memory. 6. He should know when to
stop. 7. He should be sure of what he means to say. 8. And be ready to
stake body and soul, goods and reputation, on its truth. 9. He should
study diligently. 10. And suffer himself to be vexed and criticized by
everyone.
The first consciousness of the possession of unusual powers is not
unfrequently accompanied by an access of vanity and self-conceit. The
young soul glories in the sense, probably vastly exaggerated, of its
own pre-eminence and anticipates, on an unlimited scale, the triumphs
of the future. But there is another way in which this discovery may
act. The consciousness of unusual powers may be accompanied with a
sense of unusual responsibility, the soul inquiring anxiously about
the intention of the Giver of all gifts in conferring them. It was in
this way that Jeremiah was affected by the information that special
gifts had been conferred on him in the scene to which I have already
referred in this lecture. He concluded at once that he had been
blessed with exceptional talents in order that he might serve his God
and his country with them. And surely in a gifted nature there could
be no saner ambition than, if God permitted it, to devote its powers
to the ministry of His Son.
There is no other profession which is so able to absorb and utilise
talents of every description. This is manifest in regard to such
talents as those mentioned by Luther--a good voice, a good memory,
etc. But there is hardly a power or an attainment of any kind which a
minister cannot use in his work. How philosophical power can serve him
may be seen in the preaching of Dr. Chalmers, whose sermons were
always cast in a philosophical mould. The philosophy was not very
deep; it was not too difficult for the common man; but it gave the
preaching a decided air of distinction. How scientific acquirements
may be utilised is shown in the sermons of some of our foremost living
preachers, who find an inexhaustible supply of illustrations in their
scientific studies. Literary style may supply the feather to wing the
arrow of truth to its mark. That poetic power may serve the preacher
it is not necessary to prove on the spot where Ray Palmer wrote "My
faith looks up to Thee." Business capacity is needed in church courts
and in the management of a congregation. In some other professions men
have to bury half their talents; but in ours there is no talent which
will not find appropriate and useful exercise.
We perhaps lay too much stress, however, on intellectual gifts and
attainments. These are the only ones which are tested by our
examinations in college; yet there are moral qualities which are just
as essential.
The polish given by education tells, no doubt; but the size of the
primordial mass of manhood tells still more. In a quaint book of
Reminiscences recently published from the pen of a notable minister of
the last generation in the Highlands of Scotland, Mr. Sage of Resolis,
there is a criticism recorded, which was passed by a parishioner on
three successive ministers of a certain parish: "Our first minister,"
said he, "was a man, but he was not a minister; our second was a
minister, but he was not a man; and the one we have at present is
neither a man nor a minister."
There is no demand which people make more imperatively in our day than
that their minister should be a man. It is not long since a minister
was certain of being honoured simply because he belonged to the
clerical profession and wore the clerical garb. People, as the saying
was, respected his cloth. But ours is a democratic age, and that state
of public feeling is passing away. There is no lack of respect,
indeed, for ministers who are worthy of the name; perhaps there is
more of it than ever. But it is not given now to clerical pretensions,
but only to proved merit. People do not now respect the cloth, unless
they find a man inside it.
Perhaps the educational preparation through which we pass at college
is not too favourable to this kind of power. In the process of cutting
and polishing the natural size of the diamond runs the risk of being
reduced. When we are all passed through the same mill, we are apt to
come out too much alike. A man ought to be himself. Your Emerson
preached this doctrine with indefatigable eloquence. Perhaps he
exaggerated it; but it is a true doctrine; and it is emphatically a
doctrine for preachers. What an audience looks for, before everything
else, in the texture of a sermon is the bloodstreak of experience; and
truth is doubly and trebly true when it comes from a man who speaks as
if he had learned it by his own work and suffering.
It will generally be noticed in any man who makes a distinct mark as a
preacher that there is in his composition some peculiarity of
endowment or attainment on which he has learned to rely. It may be an
emotional tenderness as in McCheyne, or a moral intensity as in
Robertson of Brighton, or intellectual subtlety as in Candlish, or
psychological insight as in Beecher. But something distinctive there
must be, and, therefore, one of the wisest of rules is, Cultivate your
strong side.
But what tells most of all is the personality as a whole. This is one
of the prime elements in preaching. The effect of a sermon depends,
first of all, on what is said, and next, on how it is said; but,
hardly less, on who says it. There are men, says Emerson, who are
heard to the ends of the earth though they speak in a whisper.[44] We
are so constituted that what we hear depends very much for its effect
on how we are disposed towards him who speaks. The regular hearers of
a minister gradually form in their minds, almost unawares, an image of
what he is, into which they put everything which they themselves
remember about him and everything which they have heard of his record;
and, when he rises on Sunday in the pulpit, it is not the man visible
there at the moment that they listen to, but this image, which stands
behind him and determines the precise weight and effect of every
sentence which he utters.
* * * * *
Closely connected with the force of personality is the other power,
which St. Paul possessed in so supreme a degree, of taking an interest
in others. It is the manhood in ourselves which enables us to
understand the human nature of our hearers; and we must have had
experience of life, if we are to preach to the life of men.
Some ministers do this extremely little. Not once but many a time, I
have heard a minister on the Sabbath morning, when he rose up and
began to pray, plunging at once into a theological meditation; and in
all the prayers of the forenoon there would scarcely be a single
sentence making reference to the life of the people during the week.
Had you been a stranger alighted from another planet, you would never
have dreamed that the human beings assembled there had been toiling,
rejoicing and sorrowing for six days; that they had mercies to give
thanks for and sins to be forgiven; or that they had children at home
to pray for and sons across the sea.
There is an unearthly style of preaching, if I may use the term,
without the blood of human life in it: the people with their burdens
in the pews--the burden of home, the burden of business, the burden
of the problems of the day--whilst, in the pulpit, the minister is
elaborating some nice point, which has taken his fancy in the course
of his studies, but has no interest whatever for them. Only now and
then a stray sentence may pull up their wandering attention. Perhaps
he is saying, "Now some of you may reply"; and then follows an
objection to what he has been stating which no actual human being
would ever think of making. But he proceeds elaborately to demolish
it, while the hearer, knowing it to be no objection of his, retires
into his own interior.
If what was said in a former lecture about the distinctive difference
between the preaching of the Old Testament and that of the new be
considered, it will at once be recognised how vital is this aspect of
the matter. The prophets of the Old Testament, in common with the
thinkers of antiquity in general, thought of men in masses and
regarded the individual only as a fragment of a larger whole. But
Christ introduced an entirely new way of thinking. To Him the
individual was a whole in himself; beneath the habiliments of even the
humblest member of the human family there was hidden what was more
precious than the entire material world; and on the issues of every
life was suspended an immortal destiny. This faith may be said to
have made Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world; for He saw in the
lost children of men that which made Him live to seek them and die to
save them. And it is by this same faith and vision that anyone is
qualified to be a fellow-worker with Christ. No one will ever be able
to engage with any success in the work of human salvation who does not
see men to be infinitely the most interesting objects in the world,
and who does not stand in awe before the solemn destiny and the
sublime possibilities of the soul. It is by the growth and the glow of
this faith that the worth of all ministerial work is measured.
It is far easier, however, to acknowledge this view in the abstract
than to cherish it habitually towards the actual men and women of our
own sphere and our own vicinity. That man is the most interesting
object in the world; that the soul is precious; and that it is better
for a human being to lose the whole world than to miss his
destiny--these are now commonplaces, which everyone who bears the
Christian name will acknowledge. Yet in reality few live under their
power. Many a one who has paid the tribute of love and admiration to
the spectacle of Christ's compassion for the outcasts, and melted with
æsthetic emotion before a picture of the Woman taken in Adultery or
the Woman that was a Sinner, has never once attempted to save an
actual woman of the same kind in his own city, and would be utterly at
a loss if such a one, in an hour of remorse, were to throw herself on
his pity and protection. There is a great difference between a sinner
in a book or a picture and a sinner in the flesh. Multitudes in their
hearts believe that all the remarkable and interesting people lived
long ago or that, at any rate, if any are now alive, they live many
miles away from their vicinity. They believe that there were
remarkable people in the first or the ninth century, but by no means
in the nineteenth; they believe that there are interesting people in
Paris or London or New York; but they have never discovered anything
wonderful in those living in their own village or in their own street.
Many who consider themselves enlightened will tell you that their
neighbours are a poor lot. They fancy that, if they were living
somewhere else, fifty or a hundred miles away, they would find company
worthy of themselves; though it is ten to one that, if they made the
change, their new neighbours would be a poor lot also.
If a minister allows himself to harbour sentiments of this sort, he is
lost.[45] No one will ever win men who does not believe in them. The
true minister must be able to see in the meanest man and woman a
revelation of the whole of human nature; and in the peasant in the
field, and even the infant in the cradle, connections which reach
forth high as heaven and far as eternity. All that is greatest in king
or kaiser exists in the poorest of his subjects; and the elements out
of which the most delicate and even saintly womanhood is made exist in
the commonest woman who walks the streets. The harp of human nature is
there with all its strings complete; and it will not refuse its music
to him who has the courage to take it up and boldly strike the
strings. The great preacher is he who, wherever he is speaking, among
high or low, goes straight for those elements which are common to all
men, and casts himself with confidence on men's intelligence and
experience, believing that the just suggestions of reason and the
terrors of conscience, the sense of the nobility of goodness and the
pathos of love and pity are common to them all.[46]
Let me close this lecture with a few words on a great subject, to
which a whole lecture might have been profitably devoted.
No safer piece of advice could be tendered you than to let the
beginning of your ministry be marked by care for the young. This is
work which more than any other will encourage yourselves, and it is
more likely than any other to establish you in the affections of a
congregation.
To work successfully among children you must know their life and have
the _entrée_ of their little world of interests, excitements, prizes
and hopes. It is not difficult to get it, if only we are simple and
genuine. Children will approach their minister gladly, and make him
their confidant, if only he is accessible to them. By the ministers of
an older generation they were kept at an awful distance. When they
were out of temper or doing wrong, they were threatened with a visit
from the minister in the same way as they might be threatened with the
policeman, or the parish beadle, or a still more awful functionary of
the universe. This, let us hope, has passed away, and in most parishes
a ministerial visit is spoken of as a promise instead of a threat. A
minister is proud nowadays if a child flies up to him in the street
and ruffles his feathers with boisterous familiarity, or if a group of
children pin him into the corner of a room and order him, under pains
and penalties, to tell them a story. We are returning to the ideal of
Goldsmith, in the _Deserted Village_:--
"The service past, around the pious man
With steady zeal each loyal rustic ran;
Even children followed with endearing wile,
And plucked his gown to share the good man's smile."
More important even than accessibility is genuine respect for the
children.