we should give them our very best. I venture to say, that a much
larger proportion of the sermons preached to children is never written
out than of sermons to adults. The preacher, having thought of two or
three lines of remark and got hold of two or three stories, enters the
pulpit with these materials lying loosely in his mind, and trusts to
the moment for the style of the sermon. Of course, if a man has
trained himself to preach in this way always, it is all right; but, if
not, it is a mistake. Children are greatly affected by felicity of
arrangement and the music of language; they do not know to what their
pleasure is due, but they feel it; and, if a preacher has the power
of original thought or of beautiful diction, there is no occasion when
he should be more liberal in the use of it than when he is addressing
them.[47] The truth is, it is a complete mistake to make the
children's sermon so different from other sermons as to create the
impression that it is the only utterance from the pulpit to which they
are expected to listen. It is not easy to get children to begin to
listen at all to what is said in church; the children's sermon is a
device to catch their attention; but it ought also to be a bridge
conducting them over to the habit of listening to all that is said
there. If they acquire the habit, they are our best hearers. A boy of
twelve or thirteen can follow nearly anything; and there is no keener
critic of the logic of a discourse or warmer appreciator of any
passage which is worthy of admiration.
But, while we respect the intelligence of the young, there is
something else which we need to believe in still more. We do not half
realise the drama of religious impression going on in the minds of
children. We forget our own childhood and the movements excited in our
childish breasts under the preaching of the Word--how real the things
unseen were to us; how near God was, His eye flashing on us through
the darkness; how our hearts melted at the sufferings of Christ; how
they swelled with unselfish aspirations as we listened to the stories
of heroic lives; how distinctly the voice of conscience spoke within
us; and how we trembled at the prospect of death, judgment and
eternity. What we were then, other children are now; and what went on
in us is going on in them. It is the man who believes this and reveres
it who will reap the harvest in the field of childhood.
There is no surer way to secure for ourselves the interest of the old
than to take an interest in the young. Of course a forced interest in
children, shown with this in view, would be hypocrisy and deserve
contempt. We must love the children for their own sakes. Yet we may
quite legitimately nourish our interest in the young by observing that
it is one of the strongest instincts of human nature which makes
fathers and mothers feel kindnesses shown to their children to be the
greatest benefits which can be conferred on themselves. An Edinburgh
minister, who has had conspicuous success in preaching to children as
well as in every other department of the work of his sacred office,
once, in a gathering of divinity students, of whom I was one, told an
incident from his own life which is almost too sacred to be repeated
by any lips except his own, but which I hope he will excuse me for
enriching you with, as it puts in a memorable form one of the truest
secrets of ministerial success. On the morning of the day when he was
going to be ordained to his first charge, he was leaving his home in
the country to travel to the city, and his mother came to the door to
bid him good-bye. Holding his hand at parting, she said, "You are
going to be ordained to-day, and you will be told your duty by those
who know it far better than I do; but I wish you to remember one thing
which perhaps they may not tell you--remember, that, whenever you lay
your hand on a child's head, you are laying it on its mother's heart."
FOOTNOTES:
[43] "The Sybarites of to-day will tolerate a sermon which is delicate
enough to flatter their literary sensuality; but it is their taste which
is charmed, not their conscience which is awakened: their principle of
conduct escapes untouched.... Amusement, instruction, morals, are
distinct _genres_."--AMIEL.
[44] The finest description of a speaker known to me is this of Lord
Bacon in Ben Jonson's _Discoveries_; and it is evident that it was the
man rather than the manner or even the matter which made the impression:
"Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of
gravity in his speaking. His language, where he could spare or pass by a
jest, was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly,
more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he
uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His
hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He
commanded where he spoke; and had his judges angry and pleased at his
devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of
every man that heard him was, lest he should make an end."
[45] It has often astonished me to observe how easily ministers' wives
in this respect find for themselves the right path. One would think it
would be very difficult sometimes for those who have been brought up in
cities or in a secluded circle to adapt themselves suddenly to a remote
and unselect society; and they have not, like their husbands, had the
opportunity of meditating long on the duties of a public position. A
hearty and cordial humanity in the members of a minister's family lends
an immense assistance to his work. A minister ought to belong to no
class of society, but to have the power of moving without constraint in
every class.
[46] "Not a heart but has its romance, not a life which does not hide a
secret which is either its thorn or its spur. Everywhere grief, hope,
comedy, tragedy; even under the petrifaction of old age, as in the
twisted forms of fossils, we may discover the agitations and tortures of
youth. This thought is the magic wand of poets and preachers."--_Amiel._
[47] This may be a reason for rather devoting a whole diet of worship to
the children once a month or once a quarter than only giving them a few
minutes every Sabbath. But many follow the latter practice with
excellent results. Perhaps there ought to be something specially for the
children at every service. If I may mention my own practice, I have,
during my whole ministry, preached to children once a month; and every
Sunday I have a children's hymn in the forenoon and a prayer for
children in the afternoon.
LECTURE VII.
THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN.
In the last lecture I spoke of St. Paul as a Man, showing how
remarkable were his endowments and acquirements, and how these told in
his apostolic career. But it was not through these that he was what he
was. Great as were the gifts bestowed on him by nature and cultivated
by education, they were utterly inadequate to produce a character and
a career like his. It was what Christianity added to these that made
him St. Paul.
It is right enough that we should now recognise the importance of his
natural gifts and trace out the ways in which Providence was shaping
his life towards its true aim before he was conscious of it. But St.
Paul himself had hardly patience for such cool reflections. He turned
away with strong aversion from his pre-Christian life as something
condemned and lost; and he delighted to attribute all that he was and
did to the influence of Christ alone. In my last lecture I quoted a
single passage to show that he himself recognised that his natural
endowments had been bestowed in order to fit him for the peculiar
work which he was destined to accomplish in the world; but I question
if from all his writings I could have quoted another passage to the
same effect. It was only for a moment that he allowed himself to stand
on this point of view; whereas we could quote from every part of his
writings such sayings as these: "By the grace of God I am what I am";
"I laboured more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of
God in me"; "It is no more I that live, but Christ liveth in me."
That this was his habitual way of estimating his own achievements is
strikingly illustrated by his mode of thinking and speaking of certain
defects in the equipment with which nature had supplied him for the
career on which he was embarked. Gifted as he was, even he did not
possess all gifts. He lacked one or two of those which might have been
thought most essential to his success.
It would appear that he lacked the rotund voice and copious diction of
the orator; for his critics were able to allege that, whilst his
written style was powerful, his spoken style was contemptible.
Painters have represented him as a kind of demi-god, with the stature
of an athlete and the grace of an Apollo. But he seems to have been
diminutive in stature; and there appears to be evidence to prove that
there was that in his appearance which, at first sight, rather
repelled than attracted an audience. He felt these defects keenly, and
could not but wish sometimes that they were removed. But his habitual
and settled feeling about them was, that he ought to look upon them as
sources of strength rather than as weaknesses, because they made him
rely the more on the strength of Christ. This was an unfailing
resource, on which he felt that he could draw without limit. And so he
gloried in his infirmities, that the power of Christ might rest upon
him.[48]
It might be said that it was only the enthusiasm of Paul which made
him attribute to Christ that which really belonged to himself. But his
own point of view is the just one. It was Christ who made him; and, if
we are to understand a ministry like his, we must try to measure the
influence of Christ upon him, or, in other words, investigate the
elements of his Christianity.
* * * * *
1. Paul could claim that even in his pre-Christian days he had lived
in all good conscience towards both God and man. Yet this profession
of uprightness does not prevent him from confessing elsewhere that
deep down in his consciousness there had been a mortal struggle
between the principles of good and evil, in which the good was far
from always winning the victory: "We all," he acknowledges, "had our
conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the
desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children
of wrath even as others." In the seventh chapter of Romans he has
drawn a picture of this struggle, and it is to the very life.
Theologians have, indeed, disputed among themselves as to the stage of
experience there referred to--whether it is the state of an
unconverted or of a converted man. But the human heart has no
difficulty in interpreting it. The more thoroughly anyone is a man,
the more easily will he understand it; and especially the more upright
and conscientious anyone is, the more certainly must he have
experienced what is described in words like these, "That which I do I
allow not, for what I would that do I not, but what I hate that do
I"; "For the good that I would I do not, but the evil that I would not
that I do"; "I find, then, a law that, when I would do good, evil is
present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man;
but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my
mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my
members. Oh wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body
of this death?" Thus Paul had been a lost man, in hopeless bondage to
sin.
But he had to repent of his own righteousness as well as of his sin.
He had inherited the passionate longing of the Jewish race for
fellowship with God--the longing expressed a hundred times in the
poetry of his fathers in words like these: "As the hart panteth after
the waterbrooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God"; "My soul
thirsteth for God, for the living God; when shall I come and appear
before God?" He had been taught that the great prize of life is to be
well-pleasing to God, and he had learned the lesson with all the
passionate earnestness of his nature. Yet he never could attain to
that for which he longed. There always seemed to be a cloud on the
Divine face, and he was kept at a distance. Luther went through the
very same experience. His was also a passionately religious nature,
and he strove with all his might to get into the sunshine of God's
face; but his efforts were entirely baffled. Wash them as he would,
his hands were never clean.
What could an earnest nature do in such circumstances but seek to
bring still greater sacrifices? Probably this was the source of Paul's
zeal in the work of the persecutor. He was vindicating the honour of
God when he exterminated the enemies of God. The work must have gone
sorely against the grain of a nature as sensitive as his, especially
when he saw scenes, like the death of Stephen, in which the gentleness
and heroism of his victims shone out with unearthly beauty. But he
only flung himself more passionately into his task; because, the more
trying it was, the greater was the merit of doing it, and the more
certain was he of winning at last the full approval of God.
This portion of Paul's career seems to be capable of complete
vindication on the ground of conscientiousness. Indeed, in reviewing
it, he stands sometimes on this point of view himself, and says that
God had mercy on him because he did it ignorantly in unbelief. But
oftener he thinks of it with overwhelming shame and remorse. The whole
course of life which had logically led up to work so inhuman in its
details and so directly in the face of God's purposes was
demonstrated by the issue to have been utterly ungodly. His thoughts
had not been God's thoughts nor his ways God's ways. The scenes of the
persecution, when, haling men and women, he cast them into prison; the
hatred and fury which in those days had raged in his breast; the
efforts which he had put forth to oppose the cause of Christ, which it
was his firm resolution to extinguish to its last embers--these
memories would never afterwards quit his mind. They kept him humble;
for he felt that he was the least of the apostles, who was not worthy
to be called an apostle, because he had persecuted the Church of God.
He called himself the chief of sinners, and believed that God had in
his case exhaustively displayed the whole wealth of His mercy for a
pattern to all subsequent generations.
The first element of St. Paul's Christianity, then, was the penitence
of a lost man and a great sinner, who owed to Christ the forgiveness
of his sins and the redemption of his life from an evil career. And he
believed that Christ had purchased these benefits for him by the
sacrifice of His own life.
2. The second great element of St. Paul's Christianity was his
Conversion, which set a gulf between the portion of his life which
preceded and the portion which followed it. It was the chief date of
his life, and confronted him every time he looked back. Its influence
extended to every part of his experience; but perhaps its most
important effect was to set Christ up within him as a living Person,
of whose reality he was absolutely assured.
Probably Paul's opposition to Christianity was from the first very
specially opposition to Christ Himself. When he struck at the
disciples, he was really striking at the Master through them. It is
easy to conceive what an affront the pretensions of Jesus must have
been felt to be by Paul. Jesus had been a man of about his own age--a
young man; he had sprung from the lowest of the people, being a
villager and mechanic; he had never sat in the schools of learning;
the men of ability and authority had had no hesitation in condemning
Him. That such a one should be esteemed the Messiah of the Jews and
worshipped as if He were Divine, raised a storm of indignation in the
heart of Paul.
Probably nothing could have converted him except the miraculous
occurrence which God employed. Christ had to come to him in person and
in a visible shape--in the shape of the glorified humanity which He
wears somewhere in that empire of God which we call Heaven. Paul knew
the light in which he was enveloped to be a Divine light; the sound of
the voice calling him was the thunder which from of old had been
recognised by the race to which he belonged as the voice of God; he
was looking straight up to the place of God; and in that place he saw
Jesus, whom he was persecuting. Most Divine of all, however, were the
sweetness, the clemency and the respect of the words in which he was
addressed. This Jesus, against whom he was raging, came to him, not
with corresponding rage, to take vengeance and destroy him, but with
winning words of truth and with the call to a high and blessed
vocation. It was this which broke the heart of Paul and attached him
to Christ forever.
He always afterwards believed that what took place on this occasion
was what I have said--that Jesus of Nazareth descended from the right
hand of God to prove to him who He was and to claim him as His servant
and apostle--and never afterwards did he for a moment doubt that the
man whom his fellow-countrymen had crucified, and whom he himself had
persecuted, was seated on the throne of heaven, clothed with Divine
blessedness and omnipotence.
Of course others have doubted this. It may be said that what Paul saw
was only a vision, and that therefore his new life was founded on a
mistake. I believe his own account to be the correct one; but perhaps
we need not dogmatize too much about what he saw; because it was not
in reality on any theory of this vision that his faith was founded. It
was not because he saw Christ that day with the bodily eye, or
believed he did so, that he became or continued a Christian; it was
because, trusting Christ, thus revealed, he obtained that for which he
had all his life been longing: he was no longer banished or kept at a
distance, but brought nigh to God; he was reconciled, and the love of
God was shed abroad in his heart. He had all his lifetime been asking
in despair, "What must I do to be saved?" but now he was saved. The
humiliating bondage in which his spiritual nature had been held was
dissolved, and, following Christ, he advanced from victory to victory.
This is the test of all conversions; it is the best evidence of
Christianity; and it is the power of preaching. We believe in Christ
not only because there is sufficient historical evidence that He
existed eighteen hundred years ago and did such acts as proved that He
was sent from God, but because He proves Himself to be living now by
the transformation which He brings to pass in those who put their
trust in Him. We are certain that there is a Saviour, because He has
saved ourselves. I am happy to see that this evidence of our religion
is at present coming again to the front. One of your younger
scholars, Dr. Stearns of Bangor, Maine, has developed it, in a book
just published, with great breadth of theological knowledge; and a
former Yale lecturer, Dr. Dale of Birmingham, has given a telling
exposition of it at the same time.[49] This is the vital force of
preaching. We are witnesses to Christ--not merely to a Christ who
lived long ago and did wonders, but to a Christ who is alive now and
is still doing moral miracles. And the virtue of any man's testimony
lies in his being able to say that he has himself seen the Christ whom
he preaches to others, and himself experienced the power which he
recommends others to seek.
3. After his conversion the whole life of St. Paul was comprehended in
one word; and this word was Christ. There has often in modern times
been a Christianity which has contained very little of Christ. Mr.
Sage, of Resolis, one of whose quaint sayings I quoted in my last
lecture, has solemnly left it on record that, when he was a student at
Aberdeen, the Professor of Divinity, who was also Principal of the
University, in a three years' course of lectures on the principles of
the Christian religion, never once mentioned the name of Christ; and
in those times sermons were perfectly common in which there was not
the slightest allusion to the Saviour. In our day this is entirely
changed. Yet we are also surrounded with a Christianity which is
extremely vague. Almost every sentiment in which there is anything
devout or humane receives the name of Christian; and the question
which many are asking is how little it is necessary for one who claims
the Christian name to believe and profess. Even this question may,
indeed, in some cases indicate a state of mind far from unpromising,
which requires the utmost pastoral sympathy and skill; but, if we wish
to know what Christianity is in its power, we must not live in this
unhealthy region, but find a Christianity in which the distinctively
Christian element is not a minimum but a maximum. Such was St. Paul's
Christianity. Its most prominent peculiarity was that there was so
much of Christ in it. He expressed this in the characteristic saying,
"To me to live is Christ," which was only a Greek way of saying, To me
life is Christ; and, from whatever side we look at his life, we see
that this was true.
Christ had obtained, and He retained, an extensive hold on his
emotional nature. St. Paul's was a large heart, and it was all
Christ's. We are shy of speaking of our personal feeling towards the
Saviour; and we probably feel pretty often that the conventional
terms of affection for Him, which are made use of, for example, in the
hymns of the Church, transcend our actual experience. St. Paul, on the
contrary, has no hesitation in employing about Christ the language
commonly used to describe the most absorbing passion, when love is
filling life with a sweet delirium and making everything easy which
has to be done for the sake of its object. St. Paul's achievements and
self-denials were almost more than human; but his own explanation of
them was simple: "The love of Christ constraineth us." He had to
forego the prizes which to other men make life worth living; but what
did he care? "I count them but dung," he says, "that I may win
Christ." If only he retained one thing, he was willing to let all
others go: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall
tribulation or distress or persecution, or famine or nakedness, or
peril or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors
through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor
life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor
things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature shall be
able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ our
Lord." These sound like the fervours of first love; but they are the
words of a man at the height of his powers. And in old age he was
still the same: still to him Christ was the star of life, and the hope
of being with Him had annihilated the terrors of death: "I am in a
strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ,
which is far better."
But Christ was enthroned in St. Paul's intellect no less than in his
heart. It was an intellect vast in its compass and restless in its
movements; but all its movements circled round Christ, and its most
powerful efforts were put forth to reach the full height of His glory.
Everyone acquainted with his writings knows how full of Christ they
are. What is technically called his Christology is both splendid and
profound; but, indeed, his whole thinking is Christological; he saw
the whole universe in Christ.