inhabitants of even the little world of his day. Yet it is amazing to
think of the range of his labours. He preached in nearly all the great
cities of that world--in Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Athens, Rome and
many others--his predilection for cities being obviously due to the
hope that, when Christ was made known in these crowded centres, the
sound of his doctrine would echo through the surrounding regions. And
this hope was justified. The cities in the province of Asia, for
example, to which St. John sent the letters in the beginning of
Revelation, were probably all evangelized from Ephesus by converts of
St. Paul, though he himself may have visited none of them but
Ephesus. The passion burned continually in his mind to get forward and
cover new ground. He could not bear to build on another man's
foundation. The wide unfulfilled provinces of his apostolate ever
called him on.
His first journey was merely a circuit of the countries bordering to
the west and north on his own native Cilicia, and lay chiefly among
barbarians. But the second, after a still more extended tour among the
barbarians, brought him to the borders of that wonderful world of
culture and renown in which dwelt the Greeks as distinguished from the
barbarians. He was standing on the shore of Asia and looking across to
the shore of Europe. In Europe were the two great eyes of the Gentile
world--Athens and Rome--the one the centre of its wisdom and the other
of its power. How could the Apostle of the Gentiles help wishing to
preach the Gospel there? He crossed the narrow strait, and then
advanced from one Greek town to another, till he stood on the very
spot where Socrates had taught and Demosthenes thundered. In his third
journey he had to concentrate his work on Ephesus; because, like a
skilful general, he would not leave territory in the rear unconquered.
But Rome was now the aim of all his desires--Rome, the very citadel of
the world which he had to conquer. He approached it at last in the
garb of a prisoner and in a gang of prisoners. But, as we follow him,
we feel as if we were going with a victorious army to take part in a
grand triumph. Indeed, as you accompany this great spirit, this is
often the feeling you have. He had it himself. "Thanks be unto God,"
he says, "who always causeth us to triumph." Only to his mind the
occupant of the car of victory was not himself, but Christ; he was
only a satellite, showering largess in the name of the Victor among
the crowd around the chariot-wheels.
Such is the image of the Apostle which grows on the imagination as we
read his extraordinary life. Yet there was another side. To us now his
career is heroic and glorious; but to him, at the time, it was beset
with innumerable obstacles; and, wonderful as were his labours, more
wonderful still were his sufferings. He went from town to town
incessantly; but seldom did he leave any place without having been in
peril of his life. Sometimes the mob rose against him and only left
him when they had cast out of their town his apparently lifeless body,
as they would have flung away the carcase of a dog. Sometimes the
authorities apprehended him and subjected him to the rigour of the
law. But hear the catalogue of his sufferings from his own lips: "Are
they ministers of Christ? so am I: in labours more abundant, in
stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft; of the
Jews five times received I forty stripes save one, thrice was I beaten
with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and
a day I have been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of
waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in
perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the
wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in
weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in cold and nakedness;
besides those things which are without, that which cometh upon me
daily, the care of all the churches." Yet, when he wrote this, he was
only midway in his career.
These incidents are glorified now by the influence of time, but, when
they had to be endured, they were real and painful enough. To take but
a single instance, what must it have been to a man of such sensitive
honour and engaged only in doing good to be so frequently in the hands
of the police and in the company of malefactors? In his epistles he
cannot conceal the irritation caused by his "chain." Although in
victorious moods he felt himself, as we have seen, borne onwards in
triumph, in other moods he felt himself at the opposite extreme: "I
think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were
appointed to death; for we are made a spectacle unto the world and to
angels and to men; we are made as the filth of the world and are the
offscourings of all things"; the reference being to the gladiators
whose cheap lives were sacrificed to embellish the conqueror's
triumph.
Yet it was never long before he could rally from such depression at
the thought of the cause in which he suffered all; and his habitual
mood, in the face of accumulating difficulties, was expressed in these
heart-stirring words, "None of these things move me, neither count I
my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy
and the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify
the Gospel of the grace of God."
It is good to linger beside one who was so faithful to his charge, so
hard a worker and so patient a sufferer. We may learn from these
extraordinary labours and sufferings to do honest work and to endure
hardness ourselves.
Our sphere is, indeed, very different from his. His was so vast as to
be almost limitless; ours may be very circumscribed. He was
continually moving from place to place and encountering new people; we
may have to labour among the same handful of people for a lifetime. He
lived amidst daily novelty and excitement; we may have to fulfil an
existence of deep monotony. And all the disadvantages do not belong
to the large, difficult and dangerous lot. It may seem easy to be
faithful in a small sphere and to exhaust all its possibilities. But
the narrow lot has its trials as well as the wide one, and perhaps it
does not require less virtue to overcome them. A stronger sense of
duty may be needed to prepare an honest sermon week by week to a small
and comparatively ignorant congregation than to bear the brunt of
danger in an exposed post of the mission field.[55]
Nowhere can the ministry be easy if its responsibilities are realised
and its duties honestly discharged. Look forward, I would say to you,
to a labourious life. If you are thinking of the ministry otherwise,
you had better turn back. Ours is a more crowded existence than that
of any other profession.
There is the work of study and preaching. I do not know the details of
a minister's week among you; but in Scotland ministers have, as a
rule, two discourses to prepare for Sunday, besides a lesson for the
Bible Class, which may involve as much work as a sermon; and we have
at least one week-day meeting at which a lengthy address is given.
For these four discourses subjects have to be found; materials for
exposition and illustration have to be collected; the mind has first
to make each subject its own and then to shape it into a form suitable
for popular effect. A sermon may sometimes, indeed, come in a flash,
and perhaps there is something of sudden discovery in the very best
work; but even then time is required to work out the thought and
enrich it with subsidiary thinking; and there are many discourses
which are of no value without extensive investigation and the patient
working-up of the quarried materials. Then follows the writing. This
will take at least six or eight hours for a discourse, and may easily
take much more. Many ministers do not write more than one discourse a
week fully out, and probably they are wise; but many write two. Here,
then, there is obviously ample work for a long forenoon on five days
of the week. I have always had to add the afternoon of Friday and
Saturday, and often the evening as well. Then comes the hard and
exciting work of Sunday. It is a religious duty to rest on Monday, as
we do not get the bodily rest of the Sabbath.[56]
There is the work of visitation. The sick and the bed-ridden must be
visited; and it is of enormous profit to visit the whole congregation
from house to house. As Dr. Chalmers said, the directest way to a
man's heart is generally through the door of his home. Acquaintance
with the actual circumstances of the families of the congregation
gives wonderful reality and point to the prelections of Sunday. Our
sermons must rise out of the congregation if they are ever to reach
down to it again. Here, it is evident, there is abundant work for the
afternoons which study leaves free. Many ministers have to add one or
two evenings, the evening being the best time to find their people at
home.
There is a third mass of work of an exceedingly miscellaneous
character which absorbs much time and strength. It includes such
duties as performing the ceremonies at baptisms, marriages and
funerals; organizing the work of the congregation; attending church
courts and sitting on committees; serving on school boards and the
boards of benevolent societies; preaching from home and addressing the
meetings of neighbour ministers; writing official letters; raising
money; receiving visitors; writing for the press. It would be easy for
ministers in positions of any prominence to spend their whole time in
duties of this description, none of which might appear useless; so
great is the multitude of the claims which pour in from every side.
I have said nothing of the time required for keeping abreast of the
literature of the day or for cultivating an intellectual specialty. It
is extraordinary what some of the busiest men achieve in this respect;
but it is only managed by an economy and even penury of time for which
a kind of genius is requisite. Of course there are seasons of the year
when the pressure of public engagements is not so great; and ministers
are allowed longer holidays than other professional men. A couple of
hours a day given from a holiday to great reading may shoot threads of
fresh colour through the whole web of a season's work. Nor have I said
anything of the time necessary for thinking over the devotional
portion of the service of the sanctuary, though in our churches, where
free prayer prevails, this deserves as careful attention as the
sermon.
The glimpse which I have given you into the details of a minister's
week will help you to realise that the life which lies before you is a
labourious one. Of course the labour may be shirked. Ministers have
their time in their own hands; they have no office hours; and, I
suppose, a minister's life may be more ignobly idle than any other
professional man's. That is, if he has no conscience.
How far a man who is conscientious and works hard may be justified in
devoting himself to one branch of ministerial work for which he has
special aptitudes or predilections, it is difficult to judge. Perhaps
the Protestant Church has failed in making use of special gifts. Some
eminent preachers, for example, neglect pastoral visitation;[57] and
there are, I suppose, many ministers who keep out of more general
public work, because they have no taste for it. There may be some gain
in this; but there is also loss. When a preacher does not visit, he is
apt to become an orator, who dazzles but does not feed the flock. When
a minister keeps himself apart from public interests, the Church to
which he belongs is likely to be weak at that point.
The most fatal neglect is that of study; and perhaps it is the
commonest. The part of our work which needs most moral resolution is
undoubtedly the sermon--to get it begun, studied, written and
finished. It requires the discipline of years in even the most
conscientious to win the mastery of themselves in this particular; and
it is probably at this point that three-fourths of all ministerial
failures take place. It is not the reading of the material bearing on
the subject which is difficult; indeed, this may be luxuriously
prolonged, till it is too late to think and write the sermon out. The
hard and sour toil lies in facing the sweat of thought and the
irksomeness of writing; although, when the difficulty is overcome, the
happiness and triumph of our calling lie here also.
Of course this difficulty is greatest in the small sphere. Here the
temptation is, to be overcome by the monotony of the situation, to
allow the powers to stagnate, to feel that anything will do, and put
the people off with that which has cost no exertion. "I know," says
one who wields a trenchant pen,[58] "how plausible the excuses are,
and I know what relaxation of study results in--laziness in the
morning, increasing excesses in the daily papers, increased interest
in gardening, several more pipes a day, and so forth. Breakfast comes
finally to its long-deferred end about ten; then there is a
consultation with the gardener, which is, of course, business, and
makes the idler feel that really his active habits are returning; then
two letters have to be answered; then, just as he means to go to his
study, he sees Mr. Fritterday passing, and before he has finished his
colloquy over the hedge with him, it is past midday. When he does get
to his study, _Macmillan_ or _Blackwood_ is lying on his table, and he
feels he cannot settle till he knows what is the fate of the heroine
of the current story, or his window overlooks the busy hayfield of his
neighbour, and he becomes ten times more interested in that work than
in his own; and so his whole forenoon is gone, and he is summoned to
dinner before he has earned his salt by one decent hand's turn."
This kind of temptation, however, is not confined to the man in the
small and easy situation: it is the common temptation of all
ministers. Only in the city it comes in another form. The man who has
a large congregation and a little popularity is beset with calls from
every quarter to engage in every kind of duty outside his own sphere.
His doorbell never ceases ringing. Every applicant supposes his own
case the most important. There is a whirl of excitement, and there is
an exhilaration in being able in many ways to serve the public. But,
if the man gives up his habits of study, he is lost. His appearances
become commonplace; the public tire of him, and throw him aside as
ruthlessly as they have senselessly idolized him. Robert Hall used to
say that, when the devil saw that a minister was likely to be useful
in the church, his way of disposing of him was to get on his back and
ride him to death with engagements.
* * * * *
To follow the course of St. Paul's labours and sufferings on the grand
scale produces an overwhelming impression of earnestness and devotion;
yet it is even more by entering into the minute details of his
activity that we find the apostle. One who has to deal with vast
masses is apt to overlook details; and it is so even in the work of
Christ. An evangelist, for example, moving from place to place and
surrounded with multitudes, may know very little of individuals. The
minister of a large congregation is exposed to the same temptation.
Indeed, we are all too desirous of crowds and too little occupied with
the units of which they are composed. But this is the greatest of all
mistakes. St. Paul, amidst the constant change of scene and the
pressure of large bodies of people in which he lived, never overlooked
individuals. In his speech to the elders of Ephesus he could challenge
them to bear witness that he had taught not only publicly but from
house to house, and had warned everyone night and day with tears.
While, like his Master, he was moved by the sight of a multitude and
welcomed the opportunity of making known the glad tidings to many, he
was quite as ready to preach to the small company of women of whom
Lydia was one at the riverside or to the soldier to whom he was
chained in the Roman prison.
St. Paul was never a mere evangelist. The evangelist's work is to deal
with the initial stage of the Christian life: he has to bring men to
decision; and, when this is done, he passes on, leaving to other
agencies whatever more may be required. An evangelist sometimes knows
very little of what becomes of his converts after he has quitted the
place. But St. Paul was as eager about this as about the first
impressions. However small the company of the converted might be, he
formed them into a Christian Church, and ordained elders in every
city. He often left an assistant behind to carry on and consolidate
the work which he had begun. When at a distance, he was always eager
for news about his churches. His epistles are full of such anxieties;
and, indeed, his epistles themselves are the best monument of his
pastoral care; for they were written to ask after the welfare of those
whom he had left behind, or to give counsel on points about which they
had consulted him. They brim over with the expressions of a tender and
heartfelt love. He is able to assure those to whom he is writing that
he is praying for them, and that not only in the mass but one by one.
He kept their faces and names alive in his memory by thus recalling
them at the throne of grace; and his life must have been one long
prayer about his work.
Sometimes he lets the prayer which he has been offering slip through
his pen; and then we see how high was the ideal of Christian
attainment which he cherished on behalf of his converts. He was not
content that they had turned from their old sins and taken the first
steps in the Divine life. He longed to see them becoming creditable
specimens of Christianity and ornaments to the Church--complete men,
thoroughly furnished unto all good works. It was life itself to him to
hear of their progress: "Now we live if ye stand fast in the Lord."
And the crown to which he looked forward as the reward of all his
toils and sufferings was to be permitted at last to present the soul
of everyone of them as a chaste virgin to Christ.
Gentlemen, I believe that almost any preacher, on reviewing a ministry
of any considerable duration, would confess that his great mistake had
been the neglect of individuals. If I may be permitted a personal
reference: when, not long ago, I had the opportunity, as I was passing
from one charge to another, of reviewing a ministry of twelve years,
the chief impression made on me, as I looked back, was that this was
the point at which I had failed; and I said to myself that henceforth
I would write Individuals on my heart as the watchword of my ministry.
We make impressions in the church; but we do not follow them up, to
see that the decision is arrived at and the work of God accomplished;
and so they are dissipated by the influences of the world; and those
who have experienced them are perhaps made worse instead of better. It
is a very significant thing that is said of the pastor in our Lord's
parable--that he sought the lost sheep "until he found it." We seek:
we even seek labouriously and painfully: but we frequently leave off
just before finding.
A minister told me that, on the Saturday evening before his first
Sunday in his first charge, the experienced minister who was to
introduce him to his people next day was strolling with him in the
vicinity of the village and talking about his duties, when they
chanced to pass a plantation of trees. Pointing to them, the aged
minister asked, "If you had to cut these trees down, how would you go
about it? would you go round the whole plantation, giving each tree a
single blow, and then go round them all again, giving each a second
blow"? "Well, no," he answered, "I think I should attack one tree and
cut at it till it came down; and then go on and do the same to a
second and a third, and so forth." "Well," said his experienced
friend, "that is the way you must do here. After you have been settled
a short time, you will discover which families and individuals are
most impressed by your first efforts, and you must devote yourself to
these susceptible souls, till you have won them thoroughly; and then
in their enthusiasm for yourself and their willingness to work for the
congregation you will have the best foundation for a successful
ministry."
In a former lecture I spoke of the power of discerning in men and
women of every class and condition the humanity which is common to all
and speaking straight to that, without reference to the superficial
differences which distinguish class from class and one individual from
another. But ministerial sympathy has to embrace what is peculiar to
classes and individuals as well as what is common to all. Though St.
Paul, like his Master, had a powerful grasp of what is universal in
humanity, yet to the Jew he made himself a Jew, that he might gain the
Jew, and to them that were without law as without law, that he might
gain them who were without law; he was made all things to all men,
that he might gain the more.
His persuasion obviously was, that God was trying, by His revelation
among those who possessed the Written Word, and by His providence
among those who did not possess it, to lead His children by divers
ways to Himself; and his own duty was to join himself to each company
at the stage which it had reached and offer to become its conductor.
The Jew was more advanced, and he met him where he was; the Gentile
was further behind, and he had to go back and approach him also where
he stood, that he might win his confidence and be allowed to lead him
on.
This is the persuasion which gives a minister faith in his own work.
The souls of men are God's. His providence is a discipline intended to
lead them to Himself; there are none with whom His Spirit does not
strive. And it is only as our work co-operates with His that it is of
any effect. Where God has been working, opening and softening the
heart, very simple efforts, put forth at the right moment, may go a
long way, and the work of God be quickly done.
What situation could be more pathetic to a sensitive and sympathetic
mind than that of a minister when he stands up in the pulpit and looks
down on the congregation? What a variety of conditions are before him!
In one pew there is a man who during the week has been fighting a
losing battle with his business and sees himself on the verge of
bankruptcy; in the next may be a merchant into whose lap fortune has
been pouring her gifts in handfuls. Here is a mother who is thinking
of her son who has just left his home and is sailing on the sea; and
there a girl whose heart is rejoicing in the happy dreams of youth. On
the right may be a young man who is trembling on the brink of the
great temptation of his life, and on the left another who is reeking
from some orgy of secret sin. There is endless variety; yet none are
uninteresting; and probably there is no one but, if you could meet him
exactly where he stands, would respond to the influence which you
bring. It arrests men when you are able to show such a knowledge of
the human heart that they feel themselves discovered; and it disposes
a man to answer to your call if he sees that you are familiar with the
circumstances in which he will have to lead the life to which you are
inviting him, and that you appreciate the difficulties of the
situation. Therefore the more a minister knows of the variety of
actual life the better; and, if he is to do really effective work, he
must know how to come down from the pulpit and put himself alongside
of individuals.[59]
Here I might again recommend the work of visitation and the practice
of being accessible at home to the visits of those who come with
confidences to communicate; but let me rather close this lecture with
a word or two on some of the more favourable opportunities which
ministerial life affords for direct dealing with individuals.[60]
One of the best opportunities of this kind is when parents come
seeking baptism for their children. When you are speaking in their
children's interest, men will welcome an amount of faithfulness which
they would not endure at other times. You can show how much their
children's welfare in time and eternity may depend on their own
religious condition; you can urge the duty of family worship; and you
must have very little skill if you cannot get very close to their
hearts. Especially when a man comes about the baptism of his first
child, he is perhaps in the most favourable state for an earnest talk
in which you can ever find him. His soul is opened with tenderness
and overawed with the mystery of life; he is longing with his whole
heart to do his best for his child; and, if you show him that the best
he can do for it is to become connected with the great source of holy
influence himself, there is no other occasion on which a good
impression is more likely to be made.