come to join the Church. I well remember that, when I was a student,
there was no part of a minister's duty to which I looked forward with
so much fear and trembling as this; for I had the conviction, which I
still have, that it is our duty at this crisis to bring the question
of personal salvation in the most direct and solemn way before every
intending communicant, and that it is ministerial treason to let the
opportunity slip. Some of you may be looking forward to this with the
same feelings; and, therefore, I am happy to tell you that in practice
it is not nearly so difficult as it seems at a distance. The
applicants themselves expect you to be faithful; if you are, they will
honour you for it, and, if not, they will be disappointed. If they get
the opportunity, they are far franker than you would expect. No doubt
it is delicate work, and one has to guard against harshness and
anything inquisitorial; but it yields the most blessed results. This
is the harvest-time of the minister's year, when he sees that his
labour is not in vain. Even one such close talk, brought about in this
way or otherwise, casts a glow of reality into one's work which does
not pass away for weeks; and, if a minister is so highly honoured as
to receive many of these confidences, he acquires a skill in laying
his finger on the very pulse of his hearers' deepest life which
nothing else can give.
FOOTNOTES:
[54] An indication of the intensity with which St. Paul's mind worked
upon the subject of the ministry is to be found in the number and
variety of his metaphors for it. The following are those which I have
noted, but there may be more--nurse (1 Thess. ii. 7), father (1 Cor. iv.
15), gardener (1 Cor. iii. 6), labourer (1 Cor. iii. 9), builder (1 Cor.
iii. 10), servant (1 Cor. iv. 1), bondman (2 Tim. ii. 24), steward (1
Cor. iv. 1), ambassador (Eph. vi. 20), soldier (1 Tim. vi. 12), herald
(1 Tim. ii. 7), shepherd (Acts xx. 28), workman (2 Tim. ii. 15), athlete
(1 Tim. iv. 7), vessel (2 Tim. ii. 21).
[55] "Go where you can do most _for_ men, not where you can get most
_from_ men.
"Be more concerned about your ability than about your opportunity, and
about your walk with God than either.
"Your sphere is where you are most needed.
"There is no place without its difficulties: by removing you may change
them, it may be you will increase them; but you cannot escape
them."--PREDIGER.
[56] "A sermon which costs little is worth as much as it has cost. Yet
measure not the value of the sermon by the length and hardness of your
labour."--DUPANLOUP.
[57] The first Sunday I was in America, I worshipped in the churches of
Rev. Dr. W.M. Taylor and Rev. Dr. John Hall, who are, I suppose, the two
most eminent ministers of New York; and I was astonished to hear both of
them intimate that they would visit in certain streets during the week.
There are no ministers anywhere more immersed than these in every kind
of public duty; yet they find time for regular pastoral visitation. On
coming home, I mentioned this fact to an equally eminent minister in my
own country. "Well," said he, "when I came to the city, the elders of my
congregation advised me not to visit, and I followed their advice; but
it was the worst advice I ever got."
[58] Dr. Marcus Dods.
[59] "Get others to talk: what a man says to you has more influence upon
him than all you can say to him.
"It is not the time of sickness so much as the time of convalescence
that decides the future life. Remember this, and seize opportunities."
--PREDIGER.
[60] "Much of the Gospels is taken up with conversations between Christ
and individuals. Teaching so startling and difficult as His, with such
an element in it of attraction and hope, naturally drew around Him many
who sought to know further what this Gospel meant. He, on His part, was
as eager to meet inquirers as they were to seek Him; and we find that He
bestowed as much care and pains in expounding the nature of His kingdom
to individuals as He did when He was speaking to great multitudes. The
audience, if small, was fit. Not only so, but we find that He put
Himself in the way of individuals."--NICOLL, _The Incarnate Saviour_.
LECTURE IX.
THE PREACHER AS A THINKER.
Gentlemen, in the foregoing lectures I have adverted very little to
the studies, in preparation for the work of the ministry, with which
you are at present occupied. Indeed, I have rather ostentatiously kept
to a standpoint at some distance from the academic one, for reasons
which I explained in the opening lecture. But the clue which I have
endeavoured faithfully to follow has brought us at last to this point
also; and I welcome the opportunity of saying something about the more
intellectual aspects of our work. The subject to-day is the Preacher
as a Thinker.
* * * * *
In my last lecture I spoke of the vast sphere of operations assigned
to St. Paul and of the almost superhuman exertions which he made to
fill it. But what did he exert himself to fill it with? It was not
merely to overtake the ground and be himself present in so many
countries and cities that he was so zealous. That which drove him on
was the glorious message of which he was the bearer, with the sound
of which he desired to fill the world. He often combines these two
ideas in his writings--that the Gentile world had been committed to
him as a trust, to care for the souls which it contained, and that the
Gospel had been committed to him as a trust, to be communicated to the
Gentiles. These two things were included in his apostolate--on the one
hand, the care of the heathen world, and, on the other, the
publication of the Gospel.
Of course he had not, like the original apostles, heard the Gospel
from the lips of Christ; but he had received it directly from Christ
in some other way; and you know how vigorously he claimed that he had
not received it from man and was not indebted to the other apostles
for it. He frequently calls it his own gospel, and he maintains it to
be as authentic and authoritative as that preached by any of the other
apostles. How it was revealed to him we cannot tell. This is the same
mystery as we encountered in studying the prophets of the Old
Testament. Both prophets and apostles speak with a knowledge of the
mind and will of God which has a certainty and authority peculiar to
their writings. We ought to speak, if we speak at all, with certainty
and authority too; but there is a difference between ours and theirs.
I know how difficult it is to define the difference; we cover it up
with the vague word Inspiration; but I do not see any use in hiding
from ourselves that it exists.
Admitting, however, that there is this mystery, yet we can see, in
some respects, how the truth, when it came, dealt with St. Paul, and
how his mind was exercised about it; and in these respects he is not
beyond our imitation.
What I wish to emphasize in this lecture is, that Christianity did
specially lay hold of him in the region of the intellect. It is meant
to lay hold of all parts of the inner man--the feelings, the
conscience, the will, the intellect; and it may lay hold of certain
people more fully in one part of their being and of others in another
according to their constitutional peculiarities. Some suppose--and
perhaps they are not far wrong--that the first preaching of the Gospel
consisted of little more than the simple story of the life and death
of Jesus; that those who heard it sympathetically began forthwith to
live new lives in imitation of Christ; and that this was the most of
their Christianity. In a fine and peculiar nature like that of St.
John, again, the Gospel caught hold chiefly in the region of the
emotions; and his Christianity was a mystical union and fellowship
between the Saviour and the soul. St. Paul was not by any means
deficient in the other elements of humanity; but he was conspicuously
strong in intellect. That is to say, he was one of those natures to
which it is a necessity to know the why and the wherefore of
everything--of the universe in which they live, of the experiences
through which they pass, of the ends which they are called upon to
pursue. This natural tendency was strengthened by the training of an
educated man. And therefore the Gospel came to him as a message of
truth, which cleared up the mysteries of existence and presented the
universe to the mind as a realm of order.
St. Paul often expresses the intense intellectual satisfaction which
Christianity brought him, and the joy he experienced in applying it to
the solution of the problems of life. The light which Christianity
cast on the universe was to him, he says, like the morning of
creation, when God said, Let there be light, and there was light.
Before, all was darkness and chaos, but then all became sunshine and
order. He often speaks with wondering gratitude of the fact that the
mystery which had been hidden from ages and from generations had been
revealed to him: Eye had not seen, nor ear heard, neither had entered
into the heart of man, the things which God had prepared for them that
love Him, but God had revealed them unto him by His Spirit. And by
this mystery he meant the tangle of God's providence in history,
which the coming of Christ disentangled and smoothed out into a web
whose pattern the mind could discern.
Having himself received Christianity as an intellectual system, he
very specially addressed himself to the intellect of others. The door
of the kingdom of heaven, it has been beautifully said, can only be
opened from the inside; but to that observation this other may be
added, that in a sense there are many doors, but each man can only
open to others the one by which he has entered himself. Christianity
had come to St. Paul as the truth about God and the world and himself.
There was plenty of emotion besides; but the emotion for him came
after the clear intellectual conviction and sprang out of it. And he
expected that others would receive Christianity in the same way.
Therefore he never spared the minds of those he addressed; he expected
them to think; and he would have said that, if they would not open and
exert their minds, they could not receive Christianity.
I hardly know anything more puzzling than the audacity with which he
cast himself on the minds of his hearers and trusted them to
understand him, when he was thinking his strongest and his deepest.
Imagine an epistle of his arriving in Rome or Ephesus, and read out
in the audience of the church for the first time. Who were the
hearers? The majority of them were slaves; many had till a short time
before been unconcerned about religion; in all probability not a tithe
of them could read or write. Yet what did Paul give them? Not milk for
babes; not a compost of stories and practical remarks; but the Epistle
to the Romans, with its strict logic and grand ideas, or the Epistle
to the Ephesians, with its involved sentences and profound mysticism.
He must have believed that they would understand what he wrote, though
scholarship has considered it necessary to pile up a mountain of
commentaries on these epistles. Christianity, as it went through the
cities of the world in St. Paul's person, must have gone as a great
intellectual awakening, which taught men to use their minds in
investigating the profoundest problems of life.
How deeply he was interested in the intellectual reception of the
Gospel is shown by the earnestness with which he prays that his
converts may excel in mental grasp of the truth. "I pray," he says,
"that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all
judgment." And again he says, "Making mention of you in my prayers,
that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give
unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him,
the eyes of your understanding being enlightened," etc.
But nothing proves so clearly the value which he set on this element
of Christianity as his earnestness that his version of the Gospel
should be kept pure and entire. He called upon younger ministers, like
Timothy and Titus, to guard it as a precious treasure and to transmit
it to faithful men who would be able to teach others also. It filled
him with the most poignant anxiety and pain when the minds of his
converts were assailed with doctrines subversive of the truth which he
had taught. He had to encounter assaults of this kind coming from the
side of orthodoxy as well as of heterodoxy, and no small portion of
his energy had to be expended in refuting them. You remember, for
example, with what a heat of zeal and affection he cast himself on the
Galatians, when they had lent an ear to false teachers: "O foolish
Galatians, who hath bewitched you?" "If any man preach any other
gospel unto you than that which ye have received, let him be
accursed."
* * * * *
Gentlemen, you are going to be teachers of Christianity, and this
implies that you should yourselves have mastered it in thought. A
certain number of people will be more or less dependent on you for
the view they have of Christianity; and this really means the view
they have of all the most important and solemn objects of existence;
for to them all things will be comprehended in Christianity; and on
you will largely depend whether this view is true or false, narrow or
noble.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance to men and women of
their fundamental convictions about this universe in which they live.
There is current, indeed, at present a way of speaking about the
intellect, as if, while all the other faculties have to do with
religion, it were only an intruder; and there is a way of speaking
about definite religious truth which really implies, if any strict
meaning is to be attached to it, that in religion, when the truth is
not found, the opposite may answer quite as well; and yet, strange to
say, this language is usually to be heard from the lips of those who
make special claims to intellectuality and affect to be the special
champions of truth. But the intellect is a noble faculty and has an
important office in religion. It is, properly speaking, antecedent to
both feeling and will; and what is put into it determines both what
feeling and choice will be. People are often, indeed, swept into the
Church on some current of feeling; and the pressure on every side of
the Christian society, along with the examples of superior
Christians, does much to develop the religious nature; but probably in
the great crises of temptation, when a flood of passion or some great
worldly opportunity is about to sweep a man away from his connection
with Christ, that which keeps hold of him is the force of
conviction--if the roots of his mind have gone deep down and clasped
themselves about the great verities of the faith. Our Lord Himself
called the truth the foundation on which the whole structure of life
is built. All that a man is and does depends, in the last resort, on
what he knows and believes. It will be a calamity for your hearers, if
from your preaching they are not able by degrees to put together in
their minds a conception of Christianity both true and elevating,
which will supply them with the fundamental principles of their life.
Besides this sacred obligation to our people, there is the obligation
to the truth itself. This was felt by St. Paul profoundly. A
revelation of Christianity had been committed to him, and he had to
present it in all its splendour and apply it to all the details of
life. So the Word of God is committed to us, and we are responsible
for delivering its whole message. If we take up a single text of the
Bible, our merit as preachers lies in bringing out attractively and
comprehensively the truth which it contains. It would be considered
still more meritorious to present the whole message contained in a
book of the Bible; and it would be quite in accordance with the
theological fashion of the time if a preacher were able to show that
he was master of some single section of Scripture, say, the Prophets
of the Old Testament or the writings of St. John. I do not know why we
should hesitate about the next step, which, if we have gone so far, we
are logically bound to take--the mastery of the message of the Bible
as a whole. This is what we are responsible for. The Bible is the
message of the mind and will of the loving and redeeming God; and this
we are bound to deliver in such a way that neither its truth nor its
glory will suffer in our hands.
How this is to be done, of course it requires wisdom to decide, and
there will doubtless be different ways for different men and for
different times. In a former generation a president of this
college[61] preached in the College Chapel straight through the
doctrines of Christianity, taking them up one by one in systematic
order; and his book was long a model to preachers both in this country
and Great Britain. He was preaching to an academic audience, and there
are probably few congregations for which such a course would be
suitable now; although I know at least one able young minister in a
country village who has been pursuing this method from the
commencement of his ministry. Once a month he gives a sermon of the
course; perhaps his people do not know that he is doing so; but he is
giving his own mind the discipline of investigating the doctrines of
Christianity in their order; and I am certain both that he himself is
growing a strong man in the process and that his people, though
unconsciously, are getting the benefit of it. In the Lutheran and
Episcopal Churches the observance of the Christian festivals gives
occasion for regularly bringing the circle of the grand Christian
facts before the minds of the people. We have not this guidance; but a
faithful minister is bound to make sure that he is preaching with
sufficient frequency on the leading Christian facts and doctrines, and
that he is not omitting any essential element of Christianity.[62]
Not unfrequently ministers are exhorted to cultivate extreme
simplicity in their preaching. Everything ought, we are told, to be
brought down to the comprehension of the most ignorant hearer, and
even of children. Far be it from me to depreciate the place of the
simplest in the congregation; it is one of the best features of the
Church of the present day that it cares for the lambs. I dealt with
this subject, not unsympathetically I hope, in a former lecture. But
do not ask us to be always speaking to children or to beginners. Is
the Bible always simple? Is Job simple, or Isaiah? Is the Epistle to
the Romans simple, or Galatians? This cry for simplicity is
three-fourths intellectual laziness; and that Church is doomed in
which there is not supplied meat for men as well as milk for babes. We
owe the Gospel not only to the barbarian but also to the Greek, not
only to the unwise but also to the wise.[63]
I do not believe, however, that it is only in cultured congregations
that this element of preaching is required. There is no greater
mistake than to suppose that you will drive the common man away from
the Church by strong intellectual preaching. You will do so no doubt
if you preach over his head,[64] and use a language which he does not
understand. You must find him where he is, and either speak to him in
his own language or teach him yours by slow degrees. But, if you
accommodate yourself to him so far, you will find him alert and
willing to accompany you; you will find that he has not only sturdy
limbs for climbing, but even wings for soaring to the heights of
truth.
A greater difficulty lies in the preacher himself. At the beginning of
his ministry he may be encumbered with doubts and far from clear in
his faith. This is a real obstacle, and the first years of ministerial
life may be a time of great perplexity and pain. I suspect our
congregations have often a good deal to suffer while we are
endeavouring to preach ourselves clear. It is vicarious suffering; for
they do not know what is perplexing us. They have to stand by and look
on while their minister is fighting his doubts. But, if he is a true
man, it is worth their while to wait. If these are the pangs of
intellectual birth, and the truth is merely divesting itself of a
traditional form in order to invest itself in a form which is his own,
he will preach with far greater power when the process is complete,
and he is able to speak with the strength of personal conviction.
But, gentlemen, it is important for you to see that your opening
ministry is not enveloped in mist simply because you have never made a
real study of Christianity. This, I am afraid, is the commonest source
of a vague theology. In a former lecture I have recommended a wide
acquaintance with the masterpieces of literature; but some able men at
college substitute this for the studies of their profession; and this
is a fatal mistake. Literature ought to be a supplement to these, not
a substitute for them. I have watched the subsequent career of more
than one student who had pursued this course; and I must say it is not
encouraging. Their supply of ideas soon runs out; their tone becomes
secular; and the people turn away from them dissatisfied.
A student ought, while at college, to make himself master of at least
one or two of the great books of the Christian centuries in which
Christianity is exhibited as a whole by a master mind. If I may be
allowed to mention my own experience, it happened to me, more by
chance, perhaps, than wise choice, to master, when I was a student,
three such books. One was Owen's work on _The Holy Spirit_, another
Weiss' _New Testament Theology_, and the third Conybeare and Howson's
_Life and Epistles of St. Paul_. Each of these may be said, in its own
way, to exhibit Christianity entire, and I learned them almost by
heart, as one does a text-book. I was not then thinking much of
subsequent benefit; but I can say, that each of them has ever since
been a quarry out of which I have dug, and probably I have hardly ever
preached a sermon which has not exhibited traces of their influence.
There is another valuable result which will follow from the early
mastery of books of this kind. You will be laying the foundation of
the habit of what may be called Great Reading, by which I mean the
systematic study of great theological works in addition to the special
reading for the work of each Sunday. Week by week a conscientious
minister has to do an immense amount of miscellaneous reading in
commentaries, dictionaries, etc., in connection with the discourses in
hand; but, in addition to this, he should be enriching the subsoil of
his mind by larger efforts in wider fields. It is far from easy to
carry this on in a busy pastorate; and it is almost impossible unless
the foundation has been laid at college.[65]
One more hint I should like to give: it is a reminiscence from a
casual lecture which I listened to when a student and profited by.
Besides attending to theological studies in general, one ought to have
a specialty. The minister, and even the student before he leaves
college, should be spoken of as the man who knows this or that.
Perhaps the best specialty to choose is some subject which is just
coming into notice, such as, at present, Comparative Religion, or
Christian Ethics, or, best of all, Biblical Theology. Such a
specialty, early taken up, is like a well dug on one's property, which
year by year becomes deeper. All the little streams and rivulets of
reading and experience find their way into it; and almost unawares the
happy possessor comes to have within himself a fountain which makes it
impossible that his mind should ever run dry.
* * * * *
Of course I cannot attempt to give here even the slightest sketch of
the doctrinal system of St. Paul; but there are two characteristics of
it which I should like to mention in closing, as they are essential to
the right management of the element of preaching with which I have
occupied you to-day.