Christianity began in a great experience, in which he discovered the
secret of life and found peace with God. He set his mind to reflect
upon this, so as to comprehend how it came about and what it involved;
and the theology of the first part of his apostolate was nothing but
the result of these broodings under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
These in their turn, however, brought him still nearer to God and
closer to Christ; and so he obtained new and deeper experiences, of
which the doctrines of his more advanced life are again the
exposition. Thus his thinking was both experimental and progressive.
If his Epistles be arranged in chronological order, it will easily be
seen that there is a splendid growth in his theology from first to
last. He never, indeed, gave up the doctrines of his earlier life;
there is no inconsistency between one part of his writings and
another; but neither his experience nor his thinking ever stood still;
he made his first doctrines the foundations on which he reared a
structure which was rising higher and higher to the very close of his
life.
St. Paul had the heartiest scorn for intellectualism in religion
divorced from experience; and it cannot be denied that it is this
divorce which has brought contempt on the intellectual element in
preaching. When doctrine is preached as mere dogma, imposed as a form
on the mind of the preacher from without, no wonder it is dry and
barren. It is when the preacher's own experience is growing, and he is
coming up with the doctrines of Christianity one by one as the natural
expression for what he knows in his deepest consciousness to be true,
that he utters the truth with power. Never, perhaps, is a sermon so
living as when the preacher has found out the truth during the week as
a novelty to himself, and comes forth on Sunday to deliver it with the
joy of discovery.
The other feature to which I wish to draw attention is the perfect
balance in St. Paul of the doctrinal and the ethical. If reproach has
been cast on the intellectual element in preaching by its want of
connection with experience, this has been done no less by its want of
connection with conduct. But St. Paul is not open to this reproach.
This is made clear by the very external form of his writings. An
Epistle of St. Paul is divided into two parts, the first containing
doctrines and the second practical rules for the conduct of life; and
not unfrequently the two parts are of about equal length.
But the connection is far closer than this. In St. Paul's mind all the
great doctrines of the Gospel were living fountains of motives for
well-doing; and even the smallest and commonest duties of every-day
life were magnified and made sacred by being connected with the facts
of salvation. Take a single instance. There is no plainer duty of
every-day life than telling the truth. Well, how does St. Paul treat
it? "Lie not one to another," he says, "seeing ye have put off the old
man with his deeds." Thus truthfulness flows out of regeneration.
Treating of the same subject again, he says, "Lie not one to another,
for ye are members one of another," deriving the duty from the union
of believers to one another through their common union with
Christ.[66] Thus does St. Paul everywhere show great principles in
small duties and stamp the commonest actions of life with the image
and the superscription of Christ.
This balance between the doctrinal and the moral is difficult to
maintain. Seldom has the mind of the Church been able to preserve it
for any length of time. It has oscillated from one kind of
one-sidedness to another, sometimes exalting doctrines and neglecting
duties and at other times preaching up morality and disparaging
doctrine. To which side the balance may be dipping at the present time
among you I do not know; but among us, I should say, it was from
doctrines towards duties.
Perhaps in the last generation we had too much preaching of doctrine,
or rather I should say, too little preaching of duty. Younger
preachers are beginning to dwell much on a nobler conception of the
Christian life, and there is a strong demand for practical preaching.
Undoubtedly there is room for a healthy development in this direction.
Yet this is a transition about which our country has good cause to be
jealous; because it passed through a terrible experience of the
effects of preaching morality without doctrine. I question if in the
whole history of the pulpit there is a document more worthy of the
attention of preachers than the address which Dr. Chalmers sent to the
people of his first charge at Kilmeny, when he was leaving it for
Glasgow. It is well known that for seven years after his settlement in
this rural parish he was ignorant of the Gospel and preached only the
platitudes of the Moderate creed; but, the grace of God having
visited his heart, he lived for other five years among his people as a
true ambassador of Christ, beseeching them in Christ's name to be
reconciled to God. This is his summing up of the results of the two
periods:--
"And here I cannot but record the effect of an actual though
undesigned experiment, which I prosecuted for upwards of twelve years
among you. For the greater part of that time I could expatiate on the
meanness of dishonesty, on the villany of falsehood, on the despicable
arts of calumny; in a word, upon all those deformities of character
which awaken the natural indignation of the human heart against the
pests and the disturbers of human society. Now, could I, upon the
strength of these warm expostulations, have got the thief to give up
his stealing, and the evil speaker his censoriousness, and the liar
his deviations from truth, I should have felt all the repose of one
who had gotten his ultimate object. It never occurred to me that all
this might have been done, and yet the soul of every hearer have
remained in full alienation from God; and that, even could I have
established in the bosom of one who stole such a principle of
abhorrence at the meanness of dishonesty that he was prevailed upon to
steal no more, he might still have retained a heart as completely
unturned to God and as totally unpossessed by a principle of love to
Him as before. In a word, though I might have made him a more upright
and honourable man, I might have left him as destitute of the essence
of religious principle as ever. But the interesting fact is, that
during the whole of that period in which I made no attempt against the
natural enmity of the mind to God; while I was inattentive to the way
in which this enmity is dissolved, even by the free offer on the one
hand, and the believing acceptance on the other, of the Gospel
salvation; while Christ, through whose blood the sinner, who by nature
stands afar off, is brought near to the heavenly Lawgiver, whom he has
offended, was scarcely ever spoken of, or spoken of in such a way as
stripped Him of all the importance of His character and His offices;
even at this time I certainly did press the reformations of honour and
truth and integrity among my people; but I never once heard of any
such reformations having been effected amongst them. If there was
anything at all brought about in this way, it was more than ever I got
any account of. I am not sensible that all the vehemence with which I
urged the virtues and the proprieties of social life had the weight of
a feather on the moral habits of my parishioners. And it was not till
I got impressed by the utter alienation of the heart in all its
desires and affections from God; it was not till reconciliation to Him
became the distinct and the prominent object of my ministerial
exertions; it was not till I took the Scriptural way of laying the
method of reconciliation before them; it was not till the free offer
of forgiveness through the blood of Christ was urged upon their
acceptance, and the Holy Spirit, given through the channel of Christ's
mediatorship to all who ask Him, was set before them as the unceasing
object of their dependence and their prayers; in one word, it was not
till the contemplations of my people were turned to these great and
essential elements in the business of a soul providing for its
interest with God and the concerns of its eternity, that I ever heard
of any of those subordinate reformations which I aforetime made the
earnest and the zealous, but, I am afraid, at the same time the
ultimate object of my earlier ministrations. Ye servants, whose
scrupulous fidelity has now attracted the notice, and drawn forth in
my hearing a delightful testimony from your masters, what mischief you
would have done, had your zeal for doctrines and sacraments been
accompanied by the sloth and the remissness, and what, in the
prevailing tone of moral relaxation, is counted the allowable
purloining of your earlier days. But a sense of your Heavenly Master's
eye has brought another influence to bear upon you; and, while you
are thus striving to adorn the doctrine of God your Saviour in all
things, you may, poor as you are, reclaim the great ones of the land
to the acknowledgment of the faith. You have at least taught me that
to preach Christ is the only effective way of preaching morality in
all its branches; and out of your humble cottages have I gathered a
lesson, which I pray God I may be enabled to carry with all its
simplicity into a wider theatre, and to bring with all the power of
its subduing efficacy upon the voices of a more crowded population."
* * * * *
There is nothing which I should more like to leave ringing in your
ears than this remarkable statement of my great fellow-countryman. But
I cannot close and bid you farewell without expressing the happiness
which I have derived from these weeks spent in your society and
thanking you for the extremely encouraging attendance with which you
have honoured me from first to last. To the authorities of the
college, as well as to many citizens of this town, I have to express
my indebtedness for an amount of kindness and courtesy which I can
never forget, and which will always make my visit to this country one
of the pleasantest of memories.
Let us, in parting, commend each other to the grace of God:
O God our Father, the infinite Power, the perfect Wisdom and
the immortal Love, in Thy hands are all our ways, and the
success of our purposes proceeds from Thee alone. Follow with
Thy blessing our intercourse together and the work which we
have now completed. Bless this University--its president, its
professors and students. May knowledge grow in it from more to
more, and, along with knowledge, reverence and love. May those
especially who are preparing for the ministry of Thy Son be
filled with Thy Spirit, and in due time may they prove
faithful stewards of the mysteries of God. Bless them in their
studies, in their fellowship with one another, and in their
efforts to advance Thy kingdom. We commend each other
affectionately to Thee; be our God and our Guide in life and
in death, in time and in eternity. For Christ's sake. Amen.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] The earlier President Dwight.
[62] "Great subjects insure solid thinking. Solid thinking prompts a
sensible style, an athletic style, on some themes a magnificent style,
and on all themes a natural style."--PHELPS, _My Note-book_.
[63] "We owe it to the Church, we owe it to the time in which God has
called us to labour, we owe it to the restless and perplexed but often
honest minds in whose presence we carry on our ministry, to be not
merely a hard-working but a learned clergy. To those great questions
which both stir and disquiet men, we are bound to bring that knowledge
which will give us a claim to be listened to. 'Know as much as you can;'
that ought to be the rule to which an educated clergyman should hold
himself forever tied. A clergyman ought to be a _student_, a reader and
a thinker, to the very end."--DEAN CHURCH.
[64] Richard Baxter confesses that he deliberately preached over the
heads of his people once a year, for the purpose of keeping them humble
and showing them what their minister could do every Sunday of the year,
if he chose!
[65] "A sentence of Pascal would sometimes shoot more light and life
through a sermon than all the commentators upon the text since the days
of Noah."--PRINCIPAL RAINY.
[66] Rev. Dr. Henderson, of Crieff, told me a story which illustrates in
an amusing yet significant way the change which passed over the
religious mind of Scotland in the beginning of the present century. His
father, the late Rev. Dr. Henderson, of Glasgow, when newly licensed,
was preaching, on the Saturday before a communion, for an extremely
Moderate minister of the dignified and pompous school. "I do not know,
Mr. Henderson," said the latter, "what is the difference between you
evangelicals and us; but I suppose it is that you preach doctrines,
while we preach duties." "I do not know about that," said Mr. Henderson;
"we preach duties too." "Well," said the old man, "for example, my
action sermon to-morrow is to be on lying; and my divisions are--first,
the nature of lying; secondly, the sin of lying; and thirdly, the
consequences of lying: now what could you add to that?" "Well," replied
Mr. Henderson, "I would add two things--first, 'Lie not one to another,
seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds,' and secondly,
'Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour; for we
are members one of another.'" "Mr. Henderson, these suggestions are
admirable: I shall add them to my discourse!"
APPENDIX
AN ORDINATION CHARGE
APPENDIX.
AN ORDINATION CHARGE.[67]
I should like to connect what I have to say with a text of Scripture,
which you may remember as a motto for this occasion. Take, then, that
pastoral exhortation to a young minister in 1 Tim. iv. 16: "Take heed
unto thyself, and to the doctrine; continue in them; for in doing this
thou shalt both save thyself and them that hear thee."
There are three subjects recommended in this text to one in your
position--_first_, yourself; _second_, your doctrine; _third_, those
that hear you.
I. _Take heed unto thyself._--Perhaps there is no profession which so
thoroughly as ours tests and reveals what is in a man--the stature of
his manhood, the mass and quality of his character, the poverty or
richness of his mind, the coldness or warmth of his spirituality.
These all come out in our work, and become known to our congregation
and the community in which we labour.
When a man comes into a neighbourhood, as you are doing now, he is to
a large extent an unknown quantity; and it is very touching to observe
the exaggeration with which we are generally looked on at first,
people attributing to us a sort of indefinite largeness. But it is
marvellous how soon the measure of a man is taken, how he finds his
level in the community, and people know whether he is a large or a
petty man, whether he is a thinker or not, whether he is a deeply
religious man or not. The glamour of romance passes off, and
everything is seen in the light of common day.
The sooner this takes place the better. A true man does not need to
fear it. He is what he is, and nothing else. He cannot by taking
thought add one cubit to his stature. Any exaggeration of his image in
the minds of others does not in reality make him one inch bigger than
he is.
It seems to me to lie at the very root of a right ministerial life to
be possessed with this idea--to get quit of everything like pretence
and untruthfulness, to wish for no success to which one is not
entitled, and to look upon elevation into any position for which one
is unfit as a pure calamity.
The man's self--the very thing he is, standing with his bare feet on
the bare earth--this is the great concern. This is the self to which
you are to take heed--what you really are, what you are growing to,
what you may yet become.
All our work is determined by this--the spirit and power of our
preaching, the quality of the influence we exert, and the tenor of our
walk and conversation. We can no more rise above ourselves than water
can rise above its own level. We may, indeed, often fail to do
ourselves justice, and sometimes may do ourselves more than justice.
But that is only for a moment; the total impression made by ourselves
is an unmistakable thing. What is in us must come out, and nothing
else. All we say and do is merely the expression of what we are.
Evidently, therefore, there can be nothing so important as carefully
to watch over our inner life, and see that it be large, sweet and
spiritual, and that it be growing.
Yet the temptations to neglect and overlook this and turn our
attention in other directions are terribly strong. The ministerial
life is a very outside life; it is lived in the glare of publicity; it
is always pouring out. We are continually preaching, addressing
meetings, giving private counsel, attending public gatherings, going
from home, frequenting church courts, receiving visits, and occupied
with details of every kind. We live in a time when all men are busy,
and ministers are the busiest of men. From Monday morning till Sunday
night the bustle goes on continually.
Our life is in danger of becoming _all_ outside. We are called upon to
express ourselves before conviction has time to ripen. Our spirits get
too hot and unsettled to allow the dew to fall on them. We are
compelled to speak what is merely the recollection of conviction which
we had some time ago, and to use past feelings over again. Many a day
you will feel this; you will long with your whole heart to escape away
somewhere into obscurity, and be able to keep your mouth closed for
weeks. You will know the meaning of that great text for ministers,
"The talk of the lips tendeth only to penury,"--that is, it shallows
the spirit within.
This is what we have to fight against. The people we live among and
the hundred details of our calling will steal away our inner life
altogether, if they can. And then, what is our outer life worth? It is
worth nothing. If the inner life get thin and shallow, the outer life
must become a perfunctory discharge of duties. Our preaching will be
empty, and our conversation and intercourse unspiritual, unenriching
and flavourless. We may please our people for a time by doing all they
desire and being at everybody's call; but they will turn round on us
in disappointment and anger in the day when, by living merely the
outer life, we have become empty, shallow and unprofitable.
Take heed to thyself! If we grow strong and large inwardly, our people
will reap the fruit of it in due time: our preaching will have sap and
power and unction; and our intercourse will have about it the breath
of another world.
We _must_ find time for reading, study, meditation and prayer. We
should at least insist on having a large forenoon, up, say, to two
o'clock every day, clear of interruptions. These hours of quietness
are our real life! It is these that make the ministerial life a grand
life. When we are shut in alone, and, the spirit having been silenced
and collected by prayer, the mind gets slowly down into the heart of a
text, like a bee in a flower, it is like heaven upon earth; it is as
if the soul were bathing itself in morning dews; the dust and fret are
washed off, and the noises recede into the distance; peace comes; we
move aloft in another world--the world of ideas and realities; the
mind mounts joyfully from one height to another; it sees the common
world far beneath, yet clearly, in its true meaning and size and
relations to other worlds. And then one comes down on Sabbath, to
speak to the people, calm, strong and clear, like Moses from the
mount, and with a true Divine message.
In so doing, my dear brother, thou shalt save thyself. Lose your inner
life, and you lose yourself, sure enough; for that _is_ yourself. You
will often have to tell your people that salvation is not the one act
of conversion, nor the one act of passing through the gate of heaven
at last; but the renewal, the sanctification, the growth, into large
and symmetrical stature, of the whole character. Tell that to yourself
often too. We take it for granted that you are a regenerated man, or
we would not have ordained you to be a minister of the Gospel to-day.
But it is possible for a man to be regenerate and to be a minister,
and yet to remain very worldly, shallow, undeveloped and unsanctified.
We who are your brethren in the ministry could tell sad histories in
illustration of this out of our own inner life. We could tell you how,
in keeping the vineyard of others, we have often neglected our own;
and how now, at the end of years of ministerial activity and incessant
toil, we turn round and look with dismay at our shallow characters,
our unenriched minds, and our lack of spirituality and Christlikeness.
O brother! take heed to thyself--save thyself!
II. _Take heed to the Doctrine._--A very little experience of
preaching will convince you that in relation to the truth which you
have to minister week by week to your people you will have to sustain
a double character--that of an interpreter of Scripture and that of a
prophet.
Let me first say something of the former. With whatever high-flown
notions a man may begin his ministry, yet, if he is to stay for years
in a place and keep up a fresh kind of preaching and build up a
congregation, delivering such discourses as Scotchmen like to hear, he
will find that he must heartily accept the _rôle_ of an interpreter of
Scripture, and lean on the Bible as his great support.
This is your work; the Book is put into your hands to-day, that you
may unfold its contents to your people, conveying them into their
minds by all possible avenues and applying them to all parts of their
daily life.
It is a grand task. I cannot help congratulating you on being ordained
to the ministry to-day, for this above everything, that the Bible is
henceforth to be continually in your hands; that the study of it is to
be the work of your life; that you are to be continually sinking and
bathing your mind in its truths; and that you are to have the pleasure
of bringing forth what you have discovered in it to feed the minds of
men. The ministerial profession is to be envied more for this than
anything else. I promise you that, if you be true to it, this Book
will become dearer to you every day; it will enrich every part of your
nature; you will become more and more convinced that it is the Word of
God and contains the only remedy for the woes of man.
But be true to it! The Bible will be what I have said to you only if
you go deep into it. If you keep to the surface, you will weary of it.
There are some ministers who begin their ministry with a certain
quantity of religious doctrine in their mind, and what they do all
their life afterwards is to pick out texts and make them into vessels
to hold so much of it. The vessels are of different shapes and sizes,
but they are all filled with the same thing; and oh! it is poor stuff,
however orthodox and evangelical it may seem.
To become a dearly loved friend and an endless source of intellectual
and spiritual delight, the Bible must be thoroughly studied. We must
not pour our ideas into it, but apply our minds to it and faithfully
receive the impressions which it makes on them. One learns thus to
trust the Bible as an inexhaustible resource and lean back upon it
with all one's might. It is only such preaching, enriching itself out
of the wealth of the Bible and getting from it freshness, variety and
power, that can build up a congregation and satisfy the minds of
really living Christians.
The intellectual demand on the pulpit is rapidly rising. I should like
to draw your earnest attention to a revolution which is silently
taking place in Scotland, but is receiving from very few the notice
which it deserves. I refer to the changes that are being made by the
new system of national education. No one can have travelled much for
several years past through this part of the island without his
attention being attracted by the new and imposing school buildings
rising in almost every parish. These are the index of a revolution;
for inside, in their management and in the efficiency of the
education, there has also been an immense change. I venture to say
that nothing which has taken place in Scotland this century--and I am
remembering both the Reform Bill and the Disruption--will be found to
have been of more importance. There will be a far more educated
Scotland to preach to in a short time, which will demand of the
ministry a high intellectual standard. It is a just demand. Our people
should go away from the church feeling that they have received new and
interesting information, that their intellects have been illuminated
by fresh and great ideas, and that to hear their minister regularly is
a liberal education.