minds equipped with all the technical helps, as well as enriched by
the constant reading of the best literature, both on our own and
kindred subjects. One of our hymns says that the Bible "gives a light
to every age; it gives, but borrows none." Nothing could be more
untrue. The Bible borrows light from every age and from every
department of human knowledge. Whatever especially makes us acquainted
with the mysterious depths of human nature is deserving of our
attention. The Bible and human nature call to each other like deep
unto deep. Every addition to our knowledge of man will be a new key to
open the secrets of the Word; and the deeper you go in your preaching
into the mysteries of the Word, the more subtle and powerful will be
the springs you touch in the minds and hearts of your hearers.
But preparation of this sort for the pulpit is not easy. It requires
time, self-conquest and hard work. Perhaps the greatest ministerial
temptation is idleness in study--not in going about and doing
something, but in finding and rightly using precious hours in one's
library, avoiding reverie and light or desultory reading, and sticking
hard and fast to the Sabbath work. I, for one, must confess that I
have had, and still have, a terrible battle to fight for this. No men
have their time so much at their own disposal as we. I often wish we
had regular office-hours, like business men; but even that would not
remedy the evil, for every man shut up alone in a study is not
studying. Nothing can remedy it but faithfulness to duty and love of
work.
You will find it necessary to be hard at it from Tuesday morning to
Saturday night. If you lecture, as I trust you will--for it brings
one, far more than sermonising, into contact with Scripture--you will
know your subject at once, and be able to begin to read on it. The
text of the other discourse should be got by the middle of the week at
latest, and the more elaborate of the two finished on Friday. This
makes a hard week; but it has its reward. There are few moods more
splendid than a preacher's when, after a hard week's work, during
which his mind has been incessantly active on the truth of God and his
spirit exalted by communion with the Divine Spirit, he appears before
his congregation on Sabbath, knowing he has an honestly gotten message
to lavish on them; just as there can be no coward and craven more
abject than a minister with any conscience who appears in the pulpit
after an idle, dishonest week, to cheat his congregation with a diet
of fragments seasoned with counterfeit fervour.
But, besides being an interpreter of Scripture, a true minister fills
the still higher position of a prophet. This congregation has asked
you to become its spiritual overseer. But a minister is no minister
unless he come to his sphere of labour under a far higher
sanction--unless he be sent from God, with a message in his heart
which he is burning to pour forth upon men. An apostle (that is, a
messenger sent from God) and a prophet (that is, a man whose lips are
impatient to speak the Divine message which his heart is full of)
every true minister must be. I trust you have such a message, the
substance of which you could at this moment, if called upon, speak out
in very few words. There is something wrong if from a man's preaching
his hearers do not gather by degrees a scheme of doctrine--a message
which the plainest of them could give account of.
What this message should be, there exists no doubt at all in the
Church of which you have to-day been ordained a minister. It can be
nothing else than the evangelical scheme, as it has been understood
and expounded by the greatest and most godly minds in all generations
of the Church and preached with fresh power in this country since the
beginning of the present century. It has proved itself the power of
God, to the revival of the Church and the conversion of souls,
wherever it has been faithfully proclaimed; and it is a great trust
which is committed to your hands to-day to be one of its heralds and
conservators.
Not that we in this generation are to pledge ourselves to preach
nothing except what was preached last generation. That would be a poor
way of following in the footsteps of men who thought so independently
and so faithfully fulfilled their own task. The area of topics
introduced in the pulpit is widening, I think. Why should it not? The
Bible is far greater and wider than any school or any generation; and
we will fearlessly commit ourselves to it and go wherever it carries
us, even though it should be far beyond the range of topics within
which we are expected to confine ourselves. Your congregation will put
one utterance side by side with another; and, if you are a truly
evangelical man, there will be no fear of their mistaking your
standpoint. There is no kind of preaching so wearisome and
unprofitable as an anxious, constrained and formal repetition of the
most prominent points of evangelical doctrine. The only cure for this
is to keep in close contact with both human nature and the Bible, and
be absolutely faithful to the impressions which they make.
Yet take heed that your doctrine be such as will save them that hear
you. What saving doctrine is has been determined in this land by a
grand experiment; and it is only faithfulness to the history of
Scotland, as well as to God and your people, to make it the sum and
substance and the very breath of life for all you preaching. Our
calling is emphatically "the ministry of reconciliation; to wit, that
God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing
their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of
reconciliation. Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God
did beseech you by us; we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled
to God. For He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin; that we
might be made the righteousness of God in Him." This is the glorious
message of the Gospel, which alone can meet the deep spiritual wants
of men.
Preach it out of a living experience. Bunyan, in his autobiography,
gives an account of his own preaching, telling how, for the first two
years of his ministry, he dwelt continually on the terrors of the law,
because he was then quailing beneath them himself; how for the next
two years he discoursed chiefly on Christ in his offices, because he
was then enjoying the comfort of these doctrines; and how, for a third
couple of years, the mystery of union to Christ was the centre both of
his preaching and his experience; and so on. That appears to me the
very model of a true ministry--to be always preaching the truth one is
experiencing oneself at the time, and so giving it out fresh, like a
discovery just made; while at the same time the centre of gravity, so
to speak, of one's doctrine is constantly in motion, passing from one
section of the sphere of evangelical truth to another, till it has in
succession passed through them all.
III. _Take heed to them that hear you._--I almost envy you the new joy
that will fill your heart soon, when you fairly get connected with
your congregation. The first love of a minister for his own flock is
as original and peculiar a blossom of the heart as any other that
could be named. And the bond that unites him to those whom he has been
the means of converting or raising to higher levels of life is one of
the tenderest in existence.
You have come to a hearty people, who will be quite disposed to put a
good construction on all you do. This is a busy community, that
appreciates a man who works hard. If you do your work faithfully and
preach with the heart and the head, they will come to hear you. It is
wonderful how lenient those who hear us are. You will wonder, I
daresay, some Sabbaths, that they sit to hear you at all, or that,
having heard you, they ever come back again. But, if a man is really
true, he is not condemned for a single poor sermon. Honesty and
thorough work and good thinking are not so easily found in the world
that a man who generally exhibits them can be neglected. If we fail,
it must surely generally be our own fault.
The more we put ourselves on a level with the people the better. We
stoop to conquer. It is better to feel that we belong to the
congregation than that it belongs to us. I like to think of the
minister as only one of the congregation set apart by the rest for a
particular purpose. A congregation is a number of people associated
for their moral and spiritual improvement. And they say to one of
their number, Look, brother, we are busy with our daily toils and
confused with domestic and worldly cares; we live in confusion and
darkness; but we eagerly long for peace and light to cheer and
illuminate our life; and we have heard there is a land where these are
to be found--a land of repose and joy, full of thoughts that breathe
and words that burn: but we cannot go thither ourselves; we are too
embroiled in daily cares: come, we will elect you, and set you free
from our toils, and you shall go thither for us, and week by week
trade with that land and bring us its treasures and its spoils. Oh,
woe to him who accepts this election, and yet, failing through
idleness to carry on the noble merchandise, appears week by week
empty-handed or with merely counterfeit treasure in his hands! Woe to
him too, if, going to that land, he forgets those who sent him and
spends his time there in selfish enjoyment of the delights of
knowledge! Woe to him if he does not week by week return laden, and
ever more richly laden, and saying, Yes, brothers, I have been to that
land; and it is a land of light and peace and nobleness: but I have
never forgotten you and your needs and the dear bonds of brotherhood;
and look, I have brought back this, and this, and this: take it to
gladden and purify your life!
I esteem it one of the chief rewards of our profession, that it makes
us respect our fellow-men. It makes us continually think of even the
most degraded of them as immortal souls, with magnificent undeveloped
possibilities in them--as possible sons of God, and brethren of
Christ, and heirs of heaven. Some men, by their profession, are
continually tempted to take low views of human nature. But we are
forced to think worthily of it. A minister is no minister who does not
see wonder in the child in the cradle and in the peasant in the field
relations with all time behind and before, and all eternity above and
beneath. Not but that we see the seamy side too--the depths as well as
the heights. We get glimpses of the awful sin of the heart; we are
made to feel the force of corrupt nature's mere inert resistance to
good influences; we have to feel the pain of the slowness of the
movement of goodness, as perhaps no other men do. Yet love and undying
faith in the value of the soul and hope for all men are the
mainsprings of our activity.
For the end we always aim at is to save those who hear us. Think what
that is! What a magnificent life work! It is to fight against sin, to
destroy the works of the devil, to make human souls gentle, noble and
godlike, to help on the progress of the world, to sow the seed of the
future, to prepare the population of heaven, to be fellow-sufferers
and fellow-workers with Christ, and to glorify God.
This is your work; and the only true measure of ministerial success is
how many souls you save--save in every sense--in the sense of
regeneration, and sanctification and redemption.
THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[67] Delivered at the Ordination of the Rev. William Agnew, Gallatown,
Kirkcaldy, 1879.
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End of Project Gutenberg's The Preacher and His Models, by James Stalker