will and help, but he is respectfully careful to efface himself, that he
may alter as little as possible the higher work of the Genius who is
making a momentary use of him. A pure emotion deprives him of
personality and annihilates the self in him. Self must perforce
disappear when it is the Holy Spirit who speaks, when it is God who
acts. This is the mood in which the prophet hears the call, the young
mother feels the movement of the child within, the preacher watches the
tears of his audience. So long as we are conscious of self, we are
limited, selfish, held in bondage."--AMIEL.

[51] As enthusiasm for Christ is the soul of preaching as far as the
preacher is concerned, so in a spiritual congregation there will always
be found a jealous desire for this element in what they hear.

[52] See an article by the Rev. John Kennedy, D.D., in _The Evangelical
Magazine_, April, 1891.

[53] Here may be introduced a few notes which are to me of inestimable
value. The happiness of my visit to the States, which was great, was
overshadowed at the close by the news of the death of the best friend I
had on earth--the Rev. Robert W. Barbour, of Bonskeid. None who knew him
will need to have it explained why I should think of him at this point;
because, while he had drunk deeply of the spirit of the time and was
possessed of a rare love for men, the deepest source of the sacred
extravagance with which he lavished himself and his many talents on
every good cause was nothing else than the passion for Christ which I am
trying in this lecture to illustrate. He took a warm interest in this
course of lectures, and sent me the following Aphorisms on Preaching, to
be used as I might think fit. I reproduce them entire, as they came from
him. Perhaps they were the very last literary work he did:--

   _The Book and the Library._ The preacher must be master of many
   books, and servant of one.

   _Closet and Desk._ Study as though thou mightest preach for
   fifty years; pray as though thou mightest preach for five.

   _Divine and Human._ Speak as though the mouth were God's; but
   let the voice be a man's.

   _First and Second Aims._ All gifts (presence, voice, gesture,
   culture, style, and so on) may be wings, if kept behind one's
   back; the moment they are seen they become dead weights.

   Two strings to one's bow will do with any shafts but the arrows
   of the King. Letters, the press, the lyre, the porch, must
   stand in the background behind "this one thing."

   Think less and less of everything else, and more and more of
   thy message.

   _Aims and No Aims._ Aim at something, you will hit it; also
   draw your bow at a venture.

   "_Make full proof of thy ministry._" Try every method--writing,
   reading, committing, extending, extemporising. Imitate every
   man, but mimic none. Nothing makes a preacher like preaching.

      Whence comes it that my nature is subdued
      To that it works in, like the dyer's hand.

   _Pulpit Form._ Respect your hearers. Do not gird at them; angle
   for them--and agonize. Address yourself to one at a time--first
   to the man in the pulpit. He who has hit himself first will not
   miss others. He who trembles at the word of the Lord, men will
   tremble at his word. (Borrowed) A preacher must either be
   afraid of his audience or his audience of him.

   _Janua Domini._ Always enter the pulpit by the Door (John x. 7).

   _Contents and Omissions._ Put everything you can into every
   address. Omit everything you can from every address.

   "_Faith cometh by hearing._" Therefore, to begin with, be
   audible. The Sermon on the Mount commences thus: "He opened His
   mouth" (Matt. v. 2).

   _Time and Eternity._ Speak to men's fleeting hopes and passing
   interests; speak also to their grey hairs and to their midnight
   hours.

   _Ultimata._ Desire to prophesy (1 Cor. xiv. 1); covet to
   prophesy (_ib._ 39); do not preach if thou darest be silent (1
   Cor. ix. 16).

LECTURE VIII.

THE PREACHER AS AN APOSTLE.

Gentlemen, in the two last lectures we have investigated two of the
principal sources--perhaps I might say the two principal sources--of a
minister's power--his manhood and his Christianity. These may be
called the two natural springs out of which work for men and God
proceeds. Out of these it comes as a direct necessity of nature. If
anyone is much of a man--if there be in him much fire and force, much
energy of conviction--it will be impossible for him to pass through so
great an experience as the reception of Christianity without making it
known; and, if he be much of a Christian--if there be in him much of
the spirit of Christ, which is the spirit of self-sacrifice and
benevolence--it will be impossible for him to refrain from approaching
men in their sin and misery and endeavouring to communicate to them
the secret of blessedness. He will make but a poor minister who would
not be an earnest worker for God and man, even if he were not a
minister.

These impulses were conspicuously strong in St. Paul. Yet there was
also another source from which he drew the motives of his ministry.
This was the fact that God had appointed him to the office of an
apostle and allotted him a specific sphere of activity as the apostle
of the Gentiles.

The other two sources of motive are, as I have said, natural; this
one, on the contrary, is official. This may raise a prejudice against
it. So many and such grave mistakes have been made through regarding
official appointment as the only warrant for Christian work, to the
prejudice of the antecedent qualifications of a genuine and
sympathetic manhood and a deep personal Christianity, without which it
is nothing, that there is a disposition to ignore this kind of motive
altogether. But St. Paul acknowledges it. Although he was always, no
doubt, far more of a man and a Christian than an official, yet, in
reply to opposition, he insists with great vehemence on his apostolic
rank; and evidently he felt that this imposed on him additional
obligations to be earnest and faithful in the work to which his manly
and Christian instincts prompted him.

It is, indeed, of great consequence to anyone who has become a
Christian, and who begins to feel stirring in his breast those
impulses to serve God and bless the world which are native to the
Christian spirit, to obtain a definite sphere to fill and a definite
work to do. Otherwise these God-inspired impulses, expressing
themselves in mere words and sentiments, gradually decay through want
of exercise, or they are dispersed over so many objects that nothing
is done. But, when a special task is obtained, the force of these
sentiments is concentrated upon it and transmuted into actual work.
The Christian man says: Here is my own task; if I do not accomplish
it, no one else can; this is my corner in the great labour-field,
which I, and no one else, have to make fruitful and beautiful; I shall
be answerable to the Judge of all at the last for the manner in which
the work assigned to me is done.

Such sentiments had a strong hold of the mind of St. Paul. One of his
commonest ways of thinking of his office was as a stewardship, which
he was administering, and for which by-and-by he would have to render
a reckoning. "And," says he, "it is required in stewards that a man be
found faithful."[54] Similarly, he thought of himself as a workman
with a certain portion of a temple to build; but the great Taskmaster
was coming round in the evening to inspect the work--ay, and even to
test it with fire; and, when that testing-time came, he desired to be
a workman not needing to be ashamed. All the work of his apostleship
appeared to him a curriculum which he had to cover before he could win
the prize of the Divine approval. This is his favourite figure of
speech, and he applies it in many directions.

For example, the athlete in the racecourse has to keep himself in
training and to put every muscle on the stretch. So St. Paul felt the
obligation to put every power he possessed into his work. "Give
thyself wholly to them," he says to a young fellow-labourer about his
duties; and what he preached he practised. "Stir up the grace of God
that is in thee," he says to the same friend again; and he called on
his own nature continually for the utmost exertion of its powers. He
was always growing; but the increment of his faculty and influence
went all to the same object.

An athlete in the games naturally laid aside every weight, divesting
himself of everything which might impede his running and rob him of
the prize. He dared not glance aside at any object which would take
his eye off the goal. So St. Paul sacrificed everything for the
Gospel's sake; he had but one end and no by-ends. He was often,
indeed, accused of aiming at some end of his own. With especial
persistency he was accused of avarice. It is very ludicrous now to
think of this great man having been supposed capable of so mean a
vice. But his motives were too high and pure to be intelligible to his
accusers, and they naturally attributed to him the motive which was
the strongest of which they were conscious themselves. But they only
brought out the true greatness of the man. He believed in the right of
preachers of the Gospel to live by the Gospel, and he looked forward
to the general recognition of this as soon as Christianity had
obtained a footing in the world. But he himself lived above all such
claims. He accepted support from his converts, indeed, and thanked God
for it, when he had good reason to think that his motives were
understood. But, where they were suspected or the success of the
Gospel seemed to be in any degree endangered by his acceptance of
money, he would not take a cent, but would rather sit up half the
night and work his fingers to the bone to earn his livelihood. There
is no sublimer scene in history than the great Apostle, who was
bearing the weight of Christianity on his shoulders and carrying the
future of the world beneath his robe, toiling with his hands for his
living by the side of Aquila and Priscilla, in order that he might
keep Christianity from being tarnished with the faintest suspicion of
mercenary motives.

Gentlemen, among the many attractions of our calling on which I should
like to congratulate you this is not the least, that it provides a
definite sphere for the exercise of the benevolent impulses which you
may feel as men and as Christians and, by exercising, develops them.
These impulses may be the strongest and most sacred in our nature. But
in other occupations, in the excitement and competition of life, they
are in great danger of being slowly extinguished. In our calling, on
the contrary, they receive constant opportunities of nurture and
development. Their healthy and spontaneous activity is the soul of
ministerial work; and this is stimulated by the sense of
responsibility to fill the sphere allotted to us and exhaust its
possibilities.

But, besides the sense of duty, there is a stimulus of a still more
affecting kind which comes to a man when he is set over a congregation
of his own. When I first was settled in a church, I discovered a thing
of which nobody had told me and which I had not anticipated, but which
proved a tremendous aid in doing the work of the ministry. I fell in
love with my congregation. I do not know how otherwise to express it.
It was as genuine a blossom of the heart as any which I have ever
experienced. It made it easy to do anything for my people; it made it
a perfect joy to look them in the face on Sunday morning. I do not
know if this is a universal experience; but I should think it is
common. For my part, I like to meet a man who thinks his own
congregation, however small it may be, the most important one in the
Church and is rather inclined to bore you with its details. When a man
thus falls in love with his people, the probability is that something
of the same kind happens to them likewise. Just as a wife prefers her
own husband to every other man, though surely she does not necessarily
suppose him to be the most brilliant specimen in existence, so a
congregation will generally be found to prefer their own minister, if
he is a genuine man, to every other, although surely not always
entertaining the hallucination that he is a paragon of ability. Thus
to love and to be loved is the secret of a happy and successful
ministry.

Taking up the responsibilities of his office in the spirit which I
have described, St. Paul would have found any sphere, however limited,
laborious. But, in point of fact, the sphere allotted to him was an
enormous one. It was nothing less than the whole Gentile world.

The known world was not, indeed, in that age, of anything like the
same dimensions as it is today. It consisted only of a narrow disc of
countries round the shores of the Mediterranean. Yet to any other man
the vocation to evangelize it all must have been bewildering and even
paralyzing. St. Paul, however, accepted it in all seriousness, and
ever afterwards, till the day of his death, he regarded the
populations of these countries as people to whom he owed the message
of the Gospel. Speaking of the two recognised divisions of the Gentile
world of that day, he says, "I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the
barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise."

Of course he did not live long enough to preach the Gospel to all the
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.

The other opportunity which I should like to mention is when the young
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.

The thinking of St. Paul went hand in hand with his experience. His
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.

Nothing will meet this demand except thorough study of Scripture by
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