i 92; 
 
 10* 
 
SOME LIVING MASTERS 
 OF THE PULPIT 
 
 JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, Litt.D., D.D. 
 
I 
 
SOME LIVING MASTERS 
 OF THE PULPIT 
 
 Studies in Religious Personality 
 
 JOSEPH FORT NEWTON 
 
 LITT.D., D.D. 
 
 Author of "The Sword of the Spirit ” (( Preaching 
 
 m London ” etc. 
 
 NEW 
 
 YORK 
 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1925, 
 
 BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 
 SOME LIVING MASTERS OF THE PULPIT. I 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
CHARLES CLAYTON MORRISON 
 
 LEADER AND COMRADE 
 
 IN THE SERVICE OF A GREATER CHRISTIANITY 
 
 WITH ADMIRATION, GRATITUDE AND 
 PERSONAL AFFECTION 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 V 
 
 https://archive.org/details/somelivingmasterOOnewt 
 
INVOCATION 
 
 With curious regularity every age has be¬ 
 wailed the passing of the pulpit; but the great 
 office abides—persistent, permanent, precious 
 —surviving new theories of knowledge and old 
 conditions of life, helped, not hurt, by the sky¬ 
 line being set back. When Mahaffy wrote 
 “The Decay of Modern Preaching” in 1882, 
 Parker, Liddon, Spurgeon, Maclaren, Beecher, 
 Brooks, Broadus and Simpson were in the full 
 splendour of their powers! It must be that 
 men do not see what is passing before their 
 eyes, because they are so busy weaving a robe 
 of romance for the past The chorus of com¬ 
 plaint has been unusually loud in our time, as 
 witness these words which suggested the 
 following sketches: 
 
 “If the great sermons which contain the 
 philosophy of Bishop Butler were preached 
 today, would they fill the smallest church in 
 London? For the present, at least, the noble 
 art of the pulpit must be considered as lost. 
 
 vii 
 
viii Invocation 
 
 There exists for it neither favorable condi¬ 
 tions, nor the indispensable audience, nor 
 apparently even the artists themselves. It 
 awaits, like so many other of the arts—like 
 great painting, like great poetry—the return 
 of the mind of Europe to an assured and all- 
 pervading religious faith.” 
 
 Thus even the London Times joins in the 
 litany of lament that the pulpit of today is in 
 eclipse, forgetting that if preaching depended 
 on a willing response to prophetic voices it 
 would have ceased long since. Of course the 
 sermons of Bishop Butler would not fill even 
 a small London church today—the times have 
 changed, the taste is different—and one recalls 
 how in his own day the Bishop sat in his castle 
 brooding over the decay of religion, while the 
 miners, touched by the wondrous evangelism 
 of Wesley, were singing hymns of praise al¬ 
 most under his window. Surely we have not 
 yet realised the full import of those words of 
 Jesus which echo like a refrain through the 
 • Gospels, “He that hath ears to hear, let him 
 hear.” 
 
 Hence a series of studies of some living 
 masters of the pulpit—impressionistic and im- 
 
Invocation 
 
 ix 
 
 perfect enough, and selecting only a few out of 
 many shining examples—intended to show that 
 the divine art of preaching is not lost, and in 
 the hope that elect young men may be won to 
 its high service. Indeed, my task has been 
 made difficult not by the barrenness of the 
 modern pulpit, but by the richness, variety and 
 comprehensiveness of its Christian witness in 
 a tangled time. Grateful to God for many 
 others of equal genius and charm, if I have 
 written of preachers of whom I have vivid 
 and moving memories, it is because such ex¬ 
 periences enable one to write with more insight 
 and understanding—and, perhaps, to repro¬ 
 duce somewhat of the atmosphere and impress 
 of personality. 
 
 Anybody can find fault, but some of us have 
 learned to give thanks for what men can do, 
 rejoicing in their gifts without dwelling on 
 their limitations. Goethe has a golden sentence 
 in which he tells how, as he grew older, the 
 beautiful feeling entered his mind that only 
 mankind together is the true man, and that 
 the individual can only be happy when he has 
 the courage to feel himself in the whole. It is 
 so in our Christian ministry, if we have the 
 
X 
 
 Invocation 
 
 grace to know our brethren, and especially 
 those who can do what we cannot do, making 
 their work our own by appreciation. No two 
 men could be more unlike than Dean Inge and 
 Bishop Quayle—no two farther apart in point 
 of view than Dr. Truett and Dr. Crothers— 
 but all of them are our brethren, and together 
 they make a goodly, gracious company in whose 
 many keys and cadences the Everlasting Gospel 
 is made eloquent. 
 
 Such a study suggests many reflections, one 
 of which is that if we are to have Christian 
 Unity it must be by virtue of the insight which 
 divines one Spirit, one purpose, one passion 
 underlying differing gifts and points of view.. 
 Here are trinitarians, Unitarians, radicals, 
 conservatives, liberals, evangelicals—scholars, 
 orators, pastors, teachers, evangelists, a noble 
 layman and a great woman—yet the tie that 
 binds them into a radiant fellowship is a devout 
 life devoted to the service of a common Master 
 whose they are, and whose Gospel they preach 
 each with his own accent and emphasis. At last, 
 or soon or late, the truth as it is in Jesus, res¬ 
 cued from the sectarianism which has obscured 
 it, will rise and shine by its own splendour 
 
Invocation 
 
 xi 
 
 —profounder than all philosophies, yet as 
 simple as the prayer of a child—revealing its 
 reality as a Life not a system, a Person not a 
 dogma, and finding its fulfilment in a Beloved 
 Community. 
 
 Some one ought to follow these sketches 
 with a series of studies of the New Preaching 
 now developing, at once so direct in method 
 and so full of promise, and which seeks to 
 interpret the Gospel in its relation to the new 
 issues, new outlooks, and new enterprises 
 which preoccupy the thought of men in our 
 time. Since the Great War a new note has 
 been heard in our Christian message, a new 
 emphasis and implication—differing from the 
 old as Salvation differs from Salvage—and 
 there is a gallant company of young men in 
 all communions to whom it is the Word of God 
 for our age. It is for us to preach “the Gospel 
 of the Kingdom” with veracity of mind and 
 humility of heart, speaking the truth in the 
 spirit of Jesus, remembering the exhortation 
 of St. Vincent: 
 
 “O priest, O expositor, O doctor, if the 
 Divine gift hath made thee fit by genius, train¬ 
 ing and learning, be thou Bazaleel of the 
 
Xll 
 
 Invocation 
 
 spiritual tabernacle; engrave the precious gems 
 of Divine doctrine; faithfully fit them to¬ 
 gether; adorn them wisely; add splendor, 
 grace, loveliness. Let that which was formerly 
 believed darkly, be understood clearly by thy 
 exposition. Let posterity by thy aid rejoice in 
 truths understood, which antiquity venerated 
 without understanding them. Yet teach still 
 the same things which thou didst learn, so that 
 although thou speakest in a new fashion, thou 
 speakest not new things.” 
 
 J. F. N. 
 
 Church of the Divine Paternity. 
 
 New Y ork City . 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I: 
 
 George A. Gordon 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 17 
 
 II: 
 
 John A. Hutton . 
 
 
 
 36 
 
 III: 
 
 Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s . 
 
 
 
 53 
 
 IV: 
 
 * 
 
 Charles E. Jefferson . 
 
 
 
 69 
 
 V: 
 
 W. E. Orchard . 
 
 
 
 88 
 
 VI: 
 
 Charles D. Williams . 
 
 
 
 105 
 
 VII: 
 
 A. Maude Royden 
 
 
 
 122 
 
 VIII: 
 
 Samuel McChord Crothers 
 
 
 
 136 
 
 IX: 
 
 T. Reaveley Glover . 
 
 
 
 152 
 
 X: 
 
 S. Parkes Cadman 
 
 
 
 168 
 
 XI: 
 
 Reginald J. Campbell . 
 
 
 
 185 
 
 XII: 
 
 William A. Quayle . 
 
 
 
 200 
 
 XIII : 
 
 George W. Truett . 
 
 
 
 215 
 
 XIV: 
 
 Edward L. Powell 
 
 
 
 231 
 
 XV: 
 
 Frank W. Gunsaulus: In 
 
 Mem 
 
 oriam 
 
 245 
 

 I 
 
 
SOME LIVING MASTERS 
 OF THE PULPIT 
 

 / 
 
SOME LIVING MASTERS 
 OF THE PULPIT 
 
 I: George A. Gordon 
 
 As one of a host of students who used to 
 throng the galleries of the Old South Church— 
 just as they do today—I confess that it is not 
 easy for me to write about Dr. Gordon calmly. 
 Under God I owe more to that gracious and 
 wise preacher than to any living man, and but 
 for his influence upon me—alike by the nobility 
 of his character, the integrity of his intellect, 
 and the richness of his insight—at a time when 
 nothing was certain but uncertainty, I should 
 not be in the pulpit today. God be thanked for 
 the leadership of authentic teachers of faith 
 in the critical, formative years of youth—next 
 to good mothers they are the best gifts of God! 
 It was a joy, as well as an honour, to stand in 
 
 r 
 
 the pulpit of Old South Church and bear such 
 
 testimony, both for myself and for a vast com- 
 
 17 
 
18 Some Living Masters of, the Pulpit 
 
 pany of young men whom his ministry has 
 blessed, on the evening before I set sail to take 
 up my labours at the City Temple. 
 
 Others have written of Dr. Gordon as a 
 theologian, ranking him in the dynasty of Ed¬ 
 wards and Bushnell, as the third truly great 
 constructive theologian that America has 
 known. 1 With this estimate I am in full agree¬ 
 ment, and with the further verdict that in the 
 scope and quality of his labour as a Christian 
 thinker, no less than in the originality and fruit¬ 
 fulness of his total accomplishment—bringing 
 to the service of faith not only exact thinking 
 and ample learning, but a high and tender 
 humanity, an ennobling imagination, and the 
 transfiguring insight of a poet—he out-tops his 
 peers and stands alone. The House of Doc¬ 
 trine, needed for the comfort and habitation of 
 the intellect, and as a shelter for the holy things 
 of faith, is a temple ever “building and built 
 upon.” As between the easy-going agnosticism. 
 
 1 Progressive Religious Thought in America, by J. W. 
 Buckham, of the Pacific School of Religion, contains a chapter 
 entitled, “George A. Gordon: The New Theology Universal¬ 
 ized,”—though by New Theology he does not mean the move¬ 
 ment associated with the City Temple. For an early con¬ 
 servative critique, see “Dr. G. A. Gordon’s Reconstruction of 
 Christian Theology,” by Dr. A. H. Plumb, Bibliotheca Sacra, 
 April, 1896. The article makes rather interesting reading to¬ 
 day. 
 
George A. Gordon 19 
 
 so widespread in the modern world—often 
 only a labour-saving device to escape the toil 
 of high thinking—and the artificial “block 
 universe” of the old dogmatic theology, Dr., 
 Gordon has been a wise master-builder in an 
 era of theological break-up, building once more 
 a House of Faith in the midst of the years. 
 
 It has been the fashion of late years to make 
 light of theology—forgetting that it is not 
 theology that is wrong, but wrong theology 
 that needs to be reinterpreted—and to all such 
 glib and superficial judgments the ministry of 
 Dr. Gordon has been a standing rebuke. Like 
 Plato, “the father of theology,” he holds that 
 “an unexamined life is unlivable,” and that 
 religion must be not simply a life of the spirit— 
 much less a series of chance thoughts and 
 vagrant insights—but an order of ideas, con¬ 
 trolling the issues of the heart through the 
 authority of its teaching over the mind. Else 
 it will be an empty emotion or a mere super¬ 
 stition, Hence his task and his toil, pursued 
 with single-hearted devotion, making his 
 labour a fulfilment of his own description of 
 the older New England divines, “the teacher 
 of the people, the former of their minds in 
 
20 Some Living Masters of, the Pulpit 
 
 Christian belief, the thinker who covered their 
 existence with the power of a consistent 
 thought of the universe.” At once critical 
 and creative, his study of the old New England 
 theology is a piece of analytic and synthetic 
 criticism which it would be difficult to match 
 in the entire literature of theology, showing 
 how life acts upon abstractions as fresh air 
 acts upon mummies—how they crumble to dust 
 and blow away. But in its place he has helped 
 to erect upon surer foundations a more spacious 
 Home of the Soul, and we behold “the sweet 
 heavens built in unity and dominion and power, 
 and under them the obedient, awestruck, and 
 yet hopeful world of men.” Nor must we for¬ 
 get that Dr. Gordon, like the apostolic succes¬ 
 sion of great thinkers in which he stands, has 
 toiled not as a technical theologian, but as a 
 preacher in the active service of the church, 
 living not in the half lights of a few arid and 
 well-domesticated abstractions, but in the 
 vision of truth as it stands in the service of our 
 piteous, passionate, and pathetic human life. 
 
 No one questions that Dr. Gordon is a great 
 preacher, but we learn very little from that 
 fact, because great preachers are of many 
 
21 
 
 George A. Gordon 
 
 kinds; chiefly of two kinds, as he himself once 
 pointed out in an exquisite tribute to Dr. 
 Hunger. There is the type represented in 
 America by Beecher and Brooks, and in Eng¬ 
 land by Parker and Spurgeon—“the fiery 
 orator, the master of assemblies, the cyclonic 
 commander of the assent and homage of the 
 multitude.” Such a preacher is properly placed 
 in a great centre of population, where he may 
 make his audience by a process of gradual 
 selection from among the mass of those to 
 whom his individual quality appears; but it is 
 delusion fatal to the ministry to imagine that 
 there is no other type of great preacher. There 
 is the type represented by Bushnell and 
 Munger, by Martineau and Tipple—who 
 preached such sermons as Emerson might have 
 preached had he remained in the pulpit, and 
 whom Ruskin called “the greatest master of 
 pulpit prose.” This preacher is no striking 
 orator. He can never be popular except with 
 a few select minds. He prevails mightily, but 
 it is by the depth and vitality of his ideas, by 
 the intensity and clarity of his vision of God, 
 and by the form and beauty which he presses 
 into the service of his vocation. He is the 
 
22 Some Living Masters of, the Pulpit 
 
 scholar, the thinker, the seer, and his power 
 lies wholly in his message and in his high con¬ 
 cern to utter it. He influences men deeply, 
 especially young men who are caught up into 
 the radiance of his vision, and he remains a 
 fertilising power long after he passes away. 
 No one will deny that Bushnell is more than a 
 peer of Beecher or Parker; at least our admira¬ 
 tion for the orator must not blind us to the 
 right of Munger and Martineau to an equal 
 honour in the ministry. 
 
 More nearly than any man in our generation 
 —more nearly than any preacher I can recall— 
 Dr. Gordon has united these two types of 
 preaching; the thinker and the orator, the 
 scholar and the artist; the prophet and the man 
 of letters; the theologian whose sermons are 
 lyrics and whose theology is an epic. If he is 
 not widely known as an orator, it is because 
 his devotion to his high task has kept him too 
 much from the great assemblies of the church; 
 and he has not been at the beck and call of 
 patriotic, social, and academic fraternities, 
 with the result that there is no body of secular 
 oratory by him, as there was in the case of 
 Beecher. But at his best, in his great hours of 
 
George A. Gordon 23 
 
 vision and conquest—especially when he drops 
 manuscript and lets himself go—Dr. Gordon 
 is an orator of incomparable power, of unique 
 and compelling charm, who can make smiles 
 and tears alternate as swiftly as Beecher did; 
 “whose touch is light enough for the after- 
 dinner speech, with its potpourri of wit and 
 story, yet commanding and weighty enough on 
 occasion to shape the policies of church and 
 state.” Those who have not heard him when 
 he is deeply stirred, and dealing with a great 
 theme before an expectant throng, do not know 
 him at his highest and best. The sweep and 
 grasp and grandeur of his thought, aglow with 
 virility, sympathy, and abounding hope, and 
 shot through with the colour, fire and beauty 
 of a poet, is a thing of splendour. Master of a 
 picturesque, variegated and brilliant homiletic, 
 his eloquence blooms into literature, and if 
 poetry is of his essence, “the prophet-warrior 
 in him exorcises the table-serving priest.” 
 
 Surely no one can ever forget a service in 
 Old South Church, where all classes of people 
 mingle in an air of democratic fellowship. 
 There the Back Bay matron worships with the 
 simply-dressed school teacher, and the railroad 
 
24 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 president and the brakeman on his line are 
 equally at home. Boston is a hive of student 
 life, proof of which is seen in the rows of 
 eager, intelligent faces in the galleries. The 
 preacher arrests attention by his stalwart 
 frame, his massive head, his shaggy brows, his 
 piercing eyes, and by the simple dignity of his 
 manner. Tall, broad-shouldered, finely formed, 
 one can well believe that he did good work in 
 the iron-foundry when he came, “a lad of 
 pairts,” from Aberdeenshire to make his future 
 in America. The face and figure are worthy 
 of the brush of a great painter of men. Rugged 
 yet gentle, it is a face that one can study for 
 a long time, reading in it the story of his 
 struggle upward, his fearless facing of the 
 issues of thought, and his fight for a larger 
 faith; and there are lines where smiles fall 
 asleep when they are weary. For all his learn¬ 
 ing, he is a man of the people, and as he prays 
 one feels that he not only knows people, but 
 loves them. The prayer is neither hortatory 
 nor declamatory, but brooding, tender and far- 
 ranging in its sympathy, mindful alike of the 
 joys and sorrows of home and of the burdens 
 of the man of state. He talks with a God 
 
George A. Gordon 25 
 
 whose love is equal to his power, and there are 
 phrases that haunt the heart for years, as when 
 he seeks “the consolation of moral self-respect/’ 
 or death is described as “the last, ineffable, 
 homeward sigh of the soul.” 
 
 When the sermon begins the mood of the 
 preacher alters—disciplined thought takes the 
 place of worshipful passivity, and the truth of 
 the day is seen against a long background of 
 philosophy and a far horizon of faith. His 
 gestures are vigorous rather than graceful, as 
 befits the forthright sinewiness of his thought, 
 and if certain mannerisms are disconcerting 
 at first, they are atoned for by a Scotch burr 
 which still clings to his accent. The symmetry 
 of the sermon is a feat of homiletic genius, and 
 as its great power gathers and grows one feels 
 that the secret of the preacher is that he has 
 what Wordsworth called “the first great gift, 
 the vital soul.” Positive without being dog¬ 
 matic, he has no “art of subtle phrases that 
 touch the edge of assertion and yet stops short 
 of it.” What loftiness and range of thought, 
 expounding the sublimity and tenderness of 
 Christian faith; what gorgeous colouring of 
 imagination, rich and vivid in its tints; what 
 
26 Some Living Masters of. the Pulpit 
 
 analyses of character, done with the stroke 
 of the etcher; what wealth of allusion to litera¬ 
 ture, science, philosophy, the poets with whom 
 he lives and the eager, troubled, aspiring life of 
 man. Here is a man whose interest ranges 
 from Aristotle to the records of champion 
 athletes, equally at home in St. Augustine and 
 Alice in Wonderland to whom nothing human 
 is alien or without meaning. There are scenes 
 from nature in many moods, gusts of elemental 
 feeling, and epithets Carlylean in their wither¬ 
 ing blast. Sunlight alternates with shadow, 
 and the swift, terse summing up of an indi¬ 
 vidual character or an historical epoch—sur¬ 
 passing Fairbairn in vividness—is followed by 
 lines from Robert Burns so apt that they seem 
 to have been written for the day. But he knows 
 just how far he can lead us at the moment— 
 how much strain feeling and attention can 
 stand without fatigue—and before we are 
 aware of it some flash of bright humour, never 
 far away, has relieved the tension, before he 
 takes us with him to the triumphant conclusion. 
 Often we have a glimpse of his early days and 
 then one hears a note of sweet-toned, melting 
 pathos, as of one who knows the beauty and 
 
George A. Gordon 27 
 
 sorrow of life and the sadness of its long 
 farewells: 
 
 I remember well the last walk that I took in 
 my native land before I sailed for the Western 
 world more than forty years ago. It was on 
 one of the longest and brightest days in June. 
 I had said good-bye to dear friends and my 
 solitary path for ten miles lay through peaceful 
 and fruitful farms and over the ridge of a 
 mountain whose shapely summit had looked 
 down upon the coming and going of im¬ 
 memorial generations of men. Then followed 
 a long stretch of moor, barren, dismal, whose 
 heather would in three months bloom again and 
 fade like the hopes in the hearts of poor human 
 beings. As I struck the moor, the sun was 
 setting. The lonely path lay in the great trans¬ 
 figuring radiance. It became a path of beauty 
 and infinite tender suggestion; a heavenly 
 meaning seemed to beat in the boundless glow; 
 a sense of companionship, not understood then, 
 settled in the heart, delight took the place of 
 loneliness, and the journey that thus lay in the 
 path of the setting sun I could not wish to end. 
 
 More than forty years have come and gone 
 since then. Farewells have been spoken to 
 many friends for the last time on earth. The 
 journey has been through much of the beauty 
 of the world, and still the way has been over 
 hill and moor, crag and torrent. The pil¬ 
 grimage has often seemed a type of the lonely 
 
28 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 and sorrowful migration of men from the 
 shadows of morning to the gloom of the eve¬ 
 ning. The happiest experiences have not 
 deafened me to the still sad music of humanity; 
 the evanescence of all things earthly has been 
 a constant refrain in my spirit. Despair and 
 utter heart-break would long ago have undone 
 my days if nothing heavenly had been found 
 to glorify and comfort and protect the precious 
 burden of human love. 
 
 “The light that never was on sea or land” 
 enfolds the way of every pilgrim. He is travel¬ 
 ling in the glow that falls upon time from the 
 Eternal; his path is in the transfiguring 
 presence of the Infinite Love. . . 
 
 Who would stop, or fear to advance, 
 Though home or shelter he had none, 
 With such a sky to lead him on ? 2 
 
 The first volume of sermons by Dr. Gordon— 
 as distinguished from his essays and lectures 
 —was published in 1906, and its appearance 
 was both a religious and a literary event. It is 
 entitled Through Man to God, and deals not 
 with the passing moods and modes of thought, 
 but with the fundamental issues of faith. What 
 is final? What is sovereign? Who is God? 
 How shall we appear before God? Is the 
 
 3 Revelation and the Ideal. 
 
George A. Gordon 29 
 
 character of the Eternal accessible to Man? 
 And if so, how? Along what path shall we 
 approach that character? No serious-minded 
 man can read these discourses without being 
 enlarged and enriched by them, and to have 
 listened to them must have been one of the 
 great inspirations of a life-time. In stateliness 
 of thought, in scope and clarity of insight, in 
 nobility of sentiment, in strength and beauty 
 of diction, they match the greatest sermons in 
 Christian history. The technique of the 
 preacher is forgotten in the majesty of his 
 thought, all is so spontaneous, so natural, so 
 free. The short sentence prevails, but the 
 poetic imagery of the style is in the fibre, not 
 in the dress of the thought. It is a vision of 
 God through humanity at its highest, and if it 
 is humanity that interprets God, only God can 
 adequately interpret humanity. The universe 
 is seen in its vastness as unveiled by science, 
 but despite its seeming moral contradictions, it 
 is the native country of the human spirit, for 
 God is in it and love is its final law. The 
 preacher lives with great men, great epochs, 
 great events; the old philosophers are his 
 fellows, the prophets and the classic poets, and 
 
30 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 one learns that it is the great truths that are the 
 home-speaking truths. What is the great mean¬ 
 ing of it all? is the ever-recurring thought 
 refrain of a volume the cumulative impression 
 of which is simply overwhelming. The last 
 sermon, “God All in All,” is a theodicy exalt¬ 
 ing, subduing, satisfying—a sermon more 
 majestic, more fundamentally true and beauti¬ 
 ful it is difficult to imagine. 3 
 
 With the theology of Dr. Gordon I have not 
 to do, except to say this his chief service has 
 
 3 Other volumes appeared later, notably Revelation and the 
 Ideal in 1913; the fruit of ten years of study and reflection 
 with the intent of writing a book on the philosophy of Reve¬ 
 lation. Alas, the book had to be abandoned, and instead of a 
 treatise we have a series of visions, the central insight of 
 which is that “Moral Idealism and Revelation are but the 
 concave and the convex of the same figure,”—the Ideal being 
 the East where, in each new age, the Eternal light breaks in 
 upon our human world. The book asks two of the pro- 
 foundest questions in the entire sphere of religious interest: 
 Does the Eternal God speak to man? If so, how? What 
 the unwritten treatise might have been we can only imagine; 
 but this scroll of vision is one of the golden books to those 
 who believe that “the ideal is the shadow of God in the mind 
 of man;” its depth of insight only equalled by the richness 
 and variety of its exposition. 
 
 Still another volume appeared in 1916, entitled Aspects of 
 the Infinite Mystery —a rather forbidding title for the most 
 intimate and revealing of his books—perhaps as much of a 
 spiritual biography of the preacher as we are ever likely to 
 get. It was first a series of mid-week talks, then a series 
 of sermons at the request of the Church, which by resolution 
 asked that they be published. Here is the ripe, mellow thought 
 of a man who has reached the time of life when he has 
 “something on hand infinitely more serious than the attempt 
 to get votes from either the liberal or conservative camp.” 
 He writes with his eyes on reality, and as life draws toward 
 
George A. Gordon 31 
 
 been the transformation of our thought of God 
 from the partialism of a sovereign to the uni¬ 
 versal saving grace of a Father; and he is one 
 of the few men who has had the courage to 
 follow that vision through to its inevitable con¬ 
 clusion. My purpose here is not with his 
 theology, but with the art and genius with 
 which he has preached a faith not won without 
 struggle—as we learn from a bit of revealing 
 autobiography in the second of his lectures on 
 the Ultimate Conceptions of Faith. It is 
 thought by some that Dr. Gordon preaches 
 philosophy more than theology, and theology 
 more than religion, but that is to err; though 
 his published works might leave such an im¬ 
 pression. But in the ordinary course of hi§ 
 
 evening he finds that "something has been found that is im¬ 
 perishable,a sobered, purified, residual faith, the issue of 
 the discipline of time upon a free mind; a faith which many 
 waters cannot quench. 
 
 In the Book of Memory he finds a symbol of his thought, 
 in the three ways of crossing a stream in his boyhood home 
 in Scotland. The bridge, the ferry, and the stepping-stones 
 now represent to him dogmatic belief, ecclesiasticism, and 
 insight. Any one can cross the river of the mystery of life 
 on the bridge of a creed. All who are satisfied with a boat 
 can find an ideal method in sitting still and not upsetting the 
 Catholic tradition; but those who put their souls to a test 
 must pick their way over with the spirit of adventure. In 
 this familiar, homely fashion he deqjs with the vital issues 
 of faith and life, with now a flash of humour, now a touch of 
 pathos, and always a sense of wonder and mystery not in¬ 
 consistent with a confident and happy outlook. 
 
32 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 ministry it is not so. Life is above philosophy, 
 and he touches its practical problems with the 
 same insight and power with which he ex¬ 
 pounds the faith by which it is lighted and led, 
 preaching righteousness so full of ideal splen¬ 
 dour as to overawe and win the heart, and so 
 instinct with love as to stir the sluggish will. 
 On public questions he can withhold his 
 thunder-bolts, but if he speaks the spade is 
 called a spade, as Plutarch said of one of his 
 characters. He follows no fads, and is duped 
 by no delusions, nor does he have any patience 
 with clap-trap: 
 
 The cry for a revival of religion is natural; 
 but the religion to be revived is not the right 
 kind. . . . For this end professional revival¬ 
 ism with its organisations, its staff of reporters 
 who make the figures suit the hopes of good 
 men, the system of advertisements, the ex¬ 
 clusion or suppression of all sound critical 
 comment, the appeals to emotion and the use of 
 means that have no visible connection with 
 grace, is utterly inadequate. The world awaits 
 the vision, the passion, the simplicity, and the 
 stern truthfulness of the Hebrew prophet; it 
 awaits the imperial breadth and moral energy 
 of the Christian Apostle of the nations. . . . 
 I have spoken of the few elect souls, men and 
 
George A. Gordon 33 
 
 women, in our churches who are worthy to 
 stand among the best of the Christian ages. 
 What about the mass of church people? Are 
 they not as fond of the polluted book, the play 
 with its appeal to sensual passion, as their 
 pagan neighbors? . . . Do they not know 
 every avenue of exclusiveness and pride, every 
 black art of gossip, every twist and turn of 
 the ropes of inhumanity, and do they not attend 
 church and look for the coming of the kingdom 
 of God? What kind of a revival will meet this 
 case ? Hysteria will not do, nor the devoutness 
 of Lent, nor a turn at psychic healing, whether 
 as patient or patron. What is demanded here 
 is the axe laid at the root of the tree; the new 
 heaven and the new earth, wherein dwelleth 
 righteousness; the renunciation of the devil and 
 all his works, and the profound and sincere 
 appeal to the Eternal God. 4 
 
 There speaks a man who is as prodigal in his 
 brotherliness as he is pungent in his rebuke of 
 sin, sham, and unreality; a man to know whom 
 is a religion. If there is such a thing as Chris¬ 
 tian envy, not evil but honourable—a kind of 
 joyous jealousy in the presence of great work 
 greatly done—the ministry of Dr. Gordon, 
 alike by its completeness, its consistent devotion 
 to an “august opportunity/' and its fruitfulness 
 
 * Religion and Miracle. 
 
34 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 in practical service, would excite such an emo¬ 
 tion. One cannot overestimate the worth, both 
 in achievement and example, of his years of 
 high, incessant work, full of the peace of great 
 thoughts and the chastening force of pure 
 motives, undisturbed by vulgar popularity. 
 Lovable as a friend, wise as an adviser, inspir¬ 
 ing as a teacher, beloved as a shepherd of souls, 
 the nearer one comes to him the more just and 
 stainless he seems to be. No great preacher 
 has ever been more responsive to the gallant 
 and chivalrous love of his younger brethren, 
 all of whom will join me in applying to him 
 these words of his own, written of one whom 
 he loved and admired: 
 
 Above all else for this high grace, we, his 
 brethren in the ministry, revere and love him. 
 Under his influence we feel upon our hearts 
 the peace of God, and we do not grudge him his 
 great gifts, his distinguished success or his 
 place in the reverent esteem of thousands. He 
 has blessed us with the sense of the grace that 
 comes only from our Lord Jesus Christ, the 
 love that issues from God the Father, and the 
 friendship that stands in the communion of the 
 Holy Spirit. Long may his witness continue. 
 Long may he live in his hospitable home, among 
 
George A. Gordon 35 
 
 his books and his friends, with his fruitful pen 
 busy in the service of the kingdom of heaven. 
 In his day may there be no failing light, and 
 when the inevitable evening comes may its soft 
 farewell fires be lost in the glorious peace of the 
 eternal morning. 
 
II: John A. Hutton 
 
 In a series of sketches of living preachers by 
 Hugh Sinclair, in 1912, Dr. Hutton was in¬ 
 cluded, but he did not come off very well. As 
 minister of the wealthy Belhaven Church, Glas¬ 
 gow, he was described as “a well-placed man,” 
 meaning that he fitted a well-groomed congre¬ 
 gation of aristocratic people whom other people 
 like to know. Nor was it difficult, the author 
 said, to imagine the type of minister who goes 
 with such a church. He must be a man of 
 ability, of course, and he must possess the mod¬ 
 ern equivalent of “soundness in the faith,” 
 with a distinct talent for finding a foothold in 
 Scripture for the uneasy mind of the age. 
 Public-spirited, within well-defined limits, he 
 must be, with the maximum of social tact and 
 the knack of genial acquaintanceship; “and one 
 can imagine a gift for opportune silence super¬ 
 latively useful.” Balance, sanity, a realistic 
 
 mental habit, a turn for middle ways, and a 
 
 36 
 
John A. Hutton 37 
 
 diplomatic personality, were named as the 
 characteristics of the minister of Belhaven: 
 
 He is shrewd, terse and stimulating, flings 
 out the kind of a challenge that is provocative 
 without being provoking, makes his hearers 
 feel that he respects their views even when he 
 is demolishing them, states his points seriously 
 but without over-stringency. He has a sure 
 eye for the practically effective, is master of 
 the art of putting things, gives us the kind of 
 truth we can understand; has a gift of recon¬ 
 noitre and grip which commands the respect of 
 the hard-headed business man. “Clever” is 
 undoubtedly a word that fairly applies to him—- 
 the question remains, in what sense? Does it 
 sum him up, or is it merely the pinch of salt in 
 his dish of wisdom? Is it of the disconcerting 
 order that breeds instinctive suspicion, or does 
 it add practical confidence to moral trust? Is 
 is merely a flair of the things that “go down” 
 with people, or an instinct for the shortest way 
 to lift people up ? It does not take long to make 
 up one's mind on that score. 
 
 It is, indeed, the touch of sympathy that 
 dominates all his preaching—the sympathy of 
 the man who may not himself be deeply 
 acquainted with grief and anguish, but whose 
 fine intuition outruns his experience as John 
 outran Peter long ago. To the problems which 
 arise from the griefs of man and the silence of 
 God he brings a quiet but profound under- 
 
38 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 standing and a healing touch. His treatment 
 covers all the mysterious, wistful places where 
 the wind of the Spirit stirs the reed that is man, 
 and nearly every ford where the soul’s weak¬ 
 ness wrestles with the eternal strength, except 
 perhaps the ford that is called Jabbok. The 
 light of a penetrative but reverent compre¬ 
 hension plays over all he says. Undramatic in 
 form, he has much of the dramatist’s art, much 
 of his sensitiveness to human fate, of his swift 
 understanding of human sin and sorrow. And 
 with this there goes a very instant and vital 
 sense of the presence of God in human life. 1 
 
 As an estimate of Dr. Hutton—except the 
 last part of it—such a passage is not only 
 superficial and inadequate, but actually unjust. 
 At any rate, it was very unlike the image of 
 him which I had formed from reading his 
 books, all of which I had followed with joy 
 and gratitude. Certainly the unhappy and 
 misused word “clever” is the last word I should 
 have thought of applying to him. As far back 
 as 1904 I read his Guidance from Robert 
 Browning in Matters of Faith; and to this day 
 I do not know a better exposition of the mes¬ 
 sage of that glorious singer of the triumph of 
 faith. Later, in 1906, I read his Pilgrims in 
 
 1 Voices of Today, by Hugh Sinclair. 
 
John A. Hutton 39 
 
 the Region of Faith, discussing Amiel, Tolstoy, 
 Pater, and Newman; a study in temperament, 
 showing how difficult faith is for introspective, 
 self-analysing minds in an unsettled, all-ques¬ 
 tioning age. It revealed an incomparable in¬ 
 terpreter of spiritual experience as disclosed in 
 great literature, a field in which much of his 
 best service has been rendered. Nothing better 
 has been written about Walter Pater, and no 
 one has come nearer capturing the secret of 
 Newman, whose elusive, if not inscrutable, 
 personality is as baffling as it is fascinating. 
 Those essays prepared me for his brilliant 
 studies of Nietzsche, Chesterton, Ibsen, and 
 Shaw, in Ancestral Voices. As for his 'ser¬ 
 mons, I know them from end to end, from 
 The Fear of Things to the latest volume, and 
 regard them as among the most suggestive 
 sermons of our time, richly rewarding alike for 
 their spiritual insight and for their artistic 
 stroke. 
 
 But I had never met Dr. Hutton, or heard 
 him preach, until he came down to London for 
 the Thursday noonday service on the day of 
 my Recognition as minister of the City Temple 
 —an event delayed for more than a year by 
 
40 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 the exigencies of the war. It was a memorable 
 occasion, made so by the genius of the preacher 
 •—who, curiously enough, has a greater fame in 
 America and a larger hearing in England than 
 in his own Scotland—and his sermon was one 
 of the dozen supremely great sermons I have 
 heard in my life. The theme, the passion of 
 the preacher, the posture of the times—when 
 the idealism of the war was beginning to cool— 
 and, above all, perhaps the meaning of the day 
 for me personally, made it unforgettable while 
 memory holds her throne. Sitting beside him 
 in the great white pulpit, I felt the very heart¬ 
 beat of the vast congregation as the sermon 
 went home to each hearer, now with terrible 
 intensity, now with melting pathos, now with 
 an intimacy indescribable, as if the preacher 
 had moved to and fro whispering into each 
 ear—so truly did our own souls speak to us in 
 the voice from the pulpit. As I watched the 
 audience and listened, it seemed to me that 
 preaching, at its highest, is the greatest art 
 known among men, more vivid than archi¬ 
 tecture, more intimate than music, more per¬ 
 suasive than poetry. My Diary gives a very 
 dim picture of that scene, but it offers a differ- 
 
John A. Hutton 41 
 
 ent estimate of Dr. Hutton from that of his 
 appraiser in 1912. Having lost one son in 
 the war, and another wounded in a terrifying 
 manner, it could no longer be said that the 
 preacher knew grief and anguish only by 
 imaginative intuition: 
 
 Jan. 18th, 1918:—What a sermon Dr. Hut¬ 
 ton preached in the City Temple yesterday, 
 both for its eloquence and its appropriateness. 
 He dealt with “The Temptation/' that is the 
 one temptation which sums up all others, in¬ 
 cluding that of the minister, to which he 
 alluded with illuminative understanding. What 
 is the Great Temptation, faced by Jesus in the 
 wilderness and escaped by none of the sons of 
 men? It is the cynical spirit, by which we are 
 sorely tried in these days, and will be more 
 terribly tried later, because it haunts all high 
 moods. Subtly, artfully, it seeks to lower, 
 somehow, the lights of the soul, to slay ideals, 
 to betray and deliver us to base-mindedness. 
 Satan, said the preacher, is the base-minded 
 spirit; he is the denier, as God is the Affirmer, 
 within all souls. Such preaching! He searches 
 like a surgeon and heals like a physician. 
 Seldom, if ever, have I had a man walk right 
 into my heart with a lighted candle in his hand, 
 as he did, and look into the dark corners. For 
 years I had known Dr. Hutton as a master of 
 the inner life, whether dealing with the Bible 
 
42 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 At Close Quarters, or with the friends and 
 aiders of faith, like Browning; and there are 
 passages in The Winds of God that haunt 
 me like great music. And no book in this dark 
 time of war—in which, alas, the author has 
 suffered his share of bitter loss—has gripped 
 me more firmly, more surely, than his Loyalty, 
 the Approach to Faith. There one hears not 
 the great guns behind dim horizons, but their 
 echo in the lonely places of the soul. As a 
 guide to those who are walking in the middle 
 years of life, where bafflements of faith are 
 many and moral pitfalls are deep, there is no 
 one like Hutton; no one to stand alongside him. 
 Rich as his books are, his preaching is much 
 more wonderful than his writings. His style 
 is indeed a marvel, but one does not think of 
 it while he is preaching. While his sermon 
 has the finish of a literary essay, it is delivered 
 with the enthusiasm of an evangelist. The 
 whole man goes into it, uniting humour, pathos, 
 poetry and hard reason, literature, life, unction, 
 with a certain wildness of abandon, as of one 
 possessed, which is the note of truly great 
 preaching. In my humble judgment he is the 
 greatest preacher in Britain. 
 
 The sermon was published—alas, only in 
 part, whole sections of it having been im¬ 
 promptu—in a volume entitled Our Only 
 Safeguard; but like most printed sermons, it 
 
John A. Hutton 43 
 
 lacks the inspiration of the occasion and the 
 transfiguration of personality. The sermon 
 was read, as is the usual—though not in¬ 
 variable—habit of the preacher; but for the 
 last twenty minutes he forgot his manuscript 
 entirely, and plunged into the dark forest of 
 Russian literature—which he has studied more 
 profoundly than any man in the modern pulpit 
 —to the heart-shaking scene in the fifth 
 chapter of the fifth book of The Brothers 
 Karamazov, by Dostoevsky, where the spirit 
 of anti-Christ, incarnated in the Grand In¬ 
 quisitor, is face to face with Christ. The faces 
 of the audience seemed ashy grey as they saw 
 the Christ-spirit grapple with ultimate Evil 
 wearing the robes of the church. It made the 
 very soul shiver. The sentences of the preacher 
 flashed like lightning. He crouched behind 
 the pulpit, his face livid with all the sinister 
 suggestions of the scene, as the cool, cunning 
 Spirit of Evil defied Christ in his own name! 
 As a commentary on the temptation of Jesus, 
 which he had taken for his text, it was over¬ 
 whelming. Then his whole being lighted up 
 as he saw, and made all who heard him see, the 
 incredible might of the Spirit of Love which, 
 
44 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 on the cross, revealed a power equal to the 
 darkest tragedy and the most desperate tempta¬ 
 tion of human life. After the service, to an 
 eager group in the vestry, he discoursed of 
 Russia and its spiritual history and message. 
 His knowledge of all things Russian was amaz¬ 
 ing, and his talk about it was one of the 
 wonders of conversational genius. 
 
 Often it has been said that Dr. Hutton—like 
 F. W. Robertson—is a preacher to preachers; 
 and that is true indeed, but in many other 
 senses than the saying usually implies. To go 
 through any of his many volumes, with their 
 instinct for the right subject and their fertile 
 actuality of treatment—their wealth of spiri¬ 
 tual insight, intellectual surprise, and literary 
 grace—is at once to understand why so many 
 preachers are keen students of him. He sug¬ 
 gests to them the kind of theme they find it 
 worthwhile to talk about, and, without abrogat¬ 
 ing the necessity of their own thought, he sets 
 their minds travelling on all kinds of stimulat¬ 
 ing roads. Everywhere he goes he opens 
 doors, and there is hardly a page on which he 
 does not set a lighted candle down beside some 
 dark text, or some dark experience, and leave 
 
John A, Hutton 45 
 
 it burning. But he does more. It was a saying 
 of Joseph Parker that any man who preaches 
 to broken hearts preaches to the times; and in 
 the widest and profoundest sweep of that spirit 
 Dr. Hutton preaches to the times in which we 
 live. Not only does he bring to our troubled 
 age the grace of insight and the comfort of 
 great ideas, but he reads the signs of the age 
 as few men are able to do. For skilled, pene¬ 
 trating diagnosis of present-day symptoms— 
 as in his volume, Discerning the Times —he 
 is one of our first men; and there is no flimsy 
 sentimentalism or superficiality about his pre¬ 
 scriptions, which is another way of saying that 
 he sets “the times” in the perspective of Time, 
 linking passing moods and events with abiding 
 realities. 
 
 Few people realise how much the man in the 
 pulpit preaches to himself, and what a struggle 
 goes on in his heart in respect of the faith that 
 makes us men. With some it is a moral 
 struggle, with some temperamental obscura¬ 
 tions, with some intellectual difficulties; and 
 not a few men of saintly character have re¬ 
 mained uncertain to the end. They walked by 
 faith, not by knowledge. “Rabbi” Duncan, of 
 
46 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 Edinburgh, called himself to the last an in¬ 
 tellectual sceptic. Life had for him on one side 
 a precipice, down to the abysses, but on the 
 other side his feet were on the rock; and that 
 rock was experience. It is still a matter of 
 debate whether Newman was not in intellect a 
 sceptic, as in heart he was a mystic. Even a 
 casual student of Joseph Parker must feel in 
 him the stress of a struggle never adjourned— 
 “an atheism within a theism,” as he called it— 
 and if he did not become a saint, he had it in 
 him to be a thorough-going sceptic, as well as 
 a great sinner. So it is with Dr. Plutton, in 
 whom one finds so little of that over-belief 
 which to men who live in the thick of things 
 often sounds like cant, or else like a fourth 
 dimension . 2 Such struggles make him a helper 
 of others who are not strong swimmers, and if 
 he has great compassion it is because he knows 
 
 2 This does not mean that Dr. Hutton is in his heart a 
 sceptic,—far from it!—but simply that he knows the nature 
 of faith, and prefers its risk and peril and moral urgency to 
 the paralysis of dead certainty; as the Pope, in The Ring and 
 the Book, prayed to be delivered from “the torpor of assur¬ 
 ance.” His position is wlell set forth in “Further Thoughts from 
 my Note-book on Newman,” which appears as an addendum to 
 his Pilgrims of Faith. Faith stands midway between denial 
 and credulity, both of which mean the end of adventure and 
 entreaty. Dr. Hutton agrees with Emerson when he said that 
 God has given us the choice “between truth and repose,” 
 whereas half the modern world is seeking repose. 
 
John A. Hutton 47 
 
 that every man fights a hard fight—often 
 against heavy odds. 
 
 One does not wonder at the enthusiasm of 
 Dr. Hutton for Browning, which permeated so 
 much of his earlier preaching and writing. 
 Like that mighty poet, he, too, sees with un¬ 
 flinching eye the risk and adventure of faith, 
 the pathos and peril of our mortal strife, 
 vividly aware of the contradictions and des¬ 
 perate enigmas which life flings in the teeth of 
 the soul. He, too, sees life as one might see 
 a man from whom one expected kindness and 
 friendship doing brutal, outrageous things, 
 and offering closed lips and averted eyes to all 
 demands for an explanation. The man is an 
 enemy, then, and we are at his mercy? 
 
 “Hush, I pray you! 
 
 What if this friend happen to be—God?” 
 
 To know the meaning of that “Hush” in his 
 own heart, to be able to say it convincingly, so 
 that a man who is being buffeted and blud¬ 
 geoned by hard lot, or beshadowed by deep 
 grief, can believe it and take hope—surely that 
 is the highest service which a man can render 
 to his fellows. Of that finest of all arts Dr. 
 
48 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 Hutton is a master; he knows how to comfort 
 men in the true sense, that is, not merely to 
 soothe, but to strengthen, fortify, establish. At 
 any rate, no man living can preach to me as he 
 can, in certain moods, doubly so when he pins 
 me to the wall and forces me to face the facts 
 of the moral life, bringing to bear his power 
 of spiritual analysis, his gift for tracking the 
 subtler movements of the soul, its hidden 
 motives, its push and pull of resolution, its blind 
 thoughts we know not nor can name, and what 
 Woolman called “the stop in the mind.” 
 
 For the same reason that Dr. Hutton lent his 
 soul to Browning in the earlier years, he now 
 turns to the great Russians, and especially to 
 Dostoevsky, whom he regards as the profound- 
 est spiritual genius of recent centuries. The 
 Russians, he thinks, come near to forming an 
 exception to the law that no man can see God 
 and live. Some of them have almost seen Him 
 and have lived to tell what they saw. The last 
 time I heard him he had been reading a Rus¬ 
 sian book in which it seemed that the last truth 
 of things was revealed with a thoroughness 
 and unflinchingness of which we in the West 
 are incapable. The book itself was a huddled 
 
John A. Hutton 49 
 
 and tumultuous business, apparently without 
 plot, the interest being created and sustained by 
 the sharpness of the author’s psychology. The 
 writer—whose name he did not give—had 
 created a truly wonderful effect by making all 
 his characters run away from the things which 
 they knew and acknowledged to be perfectly 
 true. Looking superficially at the book, one 
 would say that it was disjointed, unstable, and 
 futile, but beneath the surface it held a lesson 
 which few western writers could enforce. 
 Christ was not mentioned in the book from first 
 to last, but nevertheless he pervaded the whole 
 of it, as he does so much of Russian literature, 
 just as Julius Caesar, while making only a 
 fugitive appearance in the Shakespeare play 
 of that title, is felt in every line of it. From 
 such a delineation of the unmentioned but 
 acknowledged Christ, from whom men run 
 away in fear, not of him, but of themselves, he 
 made us understand how even now, in spite of 
 its apparent rejection of him, Christ is over¬ 
 coming the world. A book by Dr. Hutton— 
 and his friends will never let him rest until 
 he writes it—interpreting the soul of Russia in 
 its literature, and most of all the Russian ex- 
 
50 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 perience of Christ, would introduce us to a new 
 home of ideas—ideas, too, of such a kind that 
 they may yet heal this tortured world of ours 
 as with a balm . 3 
 
 It is a criticism of Dr. Hutton, and also a 
 
 3 Since this essay was written Dr. Hutton has published his 
 lectures on preaching—“conversations,” he prefers to call 
 them—delivered to divinity students at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, 
 and Glasgow, under the title, That the Ministry be not Blamed. 
 It is a brilliant book, rich in personal revelation, and if one 
 may not follow all the methods he recommends—as to reading, 
 for example—he may well be tenacious of methods which 
 have been so fruitful in his own ministry. More than once he 
 speaks of “the Great Russians who know everything, and who 
 know so much about the soul of man indeed that our most 
 subtle minds, minds like Meredith’s even, seem heavy and 
 half awake.” His indebtedness to Browning is celebrated 
 with rejoicing gratitude, in a passage which is also a plea 
 for the ministry as a vocation: 
 
 “Surely it is no time for a sensitive man who knows history, 
 and who knows his own soul, to hesitate on the threshold 
 of this ancient career. Probably never in the history of man 
 was the great and final question about life at stake as it is 
 today. All our questions fall back upon deeper questions, and 
 these on deeper still, until they pause before the great and 
 Awful question as to what this life of ours means. Are we 
 human beings irrelevant to this vast system which was our 
 cradle and becomes our grave? Or is there a blessed hy¬ 
 pothesis which thinking, feeling men can honourably hold—a 
 hypothesis which without robbing life of its mystery and 
 awe ends for us its aching ambiguity? May we speak 
 to men of God? There is one solving word for this universe: 
 it is God. There is one solving word for God: it is Christ. 
 
 I am sorry for you men that you have no great poet, as 
 we had, to set your Christian blood leaping, and disposing you 
 almost to dance before the Lord. We had Browning: for 
 whom be all thanks to God for ever and for ever. And 
 Browning spent his whole life and wrote seventeen volumes 
 to this and no other effect: 
 
 While I see day succeed the deepest night— 
 
 How can I speak but as I know?—my speech 
 Must be, throughout the darkness, ‘It will end: 
 
 The light that did burn, will burn!’ ” 
 
John A. Hutton 51 
 
 tribute to him, that, rich as his sermons and 
 essays are, they seem too much like by-products 
 to be accepted as his final contribution to the 
 religious thought of his time. All his friends 
 feel that he has it in him to do some great 
 thing in behalf of the life of faith—a thing 
 which no one else can do—and for this they are 
 waiting. So rare a blend of spiritual and 
 literary resource, so unique a gift of insight 
 and expression, which have given him an in¬ 
 fluence and power such as few preachers can 
 command, ought to be employed at full stretch 
 on the problems to which the modern mind is 
 so sensitive. The best promise of a fulfilment 
 of this demand, so far, is his series of lectures 
 on The Proposal of Jesus, which sets the life 
 and ministry of the Master in a new and re¬ 
 vealing light. It is one of the most fruitful 
 books of recent times, suggestive even in its 
 discursiveness, and one which no one can read 
 without feeling anew that the hope of the world 
 is that we may yet discover what Christianity 
 is. In this discovery and interpretation of the 
 religion of Jesus, Dr. Hutton, now in the prime 
 and splendour of his powers—richly endowed, 
 radiant in his insight and personality—ought 
 
52 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 to have a great part. He himself, with that 
 divination of the deeper trend of things which 
 is so marked a trait of his genius, feels that 
 we are on the eve of unpredictable revelations 
 and advances in the faith and fortune of our 
 humanity. As we may read in a passage of 
 which I am fond: 
 
 “1 sometimes think that in a great, wholesale 
 way we are all of us about to make a wonder¬ 
 ful discovery. At times it seems to me as 
 though we were on the edge and moment of a 
 world-shaking revolution in thought and mood. 
 For a long time now we have been feeling our 
 way in a vast, unlit corridor, contending with 
 others in the dark, striking out at shapes which 
 seem to be wishing to do us harm, when all the 
 time they, like ourselves, may only have been 
 out upon their business, and, like us, in the 
 dark. I sometimes think that in answer to the 
 cry of our present distress a light is once more 
 about to shine: and by this light we shall see 
 again an open door, and beyond this door the 
 fair earth and sky. I sometimes think that 
 we are all of us on the point of making the 
 discovery that our Christianity is true, and that 
 for mankind to oppose it or neglect it, is for 
 mankind in the long run—and a long run is 
 needed for the testing of principles—to rush 
 down a steep place and to perish.” 
 
III. Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s 
 
 At a meeting of the Whitefriars Club one 
 night Dean Inge read an essay on immortality.: 
 It was an able essay, of course, albeit so ab¬ 
 stract and difficult to follow that it left the 
 company puzzled, if not depressed. The eternal 
 hope seemed as remote as a star, as vague as a 
 dream, and so attenuated as to be hardly desir¬ 
 able at all. No one had the courage to start 
 the discussion, until Bernard Shaw made bold 
 to say that having lived sixty years, or there¬ 
 abouts, he was not encouraged to go on by such 
 a prospect. It was too awful to contemplate, 
 and he proceeded to advocate the organisation 
 of a Suicide Club. The essay, or an elaboration 
 of it, appeared in Outspoken Essays —one of 
 the few books of our day which will be read 
 fifty years hence—and the impish attitude of 
 Shaw, who is never more happy than when he 
 can gibe a dean or a bishop, may be inferred 
 from his review of that volume. Among other 
 saucy things, he said: 
 
 53 
 
54 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 These essays, dazzling as they are, have done 
 much to confirm me in a conviction which has 
 been deepening in me for years, that what we 
 call secondary education as practised in our 
 public schools and universities is destructive to 
 any but the strongest minds, and even to them 
 is disastrously confusing. I find in the minds 
 of all able and original men and women who 
 have been so educated, a puzzling want of 
 homogeneity. They are full of chunks of un¬ 
 assimilated foreign bodies which are more 
 troublesome and dangerous than the vacancies 
 I find in the minds of those who have not been 
 educated at all. I prefer a cavity to a cancer 
 or a calculus: it is capable of being filled with 
 healthy tissue and is not malignant. In the 
 mind of the dean, which is quite unmistakably 
 a splendid mind, I find the most ridiculous sub¬ 
 stances, as if, after the operation of educating 
 him, the surgeon-pedagogue had forgotten to 
 remove his sponges and instruments and sewn 
 them up inside him. 
 
 There is no doubt that Dean Inge is one of 
 the greatest minds on the British Isles; but if 
 his thinking does not give one quite the im¬ 
 pression of hopeless confusion which Shaw de¬ 
 scribed, it does set one wondering over that 
 extraordinary bundle of antinomies we call the 
 human intellect. An aristocrat by nature and 
 training, he has the knack of catching the ear 
 
Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s 55 
 
 of the crowd, as much by the vivid colors he 
 employs as by the challenge of his thought. If 
 not actually a pessimist in his temperament, he 
 is at least a Cassandra—doomed to tell the 
 bitter truth and have nobody believe it—whose 
 dismal outlook entitles him to be called “the 
 gloomy dean,” a title given as a reward for his 
 remarkable lectures on The Church and the 
 Age. One such prophet, if no more, is needed 
 in every generation, and we are sorely in need 
 of one in America, if only to mitigate our easy, 
 evasive optimism which plays ostrich in the 
 face of dark facts. A great Christian teacher, 
 the dean seems to contradict in one breath what 
 he says in the next; so much so that the 
 Methodist Times, after reading his Romanes 
 Lecture on Progress, was moved to ask: 
 “Has Dean Inge heard of the gospel?” A 
 rationalist who relegates miracles to “the 
 sphere of pious opinion,” he is an apostle of a 
 lofty, if somewhat severe, spirituality; and at 
 the very moment when one expects his shrewd, 
 positive mind to be dogmatic, he “slips through 
 the stile of religious imagination to gather 
 moon-flowers betwixt dusk and dawn.” 
 
 The surprise was general when the dean 
 
56 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 chose Christian mysticism as the theme of his 
 Bampton Lectures; and if at first reading he 
 did not seem to get beyond the fringe of the 
 subject, interest soon shifted from the thesis 
 to the personality of the author. It was aston¬ 
 ishing that one of his type of mind, who ap¬ 
 parently had not the slightest suspicion that 
 “they see not clearest who see all things clear/’ 
 should undertake such a study. But a further 
 reading revealed an odd mixture of rationalism 
 and spiritual immediacy, and in spite of his 
 criticisms of the excesses and excrescences of 
 mysticism, the sober web of his thought was 
 shot through with the glow and fire of the 
 reality he sought to expound. Since that time 
 there have been many manuals of mysticism, 
 some wise, some not wise. Evelyn Underhill 
 is scholarly, weighty, noble, though a medie¬ 
 valist ; E. Herman is worth looking into, albeit 
 too much inclined to cleverness—like a juggler 
 doing tricks with the Pearl of Eternity. The 
 great masterpiece in exposition of mysticism in 
 our day is The Way of Divine Union , by A. 
 E. Waite, who writes from the inside and with 
 the winged wisdom of a poet, as one who has 
 in his experience that which gives him the key 
 
Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s 57 
 
 to much that is hidden from others. But Dean 
 Inge led the way in the study of mysticism, and 
 it is his subtle, shy affinity with the mystics that 
 makes him a worthy successor to a great 
 dynasty of deans, and the one voice to which all 
 England listens. 
 
 As a preacher Dean Inge is singularly ef¬ 
 fective, if one forgets the most amazing 
 mannerisms ever seen in a pulpit, and attends 
 to the matter of his discourse. With clear-cut, 
 ascetic face, scholarly in bearing, looking taller 
 than he is, he has a sober, dry-eyed, didactic 
 personality, and an elocution atrocious in its 
 angularity. As he rises to read his sermon— 
 often without noticing that the audience is 
 present—that straight, level, self-contained 
 look makes no appeal, and the thin, flexible lips 
 seem made to set inferior folk right on no very 
 gentle terms. He makes little concession to 
 dulness or ignorance. As he reads on, his 
 facial expression suggests a contortionist, as 
 he launches his clear, carrying voice—rather 
 rasping at times, owing, no doubt, to his deaf¬ 
 ness—into the vast spaces of the cathedral. 
 His attitude is one of aristocratic carelessness, 
 as if he trusted to the vaults and pillars to bear 
 
58 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 his message, but is not greatly concerned 
 whether they do or not. His matter is a com¬ 
 pound of epigram and paradox, or mordant wit 
 and rapier-like satire, matching the tartness of 
 his tones. His humour is of the intellectual 
 variety, and more often than not with a sting 
 in its tail. Without wasting a word, in a style 
 as incisive as his thought—clear, concise, keen¬ 
 cutting—he sets forth the truth as he sees it. 
 There is no unction in his preaching, no pathos. 
 It is cold intellect, with never a touch of tender¬ 
 ness. Much of what he says is more able than 
 weighty, more brilliant than moving, leaving 
 one wiser rather than better, abashed rather 
 than lifted. Yet, at rare intervals, in the 
 middle of a lecture, there is sometimes a brief 
 unveiling, and one sees the prophet-soul behind 
 the superficial habit of sardonic criticism and 
 pungent epigram. 
 
 So the Dean of St. Paul's stands before us 
 with his dry, biting speech, his formidable sar¬ 
 casm, his alarming air of finality, his startling 
 gift of characterisation, and even in his 
 gentlest moods one feels a bleak wind round the 
 corner. It would not do for all preachers to be 
 of his order. Men need comfort as well as 
 
Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s 59 
 
 castigation. Yet what austere sincerity is his, 
 what intrepid courage, what weight of clear 
 judgment, what prophetic power! His quality 
 is that of the Hebrew prophets, with more of 
 Jeremiah than of Isaiah in his spiritual outlook, 
 and if he inspires less affection than any great 
 preacher of his time, it is due partly to his for¬ 
 bidding temperament, but chiefly to his habit of 
 exploding shams and absurdities. Using the 
 flail of John the Baptist, he is a gift of God to 
 our age with its “Lo, here” and “Lo, there,” 
 and every kind of fad runs rife. The dean is 
 unconcerned about majorities, impervious to 
 popular feeling. Indeed, one suspects that he 
 is uncomfortable in a majority, like the elder 
 statesman who, when his speech was applauded 
 by the multitude, asked uneasily, “Have I said 
 anything very foolish?” Anyway, he holds 
 it to be a maxim that “the church can rarely 
 co-operate with a popular movement,” by which 
 he means that it can seldom tread the path of 
 success, and never because it is the path of suc¬ 
 cess. Unfortunately his bald veracity is not 
 graced by the genius of speaking the truth in 
 love, and he utters hard sayings regardless of 
 consequences; but he will not compromise his 
 
6o Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 gospel. During the Great War, when so many 
 churchmen of all communions took low ground, 
 he never mitigated by one iota the severity of 
 the Christian message. Later, when so many 
 pandered to the growing power of the labour 
 movement, the dean stood firm, refusing to 
 weaken his gospel in the service of a political 
 party. It did not matter that he was denounced 
 as an obstinate obscurantist; he upheld the 
 dignity of a faith which commands, and can 
 never be subject to the experiences of the hour. 
 Every right-thinking man must honour the 
 dean for his unyielding tenacity to principle; 
 but at times he seems to stand so straight that 
 he leans backward. Even before he has uttered 
 a word against it one knows that he despises 
 democracy and has no faith in it, because it 
 smells of the mob. Certainly he does not be¬ 
 lieve that the majority is right, much less that 
 massed ignorance makes wisdom. Often he 
 seems to identify democracy with socialism, if 
 not with demagogy, and he smites both with 
 the swift sword of his satire. Not that he is 
 opposed to social reform. He would indeed 
 build the City of God “in England's green and 
 pleasant land"; but always with the tools of the 
 
Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s 6l 
 
 spirit Nor does this attitude mean, as his 
 critics are so ready to infer, that Christianity 
 should be the fortress and bulwark of aristoc¬ 
 racy. Far from it. His point is that the 
 church must be ready, if need be, to incur the 
 antagonism of old aristocracy and the vitupera¬ 
 tions of young demos alike, truckling to neither. 
 She must not cringe to the masses in our day 
 as she once did to the classes; must not seek to 
 be applauded by a multitude who demanded the 
 crucifixion of her Master, and could demand 
 it again—that is the core of a message de¬ 
 livered with needless acerbity, invective and 
 scorn. It is a sound message and one sorely 
 needed in our day, unpalatable though it be. 
 But like all men of wisdom, the dean has his 
 defects, his blind spots, the chief of which— 
 as one might have guessed—is an incredible 
 astigmatism with respect to the social meaning 
 and application of Christianity. Take, for ex¬ 
 ample, his lecture on “The Kingdom of God in 
 the World,” and one feels that the gibe of 
 Bernard Shaw was well nigh justified. 
 
 Can we point to any recognisable type of 
 character and belief and say, This is Chris¬ 
 tianity? We might try. Say that belief in 
 
62 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 the fatherhood of God, in the brotherhood of 
 man, in the sacredness and eternal importance 
 of the essential part of each personality; the 
 immeasurable superiority of moral goodness to 
 any worldly advantages; love as the crown of 
 all the virtues; selfishness as the root of 
 sin; hypocrisy, hard-heartedness and prudent 
 worldliness as the three things our Lord hated 
 most, trust in God and joy even in affliction; 
 the simple life; the love of wisdom; accumula¬ 
 tions of money a snare to their owner; the 
 great renunciation,—he that will save his life 
 shall lose it, and he that will lose his life shall 
 save it—and what Matthew Arnold calls the 
 method of inwardness—these do seem to be 
 enough for a fairly clear notion of what a real 
 Christian is like, and in considering the in¬ 
 fluence of Christianity on the social order this 
 is also important: that the gospel works by 
 personal influence upon the will and affections 
 and not by external machinery. Jesus left no 
 book, no code, no system: he wrote his gospel 
 on the hearts of men. A slow method? Yes, 
 it is a slow method: it is not easy to change 
 people, but that was the method he chose—like 
 the ancient torch race in which the wearied 
 runner handed on his torch to someone else to 
 carry on. The Christian religion is not taught; 
 it is caught from someone who has it. 
 
 The preaching of this gospel is and always 
 has been the great business of the church. All 
 Christians must agree in combating, for ex- 
 
Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s 63 
 
 ample, all exploitation and ruining of souls 
 all that great network of co-operative guilt 
 with limited liability which makes up so much 
 of secular society. But when we are invited 
 to go further and take sides as a church in mat¬ 
 ters in which good and wise men are divided, 
 the case is different. I am not suggesting for 
 a moment that Christians should not have 
 political opinions. I am speaking of organised 
 Christianity as such, and I say deliberately that 
 Christians ought not to organise themselves 
 as Christians for any particular social or 
 political propaganda. We do not want a power¬ 
 ful political church again, whether run by 
 Catholics or Independents. Christianity is a 
 leaven, it can never be more. Our Lord made 
 that absolutely plain, that he never expected to 
 have the majority on his side. Our Lord never 
 gave any reason to suppose the church would 
 ever be successful in winning the masses as 
 such. He never gave any reason to think there 
 would ever be an inconvenient crowd gathered 
 round the narrow gate. Therefore all this kind 
 of clerical demagogy and democracy is funda¬ 
 mentally contrary to his method, and it is, 
 though many good people think otherwise, a 
 treachery against his teaching. 
 
 There we have it “plain and flat,” as Lowell 
 would say; on the one side a powerful political 
 church to be avoided, and on the other not even 
 a co-operative conscience with limited liability 
 
64 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 to match the organised iniquity of the world. 
 In short, every protest of the church against 
 political infamy, every effort of Christians— 
 other than individual—in behalf of juster, 
 wiser, more merciful laws, every attempt of 
 the pulpit to translate the teachings of Jesus 
 into practical social justice is, as Dean Inge 
 sees it under the glorious dome of St. Paul’s, 
 a form of treachery and demagogy. “What 
 can we do?” is surely a fair question, and the 
 dean answers it in his closing lecture on “The 
 Church and the Age,” from which we learn, 
 after a merciless flaying of nearly every for¬ 
 ward-looking movement of our time, that “the 
 whole duty of the church is to hold up the 
 Christian view of life, the Christian standard 
 of values, steadily before the eyes” of the 
 people, laying emphasis upon love, sympathy, 
 economy, sincerity, holy living, “setting a good 
 example” for the poorer members of our own 
 class, and indirectly for “the class below,” upon 
 charity, prayer, and the duty of helping to form 
 a moral public opinion against the evils of fool¬ 
 ish fashions, gambling, and the like. More 
 specifically, three avenues of influence seem to 
 be open to Christian enterprise, three modern 
 
Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s 65 
 
 tendencies with which “we, as church people, 
 may co-operate and assist.” They are the 
 breaking down of class barriers, the spread of 
 education, and the care of public health, and 
 especially the support of the new science of 
 eugenics! Such is the programme of the Chris¬ 
 tian church, as outlined in the old grey cathe¬ 
 dral of England, at a time when the world is 
 shattered by universal war, disfigured by in¬ 
 dustrial brutality, plundered by greed, and 
 staggering under the shadow of a vast despair! 
 One recalls the word of Carlyle: “The world 
 asks of its church in these times, more passion¬ 
 ately than of any other institution, the ques¬ 
 tion—Canst thou teach us or not?” 
 
 Howbeit, my purpose here is not to argue 
 with Dean Inge, but simply to portray his out¬ 
 look and art as a preacher. He stands for a 
 point of view—held by many noble and true 
 hearted men—which, if held by all, would make 
 the church an arcana celestia of a barren and 
 immovable conservatism; but that is not the 
 attitude of the church of today and it never 
 will be! Jesus was not put to death for laying 
 emphasis upon love, sympathy, prayer, and the 
 doing of good, but for making a definite pro- 
 
66 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 posal for the public policy of the world; and 
 if following him leads the church to Calvary, 
 it is not better than its leader. For the char¬ 
 acter, the scholarship, and the noble prophetic 
 courage of Dean Inge, we give thanks, but we 
 refuse to follow him in his advocacy of “the 
 public impotence of religion/' His fame will 
 outlive his defects, and the stones he has laid 
 will abide as a foundation for other and per¬ 
 haps more genial workers. One such stone is 
 his vision of a church truly one, not in organ¬ 
 isation or creed or ritual, but because drawn to 
 communion through a profound veneration and 
 love for its Master. He has taught us out of 
 long and deep study that the mystics all tell 
 the same tale; all climb the same mountain, and 
 their witness agrees together. All ages, all 
 sects, all languages are blended harmoniously 
 on that shining Jacob's ladder which scales the 
 heavens in far other fashion than was ever 
 dreamed of by the builders of Babel. Despite 
 the deflections of his insight, he has interpreted 
 that eternal religion which is the original divine 
 poetry, whereof our theologies are imperfect 
 translations, summing it up in a golden passage 
 which Bernard Shaw was “wicked” enough to 
 
Dean Inge, of St. Paul’s 67 
 
 say is one of the rare intervals of inspiration 
 enjoyed by the dean in the midst of the years: 
 
 It allows us what George Meredith calls “the 
 rapture of the forward view.” It brings home 
 to us the meaning of the promise of Christ that 
 there are many things yet hid from humanity 
 which will in the future be revealed by the 
 Spirit of Truth. It encourages us to hope that 
 for each individual who is trying to live the 
 right life the venture of faith will be progres¬ 
 sively justified in experience. It breaks down 
 the denominational barriers which divide men 
 and women who worship the Father in spirit 
 and in truth—barriers which become more 
 senseless in each generation, since they no 
 longer correspond even approximately with 
 real differences of belief or of religious 
 temperament. It makes the whole world kin 
 by offering a pure religion which is substan¬ 
 tially the same in all climates and in all ages— 
 a religion too divine to be fettered by any man¬ 
 made formulas, too nobly human to be readily 
 acceptable to men in whom the ape and tiger 
 are still alive, but which finds a congenial home 
 in the purified spirit which is the throne of the 
 Godhead. Such is the type of faith which is 
 astir among us. It makes no imposing show in 
 church conferences; it does not fill our churches 
 and chapels; it has no organisation, no propa¬ 
 ganda; it is for the most passively loyal, with¬ 
 out much enthusiasm, to the institutions among 
 
68 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 which it finds itself. But in reality it has over¬ 
 leapt all barriers; it knows its true spiritual 
 kin; and amid the strifes and perplexities of 
 a sad, troublous time it can always cover its 
 hope and confidence by ascending in heart and 
 mind to the heaven which is closer to it than 
 breathing, and nearer than hands and feet, 
 
IV: Charles E. Jefferson 
 
 It so happened that I heard Dr. Jefferson 
 preach just after I had read his four golden 
 books of counsel and guidance in the matter of 
 preaching. 1 It was an interesting experience, 
 like listening to a master painter lecture 
 on painting, and then watching him paint a pic¬ 
 ture ; and never did practice fulfil precept more 
 perfectly. Those four books, if taken together, 
 form the best course of practical instruction 
 for a young minister with which I am ac¬ 
 quainted, as much for their fraternal spirit as 
 for their plain-spoken wisdom. They have the 
 ring of reality, the tang of experience, as of 
 one who is not spinning a theory but telling us 
 what he has learned by living. Uniting a 
 heavenly vision with homely common sense, 
 they show us how, since we have this treasure 
 
 1 The Minister as Shepherd and The Minister as Prophet 
 were lectures delivered at the Bangor Theological Seminary; 
 The Building of the Church was the Yale lectures for 1910; 
 while Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers is a series of familiar 
 talks in the study, telling things that laymen need not hear. 
 
 69 
 
70 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 in earthen vessels, we must make the vessel fit 
 for the divine use. A little book long famous 
 in English literature was entitled A Mirror 
 for Magistrates; and these books are a Mir¬ 
 ror for Ministers, showing the things that help 
 and the faults that mar the ministry—a mir¬ 
 ror held in a wise and brotherly hand. 
 
 Some of us regard The Building of the 
 Church as one of the best of all the historic 
 series of Yale Lectures, if only because it ap¬ 
 proaches the preacher through the church. 
 There we see the preacher against the back¬ 
 ground of “organised preaching” in which his 
 labor is enshrined; in the environment of faith 
 and prophecy of which he is both the creation 
 and the interpreter. The thesis of the lectures, 
 expounded with characteristic lucidity of in¬ 
 sight and style, is that preaching involves not 
 one man only, but a society of men and women. 
 The sermon does not grow out of the soul of 
 the preacher alone, but out of the deep heart 
 of the church. It is not the preacher who 
 makes the church; it is the church which makes 
 the preacher. He does not shape himself, but 
 is moulded by the communal life and faith of 
 a body of believers, and gives back what he 
 
Charles E. Jefferson 71 
 
 receives. The church in her corporate experi¬ 
 ence is his mother, to whom he owes his life 
 of faith, and, by the same token, a life of loy¬ 
 alty. He is not an isolated individual, but an 
 organ functioning in an organism; and his 
 ministry belongs to him not alone by virtue of 
 his temperament, his poetic gift, or his social 
 passion, but as an endowment of the church of 
 God whose son and servant he is. 
 
 With this thesis fresh in my mind, when I 
 entered the “Skyscraper Church,” as the 
 Broadway Tabernacle is called by the New 
 York papers, I felt that I was approaching 
 Dr. Jefferson through the great church which, 
 in its present form and influence, is the crea¬ 
 tion of his faith as a leader and his acumen as 
 an executive, no less than of his genius as a 
 preacher. When he came to New York in 1898 
 he found a church living almost wholly in the 
 past, and stifling in a neighbourhood quite un¬ 
 favourable to growth. He made certain de¬ 
 mands as conditions of his acceptance—there 
 was, I am told, a three months' option clause, 
 long since forgotten by both pastor and people 
 —and from that uncertain beginning, in spite 
 of the swelling tides of alien populations, and 
 
72 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 the swiftly shifting conditions of New York, 
 the church has grown, and the preacher has 
 grown with it, until today it is a bulwark of 
 righteousness, a shrine of faith and a throne 
 of power, in the greatest city of America. If 
 Emerson was right when he said that every 
 institution is the lengthened shadow of a man, 
 the building at Fifty-sixth Street, with its mod¬ 
 ern appointments and equipment, and still more 
 the noble Christian community, whose gra¬ 
 cious, wholesome, creative activities take so 
 many forms of fruitful service, is the incarna¬ 
 tion of the spirit, personality and constructive 
 vision of its minister. Such a ministry, so 
 wisely and quietly wrought, rich in insight and 
 enterprise, deserves to be celebrated with grati¬ 
 tude and joy by the whole church of every 
 name. 
 
 The New York papers are wont to describe 
 Dr. Jefferson as stern, cold, unbending, an old- 
 time Puritan pastor in whose thought modern¬ 
 ism has no place, and whose methods are as 
 masterful as his personality. It is a strange 
 caricature, as alien to the spirit of the preacher 
 as it is unlike the Puritans whose history he 
 knows as few others. He does embody the 
 
Charles E. Jefferson 73 
 
 heroic Puritan tradition, and if there is any¬ 
 place on earth where such a minister is needed 
 more than another, it is in our gay and giddy- 
 paced metropolis, in the garish glitter of 
 Broadway. They err who think him stern, 
 cold, or unbending; though, as he sits in the 
 pulpit, his appearance does give one an impres¬ 
 sion of firmness, if not of austerity. But as he 
 begins to speak his rugged face is illumined 
 by an inner brightness, and one discovers that 
 it is the firmness of strength, of poise, of seren¬ 
 ity, suffused by a great gentleness, and touched 
 by that elusive magnetic quality so impossible 
 to define. On that long-gone Sunday morning 
 the Tabernacle was full, the men outnumber¬ 
 ing the women—young men, especially, to 
 whom the preacher is so attractive. If, as 
 Delsarte once said, “mediocrity is not the too 
 little, but the too much,” Dr. Jefferson is a 
 genius in the conduct of public worship. The 
 service was simple, natural, satisfying, rich 
 without being ornate, reverent without being 
 formal; and it did what every service of social 
 worship is intended to do. It welded an audi¬ 
 ence into a congregation, wooing us out of our 
 
74 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 lonely isolation into liberty and joy of fellow¬ 
 ship. 
 
 The sermon had to do with the atonement, 
 and I felt a sense of dismay when he announced 
 the theme, expecting a dull time with an old 
 theological riddle. Having used the word once 
 or twice, he threw it aside, because of the unre¬ 
 alities associated with it, using, instead, the 
 word “reconciliation,” which is nearer to the 
 experience of the New Testament. As a 
 thinker it was plain that he stood in the tradi¬ 
 tion of Clement of Alexandria, and, later, 
 of Schleiermacher, Maurice, Wordsworth, and 
 Coleridge, to whom the incarnation was “the 
 climax of immanence in the world,” and the 
 atonement an age-long process in which God 
 is ever present and all-suffering. The old ideas 
 of the atonement, he said, were either artificial, 
 mechanical, or theatrical. The idea of God 
 underlying them was not only inadequate, but 
 false. Henceforth we must think in terms of 
 fatherhood, drawing our analogies not from 
 the courthouse and the counting-room, but 
 from the deepest, holiest realities of life,, 
 Quite frankly the preacher gave us more than 
 one glimpse of the struggle in his own heart in 
 
Charles E. Jefferson 75 
 
 days agone, and how he rebelled against the 
 old dogma: “I would not accept it. I became 
 an infidel. No man can accept a doctrine that 
 darkens his moral sense. I wonder in telling 
 this if I have not spoken the experience of many 
 of you this morning.” Indeed, yes. Some of 
 us knew every footprint along that dark path, 
 and the bitter agony of the way. He told how 
 a minister, who had outgrown the old dogmas, 
 led him to see a clearer vision which set his 
 heart singing. No doubt it was Phillips 
 Brooks, under whose spell he fell as a young 
 man, and by whom he was won from the law 
 to the ministry. What a lawyer he would have 
 made, with his clear incisive intellect, his 
 scrupulous precision as a workman, and his 
 gift of quiet, persuasive eloquence! Another 
 bit of self-revelation came in his reply to those 
 who say that, if God carries the wound of the 
 world in his heart, He cannot be happy: “Of 
 course he cannot be happy. Children are 
 happy, grown people never are. After we have 
 passed over the days of childhood, there is 
 happiness no longer. Some of us have lived 
 too long and borne too much ever to be happy 
 any more.” An undertone of pathos, far 
 
76 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 enough from pessimism—as of one whom the 
 years has taken below the surface of things, 
 some way down into the mystery and sorrow 
 of life—made itself heard all through the ser¬ 
 mon, if the ear that listened was sensitive. It 
 was real preaching, what the English call 
 “preaching of the centre,” heart speaking to 
 heart in words so simple that one felt the im¬ 
 pact of reality. Somehow it recalled a passage 
 in one of his lectures in which he tells what a 
 sermon costs, and how the preacher must live 
 the word of God before he preaches it: 
 
 A sermon is not a manufactured product, but 
 a spiritual creation. It is not a machine which 
 a man can construct in his sermonic shop, and 
 set running in the pulpit like the electric toys 
 which one sees sometimes on the corner of the 
 city street. A sermon is an exhalation, a spir¬ 
 itual vapor emerging from the oceanic depths 
 of the preacher's soul. It is an emanation, an 
 efflux, an effluence flowing from an interior 
 fountain hidden in the depths of personality. 
 It is an efflorescence, an outflowing of beautiful 
 things whose home is in the blood. It is a per¬ 
 fume from spiritual roses blooming in the gar¬ 
 den of the heart. It is a fruit growing on the 
 tree of a man's life. “A good tree cannot bring 
 forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree 
 bring forth good fruit.” Make the tree good. 
 
Charles E. Jefferson 77 
 
 A sermon is the life-blood of a Christian spirit. 
 A preacher dies in the act of preaching. He 
 lays down his life for his brethren. He saves 
 others, himself he cannot save. The pulpit is 
 a Golgotha in which the preacher gives his life 
 for the life of the world. Preaching is a great 
 work. To do it as God wants it done, the 
 preacher must be a good man, full of the Holy 
 Ghost and of faith. 2 
 
 There are those who hold that oratory al¬ 
 ways moves on a more or less low moral plane, 
 and is an exercise perilous alike to the soul of 
 speaker and hearer. Froude, who could not do 
 away with eloquence, thought it nearly always 
 misleading, if not dishonest; and Montaigne 
 was of a similar opinion. Meredith has an 
 epigram sufficiently light, to the effect that 
 oratory “is always the more impressive for the 
 spice of temper which renders it untrust¬ 
 worthy.” 3 Dr. Jefferson shares this distrust 
 of oratory—he so fears unreality—and that, 
 too, in spite of his amazing gift of lucid, fitly 
 coloured, gracious and moving speech. He 
 knows how easily an orator is betrayed into say¬ 
 ing more than he sees, mistaking ornament for 
 
 3 The Building of the Church, Lecture VIII. 
 
 3 Diana of the Crossways, Chap. i. 
 
78 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 insight; a peril which, if unchecked, eats away 
 the moral fibre of a man. He knows that if a 
 man sets out to be eloquent, using oratorical 
 tricks, stratagems and pyrotechnics, he bids 
 good-bye to truth and sincerity. One of his 
 sayings ought to be written in the mind of every 
 young minister: “Never endeavour to be elo¬ 
 quent. It may be that God will let you be 
 eloquent half a dozen times in your life, but 
 I am sure you cannot be eloquent if you try to 
 be.” All of which bespeaks the austere integ¬ 
 rity of the man, his veracity of soul in dealing 
 with the truth, and with the people. For no 
 one has a more vivid sense of the potent, far- 
 reaching influence of true Christian speech, 
 whose word is also a deed, and of which he is 
 one of the noblest masters among us. 
 
 Style, he once said, is perfect when it be¬ 
 comes invisible; and that exactly describes his 
 own style. It puts on no airs, knows no frills, 
 and attracts no attention to itself. It fits his 
 thought as tightly as the skin fits the flesh. 
 There is not a wrinkle, and it is so natural and 
 true that unless you sit before it as a critic and 
 pay close attention, you will not see it at alb 
 Simple, sinewy, flexible, it can preach a ser- 
 
Charles E. Jefferson 79 
 
 man, write an essay, or tell a lovely Christmas 
 story, with equal grace and ease. The style of 
 a preacher is conditioned, of course, by his 
 mental quality and the fashion of his spoken 
 address. Thus, the stately, sweeping periods 
 of Gunsaulus were suited to the uses of his 
 voice; that magnificent organ whose rich and 
 manifold music follows us down the years. In 
 like manner, the diction of Dr. Jefferson is 
 admirably attuned to the character of his de¬ 
 livery, which is clear, gentle, melodious and of 
 varied modulation. He is sparing of gesture; 
 his sentences are short; his language is rich in 
 colour, but its beauty is inwrought rather than 
 decorative. His sermons are not read, but 
 spoken, and that with an air of the utmost ease 
 and spontaneity—like a teacher telling a tale, 
 like a friend persuading you of a high matter. 
 There is passion in his discourse, but it is not 
 of a kind that resembles a torrent of fire. 
 Rather, as was said of John Ker—whom he 
 resembles in many ways—it is like “a warm 
 radiance shining through the windows of a 
 home where strong conviction and quiet faith 
 dwell at peace with understanding and hope 
 and acquaintance with grief.” He does not 
 
80 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 seek to take the mind of an audience by vio¬ 
 lence or to carry it away on an impetuous tide 
 of words. His way is rather to win his hear¬ 
 ers, taking* them captive unawares, showing 
 them the beauty of the gospel and the meaning 
 of their lives, seeking to lead them into the free¬ 
 dom and service of the Master. 
 
 An English writer has recently said that one 
 grave fault of the pulpit of our day, and espe¬ 
 cially in America, is what he picturesquely 
 calls “suburban preaching.” 4 By suburban 
 preaching he does not mean preaching to peo¬ 
 ple who live in the suburbs, but preaching 
 which makes its home on the fringes and out¬ 
 skirts of Christian truth, rather than in the 
 centre and the citadel; preaching that has 
 much to say about the minor moralities, and the 
 passing events of the day, but very little about 
 the great themes of the gospel. If, the writer 
 adds, preachers like Wesley, Newman, Dale, 
 Spurgeon and Liddon have one common word 
 to speak to the pulpit of today it is this: that 
 behind all great preaching there lies always a 
 great gospel greatly conceived. To that list of 
 names he might have added Jefferson, whose 
 
 4 Dr. George Jackson, in The Manchester Guardian. 
 
Charles E. Jefferson 8l 
 
 plea for doctrinal preaching—as in his lecture 
 on ‘'The Place of Dogma in Preaching”—has 
 been fulfilled, in a crowded and versatile minis¬ 
 try, by showing what such preaching should be. 
 Take any of his volumes, such as Doctrine 
 and Deed and The New Crusade —which are 
 an honour to the American pulpit—and you 
 find him dealing with the basic issues of faith, 
 both in their profound significance for thought 
 and in their practical meaning for life. His 
 volume entitled Things Fundamental was a 
 series of Lenten sermons, his custom being to 
 devote that sacred season not merely to pious 
 reverie, but to grappling with the great truths 
 which, like the rock ribs of the earth, underlie 
 and uphold the lives of all Christian men. In¬ 
 deed, in the first sermon I heard him preach 
 there was a passage as apt today as it was well- 
 nigh twenty years ago: 
 
 If Protestantism today is not doing what it 
 ought to do, and is manifesting symptoms 
 which are alarming to Christian leaders, it is 
 because she has in these recent years been en¬ 
 gaged so largely in practical duties as to forget 
 to drink inspiration from the great doctrines 
 which must forever furnish life and strength 
 
82 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 and hope. If you will allow me to prophesy 
 this morning I predict that the preaching of the 
 next fifty years will be far more doctrinal than 
 the preaching of the last fifty years has been. 
 I imagine some of you will shudder at that. 
 You say you do not like doctrinal preaching, 
 you want preaching that is practical. Well, 
 pray, what is practical preaching? ... If 
 you really want practical preaching, the only 
 preaching that is deserving the name is preach¬ 
 ing that deals with the great Christian doc¬ 
 trines. When people say they do not like doc¬ 
 trinal preaching they often mean that they do 
 not like preaching which belongs to the seven¬ 
 teenth or sixteenth centuries. They are not to 
 blame for this. There is nothing that gets 
 stale so soon as preaching. We cannot live on 
 the preaching of a by-gone age. But doctrinal 
 preaching need not be antiquated or belated, it 
 may be fresh, it may be couched in the language 
 in which men were born. And whenever it 
 does this there is no preaching which is so 
 thrilling and uplifting and mighty as that which 
 deals with the great fundamental doctrines. 5 
 
 Some one has said that any regular attend¬ 
 ant at the Broadway Tabernacle could pass an 
 examination on Christian teaching, both as to 
 its ruling ideas and their application to the life 
 of today. It is indeed true, as two recent series 
 
 5 Doctrine and Deed. 
 
Charles E. Jefferson 83 
 
 of sermons may illustrate. One had to do with 
 “Work and Wages/’ and dealt with economic 
 facts and forces in the light of Christian truth, 
 revealing an astonishing knowledge of facts, 
 in a spirit as far removed from an erratic radi¬ 
 calism as from a petrified conservativism., 
 Another series, which ran for more than two 
 months, was entitled “How to Live,” and 
 showed how well and wisely Dr. Jefferson ful¬ 
 fills what the Catholics call the office of Direc¬ 
 tion—that is, specific guidance in the details of 
 practical spiritual life—which, next to hard 
 pastoral work, is one of the greatest needs of 
 the Protestant church. For example, the 
 church tells men to pray, but it does not tell 
 them how to do it. The physician must not 
 simply tell his patients to be well, he must tell 
 them how to live—how to sleep, what to eat, 
 and the rest.) The church ought to do the same 
 for the moral and spiritual life. There are 
 difficulties of course in handling mental and 
 spiritual hygiene in the pulpit, but people need 
 help—definite instruction—and if they do not 
 find it in the church, in their need they will go 
 elsewhere to get it, perhaps to the mercenary 
 quack and the half-baked charlatan. 
 
84 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 Not alone as a builder of faith and character, 
 but equally in behalf of social justice, the fra¬ 
 ternity of classes and the comity of nations, 
 Dr. Jefferson has been a seer-like leader. No 
 preacher in this land has been a more relent¬ 
 less en emy o f war, using fact, reason, satire— 
 every weapon in his bright armory—to fight 
 the fiend. Some of his addresses are memo¬ 
 rable, as when he led a visitor from Mars upon 
 a tour of the earth, taking him behind the 
 scenes in the parliamentary assemblies of the 
 nations, until, disgusted at the duplicity of 
 mankind—mouthing about peace and making 
 ready for war—to hide his horror the Martian 
 boarded a celestial express for a saner planet! 
 What the world-tragedy meant to Dr. Jeffer¬ 
 son, both as a fulfilment of his forebodings and 
 a crucifixion of his ideals, only his brethren 
 who walked through the same valley of shadow 
 can ever know. Not all the casualties of war 
 are on the battlefield; in the hearts of Chris¬ 
 tian men there is devastation and unspeakable 
 woe. Cast down but not destroyed, saddened 
 but not defeated, Dr. Jefferson sought to in¬ 
 terpret the will and truth of God in the awful 
 exegesis of events; hence his volume, What 
 
Charles E. Jefferson 85 
 
 the War has Taught Us. He has been a tower 
 of strength in days of rancour and reaction, 
 and often he alone found the needed word for 
 the hour, as when, on the Sunday following 
 the rejection of the Covenant of the League 
 of Nations by the Senate, he took for his text 
 the words: “And Noah was drunk/' In a 
 fairer, juster day men will turn the pages of 
 his prophetic witness and thank God for a man 
 who was clear-visioned under a cloudy sky, and 
 .whose testimony for righteousness, no less than 
 his rebuke of evil, was uttered with gentleness 
 of heart and the dignity of a golden voice. 
 
 Truly it is a great ministry, worthy of 
 honour in all the churches, its influence more 
 wide-ranging than the minister himself knows, 
 and in ways no art can trace. To his younger 
 brethren—some of whom toil alone in far 
 places-—it is a comfort and joy just to know 
 that he is there, keeping the light of God aglow 
 amid the glare of Broadway. His genius as 
 preacher and pastor is only equalled by his 
 wealth of friendship, his brotherly kindness, 
 his sagacity in counsel, and his leadership in 
 all Christian enterprise. Every man of us 
 
86 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 knows that whoever else may lose heart, let go 
 of faith, or lower the ideal of the minister of 
 Christ, that will Dr. Jefferson never! In days 
 when the church is the target of every kind of 
 calumny, and many fall away, he bids us lift 
 up our hearts, remembering the words of the 
 Lord Jesus how he said: 
 
 “I will build my church.” He is a work. 
 The church is no little private enterprise of 
 ours. It is his. We are colabourers with him., 
 Critics rage and brilliant writers imagine a 
 vain thing. Kings and rulers in divers realms 
 take counsel together and agree that the glory 
 of the church is departing. The Lord holds 
 them in derision. The church is not obsoles¬ 
 cent. Humanity has not outgrown it. Its 
 noon is not behind it. Its triumphal career has 
 only begun. We are toiling amid the mists of 
 the early morning. It is the rising sun that 
 smites our foreheads, and we cannot even 
 dream of the victory which is to be. We work 
 upon an enduring institution. After the flags 
 of republics and empires have been blown to 
 tatters and the earth itself has tasted death, the 
 church of Jesus shall stand forth glorious, free 
 from blemish and mark of decay, the gates of 
 Hades shall not prevail against it. Therefore, 
 my beloved brethren, in these confused and 
 confusing days, be steadfast, immovable in the 
 
Charles E. Jefferson 87 
 
 presence of the world's clamour and rancour, 
 always building your life and the lives of as 
 many as God entrusts to your keeping, into the 
 church of the Lord, for as much as you know 
 that such labour is not in vain in the Lord. 
 
V: W. E. Orchard 
 
 “I tell you what it is. That parson is city- 
 bred, a town man down to the roots of him. If 
 he'd got the sea and the hills in his soul, or the 
 great wide spaces, and if he heard the cry of 
 the wind above the rattle of your beastly old 
 streets, he'd not say much about the things that 
 seem big to him now, and he’d not know how 
 to say enough about some things he gets rid 
 of in five minutes!" 
 
 After such manner a man from the far Back 
 Bush of Australia, who had lived in the great, 
 lonely silences until he had been stripped of all 
 conventionality, but confirmed in the worship 
 and fear of God, spoke of Dr. Orchard in his 
 Enfield days. The man from the Bush never 
 went to church—did not care a hang about it, 
 he said—and at first he was shocked by the 
 sermon, as no anaemic sermon-taster knows 
 how to be shocked. But he soon realised the 
 profound reverence and sincerity of the 
 
 preacher, despite a seeming flippancy and a 
 
 88 
 
W. E. Orchard 89 
 
 love of shocking people, from which he has 
 never recovered. There was a point in the 
 thrust; but it is also true that if Dr. Orchard 
 had the wave in his heart and the cry of the 
 wind in his soul, he would have less to give the 
 restless, nervous, jostled city folk to whom he 
 ministers, and which makes him easily the 
 most picturesque and outstanding figure in the 
 Free Church pulpit of London. 
 
 In the stormy days of the New Theology 
 discussion, hardly an echo of which remains, 
 Dr. Orchard stood with R. J. Campbell, albeit 
 with an accent, emphasis and point of view all 
 his own. By virtue alike of temperament and 
 experience both were wandering stars, each in 
 his own orbit, but Orchard was the abler of the 
 two, having a more incisive intellect as well as 
 a finer literary quality. His early thesis upon 
 Modern Theories of Sin revealed a man with 
 whom to reckon, at once provocative and pro¬ 
 voking in thought, as fearless in criticism as 
 he was fruitful in constructive insight. Many 
 still think that some of the best work he has 
 ever done was as confidant and counsellor of 
 souls astray, torn between sorrow and revolt, 
 whereof we read in Problems and Perpiexi- 
 
90 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 ties —one of the best books of its kind ever 
 written. Indeed, he is reported to have said 
 that it was in dealing with the difficulties of 
 others that he discovered the inadequacy, if 
 not bankruptcy, of the New Theology, and a 
 need for something deeper, more drastic, more 
 real. Hence his “trek back to Christ/' as he 
 described it, wherein he abandoned the position 
 then held, or rather went beyond it towards a 
 Free Catholicism. The closing pages of the 
 little book gave a hint of this tendency: 
 
 The true Church is that organism which con¬ 
 tinues the ministry of Jesus Christ, and is the 
 body of God's increasing incarnation. At pres¬ 
 ent no organisation can be identified with that 
 organism. . . . But it does follow that the 
 present institution can never become the 
 church of God. It will probably grow worse 
 before it grows better. It will have to face 
 reform or extinction. ... It is impossible to 
 predict the character of the next generation. 
 But there will probably be a change in the very 
 idea of the church, and it is more than likely 
 that the conflicting ideals of Catholicism and 
 Protestantism will disappear and give rise to 
 a fresh synthesis. . . . The church will then 
 be truly catholic, for it will embrace every type: 
 lowly, like the Lord, the servant rather than 
 the mistress, the learner even more than the 
 
W. E. Orchard 
 
 91 
 
 teacher. : Surely all within the church must 
 hear the warning sounds. They come not from 
 the defiant world; the world heeds us not; nor 
 from some scornful ambassador of the gates of 
 hell. That sound is the church’s Lord, knock¬ 
 ing, without! 
 
 Even in his liberal days Dr. Orchard was a 
 liberalist with a difference; as far removed 
 from an arid rationalism as from the dilettante 
 whose theology is a confection of rose-water 
 sentiment. For him Christianity was dyna¬ 
 mite, not jam, a stroke of lightning, not a stick 
 of candy. He held that liberalism meant that 
 a man was free to be a Christian, not that he 
 holds his Christianity lightly or loosely; that he 
 has the same charity toward the past as toward 
 the future, and is as willing to listen to St. 
 Bernard as to Henri Bergson. Otherwise, he 
 said, our boasted liberalism is only sound and 
 bluster, signifying nothing more than narrow¬ 
 ness and vanity. He thought the liberal pulpit 
 rejected certain dogmas about Christ, because 
 it wanted Christ himself brought nearer to us— 
 with the demand which he knew would plague 
 him with an unsatisfied passion to be more 
 like Him. He imagined that liberals were dis- 
 
92 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 contented with the dogmas of atonement and 
 salvation because they were against an easy 
 gospel—that is, they were willing to stand 
 naked before the Awful Holiness, seeking 
 “purity rather than peace,” as Newman made 
 his motto. In short, if he was anxious for 
 religion to be liberal, he was far more con¬ 
 cerned that liberalism should be religious in a 
 radical, creative, deep-going fashion, issuing 
 in heroic moral action. As a result he found 
 himself an orthodox heretic among liberals and 
 a liberal heretic among the orthodox; and that 
 is where he stands today. 
 
 No matter; it is far more important to un¬ 
 derstand Dr. Orchard and his message than it 
 is to try to classify him in one category or 
 another, much less to paste a label on his cas¬ 
 sock. At the King's Weigh House in London, 
 as in his earlier ministry in Enfield, he attracts 
 an eclectic audience from all over the city, 
 drawn equally by his shattering criticisms of 
 the older views of theology and the positive 
 message which no utterance of his ever lacks— 
 but still more by a grace of personality and an 
 authentic spiritual genius which mark him as 
 a God-illumined preacher. Not a few insist 
 
W. E. Orchard 93 
 
 that the rarest power of Dr. Orchard is his 
 gift of prayer, as revealed in his golden little 
 book, The Temple, which has done so much 
 to help men of the modern mind to walk once 
 more the quiet way to the Place of Hear¬ 
 ing. Brief, tender, wistful, heart-probing, its 
 prayers are like those paving stones one finds 
 in unexpected places on the Yorkshire moors, 
 marking a broken and half-forgotten path over 
 the heather toward an ancient shrine of faith, 
 Whitby Abbey, uplifted on its stately headland 
 above the northern sea. It is a modern devo¬ 
 tional classic, the like of which it would be hard 
 to name, unless it be Spoken Words of Prayer 
 and Praise, by Tipple, whose prayers are 
 lyrics of the love of God and the beauty of his 
 world, sun-bright and attuned to the songs of 
 birds, albeit not lacking in sympathy for the 
 struggle and tragedy of life. In my London 
 Diary I find the following memory of my first 
 service at the King's Weigh House, the Sunday 
 evening before I returned to my work at the 
 City Temple in 1917: 
 
 May 12th:—Went to King's Weigh House 
 Church today—made famous by Dr. Binney— 
 and heard W. E. Orchard preach. He is an 
 
94 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 extraordinary preacher, of vital mind, of au¬ 
 thentic insight, of challenging personality. 
 From an advanced liberal position he has 
 swung toward the Free Catholicism, and by 
 an elaborate use of symbols is seeking to lead 
 men by the sacramental approach to the mysti¬ 
 cal experience and the social expression of 
 religion. Some attend for the service, some 
 for the sermon, and together they make an 
 influential following. The sermon had to do 
 with the vision of Isaiah in the temple—a 
 favorite theme in these days when so many 
 things are shaken—and seldom have I heard a 
 preacher more searching, more aglow with the 
 divine passion. He does not simply kindle the 
 imagination; he gives one a vivid sense of real¬ 
 ity. He has a dangerous gift of humour, which 
 sometimes sharpens into satire, but he uses it 
 as a whip of cords to drive sham and unreality 
 out of the temple. He said that preaching in 
 our day is bad, and that in the Anglican church 
 “it is really worse than necessary!” Much ado 
 is now made about reordination, and he 
 thought that it is not enough for the bishop to 
 lay his hands on a preacher; the servant-girl 
 and the tram-driver ought also to add their con¬ 
 secration. With the lift of God in his face he 
 cried: “You need Christ, and I can give him 
 to you!” Surely that is the ultimate grace and 
 glory of the pulpit—the living Christ mediated 
 to men. It recalled the oft repeated record in 
 the Journal of Wesley, in respect of the com- 
 
W. E. Orchard 
 
 95 
 
 panies to whom he preached: “I gave them 
 Christ.” It was more than an offer; it was a 
 sacrament of communication. 
 
 Such an entry gives no details of the picture, 
 no account of the service with its strange blend 
 of medievalism and modernity, no description 
 of the man wdio is the most impelling preacher 
 in London, as he is often the most perplexing 
 and irritating. A tiny wisp of a man, with 
 tow hair and searching blue eyes, if in the pul¬ 
 pit he looks like an ascetic, in private he is the 
 most joyous of comrades and the best story 
 teller in England. At first the service, with its 
 quick changes of artistic vestments, suggests 
 a kindergarten parade of ecclesiastical milli¬ 
 nery—in which Leviticus is substituted for 
 Galatians, and the crucifix for the cross—until 
 one has read his remarkable sermon on 
 “Colour in Religion,” and knows what he means 
 by it. Behind him in the pulpit hangs a cruci¬ 
 fix, and he often seems to appeal to it beseech¬ 
 ing the Master to speak through him the living 
 word. For sheer intellectual power, for keen¬ 
 ness of spiritual insight—its authority marred, 
 at times, by priestly assumption—he is as 
 unique in his appeal as he is inimitable in his 
 
g6 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 oratory. His brilliant asides, swift and sharp 
 as a rapier-thrust, with enough slang in them 
 to make them spicy, would not survive revision 
 in print, but they are tellingly effective. When, 
 however, we get beyond his humour, his satire, 
 his gadfly criticism—which entitle him to be 
 called the Bernard Shaw of Nonconformity— 
 we find ourselves face to face with something 
 that grips and pierces, and will not let us go. 
 It is not of the intellect merely; it is a passion 
 for souls which softens the sharpest edges of 
 his thought and irradiates even his most cut¬ 
 ting sarcasm. As another has written with 
 true insight: 
 
 At the heart of his theology is a Christ who, 
 feeling the urgency of the divine will upon him, 
 and yielding himself up with the utmost single¬ 
 ness of purpose and the most complete self- 
 abandonment to the impulse of Saviourhood 
 latent in every man, obtained that “Name that 
 is above every name/’ whereby all men must 
 be saved. Suddenly a note of passion creeps 
 into the clear, sympathetic voice, bringing us 
 up against something really great and search¬ 
 ing, and all the minor irritations are forgot¬ 
 ten. Suddenly the preacher grips reality with 
 naked hands and all side issues sink below the 
 surface. He is speaking of the reality of the 
 
W. E. Orchard 97 
 
 soul, of sin, of the human will, of God, of 
 Christ. Terrible in some moods is his unspar¬ 
 ing surrender to truth, his incorruptible atti¬ 
 tude towards reality. He refuses to eat the 
 bread of compromise, spurns all cheap pragma¬ 
 tisms, scorns to debase religion into a mere 
 means of human happiness. He does not pal¬ 
 ter with the irony, the exactions, the crushing 
 sternness of the love of God; he does not trick 
 himself or others into believing that Jesus can 
 be loved with immunity. His Christ is the 
 Christ whose words fling fire on the earth, 
 whose touch leaves wounds, whose cross shat¬ 
 ters our little providential theories and tempts 
 us to cry out in our passionate hours that it is 
 a cruel and bitter thing to be loved of God. 
 Men who have so learnt Christ have a Herod- 
 sword within their hearts, and by an inalien¬ 
 able birthright belong to the spiritual aristoc¬ 
 racy. If such a man is a preacher, especially 
 if he is a born preacher like Dr. Orchard, he 
 will fling fire among men and live to see it 
 kindle . 1 
 
 From the first day of the Great War to the 
 last, Dr. Orchard stood in his pulpit and 
 pointed to the crucifix, at once a prophet of 
 indignation and a priest of pity. He preached 
 no interim ethics. If he was called a pacifist 
 it did not matter; he refused to lower the Chris- 
 
 1 Voices of Today, by Hugh Sinclair. 
 
98 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 tian ideal an inch. Insistently, consistently, 
 with passionate and surrendering conviction 
 he bore magnificent and ceaseless witness 
 against all war. His criticism was merci¬ 
 less, his sarcasm withering, and he spared no 
 one however high in office. Through it all one 
 felt an infinite heartache, as of one who was 
 himself crucified by the agony of it all. Re¬ 
 turning one day from Scotland, in a railway 
 carriage, I heard one British officer say to 
 another: “X say, old chap, it’s a beastly busi¬ 
 ness, this war. It tears me in two. Over here 
 we sing Peace on Earth, and out there the kill¬ 
 ing of boys goes on. When I get so fed up I 
 can't stand it any longer, I go to a little chapel 
 in Duke Street, where a chap named Orchard 
 blows the whole blooming business up. All I 
 can do is to swear, but he gets it said. It's rip¬ 
 ping to hear him do it." Had Dr. Orchard 
 exercised such a ministry in New York, no 
 doubt he would have landed in jail, so much 
 greater is the freedom enjoyed in England. 
 In my diary are a number of entries about him 
 and I venture to transcribe another: 
 
 May 10th, 1918:—What the Free Catholi¬ 
 cism may turn out to be remains to be disclosed: 
 
W. E. Orchard 99 
 
 so far it is more clever and critical than con¬ 
 structive. W. E. Orchard is its Bernard Shaw, 
 and W. G. Peck its Chesterton. At first it was 
 thought to be only a protest against the ungra¬ 
 cious barrenness of Nonconformist worship, in 
 behalf of rhythm, colour, and symbolism. But 
 it is more than that. It seeks to unite personal 
 religious experience with its corporate and sym¬ 
 bolical expression, thus joining two things 
 hitherto held apart. As between Anglicans 
 and Nonconformists it discovers the higher 
 unity of things which do not differ, and that is 
 a distinct advance. For, if we are ever to have 
 Christian union, it must be by comprehension, 
 not by compromise. It ought to be possible for 
 those who emphasize individual experience of 
 religious reality to unite with those who seek 
 the corporate fellowship of believers. To¬ 
 gether they may approach the largeness of 
 Christ, in whom there is room for every type 
 of experience and expression. Also, by inter¬ 
 preting and extending the sacramental princi¬ 
 ple, and at the same time disinfecting it of 
 magic and superstition, the Free Catholicism 
 may give new sanction and inspiration to crea¬ 
 tive social endeavour. For years it has been 
 observed how many ultra High Churchmen— 
 for example, Bishop Gore, one of the noblest 
 characters in modern Christianity—have been 
 leaders in the social interpretation and applica¬ 
 tion of Christianity. Perhaps, at last, we shall 
 learn that it was not the church, but humanity, 
 
100 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 with which Jesus identified himself when he 
 said, “This is my body broken for you.” There 
 is still further light to break forth from Chris¬ 
 tian truth, and let us hope that the Free Ca¬ 
 tholicism will help us to see and follow it. The 
 great thing about Christianity is that no one 
 can tell what it will do next. 
 
 Perhaps this entry may help some of those 
 who misunderstand Dr. Orchard to see the 
 kind of Catholicism of which he is a prophet 
 and a pioneer. Some imagine that by Catholi¬ 
 cism he means the Roman Church, but that is 
 neither free nor catholic. No one knows better 
 than Dr. Orchard that Rome, as it now is, 
 would crush him as quickly, as contemptuously, 
 as she did Tyrrell, and with a tragedy far more 
 ghastly than that of Newman. For while he 
 has much that reminds one of Newman, he is 
 a free spirit, and he knows the way to Emmaus 
 as Newman never did. Others think that his 
 Catholicism is merely aesthetic and temperamen¬ 
 tal, a sentimental attachment to some antique 
 survival, like a fondness for Gothic architec¬ 
 ture or a new version of the Mass. Far from 
 it. He would, no doubt, restore much, if not 
 all, of the old Catholic system, but without the 
 spirit of anathema, exclusion, and compulsion, 
 
W. E. Orchard 
 
 101 
 
 uniting the cultus of Christianity with its 
 creed, and interpreting both in terms of eter¬ 
 nal truth and modern need. Thus his vision is 
 far wider, more comprehensive, more revolu¬ 
 tionary than his critics are aware. Recently 
 he said: “Some of you have been reassured 
 about me lately that I am not going over to 
 Rome, after all. I am not so sure. I may! 
 But why are you not afraid that I may join the 
 Salvation Army? Because equally I may! 
 What I hate are the middle ways.” 
 
 No; the Free Catholicism is far more cath¬ 
 olic than the Roman Church, and it is freer 
 than the Free Churches. It is a rediscovery 
 of the comprehensiveness of Christianity, a 
 living experience of the universality of Christ, 
 as much at home with the Inner Light of the 
 Quaker as with the Real Presence. But it joins 
 depth with breadth, and finds in the old Chris¬ 
 tian dogmas not metaphysical abstractions, 
 but dynamic forces for the creation of new men 
 and a new social order, linking mystical vision 
 with social passion, and freedom with fellow¬ 
 ship. One has only to read the sermons of Dr. 
 Orchard, who follows the old elaborate homi¬ 
 letic method—what the English call “the three- 
 
102 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 deck sermon”—to discover how profoundly 
 radical the Free Catholicism is both as to per¬ 
 sonal experience and social regeneration. For 
 the two are inseparable in his thought, as wit¬ 
 ness such sermons as “Flow the Cross Recon¬ 
 structs Personality,” and “Christian Dogma 
 and Social Revolution.” Here is vital preach¬ 
 ing, as ancient as it is modern, aglow with 
 insight and passion and prophecy; the voice of 
 one who has the genius of a pathfinder, and the 
 courage to make experiments, knowing that as 
 of old Jesus “made as though he would have 
 gone further,” so, today, he beckons us toward 
 his own largeness. In a striking sermon en¬ 
 titled “The New Catholicism,” he says: 
 
 This then is the New Catholicism. At pres¬ 
 ent it is no more than a dream in the hearts 
 of a few, rather misty and vague perhaps, yet 
 able to make every waking hour full of unrest 
 for its realisation. With others it is only a 
 dumb craving for they know not what, a dis¬ 
 content with things as they are. It has yet to 
 outline its policy and fight its battles; and 
 before it can conquer, there are prejudices to 
 overcome, fears to dispel, false conclusions to 
 disprove. Yet it holds the field. Denomina- 
 tionalism can no longer count upon the old-time 
 loyalties. Neither Protestantism nor Roman- 
 
W. E. Orchard 
 
 103 
 
 ism can ever do anything but stand over against 
 one another, hostile and suspicious. There can 
 be no reconciliation until they are gathered into 
 one really Catholic Church. . . . Such hopes 
 can only be realised as we get back to the catho¬ 
 licity of Christ’s character and teaching. It is 
 following names instead of Christ that has 
 ruined us all. It is the attempt to employ 
 worldly power instead of the wisdom of the 
 Cross. It is a false scholarship that has given 
 us a divided Christ. Only as we discover the 
 One Catholic Christ shall we be able to build 
 the One Catholic Church. 
 
 If in this appreciation the emphasis has been 
 laid as much upon the message as upon the mes¬ 
 senger, it is because the Minister of the King’s 
 Weigh House stands before us a shining and 
 challenging figure, at once a rebuke and a 
 portent. With the spiritual radicalism of his 
 Master, he puts to scorn our comfortable con¬ 
 ventionalism, our plausible expediences, our 
 Pickwickian endeavours after Christian unity, 
 no less than our compromising cowardice in the 
 presence of the organised brutality of modern 
 industrial and political life. When one thinks 
 of the tragedy of a divided, distracted, ineffec¬ 
 tive church—a mere huddle of sects, each 
 clinging to its own little dialect—set over 
 
104 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 against the federated iniquity of the world, one 
 thanks God for a prophet-priest like Dr. 
 Orchard; as much for his teasing humour, his 
 tormenting satire, and his tantalising waspish 
 criticism, as for his radiant insight and elo¬ 
 quence. Let him wear his gorgeous vestments 
 and use the ancient symbols and litanies of 
 faith, if by any means he can help to bring 
 back the visions that make the church the sac¬ 
 ramental incarnation of Christ. Frail, fear¬ 
 less, fascinating, across the tumbling seas I 
 can still see him as he stood at his high altar, 
 having poured out his heart in protest against 
 the collective suicide of war, making the ges¬ 
 ture of the Cross in benediction—as if to point 
 us, in parable as well as precept, to the living 
 Christ whose anointed messenger he is. 
 
VI: Charles D. Williams 
 
 Can a prophet be a bishop? Can a bishop 
 be a prophet? What is the function of a 
 radical democrat in an old, aristocratic institu¬ 
 tion? What is the prophetic message for the 
 ministry of today ? Such questions were in my 
 mind as I mingled with the divinity students 
 at Yale when Bishop Williams gave his first 
 lecture on preaching on the Lyman Beecher 
 Foundation. It was an eager, expectant com¬ 
 pany, and some seemed waiting to see a long¬ 
 haired, wild-eyed radical whose sentences 
 would be a series of explosions. The lecturer, 
 except for his clerical garb, looked more like a 
 clear-cut, straight-seeing business man than a 
 prophet of any kind; but behind his quiet man¬ 
 ner and simple style one felt the glow of a 
 divine fire. The genuineness of the man, his 
 earnestness, his courage, his intellectual hon¬ 
 esty, his spiritual passion won the day. The 
 title of the course, “The Prophetic Ministry for 
 
 Today,” was characteristic of a teacher to 
 
 105 
 
106 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 whom religion is a vision, but a vision to be 
 worked out practically in business, politics, in¬ 
 dustry, and legislation, no less than in the 
 lonely conflicts of the inner life. 
 
 Unfortunately, I was able to hear only the 
 first lecture in the course, which was a com¬ 
 posite portrait of the Christian ministry—a 
 series of dissolving views in which the He¬ 
 brew prophet, the Hebrew priest, the apostolic 
 administrator, and the Greek sophist or rhet¬ 
 orician were blended. As in every such photo¬ 
 graph, one saw when he had finished dim traces 
 of each type; but it was clear that the lecturer 
 thought the prophet faith and spirit ought to 
 be supreme. The priest, the executive, and 
 especially the rhetorician, ought to be subordi¬ 
 nate, a point which he emphasised with some 
 rather sharp words about flowery eloquence. 
 
 Howbeit, no man can be a prophet fifty-two 
 days in the year, no matter how brightly the 
 fire burns. There are interludes of teaching 
 and administration—what St. Paul called 
 “helps and governments”—which often make 
 passages of prose in the poetry of the ministry. 
 There is also the danger, he said, that the run¬ 
 ning of wheels may finally run to wheels, and 
 
Charles D. Williams 107 
 
 a man meant to be a prophet ends by being the 
 pastor of “The Church of the Holy Fuss,” 
 where the wheels go round but get nowhere. 
 Once in the lecture he gave us a glimpse of the 
 life of a bishop, which made all of us vow 
 never to accept such an office—reminding one 
 of the words of Bishop Gore when he resigned 
 as Bishop of Oxford. In the preface to the 
 volume in which the lectures now appear he 
 makes the glimpse more vivid, confirming us 
 in our resolution: 
 
 There is no motto more applicable to a mod¬ 
 ern Bishop than the text, “Gather up the 
 fragments that nothing be lost.” He is a man 
 “scattered and peeled,” troubled about many 
 things, distracted with various and often mutu¬ 
 ally variant occupations. He must be a man 
 of affairs and many affairs. He is expected to 
 fulfil many functions. He is primarily a busi¬ 
 ness man, an administrator and executive. 
 Particularly he is the “trouble man” of a large 
 corporation. All the “church quarrels” gather 
 about his devoted head. He has the responsi¬ 
 bility for everything that goes wrong, often 
 without the authority to set anything right. 
 He serves as a lightning rod to carry off 
 the accumulated wrath of the ecclesiastical 
 heavens. He is constantly called on to act as 
 judge and should have a judicial temper ament. 
 
108 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 He is also a “travelling man,” a kind of eccle¬ 
 siastical “drummer” or salesman. He is even 
 sometimes in demand as a social ornament to 
 say grace at banquets, make after-dinner 
 speeches, adorn the stage at public meetings, 
 and administer to the aesthetic needs of conven¬ 
 tional society at fashionable weddings, bap¬ 
 tisms and funerals. In the midst of it all he is 
 expected to find time and mind to be a preacher 
 and teacher, a scholar and leader, and above 
 all a man of prayer and a man of God. 
 
 Two weeks later Bishop Williams preached 
 in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—that 
 noble Home of the Soul slowly rising on the 
 cathedral heights of New York City, about 
 which James Lane Allen wove his lovely story, 
 The Cathedral Singer. While waiting for 
 the service to begin I found myself inquiring 
 in the sanctuary in respect to two matters 
 which weighed heavily upon my heart. What 
 is the function of the cathedral in a democ¬ 
 racy? Can it give our tangled modern world 
 a common principle, a common passion, a com¬ 
 mon idea as it did the middle ages, when it 
 sent the common man in his multitudes away 
 to the crusades? Today we have no unifying 
 principle to hold the world together. The 
 
Charles D. Williams 109 
 
 nations seem to be drifting apart, and the 
 classes in each are falling asunder, lacking a 
 common ideal, a common faith, and a common 
 hope. Would not a common form of worship 
 —not so rigid as to become a mere rote or rig¬ 
 marole, but with a common rhythm, at once 
 corporate and communal, bringing art to the 
 service of faith—do something to evoke a 
 sense of common fellowship and obligation, 
 and help to heal the appalling spiritual loneli¬ 
 ness and chaos in which we find ourselves? In 
 a cathedral all kinds and classes of people, 
 learned and unlearned alike, are touched by a 
 sense of mystery and awe which, if only for a 
 brief time, brings each into the presence of a 
 Reality which makes all one in their littleness 
 and longing. In the midst of my reverie the 
 organ began, but, like the writer of the 73rd 
 Psalm, some solution of my problem seemed 
 possible under that high and hospitable roof of 
 God. 
 
 It was a notable occasion, made so by the 
 daring of the preacher, whose sermon quickly 
 shattered my mediaeval mood, by showing how 
 many clamorous questions from the noisy 
 world intrude into the peace of a modern cathe- 
 
110 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 drah The sermon provoked a heated discus¬ 
 sion in the days following, as much for its 
 rebuke of the hysteria and mob-mindedness of 
 the moment when the Wilson-phobia was at its 
 height, as for its castigation of certain reac¬ 
 tionary influences seeking to capitalise an ugly 
 mood for their own advantage. America was 
 “seeing red/’ in a mood of mingled anger, hate 
 and fear, actually having a cataleptic fit of 
 terror at thought of a few radicals—like an 
 elephant frightened at a mouse. It required 
 some courage to speak plainly in face of such a 
 mood, at a time when the pulpit seemed 
 cowed and terrorised, and anyone who dared 
 to dissent from the madness of the hour was 
 branded as a bolshevist, a socialist, an anar¬ 
 chist, or some other thought-saving epithet. 
 The bishop not only stood erect against the 
 storm, but he spoke pointedly about the steel 
 strike, the open-shop campaign, and the absurd 
 intolerance of the moment. In particular, he 
 denounced the “invisible government’' of the 
 privileged few which, he said, was seeking to 
 control pulpit, as well as academic and legisla¬ 
 tive, utterances. At once there was an uproar, 
 and The Wall Street Journal asked exasper- 
 
Charles D. Williams 
 
 111 
 
 atedly: “Was it the bolshevists or the business 
 men who built and endowed the Cathedral of 
 St. John the Divine?” The implication of such 
 a question is that, since Big Business builds 
 cathedrals, it has the right to dictate what is 
 preached in their pulpits; and that is a fact 
 worth knowing. The next Sunday the bishop- 
 elect of New York preached in reply, depre¬ 
 cating the preaching of politics, as if a sermon 
 in defence of the present order is not as much 
 “political-preaching” as a sermon in criticism 
 of it. The matter was taken up by the secular 
 and religious press of the country, and both 
 bishops got as many brick-bats as bouquets; 
 but the issue was clearly drawn. 
 
 The bishop of Michigan thus stands before 
 us as a man who provokes controversies, not 
 only by virtue of the causes he champions, but 
 also by the picturesque and pungent manner in 
 which he states his message. He is indeed one 
 of the outstanding and challenging figures of 
 our American Christianity—manly, brotherly, 
 democratic, fearless, sincere, utterly loyal to 
 his Master and a lover of humanity—and if he 
 receives many floggings at the hands of his 
 
112 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 critics, he is wise enough to adopt the philoso¬ 
 phy of the old couplet: 
 
 Sticks and stones will break my bones, 
 But words will never hurt me. 
 
 Happily he has a keen sense of humour 
 which serves as a shield against the slings and 
 arrows of his enemies, the while it makes him 
 a charming companion; as when, albeit a 
 single-taxer himself, he describes how an 
 orator of that sect fixes you with his glittering 
 eye, until he has proved that his scheme is a 
 panacea for all the ills that flesh is heir to, 
 “even the measles”; or when, in an impish 
 mood, he mimics the holy whine—what Dick¬ 
 ens called “the Heavenly Father voice”—with 
 which the curate intones the service. It does 
 not matter that he is called a radical, a noto¬ 
 riety seeker, and an inciter of unrest; such 
 things are a part of a prophet’s reward. The 
 chief fact about him is his profound earnest¬ 
 ness, his fine sanity, and his vision of the reli¬ 
 gion of Jesus as practical fraternal righteous¬ 
 ness. Yet even his friends have misgivings, at 
 times, as to his methods, as witness these words 
 of an able and high-minded journalist—words 
 
Charles D. Williams 113 
 
 the more remarkable when we remember that 
 any working journalist sees enough of the 
 seamy side of humanity to equip half a dozen 
 cynics: 
 
 As a preacher the bishop is earnest, forceful, 
 intellectually honest, and tremendously cour¬ 
 ageous, and he marshals his facts well. Yet, 
 somehow, I have always thought of him as a 
 social, political and economic leader, rather 
 than as a churchman. He has the two fisted 
 belligerence of the worldly advocate, rather 
 than those spiritual refinements we are sup¬ 
 posed to associate with the pulpit. Yet he may 
 be right, and our laymen’s point of view all 
 wrong, as to what a church leader should be., 
 I do not know. He finds religion in the city 
 streets and shops and factories; it is not some¬ 
 thing to be spiritualised and saved up for use 
 only on Sundays. Whether his idea of the 
 Christian church be right or wrong, he lives up 
 to it; and because of his attitude he is beloved 
 by the labouring men of the city, and is either 
 feared, simply disliked, or blindly hated by 
 that element in his church which pays its pew 
 rent by the year and is eminently respectable— 
 ah, yes, respectable though the heavens fall! 
 Being a member of that church I know some¬ 
 thing of their quaint philosophy, and I really 
 think that some of them would rather lose their 
 souls than the world’s respect. 
 
114 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 Yet, when I hear the bishop in church, I 
 always feel that I would rather hear him as a 
 great leader of worldly affairs, on the floor of 
 the United States Senate for example. Morally 
 and intellectually he holds me tight, but I have 
 heard other men who could stir me more 
 deeply spiritually. Or should I say emotion¬ 
 ally? No doubt this feeling is due to genera¬ 
 tions behind me who held, as my father used 
 to say, that the Episcopal church is a good one 
 to belong to, because it never interferes either 
 with politics or religion. On politics, economic 
 and social issues the bishop has always been 
 consistently liberal, sane, and sensible—sane, 
 of course, because he agrees with me. From 
 time to time radicals have tried to tie him up 
 with their extreme proposals, but he has always 
 avoided them. Personally I think this is his 
 field, unless, after all, it is conceded that this 
 is the field of the church. Either the church, 
 as it is now organised, has outgrown its use¬ 
 fulness and the bishop is a pioneer in a new 
 order of Christianity, or the church is right 
 and he is wrong. Certainly they do not hitch, 
 at least in their philosophic outlook. 
 
 Some of us would rejoice to see the bishop of 
 Michigan in the United States Senate—no¬ 
 where is spiritual vision more needed; but does 
 not the church have need of a robust, forth¬ 
 right, statesman-like leadership? Surely, if 
 
Charles D. Williams 115 
 
 Christianity is to be more practical, more 
 socially-minded, less sectarian and more cre¬ 
 ative, and not simply “a device to give peace of 
 mind in the midst of conditions as they are,” 
 such leadership is the first necessity. In short, 
 if Christianity be the realisation of God and 
 the practice of brotherhood, then Bishop Wil¬ 
 liams is both a pioneer and a prophet. Those 
 who say that he is not ‘‘spiritual” mistake 
 emotional pietism for spirituality, as if truth, 
 justice, and brotherhood were less spiritual 
 than the rhythm of a ritual or the devoutness 
 of Lent! The bishop holds that brotherhood— 
 by which he means practical brotherhood, not 
 a vague, dreamy sentiment—is not merely a 
 poetic gesture in the Gospel of Jesus, but a 
 fundamental principle; and that it is the mis¬ 
 sion of the church not only to redeem indi¬ 
 viduals, but also to help create an environment 
 in which men can live the life of the spirit. 
 He thinks the salvation of the church lies in 
 its becoming once more the church of the lowly, 
 since it is more important to have small 
 churches of earnest men and women, poor but 
 godly, than large churches housed in magnifi¬ 
 cent edifices—if it is necessary to temper the 
 
li6 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 Gospel to the rich in order to gain their 
 support. 
 
 Hence the cry of socialist, anarchist, bol- 
 shevist, and all the rest of the new vocabulary 
 of profanity now in vogue, like jazz music. In 
 olden times men threw stones at their prophets, 
 but today they call names, finding abuse an 
 easy substitute for the insight necessary to 
 understand. The tragedy of our day is that we 
 seem dead-locked between a narrow, selfish 
 individualism on the one side and a visionary 
 absurdity on the other, unable to find a fourth 
 dimension. It so happens that Bishop Williams 
 is not a Socialist at all, but a Christian teacher 
 who finds in the gospel of Christ a way out of 
 the dilemma. No one knows better than he 
 that property, if honestly come by, represents 
 moral values; and for that very reason it must 
 be used in moral ways and for moral ends. It 
 is not a question of the ownership of property, 
 but of its moral and Christian use, modified 
 by a sense of the common good, and, above all, 
 by a sense of the sanctity of the human soul 
 as the greatest and most precious of earthly 
 realities. Therefore the bishop holds that 
 Judge Gary has no right to cling to the twelve- 
 
Charles D. Williams 117 
 
 hour day in the steel mills, because it debases 
 and brutalises human souls, destroying that 
 holy thing which Christ came to seek and re¬ 
 deem. So long as the lives of men, women, 
 and little children are ground up in the machin¬ 
 ery of industry in order to make money, 
 he insists that the church must speak out 
 specifically, emphatically, insistently, and that 
 to be silent or neutral is to betray the Master. 
 In regard to these and other matters the bishop 
 has his own way of speaking out, which he 
 would hardly ask, expect, or encourage all his 
 clergy to follow; and no one can deny that it 
 is effective. Some of his sayings are very 
 striking, and they hit the mark: 
 
 If the Lord in desperation—pardon the 
 phrase—should say, “I will feed these down¬ 
 trodden, starving children of mine,” and rain 
 brown bread and molasses upon the earth, it 
 would do nothing to help the poverty of the 
 world under our present system. It would 
 merely raise the value of the land where the 
 fall was heaviest. 
 
 We are soft and flabby because this is a day 
 of self-indulgence. If a thing is agreeable, we 
 do it. If it is disagreeable, we do not. This 
 is the chief reason for the divorce problem. 
 
n8 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 Homes are wrecked, moral life is undermined, 
 children are damned because “I was unhappy.” 
 
 The habit of decision, of swift moral action 
 is lost. In the business world, statutes are 
 broken and moral laws are shattered, because 
 “a man must get ahead.” Any principle is 
 sacrificed rather than make a failure, because 
 a failure is unpleasant. We are devotees of 
 the pleasant, the agreeable, the successful— 
 the slaves of comfort. We are morally short 
 of wind, worshippers of the god of ease; our 
 moral discrimination is blurred. 
 
 My ancestry has been American for two 
 hundred years; my family has fought in all the 
 wars of the republic. I am not a bolshevik, 
 parlor or otherwise. I am not a socialist, pink 
 or white. As far as I can tell I am a plain, 
 downright American. But I cannot stand this 
 stage brand of ioo per cent Americanism that 
 is up today. It is not Americanism. By the 
 history of our nation, I call it Prussianism. 
 
 Our task is to make an imperfect Christian 
 civilisation more Christian, but three kinds of 
 impossibilists stand in the way. One is the 
 blind individualist, the conventional Christian, 
 who does not see the task at all. Another 
 is the pessimist who resorts, as pessimists al¬ 
 ways do, to the apocalyptic and eschatological. 
 He is the premillenarian. The third is the 
 visionary idealist, the man with a panacea, 
 with complete specifications of the heavenly 
 city down to the last brick in the pavement. 
 
Charles D. Williams 119 
 
 There are lions in the way. There are diffi¬ 
 culties and dangers and demands as you go 
 forth into our prophetic ministry, but these are 
 so many challenges and opportunities which 
 make it the most glorious day in which men 
 could be called to that ministry. Marcus Dodds 
 once said, “I do not envy those who have to 
 fight the battle of Christianity in the twentieth 
 century. Yes, perhaps, I do, but it will be a 
 stiff fight.” And let me add, a stiff fight is 
 what the true soldier of Christ loves. 
 
 If in this study I have laid less emphasis 
 upon the teacher than upon his teaching, it is 
 because he incarnates, as much by his office 
 as by his insight, issues which will confront us 
 increasingly in the days that lie ahead. The 
 sum of his teaching, as well as the art which 
 he employs, may be found in a book of sermons 
 entitled, A Valid Christianity for Today , 
 which, by any test, must be reckoned as one of 
 the most virile and arresting volumes in the 
 literature of the American pulpit. Some of its 
 sermons—such as The Religion of Democracy, 
 Dives and Lazarus, and The Supreme Value— 
 are of enduring worth and power; they search 
 our hearts like flames of fire. The mysticism 
 of the book—for, as Phillips Brooks said, mys- 
 
120 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 ticism is the heart of religion, without whose 
 ever-beating life the hands of religion, which 
 do the work, fall dead—is social as well as 
 individual, and less contemplative than active. 
 It is like the pity in the hearts of the medical 
 students at Edinburgh, of which Dr. Brown 
 wrote in a haunting passage; a pity, he said, 
 which finds expression not in trembling tears 
 and long-drawn sighs, but in clearer insight 
 and a firmer and more skilful hand in healing 
 the hurts of humanity. It is the vision of a 
 man who sees that all life is sacramental, and 
 that the Kingdom of God is a beloved com¬ 
 munity of noble men and women who do noble 
 things together, making the service of man a 
 ritual for the worship of God. 
 
 Even those who account themselves con¬ 
 servative—whether by nature or by grace— 
 must surely thank God for the heroic ministry 
 of Bishop Williams, both as prophet and states¬ 
 man. If they do not always agree with his 
 teaching or method, they ought to be ready to 
 fight for his right to teach the truth as God 
 gives him to see it with every art at his com¬ 
 mand—a right now challenged in his own 
 communion—in behalf of a complete and com- 
 
Charles D. Williams 121 
 
 prehensive Christian witness in a sorely baffled 
 world. St. James did not preach like St. John, 
 nor did St. Peter and St. Paul always agree— 
 each finding in the other things hard to under¬ 
 stand—but together, by a fraternity of insight 
 and experience, they expounded a profound 
 and many-sided gospel, which, at last, will win 
 all our various and imperfect tones into one 
 sovereign harmony. This lesson is for us, re¬ 
 minding us that the Gospel of Jesus is deeper, 
 richer and larger than our individual insight 
 and emphasis; and, further, that though we 
 have the eloquence of an angel and the zeal 
 of a martyr, and have not brotherly love, we 
 are as dead. God be thanked for a prophet- 
 bishop ! Long may he labour among us! 
 
VII: A. Maude Royden 
 
 The story of how the greatest woman 
 preacher of our generation was discovered and 
 pushed into the pulpit, is after this manner. 
 As had been anticipated both by myself and by 
 the officers of the City Temple, it soon became 
 plain that I must have a colleague in my work. 
 Indeed, it had been so agreed before I landed 
 in England, and as a condition of my accept¬ 
 ance of the Temple ministry. The strain of 
 three sermons each week, with so many out¬ 
 side demands, had taxed the strength of a 
 giant like Dr. Parker—who often enough 
 “warmed over” old material on a Thursday— 
 and it had nearly killed R. J. Campbell. Be¬ 
 sides, invitations were pouring in upon me 
 from all over the kingdom, and the City Temple 
 people sympathised entirely with my plan for 
 a larger ministry of interpretation between the 
 two countries. But to find a colleague was no 
 
 easy undertaking—so many preachers were 
 
 122 
 
A. Maude Royden 1^3 
 
 already at the war that churches had to 
 double up. 
 
 Since England was at that time a world of 
 women, and woman was entering upon a life 
 new and strange and difficult, it seemed to some 
 of us that if a great woman of genius could be 
 found the problem would be solved. Such a 
 thing could not have been done before the 
 war without a hubbub of criticism, and it would 
 have been denounced as a Yankee innovation. 
 But the war had changed everything. Woman 
 had been in revolt; now she was triumphant, 
 the vote, about which there had been so much 
 bother, having become a mere bagatelle to be 
 taken for granted. She had shown her worth 
 in the war, taking the place of man even in 
 hard, heavy work. There was need of a wom¬ 
 an of vision to interpret the new life of woman, 
 its spiritual meaning no less than its obliga¬ 
 tions and aspirations, if only the right one 
 could be found to meet the need. 
 
 Of women preachers there had been a few 
 in England before, and many in America— 
 from the days of Mary Livermore down—but 
 on neither side of the Atlantic had any woman 
 ever been chosen as a regular assistant in a 
 
124 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 great city pulpit. Fearsome things were 
 prophesied of so revolutionary an arrange¬ 
 ment; even a few of the City Temple folk 
 hesitated, much depending, as they said, upon 
 the woman selected. Fortunately we found in 
 Miss A. Maude Royden the woman exactly 
 fitted by genius, by training, by temperament, 
 and by courage to attempt a great work and 
 do it. Yet, as a fact, though devout almost to 
 asceticism, she had never tried to preach, and 
 apparently had not thought of doing so, know¬ 
 ing, as a loyal daughter of the Church of Eng¬ 
 land, that she would not be allowed to preach 
 in her own communion. She did not know 
 whether she could preach or not. Nor did we. 
 Finally, not without misgiving and much per¬ 
 suasion, she agreed to try, and, as all now 
 know, the attempt was brilliantly vindicated. 
 The secular press welcomed the innovation 
 with enthusiasm, and even the religious papers 
 —with exceptions, of course, chiefly among the 
 Anglican journals—accepted it as an inevitable 
 “sign of the times/’ watching the experiment 
 with interest and concern. 
 
 Sunday after Sunday large congregations 
 gathered to hear Miss Royden, some drawn 
 
A. Maude Roy den 125 
 
 by curiosity at first, but all remained to pray; 
 and if the majority of her audiences were 
 women, it was to be noted that many men 
 in khaki found her preaching a blessing. 
 Naturally, in private, I had to bear the brunt 
 of criticism, in a flood of letters sometimes 
 angry, and often ugly. Of course the words 
 of St. Paul about women keeping silence in 
 church were worn threadbare—so few knew 
 what he meant—-and the gibe of Dr. Johnson 
 about a woman preaching being like a dog try¬ 
 ing to walk on his hind legs, was not forgotten. 
 More than one letter reminded me of the dic¬ 
 tum of Montaigne that “women are hardly fit 
 to treat on matters of theology”; and so it 
 went, with much ridicule of “petticoats in the 
 pulpit.” One Anglican layman did, however, 
 modify the saying of Henry Sidgwick for my 
 benefit: “Of course, it’s nonsense, but it's 
 the right kind of nonsense.” As often as I 
 met the Bishop of London, his chief concerns 
 seemed to be whether Miss Royden actually 
 stood in the pulpit of the City Temple, and 
 whether or not she wore a hat! It did not 
 matter; I was content to let facts refute folly, 
 
126 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 and Miss Royden soon made her place in what 
 proved to be her rightful sphere. 
 
 The daughter of Sir Thomas Royden, Bart., 
 formerly Lord Mayor of Liverpool, in a home 
 at once high church and ultra Tory, Miss 
 Royden was born to a life of wealth, luxury, 
 and culture. Like Beatrice she might have 
 said, “Then there was a star danced and under 
 it I was born”; but it was a pilgrim star making 
 her a pioneer, a radical, a reformer, a leader 
 of unpopular causes. Unlike Beatrice, she did 
 not feel the sadness of the world only when 
 she was asleep; the more awake she was the 
 more she felt it, though never in a way to be¬ 
 cloud a spirit to whom joy was native, beauty 
 a sacrament, and life an adventure and a 
 challenge. She was educated at Cheltenham 
 College, going later into residence at Lady 
 Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she took hon¬ 
 ours in modern history. After some work done 
 in the slums of Liverpool and in a midland 
 country parish, she became the first woman lec¬ 
 turer under the Oxford University Extension 
 scheme, her subjects being history and litera¬ 
 ture. Always her interest lay less with the 
 classes than with the masses, where, as Dos- 
 
A. Maude Roy den 127 
 
 toevsky, her favourite novelist, had shown, so 
 much of divinity is to be found. 
 
 For some years Miss Royden devoted her¬ 
 self to the cause of the enfranchisement of 
 women, and as editor of The Common Cause, 
 she very soon won a place of leadership in the 
 law-abiding suffrage movement. To a smaller 
 public she was known as an original thinker, 
 an expert in all matters relating to the life of 
 woman and child—having much the same posi¬ 
 tion in England that Miss Jane Addams has 
 long held in America—and a writer in behalf 
 of a new internationalism. Indeed, she was a 
 pleader for all great human causes, but 
 especially for a purer social life, based, not 
 upon legalisms, but upon a higher standard, 
 equal for men and women, in morals, health, 
 and culture. Yet, during all those labours and 
 agitations, she kept an inviolate altar in her 
 heart—-true to the church in spite of its laggard 
 and reluctant interest in prophetic human 
 enterprises—uniting the devotion of a saint 
 with a flaming social passion, and keeping both 
 in poise by a dauntless faith, a calm reason¬ 
 ableness, and a rich and sparkling humour. 
 
 Slight of figure, frail unspeakably, with a 
 
128 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 limp in her gait, as an orator Miss Royden is 
 unique in her simplicity—direct, forthright, 
 winsome. She reminds me more of Frances 
 Willard—“St. Frances, of Evanston,” as I love 
 to call her—than anyone I remember to have 
 heard, albeit with more verve and fire. Rich, 
 mellow, unfaltering, her voice is singularly re¬ 
 vealing, her articulation perfect, and, without 
 a trace of sentimentality, she speaks to the 
 heart. There is no shrillness in her eloquence, 
 no impression of strain, no affectation. She 
 speaks with the exquisite ease of long practice, 
 in a style more conversational than oratorical, 
 and is more at home in an assembly where the 
 people can answer back, whether on a chair at 
 the street corner, or at a conference of a band 
 of rescue workers, or wherever the common 
 people foregather. 
 
 At first she was not at home in the pulpit of 
 the City Temple, until she started an after 
 meeting in which her hearers could have their 
 say, discussing questions suggested by the 
 sermon, or the problems of the religious life. 
 Some of her epigrams are unforgettable in 
 their quick-sighted summing up of situations, 
 as when she said in the Royal Albert Hall, to 
 
A. Maude Roy den 129 
 
 the horror of deans and bishops: “The church 
 of England is the conservative party at 
 prayer.’" One secret of her influence and power 
 may be found in the faith thus confessed: “I 
 am convinced that what I can see others can 
 see, and nothing will persuade me that the 
 world is not ready for an ideal for which I am 
 ready.” Untrained in theology—which some 
 hold to be an advantage—she deals with the 
 old issues of faith as an educated, spiritually- 
 minded woman in sensitive contact with life, 
 inspired by a lofty faith and guided by a sancti¬ 
 fied common sense worth more than much 
 dogma. She casts aside the “muffled Chris¬ 
 tianity” which Wells once described as the 
 religion of the well-to-do classes, holding resig¬ 
 nation to be “a detestable virtue,” however 
 canonical, if it means that worship is to be an 
 opiate and the sermon a dose of soothing syrup. 
 Not only stimulating but provocative—seldom 
 provoking—it is no wonder that she shocked 
 many of the staid, unco-respectable folk when 
 she made her advent in the City Temple. 
 
 Nothing was plainer than that the best way 
 for me to help Miss Royden was to let her be 
 entirely free; and I did so. Usually we had 
 
130 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 a conference once a month, or more often in 
 case of emergency, and we never had but one 
 difference of judgment—regarding sending a 
 petition from the City Temple to the British 
 government to lift the blockade, which, as an 
 American citizen, I could not do, though I as¬ 
 sured her she was free to denounce the block¬ 
 ade as she liked. Not the least important 
 feature of the work of Miss Royden at the 
 Temple, aside from the three services a month 
 which she conducted, was what I called her 
 ‘clinic”; that is, two or three days a week when 
 she was in attendance at the City Temple, act¬ 
 ing as guide, confidant and friend to hundreds 
 of women, and as priest and confessor to not 
 a few. Here she did what no man born may 
 ever hope to do. Woman can comfort and 
 counsel woman in a way unique. Tactful, large 
 souled, wisely sympathetic, she entered deeply 
 into the problems of those who consulted her, 
 gaining a clear insight into the real needs of 
 the modern soul astray in its own life—wist¬ 
 ful, lonely, troubled, longing for an experi¬ 
 mental sense of spiritual reality, yet only half 
 willing to submit to the discipline of the quest. 
 It meant much to young women bewildered by 
 
A. Maude Roy den 131 
 
 perplexity, or broken by bereavement, to meet 
 and take counsel with a woman like Miss 
 Roydem And this ministry of conference and 
 confession reacted, in turn, upon her preaching, 
 making it peculiarly effective in meeting the 
 issues, both spiritual and social, confronting 
 present day womanhood. 
 
 There was a brief outcry of criticism when 
 Miss Royden christened a child one Sunday—a 
 service performed with such grace and im¬ 
 pressiveness that it was not soon forgotten— 
 but the critics were soon hushed. Personally 
 I should have been glad to have had her ad¬ 
 minister the Lord’s Supper, but she thought 
 it best not to do so, lest it expose her to rebuke, 
 if not to discipline, by the authorities of the 
 Anglican church, to which she remained loyal, 
 and some of whose leaders resented her min¬ 
 istry in the City Temple. Indeed, the Bishop 
 of London actually inhibited her from conduct¬ 
 ing a Good Friday service in one of the city 
 churches under his obedience, to the horror of 
 multitudes of Christian people who felt that 
 on that day, of all days, no voice of prayer 
 should be hushed. It seemed to many that the 
 Bishop—whose foresight is not abnormal—had 
 
132 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 been wiser, if, instead of driving Miss Royden 
 out of the church, to consort with feminists, 
 intellectuals and social revolutionaries, he had 
 set her the task of bringing them inside. But 
 apparently he was more concerned about her 
 hat than about what she was doing with the 
 brains under her hat! Like John Wesley, she 
 may remain all her days in the Anglican fold, 
 but she will be there only in her private 
 capacity, and her influence will be centrifugal. 
 
 At any rate, I gave a great woman a great 
 opportunity, to which she measured up, vindi¬ 
 cating once for all the possibilities of a woman 
 of genius in the service of the Christian pulpit; 
 and together we gave an example of that Chris¬ 
 tian unity of which we heard so much and saw 
 so little. In short, the woman insight, the 
 woman touch, the woman point of view were 
 needed in the pulpit, as elsewhere, and her 
 presence added to the City Temple ministry 
 a hint of that beautiful thing which we feel in 
 the Gospel of St. Luke. It was an honour to 
 have a colleague so gifted and so gracious, and 
 our fellowship was the more completely har¬ 
 monious, no doubt, because each could do what 
 the other could not do. As the war went on, 
 
A. Maude Royden 133 
 
 bringing a still further degradation of morals 
 in respect to the relations of the sexes—an 
 appalling letting down of the bars to the brute 
 —more than one issue came up with which 
 Miss Royden could deal in a manner impossible 
 to any man. She showed how a woman of 
 ethereal refinement and spirituality, while 
 speaking plainly, can handle such delicate and 
 difficult subjects as no man can handle them. 
 An entry in my London Diary speaks for 
 itself: 
 
 April 15, 1918:—When the question came 
 up as to the Maison-Tolerees —that is, houses 
 within the bounds of the British Army in which 
 women were herded, under medical super¬ 
 vision, for the uses of the soldiery—I had a 
 conference with Miss Royden, telling her that 
 the problem was hers. She agreed, and the 
 manner in which she has dealt with it is mag¬ 
 nificent. Delicately, yet plainly, disguising 
 none of the beastliness of it, she stated the 
 case, and I have never seen such flaming wrath 
 of outraged womanhood against the degrada¬ 
 tion of her sex! To those who defended the 
 system—and I heard it defended in a group 
 of Christian ministers!—after describing the 
 tolerated house at Cayeux-sur-Mer, and de¬ 
 nouncing the Government as a procurer in the 
 practise of prostitution, she said: “To any 
 
134 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 woman who believes the sacrifice to be neces¬ 
 sary, I would say that she ought herself to 
 volunteer! The men who urge regulated 
 prostitution on grounds of national necessity, 
 ought to invite their wives and daughters to 
 fill the places left vacant by the women who 
 are worn out! I use words that sear my heart, 
 but as a woman in a Christian pulpit I cannot 
 be silent in the presence of such an infamy!” 
 Soon the Government began to wince under 
 her attacks, and the abomination was abolished. 
 Unfortunately the Archbishop did not get 
 angry until after the victory had been won— 
 then he denounced the horror in the House of 
 Lords! 
 
 The ministry of Miss Royden at the City 
 Temple—memorable in many ways—ended 
 with my own, because she did not wish to em¬ 
 barrass my successor, and she feared that no 
 British minister would work with her as I had 
 done. In this she was happily mistaken. Later, 
 she and Dr. Dearmer, of King's College, held 
 services in the Kensington Town Hall with 
 conspicuous success—he speaking in the after¬ 
 noons, she in the evenings, to the vast audience 
 which follows her wherever she goes. For a 
 time she was a wanderer, a preacher to whom 
 no church would open its doors—a strange 
 
A. Maude Roy den 135 
 
 situation at a time when so many churches, 
 both Anglican and Free, were empty! Finally 
 an abandoned church was secured, and she 
 and Dr. Dearmer have formed a Fellowship, 
 to which many restless, forward-looking 
 people are attracted—but, alas, ill health adds 
 a handicap to one already frail. Whatever may 
 be the future of Miss Royden, it was the City 
 Temple that discovered her and gave her an 
 opportunity equal to her powers. There, in a 
 setting and service often described—never 
 more vividly than by Archibald Marshall in 
 his story, The Greatest of These —the dark 
 little woman in the big white pulpit seemed in 
 accord with the fitness of things; and her 
 genius shone as a light of God in the cruel days 
 of war, and the still more cruel days of rancour 
 and reaction which followed* 
 
VIII: Samuel McChord 
 
 Crothers 
 
 A Nevada minister once described to me the 
 action of a brother minister in the early days. 
 The minister went to a certain town where he 
 offended the lawless element, and was threat¬ 
 ened with physical violence if he persisted in his 
 intention of preaching. My friend described 
 the method by which the liberty of prophesying 
 was asserted. “He went into the pulpit, laid 
 his revolver on the Bible—and then preached 
 ex tempore ” 
 
 The manner of narration savoured of the 
 soil. The Honest Miner under the circum¬ 
 stances would subordinate everything to em¬ 
 phasis on the correct homiletical method. No 
 matter how able the minister might be, it was 
 evident that if he were closely confined to his 
 notes, his delivery could not be effective. 
 
 These words from an inimitable essay, “A 
 Community of Humourists,” 1 show us the 
 difference between the humour of the back¬ 
 woodsman and that of the miner of the west— 
 
 1 The Pardoner’s Wallet. 
 
 136 
 
Samuel McChord Crothers 137 
 
 whither Dr. Crothers went from Union Semi¬ 
 nary, driven by an illness which required the 
 high, clear air of the mountains. The humour 
 of the pioneer consisted in a grave, grotesque 
 exaggeration, while that of the miner is a deli¬ 
 cate, deliberate understatement, like the con¬ 
 siderate notice posted by the side of an open 
 shaft: “Gentlemen will please not fall down 
 this shaft, for there are men at work below.” 
 But the passage has a further significance more 
 pertinent to the matter in hand. As a fact, so 
 I have been told, it was after some such fashion 
 —happily without a threat of violence or the 
 need of a revolver—that Dr. Crothers himself 
 learned that he could preach without manu¬ 
 script or notes; a discovery which added a 
 whole dimension to his power as a preacher. 
 
 The story, as it was told me on good author¬ 
 ity, ran somewhat after this manner. It was 
 the first Sunday the young theologue ever ap¬ 
 peared in a pulpit, and, supposing that he was 
 to have but one service on that day, he pre¬ 
 pared only one sermon. The sermon was care¬ 
 fully written and apparently got itself preached 
 without mishap; but to his amazement, during 
 the morning service he was asked to announce 
 
138 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 a second service in the evening at which he 
 was to be the preacher. As the afternoon was 
 taken up with engagements, and he had no 
 time to prepare, he was obliged to preach off¬ 
 hand, so to speak; and he did it with such ease 
 and joy that he has never used manuscript 
 since. It was a fortunate circumstance, and 
 one often wishes that something of the sort 
 might happen—as in the case of the prophet 
 of Nevada, who dared not take his eyes off his 
 audience lest he be shot—compelling all preach¬ 
 ers to speak freely, frankly, and directly con¬ 
 cerning the things that matter most. 
 
 The passage quoted above has a still further 
 significance, as showing the wide experience 
 Dr. Crothers has had of America, and espe¬ 
 cially of the west, which he has interpreted 
 with so much insight and understanding. If 
 asked where the west begins, he would answer 
 that it begins “at that point where the centre 
 of interest suddenly shifts from the day before 
 yesterday to the day after tomorrow.” No 
 one knows America, he insists, until he has 
 been touched by the fever of the west; and one 
 who has felt that fever never completely re¬ 
 covers, but is always subject to intermittent 
 
Samuel McChord Crothers 139 
 
 attacks. Indeed, his life in Nevada and his 
 ministry in Minnesota qualify him to write 
 that psychological-geography of “The Land of 
 the Large and Charitable Air/’ which he sug¬ 
 gests in an essay of that title. Hence a chapter 
 on “The Lure of the West” in the best book 
 ever written in interpretation of Emerson 2 — 
 the best in its appreciative discrimination, and 
 because it treats the Sage of Concord not as 
 an oracle, but as a comrade and “con¬ 
 temporary”—who did “more than any one else 
 to redeem the New England group of authors 
 from the kind of provincialism which was their 
 darling sin.” Like Emerson, he knows the 
 robust, prophetic idealism of the west, and 
 loves it the more because it is still pushing its 
 way up through the hearty, wholesome ma¬ 
 terialism of a new country; and so long as 
 America keeps these two things together, it 
 will not go far astray. 
 
 Such is the background of the ministry of 
 Dr. Crothers to one of the most thoughtful 
 and cultured congregations in New England, in 
 the old First Parish of Cambridge—where not 
 a little of the old provincialism which Emerson 
 
 2 Emerson, How to Know Him. 
 
140 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 sought to correct is still to be found. There, 
 in a church mellow with history, in a setting 
 exquisite in its simplicity—colonial in aspect 
 and arrangement—I heard Dr. Crothers 
 preach not far from twenty years gone by. 
 The atmosphere and impression of that hour 
 are still vivid in my heart, and still more the 
 radiant and benignant personality of the 
 preacher—his grave, quiet manner, his delib¬ 
 erate delivery, his chaste and limpid style, his 
 sly humour, his lofty and logical thought. At 
 this distance I do not recall the text, but his 
 theme was “Three Ancient Types of Religion,” 
 the priest, the prophet, and the philosopher; 
 and he seemed to me to be a compound of all 
 three. It so happened that I was in the first 
 glow and enthusiasm of my discovery of Emer¬ 
 son, and I felt as King Herod must have felt 
 when he heard of the preaching of Jesus, and 
 thought he was John the Baptist returned from 
 the dead. Indeed, all through the sermon I 
 felt almost as if I were listening to Emerson— 
 not that Dr. Crothers was an echo of the sage, 
 or even a disciple, but he had the same wise 
 and serene elevation of thought. So much was 
 this true that I have hesitated to describe the 
 
Samuel McChord Crothers 141 
 
 impression of that day, fearing that the two 
 men were blended, if not blurred, in my mind, 
 like a dissolving view. But since reading his 
 book on Emerson—in which we see how much 
 the two have in common, and in what ways 
 they differ—I am not sure that I was so far 
 wrong, after all; and my faith is confirmed by 
 a letter from a great and wise man who has 
 attended the First Parish church for many 
 years: 
 
 The study of Dr. Crothers as a preacher 
 presents an interesting problem; for, in the 
 ordinary sense of the word, he is not a 
 preacher. Pie uses no hortatory eloquence, or 
 application of his theme; nothing of the 
 “Finally, my brethren/’ or “O my dear 
 friends.” Pie simply delivers himself of a 
 thought, and lets it have its own way. In the 
 details of parish affairs he is very childlike, and 
 the simplest notice is a stumbling block to him. 
 He is but slightly interested in the enrichment 
 of worship, or its technical details. On the 
 other hand, when he passes to the development 
 of his thought, he is the finest master of logical 
 and convincing* speech I ever knew. With 
 no shred of manuscript, and no appearance of 
 effort, his sermon advances up the heights of 
 insight and power with extraordinary con¬ 
 tinuity and force. In other words, he is at his 
 
142 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 best when his thought is most elevated, and 
 least effective when dealing with ordinary 
 affairs. He is the lineal descendant of Emer¬ 
 son in the pulpit, directing a transparent 
 stream of purifying thoughtfulness. Such a 
 method removes him altogether from the posi¬ 
 tion of a model for other preachers. An earlier 
 generation of Unitarian ministers ran much 
 risk of being spoiled by using a method which 
 is described as “Emerson and water.” To 
 imitate Crothers without his genius for lucidity 
 would be a hopeless task. He is as much alone 
 in the pulpit as Emerson is in literature. The 
 consequences of this kind of ministry are, how¬ 
 ever, instructive. It is generally recognised 
 in his parish that he cannot be depended upon 
 as a mechanic or organiser. Accepting his in¬ 
 spiration, others do the work of organisation, 
 and his church has become distinguished for its 
 multifarious undertakings of social service. In 
 other words, the wheels go round because there 
 is a quietly moving and powerful engine among 
 them, like the Living Creatures among the 
 wheels, whom Ezekiel saw. 
 
 Unfortunately, for the purposes of this 
 article, Dr. Crothers is more widely known as 
 an essayist than as a preacher; and he can never 
 be really known as a preacher save by those 
 who hear him. His sermons, as we read them, 
 are essays—like most sermons in the Unitarian 
 
Samuel McChord Crothers 143 
 
 ministry to which he belongs—that it might be 
 fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet 
 Emerson: 
 
 A new commandment, said the smiling Muse, 
 I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach., 
 
 But his essays are often sermons, and good 
 ones, too, such as “The Cruelty of Good 
 People,” or the chapter in his study of Emer¬ 
 son entitled “Spent the Day at Essex Junc¬ 
 tion.” A more helpful sermon than that 
 chapter it would be hard to name, teaching us 
 that we must learn how to find fulness of life 
 everywhere, anywhere, even in “a place on the 
 way to somewhere else.” But the reason why 
 one must hear Dr. Crothers in order to know 
 him as a preacher is that his sermons are 
 seldom, if ever, printed as they were delivered. 
 Often there is as much humour in his preach¬ 
 ing as in his essays, but the sermons are revised 
 by him from the report of the stenographer, 
 and he edits the humour out. This is matter 
 for regret, not only because humour has a place 
 in religion, but because the humour of Dr. 
 Crothers is unique, blending the elusive smile 
 of Emerson, the whimsical wisdom of Lamb, 
 
144 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 and the inverted exaggeration of the Honest 
 Miner, with many ingredients all his own. 
 Anyway, his printed sermons hardly give an 
 adequate idea of the impression made upon 
 his hearers. How he prepares his sermons 
 some of us would like to know, just as we 
 should like to know what use he makes, in 
 these arid days, of a certain fund left to the 
 First Parish by a benevolent saint of long ago, 
 intended “to supply the minister with tobacco 
 and rum.” Of course, a man who has access 
 to The Pardoner s Wallet enjoys obvious ad¬ 
 vantages; but the matter excites curiosity. 
 
 Almost thirty years have now come and gone 
 since Dr. Crothers published his first volume of 
 sermons, entitled Members of One Body, 
 which happily may still be had. It was made 
 up of a series of Sunday evening addresses 
 during his ministry at St. Paul—when he was 
 a kind of bishop of the northwest, starting new 
 centres of liberal faith at Duluth, St. Cloud, 
 and as far as Helena—dealing with the differ¬ 
 ent types of the religious life, Catholicism, 
 Calvinism, Methodism, Rationalism, Mysti¬ 
 cism, and a final address on “The Unity of 
 Christendom.” Even in those early days he 
 
Samuel McChord Crothers 145 
 
 was master of the same lucid style, and had 
 the same large outlook in which many appar¬ 
 ently contradictory qualities were joined— 
 breadth and depth, rationalism and mysticism, 
 catholicity and missionary zeal, the wisdom of 
 a philosopher and the ardour of a reformer. 
 A more sincere appreciation of the great quali¬ 
 ties of the Roman church it would be hard to 
 find; and so of the other types, his plea being 
 for men of the spirit who are co-operatively 
 minded, which requires them to get rid both of 
 narrowness and fastidiousness. Toleration is 
 not enough; there must be insight, understand¬ 
 ing, appreciation. We must not simply live 
 and let live, think and let think; we must learn 
 that the devout life is everywhere the same, 
 "Towing underneath the thickest ice of theory/’ 
 if we try to discern and understand. What is 
 greater than any one of our sects? All of 
 them! Our very recognition of the truth which 
 each contains should make us realise how 
 fragmentary each is. As we may read: 
 
 When we assume this attitude, we begin to 
 see through all its variations of thought the 
 essential unity of Christianity. The most op¬ 
 posite types have points of kinship. Each of 
 
146 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 them is aiming to get beyond sectarian narrow¬ 
 ness, and to build a universal church. They 
 agree as to their ideals: they disagree as to 
 their way of reaching them. . . . How may 
 this unity be practically realised? I have little 
 hope in any external power that shall compel 
 uniformity. I think such external union under 
 present conditions neither desirable nor practi¬ 
 cable. When we read that different competing 
 firms have united their interests in one great 
 trust, we expect very soon after to find a 
 modest item in the papers to the effect that this 
 trust has taken measures to limit production. 
 And, were all the churches of Christendom 
 united in one church, the next move would be 
 to repress the liberty of prophesying. If we 
 cannot have liberty and union, we must cling 
 ever to liberty. But I am one who believes that 
 through the most perfect liberty will come at 
 last the most perfect unity. 
 
 There is no power in any sect or church that 
 can prevent that largeness of sympathy which 
 every man of true religion exercises. I like 
 the good old New England puritan who, when 
 he was excommunicated by the church, refused 
 to stay excommunicated. We read that for 
 twenty years the good man came every com¬ 
 munion Sunday, and brought with him a bit 
 of bread and bit of wine of his own, and there, 
 in the safety of his high pew, communed with 
 the church, in spite of the deacons. When a 
 man brings his own communion with him, who 
 
Samuel McChord Crothers 147 
 
 can prevent ? Whether we shall enjoy the com¬ 
 munion of saints depends on ourselves. The 
 best that belongs to Calvinism and the best 
 that belongs to Romanism is mine, if I seek it. 
 The fellowship of the spirit, which is the only 
 fellowship that one need care to obtain—this 
 fellowship is ours, if we will. 
 
 From heart to heart, from creed to creed, 
 
 The hidden river runs. 
 
 A second volume of sermons, entitled The 
 Understanding Heart, appeared ten years 
 later—he has published but two, though many 
 of his sermons may be had in pamphlet form— 
 yet one would not know that it is a volume of 
 sermons at all. There are no texts to tell us so. 
 There is none of the urgency or appeal that 
 goes with preaching; no exhortation, no fer¬ 
 vour of evangelism, such as we find in Theo¬ 
 dore Parker. It is a book of essays for the elect, 
 who know that the problems of the under¬ 
 standing heart are educational, and that only 
 so can we readjust our thought and faith to the 
 facts of a growing, but friendly, universe. 
 How may our religious inheritance be harmon¬ 
 ised with our fresh experiences? How may 
 the institutions which have purely spiritual 
 ends be adjusted to those which serve our ma- 
 
148 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 terial welfare? How may we at the same time 
 live according to the rules of sound reason and 
 according to the inspirations of religious faith? 
 Such questions are discussed with fruitful in¬ 
 sight, a gentle and revealing wisdom, and a 
 grace of form which marks all his work. The 
 readjustment must not be merely formal, but 
 must come through the multitudes of men and 
 women doing their work with joyous and con¬ 
 fident intelligence, following the new develop¬ 
 ments as well as recording the old—organising 
 the religion of freedom, as of old men organ¬ 
 ised the religion of authority. 
 
 However, it is an error if I have left the 
 impression that Dr. Crothers lives aloft, writ¬ 
 ing exquisite essays in an ivory tower, aloof 
 from the interests and agitations of his age. 
 Not so. If to many he seems to live apart, his 
 very detachment gives him a clearer perspec¬ 
 tive, and more than once in his own communion 
 he has relieved the tension as much by his wis¬ 
 dom as by his humour. Some years ago when 
 John Haynes Holmes proposed, in a brilliant 
 speech, to commit the Unitarian church to a 
 definite programme of reform, it was Dr. 
 Crothers who made protest, not against reform, 
 
Samuel McChord Crothers 149 
 
 but against tying the church to particular 
 schemes. It was a picturesque occasion, and 
 while he had to pay the penalty of being a man 
 of humour, his triumph was due to sound sense. 
 His protest was in behalf of freedom, and 
 against any kind of coercion—whether by con¬ 
 servative or radical—and wisdom was on his 
 side. First find your dogma, and then adapt 
 yourself to it—such was the archaic method. 
 It does not work theologically, and he did not 
 believe it would work sociologically either. In 
 other words, he did not want a new sectarian¬ 
 ism for the old, but freedom in the largest, 
 fullest sense—liberty of prophesying, and “the 
 liberty of not believing more than half the 
 prophet says/' He said that if he had been in 
 Jerusalem when Jeremiah proposed to let Nebu¬ 
 chadnezzar punish the nation as the scourge of 
 God, he would have voted against him. The 
 kind of prophets he likes are “prophets that 
 have some sense, and a prophetic fervour be¬ 
 hind” ; as if any age ever regarded its prophets 
 as sensible! In the same address he said: 
 
 A year or two ago a revivalist came to Bos¬ 
 ton preaching the new evangelism. The min- 
 
150 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 isters met together and had daily meetings to 
 stir the conscience of Boston, to bring again 
 the old sense of sin. He was a good preacher. 
 As a practical application of his preaching, the 
 evangelist said to the business men who had 
 come to the noonday meetings, “Let us go and 
 march in a procession to find and save the 
 sinners.” Where do you think they went? 
 They went up into the North End of Boston. 
 A gentleman coming out of the meeting said 
 to me, “That ends my interest in it: why did 
 they not go on State street?” The ethical ques¬ 
 tions of today are like the ethical questions of 
 the time when slavery was a source of revenue 
 to good people. They go deep, sometimes they 
 touch your interests and mine, and earnest men 
 know that full well. Every attempt to found a 
 church today on glittering generalities, where 
 the preacher does not dare to follow to its 
 practical and necessary issues the religion of 
 the present generation, has no future: it has 
 no interest for the young. ... I believe these 
 are great days, interesting days for the young 
 men who are about to enter the ministry—men 
 of clearness, of sagacity, of patience, of com¬ 
 mon sense, all mixed up with a great sense of 
 humour. If they are patient enough and do not 
 allow things to get too much on their nerves, 
 they are going to win out. 
 
 Some think Dr. Crothers is at his best in his 
 Harvard lecture on The Endless Life, if only 
 
Samuel McChord Crothers 151 
 
 because he has described once for all that of 
 which—when the clouds are off our souls— 
 we dare assert immortality. There he moves 
 in a realm of moral and spiritual.values, where 
 his calm and clear insight shines like a friendly 
 beacon. The future life, at once the polar 
 expedition of philosophy and the polar star of 
 faith, becomes in his hands a quest of the 
 quality of life which reveals its own eternity. 
 For him the final assurance is “the confidence 
 of the simple man who stands in his integrity 
 undaunted by death”; and while he does not 
 profess to see “the lights o' Dover,” he leaves 
 us confident, but not curious—knowing that 
 all is well because man brings down to the Gate 
 of the Mist something that ought not to die. 
 
IX: T. Reaveley Glover 
 
 In August, 1918, while waiting for a steamer 
 to take me to America on a speaking tour, I 
 heard six of a series of eight sermons by Dr., 
 Glover at Westminster Chapel. He was 
 preaching at the Chapel for a month, Dr. 
 Jowett being away on a holiday, and the theme 
 of his series dealt with “J esus in the Ex¬ 
 perience of Men.” Since that time he has 
 written a book under the same title, as a sequel 
 to his Jesus of History; but the sermons were 
 different from the chapters of the book when 
 it appeared. In some ways they were better 
 than the book, one of them, for example, being 
 in the form of a story, telling how the first 
 statue of Jesus as the Good Shepherd was 
 carved. They were not lectures, but preaching 
 of a very real kind, at once stimulating and 
 searching., It was interesting to study the 
 congregations, many of whom were ministers 
 —most of them on holiday, like myself—and 
 
 all eager to hear Dr. Glover. It is always so, 
 
 152 
 
T. Reaveley Glover 153 
 
 whenever and wherever he speaks. In my diary 
 I find the following entry recalling those 
 summer days: 
 
 August 12, 1918:—-Whether I get a steamer 
 or not does not much matter, so long as Dr. 
 Glover preaches at the Westminster Chapel. 
 His series of sermons on the Jesus of Ex¬ 
 perience will make as rich a book as his studies 
 of the Jesus of History. A layman who is a 
 Doctor of Divinity, an orator with an atrocious 
 elocution, he is a scholar who knows more than 
 the law allows any one man to know. At times 
 his manner suggests a professor in a class¬ 
 room, but he is a truly great preacher—simple, 
 direct, earnest, with no thought other than to 
 make clear his vision of Jesus in the lives of 
 men. Rarely have I heard sermons so packed 
 with forthright thinking and fruitful insight.. 
 There is ripe scholarship without pedantry and 
 noble eloquence without oratory. Perhaps the 
 outstanding impression is a fresh, vivid sense 
 of reality, as of one who is looking straight at 
 the truth he is talking about. He “speaks 
 things,” as Cromwell would say. Vital faith 
 and fearless thinking are joined with a convic¬ 
 tion of the genuineness of the man, and his 
 knowledge of Jesus in his own experience. He 
 dodges no issue, no fact, no difficulty, and 
 his knowledge of the social, intellectual and 
 spiritual world in which Jesus lived, and in 
 which the church began her morning march, 
 
154 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 is extraordinary. He has a curious power of 
 taking us back into those times. There are 
 many ministries, but one Spirit. Some are 
 prophets, some evangelists, some teachers. Dr., 
 Glover is a great teacher of the truth as it is in 
 Jesus. 
 
 The first sermon of the series was preached 
 on August 4th, the anniversary of that dark 
 day, four years before, when England entered 
 the war. Memories of that great decision, 
 thoughts of its meaning, its cost in blood and 
 sorrow, filled all our minds; and instead of the 
 morning prayer Dr. Glover talked to us out 
 of a full heart, in the gentle words which men 
 use when they speak of such matters., What 
 is the meaning of this “long-lived storm of 
 great events ?” he asked. What difference has 
 it made? It is the task of the church, if it is 
 to be the priest of God to the nation, to trace 
 and measure the reactions of events in the 
 deeper life of the people. How does it stand 
 today in that inner life of thought, of motive, 
 of faith, down where “the shell-burred cables 
 creep ?” The Bible, and especially the Old 
 Testament, is a record of the reactions in the 
 life of a nation to the terrible deeds of God., 
 
T. Reaveley Glover 155 
 
 The Assyrian army lives in the inner life of 
 man, because through its movements the soul 
 of Isaiah was given new reach and range of 
 vision. When Titus destroyed Jerusalem he 
 released into the world a new Israel, the church 
 of Christ. Acts which absorb the minds of 
 men at the moment live afterwards chiefly in 
 the literature of the soul. Will it be so today? 
 Surely he who awakened the soul of Israel 
 through the march of the Assyrian host, has 
 some word to speak in this terror and tumult. 
 Who will read for us the new and living Word 
 of God, written in the facts and events of the 
 day? Are there elect souls who can hear for 
 others the still small voice speaking in the 
 storm? Then he asked all to join in the Lord’s 
 Prayer, as alone adequate to upbear the 
 thoughts and yearnings of the hour. Never 
 have I heard that brief, grand prayer so sur¬ 
 charged with feeling, lifting a troubled people 
 into the fellowship and consolation of God. 
 
 The sermon which followed had two texts— 
 1 Cor. 2:8, and Heb. 8:8—portraying Christ 
 the same yesterday, today and forever, in con¬ 
 trast with the phantasmagoria of “world- 
 rulers of the darkness” which haunted the 
 
156 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 ancient world. In Paradise Lost we see 
 that daemon world, “thrones, dominions, prin¬ 
 cipalities and powers,” in its most glorious 
 form, but we do not realise how real and 
 terrifying it was to the ancient mind. To us 
 all that history of war in the spirit sphere is a 
 dim, shadowy mythology, but to the men of 
 that day it was real, proven by long belief, and 
 confirmed by the best and most catholic of 
 philosophic thinkers. Indeed, it was more real 
 than Jesus. He, and not the daemon dominions, 
 was the doubtful element. For us the whole 
 thing has vanished, like the baseless fabric of 
 a dream. We do not believe it. We think no 
 more of it, neither about Satan, nor his hosts. 
 But if the legend of spirits at war was a part 
 of the early Christian faith, what becomes of 
 Jesus? Is he going too, along with the rest 
 of the strange tales, to take his place among 
 the old imaginings? No; Jesus abides and 
 grows, first, because he is rooted in historic 
 fact, as actual and well attested a figure in 
 history as any one of us. Men knew him, saw 
 him, spoke with him. He was as definitely his¬ 
 torical as Caesar himself. Second, he abides 
 
T. Reaveley Glover 157 
 
 because, even today, he is more real than any 
 of us, revealed in the depth, intensity, and ful¬ 
 ness of his experience both of the dark facts of 
 life and of the reality of God. Further, he 
 abides because he is still unexhausted; because 
 the race has not yet used to the full his ex¬ 
 perience of life and his intuitions of God. 
 There is no example in history of a great per¬ 
 sonality putting a lesson to the world and pass- 
 % 
 
 ing away before the lesson is learned to the 
 very end, and transcended. So far from 
 transcending Jesus, we are still far, very far, 
 behind him. The closing passages of the 
 sermon were memorable, as much for their 
 vital insight as for the quiet, compelling 
 earnestness of the preacher; so much so that, 
 looking toward the pulpit, we saw no man but 
 Jesus only. 
 
 So far as I understand these modern times 
 in which we live, religion is only possible to the 
 modern man along the lines of Jesus Christ. 
 For you and me there are no other religions. 
 Of course, there are people who play at being 
 Buddhists and Hindus; and we may wonder 
 what the reflective Buddhist and the reflective 
 Hindu think of them. All sorts of poses are 
 adopted by men and women, but serious 
 
158 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 thinkers do not pose, and any man who comes 
 to grips with history and philosophy knows 
 that Buddha and Mohammed and the Hindu 
 sages are not for us. It is Jesus or nobody, 
 and we have not exhausted what he has to say. 
 The plain fact is that God for Jesus, God in 
 Jesus, is an unexplored treasure still; and for 
 us, apart from Jesus, God is little better than 
 an abstract noun; and, as I grow older, I find 
 abstract nouns of less and less use. Let us 
 put it this way. If we spoke straight out we 
 should say that God could not do better than 
 follow the example of Jesus. That means that 
 Jesus fulfils our conception of God, but that 
 is not enough. He is constantly enlarging our 
 idea of God, revealing great tracts of God un¬ 
 suspected by us. God interpretable in and 
 through Jesus is unexhausted by you and me. 
 That means that Jesus is going to stay. 
 
 I have not touched the fourth point yet, 
 which is less theoretical than any of the others. 
 There are about us hundreds of men and wom¬ 
 en who have found that in the terrible business 
 of keeping level with life in the more terrible 
 business of fighting one’s character through to 
 something like decency, Jesus is still a depend¬ 
 able factor. We are not dealing with propo¬ 
 sitions in the air; we are dealing with Someone 
 to whom we can go and say, “Come and help 
 me,” and he does. If some of the psychologists 
 will not quite let us say that, they must concede 
 that we find help when we bring him in. In 
 
T. Reaveley Glover 159 
 
 other words, where you touch Jesus you touch 
 the real still. Is not that true? Do you not 
 know men and women who have been remade 
 by Jesus Christ? In your own lives, too, you 
 know that help that Jesus has been and is. The 
 fact that you can depend upon him, that you 
 can utilise him, means that he stays. 
 
 My last point is this: If all this is so, do not 
 we feel again the importance of keeping the 
 gaze fixed upon him? That beautiful verse in 
 Hebrews speaks of “Looking away and fixing 
 the eyes upon Jesus"—keeping full in the fore¬ 
 front, not a theological figure, but the real, one, 
 true, vivid Jesus; yesterday and today the same, 
 and forever; tender, intelligent, sympathetic, 
 wonderful, available; just the kind of Jesus to 
 whom people went with every sort of trouble, 
 lost children, the storm at sea, all sorts and 
 kinds of things; the Jesus who could be inter¬ 
 rupted by mothers with little children; and like 
 it; the Jesus who took his friends away and 
 lay under the trees with them when they were 
 tired; the Jesus who knew their problems and 
 helped them. Let us remember in all our think¬ 
 ing that Jesus in glory—and I do not know 
 much about glory—is the same, and is to be 
 interpreted by those stories of his life which we 
 know so well in the gospels, and that he is not 
 more inaccessible now than he was then, but 
 better proved, better attested, better known, 
 and more available for you and me. “Who 
 shall separate us from the love of Christ?" 
 
160 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 Of course the volume discussing Jesus in 
 the Experience of Men, as we now have it, 
 contains much more than the eight sermons 
 delivered in Westminster Chapel. All the 
 sermons were recast and extended, losing much 
 in essay form, and the story of the Good Shep¬ 
 herd was omitted entirely—much to my regret. 1 
 Six other chapters were added, none more 
 arresting than the one entitled “The Compro¬ 
 mising Church,” in which we hear a layman 
 speaking very plainly about the narrowness 
 and cowardice of the church. The complaint 
 of educated people, he says, is that the church, 
 for all its talk, is unsympathetic with progress 
 
 Un a later book, entitled The Pilgrim, made up of various 
 articles and sketches, I am glad to see that Dr. Glover has 
 included the story of the Good Shepherd, referred to above. 
 •Somehow, in spite of its richness of thought and insight, 
 Jesus in the Experience of Men does not have the same sat¬ 
 isfying appeal as The Jesus of History did. A young English 
 minister states the matter briefly in a letter: “The simple, 
 searching style of sentence is missing for the most part; there 
 is a hesitancy of thought, a subconscious bewilderment, as 
 though the subject was too great to handle—as indeed it is, 
 since the whole world could hardly contain the books that 
 could be written on such a theme. Dr. Glover, as historian, 
 describes the world with the light of the Master’s presence 
 around him; but he fails when he turns to describe the light 
 itself. The reader has the feeling that he is being led to a 
 new focus of experience, but when he has finished the book 
 he is still waiting for the promise which the writer holds out. 
 Yet there are sentences that stick in the mind: ‘The death of 
 Jesus lit up the heart of God’: ‘The stars themselves move 
 on the lines of Jesus’: ‘Prescribed thinking is proscribed 
 thinking.’ ” 
 
T. Reaveley Glover 161 
 
 and with intellectual advance. It is mistrustful 
 of art, and afraid of science and socialism; it 
 clings to out-of-date scholarship and pre-Chris¬ 
 tian psychology, and presses philanthropy 
 without economics and missions without an¬ 
 thropology. So far from representing Jesus to 
 the world, it has made him odious to the in¬ 
 telligent mind. He does not mince matters in 
 denouncing the alliance of English religion 
 with special privilege, and its economic ortho¬ 
 doxy. Its weak spot has always been its un¬ 
 certainty what to make of Jesus, and its un¬ 
 willingness to obey him. “Its associations 
 tainted with capitalism; its creed mere jargon 
 —what is to help the church?” he asks. Still, 
 he has faith in the church triumphant—when 
 the church has dropped its reluctance to take 
 Jesus seriously, when it believes he means what 
 he says, and when it is willing to believe that 
 Jesus and truth will prevail. 
 
 Such is the preaching of a great layman, who 
 is also a great scholar, a historian of authority, 
 and the Public Orator of the University of 
 Cambridge. Even these excerpts from a single 
 sermon show how real and vital his preaching 
 is. There is hardly any man now living from 
 
162 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 whom preachers may learn more, except in 
 his manner of delivery, and that is soon for¬ 
 gotten in the vividness of his insight and 
 appeal. Few men unite as he does those three 
 rarest of gifts, accurate knowledge, the ability 
 to describe what he knows as if it were a new 
 discovery, and to do so in words which anybody 
 can understand. One of the greatest of living 
 scholars, he is the least bookish of men, and 
 the learned and the unlearned alike hear him 
 gladly. His amazing knowledge never obscures 
 the freshness of his vision. The Life of Jesus 
 loses much of its power by sheer familiarity; 
 we know it so well that we hardly know it at 
 all. But when Dr. Glover writes of the Jesus 
 of History, the old, old story is so real, so liv¬ 
 ing, that we seem almost to be listening to it 
 for the first time. Arnold says that Gray 
 doubled his force by his style. The same is 
 true of Dr. Glover, whose style is as lucid, as 
 virile, as direct as his thought, and withal rich 
 in rhythm and colour, with now a flash of crim¬ 
 son and now a gleam of gold. Above all, he 
 bases himself on experience; in all his preach¬ 
 ing the emphasis falls on fact that can be tested 
 and relied on. No man can hear him without 
 
T. Reaveley Glover 163 
 
 feeling that he is dealing with realities, and 
 that he will not go an inch beyond what he sees 
 to be verifiable and true. 
 
 There are those who say that the preaching 
 of Dr. Glover, and his religious thinking in 
 general, is too individualistic. It is a strange 
 criticism to one who knows his writings, as, for 
 example, his Angus lectures on The Christian 
 Tradition and its Verification, in which his 
 appeal, as always, is to the Christian experience 
 of the ages, communal and cumulative, as 
 against the errors of individual insight. Better 
 still, because in briefer form, is the Swarth- 
 more lecture on The Nature and Purpose of a 
 Christian Society: a little gem, worth its 
 weight in gold. When asked why, in a lecture 
 delivered to a Yearly Meeting of the Society 
 of Friends, he took such a turn, he said that 
 he did it deliberately and of set purpose, in 
 order to appeal to the experience of the historic 
 church; whereas the Quaker differentia is, for 
 the most part, an appeal against the historic 
 church, “the apostasy/’ in fact, to quote George 
 Fox. For, he added, “I believe that any real 
 light that comes to man from God, directly or 
 indirectly, will be confirmed by the light that 
 
164 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 comes to others from him. It is for some such 
 reason that I appeal to the experience of the 
 historic church.” As a study of the experience 
 of the church, its creative fellowship, the type 
 of character and quality of personality it has 
 produced, as well as the body of truth which 
 has been, and remains, its unique treasure, it 
 would be hard to name another little book 
 like it. 
 
 However, it is with Dr. Glover the preacher 
 —not the scholar, the historian, or the literary 
 critic—that we have now to do; doubly so be¬ 
 cause he is a layman, and ministers need to 
 know what kind of sermons a great layman 
 preaches. As a further example, and one show¬ 
 ing not only the depth and simplicity of his 
 faith, but also his skill in direct appeal, in the 
 use of familiar language, and his habit of 
 avoiding the set phrases of theology, let us 
 take one of the noblest sermons of which I 
 have any knowledge, entitled “Why Jesus is 
 My Master.” Five reasons are given for his 
 willingness to be called a “slave” of Jesus. 
 Being a man of modern education—critical, 
 hesitating, sceptical—he finds that intellectually 
 Jesus is the clearest and sincerest Teacher that 
 
T. Reaveley Glover 165 
 
 man has. It does not matter that he lived long 
 ago. It is not the date, but the depth that 
 counts, and Jesus went to the bottom of things 
 once for all. The lucidity of his moral vision 
 is only equalled by his faith in man. Indeed, 
 he is the only teacher who really offers any 
 hope for humanity, any way out of the pit of 
 personal and social sin. What is more to the 
 point, he not only has hope for man, but he has 
 the power to pick us up and set us on our feet 
 when we slip and fall into the mire. His magic 
 of personality, and his skill in making and lead¬ 
 ing men, compel his abject surrender and 
 devotion. 
 
 Who is the leader that you want to find? 
 What sort of a spirit? How does he handle 
 men? You know the difference between one 
 man and another; how one may steal a horse 
 and the other may not look over the hedge. 
 Why? Because it is he that takes the horse; 
 it is just him. That is not grammar perhaps, 
 but it is human experience. What is it about 
 him? somebody asks. I do not know, but it 
 is in him. Here is a story—a true one. It 
 comes from Italy, from one of the great periods 
 of Garibaldi. He had conquered Sicily for 
 Italy, he had conquered a large part of the 
 Neapolitan kingdom on the mainland, and was 
 
i66 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 held up on a river. A well-known Englishman 
 drifted into the camp, and while strolling about 
 came upon a soldier in rags. The terms in 
 which Garibaldi enlisted his men were these: 
 he paid them nothing, he gave them no clothes, 
 he gave them no food, and if they looted the 
 Italians he shot them. The Englishman got 
 to talking with the boy in rags about the situa¬ 
 tion. Yes, he was depressed. He said: “The 
 other day, as I was sitting here on the hill, I 
 was wondering how long I could stand it, or 
 whether I would go, desert. Things had got so 
 far, then he came by. I had never spoken to 
 him. But he saw me and came up to me, and 
 clapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Courage, 
 tomorrow we shall fight for our country!’ Do 
 you think I could go after that?” 
 
 Now, what is that? We call it personal 
 magnetism. I do not know quite what that 
 means; it is just a long way of saying, “It's 
 him.” That is the reason why Jesus enlists 
 people to stand with him. There is something 
 about him that, as you get to know him, makes 
 it impossible to have anything but enthusiasm 
 for him. The more you know of him the more 
 He is. The great regret of a Christian man 
 is that he has not served him enough; that he 
 has not more to give him. That is the ex¬ 
 perience of the Christian church. It is always 
 the Person: the highest thing we can guess of 
 God, his personality. And here is one who 
 comes into our midst, a person full of power 
 
T. Reaveley Glover 167 
 
 and charm. He takes our lives and makes 
 good things out of them. He takes our temp¬ 
 tations and beats them down under our feet. 
 He forgives our sins; he restores us; goes with 
 us, loves us and is ours. Do you wonder why 
 men and women want to be called the slaves of 
 Jesus Christ? 
 
 I want to put this to some of you: Can you 
 face up to what he is? Can you see what he 
 has done for men? What he has made of men, 
 what he has enabled them to do, the way in 
 which he has used them for the everlasting 
 happiness and betterment of the race? Can 
 you see that and say, “I do not think he has 
 anything for me?” He has, and that is the 
 gospel; that he who enlisted others, charmed 
 them, kept them, used them, is going to enlist 
 you, and he is going to do with you more than 
 you dream. How old are you? Eighteen? 
 Forty? Fifty? There is no telling what Jesus 
 Christ can do with a man or woman once they 
 have surrendered. What I urge is that you 
 surrender to him. That is all. 
 
X: S. Parkes Cadman 
 
 In writing about Dr. Cadman, even if one 
 shares his breadth of sympathy, one craves 
 something of his rare gift of insight and 
 characterisation; the more because he is so 
 baffling to all analysis. He admires widely, 
 and with catholic appreciation; he can praise 
 both Lacordaire and Gipsy Smith, and is as 
 much at home with Newman as with Wesley. 
 At once generous and discerning, dynamic and 
 gentle, he is so many-sided, so fertile, so amaz¬ 
 ing in his activities, and withal so human and 
 lovable, that he puzzles any artist because he is 
 so unlike any model. The spaciousness and 
 majesty of his thought, the swiftness and 
 felicity of his delivery, the enchantment of his 
 personality, leave one with a sense of dismay. 
 Some years ago an English friend, having 
 heard Dr. Cadman at Whitefield’s in the morn¬ 
 ing and Dr. Gunsaulus at the City Temple in 
 the evening, confided to me his impressions: 
 
S. Parkes Cadman 169 
 
 Two of your prophets held central citadels in 
 “ye olde London town” today, much to our 
 edification. They differ as much from each 
 other in type as do the men whose pulpits they 
 occupied, Horne and Campbell; but both are 
 princes of the invisible. Cadman is not an 
 impressive figure in the pulpit—until he begins 
 to speak. Then the whole man lights up. His 
 voice has some unusual tone qualities and rare 
 carrying power. Sturdy, broad of shoulder, 
 with close-cropped brown hair touched with 
 grey, he is as decisive in movement as he is 
 direct in speech. He speaks, through his whole 
 personality, of energy and intellect. His 
 closely knit argument, his still more closely knit 
 sentences, finely phrased but delivered with 
 passionate rapidity, overwhelm by the power of 
 reason at white heat. An excerpt is like an 
 amputation. A note directly opposite, but not 
 opposed, is struck by Gunsaulus, who is an 
 impressionist artist in words, relying more on 
 illustration and colour. The sermon of Cad¬ 
 man was that of an architect producing a splen¬ 
 did effect as a whole by infinite attention to 
 detail. Gunsaulus is a man of large, strong 
 gesture, of lyrical speech, in which a haunting 
 voice and poetic thought blend to win by beauty 
 rather than compel by power. He is dramatic 
 rather than argumentative. Something of the 
 crooning magnetism of Gipsy Smith is tem¬ 
 pered in him by a large and rich culture. Cad¬ 
 man revealed throughout his extraordinary 
 
170 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 power of literary phrasing, and if the impres¬ 
 sion he makes is more intellectual than spiritual, 
 it is both virile and challenging. America is 
 happy in having two men of such rare gifts, 
 one on the eastern seaboard and the other in 
 the Middle West. 
 
 Unfortunately, Dr. Cadman has published 
 no volume of sermons, so far as I am aware; 1 
 and one must depend upon newspaper reports— 
 especially those in the Brooklyn Eagle, which 
 is in fact a great pulpit with one Amen Corner 
 in New England and the other in Florida, with 
 the Rocky Mountains for a gallery. For a 
 long time, though I had heard Dr. Cadman 
 lecture, I knew him as a preacher only in his 
 reported sermons, and that is hardly to know 
 him at all, since there is so much in the per¬ 
 sonality of the man—Rooseveltian in its 
 
 'One does not forget his brilliant volume of lectures, 
 Charles Darwin and other English Thinkers; as valuable for 
 its portrayal of the background and setting of the men studied, 
 as for its analysis of their thought. Some of us think The 
 Three Religious Leaders of Oxford the best bit of work 
 Dr. Cadman has done, showing his powers put forth at full 
 stretch on themes congenial to his mind and heart. No one 
 may ever hope to find a more satisfying study of Wesley, the 
 wonder of whose life remains as baffling as it is fascinating— 
 as if Benjamin Franklin had become the greatest evangelist 
 since St. Paul. Dr. Denney, in his Letters, renews our amaze¬ 
 ment, but does not solve the riddle of it. If Dr. Cadman 
 leaves the mystery of Newman unsolved, it is because no one 
 can unravel it until the secrets of all hearts are known. 
 
S. Parkes Cadman 171 
 
 energy, enthusiasm, and winsomeness—that 
 does not find its way into print. So it was 
 nothing short of a revelation when I went for 
 the first time to Central Church—the “Tin 
 Church,” as it is called in Brooklyn—taking 
 with me a discerning friend who boasts his 
 ability as a sermon-taster, and not without 
 good reason, for he listened to Beecher for 
 fifteen years. 
 
 The Church was full, though not crowded; 
 the audience for the most part middle-aged 
 people, and the men were in the majority— 
 hard-headed business and professional men 
 apparently. The service was planned and con¬ 
 ducted by a man who is not simply a preacher, 
 but a minister, and in the highest and best sense 
 a sacramentarian; sane enough to achieve rich¬ 
 ness of worship without too much ritual—just 
 as he is wise enough to be liberal yet evangelical 
 in faith. There was about the man, as Carlyle 
 would say, somewhat of the Eternal. When 
 he began the sermon one felt that he regarded 
 the sermon as also a sacrament, not a rostrum 
 for a reputation but an opportunity to lead 
 men to God; and that he loves men too well 
 to lead them anywhere else. There he stood, 
 
172 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 a stockily-built figure, the very embodiment 
 of mental efficiency and spiritual sanity, re¬ 
 minding me of a passage in a book of science 
 describing the quality called vigour, which is 
 evidently something 4j|ore than strength, some¬ 
 thing more than health; a capacity for living 
 intensely, yet without any loss of balance, a 
 power of expending energy lavishly yet without 
 ceasing to have plenty in reserve, an ability 
 to resist strain and to defy fatigue. It implies 
 being ever ready for great exertions and yet 
 having staying power. 
 
 The sermon was entitled ‘‘Treasures in 
 Christ”—Col. 2:3—and it was no haphazard 
 affair, but a real work of homiletic art, orderly 
 in arrangement, exquisite in language, apt in 
 illustration; but its art was forgotten in 
 the effortless ease—nay, more, the rejoicing 
 urgency—with which it was delivered. It had 
 a skeleton and was athletic enough to stand 
 alone, but so much alive that its bones did not 
 stick out in Firstly, Secondly, and so forth. 
 It was a characteristic Cadman sermon, as 
 much for its vitality as for its distinction of 
 manner; moving in a large orbit, bright with 
 insight and epigram, and reminding one of 
 
S. Parkes Cadman 173 
 
 David Swing in the great names with which it 
 conjured. Its daring and far-ranging general¬ 
 isations seemed to open new vistas of divine 
 surprise, until we saw Christianity as the centre 
 and synthesis of truth; a faith simple, catho¬ 
 lic, profound, satisfying the thinker and alone 
 equal to the problem of redemption in its tragic 
 and gigantic modern setting. After the first 
 ten minutes my friend the sermon-taster said 
 it was glorified glibness; at the end he thought 
 it nothing less than miraculous. And no won¬ 
 der ; for it was a portrayal of the uniqueness, 
 comprehensiveness, and supremacy of the liv¬ 
 ing Christ, as certain of its sentences, which 
 my friend can still quote, make plain: 
 
 We reflect upon the blind gropings and 
 blurred apprehension of venerable faiths. 
 Their literature is translated and we read it 
 with curious and pathetic interest. The scurvy 
 gods of the pantheons, vindictive and weak, 
 are condemned and repudiated by us. Men may 
 be agnostic, they may become atheists, but 
 never again can men apprentice themselves to 
 these primitive forms. In the teaching of Jesus 
 these erstwhile faiths find explanation. They 
 are part of the cosmic process in religion; 
 tragic, but significant, overtures ere the Lord 
 of men appears to bring them to God. He 
 
174 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 gives to nature heart and purpose. He shows 
 that the very ground beneath our feet is sympa¬ 
 thetic, that no star shines or pales away with¬ 
 out his consent. This earthly scene becomes 
 intelligible in him, and pain and sorrow and 
 death cannot be understood apart from his 
 word concerning them. 
 
 No wonder that Christian theology is hasten¬ 
 ing, under pressure, to restore central authority 
 to the doctrine of the incarnation. Christ 
 himself, no book, no creed, no ecclesiastical 
 form, has seized the life of this age, so vast, 
 so complex and so baffling, and now, as never, 
 history gives him testimony and the ages 
 chant: “Thou hast the words of eternal life.” 
 If you ask why this changeless power over 
 society exists in Jesus, the only reply is, because 
 He ever lives as a present authority. Other 
 masters are an echo; He is a voice. They died 
 and left their systems to the blemish of time; 
 He controls the event by being with its happen¬ 
 ing. Hence the adaptations of the religion He 
 founded among different races. Christianity 
 began in Rome, hidden in the catacombs, and 
 upward it came to rear into Italy’s pure and 
 brilliant skies its monuments of faith. 
 
 Much of the treasure is hidden, but since the 
 treasures are hidden in Christ, they are as safe 
 as He is and as abiding as His eternity. The 
 mighty strands of Brooklyn Bridge are gath¬ 
 ered into one great heart of masonry at either 
 end, and there buried out of sight, and we cross 
 
S. Parkes Cadman 175 
 
 the stream in safety. So the complex web of 
 life, its apparent antinomies, its grief, its pain, 
 its ministries, its explanations, are gathered up 
 into the mighty heart of Jesus, and whatever 
 wonder awaits man, however fecund his dis¬ 
 coveries and phenomenal his advances, he will 
 continue to cross the gulfs of time in safety, 
 since life, knowledge and wisdom are hidden 
 with Christ in God, to whom be glory forever 
 and ever. ... 
 
 Next evening we met to read and discuss the 
 sermon, but, alas, the report of it in the Eagle 
 was only an elaborate synopsis, hardly more 
 than a thin shadow of what we had heard. 
 Moreover it read less like a sermon than a 
 lecture, or an article in a Review; so much does 
 the work of Dr. Cadman lose when his per¬ 
 sonality is withdrawn. Something was lost. 
 Glamour was not the word to describe it, be¬ 
 cause it suggests something unreal, and the 
 spell which he cast over us was not only real, 
 but exalting and revealing. However, we 
 agreed—reading a number of his sermons in 
 the glow of that radiance—that he was one 
 of the best natural orators we had ever heard, 
 for his grace, ease, fluency, fertility, and re¬ 
 source, having a copious vocabulary, rich in 
 
176 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 content and quality—albeit lacking at times in 
 the reticences and reserves which true style 
 requires. Also, his studentship, at once prodi¬ 
 gious and omniverous, filled us with astonish¬ 
 ment, and what he had read was assimilated 
 and minted in his own mind. Indeed, he is one 
 of the few popular preachers who really cares 
 for learning, and his knowledge is encyclo¬ 
 pedical in its accuracy and range. As a maker 
 of sermons he is unique, alike in his style and 
 his skill, but hardly the equal of his neighbour, 
 Dr. Hillis, as a master of popular homiletics. 
 Strong, vivid, full-blooded—the Rubens of the 
 pulpit, as Jowett is its Meissonier—he is a 
 great preacher for the greatness of his themes, 
 no less than for the virility of his thought and 
 faith; and because he always leaves us think¬ 
 ing and wondering, not about himself—his 
 brilliant mind, his incisive reasoning, his 
 lambent eloquence—but about the great things 
 of life; about God and man, about following 
 Christ, about the crown of sanctity and the 
 building of that city which hath foundations. 
 
 Of books about preaching by great preachers 
 we have had many, and the value of each, aside 
 from the fresh wisdom of experience which it 
 
S. Parkes Cadman 177 
 
 teaches, lies in the unconscious self-revelation 
 of its author. It is always interesting to see 
 how a master workman does his work, though 
 not much that is new has been said about the 
 technique of preaching since Phelps and 
 Broadus; and little has been added to its history 
 and philosophy since Dykes, Dargan, and Beh- 
 rends. Brilliant, stimulating, wise in practical 
 counsel, fruitful alike in generalisation and 
 in characterisation, the lectures of Dr. Cad¬ 
 man, Ambassadors of God, are disappointing 
 in their personal communicativeness, as com¬ 
 pared, for example, with the lectures of 
 Beecher, Jefferson, or Quayle. However, it 
 was not his purpose to add a new vade-mecum 
 to an already long catalogue; but, rather, to 
 give a swift survey of the history, philosophy 
 and practice of preaching, the better to show 
 its function in these new and strange times. 
 No man among us is better fitted, both by 
 knowledge and sure-footed wisdom, to guide 
 his brethren amid the bewildering eddies, cross¬ 
 currents, and whirlpools of modern life and 
 thought; and therein lies the chief value of the 
 book. He is a Greatheart threading the 
 tangled maze of the modern mind, astray in 
 
178 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 its own confusion, and telling us that there is 
 nothing to dishearten the preacher of Christ 
 in the agitations and misapprehensions of this 
 ambiguous age. Unfortunately, the style of 
 the lectures, “loaded with polysyllabic Latin- 
 ity,” is often a disadvantage, and at times as 
 ponderous as procession of elephants. This is 
 due, in large part, to the fact that for Dr. 
 Cadman—as for Beecher—writing is a drud¬ 
 gery, and so much that is most commanding 
 and winsome in the man breaks through words 
 and escapes. Had the lectures been reported 
 they would have been ten times better—aglow 
 with flashes of lightning and every kind of 
 felicity and surprise, which only an audience 
 can evoke from the preacher. Despite this 
 limitation, no better book about the great art, 
 which is also an incarnation, has come to us 
 in many a day. An exalted conception of the 
 office of preaching, a romantic sense of its his¬ 
 tory, rich experience, wide reading, and a 
 vision of the need and challenge of a world 
 troubled, enthralled, groping, unite to give us 
 an overwhelming sense of the divine origin, 
 worth, and permanent function of the gospel 
 ministry. Much needed, too, especially in 
 
S. Parkes Cadman 179 
 
 America, is the emphasis upon preaching as 
 itself sacramental, and the insistence that the 
 sermon is not a thing apart, but a passage in 
 the context of the worship which it seeks to 
 inspire, direct, and interpret. 
 
 Some things Dr. Cadman ought to explain to 
 his brethren, and one is the secret by which 
 he seems to have all that he has ever heard, 
 read or thought instantly at command, as if 
 he had it pigeonholed in his mind within reach. 
 It is almost uncanny. There is a sentence in 
 the Life of John Sterling, by Carlyle, which 
 describes it exactly: “So ready lay his store 
 of knowledge round him, so perfect was his 
 ready utterance of the same—in coruscating 
 wit, in jocund drollery, in compact articulated 
 clearness or high poignant emphasis, as the 
 case required—he was a match for any man in 
 argument before a crowd.” Hence a ministry 
 of information, no less than of inspiration, in 
 which Dr. Cadman is surpassed by no living 
 man. He reads everything and forgets noth¬ 
 ing; and his ability to summon all his resources 
 at will—added to his amazing industry in 
 study, his painstaking preparation, and his 
 incredible gift of speech—make him one of the 
 
180 Some Living Masters of- the Pulpit 
 
 great public teachers of his time. Nothing 
 human is alien to Dr. Cadman, and his inter¬ 
 pretative insight and picturesque eloquence 
 mark him as without doubt the most brilliant 
 and effective popular lecturer since Beecher— 
 a Christian publicist, a former of intelligent 
 national opinion, an incomparable champion of 
 fraternal righteousness and practical idealism, 
 whose personality is an invaluable asset to the 
 republic. 
 
 In Brooklyn, Dr. Cadman is not simply a 
 personality; he is an institution. Not alone as 
 orator, but as pastor, organiser, citizen, and 
 friend, he is a leader whose authority is only 
 equalled by his sanity, and his church is a com¬ 
 munity force. Keeping his pose in a difficult 
 time, weighing the issues carefully, thrilling in 
 appeal, terrific in denunciation, during the 
 great war he was a tower of strength, not only 
 in his own city, but all over the land. If a 
 vexed question agitates the public mind, or 
 some united public effort is needed in behalf 
 of the public good, it is Dr. Cadman who 
 crystallises the sentiment and best judgment 
 of the community. His conferences for men 
 at the Bedford Branch of the Young Men's 
 
S. Parkes Cadman 181 
 
 Christian Association have been for years both 
 a local and a national forum, and a feature of 
 Greater New York. Week after week he holds 
 a vast audience of men—perhaps the largest 
 in the country—discussing an astonishing 
 range of subjects, and in addition answering 
 questions dealing with every conceivable topic, 
 from the character of Socrates to the Passion 
 Play at Hoboken. There he is in his glory, 
 and his replies, if sometimes oracular, are com¬ 
 pounded of accurate knowledge, sanctified com¬ 
 mon sense, and sparkling wit, equally a joy to 
 the student and a terror to the crank For 
 example: 
 
 Q—Do you believe in the Darwinian theory 
 of evolution, and do you think it explains any¬ 
 thing? 
 
 A—According to that theory, man is not only 
 descended from the ape, but he has within him 
 a whole menagerie, and sometimes the ape is 
 uppermost, and sometimes the ass. I am in¬ 
 clined to believe in it; it explains a lot. 
 
 Q—Who was the greatest man, Caesar, Al¬ 
 exander, Cromwell, or Isaac Newton? 
 
 A—If true greatness consists in the right 
 use of a powerful understanding, Sir Isaac 
 Newton leads the list. It is to such men as 
 Newton—men who enlighten their fellow men 
 
182 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 —not to men who enslave them by violence, 
 that we owe reverence. 
 
 Q—What was the ideal of the Pilgrim 
 Fathers, and why do you attribute supremacy 
 to them in the making of America ? 
 
 A—A theocracy consisting of a solemn al¬ 
 legiance to the covenant of the gospel and a de¬ 
 termination to walk by its rule, whatever the 
 cost. The Pilgrim was supreme because his 
 ideals were the loftiest and he made the largest 
 sacrifices in their behalf. It was reserved for a 
 band of obscure and despised sectaries to lay 
 down in all essentials the principles of repre¬ 
 sentative democracy. They set sail from the 
 old world, but they carried a new world in their 
 hearts. 
 
 Q—What is the matter with the church? 
 Where are the great preachers, such as we 
 used to have? 
 
 A—Internally, sectarian strife; externally, 
 the prevalent indifference and the superficial 
 character of much of the national mind. 
 Preaching has killed the Christian church. We 
 go to church to hear the star in the pulpit. We 
 have become sermon tasters instead of Chris¬ 
 tian workers. You hear a fat old grocer boast 
 that he has sat under the pulpit of Rev. Blow- 
 hard for twenty years, and all the time you 
 know that he has been skinning the public. We 
 are a sorry lot and make a poor fist at religion. 
 
 Q—Has Christianity failed? After two 
 
S. Parkes Cadman 183 
 
 thousand years of its influence why are we in 
 such a mess? 
 
 A—No; Christianity has not failed; as Ches¬ 
 terton said, it has been found difficult and laid 
 aside. I should like to see a demonstration of 
 its efficiency in every sort of man, using the 
 leading churches for the occasion. Get to¬ 
 gether the regenerated Pharisees, the converted 
 nobodies, the saved who were once lost and far 
 away from God. Let the preacher for once 
 retire. What eloquence could equal the story 
 of such transformed lives! The outcome would 
 be that many of us would perceive that the 
 same power that brought St. Paul to the feet 
 of Jesus, that sent Henry Martyn to India and 
 Father Damien to the lepers, that touched the 
 tongues of St. Bernard and of Beecher, is an 
 everlasting power and has signs and wonders 
 attending it. 
 
 So wholesome, so intelligently loyal, so nobly 
 prophetic is the Americanism of Dr. Cadman, 
 that one has difficulty in remembering his Brit¬ 
 ish origin. None the less, because he married 
 a wife he does not hate his old mother, and no 
 small part of his remarkable ministry is the 
 service he has rendered in behalf of the friend¬ 
 ship of English-speaking peoples. Here, too, 
 he has been an Ambassador of God, embodying, 
 as he does, the common spirit and ideal of 
 
184 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 kindred lands. No doubt William James would 
 classify Dr. Cadman among the “tough- 
 minded,” rather than among the mystics; but 
 he would rejoice in his brilliant intellect, his 
 abounding vitality, his buoyant good cheer, and 
 his infinite brotherliness, which knows no 
 bounds of creed, or sect, or party—all the rich 
 human qualities which make him so radiant 
 and so fascinating. No man is more beloved 
 by his brethren, as much for his goodness of 
 heart as for his gifts of mind, all of whom 
 have an honourable Christian pride in a minis¬ 
 try as fruitful in personal blessing as it is 
 nation wide in its influence* 
 
XI: Reginald J. Campbell 
 
 No two men were ever more unlike in physi¬ 
 cal aspect, intellectual quality and spiritual ap¬ 
 peal, than the first two ministers of the City 
 Temple. The first was a sturdy, stockily built 
 giant, the second slight, frail, almost ethereal; 
 one the son of a stone-mason, the other a child 
 of the manse; an old man with a black mane 
 followed by a young man with a white mane. 
 If one had a rugged, massive, dynamic intellect, 
 the other had a mystical mind of iridescent bril¬ 
 liance. One personality was pervasive, opulent, 
 dififusive, the other magnetic, absorbent, win¬ 
 some. The eloquence of the older man had 
 always a suggestion of the stage, not that it 
 was insincere, but because the dramatic instinct 
 was ineradicable; the oratory of the younger 
 man was unaffected in its simplicity, with no 
 effort after effect, and no flowers of rhetoric., 
 The contrast might go on indefinitely, they 
 
 were so utterly different; yet each in his own 
 
 185 
 
186 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 distinction and power was a man of mark, and 
 each had a word of God for his age. 
 
 Mark Rutherford thought that George Mac¬ 
 Donald was the most fascinating preacher that 
 ever entered a pulpit: but if he had seen the 
 young man who came up from Brighton, at the 
 dying wish of Joseph Parker, to the City 
 Temple in 1902, he might have altered his ver¬ 
 dict. With a head grey in youth, eyes eloquent 
 with a nameless hunger, and a face thin and 
 pallid as that of some ascetic of the desert, his 
 advent in the pulpit was an event—one had 
 almost said, an apparition. Seldom, if ever, has 
 there been a figure more arresting, a presence 
 more captivating, or an appeal more winning 
 than R. J. Campbell made in those early days 
 of his incandescence. Preaching, said Dr. 
 Parker, will endure as long as the race, but it 
 must be preaching; and the Sermons Ad¬ 
 dressed to Individuals were preaching of the 
 most real kind, at once searching and revealing. 
 The vestry of the City Temple is a confessional, 
 as I well know, and each of the sermons dealt 
 with some personal problem confided to the 
 preacher, uniting a clairvoyant insight with a 
 sympathy almost substitutionary. Direct, con- 
 
Reginald J. Campbell 187 
 
 crete, lambent, they were unique in their evoca¬ 
 tion of the religious atmosphere, and in that 
 “naturalization of the Unseen” which it is the 
 glory of the pulpit to achieve. If in their 
 printed form the sermons lost something, it was 
 because no art could detain the incommuni¬ 
 cable grace of a personality as challenging as it 
 was charming. From a letter dated 1904, writ¬ 
 ten by a friend long vanished, I take these 
 words giving an impression of the “Little Grey 
 Angel,” as the preacher was described: 
 
 A more beautiful countenance than his I 
 have never beheld among living men. There 
 are pictures of the saints that possess the same 
 haunting and ethereal loveliness. It is a beauty 
 that affects some men as being almost uncanny; 
 the features are so delicate that they would be 
 effeminate save for the glowing, searching eyes 
 and the firm, long lines of the chin. The hair 
 is prematurely grey, but luxuriant. Garbed in 
 his long black cassock, the preacher looked like 
 a Dante that had known no sorrow. Asceticism 
 was there, but no hardness; spirituality without 
 aloofness. As he stood in silence when he rose 
 to preach, searching out the people with his 
 eyes, he looked like a friendly angel. His de¬ 
 livery was not good, being muffled and feeble, 
 sometimes dropping almost to a murmur. He 
 seemed to use manuscript, but I got the impres- 
 
l88 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 sion that only notes and headings were written 
 down. Frequently he made use of devotional 
 poetry, summing up an argument or a plea with 
 a stanza. He spoke intimately to the people 
 and never waxed either oratorical or spectacu¬ 
 lar. The most extreme gesture that he made 
 was a long, upward and outward movement of 
 the arm, as though he intended to drop a 
 thought among the rear pews. It was a cu¬ 
 rious and, as you may observe, not an easy 
 gesture to describe, but it had a striking effect 
 and brought the beholder up with a start. My 
 impression all through was of a profound but 
 quietly expressed solicitude that man should 
 not only be happier for being good, but be bet¬ 
 ter for being happier. The secret of his power 
 is elusive. The explanation for such a lack of 
 explanation would naturally be—magnetism or 
 genius. The magnetism, certainly, is unde¬ 
 niable. As to the latter, it is doubtful whether 
 his warmest friends would claim for him the 
 title of genius. Ability, grace, charm, skill— 
 yes; but genius—no. 
 
 Unfortunately, it was never my joy to hear 
 Campbell in the City Temple in those days, and 
 one had to see and hear him in that setting in 
 order to know him at his best. Outside the 
 Temple he seemed bereft of half his power, 
 which explains the disappointment of those who 
 heard him elsewhere, and especially in America. 
 
Reginald J. Campbell 189 
 
 Knowing something of the amazing audience 
 which assembles in the City Temple—amazing 
 alike in its composition and in its spiritual con¬ 
 trasts—I know how it tugs at the heart of the 
 preacher. The curious tourists who “do” the 
 Temple count for as little as the jaded sermon- 
 tasters seeking a new thrill. The standing 
 congregation is a mixed multitude in itself, too 
 bewilderingly varied to be described, with 
 which is joined a crowd of lonely, baffled folk, 
 drawn or driven by an inappeasable need of the 
 soul, and no preacher can ever forget their 
 eager, expectant, storm-vexed faces. Men 
 fighting' for faith, men who have lost the fight, 
 spiritual derelicts tossed between cynicism and 
 despair—weary, unexcited, tormented—de¬ 
 feated men whose past is ever before them, and 
 women to whom hell is the only reality—these 
 sit side by each at every service. The appeal to 
 the penetrative and compassionate understand¬ 
 ing of the preacher is like “deep calling unto 
 deep,” and if he has the shepherd soul it is 
 irresistible. To such an audience—its mind a 
 chaos of unrelated ideas, its soul dumb with a 
 wordless yearning, terrible in the loneliness of 
 a great city—Campbell came like an old mystic 
 
190 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 who had wandered out of the Middle Ages. 
 Without being aesthetically fine or intellectually 
 satisfying, his presence was electrifying, his 
 personality haunting, his utterance thrilling— 
 
 Clothed about with flame and with tears, and 
 singing 
 
 Songs that break the heart of the earth with 
 pity. 
 
 Such was the minister of the City Temple 
 when the New Theology sensation began: a 
 matter with which I have not to do, except to 
 say that, since it was neither new nor a theol¬ 
 ogy, it did not enlist my interest. Indeed, we 
 in America were amazed at the furor it made, 
 finding in it little, if anything, that had not 
 long been familiar to us either in the old liberal¬ 
 ism or the new orthodoxy; nothing, that is, 
 unless it was a misplaced emphasis or a sense 
 of proportion all awry. It seemed to us only 
 another proof of the saying of Disraeli that 
 the English are the most enthusiastic and least 
 excitable people on earth, and that the two 
 inspirations of their enthusiasm are politics 
 and religion. Nor did we on this side realise 
 that the movement had been taken up by the 
 
Reginald J. Campbell 191 
 
 Northcliffe papers, especially by the Daily Mail, 
 which exploited an ethereal personality in a 
 manner unprecedented—taking bits of his ser¬ 
 mons out of their context and flashing them in 
 large type, much to the regret of the preacher 
 and his friends. The book entitled The New 
 Theology, and described in its preface as “a 
 concise statement of the outlines of the teach¬ 
 ing given from the City Temple pulpit,” while 
 containing many vagrant insights of rare 
 beauty, was so ill-considered and hastily writ¬ 
 ten as almost to justify the cartoon in Punch, 
 showing the author pacing up and down his 
 study, dictating a new theology in an evening. 
 
 There is no wish on my part to belittle the 
 author of The New Theology; far from it. 
 He was a preacher of rare and exquisite art, 
 commanding many resources, and there was 
 always a suggestion of a supernatural back¬ 
 ground to his ministry. His knowledge of the 
 human heart—especially in its bafflements, its 
 struggle with temptation, its pain at the hard¬ 
 ness of life, its wistful loneliness—was almost 
 uncanny; and his divination of what people 
 were thinking and feeling, of their inarticulate 
 yearnings, made him an answerer of the un- 
 
192 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 asked questions of many minds. His preaching 
 during the New Theology days was in many 
 ways extraordinary, albeit marred at times by 
 an aggressive self-consciousness. Often a ser¬ 
 mon began with a too elaborate, if not laboured, 
 exegesis of the text in the light of the higher 
 criticism—“I believed the Germans too read¬ 
 ily,he afterwards said—but it nearly always 
 found focus in a glow-point of real insight. 
 His prayers, too, were singularly searching, 
 healing, exalting. Indeed, many were drawn 
 to him, not because he had invented a new 
 theology, but because, with real insight and 
 at the psychological moment, he uttered truths 
 deeply felt, or dimly seen, in the terms of his 
 time, and related Christianity to everyday life 
 and the issues of his age. His spiritual fervour, 
 his moral earnestness, his passion for social 
 justice found response in many who knew little, 
 and cared less, about any kind of theology, new 
 or old. 
 
 Nor do I mean to imply that the New The¬ 
 ology movement, at one time so much discussed, 
 did no good except to make a stir in the dry 
 leaves. It did good both directly and indirectly. 
 It awakened interest in religion; it emphasised 
 
Reginald J. Campbell 193 
 
 the social meaning of Christianity; it enabled 
 many ministers to speak their minds more 
 freely and frankly; and a freer, fresher air was 
 felt to be blowing through all the churches. 
 Though the movement itself has had its day 
 and ceased to be, thousands of people were 
 made aware of a new sense of reality and a new 
 impulse to service. The leader of the New 
 Theology reached the zenith of his influence 
 and power in 1909, and the following year was 
 smitten with a serious illness which seemed to 
 affect not only his body but his whole person¬ 
 ality. Three sermons a week, besides innumer¬ 
 able outside demands, had overtaxed his 
 strength. The minister of the City Temple, as 
 I learned to my sorrow, is regarded as public 
 property in London, and it is a wonder to me 
 that so frail a man as Campbell stood the strain 
 as long as he did. A second visit to America 
 in 1911 did not improve his health, but it 
 marked the turning point of his career. A 
 subtle change crept into his pulpit utterances, 
 and the congregations at the City Temple, 
 while still relatively large, began to decline. 
 At the Thursday noon service the attendance 
 became smaller than it has been for thirty 
 
194 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 years. Another illness in July, 1914, left the 
 preacher unspeakably frail, and in the autumn 
 he resigned and entered the Church of Eng¬ 
 land. 
 
 Dr. Parker had left a large and influential 
 following at the City Temple, but the attrition 
 of years, the changes in London, and, more 
 than all, the agitations of the succeeding min¬ 
 istry, scattered it. Not a few left when the 
 New Theology discussion began, and many 
 more when the minister adventured into social¬ 
 ism. Others took their places, to be sure, in¬ 
 cluding a multitude of young people who filled 
 the Temple with ardour and enthusiasm. But 
 when their leader recanted his teaching they, in 
 turn, were first dazed, and then disillusioned, 
 like sheep led into a wilderness and deserted 
 by the shepherd—surely not the least part of 
 the tragedy of a notable career. As a result 
 little was left at the City Temple: as one of its 
 officers said to me when I arrived: “It is not 
 only flat, it is a hole in the ground/’ When I 
 took up my labours at the Temple my predeces¬ 
 sor was a priest of St. Philip’s Cathedral, in 
 Birmingham, and had just published his apo¬ 
 logia, entitled A Spiritual Pilgrimage . It 
 
Reginald J. Campbell 195 
 
 was more than an apology; it was a recantation. 
 Perhaps an Intellectual Pilgrimage had been a 
 better title; but the tone of the book was irenic, 
 with very few barbed sentences, yet one felt all 
 through a deep undercurrent of disappoint¬ 
 ment. He spoke rather sadly of “my most 
 latitudinarian days,” meaning his great days at 
 the City Temple, over which he wished to 
 “draw a veil.” Indeed, he was not aware of 
 owing anything in his religious life to Noncon¬ 
 formist influences; what he had received from 
 that source was rather “a truer view of his¬ 
 tory and of the sterner realities of modern 
 life.” 
 
 He was explicit in his remarks about his “re- 
 ordination,” a word not chosen at haphazard, 
 when he said that he believed himself to be “no 
 more, and no less, truly a minister of Jesus 
 Christ after I had been ordained in the Church 
 of England than I was before”; and he re¬ 
 garded that act as no judgment upon his min¬ 
 istry one way or the other. “The fact is that 
 distinctive nonconformist—or shall I say evan¬ 
 gelical?—theology failed me,” he said. Appar¬ 
 ently the New Theology had failed him, too. 
 He felt, as he frankly admitted, that “in the 
 
196 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 corporate unity of the catholic church and in 
 that alone was full satisfaction to be found for 
 my religious need.” Yet he makes the curious 
 remark that had his health stood the strain, he 
 did not see how he could legitimately, “in all 
 reason and conscience,” have left the City 
 Temple. Indeed, he more than once said to me 
 that if he could have had an assistant, as I had 
 at the City Temple, he would not have left. It 
 was all very strange, and the apologia did not 
 explain it. 
 
 Nor is it my business to inquire into it fur¬ 
 ther . 1 Later, when Mr. Campbell came to 
 London as Vicar of Christ Church, West¬ 
 minster, I found him the same lovable and 
 brotherly man whom I had met and heard in 
 America, albeit somewhat pensive and aloof— 
 as one who had “journeyed a long way and 
 passed many graves along the road.” At the 
 invitation of a mutual friend, I attended his 
 
 1 It was not so much the fact of his entering another com¬ 
 munion that hurt the people of the City Temple—though to 
 some of his friends it was like a personal bereavement—but 
 the way in which it was done. He could have had any¬ 
 thing he asked—never was a man more beloved—but the 
 church was not taken into confidence. His arrangements for 
 entering the Established Church were made before his friends 
 knew anything about it. He had a right to burn all bridges 
 behind him, but so loyal a people deserved a better fate. 
 
Reginald J. Campbell 197 
 
 Induction as Vicar, and I shall not soon forget 
 my feelings when I saw him stand at the altar, 
 holding a Bible aloft in his hand, and accept 
 the Thirty-nine Articles of faith—remember¬ 
 ing what he had often said of the intellect 
 capable of such a feat. Many great and saintly 
 men accept that ancient formula, but for Mr. 
 Campbell to do so required a reversal of mind 
 which baffled his friends and puzzled his foes. 
 In all this he was utterly sincere—being a man 
 who lives in phases—but I wondered what had 
 happened in his heart, and how such a thing 
 could be. Temperament, no doubt, explains 
 much. The very qualities which made him so 
 stimulating a preacher unfitted him as a guide 
 for theological wayfarers, the more so when, 
 unfixed from his orbit, he became a wandering 
 star. For he was ever a lonely, pilgrim soul, 
 “a trail of fire burning at white heat/’ restless, 
 impulsive, erratic . 2 Such a mind has no place 
 in English Nonconformity, in which there is 
 so much that is not only definite, but hard, un¬ 
 yielding, and, if one may say so, ungracious. 
 By temperament, no less than by training, R. J. 
 Campbell belongs in the Church of England, 
 
 3 Prophets, Priests, and Kings, by A. G. Gardiner. 
 
198 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 and no one will begrudge him the peace he has 
 found in its wide fellowship, its sweet and tem¬ 
 pered ways, and its veneration for those forms 
 and symbols which enshrine the wisdom and 
 faith of the past. 
 
 Often, during his ministry at the City Tem¬ 
 ple, Mr. Campbell—Dr. Campbell, as he is now, 
 by the grace of Oxford University—was urged 
 to write a Life of Christ; no doubt because he 
 made Christ a living reality to so many seeking 
 and hitherto baffled souls. At last, after many 
 delays due to the Great War, he has fulfilled 
 that request; but it is not the great Life of 
 Jesus for which we have been waiting, written 
 in full light of the ancient faith and the new 
 knowledge—for that the author has neither the 
 scholarship nor the literary gift. In many re¬ 
 spects his Life of Jesus is different from what 
 it would have been had he written it while min¬ 
 ister of the City Temple. His attitude and 
 point of view have changed. The homiletic 
 instinct prevails, and he promises to follow this 
 volume with a homiletical commentary on the 
 Gospels. Every man unconsciously portrays 
 that in Christ most akin to himself; and in this 
 volume Mr. Campbell is at his best when inter- 
 
Reginald J. Campbell 199 
 
 preting “the wonderful winsomeness” of the 
 Master, as Papini, who fell in love with Jesus 
 while reading the Gospels to the peasants, sees 
 him as “terribly and fearfully alone.” The 
 book is rich in insight and beauty, making us 
 feel the majesty of the Master, and still more 
 the nameless and haunting charm which clings 
 to every word and gesture of those swift and 
 gentle years. 
 
XII: William A. Quayle 
 
 Those who have read Old Delabole, by 
 Eden Phillpotts, will not soon forget the little 
 Cornish village—so near to the “sounding 
 shores of Boss and Bude”—where men win 
 with patient toil, and not without peril, the 
 famous dark grey slate that is the delight of 
 every good builder. But even to the dwellers 
 of that “City of Slate,” the religious activities 
 of the village, divided between “Wesleyans” 
 and “Uniteds,” take rank with the affairs of 
 the great quarry in interest and importance. 
 It is worth while to know Granfer Nute, the 
 village philosopher, who comes aptly to the 
 rescue of every perplexing situation with his 
 shrewd humour and his quaint estimates of men 
 and things. Foregathered one day with his 
 special crony, they discuss the aims and actions 
 of certain young people, as old folk are wont to 
 do: 
 
 “Pity your grandson hedn’t more like his 
 
 200 
 
201 
 
 William A. Quayle 
 
 brother Pooley, and not so fond of dolly¬ 
 mopping with the girls,” said the friend of the 
 philosopher. 
 
 “Pooley has the Methodist mind,” Granfer 
 replied. “Ned hedn’t. He’s feeling out for the 
 joy of life, while Pooley wants the joy of 
 truth.” 
 
 Not all may be willing to agree that there is 
 a Methodist mind, as a thing distinct and set 
 apart, on the ground that others have an equal 
 right to Granfer’s highly honourable phrase., 
 However that may be, there is a Methodist 
 genius, unique, particular, precious—joining 
 mind and heart, uniting the joy of truth with 
 the joy of life—and there has never been a 
 more perfect incarnation of it than Bishop 
 Quayle; in whom humour, pathos, literature, 
 life, faith, philosophy and poetry are made in¬ 
 candescent by a spiritual genius who is also an 
 unveneered human being. What he may be as 
 an executive I know not—though it is reported 
 that a great layman once thanked God “for one 
 Bishop Quayle, and no more”—but as a 
 preacher there is not another like him in Meth¬ 
 odism, or anywhere else. In a church so rich 
 in great preachers—the church of Simpson and 
 
202 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 Fowler, of Price Hughes and W. L. Watkin- 
 son—no one may be supreme; but Bishop 
 Quayle is one of the princes of that realm, a 
 peer in a shining company of those whose 
 hearts God has touched with light and power 
 and loveliness. No wonder he confirms some 
 of us in the conviction, long held as an article 
 of faith, that when God made the Methodist 
 Church he did not do anything else that whole 
 day; and behold it was good! 
 
 Many times I have heard Bishop Quayle 
 preach, before he was elevated to the episco¬ 
 pate and after, but one day stands out in my 
 memory as showing the many-sidedness of the 
 man. It was at a conference over which he 
 presided in Iowa, and I can still see him as he 
 stood transfigured by the autumn sunlight fall¬ 
 ing through a lovely window—tall, stockily 
 built, stooped, his massive head crowned with 
 reddish hair tinged with grey, his great blue 
 eyes the homes of laughter and of tears, his 
 face as mutable as the sea. As I entered the 
 church, I heard first ripples and then roars of 
 laughter, for no great preacher of our time 
 makes so liberal a use of wit and humour in his 
 work; bright wit in which there is no sting; 
 
William A. Quayle 203 
 
 sweet humour without any acid. The bishop 
 was receiving a group of young men into the 
 ministry, to an accompaniment of a running 
 commentary on the requirements and duties of 
 a minister as laid down in the Discipline. Noth¬ 
 ing was omitted, not even “the expectoratious 
 subject of tobacco / 1 and neither before nor 
 since have I heard so much common sense 
 taught in the guise of nonsense. Among other 
 things he advised each minister to have a patch 
 of ground—large or small—all his own, where 
 he could take refuge from obstinate bishops 
 and obstreperous elders, and assert his rights. 
 We laughed until we cried as he described the 
 foibles of the minister, and the difficulties and 
 trivialities of his work; then we cried in earnest 
 as he spoke of the meaning of the ministry, its 
 dignity, its pathos, and its sacred service amid 
 the lights and shadows of life. 
 
 After the singing of a hymn, the bishop read 
 the account of the raising of Dorcas and 
 preached a sermon, which might have had for 
 its title the Wordsworth phrase, “The Deep 
 Power of Joy”—always a keynote in his preach¬ 
 ing, and one too seldom heard in our anxious 
 modern days. It was a charge to the church 
 
204 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 in behalf of the young men whom he had wel¬ 
 comed into the ministry; a study of the atmos¬ 
 phere which the gospel of Christ should create 
 —a happy, healing, redeeming atmosphere in 
 which evil will be overcome as seeds of good 
 grow into golden harvest. Since Christianity 
 is a gospel of joy—no vague, mystical ecstasy, 
 but a real, human-hearted joy—its messengers 
 should be bringers of joy, changing the human 
 climate from winter to summer. The sermon 
 was an illustration of its subject. Serious but 
 in nowise solemn, it created the very atmos¬ 
 phere it described—“almost a picnic spirit,” as 
 one listener called it—reminding me of the say¬ 
 ing of Hermas, that the Holy Spirit is a hilari¬ 
 ous spirit. For an hour the preacher made us 
 glad about God—-glad about life and the world 
 —showing us that there is healing for all the 
 hates and hurts of life, if we use the gospel with 
 strategy and skill. As a feat of homiletics it 
 was a work of art, albeit, like a vine-covered 
 church, its solid structure was hidden by every 
 kind of beauty both of imagery and of phrase. 
 It was not rhetoric but poetry; and the manner 
 of its delivery had all the freedom, directness 
 and charm of a stump speech. 
 
William A. Quayle 205 
 
 As if all that were not enough for one day, in 
 the evening the bishop gave a lecture on The 
 Tale of Two Cities, the like of which I have 
 never heard from anyone else. It would have 
 delighted Dickens, both for its vivid portraiture 
 and its dramatic power, being a series of 
 sketches of the characters in the story seen 
 against the stupendous background of the 
 Revolution. In speaking of Sidney Carton and 
 his fight with the demon of drink, he let fall a 
 page from his own life, telling how when only 
 a lad of ten he lay drunk on the floor of a 
 saloon. His mother was dead, his father was 
 a miner at his work, and the rough men thought 
 it a great joke to make the boy drunk. It made 
 the heart shudder, and in his dealing with 
 Carton one felt that he was aware of his own 
 escape from a tragic fate. There was no need 
 to point the moral, save in one swift sentence 
 which flashed like a silver arrow as it hit the 
 mark. Surely no one ever forgot that day of 
 wonder, so fruitful in inspiration for the heart 
 and in “pollen for the mind/’ to use one of its 
 happy phrases. It was like an apocalypse in 
 which the preacher stood revealed, equally in 
 his homely counsel to his young brethren and in 
 
206 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 his high command of great assemblies; his ten¬ 
 der humanity, his witchery of personality, his 
 knowledge of life from bottom to top, his magic 
 of speech, his love of the out-of-doors—a mind 
 as full of colour as a painter’s shop, a heart 
 lyrically confident of God and joyously loyal to 
 the Master. 
 
 A child of the Isle of Man, brought up in 
 the large and liberal air of the Middle West of 
 America, the life of Bishop Quayle, as one day 
 it will be told, shows us the growth of a great 
 preacher and the process of his making. How 
 interesting it is to compare the earliest volume 
 of his sermons, Eternity in the Heart, a fruit 
 of his Kansas City ministry—happily left as 
 they came from the heart and lips of the 
 preacher on his feet—with his latest volume, 
 entitled The Dynamite of God and note the 
 deeper insight and the greater wealth of beauty 
 and suggestiveness. In the first volume there 
 is hardly a literary allusion; in the second, there 
 are almost too many. If only we had a volume 
 between them, a trophy of his pastorate at St. 
 James Church, Chicago, we might the better 
 study the stages of the rapid unfolding of his 
 vision and power; how he took all life and all 
 
William A. Quayle 207 
 
 literature as his province, levying tribute in the 
 name of his Master. Yet it would be hard to 
 name anything more brilliant than his fraternal 
 address to the British Wesleyan Conference in 
 1902, though what I best remember about it is 
 his unforgettable tribute to his father. Every 
 man has his own idiom, which is the accent of 
 his heart, the native gesture of his mind; but 
 of late years Bishop Quayle has fallen into cer¬ 
 tain mannerisms of literary style which mar 
 his work, giving at times almost an impression 
 of artificiality—a thing utterly alien to his na¬ 
 ture. In these despites, not since Joseph Par¬ 
 ker went away have we had a preacher so 
 epigrammatic, so quotable, so happy in his 
 power to startle and sting the mind with the 
 sudden surprise of beauty and of truth. His 
 fertility of thought is matched by an exceeding 
 aptness of imagery, as of one who thinks in 
 pictures and talks in lyrics. His illustrations 
 are both illuminative and instructive, as in a 
 passage in his sermon on “Life's Criminal Ag¬ 
 nosticism"—a title too harsh for the setting of 
 the text—which tells what many have felt: 
 
 Do you read John Burroughs? You ought 
 to. He likes dirt. He says dirt is good enough 
 
208 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 to eat in the spring. All told, as nature writers 
 go, I think John Burroughs the best of ail the 
 sweet chorus. I have all his books except the 
 one on Whitman. I have asked to be excused 
 on that for a time. But do you read Burroughs’ 
 books? What is the lack of them? I will tell 
 you. He has missed the Gardener. Burroughs 
 is apparently an agnostic. I have gone through 
 all his books, seen him walk on his dirt, gone 
 down among the water lilies with him, stopped 
 on the Hudson banks with him, heard the water 
 brooks bubbling strangely intelligible speech 
 with him, have been all wheres with him, but 
 never saw a hint about the Gardener. If he 
 only once had looked into the Gardener’s face 
 and said, “I bless thee, Gardener, that the gar¬ 
 den is so sweet,” Burroughs would have had no 
 fellow in the earth as an interpreter of the 
 out-of-doors. But in the garden he has missed 
 the Gardener. We must not miss the Gar¬ 
 dener. Is he at home? I call you to mark 
 that you are out in God’s flower garden, all 
 a-bloom and all a-perfume, and all a-rapture of 
 green. Do not miss the Gardener. 1 
 
 In all the preaching of Bishop Quayle, at 
 least in his later period—over it, through it— 
 there is the breath and beauty of the out-of- 
 doors ; singing birds, growing flowers, drifting 
 seas, and rustling woods, and the wandering 
 
 1 The Dynamite of God. 
 
William A. Quayle 209 
 
 brotherhood of the winds. No preacher of our 
 out-door age—not one—approaches him in his 
 love of nature and his vision of its meaning to 
 the spiritual life of man. He is a radiant 
 prophet of the everywhereness of God, a 
 “priest to us all of the wonder and bloom of 
 the world.” As a naturalist, and still more as a 
 poet, he walks the earth with reverent, happy 
 feet, revealing to men the beauty at their doors, 
 no less than on far away hills, chanting the 
 eternal loveliness of earth and sky. He reads 
 God's Calendar so lovingly that if he were 
 to fall asleep and wake up, like Rip Van Win¬ 
 kle, he would know the time of year by the 
 flowers in bloom and the notes of bird-song in 
 the woodland. He knows the sea and its moods, 
 the far-stretching mystery of the prairies; the 
 mountains, the desert, the haunts of the birds 
 and the dells where the violets hide. All sea¬ 
 sons are his, summer with its splendour, and the 
 winter days when the north wind tumbles out 
 of his bed and goes romping over the hills, 
 sending the clouds scudding, and building the 
 snow into every form of frolic architecture. 
 To him trees are a means of grace, the fra¬ 
 grance of a rose is like a kiss of God, and the 
 
210 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 sunlight falling on flowing waters is like the 
 memory of one much loved and long dead., 
 Like his Master, who taught out-of-doors, all 
 nature is an infinite parable of God and he 
 pours out his heart in poems of prayer and 
 praise, reflection blooming into rapture and 
 theology into song. 
 
 Joined with his love of nature is a lyric love 
 of humanity, not unlike that of Browning, so 
 genuine and joyous that all men feel the glow 
 of it. Nothing human is alien to his insight 
 and interest. He has an essay on “The 
 Preacher as an Appreciator,” and he is a model 
 of his own precept. He knows “The Fine Art 
 of Loving Folks”—all kinds and conditions of 
 folk—and his worship of little children just 
 stops short of idolatry. No wonder his book 
 on The Pastor-Preacher —note the order of 
 the words—is one of the richest of its kind, 
 made so by his abounding humanity, no less 
 than by his knowledge and experience of 
 “preacher-craft.” No one can talk to preach¬ 
 ers as he can, unless it be Dr. Jefferson, and 
 Quayle is more of a poet, more of a mystic. It 
 would be hard to name anyone else who could 
 have written the chapter on “The Preacher a 
 
211 
 
 William A. Ouayle 
 
 Mystic,” in which we see that window in his 
 heart open toward the City of God, through 
 which falls a ‘light that never was on sea or 
 land.” Seldom has genius been more com¬ 
 municative. The very informality of the book 
 is half its charm, dealing, as it does, both with 
 the trivialities and the sublimities of our holy 
 art. Never was there a more responsive lis¬ 
 tener or a more gentle-hearted critic. From 
 Spurgeon he derived little, Brooks he knows 
 only by report, but his tribute to Beecher is 
 memorable: 
 
 Since the apostolic days preaching, as 
 preaching, has never soared so high as in 
 Henry Ward Beecher. There were in him an 
 exhaustiveness and an exuberance, an insight 
 deep as the soul, a power to turn a light like 
 sunlight for strength on the sore weaknesses of 
 humanity, a bewilderment of approach to the 
 heart to tempt it from itself to God that I find 
 nowhere else; and it has been my privilege to 
 be a wide reader of the sermonic literature of 
 the world. Compared to him, Berry, the Eng¬ 
 lish preacher, whom Beecher thought most apt 
 to be his successor in the Plymouth pulpit, was 
 an instrument of a couple of strings matched 
 with Beecher’s harp of gold. Phillips Brooks 
 cannot in any just sense be put alongside him; 
 and Simpson in his genius was essentially ex- 
 
212 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 temporaneous and insular. Beecher was per¬ 
 petual, like the eternal springs. In Robertson 
 of Brighton are some symptoms of Beecher, 
 but they are cameo not building stone resem¬ 
 blances. Beecher was the past master of our 
 preaching art. Storrs and Beecher were con¬ 
 temporaries in the same city. Storrs was a 
 field of cloth of gold. Gorgeous he was, and 
 a man of might. But you cannot get from the 
 thought of effort in him and in his effects. In 
 Beecher is no sense of effort, any more than in 
 a sea bird keeping pace with a rushing ship. In 
 him are effortless music and might of a vast 
 power of reserve. This estimate of Beecher 
 may be right or wrong. I give it as my esti¬ 
 mate of him. He has no successor, as Samson 
 had no son. 
 
 Some of us love Bishop Quayle best in his 
 little books of prayer, and we find The Climb 
 to God less to our need than The Throne of 
 Grace. They are years apart, and life has 
 taught him much betimes. The last named 
 rosary is deeper and more revealing, a kind of 
 diary of the soul written for God to read, like 
 the Confessions of Augustine. What music 
 and touch of deep truth, what unveiling of the 
 moods of the heart and its hunger for a more 
 than mortal fellowship. A deep and grateful 
 joy in God is joined with an eager, incessant 
 
William A. Quayle 213 
 
 quest for more of God. On one page is a sinner 
 abject at the mercy seat; on another he is a poet 
 dropping roses at the feet of the Master. Half 
 the time he is out of doors, rejoicing in “the 
 beauty of the Lord our God,” which is ever 
 upon us in the wonder of his works. When we 
 read “A Preacher’s Prayer,” we know him to 
 be a kinsman, “proficient only in incompe¬ 
 tency,” as he is dazzled by the richness of the 
 good news he is sent to tell. “Thy mandate is 
 on my heart and on my lips. By thy command 
 I am evangelist. Eternity is part of my parish. 
 God help me.” In prayer, in poem, in sermon 
 the note of his genius is beauty; its depth is the 
 depth that goes with beauty. It is as a great 
 artist that he thinks of God, of Christ and of 
 the life of man. In him the poet is supreme: 
 
 A man of sorrows He, and guest of grief, 
 Who walked in quiet on life’s humble ways 
 And suffered all the slurs and dull dismays 
 Which crush on mighty souls. His days were 
 brief— 
 
 A sudden splendour cleft with storm. Belief 
 On Him grew dim, though great hearts 
 walked through haze 
 
 Of doubt and fogs of death with shouts of 
 praise, 
 
214 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 And knew Him glorious and acclaimed Him 
 Chief. 
 
 And now He stands strange, uncompanied, 
 vast, 
 
 Tall as all solemn, purpling mountains are— 
 
 Stands, while majestic, crumbling centuries 
 waste. 
 
 The moaning travail of His soul is past. 
 
 He hath throned Love and wrought redemption 
 far; 
 
 And who believeth on Him shall not haste. 
 
XIII: George W. Truett 
 
 Three scenes are linked in my mind as I 
 think of the career of Dr, Truett, whose min¬ 
 istry is one of the most remarkable in the his¬ 
 tory of the modern church. Taken together 
 they show how God made a mighty preacher, 
 endowed and trained him for his task, and set 
 him in a place of influence and power. He is a 
 truly great preacher, as much for the depth, 
 simplicity and intensity of his faith as for the 
 size, poise, and incommunicable charm of his 
 personality. No man among us has more of 
 what Joseph Parker called “the tone of great 
 preaching/’ which might be the solicitude of a 
 mother, the passion of a father, and the wooing 
 note of a lover all in one. “Men are guided 
 by type, not by argument,” said Bagehot; “it 
 is the life of teachers that is catching, not their 
 tenets”; and that is supremely true of Dr. 
 Truett, whose character fulfills the words of 
 Amiel who said, “to be religious is to personify 
 
 and embody the Eternal.” 
 
 215 
 
216 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 The first scene is from a biographical sketch 
 of Dr. Truett, all too brief, which shows us the 
 boy from the Blue Ridge Mountains at a meet¬ 
 ing of the Baptists of Georgia, in the old court¬ 
 house at Marietta, in 1889. He was there to 
 plead the cause of the youth of the mountains, 
 as precious as gold for the miner’s pick and fit 
 to adorn the crown of a king. Tall, pale, shy, 
 vastly embarrassed in the focus of so many eyes, 
 the youth was forced into the aisle and led to 
 the “prisoner’s dock.” There he told his story, 
 forgetting himself—as he always does—and 
 remembering only youth denied an opportunity 
 of access to its rightful inheritance of knowl¬ 
 edge. It was a simple story, but epic in its 
 pathos of quiet recital of the passions, hopes, 
 and longings of an unsung heroism. It grew 
 more poignant with each word, until every 
 heart was broken and yet athrill, moved alike 
 by the merit of the plea and by the tones of a 
 voice which carries the burden of tears which 
 seems ever laid upon it. It was no pitiful plea 
 of poverty—who ever heard that from a south¬ 
 ern mountaineer?—but the cry of a youth in 
 behalf of youth, the strong persuasion of a just 
 matter, the logic of one who was resolved to let 
 
George W. Truett 217 
 
 his own lack of opportunity plead for others. 
 Suffice it to say that the young man of twenty- 
 two went back to his mountain home taking 
 new hope and joy with him. 
 
 Thence, after a time, the path of the young 
 man led westward to Texas, where his parents 
 had moved ahead of him. Within a few years 
 he had saved a college from financial despair, 
 had endowed it, had been graduated from it, 
 and was elected to its presidency. Happily, and 
 wisely, he did not accept the honour, keeping 
 to the path marked out for his soul by One who 
 made him to be a preacher. The triumphs of 
 Dr. Truett-—“plain, mountain-hearted, love- 
 torn George Truett/' in the words of one of 
 his friends—read like a legend, as year by year 
 he moved forward, divinely led while humbly 
 following, to a place of command among his 
 brethren. The man who wooed cowboys to 
 their knees won cities also, until, in 1897, he 
 came to the pulpit of the First Baptist Church 
 of Dallas, a noble church destined to grow 
 under his leadership to be one of the mighty 
 forces of the nation, both in numbers and in 
 spiritual fruitfulness. There, as pastor, teacher 
 and evangelist, his genius has shone for more 
 
218 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 than twenty years, where his name is a house¬ 
 hold word, and his fame is like a fragrance 
 throughout the nation. 
 
 The second scene was two years later, in 
 Louisville, at a meeting of the Baptist conven¬ 
 tion of the south in 1899, when Dr. Truett was 
 the preacher. It was a great occasion, and 
 there was a great orator to match it. The pic¬ 
 ture is vivid in my memory—the finely wrought! 
 sermon, the burning earnestness of the preacher 
 —but no words of mine can describe a voice 
 which has in it an echo of that infinite pain 
 that throbs forever in the human heart; the 
 voice of one who knows that humanity is deeply 
 wounded, and that only Christ can heal it. The 
 sermon was entitled “The Subject and Object 
 of the Gospel,” and was valuable not only for 
 its exposition of the theme but as a revelation 
 of the ideals of the preacher. He magnified his 
 office, and there were passages of stinging re¬ 
 buke of clap-trap methods which degrade the 
 pulpit. “All sensationalism in the pulpit is 
 worse than sawdust,” he said; it smacks of the 
 street and is a burning shame upon the Chris¬ 
 tian ministry. The following passage from the 
 
George W. Truett 219 
 
 sermon gives one clue to the secret of a 
 preacher who knows whereof he speaks, and in 
 whom the Christ-motif is supreme: 
 
 Nothing can take the place of the Christian 
 ministry. The progress of civilisation, the 
 making of many books, the increase of schools 
 and learning, the marvelous triumphs of the 
 press—mighty as are all of these agencies— 
 they can never supersede the divinely sent 
 preacher. ... In the great crises of the past, 
 matchless has been the influence wielded by 
 God's prophets and preachers. When all other 
 voices have failed, they have rallied the waver¬ 
 ing people to the standards of truth and right¬ 
 eousness. It was the golden-mouthed Chry¬ 
 sostom who became the oracle of the hour in 
 the days when Antioch was smitten with terror. 
 It was the flaming Augustine who rallied his 
 fellow countrymen from despair and breathed 
 into their lives new hope and purpose, when im¬ 
 perial Rome lay bleeding and trampled beneath 
 the heel of an invading oppressor. It was the 
 plain, yet invincible Luther, who, when reeking 
 corruption reigned in the papal court and 
 spread its blight over all Europe, spoke forth 
 words that echoed as the thunder and were 
 piercing as the lightning, stirring a revolution 
 that thrilled all Christendom and marking a 
 new epoch in the civilisation of the world. As 
 in the past so shall it be in the future, that God's 
 foremost instrument is his preacher, in both 
 
220 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 the civilisation and the evangelisation of the 
 world. 
 
 There was an element in Paul’s preaching 
 that must needs be in all effective preaching., 
 It was his tone of authority. He believed his 
 message with all his heart, and as God’s am¬ 
 bassador he delivered it without quailing, for 
 one moment, under any fire. There is untold 
 power in him who knows his mission is a thing 
 of God’s own willing, and that he cannot fail, 
 though doubts may shroud in cloud the tran¬ 
 sient hour. It is conviction that convinces. 
 The last place on earth for stammering and 
 indefiniteness is the pulpit. Christ’s ambas¬ 
 sador is to proclaim his Master’s message 
 rather than to defend it. He is a witness 
 rather than an advocate. Christianity is noth¬ 
 ing if it is not sublimely positive. It is not a 
 conundrum to be guessed at, or a theory to be 
 speculated upon, but it is a divine revelation 
 which is to be implicitly accepted and followed 
 with the deepest heart-throb of our lives. To 
 be continually on the defensive is contrary to 
 the very genius and purpose of the gospel. The 
 gospel faithfully preached is its own best de¬ 
 fence. 
 
 The third scene was in Washington, in May, 
 1920, where the hosts of southern Baptists had 
 assembled for their great convention—perhaps 
 the greatest religious assembly in the world., 
 
George W. Truett 221 
 
 As the convention was held in the national 
 capital it was decided that there should be an 
 address setting forth the Baptist position with 
 regard to the relation of church and state; and 
 Dr. Truett was selected to deliver the address. 
 He stood on the front steps of the capitol build¬ 
 ing, looking toward the White House, and the 
 audience, numbering many thousands, filled the 
 open space. Not for twenty years had I seen 
 Dr. Truett, and time had powdered his hair; 
 but the wonderful voice, with its haunting keys 
 and cadences, was the same. The address was 
 entitled “Baptists and Religious Liberty/’ and 
 it was as much a sermon as an oration, review¬ 
 ing the long struggle for the freedom of faith, 
 and the part which Baptist heroes had in fight¬ 
 ing the battle. If it celebrated liberty, it was 
 also a plea for what Burke called “a manly, 
 moral, regulated liberty”; and it laid emphasis 
 upon the obligations which all true liberty im¬ 
 poses, lest it be used “for an occasion of the 
 flesh.” But liberty is not all. Even if educa¬ 
 tion be added to liberty it is not enough, for 
 “a democracy needs more than intelligence—it 
 needs Christ”; and the address closed with a 
 demand for evangelisation nation-wide, world- 
 
222 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 wide, and ceaseless. For more than an hour 
 the orator held the vast audience enthralled, 
 and he sent us away with a solemn and over¬ 
 whelming sense of the crisis of the modern 
 world and its challenge to the Christian faith. 
 
 Someone said of Spurgeon that his theology, 
 by itself, was abhorrent, but that it was never 
 by itself. It was mixed with the stuff of the 
 man, dipped and dyed in all the hues of his life, 
 touched with spiritual genius and transfigured 
 by a glorified common sense. In the same way, 
 to many of us the theology of Dr. Truett would 
 seem archaic, if not untenable, if we stopped to 
 remember it. What we remember is not his 
 theory but his experience, and we share and 
 rejoice in the grand orthodoxy of the heart 
 which makes his preaching so vital and com¬ 
 pelling. Like the rest of us, when he argues 
 he is weak; when he tells of the love of God 
 and the saviourhood of Christ, he is irresistible.: 
 According to Aristotle—whose book on Rhet¬ 
 oric every preacher should study, if only to 
 learn that rhetoric is not mere cookery, as Plato 
 said in contempt—the office of the orator is 
 persuasion, for which three qualities are neces¬ 
 sary : prudence, moral excellence, and the good 
 
George W. Truett 223 
 
 of the hearers at heart. No one fulfills these 
 conditions more perfectly than Dr. Truett, 
 whose character lights up like an altar lamp 
 the teaching of his words. More than an 
 evangelist, he is an evangel. As a rough man 
 put it, unconsciously paying a high tribute, “He 
 is a man.who means it without trying to.” His 
 sincerity is not simply transparent, it is lumi¬ 
 nous. Men know that he loves them—they feel 
 it—and that his one wish is to win them to 
 Christ, and that to that end he spends his power 
 without thought of himself. One of his friends 
 has tried to describe his secret: 
 
 What is it that constitutes the acknowledged 
 power of his preaching? In one answer all 
 opinions meet. It is something in the man him¬ 
 self—the man behind the sermon, the incarna¬ 
 tion of truthfulness in the messenger. Many 
 sermons will yield to analysis the secret of their 
 charm. Though many of the sermons of Truett 
 have been reported in full, he belongs to that 
 class of preachers who convince us that preach¬ 
 ing is in the highest sense an incarnation, some¬ 
 thing more than a report of the truth, some¬ 
 thing more than the proclamation of the gospel. 
 Whitfield could so speak the most commonplace 
 words as to send chills through his audience., 
 Truett has much of this power to communicate 
 
224 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 to men his soul on the most ordinary vehicles 
 of thought and language. His words take on 
 his spiritual quality as the dull black wire takes 
 on the electric current. 
 
 Electricity, however, is scarcely a fortunate 
 figure. He is least of all of the spectacular 
 type. There is nothing angular or irregular 
 in him. He has none of the personality run to 
 seed—individualism on a pious spree. The 
 strongest personalities are not eccentric. Ec¬ 
 centricity is unnecessary to such men. They 
 have specific gravity beyond the need of pe¬ 
 culiar advertisement. Too much of what men 
 call personality in the pulpit, in the view that 
 preaching is an incarnation, must hinder rather 
 than help the gospel purpose. Is it possible 
 that evangelism, which, reduced to the terms of 
 psychology, is egotism, can be the appointed 
 power of God unto salvation? The power of 
 George Truett, as a preacher, can have no such 
 explanation. 
 
 The phrase most often employed to explain 
 Truett is “heart-power.” Translated into 
 visible, audible fact, it is this: A man of sub¬ 
 stantial flesh, enough to be a man of like pas¬ 
 sions with other men; an open Saxon face—a 
 serious, some say a sad face; a voice set in a 
 key of pathos; an impression of unfeigned 
 sympathy, as of a man who has suffered, and 
 whose pain, whatever it be, has become lost in 
 a larger pain, through exchange of all personal 
 life sorrows for the great human sorrow every- 
 
George W. Truett 225 
 
 where. In declining the presidency of Baylor 
 University he said simply in explanation: “I 
 have sought and found the shepherd’s heart.” 
 Perhaps there lies the hiding of his power. 
 Many have quoted the great avowal which 
 Frederic Myers puts into the mouth of Paul 
 the Apostle, but none whom I know can appro¬ 
 priate it more truly than Truett, when he 
 stands before a congregation of his fellow men 
 to preach the gospel that saves: 
 
 “Oft when the word is on me to deliver, 
 
 Lifts the illusion and truth lies bare, 
 
 Desert or throng, the city or the river 
 Melts in a lucid paradise of air. 
 
 “Only like souls I see the folk thereunder 
 Bound who should conquer, slaves who 
 should be kings; 
 
 Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder, 
 Sadly content in a show of things. 
 
 “Then with a rush the intolerable craving 
 Shivers throughout me like a trumpet call. 
 Oh, to save these, to perish for their saving, 
 Die for their life, be offered for them all.” 
 
 When all due allowance is made for the 
 beautiful exaggeration of friendship in this 
 tribute, these words do help us to know the 
 power of a preacher whose passion for human 
 
226 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 souls is a consuming fire, and whose ministry 
 is attuned to the mighty music of redemption. 
 The latest volume of sermon by Dr. Truett is 
 by far the best, not only as a revelation of 
 deeper experience and riper powers, but be¬ 
 cause it preserves the whole of each service and 
 thus reproduces, as far as can be done in print, 
 the atmosphere of his personality. The com¬ 
 ments on the lessons, the prayers, the exhorta¬ 
 tions, the glowing appeals, all are reported in 
 full, erasing only such errors as are inevitably 
 due to rapid speaking and reporting. It is en¬ 
 titled A Quest for Souls —a title selected by 
 another, but exactly descriptive of the life- 
 passion of the preacher—and as an example 
 of evangelistic preaching at its highest it has 
 no volume to surpass it. As in his former 
 volume, We Would See Jesus, his homiletic 
 method is utterly simple and straightforward, 
 with no clever devices, no suggestion of sensa¬ 
 tion, nothing to deflect attention from the mes¬ 
 sage. It is as free from the artificial and the 
 meretricious as the preacher himself is free 
 from the blandishments of flattery, wealth, or 
 fame.. It is rich in illustration, drawn from 
 life, from history, from biography, from his 
 
George W. Truett 227 
 
 own wide observation, and especially from his 
 varied experience as a confidant of storm-vexed 
 human souls; but the illustration never once 
 gets in the way of the truth. Of the prayers 
 one hesitates to speak—they are so tender, so 
 direct, so aglow with insight and sympathy, so 
 intimate without being familiar, so haunting in 
 pathos yet so victorious in faith; as of one who 
 knows how to climb right up onto the knees of 
 God and talk with the simplicity of a little child. 
 The total impression of the volume does not 
 leave one thinking of the preacher at all—he is 
 quite forgotten—but of the Master whose he 
 is and whom he reveals; and it is hard to know 
 how any human being resisted such a series of 
 appeals. 
 
 Truly he is a winsome preacher of the win¬ 
 someness of Christ; one could not imagine the 
 gospel message being stained on his lip by 
 acerbity or odium. Always positive, always 
 persuasive, Dr. Truett has none of the grim, 
 harsh dogmatism of Torrey, none of the in¬ 
 credible vituperation which has disfigured so 
 much popular revivalism. He is an evangelist 
 of the Loving-Heart, not of threats and thun¬ 
 ders, and even in his most earnest moods his 
 
228 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 gentleness is palpable, his good will unfailing., 
 His thought and language are of the simplest. 
 He knows how to be picturesque and full of 
 colour, and he need only be himself to be richly 
 human, but he never speaks except for a ver¬ 
 dict. Instead of coming religiously to every 
 point he comes at once to the point of religion, 
 as when he began a sermon with the question: 
 “Does not that boy over there wish to be a 
 Christian, and that older one, turning into man¬ 
 hood, and that young man himself there, and 
 that young woman—do you not wish to be 
 Christians?” It is his explicit and purposeful 
 “preaching for conversions” that makes it 
 worth while, and very much worth while, 
 studying him. An adherent of the older con¬ 
 ception of Christianity, he is by that much 
 ahead of the times, and the glib young liberals, 
 who imagine they are progressive, are far be¬ 
 hind. For, unless we are winners of human 
 souls, we are not messengers of him who came 
 to seek and to save that which is lost. 
 
 A famous master of Trinity College said of 
 Maurice, after hearing him preach a university 
 sermon: “There is about that man a kind of 
 divine feeling or possession/’ More and more 
 
George W. Truett 229 
 
 this divine feeling, this supernatural grace, 
 seems to me to be the great distinction and 
 charm of Dr. Truett as a preacher. Other men 
 are greater scholars and profounder thinkers, 
 and there may be others who have something 
 of his artless simplicity of moving eloquence— 
 Gipsy Smith has much of it—but in his char¬ 
 acter as a Christ-anointed evangelist I doubt if 
 Dr. Truett is surpassed by any man in our 
 generation. Edmund Burke said of Charles 
 Fox: “That man was made to be loved”; but 
 his remark is of far nobler application to 
 George Truett. He was made to be loved. In¬ 
 deed, it may be truly said that he does his best 
 work through the exalted and wonderful love 
 which he unconsciously and inevitably draws 
 toward himself. People do not try, do not care 
 to analyse or define his power; they simply love 
 him as one altogether worthy of their homage 
 and affection. Here is a burden of confidence 
 and devotion to make a man tremble; and it 
 must be added that no man ever used an op¬ 
 portunity with higher seriousness or nobler 
 power. Back into the hearts of the people he 
 pours through their love a tide of holy man¬ 
 hood, seeking to lift them by their love into the 
 
230 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 redeeming fellowship of the great Lover. One 
 thanks God for every remembrance of such a 
 man, whose ministry is a benediction to the 
 world and a theme of thanksgiving in the whole 
 church of God. 
 
XIV: Edward L. Powell 
 
 When a sermon is remembered for twenty- 
 five years, and the very tones of the preacher 
 still echo in the heart, it argues an unusual 
 man in the pulpit; and thereby hangs a bit of 
 reminiscence. In 1896, while a theologue in 
 the Baptist Seminary at Louisville, I went with 
 a number of my fellow students to the old 
 Fourth and Walnut Street Church to hear the 
 pastor, whom we greatly admired. It so hap¬ 
 pened that Dr, Eaton was not in the pulpit that 
 day and, somewhat disappointed, we held con¬ 
 clave as to what we should do. Just opposite 
 stood a plain, square, flat-roofed church with¬ 
 out a spire, its wide porch and massive columns 
 looking more like a Greek temple than a Chris¬ 
 tian shrine. Being in a mood for adventure, 
 we strolled across the street, climbed the great 
 stone steps, and entered the First Christian 
 Church, to see what might transpire. 
 
 Of course we were severe critics, as young 
 
 men are apt to be—especially theologues, who 
 
 231 
 
232 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 fancy they are wise—and our attitude of mind 
 was biased, no doubt, by sectarian prejudice. 
 Anyway, as there was no time to go to another 
 church of proper faith and order, we took the 
 risk, little knowing what revelations awaited 
 us. What that day may have meant to others 
 of the group I do not know, but it was one of 
 the great days of my life, because it meant the 
 discovery of one of the noblest preachers of our 
 generation; a man as brotherly in private as he 
 was brilliant in the pulpit, whose influence has 
 been not only stimulating but emancipating, at 
 once an inspiration and a benediction. The old 
 Greek temple has vanished, along with the 
 Fourth and Walnut Street Church, both having 
 been removed from the centre of the city, 
 where they had stood for so many years, bear¬ 
 ing witness, each with its own eloquence, to the 
 reality of the Unseen in the midst of time. 
 
 The First Church was crowded to the doors, 
 but a kindly usher found chairs and tucked us 
 away in a far corner, just as the preacher en¬ 
 tered the pulpit. Not one of us had ever seen 
 the preacher before, having for the first time 
 read his name as we entered the church—a fact 
 which gives the measure of our abysmal igno- 
 
Edward L. Powell 233 
 
 ranee. Across the years I can still see Dr. 
 Powell as he stood that day, in the prime and 
 glory of his power—his slight figure, his huge 
 head, his thin, light hair, his keen, searching 
 eyes—not a graceful man, his gestures angular 
 at times, his face aglow with unearthly light, 
 uttering his high message in words vivid, full 
 of grace, and surcharged with living fire. It 
 was a vision unforgettable. He conducted the 
 service less as a leader of worship than as a 
 leading worshipper—it was all so simple, so 
 reverent, so impressive. He read the Bible as 
 one who was himself a listener at the portals of 
 a book where “the sweet voice sounds and the 
 vision dwells. The prayer was direct, tender, 
 and far ranging in its sympathies, as of one 
 who remembered only the sublime object of his 
 office, to lift men out of the mire of sin, ma¬ 
 terialism, and the bewilderments of life into the 
 higher air of God. It besought the grace of 
 God in that moral self-legislation which each 
 man must enact and execute, if he is to verify 
 faith in character. 
 
 The sermon began quietly, all eyes fixed upon 
 the preacher, some eager, some tender, all in¬ 
 terested. It had to do with the holiness of God, 
 
234 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 taking as its text the vision of Isaiah in the 
 temple, and surely no one ever forgot the terri¬ 
 fying vision of a universe ruled by an unholy 
 God, where men sit by the poisoned springs of 
 life, looking at polluted flowers, and lifting up 
 hands to abominable hills. Man can endure an 
 indifferent world. He does not lose heart when 
 told that the flowers are heartless, and would 
 as soon adorn a grave as a bridal altar. But a 
 malignant universe is intolerable. Not only the 
 value but the very existence of the soul is in 
 jeopardy, and all our dear human world is cast 
 into shadow, “pent up in the kingdom of pity 
 and death.” It made the very soul shudder, 
 and there are times when a shudder is an argu¬ 
 ment. Then followed, by contrast, a picture 
 of a lucid and wise order where righteousness 
 reigns, where every mountain is an altar, and 
 all the laws of life are God's ten thousand com¬ 
 mandments: a picture appropriate to a Greek 
 temple—the vision of a man who sees the holi¬ 
 ness of beauty, no less than the beauty of holi¬ 
 ness. He had not spoken two paragraphs be¬ 
 fore the spark caught, and the man, his theme, 
 and his audience were alike transfigured. His 
 slight figure seemed to tower aloft to the pro- 
 
Edward L. Powell 235 
 
 portions of a giant; his voice vibrated with 
 moral electricity; his burning words became a 
 torrent, yet all was held in bound by a firm, 
 directing hand. It was a revelation of “truth 
 through personality/’ as Phillips Brooks defined 
 preaching; what George MacDonald called 
 “the rare speech of a man to his fellows 
 whereby they know that in his innermost heart 
 he is a believer.” 
 
 No skill of oratory could have produced that 
 sermon; it came from no such art. It came 
 from something beyond creeds, something far 
 beyond differences of theology and methods of 
 worship. It was that old, haunting, pathetic, 
 subduing, thrilling voice heard in all ages of the 
 church, amidst the splendours of mediaeval su¬ 
 perstition, as in the fiery appeal of modern re¬ 
 vivalism. Older than Christianity itself, it is 
 more vivid than music and more eloquent than 
 architecture, and its spell is as mysterious as 
 the wind in the trees. Such words have stirred 
 the souls of men in every age, winning restless, 
 wayward spirits by their divine passion, and 
 turning bloodshed and rapine into righteous 
 crusades. Whether spoken on bare hillsides 
 beneath a crucifix, or in a plain white country 
 
236 Some Living Masters of' the Pulpit 
 
 meeting house, such words can never lose their 
 power while human nature is the same. This 
 quality of spirituality, so rare in men of great 
 powers, inspires a kind of awe. Men bow to it, 
 as a field of grain bows at the breath of the 
 wind, feel themselves in the presence of the- 
 Unseen, and are touched, if only for a moment, 
 by a sense of wonder and regret. 
 
 There is no need to say that I became a regu¬ 
 lar attendant at the old First Church, much to 
 the scandal of my seminary, where I was reck¬ 
 oned a black sheep in the flock. It seemed to 
 me that the sermon of that day was the achieve¬ 
 ment of a lifetime; but so far from being ex¬ 
 ceptional, I learned that it was typical of a 
 preacher who always invested the facts of 
 Christian faith with commanding certainty and 
 practical urgency. As often as I heard Dr. 
 Powell, he always seemed able instantly to real¬ 
 ise that release of personality—what the old 
 time Methodists called “liberty”—without 
 which preaching is the hardest work ever 
 undertaken by mortal man; harder than mak¬ 
 ing brick without straw. Tales are told of his 
 failures—as in Richmond one night when his 
 sermon went from him entirely—but never 
 
Edward L, Powell 237 
 
 once have I heard him when he did not trans- 
 mute his thoughts into fire and light to kindle 
 and illumine, and it was always light without 
 smoke. Less scholarly than Broadus, less 
 rhetorical than Gunsaulus—two of his peers 
 now fallen asleep—he is more virile than 
 Jowett, having none of that flowery emptiness 
 which is the besetting sin of the '‘poet- 
 preacher/’ Indeed, he knows nothing of the 
 dainty, prettified, pietistic gospel so dear to the 
 dilettante, and no doubt that is why he appeals 
 so strongly to strong men, uniting a vivid faith 
 with a vital, winsome, and enthusiastic man¬ 
 hood. Besides, judged by any test, Dr. Powell 
 is one of the great orators of his day, though 
 not the equal of his uncle, Dr. Robert C. Cave 
 —the most perfect orator I have ever heard 
 speak, alike in matter and in manner. 
 
 One has only to turn to a volume of his ser¬ 
 mons—all too rare, alas—such as The Vic¬ 
 tory of Faith, to know the quality of Dr. 
 Powell and his ministry. They are the words 
 of a man familiar with the most perfect fruits 
 of culture and sensitive in high degree to the 
 charms of literary form. Not merely in pal¬ 
 pable allusion, but in the choice phrase, the 
 
238 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 brilliant epigram, the modulations of his sen¬ 
 tences, and a most chaste verbal reserve, is to 
 be discerned the master of speech. As sacred 
 compositions they captivate as much by their 
 beauty as by their forthrightness of insight and 
 appeal. They are logical without any display 
 of argument, and poetical without any sacrifice 
 of directness and sincerity. Reason is appealed 
 to all along, but the language of the appeal 
 comes up all blossoming and fragrant with the 
 heart. No one can fail to recognise their 
 catholicity of spirit, their gracious aim, and 
 their helpfulness to mind that recoil from the 
 formal and arbitrary in religion. Only the 
 commanding vitalities of Christianity and its 
 heroic enterprise engage his heart and inspire 
 his ministry. He cares nothing for hair split¬ 
 ting dogmas, but for those heavenly truths 
 which overarch all creeds, and that life of the 
 spirit, “mystical in its roots and practical in its 
 fruits/' which underlies all sects. As we may 
 read, turning the pages swiftly: 
 
 What is the preacher's world? Answer 
 may be made that he is the messenger of re¬ 
 ligion; as Ralph Connor would say, he is the 
 “sky pilot." But when we begin to think of 
 
Edward L. Powell 239 
 
 what religion means—that it has to do with all 
 life and therefore with all things, that it claims 
 all provinces of thought and activity for its 
 territory—we begin to see that the preacher as 
 a messenger of religion must be a many-sided 
 individual, and must touch life in one way or 
 another at almost every point. The religion of 
 Jesus has to do with all men and all things, and 
 with all of a man—body, soul, and spirit. And 
 he who would proclaim that religion must be 
 a man of the world in the best sense. The more 
 he knows of life, the more effectively he can 
 meet the requirements of human need. 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 Should a preacher enter politics? Not as 
 a profession, but in the proclamation of right¬ 
 eousness he must necessarily have to do with 
 the politician and with the affairs of state, even 
 as in preaching honesty, purity, love, he is de¬ 
 claring principles that touch every business and 
 avocation in life. The preacher cannot be side¬ 
 tracked during the week or given to understand 
 that his business belongs to Sunday and the 
 church. Every day is his day of opportunity; 
 every realm is his field of service and duty; all 
 places, if they be entered in the spirit of his 
 Master, furnish him with a pulpit. To the ex¬ 
 tent that preaching becomes a mere profession 
 —having to do with certain things that can be 
 labelled and classified, the preacher is provin¬ 
 cial. In the words of Wesley, the preacher has 
 the world for his parish. I do not know any 
 
240 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 man who requires a deeper, richer or fuller life 
 for his work than does the preacher. 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 The imperialism of Jesus takes the whole 
 life of man for its kingdom. His rule within 
 the heart of man must manifest itself in every 
 part of man’s environment. He cannot govern 
 the inner life apart from the outer. The whole 
 frame-work of society is, therefore, involved in 
 the imperial programme of Jesus. Poverty, vice 
 and crime are inconsistent with the present 
 social condition of our great cities. The Bible, 
 through and through, insists upon the redemp¬ 
 tion of the bodies of men, as well as their souls, 
 and of the whole frame-work of human society. 
 And so the regency of Christ contemplates the 
 bringing of our homes, our politics, our trade— 
 all the means, agencies and things with which 
 we are connected—under the sway of Jesus. 
 
 « • 1 • • 
 
 Consider the sweeter, nobler, conceptions of 
 religion which are ours today. As life takes 
 colour from Christianity it is ennobled. Today 
 life is happier, stronger, because of the things 
 we have left behind. The church is journeying 
 away from the falsities of mediaevalism, but 
 carries forward the sweetness and light of 
 Jesus. Gone forever the hideous dogmas that 
 tortured our fathers. Gone the dogmas which 
 confused Satan with God. The church is ex¬ 
 changing the worship of the past for the 
 heritage of the present, the old philosophies for 
 
Edward L. Powell 241 
 
 the new living Christ. We know more, and 
 therefore we love more. The certificate of 
 Christianity is something more than proved 
 propositions. It is a helpful life. There has 
 come a new conscience which makes it impos¬ 
 sible for men to be content to have, while their 
 brothers have not. The physical misery of the 
 world’s disinherited is becoming the spiritual 
 misery of the world’s elect. 
 
 Happy is the city which has sent to it an 
 authentic messenger of great truths; one of 
 those elect spirits to whom religious cares and 
 interests are what secular cares and interests 
 are to other men. For thirty years Dr. Powell 
 has laboured in Louisville, at the gateway of 
 the South—himself a Virginian gentleman of 
 the old school—taking not only a city but a com¬ 
 monwealth for his parish, with a public influ¬ 
 ence only equalled by his indefatigable industry 
 as a pastor. Resisting all temptations to leave 
 Louisville, he added year to year, decade to 
 decade, with a continuity and cumulative mo¬ 
 mentum of influence, giving him a command 
 of the higher life of a city such as few men 
 have ever attained. Through all the years he 
 has played well his part in practical affairs, but 
 his life is not there. The growth of the king- 
 
242 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 dom of grace is his prosperity, the application 
 of Christian ideas to life is his supreme con¬ 
 cern. Less a reformer than a former of the 
 ideals and conscience of a great community, all 
 through his ministry he has fearlessly dealt 
 with public issues, and always from a Christian 
 point of view. Never a pulpit scold, never fall¬ 
 ing into a pessimistic or denunciatory tone— 
 like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, who 
 said there was jam yesterday, and there will be 
 jam tomorrow, but there is no jam today—by 
 the weight of his character, by the wisdom of 
 his practical suggestion, no less than by the 
 power of his passionate eloquence, he has 
 wrought mightily as a preacher and leader of 
 righteousness. 
 
 There was a time, years ago, when Kentucky 
 was torn by a bitter political feud, becoming 
 almost an armed camp, and the governor-elect 
 was shot dead in the capital city. With 
 triumphant tact, with unfaltering courage, Dr. 
 Powell made it an opportunity for some of the 
 greatest preaching of his life, rebuking iniq¬ 
 uity, and pleading for the fundamental morali¬ 
 ties of private and public life. Later, when the 
 chief executive of the state was a fugitive in 
 
Edward L. Powell 243 
 
 an adjoining state, it was the pulpit of the old 
 First Church that spoke in behalf of forgive¬ 
 ness, making plea equally for Christian com¬ 
 mon sense and public decency. It was a difficult 
 —nay, a disgraceful—time, but Dr. Powell 
 dealt with it in a manner forever memorable, 
 revealing the political function of religion and 
 the strategy of Christian leadership. Fortu¬ 
 nately some of the sermons, addresses, and 
 articles of that period were gathered into a 
 little book, entitled Savonarola, and Other 
 Addresses on Civic Righteousness, in which 
 we may read to this day the heartache of a 
 patriot and the testimony of a prophet. His 
 ringing call to “Sleeping Citizenship/’ his fine 
 appeal to “Public Men and Morals,” his thrill¬ 
 ing commentary on the Battle Hymn of the 
 Republic—itself a prose-poem of no mean 
 order—and his noble interpretation of “The 
 Divine Presence in Political History,” the last 
 two evoked by the Spanish-American war— 
 show us how a Christian can be a patriot, and 
 a patriot a Christian. In the same way, during 
 the Great War, when his body was frail and 
 his heart wrung with agony, his pulpit was an 
 altar alike of Christian faith and patriotic fire. 
 
244 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 For some of us Louisville is a city of many 
 memories, not only of days that come not back, 
 but of great scholars and dear teachers whose 
 influence abides, and of fellowships which time 
 cannot destroy. It is the city of Henry Wat- 
 terson, last and greatest of the editors of the 
 old days of chivalrous and brilliant journalism; 
 the golden voice of the south and a national 
 character. It is the city of Mary Anderson, 
 and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch; of 
 Madison Cawein, a lyric poet whose song was 
 heard and loved in England, even before it 
 won its way at home. It has ever been a city 
 of great preachers, like Broadus, Boyce, Hemp¬ 
 hill, Hamilton, Pickard, Dudley, Eaton, and 
 Rabbi Adolph Moses, a stately, grave, and 
 noble teacher. Many have fallen asleep but 
 Powell remains, the peer and comrade of a 
 goodly company, the best beloved and—now 
 that Watterson has vanished—the most famous 
 citizen of his city. 
 
XV: Frank W. Gunsaulus 
 
 In Memoriam 
 
 As I sit down to write in appreciation of the 
 genius of Dr. Gunsaulus as a preacher, the 
 news tells me that he has gone to his crowning. 
 It is heavy tidings, and like thousands of young 
 men all over the land, to whom he was as much 
 father as friend, I am lonely and forlorn. It 
 seems impossible to realise that his abounding 
 personality, his incandescent vitality, his pure 
 and winsome manhood are now only a memory, 
 and that we are never to hear that golden voice 
 again on earth. The words from the old 
 Hebrew centuries flash into my mind: “My 
 father! My father! The chariots of Israel 
 and the horsemen thereof!” Alas, my ap¬ 
 praisal becomes a memorial, and I can make no 
 reader of mine understand with me, remem¬ 
 bering almost twenty years of unbroken friend¬ 
 ship, how a gracious presence—majestic, mag¬ 
 netic, commanding, enchanting—stands yet 
 
 vividly before me, refusing to say farewell. 
 
 245 
 
246 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 No doubt there will be a biography of Dr. 
 Gunsaulus, but one cannot be sure of it. Chi¬ 
 cago is neglectful of its great personalities. 
 Gentle, wise, meditative David Swing had to 
 wait for more than twenty years—until it was 
 almost too late—and even now there is no life- 
 story of Dr. Harper who, alike in character 
 and achievement, must be reckoned among the 
 great Americans. A biography of Gunsaulus, 
 if written, will show us a man of many mani¬ 
 festations, and it will tell a story more thrilling 
 than any romance. Poet, artist, scholar, edu¬ 
 cator, author, orator, statesman, and, above all, 
 a God-endowed preacher whose mysticism was 
 at once the inspiration and illumination of his 
 multifarious activity—it is a story of which 
 America ought to be proud. He was the first 
 citizen of his city, if not the most distinguished 
 —the incarnation of its genius and the proph¬ 
 ecy of its future. Uniting the fine, firm quali¬ 
 ties of the Puritan with the glow, colour and 
 tropical richness of Spain, he also joined the 
 skyey vision of the poet with the practical 
 acumen of a man of affairs. Words are the 
 daughters of earth, deeds are the sons of God, 
 and both were wedded in his life. Fortunately 
 
Frank W. Gunsaulus 247 
 
 I am to write of him only as a preacher, but 
 even in that capacity one may well despair of 
 describing a man whose personal and intel¬ 
 lectual charm none could define and few resist. 
 
 Already the early eloquence of Gunsaulus is 
 a legend of magic and mystery. Only recently 
 a man related how he sat with a friend on the 
 floor in the aisle of Plymouth Church, during 
 the Columbian Exposition, and heard the pas¬ 
 tor preach. It was the enchantment of pure 
 genius, an oratory more vivid than music in 
 which every gesture seemed an event. He read 
 his text from Exodus 4:4, “And the Lord said 
 unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it 
 by the tail. And he put forth his hand, and it 
 became a rod in his hand.” Both men won¬ 
 dered what could be made out of such a text, 
 but they did not have long to wait. The appe¬ 
 tites and passions of a man, like snakes, coil 
 and wriggle at his feet until, at the command 
 of God, he grasps them firmly. Then they be¬ 
 come sceptres of sovereignty, wands of moral 
 authority—forging passion into power. But 
 no art can bring back the magic whereby the 
 orator swept all before him, holding men as if 
 their own soul spoke to them in his words, as he 
 
248 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 described the fight every man must wage with 
 himself if he is to be a man. Standing back 
 from the pulpit, brushing his long raven hair 
 from his forehead, his eyes kindling with a 
 dusty yet piercing light, “orb within orb,” he 
 swayed his audience as the wind sways the 
 clouds. There was nothing artificial, no stud¬ 
 ied unnatural effect, but the fire and rapture of 
 great eloquence dedicated to the service of the 
 moral life. To this day, though twenty-seven 
 years have come and gone, my friend can repeat 
 not only the idea and outline of that sermon, 
 but whole passages of its music. 
 
 As early as 1881—to go back for a time in 
 my story—the young preacher saw, propheti¬ 
 cally, that theology must be translated into 
 sociology. When he came to Chicago, six 
 years later, the Armour Mission lay ready to 
 his hand, and he laid hold of it, lavishing upon 
 it his love and labour. Some months later he 
 preached a sermon in which he not only unbur¬ 
 dened the passion of his heart for the young, 
 but, as was equally characteristic, outlined a 
 practical plan and remedy. At the conclusion 
 of the sermon, Philip D. Armour came forward 
 with a direct, searching question: 
 
Frank W. Gunsaulus 249 
 
 “Do you really believe in those ideas you 
 have just expressed ?” said the captain of in¬ 
 dustry. 
 
 “I certainly do,” answered the preacher. 
 
 “Well, then, if you will give me five years 
 of your time, I will furnish the money,” was 
 the reply; and that sermon became known as 
 the two million dollar sermon. 
 
 Out of that sermon grew Armour Institute, 
 the history and growth of which should make 
 more than one chapter in the biography of the 
 preacher. With that story I have not to do 
 now, except to say that, while one does not see 
 how Dr. Gunsaulus could have escaped the op¬ 
 portunity and burden of so prodigious an un¬ 
 dertaking—and, manifestly, he did not desire 
 to escape—it none the less divided the interests 
 of his life, and diverted the full tide of his 
 genius from the pulpit. Indeed, he was more 
 than once ready—and actually tried—to resign 
 the pulpit altogether and devote himself en¬ 
 tirely to education, as he finally did two years 
 ago. Yet there are fifty men who can conduct 
 and develop a technical institute, for every one 
 whom God has endowed with the rare and 
 precious genius of a great preacher. A giant 
 
250 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 in strength, of fabulous mental and spiritual 
 resource, he did the work of many men, adding 
 labour to labour—the institute and the church 
 being only two items in an incredible number 
 of activities—though I have often wondered if 
 it had not been better had he obeyed the ex¬ 
 ample of St. Paul, “this one thing I do,” in 
 single-hearted devotion. 
 
 At any rate, Dr. Gunsaulus made his de¬ 
 cision, did his work—and paid the price! The 
 call of a great growing city, and the pathos of 
 its spiritual need, lured him on. As if his 
 church and the institute were not enough, he 
 began a great downtown Sunday evening 
 service in Central Music Hall, which was 
 packed to the doors. At length the inevitable 
 happened. The man of iron broke. Physical 
 collapse—complete and shattering—befell him 
 in 1897, and for six months he lay motionless 
 on a bed of agony. No sermons came from the 
 preacher then, no books; only a poem. That 
 poem revealed his intrepid and unconquerable 
 spirit: 
 
 I care not that the furnace fire of pain 
 
 Laps round and round my life and burns 
 alway; 
 
Frank W. Gunsaulus 251 
 
 I only care to know that not in vain 
 
 The fierce heats touch me throughout night 
 and day. 
 
 When he returned to Plymouth pulpit, a quiv¬ 
 ering sigh, not unmixed with horror, ran 
 through the congregation. A terrible thing 
 had happened. Valiantly he had wrestled with 
 the Angel of Pain in the twilight, and it had 
 left him lame and misshapen of frame. He had 
 been tall, agile, handsome as a Greek god, and 
 now he was doomed to go limping to the end. 
 One leg behaved like a dead thing. Later, 
 when Lorenz of Vienna tried with his deft 
 fingers to untie the knot, he said with grim 
 Teutonic humour, “Cheer up! There is no hope 
 for you.” He did cheer up. For, in the fiery 
 furnace of pain Another had walked with him 
 betimes. New windows of insight had been 
 opened, new depths of experience fathomed, 
 and new and haunting stops of music had been 
 mastered! 
 
 It was on Sunday, November 30, 1902, 
 that I first heard Gunsaulus preach, and the 
 wonder of that day is still vivid in my heart. 
 Such a voice cannot be made in one generation! 
 Today its tones come back to me from behind 
 
252 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 the hills, now soft as a flute, now melodious as 
 an orchestra, with never a note to jar. It was 
 as variable as the moods of the man, as just as 
 his character, as sweet as his spirit. It was 
 the Sunday after the death of Joseph Parker, 
 and the sermon was a vision of the Christian 
 ministry as illustrated in the life of the first 
 minister of the City Temple. They had been 
 friends—the preacher and his subject—and 
 some allowance had to be made for the beauti¬ 
 ful bias of friendship in his estimate of Parker. 
 It was an extraordinary portrayal, as touch 
 after touch was added to the picture, until at 
 last Joseph Parker seemed to live again in the 
 pulpit of Central Church. As I had never seen 
 Parker, it was like a revelation to me, albeit 
 I could not follow him when at times he seemed 
 to place him above Beecher. From the notes 
 of that day I transcribe a passage, if only be¬ 
 cause the sermon was a revelation equally of 
 the subject and of the preacher, and because it 
 will help to make clear what, to me, at least, 
 was the greatest quality of Dr. Gunsaulus as a 
 preacher. Thus: 
 
 It is an awful risk God takes in creating a 
 David or a Robert Burns. But they justify it, 
 
Frank W. Gunsaulus 253 
 
 for they give a double significance to nature 
 and life. Such men recreate the external world 
 and its events into an internal order made 
 richer by the language they learn. David, 
 Burns, Augustine, with varying colours portray 
 to us the cost and the peril of letting loose a 
 great soul on the earth. Joseph Parker, by the 
 grace of God, made gigantic mistakes; but also, 
 by the grace of God, he avoided many pitfalls 
 which such a genius digs for a man. I regard 
 him as a wonderfully endowed and restrained 
 man. He could never have been a little sinner; 
 he was not a little saint. The stone-mason’s 
 boy has not opened unto us the Scriptures, and 
 Gladstone and the kitchen-maid, Sir Henry 
 Irving and the bootblack, have not listened to 
 be pleased for so many years, without demon¬ 
 strating that the mark of such a nature is ca¬ 
 pacity for pain. 
 
 A great man and a great theme—Joseph 
 Parker with the Scriptures of God and man— 
 how marvellously they re-enforce and illustrate 
 each other! He had so meditated upon the 
 Scriptures and lived with kings, prophets, 
 psalmists and captain of the Bible that he be¬ 
 came a part of them and they of him. When 
 he preached upon David, it was no small man 
 attempting to measure the girth of the poet- 
 king. Parker was David at the time. One 
 instant it was the boy looking into the heights 
 of manhood as he talked with Samuel; the next, 
 it was the man looking down from physical 
 
254 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 safety and moral insecurity from his palace 
 into the defenseless home of Uriah. When he 
 preached on Isaiah, one saw how unobstruct- 
 edly the prophet-statesman of Israel moved in 
 the City Temple pulpit. Exegesis like this is a 
 matter of complete personality; it is not a mat¬ 
 ter of learning Greek or skill in analysis. The 
 legend of his eloquence will be told by many 
 generations! 
 
 Here is an example of the style of Dr. Gun- 
 saulus—at times so curiously involved and lack¬ 
 ing in lucidity, and often so luxuriant as to 
 bewilder—but the significant thing is that he 
 seized upon that in Joseph Parker most akin to 
 himself, his power of dramatic characterisa¬ 
 tion. In this art Gunsaulus himself was at his 
 best, and in the use he made of it we have had 
 no one like him in America; no one near him. 
 Such an art—depending so much upon gesture, 
 facial expression, and the dramatic personality 
 of the preacher—loses three-fourths of its spell 
 and wonder on the printed page. No printed 
 sermon by Dr. Gunsaulus shows us more than 
 half the man. Alas, much the same is true of 
 every great preacher—his art dies with him, 
 becoming a vacancy that is vacated with the 
 passing of the generation to whom he minis- 
 
Frank W. Gunsaulus 255 
 
 tered—but it is doubly so with a preacher like 
 Gunsaulus. If only by some art we could re¬ 
 capture and perpetuate the magic spell of his 
 genius, that as little as possible may be lost of 
 the precious treasure of mankind! 
 
 Howbeit, all that one can do in such a sketch 
 as this is to indicate, in some measure, not what 
 Dr. Gunsaulus had in common with other 
 preachers, but the gift which was uniquely and 
 supremely own. And that, as I have said, 
 was his genius for dramatic characterisation. 
 Two of his sermons may serve as examples, 
 two of the greatest sermons I have ever heard, 
 and I doubt if anyone else could have preached 
 either one of them. One dealt with the Tempta¬ 
 tion of Jesus, and the vision of the Master, 
 worn, weary, weak from hunger and long vigil, 
 standing—a lone and quivering soul—face to 
 face with the subtle cunning of ultimate Evil, 
 feeling its fearful fascination, can never be for¬ 
 gotten ! The other sermon—it has never been 
 printed, I believe—might have been entitled, 
 “Jesus at the Feet of his Disciples/ 5 and had to 
 do with the evening in the Upper Room when 
 the Master washed the feet of his Apostles. 
 “And He took a towel/ 5 was the text. “He 
 
256 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 might have taken a star!” said the preacher, the 
 better to show the august humility of the Serv¬ 
 ant in the House. Then he became an artist, 
 reproducing not only the scene, but the atmos¬ 
 phere of the farewell meal. All at once he 
 began to re-enact the scene, from the point of 
 view of each disciple, as the Master approached 
 him with basin and towel. Only a man of 
 painter-like sympathy and dramatic insight 
 could have done it. A single false note would 
 have ruined the scene, but there was no false 
 note. Each disciple stood out distinctly—-his 
 character, his personality, his very soul—as if, 
 by some magic, the man had been there in the 
 pulpit. The preacher forgot himself—the con¬ 
 gregation forgot the preacher—all were pres¬ 
 ent again in the Upper Room long ago. One 
 could have taken a photograph of Simon Peter, 
 it was so real, so vivid. It was a solemn, almost 
 terrifying moment when he came to Judas; 
 strong men sobbed like children, torn equally 
 between the horror of evil obsession and the 
 awful mercy of the Master. Never again on 
 this earth do I expect to hear such a sermon, 
 now that the great artist-preacher has van¬ 
 ished ! 
 
Frank W. Gunsaulus 257 
 
 Memories crowd upon me, among them a 
 radiant Easter service in the Auditorium Thea¬ 
 ter, every seat of which was filled with an 
 eager, expectant humanity. I entered the top 
 gallery just as the vast congregation bowed, 
 like a field of grain touched by a soft wind, and 
 the prayer began with these words: u O God, 
 in the far distances of Thy fatherhood we were 
 conceived in love; from Thy fatherhood we 
 have come we do not know how far.” What 
 a sentence! I had journeyed two hundred 
 miles to the service, and that sentence was 
 worth the journey. After a hymn, the words 
 of which he himself had written, the preacher 
 began his sermon, taking for his text the 
 words: “If a man die shall he live again?”— 
 words that come wailing across perplexed and 
 anxious ages, pathetic, heroic, awful! For an 
 hour the preacher spoke out of a deep heart and 
 a clear mind, using every kind argument, 
 imagery and appeal,—hints, flashing phrases, 
 glowing apostrophes, intricate facts of science, 
 and radiant insights that just stopped short of 
 rhapsody. Men listened believing, or wanting 
 to believe, and the scene comes back to me to¬ 
 day, now that the preacher has passed into the 
 
258 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 life of which he spoke with passionate and per¬ 
 suasive eloquence. These words from the clos¬ 
 ing prayer echo in my heart: “O Lord, may we 
 realise that Thou hast done Thy divinest for 
 man in compelling him to cut the path and 
 fathom the mystery of pain.” 1 
 
 There is no need to say that Dr. Gunsaulus 
 was the orator, not the theologian, nor yet the 
 man of letters—a man who ruled by his grace 
 and charm of spirit, rather than by his origi¬ 
 nality and potency of thought—though his 
 scholarship was thorough, and his books are 
 rewarding, especially his historical novel, The 
 Monk and the Knight. He was indeed almost 
 the last of the old Gladstonian school of the 
 elaborate and rounded period, using the full- 
 
 1 Happily we now have a volume of The Pulpit Prayers of 
 Dr. Gunsaulus, edited by his daughter, Helen, and dedicated 
 to the great preacher “who, a year ago this Easter-time, en¬ 
 tered completely into the life eternal which he illumined for 
 his fellowmen during all the years of his ministry.” The 
 prayers, taken down verbatim during the services of Central 
 Church, cover the period between 1913 and 1918, and are 
 grouped as invocations, petitions, prayers in war-time, and on 
 special occasions. The little book brings back the echo of a 
 voice now hushed on earth, but which still lives in the hearts 
 of a vast company to whom it spoke, as from the sky, words 
 of comfort and command. Some of us can almost see the 
 characteristic gesture—the towering figure, the noble head, the 
 arms outstretched to embrace—as if the preacher sought to 
 gather his congregation to his heart, and on the wings of his 
 prayer lift them into the higher air of God, and detain them 
 there for cleansing and consecration. 
 
Frank W. Gunsaulus 259 
 
 throated Latin family of words. In early days 
 his style—warm, exuberant, chromatic—often 
 had all the lurid tropic colouring of Hugo, re¬ 
 splendent and sometimes grandiose; but in later 
 years it had softened and chastened its hues. 
 More often, toward the end, he struck a calmer 
 key in which, with hardly a movement of the 
 body, with the slightest employ of any dra¬ 
 matic suggestion, he held his hearers by the 
 depth of his insight, the richness of his expe¬ 
 rience of things immortal, and the nameless 
 grace of his spirit. Some of us thought his 
 lecture on “The Heroism of Scholarship’' far 
 more admirable than his “Gladstone” or his 
 “Savonarola.” He was not always triumphant, 
 and if his successes were noble and moving, his 
 failures were equally gorgeous—like that awful 
 day in the City Temple when he took for his 
 theme the death of Florence Nightingale, and 
 the sermon simply did not come off. Even at 
 his worst he was never commonplace, never 
 cheap, and the contagious quality of his per¬ 
 sonality—by its generosity, its amplitude, its 
 winsomeness—redeemed many an ill-starred 
 effort. 
 
 Alas, how inadequate is my analysis and esti- 
 
260 Some Living Masters of the Pulpit 
 
 mate of a man so radiant and radiating, so 
 brotherly withal and lovable; the Friar Gonsol 
 of Eugene Field’s rare and quizzical book, The 
 Temptation of Friar Gonsol. To know him 
 was to become, if not actually generous, like 
 him, at least indisposed—partly indeed unable 
 —to judge him calmly, much less critically. He 
 was enchanting in the warmth of his fellow¬ 
 ship, his boyish joy in life, the vividness of his 
 enthusiasm, and the unfeigned simplicity of his 
 modesty. Never will his young brethren forget 
 his gay heart, his glittering mind, his gener¬ 
 osity of appreciation, his self-giving so open- 
 hearted and open-handed, his verve, dash and 
 gentleness—what times we talked the hours 
 away. He had a talent for living and a genius 
 for friendship. But the deepest thing in him 
 —the still centre of his busy, fruitful life—was 
 his poet-soul, and its experience of God in 
 Christ. Before me lie letters telling, man to 
 man, his faith in Jesus in words as simple as 
 the prayer of a child—letters so lovely that they 
 make the heart ache. Anyone who knew him, 
 and the rising and falling moods out of which 
 his poems were born, can trace his real biog¬ 
 raphy in his songs. They disclose a tender, 
 
Frank W. Gunsaulus 261 
 
 wistful, beauty-loving spirit, sensitive to all Di¬ 
 vine persuasions, uniting a large and living cul¬ 
 ture with a heroic faith; a faith not held with¬ 
 out struggle in a world pent up in “the king¬ 
 doms of pity and death/' where life is woven 
 of beauty, mystery, and sorrow. His own 
 words return to tell us whither he has gone: 
 
 From moonlight, night and wonder, 
 
 He stepped to sunlight yonder— 
 
 The poet’s paradise. 
 
 His lyre with string unbroken, 
 
 Will ring like music spoken, 
 
 And tremble toward God’s day. 
 
 THE END 
 

 
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NEWTON B - Mod.Pr. 
 
 Some living masters 
 of the pulpit.