tihvaxy of ^he Cheolocjical ^tminaxy 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 •tt^^D* 
 
 BV 4211 .B76 1891 
 Brooks, Phillips, 1835-1893 
 Lectures on preaching, 
 delivered before the 
 
LECTURES ON PREACHING 
 
 DEiaVERED BEFORE THK 
 
 DIVINITY SCHOOL OF YALE COLLEGE 
 
 IN JANUARY AND FKBR UAR Y, 1871 
 
 REV. PHILLIPS BPtOOKS 
 
 O.ECT0K OK TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 
 1891 
 
OOPTBIQaT, 1877 
 V. BUTTON AND COMPANY. 
 
\From the Records of the Corporation of Yale College, April 12, 187 1.[ 
 
 " Voted, To accept the offer of Mr. Henry jS. Sagk, of Brooklyu, 
 of the sum of ten tliousaud dollars, tor tlie fouiuliuij of a Lectureship 
 in the Theological Departmer.t. in a branch of I'astoral Theology, to 
 be designated ' The Lyman Ueecher Leccuresnip on Preachiug,' to be 
 filled from time to time, upon the appointment of the Corpoiation, by 
 a minister of the Gospel, of any evangelical denomination, who has 
 been markedly successful in the special work of the' Christian miu- 
 istrj." 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 aOTCRB PUQl 
 
 I. The Two Elements in Preaching .... 1 
 
 11. The Preacher Himself 35 
 
 III. The Preacher in his Work 72 
 
 IV. The Idea of the Sermon 108 
 
 V. The Making of the Sermon . . . . 143 
 
 VI. The Congregation . ... . . . 180 
 
 VII. The Ministry for our Age 217 
 
 VIII. The Value of the Human Soul . . . 255 
 
LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 
 
 OINCE I received, some months ago, tlie invitation 
 ^^ to deliver these lectures which I begin to-day, I 
 have been led to ponder much upon the principles by 
 which I have only half consciously been living and 
 working for many years. This is part of the debt 
 which I owe to those who have honored me with 
 their invitation. It is interesting to one's self to 
 examine and recognize and arrange the ideas which 
 have been slowly taking shape within him during the 
 busy years of work. I shall be very glad if you too 
 are interested, as I try to recount them to you, and 
 very thankful if you find in them any help or in- 
 spiration. 
 
 The personal character of this lectureship is very 
 evident. It is always to be filled by preachers in 
 active work, who are to come and speak to you of 
 preaching. It is not a Homiletieal Professorship. It 
 is each man's own life in the ministry of which he is 
 to tell. But certainly you do not expect from your 
 
2 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 Buccessive lecturers a series of anecdotes of what haa 
 happened to them in their ministry, nor a mere re 
 cital of their ways of working. It cannot be intended 
 that this lectureship should exalt the interviewer into 
 an organized and permanent institution. The hope 
 must rather be that as each preacher speaks of our 
 common work in his own way, whatever there may 
 be of value in his personal experience may come, not 
 directly but indirectly, into what he says, and make 
 the privilege of preaching shine for the moment in 
 your eyes with the same kind of light which it has 
 won in his. 
 
 I feel as I begin something of the fear which I have 
 often felt in commencing a new sermon. It has often 
 seemed to me as if the vast amount of preaching which 
 people hear must have one bad effect, in leaving on 
 their minds a vague impression that this Christian life 
 to which they are so continually urged must be a very 
 difficult and complicated thing that it should take 
 Buch a multitude of definitions to make it clear. And 
 80 there is some danger lest these multiplied lectures 
 upon preaching should give to those who are prepar- 
 ing to preach an uncomfortable feeling that the work 
 of preaching is a thing of many rules, hard to under- 
 stand, and needing a great deal of commentary. For 
 my part, I am startled when I think how few and 
 simple are the things which I have to say to you, 
 The principles which one can recognize in his minis- 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PRE/i CHING. 3 
 
 try are \evj broad and plain. The applications of 
 those principles are endless ; but I should be very 
 sorry indeed if anything that I shall say should lead 
 any of you to confound the few plain principles with 
 their many varied applications, and so make you think 
 that work complicated and difficult which to him who 
 is equipped for it, and loves it, is the easiest and sim- 
 plest work in life. 
 
 Let me say one word more in introduction. He 
 who is called upon to give these lectures cannot but 
 remember that they are given every year, and that 
 he has had very able and faithful predecessors. There 
 are certainly, therefore, some things which he may 
 venture to omit without being supposed to be either 
 ignorant or careless of them. There are certain first 
 principles, of primary importance, which he may take 
 for granted in all that he says. They are so funda- 
 mental, that they must be always present, and their 
 power mnst pervade every treatment of the work 
 wliich is built upon them. But they need not be de- 
 liberately stated anew each year. It would make 
 these courses of lectures very monotonous ; and one 
 may venture to assume that there are some elemen- 
 tary principles upon whose truth all students of theol- 
 ogy are agreed, and whose importance they all feel. 
 
 I cannot begin, then, to speak to you who are pre- 
 \. iring for the work of preaching, without congratu 
 
4 LECTURES ON PREACH I a\(J. 
 
 lating you most earnestly upon the prospect that liea 
 before you. I cannot help bearing witness to the joy 
 of the life which you anticipate. There is no career 
 that can compare with it for a moment in the rich 
 and satisfying relations into which it brings a man 
 with his fellow-men, in the deep and interesting in- 
 sight which it gives him into human nature, and in 
 the chance of the best culture for his own character. 
 Its delight never grows old, its interest never wanes, 
 its stimulus is never exhausted. It is different to a 
 man at each period of his life ; but if he is the min- 
 ister he ought to be, there is no age, from the earliest 
 years when he is his people's brother to the late days 
 when he is like a father to the children on whom he 
 looks down from the pulpit, in which the ministry 
 has not some fresh charm and chance of usefulness to 
 offer to the man whose heart is in it. Let us never 
 think of it in any other waj'^ than this. Let us re- 
 joice with one another that in a world where there 
 are a great many good and happy things for men to 
 do, God has given us the best and happiest, and made 
 us preachers of His Triitli. 
 
 I propose in this introductory lecture to lay before 
 you some thoughts which cover the whole field which 
 we shall have to traverse; and the lectures which fol- 
 low will be mainly applications and illustrations of 
 the principles which I lay down to-day. It may make 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 5 
 my first lecture seem a little too general, but perhaps 
 it will help us to understand each other better as we 
 
 go on. 
 
 What, then, is preaching, of which we are to speak / 
 It is not hard to find a definition. Preaching is the 
 communication of truth by man to men. It has in 
 it two essential elements, truth and personality. 
 Neither of those can it spare and still be preaching. 
 The truest truth, the most authoritative statement of 
 God's will, communicated in any other way than 
 through the personality of brother man to men is 
 not preached truth. Suppose it written on the sky, 
 suppose it embodied in a book which has been so long 
 held in reverence as the direct utterance of God that 
 the vivid personahty of the men who wrote its pages 
 has well-nigh faded out of it; in neither of these 
 cases is there any preaching. And on the other 
 hand, if men speak to other men that which they 
 do not claim for truth, if they use their powers of 
 persuasion or of entertainment to make other men 
 Usten to their speculations, or do their will, or applaud 
 their cleverness, that is not preaching either. The 
 first lacks personality. The second lacks truth. And 
 preaching is the bringing of truth through person- 
 ality. It must have both elements. It is in the 
 different proportion in which the two are mingled 
 that the difference between two great classes of ser- 
 mons and preaching lies. It is in the defect of one 
 
O LECTURES OX PREACHING. 
 
 or the other element that every sermon and preaehei 
 falls short of the perfect standard. It is in the ab- 
 sence of one or the other element that a discourse 
 ceases to be a sermon, and a man ceases to be a 
 preacher altogether. 
 
 If we go back to the beginning of the Christian 
 ministry we can see how distinctly and deliberately 
 Jesus chose this method of extending the knowledge 
 of Himself throughout the world. Other methods no 
 doubt were open to Him, but He deliberately selected 
 this. He taught His truth to a few men and then 
 He said, " Now go and tell that truth to other men." 
 Both elements were there, in John the Baptist who 
 prepared the way for Him, in the seventy whom He 
 sent out before His face, and in the little company 
 who started from the chamber of the Pentecost to 
 proclaim the new salvation to the world. If He gave 
 them the power of Avorking miracles, the miracles 
 themselves wore not the final purpose for which He 
 gave it. The power of miracle was, as it were, a 
 divine fire pervading the Apostle's being and open- 
 ing his individuality on either side ; making it more 
 open God-wards by the sense of awful privilege, mak- 
 ing it more open man- wards by the inipressivenesa 
 and the helpfulness with which it was clothed. 
 Everything that was peculiar in Christ's treatment 
 of those men was meroly part of the process by which 
 the Maflter prepared tlieir personality to be a i'lt 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 1 
 
 iiedium for the communication of His Word. When 
 His treatment of them was complete, they stood 
 fused like glass, and able to take God's truth in per- 
 fectly on one side and send it out perfectly on the 
 other side of their transparent natures. 
 
 This was the method by which Christ chose that 
 His Gospel should be spread through the world. It 
 was a method that might have been applied to the 
 dissemination of any truth, but we can see why it 
 was especially adapted to the truth of Christianity. 
 For that truth is preeminently personal. However 
 *;he Gospel may be capable of statement in dogmatic 
 Zorm, its truest statement we know is not in dogma 
 but in personal life. Christianity is Christ ; and Ave 
 can easily understand how a truth which is of such 
 peculiar character that a person can stand forth and 
 Bay of it " I am the Truth," must always be best 
 conveyed through, must indeed be almost incapable 
 of being perfectly conveyed except through person- 
 ality. And so some form of preaching must be es- 
 sential to the prevalence and spread of the knowledge 
 of Christ among men. There seems to be some such 
 meaning as this in the words of Jesus when He said 
 to His disciples, " As my Father has sent me into 
 llie world even so have I sent you into the world." 
 It was the continuation, out to the minutest ramifi- 
 cations of the new system of influence, of that per- 
 6onal method which the Incarnation itself had in* 
 •^olved. 
 
8 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 If this be true, then, it establishes the first of iiL 
 principles concerning the ministry and preparation 
 for the ministry. Truth-through Personality is cur 
 description of real preachijig. The truth must come 
 really through the person, not merely over his lij)3, 
 not merely into his understanding and out through 
 his pen. It must come through hi s character, hia 
 affections, his whole mJfcellectuaL aad-mflraT Jjeing. 
 It must come genuinelj_through_him. I think that, 
 granting equal intelligence and study, here is the 
 great difference which we feel between two preachers 
 of the Word. The Gospel has come over one of them 
 and reaches us tinged and flavored with his superfi- 
 cial characteristics, belittled with his littleness. The 
 Gospel has come through the other, and we receive it 
 impressed and winged with all the earnestness and 
 strength that there is in him. In the first case the 
 man has been but a printing machine or a trumpet. 
 In the other case he has been a true man and a real 
 messenfrer of God. We know how the views which 
 theologians have taken of the agency of the Bible 
 writers in their work differ just here. There have 
 been those who would make them mere passive in- 
 struments. The thought of our own time lias more 
 and more tended to consider their the active mes- 
 aengers of the Word of God. This is the highfr 
 thought of inspiration. And this is the only true 
 thought of the Christian preachership. I tlunk that 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 9 
 
 one of the most perplexing points in a man's minis- 
 try is in a certain variation of this power of trans- 
 mission. Sometimes you are all open on both sides, 
 open to God and to fellow-man. At other times 
 something clogs and clouds your transparency. You 
 will know the differences of the sermons which you 
 preach in those two conditions, and, however little 
 they describe it to themselves or know its causes, 
 your congregation will feel the difference full well. 
 
 But this, as I began to say, decrees for us in gen- 
 eral what the preparation for the ministry is. It 
 must be nothing less than the making of a man. 
 It cannot be the mere training to certain tricks. It 
 cannot be even the furnishing with abundant knowl- 
 edge. It must be nothing less than the kneading 
 and tempering of a man's whole nature till it becomes 
 of such a consistency and quality as to be capable of 
 transmission. This is the largeness of the preacher's 
 culture. It is not for me, standing here or anywhere, 
 to depreciate the work which our theological schools 
 do. It certainly is not my place to undervalue the 
 usefulness of lectures on preaching, or books on cler- 
 ical manners. But none of these things make the 
 preacher. You are surprised, when you read the 
 biographies of the most successful ministers, to see 
 how small a part of their culture came from their 
 professional schools. It is a real part but i-t is w 
 imall part. Everything that opens their lives towards 
 
10 LECTURES ON J'REACJIIAG. 
 
 God and towards man makes part (jf their education 
 The professional schools fuiniftli tlicm. The whole 
 world is the scjiool that makes tliem. This is the 
 value of the biographies of tiie great preachers if we 
 can only read them largely enough, if we can lead 
 tliem not in a small desire to copy their details of Vw- 
 ing, but in a large sympathetic wish to know what their 
 life was, to see how the men became the men they were. 
 This is the value of Baxter's story of himself, so unsus- 
 piciously confident of the readei-'s interest in every- 
 thing that concerns him, or of Robertson's painful but 
 precious history, or of the strong, manly, constantly 
 advancin*; life of Norman Macleod. I think that 
 either of these books might be the ruin of a young 
 minister who read it for the methods of his work, as 
 either of them might be the making of him if he read 
 it for the spirit and the spiritual history of the man 
 of whom it told the story. In a time Avhich abounds 
 in biographies as ours does, especially in the biogra- 
 phies of preachers, it is woith while, 1 am sure, to 
 remember that another man's life may be the noblest 
 inspiration or the heaviest burden, according as wo 
 take its sjiirit into our spirit, or only bind its meth- 
 ods like a fagot of dry sticks upon our back. 
 
 One other consequence of the fundamental charac- 
 ter of preaching which I have stated must be the 
 perpetual function of the puljiit. Every now and 
 then we hear some speculations about the prospects 
 
THE TWO KLKMEXTS L\ PREACHING. 11 
 
 of preaching. Will men continue to preach and will 
 other men continue to go and hear them ? Books are 
 multiplying enormousl}'. Any man may feel reason- 
 ably sure on any Sunday morning that in a book 
 which he can choose from his shelf he can read some- 
 thing more wisely thought and more perfectly ex- 
 pressed than he will hear from the pulpit if he goes 
 to church. Why should he go ? One answer to the 
 question certainly would be in the assertion that 
 preaching is only one of the functions of the Christian 
 Church and that, even if preaching should grow ob- 
 solete, there would still remain reason enough why 
 Christians should meet together for worship and for 
 brotherhood. But even if we look at preaching only, 
 it must still be true that nothing can ever take its 
 place because of the personal element that is in it. 
 No multiplication of books can ever supersede the 
 human voice. No newly opened channel of approach 
 to man's mind and heart can ever do away with 
 man's readiness to receive impressions through his 
 fellow-man. There is no evidence, I think, in all 
 the absorption in books which characterizes our much 
 reading age, of any real decline of the interest in 
 preaching. Let a man be a true preacher, really 
 uttering the truth through his own personality, and 
 it is strange how men will gather to listen to him. 
 We hear that the day of the pulpit is past, and. then 
 «ome morning the voice of a true preacher is heard 
 
12 LECTURES OX PllEACIIiya. 
 
 in the land and all the streets are full of men crowd- 
 ing to hear him, just exactly as were the streets of 
 Constantinople when Chrysostom was going to preach 
 at the Church of the Apostles, or the streets of Lou- 
 don wlien Latimer was bravely telling his truth at 
 St. Paul's. 
 
 The same is true of reading sermons. I think, as 
 I shall liave occasion to say more fully in some other 
 lecture, that a sermon that has the true sermon 
 quality in it, when it is made, {)reserves that quality 
 even under t<»ae constraints of manuscript or print. 
 And books of sermons which n-ally bring the truth 
 through personality to men, were never bought and 
 read more largely than they are to-ilay. 
 
 No ; the truth about this matter of the competition 
 of the printed book witii the preached sermon, seems 
 to be what is true of every competition. It h;is led 
 to more discrimination. There were things which 
 people went to hear once but which they will not go 
 to hear to-day. They can read better things of the 
 same sort at home. But those things are not ser- 
 mon?. They never were sermons. The competition 
 of print has interfered very much, is destined to in- 
 terfere nuu-ii more, — we may hope will not cease to 
 interfere till it has caused it to disapjicar, — with the 
 " pulpit droning of old saws," with the monotonous 
 reiteration of commonplaces and abstractions ; but 
 the true sermou, the utterance of 1 ving truth by In- 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 13 
 
 ing men, was never more powerful than it is to-day. 
 People never came to it with more earnestness, of 
 carried away from it more good results. 
 
 I cannot help begging you, in the ministry which 
 is before you, to beware of excusing your own failures 
 by foolish talk about the obstinate aversion which the 
 age has to the preaching of the Gospel. It is the 
 meanest and shallowest kind of excuse. The age has 
 no aversion to preaching as such. It may not listen 
 to your preaching. If that prove to be the case, look 
 for the fault first in your preaching, and not in the 
 age. I wonder at the eagerness and patience of con- 
 gregations. I think that there are two things wliich 
 we ministers have to guard against in this matter : one, 
 the tendency of which I have just spoken, to blame 
 the impatience which men feel with false pretences of 
 preaching, for the lack of success which onr preach- 
 ing brings ; the other, an exactly opposite tendency, 
 to trust so confidently to the much tried patience of 
 the people, that we shall do our work carelessly from 
 feeling too secure about our power. He who escapes 
 both of these dangers, he who feels the magnitude 
 and privilege of his work, he who both respects and 
 trusts his people, neither assuming their indifference, 
 so that he is paralyzed, or assuming their interest, so 
 that he grows careless, — that man, I think, need envy 
 no one of the preachers of the ages that are past the 
 pulpit in which he stood, or the congregation to which 
 ae preached. 
 
H LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 Let us look now for a few moments at these two 
 elements of preaching — Truth and Personality ; the 
 one universal and invariable, the other special and al- 
 ways dilft^rent. There are a few suggestions that I 
 should like to make to you about each. 
 
 And first with regard to the Truth. It is strancje 
 how impossible it is to separate it and consider it 
 wholly by itself. The personalness will cling to it. 
 There are two aspects of the minister's work, which 
 we are constantly meeting in the New Testament. 
 They are really embodied in two words, one of which 
 is " message," and the other is " witness.'' " This is 
 the message which we have heard of Him and declare 
 unto you," says St. John in his first Epistle. " We 
 are his witnesses of these things," says St. Peter be- 
 fore the Council at Jerusalem. In these two words 
 together, I think, we have the fundamental concep- 
 tion of the matter of all Christian preaching. It is 
 to be a message given to us for transmission, but yet 
 a message which we cannot transmit until it has en- 
 tered into our own experience, and we can give our 
 own testimony of its spiritual power. The minister 
 who keeps the word "message" always written before 
 him, as he prepares his sermon in his study, or utters 
 it from his ])ulpit, is saved from the tendency to 
 wanton and wild speculation, and from the mere pas- 
 sion of originality. He who never forgets that word 
 " witness," is saved from the unreality of repeating 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 15 
 
 by rote mere forms of statement which he has learned 
 a8 orthodox, but never i-ealized as true. If you and 
 I can always carry this double consciousness, that we 
 are.j31 £ssen gers , and that we are witnesses , we shall 
 have in our preaching all the autkadL}L-aridJ.iidepend- 
 e nce of assured truth , and yet all the appeal and 
 convincingness of personal belief. It will not be we 
 that speak, but the spirit of our Father that speaketh 
 in us, and yet our sonship shall give the Fatlier's 
 voice its utterance and interpretation to His otlier 
 children. 
 
 I think that nothing is more needed to correct the 
 peculiar vices of preaching which belong to our time, 
 than a new prevalence among preachers of this first 
 conception of the truth which they have to tell as a 
 message. I am sure that one great soui'ce of the 
 weakness of the pulpit is the feeling among the 
 people that these men who stand up before them 
 every Sunday have been making up trains of thought, 
 and thinking how they should " ti*eat their subject," 
 as the phrase runs. There is the first ground of the 
 vicious habit that our congregations have of talking 
 about the preacher more than they think about the 
 truth. The minstrel who sings before you to show hia 
 skill, will be praised for his wit, and rhymes, and voice. 
 But the courier who hurries in, breathless, to bring 
 you a message, will be forgotten in the message that 
 Ue brings. Among the many sermons I have heard, 
 
IG LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 I III ways remember one, for the wonderful way in 
 wliich it was pervaded by thi8 quality. It was a 
 sermon by Mr. George Macdonald, the English au- 
 thor, who was in this country a few years ago ; and 
 it had many of the good and bad characteristics of hia 
 interesting style. It had his brave and manly hon- 
 esty, and his tendency to sentimentality. But over 
 and through it all it had this quality : it was a mes- 
 sage from God to these people by him. The man 
 struggled wnth language'as a child struggles with his 
 imperfectly mastered tongue, that will not tell the 
 errand as he received it, and has it in his mind. .\s 
 I listened, I seemed to see how weak in contrast was 
 the way in which other pretichers had amused me 
 and challenged my admiration for the working of 
 their minds. Here was a gospel. Here were real 
 tidings. And you listened and forgot the preacher. 
 
 Whatever else you count yourself in the ministr}', 
 never lose this fundamental idea of yourself as a mes- 
 Bcnger. As to the way in which one shall best keep 
 that idea, it would not be hard to state ; but it would 
 involve the whole story of th(^ Christian life. Here 
 is the primary necessity that the Christian preai-her 
 should be a CJhristian first, that he should be de»'ply 
 cognizant of God's authority, and of the absoluteness 
 of Christ's truth. That was one of the first princi- 
 ples which I ventured to assume as I began my lect- 
 ure. But without entering so wide a field, let me 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 17 
 
 Bay one thing about this conception of preaching a,, 
 the telling of a message which constantly impresses 
 me. I think that it would give to our preaching 
 just the quality which it appears to me to most 
 lack now. That quality is breadth. I do not mean 
 liberality of thought, not tolerance of opinion, nor any- 
 thing of that kind. I mean largeness of movement, 
 the great utterance of great truths, the great enforce- 
 ment of great duties, as distinct from the minute, and 
 subtle, and ingenious treatment of little topics, side 
 issues of the soul's life, bits of anatomy, the bric-a- 
 brac of theology. Take up, some Saturday, the list 
 of subjects on which the ministers of a great city are 
 to preach the next day. See how many of them seem 
 to have searched in strange coi-ners of the Bible for 
 their topics, how small and fantastic is the bit of 
 truth which their hearers are to have set before them. 
 Then turn to Barrow, or Tillotson, or Bushnell-— "' Of 
 beino; imitators of Christ ; " " That God is the onlv 
 happiness of man ; " " Every man's life a plan, of 
 God." There is a painting of ivory miniatures, and 
 there is a painting of great frescoes. One kind of 
 art is suited to one kind of subject, and another to 
 another. I suppose that all preachers pass through 
 some fantastic period when a strange text fascinates 
 them ; when they like to find what can be said for 
 an hour on some little topic on wliich most meti could 
 9niy talk two minutes ; when they are eager for sub- 
 
 2 
 
18 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 Llety more tlmn force, and for originality more than 
 truth. But as a preacher grows more full of the con- 
 ception of the sermon as a message, he gets clear of 
 those brambles. He comes out on to open ground. 
 His work grows freer, and bolder, and broader. He 
 loves the simplest texts, and the great truths which 
 run like rivers through all life. God's sovereignty, 
 Christ's redemption, man's hope in the Spirit, the 
 privilege of duty, the love of man in the Saviour, 
 make the strong music which his soul tries to catch. 
 
 And then another result of this conception of 
 preaching as the telling of a message is that it puts 
 us into right relations with all historic Christianity. 
 The message never can belold as if we were the first 
 to tell it. It is the same message which the Church 
 has told in all the ages. He who tells it to-day is 
 backed by all the multitude who have told it in the 
 past. He is companied by all those who are telling 
 it now. The message is his witness ; but a part of the 
 assurance with whicii he has received it, comes from 
 the fact of its being the identical message which lias 
 corae down from the beginning. Men find on both 
 sides how difficult it is to jireserve the true poi.se 
 and proportion between the corporate and tlie indi- 
 vidual conceptions of the Christian life. But all will 
 1 own to-day the need of both. The identity of tlio 
 ' Church in all times consists in the identity of the 
 meosage which slie has always had to carry from her 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 19 
 
 Lord to men. All outward utterances of tlie perpet- 
 ual identity of tlie Church are valuable only as they 
 assert this real identity. There is the real meaning 
 of the perpetuation of old ceremonies, the use of an- 
 cient liturgies, and the clinging to what seem to be 
 apostolic types of government. - The heretic in hU 
 times has been not the errorist as such, but the self- 
 willed man, whether his judgments were right or 
 wrong. "A man maybe a heretic in the truth," says 
 Milton. He is the man who, taking his ideas not as 
 a message from God, but as his own discoveries, has 
 cut himself off from the message-bearing Church of all 
 the ages. I am sure that the more fully you come to 
 count your preaching the telling of a message, the 
 more valuable and real the Church will become to 
 you, the more true will seem to you your brother- 
 hood with all messengers of that same message in all 
 strange dresses and in all strange tongues. y^ 
 
 I should like to mention, with reference to the 
 Truth which the preacher has to preach, two ten- 
 dencies which I am sure that you will recognize as 
 very characteristic of our time. One is the tendency 
 of cinticism, and the other is the tendency of mech- 
 anism. Both tendencies are bad. By the tendency of 
 criticism I mean the disposition that prevails every- 
 where to deal with things from outside, discussing 
 iheir relations, examining their nature, and not put- 
 ting ourselves into their power. Preaching in every 
 
i^ LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 age follows, to a certain extent, the changes which 
 come to all literature and life. The age in which we 
 live is strangely fond of criticism. It takes all things 
 to pieces for the mere pleasure of examining their 
 nature. It studies forces, not in order to obev them, 
 but in order to understand them. It talks about 
 things for the pure pleasure of discussion. Much of 
 the poetry and prose about nature and her wonders, 
 much of the investigation of the country's genius and 
 institutions, much of the subtle analysis of human 
 nature is of this sort. It is all good ; but it is some- 
 thing distinct from the cordial sympathy by which 
 one becomes a willing servant of any of these powers, 
 a real lover of nature, or a faithful citizen, or a true 
 friend. Now it would be strange if this critical ten- 
 dency did not take possession of the preaching of the 
 day. And it does. The disposition to watch ideas in 
 their working, and to talk about their relations and 
 their influence on one another, simply as problems, in 
 which the mind may find pleasure without any real 
 entrance of the soul into the ideas themselves, this, 
 which is the critical tendency, invades the pulpit, and 
 the result is an immense amount of preaching which 
 must be called preaciiing about Christ as distinct from 
 preaching Christ. There are many preachers who 
 «eein to do nothing else, always discussing Christian- 
 ity as a problem instead of announcing Christianity 
 as a message, and proclaiming Christ as a Saviour, 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PRE A CHrNG. 21 
 
 I do not undervalue their discussions. But I think 
 we ought always to feel that such discussions are not 
 the type or ideal of preaching. They may be neces- 
 sities of the time, but they are not the work which 
 the great Apostolic preachers did, or which the true 
 preacher will always most desire. Definers and de- 
 fenders of the faith are always needed, but it is bad 
 for a church, when its ministers count it their true 
 work to define and defend the faitli rather than to 
 preach the Gospel. Beware of the tendency to preach 
 about Christianity, and try to preach Christ. To dis- 
 cuss the relations of Christianity and Science, Chris- 
 tianity and Society, Christianity and Politics, is good. 
 To set Christ forth to men so that they shall know 
 Him, and in gratitude and love become His, that is 
 far better. It is good to be a Herschel who describes 
 the sun ; but it is better to be a Prometheus who 
 brings the sun's fire to the earth. 
 
 I called the other tendency the tendency of mech- 
 anism. It is the disposition of the preacher to forget 
 that the_Gpspel of Christ is primarily addressed to 
 individu als. andJJiat its u-lti^aate purpose is the salva- 
 tion of multitudes of men. Between the time when 
 it first speaks to a man's soul, and the time when 
 that man's soul is gathered into heaven, with the 
 whole host of the redeemed, the Gospel uses a great 
 aiany machineries which are more or less impe-rsonal. 
 The Cluirch, with all its instrumentalities, conies in. 
 
22 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 The preacher works by them. But if the preachoi 
 ever for a moment counts them the purpose of hia 
 working, if he takes his eye off the single soul as the 
 prize he is to win, he falls from his highest function 
 and loses his best power. All succes sful preaching, 
 I more and more believe, talks to ind iviSuals. The 
 Church is for the soul. I am not thinkins: of the fault 
 or danger of any one body of Christians alone when 
 I say this, not of my own or any other. The ten- 
 dency to work for the means instead of for the end is 
 everywhere. And, my friends, learn tliis at the be- 
 ginning of your ministry, that just as surely as you 
 think that any kind of fault or danger belongs wholly 
 to another system than your own, and that you are 
 not exposed to it, just so surely you will reproduce 
 that fault or danger in some form in your own life. 
 This surely is a good rule : whenever you see a fault 
 in any other man, or any other church, look for it 
 in yourself and in your own church. Where is the 
 church which is not liable to value its machineries 
 above its purposes, whose ministers are not tempted 
 to preach for the denomination and its precious pe- 
 culiarities, instead of for men and for their precious 
 Bouls ? Let your preaching be to individuals, and to 
 the Church always as living for and made up of indi- 
 viduals. 
 
 Of the second element ir preaching, namely, tho 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 23 
 
 preacher's personality, there will be a great deal to 
 say, especially in the next lecture. But there are 
 two or three fundamental things which I wish to say 
 to-day. 
 
 The first is this, that the principle of personality 
 once admitted involves the individuality of every 
 preacher. The same considerations which make it 
 good that the Gospel should not be written on the 
 sky, or committed merely to an almost impersonal 
 book, make it also most desirable that every preacher 
 should utter the truth in his own way, and according 
 to his own nature. It must come not only through 
 man but through men. If you monotonize men you 
 lose their human power to a large degree. If you 
 could make all men think alike it would be very 
 much as if no man thought at all, as when the whole 
 earth moves together with all that is upon it, every- 
 thing seems still. Now the deep sense of the solem- 
 nity of the minister's work has often a tendency to 
 repress the free individuality of the preacher and his 
 tolerance of other preachers' individualities. His 
 own way of doing his work is with him a matter of 
 conscience, not of taste, and the conscience when it is 
 thoroughly awake is more intolerant than the taste is. 
 Or, working just the other way, his conscience tells 
 him that it is not for him to let his personal peculiar- 
 ities intrude in such a solemn work, and so he tries to 
 oind himself to the ways of working which the most 
 
24 LECTURES ON P UK ACHING. 
 
 Buccessful preachers of tlie Word have followed. 1 
 have seen both these kinds of ministers : those whoso 
 consciences made them obstinate, and those whose 
 consciences made them pliable ; those whose con- 
 sciences hardened them to steel or softened them to 
 wax. However it comes about, there is an unmis- 
 takable tendency to the repression of the individuality 
 of the preacher. It is seen in little things: in the uni- 
 form which preachers wear, and the disposition to a 
 uniformity of language. It is seen in great things : in 
 the disposition which all ages have witnessed to draw 
 a line of orthodoxy inside the lines of truth. Wisely 
 and soberly let us set ourselves against this influence. 
 The God who sent men to preach the Gospel of His 
 Son in their humanity, sent each man distinctively 
 to preach it in his humanity. Be yourself by all 
 means, but let that good result come not by culti- 
 vating merely superficial peculiarities and oddities. 
 Let it be by winning a true self full of your own 
 faith and your own love. The deep originality is 
 noble, but the surface originality is miserable. It is 
 8o easy to be a John the Baptist, as far as the desert 
 Hud camel's hair and locusts and wild honey go. But 
 the devoted heart to speak from, and the fiery words 
 to speak, are other things. 
 
 Again, we never can forget in thinking of the 
 preacher's personality that he is one who lives in con- 
 atant familiaritv with llioujxhts and words which fc 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 2d 
 
 Dther men are occasional and rare, and which pre- 
 serve their sacredness mainly by their rarity. That 
 fact must always come in when we try to estimate 
 the influences of a preacher's life. What will the 
 power of that fact be ? I am sure that often it 
 weakens the minister. I am sure that many men 
 w^ho, if they came to preach once in a great while in 
 the midst of other occupations, would preach with 
 feality and fire, are deadened to their sacred work by 
 their constant intercourse with sacred things. Their 
 eonstant dealing with the truth makes them less 
 powerful to bear the truth to others, as a pipe 
 through which the water always flows collects its 
 sediment, and is less fit to let more water through. 
 And besides this, it ministers to self-deception and to 
 an exaggeration or distortion of our own history. 
 The man who constantly talks of certain experiences, 
 and urges other men to enter into them, must come 
 in time, by very force of describing those experiences, 
 to think that he has undergone them. You beg men 
 to repent, and you grow so familiar with the whole 
 theory of repentance that it is hard for you to know 
 that you yourself have not repented. You exhort to 
 patience till you have no eyes or ears for your own 
 impatience. It is the way in (vhich the man who 
 starts the trains at the railroad station must come in 
 time to feel as if he himself had been to all the towns 
 4long the road whose names ho has always been 
 
26 LECTURES OX PRE ACHING. 
 
 Bhouting in tlie passengers' ears, and to which he ha8 
 for years sold them their tickets, when perhaps he has 
 not left his own little way-station all the time. I 
 know that all this is so, and yet certainly the fault is 
 in the man not in the ti-uth. The remedy certainly 
 is not to make the truth less familiar. There is a 
 truer relation to preaching, in which the constancy of 
 it shall help instead of harming the reality and ear- 
 nestness with which you do it. The more that you 
 urge other people to holiness the more intense may 
 be the hungering and thirsting after holiness in your 
 own heart. Familiarity does not breed contempt 
 except of contemptible things or in contemptible 
 people. The adage, that no man is a hero to his 
 valet de chamhre^ is sufficiently answered by saying 
 that it is only to a valet de chamln'e that a trul^ 
 gi-eat man is unheroic. You must get the impulse, 
 the delight, and the growing sacredness of your life 
 out of your familiar work. You are lost as a 
 preacher if its familiarity deadens and encrusts, in- 
 Btead of vitalizing and opening your powers. And it 
 will all depend upon whether you do your work for 
 \our Master and His people or for yourself. The 
 last kind of labor slowly kills, the first gives life more 
 and more. 
 
 The real i)rej)aration of the preacher's personality 
 for its transmissive work comes by the opening of 
 his life on both sides, towards the truth of God and 
 
2 HE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 27 
 
 tow ards the iieeds of man. To apprehend in all 
 their intensity the wantTan^ woes of men, to see the 
 problems and dangers of this life, then to know all 
 through us that nothing but Christ and His Redemp- 
 tion can thoroughly satisfy these wants, that is what 
 makes a man a preacher. Alas for him who is only 
 open on the manward side, who only knows how mis- 
 erable and wicked man is, but has no power of God 
 to bring to him. He lays a kind but helpless hand 
 upon the wound. He tries to relieve it with his 
 sympathy and liis philosophy. He is the source of 
 all he says. There is no God behind him. He is no 
 preacher. The preacher's instinct is that which feels 
 instantly how Christ and human need belong together, 
 neither thinks Christ too far off for the need, nor the 
 need too insignificant for Clirist. Never be afraid to 
 bring the transcendent mysteries of our faith, Christ's 
 life and death and resurrection, to the help of the 
 humblest and commonest of human wants. There is 
 a sort of preaching which keeps them for the great 
 emergencies, and soothes the common sorrows and re- 
 bukes the common sins with lower considerations of 
 economy. Such preaching fails. It neither appeals 
 to the lower nor to the higher perceptions of man- 
 kind. It is useful neither as a law nor as a gospel. 
 It is hke a river that is frozen too hard to be navi- 
 gable but not hard enough to bear. Never ft>ar, as 
 you preach, to bring thi- sublimest motive to the 
 
28 LECrURES ON PRE ACHING. 
 
 Btnallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to tlie 
 smallest trouble. They will prove that they belong 
 there if only the duty and trouble are real and yon 
 have read them thoroughly aright. 
 
 These are the elements of preaching, then, — Truth 
 and Personality. The truth is in itself a fixed and 
 stable element; the personality is a varying and 
 growing clement. In the union of the two we have 
 the provision for the combination of identity with 
 variety, of stability with growth, in the preaching of 
 the Gospel. The truth which you are preaching is 
 the same which your brother is preaching in the next 
 pulpit, or in some missionary station on the other 
 side of the globe. If it were not, you would get no 
 strength from one another. You would not stand 
 back to back against the enemy, sustaining one an- 
 other, as you do now. But the way in which you 
 preach the truth is different, and each of you i-eaches 
 some ears that would be deaf to the most persuasive 
 tones of the other. The Gospel you are preaching 
 now is the same Gospel that you preached when you 
 were first ordained, in that first sermon wliich it was 
 Ht once such a terror and such a joy to preach; but 
 if you have been a live man all the time, you are not 
 preaching it now Jis you did then. If the truth had 
 changed, your life would have lost its unity. The 
 truth has not changed, but you have grown to fuller 
 
'HE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 29 
 
 unJei standing of it, to larger capacity of receiving 
 and transmitting it. There is no pleasure in the 
 minister's life stronger than this, — the perception of 
 identity and progress in his preaching of the truth as 
 he grows older. It is like a man's pleasure in watch- 
 ing the growth of his own body or his own mind, or 
 of a tree which he has planted Always the same it 
 is, yet always larger. It is a common experience of 
 ministers, I suppose, to find that sentences in their 
 old sermons Avhicli were written years ago contain 
 meanings and views of truth which they hold now 
 but which they never had thought of in those early 
 days. The truth was there, but tlie man had not 
 appropriated it. The truth has not changed, but the 
 man is more sufficient for it. Here is the" power by 
 which the truth becomes related to each special af^e. 
 It is brought to it through the men of the age. If a 
 preacher is not a man of his age, in sympathy with 
 its spirit, his preaching fails. He. wonders that the 
 truth has grown so powerless. But it is not the 
 truth that has failed. It is the other element, the 
 person. That is the reason why sometimes the old 
 preacher finds his well-known power gone, and com- 
 plains that while he is still in his vigor people are 
 looking to younger men for the work which they 
 iuce delighted to demand of him. There are noblo 
 examples on the other side : old men with a person- 
 ality as vitally sympathetic with the changing age as 
 
80 LECTURES ON riiEACIIING. 
 
 the truth which they preach is true to the Weird ol 
 God. They have a power which no young man can 
 begin to wield, and the world owns it willingly. Peo- 
 ple would rather see old men than ycung men in 
 their pulpits, if only the old men briny them both 
 elements of preaching, a faith that is eternally true, 
 and a person that is in quick and ready sympathy 
 with their present life. If they can have but one, 
 they are apt to choose the latter ; but what they 
 really want is both, and the noblest ministries in the 
 Church are those of old men who have kept the fresh- 
 ness of their youth. 
 
 It is in the poise and proportion of these two ele« 
 ments of preaching that we secure the true relation 
 between independence and adaptation in the preach- 
 er's character. The desire to meet the needs of the 
 p<!ople to whom we preach may easily become ser- 
 vility. Many a man has lost his manliness and won 
 people's contempt in a truly earnest desire to win 
 tlieir hearts for his great message. Here is where the 
 stable and unchanging element of our work comes in. 
 There is something that you owe to the truth and 
 to yourself as its preacher. There is a line beyond 
 which adaptation becomes feebleness. There are some 
 things which St. Paul will not become to any man. 
 Nothing but this sense of the unchanging demands of 
 the truth which we are sent to preach (nin keep us 
 from giving our ]»cople what they want, instead of 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 31 
 
 what they need. Keep a clear sense of wliat yoin 
 truth requires of you. Count it unworthy of your- 
 self as a minister of the Gospel to comfort any sorrow 
 with less than the Gospel's whole comfortableness, or 
 to bid any soul be perfectly happy in anything less 
 than the highest spiritual joy. The saddest moments 
 in every preacher's life, I think, are those in which 
 he goes away from his pulpit conscious that he has 
 given the people, not the highest that he knew how 
 to give, but only the highest that they knew how to 
 ask. He has satisfied them, and he is thoroughly 
 discontented with himself. When a friend of Alex- 
 ander the Great had asked of him ten talents, he ten- 
 dered to him fifty, and when reply was made tluit 
 ten were sufficient, " True," said he, " ten are sut- 
 ficient for you to take, but not for me to give." 
 
 If it is the decay of the personal element that 
 weakens the ministry of some old men, I think it is 
 the slighting of the element of absolute truth that 
 degrades the work of preaching in many young men's 
 eyes, and keeps such numbers of them, who oiight to 
 be there, from its sacred duties. The prevalence of 
 doubt about all truth, and to some extent also the 
 general eagerness of preachers to find out and meet 
 the people's desires and demands, these two .-causes 
 together have created the impression that the minis- 
 ky had no certain purposes or definite message, that 
 the preacher was a promiscuous caterer for men'a 
 
82 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 whims, wishing thein well, inspired by a certain gen- 
 eral benevolence, but in no sense a prophet uttering 
 positive truth to them which they did not know be- 
 fore, uttering it whether they liked it or hated it. 
 Is not that the impression which many young men 
 have of the ministry? Is it not natural that with 
 that impression they should seek some other way to 
 help their fellow-men ? And is there not very much 
 indeed in the way in which preachers do their work 
 to give such an impression ? Everywhere, for tho 
 strengthening of the weak preacher, tlie enlivening 
 of the dull preacher, the sobering of the flippant 
 preacher, the freshening of the old preacher, the ma- 
 turing of the young preacher, what we need is the 
 just poise and proportion of these two elements of the 
 preacher's work, the truth he has to tell and the per- 
 sonality through which he has to tell it. 
 
 The purpose of preaching must always be the first 
 condition that decrees its character. The final cause 
 :s that which really shapes everything's life. And 
 what is preaching-for? The answer comes without 
 .'lositation. It is for men's salvation. But the idea 
 itf what salvation is has never been entirely uniform 
 M' certain ; and all through the history of preaching 
 we can see that the character of preaching varie(l 
 •jontinually, rose or fell, enlarged or narrowed, with 
 the constant variation of m<'n's ideas as to what ft 
 
THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 33 
 
 was to be bavecl. If salvation was something here 
 and now, preaching became a direct appeal to man's 
 present life. If salvation was something future and 
 far away, preaching died into remote whispers and 
 only made itself graphic and forcible by the vivid 
 pictures of torture addressed to the senses whose pain 
 men most easily understand. If to be saved was to 
 be saved from sin, preaching became spiritual. If to 
 be saved was to be saved from punishment, preach- 
 ing became forensic and economical. If salvation was 
 the elevation of society, preaching became a lecture 
 upon social science. The first thing for you to do is 
 to see clearly what you are going to preach for, what 
 you mean to try to save men from. By your con- 
 viction about that, the whole quality of your minis- 
 try will be decided. To the absence of any clear 
 answer to that question, to the entire vagueness as to 
 what men's danger is, we owe the vagueness with 
 which so many of our preachers preach. 
 
 The world has not heard its best preaching yet. 
 If there is more of God's truth for men to know, 
 and if it is possible for the men who utter it to be- 
 come more pure and godl}^, then, with both of its 
 elements more complete than they have ever been be- 
 fore, preaching must some day be a completer power. 
 But that better preaching will not come by any sud- 
 ien le«p of inspiration. As the preaching of the 
 
34 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 present came from the preaching of the past, so the 
 preaching that Is to be will come from the preaching 
 that is now. Tf we preach as honestly, as intelli- 
 gently, and as spiritually as we can, we shall not 
 merely do good in our own day, but help in some 
 real though unrecorded way the future triumphs of 
 the work we love. 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 
 
 "1% /TY last lecture indicated very cleai'ly the iiiipor- 
 ■^-'- tance which I tliiiik belongs to the preacher's 
 person in the work to which he is ordained. In 
 my second and third lectures I want to dwell upon 
 this subject and consider distinctively the preacher. 
 After that we will look at the sermon. And in con- 
 sidering the preacher, we may think of him first in 
 himself and then in relation to his work. It is not 
 a distinction that can be accurately and constantly 
 maintained. The two views run together. But 
 it will help me in making an arrangement of what 
 I have to .say; and if we do not insist on it too 
 strongly, it will aid our thoughts. To-day I take 
 the first of these two topics, and shall speak of the 
 preacher's personal character, the preacher in himself. 
 
 ■ Let us ask, then, first, What sort of man may be a 
 ffiinister ? It would be good for the Church if it were 
 a more common question. Partly because the motives 
 which lead a young man to the ministry are so per- 
 gonal and spiritual, partly because of our sense of the 
 
aO LECTURES ON PREACIllSd. 
 
 magnitude and privilege of the work, which makes 
 us fear to be the means of exchiding any worthy man 
 from it, partly because, at present, while the harvest 
 is 80 plenteous the laborers are so very few, — foi 
 these and other reasons, there is far too little discrim- 
 ination in the selection of men who are to preach, 
 and many men find their way into the preacher's 
 office who discover only too late that it is not their 
 place. When our Lord selected those to whom He 
 was to commit His gospel, we are impressed with the 
 deliberation and solemnity of the act : "' And it came 
 to pass in these daj^s that He went out into a mount- 
 ain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to 
 God. And when it was day. He called unto Him His 
 disciples and of them He chose twelve whom also He 
 named apostles." There has certainly grown up in 
 the Church a strong misgiving as to the whole policy 
 of charitable people and benevolent societies who, 
 with their lavish offers of help, gather into the min- 
 istry, along with many noble, faithful men, a multi- 
 tude who, amiable and pious as they may be, are of 
 tlie kind who make no place in life for themselves, 
 but wait till some one kindly makes one for tli<'in 
 and drops them into it. I am convinced that the 
 ministry can never have its true dignity or power till 
 it is cut aloof from mendicancy, — till young men 
 whose hearts are set on preaching make their way to 
 th<' pulpit by the same energy and through the same 
 
THE PREACHER HIM SELL. 37 
 
 iifficulties which mee1^^oimtless_joung men on their 
 way to business and the bar. We beheve the influ- 
 ence which brings men to the pulpit to be a far holier 
 one. It ought, then, to be a far stronger one ; and 
 yet we trust less to its power than we do to the 
 power of ambition and self-interest. It is a part 
 of the whole unmanly way of treating ministers, of 
 which there will be more to say. 
 
 It is not easy to describe, with our large views of 
 personal liberty and personal rights, what methods 
 of inspection and authentication it may be well to 
 use on the admission of preacliers to their sacred 
 work ; but what we most of all need is a clearer un- 
 derstanding and a fuller statement of what are the 
 true conditions of a minister's success, and so what 
 qualities we have a right to ask of ourselves and of 
 one another before we can feel that the .true call to 
 the ministry has been established. We must not 
 draw the line too narrowly. There is nothing more 
 Btriking about the ministry than the way in which 
 very OiDposite men do equally effective work. You 
 look at some great preacher, and you say, "• There is 
 the type. He who is like that can preach," and just 
 as your sii|^ig conclusion is all made, some other voice 
 rings out from a neighboring pulpit, and the^same 
 power of God reaches the hearts of men in a totally 
 new way, and your neat conclusion cracks and breaks. 
 Spurgeon preaches at his Surrey Tabernacle, and Lid- 
 
38 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 don preaches at St. Paul's, and both are great preach- 
 ers, and yet no two men could be more entirely un- 
 like. It must be so. If the preacher is after all only 
 the representative man, the representative Christian 
 doing in special ways and with a special ordination 
 that which all men ought to be doing for Christ and 
 fellow-man, then there ought to be as many kinds of 
 preachers as there are kinds of Christians ; and there 
 ax'e as many kinds of Christians as there are kinds of 
 men. 
 
 It is evident, then, that only in the largest way 
 can the necessary qualities of the preacher be enu- 
 merated. With this provision such an enumeration 
 may be attempted. 
 
 I must not dwell upon the first of all the necessary 
 qualities, and yet there is not a moment's doubt that 
 it does stand first of all. It is person al piety , a deep 
 possession in one's own soul of the faith and hope 
 and resolution which he is to offer to his fellow-men 
 for their new life. Nothing but fire kindles fire. To 
 know in one's whole nature what it is to live by 
 Christ; to be His, not our own; to be so occupied 
 with gratitude for what He did for us and for what 
 He continually is to us that His will and His glow 
 Bhall be the sole desires of our life, I wish that I 
 could put in some words of new and overwhelming 
 force the old accepted certainty that that is the first 
 necessity of the preacher, that to preach without that 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 39 
 
 is weary and unsatisfying and unprofitable work, that 
 to preach with that is a perpetual privilege and 
 joy. 
 
 And next to this I mention what we may call men- 
 tal and spiritual unselfishness. I do not speak so 
 much of a moral as of an intellectual quality. I 
 mean that kind of mind which always conceives of 
 truth with reference to its communication and re- 
 ceives any spiritual blessing as a trust for others. 
 Both of these are capable of being cultivated, but I 
 hold that there is a natural difference between men 
 in this respect. Some men by nature receive truth 
 abstractly. They follow it into its developments. 
 They fathom its depths. But tbey never think of 
 sending it abroad. They are so enwrapt in seeing 
 what it is that they never care to test what it can do. 
 Other men necessarily think in relation to other mep 
 and their first impulse with every new truth is to 
 give it its full range of power. Their love for truth 
 is always complemented by a love for man. They 
 are two clearly different temperaments. One of them 
 does not and the other does make the preacher. 
 
 Again, hopefulness is a necessary quality of the 
 true preacher's nature. You know how out of every 
 complicated condition of affairs one man natvirally 
 appropriates all the elements of hope, while another 
 hivariably gathers up all that tends to despair. The 
 latter kind of man may have his uses. There are 
 
 i- 
 
*0 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 tasks and times for which no prophet but Cassandi-a 
 is appropriate. There were duties laid on some of 
 the old Hebrew prophets which perhaps they might 
 have done with hearts wholly destitute of any ray of 
 light. But such a temper is entirely out of keeping 
 with the Christian gospel. The preacher may some- 
 times denounce, rebuke, and terrify. When he doef^ 
 Ihut, he is not distinctively the preacher of Christian- 
 ity. If his nature is such that he must dread and fear 
 continually, he was not made to preach the gospel. 
 
 If I go on and mention a certain physical condition 
 as essential to the preacher, I do so on very serious 
 grounds. I am impressed with what seems to rae the 
 frivolous and insufficient way in which th e health of 
 the preacher is often treated. It is not siuiply that 
 the sick minister is always hampered and restrained. 
 It is not merely that the truth he has within him 
 finds imperfect utterance. It is that the preacher's 
 work is the most largely human of all occupations. 
 It brings a man into more multiplied relations with 
 his fellow-man than any other work. It is not the 
 doing of certain specified duties. You will be sadly 
 mistaken if you tliink it is, and try to set down in 
 your contract with your parish just what you are to 
 do, and where your duties are to stop. It is the man 
 offered as a mediimi through whom God's influence 
 may reach his fellow-men. Such an offering involves 
 tlio whole man, and the whole man is body and soul 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 41 
 
 together. Therefore the ideal preacher brings the 
 perfectly healthy body with the perfectly sound soul. 
 Remember that the care for your health, the avoid- 
 ance of nervous waste, the training of your voice, and 
 everything else that you do for your body is not 
 merely an economy of your organs that they may be 
 fit for certain works ; it is a part of that total self- 
 consecration wliich cannot be divided, and which all 
 together makes you the medium through which God 
 may reach His children's lives. I cannot but think 
 that so high a view of the consecration of the body 
 would convict many of the reputable sins against 
 health in which ministers are apt to live, and do the 
 fundamental good which the tinkering of the body 
 by specifics for special occasions so completely fails 
 to do. 
 
 I speak of only one thing more. I do not know 
 how to give it a name, but I do think that in every 
 man who preaches there should be something of that 
 quality wliich we recognize in a high degree in. some 
 man of whom we say, when we see him in the pulpit, 
 that he is a " born preacher." Call it enthusiasm ; call 
 it eloquence; call it magnetism ;._call it the gift for 
 preaching. It is the quality that kindles at the sight 
 of men, that feel a keen joy at the meeting of truth 
 and the human mind, and recognizes how God made 
 them for each other. It is the power by which -a 
 man loses himself and becomes but the sympathetic 
 
■12 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 atmosphere between the truth on one side of him and 
 the man on tho other side of him. It is the ins|;ini- 
 tion, the possession, — what I have heard called the 
 " demon " of preaching. Something of this quality 
 there must be in every man who really preached. He 
 who wholly lacks it cannot be a preacher. 
 
 All of these qualities which I have thus enumer- 
 ated exist in degrees. All of them are capable of 
 culture if they exist at all. All of them are difficult 
 to test except by the actual work of preaching. I 
 grant, therefore, fully, that it is difficult to draw out 
 of them a set of tests which the secretary of an educa- 
 tion society can apply to candidates, — as a recruiting 
 sergeant measures volunteers around the chest, — and 
 mark them as fit or unfit for the ministry. But from 
 their enumeration I think still that there does rise up 
 before us a clear picture of the man who ought to be 
 H i)reacher. Full of the love of Christ, taking all 
 truth and blessing as a trust, in the best sense didac- 
 tic, hopeful, healthy, and counting health, as far as it 
 is in liis power, a part of his self-consecration ; will- 
 ing, not simply as so many men are, to bear sickness 
 for God's work, but willing to preserve health for 
 God's work ; and going to his preaching with the en- 
 thusiasm that shows it is what God made him for. 
 The nearer you can come to him, my friends, the bet* 
 ter preachers you will be, the surer you may be that 
 you have a right to be preachers at all. 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 4-3 
 
 And the next question will be, When you have 
 the light kind of man to make a preacher of, what 
 are the changes you will want him to undergo that 
 he may become a preacher. The formal ordination 
 which he will meet by and by will be nothing, of 
 course, unless it signifies some real experiences which 
 have filled these years since his soul heard what it 
 recognized as God's call to the ministry. We may 
 set him apart from other men with what solemn cere- 
 monies we may please, but he will be just like other 
 men still, unless the power of the w6i*k to which he 
 looks forward has entered into him during his careful 
 ]n-eparation and made hiui different. 
 
 What does this difference consist in ? What is the 
 true preparation ? First, and most evident, there are 
 his special studies which have been filling him with 
 their spirit. Most men begin really to study when 
 they enter on the preparation for their professions. 
 Men whose college life, with its general culture, has 
 been very idle, begin to work when at the door of 
 the professional school the work of their life comes 
 into sight before them. It is the wa}' in whicli a bird 
 who has been wheeling vaguely hither and thither 
 sees at last its home in the distance and flies towards 
 it like an arrow. But shall I say to you how often I 
 !uive thought that the very transcendent motives of 
 the young minister's stud}'^ have a certain tendency 
 lo bewilder him and make his study less faithful than 
 
44 LECTURES ON PREACIIL\(J. 
 
 that of men seeking other professions from / /v^ei 
 motives ? The highest motive often dazzles before it 
 illuminates. It is one of the ways m which the light 
 within us becomes darkness. I never shall forg(;t 
 my first experience of a divinity school. I had come 
 from a college where men studied hard but said noth 
 ing about faith. I had never been at a prayer-meei- 
 ing in my life. The first place I was taken to at the 
 seminary was the prayer-meeting ; and never shall 
 I lose the impression- of the devoutness with which 
 those men praj'ed and exhorted one another. Their 
 whole souls seemed exalted and their natures were on 
 fire. I sat bewildered and asluimed, and went away 
 depressed. On the next day I met some of those 
 same men at a Greek recitation. It would be little 
 to say of some of the devoutest of them that they had 
 not learnt their lessons. Their whole way showed 
 that they never learnt their lessons ; that they had 
 not got hold of the first principles of hard, faithful, 
 conscientious study. The boiler had no connection 
 with the engine. The devotion did not touch tlie 
 work which then and tlKve was the work and the. 
 only work for them to do. By and by I found some- 
 thing of where the steam did escape to. A sort of 
 amateur, premature preaching was much in vogue 
 among us. We were in haste to be at what wo 
 called "our work." A feeble twilight of tlie coining! 
 ministry we lived in. The people in the neigli- 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 4.1 
 
 Oorliood dubbed us " parson nettes." Oh, my fellow- 
 students, the special study of theology and all that 
 appertains to it, that is what the preacher mu,:t be 
 doing always ; but he never can do it afterward as 
 he can in the blessed days of quiet in Arabi.i, after 
 Christ has called him, and before the Apostles lay 
 their hands upon him. In many respects an ignorant 
 clergy, however pious it may be, is worse than none 
 at all. The more the empty head glows and burns, 
 the more hollow and thin and dry it grows. " The 
 knowledge of the priest," said St. Francis de Sales, 
 " is the eighth sacrament of the Church." 
 
 But again, the minister's preparation of charac- 
 ter for his work involves something more intimate 
 than the accumulation of knowledge. The knowledge 
 which comes into him meets in him the intention of 
 preaching, and, touched by that, undergoes a trans- 
 formation. It is changed into doctrine. Doctrine 
 means this, — truth considered with reference to its 
 being taught. The reason why many men dislike 
 the word doctrine is from their dislike of the whole 
 notion of docility Avhich is attached to it. Just as 
 a citizen who is preparing himself for public office 
 considers the law and character of the State not ab- 
 stractly, but with reference to their application to 
 the people whom he aspires to govern ; just as the 
 student in a normal school learns everything wi-th an 
 inder-consciousness that he is going to teacU thai 
 
46 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 same tiling some clay, influencing nil the methods 
 of Lis learning ; so the student preparing to be a 
 prea(;her cannot learn truth as the mere student of 
 theology for its own sake might do. He always feela 
 it rea<?lung out through him to the people to whom 
 he is some day to carry it. He cannot get rid of 
 this consciousness. It influences all his understand- 
 ing. We can see that it must have its dangers. It 
 will threaten the impartiality with which he will 
 seek truth. It will tempt him to prefer those forma 
 of truth which most easily lend themselves to didac- 
 tic uses, rather than those which bring evidence of 
 being most simply and purely true. That is the 
 danger of -all preachers. Against that danger the 
 man meaning to be a preacher must be upon his 
 guard, but he cannot avoid the danger by sacrificing 
 the habit out of which the danger springs. He must 
 receive truth as one who is to teach it. He cannot, 
 he must not study as if the truth he sought were 
 purely for his own culture or enrichment. And the re- 
 sult of such a habit, followed with due guard against 
 its dangerous tendencies, will be threefold. It will 
 bring, first, a deeper and more solemn sense of re- 
 sponsibility in the search for truth ; second, a desire 
 to find the human side of every truth, the point at 
 which every speculation touches humanity ; and third, 
 \ bieadth which comes from the constant prefjence in 
 the mind of the fact that truth has various aspects 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 47 
 
 ftnd presents itself in many ways to different people 
 according to their needs and characters. 
 
 Along with this preparation for preaching goea . 
 another, I said the man who studied with the in- 
 tention of teaching learned to see and seize the 
 human side of all divinity. It is true, also, that he 
 learns to seize the divine side of all humanity. The 
 sources from which his preaching is to be fed open on 
 every side of him, I can remember how, as I looked 
 forward to preaching, every book I read and every 
 man I talked with seemed to teem with sermons. 
 They all suggested something which it seemed as if 
 the preacher of the gospel ought to say to men. 1 
 have not found the sermons in them all as I^-went^ 
 on ; not, I believe, because I was mistaken "in think- 
 ing they were there, but because I have grown less 
 eager or keen in finding them, I think there is no 
 point in which ministers differ from one another, and 
 in which we all differ from ourselves, more than in 
 this, — this open-mindedness and power of appropri- 
 iting out of everything the elements of true instruc- 
 tion, I find two classes of ministers of different hab- 
 its in this respect. One of them abjures everything 
 outside the narrowest lines of technically religious 
 reading, has no knowledge of literature or art or sci- 
 ence. The other minister cultivates them all, but hia 
 life in them is wholly outside of his life as a preacher. 
 'Je changes his nature when he turns away from his 
 
48 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 sermon and takes a volume from his sheiVes. And 
 liis slielves themselves are divided. His secular and 
 his religious books are ranged on opposite sides of his 
 study. There is something better than either, — a 
 true devotion to our work which will not let us leave 
 it for a moment when we are once ordained ; preach- 
 ers once and preachers always; but a conception of 
 our work so large that everything which a true man 
 has any right to do or know ma}' have some help to 
 render it. And this is what you ought to be laying 
 the foundation of in these preparatory days. 
 
 You will see that I place very great value on this 
 preparation, in which a man who is devout and ear- 
 nest comes to that fitness for his work which St. Paul 
 describes in a word that he uses twice to Timothy, — 
 "•apt to teach," " AtSaKTiKo's," the didactic man. It 
 is not something to which one comes by accident or 
 by any sudden burst of fiery zeal. No doubt there is 
 a power in the untutored utterance of the new con- 
 vert that the ripe utterances of the educated preacher 
 often lack ; but it is not so nuich a praise to the new 
 ?ouvert that he has that power as it is a shame to 
 the educnted preacher that lie does not have it all 
 the more richly in proportion to his education. And 
 whattiver else he has, the man who has leaped directly 
 from his own experience into the pulpit will almost 
 certainly be wanting in that breadth of sympathy and 
 understanding which comes in the studies of the wait* 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 4S 
 
 ing years. He will know that other men are not 
 made just like himself, but he will realize only him- 
 self, and preach to them as if they were. He will 
 be like the man whom Archbishop Whately tells of, 
 who was born blind and afterwards brought to sight. 
 " The room he was in, he said, he knew must be part 
 of the house, yet he could not conceive that the 
 whole house could look bigger than that one room." 
 So our new Christian experience only slowly realizes 
 that it is but one part of the universal Christian life. 
 Only as our study carries us from I'oom to room doe?. 
 the whole house grow real to us. 
 
 Suppose our minister now actually preaching, and 
 next let us ask. What are the elements of personal 
 power which will make him successful ? Remember 
 success in preaching is no identical, invariable thing. 
 It differs in all whom we call successful men, and so 
 only the broadest and most general description can 
 be given of the qualities that will secure it. Special 
 successes will require special fitness. But he who 
 has these qualities that I enumei-ate is sure to suc- 
 ceed somewhere and somehow. 
 
 And first among the elements of power which make 
 ">uceess I must jnit the supreme im23ortance of char- 
 acter, of personal uprightness and purity impressing 
 th(Mnselves upon the men who witness them. There is 
 ji very striking remark in Lord Nugent's "• Memorials 
 of Jiihn Hampden," Vhere, speaking of the English 
 
50 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 Refoni.ation, he is led to make this general observa- 
 tion : " Indeed, no hierarchy and no creed has evei 
 been overthrown by the people on account only of 
 its theoretical dogmas, so long as the practice of the 
 clergy was incorrupt and conformable with their pro- 
 fessions." I believe that that is strictly true. And it 
 is always wonderful to see how much stronger are the 
 antipathies and sympathies which belong to men's 
 moral nature than those which are purely intellectual 
 Baxter tells us in an interesting passage how in the 
 civil wars " an abundance of the ignorant sort of tlie 
 common people which were civil did flock in to the 
 Parliament and filled up their armies merely because 
 they heard men swear for the Common Prayer and 
 bishops, and heard men pray that were against them. 
 And all the sober men that I was acquainted with 
 who were against the Parliament were wont to say, 
 ' The king hath the better cause, but the Parliament 
 the better men.' " The better men will always con- 
 quer the better cause. I suppose no cause could bo 
 so good that, sustained by bad men and opposed by 
 any error whose cliamplons were men of spotless 
 lives, it would not fall. The tiiith must conquer, but 
 it must first embody itself in goodness. And in tlie 
 ministry it is not merely by superficial prejudice, but 
 by the soundest reason, that intellect and spiritual- 
 ity come to be tested, not by the views mon hold sc 
 much as by tin; way in which tliey hold them, a:]cl 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 51 
 
 the sort of men which their views seem to make of 
 them. Whatever strange and scandalous eccentrici' 
 ties the ministry has sometimes witnessed, this is cer- 
 tainly true, and is always encouraging, that no man 
 permanently succeeds in it who cannot make men 
 believe that he is pure and devoted, and the only 
 sure and lasting way to make men believe in one's 
 devotion and purity is to be what one wishes to be 
 believed to be. 
 
 I put next to this fundamental necessity of char- 
 acter as an element of the preacher's power the free- -z 
 dom from self-consciousness. My mind goes back to 
 a young man wnom I knew in the ministry, who did 
 an amount of work at which men wondered, and who, 
 dying early, left a power behind him whose influence 
 will go on long after his name is forgotten ; and the 
 great feature of his character was his forgetfulness of 
 self. He had not two questions to ask about every 
 piece of work he did, — first, "How shall I do it 
 most effectively for others ? " and second, "How shall 
 I do it most creditably to myself ? " Only the first 
 question ever seemed to come to him ; and when a 
 task was done so that it should most perfectly accom- 
 plish its designed result, he left it and went on to 
 some new task. There is wonderful clearness' and _ 
 economy of force in such simplicity. No man ever/jvZ. 
 vet thought whether he was preaching well without! ' 
 weakening his sermon. I think there are few higher; 
 
 V-- 
 
52 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 or moie delightful moments in a preacher's life than 
 tluit which comes sometimes when, standing befonj a 
 congregation and haunted by questionings about tlie 
 merit of your preaching, which you hate but caraiot 
 drive away, at last, suddenly or gradually, you find 
 yourself taken into the power of your truth, absorbed 
 in one sole desire to send it into the men whom you 
 are preaching to ; and then every sail is set, and your 
 sermon goes bravely out to sea, leaving your self high 
 ^md dry upon the beach, where it has been holding 
 your sermon stranded. The second question disap- 
 pears out of your work just in proportion as the first 
 question grows intense. No man is perfectly strong 
 until tlie second question has disappeared entirely. 
 Devotion is like the candle, which, as Vasari tells us, 
 Michael Angelo used to carry stuck on his forehead 
 in a pasteboard cap, and which kept his own shadow 
 from being cast upon his work while he was hewing 
 out his statues. 
 
 The. next element of a preacher's power is genuine 
 respect for the people whom he preaches to. I should 
 not like to say how rare I think this power, or how 
 plentiful a source of weakness I think its absence is. 
 There is a great deal of the genuine sympathy of 
 wntiment. There is a great deal of liking for cer- 
 tain people in our congregations who are interesting 
 in themselves and who are interested in what inter- 
 ests U3. There is a great deal of the '.•.•...t liat the 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. t)h 
 
 clergy need the cooperation of the laity, and so must 
 cultivate their intimacy. But of a real profound re- 
 spect for the men and women whom we preach to, 
 simply as men and women, of a deej) value for the 
 capacity that is in them, a sense that we^are tjieira 
 an^jiot_theyM)urSj I think that there is far too little. 
 But without this there can be no real strength in the 
 preacher. We patronize the laity now that our power 
 of domineering over them has been mercifully taken 
 away. Many a time the tone of a clergyman who 
 has talked of the relations of the preacher and the 
 people, setting forth, with the best will in the world, 
 their mutual functions, reminds one of the sermon of 
 the mediaeval preacher, wlio, discoursing on this same 
 subject, on the necessary cooperation of the clergy 
 and the laity, took his text out of Job i. 14 : " The 
 oxen wei'e ploughing and. the asses feeding beside 
 them." There is no good preaching in the supercil- 
 ious preacher. No man preaches well who has not 
 a strong and deep appreciation of humanity. The 
 minister is often called upon to give up- the society of 
 the cultivated and learned to whom h,e would most be 
 drawn', but he finds his compensation and strength in 
 knowing man, simply as man, and learning his ines- 
 timable worth. 
 
 I think, again, that it is essential to the preacher's / ^ 
 success that he should thoroughly en joy h is work. I 
 mean in the actual doing of it, and not only in its 
 
\ 
 
 .^4 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 idea. No man to whom the details of his task are 
 repulsive can do his task well constantly, however 
 fuJl he may be of its spirit. He may make one bold 
 dash at it and carry it over all his disgusts, but he 
 cannot work on at it year after year, day after day 
 Therefore, count it not merely a perfectly legitimate 
 pleasure, count it an essential element of your power, 
 if you can feel a simple delight in what you have to 
 do as a minister, in the fervor of writing, in the glow 
 of speaking, in standing before men and moving them, 
 in contact with the young. The more thoroughly you 
 enjoy it, the better you will do it all. 
 
 I almost hesitate as I speak of the next element of 
 ihe preacher's power. I almost doubt by what name 
 I shall call it to give the impression of the thing I 
 mean. Perhaps there is no better name than Grav- 
 ity. I mean simply that grave and serious way of 
 looking at life which, while it never repels the true 
 lightheartedness of pure and trustful hearts, welcomes 
 into a manifest sympathy the souls of men who are 
 oppressed and burdened, anxious and full of questions 
 which for the time at least have banished all laughter 
 from their faces. I know, indeed, the miserableness 
 of all mock gravity. I think I am as much disgusted 
 at it as anybody. The abuse and satire that have 
 been heaped uprin it are legitimate enougli, though 
 •omewhat cheaj). The gravity that is assumed, that 
 merely hides with solemn front the lack of thought 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 5£ 
 
 and feeling, that is put on as the uniform of a pro- 
 fession, that consists in certain forms, and is shocked 
 at a-iy serious thought of life more truly grave than 
 it is, but which happens to show itself under other 
 forms which it chooses to 'call frivolous, this is worthy 
 of all satire and contempt. The merely solemn min- 
 isters are very empty, and deserve all that has been 
 "heaped upon them of contempt through all the ages. 
 They are cheats and shams. As tliey stand with 
 their little knobs of prejudice down their straight 
 coats of precision, they are like nothing so much as 
 the chest of drawers which Mr. Bob Sawyer showed 
 to Mr. Winkle in his httle surgery : " Dummies, my 
 dear boy," said he to his impressed, astonished vis- 
 itor ; " half the drawers have nothing in them, and 
 the other half don't open." I know what the abuse 
 of such men means. I know there are men who de- 
 serve it. But I cannot help thinking that we have 
 about come to the time when all of that abuse is of 
 the safe and feeble character which belongs to all 
 satire of unpopular foibles and abuses which are in 
 decay. I think that at least there is another creature 
 who ought to share with the clerical prig the con- 
 lempt of Christian people. I mean the clerical jester 
 '\v\ all tlie varieties of his unpleasant existence. He 
 appears in and out of the pulpit. He lays his hands 
 Dn the most sacred things, and leaves defilement upon 
 ali he touches. He is full of Bible jokes. He talks 
 
66 LECTURES ON I>lU:Ai II ING. 
 
 ftbout the Church's sacred symbols in the language 
 of stale jests that have come down fi-om generations 
 of feeble clerical jesters before him. The doctrines 
 which, if they mean anything, mean life or death to 
 Bouls, he turns into material for chalf that flies back 
 and forth, like the traditional banter of the Thames, 
 between the clerical watermen who ply their boats 
 on this side or that side of the river of Theology. 
 There are passages in the Bible which are soiled 
 forever by the touches which the hands of ministers 
 who delight in cheap and easy jokes have left upon 
 them. 
 
 I think there is nothing that stirs one's indignation 
 more than this, in all he sees of ministers. It is a 
 purely wanton fault. What is simply stupid every- 
 where else becomes terrible here. The buffoonery 
 which merely tries me when I hear it from a gang 
 of laborers digging a ditch beside my door angers 
 and frightens me when it comes from the lips of the 
 captain who holds the helm or the surgeon on whose 
 skill my life depends. You will not misunderstand 
 nie, I am sure. The gravity of which I speak is not 
 inconsistent ^^ith the keenest perception of the ludi- 
 crous side of things. It is more than consistent with 
 — it is even necessary to — humor. Humor involves 
 the perception of the true proportions of life. It ia 
 one of the most helpful qualities that the preacher 
 3au possess. There is no extravagance wliieli de- 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 57 
 
 forms the pulpit which would not be modiiied and 
 repressed, often entirely obliterated, if the ministe:' 
 had a true sense of humor. It has softened the bit- 
 terness of controversy a thousand times. You can- 
 not encourage it too much. You cannot grow too 
 familiar with the books of all ages which have in 
 them the truest humor, for the truest humor is the 
 bloom of the highest life. Read George Eliot and 
 Thackeray, and, above all, Shakespeare. They will 
 help you to keep from extravagances without fading 
 into insipidity. They will preserve your gravity while 
 they save you from pompous solemnity. But humor 
 is something very different from frivolity. People 
 sometimes ask whether it is right to make people 
 laugh in church by something that you say from the 
 pulpit, — as if laughter were always one invariable 
 thing ; as if there were not a smile which swept 
 across a great congregation like the breath of a May 
 morning, making it fruitful for whatever good thing 
 might be sowed in it, and another laughter that was 
 like the crackling of thorns under a pot. The smile 
 that is stirred by true humor and the smile that 
 comes from the mere tickling of the fancy are as 
 different from one another as the tears that sorrow 
 forces from the soul are from the tears that you com- 
 pel a man to shed by pinching him. 
 
 And there is no delusion greater than to think 
 what you commend your work and gain an influence 
 
58 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 over people by becoming the clericiil luiinorist. It 
 builds a wall between your fellow-iuen and you. 
 It makes them less inclined to seek you in their spir- 
 itual need. I think that many of us feel this, and 
 have a sort of dread when we see laymen growing 
 familiar with clergymen's society. That society is 
 on the whole lofty and inspiring, but there are some 
 things in it of which you wlio are soon to become 
 clergymen must beware. Keep the sacredness of your 
 profession clear and bright even in little things. Re- 
 frain from all joking about congregations, flocks, par- 
 ish visits, sermons, the mishaps of the pulpit, or the 
 makeshifts of the study. Such joking is always bad, 
 and almost always stupid ; but it is very common, 
 and it takes the bloom off a young minister's life. 
 This is the reason why so many people shrink, I 
 believe, from personally knowing the preachers to 
 whom they listen with respect and gratitude. They 
 fear what they so often find. But really the minis- 
 ter's life may be a help and enforcement of all his 
 preaching. The quality which makes it so is this 
 which I call gravity. It has a delicate power of dis- 
 crimination. It attracts all that it can help and it 
 repels all that could harm it or be harmed by it. It 
 admits the earnest and simple with a cordial wel* 
 oome. It shuts out the impertinent and insincere 
 inexorably. Pure gravity is like the hinges of the 
 wonderful gates of the ancient labyrinth, so strong 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 59 
 
 that no battery could break them down, but so deli- 
 cately hung tliat a child's light touch could make 
 them swing back and let him in. 
 
 There is another soiirce of power which I can 
 hardly think of as a separate quality, but rather as 
 tlie sum and result of all the qualities which I have 
 been naming. I mean Coura ge. It is the indispen- 
 sable requisite of any true ministry. The timid min- 
 ister is as bad as the timid surgeon. Courage is good 
 everywhere, but it is necessary here. If you are 
 afraid of men and a slave to their opinion, go and do 
 something else. Go and make shoes to fit them. Go 
 even and paint pictures which jou know are bad but 
 which suit their bad taste. But do not keep on all 
 your life preaching sermons which shall say not what 
 God sent you to declare, but what they hire you to 
 say. Be courageous. Be independent. Only remem- 
 ber where the true courage and independence comes 
 from. Courage in the ministry is, I think, one of 
 those qualities which cannot be healthily acquired if 
 it is sought for directly. It must come as health) 
 comes in the body, as the result of tlie seeking for 
 other things. It must be from a sincere respect forj 
 men's higher nature that you must grow bold to re-j 
 5ist their whims. He who begins by despising men 
 >vill often end by being their slave. A passionate/ 
 iesire to do men good is always the surest safepiard ' 
 that they shall not do us harm. Jesus himself was 
 
60 . LECTURES ON PREACin?i J. 
 
 hold before men out of the infinite love which He felt 
 fof men. That wjis the way in which He ruled them 
 from His cross, and was their master because He was 
 their servant even unto death. 
 
 There is one other topic upon which I wished U> 
 dwell in this lecture, but on this I must speak ver/ 
 briefly. I wanted to try to estimate with you son.e 
 of the dangers to a man's own character which come 
 from his being a preacher. The first of these dan- 
 gers, beyond all doubt, is Self-conceit. In a certain 
 sense every young minister is conceited. He begins 
 his ministry in a conceited condition. At least every 
 man begins with extravagant expectations of what 
 his ministry is to result in. We come out from it 
 by and by. A man's first wonder when he begins to 
 preach is that people do not come to hear him. After 
 a while, if he is good for anything, he begins to won- 
 der that they do. He finds out that old Adam is too 
 strong for voung Melanchthon. It is not stranjje that 
 it should be so. It is not to the young minister's dis- 
 credit that it should be so. Th- student for the min- 
 istry has to a large extent comprehended the force 
 by which he is to woi'k, but he has not measured the 
 resistance that lie is to meet, IIc^ knows the power 
 of the truth of which Ik^ is all full, but he has not 
 estimated tiie sin of which the w^orld is all full. The 
 more earnest and intense and full of love for God and 
 oian he is, the more impossible does it seem that he 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELt. Qa 
 
 should not do great things for his Master. And then 
 the character of men's ministries, it seems to me, de- 
 pends very largely upon the ways in wliich they pass 
 out of that first self-confidence and upon what con- 
 dition comes afterwards when it is gone. 
 
 The first way in which life affects this self-confi- 
 dence and lifts men out of their conceit is by Success, 
 by letting us see the work which we are undertaking 
 actually going on under our hands. It is only in poor 
 men and in the lower things that success increases self- 
 conceit. In every high work and in men worthy of 
 it, success is always sure to bring humility. " Recog- 
 nition," said Hawthorne once, " makes a man very 
 modest." The kjiowledge that you are really accom- 
 plishing results, and the reassurance of that knowl- 
 edge by the judgment of your fellow-men, opens to 
 you the deeper meaning of your work, shows you 
 how great it is, makes you ashamed of all the praise 
 men give you, as you see gr adually how much bet ter 
 your work might have been done. I think that some 
 of the noblest and richest characters among ministers 
 in all times are those who have been humiliated by 
 men's praises and enlightened by success. 
 
 Rut there is another way by which men go out of 
 their first satisfaction, by a door directly opposite to 
 this, — by Failure. Failure and success to really work- 
 ing ministers are only relative. Remember that no 
 true man wholly succeeds or wholly fails. But the 
 
62 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 mt.iu difference in effect between what we call succesa 
 and wliat we call failure in the ministry is here : suc- 
 cess makes a man dwell upon and be thankful for how 
 much a preacher can do ; failure makes a man think 
 how much there is which no preacher can do, and is 
 apt to weigh him down into depression. It confronts 
 him with the magnitude of the task of the Christian 
 ministry, not as a great temptation, but as a great 
 burden. He is paralyzed as Hamlet was. 
 
 " The time is out of joint : cursed spite, 
 That ever I was born to set it riglit ! " 
 
 Such an end of a young man's first high hopes is 
 terrible to see. The very power that once made him 
 strong now weakens him. The wekjht that was his 
 ballast and helped his speed sinks wi^i when once the 
 leak has come. There is no help except in a pro- 
 founder retreat of the whole nature upon God, — s'jch 
 a perception of Him and of His dearness as shall take 
 oft' our heavy responsibility and make us ready to fail 
 for Him with joy as well as to succeed for Him, if 
 such shall be His choice ; and ready to work as hard 
 for Him in fiiilure as ii}_^succesSj beca^use we work not 
 fur success but for Him. The drawing of the man 
 back into God by failure is always a noble sight, and 
 no region of life has such noble specimens of it to 
 8how as the Christian ministry. 
 
 There is another refuge when the yuung preacher's 
 Srst self-conceit is shaken. It is into another self 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. Q^ 
 
 conceit wnich is smaller than the first. The be- 
 leaguered householder refuses to surrender, and re- 
 treats from his strong outer i-amparts, defending one 
 line after another till at last he dwells onl}^ in his 
 most mean and worthless chamber. A man makes up 
 his mind that he is not going to convert the world. 
 The strongholds of the Prince of Evil evidently will 
 not fall before him. He is to leave the unbuilt king- 
 dom of God very much as he found it when he came 
 into the ministry. But then he falls back upon some 
 petty pride. " My church is full ; " " My name is 
 prominent in the movements of my denomination ; " 
 " My sermons win the compliments of people ; " or 
 simply this, "I am a minister. I bear a dignity that 
 these laymen cannot boast. I have an ordination 
 which separates me into an indefinable, mysterious 
 privilege." Here is the beginning of -many of the 
 fantastic and exaggerated theories about the minis- 
 try. The little preacher magnifies his office in a most 
 unpauline way. And you hear a man to whom no one 
 cares to listen quoting the solemn words of God about 
 "whether men will hear or whether they wil for- 
 bear," as if they had been spoken to him as much as 
 to Ezekiel. 
 
 What shall we say then ? What is the true -escape 
 from the crudeness of the untried preacher which set- 
 lies and centres all his thought upon himself? It ia 
 fcu escape which many a preacher has found nnd grad- 
 
b4 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 ually passed into. It is the growing devotion of his 
 life to God, the more and more complete absorption 
 of his being in the seeking of God's glory. As he 
 goes on, the work nnfolds itself. It outgoes all his 
 powers. But as he looks over its increasing vastnesa 
 he sees it on every side touching the omnipotence of 
 God. As he sees more and more clearly that he will 
 n'jver do what he once hoped to do, it becomes clear 
 to him at the same time that God will do it in His 
 own time and way. His own disappointment is swal- 
 lowed up and drowned in the promise of his Lord's 
 success. He becomes a true John Baptist. He is 
 happy with a higher joy, and works with an energy 
 that he never knew before. This is the true refu<xe 
 of the minister in the disenchantment of his earliest 
 dreams. 
 
 Another of the dangers of the clergyman's life is 
 Self-indulgence. The ways and methods of the min- 
 ister's work are almost wholly at his own control. It 
 is impossible for him to reduce his life to a routine. 
 There are but few tests which he must meet at spe- 
 cial times, as a business man must meet his notes 
 when they are due. And a great deal of his work is 
 of that sort which requires spontaneity for its best 
 txecution. The result of all these causes working to- 
 gether is to create in many a minister a certain feel- 
 ing that his faithfulness in his work is not to be 
 judged as other men's faithfulness in their work ia 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 65 
 
 Indeed, I think, the very consciousness of laboring 
 under a loftier motive has often a tendency to weaken 
 the conscientiousness with which each minute detail 
 of work is met. There is a lurking Antinomianism 
 in many a most arminian study. We are apt to be- 
 come men of moods, thinking we cannot work unless 
 we feel like it. There is just enough of the artistic 
 element in what we have to do, to let us fall into the 
 artisf s ways and leave our brushes idle when the sky 
 frowns or the head aches. But the artistic elemen t 
 is, afteji all ^__the sniallejit_element i n the true ser- 
 mon. Its best qualities depend on those moral and 
 spiritual conditions which may be always present in 
 the devoted servant of God. And so the first busi- 
 ness of the preacher is to conquer the tyranny of his 
 moods, and to be always ready for his work. It can 
 be done. The man who has not learned to do it has 
 not really reached the secret of Jesus, v/hicli was such 
 utter love for His Father and man, between whom He 
 Btood, as obliterated all thought of Himself save as a 
 medium, through which the divine might come down 
 to the human. We read of Jesus that He again and 
 again grew heavy in spirit. In utter weariness, some- 
 times, when His work was done, He would witlidraw 
 into a mountain, or put out in a boat upon the lake. 
 We can feel the fluctuations of that humanity of His, 
 ^nd, interpreting it by our own, we can seem to see 
 how one bright morning by the seaside He was exu- 
 6 
 
6b* LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 berant and joyous, and on another morninof He would 
 be sad and burdened. We can trace the dilTerences 
 in the kind of preaching of the two different days. 
 But through it all there is nothing in the least like 
 self-indulgence. We are sure that no day ever Avent 
 without its preaching, because it found him moody 
 and depressed. He did no mighty works in Naza- 
 reth ; but it was because of the peoj5le's unbelief, not 
 because of his own reluctance. So it may be with 
 us. It is part of the privilege of our humanity, it is 
 part of the advantage of our people in having men 
 and not machines for ministers, that we preach the 
 truth in various lights, or shades, according as God 
 brightens or darkens our own experience ; but any 
 mood which makes us unlit to preach at all, or really 
 weakens our will to preach, is bad, and can be broken 
 through. Then is the time for the conscience to be- 
 stir itself and for the man to be a man. 
 
 I wish that it were possible for one to spealc to the 
 laity of our churches frankly and freely about their 
 treatment of the c-lerg}'. The clergy are largely what 
 the laity make them. And though one may look 
 wholly without regret upon the departure of that 
 reverence, which seems to have clothed the preacher's 
 oflice in our fathers' days, I think lie must have nany 
 misgivings about the weaker substitute for it, which 
 in many instances has taken its place. It was not 
 good that the minister should be worshipped ani 
 
THE PR \A CHER HIMSELF. 67 
 
 made an oracle. It is still worse that lie should be 
 flattered and made a pet. And there is such a ten- 
 dency in these days among our weaker people. I 
 have already spoken of the way in which many men 
 are petted into the ministry'-. It is possible for such 
 a man, if he has popular gifts, to be petted all 
 through his ministry, never once to come into strong 
 contact with other men, or to receive one good hard 
 knock of the sort that bi-ings out manliness and char- 
 acter. The people who gather closest around a min- 
 ister's life, believing his beliefs, and accepting his 
 standards, make a sort of cushion between him and 
 the unbelief and wickedness which smite other men 
 in the face and wound them mercilessly at every turn- 
 It is not wholly unnatural. The minister "stands in 
 a unique position to the community. In no other 
 man's private affairs, his health, his comfort, his free- 
 dom from financial care, are so many people so di- 
 rectly interested. It is not strange that that interest 
 in him and care for him, which ought simply to put 
 him where, without personal fear or personal indebt- 
 edness, he may bravely and independently be himself 
 and speak out his own soul, should often be corrupted 
 vnto a poison of his manhood, and a temptation to his 
 lelf-indulgence. It is beyond all doubt the weal^ point 
 of our American voluntary system which brings the 
 minister into those close personal relations to his peo- 
 ple, which on the whole are good and healthy, but 
 \»'hich have this one defect and danger. 
 
i)8 LECl JRES ON PREACHING. 
 
 If you have read the Y\U\ of Frederick Robertson 
 you know how hateful many of the incidents of the 
 life of a popular minister were to him. So they 
 must be to every true num. If a man is not wholly 
 true they hnd out his weak point and fix upon it. 
 He begins to expect different treatment from other 
 men. His personal woes and pains seem to him 
 things of public interest. He grows first unhuman 
 in the separation from the ordinary standards of hia 
 race, and that makes him inluiman, unsympathetic. 
 The weak is always cruel. 
 
 Mr. Galton, in his work on " Hereditary Genius," 
 Bumming up the result of liis reading in clerical biog- 
 raphies, declares that '* A gently complaining and 
 fatigued spirit is that in which Evangelical Divines 
 are very apt to pass their days." These words tell 
 perfectly a story that Ave all know who have been in- 
 timate, with many ministers. That which ought to 
 be the manliest of all professions has a tendency, prac- 
 tically, to make men unmanly. Men make appeals 
 for sympathy that no true man should make. They 
 take to themselves St. Paul's pathos Avithout St. 
 Paul's strength. Against that tendency, my friends. 
 Bet your whole foi je. Fear its insidiousness. "I feel 
 no intoxieating elTect," Avrote Maeaulay when the firet 
 Hush of his success was on him, " but a man niiiy be 
 drunk without knowing it." Insist on applying to 
 yourseJf tests which oth(>r8 refuse to apply to a ou 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 60 
 
 Resent indulge nces which_ are3ot,.given_JO-JlLen_gf 
 other^^erofessions. Learn to enjoy and be sober; 
 [earn to suffer and be strong. Never appeal for sym- 
 pathy. Let it find you out if it will. Count your 
 manliness the soul of your ministry and resist all at- 
 tacks upon it however sweetly they may come. 
 
 I had hoped to say some words, to-day, about one 
 other danger of the preacher's life, I mean the dan- 
 ger of narrowness. We all live within the rings of 
 concentric circles. They extend one beyond another 
 till they come to that outmost circle of all, the hori- 
 zon where humanity touches divinity, as the earth 
 meets the sky. Now I hold that all that is by God's 
 appointment, and is intended for our best good. The 
 narrowness is for the sake of breadth. I- hold that 
 every smaller circle is meant to carry the eye out 
 to the next larger than itself, and so, at last, to the 
 largest of all. You stand firm on your one little spot, 
 and thence you look out and find yourself like Ten- 
 nyson's eagle, " ringed with the azure world." So 
 every smaller circle of your moral life is meant to 
 carry you out, and make you realize the larger circles. 
 You may be a better minister because you are clear in 
 your denominational position as a Congregationalist 
 or Episcopalian ; and because you are a minister you 
 may be a better man. The danger is lest the smiiUer 
 circle, instead of tempting the sight onward, jeal- 
 ously confines it to itself. Narr< wness is to be es- 
 
70 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 capod, not by deserting our special function, but by 
 compelling it to open to U3 the things beyond itself. 
 You will not be a better man by pretending that you 
 are not a Christian, nor a better Christian by pre- 
 tendincf to have no dogmatic faith. The true breadth 
 comes by the strength of your own belief making you 
 tolerant of other believers ; and by the earnestness of 
 your Christianity teaching you your brotherhood even 
 to the most unchristian men. 
 
 I must stop here. I have spoken very freely of 
 these dangers and hindrances with which the preach- 
 er's occupations beset his character. Yet you must 
 not misundei'stand me. There is no occupation in 
 which it is so possible, nay so easy to live a noble life. 
 These tares grow rank only because the soil is rich. 
 The wheat grows rich beside them. The Christian 
 ministry is the largest field for the growth of a human 
 BOuT tliat this world offers. In it he who is faithful 
 must go on learning more and more forever. His 
 growth in learning is all bound up with his growth in 
 character. Nowhere else do the moral and intellect- 
 ual so sympathize, and lose or gain together. The 
 tiiinister must grow. His true growth is not neces- 
 sarily a change of views. It is a change of vieAV. It 
 .8 not revolution. It is progress. It is a continual 
 climbing which opens continually wider orospecta. 
 It repeats the experience of Christ's ilisciplcs of whom 
 
THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 71 
 
 Isheir Lord was always making larger men and then 
 giving them the larger truth of which their enlarged 
 natures had become capable. Once more, I rejoice 
 for you that this is the ministry in which you are to 
 spend your ))¥©*. 
 
THE PREACHER IN H1.«S WORK. 
 
 ATTHEN I was just about to begin the writing 
 '^ ' of this lecture, I chanced "to be thrown for a 
 day or two into the company of a young man who 
 had been engaged in the work of the ministry only 
 a few months. He was in the first flush and fervor 
 of his new experience, and in listening to him I re- 
 called much of the spirit with which I myself began 
 man}^ years ago. The spirit had not passed away, 
 but the first freshness of many impressions had been 
 ripened, I hope, into something better, but still into 
 something soberer. He revived for me the delight 
 of that new and strange relation to his fellow-men 
 which comes when a young man who thus far in 
 his life has had others ministering to him, finds the 
 conditions now reversed and other men are looking 
 up to him for culture. There is the sober joy ot 
 responsibility. There is the sui'prised recognition of 
 something which we have learned in some one of our 
 B'lhools of books or life, and counted useh'ss, which 
 now some man we meet welcomes when we give it 1 j 
 hira as if it were the one thin^ f<>r which he hat( hveu 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 7?, 
 
 always waiting. There is the liopefulness that feaia 
 no failure. There is the pleasure of a new knowl- 
 edge of ourselves as others begin to call out in us 
 what we never knew was there. There is the joy of 
 being trusted and responded to. There is the deep- 
 ened sacredness of prayer and of communion with 
 God when we go to Him, not merely for ourselves and 
 for the great vague world, but for a people whom we 
 have begun to love and call our own, while we know 
 that they are His. There is the discovery of the 
 better and devouter nature in men. There is the 
 interest of countless new details and the inspiration 
 of the noblest purpose for which a man can live. All 
 these together make up the happiness and hope of 
 those bright days in which a strong and healthy and 
 devout young man is just entering the ministry of tha 
 Gospel. 
 
 I wish to speak to you to-day about the preacher 
 in his work, and what I shall have to say will natu- 
 rally divide itself into suggestions with reference to 
 the nature, the method, and the spirit of that work. 
 
 I must recur to what I said in the first lecture 
 about the true character of preaching. Preaching is 
 the communication of truth through a man to men. 
 The human element is essential in it, and not merely 
 accidental. There cannot really be a sermon in a 
 Btone, whatever lessons the stone may have to teach. 
 This being so, we must carry out the importance of 
 
74 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 the human element to its full consequence. Jt is no* 
 only necessary for a sermon tliiit there should be a 
 human being to speak to other human beings, but h\x 
 a good sermon there must be a man who can speak 
 well, whose nature stands in right relations to ihoso 
 to whom he speaks, who has brought his life close to 
 theirs with sympathy. In every highest task there 
 is an instinctive tendency of men to shirk and hide 
 under the protection of some idea of fate. And very 
 often we hear ministers trying to escape responsibil- 
 ity by vague and foolish statements that tlic truth is 
 everything, and that it ought not to make any differ- 
 ence to a congregation how or from whom they hear 
 it. It is a latent fatalissm, a readiness to count out 
 of the highest operations the play of human free will 
 and choice, which lies at the bottom of such speeches. 
 The same I'eason which requires a man for a ])reacher 
 at all requires as wise and strong and well-furnished, 
 as skilful and as eloquent a man as can be found or 
 made. The duty of making yourself acceptable to 
 people, and winning by all manly ways their con- 
 fidence in you, and in the truth which you tell, is 
 one that is involved in the very fact of your being a 
 preacher. And the dignity of the purpose gives dig- 
 /lity to many details which in themselves are trivial. 
 The study of language and of oratory, whic'li would 
 belittle you if they were merely undertaken for your 
 own culture, are noble when you undertake them in 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 75 
 
 order that your tongue may be a worthier minister 
 'A God's truth ; and the assiduous attention to peo- 
 pk>, and their tastes and habits and ways of think- 
 ing, which would be slavery if it had no object be- 
 sides their pleasure or your own repute, is a lofty 
 exercise, if it has for its purpose the finding out on 
 which side of every man you can best bring to him 
 the truth. Here stands a man, and two other men 
 are watching him. Both of them are studying his 
 character. Both want to know what he thinks about, 
 what his tastes are, how he spends his time. One of 
 them is trying to find how he can best win from him 
 a dollar or a vote. The other is trying to see what 
 is his true way to preach the Gospel to that fellow- 
 man. There are the meanest and the noblest rela- 
 tions which any man can occupy toward his fellow- 
 man. The first is ignominious beyond description. 
 It is a relation' too low for any man to hold. A true 
 man would rather starve than occupy it. But the 
 other is a relation in which every man must stand 
 who means to really preach to any brother. It is but 
 the effort after what it is in our feeble power to at- 
 tain of that knowledge of humanity which was in 
 Him who " knew what was in man," and who, there« 
 fore, " spake as never man spake." 
 
 It follows from this that the work of the preacher 
 and the pastor really belong together, and ought not 
 Co be separated. I believe that very strongly. Everj 
 
re LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 now and then somebody rises with a plea that is very 
 familiar and specious. He says, how much better it 
 would be if only there could be a classification of 
 ministers and duties. Let some ministers be Avholly 
 preachers, and some be wholly pastors. Let one 
 class visit the flock, to direct and comfort them ; and 
 the other class stand in the j)iilpit. You will not go 
 far in your ministry before you will be tempted to 
 echo that desire. The two parts of a preacher's work 
 are always in rivalry. When you find that you can 
 never sit down to study and write without the faces 
 of the people, who you know need your care, look- 
 ing out at you from the paper ; and yet you never 
 can "go out among your people without hearing your 
 forsaken study I'eproaching you, and calling you 
 home, you may easily come to believe that it would 
 be good indeed if you could bo one or other of two 
 things, and not both ; either a preacher or a pastor, 
 but not the two together. But I assure you you are 
 wrong. The two things are not two, but one. There 
 may be preachers here and there with such a deep, 
 intense insight into the general humanity, that they 
 can speak to men without knowing the men to whom 
 they speak. Such preachers are very lare ; and other 
 preachers, who have not their power, trying to do it, 
 an; sure to preach to some unreal, unhuman man of 
 their own imagination. There ai'e some pastors here 
 and thcro with such a constantly lofty and spiritual 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 7 "J 
 
 view of little things, that they can go about from 
 house to house, year after year, and deal with men and 
 women at their common work, and lift the men and 
 women to themselves, and never fall to the level of the 
 men and women whom they teach. Such pastors are 
 rare ; and other men, trying to do it, and never in more 
 formal way from the pul[)it treating truth in its larger 
 aspects, are sure to grow frivolous gossips or tiresome 
 machines. The preacher needs to be pastor, that, 
 he may preach to real men. The pastor must be 
 preaclier, that he may keep the dignity of his work 
 alive. The preacher, who is not a pastor, grows re- 
 mote. The pastor, who is not a preacher, grows 
 petty. Never be content to let men truthfully say o[ 
 you, " He is a preacher, but no pastor ; " or, " He is 
 a pastor, but no preacher." Be both ; for 3'ou can- 
 not really be one unless you also are the other. 
 
 Of the pastor's function considered by itself there 
 is, I think, but very little to be said. I count of little 
 worth all sets of rules, all teaching directly on the 
 subject. The books that teach a pastor's duty except 
 in the way of the most general suggestion are almost 
 worthless. They have the fault which belongs to 
 uU books on behavior, whicli are needless for those 
 who do behave well and useless for those wdio 'do not. 
 The powers of the pastor's success are truth and sym- 
 pathy together. "Speaking the truth in Love," ia 
 the golden text to write in the book where you keep 
 
78 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 the names of your people, so that you may read it 
 every time j'ou go to visit them. Sympathy without 
 truth makes a plausible pastor, but one whose hold 
 on a parish soon grows weak. Men feel his touch 
 upon them soft and tender, but never vigorous and 
 strong. Truth without sympathy makes the sort of 
 pastor whom people say that they respect but to 
 whom they seldom go and whom they seldom care to 
 Bee coming to them. But where the two unite, so 
 far as the two unite in you, I think there will be 
 nothing that will surprise you more than to discover 
 how certain their power is. The man who has them 
 cannot help saying the right word at the right time. 
 You go to some poor crushed and broken heart ; you 
 tell what truth you know, the truth of the ever ready 
 and inexhaustible forgiveness, the truth of the unut- 
 terable love, the truth of the unbroken life of im- 
 mortality; and you let the sorrow for that heart's 
 sorrow which you truly feel, utter itself in whatever 
 true and simple ways it will ; then you come away 
 sick at heart because you have so miserably failed ; 
 but by and by you find that you \\\\\v not failed, 
 that you really did bring elevation and comfort. 
 You cannot help doing it if you go with truth and 
 Bympathy, This is the constant experien -e of the 
 minister. This is the ground of confidence and hope 
 with which he presses on from year to yeai 
 
 I am inclined to think, ivs 1 have already intimated, 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 'fS 
 
 that the trouble of much of our pastoral work is ir. 
 its pettiness. It is pitched in too low a key. li 
 tries to meet the misfortunes of life with comfort and 
 not with inspiration, offering inducements to patience 
 and the suggestions of compensation in this life or 
 another which lies beyond, rather than imparting 
 that higher and stronger tone which will make men 
 despise their sorrows and bear them easily in their 
 search for truth and nobleness, and the release that 
 comes from foi-getfulness of self and devotion to the 
 needs of other people. The truest help which one 
 can render to a man who has any of the inevitable 
 burdews of life to carry is not to take his burden off 
 but to call out his best strength that he may be able 
 to bear it. The pastorship of Jesus is characterize(l 
 everywhere by its frankness and manliness. He meets 
 Isieodeinus with a staggering assertion of the higher 
 needs of the spirit. The man who wants the inher- 
 itance divided is encountered with a strong rebuke 
 of his presumptuous selfishness. And Simon Peter 
 has the assurance of his forgiveness offered him in a 
 demand for work. All three of these instances and 
 many others are richly suggestive of contrasts with 
 what many of the ministers of Christ would do in the 
 game circumstances. It is the utter absence ef sen- 
 timentality in Christ's relations with men that makes 
 bis tenderness so exquisitely touching. It is in the 
 power, even in the effort, to awake the stronger 
 
80 LECTURES ON PRE ACHING. 
 
 nature of mankind that our modern pastorship is apt 
 to be deficient. It ministers to women more tlian to 
 men. It tries to soothe with eonsohition more than 
 to fire witli ambition or to sting witli shame. 
 
 Perhaps there will be no better place than this for 
 me to say that it is in the absence of the heroic el- 
 ement that our current Christianity most falls short 
 of the Christianity of Gospel times. We keep still the 
 heroic language, but does it not often suggest strange 
 incongruities ? Have not the pictures of souie of our 
 hymns, for instance, seemed sometimes strangely out 
 of keeping with the lips that sang theui ? A row of 
 lomfortable, self-contented, conservative gentlemen 
 and ladies standing up, for instance, and singing 
 " Onward, Christian soldiers marching as to war," or 
 " Hold the fort for I am coming, Jesus signals still," 
 reminds us all the more of how unmilitary and un- 
 heroic are the lives they live. It is not the mere dif- 
 ference of dress. I doubt not the Christians in the 
 Catacombs, or the colliers who listened to Whitefield 
 wlien he preached at Bristol, might have sang hymns 
 that were built on the same imagery, and nothing in- 
 congruous would have been suggested. And yet they 
 were as evidently nu'u of peace as are our congrega- 
 '.ions. But they were conscious of and showed the 
 true inlenseness of spiritual warfare. They knew the 
 fight within, the terrible reality of the enemy, the ter- 
 rible suspense of tlie struggle, the glorious delight o/ 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 81 
 
 fci'iumph. No, it is tbe uiiheroic character erf mod 
 ern life and especially of modern Christianity. The 
 life of Jesus Christ was radical. It went to the deep 
 roots of things. It claimed men's noblest and freest 
 action. We, if we are his ministers, must bring the 
 heroic into the unheroic life of men, demanding of 
 them truth, breadth, braver}'-, self-sacrifice, the free- 
 dom from conventionalities and an elevation to high 
 standards of thought and life. We must bring men's 
 life up to Him and not bring Him down to men's 
 life. This is the Christian pastor's privilege and duty. 
 
 It seems to me that a large part of the troubles 
 and mistakes of our pastoral life come from our hav- 
 ing too high an estimate of men's present condition 
 and too low an estimate of their possibility. If this 
 be true, then what we need to make us better pastors 
 is more of the Gospel which reveals at once man's 
 imperfect condition and his infinite hope. Jesus was 
 the perfect pastor in the way in which He showed 
 men what they were and what they might become. 
 He never deceived and never discouraged them. The 
 contact with His perfect humanity brought them at 
 once shame and hope. And when He comes near to 
 us now, when His Spirit does His appointed work of 
 taking Him and showing Him to us, the same power, 
 combined of shame and hope, comes into our lives. 
 Let that be the model of our pastorship. 
 
 But to return more definitely to preaching. I 
 
82 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 think that one of the preliminary considerations 
 jiboiit it — one characteristic of it so prominent that 
 we are sure that He who sent men out to pr<:ach 
 must have designed it — is that which I have already 
 once alluded to, the pleasure that belongs to it, the 
 way in which it thoroughly interests the best par-cs 
 of the man who does it. I remember, ;is I recur to it, 
 how much I have already said about it, and may have 
 yet to say; but it is much upon my mind. For I 
 think there is something unhappy in the frequency 
 with which ministers dwell upon their work as if it 
 were full of hardships and disappointments. Every 
 .power of man which has its natural and legitimate 
 pui-pose brings two pleasures, one in the anticipation 
 and attainment of its end, the other in its own exer- 
 cise. There is a delijjht in exercisinjj faculties as 
 well as in doing work, and in all the best activities uf 
 men the two will go together. This is all true of 
 preaching. Its highest joy is in the great ambition 
 that is set before it, the glorifying of the Lord and 
 the saving of the souls of men. No other joy on 
 earth compares with that. The ministr\' that does 
 not feel that joy iy dead. Rut in behind that highest 
 joy, beating in humble unison with it, as the healthy 
 body thrills in sympathy witt the deep thoughts and 
 pure desires of tlie mind and soul, the l)('st ministries 
 have always been conscious o another pleasure which 
 oolonged to the very doing ( f the work itself. As 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 82 
 
 we read the lives of all the most effective preachera 
 of the past, or as we meet the men who are powerful 
 preachers of the Word to-day, we feel how certainly 
 and how deeply the very exercise of their ministry 
 delights them. The best sermons always seem to 
 carry the memory of the excited spring or quiet hap- 
 piness, with which they are written or uttered. The 
 soldier enjoys the battle as well as the victory. The 
 carpenter enjoys the saw and plane as well as the 
 prospect of the full-built house. When Wilberforce 
 heard of Macaulay's first offer of a chance oi public 
 life, he was silent for a moment, and then liis face 
 lighted up and he clapped his hand to his ear and 
 cried, "Ah, I hear that shout again. Hear! Hear! 
 What a life it was ! " In the case of the preacher 
 this secondary pleasure, if I may call it so, consists in 
 the enjoyment of close i-elationship with fellow-men 
 and in the orator's delight in moving men. The fas- 
 tidious man or the cold man loses a great deal of the 
 stimulus and unfading freshness of the ministry. 
 Sometimes this pleasure grows very keen. I always 
 remember one special afternoon, years ago, when the 
 light faded from the room where I was preaclnng and 
 the faces melted together into a unit as of one impres 
 Bive pleading man, and I felt them listening when 
 I could hardly see them ; I remember this accidental 
 day as one of the times when the sense of the privi- 
 lege of having to do with people as their preaciiei 
 
84 LECTURES ON PREACILXG. 
 
 camu out almost overpoweringly. It is good to tn-as* 
 ure all such enjoyment of the actual work of preach- 
 ing. It bridges over the times when the higher en- 
 thusiasm flags, and it gives a deeper delight to it 
 when it is strongest. 
 
 I think that as we study tlie preaching of Jesus 
 we admire above almost everything the way in which 
 He was at once the Leader and the Brother of the 
 men He taught. He spake as one having authority 
 always, but always His power was brought near to 
 men by the complete way in which He made Himself 
 one of them, by the evident reality with which He 
 bore their sins and carried their sorrows. So that by 
 as much as the Son of God was above men in His 
 nature, by so much the more He came near to them 
 in his sympathies and was a truer Son of Man 
 than any of the wonderfully human prophets of the 
 Old Testament, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, to whom 
 the same name is constantly applied. Now wiien we 
 compare the ordinary preacher's life with that of Je- 
 sus, I think we see how much more apt he is, to 
 have kept the position of leader than the position of 
 brother of the people. At any rate, what we miss 
 in a great doal of our preacliing is that beautiful 
 blending of the two wIkjsc jjower we recognize in the 
 word and work of Jesus. We are the leaders of the 
 people. Woe to our preaching if in any feeble, false 
 humility we abdicate that place. The people pass 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 85 
 
 us by and pity us if they see ns standing in our pul- 
 pits saying, " We know nothing particular about these 
 things whereof we preach ; we have no authority ; 
 only come here and we will tell you what we think, 
 and you shall tell us what you think, and so perhaps 
 together we can strike out a little light." That is 
 not preaching. There has been pulpit talk like that, 
 and men have always passed it by and hurried on to 
 find some one who at least pretended to tell them the 
 will of God. No, the preacher must be a leader, but 
 his leadership must be bound in with his brother- -^ 
 hood. It was as Man that Christ led men to God. 
 It must be as men that we carry on the work of 
 Christ and help men's souls to Him, This truth 
 seems to me to lie at the bottom of all the" best suc- 
 cesses, and the forgetf ukiess of it at the bottom of all 
 the worst failures of the ministry. There is no real 
 leadership of people for a preacher or a pastor except 
 that which comes as the leadership of the Incarnation 
 came, by a thorough entrance into the lot of those 
 whom one would lead. 
 
 And again, the limits of the preacher's leadership 
 are very clear, and it is necessary that the yonng 
 minister should know them. Sometimes a preacher 
 finds himself — and oftener still, some foolish frienda 
 bj his side will make him think himself — one of the 
 wisest men, perhaps the wisest man in his small cir- 
 ^e upon any of the ordinary topics of thought, upon 
 
S^ LECTURES UN PREACHING. 
 
 art, or politics, or letters, or education. It is good 
 for him to use his wisdom as it is for any other man. 
 It is wrong for him to leave his wisdom unused as it 
 is for any other man. He may do much good to' the 
 people, he may indirectly help his own peculiar mis- 
 Bion by sharing his knowledge with them. One of 
 the most interesting pages of clerical life of Avhich I 
 know is Norman Macleod's account of his lectures to 
 the weavers at Newmilns, on geolog)\ Would that 
 more of us were able to follow his example. All that 
 is well ; but we must know that there is nothing in 
 our quality as preachers that gives us any claim to be 
 authoritative guides to men in any of those things, 
 neither in politics, nor in education, nor in science. 
 On one thing only we may speak with authority, and 
 that is the will of God. Nor even in the details of 
 religious thought need we aspire to be their guides. 
 I do not want — and certainly I know that if I did 
 want I never should be able — to make the people who 
 listen to me accept every view of Christian truth 
 which I utter before them. I have no reason to 
 believe that what I utter is clothed with an infalli- 
 bility. In much of what one preaches he is satisfied 
 if men take home what he says as the utterance of 
 one who has thought upon the subject of which he 
 speaks and wishes them to think and judge. Surely 
 he does not declare to them his belief about the 
 method of the atonement, with the same authoril> 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 87 
 
 with which he bids them repent of sin, and warn? 
 hhem that without holiness no man shall see tbo 
 IvfOrd. Such line of difference every true preacher 
 draws, and freely lets men see where it runs. If 
 you attempt to claim authority for all your specula- 
 tions you will end by losing it for your most sure 
 and solemn declarations of God's will. 
 
 One difficulty of the preacher's office is its sub- 
 jection to flippant gossip, along with its exemption ^ 
 from severe and healthy criticism. There are people 
 enough always to find out a, minister's little faults, 
 and let him hear of them ; but it is wonderful how 
 he can go on year after year, without being once 
 brought up to the judgment-seat of sound intelli- 
 gence, and hearing what is the real worth of the 
 words that he is saying, and the work that he is 
 doing. There are plenty of people to do for him 
 the office of the man whom Philip of Macedon kept 
 in his service, to tell him every day before he gave 
 audience, " Philip, remember thou art mortal," but 
 hardly ever does he meet that sound and prompt 
 investigation of his special work which comes to the 
 author from his public, or the lawyer from his judge. 
 This makes for many men the worst possible condi- 
 tion to labor in — a constant fretting by small .cavils, 
 and no large estimation of the whole. It is like 
 standing in a desultory dropping fire without being 
 allowed to plunge into the battle, and settle at once 
 
88 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 llie question of life or death. It makes siiprenidly 
 essential to the minister that independence of men's 
 judgments whicli can only come by the most absolute 
 dependence on the judgment of the Lord, by living 
 " ever in the great Taskmaster's eye." 
 
 I should have liked to speak of one other danger 
 of the preacher from his work. It is that which 
 conies from the paralysis of great ideas. There are 
 times when the vast thoughts of God stimulate us to 
 action. There are other times when they seem to 
 take all power of action out of us. These last times 
 gi'ow very frequent with some men, till you have the 
 race of clerical visionaries who think vast, dim, vague 
 thouglits, and do no work. It is a danger of all ar- 
 dent minds. The only salvation, if one finds himself 
 verging to it, is an misparing rule that no idea, how- 
 ever abstract, shall be ever counted as satisfactorily 
 received and grasped till it has opened to us its prac- 
 tical side and helped us somehow in our work. The 
 spirit of practicalness is the consecration of the whole 
 man, even the most ideal and visionary parts of him, 
 to the work of life. 
 
 With regard to the second point of whicli I spoke, 
 the methods of the preacher's work, there are two dif- 
 ficulties which beset us : one is the absence of method, 
 and the other is the tendency to wrong methods. Let 
 mo say a few words to you on each of tl ese. 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 89 
 
 There is a certain air of spontaneousness, a certain 
 dislike of rule and system which belongs to a great 
 many ministers' fundamental conception of the work 
 of preaching. Rightly studied and weighed, no doubt, 
 the teachings of Christ and of the whole New Testa- 
 ment all look one way. They all involve the simple 
 truth that he who works for God must work with hia 
 best power's • and since among the effective powers 
 of man the powers of jDlan and arrangement stand 
 very high, the whole of the New Testament really 
 implies that he Avho preaches must lay out the meth- 
 ods and ways of preaching, as a merchant or a soldier 
 lays out a campaign of the market or the battle-field. 
 But at the same time there are many passages in 
 the New Testament which seem to have in them 
 something like a promise of immediate inspiration. 
 Chi'ist bids His disciples : " Settle it, therefore, in 
 your hearts not to meditate before what ye shall 
 answer. For I will give you a mouth and wisdom 
 which all your adversaries shall not be able to gain- 
 say nor resist." These words, and others like them, 
 were spoken indeed to certain disciples, and in view 
 of certain special emergencies of their life ; but, with 
 our vague unscientific notions about inspiration, they 
 have been easily appropriated by many a poor un- 
 inspired creature who has found himself the subject 
 of ordination ; and a general impression of the piety 
 %i exteraporaneousness has spread more widely and 
 
90 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 reached more tlioviglitful and intelligent men than we 
 Buppose. I think, too, that the revolt of Protestant- 
 ism against the minute and overstrained organization 
 of the Romish Church has had very much to do with 
 the creation of that distrust of methodicalness which 
 prevails so largely among preachers. However it haa 
 come about, the fact is clear enough. Look at the 
 way in which the pulpit teaches. I venture to say 
 that there is nothing so unreasonable in any other 
 branch of teaching. You are a minister, and you are 
 to instruct these people in the truths of God, to bring 
 God's message to them. All the vast range of God's 
 revelation and of man's duty is open to you. And 
 how do you proceed ? If you are like most minis- 
 ters there is no order, no progress, no consecutive 
 purpose in your teaching. You never begin at the 
 beginning and proceed step by step to the end of 
 any course of orderly instruction. You float over the 
 whole sea of truth, and plunge here and there, like a 
 gull, on any subject that either suits your mood, or 
 that some casual aiid superficial intercourse with peo- 
 ple makes you conceive to be required by a popular 
 need. No other instruction ever was given so. No 
 hearer has the least idea, as he goes to your church, 
 wluit you will preach to him about that day. It is 
 hopeless for him to try to get ready for your teach- 
 ing. I am sure that I may s;iy (I suppose that this 
 is partly the reason why as an Episcopalian I h;>v« 
 
rilE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 91 
 
 been asked to lecture here) that I rejoice to see in 
 many churches outside our own that to wliich we owe 
 so much as a help to the orderliness of preaching, the 
 observance of a church year with its commemorative 
 festivals, growing so largely common. It still leaves 
 largest liberty. It is no bondage within which any 
 man is hampered. But the great procession of the 
 year, sacred to our best human instincts with the ac- 
 cumulated reverence of ages, — Advent, Christmas, 
 Epiphany, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Whit- 
 sunday, — leads those who walk in it, at least once 
 every year, past all the great Christian facts, and, 
 however careless and selfish be the preacher, will not 
 leave it in his power to keep them from his people. 
 The Church year, too, preserves the personality of our 
 religion. It is concrete and picturesque. The his- 
 torical Jesus is forever there. It lays each life con- 
 tinually down beside the perfect life, that it may see 
 at once its imperfection and its hope. 
 
 But not to dwell any longer on this special in- 
 stance, the order and course of preaching, the 'same 
 absence of method is apt to show itself everywhere 
 in a preacher's life. Beside the reasons for it which 
 I have already suggested, it comes from a feeble sense 
 of responsibility. The mental and the moral matures 
 Have closer connections than very often we allow them, 
 and traita which we think wholly intellectual are con- 
 stantly revealing to us moral bases upon which they 
 
92 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 rest. We talk of clearness, for instance, as if it -rere 
 pnrel}^ a quality of style, but clearness in ovei-y speech 
 addressed to men comes out of sympathy, which is a 
 moral quality. So force implies conviction. And so 
 the truest method involves conscientiousness. The 
 intellectual and the spiritual belonq; together. Losri- 
 cal arrangement of thought has real connection with 
 a sincere desire to do right. The more you mean to 
 do all the right, the more clearly your whole thinking 
 processes will dispose themselves, and then, by tiie 
 law of reaction, your orderly thinking will make it 
 easier for you to do riglit. That which all men ought 
 to remember, it behooves the minister more than all 
 men not to forget, how closely the mental and moral 
 natures are bound together in their characters and 
 destinies. 
 
 On this high ground, and on a ground that perhaps 
 is lower but still is sound, I urge upon you the need 
 of method and order in your life and work. Do not 
 be tempted by the fascination of spontaneousness. 
 Do not be misled by any delusion of inspiration. The 
 lower ground is the support which well-considered 
 and settled mctiiods of operation give to the higher 
 powers ill their weaker moments. No one di-eada 
 mechanical woodenness in the ministry more than I 
 do. And yot a strong wooden strnctuie running 
 through your work, a set of well-framed and well- 
 jointed habits abcut times and ways of work, writing, 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 9S 
 
 Studying, intercourse with people, the administration 
 of charity and education, and the proportions between 
 the different departments of clerical labor, is again 
 and again the bridge over which the minister walks 
 where the solid ground of higher motive fails him for 
 a time. Routine is a terrible master, but she is a ser- 
 vant whom we can hardly do without. Routine as a 
 law is deadly. Routine as a resource in the temporary 
 exhaustion of impulse and suggestion is often our sal- 
 vation. Coleridge told the story when he sang, — 
 
 " There will come a weary day 
 When, overtaxed at length, 
 Both hope and love beneath 
 The weight give way. 
 Then with a statue's smile, 
 A statue's strength, 
 Patieuco, nothing loth, 
 And uncomplaiuiug, does 
 The work of both." 
 
 But patience, while a strong power, is not "qui jk- 
 sio-hted, and works in ways and habits which havo 
 been made before. 
 
 Of mistakes of method as distinguished from ab- 
 sence of method in the ministry, experience has 
 seemed to me to show that there is one comprehensive 
 dead under which a wonderfully large proportion of 
 them all may be included. It is the passion for ex- 
 pedients. I know of no department of htnnan activ- 
 ity, from the governing of a great nation to the doc- 
 
94 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 toring of a little body, where the disposition is ,.ol 
 constantly appearing to invent some stultlcMi method 
 or to seek some magical and concise prescription 
 vhich sliall obviate the need of careful, comprehen- 
 £-ve study and long-continued application. But thia 
 disposition is nowhere so strong, I think, as in the min- 
 istry. The bringing of truth, of Christ the Truth, 
 to man, of the whole Christ to the whole man, you 
 .VAw think of no work larger in its idea than that. 
 And evidently its methods must be as manifold as are 
 the natures with which it deals. liut we are con- 
 stantly meeting people who seem to have epitomized 
 all the needs of the Church, all the requirements of 
 the successful minister, into some one expedient, some 
 panacea which, if it could only be applied, would 
 overcome every obstacle and bring on at once the per- 
 fect day of preaching. These expedients are things 
 good in themselves, making no doubt some very use- 
 ful part of the great whole ; but when tht-y are mag- 
 nified into solitary importance and offered as solutions 
 of the difficulties that beset the Gospel, the}^ are ludi- 
 crously insuflficient. Many a young minister to-day 
 is staking his whole ministry on some one such idea. 
 He attributes every defect to the imperfect apprehen- 
 8i(jn of that idea in his community. He hopes for 
 every good as that idea comes to be completely real- 
 ized. He can expect no good without it. He can 
 bardly conceive of any evil in connection with it, 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 95 
 
 Perhaps Ins favorite idea is free churches ; a goo3 
 idea indeed, an idea without which there could have 
 been no Christian church at all ; an idea wliicli be- 
 yond all doubt does represent the standard of Chris- 
 tianity, and to which Christiiin practice must some 
 day return ; but by no means the only idea of wor- 
 ship, nor suggesting by any means the only or the 
 principal difficulty in the way of spreading the Gospel. 
 You might break down everj'^ pew door and abolish 
 every pew tax and yet wait to see your churches ami 
 the kingdom of God fill themselves full in vain. An- 
 other's consuming thought is congregational singing. 
 As you listen to him rushing hither and thither shout- 
 ing the praises of his favorite method and dealing 
 dreadful blows at the four-headed Cerberus which hg 
 detests, you are almost ready to believe that if all 
 the people only could lift up their voices and sing the 
 walls of wickedness must tumble into dust. It is a 
 good and healthy agitation. It is well that we should 
 break through the tyranny of old methods and really 
 sing the praises of the Lord. But it is not going to 
 do the work of casting out sin and winning righteous- 
 ness. When the army goes into battle the bands 
 must play, but they do not lead the host. And so it 
 is again with the hobby of interdenominational inter- 
 course, of Christian union. It is well, and I would 
 ihat we had more of it. But, to borrow the army 
 simile again, no courtesies between two regiments 
 
9C LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 ever yet defeated the other iiriny. And so of the 
 church sociiible which tries to entice the passer-by to 
 the altar of the Lord witli tlie familiar but feeble 
 odor of a cup of tea. And so with the children's 
 cliurch ; one of the best and purest of the Church's 
 inventions for her work, but by no means enough to 
 make a sj)ecial and peculiar feature of in any congre- 
 gation. It almost always weakens the preacher for 
 his preaching to adults. There is nothing so insig- 
 nificant that some petty minister will not make it the 
 Christian panacea. A young pastor said to me once, 
 "Wherever else I fail, there is one point in which my 
 ministry will be a success." "And what is that?" 
 said I, expecting something sweet and spiritual. " In 
 printing," he replied. He had devoted himself to 
 setting forth elaborate advertisements, and orders of 
 services, and Sunday-school reward cards, and most 
 complicated parish records, and I suppose his parish 
 is strewn thick with tlmso thick-falling leaves unto 
 this day. No! The clerical or parish hobby is either 
 tli(! fancy of a man who has failed to apprehend the 
 grt'at work of the Gospel, or the refuge of a man who 
 has failed to do it. Its evils are endless. It makes a 
 fantastic Christianity. It keeps us battering at one 
 point in the long citadel of sin and lets the enemy 
 safel}' concentrate all his force there to protect it. It 
 robs us of iill j>ower of large appeal and confines the 
 tru'h which we preach to some small class of people. 
 
THE PREjiCHER IN HIS WORK. 97 
 
 It makes us exalt llie means above the e.ud, till we 
 come to count the means precious, whether it attain 
 the end or not. That is the death which many a par- 
 ish life has died. As George Herbert has it, — 
 
 " What wretcheduess can give liini any room 
 Whose house is foul while he adores his broom ? " 
 
 But finall)^ and worst of all, the passion for expe 
 dients and panaceas narrows our standards of Chris- 
 tian life, and gives us false tests of what are Chris- 
 tians. It is possible to come to think that there can 
 be no conversion in a rented pew ; and that God will 
 not hear the music of a choir, however devoutly it 
 bears the praises of the people up to Him. Beware 
 of hobbies. Fasten yourself to the centre of your 
 ministry ; not to some point on its circumference. 
 The circumference must move when the centre moves. 
 The escape from the slavery of expedients is not 
 in finding each one insufficient, and so changing it for 
 another. The escape from despotism is never in a 
 mere change of despots. Some men's ministr}^ has 
 been occupied all through in the substitution of hobby 
 for hobb}' year after year. Their histoiy is made up 
 of th*^ record of the dynasties of successive expe- 
 flients, following each other like the later Eni])erors, 
 each murdering his predecessor and murdered in his 
 turn. The escape must come in a larger human life 
 for the minister. He must come into larger knowledge 
 
98 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 of men, and be in the truest and best seifse a man ol 
 tlie world. He must get out of the merely ecclesi;ia- 
 tical spirit; that is, he must cease to think of the 
 Church as a petty institution, to be carried on by fan- 
 tastic methods of its own. It must seem to him what 
 it is, the type and pattern of what humanity ought to 
 be, so to be kept large enough that any man, comiuf^ 
 from any exile where the homesickness of his heart 
 has been awakcjied, may find his true and native place 
 awaiting him. The preacher then will know all kinds 
 of men, keeping his life large enough to enter into 
 Bympathy with them. Let me make one special re- 
 mark upon this head. Apart from its incidental ad- 
 vantage, to his style and nuinuer, I think it is good 
 for a minister to do some work besides clerical work, 
 and to write somethincj besides sermons. But he 
 must do it as a minister. And the proof of how large 
 is his vocation, is that he can do it and yet be a min- 
 ister in it all. He can write books, and yet be not a 
 literary man but a minister. He can help the gov- 
 ernment, and yet be not a politician but a minister. 
 There are bad ways, but there are also good ways in 
 which a clergyman may carry his clerical character 
 with him wherever he goes. It may be to your dis- 
 ?redit, or to your credit, that strangers say of you, 
 '* I should know he was a minister." For the best 
 minister is simply the fullest man. You cannot sep- 
 arate him from his manhood. Voltaire said (tf Louis 
 
THE rilEACHEi. N HIS WORK. 99 
 
 XIV., " He was not one of the greatest men but cer- 
 tainly one of the greatest kings that ever lived." It 
 would not be possible to say that of any minister. 
 He who was one of the greatest of ministers must be 
 one of the greatest of men. 
 
 The faults of a minister's method are apt to be of 
 the simplest sort ; as his virtues are of no intricate or 
 complicated kind, but the primai-y virtues of human- 
 ity. I cannot then pass by what, after all, has seemed 
 to me to lie at the bottom of a very large part of the 
 clerical failures, and half-successes which I have wit- 
 nessed. What is called a " success " in the ministry 
 is, indeed, a curious sort of phenomenon, very hard 
 to analyze. It is half cla}^ half gold. It is half sec- 
 ular and half religious, and the two halves are mingled 
 so that it is impossible to separate them. There is 
 too much of religious feeling in our communities to 
 call a minister successful unless he seems to be doing 
 a really spiritual work, and on the other hand there 
 is too steady a watch kept upon economical considera- 
 tions, to give the praise of success to mere spiritual 
 devotion, unless it carries with it the signs of material 
 prosperity. The " successful minister " is a being of 
 such mingled qualities that he leaves open room 
 enough for many men who are not called successful, 
 to be thoroughly good and nobly useful and very 
 bapjty. But still this standard of success has its ad- 
 vantages. It is intelligible. And it brings at once 
 
100 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 loiwaid the simplest of ill causes of failure, and 
 shows it to be the same that brings failure in every 
 department of life. That cause is mere unfaithful- 
 ness, the fact of men's not doing their best with the 
 I)owers that God has given them. I think that it is 
 hard to believe how common this trouble, underlying 
 all troubles, is in the minister's life. I want to urge 
 it upon you very earnestly. You watch the career of 
 some man who does not seem to succeed. You know 
 his piety ; you recognize his intelligence ; you make 
 all kinds of elaborate theories about what there is in 
 his peculiar character that unfits him for effective- 
 ness ; you dwell on his fastidiousness, his i-eserve, the 
 wonderful sensitiveness of his nature. You picture 
 him to yourself writing exquisite sermons, full of 
 thought, which the people are too coarse to compre- 
 hend. And then, Avith tiiis jiicture of him in your 
 mind, yon come to know the habits of his life, and all 
 your fine-spun pity scatters as you learn that, what- 
 ever other hindrances there may be, the hindrance 
 that lies uppermost of all is that the man is not do- 
 ing his best. His wctrk is at loose ends ; he treivts his 
 people with a neglect with which no doctor could 
 treat his patients and no lawyer his clients; and he 
 writes his sermons on Saturday nights, 'i'hat hust I 
 count the crowning disgrace of a man's ministry. It 
 is dishonest. It is giving but the last flicker of the 
 week as it sinks in its socket, to those who, simply to 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 101 
 
 talk about it as a bargain, have paid for the full light 
 burning at its brightest. And yet n.en boast of it. 
 They tell you in how short time they write their ser 
 mons, and'when you hear them preach you only won- 
 der that it took so long. Ah ! my friends, it is won. 
 derful what a central power is the moral law. ihe 
 primary fact of duty lies at the core of everything. 
 Operations which we think have no moral character, 
 move by the power which is coiled up in that spring. 
 Derange it in any man, and his taste becomes cor- 
 rupted, and his intellect suffers distortion. The first 
 necessity for the preacher and the hod-earner is the 
 same. Be faithful, and do your best always for every 
 congregation, and on every occasion.^ 
 
 A very curious study in human nature' is the way 
 in which the moral sense sometimes suffers in connec- 
 
 1 An unknown friend has called my attention to tUe.e good word. 
 of Cotton Mother, since this lecture was delivered. They are from 
 the Ratio Discipline, pp. 59 and GO. ,,,,„„ :„ 
 
 "Hchnrches hear of ministers boasting that they have been m 
 their studies only a few hours on Saturday, or so, they reckon that 
 Buch per>ons rather glory in their shame. _ 
 
 "Sudden sermons they may sometimes admire from their accom- 
 .lished ministers, when the suddenness has not been a chosen nr- 
 ;um.tance. But as one of old, when it was objected agamst his public 
 speeches (in matters of less moment than the salvation of^ souls), re- 
 plied 'I should blush at the incivility of treating so great and wise 
 peciple with anvthing but what rhall be studied; ' so the best mm- 
 jcrsof New England o.dinarily vould blush to add.e.s thcr flocks 
 without premeditatiou." 
 
102 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 'ion with tlie liigliest spiritual experiences. A man 
 wlio will cheat nowhere else will be a hypocrite in 
 .eligion. A man who really wants to convert his 
 brethren will sometimes try to do it by preaching 
 other people's sermons as if they were his own. It 
 is partly, I suppose, the vague sense of elevation 
 which seems to have somewhat enfeebled the hold of 
 the ordinary morality upon a man, as the earth's 
 gravitation weakens for him who mounts among tho 
 stars. And in some men it is that demoralization 
 which comes from feeling themselves in a place for 
 which they are not fit, burdened with duties for which 
 they have no capacity. And that, in political, or com- 
 mercial, or clerical life, is the most demoralizing con- 
 sciousness that a man can feel. 
 
 This question of faithfulness touches, I believe, 
 almost all the ditlioulties in the way of constraint or 
 dictation which a minister meets with from his people. 
 I am apt to believe that almost all the troubles be- 
 tween ministers and parishes are from the minister's 
 folly if not from his fault. Not that there is not 
 often enough blame upon the other side. But it 
 seems to me reasonable that the minister, having an 
 intenser and more concentrated interest in his parish 
 than any layman has, should have that measure of 
 control which, wisely used, might hinder alrLost any 
 trouble before it grew vigorous enough to enlist the 
 ingry interest of the people whose lives are largely 
 
THE rnKACIIER IN II IS WORK. 103 
 
 Dcoupied with other things. There are such things 
 as parish quarrels. If 1 am right, my friends, you 
 will never have one in your parish which you might 
 not have prevented, and never come out of one with- 
 out injury to your character and your Master's cause. 
 It is wonderful to me with what freedom a minister 
 is left to do his work in his own way, if only hia 
 people believe in his scrupulous faithfulness. Take, 
 for instance, the matter of preaching old sermons. 
 It is not good. A new sermon, fresh from the brain, 
 has always a life in it which an old sermon, though 
 better in itself, must lack. The trouble is in the 
 prominence of that personal element in preaching of 
 which I spoke in my first lecture. You may take the 
 sermon off the shelf, and when you have brushed the 
 dust off the cover it is the same sermon that you 
 preached on that memorable day when you were all 
 afire with your new line of study or with the spiritual 
 zeal that was burning about you. You may reproduce 
 the paper but you cannot reproduce the man, and the 
 sermon was man and paper together. No, I would 
 make as rare as possible the preaching of the same 
 sermon to the same people. But what I wanted to 
 Bay was this, that the main objection which the people 
 have to the preaching of old sermons is in the impres- 
 iion that it gives them of unfaithfulness and idleness. 
 Let a minister's wlic'e life make any such suspicion 
 im possible and thert "s no complaint. The minister 
 
104 LECTURES ON PREACIIIXn. 
 
 in whose faithfulness his people believe may use his 
 own discretion. He must not play any trieks. lie 
 must not put old sermons to new texts. To put new 
 sermons to old texts is better. But he may use his 
 judgment, and those sermons, of which there is a cer- 
 tain class, whicli do not lose but rathm- gain by repe- 
 tition, he may repreach again and again till they 
 grow to be to people like their most cherished hymns 
 or passages from some long-loved book of devotion. 
 
 One of tlie most remarkable things about the 
 preacher's methods of work is the way in which they 
 form themselves in the earliest years of his ministry, 
 and then rule him with almost despotic power to the 
 end. I am a slave to-day, and so I suppose is every 
 minister, to ways of work that were made within two 
 or three years after beginning to preach. The new- 
 ness of the occupation, that unex]ji'cti'dness of every- 
 thing to which I aUuded when I began to spi>ak to 
 you this afternoon, opens all the life, and makes it re- 
 ceptive; and then tlu; earnestness and fresh enthusi- 
 asm of those days serves to set the habits that a man 
 makes them, to clothe them with something that is 
 almost sacredness, and to make them jn-actically al- 
 most unchangeable. They an* the years when a 
 preadier needs to be very watchful over his discre- 
 tion and his independence. When the (jlay is in tlie 
 bank, it matters not so much who trcids on it. And 
 wlien the clay is hardened in the vase, it may press 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. lOc 
 
 close upon another vase and yet keep its own shape. 
 But when the clay is just setting, and the shape still 
 soft, then is the time to guard it from the blows or 
 pressures that would distort it forever. Be sure, 
 then, that the habits and methods of your opening 
 ministry are, first of all, your own. Let no respect, 
 however profound or merited, for any hero of the 
 pulpit make you submit yourself to him. Let your 
 own nature freely shape its own ways. Only be sure 
 that those ways do really come out of your own nat- 
 ure, and not out of the merely accidental circum- 
 stances of your first parish. And let them be intel- 
 ligent, not merely such as you happen into, but such 
 as you can give good reasons for. And let them be 
 noble, framed with reference to the large ideal and 
 most sacred purposes of your work, not with reference 
 to its minute conveniences. And let them be broad 
 enough to give you room to grow. It is with ideas 
 and methods of work as it is with houses. To remove 
 from one to another is wasteful and dispiriting ; but 
 to find the one in which we have taken up our abode 
 unfolding new capacity to accommodate our growing 
 mcnral famdy, is satisfactory and encouraging. It 
 gives us the sense at once of settlement and progress. 
 He is the happiest and most effective old man whoso 
 life has been full of growth, but free from revolution ; 
 who is living still in the same thoughts and habits 
 which he had when a boy, but has found them as the 
 
106 LECTURES ON PREACHIXG. 
 
 Helrews say that tlie Israelites found their clnthes i/i 
 the desert during the forty years, not merely never 
 waxing old upon them, but growing with their growth 
 as they passed on from youth to manhood. 
 
 I liojje that I shall not have disappointed your ex- 
 pectation in what I have said about the preacher's 
 methods by dwelling so largely upon prinei|)l('.s, and 
 going so little into details. It would V)e easy enough 
 for any minister to amuse himself, and perhaps amuse 
 you, by recitations from his diary. But it would not 
 be good. I want to make you know two things: 
 first, that if your ministry is to be good for any- 
 thing, it must be your ministry, and not a feel)le echo 
 of any other man's ; and, second, that the Christian ' 
 ministry is not the mere practice of a set of rules and 
 precedents, but is a broad, free, fresh meeting of a 
 man with men, in such close contact that the Christ 
 who has entered into his life may, through his, enter 
 into theirs. 
 
 I luive but a few words to add upon the spirit in 
 which the j)reacher does his best work. Aftca* what 
 I have been saying, my points will need no elabora- 
 tion. Forgive mc if I venture to put them in the 
 Bimj)lest and strongest imperatives I can command. 
 
 First, count and rejoice to count yourself the ser- 
 vant of the people to whom you minister. Not in 
 any worn-out figure but in very truth, call yourself 
 »nd be their servant. 
 
THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 107 
 
 Second, never_alIow youi'self to feel equal to youi 
 work._ If you ever find that spirit growing on you, 
 be vifraid, and instantly attack your hardest piece of 
 work, try to convert your toughest infidel, try to 
 preach on your most exacting theme, to show your- 
 self how unequal to it all you are. 
 
 Third, be_p rofoandl y h ones t. Never dare to say 
 in the pulpit or in private, through ardent excite- 
 ment or conformity to what you know you are e:f- 
 pected to say, one word which at the moment when 
 you say it, you do not believe. It would cut down 
 the range of what you say, perhaps, but it would en- 
 dow every word that was left with the force of ten. 
 
 And last of all, be vital, be alive, not dead. Do 
 everything that can keep your vitality at its fullest. 
 Even the physical vitality do not dare to disregard. 
 One of the most striking preachers of our country 
 seems to me to have a large part of his power simply 
 in his physique, in the impression of vitality, in the 
 magnetisni almost like a material thing, that passes 
 between him and the people who sit before him. 
 Pi'ay for and work for fulness of life above every- 
 thing ; full red blood in the body ; full honestj'^ and 
 truth in the mind ; and the fulness of a grateful love 
 for the Saviour in your heart. Then, however men 
 set their mark of failure or success upon your niinis- 
 hrj', you cannot fail, you must succeed. 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 
 
 I 
 
 HAVE dwelt long upon the preacher and his char- 
 acter because he is essential to the sermon. He 
 cannot throw a sermon forth into tlie world as an au- 
 thor can his book, as an artist can his statue, and let 
 it live thenceforth a life wholly independent of him- 
 self. That is the reason why sermons are not ordi- 
 narily interesting reading. At least that is one of the 
 reasons. Now and then you do find a volume of ser- 
 mons which, as it were, keep their author in them, 
 60 that as you read them you feel him present in the 
 room. But, ordinarily, reading sermons is like list- 
 ening to an c!cho. The words are there, but the per- 
 sonal intonation is gone out of them and there is an 
 unreality about it all. Now and thou you find sei-- 
 mons which do not suggest their ever having been 
 preached and they give you none of this feeling. But 
 they were not good sermons, scarcely even real ser- 
 mons, when they were preached. In general it ia 
 true that the sermon which is good to ]n-each is poor 
 to read and tl;e sermon which is good to read is poor 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 109 
 
 CO preach. There are exceptions, but this is gener- 
 ally true. 
 
 Whatever is in the sermon must be in the preacher 
 first ; clearness, logicalness, vivacity, earnestness, 
 sweetness, and light must be personal qualities in 
 him before they are qualities of tliought and languagQ 
 in what he utters to his people. If you have your 
 artist you have only to supply your marble and chisel 
 with the mere technicid skill, and you have your 
 statue. If you have your preacher very little more 
 is needed to set free the sermon which is in him. In 
 this lecture and the next I want to speak about the 
 sermon. I make a division which will not be very 
 precise, but may be of some service ; and shall speak 
 to-day more of the sermon in its general purpose and 
 idea, and next Thursday more of the make and 
 method of the sermon. 
 
 It seems to me, then, that at the very outset the 
 definite and immediate purpose which a sermon has 
 set before it makes it impossible to consider it as a 
 work of art, and everj^ attempt to consider it so works 
 injury to the purpose for which the sermon was 
 created. Many of the ineffective sermons that ace 
 made owe their failure to a blind and fruitless effort 
 to produce something which shall be a work of art, 
 prnforraing to souie type or pattern which is not 
 clearly understood but is supposed to be essential and 
 eternal. But the unreasonableness of this appears 
 
110 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 the moment that we think of it. A sermon exists 
 in and for its purpose. That purpose is the persuad- 
 ing and moving of men's souls. That purpose must 
 never be lost sight of. If it ever is, the sermon flags. 
 It is not always on the surface ; not always impetu- 
 ous and eager in the discourses of the settled paster 
 as it is in the appeals of the Evangelist who speaks 
 this once and this once only to the men he sees be- 
 fore him The sermon of the habitual preacher 
 grows more sober, but it never can lose out of it this 
 consciousness of a purpose ; it never can justify itself 
 in any self-indulgence that will hinder or delay that 
 l)urpose. It is always aimed at men. It is always 
 looking in their faces to see how they are moved. It 
 knows no essential and eternal type, but its law 
 for what it ought to be comes from the needs and 
 fickle changes of the men for whom it lives. Now 
 this is thoroughly inartistic. Art contemplates and 
 serves the absolute beauty. The simple work of art 
 is the pure utterance of beautiful thought in beau- 
 tiful form without further purpose than simply that 
 it should be uttered. The poem or the statue may 
 instruct, inspire, and rebuke men, but that design, if 
 it were present in the making of the poem or the 
 statue, vitiated the purity of its artistic quality. Art 
 knows nothing of the tumultuous eagerness of ear- 
 nest purpose. She is supremely calm and independ- 
 ent of the whims of men. Phidias cast among a 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. Ill 
 
 barbarous race must carve not some hideous idol 
 which shall stir their coarse blood by its frantic ex- 
 travagance, but the same serene and lofty beauty of 
 Athene which he would carve at Athens. If it wholly 
 fails to reach their gross and blunted senses, that ia 
 no disgrace to it as a work of art, for the artistic and 
 the didactic are separate from one another. 
 
 And yet we find a constant tendency in the his- 
 tory of preaching to treat the sermon as a work of 
 art. It is spoken of as if it were something which 
 had a value in itself. We hear of beautiful sermons, 
 as if they existed solely on the ground that "beauty 
 is its own excuse for being." The age of the great 
 French preachers, the age of Louis XIV. with its ser- 
 mons preached in the salons of critical and sceptical 
 noblemen, and of ladies who offered to their friends 
 the entertainment of ^le last discovered preacher, 
 was full of this false idea of the sermon as a work of 
 art. And the soberer Englishman, whether he be the 
 Puritan praising the painful exposition to which he 
 has just listened, or the Churchman delighting in the 
 polished periods of Tillotson or South, has his own 
 way of falling into the same heresy. I think it does 
 lis good to go back to the simple sermons of the New 
 Testament. I do not speak of the perfect discourses 
 of our Lord, though m them we should find the 
 strongest confirmation of what I am now saying : 
 but take the sermons of St. Peter, of St. Stephen, 
 
112 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 of St. Paul, and from tbem come down to the ser- 
 mons which have been great as sermons ever since. 
 Through all their variety you find this one thing 
 constantly true about them : they were all valuable 
 solely for the work they could accomplish. They 
 were tools, and not works of art. To turn a tool into 
 a work of art, to elaborate the shape and chase the 
 surface of the axe with which you are to hew your 
 wood, is bad taste ; and to give any impression in a 
 sermon that it has forgotten its purpose and been 
 shaped for anything else than what in the largest 
 extent of those great words might be described as 
 saving souls, makes it offensive to a truly good taste 
 and dull to the average man, who feels an incon- 
 gruity which he cannot define. The power of the 
 sermons of the Paulist fathers in the Romish Chui'ch 
 and of Mr. Moody in Protestantism lies simply here: 
 in the clear and undisturbed presence of their pur- 
 pose ; and maiiy ministers who never dream of such 
 a thing, who think that they are preaching purely 
 for the good of souls, are losing the jDOwer'' out of 
 their sermons because they ai'e trjnng, even without 
 knowing it, to make them not only sermons, but 
 works of art. There was an old word which I think 
 fias ceased to be used. Men used to talk of " ser- 
 monizing." They said that some good preacher waa 
 "a fine sermc-nizer." The word contained just this 
 vice •. it made the sermon an achievement, to b(} at- 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 113 
 
 tempted and enjoyed for itself apart from an }■ thing 
 that it could do, like a picture or an oratorio, like 
 the Venus of Milo or the Midsumraer-Nig-ht's Dream. 
 And here lies the truth concerning the way in which 
 really high truth and careful thought may be brought 
 to a congregation. We hear a good deal about preach- 
 ing over people's heads. There is such a thing. But 
 generally it is not the character of the ammunition, but 
 the fault of aim, that makes the missing shot. There 
 is nothing worse for a preacher than to come to think 
 that he must preach down to j^eople ; that they can- 
 not take the very best he has to give. He grows to 
 despise his own sermons, and the people quickly learn 
 to sympathize with their minister. The people will • 
 get the heart out of the most thorough and thought- 
 ful sermon, if only it really is a sermon. Even sub- 
 
 J^ety of thought, the tracing of intricate relations of 
 ideas, it is remarkable how men of no subtle thought 
 
 "will follow it, if it is really preached. But subtlety 
 which has delighted in itself, which has spun itself 
 fine for its own pleasure in seeing how fine it could 
 be spun, vexes and throws them off ; and they are 
 right. Never be afraid to call upon your people to 
 follow your best thought, if only it is really trying to 
 lead them somewhere. The confidence of the minis- 
 ter in the people is at the bottom of every confidence 
 of the people in the minister. 
 
 What I have been saying bears also on what we 
 
114 LECTURES OxV PREACHING. 
 
 hear, every now and then, from the days of the 
 " Spectator " down, the expression of a wish tlmt 
 moderate ministers, instead of giving people their 
 own moderate thought, wouki recur to the good work 
 which has been ah-eady done, and read some sermon 
 of one of the great masters. There too, there is the 
 "sermonizing" idea. The real sermon idea is lost. 
 Such a practice coming into vogue would speedily 
 destroy the pulpit's power. Not merely would it be 
 a confession of incapacity, but the idea of speech, of 
 present address for a present purpose, would disap- 
 jiear. I do not think we could anticipate any con- 
 tinual interest, scarcely any perpetual existence for 
 the preaching work in case such an idea became prev 
 alent ;uid accepted. 
 
 The first good consequence of the emphatic state- 
 ment that a sermon is to be considered solely with 
 reference to its proper purposes will be in a new and 
 larger freedom for the preacher. We make the idea 
 of a sermon too specific, wishing to conform it to 
 some preestablished type of what a sermon ought to 
 be. There is nothing which a sermon oujrht to be 
 except a fit medium of truth to men. There is no 
 model of a sermon so strange and nOvel, so different 
 from every pattern upon which sermons have been 
 Bha[)cd before, that if it became evident to you that 
 that was the form through which the message which 
 you had to tell would best reach the men to when/ 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 115 
 
 you had to tell it, it would not be your right, nay, 
 be your duty to preach your truth in that new form. 
 I grant that the accepted forms of preaching were 
 shaped originally by a lesire for utility, and only 
 gradually assumed a secondary value and importanca 
 for their own sakes. That is the way in which every 
 such superstitious value of anything originates. I 
 grant, therefore, that the young preacher may well 
 feel that a certain presumption of advantage belongs 
 to those types of sermons which he finds in use. He 
 will not wantonly depart from them. I am sure that 
 all hearers of sermons will say : '' Better the most 
 abject conformity to rule than departure from rule for 
 the mere sake of departiu-e. Better the stiff move- 
 ments of imitation than the fantastic gestures of de- 
 liberate originality." But what I plead for is, that 
 in all your desire to create good sermons you should 
 think no sermon good that does not do its work. Let 
 the end for which you preach play freely in and mod- 
 ify the form of your preaching. He who is original 
 for the sake of originality is as much governed by 
 the type from which he departs as is another man 
 who slavishly conforms to it ; but he who freely 
 uses the types which he finds, and yet compels thcru 
 always to bend to the purposes for which lie uses 
 them, he is their true master, and not their slave. 
 Such originality as that alone at once secures the 
 best effectiveness of the preacher, and advances at 
 
116 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 the same time the general type and idea of tlie ser- 
 mon, preserving it from monotony and making it bet- 
 ter and better from age to age. 
 
 Now let me turn to some of those questions affect- 
 ing the general idea of what a sermon ought to be, 
 which are continually recurring, and say a few worda 
 on each. 
 
 One of the most interesting of those questions, 
 which appears in many forms, arises from the neces- 
 sity of which I have already so much spoken, of min 
 gling the elements of personal influence and abstract 
 truth to make the perfect sermon. There are some 
 sermons in which the preacher does not appear at all ; 
 there are other sermons in which he is offensively and 
 crudely prominent ; there are still other sermons 
 where he is hidden and yet felt, the force of his per- 
 sonal conviction and earnest love being poured through 
 tlie arguments which he uses, and the promises which 
 he holds out. (3f the second class of sermons in 
 which the minister's personality is offensively promi- 
 nent, the most striking instance is what seems to 
 me to have become rather common of late, and what 
 I may call the autobiographical style of preacli- 
 ing. There are some preachers to whom one might 
 listen for a year, and then he could write their bi- 
 ography, if it were worth the doing. Every truth 
 they wish to teach is illustrated by some event in 
 their own history. Every change of character which 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 117 
 
 i/hey wish to urge is set forth under the form in 
 which that change took place in them. The story 
 of how they were converted becomes as familiar to 
 their congregation as the story of the conversion of 
 St. Paul. It is the crudest attempt to blend per- 
 sonality and truth. They are not fused with one 
 another, but only tied together. It has a certain 
 power. It is wonderful how interesting almost any 
 man becomes if he talks frankly about himself. You 
 cannot help listening to the garrulous unfolding of 
 his histor}^ And in the pulpit no doubt it gives a 
 certain vividness, when a popular preacher whose peg- 
 pie are already interested in, and curious about his 
 personality, after enforcing some argument, suddenly 
 turns, and instead of saying, after the pulpit manner, 
 " But the objector will reply," briskly breaks out 
 with, " Last Monday afternoon a man came into my 
 etudy," or " A man met me in the street, and said, 
 Mr. this or that" (using his own name), "what do 
 3'ou make of this objection ? " It gives a clear con- 
 creteness to the whole, and feeds that curiosity about 
 each other's ways of living out of which all our 
 gossip grows. 
 
 The evils of the habit are evident enough. Not to 
 speak of its oppressiveness to the best taste, nor of 
 the way in which its power dies out, as the much- 
 paraded person of the niinistev grows familiar and 
 unimposing, it certainly must have a tendency tc 
 
118 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 narrow the suggested range of Christian truth and 
 experience. In parishes where such strong promi- 
 nence belongs to the preacher's personahty, where the 
 people are always hearing of how he learned thia 
 truth or passed through that emotion, all apprehen- 
 sion of thought and realization of experience narrows 
 itself. It is expected in just that way which has 
 been so often and so vividly pictured. It is distrusted 
 if it comes in other forms. The rich variety and 
 lai-geness of the Christian life is lost. There are 
 some parishes which, in the course of a long pastor- 
 ate, have become but the colossal repetition of their 
 minister's personality. They are the form of his ex- 
 perience seen through a mist, grown large in size but 
 vague and dim in outline. Every parishioner is a 
 weakened repetition of the minister's ideas and ways. 
 I think that what a minister learns to rejoice in more 
 and more is the endless difference of that Christian 
 life, which is yet always the same. It shows him the 
 possibility of a Christianity as universal as humanity, 
 a Christianity in which the diversity and unity of 
 humanity might both be kept. And any undue promi- 
 nence of himself in liis teaching, loses tlie largeness 
 )n which the hope of this variety in unity depends. 
 
 There is something better than this. There is a 
 fine and subtle infusion of a man into his work, which 
 achieves what this crude fastening of the two together 
 attempts, but fails to accomplish. Take, for instance, 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 119 
 
 the sermons of Robertson. You will know, from al- 
 lusions to them wliicli I have already made, that I 
 sympathize very fully with that high estimate which 
 6uch multitudes of jDeople have set upon those re- 
 markable discourses. I think that in all the best 
 qualities of preaching they stand supreme among the 
 sermons of our time. And one of the most remark- 
 able things about them is the way in which the per- 
 sonal force of the preacher, and the essential power 
 of the truth, are blended into one strong impressive- 
 nesss. The personality never muddies the thought. 
 I do not remember one allusion to his own history, 
 one anecdote of his own life ; but they arc his ser- 
 mons. The thought is stronger for us because he has 
 thought it. The feelins: is more vivid because he has 
 felt it. And always he leads us to God by a way 
 along which he has gone himself. It is interesting to 
 read along with the sermons the story of his life, to 
 see what he was passing through at the date when 
 this sermon or that was preached, and to watch, as 
 you often may, without any suspicion of mere fanci- 
 fulness, how the experience shed its power into the 
 sermon, but left its form of facts outside ; how his 
 Bermons were like the heaven of his life, in which the 
 spirit of his life lived after it had cast away its body. 
 There have, indeed, been preachers and writers 
 whose utterance of truth has fallen naturally in the 
 forms of autobiography, and yet who have been at 
 
i'20 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 once strong and broad. You can gather all of Lati- 
 mer's history out of his sermons, and jNIilton haa 
 given us a large part of his teaching in connection 
 with the events of his own life. But ordinarily that 
 ii true in literature, and certainly in preaching, which 
 is true in life. It is not the man who forces the 
 events of his life on you who most puts the spirit of 
 his life into you. The most unreserved men are not 
 the most influential. A reserved man who cares for 
 truth, and cares that his brethren should know the 
 truth, who therefore is always holding back the mere 
 envelope of accident and circumstance in which the 
 truth has embodied itself to him, and yet sending 
 forth the truth with all the clearness and force which 
 it has gathered for him from that embodiment, he is 
 the best preacher,- as everywhere he is the most influ- 
 ential man. Try to live such a life, so full of events 
 and relationships, that the two great things, the 
 power of Christ and the value of your brethren's 
 souls, shall be tangible and certain to j'ou, not sub- 
 jects of speculation and belief, but realities whieh you 
 have seen and known ; then siidc the shell of per- 
 sonal experience, lest it should hamper the truth that 
 you must utter, and let the truth go out as the shot 
 goes, carrying the force of the gun with it, but leav- 
 ing the gun behind. 
 
 There is something beautiful to me in the WAy in 
 viMich. the utterance of the best part of a man's jwn 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 121 
 
 life, its essence, its result, which the pulpit makea 
 possible, and even tempts, is welcomed by many men, 
 who seem to find all other utterance of themselves 
 impossible. I have known shy, reserved men, Avho, 
 standing in their pulpits, have drawn back before a 
 thousand eyes veils that were sacredly closed when 
 only one friend's eyes could see. You might talk 
 with them a hundred times, and you would not learn 
 so much of what they were as if you once lieard them 
 preach. It was partly the impersonality of the great 
 congregation. Humanity, without the offense of in- 
 dividuality, stood there before them. It was no vio- 
 lation of their loyalty to themselves to tell their se- 
 cret to mankind. It was a man who silenced them. 
 But also, besides this, it was, I think, that the sight 
 of many waiting faces set free in them a new, clear 
 knowledge of what their truth or secret was, un- 
 snarled it from the petty circumstances into which it 
 had been entangled, called it first into clear conscious- 
 ness, and then tempted it into utterance with an au- 
 thority which they did not recognize in an individual 
 curiosity demanding the details of their life. Our 
 race, represented in a great assemblage, has more au- 
 thority and more beguilement for many of us than 
 the single man, however near he be. And he, who is 
 eilent before the interviewer, pours out the very 
 depths of his soul to the great multitude. He will 
 tot print his diary for the world to read, but he will 
 
V22 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 tell his fellow-men what Christ may be to them, sc 
 that they shall see, as God sees, what Christ has been 
 to him. 
 
 I think again that this first truth of preaching, the 
 truth that the minister enters into the sermon, touehea 
 upon the point of which I spoke in my last sermon, 
 the authority of the sermon. The sermon is God'a 
 message sent by you to certain of your fellow-men. 
 If the message came to your fellow-men just as it 
 came from God it must be absolutely true and must 
 have absolute authority. If the fallible messenger 
 mixes himself with his infallible message, tbe absolute 
 authority of the message is in some degree qualified. 
 But we have seen that the very idea of the sermon 
 implies that the messenger must mingle himself with 
 the message that he brings ; and, as a mere matter of 
 fact, we Imoio that every preacher does declare the 
 truth from his own point of view and follows his own 
 judgment, enlightened by his study and his prayer, 
 when he declares how the eternal truth applies to 
 ttMuporary circumstances. Some things which you 
 say from the pulpit you know; other things are your 
 speculations. This is true very largely of the antici- 
 pations and prophecies about the destiny of the Gos- 
 pel, about the relations which the Gospel holds to the 
 circumstances of special times in which ministers in- 
 vlulge. John Wesley used to say that " Infidels know, 
 whether Christians know it or not, that the giving up 
 
THE IDEA OE THE SERMON. 128 
 
 witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible." When 
 we were children it used to be preached to us that the 
 Bible must stand or fall witli human slaver3^ And 
 now we hear continually that this or that will happen 
 to religion if such or such a theory of natural science 
 should be accepted. Such prophecies are always bad. 
 Tests which are not essential and absolute tests do 
 great harm. But these are instances of the way in 
 which speculations, personal opinions, prejudices, if 
 you will, must attach themselves to any live man's 
 utterance of the truth. It is inevitable ; and what 
 must be the result ? Either all speculation must be 
 cut away and the sermon be reduced to the mere rep- 
 etition of indisputable and undisputed truth : and the 
 mere primary facts of Christianity which alone are 
 held absolutely "semper, ubique et ab omnibus" must 
 make the sum of preaching ; or else the preacher must 
 let the people clearlj^ understand that between the 
 facts that are his message and the philosophy of those 
 facts which is his best and truest judgment there is a 
 clear distinction. The first come with the authority 
 of God's revelation. The others come with what 
 persuasion their essential reasonableness gives them. 
 Now the first method is impracticable. No man ever 
 did it. No man who claims to preach nothing but the 
 simple Gospel preaches it so simply that it has not in 
 •t something of his own speculation about it. The 
 ftther method is the only method. Even St. Paul 
 
124 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 camo to it in his epistles. But how few preachers 
 frankly adopt it. We cover all we sa}' — our cnido 
 guesses, our ignorant anticipations — with a certain 
 vague antl undefined authority ; and men, hearing 
 themselves called on to believe them all, and seeing 
 part of them to be untrue, really believe none of 
 them in any genuine or hearty way. We stretch our 
 authority to try to make it cover so much that it 
 grows thin and will not decently cover anything at 
 nil. Frankness is what we need, frankness to say 
 " This is God's truth, and this other is what I think." 
 If we Avere frank like that, see what good things 
 would come. The minister would have room for in- 
 tellectual change and growth, and not have to steal 
 them as if they were something to which he had no 
 right. The people could hear many men preach and 
 hear them differ from each other and yet not be be- 
 wildered and confounded. And every preacher, with 
 the clearly recognized right, would have to accept 
 the duty of being a thinker in the things of God. 
 
 One of the most interesting questions which meets 
 us as we try to form an idea of what the sermon 
 ought to be, is that suggested by the occasional or 
 constant outcry against the preaching of Doctrine, 
 and the call for practical sermons, or for what is 
 called " preaching Christ only." Let me speak of 
 this. I do not hold that the outcry is absurd. I do 
 not think that it is one to which the preacher ought 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 12o 
 
 to slmc liis ears. It is a very blind and unintelligent 
 cry, no doubt. All popular outcries are that. Every 
 popular movement and demand has in genel'al the 
 same history. It begins with a vague discontent 
 that never even attempts to give an account of what 
 it means, and it passes on into three different man- 
 ifestations of itself ; one, an honest attempt by its 
 own adherents to declare its philosophy and give an 
 intelligible reason for it ; another, an effort by those 
 who dislike it to misrepresent and to defame it ; a 
 third the adoption of its phrases by people who care 
 little about it but like to affect an interest in what- 
 ever is uppermost. In this last stage the popular 
 movement becomes a fashionable cant. Thej-e never 
 was a stir and dissatisfaction, a dislodging and out- 
 reachins of men's minds which did not show itself 
 in all these forms. This dissatisfaction with vhat is 
 called doctrinal preaching appears in all throe. At 
 the bottom it is a discontent with something that the 
 souls of men feel to be wrong. Then comes the en- 
 deavor of men to state the grievance, which 's often 
 very foolishly done, and would, if carried out. sweep 
 away everything like positive Christianity together. 
 Then comes the misrepresentation of the popular de- 
 mand, which talks about it as if it all came of the 
 spirit of indifference or unbelief. And then finally 
 succeeds that which is the lowest degradation tc 
 which anything which might be an intelligent opii^ior 
 
126 LECTURES ON PRE A( RING. 
 
 can be reduced, the affectation which pn^tends to be in 
 horror at anything like dogin;itisin, and repeats with- 
 out meaning the praises of an undogmatic preaching. 
 Now the minister meets all of these. What shall he 
 do ? It is easy enough for him to expose the illogical 
 reasoning, easy for him to see its misconceptions, 
 easy for him to despise its cant, but it ought not to 
 be easy for him to shut his ears to that out of which 
 they all come, that deep, blind, unintelligent discon- 
 tent with something which is evidently wrong. He 
 must bring his intelligence to bear on that. It can- 
 not tell what it means itself. He must find out what 
 it means, and not be deterred by the offensiveness 
 of any of its exhibitions from a careful understandiug 
 of its true significance. 
 
 For it does mean something, and what it means 
 is this : that men who are locking for a law of life 
 and an inspiration of life are met by a theory of 
 life. Much of our preaching is like delivering lect- 
 ures upon medicine to sick people. The lecture is 
 true. The lecture is interesting. Nay, the truth of 
 the lecture is important, and if the sick man could 
 learn the truth of the lecture he would be a bet <er 
 patient, he would take his medicine more responsibly 
 and regulate his diet more intelligently. But still 
 the fact remains that the lecture is not medicine, and 
 that to give the medicine, not to deliver the lecture, 
 is the preacher's duty. I know the delusiveness oi 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON: 127 
 
 Bucb an analogy. Let us not urge it too far ; but let 
 us own that the idea which has haunted the religious 
 life of man, and which is not true, has had a serious 
 and bad effect on preaching. That idea is that the 
 tenure of certain truths, and not the possession of a 
 certain character, is a saving thing. It is the notion 
 that faith consists in the believing of propositions. 
 Let that heresy be active or latent in a preacher's 
 mind, and he inevitably falls into the vice which 
 people complain of v/hen they talk about doctrinal 
 preaching. He declares truth for its own value and 
 not with direct reference to its result in life. 
 
 It is not my place to argue here that the idea of 
 faith from which such preaching comes is not the 
 scriptural idea, not the idea of Jesus. 13 ut it does 
 come within my region to point out the influence that 
 a man's first idea of saving faith must have upon his 
 whole conception of a sermon. The preacher who 
 thinks that faith is the holding of truth, must ever 
 be aiming to save men from believing error and to 
 bring them to the knowledge of what is true. The 
 man who thinks that faith is personal loyalty, must 
 always be trying to bring men to Christ and Christ 
 to men. Which is the true idea ? That, as I said, 
 't is not for me to discuss. But I may beg -you to 
 consider seriously what the faith was that Christ 
 longed so to see in his disciples, and what that faith 
 laust be whose " trial " or education St. Pet(!r saj^a 
 
128 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 " is much more precious than of gold that perishes." 
 Such words as those carry us inevitably into the 
 reahn of cliaracter, which we know is the one thing 
 in man wliich God vahies and for wliicli Christ 
 labored and lived and died. 
 
 This does seem to me to make the truth about the 
 preaching of doctrine very plain. The salvation of 
 men's souls from sin, the renewing and perfecting of 
 their characters, is the great end of all. But that is 
 d.Mie by Chrisi. To bring tliem then to Christ that 
 lie may do it, to make Christ jilain to them that 
 they may find Him, this is the preacher's work. But 
 I cannot do my duty in making Christ plain unless 1 
 tell them of Him all the richness that I know. I 
 must keep nothing back. All that has come to me 
 about Him from His word, all that has grown clear 
 to me about His nature or His methods by my in- 
 ward or outward experience, all that He has told me 
 of Himself, becomes part of the message that T must 
 tell to those men whom He has sent me to call home 
 to Himself. I will do this in its fulness. And this 
 is the preaching of doctrine, positive, distinct, charac- 
 teristic Christian Tiiith. Only, the truth has always 
 character beyond it as its ulterior purpose. Not 
 until I forget that, and begin to tell men about Christ 
 .18 if that they should know the truth about Him, 
 and not that they should become what knowing the 
 truth about Him would help them be, were the final 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 129 
 
 purpose of my preaching, not until then do I begin 
 to preach doctrine in the wrong way which men ai'e 
 trying to describe wlien they talk about " doctrinal 
 preaching." 
 
 The truth is, no preaching ever had any strong 
 power that was not the preaching of doctrine. Th*^ 
 preachers that have moved and held men have always 
 preached doctrine. No exhortation to a good life 
 that does not put behind it some truth as deep as 
 eternity can seize and hold the conscience. Preach 
 doctrine, preach all the doctrine that you know, and 
 learn forever more and more ; but preach it always, 
 not that men may believe it, but that men may be 
 saved by believing it. So it shall be live, not dead. 
 So men shall rejoice in it and not decry it. So they 
 shall feed on it at your hands as on the bread of life, 
 solid and sweet, and claiming for itself the appetite 
 of man which God made for it. 
 
 I am inclined to think that the idea of a sermon is 
 so properly a unit, that a sermon involves of necessity 
 such elements in combination, the absence of any 
 one of which weakens the sermon-nature, that the 
 ordinary classifications of sermons are of little con- 
 sequence. We hear of expository preaching and 
 topical sermons, of pi-actical sermons, of hortatory 
 discourses, each separate species seeming to stand by 
 itself. It seems as if the preacher were expected to 
 letermine each week what kind jf sermon "^he next 
 
 9 
 
130 LECTURES uN PREACHING. 
 
 Sunday was to enjoy and set himself deliberately to 
 produce it. It may be well, but I say frankly that 
 to my mind the sermon seems a unit and tliat no 
 sermon seems complete that does not include all these 
 elements, and that the attempt to make a sermon of 
 one sort alone mangles the idea and produces a one- 
 sided thing. One element will preponderate in every 
 sermon according to the nature of the subject that is 
 treated, and the structure of the sermon will vary 
 according as you choose to announce for it a topic or 
 to make it a commentary upon some words of Christ 
 or His apostles. But the mere preponderance of one 
 element must not exclude the others, and the dif- 
 ference of forms does not really make a difference of 
 sermons. The preaching which is wholly exposition 
 men are apt to find dull and pointless. It is heat 
 lightning that quivei-s over many topics but strikes 
 nowhere. The preaching that is the discussion of a 
 topic may be interesting, but it grows unsatisfactoiy 
 because it does not fasten itself to the authority of 
 Scripture. It tempts the preacher's genius and in- 
 vention but is apt to send people away witli a feeling 
 that they have heard him more than they have heard 
 God. The sermon which only argues is almost sure 
 to argue in vain, and the sermon which only exhorts 
 is like a man who blows the wood and coal to which 
 he has not first put a light. Either is incomplete 
 %lone ; but to supplement each by the other in 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 131 
 
 another sermon is certainly a very crude, imperfecl: 
 way to meet the difficulty. It is better to start by 
 feeling that every sermon must have a solid rest on 
 Scripture, and the pointedness which comes of a clear 
 subject, and the conviction which belongs to well- 
 thought argument, and the warmth that proceeds 
 from earnest appeal. I spoke of vagueness as the 
 fault that most of all attended what is ordinarily 
 called expository preaching. Besides this, there is 
 the other fault of narrow view. I know that fault 
 does not belong to it of necessity. I know that the 
 expositor may refuse to become the mere ingenious 
 interpreter of texts and the distiller of partial doc- 
 trines out of one petal of a great book or argument 
 which is a symmetrical flower. He may insist on 
 taking in the purpose of the whole Epistle as he com- 
 ments upon one isolated chapter. He may claim light 
 from the manifold radiance of the whote New Testa- 
 ment to let him see the meaning of a doubtful verse. 
 But we all know the danger of the mere expositor of 
 any book, whether that book be Shakespeare or the 
 Bible. There is no reason why, in the Bible as in 
 Shakespeare, the minute study of parts should not 
 be dangerous to the conception of the whole. The 
 same powers and the same weaknesses of the human 
 mind are present in the sacred study as in vdiat we 
 2all the profane study. The escape is not in the 
 ^bandonment of minute and faithful study, but in th» 
 
132 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 careful preservation of the larger purpose and spirit 
 of tlie work. Our literature abounds in illustrations 
 of ihe difference. Compare the noble and vivid 
 pages of Dean Stanley's " Jewish Church " with the 
 labor of the ordinary textual commentator, and which 
 is the true expositor of the Old Testament? The 
 larger view in which the poetry and the essential 
 truth resides comes in the attempt to grasp the topic 
 of the whole. And so that preaching which most 
 harmoniously blends in the single sermon all these 
 varieties of which men make their classifications, the 
 preaching which is strong in its appeal to authority, 
 wide in its grasp of truth, convincing in its appeal to 
 reason, and earnest in its address to the conscience 
 and the heart, all of these at once, that preaching 
 comes nearest to the tj^pe of the apostolical epistles, 
 is the most complete and so the most powerful ap- 
 proach of truth to the whole man, and so is the kind 
 of preaching which, with due freedom granted to our 
 jdiosyncracies, it is best for us all to seek and edu- 
 cate. 
 
 There is indeed another classification of sermons 
 which often occurs to me and which I think is not 
 without its use. It belongs not to the mere form 
 which a sermon takes, but to the side on which it ap- 
 liroaches and undertakes to convince the human mind. 
 Every "eality of God may be recognized by us in its 
 oeauty, its righteousness, oi' its usefulness, I may see, 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 133 
 
 for instance, of God's justice either the absohite beauty 
 of it, may stand in awe before it as the perfect utter- 
 ance of the perfect nature, may desire to come near 
 to it as the most majestic tiling in tlie whole universe, 
 may love it solely for itself. Or I may be possessed 
 with the relations which it holds to my own moral nat- 
 ure. It may impress me not so much as a quality in 
 Grod as a relationship between God's life and mine. It 
 may fill me with a sense of sin, make me realize temp- 
 tation and stir the depths of moral struggle in my life. 
 Or yet again, I may realize that justice as the regu- 
 lative power of the universe, see how conformity to it 
 means peace and prosperity from centre to circum- 
 ference of this vast order. I may rejoice in it not 
 for what it is but for what it does. Of these three 
 conceptions of God's justice, one appeals to the soul 
 and its intuitions of eternal fitness, the second to the 
 conscience and its knowledge of right and wrong, the 
 third to the practical instinct with its love of visible 
 achievement. Now here we have the suggestions of 
 three different sermons. The message which we have 
 to bring is the same message, but we bring it to three 
 different doors of the same manhood which it desires 
 to enter. And one preacher will bring his message 
 oftenest to one door, appealing mostly in his sei-mons 
 to the soul, or to the conscience, or to the practical 
 lense. And one congregation or one generation will 
 !iave (uie dooi more open than the others, its rircuin 
 
 / 
 
134 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 stances in some way making it most approachablfl 
 upon that side. Here is the free room for the per- 
 sonal differences of men to play within the great unity 
 of the sermon idea. Among the great French preach- 
 ers there has always been drawn an evident distinc- 
 tion corresponding veiy nearly to this whicli I have 
 defined. Masillon is the interpreter of the religious in- 
 stinct, speaking to the heart. Bossuet is the preacher 
 of dogma, appealing to the conscience. Bourdaloue 
 is the preacher of morality, addressing himself to rea- 
 son. Either of these sermons may be of the expos- 
 itory or of the topical sort. All of them are able to 
 bring Christ in some one of his offices to men, as 
 Priest, Prophet, or King. Each of them is capable of 
 blending with another. There is no such distinction 
 between them that we may not find a great sermon 
 here and there where the three are met, and where 
 Christ in His completeness as the satisfaction of the 
 loving heart, as the convicter and guide of the awak- 
 ened conscience, and as the hope and inspiration of a 
 laboring humanity, is perfectly set forth. According 
 to the largeness of your own Christian life will be 
 your power to preach that largest sermon. Only I 
 beg you to remember in what different ways sermons 
 may all be messages of the Lord. Let it save you 
 from the monotonous narrowness of one eternally re- 
 peated sermon. And, what is far more important, 
 let it keep you from even* daring to say witli cruel 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON., 135 
 
 flil)paney of some brother who brings his message to 
 another door of humanity from you, that he " does 
 not preach Christ." 
 
 The best sermon of any time is that time's best 
 utterance. More than its most ingenious invention or 
 its most highly organized government, it declares the 
 point which that time has reached. So I think that 
 a man's best sermon is the best utterance of his life. 
 It embodies and declares him. If it is really his, it 
 tells more of him than his casual intercourse with his 
 friends, or even the revelations of his domestic life. 
 If it is really God's message through him, it brings 
 him out in a Avay that no other experience of his life 
 has power to do, as the quality of the trumpet de- 
 clares itself more clearly when the strong "man blows 
 a blast for battle through it than when a child whis- 
 pers into it in play. Remember this, experience it in 
 yourself, and then, when you hear your brother 
 preach, honor the work that he is doing and listen as 
 reverently as you can to hear through him some voice 
 of God. They say that brother ministers make the 
 most critical and least responsive hearers. I have not 
 found them so. I have found them always fullest of 
 sympathy. It would be much to their discredit and 
 excite serious suspicions of their work if their mere 
 familiarity with its details made them less ready to 
 feel its spirit and to submit to its power. It is not 
 80. Do not begin by thinking that it is so, ajid you 
 will not find it so. 
 
136 , LECTURES OX PREACHING. 
 
 I should like to devote part of what time remaina 
 to-day to some suggestions about the true subjects of 
 Bermons. I used a few minutes ago the phrase 
 "preaching Christ;" and, without cant, it is Christ 
 that we are to preach. But what is Christ ? " The 
 saving power of the world," we say. Where is His 
 power then to reach ? Wherever men are wrong ; 
 wherever men are capable of being better ; wherever 
 His authority and love can make them better. 
 Wherever the abundance of sin has gone there the 
 abundance of grace must go. There you and I, as 
 ministers of grace, are bound to carry it. I confess 
 that at the very first statement of it this idea of 
 Christ opens to me a range of the subjects, with which 
 it is the preacher's duty and right to deal, which seems 
 to have no limit. 
 
 But let us go more into particulars. We hear to- 
 day a great deal about how desirable it is that the 
 pulpit, partly because it is and partly that it may 
 more fully be, a power, should deal more directly 
 than it does with the special conditions of the time, 
 with the special vices, and the special needs of the 
 days in which we live. It is urged that we ouglit to 
 hear more often than we do now from our preachers 
 ■•oncerning the right use of wealth, concerning the 
 extravjxgance of society, concerning impurity and li- 
 centiousress, concerning the prevalimt l;u-k of thor- 
 l>ughness in our hurried life, concerning political 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON.^ 137 
 
 EoiTuption and misrule. I believe the cUiiiu is abso- 
 lutely right. I believe no powerful pulpit ever held 
 aloof from the moral life of the community it lived 
 in, as the practice of many preachers, and the theory- 
 of some, would make our pulpit separate itself and 
 confine its message to what are falsely discriminated 
 as spiritual things. But with regard to this interest 
 of the pulpit in the moral conditions of the day, while 
 I most heartily and even enthusiastically assert its 
 necessity, I want to make one or two suggestions. 
 The first is, that nowhere more than here ought the 
 personal differences of ministers to be regarded. Some 
 men's minds work abstractly, and others work con- 
 cretely. One man sees sin as an awful, all-pervading 
 spiritual presence ; another cannot recognize sin un- 
 less he sees it incarnated in some special vicious act, 
 which some man is doing here in his own town. One 
 man owns holiness as an unseen spirit ; to another, 
 holiness is vague, but good deeds strike his enthusi- 
 asm and stir him to delight and imitation. Now, 
 neither of these men must ask the other man to 
 preach just in his way. The first man must not call 
 the second a " mere moralist ; " the second must not 
 answer back by calling his accuser a pietist. Grant- 
 ing that the preacher must attack the specuil sins 
 around him, it is not true that every preacher, be the 
 ttature of his genius what it may, must be goaded and 
 driven to it. It is good for us that there should be 
 
138 LECTURES OX PREACHING. 
 
 some men to preach, as it would not be well that all 
 men should preach, of truth in its pure, invariable 
 essence, and of duty in its primary idea, as it issues 
 a yet undivided stream from the fountain of the will 
 of God. 
 
 But again, the method in which the pulpit ought 
 to approach the topics of the time is even more im- 
 ))ortant. It seems to me to be involved, if we can 
 find it there, in the perfectly commonplace and fa- 
 miliar statement that the visible, moral conditions of 
 any life, or any age, are only symptoms of spiritual 
 conditions which are the essential thing. But what 
 is the meaning and value of a symptom ? Are there 
 not two ? A symptom is valuable, first as a sign and 
 test of inward processes which it is impossible to ob- 
 serve directly, and it has a secondar}^ value under the 
 law of reaction, by whlcli a wise restraint applied to 
 the result may often tend to weaken and help destroy 
 the cause. How then ,are symptoms to be treated ? 
 Always with reference to tlie unseen conditions which 
 they manifest. They are to be examined as tests of 
 what these conditions are, and they are to be acted 
 upon, not for themselves, but in the hope of reaching 
 those conditions in behind them. Apply all this. 
 You and I are preachers in the midst of a corrupt 
 community. All kinds of evil practices are rife 
 around us. We know — it is the first truth of the 
 religion which we preach — that those evil practices 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 139 
 
 are not the real- essential evil. It is the heart 
 estranged from God, the so.d gone wrong, the unseen 
 springs of manhood out of order, upon which our eye 
 is always fastened, and to which alone we know the 
 remedy can be applied. What have we then to do 
 with these evil practices, which we see only as the 
 outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual 
 disgrace? Just what" I said above: First, honestly 
 treat them as tests; honestly own that, so long as 
 these exist and wherever these exist, the spiriUial 
 condition is not right ; frankly admit of any man, 
 whatever his professions of emotional experience, 
 whatever he believes, whatever he " feels," that if he 
 does bad things he is not a good man. So cordially 
 put the spiritual processes of which you preach within 
 the judgment of all men who know a good life from 
 a bad one. And in the second place strike at the 
 symptom always for the sake of the disease. Aim at 
 all kinds of vicious acts. Rebuke dishonesty, licen- 
 tiousness, drunkenness, cruelty, extravagance, but al- 
 ways strike in the interest of the soul to which you 
 are a messenger, of which your Master has given you 
 part of the care. Never let men feel that you and 
 your gospel would be satisfied with mere decency, 
 Jvith the putting down of all vicious life that left the 
 vicious character still strong behind. Surely such a 
 protest against vice as this ought to be far more earn- 
 est, more uncompromising, mor^ self-sacrificing than 
 
140 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 Diie that worked on lower motives and took shortei 
 views. It can make no concessions. It strikes at all 
 vices alike. It will not merely try to exchange one 
 vice for another. It will hate vices more deeply in 
 proportion as it realizes the depth of sin. 
 
 Do not these two methods of dealing with all 
 symptoms describe the true attitude of the Christian 
 preacher toward the evident vicious practices by 
 which he is surrounded ? Conceiving of tl^em thus, 
 he is neither the abstract religionist devoted to the 
 fostering of certain spiritual conditions, heedless of 
 how they show their worth or worthlessness in the 
 moral life which they produce ; nor is he tlie enlight- 
 ened economist, weighing with anxious heart the evil 
 of sins, but knowing nothing of the sinfulness of sin 
 from which they come. He is the messenger of 
 Christ to the soul of man always. His sermon about 
 temperance, or the late election, or the wickedness of 
 oppression, is not an exception, an intrusion in tlie 
 cui'rent of that preaching which is always testifying 
 of the spiritual salvation. He is ready to speak on 
 any topic of the day, but his sermon is not likely to 
 be mistaken for an article from some daily news- 
 paper. It looks at the topic from a loftier height 
 traces the trouble to a deeper source, and is not sat 
 isfied except with a more thorough cure. 
 
 I do not know of any other principles than these 
 which can be applied to the somewhat disputed ques- 
 
THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 141 
 
 tion of political preaching. These seem to me suffi- 
 cient. I despise, and ciiU upon you to despise all 
 the weak assertions that a minister must not preach 
 politics because he will injure his influence if he 
 does, or because it is unworthy of his sacred office. 
 The influence that needs such watching may well be 
 allowed to die, and, the more sacred the preacher's 
 office is, the more he is bound to care for all the in- 
 terests of every child of God. But apply the prin- 
 ciples which I laid down, and I think we have a bet- 
 ter rule. See in the political condition the indication 
 of the nation's spiritual state, and aim in all you say 
 about public affairs, not simply at securing order and 
 peace, but at making good men, who sliall constitute 
 a " holy nation." The first result of the application 
 of these principles will be that only a true moral is- 
 sue will provoke your utterance. You will not turn 
 the pulpit into a place whence you can throw out 
 your little scheme for settling a part}^ quarrel or se- 
 curing a party triumph. But when some clear ques- 
 tion of right and wrong presents itself, and men with 
 some strong passion or sordid interest are going 
 wrong, then your sermon is a poor, untimely thing if 
 rt deals only with the abstractions of eternity, and 
 das no word to help the men who are dizzied with the 
 whirl, and blinded with the darkness of to-day. It 
 was good to be a minister during the war of the Re- 
 bellion. A clear, strong, moral issue stood out plain, 
 
142 LECTURES ON 1 REACHING. 
 
 and the preacher luid his duty as shurpl}- marked as 
 the soldiers. That is not the case in the same clear 
 way now. It will not ordinarily be so. But still, the 
 ordinary talk about ministers not having any power 
 in politics is not true. In a land like ours, wliero 
 the tone of the people is of vast valiie in public af- 
 fairs, the preachers who have so much to do in the 
 creation of the popular tone must always have their 
 part in politics. 
 
 I close this lecture with three suggestions, on which 
 I had meant to dwell at large, but I have used up all 
 my time. 
 
 You never can make a seruion what it ought to be 
 if you consider it alone. The service that accompa- 
 nies it, the prayer and praise, must have their influ- 
 ence upon it. 
 
 The sermon must never set a standard which it is 
 not really meant that men should try to realize in 
 life. 
 
 No sermon to one's own people can ever be con- 
 ceived as if it were the only one. It must be part 
 of a long culture, working with all the others. 
 
 And yet, in spite of all these definitions and sug- 
 gestions, I beg you to go away believing that the 
 idea of the sermon i? not a complicated, but a verj 
 Bimple thing. 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 
 
 T AM to speak to 3^011 to-day about the making of a 
 sermon, and if you compare their titles you "\vill see 
 in what relation this lecture and the last stand to 
 each other, for the make of a sermon must always be 
 completely dependent upon the idea of a sermon. 
 The idea is perfectly supreme. It is the formative 
 power to which all accidents must bow. If any rule 
 of the composition or form contradicts the -idea, it is 
 rebellious and must be sacrificed without a scruple. 
 I have heard sermons where it was evident that some 
 upstart rule of form was in rebellion against the essen- 
 tial idea and the idea was not strong enough to put 
 the rebellion down, and the result was that the ser- 
 mon, like a country in the tumult of rebellion, had 
 neither peace nor power. What I say to-day then is 
 in subordination to what I said before. Any law of 
 execution which I may lay down that is inconsistent 
 with the idea and purpose of preaching is an intruder 
 vnd must be thrust aside. 
 
 The elements which determine the make of any 
 particular sermon are three, the preacher, the mate- 
 
M4 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 rial, and the audience; just as the character of any 
 battle is determined by three elements, the gun (in- 
 cluding the gunner), the ammunition, and the fortresa 
 against which the attack is make. The reason why a 
 sermon preached last Sunday in the Church of St. 
 John Lateran at Rome differed from the sermon 
 preached in the First Congregational Church of New 
 Haven must have been partly that the preacher was 
 a different sort of man, partly that the truth which 
 he wanted to preach was different, partly that the 
 man he wished to touch and influence was different, 
 at least in his conception. Make these three ele- 
 ments exactly alike, and all sermons must be per- 
 fectly identical. It is because these three elements 
 are never exactly the same, and yet there always is a 
 true resemblance, that we have all sermons unlike one 
 another and yet a certain similarity running through 
 them all. No two men are precisely similar, or think 
 of truth alike, or see the men to whom tliey speak in 
 the same light. Consequently the make of every 
 man's sermons must be different from the make of 
 every other man's. Nay, we may carry this farther. 
 No live man at any one moment is just the same as 
 himself at any other moment, nor does he see truth 
 always alike, nor do men always look to him the 
 same ; and therefore in his sermons there must be the 
 same general identity combined with perpetual vari- 
 ety which there is in his life. Mis sermons will be 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 145 
 
 \\\ like and yet unlike each other. And the making 
 of every sermon, while it may follow the same general 
 rules, will be a fresh and vital process, with the zest 
 and freedom of novelty about it. This is the first 
 thing that I wish to say. Establish this truth in 
 your minds and then independence comes. Then you 
 can stand in the right attitude to look at rules of ser- 
 mon making which come out of other men's experi- 
 ence. You can take them as helpful friends and not 
 as arrogant masters. I wish that not merely in ser- 
 mon writing but in all of life we could all come to 
 understand that independence and the refusal to imi- 
 tate and repeat other people's lives may come from 
 •true modesty as well as from pride. To be independ- 
 ent of man's dictation is simply to declare that we 
 must live the special life which God has marked out 
 for us and which he has indicated in the special 
 powers which we discover in ourselves. We are fit 
 for no other life. There can be nothing more modest 
 than that. It is not pride when the beech-tree re- 
 fuses to copy the oak. He knows his limitations. 
 The only chance of any healthy life for him is to be 
 as full a beech-tree as he can. Apply all that, and 
 out of sheer modesty refuse to try to be any kind of 
 preacher which God did not make you to be. 
 
 The lack of flexibility in the preacher, resulting in 
 whe lack of variety in the sermon, has very much to 
 do with our imperfect education. The true result of 
 10 
 
146 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 educatiDii is to develop in the individual that A which 
 r have been speaking, the clear consciousness of iden- 
 tity together with a. wide range of variety. The 
 really educated man will be always distinctly himself, 
 and yet never precisely the same that he was at any 
 other moment. His personality will be trained both 
 in the persistency of its central stock and in its sus- 
 ceptibility and responsiveness to manifold impres- 
 sions. He will have at once a stronger stand and a 
 wider play of character. But mu uneducated man 
 will be either monotonously and doggedly the same, 
 or else full of fickle alteration. The defects of our 
 education are seen in the way in which it sometimes 
 produces the narrow and obstinate specialist, some-- 
 times the vague and feeble amateur in many works, 
 but not often the strong man who has at once clear 
 individuality and wide range of sympathy and action. 
 This is the kind of man that the preacher above all 
 ought to be. Education alone, thorough education, 
 nothing but true, wise, devoted study can make him 
 80. Education alone gives a man at once a good stand 
 and a good outlook. It is the Frenchman's rule for 
 fencing, "Bon pied, bon oeil," a good foot and a good 
 eye. As I begin to speak to ycu about literary style 
 and homiletical construction, I cannot help once more 
 urging upon you the reed of hard and manly study ; 
 not simply the study of language and style itself, but 
 study in its broader sense, the study of truth, of hi* 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 14'< 
 
 toiy, of philosophy ; for no man can have a richly 
 Btored mind without its influencing the style in which 
 he writes and speaks, making it at once thoroughly 
 his own, and yet giving it variety and saving it from 
 monotony. I suppose the power of an uneducated 
 man like Mr. Moody is doing something to discredit 
 the necessity of study among ministers and to tempt 
 men to rely upon spontaneousness and inspiration. I 
 honor Mr. Moody, and rejoice in much of the work 
 that he is doing, but if his success had really this 
 effect it would be a very serious deduction from its 
 value. When you see such a man, you are to con- 
 sider both his exceptionalness and his limitations. In 
 some respects he is a very remarkable and unusual 
 man, and therefore not a man out of whom ordinary 
 men can make a rule. And his work, valuable as it 
 is, stops short at a clear line. He leaves undone what 
 nothing but an educated ministry can do, and he who 
 is most filled with thankfulness and admiration at that 
 man's career ought to go the more earnestly to his 
 books to try to be such a preacher as can help fulfil 
 tlie work which the great revivalist begins. 
 
 Every preacher's sermon style then ought to be his 
 twn; that is the first principle of sermon making. 
 ^' The style is the man," said Buffon. Only we must 
 remember that the man is not something invariable. 
 He is capable of improvement. He is something dif- 
 ferent when he is filled with knowledge and affection 
 
H8 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 and enthusiasm, from what he was in his first empti 
 ness. The practical conclusion then that will coma 
 from our first principle will not be simply that every 
 preacher is to accept himself just as he finds himself, 
 and hope for nothing better ; but rather this, that style 
 is capable of indefinite cultivation, only that its main 
 cultivation must come through the cultivation of the 
 man; not by mere critical discipline of language, 
 which at the best can only produce correctness, but 
 by lifting the whole man to a more generous and ex- 
 alted life, which is the only thing that can make a 
 style truly noble. I think, indeed, that the question, 
 as to wherein lies the power of a sermon style, corre- 
 sponds very largely with the question about the inspi- 
 ration of the Scriptures. Various ideas have prevailed 
 about the point in which was lodged that quality of 
 the Bible which makes us separate it from other books 
 and talk about it as inspired. One idea of inspira- 
 tion puts it in the language, and supposes each word 
 to be a dictation of the Holy Ghost. Another idea 
 puts it in the wn-iter and supposes, with a profounder 
 philosophy, that the power of exalted and truthful 
 utterance was a truthful and exalted soul. Another 
 idea puts it in the material. The history itself was 
 full of God, and when men wrote that God-filled his- 
 tory their writings were different from other men's, 
 uiore full of the divine atmosphere, because of the 
 strange divine character of the things they wrote 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 149 
 
 about. And so the sermon comes forth peculiar. 
 Wherein does its peculiarity reside? Is it that a cer- 
 tain language, certain forms of speech, belong there 
 which do not belong to other literature ? Is it that 
 the sermon writer is in a condition and an attitude 
 that no other man ever quite assumes ? Is it that 
 the subjects with which the sermon deals are more 
 solemn, and more touching, more divine than any 
 others? No doubt all three ideas are true in their 
 degrees, but no doubt, also, he who looks to the deep- 
 est truth in the matter will get the deeper power. 
 He who aspires to the strength of truth and charac- 
 ter will be a stronger man than he who tries to pre- 
 vail by the finish and completeness of his language. 
 
 Theji istory of a ^ar^ticulaF-eermen begins with the 
 selection, of a topic,__ Ordinarily, except in purely ex- 
 pository preaching, that comes before the selection of 
 a text. And the ease and readiness of this selection 
 depends upon the richness of a man's own life, and 
 the naturalness of his conception of a sermon. I can 
 conceive of but two things which should cause the 
 preacher any difficulty in regard to the abundance of 
 subjects for his preaching. The first is a steriUty of 
 his own mind ; the second is a stilted and uiyiatural 
 idea of what the sermon he is going to write must 
 be. Let the man's own mind be everywhere else ex- 
 cept upon the things of God, let his own spiritual life 
 
150 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 be meagre and unsuggestive, let him feel no clevelo[>' 
 ing power in. his own experience, and I can see him 
 sitting in despair, or hurrying liither and thither in 
 distraction, as the day approaches when lie must talk 
 of something, and he has nothing of which to talk. 
 Or let him once get the idea that every sermon, or 
 that any particular sermon, is to be a great sermon, 
 a "pulpit-effort," as the dreadful epithet runs, and 
 again he is all lost. Which of these quiet, simple, 
 practical themes that offer themselves is suitable to 
 bear the aspirations and contortions of his eloquence? 
 The first of the difficulties I say no more about, onl^ 
 because I seem to have talked to you of nothing else 
 than the way in which there must be a man behind 
 every sermon, though, indeed, I do think that the 
 most important, I had almost said the only important 
 thing in this matter of learning to preach. But I say 
 no more of that just now. This other matter let me 
 dwell on for a moment. The notion of a great ser- 
 mon, either constantly or occasionally haunting the 
 preacher, is fatal. It hampers, as I said, the freedom 
 of utterance. Many a true and helpful word which 
 your people need, and which you ouglit to say to 
 them, will seem unworthy of the dignity of your 
 great discourse. Some poor exhorter coming along 
 the next we(?k, and saying it, will sweep the last 
 recollection of 3'our selfish achievement out of the 
 minds of people. Never tolerate Xny Idea f the dig- 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. i51 
 
 jiiiy of a sermon which will keep you from saying 
 anything in it which you ought to say, or which your 
 people ought to hear. It is the same folly as making 
 your chair so fine that you dare not sit down in it. 
 There will come great, or at least greater sermons in 
 every live minister's career, sermons which will stand 
 out for vigor and beauty, distinctly above his ordi- 
 nary work, but they will come without deliberation, 
 the flowers of his ministry, the offspring of moments 
 which found his powers at their best activity and 
 him most regardless of effect. It is good and en- 
 couraging, it helps one's faith in human nature, and 
 it has an influence to keep us from the pulpit's beset- 
 ting follies, when we see how universally the deliber- 
 ate attempt to make great sermons fails. They never 
 have the influence, and they very seldom win the 
 praise that they desire. The sermons of which no- 
 body speaks, the sermons which come from mind and 
 heart, and go to heart and mind with as little con- 
 sciousness as possible of tongue and ear, those are the 
 sermons that do the work, that make men better men, 
 and really sink into their affections. They are like 
 the perfect days when no man says, " How fine it 
 is ; " but when every man does his best work and 
 feels most fully what a blessed thing it is to live. 
 
 I think, too, that this wrong notion about sermons 
 lias led to a great deal of the bad talk which is run- 
 viing about now among both clergymen and laymen 
 
152 LECTURES ON PIlEACIUXr;. 
 
 about the ex cessiv e amount of preacliing. " Ilow is 
 it possible," thej' say, " that any man should bring 
 forth two strong, good sermons every week ? It is 
 impossible. Let us have only one sermon every Sun- 
 day ; and if the people will insist on coming twice to 
 the church, let us cheat them with a little poor music 
 and a ' few remarks,' and call it ' vesper service,' or 
 let us tell a few stories to the Sunday-school, and call 
 it ' children's church ; ' but let us not preach twice to 
 men and women. It is impossible." It is impossi- 
 ble, if by a sermon you intend a finished oration. It 
 is as impossible to produce that tv.-ice, as it is unde- 
 sirable to produce it once a week. But that a man 
 who lives with God, whoee delight is to study God's 
 words in the Bible, in the world, in history, in human 
 nature, who is thinking about Christ, and man, and 
 salvation every day, that he should not be able to 
 talk about these things of his hi;art, seriously, lov- 
 ingly, thoughtfully, simply, for two half hours every 
 week, is inconceivable, and I do not believe it. Cast 
 off the haunting incubus of tiie notion of e^reat ser- 
 mons. Care not for your sermon, but for your truth, 
 and for your people ; and subjects will spring up on 
 every side of you, and the chances to preach upun 
 Uietn will be all too few. I beg you not to fall into 
 this foolish talk about too much preaching. It is not 
 for us ministers to say that there is no need of more 
 \han one discourse a day. If you have anything to 
 
VHE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 153 
 
 Bay, and say it bravely and simply, men will come to 
 hear you. If you will preach as faithfully and 
 thoughtfully at the second service as at the first, the 
 second service will not be deserted. At any rate, it 
 is our place to stand by our pulpits till men have de- 
 serted us, and not, for the sake of saving our own 
 credit, to shut the church doors while they are still 
 ready to come and hear. 
 
 But to return more closely to our subject; having 
 settled in general what topics may be preached upon, 
 how shall the topic for a single sermon, the sermon 
 for next Sunday, be selected ? I answer that there 
 are three principles which have a right to enter into 
 the decision. They are the bent of the preacher's 
 inclination, the symmetry and " scale " .of all his 
 preaching, and the peculiar needs of his people. I 
 mention the three in the order in which they are apt 
 to present themselves to the minister as he makes his 
 choice. Reverse that order, begin with the last, and 
 you have the elements of a right choice rightly ar- 
 ranged. First comes- the sympathetic and wise per- 
 ception of what the people need ; not necessarily 
 what they consciously want, though, remember, no 
 more niicessarily what they do not Avant. This per- 
 ception is not the sudden result of an impression that 
 has come from some lively conversation which has 
 sprung up on a parish visit, not the desire to ( onfute 
 the cavil of some single captious disputant ; it a tlm 
 
I'Ti LECTURES OX PREACHING. 
 
 aggregate effect of a large syini)atlietic intercourse, 
 the fruit of a true knowledge of luiman nature, com- 
 bined witli a special knowledge of these epecial peo- 
 ple, aiid a cordial interest in the circumstances under 
 which they live. That evidently is no easy thing to 
 win. It requires of a minister that timeliness and 
 that breadth which it is very hard to find in union 
 with each other. It is not something to be picked up 
 in the easy intimacy of parochial visiting. It mav bo 
 helped there, but it must be born of an alert mind, 
 fully interested in the times in which it lives, and a 
 devout soul really loving the souls with which it had 
 to deal. 
 
 The second element of choice, the desire to pre- 
 serve a symmetry and proportion in our preacliing, of 
 course comes in to modify the action of the first. 
 Not merely by our present perception of what people 
 need, but in relation to our whole scheme of teach- 
 ing, to what has gone before and what is to come 
 after, the subject of next Sunday is to be selected. I 
 have suggested to you in another lecture how great a 
 luilp the ancient calendar of the church year is in 
 this respect. The prolonged and connected course of 
 sermons is a safeguai'd against mere flightiness and 
 partialncss in the jlioice of topics. The only serious 
 danger about a course of sermons is, that where the 
 serpent grows too long it is difficult to have the vilal- 
 ity distributed through all his length, and eren to hiw 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. io5 
 
 last extremity. Too many courses of sermoiik 3tart 
 with a very vital head, that draws behind it by and 
 by a \eiy lifeless tail. The head springs and the tail 
 crawls, and so the beast makes no graceful progress. 
 I think that a set and formally announced course of 
 Bermons very seldom preserves both its symmetry and 
 its interest. The system of long courses is apt to se- 
 cure proportion at too great an expense of sponta- 
 neity. The only sure means of securing the result 
 is orderliness in the preacher's mind ; the grasp of 
 Christian truth as a system, and of the Christian life 
 as a steady movement of the whole nature through 
 Christ to the Father. 
 
 Then comes the third principle by which the choice 
 is regulated, the principle that a man can preach best 
 about what he at that moment wishes to preach 
 about, the element of the preacher's own disposition. 
 You can see whj'^ it should not be made the first ele- 
 ment. I could tell you of pulpits which have sinned 
 and failed by making it the first element. But you 
 can see, also, why it must come in at least as the third 
 element. It gives the freshness and joyousness and 
 spring to the other two. You cannot think of a peo- 
 ple listening with pleasure or vivacity to a sermon on 
 a subject which thej' knew the minister thought they 
 Reeded to hear about, and thought the time had come 
 to preach about, but which they also knew that he 
 did not care for, and did not want to preach upon. 
 
156 LECTURhS OX PREACHING. 
 
 The personal interest of the preacher is the buoyant 
 air that fills the mass and lifts it. 
 
 These three considerations then settle the sermon's 
 topic. Evidently neither is sufficient by itself. The 
 sermon preached only with reference to the people's 
 needs is heavy. The sermon preached foi" symmetry is 
 formal. The sermon preached with sole reference to 
 the preacher's wish, is whimsical. The constant con- 
 sideration of all three makes preaching always strong 
 and always fresh. When all three urgently unite to 
 settle the topic of some special sermon I do not 
 see why Ave may not prepare that sermon in a solemn 
 exliihiration, feeling sure that it is God's will that we 
 should preach upon that topic then ; and, when it is 
 written, go forth with it on Sunday to our pulpit, 
 declaring, almost with the certainty of one of the old 
 prophets, — " The Word of tlie Lord came unto me, 
 saying." 
 
 Let me add tliis, that the meeting of these various 
 elements of choice is clearest when the selection is 
 most deliberate. Always have the topic of your ser- 
 mon in your mind as long as possible before you begin 
 your preparation. Whatever else is hasty and extem- 
 poraneous, let it not be your decision as to what you 
 will preach about. 
 
 The subject chosen, next will come the special prep- 
 aration for tlie sermon. This ought to consist mostly 
 ID bringing together, and arranging, and illuminating, 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 157 
 
 a knowledge of the subject and thought about it 
 which has_ali-eady. i.eeii_iiL_lhe -^js&essioft of tlie 
 preacher. I think that the less of special preparation 
 tliat is needed for a sermon, the better the sermon is. 
 The best sermon would be that whose thoughts, 
 though carefully arranged, and lighted up with every 
 illustration that could make them clearer for this 
 special appearance, were all old thoughts, familiar to 
 the preacher's mind, long a part of his experience. 
 Here is suggested, as you see, a clear and important 
 difference between two kinds of preachers. One 
 preacher depends for his sermon on special reading. 
 Each discourse is the result of work done in the 
 week in which it has been written. All his study 
 is with reference to some immediately pressing oc- 
 casion. Another preacher studies and thinks with far 
 more industry, is always gathering truth into his 
 mind, but it is not gathered with reference to the 
 next sermon. It is truth sought for truth's sake, and 
 for that largeness and ripeness and fullness of char- 
 acter which alone can make him a strong preacher. 
 Which is the better method ? The latter beyond all 
 doubt. In the first place, the man of special prepa- 
 rations is always crude ; he is always tempted to take 
 ap some half considered thought that strikes him in 
 the hurry of his reading, and adopt it suddenly, and 
 Bet it before his people, as if it were his true convic- 
 tion. Many a minister's old sermons are scattered alJ 
 
i.58 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 over with ideas which he never held, but which once 
 held him for a week, like the camps in other men's 
 forests where a wandering hunter has slept for a 
 single night. The looseness and falseness, the weak- 
 ening of the essential sacredness of conviction which 
 must come from years of such work, any one may see. 
 And in the second place the immediate preparation 
 for a sermon is something that the people always feel. 
 They know the difference between a sermon that has 
 been crammed, and a sermon Avhich has been thought 
 long before, and of which only the form, and the illus- 
 trations, and the special developments, and the appli- 
 cation of the thought, are new. Some preachers are 
 always preaching tlie last book which they have read, 
 and their congregations always find it out. The feel- 
 ing of superficialness and thinness attaches to all they 
 do. The exegesis of a passage which the man never 
 thought of till lie began to preach about it may be 
 clever and suggestive, but it inspires no confidence. 
 I do not rest on it with even that amount of assurance 
 which the same man's careful study would inspire. 
 It is got up for the occasion. It is like a politician's 
 opinions just before election. But the strongest rea- 
 son for the rule which I am stating come.«» from the 
 very nature of the sermon on which I have dwelt 
 BO much. The sermon is truth and man togetlxer ; 
 it is the truth brought through the man. The per- 
 •onal element is essential. Now the tru^ll which tbe 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 159 
 
 preacher has gathered on Friday for the sermon 
 which he preaches on Sunday, has come across tlie 
 man, but it has not come through the man. It has 
 never been wrought into his experience. It comes 
 weighted and winged with none of his personal life. 
 If it is true, it is a book's truth, not a man's truth 
 that we get. It does not make a full real sermon. 
 
 If I am right in this idea, then it will follow that 
 the preacher's life must be a life of large accumula- 
 tion. He must not be always trying to make ser- 
 mons, but always seeking truth and out of the truth 
 which he has won the sermons will make themselves. 
 I can remember how, before I began to preach, every 
 book I read seemed to spring into a sermon. It 
 seemed as if one could read nothing without sitting 
 down instantly and turning it into a discourse. But 
 as I began and went on preaching, the sermons that 
 came of special books became less and less satisfac- 
 tory and more and more rare. Some trutli whiuh 
 one has long known, stirred to peculiar activity by 
 something that has happened or by contact with 
 some other mind, makes the best sermon ; as the 
 best dinner comes not from a hurried raid upon the 
 caterer's, but from the resources of a constantly well- 
 furnished house. Constant quotations_ in^ sermons 
 ftre^I-think, a sign of the same crudeness. They 
 show an undigested knowledge. They lose the 
 power of personality. They daub the wall with an- 
 
160 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 tempered mortar. Here is the need of bioad jiud 
 generous culture. Learn to study for the sake of 
 truth, learn to think for the profit and tlie joy of 
 thinking. Then your sermon shall be like the leaping 
 of a fountain and not like the pumping of a pump. 
 
 For over six hundred years now it has been the 
 almost invariable custom of Christian preachers to 
 take a text from Scripture and associate their 
 thoughts more or less strictly with that. For the 
 first twelve Christian centuries there seems to have 
 been no such prevailing habit. This fact ought to 
 be kept in mind whenever the custom of a text shows 
 any tendency to become despotic or to restrain in 
 any way the liberty of prophesying. At the present 
 day there can be no doubt that the change in the 
 way of considering the Bible which belongs to our 
 times has had an influence upon our feeling with re- 
 gard to texts and our treatment of them. The unity 
 of the Bible, the relation of its parts, its organic 
 life, the essentialness of every part and yet the dis- 
 tinct difference in worth and dignity of the several 
 parts, these are now familiar ideas as they were not 
 a few years ago. There was a time when to many 
 people the Bible stood, not merely a collection of 
 various books, all equally tlie Word of God, all 
 equally useful to men, but also as a succession of 
 verses, all true, all edifying, all vital with the Gospel. 
 A. page of the Bible torn out at random and blown 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 161 
 
 into some savage island seemed to have in it some 
 power of salvation. The result of such a feeling 
 was, of course, to clothe the single text with inde- 
 pendent sacredness and meaning. It hardly mattered 
 from what part of the Bible it might come. Solo^ 
 mon's Song and St. John's Gospel were preached 
 from as if they taught the same truth with the same 
 authority. The cynical author of the Ecclesiastes 
 was made to utter the same message as the hopeful 
 and faithful St. Paul. This is not the place to re- 
 count the causes for the change, nor to estimate its 
 value or its dangers. Considered simpl}'^ as it has 
 affected the preacher's relation to the Bible I think 
 there can be no doubt of the, improvement it has 
 brought. It has made the single text of less impor- 
 tance. It has led men to desire an entrance into the 
 heart and spirit of the Bible. It has made biblical 
 study to consist, not in the weighing of text against 
 text, but in the estimating of great streams of ten- 
 dency, the following of great lines of thought, the 
 apprehension of the spirit of great spiritual thinkers 
 who "had the mind of Christ." The single verse is 
 no longer hke a jewel set in a wall which one may 
 pluck out and carry off as an independent thing. It is 
 f\ window by which we may look through the wall and 
 tee the richness it incloses. Taken out of its place 
 it has no value. To enter thoroughly into the spirit 
 of this new and better relation to the Bible seems to 
 11 
 
162 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 me to be all that the preacher needs to guide hnn 
 with reference to the selection and the use of texts. 
 Make them always windows. Go up and look 
 tlirough them and then tell the people what you see. 
 Keep them in their places in the wall of truth, i 
 would not say that it is not good to use them, though 
 certainly there may be true sermons without theii>. 
 They are like golden nails to hold our preaching to 
 the Bible. Whether the subject spring out of the 
 text as stating the divine philosophy that underlies 
 some Scripture incident, or the text spring out of the 
 subject as describing some incident that illustrates 
 divine ])hilosophy, is unimportant. There are both 
 kinds of sermons and. both kinds are good. Only, as 
 one rule that has no exceptions, let your use of texts 
 be real. Never make them mean what they do not 
 mean. In the name of taste and reverence alike, let 
 there be no tNvists and puns, no dealing with the 
 word of God as it Avould be insulting to deal with the 
 word of any friend. The Bible has suffered in the 
 hands of many Christian preachers what the block 
 of wood which the savage ch(;oses for his idol suffers 
 from its worshipper. The same selection which con- 
 secrates it as moi'e sacred than other blocks of wood 
 condemns it also to have all his ugly fancies and fan- 
 tastic conceits painted and carved upon it. It is the 
 most sacred and most hideous block of wood in the 
 fillage So the sacredneSs of the Bible has subjected 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 163 
 
 it to a usage that no other book has received. Such 
 a fantastic and irreverent way of manifesting our 
 reverence has lasted too long. It is time that it were 
 stopped. I beg you to do what you can to stop it. 
 At least make your own use of the Bible reverent 
 and true. Never draw out of a text a meaning 
 which you know is not there. If your text has not 
 your truth in it, find some other text which has. Jf 
 ^y ou can find no text for it in the Bible, then preach 
 on something else. 
 
 I pass on to a few remarks, which will be mere 
 suggestions, about the style of sermons. The mat- 
 ter will control the style if it is free. The object of 
 every training of style is to make it so simple and 
 tlexible an organ that through it the moving and 
 changing thought can utter itself freely. I pity any 
 man who writes the same upon all topics. He is evi- 
 dently a slave to himself. To be yourself, yet not to 
 be haunted by an image of yourself to which you are 
 continually trying to correspond, that is the secret of 
 a style at once characteristic and free, i go to hear 
 a preacher whose style is peculiarly his own, and very 
 often indeed I find him a slave to his own peculiari- 
 ties. He must not think anything except what is 
 capable of being said in a certain way. A true style is 
 like a suit of the finest cliain armor, so -strong that the 
 thought can go into battle with it, but so flexible that 
 t can hold the pencil in its steel fingers for the most 
 
164 . LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 delicate painting. For the acquisition of such a style 
 no labor is too great. I think that it is good for 
 every minister to write something besides sermons, ^ 
 books, articles, essays, at least letters ; provided he 
 has control of himself and still remains the preacher, 
 and does not become an amateur in literature instead. 
 If he can do it rightly, it frees him from the tyranny 
 of himself, and keeps him in contact with larger 
 standards. Some of our noblest thinkers fail of effect 
 for want of an organ of utterance, a free pulpit style. 
 The trouble with them, often, is that they never 
 wrote anything but sermons. Indeed I do not think 
 there is any such thing as a sermon-style proper. He 
 who can write other things well, give him the soul 
 and purpose and knowledge of a preacher and he will 
 write you a good sermon. But he who cannot write 
 anything well cannot write a sermon well, although 
 we often think he can. To him who has no literary 
 Bivill all subjects are alike. If you cannot swim, it 
 matters not whether there be twenty or forty feet of 
 water. 
 
 In a word then I should say, get facility of utter 
 ance where you can ; in part at least, outside of ser 
 mon writing. Make your style characteristic and 
 forcible by never writing unless you have something 
 tliat you ically want to s;iy ; then let the chan(.""s of 
 your truth freely play within it and shape its special 
 forms. A style which is really a man's own will 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON 105 
 
 grow as long as he grows. One of the beut things 
 about Macaulay's life is his belief that ay a writer he 
 was improving to the last. It belonged to thaf vital- 
 ity of which the man and the writing were both so 
 
 full. 
 
 The range of sermon writing gives it a capacity of 
 various vices which no other kind of composition can 
 presume to rival. The minister may sin in the same 
 sermon by grandiloquence and meanness, by exag- 
 geration and inadequacy. He needs a many sided 
 watchfulness, or rather a perfectly true literary nat- 
 ure, in order that he may do what Roger Ascham 
 so quaintly and tellingly sums up thus, " in Genere 
 Sublimi to avoid Nimium, in Mediocri to atteyne 
 Satis, in Humili to eschew Parum." The way that 
 he advises to do it is to study Cicero. Certainly, 
 stated more generally, the true way is to know first 
 what style is for, that it is an instrument and not 
 an end, and then as an instrument to perfect it by 
 every noble intimacy and laborious practice. 
 
 It would be impossible to speak of this matter of 
 style without saying something of the danger of imi- 
 tation and the way to guard against it. It is con- 
 nected with that personalness of the work of preach- 
 ing about which I have said so much. A successful 
 preacher is not like a successful author. He stands 
 out himself more prominently through his work 
 Men reahze him more and feel in themselves the same 
 
166 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 powers by which he has succeeded. A mere finished 
 result such as the author gives us in liis book does 
 not excite the desire of imitation like the sight of the 
 process going oti in personal action before us in the 
 pulpit. This is the reason why those preachers whose 
 power has in it the largest element of personality are 
 the richest in imitators. There are some strong 
 voices crying in the wilderness who fill the land with 
 echoes. There are some preachers who have done 
 noble work, of whom we are often compelled to ques- 
 tion whether the work that they have accomplished 
 is after all greater than the harm that they have in- 
 nocently done by spoiling so many men in doing it. 
 They have gone through the ministry, as a savage 
 goes through the forest, blazing his way upon the 
 trees that stand around him, so that you can tell as 
 you travel through the land just where they have 
 been by the tones of voice and the turns of sentences 
 which they have left behind them. They leave their 
 imitators behind them when they die, and in a sense 
 which is not pleasant "• being dead yet speak." Often 
 the circle of one man's influence widens, growing 
 feebler and feebler until it meets the wave that is 
 spreading from another centre, another popular pul- 
 pit, and only there they obliterate each other and 
 calmness is restored and freedom to be oneself is r& 
 tisserted. 
 
 The dangers of imitation are two — one positive, 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 167 
 
 Ihe other negative. There is evil in what you get 
 from him whom you imitate and there is a loss of 
 your own peculiar power. The positive evil comes 
 from the fact that that which is worst in any man is 
 always the most copiable. And the spirit of the copy- 
 ist is blind. He cannot discern the real seat of the 
 power that he admires. He fixes on some little thing 
 and repeats that perpetually as if so he could get the 
 essential greatness of his hero. There is a passage 
 in Macaulay's diary which is full of philosophy. " I 
 looked through ," he says. " He is, I see, an im- 
 itator of me. But I am a very unsafe model. My 
 manner is, I think, and the world thinks, on the 
 whole a good one, but it is very near to a very bad 
 manner indeed, and those clear characteristics of my 
 style which are the most easily copied are the most 
 questionable." All this is very true of ministers. 
 There is hardly any good pulpit style among us which 
 is not very near to a very bad style indeed, and the 
 most prominent characteristics are very often the 
 most questionable. The obtuseness of the imitator is 
 amazing. I remember going years ago with an intel- 
 ligent friend to hear a great orator lecture. The dis- 
 LDurse was rich, thoughtful, glowing, and delightful. 
 As we came away my companion seemed meditative. 
 By and by he said " Did you see where his power 
 lay ? " I felt unable to analyze and epitomize in an 
 iTwtant such a complex result and meekly I said " No. 
 
168 LECTURES ON PREACITING. 
 
 did you? "Yes," he replied briskly, "I watched 
 him and it is in the double motion of his hand. 
 When he wanted to solemnize and calm and subdue 
 us he turned the palm of his hand down ; when he 
 wanted to elevate and inspire us he turned the palm 
 of his hand up. That was it." And that Avas all the 
 man had seen in an eloquent speech. He was no 
 fool, but he was an imitator. He was looking for a 
 single secret for a multifarious effect. I suppose he 
 has gone on from that day to this turning his hand 
 upside down and downside up and wondering that 
 nobody is either solemnized or inspired. 
 
 The negative evil of imitation, the loss of a man's 
 own personal power is even more evident and more 
 melancholy. Ii it were only the men who were inca- 
 pable of any manner of their own that caught up 
 other people's manners it would not be so bad, but 
 often strong men do it. Men imitate others who are 
 every way their inferiors and so some pretentious 
 blockhead not merely gives us himself, but loses for 
 us the simple and straightforward power of some bet- 
 ter man, as a log of wood lodged just in the neck of 
 the channel stops the water of a free, live stream. 
 
 I am convinced that the only escape from the power 
 of imitation when it has once touched us — and re- 
 member it often touches us without our conscious- 
 ness — you and I may be imitating other men to-day 
 and not ut all aware of t — lies in a deeper serious* 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 160 
 
 ness about all our work. What we need is a fullei 
 sense of personal responsibility and a more real rev- 
 erence for the men who are greater than we are. 
 Give a man real personal sense of his own duty and 
 he must do it in his own way. The temptation of 
 imitation is so insidious that you cannot resist it by 
 the mere determination that you will not imitate. 
 You must bring a real self of your own to meet this 
 intrusive vself of another man that is crowding in upon 
 you. Cultivate your own sense of duty. The only 
 thing that keeps the ocean from flowing back into 
 the river is that the river is always pouring down 
 into the ocean. And again, if you really reverence 
 a great man, if you look up to and rejoice in his good 
 work, if you truly honor him, you will get at his 
 spirit, and doing that you will cease to imitate his 
 outside ways. You insult a man when you try to 
 catch his power by moving your arms or shaping 
 your sentences like his, but you honor him when 
 you try to love truth and do God's will the better 
 for the love and faithfulness which you see in him. 
 So that the release from the slavery of superficial 
 imitation must come not by a supercilious contempt, 
 but by a profounder reverence for men stronger and 
 more successful than yourself. 
 
 With regard to the vexed question of written or 
 unwritten sermons I have not very mnch to say. I 
 
I'iO LECTURES ON PREACIUNi!. 
 
 think it is a question wliose importance has been 
 very much exaggerated, and the attempt to settle 
 which with some invariable rule has been unwise, 
 ani probably has made stumbling speakers out of 
 Bome men who might have been effective readers, or 
 stupid readers out of men who might have spoken 
 with force and fire. The different methods have their 
 evident different advantages. In the written sermon 
 tlie best part of the care is put in where it belongs, 
 in the thought and construction of the discourse. 
 There is deliberateness. There is the assurance of 
 industry and the man's best work. The truth comes 
 to the people with the weight that it gets from being 
 evidently the preacher's serious conviction. There is 
 self-restraint. There is some exemption from those 
 foolish fluent things tliat slip so easily off of the ready 
 tongue. The writer is spared some of those de- 
 spairing moments which come to the extemporaneous 
 speaker when a wretched piece of folly escapes him 
 which he would give anything to recall but cannot, 
 and he sees the raven-like reporters catch the silly 
 morsel as it drops. Whatever may be said about the 
 duty of labor upon extemporaneous discourses, the 
 advantage in point of faithfulness will no doubt al- 
 ways be with the written sermon. King Charles the 
 Second used to call the practice of preaching from 
 manuscript which had arisen during the civil wars, 
 * this slothful way of preaching," but he was com 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 171 
 
 paring it probably with the method of preaching by 
 memory, the whole sermon being first written and 
 tiien learnt by heart, — a method which some men 
 practice, but 'which I hope nobody commends. 0\i 
 the other hand, the extemporaneous discourse has the ^ 
 advantage of alertness. It gives a sense of liveliness. 
 It is more immediately striking. It possesses more, 
 activity and warmth.- It conveys an idea of steadi- 
 ness and readiness, of poise and self-possession, even 
 to the most rude perceptions. Men have an admira- 
 tion for it, as indicating a mastery of powers and an 
 independence of artificial helps. A rough backwoods- 
 man in Virginia heard Bishop Meade preach an ex- 
 temporaneous sermon, and, being somewhat unfamil- 
 iar with the ways of the Episcopal Church, he said 
 " He liked him. He was the first one he ever saw of 
 those petticoat fellows that could shoot without a 
 rest." 
 
 It is easy thus to characterize the two methods ^ 
 but, when ■ our characterizations are complete, what 
 shall we say ? Only two things, I think, and those 
 so simple and so commonplace that it is strange that 
 they should need to be said, but certainl}^ they do. 
 The first is, that two such different methods must be- 
 long in general to two different kinds of men ;■ that 
 Bome men are made for manuscripts, and some for the • 
 vpen platform ; that to exclude either class from the 
 iiinistry, or to compel either class to use the methods 
 
172 LECTURES ON PREACHING.^ 
 
 of the other, would rob the pulpit by silencing some 
 of its best men. The other remark is that almost 
 every man, in some proportion, may use both meth- 
 ods ; that they help each other ; that you will write 
 better if you often speak without your notes, and you 
 will speak better if you often give yourself the disci- 
 pline of writing. Add to these merely that tlie pro- 
 portion of extemporaneous preaching may well be in- 
 creased as a man grows older in the ministry, and I 
 do not know what more to say in the way of general 
 suggestion. The rest must be left to a man's uwn 
 knowledge of himself and that personal good sense 
 which lies behind all homileties. 
 
 But there is one thing which I want very much to 
 urge upon you. The real question about a sermon is, 
 not whether it is extemporaneous when you deliver 
 it to your people, but whether it ever was extem- 
 poraneous, — whether there ever was a time when 
 the discourse sprang freshly from your heart and 
 mind. The main difference in sermons is that some 
 sermons are, and other sermons are not, conscious of 
 an audience. The main question about sermons is, 
 whether they feel their hearers. If they do, they are 
 entluisiastic, personal, and warm. If they do not, 
 they are calm, abstract, and cold. Hut that con- 
 sciousness of an audience is something that may come 
 into the preacher's study ; and if it does, his sermon 
 springs with the same personalness and fervor there 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 173 
 
 \;vbicli it would get if he made it in the pulpit with 
 the multitude before him. I think that every earnest 
 preacher is often more excited as he writes, kindles 
 more th(in with the glow of sending truth to men 
 than he ever does in speaking ; and the wonderful 
 thing is, that that fire, if it is really present in the 
 sermon when it is written, stays there, and breaks 
 out into flame again when the delivery of the sermon 
 comes. The enthusiasm is stowed away and ke]3t. 
 It is like the fire that was packed away in the coal- 
 beds ages ago and comes out now to give us its un- 
 decayed and unwasted light. As you preach old ser- 
 mons, I think you can always tell, even if the history 
 of them is forgotten, which of them you wrote enthu- 
 siastically, with your people vividly before you. The 
 fire is in them still. F^nelon had a favorite maxiim 
 that anything which was truly written with enthu- 
 siasm could be quickly learned even by some one else 
 than its author. It is the same idea : that which 
 once has true life in it never dies. Believe me, this 
 is the most important principle about the matter. It 
 differs, no doubt, in diffei*ent subjects. Some kinds 
 of discourses we can never write. They must be 
 made as we deliver them. Others we may bettej* 
 write, if we can write with the people there before 
 us. Some medicines you must mix on the spot ; 
 others you may mix beforehand and they will keep 
 their power. Only be sure that you are a true 
 
174 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 prea(;lier, that j^ou really feel your people, and the 
 details of method may be settled by minute and 
 personal considerations, — by your special fitness, in 
 some degree even by your peculiar taste. I really 
 think that you will be surprised to see how often this 
 idea describes the secret of some power fii a sermon 
 •whijh you have found it hard to discover while you 
 have felt it very deeply. The minister who reads 
 his manuscript had you with him as he wrote those 
 pages. In the calm air of his study, sacred with the 
 thought and prayer of years, nothing came in be- 
 tween him and you ; and so the accidents of the 
 paper and the reading amount to nothing. The ser- 
 mon still speaks to you. But sometimes to an ex- 
 temporaneous preacher his very extemporaneousness 
 proves a dull, dead cloud, which wraps itself around 
 him, and separates him from the people who are 
 crowded up close about his feet. The struggles of 
 thought are on him. He is busy with the choice of 
 words. His mind is watching its own action as it 
 seizes on thought after thought. There is a process 
 of memory and a process of anticipation going on all 
 the time which prevent his perfect occupation in the 
 present act. He is forced to recollect liimself, and so 
 he does not feel the people. This, I am sure, is a 
 true account of what is no unusual condition of the 
 extemporaneous preacher's mind. I think that the 
 uest sermons that ever have been preached, taking 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. UB 
 
 all the qualities of sermons into account, haw /'rob- 
 ably been extemporaneous sermons, but that the num- 
 ber of good sermons preached from manuscript have 
 probably been far greater than the number of good 
 sermons preached extemporaneously ; and he who 
 can put those two facts together will arrive at some 
 pretty clear and just idea of how it will be best for 
 him to preach. 
 
 Let me offer only a few suggestions upon one or 
 two other points, and first, with regard to illustra- 
 tions. The Christian sermon deals with all life, and 
 may draw its illustrations from the widest range. 
 The first necessity of illustration is that it should be 
 true, that is, that it should have real relations to the 
 subject which it illustrates. An illustration is prop- 
 erly used in preaching either to give clearness or to 
 give splendor to the utterance of truth. Both ob- 
 jects, I believe, are legitimate. Ruskin says that 
 " All noble ornament is the expression of man's de- 
 light in God's work." And so I think that we con- 
 fine too much the office of illustration if we give it 
 only the duty of making truth clear to the under- 
 standing, and do not also allow it the privilege of 
 making truth glorious to the imagination. Arch- 
 bishop Whately's illustrations are of the first sort, 
 Jeremy Tajdor's of the second. The ornament that 
 fills his sermons is almost alwa^'S the expression of 
 man's delight in God's truth. But both sorts of illua- 
 
ITfi LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 tration, as you see, have this characteristic. Thej 
 exist for the truth. They are not counted of value 
 for themselves. That is the test of illustration which 
 you ought to apply unsparingly. Does it call atton- 
 tion to or call attention away from my truth ? If the 
 latter, cut it off without a hesitation. The prettier 
 it is, the "worse it is. Here as everywhere the love of 
 truth for itself is the only salvation. Love the truth, 
 and then, for your people's good and for your own 
 delight, make it as beautiful as you can. 
 
 As to the subjects from which illustrations may be 
 drawn, I cannot but think that it would be well if we 
 made a much greater use of the history of the Old 
 Testament to illustrate the Gospel of the New. And 
 for these reasons: first, that the two have an essential 
 connection with each other and so they come together 
 with peculiar sympathy and fitness ; second, that the 
 very antiquity of that history makes it timeless and 
 passionless, as it were, and so enables us to use it 
 purely as ornament or illustration, without the danger 
 of its introducing side issues from its own life ; and 
 thirdly, we should thus revive and preserve people's 
 acquaintance with tlie Old Testament which is al- 
 ways falling into decay. The second of these reasons 
 shows where the weak spot is in the illustration 
 drawn from the events of the current hour, which is 
 otherwise so strong and vivid. It is difficult to make 
 it serve purely as an illustration. It brings in it» 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. Ill 
 
 own aBSOciations and prejudices. It is too alive. It 
 is as if you made the cornice of your house out of 
 wood with so much life in it that it sprouted after it 
 was up, and hid with its foliage the architecture which 
 it was intended only to display. It was hard during 
 the rebellion to illustrate the Christian warfare by 
 the then familiar story of the soldier's life without 
 hearing through the sermon the drums of the Poto- 
 mac, and seeing the spires of Richmond quite as much 
 as the walls of the New Jerusalem in the distance. 
 Besides this, an over eagerness to catch the last sen- 
 sation to decorate your sermon with, gives a certain 
 cheapness to your pulpit work. With cautions such 
 as these in mind, we cannot still afford to lose the 
 freshness and reality which comes from letting men 
 Bee the eternal truths shining through the familiar 
 windows of to-day, and making them understand that 
 the world is as full of parables as it was when Jesus 
 painted the picture of the vineyard between Jerusa- 
 lem and Shechera, or took his text from the recent 
 terrible accident at Siloam. 
 
 One prevalent impression about sermons, which 
 prevails now in reaction from an old and disagreeable 
 method, is, I think, mistaken. In the desire to make 
 a sermon seem free and spontaneous there is a prev- 
 alent dislike to giving it its necessary formal struct- 
 ure and organism. The statement of the subject, 
 Vhe division into heads, the recapitulation at the end, 
 la 
 
178 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 all the scaffolding and anatomy of a sermon is out oi 
 favor, and there are many very good jests about it. 
 I can c>nly say that I have come to fear it less and 
 less. The escape from it must be not negative but 
 positive. The true way to get rid of the bonynesa 
 of yt>ur sermon is not by leaving out the skeleton, 
 but by clothing it with flesh. True liberty in writ- 
 ing comes b}- law, and tlie more thoroughly the out- 
 lines of your work are laid out the more freely your 
 sermon will flow, like an unwasted stream between its 
 well-built banks. I think that most congregations 
 welcome, and are not offended by clear, precise state- 
 raents of the course which a sermon is going to pur- 
 sue, carefully marked division of its thoughts, and, 
 above all, full recapitulation of its argument at the 
 close. A sermon is not like a picture which, once 
 painted, stands altogether before the eye. Its parts 
 elude the memor}', and it is good before you close to ' 
 gather all the parts together, and as briefly as you 
 can, set them as one completed whole before your 
 hearer's mind. Leave to the ordinary Sunday-school 
 address its unquestioned privilege of inconsequence 
 and incoherence. But give your sermon an orderly 
 .consistent progress, and do not hesitate to let your 
 hearers see it distinctly, for it will help them first to 
 understand and then to remember what you say. 
 
 Of oratory, and all the marvellous mysterious ways 
 rf those who teach it, I dare say nothing. I believe 
 
THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 179 
 
 in the true elocution teacher, as I believe in the exist- 
 ence of Halley's comet, which comes into sight of this 
 earth once in about seventy-six years. But whatever 
 you may learn or unlearn from him to your advan- 
 trige, the real power of your oratory must be your 
 own intelligent delight in what you are doing. Let 
 your pulpit be to you what his studio is to the artist, 
 or his court room to the lawyer, or his laboratory to 
 the chemist, or the broad field with its bugles and 
 banners to the soldier, only far more sacredly let j^our 
 pulpit be this to you, and you have the power which 
 is to all rules what the soul is to the body. You have 
 enthusiasm which is the bi'eath of life. 
 
 I have spoken to-day about the making of a ser- 
 mon. I alluded at the beginning of one lecture to a 
 young man whom I saw just entering on his work. 
 To-day I have been thinking of one whom I knew — 
 nay, one whom I know — who finished his preaching 
 years ago and went to God. How does all this seem 
 to him ? — these rules and regulations of the preach- 
 er's art, which he once studied as we are studying 
 them now. Let us not doubt, my friends, that while 
 he has seen a glory and strength in the truth which 
 we preach, such as we never have conceived, he has 
 9een also that no expedient which can make that 
 truth a little more effective in its presentation to 'he 
 world is trivial, or undignified, or unworthy of rhe 
 Datient care and study of the minister of Christ. 
 
 /- 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 
 
 T IlA VE 4iid wliat I had to say about the preachel 
 ■^ and abo-ut the sermon. To-day I want to speak to 
 you about the congregation. There is something re- 
 markable in the way in whicli a minister talks about 
 " ray congregation." They evidently come to seem to 
 him different from the rest of humankind. There is 
 the rest of our race, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and 
 America, and the Islands of the Sea, and then there 
 is " my congregation." A man begins the habit the 
 moment he is settled in a parish. However young, 
 however inexperienced he may be, he at once takes 
 possession of that fraction of the human family and 
 holds it with a sense of ownership. He immediately 
 assumes certain fictions concerning them. He takes 
 it for granted that they listen to his words Avith a 
 deference quite irrespective of the value of the words 
 themselves. He talks majestically about " what I 
 tell my congregation " as if there were some basis 
 upon which they received his teachings quite different 
 from that upon which other intelligent men listen to 
 ■>ne who takes his place before them as their teacher. 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 181 
 
 He supposes them to be subject to emotions which he 
 expects of no one else. He thinks that, in some mys- 
 terious way, their property as well as their intelligence 
 is subject to his demand, to be handed over to hira 
 when he shall tell them that he has found a good use 
 to which to put it. He imagines that, though they 
 are as clear-sighted as other people, little devices of 
 his which are perfectly plain to eveiybody else impose 
 upon them perfectly. He talks about them so un- 
 naturally that we are almost surprised when we ask 
 their names and find that they are men and women 
 whom we know, men and women who are living ordi- 
 nary lives and judging people and things by ordinary 
 standards, with all the varieties' of character and 
 ways which any such group must have, whom he has 
 separated from the rest of humanity and distinguished 
 by their relation to himself and calls " my congre- 
 gation." 
 
 I think that a good deal of the unreality of clerical 
 life comes from this feeling of ministers about their 
 congregations. I have known many ministers who 
 were frank and simple and unreserved with other 
 people for whom they did not feel a responsibility, 
 but who threw around themselves a cloak of fictions 
 and reserves the moment that they met a parishioner. 
 They were willing to let the sti'anger clearly see that 
 there were many things in religion and theology 
 <v^hich they did not know at all, many other questions 
 
182 LECTURES OX PREACHING. 
 
 ou vvliich tliey were in doubt, points of their church's 
 faith which they thought unimportant to salvation, 
 methods of tlieir church's policy wliicli tlioy thought 
 injudicious. All this they would say freely as they 
 talked ^vith the wolf over the sheepfold wall, or with 
 some sheep in the next flock ; but in their own flock 
 they held their peace, or said that everything was 
 riglit, and never dreamed that their flock saw through 
 their feeble cautiousness. The result of all this has 
 sometimes been that parishioners have trusted other 
 men more than their minister just because he was 
 their minister, and have gone with, their troublesome 
 questions and dark experiences to some one who 
 should speak of them freely because he should not 
 feel that he was speaking to a member of his congre- 
 gation. 
 
 It is easy to point out what are the causes of this 
 feeling whicli we thus see has its dangers. The bad 
 part in it is a love of power. The better part is an 
 anxious sense of responsibility, made more anxious 
 by the true affection which grows up in the preacher's 
 heart. It is almost a parental feeling in its worse as 
 in its better features, in its partialness and jealousy 
 as well as in its devotion and love. But besides these 
 there is another element in the view which the 
 preacher takes of his congregation which I beg you 
 to observe and think about. It is the way in which 
 be assumes a difference in the charact'^r of people 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 183 
 
 ^he;i they are massed together from any which they 
 had when they were looked at separately. This la 
 the real meaning of the tone which is in that phrase 
 " my congregation." It is to the minister a unit of 
 a wholly novel sort. There is something in the con- 
 gregation which is not in the men and women as he 
 knows them in their separate humanities, something 
 in the aggregate which was not in the individuals, a 
 character in the whole which was not in the parts. 
 This is the reason why he can group them in his 
 thought as a peculiar people, hold, them in his hand 
 as a new human unity, his congregation. 
 
 And no doubt he is partly right. There is a prin- 
 ciple underneath the feeling by which he vaguely 
 works. A multitude of people gathered for a special 
 purpose and absorbed for the time into a common in- 
 terest has a new character which is not in any of the 
 individuals which compose it. If you are a speaker 
 addressing a crowd you feel that. You say things to 
 them without hesitation that would seem either too 
 bold or too simple to say to any man among them if 
 you talked with him face to face. If you are a spec- 
 tator and watch a crowd while some one else is speak- 
 ing to it, you can feel the same thing. You can see 
 emotions run through the mass that no one man there 
 would have deigned to show or submitted to feel if 
 he could have helped it. The crowd will laugh at 
 pkes which every man in the crowd would have de- 
 
184 LECTURES ON P REACHING. 
 
 Bpised, and be melted by mawkish pathos thai would 
 not have extorted a tear from the weakest of them by 
 himself. Imagine Peter the Hermit sitting down 
 alone with a man to fire him up for a crusade. Prob- 
 ably all this is less true of one of our New England 
 audiences than of any other that is ever collected in 
 -our land. In it every man keeps guard over his indi- 
 viduality and does not easily let it sink in the char- 
 acter of the multitude. And yet we are men and 
 women even here, and the universal laws of human 
 nature do work even among us. And this is a law of 
 nature which all men have observed. " It is a strange 
 thing to say," says Arthur Helps in " Realmah," "but 
 when the number of any public body exceeds that of 
 forty or fifty, the whole assembly has an element of 
 joyous childhood in it, and each member revives at 
 times the glad, mischievous nature of his school-boy 
 days." Canning used to say that the House of Com- 
 mons as a body had better taste than the man of the 
 best taste in it, and Macaulay was much inclined to 
 think that Canning was right. 
 
 What are the elements of this new character which 
 belongs to a congregation, a company of men ? Twc 
 of them have been suggested in the two instances 
 which I have just quoted, — the spontaneousncss and 
 liberty, and the higher standard of thought and taste. 
 [t is not hard to see what some of the other elements 
 fcre. There is no doubt greater receptivity than there 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 185 
 
 is in the individual. Many of the sources of antago- 
 nism are removed. The tendency to irritation is put 
 to rest. The pride of argument is not there ; or is 
 modified by the fact that no other man can hear tho 
 argument, because it cannot speak a word, but must 
 go on in a man's own silent soul. It is easier to give 
 way when you sit undistinguished in an audience, 
 and your next neighbor cannot see the moment when 
 you yield. The surrender loses half its hardness 
 when you have no sword to surrender and no flag to 
 run down. And, besides this, we have all felt how 
 the silent multitude, in the midst of which we sit or 
 stand, becomes ideal and heroic to us. We feel as if 
 it were listening without prejudice, and responding 
 unselfishly and nobly. So we are lifted up to our 
 best by the buoyancy of the mass in which we have 
 been merged. It may be a delusion. Each of these 
 silent men may be thinking and feeling meanly, but 
 probably each of them has felt the elevation of the 
 mass about him of which we are one particle, and so 
 is lifting and lifted just as we are. Who can say 
 which drops in the great sweep of the tide are borne ^ 
 and which bear others toward the shore, on which 
 they all rise together ? 
 
 This, then, is the good quality in the character of 
 the congregation. It produces what in general we 
 call responsiveness. The compensating quality which 
 takes away part of the value of this one is its irre« 
 
186 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 uponsibility. The audience is quick to feel, but slov* 
 to decide. The men who make up the audience, 
 taken one by one, are slower to feel an argument or 
 an appeal to their higher nature, but when they are 
 convinced or touched, it is comparatively easy to 
 waken the conscience, and make them see the neces- 
 sity of action, I liave often heard the minister's ap- 
 peals compared to the lawyer's addresses to the jury. 
 " Look," men say, " the lawyer pleads, and gets hia 
 verdict." " You plead a hundred times. You argue 
 week after week, and men will not decide that Chris- 
 tianity is true, nor steadfastly resolve to lead a new 
 life." The fallacy is obvious. We are like lawyers 
 pleading before a jury, which in the first place feels 
 itself under no compulsion to decide at all ; and in 
 the second place, if it decides as we are urging it, 
 must change its life, break off its habits, and make 
 new ones, which it does not like to contemplate. 
 There is no likeness between it and that body of 
 twelve men, who cannot go home till they decide one 
 way or the other, and who have no selfish interest to 
 bias their decision. No wonder that our jury listens 
 to us as long as it pleases, perhaps trembles a little 
 when we are most true and powerful, and then, like 
 Felix, who was both judge aiid jury to St. Paul, 
 shuts up the court, and departs with only the dim- 
 mest feeling of responsibility, saying, " Go thy waj 
 tor this time. I will hear thee again of this matter.' 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 187 
 
 The result of all this is that in the congregation 
 you have something very near the general huraanit}'. 
 You have human nature as it appears in its largest 
 contemplation. Personal peculiarities have disap- 
 peared and man simply as man is before you. This is 
 a great advantage to the preacher. " It is more easy 
 to know man in general than to know a man in par- 
 ticular," said La Rochefoucauld. If in the crowd to 
 whom you preach you saw every man not merely in 
 general but in particular, if each sat there with his 
 idiosyncrasies bristling all over him, how could you 
 preach ? There are some preachers, I think, who 
 are ineffective from a certain incapacity of this larger 
 general sight of humanity which a congregation ought 
 to inspire. It has been said of the French preachers 
 that Bossuet knew man better than men, but Fdnelon 
 knew both man and men. There are some preach- 
 ers who seem to know men but hardly to know or to 
 be touched by man at all. They are ready with 
 special sympathies and with minute advice in the 
 dilemmas of detail which men encounter ; but the 
 sight of their race does not rouse them, and they are 
 not able to bring to bear upon a people those univer- 
 sal and eternal motives of the highest human action, 
 which, however they may distribute themselves into 
 special motives for special acts, still have a real unity 
 and are the springs of many goodnesses of many 
 kinds. Such men may have a certain fitness to be 
 
188 LECTUliES ON PRE ACHING. 
 
 tne spiritual advisers of individuals, but it is not 
 easy to see how they can be powerful preachers to 
 mankind. 
 
 I think that it is almost necessary for a man to 
 preach sometimes to congregations which he does not 
 know, in order to keep this impression of preaching 
 to humanity, and so to keep the truth which ho 
 preaches as large as it ought to be. He who minis- 
 ters to the same people always, knowing them mi- 
 nutely, is apt to let his preaching grow minute, to for- 
 get the world, and to make the same mistakes about 
 the Gospel that one Avould make about the force of 
 gravitation if he came to consider it a special arrange- 
 ment made for these few operations which it accom- 
 plishes within his own house. I think there are few 
 inspirations, few tonics for a minister's life better than, 
 when he is fretted and disheartened with a liundred 
 little worries, to go and pi'each to a congregation in 
 which he does not know a face. As he stands u]) 
 and looks across them before he begins his sermon, 
 it is like looking the race in the face. All the noble- 
 ness and responsibility of liis vocation comes to him. 
 It is the feeling which one; has had sometimes in 
 travelling when he has passed through a great town 
 whose nnme he did not even learn. There were men, 
 but not one man he knew ; houses, shops, churches, 
 bank, post-office, business and pleasure, but none of 
 them Jndividiuili/A'd to him l)y any persona) interest. 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 189 
 
 It is human life in general, and often has a solemnity 
 for him which the human lives whicli he knows in 
 particular have lost. And this is what we often find 
 in some strange pulpit facing some congregation 
 wholly made up of strangers. 
 
 But this should be occasional. A constant travel- 
 ling among unknown towns would no doubt weaken 
 and perhaps destroy our sense of humanity alto- 
 gether. Tliere can be no doubt that it is good for a 
 man that his knowledge of a congregation should be 
 primarily and principally the knowledge of his own 
 congregation, certain dangers of a too exclusive re- 
 lationship being obviated by preaching sometimes 
 where the people are all strange. It is remarkable 
 how many of the great preachers of the world are 
 inseparably associated with the places where their 
 work was done, where perhaps all- their life was 
 lived. In many cases their place lias passed into 
 their name as if it were a true part of themselves. 
 Chrysostom of Constantinople, Augustine of Hippo, 
 Savonarola of Florence, Baxter of Kidderminster, Ar- 
 nold of Rugby, Robertson of Brighton, Chalmers of 
 Glasgow, and in our New England a multitude of 
 Buch associations which have become historic and 
 compel us always to think of the man with the place 
 and of the place with the man. Everywhere a man 
 must have his place. The disciples are sometimes 
 »et before us as if our pastoral life of modern times 
 
190 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 were an entire departure from their methods ; and 
 yet they had their j^astorates. Think of St. Paul at 
 Ephesus. Think of St. John in the same city. Think 
 of St. James at Jerusalem. The same necessity, may 
 we not say, which required tiiat the Incarnation 
 should bring divinity, not into humanity in general, 
 but into some special human circle, into a nation, a 
 tribe, a family, requires that he who would bear fruit 
 everywhere for humanity should root himself into 
 some special plot of human life and draw out the 
 richness of the earth by which he is to live at some 
 one special point. There is nothing better in a cler- 
 gyman's life than to feel constantly _that^hroughh]8 
 congregation he is gett ing a t his race. Certainly the 
 long pastorates of other days were rich in the knowl- 
 edge of human nature, in a very intimate relation 
 with humanity. These three rules seem to have in 
 tliem the practical sum of the whole matter. I beg 
 you to remember them and apply them with all the 
 wisdom that God gives you. First. Have as few con- 
 gregations as you can. Second. Know your congre- 
 gation as thoroughly as you can. Third. Know your 
 congregation so largfely and deeply that in knowing 
 It you shall know humanity. 
 
 I have lingered too long upon the congregation as 
 a whole. Let me go on to speak of that which ap 
 pears to every minister as he takes a certain congre- 
 gation to be his congregation and comes to kno^v 
 
rilE CONGREGATION. 191 
 
 them very well. Then the unity in which he saw 
 them the first time he stood before them breaks up, 
 and they are divided into various classes. Between 
 that one great gathering which fills the house and 
 the individuals of whom it is composed, there are 
 divisions into various ^ groups, which with certain 
 modifications here and there, appear in every congre- 
 gation in the land. Let us see what they are. 
 
 First and most prominent in every congregation 
 there are some persons who peculiarly represent it to 
 the world. They live in the Church, as it were. 
 Their whole life is bound up in its interests. They 
 may be church officers or not. They are part of its 
 history and of its present life. The congregation 
 goes by their name almost as readily as, in your Con- 
 gregational fashion, by the minister's. They are the 
 persons to whom every new enterprise in church life 
 looks first for approval and then for the means of its 
 execution. They are what are sometimes called the 
 '■' pillars of the Church." And such people are very 
 valuable. Often their lives are very noble and de- 
 voted. There are people so prominently representa- 
 tive of churches, whose life is as truly a consecrated 
 life, with an ordination of its own, as any minister's. 
 They give a solidity and permanence to the con- 
 gregation, preserve its continuity and identity in 
 the midst of the continual changes of these parts of 
 "t which are less firmly fixed. They gather their 
 
192 LECTURES ON PUEACIIING. 
 
 strength about the minister. They save liiin from 
 falling into that heresy which has beset all Christian 
 history and been the fruitful source of many kinds 
 of woes, the heres}^ that the clergyman is the Church. 
 They constantly remind him that the people are the 
 Church, and that he is the Church's servant. I rec- 
 ognize the value of this element in the congregation 
 very heartily. I think that every parish needs such 
 laymen. It would be a very loose and incoherent 
 thing without them. But still I want you to notice 
 the dangers that may come in connection with the 
 special prominence and special usefulness of a few 
 members of the Church. There is chance always of 
 the Church becoming a sort of club, providing for 
 the wants, perhaps indeed the highest spiritual 
 wants, of a few, but forgetting that it has the world 
 about it and was meant for all men. This is a danger 
 which belongs to the very fact of a recognized body 
 called the congregation. It is a danger which is in- 
 tensified when in the centre of that body there is a 
 core which emphasizes all its qualities and spirit, the 
 congregation of the congregation. The congregation 
 Dught to be exclusive only, as our old professor of 
 theology used to say of the Gospel, as the light in 
 the Pharos was covered with glass merely that it 
 might burn the more brightly and shed the more 
 light abroad. Remember this danger. Give much 
 time and thought and care to the outskirts of your 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 193 
 
 parish, to its loose and ragged fringes ; seek the peo- 
 ple who just drift within your influence, and who 
 will drift awa}^ again, if your kind strong hand is not 
 upon them. Do not spend too much time in the safe 
 sheepfold where the ninety-nine are secure, while 
 there are sheep upon the mountains. Be sure that 
 nothing will make the core and heart of your con- 
 gregation so solid as a strong drawing inward of its 
 loose circumference. The stronsr and settled men of 
 your church will value you and your usefulness to 
 them more highly if they see you busy among the 
 wretched, the careless, and what men dare to call the 
 worthless souls. And there is another danger, I 
 think, which the congregation in the congregation 
 brings with it. The laymen who are most active and 
 interested in church life are ver}'- often not the most 
 receptive hearers. They are apt to take a few truths 
 for settled, and, realizing them very fully, using them 
 in their church work constantly, to ask no more, in- 
 deed to be hardly open to any more. They are half 
 clergyman, half layman, without the full receptivity 
 and mental enterprise which belongs to either. This 
 is the reason why thejr sometimes become dogmatic, 
 and not merely do not care themselves to speculate 
 3r learn, but, with an honest and narrow fear, be- 
 grudge the clergy and their fellow laymen an eager- 
 ness for truth which overruns their own settled lines. 
 The strongest bigotry is often found among theolog- 
 
 13 
 
194 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 ical laymen rather than among clergymen. Tlie 
 pillars of the Church are apt to be like the Pillars 
 of Hercules, beyond which no man might sail. Dean 
 Stanley, in an essay upon the connection of Church 
 and State, says .of the lay element in Church Synods : 
 *• The laymen who as a general rule figure in such 
 assemblies do not represent the true lay mind of the 
 Church, still less the lay intelligence of the whole 
 country. They are often excellent men, given to 
 good works, but they are also usually the partisans of 
 some special clerical school ; they are in short clergy- 
 men under another form rather than the real laity 
 themselves." He is writing on an English subject, 
 but his words describe a danger which we in America 
 can recognize, and which makes us glad to go on and 
 find in the congregation other elements besides this 
 most valuable, this indispensable one of which I have 
 been speaking. 
 
 To pass at once, tiien, to the other extreme, there is 
 in very numy, if not in all, congregations in those 
 days what we may call the supercilious hearer. He 
 is a man who for some reason comes to church, but is 
 out of sympathy with what goes on there. He is scep- 
 tical about the truth of what we believe and preach. 
 You come to know that hearer. You are sure that he 
 is critical. You are aware that some safe, sonorous, 
 and unmeaning statements, which some of your people 
 will take because they have the right words m them, 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 195 
 
 ind the true ring about them, he seizes on the mo- 
 ment that they fall from your lips and tears their 
 flimsiness to pieces in his merciless mind. Sometimes 
 your heart has sunk as you have said some foolish 
 thing and not dared to look him in the face, but felt 
 sure that it has not escaped him. In one of his Lent 
 discourses Massillon upbraids such hearers. " It is 
 not to seek corn," he says, *' that you come into 
 Egypt. It is to seek out the nakedness of the land. 
 Exploratores Estis, ut videatis infirmiora terree hujus 
 venistis." Now, such an element in a congregation, 
 though it may be very small, cannot but influence the 
 preacher. What shall he think about it ? He ought 
 to start, it seems to me, by feeling that the very pres- 
 ence of such men in church means something. They 
 have not come wholly, certainly they will noi come 
 continually, for the malicious reason which Massillon 
 ascribes. There is some better and deeper cause, even 
 though the man is not conscious of it himself. The 
 preacher has a right to believe this, and so the man's 
 presence may become not an embarrassment but an 
 inspiration. And then, when this is gained, he may 
 Decome a help in other ways. He keeps the atmos- 
 phere of the church fresh. He makes you aware as 
 you preach of the unbelief which you have no right 
 to forget. He incites you with the sense of diSicuity 
 and the consciousness of criticism. A parish of critics 
 «vould be killing, but a critic here and there is tonie 
 
19G LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 He keejjs the walls of your church from growing so 
 solid that as you preach, you cannot, as you ought, 
 look through them as if they were glass, and preach 
 in the present remembrance of the multitudes whc 
 never come to church, and do not know your truth, 
 and yet for whom your truth is just as true and might 
 be just as lielpful as it is to you. This man makes 
 all this real to you. He compels you to remember it. 
 It is strange how the general scepticism about us may 
 not put us out, or disturb us at all, while a special 
 case close by us will excite us and waken all our 
 powers. It is like the way in which you can go on 
 with your private work or thought, perfectly well, 
 perhaps all the better, for the general roar of the city, 
 while a single hammer clanging under your window 
 iiistracts you and compels you to hear it. How shall 
 such a critic enter into your preaching ? What in- 
 fluence shall it have upon your sermon to know that 
 he is there ? The influence, I should say, of making 
 the whole sermon more true and conscientious, more 
 complete in the best qualities that belong to all good 
 Bermons. But not the influence of changing the sei'- 
 mon's essential character. Preach the Gospel all the 
 more seriously, simpl}^ mightily if you can, because 
 of the unsympathetic criticism that it has to meet, 
 but let it be the same Gospel which you Avould [lour 
 into ears hungry to receive it. The two faults that 
 you have to avoid in preaching to unbelief are, Deti- 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 197 
 
 ance and Obsequience. One makes the unbeliever 
 hate your truth, and the other makes him despise it. 
 Be frank., brave, simple. There is nothing the un- 
 believer honors like belief. Let the influence of 
 your supercilious and sceptical audience be primarily 
 upon yourself, making you more serious and eager , 
 then let it come indirectly into your sermon, not 
 changing its topic but filling it with a stronger power 
 of conviction and of love. Of course I am speaking 
 now, not of the sermons in which one specially deals 
 with some special phase of scepticism, but only of 
 the general tenor of a man's preaching in view of this 
 part of his congregation. 
 
 The next element in the congregation of which I 
 wish to speak is less interesting than these two ; per- 
 haps, also, more puzzling. In every congregation 
 there are many people who come to church, as it 
 seems, purely from habit. As with the supercilious 
 hearers, it is hai"d to tell why they come, but not now 
 because of any positive reasons why they should not, 
 but merely from the absence of any reasons why they 
 ihould. Such a hearer seems to be docile, but his 
 docility consists in never doubting or denying what 
 you say. He has probably grown up in the Church. 
 There is more or less of the notion of respectability 
 ^11 aching to that mysterious impulse which every 
 Sunday turns his steps toward the sanctuary. Prob- 
 ably if you could get deep encugb, deeper than I lis 
 
198 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 own consciousness of its causes, you would find that 
 some vague fear Lad something to do at least with 
 the origin, perhaps with the continuance of thia 
 strange habit. He is no unusual sight. He comes 
 and goes in all our churches. In many cliurches it 
 seems as if such as he made up a large part of th? 
 congregation. Now what shall we say of him ? First 
 of all, certainly, as we said of the critic, that we have 
 a right to believe that we have not wholly fathomed 
 the secret of his presence. At least we may hope 
 tha,t, however unconsciously and vaguely, the spirit 
 of the place has reached him. Hoping this, you may 
 expect to see the unconscious impulse develop into a 
 conscious seeking, if you can intensify the spirit of 
 the place, and make it more positive about him. 
 The form in which the change takes place will vary 
 according to his character. It may be sudden and 
 vehement ; a conversion as true and picturesque as 
 any that comes to one who, after years of brutal 
 ignorance, hears for the first time the story of the 
 Saviour. Or it may be very gradual, the slow, still 
 drawing to a focus, and quickening into fire of that 
 heat which he has been absorbing, without knowing 
 it, so long. There are two effects of every sermon, 
 one special, in the enforcement of a single thought, or 
 the inculcation of a single duty; the other general, in 
 the diffusion of a sense of the beauty of holiness and 
 the value of truth. To the second of these effects, 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 199 
 
 ti.is routine listener has been susceptible during many 
 a service and sermon that seemed to pass across him 
 like the wind. However the awakening comes, there 
 is no happier sight for any minister to see. It puts 
 new vigor into him, makes him believe his truth by 
 one more evidence, and teaches him that lesson which 
 the preacher must know, but M'hich he can only leai'n 
 thoroughly out of experiences such as this, that it is 
 not his business to despair of anybody. Perhaps, so 
 far as the minister is concerned, this is the final cause 
 of this most discouraging being's presence in the con- 
 gregation. He furnishes the minister now and then 
 with an encouragement such as nobody but himself 
 could furnish. And, in the mean time, sitting there 
 with the calm countenance which has faced so many 
 Bermons, if anything could sting the jaded and com- 
 monplace minister into freshness and pointedness, it 
 would seem as if it must be this man's presence. He 
 shames you and inspires you. He makes you feel 
 your responsibility, and makes you eager not to boast 
 of it. He reminds you of your duty and your fee- 
 bleness. He rebukes anything fantastic or unreal 
 in your preaching. He tempts your plainest, and 
 directest, and tersest truth. There is a prayer in an 
 old Russian Liturgy which always seemed to me the 
 very model of a minister's prayer, which I wish that 
 ^11 of us ministers could learn to pray continually, 
 ind wliich this man in your congregation makes you 
 
200 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 pray with double earnestness, — '' O Lord and Sover- 
 eign of my Life, take from nie the Spirit of idleness, 
 despair, love of power, and unprofitable speaking." 
 
 But from these classes let us turn to that part of a 
 confjrefjation which constitutes its chief and most in- 
 spiring interest. I mean those who in any way are 
 to be characterized as earnest seekers after truth. It 
 is the element that calls out all that is best in a 
 preacher. Very often as we read Christ's teachings, 
 we can almost feel His eye wandering here and there 
 across the motley crowd around Him, till He finds 
 some one man evidently in earnest, and then the 
 discourse sets towards him, and we almost feel the 
 Saviour's heart beat with anxiety to help some poor 
 forgotten creature, who has long since past out of the 
 memory of man, but in whom on that day so long 
 ago He saw a seeker. And we may say with cer- 
 tainty that any man who has not in him the power 
 of quick response to the appeal of spiritual hunger, 
 lacks a fundamental quality of the true preacher. 
 There are some men who cannot see boilil}' pain with- 
 out a longing to relieve it, which begets an ingenuity 
 in relieving it, out of which spring all the best refine- 
 ments of the doctor's art. There are other men who, 
 just in the same way, perceive the wants and longings 
 of men's souls, and in them is begotten the holy 
 ingenuity which the true preacher usi-s. The soul 
 quickens the mind to its most complete fertilitv. 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 201 
 
 I do not subdivide this class. It includes the whole 
 range of personal earnestness. The heart just con- 
 scious of some need, all ignorant of what it is, dis- 
 satisfied and restless, not alone from the unsatisfac- 
 toriness of earthly things, but likewise from a true 
 attraction which comes to it from a higher life, this 
 heart is close beside another which has long knowh 
 the truth and long rested on the love of Christ but 
 yet is always craving a deeper truth and a more un- 
 hindered love. The two hearts belong: together. 
 They help to throw the same kind of spirit into the 
 congregation. They send up the same kind of in- 
 spiration to the preacher. It is good always to think 
 of these two hearts together, to count your congrega- 
 tion, not by the point in Christian attainment which 
 you conceive them to have reached, but by the spirit- 
 ual desire and eagerness which you can perceive in 
 them. We may mistake the first. We can hardly 
 be mistaken about the second. Here must be the 
 preacher '^s real encouragement. Behind all tests which 
 the church-membership lists and the contribution 
 boxes can furnish, there lies the knowledge, which 
 comes out of all his anxious intercourse with them, 
 whether these men and women to whom he preaches 
 are seeking for more truth and higher life. It seems 
 \l,s if one of the ways in which the Lord's beatitude 
 about the hungerers and thirsters after righteousnesa 
 eame true was by the power to help them which tho 
 
202 LECTURF.S n\ PRE AC TUNG. 
 
 very sight of their thirst and hunger gave to tlioae 
 whom God had sent to be their feeders. 
 
 And I believe that the proportion of tliis class in 
 the general congregation is much greater than we are 
 apt to imagine. In all life, and nowhere more than 
 in what we say about the Church and its work, cyn- 
 ical and disparaging ideas are capable of much more 
 clever, epigrammatic statement than hopeful ideas. So 
 they have easy currency and impose on people. It is- 
 easy to draw the picture of the faithless or frivolous 
 elements in a congregation till it appears as if the 
 whole compau}^ which meets every Sunday were in an 
 elaborate conspiracy to make sport of itself, as if a 
 crowd of people came together to criticise what none 
 of them believed, and to endure with half-concealed 
 impatience what none of them cared anything about. 
 But such a picture, the more cleverly and sweepingly 
 it is drawn, evidently disproves itself. If that were 
 the congregation, evidently there would not long be 
 any congregation. If that were wliat their meeting 
 meant, evidently they would not meet again and again 
 year after year. No mere momentum of a past im- 
 pulse could carry along so dead a weight. No, there 
 is in the congregation as its heart and soul a craving 
 after truth. Believe in that. Let it give an expec- 
 tant look to the whole congregation in your eyes. 
 Let it fill your study as you write at home. And if 
 i,raong the elements which make up your great con- 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 20£ 
 
 grogation you grow bewildered and cannot t^U lo 
 winch one you ought to write or speak, I do not 
 hesitate at all to say let it be this one. This is the 
 spirit to which if you speak you will be sure to speak 
 most universally. One sermon here and there to 
 those who are entirely indifferent, beating their 
 sleepy carelessness awake ; one sermon here and 
 there to those who are scornfully sceptical, showing 
 them if you can how weak their superciliousness is, 
 a sermon fired if need be with something of " the 
 scorn of scorn ;" one sermon here and there per- 
 haps for those rare few whose life seems to have mas- 
 tered truth and bathed itself in love, a sermon of 
 congratulation and of peace ; but almost -all your ser- 
 mons with the seekers in your eye. Preaching to 
 them you shall preach to all. The indifferent shall 
 be awakened into hope; the scornful shall feel some 
 sting of shame ; and before those who are most con- 
 scious of. what God has done for them shall open 
 visions of what greater things he yet may do, and 
 like St. Paul they may forget the things behind and 
 press forward with a new desire. 
 
 It is from the recognition of this element in the 
 congregation that the minister's perception of the 
 necessary variety of Christian life proceeds. All 
 earnestness emphasizes individuality. So long as you 
 Bee no personal anxiety in your people's ej^es, you 
 may calmly form your own plans about them, make 
 
204 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 ap your mind what they are to be made, an i go to 
 work to make tliem that with certain expectation 
 that they will take your truth in just your way, and 
 shape their lives into the mould which you lay before 
 them as if it showed the only shape of Christian char- 
 acter. But when you feel the anxious wish of men 
 and women really seeking after truth, when the cry 
 " What must I do to be saved ? " sounds in your 
 quickened ears from all the intent and silent pews, 
 then is the time when you really learn how wide and 
 various salvation is. The revival and the inquiry 
 room must always widen a man's conception of Chris- 
 tianity, and they are only the emphatic expressions of 
 what is always present and may always be felt in 
 every congregation. A minister once said to me how 
 strange it seemed to him that he had been preaching 
 one truth in one language for years and yet the 
 people who came to him moved by the truth he taught 
 never conceived it in his form, nor used, as they told 
 him their experience, the language in which he had 
 set the truth before them. It troubled him. It made 
 him wonder whether the language he had used was 
 wrong and false ; perhaps also whether the truth 
 which they stated so differently really was the same 
 truth which he had tried to teach them. To mo it 
 rather showed that there must have been truth and 
 Tioble reality about his words, a genuinely feeding 
 powar, that men should have taken them as they 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 205 
 
 take the healthy corn out of the fields and turn it 
 into all kinds of strength and work. However that 
 may have been, the more truly you think of your con- 
 gregation as seekers after salvation, to whom you are 
 to open the sacred doors, the more ready you will be 
 to see each entering in to a salvation peculiarly his 
 own. You will be glad and not sorry when a man 
 tells you what God has done for him, and only gradu- 
 ally you find that it is the truth which you told him, 
 transformed into some new shape of which you never 
 dreamed, that is the new treasure of his life. 
 
 These, then, are the elements which make up the 
 congregation. They are the constant factors. In 
 order to realize the congregation entirely, we must 
 think of it as not closed, but open, and always in- 
 eluding some peojjlewho as mere strangers have wan- 
 dered in and taken their seats among the people who 
 are always there. They suggest the outside world. 
 Their unfamiliar faces remind the preacher of the 
 general humanity. They are not classified at all. 
 They are simply men and women. I think it is a 
 great advantage to a congregation that it should have 
 such an element. They are to a congregation what 
 the few people who came into contact with Jesus who 
 were not Jews — such as the Syrophenician woman, 
 and the Centurion, and the Greeks, who asked to see 
 him — were to Christ's disciples. They kept men'? 
 conception of His ministry from closing in tJghtly to 
 
206 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 the Jewish people. This is the danger of the coun- 
 try parish, where you know everybody who cornea 
 into the church. You forget the mission to the world. 
 I know no safeguard against such forgetfulness but a 
 deep sense of the general humanity of the people un- 
 derneath their special characters, W'hich shall make 
 them true specimens of the race, as well as the dis- 
 tinct individuals, whose faces, names, and ways you 
 know. 
 
 These are the elements, then. Now mingle these 
 elements in j-^our mind, and ask what sort of body 
 they make. What will be the general characteristics 
 of this assemblage, so heterogeneous and yet with 
 such a true unity in it, which we call The Congrega- 
 tion ? It has the genuine solidity which comes from 
 certain fundamental assumptions. It is gathered as 
 a Cln-istian gathering. It is not loose and incohe- 
 rent, like the multitude who stood about Paul on the 
 Hill of Mars, merely asking in general for what is 
 new, or, more earnestly, for what is true. It has a 
 positive character. It accepts a positive authority. 
 And yet it is alert and questioning. The truth which 
 it desires is open to abundant varieties of conception 
 and application. It is this combination of solidity 
 with vitality, this harmonizing of settled conditions 
 with constant activity and growth, which makes, I 
 think, the most mai'ked character of the Christian 
 congregation. It is an institution pervaded with in- 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 207 
 
 dividual life; it is an assembly of individuals to 
 which has been given something of the coherence of 
 an institution. It is the home at once of Faith and 
 Thought. Try to keep all of this character in your 
 congregation. Remember both its institutional char- 
 acter and its individual character. Do not" try ^o 
 make it a liighly organized machine, nor to let it 
 merely dissipate into an audience. Make it one, with- 
 out losing its multitude ; treat it as many, without 
 forgetting its oneness. Let it be full of the spirit of 
 autlioritative truth, iind at the same time of per- 
 sonal responsibility for thought and action. 
 
 If we look at the Christian congregation in another 
 and perhaps a simpler way, it stands as perhaps the 
 best representative assembly of humaliity that you 
 can nnd in the world. Men, women, and children 
 are all there together. No age, no sex must monopo- 
 Hze its privileges. All ministrations to it must be full 
 at once of vigor and of tenderness, the father's and 
 the mother's touch at once. Riches and poverty 
 meet indifferently in the idea, however it may be in 
 the realit}^, of the congregation. Even learning and 
 ignorance are recognized as properly meeting there. 
 However difficult it may be to do it, it is clearl}'^ rec- 
 ognized that men ought to preach so that the wisest 
 and the simplest alike can understand and get the 
 blessing. Here, then, is pure humanity. What othei 
 »8sembly so brings us together on the simple warrant 
 
208 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 of our race. This is what I always think is meant 
 by that record of tlie ministry of Jesus, " The com- 
 mon peoph^. heard Him gladly." It was not the pooi 
 because of some privilege that belonged to their pov- 
 erty. It was those, rich or poor, wise or rude, in 
 wliom the fundamental elements of human life were 
 unclouded by artificial culture. Pharisee or publican, 
 fisherman or philosopher, if they had not forgotten 
 to be men, they were still " common people," and 
 heard the huuian Saviour gladly. It was to their hu- 
 manity He preached, and nothing that He knew of 
 God was too precious to be brought, if He could bring 
 it, to their understaSiding. Preach to this same hu- 
 numity, and you too will give it your best. Tru.->t 
 the people to whom you preach more than most min- 
 isters do. Begin your ministry by being sure that if 
 you give your people your best thought, it ^yill be 
 none too good for them. They will take it all. Only 
 be sure that it is real, and that you are giving it to 
 them for their best good, and that it is what, if they 
 did receive it, would do them good, and then give 
 them the ver^'^ best and truest that you know. For 
 one minister who preaches " over people's heads " 
 there are twenty whose preaching goes wandering 
 about under men's feet, or is flung off into the air, in 
 .-ho right intellectual plane perhaps, but in a wholl\ 
 <Frong direction. 
 Not that there must not be discrimination ; only it 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 209 
 
 must not be in the quality of your thought. Never 
 your best thought for the old, your cheap thought for 
 the children ; never your best thought for the rich, 
 and poor thought for the poor. The best that you 
 can give is not too good for any one ; but in that 
 giving of the best, there is need for the most true and 
 delicate discrimination as to how it shall be given, 
 and which part of it shall be given to this congrega- 
 tion and which to that. It is not a matter of rule. 
 It belongs to wise and sympathetic instinct. To cul- 
 tivate that instinct, to learn to feel a congregation, 
 to let it claim its own from him, is one of the first 
 duties of a minister. Until you do that you may be 
 a great expounder, a brilliant^ " sermonizer," but you 
 cannot be a preacher. Never to be tempted to pro- 
 foundness where it would be thrown away ; never to 
 be childlike when it is manly vigor that you need ; 
 never to be dull when you mean to be solemn, nor 
 frivolous when you mean only to be bright ; this 
 comes from a very quick power of perception and 
 adaptation. Our work has always had some curious 
 connections with the art of fishing. Let me quote 
 you from Isaak Walton what Piscator says to Vena- 
 tor while they sit by the stream-side at breakfast, on 
 the morning of the first lesson in trout- fishing. I 
 was struck by its appropriateness to the subject of 
 discrimination in preaching. It may help you, if you 
 remember it, when you come to " fish for trout with 
 
 14 
 
210 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 a worm " yourself, and may make no unfit rule foi 
 real timeliness in the pulpit. " Take this for a rule," 
 he says, " when you fish for trout with a worm, let 
 your line have so much and not more lead than will 
 fit the stream in which you fish ; that is to say, more 
 in a great troublesome stream than in a smaller that 
 is quieter, as near as may be so nmch as will sink the 
 bait to the bottom and keep it still in motion and not 
 more." Weight and movement, — these are what we 
 need in fishing and in preaching. 
 
 The congregation being^what it is, let me ask, in 
 the few moments that remain to-day, what it can do 
 for the preacher, both in the way of help and in the 
 way of danger. 
 
 In the way of help., it brings him the inspiration of 
 its numbers, the boldness and freedom of its miti- 
 gated personality, and the larger test of his work. It 
 is not safe to judge of the effect of your work by any 
 one individual ; but when a congregation pronounces 
 on it, not by the unreliable witness of praise, but by 
 the testimony of its evidently changed condition, its 
 higher life, its more complete devotion, it is never 
 wrong. Do not despise the witness that even the 
 meanest of your people bear to your faithfulness or 
 unfaithfulness. When it really rains, the puddles as 
 «vell as the oceans bear witness to the shower. Trust 
 four people's judgment on your work : what they 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 211 
 
 say about it, a good deal ; but what it does upon 
 them, much more. 
 
 And I cannot help bearing witness to the fairness 
 and considerateness whi.h belongs to this strange 
 composite being, the congregation. His insight is 
 very true, and his conscience on the whole is very 
 right. If he sees that his minister is totally devoted 
 to him, and giving his life up to his work, he stands 
 by that minister of his and provides for him abun- 
 dantly. If he sees that his minister is taking good 
 care of his own interests, he lets him do it, as he 
 would let any other man, and does not trouble him- 
 self about it, as there is no reason that he should. 
 Whether the minister feels the congregation or not, 
 the congregation feels the minister. Often the horse 
 knows the rider better than the rider knows the horse. 
 There may be exceptions which would not justify my 
 confidence. In all these lectures I am only givino- 
 you the impressions which have come out of my 
 own experience. I am sure it will be well if you 
 can never allow yourself to complain that your con- 
 gregation neglect you without first asking yourself 
 whether you have given them any reason why they 
 should attend to you. 
 
 Indeed, the danger of the congregation to the min- 
 ister comes more from their indulgence than from 
 their opposition The feeling of the strongest min- 
 isters about the superficialness of clerical popularity 
 
212 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 is very striking. Nothing seemed to vex Robertson 
 60 much as to be talked of as the idol of the crowd. 
 Indeed, he is absolutely morbid about it, and liates 
 that to which he need only have been indifferent. It 
 would seem as if mere popularity', to a man of any 
 independence, was the driest of all Dead Sea fruits. 
 And there is reason why it should be so. It is the 
 M'orst and feeblest part of your congregation tluit 
 makes itself heard in vociferous appUiuse, and it ap- 
 plauds that in you which pleases it. Robertson, in 
 one of his letters, says of a friend : " He has lost his 
 power, which was once the greatest that I ever knew. 
 The sentimental people of his congregation attribute 
 it to an increase of spirituality, but it is, in truth, a 
 falling-off of energy of grasp." Those words suggest 
 the cause of many a minister's decay, the Capua where 
 many a preaching Hannibal has been ruined. " Turba 
 est argumentum pessimi," says Seneca. There are 
 certain other causes wliicli help to produce the im- 
 pression, but still there is truth in the belief that 
 much of the best thinking and preaching of the land 
 is done in obscure parishes and by unfamous preach- 
 ers. The true balance, if we could only reach and 
 keep it, evidently is in neither courting nor despising 
 the popular applause, to feel it as every healthy mau 
 feels the ap]n-oval of his fellow-UK'n, and yet never to 
 be beguiled by it from that which is the only true 
 object of our work, God's truth and men's salvation, 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 213 
 
 And remember this, that the only way to be saved 
 from the poison of men's flattery is to be genuineljr 
 devoted to those same men's good. It" you really 
 want to drag a man out of the fire, you will not be 
 distracted into self-conceit by his praises of the grace 
 and softness of the hand that you reach out to him. 
 You will say, " Stop your compliments and take 
 hold." 
 
 The subject of the popularity of ministers is indeed 
 a curious one, and may well merit a few moment's 
 study. We hardly realize, I believe, how far the de- 
 sire for popularity in this time and land has tiiken 
 the place of the ambition for preferment which we 
 read of in English clerical history, and which has 
 so strongly and so justly excited our di&like. He 
 who used there to seek the favor of a bishop, or some 
 other patron, bids here for the liking of the multitude. 
 It is a question hardly worth the asking, which ambi- 
 tion calls out the lower arts, or does the greater mis- 
 chief. Both are very bad. To set one's heart on 
 being popular is fatal to the preacher's best growth. 
 To escape from that desire, one needs to know that 
 the men who are in no sense popular favorites do 
 much of the very best work of the ministry. In all 
 work there seems to be generally two classes of 
 workers, one whose processes of working are ap- 
 parent, the other whose results only appear. Now 
 most popular preachers seem to me to belong to the 
 
214 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 first class, and to owe their popularity to that charao 
 teristic. Not only what they do, but the wa}' in which 
 they do it interests people. It is not only the power 
 of the truth which they declare : it is the eloquence 
 of the sermons in which they declare it. It is not 
 only the gracious influence they exercise : it is their 
 gracious way of exercising it, the smile, the tone, the 
 transparent vision of the kindly heart. Let a man 
 understand this, and it will certainly require no very 
 profound philosophy or devotion for him to let the 
 popularity go if he can do the work. The popularity 
 is an accident : the power is essential. 
 
 And, no doubt, the absence of lively popular favor 
 has an influence in enabling a minister to apprehend 
 the larger indications of the successful working of his 
 truth. The people's applause emphasizes the small 
 success, and tempts a man to be content with that. 
 He who works in silence becomes aware of the larger 
 movements of the truth and the surer conquests of 
 the power of God. The small signs fail ; there is no 
 glitter in the arms, no shout of triumph anywhere, 
 but often the very silence lets one hear more clearly 
 the great progress that is going on all over the field. . 
 
 Again, there is great difference in men according 
 as they seem to possess or to lack themselves the 
 qualities and conditions which they try to create in 
 other people. Some men are all afire themselves, and 
 •eeni to fire others by contagion ; other men appear 
 
THE CONGREGATION. 215 
 
 cold, but send forth fire from their very coldness. 
 Some men are full of movement and so make others 
 move ; other men seem sluggish and yet awaken 
 others to a vitality which they do not seem to possess 
 
 themselves. 
 
 " The enormous axle-tree 
 That whirls (how slow itself ! ) ten thousand spindles." 
 
 In general, the popularity, the quick general sym- 
 pathy and admiration, will go with the first class of 
 men. The others will do their work in quietness, 
 with much power but not much observation. 
 
 To be your own best self for your people's sake. 
 That is the true law of the minister's devotion. 
 " Loquendura ut multi, sapiendum ut pauci " — the 
 thought of the few in the speech of the many — that 
 describes a popular power which any preacher has 
 not only the right but the duty to covet. 
 
 The whole of the relation, then, between the 
 preacher and the congregation is plain. They belong 
 together. But neither can absorb or override the 
 other. They must be filled with mutual respect. 
 .He is their leader, but his leadership is not one con- 
 stant strain, and never is forgetful of the higher guid- 
 ance upon which they both rely. It is like the rope 
 by which one ship draws another out into the sea. 
 The rope is not always tight between them, and all 
 the while the tide on which they float is carrying 
 them both. So it is not mere leading and following. 
 
216 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 It is one of the very highest pictures of human com- 
 panionship that can be seen on earth. Its constant 
 presence has given Christianity much of its noblest 
 and sweetest color in all ages. It has much of the in- 
 timacy of the family with something of the breadth 
 and dignity that belongs to the state. It is too sa- 
 cred to, be thought of as a contract. It is a union 
 which God joins together for purposes worthy of His 
 care. When it is worthily realized, who can say that 
 it may not stretch beyond the line of death, and they 
 who have been minister and people to each other here, 
 be something holy and peculiar to each other in the 
 City of God forever ? 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 
 
 T AM to speak to you to-day upon the preacher in 
 his special relation to our own time. There is a 
 strange sound, perhaps, when we think about it, in 
 the very suggestion that the preacher of the Gospel 
 is to be something special Avith reference to the spe- 
 cial time in which he lives. For we have dwelt upon 
 the one universal and eternal message which tlie 
 preacher is sent to carry to the world. That message 
 never changes. The identity of Christianity lies in 
 its identity. Nay, the identity of man is bound up 
 with it; and so long as man is what he is, what God 
 has to say to him by His servants will certainly al- 
 ways be the same. And so the preacher, as the 
 bearer of that message, must have his true identity, 
 must stand before men in essentially the same figure 
 and speak with essentially the same voice in all the 
 ages. Where, then, does the adaptation of a preacher 
 to his own age come in ? The best answer, perhaps, 
 would be, by way of illustration, in the position 
 lyhich every live and cultivated man holds with refer- 
 ence to the time he lives in. He is, in the first placej 
 
218 LECTURES ON PREACHLVCr. 
 
 a mail in universal human history. His are the 
 rights, the duties, and the standards which belong to 
 all men simply as men. In proportion as he is a 
 strong, wise man, this larger life is real to him. He 
 knows that he will live his special life more healthily 
 for himself and more helpfully to his brethren, not 
 by forgetting, but by remembering his place in the 
 general and continuous humanity. It will keep his 
 sight truer. Many times it will preserve his inde- 
 pendence when it is in danger from the fleeting pas- 
 sions of the hour. But yet he lives the special life. 
 He is a man of his own day, thoroughly interested 
 in the questions that are exciting men around him, 
 pained by the troubles, delighted by the joys, and 
 busy in the tasks of his own time. His broad hu- 
 manity and broad culture makes him a man of all 
 days ; his keen life and quick sympathies and healthy 
 instincts and real desire for work, make him a man 
 of his own day. We can all see the ideal complete- 
 ness of such a life. Whenever we have seen a man 
 at all attaining it, we have felt how complete he was. 
 The incompleteness of men comes as they fall short 
 of this on one side or the other. The man who be- 
 longs to the world but not to his time, grows abstract 
 and vague, and lays no strong grasp upon men's lives 
 .and the present causes of their actions. Tlie man 
 who belongs to his time but not to the world growa 
 thin and superficial. 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 219 
 
 And just exHctl^r this is true about the preacher. 
 There are the constant and unchanging needs of men, 
 ftnd the message which is addressed to those needs 
 and shares their unchangeableness ; and then there 
 are the ever-varying aspects of those needs to which 
 the toys of the message, if it would really reach the 
 needy soul, must intelligently and sympathetically 
 correspond. The first of these comes of the preach- 
 er's larger life, his study of the timeless Word of 
 God, his intercourse with God in history, his personal 
 communion with his Master, and the kuowledge of 
 those depths of human nature which never chano-f 
 whatever waves of alteration may disturb the sur- 
 face. The second comes from a constantly alert 
 watch of the events and symptoms of the current 
 times, begotten of a deep desire that the salvation of 
 the world, which is always going on, may show itself 
 here and now in the salvation of these particular men 
 to whom the preacher speaks. If we leave out the 
 difference of natural endowments and of personal de- 
 votedness, there is nothing which so decides the dif- 
 ferent kinds as well as the different degrees of min- 
 isters' successes as the presence or absence of this 
 balance and proportion of the general and special, the 
 •world-consciousness and the time-consciousness. The 
 abstract reasoner, laying his deep trains of thought 
 which run far wide of the citadels where sin is now 
 ^trenched, and never shatter a stone of present 
 
220 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 wickedness with their ponderous explosions, whatever 
 other good things he may do, fails as a preacher to 
 men. The mere critic of the time who, with no deep 
 principles tmd no long hopes, goes on his way merrily 
 or fiercely lopping off the ugly heads of the vices of 
 the time with his light switch or valiant swqrd, he, 
 too, fails in his work, and by and by is wearied and 
 distressed as he finds the surface character of all the 
 reformation to which he brings his converts. It is 
 the first sort of preaching that wearies men when 
 they complain of what they call a very profound but 
 a very dull sermon. The second is what makes peo- 
 ple dissatisfied with a sense of unthoroughness as 
 they come home still mildly tingling from what they 
 call a sensational sermon. The first man has aimed 
 at truth without caring for timeliness. The second 
 man has been so anxious to be timely that he has 
 perhaps distorted truth, and certainly robbed her of 
 her completeness. Truth and timeliness together 
 make the full preacher. How shall you win' such 
 fulness ? Let me say one or two general words, and 
 leave particulars of the method to come out, if they 
 may, all tlirough the lecture. First, seek always 
 truth first and timeliness secoHd, — never timeliness 
 first and truth second. Then, let your search for 
 trutli be deliberate, systematic, conscientious. Let 
 yo\ir search for timeliness consist ratlu'r in seeking 
 for strong 8ym})a*:hy with your kind, a real share ixi 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 221 
 
 tlieir occupations, and a hearty intei'est in what is 
 going on. And yet again; let the subjects of your 
 sermons be mostly eternal truths, and let the timeli- 
 ness come in the illustration of those truths by, and 
 their application to, the events of current life. So 
 you will make the thinking of your hearers larger, 
 and not smaller, as you preach to them. 
 
 So much in general. But now let us come to this 
 most interesting age in which we live and in which 
 we are set to preach. I want to point out two or 
 three of its broadest characteristics and see how they 
 affect the preacher's work. I do not undertake any 
 such task as a general estimate of the character of 
 our strange century and country. I only want to 
 indicate some points in it which come directly home 
 to you and me, and to see, if we can, how we shall 
 treat them. Let me speak of the feeling of our time 
 about Truth and Life in general, about the Ministry 
 and about the Bible. 
 
 In the fii'st place, then, there are certain vaguely 
 conceived but real difficulties lying in people's minda 
 to-day against which the Gospel that we preach 
 strikes. We meet them in a great variety of forms. 
 We find their spirit appearing in regions of intelli- 
 gence where there cannot be any understanding of 
 their intellectual statements. The most common, the 
 most wonderfully subtle and pervasive of all these ia 
 the notion of Fate, with all the consequences which 
 
222 LECTURES OX PREACHING. 
 
 it brings ■with it to the ideas of responsibility and 
 even to the fundamental conception of personal Life. 
 We are so occupied with watching the developments 
 of fatalistic philosophy in its higher and moi'e scien- 
 tific phases that I think we often fail to see to what 
 an extent and in what unexpected forms it has found 
 its way into the common life of men and is governing 
 their thoughts about ordinary things. The notion of 
 fixed helplessness, of the impossibility of any strong 
 power of a man over his own life, and, along with 
 this, the mitigation of the thought of responsibility 
 which, beginning with the sublime notion of a man's 
 being answerable to God, comes down to think of 
 him only as bound to do his duty to society, then 
 descends to consider him as only liable for the harm 
 which he does to himself, and so finally reaches the 
 absolute abandonment of any idea of judgment or 
 accountability whatever, — all this is very much more 
 common than we dream. It runs down through all 
 the degrees of lessening consciousness. There is 
 nothing stranger than to watch how the intelligent 
 Bpaculations of the learned become the vague preju- 
 dices of the vulgar. You can shut up nothing within 
 the scholar's study-door. For good or for mischief 
 all that the wisest are thinking becomes in some 
 form or other the basis upon which the ignorant live. 
 Partly this, and partly a power which works just the 
 Dth»3r way. Partly that the learned are led on by 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 223 
 
 dieif oneness with all their brethren to take for the 
 subjects of their study those things to which the 
 interest of the unlearned has been turned and to 
 reduce to philosophical expression those ideas by 
 which the rudest are shaping their lives. "Whatever 
 the interaction of the two causes may have been, the 
 result is here in a certain suspicion of fatalism all 
 around us. With it come the inevitable conse- 
 quences of hopelessness and restraint pervading all 
 society and influencing all action, different in differ- 
 ent natures, hard and defiant in some, soft and lux- 
 urious in others, but in all their various forms 
 unfitting men for the best happiness, or the best 
 growth, or the best usefulness to fellow-men. This 
 is what we find scattered through the society in 
 which we live. This is what you have got to preach 
 to, my young friends. You will not. escape it by 
 ministering to one class of people rather than to an- 
 other, for it runs everywhere. You will leave it in 
 the study only to find it in some new form in the 
 workshop. You will silence it in the dull querulous 
 discontent of the boor only to hear it in the calm and 
 resigned and lofty philosophy of the sage. What 
 preaching can you meet it with ? Certainly one 
 may point out the broadest features of the preaching 
 Mhich alone can meet it. It must be positive preach- 
 ing. There never was an age when negative preach- 
 ing, the mere assertion of what is not true, showed 
 
224 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 its uselessness as it does to-day. It does no good tc 
 show the fatalist that fatahsra is untenable. He 
 does not really believe it ; it is only that he seems to 
 be unable to believe anything else. You disprove it, 
 and that only adds another to the heap of things that 
 are incredible. You must preach positively, telling 
 him what is true, setting God before his heart and 
 bidding it know its Lord. And it must be preaching 
 to the conscience. The conscience is the last part of 
 our personality that dies into the death of fatalism. 
 It must be the first part of us that wakens to the 
 privileges and obligations of personal life. Make a 
 man know that he is wicked and that he may be good, 
 and his self and God's self will be realities to him 
 which no juggle of words can make him believe do 
 not exist. And, thirdly, there never was an age that 
 so needed to have Christ preached to it, the personal 
 Christ. In his personality the bewildered soul must 
 re-find its own personal life. In the service of Him 
 it must re-discover the possibility and the privilege of 
 duty. The haunting scepticism must be invaded by 
 preaching such as this. The doubt which has grown 
 up so vaguely and will give no account of itself, must 
 be overshadowed and undermined, overshadowed by 
 the vivid majesty of God in Christ, undermined by 
 the sense of sin and the necessity of righteousness. 
 The only hope of its complete dispersion is to pro^ 
 duce the Christian life which is its own assurance, 
 
■ THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 225 
 
 declares its own freedom and prophesies its own 
 possibilities. 
 
 I speak of this tendency to doubt qoncerning spir- 
 itual and personal forces principally as it appears all 
 through the movements of society and the lives of 
 common men. I have not much to say here about 
 the way in which the preacher meets it in the theo- 
 ries of science, the guesses at the philosophy of the 
 universe which the philosophers of our time have made 
 so plentifully. But nobody can listen to sermons 
 nowadays and not be struck by seeing how con- 
 fusedly the purpose of preaching and the function of 
 tlie preacher seems to be apprehended by those who 
 preach. Among the preachers who busy themselves 
 with what mode'rn science is doing and saying, we 
 can easily discern several classes. One class claims 
 competently to criticise the work of specialists and to 
 revise their judgments, even about those subjects on 
 wdnch they ought to be authorities. It attempts to 
 pronounce with competence upon the results of scien- 
 tific inquiry in a summary way which it would never 
 tolerate with reference to its own peculiar subjects of 
 study. It is needless to say how this class puts itself 
 into the power of those whom it criticises. It can get 
 the material for its criticism only from them. So 
 Boon as it leaves the field of general reasoning and 
 attempts to touch the question of scientific fact, it 
 must look for its facts to those who, for the time, it ia 
 
 15 
 
226 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 treating as its adversaries. It is reduced to some, 
 thing of the helplessness to which the Israelites were 
 brought when the Philistines who had conquered 
 them compelled them to come to their smiths to 
 sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and 
 his axe, and his mattock. Another class seems to 
 stand ready, not merely to disown the power of com- 
 petent criticism, but to accept with headlong zeal 
 every momentary conclusion of modern science, even 
 before the scientific world itself has learned to treat 
 it as more than a probable hypothesis ; and seems to 
 be all the more eager to accept it the more entirely 
 it seems to be in conflict with the faith of Chris- 
 tianity. No one will deny, I think, that there are 
 among the disciples of natural science to-day some 
 men who curiously repeat on their own ground every 
 offensive and arrogant peculiarity of the priestcraft 
 whose historical enormities they so fondly and truly 
 upbraid. It is an interesting illustration of how 
 human nature is the same at heart, and, if it be bad, 
 will show the same kind of badness whether it wear 
 the priest's surplice or tlie professor's gown. To this 
 overbearing assumption this second class is always in 
 great haste to prostrate itself. Surely the spirit ot 
 both of these classes is not good. Either is bad > 
 either the competence with which some clergymen 
 attempt to pronounce upon the value of scientific 
 theories, or the panic in which other clergymen seem 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 'I'-ll 
 
 to be waiting only to surrender to the first man with 
 a hammer or a microscope who challenges them. 
 There is another class still which seems to be merely 
 frightened. A sense of vague inevitable danger ia 
 continually haunting those who feel how wholly in- 
 competent they are to master or even to comprehend 
 the thing they fear. They hate and dread the very 
 name of Science. They would really, literally, silence 
 its investigations if they could. As the best thing 
 which they can do, they are very apt to devise or to 
 adopt some exceedingly fantastic and exacirerated 
 form either of church government, or of ritual, or of 
 doctrine, which they clothe with artificial sacredness, 
 and then set it up to keep the advancing monster 
 back, as they said that the Chinese piled their most 
 sacred crockery upon the track to stop the progress 
 of the first locomotive that came thundering throuo-h 
 their land. All fanaticism is closely bound to fear. 
 These are the dispositions with which some minis- 
 ters meet the spirit of the day. These are the vari- 
 ous classes. Among these classes comes some new 
 minister, and stands and says. To which shall I be- 
 long ? Is there not something better than either? 
 Indeed there is. It is possible for you and me, tak- 
 ing the facts of the spiritual life, to declare tliem with 
 AS true a certainty as any preacher ever did, in what 
 men call the " ages of faith." They are as true to- 
 day as they ever were. Men are as ready to feel 
 
228 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 their truth. The spiritual nature of man, with all 
 Its needs, is just as real a thing, and Christ is just 
 as truly and richly its satisfaction. To speak to it 
 and offer Him is your privilege and mine. And yet 
 not to be unregardful of what men are thinking by 
 our side, to watch it, so far as we may to understand 
 it all, but alwaj'^s to watch it with a desire to see, not 
 what it will say to overthrow, but what it will say to 
 strengthen and enlarge the truth we preach ; to watch 
 it with a feeling that it may modify our conception 
 and statement of the truth, but with no fear at all 
 that it ever can destroy the truth itself ; this does 
 seem to me to be the temper for the preacher of to- 
 day. Our truth stands on its own evidence, but it 
 has its connections with all the truth that men are 
 learning so wonderfully on every side. To listen to 
 what they learn, not that we may see whether our 
 truth of the soul and of God is true, but that we may 
 come to truer and larger ways of apprehending it, 
 this is our place. If we can take this place, it will 
 give us both firmness and freedom ; it will free us 
 alike from the uselessness of doubt and the useless- 
 Qess of bigotr3\ 
 
 I seem to see strange panic in the faces of the min- 
 isteis of to-day. I have seen a multitude of preach- 
 ers gathered together to listen to one who expounded 
 scientific theories upon the i-eligious side, and making 
 the hall ring with vociferous applause of statements 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 229 
 
 which might be true or not, but certainly whose truth 
 they had not examined, and in which it certainly was 
 not the truth but the tendency to help their side of 
 the argument that the}' applauded. I think that 
 that is not a pleasant sight for any one to see who 
 really cares for the dignity and purity of his profes- 
 sion. 
 
 The preacher must mainly rely upon the strength 
 of what he does believe, and not upon the weakness 
 of what he does not believe. It must be the power 
 of spirituality, and not the feebleness of materialism 
 that makes him strong. No man conquers, no true 
 man tries to conquer merely by the powerlessness of 
 his adversary. I think the scene which I just de- 
 scribed was pi'incipally melancholy, because it sug- 
 gested a lack of faith among the ministers themselves. 
 And one feared that that was connected with the ob- 
 stinate hold upon some untenable excrescences upon 
 their faith which they chose to consider part of the 
 substance of their faith itself. So bigotry and cow- 
 ardice go together always. 
 
 But after all, in days like these, one often finds 
 himself falling back upon the simplest truths con- 
 cerning the whole matter of belief. If there be dis- 
 proof or modification of what we Christians hold, the 
 sooner it can be made known to us the better. We 
 are Christians at all, if we are Christians worthily, 
 because we are first lovers of the truth. And if oui 
 
230 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 truth is wholly true, it is God's before it is ours, and 
 we may at least trust Him with some part of its care. 
 We are so apt to leave Him out. 
 
 And there is one strong feeling that comes out of 
 the extravagant unbelief of our time, which has in it 
 an element of reassurance. The preacher and pastor 
 sees that in human nature which assures him of the 
 essential religiousness of man. He comes to a com- 
 plete conviction that only a religion can overthrow and 
 supplant a religion. Man, wholly unreligious, is not 
 even conceivable to him. And so, however he may 
 fear for single souls, the very absoluteness of much of 
 the denial of the time seems to offer security for the 
 permanence of faith. 
 
 But the main thing is to know our own ground as 
 spiritual men, and stand on its assured and tested 
 strength. And that strength can be tested only by 
 our own experience ; and so once more we come I'ound 
 to our old first truth, that the man is behind the min- 
 istry, that what is in the sermon must be in the 
 preacher first. 
 
 Hcn'e must come what useful work we can do for 
 those who are bewildered and faithless in these trying 
 times. If you are going to help men who are ma- 
 terialists, it will not probably be by a scientific dis- 
 proof of materialism. It will be by a strong live 
 offer of spiritual realities. It is not what the minis- 
 ter knows of science, but how he grasps and presents 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 231 
 
 liis spiritual verities, that makes him strong. AEany 
 ignorant ministers meet tlie difficulties of men far 
 wiser than themselves. I may know nothing of spec- 
 ulative atheism. It is how I know God that tells. 
 
 I do not disparage controversy. Theology must be 
 prepared to maintain her ground against all comers. 
 If she loses her power of attack and defense, she will 
 lose her life, as they used to say that when the bee 
 parted with his sting he parted with his industry and 
 spirit. Only not every minister is made for a contro- 
 versialist, and the pulpit is not made for contro- 
 versy. The pulpit must be positive, telling its mes- 
 sage, trusting to the power of that message, expecting 
 to see it blend into harmony with all the other truth 
 that fills the world ; and the preacher, whatever else 
 he may be elsewhere, in the pulpit must be positive 
 too, uttering truth far more than denying error. 
 There is nothing that could do more harm to Chris- 
 tianity to-day than for the multitude of preachers to 
 turn from preaching Christ whom they do under- 
 stand, to the discussion of scientific 'questions which 
 they do not understand. Hear the conclusion of the 
 whole matter. Preach positively what you believe. 
 Never preach what you do not believe, or deny what 
 you do believe. Rejoice in the privilege of declaring 
 God. Let your people frankly understand, while you 
 preach, that there is raWch you do not know, and that 
 50th you and they are waiting for completer light. 
 
232 LECTURES ON PIli: ACHING. 
 
 I must iiDt linger longer on this topic. May G(»cl 
 help you, as you meet it constantly, to be wise and 
 true. 
 
 Another of the questions which belong to this time 
 of ours in some peculiar ways is the question of tol- 
 eration, — the relation of truth to partial truth and 
 error. This again, like every deep pervading ques- 
 tion, has its form for the learned and for the un- 
 learned. To the scholar it comes with the specula- 
 tions, for which the enlarged, acquaintance with other 
 lp,nds and times has furnished such abundant food, 
 pbout comparative religion. To the unscholarly it 
 offers itself in the prevailing disposition to exalt con- 
 duct above belief, and ask not what views a man 
 holds, but what sort of life he lives. In both these 
 cases the tendency of our time is no doubt towai'd 
 tolerance. The scholar and the ignorant man alike 
 are both content that their m.'ighbors should think 
 differently from them about religion. The very de- 
 sire for the stake has died away. We look back to 
 the sixteenth aiid seventeenth century and wonder at 
 the enormities of bigotry. We are all thankful for 
 the progress ; but often as we read the books of the 
 time, often as we talk with our friends, there is a 
 
 misfrivin<T which intrudes. How much of this tolera- 
 te o 
 
 tion is indifference? How many of these people that 
 are kindly to their neighbors' faiths are careless about 
 kheir own? How much )f the difference between us 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 233 
 
 and the zealots of the seventeenth century has como 
 from our weakened hold on truth ? They believed 
 with all their hearts, and were intolerant ; we h;i.vo 
 grown tolerant, but then we do not believe as they 
 believed. We must realize their intensity before we 
 presume to sit in judgment on their intolerance. S(^ 
 often we are only trying to be mutually harmless. 
 We are like steamers lying in the fog and whistling, 
 that we may not run into others nor they into us. 
 It is safe, but commerce makes no great progress 
 thereby, and it shows no great skill in navigation. 
 And then there comes the picture of a higher state 
 than either the seventeenth or nineteenth century 
 has reached. We see that here, as everywhere, man- 
 kind has been advancing in a halting and awkward 
 way, first dragging one side forward, and only gradu- 
 ally dragging the other side along to meet it. There 
 was a time when men were standing with their love 
 of truth in advance of their love of personal liberty. 
 We see that we are standing now with our love of 
 personal liberty in advance of our love for truth. We 
 anticipate a time when the love of truth shall have 
 come up to our love of liberty, and men shall be cor^ 
 dially tolerant and earnest believers both at once. 
 When that comes it will be a new thing in the world. 
 It has been seen in beautiful or splendid individu- 
 als scattered all through the ages, but there has been 
 10 age in which the mass of thinkers were at once 
 
23 i LECTURES OX J'nKACHING. 
 
 ijtrong in positive belief, and tolerant of difference Oj 
 opinion. 
 
 Now it is certainly the minister's duty to inculcate 
 positive belief. We rejoice that it has also been recog- 
 nized as the minister's duty to foster charity and tol- 
 erance. In the minister, then, would seem to rest the 
 hope of that better time to come when both of these 
 together are to bless the world. As he goes aSout 
 among his people he is perpetually saddened by their 
 unnatural divorce. He hears some member of his 
 church talk about truth. He listens to clear state- 
 ments of the Gospel ; wise, sound discriminations ; 
 true scriptural explanations of the mysteries of God 
 and man and grace. And all uttered with a deep 
 fervor, which shows how the man loves the truth he 
 knows. The preacher says, " What clearness ! " 
 " What faith ! " and rejoices over his disciple. And 
 just then some stray word drops from the glowing 
 lips which shows with what a strangeness, amounting 
 almost to antipathy, this believer looks upon other 
 people who hold truth differentl}' from himself; with 
 what a sense of narroAV and exclusive privilege he 
 treasures liis orthodox belief. Or, just the opposite. 
 Some hearer of your preaching delights you with his 
 ardent charity for all religions, until you find that he 
 has no real religion of his own. He upbraids the 
 bigot without ever having dreamed of the intense be- 
 lief which has made the bigot what lie is. In eitbei 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 235 
 
 ease there is a disappointment in tlie result of your 
 work as it appears in these two men. Belief and 
 charity are not yet in their true association. Mercy 
 and truth have not yet met together. And you set 
 youi'self, as you walk homo from your two parish calls, 
 to think what you can do to bring about their union. 
 What the minister can really do is this. I give it 
 ill no special rules. I know none. If I did, I should 
 not think it worth my while or yours to come here 
 and repeat the little methods of my working which 
 would not help you. I only give here, as I have 
 tried to all along, the principles for which the grace 
 of God and your good sense, if you have both, will 
 find for you the applications. The preacher can, 
 first always insist on looking and on making his peo- 
 ple look on doctrines not as ends but means ; and 
 so, if other men less perfectly reach the same ends 
 by means of other doctrines, he will be able to re- 
 joice in their attainment of the end without doing 
 dishonor to or valuing one whit the less the truth 
 which as it seems to him leads much more directly 
 and fully to the great attainment. " Master," said 
 John, " we saw one casting out devils in th}^ name, 
 and we forbade him because he foUoweth not with 
 us." And Jesus said, " Forbid him not, for there is 
 no man which shall do a miracle in my name" that 
 can lightly speak evil of me. For he that is not 
 against us is on our part." I suppose the day is past 
 
£B6 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 when people strengthened their sense of tlie impDr- 
 tance of the Gospel and of their privilege in hearing 
 it, and of their duty to carry it to the heathen, by 
 assertino: that no heathen could be saved who had not 
 heard it. But something of the same s[)irit lingers 
 Btill at home. The grosser forms of an error will 
 often disappear before its milder ones. And many 
 men, many ministers, are apt to emphasize the value 
 of the truth to themselves by asserting or at least 
 implying consequences which they do not really think 
 would follow on its rejection by their neighbors. The 
 abandonment of such a way of thinking and talking 
 would be a great step forward toward the desired 
 union of belief and charity. 
 
 'V And again the preacher may industriously and dis- 
 criminatingly set himself to discern what there is 
 good in the heart of the system that he tolerates, and,, 
 tolerating it for that good., may so keep his absolute 
 standards and his love for his own truth unimpaired. 
 The weakness of a large part of our toleiance for 
 other systems than our own is that it is not discrimi- 
 nating. It is a mere sentiment. It thinks that it 
 is narr')W not to tolerate, and so it says, " Come now 
 and let us tolerate ; " but it never dissects out that 
 Boul of goodness in things evil or only half good 
 ^vhich should make it possible to tolerate them cor- 
 dially and be glad of their existence; and so while 
 It wastes its cheap and unmeaning compliments upon 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 237 
 
 them, it often has no real sympathy with them, and 
 either despises or hates them underneath its compli- 
 ments. This is the kind of tolerance that haunts 
 the anniversary platforms where sects are met to 
 gether, where men seem to have forgotten that thero 
 are any differences between them, and from which 
 they go back to their pulpits without a perceptible 
 mitigation in the blindness with which they misap- 
 prehend the whole position of their neighbor who is 
 preaching in the next street to them. Toleration as 
 a mere fashion and sentiment is very feeble. It must 
 study and appreciate that which is good in what it 
 tolerates. To see the positive truths that underlie 
 the Roman Catholic errors, that is the .only way to 
 be cordially tolerant of Romanism, and yet keep 
 clearly and strongly one's own Protestant belief. 
 
 It is possible for earnest belief to be united with 
 ardent charity, and it is for us who preach the Gos- 
 pel of Christ to show the possibility in all our life 
 and preaching. Value the ends of life more than its 
 means, watch ever for the soul of good in things evil, 
 ind the soul of truth in things false, and beside the 
 richer influence that will flow out from your life on all 
 to whom you minister, you will do something to help 
 the solution of that unsolved problem of the humnn 
 mind and heart, the reconciliation of hearty tolerance 
 rith strong positive belief. 
 
 I have been speaking of some of the intellectual 
 
238 . LECTURES ON PREACIUNG. 
 
 chanicteristics of our time wliich the preacher nnisl 
 encounter. They are very prominent. But there are 
 other characteristics of a different sort that force 
 themselves upon us ahnost as much. We talk about 
 the scientific character of our age. We think of it 
 as wholly given up to the search after knowledge. 
 But after all there is a vast preponderance of the ac- 
 ti\'ity of our time wliich is in no simse scientific. 
 The commercial and social and political movementa 
 which go on about us cannot be said, I think, to have 
 any more of the scientific spirit, to show any more 
 tendency to revert to facts and trust to established 
 principles, than those same movements have always 
 manifested. The trouble with these great continuous 
 and universal interests of life no doubt has its con- 
 nections wdth the danger which besets the study of 
 science. What we have to fear is the magnifying 
 of second causes to the forgetfulness of the first cause 
 and the final cause of things. We need to remember 
 as we preach with what enormous urgency this dan- 
 ger is pressing upon the lives of the men and women 
 to whom our preaching is addressed. The men and 
 women are living in the midst of the intense but * 
 Buperficial excitement which comes of the unnatural 
 and exclusive vividness of second causes. It seems to 
 the business man as if Wealth were the king of every- 
 thing ; as if it made reputation, made happiness, al- 
 tnost made character. It seems to the man or woman 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 239 
 
 Df society as if Fashion, in some snpi*eine reserv^e of 
 queenship where she sits and whence her undisputed 
 mandates come, were the supreme arbiter of destiny. 
 It is the frankness with which men own that their 
 views of the forces which govern things stops with 
 these immediate causes, wealth and fashion and tlie 
 pleasure of the senses, that appals us now. They do 
 not even go through the form of recognizing some 
 spiritual force farther back. " Alas, there are no 
 more hypocrites now," cried the Abbd Poulle in 
 France in the last century. And it was indeed a 
 symptom. As humanity is constituted, when men 
 no longer give themselves the trouble to make an im- 
 itation, it proves how little the reality is honored ; 
 and the very carelessness of men about affecting any 
 thought of higher causes is aii indication of liow the 
 lower causes have absorbed the attention and are try- 
 ing to satisfy the needs of men. 
 
 This is the world to which we liave to bring the 
 Gospel, the story that begins with " God created the 
 heaven and the earth," and goes on with the record 
 of God's power and love until it comes to the proph- 
 ecy of the spiritual Judgment Day. What can we 
 do to get that story of the one first cause home to the 
 aeart of this eager, feverish age worshipping in its 
 Pantheon of second causes ? First, O my brothers 
 who are to be pastors of the Church, we can take 
 mitchful care that the Church herself is true to hei 
 
.2-10 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 belief in God as the source of all power. One of the 
 most terrible signs of how t!ie spirit of sordidness has 
 filled the world is the lamentable extent to whicli it 
 has pervaded the Church. The Church is constantly 
 found trusting in second causes as if she knew of no 
 first cause. She elaborates her machineries as if the 
 power lay in them. She goes, cap in hand, to rich 
 men's doors, and flatters them and dares not tell 
 them of their sins because she wants their money. 
 She lets her officers conduct her aftairs with all the 
 arts of a transaction on the street or an intrigue in 
 politics, or only shows her difference of standards and 
 freedom from responsibility by some advantage taken 
 which not even the conscience of the exchange or of 
 the caucus would allow. She degrades the dignity of 
 her grand commission by puerile devices for raising 
 money and frantic efforts to keep herself before the . 
 public whicli would be fit only for the sordid ambi- 
 tions of a circus troupe. You must cast all that out 
 of the churcli with which you have to do, or you will 
 make its pulpit perfectly powerless to speak of God 
 to our wealth-ridden and pleasure-loving time. You 
 must show first that His Church believes in Him and 
 trusts Hiui and is satisfied in Him, or yow will cr} in 
 vain to men to come to Him. To do this, you must 
 oot only cast out at your doors the disreputable tin- 
 Bel of church life of which I have been speaking. You 
 must believe in man as tiie child of God enough t( 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 241 
 
 preach to him at once the highest spiritual truth 
 about his Father. Many a well-meaning preacher ia 
 all wrong here, I think. He says, " You must take 
 men as you find them. You must speak to such fac- 
 ulties and perceptions as are awake in them." And 
 so because he sees the economical perceptions very 
 acute in our commercial time, he preaches the econ- 
 omy of goodness. He shows men how holiness will 
 pay. He knows there is a higher truth, but he can- 
 not trust men to hear it. He hopes to lead them on 
 to it by and by. Ah, that is all wrong. There is in 
 every man's heart, if you could only trust it, a power 
 of appreciating genuine spiritual truth ; of being 
 moved into unselfish gratitude by the love of God. 
 Continually he who trusts it finds it there. A hun- 
 dred men stand like the Spanish magnates on the 
 shore and say, " You must not venture far away. 
 There is no land beyond. Stay here and develop 
 what we have." One brave and trustful man like 
 Columbus believes that the complete world is com- 
 plete, and sails for a fair land beyond the sea and 
 finds it. The minister who succeeds is the minister 
 who in the midst of a sordid age trusts the heart of 
 man who is the child of God, and knows that it is 
 not all sordid, and boldly speaks to it of God his 
 Father as if he expected it to answer. And it does 
 answer ; and other preachers who have not believed 
 In man, and have talked to him in low planes and 
 
 16 
 
242 LECTURES OX PREACIIIXG. 
 
 preached to him half gospels which they thought 
 were all that he could staud, look on and wonder at 
 their brother-preacher's unaccountable success. There 
 have always been illustrations of this. There never 
 were more striking ones than in our time. With all 
 the sordidness of our time, the preachers that have 
 been the most powerful have been the most spiritual. 
 His theology has something of the taint of mercena- 
 riness about it, but of all the great revivalists I do 
 not know where we shall find any one who has 
 preached more constantly to the good that there is in 
 man and assumed in all men a power of spiritual ac- 
 tion than Mr. Moody. There is nothing liner than 
 to see a soul, which amazes the men in whom it rises, 
 rise up in men, when he who trusts it to answer to the 
 highest call speaks to it of the love of God. In all 
 your pi'eaching echo the ministry of Jesus, who spuke. 
 to the lowest and most sensual people directly of the 
 everlasting love, and by the trust He had in them 
 brought them to His Father. 
 
 I do not think that one could rightly suggest the 
 «;haracteristics of our time which a minister encoun- 
 ters without naming a tendency to sentimentalness 
 which shows itself in a great deal of our religion, and 
 which, both directly and indirectly, does our work 
 great harm. It is connected with the other features 
 of the time, with the prevalence of doubt and unbe- 
 lief. It is most natural that when a multitude of meij 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 2-1;] 
 
 have more or les3 deliberately taken up the idea that 
 the foundations of faith are shaken, wheii they are 
 ifraid to say that they hold the truths of religion to 
 be literally and absolutely true, when even the au- 
 thority of religion as the lord of morality is dis- 
 turbed, and men are looking somewhere else than to 
 God for 1^ constant reason why they should do right, 
 and when yet, with all this, the impulses of rever- 
 ence and worship remain strong, it is inevitable then 
 that a certain religion of sentiment should grow up, 
 of which it is impossible to say how much it believes, 
 but which delights in glowing and vague utterances of 
 feeling. No one can read our hymns, whether they 
 be of the rudest revival sort or the translated mediae- 
 valisms of ritualism, without feeling what I mean. 
 They are very beautiful often, but, compared with the 
 hymns that our fathers sang, they are weak. They 
 lack thought, and no religion that does not think is 
 strong. It may be in reaction from t>he way in which 
 many of the old hymns were made to labor witli a 
 process of reasoning tliat struggled on most unlyri- 
 cally from verse to verse, that the favorite hymn of 
 to-day discards connected thought and seems to try 
 ')nly to utter moods of mystic feeling, or to depict 
 some scene in whicli the spiritual parable is apt to be 
 lost in the brightness of the sensuous imagery. I 
 *;hink that the same thing is true of prayers. A 
 orayer must have thought in it. The thought may 
 
244 LECTURES ON PREACH I XG. 
 
 ovo Durden it so that its w'ngs of devotion are fas- 
 tened down to its sides and it cannot ascend. Then 
 it is no prayer, only a meditation or a contemplation. 
 But to take the thought out of a prayer does not in- 
 sure its going up to God. It may be too light as well 
 as too heavy to ascend. I saw once in a shop-window 
 in London a placard which simply announced " Limp 
 Prayers." It descri5ed, I believe, a kind of Prayer 
 Book in a certain sort of binding which was for sale 
 within ; but it brought to mind many a prayer to 
 which one had listened, in which he could not join, 
 out of which had been left the whole backbone of 
 thought, and to which he could attach none of his 
 own heart's desires. 
 
 I know that there have always been sentimentalists 
 in religion. Mj'sticism, which at its best is a very high 
 and thorough action of the whole nature in apprehend- 
 ing spiritual truth, is always degenerating into senti- 
 mentalism. But it is dangerous to-day because it so 
 frankly claims for itself that it is religion. Disown- 
 ing doctrine and depreciating law, it asserts that re- 
 ligion belongs to feeling, and that there is no truth 
 but love. You will meet it surely in 3'our first parish 
 at the very door. Some of the sweetest and noblest 
 natures there are sure to be full of it, and show it to 
 vou very winningly. Others will set it before you as 
 more weak sc^lf-indulgence. You will find many of 
 tb) strongest brains and consciences in b)wn separated 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 245 
 
 entirely from the church, because they consider it, as 
 they would say if they spoke their whole minds out 
 to you, to be the very shop and banquet room of sen- 
 timentalism. You cannot ignoi'e this as you preach. 
 You cannot help struggling against its influence upon 
 yourself. The hard theology is bad. The soft theol- 
 ogy is worse. You must count your work unsatis- 
 factory unless you waken men's brains and stir their 
 sonsciences. Let them see clearly that you value no 
 feeling which is not the child of truth and the father 
 of duty. And to let them see that you value no 
 other feeling j^ou must value no other feeling either 
 in yourself or them. 
 
 It is natural for sentimentalism and scepticism to 
 go together, like the fever and the chill, and the 
 same mixture of deeper faith and more conscientious 
 duty must be medicine for both. 
 
 We ministers cannot help noting with interest 
 among the symptoms of our time the way in which 
 the preacher himself is regarded. To remark the 
 changed attitude which the people generally hold to- 
 wards ministers is the most familiar commonplace ; 
 to mourn over it as a sign of decadence in the re- 
 ligious spirit is the habit of some people. But the 
 reasons of it are plain enough and have been often 
 pointed out. The preacher is no longer the manifest 
 superior of other men in Avit and wisdom. That def- 
 
246 LECTURES OX PREACHING. 
 
 erence \\hich was once paid to the minister's office, 
 upon the reasonable presumption that the man who 
 occupied it was better educated, more large in his 
 ideas, a better reasoner, a more trustworthy guide iu 
 all the various affairs of life than other men, if it were 
 paid still would either be the perpetuation of an old 
 habit, or would be paid to the office purely for itself 
 without any presumption at all about the man. This 
 latter could not be long possible ; no dignity of office 
 can secure men's respect for itself continuously unless 
 it can show a worthy character in those who hold it. 
 I am glad that the mere forms of reverence for the 
 preacher's office have so far passed away. I am not 
 making a virtue of necessity. I rejoice at it. Noth- 
 incr could be worse for us than for men to keep tell- 
 ing us by deferential forms that we are the wisest of 
 men when their shelves are full of books with far 
 wiser words in them than the best that we can 
 preach ; or that we are the most eloquent of men 
 when there are better orators by the score on every 
 Bide ; or that we are the best of men when we know 
 of sainthoods among the most obscure souls before 
 which we stand asha,med. No manly man is satis- 
 fied with any ex-officio estimate of his character. 
 Whether it makes him better or worse than he is, he 
 cares nothing for it. And so the nearer that minis- 
 ters come to being judged like other men just tor 
 !shat they are, the more they ought to rejoice, the 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 247 
 
 more 1 think they do rejoice. But what then ? Is 
 the minister's sacred office nothing ? Does not his 
 truth gain authority and his example urgency from 
 the position whei-e he stands ? Indeed they do. It 
 seems to me that the best privilege which can be 
 given to any man is a position which shall stimulate 
 him to his best and which shall make his best most 
 effective. And that is just what is given to the min- 
 ister. An official position which should substitute 
 some other power for the best powers of the man 
 himself, and should make him seem effective beyond 
 his real force, would be an injury to him and ulti- 
 mately would be recognized as an empty sham itself. 
 I quarrel with no man for his conscientious belief 
 about the high and separate commission of the Chris- 
 tian ministry. I only quarrel with the man who, 
 resting satisfied with what he holds to be his high 
 commission, is not eager to match it with a high 
 character. The more you think yourself different 
 from other men because you are a minister, the more 
 try to be different from other men by being more 
 fully what all men ought to be. That is a High 
 Churchmanship of which we cannot have too much. 
 
 I hold then that the Christian ministry has still in 
 men's esteem all that is essentially valuable, and all 
 ihat it is really good for it to have. It has a place 
 of utterance more powerful and sacred than any 
 •jther in the world. Then comes the question, What 
 
248 LLCTURES ON PllEACHLSa. 
 
 has it to utter? The pedestal is still there. Men 
 will not gather "about it as they once did perhaps, 
 without regard to the statue that stands upon it. 
 But if a truly good statue stands there the world can 
 Bee it as it could if it stood nowhere else. 
 
 There ai'e two -grejit faults of the ministry -wh'xh 
 come, one of them from ignoring, the other from re- 
 belling against, this change in the attitude of the 
 minister and the people towards each other. The 
 first is the perpetual assertion of the minister's 
 authority for the truth which he teaches. To claim 
 that men should believe what we teach them because 
 we teach it to them and not because they see it to be 
 true is to assume a place which God does not give 
 tis and men will not acknowledge for us. Many a 
 Christian minister needs to be sent back to him whom 
 we call the heathen Socrates, to read these noble 
 words in the Phgedo — which whole <?ialogue, by the 
 way, is itself no unworthy pattern of the best quali- 
 ties of preaching. " You, if you take my advice, wiL 
 think little about Socrates, bat a gres^^- lUsal about 
 Truth." 
 
 And the other fault is the constant def»re to make 
 |.eople hear us who seem determined to forg(?t us. 
 This is the fault of the sensational preaoM.'ng. A 
 large part of what is called sensational preaching is 
 dimply the effort of a man who has no faith in hia 
 utfice or in the essential power of truth to keep h^'n 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 249 
 
 self before people's eyes by some kind of intellectual 
 fantasticalness. It is a pursuit of brightness and vi- 
 vacity of thouglit for its own sake, which seems to 
 come from a certain almost desperate determination of 
 the sensational minister that he will not be forgotten, 
 I think there is a great deal of nervous uneasiness of 
 mind which shows a shaken confidence in one's posi- 
 tion. It struggles for cleverness. It lives by mak- 
 ing points. It is fatal to that justice of thought 
 which alone in the long run commands confidence 
 and carries weight. The man who is always trying 
 to attract attention and be brilliant counts the mere 
 sober effort after absolute truth and justice dull. It 
 is more tempting to be clever and unjust than to be 
 serious and just. Every preacher has constantly to 
 make his choice which he will be. It does not be- 
 long to men, like angels, to be "ever bright and 
 fair " together. And the anxious desire for glitter is 
 one of the signs of the dislodgment of the clerical 
 position in our time. 
 
 There is a possible life of great nobleness and use- 
 fulness for the preacher who, frankly recognizing and 
 cordially accepting the attitude towards his office 
 which he finds on the world's jjart, preaches triith 
 and duty on their own intrinsic authority, and wins 
 personal power and influence because he does not 
 seek them, but seeks the prevalence of righteousness 
 And the salvation of men's souls. 
 
/• 
 
 250 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 The relation of our time to the Bible is another 
 / subject which must interest a preacher very deeply. 
 / \/ The Bible is the authority by which we preach ; unci 
 to find tlie people whom our preaching interests so 
 largely uninterested in and ignorant of the source 
 from which our truth is drawn, must awaken some 
 questions as to whether our preaching is wholly 
 right. I do not speak now of the prevalent doubts 
 about the Bible, though they are of course connected 
 very closely, both as cause and eflPect, with men's 
 ignorance about it. I speak merely of the fact of 
 that undoubted ignorance. Who is there among our 
 people that knows the Old Testament ? Where are 
 the people that in any real sense know the New ? 
 
 If we look for the reasons of such ignorance about 
 a book which lies on everybody's table, and whose 
 name is on everybody's lips, they are not hard to 
 find. First there is in our time a great reaction 
 from the belief that men once had in the saving 
 power of the Bible. Men who have read a book not 
 because it was true or because they wanted to get at 
 its lessons, but because they thought it was safe to 
 read it and unsafe not to read it, just as soon as 
 the notion of safety is loosened from it, will be less 
 ready to care for its truth and to feel its power tha?i 
 that of other books. This is human nature Tiie 
 stronger feeling about th(^ Bible has kept down the 
 more familiar feeling which attaches us to othoj 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 2ra 
 
 books. Another reason is, of course, the crowd of 
 other books, their cheapness and their apparent press- 
 ingness. Even the man who know^s that the Bible is 
 the best of books, will read the last new treatise on 
 religion instead of the Bible, because he knows the 
 Bible belongs to all ages, and can never pass out of 
 date, while with this " latest publication " it is to- 
 day or ne ,^er. And yet another reason is the preva- 
 lent disposition to consider the Bible the clergy's 
 book. We wonder at the pusillanimity with which 
 the people of the Middle Ages and the Romanists of 
 to-day have submitted to restrictions on the reading 
 of the Bible, and to the acceptance of whatever ac- 
 count of it their preachers chose to give. The real 
 truth is that they like this state of things'; and many 
 of our Protestants like it too, and of their own free 
 will treat the Bible so exactly as the Medieval 
 Christian was compelled to treat it that it ought not 
 to seem strange. And another reason is, that the 
 clergy by their unreal fantastic treatment of the 
 Bible often do what they can to make the people 
 think that it is indeed unintelligible except to one 
 who holds a very complicated key, and so that it is 
 not for the like of them to touch it. This is the 
 evil of all unreal exegesis. It throws an unreal air 
 *bout the book of God. I hea,rd of a sermon on the 
 first verse of the forty- first psalm which declared it to 
 Ue a statement of the mission of Christ and the 
 
252 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 scheme of the Atonement. Imagine a believing dis- 
 ciple going home after that sermon and reading hia 
 Bible with the slightest hope of knowing what 
 it meant ! And another reason still is our unbiblical 
 preaching. I mean our preaching about all topics 
 with various degrees of wisdom but with nothing 
 which would suggest that what we give men is only 
 a few drops out of a spring of truth and life, and so 
 would send them eagerly to the fountain to drink 
 their fill. 
 
 Against these tendencies to make the Bible unreal 
 and uninteresting there has come the protest of the 
 new way of treating it and the new books about it. 
 I know the danger of superficialness which attends 
 the realistic treatment of the Bible. I know how apt 
 it is to carry the mind up to a certain point of ama- 
 teur interest and leave it there. Certainly no one 
 can praise it except as an introduction to a spiritujd 
 richness which is far deeper than itself, but in our 
 day it is something to be very glad of that Milman 
 and Stanley, and Farrar and the author of "Ecce 
 Homo," in literature, and Hohnan Hunt and Bida, in 
 the region of art, have made the outer life of the 
 Bible live anew, and by sweeping aside the mist of 
 unreality that hung about its door have opened the 
 Mray for a deeper entrance into its spirit than man 
 has yet attaiued. 
 
 There is need of every special effort to make men 
 
THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 253 
 
 know the Bible. The Bible class, the expository lect- 
 ure, the illustrative picture, none of them can do too 
 much. But there is yet greater need that you and 
 I who preach should let the people see that we are 
 men of the Bible, that we know its letter and are 
 possessed by its spirit, that out of it directly comes 
 the support of our own rehgious life and the fcod 
 which we offer in our preaching. 
 
 I must not let my lecture grow any longer. I have 
 tried to point out to you some of the peculiarities of 
 our time which we as preachers must encounter. I 
 must not close without begging you not to be ashamed 
 or afraid of the age you live in, and least of all to 
 talk of it in a tone of weak despair. In the beginning 
 of the last century many men talked of Christianity 
 as if it were an effete superstition. And j'et behold 
 the new life which has come forth since from that 
 which men then called dead. The state of things 
 which then existed may seem to be renewed, though 
 it is not possible for men to be as wholly unbelieving 
 in the nineteenth century as they were in the eigh- 
 teenth. But out of what men now call a slow death 
 I13W life will come. In many ways we can see clearly 
 Ihat it is not death, but some strange change and 
 progress of the methods of life by which we are sur- 
 rounded. To be thoroughly in sympathy with the 
 ige, to admire everything in it that is admirable, tc 
 
254 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 rejoice in its great achievements, to see the beauty 
 of the superb material structure which it is building 
 for the better spirituahty which is to come to dwell 
 in it, to love to trace the strange nomadic currents of 
 spiritual desire which run, often grotesquely or fran- 
 tically, through its tumultuous life, to see with joy 
 how its new needs bring out new sides of helpfulness 
 in the ever helpful Gospel of Christ, this is the true 
 culture of a preacher for our time. He believes in it 
 and loves it, and sees its great strong faults against 
 the background of its noble qualities. He thankii 
 God, who sent him here to work ; for he is sure that 
 while there have been many centuries in which it 
 was easier, there has been none in which it was more 
 interesting or inspiring for a man to preach. 
 
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 
 
 nnHERE is a power which lies at the centre of {.U 
 success in preaching, and whose influence reaches 
 out to the circumference, and is essential everywhere. 
 Without its presence we cannot imagine the most 
 brilliant talents making a preacher of the Gospel in 
 the fullest sense. Where it is largely present, it is 
 wonderful how many deficiencies count for nothing. 
 It has the characteristics which belong to all the most 
 essential powers. It is able to influence the whole 
 life as one general and pervading motive ; and it can 
 also press on each particular action with peculiar 
 force. Under its compulsion a man first becomes a 
 preacher, and every sermon that he preaches is more 
 or less consciously shaped by its pressure ; as the 
 whole round world and each round atom are shaped 
 and held in shape by the same laws. Without this 
 power, preaching is almost sure to become either a 
 struggle of ambition or a burden of routine. With 
 it, preaching is an ever fresh delight. The power is 
 the value of the human soul, felt by the preacher, 
 and inspiring all his work , 
 
256 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 The power of that motive has been assumed in 
 all that I have said to you. But it seems to me to 
 be so supremely important ; the ministry which ig 
 full of it is so rich ; the ministry which lacks it is so 
 poor, that I determined, when I undertook the duty 
 which I complete to-da}^ that this last lecture should 
 be given to a serious consideration of the importance 
 and value of this mainspring, which lies coiled up 
 within all the complicated machinery of the ministry, 
 the realized value of the human soul. 
 
 As to its importance, we get our clearest impres- 
 sion if we look at the earthly ministry of Jesus. 
 There are many accounts to be given of His wondrous 
 work. People may say many ingenious things about 
 it, and many of them are true. But we are sure that 
 he has put his hand most certainly upon the central 
 power of Christ's ministry, who holds up before us. 
 the intense value which the Saviour always set upon 
 the souls for which He lived and died. It shines in 
 everything He says and does. It looks out from His 
 ej'^es when they are happiest and when they are sad- 
 dest. It trembles in the most loving consolations, 
 and thunders in the most passionate rebukes which 
 come from His lips. It is the inspiration at once of 
 His pity and His indignation. And it has made the 
 few persons on whom it chanced to fall, and in whoso 
 histories it found its illustrations, the men and women 
 who represented humanity about Him in Palestine — 
 
THE. VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 257 
 
 Nicodemus, Peter, John, the Pharisees, the Mag- 
 dalen, the woman of Samaria, and all the rest — 
 himinous forever with its light. That power still 
 continues wherever the same value of the human 
 Boul is present. If we could see how precious the 
 human soul is as Christ saw it, our ministry would 
 approach the effectiveness of Christ's. " I am not 
 convinced by what you say. I am not sure that I 
 cannot answer every one of your arguments," said a 
 man with whom a preacher had been pleading, "but 
 one thing which I confess I cannot understand. It 
 puzzles me, and makes me feel a power in what you 
 say. It is why you should care enough for me to 
 take all this trouble, and to labor with me^ as if you 
 eared for my soul." It is a power which every man 
 must feel. It Inspires the preacher ; and his hearers, 
 catching its influence, become soft and ready to re- 
 ceive the truth. It is strength in the arm which 
 strikes, and tenderness in the rock which receives 
 the blow. 
 
 The other motives of the minister's work seem to 
 me to stand around this great central motive as the 
 staff officers stand around a general. He needs them. 
 They execute his commands. He could not do his 
 work without them. But he is not dependent upon 
 them as they ai*e upon him ; any one of them might 
 fall away and he could still fight the battle. The 
 power of the battle is in him. If he falls, the cause 
 
 33 
 
258 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 is ruined. So stand the subordinate motives of the 
 ministry around the commanding motive,|the realized 
 vakie of the human soul. They are the motives 
 which I have had occasion to dwell on one by one in 
 the course of these lectures. They are. the pleasure 
 of work, the mere delight in the exercise of powers 
 which is natural to any man who is healthy both in 
 body and mind ; the love of influence, that gratifica- 
 tion in feeling our life touch another life for some 
 good result, which is also natural and healthy ; the 
 perception of order, that love of regulated movement, 
 of the rhythm of righteousness in the lives and ways 
 of men, which in its higher forms is noble, though in 
 the lower it degenerates into routine ; and lastly the 
 pure concern for truth, the pleasure in seeing right 
 ideas take the place of wrong ideas, which may be 
 quite separate from any regard for the interest of the 
 person in whom the change takes place. These are 
 the nobler members of the staff of the great general. 
 There are more ignoble ones who volunteer theii 
 services and wear something like his uniform and 
 cannot always be distinguished from his true ser- 
 vants; such as emulation, and the love of fame, and 
 the pride of opinion, and the enjoyment of congenial 
 society. I will not dwell on those. These others are 
 the real staff of the general. But when we look at 
 their group, how the commanding motive whom they 
 serve t'^wers up far above them alh They get their 
 
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SCUL. 259 
 
 highest dignity from serving him. For in Ins service 
 each of them, which is abstract in itself, comes into 
 actual contact with man ; and no abstract princi})Ie 
 has shown its full power or given its full pleasure 
 until it has opened the essential relations which exist 
 between it and human nature. It is the great priv- 
 ilege of the ministry that it is kept in constant nec- 
 essary contact with mankind. Therein lies its health- 
 iness. Man in his mystery and wonderfulness is 
 more full of the suggestion of God than either ab- 
 stract truth or physical nature. And so the true 
 preacher, in spite of his imperfect opportunities for 
 study, in spite of his separation from the beauty of 
 the natural world, has the chance to know more of 
 God than the profoundest speculative philosophy or 
 the most exquisite scenery of earth could reveal to 
 him. 
 
 Let me try then to point out to you what some of 
 the effects will be in a man's preaching from a true 
 sense of the value of the human soul, by which I 
 mean a high estimate of the capacity of the spiritual 
 nature, a keen and constant appreciation of the attain- 
 ments to which it may be brought. And first of all 
 it helps to rescue the Gospel which we preach from 
 a sort of unnaturalness and incongruity which is very 
 apt to cling to it. This is, I think, very important. 
 Consider what it is that you are to declare week after 
 week, to the men and women who come to hear you. 
 
260 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 llie mighty truths of Incarnation and Atonement 
 are your themes. You tell them of the birth and 
 life and death of Jesus Christ. You picture the 
 adorable love and the mysterious sacrifice of the 
 Saviour. And you bind all this to their lives. You 
 tell them that in a true sense all this was certainly 
 for them. I do not know what you are made of, if 
 sometimes, as you preach, there does not come into 
 your mind a thought of incongruity. What are you, 
 you and these people to whom you preach, that for 
 you the central affection of the universe should have 
 been stirred ? You know your own life. You know 
 something of the lives they live. You look into theii 
 faces as you preach to them. Where is the end 
 worthy of all this ministry of almighty grace which 
 you have been describing? Is it possible that all 
 this once took place and, by the operation of the Holy 
 Spirit, is a perpetual power in the world, merely that 
 these machine-lives might run a little truer, or that 
 a series of rules mighc be established by which the 
 current workings of society might move more smooth 
 ly ? That, M'hich men sometimes make the purpose 
 of it all, is too unworthy. The engine is too coarse 
 to have so fine a fire under it. You must see some- 
 thing deeper. You must discern in all these men 
 «nd women some inherent preciousness for which 
 even tlu; marvel of the Incarnation and the agony of 
 L'al'ary was not too great, or it is impossible that you 
 
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 261 
 
 should keep your faith in those stupendous truths 
 which Bethlehem and Calvary offer to us. Some 
 source of fire from which these dimmed sparks come, 
 some possible renewal of the fire which is in them 
 still, some sight of the education througli which each 
 soul is passing, and some suggestion of the special 
 personal perfectness to which each may attain, all 
 this must brighten before you, as you look at them ; 
 and then the truths of your theology shall not be 
 thrown into confusion nor faded into unreality by 
 your ministry to men. The best thing in a minister's 
 life is the action of his works and his faith on one 
 another; his experience of the deeper value of the 
 human soul making the wonders of his faith more 
 credible, and the truths of his faith always revealing 
 to him a deeper and deeper value in the soul. 
 
 I think that nobody can preach with the best 
 power who is not possessed with a sense of the mys- 
 teriousness of the human life which he preaches to. 
 It must seem to him capable of indefinite enlarge- 
 ment and refinement. He must see it in each new 
 p?rson as something original and new. This must 
 be something which belongs to his whole conception 
 ?f man as the child of God. It must not be the mere 
 inspiration of his whim, attributed in great richness 
 to some lives which chance to take his fancy but 
 ignored in others. He must see it in all men simply 
 us men. When he undertakes to lead th »m he must 
 
2fci2 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 feel the mystery and spontaneity of the lives that ha 
 takes under his teaching. He must be a careful stu- 
 dent of the characters he trains. He cannot carry 
 people over the route of his ministry as a ferryman 
 Carrie? passengers across the river, always running 
 his boat in the same line and never even asking the 
 names of the people whom he carries. He must 
 count himself rather like the tutor of a family of 
 princes, who, with careful study of their several dis- 
 positions, trains the royal nature of each for the spe- 
 cial kingdom over which he is to rule. 
 
 Here is where the preacher and the poet touch. 
 Every true preacher must be a poet, at least in so far 
 as to see behind all the imperfections of men a certain 
 ideal manhood from wliich they have never separated, 
 which underlies the life and lends its value to the 
 blurred and broken character of every one. A belief 
 in the Incarnation, in the divine Son of Man makes 
 such poets of us all. It is interesting to see in how 
 many ministers the hopefulness of this ideal poetic 
 view of human life overcomes the tendencies of nat- 
 ural temperament, tlie discouragement of poverty and 
 disease and the disenchanting influence of intercourse 
 with men, and keeps ministers the most liopeful class 
 of men. They are always standing where, if they 
 will, they may listen for the bells that shall " ring in 
 the Christ that is to be." I have seen ministers try 
 to crush back this nobl^j ♦^endency of their vocation 
 
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 263 
 
 •ind to assume a cynicism and a hopelessness which 
 they did not feel, so that other men might not call 
 them childish. And I have seen men of the world 
 disappointed when they came to such ministers and 
 did not find in them the childlike hope and trust 
 that they expected, but only false and despairing 
 thoughts of human nature like their own ; as if the 
 ice came up to the fire to warm itself, and found the 
 fire ashamed of being warm and trying hai'd to make 
 itself as cold as ice. 
 
 I might dwell, also, on this value of the human 
 soul for its own sake, as constituting the constant re- 
 serve of pleasure in the ministry. There are other 
 pleasures in our work, as I have recoiuited to you 
 already ; but they are all, to a certain extent, de- 
 pendent upon circumstances. A parish uproar which 
 reveals the bad reality of life, may scatter some of 
 them. Poverty, which deprives you of the means of 
 culture, and takes away the power of carrying out 
 your plans, may rob you of others. But the mere 
 pleasure of dealing with man as man, as a being val- 
 uable in himself, for this no peculiar happiness of 
 circumstances is needed. Wherever men are, you 
 may have it. Nobody but Robinson Crusoe is shut 
 out from it, and even to him the ]\ ',an Friday is sure 
 to come. 
 
 And herein lies the real fellowship of the ministry. 
 There are no fellow-workers who come so close 
 
2Q4 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 together as fellow-workers in the ministi-y of the 
 Gospel ; and their companionship is closest when 
 they most deeply know this truth of the essential 
 value of the human soul. A preacher comes to 
 me from Africa, or from some church of another do- 
 nomination in the next street, which often seems 
 farther off than Africa. It depends upon what tho 
 power of our preaching is, how near we come to- 
 gether. If we are both given to machineries, each 
 of us valuing only what a certain sort of people may 
 become under the peculiar culture of the denomina- 
 tion which he represents, then wo talk together, 
 however pleasantly, only over our fences, and shake 
 hands, however cordially, only through the slats. If 
 we both really value the soul of man, we understand 
 each other ; the different methods of our work do 
 not keep us apart but bring us together, for they are 
 the means by which we manifest to one another the 
 deep motive which is the power of both our lives. 
 The fences are turned into bridges. Certainly, Chris- 
 tian union, whenever it comes, must come thus, not 
 by compromise and the adjustment of various forms 
 of government and worship, but by the develop- 
 ment in all preachers of all kinds of that value for 
 man in Christ which burrows far beneath the dif- 
 ferences of forms and flies far above th'^m. It 
 may be given to some people in these days to take 
 iirect steps toward organic Christian union. I bid 
 
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL 265 
 
 them God speed. But if that is not our task let us 
 know, and let us rejoice in knowing, that we arc 
 doing, perhaps, as much as they for the millenium, 
 if, in ourselves and those who hear us, by whatever 
 partial name we and they may be called, we are do- 
 mg what we can to make strong that sense )f the 
 value of the human soul which, by its very nature, 
 is universal, and cannot be partial. Here is where 
 the zealous partisan, who is at the same time an 
 earnest Christian, is often working better than he 
 knows. He is like a jealous farmer who prays for 
 rain to water his field that it may be richer than 
 his neighbor's ; but the heaven is too broad for him, 
 and will not limit its bounty by the intention of his 
 prayer. It will rain, but it cannot rain between 
 fences ; and so his selfish prayer brings refreshment 
 for the alien acres for which he does not pray. 
 
 And as this power in the ministry lies deepest, so 
 it lasts longest. The veteran preacher, I think, 
 keeps the enjoyment and tries to keep the practice of 
 his work later in life than the veteran in almost any 
 ether occupation. That always seems to me a touch- 
 uig and convincing proof of the excellence of our 
 calling. It shows better and better as it grows 
 older. The delightful French artist, Millet, used to 
 Bay to his pupils : " The end of the day is the 
 proof of fi picture," " La fin du jour, c'est I'^preuve 
 d'uu tableau." He meant that the twilight hour 
 
2(36 LECTURES ON P HE ACHING. 
 
 wlien there is not light enough to distinguish detuiU 
 is the most favorable time to judge of a picture as a 
 whole. And so it is with the ministry. Wlien tht, 
 cross-lights of jealous emulation ami the glare ol 
 constant notoriety are softening toward the darkness 
 in which lies the pure judgment of God and the 
 peace of being forgotten by mankind, then that 
 which has been lying behind them all the time 
 cumes out ; and the old preacher who has ceased to 
 care whether men praise or blame him, who has 
 attained or missed all that there is for him of success 
 or failure here, preaches on still out of the pure sense 
 of how precious the soul of man is, and the pure di- 
 sire to serve a little more that which is so worthy of 
 his service, before he goes. 
 
 Let me follow still farther the enumeration of the 
 qualities which grow up in the preacher from his 
 value for the human soul. Courage is one of its 
 most necessary results. The truest way not to be 
 afraid of the worse part of a man is to value and try 
 to serve his better part. The patriot who really ap- 
 preciates the valuable principles of his nation's life, 
 is h(! who most intrepidly rebukes the nation's faults 
 And Christ was all the more independent of men's 
 whims because of His profound love for them and 
 complete consecration to their needs. There come 
 three stages in this matter; the first, a flippant 
 •uperiority which despises the poople and thinks of 
 
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 26"2 
 
 Ihem as only made to take what the preacher chooses 
 to give to them, and to minister to his support ; tlie 
 second, a servile sycophancy which watches all their 
 fancies, and tries to blow whichever way their vane 
 points ; and the third, a deep respect which cares too 
 earnestly for what the people are capable of being to 
 let them anywhere fall short of it without a strong 
 remonstrance. You have seen all three in the way 
 in which parents treat their children. I could show 
 yoa each of the three to-day in tlie relation of differ- 
 ent preachers to their parishes. Believe me, the last 
 is the only true independence, the only one that it 
 is worth while to seek, or indeed that a man has any 
 right to seek. An actor may encourage himself by 
 despising or forgetting his audience, but a preacher 
 must go elsewhere for courage. The more you prize . 
 the spiritual nature of your people, the more able you 
 will be to oppose their whims. There must be the 
 fountain of your independence. 
 
 And here too is the power of simplicity and abso- 
 lute reality. All turgid rhetoric, all false ornament, 
 all doctrinal fantasticaliiess must disappear in the 
 presence of a supreme absorbing value for the souls 
 of men. The conscience and the taste, when both 
 ^re pure, will coincide. Every divorce which separates 
 ihem is a parting of what God has joined tegethei. 
 The two are most essentially united in the functions 
 of our sacred office. The man wlioise eye is set upoD 
 
208 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 the souls of men, and whose heart burns "svith tlie de- 
 sire to save thera, chooses with an ahnost unerring 
 instinct what figure will set the truth most clearly 
 before their minds, what form of appeal will bring it 
 most strongly to their sluggish wills. lie takes those 
 and rejects every other. The mere unwarlike citizeu 
 goes lounging through the Tower of London, and 
 among the old armor there he praises that which he 
 calls beautiful. The soldier walks through the same 
 halls, and, with a soldier's instinct, thinks no armor 
 beautiful which will not kill the enemy or protect the 
 man who wears it. That is the final principle of all 
 right choice, the touchstone of good taste. The ser- 
 mon is to be sacrificed to the soul, the system of work 
 to the purpose of work always. It strikes at the 
 root of all clerical fastidiousness and the tyranny of 
 order. It is wonderful how the character of all orna- 
 ment in a sermon declares itself. That which really 
 belongs to the purpose of the sermon is always good. 
 That which is there for its own sake every pure taste, 
 however untrained, instantly feels to be bad. The 
 one is like the sculpture on an old cathedral which, 
 however rude, was meant to tell a story. The other 
 is like the carving on our house-fronts which is meant 
 merely to look pretty, and so fails of even that. 
 There are some men born to positions of such dignity 
 that they are doomed to be either illust'-ious or ridic- 
 ulous. And so ornament when it is applied to a ser- 
 
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 26^ 
 
 inon must either do the lofty work of making truth 
 plain and glorious or it fails of everything. It cannct 
 be allowed simply to amuse or please as may the or- 
 nament of an' essay or a poem. 
 
 But our principle goes deeper than this. This con- 
 trolling value for the human soul must save a preacher 
 also from a narrow treatment of the souls under his 
 care. If he values them more than any theory of his 
 own about how souls generally are to be treated, he 
 will be broad and try only to lead each into that en- 
 tire obedience to God which results in such different 
 experiences for us all. The ascetic theorist values 
 self-sacrifice for its own sake and would enforce it in- 
 discriminately. The theorist of self-indulgence says, 
 " No, pain is a curse. Pleasure is good. Shun pain. 
 Do what is pleasant." The teacher who values the 
 souls which he teaches more than any theory says 
 something different from either. He says, " Not en- 
 joyment and not sorrow, but the meeting of your will 
 with the will of God, whatever it may bring, is the 
 purpose of all discipline. Be ready for any way which 
 God shall choose to bring your will to His." But to 
 this large wisdom no teacher can be brought except 
 Dy a true sense of the preciousness of the soul of man. 
 
 It cannot be denied, and it must not be forn-otten, 
 that this absorbing conviction of the value of the 
 ouman soul has its besetting danger. That danger is 
 ftot slight nor casual. It is important and essential. 
 
270 LECTURES ON PREACHIMu. 
 
 The daiij^er is lest, in our eagerness to help the spir- 
 itual nature which we so highly value, we should bo 
 led to judge of the trutli of any idea by what we 
 think might be its influences on the soul for which 
 we are so anxious. The tendency to estimate and 
 treat ideas according to what appear their probable 
 effects on human character has been, no doubt, a 
 great besetting sin of spiritual teachers always. I 
 suppose that it cannot be wholly separated from any 
 vocation which is bound at once to seek for truth and 
 to educate character. This is the way in which a 
 great deal of half-believed doctrine comes to be cling- 
 inor to and cumbering the church. Men insist on be- 
 lieving and on having other people believe certain 
 doctrines, not because they are reasonably demon- 
 strated to be true, but because, in the present state of 
 things, it would be dangerous to give them up. This 
 is the way in which one man clings to his idea of 
 verbal inspiration, and another to his special theory 
 jf the divine justice, and another to his material no- 
 tion of the resurrection, and yet another to his notion 
 of the Church's authority and the minister's commis- 
 sion. It is a very dangerous danger, because it wears 
 the cloak of such a good motive ; but it is big with 
 all the evil fruits of superstition. It starts with a 
 lack of faith in the people and in truth and in God. 
 Jesus bids us not to cast pearls befoi-e swine, but ha 
 ices not bid us to feed even swine on pebbles. " Go "*. 
 
CHE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 271 
 
 forbid," says Bishop Watson, " that the search aftei 
 truth should be discouraged for fear of its conse- 
 ijuences The consequences of truth may be subver- 
 sive of systems of superstition, but they can never bo 
 injurious to tlie rights or well-founded expectations 
 of the human race." There is nothing that one would 
 wish to say more earnestly to our young and ardent 
 ministers than this. Never sacrifice your reverence 
 for truth to your desire for usefulness. Say nothing 
 which you do not believe to be true because you think 
 it may be helpful. Keep back nothing which you 
 know to be true because you think it nvAY be harmful. 
 Who are you that you should stint the children's 
 drinking from the cup which their Father bids you to 
 carry to them, or mix it with error because you think 
 they cannot bear it in its purity? We must learn ii\ 
 the first place to for)n our own judgments of what 
 teachings are true by other tests than the conse- 
 quences which we think those teachings will produce ; 
 and then, when we have formed our judgments, we 
 must trust the truth that we believe and the God 
 from whom it comes, and tell it freely to the people. 
 He is saved from one of the great temptations of the 
 ministry who goes out to his work with a clear and 
 Ronstant certainty that truth is always strong, no 
 matter how weak it looks, and falsehood is always 
 jFcak, no matter how strong it looks. 
 
 But if we bear this danger in our minds and are 
 
272 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 upon our guard against it, then the value for our 
 brethren's souls will help us to avoid many false 
 standards. It will give interest to many people 
 whom otherwise we should find very uninteresting. 
 There is much in the minister's training to make him 
 value purely intellectual companionships. There is 
 a tendency in many ministers, whose disposition leads 
 them to value truth more than men, to let them- 
 selves be drawn almost exclusively into the society of 
 those whose ways of thought are like their own. I 
 think it is a wonder to many people who are not min- 
 isters, how one man who is the pastor of a great par- 
 ish can be genuinely interested in so many people of 
 such various characters and lives. A good many 
 people and even some clergymen take it for granted 
 that it is not possible, and treat the appearance of 
 Buch universal interest as a pretence, necessary in. 
 order to keep up the parish feeling, and so a very 
 valuable accomplishment in a minister. But it is not 
 so. No man ever did it successfully, year aftei 
 year, as a pretence. Tlie secret of it all is simply 
 the great sense of the value of the human soul 
 brought home and individualized upon these human 
 souls committed to our care, as a magistrate sees all 
 the dignity of the law I'epresented in the settlement 
 of the pett}' quarrel that is brought before his court. 
 The large conception of the value of humanity must 
 ajo before the special value of one's own parishioners^ 
 
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 278 
 
 otherwise the pastoral relation softens into mere per- 
 sonal fondness, or else hardens into a rigid and for- 
 mal treatment of the people according to arbitrary 
 classifications which lose alike their general human- 
 ity and their personal distinctness. There is a min- 
 istry which is all the more personal because of its 
 broad humanness ; a ministry which, beginning with 
 the sacredness of man, counts all men sacred, and 
 touches, with its own peculiar pressure upon each, 
 the lives of strong men and little children, of women 
 and boys and girls, of working people and people of 
 idle lives, of saints and sinners, as the rain and dew 
 of God which water the earth feed both the oak-tree 
 and the violet ; a ministry which makes its care for 
 every soul dearer and more sacred to that soul be- 
 cause it is evidently no mere personal fondness, but 
 one utterance of that Christliness which deeply feels 
 the preciousness of the souls of all God's children. 
 
 I have not time to dwell upon tlie help which a 
 perpetual value for the souls of men must i-ender to 
 our own spiritual life, and so to our efficiency as 
 preachers. Indeed, it is the great power by which 
 our souls must grow. This is tl e niinistr}^ of the 
 people to the preacher, which is )ften greater than 
 any ministry that the preacher can render to the 
 people. I assure you that the relation between the 
 pastor and his parish is not right if the pastor thinks 
 the obligation to be all upon one side, if while he 
 
 ]8 
 
'274 LECTURED OX PREACHING. 
 
 lives with them and when he leaves them he is not 
 always full of gratitude for what they have done foi 
 him. A pastor who is insensible to this cannot dc 
 the best good to his people. And the sort of hdp 
 which a minister gets from his congregation whose 
 souls he vahies, is a direct complement of the good 
 which he gets from his study. He n(^eds them both. 
 His study furnishes him with ideas, with intellectual 
 conceptions, and his congregation furnishes him with 
 an atmosphere in which these ideas ripen to their 
 best result. The minister as he grows older changes 
 some of the opinions which he used to hold. The 
 new opinions, it is to be hoped, are truer than the 
 old ones were. But greater than all such changes 
 are the deepening convictions about all spiritual 
 things which come from the long years of dealing 
 with men's souls and which color every opinion 
 whether new or old. The conviction that truth and 
 destiny are essential and not arbitrary, that Chris- 
 tianity is the personal love and service of Christ, and 
 that salvation is positive, not negative, — convictions 
 such as these they are that fill and richen the preach- 
 er's maturer years ; and they are convictions whose 
 clearness and strength he owes to that occupation 
 which has both demanded and cultivated a value for 
 the souls of men. 
 
 As to the nature of this value for the human soul, 
 notice, I beg you, that it is something more rhan tho 
 
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 27o 
 
 mere sense of the soul's danger. It is a deliberate 
 estimate set upon man's spiritual nature in view of 
 its possibilities. The danger in which that nature 
 stiinds by sin intensifies and emphasizes the value 
 which we set upon it, but it does not create that 
 value. I think that this is important. I think that 
 we are sometimes apt to let our anxiety for the sal- 
 vation of souls degenerate into a mere pity for the 
 misery into which they may be brought by sin ; and 
 the result of such a low thought is that when we 
 have been brought to believe that a soul is, as we 
 say, " safe," that it has been forgiven and will not 
 , be punished, we are satisfied. The thought of rescue 
 has monopolized our religion and often crowded out 
 the thought of culture. I think that the tone of the 
 New Testament is different from this. I know how 
 eminently there the truths of danger and rescue 
 always appear. I know that Christ "came not to 
 call the righteous but sinners to repentance," and 
 that He was called Jesus because He should " save 
 His people from their sins ; " but all the time behind 
 the danger lies the value of that spiritual nature 
 which is thus in peril. It is not solely or principally 
 the suffering which the soul must undergo ; it is the 
 loss of the soul itself, its failure to be the bright and 
 wonderful thing which, as the soul of God's child, it 
 iught to be. That is the reason why the process of 
 salvation cannot stop with the removal of penalties 
 
276 LECTURES ON PREACH J NO. 
 
 and the forgiveness of sins. It must include all th« 
 gi'adual perfection of the soul by faith and love and 
 obedience and patience. This is the reason, too, why 
 those who have taken only a half view of the com- 
 plete salvation are apt to be severe on those who 
 have seen only the other half. Half a truth is often 
 more jealous of the other half than of an error. 
 
 This larger and deeper value for the human soul, I 
 think, is seen in all the sermons of the greatest 
 preachers. It is not mere pity for danger that in- 
 spires them to plead with men. That might move 
 them to a sort of supercilious exertion, no matter how 
 intrinsically worthless was the thing in peril, as one 
 might start up to pluck even an insect from the can- 
 dle's flame. But it is a glowing vision of how great 
 and beautiful the soul of man might be, of what great 
 things it might do if it were thoroughly purified and 
 possessed by the love of God and so opened free chan- 
 nels to His power. 
 
 There are special causes which make this great 
 po'.*^er of which I have been speaking, the sense of 
 the value of the soul, more difficult to win and keep 
 in this age of ours than it has been in many other 
 times. There are two characteristics of our time 
 which have their influence upon it. One is the ten- 
 dency of philosophy to divert itself from man and 
 turn towards other nature, and in its study of man 
 to busy itself least with his spiritual nature, most 
 
2^HE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 277 
 
 with his physical history. The other is the strong 
 philanthropic disposition which prevails about us, the 
 desire to relieve human suffering and to promote 
 human comfort and intelligence. The first of these 
 tendencies would certainly make it more than usually 
 hard to realize the spiritual value of humanity ; and 
 the second, while it makes much of man, cares mainly 
 for his material well-being and is always disposed to 
 treat the individual as subservient to the interests of 
 the mass. The general result is one of which I think 
 that there can be no doubt, a difficulty in the real, 
 vivid, perpetual sense of the worth of man's spiritual 
 nature such as has very rarely beset those in other 
 ages who have tried to serve their fellow-men. At 
 such a time we need to hold very strongly to the con- 
 stant facts of human life which lie below all such tem- 
 porary changes, and to be very sure of their reappear- 
 ance. We need a keen, quick-sighted faith which 
 shall discover the first signs of what must surely 
 come, a reaction from the partial tendencies of the 
 time. We need a generous fairness to discover 
 thought and feeling which is really spiritual but 
 which has cloaked itself, even to its own confusion, 
 in the forms and phrases of the time. 
 
 But, more than all of these, we who are preaching 
 in such days as these need to understand these meth- 
 ods by which in any time we must acquire and pre- 
 serve tlie sense of the preciousness of the human soul 
 
278 LECTURES ON_Plii: ACHING. 
 
 What are these methodk?' First of all, before a man 
 can value the souls of other men, he must have learnt 
 to value his own soul. And a man learns to value 
 his own soul only as he is conscious of the solemn 
 touches of the Spirit of the Lord upon it. Ah, my 
 friends, here is the real reason why he who preaches 
 to the inner life of othei'S must himself have had an 
 inner life. Not that he may take his own experience 
 and narrowly make it the type to which all other 
 experiences must conform ; but that, having learnt 
 how God loves him, having felt in many a silent hour 
 and many a tumultuous crisis the pressure of God's 
 hands full of care and wisdom, he may know, as he 
 looks from his pulpit, that behind every one of those 
 faces into which he looks there is a soul for which 
 God cares with the same thoughtful ness. In liis 
 closet he has first seen the light which from his closet 
 he carries forth to illuminate the humanity of his 
 congregation and bring out all its colors. The per- 
 sonal desire to be pure and holy, the personal con- 
 sciousness of power to be pure and holy through 
 Christ, reveals the possibility of other men. 
 
 Again, a preacher's view of all theology ought to 
 be colored with the preciousncss of the human soul. 
 It is possible for two men to hold the same doctrine 
 and yet to differ very widely in this respect. To one 
 of tb(im tha Christian truths reveal much of the 
 glory and mercy of God to tlie other they shine also 
 
THE VALUE cF THE HUMAN SOUL. 279 
 
 with the value of the spiritual manhood. To this 
 last the Incarnation reveals the essential dignity of 
 that nature into union with which tlie Deity could so 
 marvellously enter. The Redemption bears witness 
 of the unspeakable love of God, but also of the value 
 underneath the sin of man, which made the jewel 
 worth cleaning. And all the methods of Sanctifica- 
 tion, all the disciplines of the Spirit open before the 
 watchful minister new insight into the possibilities of 
 that being upon whom such bounty of grace is lav- 
 ished. I think that we ought to distrust at least the 
 form in which we are holding any theological idea, if 
 it is not helping to deepen in us the sense of the pre- 
 ciousness of the human soul, first impressing it as a 
 conviction and then firing it into a passion. There is 
 not one truth which man may know of God which 
 does not legitiuiately bear this fruit. I beg you more 
 and more to test the way in which you hold the truth 
 of God by the power which it has to fill you with 
 bonor for the spiritual life of man. 
 
 It is evident as we look at the ministry of Jesua 
 that He was full of reverence for the nature of the 
 men and women whom He met. There was nothing 
 which He knew of God which did not make His 
 Father's children precious to Him. We see it even 
 \n His lofty and tender courtesy. How often I have 
 %een a minister's manners either proudly distant and 
 conscious of his own importance, or fulsome and fawn- 
 
Si80 LECTURES ON PREACHING. 
 
 ing with a feeble affectionateness that was unwortay 
 of a man, and have thought that what he needed was 
 that noble union of dignity and gentleness which 
 came to Jesus from His divine insight into the value 
 of the human soul. 
 
 One other source from which the knowledge of thia 
 value comes let me mention in a single word. It is 
 by working for the soul that we best learn what the 
 soul is worth. If ever in your ministry the souls of 
 those committed to your care grow dull before you, 
 and you doubt whether they have any such value 
 that you should give your life' for them, go out and 
 work for them ; and as you work their value shall 
 grow clear to you. Go and try to save a soul and 
 you will see how well it is worth saving, how capable 
 i^Jsof themosTcFO m i j lele salVaQ on. JNot by ponder- 
 ing upon it, nor by talking of it, but by serving it 
 you learn its preciousness. So the father learns the 
 value of his child, and the teacher of his scholar, and 
 the patriot of his native land. And so the Christi:in, 
 living and dying for his brethren's souls, learns the 
 value of those souls for which Christ lived and died. 
 
 And if you ask me whether this whose theory I 
 have been stating is indeed true in fact, whether in 
 daily work for souls year after year a man does see 
 in those souls glimpses of such a value as not merely 
 justifies the little work which he does, but even 
 makes credible the work of Christ, I answer, surely, 
 
THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 'i%\ 
 
 yes. All other interest and satisfaction of the n tiis- 
 try completes itself in this, that year by yea^ the 
 minister sees more deeply how well worthy of nfi-- 
 nitely more than he can do for it is the human .oul 
 for which he works. 
 
 T do not know how I can better close my lee ares 
 to you than with that testimony. May you fii d it 
 true in your experience. May the souls of men. be 
 always more precious to you as you come ah/aya 
 nearer to Christ, and see them more perfectly a.i He 
 does. I can ask no better blessing on your min.-stry 
 than that. 
 
 And so may God our Father guide and keep yosa 
 always. 
 
 TH£ STTDt. 
 

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