YALE
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

LECTURES ON PREACHING

DELIVERED BEFORE THE

DIVINITY SCHOOL OF YALE COLLEGE

IN JANUARY AND FEBRUARY, 1877

REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS
' i •
RECTOR OF TENSITY cnURCII, BOSTON

NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
1877

CONTENTS.

LECTURE PAGE
I. The Two Elements in Preaching .... 1
II. 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.

O LNCE I received, some months ago, the 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 Homiletical 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.
successive lecturers a series of anecdotes of what has
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
such a multitude of definitions to make it clear. And
so 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 PREACHING. 3
try are very 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 must pervade every treatment of the work
which 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
paring for the work of preaching, without congratu-

4 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
lating you most earnestly upon the prospect that lies
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 way 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 Truth.
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 personality 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.
listen 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

6 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
or the other element that every sermon and preacher
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 working miracles, the miracles
themselves were 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 impressiveness
and the helpfulness with which it was clothed.
Everything that was peculiar in Christ's treatment
of those men was merely part of the process by which
the Master prepared their personality to be a fit

THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 7
medium 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
the Gospel may be capable of statement in dogmatic
form, its truest statement we know is not in dogma
but in personal life. Christianity is Christ ; and we
can easily understand how a truth which is of such
peculiar character that a person can stand forth and
say 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 ifte into
the 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
sonal method which the Incarnation itself had in
volved.

8 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
If this be true, then, it establishes the first of all
principles concerning the ministry and preparation
for the ministry. Truth through Personality is our
description of real preaching. The truth must come
really through the person, not merely over his lips,
not merely into his understanding and out through
his pen. It must come through his character, his
affections, his whole intellectual and moral being.
It must come genuinely through hini. 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
messenger o£ God. We know how the views svhich
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 has more
and more tended to consider them the active mes-.
sengers of the Word of God. This is the' higher
thought of inspiration. And this is the only true
thought of the Christian preachership. I think 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 it is a
small part. Everything that opens their lives towards

X>

10 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
God and towards man makes part of their education.
The professional schools furnish them. The whole
world is the school that makes them. This is the
great value of the great preachers if we can only
read them largely enough, if we can read them not
in a small desire to copy their details of living 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 reader's interest in every
thing that concerns him, or of Robertson's painful but
precious history, or of the strong, manly, constantly
advancing 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 which abounds
in biographies as ours does, especially in the biogra
phies of preachers, it is worth while, I am sure, to
remember that another man's life may be the noblest
inspiration or the heaviest burden, according as we
take its spirit into our spirit, or only bind its metlw
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 pulpit. Every now and
then we hear some speculations about the prospects

THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 11
of preaching. Will men continue to preach and will
other men continue to go and hear them ? Books are
multiplying enormously. 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, 1 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
some morning the voice of a true preacher is heard

12 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
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 Lon
don when Latimer was bravely telling his truth at
St. Paul's.
The same is true of reading sermons, I think, as
I shall have occasion to say more fully in some ojher
lecture, that a sermon that has the true sermon
quality in it, when it is made, preserves that quality
even under the constraints of manuscript or print.
And books of sermons which really bring the truth
through personality to men, were never bought and
read more largely than they are to-day.
No ; the truth about this matter of the competition
of the printed book with the preached sermon, seems
to be what is true of every competition. It has 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
mons. They never were sermons. The competition
of print has interfered very much, is destined to in
terfere much more, — we may hope will not cease to
interfere till it has caused it to disappear, — with the
" pulpit droning of old saws," with the monotonous
reiteration of commonplaces and abstractions ; but
the true sermon, the utterance of living truth by liv-

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, or
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 which
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 our 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
he preached.

14 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 different. There are a few suggestions that I
should like to make to you about each.
And first with regard to the Truth. It is strange
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 isrhich 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 pulpit, 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
as orthodox, but never realized as true. If you and
I can always carry this double consciousness, that we
are messengers, and that we are witnesses, we shall
have in our preaching all the authority and independ
ence 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 speaketli
in us, and yet our sonship shall give the Father's
voice its utterance and interpretation to His other
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 source 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 " treat 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 his
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
he brings. Among the many sermons I have heard,

16 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
I always remember one, for the wonderful way in
which it was pervaded by this 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 his
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 with 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. As
I listened, I seemed to see how weak in contrast was
the way in which other preachers 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 ministry,
never lose this fundamental idea of yourself as a mes
senger. A« 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 the Christian life. Here
is the primary necessity that the Christian preacher
should be a Christian first, that he should be deeply
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
say 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 corners 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
being imitators of Christ ; " " That God is the only
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 which most men could
only talk two minutes ; when they are eager for sub-
2

18 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
tlety more than 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 be told 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 \\ith which he has received it, comes from
the fact of its being the identical message which has
come down from the beginning. Men find on both
sides how difficult it is to preserve the true poise
and proportion between the corporate and the indi
vidual conceptions of the Christian life. But all will
own to-day the need of both. The identity of the
Church in all times consists in the identity of the
message which she has always had to carry from her

THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 19
Lord to men. All outward utterances of the perpet
ual identity of the 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 all
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 \vill 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.
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 criticism, 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
their relations, examining their nature, and not put
ting ourselves into their power. Preaching in every

20 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 obey 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 if 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 preaching about Christ as distinct from
preaching Christ. There are many preachers who
seem 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 PREACHING. 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 faith 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 Gospel of Christ is primarily addressed to
individuals, and that its ultimate 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
many machineries which are more or less impersonal.
The Church, with all its instrumentalities, comes in.

22 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
The preacher works by them. But if the preacher
ever for a moment counts them the purpose of his
working, if he takes his eye off the single soul as the
prize lie is to win, he falls from his highest function
and loses his best power. All successful preaching,
I more and more believe, talks to individuals. The
Church is for the soul. I am not thinking 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 this 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 whicji 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
souls ? Let your preaching be to individuals, and to
the Church always as living for and made up of indi
viduals. Of the second element in preaching, namely, the

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
bind himself to the ways of working which the most

24 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
successful preachers of the Word have followed. I
have seen both these kinds of ministers : those whose
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
so easy to be a John the Baptist, as far as the desert
and 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
stant familiarity with thoughts and words which to

THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 25
other men are occasional and rare, aud 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
who, if they came to preach once in a great while in
the midst of other occupations, would preach with
reality and fire, are deadened to their sacred work by
their constant intercourse with sacred things. Their
constant 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 which 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
along the road whose names he has always been

26 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
shouting in the passengers' ears, and to which he has
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 truth. 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 chambre, is sufficiently answered by saying
that it is only to a valet de chambre that a truly
great 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 ii its familiarity deadens and encrusts, in
stead of vitalizing and opening your powers. And it
will all depend upon whether you do your work for
your Master and His people or for yourself. The
last kind of labor slowly kills, the first gives life more
and more.
The real preparation 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

THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 27
towards the needs of man. To apprehend in all
their intensity the wants and 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 his 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 Christ. 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 like a river that is frozen too hard to be navi
gable but not hard enough to bear. Never fear, as
you preach, to bring the sublimest motive to the

28 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
smallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to the
smallest trouble. They will prove that they belong
there if only the duty and trouble are real and you
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 element. 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 reaches
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 which it was
at 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 as 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

THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 29
understanding 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
pf 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 which 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 the 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 age.
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
once delighted to demand of him. ' There are noble
examples on the other side : old men with a person
ality as vitally sympathetic with the changing age as

30 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
the truth which they preach is true to the Word of
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 young men in
their pulpits, if only the old men bring 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
people 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
their hearijs 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 can keep us
from giving our people what they want, instead of

THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 31
what they need. Keep a clear sense of what your
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 that
ten were sufficient, " True," said he, " ten are suf
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 ought 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
try had no certain purposes or definite message, that
the preacher was a promiscuous caterer for men's

32 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
whims, wishing them 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 the
strengthening of the weak preacher, the 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
is that wKich really shapes everything's life. And
what is 'preaching for? The answer comes without
hesitation. It is for men's salvation. But the idea
of what salvation is has never been entirely uniform
or certain ; and all through the history of preaching
we can see that the character of preaching varied
continually, rose or fell, enlarged or narrowed, with
the constant variation of men's ideas as to what it

THE TWO ELEMENTS IN PREACHING. 33
was to be saved. 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 godly, then, with both of its
elements more complete than they have ever been be
fore, preaching must some day be a complete power.
But that better preaching will not come by any sud
den leap 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. If 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 clearly the impor-
-"-*- tance which I think 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
minister ? It would be good for the Churcli if it were
a more common question. Partly because the motives
which lead a young man to the ministry are so per
sonal and spiritual, partly because of our sense of the

36 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
magnitude and privilege of the work, which makes
us fear to be the means of excluding any worthy man
from it, partly because, at present, while the harvest
is so plenteous the laborers are so very few, — for
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 days 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
the kind who make no place in life for themselves,
but wait till some one kindly makes one for them
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
the pulpit by the same energy and through the same

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 37
difficulties which meet countless young men on their
way to business and the bar. We believe 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 preachers 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
striking about the ministry than the way in which
very opposite 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 snug 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
are 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 personal 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
ffor 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 glory.
shall 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 unsatisf}ring and unprofitable work, that
to preach with that is a perpetual privilege and
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 they 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 men,
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 naturally
appropriates all the elements of hope, while another
invariably gathers up all that tends to despair. The
latter kind of man may have his uses. There are

40 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
tasks and times for which no prophet but Cassandra
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 does
that, 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 me the
frivolous and insufficient way in which the health ,of
the preacher is often treated.. It is not simply 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 think 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 medium through whom Gad's influence
may reach his fellow-men. Such an offering involves
the 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 which 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 which 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

42 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
atmosphere between the truth on one side of him and
the man on the other side of him. It is the. inspira
tion, the possession, — what I have heard called the
" demon " of preaching. Something of this quality
there must be in every man who really preaches. 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
a preacher. 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 his 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. 43
And the next question will be, When you have
the right 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 work to which he
looks forward has entered into him during his careful
preparation and made him 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 way in which 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
have thought that the very transcendent motives, of
the young minister's study have a certain tendency
to bewilder him and make his study less faithful than

44 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
that of men seeking other professions from lower
motives ? The highest motive often dazzles before it
illuminates. It is one of the ways in which the light
within us becomes darkness. I never shall forget
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-meet
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 prayed and exhorted one another. Their
whole souls seemed exalted and their natures were on
fire. I sat bewildered and ashamed, 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 the
work which then and there 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 we
called " our work." A feeble twilight of the coming
ministry we lived in. The people in the neigh-

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 45
borhood dubbed us " parsonnettes." Oh, my fellow-
students, the special study of theology and all that
appertains to it, that is what the preacher must be
doing always ; but he never can do it afterward as
he can in the blessed days of quiet in Arabia, 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 which 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 with an
under-consciousness that he is going to teach that

46 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
same thing some day, influencing all the methods
of his learning ; so the student preparing to be a
preacher cannot learn truth as the mere student of
theology for its own sake might do. He always feels
it reaching 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 forms
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 fog 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,
a breadth which comes from the constant presence in
the mind of the fact that truth has various aspects

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 47
and presents itself in many ways to different people,
according to their needs and characters.
Along with this preparation for preaching goes
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. I
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-tnindedness and power of appropri
ating 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 his
life in them is wholly outside of his life as a preacher.
He changes his nature when he turns away from his

48 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
sermon and takes a volume from his shelves. And
his shelves 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 may 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," " AtSaK-riKos," 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 much a praise to the new
convert that he has that power as it is a shame to
the educated preacher that he does not have it all
the more richly in proportion to his education. And
whatever 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. 49
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 room to room does
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 enumerate is sure to suc
ceed somewhere and somehow. 
And first among the elements of power which make
success I must put the supreme importance of char
acter, of personal uprightness and purity impressing
themselves upon the men who witness them. There is
a very striking remark in Lord Nugent's " Memorials
of John Hampden," where, speaking of the English
4

50 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
Reformation, he is led to make this general observa
tion : " Indeed, no hierarchy and no creed has ever
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 the
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-
i quer tha better cause. I suppose no cause could be
\ so good that, sustained by bad men and opposed by
(any error whose champions were men of spotless
lives, it would not fall. The truth must conquer, but
it) must first embody itself in goodness. And in the
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 men hold so
much as by the way in which they hold them, and

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 51
the sort of men which their views seem to make of
theTn. 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
dom from self-consciousness. My mind goes back to
a young man whom 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
yet thought whether he was preaching well without
weakening his sermon. I think there are few higher

52 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
or more delightful moments in a preacher's life than
that which comes sometimes when, standing before a
congregation and haunted by questionings about the
merit of your preaching, which you hate but cannot
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
and 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 the first question has disappeared entirely. De
votion 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 »ext 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
sentiment. There is a great deal of likirfg for cer
tain people in our congregations who are interesting
in themselves and who are interested in what inter
ests us. There is a great deal of the feeling that the

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 53
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 deep value for the
capacity that is in them, a sense that we are theirs
and not they ours, 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, who, 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 were 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 he 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 enjoy his work. I
mean in the actual doing of it, and not only in its

54 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
idea. No man to whom the details of his task are
repulsive can do his task well constantly, however
full 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
the 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
lightheadedness 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 upon it are legitimate enough, though
somewhat cheap. The gravity that is assumed, that
merely hides with solemn front the lack of thought

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 55
and feeling, that is put on as the uniform of a pro
fession, that consists in certain forms, and is shocked
at any serious thought §f 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 age.
They are cheats and shams. As they 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 little 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
tempt of Christian people. I mean the clerical jester
in all the varieties of his unpleasant existence. He
appears in and out of the pulpit. He lays his hands
on the most sacred things, and leaves defilement upon
all he touches. He is full of Bible jokes. He talks

56 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
about the Church's sacred symbols in the language
of stale jests that have come down from generations
of feeble clerical jesters before him. The doctrines
which, if they mean anything, mean life or death to
souls, he turns into material for" chaff 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 conies from the lips of the
captain who holds the helm or the surgeon on whose
skill my life depends. You will not misunderstand
me, I am sure. The gravity of which I speak is not
inconsistent with 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 is
one of the most helpful qualities that the preacher
can possess. There is no extravagance which de-

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 57
forms the pulpit which would not be modified and
repressed, often entirely obliterated, if the minister
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
that you commend your work and gain an influence

58 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
over people by becoming the clerical humorist. It
builds a wall between your fellow-men 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 who 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
come. 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 that a child's light touch could make
them swing back and let him in.
There is another source of power which I. can
hardly think of as a separate quality, but rather as
the sum and result of all the qualities which I have
been naming. 1 mean Courage.. 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 you 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 the seeking forj
other things. It must be from a sincere respect for
en's higher nature that you must grow bold to re-
i.st their whims. He who begins by despising men
will often end by being their slave. A passionate
desire to do men good is always the surest safeguard
that they shall not do us harm. Jesus himself was

60 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
bold before men out of the infinite love which He felt
for men. That was 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 to
dwell in this lecture, but on this I must speak very
briefly. I wanted to try to estimate with you some
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 young Melanchthon. It is not strange that
it should be so. It is not to the young minister's dis
credit that it should be so. The student for the min-
/ istry has to a large extent comprehended the force
by which he is to work, but he has-iiot measured the
I resistance that he is to meet. -He knows the power
of the truth of which he is all full, but he has not
estimated the sin of which the world is all full. The
,inore earnest and intense and full of love for God and
jman he is, the more impossible does it seem that he

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 61
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 which they pass
out of that first self-confidence and upon what con
dition comes afterwards when it is gone. ^
The first way in „Iiich 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 knowledge 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 gradually how much better
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.
But 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.
main difference in effect between what we call success
and what 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
Ihow muck there is which jio preacher can do, and is
'.apt to weigh him down into de^ession. 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 : 0 cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right ! "
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 weight that was his
ballast and helped his speed sinks him when once the
leak has come. There is no help except in a pro-
founder retreat of the whole nature upon God, — such
a perception of Him and of His dearness as shall take
off our heavy responsibility and make us ready to fail
for Him with joy as well as to succeed for Him, if
such shafl be His choice ; and ready to work as hard
for Him in failure as in success, because we work not
for 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
show as the Christian ministry.
There is another refuge when the young preacher's
first self-conceit is shaken. It is into another self-

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 63
conceit waich is smaller than the first. The be
leaguered householder refuses to surrender, and re
treats from his strong outer ramparts, defending one
line after another till at last he dwells only 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 bear or whether they will for
bear," as if they had been spoken to hiin as much as
to Ezekiel.
What shall we say then ? What is the true escape
from the crudeness of the untried preacher which set
tles and centres all his thought upon himself? It is
an escape which many a preacher has found and grad-

64 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 unfolds itself. It outgoes all his
powers. But as he looks over its increasing vastness
he sees it on every side touching the omnipotence of
God. As he sees more and more clearly that he will
never 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 refuge
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
execution. 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 is.

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
artist's ways and leave our brushes idle when the sky
frowns or the head aches. But the artistic element^,
is, after all, the smallest element in 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, which was such
utter love for His Father and man, between whom He
stood, 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 withdraw
into a mountain, or put out in a boat upon the lake.
We can feel the fluctuations of that humanity of His,
and, interpreting it by our own, we can seem to see
how one bright morning by the seaside He was exu-
5

66 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
berant and joyous, and on another morning He would
be sad and burdened. We can trace the differences
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 went
without its preaching, because it found him moody
and depressed. He did no mighty works in Naza
reth ; but it was because of the people'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 unfit 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 speak to the
laity of our churches frankly and freely about their
treatment of the clergy. 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
office in our fathers' days, I think he must have many
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 and

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 67
made an oracle. It is still worse that he 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 brings 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 jrom 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
into a poison of his manhood, and a temptation to his
self-indulgence. It is beyond all doubt the weak 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
which have this one defect and danger.

68 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
If you have read the life 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 man. If a man is not wholly
true they find 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 his
race, and that makes him inhuman, unsympathetic.
The weak is always cruel.
Mr. Galton, in his work on " Hereditary Genius,"
summing up the result of his 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 we 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 without St.
Paul's strength. Against that tendency, my friends,
set your whole force. Fear its insidiousness. "I feel
no intoxicating effect," wrote Macaulay when the first
flush of his success was on him, " but a man may be
drunk without knowing it." Insist on applying to
yourself tests which others refuse to apply to you.

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 69
Resent indulgences which are not given to men of
other professions. Learn to enjoy and be sober;
learn 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 smaller
circle, instead of tempting the sight onward, jeal
ously confines it to itself. Narrowness is to be es

70 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
caped, not by deserting our special function, but by
compelling it to open to us 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
tending 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 misunderstand 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
soul that 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
minister must grow. His true growth is not neces
sarily a change of views. It is a change of view. It
is not revolution. It is progress. It is a continual
climbing which opens continually wider prospects.
It repeats the experience of Christ's disciples of whom

THE PREACHER HIMSELF. 71
their 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 lives.

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK.

TTTHEN 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
many 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
*bis life lias 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 of
responsibility. There is the surprised recognition of
something which we have learned in some one, of our
schools of books or life, and counted useless, which
now some man we meet welcomes when we give it to
him as if it were the one thing for which he had been

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 73
always waiting. There is the hopefulness that fears
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 the
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
stone, 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. It is not
only necessary for a sermon that there should be a
human being to speak to other human beings, but for
a good sermon there must be a man who can speak
well, whose nature stands in right relations to those
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 the 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 fatalism, 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 reason which requires a man for a preacher
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-
ifidence 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
nity to many details which in themselves are trivial.
The study of language and of oratory, which would
belittle you jf 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
of God's truth ; and the assiduous attention to peo
ple, 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
to be separated. I believe that very strongly. Every

76 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 wholly
preachers, and some be wholly pastors. Let one
class visit the flock, to direct and comfort them ; and
the other class stand in the pulpit. 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 reproaching you, and calling you
home, you may easily come to believe that it would
be good indeed if you could be one or other of two
things, and not both .j° 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 rare ; and other
preachers, who have not their power, trying to do it,
are sure to preach to some unreal, unhuman man of
their own imagination. There are some pastors here
and there with such a constantly lofty and spiritual

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 77
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 pulpit 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
preacher, 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 of
you, " He is a preacher, but no pastor ; " or, " He is
a pastor, but no preacher." Be both ; for you 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
all books on behavior, which are needless for those
who do behave well and useless for those who do not.
The powers of the pastor's success are truth and sym
pathy together. "Speaking the truth in Love," is
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 you 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
see 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 heast ; 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 have not failed,
that you really did bring elevation and comfort.
You cannot help doing it if you go with truth and
sympathy. This is the constant experience of the
minister. This is the ground of confidence and hope
with which he presses on from year to year.
I am inclined to think, as I have already intimated,

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 79
that the trouble of much of our pastoral work is in
its pettiness. It is pitched in too low a key. It
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 forgetfulness 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
burdens 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 characterized
everywhere by its frankness and manliness. He meets
Nicodemus 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
same circumstances. It is the utter absence of sen
timentality in Christ's relations with men that make|
his tenderness so exquisitely touching. It is in the
power, even in the effort, to awake the stronger

80 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
nature of mankind that our modern pastorship is apt
to be deficient. It ministers to women more than to
men. It tries to soothe with consolation more than
to fire with ambition or to sting with 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 some of our
hymns, for instance, seemed sometimes strangely out
of keeping with the lips that sang them ? A row of
comfortable, ' 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
when 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 men of peace as are our congrega
tions. But they were conscious of and showed the
true intenseness of spiritual warfare. They knew the
fight within, the terrible reality of the enemy, the ter
rible suspense of the struggle, the glorious delight of

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 81
triumph. No, it is the unheroic character of 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, bravery, 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
about it — one characteristic of it so prominent that
we are sure that He who sent men out to preach
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 parts
of the man who does it. I remember, as 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
purpose brings two pleasures, one in the anticipation
and attainment of its end, the other in its own exer
cise. There is a delight in exercising faculties as
well as in doing work, and in all the best activities of
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 ministry that does
not feel that joy is dead. But in behind that highest
joy, beating in humble unison with it, as the healthy
body thrills in sympathy with the deep thoughts and
pure desires of the mind and soul, the best ministries
have always been conscious of another pleasure which
belonged to the^vSry doing of the work itself. As

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 83
we read the lives of all the most effective preachers
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 of public
life, he was silent for a moment, and then his face
lighted up and he clapped his hand to his ear and
eried, " 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 relationship with fellow-men
aud 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 preaching and
the faces melted together into a unit as of one impres
sive 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 preacher.

84 LECTURES ON PREACHING. .
came out almost overpoweringly. It is good to treas
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 the 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 when 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 deal of our preaching is that beautiful
blending of the two whose power 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 us 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 forgetfulness 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 young
minister should know them. Sometimes a preacher
finds himself — and oftener still, some foolish friends
by his side will make him think himself — one of the
wisest men, perhaps the wisest man in his small cir
cle upon any of the ordinary topics of thought, upon

86 LECTURES ON 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
sion by sharing his knowledge with them. One of
the most interesting pages of clerical life of which I
know is Norman Macleod's account of his lectures to
the weavers at Newmilns, on geology. 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 tg 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 authority

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 87
with which he bids them repent of sin, and warns
them that without holiness no man shall see the
Lord. 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.
the question of life or death. It makes supremely
essential to the minister that independence of men's
judgments which 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
comes 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
grow very frequent with some men, till you have the
race of clerical visionaries who think vast, dim, vague
thoughts, 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 unsparing 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 which 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
me say a few words to you on each of these.

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 his
best powers ; and since among the effective powers
of man the powers of plan and arrangement stand
very high, the whole of the New Testament really
implies that he who 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.
Christ 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
of extemporaneousness has spread more widely and

90 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
reached more thoughtful and intelligent men than we
suppose. 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 has
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 aud 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 and 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,
what 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 say (I suppose that this
is partly the reason why as an Episcopalian I have

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 91
been asked to lecture here) that I rejoice to see in
many churches outside our own that to which 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 natures
have closer connections than very often we allow them,
and traits 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 were
purely a quality of style, but clearness in every 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 belong together. Logi
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 the
law of reaction, your orderly thinking will make it
easier for you to do right. 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 methods of operation give to the higher
powers in their weaker moments. No one dreads
mechanical woodenness in the ministry more than I
do. And yet a strong wooden structure running
through your work, a set of well-framed and well-
jointed habits about times and ways of work, writing,

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 93
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,
Patience, nothing loth,
And uncomplaining, does
The work of both."
But patience, while a strong power, is not quick-
sighted, and works in ways and habits which have
been made before.
Of mistakes of method as distinguished from ab
sence of method in the ministry, experience has
seemed to me t6 show that there is one comprehensive
head 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 human 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 not
constantly appearing to invent some sudden method
or to seek some magical and concise prescription
which shall obviate the need of careful, comprehen
sive study and long-continued application. But this
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
can 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. But 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 they are mag
nified into solitary importance and offered as solutions
of the difficulties that beset the Gospel, they are ludi
crously insufficient. Many a young minister to-day
is staking his whole ministry on some one such idea.
He attributes every defect to the imperfect apprehen
sion 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
hardly conceive of any evil in connection with it.

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 95
Perhaps his favorite idea is free churches ; a good
idea indeed, an idea without which there could have
been no Christian church at all ; an idea which be
yond all doubt docs represent the standard of Chris
tianity, and to which Christian 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 every pew door and abolish
every pew tax and yet wait to see your churches and
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 he
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
that we had more of it. But, to borrow the army
simile again, no courtesies between two regiments

96 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
ever yet defeated the other army. And so of the
church sociable which tries to entice the passer-by to
the altar of the Lord with the familiar but feeble
odor of a cup of tea. And so with the children's
church ; one of the best and purest of the Church's
inventions for her work, but by no means enough to
make a special 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 those thick-falling leaves unto
this day. No ! The clerical or parish hobby is either
the fancy of a man who has failed to apprehend the
great 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
safely concentrate all his force there to protect it. It
robs us of all power of large appeal and confines the
truth which we preach to some small class of people.

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 97
It makes us exalt the means above the end, 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 wretchedness can give him any room
Whose house is foul while he adores his broom ? "
But finally, 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 ministry has
been occupied all through in the substitution of hobby
for hobby year after year. Their history is made up
of the record of the dynasties of successive expe
dients, following each other like the later Emperors,
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
7

98 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
of men, and be in the truest and best sense a man of
the world. He must get out of the merely ecclesias
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, coming
from any exile where the homesickness of his heart
has been awakened, 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
sympathy with them. Let me make one special re
mark upon this head. Apart from its incidental ad
vantage, to his style and manner, I think it is good
for a minister to do some work besides clerical work,
and to write something 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
credit, or to your credit, that strangers say of you,
" I should know he was a minister." Ifor the best
minister is simply the fullest man. You cannot sep
arate him from his manhood. Voltaire said of Louis

THE PREACHER IN 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 primary 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 clay, 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
happy. But still this standard of success has its ad
vantages. It is intelligible. And it brings at once

100 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
forward the simplest of all 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
powers 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 reserve, 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, with this picture of him in your
mind, you 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 work is at loose ends ; he treats 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. That last 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 men 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. The
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-carrier is the
same. Be faithful, and do your best always for every
congregation, and on every occasion.1
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 these good words
of Cotton Mather, since this lecture was delivered. They are from
the Ratio Disciplince, pp. 59 and 60.
" If churches hear of ministers boasting that they have been in
their studies only a few hours on Saturday, or so, they reckon that
such persons rather glory in their shame.
" Sudden sermons they may sometimes admire from their accom
plished ministers, when the suddenness has not been a chosen cir
cumstance. But as one of old, when it was objected against 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
a people with anything but what shall be studied ; ' so the best min
isters of New England ordinarily would blush to address their flocks
without premeditation."

102 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
tion with the highest spiritual experiences. A man
who will cheat nowhere else will be a hypocrite in
religion. 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 the
stars. And in some men it is that demoralizations
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 difficulties 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 almost any
trouble before it grew vigorous enough to enlist the
angry interest of the people whose lives are largely

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 103
occupied with other things. There are such things
as parish quarrels. If I 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 his
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
say was this, that the main objection which the people
have to the preaching of old sermons is in the impres
sion that it gives them of unfaithfulness and idleness.
Let a minister's whole life make any such suspicion
impossible and there is no complaint. The minister

104 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
in whose faithfulness his people believe may use his
own discretion. He must not play any tricks. He
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, which do not lose but rather 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 the most remarkable things about the
preacher's methods of work is the way in which they
form themselves in the earliest years of his ministryA
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 unexpectedness of every
thing to which I alluded when I began to speak to
you this afternoon, opens all the life, and makes it re
ceptive j and then the 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 practically al
most unchangeable. They are the years when a
preacher needs to be very watchful over his discre
tion and his independence. When the clay is in the
bank, it matters not so much who treads on it. And
when the clay is hardened in the vase, it may press

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 105
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
mental family, is satisfactory and encouraging. It
gives us the sense at once of settlement and progress.
He is the happiest and most effective old man whose
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 PREACHING.
Hebrews say that the Israelites found their clothes in
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 hope that I shall not have disappointed your ex
pectation in what I have said about the preacher's
methods by dwelling so largely upon principles, and
going so little into details. It would be 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 feeble 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 have but a few words to add upon the spirit in
which the preacher does his best work. After what
I have been saying, my points will need no elabora
tion. Forgive me if I venture to put them in the
simplest 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
and be their servant.

THE PREACHER IN HIS WORK. 107
Second, never allow yourself to feel equal to your
work. If you ever find that spirit growing on you,
be afraid, 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 profoundly honest. Never dare to say
in the pulpit or in private, through ardent excite
ment or conformity to what you know you are ex
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
magnetism almost like a material thing, that passes '
between him and the people who sit before him.
Pray for and work for fulness of life above every
thing ; full red blood in the body ; full honesty 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 minis
try, you cannot fail, you must succeed.

THE IDEA OF THE SERMON.

T HAVE dwelt long upon the preacher and his char-
-*- acter because he is essential to the sermon. He
cannot throw a sermon forth into the 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-
I 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,
so that as you read them you feel him present in the
room. But, ordinarily, reading sermons is like list
ening to an echo. The words are there, but the per
sonal intonation is gone out of them and there is an
unreality about it all. Now and then you find ser
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 is
jtrue that the sermon which is good to preach is poor
^to read and the sermon which is good to read is poor

THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 109
to 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 thought and language
in what he utters to his people. If you have your
artist you have only to supply your marble and chisel
with the mere technical 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 every attempt to consider ft so works
injury to the purpose for which the sermon was
created. Many of the ineffective sermons that are
made owe their failure to a blind and fruitless effort
to produce something which shall be a work of artV
conforming to some type or pattern which is not
clearly understood but is supposed to be essential ana
eternal. But the unreasonableness of this appears

110 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
the moment that we think of it. ^K sermon exists
in and for its purpose, ^hat 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 pastor
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
purpose. 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 is
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 the 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
us good to go back to the simple sermons of the New
Testament. I do not speak of the perfect discourses
of our Lord, though in 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 them 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 Church
and of Mr. Moody in Protestantism lies simply here:
in the clear and undisturbed presence of their pur
pose ; and many ministers who never dream of such
a thing, who think that they are preaching purely
for the good of souls, are losing the power out of
their sermons because they are trying, even without
knowing it, to make them not only sermons, but
works of art. There was an old word which I think
has ceased to be used. Men used to talk of "ser
monizing." They said that some good preacher was
" a fine sermonizer." The word contained just this
vice : it made the sermon an achievement, to be at-

THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 113
tempted and enjoyed for itself apart from anything
that it could do, like a picture or an oratorio, like
the Venus of Milo or the Midsummer-Night'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_h_ear a good deal about preach-
ingjyyerjjeople'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 people ; 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
tlety 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 ON PREACHING.
hear, every now and then, from the days of the
" Spectator " down, the expression of a wish that
moderate ministers, instead of giving people their
own moderate thought, would recur to the good work
which has been already 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
pear. 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 and 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 ought 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
shaped 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 whom

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 desire for utility, and only
gradually assumed a secondary value and importance
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 departure. 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 them
always to bend to the purposes for which he 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 the 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 words
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
the arguments which he uses, and the promises which
he holds out. Of 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 preach
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
they 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 history. And in the pulpit no doubt it gives a
certain vividness, when a popular preacher whose peo
ple 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
study," or " A man met me in the street, and said,
Mr. this or that " (using his own name), " what do
you 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 minister grows familiar and
unimposing, it certainly must have a tendency to

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 personality, where the
people are always hearing of how he learned this
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
largeness 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 Clfristianity in which the diversity and unity of
humanity might both be kept. And any undue promi
nence of himself in his teaching, loses the largeness
on 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 which I have already made, that I
sympathize very fully with that high estimate which
such multitudes of people 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 are his ser
mons. The thought is stronger for us because he has
thought it. The feeling 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
sermons 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

120 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
once strong and broad. You can gather all of Lati
mer's history out of his sermons, and Milton has
given us a large part of his teaching in connection
with the events of his own life. But ordinarily that
is 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 you, not sub
jects of speculation and belief, but realities which you
have seen and known ; then sink 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
which the utterance of the best part of a man's own

THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 121
life, its essence, its result, which the pulpit makes
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, who,
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 heard 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
silent before the interviewer, pours out the very
depths of his soul to the great multitude. He will
not print his diary for the world to read, but he will

122 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
tell his fellow-men what Christ may be to them, so
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, touches ll 4,tf~t
upon the point of which I spoke in my last sermon,
the authority of the sermon. The sermon is God's
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, the 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 know 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
temporary 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
dulge. John Wesley used to say that " Infidels know,
whether Christians know it or not, that the giving up

THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 123
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 with human slavery. 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 clearly 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
it something of his own speculation about it. The
other method is the only method. Even St. Paul

124 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
came to it in his epistles. But how few preachers
frankly adopt it. We cover all we say — our crude
guesses, our ignorant anticipations — with a certain
vague and 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
all. Frankness is what we need, frankness to say
" This is God's truth, and this other is what I think."
If we were 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. 125
to shut his ears. It is a very blind and unintelligent
cry, no doubt. All popular outcries are that. Every
popular movement and demand has in general 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. There never
was a stir and dissatisfaction, a dislodging and out-
reaching of men's minds which did not show itself
in all these forms. This dissatisfaction with what is
called doctrinal preaching appears in all three. 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 is 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 to
which anything which might be an intelligent opinion

126 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
can be reduced, the affectation which pretends to be in
horror at anything like dogmatism, 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
bo 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 understanding
of its true significance.
For it does mean something, and what it means
is this : that men who are looking 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 better
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 of

THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 121
such 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 when 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. But 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,
it 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
must be whose " trial " or education St. Peter says

128 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
" is much more precious than of gold that perishes."
Such words as those carry us inevitably into the
realm of character, which we know is the one thing
in man which God values and for which 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
done by Christ. To bring them then to Christ that
He may do it, to make Christ plain to them that
they may find Him, this is the preacher's work. But
I cannot do my duty in making Christ plain unless I
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 I must
tell to those men whom He has sent me to call home
to Hi&self. I will do this in its fulness. And this
is the preaching of doctrine, positive, distinct, charac
teristic Christian Truth. Only, the truth has always
character beyond it as its ulterior purpose. Not
until I forget that, and begin to tell men about Christ
as 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 are
trying to describe when they talk about " doctrinal
preaching." The truth is, no preaching ever had any strong
power that was not the preaching of doctrine. The
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 practical sermons, of hortatory
discourses, each separate species seeming to stand by
itself. It seems as if the preacher were expected to
determine each week what kind of sermon the next
9

130 LECTURES ON 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 that 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 quivers over many topics but strikes
nowhere. The preaching that is the discussion of a
topic may be interesting, but it grows unsatisfactory
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 with 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
alone; but to supplement each by the other in

THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 131
another sermon is certainly a very crude, imperfect
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 whole 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 what we
call the profane study. The escape is not in the
abandonment of minute and faithful study, but in the

132 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
careful preservation of the larger purpose and spirit
of the work. Our literature abounds in illustrations
of the 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 type 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
idiosyncracies, 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
proaches and undertakes to convince the human mind.
Every reality of God may be recognized by us in its
beauty, its righteousness, or its usefulness. I may see,

THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 133
for instance, of God's justice either the absolute 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 thing in the 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
God 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
these 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 sermons
to the soul, or to the conscience, or to the practical
sense. And one congregation or one generation will
have one door more open than the others, its circum-

134 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
stances in some way making it most approachable
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 which 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 ever daring to say with cruel

THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 135
flippancy 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 way 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
so. Do not begin by thinking that it is so, and you
will not find it so.

136 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
I should like to devote part of what time remains
to-day to some suggestions about the true subjects of
sermons. 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 ought to
hear more often than we do now from our preachers
concerning the right use of wealth, concerning the
extravagance of society, concerning impurity and li
centiousness, concerning the prevalent lack of thor
oughness in our hurried life, concerning political

THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 137
corruption and misrule. I believe the claim 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 special sins
around him, it is not true that every preacher, be the
nature of his genius what it may, must be goaded and
driven to it. It is good for us that there should be

138 LECTURES ON 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.
j But again, the method in which the pulpit ought
to approach the topics of the time is even more im
portant. 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 secondary value under the
law of reaction, by which 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 the 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 these evil practices

THE IDEA OF THE SERMON. 139
are not the real essential evil. It is the heart
estranged from God, the soul gone wrong, the unseen
springs of manhood out of order, upon which one 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 spiritual
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- 1
ways strike in the interest of the soul to which you I
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,
with 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, more self-sacrificing than

140 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
one that worked on lower motives and took shorter
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 them 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 the 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 the
current 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 call 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 shall 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 party 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
it deals only with the abstractions of eternity, and
has 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 PREACHING.
and the preacher had his duty as sharply 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, where
the tone of the people is of vast value 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 sermon 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 is not a complicated, but a very
simple thing.

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON.

f AM to speak to you to-day about the making of a
A sermon, and if you compare their titles you will 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
and must be thrust aside.
The el^ieifEjb which determine the make of any
particular sermon are three, the preacher, the mate-

144 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
rial, and the audience; just as the character of any
battle is determTneoTby three elements, the gun (in
cluding the gunner), the ammunition, and the fortress
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 they 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. His sermons will be

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 145
all 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 nqt^ 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-
' ehT of maiiV 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
the lack of variety in the sermon, has very much to
do with our imperfect education. The true result of
10

146 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
education is to develop in the individual that of which
I 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,
f 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 an 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
so. 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 ceil," a good foot and a good
eye. As I begin to speak to you about literary style
and homiletical construction, I cannot help once more
urging upon you the need 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 his-

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 147
tory, of philosophy ; for no man can have a richly
stored 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
the work which the great revivalist begins.
Every preacher's sermon style then ought to be his
own ; 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

148 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
and enthusiasm, from what he was in his first empti
ness. The practical conclusion then that will come
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 ^o 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 Writer 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,
more 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.
The history of a particular sermon 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 jury difficulty in regard to the abundance of
subjects for his preaching. The first is a sterility of
his own mind ; the second is a stilted and unnatural
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 develop
ing power in his own experience, and I can see him
sitting in despair, or hurrying hither and thither in
distraction, as the day approaches when he 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, only
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 ought to say to
them, will seem unworthy of the dignity of your
great discourse. Some poor exhorter coming along
the next week, and saying it, will sweep the last
recollection of your selfish achievement out of the
minds of people. Never tolerate any idea of the dig-

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 151
nity 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
has led to a great deal of the bad talk which is run
ning about now among both clergymen and laymen

152 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
about the excessive amount of preaching. " How is
it possible," they 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 twice, as it is unde
sirable to produce it once a week. But that a man
who lives with God, whose 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, aud
salvation every day, that he should not be able to
talk about these things of his heart, 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 the notion of great 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 upon
them 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
than one discourse a day. If you have anything to

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 153
say, 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 necessarily what they do not want. 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 confute
the cavil of some single captious disputant ; it is the

154 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
aggregate effect of a large sympathetic intercourse;
the fruit of a true knowledge of human nature, com
bined with a special knowledge of these special peo
ple, and 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 may be
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 has
to deal.
The second element of choice, the desire to pre
serve a symmetry and proportion in our preaching, 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
help the ancient calendar of the church year is in
this respect. The prolonged and connected course of
sermons is a safeguard against mere flightiness and
partialness in the choice 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 vital
ity distributed through all his length, and even to his

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 155
last extremity. Too many courses of sermons start
with a very vital head, that draws behind it by and
by a very 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
sermons 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 why 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 they knew the minister thought they
needed 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 LECTURES ON 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 for 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 we may not prepare that sermon in a solemn
exhilaration, 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 the Lord came unto me,
saying." Let me add this, 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 the sermon. This ought to consist mostly
in bringing together, and arranging, and illuminating,

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 157
a knowledge of the subject and thought about it
which has already been in the possession of the
preacher. I think that the less of special preparation
that 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
up some half considered thought that strikes him in
the hurry of his reading, and adopt it suddenly, and
set it before his people, as if it were his true convic
tion. Many a minister's old sermons are scattered all

158 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 which 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 the last book which they have read,
and their congregations always find it out. The feel
ing of superficial ness and thinness attaches to all they
do. The exegesis of a passage which the man never
thought of till he 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 comes from the
very nature of the sermon on which I have dwelt
so much. The sermon is truth and man together ;
it is the truth brought through the man. The per
sonal element is essential. Now the truth which the

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON 159
preacher has gathered on Friday for the sermon
which he preaches on Sunday, has come across the
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
whicli 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 truth which
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
are, I think, a sign of the same crudeness. They
show an undigested knowledge. They lose the
power of personality. They daub the wall with un-

160 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
tempered mortar. Here is the need of broad and
generous culture. Learn to study for the sake of
truth, learn to think for the profit and the 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 unavailable 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 the 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 simply 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 like a jewel set in a wall which one may
pluck out and carry off as an independent thing. It is
a window by which we may look through the wall and
see 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 him
with reference to the selection and the use of texts.
Make them always windows. Go up and look
through 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 them.
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 philosophy, 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 twists and puns, no dealing with the
word of God as it would 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 chooses for his idol suffers
from its worshipper. The same selection which con
secrates it as more 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
village. 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. If
you 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
flexible 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 chain armor, so strong that the
thought can go into battle- with it, but so flexible that
it 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 otber 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
skill 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 ;m part at least, outside of ser
mon writing. Make your style characteristic and
forcible by never writing unless you have something
that you really want to say ; then let the changes 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. 165
grow as long as he grows. One of the best things
about Macaulay's life is his belief that as a writer he
was improving to the last. It belonged to that 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
advises he 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 realize 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 his book does
not excite the desire of imitation like the sight of the
process going on 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 re
asserted. The dangers of imitation are two — one positive,

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 167
the 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 jihilosophy. " 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
course 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
instant such a complex result and meekly I said " No,

168 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
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 was 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. If 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 at all aware of it — lies in a deeper serious-

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 169
ness .about all our work. What we need is a fuller
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 self 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 oceau. 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 much to say. I

170 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
think it is a question whose importance has been
very much exaggerated, and the attempt to settle
which with some invariable rule has been unwise,
and probably has made stumbling speakers out of
some 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
- the 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 that 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
then learnt by heart, — a method which some men
practice, but which I hope nobody commends. On
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 certainly they do.
The first is, that two such different methods must be
long in general to two different kinds of men ; that
some men are made for manuscripts, and some for the
open platform ; that to exclude either class from the
ministry, 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 the 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 own
knowledge of himself and that personal good sense
which lies behind all homiletics.
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
enthusiastic, personal, and warm. If they do not,
they are calm, abstract, and cold. But 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
which 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 then 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 kept.
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. Fe'nelon had a favorite maxim
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 different subjects. Some kinds
of discourses we can never write. They must be
made as we deliver them. Others we may better
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.
preacher, that you 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 in a sermon
which 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 himself, 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
best sermons that ever have been preached, taking

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. 175
all the qualities of sermons into account, have prob
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 _ol. 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 Taylor's of the second. The ornament that
fills his sermons is almost always the expression of
man's delight in God's truth. But both sorts of illus-

176 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
tration, as you see, have this characteristic. They
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 atten
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 J
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 oimament 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 the 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 its

THE MAKING OF THE SERMON. Ill
own associations 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
see 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 Shechem, 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,
the division into heads, the recapitalation at the end,
12 \-_

178 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
all the scaffolding and anatomy of a sermon is out of
favor, and there are many very good jests about it.
I can only 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 bonyness
of your sermon is not by leaving out the skeleton,
but by clothing it with flesh. True liberty in writ
ing comes by law, and the 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
ments 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 memory, 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
of 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 H alley's comet, which comes into sight of this
earth once in about seventy-six years. But whatever
you mayr learn or unlearn from him to your advan
tage, 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 your
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 breath 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
seen also that no expedient which can make that
truth a little more effective in its presentation to the
world is trivial, or undignified, or unworthy of the
patient care and study of the minister of Christ.

THE CONGREGATION.

T HAVE said what I had to say about the preacher
-*- and about the sermon. To-day I want to speak to
you about the congregation. There is something re
markable in the way in which a minister talks about
" my 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 with 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
one 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 him
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 everybody 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 stranger clearly see that
there were many things in religion and theology
which they did not know at all, many other questions

182 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
on which they were in doubt, points of their church's
faith which they thought unimportant to salvation,
methods of their church's policy which they thought
injudicious. All this they would say freely as they
talked with 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
right, 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 which 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
he assumes a difference in the character of people

THE CONGREGATION. 183
when they are massed together from any which they
had when they were looked at separately. This is
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- f
gregation which is not in the men and women as he I
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
jokes which every man in the crowd would have de-

184 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
spised, and be melted by mawkish pathos that 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 ? Two
of them have been suggested in the two instances /
which I have just quoted, — the spontaneousness and)
liberty, and the higher standard of thought and taste. I
It is not hard to see what some of the other elements!
are. 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 the
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 resjDonsjxeness. The compensating quality which
takes away part of the value of this one is its irre-

186 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
sponsibility. The audience is quick to feel, but slow
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 have often heard the minister's ap
peals compared to the lawyer's addresses to the jury.
" Look," men say, " the lawyer pleads, and gets his
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 and jury to St. Paul,
shuts up the court, and departs with only the dim
mest feeling of responsibility, saying, " Go thy way
for 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 -humanity.
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 Fenelon
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 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
the 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 he
preaches as large as it ought to be. He who minis
ters to the same people alwayrs, 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 would 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 hundred
little worries, to go and preach to a congregation in
which he does not know a face. As he stands up
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 his vocation conies to him.
It is the feeling which one has had sometimes in
travelling when he has passed through a great town
whose name 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 individualized to him by any personal interest.

THE CONGREGATION. 189
It is human life in general, and often has a solemnity
for him which the human lives which 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 destroys our sense of humanity alto
gether. There 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 has 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
such 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
set 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 pastorates. 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 that 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 through his
congregation he is getting at 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 thjee rules seem to have in
them 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. Knowyour
congregation so largely 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 know

THE 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
it which are less firmly fixed. They gather their

192 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
strength about the minister. They save him from
falling into that heresy w^ich hag beset all Christian
history and been the fruitful source of many kinds
of woes, the heresy that the clergyman is the Church.
They constantly remind him that the j>eople 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 whifili emphasizes all its qualities and spirit, the
congregation of the congregation. The congregation
ought to be exclusive only, as our old professor of
theology ased to say of the Gospel, as the light in
the Pharos was covered with glass merely that it
might burn the rmore 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 away 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 strong 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 very 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 churcli 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 they sometimes become dogmatic,
and not merely do not care themselves to speculate
or 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. The
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, then, to the other extreme, there is
in very many, if not in all, congregations in these
days what we may call the supercilious hearer. He
is a man who for some reason comes to church, but is
out of sympathy what goes on there. He is sceptical
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 in them,

THE CONGREGATION. 195
and 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 terrae 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 not 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
become 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 difficulty, ^
and the consciousness of criticism. A parish of critics
would be killing, but a critic here and there is tonic

196 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
He keeps 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 who
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 helpful 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
distracts 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
sermons. But not the influence of changing the ser
mon's essential character. Preach the Gospel all the
more seriously, simply, mightily if you can, because
of the unsympathetic' criticism that it has to meet,
but let it be the same Gospel which you would pour
into ears hungry to receive it. The two faults that
you have to avoid in preaching to unbelief are, Defi-

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 hajjit. As with the supercilious
hearers, itlsliarct to teTTwhy they come, but not now
because of any positive reasons why they should not,
but merely from the absence of any reasons why they
should. 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 Churcli .
There is more or less of the notion of respectability
attaching to that mysterious impulse which every
Sunday turns his steps toward the sanctuary. Prob
ably if you could get deep enough, deeper than his

198 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
own consciousness of its causes, you would find that
some vague fear had something to do at least with
the origin, perhaps with the continuance of this
strange habit. He is no unusual sight. He comes
and goes in all our churches. In many churches it
seems as if such as he made up a large part of the
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
that, 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_jeeking, 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, i

THE CONGREGATION. 199
this 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 which he can only learn
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
sermons, 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
all of us ministers could learn to pray continually,
and which 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 me the Spirit of idleness,
despair, love of power, and unprofitable speaking."
But from these classes let us turn to that part of a
congregation 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%ome men who cannot see bodily 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 uses. The soul
quickens the mind to its most complete fertility.

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 known
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
as if one of the ways in which the Lord's beatitude
about the hungerers and thirsters after righteousness
came true was by the power to help them which the

202 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
very sight of their thirst and hunger gave to those
whom God had sent to be their feeders.
And I believe that the proportion of this 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 company 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 what 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
among the elements which make up your great con-

THE CONGREGATION. 203
gregation you grow bewildered and cannot tell to
which 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
see no personal anxiety in your people's eyes, you
may calmly form your own plans about them, make

204 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
up your mind what they are to be made, and go to
work to make them 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 truffh 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 me it
rather showed that there must have been truth and
noble reality about his words, a genuinely feeding
power, 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 nqt_clos^dj_but open, and always in
cluding some people who 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's
conception of His ministry from closing in tightly to

206 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
the Jewish people. This is the danger of the coun
try parish, where you know everybody who comes
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, which 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 your 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 Christian 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 marked 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 to
make it a highly 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
authoritative truth, and 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 humanity that you
can find in the world. Men, women, and children
are all there together. No age, no sex must monopo
lize 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 reality, of the congregation. Even learning and
ignorance are recognized as properly meeting there.
However difficult it may be to do it, it is clearly 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 other
assembly 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 the ministry of Jesus, " The com
mon people heard Him gladly." It was not the poor
because of some privilege that belonged to their pov
erty. It was those, rich or poor, wise or rude, in
whom 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 human 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 understanding. Preach to this same hu-
i inanity, and you too will give it your best. Trust
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 will 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 very 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
the right intellectual plane perhaps, but in a wholly
wrong 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-
'i 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 for
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 much 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 \elp 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
well as the oceans bear witness to the shower. Trust
your 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 which 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 giving
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
so much as to be talked of as the idol of the crowd.
Indeed, he is absolutely morbid about it, and hates
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
worst and feeblest part of your congregation that
makes itself heard in vociferous applause, 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 which 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 man
feels the approval of his fellow-men, 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 genuinely
devoted to those same men's good. If you really
want to drag a man out of the fire, you will net 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 taken
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 dislike. 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 charac
teristic. Not only what they do, but the way 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
seem 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.
."Loquendum ut multi, sapiendiim 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 alway7s 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 with reference to the spe
cial time in which he lives. For we have dwelt upon
the one universal and eternal message which the
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
which every live and cultivated man holds with refer
ence to the time he lives in. He is, in the first place,

218 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
a man 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 Avill 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. The man
who belongs to his time but not to the world grows
thin and superficial.

THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 219
And just exactly this is true about the preacher.
There are the constant and unchanging needs of men,
and 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 tone 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 knowledge of
those depths of human nature which never change
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
entrenched, 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 and 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 sword, 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 through the lecture. First, seek always
truth first and timeliness second, — never timeliness
first and truth second. Then, let your search for
truth be deliberate, systematic, conscientious. Let
your search for timeliness consist rather in seeking
for strong sympathy with your kind, a real share in

THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 221
their occupations, and a hearty interest 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 first place, then, there are certain vaguely
conceived but real difficulties lying in people's minds
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 is
the notion of Fate, with all the consequences which

/

222 LECTURES ON 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 more 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
speculations of the learned become the vague preju- li
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
other way. Partly that the learned are led on by

THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 223
their 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 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 toor 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
which 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 to
show the fatalist that fatalism 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. Tne 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 concerning 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 wayr 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
the preacher seems to be apprehended by those who
preach. Among the preachers who busy themselves
with what modern 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
which 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
soon 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 is
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 the professor's gown. To this
overbearing assumption this second class is always in
great haste to prostrate itself. Surely the spirit of
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. 227
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 is
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 exaggerated
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 through
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 them 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 always 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-
ness of bigotry.
I seem to see strange panic in the faces of the min
isters. of to-day. I have seen a multitude of preach
ers gathered together to listen to one who expounded
scientific theories upon the religious 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 they 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 principally 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 our

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 round
to our old first truth, that the man is behind the min
istry, that what is in the sermon must be in the
preacher Ifirst.
Here 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
his spiritual verities, that makes him strong. Many
ignorant ministers meet the 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 j)ositively_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 much you do not know, and that
both you and they are waiting for completer light.

232 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
I must not linger longer on this topic. May God
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
lands and times have furnished such abundant food,
about comparative religions. 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 toward
tolerance. The scholar and the ignorant man alike
are both content that their neighbors should think
differently from them about religion. The very de
sire for the stake has died away. We look back to
the sixteenth and 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
misgiving which intrudes. How much of this tolera
tion is indifference ? How many of these people that
are kindly to their neighbors' faiths are careless about
their own ? How much of the difference between us

THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 233
and the zealots of the seventeenth century has come
from our weakened hold on truth ? They believed
with all their hearts, and were intolerant; we have
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. So
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 thej 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 tor 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
no age in which the mass of thinkers were at once

234 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
strong in positive belief, and tolerant of difference of
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- 1
erance. In the minister, then, would seem ~\o rest the '<
hope of that better time to come when both of these
together are to bless the world. As he goes about
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 differently from himself ; with
what a sense of narrow and exclusive privilege he
treasures his 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 he is. In either

THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 235
case there is a disappointment in the 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
yourself, as you walk home 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
in 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 menless 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 thy name,
and we forbade him because he followeth 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

236 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
when people strengthened their sense of the impor
tance of the Gospel and of their privilege in hearing
it, and of their duty to carry it to the heathen, by
asserting that no heathen could be saved who had not
heard it. But something of the same spirit lingers
still 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.
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 tolerance for
other systems than our own is that it is not discrimi
nating. It is a mere sentiment. It thinks that it
is narrow not to tolerate, and so it says, " Come now
and let us tolerate ; " but it never dissects out that
soul of goodness in things evil or only half good
which 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 there
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
appreciates. 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,
and 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 human
mind and heart, the reconciliation of hearty tolerance
with strong positive belief.
I have been speaking of some of the intellectual

238 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
characteristics of our time which the preacher must
encounter. They are very prominent. But there are
other characteristics of a different sort that force
themselves upon us almost 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
tivity of our time which is in no sense scientific.
The commercial and social and political movements
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 with 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
superficial excitement which comes of the unnatural
and exclusive vividness of second causes. It seems to i
the business man as if Wealth were the king of every- !
thing ; as if it made reputation, made happiness, al
most made character. It seems to the man or woman

THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 239
of society as if Fashion, in some supreme reserve 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 the
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 Abbe' 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 an indication of how the
lower causes have absorbed the attention and are try
ing to satisfy the needs of men.
This is the world to which we have 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
heart 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
watchful care that the Church herself is true to her

240 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
. belief in God as the source of all power. One of the
most terrible signs of how the spirit of sordidness has
filled the world is the lamentable extent to which 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 affairs 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 which would be fit only for the sordid ambi
tions of a circus troupe. You must cast all that out
of the church 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 Him and is satisfied in Him, or you will cry in
vain to men to come to Him. To do this, you must
not only cast out at your doors the disreputable tin
sel of church life of which I have been speaking. You
must believe in man as the child of God enough to

THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 241
preach to him at once the highest spiritual truth
about his Father. Many a well-meaning preacher is
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 ON PREACHING.
preached to him half gospels which they thought
were all that he could stand, 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 finer 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 preaching echo the ministry of Jesus, who spoke
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
characteristics 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 men

THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 243
have more or less deliberately taken up the idea that
the foundations of faith are shaken, when they are
afraid 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 a constant reason why they should do light,
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 medise-
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 the way in which
many of the old hymns were made to labor with a
process of reasoning that struggled on most unlyri-
cally from verse to verse, that the favorite hymn of
to-day discards connected thought and seems to try
only to utter moods of mystic feeling, or to depict
some scene in which the spiritual parable is apt to be
lost in the brightness of the sensuous imagery. I
think that the same thing is true of prayers. A
prayer must have thought in it. The thought may

244 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
overburden it so that its wings 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 described, 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. Mysticism, 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 ftlaims 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 your 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
you very winningly. Others will set it before you as
mere weak self-indulgence. You will find many of
the strongest brains and consciences in town 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 ignore 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
consciences. 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 you 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 wit and wisdom. That def-

246 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
erence which 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 in
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
ing 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 th^ere are better orators by the score on every
side ; or that we are the best of men when we know
of sainthoods among the most obscure souls before
which we stand ashamed. No manly man is satis
fied with any ez-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 for
what they are, the more they ought to rejoice, the

THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 247
more I 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 where 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 'sjateh 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 J
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
that it is really good for it to have. It has a place
of utterance more powerful and sacred than any
other in the world. Then comes the question, What

248 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
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
see it as it could if it stood nowhere else.
There are two great faults of the ministry which
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
us 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 Phaado — which whole dialogue, by the
way, is itself no unworthy pattern of the best quali
ties of preaching. " You, if you take my advice, will
think little about Socrates, but a great deal about
Truth." And the other fault is the constant desire to make \
people hear us who seem determined to forget us.
This is the fault of the sensational preaching. A
large part of what is called sensational preaching is
simply the effort of a man who has no faith in his
office or in the essential power of truth to keep him-

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 thought 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 part, preaches truth
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 ; and
to find the 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 effect, 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 theyr 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 than
that of other books. This is human nature. The
stronger feeling about the Bible has kept down the
more familiar feeling which attaches us to other

THE MINISTRY FOR OUR AGE. 251
• books. Another reason is, of course, the crowd of
] other books, their cheapness and their apparent press-
ingness. Even the man who knows 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 never. 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 Mediaeval
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
about the book of God. I heard of a sermon on the
first verse of the forty-first psalm which declared it to
be 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 his
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 spiritual
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 Holman 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
way for a deeper entrance into its spirit than man
has yet attained.
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 religious life and the food
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 yet 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
new life will come. In many ways we can see clearly
that 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
age, to admire everything in it that is admirable, to

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 spirituality which is to come to dwell
in, 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 thanks
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.

PT"HERE is a power which lies at the centre of all
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 is
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-day, 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
eyes 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 whose
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 —
luminous forever with its light. That power still
continues wherever the same value of the human
soul 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 pleadingi, "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
cared 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 are 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
value 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 their
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 towers up far above them all. They get their

THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 259
highest dignity from serving him. For in his service
each of them, which is abstract in itself, comes into
actual contact with man ; and no abstract principle
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- j
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.
The 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
yrour 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 their
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 might be established by which the
current workings of society might move more smooth
ly ? That, which 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
and women some inherent preciousness for which
even the marvel of the Incarnation and the agony of
Calvary 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 through 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
person as something original and new. This must
be something which belongs to his whole conception
of 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
as men. When he undertakes to lead them he must

262 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
feel the mystery and spontaneity of the lives that he
takes under his teaching. He must be a careful stu
dent of the characters he trains. He cannot carry
people over the rorfte of his ministry as a ferryman
carries 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 which 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, the discouragement of poverty and
disease and the disenchanting influence of intercourse
with men, and keeps ministers the most hopeful 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 noble tendency of their vocation

THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 263
and 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 hard 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 recounted 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 new
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 Man Friday is sure
to come.
And herein lies the real fellowship of the ministry.
There are no fellow-workers who come so close

264 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
together as fellow-workers in the ministry 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 de
nomination in the next street, which often seems
farther off than Africa. It depends upon what the
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 we 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 them. It
may be given to some people in these days to take
direct 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 are
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
ing what we can to make strong that sense of 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
other occupation. That always seems to me a touch
ing 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
say to his pupils : " The end of the day is the
proof of a picture," " La fin du jour, c'est l'epreuve
d'un tableau." He meant that the twilight hour

266 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
when there is not light enough to distinguish details
is the most favorable time to judge of a picture as a
whole. And so it is with the ministry. When the
cross-lights of jealous emulation and the glare of
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
comes 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 de
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 o£ 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 he 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
superiority which despises the people and thinks of

THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 267
them as only made to take what the preacher chooses
to give to them, and to minister to his support ; the
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
you each of the three to-day in the 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 fantasticalness must disappear in the
presence of a supreme absorbing value for the souls
of men. The conscience and the taste, when both
are pure, will coincide. Every divorce which separates
them is a parting of what God has joined together.
The two are most essentially united in the functions
of our sacred office. The man whose eye is set upon

268 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
the souls of men, and whose heart burns with the de
sire t» save them, chooses with an almost 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. He takes those
and rejects every other. The mere unwarlike citizen
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 whuph 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 illustrious or ridic
ulous. And so ornament when it is applied to a ser-

THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 269
mon must either do the lofty work of making truth
plain and glorious or it fails of everything. It cannot
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
by a true sense of the preciousness of the soul of man.
It cannot be denied, and it must not be forgotten,
that this absorbing conviction of the value of the
human soul has its besetting danger. That danger is
not slight nor casual. It is important and essential.

270 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
The danger is lest, in our eagerness to help the spir
itual nature which we so highly value, we should be
led to judge of the truth 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
ing 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
of 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 before swine, but he
does not bid us to feed even swine on pebbles. " God

THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 271
forbid," says Bishop Watson, " that the search after
truth should be discouraged for fear of its conse
quences. The consequences of truth may be subver
sive of systems of superstition, but they can never be
injurious to the 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 may 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 in
the first place to form 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
constant certainty that truth is always strong, no
matter how weak it looks, and falsehood is always
weak, 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
such 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 after
year, as a* pretence. The 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 represented in the settlement
of the petty quarrel that is brought before his court.
The large conception of the value of humanity must
go before the special value of one's own parishioners ;

THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 273
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 j
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 the help which a
perpetual value for the souls of men must render 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 the ministry of the
people to the preacher, which is often 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
18

274 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
lives with them and when he leaves them he is not
always full of gratitude for what they have done for
him. A pastor who is insensible to this cannot do
the best good to his people. And the sort of help
which a minister gets from his congregation whose
souls he values, is a direct complement of the good
which he gets from his study. He needs 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 than the

THE VALUE OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 275
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
stands 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
ought to be. That is the reason why the process of
salvation cannot stop with the removal of penalties

276 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
and the forgiveness of sins. It must include all the
gradual 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
power 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

THE 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 tounderstand these meth
ods by which in any time we must acquire and jDre-
serve the sense of the preciousness of the human soul.

278 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
What are these methods ? 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 others 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 thoughtfulness. In his
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 preciousness 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 them the Christian truths reveal much of the
glory and mercy of God ; to the other they shine also

THE VALUE OF 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 the 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 legitimately 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
honor for the spiritual life of man.
. It is evident as we look at the ministry of Jesus
{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
in His lofty and tender courtesy. How often I have
seen a minister's manners either proudly distant and
conscious of his own importance, or fulsome and fawn-

280 LECTURES ON PREACHING.
ing with a feeble affectionateness that was unworthy
of a man, and have thought that what he needed wa3
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 this
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
it is of the most complete salvation. Not 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 Christian,
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. 281
yes. All other interest and satisfaction of the minis
try completes itself in this, that year by year the
minister sees more deeply how well worthy of infi
nitely more than he can do for it is the human soul
for which he works.
I do not know how I can better close my lectures
to you than with that testimony. May you find it
true in your experience. May the souls of men be
always more precious to you as you come always
nearer to Christ, and see them more perfectly as He
does. I can ask no better blessing on your ministry
than that.
And so may God our Father guide and keep you
always.

THE END.

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