YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY VERBUM DEI BY THE SAME AUTHOR. Large crown 8vo, cloth, $2.00. REVELATION AND THE BIBLE. " Mr. Horton is both interesting and instructive in his careful and luminous exposition." — Daily Telegraph. MACMILLAN AND CO., NEW YORK. .mm YERBUM DEI THE YALE LECTURES ON PREACHING, 1893 BY ROBERT F?" HORTON, M.A. {Sometime Fellow qf New Coll., Oxford) AUTHOR OF " REVELATION AND THE BIBLE," ETC. Eine Religion eine vollendete welche sich noch entwickelt hat Propheten, nur Schriftgelehrte Hermann Schultz j 1- *A' Nero gorfe '¦ i; 1 ' . f. y MACMILLAN AND CO. AND LONDON 1893 All rights reserved Copyright, 1893, By MACMILLAN AND CO. KortoooB 5|rtaa : J. S. Cashing & Co. — Berwick & Smith. Boston, Mass., U.S.A. ©efcicatton TO MY BELOVED FRIEND R. O. WHO THROUGH MANY CHANGEFUL YEARS HAS BY GOD'S GRACE KEPT HIGH AND CLEAR BEFORE ME THE IDEAL OF THE PREACHER'S CALLING I, WITH REVERENCE EQUAL TO AFFECTION INSCRIBE THIS BOOK PREFACE When the invitation came to me to cross the Atlantic and deliver the Lyman Beecher Lecture on Preaching, I at once accepted it, because, conscious as I was of my unworthiness to stand in the hon ourable succession of the Yale Lecturers, I felt that there is a mode of conceiving the Christian Ministry which is not sufficiently recognised even by preach ers themselves. The general contempt into which preaching has fallen on this side of the Atlantic, where the Established Church promises before long to thrust the sermon into a corner, or even outside the precincts, of its sacerdotal shrines, and where the other Churches are strongly tempted to secular ise the pulpit, is, it seems to me, due to the decay of that conception of preaching which is presented in these lectures. This must be the excuse for adding 7 8 PREFACE. another book to the ever-widening tide of passing literature. The audience of the Yale Divinity School is important, but the author would cherish the hope of speaking to preachers who are already engaged in their life-work, and of quickening in some of them the sense of their Divine commission. He would pray that this little volume may come to his brothers in the ministry with a genuine message from God. ROBERT F. HORTON. Hampstead, February, 1893. CONTENTS I. The Theme 13 II. "The Word of the Lord came" . . 45 III. The Word in the New Testament . . 77 IV. The Bible and the Word of God . .109 V. The Word of God outside the Bible . 141 VI. On Receiving the Word . . . -173 VII. The Logos 205 VIII. The Preacher's Personality . . . 239 IX. Methods and Modes . . . . .271 9 Soul, rule thyself. On passion, deed, desire, Lay thou the laws of thy deliberate will. Stand at thy chosen post, faith's sentinel : Though Hell's lost legions ring thee round with fire. Learn to endure. Dark vigil hours shall tire Thy wakeful eyes ; regrets thy bosom thrill ; Slow years thy loveless flower of youth shall kill ; Yea, thou shalt yearn for lute and wanton lyre. Yet is thy guerdon great ; thine the reward Of those elect who, scorning Circe's lure, Grown early wise, make living light their lord. Clothed with celestial steel, these walk secure, Masters, not slaves. Over their heads the pure Heavens bow, and guardian seraphs wave God's sword. J. A. Symonds. LECTURE I. LECTURE I. THE THEME. The theme which has to be handled in the present lectures is not without its grave re sponsibility. The lectures themselves should be not only an exposition of the argument, but an example of it. The lecturer is in the position of one who seeks to expound poetry by producing a poem. The aim is to show that preaching must be the deliverance of a word of God received immediately from God ; and unless these lectures are such a word, received in such a way, they doubly miss their mark; they not only fail as lec tures, but they discredit the high contention which they are intended to sustain. Need I say that I, labouring under a sense of this responsibility, am " with you in weak- 13 14 THE THEME. ness, and in fear, and in much trembling"? If I did not believe that I had a message to de liver I should not be here, but I am conscious of the straitening until the mission is accom plished, and the message delivered ; for it is one matter to see the heavens open, to be aware of an authentic voice, to catch the momentary gleams of things unspeakable ; and it is another matter to speak distinctly or even credibly of the heavenly vision. Like the tumultuous recollections of a dream, a great truth seem's to evade us when we try to state it, and what appeared to us as a revelation sounds in the telling like a truism. The truth, however, to be illustrated in these lectures is admittedly a commonplace. The object is not to persuade you to grant that it is a truth ; that we all grant even too easily ; but rather to consider how the conceded truth of theory may come into the venturous truth of practice. For preaching, like other impor tant spheres of human activity, loses its power and declines, not for want of a right theory, nor yet from defect of shining examples, but A NEGLECTED TRUISM. 1 5 from a sapping at the springs. The springs need to be renewed and cleansed that the streams may flow afresh. Let me take an illustration from a lower plane : In the sculpture gallery of the Capitol at Rome there is a collection of busts com plete, or nearly complete, of all the Roman Emperors from the earliest to the latest. The busts are for the most part the work of contemporary artists. It is a fine study to trace the decay of the Art from the noble Greek marbles of the early Caesars', through the gracious decline in the silver age of the Antonines, to the relapse into barbarism in the days of the Gothic Emperors. The sin gular reflection occurs, that the sculptor who chiselled this latest effigy, a work little better than the crude wooden doll of a child, a caricature of a human head, had before him, there in Rome, those consummate examples from the great period. The heir of all the Ages — he produced this! In the presence of masterpieces this was his handiwork. The explanation of such a decline and a degrada- 1 6 THE THEME. tion is found when we observe the conditions of true productiveness in Art. Lifeless imita tion is decay. The copy of the best models passes by insensible gradations into the pro duction of the worst. Art comes from life. Invention is as it were of the soil. A great period of Art occurs when men get back to Nature, and a few men of genius, generally men from the fresh-turned furrows and the bare ribs of the earth, lay hands, ungloved by convention, on the reality of things ; they must be men possessed of great energy and will, for it is always difficult to keep pressing closely on the contour and form of fact.. The miserable declension of Art, illustrated in that gallery of the Capitol, was due to the gradual drifting of its ministers from the sources of truth and inspiration into the servile adoption of routine. And so in the matter of preaching the great models are always before us, and the lasting principles of it are known and admitted, but the secret of it may very easily be lost. It may become — it often has become — a dull FLESH SHRINKS. I 7 mechanic exercise, which seems to the wise childish and trivial, and the -n;$re childish and trivial because it affects with the pompous make-believe of childishness to be something so much greater, something even divine. Let me, as an introduction to-day, state in the briefest form the theme that is to occupy us, and draw some of the lines on which the subsequent lectures will proceed. Here is the theme : Every living preacher must receive his message in a communication direct from God, and the constant purpose of his life must be to receive it uncorrupted, and to deliver it without addition or subtraction. It is a truism, but, I think you will all agree, a neglected truism. If in our brief better moments we see it, we constantly are tempted to recede from it. Not without some sus picion of what may be involved in unflinch ingly accepting it as true, we are apt to take refuge in modifications, compromises, denials. Flesh shrinks, and the heart cries out. Let some one else go up the rugged steep of the mountain and see Him face to face. Let some l8 THE THEME. one else stand awestruck in the passing of the Almighty. I will do some humbler task. Let me read the lessons, or let me recite the creed, or let me be a- priest, clad in the robes of office which are a discharge from personal fit ness. On many grounds and in many ways we disclaim our calling. The truth remains as a truism, but we dare not grasp it ourselves. The world notices our disclaimer, and accepts us on the level of our own elected degradation. It is a truism ; but are we ready, in face of what is involved, to. grant that it is true? The message must be received from God in a direct communication ! The preacher is in deed a Prophet. The full meaning of this dawns upon us as we look at the alternatives. He is a Prophet ; that is, he is not merely a Reciter or Rhetorician ; he is not merely a Lecturer or Philosopher; he is not, above all he is not, merely a Priest. I recollect hearing a famous reciter, who was also a clergyman. He could take any passage of literature, verse or prose, and by the exquisite modulation of voice, the supple THE PREACHER A PROPHET. 1 9 changes of feature, and the sympathetic appre hension of the author's subtlest thoughts and suggestions, he could play upon his audience with all the keyboard of books at his com mand, move us to laughter or tears, lead us tripping through the gay parterres of mirth, or bear us up the starry track to the heights beyond us. One supposed that surely he would be a great preacher. Indeed, what had he to do but to learn some noble utterances of Massillon or Bourdaloue, or to compose ser mons of his own and deliver them in the man ner of his recitals, in order to sweep us all up wards and Godwards as with a wind ? But no, he was not a great preacher; he was a great reciter in the pulpit, that was all; and there were among his contemporaries men without any command of language or any gifts of the orator who would accomplish more in a simple address than he in all his eloquent discourses. It may be well to say at once that the noble gift of oratory and the fine art of elocution may be pressed into the service of preaching, 20 THE THEME. but they have to be watched ; they are saucy slaves who with their castanets and bangles will always be seeking to gain the upper hand, superseding their master and covering his absence with their noise and sparkle. A good voice is invaluable if God speaks through it. A commanding presence is a great help if God's presence commands it. The rich flow of language may be fertilising as well as charming if the tide of God is in it. But the preacher is not a Reciter or an Orator. His purpose, his power, his practice, are quite independent of these accomplishments. Again, the Preacher is not a Lecturer or a Philosopher. There is the broad distinction between Hellas and Israel, the nation of culture and the people of revelation. In cultivated nations whose culture rests on the study of the Classics, it is not surprising that our teachers constantly show a tendency to imitate Hellenic or Latin models, to walk in the Porch or the Garden with the broad- browed thinkers of Athens, or to move in the stately periods of the rostra or the curia of NOT A LECTURER. 2 1 Rome. In this way many preachers have been misled, and, painful as it is to say so, Divine Philosophy Has pushed beyond its mark to be Procuress of the lords of hell. The Philosopher has a sphere of his own, but it is not the preacher's. He is committed to the search for Truth in devious ways. He is bound to pass through " sunless gulfs of doubt " if he is to touch the sunny shore. His conclusions are reached by the slow accumu lations qf the Ages, he is the spectator of all time and of all existence, and what he sees is precious to the world, but " the world by wisdom knows not God." Philosophy is not equal to the grand assay of understanding Him, still less is it authorised to speak as His mouthpiece. The Lecturer has a sphere of his own, but it is not the preacher's. He can by study, by reading, by observation, and by using the arts of rignt reasoning, clear ordering, and pleas ing enunciation, give the results of his labour 2 2 THE THEME. to those who will hear. His function is epit ome. He is the retailer to busy men of the goods which lie in the great wharves and warehouses of knowledge. The lecturer may under inspiration become a preacher, but woe to the preacher if under some sinister in fluences he becomes merely a lecturer. He will not have staying power. An encyclo paedia is exhausted in time, and long before it is exhausted the hearers are exhausted with receiving it. The world rightly declines to hear two lectures a week from the same man throughout the year. If he is a great man and a good lecturer it will be well content to hear a course or two from him in a life time, but even then it will acknowledge sur feit, and be sparing in utterance of grace. Yet here, again, we admit at the beginning that philosophical powers may be used with advantage in preaching, if they are not allowed to " spoil " the preacher ; and the talent of the lecturer is often of service in the vast and varied work of the pulpit. What I am saying is no slight passed on Thought ; and as we pro- NOT A PRIEST. 23 ceed you will see that I do not advocate the neglect of those stores on which the lecturer draws. A tincture of Philosophy is even. necessary for every preacher. It is impossible to move with dexterity in this complicated world without some intelligible scheme of things underlying our thought. A wrong philosophy is better than none at all. It is better to be through life a novice in thought than not to think. And in the same way the systematic dividing of truth to the people in the manner of a lecturer will produce a cer tain clearness and directness in the higher service. Let one, then, who would be a preacher, not shirk the travail of thought or the huckster's habit of displaying wares to advantage. These things are good if it is always remembered that preaching is some thing different, independent of them, though using them, and often more powerful unaided than with their aid. Again, the Priest, I am charitable enough to suppose, has a sphere of his own, but it is not the preacher's. I say, I am charitable 24 THE THEME. enough to suppose, because I find it impos sible to form a conception of what place sacerdotalism could have in Christianity as Christ conceived it; the notion that men can by virtue of their office mediate spiritual and moral blessings to others, when they them selves do not possess a spiritual or even a moral life, seems to cut at the root of that inward and vital religion the law of which was summed up by its Founder in the twofold command to love, and the ritual of which was explained by the same authority in the prin ciple that God is Spirit, and they that worship must worship in spirit and in truth. But leav ing aside this subject of contention, and even conceding that a human priesthood is needed in the Christian Church, the preacher's func tion is essentially different from the priest's. If the checkered history of the Church proves that now and again priests have been true preachers, it has been not by virtue of their priesthood, but by reason of their entering into a totally different region of the religious life; and broadly speaking, the orders of preachers MUST RECEIVE A MESSAGE. 25 have risen up outside the ranks of the priests in sacerdotal Churches, while, as a rule, preach ing in its noblest and richest sense has flour ished and wrought its wonders only in those churches in which the priesthood has been abolished, or at least successfully repressed.1 We have to face the truism, the neglected truism, that every living preacher must receive a communication direct from God. This is in the last resort the only justification of preaching at all. The man is set apart to address his fellow-men, sometimes men who are his equals or his superiors in knowledge and ability, perhaps even in speaking power and copiousness of language. Why should they listen to him ? There is no reason why 1 " Durch das Prophetenthum ist Israel vor den Gefahren der Priesterherrschaft bewahrt. Und in den Zeiten der hochsten Entwicklung dieser Religion haben sich die Wege des priester- lichen Schriftgelehrten mit seiner Thorah und des Propheten mit seinem Gottesworte mehr und mehr von einander getrennt. Doch konnte in Israel wie bei andern Volkern Priesterthum und Prophetenthum in einer Person verbunden sein, und vielleicht hat es sogar wie bei den Griechen Famihenzusammenhange gegeben, in welchen prophetische Kraft sich besonders aiisserte." (Hermann Schultz, Offenbarungsreligion, Sic, p. 216.) 26 THE THEME. they should unless he has been in the secret cell of the Oracle and has heard God speak. And indeed practically they will not, unless the authentic note is in him, and Thus saith the Lord tacitly introduces all that he teaches. Has he never heard the voice ? Is he not repeating a message ? Then assuredly he will fail. No man taketh this honour to himself. To be God's mouthpiece when God is not speaking through him is a fraud of the palpable kind which men will not away with. Over many an unfaithful preacher we are obliged to say what Keble said of the disobedient man of God in the Old Testament1 — Alas, my brother, round thy tomb In sorrow kneeling, and in fear We read the Pastor's doom Who speaks and will not hear. All manner of sins may be forgiven a preacher — a harsh voice, a clumsy delivery, a bad pro nunciation, an insufficient scholarship, a crude doctrine, an ignorance of men ; but there is one 1 i Kings xiii. 26. FROM GOD. 27 defect which cannot be forgiven, for it is a kind of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost; it can not be forgiven him if he preaches when he has not received a message from God to de liver. Woe unto those prophets whom the Lord hath not sent! That genuine prophet of our day, George Macdonald, has told a story of a clergyman who in the course of his ministry, by inter course with a dwarfed but genuinely spiritual member of his flock, became aware that his preaching was unreal, the repetition of things which he had heard by rote, and in no sense the utterance of anything which he had received from God. He came to the courageous resolve to announce to his people that he intended to preach to them other men's sermons, in each case informing them of the author, until he had something to tell them from himself. For some months this avowed plagiarism went on — and at last the seal of the fountain within him was broken, and from a genuine knowledge of God he was able to testify what he had known and his hands had handled of the word 28 THE THEME. of life. That was a wise, and indeed an inevi table result of a true and honest soul recog nising the reality of the case. There is no disgrace in frankly avowing that no word of the Lord has come to you ; but there is shame and sorrow in preaching when the word has not come ; it is a source of delusion to preacher and hearer alike. There is a noble preacher in England to-day who has declared that the turning-point in his ministry came when he discovered the principle of which I am speaking. He noted carefully which discourses, or which parts of his dis courses, were accountable for such success as attended his preaching. And presently he observed that only those things produced any effect which had passed through the alembic of his own experience, and had been, in effect, real transactions between himself and God. Thenceforward he began to base his preaching upon that foundation. And the tides of bless ing which have followed his work in these latter years are an evidence that the change was right. FROM GOD. 29 Things which are happening in the world around you, things which you have studied in books, all the material of preaching may be useful or useless. It is nothing in them them selves which determines the alternative. What settles the question is, whether or no the preacher has received these things from God to deliver in that form, on that occasion, and with that application. I remember once hearing a very remarkable and poetic preacher declare that the preacher, like the poet, nascitur non fit. I think he was uttering a protest against the notion that any college, or school of the prophets, can produce a prophet by training or education. This good minister expressed the view which it is pre cisely the object of these lectures to combat. I do not wish to contest the point that colleges cannot produce true preachers. Perhaps no person, on reflection, ever thought that they could. But the gist of what I have to say to you will perhaps appear at once if I lay down the proposition, that the preacher is in no respect like the poet, for the congenital gifts are 30 THE THEME. in a manner an accident. Non nascitur, non fit. He is not born a preacher, nor is he made a preacher. But he is called of God, called to receive the message of God. If he receives it diligently and delivers it faithfully he deserves the name by which he is called ; if he ceases to receive, or through some culpable neglect fails to deliver it, he is put from his office by God, even if he retains his titles, his congregation, and his emoluments. Non nascitur, non fit, sed vocatur. It would be premature to make any attempt to state how and on what conditions this imme diate communication is to be received by the genuine preacher, but it may be well to clear the ground for what is to be subsequently said, by first defining this kind of communication so as to distinguish it from other psychological facts with which it may be easily confused, and then pointing out some of the demands which must be made on every one who thoroughly understands what a task the preacher is called on to fulfil. First, then, we must observe that the com- NOT A CREED. 3 1 munication which God gives to the preacher must be something over and above the intel lectual conviction that certain articles of religion are true. We have all suffered many things from preachers. The sum of the world's suffer ings in that line has yet to be made up. But the most insufferable pain has come from men who thoroughly accept the great truths of religion — of Christianity — and make no ques tion about their obligation on the conscience and receptiveness of the hearer, and yet, never commending the truths to believers, or to un believers, are simply tiresome in their logical precision and irritating in their irresistible con clusiveness. To be firmly persuaded of relig ious truth is not in itself a call to preach. Every man should have this persuasion — every man should have his orthodoxy and hold by it. But every man is not required to offer his or thodoxy to others. The articles of his faith, whencesoever derived, are for him, and for him alone, until God adds this other article to the rest, "Go and tell My people." In days of doubt and uncertainty it may be so rare a thing 32 THE THEME. for a man to have a fixed belief, that the pos session of it may seem to lay on the possessor the duty of exposition. But in the Christian consciousness this is not enough. Before utter ance is obligatory, the word must be burning within like the seething lava-fountains in the heart of a volcano, and demanding outlet by a Divine compulsion. When God bids a man speak, it often chances that the man has few truths to utter, and those in a chaotic condi tion ; not infrequently His Nabi, or Seer, is one with a poor range of thought, and many big lacunae in his knowledge ; such a man as no earthly sovereign would select as an ambassa dor, and no University would pass as a gradu ate, but the. Spirit of the Lord comes upon him ; he speaks the poor and halting word, but it goes like a " bolted breath," and is wedged in a gnarled heart that no erudition or elo quence could touch. God's word may come to a man in a creed as rigid as Calvin's, and work through an intellectual system held and taught as relentlessly as Calvinism was held and taught by Jonathan Edwards. But it may not. And NOT MERELY EXPERIENCE. 1,^ we must keenly discriminate between the ac ceptance and the conviction of such a creed on the one hand, and the preacher's direct com munication on the other. Nor, strange as it sounds at first, is even a personal experience of vital religion in the soul a sufficient warrant for preaching. God will often give a man bread, yes, and wine and oil, to strengthen and gladden his heart, and yet by no means require him to dispense to a multitude. The loaf will not bear pull ing — or its tenuity becomes innutritious ; and his cruse is empty long before the first round. Though a real preacher receives the word in his experience, and, like the one to whom I just referred, finds his message, quick and powerful on that condition only, yet no de lusion could be greater than that he has to preach his own experience — that alone, or even chiefly that. What soul is large enough to box the compass of the winds, and to travel all seas of the religious life ? If God never gives a man a message except the narrative of a limited round of personal 34 THE THEME. experiences, let him speak in a class-meeting, or pour out his soul to this one or another, but let him not attempt to preach. He is certainly not called. Coleridge tells of a sculptor who produced very indifferent works, but one feature was always well moulded and executed. The secret at last oozed out — he had a wife with no other points of beauty, but that single feature. A preacher's work will be of the same untempered quality, the same wearisome admixture of many parts bad with one good, if he supposes that his personal experience, instead of the word he receives from God, is to be the substance of his message. He is an ambassador — he has to bring a matter from his sovereign. If he babbles only of his own passages with the King — the favours he has received at Court, the honour conferred on him by the present embassage, and the like — the first interest with which he was received will quickly die, and a conviction will spring up that even those personal favours must be a fiction, for how could the Great King so PREACHING NOT POETRY. 35 honour one who has this incapacity to dis charge his simple commission ? Still more important is it to avoid the con fusion between a communication from God and the emotional or aesthetic excitement which is produced in many fine temperaments by religious themes. A poet or an artist in the pulpit need not be suspect — quite the contrary — but he will have to watch himself suspiciously, lest he fall into a very natural snare. A man with poetic sensibility, awake to the harmonies and the raptures of high narrative, is very apt to glow, to thrill, to melt, and to feel the moisture on his cheek, in handling the theme of religion, and especially in telling the story of the Christ. There is little wonder if he, and even his audience, mistakes this effusion of feeling for a true word of God. But the two are quite distinct. An utterance from the deep cell of immediate revelation is a different thing from the musical sound which issues out of the cave of Apollo. Poet, or no poet, the preacher must have heard God ; the word once received may then 36 THE THEME. be delivered in pedestrian language, or in winged words, according to the manner of the individual speaker. It is the word of God, not the sweetness of the numbers, that is important. In the same way many natures are curiously susceptible to the picturesque. Colours move them. Fretted roofs and long-drawn aisles, the noise that high-built organs make, and the prophets blazoned on the panes, affect them with sentiments which seem to be religious. Preachers subject to these influences may maintain a stream of very pretty eloquence, and the ears of the people may be soothed and charmed as with a very subtle music, and all this may be mistaken for the word of God. Perhaps it is a good and safe rule that unless a message can touch men in unadorned simplic ity, it is better unadorned, so that its naked ness may appear. Unless a sermon can be effective in a hayloft or by the wayside it will be useless in a cathedral. Is the word of God in it authentic and immediate and real ? That is the vital question. If the word of God is THE RESPONSIBILITY. 37 not in it, the aesthetic excitement will be only a delusion, and the preacher may be himself deluded as he is deluding others. Further distinctions and delimitations may be spared at this stage. Here is the one thing needful. The preacher is called upon to go direct to God, to receive God's word into his heart, and to utter it, it alone, with all the power that is in him. If the word is not God's, if it is not received from Him, received in that shape and for that occasion, he were better silent ; his message will fall to the ground ; and he, unfaithful one, will have a weary circle in the purging fires to tread, that he may repent and learn wisdom. But if this is so, who can adequately describe the preacher's responsibility ? Or how can we sufficiently emphasise the essential conditions of rightly discharging the high office ? He must get a word from God before he speaks it — that is the requirement. Even at this point it is possible to see what that will demand from him in the bent of his mind and in the initial set of his life. Clearly he has a 38 THE THEME. task which will need an undivided attention and a complete absorption in its fulfilment. $ He is to climb Sinai with its ring-fence of death, and on the summit speak face to face with Him whom no one can see and yet live. He is to push through the wilderness, eating angels' meat or nothing, and scale the crags of Horeb, where in a great hollow, shadowed by a hand, he may through earthquake, wind, and fire, discern the still small voice. What a venture it is for him ! No sphere of human activity is to be compared with the exigencies of this endeavour. Men who are set on making money give their whole being to it, their time is freely sacrificed; for the one dear end they do not hesitate to barter the sweets of life, and the beauty of the earth, Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. Not only do they surrender the charms of ease and spiritual development here, but they very readily forego the life to come, give their souls to the god of this world, and tread with restless eagerness the descensus Averni. And all this, that they may make money ! THE TOIL OF IT. 39 The preacher must cast the die with a simi lar absoluteness. For the descent to Avernus is easy compared with the ascent to the mount of God and the entrance to the place of the Oracle. Or again, notice how a painter achieves excellence. The world is parcelled out into pictures for him. He sees the moving pano rama as the landscape is framed in the window of the flying express. He catches every gleam of the changing daylight, and every effect of the falling shadows. Every combination of colours, every grouping of outlines, every inci dent of the show, is entered as a note in the sketch-book of his mind. He can only be a painter on these terms : that he will sit at the gateway of Nature, and never miss a glimpse when the door is, for moments too brief, rolled back on its hinges. He must be a mirror of the great pageant by day and night, and must order and compose the fleeting reflexions. So has the preacher to wait at the portal of God, and to receive into himself the solemn utterance from the Holy Place. He has time for no inattention ; he can admit of no distrac- 40 THE THEME. tions. There is much to hear, and he can spare no syllable. Though he is in the world and moving with the life of men, full of sympathies and interests, full of the world's thought and its passion, he is necessarily detached from the world, not admitting its principles, nor dazzled by its at tractions, nor flattered by its favours. When it praises or blames, his ear is preoccupied with the voice of God. Its jargon, its claims, its philosophy, its science, the cry of its markets, and the tumult of its havens, the giddy rush of its pleasures, and the acclamation of its ambi tions, come to him, not as unreal, — they are in a sense too real, — but dwarfed into a cer tain insignificance of transitoriness by the pres ence of a truer reality and the authoritative sound of a more commanding speech which issues from the mouth of God. He cannot allow the motive of avarice or social advancement, the spur of human admira tion, or the promise of success, to move him from his place at that high portal. And the World may well look with a kind of scornful ITS COMPENSATIONS. 41 pity on this outsider who is speaking to it, so disillusioned in the contemplation of its delights, and so insistent on that faint-sounding word of God which to him is the only voice worth hear ing, and to it is the only voice which is inaudi ble or at least incredible. But he does not need pity, he has his com pensations, for — He that of such a height has built his mind, And reared the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame Of his resolved powers ; nor all the wind Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong His settled peace, or to disturb the same : What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may The boundless wastes and wealds of man survey ! And with how free an eye doth he look down Upon these lower regions of turmoil ! Where all the storms of passion mainly beat On flesh and blood : where honour, power, renown, Are only gay afflictions, golden toil ; Where greatness stands upon as feeble feet As frailty doth, and only great doth seem To little minds who do it so esteem.1 1 Daniel's Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland. LECTURE II. LECTURE II. " THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME." Illustrations from the Old Testament. The present lecture is in one way the easi est of the series, for we are all tolerably well agreed that the word of the Lord came in a very distinct and intelligible manner to " holy men of old." The difficulty in the Church has seldom been to believe that the word came, but always to believe that it comes. Most of us are believers in a revelation that was ; few in a revelation that is. It may be that we have only the faintest conception of what is meant by this familiar phrase, " The word of the Lord came ; " it may be that we have shut it up among the other curiosities of that venerable mu seum which is filled with Biblical Ideas, duly marked, " Visitors are requested not to touch ; " 45 46 "THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME. it may be that we never expect, we should deem it an irreverence to expect, that any sim ilar experience should happen to-day; but yet we are tacitly agreed that " God did of old time speak unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners," and, what is more, we believe that in the last resort all real revelation must have been a communication of that kind. The Old Tes tament, we should probably all say, derives its authority and its permanent value from this, that it records " the word of the Lord that came " to certain selected individuals during the undefined lapse of time between the dawn of human life on this planet and its full noon in the coming of Christ.1 1 "Die Gestalt des Propheten ist an sich die erste und grundlegende religiose Gestalt. Im Geiste des Propheten wird durch den Geist Gottes eine unmittelbare Gewissheit, eine innre Anschauung von Dingen gewerkt, welche sich dem Zeugnisse der Sinne entziehen, und welche von der reflectirenden oder speculirenden Vernunft immer nur mit annahernder Wahr- scheinlichkeit erkannt werden konnen. Und so ruht das Wesen einer OfFenbarungsreligion durchaus auf Prophetie. Ohne sie giebt es nur Naturreligion oder Philosophie.'' (Her mann Schultz, Die Offejibarungsreligion, &e., p. 214.) THE MANNER OF ITS COMING. 47 Whether it occurs to readers of the Bible and to preachers of the gospel that these re corded examples of the word of the Lord coming to men are given, not only as treas ures of revelation gathered from the past, but as examples of what may be expected from the present, I am unable to say. But this lecture will certainly have failed of its pur pose if it leaves an impression that there was anything which ought to be regarded as ex ceptional or incapable of repetition in the Divine events and the personal communica tions from God through the Law and the Prophets. The discussion, then, that is before us may be regarded as twofold: (i) What was the manner of the communication received by the Prophets and Leaders of Israel when " the word of the Lord came " to them ? (2) Are there facts in the present day to warrant the belief that as it was, so it is, and shall be ? I. What actually happened when " the word of the Lord came " to those men of old time ? Now, without diverging from the matter in 48 " THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME." hand into a discussion of a very different kind, it is necessary to remind ourselves that there are several degrees of accuracy and authenticity in the records which form the Old Testament. By methods familiar enough to the critic it is not difficult to discern be tween documents which tell the story of events that lie for the writer in a distant past, and documents which are in a sense autographic, the personal experiences of the writer himself or of his immediate contempo raries. It is misleading in the highest degree to make no distinction between two such dif ferent authorities. It may be, for example, precarious in the extreme to lay stress on the pious traditions concerning a patriarch which possibly did not find their way into writing until a thousand years after his death ; and it would be misleading indeed if we were to argue from the conversation between Abraham and the Lord concerning the destruction of Sodom that we to-day may expect to hold a conversation in that form. But it is a very different matter if we have the actual and BY DREAMS. 49 undisputed testimony of a man himself that the communications which passed between him and God were distinct and intelligible and capable of being written down. Little might be inferred, of a practical and experi mental kind, from the legend of Enoch or the copious and loving traditions of Abraham, but much may be inferred from the definite statements of Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Eze kiel ; and with the experience of these great souls before us we may not only heighten our expectation of what may happen now, but we may also go back into the ages before them and give some rational credence to what is re ported from that remote and legendary past. Now, firmly bearing in mind the distinction which has to be made between the different sources of our information, we may proceed to examine what may be called the manner of revelation. First of all, and on the lowest scale, there are the communications of God to men through the inexplicable phenomena of dreams. In the Yahvistic narrative of the Pentateuch there 50 "THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME. are many instances given. Two will suffice for illustration. In Gen. xv. i we read, " The word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram ; I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward," and then follows the account of that striking cove nant made between Abram and his God, which is the type of all such covenants made since by godly men. The other instance may be taken from Num. xxii. 19-20, where Balaam receives his commands from God by night, presumably in a dream : " God came unto Balaam and said unto him, If the men be come to call thee, rise up, go with them ; but only the word which 1 speak unto thee, that shalt thou do." One example may be added from the Book of Samuel : " It came to pass the same night that the word of the Lord came unto Nathan, saying, Go and tell My servant David," &c. (2 Sam. vii. 4). But similar experiences occur throughout the Bible, and, we may add, throughout the history of the Church. It is a difficult subject to thoroughly investi gate. But it seems to be clear that God uses IN ECSTASY. 51 the state of semi-consciousness and suspended will-action, When the dumb hour, clothed with black, Brings the dreams about the bed, to present His commandments, and sometimes to show His purposes for the future, to His servants who wait for Him. It is scarcely necessary to say that our hours of full consciousness must be very fully sur rendered to God if He is thus to appear to us in the hours of half-consciousness, and that our day must be very strenuously and continuously given to Him, if the night is to be the occasion of His closer communion with us. But, secondly, there is a means of revelation to be distinguished from dreams1 which may be called ecstasy. By obedience, by self-sur render, by prayer, by careful withdrawal from the entanglements of the world, prophetic men entered into a physical and mental state which 1 Jer. xxiii. 25, 28, 32, shows that dreams, as a very uncertain means of communication, were somewhat discredited in the highest period of prophetic activity. (Cf. Hermann Schultz, Offenbarungsreligion, p. 250.) 52 "THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME. was abnormal, if we are speaking of the com mon life that men live, but highly normal, if we are speaking of the Divine life which they were meant to live. All that is best and most enduring in human life has been attained by dedicated men of this kind. If chosen men could never be alone In deep mid-silence, open-doored to God, No greatness ever had been dreamed or done.1 Two significant examples of this condition may be given. Isaiah tells us, in the first person, how he was called to his life-long mis sion when he was still a boy (Isa. vi.). He was in the Temple, meditating, no doubt, on all that was implied by the sacred building, and on the political, the social, the religious con dition of his country. A Divine pageant passed before his eyes. The dark, narrow, lofty chamber seemed to expand and to be illumined with heavenly radiance. There was the Lord, surrounded by His train of burning seraphim. What followed was a transaction 1 J. R. Lowell. ISAIAH AND EZEKIEL. 53 between the young man and God, evidently as real and tangible to his consciousness as anything that happens between man and man. Language has no meaning, and literature no authenticity, if this is not to be treated as an actual occurrence, an occurrence of thrilling and poetical interest, and yet literally, and even prosaically, recorded. The ecstatic con dition is not to be confused with hallucination. It is a form of the Spirit's life, a contact be tween the visible and the invisible. And so far from these spiritual experiences being dis credited because they transcend the common experience of common men, the true meaning of the Spiritual is, as Emerson said, the Real, and these doings in the higher plane are the key and interpretation of life. The other example which will serve us now is that of Ezekiel. The book of this prophet is so absolutely unimpeachable, its authenticity is so far above suspicion, its careful arrange ment and editing give such a sense of delibera tion and calm conclusiveness, that the express witness of this writer possesses a peculiar 54 " THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME. value. There is something curiously particu lar and emphatic in the introduction of the book. "There was indeed1 a word of Yahveh to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans, by the river Chebar; and the hand of the Lord was there upon him" (Ezek. i. 3). Ezekiel is no poet; he is quite prosaic ; such poetry as appears in his book is the realism of what he saw in vision. One of the least of the prophets in genius, he is one of the greatest in vision. He lived in view of the opened heavens. Thirdly, the word of the Lord evidently came to men, not in dream or in ecstasy, but by a strengthening of the natural faculties, an illumination of the intelligence, which en abled them to see the truth and speak about things present and to come with a wisdom not their own. Keble well expresses it thus: — As little children lisp and tell of Heaven, So thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given. 1 The Hebrew idiom of emphasis .TH ,Tn occurring at the be ginning of the sentence lays stress on the actuality of the fact. DIRECT INSPIRATION. 55 Nothing can be more instructive for us than to observe the operation of this human, yet Divine, inspiration. Take, for example, the prophet Micah. He is a man of the people. He is keenly alive to their sufferings and espouses their cause. The intensity of his moral convictions unites him with God ; and the truths he utters come to him definitely as God's truths rather than his own. To quote the words of a prophetic student of the prophets : — " Micah is convinced of Jehovah's spiritual presence with him, and perfectly happy in the faith that his own opinions are the very mind of God, and have arisen in his soul by God's spiritual operation in him. He founds his spiritual life on direct oneness of his spirit and power and activity with the spirit of God. His power to speak, to think aloud, to win or to condemn by eloquent speech, his whole personal beneficent activity is one with the Spirit Jehovah." L 1 Archibald Duff, M.A., LL.D., Old Testament Theology, P- 325- 56 Those spiritual directions which shaped the history of Israel, and made the chosen people the forerunner of Christ ; those conceptions of God which were the essential condition of receiving the full revelation of God in the Person of Christ ; those noble religious truths which abide for ever in the Old Testament, like stars in the firmament, a light shining in a dark place, not superseded even by our fullest and latest knowledge; — were received from God very largely by men of like passions with ourselves, who in simplicity of heart and singleness of purpose threw their minds open to God, and allowed His Spirit to work upon their nature, until the exercise of their judg ment on political issues which were before them, the formation of a theology in their glowing hearts, and the careful elaboration of a moral code, were veritable words of God. Not that any infallibility could attach to their utterances. The human factor could not be completely eliminated. It was not given to them to rise entirely above their environment, or to see things out of the forms of time and JEREMIAH. 57 space in which their life necessarily moved. Thus, for example, in one of the most striking communications of the word of the Lord to the greatest of all the prophets, Jeremiah, that prophecy in which a promise is made of " a Branch of Righteousness to grow up unto David," it appears from the language employed that the prophet himself expected the throne of David in Jerusalem and the ministrations of the Levites in the Temple to be inviolable and eternal, it not being given to him to understand that throne and temple alike were to disappear and find their fulfilment in the Person of Christ.1 But in their complete surrender to the will of God, and their constant study of His mind, they became quite consciously the organs of His utterance, and could say without hesitation, in words which no good man can use without a conviction of their truth, words which the prophets, as the events have proved, were fully justified in using, " The word of the Lord came unto me, saying." Nothing but a close and constant study of 1 Jer. xxxiii. 14-26. 58 " THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME." the Prophets can adequately bring out the nature and significance of this inward experi ence. But one or two observations may be made in passing. Even when the word of the Lord was received by what might be called natural methods, as distinct from dreams and ecstasies — even when it came apparently as the simple exercise of a sound judgment or the utterance of a searching moral truth — the prophet distinguished quite clearly between his own mind, which was the instrument, and the Spirit of God, who was the speaker. The word of the Lord comes into the heart — comes from Him, but it will out. Our own opinions we can always suppress if we will — even our convictions of truth do not always lay upon us the obligation of utterance. But when the word of the Lord is in a man's heart it acts as it did in Jeremiah. " If I say I will not make mention of Him, nor speak any more in His name, then there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing, and I cannot contain" (Jer. xx. 9). DIPSUCHIA. 59 Again, apart from the ecstatic state in which Isaiah conversed with God, there is, in the quiet and unexcited communion of the soul with its Maker, an interchange of thought — a lofty argument — which can only be expressed in the form of a dialogue. That element of Dipsuchia which is often perceived in con sciousness, when two contending voices seem to be answering one another in the soul, appears in the experience of the prophet still more distinctly ; the argument proceeds between the self and God. Thus Jeremiah gives us a daylight experience ; there is no hush or mys tery of the night about it ; there is no excite ment of the Temple service, nor even the agitation of the exiled spirit on the gloomy bank of Chebar ; but he says very simply : " The word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee; I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations." Such a voice has surely often sounded in the meditative soul of a young man who has been brought up in a 60 'THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME. religious home and nurtured on the lap of prayer. And he is persuaded that God is calling him to be His messenger. To Jere miah, however, the voice is so objective, and, in the vulgar sense of the word, real, that he answers aloud, " Ah, Lord God, behold, I can not speak, for I am a child." And the dialogue proceeds in perfect sincerity and obvious reality, " But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child ; for to whomsoever I shall send thee thou shalt go, and whatsoever I shall command thee thou shalt speak. . . . Then the Lord put forth His hand, and touched my mouth ; and the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put My words in thy mouth."1 Now, if we are to make some allowance for the naivete and imagery of Eastern speech, if we .hesitate to affirm that this dialogue was of such a character that indifferent persons standing near would have heard it, or that a hand was put out which sensibly touched the young man's lips, there can yet be no shadow of question that here was a genuine experience, a real contact with 1 Jer. i. 4-10. ELIJAH AND SAMUEL. 6 1 God, a command given, a deprecatory plea, a renewed command with an enabling power, and a clear conviction that henceforth the words to be spoken, though issuing from human lips, should really proceed from the Divine mind. And the whole Book of Jeremiah, notwith standing the somewhat confused editing, and the frequently cumbersome language, fully justifies the expectation which is created by this remarkable introduction. It is the same with all the prophets whose writings have come down to us, and after a care ful study of their words, and the confession of their call, which they all make with more or less distinctness, we may turn back to those earlier prophets — whose messages were written not by them at the time but by their disciples who cherished the memory of their words — to Elijah, to Samuel, to Moses, and may perceive with a clearer understanding the manner of the Lord's communications to them. There is no more authentic personality in the Bible than Elijah. Ever since he lived they who have studied his history have agreed 62 "THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME. with the widow of Zarephath in her exclama tion, " Now I know that thou art a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth " (i Kings xvii. 24). The word which came to him was that of practical and immedi ate direction in a bold protest against religious corruption, and a manful championship of spiritual worship, rather than discourses which would instruct after generations. But it is evident that his zeal was created and sustained, and the protest he made was effectual with sovereigns and with people, because upon the watch-tower of Carmel, or in the caves of Horeb, he maintained that solitary communion with God, in which a passionate and devoted soul receives with perfect definiteness " the word of the Lord." Elijah is a noble example of what a man may become who is very jealous for the Lord his God, remains disentangled from the religious forms which happen to pre vail at the time, and presses into immediate relations with the Supreme Spirit, to hear His word and to obey. Going back a little further in the history, we SAMUEL. 63 light upon Samuel, a genuine prophet, who received and delivered the word of the Lord. There is a pathetic interest about this man because he lived in one of those periods, far too common in the world's history, when " the word of the Lord is rare, and there is no open vision," a period of formalism, of priestliness instead of religion, when every one was ready to believe that the Lord spoke long ago to the fathers, but not that He was able to speak still. That dedicated child, conceived and born in the throes of prayer and of a mother's faith, stood open-eared to hear what the Lord would say throughout his life. " The word of Samuel came to all ; " and rightly so, for it was indeed the word of God. The kingdom was his crea tion, and the man after God's own heart was his choice, and one of his God-given utterances rings down the ages, and is to-day as loud a voice of God as when it first broke from Sam uel's angry lips : " Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams " (1 Sam. xv. 22). Or, pushing back further still, we come to 64 " THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME." Moses.1 So immediate and decisive was his dealing with God, so important and unexpected was the communication that he received, so distinct was the impression which his life and personality made in Israel, that it occasions no surprise if the Law by which the community lived was always ascribed to him in its entirety, and every addition made to the code, at each successive stage of development, was reverently prefaced by " The Lord spake unto Moses, ¦ Speak unto the children of Israel." Though criticism and history, religion and common sense, alike make it impossible to accept the Jewish tradition that all the contents of the Pentateuch were communicated by word" of mouth to Moses, there can be no question but that the Lord did speak to Moses, giving him words so vital and eternal that they created a nation which time and change seem powerless to destroy, and founded a religion for a few 1 For the historical personality of Moses, which emerges from the critical recasting of the Pentateuch, a personality not injured but cleared by the admission of the undeniable facts, see Her mann Schultz, Die Offenbarungsreligion, &c, p. 114, &c. Got- tingen, 1889. MOSES. 65 tribes of Bedouin which had the dynamic forces in it to change and master the world. Whatever we know or do not know about Moses, we are certain that the word of the Lord came to him, and in the words which have come to mankind ever since we always detect some underlying note of the truths com municated on Sinai to that noble and heroic man.1 But if we are to complete the scheme of this lecture we must turn from these fascinating inquiries into the history of a distant past, and put the question which refers to the present. II. Does the Word of the Lord come to His servants to-day as it came to the Prophets and the Leaders of Israel? Now we have not reached the stage in the present discussion at which a reasoned answer can be given to this question. Before such an answer can be given we shall have to conceive correctly how the 1 See Schultz, 1. c. p. 118. "Moses ist weder als Philosoph noch als Dichter der Griinder der Religion seines Volkes gewor- den, sondern als Prophet. Er hat sie empfangen, hat sie religios aufgenommen, nicht sie denkend geschaffen." 66 "THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME. immediate revelations of God are affected by the records of the past revelations not only in the Hebrew Bible, but in the more important writings of the New Testament. But it is pos sible even at this stage to give two or three illustrations taken from our own century, and from men who have lived among us and been of us, to throw discredit on the faithless suppo sition that the days of the word of the Lord are in the past, and on that incredible article of faith which is implied in much of our modern religion, that God who was so near to patriarchs and prophets in Canaan that they could hear Him speak and receive directions from His lips, is after all these ages of growing light, and after the consummation of His spiritual revela tion, less near, less tangible, less audible, less real to us. The three examples which I will give shall all be taken from easily accessible sources, and lest I should in any way colour the facts by my own views I shall, at the risk of being weari some, quote the words of the principal agents themselves. The examples shall be Stephen DOES THE WORD COME NOW? 67 Grellet, the Rev. C. G. Finney, and the Rev. Egerton Young. Here is a passage from the life of Stephen Grellet : — " Through adorable mercy, the visitation of the Lord was now again extended towards mef by the immediate openings of the Divine light on my soul. One evening, as I was walking in the fields alone, my mind being under no kind of religious concern, nor in the least excited by anything I had heard or thought of, I was sud denly arrested by what seemed to be an awful voice proclaiming the words, ' Eternity ! Eter nity! Eternity ! ' It reached my very soul, — my whole man shook, — it brought me, like Saul, to the ground. The great depravity and sinfulness of my heart were set open before me, and the gulf of everlasting destruction to which I was verging. I was made bitterly to cry out" — it must be remembered that at this time he considered himself an atheist — " ' If there is no God, doubtless there is a hell.' I found myself in the midst of it. . . . After that I remained almost whole days and nights, 68 " THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME. exercised in prayer that the Lord would have mercy upon me, expecting that He would give me some evidence that He had heard my sup plication. But for this I was looking to some outward manifestation, my expectation being entirely of that nature." l This was the commencement of a life — lived in the early part of the present century — hardly less remarkable than the lives of Isaiah and Jeremiah. It is easy to say that the event just described was merely subjective, or even that it was a hallucination. But they who take such a position in the matter will say that the call of Isaiah was hallucination, and the conversa tion between Jeremiah and God was merely subjective. The purpose for which I cite this illustration is simply to show that the word of the Lord comes to men to-day just as it came to the prophets of Israel. The second example is a personal experience of Mr. Finney's which must be given in his own words : — " When I came out of the pulpit in the after- 1 Life of Stephen Grellet, p. 13. By Benjamin Seebohm. A MESSAGE GIVEN. 69 noon an aged man approached, and said to me, ' Can you not come and preach in our neigh bourhood ? We have never had any religious meetings there.' I inquired the direction and the distance, and appointed to preach there the next afternoon, Monday, at five o'clock, in their schoolhouse. ... I went on foot to fulfil this appointment. The weather was very warm that day, and before I arrived there I felt almost too faint to walk, and greatly discouraged in my mind. I sat down in the shade by the way side, and felt as if I were too faint to reach there, and, if I did, too much discouraged to open my mouth to the people. When I arrived I found the house full, and immediately com menced the service by reading a hymn. They attempted to sing, but the horrible discord ago nised me beyond expression. I leaned forward, put my elbows upon my knees and my hands over my ears, and shook my head withal, to shut out the discord, which even then I could barely endure. As soon as they had ceased to sing I cast myself down upon my knees, almost in a state of desperation. The Lord opened 70 " THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME. the windows of heaven upon me and gave me great enlargement and power in prayer. Up to this moment I had had no idea what text I should use on the occasion. As I rose from my knees the Lord gave me this: ' Up, get you out of this place, for the Lord will destroy this city.' I told the people, as nearly as I could recollect, where they would find it, and went on to tell them of the destruction of Sodom. . . . While I was doing this I was struck with the fact that the people looked exceeding angry about me. Many countenances appeared very threatening, and some of the men near me looked as if they were about to strike me. This I could not understand, as I was only giving them, with great liberty of spirit, some interesting sketches of Bible history. ... I turned upon them and said that I had under stood that they had never had any religious meetings in that neighbourhood ; and, applying that fact, I thrust at them with the sword of the Spirit with all my might. From this mo ment the solemnity increased with great rapid ity. In a few moments there seemed to fall ANOTHER EXAMPLE. 7 1 upon the congregation an instantaneous shock; . . . the Word seemed literally to cut like a sword." 1 I need not quote more. At the second visit Mr. Finney learned for the first time that the place, on account of its wickedness, had been nicknamed Sodom, and the old man who had invited the preacher to visit it was nicknamed Lot because he was the only professor of relig ion there. I do not know any instance in the Old Testament of the word of the Lord coming more aptly and powerfully, or in circumstances of greater need and dejection, to a Moses,' a Samuel, an Elijah, or any of the prophets whose writings have come down to us. My third example shall be from a page of modern missionary enterprise. The narrator spent many years in preaching the gospel to the Indians in the Canadian Dominion. He says : — " On the banks of a wild river, about sixty miles from Beaver Lake, I visited a band of 1 The Baptism of the Holy Ghost, p. 237. By Dr. Asa Mahan. 72 "THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME. pagan Indians, after a painful and difficult journey, who seemed determined to resist every appeal or entreaty I could make to them. My faithful Indians, my companions, did all they could to rouse them by telling them of their own happy experience. But the people sat shrouded in their blankets, smoking in a sullen indifference, upright and motionless as mummies. Tired out in body and sad at heart, I threw myself upon the help of God and breathed a prayer for guidance in this hour of sore perplexity. God heard me, and springing up I shouted, ' I know where all your children are, all your dead children ! Yes, I know most certainly where all the children are whom Death has taken, the children of the good and the bad. I know where they all are.' The Indians quickly uncovered their faces and manifested intense interest. I went on : ' They have gone from your camp-fires and your wigwams. The hammocks are empty and the little bows and arrows lie idle. Your hearts are sad, and you mourn for the children you hear not, and who come not at your call. ALWAYS THE SAME. 7 3 But there is only one way to the beautiful land where the Son of God has gone, and into which He takes the children, and you must come this way if you would be happy and enter in.' As I spoke a big, stalwart man from the side of the tent sprang up and rushed towards me. ' Missionary, my heart is empty, and I mourn much, for none of my children are left among the living ; very lonely is my wigwam. I long to see them again and to clasp them in my arms. Tell me, mis sionary, what must I do to please the Great Spirit, that I may enter that beautiful land and see my children again ? ' He sank at my feet in tears, and was quickly joined by others who, like him, were broken down with grief and anxious for instruction." x Was not that exclamation, " I know where all your dead children are," a veritable word of God ? Did ever any saint in Old Testament times receive a more direct or manifest message to deliver ? It was the one 1 From Mr. Egerton Young's deeply interesting book, By Canoe and Dog Train. 74 " THE WORD OF THE LORD CAME.' point where the callousness of that congre gation was penetrable. The missionary had no means of knowing where that one point was. And the word of the Lord came to him. He gave it, and with such result as might be expected. The method of God is one in all ages. Every one who is to speak for Him must hear Him speak. With distinct and personal application the word must come : " As an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead : fear them not, neither be dismayed at their looks, though they be a rebellious house. Son of man, all My words that I shall speak unto thee receive in thy heart, and hear with thine ears. And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord God; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear" (Ezek. iii. 9-1 1 ). LECTURE III. LECTURE III. THE WORD IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. To one who has been patiently investigating and quietly pondering the significance of the expression, " The word of the Lord came," in the Old Testament history and prophecy, it gives a shock of mild surprise to turn over the leaves of the Bible, and to read in the New Testament — yes, and as the middle point and pivot of the New Testament — the fact that " the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us." He may not be curious to inquire how the use of an expression in the Targums, and the coining of a cognate term in the philo sophical schools of Alexandria, prepared the way for the truth with which the Fourth Gos pel opens. He may be simply content to ac cept the Biblical writings as they stand, and to 77 78 THE WORD IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. use them as their own interpreter. And then his surprise will pass into a glowing wonder and admiration. For it appears that the Word of God, which through many advancing centuries had come, in syllables and letters, to the men of old, a Divine language finding ex pression in human lips that were more or less able to give it utterance, at last in the fulness of time came, not in this partial and fragmen tary way, lisping in alternate exclamations and silences, but embodied in a Person full of grace and truth. When we realise that this is the gist of the New Testament — the Word of God is incar nate, and men have " beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father" — we are compelled to face some very searching ques tions which suggest themselves from the stand point of the present inquiry. We have been arguing all along that the word of the Lord comes directly as a message from God to the individual soul, and that this immediate com munication is the condition of real preaching. But if the examples we have examined in the THE LOGOS. 79 Old Testament belong to an imperfect and preparatory stage of revelation ; if it is the mark and the characteristic of those kings and prophets in that elder time that — Vainly they tried the deeps to sound E'en of their own prophetic thought, When of Christ crucified and crown'd His Spirit in them taught : But He their aching gaze repressed, Which sought behind the veil to see, For not without us fully blest Or perfect might they be ; : if the historic Person of Jesus, the Christ, was the utterance in its completeness of the Word which had only been given in portions before ; perhaps we may be driven to the conclusion that with the Incarnation the prophetic ele ment in religion — by which I mean the imme diate revelation of God to the individual soul, and the deliverance of a message through a human mouthpiece — passed away. At first sight it might seem that the absoluteness of 1 Christian Year. Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity. 80 THE WORD IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. the truth, that Christ is the Word of God, refutes and nullifies the argument of the present lectures. It is our task to-day to see whether this first impression is correct. The only way of deter mining the question is to examine the New Testament writings, which, following the In carnation, furnish us with the clearest view of the religious experiences to be expected in the new era created by the coming of Christ. But it will promote clearness in the inquiry if I state beforehand the conclusion to which, as it seems to me, we shall be led. We shall find that the first impression was wrong. The appearance of the Word in the flesh was not to abolish the prophetic element, but to make it general, by realising the aspiration of the first great prophet, " Would that all the Lord's people were prophets ! " The Person of Christ was to furnish a norm or type of what each one might become who received the Word. Henceforth there would always be an effectual test to prove whether the word received were a word of God or not, because nothing could PROPHETS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. 8 1 be a word of God which clashes with the Word made flesh. Henceforth, through the operation of the Holy Spirit the personality of Christ should be reproduced in the believer, in such a way that the Christ-filled soul would speak the word of God ; but it would be the utterance or expression of that Divine Person who "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." So far from the new order nullifying the old prophetic inspiration, and reducing the minis ters of the gospel to a position in relation to God inferior to that of the older prophets,, it, as one might have expected, fulfilled and real ised the promise in that old relation, and sub stituted for the occasional coming of the Word to a few favoured individuals at exceptional times, a normal state for believing men which could thus be described by a Christian writer — " the word of the Lord dwelling in you richly in all wisdom ; teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts unto 82 THE WORD IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. God" (Col. iii. 16). The prophets did not cease in the Christian Church, and one of the earliest documents we have from that primitive society, the Didache, or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, reveals to us the constant activity and the careful regulation of these men who received the word from God to deliver to the people.1 Now let us turn to the New Testament writings for light upon this subject. To begin with, the last of. the Prophets, — the Old Testament Prophets, — is a contem porary of Jesus. Our historian, in describing the career of John the Baptist, uses the famil iar expression, " The word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness" (Luke iii. 2). The final announcement of the coming Messias, of the One who already stood among the people, though they knew it not, 1 Cf. in the DidachS, rots Se TrporJTais iiriTpiireTC tv^npurTWi otra OeXovaiv (chap, x.), Trepl Se tS>v aTrocToXoiv ko.1 Trpo^>r)T(ov Kara to 86ypa toS evayyeAtbu ovrtos irorq