Chapter 10

We perhaps lay too much stress, however, on intellectual gifts and attainments. These are the only ones which are tested by our examinations in college; yet there are moral qualities which are just as essential.

The polish given by education tells, no doubt; but the size of the primordial mass of manhood tells still more. In a quaint book of Reminiscences recently published from the pen of a notable minister of the last generation in the Highlands of Scotland, Mr. Sage of Resolis, there is a criticism recorded, which was passed by a parishioner on three successive ministers of a certain parish: "Our first minister," said he, "was a man, but he was not a minister; our second was a minister, but he was not a man; and the one we have at present is neither a man nor a minister."

There is no demand which people make more imperatively in our day than that their minister should be a man. It is not long since a minister was certain of being honoured simply because he belonged to the clerical profession and wore the clerical garb. People, as the saying was, respected his cloth. But ours is a democratic age, and that state of public feeling is passing away. There is no lack of respect, indeed, for ministers who are worthy of the name; perhaps there is more of it than ever. But it is not given now to clerical pretensions, but only to proved merit. People do not now respect the cloth, unless they find a man inside it.

Perhaps the educational preparation through which we pass at college is not too favourable to this kind of power. In the process of cutting and polishing the natural size of the diamond runs the risk of being reduced. When we are all passed through the same mill, we are apt to come out too much alike. A man ought to be himself. Your Emerson preached this doctrine with indefatigable eloquence. Perhaps he exaggerated it; but it is a true doctrine; and it is emphatically a doctrine for preachers. What an audience looks for, before everything else, in the texture of a sermon is the bloodstreak of experience; and truth is doubly and trebly true when it comes from a man who speaks as if he had learned it by his own work and suffering.

It will generally be noticed in any man who makes a distinct mark as a preacher that there is in his composition some peculiarity of endowment or attainment on which he has learned to rely. It may be an emotional tenderness as in McCheyne, or a moral intensity as in Robertson of Brighton, or intellectual subtlety as in Candlish, or psychological insight as in Beecher. But something distinctive there must be, and, therefore, one of the wisest of rules is, Cultivate your strong side.

But what tells most of all is the personality as a whole. This is one of the prime elements in preaching. The effect of a sermon depends, first of all, on what is said, and next, on how it is said; but, hardly less, on who says it. There are men, says Emerson, who are heard to the ends of the earth though they speak in a whisper.[44] We are so constituted that what we hear depends very much for its effect on how we are disposed towards him who speaks. The regular hearers of a minister gradually form in their minds, almost unawares, an image of what he is, into which they put everything which they themselves remember about him and everything which they have heard of his record; and, when he rises on Sunday in the pulpit, it is not the man visible there at the moment that they listen to, but this image, which stands behind him and determines the precise weight and effect of every sentence which he utters.

* * * * *

Closely connected with the force of personality is the other power, which St. Paul possessed in so supreme a degree, of taking an interest in others. It is the manhood in ourselves which enables us to understand the human nature of our hearers; and we must have had experience of life, if we are to preach to the life of men.

Some ministers do this extremely little. Not once but many a time, I have heard a minister on the Sabbath morning, when he rose up and began to pray, plunging at once into a theological meditation; and in all the prayers of the forenoon there would scarcely be a single sentence making reference to the life of the people during the week. Had you been a stranger alighted from another planet, you would never have dreamed that the human beings assembled there had been toiling, rejoicing and sorrowing for six days; that they had mercies to give thanks for and sins to be forgiven; or that they had children at home to pray for and sons across the sea.

There is an unearthly style of preaching, if I may use the term, without the blood of human life in it: the people with their burdens in the pews--the burden of home, the burden of business, the burden of the problems of the day--whilst, in the pulpit, the minister is elaborating some nice point, which has taken his fancy in the course of his studies, but has no interest whatever for them. Only now and then a stray sentence may pull up their wandering attention. Perhaps he is saying, "Now some of you may reply"; and then follows an objection to what he has been stating which no actual human being would ever think of making. But he proceeds elaborately to demolish it, while the hearer, knowing it to be no objection of his, retires into his own interior.

If what was said in a former lecture about the distinctive difference between the preaching of the Old Testament and that of the new be considered, it will at once be recognised how vital is this aspect of the matter. The prophets of the Old Testament, in common with the thinkers of antiquity in general, thought of men in masses and regarded the individual only as a fragment of a larger whole. But Christ introduced an entirely new way of thinking. To Him the individual was a whole in himself; beneath the habiliments of even the humblest member of the human family there was hidden what was more precious than the entire material world; and on the issues of every life was suspended an immortal destiny. This faith may be said to have made Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world; for He saw in the lost children of men that which made Him live to seek them and die to save them. And it is by this same faith and vision that anyone is qualified to be a fellow-worker with Christ. No one will ever be able to engage with any success in the work of human salvation who does not see men to be infinitely the most interesting objects in the world, and who does not stand in awe before the solemn destiny and the sublime possibilities of the soul. It is by the growth and the glow of this faith that the worth of all ministerial work is measured.

It is far easier, however, to acknowledge this view in the abstract than to cherish it habitually towards the actual men and women of our own sphere and our own vicinity. That man is the most interesting object in the world; that the soul is precious; and that it is better for a human being to lose the whole world than to miss his destiny--these are now commonplaces, which everyone who bears the Christian name will acknowledge. Yet in reality few live under their power. Many a one who has paid the tribute of love and admiration to the spectacle of Christ's compassion for the outcasts, and melted with æsthetic emotion before a picture of the Woman taken in Adultery or the Woman that was a Sinner, has never once attempted to save an actual woman of the same kind in his own city, and would be utterly at a loss if such a one, in an hour of remorse, were to throw herself on his pity and protection. There is a great difference between a sinner in a book or a picture and a sinner in the flesh. Multitudes in their hearts believe that all the remarkable and interesting people lived long ago or that, at any rate, if any are now alive, they live many miles away from their vicinity. They believe that there were remarkable people in the first or the ninth century, but by no means in the nineteenth; they believe that there are interesting people in Paris or London or New York; but they have never discovered anything wonderful in those living in their own village or in their own street. Many who consider themselves enlightened will tell you that their neighbours are a poor lot. They fancy that, if they were living somewhere else, fifty or a hundred miles away, they would find company worthy of themselves; though it is ten to one that, if they made the change, their new neighbours would be a poor lot also.

If a minister allows himself to harbour sentiments of this sort, he is lost.[45] No one will ever win men who does not believe in them. The true minister must be able to see in the meanest man and woman a revelation of the whole of human nature; and in the peasant in the field, and even the infant in the cradle, connections which reach forth high as heaven and far as eternity. All that is greatest in king or kaiser exists in the poorest of his subjects; and the elements out of which the most delicate and even saintly womanhood is made exist in the commonest woman who walks the streets. The harp of human nature is there with all its strings complete; and it will not refuse its music to him who has the courage to take it up and boldly strike the strings. The great preacher is he who, wherever he is speaking, among high or low, goes straight for those elements which are common to all men, and casts himself with confidence on men's intelligence and experience, believing that the just suggestions of reason and the terrors of conscience, the sense of the nobility of goodness and the pathos of love and pity are common to them all.[46]

Let me close this lecture with a few words on a great subject, to which a whole lecture might have been profitably devoted.

No safer piece of advice could be tendered you than to let the beginning of your ministry be marked by care for the young. This is work which more than any other will encourage yourselves, and it is more likely than any other to establish you in the affections of a congregation.

To work successfully among children you must know their life and have the _entrée_ of their little world of interests, excitements, prizes and hopes. It is not difficult to get it, if only we are simple and genuine. Children will approach their minister gladly, and make him their confidant, if only he is accessible to them. By the ministers of an older generation they were kept at an awful distance. When they were out of temper or doing wrong, they were threatened with a visit from the minister in the same way as they might be threatened with the policeman, or the parish beadle, or a still more awful functionary of the universe. This, let us hope, has passed away, and in most parishes a ministerial visit is spoken of as a promise instead of a threat. A minister is proud nowadays if a child flies up to him in the street and ruffles his feathers with boisterous familiarity, or if a group of children pin him into the corner of a room and order him, under pains and penalties, to tell them a story. We are returning to the ideal of Goldsmith, in the _Deserted Village_:--

"The service past, around the pious man With steady zeal each loyal rustic ran; Even children followed with endearing wile, And plucked his gown to share the good man's smile."

More important even than accessibility is genuine respect for the children.

We ought to respect their intelligence. When we are preaching to them, we should give them our very best. I venture to say, that a much larger proportion of the sermons preached to children is never written out than of sermons to adults. The preacher, having thought of two or three lines of remark and got hold of two or three stories, enters the pulpit with these materials lying loosely in his mind, and trusts to the moment for the style of the sermon. Of course, if a man has trained himself to preach in this way always, it is all right; but, if not, it is a mistake. Children are greatly affected by felicity of arrangement and the music of language; they do not know to what their pleasure is due, but they feel it; and, if a preacher has the power of original thought or of beautiful diction, there is no occasion when he should be more liberal in the use of it than when he is addressing them.[47] The truth is, it is a complete mistake to make the children's sermon so different from other sermons as to create the impression that it is the only utterance from the pulpit to which they are expected to listen. It is not easy to get children to begin to listen at all to what is said in church; the children's sermon is a device to catch their attention; but it ought also to be a bridge conducting them over to the habit of listening to all that is said there. If they acquire the habit, they are our best hearers. A boy of twelve or thirteen can follow nearly anything; and there is no keener critic of the logic of a discourse or warmer appreciator of any passage which is worthy of admiration.

But, while we respect the intelligence of the young, there is something else which we need to believe in still more. We do not half realise the drama of religious impression going on in the minds of children. We forget our own childhood and the movements excited in our childish breasts under the preaching of the Word--how real the things unseen were to us; how near God was, His eye flashing on us through the darkness; how our hearts melted at the sufferings of Christ; how they swelled with unselfish aspirations as we listened to the stories of heroic lives; how distinctly the voice of conscience spoke within us; and how we trembled at the prospect of death, judgment and eternity. What we were then, other children are now; and what went on in us is going on in them. It is the man who believes this and reveres it who will reap the harvest in the field of childhood.

There is no surer way to secure for ourselves the interest of the old than to take an interest in the young. Of course a forced interest in children, shown with this in view, would be hypocrisy and deserve contempt. We must love the children for their own sakes. Yet we may quite legitimately nourish our interest in the young by observing that it is one of the strongest instincts of human nature which makes fathers and mothers feel kindnesses shown to their children to be the greatest benefits which can be conferred on themselves. An Edinburgh minister, who has had conspicuous success in preaching to children as well as in every other department of the work of his sacred office, once, in a gathering of divinity students, of whom I was one, told an incident from his own life which is almost too sacred to be repeated by any lips except his own, but which I hope he will excuse me for enriching you with, as it puts in a memorable form one of the truest secrets of ministerial success. On the morning of the day when he was going to be ordained to his first charge, he was leaving his home in the country to travel to the city, and his mother came to the door to bid him good-bye. Holding his hand at parting, she said, "You are going to be ordained to-day, and you will be told your duty by those who know it far better than I do; but I wish you to remember one thing which perhaps they may not tell you--remember, that, whenever you lay your hand on a child's head, you are laying it on its mother's heart."

FOOTNOTES:

[43] "The Sybarites of to-day will tolerate a sermon which is delicate enough to flatter their literary sensuality; but it is their taste which is charmed, not their conscience which is awakened: their principle of conduct escapes untouched.... Amusement, instruction, morals, are distinct _genres_."--AMIEL.

[44] The finest description of a speaker known to me is this of Lord Bacon in Ben Jonson's _Discoveries_; and it is evident that it was the man rather than the manner or even the matter which made the impression: "Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language, where he could spare or pass by a jest, was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke; and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was, lest he should make an end."

[45] It has often astonished me to observe how easily ministers' wives in this respect find for themselves the right path. One would think it would be very difficult sometimes for those who have been brought up in cities or in a secluded circle to adapt themselves suddenly to a remote and unselect society; and they have not, like their husbands, had the opportunity of meditating long on the duties of a public position. A hearty and cordial humanity in the members of a minister's family lends an immense assistance to his work. A minister ought to belong to no class of society, but to have the power of moving without constraint in every class.

[46] "Not a heart but has its romance, not a life which does not hide a secret which is either its thorn or its spur. Everywhere grief, hope, comedy, tragedy; even under the petrifaction of old age, as in the twisted forms of fossils, we may discover the agitations and tortures of youth. This thought is the magic wand of poets and preachers."--_Amiel._

[47] This may be a reason for rather devoting a whole diet of worship to the children once a month or once a quarter than only giving them a few minutes every Sabbath. But many follow the latter practice with excellent results. Perhaps there ought to be something specially for the children at every service. If I may mention my own practice, I have, during my whole ministry, preached to children once a month; and every Sunday I have a children's hymn in the forenoon and a prayer for children in the afternoon.

LECTURE VII.

THE PREACHER AS A CHRISTIAN.

In the last lecture I spoke of St. Paul as a Man, showing how remarkable were his endowments and acquirements, and how these told in his apostolic career. But it was not through these that he was what he was. Great as were the gifts bestowed on him by nature and cultivated by education, they were utterly inadequate to produce a character and a career like his. It was what Christianity added to these that made him St. Paul.

It is right enough that we should now recognise the importance of his natural gifts and trace out the ways in which Providence was shaping his life towards its true aim before he was conscious of it. But St. Paul himself had hardly patience for such cool reflections. He turned away with strong aversion from his pre-Christian life as something condemned and lost; and he delighted to attribute all that he was and did to the influence of Christ alone. In my last lecture I quoted a single passage to show that he himself recognised that his natural endowments had been bestowed in order to fit him for the peculiar work which he was destined to accomplish in the world; but I question if from all his writings I could have quoted another passage to the same effect. It was only for a moment that he allowed himself to stand on this point of view; whereas we could quote from every part of his writings such sayings as these: "By the grace of God I am what I am"; "I laboured more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God in me"; "It is no more I that live, but Christ liveth in me."

That this was his habitual way of estimating his own achievements is strikingly illustrated by his mode of thinking and speaking of certain defects in the equipment with which nature had supplied him for the career on which he was embarked. Gifted as he was, even he did not possess all gifts. He lacked one or two of those which might have been thought most essential to his success.

It would appear that he lacked the rotund voice and copious diction of the orator; for his critics were able to allege that, whilst his written style was powerful, his spoken style was contemptible. Painters have represented him as a kind of demi-god, with the stature of an athlete and the grace of an Apollo. But he seems to have been diminutive in stature; and there appears to be evidence to prove that there was that in his appearance which, at first sight, rather repelled than attracted an audience. He felt these defects keenly, and could not but wish sometimes that they were removed. But his habitual and settled feeling about them was, that he ought to look upon them as sources of strength rather than as weaknesses, because they made him rely the more on the strength of Christ. This was an unfailing resource, on which he felt that he could draw without limit. And so he gloried in his infirmities, that the power of Christ might rest upon him.[48]

It might be said that it was only the enthusiasm of Paul which made him attribute to Christ that which really belonged to himself. But his own point of view is the just one. It was Christ who made him; and, if we are to understand a ministry like his, we must try to measure the influence of Christ upon him, or, in other words, investigate the elements of his Christianity.

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1. Paul could claim that even in his pre-Christian days he had lived in all good conscience towards both God and man. Yet this profession of uprightness does not prevent him from confessing elsewhere that deep down in his consciousness there had been a mortal struggle between the principles of good and evil, in which the good was far from always winning the victory: "We all," he acknowledges, "had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath even as others." In the seventh chapter of Romans he has drawn a picture of this struggle, and it is to the very life. Theologians have, indeed, disputed among themselves as to the stage of experience there referred to--whether it is the state of an unconverted or of a converted man. But the human heart has no difficulty in interpreting it. The more thoroughly anyone is a man, the more easily will he understand it; and especially the more upright and conscientious anyone is, the more certainly must he have experienced what is described in words like these, "That which I do I allow not, for what I would that do I not, but what I hate that do I"; "For the good that I would I do not, but the evil that I would not that I do"; "I find, then, a law that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. Oh wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Thus Paul had been a lost man, in hopeless bondage to sin.