Lectures on Preaching

Since I received, some months ago, the invitation to deliver these lectures which I begin to-day, I have been led to ponder much upon the principles by which I have only half consciously been living and working for many years. This is part of the debt which I owe to those who have honored me with their invitation. It is interesting to one’s self to examine and recognize and arrange the ideas which have been slowly taking shape within him during the busy years of work. I shall be very glad if you too are interested, as I try to recount them to you, and very thankful if you find in them any help or inspiration.

The personal character of this lectureship is very evident. It is always to be filled by preachers in active work, who are to come and speak to you of preaching. It is not a Homiletical Professorship. It is each man’s own life in the ministry of which he is to tell. But certainly you do not expect from your l Buccessive lecturers a series of anecdotes of what has happened to them in their ministry, nor a mere recital of their ways of working. It cannot be intended that this lectureship should exalt the interviewer into an organized and permanent institution. The hope must rather be that as each preacher speaks of our common work in his own way, whatever there may be of value in his personal experience may come, not directly but indirectly, into what he says, and make the privilege of preaching shine for the moment in your eyes with the same kind of light which it has won in his.

I feel as I begin something of the fear which I have often felt in commencing a new sermon. It has often seemed to me as if the vast amount of preaching which people hear must have one bad effect, in leaving on their minds a vague impression that this Christian life to which they are so continually urged must be a very difficult and complicated thing that it should take such a multitude of definitions to make it clear. And so there is some danger lest these multiplied lectures upon preaching should give to those who are preparing to preach an uncomfortable feeling that the work of preaching is a thing of many rules, hard to understand, and needing a great deal of commentary. For my part, I am startled when I think how few and simple are the things which I have to say to you. The principles which one can recognize in his ministry are very broad and plain. The applications of those principles are endless; but I should be very sorry indeed if anything that I shall say should lead any of you to confound the few plain principles with their many varied applications, and so make you think that work complicated and difficult which to him who is equipped for it, and loves it, is the easiest and simplest work in life.

Let me say one word more in introduction. He who is called upon to give these lectures cannot but remember that they are given every year, and that he has had very able and faithful predecessors. There are certainly, therefore, some things which he may venture to omit without being supposed to be either ignorant or careless of them. There are certain first principles, of primary importance, which he may take for granted in all that he says. They are so fundamental, that they must be always present, and their power must pervade every treatment of the work which is built upon them. But they need not be deliberately stated anew each year. It would make these courses of lectures very monotonous; and one may venture to assume that there are some elementary principles upon whose truth all students of theology are agreed, and whose importance they all feel.

I cannot begin, then, to speak to you who are preparing for the work of preaching, without congratulating you most earnestly upon the prospect that lies before you. I cannot help bearing witness to the joy of the life which you anticipate. There is no career that can compare with it for a moment in the rich and satisfying relations into which it brings a man with his fellow-men, in the deep and interesting insight which it gives him into human nature, and in the chance of the best culture for his own character. Its delight never grows old, its interest never wanes, its stimulus is never exhausted. It is different to a man at each period of his life; but if he is the minister he ought to be, there is no age, from the earliest years when he is his people’s brother to the late days when he is like a father to the children on whom he looks down from the pulpit, in which the ministry has not some fresh charm and chance of usefulness to offer to the man whose heart is in it. Let us never think of it in any other way than this. Let us rejoice with one another that in a world where there are a great many good and happy things for men to do, God has given us the best and happiest, and made us preachers of His Truth.

I propose in this introductory lecture to lay before you some thoughts which cover the whole field which we shall have to traverse; and the lectures which follow will be mainly applications and illustrations of the principles which I lay down to-day. It maywnake my first lecture seem a little too general, but perhaps it will help us to understand each other better as we go on.

What, then, is preaching, of which we are to speak? It is not hard to find a definition. Preachings is the communication of truth by man to men. It has in it two essential elements, truth and personality. Neither of those can it spare and still be preaching. The truest truth, the most authoritative statement of God’s will, communicated in any other way than through the personality of brother man to men is not preached truth. Suppose it written on the sky, suppose it embodied in a book which has been so long held in reverence as the direct utterance of God that the vivid personality of the men who wrote its pages has well-nigh faded out of it; in neither of these cases is there any preaching. And on the other hand, if men speak to other men that which they do not claim for truth, if they use their powers of persuasion or of entertainment to make other men listen to their speculations, or do their will, or applaud their cleverness, that is not preaching either. The first lacks personality The second lacks truth. And preaching is the bringing of truth through personality. It must have both elements. It is in the different proportion in which the two are mingled that the difference between two great classes of sermons and preaching lies. It is in the defect of one

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or the other element that every sermon and preacher falls short of the perfect standard. It is in the absence of one or the other element that a discourse ceases to be a sermon, and a man ceases to be a preacher altogether.

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