The Preacher Himself

1TY last lecture indicated very clearly the importance which I think belongs to the preacher’s person in the work to which he is ordained. In my second and third lectures I want to dwell upon this subject and consider distinctively the preacher. After that we will look at the sermon. And in considering the preacher, we may think of him first in himself and then in relation to his work. It is not a distinction that can be accurately and constantly maintained. The two views run together. But it will help me in making an arrangement of what I have to say; and if we do not insist on it too strongly, it will aid our thoughts. To-day I take the first of these two topics, and shall speak of the preacher’s personal character, the preacher in himself.

Let us ask, then, first, What sort of man may be a minister? It would be good for the Church if it were a more common question. Partly because the motives which lead a young man to the ministry are so personal and spiritual, partly because of our sense of the magnitude and privilege of the work, which makes us fear to be the means of excluding any worthy man from it, partly because, at present, while the harvest is so plenteous the laborers are so very few, — for these and other reasons, there is far too little discrimination in the selection of men who are to preach, and many men find their way into the preacher’s office who discover only too late that it is not their place. When our Lord selected those to whom He was to commit His gospel, we are impressed with the deliberation and solemnity of the act: “And it came to pass in these days that He went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God. And when it was day, He called unto Him His disciples and of them He chose twelve whom also He named apostles.” There has certainly grown up in the Church a strong misgiving as to the whole policy of charitable people and benevolent societies who, with their lavish offers of help, gather into the ministry, along with many noble, faithful men, a multitude who, amiable and pious as they may be, are of the kind who make no place in life for themselves, but wait till some one kindly makes one for them and drops them into it. I am convinced that the ministry can never have its true dignity or power till it is cut aloof from mendicancy, — till young men whose hearts are set on preaching make their way to the pulpit by the same energy and through the same difficulties which meet countless young men on their way to business and the bar. We believe the influence which brings men to the pulpit to be a far holier one. It ought, then, to be a far stronger one; and yet we trust less to its power than we do to the power of ambition and self-interest. It is a part of the whole unmanly way of treating ministers, of which there will be more to say.

It is not easy to describe, with our large views of personal liberty and personal rights, what methods of inspection and authentication it may be well to use on the admission of preachers to their sacred work; but what we most of all need is a clearer understanding and a fuller statement of what are the true conditions of a minister’s success, and so what qualities we have a right to ask of ourselves and of one another before we can feel that the true call to the ministry has been established. We must not draw the line too narrowly. There is nothing more striking about the ministry than the way in which very opposite men do equally effective work. You look at some great preacher, and you say, “There is the type. He who is like that can preach,” and just as your snug conclusion is all made, some other voice rings out from a neighboring pulpit, and the same power of God reaches the hearts of men in a totally new way, and your neat conclusion cracks and breaks. Spurgeon preaches at his Surrey Tabernacle, and Liddon preaches at St. Paul’s, and both are great preachers, and yet no two men could be more entirely unlike. It must be so. If the preacher is after all only the representative man, the representative Christian doing in special ways and with a special ordination that which all men ought to be doing for Christ and fellow-man, then there ought to be as many kinds of preachers as there are kinds of Christians; and there are as many kinds of Christians as there are kinds of men.

It is evident, then, that only in the largest way can the necessary qualities of the preacher be enumerated. With this provision such an enumeration may be attempted.

I must not dwell upon the first of all the necessary qualities, and yet there is not a moment’s doubt that it does stand first of all. It is personal piety, a deep possession in one’s own soul of the faith and hope and resolution which he is to offer to his fellow-men for their new life. Nothing but fire kindles fire. To know in one’s whole nature what it is to live by Christ; to be His, not our own; to be so occupied with gratitude for what He did for us and for what He continually is to us that His will and His glory shall be the sole desires of our life, I wish that I could put in some words of new and overwhelming force the old accepted certainty that that is the first necessity of the preacher, that to preach without that is weary and unsatisfying and unprofitable work, that to preach with that is a perpetual privilege and

And next to this I mention what we may call mental and spiritual unselfishness. I do not speak so much of a moral as of an intellectual quality. I mean that kind of mind which always conceives of truth with reference to its communication and receives any spiritual blessing as a trust for others. Both of these are capable of being cultivated, but I hold that there is a natural difference between men in this respect. Some men by nature receive truth abstractly. They follow it into its developments. They fathom its depths. But they never think of sending it abroad. They are so enwrapt in seeing what it is that they never care to test what it can do. Other men necessarily think in relation to other men, and their first impulse with every new truth is to give it its full range of power. Their love for truth is always complemented by a love for man. They are two clearly different temperaments. One of them does not and the other does make the preacher.

Again, hopefulness is a necessary quality of the true preacher’s nature. You know how out of every complicated condition of affairs one man naturally appropriates all the elements of hope, while another invariably gathers up all that tends to despair. The Latter kind of man may have his uses. There are tasks and times for which no prophet but Cassandra

is appropriate. There were duties laid on some of

the old Hebrew prophets which perhaps they might

have done with hearts wholly destitute of any ray of light. But such a temper is entirely out of keeping

[with the Christian gospel. The preacher may sometimes denounce, rebuke, and terrify. When he does that, he is not distinctively the preacher of Christianity. If his nature is such that he must dread and fear continually, he was not made to preach the gospel.

If I go on and mention a certain physical condition as essential to the preacher, I do so on very serious grounds. I am impressed with what seems to me the frivolous and insufficient way in which the health of the preacher is often treated. It is not simply that the sick minister is always hampered and restrained. It is not merely that the truth he has within him finds imperfect utterance. It is that the preacher’s work is the most largely human of all occupations. It brings a man into more multiplied relations with his fellow-man than any other work. It is not the doing of certain specified duties. You will be sadly mistaken if you think it is, and try to set jiown in your contract with your parish just what you are to do, and where your duties are to stop. It is the man offered as a medium through whom God’s influence may reach his fellow-men. Such an offering involves the whole man, and the whole man is body and soul together. Therefore the ideal preacher brings the perfectly healthy body with the perfectly sound soul. Remember that the care for your health, the avoid-, ance of nervous waste, the training of your voice, and everything else that you do for your body is not merely an economy of your organs that they may be fit for certain works; it is a part of that total self-consecration which cannot be divided, and which all together makes you the medium through which God may reach His children’s lives. I cannot but think that so high a view of the consecration of the body would convict many of the reputable sins against health in which ministers are apt to live, and do the fundamental good which the tinkering of the body by specifics for special occasions so completely fails to do.

I speak of only one thing more. I do not know how to give it a name, but I do think that in every man who preaches there should be something of that quality which we recognize in a high degree in some man of whom we say, when we see him in the pulpit, that he is a “born preacher.” Call it enthusiasm; call it eloquence; call it magnetism; call it the gift for preaching. It is the quality that kindles at the sight of men, that feel a keen joy at the meeting of truth and the human mind, and recognizes how God made them for each other. It is the power by which a man loses himself and becomes but the sympathetic

atmosphere between the truth on one side of him and the man on the other side of him. It is the inspiration, the possession, — what I have heard called the “demon” of preaching. Something of this quality there must be in every man who really preaches. He who wholly lacks it cannot be a preacher.

All of these qualities which I have thus enumerated exist in degrees. All of them are capable of culture if they exist at all. All of them are difficult to test except by the actual work of preaching. I grant, therefore, fully, that it is difficult to draw out of them a set of tests which the secretary of an education society can apply to candidates, — as a recruiting sergeant measures volunteers around the chest, — and mark them as fit or unfit for the ministry. But from ‘their enumeration I think still that there does rise up before us a clear picture of the man who ought to be a preacher. Full of the love of Christ, taking all truth and blessing as a trust, in the best sense didactic, hopeful, healthy, and counting health, as far as it is in his power, a part of his self-consecration; willing, not simply as so many men are, to bear sickness for God’s work, but willing to preserve health for God’s work; and going to his preaching with the enthusiasm that shows it is what God made him for. The nearer you can come to him, my friends, the better preachers you will be, the surer you may be that you have a right to be preachers at all.

And the next question will be, When you have the right kind of man to make a preacher of, what are the changes you will want him to undergo that he may become a preacher. The formal ordination which he will meet by and by will be nothing, of course, unless it signifies some real experiences which have filled these years since his soul heard what it recognized as God’s call to the ministry. We may set him apart from other men with what solemn ceremonies we may please, but he will be just like other men still, unless the power of the work to which he looks forward has entered into him during his careful preparation and made him different.

What does this difference consist in? What is the true preparation? First, and most evident, there are his special studies which have been filling him with their spirit. Most men begin really to study when they enter on the preparation for their professions. Men whose college life, with its general culture, has been very idle, begin to work when at the door of the professional school the work of their life comes into sight before them. It is the way in which a bird who has been wheeling vaguely hither and thither sees at last its home in the distance and flies towards it like an arrow. But shall I say to you how often I have thought that the very transcendent motives of the young minister’s study have a certain tendency to bewilder him and make his study less faithful than that of men seeking other professions from lower motives? The highest motive often dazzles before it illuminates. It is one of the ways in which the light within us becomes darkness. I never shall forget my first experience of a divinity school. I had come from a college where men studied hard but said nothing about faith. I had never been at a prayer-meeting in my life. The first place I was taken to at the seminary was the prayer-meeting; and never shall I lose the impression of the devoutness with which those men prayed and exhorted one another. Their whole souls seemed exalted and their natures were on fire. I sat bewildered and ashamed, and went away depressed. On the next day I met some of those same men at a Greek recitation. It would be little to say of some of the devoutest of them that they had not learnt their lessons. Their whole way showed that they never learnt their lessons; that they had not got hold of the first principles of hard, faithful, conscientious study. The boiler had no connectionwith the engine. The devotion did not touch the work which then and there was the work and the only work for them to do. By and by I found something of where the steam did escape to. A sort of amateur, premature preaching was much in vogue among us. We were in haste to be at what we called “our work.” A feeble twilight of the coming ministry we lived in. The people in the neighborhood dubbed us “parsonnettes.” Oh, my fellow-students, the special study of theology and all that appertains to it, that is what the preacher must be doing always; but he never can do it afterward as he can in the blessed days of quiet in Arabia, after Christ has called him, and before the Apostles lay their hands upon him. In many respects an ignorant clergy, however pious it may be, is worse than none at all. The more the empty head glows and burns, the more hollow and thin and dry it grows. “The knowledge of the priest,” said St. Francis de Sales, “is the eighth sacrament of the Church.”

But again, the minister’s preparation of character for his work involves something more intimate than the accumulation of knowledge. The knowledge which comes into him meets in him the intention of preaching, and, touched by that, undergoes a transformation. It is changed into doctrine. Doctrine means this, — truth considered with reference to its being taught. The reason why many men dislike the word doctrine is from their dislike of the whole notion of docility which is attached to it. Just as a citizen who is preparing himself for public office considers the law and character of the State not abstractly, but with reference to their application to the people whom he aspires to govern; just as the student in a normal school learns everything wkh an under-consciousness that he is going to teach that same thing some day, influencing all the methods of his learning; so the student preparing to be a preacher cannot learn truth as the mere student of theology for its own sake might do. He always feels it reaching out through him to the people to whom he is some day to carry it. He cannot get rid of this consciousness. It influences all his understanding. We can see that it must have its dangers. It will threaten the impartiality with which he will seek truth. It will tempt him to prefer those forms of truth which most easily lend themselves to didactic uses, rather than those which bring evidence of being most simply and purely true. That is the danger of all preachers. Against that danger the man meaning to be a preacher must be upon his guard, but he cannot avoid the danger by sacrificing the habit out of which the danger springs. He must receive truth as one who is to teach it. He cannot, he must not study as if the truth he sought were purely for his own culture or enrichment. And the result of such a habit, followed with due guard against its dangerous tendencies, will be threefold. It wil bring, first, a deeper and more solemn sense of responsibility in the search for truth; second, a desire to find the human side of every truth, the point at which every speculation touches humanity; and third, n, breadth which comes from the constant presence in the mind of the fact that truth has various aspects and presents itself in many ways to different people, according to their needs and characters.

Along with this preparation for preaching goes another. I said the man who studied with the intention of teaching learned to see and seize the human side of all divinity. It is true, also, that he learns to seize the divine side of all humanity. The sources from which his preaching is to be fed open on every side of him. I can remember how, as I looked forward to preaching, every book I read and every man I talked with seemed to teem with sermons. They all suggested something which it seemed as if the preacher of the gospel ought to say to men. I have not found the sermons in them all as I went on; not, I believe, because I was mistaken in thinking they were there, but because I have grown less eager or keen in finding them. I think there is no point in which ministers differ from one another, and in which we all differ from ourselves, more than in this, — this open-mindedness and power of appropriating out of everything the elements of true instruction. I find two classes of ministers of different habits in this respect. One of them abjures everything outside the narrowest lines of technically religious reading, has no knowledge of literature or art or science. The other minister cultivates them all, but his life in them is wholly outside of his life as a preacher. He changes his nature when he turns away from his sermon and takes a volume from his shelves. And his shelves themselves are divided. His secular and his religious books are ranged on opposite sides of his study. There is something better than either, — a true devotion to our work which will not let us leave it for a moment when we are once ordained; preachers once and preachers always; but a conception of our work so large that everything which a true man has any right to do or know may have some help to render it. And this is what you ought to be laying the foundation of in these preparatory days.

You will see that I place very great value on this preparation, in which a man who is devout and earnest comes to that fitness for his work which St. Paul describes in a word that he uses twice to Timothy, — “apt to teach,” “AiSaKTi/cos,” the didactic man. It is not something to which one comes by accident or by any sudden burst of fiery zeal. No doubt there is a power in the untutored utterance of the new convert that the ripe utterances of the educated preacher often lack; but it is not so much a praise to the new convert that he has that power as it is a shame to the educated preacher that he does not have it all the more richly in proportion to his education. And whatever else he has, the man who has leaped directly from his own experience into the pulpit will almost certainly be wanting in that breadth of sympathy and understanding which comes in the studies of the waiting years. He will know that other men are not made just like himself, but he will realize only himself, and preach to them as if they were. He will be like the man whom Archbishop Whately tells of, who was born blind and afterwards brought to sight. “The room he was in, he said, he knew must be part of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger than that one room.” So our new Christian experience only slowly realizes that it is but one part of the universal Christian life. Only as our study carries us from room to room does the whole house grow real to us.

Suppose our minister now actually preaching, and next let us ask, What are the elements of personal power which will make him successful? Remember success in preaching is no identical, invariable thing. It differs in all whom we call successful men, and so only the broadest and most general description can be given of the qualities that will secure it. Special successes will require special fitness. But he who has these qualities that I enumerate is sure to succeed somewhere and somehow.

And first among the elements of power which make success I must put the supreme importance of character, of personal uprightness and purity impressing themselves upon the men who witness them. There is a very striking remark in Lord Nugent’s “Memorials of John Hampden,” where, speaking of the English Reformation, lie is led to make this general observation: “Indeed, no hierarchy and no creed has ever been overthrown by the people on account only of its theoretical dogmas, so long as the practice of the clergy was incorrupt and conformable with their professions.” I believe that that is strictly true. And it is always wonderful to see how much stronger are the antipathies and sympathies which belong to men’s moral nature than those which are purely intellectual. Baxter tells us in an interesting passage how in the civil wars “an abundance of the ignorant sort of the common people which were civil did flock in to the Parliament and filled up their armies merely because they heard men swear for the Common Prayer and bishops, and heard men pray that were against them. And all the sober men that I was acquainted with who were against the Parliament were wont to say, ‘The king hath the better cause, but the Parliament the better men.’” The better men will always conquer the better cause. I suppose no cause could be

. so good that, sustained by bad men and opposed by

any error whose champions were men of spotless lives, it would not fall. The truth must conquer, but it must first embody itself in goodness. And in the ministry it is not merely by superficial prejudice, but by the soundest reason, that intellect and spirituality come to be tested, not by the views men hold so much as by the way in which they hold them, and the sort of men which their views seem to make of them. Whatever strange and scandalous eccentricities the ministry has sometimes witnessed, this is certainly true, and is always encouraging, that no man permanently succeeds in it who cannot make men believe that he is pure and devoted, and the only sure and lasting way to make men believe in one’s devotion and purity is to be what one wishes to be believed to be.

I put next to this fundamental necessity of character as an element of the preacher’s power the freedom from self-consciousness. My mind goes back to a young man whom I knew in the ministry, who did an amount of work at which men wondered, and who, dying early, left a power behind him whose influence will go on long after his name is forgotten; and the great feature of his character was his forgetfulness of self. He had not two questions to ask about every piece of work he did, — first, “How shall I do it most effectively for others?” and second, “How shall I do it most creditably to myself?” Only the first question ever seemed to come to him; and when a task was done so that it should most perfectly accomplish its designed result, he left it and went on to some new task. There is wonderful clearness and economy of force in such simplicity. No man ever yet thought whether he was preaching well without weakening his sermon. I think there are few higher or more delightful moments in a preacher’s life than that which comes sometimes when, standing before a congregation and haunted by questionings about the merit of your preaching, which you hate but cannot drive away, at last, suddenly or gradually, you find yourself taken into the power of your truth, absorbed in one sole desire to send it into the men whom you are preaching to; and then every sail is set, and your sermon goes bravely out to sea, leaving your self high and dry upon the beach, where it has been holding your sermon stranded. The second question disappears out of your work just in proportion as the first question grows intense. No man is perfectly strong until the first question has disappeared entirely. Devotion is like the candle, which, as Vasari tells us, Michael Angelo used to carry stuck on his forehead in a pasteboard cap, and which kept his own shadow from being cast upon his work while he was hewing out his statues.

The next element of a preacher’s power is genuine respect for the people whom he preaches to. I should not like to say how rare I think this power, or how plentiful a source of weakness I think its absence is. There is a great deal of the genuine sympathy of sentiment. There is a great deal of liking fou, certain people in our congregations who are interesting in themselves and who are interested in what interests us. There is a great deal of the feeling that the clergy need the cooperation of the laity, and so must cultivate their intimacy. But of a real profound respect for the men and women whom we preach to, simply as men and women, of a deep value for the capacity that is in them, a sense that we are theirs and not they ours, I think that there is far too little. But without this there can be no real strength in the preacher. We patronize the laity now that our power of domineering over them has been mercifully taken away. Many a time the tone of a clergyman who has talked of the relations of the preacher and the people, setting forth, with the best will in the world, their mutual functions, reminds one of the sermon of the mediaBval preacher, who, discoursing on this same subject, on the necessary cooperation of the clergy and the laity, took his text out of Job i. 14: “The oxen were ploughing and the asses feeding beside them.” There is no good preaching in the supercilious preacher. No man preaches well who has not a strong and deep appreciation of humanity. The minister is often called upon to give up the society of the cultivated and learned to whom he would most be drawn, but he finds his compensation and strength in knowing man, simply as man, and learning his inestimable worth.

I think, again, that it is essential to the preacher’s success that he should thoroughly enjoy his work. I mean in the actual doing of it, and not only in its idea. No man to whom the details of his task are repulsive can do his task well constantly, however full he may be of its spirit. He may make one bold dash at it and carry it over all his disgusts, but he cannot work on at it year after year, day after day. Therefore, count it not merely a perfectly legitimate pleasure, count it an essential element of your power, if you can feel a simple delight in what you have to do as a minister, in the fervor of writing, in the glow of speaking, in standing before men and moving them, in contact with the young. The more thoroughly you enjoy it, the better you will do it all.

I almost hesitate as I speak of the next element of fche preacher’s power. I almost doubt by what name I shall call it to give the impression of the thing I mean. Perhaps there is no better name than Gravity. I mean simply that grave and serious way of looking at life which, while it never repels the true lightheadedness of pure and trustful hearts, welcomes into a manifest sympathy the souls of men who are oppressed and burdened, anxious and full of questions which for the time at least have banished all laughter from their faces. I know, indeed, the miserableness of all mock gravity. I think I am as much disgusted at it as anybody. The abuse and satire that have been heaped upon it are legitimate enough, though somewhat cheap. The gravity that is assumed, that merely hides with solemn front the lack of thought and feeling, that is put on as the uniform of a profession, that consists in certain forms, and is shocked at any serious thought of life more truly grave than it is, but which happens to show itself under other forms which it chooses to call frivolous, this is worthy of all satire and contempt. The merely solemn ministers are very empty, and deserve all that has been heaped upon them of contempt through all the age. They are cheats and shams. As they stand with their little knobs of prejudice down their straight coats of precision, they are like nothing so much as the chest of drawers which Mr. Bob Sawyer showed to Mr. Winkle in his little surgery: “Dummies, my dear boy,” said he to his impressed, astonished visitor; u half the drawers have nothing in them, and the other half don’t open.” I know what the abuse of such men means. I know there are men who deserve it. But I cannot help thinking that we have about come to the time when all of that abuse is of the safe and feeble character which belongs to all satire of unpopular foibles and abuses which are in decay. I think that at least there is another creature who ought to share with the clerical prig the contempt of Christian people. I mean the clerical jester in all the varieties of his unpleasant existence. He appears in and out of the pulpit. He lays his hands on the most sacred things, and leaves defilement upon all he touches. He is full of Bible jokes. He talks about the Church’s sacred symbols in the language of stale jests that have come down from generations of feeble clerical jesters before him. The doctrines which, if they mean anything, mean life or death to souls, he turns into material for chaff that flies back and forth, like the traditional banter of the Thames, between the clerical watermen who ply their boats on this side or that side of the river of Theology. There are passages in the Bible which are soiled v forever by the touches which the hands of ministers who delight in cheap and easy jokes have left upon them.

I think there is nothing that stirs one’s indignation more than this, in all he sees of ministers. It is a purely wanton fault. What is simply stupid everywhere else becomes terrible here. The buffoonery which merely tries me when I hear it from a gang of laborers digging a ditch beside my door angers and frightens me when it comes from the lips of the captain who holds the helm or the surgeon on whose skill my life depends. You will not misunderstand me, I am sure. The gravity of which I speak is not inconsistent with” the keenest perception of the ludicrous side of things. It is more than consistent with — it is even necessary to — humor. Humor involves the perception of the true proportions of life. It is one of the most helpful qualities that the preacher can possess. There is no extravagance which deforms the pulpit which would not be modified and repressed, often entirely obliterated, if the minister had a true sense of humor. It has softened the bitterness of controversy a thousand times. You cannot encourage it too much. You cannot grow too familiar with the books of all ages which have in them the truest humor, for the truest humor is the bloom of the highest life. Read George Eliot and Thackeray, and, above all, Shakespeare. They will help you to keep from extravagances without fading into insipidity. They will preserve your gravity while they save you from pompous solemnity. But humor is something very different from frivolity. People sometimes ask whether it is right to make people laugh in church by something that you say from the pulpit, — as if laughter were always one invariable thing; as if there were not a smile which swept across a great congregation like the breath of a May morning, making it fruitful for whatever good thing might be sowed in it, and another laughter that was like the crackling of thorns under a pot. The smile that is stirred by true humor and the smile that comes from the mere tickling of the fancy are as different from one another as the tears that sorrow forces from the soul are from the tears that you compel a man to shed by pinching him.

And there is no delusion greater than to think that you commend your work and gain an influence over people by becoming the clerical humorist. It builds a wall between your fellow-men and you. It makes them less inclined to seek you in their spiritual need. I think that many of us feel this, and have a sort of dread when we see laymen growing familiar with clergymen’s society. That society is on the whole lofty and inspiring, but there are some things in it of which you who are soon to become clergymen must beware. Keep the sacredness of your profession clear and bright even in little things. Refrain from all joking about congregations, flocks, parish visits, sermons, the mishaps of the pulpit, or the makeshifts of the study. Such joking is always bad, and almost always stupid; but it is very common, and it takes the bloom off a young minister’s life. This is the reason why so many people shrink, I believe, from personally knowing the preachers to whom they listen with respect and gratitude. They fear what they so often find. But really the minister’s life may be a help and enforcement of all his preaching. The quality which makes it so is this which I call gravity. It has a delicate power of discrimination. It attracts all that it can help and it repels all that could harm it or be harmed by it. It admits the earnest and simple with a cordial welcome. It shuts out the impertinent and insincere inexorably. Pure gravity is like the hinges of the wonderful gates of the ancient labyrinth, so strong that no battery could break them down, but so delicately hung that a child’s light touch could make them swing back and let him in.

There is another source of power which I can hardly think of as a separate quality, but rather as the sum and result of all the qualities which I have been naming. I jaiean Courage. It is the indispensable requisite of any true ministry. The timid minister is as bad as the timid surgeon. Courage is good everywhere, but it is necessary here. If you are afraid of men and a slave to their opinion, go and do something else. Go and make shoes to fit them. Go even and paint pictures which you know are bad but which suit their bad taste. But do not keep on all your life preaching sermons which shall say not what God sent you to declare, but what they hire you to say. Be courageous. Be independent. Only remember where the true courage and independence comes from. Courage in the ministry is, I think, one of those qualities which cannot be healthily acquired if it is sought for directly. It must come as health comes in the body, as the result of the seeking for other things. It must be from a sincere respect for men’s higher nature that you must grow bold to resist their whims. He who begins by despising men will often end by being their slave. A passionate desire to do men good is always the surest safeguard that they shall not do us harm. Jesus himself was bold before men out of the infinite love which He felt for men. That was the way in which He ruled them from His cross, and was their master because He was their servant even unto death.

There is one other topic upon which I wished to dwell in this lecture, but on this I must speak very briefly. I wanted to try to estimate with you some of the dangers to a man’s own character which come from his being a preacher. The first of these dangers, beyond all doubt, is Self-conceit. In a certain sense every young minister is conceited. He begins his ministry in a conceited condition. At least every man begins with extravagant expectations of what his ministry is to result in. We come out from it by and by. A man’s first wonder when he begins to preach is that people do not come to hear him. After a while, if he is good for anything, he begins to wonder that they do. He finds out that old Adam is too strong for young Melanchthon. It is not strange that it should be so. It is not to the young minister’s discredit that it should be so. The student for the ministry has to a large extent comprehended the force by which he is to work, but he has not measured the resistance that he is to meet. He knows the power of the truth of which he is all full, but he has not estimated the sin of which the world is all full. The more earnest and intense and full of love for God and man he is, the more impossible does it seem that he should not do great things for his Master. And then the character of men’s ministries, it seems to me, depends very largely upon the ways in which they pass out of that first self-confidence and upon what condition comes afterwards when it is gone.

The first way in which life affects this self-confidence and lifts men out of their conceit is by Success, by letting us see the work which we are undertaking actually going on under our hands. It is only in poor men and in the lower things that success increases self-conceit. In every high work and in men worthy of it, success is always sure to bring humility. “Recognition,” said Hawthorne once, “makes a man very modest.” The knowledge that you are really accomplishing results, and the reassurance of that knowledge by the judgment of your fellow-men, opens to you the deeper meaning of your work, shows you how great it is, makes you ashamed of all the praise men give you, as you see gradually how much better your work might have been done. I think that some of the noblest and richest characters among ministers in all times are those who have been humiliated by men’s praises and enlightened by success.

But there is another way by which men go out of their first satisfaction, by a door directly opposite to this, — by Failure. Failure and success to really working ministers are only relative. Remember that no true man wholly succeeds or wholly fails. But the main difference in effect between what we call success and what we call failure in the ministry is here: success makes a man dwell upon and be thankful for how much a preacher can do; failure makes a man think how much there is which no preacher can do, and is apt to weigh him down into depression. It confronts him with the magnitude of the task of the Christian ministry, not as a great temptation, but as a great burden. He is paralyzed as Hamlet was.

u The time is out of joint: 0 cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”

Such an end of a young man’s first high hopes ia terrible to see. The very power that once made him strong now weakens him. The weight that was his ballast and helped his speed sinks him when once the leak has come. There is no help except in a profounder retreat of the whole nature upon God, — such a perception of Him and of His dearness as shall take off our heavy responsibility and make us ready to fail for Him with joy as well as to succeed for Him, if such shall be His choice; and ready to work as hard for Him in failure as in success, because we work not for success but for Him. The drawing of the man back into God by failure is always a noble sight, and no region of life has such noble specimens of it to show as the Christian ministry.

There is another refuge when the young preacher’s first self-conceit is shaken. It is into another self-conceit waich is smaller than the first. The beleaguered householder refuses to surrender, and retreats from his strong outer ramparts, defending one line after another till at last he dwells only in his most mean and worthless chamber. A man makes up his mind that he is not going to convert the world. The strongholds of the Prince of Evil evidently will not fall before him. He is to leave the unbuilt kingdom of God very much as he found it when he came into the ministry. But then he falls back upon some petty pride. “My church is full;” “My name is prominent in the movements of my denomination;” “My sermons win the compliments of people;” or simply this, “I am a minister. I bear a dignity that these laymen cannot boast. I have an ordination which separates me into an indefinable, mysterious privilege.” Here is the beginning of many of the fantastic and exaggerated theories about the ministry. The little preacher magnifies his office in a most unpauline way. And you hear a man to whom no one cares to listen quoting the solemn words of God about “whether men will bear or whether they will forbear,” as if they had been spoken to him as much as to Ezekiel.

What shall we say then? “What is the true escape from the crudeness of the untried preacher which settles and centres all his thought upon himself? It is an escape which many a preacher has found and gradually passed into. It is the growing devotion of his life to God, the more and more complete absorption of his being in the seeking of God’s glory. As he goes on, the work unfolds itself. It outgoes all his powers. But as he looks over its increasing vastness he sees it on every side touching the omnipotence of God. As he sees more and more clearly that he will never do what he once hoped to do, it becomes clear to him at the same time that God will do it in His own time and way. His own disappointment is swallowed up and drowned in the promise of his Lord’s success. He becomes a true John Baptist. He is happy with a higher joy, and works with an energy that he never knew before. This is the true refuge of the minister in the disenchantment of his earliest dreams. ^-~-^”

Another of the dangers of the clergyman’s life is Self-indulgence. The ways and methods of the minister’s work are almost wholly at his own control. It is impossible for him to reduce his life to a routine. There are but few tests which he must meet at special times, as a business man must meet his notes when they are due. And a great deal of his work is of that sort which requires spontaneity for its best execution. The result of all these causes working together is to create in many a minister a certain feeling that his faithfulness in his work is not to be judged as other men’s faithfulness in their work is.

Indeed, I think, the very consciousness of laboring under a loftier motive has often a tendency to weaken the conscientiousness with which each minute detail of work is met. There is a lurking Antinomianism in many a most arminian study. We are apt to become men of moods, thinking we cannot work unless we feel like it. There is just enough of the artistic element in what we have to do, to let us fall into the artist’s ways and leave our brushes idle when the sky frowns or the head aches. But the artistic element is, after all, the smallest element in the true sermon. Its best qualities depend on those moral and spiritual conditions which may be always present in the devoted servant of God. And so the first business of the preacher is to conquer the tyranny of his moods, and to be always ready for his work. It can be done. The man who has not learned to do it has not really reached the secret of Jesus, which was such utter love for His Father and man, between whom He stood, as obliterated all thought of Himself save as a medium, through which the divine might come down to the human. We read of Jesus that He again and again grew heavy in spirit. In utter weariness, sometimes, when His work was done, He would withdraw into a mountain, or put out in a boat upon the lake. We can feel the fluctuations of that humanity of His, nd, interpreting it by our own, we can seem to see how one bright morning by the seaside He was exu-UBI7HRSIT;

berant and joyous, and on another morning He would be sad and burdened. We can trace the differences in the kind of preaching of the two different days. But through it all there is nothing in the least like self-indulgence. We are sure that no day ever went without its preaching, because it found him moody and depressed. He did no mighty works in Nazareth; but it was because of the people’s unbelief, not because of his own reluctance. So it may be with us. It is part of the privilege of our humanity, it is part of the advantage of our people in having men and not machines for ministers, that we preach the truth in various lights, or shades, according as God brightens or darkens our own experience; but any mood which makes us unfit to preach at all, or really weakens our will to preach, is bad, and can be broken through. Then is the time for the conscience to bestir itself and for the man to be a man.

I wish that it were possible for one to speak to the laity of our churches frankly and freely about their treatment of the clergy. The clergy are largely what the laity make them. And though one may look wholly without regret upon the departure of that reverence, which seems to have clothed the preacher’s office in our fathers’ days, I think he must have many misgivings about the weaker substitute for it, which in many instances has taken its place. It was not good that the minister should be worshipped and made an oracle. It is still worse that he should be flattered and made a pet. And there is such a tendency in these days among our weaker people. I have already spoken of the way in which many men are petted into the ministry. It is possible for such a man, if he has popular gifts, to be petted all through his ministry, never once to come into strong contact with other men, or to receive one good hard knock of the sort that brings out manliness and character The people who gather closest around a minister’s life, believing his beliefs, and accepting his standards, make a sort of cushion between him and the unbelief and wickedness which smite other men in the face and wound them mercilessly at every turn. It is not wholly unnatural. The minister stands in a unique position to the community. In no other man’s private affairs, his health, his comfort, his freedom from financial care, are so many people so directly interested. It is not strange that that interest in him and care for him, which ought simply to put him where, without personal fear or personal indebtedness, he may bravely and independently be himself and speak out his own soul, should often be corrupted vnto a poison of his manhood, and a temptation to his lelf-indulgence. It is beyond all doubt the weak point of our American voluntary system which brings the minister into those close personal relations to his people, which on the whole are good and healthy, but lrhich have this one defect and danger.

If you have read the life of Frederick Robertson you know how hateful many of the incidents of the life of a popular minister were to him. So they must be to every true man. If a man is not wholly true they find out his weak point and fix upon it. He begins to expect different treatment from other men. His personal woes and pains seem to him things of public interest. He grows first unhuman in the separation from the ordinary standards of his race, and that makes him inhuman, unsympathetic. The weak is always cruel.

Mr. Galton, in his work on “Hereditary Genius,” summing up the result of his reading in clerical biographies, declares that “A gently complaining and fatigued spirit is that in which Evangelical Divines are very apt to pass their days.” These words tell perfectly a story that we all know who have been intimate with many ministers. That which ought to be the manliest of all professions has a tendency, practically, to make men unmanly. Men make appeals for sympathy that no true man should make. They take to themselves St. Paul’s pathos without St. Paul’s strength. Against that tendency, my friends, set your whole force. Fear its insidiousness. “I feel no intoxicating effect,” wrote Macaulay when the first flush of his success was on him, “but a man may be drunk without knowing it.” Insist on applying to yourself tests which others refuse to apply to you.

Resent indulgences which are not given to men of other professions. Learn to enjoy and be sober; learn to suffer and be strong. Never appeal for sympathy. Let it find you out if it will. Count your manliness the soul of your ministry and resist all attacks upon it however sweetly they may come.

I had hoped to say some words, to-day, about one other danger of the preacher’s life, I mean the danger of narrowness. We all live within the rings of concentric circles. They extend one beyond another till they come to that outmost circle of all, the horizon where humanity touches divinity, as the earth meets the sky. Now I hold that all that is by God’s appointment, and is intended for our best good. The narrowness is for the sake of breadth. I hold that every smaller circle is meant to carry the eye out to the next larger than itself, and so, at last, to the largest of all. You stand firm on your one little spot, and thence you look out and find yourself like Tennyson’s eagle, “ringed with the azure world.” So every smaller circle of your moral life is meant to carry you out, and make you realize the larger circles. You may be a better minister because you are clear in your denominational position as a Congregationalist or Episcopalian; and because you are a minister you may be a better man. The danger is lest the smaller circle, instead of tempting the sight onward, jealously confines it to itself. Narrowness is to be escaped, not by deserting our special function, but by compelling it to open to us the things beyond itself. You will not be a better man by pretending that you are not a Christian, nor a better Christian by pretending to have no dogmatic faith. The true breadth comes by the strength of your own belief making you tolerant of other believers; and by the earnestness of your Christianity teaching you your brotherhood even to the most unchristian men.

I must stop here. I have spoken very freely of these dangers and hindrances with which the preacher’s occupations beset his character. Yet you must not misunderstand me. There is no occupation in which it is so possible, nay so easy to live a noble life. These tares grow rank only because the soil is rich. The wheat grows rich beside them. The Christian ministry is the largest field for the growth of a human soul that this world offers. In it he who is faithful must go on learning more and more forever. His growth in learning is all bound up with his growth in character. Nowhere else do the moral and intellectual so sympathize, and lose or gain together. The minister must grow. His true growth is not necessarily a change of views. It is a change of view. It is not revolution. It is progress. It is a continual climbing which opens continually wider prospects. It repeats the experience of Christ’s disciples of whom fcheir Lord was always making larger men and then giving them the larger truth of which their enlarged natures had become capable. Once more, I rejoice for you that this is the ministry in which you are to spend your lives.