The Preacher in His Work

Ttthen I was just about to begin the writing * of this lecture, I chanced to be thrown for a day or two into the company of a young man who had been engaged in the work of the ministry only a few months. He was in the first flush and fervor of his new experience, and in listening to him I recalled much of the spirit with which I myself began many years ago. The spirit had not passed away, but the first freshness of many impressions had been ripened, I hope, into something better, but still into something soberer. He revived for me the delight of that new and strange relation to his fellow-men which comes when a young man who thus far in his life has had others ministering to him, finds the conditions now reversed and other men are looking up to him for culture. There is the sober joy of responsibility. There is the surprised recognition of something which we have learned in some one of our schools of books or life, and counted useless, which now some man we meet welcomes when we give it to him as if it were the one thing for which he had been always waiting. There is the hopefulness that fears no failure. There is the pleasure of a new knowledge of ourselves as others begin to call out in us what we never knew was there. There is the joy of v being trusted and responded to. There is the deepened sacredness of prayer and of communion with God when we go to Him, not merely for ourselves and for the great vague world, but for a people whom we have begun to love and call our own, while we know that they are His. There is the discovery of the better and devouter nature in men. There is the interest of countless new details and the inspiration of the noblest purpose for which a man can live. All these together make up the happiness and hope of those bright days in which a strong and healthy and devout young man is just entering the ministry of the Gospel.

I wish to speak to you to-day about the preacher in his work, and what I shall have to say will naturally divide itself into suggestions with reference to the nature, the method, and the spirit of that work.

I must recur to what I said in the first lecture about the true character of preaching. Preaching is the communication of truth through a man to men. The human element is essential in it, and not merely accidental. There cannot really be a sermon in a stone, whatever lessons the stone may have to teach. i This being so, we must carry out the importance of the human element to its full consequence. It is not only necessary for a sermon that there should be a human being to speak to other human beings, but for a good sermon there must be a man who can speak well, whose nature stands in right relations to those to whom he speaks, who has brought his life close to theirs with sympathy. In every highest task there is an instinctive tendency of men to shirk and hide under the protection of some idea of fate. And very often we hear ministers trying to escape responsibility by vague and foolish statements that the truth is everything, and that it ought not to make any difference to a congregation how or from whom they hear it. It is a latent fatalism, a readiness to count out of the highest operations the play of human free will and choice, which lies at the bottom of such speeches. The same reason which requires a man for a preacher at all requires as wise and strong and well-furnished, as skilful and as eloquent a man as can be found or made. The duty of making yourself acceptable to people, and winning by all manly ways their confidence in you, and in the truth which you tell, is one that is involved in the very fact of your being a preacher. And the dignity of the purpose gives dignity to many details which in themselves are trivial. The study of language and of oratory, which would belittle you if they were merely undertaken for your own culture, are noble when you undertake them in order that your tongue may be a worthier minister of God’s truth; and the assiduous attention to people, and their tastes and habits and ways of thinking, which would be slavery if it had no object besides their pleasure or your own repute, is a lofty exercise, if it has for its purpose the finding out on which side of every man you can best bring to him the truth. Here stands a man, and two other men v are watching him. Both of them are studying his character. Both want to know what he thinks about, what his tastes are, how he spends his time. One of them is trying to find how he can best win from him a dollar or a vote. The other is trying to see what v is his true way to preach the Gospel to that fellow-man. There are the meanest and the noblest relations which any man can occupy toward his fellow-man. The first is ignominious beyond description. It is a relation too low for any man to hold. A true man would rather starve than occupy it. But the other is a relation in which every man must stand who means to really preach to any brother. It is but the effort after what it is in our feeble power to attain of that, knowledge of humanity which was in Him who “knew what was in man,” and who, therefore, “spake as never man spake.”

It follows from this that the work of the preacher and the pastor really belong together, and ought not to be separated. I believe that very strongly. Every now and then somebody rises with a plea that is very familiar and specious. He says, how much better it would be if only there could be a classification of ministers and duties. Let some ministers be wholly v preachers, and some be wholly pastors. Let one class visit the flock, to direct and comfort them; and the other class stand in the pulpit. You will not go far in your ministry before you will be tempted to echo that desire. The two parts of a preacher’s work are always in rivalry. When you find that you can never sit down to study and write without the faces of the people, who you know need your care, looking out at you from the paper; and yet you never can go out among your people without hearing your forsaken study reproaching you, and calling you home, you may easily come to believe that it would be good indeed if you could be one or other of two things, and not both; either a preacher or a pastor, but not the two together. But I assure you you are wrong. The two things are not two, but one. There may be preachers here and there with such a deep, intense insight into the general humanity, that they can speak to men without knowing the men to whom they speak. Such preachers are very rare; and other preachers, who have not their power, trying to do it, are sure to preach to some unreal, unhuman man of their own imagination. There are some pastors here and there with such a constantly lofty and spiritual view of little things, that they can go about from house to house, year after year, and deal with men and women at their common work, and lift the men and women to themselves, and never fall to the level of the men and women whom they teach. Such pastors are rare; and other men, trying to do it, and never in more formal way from the pulpit treating truth in its larger aspects, are sure to grow frivolous gossips or tiresome machines. The preacher needs to be pastor, thaW he may preach to real men. The pastor must be preacher, that he may keep the dignity of his work alive. The preacher, who is not a pastor, grows remote. The pastor, who is not a preacher, grows petty. Never be content to let men truthfully say of you, “He is a preacher, but no pastor;” or, “He is a pastor, but no preacher.” Be both; for you cannot really be one unless you also are the other.

Of the pastor’s function considered by itself there is, I think, but very little to be said, I count of little worth all sets of rules, all teaching directly on the subject. The books that teach a pastor’s duty except in the way of the most general suggestion are almost worthless. They have the fault which belongs to all books on behavior, which are needless for those who do behave well and useless for those who do not. The powers of the pastor’s success are truth and sympathy together. “Speaking the truth in Love,” is - the golden text to write in the book where you keep the names of your people, so that you may read it every time you go to visit them. Sympathy without truth makes a plausible pastor, but one whose hold on a parish soon grows weak. Men feel his touch upon them soft and tender, but never vigorous and strong. Truth without sympathy makes the sort of pastor whom people say that they respect but to whom they seldom go and whom they seldom care to see coming to them. But where the two unite, so far as the two unite in you, I think there will be nothing that will surprise you more than to discover how certain their power is. The man who has them cannot help saying the right word at the right time. You go to some poor crushed and broken heart; you tell what truth you know, the truth of the ever ready and inexhaustible forgiveness, the truth of the unutterable love, the truth of the unbroken life of immortality; and you let the sorrow for that heart’s sorrow which you truly feel, utter itself in whatever true and simple ways it will; then you come away sick at heart because you have so miserably failed; but by and by you find that you have not failed, v’ that you really did bring elevation and comfort. You cannot help doing it if you go with truth and sympathy. This is the constant experience of the minister. This is the ground of confidence and hope with which he presses on from year to year. I am inclined to think, as 1 have already intimated, that the trouble of much of our pastoral work is in its pettiness. It is pitched in too low a key. It tries to meet the misfortunes of life with comfort and not with inspiration, offering inducements to patience and the suggestions of compensation in this life or another which lies beyond, rather than imparting that higher and stronger tone which will make men despise their sorrows and bear them easily in their search for truth and nobleness, and the release that comes from forgetfulness of self and devotion to the needs of other people. The truest help which one can render to a man who has any of the inevitable burdens of life to carry is not to take his burden off but to call out his best strength that he may be able to bear it. The pastorship of Jesus is characterized everywhere byTtsTrankness and manliness. He meets Nicodemus with a staggering assertion of the higher4” needs of the spirit. The man who wants the inneritance divided is encountered with a strong rebuke of his presumptuous selfishness. And Simon Peter has the assurance of his forgiveness offered him in a s demand for work. All three of these instances and many others are richly suggestive of contrasts with what many of the ministers of Christ would do in the same circumstances. It is the utter absence of sentimentality in Christ’s relations with men that makes his tenderness so exquisitely touching. It is in the power, even in the effort, to awake the stronger

<s nature of mankind that our modern pastorship is apt to be deficient. It ministers to women more than to y men. It tries to soothe with consolation more than to fire with ambition or to sting with shame.

Perhaps there will be no better place than this for me to say that it is in the absence of the heroic element that our current Christianity most falls short of the Christianity of Gospel times. We keep still the heroic language, but does it not often suggest strange incongruities? Have not the pictures of some of our hymns, for instance, seemed sometimes strangely out of keeping with the lips that sang them? A row of comfortable, self-contented, conservative gentlemen and ladies standing up, for instance, and singing “Onward, Christian soldiers marching as to war,” or “Hold the fort for I am coming, Jesus signals still,” reminds us all the more of how un military and unheroic are the lives they live. It is not the mere difference of dress. I doubt not the Christians in the Catacombs, or the colliers who listened to Whitefield when he preached at Bristol, might have sang hymns that were built on the same imagery, and nothing incongruous would have been suggested. And yet they were as evidently men of peace as are our congregations. But they were conscious of and showed the true intenseness of spiritual warfare. They knew the fight within, the terrible reality of the enemy, the terrible suspense of the struggle, the glorious delight of triumph. No, it is the unheroic character of modern life and especially of modern Christianity. The life of Jesus Christ was radical. It went to the deep v roots of things. It claimed men’s noblest and freest action. We, if we are his ministers, must bring the heroic into the unheroic life of men, demanding of them truth, breadth, bravery, self-sacrifice, the freedom from conventionalities and an elevation to highs standards of thought and life. We must bring men’s ’ life up to Him and not bring Him down to men’s life. This is the Christian pastor’s privilege and duty.

It seems to me that a large part of the troubles and mistakes of our pastoral life come from our having too high an estimate of men’s present condition and too low an estimate of their possibility. If this be true, then what we need to make us better pastors is more of the Gospel which reveals at once man’s imperfect condition and his infinite hope. Jesus was the perfect pastor in the way in which He showed V men what they were and what they might become. He never deceived and never discouraged them. The contact with His perfect humanity brought them at once shame and hope. And when He comes near to us now, when His Spirit does His appointed work of taking Him and showing Him to us, the same power, combined of shame and hope, comes into our lives. Let that be the model of our pastorship.

But to return more definitely to preaching. I think that one of the preliminary considerations about it — one characteristic of it so prominent that we are sure that He who sent men out to preach must have designed it — is that which I have already once alluded to, the pleasure that belongs to it, the way in which it thoroughly interests the best parts of the man who does it. I remember, as I recur to it, how much I have already said about it, and may have yet to say; but it is much upon my mind. For I think there is something unhappy in the frequency with which ministers dwell upon their work as if it were full of hardships and disappointments. Every power of man which has its natural and legitimate purpose brings two pleasures, one in the anticipation and attainment of its end, the other in its own exercise. There is a delight in exercising faculties as well as in doing work, and in all the best activities of men the two will go together. This is all true of preaching. Its highest joy is in the great ambition that is set before it, the glorifying of the Lord and the saving of the. souls of men. No other joy on earth compares with that. The ministry that does not feel that joy is dead. But in behind that highest joy, beating in humble unison with it, as the healthy body thrills in sympathy with the deep thoughts and pure desires of the mind and soul, the best ministries have always been conscious of another pleasure which belonged to the very doing of the work itself. As we read the lives of all the most effective preachers of the past, or as we meet the men who are powerful preachers of the Word to-day, we feel how certainly and how deeply the very exercise of their ministry delights them. The best sermons always seem to carry the memory of the excited spring or quiet happiness, with which they are written or uttered. The soldier enjoys the battle as well as the victory. The carpenter enjoys the saw and plane as well as they prospect of the full-built house. When Wilberforce heard of Macaulay’s first offer of a chance of public life, he was silent for a moment, and then his face lighted up and he clapped his hand to his ear and cried,” Ah, I hear that shout again. Hear! Hear! What a life it was I In the case of the preacher this secondary pleasure, if I may call it so, consists in the enjoyment of close relationship with fellow-men and in the orator’s delight in moving men. The fastidious man or the cold man loses a great deal of the stimulus and unfading freshness of the ministry. Sometimes this pleasure grows very keen. I always remember one special afternoon, years ago, when the light faded from the room where I was preaching and the faces melted together into a unit as of one impressive pleading man, and I felt them listening when I could hardly see them; I remember this accidental day as one of the times when the sense of the privilege of having to do with people as their preacher came out almost overpoweringly. It is good to treasure all such enjoyment of the actual work of preaching. It bridges over the times when the higher enthusiasm flags, and it gives a deeper delight to it when it is strongest.

I think that as we study the preaching of Jesus we admire above almost everything the way in which He was at once the Leader and the Brother of the v men He taught. He spake as one having authority always, but always His power was brought near to men by the complete way in which He made Himself one of them, by the evident reality with which He bore their sins and carried their sorrows. So that by as much as the Son of God was above men in His nature, by so much the more He came near to them in his sympathies and was a truer Son of Man than any of the wonderfully human prophets of the Old Testament, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, to whom the same name is constantly applied. Now when we compare the ordinary preacher’s life with that of Jesus, I think we see how much more apt he is to have kept the position of leader than the position of brother of the people. At any rate, what we miss in a great deal of our preaching is that beautiful blending of the two whose power we recognize in the word and work of Jesus. We are the leaders of the people. Woe to our preaching if in any feeble, false humility we abdicate that place. The people pass us by and pity us if they see us standing in our pulpits saying, “We know nothing particular about these things whereof we preach; we have no authority; only come here and we will tell you what we think, and you shall tell us what you think, and so perhaps together we can strike out a little light.” That is not preaching. There has been pulpit talk like that, and men have always passed it by and hurried on to find some one who at least pretended to tell them the will of God. No, the preacher must be a leader, but v his leadership must be bound in with his brotherhood. It was as Man that Christ led men to God. It must be as men that we carry on the work of Christ and help men’s souls to Him. This truth seems to me to lie at the bottom of all the best successes, and the forgetfulness of it at the bottom of all the worst failures of the ministry. There is no real leadership of people for a preacher or a pastor except that which comes as the leadership of the Incarnation came, by a thorough entrance into the lot of those whom one would lead.

And again, the limits of the preacher’s leadership are very clear, and it is necessary that the young v- ’ minister should know them. Sometimes a preacher finds himself — and oftener still, some foolish friends by his side will make him think himself — one of the wisest men, perhaps the wisest man in his small circle upon any of the ordinary topics of thought, upon art, or politics, or letters, or education. It is good for him to use his wisdom as it is for any other man. It is wrong for him to leave his wisdom unused as it is for any other man. He may do much good to the people, he may indirectly help his own peculiar mission by sharing his knowledge with them. One of the most interesting pages of clerical life of which I know is Norman Macleod’s account of his lectures to the weavers at Newmilns, on geology. Would that more of us were able to follow his example. All that is well; but we must know that there is nothing in our quality as preachers Jhat gives us any claim to be authoritative guides to men in any of those things, neither in politics, nor in education, nor in science. Qn one thing only we may speak with authority, and that is the will of God. Nor even in the details of religious thought need we aspire to be their guides. I do not want — and certainly I know that if I did want I never should be able — to make the people who listen to me accept every view of Christian truth which I utter before them. I have no reason to believe that what I utter is clothed with an infallibility. In much of what one preaches he is satisfied if men take home what he says as the utterance of one who has thought upon the subject of which he speaks and wishes them to think and judge. Surely he does not declare to them his belief about the method of the atonement, with the same authority with which he bids them repent of sin, and warns them that without holiness no man shall see the Lord. Such line of difference every true preacher draws, and freely lets men see where it runs. If you attempt to claim authority for all your speculations you will end by losing it for your most sure and solemn declarations of God’s will.

One difficulty of the preacher’s office is its sub-1 jection to flippant gossip, along with its exemption from severe and healthy criticism. There are people enough always to find out a minister’s little faults, and let him hear of them; but it is wonderful how he can go on year after year, without being once brought up to the judgment-seat of sound intelligence, and hearing what is the real worth of the words that he is saying, and the work that he is doing. There are plenty of people to do for him the office of the man whom Philip of Macedon kept in his service, to tell him every day before he gave audience, “Philip, remember thou art mortal,” but hardly ever does he meet that sound and prompt investigation of his special work which comes to the author from his public, or the lawyer from his judge. v’ This makes for many men the worst possible condition to labor in — a constant fretting by small cavils, i and no large estimation of the whole. It is like standing in a desultory dropping fire without being allowed to plunge into the battle, and settle at once “the question of life or death. It makes supremelyessential to the minister that independence of men’s judgments which can only come by the most absolute dependence on the judgment of the Lord, by living “ever in the great Taskmaster’s eye.”

I should have liked to speak of one other danger of the preacher from his work. It is that which comes from the paralysis of great ideas. There are times when the vast thoughts of God stimulate us to action. There are other times when they seem to take all power of action out of us. These last times grow very frequent with some men, till you have the race of clerical visionaries who think vast, dim, vague thoughts, and do no work. It is a danger of all ardent minds. The only salvation, if one finds himself verging to it, is an unsparing rule that no idea, however abstract, shall be ever counted as satisfactorily received and grasped till it has opened to us its practical side and helped us somehow in our work. The spirit of practicalness is the consecration of the whole man, even the most ideal and visionary parts of him, to the work of life.

With regard to the second point of which I spoke, the methods of the preacher’s work, there are two difficulties which beset us: one is the absence of method, and the other is the tendency to wrong methods. Let me say a few words to you on each of these.

There is a certain air of spontaneousness, a certain dislike of rule and system which belongs to a great many ministers’ fundamental conception of the work of preaching. Rightly studied and weighed, no doubt, the teachings of Christ and of the whole New Testament all look one way. They all involve the simple truth that he who works for God must work with his best powers; and since among the effective powers of man the powers of plan and arrangement stand very high, the whole of the New Testament really implies that he who preaches must lay out the methods and ways of preaching, as a merchant or a soldier lays out a campaign of the market or the battle-field. But at the same time there are many passages in the New Testament which seem to have in them something like a promise of immediate inspiration. Christ bids His disciples: “Settle it, therefore, in your hearts not to meditate before what ye shall answer. For I will give you a mouth and wisdom which all your adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor resist.” These words, and others like them, were spoken indeed to certain disciples, and in view V of certain special emergencies of their life; but, with our vague unscientific notions about inspiration, they have been easily appropriated by many a poor uninspired creature who has found himself the subject of ordination; and a general impression of the piety f extemporaneousness has spread more widely and reached more thoughtful and intelligent men than we suppose. I think, too, that the revolt of Protestantism against the minute and overstrained organization of the Romish Church has had very much to do with the creation of that distrust of methodicalness which prevails so largely among preachers. However it has come about, the fact is clear enough. Look at the way in which the pulpit teaches. I venture to say that there is nothing so unreasonable in any other branch of teaching. You are a minister, and you are to instruct these people in the truths of God, to bring God’s message to them. All the vast range of God’s revelation and of man’s duty is open to you. And how do you proceed? If you are like most ministers there is no order, no progress, no consecutive purpose in your teaching. You never begin at the beginning and proceed step by step to the end ofv any course of orderly instruction. You float over the whole sea of truth, and plunge here and there, like a gull, on any subject that either suits your mood, or that some casual and superficial intercourse with people makes you conceive to be required by a popular need. No other instruction ever was given so. No v hearer has the least idea, as he goes to your church, what you will preach to him about that day. It is hopeless for him to try to get ready for your teaching. I am sure that I may say (I suppose that this £ partly the reason why as an Episcopalian I have been asked to lecture here) that I rejoice to see in many churches outside our own that to which we owe bo much as a help to the orderliness of preaching, the observance of a church year with its commemorative v festivals, growing so largely common. It still leaves largest liberty. It is no bondage within which any man is hampered. But the great procession of the year, sacred to our best human instincts with the accumulated reverence of ages, — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, Whitsunday, — leads those who walk in it, at least once every year, past all the great Christian facts, and, however careless and selfish be the preacher, will not leave it in his power to keep them from his people. The Church year, too, preserves the personality of our - religion. It is concrete and picturesque. The historical Jesus is forever there. It lays each life continually down beside the perfect life, that it may see at once its imperfection and its hope.

But not to dwell any longer on this special instance, the order and course of preaching, the same absence of method is apt to show itself everywhere in a preacher’s life. Beside the reasons for it which I have already suggested, it comes from a feeble sense of responsibility. The mental and the moral natures have closer connections than very often we allow them, and traits which we think wholly intellectual are con- «tantly revealing to us moral bases upon which they rest. We talk of clearness, for instance, as if it were purely a quality of style, but clearness in every speech addressed to men comes out of sympathy, which is a moral quality. So force implies conviction. And so the truest method involves conscientiousness. The intellectual and the spiritual belong together. Logical arrangement of thought has real connection with a sincere desire to do right. The more you mean to do all the right, the more clearly your whole thinking processes will dispose themselves, and then, by the law of reaction, your orderly thinking will make it easier for you to do right. That which all men ought to remember, it behooves the minister more than all men not to forget, how closely the mental and moral natures are bound together in their characters and destinies.

On this high ground, and on a ground that perhaps is lower but still is sound, I urge upon you the need of method and order in your life and work. Do not be tempted by the fascination of spontaneousness. Do not be misled by any delusion of inspiration. The lower ground is the support which well-considered and settled methods of operation give to the higher powers in their weaker moments. No one dreads mechanical woodenness in the ministry more than I do. And yet a strong wooden structure running through your work, a set of well-framed and welljointed habits about times and ways of work, writing, studying, intercourse with people, the administration of charity and education, and the proportions between the different departments of clerical labor, is again and again the bridge over which the minister walks where the solid ground of higher motive fails him for a time. Routine is a terrible master, but she is a servant whom we can hardly do without. Routine as a law is deadly. Routine as a resource in the temporary exhaustion of impulse and suggestion is often our salvation. Coleridge told the story when he sang, —

“There will come a weary day
When, overtaxed at length,
Both hope and love beneath
The weight give way.
Then with a statue’s smile,
A statue’s strength,
Patience, nothing loth,
And uncomplaining, does
The work of both.”

But patience, while a strong power, is not quick-sighted, and works in ways and habits which have been made before.

Of mistakes of method as distinguished from absence of method in the ministry, experience has seemed to me to show that there is one comprehensive head under which a wonderfully large proportion of them all may be included. It is the passion for expedients. I know of no department of human activity, from the governing of a great nation to the doctoring of a little body, where the disposition is not constantly appearing to invent some sudden method or to seek some magical and concise prescription which shall obviate the need of careful, comprehensive study and long-continued application. But this disposition is nowhere so strong, I think, as in the ministry. The bringing of truth, of Christ the Truth, to man, of the whole Christ to the whole man, you can think of no work larger in its idea than that. And evidently its methods must be as manifold as are the natures with which it deals. But we are constantly meeting people who seem to have epitomized all the needs of the Church, all the requirements of the successful minister, into some one expedient, some panacea which, if it could only be applied, would overcome every obstacle and bring on at once the perfect day of preaching. These expedients are things good in themselves, making no doubt some very useful part of the great whole; but when they are magnified into solitary importance and offered as solutions of the difficulties that beset the Gospel, they are ludicrously insufficient. Many a young minister to-day is staking his whole ministry on some one such idea. He attributes every defect to the imperfect apprehension of that idea in his community. He hopes for every good as that idea comes to be completely realized. He can expect no good without it. He can hardly conceive of any evil in connection with it.

Perhaps his favorite idea is free churches; a good idea indeed, an idea without which there could have been no Christian church at all; an idea which beyond all doubt does represent the standard of Christianity, and to which Christian practice must some day return; but by no means the only idea of worship, nor suggesting by any means the only or the principal difficulty in the way of spreading the Gospel. You might break down every pew door and abolish every pew tax and yet wait to see your churches and the kingdom of God fill themselves full in vain. Another’s consuming thought is congregational singing. As you listen to him rushing hither and thither shouting the praises of his favorite method and dealing dreadful blows at the four-headed Cerberus which he v detests, you are almost ready to believe that if all the people only could lift up their voices and sing the walls of wickedness must tumble into dust. It is a good and healthy agitation. It is well that we should break through the tyranny of old methods and really sing the praises of the Lord. But it is not going to do the work of casting out sin and winning righteousness. When the army goes into battle the bands u must play, but they do not lead the host. And so it is again with the hobby of interdenominational intercourse, of Christian union. It is well, and I would that we had more of it. But, to borrow the army simile again, no courtesies between two regiments ever yet defeated the other army. And so of the church sociable which tries to entice the passer-by to the altar of the Lord with the familiar but feeble odor of a cup of tea. And so with the children’s church; one of the best and purest of the Church’s inventions for her work, but by no means enough to make a special and peculiar feature of in any congregation. It almost always weakens the preacher for his preaching to adults. There is nothing so insignificant that some petty minister will not make it the Christian panacea. A young pastor said to me once, “Wherever else I fail, there is one point in which my ministry will be a success.” “And what is that?” said I, expecting something sweet and spiritual. “In printing,” he replied. He had devoted himself to setting forth elaborate advertisements, and orders of services, and Sunday-school reward cards, and most complicated parish records, and I suppose his parish is strewn thick with those thick-falling leaves unto this day. No! The clerical or parish hobby is either the fancy of a man who has failed to apprehend the great work of the Gospel, or the refuge of a man who has failed to do it. Its evils are endless. It makes a fantastic Christianity. It keeps us battering at one point in the long citadel of sin and lets the enemy safely concentrate all his force there to protect it. It robs us of all power of large appeal and confines the truth which we preach to some small class of people.

It makes us exalt the means above the end, till we come to count the means precious, whether it attain the end or not. That is the death which many a parish life has died. As George Herbert has it, —

“What wretchedness can give him any room Whose house is foul while he adores his hroom?”

But finally, and worst of all, the passion for expedients and panaceas narrows our standards of Christian life, and gives us false tests of what are Christians. It is possible to come to think that there can be no conversion in a rented pew; and that God will not hear the music of a choir, however devoutly it bears the praises of the people up to Him. Beware of hobbies. Fasten yourself to the centre of youru ministry; not to some point on its circumference. The circumference must move when the centre moves, t The escape from the slavery of expedients is not in finding each one insufficient, and so changing it for another. The escape from despotism is never in a mere change of despots. Some men’s ministry has been occupied all through in the substitution of hobby v for hobby year after year. Their history is made up of the record of the dynasties of successive expedients, following each other like the later Emperors, each murdering his predecessor and murdered in his turn. The escape must come in a larger human life v for the minister. He must come into larger knowledge of men, and be in the truest and best sense a man of the world. He must get out of the merely ecclesiastical spirit; that is, he must cease to think of the Church as a petty institution, to be carried on by fantastic methods of its own. It must seem to him what it is, the type and pattern of what humanity ought to be, so to be kept large enough that any man, coming from any exile where the homesickness of his heart has been awakened, may find his true and native place awaiting him. The preacher then will know all kinds of men, keeping his life large enough to enter into sympathy with them. Let me make one special remark upon this head. Apart from its incidental advantage, to his style and manner, I think it is good for a minister to do some work besides clerical work, and to write something besides sermons. But he must do it as a minister. And the proof of how large is his vocation, is that he can do it and yet be a minister in it all. He can write books, and yet be not a literary man but a minister. He can help the government, and yet be not a politician but a minister. There are bad ways, but there are also good ways in which a clergyman may carry his clerical character with him wherever he goes. It may be to your discredit, or to your credit, that strangers say of you, “I should know he was a minister.” For the best minister is simply the fullest man. You cannot separate him from his manhood. Voltaire said of Louis XIV., “He was not one of the greatest men but certainly one of the greatest kings that ever lived.” It would not be possible to say that of any minister. He who was one of the greatest of ministers must be one of the greatest of men.

The faults of a minister’s method are apt to be of the simplest sort; as his virtues are of no intricate or complicated kind, but the primary virtues of humanity. I cannot then pass by what, after all, has seemed to me to lie at the bottom of a very large part of the clerical failures, and half-successes which I have witnessed. What is called a u success “in the ministry is, indeed, a “curious sort of phenomenon, very hard to analyze. It is half clay, half gold. It is half secular and half religious, and the two halves are mingled so that it is impossible to separate them. There is too much of religious feeling in our communities to i call a minister successful unless he seems to be doing a really spiritual work, and on the other hand there is too steady a watch kept upon economical considerations, to give the praise of success to mere spiritual devotion, unless it carries with it the signs of material prosperity. The “successful minister” is a being of such mingled qualities that he leaves open room enough for many men who are not called successful, to be thoroughly good and nobly useful and very happy. But still this standard of success has its advantages. It is intelligible. And it brings at once

“CWIVBRSIT!

forward the simplest of all causes of failure, and shows it to be the same that brings failure in every department of life. That cause is mere unfaithfulness, the fact of men’s not doing their best with the powers that God has given them. I think that it is hard to believe how common this trouble, underlying all troubles, is in the minister’s life. I want to urge it upon you very earnestly. You watch the career of some man who does not seem to succeed. You know his piety; you recognize his intelligence; you make all kinds of elaborate theories about what there is in his peculiar character that unfits him for effectiveness; you dwell on his fastidiousness, his reserve, the wonderful sensitiveness of his nature. You picture him to yourself writing exquisite sermons, full of thought, which the people are too coarse to comprehend. And then, with this picture of him in your mind, you come to know the habits of his life, and all your fine-spun pity scatters as you learn that, whatever other hindrances there may be, the hindrance that lies uppermost of all is that the man is not doing his best. His work is at loose ends; he treats his people with a neglect with which no doctor could treat his patients and no lawyer his clients; and he writes his sermons on Saturday nights. That last I count the crowning disgrace of a man’s ministry. It is dishonest. It is giving but the last flicker of the week as it sinks in its socket, to those who, simply to talk about it as a bargain, have paid for the full light burning at its brightest. And yet men boast of it. They tell you in how short time they write their sermons, and when you hear them preach you only wonder that it took so long. Ah! my friends, it is wonderful what a central power is the moral law. The primary fact of duty lies at the core of everything. Operations which we think have no moral character, move by the power which is coiled up in that spring. Derange it in any man, and his taste becomes corrupted, and his intellect suffers distortion. The first necessity for the preacher and the hod-carrier is the; same. Be faithful, and do your best always for every congregation, and on every occasion.

A very curious study in human nature is the way in which the moral sense sometimes suffers in connec-

1 An unknown friend has called my attention to these good words of Cotton Mather, since this lecture was delivered. They are from the Ratio Disciplines, pp. 59 and 60.

“If churches hear of ministers boasting that they have been in their studies only a few hours on Saturday, or so, they reckon that such persons rather glory in their shame.

“Sudden sermons they may sometimes admire from their accomplished ministers, when the suddenness has not been a chosen circumstance. But as one of old, when it was objected against his public speeches (in matters of less moment than the salvation of souls), replied, ‘I should blush at the incivility of treating so great and wise a people with anything but what shall be studied; ’ so the best ministers of New England ordinarily would blush to address their flocks without premeditation.” tion with the highest spiritual experiences. A man who will cheat nowhere else will be a hypocrite in religion. A man who really wants to convert his brethren will sometimes try to do it by preaching other people’s sermons as if they were his own. It is partly, I suppose, the vague sense of elevation which seems to have somewhat enfeebled the hold of the ordinary morality upon a man, as the earth’s gravitation weakens for him who mounts among the stars. And in some men it is that demoralization which comes from feeling themselves in a place for which they are not fit, burdened with duties for which they have no capacity. And that, in political, or commercial, or clerical life, is the most demoralizing consciousness that a man can feel.

This question of faithfulness touches, I believe, almost all the difficulties in the way of constraint or dictation which a minister meets with from his people. I am apt to believe that almost all the troubles between ministers and parishes are from the minister’s folly if not from his fault. Not that there is not often enough blame upon the other side. But it seems to me reasonable that the minister, having an intenser and more concentrated interest in his parish than any layman has, should have that measure of control which, wisely used, might hinder almost any trouble before it grew vigorous enough to enlist the angry interest of the people whose lives are largely occupied with other things. There are such things as parish quarrels. If I am right, my friends, you will never have one in your parish which you might not have prevented, and never come out of one without injury to your character and your Master’s cause. It is wonderful to me with what freedom a minister is left to do his work in his own way, if only his people believe in his scrupulous faithfulness. Take, for instance, the matter of preaching old sermons. It is not good. A new sermon, fresh from the brain, has always a life in it which an old sermon, though better in itself, must lack. The trouble is in the prominence of that personal element in preaching of which I spoke in my first lecture. You may take the sermon off the shelf, and when you have brushed the dust off the cover it is the same sermon that you preached on that memorable day when you were all afire with your new line of study or with the spiritual zeal that was burning about you. You may reproduce the paper but you cannot reproduce the man, and the sermon was man and paper together. No, I would make as rare as possible the preaching of the same u sermon to the same people. But what I wanted to say was this, that the main objection which the people have to the preaching of old sermons is in the impression that it gives them of unfaithfulness and idleness. Let a minister’s whole life make any such suspicion impossible and there is no complaint. The minister in whose faithfulness his people believe may use his own discretion. He must not play any tricks. He must not put old sermons to new texts. To put new sermons to old texts is better. But he may use his judgment, and those sermons, of which there is a certain class, which do not lose but rather gain by repetition, he may repreach again and again till they grow to be to people like their most cherished hymns or passages from some long-loved book of devotion.

One of the most remarkable things about the preacher’s methods of work is the way in which they form themselves in the earliest years of his ministry, and then rule him with almost despotic power to the end. I am a slave to-day, and so I suppose is every minister, to ways of work that were made within two or three years after beginning to preach. The newness of the occupation, that unexpectedness of everything to which I alluded when I began to speak to you this afternoon, opens all the life, and makes it receptive; and then the earnestness and fresh enthusiasm of those days serves to set the habits that a man makes them, to clothe them with something that is almost sacredness, and to make them practically almost unchangeable. They are the years when a preacher needs to be very watchful over his discretion and his independence. When the clay is in the bank, it matters not so much who treads on it. And when the clay is hardened in the vase, it may press close upon another vase and yet keep its own shape. But when the clay is just setting, and the shape still soft, then is the time to guard it from the blows or pressures that would distort it forever. Be sure, then, that the habits and methods of your opening ministry are, first of all, your own. Let no respect, however profound or merited, for any hero of the pulpit make you submit yourself to him. Let your own nature freely shape its own ways. Only be sure that those ways do really come out of your own nature, and not out of the merely accidental circumstances of your first parish. And let them be intelligent, not merely such as you happen into, but such as you can give good reasons for. And let them be noble, framed with reference to the large ideal and most sacred purposes of your work, not with reference to its minute conveniences. And let them be broad enough to give you room to grow. It is with ideas and methods of work as it is with houses. To remove from one to another is wasteful and dispiriting; but to find the one in which we have taken up our abode unfolding new capacity to accommodate our growing mental family, is satisfactory and encouraging. It gives us the sense at once of settlement and progress. He is the happiest and most effective old man whose life has been full of crowth, but free from revolution; who is living still in the same thoughts and habits which he had when a boy, but has found them as the Hebrews say that the Israelites found their clothes in the desert during the forty years, not merely never waxing old upon them, but growing with their growth as they passed on from youth to manhood.

I hope that I shall not have disappointed your expectation in what I have said about the preacher’s methods by dwelling so largely upon principles, and going so little into details. It would be easy enough for any minister to amuse himself, and perhaps amuse you, by recitations from his diary. But it would not be good. I want to make you know two things: first, that if your ministry is to be good for anything, it must be your ministry, and not a feeble echo of any other man’s; and, second, that the Christian ministry is not the mere practice of a set of rules and precedents, but is a broad, free, fresh meeting of a man with men, in such close contact that the Christ who has entered into his life may, through his, enter into theirs.

I have but a few words to add upon the spirit in which the preacher does his best work. After what I have been saying, my points will need no elaboration. Forgive me if I venture to put them in the Bimplest and strongest imperatives I can command.

First, count and rejoice to count yourself the servant of the people to whom you minister. Not in any worn-out figure but in very truth, call yourself and be their servant.

Second, never allow yourself to feel equal to your Work. If you ever find that spirit growing on you, be afraid, and instantly attack your hardest piece of work, try to convert your toughest infidel, try to preach on your most exacting theme, to show yourself how unequal to it all you are.

Third, be profoundly honest. Never dare to say in the pulpit or in private, through ardent excitement or conformity to what you know you are expected to say, one word which at the moment when you say it, you do not believe. It would cut down the range of what you say, perhaps, but it would endow every word that was left with the force of ten.

And last of all, be vital, be alive, not dead. Do everything that can keep your vitality at its fullest. Even the physical vitality do not dare to disregard. One of the most striking preachers of our country seems to me to have a large part of his power simply in his physique, in the impression of vitality, in the magnetism almost like a material thing, that passes between him and the people who sit before him. Pray for and work for fulness of life above everything; full red blood in the body; full honesty and truth in the mind; and the fulness of a grateful love for the Saviour in your heart. Then, however men set their mark of failure or success upon your ministry, you cannot fail, you must succeed.