The Idea of the Sermon

T HAVE dwelt long upon the preacher and his character because he is essential to the sermon. He cannot throw a sermon forth into the world as an author can his book, as an artist can his statue, and let it live thenceforth a life wholly independent of himself. That is the reason why sermons are not ordinarily interesting reading. At least that is one of the reasons. Now and then you do find a volume of sermons which, as it were, keep their author in them, so that as you read them you feel him present in the room. But, ordinarily, reading sermons is like listening to an echo. The words are there, but the personal intonation is gone out of them and there is an unreality about it all. Now and then you find sermons which do not suggest their ever having been preached and they give you none of this feeling. But they were not good sermons, scarcely even real sermons, when they were preached. In general it is true that the sermon which is good to preach is poor to read and the sermon which is good to read is poor to preach. There are exceptions, but this is generally true.

Whatever is in the sermon must be in the preacher first; clearness, logicalness, vivacity, earnestness, sweetness, and light must be personal qualities in him before they are qualities of thought and language in what he utters to his people. If you have your artist you have only to supply your marble and chisel with the mere technical skill, and you have your statue. If you have your preacher very little more is needed to set free the sermon which is in him. In this lecture and the next I want to speak about the sermon. I make a division which will not be very precise, but may be of some service; and shall speak to-day more of the sermon in its general purpose and idea, and next Thursday more of the make and method of the sermon.

It seems to me, then, that at the very outset the definite and immediate purpose which a sermon has set before it makes it impossible to consider it as a work of art, and every attempt to consider it so works injury to the purpose for which the sermon was created. Many of the ineffective sermons that are made owe their failure to a blind and fruitless effort to produce something which shall be a work of art, conforming to some type or pattern which is not clearly understood but is supposed to be essential and eternal. But the unreasonableness of this appears the moment that we think of it. A sermon exists in and for its purpose. That purpose is the persuading and moving of men’s souls. That purpose must never be lost sight of. If it ever is, the sermon flags. It is not always on the surface; not always impetuous and eager in the discourses of the settled pastor as it is in the appeals of the Evangelist who speaks this once and this once only to the men he sees before him. The sermon of the habitual preacher grows more sober, but it never can lose out of it this consciousness of a purpose; it never can justify itself in any self-indulgence that will hinder or delay that purpose. It is always aimed at men. It is always looking in their faces to see how they are moved. It knows no essential and eternal type, but its law for what it ought to be comes from the needs and fickle changes of the men for whom it lives. Now this is thoroughly inartistic. Art contemplates and serves the absolute beauty. The simple work of art is the pure utterance of beautiful thought in beautiful form without further purpose than simply that — it should be uttered. The poem or the statue may L instruct, inspire, and rebuke men, but that design, if it were present in the making of the poem or the statue, vitiated the purity of its artistic quality. Art knows nothing of the tumultuous eagerness of earnest purpose. She is supremely calm and independent of the whims of men. Phidias cast among a barbarous race must carve not some hideous idol which shall stir their coarse blood by its frantic extravagance, but the same serene and lofty beauty of Athene which he would carve at Athens. If it wholly fails to reach their gross and blunted senses, that is Aj. $ no disgrace to it as a work of art, for the artisticand *Aa£V r the didactic are separate from one another.

And yet we find a constant tendency in the his- “T^vk, tory of preaching to treat the sermon as a work of art. It is spoken of as if it were something which had a value in itself. We hear of beautiful sermons, as if they existed solely on the ground that “beauty is its own excuse for being.” The age of the great French preachers, the age of Louis XIV. with its ser-*- mons preached in the salons of critical and sceptical noblemen, and of ladies who offered to their friends the entertainment of the last discovered preacher, was full of this false idea of the sermon as a work of art. And the soberer Englishman, whether he be the Puritan praising the painful exposition to which he has just listened, or the Churchman delighting in the polished periods of Tillotson or South, has his own way of falling into the same heresy. I think it does us good to go back to the simple sermons of the New Testament. I do not speak of the perfect discourses of our Lord, though in them we should find the strongest confirmation of what I am now saying: out take the sermons of St. Peter, of St. Stephen, of St. Paul, and from them come down to the sermons which have been great as sermons ever since. Through all their variety you find this one thing constantly true about them: they were all valuable solely for the work they could accomplish. They were tools, and not works of art. To turn a tool into a work of art, to elaborate the shape and chase the surface of the axe with which you are to hew your wood, is bad taste; and to give any impression in a sermon that it has forgotten its purpose and been shaped for anything else than what in the largest extent of those great words might be described as saving souls, makes it offensive to a truly good taste and dull to the average man, who feels an incongruity which he cannot define. The power of the sermons of the Paulist fathers in the Romish Church and of Mr. Moody in Protestantism lies simply here: in the clear and undisturbed presence of their purpose; and many ministers who never dream of such a thing, who think that they are preaching purely for the good of souls, are losing the power out of their sermons because they are trying, even without knowing it, to make them not only sermons, but works of art. There was an old word which I think has ceased to be used. Men used to talk of “sermonizing.” They said that some good preacher was “a fine sermonizer.” The word contained just this vice: it made the sermon an achievement, to be attempted and enjoyed for itself apart from anything that it could do, like a picture or an oratorio, like the Venus of Milo or the Midsummer-Night’s Dream.

And here lies the truth concerning the way in which really high truth and careful thought may be brought to a congregation. We hear a good deal about preaching over people’s heads. There is such a thing. But generally it is not the character of the ammunition, but the fault of aim, that makes the missing shot. There is nothing worse for a preacher than to come to think that he must preach down to people; that they cannot take the very best he has to give. He grows to despise his own sermons, and the people quickly learn to sympathize with their minister. The people will get the heart out of the most thorough and thought-* — ful sermon, if only it really is a sermon. Even subtlety of thought, the tracing of intricate relations of ideas, it is remarkable how men of no subtle thought will follow it, if it is really preached. But subtlety which has delighted in itself, which has spun itself fine for its own pleasure in seeing how fine it could be spun, vexes and throws them off; and they are right. Never be afraid to call upon your people to follow your best thought, if only it is really trying to lead them somewhere. The confidence of the minister in the people is at the bottom of every confidence of the people in the minister.

What I have been saying bears also on what we

*<£’ hear, every now and then, from the days of the “Spectator” down, the expression of a wish that moderate ministers, instead of giving people their own moderate thought, would recur to the good work which has been already done, and read some sermon of one of the great masters. There too, there is the “sermonizing” idea. The real sermon idea is lost. Such a practice coming into vogue would speedily destroy the pulpit’s power. Not merely would it be a confession of incapacity, but the idea of speech, of present address for a present purpose, would disappear. I do not think we could anticipate any continual interest, scarcely any perpetual existence for the preaching work in case such an idea became prevalent and accepted.

The first good consequence of the emphatic statement that a sermon is to be considered solely with reference to its proper purposes will be in a new and larger freedom for the preacher. We make the idea of a sermon too specific, wishing to conform it to some preestablished type of what a sermon ought to be. There is nothing which a sermon ought to be except a fit medium of truth to men. There is no model of a sermon so strange and novel, so different from every pattern upon which sermons have been shaped before, that if it became evident to you that that was the form through which the message which you had to tell would best reach the men to whom you had to tell it, it would not be your right, nay, be your duty to preach your truth in that new form. I grant that the accepted forms of preaching were shaped originally by a desire for utility, and only gradually assumed a secondary value and importance for their own sakes. That is the way in which every such superstitious value of anything originates. I grant, therefore, that the young preacher may well feel that a certain presumption of advantage belongs to those types of sermons which he finds in use. He will not wantonly depart from them. I am sure that all hearers of sermons will say: “Better the most abject conformity to rule than departure from rule for the mere sake of departure. Better the stiff movements of imitation than the fantastic gestures of deliberate originality.” But what I plead for is, that in all your desire to create good sermons you should think no sermon good that does not do its work. Let the end for which you preach play freely in and modify the form of your preaching. He who is original for the sake of originality is as much governed by the type from which he departs as is another man who slavishly conforms to it; but he who freely uses the types which he finds, and yet compels them always to bend to the purposes for which he uses them, he is their true master, and not their slave. Such originality as that alone at once secures the best effectiveness of the preacher, and advances at the same time the general type and idea of the sermon, preserving it from monotony and making it better and better from age to age.

Now let me turn to some of those questions affecting the general idea of what a sermon ought to be, which are continually recurring, and say a few words on each.

One of the most interesting of those questions, which appears in many forms, arises from the necessity of which I have already so much spoken, of mingling the elements of personal influence and abstract truth to make the perfect sermon. There are some sermons in which the preacher does not appear at all.; there are other sermons in which he is offensively and crudely prominent; there are still other sermons where he is hidden and yet felt, the force of his personal conviction and earnest love being poured through the arguments which he uses, and the promises which he holds out. Of the second class of sermons in which the minister’s personality is offensively prominent, the most striking instance is what seems to me to have become rather common of late, and what I may call the autobiographical style of preaching. There are some preachers to whom one might listen for a year, and then he could write their biography, if it were worth the doing. Every truth they wish to teach is illustrated by some event in their own history. Every change of character which irhey wish to urge is set forth under the form in which that change took place in them. The story of how they were converted becomes as familiar to their congregation as the story of the conversion of St. Paul. It is the crudest attempt to blend personality and truth. They are not fused with one another, but only tied together. It has a certain power. It is wonderful how interesting almost any man becomes if he talks frankly about himself. You cannot help listening to the garrulous unfolding of his history. And in the pulpit no doubt it gives a certain vividness, when a popular preacher whose people are already interested in, and curious about his personality, after enforcing some argument, suddenly turns, and instead of saying, after the pulpit manner, “But the objector will reply,” briskly breaks out with, “Last Monday afternoon a man came into my study,” or “A man met me in the street, and said, Mr. this or that” (using his own name), “what do you make of this objection?” It gives a clear concreteness to the whole, and feeds that curiosity about each other’s ways of living out of which all our gossip grows.

The evils of the habit are evident enough. Not to speak of its oppressiveness to the best taste, nor of the way in which its power dies out, as the muchparaded person of the minister grows familiar and unimposing, it certainly must have a tendency to narrow the suggested range of Christian truth and experience. In parishes where such strong prominence belongs to the preacher’s personality, where the people are always hearing of how he learned this truth or passed through that emotion, all apprehension of thought and realization of experience narrows itself. It is expected in just that way which has been so often and so vividly pictured. It is distrusted if it comes in other forms. The rich variety and’ largeness of the Christian life is lost. There are some parishes which, in the course of a long pastorate, have become but the colossal repetition of their minister’s personality. They are the form of his experience seen through a mist, grown large in size but vague and dim in outline. Every parishioner is a weakened repetition of the minister’s ideas and ways. I think that what a minister learns to rejoice in more and more is the endless difference of that Christian life, which is yet always the same. It shows him the possibility of a Christianity as universal as humanity, a Christianity in which the diversity and unity of humanity might both be kept. And any undue prominence of himself in his teaching, loses the largeness on which the hope of this variety in unity depends.

There is something better than this. There is a fine and subtle infusion of a man into his work, which achieves what this crude fastening of the two together attempts, but fails to accomplish. Take, for instance, the sermons of /Robertson) You will know, from allusions to them which I have already made, that I sympathize very fully with that high estimate which such multitudes of people have set upon those remarkable discourses. I think that in all the best qualities of preaching they stand supreme among the sermons of our time. And one of the most remarkable things about them is the way in which the personal force of the preacher, and the essential power of the truth, are blended into one strong impressivenesss. The personality never muddies the thought. I do not remember one allusion to his own history,* — ’ one anecdote of his own life; but they are his sermons. The thought is stronger for us because he has thought it. The feeling is more vivid because he has felt it. And always he leads us to God by a way along which he has gone himself. It is interesting to read along with the sermons the story of his life, to see what he was passing through at the date when this sermon or that was preached, and to watch, as you often may, without any suspicion of mere fancifulness, how the experience shed its power into the*- sermon, but left its form of facts outside; how his sermons were like the heaven of his life, in which the spirit of his life lived after it had cast away its body. There have, indeed, been preachers and writers whose utterance of truth has fallen naturally in the forms of autobiography, and yet who have been at

j pi i once strong and broad. You can gather all of Latimer’s history out of his sermons, and Milton has given us a large part of his teaching in connection with the events of his own life. But ordinarily that is true in literature, and certainly in preaching, which is true in life. It is not the man who forces they’ events of his life on you who most puts the spirit of his life into you. The most unreserved men are not the most influential. A reserved man who cares for truth, and cares that his brethren should know the truth, who therefore is always holding back the mere envelope of accident and circumstance in which the truth has embodied itself to him, and yet sending forth the truth with all the clearness and force which it has gathered for him from that embodiment, he is the best preacher, as everywhere he is the most influential man. Try to live such a life, so full of events W and relationships, that the two great things, the power of Christ and the value of your brethren’s ’ souls, shall be tangible and certain to you, not subjecta of speculation and belief, but realities which you j have seen and known; then sink the shell of personal experience, lest it should hamper the truth that you must utter, and let the truth go out as the shot goes, carrying the force of the gun with it, but leaving the gun behind.

There is something beautiful to me in the way in which the utterance of the best part of a man’s own life, its essence, its result, which the pulpit makes possible, and even tempts, is welcomed by many men, who seem to find all other utterance of themselves impossible. I have known shy, reserved men, who, standing in their pulpits, have drawn back before a thousand eyes veils that were sacredly closed when only one friend’s eyes could see. You might talk with them a hundred times, and you would not learn so much of what they were as if you once heard them preach. It was partly the impersonality of the great congregation. Humanity, without the offense of individuality, stood there before them. It was no violation of their loyalty to themselves to tell their secret to mankind. It was a man who silenced them. But also, besides this, it was, I think, that the sight of many waiting faces set free in them a new, clear knowledge of what their truth or secret was, unsnarled it from the petty circumstances into which it had been entangled, called it first into clear consciousness, and then tempted it into utterance with an authority which they did not recognize in an individual curiosity demanding the details of their life. Our race, represented in a great assemblage, has more au-*” thority and more beguilement for many of us than the single man, however near he be. And he who is silent before the interviewer, pours out the very depths of his soul to the great multitude. He will not print his diary for the world to read, but he will tell his fellow-men what Christ may be to them, so that they shall see, as God sees, what Christ has been to him.

I think again that this first truth of preaching, the truth that the minister enters into the sermon, touches upon the point of which I spoke in my last sermon, the authority of the sermon. The sermon is God’s message sent by you to certain of your fellow-men. If the message came to your fellow-men just as it came from God it must be absolutely true and must have absolute authority. If the fallible messenger mixes himself with his infallible message, the absolute authority of the message is in some degree qualified. But we have seen that the very idea of the sermon implies that the messenger must mingle himself with the message that he brings; and, as a mere matter of fact, we know that every preacher does declare the truth from his own point of view and follows his own judgment, enlightened by his study and his prayer, when he declares how the eternal truth applies to temporary circumstances. Some things which you say from the pulpit you know; other things are your speculations. This is true very largely of the anticipations and prophecies about the destiny of the Gospel, about the relations which the Gospel holds to the circumstances of special times in which ministers indulge. John Wesley used to say that “Infidels know, v’ whether Christians know it or not, that the giving up witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible.” When we were children it used to be preached to us that the Bible must stand or fall with human slavery. And now we hear continually that this or that will happen to religion if such or such a theory of natural science should be accepted. Such prophecies are always bad. Tests which are not essential and absolute tests do great harm. But these are instances of the way in which speculations, personal opinions, prejudices, if you will, must attach themselves to any live man’s utterance of the truth. It is inevitable; and what must be the result? Either all speculation must be cut away and the sermon be reduced to the mere repetition of indisputable and undisputed truth; and the mere primary facts of Christianity which alone are held absolutely “semper, ubique et ab omnibus” must make the sum of preaching; or else the preacher must let the people clearly understand that between the facts that are his message and the philosophy of those facts which is his best and truest judgment there is a clear distinction. The first come with the authority of God’s revelation. The others come with what persuasion their essential reasonableness gives them. Now the first method is impracticable. No man ever did it. No man who claims to preach nothing but the simple Gospel preaches it so simply that it has not in it something of his own speculation about it. The other method is the only method. Even St. Paul came to it in his epistles. But how few preachers frankly adopt it. We cover all we say — our crude guesses, our ignorant anticipations — with a certain vague and undefined authority; and men, hearing themselves called on to believe them all, and seeing part of them to be untrue, really believe none of them in any genuine or hearty way. We stretch our authority to try to make it cover so much that it grows thin and will not decently cover anything at all. Frankness is what we need, frankness to sayj “This is God’s truth, and this other is what I think.”’ If we were frank like that, see what good things would come. The minister would have room for intellectual change and growth, and not have to steal them as if they were something to which he had no right. The people could hear many men preach and hear them differ from each other and yet not be bewildered and confounded. And every preacher, with the clearly recognized right, would have to accept the duty of being a thinker in the things of God.

One of the most interesting questions which meets us as we try to form an idea of what the sermon ought to be, is that suggested by the occasional or constant outcry against the preaching of Doctrine, and the call for practical sermons, or for what is called “preaching Christ only.” Let me speak of this. I do not hold that the outcry is absurd. I do not think that it is one to which the preacher ought fco shut his ears. It is a very blind and unintelligent cry, no doubt. All popular outcries are that. Every popular movement and demand has in general the same history. It begins with a vague discontent that never even attempts to give an account of what it means, and it passes on into three different manifestations of itself; one, an honest attempt by its own adherents to declare its philosophy and give an intelligible reason for it; another, an effort by those who dislike it to misrepresent and to defame it; a third the adoption of its phrases by people who care little about it but like to affect an interest in whatever is uppermost. In this last stage the popular movement becomes a fashionable cant. There never was a stir and dissatisfaction, a dislodging and outreaching of men’s minds which did not show itself in all these forms. This dissatisfaction with what is called doctrinal preaching appears in all three. At the bottom it is a discontent with something that the ’ souls of men feel to be wrong. Then comes the endeavor of men to state the grievance, which is often very foolishly done, and would, if carried out, sweep away everything like positive Christianity together. Then comes the misrepresentation of the popular demand, which talks about it as if it all came of the spirit of indifference or unbelief. And then finally succeeds that which is the lowest degradation to which anything which might be an intelligent opinion can be reduced, the affectation which pretends to be in horror at anything like dogmatism, and repeats without meaning the praises of an undogmatic preaching. Now the minister meets all of these. What shall he do? It is easy enough for him to expose the illogical reasoning, easy for him to see its misconceptions, easy for him to despise its cant, but it ought not to be easy for him to shut his ears to that out of which they all come, that deep, blind, unintelligent discontent with something which is evidently wrong. He must bring his intelligence to bear on that. It cannot tell what it means itself. He must find out what it means, and not be deterred by the offensiveness of any of its exhibitions from a careful understanding of its true significance.

For it does mean something, and what it means is this: that men who are loc king for a law of life and an inspiration of life are met by a theory of life. Much of our preaching is like delivering lectures upon medicine to sick people. The lecture is true. The lecture is interesting. Nay, the truth of the lecture is important, and if the sick man could learn the truth of the lecture he would be a better patient, he would take his medicine more responsibly and regulate his diet more intelligently. But still the fact remains that the lecture is not medicine, and that to give the medicine, not to deliver the lecture, is the preacher’s duty. I know the delusiveness of such an analogy. Let us not urge it too far; but let us own that the idea which has haunted the religious life of man, and which is not true, has had a serious and bad effect on preaching. That idea is that the tenure of certain truths, and not the possession of a certain character, is a saving thing. It is the notion that faith consists in the believing of propositions. Let that heresy be active or latent in a preacher’s mind, and he inevitably falls into the vice which people complain of when they talk about doctrinal preaching. He declares truth for its own value andu not with direct reference to its result in life.

It is not my place to argue here that the idea of faith from which such preaching comes is not the scriptural idea, not the idea of Jesus. But it does come within my region to point out the influence that a man’s first idea of saving faith must have upon his whole conception of a sermon. The preacher who thinks that faith is the holding of truth, musfc ever be aiming to save men from believing error and to bring them to the knowledge of what is true. The man who thinks that faith is personal loyalty, must always be trying to bring men to Christ and Christ to men. Which is the true idea? That, as I said, it is not for me to discuss. But I may beg you to consider seriously what the faith was that Christ longed so to see in his disciples, and what that faith Viust be whose “trial” or education St. Peter says “is much more precious than of gold that perishes.” Such words as those carry us inevitably into the realm of character, which we know is the one thing in man which God values and for which Christ labored and lived and died.

This does seem to me to make the truth about the preaching of doctrine very plain. The salvation of men’s souls from sin, the renewing and perfecting of their characters, is the great end of all. But that is done by Christ. To bring them then to Christ that He may do it, to make Christ plain to them that they may find Him, this is the preacher’s work. But I cannot do my duty in making Christ plain unless I tell them of Him all the richness that I know. I must keep nothing back. All that has come to me about Him from His word, all that has grown clear to me about His nature or His methods by my inward or outward experience, all that He has told me of Himself, becomes part of the message that I must tell to those men whom He has sent me to call home to Himself. I will do this in its fulness. And this is the preaching of doctrine, positive, distinct, characteristic Christian Truth. Only, the truth has always character beyond it as its ulterior purpose. Not until I forget that, and begin to tell men about Christ as if that they should know the truth about Him, and not that they should become what knowing the truth about Him would help them be, were the final purpose of my preaching, not until then do I begin to preach doctrine in the wrong way which men are trying to describe when they talk about “doctrinal preaching.”

-i The truth is, no preaching ever had any strong power that was not the preaching of doctrine. The preachers that have moved and held men have always preached doctrine. No exhortation to a good life that does not put behind it some truth as deep as eternity can seize and hold the conscience. Preach doctrine, preach all the doctrine that you know, and learn forever more and more; but preach it always, not that men may believe it, but that men may be saved by believing it. So it shall be live, not dead. So men shall rejoice in it and not decry it. So they shall feed on it at your hands as on the bread of life, solid and sweet, and claiming for itself the appetite of man which God made for it.

I am inclined to think that the idea of a sermon is so properly a unit, that a sermon involves of necessity such elements in combination, the absence of any one of which weakens the sermon-nature, that the ordinary classifications of sermons are of little consequence. We hear of expository preaching and topical sermons, of practical sermons, of hortatory discourses, each separate species seeming to stand by itself. It seems as if the preacher were expected to determine each week what kind of sermon the next 9 Sunday was to enjoy and set himself deliberately to produce it. It may be well, but I say frankly that to my mind the sermon seems a unit and that no sermon seems complete that does not include all these - elements, and that the attempt to make a sermon of one sort alone mangles the idea and produces a one-sided thing. One element will preponderate in every sermon according to the nature of the subject that is treated, and the structure of the sermon will vary according as you choose to announce for it a topic or to make it a commentary upon some words of Christ or His apostles. But the mere preponderance of one element must not exclude the others, and the difference of forms does not really make a difference of sermons. The preaching which is wholly exposition men are apt to find dull and pointless. It is heat lightning that quivers over many topics but strikes nowhere. The preaching that is the discussion of a topic may be interesting, but it grows unsatisfactory because it does not fasten itself to the authority of Scripture. It tempts the preacher’s genius and invention but is apt to send people away with a feeling that they have heard him more than they have heard God. The sermon which only argues is almost sure ’ to argue in vain, and the sermon which only exhorts is like a man who blows the wood and coal to which he has not first put a light. Either is incomplete alone; but to supplement each by the other in another sermon is certainly a very crude, imperfect way to meet the difficulty. It is better to start by feeling that every sermon must have a solid rest on Scripture, and the pointedness which comes of a clear subject, and the conviction which belongs to wellthought argument, and the warmth that proceeds from earnest appeal. I spoke of vagueness as the fault that most of all attended what is ordinarily called expository preaching. Besides this, there is the other fault of narrow view. I know that fault does not belong to it of necessity. I know that the expositor may refuse to become the mere ingenious interpreter of texts and the distiller of partial doctrines out of one petal of a great book or argument which is a symmetrical flower. He may insist on taking in the purpose of the whole Epistle as he comments upon one isolated chapter. He may claim light from the manifold radiance of the whole New Testament to let him see the meaning of a doubtful verse. But we all know the danger of the mere expositor of any book, whether that book be Shakespeare or the Bible. There is no reason why, in the Bible as in u Shakespeare, the minute study of parts should not be dangerous to the conception of the whole. The same powers and the same weaknesses of the humane mind are present in the sacred study as in what we call the profane study. The escape is not in the abandonment of minute and faithful study, but in the careful preservation of the larger purpose and spirit of the work. Our literature abounds in illustrations of the difference. Compare the noble and vivid pages of Dean Stanley’s “Jewish Church” with the labor of the ordinary textual commentator, and which is the true expositor of the Old Testament? The larger view in which the poetry and the essential truth resides comes in the attempt to grasp the topic of the

whole. And so that preaching which most harmoniously blends in the single sermon all these varieties of which men make their classifications, the preaching which is strong in its appeal to authority, wide in its grasp of truth, convincing in its appeal to reason, and earnest in its address to the conscience and the heart, all of these at once, that preaching comes nearest to the type of the apostolical epistles, is the most complete and so the most powerful approach of truth to the whole man, and so is the kind of preaching which, with due freedom granted to our idiosyncracies, it is best for us all to seek and educate.

There is indeed another classification of sermons which often occurs to me and which I think is not without its use. It belongs not to the mere form which a sermon takes, but to the side on which it approaches and undertakes to convince the human mind. Every reality of God may be recognized by us in its oeauty, its righteousness, or its usefulness. I may see, for instance, of God’s justice either the absolute beauty of it, may stand in awe before it as the perfect utterance of the perfect nature, may desire to come near to it as the most majestic thing in the whole universe, may love it solely for itself. Or I may be possessed with the relations which it holds to my own moral nature. It may impress me not so much as a quality in God as a relationship between God’s life and mine. It may fill me with a sense of sin, make me realize temptation and stir the depths of moral struggle in my life. Or yet again, I may realize that justice as the regulative power of the universe, see how conformity to it means peace and prosperity from centre to circumference of this vast order. I may rejoice in it not for what it is but for what it does. Of these three conceptions of God’s justice, one appeals to the soul and its intuitions of eternal fitness, the second to the conscience and its knowledge of right and wrong, the third to the practical instinct with its love of visible achievement. Now here we have the suggestions of three different sermons. The message which we have to bring is the same message, but we bring it to three different doors of the same manhood which it desires to enter. And one preacher will bring his message oftenest to one door, appealing mostly in his sermons to the soul, or to the conscience, or to the practical Bense. And one congregation or one generation will have one door more open than the others, its circumstances in some way making it most approachable upon that side. Here is the free room for the personal differences of men to play within the great unity of the sermon idea. Among the great French preachers there has always been drawn an evident distinction corresponding very nearly to this which I have defined. Masillon is the interpreter of the religious instinct, speaking to the heart. Bossuet is the preacher of dogma, appealing to the conscience. Bourdaloue is the preacher of morality, addressing himself to reason. Either of these sermons may be of the expository or of the topical sort. All of them are able to bring Christ in some one of his offices to men, as Priest, Prophet, or King. Each of them is capable of blending with another. There is no such distinction between them that we may not find a great sermon here and there where the three are met, and where Christ in His completeness as the satisfaction of the loving heart, as the convicter and guide of the awakened conscience, and as the hope and inspiration of a laboring humanity, is perfectly set forth. According to the largeness of your own Christian life will be your power to preach that largest sermon. Only I beg you to remember in what different ways sermons may all be messages of the Lord. Let it save you from the monotonous narrowness of one eternally repeated sermon. And, what is far more important, let it keep you from ever daring to say with cruel v flippancy of some brother who brings his message to another door of humanity from you, that he “does not preach Christ.”

The best sermon of any time is that time’s best utterance. More than its most ingenious invention or its most highly organized government, it declares the point which that time has reached. So I think that a man’s best sermon is the best utterance of his life. It embodies and declares him. If it is really his, it tells more of him than his casual intercourse with his friends, or even the revelations of his domestic life. If it is really God’s message through him, it brings him out in a way that no other experience of his life has power to do, as the quality of the trumpet declares itself more clearly when the strong man blows a blast for battle through it than when a child whispers into it in play. Remember this, experience it in yourself, and then, when you hear your brother preach, honor the work that he is doing and listen as reverently as you can to hear through him some voice of God. They say that brother ministers make the most critical and least responsive hearers. I have not found them so. I have found them always fullest of sympathy. It would be much to their discredit and excite serious suspicions of their work if their mere familiarity with its details made them less ready to feel its spirit and to submit to its power. It is not so. Do not begin by thinking that it is so, and you will not find it so.

I should like to devote part of what time remains to-day to some suggestions about the true subjects of sermons. I used a few minutes ago the phrase “preaching Christ;” and, without cant, it is Christ that we are to preach. But what is Christ? “The saving power of the world,” we say. Where is His power then to reach? Wherever men are wrong wherever men are capable of being better; wherever His authority and love can make them better Wherever the abundance of sin has gone there the abundance of grace must go. There you and I, as ministers of grace, are bound to carry it. I confess i that at the very first statement of it this idea of Christ opens to me a range of the subjects, with which it is the preacher’s duty and right to deal, which seem a to have no limit.

But let us go more into particulars. We hear to-day a great deal about how desirable it is that the pulpit, partly because it is and partly that it may more fully be, a power, should deal more directly than it does with the special conditions of the time, with the special vices, and the special needs of the days in which we live. It is urged that we ought to hear more often than we do now from our preachers concerning the right use of wealth, concerning the extravagance of society, concerning impurity and licentiousness, concerning the prevalent lack of thoroughness in our hurried life, concerning political corruption and misrule. I believe the claim is absokitely right. I believe no powerful pulpit ever held aloof from the moral life of the community it lived in, as the practice of many preachers, and the theory of some, would make our pulpit separate itself and confine its message to what are falsely discriminated as spiritual things. But with regard to this interest of the pulpit in the moral conditions of the day, while I most heartily and even enthusiastically assert its necessity, I want to make one or two suggestions.. The first is, that nowhere more than here ought the personal differences of ministers to be regarded. Some men’s minds work abstractly, and others work concretely. One man sees sin as an awful, all-pervading spiritual presence; another cannot recognize sin unless he sees it incarnated in some special vicious act, which some man is doing here in his own town. One man owns holiness as an unseen spirit; to another, holiness is vague, but good deeds strike his enthusiasm and stir him to delight and imitation. Now, neither of these men must ask the other man to preach just in his way. The first man must not call the second a “mere moralist;” the second must not answer back by calling his accuser a pietist. Granting that the preacher must attack the special sins around him, it is not true that every preacher, be the nature of his genius what it may, must be goaded and driven to it. It is good for us that there should be Borne men to preach, as it would not be well that all men should preach, of truth in its pure, invariable essence, and of duty in its primary idea, as it issues a yet undivided stream from the fountain of the will of God.

But again, the method in which the pulpit ought Ito approach the topics of the time is even more imjportant. It seems to me to be involved, if we can find it there, in the perfectly commonplace and familiar statement that the visible, moral conditions of any life, or any age, are only symptoms of spiritual conditions which are the essential thing. But what is the meaning and value of a symptom? Are there not two? A symptom is valuable, first as a sign and test of inward processes which it is impossible to observe directly, and it has a secondary value under the law of reaction, by which a wise restraint applied to the result may often tend to weaken and help destroy the cause. How then are symptoms to be treated? Always with reference to the unseen conditions which they manifest. They are to be examined as tests of what these conditions are, and they are to be acted upon, not for themselves, but in the hope of reaching those conditions in behind them. Apply all this. You and I are preachers in the midst of a corrupt community. All kinds of evil practices are rife around us. We know — it is the first truth of the religion which we preach — that these evil practices are not the real essential evil. It is the heart estranged from God, the soul gone wrong, the unseen springs of manhood out of order, upon which one eye is always fastened, and to which alone we know the remedy can be applied. What have we then to do with these evil practices, which we see only as the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual disgrace? Just what I said above: First, honestly treat them as tests; honestly own that, so long as these exist and wherever these exist, the spiritual condition is not right; frankly admit of any man, whatever his professions of emotional experience, whatever he believes, whatever he “feels,” that if he does bad things he is not a good man. So cordially put the spiritual processes of which you preach within the judgment of all men who know a good life from a bad one. And in the second place strike at the symptom always for the sake of the disease. Aimjit all kinds of vicious acts. Rebuke dishonesty, licentiousness, drunkenness, cruelty, extravagance, but always strike in the interest of the soul to which you are a messenger, of which your Master has given you part of the care. Never let men feel that you and your gospel would be satisfied with mere decency, With the putting down of all vicious life that left the vicious character still strong behind. Surely such a protest against vice as this ought to be far more earnest, more uncompromising, more self-sacrificing than

(USI7BESIT7) one that worked on lower motives and took shorter views. It can make no concessions. It strikes at all vices alike. It will not merely try to exchange one vice for another. It will hate vices more deeply in proportion as it realizes the depth of sin.

Do not these two methods of dealing with all symptoms describe the true attitude of the Christian preacher toward the evident vicious practices by which he is surrounded? Conceiving of them thus, he is neither the abstract religionist devoted to the fostering of certain spiritual conditions, heedless of how they show their worth or worthlessness in the moral life which they produce; nor is he the enlightened economist, weighing with anxious heart the evil of sins, but knowing nothing of the sinfulness of sin from which they come. He is the messenger of Christ to the soul of man always. His sermon about temperance, or the late election, or the wickedness of oppression, is not an exception, an intrusion in the current of that preaching which is always testifying of the spiritual salvation. He is ready to speak on any topic of the day, but his sermon is not likely to be mistaken for an article from some daily newspaper. It looks at the topic from a loftier height, traces the trouble to a deeper source, and is not satisfied except with a more thorough cure. I do not know of any other principles th which can be applied to the somewhat disputed question of political preaching. These seem to me sufficient. I despise, and call upon you to despise all the weak assertions that a minister must not preach politics because he will injure his influence if he does, or because it is unworthy of his sacred office. The influence that needs such watching may well be allowed to die, and, the more sacred the preacher’s office is, the more he is bound to care for all the interests of every child of God. But apply the principles which I laid down, and I think we have a bettexrule. See in the political condition the indication lof thexnation’s spiritual state, and aim in all you say about public affairs, not simply at securing order and peace, but at making good men, who shall constitute a u holy nation.” The first result of the application of these principles will be that only a true moral issue will provoke your utterance. You will not turn the pulpit into a place whence you can throw out your little scheme for settling a party quarrel or securing a party triumph. But when some clear question of right and wrong presents itself, and men with some strong passion or sordid interest are going wrong, then your sermon is a poor, untimely thing if it deals only with the abstractions of eternity, and has no word to help the men who are dizzied with the whirl, and blinded with the darkness of to-day. It was good to be a minister during the war of the Rebellion. A clear, strong, moral issue stood out plain, and the preacher had his duty as sharply marked as the soldiers. That is not the case in the same clear way now. It will not ordinarily be so. But still, the ordinary talk about ministers not having any power in politics is not true. In a land like ours, where the tone of the people is of vast value in public affairs, the preachers who have so much to do in the creation of the popular tone must always have their part in politics.

I close this lecture with three suggestions, on which I had meant to dwell at large, but I have used up all my time.

You never can make a sermon what it ought to be if you consider it alone. The service that accompanies it, the prayer and praise, must have their influence upon it.

The sermon must never set a standard which it is not really meant that men should try to realize in life.

No sermon to one’s own people can ever be conceived as if it were the only one. It must be part of a long culture, working with all the others.

And yet, in spite of all these definitions and suggestions, I beg you to go away believing that the idea of the sermon is not a complicated, but a very simple thing.